"Soldier of fortune" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Marmaduke Lovel. He was a disappointed man, a discontented man, a man given to brooding over the failure of his life, inclined to cherish vengeful feelings against his fellow-men on account of that failure. Books to him were very much what they might have been to some fiery-tempered ambitious soldier of fortune buried alive in a prison, without hope of release,—some slight alleviation of his anguish, some occasional respite from his ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... would allow. She was seated on a sofa at the far end of the room when Seymour Michael was shown in, and the first thing that struck her was his diminutiveness. After the hearty country gentlemen who habitually carried mud into the Stagholme drawing-room, this small-limbed dapper soldier of fortune looked almost puny. But there is a depth in every woman's heart which is only to be reached by one man. Whatever betide them both, that one is different from the rest ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... "A soldier of fortune," he went on, "pins his faith and zeal to standards which to-day rise and to-morrow fall. Unfortunately, he takes it at flood tide, which immediately ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... concentrated a few miles south of the city. The French generals who had sailed with him from Brest were in his train; and two of them, Rosen and Maumont, were placed over the head of Richard Hamilton, [193] Rosen was a native of Livonia, who had in early youth become a soldier of fortune, who had fought his way to distinction, and who, though utterly destitute of the graces and accomplishments characteristic of the Court of Versailles, was nevertheless high in favour there. His temper was savage: his manners were coarse: ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... even distinguished-looking female. In the secret service her number was 528. Their passes from the war office described them as nurses of the German Red Cross. Only the Intelligence Department knew their real mission. With her, also, as her chauffeur, was a young Italian soldier of fortune, Paul Anfossi. He had served in the Belgian Congo, in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers, and spoke all the European languages. In Rome, where as a wireless operator he was serving a commercial company, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... benefits on his native town, as his elephants showered water, and that it was in gratitude to him that Chambery had raised the monument; but I was disappointed to learn that the elephants had no prototypes in real life. It would have satisfied my imagination to hear that the soldier of fortune had returned from the Orient to his birthplace, with the four original elephants following him like dogs, having refused to be left behind. But nothing is quite perfect in history, and one usually feels that one could have arranged ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... military reputation. He was the descendant of a noble family, in the Palatinate, and his mother was an Englishwoman, daughter of Lord Dudley. Being obliged to leave his country on account of the troubles by which it was agitated, he commenced a soldier of fortune, and served successively in the armies of Holland, England, France, Portugal, and Brandenburg; he attained to the dignity of mareschal in France, grandee in Portugal, generalissimo in Prussia, and duke in England. He professed the Protestant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Presidential Election of 1856. Its real leader was Seward of New York, but it was thought that electioneering exigencies would be better served by the selection of Captain Fremont of California, who, as a wandering discoverer and soldier of fortune, could be made a picturesque figure in the public eye. Later, when Fremont was entrusted with high military command he was discovered to be neither capable nor honest, but in 1856 he made as effective a figure as any ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... later to Plymouth Rock, when the Englishmen began the erection of a fort on the peninsula or island in the river, where they proposed to establish the capital of their colony. They chose for their president Edward Maria Wingfield, ignoring Captain John Smith, a gallant and resourceful soldier of fortune who would have been invaluable as a leader against any foe. The fort had not been completed when the Indians gathered in large numbers and made a desperate attack on the colony. Twelve of the colonists were killed and wounded before the savages were driven off by the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... said, "courage! the whole South has it, Courage! If I did not have that, I would send Sambo to my father's room for his ebony box and blow my brains out. No, Jinny, I am nothing but a soldier of fortune. I never possessed any quality but a wild spirit for adventure, to shirk work. I wanted to go with Walker, you remember. I wanted to go to Kansas. I wanted to distinguish myself," he added with a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... swimming rivers, killing and cooking his own game, noting in his diary soils, minerals, and locations, and making maps which are models of nice and accurate draughtsmanship; the incipient soldier, studying tactics under Adjutant Muse, and taking lessons in broadsword fence from the old soldier of fortune, Jacob Van Braam; the major and adjutant-general of the Virginia frontier forces at nineteen:—we seem to see him yet as here he stood, a model of manly beauty in his youthful prime, a man in all that makes a man ere manhood's years have been fulfilled, standing on the threshold of a grand career, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... O'Connor. 'The idea is a literary one. The ten-cent magazine stole it from "Ridpath's History of the World from the Sand-stone Period to the Equator." You'll find it in every one of 'em. It's a continued story of a soldier of fortune, generally named O'Keefe, who gets to be dictator while the Spanish-American populace cries "Cospetto!" and other Italian maledictions. I misdoubt if it's ever been done. You're not thinking of trying that, are you, Barney?' ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... pronounced by Winter with an intonation which would have puzzled any one not familiar with certain matters known only to a few in England, Catesby, Wright and Digsby cast searching glances at the new comer, as though seeking to read in the impassive features of the soldier of fortune some riddle which heretofore had puzzled them. As to Fawkes, not deigning to notice the evident curiosity with which the three gentlemen greeted him, he allowed his cloak to fall upon the floor, walked to the fireplace, and stood with back ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... when she out with that," he confessed. "Oh, she's a deep one, Jean! But your manner and tongue betrayed the returned soldier of fortune; of such officers in the ranks of Argile there are not so many that it was risking too much to believe all of them knew the story of the Provost's daughter, and your conduct, once she got that length, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... is remembered as a traitor by the average Mexican (just as Bazaine is regarded by the French), although he was five times President and four times military Dictator of Mexico. It will be remembered that this eccentric and notorious soldier of fortune was banished to the West Indies, whence he wrote a congratulatory letter to the intruder Maximilian, and sought to take command under him. His proffered aid was coolly declined, whereupon he offered his services to Juarez, who