One day that I was visiting at Lady Ingoldsby's, where Polly and her husband had come for to spend a few weeks, and much company was going in and out, the faces and names of which were new to me, some gentlemen came there whose dress attracted notice from the French fashion thereof. One of them was a young man of very comely appearance and pleasant manners, albeit critical persons might have judged somewhat of' the bravado belonged to his attitudes and speeches, but withal tempered with so much gentleness and courtesy, that no sooner had the eye and mind taken note of the defect than the judgment was repented of. What in one of less attractive face and behavior should have displeased, in this youth did not offend. It was my hap to sit beside him at supper, which lasted a long time; and as his behavior was very polite, I freely conversed with him, and found him to be English, though from long residence abroad his tongue had acquired a foreign trick. When I told him I had thought he was a Frenchman, he laughed, and said if the French did ever try to land in England, they should find him to be a very Englishman for to fight against them; but in the matter of dinners and beds, and the liking of a dear sunny sky over above a dim cloudy one, he did confess himself to be so much of a traitor as to prefer France to England, and he could not abide the smoke of coal fires which are used in this country.
"And what say you, sir," I answered, "to the new form of smoke which Sir Walter Raleigh hath introduced since his return from the late discovered land of Virginia?"
He said he had learnt the use of it in France, and must needs confess he found it to be very pleasant. Monsieur Nicot had brought some seeds of tobacco into France, and so much liking did her majesty Queen Catharine conceive for this practice of smoking, that the new plant went by the name of the queen's herb. "It is not gentlemen alone who do use a pipe in France," he said, "but ladies also. What doth the fair sex in England think on it?"
"I have heard," I answered, "that her majesty herself did try for to smoke, but presently gave it up, for that it made her sick. Her highness is also reported to have lost a wager concerning that same smoking of tobacco."
"What did her grace bet?" the gentleman asked.
"Why, she was one day," I replied, "inquiring very exactly of the various virtues of this herb, and Sir Walter did assure her that no one understood them better than himself, for he was so well acquainted with all its qualities, that he could even tell her majesty the weight of the smoke of every pipeful he consumed. Her highness upon this said, 'Monsieur Traveller, you do go too far in putting on me the license which is allowed to such as return from foreign parts;' and she laid a wager of many pieces of gold he should not be able to prove his words. So he weighed in her presence the tobacco before he put it into his pipe, and the ashes after he had consumed it, and convinced her majesty that the deficiency did proceed from the evaporation thereof. So then she paid the bet, and merrily told him 'that she knew of many persons who had turned their gold into smoke, but he was the first who had turned smoke into gold.'"
The young gentleman being amused at this story, I likewise told him of Sir Walter's hap when he first returned to England, and was staying in a friend's house: how a servant coming into his chamber with a tankard of ale and nutmeg toast, and seeing him for the first time with a lighted pipe in his mouth puffing forth clouds of smoke, flung the ale in his face for to extinguish the internal conflagration, and then running down the stairs alarmed the family with dismal cries that the good knight was on fire, and would be burnt into ashes before they could come to his aid.
My unknown companion laughed, and said he had once on his travels been taken for a sorcerer, so readily doth ignorance imagine wonders. "Near unto Metz, in France," quoth he, "I fell among thieves. My money I had quilted within my doublet, which they took from me, howsoever leaving me the rest of my apparel, wherein I do acknowledge their courtesy, since thieves give all they take not; but twenty-five French crowns, for the worst event, I had lapped in cloth, and whereupon did wind divers-colored threads, wherein I sticked needles, as if I had been so good a husband as to mend mine own clothes. Messieurs the thieves were not so frugal to take my ball to mend their hose, but did tread it under their feet. I picked it up with some spark of joy, and I and my guide (he very sad, because he despaired of my ability to pay him his hire) went forward to Chalons, where he brought me to a poor ale-house, and when I expostulated, he replied that stately inns were not for men who had never a penny in their purses; but I told him that I looked for comfort in that case more from gentlemen than clowns; whereupon he, sighing, obeyed me, and with a dejected and fearful countenance brought me to the chief inn, where he ceased not to bewail my misery as if it had been the burning of Troy; till the host, despairing of my ability to pay him, began to look disdainfully on me. The next morning, when, he being to return home, I paid him his hire, which he neither asked nor expected, and likewise mine host for lodgings and supper, he began to talk like one mad for joy, and professed I could not have had one penny except I were an alchemist or had a familiar spirit."
I thanked the young gentleman for this entertaining anecdote, and asked him if France was not a very disquieted country, and nothing in it but wars and fighting.
"Yea," he answered; "but men fight there so merrily, that it appears more a pastime than aught else. Not always so, howsoever. When Frenchman meets Frenchman in the fair fields of Provence, and those of the League and those of the Religion—God confound the first and bless the last!—engage in battle, such encounters ensue as have not their match for fierceness in the world. By my troth, the sight of dead bodies doth not ordinarily move me; but the valley of Allemagne on the day of the great Huguenot victory was a sight the like of which I would not choose to look on again, an I could help it."