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These elegant warriors, he
calculated, would serve both for the purpose of infusing terror into
the minds of potential enemies, and of acting as a decorative
body-guard to enhance his own public appearances on gala days. He threw
his whole soul into the enterprise. After the corps had been duly
established, he amused himself by drilling them on Sunday afternoons
and modelling new buttons for their uniforms; to give them the
requisite military stamina he over-fed and starved them by turns,
wrapped them in sheepskin overcoats for long route-marches in July,
exercised them in sham fights with live grapeshot and unblunted
stilettos and otherwise thinned their ranks of undesirables, and
hardened their physique, by forcing them to escalade horrible
precipices at midnight on horseback. He was a martinet; he knew it; he
gloried on the distinction. "All the world loves a disciplinarian," he
was wont to say.
Nevertheless, like many great princes, he realized that political
reasons might counsel at times an abatement of rigour.


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