The town of Angers, which appears to have been the native place of Boullaye le Gouz, was not unimportant at this period, and had been a fortified city of some consequence in the wars of Edward III. and Henry VI. and of the Huguenot. The population was about 20,000 souls. Angers possessed, before the Revolution, a military school (école militaire), to which, under the tuition of a certain Monsieur de Pignerol, there came a young Irish gentleman, in his seventeenth year, to study the rudiments of war. The pupil subsequently entered as Ensign in the 41st Regiment of Foot, and is now known by his title of Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Well might Frenchmen say, of their noble vanquisher's military tuition, after the final catastrophe at Waterloo, what Dido is represented to have said apropos of the sword of Æneas, with which she immolated herself:
Non hos quæsitum munus in usus.’’
—Aeneid, 4.