Savoy 1636 The Wargame of the lost Dumas Novel

  From   Dumas' lost novel, Savoy 1630 "On a night when the wind came prowling down from the Alps like a starving wolf, and the bells of trembled faintly through the snow-laden dark, a solitary horseman descended the road from the fortress of Exilles. He wore black from spur to collar — not the proud velvet black of a courtier, nor the sober cloth of a priest, but that severe and dreadful black which seems less a colour than a sentence pronounced upon the world.  The peasants who glimpsed him crossing themselves beside their dying hearths swore later that his face was pale as candle-wax, and that one white hand, emerging from his cloak as he gathered the reins, bore the scar of an iron manacle. Yet neither the winter storm, nor the wolves upon the ridges, nor even the patrols of the Duke of Savoy delayed him; for the rider had escaped from a prison where men entered only to vanish from memory, and he carried beneath his cloak not gold, nor jewels, nor letters of stat...