How the Saracens, when they took him prisoner, he being half dead with a complication of diseases, kindly left him "un mien couverture d'ecarlate" which his mother had given him, and which he put over him, having made a hole therein and bound it round him with a cord; how when he came to Acre in a pitiable condition an old servant of his house presented himself, and "brought me clean white hoods and combed my hair most comfortably"; how he bought a hundred tuns of wine and served it - the best first, according to high authority - well-watered to his private soldiers, somewhat less watered to the squires, and to the knights neat, but with a suggestive phial of the weaker liquid to mix "si comme ils vouloient" - these are the details in which he seems to take greatest pleasure, and for readers six hundred years after date perhaps they are not the least interesting details.
But all knights were also knights of the spur or " equites aurati," because their spurs were golden or gilt, - the spurs of squires being of silver or white metal, - and these became their peculiar badge in popular estimation and proverbial speech.
Country neighbors from Otradnoe, impoverished old squires and their daughters, Peronskaya a maid of honor, Pierre Bezukhov, and the son of their district postmaster who had obtained a post in Petersburg.
Squires, of which only four parts appeared, all devoted to Edwards and all written by Squires.
Her husband, though he afterwards deteriorated, seems at that time to have been neither better nor worse than the Berrichon squires around him, and the first years of her married life, during which her son Maurice and her daughter Solange were born, except for lovers' quarrels, were passed in peace and quietness, though signs were not wanting of the coming storm.
