#happy birthday to the baby generalissimo

[amateurvoltaire]

252 years ago, on a quiet Sunday, a boy was born, not in a fashionable 18th-century château but within the sombre walls of a fortress.

La Durbelière, with its moss-covered stones and silent moat, held the boy's first cries within its weathered 15th-century walls. This was a place of solid stone and ancient oaks, where the winds carried the scent of earth and the songs of the Poitevin countryside. This was a place where the laughter of the boy, his siblings and peasant children from the parish echoed alongside the thundering of hooves. This was a place where he grew wild and free, tracing paths through the tall grass and dreaming beneath the sheltering branches of trees that had seen so much.

This was a place where the boy would come to love his region and his people so deeply, so completely, that just 21 years later, he would give his life to protect them and everything they stood for.