The Adventures of Roderick Random

In the next chapter, an Irish drummer offers to teach the narrator swordsmanship, his real motive being jealousy of the Frenchman’s correspondence with his own wife. The narrator accepts and, after sufficient practice, returns to the campaign. The regiment joins Noailles’ camp on the eve of the Battle of Dettingen. Crossing the river under the Duc de Grammont, the French occupy a defile through which the allies must pass at a disadvantage; an old officer is astonished that Lord Stair, said to be a good general, has allowed his army to be “pent up,” but the narrator overhears that Stair was overruled and acted in an inferior capacity. When Grammont quits his advantageous post and attacks the English, drawn up in order of battle on the plain, the French are routed with a loss of five thousand men, including officers of distinction, many drowning in the river through “pure fear and confusion.” The narrator notes that the English king, heading the allies in person, halted the carnage, and the French subsequently buried the dead and treated the wounded with humanity, a point the French troops used to claim victory through extravagant self-praise.

The narrator re-engages the old Gascon, kicks him, draws his sword when the man attacks, and at last disarms him, thrusting the fellow’s blade into something, “it was not a tansy,” that lay smoking on the plain. The regiment is sent into winter quarters at Rheims, where the narrator, reduced to five sols a day and a wardrobe of tattered sleeves, writes to his uncle in England. Standing sentinel at a general’s gate, he hears a nobleman tell a gentleman in mourning, “You may depend upon my good offices,” and recognises the face of his old friend Strap, now passing as Monsieur d’Estrapes, valet-de-chambre to a deceased English gentleman. The two embrace in a transport of joy, and Strap produces three dozen fine Holland shirts, a wardrobe of five fashionable coats, a gold watch, diamond rings, mourning swords, pistols, and ready money amounting to over two hundred pounds, the bequest of his late master, which he offers entirely to the narrator. With Strap’s intercession, the narrator secures his discharge through a marquis, the pair travel to Paris, and then proceed by way of Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges to Ostend, where they take ship to Deal and post-chaise to London.

In London the narrator dispatches Strap to Wapping and learns that his Uncle Bowling, having failed to recover his post at the Admiralty, has gone to sea as mate of a merchant ship. He hires handsome lodgings near Charing Cross, attends a play where his vanity and inexperience lead him to perform “a thousand ridiculous coquetries” with his watch, snuff-box, and cane, then offers his services to a handsome woman whom he hopes to escort to her chair. She turns out to be a courtesan; a kiss rewards him with the “steams of Geneva,” and her coach-hire demand, “D—n you, you dog, won’t you pay the coach-hire?”, and a stream of “Billingsgate,” confirms her character.

Seeking better company, the narrator dines at an ordinary where thirteen guests, mostly better dressed, debate politics in French. A so-called ambassador, a young prince, a general, and a doctor favour the French cause; the narrator and a testy English patriot oppose them. When the general mentions an “epaulement” and cannot explain the term, the narrator supplies the definition, earning the gratitude of the old gentleman, who turns out to be Mr. Medlar. In the coffee-room, Medlar identifies the prince as a dancer, the ambassador as a fiddler, the doctor as a Roman Catholic priest, and the general as a malcontent pensioner whose promotion owed more to interest than to capacity. The doctor, who is one Doctor Wagtail, interrupts them with a trivial oyster anecdote, then discourses on the etymology of “drink,” distinguishing the Greek verbs poteein and pinein. The narrator corrects his classical scholarship, citing Horace and Anacreon, astonishing the physician. The two converse fluently in Latin for two hours, after which Wagtail proposes to introduce the narrator to wealthy young gentlemen at the Bedford coffee house.

The company at the Bedford proves a roistering set: Bragwell, a duellist; Banter, a wit; Chatter, a gossip; Slyboot, a painter; and Ranter, a player. They repair to a tavern, where they invent a “tinder water” specific and a method of producing it in an infirmary, duping Wagtail, then stage a scene in which a tall strapping wench, plainly a confederate, accuses the doctor of seduction and pregnancy. Wagtail protests his impotence, delivers a learned lecture on the mind and stimulating medicines, and is bitten on the cheek and anointed with black paint, which Slyboot pretends is a balsam for the bite of a mad dog. The doctor, in “the utmost horror,” is sent home in a chair. Ranter, who has been mocking the narrator all evening, is forced to leap over the narrator’s sword and vanishes into the night. The company disperses: Bragwell is left asleep on a bench at Moll King’s coffee-house, and Banter and the narrator retire toward Charing Cross as friends, the latter’s reputation vindicated.