was fighting against Maximilian, but was repulsed with equal ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... A soldier of fortune is Lettow. His name is stained with the hideous massacres of the Hereros in South-West Africa. His was the order, transmitted through the German Governor's mouth, that thrust the Herero women and ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... into a pocket of the Quartermaster, out of which he drew a purse. Emptying the contents on the ground, several double-louis rolled towards the soldiers, who were not slow in picking them up. Casting the purse from him in contempt, the soldier of fortune turned towards the soup he had been preparing with so much care, and, finding it to his liking, he began to break his fast with an air of indifference that the most stoical ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... nearly every page of whose recent history might be written 'out of evil cometh forth good,' was the banishment which threw Garibaldi into his romantic career of the next twelve years between the Amazon and the Plata. Soldier of fortune who did not seek to enrich himself; soldier of freedom who never aimed at power, he always meant to turn to account for his own country the experience gained in the art of war in that distant land, where he rapidly became the centre of a legend, almost the origin ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... of a truth he is a wonderful man. In the sixth month of Grace, 1606, I Was living as best I might in that great city of London, which is as much a wilderness of houses, as this country is a wilderness of trees. My father was a soldier of fortune, which means that he stood ready to do battle in behalf of whatsoever nation he believed was in the right, or, perhaps, on the side of those people who would pay him the most ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... bit her lip, and seemed to struggle vainly for a reply, but the look in her eyes would have withered any man less accustomed to strife than this iron-jawed young soldier of fortune from Wall Street. In my turn, anger seized me as ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. The thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. Even more commonplace experiences are not without an element of the adventurous, for life itself is a great adventure. Many special feature stories in narrative form have ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... rival, though proceeding by a less philosophical but no less lucid method, entirely endorses this view. A Swiss soldier of fortune, his experience was much the same as that of Clausewitz. It was obtained mainly on the Staff of Marshal Ney and subsequently on the Russian headquarter Staff. He reached no definite theory of war, ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... was a mere soldier of fortune, whose world was his camp, whose opinions and feelings had been formed in quite another school from those of his fellow-general; whose code of honor and of morals was an entirely different one, and whose ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... a soldier of fortune, and practiced war as an art, and delighted in it like Alexander or Charles XII. He readily responded to the overture of the Tarentine Ambassador, and sent over a general with three thousand men to secure a footing, and soon followed with twenty ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... over boiling chasms three thousand feet below in the Andes river bottoms; it isn't leading ragged armies of half-baked South American natives against a mud stockade; it isn't shooting African animals and dining on quinine and hippopotamus liver. No, there's none of the soldier of fortune business about it. But vital! My heavens! what ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Francois Sebastiani, one of the favorites of Napoleon the Great, died on July 21 at Paris. Sebastiani was a Corsican like Napoleon. He was identified with his great countryman's career from beginning to end. A soldier of fortune, like his illustrious chief, he distinguished himself chiefly by his Machiavellian talents for diplomacy. It was he who stirred up Napoleon's first war with England by his famous mission to the East to lay bare England's weakness in that quarter. After this, Sebastiani's ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... themselves into four categories. Illustrating them by reference to the Gordons alone, there was the venturer, usually a soldier of fortune, who died in the country of his adoption, such as the well-known General Patrick Gordon, of Auchleuchries, Aberdeenshire (1635-1690), who, having spent thirty-nine years of faithful service to Peter the Great, died and was buried at Moscow. Or ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... at Pavia for several months. He evidently looked back to the time with gratitude, as having wakened his better associations, which had been well-nigh stifled during the previous years of the wild life of a soldier of fortune. His host's young daughter had eyes like Aldonza, and the almost forgotten possibility of returning to his love a brave and distinguished man awoke once more. His burgher thrift began to assert itself again, and he deposited a nest-egg from ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Luckenough was Alexander Kalouga, a Polish soldier of fortune, some time in the service of Cecilius Calvert, Baron of Baltimore, first Lord Proprietary of Maryland. This man had, previous to his final emigration to the New World, passed through a life of the most wonderful vicissitudes—wonderful ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... renewed vigour. Here at Ahrenburg I met a character who added greatly to the interest of my stay. He was a gigantic, raw-boned Frenchman, at that time engaged in the construction of a motor boat; but a miner, a sailor, and a soldier of fortune in many ways, one who had pried into many of the hidden corners of the country and had a graphic way of describing what he had seen. I was his guest until late that night, and was entertained royally on what humble fare he had to offer. We both intended to renew our acquaintance ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... character to be convinced that his prospect of obtaining her hand was any thing but improved by her father's death and that to her the wealthy possessor of her family's estates would be as unwelcome a wooer as the needy soldier of fortune. He did not doubt that, after the first violence of her grief should subside, she would return to France, where some of her mother's relatives were resident; and that, when next he heard of her, it would be as the bride of his fortunate rival. The picture thus conjured up caused him to grind his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... followers. Two hundred manors in Kent with more than an equal number elsewhere rewarded the services of his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's counsellors Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares. But the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord. Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on condition of its holder's service at the King's call; a whole army was by this means encamped ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... lad. Your father and I were hand and glove then. Never separate. We fought together, bled together, and ah! how fate is partial in the way she spreads her favours! Your father dresses his son in velvet; while I, poor soldier of fortune—I mean misfortune—am growing rusty; sword, morion, breast-plate, body battered, ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... figure is Col. Treloar, ex-Captain in the Coldstream Guards, a soldier of fortune, now serving in Wrangel's army from pure devotion to the Russians. Appalled at the tragedy of the Russians, here is a man who does not mind speaking out. He was with Denikin before Wrangel, and explained that General's downfall by the scoundrels and incapables by ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... I said, with some haughtiness, "I am serving no one's interest but my own. I read in the papers of General Laguerre and his foreign legion, and I came here to join him and to fight with him. That's all. I am a soldier of fortune, I said." I repeated this with some emphasis, for I liked the sound of it. "I am a soldier of fortune, and my name is Macklin. I hope in time to make ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... the army, by whose noble and patriotic conduct the fortunes of the family were afterwards to some extent restored. Disdaining to live on the charity of his friends and as a burden on his father, he joined the Swedish army as a soldier of fortune worked his way there, was aide-de-camp to the King, who created him Count Cromarty, and, in 1775, returned to his native country, after twenty-seven years of distinguished foreign service, full of fame and honours, with the rank of Lieut.-General. In 1754 the re-grant of the Lovat estates by George ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... on behalf of the restored Bourbons of Paris, intended to throw all his strength into a diplomatic attack upon Murat before the end of the Congress; but for the present Murat's chances seemed to be superior to those of his rival. Southern Italy thus continued in the hands of a soldier of fortune, who, unlike Bernadotte, was secretly the friend of Napoleon, and ready to support him in any ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... before she gave him that very broad 'hint to speak.' I may add that those who find fault with her forget that it was necessary for her to take the first open step. She was the daughter of a Venetian grandee, and Othello was a black soldier of fortune. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... that, dear lady. Truly, I did at first fly out at him and all concerned for what has made me a poor pensioner in my father's house—or rather in the house that was my father's. But that was while the hurt was new. I have been a soldier of fortune too long to think overmuch of the loss of Appleby Hundred. 'Twas my father's, certainly; but ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... is commanding, and he rides easily in the saddle. Colleone's statue at Venice is superior in many ways: yet the radical distinction between them is that whereas Gattamelata is the faithful portrait of a modest though successful warrior, it must be confessed that Verrocchio makes an idealised soldier of fortune, full of bravado and swagger, a Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre of the Quattrocento. But, striking as the contrast of sentiment is, noticeable alike in the artist and his model, these two statues remain the finest equestrian monuments in the world, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... affairs. His grandfather was the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... sick at heart to think of these men throwing away their lives in so futile a cause. That little black patch had been perhaps a student filled with fervor for Pan-Hellenism, a college boy out for an adventurous holiday, or perhaps a soldier of fortune who held his life cheaply and was ready to give it for the brief joy of a battle. Now I stood by one of those little black patches, by the first still outpost which marked the fight ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... of Surrey. There he remained for four years, learning something of the art of poetry from his patron; some of the poems he contributed later (1557) to Songes and Sonettes may well date from this early period. In 1541 he began his career as a soldier of fortune, being, he said, "pressed into the service." He fought his way through nearly every campaign in Scotland and the Low Countries for thirty years. He served under the emperor Charles V. in Flanders in 1542, returning to England after ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... spirits from everywhere. Our chief trumpeter was a native American, our second trumpeter was from the Mediterranean—I think an Italian—who had been a soldier of fortune not only in Egypt, but in the French Army in Southern China. Two excellent men were Osborne, a tall Australian, who had been an officer in the New South Wales Mounted Rifles; and Cook, an Englishman, who had served in South Africa. Both, when the regiment disbanded, were plaintive in ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... tangled skein for the next five years. Haldimand had not been popular with either of the two chief parties into which the leading French Canadians were divided. The seigneurs had nothing like the same regard for a Swiss soldier of fortune that they had for aristocratic British commanders like Murray and Carleton. The clergy also preferred these Anglicans to such a strong Swiss Protestant. The habitants and agitators, who were far less favourable ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... picturesquely. In fact Mr. George H. Jessop has seen to it that no ingredient proper to this kind of dish shall be wanting, and I have great pleasure in congratulating him upon the result. Desmond was a soldier of fortune, a captain in the gallant Irish Brigade that served King Louis XIV. against the Allies. During the siege of Bruges the young captain chanced to see one morning at mass the fair Margaret, Countess of Anhalt. She had lately fled to the town to frustrate the intentions of Louis, who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... Bishop of Durham, Duke of Richmond, Earl of Oxford, Marquis of Winchester, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and the Earl of Sussex. The arcade, or Piazza, as it was called, was a fashionable lounging-place, and many foundling children were called Piazza in its honour. One of the scenes in Otway's "Soldier of Fortune" is laid here, and also one in Wycherley's "Country Wife." Sir Peter Lely had a house in the square, and this house was successively occupied by Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir James Thornhill (Timbs). Coffee-houses and taverns abounded in and about the square. Of these ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Claverhouse himself, as if in prophetic cynicism, writes his own condemnation as to character thus: "In any service I have been in, I never inquired further in the laws than the orders of my superior officer." An appropriate motto for a "soldier of fortune," which might be abbreviated and paraphrased into "Stick ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... —he an exotic weed of desert birth. And, while princes strove for her hand, he remembered, he felt, that he was an orphan of foreign and of obscure parentage—a scholar by accident, (but to be a scholar was no recommendation in those days, and it is but seldom that it is one even now.) and a soldier of fortune, to whose name royal honours were not attached, while his purse was light, and who, because his feet covered more ground than he could call his own, his heels were denied the insignia of knighthood. Yet, while he ventured not to breathe his thoughts or wishes before her, he imagined that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... the windows of the chamber of the Council of Regency at Prague. This act of violence was the signal of a general revolt, not in Bohemia merely, but in Silesia, Moravia, Hungary, and Austria. The celebrated Count Mansfeld, a soldier of fortune, with only four