The two
Balafres, father and son, wounded and scarred in the same manner, lost
something of this type, but not the grace and affability by which, as
much as by their bravery, they won the hearts of the soldiery.
It is not useless to relate how the present Grand Master received his
wound; for it was healed by the heroic measures of a personage of our
drama,--by Ambroise Pare, the man we have already mentioned as under
obligations to Lecamus, syndic of the guild of furriers. At the siege
of Calais the duke had his face pierced through and through by a
lance, the point of which, after entering the cheek just below the
right eye, went through to the neck, below the left eye, and remained,
broken off, in the face. The duke lay dying in his tent in the midst
of universal distress, and he would have died had it not been for the
devotion and prompt courage of Ambroise Pare. "The duke is not dead,
gentlemen," he said to the weeping attendants, "but he soon will die
if I dare not treat him as I would a dead man; and I shall risk doing
so, no matter what it may cost me in the end. See!" And with that he
put his left foot on the duke's breast, took the broken wooden end of
the lance in his fingers, shook and loosened it by degrees in the
wound, and finally succeeded in drawing out the iron head, as if he
were handling a thing and not a man.
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