"That is not bad—but now bring four guns."
He was obeyed, for he was recognised as the commander-in-chief.
He then put his four fingers in the four gun holes and lifted the four guns with as much ease as the soldier had lifted one.
"See how easy it is," said he, placing them gently on the ground—"when one is in training for such exercises."
When Ferus told me this incident, he said he still marvelled how any man's muscles could bear such a weight.
Old Moulin, landlord of the Palais-Royal at Avignon, where Marshal Brune was murdered, was also possessed of immense strength. When trying to defend the marshal from assassination he took up one of the assassins, to use his own expression, "by putting his hand under his ribs, and threw him out of the window." This same Moulin told me once, when I was passing through Avignon, that when he was serving under my father in Italy orders were given forbidding the soldiers to go out without their sabres, under penalty of forty-eight hours in the guardroom.
This order was issued on account of the number of assassinations that had taken place.
My father was riding out, and met old Moulin, who was then a handsome, strapping fellow of twenty-five. Unluckily this handsome, strapping fellow had not his sword on.
Directly he caught sight of my father he set off at a run to try and slip down a side street; but my father had spied the fugitive and guessed the cause, so he put his horse to a gallop and, catching up with the culprit, he sang out, "You rascal, so you want to be murdered?" Then, seizing hold of him by his coat-collar, he raised him completely off the ground without either urging on or slackening his horse's pace, and carried him thus in a tight grip, just as a hawk swoops down on a lark, until, meeting a patrol, he threw down his burden and exclaimed:
"Forty-eight hours in the guardroom for this scoundrel!"