thousand troops, dared to defy the whole imperial power; and for a while he was successful. The Bohemians renounced their allegiance to Ferdinand, and chose for their king Frederick V.,—Elector Palatine of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... cathedral at Pisa. As they failed to appear they were condemned for contumacy and deposed. A new pope was then elected, and on his death a year later, he was succeeded by the notorious John XXIII, who had been a soldier of fortune in his earlier days. John was selected on account of his supposed military prowess. This was considered essential in order to guard the papal territory against the king of Naples, who had announced his intention of getting possession of Rome. Neither ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... teacher would no more humor my lunatic impulses, or guide me in the even, broad road of universal truth. With his voice and form forever gone, there was nothing left to me but to wander over the cheerless, mighty world as a literary pioneer and soldier of fortune, using my pen and sword wherever Love ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Mind Cure and New Thought grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... not alone in his opposition to the war,—Robespierre and Marat, nearly in accord, both stood for peace. Robespierre, from the first, had foreseen the course of the Revolution, had {133} prophetically feared the success of some soldier of fortune,—he was at this moment that unknown lieutenant of artillery, Napoleone Buonaparte,—who should with a stroke of the sword convert the Revolution to his purposes. Marat, in his more hectic, malevolent, uncertain way, was haunted ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... at Dalgrothe Mountain, soldiering for Valmond. Every evening, when the haymakers put up their scythes, the mill-wheel stopped turning, and the Angelus ceased, the men marched away into the hills, where the ardent soldier of fortune ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... brought forth, returned to the castle-yard, he found them standing confusedly together, some mounted, some on foot, all men speaking loud, and all in a state of disorder. Ralph Genvil, a veteran whose face had been seamed with many a scar, and who had long followed the trade of a soldier of fortune, stood apart from the rest, holding his horse's bridle in one hand, and in the other the banner-spear, around which the banner of De Lacy ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... showers passing by and under us across the valley, which leads the eye to the bay below. The General entered frankly into conversation, and during breakfast, and while the shower lasted, spoke almost incessantly of his imperial master. Early in life the Count had entered the army, a soldier of fortune, under Frederick of Prussia. On his return to his native country, Holland, he was employed by the States, successively, as governor of the eastern part of Java, and as envoy to one of the German courts. During his residence in Java, he had visited ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... him like a sullen and dangerous bull and moved away, saying no more. But Solange felt cheered. There were some who regarded her ahead of this soldier of fortune whom she had hired ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... other historians might have something to say on this subject. The authors fail to tell that Baron von Steuben, a soldier of fortune, who sold his services to the highest bidder, was hired to join the American army by a Frenchman, Beaumarchais, who ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... broken the neck of this far-reaching and disastrous rebellion, and had restored to the Emperor of China the principal cities and towns in peace, the London Times wrote of him:—"Never did a soldier of fortune deport himself with a nicer sense of military honour, with more gallantry against the resisting, with more mercy towards the vanquished, with more disinterested neglect of opportunities of personal advantage, or with more entire devotion to the objects and ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... or her fair daughter. In a word, continued he, I am a soldier, and to be plain is my character: You see me, Madam, young, sound, and impudent; take me yourself, widow, or give me to her, I will be wholly at your disposal. I am a soldier of fortune, ha!' This was followed by a vain laugh of his own, and a deep silence of all the rest of the company. I had nothing left for it but to fall fast asleep, which I did with all speed. 'Come,' said he, 'resolve ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... spread out in many directions, with propaganda as the base from which to broaden espionage activities. One of the earliest of the secret agents sent to this country was an American, Colonel Edwin Emerson, soldier of fortune, mediocre author and fairly competent war correspondent. Emerson lived at 215 East 15th Street, New York City and had an office in Room 1923 at 17 Battery Place, the address of the German Consulate General. Room 1923 was rented by a representative of the German ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... Service of her or her fair Daughter. In a Word, continued he, I am a Soldier, and to be plain is my Character: You see me, Madam, young, sound, and impudent; take me your self, Widow, or give me to her, I will be wholly at your Disposal. I am a Soldier of Fortune, ha!' ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of men, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibuster" and soldier of fortune. At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regiment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county—"Sweet Owen," as it used to be called—and came of ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a queen of grace and beauty on the stage, delighted immense audiences at the Park Theater. She came to this country under the auspices of Chevalier Henry Wikoff, a roving but accomplished soldier of fortune, who pitched his camp in both continents. Upon her arrival in New York the "divine Fanny," as she was invariably called, was borne to her destination in a carriage from which the horses had been detached by her enthusiastic adorateurs, ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the "young king," gave him political importance, and his marriage with Strongbow's daughter made him a mighty man in England, Ireland, Wales, and Normandy. Strenuous and upright, simple and dignified, the young soldier of fortune bore easily the weight of office and honour which accrued to him before the death of his first patron. Limited as was his outlook, he gave himself entirely to his master-principle of loyally to the feudal lord whom he had sworn to obey. This simple conception ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... his fame is great, justly earned in many a battle. My friend in deerskin is Armand Dubois, born a Canadian of good French stock, and a most valiant and trustworthy man. As for me, I am Raymond Louis de St. Luc, Chevalier of France and soldier of fortune in the New World. And now you know the list of us. It's not so long as Homer's catalogue of the ships, nor ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... the elderly man kneeling beside my bed, and my brain whirled with the unreality of it all. The "man of mystery," the "Quester" of Broadway, the elderly soldier of fortune, about whose reputed wealth and constant searching of faces wherever he was the idle gossip of the city's Bohemia had whirled—to think that this man was the father I had never known, the father, alas! whom I had hoped never ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of my protector, Captain