Marshal Of France; The Life And Times Of Maurice, Comte De Saxe, 1699-1750 by Jon Manchip White

Author:Jon Manchip White [White, Jon Manchip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-03-27T22:00:00+00:00

During the winter of 1744-45, Maurice became an increasingly sick man. According to the Saxon envoy in France, his life was in danger. At one stage it seemed in the highest degree unlikely that, even if he survived, he would ever again be able to leave Paris on campaign. The king was in despair. ‘His Majesty entertains so lively a regard for the marshal’s experience and ability,’ reported Count Loss, the Saxon ambassador,

“that he is convinced that his death would be irretrievable for France in the present circumstances; and although his kingdom swarms with general officers, none of them is considered capable of replacing him.”{122}

A troop of doctors was called in to execute running repairs on Maurice’s battered frame. His personal physician, Sénac de Meilhan, was soon reinforced by Roth, the physician to the Régiment Saxe. From Halle travelled the learned Professor Stahl, who prescribed draconian remedies for the unfortunate patient. At first glance they regarded the case as almost hopeless:

“There is no cure for this disease,

They murmured, as they took their fees.”

Maurice submitted to their ministrations with docility. He may have entertained some fleeting regret for those earlier excesses of bed, board and battlefield that now incapacitated him. The intensity of his debaucheries may be judged by the fact that he had originally been endowed with one of the most powerful constitutions of the age. Many regarded him as being even more remarkable in physique than his father, whom he so closely resembled in appearance. Yet Augustus the Strong, the ‘Saxon Man of Sin’ as Carlyle liked to call him, survived a life of riot and lechery until past his sixtieth year, whereas his favourite son began to break up before he was fifty. Maurice, driven by the dark impulses of the Königsmarcks, had early committed himself to a running fight with his own flesh. By now the breach had been effected, and the walls were crumbling. It was none the less an indication of his body’s unusual strength that it could survive for so long the onslaught of disease, and the equally dreadful onslaught of the doctors.

He was suffering principally from dropsy, an affliction regarded in the eighteenth century as a fatal disorder, the culmination of a series of other disorders scarcely less fatal.{123} It was not until 1827 that Richard Bright established that dropsy, with albuminous urine, was the result of malfunction of the kidneys.{124} Earlier physicians could only shake their heads over the horribly swollen legs of their torpid and thirst-tortured patients, and prescribe for them time-honoured and useless remedies. These remedies, some of them no doubt swallowed by Maurice, included cantharides, elaterium, squills, gamboge, Rochelle salt, soluble tartar, and the juice of artichoke leaves steeped in hock. When these oral remedies failed to provide relief, as inevitably they did, recourse was then made to more drastic methods. Attempts were sometimes made to draw off the liquid in the calves and ankles by means of blistering: that is, by making burns on the limbs with a hot iron and puncturing the subsequent blisters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.