Yet what we saw and learned in this great city of Paris was most instructive. Through the good offices of M. de Teligny, and of Coligny, I had been enabled to renew my costume; and Goddard had been given a purse well-lined with pistoles, out of which he had bought himself from a dealer in cast-off garments a most gaudy vesture of red and yellow velvet and silk, these being the colors most to his liking. He had a gray, high-pointed hat, of a bygone fashion, ornamented with a wide-flowing plume; the breeches were most capacious and trimmed with ribbons; the stockings were gray and the shoes were high, ornamented with great flame-colored rosettes. His sword was of a most prodigious length, and though hooked well up by his shoulder straps, clanked and clattered upon the paving stones like that of a swaggerer of the Reiters. Much of the time he spent below in the courtyard smoking and conversing with La Chastro, the body-servant of our host, a roystering man-at-arms who, second only to Goddard himself, had the most voluble proficiency in camp language I had ever heard. There upon a bench in the sun the two of them would sit during most of the day, the one rolling out his roundest, mouth-filling speech, which the other would set in some fashion into a language of his own. Goddard had soon cut his hair short in the prevailing fashion, and by the end of a week his upper lip was blue with stubble which, with elbow aloft, he vainly strove to stroke and twist after the manner of the _raffinés_ he had seen coming from the _levee_. When I, marveling and curious at his wonderful jerkin and shadowy lip, called him to me and asked him how it was that he was turning frog-eater upon so short occasion, he sent a great whiff of smoke from his pipe, saying,
“’Tis a wench, sir,--a most comely wench who vows that ’til I grow a beard upon my face, she will have none of me. ‘A man without hair upon his face,’ says she, ‘is like a pasty without truffles.’ What think you of that for a saucy minx?”
I went off to the fencing hall. Here Pompée, the maître d’armes to the King, sometimes gave a showing of his art; and I picked up one or two tricks of fence on the use of the dagger and had much interest in some strokes which had come newly into vogue at court. Once when we were returning thence, we came to a small hostel before the door of which a crowd had gathered. From within there was a babel of voices and much laughter. A familiar odor saluted my nostrils, for there was Job Goddard teaching mine host the art of smoking. That ’twas not altogether to the fancy of that worthy was readily to be seen by the grimaces he made and the groans which he let forth from his throat. But La Chastro was behind him, the point of his rapier touching the wide breeches, prodding at intervals between the puffs to spur his energy. Goddard, with his tall plume waving in the air, was standing in front of him holding the reed within his lips and saying,