Fagan, I am forced to confess that I fell into the very worst of courses and company. Being a rough soldier of fortune himself, he had never been a favourite with the officers of his regiment; who had a contempt for Irishmen, as Englishmen sometimes will have, and used to mock his brogue, and his blunt uncouth manners. I had been insolent to one or two of them, and had only been screened from punishment ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pleasant recollection of "Garibaldi's Englishman," Colonel Peard. Peard had many more qualities and capabilities than such as are essential to a soldier of fortune. The phrase, however, is perhaps not exactly that which should be used to characterise him. He had qualities which the true soldier of fortune should not possess. His partisanship was with him in the highest degree a matter of conviction and conscientious ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... could have fallen; when he saw what she had become he could not believe that she had ever been innocent. A baser man than Giovanni would have suffered more in his personal vanity, seeing that his idol had been degraded for a mere soldier of fortune—or for a clever artist—whichever Gouache called himself, and such a husband would have forgiven her more easily had she forsaken him for one of his own standing and rank. But Giovanni was far above and beyond the thought of comparing ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... his remaining years in London, dying there in 1631. There is a portrait of him, showing him as a handsome, bearded man, with nose and mouth bespeaking will and spirit—just such a man as one would imagine this gallant soldier of fortune to have been. ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... be plain with you, Master Manners," said Lady Maude, with considerable asperity. "It can never, no, never be as you desire. We have other designs for Dorothy than that she should marry a soldier of fortune. Her portion," she continued, curling her lips in scorn, "is a half of the whole estate of Haddon, which, you must admit, is no small dowry; and what have you to set against that? Your lands would not maintain yourself alone," and, having delivered herself thus, she cast a triumphant glance upon ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... expression. Rather was he moved to exultation over the profit which he saw there. "Truly," he said, in a letter to his correspondent in London, "It is a pleasant thing to drop a line and pull up threepence, fivepence, and sixpence as fast as one may haul in." The gallant soldier of fortune was evidently quite awake to the possibilities of profit upon which he had stumbled. Yet, probably even he would have been amazed could he have known that within fifty years not all the land in the colony of Massachusetts ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... quite clear in my mind, and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse's first love would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse would confess her fault to her second ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... a soldier of fortune, who for some years was engaged in the Spanish service. Little is known of his early life, except that he was a native of the county of York, and received his education in the city of York. The writer ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... after, we hired a carriage in Apia, Fanny, Belle, Lloyd and I, and drove in great style, with a native outrider, to the prison; a huge gift of ava and tobacco under the seats. The prison is now under the PULE of an Austrian, Captain Wurmbrand, a soldier of fortune in Servia and Turkey, a charming, clever, kindly creature, who is adored by 'HIS chiefs' (as he calls them) meaning OUR political prisoners. And we came into the yard, walled about with tinned iron, and drank ava with the prisoners and the captain. It may amuse you to hear how it ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... egotistical and cowardly Lambert; and the faction of the Cavaliers, featherheaded, merry, unscrupulous, reckless, devoted, led by the man who, aside from his devotion to the cause, was least fitted to represent it, the stern and upright Ormond; and those ambassadors, so humble and fawning before the soldier of fortune; and the court itself, an extraordinary mixture of upstarts and great nobles vying with one another in baseness; and the four jesters whom the contemptuous neglect of history permitted me to invent; and Cromwell's family, each ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... revelled in delectable imaginings. Night after night I fought battles, devised pageants, partitioned empires. I gloried in details. My rugged war-lords were very real to me, and my adventures sounded many periods of history. I was a solitary caveman with an axe of stone; I was a Roman soldier of fortune; I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... soldier of fortune, dependent upon his sword, and the little sentiment that he possessed was at once awakened by so unexpected a communication. As a natural consequence, therefore, he protested his readiness to risk life and limb at the pleasure of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... honest adventurers and adventurers of doubtful reputation) have appeared on the scene of the kingdom of Poland. The best known on the shores of the Vistula are: the miraculous Cagliostro: Boisson de Quency, grand charlatan, soldier of fortune, decorated with many orders, member of numerous Academies: the Venetian Casanova of Saint-Gall, a true savant, who fought a duel with Count Branicki: the Baron de Poellnitz . . . the lucky Count Tomatis, who knew so well how to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... some of Dr. Foster's letters, to give this account of his earlier life, to show that he was no soldier of fortune or eleventh-hour laborer, but that his sympathies were enlisted and his aid given among the earliest of the friends of a then doubtful cause,—and that he ventured influence, wealth, and professional fame, and abandoned home and ease, at what seemed to him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... wanderings from the small lake to the gulf, into which it debouches as a mighty river like the "Father of Waters," so the first encroachments of the land shark are small, and hardly felt; but give him time, let him grow from the Norman soldier of fortune into the English nobility of to-day, and you have a monster whose proportions and rapacity stagger the imagination to fully apprehend. What the common soldier of fortune received as reward for his valor eight hundred years ago, and which he held subject ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the hands of his son Guidobaldo, the husband of Elizabetta. Federigo's immense wealth was not gained by burdening his subjects with heavy taxes, but rather from the money which he was able to earn as a military leader, for he was a noble soldier of fortune. Vespasiano tells us, with regard to his military science, that he was excelled by no general of his time, and his good faith was never questioned. He was also a man of singularly religious nature, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... hearing when he began, "Brave soldier of fortune, that! Where did he come from?" Without waiting for me to answer he went on: "I didn't know you were a missionary, else you couldn't have tied me with a rope and made me listen to a sermon and a peck of golden texts ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... maintaining the institutions which the spirit of the age demanded, and which France, after having so dearly purchased, was now about to lose. The country looked for a man who