On the next day, while Bonaparte was dictating his letters to Bourrienne, Marmont, one of his favorite aides-de-camp, who was discreetly looking out of the window, announced that he could distinguish at the end of the avenue the waving plume of Murat and the somewhat massive form of Augereau.
Murat was then, as we have said, a handsome young man of twenty-three or four. He was the son of an innkeeper of Labastide, near Cahors; and his father being also postmaster, Murat, at an early age, learned how to manage horses, and in time became an excellent horseman. Then through I know not what caprice of his father's (who probably wanted to have a prelate in the family), he had been sent to a seminary, where, if we may judge from the letters which are lying before us, his studies did not extend so far as to give him a proper knowledge of orthography.
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