was capable of restoring her to tranquillity; but as yet no such man had appeared. A soldier of fortune presented himself, covered with glory; he had planted the standard of France on the Capitol and on the Pyramids. The whole world acknowledged his superior talent; his character, his courage, and his victories had raised ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... de Almagro, was a soldier of fortune somewhat older, it seems probable, than Pizarro; though little is known of his birth, and even the place of it is disputed. It is supposed to have been the town of Almagro in New Castile, whence his own name, for want of a better source ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... his penitence. Patrick was an honourable knight, a religious man, as times went, but he had been brought up in a much rougher and more unscrupulous school than Malcolm, and had been hardened by years of service as a soldier of fortune. The Armagnac camp was not like that of England. Warriors of such piety and strictness as Henry and Bedford had never come within his ken; and that any man, professing to be a soldier, should hesitate at the license ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any story of duty done, or cause defended. Assume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise; assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than any other play; had rather he had made it by thrusting than by batting;—much more, than by ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... these innocent villagers? Well, there was Tenor Robusto, in love with Soprano and fated to be left at the post; Tenor Di Grazia, his twin brother; Giovanni Baritono, a Soldier of Fortune; Piccolo, an innkeeper; Fra Tonerero Basso, a priest; Signorina Prima Soprano, a bar maid; Signorina Mezzo, also a bar maid, and Signora Contralto, Piccolo's wife, besides villagers, eight topers, musicians, five couples of rustic brides and grooms, and a dancing bear and his keeper. Let us not ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of Gloucester was one Massey, a soldier of fortune, who, before he engaged with the parliament, had offered his service to the king; and as he was free from the fumes of enthusiasm, by which most of the officers on that side were intoxicated, he would lend an ear, it was presumed, to proposals for accommodation. But Massey was resolute to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Africa and such. Buys a quart of ink at a clip. He conveyed to us further, unconsciously, perhaps, a subtle impression that he was, in sympathy with us, on our side, so to say; in any difficulty, that would be, that might arise; with "the boys," in a manner of speaking. Veteran globe trotter and soldier of fortune on the earth's surface, Mr. Davis suffered a considerable shock to discover in tete-a-tete that we had never been in London. London? Such a human vegetable, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Batavian of noble race, who had served twenty-five years in the Roman armies. His Teutonic name has perished, for, like most savages who become denizens of a civilized state, he had assumed an appellation in the tongue of his superiors. He was a soldier of fortune, and had fought wherever the Roman eagles flew. After a quarter of a century's service he was sent in chains to Rome, and his brother executed, both falsely charged with conspiracy. Such were the triumphs adjudged to Batavian auxiliaries. He escaped with life, and was disposed to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... commemorated and magnified in the following ballad, as indeed it has been in some histories, was, in itself, no very important affair. It began in Dumfries-shire where Sir James Turner, a soldier of fortune, was employed to levy the arbitrary fines imposed for not attending the episcopal churches. The people rose, seized his person, disarmed his soldiers, and having continued together, resolved to march towards Edinburgh, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... III. and Philip, many a soldier of fortune amassed considerable opulence by the ransoming of his prisoners. Croquart, a famous leader of these companies, is related to have become extremely rich by the money he received from the ransoms of castles and towns. In the fourteenth century ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... of a dark-haired, olive-skinned man, a fascinating face, but a face to be afraid of. I remembered him, I thought, from my police experience, as a notorious crook who had not been seen in New York for years, a man who in the old days used to gamble with death in South American revolutions, a soldier of fortune. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... members of the new cabinet were: M. A. I. Gutchkov, chairman of the War Industries Committee, Minister of War and Marine. In earlier life he had been a soldier of fortune, having fought under many flags, for many causes, including that of the Boers in South Africa. In politics he was conservative. Andrei Shingarev, a Constitutional Democrat, was made Minister of Agriculture, an important post, for ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... is a story of a garrison brawl in which a Bismarck slew his companion in drink, then fled to Russia, then on to Siberia; soldier of fortune, he fights under any flag that promises a gay life and plenty of loot. Three hundred years later—how the wheel turns round!—Otto von Bismarck, as Russian Ambassador to the King of Prussia, engaged ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... halted, and sent one of his lieutenants named de Sainte-Chatte to make a reconnaissance, which he did, advancing beyond the men in ambush, who gave no sign of their existence, while the officer quietly examined the ground. But Sainte-Chatte was an old soldier of fortune and not easily taken in, so on his return, while explaining the plan of the ground chosen by Cavalier for the disposition of his troops to M. de La Jonquiere, he added that he should be very much astonished if the young Camisard ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... distinction and was vain enough to think himself fit for almost any position. The other was Charles Lee, a British officer who had served in America in the French War and afterward wandered about Europe as a soldier of fortune. He had returned to America in 1773 in the hope of playing a leading part here. He set himself up as an authority on military questions, and pretended to be a zealous lover of liberty. He was really an unprincipled charlatan ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... was that he couldn't be fooled by the success of his own methods, and no amount of "recognition" could make a stuffed shirt of him. No matter how much he was advertised as a great medicine-man in the councils of the nation, he knew that he was a born gambler and a soldier of fortune. He left his dignified office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year while he played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked being a great man from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities where he had once been merely ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... wilderness that they had neither time nor inclination for literary labours. Were it not for the state papers preserved in England, and for a collection of papers made by Sir Frederick Haldimand, the Swiss soldier of fortune who was governor of Quebec at the time of the migration, and who had a passion for filing documents away, our knowledge of the settlements in the Canadas would be of the most ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... way,—so people said. And I must not forget "Jac-cook," whose grandfather, according to his own report, had been a cannibal, a king of cannibals, and eaten a roast baby every morning for his breakfast. Jack was a soldier of fortune if there ever was one. He could give you a recipe for making poi from ripe bananas and the milk of cocoanuts, or for distilling whisky from fermented oranges,—both of which formulas I have unfortunately lost. He recommended an exclusive diet of raw fish, and in ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... impossible. How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice, and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because they were stout-hearted for an ideal—their ideal, not ours, of civil and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute men and women ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... malice of religious zeal, whilst it arraigns the savage fierceness of his colleague Maximian, has affected to cast suspicions on the personal courage of the emperor Diocletian. [3] It would not be easy to persuade us of the cowardice of a soldier of fortune, who acquired and preserved the esteem of the legions as well as the favor of so many warlike princes. Yet even calumny is sagacious enough to discover and to attack the most vulnerable part. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Cinna had been sworn to maintain Sylla's reforms, but no oath could be held binding which was extorted at the sword's point. A fresh Sulpicius was found in Carbo, a popular tribune. A more valuable supporter was found in Quintus Sertorius, a soldier of fortune, but a man of real gifts, and even of genius. Disregarding the new obligation to obtain the previous consent of the Senate, Cinna called the assembly together to repeal the acts which Sylla had forced on them. Sylla, it is to be remembered, had as yet won no victories, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... countrymen, he claimed a cousinship; and so profoundly did he impose upon Paris with his immense stature, his elegant attire, his courtly manners (for he was courtesy itself, when it pleased him), that he was taken for an eminent scholar, or at least a soldier of fortune. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Guernsey late in 1821 for Rio de Janeiro, whence he proceeded to Buenos Ayres, and thence over land to Chile, then struggling for her independence of Spain. His family was averse to his joining the patriot cause, as it was then termed, and he arrived at Santiago a mere soldier of fortune—without, we believe, a single letter of introduction to those in authority. But his appearance and manners, and a perfect knowledge of three languages, English, French, and Spanish, all of which he spoke fluently, soon procured him friends and active military employment. He rose rapidly, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... think those bars would keep me out long if I had a mind to climb them," he said to himself, complacently. But he was content to wait, walking up and down on the wet grass and running over in his mind the playhouse verses most suited to a soldier of fortune at the gate of a great lady. He had not to wait long. Before the jumble-cupboard of his memory had furnished him with the most felicitous quotation his ears heard a heavy tread through the trees, and the man with the musket hailed ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and, in place of entering into competition with the Master, would afford a slight though a distinct relief. I know not if I have done him well, though his moral dissertations ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a motley personality, which is sufficiently evident in his portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so different ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Villabuena, that distant relative of the Count to whom reference has been already made as the intended husband of his daughter, was a soldier of fortune who had entered the army at an early age, and at the outbreak of the Carlist insurrection was captain in a regiment of the line. He might have risen higher during his twenty years' service, but for his dogged and unpleasant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... gallant, impulsive, reckless, lovable soldier of fortune was dead, and it seemed as if all the power he had built up by his indomitable energy must inevitably vanish with its founder. The Marquis de Comares and the Spanish army held the fate of Algiers in their hands; one steady march, and surely the Corsairs ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... the next best thing to soldiering, anyway. Prescott, my boy, the reporter of to-day is the descendant of the old free-lance soldier of fortune. It takes a lot of nerve to be a reporter, sometimes, and to do one's work just as it should be done. The reporter's life is almost as full of adventure as the soldier's. And there are no 'peace times' for the reporter. He never knows when his style of ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... little farther, on the main stream, Citta di Castello recalls the story of a long siege which it valiantly sustained against Braccio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio (Strongarm), another renowned soldier of fortune of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... irregular, guerilla, partisan, condottiere[obs3]; franctireur[Fr], tirailleur[obs3], bashi-bazouk; vietminh[guerilla organization names: list], vietcong; shining path; contras; huk, hukbalahap. mercenary, soldier of fortune; hired gun, gunfighter, gunslinger; bushwhacker, free lance, companion; Hessian. hit man[criminals specializing in violence: see bad man], torpedo, soldier. levy, draught; Landwehr[Ger], Landsturm[Ger]; conscript, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... father's friend," he said, after a moment's hesitation, "a soldier of fortune by name of Galeotto—a leader of free lances who goes by the name of Il Gran Galeotto. But let that be. I want to tell you of myself, that you may judge ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... sixteenth, before Mantua, is known as the battle of La Favorita, from the stand made by Serurier on the road to that residence. Its results were six thousand prisoners, among them the Vienna volunteers with the Empress's banner, and many guns. In his fifty-fifth year this French soldier of fortune had finally reached the climax of his career. Having fought in the Seven Years' War, in Portugal and in Corsica, the Revolution gave him his opening. He assisted Scherer in the capture of the Maritime Alps, and fought ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The Soldier of Fortune The Gramaphone at Fond-Du-Lac The Land of Beyond Sunshine The Idealist Athabaska Dick Cheer The Return The Junior God The Nostomaniac Ambition To Sunnydale The Blind and the Dead The Atavist The Sceptic The Rover Barb-Wire Bill ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind, if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... dispositions modified by a slight knowledge of real life, and guided by the manners and conversation of his friends and acquaintance. Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad, will no longer be his favourite heroes; but he will now admire the soldier of fortune, the commercial adventurer, or the nabob, who has discovered in the east the secret of Aladdin's wonderful lamp; and who has realized the treasures ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... who was the Cardinal's man, had been staying for a day or two in my father's company. He was a real soldier of fortune, strong as a bull, a fine swordsman, and afraid of no man living. He told us many ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... made acquaintance with Madame Marigny, a natural daughter of high-placed parents, by whom, of course, she had never been acknowledged, but who had contrived that she should receive a good education at a convent; and on leaving it also contrived that an old soldier of fortune—which means an officer without fortune—who had served in Algiers with some distinction, should offer her his hand, and add the modest dot they assigned her to his yet more modest income. They contrived also that she should understand the offer must be accepted. Thus Mademoiselle 'Quelque ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Vasco Nunez had, in fact, risen with his circumstances, and now assumed a nobleness and grandeur from the discovery he had made, and the important charge it had devolved upon him. He no longer felt himself a mere soldier of fortune, at the head of a band of adventurers, but a great commander conducting an immortal enterprise. 'Behold,' says old Peter Martyr, 'Vasco Nunez de Balboa, at once transformed from a rash royster to a politic and discreet captain:' and thus it is that men are often made ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... was what he was—genial, complimentary, affectionate, but a playboy, merely, and a soldier of fortune, with no desire to make over her life for her on any new basis—she was now grieving over the futility of this romance which had got her nowhere, and which, in all probability, had alienated Cowperwood for good. He was still outwardly genial and friendly, but their ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... opportunities of doing these things far and near, but they have been denied to me. I trust that I have always been on the right side. I know that, except in one case, I have always been on the weaker side; but until my marriage I was what is generally called a soldier of fortune. I am known to this day as Captain Fyffe, though I never held her most sacred Majesty's commission. That I should be delighted to fight in my country's cause goes, I hope, without saying; but I never had the opportunity, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... war, and compelled to perform the most ignoble tasks, until, escaping by killing his brutal master, he made his way by his wits to his native country in 1604. He was now twenty-five years of age, and emphatically a soldier of fortune. The tale of his prowess and adventures had preceded him, and he was eagerly welcomed in London by kindred spirits who were preparing to emigrate to America to form the colony of Virginia under the grant and direct patronage of James I. By the time the enterprise was ripe for execution, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... left the Prince, she hurried straight to Colonel Gordon; and not content with directing the arrangements, she had herself accompanied the soldier of fortune to the Flying Mercury. The Colonel gave her his arm, and the talk between this pair of conspirators ran high and lively. The Countess, indeed, was in a whirl of pleasure and excitement; her tongue stumbled upon laughter, her eyes shone, the colour that was usually wanting now perfected ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his position from the first; but it was only by insensible degrees that the younger brother, from participating on equal terms in all the dangers and enjoyments of his kinsman, sank into the priest, the soldier of fortune, or the hanger-on of the mansion. The legal revolution was identical with that which occurred on a smaller scale, and in quite recent times, through the greater part of the Highlands of Scotland. When called in to determine the legal powers of the chieftain ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... world whilst he lived. "He thought it," Plutarch says—we quote from Dryden's translation—"a nauseous course of life not to be doing mischief to others or receiving some from them." But he was in reality an unlettered soldier of fortune, probably very much of the same type as some of Napoleon's rougher marshals, such as Augereau or Massena. His manners were those of the camp, and his statesmanship that of the barrack-room. He blundered in everything he undertook except ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!" He had had two wives, as we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance, or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had been made colonel at Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family," said the old bourgeois. He ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a young man pushed open the door—a tall, clean-cut young fellow, whose face bore the tan of a sun much stronger than any about New York. As I took his appraisal, I found him unmistakably of the type of American soldier of fortune who has been carried by the wander-spirit down among the romantic republics to the south ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... soldier of fortune is a romance from beginning to end, a poignant human drama shot through with passion, adventure, pathos and tragedy. In a sense it is an epitome of the earlier Middle Ages and through it shines the ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... The United States can't interfere in this. You know you were caught insurging against the government, and you're subject to the laws of this country. To tell the truth, I've had an intimation from the State Department—unofficially, of course—that whenever a soldier of fortune demands a fleet of gunboats in a case of revolutionary katzenjammer, I should cut the cable, give him all the tobacco he wants, and after he's shot take his clothes, if they fit me, for part payment of ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... hands. "I will marry you," she retorted. "You shall follow out your purpose. Though, after all, you cannot succeed. Who are you? A dreamer, a soldier of fortune, a man without place or following. You think slowly, and your heart rules your head. How can you hope to wrest an empire from—from us? You cannot do it. You cannot. But you shall have your chance. You gave me mine and you shall have yours. We go west. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... state of affairs at Constantinople exercised a yet more powerful influence. Anastasius, who, though no Arian, had during his long reign been always in an attitude of hostility towards the Papal See, was now dead, and had been succeeded by Justin. This man, a soldier of fortune, who had as a lad tramped down from the Macedonian highlands into the capital, with a wallet of biscuit over his shoulder for his only property, had risen, by his soldierly qualities, to the position ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... The soldier of fortune, driven at an early age from home, sent from country to country, serving, with little hope of advancement, under various generals, Balmerino had learned to view life almost as a matter of indifference, compared with the honest satisfaction of preserving ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... magnificent success and the most crushing defeat. He was successively the friend, the rival, the enemy of Essex, and when that favourite's star was in the ascendant, his waned, until a change in the queen's fickle fancy made him again, for a short period, an object of admiration and envy. A soldier of fortune, a planter of colonies, an admiral, a courtier, a statesman, a wit, a scholar, a chemist, an agriculturist, he was eminent as each of these, and his exploits in Guiana read like some fantastic tale of fictitious adventure. His History ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in A Legend of Montrose of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation! Who could read that scene ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton |
