jacques bonneval or, the days of the dragonnades by the author of _mary powell_, _the faire gospeller_, etc., etc. contents chapter i. the fair of beaucaire chapter ii. the feast of st. magdalen chapter iii. les arÈnes chapter iv. my uncle chambrun chapter v. the passport chapter vi. trial by fire chapter vii. la croissette chapter viii. persecuted, yet not forsaken chapter ix. cast down, but not destroyed chapter x. "my native land, good-night" [illustration] chapter i. the fair of beaucaire. there was magic, to my young ears, in the very name of the fair of beaucaire. beaucaire is only ten miles from nismes, therefore no wonder i heard plenty about it. it is true, that in my time, the world-famous fair did not exercise so vast an influence on commercial affairs in general, as in the old days, when it was the great market of france; and not only france, but of all civilized countries. with what enjoyment would i hear my grandfather relate how great caravans of wealthy merchants would assemble for mutual protection, because of the audacious outlaws, often headed by some powerful baron, who lay in wait for them to despoil them of their merchandise, and often to carry them off prisoners and extort heavy ransom. my grandfather would tell hew long files of mules, laden with rich silks, cloths, serges, camlets, and furs, from montpelier, from narbonne, from toulouse, from carcassonne, and other places, would wend towards beaucaire, as the day called the feast of st. magdalene approached, on which the fair was opened. the roads were then thronged with travelers; the city was choke-full of strangers; not a bed to be had, unless long preëngaged, for love or money. the shops exhibited the utmost profusion of rich goods; hospitality was exercised without grudging; old friends met from year to year; matches between their children were frequently concerted; bargains were struck, and commercial bills were commonly made payable at the fair of beaucaire. the crowd was immense while it lasted; a hundred thousand strangers being generally present. thus, you can easily conceive what charms such a lively scene had for the young; while to the old it was the crown of their industry during the year. those at a distance, finding communications difficult and journeys expensive, were glad to make an annual pilgrimage serve their turn, when they were certain of meeting their fellow-traders, and of having under their notice goods from all parts of the world. it was with great glee, therefore, that i, a youth of nineteen, started with my family for the fair of beaucaire on the st of july, . accommodation was promised us by my uncle nicolas, and we went the day before the festival in order to see it from the beginning. i drove a large and commodious char-a-banc, in which were my father and mother, my younger brothers and sisters, monsieur bourdinave, my father's partner, his two fair daughters, madeleine and gabrielle, and their old servant alice, who was also their kinswoman in a distant degree. i was held to be a smart youth in those days, by my family and friends, and certainly i had made myself as fine as i could, in the hope of pleasing madeleine, who, to my mind, was the most charming girl in the world. nor was she behindhand in the way of ornament, for she and her sister were dressed in their best, and looked as fresh as daisies. in fact, we were, one and all, in holiday attire; even the horse being tricked out with ribbons, tassels, fringes, and flowers, till he was quite a sight. my father opened the day with family worship, which always seemed to put us in tune for the morning, and spread a balmy influence over us. i well remember the portion of scripture he read was the seventeenth chapter of st. john's gospel, which, i need not remind you, contains this verse--"i pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." my father dwelt on this in his prayer, and said, "lord, i know that these dear young people cannot pass through life without hearing and seeing much of evil: but, oh, keep them unspotted by it! let an atmosphere of sanctity and safety surround them even in the midst of the fires, that they receive no hurt. in their allowed pleasures and pastimes, let them wear that spiritual hauberk which is invulnerable to the darts of the wicked; let them steadfastly set their faces against whatever thy word disallows; and, should fiery trial and temptation beset them, enable them, having done all, to stand." i am confident that these were as nearly as possible the very words of my father; for they made an impression on me that i could hardly account for: and as he had recently been explaining to the children the nature of a hauberk, as a coat of defensive armor, and remarking on its pliancy and being often worn out of sight, the metaphor fixed itself in my memory. we had a substantial breakfast of soup and bread before we started; and then drove in state to m. bourdinave's door, where i sprang out to help the smiling girls into the char-a-banc. i would gladly have had madeleine next me, but, as ill-luck would have it, m. bourdinave placed himself at my side, and my father just behind; so that i was completely shut out from her, to my great chagrin. however, if i could not see her, unless by looking round, i knew she could see me; so i carried myself my best, and flourished my whip in fine style. and thus we went to the fair of beaucaire. as we passed les arènes, that famous roman amphitheatre in the centre of our city, i heard my father and his old friend allude to its former uses, without paying much heed to them. i believe they reminded one another that not only wild beasts but christians had formerly been put to death there, for the recreation of those who were wild beasts themselves; and my father said how he hated the sunday bull-fights that took place there still, and never would let me go near them; on which i put in soberly, "i never want to, father." "thou art a steady lad, i'll warrant thee," said m. bourdinave, approvingly. "hold fast the form of sound words which hath been given thee in faith and love which is in christ jesus." "ay, ay, sir," said i, whipping old réné smartly. and in another minute we were thumping and bumping over great paving-stones, too noisily for conversation to be carried on, and getting into a mêlée of carts, wagons, and horsemen, all bound for beaucaire. the women were now in great delight, looking from side to side, commenting on the dress of one, the equipage of another, nodding to acquaintance, and crying "o, look!" to each other, when they saw anything beyond common. i had enough to do, i assure you, to steer a straight course; and m. bourdinave observing it, remarked that he hoped i should be equally vigilant in steering a straight course through life, which made me cry "ay, ay, sir," and set me thinking. when the road became a little quieter, i heard him and my father discussing the price of cocoons, the superiority of good cocoons to cocalons, dupions, and soufflons; which last, i need not tell you, are very imperfect cocoons; dupions have two threads, and confuse one with another; and pointed cocoons are apt to break in the winding. but all these, as you know, are turned to account by the silk-spinner, and worked up into stockings, sewing-silk, and handkerchiefs. but the good cocoons that yield a strong, thick, compact filament, are appropriated by the silk-throwsters. but this trade-talk was interrupted by cries of amused delight from the women, and on looking about to see what tickled their fancies, they pointed out to us a most extraordinary figure, standing bolt upright in a cart. he was tall and meagre, and wore a long black robe and tall pointed cap, both of which appeared spangled with silver; instead of which, they were studded with steel buttons, needles, and pins, of which he was an itinerant vendor. i believe the women would have purchased largely of him, had my father let me stop. next we came up with a little house upon wheels, drawn by a sorry horse, and on the wooden wall of the said house was depicted, many sizes larger than life, a great human tooth, with bleeding fangs. beneath was an inscription that the owner of the cart was a traveling dentist, who drew teeth without the least pain. alice, the maid, had instantly a great desire to let him draw a troublesome tooth of hers which, she took pains to assure us, was not impaired by natural decay, but only accidentally broken in cracking a cherry-stone. "the edge is so rough," said she, "that it hurts my tongue; and since this honest gentleman can extract it painlessly, i have a great mind to try his hand." "plenty of time for that when we get to beaucaire," said m. bourdinave. "sure, you would not have a tooth drawn in the middle of the high road?" "truly, i should not mind it, inside that nice little wooden house," said she. but no, she was not allowed to do so; and, to console her, madeleine uncovered a little basket she carried on her arm, and discovered cherries as red as her own lips, nestling in dark green leaves. "here," said she, cheerfully, "are some stones to take your revenge on." "ah, what beauties," cried alice, taking a few; and the basket being handed round, we were soon all eating cherries; and gabrielle asked me if i did not wish she had the gift of st. marguerite. "i do not know what gift you mean," said i, turning half round, and looking full at her. "once on a time," said the lively girl, "the foolish story goes, that two saints, who were brother and sister, lived in separate monasteries; but the brother was frequently visited by his sister, on the pretence of seeking spiritual advice. their names were st. honorat and st. marguerite. at length the brother grew rather tired of his sister's visits, and called them a waste of time. 'henceforth, let it suffice that i shall visit you occasionally, said he. 'when?' said st. marguerite. 'when the cherry-trees blossom,' said st honorat. thereupon, st. marguerite prayed that the cherry-trees might blossom once a month, which they did; so her brother acknowledged himself outwitted." "fie for shame, daughter," said m. bourdinave, with displeasure. "i am grieved that you should remember and repeat such lying legends." "dear father, they exercise the fancy--" "exercise the fancy, indeed! let fancy confine herself to her own province. she is a good servant, but a bad mistress. the jews exercised their fancies in the wild talmudical fables. what said our saviour of them? 'ye make the word of god of none effect through your traditions. let me hear no more papistical fables." gabrielle hung her head, and stealing a glance that way, i saw madeleine pass her arm round her sister's waist, and look sweetly at her, which made me think madeleine more attractive than ever. m. bourdinave did not immediately recover his equanimity, but addressing my father, said it more than ever behooved good reformers to walk warily, and not give in to any of the ensnaring practices of the surrounding catholics. "little by little they are stealing in on us already," said he, "and, if our sagacious men are to be believed, a time of trouble is preparing for us that may perhaps not fall very short of the massacre on the day of st. bartholomew." "still," said my father, "we are under the protection of the edict of nantes." "edicts may be set aside," said m. bourdinave, in a lowered voice, which yet i heard, being next him. "only think how we have been annoyed and injured the last two or three years, by edicts differing greatly from the edict of nantes. that one, for instance, which rendered us liable to the intrusion of catholics into our temples, to spy at our observances, pick up scraps of our sermons, and report them incorrectly. what advantage the rabble have taken of it!" "too true," said my father, gravely. "last year," pursued m. bourdinave, "that attempted confederacy for mutual protection, when all our closed meetinghouses were reopened for worship, showed what temper our adversaries were of." "it was an ill-considered measure," said my father, slowly. "ill-conducted, rather," said m. bourdinave. "the act should have been simultaneous; whereas the want of concert among our people betrayed their weakness, and laid them open to attack. the military at bordeaux acted with shocking barbarity." "i do not like to think upon it," said my father. "i trust there will be no recurrence of such lamentable scenes." "i much fear there will be, though," said m. bourdinave, gloomily. "satan desires to have us, that he may sift us like wheat. let us hope to abide the trial." at this moment a burst of noisy music, drowned their voices; and the needle-seller's horse, which was just before us, making a sudden start, the poor needle-vendor was thrown off his balance, and jerked out of his cart on to a heap of flints by the road-side, while his horse began to kick. giving the reins to my father, i jumped out, and ran to his assistance; but he was so prickly all over, that it was difficult to lay hold of him. his needles and pins ran into my fingers in a dozen places. to make matters worse, his nose began to bleed, so that he was in a pitiable plight. however, i picked him up at last, found he was not seriously injured, gave him a clean handkerchief (which he promised to return), and started him off again in his cart, in a sitting position this time, and much crestfallen. the throng increased as we approached beaucaire, and when we got into the streets there was frequently a complete stoppage. oh, what a lively scene it was! and what a noise! music playing, bells ringing, people talking at the top of their voices. what joyous meetings i what hearty welcomes! what various smells of fried fish, hot soups, and roast meats! truly, the fair of beaucaire exceeded my liveliest imaginings, and yours will certainly never come up to it. the fair, you have perhaps heard, is held on a wide open ground between the rhone and the castle rock. this space was covered with streets of booths and sheds, in which all kinds of merchandise were displayed. the river was choked with heavily-freighted barges. as for the streets, they were hung from their upper windows with the richest tapestries; silks, damasks, velvets, and goldsmiths' work were displayed in the richest abundance; the most costly valuables exposed, almost at the mercy of jostling wayfarers; banners flaunting overhead, and casting fleeting shadows beneath. languages of all nations mingled in strange medley--german, spanish, italian, turkish, arabic, russian. ah, it was like a dream! my uncle nicolas received us most heartily; and, while my father and m. bourdinave went about their affairs, i had the pleasing charge of the women, and showing them what was to be seen. my mother, with a child in each hand, madeleine and i, each with another child, gabrielle and old alice close behind us, formed such a phalanx that we made way for ourselves, or had it made for us, wherever we went, and saw everything we wanted to see. we even saw the dentist, and alice would not be foiled this time, but almost thrust herself on his notice. he made her sit on the ground, put her head between his knees and dragged out the tooth by main force. she screamed horribly, and said, "you engaged to give no pain!" "to myself," said he, "but i could not engage for you." so there was the laugh against her. however, the tooth was out, and he generously gave it to her; so we walked away laughing. chapter ii. the feast of st. magdalen. we looked about us till dinner, and after dinner we looked about us again; for the women and children seemed as though they would never be sated with sightseeing; and as for me, i was never sated of going about with madeleine. all at once she cried out in a frightened voice, "where is gabrielle?" we looked about and could see neither her nor alice; and as it was nearly the hour they call vesper, though the days were still pretty long, we were greatly alarmed at their disappearance. little louison, however, plucked my sleeve, and said, "i think they went in there," pointing to a church-door; so, although my father specially objected to my setting foot within a catholic place of worship, madeleine and i went in to look for her sister; but my mother kept the children outside. as soon as we entered we found ourselves almost in darkness, what little light there was proceeding from great wax candles; and there was a good deal of tawdry finery and trumpery all about, and a strong smell of incense. i was looking about me with curiosity and interest, mixed with a certain repulsion, when madeleine, in an eager undertone, exclaimed, "there she is!" and pressed forward, i close following, to a little side-altar, where gabrielle and alice were listening, with amused wonder, to a priest, who was telling a group of people about him that what he was exhibiting to them was one of mary magdalen's bones; and that she and lazarus, and martha his sister, had put to sea in an old boat, and in process of time, after being sorely buffeted by winds and waves, had been cast ashore at marseilles, where they preached the gospel to the natives, and converted them all. i did not believe one word of this, nor did madeleine, who drew her reluctant sister away; and when we got her into the open air, rebuked her for doing what their father would not approve. gabrielle looked inclined to defend herself, and make a joke of it. however, a great bell began to clang so near us as to drown her voice; people were pushing past us into church, and we found ourselves going against the stream, and made the best of our way out of it, and back to our quarters. my father and m. bourdinave were standing at the door, conversing with my uncle, and when they saw us they smiled, and my father said, with unwonted softness in his tone, "well, children, are you come back? have you enjoyed yourselves?" and looked earnestly at madeleine, whose eyes sank under his. my uncle nicolas kept a mercer's shop, and his shelves and counters were now so laden with goods that it was difficult to steer our way through them to the steep stair which led to the floor above; and that, too, was converted, for the time, into a kind of warehouse; but above that was the living-room, and above that, again, numerous bedrooms with sloping sides, and small windows piercing the steep roof. my aunt jeanne was good and hospitable to excess. she would not let m. bourdinave and his family return to their lodging till they had supped with her, though there were other guests; so we were jammed rather closely around the table with little elbow-room. then ensued clinking of glasses, clatter of plates, dishes, knives, forks, the buzzing of many tongues, savory smells of hot viands, and much helping and pressing of one another; much talk of the price of silks, velvets, and serges; of the credit of such and such a house; of the state of trade; of the court; and of the country. i, wedged between madeleine and her sister, had the opportunity of giving her many tender looks, though few words passed between us. among the strangers at table was a strangely unpleasant englishman, who prefaced every speech with "i want to know--" and would not be satisfied with a short answer. at length my father mildly said-- "sir, you seek to know trade secrets. you know there are secrets in all trades." "that is precisely why i want to know them," said he, laughing. "but a good reason why we should not tell them," said my father; who then turned from him, and addressed some one else. gabrielle whispered, "i shall call that man monsieur i-want-to-know." "ah, well, i know already what i chiefly want," pursued the englishman, who, had he not been drinking more freely than was good for him, would probably have been less communicative. "i've been to italy, and have seen the italian machinery for throwing silk, and shall carry back a pretty good idea of the process." "that man shall never carry anything back," whispered a vindictive-looking italian, whose eyes glittered like fire. "hush! he is only an empty boaster." "we want no empty boasters. we will not let him steal our trade secrets." that night, going home to his lodging, the englishman was set upon by the italian, and pricked with his stiletto, narrowly escaping with his life. he gave him what he called "a good english black-eye," and bawled loudly for justice. the italian ran off, and was no more seen; and the englishman, whose ugly name was hogg, talked big about applying to his ambassador, sir william trumbull, but was induced to let the matter drop. the ambassador shortly had worse things to complain of. the next day was the catholic feast of st. magdalen, which, though we huguenots felt no manner of respect for, we were obliged to conform to outwardly, by not selling or working in open shops, till the services of the day were over. we made up to ourselves for it by having a prayer-service of our own in-doors, followed by a long exposition and exhortation from a godly minister named brignolles, who warned us of times of trial that should soon be revealed, and adjured us to put on the whole armor of god, that we might be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. then, after our mid-day meal, we went forth to see the show. this time i had the care of gabrielle, and wished i had not, for she was in her giddiest humor, and a young man, whose appearance i did not like, continually hung about us, and looked attentively at her, which i resented, but she was evidently pleased with. at length, some waxwork attracting our notice, a change took place in the disposition of our party. i shifted the charge of gabrielle to her father, and got madeleine instead. my memories of the rest of the day are more about madeleine than anything else. i remember, though, that we fell in with our neighbors the lefevres at a waxwork stall, and while madeleine and i were admiring some fruit that exactly imitated nature, little jules lefevre stretched out his hand to touch a little waxen boy with a lamb, saying, "pretty, pretty!" "dear child, you shall have it!" cried a honeyed voice behind; and a lady nicely dressed put the image into his hand, and stooped down to kiss him. when marie lefevre turned round, and saw what her little boy held, she looked displeased, and made him lay it on the stall again, for it was one of those papistical images which we hold in detestation. at night, when all had dispersed but our own immediate party, there was a pause, and i saw that the elders had something on their minds that they were about to unfold. i felt a strange emotion that presaged what was coming, for not a hint had been dropped. "son," said my father--and i looked towards him with awe--"you are now on the confines of manhood, and it behooves us to consider your future. at your time of life i was betrothed to your mother, and a share was promised me of my father's business. what are your own views respecting your course in life?" all the elder people fixed their eyes on me with gravity, and madeleine afterwards told me her heart stopped beating; while gabrielle struggled with a disposition to laugh. "my views are," returned i, boldly, "to follow my honored father, step by step, and, his concurrence obtained, to get betrothed as fast as i can." "well said, my boy," said my father, heartily, while every face wore a broad smile but one, which was mantling with blushes. "provided," continued i, "that i may choose the young lady." "let us know where your choice will fall," said my father, trying to keep the corners of his mouth in order, while m. bourdinave scarcely suppressed a chuckle. i stepped across the room, and took madeleine's hand. "here is my choice," said i, "if she will have me. we have known each other from childhood." madeleine instantly snatched her hand away, and covered her face. however, the next moment her father joined our hands, and gave us his blessing; and then we were bewildered with congratulations and good auguries; and master brignolles gave us a world of good advice, and offered a prayer; and my father gave me a ring of betrothal to put on her finger, and thus we became plighted to one another. the rest of our stay at beaucaire passed like a dream, and its brightness yet remained while we pursued our homeward journey. madeleine sat close behind me this time, and on her knee was little jules lefevre, whom we had taken in charge of because his father's wagon was over-full. he had something clasped tight in his hand, which he unclosed for a moment at madeleine's request, and gave her a glimpse of a little "agnus dei," which he said had been given him by "the pretty lady." how or when she had done so, we never made out. madeleine tried to get it from him; but he resisted with all his might, saying it was "his own." "it must be confessed," said gabrielle, "that the catholic churches have much more in them to attract the eye than our plain temples." "who denies it?" said i. "their appeals are to the outward senses, which never influence the heart." "i think my heart would be very much influenced by them," said gabrielle, "if i had not been brought up to think them wrong." "i cannot bear to hear you talk in that way, sister," said madeleine. "pray, do not seem indifferent to the blessings of a purer faith." gabrielle pouted, and said, "indifferent? no; but perhaps if you and i had been brought up catholics, we might have been as positive we held the purer faith as we are now that we are of the reformed." "a very good thing, then, that you were not so brought up," said i, "for then i should not have been betrothed to madeleine;" and to prevent her pursuing so unpleasant a subject, i lifted up my voice and sang. little jules presently dropped asleep in madeleine's arms, and his little fat fingers unclosing, the dangerous bauble dropped from them, and, by a dexterous touch of my whip, i flicked it into the road. by-and-by, awaking, he cried for it, and beat madeleine with his tiny fists; nor was pacified till his attention was diverted by an almost interminable file of mules, with their five or six olive-faced muleteers in brown jackets and red sashes. chapter iii. les arÈnes. when we got back, we found my uncle chambrun, my mother's only brother, standing at the door. he was the minister of a small town near avignon, and did not care to go to the fair; nevertheless he was very glad to hear all about it from those who had been there. we were well pleased to have so ready a listener; and when we had said our say, he fell into grave talk with my father and mother of the signs of the times, which he thought very threatening. "what can we expect otherwise," said he, "with louis the fourteenth for king and louvois for his minister, and père la chaise for his confessor, and madame de maintenon for his confidante and adviser? a storm is gathering overhead, but never mind--there is a heaven higher than all." these words checked us; but youthful spirits soon rise, and the impression did not last long. i now seemed walking on air, for i loved and was loved by madeleine. a few days after our return from beaucaire, marie lefevre burst in on us with troubled looks, and exclaimed, "have you seen my boy?" "no!" exclaimed we all. "then something has befallen him," cried she, wringing her hands. "we have lost sight of him." we gathered about her, full of pity, and asked where he had last been seen. "near les arènes." "he may have fallen into some pit, or lost himself among the dungeons," said my mother. "we will go and help you to find him." so she and i accompanied marie, who was crying bitterly, and made frequent inquiries for him by the way. when we got inside that vast, circular inclosure, we agreed that marie should explore one side and we the other, and thus meet at the other end. this took us some time, for you must know that it consists of two stories, each of sixty arcades, seventy feet high; and under its great arches and pillars are many vaulted chambers and passages, wherein good christians have been confined; and again, wherein other good christians have found asylums in time of hot persecution. within the amphitheatre were originally thirty-two rows of seats, which would accommodate at least twenty thousand spectators that had a mind to feast their eyes on scenes of blood in the central arena. i looked with curiosity at this place, which i had never so thoroughly visited before. some of the dens were still in use for the bulls that were baited on sundays, and others seemed lairs for rogues and vagabonds; but there was many a corner which, as i said to my mother, would afford a good hiding-place in time of danger, and one, especially, in which i thought a fugitive might defy detection (though _i_ had detected it). well, we hunted high and low, but could not find little jules. his mother was distracted: we feared she would lose her reason altogether. madeleine devoted herself to her like an angel; neighbors were full of compassion--those of our own persuasion, i mean; for the catholics mocked her and said, "go seek him in the jews' quarter. the jew baker's daughter has, doubtless, made him into pies. go seek him in their secret assemblies--in their cellars--in their slaughter-houses--doubtless they are fattening him for their passover." conceive the anguish of the mother. at length she found he was not dead. her heart leaped for joy. but when she found how the case stood with him, she was ready to wish him dead and numbered among the little children that follow the lamb whithersoever he goeth. jules had been kidnapped and tampered with by the catholics. the little apostate had been taught to curse his parents. the case occasioned a great deal of talk in nismes at the time; unhappily, similar kidnappings made it soon forgotten, except by the family. one day, when i had been hunting for him, i came suddenly on the young man who had stared so rudely at gabrielle at beaucaire. i was sorry to see him in nismes. i did not like the look of him, with his narrow head, low forehead, and eyes too near his nose, though otherwise he was well enough. returning to our factory, i found him just coming out of it. i said to my father, "who is that?" he said, "a troublesome fellow, i think, but he brought a message from your uncle nicolas. he is called martin prunevaux. he asked me all manner of impertinent questions, and, if he fall in with you, may ask you as many; but remember jaques coeur's motto, "'en close bouche n'entre mouche--' "and again, 'dire, faire, taire.'" "ay, ay, father, you may depend on me," said i, heartily. sometimes, before i went to bed, i stepped out to get a glimpse of the light in madeleine's window. i should observe, it was also gabrielle's, for the sisters shared the same room. the moon cast strong lights and shadows, and i kept in the shade till close to the house, when what was my disgust to hear the wretched tinkle of a guitar under the window! serenades might be all very well for italy, but we did not favor them in nismes; and stepping briskly up to the musician, i said abruptly, "we want none of this miserable noise!" he started as if shot, saying, "pardon, monsieur," evidently taking me for one of the family; a mistake which i favored by knocking at the door. as i was in deep shadow he did not recognize me, but the moonlight fell full on his face, and i saw it was martin prunevaux. i felt exceedingly inclined to fall on him and beat him for daring to tune his wretched pipes under madeleine's window; but a second thought assured me that gabrielle must be his object; the more so that i was sure i saw her shadow (which was shorter than her sister's) fall on the curtain, and i could even fancy her making merry behind it. still, i liked not such a fellow to come prowling about either of the sisters. i stood my ground, that i might not be guilty of a runaway knock, and when alice came to the door i made a bungling speech and said, "oh, i suppose the family are all gone to bed. i am late tonight." she said, "they are so, sir," and looked surprised. i said, "there was a street musician of some sort before the house when i came up. i think i have chased him away." she said, "all the better, sir; we are much obliged to you; we never encourage such people." when i rallied madeleine, next day, on having been serenaded, tears sprang into her eyes, and she assured me it was not her fault, adding that she feared gabrielle, in her thoughtlessness, must have given some encouragement to a presumptuous young man. "however, when my father returns, he will take measures," she added, "to prevent our being further troubled with him." monsieur bourdinave was at this time traveling on business. the sisters spent that evening at our house as was not unusual. on these occasions we often sang hymns; and i had just set the tune of "chantez de dieu le renom"-- "chantez de dieu le renom, vous serviteurs du seigneur! venez pour lui faire honneur, vous qui avez eu ce don"-- and was lifting up my voice on high, followed by the sweet treble of the girls, when a shower of stones rattled against the casement, and a flint passed close to madeleine and hit my father on the cheekbone. hot with anger, i rushed into the street, and found a group of unmannerly fellows outside, who, instead of taking to their heels, gathered round me with defiant looks. "what is the meaning of this?" cried i in anger. "what is the meaning of your disturbing the neighborhood with your uproar?" cried one of them, saucily. "uproar! we were singing to the praise and glory of god. do you know that you have hurt my father?" "we neither know nor care; and if you don't keep a quiet tongue in your head, will slit it as soon as not." "come in, son, come in," said my father, whose cheek was covered with blood. "as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men"--drawing me indoors as he spoke. "excellent advice! take care that he follows it," cried they, tauntingly, as my father shut-to the door. i was burning with rage; madeleine was in tears; the children, with scared looks, were gathered round my mother. my father, with gentle force, drew me into the little circle, and made me sit down beside him. "my children," said he, "we have been warned that evil times are coming, and this may be the beginning. if it prove otherwise, we shall have the more reason to praise the lord; but if it please him to try and to prove us, let us not be found unprepared. our strength lies in prayer, in not giving offence, and in not being easily offended." "we gave no offence, father," said i. "but you were too easily offended. if any one had cause of complaint, it was i; but i do not take it up." my mother was meanwhile bathing his cut cheek and applying a plaster. "sure, it would make any son's blood boil, to see his father hit!" cried i; and i saw that madeleine sympathized with me. "why, then, let his blood cool again," said my father, jocularly. "tush, many a school-boy gets a worse hurt than this, and makes no moan. there! your mother has made all right, and i feel no smart. let us say no more about it." i thought he strikingly acted on our lord's axiom of "if thine enemy smite thee on the one cheek, offer him the other," but could not just then enter into it. i longed to give those rascals a good beating. "now, then, i'll set the tune again," said i, affecting composure. but, "no, no," said the girls simultaneously; and "no, no," said my dear mother. "don't you see," she continued, "i have all this broken glass to pick up? if you will do me a real kindness, you will step round to the glazier, the first thing in the morning, and get him to mend the window before breakfast." "i'll go at once," said i; but "no, no," was again the word. my father laid his hand firmly on my right arm, and madeleine hers on my left. though her touch was as light as a snow-flake, i would not have shaken it off for the world. "the streets are unquiet to-night," said my father, "and i mean no one to go forth till the girls return home, when we will see them safely to their door; going out the back way." so we spent the next hour in a sober, subdued manner. madeleine shyly let me steal her hand and hold it some minutes, as though she knew it would calm me. and so it did; there was much sweetness in that hour, after all. at length it was time to see them home; my mother kissed and blessed them as if they were going further than into the next street. we went out the back way, my father taking gabrielle and i madeleine, and we met with no evil by the way. being rather high-wrought, i would willingly have faced a little danger for madeleine's sake. i kissed her soft cheek unrebuked, and followed my father through the dark with a happy heart mechanically, rather than from either devotion or defiance, i began to hum "chantez de dieu," when my father's warning hand plucked my sleeve, and, at the same instant, a rough voice beside me said, "hold your peace! have you not heard of the _arrêt?_" and passed on. we had heard nothing of any _arrêt_; but next morning, when i went to the glazier's, he told me that an order had been issued forbidding the reformed to sing psalms in the streets and public walks, or even within their own houses loud enough to be heard outside. and he told me he was so full of work that he hardly knew which way to turn, in consequence of the many windows broken over night by evil-disposed men suborned to interrupt psalmody. i asked him, half jesting, if he thought any of the suborned men were glaziers; but it hurt him, for he was as good a huguenot as any in nismes. going home with him, i saw a horrid sight--a dead body that had been some time buried, torn from the grave, stripped of its shroud, and lying in the gutter. i shuddered, and asked the glazier if we had not better tell the authorities; but he hurried on, saying, "better let it be. the authorities doubtless know all about it." so there had we to leave the ghastly object, though its remaining there was equally prejudicial to decency and to health. men's tongues were very busy that day; every one foreboding calamity and nobody knowing how to meet it. my mother sent me, after breakfast, to visit my uncle chambrun, who had fallen sick; and as the distance was about seven leagues, i went to him on a small but active horse. on my arrival, i found him in bed, with a royal commissioner seated beside him, who was talking to him with great show of courtesy, while my uncle looked much wearied. the bishop of valence was on the other side of his bed. finding myself in such high company, i fell back, and awaited a better opportunity of presenting myself. the commissioner was inquiring very sedulously after my uncle's health, and assuring him he respected him greatly, and wished to show him favor. "we have been constrained," said he, "to subject several of your colleagues to temporary confinement, but i have great hope that nothing of the kind will be necessary in your case, if you are a man of wisdom who know how to comply with exigencies as they arise, and thereby set an example to those around you. to this end the bishop has come to put a few easy interrogations. it is a mere form, and i am sure you will make no difficulty." my uncle thanked him for his kind expressions, but said he had a master in heaven to whom he owed his first duty. "so have we all," interposed the bishop. and that he should make answer with that end in view and nothing else. the bishop then took up the word, and very little can i remember of what he said, so hampered was i by his presence; but it was plain that he sought to entangle my uncle in his talk. that was no easy thing to do, my uncle was so temperate and logical, and so much more conversant with the holy scriptures than the bishop was. the commissioner, perceiving that the bishop was getting the worst of it, broke in with-- "all this is beside the mark. the king is determined that you, monsieur chambrun, should be a good catholic; so it is no good begging off. you had much better accept the good offer made you, which i trust you will do on thinking it over." "the only offer i desire," replied my uncle, "is of a passport, to enable me, as soon as i am well enough, to follow my brother ministers to holland. my reason tells me--" "a truce with your reason," interrupted the bishop, rising to go away. "you have too much rhetoric by half. i advise you to reflect and to obey." "monseigneur, i am sure you think you are giving me the best advice," said my uncle, feebly. "nephew, see the noble and reverend gentlemen out." chapter iv. my uncle chambrun. having done so, i returned to my uncle, and said to him,--"uncle, the bishop has gone away in great wrath, vowing that you shall repent of your conduct." "and when i would have made way for him," said my aunt, indignantly, "he called me a bad name, and looked as if i were the very scum of the earth." "ah, he does not recognize marriages among the clergy," said my uncle, calmly. "never mind him, my good dorothée; he'd be glad enough to have a wife of his own, and seeing me so much better off than he is, makes him captious and querulous. come and shake up my pillow, for my poor head aches sadly. i will try to get a little sleep." at that instant, a loud trampling of horses' feet was heard, together with the jingling of spurs and the clanking of armor. "what's that?" cried aunt dorothée, running from the bed to the window, and pulling back the little curtain, "ah, le beau spectacle! look out, jacques!" it was indeed a fine spectacle, as far as mere outward splendor went, to see a troup of cavalry in blue and burnished steel, on powerful black horses, ride proudly by, making the very earth shake under them; and many children, attracted by the sight, ran towards them, shouting and throwing up their caps; but when i looked at the ferocious faces of these men, seamed with many an ugly scar--their lowering brows, their terrible eyes, their sour aspect--i felt they might be as dreadful to face in peace as in war. i watched them out of sight, and then placed myself beside my uncle, who, with closed eyes and folded hands, was endeavoring to sleep. my aunt went below to baste the poulet for his dinner. the house was very still; nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock. all at once i heard heavy feet tramping towards the house, and a confused medley of rough voices. the next instant, the house door was battered as if to break it in, which, being of solid oak, was no easy matter. the door being opened, i heard a faint cry of terror from my aunt, and a brawling and trampling impossible to describe. i looked down from the stair-head and counted forty-two dragoons, trampling in one after another, till, the house being of moderate size, there was hardly room for them to stand. yet they continued to pour in, jostling, pushing, and elbowing one another, each trying to shout louder than his comrades, "holà! holà! house! house!--give us to eat! give us to drink!" with frightful oaths and curses. "good sirs, a moment's patience, and you shall be waited on," cried my terrified aunt. "to jericho with your patience! we wait for nobody. i decide for this poulet," said one, taking it up hot in his hands, and bawling because they were burnt; "dress two dozen more--cook all you have in the poultry-yard, or we will cook you." "i claim my share of that poulet," says one. "why not have one apiece?" said another. "who would make two bites of a cherry? he has gnawn off all the best mouthfuls already. come, be quick, mistress housewife! where are the cellar keys?" "i've mislaid them, good sirs," said the poor terrified woman. "we'll kick the door open, then. here's a ham! here are two hams! ha! ha! ham is good--we will heat the copper and boil them." "no, slice them and fry them," says another; "they take too long to boil. bread!--where's the bread? where's the oven? if it were big enough, goody, we'd put you into it." "ha! ha! what have i found here!--a bag of money." "divide! divide!" shouted two dozen voices. "it's mine, i found it!" cried the first. then they fell to blows, and some of them fell sprawling to the ground, and were kicked, the bag was snatched from the finder, and the money scattered on the floor; then they scrambled for it, as many as could get near it, laughing and cursing; while others ransacked drawers, cupboards, and shelves, and others broke open the cellar door, and began to drink. terrified beyond expression, i went back to my uncle, and saw, to my surprise and relief, that he had fallen into a heavy sleep, which was a restorative he particularly needed. on looking from the window, i say my aunt, almost incapacitated by her fears, attempting to catch the poultry, in which the dragoons alternately helped and hindered her, roaring with laughter when a hen flew shrieking over their heads, and then abusing my aunt. they were quickly caught and plucked, and set, some to roast, some to broil, according to their capricious mandates; and then, when everything was in as fair train for their disorderly feast as it well could be (two or three additional fires having been kindled), one of them said, "let us divert the time with a little good music;" and began to beat a drum. "louder! louder!" cried his comrades. "let's have a chorus of drums!" how they came to have so many, i know not, except that they were brought for the special purpose of tormenting; but they produced six or eight, slung them round their necks, and began to beat them, crying,-- "now for the tour of the house!" "sure my uncle must be dead!" thought i, leaning over him anxiously. but no, his breath came and went, though inaudibly, and had he been allowed to finish his sleep in peace it might have been for his healing. instead of this, i heard the dragoons come stamping upstairs, producing a muffled roll on their drums that sounded like muttering thunder. they went into one room after another, and speedily reached that of my uncle, on catching sight of whom they triumphantly exclaimed, "hah! ha! v'lâ notre ami! here is he whom we seek, and for whom we prepare the reveille." and ranging themselves round his bed in a moment of time, in spite of a warning gesture from me, it being impossible for my voice to be heard, they simultaneously beat their drums with a clangor that might have waked the dead. no wonder, therefore, that my poor uncle started from his sleep bewildered, terrified, and looking as if he believed himself in some horrid dream. in vain he moved his lips, in vain he raised his clasped hands to one and another, as if in supplication; the more distress he showed the more noise they made, till it seemed to me as if my eardrums would split. in the midst of it all up came my aunt, whose fortitude and presence of mind at that moment i can never sufficiently admire; and with forced smiles and courteous gestures made them to understand, in dumb show, that the first course of their meal was served. instantly the drums ceased; one of them seized her by the shoulders, and hurried her down stairs before him, the others clattering after him. i turned, and saw my uncle raise his eyes and hands to heaven, and fall back on his pillow. there was now a lull, while the viands were being consumed; but soon a new uproar arose--the supply was inadequate for the demand: every morsel of food in the house was consumed at one sitting, and yet there was not nearly enough. the dragoons were furious: they gathered about my aunt, pulling her hair, threatening her with their fists, threatening to boil her in her own copper, and set fire to the house, with her sick husband in it, if she did not procure an ample supply. with matchless patience she looked one after another in the face, said, "attendez, attendez, messieurs, s'il vous plait;" and then, calling me down, bid me go forth and beg of my neighbors as much food as i could. when wondering much at my aunt's fortitude and self-possession, she afterwards told me that she lifted her heart to god in earnest prayer, and there came to her the comforting remembrance of these words. "blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." alas! what a scene presented itself out of doors. the people were running up and down in despair; a woman rushed wildly out of her house, and seized me by the arm, crying, "they are batooning my husband!" another shrieked from a window, 'help, help, they are killing my father!' children ran about the streets, crying, "oh, my father!--oh, my mother!" it seemed a heartless task to be going from one to another begging something to eat under such piteous circumstances; and yet how knew i that as bad or worse a tragedy might be acted at my uncle's if i failed to supply what was wanted? at length i returned, staggering under the weight of a huge cheese and a bag of chestnuts. and though i was reviled for not bringing them better cheer, yet i pacified them by smiling like my aunt, and echoing her "attendez, messieurs, s'il vous plait;" and started forth again on my foraging expedition, though very doubtful of having anything to bring back. how long were these horrible men going to stay? how could we go on supplying their wants at this rate? if their orders were to eat my uncle out of house and home, and drive him and my aunt to distraction, would it not be just as well to let them do so at once, and have done with it? one and another to whom i applied were so full of their own griefs that i had to listen to what they had to say before they would or could hear a word from me in return. one had been hung up by his feet over a chimney; another had a knife held to his throat; one had seen her little infant nearly strangled; another had been dragged along the ground by her hair. i could not help pitying them sincerely, but not so much as i should have done, but for the sad plight of my uncle. when i, with a kind of wrench, forced the talk into the subject of what was going on at his house, they, through their great love for him, forgot for a moment their own trials in thinking of his; and those who had anything to contribute brought it out, and those who had nothing to spare made up for it in pity. all this consumed so much time that when i got back it was nearly dark, and the house was all in a blaze with lights, for the dragoons had lighted candles all over the house; and some of them were stupid with drink, and lying in heaps; others were rendered quarrelsome by it, and fighting and abusing one another; but as for the drummers, they never ceased. they were at it when i set forth, they were at it while i was away, they were at it when i came back again, and stared at the good things i spread out before them without once staying their drumsticks. i was so sick of it by this time, and so unable to disguise my disgust and anger, that i persuaded myself i might as well return home, for that i could do no good where i was, and things could get no worse without me. so i went up to my aunt, who was then sitting like a stone image, without seeming able to hear or see anything, and made signs of leave-taking. she grasped my hand in both hers, and looked up so piteously at me, her lips moving as if with the words "do not go," that i felt i must stay by her, come what would. for was she not my mother's sister-in-law? and was not my uncle my mother's brother? i made a sign i would remain, on which she kissed my hands; and then i patted her on the shoulder, and could not help letting fall a tear. then she got up, and bestirred herself for the men, hoping, no doubt, they would intermit their drumming if she could but conciliate them. but as soon as one relay ceased drumming another took it up; and thus, shameful to relate, they continued the whole night without intermission, crowding round my uncle's bed, making his room intolerably hot and close, and pushing in and out of the room and up and down the stairs. my uncle now lay in a kind of torpor; the expression of his face painful to witness; his wan hands lying outside the counterpane, and now and then slightly moving, which showed me he still lived. towards daybreak i was so worn out that i dropped asleep as i sat beside him with my face on the edge of his pillow--such deep sleep that i neither heard nor dreamed of the drumming. when i woke, with a strangely confused, unrefreshed feeling, the daylight was faintly making its way into the room, which had no one in it but my uncle, my aunt, and me. she seemed to have crawled with difficulty to the foot of his bed, and there sunk and fallen asleep i went out on the landing--candles were burning in their sockets with a vile smell--the house was full of vile smells and of confusion and disorder--the house-door stood ajar--one or two dragoons lay sleeping heavily on the ground. i went up again to tell my aunt, and found her straightening my uncle like a corpse. at the same moment a dragoon came up behind me. he was going to recommence the disturbance, when i pointed to the bed, and said, sternly, "see what you have done. you may now go away satisfied with having made this lately peaceful family completely wretched. god grant you forgiveness ere you are laid out like those cold remains." the dragoon looked confounded. he muttered something, turned on his heel, said something to his companions below, and we presently saw them run out of the house. i went and shut the door. on returning i saw my uncle was not dead. their thinking him so was a mercy, since it gave him a little respite. he was too weak to be moved, but he begged me to return home and tell what had happened to my parents: adding, as i left him, "do not make the affair worse than it is." i thought it would be difficult to do that. chapter v. the passport. when i reached home it was some hours after sunrise. the dragoons, just recalled from the spanish frontier, where they were no longer wanted, were spreading themselves over the country with the express commission to harass the huguenot inhabitants as much as possible, short of death, but had not yet reached nismes. i entered my father's house. contrary to custom, he was not at the factory, but awaiting my return. he rose when i appeared, and stood silently looking at me, while my mother put her hands on my shoulders, and looked piteously in my face. "son, thou hast been out all night." "at my uncle's, mother. he was ill in bed; the dragoons were there; and my aunt begged me to stay as a safeguard." "you did quite right to comply, my boy," said my father, heartily. "i trust the dragoons did not misuse thy good uncle." "i know not what you call misusing," replied i, "if beating their drums round his bed all night did not deserve that term. they almost killed him with their clamor--ate everything in the house--called for more--reviled my aunt--scrambled for her money--broke open the cellar, and drank every drop it contained." i spoke this so fast as to be almost unintelligible; they listened in silent dismay. my father, then bidding me be seated, desired me to go over the whole matter from the beginning, with composure and method. having drunk a cup of water, i did so; and we then held a family council, in which it was decided that my uncle, in his precarious health, would probably sink under a similar attack of the dragoons, and that it would be expedient for me to return to him at dusk with a covered cart, well supplied with hay, and to place him thereon and bring him back with me, to be kept at our house, in secresy and safety, till he should be able to escape from the kingdom--"though this would have been an easier matter to effect," observed my father, "before he had made himself personally obnoxious to the bishop." my father then went to his daily business at the silk-factory, while i remained behind awhile with my mother, to assist her in clearing out a loft for my uncle's reception, the entrance to which could be concealed. i then paid a hasty visit to madeleine, whom i found bathed in tears, as she had learnt from my mother that i had been away all night; and though this at another time would have occasioned no alarm, yet at a season of so much uneasiness she had foreboded some sad calamity. my sudden appearance caused a fresh flow of tears, but they were of thankfulness for my safety. a few tender words reassured her. i then gave her a short account of what had passed, taking care, as my uncle desired me, not to make things worse than they were. but still it was evident that he was marked for the victim of a persecution he was not in a condition to support; and as madeleine had a sincere regard for him, which his character justly merited, she commended me for standing by him, and rejoiced that i was going to fetch him to our house. "we have not been quite undisturbed, even during your short absence," said she. "our evening service was yesterday interrupted, just as the congregation were in the middle of a psalm, by several officials rudely entering the temple, and commanding us to desist, because the host was being carried by." "in the temper in which those in authority seem to be at present," said i, "it is to be feared that things will grow worse before they mend." "meanwhile, remember your father's admonition, i entreat you," said madeleine; "and, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." "rely on it, sweet madeleine," said i. "i am a man of peace, not of war." cheered by my little interview with her, i proceeded to my usual work, and, after supping with my family, stole quietly forth on my mission. i reached the neighboring town without misadventure, and, leaving the cart out of sight, raised my uncle's latch and went in. he and my aunt had the house to themselves (for their only servant had gone to her friends); and she was sitting on the bed, supporting his head on her shoulder. "here's jacques," said she, looking up. "jacques, my good lad," said my uncle, holding out his feeble hand, "i thank you for this visit, and yet more for staying with us last night." "you have not noticed any of the dragoons lurking about outside, i hope?" said my aunt, anxiously. "no," said i, "all seems quiet at present; but there is no knowing when they will return, and my parents have sent me to fetch you away. my mother declares she shall know no peace till she has you under her roof." "my good boy, i can no more go to her than i can fly," said my uncle. "oh yes, uncle, you can. i have brought you a nice covered cart, filled with hay, on which you will lie quite easily, and i will carry you down to it on my back." my uncle and aunt were most thankful for this, and, after very little preparation, closed the shutters of the little dwelling, and turned the key on it. my uncle was made tolerably comfortable, with my aunt seated beside him; and in this way we stealthily quitted the neighborhood. i could hear uproarious voices in the distance, and occasionally a faint scream or wail, but gradually left these painful sounds behind. to say truth, i was by no means sure of our performing this journey in safety, and had many alarms by the way; and as for my uncle, my aunt afterwards told me he was in prayer the whole of the way, to which might probably be ascribed our safety; for ours is a god that heareth prayer, not when it is a mere babble of words, in a language we do not understand, repeated over and over again, and made a merit of; but his ears are attent unto the cry of the contrite heart, and the prayer of them that are sorrowful. it was far into the night, or rather near morning, when we reached our journey's end. my father cautiously admitted us; my mother received the fugitives with the tenderest affection. a hot supper awaited them, after partaking which they were thankful to retire to the loft; and not even the children were to know they were there, and the youngest of our two servants had been sent to her home; for my father told me that the dragoons were expected to pay us a visit shortly, when the premises would doubtless be ransacked; "and since your uncle has borne the journey better than might have been expected," said he, "the sooner we can get him out of the country the better." he then told me what plans he had been devising for this purpose, and that if my uncle were equal to it on the morrow, i should set him and my aunt on their way to a certain point, which, if they reached in safety, they would then be cared for. "the greatest difficulty," said he, "is about a passport; but that may possibly be procured on the frontier, for the great object of government seems to be to chase all our godly ministers out of the kingdom, that their flocks, deprived of their strengthening exhortations, may fall an easier prey." while he thus spoke, a noise at the door, as if some one were hammering on it with his fist, made us start. "who's there?" said my father, without withdrawing the bolt. "your neighbor romilly," returned the other; and we, knowing his voice, let him in. "neighbor, i have traveled far and fast," said he, "and would not go home without looking in to tell you the bad news. they are carrying things hardly at arles and uséz, and you had better warn m. chambrun he is in danger." my father changed countenance. "he and his wife are with us at this moment," said he. "they must depart, then," said romilly, "and without loss of time, or she will not be allowed to go with him. see, here is a passport," said he, dubiously smiling, "which will do for him as well as the person for whom it was intended. he shall have it." we thanked him warmly, and after a little more eager talk, he hurried homeward. day was now breaking, and i threw myself on my bed for a short sleep. when i awoke, my dear mother was beside me. "your uncle is awake, and talking to your father," said she, softly. "he refuses the passport, because it was not made out for himself, saying he will not do an evil that good may come." "this is sheer madness," said i, springing up. "it is consistency," said my mother. "we are now on the brink of a great struggle between the powers of light and darkness. those who feel they have no strength of their own to meet it with, and do not care to seek it from above, will probably give in at the very first word--certainly do so sooner or later; but those whose adhesion to god's cause is of any worth, will brace themselves for the encounter, knowing that he can and will arm them for the fight." "you approve my uncle's making a point of conscience, then, of this?" "i must say i do, though your father is angry with him for it. perhaps, during the day, we may yet get him a proper passport; for if the authorities are so anxious to get rid of our godly ministers, surely they will not hinder their departure. however that may be, you are to convey your uncle and aunt towards the coast tonight." "she goes with him, then?" "she will not leave him. they have lost all their money, but we have made a little purse for them. oh, my child, what times are these! you have scarcely had any rest these two nights; but do not forget to say your morning prayers." and kissing my forhead, she left me, that i might obey her injunction. it may be said that trade was at a standstill that day. the weaver at his loom, the jeweler behind his counter, the baker at his kneading-trough, all thought and talked but of one subject, the expected visitation of the dragoons. my father, with vexation, gave me back the passport, saying, "your uncle will not use it, so you must return it to romilly." romilly raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders when i did so, saying, "what will he do, then?" "i know not. take his chance, i suppose." "here, take you it," said he, thrusting it into my pocket "he may be glad of it at the end." it was a sad day. mothers were weeping over their new-born infants; men were talking to one another in anger and sorrow. the catholics were already carrying their heads high, and smiling scornfully as we passed them. i thought, "oh that we were in a desert, all to ourselves, with none to impugn our faith!" but then i called to mind that without needing to be in a desert, people might dwell in happy countries where each man's faith is respected and tolerated. i hoped my uncle would safely reach one of these happy countries; but yet one's native land is very dear after all! twilight came; the parting took place amid tears and embraces and benedictions; and soon i was driving my good uncle and aunt towards the coast. we had gone some miles, when a man, scarcely distinguishable in the dark, emerged from a corner and said, "who goes there?" i was greatly alarmed, but my uncle, recognizing the voice, said, "oh, joseph, is it thou? whither art thou bound?" "fleeing for my life," said joseph, "as i take it you are doing. it is well you have escaped, though i cannot make out how you come to be so far on the road. i have just left your neighborhood; the dragoons are turning your house out of window." "give him a lift, jacques," said my uncle to me; "the poor man is weary." finding him to be one of my uncle's flock, i readily did so; the more that his tone and words betokened honesty. "sir, you are doubtless going to join your brother-ministers," said joseph. "have you a passport?" "i have not, but i hope to get one on the frontier, or find some other path open to me," said my uncle. "let us trust the 'other path' may open, then," said joseph, "for most vexatious obstacles are being thrown in the way of our ministers on the frontier; they are either refused passports altogether, or such as they are provided with are declared worthless." "romilly's passport, then, will be no good," thought i, and i was musing on the moral advantage to my uncle of his having refused to use it from the first, when joseph in alarm cried-- "hist--i hear some one galloping hard after us. let us whip on as fast as we can." but we had just reached the foot of a heavy ascent, and the pursuer gained upon us, and presently came up panting. "is minister chambrun here?" cried he, breathlessly. "who are you that ask?" returned i. at the same instant my uncle cried-- "yes, here i am. what is it?" "what a dance you have led me!" cried the messenger. "i come from the commissioner, who sends you a passport, and desires you to go to bordeaux as fast as you can." what a smile broke over my uncle's face! "said i not," cried he, joyfully, "that a path would doubtless open for me? henceforth, my children, never distrust the lord." his course was now altered. instead of making for the nearest coast, now within a few miles, on the borders of the mediterranean, he decided to proceed with all convenient speed to montauban, where my aunt had friends, thence down the garonne, and so to bordeaux. i could but set him on his way and trust his future course to the same good providence that had hitherto protected him. my aunt was decided to follow his fortunes, happen what would. chapter vi. trial by fire. day was far spent before i got back, my horse having gone lame. there seemed unusual disturbance in the town; i distinguished a distant hum of many voices, and all at once a shrill cry that made me shudder, followed by the passionate wailing of children, and the incessant barking of dogs. i took the back way to our house, where lay our stable, and entering the little yard, saw to my dismay six or eight cavalry horses standing in it. i sprang from my cart and hurried into the house, on the threshold of which my little brother charles met me all in tears, and cried, "oh, they're burning mamma!" i burst into the kitchen; there was a roaring fire on the hearth, which a dragoon was feeding with handfuls of paper torn from our great family bible; but there were also great billets of wood burning, which threw out intense heat, and close in front of it was placed my mother, penned in with heavy pieces of furniture, while two dragoons in front of her were thrusting their clenched fists in her face, saying, "now then, you obstinate woman! will you roast like a pig, or say where he is gone?" my mother looked immovable as stone, but directly i entered, i saw her change countenance a little. my father lay on the ground, bound hand and foot, while a dragoon was preparing to beat him with a heavy bridle. "ah, ah, here is the young cub," cried they as i entered; "here is the young fellow that was attending on his uncle!" then, with more bad language than i choose to repeat, they bade me tell where i had carried him, unless i would see my mother roasted alive. "out of your reach," said i, boldly; "so now let my mother go free," and springing towards her, i released her before they could throw themselves upon me. the next minute, we were rolling on the ground, but, as my mother for the moment was safe, i did not mind the blows i was getting, but returned them with a fire-iron that lay within reach. i dealt blows with such a will that for a time i had the advantage, never ceasing to shout, "never fear, mother! all's safe! he's on the wide sea. fly with the children and leave me to deal with these gentry." this so enraged them that they redoubled their violence; no wonder, then, that i was got down at last, bound hand and foot, and my feet made bare to receive the bastinado. before they laid it on, they put the question to me: "wilt thou now, then, recant thine accursed doctrines?" "what doctrines?" said i, to gain time. "those that are falsely called reformed." "oh yes, all that are falsely called reformed." they stood at pause on this, and looked at one another. "he gives in," muttered one. "not a bit," replied another. "he is only lying." "well but, mark you, that's no matter of ours," said the first. "i tell you it is!" roared the second, pushing him aside. "let me take him in hand. you don't know how to question him." then accosting me, in a defiant sort of way (he was far from sober), he said, "hark ye, young man. now answer for your life. give us no double meanings. what is your religion?" "that which was brought us and taught us by our lord jesus christ." "do you believe in st. peter?" "of course." "and in the virgin mother of god?" "the angel gabriel called her blessed among women." "but do you worship her?" "i reverence her, and worship her divine son." "do you worship her, i say?" threatening me with the stirrup-leather. "son, son," put in my father. "silence, old man!" and they hit him on the mouth. "do you worship her?" "i do not." then they beat the soles of my feet, till my father in anguish cried, "oh, i cannot bear this--" but had to bear it. and so had i. but on their burning my soles with a red-hot iron, a merciful providence took me out of their hands, by bringing me insensibility. how long they pursued their barbarities after i fainted, i know not; but when i came to myself, it was in cold and darkness, lying in the open street, where i suppose they had cast me, thinking me dead. how long a time must have passed! for the stars were shining above me. where were my parents, my brothers and sisters? i tried to raise myself a little and look around, but was beaten and bruised so that i was in agonies of pain, and sank back on the ground. the cold made my wounded feet smart indescribably; but while, with closed eyes, i was inwardly murmuring, "lord, help thy poor servant, for i cannot help myself;" something that made me wince with pain, but the next moment gave exquisite relief, was applied to the soles of my feet, and the next instant i heard the hushed voices of those who were dearest to me on earth, my mother and madeleine "can it be that we are too late?" said madeleine. "no, his pulse yet beats, though as feebly as possible. oh, what he must have suffered, and how i love him for not having given in!" in pain though i was, a smile of joy broke over my face on this, and i opened my eyes. "praise the lord, he revives!" said my mother. "how art thou, my son?" "i shall do well, my mother--," but i could not speak another word. i closed my eyes, and felt about to faint. "jacques, dear jacques," said madeleine, whispering energetically and distinctly, close to my ear, "be of good courage, and god will help thee. i have found a place of safety in the vaults of les arènes, whither gabrielle has already taken the children; and now, if you can but master the pain enough to get there with such help as we can give you, before the dragoons return, we shall all be safe." "oh, most certainly i will," said i, trying to rise; but when i attempted to set my feet to the ground, i was in such anguish that i nearly fell down; but what will not "needs must" effect? the poor galley-slaves at marseilles and dunkirk can tell how, when it seems impossible for them to pull another stroke, the taskmaster's whip, mercilessly applied, proves that they not only can pull still, but pull well too. i am ashamed to say how these two beloved women had almost to carry me, a stout youth; and even all their strength might have been insufficient but for the potent spur of the dragoons' return. with an arm round the neck of each, and resting almost my entire weight on their shoulders, i managed to scuffle along, very slowly and with fearful pain, towards les arènes. we paused now and then, under the deep shadow of a wall, for me to regain my strength. i was astonished at my mother's utter forgetfulness of herself in her care for me; and said, "were you much burnt, my mother?" "no, my son; no," she answered, cheerfully; but in truth she was sadly seared and blistered, and her heroism under suffering might be likened to that of the martyrs of old. "what took place after i fainted?" said i. "they believed you were dead, and threw you into the road," said my mother, "saying they hoped the dogs would come and lick your blood like ahab's. after that a trumpet was blown, and there seemed something going on in the town, and they all ran off. the children had meanwhile taken refuge with madeleine; and i then took the opportunity of raising your father, after cutting his bonds, and sending him off to the factory, whence he was to return with men to carry you away, but they have never come, and i fear some mischief may have befallen him. i would fain have gone to see, but you were my first object. i could not carry you, and went to madeleine for help. she had just gone with gabrielle and the children to les arènes; but while i was preparing bandages and a liniment for your poor feet, she returned and accompanied me back." "madeleine is a good angel," said i, pressing my arm more closely to her. "what is your case to-day, may be ours to-morrow," said she. we continued our painful and tedious course, "lurking in the thievish corners of the streets," like evil-doers, if we saw any one coming. the moon was dangerously bright, but the shadows were proportionately dark, and at length we reached les arènes, with their depths of mysterious shadow, and solemn pillars and arches silvered by the white beams. though the amphitheatre is in the heart of the city, the neighborhood seemed unusually deserted. people had fled, or were cowering in hiding-places, or were flocking to see what was going on elsewhere. i cannot otherwise account for it. only that as we passed near the house of good old monsieur de laccassagne, we could hear the abominable uproar of drums within it, and it would seem as if all the drummers in nismes must have been congregated to drive the poor old gentleman to distraction. we had also seen in the distance, floods of light streaming from the windows of the cathedral, and heard a strange murmur of cries, and we afterwards learnt that multitudes of poor people of the baser sort had been driven like oxen or silly sheep into the church, pricked on by the dragoons' swords and shouts of "kill! kill!" to be present at mass. but now, as we gained a spot where, at the end of a street, we could gain a distant glimpse of our factory, we perceived the sky red with flurid flames bursting from it. "the factory is on fire!" i exclaimed. then my mother wrung her hands, crying, "oh, my husband! you are ruined, perhaps sacrificed! i must go in quest of thee, and leave my son with a faithful friend." then she hastened off towards the factory, and i could not blame her nor wonder at her, though my heart misgave me that she might fall into mischief. madeleine's support was insufficient for me now; but i set my teeth like a flint, and commanded the pain i was in every time i set foot to the ground. was it not alleviation enough to have her dear arm for my stay, and her tender hand wiping from my brow the drops forced forth by my suffering? then we came to some steps. these gave me much trouble to descend, especially as we were so nearly in the dark, but madeleine seemed to know them pretty well. "i have often been here already," whispered she, "only not after dark, and have laid in stores of many things necessary for our subsistence." we were now groping along a chill stone passage, and were presently brought up by a wall right in front, against which we violently hit our heads. "i fear i have missed the way," said madeleine, in alarm. "hark! i hear the children laughing. nothing damps the spirits at their age." the next turn brought us to the entrance of a chamber, or rather den, for it had probably been built for wild beasts, and formerly tenanted by them. a ruddy fire burned in the middle, and circles of smoke escaped through crannies and fissures, for of course there was no chimney. a savory steam arose from a large black pot suspended over this fire, and round it was gathered a motley and unruly group, not gabrielle and the children, but of tramps, gipsies, peddlers, and very likely thieves. swarthy morescoes, basques, i know not how many nations, were there represented. they were singing, carousing, and making much noise. "here's a pretty lady," cried a gipsy woman, as madeleine shrank back affrighted. "welcome, welcome!" cried one or two voices. "come and make one of us." "not so fast," said a dissentient voice. "there's a young man with her. how do we know he is not a spy?" "good sir, i am lame on both feet," said i, and was turning away with madeleine, both of us anxious to plunge into the darkness, out of their sight, when a threatening, swarthy man, of great strength, prevented our departure. "you are neither of you going," said he, defiantly, "till you give some account of yourselves and your object." "we are harmless people; we have only mistaken our way," interposed madeleine. "soho! only mistaken your way? and how come harmless people to be abroad at this time of night, groping about among the vaults of les arènes?" before there was time to answer, a tall, lean man in black, with a bottle in his hand, which he had just removed from his lips, came forward from a corner, and said. "hold, there, enough has been said. i know this young man, and, i dare say, this young maiden. we are very good friends. don't you remember me?" looking sharply at me. "not exactly," said i, straining my memory. "oh, come, don't deny it. last time you had the best of it; this time i have. don't you remember the fair of beaucaire?" "yes, of course, sir," said madeleine, readily, "and your beautiful needles and pins and pretty equipage." the needle-vender looked pleased, and said, "you have a better memory than the young fellow; however, i owe him a good turn. you saved me from the hoofs of le docteur jameray's horse, and lent me your handkerchief. i have had it in keeping for you ever since," drawing it from his breast. then, turning to his companions, he said, "excuse me; i attend these young persons a little way. they are friends, and the young man is ill." in fact, my head swam round, and i swooned again, and have no remembrance but of a confused babble of sounds. when i came to, madeleine and the needle-seller, whose name was la croissette, were conveying me between them; or, in fact, he was chiefly carrying me, and she supporting my feet. i said, "set me down, i'll try to walk," but found i could not. then she said, "wait here; i'll run on a little, and find where gabrielle is." i would have stayed her, but she was gone. la croissette said, "you seem in trouble; what is it?" i said, "don't you know the dragoons are in nismes? they have tried to burn my mother, have bound and beaten my father, destroyed our property, and cudgelled and burnt me till i cannot stand." he drew in his breath, and said, "any one of those things is trouble enough. is that pretty girl your sister?" "no; my affianced wife." "and you have taken to les arènes for safety, and left your father and mother behind?" "not willingly, you may be sure. my mother and madeleine half carried me hither. then we saw my father's silk factory in flames, and she ran to find him." madeleine here returned, and said, encouragingly, "i have found where they are; it is a very little way, and they look so comfortable!" with her help and la croissette's i dragged myself along, and though it seemed a long way off, we got there at last; and very snug did the old vault look, with the little brazier and the lamp, and the curtain to keep off the draught, and food and bedding on the floor. i sank down on the straw they had prepared for me, and never was couch of down more grateful to a luxurious man than this poor pallet to me. la croissette viewed the whole party with keenness, then, putting his bottle to my lips, said, "take this; there's a little left." whatever it was, it revived me; and then he nodded, said "bon soir," and went away. i now became anxious for my parents, though madeleine assured me they knew the way to our retreat. a long time passed; the children fell asleep; we remained in anxious suspense. at length we heard footsteps. were they of friend or foe? madeleine went out to see. i could not bear her taking on herself every office that ought to devolve upon me, but could not help it. in a few instants she guided my father and mother into our dungeon, holding a hand of each. as they entered, the red fire-light leaped up and showed their grave faces. the first thing my father did, after taking us in at a glance, was to say, "children, let us pray!" even the little ones, roused from their slumber, and but half awake, put up their hands. my mother and the girls knelt; my father stood. his prayer began with earnest thanksgiving that we were all together again, and that, though his worldly substance had been taken from him, there was no loss of life or limb. then he returned hearty thanks that, in this our day of spiritual trial and temptation, there had been no apostacy, no temporizing cowardice, no falling short. but, he added, he knew, and we all knew, that this was but the beginning of sorrows; that many a sore trial and temptation remained behind; that we had no strength of our own wherewith to meet it; but that there was all-sufficient strength in the great captain of our salvation. then he prayed the lord to give us his strength, sufficient for our day, whatever it might be, even as he had strengthened daniel in the lions' den, and shadrach, meshach, and abednego in the fiery furnace, and peter and paul and silas in prison, and john in patmos; and that we might have grace to rejoice at being accounted worthy to suffer for his name's sake, and be strengthened to bear testimony even before kings if need were; and to cast all our burden upon him, not caring much for the things of this life, knowing that he could reduplicate them if it were his will, at any time, as he had done to job. while he thus prayed, an ineffable calm and sweetness took possession of me, my eyes involuntarily closed, or, if opened at intervals, only saw vague, uncertain forms, and thus a deep, deep sleep fell on me, without even a dream, that lulled all sense of pain, and loss, and fear, and sorrow, until morning. "for so he giveth his beloved sleep." words how beautiful, and true, and reassuring! they that expend all their little strength for him, and lay their little substance at his feet, are his beloved. there is no need to be afraid we are not; we know it; we feel it; we have the witness in ourselves, just as the child, nestling in his father's arms, knows that he loves and is beloved. i have heard persons say, "have you the faith of assurance?" yes, thank god, i have it, and have had it ever since he was first graciously pleased to call me to him, and that was long, long ago. but all have not this faith; just as a man, wanting to go to bordeaux, may not be assured he is on the road to bordeaux, and yet he may be on the way thither nevertheless. then if you have not the faith of assurance, practise at least the faith of adherence. that, at least, is in your own power. cleave to god exactly as if you were certain of being accepted by him at last; and thus, fulfilling his own conditions, you will be accepted by him whether you are assured of it beforehand or not. "him that cometh unto me, i will in no wise cast out." chapter vii. la croissette. how chill and painful was my awaking! the soles of my feet were raw with so much walking after they were blistered, and the inflammation irritated my whole frame, which was likewise stiffened with so much beating. when i opened my eyes, i saw the anxious face of my dear mother, as she examined my wounds, and prepared with light hand to dress them. nor would anybody have guessed she herself was terribly burnt, had not one of the children, inadvertently running against her, caused a sudden wince, but without any audible expression of pain. the thought of what she was enduring with such stoicism, or rather, let me say, with such christianity, enabled me, better than any stimulant would have done, to endure without murmuring; and she said to me, with strong approval in her kind eyes, "your wounds tell me, my poor boy, how much you have to bear; therefore there is no need to cry out. our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." "yes, that is true indeed," said my father, "and things might have gone much worse with us." "can you say that, my father," said i, "when you have lost all?" "i have not lost all," replied he. "before the factory was attacked, i had time to disperse the workmen, dispatch a hasty line to an english correspondent, and secrete certain bills of exchange; so that if we can but find our way to england we shall, indeed, have to begin life again, but with god's blessing, shall not fare badly. and with that blessing, my son, we shall not fare badly even here." "no, indeed, father." and as i spoke i looked towards where the lamp-light (for we had no other) fell on the bending head of madeleine, as she talked in a low voice to the children, and kept them amused. not a glimpse of the sun's light could penetrate our refuge, and thus it always seemed night with us when, in fact, it was bright day. doubtless this was tedious to all; but no one, even the children, so much as murmured at it, except gabrielle, who was inexpressibly wearied, and now and then gave a long yawn, which set others yawning, and procured her a good-humored rebuke. "how long is this to last?" said she. "till the dragoons find us out, perhaps," said my father, gravely; which silenced her for a little while. "our provisions will not last long," said she presently. "then we must procure more," said my mother. "we have enough for the present." "yes, we have cheese and wine and flour; but what good is flour unless it is cooked?" "do not make mountains of molehills, gabrielle," said madeleine, aside; "it is such a bad example for the children." "well, but they are not molehills," returned gabrielle, in rather a lower tone, which, however, we could hear well enough. "i suppose we cannot starve." "has your endurance so soon ceased, my dear girl?" said my father. "think of the believers of old. they had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment. they were stoned; they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. and yet none of these, though they obtained a good report in god's own word for their faith, had received the explicit promises through christ, god having provided those better things for us; wherefore we surely should be ashamed to show less constancy than they did." "oh, of course," said gabrielle. "think of what jacques is bearing without a murmur," said madeleine. "i'm sure he sets an example to us all." "and as to minding what we eat," said little charles, "i'm sure i don't mind it a bit. do i, mamma?" "oh, if you are all going to be against me, i shall say no more," said gabrielle. "that's right," said my mother. "put a brave heart on it, my dear; i know you have it in you." gabrielle bit her lip, but took out a comb, and began to arrange little louison's hair. "now," she whispered, "i'll make you as smart as the young lady we saw with madame de laccassagne;" and in this way she amused herself and the child, talking nonsense with her, and inventing imaginary scenes and people, all in a hushed voice, that my father might not hear. suddenly, some one at the entrance of our dungeon wishing us "bon jour," made us start violently and look towards him in alarm. "you need not shrink from me," said la croissette, advancing among us when he had looked around. "i may not be as good as yourselves, or i may be--that's neither here nor there. i'm not quite a bad fellow, i believe, though at times i am driven to keep indifferent company. still, i am not very fond of those i'm among at present, so i thought i'd look in on you. your servant, sir," to my father. "a votre service, madame," very politely to my mother. "you were not here last night, when your son and that young lady rather unexpectedly looked in on us. to speak the truth, there are reasons why some of us don't relish being looked in on unexpectedly." "quite natural," said my father; "no more do we." "ah, but you need not be afraid of me," said la croissette, "i'm no traitor, i! it might be rash, though, to say as much of some of my companions, and therefore i advise you not to be too familiar with them." "my good friend, we have not the least intention of being so." "age is wary, and youth is full of trust," said la croissette. "not knowing that you, respected sir, and you, madame, were here to look after the younger persons, i ventured to do so myself, to bid them beware of their neighbors." "that was very friendly, and i thank you heartily for it," said my father. "shall you remain here long?" said la croissette. "that depends entirely on circumstances." "doubtless you are hiding from the dragoons." "is it necessary to tell you?" "why, no; but you might do so without fear. i have no love for them myself, but nothing to fear; i am certainly not a huguenot; but neither would i betray one. come, i see you would rather i went away. i am going into town. there is nothing i can do for you, then?" "nothing; we thank you very much." when he was gone, gabrielle exclaimed, "now that is what i call an opportunity wasted." "we must beware, my child, who we trust," said my mother. "of course; but he was so evidently a harmless, good sort of man." "we had no occasion to trouble him." gabrielle plainly thought there was a good deal of occasion. indeed, had she known she was actually doomed to spend a few days in the vaults of les arènes, i am persuaded she would have fitted them up with upholstery and eatables, even to pickles and preserves. meanwhile madeleine was beguiling the time to the children by setting them easy sums on the wall, scratched with a nail, and drawing pictures for them with the same implement, accompanied with stories, as thus:--"once on a time there was a poor christian captive in this very dungeon--here he is (drawing his picture)--sentenced to be thrown to the lions (picture). once he had been a little boy like this (picture), fond of playing with other little boys (picture), and ready to carry his mother's pitcher to the well (picture), or sweep her floor (picture), or make himself useful to her in any way whatever. one day,"--and so forth. gabrielle's fancy was tickled with this, and when madeleine desisted she continued it, though now and then with a furtive yawn. meanwhile my father was pondering over the papers he had about him, and sitting immersed in thought, or now and then saying a little to my mother. by-and-by he ventured out a little without quitting the precincts of the amphitheatre, and returned, saying several tramps were loitering about, whose attention it would not be prudent to attract. the day, which seemed the longest i ever knew, at length drew to a close, which we only learnt by my father's watch, for we were out of hearing of the town clocks. he said it would make time pass less heavily if we divided it methodically, and had our set hours for meals, rest, prayer, and mutual improvement, whether by exhortation, discussion, or general discourse, we followed his lead as well as we could, but our thoughts were chiefly with the outer world. just after the women and children had retired for the night to a little inner dungeon, la croissette once more presented himself uninvited. "i thought, messieurs, you might like to hear the news of the day," said he. "most certainly," said my father. "pray be seated. i wish i had a better seat to offer you. what is stirring?" "the news, then, is, that nismes is being converted as fast as possible," said la croissette. "no persuader, sirs, like fire and sword. dragoons are quartered on every protestant. they are destroying whatever they cannot make booty of. some are littering their fine black horses with bales of broadcloth, silk, and cotton; others with fine holland cloths. the common people are being driven to church at the sword's point, and conforming by shoals. the gentry give more trouble, but end by coming round." "some may--some weak-hearted persons," said my father, reluctantly. "well, they may be weak-hearted; i'm sure i should be, in their place," said la croissette. "in fact, what is it?--a mere form. they just slur over a few words--cross themselves--kiss a relic, or some little matter of that sort. no more is required; the bishop lets them off easy." "will the lord let them off easy?" said my father. "christianity admits of no such temporizing. the early christians might have saved their lives by burning a handful of incense before the roman emperor's statue; but they did not hold it a mere form. and the romanists admit in principle what they dissent from in practice; for they almost deify those early martyrs for their constancy to the truth, and yet would martyr us for doing the very same thing." "well, i don't mean them to martyr me," said la croissette, "i've an elastic creed, i!--it stretches or collapses like an easy stocking." "beware, beware, my friend, of fancying a creed like that of any worth at all." "sir, we all have our weak points and our strong ones. i'm no polemic, i!--i prefer meddling with things that will not bring me into trouble. there was a factory burnt down last night--" "ah!" groaned my father. "some say both the partners were burnt; others that one of them is at a distance. some think the factory was set on fire on purpose; others that it was an accident. nothing remains of it but the outer walls and a smoking heap of ruins." my father covered his face with his hand. "then, again," pursued la croissette, "that worthy old monsieur laccassagne, unable to stand the deprivation of sleep any longer, has conformed--" "has he, though!" cried my father, with a start. "oh, how sad a fall!" "outwardly, only outwardly," said la croissette. "the poor old gentleman was driven almost out of his senses by that deafening drumming. 'you shall have rest now,' said the bishop. 'alas!' replied he, 'i look for no rest on this side heaven; and may god grant that its doors may not be closed against me by this act.'" "poor old man! poor monsieur laccassagne!" ejaculated my father. "well might he say so." "yes, but what reasonable person can suppose the doors of heaven will be closed against him by it?" said la croissette. "the lord is a god of mercy--" "but will by no means clear the guilty," said my father. "and he looketh not to the outward appearance, but to the heart," said la croissette. "that expression applies to the personal, bodily appearance, which none of us can help," said my father, "not to the pretence of believing one thing, when we believe, its opposite. i mourn over the backsliding of my old friend. better had it been to suffer affliction for a season. "so the virtuous lady his wife thought," said la croissette. "she escaped in the disguise of a servant, and is now wandering in the open fields." "ah, what sorrow! may the good lord support her under it!" "ay, and the many other women who are in similar case. numbers of them are at this instant cowering in the cold and darkness in ditches and under hedges." "monsieur laccassagne might well say he could hope for no rest on this side heaven," said my father, bitterly. "how can he rest, knowing that his excellent wife, accustomed to every comfort, is now an outcast for her faith--the faith which he has denied?" "well, i wish i could have brought you more cheerful news," said la croissette, rising. "in truth, you need it, in this dismal hole, to keep up your spirits. tell me, now, good sir, how long do you expect to be able, you and yours, to hold out?" "sufficient to the day is the evil thereof," said my father. "thanks be to god, he does not require us to dwell on what may be in store for our chastening. he says explicitly, 'take no thought for the morrow--the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.' words how kind and how wise!" this seemed to strike la croissette a good deal. he remained in thought a few minutes, and then said, "well, it is time i should take my leave. i respect you very much." then, resuming his bantering tone, "since you are so willing to hazard the disturbance which poor old monsieur laccassagne found it so hard to bear, i advise you to sleep day and night while you are here, and lay in a good stock of repose against the time when you will be deprived of it." stepping back again, just as he seemed going, he said, "you fancy yourselves very safe here; and, indeed, the dragoons unless with a guide to you, might possibly take some time to find you out; but depend on it, les arènes will be well searched some day--perhaps very soon; it is too well known as having been an old hiding-place. every corner--this among the rest--is known to outcasts, many of them of bad reputation, who, for a morsel of bread, would give up st. paul or st. peter. all are not so, however, and those i am now among have a kind of the honor which exists among thieves. do not depend too much on it, however." and with this very unsatisfactory speech, he left us. my father, after brooding on what he had said for some time, knelt down, and was long in prayer: then he murmured, "i will both lay me down in peace and sleep: for thou, lord, only makest me dwell in safety." and i knew soon, by his breathing, that he had indeed found rest in sleep. for me, i could not close my eyes: the text that dwelt in my mind was, "my soul is among lions." i thought of madame laccassagne and the other poor women wandering in the fields, and pictured a thousand distressing circumstances. our solitary oil-lamp was beginning to languish for want of trimming, and i thought, "what if it should leave us in darkness altogether, and we should never know when it is day?" and dwelt on the egyptians in the plague of darkness, when none of them rose from his place for three days. i was so feverish that it seemed to me a darkness like that would madden me--i must dash my head against the wall, or do something desperate; and i thought of jonah in the whale's belly, when the waters compassed him round about, and his soul fainted in that hideous darkness; and again it was "three days." then i thought, "why three days?" was it because the son of man was three days in the heart of the earth? and shall we remain here in this subterranean darkness three days? just as the lamp seemed going out my loved mother stole out of the inner dungeon, and trimmed it; then noiselessly stole to my side, and, seeing my eyes open, smiled on me and kissed me, and then lay down beside my father. oh, the peace, the security of her presence! i sank into dreamless sleep. i was awakened by the most horrid noise i ever heard in my life. it seemed like the roar of a lion close to my ear, and i started up in wild affright, fancying myself a christian prisoner about to be thrown to the wild beasts. all around was dark as pitch--the lamp had gone out! the frightful bellowing continued without intermission; and, besides, there were sobs and screams, brutal laughter and cursing. dreadful moment! presently a spark of light momentarily illumined our cell, and showed the anxious face of my mother, as she re-kindled the lamp, surrounded by the terrified children and girls, roused from their sleep by the hideous uproar. "oh, what is it?--what is it?" cried i. my mother's lips moved, but she could not make herself heard. having succeeded in lighting the lamp, she came close to me, and said-- "they seem to have put one of the bulls of la camargue into the adjoining den for the next bull-baiting, and to have lashed it to frenzy with their goads. the noise is terrific, but i do not suppose the animal can break loose." la croissette now appeared among us, suffocating with laughter. "are you frightened out of your lives?" said he. "'tis nothing." "nay, sir," said my mother, "'tis something, i think, to be raised up in the middle of the night by such a dreadful noise." "night? 'tis broad daylight! no wonder you were frightened. i can hardly hear myself speak; but i felt impelled to come and see how you took it. they have put an enormous bull in the adjoining den; and if you don't like his company, you will have to change your quarters, which i advise you to do at any rate; for the basques who have him in charge are brutal fellows, whose jargon i don't understand. ten to one they will discover you before the day's out; and then what will you do?" "truly, our case is hard," said my mother, looking wistfully at my father. "it is so, my dear wife," replied he; "and i do not see my way clearly. let us ask god to make it a little clearer to us." la croissette looked amazed when he saw the whole family kneel down, and made a movement to go, but paused at the entrance and looked back on us. though the bellowing still continued, it was neither so loud nor so frequent; but still only snatches of my father's voice could be heard. but his very look and attitude was a prayer; and there were the two sweet sisters, with their clasped hands and bent heads, and the little ones crowded about my mother. now and then such broken sentences were heard as--"lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another--thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance--the dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the air, and the flesh of thy saints to the beasts of the land--we are become an open shame to our enemies, and a very scorn to them that hate us. return, o lord! how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants--oh, satisfy us with thy mercy, and that soon; so will we rejoice, and give thanks to thee all the days of our life--make thy way plain before us, o lord, because of our enemies." i could not help furtively watching the workings of la croissette's face as he listened to these words of the psalmist, so appropriate and pathetic. he started as if shot when touched by some one behind; and the next instant m. bourdinave stood among us. chapter viii. persecuted, yet not forsaken. "my father!" exclaimed the girls, and flew into his arms. the next instant the bellowing recommenced. "what is that?" cried m. bourdinave, starting. "one of the bulls intended for baiting," said my father. "ah, what a vicinity to find you in?" said m. bourdinave. "better, my dear friend, than the captives of old had in this very dungeon. and now, what news? where have you been?" "i'd better go; i'm not wanted." muttered la croissette, heard only by me, and then retiring. "i bring the worst of news," returned m. bourdinave, sitting down. "the edict of nantes is revoked." "ah!" and a general cry broke from us. "what signifies it," said my mother, bitterly, "when already its provisions have been set at nought? are we any the better for it?" "we may be yet worse for losing it," said m. bourdinave. "every reformed meeting-house in france is to be demolished; no private assemblages for devotional purposes are to be allowed on any pretext whatever. all huguenot schools are to be suppressed; all children born of huguenot parents to be baptized and educated as catholics; all non-conforming ministers to quit the country within fifteen days, on pain of the galleys." "let us rise, my children," cried my father in great agitation, "and leave this country, which is no longer a mother to us, shaking the dust off our feet. alas, what am i saying? whither can we go?" "to england," replied m. bourdinave. "i have already taken measures for it." "heaven be praised!" cried we simultaneously. "but it will be under circumstances of great hardship, difficulty, and danger." "never mind; we willingly encounter them. yes, yes," said one after another. "have you the courage, my daughters?" looking earnestly at them. madeleine threw herself into his arms. "i knew what your answer would be," said he, fondly kissing her; "but my little gabrielle--" "oh, fear me not, father," cried gabrielle, hastily. "anything to get out of this horrid place. i believe i have seemed too impatient of it to those around me, but that was because inaction is always so trying to me." "my love, you may yet be exposed to it. i have known one of our brethren put into a chest, with very few air-holes, and lowered into the hold of a merchant-vessel, with considerable roughness, where he was left many hours before he could be released." gabrielle changed color. "never mind," said she, in a low voice, and pressing her father's hand. "what man has done man may do, though i am but a woman who say it." "that's my brave girl!" fondly kissing her. "well, my friends, if we can but get to bordeaux, we shall escape; that is provided for. it was this which kept me from you so long. and what a return has been mine! i got no answers from you to my letters; i heard the persecution here was raging with fury; i came to snatch you from it, and found my home deserted, the factory burnt, the workmen scattered, no tidings of you to be found. at length i got news of you from one of the men, who told me of your retreat, and that he, under cover of night, brought you bread. we planned how to remove you hence to-night, but it must be in detachments. at a place agreed on there will be a small cart that will convey the children and perhaps their mother." "i prefer walking," interposed my mother. "jacques is unable to do so." "impossible! i am sure you have not the strength for it," said we all. "never fear," said she, stoutly. "no, no; it must not be," said i. "and you, my son?" "i will undertake for him," said la croissette, who, it now appeared, had been listening behind the doorway all this time. "who are you, my man?" said m. bourdinave, in surprise and some distrust. "an honest fellow, though i say it that shouldn't," was his answer. "i am one of those who deal in deeds more than words. i cannot patter ave marias with a catholic, nor sing interminable psalms like a huguenot, but neither can i endure the ways the catholics are taking to compel the huguenots to submission. i take my own way, d'ye see, and am fettered by nobody. no one would molest la croissette the needle-seller, not even a dragoon. and i have learnt to esteem you all; i admire the young ladies, and respect the old lady and gentleman. therefore, there's my hand; you may take it or not. 'tis not over soft; but there's no blood on it, and it never took a bribe. let those say so who can. and what i say next is this: dr. jameray has fallen sick, and i've undertaken to drive his little wagon, with the sign of the bleeding tooth, from hence to montauban. as far as that i'll give my young friend here a cast, and he may thence easily take boat down the garonne to bordeaux. at least, if he cannot of himself, i'll manage it for him." how grateful we were to the worthy la croissette! not one of us distrusted him in the least; at any rate, if m. bourdinave did so at first, he was soon reassured by us, and took the honest fellow heartily by the hand. a good deal more was now said than i have space to recount or memory to recall. indeed, my head was in a confused state, and i was conscious of little but of the tender pressure of dear madeleine's hand, from whom i must so soon part. we were to start as soon as night afforded us its friendly cover; but some hours of daylight remained. my father and m. bourdinave had many business affairs to discuss, and madeleine kept the children quiet, that they might not interrupt them. i never thought gabrielle so pretty as now that she had spoken with resolution, and seemed strengthening herself to keep up to it. nevertheless, we have no real strength of our own; it all comes from god; but he gives it to all who ask it faithfully. madeleine whispered to me, "let us pray that strength for her duty may be given her." i nodded and smiled. meanwhile my mother went out to the appointed place where, it seems, raoul had daily placed a loaf. we, who were not in the secret, had much wondered where our bread came from, and how it lasted out. this time she returned with a large sausage as well; so we ate our meal with gladness and thankfulness of heart, la croissette insisting on passing round his bottle, which, somehow, he always kept well filled. and had this man had a mind to betray us, how easily he might have done so! he overheard our plans, might have drugged our wine, and stretched us all powerless; might have told his comrades to make sport of us, and kept out of sight himself; or might openly have led the dragoons to our hiding-place with torches and weapons. our blessed lord had more reason, humanly speaking, to trust judas, than we to trust la croissette; but you see this man was honest; you could not have tempted him to sell us for thirty pieces of silver. when he went forth, though, after supper, my mind misgave me for a while, thinking, "what if he be gone to betray us?" i wronged his worthy heart. so many people are worse than we think them, that it is a comfort when some prove better than we think them. worthy la croissette! i have thy tall, meagre form and lantern jaws now before me. many a showy professor might be bettered by having as true a heart. when he was gone, my father said, "let us join once more in family worship, and then get a little sleep before our night-journey begins." i think he and m. bourdinave and the children actually did sleep, but not my mother or the girls. i certainly did not. my mother dressed and bandaged my wounded feet for the last time. they were healing, but too tender for walking or standing without injury to the newly-formed skin. then she sat beside me, with looks of love, and was presently joined by madeleine. we knew so well what was passing in each other's minds, that we did not need to say much. then my father awoke, with all his faculties about him, looked at his watch, and said it was time to start. m. bourdinave went out, and after what seemed to our impatience rather a long time, returned, and said raoul reported unusual disturbance in the city, but that now all was ready. we took leave of one another, agreed on places of rendezvous (if we were ever enabled to reach them), and had a valedictory prayer. still they did not like to go and leave me without la croissette. at length he appeared, and, addressing my father, said: "you had better avoid the precincts of your famous temple, la calade: it has been completely demolished, and crowds are yet hanging about their beloved place of worship, regardless of danger, but the military will presently disperse them." "ah, what desecration!" exclaimed my mother. "keep your regrets for the sufferings of living people, my good lady," said la croissette. "stones have no feeling, and are not prone to revenge insult. 'tis said, walls have ears. the walls of la calade have, at all events, a tongue; for on the summit of the ruins lies a stone with these words on it, 'lo, this is the house of god; this is the gate of heaven!'" then addressing my father, he said. "the very fact of the public attention being drawn to this point makes other parts of the city comparatively deserted, and therefore favors your escape. lose no time, i advise you, in availing yourselves of it." we exchanged our last embraces in tears, and they went forth, he following them. i felt inexpressibly lonely and sad. just as i was beginning to get uneasy at his absence, and to think, "what if he should never come back?" he returned. "they are safely off now," said he, "and little know what peril they have been in here. another twelve hours, and they would all have been taken. now, then, let us bestir ourselves, young man. they call you jacques; but i shall call you jean, after my younger brother." helped on by him, i hobbled along, though in pain. how chill, but how fresh and pleasant, felt the open air! it seemed the breath of life to me, and revived me like a potent medicine. there was a distant, sullen murmur in the city, but around us all was still. above us were bright stars, but no moon. at length we got among low dwellings, some of which had twinkling lights. we entered a dark, narrow passage, smelling powerfully of fried fish and onions. some one from above said cautiously, "who goes there?" "la croissette." "who else?" "my brother jean." "advance, brothers la croissette." we ascended a mean staircase and entered a room where we found a man and woman standing beside a large basket. "now get you into this," said la croissette to me, "and we will lower you from the window. stay, i will go first; it will give you confidence." twisting his long frame into the basket, he clasped his arms round his knees, and the others began to raise him by well-secured pulleys. the woman grew quite red in the face with the exertion of getting him over the window-ledge, and i own i trembled for him. "all is right, he is safely down," said she, at length, and helped to pull up the basket. "now, young man; you're not afraid?" "oh no; only don't let me down too fast." "that must depend on how heavy you are. we can't keep dangling you between sky and earth all night. come; you are not nearly as heavy as your brother. adieu, mon cher; bon voyage!" "adieu, madame; mille remerciments." i thought of st. paul in the basket, and the two israelitish spies. la croissette eased my descent a good deal, by steadying the basket, and helped me out of it to our mutual satisfaction. it was then swiftly drawn up, and taken in. "thank heaven, we are safe!" said i. "that was very cleverly managed." "do you suppose it the first time?" said la croissette. "far from it, i can tell you. many things are done in nismes that the authorities know nothing of, for all their vigilance. now we are fairly outside the city, and, with ordinary good luck, shall perform our night-journey in safety." "with god's blessing we may," said i. "make that proviso with all my heart," said la croissette. "some trust in providence and some in luck. i have nothing to say against either. now get into the cart." he led the horse a little out of the shadow as he spoke, and helped me inside the little house on wheels, where i found a mattress that proved a most acceptable rest; and then we drove slowly and quietly off, and gradually got among fields and hedges. "how are you getting on?" said la croissette, at length. "do you mind the shaking?" "oh," said i, "i have so many things on my mind that i take no thought for the body." "all the better; though some say that pain of the mind is the worst to bear of the two." "i have little doubt of it," said i, "though each are bad enough. but all i meant was that my mind is preoccupied and anxious, and prevents my noticing any mere discomforts; for i cannot say i am miserable." "indeed i think you ought not to be, for you have had an escape from that troubled city that many would rejoice at." "tell me truly; do you think i have actually escaped?" "what know i? you have escaped from the evils behind; you may not escape from the evils before. yesterday was cloudy, to-morrow may be rainy, the day after may be fine; none of us knows. at least there is a weather-prophet at arles whom some of the fools believe in; but he broke his leg a little while ago, and his spirit of prophecy did not enable him to foresee that, therefore i doubt his knowing about the weather." "there have always been those who dealt in lying signs and wonders," said i, "from the days of moses, when the magicians feigned to change their rods into serpents, which of course they could not do really." "they were clever at sleight-of-hand, i suppose," said la croissette. "so is doctor jameray. he can do many wonderful things. i can do some of them myself. you see, some of his conjuring tricks require a second person, who must not be known for his assistant; so that when he sets out on his tours through the provinces, i generally do the same, and contrive to cross his path, as if by accident. then we play off on a new set of people the tricks we have played twenty times before in other places." "then needle-selling is only a blind?" said i. "i turn a little money by it; the more, that i am careful always to sell the best needles and pins. thus i have acquired a name--the housewives trust me; i have a character to support. and my character supports me." "a good character always does so in the long run," said i. "well, i don't know what to say about that. you are too young to have any authority of weight. it must be your father's wisdom, and i am not sure it will stand the test." "i feel sure of it," said i. 'what, when you are this very moment a houseless wanderer, without having done any wrong? how does your good character support you now?" "for example, it has secured me your good offices," said i. "you would not have given me this good turn if i had been a worthless villain." "well, perhaps not; supposing i had known you for such--though worthless villains often escape deserved punishment, and sometimes are very plausible, and pay very well. and sometimes not"--reflectively. "you seem to remember a case in point," said i, smiling. "well, i do," said la croissette. "there was a young lord who led a sad course, and nearly fell into the hands of justice. he had a dashing, off-hand manner, that made friends till he was found out for what he was; and partly because he talked me over, and partly for high pay, i smuggled him beyond the reach of his enemies. but the pay never came. he won't get me to help him another time." "he'll miss the want of a good character in the long run, then," said i. "oh, he has done so already; he lies in prison now. but so do many of you huguenots, who have done nothing amiss. it seems to me there is one event to the good and to the wicked." "oh no, do not believe it," said i. "in the first place, none of us are righteous; no, not one; our merits only comparative. thus, there is something in every one of us to punish; and sometimes the lord sees fit to chasten his best-loved servants so severely, that it is difficult to distinguish their chastisement from his judgments on the wicked." "that comes to what i was saying," said la croissette; "that there is but one event to the good and to the bad." "it seems so, though it is not so," said i. "but don't you perceive in this a grand argument in favor of a future life?" "i am no scholar, i;--you must explain it to me," said la croissette. "if the lord lets his dear children fall into the same afflictions here as the rebellious and impenitent, it is because he knows that in the long run, it will be to their advantage rather than otherwise: that they will turn their trials to such good account as actually to be the better for them; and that their light affliction, which is but for a moment, will work for them a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. so that hereafter they shall look back on their present pains, not only with indifference but with thankfulness. but ah! where shall then the unrighteous and sinner appear?" "you seem to have a natural gift for preaching," said la croissette, after a pause. "where will they appear, say you? why, if our priests are to be believed, those of them, even the very worst, who have money enough to pay for masses and indulgences, may buy themselves off from purgatory, and shine in glory with the best." "does not that carry incredibility and absurdity on the very face of it?" "it seems very hard on the poor man who can't buy himself off," said la croissette. "you huguenots, then, don't believe in it?" "most assuredly not. god accepts no prayers that do not spring from a lowly and contrite heart: and they may be offered by a poor man as well as a rich one." "but does not a poor man's soul require those purgatorial fires?" "oh no, my dear la croissette! the son of god told of no purgatory--only of heaven and hell. and he was so truthful that he would not have told of a hell if there had not been one--nor have failed to tell of a purgatory if there had been one. the end would not have been commensurate with the means, had he laid down his life to save us from anything short of condign punishment, or to save us only incompletely. if there were a purgatory to endure at any rate, where would be the all-sufficiency of his sacrifice once offered?" he bade us believe in him and be saved. he did not say, 'believe also in my mother, and my brethren, and my apostles, and ask them to ask me to save you.' he said, 'come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and i will give you rest.'" "no! did he, though?" said la croissette, suddenly checking his horse. at the same moment, a woman sprang from the hedge and laid her hand on the shaft, saying: "good sir, save us! we perish!" "what is the matter?" said he, starting. "we are fugitives from nismes; we were beaten, we were burnt, we were pillaged." "my poor good woman, there are numbers in like case." "but we starve," said she, bursting into tears. "my aged mother and my little ones." "i am very sorry for you, but i am a poor man myself--here, take this trifle." "alas, we cannot eat money!" in a tone of such mournful reproach. "no, true; it will buy a little bread--but there are no shops. jean," in a lower voice to me, "i've a loaf in the cart, shall we part with it?" "give it to her by all means," said i. before he did so, he said to her, "true, you cannot eat money, but money will buy you bread in nismes. why not return there? the authorities are welcoming all that conform." "death rather than that!" said she, clasping her hands to her heart, and turning away. "stay, stay. here is bread for you. it is all we have." "ah! bless--." she could say no more, but sobbed bitterly. la croissette turned his face away. "there are many of us, many!" sobbed she. "we shall so bless you. we will pray for you." "do so; do," said he, affecting composure, and whipping on. chapter ix. cast down, but not destroyed. the moon had now risen, and shone full on our road, which was completely exposed; but happily we met with no hindrance. the motion of the cart now made me very drowsy, and i fell into deep dreamless sleep. when i woke, feeling stiff and chilled, i wondered where i was. the cart had stopped, i was alone, the gray light of morning was forcing its way through the chinks of my little lodging-house, but the door was locked. i thought my position a curious one, and wondered whether la croissette was going to give me up after all, to my enemies, but could not readily distrust a fellow apparently so kind-hearted. i lay still and listened to the sounds about me; the clucking of hens, gobbling of turkeys, stamping of horses, and lowing of calves, told me i was in a farm-yard. then i heard voices, including that of la croissette, and presently a sharp cry and then a laugh. by-and-by, the key turned in the lock and he looked in on me. "so ho, you are awake after a famous long nap," said he. "do you want your breakfast?" "if i do, want must be my master," said i, returning his smile. "we gave away our only loaf." "but what if i have earned another, and a good bowl of milk?" rejoined la croissette, producing both as he spoke. "there, sit up and eat your fill; i've had my share in the house." "where are we?" said i, readily obeying his instructions. "at a wayside farm-house, where the honest people have given my horse a good feed, and you and me a good breakfast." "how did you earn it, then?" "by pulling out a tooth for a great lubberly boy, whose cheek had swollen enormously with toothache. did you not hear him cry out? you might almost have heard him from here to nismes." "yes, i heard him cry and then laugh." "because he was so glad to have got rid of it." "can you draw teeth, then?" "i never drew one before, but i went at it as if it was a regular thing with me." "how could you venture?" "psha! it is good to show confidence; and every one must have a beginning. which of us would let a doctor try his hand on us, if we knew it was for the first time?" i smiled and shook my head at him, but said no more. when i had swallowed the delicious milk, he said, "now i will return the bowl, and bring out my horse. i told them i had a sick brother in the cart, recovering from a burning fever, or you would have had some visitors. to make doubly sure, i locked you up." "would not that have been enough without the other?" i said, grieved at his want of truth. "no, i think not, and i'm not as particular as you are." presently we were driving off again, and for a mile or so in silence. then la croissette, looking back at me, said, "there are certainly good people on both sides. that poor wretch to whom we gave the loaf was undoubtedly a good huguenot; she would rather starve and die than abjure her faith. but here, again, are a family of catholics, who are good, too, and believed every word i said, and liberally supplied my wants." "doubtless there are good people on both sides," said i; "and if the catholics would believe it of us, we might yet live in peace and quietness together. we have not harmed them--it is they who harm us." "for your good, they will tell you." "they may tell us, but we cannot believe it. their compulsions are not in the spirit of love." la croissette softly whistled, and presently talked of other things. by-and-by he said, "now we are coming to a town, and you shall see some fun." "will it be quite safe?" "safer than anything else. it is a fair-day; i shall drive straight into the market-place, blow my horn, and play the quack doctor. nay, you shall be my accomplice and blow the horn. let me put you in costume at once." saying which, he fished out a soiled scarlet cloak, gaily spangled, which he threw over my shoulders, produced a half-mask with an enormous red nose, with which he concealed the upper part of my face, covered my head with a spanish hat and feather, and gave me a horn. "now blow as much as you like," said he; "be as brazen as your trumpet." i laughed, and entered into the joke; no one would suspect me for a huguenot. la croissette then disguised himself in dr. jameray's long black gown, and added a pair of green spectacles, which certainly heightened the effect. having driven into the market-place, he placed a little table before him and spread it with boxes and phials, i blowing the horn from time to time in a way which he called quite original, and which speedily drew people about us. then, with wonderful self-possession, he harangued them on the merits of his medicines. for instance, taking up a phial which contained a pink-colored fluid, he descanted on its virtues in this style: "my friends, this small bottle contains a famous specific, for those who know how to use it prudently. when i say prudently, i mean that there are certain things it will do and others it will not. this remedy is for increasing the strength, improving the appetite, and clearing the head. will it, therefore, set a broken arm or draw a tooth? most certainly not. i can draw a tooth for you, if you like it (by-the-by, some think i have a gift that way, but self-praise is no recommendation); i can draw a tooth, i say, no matter with how many fangs; but this medicine cannot. does it follow, then, that it will cure a cough or sore throat? not at all. here, if you like (taking up another bottle) is something that will, but what is that to the purpose? will it cure sore eyes? no; or sprains? far from it. no, no, my most excellent ladies and gentlemen, let us not form unreasonable expectations; day is not night; summer is not winter; nor is a horse-medicine a febrifuge. it is useless to assert such trash to sensible, well-informed people, here is an opportunity, such as most of you may possibly never have again, of buying a most delightful and effectual medicine, sweet, not nauseous (strongly reminding one of cherry-brandy), gently exhilarating, and very difficult to be procured; indeed, i have only three small doses of it--three, did i say? i'm afraid i have only two--let me see--oh, yes, here are three; and the price is merely nominal--" the extreme frankness and moderation of this harangue of course met with great success; and purchasers speedily bought, not only his three pink bottles, but his green ones, his blue ones, his pills, his pomades, and his perfumed medicinal soaps that were to soften the skin, strengthen the joints, and promote longevity. after this, he sang a comic song of innumerable verses (with horn obligato) and delivered a discourse, in which he said there had never been more than three great men in the world, louis the fourteenth, alexander the great, and hippocrates, the father of physic. it was surprising to me how he carried on this game hour after hour, apparently without fatigue, and always to the delight of his audience, new-comers continually pressing around him, and old ones lingering in the distance with broad smiles on their faces. a little of it was well enough, but i thought that to be always at it must be harder work than the hardest handywork trade i knew. at last the day closed in, the people departed, we supplied ourselves with food, and departed like the rest. "now, then, have i not come off with flying colors?" said la croissette, complacently. "assuredly you have: but you must be very tired." "tired as can be--you know i had no sleep last night--we are coming to a little thicket where we will roost for the night." we had scarcely drawn up under the trees, which were thinning of leaves, when we heard a distant hollow sound gradually growing louder as it approached. "the dragoons," said la croissette, in a low voice. "i trust we shall escape their notice." they passed by like a whirlwind, taking the direction we had just left, and we congratulated ourselves on having quitted their path. "these wretches, look you," said la croissette, "know neither mercy nor justice; they know they are let loose on the country to do all the mischief they can, and if they find a paradise, they leave it a howling wilderness." of this we had proof next day, when we came on their track, and found wretched women and children in tears and lamentations impossible for us to assuage: men that had been cudgelled within an inch of their lives, or hung up by their wrists or their heels till they swooned, lying on the ground uncared for and dying. ah, what wickedness! and all under pretence of doing god service! i cannot dwell on the terrible scenes we saw in crossing the country. sometimes la croissette did some trifling act of kindness, but the evils demanded more potent remedies. "this unfits me for my calling," said he, one day, as he scrambled into the cart and drove off. "how can one play the merry-andrew under such circumstances? what will become of these poor creatures as winter comes on, even if they can last till then? it is impossible they should all escape from the country--they will have to conform after all, and had they not better do so now?" i replied, "it is written, 'fear not, little flock; for it is the father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.'" "the kingdom of france?" "no, the kingdom of heaven." "to whom were the words spoken?" "to the early christians, whose praise is in all the churches--whom the catholics not only reverence but worship." "hum. well, if they weathered such persecution as this, perhaps these may; but i could not stand it, i!--do you know (with great awe) there are dungeons called hippocrates' sleeves, the walls of which slope like the inside of a funnel tapering to a point, so that those who are put inside them can neither lie, sit, nor stand? they are let down into them with cords, and drawn up every day to be whipped." "and have any come forth alive from such places?" "i grant you; but sometimes without teeth or hair." "o, what glorious faith, to survive such a test!" exclaimed i. "but some don't survive." "o, what hallelujahs their freed spirits must sing as they find themselves suddenly released and soaring upward with myriads of rejoicing angels, to receive their welcome at the throne of god!" "jean, i never knew anything like you!" said la croissette. "the worse the stories i tell you, the greater the triumph and exultation you cap them with." i answered, "they overcame by the blood of the lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death." rev. xii. ii. "do you think you could bear being put into a hippocrates' sleeve?" "i am not called on to think what i could bear: only to bear what is put on me." "your father, every word! as the old cock crows, so does the young one. but after all, 'tis a fearful thing to lie at the mercy of those that can devise and carry out such tortures." "it is written, 'i say unto you, my friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but i will forewarn you whom ye shall fear. fear him which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell; yea, i say unto you, fear him.'" "you seem to have all the texts on this particular head at the tips of your fingers. did you learn them for this particular purpose?" "my dear mother used to repeat to me a text every night, and expect me to repeat it to her the next day." "an excellent plan," said la croissette, whipping his horse. and he hummed a tune. when we reached montauban, he said, "i must now begin my old tricks, to earn a little money;" and he drew up in the market-place. but the people had been as heavily visited as at nismes, and were in no mood for jesting. when he began to vend his nostrums, an old man of severe aspect held up his hand, and said: "peace, unfeeling man--you bring your senseless ribaldry to the wrong market. here are only lamentations, and mourning, and woe." "my good sir, one must live," said la croisette. "and how? tell me that!" retorted the old man, indignantly. "they that fed delicately are desolate in the streets; they that were clad in scarlet are cast on dunghills; the tongue of the suckling child cleaves to the roof of its mouth for thirst; the young children ask for bread, and no man giveth unto them." then, with a wail that was almost like a howl, he tore his hair and cried, "for this, for this mine eyes run down with water and mine eyelids take no rest. is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" "jean, i cannot stand this," said la croissette, as the old man hurried away. "all the people seem with broken hearts--it takes all spirit out of me. i cannot even hawk needles and pins among the starving--who would buy?" i could only say, "how dreadful is this place! the lord seems to have forsaken his sanctuary." "let us seek another place as soon as we can--" "you forget: i am to be met here by an agent of my father's at la boule d'or." "ah, well, we will go thither." when we drove into the inn-yard, however, we could hear unruly voices in the house, and feared we might fall into bad company. a man immediately came up to us, and said to me, in a low voice: "are you m. jacques bonneval?" "i am. are you antoine leroux?" "hist!--yes. there are ill-disposed people in the inn; you had better not go in-doors. can you walk a little way?" "yes." "come with me, then." "i must bid my companion farewell." turning to la croissette, i took his hand in both mine, and pressed it fervently, saying: "my dear la croissette, adieu. may god bless you in this world and the next. i wish i could make some return for your exceeding kindness, but, unfortunately, can give you nothing but my prayers." "pray say nothing of it," said he, cordially. "your prayers are the very thing i should like to have, for, unfortunately, i am not good at them myself. as i pass a calvary by the roadside i pull off my hat, in token of respect, you know, for what it represents; and had i had a bringing up like yours i might have had as pretty a turn for psalmody; but as the matter stands, why, you will be jacques bonneval, and i bartholomé la croissette to the end of the chapter. as for what i have done for you, why, it's nothing! i was coming this way, at any rate, and i've given you a lift; that's all." "you may make light of it, if you will," said i, "but i know you have continually run risks for me; and depend on it, i shall never forget you. adieu, my friend." "farewell, then," said he, "and take my best wishes with you. i hope you will now slip safely out of the country, but a good piece of it remains before you yet. nor are your feet in good condition for walking." "that has been provided for," said antoine. "as soon as we get to the waterside we shall find a boat awaiting us, which will carry us to bordeaux." "but you are some way from the water.' "yes, but i have a cart." we then parted, la croissette kissing me on both cheeks with the utmost kindness; and i turned away with antoine. looking round as we quitted the court, i had my last glimpse of his tall, meagre figure, as he stood with his hand on his hip, looking after me; and i thought how strange and disproportionate a return his kindness to me had been for mine to him, in lifting him up and saving him from a kicking horse on the way to beaucaire. the whole scene at once started up before me--our family party in the wagon--the girls' blooming faces and gay dresses--the crowded road--the music--the bustle. then my thoughts flew on to what followed--the humors of the fair--the crowded table at my uncle's--my betrothal to madeleine. what a different future then seemed to lie before us to what awaited us now! where was she? should we meet soon? might we not be separated for ever? i cannot tell how many thoughts like these passed through my mind as i limped after antoine, who was himself somewhat awkward in his gait, like many of the silk-weavers from sitting so constantly at the loom. thus we passed through some of the by-ways of montauban, and entered a small house. chapter x. "my native land, good-night" the room we entered was destitute of furniture and blackened with smoke. heaps of broken fragments impeded our entrance and lay on the floor. a man sitting on the ground was restlessly taking up one piece after another, and laying them down again, muttering to himself, without noticing us. "i know not why they should have done so," he said hurriedly; "the poor chairs and tables could not hurt. and, after all, when they hung me up i gave in, and kissed the cross made by their swords; and they knocked me about after that. if that was justice, i don't know what justice is. they hurt my wife, too, or she would not have shrieked out so. and her word always had been--'hold out; pain may be borne; and they dare not kill us!' but when she saw them tie me up, she cried out, 'oh, pierre, pierre, give in--give in!' so what was i to do? answer me that." "this poor fellow has lost his senses," said antoine, softly. "wait here a minute. i will soon return." i stood where i was. it seemed to me from the charred remains that the furniture had been just broken up and then partially burnt. there was a great beam across the ceiling, with large iron hooks on which to hang bacon, onions, and such-like. from one of these hooks dangled a strong chain. "they drew me up with that," said he, turning his dull eyes on me, and the next instant looking away. "they passed the chain under one of my armpits, and so suspended me; and then beat me. i was not going to stand that, you know. my wife ran away, calling on me to give in; so what could i do? could i help it? am i a renegade?" i said, "let us remember david's words--'have mercy on me, o lord, for my sin is great.' he did not say, 'for my sin is little--a very little one--the first i ever sinned;' but 'my sin is great;' and therefore have mercy on me. say it after me. 'have mercy on me, for my sin is great.'" --"for my sin is great," repeated he, melting into tears. and again and again he repeated, weeping, "for my sin is great--my sin is great. have mercy on me, o lord, for my sin is great." "he also hath forgiven the wickedness of thy sin," said i. "let us turn unto the lord, for he will heal us, and not be angry with us for ever." antoine drew me away. we left the poor man in tears, and went into the yard, where stood a cart, with a sorry horse in it, and a heap of loose fagots and pieces of broken furniture beside it. "get you in here, sir, and lie down," said he. "i will pile the wood over you as lightly as i can." i did as he desired. he bestowed the wood over me as carefully as he could, and then led the horse out. "whither away?" said somebody, passing. "to dispose of this rubbish," said he, carelessly. "poor pierre's chattels have been reduced to mere firewood. if a trifle can be got for them, it may buy him bread." i thought of the two messengers to king david, whom a woman concealed in a well at bahurim, spreading a covering over the well's mouth, and spreading ground corn thereon. i was startled when the man said, "i have a mind to buy it of you: it will do to heat my oven." "but this load is engaged already," said antoine. "why did you not say so at first? you said you were going to see if you could get a trifle for it." "i confess i expressed myself badly. my poor brother's sad state has bewildered me. go you, and look in on him, and see what a pitiable object he is." "well, i think i will. what is the value of this load, as it stands?" antoine seemed so disposed to haggle for it that i confess i quaked; however, he set such a high value on it that the other demurred. happily we got out of the town without further molestation. i was very much cramped, but that was no matter. the church-bells began to ring; and antoine said, in a low voice, "how pitiable are the poor people who are now going to vespers on compulsion! where will all this end? can it be that he who now goeth forth weeping, and bearing good seed, shall return again in joy, bringing his sheaves with him?" i said, "the lord's hand is not straitened, that he cannot save. what is impossible with man is possible with god." "oh that we may live to see it, sir." we came up with a wagon, with the driver of which antoine fell into conversation for some time, but what they said i could not well hear. at length we reached the water-side, at a landing-place where a boat laden with kitchen stuff was awaiting us. here antoine saw me safely placed in charge of the boatman, who bade me never fear, for he would safely carry me to bordeaux. we pushed off: the moon shone cold and bright; the air on the river felt fresh and chill. the boatman threw a warm covering on me, bade me sleep, and began a monotonous boat-song. i soon slept. when i awoke it was late in the morning, for the bright october sun overhead was making the rapid garonne quiver in a sheen of golden light. i found we had made good progress, and were not many hours from our destination. i found it inexpressibly pleasant to float down that bright river, as it carried me to new scenes, which love, hope, and inexperience painted in pleasing colors. my feet were sufficiently painful for me to be glad to lie idly among the piles of cabbages and while the time in day-dreams. aged confessors might go forth sighing, "how shall we sing the lord's song in a strange land?" but to the young and buoyant, change of occupation and foreign travel have great allurement, even when rudely come by. the boatman seemed an honest poor fellow. sometimes he exchanged greetings and jokes with other boatmen; sometimes he sang snatches of plaintive songs, such as "n'erount très frères n'erount très frères n'haut qu'une soeur à marida:" for his mother was from languedoc. at other times he talked to me quietly. "yours seems a contented, merry life, said i. "well, i make it so," said he. "where is the good of picking up troubles? they come sure enough. once i was foolish enough to think 'what a poor lot is this, to be pulling a market-boat up and down stream, with greens for the seafaring men, while others go riding on horseback or in carriages, wear fine clothes, feast every day, and go to theatres at night.' but when the dragoons came i was thankful to be what i was. did you hear what happened to collette at our place? collette was the prettiest girl of our village, and a good girl, but a thought too vain. perhaps it is too much to expect a woman not to be vain when she is pretty, but all are not. collette's skin was like lilies and roses. when the dragoons were let loose on us they burnt her father's furniture, and beat him within an inch of his life. they asked collette if she would go to mass: she said, 'i will not.' they pulled her hair, beat her, pinched her, but she only said the more, 'i will not.' then a dragoon said, 'this girl is too pert, her conceit must be lowered a little.' and he took a comb off her toilette, and drew it down her face two or three times, quite hard, till it was scratched and scored all over. conceive how the poor thing was cut up! she burst into tears, and said, 'take me to a convent; i don't care where i go now, so that i am not seen. i shall never be worth looking at again.'" "but what an unworthy motive for an unworthy act!" cried i. "but only think how she was goaded to it!" said he. "women think so much of their looks. i am told the dragoons have tried that trick with many ladies of quality." "if they deserved the name of men they would be ashamed of it." "well, i think so too; but see how they treat the men! have you seen a chain of galley-slaves on their way to marseilles? certainly no treatment can be too bad for the infamous, but that nobles and gentlemen should be fettered along with felons, forgers, murderers, and such-like--ah, 'tis too bad!"[ ]... [footnote : see "autobiography of a french protestant." religious tract society. a thrilling narrative, of which the quarterly review says:--"the facts are more interesting than fiction, and the incidents not less strange."] "but now we come to bordeaux," said he, at length; and in fact, the increase of traffic on the water was sufficient of itself to tell us that we were approaching an important commercial city, while in the distance were seen the masts of ships of many nations. nearer at hand the richly-wooded heights were studded with the country seats of opulent merchants, many of whom either were huguenots or had made their fortunes by huguenots. it was to be supposed, therefore, that we had many friends here; and, indeed, many were favoring our escape as much as they could without compromising themselves; but such jealous watch was being kept on the port that this was extremely difficult. soon my companion ran his boat in between two others similarly laden--as far as vegetables when, that is, for i know not they held any fugitives; and a great war of words ensued, in which it was difficult to know whether they were really quarrelling or not. at length i got ashore, and found my way to the counting-house of my father's correspondent, monsieur bort. he was a very business-looking man, with a short, hard, dry way of speaking. i found him immersed in his books. directly he saw me, he said, abruptly. "you are young bonneval. you come too late. the others are gone." "oh" and i dropped into a seat, quite stunned by this reverse. "mais que voulez-vous?" said he. "they could not wait. the opportunity would have been lost." "are they really off, and safe?" "off they are, but whether safe--." he shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. however, seeing my chagrin, he added, "i imagine they are in the river thames by this time." "do you mean they are ascending the river to london?" "precisely. it may not be so, but we may hope the best. and you?"--eyeing me inquiringly. "what am i to do, sir? did my father leave me no word of direction?" "he left you his blessing, and bade you be a good boy, and submit yourself to my direction." "that i will gladly do, if you will direct me." "well, i am pledged to do the best i can for you. but, unhappily, the surveillance is now so strict that i know not how to smuggle you on board." "in a box--in a cask," said i, desperately. "have you really courage to be packed in that manner?" "yes, if there is no alternative." "come, you are un brave garçon! i respect you for your resolution. there is a vessel of mine being loaded now, and if you will really go on board in such a way as you propose i think we can manage it, and your durance will not last more than a few hours. you will be a regulus without the nails." smiling grimly at this allusion, he went out, and left me to meditate on what lay before me. it was not pleasant, certainly; but then the incentive was so great!--to join all whom i held dear, in a free land! the light affliction would be but for a moment. monsieur bort returned. "all is arranged," said he complacently. "i have taken the porter who will roll you into the secret. he promises to be as careful of you as he can. an officer on board is likewise in my confidence: he engages you shall be released as soon as the vessel is fairly under weigh. so take heart; it will be but a short trial compared with what many huguenots are put to. take this money and these papers--" after some business directions he accompanied me to the warehouse, where the cask awaited me, with some hay to soften my journey in it. "you are a pipe of bordeaux, going as a present to my particular friend in london," said he, smiling. "now, behave yourself as a good pipe of wine should; and don't cry out even if you are hurt. see, there are some air-holes. you won't stifle." "they are very small--" "how can that be helped? who would have doors and windows in a wine-cask? you will get on board alive, will be released when well to sea, and must not mind a little discomfort." we shook hands, and i stepped in and settled myself as well as i could, with my mouth close to one of the air-holes; and the cask was closed upon me. the next minute i was rolled slowly off; and a most odd sensation it was! i advise you to try it, if you would like something perfectly new; but have bigger air-holes if you can; and even then let your experiment be short. i verily believe the porter did his best for me; but how slowly he rolled: and even then what bumps and jolts i had when we came to uneven ground! now and then he stopped, to wipe his face and rest, seemingly--then on we trundled again meanwhile i was getting exceedingly hot; all the blood in my body seemed mounting into my head: and unpleasant ideas of smothering obtruded themselves. the noises around me told me we were on the wharf; then the jolting and bumping became worse than before: i fancied i could tell we passed up a sloping plank and were on shipboard. then, without the least warning, i was rolled over and over, and then set upon my head! but a loud cry outside drowned a smothered cry within; and i was placed in a horizontal position again, with feelings impossible to describe. i think i became sleepy after that; or else in a painless state of insensibility. when i woke i was numb all over, and had to rub my dazzled eyes as the bright daylight broke in on them. "he seems to like his quarters so well as to have no mind to turn out," said a rough voice. "he wants assistance," said some one, in a kinder tone; and a handsome, frank-looking man laid hold of my arm, and helped me to rise. above me were the sails and cordage of a ship; all around me the sparkling blue waves, leaping in freedom. i clasped my hands, and raised them to heaven. "you do well to give thanks where thanks are due," said the mate. "now come into the cabin." seeing me stagger, he took me by the arm, and kindly assisted me into the presence of the captain, saying, "here is one of the noble army of martyrs." the captain gave me a most kind reception, made me dine with him, and asked me a great many questions. he then told me many moving stories of other huguenots who had escaped or tried to escape to england; and he related such instances of the kindness of the english to the fugitives that my heart warmed towards them with gratitude and hope. after this i suffered much from seasickness, and lay two or three days in my cot, where we were buffeted of the winds, and tossed. we were chased by a strange ship, and had to put on all the sail we could to escape being overhauled; and this led to our being driven out of our course; so that, what with one thing and another, we we did not reach gravesend till the th of november. then the captain went ashore with his ship's papers, and, after transacting business, started for london, and took me with him. what a day it was for forming one's first impressions of that much-longed-for capital! there was a thick november fog, through which street-lamps sent an imperfect light; and shops were lighted up with candles. vehicles ran against one another in the streets, in spite of link-boys darting between the horses, fearless of danger, and scattering sparks from their fiery torches. the noise, the unknown language, the strange streets and lanes bewildered me. the captain called a hackney-coach, and in this we made our way to fenchurch street, where lived his shipping agent, mr. smith. we went upstairs to his counting-house, and found him talking to some one, who turned round as we entered. i exclaimed "oh, my father!" and precipitated myself into his arms. he embraced me with transport. "where is my mother? where is madeline?" "safe and well, at the country-house of our esteemed friend mr. smith. thither i will speedily take you, my dear boy. i came here to gather tidings of you." "how long it seems since we lost sight of one another!" "long, indeed! and how much we have to tell each other! but we are in smooth water now. in this free, happy land people are no longer persecuted for their faith. we must begin the world again, my son; but what does that signify? you have youth and energy; i have experience and patience." the captain and mr. smith looked on with sympathy at our mutual felicitations. soon i was with my father in a stage-coach on our way to walthamstow. there, in an old-fashioned red-brick mansion, i found my mother, brothers and sisters, my madeleine, and gabrielle. what joy! what affection! in short, we were all, without one exception, among the four hundred thousand persons who forsook france rather than renounce their faith. of that number, a very great many perished of famine, hardships, and fatigue; but we were among the many who safely reached this hospitable country and commenced life anew. many of us settled without the city walls in the open ground of spital fields, which we gradually covered with houses and silk-factories. here we spoke our own language, sang our own songs, had our own places of worship, and built our dwellings in the old french style, with porticoes and seats at the doors, where our old men sat and smoked on summer evenings, and conversed with one another in their own tongue. at first our starving refugees were relieved by a parliamentary grant of £ , a year; but, god prospering our industry our trade went on steadily increasing till that, now, in , three hundred thousand of us are maintained by it in england. and many others of us in friendly countries abroad, where we have been driven. prosperity to those among whom we have settled has followed. the native land that cast us forth has been impoverished. happy are the people whom the lord hath blessed. yea, happy are they who have the lord for their god. count hannibal a romance of the court of france. by stanley j. weyman. sorori sua caussa carae pro erga matrem amore etiam cariori hoc frater. contents i. crimson favours ii. hannibal de saulx, comte de tavannes iii. the house next the golden maid iv. the eve of the feast v. a rough wooing vi. "who touches tavannes?" vii. in the amphitheatre viii. two hens and an egg ix. unstable x. madame st. lo xi. a bargain xii. in the hall of the louvre xiii. diplomacy xiv. too short a spoon xv. the brother of st. magloire xvi. at close quarters xvii. the duel xviii. andromeda, perseus being absent xix. in the orleannais xx. on the castle hill xxi. she would, and would not xxii. playing with fire xxiii. a mind, and not a mind xxiv. at the king's inn xxv. the company of the bleeding heart xxvi. temper xxvii. the black town xxviii. in the little chapter-house xxix. the escape xxx. sacrilege! xxxi. the flight from angers xxxii. the ordeal by steel xxxiii. the ambush xxxiv. "which will you, madame?" xxxv. against the wall xxxvi. his kingdom chapter i. crimson favours. m. de tavannes smiled. mademoiselle averted her eyes, and shivered; as if the air, even of that close summer night, entering by the door at her elbow, chilled her. and then came a welcome interruption. "tavannes!" "sire!" count hannibal rose slowly. the king had called, and he had no choice but to obey and go. yet he hung a last moment over his companion, his hateful breath stirring her hair. "our pleasure is cut short too soon, mademoiselle," he said, in the tone, and with the look, she loathed. "but for a few hours only. we shall meet to-morrow. or, it may be--earlier." she did not answer, and "tavannes!" the king repeated with violence. "tavannes! mordieu!" his majesty continued, looking round furiously. "will no one fetch him? sacre nom, am i king, or a dog of a--" "i come, sire!" the count cried hastily. for charles, king of france, ninth of the name, was none of the most patient; and scarce another in the court would have ventured to keep him waiting so long. "i come, sire; i come!" tavannes repeated, as he moved from mademoiselle's side. he shouldered his way through the circle of courtiers, who barred the road to the presence, and in part hid her from observation. he pushed past the table at which charles and the comte de rochefoucauld had been playing primero, and at which the latter still sat, trifling idly with the cards. three more paces, and he reached the king, who stood in the _ruelle_ with rambouillet and the italian marshal. it was the latter who, a moment before, had summoned his majesty from his game. mademoiselle, watching him go, saw so much; so much, and the king's roving eyes and haggard face, and the four figures, posed apart in the fuller light of the upper half of the chamber. then the circle of courtiers came together before her, and she sat back on her stool. a fluttering, long-drawn sigh escaped her. now, if she could slip out and make her escape! now--she looked round. she was not far from the door; to withdraw seemed easy. but a staring, whispering knot of gentlemen and pages blocked the way; and the girl, ignorant of the etiquette of the court, and with no more than a week's experience of paris, had not the courage to rise and pass alone through the group. she had come to the louvre this saturday evening under the wing of madame d'yverne, her _fiance's_ cousin. by ill-hap madame had been summoned to the princess dowager's closet, and perforce had left her. still, mademoiselle had her betrothed, and in his charge had sat herself down to wait, nothing loth, in the great gallery, where all was bustle and gaiety and entertainment. for this, the seventh day of the fetes, held to celebrate the marriage of the king of navarre and charles's sister--a marriage which was to reconcile the two factions of the huguenots and the catholics, so long at war--saw the louvre as gay, as full, and as lively as the first of the fete days had found it; and in the humours of the throng, in the ceaseless passage of masks and maids of honour, guards and bishops, swiss in the black, white, and green of anjou, and huguenot nobles in more sombre habits, the country-bred girl had found recreation and to spare. until gradually the evening had worn away and she had begun to feel nervous; and m. de tignonville, her betrothed, placing her in the embrasure of a window, had gone to seek madame. she had waited for a time without much misgiving; expecting each moment to see him return. he would be back before she could count a hundred; he would be back before she could number the leagues that separated her from her beloved province, and the home by the biscay sea, to which even in that brilliant scene her thoughts turned fondly. but the minutes had passed, and passed, and he had not returned. worse, in his place tavannes--not the marshal, but his brother, count hannibal--had found her; he, whose odious court, at once a menace and an insult, had subtly enveloped her for a week past. he had sat down beside her, he had taken possession of her, and, profiting by her inexperience, had played on her fears and smiled at her dislike. finally, whether she would or no, he had swept her with him into the chamber. the rest had been an obsession, a nightmare, from which only the king's voice summoning tavannes to his side had relieved her. her aim now was to escape before he returned, and before another, seeing her alone, adopted his _role_ and was rude to her. already the courtiers about her were beginning to stare, the pages to turn and titter and whisper. direct her gaze as she might, she met some eye watching her, some couple enjoying her confusion. to make matters worse, she presently discovered that she was the only woman in the chamber; and she conceived the notion that she had no right to be there at that hour. at the thought her cheeks burned, her eyes dropped; the room seemed to buzz with her name, with gross words and jests, and gibes at her expense. at last, when the situation had grown nearly unbearable, the group before the door parted, and tignonville appeared. the girl rose with a cry of relief, and he came to her. the courtiers glanced at the two and smiled. he did not conceal his astonishment at finding her there. "but, mademoiselle, how is this?" he asked, in a low voice. he was as conscious of the attention they attracted as she was, and as uncertain on the point of her right to be there. "i left you in the gallery. i came back, missed you, and--" she stopped him by a gesture. "not here!" she muttered, with suppressed impatience. "i will tell you outside. take me--take me out, if you please, monsieur, at once!" he was as glad to be gone as she was to go. the group by the doorway parted; she passed through it, he followed. in a moment the two stood in the great gallery, above the salle des caryatides. the crowd which had paraded here an hour before was gone, and the vast echoing apartment, used at that date as a guard-room, was well-nigh empty. only at rare intervals, in the embrasure of a window or the recess of a door, a couple talked softly. at the farther end, near the head of the staircase which led to the hall below, and the courtyard, a group of armed swiss lounged on guard. mademoiselle shot a keen glance up and down, then she turned to her lover, her face hot with indignation. "why did you leave me?" she asked. "why did you leave me, if you could not come back at once? do you understand, sir," she continued, "that it was at your instance i came to paris, that i came to this court, and that i look to you for protection?" "surely," he said. "and--" "and do you think carlat and his wife fit guardians for me? should i have come or thought of coming to this wedding, but for your promise, and madame your cousin's? if i had not deemed myself almost your wife," she continued warmly, "and secure of your protection, should i have come within a hundred miles of this dreadful city? to which, had i my will, none of our people should have come." "dreadful? pardieu, not so dreadful," he answered, smiling, and striving to give the dispute a playful turn. "you have seen more in a week than you would have seen at vrillac in a lifetime, mademoiselle." "and i choke!" she retorted; "i choke! do you not see how they look at us, at us huguenots, in the street? how they, who live here, point at us and curse us? how the very dogs scent us out and snarl at our heels, and the babes cross themselves when we go by? can you see the place des gastines and not think what stood there? can you pass the greve at night and not fill the air above the river with screams and wailings and horrible cries--the cries of our people murdered on that spot?" she paused for breath, recovered herself a little, and in a lower tone, "for me," she said, "i think of philippa de luns by day and by night! the eaves are a threat to me; the tiles would fall on us had they their will; the houses nod to--to--" "to what, mademoiselle?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders and assuming a tone of cynicism. "to crush us! yes, monsieur, to crush us!" "and all this because i left you for a moment?" "for an hour--or well-nigh an hour," she answered more soberly. "but if i could not help it?" "you should have thought of that--before you brought me to paris, monsieur. in these troublous times." he coloured warmly. "you are unjust, mademoiselle," he said. "there are things you forget; in a court one is not always master of one's self." "i know it," she answered dryly, thinking of that through which she had gone. "but you do not know what happened!" he returned with impatience. "you do not understand that i am not to blame. madame d'yverne, when i reached the princess dowager's closet, had left to go to the queen of navarre. i hurried after her, and found a score of gentlemen in the king of navarre's chamber. they were holding a council, and they begged, nay, they compelled me to remain." "and it was that which detained you so long?" "to be sure, mademoiselle." "and not--madame st. lo?" m. de tignonville's face turned scarlet. the thrust in tierce was unexpected. this, then, was the key to mademoiselle's spirt of temper. "i do not understand you," he stammered. "how long were you in the king of navarre's chamber, and how long with madame st. lo?" she asked with fine irony. "or no, i will not tempt you," she went on quickly, seeing him hesitate. "i heard you talking to madame st. lo in the gallery while i sat within. and i know how long you were with her." "i met madame as i returned," he stammered, his face still hot, "and i asked her where you were. i did not know, mademoiselle, that i was not to speak to ladies of my acquaintance." "i was alone, and i was waiting." "i could not know that--for certain," he answered, making the best of it. "you were not where i left you. i thought, i confess--that you had gone. that you had gone home." "with whom? with whom?" she repeated pitilessly. "was it likely? with whom was i to go? and yet it is true, i might have gone home had i pleased--with m. de tavannes! yes," she continued, in a tone of keen reproach, and with the blood mounting to her forehead, "it is to that, monsieur, you expose me! to be pursued, molested, harassed by a man whose look terrifies me, and whose touch i--i detest! to be addressed wherever i go by a man whose every word proves that he thinks me game for the hunter, and you a thing he may neglect. you are a man and you do not know, you cannot know what i suffer! what i have suffered this week past whenever you have left my side!" tignonville looked gloomy. "what has he said to you?" he asked, between his teeth. "nothing i can tell you," she answered, with a shudder. "it was he who took me into the chamber." "why did you go?" "wait until he bids you do something," she answered. "his manner, his smile, his tone, all frighten me. and to-night, in all these there was a something worse, a hundred times worse than when i saw him last--on thursday! he seemed to--to gloat on me," the girl stammered, with a flush of shame, "as if i were his! oh, monsieur, i wish we had not left our poitou! shall we ever see vrillac again, and the fishers' huts about the port, and the sea beating blue against the long brown causeway?" he had listened darkly, almost sullenly; but at this, seeing the tears gather in her eyes, he forced a laugh. "why, you are as bad as m. de rosny and the vidame!" he said. "and they are as full of fears as an egg is of meat! since the admiral was wounded by that scoundrel on friday, they think all paris is in a league against us." "and why not?" she asked, her cheek grown pale, her eyes reading his eyes. "why not? why, because it is a monstrous thing even to think of!" tignonville answered, with the confidence of one who did not use the argument for the first time. "could they insult the king more deeply than by such a suspicion? a borgia may kill his guests, but it was never a practice of the kings of france! pardieu, i have no patience with them! they may lodge where they please, across the river, or without the walls if they choose, the rue de l'arbre sec is good enough for me, and the king's name sufficient surety!" "i know you are not apt to be fearful," she answered, smiling; and she looked at him with a woman's pride in her lover. "all the same, you will not desert me again, sir, will you?" he vowed he would not, kissed her hand, looked into her eyes; then melting to her, stammering, blundering, he named madame st. lo. she stopped him. "there is no need," she said, answering his look with kind eyes, and refusing to hear his protestations. "in a fortnight will you not be my husband? how should i distrust you? it was only that while she talked, i waited--i waited; and--and that madame st. lo is count hannibal's cousin. for a moment i was mad enough to dream that she held you on purpose. you do not think it was so?" "she!" he cried sharply; and he winced, as if the thought hurt him. "absurd! the truth is, mademoiselle," he continued with a little heat, "you are like so many of our people! you think a catholic capable of the worst." "we have long thought so at vrillac," she answered gravely. "that's over now, if people would only understand. this wedding has put an end to all that. but i'm harking back," he continued awkwardly; and he stopped. "instead, let me take you home." "if you please. carlat and the servants should be below." he took her left hand in his right after the wont of the day, and with his other hand touching his sword-hilt, he led her down the staircase, that by a single turn reached the courtyard of the palace. here a mob of armed servants, of lacqueys, and footboys, some bearing torches, and some carrying their masters' cloaks and _galoshes_, loitered to and fro. had m. de tignonville been a little more observant, or a trifle less occupied with his own importance, he might have noted more than one face which looked darkly on him; he might have caught more than one overt sneer at his expense. but in the business of summoning carlat--mademoiselle de vrillac's steward and major-domo--he lost the contemptuous "christaudins!" that hissed from a footboy's lips, and the "southern dogs!" that died in the moustachios of a bully in the livery of the king's brother. he was engaged in finding the steward, and in aiding him to cloak his mistress; then with a ruffling air, a new acquirement, which he had picked up since he came to paris, he made a way for her through the crowd. a moment, and the three, followed by half a dozen armed servants, bearing pikes and torches, detached themselves from the throng, and crossing the courtyard, with its rows of lighted windows, passed out by the gate between the tennis courts, and so into the rue des fosses de st. germain. before them, against a sky in which the last faint glow of evening still contended with the stars, the spire and pointed arches of the church of st. germain rose darkly graceful. it was something after nine: the heat of the august day brooded over the crowded city, and dulled the faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. as mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the cloister of st. germain, where only the day before admiral coligny, the leader of the huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort's hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. but he laughed at her. "it was a private blow," he said, answering her unspoken thought. "it is like enough the guises sped it. but they know now what is the king's will, and they have taken the hint and withdrawn themselves. it will not happen again, mademoiselle. for proof, see the guards"--they were passing the end of the rue bethizy, in the corner house of which, abutting on the rue de l'arbre sec, coligny had his lodgings--"whom the king has placed for his security. fifty pikes under cosseins." "cosseins?" she repeated. "but i thought cosseins--" "was not wont to love us!" tignonville answered, with a confident chuckle. "he was not. but the dogs lick where the master wills, mademoiselle. he was not, but he does. this marriage has altered all." "i hope it may not prove an unlucky one!" she murmured. she felt impelled to say it. "not it!" he answered confidently. "why should it?" they stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the rue st. honore opposite the croix du tiroir; which rose shadowy in the middle of the four ways. he hammered on the door. "but," she said softly, looking in his face, "the change is sudden, is it not? the king was not wont to be so good to us!" "the king was not king until now," he answered warmly. "that is what i am trying to persuade our people. believe me, mademoiselle, you may sleep without fear; and early in the morning i will be with you. carlat, have a care of your mistress until morning, and let madame lie in her chamber. she is nervous to-night. there, sweet, until morning! god keep you, and pleasant dreams!" he uncovered, and bowing over her hand, kissed it; and the door being open he would have turned away. but she lingered as if unwilling to enter. "there is--do you hear it--a stir in _that_ quarter?" she said, pointing across the rue st. honore. "what lies there?" "northward? the markets," he answered. "'tis nothing. they say, you know, that paris never sleeps. good night, sweet, and a fair awakening!" she shivered as she had shivered under tavannes' eye. and still she lingered, keeping him. "are you going to your lodging at once?" she asked--for the sake, it seemed, of saying something. "i?" he answered a little hurriedly. "no, i was thinking of paying rochefoucauld the compliment of seeing him home. he has taken a new lodging to be near the admiral; a horrid bare place in the rue bethizy, without furniture, but he would go into it to-day. and he has a sort of claim on my family, you know." "yes," she said simply. "of course. then i must not detain you. god keep you safe," she continued, with a faint quiver in her tone; and her lip trembled. "good night, and fair dreams, monsieur." he echoed the words gallantly. "of you, sweet!" he cried; and turning away with a gesture of farewell, he set off on his return. he walked briskly, nor did he look back, though she stood awhile gazing after him. she was not aware that she gave thought to this; nor that it hurt her. yet when bolt and bar had shot behind her, and she had mounted the cold, bare staircase of that day--when she had heard the dull echoing footsteps of her attendants as they withdrew to their lairs and sleeping- places, and still more when she had crossed the threshold of her chamber, and signed to madame carlat and her woman to listen--it is certain she felt a lack of something. perhaps the chill that possessed her came of that lack, which she neither defined nor acknowledged. or possibly it came of the night air, august though it was; or of sheer nervousness, or of the remembrance of count hannibal's smile. whatever its origin, she took it to bed with her and long after the house slept round her, long after the crowded quarter of the halles had begun to heave and the sorbonne to vomit a black-frocked band, long after the tall houses in the gabled streets, from st. antoine to montmartre and from st. denis on the north to st. jacques on the south, had burst into rows of twinkling lights--nay, long after the quarter of the louvre alone remained dark, girdled by this strange midnight brightness--she lay awake. at length she too slept, and dreamed of home and the wide skies of poitou, and her castle of vrillac washed day and night by the biscay tides. chapter ii. hannibal de saulx, comte de tavannes. "tavannes!" "sire." tavannes, we know, had been slow to obey the summons. emerging from the crowd, he found that the king, with retz and rambouillet, his marshal des logis, had retired to the farther end of the chamber; apparently charles had forgotten that he had called. his head a little bent--he was tall and had a natural stoop--the king seemed to be listening to a low but continuous murmur of voices which proceeded from the door of his closet. one voice frequently raised was beyond doubt a woman's; a foreign accent, smooth and silky, marked another; a third, that from time to time broke in, wilful and impetuous, was the voice of monsieur, the king's brother, catherine de medicis' favourite son. tavannes, waiting respectfully two paces behind the king, could catch little that was said; but charles, something more, it seemed, for on a sudden he laughed, a violent, mirthless laugh. and he clapped rambouillet on the shoulder. "there!" he said, with one of his horrible oaths, "'tis settled! 'tis settled! go, man, and take your orders! and you, m. de retz," he continued, in a tone of savage mockery, "go, my lord, and give them!" "i, sire?" the italian marshal answered, in accents of deprecation. there were times when the young king would show his impatience of the italian ring, the retzs and biragues, the strozzis and gondys, with whom his mother surrounded him. "yes, you!" charles answered. "you and my lady mother! and in god's name answer for it at the day!" he continued vehemently. "you will have it! you will not let me rest till you have it! then have it, only see to it, it be done thoroughly! there shall not be one left to cast it in the king's teeth and cry, 'et tu, carole!' swim, swim in blood if you will," he continued, with growing wildness. "oh, 'twill be a merry night! and it's true so far, you may kill fleas all day, but burn the coat, and there's an end. so burn it, burn it, and--" he broke off with a start as he discovered tavannes at his elbow. "god's death, man!" he cried roughly, "who sent for you?" "your majesty called me," tavannes answered; while, partly urged by the king's hand, and partly anxious to escape, the others slipped into the closet and left them together. "i sent for you? i called your brother, the marshal!" "he is within, sire," tavannes answered, indicating the closet. "a moment ago i heard his voice." charles passed his shaking hand across his eyes. "is he?" he muttered. "so he is! i heard it too. and--and a man cannot be in two places at once!" then, while his haggard gaze, passing by tavannes, roved round the chamber, he laid his hand on count hannibal's breast. "they give me no peace, madame and the guises," he whispered, his face hectic with excitement. "they will have it. they say that coligny--they say that he beards me in my own palace. and--and, _mordieu_," with sudden violence, "it's true. it's true enough! it was but to-day he was for making terms with me! with me, the king! making terms! so it shall be, by god and devil, it shall! but not six or seven! no, no. all! all! there shall not be one left to say to me, 'you did it!'" "softly, sire," tavannes answered; for charles had gradually raised his voice. "you will be observed." for the first time the young king--he was but twenty-two years old, god pity him!--looked at his companion. "to be sure," he whispered; and his eyes grew cunning. "besides, and after all, there's another way, if i choose. oh, i've thought and thought, i'd have you know." and shrugging his shoulders, almost to his ears, he raised and lowered his open hands alternately, while his back hid the movement from the chamber. "see-saw! see-saw!" he muttered. "and the king between the two, you see. that's madame's king-craft. she's shown me that a hundred times. but look you, it is as easy to lower the one as the other," with a cunning glance at tavannes' face, "or to cut off the right as the left. and--and the admiral's an old man and will pass; and for the matter of that i like to hear him talk. he talks well. while the others, guise and his kind, are young, and i've thought, oh, yes, i've thought--but there," with a sudden harsh laugh, "my lady mother will have it her own way. and for this time she shall, but, all! all! even foucauld, there! do you mark him. he's sorting the cards. do you see him--as he will be to-morrow, with the slit in his throat and his teeth showing? why, god!" his voice rising almost to a scream, "the candles by him are burning blue!" and with a shaking hand, his face convulsed, the young king clutched his companion's arm, and pinched it. count hannibal shrugged his shoulders, but answered nothing. "d'you think we shall see them afterwards?" charles resumed, in a sharp, eager whisper. "in our dreams, man? or when the watchman cries, and we awake, and the monks are singing lauds at st. germain, and--and the taper is low?" tavannes' lip curled. "i don't dream, sire," he answered coldly, "and i seldom wake. for the rest, i fear my enemies neither alive nor dead." "don't you? by g-d, i wish i didn't," the young man exclaimed. his brow was wet with sweat. "i wish i didn't. but there, it's settled. they've settled it, and i would it were done! what do you think of--of it, man? what do you think of it, yourself?" count hannibal's face was inscrutable. "i think nothing, sire," he said dryly. "it is for your majesty and your council to think. it is enough for me that it is the king's will." "but you'll not flinch?" charles muttered, with a quick look of suspicion. "but there," with a monstrous oath, "i know you'll not! i believe you'd as soon kill a monk--though, thank god," and he crossed himself devoutly, "there is no question of that--as a man. and sooner than a maiden." "much sooner, sire," tavannes answered grimly. "if you have any orders in the monkish direction--no? then your majesty must not talk to me longer. m. de rochefoucauld is beginning to wonder what is keeping your majesty from your game. and others are marking you, sire." "by the lord!" charles exclaimed, a ring of wonder mingled with horror in his tone, "if they knew what was in our minds they'd mark us more! yet, see nancay there beside the door? he is unmoved. he looks to-day as he looked yesterday. yet he has charge of the work in the palace--" for the first time tavannes allowed a movement of surprise to escape him. "in the palace?" he muttered. "is it to be done here, too, sire?" "would you let some escape, to return by-and-by and cut our throats?" the king retorted, with a strange spirt of fury; an incapacity to maintain the same attitude of mind for two minutes together was the most fatal weakness of his ill-balanced nature. "no. all! all!" he repeated with vehemence. "didn't noah people the earth with eight? but i'll not leave eight! my cousins, for they are blood-royal, shall live if they will recant. and my old nurse, whether or no. and pare, for no one else understands my complexion. and--" "and rochefoucauld, doubtless, sire?" the king, whose eye had sought his favourite companion, withdrew it. he darted a glance at tavannes. "foucauld? who said so?" he muttered jealously. "not i! but we shall see. we shall see! and do you see that you spare no one, m. le comte, without an order. that is your business." "i understand, sire," tavannes answered coolly. and after a moment's silence, seeing that the king had done with him, he bowed low and withdrew; watched by the circle, as all about a king were watched in the days when a king's breath meant life or death, and his smile made the fortunes of men. as he passed rochefoucauld, the latter looked up and nodded. "what keeps brother charles?" he muttered. "he's madder than ever to- night. is it a masque or a murder he is planning?" "the vapours," tavannes answered, with a sneer. "old tales his old nurse has stuffed him withal. he'll come by-and-by, and 'twill be well if you can divert him." "i will, if he come," rochefoucauld answered, shuffling the cards. "if not 'tis chicot's business, and he should attend to it. i'm tired, and shall to bed." "he will come," tavannes answered, and moved, as if to go on. then he paused for a last word. "he will come," he muttered, stooping and speaking under his breath, his eyes on the other's face. "but play him lightly. he is in an ugly mood. please him, if you can, and it may serve." the eyes of the two met an instant, and those of foucauld--so the king called his huguenot favourite--betrayed some surprise; for count hannibal and he were not intimate. but seeing that the other was in earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. he was lifting the curtain to go out, when nancay, the captain of the guard, plucked his sleeve. "what have you been saying to foucauld, m. de tavannes?" he muttered. "i?" "yes," with a jealous glance, "you, m. le comte." count hannibal looked at him with the sudden ferocity that made the man a proverb at court. "what i chose, m. le capitaine des suisses!" he hissed. and his hand closed like a vice on the other's wrist. "what i chose, look you! and remember, another time, that i am not a huguenot, and say what i please." "but there is great need of care," nancay protested, stammering and flinching. "and--and i have orders, m. le comte." "your orders are not for me," tavannes answered, releasing his arm with a contemptuous gesture. "and look you, man, do not cross my path to-night. you know our motto? who touches my brother, touches tavannes! be warned by it." nancay scowled. "but the priests say, 'if your hand offend you, cut it off!'" he muttered. tavannes laughed, a sinister laugh. "if you offend me i'll cut your throat," he said; and with no ceremony he went out, and dropped the curtain behind him. nancay looked after him, his face pale with rage. "curse him!" he whispered, rubbing his wrist. "if he were any one else i would teach him! but he would as soon run you through in the presence as in the pre aux clercs! and his brother, the marshal, has the king's ear! and madame catherine's too, which is worse!" he was still fuming, when an officer in the colours of monsieur, the king's brother, entered hurriedly, and keeping his hand on the curtain, looked anxiously round the chamber. as soon as his eye found nancay, his face cleared. "have you the reckoning?" he muttered. "there are seventeen huguenots in the palace besides their highnesses," nancay replied, in the same cautious tone. "not counting two or three who are neither the one thing nor the other. in addition, there are the two montmorencies; but they are to go safe for fear of their brother, who is not in the trap. he is too like his father, the old bench-burner, to be lightly wronged! and, besides, there is pare, who is to go to his majesty's closet as soon as the gates are shut. if the king decides to save any one else, he will send him to his closet. so 'tis all clear and arranged here. if you are forward outside, it will be well! who deals with the gentleman with the tooth-pick?" "the admiral? monsieur, guise, and the grand prior; cosseins and besme have charge. 'tis to be done first. then the provost will raise the town. he will have a body of stout fellows ready at three or four rendezvous, so that the fire may blaze up everywhere at once. marcel, the ex-provost, has the same commission south of the river. orders to light the town as for a frolic have been given, and the halles will be ready." nancay nodded, reflected a moment, and then with an involuntary shudder-- "god!" he exclaimed, "it will shake the world!" "you think so?" "ay, will it not!" his next words showed that he bore tavannes' warning in mind. "for me, my friend, i go in mail to-night," he said. "there will be many a score paid before morning, besides his majesty's. and many a left-handed blow will be struck in the _melee_!" the other crossed himself. "grant none light here!" he said devoutly. and with a last look he nodded and went out. in the doorway he jostled a person who was in the act of entering. it was m. de tignonville, who, seeing nancay at his elbow, saluted him, and stood looking round. the young man's face was flushed, his eyes were bright with unwonted excitement. "m. de rochefoucauld?" he asked eagerly. "he has not left yet?" nancay caught the thrill in his voice, and marked the young man's flushed face and altered bearing. he noted, too, the crumpled paper he carried half-hidden in his hand; and the captain's countenance grew dark. he drew a step nearer, and his hand reached softly for his dagger. but his voice, when he spoke, was smooth as the surface of the pleasure-loving court, smooth as the externals of all things in paris that summer evening. "he is here still," he said. "have you news, m. de tignonville?" "news?" "for m. de rochefoucauld?" tignonville laughed. "no," he said. "i am here to see him to his lodging, that is all. news, captain? what made you think so?" "that which you have in your hand," nancay answered, his fears relieved. the young man blushed to the roots of his hair. "it is not for him," he said. "i can see that, monsieur," nancay answered politely. "he has his successes, but all the billets-doux do not go one way." the young man laughed, a conscious, flattered laugh. he was handsome, with such a face as women love, but there was a lack of ease in the way he wore his court suit. it was a trifle finer, too, than accorded with huguenot taste; or it looked the finer for the way he wore it, even as teligny's and foucauld's velvet capes and stiff brocades lost their richness and became but the adjuncts, fitting and graceful, of the men. odder still, as tignonville laughed, half hiding and half revealing the dainty scented paper in his hand, his clothes seemed smarter and he more awkward than usual. "it is from a lady," he admitted. "but a bit of badinage, i assure you, nothing more!" "understood!" m. de nancay murmured politely. "i congratulate you." "but--" "i say i congratulate you!" "but it is nothing." "oh, i understand. and see, the king is about to rise. go forward, monsieur," he continued benevolently. "a young man should show himself. besides, his majesty likes you well," he added, with a leer. he had an unpleasant sense of humour, had his majesty's captain of the guard; and this evening somewhat more than ordinary on which to exercise it. tignonville held too good an opinion of himself to suspect the other of badinage; and thus encouraged, he pushed his way to the front of the circle. during his absence with his betrothed, the crowd in the chamber had grown thin, the candles had burned an inch shorter in the sconces. but though many who had been there had left, the more select remained, and the king's return to his seat had given the company a fillip. an air of feverish gaiety, common in the unhealthy life of the court, prevailed. at a table abreast of the king, montpensier and marshal cosse were dicing and disputing, with now a yell of glee, and now an oath, that betrayed which way fortune inclined. at the back of the king's chair, chicot, his gentleman-jester, hung over charles's shoulder, now scanning his cards, and now making hideous faces that threw the on-lookers into fits of laughter. farther up the chamber, at the end of the alcove, marshal tavannes--our hannibal's brother--occupied a low stool, which was set opposite the open door of the closet. through this doorway a slender foot, silk-clad, shot now and again into sight; it came, it vanished, it came again, the gallant marshal striving at each appearance to rob it of its slipper, a dainty jewelled thing of crimson velvet. he failed thrice, a peal of laughter greeting each failure. at the fourth essay, he upset his stool and fell to the floor, but held the slipper. and not the slipper only, but the foot. amid a flutter of silken skirts and dainty laces--while the hidden beauty shrilly protested--he dragged first the ankle, and then a shapely leg into sight. the circle applauded; the lady, feeling herself still drawn on, screamed loudly and more loudly. all save the king and his opponent turned to look. and then the sport came to a sudden end. a sinewy hand appeared, interposed, released; for an instant the dark, handsome face of guise looked through the doorway. it was gone as soon as seen; it was there a second only. but more than one recognised it, and wondered. for was not the young duke in evil odour with the king by reason of the attack on the admiral? and had he not been chased from paris only that morning and forbidden to return? they were still wondering, still gazing, when abruptly--as he did all things--charles thrust back his chair. "foucauld, you owe me ten pieces!" he cried with glee, and he slapped the table. "pay, my friend; pay!" "to-morrow, little master; to-morrow!" rochefoucauld answered in the same tone. and he rose to his feet. "to-morrow!" charles repeated. "to-morrow?" and on the word his jaw fell. he looked wildly round. his face was ghastly. "well, sire, and why not?" rochefoucauld answered in astonishment. and in his turn he looked round, wondering; and a chill fell on him. "why not?" he repeated. for a moment no one answered him: the silence in the chamber was intense. where he looked, wherever he looked, he met solemn, wondering eyes, such eyes as gaze on men in their coffins. "what has come to you all?" he cried, with an effort. "what is the jest, for faith, sire, i don't see it?" the king seemed incapable of speech, and it was chicot who filled the gap. "it is pretty apparent," he said, with a rude laugh. "the cock will lay and foucauld will pay--to-morrow!" the young nobleman's colour rose; between him and the gascon gentleman was no love lost. "there are some debts i pay to-day," he cried haughtily. "for the rest, farewell my little master! when one does not understand the jest it is time to be gone." he was halfway to the door, watched by all, when the king spoke. "foucauld!" he cried, in an odd, strangled voice. "foucauld!" and the huguenot favourite turned back, wondering. "one minute!" the king continued, in the same forced voice. "stay till morning--in my closet. it is late now. we'll play away the rest of the night!" "your majesty must excuse me," rochefoucauld answered frankly. "i am dead asleep." "you can sleep in the garde-robe," the king persisted. "thank you for nothing, sire!" was the gay answer. "i know that bed! i shall sleep longer and better in my own." the king shuddered, but strove to hide the movement under a shrug of his shoulders. he turned away. "it is god's will!" he muttered. he was white to the lips. rochefoucauld did not catch the words. "good night, sire," he cried. "farewell, little master." and with a nod here and there, he passed to the door, followed by mergey and chamont, two gentlemen of his suite. nancay raised the curtain with an obsequious gesture. "pardon me, m. le comte," he said, "do you go to his highness's?" "for a few minutes, nancay." "permit me to go with you. the guards may be set." "do so, my friend," rochefoucauld answered. "ah, tignonville, is it you?" "i am come to attend you to your lodging," the young man said. and he ranged up beside the other, as, the curtain fallen behind them, they walked along the gallery. rochefoucauld stopped and laid his hand on tignonville's sleeve. "thanks, dear lad," he said, "but i am going to the princess dowager's. afterwards to his highness's. i may be detained an hour or more. you will not like to wait so long." m. de tignonville's face fell ludicrously. "well, no," he said. "i--i don't think i could wait so long--to-night." "then come to-morrow night," rochefoucauld answered, with good nature. "with pleasure," the other cried heartily, his relief evident. "certainly. with pleasure." and, nodding good night, they parted. while rochefoucauld, with nancay at his side and his gentlemen attending him, passed along the echoing and now empty gallery, the younger man bounded down the stairs to the great hall of the caryatides, his face radiant. he for one was not sleepy. chapter iii. the house next the golden maid. we have it on record that before the comte de la rochefoucauld left the louvre that night he received the strongest hints of the peril which threatened him; and at least one written warning was handed to him by a stranger in black, and by him in turn was communicated to the king of navarre. we are told further that when he took his final leave, about the hour of eleven, he found the courtyard brilliantly lighted, and the three companies of guards--swiss, scotch, and french--drawn up in ranked array from the door of the great hall to the gate which opened on the street. but, the chronicler adds, neither this precaution, sinister as it appeared to some of his suite, nor the grave farewell which rambouillet, from his post at the gate, took of one of his gentlemen, shook that chivalrous soul or sapped its generous confidence. m. de tignonville was young and less versed in danger than the governor of rochelle; with him, had he seen so much, it might have been different. but he left the louvre an hour earlier--at a time when the precincts of the palace, gloomy-seeming to us in the light cast by coming events, wore their wonted aspect. his thoughts, moreover, as he crossed the courtyard, were otherwise employed. so much so, indeed, that though he signed to his two servants to follow him, he seemed barely conscious what he was doing; nor did he shake off his reverie until he reached the corner of the rue baillet. here the voices of the swiss who stood on guard opposite coligny's lodgings, at the end of the rue bethizy, could be plainly heard. they had kindled a fire in an iron basket set in the middle of the road, and knots of them were visible in the distance, moving to and fro about their piled arms. tignonville paused before he came within the radius of the firelight, and, turning, bade his servants take their way home. "i shall follow, but i have business first," he added curtly. the elder of the two demurred. "the streets are not too safe," he said. "in two hours or less, my lord, it will be midnight. and then--" "go, booby; do you think i am a child?" his master retorted angrily. "i've my sword and can use it. i shall not be long. and do you hear, men, keep a still tongue, will you?" the men, country fellows, obeyed reluctantly, and with a full intention of sneaking after him the moment he had turned his back. but he suspected them of this, and stood where he was until they had passed the fire, and could no longer detect his movements. then he plunged quickly into the rue baillet, gained through it the rue du roule, and traversing that also, turned to the right into the rue ferronerie, the main thoroughfare, east and west, of paris. here he halted in front of the long, dark outer wall of the cemetery of the innocents, in which, across the tombstones and among the sepulchres of dead paris, the living paris of that day, bought and sold, walked, gossiped, and made love. about him things were to be seen that would have seemed stranger to him had he been less strange to the city. from the quarter of the markets north of him, a quarter which fenced in the cemetery on two sides, the same dull murmur proceeded, which mademoiselle de vrillac had remarked an hour earlier. the sky above the cemetery glowed with reflected light, the cause of which was not far to seek, for every window of the tall houses that overlooked it, and the huddle of booths about it, contributed a share of the illumination. at an hour late even for paris, an hour when honest men should have been sunk in slumber, this strange brilliance did for a moment perplex him; but the past week had been so full of fetes, of masques and frolics, often devised on the moment and dependent on the king's whim, that he set this also down to such a cause, and wondered no more. the lights in the houses did not serve the purpose he had in his mind, but beside the closed gate of the cemetery, and between two stalls, was a votive lamp burning before an image of the mother and child. he crossed to this, and assuring himself by a glance to right and left that he stood in no danger from prowlers, he drew a note from his breast. it had been slipped into his hand in the gallery before he saw mademoiselle to her lodging; it had been in his possession barely an hour. but brief as its contents were, and easily committed to memory, he had perused it thrice already. "at the house next the golden maid, rue cinq diamants, an hour before midnight, you may find the door open should you desire to talk farther with c. st. l." as he read it for the fourth time the light of the lamp fell athwart his face; and even as his fine clothes had never seemed to fit him worse than when he faintly denied the imputations of gallantry launched at him by nancay, so his features had never looked less handsome than they did now. the glow of vanity which warmed his cheek as he read the message, the smile of conceit which wreathed his lips, bespoke a nature not of the most noble; or the lamp did him less than justice. presently he kissed the note, and hid it. he waited until the clock of st. jacques struck the hour before midnight; and then moving forward, he turned to the right by way of the narrow neck leading to the rue lombard. he walked in the kennel here, his sword in his hand and his eyes looking to right and left; for the place was notorious for robberies. but though he saw more than one figure lurking in a doorway or under the arch that led to a passage, it vanished on his nearer approach. in less than a minute he reached the southern end of the street that bore the odd title of the five diamonds. situate in the crowded quarter of the butchers, and almost in the shadow of their famous church, this street--which farther north was continued in the rue quimcampoix--presented in those days a not uncommon mingling of poverty and wealth. on one side of the street a row of lofty gabled houses, built under francis the first, sheltered persons of good condition; on the other, divided from these by the width of the road and a reeking kennel, a row of peat-houses, the hovels of cobblers and sausage-makers, leaned against shapeless timber houses which tottered upwards in a medley of sagging roofs and bulging gutters. tignonville was strange to the place, and nine nights out of ten he would have been at a disadvantage. but, thanks to the tapers that to-night shone in many windows, he made out enough to see that he need search only the one side; and with a beating heart he passed along the row of newer houses, looking eagerly for the sign of the golden maid. he found it at last; and then for a moment he stood puzzled. the note said, next door to the golden maid, but it did not say on which side. he scrutinised the nearer house, but he saw nothing to determine him; and he was proceeding to the farther, when he caught sight of two men, who, ambushed behind a horse-block on the opposite side of the roadway, seemed to be watching his movements. their presence flurried him; but much to his relief his next glance at the houses showed him that the door of the farther one was unlatched. it stood slightly ajar, permitting a beam of light to escape into the street. he stepped quickly to it--the sooner he was within the house the better--pushed the door open and entered. as soon as he was inside he tried to close the entrance behind him, but he found he could not; the door would not shut. after a brief trial he abandoned the attempt and passed quickly on, through a bare lighted passage which led to the foot of a staircase, equally bare. he stood at this point an instant and listened, in the hope that madame's maid would come to him. at first he heard nothing save his own breathing; then a gruff voice from above startled him. "this way, monsieur," it said. "you are early, but not too soon!" so madame trusted her footman! m. de tignonville shrugged his shoulders; but after all, it was no affair of his, and he went up. halfway to the top, however, he stood, an oath on his lips. two men had entered by the open door below--even as he had entered! and as quietly! the imprudence of it! the imprudence of leaving the door so that it could not be closed! he turned, and descended to meet them, his teeth set, his hand on his sword, one conjecture after another whirling in his brain. was he beset? was it a trap? was it a rival? was it chance? two steps he descended; and then the voice he had heard before cried again, but more imperatively-- "no, monsieur, this way! did you not hear me? this way, and be quick, if you please. by-and-by there will be a crowd, and then the more we have dealt with the better!" he knew now that he had made a mistake, that he had entered the wrong house; and naturally his impulse was to continue his descent and secure his retreat. but the pause had brought the two men who had entered face to face with him, and they showed no signs of giving way. on the contrary. "the room is above, monsieur," the foremost said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and with a slight salutation. "after you, if you please," and he signed to him to return. he was a burly man, grim and truculent in appearance, and his follower was like him. tignonville hesitated, then turned and ascended. but as soon as he had reached the landing where they could pass him, he turned again. "i have made a mistake, i think," he said. "i have entered the wrong house." "are you for the house next the golden maid, monsieur?" "yes." "rue cinq diamants, quarter of the boucherie?" "yes." "no mistake, then," the stout man replied firmly. "you are early, that is all. you have arms, i see. maillard!"--to the person whose voice tignonville had heard at the head of the stairs--"a white sleeve, and a cross for monsieur's hat, and his name on the register. come, make a beginning! make a beginning, man." "to be sure, monsieur. all is ready." "then lose no time, i say. here are others, also early in the good cause. gentlemen, welcome! welcome all who are for the true faith! death to the heretics! 'kill, and no quarter!' is the word to-night!" "death to the heretics!" the last comers cried in chorus. "kill and no quarter! at what hour, m. le prevot?" "at daybreak," the provost answered importantly. "but have no fear, the tocsin will sound. the king and our good man m. de guise have all in hand. a white sleeve, a white cross, and a sharp knife shall rid paris of the vermin! gentlemen of the quarter, the word of the night is 'kill, and no quarter! death to the huguenots!'" "death! death to the huguenots! kill, and no quarter!" a dozen--the room was beginning to fill--waved their weapons and echoed the cry. tignonville had been fortunate enough to apprehend the position--and the peril in which he stood--before maillard advanced to him bearing a white linen sleeve. in the instant of discovery his heart had stood a moment, the blood had left his cheeks; but with some faults, he was no coward, and he managed to hide his emotion. he held out his left arm, and suffered the beadle to pass the sleeve over it and to secure the white linen above the elbow. then at a gesture he gave up his velvet cap, and saw it decorated with a white cross of the same material. "now the register, monsieur," maillard continued briskly; and waving him in the direction of a clerk, who sat at the end of the long table, having a book and a ink-horn before him, he turned to the next comer. tignonville would fain have avoided the ordeal of the register, but the clerk's eye was on him. he had been fortunate so far, but he knew that the least breath of suspicion would destroy him, and summoning his wits together he gave his name in a steady voice. "anne desmartins." it was his mother's maiden name, and the first that came into his mind. "of paris?" "recently; by birth, of the limousin." "good, monsieur," the clerk answered, writing in the name. and he turned to the next. "and you, my friend?" chapter iv. the eve of the feast. it was tignonville's salvation that the men who crowded the long white- walled room, and exchanged vile boasts under the naked flaring lights, were of all classes. there were butchers, natives of the surrounding quarter whom the scent of blood had drawn from their lairs; and there were priests with hatchet faces, who whispered in the butchers' ears. there were gentlemen of the robe, and plain mechanics, rich merchants in their gowns, and bare-armed ragpickers, sleek choristers, and shabby led- captains; but differ as they might in other points, in one thing all were alike. from all, gentle or simple, rose the same cry for blood, the same aspiration to be first equipped for the fray. in one corner a man of rank stood silent and apart, his hand on his sword, the working of his face alone betraying the storm that reigned within. in another, a norman horse-dealer talked in low whispers with two thieves. in a third, a gold- wire drawer addressed an admiring group from the sorbonne; and meantime the middle of the floor grew into a seething mass of muttering, scowling men, through whom the last comers, thrust as they might, had much ado to force their way. and from all under the low ceiling rose a ceaseless hum, though none spoke loud. "kill! kill! kill!" was the burden; the accompaniment such profanities and blasphemies as had long disgraced the paris pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry--already at a white heat--of the parisian populace. tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. but for his life he dared not. and presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him a whetstone. "are you sharp, noble sir?" he asked, with a leer. "are you sharp? it's surprising how the edge goes on the bone. a cut and thrust? well, every man to his taste. but give me a broad butcher's knife and i'll ask no help, be it man, woman, or child!" a bystander, a lean man in rusty black, chuckled as he listened. "but the woman or the child for choice, eh, jehan?" he said. and he looked to tignonville to join in the jest. "ay, give me a white throat for choice!" the cripple answered, with horrible zest. "and there'll be delicate necks to prick to-night! lord, i think i hear them squeal! you don't need it, sir?" he continued, again proffering the whetstone. "no? then i'll give my blade another whet, in the name of our lady, the saints, and good father pezelay!" "ay, and give me a turn!" the lean man cried, proffering his weapon. "may i die if i do not kill one of the accursed for every finger of my hands!" "and toe of my feet!" the cripple answered, not to be outdone. "and toe of my feet! a full score!" "'tis according to your sins!" the other, who had something of the air of a churchman, answered. "the more heretics killed, the more sins forgiven. remember that, brother, and spare not if your soul be burdened! they blaspheme god and call him paste! in the paste of their own blood," he continued ferociously, "i will knead them and roll them out, saith the good father pezelay, my master!" the cripple crossed himself. "whom god keep," he said. "he is a good man. but you are looking ill, noble sir?" he continued, peering curiously at the young huguenot. "'tis the heat," tignonville muttered. "the night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. i will go nearer the door." he hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room and giving the alarm. but when he had forced his way to the threshold, he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left, the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe, over the shoulders of the crowd. with that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim before his eyes. the catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium. he strove to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm. but he could not bring his mind to a point. instead, in lightning flashes he foresaw what must happen: his betrothed in the hands of the murderers; the fair face that had smiled on him frozen with terror; brave men, the fighters of montauban, the defenders of angely, strewn dead through the dark lanes of the city. and now a gust of passion, and now a shudder of fear, seized him; and in any other assembly his agitation must have led to detection. but in that room were many twitching faces and trembling hands. murder, cruel, midnight, and most foul, wrung even from the murderers her toll of horror. while some, to hide the nervousness they felt, babbled of what they would do, others betrayed by the intentness with which they awaited the signal, the dreadful anticipations that possessed their souls. before he had formed any plan, a movement took place near the door. the stairs shook beneath the sudden trampling of feet, a voice cried "de par le roi! de par le roi!" and the babel of the room died down. the throng swayed and fell back on either hand, and marshal tavannes entered, wearing half armour, with a white sash; he was followed by six or eight gentlemen in like guise. amid cries of "jarnac! jarnac!"--for to him the credit of that famous fight, nominally won by the king's brother, was popularly given--he advanced up the room, met the provost of the merchants, and began to confer with him. apparently he asked the latter to select some men who could be trusted on a special mission, for the provost looked round and beckoned to his side one or two of higher rank than the herd, and then one or two of the most truculent aspect. tignonville trembled lest he should be singled out. he had hidden himself as well as he could at the rear of the crowd by the door; but his dress, so much above the common, rendered him conspicuous. he fancied that the provost's eye ranged the crowd for him; and to avoid it and efface himself he moved a pace to his left. the step was fatal. it saved him from the provost, but it brought him face to face and eye to eye with count hannibal, who stood in the first rank at his brother's elbow. tavannes stared an instant as if he doubted his eyesight. then, as doubt gave slow place to certainty, and surprise to amazement, he smiled. and after a moment he looked another way. tignonville's heart gave a great bump and seemed to stand still. the lights whirled before his eyes, there was a roaring in his ears. he waited for the word that should denounce him. it did not come. and still it did not come; and marshal tavannes was turning. yes, turning, and going; the provost, bowing low, was attending him to the door; his suite were opening on either side to let him pass. and count hannibal? count hannibal was following also, as if nothing had occurred. as if he had seen nothing! the young man caught his breath. was it possible that he had imagined the start of recognition, the steady scrutiny, the sinister smile? no; for as tavannes followed the others, he hung an instant on his heel, their eyes met again, and once more he smiled. in the next breath he was gone through the doorway, his spurs rang on the stairs; and the babel of the crowd, checked by the great man's presence, broke out anew, and louder. tignonville shuddered. he was saved as by a miracle; saved, he did not know how. but the respite, though its strangeness diverted his thoughts for a while, brought short relief. the horrors which impended over others surged afresh into his mind, and filled him with a maddening sense of impotence. to be one hour, only one short half-hour without! to run through the sleeping streets, and scream in the dull ears which a king's flatteries had stopped as with wool! to go up and down and shake into life the guests whose royal lodgings daybreak would turn to a shambles reeking with their blood! they slept, the gentle teligny, the brave pardaillan, the gallant rochefoucauld, piles the hero of st. jean, while the cruel city stirred rustling about them, and doom crept whispering to the door. they slept, they and a thousand others, gentle and simple, young and old; while the half-mad valois shifted between two opinions, and the italian woman, accursed daughter of an accursed race, cried, "hark!" at her window, and looked eastwards for the dawn. and the women? the woman he was to marry? and the others? in an access of passion he thrust aside those who stood between, he pushed his way, disregarding complaints, disregarding opposition, to the door. but the pikes lay across it, and he could not utter a syllable to save his life. he would have flung himself on the doorkeepers, for he was losing control of himself; but as he drew back for the spring, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a voice he loathed hummed in his ear. "no, fair play, noble sir; fair play!" the cripple jehan muttered, forcibly drawing him aside. "all start together, and it's no man's loss. but if there is any little business," he continued, lowering his tone and peering with a cunning look into the other's face, "of your own, noble sir, or your friends', anything or anybody you want despatched, count on me. it were better, perhaps, you didn't appear in it yourself, and a man you can trust--" "what do you mean?" the young man cried, recoiling from him. "no need to look surprised, noble sir," the lean man, who had joined them, answered in a soothing tone. "who kills to-night does god service, and who serves god much may serve himself a little. 'thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn,' says good father pezelay." "hear, hear!" the cripple chimed in eagerly, his impatience such that he danced on his toes. "he preaches as well as the good father his master! so frankly, noble sir, what is it? what is it? a woman grown ugly? a rich man grown old, with perchance a will in his chest? or a young heir that stands in my lord's way? whichever it be, or whatever it be, trust me and our friend here, and my butcher's gully shall cut the knot." tignonville shook his head. "but something there is," the lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at tignonville's clothes. it was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? if so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and we'll enlist." "ay, we know shops on the bridge where you can plunge your arm elbow-deep in gold," the cripple muttered, his eyes sparkling greedily. "there's baillet's, noble sir! there's a shop for you! and there's the man's shop who works for the king. he's lame like me. and i know the way to all. oh, it will be a merry night if they ring before the dawn. it must be near daybreak now. and what's that?" ay, what was it? a score of voices called for silence; a breathless hush fell on the crowd. a moment the fiercest listened, with parted lips and starting eyes. then, "it was the bell!" cried one, "let us out!" "it was not!" cried another. "it was a pistol shot!" "anyhow let us out!" the crowd roared in chorus; "let us out!" and they pressed in a furious mass towards the door, as if they would force it, signal or no signal. but the pikemen stood fast, and the throng, checked in their first rush, turned on one another, and broke into wrangling and disputing; boasting, and calling heaven and the saints to witness how thoroughly, how pitilessly, how remorselessly they would purge paris of this leprosy when the signal did sound. until again above the babel a man cried "silence!" and again they listened. and this time, dulled by walls and distance, but unmistakable by the ears of fear or hate, the heavy note of a bell came to them on the hot night air. it was the boom, sullen and menacing, of the death signal. the doorkeepers lowered their pikes, and with a wild rush, as of wolves swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "a bas les huguenots! mort aux huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands, viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. for as it was here, so it was in a dozen other quarters. quickly as they streamed out--and to have issued more quickly would have been impossible--fiercely as they pushed and fought and clove their way, tignonville was of the foremost. and for a moment, seeing the street clear before him and almost empty, the huguenot thought that he might do something. he might outstrip the stream of rapine, he might carry the alarm; at worst he might reach his betrothed before harm befell her. but when he had sped fifty yards, his heart sank. true, none passed him; but under the spell of the alarm-bell the stones themselves seemed to turn to men. houses, courts, alleys, the very churches vomited men. in a twinkling the street was alive with men, roared with them as with a rushing tide, gleamed with their lights and weapons, thundered with the volume of their thousand voices. he was no longer ahead, men were running before him, behind him, on his right hand and on his left. in every side-street, every passage, men were running; and not men only, but women, children, furious creatures without age or sex. and all the time the bell tolled overhead, tolled faster and faster, and louder and louder; and shots and screams, and the clash of arms, and the fall of strong doors began to swell the maelstrom of sound. he was in the rue st. honore now, and speeding westward. but the flood still rose with him, and roared abreast of him. nay, it outstripped him. when he came, panting, within sight of his goal, and lacked but a hundred paces of it, he found his passage barred by a dense mass of people moving slowly to meet him. in the heart of the press the light of a dozen torches shone on half as many riders mailed and armed; whose eyes, as they moved on, and the furious gleaming eyes of the rabble about them, never left the gabled roofs on their right. on these from time to time a white-clad figure showed itself, and passed from chimney-stack to chimney- stack, or, stooping low, ran along the parapet. every time that this happened, the men on horseback pointed upwards and the mob foamed with rage. tignonville groaned, but he could not help. unable to go forward, he turned, and with others hurrying, shouting, and brandishing weapons, he pressed into the rue du roule, passed through it, and gained the bethizy. but here, as he might have foreseen, all passage was barred at the hotel ponthieu by a horde of savages, who danced and yelled and sang songs round the admiral's body, which lay in the middle of the way; while to right and left men were bursting into houses and forcing new victims into the street. the worst had happened there, and he turned panting, regained the rue st. honore, and, crossing it and turning left-handed, darted through side streets until he came again into the main thoroughfare a little beyond the croix du tiroir, that marked the corner of mademoiselle's house. here his last hope left him. the street swarmed with bands of men hurrying to and fro as in a sacked city. the scum of the halles, the rabble of the quarter poured this way and that, here at random, there swayed and directed by a few knots of men-at-arms, whose corselets reflected the glare of a hundred torches. at one time and within sight, three or four houses were being stormed. on every side rose heart-rending cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of "to the river!" the most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles and boat-hooks. all this tignonville saw, though his eyes, leaping the turmoil, looked only to the door at which he had left mademoiselle a few hours earlier. there a crowd of men pressed and struggled; but from the spot where he stood he could see no more. that was enough, however. rage nerved him, and despair; his world was dying round him. if he could not save her he would avenge her. recklessly he plunged into the tumult; blade in hand, with vigorous blows he thrust his way through, his white sleeve and the white cross in his hat gaining him passage until he reached the fringe of the band who beset the door. here his first attempt to pass failed; and he might have remained hampered by the crowd, if a squad of archers had not ridden up. as they spurred to the spot, heedless over whom they rode, he clutched a stirrup, and was borne with them into the heart of the crowd. in a twinkling he stood on the threshold of the house, face to face and foot to foot with count hannibal, who stood also on the threshold, but with his back to the door, which, unbarred and unbolted, gaped open behind him. chapter v. rough wooing. the young man had caught the delirium that was abroad that night. the rage of the trapped beast was in his heart, his hand held a sword. to strike blindly, to strike without question the first who withstood him was the wild-beast instinct; and if count hannibal had not spoken on the instant, the marshal's brother had said his last word in the world. yet as he stood there, a head above the crowd, he seemed unconscious alike of tignonville and the point that all but pricked his breast. swart and grim-visaged, his harsh features distorted by the glare which shone upon him, he looked beyond the huguenot to the sea of tossing arms and raging faces that surged about the saddles of the horsemen. it was to these he spoke. "begone, dogs!" he cried, in a voice that startled the nearest, "or i will whip you away with my stirrup-leathers! do you hear? begone! this house is not for you! burn, kill, plunder where you will, but go hence!" "but 'tis on the list!" one of the wretches yelled. "'tis on the list!" and he pushed forward until he stood at tignonville's elbow. "and has no cross!" shrieked another, thrusting himself forward in his turn. "see you, let us by, whoever you are! in the king's name, kill! it has no cross!" "then," tavannes thundered, "will i nail you for a cross to the front of it! no cross, say you? i will make one of you, foul crow!" and as he spoke, his arm shot out; the man recoiled, his fellow likewise. but one of the mounted archers took up the matter. "nay, but, my lord," he said--he knew tavannes--"it is the king's will there be no favour shown to-night to any, small or great. and this house is registered, and is full of heretics." "and has no cross!" the rabble urged in chorus. and they leapt up and down in their impatience, and to see the better. "and has no cross!" they persisted. they could understand that. of what use crosses, if they were not to kill where there was no cross? daylight was not plainer. tavannes' face grew dark, and he shook his finger at the archer who had spoken. "rogue," he cried, "does the king's will run here only? are there no other houses to sack or men to kill, that you must beard me? and favour? you will have little of mine, if you do not budge and take your vile tail with you! off! or must i cry 'tavannes!' and bid my people sweep you from the streets?" the foremost rank hesitated, awed by his manner and his name; while the rearmost, attracted by the prospect of easier pillage, had gone off already. the rest wavered; and another and another broke away. the archer who had put himself forward saw which way the wind was blowing, and he shrugged his shoulders. "well, my lord, as you will," he said sullenly. "all the same i would advise you to close the door and bolt and bar. we shall not be the last to call to-day." and he turned his horse in ill-humour, and forced it, snorting and plunging, through the crowd. "bolt and bar?" tavannes cried after him in fury. "see you my answer to that!" and turning on the threshold, "within there!" he cried. "open the shutters and set lights, and the table! light, i say; light! and lay on quickly, if you value your lives! and throw open, for i sup with your mistress to-night, if it rain blood without! do you hear me, rogues? set on!" he flung the last word at the quaking servants; then he turned again to the street. he saw that the crowd was melting, and, looking in tignonville's face, he laughed aloud. "does monsieur sup with us?" he said. "to complete the party? or will he choose to sup with our friends yonder? it is for him to say. i confess, for my part," with an awful smile, "their hospitality seems a trifle crude, and boisterous." tignonville looked behind him and shuddered. the same horde which had so lately pressed about the door had found a victim lower down the street, and, as tavannes spoke, came driving back along the roadway, a mass of tossing lights and leaping, running figures, from the heart of which rose the screams of a creature in torture. so terrible were the sounds that tignonville leant half swooning against the door-post; and even the iron heart of tavannes seemed moved for a moment. for a moment only: then he looked at his companion, and his lip curled. "you'll join us, i think?" he said, with an undisguised sneer. "then, after you, monsieur. they are opening the shutters. doubtless the table is laid, and mademoiselle is expecting us. after you, monsieur, if you please. a few hours ago i should have gone first, for you, in this house"--with a sinister smile--"were at home! now, we have changed places." whatever he meant by the gibe--and some smack of an evil jest lurked in his tone--he played the host so far as to urge his bewildered companion along the passage and into the living-chamber on the left, where he had seen from without that his orders to light and lay were being executed. a dozen candles shone on the board, and lit up the apartment. what the house contained of food and wine had been got together and set on the table; from the low, wide window, beetle-browed and diamond-paned, which extended the whole length of the room and looked on the street at the height of a man's head above the roadway, the shutters had been removed--doubtless by trembling and reluctant fingers. to such eyes of passers-by as looked in, from the inferno of driving crowds and gleaming weapons which prevailed outside--and not outside only, but throughout paris--the brilliant room and the laid table must have seemed strange indeed! to tignonville, all that had happened, all that was happening, seemed a dream: a dream his entrance under the gentle impulsion of this man who dominated him; a dream mademoiselle standing behind the table with blanched face and stony eyes; a dream the cowering servants huddled in a corner beyond her; a dream his silence, her silence, the moment of waiting before count hannibal spoke. when he did speak it was to count the servants. "one, two, three, four, five," he said. "and two of them women. mademoiselle is but poorly attended. are there not"--and he turned to her--"some lacking?" the girl opened her lips twice, but no sound issued. the third time-- "two went out," she muttered in a hoarse, strangled voice, "and have not returned." "and have not returned?" he answered, raising his eyebrows. "then i fear we must not wait for them. we might wait long!" and turning sharply to the panic-stricken servants, "go you to your places! do you not see that mademoiselle waits to be served?" the girl shuddered and spoke. "do you wish me," she muttered, in the same strangled tone, "to play this farce--to the end?" "the end may be better, mademoiselle, than you think," he answered, bowing. and then to the miserable servants, who hung back afraid to leave the shelter of their mistress's skirts, "to your places!" he cried. "set mademoiselle's chair. are you so remiss on other days? if so," with a look of terrible meaning, "you will be the less loss! now, mademoiselle, may i have the honour? and when we are at table we can talk." he extended his hand, and, obedient to his gesture, she moved to the place at the head of the table, but without letting her fingers come into contact with his. he gave no sign that he noticed this, but he strode to the place on her right, and signed to tignonville to take that on her left. "will you not be seated?" he continued. for she kept her feet. she turned her head stiffly, until for the first time her eyes looked into his. a shudder more violent than the last shook her. "had you not better--kill us at once?" she whispered. the blood had forsaken even her lips. her face was the face of a statue--white, beautiful, lifeless. "i think not," he said gravely. "be seated, and let us hope for the best. and you, sir," he continued, turning to carlat, "serve your mistress with wine. she needs it." the steward filled for her, and then for each of the men, his shaking hand spilling as much as it poured. nor was this strange. above the din and uproar of the street, above the crash of distant doors, above the tocsin that still rang from the reeling steeple of st. germain's, the great bell of the palais on the island had just begun to hurl its note of doom upon the town. a woman crouching at the end of the chamber burst into hysterical weeping, but, at a glance from tavannes' terrible eye, was mute again. tignonville found voice at last. "have they--killed the admiral?" he muttered, his eyes on the table. "m. coligny? an hour ago." "and teligny?" "him also." "m. de rochefoucauld?" "they are dealing with m. le comte now, i believe," tavannes answered. "he had his chance and cast it away." and he began to eat. the man at the table shuddered. the woman continued to look before her, but her lips moved as if she prayed. suddenly a rush of feet, a roar of voices surged past the window; for a moment the glare of the torches, which danced ruddily on the walls of the room, showed a severed head borne above the multitude on a pike. mademoiselle, with a low cry, made an effort to rise, but count hannibal grasped her wrist, and she sank back half fainting. then the nearer clamour sank a little, and the bells, unchallenged, flung their iron tongues above the maddened city. in the east the dawn was growing; soon its grey light would fall on cold hearths, on battered doors and shattered weapons, on hordes of wretches drunk with greed and hate. when he could be heard, "what are you going to do with us?" the man asked hoarsely. "that depends," count hannibal replied, after a moment's thought. "on what?" "on mademoiselle de vrillac." the other's eyes gleamed with passion. he leaned forward. "what has she to do with it?" he cried. and he stood up and sat down again in a breath. tavannes raised his eyebrows with a blandness that seemed at odds with his harsh visage. "i will answer that question by another question," he replied. "how many are there in the house, my friend?" "you can count." tavannes counted again. "seven?" he said. tignonville nodded impatiently. "seven lives?" "well?" "well, monsieur, you know the king's will?" "i can guess it," the other replied furiously. and he cursed the king, and the king's mother, calling her jezebel. "you can guess it?" tavannes answered; and then with sudden heat, as if that which he had to say could not be said even by him in cold blood, "nay, you know it! you heard it from the archer at the door. you heard him say, 'no favour, no quarter for man, for woman, or for child. so says the king.' you heard it, but you fence with me. foucauld, with whom his majesty played to-night, hand to hand and face to face--foucauld is dead! and you think to live? you?" he continued, lashing himself into passion. "i know not by what chance you came where i saw you an hour gone, nor by what chance you came by that and that"--pointing with accusing finger to the badges the huguenot wore. "but this i know! i have but to cry your name from yonder casement, nay, monsieur, i have but to stand aside when the mob go their rounds from house to house, as they will go presently, and you will perish as certainly as you have hitherto escaped!" for the second time mademoiselle turned and looked at him. "then," she whispered, with white lips, "to what end this--mockery?" "to the end that seven lives may be saved, mademoiselle," he answered, bowing. "at a price?" she muttered. "at a price," he answered. "a price which women do not find it hard to pay--at court. 'tis paid every day for pleasure or a whim, for rank or the _entree_, for robes and gewgaws. few, mademoiselle, are privileged to buy a life; still fewer, seven!" she began to tremble. "i would rather die--seven times!" she cried, her voice quivering. and she tried to rise, but sat down again. "and these?" he said, indicating the servants. "far, far rather!" she repeated passionately. "and monsieur? and monsieur?" he urged with stern persistence, while his eyes passed lightly from her to tignonville and back to her again, their depths inscrutable. "if you love monsieur, mademoiselle, and i believe you do--" "i can die with him!" she cried. "and he with you?" she writhed in her chair. "and he with you?" count hannibal repeated, with emphasis; and he thrust forward his head. "for that is the question. think, think, mademoiselle. it is in my power to save from death him whom you love; to save you; to save this _canaille_, if it so please you. it is in my power to save him, to save you, to save all; and i will save all--at a price! if, on the other hand, you deny me that price, i will as certainly leave all to perish, as perish they will, before the sun that is now rising sets to-night!" mademoiselle looked straight before her, the flicker of a dreadful prescience in her eyes. "and the price?" she muttered. "the price?" "you, mademoiselle." "i?" "yes, you! nay, why fence with me?" he continued gently. "you knew it, you have said it. you have read it in my eyes these seven days." she did not speak, or move, or seem to breathe. as he said, she had foreseen, she had known the answer. but tignonville, it seemed, had not. he sprang to his feet. "m. de tavannes," he cried, "you are a villain!" "monsieur?" "you are a villain! but you shall pay for this!" the young man continued vehemently. "you shall not leave this room alive! you shall pay for this insult!" "insult?" tavannes answered in apparent surprise; and then, as if comprehension broke upon him, "ah! monsieur mistakes me," he said, with a broad sweep of the hand. "and mademoiselle also, perhaps? oh! be content, she shall have bell, book, and candle; she shall be tied as tight as holy church can tie her! or, if she please, and one survive, she shall have a priest of her own church--you call it a church? she shall have whichever of the two will serve her better. 'tis one to me! but for paying me, monsieur," he continued, with irony in voice and manner; "when, i pray you? in eternity? for if you refuse my offer, you have done with time. now? i have but to sound this whistle"--he touched a silver whistle which hung at his breast--"and there are those within hearing will do your business before you make two passes. dismiss the notion, sir, and understand. you are in my power. paris runs with blood, as noble as yours, as innocent as hers. if you would not perish with the rest, decide! and quickly! for what you have seen are but the forerunners, what you have heard are but the gentle whispers that predict the gale. do not parley too long; so long that even i may no longer save you." "i would rather die!" mademoiselle moaned, her face covered. "i would rather die!" "and see him die?" he answered quietly. "and see these die? think, think, child!" "you will not do it!" she gasped. she shook from head to foot. "i shall do nothing," he answered firmly. "i shall but leave you to your fate, and these to theirs. in the king's teeth i dare save my wife and her people; but no others. you must choose--and quickly." one of the frightened women--it was mademoiselle's tiring-maid, a girl called javette--made a movement, as if to throw herself at her mistress's feet. tignonville drove her to her place with a word. he turned to count hannibal. "but, m. le comte," he said, "you must be mad! mad, to wish to marry her in this way! you do not love her. you do not want her. what is she to you more than other women?" "what is she to you more than other women?" tavannes retorted, in a tone so sharp and incisive that tignonville started, and a faint touch of colour crept into the wan cheek of the girl, who sat between them, the prize of the contest. "what is she more to you than other women? is she more? and yet--you want her!" "she is more to me," tignonville answered. "is she?" the other retorted, with a ring of keen meaning. "is she? but we bandy words and the storm is rising, as i warned you it would rise. enough for you that i _do_ want her. enough for you that i _will_ have her. she shall be the wife, the willing wife, of hannibal de tavannes--or i leave her to her fate, and you to yours!" "ah, god!" she moaned. "the willing wife!" "ay, mademoiselle, the willing wife," he answered sternly. "or no man's wife!" chapter vi. who touches tavannes? in saying that the storm was rising count hannibal had said no more than the truth. a new mob had a minute before burst from the eastward into the rue st. honore; and the roar of its thousand voices swelled louder than the importunate clangour of the bells. behind its moving masses the dawn of a new day--sunday, the th of august, the feast of st. bartholomew--was breaking over the bastille, as if to aid the crowd in its cruel work. the gabled streets, the lanes, and gothic courts, the stifling wynds, where the work awaited the workers, still lay in twilight; still the gleam of the torches, falling on the house-fronts, heralded the coming of the crowd. but the dawn was growing, the sun was about to rise. soon the day would be here, giving up the lurking fugitive whom darkness, more pitiful, had spared, and stamping with legality the horrors that night had striven to hide. and with day, with the full light, killing would grow more easy, escape more hard. already they were killing on the bridge where the rich goldsmiths lived, on the wharves, on the river. they were killing at the louvre, in the courtyard under the king's eyes, and below the windows of the medicis. they were killing in st. martin and st. denis and st. antoine; wherever hate, or bigotry, or private malice impelled the hand. from the whole city went up a din of lamentation, and wrath, and foreboding. from the cour des miracles, from the markets, from the boucherie, from every haunt of crime and misery, hordes of wretched creatures poured forth; some to rob on their own account, and where they listed, none gainsaying; more to join themselves to one of the armed bands whose business it was to go from street to street, and house to house, quelling resistance, and executing through paris the high justice of the king. it was one of these swollen bands which had entered the street while tavannes spoke; nor could he have called to his aid a more powerful advocate. as the deep "a bas! a bas!" rolled like thunder along the fronts of the houses, as the more strident "tuez! tuez!" drew nearer and nearer, and the lights of the oncoming multitude began to flicker on the shuttered gables, the fortitude of the servants gave way. madame carlat, shivering in every limb, burst into moaning; the tiring-maid, javette, flung herself in terror at mademoiselle's knees, and, writhing herself about them, shrieked to her to save her, only to save her! one of the men moved forward on impulse, as if he would close the shutters; and only old carlat remained silent, praying mutely with moving lips and a stern, set face. and count hannibal? as the glare of the links in the street grew brighter, and ousted the sickly daylight, his form seemed to dilate. he stilled the shrieking woman by a glance. "choose! mademoiselle, and quickly!" he said. "for i can only save my wife and her people! quick, for the pinch is coming, and 'twill be no boy's play." a shot, a scream from the street, a rush of racing feet before the window seconded his words. "quick, mademoiselle!" he cried. and his breath came a little faster. "quick, before it be too late! will you save life, or will you kill?" she looked at her lover with eyes of agony, dumbly questioning him. but he made no sign, and only tavannes marked the look. "monsieur has done what he can to save himself," he said, with a sneer. "he has donned the livery of the king's servants; he has said, 'whoever perishes, i will live!' but--" "curse you!" the young man cried, and, stung to madness, he tore the cross from his cap and flung it on the ground. he seized his white sleeve and ripped it from shoulder to elbow. then, when it hung by the string only, he held his hand. "curse you!" he cried furiously. "i will not at your bidding! i may save her yet! i _will_ save her!" "fool!" tavannes answered--but his words were barely audible above the deafening uproar. "can you fight a thousand? look! look!" and seizing the other's wrist he pointed to the window. the street glowed like a furnace in the red light of torches, raised on poles above a sea of heads; an endless sea of heads, and gaping faces, and tossing arms which swept on and on, and on and by. for a while it seemed that the torrent would flow past them and would leave them safe. then came a check, a confused outcry, a surging this way and that; the torches reeled to and fro, and finally, with a dull roar of "open! open!" the mob faced about to the house and the lighted window. for a second it seemed that even count hannibal's iron nerves shook a little. he stood between the sullen group that surrounded the disordered table and the maddened rabble, that gloated on the victims before they tore them to pieces. "open! open!" the mob howled: and a man dashed in the window with his pike. in that crisis mademoiselle's eyes met tavannes' for the fraction of a second. she did not speak; nor, had she retained the power to frame the words, would they have been audible. but something she must have looked, and something of import, though no other than he marked or understood it. for in a flash he was at the window and his hand was raised for silence. "back!" he thundered. "back, knaves!" and he whistled shrilly. "do what you will," he went on in the same tone, "but not here! pass on! pass on!--do you hear?" but the crowd were not to be lightly diverted. with a persistence brutal and unquestioning they continued to howl, "open! open!" while the man who had broken the window the moment before, jehan, the cripple with the hideous face, seized the lead-work, and tore away a great piece of it. then, laying hold of a bar, he tried to drag it out, setting one foot against the wall below. tavannes saw what he did, and his frame seemed to dilate with the fury and violence of his character. "dogs!" he shouted, "must i call out my riders and scatter you? must i flog you through the streets with stirrup-leathers? i am tavannes; beware of me! i have claws and teeth and i bite!" he continued, the scorn in his words exceeding even the rage of the crowd, at which he flung them. "kill where you please, rob where you please, but not where i am! or i will hang you by the heels on montfaucon, man by man! i will flay your backs. go! go! i am tavannes!" but the mob, cowed for a moment by the thunder of his voice, by his arrogance and recklessness, showed at this that their patience was exhausted. with a yell which drowned his tones they swayed forward; a dozen thundered on the door, crying, "in the king's name!" as many more tore out the remainder of the casement, seized the bars of the window, and strove to pull them out or to climb between them. jehan, the cripple, with whom tignonville had rubbed elbows at the rendezvous, led the way. count hannibal watched them a moment, his harsh face bent down to them, his features plain in the glare of the torches. but when the cripple, raised on the others' shoulders, and emboldened by his adversary's inactivity, began to squeeze himself through the bars, tavannes raised a pistol, which he had held unseen behind him, cocked it at leisure, and levelled it at the foul face which leered close to his. the dwarf saw the weapon and tried to retreat; but it was too late. a flash, a scream, and the wretch, shot through the throat, flung up his hands, and fell back into the arms of a lean man in black who had lent him his shoulder to ascend. for a few seconds the smoke of the pistol filled the window and the room. there was a cry that the huguenots were escaping, that the huguenots were resisting, that it was a plot; and some shouted to guard the back and some to watch the roof, and some to be gone. but when the fumes cleared away, the mob saw, with stupor, that all was as it had been. count hannibal stood where he had stood before, a grim smile on his lips. "who comes next?" he cried in a tone of mockery. "i have more pistols!" and then with a sudden change to ferocity, "you dogs!" he went on. "you scum of a filthy city, sweepings of the halles! do you think to beard me? do you think to frighten me or murder me? i am tavannes, and this is my house, and were there a score of huguenots in it, you should not touch one, nor harm a hair of his head! begone, i say again, while you may! seek women and children, and kill them. but not here!" for an instant the mingled scorn and brutality of his words silenced them. then from the rear of the crowd came an answer--the roar of an arquebuse. the ball whizzed past count hannibal's head, and, splashing the plaster from the wall within a pace of tignonville, dropped to the ground. tavannes laughed. "bungler!" he cried. "were you in my troop i would dip your trigger-finger in boiling oil to teach you to shoot! but you weary me, dogs. i must teach you a lesson, must i?" and he lifted a pistol and levelled it. the crowd did not know whether it was the one he had discharged or another, but they gave back with a sharp gasp. "i must teach you, must i?" he continued with scorn. "here, bigot, badelon, drive me these blusterers! rid the street of them! a tavannes! a tavannes!" not by word or look had he before this betrayed that he had supports. but as he cried the name, a dozen men armed to the teeth, who had stood motionless under the croix du tiroir, fell in a line on the right flank of the crowd. the surprise for those nearest them was complete. with the flash of the pikes before their eyes, with the cold steel in fancy between their ribs, they fled every way, uncertain how many pursued, or if any pursuit there was. for a moment the mob, which a few minutes before had seemed so formidable that a regiment might have quailed before it, bade fair to be routed by a dozen pikes. and so, had all in the crowd been what he termed them, the rabble and sweepings of the streets, it would have been. but in the heart of it, and felt rather than seen, were a handful of another kidney; sorbonne students and fierce-eyed priests, with three or four mounted archers, the nucleus that, moving through the streets, had drawn together this concourse. and these with threats and curse and gleaming eyes stood fast, even tavannes' dare-devils recoiling before the tonsure. the check thus caused allowed those who had budged a breathing space. they rallied behind the black robes, and began to stone the pikes; who in their turn withdrew until they formed two groups, standing on their defence, the one before the window, the other before the door. count hannibal had watched the attack and the check, as a man watches a play; with smiling interest. in the panic, the torches had been dropped or extinguished, and now between the house and the sullen crowd which hung back, yet grew moment by moment more dangerous, the daylight fell cold on the littered street and the cripple's huddled form prone in the gutter. a priest raised on the shoulders of the lean man in black began to harangue the mob, and the dull roar of assent, the brandished arms which greeted his appeal, had their effect on tavannes' men. they looked to the window, and muttered among themselves. it was plain that they had no stomach for a fight with the church, and were anxious for the order to withdraw. but count hannibal gave no order, and, much as his people feared the cowls, they feared him more. meanwhile the speaker's eloquence rose higher; he pointed with frenzied gestures to the house. the mob groaned, and suddenly a volley of stones fell among the pikemen, whose corselets rattled under the shower. the priest seized that moment. he sprang to the ground, and to the front. he caught up his robe and waved his hand, and the rabble, as if impelled by a single will, rolled forward in a huge one-fronted thundering wave, before which the two handfuls of pikemen--afraid to strike, yet afraid to fly--were swept away like straws upon the tide. but against the solid walls and oak-barred door of the house the wave beat, only to fall back again, a broken, seething mass of brandished arms and ravening faces. one point alone was vulnerable, the window, and there in the gap stood tavannes. quick as thought he fired two pistols into the crowd; then, while the smoke for a moment hid all, he whistled. whether the signal was a summons to his men to fight their way back--as they were doing to the best of their power--or he had resources still unseen, was not to be known. for as the smoke began to rise, and while the rabble before the window, cowed by the fall of two of their number, were still pushing backward instead of forward, there rose behind them strange sounds--yells, and the clatter of hoofs, mingled with screams of alarm. a second, and into the loose skirts of the crowd came charging helter-skelter, pell-mell, a score of galloping, shrieking, cursing horsemen, attended by twice as many footmen, who clung to their stirrups or to the tails of the horses, and yelled and whooped, and struck in unison with the maddened riders. "on! on!" the foremost shrieked, rolling in his saddle, and foaming at the mouth. "bleed in august, bleed in may! kill!" and he fired a pistol among the rabble, who fled every way to escape his rearing, plunging charger. "kill! kill!" cried his followers, cutting the air with their swords, and rolling to and fro on their horses in drunken emulation. "bleed in august, bleed in may!" "on! on!" cried the leader, as the crowd which beset the house fled every way before his reckless onset. "bleed in august, bleed in may!" the rabble fled, but not so quickly but that one or two were ridden down, and this for an instant checked the riders. before they could pass on-- "ohe!" cried count hannibal from his window. "ohe!" with a shout of laughter, "ride over them, dear brother! make me a clean street for my wedding!" marshal tavannes--for he, the hero of jarnac, was the leader of this wild orgy--turned that way, and strove to rein in his horse. "what ails them?" he cried, as the maddened animal reared upright, its iron hoofs striking fire from the slippery pavement. "they are rearing like thy bayard!" count hannibal answered. "whip them, whip them for me! tavannes! tavannes!" "what? this canaille?" "ay, that canaille!" "who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" the marshal replied, and spurred his horse among the rabble, who had fled to the sides of the street and now strove hard to efface themselves against the walls. "begone, dogs; begone!" he cried, still hunting them. and then, "you would bite, would you?" and snatching another pistol from his boot, he fired it among them, careless whom he hit. "ha! ha! that stirs you, does it!" he continued, as the wretches fled headlong. "who touches my brother, touches tavannes! on! on!" suddenly, from a doorway near at hand, a sombre figure darted into the roadway, caught the marshal's rein, and for a second checked his course. the priest--for a priest it was, father pezelay, the same who had addressed the mob--held up a warning hand. "halt!" he cried, with burning eyes. "halt, my lord! it is written, thou shalt not spare the canaanitish woman. 'tis not to spare the king has given command and a sword, but to kill! 'tis not to harbour, but to smite! to smite!" "then smite i will!" the marshal retorted, and with the butt of his pistol struck the zealot down. then, with as much indifference as he would have treated a huguenot, he spurred his horse over him, with a mad laugh at his jest. "who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" he yelled. "touches tavannes! on! on! bleed in august, bleed in may!" "on!" shouted his followers, striking about them in the same desperate fashion. they were young nobles who had spent the night feasting at the palace, and, drunk with wine and mad with excitement, had left the louvre at daybreak to rouse the city. "a jarnac! a jarnac!" they cried, and some saluted count hannibal as they passed. and so, shouting and spurring and following their leader, they swept away down the now empty street, carrying terror and a flame wherever their horses bore them that morning. tavannes, his hands on the ledge of the shattered window, leaned out laughing, and followed them with his eyes. a moment, and the mob was gone, the street was empty; and one by one, with sheepish faces, his pikemen emerged from the doorways and alleys in which they had taken refuge. they gathered about the three huddled forms which lay prone and still in the gutter: or, not three--two. for even as they approached them, one, the priest, rose slowly and giddily to his feet. he turned a face bleeding, lean, and relentless towards the window at which tavannes stood. solemnly, with the sign of the cross, and with uplifted hands, he cursed him in bed and at board, by day and by night, in walking, in riding, in standing, in the day of battle, and at the hour of death. the pikemen fell back appalled, and hid their eyes; and those who were of the north crossed themselves, and those who came from the south bent two fingers horse-shoe fashion. but hannibal de tavannes laughed; laughed in his moustache, his teeth showing, and bade them move that carrion to a distance, for it would smell when the sun was high. then he turned his back on the street, and looked into the room. chapter vii. in the amphitheatre. the movements of the women had overturned two of the candles; a third had guttered out. the three which still burned, contending pallidly with the daylight that each moment grew stronger, imparted to the scene the air of a debauch too long sustained. the disordered board, the wan faces of the servants cowering in their corner, mademoiselle's frozen look of misery, all increased the likeness; which a common exhaustion so far strengthened that when tavannes turned from the window, and, flushed with his triumph, met the others' eyes, his seemed the only vigour, and he the only man in the company. true, beneath the exhaustion, beneath the collapse of his victims, there burned passions, hatreds, repulsions, as fierce as the hidden fires of the volcano; but for the time they smouldered ash-choked and inert. he flung the discharged pistols on the table. "if yonder raven speak truth," he said, "i am like to pay dearly for my wife, and have short time to call her wife. the more need, mademoiselle, for speed, therefore. you know the old saying, 'short signing, long seisin'? shall it be my priest, or your minister?" m. de tignonville started forward. "she promised nothing!" he cried. and he struck his hand on the table. count hannibal smiled, his lip curling. "that," he replied, "is for mademoiselle to say." "but if she says it? if she says it, monsieur? what then?" tavannes drew forth a comfit-box, such as it was the fashion of the day to carry, as men of a later time carried a snuff-box. he slowly chose a prune. "if she says it?" he answered. "then m. de tignonville has regained his sweetheart. and m. de tavannes has lost his bride." "you say so?" "yes. but--" "but what?" "but she will not say it," tavannes replied coolly. "why not?" "why not?" "yes, monsieur, why not?" the younger man repeated, trembling. "because, m. de tignonville, it is not true." "but she did not speak!" tignonville retorted, with passion--the futile passion of the bird which beats its wings against a cage. "she did not speak. she could not promise, therefore." tavannes ate the prune slowly, seemed to give a little thought to its flavour, approved it a true agen plum, and at last spoke. "it is not for you to say whether she promised," he returned dryly, "nor for me. it is for mademoiselle." "you leave it to her?" "i leave it to her to say whether she promised." "then she must say no!" tignonville cried in a tone of triumph and relief. "for she did not speak. mademoiselle, listen!" he continued, turning with outstretched hands and appealing to her with passion. "do you hear? do you understand? you have but to speak to be free! you have but to say the word, and monsieur lets you go! in god's name, speak! speak then, clotilde! oh!" with a gesture of despair, as she did not answer, but continued to sit stony and hopeless, looking straight before her, her hands picking convulsively at the fringe of her girdle. "she does not understand! fright has stunned her! be merciful, monsieur. give her time to recover, to know what she does. fright has turned her brain." count hannibal smiled. "i knew her father and her uncle," he said, "and in their time the vrillacs were not wont to be cowards. monsieur forgets, too," he continued with fine irony, "that he speaks of my betrothed." "it is a lie!" tavannes raised his eyebrows. "you are in my power," he said. "for the rest, if it be a lie, mademoiselle has but to say so." "you hear him?" tignonville cried. "then speak, mademoiselle! clotilde, speak! say you never spoke, you never promised him!" the young man's voice quivered with indignation, with rage, with pain; but most, if the truth be told, with shame--the shame of a position strange and unparalleled. for in proportion as the fear of death instant and violent was lifted from him, reflection awoke, and the situation in which he stood took uglier shape. it was not so much love that cried to her, love that suffered, anguished by the prospect of love lost; as in the highest natures it might have been. rather it was the man's pride which suffered: the pride of a high spirit which found itself helpless between the hammer and the anvil, in a position so false that hereafter men might say of the unfortunate that he had bartered his mistress for his life. he had not! but he had perforce to stand by; he had to be passive under stress of circumstances, and by the sacrifice, if she consummated it, he would in fact be saved. there was the pinch. no wonder that he cried to her in a voice which roused even the servants from their lethargy of fear. "say it!" he cried. "say it, before it be too late. say, you did not promise!" slowly she turned her face to him. "i cannot," she whispered; "i cannot. go," she continued, a spasm distorting her features. "go, monsieur. leave me. it is over." "what?" he exclaimed. "you promised him?" she bowed her head. "then," the young man cried, in a transport of resentment, "i will be no part of the price. see! there! and there!" he tore the white sleeve wholly from his arm, and, rending it in twain, flung it on the floor and trampled on it. "it shall never be said that i stood by and let you buy my life! i go into the street and i take my chance." and he turned to the door. but tavannes was before him. "no!" he said; "you will stay here, m. de tignonville!" and he set his back against the door. the young man looked at him, his face convulsed with passion. "i shall stay here?" he cried. "and why, monsieur? what is it to you if i choose to perish?" "only this," tavannes retorted. "i am answerable to mademoiselle now, in an hour i shall be answerable to my wife--for your life. live, then, monsieur; you have no choice. in a month you will thank me--and her." "i am your prisoner?" "precisely." "and i must stay here--to be tortured?" tignonville cried. count hannibal's eyes sparkled. sudden stormy changes, from indifference to ferocity, from irony to invective, were characteristic of the man. "tortured!" he repeated grimly. "you talk of torture while piles and pardaillan, teligny and rochefoucauld lie dead in the street! while your cause sinks withered in a night, like a gourd! while your servants fall butchered, and france rises round you in a tide of blood! bah!"--with a gesture of disdain--"you make me also talk, and i have no love for talk, and small time. mademoiselle, you at least act and do not talk. by your leave i return in an hour, and i bring with me--shall it be my priest, or your minister?" she looked at him with the face of one who awakes slowly to the full horror, the full dread, of her position. for a moment she did not answer. then-- "a minister," she muttered, her voice scarcely audible. he nodded. "a minister," he said lightly. "very well, if i can find one." and walking to the shattered, gaping casement--through which the cool morning air blew into the room and gently stirred the hair of the unhappy girl--he said some words to the man on guard outside. then he turned to the door, but on the threshold he paused, looked with a strange expression at the pair, and signed to carlat and the servants to go out before him. "up, and lie close above!" he growled. "open a window or look out, and you will pay dearly for it! do you hear? up! up! you, too, old crop- ears. what! would you?"--with a sudden glare as carlat hesitated--"that is better! mademoiselle, until my return." he saw them all out, followed them, and closed the door on the two; who, left together, alone with the gaping window and the disordered feast, maintained a strange silence. the girl, gripping one hand in the other as if to quell her rising horror, sat looking before her, and seemed barely to breathe. the man, leaning against the wall at a little distance, bent his eyes, not on her, but on the floor, his face gloomy and distorted. his first thought should have been of her and for her; his first impulse to console, if he could not save her. his it should have been to soften, were that possible, the fate before her; to prove to her by words of farewell, the purest and most sacred, that the sacrifice she was making, not to save her own life but the lives of others, was appreciated by him who paid with her the price. and all these things, and more, may have been in m. de tignonville's mind; they may even have been uppermost in it, but they found no expression. the man remained sunk in a sombre reverie. he had the appearance of thinking of himself, not of her; of his own position, not of hers. otherwise he must have looked at her, he must have turned to her; he must have owned the subtle attraction of her unspoken appeal when she drew a deep breath and slowly turned her eyes on him, mute, asking, waiting what he should offer. surely he should have! yet it was long before he responded. he sat buried in thought of himself, and his position, the vile, the unworthy position in which her act had placed him. at length the constraint of her gaze wrought on him, or his thoughts became unbearable; and he looked up and met her eyes, and with an oath he sprang to his feet. "it shall not be!" he cried, in a tone low, but full of fury. "you shall not do it! i will kill him first! i will kill him with this hand! or--" a step took him to the window, a step brought him back--ay, brought him back exultant, and with a changed face. "or better, we will thwart him yet. see, mademoiselle, do you see? heaven is merciful! for a moment the cage is open!" his eye shone with excitement, the sweat of sudden hope stood on his brow as he pointed to the unguarded casement. "come! it is our one chance!" and he caught her by her arm and strove to draw her to the window. but she hung back, staring at him. "oh no, no!" she cried. "yes, yes! i say!" he responded. "you do not understand. the way is open! we can escape, clotilde, we can escape!" "i cannot! i cannot!" she wailed, still resisting him. "you are afraid?" "afraid?" she repeated the word in a tone of wonder. "no, but i cannot. i promised him. i cannot. and, o god!" she continued, in a sudden outburst of grief, as the sense of general loss, of the great common tragedy broke on her and whelmed for the moment her private misery. "why should we think of ourselves? they are dead, they are dying, who were ours, whom we loved! why should we think to live? what does it matter how it fares with us? we cannot be happy. happy?" she continued wildly. "are any happy now? or is the world all changed in a night? no, we could not be happy. and at least you will live, tignonville. i have that to console me." "live!" he responded vehemently. "i live? i would rather die a thousand times. a thousand times rather than live shamed! than see you sacrificed to that devil! than go out with a brand on my brow, for every man to point at me! i would rather die a thousand times!" "and do you think that i would not?" she answered, shivering. "better, far better die than--than live with him!" "then why not die?" she stared at him, wide-eyed, and a sudden stillness possessed her. "how?" she whispered. "what do you mean?" "that!" he said. as he spoke, he raised his hand and signed to her to listen. a sullen murmur, distant as yet, but borne to the ear on the fresh morning air, foretold the rising of another storm. the sound grew in intensity, even while she listened; and yet for a moment she misunderstood him. "o god!" she cried, out of the agony of nerves overwrought, "will that bell never stop? will it never stop? will no one stop it?" "'tis not the bell!" he cried, seizing her hand as if to focus her attention. "it is the mob you hear. they are returning. we have but to stand a moment at this open window, we have but to show ourselves to them, and we need live no longer! mademoiselle! clotilde!--if you mean what you say, if you are in earnest, the way is open!" "and we shall die--together!" "yes, together. but have you the courage?" "the courage?" she cried, a brave smile lighting the whiteness of her face. "the courage were needed to live. the courage were needed to do that. i am ready, quite ready. it can be no sin! to live with that in front of me were the sin! come!" for the moment she had forgotten her people, her promise, all! it seemed to her that death would absolve her from all. "come!" he moved with her under the impulse of her hand until they stood at the gaping window. the murmur, which he had heard indistinctly a moment before, had grown to a roar of voices. the mob, on its return eastward along the rue st. honore, was nearing the house. he stood, his arm supporting her, and they waited, a little within the window. suddenly he stooped, his face hardly less white than hers: their eyes met; he would have kissed her. she did not withdraw from his arm, but she drew back her face, her eyes half shut. "no!" she murmured. "no! while i live i am his. but we die together, tignonville! we die together. it will not last long, will it? and afterwards--" she did not finish the sentence, but her lips moved in prayer, and over her features came a far-away look; such a look as that which on the face of another huguenot lady, philippa de luns--vilely done to death in the place maubert fourteen years before--silenced the ribald jests of the lowest rabble in the world. an hour or two earlier, awed by the abruptness of the outburst, mademoiselle had shrunk from her fate; she had known fear. now that she stood out voluntarily to meet it, she, like many a woman before and since, feared no longer. she was lifted out of and above herself. but death was long in coming. some cause beyond their knowledge stayed the onrush of the mob along the street. the din, indeed, persisted, deafened, shook them; but the crowd seemed to be at a stand a few doors down the rue st. honore. for a half-minute, a long half-minute, which appeared an age, it drew no nearer. would it draw nearer? would it come on? or would it turn again? the doubt, so much worse than despair, began to sap that courage of the man which is always better fitted to do than to suffer. the sweat rose on tignonville's brow as he stood listening, his arm round the girl--as he stood listening and waiting. it is possible that when he had said a minute or two earlier that he would rather die a thousand times than live thus shamed, he had spoken beyond the mark. or it is possible that he had meant his words to the full. but in this case he had not pictured what was to come, he had not gauged correctly his power of passive endurance. he was as brave as the ordinary man, as the ordinary soldier; but martyrdom, the apotheosis of resignation, comes more naturally to women than to men, more hardly to men than to women. yet had the crisis come quickly he might have met it. but he had to wait, and to wait with that howling of wild beasts in his ears; and for this he was not prepared. a woman might be content to die after this fashion; but a man? his colour went and came, his eyes began to rove hither and thither. was it even now too late to escape? too late to avoid the consequences of the girl's silly persistence? too late to--? her eyes were closed, she hung half lifeless on his arm. she would not know, she need not know until afterwards. and afterwards she would thank him! afterwards--meantime the window was open, the street was empty, and still the crowd hung back and did not come. he remembered that two doors away was a narrow passage, which leaving the rue st. honore turned at right angles under a beetling archway, to emerge in the rue du roule. if he could gain that passage unseen by the mob! he _would_ gain it. with a swift movement, his mind made up, he took a step forward. he tightened his grasp of the girl's waist, and, seizing with his left hand the end of the bar which the assailants had torn from its setting in the window jamb, he turned to lower himself. one long step would land him in the street. at that moment she awoke from the stupor of exaltation. she opened her eyes with a startled movement; and her eyes met his. he was in the act of stepping backwards and downwards, dragging her after him. but it was not this betrayed him. it was his face, which in an instant told her all, and that he sought not death, but life! she struggled upright and strove to free herself. but he had the purchase of the bar, and by this time he was furious as well as determined. whether she would or no, he would save her, he would drag her out. then, as consciousness fully returned, she, too, took fire. "no!" she cried, "i will not!" and she struggled more violently. "you shall!" he retorted between his teeth. "you shall not perish here." but she had her hands free, and as he spoke she thrust him from her passionately, desperately, with all her strength. he had his one foot in the air at the moment, and in a flash it was done. with a cry of rage he lost his balance, and, still holding the bar, reeled backwards through the window; while mademoiselle, panting and half fainting, recoiled--recoiled into the arms of hannibal de tavannes, who, unseen by either, had entered the room a long minute before. from the threshold, and with a smile, all his own, he had watched the contest and the result. chapter viii. two hens and an egg. m. de tignonville was shaken by the fall, and in the usual course of things he would have lain where he was, and groaned. but when a man has once turned his back on death he is apt to fancy it at his shoulder. he has small stomach for surprises, and is in haste to set as great a distance as possible between the ugly thing and himself. so it was with the huguenot. shot suddenly into the full publicity of the street, he knew that at any instant danger might take him by the nape; and he was on his legs and glancing up and down before the clatter of his fall had travelled the length of three houses. the rabble were still a hundred paces away, piled up and pressed about a house where men were being hunted as men hunt rats. he saw that he was unnoted, and apprehension gave place to rage. his thoughts turned back hissing hot to the thing that had happened, and in a paroxysm of shame he shook his fist at the gaping casement and the sneering face of his rival, dimly seen in the background. if a look would have killed tavannes--and her--it had not been wanting. for it was not only the man m. de tignonville hated at this moment; he hated mademoiselle also, the unwitting agent of the other's triumph. she had thrust him from her; she had refused to be guided by him; she had resisted, thwarted, shamed him. then let her take the consequences. she willed to perish: let her perish! he did not acknowledge even to himself the real cause of offence, the proof to which she had put his courage, and the failure of that courage to stand the test. yet it was this, though he had himself provoked the trial, which burned up his chivalry, as the smuggler's fire burns up the dwarf heath upon the landes. it was the discovery that in an heroic hour he was no hero that gave force to his passionate gesture, and next moment sent him storming down the beetling passage to the rue du roule, his heart a maelstrom of fierce vows and fiercer menaces. he had reached the further end of the alley and was on the point of entering the street before he remembered that he had nowhere to go. his lodgings were no longer his, since his landlord knew him to be a huguenot, and would doubtless betray him. to approach those of his faith whom he had frequented was to expose them to danger; and, beyond the religion, he had few acquaintances and those of the newest. yet the streets were impossible. he walked them on the utmost edge of peril; he lurked in them under the blade of an impending axe. and, whether he walked or lurked, he went at the mercy of the first comers bold enough to take his life. the sweat stood on his brow as he paused under the low arch of the alley- end, tasting the bitter forlornness of the dog banned and set for death in that sunlit city. in every window of the gable end which faced his hiding-place he fancied an eye watching his movements; in every distant step he heard the footfall of doom coming that way to his discovery. and while he trembled, he had to reflect, to think, to form some plan. in the town was no place for him, and short of the open country no safety. and how could he gain the open country? if he succeeded in reaching one of the gates--st. antoine, or st. denis, in itself a task of difficulty--it would only be to find the gate closed, and the guard on the alert. at last it flashed on him that he might cross the river; and at the notion hope awoke. it was possible that the massacre had not extended to the southern suburb; possible, that if it had, the huguenots who lay there--frontenay, and montgomery, and chartres, with the men of the north--might be strong enough to check it, and even to turn the tables on the parisians. his colour returned. he was no coward, as soldiers go; if it came to fighting he had courage enough. he could not hope to cross the river by the bridge, for there, where the goldsmiths lived, the mob were like to be most busy. but if he could reach the bank he might procure a boat at some deserted point, or, at the worst, he might swim across. from the louvre at his back came the sound of gunshots; from every quarter the murmur of distant crowds, or the faint lamentable cries of victims. but the empty street before him promised an easy passage, and he ventured into it and passed quickly through it. he met no one, and no one molested him; but as he went he had glimpses of pale faces that from behind the casements watched him come and turned to watch him go; and so heavy on his nerves was the pressure of this silent ominous attention, that he blundered at the end of the street. he should have taken the southerly turning; instead he held on, found himself in the rue ferronerie, and a moment later was all but in the arms of a band of city guards, who were making a house-to-house visitation. he owed his safety rather to the condition of the street than to his presence of mind. the rue ferronerie, narrow in itself, was so choked at this date by stalls and bulkheads, that an edict directing the removal of those which abutted on the cemetery had been issued a little before. nothing had been done on it, however, and this neck of paris, this main thoroughfare between the east and the west, between the fashionable quarter of the marais and the fashionable quarter of the louvre, was still a devious huddle of sheds and pent-houses. tignonville slid behind one of these, found that it masked the mouth of an alley, and, heedless whither the passage led, ran hurriedly along it. every instant he expected to hear the hue and cry behind him, and he did not halt or draw breath until he had left the soldiers far in the rear, and found himself astray at the junction of four noisome lanes, over two of which the projecting gables fairly met. above the two others a scrap of sky appeared, but this was too small to indicate in which direction the river lay. tignonville hesitated, but not for long; a burst of voices heralded a new danger, and he shrank into a doorway. along one of the lanes a troop of children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping round something which they dragged by a string. now one of the hindmost would burl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go, or whose turn it was to pull and whose to follow. at last they started afresh with a whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of the air. their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward, and lingered like a thing of life. but it was no thing of life, as tignonville saw with a shudder when they passed him. the object of their sport was the naked body of a child, an infant! his gorge rose at the sight. fear such as he had not before experienced chilled his marrow. this was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong man quailed; the hate of which mademoiselle had spoken when she said that the babes crossed themselves at her passing, and the houses tottered to fall upon her! he paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him; and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed on him. instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the back of a house, which looked another way. the outer gates of an arched doorway were open, and a loaded haycart, touching either side and brushing the arch above, blocked the passage. his gaze, leaving the windows, dropped to this--he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he stiffened. between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant, then vanished. tignonville stared. at first he thought his eyes had tricked him. then the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable invitation. it is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive has aught to fear, and tignonville, after casting a glance down the lane--which revealed a single man standing with his face the other way--slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall. he coughed. a voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the act, and aided him. in a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed between the hay and the roof of the arch. beside him lay a man whose features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern. but the man knew him and whispered his name. "you know me?" tignonville muttered in astonishment. "i marked you, m. de tignonville, at the preaching last sunday," the stranger answered placidly. "you were there?" "i preached." "then you are m. la tribe!" "i am," the clergyman answered quietly. "they seized me on my threshold, but i left my cloak in their hands and fled. one tore my stocking with his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured. they hunted me to the end of the next street, but i lived and still live, and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city." the sympathy between the huguenot by faith and the huguenot by politics was imperfect. tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger generation, was a huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. he felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer. "i wish i felt as sure!" he muttered bluntly. "you know that all our people are dead?" "he can save by few or by many," the preacher answered devoutly. "we are of the few, blessed be god, and shall see israel victorious, and our people as a flock of sheep!" "i see small chance of it," tignonville answered contemptuously. "i know it as certainly as i knew before you came, m. de tignonville, that you would come!" "that _i_ should come?" "that some one would come," la tribe answered, correcting himself. "i knew not who it would be until you appeared and placed yourself in the doorway over against me, even as obadiah in the holy book passed before the hiding-place of elijah." the two lay on their faces side by side, the rafters of the archway low on their heads. tignonville lifted himself a little, and peered anew at the other. he fancied that la tribe's mind, shaken by the horrors of the morning and his narrow escape, had given way. "you rave, man," he said. "this is no time for visions." "i said naught of visions," the other answered. "then why so sure that we shall escape?" "i am certified of it," la tribe replied. "and more than that, i know that we shall lie here some days. the time has not been revealed to me, but it will be days and a day. then we shall leave this place unharmed, as we entered it, and, whatever betide others, we shall live." tignonville shrugged his shoulders. "i tell you, you rave, m. la tribe," he said petulantly. "at any moment we may be discovered. even now i hear footsteps." "they tracked me well-nigh to this place," the minister answered placidly. "the deuce they did!" tignonville muttered, with irritation. he dared not raise his voice. "i would you had told me that before i joined you, monsieur, and i had found some safer hiding-place! when we are discovered--" "then," the other continued calmly, "you will see." "in any case we shall be better farther back," tignonville retorted. "here, we are within an ace of being seen from the lane." and he began to wriggle himself backwards. the minister laid his hand on him. "have a care!" he muttered. "and do not move, but listen. and you will understand. when i reached this place--it would be about five o'clock this morning--breathless, and expecting each minute to be dragged forth to make my confession before men, i despaired as you despair now. like elijah under the juniper tree, i said, 'it is enough, o lord! take my soul also, for i am no better than my fellows!' all the sky was black before my eyes, and my ears were filled with the wailings of the little ones and the lamentations of women. 'o lord, it is enough,' i prayed. 'take my soul, or, if it be thy will, then, as the angel was sent to take the cakes to elijah, give me also a sign that i shall live.'" for a moment he paused, struggling with overpowering emotion. even his impatient listener, hitherto incredulous, caught the infection, and in a tone of awe murmured-- "yes? and then, m. la tribe!" "the sign was given me. the words were scarcely out of my mouth when a hen flew up, and, scratching a nest in the hay at my feet, presently laid an egg." tignonville stared. "it was timely, i admit," he said. "but it is no uncommon thing. probably it has its nest here and lays daily." "young man, this is new-mown hay," the minister answered solemnly. "this cart was brought here no further back than yesterday. it smells of the meadow, and the flowers hold their colour. no, the fowl was sent. to- morrow it will return, and the next, and the next, until the plague be stayed and i go hence. but that is not all. a while later a second hen appeared, and i thought it would lay in the same nest. but it made a new one, on the side on which you lie and not far from your foot. then i knew that i was to have a companion, and that god had laid also for him a table in the wilderness." "it did lay, then?" "it is still on the nest, beside your foot." tignonville was about to reply when the preacher grasped his arm and by a sign enjoined silence. he did so not a moment too soon. preoccupied by the story, narrator and listener had paid no heed to what was passing in the lane, and the voices of men speaking close at hand took them by surprise. from the first words which reached them, it was clear that the speakers were the same who had chased la tribe as far as the meeting of the four ways, and, losing him there, had spent the morning in other business. now they had returned to hunt him down; and but for a wrangle which arose among them and detained them, they had stolen on their quarry before their coming was suspected. "'twas this way he ran!" "no, 'twas the other!" they contended; and their words, winged with vile threats and oaths, grew noisy and hot. the two listeners dared scarcely to breathe. the danger was so near, it was so certain that if the men came three paces farther, they would observe and search the haycart, that tignonville fancied the steel already at his throat. he felt the hay rustle under his slightest movement, and gripped one hand with the other to restrain the tremor of overpowering excitement. yet when he glanced at the minister he found him unmoved, a smile on his face. and m. de tignonville could have cursed him for his folly. for the men were coming on! an instant, and they perceived the cart, and the ruffian who had advised this route pounced on it in triumph. "there! did i not say so?" he cried. "he is curled up in that hay, for the satan's grub he is! that is where he is, see you!" "maybe," another answered grudgingly, as they gathered before it. "and maybe not, simon!" "to hell with your maybe not!" the first replied. and he drove his pike deep into the hay and turned it viciously. the two on the top controlled themselves. tignonville's face was livid; of himself he would have slid down amongst them and taken his chance, preferring to die fighting, to die in the open, rather than to perish like a rat in a stack. but la tribe had gripped his arm and held him fast. the man whom the others called simon thrust again, but too low and without result. he was for trying a third time, when one of his comrades who had gone to the other side of the lane announced that the men were on the top of the hay. "can you see them?" "no, but there's room and to spare." "oh, a curse on your room!" simon retorted. "well, you can look." "if that's all, i'll soon look!" was the answer. and the rogue, forcing himself between the hay and the side of the gateway, found the wheel of the cart, and began to raise himself on it. tignonville, who lay on that hand, heard, though he could not see his movements. he knew what they meant, he knew that in a twinkling he must be discovered; and with a last prayer he gathered himself for a spring. it seemed an age before the intruder's head appeared on a level with the hay; and then the alarm came from another quarter. the hen which had made its nest at tignonville's feet, disturbed by the movement or by the newcomer's hand, flew out with a rush and flutter as of a great firework. upsetting the startled simon, who slipped swearing to the ground, it swooped scolding and clucking over the heads of the other men, and reaching the street in safety, scuttled off at speed, its outspread wings sweeping the earth in its rage. they laughed uproariously as simon emerged, rubbing his elbow. "there's for you! there's your preacher!" his opponent jeered. "d---n her! she gives tongue as fast as any of them!" gibed a second. "will you try again, simon? you may find another love-letter there!" "have done!" a third cried impatiently. "he'll not be where the hen is! let's back! let's back! i said before that it wasn't this way he turned! he's made for the river." "the plague in his vitals!" simon replied furiously. "wherever he is, i'll find him!" and, reluctant to confess himself wrong, he lingered, casting vengeful glances at the hay. but one of the other men cursed him for a fool; and presently, forced to accept his defeat or be left alone, he rejoined his fellows. slowly the footsteps and voices receded along the lane; slowly, until silence swallowed them, and on the quivering strained senses of the two who remained behind, descended the gentle influence of twilight and the sweet scent of the new-mown hay on which they lay. la tribe turned to his companion, his eyes shining. "our soul is escaped," he murmured, "even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. the snare is broken and we are delivered!" his voice shook as he whispered the ancient words of triumph. but when they came to look in the nest at tignonville's feet there was no egg! chapter ix. unstable. and that troubled m. la tribe no little, although he did not impart his thoughts to his companion. instead they talked in whispers of the things which had happened; of the admiral, of teligny, whom all loved, of rochefoucauld the accomplished, the king's friend; of the princes in the louvre whom they gave up for lost, and of the huguenot nobles on the farther side of the river, of whose safety there seemed some hope. tignonville--he best knew why--said nothing of the fate of his betrothed, or of his own adventures in that connection. but each told the other how the alarm had reached him, and painted in broken words his reluctance to believe in treachery so black. thence they passed to the future of the cause, and of that took views as opposite as light and darkness, as papegot and huguenot. the one was confident, the other in despair. and some time in the afternoon, worn out by the awful experiences of the last twelve hours, they fell asleep, their heads on their arms, the hay tickling their faces; and, with death stalking the lane beside them, slept soundly until after sundown. when they awoke hunger awoke with them, and urged on la tribe's mind the question of the missing egg. it was not altogether the prick of appetite which troubled him, but regarding the hiding-place in which they lay as an ark of refuge providentially supplied, protected and victualled, he could not refrain from asking reverently what the deficiency meant. it was not as if one hen only had appeared; as if no farther prospect had been extended. but up to a certain point the message was clear. then when the hand of providence had shown itself most plainly, and in a manner to melt the heart with awe and thankfulness, the message had been blurred. seriously the huguenot asked himself what it portended. to tignonville, if he thought of it at all, the matter was the matter of an egg, and stopped there. an egg might alleviate the growing pangs of hunger; its non-appearance was a disappointment, but he traced the matter no farther. it must be confessed, too, that the haycart was to him only a haycart--and not an ark; and the sooner he was safely away from it the better he would be pleased. while la tribe, lying snug and warm beside him, thanked god for a lot so different from that of such of his fellows as had escaped--whom he pictured crouching in dank cellars, or on roof- trees exposed to the heat by day and the dews by night--the young man grew more and more restive. hunger pricked him, and the meanness of the part he had played moved him to action. about midnight, resisting the dissuasions of his companion, he would have sallied out in search of food if the passage of a turbulent crowd had not warned him that the work of murder was still proceeding. he curbed himself after that and lay until daylight. but, ill content with his own conduct, on fire when he thought of his betrothed, he was in no temper to bear hardship cheerfully or long; and gradually there rose before his mind the picture of madame st. lo's smiling face, and the fair hair which curled low on the white of her neck. he would, and he would not. death that had stalked so near him preached its solemn sermon. but death and pleasure are never far apart; and at no time and nowhere have they jostled one another more familiarly than in that age, wherever the influence of italy and italian art and italian hopelessness extended. again, on the one side, la tribe's example went for something with his comrade in misfortune; but in the other scale hung relief from discomfort, with the prospect of a woman's smiles and a woman's flatteries, of dainty dishes, luxury, and passion. if he went now, he went to her from the jaws of death, with the glamour of adventure and peril about him; and the very going into her presence was a lure. moreover, if he had been willing while his betrothed was still his, why not now when he had lost her? it was this last reflection--and one other thing which came on a sudden into his mind--which turned the scale. about noon he sat up in the hay, and, abruptly and sullenly, "i'll lie here no longer," he said; and he dropped his legs over the side. "i shall go." the movement was so unexpected that la tribe stared at him in silence. then, "you will run a great risk, m. de tignonville," he said gravely, "if you do. you may go as far under cover of night as the river, or you may reach one of the gates. but as to crossing the one or passing the other, i reckon it a thing impossible." "i shall not wait until night," tignonville answered curtly, a ring of defiance in his tone. "i shall go now! i'll lie here no longer!" "now?" "yes, now." "you will be mad if you do," the other replied. he thought it the petulant outcry of youth tired of inaction; a protest, and nothing more. he was speedily undeceived. "mad or not, i am going!" tignonville retorted. and he slid to the ground, and from the covert of the hanging fringe of hay looked warily up and down the lane. "it is clear, i think," he said. "good-bye." and with no more, without one upward glance or a gesture of the hand, with no further adieu or word of gratitude, he walked out into the lane, turned briskly to the left, and vanished. the minister uttered a cry of surprise, and made as if he would descend also. "come back, sir!" he called, as loudly as he dared. "m. de tignonville, come back! this is folly or worse!" but m. de tignonville was gone. la tribe listened a while, unable to believe it, and still expecting his return. at last, hearing nothing, he slid, greatly excited, to the ground and looked out. it was not until he had peered up and down the lane and made sure that it was empty that he could persuade himself that the other had gone for good. then he climbed slowly and seriously to his place again, and sighed as he settled himself. "unstable as water thou shalt not excel!" he muttered. "now i know why there was only one egg." meanwhile tignonville, after putting a hundred yards between himself and his bedfellow, plunged into the first dark entry which presented itself. hurriedly, and with a frowning face, he cut off his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist; and this act, by disclosing his linen, put him in possession of the white sleeve which he had once involuntarily donned, and once discarded. the white cross on the cap he could not assume, for he was bareheaded. but he had little doubt that the sleeve would suffice, and with a bold demeanour he made his way northward until he reached again the rue ferronerie. excited groups were wandering up and down the street, and, fearing to traverse its crowded narrows, he went by lanes parallel with it as far as the rue st. denis, which he crossed. everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible. near the rue des lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. a little farther on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair. to obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards--but god knows how long afterwards--a passer-by, more pitiful than his fellows, had put her out of her misery with a spit, which still remained plunged in her body. m. de tignonville shuddered at the sight, and at others like it. he loathed the symbol he wore, and himself for wearing it; and more than once his better nature bade him return and play the nobler part. once he did turn with that intention. but he had set his mind on comfort and pleasure, and the value of these things is raised, not lowered, by danger and uncertainty. quickly his stoicism oozed away; he turned again. barely avoiding the rush of a crowd of wretches who were bearing a swooning victim to the river, he hurried through the rue des lombards, and reached in safety the house beside the golden maid. he had no doubt now on which side of the maid madame st. lo lived; the house was plain before him. he had only to knock. but in proportion as he approached his haven, his anxiety grew. to lose all, with all in his grasp, to fail upon the threshold, was a thing which bore no looking at; and it was with a nervous hand and eyes cast fearfully behind him that he plied the heavy iron knocker which adorned the door. he could not turn his gaze from a knot of ruffians, who were gathered under one of the tottering gables on the farther side of the street. they seemed to be watching him, and he fancied--though the distance rendered this impossible--that he could see suspicion growing in their eyes. at any moment they might cross the roadway, they might approach, they might challenge him. and at the thought he knocked and knocked again. why did not the porter come? ay, why? for now a score of contingencies came into the young man's mind and tortured him. had madame st. lo withdrawn to safer quarters and closed the house? or, good catholic as she was, had she given way to panic, and determined to open to no one? or was she ill? or had she perished in the general disorder? or-- and then, even as the men began to slink towards him, his heart leapt. he heard a footstep heavy and slow move through the house. it came nearer and nearer. a moment, and an iron-grated judas-hole in the door slid open, and a servant, an elderly man, sleek and respectable, looked out at him. tignonville could scarcely speak for excitement. "madame st. lo?" he muttered tremulously. "i come to her from her cousin the comte de tavannes. quick! quick! if you please. open to me!" "monsieur is alone?" "yes! yes!" the man nodded gravely and slid back the bolts. he allowed m. de tignonville to enter, then with care he secured the door, and led the way across a small square court, paved with red tiles and enclosed by the house, but open above to the sunshine and the blue sky. a gallery which ran round the upper floor looked on this court, in which a great quiet reigned, broken only by the music of a fountain. a vine climbed on the wooden pillars which supported the gallery, and, aspiring higher, embraced the wide carved eaves, and even tapestried with green the three gables that on each side of the court broke the skyline. the grapes hung nearly ripe, and amid their clusters and the green lattice of their foliage tignonville's gaze sought eagerly but in vain the laughing eyes and piquant face of his new mistress. for with the closing of the door, and the passing from him of the horrors of the streets, he had entered, as by magic, a new and smiling world; a world of tennis and roses, of tinkling voices and women's wiles, a world which smacked of florence and the south, and love and life; a world which his late experiences had set so far away from him, his memory of it seemed a dream. now, as he drank in its stillness and its fragrance, as he felt its safety and its luxury lap him round once more, he sighed. and with that breath he rid himself of much. the servant led him to a parlour, a cool shady room on the farther side of the tiny quadrangle, and, muttering something inaudible, withdrew. a moment later a frolicsome laugh, and the light flutter of a woman's skirt as she tripped across the court, brought the blood to his cheeks. he went a step nearer to the door, and his eyes grew bright. chapter x. madame st. lo. so far excitement had supported tignonville in his escape. it was only when he knew himself safe, when he heard madame st. lo's footstep in the courtyard and knew that in a moment he would see her, that he knew also that he was failing for want of food. the room seemed to go round with him; the window to shift, the light to flicker. and then again, with equal abruptness, he grew strong and steady and perfectly master of himself. nay, never had he felt a confidence in himself so overwhelming or a capacity so complete. the triumph of that which he had done, the knowledge that of so many he, almost alone, had escaped, filled his brain with a delicious and intoxicating vanity. when the door opened, and madame st. lo appeared on the threshold, he advanced holding out his arms. he expected that she would fall into them. but madame only backed and curtseyed, a mischievous light in her eyes. "a thousand thanks, monsieur!" she said, "but you are more ready than i!" and she remained by the door. "i have come to you through all!" he cried, speaking loudly because of a humming in his ears. "they are lying in the streets! they are dying, are dead, are hunted, are pursued, are perishing! but i have come through all to you!" she curtseyed anew. "so i see, monsieur!" she answered. "i am flattered!" but she did not advance, and gradually, light-headed as he was, he began to see that she looked at him with an odd closeness. and he took offence. "i say, madame, i have come to you!" he repeated. "and you do not seem pleased!" she came forward a step and looked at him still more oddly. "oh yes," she said. "i am pleased, m. de tignonville. it is what i intended. but tell me how you have fared. you are not hurt?" "not a hair!" he cried boastfully. and he told her in a dozen windy sentences of the adventure of the haycart and his narrow escape. he wound up with a foolish meaningless laugh. "then you have not eaten for thirty-six hours?" she said. and when he did not answer, "i understand," she continued, nodding and speaking as to a child. and she rang a silver handbell and gave an order. she addressed the servant in her usual tone, but to tignonville's ear her voice seemed to fall to a whisper. her figure--she was small and fairy- like--began to sway before him; and then in a moment, as it seemed to him, she was gone, and he was seated at a table, his trembling fingers grasping a cup of wine which the elderly servant who had admitted him was holding to his lips. on the table before him were a spit of partridges and a cake of white bread. when he had swallowed a second mouthful of wine--which cleared his eyes as by magic--the man urged him to eat. and he fell to with an appetite that grew as he ate. by-and-by, feeling himself again, he became aware that two of madame's women were peering at him through the open doorway. he looked that way and they fled giggling into the court; but in a moment they were back again, and the sound of their tittering drew his eyes anew to the door. it was the custom of the day for ladies of rank to wait on their favourites at table; and he wondered if madame were with them, and why she did not come and serve him herself. but for a while longer the savour of the roasted game took up the major part of his thoughts; and when prudence warned him to desist, and he sat back, satisfied after his long fast, he was in no mood to be critical. perhaps--for somewhere in the house he heard a lute--madame was entertaining those whom she could not leave? or deluding some who might betray him if they discovered him? from that his mind turned back to the streets and the horrors through which he had passed; but for a moment and no more. a shudder, an emotion of prayerful pity, and he recalled his thoughts. in the quiet of the cool room, looking on the sunny, vine-clad court, with the tinkle of the lute and the murmurous sound of women's voices in his ears, it was hard to believe that the things from which he had emerged were real. it was still more unpleasant, and as futile, to dwell on them. a day of reckoning would come, and, if la tribe were right, the cause would rally, bristling with pikes and snorting with war-horses, and the blood spilled in this wicked city would cry aloud for vengeance. but the hour was not yet. he had lost his mistress, and for that atonement must be exacted. but in the present another mistress awaited him, and as a man could only die once, and might die at any minute, so he could only live once, and in the present. then _vogue la galere_! as he roused himself from this brief reverie and fell to wondering how long he was to be left to himself, a rosebud tossed by an unseen hand struck him on the breast and dropped to his knees. to seize it and kiss it gallantly, to spring to his feet and look about him were instinctive movements. but he could see no one; and, in the hope of surprising the giver, he stole to the window. the sound of the lute and the distant tinkle of laughter persisted. the court, save for a page, who lay asleep on a bench in the gallery, was empty. tignonville scanned the boy suspiciously; a male disguise was often adopted by the court ladies, and if madame would play a prank on him, this was a thing to be reckoned with. but a boy it seemed to be, and after a while the young man went back to his seat. even as he sat down, a second flower struck him more sharply in the face, and this time he darted not to the window but to the door. he opened it quickly and looked out, but again he was too late. "i shall catch you presently, _ma reine_!" he murmured tenderly, with intent to be heard. and he closed the door. but, wiser this time, he waited with his hand on the latch until he heard the rustling of a skirt, and saw the line of light at the foot of the door darkened by a shadow. that moment he flung the door wide, and, clasping the wearer of the skirt in his arms, kissed her lips before she had time to resist. then he fell back as if he had been shot! for the wearer of the skirt, she whom he had kissed, was madame st. lo's woman, and behind her stood madame herself, laughing, laughing, laughing with all the gay abandonment of her light little heart. "oh, the gallant gentleman!" she cried, and clapped her hands effusively. "was ever recovery so rapid? or triumph so speedy? suzanne, my child; you surpass venus. your charms conquer before they are seen!" m. de tignonville had put poor suzanne from him as if she burned; and hot and embarrassed, cursing his haste, he stood looking awkwardly at them. "madame," he stammered at last, "you know quite well that--" "seeing is believing!" "that i thought it was you!" "oh, what i have lost!" she replied. and she looked archly at suzanne, who giggled and tossed her head. he was growing angry. "but, madame," he protested, "you know--" "i know what i know, and i have seen what i have seen!" madame answered merrily. and she hummed, "'ce fut le plus grand jour d'este que m'embrassa la belle suzanne!' oh yes, i know what i know!" she repeated. and she fell again to laughing immoderately; while the pretty piece of mischief beside her hung her head, and, putting a finger in her mouth, mocked him with an affectation of modesty. the young man glowered at them between rage and embarrassment. this was not the reception, nor this the hero's return to which he had looked forward. and a doubt began to take form in his mind. the mistress he had pictured would not laugh at kisses given to another; nor forget in a twinkling the straits through which he had come to her, the hell from which he had plucked himself! possibly the court ladies held love as cheap as this, and lovers but as playthings, butts for their wit, and pegs on which to hang their laughter. but--but he began to doubt, and, perplexed and irritated, he showed his feelings. "madame," he said stiffly, "a jest is an excellent thing. but pardon me if i say that it is ill played on a fasting man." madame desisted from laughter that she might speak. "a fasting man?" she cried. "and he has eaten two partridges!" "fasting from love, madame." madame st. lo held up her hands. "and it's not two minutes since he took a kiss!" he winced, was silent a moment, and then seeing that he got nothing by the tone he had adopted he cried for quarter. "a little mercy, madame, as you are beautiful," he said, wooing her with his eyes. "do not plague me beyond what a man can bear. dismiss, i pray you, this good creature--whose charms do but set off yours as the star leads the eye to the moon--and make me the happiest man in the world by so much of your company as you will vouchsafe to give me." "that may be but a very little," she answered, letting her eyes fall coyly, and affecting to handle the tucker of her low ruff. but he saw that her lip twitched; and he could have sworn that she mocked him to suzanne, for the girl giggled. still by an effort he controlled his feelings. "why so cruel?" he murmured, in a tone meant for her alone, and with a look to match. "you were not so hard when i spoke with you in the gallery, two evenings ago, madame." "was i not?" she asked. "did i look like this? and this?" and, languishing, she looked at him very sweetly after two fashions. "something." "oh, then i meant nothing!" she retorted with sudden vivacity. and she made a face at him, laughing under his nose. "i do that when i mean nothing, monsieur! do you see? but you are gascon, and given, i fear, to flatter yourself." then he saw clearly that she played with him: and resentment, chagrin, pique got the better of his courtesy. "i flatter myself?" he cried, his voice choked with rage. "it may be i do now, madame, but did i flatter myself when you wrote me this note?" and he drew it out and flourished it in her face. "did i imagine when i read this? or is it not in your hand? it is a forgery, perhaps," he continued bitterly. "or it means nothing? nothing, this note bidding me be at madame st. lo's at an hour before midnight--it means nothing? at an hour before midnight, madame!" "on saturday night? the night before last night?" "on saturday night, the night before last night! but madame knows nothing of it? nothing, i suppose?" she shrugged her shoulders and smiled cheerfully on him. "oh yes, i wrote it," she said. "but what of that, m. de tignonville?" "what of that?" "yes, monsieur, what of that? did you think it was written out of love for you?" he was staggered for the moment by her coolness. "out of what, then?" he cried hoarsely. "out of what, then, if not out of love?" "why, out of pity, my little gentleman!" she answered sharply. "and trouble thrown away, it seems. love!" and she laughed so merrily and spontaneously it cut him to the heart. "no; but you said a dainty thing or two, and smiled a smile; and like a fool, and like a woman, i was sorry for the innocent calf that bleated so prettily on its way to the butcher's! and i would lock you up, and save your life, i thought, until the blood-letting was over. now you have it, m. de tignonville, and i hope you like it." like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of ill-fortune? like it, when the prospect of her charms had bribed him from the path of fortitude, when for her sake he had been false to his mistress, to his friends, to his faith, to his cause? like it, when he knew as he listened that all was lost, and nothing gained, not even this poor, unworthy, shameful compensation? like it? no wonder that words failed him, and he glared at her in rage, in misery, in shame. "oh, if you don't like it," she continued, tossing her head after a momentary pause, "then you should not have come! it is of no profit to glower at me, monsieur. you do not frighten me." "i would--i would to god i had not come!" he groaned. "and, i dare say, that you had never seen me--since you cannot win me!" "that too," he exclaimed. she was of an extraordinary levity, and at that, after staring at him a moment, she broke into shrill laughter. "a little more, and i'll send you to my cousin hannibal!" she said. "you do not know how anxious he is to see you. have you a mind," with a waggish look, "to play bride's man, m. de tignonville? or will you give away the bride? it is not too late, though soon it will be!" he winced, and from red grew pale. "what do you mean?" he stammered; and, averting his eyes in shame, seeing now all the littleness, all the baseness of his position, "has he--married her?" he continued. "ho, ho!" she cried in triumph. "i've hit you now, have i, monsieur? i've hit you!" and mocking him, "has he--married her?" she lisped. "no; but he will marry her, have no fear of that! he will marry her. he waits but to get a priest. would you like to see what he says?" she continued, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. "i had a note from him yesterday. would you like to see how welcome you'll be at the wedding?" and she flaunted a piece of paper before his eyes. "give it me," he said. she let him seize it the while she shrugged her shoulders. "it's your affair, not mine," she said. "see it if you like, and keep it if you like. cousin hannibal wastes few words." that was true, for the paper contained but a dozen or fifteen words, and an initial by way of signature. "i may need your shaveling to-morrow afternoon. send him, and tignonville in safeguard if he come.--h." "i can guess what use he has for a priest," she said. "it is not to confess him, i warrant. it's long, i fear, since hannibal told his beads." m. de tignonville swore. "i would i had the confessing of him!" he said between his teeth. she clapped her hands in glee. "why should you not?" she cried. "why should you not? 'tis time yet, since i am to send to-day and have not sent. will you be the shaveling to go confess or marry him?" and she laughed recklessly. "will you, m. de tignonville? the cowl will mask you as well as another, and pass you through the streets better than a cut sleeve. he will have both his wishes, lover and clerk in one then. and it will be pull monk, pull hannibal with a vengeance." tignonville gazed at her, and as he gazed courage and hope awoke in his eyes. what if, after all, he could undo the past? what if, after all, he could retrace the false step he had taken, and place himself again where he had been--by _her_ side? "if you meant it!" he exclaimed, his breath coming fast. "if you only meant what you say, madame." "if?" she answered, opening her eyes. "and why should i not mean it?" "because," he replied slowly, "cowl or no cowl, when i meet your cousin--" "'twill go hard with him?" she cried, with a mocking laugh. "and you think i fear for him. that is it, is it?" he nodded. "i fear just _so much_ for him!" she retorted with contempt. "just so much!" and coming a step nearer to tignonville she snapped her small white fingers under his nose. "do you see? no, m. de tignonville," she continued, "you do not know count hannibal if you think that he fears, or that any fear for him. if you will beard the lion in his den, the risk will be yours, not his!" the young man's face glowed. "i take the risk!" he cried. "and i thank you for the chance; that, madame, whatever betide. but--" "but what?" she asked, seeing that he hesitated and that his face fell. "if he afterwards learn that you have played him a trick," he said, "will he not punish you?" "punish me?" he nodded. madame laughed her high disdain. "you do not yet know hannibal de tavannes," she said. "he does not war with women." chapter xi. a bargain. it is the wont of the sex to snatch at an ell where an inch is offered, and to press an advantage in circumstances in which a man, acknowledging the claims of generosity, scruples to ask for more. the habit, now ingrained, may have sprung from long dependence on the male, and is one which a hundred instances, from the time of judith downwards, prove to be at its strongest where the need is greatest. when mademoiselle de vrillac came out of the hour-long swoon into which her lover's defection had cast her, the expectation of the worst was so strong upon her that she could not at once credit the respite which madame carlat hastened to announce. she could not believe that she still lay safe, in her own room above stairs; that she was in the care of her own servants, and that the chamber held no presence more hateful than that of the good woman who sat weeping beside her. as was to be expected, she came to herself sighing and shuddering, trembling with nervous exhaustion. she looked for _him_, as soon as she looked for any; and even when she had seen the door locked and double- locked, she doubted--doubted, and shook and hid herself in the hangings of the bed. the noise of the riot and rapine which prevailed in the city, and which reached the ear even in that locked room--and although the window, of paper, with an upper pane of glass, looked into a courtyard--was enough to drive the blood from a woman's cheeks. but it was fear of the house, not of the street, fear from within, not from without, which impelled the girl into the darkest corner and shook her wits. she could not believe that even this short respite was hers, until she had repeatedly heard the fact confirmed at madame carlat's mouth. "you are deceiving me!" she cried more than once. and each time she started up in fresh terror. "he never said that he would not return until to-morrow!" "he did, my lamb, he did!" the old woman answered with tears. "would i deceive you?" "he said he would not return?" "he said he would not return until to-morrow. you had until to-morrow, he said." "and then?" "he would come and bring the priest with him," madame carlat replied sorrowfully. "the priest? to-morrow!" mademoiselle cried. "the priest!" and she crouched anew with hot eyes behind the hangings of the bed, and, shivering, hid her face. but this for a time only. as soon as she had made certain of the respite, and that she had until the morrow, her courage rose, and with it the instinct of which mention has been made. count hannibal had granted a respite; short as it was, and no more than the barest humanity required, to grant one at all was not the act of the mere butcher who holds the trembling lamb, unresisting, in his hands. it was an act--no more, again be it said, than humanity required--and yet an act which bespoke an expectation of some return, of some correlative advantage. it was not in the part of the mere brigand. something had been granted. something short of the utmost in the captor's power had been exacted. he had shown that there were things he would not do. then might not something more be won from him? a further delay, another point; something, no matter what, which could be turned to advantage? with the brigand it is not possible to bargain. but who gives a little may give more; who gives a day may give a week; who gives a week may give a month. and a month? her heart leapt up. a month seemed a lifetime, an eternity, to her who had but until to-morrow! yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less brave. to obtain aught from tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him _before_ that to-morrow which meant so much to her. it was necessary, in a word, to run some risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not hesitate. it might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. in that case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case. the position of the window, while it increased the women's safety, debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that which their ears afforded them. they had no means of judging whether tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in the work of murder. madame carlat, indeed, had no desire to know anything. in that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. to her, therefore, the notion of sending for tavannes, or communicating with him, came as a thunderbolt. was her mistress mad? did she wish to court her fate? to reach tavannes they must apply to his riders, for carlat and the men-servants were confined above. those riders were grim, brutal men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. and madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold. and yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. as we now know. for it was noon--or a little more--of sunday, august the twenty-fourth, "a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder." from the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of notre dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and tignonville crouched in his haymow--huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the seine. on the river bank spire niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books. in their houses, ramus the scholar and goujon the sculptor--than whom paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered like sheep; and in the valley of misery, now the quai de la megisserie, seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons. nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a little later, what matters it?--m. de tignonville's own cousin, madame d'yverne, the darling of the louvre the day before, perished in the hands of the mob; and the sister of m. de taverny, equally ill-fated, died in the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets. madame carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. but mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded. "if i am to be monsieur's wife," she said with quivering nostrils, "shall i fear his servants?" and opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called. the man who answered was a norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low- browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the embodiment of the women's apprehensions. moreover, his _patois_ of the cider-land was little better than german to them; their southern, softer tongue was sheer italian to him. but he seemed not ill-disposed, or mademoiselle's air overawed him; and presently she made him understand, and with a nod he descended to carry her message. then mademoiselle's heart began to beat; and beat more quickly when she heard _his_ step--alas! she knew it already, knew it from all others--on the stairs. the table was set, the card must be played, to win or lose. it might be that with the low opinion he held of women he would think her reconciled to her lot; he would think this an overture, a step towards kinder treatment, one more proof of the inconstancy of the lower and the weaker sex, made to be men's playthings. and at that thought her eyes grew hot with rage. but if it were so, she must still put up with it. she must still put up with it! she had sent for him, and he was coming--he was at the door! he entered, and she breathed more freely. for once his face lacked the sneer, the look of smiling possession, which she had come to know and hate. it was grave, expectant, even suspicious; still harsh and dark, akin, as she now observed, to the low-browed, furrowed face of the rider who had summoned him. but the offensive look was gone, and she could breathe. he closed the door behind him, but he did not advance into the room. "at your pleasure, mademoiselle?" he said simply. "you sent for me, i think." she was on her feet, standing before him with something of the submissiveness of roxana before her conqueror. "i did," she said; and stopped at that, her hand to her side as if she could not continue. but presently in a low voice, "i have heard," she went on, "what you said, monsieur, after i lost consciousness." "yes?" he said; and was silent. nor did he lose his watchful look. "i am obliged to you for your thought of me," she continued in a faint voice, "and i shall be still further obliged--i speak to you thus quickly and thus early--if you will grant me a somewhat longer time." "do you mean--if i will postpone our marriage?" "yes, monsieur." "it is impossible!" "do not say that," she cried, raising her voice impulsively. "i appeal to your generosity. and for a short, a very short, time only." "it is impossible," he answered quietly. "and for reasons, mademoiselle. in the first place, i can more easily protect my wife. in the second, i am even now summoned to the louvre, and should be on my way thither. by to-morrow evening, unless i am mistaken in the business on which i am required, i shall be on my way to a distant province with royal letters. it is essential that our marriage take place before i go." "why?" she asked stubbornly. he shrugged his shoulders. "why?" he repeated. "can you ask, mademoiselle, after the events of last night? because, if you please, i do not wish to share the fate of m. de tignonville. because in these days life is uncertain, and death too certain. because it was our turn last night, and it may be the turn of your friends--to-morrow night!" "then some have escaped?" she cried. he smiled. "i am glad to find you so shrewd," he replied. "in an honest wife it is an excellent quality. yes, mademoiselle; one or two." "who? who? i pray you tell me." "m. de montgomery, who slept beyond the river, for one; and the vidame, and some with him. m. de biron, whom i count a huguenot, and who holds the arsenal in the king's teeth, for another. and a few more. enough, in a word, mademoiselle, to keep us wakeful. it is impossible, therefore, for me to postpone the fulfilment of your promise." "a promise on conditions!" she retorted, in rage that she could win no more. and every line of her splendid figure, every tone of her voice flamed sudden, hot rebellion. "i do not go for nothing! you gave me the lives of all in the house, monsieur! of all!" she repeated with passion. "and all are not here! before i marry you, you must show me m. de tignonville alive and safe!" he shrugged his shoulders. "he has taken himself off," he said. "it is naught to me what happens to him now." "it is all to me!" she retorted. at that he glared at her, the veins of his forehead swelling suddenly. but after a seeming struggle with himself he put the insult by, perhaps for future reckoning and account. "i did what i could," he said sullenly. "had i willed it he had died there and then in the room below. i gave him his life. if he has risked it anew and lost it, it is naught to me." "it was his life you gave me," she repeated stubbornly. "his life--and the others. but that is not all," she continued; "you promised me a minister." he nodded, smiling sourly to himself, as if this confirmed a suspicion he had entertained. "or a priest," he said. "no, a minister." "if one could be obtained. if not, a priest." "no, it was to be at my will; and i will a minister! i will a minister!" she cried passionately. "show me m. de tignonville alive, and bring me a minister of my faith, and i will keep my promise, m. de tavannes. have no fear of that. but otherwise, i will not." "you will not?" he cried. "you will not?" "no!" "you will not marry me?" "no!" the moment she had said it fear seized her, and she could have fled from him, screaming. the flash of his eyes, the sudden passion of his face, burned themselves into her memory. she thought for a second that he would spring on her and strike her down. yet though the women behind her held their breath, she faced him, and did not quail; and to that, she fancied, she owed it that he controlled himself. "you will not?" he repeated, as if he could not understand such resistance to his will--as if he could not credit his ears. "you will not?" but after that, when he had said it three times, he laughed; a laugh, however, with a snarl in it that chilled her blood. "you bargain, do you?" he said. "you will have the last tittle of the price, will you? and have thought of this and that to put me off, and to gain time until your lover, who is all to you, comes to save you? oh, clever girl! clever! but have you thought where you stand--woman? do you know that if i gave the word to my people they would treat you as the commonest baggage that tramps the froidmantel? do you know that it rests with me to save you, or to throw you to the wolves whose ravening you hear?" and he pointed to the window. "minister? priest?" he continued grimly. "_mon dieu_, mademoiselle, i stand astonished at my moderation. you chatter to me of ministers and priests, and the one or the other, when it might be neither! when you are as much and as hopelessly in my power to-day as the wench in my kitchen! you! you flout me, and make terms with me! you!" and he came so near her with his dark harsh face, his tone rose so menacing on the last word, that her nerves, shattered before, gave way, and, unable to control herself, she flinched with a low cry, thinking he would strike her. he did not follow, nor move to follow; but he laughed a low laugh of content. and his eyes devoured her. "ho! ho!" he said. "we are not so brave as we pretend to be, it seems. and yet you dared to chaffer with me? you thought to thwart me--tavannes! _mon dieu_, mademoiselle, to what did you trust? to what did you trust? ay, and to what do you trust?" she knew that by the movement which fear had forced from her she had jeopardized everything. that she stood to lose all and more than all which she had thought to win by a bold front. a woman less brave, of a spirit less firm, would have given up the contest, and have been glad to escape so. but this woman, though her bloodless face showed that she knew what cause she had for fear, and though her heart was indeed sick with terror, held her ground at the point to which she had retreated. she played her last card. "to what do i trust?" she muttered with trembling lips. "yes, mademoiselle," he answered between his teeth. "to what do you trust--that you play with tavannes?" "to his honour, monsieur," she answered faintly. "and to your promise." he looked at her with his mocking smile. "and yet," he sneered, "you thought a moment ago that i should strike you. you thought that i should beat you! and now it is my honour and my promise! oh, clever, clever, mademoiselle! 'tis so that women make fools of men. i knew that something of this kind was on foot when you sent for me, for i know women and their ways. but, let me tell you, it is an ill time to speak of honour when the streets are red! and of promises when the king's word is 'no faith with a heretic!'" "yet you will keep yours," she said bravely. he did not answer at once, and hope which was almost dead in her breast began to recover; nay, presently sprang up erect. for the man hesitated, it was evident; he brooded with a puckered brow and gloomy eyes; an observer might have fancied that he traced pain as well as doubt in his face. at last-- "there is a thing," he said slowly and with a sort of glare at her, "which, it may be, you have not reckoned. you press me now, and will stand on your terms and your conditions, your _ifs_ and your _unlesses_! you will have the most from me, and the bargain and a little beside the bargain! but i would have you think if you are wise. bethink you how it will be between us when you are my wife--if you press me so now, mademoiselle. how will it sweeten things then? how will it soften them? and to what, i pray you, will you trust for fair treatment then, if you will be so against me now?" she shuddered. "to the mercy of my husband," she said in a low voice. and her chin sank on her breast. "you will be content to trust to that?" he answered grimly. and his tone and the lifting of his brow promised little clemency. "bethink you! 'tis your rights now, and your terms, mademoiselle! and then it will be only my mercy--madame." "i am content," she muttered faintly. "and the lord have mercy on my soul, is what you would add," he retorted, "so much trust have you in my mercy! and you are right! you are right, since you have played this trick on me. but as you will. if you will have it so, have it so! you shall stand on your conditions now; you shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the pact. but afterwards--afterwards, madame de tavannes--" he did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her petition, mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden on her arms, had burst into violent weeping. her hair, hastily knotted up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white. the man stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure. but he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about. first one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he seemed about to add something. but he did not speak. the sentence he had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of orations. "_afterwards, madame de tavannes_!" chapter xii. in the hall of the louvre. it is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for mademoiselle which had seized count hannibal be deemed unworthy of the higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one. as tavannes, after leaving mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes, beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the gothic spires of his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder. he saw paris as a city sacked; a slaughter-house, where for a week a masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments, broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. but he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only tignonville; tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office. probably it was to this that one man hunted through paris owed his escape that day. he sprang from a narrow passage full in tavannes' view, and, hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly--as a hare will run when chased--along the street to meet count hannibal's company. the man's face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his breath hissed from him as he ran. his pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by count hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead. and dead he would have been within thirty seconds had tavannes played his part. but his thoughts were elsewhere. either he took the poor wretch for tignonville, or for the minister on whom his mind was running; anyway he suffered him to slip under the belly of his horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped the pursuers in their tracks. the quarry slipped into an alley and vanished. the hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed inclined to resent the mistake. but tavannes smiled; a broader smile lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside. there are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of others excite pity. tavannes' lip curled as he rode on through the streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a king twenty-two years old had made of his capital. his lip curled most of all when he came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication between city and palace cut off. such a proof of unkingly panic, in a crisis wrought by the king himself, astonished him less a few minutes later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered the courtyard of the fortress. within and about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing. the weltering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated and restless movements. to a calm eye they seemed like men acting in a nightmare. their fitful talk and disjointed gestures, their sweating brows and damp hair, no less than the sullen, brooding silence of one here and there, bespoke the abnormal and the terrible. there were livid faces among them, and twitching cheeks, and some who swallowed much; and some again who bared their crimson arms and bragged insanely of the part they had played. but perhaps the most striking thing was the thirst, the desire, the demand for news, and for fresh excitement. in the space of time it took him to pass through them, count hannibal heard a dozen rumours of what was passing in the city; that montgomery and the gentlemen who had slept beyond the river had escaped on horseback in their shirts; that guise had been shot in the pursuit; that he had captured the vidame de chartres and all the fugitives; that he had never left the city; that he was even then entering by the porte de bucy. again that biron had surrendered the arsenal, that he had threatened to fire on the city, that he was dead, that with the huguenots who had escaped he was marching on the louvre, that-- and then tavannes passed out of the blinding sunshine, and out of earshot of their babble, and had plain in his sight across the quadrangle, the new facade, italian, graceful, of the renaissance; which rose in smiling contrast with the three dark gothic sides that now, the central tower removed, frowned unimpeded at one another. but what was this which lay along the foot of the new italian wall? this, round which some stood, gazing curiously, while others strewed fresh sand about it, or after long downward-looking glanced up to answer the question of a person at a window? death; and over death--death in its most cruel aspect--a cloud of buzzing, whirling flies, and the smell, never to be forgotten, of much spilled blood. from a doorway hard by came shrill bursts of hysterical laughter; and with the laughter plumped out, even as tavannes crossed the court, a young girl, thrust forth it seemed by her fellows, for she turned about and struggled as she came. once outside she hung back, giggling and protesting, half willing, half unwilling; and meeting tavannes' eye thrust her way in again with a whirl of her petticoats, and a shriek. but before he had taken four paces she was out again. he paused to see who she was, and his thoughts involuntarily went back to the woman he had left weeping in the upper room. then he turned about again and stood to count the dead. he identified piles, identified pardaillan, identified soubise--whose corpse the murderers had robbed of the last rag--and touchet and st. galais. he made his reckoning with an unmoved face, and with the same face stopped and stared, and moved from one to another; had he not seen the slaughter about "_le petit homme_" at jarnac, and the dead of three pitched fields? but when a bystander, smirking obsequiously, passed him a jest on soubise, and with his finger pointed the jest, he had the same hard unmoved face for the gibe as for the dead. and the jester shrank away, abashed and perplexed by his stare and his reticence. halfway up the staircase to the great gallery or guard-room above, count hannibal found his brother, the marshal, huddled together in drunken slumber on a seat in a recess. in the gallery to which he passed on without awakening him, a crowd of courtiers and ladies, with arquebusiers and captains of the quarters, walked to and fro, talking in whispers; or peeped over shoulders towards the inner end of the hall, where the querulous voice of the king rose now and again above the hum. as tavannes moved that way, nancay, in the act of passing out, booted and armed for the road, met him and almost jostled him. "ah, well met, m. le comte," he sneered, with as much hostility as he dared betray. "the king has asked for you twice." "i am going to him. and you? whither in such a hurry, m. nancay?" "to chatillon." "on pleasant business?" "enough that it is on the king's!" nancay replied, with unexpected temper. "i hope that you may find yours as pleasant!" he added with a grin. and he went on. the gleam of malice in the man's eye warned tavannes to pause. he looked round for some one who might be in the secret, saw the provost of the merchants, and approached him. "what's amiss, m. le charron?" he asked. "is not the affair going as it should?" "'tis about the arsenal, m. le comte," the provost answered busily. "m. de biron is harbouring the vermin there. he has lowered the portcullis and pointed his culverins over the gate and will not yield it or listen to reason. the king would bring him to terms, but no one will venture himself inside with the message. rats in a trap, you know, bite hard, and care little whom they bite." "i begin to understand." "precisely, m. le comte. his majesty would have sent m. de nancay. but he elected to go to chatillon, to seize the young brood there. the admiral's children, you comprehend." "whose teeth are not yet grown! he was wise." "to be sure, m. de tavannes, to be sure. but the king was annoyed, and on top of that came a priest with complaints, and if i may make so bold as to advise you, you will not--" but tavannes fancied that he had caught the gist of the difficulty, and with a nod he moved on; and so he missed the warning which the other had it in his mind to give. a moment and he reached the inner circle, and there halted, disconcerted, nay taken aback. for as soon as he showed his face, the king, who was pacing to and fro like a caged beast, before a table at which three clerks knelt on cushions, espied him, and stood still. with a glare of something like madness in his eyes, charles raised his hand, and with a shaking finger singled him out. "so, by g-d, you are there!" he cried, with a volley of blasphemy. and he signed to those about count hannibal to stand away from him. "you are there, are you? and you are not afraid to show your face? i tell you, it's you and such as you bring us into contempt! so that it is said everywhere guise does all and serves god, and we follow because we must! it's you, and such as you, are stumbling-blocks to our good folk of paris! are you traitor, sirrah?" he continued with passion, "or are you of our brother alencon's opinions, that you traverse our orders to the damnation of your soul and our discredit? are you traitor? or are you heretic? or what are you? god in heaven, will you answer me, man, or shall i send you where you will find your tongue?" "i know not of what your majesty accuses me," count hannibal answered, with a scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulders. "i? 'tis not i," the king retorted. his hair hung damp on his brow, and he dried his hands continually; while his gestures had the ill-measured and eccentric violence of an epileptic. "here, you! speak, father, and confound him!" then tavannes discovered on the farther side of the circle the priest whom his brother had ridden down that morning. father pezelay's pale hatchet-face gleamed paler than ordinary; and a great bandage hid one temple and part of his face. but below the bandage the flame of his eyes was not lessened, nor the venom of his tongue. to the king he had come--for no other would deal with his violent opponent; to the king's presence! and, as he prepared to blast his adversary, now his chance was come, his long lean frame, in its narrow black cassock, seemed to grow longer, leaner, more baleful, more snake-like. he stood there a fitting representative of the dark fanaticism of paris, which charles and his successor--the last of a doomed line--alternately used as tool or feared as master; and to which the most debased and the most immoral of courts paid, in its sober hours, a vile and slavish homage. even in the midst of the drunken, shameless courtiers--who stood, if they stood for anything, for that other influence of the day, the renaissance--he was to be reckoned with; and count hannibal knew it. he knew that in the eyes not of charles only, but of nine out of ten who listened to him, a priest was more sacred than a virgin, and a tonsure than all the virtues of spotless innocence. "shall the king give with one hand and withdraw with the other?" the priest began, in a voice hoarse yet strident, a voice borne high above the crowd on the wings of passion. "shall he spare of the best of the men and the maidens whom god hath doomed, whom the church hath devoted, whom the king hath given? is the king's hand shortened or his word annulled that a man does as he forbiddeth and leaves undone what he commandeth? is god mocked? woe, woe unto you," he continued, turning swiftly, arms uplifted, towards tavannes, "who please yourself with the red and white of their maidens and take of the best of the spoil, sparing where the king's word is 'spare not'! who strike at holy church with the sword! who--" "answer, sirrah!" charles cried, spurning the floor in his fury. he could not listen long to any man. "is it so? is it so? do you do these things?" count hannibal shrugged his shoulders and was about to answer, when a thick, drunken voice rose from the crowd behind him. "is it what? eh! is it what?" it droned. and a figure with bloodshot eyes, disordered beard, and rich clothes awry, forced its way through the obsequious circle. it was marshal tavannes. "eh, what? you'd beard the king, would you?" he hiccoughed truculently, his eyes on father pezelay, his hand on his sword. "were you a priest ten times--" "silence!" charles cried, almost foaming with rage at this fresh interruption. "it's not he, fool! 'tis your pestilent brother." "who touches my brother touches tavannes!" the marshal answered with a menacing gesture. he was sober enough, it appeared, to hear what was said, but not to comprehend its drift; and this caused a titter, which immediately excited his rage. he turned and seized the nearest laugher by the ear. "insolent!" he cried. "i will teach you to laugh when the king speaks! puppy! who laughs at his majesty or touches my brother has to do with tavannes!" the king, in a rage that almost deprived him of speech, stamped the floor twice. "idiot!" he cried. "imbecile! let the man go! 'tis not he! 'tis your heretic brother, i tell you! by all the saints! by the body of--" and he poured forth a flood of oaths. "will you listen to me and be silent! will you--your brother--" "if he be not your majesty's servant, i will kill him with this sword!" the irrepressible marshal struck in. "as i have killed ten to-day! ten!" and, staggering back, he only saved himself from falling by clutching chicot about the neck. "steady, my pretty marechale!" the jester cried, chucking him under the chin with one hand, while with some difficulty he supported him with the other--for he, too, was far from sober-- "pretty margot, toy with me, maiden bashful--" "silence!" charles cried, darting forth his long arms in a fury of impatience. "god, have i killed every man of sense? are you all gone mad? silence! do you hear? silence! and let me hear what he has to say," with a movement towards count hannibal. "and look you, sirrah," he continued with a curse, "see that it be to the purpose!" "if it be a question of your majesty's service," tavannes answered, "and obedience to your majesty's orders, i am deeper in it than he who stands there!" with a sign towards the priest. "i give my word for that. and i will prove it." "how, sir?" charles cried. "how, how, how? how will you prove it?" "by doing for you, sire, what he will not do!" tavannes answered scornfully. "let him stand out, and if he will serve his church as i will serve my king--" "blaspheme not!" cried the priest. "chatter not!" tavannes retorted hardily, "but do! better is he," he continued, "who takes a city than he who slays women! nay, sire," he went on hurriedly, seeing the king start, "be not angry, but hear me! you would send to biron, to the arsenal? you seek a messenger, sire? then let the good father be the man. let him take your majesty's will to biron, and let him see the grand master face to face, and bring him to reason. or, if he will not, i will! let that be the test!" "ay, ay!" cried marshal de tavannes, "you say well, brother! let him!" "and if he will not, i will!" tavannes repeated. "let that be the test, sire." the king wheeled suddenly to father pezelay. "you hear, father?" he said. "what say you?" the priest's face grew sallow, and more sallow. he knew that the walls of the arsenal sheltered men whose hands no convention and no order of biron's would keep from his throat, were the grim gate and frowning culverins once passed; men who had seen their women and children, their wives and sisters immolated at his word, and now asked naught but to stand face to face and eye to eye with him and tear him limb from limb before they died! the challenge, therefore, was one-sided and unfair; but for that very reason it shook him. the astuteness of the man who, taken by surprise, had conceived this snare filled him with dread. he dared not accept, and he scarcely dared to refuse the offer. and meantime the eyes of the courtiers, who grinned in their beards, were on him. at length he spoke, but it was in a voice which had lost its boldness and assurance. "it is not for me to clear myself," he cried, shrill and violent, "but for those who are accused, for those who have belied the king's word, and set at nought his christian orders. for you, count hannibal, heretic, or no better than heretic, it is easy to say 'i go.' for you go but to your own, and your own will receive you!" "then you will not go?" with a jeer. "at your command? no!" the priest shrieked with passion. "his majesty knows whether i serve him." "i know," charles cried, stamping his foot in a fury, "that you all serve me when it pleases you! that you are all sticks of the same faggot, wood of the same bundle, hell-babes in your own business, and sluggards in mine! you kill to-day and you'll lay it to me to-morrow! ay, you will! you will!" he repeated frantically, and drove home the asseveration with a fearful oath. "the dead are as good servants as you! foucauld was better! foucauld? foucauld? ah, my god!" and abruptly in presence of them all, with the sacred name, which he so often defiled, on his lips, charles turned, and covering his face burst into childish weeping; while a great silence fell on all--on bussy with the blood of his cousin resnel on his point, on fervacques, the betrayer of his friend, on chicot, the slayer of his rival, on cocconnas the cruel--on men with hands unwashed from the slaughter, and on the shameless women who lined the walls; on all who used this sobbing man for their stepping-stone, and, to attain their ends and gain their purposes, trampled his dull soul in blood and mire. one looked at another in consternation. fear grew in eyes that a moment before were bold; cheeks turned pale that a moment before were hectic. if _he_ changed as rapidly as this, if so little dependence could be placed on his moods or his resolutions, who was safe? whose turn might it not be to-morrow? or who might not be held accountable for the deeds done this day? many, from whom remorse had seemed far distant a while before, shuddered and glanced behind them. it was as if the dead who lay stark without the doors, ay, and the countless dead of paris, with whose shrieks the air was laden, had flocked in shadowy shape into the hall; and there, standing beside their murderers, had whispered with their cold breath in the living ears, "a reckoning! a reckoning! as i am, thou shalt be!" it was count hannibal who broke the spell and the silence, and with his hand on his brother's shoulder stood forward. "nay, sire," he cried, in a voice which rang defiant in the roof, and seemed to challenge alike the living and the dead, "if all deny the deed, yet will not i! what we have done we have done! so be it! the dead are dead! so be it! for the rest, your majesty has still one servant who will do your will, one soldier whose life is at your disposition! i have said i will go, and i go, sire. and you, churchman," he continued, turning in bitter scorn to the priest, "do you go too--to church! to church, shaveling! go, watch and pray for us! fast and flog for us! whip those shoulders, whip them till the blood runs down! for it is all, it seems, you will do for your king!" charles turned. "silence, railer!" he said in a broken voice. "sow no more troubles! already," a shudder shook his tall ungainly form, "i see blood, blood, blood everywhere! blood? ah, god, shall i from this time see anything else? but there is no turning back. there is no undoing. so, do you go to biron. and do you," he went on, sullenly addressing marshal tavannes, "take him and tell him what it is needful he should know." "'tis done, sire!" the marshal cried, with a hiccough. "come, brother!" but when the two, the courtiers making quick way for them, had passed down the hall to the door, the marshal tapped hannibal's sleeve. "it was touch and go," he muttered; it was plain he had been more sober than he seemed. "mind you, it does not do to thwart our little master in his fits! remember that another time, or worse will come of it, brother. as it is, you came out of it finely and tripped that black devil's heels to a marvel! but you won't be so mad as to go to biron?" "yes," count hannibal answered coldly. "i shall go." "better not! better not!" the marshal answered. "'twill be easier to go in than to come out--with a whole throat! have you taken wild cats in the hollow of a tree? the young first, and then the she-cat? well, it will be that! take my advice, brother. have after montgomery, if you please, ride with nancay to chatillon--he is mounting now--go where you please out of paris, but don't go there! biron hates us, hates me. and for the king, if he do not see you for a few days, 'twill blow over in a week." count hannibal shrugged his shoulders. "no," he said, "i shall go." the marshal stared a moment. "morbleu!" he said, "why? 'tis not to please the king, i know. what do you think to find there, brother?" "a minister," hannibal answered gently. "i want one with life in him, and they are scarce in the open. so i must to covert after him." and, twitching his sword-belt a little nearer to his hand, he passed across the court to the gate, and to his horses. the marshal went back laughing, and, slapping his thigh as he entered the hall, jostled by accident a gentleman who was passing out. "what is it?" the gascon cried hotly; for it was chicot he had jostled. "who touches my brother touches tavannes!" the marshal hiccoughed. and, smiting his thigh anew, he went off into another fit of laughter. chapter xiii. diplomacy. where the old wall of paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the seine and the ramparts beyond the rue st. pol wore at this date an aspect typical of the troubles of the time. along the waterside the gloomy old palace of st. pol, once the residence of the mad king charles the sixth--and his wife, the abandoned isabeau de baviere--sprawled its maze of mouldering courts and ruined galleries; a dreary monument of the gothic days which were passing from france. its spacious curtilage and dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the rue st. antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of the bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where st. pol ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall. this second palace was the hotel des tournelles, a fantastic medley of turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the days of the english domination; it had been the abode of the regent bedford. from his time it had remained for a hundred years the town residence of the kings of france; but the death of henry ii., slain in its lists by the lance of the same montgomery who was this day fleeing for his life before guise, had given his widow a distaste for it. catherine de medicis, her sons, and the court had abandoned it; already its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats played where kings had slept; and in "our palace of the tournelles" reigned only silence and decay. unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad, the grim shade of the eleventh louis sometimes walked in its desolate precincts. in the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from the rest of paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken palaces, stood the arsenal. destroyed in great part by the explosion of a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of billy, and its proximity to the bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of paris. it was the appanage of the master of the ordnance, and within its walls m. de biron, a huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm. during the day he had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led them to his gate; and as night fell--on such a carnage as the hapless city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the armagnacs, one hundred and fifty-four years earlier--the glow of his matches through the dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls, indicated that there was still one place in paris where the king's will did not run. in comparison of the disorder which prevailed in the city, a deadly quiet reigned here; a stillness so chill that a timid man must have stood and hesitated to approach. but a stranger who about nightfall rode down the street towards the entrance, a single footman running at his stirrup, only nodded a stern approval of the preparations. as he drew nearer he cast an attentive eye this way and that; nor stayed until a hoarse challenge brought him up when he had come within six horses' lengths of the arsenal gate. he reined up then, and raising his voice, asked in clear tones for m. de biron. "go," he continued boldly, "tell the grand master that one from the king is here, and would speak with him." "from the king of france?" the officer on the gate asked. "surely! is there more than one king in france?" a curse and a bitter cry of "king? king herod!" were followed by a muttered discussion that, in the ears of one of the two who waited in the gloom below, boded little good. the two could descry figures moving to and fro before the faint red light of the smouldering matches; and presently a man on the gate kindled a torch, and held it so as to fling its light downward. the stranger's attendant cowered behind the horse. "have a care, my lord!" he whispered. "they are aiming at us!" if so the rider's bold front and unmoved demeanour gave them pause. presently, "i will send for the grand master" the man who had spoken before announced. "in whose name, monsieur?" "no matter," the stranger answered. "say, one from the king." "you are alone?" "i shall enter alone." the assurance seemed to be satisfactory, for the man answered "good!" and after a brief delay a wicket in the gate was opened, the portcullis creaked upward, and a plank was thrust across the ditch. the horseman waited until the preparations were complete; then he slid to the ground, threw his rein to the servant, and boldly walked across. in an instant he left behind him the dark street, the river, and the sounds of outrage, which the night breeze bore from the farther bank, and found himself within the vaulted gateway, in a bright glare of light, the centre of a ring of gleaming eyes and angry faces. the light blinded him for a few seconds; but the guards, on their side, were in no better case. for the stranger was masked; and in their ignorance who it was looked at them through the slits in the black velvet they stared, disconcerted, and at a loss. there were some there with naked weapons in their hands who would have struck him through had they known who he was; and more who would have stood aside while the deed was done. but the uncertainty--that and the masked man's tone paralyzed them. for they reflected that he might be anyone. conde, indeed, stood too small, but navarre, if he lived, might fill that cloak; or guise, or anjou, or the king himself. and while some would not have scrupled to strike the blood royal, more would have been quick to protect and avenge it. and so before the dark uncertainty of the mask, before the riddle of the smiling eyes which glittered through the slits, they stared irresolute; until a hand, the hand of one bolder than his fellows, was raised to pluck away the screen. the unknown dealt the fellow a buffet with his fist. "down, rascal!" he said hoarsely. "and you"--to the officer--"show me instantly to m. de biron!" but the lieutenant, who stood in fear of his men, looked at him doubtfully. "nay," he said, "not so fast!" and one of the others, taking the lead, cried, "no! we may have no need of m. de biron. your name, monsieur, first." with a quick movement the stranger gripped the officer's wrist. "tell your master," he said, "that he who clasped his wrist _thus_ on the night of pentecost is here, and would speak with him! and say, mark you, that i will come to him, not he to me!" the sign and the tone imposed upon the boldest. two-thirds of the watch were huguenots, who burned to avenge the blood of their fellows; and these, overriding their officer, had agreed to deal with the intruder, if a papegot, without recourse to the grand master, whose moderation they dreaded. a knife-thrust in the ribs, and another body in the ditch--why not, when such things were done outside? but even these doubted now; and m. peridol, the lieutenant, reading in the eyes of his men the suspicions which he had himself conceived, was only anxious to obey, if they would let him. so gravely was he impressed, indeed, by the bearing of the unknown that he turned when he had withdrawn, and came back to assure himself that the men meditated no harm in his absence; nor until he had exchanged a whisper with one of them would he leave them and go. while he was gone on his errand the envoy leaned against the wall of the gateway, and, with his chin sunk on his breast and his mind fallen into reverie, seemed unconscious of the dark glances of which he was the target. he remained in this position until the officer came back, followed by a man with a lanthorn. their coming roused the unknown, who, invited to follow peridol, traversed two courts without remark, and in the same silence entered a building in the extreme eastern corner of the enceinte abutting on the ruined tour de billy. here, in an upper floor, the governor of the arsenal had established his temporary lodging. the chamber into which the stranger was introduced betrayed the haste in which it had been prepared for its occupant. two silver lamps which hung from the beams of the unceiled roof shed light on a medley of arms and inlaid armour, of parchments, books and steel caskets, which encumbered not the tables only, but the stools and chests that, after the fashion of that day, stood formally along the arras. in the midst of the disorder, on the bare floor, walked the man who, more than any other, had been instrumental in drawing the huguenots to paris--and to their doom. it was no marvel that the events of the day, the surprise and horror, still rode his mind; nor wonderful that even he, who passed for a model of stiffness and reticence, betrayed for once the indignation which filled his breast. until the officer had withdrawn and closed the door he did, indeed, keep silence; standing beside the table and eyeing his visitor with a lofty porte and a stern glance. but the moment he was assured that they were alone he spoke. "your highness may unmask now," he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. "yet were you well advised to take the precaution, since you had hardly come at me in safety without it. had those who keep the gate seen you, i would not have answered for your highness's life. the more shame," he continued vehemently, "on the deeds of this day which have compelled the brother of a king of france to hide his face in his own capital and in his own fortress. for i dare to say, monsieur, what no other will say, now the admiral is dead. you have brought back the days of the armagnacs. you have brought bloody days and an evil name on france, and i pray god that you may not pay in your turn what you have exacted. but if you continue to be advised by m. de guise, this i will say, monsieur"--and his voice fell low and stern. "burgundy slew orleans, indeed; but he came in his turn to the bridge of montereau." "you take me for monsieur?" the unknown asked. and it was plain that he smiled under his mask. biron's face altered. "i take you," he answered sharply, "for him whose sign you sent me." "the wisest are sometimes astray," the other answered with a low laugh. and he took off his mask. the grand master started back, his eyes sparkling with anger. "m. de tavannes?" he cried, and for a moment he was silent in sheer astonishment. then, striking his hand on the table, "what means this trickery?" he asked. "it is of the simplest," tavannes answered coolly. "and yet, as you just now said, i had hardly come at you without it. and i had to come at you. no, m. de biron," he added quickly, as biron in a rage laid his hand on a bell which stood beside him on the table, "you cannot that way undo what is done." "i can at least deliver you," the grand master answered, in heat, "to those who will deal with you as you have dealt with us and ours." "it will avail you nothing," count hannibal replied soberly. "for see here, grand master, i come from the king. if you are at war with him, and hold his fortress in his teeth, i am his ambassador and sacrosanct. if you are at peace with him and hold it at his will, i am his servant, and safe also." "at peace and safe?" biron cried, his voice trembling with indignation. "and are those safe or at peace who came here trusting to _his_ word, who lay in his palace and slept in his beds? where are they, and how have they fared, that you dare appeal to the law of nations, or he to the loyalty of biron? and for you to beard me, whose brother to-day hounded the dogs of this vile city on the noblest in france, who have leagued yourself with a crew of foreigners to do a deed which will make our country stink in the nostrils of the world when we are dust! you, to come here and talk of peace and safety! m. de tavannes"--and he struck his hand on the table--"you are a bold man. i know why the king had a will to send you, but i know not why you had the will to come." "that i will tell you later," count hannibal answered coolly. "for the king, first. my message is brief, m. de biron. have you a mind to hold the scales in france?" "between?" biron asked contemptuously. "between the lorrainers and the huguenots." the grand master scowled fiercely. "i have played the go-between once too often," he growled. "it is no question of going between, it is a question of holding between," tavannes answered coolly. "it is a question--but, in a word, have you a mind, m. de biron, to be governor of rochelle? the king, having dealt the blow that has been struck to-day, looks to follow up severity, as a wise ruler should, with indulgence. and to quiet the minds of the rochellois he would set over them a ruler at once acceptable to them--or war must come of it--and faithful to his majesty. such a man, m. de biron, will in such a post be master of the kingdom; for he will hold the doors of janus, and as he bridles his sea-dogs, or unchains them, there will be peace or war in france." "is all that from the king's mouth?" biron asked with sarcasm. but his passion had died down. he was grown thoughtful, suspicious; he eyed the other intently as if he would read his heart. "the offer is his, and the reflections are mine," tavannes answered dryly. "let me add one more. the admiral is dead. the king of navarre and the prince of conde are prisoners. who is now to balance the italians and the guises? the grand master--if he be wise and content to give the law to france from the citadel of rochelle." biron stared at the speaker in astonishment at his frankness. "you are a bold man," he cried at last. "but _timeo danaos et dona ferentes_," he continued bitterly. "you offer, sir, too much." "the offer is the king's." "and the conditions? the price?" "that you remain quiet, m. de biron." "in the arsenal?" "in the arsenal. and do not too openly counteract the king's will. that is all." the grand master looked puzzled. "i will give up no one," he said. "no one! let that be understood." "the king requires no one." a pause. then, "does m. de guise know of the offer?" biron inquired; and his eye grew bright. he hated the guises and was hated by them. it was _there_ he was a huguenot. "he has gone far to-day," count hannibal answered dryly. "and if no worse come of it should be content. madame catherine knows of it." the grand master was aware that marshal tavannes depended on the queen- mother; and he shrugged his shoulders. "ay, 'tis like her policy," he muttered. "'tis like her!" and pointing his guest to a cushioned chest which stood against the wall, he sat down in a chair beside the table and thought awhile, his brow wrinkled, his eyes dreaming. by-and-by he laughed sourly. "you have lighted the fire," he said, "and would fain i put it out." "we would have you hinder it spreading." "you have done the deed and are loth to pay the blood-money. that is it, is it? "we prefer to pay it to m. de biron," count hannibal answered civilly. again the grand master was silent awhile. at length he looked up and fixed tavannes with eyes keen as steel. "what is behind?" he growled. "say, man, what is it? what is behind?" "if there be aught behind, i do not know it," tavannes answered steadfastly. m. de biron relaxed the fixity of his gaze. "but you said that you had an object?" he returned. "i had--in being the bearer of the message." "what was it?" "my object? to learn two things." "the first, if it please you?" the grand master's chin stuck out a little, as he spoke. "have you in the arsenal a m. de tignonville, a gentleman of poitou?" "i have not," biron answered curtly. "the second?" "have you here a huguenot minister?" "i have not. and if i had i should not give him up," he added firmly. tavannes shrugged his shoulders. "i have a use for one," he said carelessly. "but it need not harm him." "for what, then, do you need him?" "to marry me." the other stared. "but you are a catholic," he said. "but she is a huguenot," tavannes answered. the grand master did not attempt to hide his astonishment. "and she sticks on that?" he exclaimed. "to-day?" "she sticks on that. to-day." "to-day? _nom de dieu_! to-day! well," brushing the matter aside after a pause of bewilderment, "any way, i cannot help her. i have no minister here. if there be aught else i can do for her--" "nothing, i thank you," tavannes answered. "then it only remains for me to take your answer to the king?" and he rose politely, and taking his mask from the table prepared to assume it. m. de biron gazed at him a moment without speaking, as if he pondered on the answer he should give. at length he nodded, and rang the bell which stood beside him. "the mask!" he muttered in a low voice as footsteps sounded without. and, obedient to the hint, tavannes disguised himself. a second later the officer who had introduced him opened the door and entered. "peridol," m. de biron said--he had risen to his feet--"i have received a message which needs confirmation; and to obtain this i must leave the arsenal. i am going to the house--you will remember this--of marshal tavannes, who will be responsible for my person; in the mean time this gentleman will remain under strict guard in the south chamber upstairs. you will treat him as a hostage, with all respect, and will allow him to preserve his _incognito_. but if i do not return by noon to-morrow, you will deliver him to the men below, who will know how to deal with him." count hannibal made no attempt to interrupt him, nor did he betray the discomfiture which he undoubtedly felt. but as the grand master paused-- "m. de biron," he said, in a voice harsh and low, "you will answer to me for this!" and his eyes glittered through the slits in the mask. "possibly, but not to-day or to-morrow!" biron replied, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. "peridol! see the gentleman bestowed as i have ordered, and then return to me. monsieur," with a bow, half courteous, half ironical, "let me commend to you the advantages of silence and your mask." and he waved his hand in the direction of the door. a moment count hannibal hesitated. he was in the heart of a hostile fortress where the resistance of a single man armed to the teeth must have been futile; and he was unarmed, save for a poniard. nevertheless, for a moment the impulse to spring on biron, and with the dagger at his throat to make his life the price of a safe passage, was strong. then--for with the warp of a harsh and passionate character were interwrought an odd shrewdness and some things little suspected--he resigned himself. bowing gravely, he turned with dignity, and in silence followed the officer from the room. peridol had two men in waiting at the door. from one of these the lieutenant took a lanthorn, and, with an air at once sullen and deferential, led the way up the stone staircase to the floor over that in which m. de biron had his lodging. tavannes followed; the two guards came last, carrying a second lanthorn. at the head of the staircase, whence a bare passage ran, north and south, the procession turned right- handed, and, passing two doors, halted before the third and last, which faced them at the end of the passage. the lieutenant unlocked it with a key which he took from a hook beside the doorpost. then, holding up his light, he invited his charge to enter. the room was not small, but it was low in the roof, and prison-like, it had bare walls and smoke-marks on the ceiling. the window, set in a deep recess, the floor of which rose a foot above that of the room, was unglazed; and through the gloomy orifice the night wind blew in, laden even on that august evening with the dank mist of the river flats. a table, two stools, and a truckle bed without straw or covering made up the furniture; but peridol, after glancing round, ordered one of the men to fetch a truss of straw and the other to bring up a pitcher of wine. while they were gone tavannes and he stood silently waiting, until, observing that the captive's eyes sought the window, the lieutenant laughed. "no bars?" he said. "no, monsieur, and no need of them. you will not go by that road, bars or no bars." "what is below?" count hannibal asked carelessly. "the river?" "yes, monsieur," with a grin; "but not water. mud, and six feet of it, soft as christmas porridge, but not so sweet. i've known two puppies thrown in under this window that did not weigh more than a fat pullet apiece. one was gone before you could count fifty, and the other did not live thrice as long--nor would have lasted that time, but that it fell on the first and clung to it." tavannes dismissed the matter with a shrug, and, drawing his cloak about him, set a stool against the wall and sat down. the men who brought in the wine and the bundle of straw were inquisitive, and would have loitered, scanning him stealthily; but peridol hurried them away. the lieutenant himself stayed only to cast a glance round the room, and to mutter that he would return when his lord returned; then, with a "good night" which said more for his manners than his good will, he followed them out. a moment later the grating of the key in the lock and the sound of the bolts as they sped home told tavannes that he was a prisoner. chapter xiv. too short a spoon. count hannibal remained seated, his chin sunk on his breast, until his ear assured him that the three men had descended the stairs to the floor below. then he rose, and, taking the lanthorn from the table, on which peridol had placed it, he went softly to the door, which, like the window, stood in a recess--in this case the prolongation of the passage. a brief scrutiny satisfied him that escape that way was impossible, and he turned, after a cursory glance at the floor and ceiling, to the dark, windy aperture which yawned at the end of the apartment. placing the lanthorn on the table, and covering it with his cloak, he mounted the window recess, and, stepping to the unguarded edge, looked out. he knew, rather than saw, that peridol had told the truth. the smell of the aguish flats which fringed that part of paris rose strong in his nostrils. he guessed that the sluggish arm of the seine which divided the arsenal from the ile des louviers crawled below; but the night was dark, and it was impossible to discern land from water. he fancied that he could trace the outline of the island--an uninhabited place, given up to wood piles; but the lights of the college quarter beyond it, which rose feebly twinkling to the crown of st. genevieve, confused his sight and rendered the nearer gloom more opaque. from that direction and from the cite to his right came sounds which told of a city still heaving in its blood-stained sleep, and even in its dreams planning further excesses. now a distant shot, and now a faint murmur on one of the bridges, or a far-off cry, raucous, sudden, curdled the blood. but even of what was passing under cover of the darkness, he could learn little; and after standing awhile with a hand on either side of the window he found the night air chill. he stepped back, and, descending to the floor, uncovered the lanthorn and set it on the table. his thoughts travelled back to the preparations he had made the night before with a view to securing mademoiselle's person, and he considered, with a grim smile, how little he had foreseen that within twenty-four hours he would himself be a prisoner. presently, finding his mask oppressive, he removed it, and, laying it on the table before him, sat scowling at the light. biron had jockeyed him cleverly. well, the worse for armand de gontaut de biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! but in the mean time? in the mean time his fate was sealed if harm befell biron. and what the king's real mind in biron's case was, and what the queen- mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far, when they had the grand master at their mercy, they would resist the temptation to add him to the victims. if biron placed himself at once in marshal tavannes' hands, all might be well. but if he ventured within the long arm of the guises, or went directly to the louvre, the fact that with the grand master's fate count hannibal's was bound up, would not weigh a straw. in such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the less great the small, without a scruple. and the guises did not love count hannibal; he was not loved by many. even the strength of his brother the marshal stood rather in the favour of the king's heir, for whom he had won the battle of jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the desperate madness of this day had let loose on paris. it was not the peril in which he stood, however--though, with the cold clear eye of the man who had often faced peril, he appreciated it to a nicety--that count hannibal found least bearable, but his enforced inactivity. he had thought to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm, and out of the danger of others to compact his own success. instead he lay here, not only powerless to guide his destiny, which hung on the discretion of another, but unable to stretch forth a finger to further his plans. as he sat looking darkly at the lanthorn, his mind followed biron and his riders through the midnight streets along st. antoine and la verrerie, through the gloomy narrows of the rue la ferronerie, and so past the house in the rue st. honore where mademoiselle sat awaiting the morrow--sat awaiting tignonville, the minister, the marriage! doubtless there were still bands of plunderers roaming to and fro; at the barriers troops of archers stopping the suspected; at the windows pale faces gazing down; at the gates of the temple, and of the walled enclosures which largely made up the city, strong guards set to prevent invasion. biron would go with sufficient to secure himself; and unless he encountered the bodyguard of guise his passage would quiet the town. but was it so certain that _she_ was safe? he knew his men, and while he had been free he had not hesitated to leave her in their care. but now that he could not go, now that he could not raise a hand to help, the confidence which had not failed him in straits more dangerous grew weak. he pictured the things which might happen, at which, in his normal frame of mind, he would have laughed. now they troubled him so that he started at a shadow, so that he quailed at a thought. he, who last night, when free to act, had timed his coming and her rescue to a minute! who had rejoiced in the peril, since with the glamour of such things foolish women were taken! who had not flinched when the crowd roared most fiercely for her blood! why had he suffered himself to be trapped? why indeed? and thrice in passion he paced the room. long ago the famous nostradamus had told him that he would live to be a king, but of the smallest kingdom in the world. "every man is a king in his coffin," he had answered. "the grave is cold and your kingdom shall be warm," the wizard had rejoined. on which the courtiers had laughed, promising him a moorish island and a black queen. and he had gibed with the rest, but secretly had taken note of the sovereign counties of france, their rulers and their heirs. now he held the thought in horror, foreseeing no county, but the cage under the stifling tiles at loches, in which cardinal balue and many another had worn out their hearts. he came to that thought not by way of his own peril, but of mademoiselle's; which affected him in so novel a fashion that he wondered at his folly. at last, tired of watching the shadows which the draught set dancing on the wall, he drew his cloak about him and lay down on the straw. he had kept vigil the previous night, and in a few minutes, with a campaigner's ease, he was asleep. midnight had struck. about two the light in the lanthorn burned low in the socket, and with a soft sputtering went out. for an hour after that the room lay still, silent, dark; then slowly the grey dawn, the greyer for the river mist which wrapped the neighbourhood in a clammy shroud, began to creep into the room and discover the vague shapes of things. again an hour passed, and the sun was rising above montreuil, and here and there the river began to shimmer through the fog. but in the room it was barely daylight when the sleeper awoke, and sat up, his face expectant. something had roused him. he listened. his ear, and the habit of vigilance which a life of danger instils, had not deceived him. there were men moving in the passage; men who shuffled their feet impatiently. had biron returned? or had aught happened to him, and were these men come to avenge him? count hannibal rose and stole across the boards to the door, and, setting his ear to it, listened. he listened while a man might count a hundred and fifty, counting slowly. then, for the third part of a second, he turned his head, and his eyes travelled the room. he stooped again and listened more closely, scarcely breathing. there were voices as well as feet to be heard now; one voice--he thought it was peridol's--which held on long, now low, now rising into violence. others were audible at intervals, but only in a growl or a bitter exclamation, that told of minds made up and hands which would not be restrained. he caught his own name, _tavannes_--the mask was useless, then! and once a noisy movement which came to nothing, foiled, he fancied, by peridol. he knew enough. he rose to his full height, and his eyes seemed a little closer together; an ugly smile curved his lips. his gaze travelled over the objects in the room, the bare stools and table, the lanthorn, the wine-pitcher; beyond these, in a corner, the cloak and straw on the low bed. the light, cold and grey, fell cheerlessly on the dull chamber, and showed it in harmony with the ominous whisper which grew in the gallery; with the stern-faced listener who stood, his one hand on the door. he looked, but he found nothing to his purpose, nothing to serve his end, whatever his end was; and with a quick light step he left the door, mounted the window recess, and, poised on the very edge, looked down. if he thought to escape that way his hope was desperate. the depth to the water-level was not, he judged, twelve feet. but peridol had told the truth. below lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. this quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. but, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to the right of his position. he sprang to the floor again, and listened an instant; then, with guarded movements--for there was fear in the air, fear in the silent room, and at any moment the rush might be made, the door burst in--he set the lanthorn and wine-pitcher on the floor, and took up the table in his arms. he began to carry it to the window, but, halfway thither, his eye told him that it would not pass through the opening, and he set it down again and glided to the bed. again he was thwarted; the bed was screwed to the floor. another might have despaired at that, but he rose with no sign of dismay, and listening, always listening, he spread his cloak on the floor, and deftly, with as little noise and rustling as might be, be piled the straw in it, compressed the bundle, and, cutting the bed-cords with his dagger, bound all together with them. in three steps he was in the embrasure of the window, and, even as the men in the passage thrust the lieutenant aside and with a sudden uproar came down to the door, he flung the bundle lightly and carefully to the right--so lightly and carefully, and with so nice and deliberate a calculation, that it seemed odd it fell beyond the reach of an ordinary leap. an instant and he was on the floor again. the men had to unlock, to draw back the bolts, to draw back the door which opened outwards; their numbers, as well as their savage haste, impeded them. when they burst in at last, with a roar of "to the river! to the river!"--burst in a rush of struggling shoulders and lowered pikes, they found him standing, a solitary figure, on the further side of the table, his arms folded. and the sight of the passive figure for a moment stayed them. "say your prayers, child of satan!" cried the leader, waving his weapon. "we give you one minute!" "ay, one minute!" his followers chimed in. "be ready!" "you would murder me?" he said with dignity. and when they shouted assent, "good!" he answered. "it is between you and m. de biron, whose guest i am. but"--with a glance which passed round the ring of glaring eyes and working features--"i would leave a last word for some one. is there any one here who values a safe-conduct from the king? 'tis for two men coming and going for a fortnight." and he held up a slip of paper. the leader cried, "to hell with his safe-conduct! say your prayers!" but all were not of his mind. on one or two of the savage faces--the faces, for the most part, of honest men maddened by their wrongs--flashed an avaricious gleam. a safe-conduct? to avenge, to slay, to kill--and to go safe! for some minds such a thing has an invincible fascination. a man thrust himself forward. "ay, i'll have it!" he cried. "give it here!" "it is yours," count hannibal answered, "if you will carry ten words to marshal tavannes--when i am gone." the man's neighbour laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. "and marshal tavannes will pay you finely," he said. but maudron, the man who had offered, shook off the hand. "if i take the message!" he muttered in a grim aside. "do you think me mad?" and then aloud he cried, "ay, i'll take your message! give me the paper." "you swear you will take it?" the man had no intention of taking it, but he perjured himself and went forward. the others would have pressed round too, half in envy, half in scorn; but tavannes by a gesture stayed them. "gentlemen, i ask a minute only," he said. "a minute for a dying man is not much. your friends had as much." and the fellows, acknowledging the claim and assured that their victim could not escape, let maudron go round the table to him. the man was in haste and ill at ease, conscious of his evil intentions and the fraud he was practising; and at once greedy to have, yet ashamed of the bargain he was making. his attention was divided between the slip of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his comrades; he paid little heed to count hannibal, whom he knew to be unarmed. only when tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be fain to delay, "go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is up!" tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. maudron saw a chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have leapt back with it! but quick as he, and quicker, tavannes too stooped, gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first through the window. the movement carried tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. an instant he hung on the verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards. he alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he himself bounded off right-handed. the peril was appalling, the possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have taken. but he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. he could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. but from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. they sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard, and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time. the men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. shout as they might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. they could only look on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from their view, behind the angle of the building. here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and wall. he struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless maudron--a tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he turned and painfully climbed the river-bank. the pike-wound in his shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn. nevertheless, when he had put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the arsenal he paused, and turned. he saw that the men had run to other windows which looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with triumph. he shook his fist at them. "ho, fools!" he cried, "you kill not tavannes so! till our next meeting at montfaucon, fare you well!" chapter xv. the brother of st. magloire. as the exertion of power is for the most part pleasing, so the exercise of that which a woman possesses over a man is especially pleasant. when in addition a risk of no ordinary kind has been run, and the happy issue has been barely expected--above all when the momentary gain seems an augury of final victory--it is impossible that a feeling akin to exultation should not arise in the mind, however black the horizon, and however distant the fair haven. the situation in which count hannibal left mademoiselle de vrillac will be remembered. she had prevailed over him; but in return he had bowed her to the earth, partly by subtle threats, and partly by sheer savagery. he had left her weeping, with the words "madame de tavannes" ringing doom in her ears, and the dark phantom of his will pointing onward to an inevitable future. had she abandoned hope, it would have been natural. but the girl was of a spirit not long nor easily cowed; and tavannes had not left her half an hour before the reflection, that so far the honours of the day were hers, rose up to console her. in spite of his power and her impotence, she had imposed her will upon his; she had established an influence over him, she had discovered a scruple which stayed him, and a limit beyond which he would not pass. in the result she might escape; for the conditions which he had accepted with an ill grace might prove beyond his fulfilling. she might escape! true, many in her place would have feared a worse fate and harsher handling. but there lay half the merit of her victory. it had left her not only in a better position, but with a new confidence in her power over her adversary. he would insist on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could look for no indulgence. but if the conditions proved to be beyond his power, she believed that he would spare her: with an ill grace, indeed, with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman's pride might scarcely support. but he would spare her. and if the worst befell her? she would still have the consolation of knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had ransomed those most dear to her. owing to the position of her chamber, she saw nothing of the excesses to which paris gave itself up during the remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the following morning. but the carlats and her women learned from the guards below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. how could she prove false to them? how doom them to perish, had there been no question of her lover? of him she sat thinking by the hour together. she recalled with solemn tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself. she found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for himself, and which she quickly forgave him. the revulsion of feeling which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she still clung to him. clung to him, not so much with the passion of the mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life, but sacrifice. she had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that day, and until late on the following day. her own servants waited on her, and it was known that below stairs count hannibal's riders kept sullen ward behind barred doors and shuttered windows, refusing admission to all who came. now and again echoes of the riot which filled the streets with bloodshed reached her ears: or word of the more striking occurrences was brought to her by madame carlat. and early on this second day, monday, it was whispered that m. de tavannes had not returned, and that the men below were growing uneasy. at last, when the suspense below and above was growing tense, it was broken. footsteps and voices were heard ascending the stairs, the trampling and hubbub were followed by a heavy knock; perforce the door was opened. while mademoiselle, who had risen, awaited with a beating heart she knew not what, a cowled father, in the dress of the monks of st. magloire, stood on the threshold, and, crossing himself, muttered the words of benediction. he entered slowly. no sight could have been more dreadful to mademoiselle; for it set at naught the conditions which she had so hardly exacted. what if count hannibal were behind, were even now mounting the stairs, prepared to force her to a marriage before this shaveling? or ready to proceed, if she refused, to the last extremity? sudden terror taking her by the throat choked her; her colour fled, her hand flew to her breast. yet, before the door had closed on bigot, she had recovered herself. "this intrusion is not by m. de tavannes' orders!" she cried, stepping forward haughtily. "this person has no business here. how dare you admit him?" the norman showed his bearded visage a moment at the door. "my lord's orders," he muttered sullenly. and he closed the door on them. she had a huguenot's hatred of a cowl; and, in this crisis, her reasons for fearing it. her eyes blazed with indignation. "enough!" she cried, pointing, with a gesture of dismissal, to the door. "go back to him who sent you! if he will insult me, let him do it to my face! if he will perjure himself, let him forswear himself in person. or, if you come on your own account," she continued, flinging prudence to the winds, "as your brethren came to philippa de luns, to offer me the choice you offered her, i give you her answer! if i had thought of myself only, i had not lived so long! and rather than bear your presence or hear your arguments--" she came to a sudden, odd, quavering pause on the word; her lips remained parted, she swayed an instant on her feet. the next moment madame carlat, to whom the visitor had turned his shoulder, doubted her eyes, for mademoiselle was in the monk's arms! "clotilde! clotilde!" he cried, and held her to him. for the monk was m. de tignonville! under the cowl was the lover with whom mademoiselle's thoughts had been engaged. in this disguise, and armed with tavannes' note to madame st. lo--which the guards below knew for count hannibal's hand, though they were unable to decipher the contents--he had found no difficulty in making his way to her. he had learned before he entered that tavannes was abroad, and was aware, therefore, that he ran little risk. but his betrothed, who knew nothing of his adventures in the interval, saw in him one who came to her at the greatest risk, across unnumbered perils, through streets swimming with blood. and though she had never embraced him save in the crisis of the massacre, though she had never called him by his christian name, in the joy of this meeting she abandoned herself to him, she clung to him weeping, she forgot for the time his defection, and thought only of him who had returned to her so gallantly, who brought into the room a breath of poitou, and the sea, and the old days, and the old life; and at the sight of whom the horrors of the last two days fell from her--for the moment. and madame carlat wept also, and in the room was a sound of weeping. the least moved was, for a certainty, m. de tignonville himself, who, as we know, had gone through much that day. but even his heart swelled, partly with pride, partly with thankfulness that he had returned to one who loved him so well. fate had been kinder to him than he deserved; but he need not confess that now. when he had brought off the _coup_ which he had in his mind, he would hasten to forget that he had entertained other ideas. mademoiselle had been the first to be carried away; she was also the first to recover herself. "i had forgotten," she cried suddenly, "i had forgotten," and she wrested herself from his embrace with violence, and stood panting, her face white, her eyes affrighted. "i must not! and you--i had forgotten that too! to be here, monsieur, is the worst office you can do me. you must go! go, monsieur, in mercy i beg of you, while it is possible. every moment you are here, every moment you spend in this house, i shudder." "you need not fear for me," he said, in a tone of bravado. he did not understand. "i fear for myself!" she answered. and then, wringing her hands, divided between her love for him and her fear for herself, "oh, forgive me!" she said. "you do not know that he has promised to spare me, if he cannot produce you, and--and--a minister? he has granted me that; but i thought when you entered that he had gone back on his word, and sent a priest, and it maddened me! i could not bear to think that i had gained nothing. now you understand, and you will pardon me, monsieur? if he cannot produce you i am saved. go then, leave me, i beg, without a moment's delay." he laughed derisively as he turned back his cowl and squared his shoulders. "all that is over!" he said, "over and done with, sweet! m. de tavannes is at this moment a prisoner in the arsenal. on my way hither i fell in with m. de biron, and he told me. the grand master, who would have had me join his company, had been all night at marshal tavannes' hotel, where he had been detained longer than he expected. he stood pledged to release count hannibal on his return, but at my request he consented to hold him one hour, and to do also a little thing for me." the glow of hope which had transfigured her face faded slowly. "it will not help," she said, "if he find you here." "he will not! nor you!" "how, monsieur?" "in a few minutes," he explained--he could not hide his exultation, "a message will come from the arsenal in the name of tavannes, bidding the monk he sent to you bring you to him. a spoken message, corroborated by my presence, should suffice: '_bid the monk who is now with mademoiselle_,' it will run, '_bring her to me at the arsenal, and let four pikes guard them hither_.' when i begged m. de biron to do this, he laughed. 'i can do better,' he said. 'they shall bring one of count hannibal's gloves, which he left on my table. always supposing my rascals have done him no harm, which god forbid, for i am answerable.'" tignonville, delighted with the stratagem which the meeting with biron had suggested, could see no flaw in it. she could, and though she heard him to the end, no second glow of hope softened the lines of her features. with a gesture full of dignity, which took in not only madame carlat and the waiting-woman who stood at the door, but the absent servants-- "and what of these?" she said. "what of these? you forget them, monsieur. you do not think, you cannot have thought, that i would abandon them? that i would leave them to such mercy as he, defeated, might extend to them? no, you forgot them." he did not know what to answer, for the jealous eyes of the frightened waiting-woman, fierce with the fierceness of a hunted animal, were on him. the carlat and she had heard, could hear. at last-- "better one than none!" he muttered, in a voice so low that if the servants caught his meaning it was but indistinctly. "i have to think of you." "and i of them," she answered firmly. "nor is that all. were they not here, it could not be. my word is passed--though a moment ago, monsieur, in the joy of seeing you i forgot it. and how," she continued, "if i keep not my word, can i expect him to keep his? or how, if i am ready to break the bond, on this happening which i never expected, can i hold him to conditions which he loves as little--as little as i love him?" her voice dropped piteously on the last words; her eyes, craving her lover's pardon, sought his. but rage, not pity or admiration, was the feeling roused in tignonville's breast. he stood staring at her, struck dumb by folly so immense. at last-- "you cannot mean this," he blurted out. "you cannot mean, mademoiselle, that you intend to stand on that! to keep a promise wrung from you by force, by treachery, in the midst of such horrors as he and his have brought upon us! it is inconceivable!" she shook her head. "i promised," she said. "you were forced to it." "but the promise saved our lives." "from murderers! from assassins!" he protested. she shook her head. "i cannot go back," she said firmly; "i cannot." "then you are willing to marry him," he cried in ignoble anger. "that is it! nay, you must wish to marry him! for, as for his conditions, mademoiselle," the young man continued, with an insulting laugh, "you cannot think seriously of them. _he_ keep conditions and you in his power! he, count hannibal! but for the matter of that, and were he in the mind to keep them, what are they? there are plenty of ministers. i left one only this morning. i could lay my hand on one in five minutes. he has only to find one, therefore--and to find me!" "yes, monsieur," she cried, trembling with wounded pride, "it is for that reason i implore you to go. the sooner you leave me, the sooner you place yourself in a position of security, the happier for me! every moment that you spend here, you endanger both yourself and me!" "if you will not be persuaded--" "i shall not be persuaded," she answered firmly, "and you do but"--alas! her pride began to break down, her voice to quiver, she looked piteously at him--"by staying here make it harder for me to--to--" "hush!" cried madame carlat. "hush!" and as they started and turned towards her--she was at the end of the chamber by the door, almost out of earshot--she raised a warning hand. "listen!" she muttered, "some one has entered the house." "'tis my messenger from biron," tignonville answered sullenly. and he drew his cowl over his face, and, hiding his hands in his sleeves, moved towards the door. but on the threshold he turned and held out his arms. he could not go thus. "mademoiselle! clotilde!" he cried with passion, "for the last time, listen to me, come with me. be persuaded!" "hush!" madame carlat interposed again, and turned a scared face on them. "it is no messenger! it is tavannes himself: i know his voice." and she wrung her hands. "_oh, mon dieu, mon dieu_, what are we to do?" she continued, panic-stricken. and she looked all ways about the room. chapter xvi. at close quarters. fear leapt into mademoiselle's eyes, but she commanded herself. she signed to madame carlat to be silent, and they listened, gazing at one another, hoping against hope that the woman was mistaken. a long moment they waited, and some were beginning to breathe again, when the strident tones of count hannibal's voice rolled up the staircase, and put an end to doubt. mademoiselle grasped the table and stood supporting herself by it. "what are we to do?" she muttered. "what are we to do?" and she turned distractedly towards the women. the courage which had supported her in her lover's absence had abandoned her now. "if he finds him here i am lost! i am lost!" "he will not know me," tignonville muttered. but he spoke uncertainly; and his gaze, shifting hither and thither, belied the boldness of his words. madame carlat's eyes flew round the room; on her for once the burden seemed to rest. alas! the room had no second door, and the windows looked on a courtyard guarded by tavannes' people. and even now count hannibal's step rang on the stair! his hand was almost on the latch. the woman wrung her hands; then, a thought striking her, she darted to a corner where mademoiselle's robes hung on pegs against the wall. "here!" she cried, raising them. "behind these! he may not be seen here! quick, monsieur, quick! hide yourself!" it was a forlorn hope--the suggestion of one who had not thought out the position; and, whatever its promise, mademoiselle's pride revolted against it. "no," she cried. "not there!" while tignonville, who knew that the step was useless, since count hannibal must have learned that a monk had entered, held his ground. "you could not deny yourself?" he muttered hurriedly. "and a priest with me?" she answered; and she shook her head. there was no time for more, and even as mademoiselle spoke count hannibal's knuckles tapped the door. she cast a last look at her lover. he had turned his back on the window; the light no longer fell on his face. it was possible that he might pass unrecognized, if tavannes' stay was brief; at any rate, the risk must be run. in a half stifled voice she bade her woman, javette, open the door. count hannibal bowed low as he entered; and he deceived the others. but he did not deceive her. he had not crossed the threshold before she repented that she had not acted on tignonville's suggestion, and denied herself. for what could escape those hard keen eyes, which swept the room, saw all, and seemed to see nothing--those eyes in which there dwelt even now a glint of cruel humour? he might deceive others, but she who panted within his grasp, as the wild bird palpitates in the hand of the fowler, was not deceived! he saw, he knew! although, as he bowed, and smiling, stood upright, he looked only at her. "i expected to be with you before this," he said courteously, "but i have been detained. first, mademoiselle, by some of your friends, who were reluctant to part with me; then by some of your enemies, who, finding me in no handsome case, took me for a huguenot escaped from the river, and drove me to shifts to get clear of them. however, now i am come, i have news." "news?" she muttered with dry lips. it could hardly be good news. "yes, mademoiselle, of m. de tignonville," he answered. "i have little doubt that i shall be able to produce him this evening, and so to satisfy one of your scruples. and as i trust that this good father," he went on, turning to the ecclesiastic, and speaking with the sneer from which he seldom refrained, catholic as he was, when he mentioned a priest, "has by this time succeeded in removing the other, and persuading you to accept his ministrations--" "no!" she cried impulsively. "no?" with a dubious smile, and a glance from one to the other. "oh, i had hoped better things. but he still may? he still may. i am sure he may. in which case, mademoiselle, your modesty must pardon me if i plead urgency, and fix the hour after supper this evening for the fulfilment of your promise." she turned white to the lips. "after supper?" she gasped. "yes, mademoiselle, this evening. shall i say--at eight o'clock?" in horror of the thing which menaced her, of the thing from which only two hours separated her, she could find no words but those which she had already used. the worst was upon her; worse than the worst could not befall her. "but he has not persuaded me!" she cried, clenching her hands in passion. "he has not persuaded me!" "still he may, mademoiselle." "he will not!" she cried wildly. "he will not!" the room was going round with her. the precipice yawned at her feet; its naked terrors turned her brain. she had been pushed nearer, and nearer, and nearer; struggle as she might, she was on the verge. a mist rose before her eyes, and though they thought she listened she understood nothing of what was passing. when she came to herself, after the lapse of a minute, count hannibal was speaking. "permit him another trial," he was saying in a tone of bland irony. "a short time longer, mademoiselle! one more assault, father! the weapons of the church could not be better directed or to a more worthy object; and, successful, shall not fail of due recognition and an earthly reward." and while she listened, half fainting, with a humming in her ears, he was gone. the door closed on him, and the three--mademoiselle's woman had withdrawn when she opened to him--looked at one another. the girl parted her lips to speak, but she only smiled piteously; and it was m. de tignonville who broke the silence, in a tone which betrayed rather relief than any other feeling. "come, all is not lost yet," he said briskly. "if i can escape from the house--" "he knows you," she answered. "what?" "he knows you," mademoiselle repeated in a tone almost apathetic. "i read it in his eyes. he knew you at once: and knew, too," she added bitterly, "that he had here under his hand one of the two things he required." "then why did he hide his knowledge?" the young man retorted sharply. "why?" she answered. "to induce me to waive the other condition in the hope of saving you. oh!" she continued in a tone of bitter raillery, "he has the cunning of hell, of the priests! you are no match for him, monsieur. nor i; nor any of us. and"--with a gesture of despair--"he will be my master! he will break me to his will and to his hand! i shall be his! his, body and soul, body and soul!" she continued drearily, as she sank into a chair and, rocking herself to and fro, covered her face. "i shall be his! his till i die!" the man's eyes burned, and the pulse in his temples beat wildly. "but you shall not!" he exclaimed. "i may be no match for him in cunning, you say well. but i can kill him. and i will!" he paced up and down. "i will!" "you should have done it when he was here," she answered, half in scorn, half in earnest. "it is not too late," he cried; and then he stopped, silenced by the opening door. it was javette who entered. they looked at her, and before she spoke were on their feet. her face, white and eager, marking something besides fear, announced that she brought news. she closed the door behind her, and in a moment it was told. "monsieur can escape, if he is quick," she cried in a low tone; and they saw that she trembled with excitement. "they are at supper. but he must be quick! he must be quick!" "is not the door guarded?" "it is, but--" "and he knows! your mistress says that he knows that i am here." for a moment javette looked startled. "it is possible," she muttered. "but he has gone out." madame carlat clapped her hands. "i heard the door close," she said, "three minutes ago." "and if monsieur can reach the room in which he supped last night, the window that was broken is only blocked"--she swallowed once or twice in her excitement--"with something he can move. and then monsieur is in the street, where his cowl will protect him." "but count hannibal's men?" he asked eagerly. "they are eating in the lodge by the door." "ha! and they cannot see the other room from there?" javette nodded. her tale told, she seemed to be unable to add a word. mademoiselle, who knew her for a craven, wondered that she had found courage either to note what she had or to bring the news. but as providence had been so good to them as to put it into this woman's head to act as she had, it behoved them to use the opportunity--the last, the very last opportunity they might have. she turned to tignonville. "oh, go!" she cried feverishly. "go, i beg! go now, monsieur! the greatest kindness you can do me is to place yourself as quickly as possible beyond his reach." a faint colour, the flush of hope, had returned to her cheeks. her eyes glittered. "right, mademoiselle!" he cried, obedient for once, "i go! and do you be of good courage." he held her hand: an instant, then, moving to the door, he opened it and listened. they all pressed behind him to hear. a murmur of voices, low and distant, mounted the staircase and bore out the girl's tale; apart from this the house was silent. tignonville cast a last look at mademoiselle, and, with a gesture of farewell, glided a-tiptoe to the stairs and began to descend, his face hidden in his cowl. they watched him reach the angle of the staircase, they watched him vanish beyond it; and still they listened, looking at one another when a board creaked or the voices below were hushed for a moment. chapter xvii. the duel. at the foot of the staircase tignonville paused. the droning norman voices of the men on guard issued from an open door a few paces before him on the left. he caught a jest, the coarse chuckling laughter which attended it, and the gurgle of applause which followed; and he knew that at any moment one of the men might step out and discover him. fortunately the door of the room with the shattered window was almost within reach of his hand on the right side of the passage, and he stepped softly to it. he stood an instant hesitating, his hand on the latch; then, alarmed by a movement in the guard-room, as if some were rising, he pushed the door in a panic, slid into the room, and shut the door behind him. he was safe, and he had made no noise; but at the table, at supper, with his back to him and his face to the partly closed window, sat count hannibal! the young man's heart stood still. for a long minute he gazed at the count's back, spellbound and unable to stir. then, as tavannes ate on without looking round, he began to take courage. possibly he had entered so quietly that he had not been heard, or possibly his entrance was taken for that of a servant. in either case, there was a chance that he might retire after the same fashion; and he had actually raised the latch, and was drawing the door to him with infinite precaution, when tavannes' voice struck him, as it were, in the face. "pray do not admit the draught, m. de tignonville," he said, without looking round. "in your cowl you do not feel it, but it is otherwise with me." the unfortunate tignonville stood transfixed, glaring at the back of the other's head. for an instant he could not find his voice. at last-- "curse you!" he hissed in a transport of rage. "curse you! you did know, then? and she was right." "if you mean that i expected you, to be sure, monsieur," count hannibal answered. "see, your place is laid. you will not feel the air from without there. the very becoming dress which you have adopted secures you from cold. but--do you not find it somewhat oppressive this summer weather?" "curse you!" the young man cried, trembling. tavannes turned and looked at him with a dark smile. "the curse may fall," he said, "but i fancy it will not be in consequence of your petitions, monsieur. and now, were it not better you played the man?" "if i were armed," the other cried passionately, "you would not insult me!" "sit down, sir, sit down," count hannibal answered sternly. "we will talk of that presently. in the mean time i have something to say to you. will you not eat?" but tignonville would not. "very well," count hannibal answered; and he went on with his supper. "i am indifferent whether you eat or not. it is enough for me that you are one of the two things i lacked an hour ago; and that i have you, m. de tignonville. and through you i look to obtain the other." "what other?" tignonville cried. "a minister," tavannes answered, smiling. "a minister. there are not many left in paris--of your faith. but you met one this morning, i know." "i? i met one?" "yes, monsieur, you! and can lay your hand on him in five minutes, you know." m. de tignonville gasped. his face turned a shade paler. "you have a spy," he cried. "you have a spy upstairs!" tavannes raised his cup to his lips, and drank. when he had set it down-- "it may be," he said, and he shrugged his shoulders. "i know, it boots not how i know. it is my business to make the most of my knowledge--and of yours!" m. de tignonville laughed rudely. "make the most of your own," he said; "you will have none of mine." "that remains to be seen," count hannibal answered. "carry your mind back two days, m. de tignonville. had i gone to mademoiselle de vrillac last saturday and said to her 'marry me, or promise to marry me,' what answer would she have given?" "she would have called you an insolent!" the young man replied hotly. "and i--" "no matter what you would have done!" tavannes said. "suffice it that she would have answered as you suggest. yet to-day she has given me her promise." "yes," the young man retorted, "in circumstances in which no man of honour--" "let us say in peculiar circumstances." "well?" "which still exist! mark me, m. de tignonville," count hannibal continued, leaning forward and eyeing the young man with meaning, "_which still exist_! and may have the same effect on another's will as on hers! listen! do you hear?" and rising from his seat with a darkening face, he pointed to the partly shuttered window, through which the measured tramp of a body of men came heavily to the ear. "do you hear, monsieur? do you understand? as it was yesterday it is to-day! they killed the president la place this morning! and they are searching! they are still searching! the river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! i have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase through the streets!" the younger man had risen also. he stood confronting tavannes, the cowl fallen back from his face, his eyes dilated. "you think to frighten me!" he cried. "you think that i am craven enough to sacrifice her to save myself. you--" "you were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this window and waited for death!" count hannibal answered brutally. "you flinched then, and may flinch again!" "try me!" tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. "try me!" and then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, "but you dare not!" he cried. "you dare not!" "no?" "no! for if i die you lose her!" tignonville replied in a voice of triumph. "ha, ha! i touch you there!" he continued. "you dare not, for my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself! you may threaten, m. de tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to the window"--and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other's gesture--"but my safety is more to you than to me! and 'twill end there!" "you believe that?" "i know it!" in two strides count hannibal was at the window. he seized a great piece of the boarding which closed one-half of the opening; he wrenched it away. a flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again to his opponent. "then if you know it," he cried vehemently, "in god's name act upon it!" and he pointed to the window. "act upon it?" "ay, act upon it!" tavannes repeated, with a glance of flame. "the road is open! if you would save your mistress, behold the way! if you would save her from the embrace she abhors, from the eyes under which she trembles, from the hand of a master, there lies the way! and it is not her glove only you will save, but herself, her soul, her body! so," he continued, with a certain wildness, and in a tone wherein contempt and bitterness were mingled, "to the lions, brave lover! will you your life for her honour? will you death that she may live a maid? will you your head to save her finger? then, leap down! leap down! the lists are open, the sand is strewed! out of your own mouth i have it that if you perish she is saved! then out, monsieur! cry 'i am a huguenot!' and god's will be done!" tignonville was livid. "rather, your will!" he panted. "your will, you devil! nevertheless--" "you will go! ha! ha! you will go!" for an instant it seemed that he would go. stung by the challenge, wrought on by the contempt in which tavannes held him, he shot a look of hate at the tempter; he caught his breath, and laid his hand on the edge of the shuttering as if he would leap out. but it goes hard with him who has once turned back from the foe. the evening light, glancing cold on the burnished pike-points of a group of archers who stood near, caught his eye and went chill to his heart. death, not in the arena, not in the sight of shouting thousands, but in this darkening street, with an enemy laughing from the window, death with no revenge to follow, with no certainty that after all she would be safe, such a death could be compassed only by pure love--the love of a child for a parent, of a parent for a child, of a man for the one woman in the world! he recoiled. "you would not spare her!" he cried, his face damp with sweat--for he knew now that he would not go. "you want to be rid of me! you would fool me, and then--" "out of your own mouth you are convict!" count hannibal retorted gravely. "it was you who said it! but still i swear it! shall i swear it to you?" but tignonville recoiled another step and was silent. "no? o _preux chevalier_, o gallant knight! i knew it! do you think that i did not know with whom i had to deal?" and count hannibal burst into harsh laughter, turning his back on the other, as if he no longer counted. "you will neither die with her nor for her! you were better in her petticoats and she in your breeches! or no, you are best as you are, good father! take my advice, m. de tignonville, have done with arms; and with a string of beads, and soft words, and talk of holy mother church, you will fool the women as surely as the best of them! they are not all like my cousin, a flouting, gibing, jeering woman--you had poor fortune there, i fear?" "if i had a sword!" tignonville hissed, his face livid with rage. "you call me coward, because i will not die to please you. but give me a sword, and i will show you if i am a coward!" tavannes stood still. "you are there, are you?" he said in an altered tone. "i--" "give me a sword," tignonville repeated, holding out his open trembling hands. "a sword! a sword! 'tis easy taunting an unarmed man, but--" "you wish to fight?" "i ask no more! no more! give me a sword," he urged, his voice quivering with eagerness. "it is you who are the coward!" count hannibal stared at him. "and what am i to get by fighting you?" he reasoned slowly. "you are in my power. i can do with you as i please. i can call from this window and denounce you, or i can summon my men--" "coward! coward!" "ay? well, i will tell you what i will do," with a subtle smile. "i will give you a sword, m. de tignonville, and i will meet you foot to foot here, in this room, on a condition." "what is it? what is it?" the young man cried with incredible eagerness. "name your condition!" "that if i get the better of you, you find me a minister." "i find you a--" "a minister. yes, that is it. or tell me where i can find one." the young man recoiled. "never!" he said. "you know where to find one." "never! never!" "you can lay your hand on one in five minutes, you know." "i will not." "then i shall not fight you!" count hannibal answered coolly; and he turned from him, and back again. "you will pardon me if i say, m. de tignonville, that you are in as many minds about fighting as about dying! i do not think that you would have made your fortune at court. moreover, there is a thing which i fancy you have not considered. if we fight you may kill me, in which case the condition will not help me much. or i--which is more likely--" he added, with a harsh smile, "may kill you, and again i am no better placed." the young man's pallid features betrayed the conflict in his breast. to do him justice, his hand itched for the sword-hilt--he was brave enough for that; he hated, and only so could he avenge himself. but the penalty if he had the worse! and yet what of it? he was in hell now, in a hell of humiliation, shame, defeat, tormented by this fiend! 'twas only to risk a lower hell. at last, "i will do it!" he cried hoarsely. "give me a sword and look to yourself." "you promise?" "yes, yes, i promise!" "good," count hannibal answered suavely, "but we cannot fight so, we must have more light." and striding to the door he opened it, and calling the norman bade him move the table and bring candles--a dozen candles; for in the narrow streets the light was waning, and in the half-shuttered room it was growing dusk. tignonville, listening with a throbbing brain, wondered that the attendant expressed no surprise and said no word--until tavannes added to his orders one for a pair of swords. then, "monsieur's sword is here," bigot answered in his half-intelligible patois. "he left it here yester morning." "you are a good fellow, bigot," tavannes answered, with a gaiety and good- humour which astonished tignonville. "and one of these days you shall marry suzanne." the norman smiled sourly and went in search of the weapon. "you have a poniard?" count hannibal continued in the same tone of unusual good temper, which had already struck tignonville. "excellent! will you strip, then, or--as we are? very good, monsieur; in the unlikely event of fortune declaring for you, you will be in a better condition to take care of yourself. a man running through the streets in his shirt is exposed to inconveniences!" and he laughed gaily. while he laughed the other listened; and his rage began to give place to wonder. a man who regarded as a pastime a sword and dagger conflict between four walls, who, having his adversary in his power, was ready to discard the advantage, to descend into the lists, and to risk life for a whim, a fancy--such a man was outside his experience, though in poitou in those days of war were men reckoned brave. for what, he asked himself as he waited, had tavannes to gain by fighting? the possession of mademoiselle? but mademoiselle, if his passion for her overwhelmed him, was in his power; and if his promise were a barrier--which seemed inconceivable in the light of his reputation--he had only to wait, and to- morrow, or the next day, or the next, a minister would be found, and without risk he could gain that for which he was now risking all. tignonville did not know that it was in the other's nature to find pleasure in such utmost ventures. nevertheless the recklessness to which tavannes' action bore witness had its effect upon him. by the time the young man's sword arrived something of his passion for the conflict had evaporated; and though the touch of the hilt restored his determination, the locked door, the confined space, and the unaccustomed light went a certain distance towards substituting despair for courage. the use of the dagger in the duels of that day, however, rendered despair itself formidable. and tignonville, when he took his place, appeared anything but a mean antagonist. he had removed his robe and cowl, and lithe and active as a cat he stood as it were on springs, throwing his weight now on this foot and now on that, and was continually in motion. the table bearing the candles had been pushed against the window, the boarding of which had been replaced by bigot before he left the room. tignonville had this, and consequently the lights, on his dagger hand; and he plumed himself on the advantage, considering his point the more difficult to follow. count hannibal did not seem to notice this, however. "are you ready?" he asked. and then-- "on guard!" he cried, and he stamped the echo to the word. but, that done, instead of bearing the other down with a headlong rush characteristic of the man--as tignonville feared--he held off warily, stooping low; and when his slow opening was met by one as cautious, he began to taunt his antagonist. "come!" he cried, and feinted half-heartedly. "come, monsieur, are we going to fight, or play at fighting?" "fight yourself, then!" tignonville answered, his breath quickened by excitement and growing hope. "'tis not i hold back!" and he lunged, but was put aside. "ca! ca!" tavannes retorted; and he lunged and parried in his turn, but loosely and at a distance. after which the two moved nearer the door, their eyes glittering as they watched one another, their knees bent, the sinews of their backs straining for the leap. suddenly tavannes thrust, and leapt away, and as his antagonist thrust in return the count swept the blade aside with a strong parry, and for a moment seemed to be on the point of falling on tignonville with the poniard. but tignonville retired his right foot nimbly, which brought them front to front again. and the younger man laughed. "try again, m. le comte!" he said. and, with the word, he dashed in himself quick as light; for a second the blades ground on one another, the daggers hovered, the two suffused faces glared into one another; then the pair disengaged again. the blood trickled from a scratch on count hannibal's neck; half an inch to the right and the point had found his throat. and tignonville, elated, laughed anew, and swaying from side to side on his hips, watched with growing confidence for a second chance. lithe as one of the leopards charles kept at the louvre, he stooped lower and lower, and more and more with each moment took the attitude of the assailant, watching for an opening; while count hannibal, his face dark and his eyes vigilant, stood increasingly on the defence. the light was waning a little, the wicks of the candles were burning long; but neither noticed it or dared to remove his eyes from the other's. their laboured breathing found an echo on the farther side of the door, but this again neither observed. "well?" count hannibal said at last. "are you coming?" "when i please," tignonville answered; and he feinted but drew back. the other did the same, and again they watched one another, their eyes seeming to grow smaller and smaller. gradually a smile had birth on tignonville's lips. he thrust! it was parried! he thrust again--parried! tavannes, grown still more cautious, gave a yard. tignonville pushed on, but did not allow confidence to master caution. he began, indeed, to taunt his adversary; to flout and jeer him. but it was with a motive. for suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he repeated the peculiar thrust which had been successful before. this time, however, tavannes was ready. he put aside the blade with a quick parade, and instead of making a riposte sprang within the other's guard. the two came face to face and breast to shoulder, and struck furiously with their daggers. count hannibal was outside his opponent's sword and had the advantage. tignonville's dagger fell, but glanced off the metalwork of the other's hilt; tavannes' fell swift and hard between the young man's eyes. the huguenot flung up his hands and staggered back, falling his length on the floor. in an instant count hannibal was on his breast, and had knocked away his dagger. then-- "you own yourself vanquished?" he cried. the young man, blinded by the blood which trickled down his face, made a sign with his hands. count hannibal rose to his feet again, and stood a moment looking at his foe without speaking. presently he seemed to be satisfied. he nodded, and going to the table dipped a napkin in water. he brought it, and carefully supporting tignonville's head, laved his brow. "it is as i thought," he said, when he had stanched the blood. "you are not hurt, man. you are stunned. it is no more than a bruise." the young man was coming to himself. "but i thought--" he muttered, and broke off to pass his hand over his face. then he got up slowly, reeling a little, "i thought it was the point," he muttered. "no, it was the pommel," tavannes answered dryly. "it would not have served me to kill you. i could have done that ten times." tignonville groaned, and, sitting down at the table, held the napkin to his aching head. one of the candles had been overturned in the struggle and lay on the floor, flaring in a little pool of grease. tavannes set his heel upon it; then, striding to the farther end of the room, he picked up tignonville's dagger and placed it beside his sword on the table. he looked about to see if aught else remained to do, and, finding nothing, he returned to tignonville's side. "now, monsieur," he said in a voice hard and constrained, "i must ask you to perform your part of the bargain." a groan of anguish broke from the unhappy man. and yet he had set his life on the cast; what more could he have done? "you will not harm him?" he muttered. "he shall go safe," count hannibal replied gravely. "and--" he fought a moment with his pride, then blurted out the words, "you will not tell her--that it was through me--you found him?" "i will not," tavannes answered in the same tone. he stooped and picked up the other's robe and cowl, which had fallen from a chair--so that as he spoke his eyes were averted. "she shall never know through me," he said. and tignonville, his face hidden in his hands, told him. chapter xviii. andromeda, perseus being absent. little by little--while they fought below--the gloom had thickened, and night had fallen in the room above. but mademoiselle would not have candles brought. seated in the darkness, on the uppermost step of the stairs, her hands clasped about her knees, she listened and listened, as if by that action she could avert misfortune; or as if, by going so far forward to meet it, she could turn aside the worst. the women shivering in the darkness about her would fain have struck a light and drawn her back into the room, for they felt safer there. but she was not to be moved. the laughter and chatter of the men in the guard-room, the coming and going of bigot as he passed, below but out of sight, had no terrors for her; nay, she breathed more freely on the bare open landing of the staircase than in the close confines of a room which her fears made hateful to her. here at least she could listen, her face unseen; and listening she bore the suspense more easily. a turn in the staircase, with the noise which proceeded from the guard- room, rendered it difficult to hear what happened in the closed room below. but she thought that if an alarm were raised there she must hear it; and as the moments passed and nothing happened, she began to feel confident that her lover had made good his escape by the window. presently she got a fright. three or four men came from the guard-room and went, as it seemed to her, to the door of the room with the shattered casement. she told herself that she had rejoiced too soon, and her heart stood still. she waited for a rush of feet, a cry, a struggle. but except an uncertain muffled sound which lasted for some minutes, and was followed by a dull shock, she heard nothing more. and presently the men went back whispering, the noise in the guard-room which had been partially hushed broke forth anew, and perplexed but relieved she breathed again. surely he had escaped by this time. surely by this time he was far away, in the arsenal, or in some place of refuge! and she might take courage, and feel that for this day the peril was overpast. "mademoiselle will have the lights now?" one of the women ventured. "no! no!" she answered feverishly, and she continued to crouch where she was on the stairs, bathing herself and her burning face in the darkness and coolness of the stairway. the air entered freely through a window at her elbow, and the place was fresher, were that all, than the room she had left. javette began to whimper, but she paid no heed to her; a man came and went along the passage below, and she heard the outer door unbarred, and the jarring tread of three or four men who passed through it. but all without disturbance; and afterwards the house was quiet again. and as on this monday evening the prime virulence of the massacre had begun to abate--though it held after a fashion to the end of the week--paris without was quiet also. the sounds which had chilled her heart at intervals during two days were no longer heard. a feeling almost of peace, almost of comfort--a drowsy feeling, that was three parts a reaction from excitement--took possession of her. in the darkness her head sank lower and lower on her knees. and half an hour passed, while javette whimpered, and madame carlat slumbered, her broad back propped against the wall. suddenly mademoiselle opened her eyes, and saw, three steps below her, a strange man whose upward way she barred. behind him came carlat, and behind him bigot, lighting both; and in the confusion of her thoughts as she rose to her feet the three, all staring at her in a common amazement, seemed a company. the air entering through the open window beside her blew the flame of the candle this way and that, and added to the nightmare character of the scene; for by the shifting light the men seemed to laugh one moment and scowl the next, and their shadows were now high and now low on the wall. in truth, they were as much amazed at coming on her in that place as she at their appearance; but they were awake, and she newly roused from sleep; and the advantage was with them. "what is it?" she cried in a panic. "what is it?" "if mademoiselle will return to her room?" one of the men said courteously. "but--what is it?" she was frightened. "if mademoiselle--" then she turned without more and went back into the room, and the three followed, and her woman and madame carlat. she stood resting one hand on the table while javette with shaking fingers lighted the candles. then-- "now, monsieur," she said in a hard voice, "if you will tell me your business?" "you do not know me?" the stranger's eyes dwelt kindly and pitifully on her. she looked at him steadily, crushing down the fears which knocked at her heart. "no," she said. "and yet i think i have seen you." "you saw me a week last sunday," the stranger answered sorrowfully. "my name is la tribe. i preached that day, mademoiselle, before the king of navarre. i believe that you were there." for a moment she stared at him in silence, her lips parted. then she laughed, a laugh which set the teeth on edge. "oh, he is clever!" she cried. "he has the wit of the priests! or the devil! but you come too late, monsieur! you come too late! the bird has flown." "mademoiselle--" "i tell you the bird has flown!" she repeated vehemently. and her laugh of joyless triumph rang through the room. "he is clever, but i have outwitted him! i have--" she paused and stared about her wildly, struck by the silence; struck too by something solemn, something pitiful in the faces that were turned on her. and her lip began to quiver. "what?" she muttered. "why do you look at me so? he has not"--she turned from one to another--"he has not been taken?" "m. tignonville?" she nodded. "he is below." "ah!" she said. they expected to see her break down, perhaps to see her fall. but she only groped blindly for a chair and sat. and for a moment there was silence in the room. it was the huguenot minister who broke it in a tone formal and solemn. "listen, all present!" he said slowly. "the ways of god are past finding out. for two days in the midst of great perils i have been preserved by his hand and fed by his bounty, and i am told that i shall live if, in this matter, i do the will of those who hold me in their power. but be assured--and hearken all," he continued, lowering his voice to a sterner note. "rather than marry this woman to this man against her will--if indeed in his sight such marriage can be--rather than save my life by such base compliance, i will die not once but ten times! see. i am ready! i will make no defence!" and he opened his arms as if to welcome the stroke. "if there be trickery here, if there has been practising below, where they told me this and that, it shall not avail! until i hear from mademoiselle's own lips that she is willing, i will not say over her so much as yea, yea, or nay, nay!" "she is willing!" la tribe turned sharply, and beheld the speaker. it was count hannibal, who had entered a few seconds earlier, and had taken his stand within the door. "she is willing!" tavannes repeated quietly. and if, in this moment of the fruition of his schemes, he felt his triumph, he masked it under a face of sombre purpose. "do you doubt me, man?" "from her own lips!" the other replied, undaunted--and few could say as much--by that harsh presence. "from no other's!" "sirrah, you--" "i can die. and you can no more, my lord!" the minister answered bravely. "you have no threat can move me." "i am not sure of that," tavannes answered, more blandly. "but had you listened to me and been less anxious to be brave, m. la tribe, where no danger is, you had learned that here is no call for heroics! mademoiselle is willing, and will tell you so." "with her own lips?" count hannibal raised his eyebrows. "with her own lips, if you will," he said. and then, advancing a step and addressing her, with unusual gravity, "mademoiselle de vrillac," he said, "you hear what this gentleman requires. will you be pleased to confirm what i have said?" she did not answer, and in the intense silence which held the room in its freezing grasp a woman choked, another broke into weeping. the colour ebbed from the cheeks of more than one; the men fidgeted on their feet. count hannibal looked round, his head high. "there is no call for tears," he said; and whether he spoke in irony or in a strange obtuseness was known only to himself. "mademoiselle is in no hurry--and rightly--to answer a question so momentous. under the pressure of utmost peril, she passed her word; the more reason that, now the time has come to redeem it, she should do so at leisure and after thought. since she gave her promise, monsieur, she has had more than one opportunity of evading its fulfilment. but she is a vrillac, and i know that nothing is farther from her thoughts." he was silent a moment; and then, "mademoiselle," he said, "i would not hurry you." her eyes were closed, but at that her lips moved. "i am--willing," she whispered. and a fluttering sigh, of relief, of pity, of god knows what, filled the room. "you are satisfied, m. la tribe?" "i do not--" "man!" with a growl as of a tiger, count hannibal dropped the mask. in two strides he was at the minister's side, his hand gripped his shoulder; his face, flushed with passion, glared into his. "will you play with lives?" he hissed. "if you do not value your own, have you no thought of others? of these? look and count! have you no bowels? if she will save them, will not you?" "my own i do not value." "curse your own!" tavannes cried in furious scorn. and he shook the other to and fro. "who thought of your life? will you doom these? will you give them to the butcher?" "my lord," la tribe answered, shaken in spite of himself, "if she be willing--" "she is willing." "i have nought to say. but i caught her words indistinctly. and without her consent--" "she shall speak more plainly. mademoiselle--" she anticipated him. she had risen, and stood looking straight before her, seeing nothing. "i am willing," she muttered with a strange gesture, "if it must be." he did not answer. "if it must be," she repeated slowly, and with a heavy sigh. and her chin dropped on her breast. then, abruptly, suddenly--it was a strange thing to see--she looked up. a change as complete as the change which had come over count hannibal a minute before came over her. she sprang to his side; she clutched his arm and devoured his face with her eyes. "you are not deceiving me?" she cried. "you have tignonville below? you--oh, no, no!" and she fell back from him, her eyes distended, her voice grown suddenly shrill and defiant, "you have not! you are deceiving me! he has escaped, and you have lied to me!" "i?" "yes, you have lied to me!" it was the last fierce flicker of hope when hope seemed dead: the last clutch of the drowning at the straw that floated before the eyes. he laughed harshly. "you will be my wife in five minutes," he said, "and you give me the lie? a week, and you will know me better! a month, and--but we will talk of that another time. for the present," he continued, turning to la tribe, "do you, sir, tell her that the gentleman is below. perhaps she will believe you. for you know him." la tribe looked at her sorrowfully; his heart bled for her. "i have seen m. de tignonville," he said. "and m. le comte says truly. he is in the same case with ourselves, a prisoner." "you have seen him?" she wailed. "i left him in the room below, when i mounted the stairs." count hannibal laughed, the grim mocking laugh which seemed to revel in the pain it inflicted. "will you have him for a witness?" he cried. "there could not be a better, for he will not forget. shall i fetch him?" she bowed her head, shivering. "spare me that," she said. and she pressed her hands to her eyes while an uncontrollable shudder passed over her frame. then she stepped forward: "i am ready," she whispered. "do with me as you will!" * * * * * when they had all gone out and closed the door behind them, and the two whom the minister had joined were left together, count hannibal continued for a time to pace the room, his hands clasped at his back, and his head sunk somewhat on his chest. his thoughts appeared to run in a new channel, and one, strange to say, widely diverted from his bride and from that which he had just done. for he did not look her way, or, for a time, speak to her. he stood once to snuff a candle, doing it with an absent face: and once to look, but still absently, and as if he read no word of it, at the marriage writing which lay, the ink still wet, upon the table. after each of these interruptions he resumed his steady pacing to and fro, to and fro, nor did his eye wander once in the direction of her chair. and she waited. the conflict of emotions, the strife between hope and fear, the final defeat had stunned her; had left her exhausted, almost apathetic. yet not quite, nor wholly. for when in his walk he came a little nearer to her, a chill perspiration broke out on her brow, and shudderings crept over her; and when he passed farther from her--and then only, it seemed--she breathed again. but the change lay beneath the surface, and cheated the eye. into her attitude, as she sat, her hands clasped on her lap, her eyes fixed, came no apparent change or shadow of movement. suddenly, with a dull shock, she became aware that he was speaking. "there was need of haste," he said, his tone strangely low and free from emotion, "for i am under bond to leave paris to-morrow for angers, whither i bear letters from the king. and as matters stood, there was no one with whom i could leave you. i trust bigot; he is faithful, and you may trust him, madame, fair or foul! but he is not quick-witted. badelon, also, you may trust. bear it in mind. your woman javette is not faithful; but as her life is guaranteed she must stay with us until she can be securely placed. indeed, i must take all with me--with one exception--for the priests and monks rule paris, and they do not love me, nor would spare aught at my word." he was silent a few moments. then he resumed in the same tone, "you ought to know how we, tavannes, stand. it is by monsieur and the queen- mother; and _contra_ the guises. we have all been in this matter; but the latter push and we are pushed, and the old crack will reopen. as it is, i cannot answer for much beyond the reach of my arm. therefore, we take all with us except m. de tignonville, who desires to be conducted to the arsenal." she had begun to listen with averted eyes. but as he continued to speak surprise awoke in her, and something stronger than surprise--amazement, stupefaction. slowly her eyes came to him, and when he ceased to speak-- "why do you tell me these things?" she muttered, her dry lips framing the words with difficulty. "because it behoves you to know them," he answered, thoughtfully tapping the table. "i have no one, save my brother, whom i can trust." she would not ask him why he trusted her, nor why he thought he could trust her. for a moment or two she watched him, while he, with his eyes lowered, stood in deep thought. at last he looked up and his eyes met hers. "come!" he said abruptly, and in a different tone, "we must end this! is it to be a kiss or a blow between us?" she rose, though her knees shook under her; and they stood face to face, her face white as paper. "what--do you mean?" she whispered. "is it to be a kiss or a blow?" he repeated. "a husband must be a lover, madame, or a master, or both! i am content to be the one or the other, or both, as it shall please you. but the one i will be." "then, a thousand times, a blow," she cried, her eyes flaming, "from you!" he wondered at her courage, but he hid his wonder. "so be it!" he answered. and before she knew what he would be at, he struck her sharply across the cheek with the glove which he held in his hand. she recoiled with a low cry, and her cheek blazed scarlet where he had struck it. "so be it!" he continued sombrely. "the choice shall be yours, but you will come to me daily for the one or the other. if i cannot be lover, madame, i will be master. and by this sign i will have you know it, daily, and daily remember it." she stared at him, her bosom rising and falling, in an astonishment too deep for words. but he did not heed her. he did not look at her again. he had already turned to the door, and while she looked he passed through it, he closed it behind him. and she was alone. chapter xix. in the orleannais. "but you fear him?" "fear him?" madame st. lo answered; and, to the surprise of the countess, she made a little face of contempt. "no; why should i fear him? i fear him no more than the puppy leaping at old sancho's bridle fears his tall playfellow! or than the cloud you see above us fears the wind before which it flies!" she pointed to a white patch, the size of a man's hand, which hung above the hill on their left hand and formed the only speck in the blue summer sky. "fear him? not i!" and, laughing gaily, she put her horse at a narrow rivulet which crossed the grassy track on which they rode. "but he is hard?" the countess murmured in a low voice, as she regained her companion's side. "hard?" madame st. lo rejoined with a gesture of pride. "ay, hard as the stones in my jewelled ring! hard as flint, or the nether millstone--to his enemies! but to women? bah! who ever heard that he hurt a woman?" "why, then, is he so feared?" the countess asked, her eyes on the subject of their discussion--a solitary figure riding some fifty paces in front of them. "because he counts no cost!" her companion answered. "because he killed savillon in the court of the louvre, though he knew his life the forfeit. he would have paid the forfeit too, or lost his right hand, if monsieur, for his brother the marshal's sake, had not intervened. but savillon had whipped his dog, you see. then he killed the chevalier de millaud, but 'twas in fair fight, in the snow, in their shirts. for that, millaud's son lay in wait for him with two, in the passage under the chatelet; but hannibal wounded one, and the others saved themselves. undoubtedly he is feared!" she added with the same note of pride in her voice. the two who talked, rode at the rear of the little company which had left paris at daybreak two days before, by the porte st. jacques. moving steadily south-westward by the lesser roads and bridle-tracks--for count hannibal seemed averse from the great road--they had lain the second night in a village three leagues from bonneval. a journey of two days on fresh horses is apt to change scenery and eye alike; but seldom has an alteration--in themselves and all about them--as great as that which blessed this little company, been wrought in so short a time. from the stifling wynds and evil-smelling lanes of paris, they had passed to the green uplands, the breezy woods and babbling streams of the upper orleannais; from sights and sounds the most appalling, to the solitude of the sandy heath, haunt of the great bustard, or the sunshine of the hillside, vibrating with the songs of larks; from an atmosphere of terror and gloom to the freedom of god's earth and sky. numerous enough--they numbered a score of armed men--to defy the lawless bands which had their lairs in the huge forest of orleans, they halted where they pleased: at mid-day under a grove of chestnut-trees, or among the willows beside a brook; at night, if they willed it, under god's heaven. far, not only from paris, but from the great road, with its gibbets and pillories--the great road which at that date ran through a waste, no peasant living willingly within sight of it--they rode in the morning and in the evening, resting in the heat of the day. and though they had left paris with much talk of haste, they rode more at leisure with every league. for whatever tavannes' motive, it was plain that he was in no hurry to reach his destination. nor for that matter were any of his company. madame st. lo, who had seized the opportunity of escaping from the capital under her cousin's escort, was in an ill-humour with cities, and declaimed much on the joys of a cell in the woods. for the time the coarsest nature and the dullest rider had had enough of alarums and conflicts. the whole company, indeed, though it moved in some fashion of array with an avant and a rear-guard, the ladies riding together, and count hannibal proceeding solitary in the midst, formed as peaceful a band, and one as innocently diverted, as if no man of them had ever grasped pike or blown a match. there was an old rider among them who had seen the sack of rome, and the dead face of the great constable the idol of the free companies. but he had a taste for simples and much skill in them; and when madame had once seen badelon on his knees in the grass searching for plants, she lost her fear of him. bigot, with his low brow and matted hair, was the abject slave of suzanne, madame st. lo's woman, who twitted him mercilessly on his norman _patois_, and poured the vials of her scorn on him a dozen times a day. in all, with la tribe and the carlats, madame st. lo's servants, and the countess's following, they numbered not far short of two score; and when they halted at noon, and under the shadow of some leafy tree, ate their mid-day meal, or drowsed to the tinkle of madame st. lo's lute, it was difficult to believe that paris existed, or that these same people had so lately left its blood-stained pavements. they halted this morning a little earlier than usual. madame st. lo had barely answered her companion's question before the subject of their discussion swung himself from old sancho's back, and stood waiting to assist them to dismount. behind him, where the green valley through which the road passed narrowed to a rocky gate, an old mill stood among willows at the foot of a mound. on the mound behind it a ruined castle which had stood siege in the hundred years' war raised its grey walls; and beyond this the stream which turned the mill poured over rocks with a cool rushing sound that proved irresistible. the men, their horses watered and hobbled, went off, shouting like boys, to bathe below the falls; and after a moment's hesitation count hannibal rose from the grass on which he had flung himself. "guard that for me, madame," he said. and he dropped a packet, bravely sealed and tied with a silk thread, into the countess's lap. "'twill be safer than leaving it in my clothes. ohe!" and he turned to madame st. lo. "would you fancy a life that was all gipsying, cousin?" and if there was irony in his voice, there was desire in his eyes. "there is only one happy man in the world," she answered, with conviction. "by name?" "the hermit of compiegne." "and in a week you would be wild for a masque!" he said cynically. and turning on his heel he followed the men. madame st. lo sighed complacently. "heigho!" she said. "he's right! we are never content, _ma mie_! when i am trifling in the gallery my heart is in the greenwood. and when i have eaten black bread and drank spring water for a fortnight i do nothing but dream of zamet's, and white mulberry tarts! and you are in the same case. you have saved your round white neck, or it has been saved for you, by not so much as the thickness of zamet's pie-crust--i declare my mouth is beginning to water for it!--and instead of being thankful and making the best of things, you are thinking of poor madame d'yverne, or dreaming of your calf-love!" the girl's face--for a girl she was, though they called her madame--began to work. she struggled a moment with her emotion, and then broke down, and fell to weeping silently. for two days she had sat in public and not given way. but the reference to her lover was too much for her strength. madame st. lo looked at her with eyes which were not unkindly. "sits the wind in that quarter?" she murmured. "i thought so! but there, my dear, if you don't put that packet in your gown you'll wash out the address! moreover, if you ask me, i don't think the young man is worth it. it is only that what we have not got--we want!" but the young countess had borne to the limit of her powers. with an incoherent word she rose to her feet, and walked hurriedly away. the thought of what was and of what might have been, the thought of the lover who still--though he no longer seemed, even to her, the perfect hero--held a place in her heart, filled her breast to overflowing. she longed for some spot where she could weep unseen; where the sunshine and the blue sky would not mock her grief; and seeing in front of her a little clump of alders, which grew beside the stream, in a bend that in winter was marshy, she hastened towards it. madame st. lo saw her figure blend with the shadow of the trees. "quite _a la_ ronsard, i give my word!" she murmured. "and now she is out of sight! _la, la_! i could play at the game myself, and carve sweet sorrow on the barks of trees, if it were not so lonesome! and if i had a man!" and gazing pensively at the stream and the willows, my lady tried to work herself into a proper frame of mind; now murmuring the name of one gallant, and now, finding it unsuited, the name of another. but the soft inflection would break into a giggle, and finally into a yawn; and, tired of the attempt, she began to pluck grass and throw it from her. by-and-by she discovered that madame carlat and the women, who had their place a little apart, had disappeared; and affrighted by the solitude and silence--for neither of which she was made--she sprang up and stared about her, hoping to discern them. right and left, however, the sweep of hillside curved upward to the skyline, lonely and untenanted; behind her the castled rock frowned down on the rugged gorge and filled it with dispiriting shadow. madame st. lo stamped her foot on the turf. "the little fool!" she murmured pettishly. "does she think that i am to be murdered that she may fatten on sighs? oh, come up, madame, you must be dragged out of this!" and she started briskly towards the alders, intent on gaining company as quickly as possible. she had gone about fifty yards, and had as many more to traverse when she halted. a man, bent double, was moving stealthily along the farther side of the brook, a little in front of her. now she saw him, now she lost him; now she caught a glimpse of him again, through a screen of willow branches. he moved with the utmost caution, as a man moves who is pursued or in danger; and for a moment she deemed him a peasant whom the bathers had disturbed and who was bent on escaping. but when he came opposite to the alder-bed she saw that that was his point, for he crouched down, sheltered by a willow, and gazed eagerly among the trees, always with his back to her; and then he waved his hand to some one in the wood. madame st. lo drew in her breath. as if he had heard the sound--which was impossible--the man dropped down where he stood, crawled a yard or two on his face, and disappeared. madame stared a moment, expecting to see him or hear him. then, as nothing happened, she screamed. she was a woman of quick impulses, essentially feminine; and she screamed three or four times, standing where she was, her eyes on the edge of the wood. "if that does not bring her out, nothing will!" she thought. it brought her. an instant, and the countess appeared, and hurried in dismay to her side. "what is it?" the younger woman asked, glancing over her shoulder; for all the valley, all the hills were peaceful, and behind madame st. lo--but the lady had not discovered it--the servants who had returned were laying the meal. "what is it?" she repeated anxiously. "who was it?" madame st. lo asked curtly. she was quite calm now. "who was--who?" "the man in the wood?" the countess stared a moment, then laughed. "only the old soldier they call badelon, gathering simples. did you think that he would harm me?" "it was not old badelon whom i saw!" madame st. lo retorted. "it was a younger man, who crept along the other side of the brook, keeping under cover. when i first saw him he was there," she continued, pointing to the place. "and he crept on and on until he came opposite to you. then he waved his hand." "to me?" madame nodded. "but if you saw him, who was he?" the countess asked. "i did not see his face," madame st. lo answered. "but he waved to you. that i saw." the countess had a thought which slowly flooded her face with crimson. madame st. lo saw the change, saw the tender light which on a sudden softened the other's eyes; and the same thought occurred to her. and having a mind to punish her companion for her reticence--for she did not doubt that the girl knew more than she acknowledged--she proposed that they should return and find badelon, and learn if he had seen the man. "why?" madame tavannes asked. and she stood stubbornly, her head high. "why should we?" "to clear it up," the elder woman answered mischievously. "but perhaps, it were better to tell your husband and let his men search the coppice." the colour left the countess's face as quickly as it had come. for a moment she was tongue-tied. then-- "have we not had enough of seeking and being sought?" she cried, more bitterly than befitted the occasion. "why should we hunt him? i am not timid, and he did me no harm. i beg, madame, that you will do me the favour of being silent on the matter." "oh, if you insist? but what a pother--" "i did not see him, and he did not see me," madame de tavannes answered vehemently. "i fail, therefore, to understand why we should harass him, whoever he be. besides, m. de tavannes is waiting for us." "and m. de tignonville--is following us!" madame st. lo muttered under her breath. and she made a face at the other's back. she was silent, however. they returned to the others and nothing of import, it would seem, had happened. the soft summer air played on the meal laid under the willows as it had played on the meal of yesterday laid under the chestnut-trees. the horses grazed within sight, moving now and again, with a jingle of trappings or a jealous neigh: the women's chatter vied with the unceasing sound of the mill-stream. after dinner, madame st. lo touched the lute, and badelon--badelon who had seen the sack of the colonna's palace, and been served by cardinals on the knee--fed a water-rat, which had its home in one of the willow-stumps, with carrot-parings. one by one the men laid themselves to sleep with their faces on their arms; and to the eyes all was as all had been yesterday in this camp of armed men living peacefully. but not to the countess! she had accepted her life, she had resigned herself, she had marvelled that it was no worse. after the horrors of paris the calm of the last two days had fallen on her as balm on a wound. worn out in body and mind, she had rested, and only rested; without thought, almost without emotion, save for the feeling, half fear, half curiosity, which stirred her in regard to the strange man, her husband. who on his side left her alone. but the last hour had wrought a change. her eyes were grown restless, her colour came and went. the past stirred in its shallow--ah, so shallow--grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might, thrust out hands to plague and torment her. if the man who sought to speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the skirts of her party, were tignonville--her lover, who at his own request had been escorted to the arsenal before their departure from paris--then her plight was a sorry one. for what woman, wedded as she had been wedded, could think otherwise than indulgently of his persistence? and yet, lover and husband! what peril, what shame the words had often spelled! at the thought only she trembled and her colour ebbed. she saw, as one who stands on the brink of a precipice, the depth which yawned before her. she asked herself, shivering, if she would ever sink to _that_. all the loyalty of a strong nature, all the virtue of a good woman, revolted against the thought. true, her husband--husband she must call him--had not deserved her love; but his bizarre magnanimity, the gloomy, disdainful kindness with which he had crowned possession, even the unity of their interests, which he had impressed upon her in so strange a fashion, claimed a return in honour. to be paid--how? how? that was the crux which perplexed, which frightened, which harassed her. for, if she told her suspicions, she exposed her lover to capture by one who had no longer a reason to be merciful. and if she sought occasion to see tignonville and so to dissuade him, she did it at deadly risk to herself. yet what other course lay open to her if she would not stand by? if she would not play the traitor? if she-- "madame,"--it was her husband, and he spoke to her suddenly,--"are you not well?" and, looking up guiltily, she found his eyes fixed curiously on hers. her face turned red and white and red again, and she faltered something and looked from him, but only to meet madame st. lo's eyes. my lady laughed softly in sheer mischief. "what is it?" count hannibal asked sharply. but madame st. lo's answer was a line of ronsard. chapter xx. on the castle hill. thrice she hummed it, bland and smiling. then from the neighbouring group came an interruption. the wine he had drunk had put it into bigot's head to snatch a kiss from suzanne; and suzanne's modesty, which was very nice in company, obliged her to squeal. the uproar which ensued, the men backing the man and the women the woman, brought tavannes to his feet. he did not speak, but a glance from his eyes was enough. there was not one who failed to see that something was amiss with him, and a sudden silence fell on the party. he turned to the countess. "you wished to see the castle?" he said. "you had better go now, but not alone." he cast his eyes over the company, and summoned la tribe, who was seated with the carlats. "go with madame," he said curtly. "she has a mind to climb the hill. bear in mind, we start at three, and do not venture out of hearing." "i understand, m. le comte," the minister answered. he spoke quietly, but there was a strange light in his face as he turned to go with her. none the less he was silent until madame's lagging feet--for all her interest in the expedition was gone--had borne her a hundred paces from the company. then-- "who knoweth our thoughts and forerunneth all our desires," he murmured. and when she turned to him, astonished, "madame," he continued, "i have prayed, ah, how i have prayed, for this opportunity of speaking to you! and it has come. i would it had come this morning, but it has come. do not start or look round; many eyes are on us, and, alas! i have that to say to you which it will move you to hear, and that to ask of you which it must task your courage to perform." she began to tremble, and stood looking up the green slope to the broken grey wall which crowned its summit. "what is it?" she whispered, commanding herself with an effort. "what is it? if it have aught to do with m. tignonville--" "it has not!" in her surprise--for although she had put the question she had felt no doubt of the answer--she started and turned to him. "it has not?" she exclaimed almost incredulously. "no." "then what is it, monsieur?" she replied, a little haughtily. "what can there be that should move me so?" "life or death, madame," he answered solemnly. "nay, more; for since providence has given me this chance of speaking to you, a thing of which i despaired, i know that the burden is laid on us, and that it is guilt or it is innocence, according as we refuse the burden or bear it." "what is it, then?" she cried impatiently. "what is it?" "i tried to speak to you this morning." "was it you, then, whom madame st. lo saw stalking me before dinner? "it was." she clasped her hands and heaved a sigh of relief. "thank god, monsieur!" she replied. "you have lifted a weight from me. i fear nothing in comparison of that. nothing!" "alas!" he answered sombrely, "there is much to fear, for others if not for ourselves! do you know what that is which m. de tavannes bears always in his belt? what it is he carries with such care? what it was he handed to you to keep while he bathed to-day?" "letters from the king." "yes, but the import of those letters?" "no." "and yet, should they be written in letters of blood!" the minister exclaimed, his face kindling. "they should scorch the hands that hold them and blister the eyes that read them. they are the fire and the sword! they are the king's order to do at angers as they have done in paris. to slay all of the religion who are found there--and they are many! to spare none, to have mercy neither on the old man nor the unborn child! see yonder hawk!" he continued, pointing with a shaking hand to a falcon which hung light and graceful above the valley, the movement of its wings invisible. "how it disports itself in the face of the sun! how easy its way, how smooth its flight! but see, it drops upon its prey in the rushes beside the brook, and the end of its beauty is slaughter! so is it with yonder company!" his finger sank until it indicated the little camp seated toy-like in the green meadow four hundred feet below them, with every man and horse, and the very camp-kettle, clear-cut and visible, though diminished by distance to fairy-like proportions. "so it is with yonder company!" he repeated sternly. "they play and are merry, and one fishes and another sleeps! but at the end of the journey is death. death for their victims, and for them the judgment!" she stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind her, and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the little camp. the sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness of an august afternoon. but his words went home so truly that the sunlit landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called up before the mind. the countess turned white and sick. "are you sure?" she whispered at last. "quite sure." "ah, god!" she cried, "are we never to have peace?" and turning from the valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood. after a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace. "what do you want me to do?" she cried, despair in her voice. "what can i do?" "were the letters he bears destroyed--" "the letters?" "yes, were the letters destroyed," la tribe answered relentlessly, "he could do nothing! nothing! without that authority the magistrates of angers would not move. he could do nothing. and men and women and children--men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them--will live! will live!" he repeated, with a softening eye. and with an all- embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round. "will live!" she drew a deep breath. "and you have brought me here," she said, "to ask me to do this?" "i was sent here to ask you to do this." "why me? why me?" she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him, her face wan and colourless. "you come to me, a woman! why to me?" "you are his wife!" "and he is my husband!" "therefore he trusts you," was the unyielding, the pitiless answer. "you, and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this." she gazed at him in astonishment. "and it is you who say that?" she faltered, after a pause. "you who made us one, who now bid me betray him, whom i have sworn to love? to ruin him whom i have sworn to honour?" "i do!" he answered solemnly. "on my head be the guilt, and on yours the merit." "nay, but--" she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion--"do you take both guilt and merit! you are a man," she continued, her words coming quickly in her excitement, "he is but a man! why do you not call him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him? staking your life against his, with all those lives for prize? and save them or perish? why i, even i, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not my husband! surely you, you who are a man, and young--" "am no match for him in strength or arms," the minister answered sadly. "else would i do it! else would i stake my life, heaven knows, as gladly to save their lives as i sit down to meat! but i should fail, and if i failed all were lost. moreover," he continued solemnly, "i am certified that this task has been set for you. it was not for nothing, madame, nor to save one poor household that you were joined to this man; but to ransom all these lives and this great city. to be the judith of our faith, the saviour of angers, the--" "fool! fool!" she cried. "will you be silent?" and she stamped the turf passionately, while her eyes blazed in her white face. "i am no judith, and no madwoman as you are fain to make me. mad?" she continued, overwhelmed with agitation, "my god, i would i were, and i should be free from this!" and, turning, she walked a little way from him with the gesture of one under a crushing burden. he waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and still she did not return. at length she came back, her bearing more composed; she looked at him, and her eyes seized his and seemed as if they would read his soul. "are you sure," she said, "of what you have told me? will you swear that the contents of these letters are as you say?" "as i live," he answered gravely. "as god lives." "and you know--of no other way, monsieur? of no other way?" she repeated slowly and piteously. "of none, madame, of none, i swear." she sighed deeply, and stood sunk in thought. then, "when do we reach angers?" she asked heavily. "the day after to-morrow." "i have--until the day after to-morrow?" "yes. to-night we lie near vendome." "and to-morrow night?" "near a place called la fleche. it is possible," he went on with hesitation--for he did not understand her--"that he may bathe to-morrow, and may hand the packet to you, as he did to-day when i vainly sought speech with you. if he does that--" "yes?" she said, her eyes on his face. "the taking will be easy. but when he finds you have it not"--he faltered anew--"it may go hard with you." she did not speak. "and there, i think, i can help you. if you will stray from the party, i will meet you and destroy the letter. that done--and would god it were done already--i will take to flight as best i can, and you will raise the alarm and say that i robbed you of it! and if you tear your dress--" "no," she said. he looked a question. "no!" she repeated in a low voice. "if i betray him i will not lie to him! and no other shall pay the price! if i ruin him it shall be between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!" he shook his head. "i do not know," he murmured, "what he may do to you!" "nor i," she said proudly. "that will be for him." * * * * * curious eyes had watched the two as they climbed the hill. for the path ran up the slope to the gap which served for gate, much as the path leads up to the castle beautiful in old prints of the pilgrim's journey, and madame st. lo had marked the first halt and the second, and, noting every gesture, had lost nothing of the interview save the words. but until the two, after pausing a moment, passed out of sight she made no sign. then she laughed. and as count hannibal, at whom the laugh was aimed, did not heed her, she laughed again. and she hummed the line of ronsard. still he would not be roused, and, piqued, she had recourse to words. "i wonder what you would do," she said, "if the old lover followed us, and she went off with him!" "she would not go," he answered coldly, and without looking up. "but if he rode off with her?" "she would come back on her feet!" madame st. lo's prudence was not proof against that. she had the woman's inclination to hide a woman's secret; and she had not intended, when she laughed, to do more than play with the formidable man with whom so few dared to play. now, stung by his tone and his assurance, she must needs show him that his trustfulness had no base. and, as so often happens in the circumstances, she went a little farther than the facts bore her. "any way, he has followed us so far!" she cried viciously. "m. de tignonville?" "yes. i saw him this morning while you were bathing. she left me and went into the little coppice. he came down the other side of the brook, stooping and running, and went to join her." "how did he cross the brook?" madame st. lo blushed. "old badelon was there, gathering simples," she said. "he scared him. and he crawled away." "then he did not cross?" "no. i did not say he did!" "nor speak to her?" "no. but if you think it will pass so next time--you do not know much of women!" "of women generally, not much," he answered, grimly polite. "of this woman a great deal!" "you looked in her big eyes, i suppose!" madame st. lo cried with heat. "and straightway fell down and worshipped her!" she liked rather than disliked the countess; but she was of the lightest, and the least opposition drove her out of her course. "and you think you know her! and she, if she could save you from death by opening an eye, would go with a patch on it till her dying day! take my word for it, monsieur, between her and her lover you will come to harm." count hannibal's swarthy face darkened a tone, and his eyes grew a very little smaller. "i fancy that he runs the greater risk," he muttered. "you may deal with him, but, for her--" "i can deal with her. you deal with some women with a whip--" "you would whip me, i suppose?" "yes," he said quietly. "it would do you good, madame. and with other women otherwise. there are women who, if they are well frightened, will not deceive you. and there are others who will not deceive you though they are frightened. madame de tavannes is of the latter kind." "wait! wait and see!" madame cried in scorn. "i am waiting." "yes! and whereas if you had come to me i could have told her that about m. de tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting and waiting and waiting until one fine day you'll wake up and find madame gone, and--" "then i'll take a wife i can whip!" he answered, with a look which apprised her how far she had carried it. "but it will not be you, sweet cousin. for i have no whip heavy enough for your case." chapter xxi. she would, and would not. we noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe. but there are concessions which touch even a good woman's conscience; and madame de tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her. to ignore what la tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from massacre--this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish, that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. but to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment. and the countess was no fanatic. no haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own. even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her. true, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pass for punishment. but he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. in return for which she was to ruin him? it was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him. she pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the weltering sun in their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the bracken which fringed the track. across breezy heaths and over downs, through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world--from which they came and to which they must return--that she could have wept in anguish, cursing god for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on creation. the gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and swaying stirrups--and singing now a refrain from ronsard, and now one of those verses of marot's psalms which all the world had sung three decades before--wore their most lamb-like aspect. behind them madame st. lo chattered to suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at angers. and the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. in time of war death's shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is out of mind. of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of vendome, three only wore faces attuned to the cruel august week just ending; three only, like dark beads strung far apart on a gay nun's rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in their places. the countess was one--the others were the two men whose thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, la tribe's with sombre fire in their depths, count hannibal's fraught with a gloomy speculation, which belied his brave words to madame st. lo. he, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not touch her. and she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. so that of the three only la tribe was single-minded. this day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak- wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. night was hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which marked where vendome stood. "another league," count hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'tis pure and dry here," he said. "set a watch, bigot, and let two men go down for water. i hear frogs below. you do not fear to be moonstruck, madame?" "i prefer this," she answered in a low voice. "houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "give me god's heaven." "the earth is his, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke. he looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. he stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and madame st. lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order. by-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of nature's cathedral. through the shadowy gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a brescian organ. the darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night. the countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions. "yet, i believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself. "though i have seen what i have seen, yet i believe!" and though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which her soul shrank! the woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for choosing evil, or good, ease for herself or life for others. but the moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no shame and no suffering seemed--for the moment at least--too great a price to pay for the lives of little children. love had been taken from her life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity--that must go, too! she felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night. but things fell out in a manner she had not pictured. they halted before noon on the north bank of the loir, in a level meadow with lines of poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the soft shimmer of leaves. blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky, flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, italian fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair. a road ran across the meadow to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself. presently madame st. lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have it. the poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a hermit--in a meadow--was no longer to her taste. "let us go on the water!" she cried. "presently you will go to bathe, monsieur, and leave us to grill!" "two livres to the man who will fetch the boat!" count hannibal cried. in less than half a minute three men had thrown off their boots, and were swimming across, amid the laughter and shouts of their fellows. in five minutes the boat was brought. it was not large and would hold no more than four. tavannes' eye fell on carlat. "you understand a boat," he said. "go with madame st. lo. and you, m. la tribe." "but you are coming?" madame st. lo cried, turning to the countess. "oh, madame," with a curtsey, "you are not? you--" "yes, i will come," the countess answered. "i shall bathe a short distance up the stream," count hannibal said. he took from his belt the packet of letters, and as carlat held the boat for madame st. lo to enter, he gave it to the countess, as he had given it to her yesterday. "have a care of it, madame," he said in a low voice, "and do not let it pass out of your hands. to lose it may be to lose my head." the colour ebbed from her cheeks. in spite of herself her shaking hand put back the packet. "had you not better then--give it to bigot?" she faltered. "he is bathing." "let him bathe afterwards." "no," he answered almost harshly; he found a species of pleasure in showing her that, strange as their relations were, he trusted her. "no; take it, madame. only have a care of it." she took it then, hid it in her dress, and he turned away; and she turned towards the boat. la tribe stood beside the stern, holding it for her to enter, and as her fingers rested an instant on his arm their eyes met. his were alight, his arm even quivered; and she shuddered. she avoided looking at him a second time, and this was easy, since he took his seat in the bows beyond carlat, who handled the oars. silently the boat glided out on the surface of the stream, and floated downwards, carlat now and again touching an oar, and madame st. lo chattering gaily in a voice which carried far on the water. now it was a flowering rush she must have, now a green bough to shield her face from the sun's reflection; and now they must lie in some cool, shadowy pool under fern- clad banks, where the fish rose heavily, and the trickle of a rivulet fell down over stones. it was idyllic. but not to the countess. her face burned, her temples throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to steady her pulses. the packet within her dress scorched her. the great city and its danger, tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action, the irrevocableness of action hurried through her brain. the knowledge that she must act now--or never--pressed upon her with distracting force. her hand felt the packet, and fell again nerveless. "the sun has caught you, _ma mie_," madame st. lo said. "you should ride in a mask as i do." "i have not one with me," she muttered, her eyes on the water. "and i but an old one. but at angers--" the countess heard no more; on that word she caught la tribe's eye. he was beckoning to her behind carlat's back, pointing imperiously to the water, making signs to her to drop the packet over the side. when she did not obey--she felt sick and faint--she saw through a mist his brow grow dark. he menaced her secretly. and still the packet scorched her; and twice her hand went to it, and dropped again empty. on a sudden madame st. lo cried out. the bank on one side of the stream was beginning to rise more boldly above the water, and at the head of the steep thus formed she had espied a late rosebush in bloom; nothing would now serve but she must land at once and plunder it. the boat was put in therefore, she jumped ashore, and began to scale the bank. "go with madame!" la tribe cried, roughly nudging carlat in the back. "do you not see that she cannot climb the bank? up, man, up!" the countess opened her mouth to cry "no!" but the word died half-born on her lips; and when the steward looked at her, uncertain what she had said, she nodded. "yes, go!" she muttered. she was pale. "yes, man, go!" cried the minister, his eyes burning. and he almost pushed the other out of the boat. the next second the craft floated from the bank, and began to drift downwards. la tribe waited until a tree interposed and hid them from the two whom they had left; then he leaned forward. "now, madame!" he cried imperiously. "in god's name, now!" "oh!" she cried. "wait! wait! i want to think." "to think?" "he trusted me!" she wailed. "he trusted me! how can i do it?" nevertheless, and even while she spoke, she drew forth the packet. "heaven has given you the opportunity!" "if i could have stolen it!" she answered. "fool!" he returned, rocking himself to and fro, and fairly beside himself with impatience. "why steal it? it is in your hands! you have it! it is heaven's own opportunity, it is god's opportunity given to you!" for he could not read her mind nor comprehend the scruple which held her hand. he was single-minded. he had but one aim, one object. he saw the haggard faces of brave men hopeless; he heard the dying cries of women and children. such an opportunity of saving god's elect, of redeeming the innocent, was in his eyes a gift from heaven. and having these thoughts and seeing her hesitate--hesitate when every movement caused him agony, so imperative was haste, so precious the opportunity--he could bear the suspense no longer. when she did not answer he stooped forward, until his knees touched the thwart on which carlat had sat; then, without a word, he flung himself forward, and, with one hand far extended, grasped the packet. had he not moved, she would have done his will; almost certainly she would have done it. but, thus attacked, she resisted instinctively; she clung to the letters. "no!" she cried. "no! let go, monsieur!" and she tried to drag the packet from him. "give it me!" "let go, monsieur! do you hear?" she repeated. and, with a vigorous jerk, she forced it from him--he had caught it by the edge only--and held it behind her. "go back, and--" "give it me!" he panted. "i will not!" "then throw it overboard!" "i will not!" she cried again, though his face, dark with passion, glared into hers, and it was clear that the man, possessed by one idea only, was no longer master of himself. "go back to your place!" "give it me," he gasped, "or i will upset the boat!" and, seizing her by the shoulder, he reached over her, striving to take hold of the packet which she held behind her. the boat rocked; and, as much in rage as fear, she screamed. a cry uttered wholly in rage answered hers; it came from carlat. la tribe, however, whose whole mind was fixed on the packet, did not heed, nor would have heeded, the steward. but the next moment a second cry, fierce as that of a wild beast, clove the air from the lower and farther bank; and the huguenot, recognizing count hannibal's voice, involuntarily desisted and stood erect. a moment the boat rocked perilously under him; then--for unheeded it had been drifting that way--it softly touched the bank on which carlat stood staring and aghast. la tribe's chance was gone; he saw that the steward must reach him before he could succeed in a second attempt. on the other hand, the undergrowth on the bank was thick, he could touch it with his hand, and if he fled at once he might escape. he hung an instant irresolute; then, with a look which went to the countess's heart, he sprang ashore, plunged among the alders, and in a moment was gone. "after him! after him!" thundered count hannibal. "after him, man!" and carlat, stumbling down the steep slope and through the rough briars, did his best to obey. but in vain. before he reached the water's edge, the noise of the fugitive's retreat had grown faint. a few seconds and it died away. chapter xxii. playing with fire. the impulse of la tribe's foot as he landed had driven the boat into the stream. it drifted slowly downward, and if naught intervened, would take the ground on count hannibal's side, a hundred and fifty yards below him. he saw this, and walked along the bank, keeping pace with it, while the countess sat motionless, crouching in the stern of the craft, her fingers strained about the fatal packet. the slow glide of the boat, as almost imperceptibly it approached the low bank; the stillness of the mirror- like surface on which it moved, leaving only the faintest ripple behind it; the silence--for under the influence of emotion count hannibal too was mute--all were in tremendous contrast with the storm which raged in her breast. should she--should she even now, with his eyes on her, drop the letters over the side? it needed but a movement. she had only to extend her hand, to relax the tension of her fingers, and the deed was done. it needed only that; but the golden sands of opportunity were running out--were running out fast. slowly and more slowly, silently and more silently, the boat slid in towards the bank on which he stood, and still she hesitated. the stillness, and the waiting figure, and the watching eyes now but a few feet distant, weighed on her and seemed to paralyze her will. a foot, another foot! a moment and it would be too late, the last of the sands would have run out. the bow of the boat rustled softly through the rushes; it kissed the bank. and her hand still held the letters. "you are not hurt?" he asked curtly. "the scoundrel might have drowned you. was he mad?" she was silent. he held out his hand, and she gave him the packet. "i owe you much," he said, a ring of gaiety, almost of triumph, in his tone. "more than you guess, madame. god made you for a soldier's wife, and a mother of soldiers. what? you are not well, i am afraid?" "if i could sit down a minute," she faltered. she was swaying on her feet. he supported her across the belt of meadow which fringed the bank, and made her recline against a tree. then as his men began to come up--for the alarm had reached them--he would have sent two of them in the boat to fetch madame st. lo to her. but she would not let him. "your maid, then?" he said. "no, monsieur, i need only to be alone a little! only to be alone," she repeated, her face averted; and believing this he sent the men away, and, taking the boat himself, he crossed over, took in madame st. lo and carlat, and rowed them to the ferry. here the wildest rumours were current. one held that the huguenot had gone out of his senses; another, that he had watched for this opportunity of avenging his brethren; a third, that his intention had been to carry off the countess and hold her to ransom. only tavannes himself, from his position on the farther bank, had seen the packet of letters, and the hand which withheld them; and he said nothing. nay, when some of the men would have crossed to search for the fugitive, he forbade them, he scarcely knew why, save that it might please her; and when the women would have hurried to join her and hear the tale from her lips he forbade them also. "she wishes to be alone," he said curtly. "alone?" madame st. lo cried, in a fever of curiosity. "you'll find her dead, or worse! what? leave a woman alone after such a fright as that!" "she wishes it." madame laughed cynically; and the laugh brought a tinge of colour to his brow. "oh, does she?" she sneered. "then i understand! have a care, have a care, or one of these days, monsieur, when you leave her alone, you'll find them together!" "be silent!" "with pleasure," she returned. "only when it happens don't say that you were not warned. you think that she does not hear from him--" "how can she hear?" the words were wrung from him. madame st. lo's contempt passed all limits. "how can she!" she retorted. "you trail a woman across france, and let her sit by herself, and lie by herself, and all but drown by herself, and you ask how she hears from her lover? you leave her old servants about her, and you ask how she communicates with him?" "you know nothing!" he snarled. "i know this," she retorted. "i saw her sitting this morning, and smiling and weeping at the same time! was she thinking of you, monsieur? or of him? she was looking at the hills through tears; a blue mist hung over them, and i'll wager she saw some one's eyes gazing and some one's hand beckoning out of the blue!" "curse you!" he cried, tormented in spite of himself. "you love to make mischief!" "no!" she answered swiftly. "for 'twas not i made the match. but go your way, go your way, monsieur, and see what kind of a welcome you'll get!" "i will," count hannibal growled. and he started along the bank to rejoin his wife. the light in his eyes had died down. yet would they have been more sombre, and his face more harsh, had he known the mind of the woman to whom he was hastening. the countess had begged to be left alone; alone, she found the solitude she had craved a cruel gift. she had saved the packet. she had fulfilled her trust. but only to experience, the moment the deed was done, the full poignancy of remorse. before the act, while the choice had lain with her, the betrayal of her husband had loomed large; now she saw that to treat him as she had treated him was the true betrayal, and that even for his own sake, and to save him from a fearful sin, it had become her to destroy the letters. now, it was no longer her duty to him which loomed large, but her duty to the innocent, to the victims of the massacre which she might have stayed, to the people of her faith whom she had abandoned, to the women and children whose death-warrant she had preserved. now, she perceived that a part more divine had never fallen to woman, nor a responsibility so heavy been laid upon woman. nor guilt more dread! she writhed in misery, thinking of it. what had she done? she could hear afar off the sounds of the camp; an occasional outcry, a snatch of laughter. and the cry and the laughter rang in her ears, a bitter mockery. this summer camp, to what was it the prelude? this forbearance on her husband's part, in what would it end? were not the one and the other cruel make-believes? two days, and the men who laughed beside the water would slay and torture with equal zest. a little, and the husband who now chose to be generous would show himself in his true colours. and it was for the sake of such as these that she had played the coward. that she had laid up for herself endless remorse. that henceforth the cries of the innocent would haunt her dreams. racked by such thoughts she did not hear his step, and it was his shadow falling across her feet which first warned her of his presence. she looked up, saw him, and involuntarily recoiled. then, seeing the change in his face-- "oh! monsieur," she stammered, affrighted, her hand pressed to her side, "i ask your pardon! you startled me!" "so it seems," he answered. and he stood over her regarding her dryly. "i am not quite--myself yet," she murmured. his look told her that her start had betrayed her feelings. alas! the plan of taking a woman by force has drawbacks, and among others this one: that he must be a sanguine husband who deems her heart his, and a husband without jealousy, whose suspicions are not aroused by the faintest flush or the lightest word. he knows that she is his unwillingly, a victim, not a mistress; and behind every bush beside the road and behind every mask in the crowd he espies a rival. moreover, where women are in question, who is always strong? or who can say how long he will pursue this plan or that? a man of sternest temper, count hannibal had set out on a path of conduct carefully and deliberately chosen; knowing--and he still knew--that if he abandoned it he had little to hope, if the less to fear. but the proof of fidelity which the countess had just given him had blown to a white heat the smouldering flame in his heart, and madame st. lo's gibes, which should have fallen as cold water alike on his hopes and his passion, had but fed the desire to know the best. for all that, he might not have spoken now, if he had not caught her look of affright; strange as it sounds, that look, which of all things should have silenced him and warned him that the time was not yet, stung him out of patience. suddenly the man in him carried him away. "you still fear me, then?" he said, in a voice hoarse and unnatural. "is it for what i do or for what i leave undone that you hate me, madame? tell me, i beg, for--" "for neither!" she said, trembling. his eyes, hot and passionate, were on her, and the blood had mounted to his brow. "for neither! i do not hate you, monsieur!" "you fear me then? i am right in that." "i fear--that which you carry with you," she stammered, speaking on impulse and scarcely knowing what she said. he started, and his expression changed. "so?" he exclaimed. "so? you know what i carry, do you? and from whom? from whom," he continued in a tone of menace, "if you please, did you get that knowledge?" "from m. la tribe," she muttered. she had not meant to tell him. why had she told him? he nodded. "i might have known it," he said. "i more than suspected it. therefore i should be the more beholden to you for saving the letters. but"--he paused and laughed harshly--"it was out of no love for me you saved them. that too i know." she did not answer or protest; and when he had waited a moment in vain expectation of her protest, a cruel look crept into his eyes. "madame," he said slowly, "do you never reflect that you may push the part you play too far? that the patience, even of the worst of men, does not endure for ever?" "i have your word!" she answered. "and you do not fear?" "i have your word," she repeated. and now she looked him bravely in the face, her eyes full of the courage of her race. the lines of his mouth hardened as he met her look. "and what have i of yours?" he said in a low voice. "what have i of yours?" her face began to burn at that, her eyes fell and she faltered. "my gratitude," she murmured, with an upward look that prayed for pity. "god knows, monsieur, you have that!" "god knows i do not want it!" he answered. and he laughed derisively. "your gratitude!" and he mocked her tone rudely and coarsely. "your gratitude!" then for a minute--for so long a time that she began to wonder and to quake--he was silent. at last, "a fig for your gratitude," he said. "i want your love! i suppose--cold as you are, and a huguenot--you can love like other women!" it was the first, the very first time he had used the word to her; and though it fell from his lips like a threat, though he used it as a man presents a pistol, she flushed anew from throat to brow. but she did not quail. "it is not mine to give," she said. "it is his?" "yes, monsieur," she answered, wondering at her courage, at her audacity, her madness. "it is his." "and it cannot be mine--at any time?" she shook her head, trembling. "never?" and, suddenly reaching forward, he gripped her wrist in an iron grasp. there was passion in his tone. his eyes burned her. whether it was that set her on another track, or pure despair, or the cry in her ears of little children and of helpless women, something in a moment inspired her, flashed in her eyes and altered her voice. she raised her head and looked him firmly in the face. "what," she said, "do you mean by love?" "you!" he answered brutally. "then--it may be, monsieur," she returned. "there is a way if you will." "a way!" "if you will!" as she spoke she rose slowly to her feet; for in his surprise he had released her wrist. he rose with her, and they stood confronting one another on the strip of grass between the river and the poplars. "if i will?" his form seemed to dilate, his eyes devoured her. "if i will?" "yes," she replied. "if you will give me the letters that are in your belt, the packet which i saved to-day--that i may destroy them--i will be yours freely and willingly." he drew a deep breath, still devouring her with his eyes. "you mean it?" he said at last. "i do." she looked him in the face as she spoke, and her cheeks were white, not red. "only--the letters! give me the letters." "and for them you will give me your love?" her eyes flickered, and involuntarily she shivered. a faint blush rose and dyed her cheeks. "only god can give love," she said, her tone low. "and yours is given?" "yes." "to another?" "i have said it." "it is his. and yet for these letters--" "for these lives!" she cried proudly. "you will give yourself?" "i swear it," she answered, "if you will give them to me! if you will give them to me," she repeated. and she held out her hands; her face, full of passion, was bright with a strange light. a close observer might have thought her distraught; still excited by the struggle in the boat, and barely mistress of herself. but the man whom she tempted, the man who held her price at his belt, after one searching look at her turned from her; perhaps because he could not trust himself to gaze on her. count hannibal walked a dozen paces from her and returned, and again a dozen paces and returned; and again a third time, with something fierce and passionate in his gait. at last he stopped before her. "you have nothing to offer for them," he said, in a cold, hard tone. "nothing that is not mine already, nothing that is not my right, nothing that i cannot take at my will. my word?" he continued, seeing her about to interrupt him. "true, madame, you have it, you had it. but why need i keep my word to you, who tempt me to break my word to the king?" she made a weak gesture with her hands. her head had sunk on her breast--she seemed dazed by the shock of his contempt, dazed by his reception of her offer. "you saved the letters?" he continued, interpreting her action. "true, but the letters are mine, and that which you offer for them is mine also. you have nothing to offer. for the rest, madame," he went on, eyeing her cynically, "you surprise me! you, whose modesty and virtue are so great, would corrupt your husband, would sell yourself, would dishonour the love of which you boast so loudly, the love that only god gives!" he laughed derisively as he quoted her words. "ay, and, after showing at how low a price you hold yourself, you still look, i doubt not, to me to respect you, and to keep my word. madame!" in a terrible voice, "do not play with fire! you saved my letters, it is true! and for that, for this time, you shall go free, if god will help me to let you go! but tempt me not! tempt me not!" he repeated, turning from her and turning back again with a gesture of despair, as if he mistrusted the strength of the restraint which he put upon himself. "i am no more than other men! perhaps i am less. and you--you who prate of love, and know not what love is--could love! could love!" he stopped on that word as if the word choked him--stopped, struggling with his passion. at last, with a half-stifled oath, he flung away from her, halted and hung a moment, then, with a swing of rage, went off again violently. his feet as he strode along the river-bank trampled the flowers, and slew the pale water forget-me-not, which grew among the grasses. chapter xxiii. a mind, and not a mind. la tribe tore through the thicket, imagining carlat and count hannibal hot on his heels. he dared not pause even to listen. the underwood tripped him, the lissom branches of the alders whipped his face and blinded him; once he fell headlong over a moss-grown stone, and picked himself up groaning. but the hare hard-pushed takes no account of the briars, nor does the fox heed the mud through which it draws itself into covert. and for the time he was naught but a hunted beast. with elbows pinned to his sides, or with hands extended to ward off the boughs, with bursting lungs and crimson face, he plunged through the tangle, now slipping downwards, now leaping upwards, now all but prostrate, now breasting a mass of thorns. on and on he ran, until he came to the verge of the wood, saw before him an open meadow devoid of shelter or hiding- place, and with a groan of despair cast himself flat. he listened. how far were they behind him? he heard nothing--nothing, save the common noises of the wood, the angry chatter of a disturbed blackbird as it flew low into hiding, or the harsh notes of a flock of starlings as they rose from the meadow. the hum of bees filled the air, and the august flies buzzed about his sweating brow, for he had lost his cap. but behind him--nothing. already the stillness of the wood had closed upon his track. he was not the less panic-stricken. he supposed that tavannes' people were getting to horse, and calculated that, if they surrounded and beat the wood, he must be taken. at the thought, though he had barely got his breath, he rose, and keeping within the coppice crawled down the slope towards the river. gently, when he reached it, he slipped into the water, and stooping below the level of the bank, his head and shoulders hidden by the bushes, he waded down stream until he had put another hundred and fifty yards between himself and pursuit. then he paused and listened. still he heard nothing, and he waded on again, until the water grew deep. at this point he marked a little below him a clump of trees on the farther side; and reflecting that that side--if he could reach it unseen--would be less suspect, he swam across, aiming for a thorn bush which grew low to the water. under its shelter he crawled out, and, worming himself like a snake across the few yards of grass which intervened, he stood at length within the shadow of the trees. a moment he paused to shake himself, and then, remembering that he was still within a mile of the camp, he set off, now walking, and now running in the direction of the hills which his party had crossed that morning. for a time he hurried on, thinking only of escape. but when he had covered a mile or two, and escape seemed probable, there began to mingle with his thankfulness a bitter--a something which grew more bitter with each moment. why had he fled and left the work undone? why had he given way to unworthy fear, when the letters were within his grasp? true, if he had lingered a few seconds longer, he would have failed to make good his escape; but what of that if in those seconds he had destroyed the letters, he had saved angers, he had saved his brethren? alas! he had played the coward. the terror of tavannes' voice had unmanned him. he had saved himself and left the flock to perish; he, whom god had set apart by many and great signs for this work! he had commonly courage enough. he could have died at the stake for his convictions. but he had not the presence of mind which is proof against a shock, nor the cool judgment which, in the face of death, sees to the end of two roads. he was no coward, but now he deemed himself one, and in an agony of remorse he flung himself on his face in the long grass. he had known trials and temptations, but hitherto he had held himself erect; now, like peter, he had betrayed his lord. he lay an hour groaning in the misery of his heart, and then he fell on the text "thou art peter, and on this rock--" and he sat up. peter had betrayed his trust through cowardice--as he had. but peter had not been held unworthy. might it not be so with him? he rose to his feet, a new light in his eyes. he would return! he would return, and at all costs, even at the cost of surrendering himself, he would obtain access to the letters. and then--not the fear of count hannibal, not the fear of instant death, should turn him from his duty. he had cast himself down in a woodland glade which lay near the path along which he had ridden that morning. but the mental conflict from which he rose had shaken him so violently that he could not recall the side on which he had entered the clearing, and he turned himself about, endeavouring to remember. at that moment the light jingle of a bridle struck his ear; he caught through the green bushes the flash and sparkle of harness. they had tracked him then, they were here! so had he clear proof that this second chance was to be his. in a happy fervour he stood forward where the pursuers could not fail to see him. or so he thought. yet the first horseman, riding carelessly with his face averted and his feet dangling, would have gone by and seen nothing if his horse, more watchful, had not shied. the man turned then; and for a moment the two stared at one another between the pricked ears of the horse. at last-- "m. de tignonville!" the minister ejaculated. "la tribe!" "it is truly you?" "well--i think so," the young man answered. the minister lifted up his eyes and seemed to call the trees and the clouds and the birds to witness. "now," he cried, "i know that i am chosen! and that we were instruments to do this thing from the day when the hen saved us in the haycart in paris! now i know that all is forgiven and all is ordained, and that the faithful of angers shall to-morrow live and not die!" and with a face radiant, yet solemn, he walked to the young man's stirrup. an instant tignonville looked sharply before him. "how far ahead are they?" he asked. his tone, hard and matter-of-fact, was little in harmony with the other's enthusiasm. "they are resting a league before you, at the ferry. you are in pursuit of them?" "yes." "not alone?" "no." the young man's look as he spoke was grim. "i have five behind me--of your kidney, m. la tribe. they are from the arsenal. they have lost one his wife, and one his son. the three others--" "yes?" "sweethearts," tignonville answered dryly. and he cast a singular look at the minister. but la tribe's mind was so full of one matter, he could think only of that. "how did you hear of the letters?" he asked. "the letters?" "yes." "i do not know what you mean." la tribe stared. "then why are you following him?" he asked. "why?" tignonville echoed, a look of hate darkening his face. "do you ask why we follow--" but on the name he seemed to choke and was silent. by this time his men had come up, and one answered for him. "why are we following hannibal de tavannes?" he said sternly. "to do to him as he has done to us! to rob him as he has robbed us--of more than gold! to kill him as he has killed ours, foully and by surprise! in his bed if we can! in the arms of his wife if god wills it!" the speaker's face was haggard from brooding and lack of sleep, but his eyes glowed and burned, as his fellows growled assent. "'tis simple why we follow," a second put in. "is there a man of our faith who will not, when he hears the tale, rise up and stab the nearest of this black brood--though it be his brother? if so, god's curse on him!" "amen! amen!" "so, and so only," cried the first, "shall there be faith in our land! and our children, our little maids, shall lie safe in their beds!" "amen! amen!" the speaker's chin sank on his breast, and with his last word the light died out of his eyes. la tribe looked at him curiously, then at the others. last of all at tignonville, on whose face he fancied that he surprised a faint smile. yet tignonville's tone when he spoke was grave enough. "you have heard," he said. "do you blame us?" "i cannot," the minister answered, shivering. "i cannot." he had been for a while beyond the range of these feelings; and in the greenwood, under god's heaven, with the sunshine about him, they jarred on him. yet he could not blame men who had suffered as these had suffered; who were maddened, as these were maddened, by the gravest wrongs which it is possible for one man to inflict on another. "i dare not," he continued sorrowfully. "but in god's name i offer you a higher and a nobler errand." "we need none," tignonville muttered impatiently. "yet many others need you," la tribe answered in a tone of rebuke. "you are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the king for the hands of the magistrates of angers?" "ha! does he?" "bidding them do at angers as his majesty has done in paris?" the men broke into cries of execration. "but he shall not see angers!" they swore. "the blood that he has shed shall choke him by the way! and as he would do to others it shall be done to him." la tribe shuddered as he listened, as he looked. try as he would, the thirst of these men for vengeance appalled him. "how?" he said. "he has a score and more with him and you are only six." "seven now," tignonville answered with a smile. "true, but--" "and he lies to-night at la fleche? that is so?" "it was his intention this morning." "at the old king's inn at the meeting of the great roads?" "it was mentioned," la tribe admitted, with a reluctance he did not comprehend. "but if the night be fair he is as like as not to lie in the fields." one of the men pointed to the sky. a dark bank of cloud fresh risen from the ocean, and big with tempest, hung low in the west. "see! god will deliver him into our hands!" he cried. tignonville nodded. "if he lie there," he said, "he will." and then to one of his followers, as he dismounted, "do you ride on," he said, "and stand guard that we be not surprised. and do you, perrot, tell monsieur. perrot here, as god wills it," he added, with the faint smile which did not escape the minister's eye, "married his wife from the great inn at la fleche, and he knows the place." "none better," the man growled. he was a sullen, brooding knave, whose eyes when he looked up surprised by their savage fire. la tribe shook his head. "i know it, too," he said. "'tis strong as a fortress, with a walled court, and all the windows look inwards. the gates are closed an hour after sunset, no matter who is without. if you think, m. de tignonville, to take him there--" "patience, monsieur, you have not heard me," perrot interposed. "i know it after another fashion. do you remember a rill of water which runs through the great yard and the stables?" la tribe nodded. "grated with iron at either end and no passage for so much as a dog? you do? well, monsieur, i have hunted rats there, and where the water passes under the wall is a culvert, a man's height in length. in it is a stone, one of those which frame the grating at the entrance, which a strong man can remove--and the man is in!" "ay, in! but where?" la tribe asked, his eyebrows drawn together. "well said, monsieur, where?" perrot rejoined in a tone of triumph. "there lies the point. in the stables, where will be sleeping men, and a snorer on every truss? no, but in a fairway between two stables where the water at its entrance runs clear in a stone channel; a channel deepened in one place that they may draw for the chambers above with a rope and a bucket. the rooms above are the best in the house, four in one row, opening all on the gallery; which was uncovered, in the common fashion until queen-mother jezebel, passing that way to nantes, two years back, found the chambers draughty; and that end of the gallery was closed in against her return. now, monsieur, he and his madame will lie there; and he will feel safe, for there is but one way to those four rooms--through the door which shuts off the covered gallery from the open part. but--" he glanced up an instant and la tribe caught the smouldering fire in his eyes--"we shall not go in by the door." "the bucket rises through a trap?" "in the gallery? to be sure, monsieur. in the corner beyond the fourth door. there shall he fall into the pit which he dug for others, and the evil that he planned rebound on his own head!" la tribe was silent. "what think you of it?" tignonville asked. "that it is cleverly planned," the minister answered. "no more than that?" "no more until i have eaten." "get him something!" tignonville replied in a surly tone. "and we may as well eat, ourselves. lead the horses into the wood. and do you, perrot, call tuez-les-moines, who is forward. two hours' riding should bring us to la fleche. we need not leave here, therefore, until the sun is low. to dinner! to dinner!" probably he did not feel the indifference he affected, for his face as he ate grew darker, and from time to time he shot a glance, barbed with suspicion, at the minister. la tribe on his side remained silent, although the men ate apart. he was in doubt, indeed, as to his own feelings. his instinct and his reason were at odds. through all, however, a single purpose, the rescue of angers, held good, and gradually other things fell into their places. when the meal was at an end, and tignonville challenged him, he was ready. "your enthusiasm seems to have waned," the younger man said with a sneer, "since we met, monsieur! may i ask now if you find any fault with the plan?" "with the plan, none." "if it was providence brought us together, was it not providence furnished me with perrot who knows la fleche? if it was providence brought the danger of the faithful in angers to your knowledge, was it not providence set us on the road--without whom you had been powerless?" "i believe it!" "then, in his name, what is the matter?" tignonville rejoined with a passion of which the other's manner seemed an inadequate cause. "what will you! what is it?" "i would take your place," la tribe answered quietly. "my place?" "yes." "what, are we too many?" "we are enough without you, m. tignonville," the minister answered. "these men, who have wrongs to avenge, god will justify them." tignonville's eyes sparkled with anger. "and have i no wrongs to avenge?" he cried. "is it nothing to lose my mistress, to be robbed of my wife, to see the woman i love dragged off to be a slave and a toy? are these no wrongs?" "he spared your life, if he did not save it," the minister said solemnly. "and hers. and her servants." "to suit himself." la tribe spread out his hands. "to suit himself! and for that you wish him to go free?" tignonville cried in a voice half-choked with rage. "do you know that this man, and this man alone, stood forth in the great hall of the louvre, and when even the king flinched, justified the murder of our people? after that is he to go free?" "at your hands," la tribe answered quietly. "you alone of our people must not pursue him." he would have added more, but tignonville would not listen. brooding on his wrongs behind the wall of the arsenal, he had let hatred eat away his more generous instincts. vain and conceited, he fancied that the world laughed at the poor figure he had cut; and the wound in his vanity festered until nothing would serve but to see the downfall of his enemy. instant pursuit, instant vengeance--only these, he fancied, could restore him in his fellows' eyes. in his heart he knew what would become him better. but vanity is a potent motive: and his conscience, even when supported by la tribe, struggled but weakly. from neither would he hear more. "you have travelled with him, until you side with him!" he cried violently. "have a care, monsieur, have a care, lest we think you papist!" and walking over to the men, he bade them saddle; adding a sour word which turned their eyes, in no friendly gaze, on the minister. after that la tribe said no more. of what use would it have been? but as darkness came on and cloaked the little troop, and the storm which the men had foreseen began to rumble in the west, his distaste for the business waxed. the summer lightning which presently began to play across the sky revealed not only the broad gleaming stream, between which and a wooded hill their road ran, but the faces of his companions; and these, in their turn, shed a grisly light on the bloody enterprise towards which they were set. nervous and ill at ease, the minister's mind dwelt on the stages of that enterprise: the stealthy entrance through the waterway, the ascent through the trap, the surprise, the slaughter in the sleeping-chamber. and either because he had lived for days in the victim's company, or was swayed by the arguments he had addressed to another, the prospect shook his soul. in vain he told himself that this was the oppressor; he saw only the man, fresh roused from sleep, with the horror of impending dissolution in his eyes. and when the rider, behind whom he sat, pointed to a faint spark of light, at no great distance before them, and whispered that it was st. agnes's chapel, hard by the inn, he could have cried with the best catholic of them all, "inter pontem et fontem, domine!" nay, some such words did pass his lips. for the man before him turned halfway in his saddle. "what?" he asked. but the huguenot did not explain. chapter xxiv. at the king's inn. the countess sat up in the darkness of the chamber. she had writhed since noon under the stings of remorse; she could bear them no longer. the slow declension of the day, the evening light, the signs of coming tempest which had driven her company to the shelter of the inn at the crossroads, all had racked her, by reminding her that the hours were flying, and that soon the fault she had committed would be irreparable. one impulsive attempt to redeem it she had made; but it had failed, and, by rendering her suspect, had made reparation more difficult. still, by daylight it had seemed possible to rest content with the trial made; not so now, when night had fallen, and the cries of little children and the haggard eyes of mothers peopled the darkness of her chamber. she sat up, and listened with throbbing temples. to shut out the lightning which played at intervals across the heavens, madame st. lo, who shared the room, had covered the window with a cloak; and the place was dark. to exclude the dull roll of the thunder was less easy, for the night was oppressively hot, and behind the cloak the casement was open. gradually, too, another sound, the hissing fall of heavy rain, began to make itself heard, and to mingle with the regular breathing which proved that madame st. lo slept. assured of this fact, the countess presently heaved a sigh, and slipped from the bed. she groped in the darkness for her cloak, found it, and donned it over her night gear. then, taking her bearings by her bed, which stood with its head to the window and its foot to the entrance, she felt her way across the floor to the door, and after passing her hands a dozen times over every part of it, she found the latch, and raised it. the door creaked, as she pulled it open, and she stood arrested; but the sound went no farther, for the roofed gallery outside, which looked by two windows on the courtyard, was full of outdoor noises, the rushing of rain and the running of spouts and eaves. one of the windows stood wide, admitting the rain and wind, and as she paused, holding the door open, the draught blew the cloak from her. she stepped out quickly and shut the door behind her. on her left was the blind end of the passage; she turned to the right. she took one step into the darkness and stood motionless. beside her, within a few feet of her, some one had moved, with a dull sound as of a boot on wood; a sound so near her that she held her breath, and pressed herself against the wall. she listened. perhaps some of the servants--it was a common usage--had made their beds on the floor. perhaps one of the women had stirred in the room against the wall of which she crouched. perhaps--but, even while she reassured herself, the sound rose anew at her feet. fortunately at the same instant the glare of the lightning flooded all, and showed the passage, and showed it empty. it lit up the row of doors on her right and the small windows on her left, and discovered facing her the door which shut off the rest of the house. she could have thanked--nay, she did thank god for that light. if the sound she had heard recurred she did not hear it; for, as the thunder which followed hard on the flash crashed overhead and rolled heavily eastwards, she felt her way boldly along the passage, touching first one door, and then a second, and then a third. she groped for the latch of the last, and found it, but, with her hand on it, paused. in order to summon up her courage, she strove to hear again the cries of misery and to see again the haggard eyes which had driven her hither. and if she did not wholly succeed, other reflections came to her aid. this storm, which covered all smaller noises, and opened, now and again, god's lantern for her use, did it not prove that he was on her side, and that she might count on his protection? the thought at least was timely, and with a better heart she gathered her wits. waiting until the thunder burst over her head, she opened the door, slid within it, and closed it. she would fain have left it ajar, that in case of need she might escape the more easily. but the wind, which beat into the passage through the open window, rendered the precaution too perilous. she went forward two paces into the room, and as the roll of the thunder died away she stooped forward and listened with painful intensity for the sound of count hannibal's breathing. but the window was open, and the hiss of the rain persisted; she could hear nothing through it, and fearfully she took another step forward. the window should be before her; the bed in the corner to the left. but nothing of either could she make out. she must wait for the lightning. it came, and for a second or more the room shone. the window, the low truckle-bed, the sleeper, she saw all with dazzling clearness, and before the flash had well passed she was crouching low, with the hood of her cloak dragged about her face. for the glare had revealed count hannibal; but not asleep! he lay on his side, his face towards her; lay with open eyes, staring at her. or had the light tricked her? the light must have tricked her, for in the interval between the flash and the thunder, while she crouched quaking, he did not move or call. the light must have deceived her. she felt so certain of it that she found courage to remain where she was until another flash came and showed him sleeping with closed eyes. she drew a breath of relief at that, and rose slowly to her feet. but she dared not go forward until a third flash had confirmed the second. then, while the thunder burst overhead and rolled away, she crept on until she stood beside the pillow, and, stooping, could hear the sleeper's breathing. alas! the worst remained to be done. the packet, she was sure of it, lay under his pillow. how was she to find it, how remove it without rousing him? a touch might awaken him. and yet, if she would not return empty- handed, if she would not go back to the harrowing thoughts which had tortured her through the long hours of the day, it must be done, and done now. she knew this, yet she hung irresolute a while, blenching before the manual act, listening to the persistent rush and downpour of the rain. then a second time she drew courage from the storm. how timely had it broken. how signally had it aided her! how slight had been her chance without it! and so at last, resolutely but with a deft touch, she slid her fingers between the pillow and the bed, slightly pressing down the latter with her other hand. for an instant she fancied that the sleeper's breathing stopped, and her heart gave a great bound. but the breathing went on the next instant--if it had stopped--and dreading the return of the lightning, shrinking from being revealed so near him, and in that act--for which the darkness seemed more fitting--she groped farther, and touched something. then, as her fingers closed upon it and grasped it, and his breath rose hot to her burning cheek, she knew that the real danger lay in the withdrawal. at the first attempt he uttered a kind of grunt and moved, throwing out his hand. she thought that he was going to awake, and had hard work to keep herself where she was; but he did not move, and she began again with so infinite a precaution that the perspiration ran down her face and her hair within the hood hung dank on her neck. slowly, oh so slowly, she drew back the hand, and with it the packet; so slowly, and yet so resolutely, being put to it, that when the dreaded flash surprised her, and she saw his harsh swarthy face, steeped in the mysterious aloofness of sleep, within a hand's breadth of hers, not a muscle of her arm moved, nor did her hand quiver. it was done--at last! with a burst of gratitude, of triumph, of exultation, she stood erect. she realized that it was done, and that here in her hand she held the packet. a deep gasp of relief, of joy, of thankfulness, and she glided towards the door. she groped for the latch, and in the act fancied his breathing was changed. she paused, and bent her head to listen. but the patter of the rain, drowning all sounds save those of the nearest origin, persuaded her that she was mistaken, and, finding the latch, she raised it, slipped like a shadow into the passage, and closed the door behind her. that done she stood arrested, all the blood in her body running to her heart. she must be dreaming! the passage in which she stood--the passage which she had left in black darkness--was alight; was so far lighted, at least, that to eyes fresh from the night, the figures of three men, grouped at the farther end, stood out against the glow of the lanthorn which they appeared to be trimming--for the two nearest were stooping over it. these two had their backs to her, the third his face; and it was the sight of this third man which had driven the blood to her heart. he ended at the waist! it was only after a few seconds, it was only when she had gazed at him awhile in speechless horror, that he rose another foot from the floor, and she saw that he had paused in the act of ascending through a trapdoor. what the scene meant, who these men were, or what their entrance portended, with these questions her brain refused at the moment to grapple. it was much that--still remembering who might hear her, and what she held--she did not shriek aloud. instead, she stood in the gloom at her end of the passage, gazing with all her eyes until she had seen the third man step clear of the trap. she could see him; but the light intervened and blurred his view of her. he stooped, almost as soon as he had cleared himself, to help up a fourth man, who rose with a naked knife between his teeth. she saw then that all were armed, and something stealthy in their bearing, something cruel in their eyes as the light of the lanthorn fell now on one dark face and now on another, went to her heart and chilled it. who were they, and why were they here? what was their purpose? as her reason awoke, as she asked herself these questions, the fourth man stooped in his turn, and gave his hand to a fifth. and on that she lost her self-control, and cried out. for the last man to ascend was la tribe--la tribe, from whom she had parted that morning. the sound she uttered was low, but it reached the men's ears, and the two whose backs were towards her turned as if they had been pricked. he who held the lanthorn raised it, and the five glared at her and she at them. then a second cry, louder and more full of surprise, burst from her lips. the nearest man, he who held the lanthorn high that he might view her, was tignonville, was her lover! "_mon dieu_!" she whispered. "what is it? what is it?" then, not till then, did he know her. until then the light of the lanthorn had revealed only a cloaked and cowled figure, a gloomy phantom which shook the heart of more than one with superstitious terror. but they knew her now--two of them; and slowly, as in a dream, tignonville came forward. the mind has its moments of crisis, in which it acts upon instinct rather than upon reason. the girl never knew why she acted as she did; why she asked no questions, why she uttered no exclamations, no remonstrances; why, with a finger on her lips and her eyes on his, she put the packet into his hands. he took it from her, too, as mechanically as she gave it--with the hand which held his bare blade. that done, silent as she, with his eyes set hard, he would have gone by her. the sight of her _there_, guarding the door of him who had stolen her from him, exasperated his worst passions. but she moved to hinder him, and barred the way. with her hand raised she pointed to the trapdoor. "go!" she whispered, her tone stern and low, "you have what you want! go!" "no!" and he tried to pass her. "go!" she repeated in the same tone. "you have what you need." and still she held her hand extended; still without faltering she faced the five men, while the thunder, growing more distant, rolled sullenly eastward, and the midnight rain, pouring from every spout and dripping eave about the house, wrapped the passage in its sibilant hush. gradually her eyes dominated his, gradually her nobler nature and nobler aim subdued his weaker parts. for she understood now; and he saw that she did, and had he been alone he would have slunk away, and said no word in his defence. but one of the men, savage and out of patience, thrust himself between them. "where is he?" he muttered. "what is the use of this? where is he?" and his bloodshot eyes--it was tuez-les-moines--questioned the doors, while his hand, trembling and shaking on the haft of his knife, bespoke his eagerness. "where is he? where is he, woman? quick, or--" "i shall not tell you," she answered. "you lie," he cried, grinning like a dog. "you will tell us! or we will kill you too! where is he? where is he?" "i shall not tell you," she repeated, standing before him in the fearlessness of scorn. "another step and i rouse the house! m. de tignonville, to you who know me, i swear that if this man does not retire--" "he is in one of these rooms?" was tignonville's answer. "in which? in which?" "search them!" she answered, her voice low, but biting in its contempt. "try them. rouse my women, alarm the house! and when you have his people at your throats--five as they will be to one of you--thank your own mad folly!" tuez-les-moines' eyes glittered. "you will not tell us?" he cried. "no!" "then--" but as the fanatic sprang on her, la tribe flung his arms round him and dragged him back. "it would be madness," he cried. "are you mad, fool? have done!" he panted, struggling with him. "if madame gives the alarm--and he may be in any one of these four rooms, you cannot be sure which--we are undone." he looked for support to tignonville, whose movement to protect the girl he had anticipated, and who had since listened sullenly. "we have obtained what we need. will you requite madame, who has gained it for us at her own risk--" "it is monsieur i would requite," tignonville muttered grimly. "by using violence to her?" the minister retorted passionately. he and tuez were still gripping one another. "i tell you, to go on is to risk what we have got! and i for one--" "am chicken-hearted!" the young man sneered. "madame--" he seemed to choke on the word. "will you swear that he is not here?" "i swear that if you do not go i will raise the alarm!" she hissed--all their words were sunk to that stealthy note. "go! if you have not stayed too long already. go! or see!" and she pointed to the trapdoor, from which the face and arms of a sixth man had that moment risen--the face dark with perturbation, so that her woman's wit told her at once that something was amiss. "see what has come of your delay already!" "the water is rising," the man muttered earnestly. "in god's name come, whether you have done it or not, or we cannot pass out again. it is within a foot of the crown of the culvert now, and it is rising." "curse on the water!" tuez-les-moines answered in a frenzied whisper. "and on this jezebel. let us kill her and him! what matter afterwards?" and he tried to shake off la tribe's grasp. but the minister held him desperately. "are you mad? are you mad?" he answered. "what can we do against thirty? let us be gone while we can. let us be gone! come." "ay, come," perrot cried, assenting reluctantly. he had taken no side hitherto. "the luck is against us! 'tis no use to-night, man!" and he turned with an air of sullen resignation. letting his legs drop through the trap, he followed the bearer of the tidings out of sight. another made up his mind to go, and went. then only tignonville, holding the lanthorn, and la tribe, who feared to release tuez-les-moines, remained with the fanatic. the countess's eyes met her old lover's, and whether old memories overcame her, or, now that the danger was nearly past, she began to give way, she swayed a little on her feet. but he did not notice it. he was sunk in black rage--rage against her, rage against himself. "take the light," she muttered unsteadily. "and--and he must follow!" "and you?" but she could bear it no longer. "oh, go," she wailed. "go! will you never go? if you love me, if you ever loved me, i implore you to go." he had betrayed little of a lover's feeling. but he could not resist that appeal, and he turned silently. seizing tuez-les-moines by the other arm, he drew him by force to the trap. "quiet, fool," he muttered savagely when the man would have resisted, "and go down! if we stay to kill him, we shall have no way of escape, and his life will be dearly bought. down, man, down!" and between them, in a struggling silence, with now and then an audible rap, or a ring of metal, the two forced the desperado to descend. la tribe followed hastily. tignonville was the last to go. in the act of disappearing he raised his lanthorn for a last glimpse of the countess. to his astonishment the passage was empty; she was gone. hard by him a door stood an inch or two ajar, and he guessed that it was hers, and swore under his breath, hating her at that moment. but he did not guess how nicely she had calculated her strength; how nearly exhaustion had overcome her; or that, even while he paused--a fatal pause had he known it--eyeing the dark opening of the door, she lay as one dead, on the bed within. she had fallen in a swoon, from which she did not recover until the sun had risen, and marched across one quarter of the heavens. nor did he see another thing, or he might have hastened his steps. before the yellow light of his lanthorn faded from the ceiling of the passage, the door of the room farthest from the trap slid open. a man, whose eyes, until darkness swallowed him, shone strangely in a face extraordinarily softened, came out on tip-toe. this man stood awhile, listening. at length, hearing those below utter a cry of dismay, he awoke to sudden activity. he opened with a turn of the key the door which stood at his elbow, the door which led to the other part of the house. he vanished through it. a second later a sharp whistle pierced the darkness of the courtyard, and brought a dozen sleepers to their senses and their feet. a moment, and the courtyard hummed with voices, above which one voice rang clear and insistent. with a startled cry the inn awoke. chapter xxv. the company of the bleeding heart. "but why," madame st. lo asked, sticking her arms akimbo, "why stay in this forsaken place a day and a night, when six hours in the saddle would set us in angers?" "because," tavannes replied coldly--he and his cousin were walking before the gateway of the inn--"the countess is not well, and will be the better, i think, for staying a day." "she slept soundly enough! i'll answer for that!" he shrugged his shoulders. "she never raised her head this morning, though my women were shrieking 'murder!' next door, and--name of heaven!" madame resumed, after breaking off abruptly, and shading her eyes with her hand, "what comes here? is it a funeral? or a pilgrimage? if all the priests about here are as black, no wonder m. rabelais fell out with them!" the inn stood without the walls for the convenience of those who wished to take the road early: a little also, perhaps, because food and forage were cheaper, and the wine paid no town-dues. four great roads met before the house, along the most easterly of which the sombre company which had caught madame st. lo's attention could be seen approaching. at first count hannibal supposed with his companion that the travellers were conveying to the grave the corpse of some person of distinction; for the _cortege_ consisted mainly of priests and the like mounted on mules, and clothed for the most part in black. black also was the small banner which waved above them, and bore in place of arms the emblem of the bleeding heart. but a second glance failed to discover either litter or bier; and a nearer approach showed that the travellers, whether they wore the tonsure or not, bore weapons of one kind or another. suddenly madame st. lo clapped her hands, and proclaimed in great astonishment that she knew them. "why, there is father boucher, the cure of st. benoist!" she said, "and father pezelay of st. magloire. and there is another i know, though i cannot remember his name! they are preachers from paris! that is who they are! but what can they be doing here? is it a pilgrimage, think you?" "ay, a pilgrimage of blood!" count hannibal answered between his teeth. and, turning to him to learn what moved him, she saw the look in his eyes which portended a storm. before she could ask a question, however, the gloomy company, which had first appeared in the distance, moving, an inky blot, through the hot sunshine of the summer morning, had drawn near, and was almost abreast of them. stepping from her side, he raised his hand and arrested the march. "who is master here?" he asked haughtily. "i am the leader," answered a stout pompous churchman, whose small malevolent eyes belied the sallow fatuity of his face. "i, m. de tavannes, by your leave." "and you, by your leave," tavannes sneered, "are--" "archdeacon and vicar of the bishop of angers and prior of the lesser brethren of st. germain, m. le comte. visitor also of the diocese of angers," the dignitary continued, puffing out his cheeks, "and chaplain to the lieutenant-governor of saumur, whose unworthy brother i am." "a handsome glove, and well embroidered!" tavannes retorted in a tone of disdain. "the hand i see yonder!" he pointed to the lean parchment mask of father pezelay, who coloured ever so faintly, but held his peace under the sneer. "you are bound for angers?" count hannibal continued. "for what purpose, sir prior?" "his grace the bishop is absent, and in his absence--" "you go to fill his city with strife! i know you! not you!" he continued, contemptuously turning from the prior, and regarding the third of the principal figures of the party. "but you! you were the cure who got the mob together last all souls'." "i speak the words of him who sent me!" answered the third churchman, whose brooding face and dull curtained eyes gave no promise of the fits of frenzied eloquence which had made his pulpit famous in paris. "then kill and burn are his alphabet!" tavannes retorted, and heedless of the start of horror which a saying so near blasphemy excited among the churchmen, he turned to father pezelay. "and you! you, too, i know!" he continued. "and you know me! and take this from me. turn, father! turn! or worse than a broken head--you bear the scar, i see--will befall you. these good persons, whom you have moved, unless i am in error, to take this journey, may not know me; but you do, and can tell them. if they will to angers, they must to angers. but if i find trouble in angers when i come, i will hang some one high. don't scowl at me, man!"--in truth, the look of hate in father pezelay's eyes was enough to provoke the exclamation. "some one, and it shall not be a bare patch on the crown will save his windpipe from squeezing!" a murmur of indignation broke from the preachers' attendants; one or two made a show of drawing their weapons. but count hannibal paid no heed to them, and had already turned on his heel when father pezelay spurred his mule a pace or two forward. snatching a heavy brass cross from one of the acolytes, he raised it aloft, and in the voice which had often thrilled the heated congregation of st. magloire, he called on tavannes to pause. "stand, my lord!" he cried. "and take warning! stand, reckless and profane, whose face is set hard as a stone, and his heart as a flint, against high heaven and holy church! stand and hear! behold the word of the lord is gone out against this city, even against angers, for the unbelief thereof! her place shall be left unto her desolate, and her children shall be dashed against the stones! woe unto you, therefore, if you gainsay it, or fall short of that which is commanded! you shall perish as achan, the son of charmi, and as saul! the curse that has gone out against you shall not tarry, nor your days continue! for the canaanitish woman that is in your house, and for the thought that is in your heart, the place that was yours is given to another! yea, the sword is even now drawn that shall pierce your side!" "you are more like to split my ears!" count hannibal answered sternly. "and now mark me! preach as you please here. but a word in angers, and though you be shaven twice over, i will have you silenced after a fashion which will not please you! if you value your tongue therefore, father--oh, you shake off the dust, do you? well, pass on! 'tis wise, perhaps." and undismayed by the scowling brows, and the cross ostentatiously lifted to heaven, he gazed after the procession as it moved on under its swaying banner, now one and now another of the acolytes looking back and raising his hands to invoke the bolt of heaven on the blasphemer. as the _cortege_ passed the huge watering-troughs, and the open gateway of the inn, the knot of persons congregated there fell on their knees. in answer the churchmen raised their banner higher, and began to sing the _eripe me, domine_! and to its strains, now vengeful, now despairing, now rising on a wave of menace, they passed slowly into the distance, slowly towards angers and the loire. suddenly madame st. lo twitched his sleeve. "enough for me!" she cried passionately. "i go no farther with you!" "ah?" "no farther!" she repeated. she was pale, she shivered. "many thanks, my cousin, but we part company here. i do not go to angers. i have seen horrors enough. i will take my people, and go to my aunt by tours and the east road. for you, i foresee what will happen. you will perish between the hammer and the anvil." "ah?" "you play too fine a game," she continued, her face quivering. "give over the girl to her lover, and send away her people with her. and wash your hands of her and hers. or you will see her fall, and fall beside her! give her to him, i say--give her to him!" "my wife?" "wife?" she echoed, for, fickle, and at all times swept away by the emotions of the moment, she was in earnest now. "is there a tie," and she pointed after the vanishing procession, "that they cannot unloose? that they will not unloose? is there a life which escapes if they doom it? did the admiral escape? or rochefoucauld? or madame de luns in old days? i tell you they go to rouse angers against you, and i see beforehand what will happen. she will perish, and you with her. wife? a pretty wife, at whose door you took her lover last night." "and at your door!" he answered quietly, unmoved by the gibe. but she did not heed. "i warned you of that!" she cried. "and you would not believe me. i told you he was following. and i warn you of this. you are between the hammer and the anvil, m. le comte! if tignonville does not murder you in your bed--" "i hold him in my power." "then holy church will fall on you and crush you. for me, i have seen enough and more than enough. i go to tours by the east road." he shrugged his shoulders. "as you please," he said. she flung away in disgust with him. she could not understand a man who played fast and loose at such a time. the game was too fine for her, its danger too apparent, the gain too small. she had, too, a woman's dread of the church, a woman's belief in the power of the dead hand to punish. and in half an hour her orders were given. in two hours her people were gathered, and she departed by the eastward road, three of tavannes' riders reinforcing her servants for a part of the way. count hannibal stood to watch them start, and noticed bigot riding by the side of suzanne's mule. he smiled; and presently, as he turned away, he did a thing rare with him--he laughed outright. a laugh which reflected a mood rare as itself. few had seen count hannibal's eye sparkle as it sparkled now; few had seen him laugh as he laughed, walking to and fro in the sunshine before the inn. his men watched him, and wondered, and liked it little, for one or two who had overheard his altercation with the churchmen had reported it, and there was shaking of heads over it. the man who had singed the pope's beard and chucked cardinals under the chin was growing old, and the most daring of the others had no mind to fight with foes whose weapons were not of this world. count hannibal's gaiety, however, was well grounded, had they known it. he was gay, not because he foresaw peril, and it was his nature to love peril; not--in the main, though a little, perhaps--because he knew that the woman whose heart he desired to win had that night stood between him and death; not, though again a little, perhaps, because she had confirmed his choice by conduct which a small man might have deprecated, but which a great man loved; but chiefly, because the events of the night had placed in his grasp two weapons by the aid of which he looked to recover all the ground he had lost--lost by his impulsive departure from the pall of conduct on which he had started. those weapons were tignonville, taken like a rat in a trap by the rising of the water; and the knowledge that the countess had stolen the precious packet from his pillow. the knowledge--for he had lain and felt her breath upon his cheek, he had lain and felt her hand beneath his pillow, he had lain while the impulse to fling his arms about her had been almost more than he could tame! he had lain and suffered her to go, to pass out safely as she had passed in. and then he had received his reward in the knowledge that, if she robbed him, she robbed him not for herself; and that where it was a question of his life she did not fear to risk her own. when he came, indeed, to that point, he trembled. how narrowly had he been saved from misjudging her! had he not lain and waited, had he not possessed himself in patience, he might have thought her in collusion with the old lover whom he found at her door, and with those who came to slay him. either he might have perished unwarned; or escaping that danger, he might have detected her with tignonville and lost for all time the ideal of a noble woman. he had escaped that peril. more, he had gained the weapons we have indicated; and the sense of power, in regard to her, almost intoxicated him. surely if he wielded those weapons to the best advantage, if he strained generosity to the uttermost, the citadel of her heart must yield at last! he had the defect of his courage and his nature, a tendency to do things after a flamboyant fashion. he knew that her act would plunge him in perils which she had not foreseen. if the preachers roused the papists of angers, if he arrived to find men's swords whetted for the massacre and the men themselves awaiting the signal, then if he did not give that signal there would be trouble. there would be trouble of the kind in which the soul of hannibal de tavannes revelled, trouble about the ancient cathedral and under the black walls of the angevin castle; trouble amid which the hearts of common men would be as water. then, when things seemed at their worst, he would reveal his knowledge. then, when forgiveness must seem impossible, he would forgive. with the flood of peril which she had unloosed rising round them, he would say, "go!" to the man who had aimed at his life; he would say to her, "i know, and i forgive!" that, that only, would fitly crown the policy on which he had decided from the first, though he had not hoped to conduct it on lines so splendid as those which now dazzled him. chapter xxvi. temper. it was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the countess. she could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so much hung and of which he had indicated the importance. but if he had missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? why did he not cry the alarm, search and question and pursue? why did he not give her that opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her resolution died within her? above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? of the snatches of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of astonishment? of the parades which his horse, catching the infection, made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught it? ay, what? why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his melancholy and ride like the youngest? she wondered what the men thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. what were they thinking of it? she could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began to grip her heart. twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had shaken under her. but the cool freshness of the early summer morning, and the sight of the green landscape and the winding loir, beside which their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth. but his new mood veiled she knew not what. it seemed, if she comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. before it her heart became as water. even her colour little by little left her cheeks. she knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now guiltily sought and now avoided his. and feeling sure that he did read it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her perplexity. this, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful thoughts. on one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent. on the other the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee- deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. again the travellers lost sight of the loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last year's leaves. and out again and down again they passed, and turning aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through the glare and heat. down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of nones. and still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also. he hoped to arrive at angers before nightfall. what, she wondered, shivering, would happen there? what was he planning to do to her? how would he punish her? brave as she was, she was a woman, with a woman's nerves; and fear and anticipation got upon them; and his silence--his silence which must mean a thing worse than words! and then on a sudden, piercing all, a new thought. was it possible that he had other letters? if his bearing were consistent with anything, it was consistent with that. had he other genuine letters, or had he duplicate letters, so that he had lost nothing, but instead had gained the right to rack and torture her, to taunt and despise her? that thought stung her into sudden self-betrayal. they were riding along a broad dusty track which bordered a stone causey raised above the level of winter floods. impulsively she turned to him. "you have other letters!" she cried. "you have other letters!" and freed for the moment from her terror, she fixed her eyes on his and strove to read his face. he looked at her, his mouth grown hard. "what do you mean, madame?" he asked, "you have other letters?" "for whom?" "from the king, for angers!" he saw that she was going to confess, that she was going to derange his cherished plan; and unreasonable anger awoke in the man who had been more than willing to forgive a real injury. "will you explain?" he said between his teeth. and his eyes glittered unpleasantly. "what do you mean?" "you have other letters," she cried, "besides those which i stole." "which you stole?" he repeated the words without passion. enraged by this unexpected turn, he hardly knew how to take it. "yes, i!" she cried. "i! i took them from under your pillow!" he was silent a minute. then he laughed and shook his head. "it will not do, madame," he said, his lip curling. "you are clever, but you do not deceive me." "deceive you?" "yes." "you do not believe that i took the letters?" she cried in great amazement. "no," he answered, "and for a good reason." he had hardened his heart now. he had chosen his line, and he would not spare her. "why, then?" she cried. "why?" "for the best of all reasons," he answered. "because the person who stole the letters was seized in the act of making his escape, and is now in my power." "the person--who stole the letters?" she faltered. "yes, madame." "do you mean m. de tignonville?" "you have said it." she turned white to the lips, and trembling, could with difficulty sit her horse. with an effort she pulled it up, and he stopped also. their attendants were some way ahead. "and you have the letters?" she whispered, her eyes meeting his. "you have the letters?" "no, but i have the thief!" count hannibal answered with sinister meaning. "as i think you knew, madame," he continued ironically, "a while back before you spoke." "i? oh no, no!" and she swayed in her saddle. "what--what are you--going to do?" she muttered after a moment's stricken silence. "to him?" "yes." "the magistrates will decide, at angers." "but he did not do it! i swear he did not." count hannibal shook his head coldly. "i swear, monsieur, i took the letters!" she repeated piteously. "punish me!" her figure, bowed like an old woman's over the neck of her horse, seemed to crave his mercy. count hannibal smiled. "you do not believe me?" "no," he said. and then, in a tone which chilled her, "if i did believe you," he continued, "i should still punish him!" she was broken; but he would see if he could not break her further. he would try if there were no weak spot in her armour. he would rack her now, since in the end she must go free. "understand, madame," he continued in his harshest tone, "i have had enough of your lover. he has crossed my path too often. you are my wife, i am your husband. in a day or two there shall be an end of this farce and of him." "he did not take them!" she wailed, her face sinking lower on her breast. "he did not take them! have mercy!" "any way, madame, they are gone!" tavannes answered. "you have taken them between you; and as i do not choose that you should pay, he will pay the price." if the discovery that tignonville had fallen into her husband's hands had not sufficed to crush her, count hannibal's tone must have done so. the shoot of new life which had raised its head after those dreadful days in paris, and--for she was young--had supported her under the weight which the peril of angers had cast on her shoulders, died, withered under the heel of his brutality. the pride which had supported her, which had won tavannes' admiration and exacted his respect, sank, as she sank herself, bowed to her horse's neck, weeping bitter tears before him. she abandoned herself to her misery, as she had once abandoned herself in the upper room in paris. and he looked at her. he had willed to crush her; he had his will, and he was not satisfied. he had bowed her so low that his magnanimity would now have its full effect, would shine as the sun into a dark world; and yet he was not happy. he could look forward to the morrow, and say, "she will understand me, she will know me!" and, lo, the thought that she wept for her lover stabbed him, and stabbed him anew; and he thought, "rather would she death from him, than life from me! though i give her creation, it will not alter her! though i strike the stars with my head, it is he who fills her world." the thought spurred him to further cruelty, impelled him to try if, prostrate as she was, he could not draw a prayer from her. "you don't ask after him?" he scoffed. "he may be before or behind? or wounded or well? would you not know, madame? and what message he sent you? and what he fears, and what hope he has? and his last wishes? and--for while there is life there is hope--would you not learn where the key of his prison lies to-night? how much for the key to-night, madame?" each question fell on her like the lash of a whip; but as one who has been flogged into insensibility, she did not wince. that drove him on: he felt a mad desire to hear her prayers, to force her lower, to bring her to her knees. and he sought about for a keener taunt. their attendants were almost out of sight before them; the sun, declining apace, was in their eyes. "in two hours we shall be in angers," he said. "mon dieu, madame, it was a pity, when you two were taking letters, you did not go a step farther. you were surprised, or i doubt if i should be alive to-day!" then she did look up. she raised her head and met his gaze with such wonder in her eyes, such reproach in her tear-stained face, that his voice sank on the last word. "you mean--that i would have murdered you?" she said. "i would have cut off my hand first. what i did"--and now her voice was as firm as it was low--"what i did, i did to save my people. and if it were to be done again, i would do it again!" "you dare to tell me that to my face?" he cried, hiding feelings which almost choked him. "you would do it again, would you? mon dieu, madame, you need to be taught a lesson!" and by chance, meaning only to make the horses move on again, he raised his whip. she thought that he was going to strike her, and she flinched at last. the whip fell smartly on her horse's quarters, and it sprang forward. count hannibal swore between his teeth. he had turned pale, she red as fire. "get on! get on!" he cried harshly. "we are falling behind!" and riding at her heels, flipping her horse now and then, he forced her to trot on until they overtook the servants. chapter xxvii. the black town. it was late evening when, riding wearily on jaded horses, they came to the outskirts of angers, and saw before them the term of their journey. the glow of sunset had faded, but the sky was still warm with the last hues of day; and against its opal light the huge mass of the angevin castle, which even in sunshine rises dark and forbidding above the mayenne, stood up black and sharply defined. below it, on both banks of the river, the towers and spires of the city soared up from a sombre huddle of ridge-roofs, broken here by a round-headed gateway, crumbling and pigeon-haunted, that dated from st. louis, and there by the gaunt arms of a windmill. the city lay dark under a light sky, keeping well its secrets. thousands were out of doors enjoying the evening coolness in alley and court, yet it betrayed the life which pulsed in its arteries only by the low murmur which rose from it. nevertheless, the countess at sight of its roofs tasted the first moment of happiness which had been hers that day. she might suffer, but she had saved. those roofs would thank her! in that murmur were the voices of women and children she had redeemed! at the sight and at the thought a wave of love and tenderness swept all bitterness from her breast. a profound humility, a boundless thankfulness took possession of her. her head sank lower above her horse's mane; but this time it sank in reverence, not in shame. could she have known what was passing beneath those roofs which night was blending in a common gloom--could she have read the thoughts which at that moment paled the cheeks of many a stout burgher, whose gabled house looked on the great square, she had been still more thankful. for in attics and back rooms women were on their knees at that hour, praying with feverish eyes; and in the streets men--on whom their fellows, seeing the winding-sheet already at the chin, gazed askance--smiled, and showed brave looks abroad, while their hearts were sick with fear. for darkly, no man knew how, the news had come to angers. it had been known, more or less, for three days. men had read it in other men's eyes. the tongue of a scold, the sneer of an injured woman had spread it, the birds of the air had carried it. from garret window to garret window across the narrow lanes of the old town it had been whispered at dead of night; at convent grilles, and in the timber-yards beside the river. ten thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, it was rumoured, had perished in paris. in orleans, all. in tours this man's sister; at saumur that man's son. through france the word had gone forth that the huguenots must die; and in the busy town the same roof-tree sheltered fear and hate, rage and cupidity. on one side of the party- wall murder lurked fierce-eyed; on the other, the victim lay watching the latch, and shaking at a step. strong men tasted the bitterness of death, and women clasping their babes to their breasts smiled sickly into children's eyes. the signal only was lacking. it would come, said some, from saumur, where montsoreau, the duke of anjou's lieutenant-governor and a papist, had his quarters. from paris, said others, directly from the king. it might come at any hour now, in the day or in the night; the magistrates, it was whispered, were in continuous session, awaiting its coming. no wonder that from lofty gable windows, and from dormers set high above the tiles, haggard faces looked northward and eastward, and ears sharpened by fear imagined above the noises of the city the ring of the iron shoes that carried doom. doubtless the majority desired--as the majority in france have always desired--peace. but in the purlieus about the cathedral and in the lanes where the sacristans lived, in convent parlours and college courts, among all whose livelihood the new faith threatened, was a stir as of a hive deranged. here was grumbling against the magistrates--why wait? there, stealthy plannings and arrangements; everywhere a grinding of weapons and casting of slugs. old grudges, new rivalries, a scholar's venom, a priest's dislike, here was final vent for all. none need leave this feast unsated! it was a man of this class, sent out for the purpose, who first espied count hannibal's company approaching. he bore the news into the town, and by the time the travellers reached the city gate, the dusky street within, on which lights were beginning to twinkle from booths and casements, was alive with figures running to meet them and crying the news as they ran. the travellers, weary and road-stained, had no sooner passed under the arch than they found themselves the core of a great crowd which moved with them and pressed about them; now unbonneting, and now calling out questions, and now shouting, "vive le roi! vive le roi!" above the press, windows burst into light; and over all, the quaint leaning gables of the old timbered houses looked down on the hurry and tumult. they passed along a narrow street in which the rabble, hurrying at count hannibal's bridle, and often looking back to read his face, had much ado to escape harm; along this street and before the yawning doors of a great church whence a breath heavy with incense and burning wax issued to meet them. a portion of the congregation had heard the tumult and struggled out, and now stood close-packed on the steps under the double vault of the portal. among them the countess's eyes, as she rode by, a sturdy man- at-arms on either hand, caught and held one face. it was the face of a tall, lean man in dusty black; and though she did not know him she seemed to have an equal attraction for him; for as their eyes met he seized the shoulder of the man next him and pointed her out. and something in the energy of the gesture, or in the thin lips and malevolent eyes of the man who pointed, chilled the countess's blood and shook her, she knew not why. until then, she had known no fear save of her husband. but at that a sense of the force and pressure of the crowd--as well as of the fierce passions, straining about her, which a word might unloose--broke upon her; and looking to the stern men on either side she fancied that she read anxiety in their faces. she glanced behind. boot to boot, the count's men came on, pressing round her women and shielding them from the exuberance of the throng. in their faces too she thought that she traced uneasiness. what wonder if the scenes through which she had passed in paris began to recur to her mind, and shook nerves already overwrought? she began to tremble. "is there--danger?" she muttered, speaking in a low voice to bigot, who rode on her right hand. "will they do anything?" the norman snorted. "not while he is in the saddle," he said, nodding towards his master, who rode a pace in front of them, his reins loose. "there be some here know him!" bigot continued, in his drawling tone. "and more will know him if they break line. have no fear, madame, he will bring you safe to the inn. down with the huguenots?" he continued, turning from her and addressing a rogue who, holding his stirrup, was shouting the cry till he was crimson. "then why not away, and--" "the king! the king's word and leave!" the man answered. "ay, tell us!" shrieked another, looking upward, while he waved his cap; "have we the king's leave?" "you'll bide _his_ leave!" the norman retorted, indicating the count with his thumb. "or 'twill be up with you--on the three-legged horse!" "but he comes from the king!" the man panted. "to be sure. to be sure!" "then--" "you'll bide his time! that's all!" bigot answered, rather it seemed for his own satisfaction than the other's enlightenment. "you'll all bide it, you dogs!" he continued in his beard, as he cast his eye over the weltering crowd. "ha! so we are here, are we? and not too soon, either." he fell silent as they entered an open space, overlooked on one side by the dark facade of the cathedral, on the other three sides by houses more or less illumined. the rabble swept into this open space with them and before them, filled much of it in an instant, and for a while eddied and swirled this way and that, thrust onward by the worshippers who had issued from the church and backwards by those who had been first in the square, and had no mind to be hustled out of hearing. a stranger, confused by the sea of excited faces, and deafened by the clamour of "vive le roi!" "vive anjou!" mingled with cries against the huguenots, might have fancied that the whole city was arrayed before him. but he would have been wide of the mark. the scum, indeed--and a dangerous scum--frothed and foamed and spat under tavannes' bridle-hand; and here and there among them, but not of them, the dark-robed figure of a priest moved to and fro; or a benedictine, or some smooth-faced acolyte egged on to the work he dared not do. but the decent burghers were not there. they lay bolted in their houses; while the magistrates, with little heart to do aught except bow to the mob--or other their masters for the time being--shook in their council chamber. there is not a city of france which has not seen it; which has not known the moment when the mass impended, and it lay with one man to start it or stay its course. angers within its houses heard the clamour, and from the child, clinging to its mother's skirt, and wondering why she wept, to the provost, trembled, believing that the hour had come. the countess heard it too, and understood it. she caught the savage note in the voice of the mob--that note which means danger--and, her heart beating wildly, she looked to her husband. then, fortunately for her, fortunately for angers, it was given to all to see that in count hannibal's saddle sat a man. he raised his hand for silence, and in a minute or two--not at once, for the square was dusky--it was obtained. he rose in his stirrups, and bared his head. "i am from the king!" he cried, throwing his voice to all parts of the crowd. "and this is his majesty's pleasure and good will! that every man hold his hand until to-morrow on pain of death, or worse! and at noon his further pleasure will be known! vive le roi!" and he covered his head again. "vive le roi!" cried a number of the foremost. but their shouts were feeble and half-hearted, and were quickly drowned in a rising murmur of discontent and ill-humour, which, mingled with cries of "is that all? is there no more? down with the huguenots!" rose from all parts. presently these cries became merged in a persistent call, which had its origin, as far as could be discovered, in the darkest corner of the square. a call for "montsoreau! montsoreau! give us montsoreau!" with another man, or had tavannes turned or withdrawn, or betrayed the least anxiety, words had become actions, disorder a riot; and that in the twinkling of an eye. but count hannibal, sitting his horse, with his handful of riders behind him, watched the crowd, as little moved by it as the armed knight of notre dame. only once did he say a word. then, raising his hand as before to gain a hearing-- "you ask for montsoreau?" he thundered. "you will have montfaucon if you do not quickly go to your homes!" at which, and at the glare of his eye, the more timid took fright. feeling his gaze upon them, seeing that he had no intention of withdrawing, they began to sneak away by ones and twos. soon others missed them and took the alarm, and followed. a moment and scores were streaming away through lanes and alleys and along the main street. at last the bolder and more turbulent found themselves a remnant. they glanced uneasily at one another and at tavannes, took fright in their turn, and plunging into the current hastened away, raising now and then as they passed through the streets a cry of "vive montsoreau! montsoreau!"--which was not without its menace for the morrow. count hannibal waited motionless until no more than half a dozen groups remained in the open. then he gave the word to dismount; for, so far, even the countess and her women had kept their saddles, lest the movement which their retreat into the inn must have caused should be misread by the mob. last of all he dismounted himself, and with lights going before him and behind, and preceded by bigot, bearing his cloak and pistols, he escorted the countess into the house. not many minutes had elapsed since he had called for silence; but long before he reached the chamber looking over the square from the first floor, in which supper was being set for them, the news had flown through the length and breadth of angers that for this night the danger was past. the hawk had come to angers, and lo! it was a dove. count hannibal strode to one of the open windows and looked out. in the room, which was well lighted, were people of the house, going to and fro, setting out the table; to madame, standing beside the hearth--which held its summer dressing of green boughs--while her woman held water for her to wash, the scene recalled with painful vividness the meal at which she had been present on the morning of the st. bartholomew--the meal which had ushered in her troubles. naturally her eyes went to her husband, her mind to the horror in which she had held him then; and with a kind of shock--perhaps because the last few minutes had shown him in a new light--she compared her old opinion of him with that which, much as she feared him, she now entertained. this afternoon, if ever, within the last few hours, if at all, he had acted in a way to justify that horror and that opinion. he had treated her--brutally; he had insulted and threatened her, had almost struck her. and yet--and yet madame felt that she had moved so far from the point which she had once occupied that the old attitude was hard to understand. hardly could she believe that it was on this man, much as she still dreaded him, that she had looked with those feelings of repulsion. she was still gazing at him with eyes which strove to see two men in one, when he turned from the window. absorbed in thought, she had forgotten her occupation, and stood, the towel suspended in her half-dried hands. before she knew what he was doing he was at her side; he bade the woman hold the bowl, and he rinsed his hands. then he turned, and without looking at the countess, he dried his hands on the farther end of the towel which she was still using. she blushed faintly. a something in the act, more intimate and more familiar than had ever marked their intercourse, set her blood running strangely. when he turned away and bade bigot unbuckle his spur-leathers, she stepped forward. "i will do it!" she murmured, acting on a sudden and unaccountable impulse. and as she knelt, she shook her hair about her face to hide its colour. "nay, madame, but you will soil your fingers!" he said coldly. "permit me," she muttered half coherently. and though her fingers shook, she pursued and performed her task. when she rose he thanked her; and then the devil in the man, or the nemesis he had provoked when he took her by force from another--the nemesis of jealousy, drove him to spoil all. "and for whose sake, madame?" he added, with a jeer; "mine or m. de tignonville's?" and with a glance between jest and earnest, he tried to read her thoughts. she winced as if he had indeed struck her, and the hot colour fled her cheeks. "for his sake!" she said, with a shiver of pain. "that his life may be spared!" and she stood back humbly, like a beaten dog. though, indeed, it was for the sake of angers, in thankfulness for the past rather than in any desperate hope of propitiating her husband, that she had done it! perhaps he would have withdrawn his words. but before he could answer, the host, bowing to the floor, came to announce that all was ready, and that the provost of the city, for whom m. le comte had sent, was in waiting below. "let him come up!" tavannes answered, grave and frowning. "and see you, close the room, sirrah! my people will wait on us. ah!" as the provost, a burly man, with a face framed for jollity, but now pale and long, entered and approached him with many salutations. "how comes it, m. le prevot--you are the prevot, are you not?" "yes, m. le comte." "how comes it that so great a crowd is permitted to meet in the streets? and that at my entrance, though i come unannounced, i find half of the city gathered together?" the provost stared. "respect, m. le comte," he said, "for his majesty's letters, of which you are the bearer, no doubt induced some to come together." "who said i brought letters?" "who--?" "who said i brought letters?" count hannibal repeated in a strenuous voice. and he ground his chair half about and faced the astonished magistrate. "who said i brought letters?" "why, my lord," the provost stammered, "it was everywhere yesterday--" "yesterday?" "last night, at latest--that letters were coming from the king." "by my hand?" "by your lordship's hand--whose name is so well known here," the magistrate added, in the hope of clearing the great man's brow. count hannibal laughed darkly. "my hand will be better known by-and-by," he said. "see you, sirrah, there is some practice here. what is this cry of montsoreau that i hear?" "your lordship knows that he is his grace's lieutenant-governor in saumur." "i know that, man. but is he here?" "he was at saumur yesterday, and 'twas rumoured three days back that he was coming here to extirpate the huguenots. then word came of your lordship and of his majesty's letters, and 'twas thought that m. de montsoreau would not come, his authority being superseded." "i see. and now your rabble think that they would prefer m. montsoreau. that is it, is it?" the magistrate shrugged his shoulders and opened his hands. "pigs!" he said. and having spat on the floor, he looked apologetically at the lady. "true pigs!" "what connections has he here?" tavannes asked. "he is a brother of my lord the bishop's vicar, who arrived yesterday." "with a rout of shaven heads who have been preaching and stirring up the town!" count hannibal cried, his face growing red. "speak, man; is it so? but i'll be sworn it is!" "there has been preaching," the provost answered reluctantly. "montsoreau may count his brother, then, for one. he is a fool, but with a knave behind him, and a knave who has no cause to love us! and the castle? 'tis held by one of m. de montsoreau's creatures, i take it?" "yes, my lord." "with what force?" the magistrate shrugged his shoulders, and looked doubtfully at badelon, who was keeping the door. tavannes followed the glance with his usual impatience. "mon dieu, you need not look at him!" he cried. "he has sacked st. peter's and singed the pope's beard with a holy candle! he has been served on the knee by cardinals; and is turk or jew, or monk or huguenot as i please. and madame"--for the provost's astonished eyes, after resting awhile on the old soldier's iron visage, had passed to her--"is huguenot, so you need have no fear of her! there, speak, man," with impatience, "and cease to think of your own skin!" the provost drew a deep breath, and fixed his small eyes on count hannibal. "if i knew, my lord, what you--why, my own sister's son"--he paused, his face began to work, his voice shook--"is a huguenot! ay, my lord, a huguenot! and they know it!" he continued, a flush of rage augmenting the emotion which his countenance betrayed. "ay, they know it! and they push me on at the council, and grin behind my back; lescot, who was provost two years back, and would match his son with my daughter; and thuriot, who prints for the university! they nudge one another, and egg me on, till half the city thinks it is i who would kill the huguenots! i!" again his voice broke. "and my own sister's son a huguenot! and my girl at home white-faced for--for his sake." tavannes scanned the man shrewdly. "perhaps she is of the same way of thinking?" he said. the provost started, and lost one half of his colour. "god forbid!" he cried, "saving madame's presence! who says so, my lord, lies!" "ay, lies not far from the truth." "my lord!" "pish, man, lescot has said it, and will act on it. and thuriot, who prints for the university! would you 'scape them? you would? then listen to me. i want but two things. first, how many men has montsoreau's fellow in the castle? few, i know, for he is a niggard, and if he spends, he spends the duke's pay." "twelve. but five can hold it." "ay, but twelve dare not leave it! let them stew in their own broth! and now for the other matter. see, man, that before daybreak three gibbets, with a ladder and two ropes apiece, are set up in the square. and let one be before this door. you understand? then let it be done! the rest," he added with a ferocious smile, "you may leave to me." the magistrate nodded rather feebly. "doubtless," he said, his eye wandering here and there, "there are rogues in angers. and for rogues the gibbet! but saving your presence, my lord, it is a question whether--" but m. de tavannes' patience was exhausted. "will you do it?" he roared. "that is the question. and the only question." the provost jumped, he was so startled. "certainly, my lord, certainly!" he muttered humbly. "certainly, i will!" and bowing frequently, but saying no more, he backed himself out of the room. count hannibal laughed grimly after his fashion, and doubtless thought that he had seen the last of the magistrate for that night. great was his wrath, therefore, when, less than a minute later--and before bigot had carved for him--the door opened, and the provost appeared again. he slid in, and without giving the courage he had gained on the stairs time to cool, plunged into his trouble. "it stands this way, m. le comte," he bleated. "if i put up the gibbets and a man is hanged, and you have letters from the king, 'tis a rogue the less, and no harm done. but if you have no letters from his majesty, then it is on my shoulders they will put it, and 'twill be odd if they do not find a way to hang me to right him." count hannibal smiled grimly. "and your sister's son?" he sneered. "and your girl who is white-faced for his sake, and may burn on the same bonfire with him? and--" "mercy! mercy!" the wretched provost cried. and he wrung his hands. "lescot and thuriot--" "perhaps we may hang lescot and thuriot--" "but i see no way out," the provost babbled. "no way! no way!" "i am going to show you one," tavannes retorted. "if the gibbets are not in place by sunrise, i shall hang you from this window. that is one way out; and you'll be wise to take the other! for the rest and for your comfort, if i have no letters, it is not always to paper that the king commits his inmost heart." the magistrate bowed. he quaked, he doubted, but he had no choice. "my lord," he said, "i put myself in your hands. it shall be done, certainly it shall be done. but, but--" and shaking his head in foreboding, he turned to the door. at the last moment, when he was within a pace of it, the countess rose impulsively to her feet. she called to him. "m. le prevot, a minute, if you please," she said. "there may be trouble to-morrow; your daughter may be in some peril. you will do well to send her to me. my lord"--and on the word her voice, uncertain before, grew full and steady--"will see that i am safe. and she will be safe with me." the provost saw before him only a gracious lady, moved by a thoughtfulness unusual in persons of her rank. he was at no pains to explain the flame in her cheek, or the soft light which glowed in her eyes, as she looked at him across her formidable husband. he was only profoundly grateful--moved even to tears. humbly thanking her, he accepted her offer for his child, and withdrew wiping his eyes. when he was gone, and the door had closed behind him, tavannes turned to the countess, who still kept her feet. "you are very confident this evening," he sneered. "gibbets do not frighten you, it seems, madame. perhaps if you knew for whom the one before the door is intended?" she met his look with a searching gaze, and spoke with a ring of defiance in her tone. "i do not believe it!" she said. "i do not believe it! you who save angers will not destroy him!" and then her woman's mood changing, with courage and colour ebbing together, "oh no, you will not! you will not!" she wailed. and she dropped on her knees before him, and holding up her clasped hands, "god will put it in your heart to spare him--and me!" he rose with a stifled oath, took two steps from her, and in a tone hoarse and constrained, "go!" he said. "go, or sit! do you hear, madame? you try my patience too far!" but when she had gone his face was radiant. he had brought her, he had brought all, to the point at which he aimed. to-morrow his triumph awaited him. to-morrow he who had cast her down would raise her up. he did not foresee what a day would bring forth. chapter xxviii. in the little chapter-house. the sun was an hour high, and in angers the shops and booths, after the early fashion of the day, were open or opening. through all the gates country folk were pressing into the gloomy streets of the black town with milk and fruit; and at doors and windows housewives cheapened fish, or chaffered over the fowl for the pot. for men must eat, though there be gibbets in the place ste.-croix: gaunt gibbets, high and black and twofold, each, with its dangling ropes, like a double note of interrogation. but gibbets must eat also; and between ground and noose was so small a space in those days that a man dangled almost before he knew it. the sooner, then, the paniers were empty, and the clown, who pays for all, was beyond the gates, the better he, for one, would be pleased. in the market, therefore, was hurrying. men cried their wares in lowered voices, and tarried but a little for the oldest customer. the bargain struck, the more timid among the buyers hastened to shut themselves into their houses again; the bolder, who ventured to the place to confirm the rumour with their eyes, talked in corners and in lanes, avoided the open, and eyed the sinister preparations from afar. the shadow of the things which stood before the cathedral affronting the sunlight with their gaunt black shapes lay across the length and breadth of angers. even in the corners where men whispered, even in the cloisters where men bit their nails in impotent anger, the stillness of fear ruled all. whatever count hannibal had it in his mind to tell the city, it seemed unlikely--and hour by hour it seemed less likely--that any would contradict him. he knew this as he walked in the sunlight before the inn, his spurs ringing on the stones as he made each turn, his movements watched by a hundred peering eyes. after all, it was not hard to rule, nor to have one's way in this world. but then, he went on to remember, not every one had his self-control, or that contempt for the weak and unsuccessful which lightly took the form of mercy. he held angers safe, curbed by his gibbets. with m. de montsoreau he might have trouble; but the trouble would be slight, for he knew montsoreau, and what it was the lieutenant- governor valued above profitless bloodshed. he might have felt less confident had he known what was passing at that moment in a room off the small cloister of the abbey of st. aubin, a room known at angers as the little chapter-house. it was a long chamber with a groined roof and stone walls, panelled as high as a tall man might reach with dark chestnut wood. gloomily lighted by three grated windows, which looked on a small inner green, the last resting-place of the benedictines, the room itself seemed at first sight no more than the last resting-place of worn-out odds and ends. piles of thin sheepskin folios, dog's-eared and dirty, the rejected of the choir, stood against the walls; here and there among them lay a large brass-bound tome on which the chains that had fettered it to desk or lectern still rusted. a broken altar cumbered one corner: a stand bearing a curious--and rotting--map filled another. in the other two corners a medley of faded scutcheons and banners, which had seen their last toussaint procession, mouldered slowly into dust--into much dust. the air of the room was full of it. in spite of which the long oak table that filled the middle of the chamber shone with use: so did the great metal standish which it bore. and though the seven men who sat about the table seemed, at a first glance and in that gloomy light, as rusty and faded as the rubbish behind them, it needed but a second look at their lean jaws and hungry eyes to be sure of their vitality. he who sat in the great chair at the end of the table was indeed rather plump than thin. his white hands, gay with rings, were well cared for; his peevish chin rested on a falling-collar of lace worthy of a cardinal. but though the bishop's vicar was heard with deference, it was noticeable that when he had ceased to speak his hearers looked to the priest on his left, to father pezelay, and waited to hear his opinion before they gave their own. the father's energy, indeed, had dominated the angerins, clerks and townsfolk alike, as it had dominated the parisian _devotes_ who knew him well. the vigour which hate inspires passes often for solid strength; and he who had seen with his own eyes the things done in paris spoke with an authority to which the more timid quickly and easily succumbed. yet gibbets are ugly things; and thuriot, the printer, whose pride had been tickled by a summons to the conclave, began to wonder if he had done wisely in coming. lescot, too, who presently ventured a word. "but if m. de tavannes' order be to do nothing," he began doubtfully, "you would not, reverend father, have us resist his majesty's will?" "god forbid, my friend!" father pezelay answered with unction. "but his majesty's will is to do--to do for the glory of god and the saints and his holy church! how? is that which was lawful at saumur unlawful here? is that which was lawful at tours unlawful here? is that which the king did in paris--to the utter extermination of the unbelieving and the purging of that sacred city--against his will here? nay, his will is to do--to do as they have done in paris and in tours and in saumur! but his minister is unfaithful! the woman whom he has taken to his bosom has bewildered him with her charms and her sorceries, and put it in his mind to deny the mission he bears." "you are sure, beyond chance of error, that he bears letters to that effect, good father?" the printer ventured. "ask my lord's vicar! he knows the letters and the import of them!" "they are to that effect," the archdeacon answered, drumming on the table with his fingers and speaking somewhat sullenly. "i was in the chancellery, and i saw them. they are duplicates of those sent to bordeaux." "then the preparations he has made must be against the huguenots," lescot, the ex-provost, said with a sigh of relief. and thuriot's face lightened also. "he must intend to hang one or two of the ringleaders, before he deals with the herd." "think it not!" father pezelay cried in his high shrill voice. "i tell you the woman has bewitched him, and he will deny his letters!" for a moment there was silence. then, "but dare he do that, reverend father?" lescot asked slowly and incredulously. "what? suppress the king's letters?" "there is nothing he will not dare! there is nothing he has not dared!" the priest answered vehemently, the recollection of the scene in the great guard-room of the louvre, when tavannes had so skilfully turned the tables on him, instilling venom into his tone. "she who lives with him is the devil's. she has bewitched him with her spells and her sabbaths! she bears the mark of the beast on her bosom, and for her the fire is even now kindling!" the laymen who were present shuddered. the two canons who faced them crossed themselves, muttering, "avaunt, satan!" "it is for you to decide," the priest continued, gazing on them passionately, "whether you will side with him or with the angel of god! for i tell you it was none other executed the divine judgments at paris! it was none other but the angel of god held the sword at tours! it is none other holds the sword here! are you for him or against him? are you for him, or for the woman with the mark of the beast? are you for god or against god? for the hour draws near! the time is at hand! you must choose! you must choose!" and, striking the table with his hand, he leaned forward, and with glittering eyes fixed each of them in turn, as he cried, "you must choose! you must choose!" he came to the archdeacon last. the bishop's vicar fidgeted in his chair, his face a shade more shallow, his cheeks hanging a trifle more loosely, than ordinary. "if my brother were here!" he muttered. "if m. de montsoreau had arrived!" but father pezelay knew whose will would prevail if montsoreau met tavannes at his leisure. to force montsoreau's hand, therefore, to surround him on his first entrance with a howling mob already committed to violence, to set him at their head and pledge him before he knew with whom he had to do--this had been, this still was, the priest's design. but how was he to pursue it while those gibbets stood? while their shadows lay even on the chapter table, and darkened the faces of his most forward associates? that for a moment staggered the priest; and had not private hatred, ever renewed by the touch of the scar on his brow, fed the fire of bigotry he had yielded, as the rabble of angers were yielding, reluctant and scowling, to the hand which held the city in its grip. but to have come so far on the wings of hate, and to do nothing! to have come avowedly to preach a crusade, and to sneak away cowed! to have dragged the bishop's vicar hither, and fawned and cajoled and threatened by turns--and for nothing! these things were passing bitter--passing bitter, when the morsel of vengeance he had foreseen smacked so sweet on the tongue. for it was no common vengeance, no layman's vengeance, coarse and clumsy, which the priest had imagined in the dark hours of the night, when his feverish brain kept him wakeful. to see count hannibal roll in the dust had gone but a little way towards satisfying him. no! but to drag from his arms the woman for whom he had sinned, to subject her to shame and torture in the depths of some convent, and finally to burn her as a witch--it was that which had seemed to the priest in the night hours a vengeance sweet in the mouth. but the thing seemed unattainable in the circumstances. the city was cowed; the priest knew that no dependence was to be placed on montsoreau, whose vice was avarice and whose object was plunder. to the archdeacon's feeble words, therefore, "we must look," the priest retorted sternly, "not to m. de montsoreau, reverend father, but to the pious of angers! we must cry in the streets, 'they do violence to god! they wound god and his mother!' and so, and so only, shall the unholy thing be rooted out!" "amen!" the cure of st.-benoist muttered, lifting his head; and his dull eyes glowed awhile. "amen! amen!" then his chin sank again upon his breast. but the canons of angers looked doubtfully at one another, and timidly at the speakers; the meat was too strong for them. and lescot and thuriot shuffled in their seats. at length, "i do not know," lescot muttered timidly. "you do not know?" "what can be done!" "the people will know!" father pezelay retorted "trust them!" "but the people will not rise without a leader." "then will i lead them!" "even so, reverend father--i doubt," lescot faltered. and thuriot nodded assent. gibbets were erected in those days rather for laymen than for the church. "you doubt!" the priest cried. "you doubt!" his baleful eyes passed from one to the other; from them to the rest of the company. he saw that with the exception of the cure of st.-benoist all were of a mind. "you doubt! nay, but i see what it is! it is this," he continued slowly and in a different tone, "the king's will goes for nothing in angers! his writ runs not here. and holy church cries in vain for help against the oppressor. i tell you, the sorceress who has bewitched him has bewitched you also. beware! beware, therefore, lest it be with you as with him! and the fire that shall consume her, spare not your houses!" the two citizens crossed themselves, grew pale and shuddered. the fear of witchcraft was great in angers, the peril, if accused of it, enormous. even the canons looked startled. "if--if my brother were here," the archdeacon repeated feebly, "something might be done!" "vain is the help of man!" the priest retorted sternly, and with a gesture of sublime dismissal. "i turn from you to a mightier than you!" and, leaning his head on his hands, he covered his face. the archdeacon and the churchmen looked at him, and from him their scared eyes passed to one another. their one desire now was to be quit of the matter, to have done with it, to escape; and one by one with the air of whipped curs they rose to their feet, and in a hurry to be gone muttered a word of excuse shamefacedly and got themselves out of the room. lescot and the printer were not slow to follow, and in less than a minute the two strange preachers, the men from paris, remained the only occupants of the chamber; save, to be precise, a lean official in rusty black, who throughout the conference had sat by the door. until the last shuffling footstep had ceased to sound in the still cloister no one spoke. then father pezelay looked up, and the eyes of the two priests met in a long gaze. "what think you?" pezelay muttered at last. "wet hay," the other answered dreamily, "is slow to kindle, yet burns if the fire be big enough. at what hour does he state his will?" "at noon." "in the council chamber?" "it is so given out." "it is three hundred yards from the place ste.-croix and he must go guarded," the cure of st.-benoist continued in the same dull fashion. "he cannot leave many in the house with the woman. if it were attacked in his absence--" "he would return, and--" father pezelay shook his head, his cheek turned a shade paler. clearly, he saw with his mind's eye more than he expressed. "_hoc est corpus_," the other muttered, his dreamy gaze on the table. "if he met us then, on his way to the house and we had bell, book, and candle, would he stop?" "he would not stop!" father pezelay rejoined. "he would not?" "i know the man!" "then--" but the rest st. benoist whispered, his head drooping forward; whispered so low that even the lean man behind him, listening with greedy ears, failed to follow the meaning of his superior's words. but that he spoke plainly enough for his hearer father pezelay's face was witness. astonishment, fear, hope, triumph, the lean pale face reflected all in turn; and, underlying all, a subtle malignant mischief, as if a devil's eyes peeped through the holes in an opera mask. when the other was at last silent, pezelay drew a deep breath. "'tis bold! bold! bold!" he muttered. "but have you thought? he who bears the--" "brunt?" the other whispered, with a chuckle. "he may suffer? yes, but it will not be you or i! no, he who was last here shall be first there! the archdeacon-vicar--if we can persuade him--who knows but that even for him the crown of martyrdom is reserved?" the dull eyes flickered with unholy amusement. "and the alarm that brings him from the council chamber?" "need not of necessity be real. the pinch will be to make use of it. make use of it--and the hay will burn!" "you think it will?" "what can one man do against a thousand? his own people dare not support him." father pezelay turned to the lean man who kept the door, and, beckoning to him, conferred a while with him in a low voice. "a score or so i might get," the man answered presently, after some debate. "and well posted, something might be done. but we are not in paris, good father, where the quarter of the butchers is to be counted on, and men know that to kill huguenots is to do god service! here"--he shrugged his shoulders contemptuously--"they are sheep." "it is the king's will," the priest answered, frowning on him darkly. "ay, but it is not tavannes'," the man in black answered with a grimace. "and he rules here to-day." "fool!" pezelay retorted. "he has not twenty with him. do you do as i say, and leave the rest to heaven!" "and to you, good master?" the other answered. "for it is not all you are going to do," he continued, with a grin, "that you have told me. well, so be it! i'll do my part, but i wish we were in paris. st. genevieve is ever kind to her servants." chapter xxix. the escape. in a small back room on the second floor of the inn at angers, a mean, dingy room which looked into a narrow lane, and commanded no prospect more informing than a blind wall, two men sat, fretting; or, rather, one man sat, his chin resting on his hand, while his companion, less patient or more sanguine, strode ceaselessly to and fro. in the first despair of capture--for they were prisoners--they had made up their minds to the worst, and the slow hours of two days had passed over their heads without kindling more than a faint spark of hope in their breasts. but when they had been taken out and forced to mount and ride--at first with feet tied to the horses' girths--they had let the change, the movement, and the open air fan the flame. they had muttered a word to one another, they had wondered, they had reasoned. and though the silence of their guards--from whose sour vigilance the keenest question drew no response--seemed of ill-omen, and, taken with their knowledge of the man into whose hands they had fallen, should have quenched the spark, these two, having special reasons, the one the buoyancy of youth, the other the faith of an enthusiast, cherished the flame. in the breast of one indeed it had blazed into a confidence so arrogant that he now took all for granted, and was not content. "it is easy for you to say 'patience!'" he cried, as he walked the floor in a fever. "you stand to lose no more than your life, and if you escape go free at all points! but he has robbed me of more than life! of my love, and my self-respect, curse him! he has worsted me not once, but twice and thrice! and if he lets me go now, dismissing me with my life, i shall--i shall kill him!" he concluded, through his teeth. "you are hard to please!" "i shall kill him!" "that were to fall still lower!" the minister answered, gravely regarding him. "i would, m. de tignonville, you remembered that you are not yet out of jeopardy. such a frame of mind as yours is no good preparation for death, let me tell you!" "he will not kill us!" tignonville cried. "he knows better than most men how to avenge himself!" "then he is above most!" la tribe retorted. "for my part i wish i were sure of the fact, and i should sit here more at ease." "if we could escape, now, of ourselves!" tignonville cried. "then we should save not only life, but honour! man, think of it! if we could escape, not by his leave, but against it! are you sure that this is angers?" "as sure as a man can be who has only seen the black town once or twice!" la tribe answered, moving to the casement--which was not glazed--and peering through the rough wooden lattice. "but if we could escape we are strangers here. we know not which way to go, nor where to find shelter. and for the matter of that," he continued, turning from the window with a shrug of resignation, "'tis no use to talk of it while yonder foot goes up and down the passage, and its owner bears the key in his pocket." "if we could get out of his power as we came into it!" tignonville cried. "ay, if! but it is not every floor has a trap!" "we could take up a board." the minister raised his eyebrows. "we could take up a board!" the younger man repeated; and he stepped the mean chamber from end to end, his eyes on the floor. "or--yes, _mon dieu_!" with a change of attitude, "we might break through the roof?" and, throwing back his head, he scanned the cobwebbed surface of laths which rested on the unceiled joists. "umph!" "well, why not, monsieur? why not break through the ceiling?" tignonville repeated, and in a fit of energy he seized his companion's shoulder and shook him. "stand on the bed, and you can reach it." "and the floor which rests on it!" "_par dieu_, there is no floor! 'tis a cockloft above us! see there! and there!" and the young man sprang on the bed, and thrust the rowel of a spur through the laths. la tribe's expression changed. he rose slowly to his feet. "try again!" he said. tignonville, his face red, drove the spur again between the laths, and worked it to and fro until he could pass his fingers into the hole he had made. then he gripped and bent down a length of one of the laths, and, passing his arm as far as the elbow through the hole, moved it this way and that. his eyes, as he looked down at his companion through the falling rubbish, gleamed with triumph. "where is your floor now?" he asked. "you can touch nothing?" "nothing. it's open. a little more and i might touch the tiles." and he strove to reach higher. for answer la tribe gripped him. "down! down, monsieur," he muttered. "they are bringing our dinner." tignonville thrust back the lath as well as he could, and slipped to the floor; and hastily the two swept the rubbish from the bed. when badelon, attended by two men, came in with the meal he found la tribe at the window blocking much of the light, and tignonville laid sullenly on the bed. even a suspicious eye must have failed to detect what had been done; the three who looked in suspected nothing and saw nothing. they went out, the key was turned again on the prisoners, and the footsteps of two of the men were heard descending the stairs. "we have an hour, now!" tignonville cried; and leaping, with flaming eyes, on the bed, he fell to hacking and jabbing and tearing at the laths amid a rain of dust and rubbish. fortunately the stuff, falling on the bed, made little noise; and in five minutes, working half-choked and in a frenzy of impatience, he had made a hole through which he could thrust his arms, a hole which extended almost from one joist to its neighbour. by this time the air was thick with floating lime; the two could scarcely breathe, yet they dared not pause. mounting on la tribe's shoulders--who took his stand on the bed--the young man thrust his head and arms through the hole, and, resting his elbows on the joists, dragged himself up, and with a final effort of strength landed nose and knees on the timbers, which formed his supports. a moment to take breath, and press his torn and bleeding fingers to his lips; then, reaching down, he gave a hand to his companion and dragged him to the same place of vantage. they found themselves in a long narrow cockloft, not more than six feet high at the highest, and insufferably hot. between the tiles, which sloped steeply on either hand, a faint light filtered in, disclosing the giant rooftree running the length of the house, and at the farther end of the loft the main tie-beam, from which a network of knees and struts rose to the rooftree. tignonville, who seemed possessed by unnatural energy, stayed only to put off his boots. then "courage!" he panted, "all goes well!" and, carrying his boots in his hands, he led the way, stepping gingerly from joist to joist until he reached the tie-beam. he climbed on it, and, squeezing himself between the struts, entered a second loft, similar to the first. at the farther end of this a rough wall of bricks in a timber-frame lowered his hopes; but as he approached it, joy! low down in the corner where the roof descended, a small door, square, and not more than two feet high, disclosed itself. the two crept to it on hands and knees and listened. "it will lead to the leads, i doubt?" la tribe whispered. they dared not raise their voices. "as well that way as another!" tignonville answered recklessly. he was the more eager, for there is a fear which transcends the fear of death. his eyes shone through the mask of dust, the sweat ran down to his chin, his breath came and went noisily. "naught matters if we can escape him!" he panted. and he pushed the door recklessly. it flew open; the two drew back their faces with a cry of alarm. they were looking, not into the sunlight, but into a grey dingy garret open to the roof, and occupying the upper part of a gable-end somewhat higher than the wing in which they had been confined. filthy truckle- beds and ragged pallets covered the floor, and, eked out by old saddles and threadbare horserugs, marked the sleeping quarters either of the servants or of travellers of the meaner sort. but the dinginess was naught to the two who knelt looking into it, afraid to move. was the place empty? that was the point; the question which had first stayed, and then set their pulses at the gallop. painfully their eyes searched each huddle of clothing, scanned each dubious shape. and slowly, as the silence persisted, their heads came forward until the whole floor lay within the field of sight. and still no sound! at last tignonville stirred, crept through the doorway, and rose up, peering round him. he nodded, and, satisfied that all was safe, the minister followed him. they found themselves a pace or so from the head of a narrow staircase, leading downwards. without moving, they could see the door which closed it below. tignonville signed to la tribe to wait, and himself crept down the stairs. he reached the door, and, stooping, set his eye to the hole through which the string of the latch passed. a moment he looked, and then, turning on tiptoe, he stole up again, his face fallen. "you may throw the handle after the hatchet!" he muttered. "the man on guard is within four yards of the door." and in the rage of disappointment he struck the air with his hand. "is he looking this way?" "no. he is looking down the passage towards our room. but it is impossible to pass him." la tribe nodded, and moved softly to one of the lattices which lighted the room. it might be possible to escape that way, by the parapet and the tiles. but he found that the casement was set high in the roof, which sloped steeply from its sill to the eaves. he passed to the other window, in which a little wicket in the lattice stood open. he looked through it. in the giddy void white pigeons were wheeling in the dazzling sunshine, and, gazing down, he saw far below him, in the hot square, a row of booths, and troops of people moving to and fro like pigmies; and--and a strange thing, in the middle of all! involuntarily, as if the persons below could have seen his face at the tiny dormer, he drew back. he beckoned to m. tignonville to come to him; and when the young man complied, he bade him in a whisper look down. "see!" he muttered. "there!" the younger man saw and drew in his breath. even under the coating of dust his face turned a shade greyer. "you had no need to fear that he would let us go!" the minister muttered, with half-conscious irony. "no." "nor i! there are two ropes." and la tribe breathed a few words of prayer. the object which had fixed his gaze was a gibbet: the only one of the three which could be seen from their eyrie. tignonville, on the other hand, turned sharply away, and with haggard eyes stared about the room. "we might defend the staircase," he muttered. "two men might hold it for a time." "we have no food." "no." suddenly he gripped la tribe's arm. "i have it!" he cried. "and it may do! it must do!" he continued, his face working. "see!" and lifting from the floor one of the ragged pallets, from which the straw protruded in a dozen places, he set it flat on his head. it drooped at each corner--it had seen much wear--and, while it almost hid his face, it revealed his grimy chin and mortar-stained shoulders. he turned to his companion. la tribe's face glowed as he looked. "it may do!" he cried. "it's a chance! but you are right! it may do!" tignonville dropped the ragged mattress, and tore off his coat; then he rent his breeches at the knee, so that they hung loose about his calves. "do you the same!" he cried. "and quick, man, quick! leave your boots! once outside we must pass through the streets under these"--he took up his burden again and set it on his head--"until we reach a quiet part, and there we--" "can hide! or swim the river!" the minister said. he had followed his companion's example, and now stood under a similar burden. with breeches rent and whitened, and his upper garments in no better case, he looked a sorry figure. tignonville eyed him with satisfaction, and turned to the staircase. "come," he cried, "there is not a moment to be lost. at any minute they may enter our room and find it empty! you are ready? then, not too softly, or it may rouse suspicion! and mumble something at the door." he began himself to scold, and, muttering incoherently, stumbled down the staircase, the pallet on his head rustling against the wall on each side. arrived at the door, he fumbled clumsily with the latch, and, when the door gave way, plumped out with an oath--as if the awkward burden he bore were the only thing on his mind. badelon--he was on duty--stared at the apparition; but the next moment he sniffed the pallet, which was none of the freshest, and, turning up his nose, he retreated a pace. he had no suspicion; the men did not come from the part of the house where the prisoners lay, and he stood aside to let them pass. in a moment, staggering, and going a little unsteadily, as if they scarcely saw their way, they had passed by him, and were descending the staircase. so far well! unfortunately, when they reached the foot of that flight they came on the main passage of the first-floor. it ran right and left, and tignonville did not know which way he must turn to reach the lower staircase. yet he dared not hesitate; in the passage, waiting about the doors, were four or five servants, and in the distance he caught sight of three men belonging to tavannes' company. at any moment, too, an upper servant might meet them, ask what they were doing, and detect the fraud. he turned at random, therefore--to the left as it chanced--and marched along bravely, until the very thing happened which he had feared. a man came from a room plump upon them, saw them, and held up his hands in horror. "what are you doing?" he cried in a rage and with an oath. "who set you on this?" tignonville's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. la tribe from behind muttered something about the stable. "and time too!" the man said. "faugh! but how come you this way? are you drunk? here!" he opened the door of a musty closet beside him, "pitch them in here, do you hear? and take them down when it is dark. faugh. i wonder you did not carry the things though her ladyship's room at once! if my lord had been in and met you! now then, do as i tell you! are you drunk?" with a sullen air tignonville threw in his mattress. la tribe did the same. fortunately the passage was ill-lighted, and there were many helpers and strange servants in the inn. the butler only thought them ill-looking fellows who knew no better. "now be off!" he continued irascibly. "this is no place for your sort. be off!" and, as they moved, "coming! coming!" he cried in answer to a distant summons; and he hurried away on the errand which their appearance had interrupted. tignonville would have gone to work to recover the pallets, for the man had left the key in the door. but as he went to do so the butler looked back, and the two were obliged to make a pretence of following him. a moment, however, and he was gone; and tignonville turned anew to regain them. a second time fortune was adverse; a door within a pace of him opened, a woman came out. she recoiled from the strange figure; her eyes met his. unluckily the light from the room behind her fell on his face, and with a shrill cry she named him. one second and all had been lost, for the crowd of idlers at the other end of the passage had caught her cry, and were looking that way. with presence of mind tignonville clapped his hand on her mouth, and, huddling her by force into the room, followed her, with la tribe at his heels. it was a large room, in which seven or eight people, who had been at prayers when the cry startled them, were rising from their knees. the first thing they saw was javette on the threshold, struggling in the grasp of a wild man, ragged and begrimed; they deemed the city risen and the massacre upon them. carlat threw himself before his mistress, the countess in her turn sheltered a young girl, who stood beside her and from whose face the last trace of colour had fled. madame carlat and a waiting-woman ran shrieking to the window; another instant and the alarm would have gone abroad. tignonville's voice stopped it. "don't you know me?" he cried, "madame! you at least! carlat! are you all mad?" the words stayed them where they stood in an astonishment scarce less than their alarm. the countess tried twice to speak; the third time-- "have you escaped?" she muttered. tignonville nodded, his eyes bright with triumph. "so far," he said. "but they may be on our heels at any moment! where can we hide?" the countess, her hand pressed to her side, looked at javette. "the door, girl!" she whispered. "lock it!" "ay, lock it! and they can go by the back-stairs," madame carlat answered, awaking suddenly to the situation. "through my closet! once in the yard they may pass out through the stables." "which way?" tignonville asked impatiently. "don't stand looking at me, but--" "through this door!" madame carlat answered, hurrying to it. he was following when the countess stepped forward and interposed between him and the door. "stay!" she cried; and there was not one who did not notice a new decision in her voice, a new dignity in her bearing. "stay, monsieur, we may be going too fast. to go out now and in that guise--may it not be to incur greater peril than you incur here? i feel sure that you are in no danger of your life at present. therefore, why run the risk--" "in no danger, madame!" he cried, interrupting her in astonishment. "have you seen the gibbet in the square? do you call that no danger?" "it is not erected for you." "no?" "no, monsieur," she answered firmly, "i swear it is not. and i know of reasons, urgent reasons, why you should not go. m. de tavannes"--she named her husband nervously, as conscious of the weak spot--"before he rode abroad laid strict orders on all to keep within, since the smallest matter might kindle the city. therefore, m. de tignonville, i request, nay i entreat," she continued with greater urgency, as she saw his gesture of denial, "you to stay here until he returns." "and you, madame, will answer for my life?" she faltered. for a moment, a moment only, her colour ebbed. what if she deceived herself? what if she surrendered her old lover to death? what if--but the doubt was of a moment only. her duty was plain. "i will answer for it," she said, with pale lips, "if you remain here. and i beg, i implore you--by the love you once had for me, m. de tignonville," she added desperately, seeing that he was about to refuse, "to remain here." "once!" he retorted, lashing himself into ignoble rage. "by the love i once had! say, rather, the love i have, madame--for i am no woman-weathercock to wed the winner, and hold or not hold, stay or go, as he commands! you, it seems," he continued with a sneer, "have learned the wife's lesson well! you would practise on me now, as you practised on me the other night when you stood between him and me! i yielded then, i spared him. and what did i get by it? bonds and a prison! and what shall i get now? the same! no, madame," he continued bitterly, addressing himself as much to the carlats and the others as to his old mistress. "i do not change! i loved! i love! i was going and i go! if death lay beyond that door"--and he pointed to it--"and life at his will were certain here, i would pass the threshold rather than take my life of him!" and, dragging la tribe with him, with a passionate gesture he rushed by her, opened the door, and disappeared in the next room. the countess took one pace forward, as if she would have followed him, as if she would have tried further persuasion. but as she moved a cry rooted her to the spot. a rush of feet and the babel of many voices filled the passage with a tide of sound, which drew rapidly nearer. the escape was known! would the fugitives have time to slip out below? some one knocked at the door, tried it, pushed and beat on it. but the countess and all in the room had run to the windows and were looking out. if the two had not yet made their escape they must be taken. yet no; as the countess leaned from the window, first one dusty figure and then a second darted from a door below, and made for the nearest turning, out of the place ste.-croix. before they gained it, four men, of whom, badelon, his grey locks flying, was first, dashed out in pursuit, and the street rang with cries of "stop him! seize him! seize him!" some one--one of the pursuers or another--to add to the alarm let off a musket, and in a moment, as if the report had been a signal, the place was in a hubbub, people flocked into it with mysterious quickness, and from a neighbouring roof--whence, precisely, it was impossible to say--the crackling fire of a dozen arquebuses alarmed the city far and wide. unfortunately, the fugitives had been baulked at the first turning. making for a second, they found it choked, and, swerving, darted across the place towards st.-maurice, seeking to lose themselves in the gathering crowd. but the pursuers clung desperately to their skirts, overturning here a man and there a child; and then in a twinkling, tignonville, as he ran round a booth, tripped over a peg and fell, and la tribe stumbled over him and fell also. the four riders flung themselves fiercely on their prey, secured them, and began to drag them with oaths and curses towards the door of the inn. the countess had seen all from her window; had held her breath while they ran, had drawn it sharply when they fell. now, "they have them!" she muttered, a sob choking her, "they have them!" and she clasped her hands. if he had followed her advice! if he had only followed her advice! but the issue proved less certain than she deemed it. the crowd, which grew each moment, knew nothing of pursuers or pursued. on the contrary, a cry went up that the riders were huguenots, and that the huguenots were rising and slaying the catholics; and as no story was too improbable for those days, and this was one constantly set about, first one stone flew, and then another, and another. a man with a staff darted forward and struck badelon on the shoulder, two or three others pressed in and jostled the riders; and if three of tavannes' following had not run out on the instant and faced the mob with their pikes, and for a moment forced them to give back, the prisoners would have been rescued at the very door of the inn. as it was they were dragged in, and the gates were flung to and barred in the nick of time. another moment, almost another second, and the mob had seized them. as it was, a hail of stones poured on the front of the inn, and amid the rising yells of the rabble there presently floated heavy and slow over the city the tolling of the great bell of st.-maurice. chapter xxx. sacrilege! m. de montsoreau, lieutenant-governor of saumur almost rose from his seat in his astonishment. "what! no letters?" he cried, a hand on either arm of the chair. the magistrates stared, one and all. "no letters?" they muttered. and "no letters?" the provost chimed in more faintly. count hannibal looked smiling round the council table. he alone was unmoved. "no," he said. "i bear none." m. de montsoreau, who, travel-stained and in his corselet, had the second place of honour at the foot of the table, frowned. "but, m. le comte," he said, "my instructions from monsieur were to proceed to carry out his majesty's will in co-operation with you, who, i understood, would bring letters _de par le roi_." "i had letters," count hannibal answered negligently. "but on the way i mislaid them." "mislaid them?" montsoreau cried, unable to believe his ears; while the smaller dignitaries of the city, the magistrates and churchmen who sat on either side of the table, gaped open-mouthed. it was incredible! it was unbelievable! mislay the king's letters! who had ever heard of such a thing? "yes, i mislaid them. lost them, if you like it better." "but you jest!" the lieutenant-governor retorted, moving uneasily in his chair. he was a man more highly named for address than courage; and, like most men skilled in finesse, he was prone to suspect a trap. "you jest, surely, monsieur! men do not lose his majesty's letters, by the way." "when they contain his majesty's will, no," tavannes answered, with a peculiar smile. "you imply, then?" count hannibal shrugged his shoulders, but had not answered when bigot entered and handed him his sweetmeat box; he paused to open it and select a prune. he was long in selecting; but no change of countenance led any of those at the table to suspect that inside the lid of the box was a message--a scrap of paper informing him that montsoreau had left fifty spears in the suburb without the saumur gate, besides those whom he had brought openly into the town. tavannes read the note slowly while he seemed to be choosing his fruit. and then-- "imply?" he answered. "i imply nothing, m. de montsoreau." "but--" "but that sometimes his majesty finds it prudent to give orders which he does not mean to be carried out. there are things which start up before the eye," tavannes continued, negligently tapping the box on the table, "and there are things which do not; sometimes the latter are the more important. you, better than i, m. de montsoreau, know that the king in the gallery at the louvre is one, and in his closet is another." "yes." "and that being so--" "you do not mean to carry the letters into effect?" "had i the letters, certainly, my friend. i should be bound by them. but i took good care to lose them," tavannes added naively. "i am no fool." "umph!" "however," count hannibal continued, with an airy gesture, "that is my affair. if you, m. de montsoreau, feel inclined, in spite of the absence of my letters, to carry yours into effect, by all means do so--after midnight of to-day." m. de montsoreau breathed hard. "and why," he asked, half sulkily and half ponderously, "after midnight only, m. le comte?" "merely that i may be clear of all suspicion of having lot or part in the matter," count hannibal answered pleasantly. "after midnight of to-night by all means do as you please. until midnight, by your leave, we will be quiet." the lieutenant-governor moved doubtfully in his chair, the fear--which tavannes had shrewdly instilled into his mind--that he might be disowned if he carried out his instructions, struggling with his avarice and his self-importance. he was rather crafty than bold; and such things had been, he knew. little by little, and while he sat gloomily debating, the notion of dealing with one or two and holding the body of the huguenots to ransom--a notion which, in spite of everything, was to bear good fruit for angers--began to form in his mind. the plan suited him: it left him free to face either way, and it would fill his pockets more genteelly than would open robbery. on the other hand, he would offend his brother and the fanatical party, with whom he commonly acted. they were looking to see him assert himself. they were looking to hear him declare himself. and-- harshly count hannibal's voice broke in on his thoughts; harshly, a something sinister in its tone. "where is your brother?" he said. and it was evident that he had not noted his absence until then. "my lord's vicar of all people should be here!" he continued, leaning forward and looking round the table. his brow was stormy. lescot squirmed under his eye; thuriot turned pale and trembled. it was one of the canons of st.-maurice, who at length took on himself to answer. "his lordship requested, m. le comte," he ventured, "that you would excuse him. his duties--" "is he ill?" "he--" "is he ill, sirrah?" tavannes roared. and while all bowed before the lightning of his eye, no man at the table knew what had roused the sudden tempest. but bigot knew, who stood by the door, and whose ear, keen as his master's, had caught the distant report of a musket shot. "if he be not ill," tavannes continued, rising and looking round the table in search of signs of guilt, "and there be foul play here, and he the player, the bishop's own hand shall not save him! by heaven it shall not! nor yours!" he continued, looking fiercely at montsoreau. "nor your master's!" the lieutenant-governor sprang to his feet. "m. le comte," he stammered, "i do not understand this language! nor this heat, which may be real or not! all i say is, if there be foul play here--" "if!" tavannes retorted. "at least, if there be, there be gibbets too! and i see necks!" he added, leaning forward. "necks!" and then, with a look of flame, "let no man leave this table until i return," he cried, "or he will have to deal with me. nay," he continued, changing his tone abruptly, as the prudence, which never entirely left him--and perhaps the remembrance of the other's fifty spearmen--sobered him in the midst of his rage, "i am hasty. i mean not you, m. de montsoreau! ride where you will; ride with me, if you will, and i will thank you. only remember, until midnight angers is mine!" he was still speaking when he moved from the table, and, leaving all staring after him, strode down the room. an instant he paused on the threshold and looked back; then he passed out, and clattered down the stone stairs. his horse and riders were waiting, but, his foot in the stirrup, he stayed for a word with bigot. "is it so?" he growled. the norman did not speak, but pointed towards the place ste.-croix, whence an occasional shot made answer for him. in those days the streets of the black city were narrow and crooked, overhung by timber houses, and hampered by booths; nor could tavannes from the old town hall--now abandoned--see the place ste.-croix. but that he could cure. he struck spurs to his horse, and, followed by his ten horsemen, he clattered noisily down the paved street. a dozen groups hurrying the same way sprang panic-stricken to the walls, or saved themselves in doorways. he was up with them, he was beyond them! another hundred yards, and he would see the place. and then, with a cry of rage, he drew rein a little, discovering what was before him. in the narrow gut of the way a great black banner, borne on two poles, was lurching towards him. it was moving in the van of a dark procession of priests, who, with their attendants and a crowd of devout, filled the street from wall to wall. they were chanting one of the penitential psalms, but not so loudly as to drown the uproar in the place beyond them. they made no way, and count hannibal swore furiously, suspecting treachery. but he was no madman, and at the moment the least reflection would have sent him about to seek another road. unfortunately, as he hesitated a man sprang with a gesture of warning to his horse's head and seized it; and tavannes, mistaking the motive of the act, lost his self- control. he struck the fellow down, and, with a reckless word, rode headlong into the procession, shouting to the black robes to make way, make way! a cry, nay, a shriek of horror, answered him and rent the air. and in a minute the thing was done. too late, as the bishop's vicar, struck by his horse, fell screaming under its hoofs--too late, as the consecrated vessels which he had been bearing rolled in the mud, tavannes saw that they bore the canopy and the host! he knew what he had done, then. before his horse's iron shoes struck the ground again, his face--even his face--had lost its colour. but he knew also that to hesitate now, to pause now, was to be torn in pieces; for his riders, seeing that which the banner had veiled from him, had not followed him, and he was alone, in the middle of brandished fists and weapons. he hesitated not a moment. drawing a pistol, he spurred onwards, his horse plunging wildly among the shrieking priests; and though a hundred hands, hands of acolytes, hands of shaven monks, clutched at his bridle or gripped his boot, he got clear of them. clear, carrying with him the memory of one face seen an instant amid the crowd, one face seen, to be ever remembered--the face of father pezelay, white, evil, scarred, distorted by wicked triumph. behind him, the thunder of "sacrilege! sacrilege!" rose to heaven, and men were gathering. in front the crowd which skirmished about the inn was less dense, and, ignorant of the thing that had happened in the narrow street, made ready way for him, the boldest recoiling before the look on his face. some who stood nearest to the inn, and had begun to hurl stones at the window and to beat on the doors--which had only the minute before closed on badelon and his prisoners--supposed that he had his riders behind him; and these fled apace. but he knew better even than they the value of time; he pushed his horse up to the gates, and hammered them with his boot while be kept his pistol-hand towards the place and the cathedral, watching for the transformation which he knew would come! and come it did; on a sudden, in a twinkling! a white-faced monk, frenzy in his eyes, appeared in the midst of the crowd. he stood and tore his garments before the people, and, stooping, threw dust on his head. a second and a third followed his example; then from a thousand throats the cry of "sacrilege! sacrilege!" rolled up, while clerks flew wildly hither and thither shrieking the tale, and priests denied the sacraments to angers until it should purge itself of the evil thing. by that time count hannibal had saved himself behind the great gates, by the skin of his teeth. the gates had opened to him in time. but none knew better than he that angers had no gates thick enough, nor walls of a height, to save him for many hours from the storm he had let loose! chapter xxxi. the flight from angers. but that only the more roused the devil in the man; that, and the knowledge that he had his own headstrong act to thank for the position. he looked on the panic-stricken people who, scared by the turmoil without, had come together in the courtyard, wringing their hands and chattering; and his face was so dark and forbidding that fear of him took the place of all other fear, and the nearest shrank from contact with him. on any other entering as he had entered, they would have hailed questions; they would have asked what was amiss, and if the city were rising, and where were bigot and his men. but count hannibal's eye struck curiosity dumb. when he cried from his saddle, "bring me the landlord!" the trembling man was found, and brought, and thrust forward almost without a word. "you have a back gate?" tavannes said, while the crowd leaned forward to catch his words. "yes, my lord," the man faltered. "into the street which leads to the ramparts?" "ye-yes, my lord." "then"--to badelon--"saddle! you have five minutes. saddle as you never saddled before," he continued in a low tone, "or--" his tongue did not finish the threat, but his hand waved the man away. "for you"--he held tignonville an instant with his lowering eye--"and the preaching fool with you, get arms and mount! you have never played aught but the woman yet; but play me false now, or look aside but a foot from the path i bid you take, and you thwart me no more, monsieur! and you, madame," he continued, turning to the countess, who stood bewildered at one of the doors, the provost's daughter clinging and weeping about her, "you have three minutes to get your women to horse! see you, if you please, that they take no longer!" she found her voice with difficulty. "and this child?" she said. "she is in my care." "bring her," he muttered with a scowl of impatience. and then, raising his voice as he turned on the terrified gang of hostlers and inn servants who stood gaping round him, "go help!" he thundered. "go help! and quickly!" he added, his face growing a shade darker as a second bell began to toll from a neighbouring tower, and the confused babel in the place ste.-croix settled into a dull roar of "_sacrilege_! _sacrilege_."--"hasten!" fortunately it had been his first intention to go to the council attended by the whole of his troop; and eight horses stood saddled in the stalls. others were hastily pulled out and bridled, and the women were mounted. la tribe, at a look from tavannes, took behind him the provost's daughter, who was helpless with terror. between the suddenness of the alarm, the uproar without, and the panic within, none but a man whose people served him at a nod and dreaded his very gesture could have got his party mounted in time. javette would fain have swooned, but she dared not. tignonville would fain have questioned, but he shrank from the venture. the countess would fain have said something, but she forced herself to obey and no more. even so the confusion in the courtyard, the mingling of horses and men and trappings and saddle-bags, would have made another despair; but wherever count hannibal, seated in his saddle in the middle, turned his face, chaos settled into a degree of order, servants, ceasing to listen to the yells and cries outside, ran to fetch, women dropped cloaks from the gallery, and men loaded muskets and strapped on bandoliers. until at last--but none knew what those minutes of suspense cost him--he saw all mounted, and, pistol in hand, shepherded them to the back gates. as he did so he stooped for a few scowling words with badelon, whom he sent to the van of the party: then he gave the word to open. it was done; and even as montsoreau's horsemen, borne on the bosom of a second and more formidable throng, swept raging into the already crowded square, and the cry went up for "a ram! a ram!" to batter in the gates, tavannes, hurling his little party before him, dashed out at the back, and putting to flight a handful of rascals who had wandered to that side, cantered unmolested down the lane to the ramparts. turning eastward at the foot of the frowning castle, he followed the inner side of the wall in the direction of the gate by which he had entered the preceding evening. to gain this his party had to pass the end of the rue toussaint, which issues from the place ste.-croix and runs so straight that the mob seething in front of the inn had only to turn their heads to see them. the danger incurred at this point was great; for a party as small as tavannes' and encumbered with women would have had no chance if attacked within the walls. count hannibal knew it. but he knew also that the act which he had committed rendered the north bank of the loire impossible for him. neither king nor marshal, neither charles of valois nor gaspard of tavannes, would dare to shield him from an infuriated church, a church too wise to forgive certain offences. his one chance lay in reaching the southern bank of the loire--roughly speaking, the huguenot bank--and taking refuge in some town, rochelle or st. jean d'angely, where the huguenots were strong, and whence he might take steps to set himself right with his own side. but to cross the great river which divides france into two lands widely differing he must leave the city by the east gate; for the only bridge over the loire within forty miles of angers lay eastward from the town, at ponts de ce, four miles away. to this gate, therefore, past the rue toussaint, he whirled his party daringly; and though the women grew pale as the sounds of riot broke louder on the ear, and they discovered that they were approaching instead of leaving the danger--and though tignonville for an instant thought him mad, and snatched at the countess's rein--his men-at-arms, who knew him, galloped stolidly on, passed like clockwork the end of the street, and, reckless of the stream of persons hurrying in the direction of the alarm, heedless of the fright and anger their passage excited, pressed steadily on. a moment and the gate through which they had entered the previous evening appeared before them. and--a sight welcome to one of them--it was open. they were fortunate indeed, for a few seconds later they had been too late. the alarm had preceded them. as they dashed up, a man ran to the chains of the portcullis and tried to lower it. he failed to do so at the first touch, and, quailing, fled from badelon's levelled pistol. a watchman on one of the bastions of the wall shouted to them to halt or he would fire: but the riders yelled in derision, and thundering through the echoing archway, emerged into the open, and saw, extended before them, in place of the gloomy vistas of the black town, the glory of the open country and the vine-clad hills, and the fields about the loire yellow with late harvest. the women gasped their relief, and one or two who were most out of breath would have pulled up their horses and let them trot, thinking the danger at an end. but a curt savage word from the rear set them flying again, and down and up and on again they galloped, driven forward by the iron hand which never relaxed its grip of them. silent and pitiless he whirled them before him until they were within a mile of the long ponts de ce--a series of bridges rather than one bridge--and the broad shallow loire lay plain before them, its sandbanks grilling in the sun, and grey lines of willows marking its eyots. by this time some of the women, white with fatigue, could only cling to their saddles with their hands; while others were red-hot, their hair unrolled, and the perspiration mingled with the dust on their faces. but he who drove them had no pity for weakness in an emergency. he looked back and saw, a half-mile behind them, the glitter of steel following hard on their heels: and "faster! faster!" he cried, regardless of their prayers: and he beat the rearmost of the horses with his scabbard. a waiting-woman shrieked that she should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, "fall then, fool!" and the instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town about the bridges, and badelon raised his hand as a signal that they might slacken speed. the bewilderment of the start had been so great that it was then only, when they found their feet on the first link of the bridge, that two of the party, the countess and tignonville, awoke to the fact that their faces were set southwards. to cross the loire in those days meant much to all: to a huguenot, very much. it chanced that these two rode on to the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing--the remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into the mind of each of them. it deepened the flush which exertion had brought to the woman's cheek, then left it paler than before. a minute earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her anger died as she looked and she remembered. in the man, shallower of feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation. he could not at first believe in their good fortune. "_mon dieu_!" he cried, "we are crossing!" and then again in a lower tone, "we are crossing! we are crossing!" and he looked at her. it was impossible that she should not look back; that she who had ceased to be angry should not feel and remember; impossible that her answering glance should not speak to his heart. below them, as on that day a month earlier, when they had crossed the bridges going northward, the broad shallow river ran its course in the sunshine, its turbid currents gleaming and flashing about the sandbanks and osier-beds. to the eye, the landscape, save that the vintage was farther advanced and the harvest in part gathered in, was the same. but how changed were their relations, their prospects, their hopes, who had then crossed the river hand-in-hand, planning a life to be passed together. the young man's rage boiled up at the thought. too vividly, too sharply it showed him the wrongs which he had suffered at the hands of the man who rode behind him, the man who even now drove him on and ordered him and insulted him. he forgot that he might have perished in the general massacre if count hannibal had not intervened. he forgot that count hannibal had spared him once and twice. he laid on his enemy's shoulders the guilt of all, the blood of all: and, as quick on the thought of his wrongs and his fellows' wrongs followed the reflection that with every league they rode southwards the chance of requital grew, he cried again, and this time joyously-- "we are crossing! a little, and we shall be in our own land!" the tears filled the countess's eyes as she looked westwards and southwards. "vrillac is there!" she cried; and she pointed. "i smell the sea!" "ay!" he answered, almost under his breath. "it lies there! and no more than thirty leagues from us! with fresh horses we might see it in two days!" badelon's voice broke in on them. "forward!" he cried, as the party reached the southern bank. "_en avant_!" and, obedient to the word, the little company, refreshed by the short respite, took the road out of ponts de ce at a steady trot. nor was the countess the only one whose face glowed, being set southwards, or whose heart pulsed to the rhythm of the horses' hoofs that beat out "home!" carlat's and madame carlat's also. javette even, hearing from her neighbour that they were over the loire, plucked up courage; while la tribe, gazing before him with moistened eyes, cried "comfort" to the scared and weeping girl who clung to his belt. it was singular to see how all sniffed the air as if already it smacked of the sea and of the south; and how they of poitou sat their horses as if they asked nothing better than to ride on and on and on until the scenes of home arose about them. for them the sky had already a deeper blue, the air a softer fragrance, the sunshine a purity long unknown. was it wonderful, when they had suffered so much on that northern bank? when their experience during the month had been comparable only with the direst nightmare? yet one among them, after the first impulse of relief and satisfaction, felt differently. tignonville's gorge rose against the sense of compulsion, of inferiority. to be driven forward after this fashion, whether he would or no, to be placed at the back of every base- born man-at-arms, to have no clearer knowledge of what had happened or of what was passing, or of the peril from which they fled, than the women among whom he rode--these things kindled anew the sullen fire of hate. north of the loire there had been some excuse for his inaction under insult; he had been in the man's country and power. but south of the loire, within forty leagues of huguenot niort, must he still suffer, still be supine? his rage was inflamed by a disappointment he presently underwent. looking back as they rode clear of the wooden houses of ponts de ce, he missed tavannes and several of his men; and he wondered if count hannibal had remained on his own side of the river. it seemed possible; and in that event la tribe and he and carlat might deal with badelon and the four who still escorted them. but when he looked back a minute later, tavannes was within sight, following the party with a stern face; and not tavannes only. bigot, with two of the ten men who hitherto had been missing, was with him. it was clear, however, that they brought no good news, for they had scarcely ridden up before count hannibal cried, "faster! faster!" in his harshest voice, and bigot urged the horses to a quicker trot. their course lay almost parallel with the loire in the direction of beaupreau; and tignonville began to fear that count hannibal intended to recross the river at nantes, where the only bridge below angers spanned the stream. with this in view it was easy to comprehend his wish to distance his pursuers before he recrossed. the countess had no such thought. "they must be close upon us!" she murmured, as she urged her horse in obedience to the order. "whoever they are!" tignonville muttered bitterly. "if we knew what had happened, or who followed, we should know more about it, madame. for that matter, i know what i wish he would do. and our heads are set for it." "what?" "make for vrillac!" he answered, a savage gleam in his eyes. "for vrillac?" "yes." "ah, if he would!" she cried, her face turning pale. "if he would. he would be safe there!" "ay, quite safe!" he answered with a peculiar intonation. and he looked at her askance. he fancied that his thought, the thought which had just flashed into his brain, was her thought; that she had the same notion in reserve, and that they were in sympathy. and tavannes, seeing them talking together, and noting her look and the fervour of her gesture, formed the same opinion, and retired more darkly into himself. the downfall of his plan for dazzling her by a magnanimity unparalleled and beyond compare, a plan dependent on the submission of angers--his disappointment in this might have roused the worst passions of a better man. but there was in this man a pride on a level at least with his other passions: and to bear himself in this hour of defeat and flight so that if she could not love him she must admire him, checked in a strange degree the current of his rage. when tignonville presently looked back he found that count hannibal and six of his riders had pulled up and were walking their horses far in the rear. on which he would have done the same himself; but badelon called over his shoulder the eternal "forward, monsieur, _en avant_!" and sullenly, hating the man and his master more deeply every hour, tignonville was forced to push on, with thoughts of vengeance in his heart. trot, trot! trot, trot! through a country which had lost its smiling wooded character and grew more sombre and less fertile the farther they left the loire behind them. trot, trot! trot, trot!--for ever, it seemed to some. javette wept with fatigue, and the other women were little better. the countess herself spoke seldom except to cheer the provost's daughter; who, poor girl, flung suddenly out of the round of her life and cast among strangers, showed a better spirit than might have been expected. at length, on the slopes of some low hills, which they had long seen before them, a cluster of houses and a church appeared; and badelon, drawing rein, cried-- "beaupreau, madame! we stay an hour!" it was six o'clock. they had ridden some hours without a break. with sighs and cries of pain the women dropped from their clumsy saddles, while the men laid out such food--it was little--as had been brought, and hobbled the horses that they might feed. the hour passed rapidly, and when it had passed badelon was inexorable. there was wailing when he gave the word to mount again; and tignonville, fiercely resenting this dumb, reasonless flight, was at heart one of the mutineers. but badelon said grimly that they might go on and live, or stay and die, as it pleased them; and once more they climbed painfully to their saddles, and jogged steadily on through the sunset, through the gloaming, through the darkness, across a weird, mysterious country of low hills and narrow plains which grew more wild and less cultivated as they advanced. fortunately the horses had been well saved during the long leisurely journey to angers, and now went well and strongly. when they at last unsaddled for the night in a little dismal wood within a mile of clisson, they had placed some forty miles between themselves and angers. chapter xxxii. the ordeal by steel. the women for the most part fell like sacks and slept where they alighted, dead weary. the men, when they had cared for the horses, followed the example; for badelon would suffer no fire. in less than half an hour, a sentry who stood on guard at the edge of the wood, and tignonville and la tribe, who talked in low voices with their backs against a tree, were the only persons who remained awake, with the exception of the countess. carlat had made a couch for her, and screened it with cloaks from the wind and the eye; for the moon had risen and where the trees stood sparsest its light flooded the soil with pools of white. but madame had not yet retired to her bed. the two men, whose voices reached her, saw her from time to time moving restlessly to and fro between the road and the little encampment. presently she came and stood over them. "he led his people out of the wilderness," la tribe was saying; "out of the trouble of paris, out of the trouble of angers, and always, always southward. if you do not in this, monsieur, see his finger--" "and angers?" tignonville struck in, with a faint sneer. "has he led that out of trouble? a day or two ago you would risk all to save it, my friend. now, with your back safely turned on it, you think all for the best." "we did our best," the minister answered humbly. "from the day we met in paris we have been but instruments." "to save angers?" "to save a remnant." on a sudden the countess raised her hand. "do you not hear horses, monsieur?" she cried. she had been listening to the noises of the night, and had paid little heed to what the two were saying. "one of ours moved," tignonville answered listlessly. "why do you not lie down, madame?" instead of answering, "whither is he going?" she asked. "do you know?" "i wish i did know," the young man answered peevishly. "to niort, it may be. or presently he will double back and recross the loire." "he would have gone by cholet to niort," la tribe said. "the direction is rather that of rochelle. god grant we be bound thither!" "or to vrillac," the countess cried, clasping her hands in the darkness. "can it be to vrillac he is going?" the minister shook his head. "ah, let it be to vrillac!" she cried, a thrill in her voice. "we should be safe there. and he would be safe." "safe?" echoed a fourth and deeper voice. and out of the darkness beside them loomed a tall figure. the minister looked and leapt to his feet. tignonville rose more slowly. the voice was tavannes'. "and where am i to be safe?" he repeated slowly, a faint ring of saturnine amusement in his tone. "at vrillac!" she cried. "in my house, monsieur!" he was silent a moment. then, "your house, madame? in which direction is it, from here?" "westwards," she answered impulsively, her voice quivering with eagerness and emotion and hope. "westwards, monsieur--on the sea. the causeway from the land is long, and ten can hold it against ten hundred." "westwards? and how far westwards?" tignonville answered for her; in his tone throbbed the same eagerness, the same anxiety, which spoke in hers. nor was count hannibal's ear deaf to it. "through challans," he said, "thirteen leagues." "from clisson?" "yes, monsieur le comte." "and by commequiers less," the countess cried. "no, it is a worse road," tignonville answered quickly; "and longer in time." "but we came--" "at our leisure, madame. the road is by challans, if we wish to be there quickly." "ah!" count hannibal said. in the darkness it was impossible to see his face or mark how he took it. "but being there, i have few men." "i have forty will come at call," she cried with pride. "a word to them, and in four hours or a little more--" "they would outnumber mine by four to one," count hannibal answered coldly, dryly, in a voice like ice-water flung in their faces. "thank you, madame; i understand. to vrillac is no long ride; but we will not ride it at present." and he turned sharply on his heel and strode from them. he had not covered thirty paces before she overtook him in the middle of a broad patch of moonlight, and touched his arm. he wheeled swiftly, his hand halfway to his hilt. then he saw who it was. "ah," he said, "i had forgotten, madame. you have come--" "no!" she cried passionately; and standing before him she shook back the hood of her cloak that he might look into her eyes. "you owe me no blow to-day. you have paid me, monsieur. you have struck me already, and foully, like a coward. do you remember," she continued rapidly, "the hour after our marriage, and what you said to me? do you remember what you told me? and whom to trust and whom to suspect, where lay our interest and where our foes'? you trusted me then! what have i done that you now dare--ay, dare, monsieur," she repeated fearlessly, her face pale and her eyes glittering with excitement, "to insult me? that you treat me as--javette? that you deem me capable of _that_? of luring you into a trap, and in my own house, or the house that was mine, of--" "treating me as i have treated others." "you have said it!" she cried. she could not herself understand why his distrust had wounded her so sharply, so home, that all fear of him was gone. "you have said it, and put that between us which will not be removed. i could have forgiven blows," she continued, breathless in her excitement, "so you had thought me what i am. but now you will do well to watch me! you will do well to leave vrillac on one side. for were you there, and raised your hand against me--not that that touches me, but it will do--and there are those, i tell you, would fling you from the tower at my word." "indeed?" "ay, indeed! and indeed, monsieur!" her face was in moonlight, his was in shadow. "and this is your new tone, madame, is it?" he said, slowly and after a pregnant pause. "the crossing of a river has wrought so great a change in you?" "no!" she cried. "yes," he said. and, despite herself, she flinched before the grimness of his tone. "you have yet to learn one thing, however: that i do not change. that, north or south, i am the same to those who are the same to me. that what i have won on the one bank i will hold on the other, in the teeth of all, and though god's church be thundering on my heels! i go to vrillac--" "you--go?" she cried. "you go?" "i go," he repeated, "to-morrow. and among your own people i will see what language you will hold. while you were in my power i spared you. now that you are in your own land, now that you lift your hand against me, i will show you of what make i am. if blows will not tame you, i will try that will suit you less. ay, you wince, madame! you had done well had you thought twice before you threatened, and thrice before you took in hand to scare tavannes with a parcel of clowns and fisherfolk. to- morrow, to vrillac and your duty! and one word more, madame," he continued, turning back to her truculently when he had gone some paces from her. "if i find you plotting with your lover by the way i will hang not you, but him. i have spared him a score of times; but i know him, and i do not trust him." "nor me," she said, and with a white, set face she looked at him in the moonlight. "had you not better hang me now?" "why?" "lest i do you an injury!" she cried with passion; and she raised her hand and pointed northward. "lest i kill you some night, monsieur! i tell you, a thousand men on your heels are less dangerous than the woman at your side--if she hate you." "is it so?" he cried. his hand flew to his hilt; his dagger flashed out. but she did not move, did not flinch, only she set her teeth; and her eyes, fascinated by the steel, grew wider. his hand sank slowly. he held the weapon to her, hilt foremost; she took it mechanically. "you think yourself brave enough to kill me, do you?" he sneered. "then take this, and strike, if you dare. take it--strike, madame! it is sharp, and my arms are open." and he flung them wide, standing within a pace of her. "here, above the collar-bone, is the surest for a weak hand. what, afraid?" he continued, as, stiffly clutching the weapon which he had put into her hand, she glared at him, trembling and astonished. "afraid, and a vrillac! afraid, and 'tis but one blow! see, my arms are open. one blow home, and you will never lie in them. think of that. one blow home, and you may lie in his. think of that! strike, then, madame," he went on, piling taunt on taunt, "if you dare, and if you hate me. what, still afraid! how shall i give you heart? shall i strike you? it will not be the first time by ten. i keep count, you see," he continued mockingly. "or shall i kiss you? ay, that may do. and it will not be against your will, either, for you have that in your hand will save you in an instant. even"--he drew a foot nearer--"now! even--" and he stooped until his lips almost touched hers. she sprang back. "oh, do not!" she cried. "oh, do not!" and, dropping the dagger, she covered her face with her hands, and burst into weeping. he stooped coolly, and, after groping some time for the poniard, drew it from the leaves among which it had fallen. he put it into the sheath, and not until he had done that did he speak. then it was with a sneer. "i have no need to fear overmuch," he said. "you are a poor hater, madame. and poor haters make poor lovers. 'tis his loss! if you will not strike a blow for him, there is but one thing left. go, dream of him!" and, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, he turned on his heel. chapter xxxiii. the ambush. the start they made at daybreak was gloomy and ill-omened, through one of those white mists which are blown from the atlantic over the flat lands of western poitou. the horses, looming gigantic through the fog, winced as the cold harness was girded on them. the men hurried to and fro with saddles on their heads, and stumbled over other saddles, and swore savagely. the women turned mutinous and would not rise; or, being dragged up by force, shrieked wild, unfitting words, as they were driven to the horses. the countess looked on and listened, and shuddered, waiting for carlat to set her on her horse. she had gone during the last three weeks through much that was dreary, much that was hopeless; but the chill discomfort of this forced start, with tired horses and wailing women, would have darkened the prospect of home had there been no fear or threat to cloud it. he whose will compelled all stood a little apart and watched all, silent and gloomy. when badelon, after taking his orders and distributing some slices of black bread to be eaten in the saddle, moved off at the head of his troop, count hannibal remained behind, attended by bigot and the eight riders who had formed the rearguard so far. he had not approached the countess since rising, and she had been thankful for it. but now, as she moved away, she looked back and saw him still standing; she marked that he wore his corselet, and in one of those revulsions of feeling--which outrun man's reason--she who had tossed on her couch through half the night, in passionate revolt against the fate before her, took fire at his neglect and his silence; she resented on a sudden the distance he kept, and his scorn of her. her breast heaved, her colour came, involuntarily she checked her horse, as if she would return to him, and speak to him. then the carlats and the others closed up behind her, badelon's monotonous "forward, madame, _en avant_!" proclaimed the day's journey begun, and she saw him no more. nevertheless, the motionless figure, looming homeric through the fog, with gleams of wet light reflected from the steel about it, dwelt long in her mind. the road which badelon followed, slowly at first, and with greater speed as the horses warmed to their work, and the women, sore and battered resigned themselves to suffering, wound across a flat expanse broken by a few hills. these were little more than mounds, and for the most part were veiled from sight by the low-lying sea-mist, through which gnarled and stunted oaks rose mysterious, to fade as strangely. weird trees they were, with branches unlike those of this world's trees, rising in a grey land without horizon or limit, through which our travellers moved, weary phantoms in a clinging nightmare. at a walk, at a trot, more often at a jaded amble, they pushed on behind badelon's humped shoulders. sometimes the fog hung so thick about them that they saw only those who rose and fell in the saddles immediately before them; sometimes the air cleared a little, the curtain rolled up a space, and for a minute or two they discerned stretches of unfertile fields, half-tilled and stony, or long tracts of gorse and broom, with here and there a thicket of dwarf shrubs or a wood of wind-swept pines. some looked and saw these things; more rode on sulky and unseeing, supporting impatiently the toils of a flight from they knew not what. to do tignonville justice, he was not of these. on the contrary, he seemed to be in a better temper on this day and, where so many took things unheroically, he showed to advantage. avoiding the countess and riding with carlat, he talked and laughed with marked cheerfulness; nor did he ever fail, when the mist rose, to note this or that landmark, and confirm badelon in the way he was going. "we shall be at lege by noon!" he cried more than once, "and if m. le comte persists in his plan, may reach vrillac by late sunset. by way of challans!" and always carlat answered, "ay, by challans, monsieur, so be it!" he proved, too, so far right in his prediction that noon saw them drag, a weary train, into the hamlet of lege, where the road from nantes to olonne runs southward over the level of poitou. an hour later count hannibal rode in with six of his eight men, and, after a few minutes' parley with badelon, who was scanning the horses, he called carlat to him. the old man came. "can we reach vrillac to-night?" count hannibal asked curtly. "by challans, my lord," the steward answered, "i think we can. we call it seven hours' riding from here." "and that route is the shortest?" "in time, m. le comte, the road being better." count hannibal bent his brows. "and the other way?" he said. "is by commequiers, my lord. it is shorter in distance." "by how much?" "two leagues. but there are fordings and a salt marsh; and with madame and the women--" "it would be longer?" the steward hesitated. "i think so," he said slowly, his eyes wandering to the grey misty landscape, against which the poor hovels of the village stood out naked and comfortless. a low thicket of oaks sheltered the place from south-westerly gales. on the other three sides it lay open. "very good," tavannes said curtly. "be ready to start in ten minutes. you will guide us." but when the ten minutes had elapsed and the party were ready to start, to the astonishment of all the steward was not to be found. to peremptory calls for him no answer came; and a hurried search through the hamlet proved equally fruitless. the only person who had seen him since his interview with tavannes turned out to be m. de tignonville; and he had seen him mount his horse five minutes before, and move off--as he believed--by the challans road. "ahead of us?" "yes, m. le comte," tignonville answered, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the fringe of trees. "i did not see him take the road, but he was beside the north end of the wood when i saw him last. thereabouts!" and he pointed to a place where the challans road wound round the flank of the wood. "when we are beyond that point, i think we shall see him." count hannibal growled a word in his beard, and, turning in his saddle, looked back the way he had come. half a mile away, two or three dots could be seen approaching across the plain. he turned again. "you know the road?" he said, curtly addressing the young man. "perfectly. as well as carlat." "then lead the way, monsieur, with badelon. and spare neither whip nor spur. there will be need of both, if we would lie warm to-night." tignonville nodded assent and, wheeling his horse, rode to the head of the party, a faint smile playing about his mouth. a moment, and the main body moved off behind him, leaving count hannibal and six men to cover the rear. the mist, which at noon had risen for an hour or two, was closing down again, and they had no sooner passed clear of the wood than the trees faded out of sight behind them. it was not wonderful that they could not see carlat. objects a hundred paces from them were completely hidden. trot, trot! trot, trot! through a grey world so featureless, so unreal that the riders, now dozing in the saddle, and now awaking, seemed to themselves to stand still, as in a nightmare. a trot and then a walk, and then a trot again; and all a dozen times repeated, while the women bumped along in their wretched saddles, and the horses stumbled, and the men swore at them. ha! la garnache at last, and a sharp turn southward to challans. the countess raised her head, and began to look about her. there, should be a church, she knew; and there, the old ruined tower built by wizards, or the carthaginians, so old tradition ran; and there, to the westward, the great salt marshes towards noirmoutier. the mist hid all, but the knowledge that they were there set her heart beating, brought tears to her eyes, and lightened the long road to challans. at challans they halted half an hour, and washed out the horses' mouths with water and a little _guignolet_--the spirit of the country. a dose of the cordial was administered to the women; and a little after seven they began the last stage of the journey, through a landscape which even the mist could not veil from the eyes of love. there rose the windmill of soullans! there the old dolmen, beneath which the grey wolf that ate the two children of tornic had its lair. for a mile back they had been treading my lady's land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall. the salt flavour, which is new life to the shore-born, was in the fleecy reek which floated by them, now thinner, now more opaque; and almost they could hear the dull thunder of the biscay waves falling on the rocks. tignonville looked back at her and smiled. she caught the look; she fancied that she understood it and his thoughts. but her own eyes were moist at the moment with tears, and what his said, and what there was of strangeness in his glance, half-warning, half-exultant, escaped her. for there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level--hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island--she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads. where it stood, the road from commequiers and the road she travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the hillocks, it ran down to the beach and the causeway--and to her home. at the sight she bethought herself of carlat, and calling to m. de tignonville, she asked him what he thought of the steward's continued absence. "he must have outpaced us!" he answered, with an odd laugh. "but he must have ridden hard to do that." he reined back to her. "say nothing!" he muttered under his breath. "but look ahead, madame, and see if we are expected!" "expected? how can we be expected?" she cried. the colour rushed into her face. he put his finger to his lip, and looked warningly at badelon's humped shoulders, jogging up and down in front of them. then, stooping towards her, in a lower tone, "if carlat has arrived before us, he will have told them," he said. "have told them?" "he came by the other road, and it is quicker." she gazed at him in astonishment, her lips parted; and slowly she understood, and her eyes grew hard. "then why," she said, "did you say it was longer. had we been overtaken, monsieur, we had had you to thank for it, it seems!" he bit his lip. "but we have not been overtaken," he rejoined. "on the contrary, you have me to thank for something quite different." "as unwelcome, perhaps!" she retorted. "for what?" "softly, madame." "for what?" she repeated, refusing to lower her voice. "speak, monsieur, if you please." he had never seen her look at him in that way. "for the fact," he answered, stung by her look and tone, "that when you arrive you will find yourself mistress in your own house! is that nothing?" "you have called in my people?" "carlat has done so, or should have," he answered. "henceforth," he continued, a ring of exultation in his voice, "it will go hard with m. le comte, if he does not treat you better than he has treated you hitherto. that is all!" "you mean that it will go hard with him in any case?" she cried, her bosom rising and falling. "i mean, madame--but there they are! good carlat! brave carlat! he has done well!" "carlat?" "ay, there they are! and you are mistress in your own land! at last you are mistress, and you have me to thank for it! see!" and heedless in his exultation whether badelon understood or not, he pointed to a place before them where the road wound between two low hills. over the green shoulder of one of these, a dozen bright points caught and reflected the last evening light; while as he spoke a man rose to his feet on the hillside above, and began to make signs to persons below. a pennon, too, showed an instant over the shoulder, fluttered, and was gone. badelon looked as they looked. the next instant he uttered a low oath, and dragged his horse across the front of the party. "pierre!" he cried to the man on his left, "ride for your life! to my lord, and tell him we are ambushed!" and as the trained soldier wheeled about and spurred away, the sacker of rome turned a dark scowling face on tignonville. "if this be your work," he hissed, "we shall thank you for it in hell! for it is where most of us will lie to-night! they are montsoreau's spears, and they have those with them are worse to deal with than themselves!" then in a different tone, and throwing off all disguise, "men to the front!" he shouted. "and you, madame, to the rear quickly, and the women with you! now, men, forward, and draw! steady! steady! they are coming!" there was an instant of confusion, disorder, panic; horses jostling one another, women screaming and clutching at men, men shaking them off and forcing their way to the van. fortunately the enemy did not fall on at once, as badelon expected, but after showing themselves in the mouth of the valley, at a distance of three hundred paces, hung for some reason irresolute. this gave badelon time to array his seven swords in front; but real resistance was out of the question, as he knew. and to none seemed less in question than to tignonville. when the truth, and what he had done, broke on the young man, he sat a moment motionless with horror. it was only when badelon had twice summoned him with opprobrious words that he awoke to the relief of action. even after that he hung an instant trying to meet the countess's eyes, despair in his own; but it was not to be. she had turned her head, and was looking back, as if thence only and not from him could help come. it was not to him she turned; and he saw it, and the justice of it. and silent, grim, more formidable even than old badelon, the veteran fighter, who knew all the tricks and shifts of the _melee_, he spurred to the flank of the line. "now, steady!" badelon cried again, seeing that the enemy were beginning to move. "steady! ha! thank god, my lord! my lord is coming! stand! stand!" the distant sound of galloping hoofs had reached his ear in the nick of time. he stood in his stirrups and looked back. yes, count hannibal was coming, riding a dozen paces in front of his men. the odds were still desperate--for he brought but six--the enemy were still three to one. but the thunder of his hoofs as he came up checked for a moment the enemy's onset; and before montsoreau's people got started again count hannibal had ridden up abreast of the women, and the countess, looking at him, knew that, desperate as was their strait, she had not looked behind in vain. the glow of battle, the stress of the moment, had displaced the cloud from his face; the joy of the born fighter lightened in his eye. his voice rang clear and loud above the press. "badelon! wait you and two with madame!" he cried. "follow at fifty paces' distance, and, when we have broken them, ride through! the others with me! now forward, men, and show your teeth! a tavannes! a tavannes! a tavannes! we carry it yet!" and he dashed forward, leading them on, leaving the women behind; and down the sward to meet him, thundering in double line, came montsoreau's men-at-arms, and with the men-at-arms, a dozen pale, fierce-eyed men in the church's black, yelling the church's curses. madame's heart grew sick as she heard, as she waited, as she judged him by the fast-failing light a horse's length before his men--with only tignonville beside him. she held her breath--would the shock never come? if badelon had not seized her rein and forced her forward, she would not have moved. and then, even as she moved, they met! with yells and wild cries and a mare's savage scream, the two bands crashed together in a huddle of fallen or rearing horses, of flickering weapons, of thrusting men, of grapples hand-to-hand. what happened, what was happening to any one, who it was fell, stabbed through and through by four, or who were those who still fought single combats, twisting round one another's horses, those on her right and on her left, she could not tell. for badelon dragged her on with whip and spur, and two horsemen--who obscured her view--galloped in front of her, and rode down bodily the only man who undertook to bar her passage. she had a glimpse of that man's face, as his horse, struck in the act of turning, fell sideways on him; and she knew it, in its agony of terror, though she had seen it but once. it was the face of the man whose eyes had sought hers from the steps of the church in angers; the lean man in black, who had turned soldier of the church--to his misfortune. through? yes, through, the way was clear before them! the fight with its screams and curses died away behind them. the horses swayed and all but sank under them. but badelon knew it no time for mercy; iron-shod hoofs rang on the road behind, and at any moment the pursuers might be on their heels. he flogged on until the cots of the hamlet appeared on either side of the way; on, until the road forked and the countess with strange readiness cried "the left!"--on, until the beach appeared below them at the foot of a sharp pitch, and beyond the beach the slow heaving grey of the ocean. the tide was high. the causeway ran through it, a mere thread lipped by the darkling waves, and at the sight a grunt of relief broke from badelon. for at the end of the causeway, black against the western sky, rose the gateway and towers of vrillac; and he saw that, as the countess had said, it was a place ten men could hold against ten hundred! they stumbled down the beach, reached the causeway and trotted along it; more slowly now, and looking back. the other women had followed by hook or by crook, some crying hysterically, yet clinging to their horses and even urging them; and in a medley, the causeway clear behind them and no one following, they reached the drawbridge, and passed under the arch of the gate beyond. there friendly hands, carlat's foremost, welcomed them and aided them to alight, and the countess saw, as in a dream, the familiar scene, all unfamiliar: the gate, where she had played, a child, aglow with lantern- light and arms. men, whose rugged faces she had known in infancy, stood at the drawbridge chains and at the winches. others blew matches and handled primers, while old servants crowded round her, and women looked at her, scared and weeping. she saw it all at a glance--the lights, the black shadows, the sudden glow of a match on the groining of the arch above. she saw it, and turning swiftly, looked back the way she had come; along the dusky causeway to the low, dark shore, which night was stealing quickly from their eyes. she clasped her hands. "where is badelon?" she cried. "where is he? where is he?" one of the men who had ridden before her answered that he had turned back. "turned back!" she repeated. and then, shading her eyes, "who is coming?" she asked, her voice insistent. "there is some one coming. who is it? who is it?" two were coming out of the gloom, travelling slowly and painfully along the causeway. one was la tribe, limping; the other a rider, slashed across the forehead, and sobbing curses. "no more!" she muttered. "are there no more?" the minister shook his head. the rider wiped the blood from his eyes, and turned up his face that he might see the better. but he seemed to be dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange _patois_. she stamped her foot in passion. "more lights!" she cried. "lights! how can they find their way? and let six men go down the _digue_, and meet them. will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?" but carlat, who had not been able to collect more than a dozen men, shook his head; and before she could repeat the order, sounds of battle, shrill, faint, like cries of hungry seagulls, pierced the darkness which shrouded the farther end of the causeway. the women shrank inward over the threshold, while carlat cried to the men at the chains to be ready, and to some who stood at loopholes above, to blow up their matches and let fly at his word. and then they all waited, the countess foremost, peering eagerly into the growing darkness. they could see nothing. a distant scuffle, an oath, a cry, silence! the same, a little nearer, a little louder, followed this time, not by silence, but by the slow tread of a limping horse. again a rush of feet, the clash of steel, a scream, a laugh, all weird and unreal, issuing from the night; then out of the darkness into the light, stepping slowly with hanging head, moved a horse, bearing on its back a man--or was it a man?--bending low in the saddle, his feet swinging loose. for an instant the horse and the man seemed to be alone, a ghostly pair; then at their heels came into view two figures, skirmishing this way and that; and now coming nearer, and now darting back into the gloom. one, a squat figure, stooping low, wielded a sword with two hands; the other covered him with a half-pike. and then beyond these--abruptly as it seemed--the night gave up to sight a swarm of dark figures pressing on them and after them, driving them before them. carlat had an inspiration. "fire!" he cried; and four arquebuses poured a score of slugs into the knot of pursuers. a man fell, another shrieked and stumbled, the rest gave back. only the horse came on spectrally, with hanging head and shining eyeballs, until a man ran out and seized its head, and dragged it, more by his strength than its own, over the drawbridge. after it badelon, with a gaping wound in his knee, and bigot, bleeding from a dozen hurts, walked over the bridge, and stood on either side of the saddle, smiling foolishly at the man on the horse. "leave me!" he muttered. "leave me!" he made a feeble movement with his hand, as if it held a weapon; then his head sank lower. it was count hannibal. his thigh was broken, and there was a lance-head in his arm. the countess looked at him, then beyond him, past him into the darkness. "are there no more?" she whispered tremulously. "no more? tignonville--my--" badelon shook his head. the countess covered her face and wept. chapter xxxiv. which will you, madame? it was in the grey dawning of the next day, at the hour before the sun rose, that word of m. de tignonville's fate came to them in the castle. the fog which had masked the van and coming of night hung thick on its retreating skirts, and only reluctantly and little by little gave up to sight and daylight a certain thing which night had left at the end of the causeway. the first man to see it was carlat, from the roof of the gateway; and he rubbed eyes weary with watching, and peered anew at it through the mist, fancying himself back in the place ste.-croix at angers, supposing for a wild moment the journey a dream, and the return a nightmare. but rub as he might, and stare as he might, the ugly outlines of the thing he had seen persisted--nay, grew sharper as the haze began to lift from the grey, slow-heaving floor of sea. he called another man and bade him look. "what is it?" he said. "d'you see, there? below the village?" "'tis a gibbet," the man answered, with a foolish laugh; they had watched all night. "god keep us from it." "a gibbet?" "ay!" "but what is it for? what is it doing there?" "it is there to hang those they have taken, very like," the man answered, stupidly practical. and then other men came up, and stared at it and growled in their beards. presently there were eight or ten on the roof of the gateway looking towards the land and discussing the thing; and by- and-by a man was descried approaching along the causeway with a white flag in his hand. at that carlat bade one fetch the minister. "he understands things," he muttered, "and i misdoubt this. and see," he cried after the messenger, "that no word of it come to mademoiselle!" instinctively in the maiden home he reverted to the maiden title. the messenger went, and came again bringing la tribe, whose head rose above the staircase at the moment the envoy below came to a halt before the gate. carlat signed to the minister to come forward; and la tribe, after sniffing the salt air, and glancing at the long, low, misty shore and the stiff ugly shape which stood at the end of the causeway, looked down and met the envoy's eyes. for a moment no one spoke. only the men who had remained on the gateway, and had watched the stranger's coming, breathed hard. at last, "i bear a message," the man announced loudly and clearly, "for the lady of vrillac. is she present?" "give your message!" la tribe replied. "it is for her ears only." "do you want to enter?" "no!" the man answered so hurriedly that more than one smiled. he had the bearing of a lay clerk of some precinct, a verger or sacristan; and after a fashion the dress of one also, for he was in dusty black and wore no sword, though he was girded with a belt. "no!" he repeated, "but if madame will come to the gate, and speak to me--" "madame has other fish to fry," carlat blurted out. "do you think that she has naught to do but listen to messages from a gang of bandits?" "if she does not listen she will repent it all her life!" the fellow answered hardily. "that is part of my message." there was a pause while la tribe considered the matter. in the end, "from whom do you come?" he asked. "from his excellency the lieutenant-governor of saumur," the envoy answered glibly, "and from my lord bishop of angers, him assisting by his vicar; and from others gathered lawfully, who will as lawfully depart if their terms are accepted. also from m. de tignonville, a gentleman, i am told, of these parts, now in their hands and adjudged to die at sunset this day if the terms i bring be not accepted." there was a long silence on the gate. the men looked down fixedly; not a feature of one of them moved, for no one was surprised. "wherefore is he to die?" la tribe asked at last. "for good cause shown." "wherefore?" "he is a huguenot." the minister nodded. "and the terms?" carlat muttered. "ay, the terms!" la tribe repeated, nodding afresh. "what are they?" "they are for madame's ear only," the messenger made answer. "then they will not reach it!" carlat broke forth in wrath. "so much for that! and for yourself, see you go quickly before we make a target of you!" "very well, i go," the envoy answered sullenly. "but--" "but what?" la tribe cried, gripping carlat's shoulder to quiet him. "but what? say what you have to say, man! speak out, and have done with it!' "i will say it to her and to no other." "then you will not say it!" carlat cried again. "for you will not see her. so you may go. and the black fever in your vitals." "ay, go!" la tribe added more quietly. the man turned away with a shrug of the shoulders, and moved off a dozen paces, watched by all on the gate with the same fixed attention. but presently he paused; he returned. "very well," he said, looking up with an ill grace. "i will do my office here, if i cannot come to her. but i hold also a letter from m. de tignonville, and that i can deliver to no other hands than hers!" he held it up as he spoke, a thin scrap of greyish paper, the fly-leaf of a missal perhaps. "see!" he continued, "and take notice! if she does not get this, and learns when it is too late that it was offered--" "the terms," carlat growled impatiently. "the terms! come to them!" "you will have them?" the man answered, nervously passing his tongue over his lips. "you will not let me see her, or speak to her privately?" "no." "then hear them. his excellency is informed that one hannibal de tavannes, guilty of the detestable crime of sacrilege and of other gross crimes, has taken refuge here. he requires that the said hannibal de tavannes be handed to him for punishment, and, this being done before sunset this evening, he will yield to you free and uninjured the said m. de tignonville, and will retire from the lands of vrillac. but if you refuse"--the man passed his eye along the line of attentive faces which fringed the battlement--"he will at sunset hang the said tignonville on the gallows raised for tavannes, and will harry the demesne of vrillac to its farthest border!" there was a long silence on the gate. some, their gaze still fixed on him, moved their lips as if they chewed. others looked aside, met their fellows' eyes in a pregnant glance, and slowly returned to him. but no one spoke. at his back the flush of dawn was flooding the east, and spreading and waxing brighter. the air was growing warm; the shore below, from grey, was turning green. in a minute or two the sun, whose glowing marge already peeped above the low hills of france, would top the horizon. the man, getting no answer, shifted his feet uneasily. "well," he cried, "what answer am i to take?" still no one moved. "i've done my part. will no one give her the letter?" he cried. and he held it up. "give me my answer, for i am going." "take the letter!" the words came from the rear of the group in a voice that startled all. they turned, as though some one had struck them, and saw the countess standing beside the hood which covered the stairs. they guessed that she had heard all or nearly all; but the glory of the sunrise, shining full on her at that moment, lent a false warmth to her face, and life to eyes woefully and tragically set. it was not easy to say whether she had heard or not. "take the letter," she repeated. carlat looked helplessly over the parapet. "go down!" he cast a glance at la tribe, but he got none in return, and he was preparing to do her bidding when a cry of dismay broke from those who still had their eyes bent downwards. the messenger, waving the letter in a last appeal, had held it too loosely; a light air, as treacherous, as unexpected, had snatched it from his hand, and bore it--even as the countess, drawn by the cry, sprang to the parapet--fifty paces from him. a moment it floated in the air, eddying, rising, falling; then, light as thistledown, it touched the water and began to sink. the messenger uttered frantic lamentations, and stamped the causeway in his rage. the countess only looked, and looked, until the rippling crest of a baby wave broke over the tiny venture, and with its freight of tidings it sank from sight. the man, silent now, stared a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. "well, 'tis fortunate it was his," he cried brutally, "and not his excellency's, or my back had suffered! and now," he added impatiently, "by your leave, what answer?" what answer? ah, god, what answer? the men who leant on the parapet, rude and coarse as they were, felt the tragedy of the question and the dilemma, guessed what they meant to her, and looked everywhere save at her. what answer? which of the two was to live? which die--shamefully? which? which? "tell him--to come back--an hour before sunset," she muttered. they told him and he went; and one by one the men began to go too, and stole from the roof, leaving her standing alone, her face to the shore, her hands resting on the parapet. the light breeze which blew off the land stirred loose ringlets of her hair, and flattened the thin robe against her sunlit figure. so had she stood a thousand times in old days, in her youth, in her maidenhood. so in her father's time had she stood to see her lover come riding along the sands to woo her! so had she stood to welcome him on the eve of that fatal journey to paris! thence had others watched her go with him. the men remembered--remembered all; and one by one they stole shamefacedly away, fearing lest she should speak or turn tragic eyes on them. true, in their pity for her was no doubt of the end, or thought of the victim who must suffer--of tavannes. they, of poitou, who had not been with him, knew nothing of him; they cared as little. he was a northern man, a stranger, a man of the sword, who had seized her--so they heard--by the sword. but they saw that the burden of choice was laid on her; there, in her sight and in theirs, rose the gibbet; and, clowns as they were, they discerned the tragedy of her _role_, play it as she might, and though her act gave life to her lover. when all had retired save three or four, she turned and saw these gathered at the head of the stairs in a ring about carlat, who was addressing them in a low eager voice. she could not catch a syllable, but a look hard and almost cruel flashed into her eyes as she gazed; and raising her voice she called the steward to her. "the bridge is up," she said, her tone hard, "but the gates? are they locked?" "yes, madame." "the wicket?" "no, not the wicket." and carlat looked another way. "then go, lock it, and bring the keys to me!" she replied. "or stay!" her voice grew harder, her eyes spiteful as a cat's. "stay, and be warned that you play me no tricks! do you hear? do you understand? or old as you are, and long as you have served us, i will have you thrown from this tower, with as little pity as isabeau flung her gallants to the fishes. i am still mistress here, never more mistress than this day. woe to you if you forget it." he blenched and cringed before her, muttering incoherently. "i know," she said, "i read you! and now the keys. go, bring them to me! and if by chance i find the wicket unlocked when i come down, pray, carlat, pray! for you will have need of prayers." he slunk away, the men with him; and she fell to pacing the roof feverishly. now and then she extended her arms, and low cries broke from her, as from a dumb creature in pain. wherever she looked, old memories rose up to torment her and redouble her misery. a thing she could have borne in the outer world, a thing which might have seemed tolerable in the reeking air of paris or in the gloomy streets of angers wore here its most appalling aspect. henceforth, whatever choice she made, this home, where even in those troublous times she had known naught but peace, must bear a damning stain! henceforth this day and this hour must come between her and happiness, must brand her brow, and fix her with a deed of which men and women would tell while she lived! oh, god--pray? who said, pray? "i!" and la tribe with tears in his eyes held out the keys to her. "i, madame," he continued solemnly, his voice broken with emotion. "for in man is no help. the strongest man, he who rode yesterday a master of men, a very man of war in his pride and his valour--see him, now, and--" "don't!" she cried, sharp pain in her voice. "don't!" and she stopped him with her hand, her face averted. after an interval, "you come from him?" she muttered faintly. "yes." "is he--hurt to death, think you?" she spoke low, and kept her face hidden from him. "alas, no!" he answered, speaking the thought in his heart. "the men who are with him seem confident of his recovery." "do they know?" "badelon has had experience." "no, no. do they know of this?" she cried. "of this!" and she pointed with a gesture of loathing to the black gibbet on the farther strand. he shook his head. "i think not," he muttered. and after a moment, "god help you!" he added fervently. "god help and guide you, madame!" she turned on him suddenly, fiercely. "is that all you can do?" she cried. "is that all the help you can give? you are a man. go down, lead them out; drive off these cowards who drain our life's blood, who trade on a woman's heart! on them! do something, anything, rather than lie in safety here--here!" the minister shook his head sadly. "alas, madame!" he said, "to sally were to waste life. they outnumber us three to one. if count hannibal could do no more than break through last night, with scarce a man unwounded--" "he had the women!" "and we have not him!" "he would not have left us!" she cried hysterically. "i believe it." "had they taken me, do you think he would have lain behind walls? or skulked in safety here, while--while--" her voice failed her. he shook his head despondently. "and that is all you can do?" she cried, and turned from him, and to him again, extending her arms, in bitter scorn. "all you will do? do you forget that twice he spared your life? that in paris once, and once in angers, he held his hand? that always, whether he stood or whether he fled, he held himself between us and harm? ay, always? and who will now raise a hand for him? who?" "madame!" "who? who? had he died in the field," she continued, her voice shaking with grief, her hands beating the parapet--for she had turned from him--"had he fallen where he rode last night, in the front, with his face to the foe, i had viewed him tearless, i had deemed him happy! i had prayed dry-eyed for him who--who spared me all these days and weeks! whom i robbed and he forgave me! whom i tempted, and he forbore me! ay, and who spared not once or twice him for whom he must now--he must now--" and unable to finish the sentence she beat her hands again and passionately on the stones. "heaven knows, madame," the minister cried vehemently, "heaven knows, i would advise you if i could." "why did he wear his corselet?" she wailed, as if she had not heard him. "was there no spear could reach his breast, that he must come to this? no foe so gentle he would spare him this? or why did _he_ not die with me in paris when we waited? in another minute death might have come and saved us this." with the tears running down his face he tried to comfort her. "man that is a shadow," he said, "passeth away--what matter how? a little while, a very little while, and we shall pass!" "with his curse upon us!" she cried. and, shuddering, she pressed her hands to her eyes to shut out the sight her fancy pictured. he left her for a while, hoping that in solitude she might regain control of herself. when he returned he found her seated, and outwardly more composed; her arms resting on the parapet-wall, her eyes bent steadily on the long stretch of hard sand which ran northward from the village. by that route her lover had many a time come to her; there she had ridden with him in the early days; and that way they had started for paris on such a morning and at such an hour as this, with sunshine about them, and larks singing hope above the sand-dunes, and with wavelets creaming to the horses' hoofs! of all which la tribe, a stranger, knew nothing. the rapt gaze, the unchanging attitude only confirmed his opinion of the course she would adopt. he was thankful to find her more composed; and in fear of such a scene as had already passed between them, he stole away again. he returned by-and-by, but with the greatest reluctance, and only because carlat's urgency would take no refusal. he came this time to crave the key of the wicket, explaining that--rather to satisfy his own conscience and the men than with any hope of success--he proposed to go halfway along the causeway, and thence by signs invite a conference. "it is just possible," he added, hesitating--he feared nothing so much as to raise hopes in her--"that by the offer of a money ransom, madame--" "go," she said, without turning her head. "offer what you please. but"--bitterly--"have a care of them! montsoreau is very like montereau! beware of the bridge!" he went and came again in half an hour. then, indeed, though she had spoken as if hope was dead in her, she was on her feet at the first sound of his tread on the stairs; her parted lips and her white face questioned him. he shook his head. "there is a priest," he said in broken tones, "with them, whom god will judge. it is his plan, and he is without mercy or pity." "you bring nothing from--him?" "they will not suffer him to write again." "you did not see him?" "no." chapter xxxv. against the wall. in a room beside the gateway, into which, as the nearest and most convenient place, count hannibal had been carried from his saddle, a man sat sideways in the narrow embrasure of a loophole, to which his eyes seemed glued. the room, which formed part of the oldest block of the chateau, and was ordinarily the quarters of the carlats, possessed two other windows, deep-set indeed, yet superior to that through which bigot--for he it was--peered so persistently. but the larger windows looked southwards, across the bay--at this moment the noon-high sun was pouring his radiance through them; while the object which held bigot's gaze and fixed him to his irksome seat, lay elsewhere. the loophole commanded the causeway leading shorewards; through it the norman could see who came and went, and even the cross-beam of the ugly object which rose where the causeway touched the land. on a flat truckle-bed behind the door lay count hannibal, his injured leg protected from the coverlid by a kind of cage. his eyes were bright with fever, and his untended beard and straggling hair heightened the wildness of his aspect. but he was in possession of his senses; and as his gaze passed from bigot at the window to the old free companion, who sat on a stool beside him, engaged in shaping a piece of wood into a splint, an expression almost soft crept into his harsh face. "old fool!" he said. and his voice, though changed, had not lost all its strength and harshness. "did the constable need a splint when you laid him under the tower at gaeta?" the old man lifted his eyes from his task, and glanced through the nearest window. "it is long from noon to night," he said quietly, "and far from cup to lip, my lord!" "it would be if i had two legs," tavannes answered, with a grimace, half- snarl, half-smile. "as it is--where is that dagger? it leaves me every minute." it had slipped from the coverlid to the ground. badelon took it up, and set it on the bed within reach of his master's hand. bigot swore fiercely. "it would be farther still," he growled, "if you would be guided by me, my lord. give me leave to bar the door, and 'twill be long before these fisher clowns force it. badelon and i--" "being in your full strength," count hannibal murmured cynically. "could hold it. we have strength enough for that," the norman boasted, though his livid face and his bandages gave the lie to his words. he could not move without pain; and for badelon, his knee was as big as two with plaisters of his own placing. count hannibal stared at the ceiling. "you could not strike two blows!" he said. "don't lie to me! and badelon cannot walk two yards! fine fighters!" he continued with bitterness, not all bitter. "fine bars 'twixt a man and death! no, it is time to turn the face to the wall. and, since go i must, it shall not be said count hannibal dared not go alone! besides--" bigot stopped him with an oath that was in part a cry of pain. "d---n her!" he exclaimed in fury, "'tis she is that _besides_! i know it. 'tis she has been our ruin from the day we saw her first, ay, to this day! 'tis she has bewitched you until your blood, my lord, has turned to water. or you would never, to save the hand that betrayed us, never to save a man--" "silence!" count hannibal cried, in a terrible voice. and rising on his elbow, he poised the dagger as if he would hurl it. "silence, or i will spit you like the vermin you are! silence, and listen! and you, old ban- dog, listen too, for i know you obstinate! it is not to save him. it is because i will die as i have lived, fearing nothing and asking nothing! it were easy to bar the door as you would have me, and die in the corner here like a wolf at bay, biting to the last. that were easy, old wolf- hound! pleasant and good sport!" "ay! that were a death!" the veteran cried, his eyes brightening. "so i would fain die!" "and i!" count hannibal returned, showing his teeth in a grim smile. "i too! yet i will not! i will not! because so to die were to die unwillingly, and give them triumph. be dragged to death? no, old dog, if die we must, we will go to death! we will die grandly, highly, as becomes tavannes! that when we are gone they may say, 'there died a man!'" "_she_ may say!" bigot muttered, scowling. count hannibal heard and glared at him, but presently thought better of it, and after a pause-- "ay, she too!" he said. "why not? as we have played the game--for her--so, though we lose, we will play it to the end; nor because we lose throw down the cards! besides, man, die in the corner, die biting, and he dies too!" "and why not?" bigot asked, rising in a fury. "why not? whose work is it we lie here, snared by these clowns of fisherfolk? who led us wrong and betrayed us? he die? would the devil had taken him a year ago! would he were within my reach now! i would kill him with my bare fingers! he die? and why not?" "why, because, fool, his death would not save me!" count hannibal answered coolly. "if it would, he would die! but it will not; and we must even do again as we have done. i have spared him--he's a white-livered hound!--both once and twice, and we must go to the end with it since no better can be! i have thought it out, and it must be. only see you, old dog, that i have the dagger hid in the splint where i can reach it. and then, when the exchange has been made, and my lady has her silk glove again--to put in her bosom!"--with a grimace and a sudden reddening of his harsh features--"if master priest come within reach of my arm, i'll send him before me, where i go." "ay, ay!" said badelon. "and if you fail of your stroke i will not fail of mine! i shall be there, and i will see to it he goes! i shall be there!" "you?" "ay, why not?" the old man answered quietly. "i may halt on this leg for aught i know, and come to starve on crutches like old claude boiteux who was at the taking of milan and now begs in the passage under the chatelet." "bah, man, you will get a new lord!" badelon nodded. "ay, a new lord with new ways!" he answered slowly and thoughtfully. "and i am tired. they are of another sort, lords now, than they were when i was young. it was a word and a blow then. now i am old, with most it is--'old hog, your distance! you scent my lady!' then they rode, and hunted, and tilted year in and year out, and summer or winter heard the lark sing. now they are curled, and paint themselves, and lie in silk and toy with ladies--who shamed to be seen at court or board when i was a boy--and love better to hear the mouse squeak than the lark sing." "still, if i give you my gold chain," count hannibal answered quietly, "'twill keep you from that." "give it to bigot," the old man answered. the splint he was fashioning had fallen on his knees, and his eyes were fixed on the distance of his youth. "for me, my lord, i am tired, and i go with you. i go with you. it is a good death to die biting before the strength be quite gone. have the dagger too, if you please, and i'll fit it within the splint right neatly. but i shall be there--" "and you'll strike home?" tavannes cried eagerly. he raised himself on his elbow, a gleam of joy in his gloomy eyes. "have no fear, my lord. see, does it tremble?" he held out his hand. "and when you are sped, i will try the spanish stroke--upwards with a turn ere you withdraw, that i learned from ruiz--on the shaven pate. i see them about me now!" the old man continued, his face flushing, his form dilating. "it will be odd if i cannot snatch a sword and hew down three to go with tavannes! and bigot, he will see my lord the marshal by- and-by; and as i do to the priest, the marshal will do to montsoreau. ho! ho! he will teach him the _coup de jarnac_, never fear!" and the old man's moustaches curled up ferociously. count hannibal's eyes sparkled with joy. "old dog!" he cried--and he held his hand to the veteran, who brushed it reverently with his lips--"we will go together then! who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" "touches tavannes!" badelon cried, the glow of battle lighting his bloodshot eyes. he rose to his feet. "touches tavannes! you mind at jarnac--" "ah! at jarnac!" "when we charged their horse, was my boot a foot from yours, my lord?" "not a foot!" "and at dreux," the old man continued with a proud, elated gesture, "when we rode down the german pikemen--they were grass before us, leaves on the wind, thistledown--was it not i who covered your bridle hand, and swerved not in the _melee_?" "it was! it was!" "and at st. quentin, when we fled before the spaniard--it was his day, you remember, and cost us dear--" "ay, i was young then," tavannes cried in turn, his eyes glistening. "st. quentin! it was the tenth of august. and you were new with me, and seized my rein--" "and we rode off together, my lord--of the last, of the last, as god sees me! and striking as we went, so that they left us for easier game." "it was so, good sword! i remember it as if it had been yesterday!" "and at cerisoles, the battle of the plain, in the old spanish wars, that was most like a joust of all the pitched fields i ever saw--at cerisoles, where i caught your horse? you mind me? it was in the shock when we broke guasto's line--" "at cerisoles?" count hannibal muttered slowly. "why, man, i--" "i caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? you remember, my lord? and at landriano, where leyva turned the tables on us again." count hannibal stared. "landriano?" he muttered bluntly. "'twas in ' , forty years ago and more! my father, indeed--" "and at rome--at rome, my lord? _mon dieu_! in the old days at rome! when the spanish company scaled the wall--ruiz was first, i next--was it not my foot you held? and was it not i who dragged you up, while the devils of swiss pressed us hard? ah, those were days, my lord! i was young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning--" "you rave!" tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. "rome? you rave, old man! why, i was not born in those days. my father even was a boy! it was in ' you sacked it--five-and-forty years ago!" the old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. the light died out of his eyes--as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink, even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down. "no, i remember," he muttered slowly. "it was prince philibert of chalons, my lord of orange." "dead these forty years!" "ay, dead these forty years! all dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "and i grow childish! 'tis time, high time, i followed them! it trembles now; but have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. all dead! ay, all dead!" he sank into a mournful silence; and tavannes, after gazing at him awhile in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. the day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to fall across his thoughts. they no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance as in the forenoon. in its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past before his eyes. the hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the sovereignty which nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman. she would not now be his. he had played highly, and he would lose highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of him highly. had she begun to think of him at all? in the chamber of the inn at angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and warmth, a shadow of turning to him. it had pleased him to think so, at any rate. it pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more confident--that in the time to come, when she was tignonville's, she would think of him secretly and kindly. she would remember him, and in her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him. it pleased him, that. it was almost all that was left to please him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. but as the day wore on, and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more grievous, the frame of his mind altered. a sombre rage was born and grew in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. to end thus, with nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! to die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen, he who had seen dreux and jarnac, had defied the king, and dared to turn the st. bartholomew to his ends! to die thus, and leave her to that puppet! strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. once, indeed, he raised himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he seemed about to speak. so that bigot came hurriedly to him. "my lord?" "water!" he said. "water, fool!" and, having drunk, he turned his face to the wall, lest he should name her or ask for her. for the desire to see her before he died, to look into her eyes, to touch her hand once, only once, assailed his mind and all but whelmed his will. she had been with him, he knew it, in the night; she had left him only at daybreak. but then, in his state of collapse, he had been hardly conscious of her presence. now to ask for her or to see her would stamp him coward, say what he might to her. the proverb, that the king's face gives grace, applied to her; and an overture on his side could mean but one thing, that he sought her grace. and that he would not do though the cold waters of death covered him more and more, and the coming of the end--in that quiet chamber, while the september sun sank to the appointed place--awoke wild longings and a wild rebellion in his breast. his thoughts were very bitter, as he lay, his loneliness of the uttermost. he turned his face to the wall. in that posture he slept after a time, watched over by bigot with looks of rage and pity. and on the room fell a long silence. the sun had lacked three hours of setting when he fell asleep. when he re-opened his eyes, and, after lying for a few minutes between sleep and waking, became conscious of his position, of the day, of the things which had happened, and his helplessness--an awakening which wrung from him an involuntary groan--the light in the room was still strong, and even bright. he fancied for a moment that he had merely dozed off and awaked again; and he continued to lie with his face to the wall, courting a return of slumber. but sleep did not come, and little by little, as he lay listening and thinking and growing more restless, he got the fancy that he was alone. the light fell brightly on the wall to which his face was turned; how could that be if bigot's broad shoulders still blocked the loophole? presently, to assure himself, he called the man by name. he got no answer. "badelon!" he muttered. "badelon!" had he gone, too, the old and faithful? it seemed so, for again no answer came. he had been accustomed all his life to instant service; to see the act follow the word ere the word ceased to sound. and nothing which had gone before, nothing which he had suffered since his defeat at angers, had brought him to feel his impotence and his position--and that the end of his power was indeed come--as sharply as this. the blood rushed to his head; almost the tears to eyes which had not shed them since boyhood, and would not shed them now, weak as he was! he rose on his elbow and looked with a full heart; it was as he had fancied. badelon's stool was empty; the embrasure--that was empty too. through its narrow outlet he had a tiny view of the shore and the low rocky hill, of which the summit shone warm in the last rays of the setting sun. the setting sun! ay, for the lower part of the hill was growing cold; the shore at its foot was grey. then he had slept long, and the time was come. he drew a deep breath and listened. but on all within and without lay silence, a silence marked, rather than broken, by the dull fall of a wave on the causeway. the day had been calm, but with the sunset a light breeze was rising. he set his teeth hard, and continued to listen. an hour before sunset was the time they had named for the exchange. what did it mean? in five minutes the sun would be below the horizon; already the zone of warmth on the hillside was moving and retreating upwards. and bigot and old badelon? why had they left him while he slept? an hour before sunset! why, the room was growing grey, grey and dark in the corners, and--what was that? he started, so violently that he jarred his leg, and the pain wrung a groan from him. at the foot of the bed, overlooked until then, a woman lay prone on the floor, her face resting on her outstretched arms. she lay without motion, her head and her clasped hands towards the loophole, her thick, clubbed hair hiding her neck. a woman! count hannibal stared, and, fancying he dreamed, closed his eyes, then looked again. it was no phantasm. it was the countess; it was his wife! he drew a deep breath, but he did not speak, though the colour rose slowly to his cheek. and slowly his eyes devoured her from head to foot, from the hands lying white in the light below the window to the shod feet; unchecked he took his fill of that which he had so much desired--the seeing her! a woman prone, with all of her hidden but her hands: a hundred acquainted with her would not have known her. but he knew her, and would have known her from a hundred, nay from a thousand, by her hands alone. what was she doing here, and in this guise? he pondered; then he looked from her for an instant, and saw that while he had gazed at her the sun had set, the light had passed from the top of the hill; the world without and the room within were growing cold. was that the cause she no longer lay quiet? he saw a shudder run through her, and a second; then it seemed to him--or was he going mad?--that she moaned, and prayed in half- heard words, and, wrestling with herself, beat her forehead on her arms, and then was still again, as still as death. by the time the paroxysm had passed, the last flush of sunset had faded from the sky, and the hills were growing dark. chapter xxxvi. his kingdom. count hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once. warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. a moment later she met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. instead, she stood quiet and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second shook her frame. at length "it is over!" she whispered. "patience, monsieur; have no fear, i will be brave. but i must give a little to him." "to him!" count hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily, pale. she smiled with an odd passionateness. "who was my lover!" she cried, her voice a-thrill. "who will ever be my lover, though i have denied him, though i have left him to die! it was just. he who has so tried me knows it was just! he whom i have sacrificed--he knows it too, now! but it is hard to be--just," with a quavering smile. "you who take all may give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have--patience!" count hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. a moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. then he sank back on the bed. "water!" he muttered. "water!" she fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips. he drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. he lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke. "you have done that?" he whispered; "you have done that?" "yes," she answered, shuddering. "god forgive me! i have done that! i had to do that, or--" "and is it too late--to undo it?" "it is too late." a sob choked her voice. tears--tears incredible, unnatural--welled from under count hannibal's closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of his beard. "i would have gone," he muttered. "if you had spoken, i would have spared you this." "i know," she answered unsteadily; "the men told me." "and yet--" "it was just. and you are my husband," she replied. "more, i am the captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, i spared you in your weakness." "mon dieu! mon dieu, madame!" he cried, "at what a cost!" and that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself into her eyeballs, hung before her. for she knew that it was the cost to _her_ he was counting. she knew that for himself he had ever held life cheap, that he could have seen tignonville suffer without a qualm. and the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing--even on a rival's life--because its was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as few things could have moved her at that moment. she saw it of a piece with all that had gone before, with all that had passed between them, since that fatal sunday in paris. but she made no sign. more than she had said she would not say; words of love, even of reconciliation, had no place on her lips while he whom she had sacrificed awaited his burial. and meantime the man beside her lay and found it incredible. "it was just," she had said. and he knew it; tignonville's folly--that and that only had led them into the snare and caused his own capture. but what had justice to do with the things of this world? in his experience, the strong hand--that was justice, in france; and possession--that was law. by the strong hand he had taken her, and by the strong hand she might have freed herself. and she had not. there was the incredible thing. she had chosen instead to do justice! it passed belief. opening his eyes on a silence which had lasted some minutes, a silence rendered more solemn by the lapping water without, tavannes saw her kneeling in the dusk of the chamber, her head bowed over his couch, her face hidden in her hands. he knew that she prayed, and feebly he deemed the whole a dream. no scene akin to it had had place in his life; and, weakened and in pain, he prayed that the vision might last for ever, that he might never awake. but by-and-by, wrestling with the dread thought of what she had done, and the horror which would return upon her by fits and spasms, she flung out a hand, and it fell on him. he started, and the movement, jarring the broken limb, wrung from him a cry of pain. she looked up and was going to speak, when a scuffling of feet under the gateway arch, and a confused sound of several voices raised at once, arrested the words on her lips. she rose to her feet and listened. dimly he could see her face through the dusk. her eyes were on the door, and she breathed quickly. a moment or two passed in this way, and then from the hurly-burly in the gateway the footsteps of two men--one limped--detached themselves and came nearer and nearer. they stopped without. a gleam of light shone under the door, and some one knocked. she went to the door, and, withdrawing the bar, stepped quickly back to the bedside, where for an instant the light borne by those who entered blinded her. then, above the lanthorn, the faces of la tribe and bigot broke upon her, and their shining eyes told her that they bore good news. it was well, for the men seemed tongue-tied. the minister's fluency was gone; he was very pale, and it was bigot who in the end spoke for both. he stepped forward, and, kneeling, kissed her cold hand. "my lady," he said, "you have gained all, and lost nothing. blessed be god!" "blessed be god!" the minister wept. and from the passage without came the sound of laughter and weeping and many voices, with a flutter of lights and flying skirts, and women's feet. she stared at him wildly, doubtfully, her hand at her throat. "what?" she said, "he is not dead--m. de tignonville?" "no, he is alive," la tribe answered, "he is alive." and he lifted up his hands as if he gave thanks. "alive?" she cried. "alive! oh, heaven is merciful. you are sure? you are sure?" "sure, madame, sure. he was not in their hands. he was dismounted in the first shock, it seems, and, coming to himself after a time, crept away and reached st. gilles, and came hither in a boat. but the enemy learned that he had not entered with us, and of this the priest wove his snare. blessed be god, who put it into your heart to escape it!" the countess stood motionless, and with closed eyes pressed her hands to her temples. once she swayed as if she would fall her length, and bigot sprang forward to support and save her. but she opened her eyes at that, sighed very deeply, and seemed to recover herself. "you are sure?" she said faintly. "it is no trick?" "no, madame, it is no trick," la tribe answered. "m. de tignonville is alive, and here." "here!" she started at the word. the colour fluttered in her cheek. "but the keys," she murmured. and she passed her hand across her brow. "i thought--that i had them." "he has not entered," the minister answered, "for that reason. he is waiting at the postern, where he landed. he came, hoping to be of use to you." she paused a moment, and when she spoke again her aspect had undergone a subtle change. her head was high, a flush had risen to her cheeks, her eyes were bright. "then," she said, addressing la tribe, "do you, monsieur, go to him, and pray him in my name to retire to st. gilles, if he can do so without peril. he has no place here--now; and if he can go safely to his home it will be well that he do so. add, if you please, that madame de tavannes thanks him for his offer of aid, but in her husband's house she needs no other protection." bigot's eyes sparkled with joy. the minister hesitated. "no more, madame?" he faltered. he was tender- hearted, and tignonville was of his people. "no more," she said gravely, bowing her head. "it is not m. de tignonville i have to thank, but heaven's mercy, that i do not stand here at this moment unhappy as i entered--a woman accursed, to be pointed at while i live. and the dead"--she pointed solemnly through the dark casement to the shore--"the dead lie there." la tribe went. she stood a moment in thought, and then took the keys from the rough stone window-ledge on which she had laid them when she entered. as the cold iron touched her fingers she shuddered. the contact awoke again the horror and misery in which she had groped, a lost thing, when she last felt that chill. "take them," she said; and she gave them to bigot. "until my lord can leave his couch they will remain in your charge, and you will answer for all to him. go, now, take the light; and in half an hour send madame carlat to me." a wave broke heavily on the causeway and ran down seething to the sea; and another and another, filling the room with rhythmical thunders. but the voice of the sea was no longer the same in the darkness, where the countess knelt in silence beside the bed--knelt, her head bowed on her clasped hands, as she had knelt before, but with a mind how different, with what different thoughts! count hannibal could see her head but dimly, for the light shed upwards by the spume of the sea fell only on the rafters. but he knew she was there, and he would fain, for his heart was full, have laid his hand on her hair. and yet he would not. he would not, out of pride. instead he bit on his harsh beard, and lay looking upward to the rafters, waiting what would come. he who had held her at his will now lay at hers, and waited. he who had spared her life at a price now took his own a gift at her hands, and bore it. "_afterwards, madame de tavannes_--" his mind went back by some chance to those words--the words he had neither meant nor fulfilled. it passed from them to the marriage and the blow; to the scene in the meadow beside the river; to the last ride between la fleche and angers--the ride during which he had played with her fears and hugged himself on the figure he would make on the morrow. the figure? alas! of all his plans for dazzling her had come--_this_! angers had defeated him, a priest had worsted him. in place of releasing tignonville after the fashion of bayard and the paladins, and in the teeth of snarling thousands, he had come near to releasing him after another fashion and at his own expense. instead of dazzling her by his mastery and winning her by his magnanimity, he lay here, owing her his life, and so weak, so broken, that the tears of childhood welled up in his eyes. out of the darkness a hand, cool and firm, slid into his, clasped it tightly, drew it to warm lips, carried it to a woman's bosom. "my lord," she murmured, "i was the captive of your sword, and you spared me. him i loved you took and spared him too--not once or twice. angers, also, and my people you would have saved for my sake. and you thought i could do this! oh! shame, shame!" but her hand held his always. "you loved him," he muttered. "yes, i loved him," she answered slowly and thoughtfully. "i loved him." and she fell silent a minute. then, "and i feared you," she added, her voice low. "oh, how i feared you--and hated you!" "and now?" "i do not fear him," she answered, smiling in the darkness. "nor hate him. and for you, my lord, i am your wife and must do your bidding, whether i will or no. i have no choice." he was silent. "is that not so?" she asked. he tried weakly to withdraw his hand. but she clung to it. "i must bear your blows or your kisses. i must be as you will and do as you will, and go happy or sad, lonely or with you, as you will! as you will, my lord! for i am your chattel, your property, your own. have you not told me so?" "but your heart," he cried fiercely, "is his! your heart, which you told me in the meadow could never be mine!" "i lied," she murmured, laughing tearfully, and her hands hovered over him. "it has come back! and it is on my lips." and she leant over and kissed him. and count hannibal knew that he had entered into his kingdom, the sovereignty of a woman's heart. * * * * * an hour later there was a stir in the village on the mainland. lanthorns began to flit to and fro. sulkily men were saddling and preparing for the road. it was far to challans, farther to lege--more than one day, and many a weary league to ponts de ce and the loire. the men who had ridden gaily southwards on the scent of spoil and revenge turned their backs on the castle with many a sullen oath and word. they burned a hovel or two, and stripped such as they spared, after the fashion of the day; and it had gone ill with the peasant woman who fell into their hands. fortunately, under cover of the previous night every soul had escaped from the village, some to sea, and the rest to take shelter among the sand-dunes; and as the troopers rode up the path from the beach, and through the green valley, where their horses shied from the bodies of the men they had slain, there was not an eye to see them go. or to mark the man who rode last, the man of the white face--scarred on the temple--and the burning eyes, who paused on the brow of the hill, and, before he passed beyond, cursed with quivering lips the foe who had escaped him. the words were lost, as soon as spoken, in the murmur of the sea on the causeway; the sea, fit emblem of the eternal, which rolled its tide regardless of blessing or cursing, good or ill will, nor spared one jot of ebb or flow because a puny creature had spoken to the night. history of the rise of the huguenots. by henry m. baird, professor in the university of the city of new york. _in two volumes._ vol. ii. _from the edict of january ( ), to the death of charles the ninth ( )._ london: hodder and stoughton, , paternoster row. mdccclxxx. hazell, watson, and viney, printers, london and aylesbury. contents of volume second. book ii. chapter xiii. - . page the first civil war unsatisfactory character of the edict of january huguenot leaders urge its observance seditious sermons opposition of parliaments new conference at st. germain defection of antoine of navarre, and its effects he is cheated with vain hopes jeanne d'albret constant immense crowds at huguenot preaching the canons of sainte-croix the guises meet christopher of würtemberg at saverne their lying assurances the guises deceive nobody throkmorton's account of the french court the massacre of vassy the huguenots call for the punishment of the murderers the pretence of want of premeditation louis of condé appeals to the king beza's remonstrance an anvil that had worn out many hammers guise enters paris the queen mother takes charles to melun her letters imploring condé's aid revolutionary measures of the triumvirs condé retires to meaux la noue justifies his prudence the huguenot summons admiral coligny's reluctance to take up arms guise and navarre seize the king and bring him to paris montmorency's exploit at the "temples" he earns the title of "le capitaine brûlebanc" condé throws himself into orleans his "justification" stringent articles of association the huguenot nobles and cities can iconoclasm be repressed? an uncontrollable impulse it bursts out at caen the "idol" of the church of sainte-croix massacre of huguenots at sens disorders and war in provence and dauphiny william of orange and his principality massacre by papal troops from avignon merciless revenge of the baron des adrets his grim pleasantry at mornas atrocities of blaise de montluc the massacre at toulouse the centenary celebrated foreign alliances sought queen elizabeth's aid invoked cecil's urgency and schemes divided sympathies of the english diplomatic manoeuvres condé's reply to the pretended "petition" third national synod of the protestants interview of catharine and condé at toury the "loan" of beaugency futile negotiations spasmodic efforts in warfare huguenot discipline severities of the parisian parliament military successes of the "triumvirs" at poitiers and bourges help from queen elizabeth siege of rouen ferocity of the norman parliament death of antoine, king of navarre the english in havre condé takes the field and appears before paris dilatory diplomacy the battle of dreux montmorency and condé prisoners riotous conduct of the parisians orleans invested coligny again in normandy huguenot reverses assassination of duke françois de guise execution of poltrot beza and coligny accused they vindicate themselves estimates of guise's character renée de france at montargis deliberations for peace the "noblesse" in favor of the terms--the ministers against them the edict of pacification remonstrance of the english ambassador coligny's disappointment results of the first civil war it prevents france from becoming huguenot * * * * * huguenot ballads and songs chapter xiv. - . the peace of amboise and the bayonne conference charles demands havre of the english the siege how the peace was received vexatious delays in normandy the norman parliament protests and threatens a rude rebuff commissioners to enforce the edict a profligate court alienated from protestantism profanity a test of catholicity admiral coligny accused of guise's murder his defence espoused by the montmorencies petition of the guises the king adjourns the decision embarrassment of catharine charles's majority proclaimed the king and the refractory parisian parliament the pope's bull against princely heretics proceedings against cardinal châtillon the queen of navarre cited to rome spirited reply of the french council catharine seeks to seduce the huguenot leaders weakness of condé recent growth of protestantism milhau-en-rouergue montpellier--béarn jeanne d'albret's reformation attempt to kidnap her close of the council of trent cardinal lorraine's attempt to secure the acceptance of its decrees his altercation with l'hospital general plan for suppressing heresy "progress" of charles and his court calumnies against the huguenots their numbers catharine's new zeal--citadels in protestant towns interpretative declarations infringing upon the edict assaults upon unoffending huguenots--no redress condé appeals to the king conciliatory answers to huguenot inhabitants of bordeaux and nantes protestants excluded from judicial posts marshal montmorency checks the parisian mob his encounter with cardinal lorraine the conference at bayonne what were its secret objects? no plan of massacre adopted history of the interview catharine and alva catharine rejects all plans of violence cardinal granvelle's testimony festivities and pageantry henry of béarn an actor roman catholic confraternities hints of the future plot of the "league" the siege of malta and french civilities to the sultan constable montmorency defends cardinal châtillon the court at moulins feigned reconciliation of the guises and coligny l'hospital's measure for the relief of the protestants another altercation between cardinal lorraine and the chancellor progress of the reformation at cateau-cambrésis insults and violence huguenot pleasantries alarm of the protestants attempts to murder coligny and porcien alva sent to the netherlands the swiss levy condé and coligny remonstrate discredited assurances of catharine "the very name of the edict employed to destroy the edict itself" * * * * * the huguenot attempts at colonization in florida the first and second expeditions ( , ) third expedition ( ) massacre by menendez indignation of the french court sincere remonstrances sanguinary revenge of de gourgues chapter xv. - . the second civil war and the short peace coligny's pacific counsels rumors of plots to destroy the huguenots d'andelot's warlike counsels prevail cardinal lorraine to be seized and king charles liberated the secret slowly leaks out flight of the court to paris cardinal lorraine invites alva to france condé at saint denis the huguenot movement alienates the king negotiations opened the huguenots abate their demands montmorency the mouthpiece of intolerance insincerity of alva's offer of aid the battle of st. denis (nov. , ) constable montmorency mortally wounded his character the protestant princes of germany determine to send aid the huguenots go to meet it treacherous diplomacy catharine implores alva's assistance condé and john casimir meet in lorraine generosity of the huguenot troops the march toward orleans the "michelade" at nismes huguenot successes in the south and west la rochelle secured for condé spain and rome oppose the negotiations for peace santa croce demands cardinal châtillon's surrender a rebuff from marshal montmorency march of the "viscounts" to meet condé siege of chartres chancellor l'hospital's memorial edict of pacification (longjumeau, march , ) condé for and coligny against the peace condé's infatuation was the court sincere? catharine short-sighted imprudence of the huguenots judicial murder of rapin at toulouse seditious preachers and mobs treatment of the returning huguenots expedition and fate of de cocqueville garrisons and interpretative ordinances oppression of royal governors "the christian and royal league" insubordination to royal authority admirable organization of the huguenots murder runs riot throughout france la rochelle, etc., refuse royal garrisons coligny retires for safety to tanlay, condé to noyers d'andelot's remonstrance catharine sides with l'hospital's enemies remonstrance of the three marshals catharine's intrigues the court seeks to ruin condé and coligny téligny sent to remonstrate the oath exacted of the huguenots the plot disclosed intercepted letter from spain isabella of spain her husband's mouthpiece charles begs his mother to avoid war her animosity against l'hospital another quarrel between lorraine and the chancellor fall of chancellor l'hospital the plot marshal tavannes its author condé's last appeal to the king flight of the prince and admiral its wonderful success the third civil war opens * * * * * the city of la rochelle and its privileges chapter xvi. - . the third civil war relative advantages of huguenots and roman catholics enthusiasm of huguenot youth enlistment of agrippa d'aubigné the court proscribes the reformed religion impolicy of this course a "crusade" published at toulouse fanaticism of the roman catholic preachers huguenot places of refuge jeanne d'albret and d'andelot reach la rochelle successes in poitou, angoumois, etc. powerful huguenot army in the south effects a junction with condé's forces huguenot reprisals and negotiations william of orange tries to aid the huguenots his declaration in their behalf aid sought from england generously accorded by clergy and laity misgivings of queen elizabeth her double dealing and effrontery fruitless sieges and plots growing superiority of anjou's forces the armies meet on the charente battle of jarnac (march , ) murder of louis, prince of condé the prince of navarre remonstrates against the perfidy shown exaggerated bulletins the pope's sanguinary injunctions sanguinary action of the parliament of bordeaux queen elizabeth colder the queen of navarre's spirit the huguenots recover strength death of d'andelot new responsibility resting on coligny the duke of deux ponts comes with german auxiliaries they overcome all obstacles and join coligny death of deux ponts huguenot success at la roche abeille furlough of anjou's troops huguenot petition to the king coligny's plans overruled disastrous siege of poitiers cruelties to huguenots in the prisons of orleans montargis a safe refuge flight of the refugees to sancerre the "croix de gastines" ferocity of parliament against coligny and others a price set on coligny's head the huguenots weaker battle of moncontour (oct. , ) coligny wounded heavy losses of the huguenots the roman catholics exultant mouy murdered by maurevel the assassin rewarded with the collar of the order fatal error committed by the court siege of st. jean d'angely huguenot successes at vézelay and nismes coligny encouraged withdrawal of the troops of dauphiny and provence the admiral's bold plan he sweeps through guyenne "vengeance de rapin" coligny pushes on to the rhône his singular success and its causes he turns toward paris his illness interrupts negotiations engagement of arnay-le-duc coligny approaches paris progress of negotiations the english rebellion affects the terms offered better conditions proposed charles and his mother for peace the war fruitless for its authors anxiety of cardinal châtillon the royal edict of st. germain (aug. , ) dissatisfaction of the clergy "the limping and unsettled peace" chapter xvii. - . the peace of st. germain sincerity of the peace the designs of catharine de' medici charles the ninth in earnest tears out the parliament record against cardinal châtillon his assurances to walsingham gracious answer to german electors infringement on edict at orange protestants of rouen attacked the "croix de gastines" pulled down projected marriage of anjou to queen elizabeth of england machinations to dissuade anjou charles indignant at interference alençon to be substituted as suitor anjou's new ardor elizabeth interposes obstacles papal and spanish efforts vexation of catharine at anjou's fresh scruples louis of nassau confers with the king admiral coligny consulted invited to court his honorable reception disgust of the guises and alva charles gratified proposed marriage of henry of navarre to the king's sister the anjou match falls through the praise of alençon pius the fifth alarmed cardinal of alessandria sent to paris the king's assurances jeanne d'albret becomes more favorable to her son's marriage her solicitude she is treated with tantalizing insincerity she is shocked at the morals of the court her sudden death coligny and the boy-king the dispensation delayed the king's earnestness mons and valenciennes captured catharine's indecision queen elizabeth inspires no confidence rout of genlis determines catharine to take the spanish side loss of the golden opportunity the admiral does not lose courage charles and catharine at montpipeau rumors of elizabeth's desertion of her allies charles thoroughly cast down coligny partially succeeds in reassuring him elizabeth toys with dishonorable proposals from the netherlands fatal results the mémoires inédits de michel de la huguerye his view of a long premeditation studied misrepresentation of jeanne d'albret chapter xviii. . the massacre of st. bartholomew's day the huguenot nobles reach paris the betrothal of henry of navarre to margaret of valois entertainment in the louvre coligny's letter to his wife festivities and mock combats huguenot grievances to be redressed catharine and anjou jealous of coligny's influence over the king the duchess of nemours and guise was the massacre long premeditated? salviati's testimony charles' cordiality to coligny coligny wounded agitation of the king coligny courageous visited by the king and his mother catharine attempts to break up the conference charles writes letters expressing his displeasure the vidame de chartres advises the huguenots to leave paris catharine and anjou come to a final decision they ply charles with arguments the king consents reluctantly few victims first selected religious hatred precautionary measures orders issued to the prévôt des marchands the first shot and the bell of st. germain l'auxerrois murder of admiral coligny his character and work murder of huguenot nobles in the louvre navarre and condé spared the massacre becomes general la rochefoucauld and téligny fall self-defence of a few nobles victims of personal hatred adventures of young la force pitiless butchery shamelessness of the court ladies anjou, montpensier, and others encourage the assassins wonderful escapes death of the philosopher ramus president pierre de la place regnier and vezins escape of chartres and montgomery charles himself fires on them the massacre continues pillage of the rich orders issued to lay down arms little heeded miracle of the "cimetière des innocents" the king's first letter to mandelot guise throws the responsibility on the king charles accepts it on tuesday morning the "lit de justice" servile reply of parliament christopher de thou ineffectual effort to inculpate coligny his memory declared infamous petty indignities a jubilee procession charles declares he will maintain his edict of pacification forced conversion of navarre and condé chapter xix. . the massacre in the provinces, and the reception of the tidings abroad the massacre in the provinces the verbal orders instructions to montsoreau at saumur two kinds of letters massacre at meaux at troyes the great bloodshed at orleans at bourges at angers butchery at lyons responsibility of mandelot rouen toulouse bordeaux why the massacre was not universal policy of the guises spurious accounts of clemency bishop le hennuyer, of lisieux kind offices of matignon at caen and alençon of longueville and gordes of tende in provence viscount d'orthez at bayonne the municipality of nantes uncertain number of victims news of the massacre received at rome public thanksgivings vasari's paintings in the vatican french boasts count for nothing catharine writes to philip, her son-in-law the delight of philip of spain charles instigates the murder of french prisoners alva jubilant, but wary england's horror perplexity of la mothe fénélon his cold reception by queen elizabeth the ambassador disheartened sir thomas smith's letter catharine's unsuccessful representations briquemault and cavaignes hung for alleged conspiracy the news in scotland in germany in poland sympathy of the genevese their generosity and danger the impression at baden medals and vindications disastrous personal effect on king charles how far was the roman church responsible? gregory probably not aware of the intended massacre paul the fifth instigates the french court he counsels exterminating the huguenots * * * * * a new account of the massacre at orleans chapter xx. - . the sequel of the massacre, to the death of charles the ninth widespread terror la rochelle and other cities in huguenot hands nismes and montauban la rochelle the centre of interest a spurious letter of catharine designs on the city mission of la noue he is badly received the royal proposals rejected marshal biron appears before la rochelle beginning of the fourth religious war description of la rochelle resoluteness of the defenders their military strength henry, duke of anjou, appointed to conduct the siege the besieged pray and fight bravery of the women la noue retires--failure of diplomacy english aid miscarries huguenot successes in the south sommières and villeneuve beginning of the siege of sancerre the incipient famine losses of the army before la rochelle roman catholic processions election of henry of anjou to the crown of poland edict of pacification (boulogne, july, ) meagre results of the war the siege and famine of sancerre continue the city capitulates reception of the polish ambassadors discontent of the south with the terms of peace assembly of milhau and montauban military organization of the huguenots petition to the king "les fronts d'airain" catharine's bitter reply the huguenots firm decline of charles's health project of an english match renewed intrigues with the german princes death of louis of nassau anjou's reception at heidelberg frankness of the elector palatine last days of chancellor l'hospital the party of the "politiques" hotman's "franco-gallia" treacherous attempt on la rochelle huguenots reassemble at milhau they complete their organization the duke of alençon glandage plunders the city of orange montbrun's exploits in dauphiny la rochelle resumes arms (beginning of the fifth religious war) diplomacy tried in vain the "politiques" make an unsuccessful rising flight of the court from st. germain alençon and navarre examined execution of la mole and coconnas condé retires to germany reasons for the success of the huguenots montgomery lands in normandy he is forced to surrender delight of catharine execution of montgomery last days of charles the ninth distress of his young queen death and funeral rites of charles had persecution, war and treachery succeeded? book second. _from the edict of january ( ) to the death of charles the ninth ( )._ chapter xiii. the first civil war. [sidenote: inconsistencies of the edict of january.] the edict of january was on its very face a compromise, and as such rested on no firm foundation. inconsistent with itself, it fully satisfied neither huguenot nor roman catholic. the latter objected to the toleration which the edict extended; the former demanded the unrestricted freedom of worship which it denied. if the existence of two diverse religions was compatible with the welfare of the state, why ignominiously thrust the places of protestant worship from the cities into the suburbs? if the two were irreconcilable, why suffer the huguenots to assemble outside the walls? [sidenote: huguenot leaders urge the observance of the edict.] yet there was this difference between the attitude assumed by the rival parties with reference to the edict: while the roman catholic leaders made no secret of their intention to insist upon its repeal,[ ] the huguenot leaders were urgent in their advice to the churches to conform strictly to its provisions, restraining the indiscreet zeal of their more impetuous members and exhibiting due gratitude to heaven for the amelioration of their lot. to the _people_ it was, indeed, a bitter disappointment to be compelled to give up the church edifices, and to resort for public service to the outskirts of the town. less keen was the regret experienced by others not less sincerely interested in the progress of the purer doctrines, who, on account of their appreciation of the violence of the opposition to be encountered, had not been so sanguine in their expectations. and so beza and other prominent men of the protestant church, after obtaining from chancellor l'hospital some further explanations on doubtful points, addressed to their brethren in all parts of france a letter full of wholesome advice. "god," said they, "has deigned to employ new means of protecting his church in this kingdom, by placing those who profess the gospel under the safeguard of the king, our natural prince, and of the magistrates and governors established by him. this should move us so much the more to praise the infinite goodness of our heavenly father, who has at length answered the cry of his children, and lovingly to obey the king, in order that he may be induced to aid our just cause." the provisional edict, they added, was not all that might yet be hoped for. as respected the surrender of the churches, those huguenots who had seized them on their own individual authority ought rather to acknowledge their former indiscretion than deplore the necessity for restitution. in fine, annoyance at the loss of a few privileges ought to be forgotten in gratitude for the gain of many signal advantages.[ ] the letter produced a deep impression, and its salutary advice was followed scrupulously, if not cheerfully, even in southern france, where the huguenots, in some places, outnumbered the adherents of the romish church. [sidenote: seditious sermons.] the papal party was less ready to acquiesce. the edict of january was, according to its representative writers, the most pernicious law for the kingdom that could have been devised. by forbidding the magistrates from interfering with the protestant conventicles held in the suburbs, by permitting the royal officers to attend, by conferring upon the ministers full liberty of officiating, a formal approval was, for the first time, given to the new sect under the authority of the royal seal.[ ] the pulpits resounded with denunciations of the government. the king of navarre and the queen mother were assailed under scriptural names, as favoring the false prophets of baal. scarcely a sermon was preached in which they did not figure as ahab and jezebel.[ ] a single specimen of the spirited discourses in vogue will suffice. a franciscan monk--one barrier--the same from whose last easter sermon an extract has already been given[ ]--after reading the royal ordinance in his church of sainte-croix, in provins, remarked: "well now, gentlemen of provins, what must i, and the other preachers of france, do? must we obey this order? what shall we tell you? what shall we preach? 'the gospel,' sir huguenot will say. and pray, stating that the errors of calvin, of martin luther, of beza, malot, peter martyr, and other preachers, with their erroneous doctrine, condemned by the church a thousand years ago, and since then by the holy oecumenical councils, are worthless and damnable--is not this preaching the gospel? bidding you beware of their teaching, bidding you refuse to listen to them, or read their books; telling you that they only seek to stir up sedition, murder, and robbery, as they have begun to do in paris and numberless places in the realm--is not this preaching 'the gospel?' but some one may say: 'pray, friar, what are you saying? you are not obeying the king's edict; you are still talking of calvin and his companions; you call them and those who hold their sentiments _heretics_ and _huguenots_; you will be denounced to the courts of justice, you will be thrown into prison--yes, you will be hung as a seditious person.' i answer, _that_ is not unlikely, for ahab and jezebel put to death the prophets of god in their time, and gave all freedom to the false prophets of baal. 'stop, friar, you are saying too much, you will be hung.' very well, then there will be a gray friar hung! many others will therefore have to be hung, for god, by his holy spirit, will inspire the pillars of his church to uphold the edifice, which will never be overthrown until the end of the world, whatever blows may be struck at it."[ ] [sidenote: opposition of the parliaments.] the parliaments exhibited scarcely less opposition to the edict than did the pulpits of the roman catholic churches. one--the parliament of dijon--never registered it at all;[ ] while that of paris instituted a long and decided resistance. "_non possumus, nec debemus," "non possumus, nec debemus pro conscientia_," were the words in which it replied when repeatedly pressed to give formal sanction.[ ] the counsellors were equally displeased with the contents of the edict, and with the irregularity committed in sending it first to the provincial parliaments. even when the king, yielding to their importunity, by a supplementary "declaration," interpreted the provision of the edict relative to the attendance of royal officers upon the reformed services, as applicable only to the bailiffs, seneschals, and other minor magistrates, and strictly prohibited the attendance of the members of parliament and other high judicatories,[ ] the counsellors, instead of proceeding to the registry of the obnoxious law, returned a recommendation that the intolerant edict of _july_ be enforced![ ] it was not possible until march to obtain a tardy assent to the reception of the january edict into the legislation of the country, and then only a few of the judges vouchsafed to take part in the act.[ ] the delay served to inflame yet more the passions of the people. [sidenote: new conference.] scarcely had the edict which was to adjust the relations of the two religious parties been promulgated, when a new attempt was made to reconcile the antagonistic beliefs by the old, but ever unsuccessful method of a conference between theologians. on the twenty-eighth of january a select company assembled in the large council-chamber of the royal palace of st. germain, and commenced the discussion of the first topic submitted for their deliberation--the question of pictures or images and their worship. catharine herself was present, with antoine of navarre and jeanne d'albret, michel de l'hospital, and other members of the council. on the papal side appeared the cardinals of bourbon, tournon, and ferrara, and a number of less elevated dignitaries. beza and marlorat were most prominent on the side of the reformed. the discussion was long and earnest, but it ended leaving all the disputants holding the same views that they had entertained at the outset. beza condemned as idolatrous the practice of admitting statues or paintings into christian churches, and urged their entire removal. the inquisitor de mouchy, fra giustiniano of corfu, maillard, dean of the sorbonne, and others, attempted to refute his positions in a style of argument which exhibited the extremes of profound learning and silly conceit. bishop montluc of valence,[ ] and four doctors of theology--salignac, bouteiller, d'espense, and picherel--not only admitted the flagrant abuses of image-worship, but drew up a paper in which they did not disguise their sentiments. they recommended the removal of representations of the holy trinity, and of pictures immodest in character, or of saints not recognized by the church. they reprobated the custom of decking out the portraits of the saints with crowns and dresses, the celebration of processions in their honor, and the offering of gifts and vows. and they yielded so far to the demands of the protestants as to desire that only the simple cross should be permitted to remain over the altar, while the pictures should be placed high upon the walls, where they could neither be kissed nor receive other objectionable marks of adoration.[ ] it was a futile task to reconcile views so discordant even among the roman catholic partisans. two weeks were spent in profitless discussion, and, on the eleventh of february, the new colloquy was permitted to dissolve without having entered upon any of the more difficult questions that still remained upon the programme marked out for it.[ ] the cardinals had prevailed upon catharine de' medici to refer the settlement to the council of trent.[ ] the joy of de mouchy, the inquisitor, and of his companions, knew no bounds when chancellor l'hospital declared the queen's pleasure, and requested the members to retire to their homes, and reduce their opinions to writing for future use. they were ready to throw themselves on beza's neck in their delight at being relieved of the necessity of debating with him![ ] [sidenote: defection of antoine and its results.] [sidenote: constancy of jeanne.] but, in truth, the time for the calm discussion of theological differences, the time for friendly salutation between the champions of the rival systems of faith, was rapidly drawing to a close. if some rays of sunshine still glanced athwart the landscape, conveying to the unpractised eye the impression of quiet serenity, there were also black and portentous clouds already rising far above the horizon. those who could read the signs of the times had long watched their gathering, and they trembled before the coming of the storm. although they were mercifully spared the full knowledge of the overwhelming ruin that would follow in the wake of that fearful war of the elements, they saw the angry commotion of the sky, and realized that the air was surcharged with material for the most destructive bolts of heaven. and yet it is the opinion of a contemporary, whose views are always worthy of careful consideration, that, had it not been for the final defection of the king of navarre at this critical juncture, the great woes impending over france might still have been delayed or averted.[ ] that unhappy prince seemed determined to earn the title of the "julian apostate" of the french reformation. plied by the arts of his own servants, d'escars (of whom mézeray pithily remarks that he was ready to sell himself for money to anybody, save his master) and the bishop of auxerre; flattered by the triumvirate, tempted by the spanish ambassador, cardinal tournon, and the papal legate, he had long been playing a hypocritical part. he had been unwilling to break with the huguenots before securing the golden fruit with which he was lured on, and so he was at the same time the agent and the object of treachery. even after he had sent in his submission to the pope by the hands of d'escars, he pretended, when remonstrated with by his protestant friends, that "he would take care not to go so far that he could not easily extricate himself."[ ] he did not even show displeasure when faithfully rebuked and warned.[ ] yet he had after long hesitation completely cast in his lot with the papal party. he was convinced at last that philip was in earnest in his intention to give him the island of sardinia, which was depicted to him as a terrestrial paradise, "worth four navarres."[ ] it was widely believed that he had received from the holy see the promise of a divorce from his heretical consort, which, while permitting him to retain the possessions which she had justly forfeited by her spiritual rebellion, would enable him to marry the youthful mary of scots, and add a substantial crown to his titular claims.[ ] but we would fain believe that even antoine of bourbon had not sunk to such a depth of infamy. certain it is, however, that he now openly avowed his new devotion to the romish church, and that the authority of his name became a bulwark of strength to the refractory parliament in its endeavor to prevent the execution of the edict of toleration.[ ] but he was unsuccessful in dragging with him the wife whom he had been the instrument of inducing first to declare herself for the persecuted faith of the reformers. and when catharine de' medici, who cared nothing for religion, tried to persuade her to arrange matters with her husband, "sooner," she said, "than ever go to mass, had i my kingdom and my son in my hand, i would cast them both into the depth of the sea, that they might not be a hinderance to me."[ ] brave mother of henry the fourth! well would it have been, both for her son and for france, if that son had inherited more of jeanne d'albret's devotion to truth, and less of his father's lewdness and inconstancy! [sidenote: immense crowds at huguenot preaching.] [sidenote: the canons of sainte croix.] as early as in february, beza was of the opinion that the king of navarre would not suffer him to remain longer in the realm to which he himself had invited him so earnestly only six months before. at all events, he would be publicly dismissed by the first of may, and with him many others. with this disquieting intelligence came also rumors of an alliance between the enemies of the gospel and the spaniard, which could not be treated with contempt as baseless fabrications.[ ] but meanwhile the truth was making daily progress. at a single gathering for prayer and preaching, but a few days before, twenty-five thousand persons, it was computed, had been in attendance, representing all ranks of the population, among whom were many of the nobility.[ ] in the city of troyes, a few weeks later, eight or nine thousand persons assembled from the neighboring country to celebrate the lord's supper, and the number of communicants was so great that they could not all partake on a single day; so the services were repeated on the morrow.[ ] elsewhere there was equal zeal and growth. indeed, so rapid was the advance of protestantism, so pressing the call for ministers, that the large and flourishing church of orleans, in a letter written the last day of february, proclaimed their expectation of establishing a theological school to supply their own wants and those of the adjacent regions; and it is no insignificant mark of the power with which the reformatory movement still coursed on, that the canons of the great church of sainte croix had given notice of their intention to attend the lectures that were to be delivered![ ] in such an encouraging strain did "the ministers, deacons, and elders" of the most protestant city of northern france write on the day before that deplorable massacre of vassy, which was to be the signal for an appeal from argument to arms, upon which the newly enkindled spirit of religious inquiry was to be quenched in partisan hatred and social confusion. within less than two months the tread of an armed host was to be heard in the city which it had been hoped would be thronged by the pious students of the gospel of peace, and frenzied soldiers would be hurling upon the floors of sainte croix the statues of the saints that had long occupied their elevated niches. we must now turn to the events preceding the inauspicious occurrence the fruits of which proved so disastrous to the french church and state. [sidenote: the guises meet the duke of würtemberg at saverne.] having at length made sure of the co-operation of the king of navarre in the contest upon which they had now resolved with the view of preventing the execution of the edict of january, the guises desired to strengthen themselves in the direction of germany, and secure, if not the assistance, at least the neutrality of the protestant princes. could the protestants on the other side of the rhine be made indifferent spectators of the struggle, persuaded that their own creed resembled the faith of the roman catholics much more than the creed of the huguenots; could they be convinced that the huguenots were uneasy and rebellious radicals, whom it were better to crush than to assist; could, consequently, the "reiters" and "lansquenets" be kept at home--it would, thought the guises, be easy, with the help of the german catholics, perhaps of spain also, to render complete the papal supremacy in france, and to crush condé and the châtillons to the earth. accordingly, the guises extended to duke christopher of würtemberg an invitation to meet them in the little town of saverne (or zabern, as it was called by the germans), in alsace, not far from strasbourg.[ ] the duke came as he was requested, accompanied by his theologians, brentius and andreä; and the interview, beginning on the fifteenth of february,[ ] lasted four days. four of the guises were present; but the conversations were chiefly with francis, the duke of guise, and charles, the cardinal of lorraine; the cardinal of guise and the grand prior of the knights of st. john taking little or no active part. christopher and francis had been comrades in arms a score of years back, for the former had served several years, and with no little distinction, in the french wars. this circumstance afforded an opportunity for the display of extraordinary friendship. and what did the brothers state, in this important consultation, respecting their own sentiments, the opinions of the huguenots, and the condition of france? happily, a minute account, in the form of a manuscript memorandum taken down at the time by duke christopher, is still extant in the archives of stuttgart.[ ] little known, but authentic beyond the possibility of cavil, this document deserves more attention than it has received from historians; for it places in the clearest light the shameless mendacity of the guises, and shows that the duke had nearly as good a claim as the cardinal, his brother, to the reputation which the venetian ambassador tells us that charles had earned "_of rarely telling the truth_." [sidenote: lying assurances.] duke christopher made the acquaintance of charles of lorraine as a preacher on the morning after his arrival, when he heard him, in a sermon on the temptation in the wilderness, demonstrate that no other mediators or intercessors must be sought for but jesus christ, who is our only saviour and the only propitiation for our sins. that day christopher had a long conversation with guise respecting the unhappy condition of france, which the latter ascribed in great part to the huguenot ministers, whose unconciliatory conduct, he said, had rendered abortive the colloquy of poissy. würtemberg corrected him by replying that the very accounts of the colloquy which guise had sent him showed that the unsuccessful issue was owing to the prelates, who had evidently come determined to prevent any accommodation. he urged that the misfortunes that had befallen france were much rather to be ascribed to the cruel persecutions that had been inflicted on so many guiltless victims. "i cannot refrain from telling you," he added, "that you and your brother are strongly suspected in germany of having contributed to cause the death, since the decease of henry the second--and even before, in his lifetime--of several thousands of persons who have been miserably executed on account of their faith. as a friend, and as a christian, i must warn you. beware, beware of innocent blood! otherwise the punishment of god will fall upon you in this life and in the next." "he answered me," writes würtemberg, "_with great sighs_: 'i know that my brother and i are accused of that, and of many other things also. but _we are wronged_,[ ] as we shall both of us explain to you before we leave.'" the cardinal entered more fully than his brother into the doctrinal conference, talking now with würtemberg, now with his theologian brentius, and trying to persuade both that he was in perfect accord with them. while pressing his german friends to declare the zwinglians and the calvinists heretics--which they carefully avoided doing--and urging them to state the punishment that ought to be inflicted on heretics, there seemed to be no limit to the concessions which lorraine was willing to make. he _adored_ and _invoked_ only christ in heaven. he merely _venerated_ the wafer. he acknowledged that his party went too far in calling the mass a sacrifice, and celebrating it for the living and the dead. the mass was not a sacrifice, but a commemoration of the sacrifice offered on the altar of the cross ("non sacrificium, sed memoria sacrificii præstiti in ara crucis"). he believed that the council assembled at trent would do no good. when the romish hierarchy, with the pope at its head, as the pretended vicar of god on earth, was objected to, he replied that that matter could easily be adjusted. as for himself, "in the absence of a red gown, he would willingly wear a black one." [sidenote: the guises deceive no one.] he was asked whether, if beza and his colleagues could be brought to consent to sign the augsburg confession, he also would sign it. "you have heard it," he replied, "i take god to witness that i believe as i have said, and that by god's grace i shall live and die in these sentiments. i repeat it: i have read the confession of augsburg, i have also read luther, melanchthon, brentius, and others; i entirely approve their doctrines, and i might speedily agree with them in all that concerns the ecclesiastical hierarchy. _but i am compelled still to dissemble for a time_, that i may gain some that are yet weak in the faith." a little later he adverted to würtemberg's remarks to guise. "you informed my brother," he said, "that in germany we are both of us suspected of having contributed to the execution of a large number of innocent christians during the reigns of henry and of francis the second. well! i swear to you, in the name of god my creator, and pledging the salvation of my soul, _that i am guilty of the death of no man condemned for religion's sake_. those who were then privy to the deliberations of state can testify in my favor. on the contrary, whenever crimes of a religious character were under discussion, i used to say to king henry or to king francis the second, that they did not belong to my department, that they had to do with the secular power, and i went away."[ ] he even added that, although du bourg was in orders, he had begged the king to spare him as a learned man. "in like manner," says würtemberg, "the duke of guise with great oaths affirmed that he was innocent of the death of those who had been condemned on account of their faith. 'the attempt,' he added, 'has frequently been made to kill us, both the cardinal and myself, with fire-arms, sword, and poison, and, although the culprits have been arrested, i never meddled with their punishment.'" and when the duke of würtemberg again "conjured them not to persecute the poor christians of france, for god would not leave such a sin unpunished," both the cardinal and the duke of guise gave him their right hands, promising on their princely faith, and by the salvation of their souls, that they would neither openly nor secretly persecute the partisans of the "new doctrines!" such were the barefaced impostures which this "par nobile fratrum" desired christopher of würtemberg to publish for their vindication among the lutherans of germany. but the liars were not believed. the shrewd landgrave of hesse, on receiving würtemberg's account, even before the news of the massacre of vassy, came promptly to the conclusion that the whole thing was an attempt at deception. christopher himself, in the light of later events, added to his manuscript these words: "alas! it can now be seen how they have kept these promises! _deus sit ultor doli et perjurii, cujus namque res agitur._"[ ] [sidenote: throkmorton's account of the french court.] meanwhile events of the greatest consequence were occurring at the capital. the very day after the saverne conference began, sir nicholas throkmorton wrote to queen elizabeth an account of "the strange issue" to which affairs had come at the french court since his last despatch, a little over a fortnight before. his letter gives a vivid and accurate view of the important crisis in the first half of february, , which we present very nearly in the words of the ambassador himself. "the cardinal of ferrara," says throkmorton, "has allured to his devotion the king of navarre, the constable, marshal st. andré, the cardinal of tournon, and others inclined to retain the romish religion. all these are bent to repress the protestant religion in france, and to find means either to range [bring over to their side] the queen of navarre, the prince of condé, the admiral, and all others who favor that religion, or to expel them from the court, with all the ministers and preachers. the queen mother, fearing this conspiracy might be the means of losing her authority (which is as dear to her as one religion or the other), and mistrusting that the constable was going about to reduce the management of the whole affair into the king of navarre's hands, and so into his own, has caused the constable to retire from the court, as it were in disgrace, and intended to do the like with the cardinal of tournon and the marshal st. andré. the king of navarre being offended with these proceedings, and imputing part of her doings to the advice of the admiral, the cardinal châtillon, and monsieur d'andelot, intended to compel those personages to retire also from the court. in these garboils [commotions] the prince of condé, being sick at paris, was requested to repair to the court and stand her [catharine] in stead. in this time there was great working on both sides to win the house of guise. so the queen mother wrote to them--they being in the skirts of almain--to come to the court with all speed. the like means were made [use of] by the king of navarre, the cardinal of ferrara and the constable, to ally them on their part. during these solicitations the duke d'aumale arrived at the court from them, who was requested to solicit the speedy repair to the court of the duke of guise and the cardinal of lorraine. "the prince of condé went from hence in a horse litter to the court of st. germain, where he found the protestant preachers prohibited from preaching either in the king's house or in the town, and that the king of navarre had solemnly vowed to retain and maintain the romish religion, and had given order that his son should be instructed in the same. the prince, finding the queen of navarre and the house of châtillon ready to leave the court, fell again dangerously sick. nevertheless his coming so revived them, as by the covert aid of the queen mother, they attempted to make the protestant preachers preach again at the town's end of st. germain, and were entreated to abide at the court, where there is an assembly which is like to last until easter. the cardinal of ferrara assists daily at these disputes. the king of navarre persists in the house of châtillon retiring from the court, and it is believed the queen of navarre, and they, will not tarry long there."[ ] such was the picture drawn by the skilful pencil of the english envoy. it was certainly dark enough. catharine and navarre had sent lansac to assure the pope that they purposed to live in and defend the roman catholic religion. sulpice had gone on a like mission to spain. it was time, throkmorton plainly told queen elizabeth, that she should show as great readiness in maintaining the protestant religion as ferrara and his associates showed in striving to overthrow it. and in a private despatch to cecil, written the same day, he urged the secretary to dissuade her majesty from longer retaining candles and cross on the altar of the royal chapel, at a time when even doctors of the sorbonne consented to the removal of images of all sorts from over the altar in places of worship.[ ] from saverne the cardinal of lorraine returned to his archbishopric of rheims, while the duke, accompanied by the cardinal of guise, proceeded in the direction of the french capital. on his route he stopped at joinville, one of the estates of the family, recently erected in their favor into a principality. here he was joined by his wife, anne d'este; here, too, he listened to fresh complaints made by his mother, antoinette of bourbon, against the insolence of the neighboring town of vassy, where a considerable portion of the inhabitants had lately had the audacity to embrace the reformed faith. [sidenote: vassy in champagne.] [sidenote: origin of the huguenot church.] vassy, an important town of champagne--though shorn of much of its influence by the removal of many of its dependencies to increase the dignity of joinville--and one of the places assigned to mary of scots for her maintenance, had apparently for some time contained a few professors of the "new doctrines." it was, however, only in october, , after the colloquy of poissy, that it was visited by a protestant minister, who, during a brief sojourn, organized a church with elders and deacons. notwithstanding the disadvantage of having no pastor, and of having notoriously incurred the special hatred of the guises, the reformed community grew with marvellous rapidity. for the gospel was preached not merely in the printed sermons read from the pulpit, but by the lips of enthusiastic converts. when, after a short absence, the founder of the church of vassy returned to the scene of his labors, he came into collision with the bishop of châlons, whose diocese included this town. the bishop, unaccustomed to preach, set up a monk in opposition; but no one would come to hear him. the prelate then went himself to the protestant gathering, and sat through the "singing of the commandments" and a prayer. but when he attempted to interrupt the services and asserted his episcopal authority, the minister firmly repelled the usurpation, taking his stand on the king's edict. then, waxing warm in the discussion, the dauntless huguenot exposed the hypocrisy of the pretended shepherd, who, not entering the fold by canonical election, but intruding himself into it without consulting his charge, was more anxious to secure his own ease than to lead his sheep into green pastures. the bishop soon retired from a field where he had found more than his match in argument: but the common people, who had come to witness his triumph over the huguenot preacher, remained after his unexpected discomfiture, and the unequal contest resulted in fresh accessions to the ranks of the protestants. equally unsuccessful was the bishop of châlons in the attempt to induce the king to issue a commission to the duke of guise against the unoffending inhabitants, and vassy was spared the fate of mérindol and cabrières. at christmas nine hundred communicants, after profession of their faith, partook of the lord's supper according to the reformed rites; and in january, , after repeated solicitations, the church obtained the long-desired boon of a pastor, in the person of the able and pious leonard morel. thus far the history of vassy differed little from that of hundreds of other towns in that age of wonderful awakening and growth, and would have attracted little attention had not its proximity to the lorraine princes secured for it a tragic notoriety.[ ] [sidenote: approach of the duke of guise.] on the twenty-eighth of february, guise, with two hundred armed retainers, left joinville. that night he slept at dommartin-le-franc. on sunday morning, the first of march, he continued his journey. whether by accident or from design, it is difficult to say, he drew near to vassy about the time when the huguenots were assembling for worship, and his ears caught the sound of their bell while he was still a quarter of a league distant. the ardor of guise's followers was already at fever-heat. they had seen a poor artisan apprehended in a town that lay on their track, and summarily hung by their leader's order, for the simple offence of having had his child baptized after the reformed rites. when guise heard the bell of the vassy church, he turned to his suite to inquire what it meant. "it is the huguenots' preaching," some one replied. "_par la mort-dieu_," broke in a second, "they will soon be huguenotted after another fashion!" others began to make eager calculations respecting the extent of the plunder. a few minutes later an unlucky cobbler was espied, who, from his dress or manner, was mistaken for a huguenot minister. it was well that he could answer the inquiries of the duke, before whom he was hurried, by assuring him that he was no clergyman and had never studied; otherwise, he was told, his case had been an extremely ugly one.[ ] [sidenote: the massacre.] on entering vassy guise repaired to the monastery chapel to hear mass said. he was followed by some of the gentlemen of his suite. meantime, their valets found their way to the doors of the building in which the protestants were worshipping, scarcely more than a stone's throw distant. this motley crowd was merely the vanguard of the papists. soon two or three gentlemen sent by guise, according to his own account, to admonish the huguenot assembly of their want of due obedience, entered the edifice, where they found twelve hundred persons quietly listening to the word of god. they were politely invited to sit down: but they replied by noisy interruption and threats. "_mort-dieu_, they must all be killed!" was their exclamation as they returned to report to guise what they had seen. the defenceless huguenots were thrown into confusion by these significant menaces, and hastened to secure the entrance. it was too late. the duke himself was approaching, and a volley from the arquebuses of his troop speedily scattered the unarmed worshippers. it is unnecessary to describe in all its details of horror the scene that ensued. the door of the sheep-fold was open and the wolf was already upon his prey. all the pent-up hatred of a band of fanatical and savage soldiers was vented upon a crowd of men, women, and children, whose heterodoxy made them pleasing victims, and whose unarmed condition rendered victory easy. no age, no sex was respected. it was enough to be a huguenot to be a fit object for the sword or the gun. to escape from the doomed building was only possible by running the gauntlet of the troops that lay in wait. those who sought to climb from the roof to the adjacent houses were picked off by the arquebuses of the besieging party. only after an hour and a half had elapsed were the soldiers of guise called off by the trumpet sounding a joyful note of victory. the evidence of their prowess, however, remained on the field of contest, in fifty or sixty dead or dying men and women, and in nearly a hundred more or less dangerously wounded.[ ] in a few hours more guise was resuming his journey toward paris. he was told that the huguenots of vassy had forwarded their complaints to the king. "let them go, let them go!" he exclaimed. "they will find there neither their admiral nor their chancellor."[ ] upon whose head rests the guilt of the massacre of vassy? this was the question asked by every contemporary so soon as he realized the startling fact that the blow there struck was a signal that called every man to take the sword, and stand in defence of his own life. it is the question which history, more calm and dispassionate, because farther removed from the agitations of the day, now seeks to solve, as she looks back over the dreary torrents of blood that sprang from that disastrous source. the inquiry is not an idle one--for justice ought to find such a vindication in the records of past generations as may have been denied at the time of the commission of flagrant crimes. the huguenots declared guise to be a murderer. theodore beza, in eloquent tones, demanded the punishment of the butcher of the human race. so imposing was the cry for retribution that the duke himself recognized the necessity of entering a formal defence, which was disseminated by the press far and wide through france and germany. he denied that the massacre was premeditated. he averred that it was merely an unfortunate incident brought about by the violence of the protestants of vassy, who had provided themselves with an abundant supply of stones and other missiles, and assailed those whom he had sent to remonstrate courteously with them. he stated the deaths at only twenty-five or thirty. most of these had been occasioned by the indignant valets, who, on seeing their masters wounded, had rushed in to defend them. so much against his will had the affair occurred, that he had repeatedly but ineffectually commanded his men to desist. when he had himself received a slight wound from a stone thrown by the huguenots, the sight of the blood flowing from it had infuriated his devoted followers. the duke's plea of want of premeditation we may, perhaps, accept as substantially true--so far, at least, as to suppose that he had formed no deliberate plan of slaughtering the inhabitants of vassy who had adopted the reformed religion.[ ] it is difficult, indeed, to accept the argument of brantôme and le laboureur, who conceive that the fortuitous character of the event is proved by the circumstance that the deed was below the courage of guise. nor, perhaps, shall we give excessive credit to the asseverations of the duke, repeated, we are told, even on his death-bed. for why should these be more worthy of belief than the oaths with which the same nobleman had declared to christopher of würtemberg that he neither had persecuted, nor would persecute the protestants of france? but the duke of guise admits that he knew that there was a growing community of huguenots at vassy--"scandalous, arrogant, extremely seditious persons," as he styles them. he tells us that he intended, as the representative of mary stuart, and as feudal lord of some of their number, to admonish them of their disobedience; and that for this purpose he sent sieur de la bresse (or brosse) with others to interrupt their public worship. he accuses them, it is true, of having previously armed themselves with stones, and even of possessing weapons in an adjoining building; but what reason do the circumstances of the case give us for doubting that the report may have been based upon the fact that those who in this terror-stricken assembly attempted to save their lives resorted to whatever missiles they could lay their hands upon? if the presence of his wife, and of his brother the cardinal, is used by the duke as an argument to prove the absence of any sinister intentions on his part, how much stronger is the evidence afforded to the peaceable character of the protestant gathering by the numbers of women and children found there? but the very fact that, as against the twenty-five or thirty huguenots whom he concedes to have been slain in the encounter, he does not pretend to give the name of a single one of his own followers that was killed, shows clearly which side it was that came prepared for the fight. and yet who that knows the sanguinary spirit generally displayed by the roman catholic masses in the sixteenth century, could find much fault with the huguenots of vassy if they had really armed themselves to repel violence and protect their wives and children--if, in other words, they had used the common right of self-preservation?[ ] the fact is that guise was only witnessing the fruits of his instructions, enforced by his own example. he had given the first taste of blood, and now, perhaps without his actual command, the pack had taken the scent and hunted down the game. he was avowedly on a crusade to re-establish the supremacy of the roman catholic religion throughout france. if he had not hesitated to hang a poor pin-dealer for allowing his child to be baptized according to the forms of calvin's liturgy; if he was on his way to paris to restore the edict of july by force of arms, it is idle to inquire whether he or his soldiers were responsible for the blood shed in peace. "he that sowed the seed is the author of the harvest." [sidenote: condé appeals to the king.] the news quickly flew to condé that the arch-enemy of the protestants had begun the execution of the cruel projects he had so long been devising with his fanatical associates; that guise was on his way toward seditious paris, with hands yet dripping with the blood of the inhabitants of a quiet champagnese town, surprised and murdered while engaged in the worship of their god. indignant, and taking in the full measure of the responsibility imposed upon him as the most powerful member of the protestant communion, the prince, who was with the court at the castle of monceaux--built for herself by catharine in a style of regal magnificence--laid before the king and his mother a full account of the tragic occurrence. it was a pernicious example, he argued, and should be punished promptly and severely. above all, the perpetrators ought not to be permitted to endanger the quiet of france by entering the capital. catharine was alarmed and embarrassed by the intelligence; but, her fear of a conjunction between guise and navarre overcoming her reluctance to affront the lorraine family, induced her to consent; and she wrote to the duke, who had by this time reached his castle of nanteuil, forbidding him to go to paris, but inviting him to visit the court with a small escort. at the same time she gave orders to saint andré to repair at once to lyons, of which he was the royal governor. but neither of the triumvirs showed any readiness to obey her orders. the duke curtly replied that he was too busy entertaining his friends to come to the king; the marshal promptly refused to leave the king while he was threatened by such perils.[ ] [sidenote: beza's remonstrance.] [sidenote: an anvil that has worn out many hammers.] the king of navarre now came from paris to monceaux, to guard the interests of the party he had espoused. he was closely followed by theodore beza and francour, whom the protestants of paris had deputed, the former on behalf of the church, the latter of the nobility, to demand of the king the punishment of the authors of the massacre. the queen mother, as was her wont, gave a gracious audience, and promised that an investigation should be made. but navarre, being present, seemed eager to display a neophyte's zeal, and retorted by blaming the huguenots for going in arms to their places of worship. "true," said beza, "but arms in the hands of the wise are instruments of peace, and the massacre of vassy has shown the necessity under which the protestants were laid." when navarre exclaimed: "whoever touches my brother of guise with the tip of his finger, touches my whole body!" the reformer reminded him, as one whom antoine had himself brought to france, that the way of justice is god's way, and that kings _owe_ justice to their subjects. finally, when he discovered, by navarre's adoption of all the impotent excuses of guise, that the former had sold himself to the enemies of the gospel, theodore beza made that noble reply which has become classic as the motto of the french reformation: "sire, it is, in truth, the lot of the church of god, in whose name i am speaking, to endure blows and not to strike them. _but also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers._"[ ] [sidenote: guise's entry into paris.] at nanteuil, guise had been visited by the constable, with two of his sons, by saint andré, and by other prominent leaders. accompanied by them, he now took the decided step of going to paris in spite of catharine's prohibition. his entry resembled a triumphal procession.[ ] in the midst of an escort estimated by eye-witnesses at two thousand horse, francis of guise avoided the more direct gate of st. martin, and took that of st. denis, through which the kings of france were accustomed to pass. vast crowds turned out to meet him, and the cries of "_vive monsieur de guise!_" sounding much like regal acclammations, were uttered without rebuke on all sides. the "prévost des marchands" and other members of the municipal government received him with great demonstrations of joy, as the defender of the faith. at the same hour the prince of condé, surrounded by a large number of protestant noblemen, students, and citizens, was riding to one of the preaching-places.[ ] the two cavalcades met, but no collision ensued. the huguenot and the papist courteously saluted each other, and then rode on. it is even reported that between the leaders themselves less sincere amenities were interchanged. guise sent word to condé that he and his company, whom he had assembled only on account of the malevolent, were at the prince's commands. condé answered by saying that his own men were armed only to prevent the populace of paris from making an attack upon the protestants as they went to their place of worship.[ ] [sidenote: anxieties of catharine de' medici.] for weeks the position of the queen mother had been one of peculiar difficulty and anxiety. that she was "well inclined to advance the true religion," and "well affected for a general reformation in the church," as admiral coligny at this time firmly believed,[ ] is simply incredible. but, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that catharine saw her interest in upholding the huguenot party, of which condé and the three châtillon brothers were acknowledged leaders. unfortunately, the king of navarre, "hoping to compound with the king of spain for his kingdom of navarre," had become the tool of the opposite side--he was "_all spanish now_"[ ]--and chantonnay, philip's ambassador, was emboldened to make arrogant demands. the envoy declared that, "unless the house of châtillon left the court, he was ordered to depart from france." grave diplomatists shook their heads, and thought the menace very strange, "the rather that another prince should appoint what counsellors should remain at court;" and sage men inferred that "to such princes as are afraid of shadows the king of spain will enterprise far enough."[ ] none the less was catharine deeply disturbed. she felt distrust of the heads of the roman catholic party, but she feared to break entirely with them, and was forced to request the protestant leaders to withdraw for a time from the vicinity of paris. that city itself presented to the eye a sufficiently strange and alarming aspect, "resembling more a frontier town or a place besieged than a court, a merchant city, or university." both sides were apprehensive of some sudden commotion, and the protestant scholars, in great numbers, marched daily in arms to the "sermons," in spite of the opposition of the rector and his council.[ ] the capital was unquestionably no place for catharine and her son, at the present moment. [sidenote: she removes the king to melun.] [sidenote: and thence to fontainebleau.] [sidenote: her painful indecision.] at length, catharine de' medici, apprehensive of the growing power of the triumvirate, and dreading lest the king, falling into its hands, should become a mere puppet, her own influence being completely thrown into the shade, removed the court from monceaux to melun, a city on the upper seine, about twenty-five miles south-east of paris.[ ] she hoped apparently that, by placing herself nearer the strongly huguenot banks of the loire, she would be able at will to throw herself into the arms of either party, and, in making her own terms, secure future independence. but she was not left undisturbed. at melun she received a deputation from paris, consisting of the "prévost des marchands" and three "échevins," who came to entreat her, in the name of the roman catholic people of the capital, to return and dissipate by the king's arrival the dangers that were imminent on account of condé's presence, and to give the people the power to defend themselves by restoring to them their arms. still hesitating, still experiencing her old difficulty of forming any plans for the distant future, and every moment balancing in her mind what she should do the next, she nevertheless pushed on ten miles farther southward, to the royal palace of fontainebleau, and found herself not far from half the way to orleans. but change of place brought the vacillating queen mother no nearer to a decision. soubise, the last of the avowed protestants to leave her, still dreamed he might succeed in persuading her. day after day, in company with chancellor l'hospital, the huguenot leader spent two or three hours alone with her in earnest argument. "sometimes," says a recently discovered contemporary account, "they believed that they had gained everything, and that she was ready to set off for condé's camp; then, all of a sudden, so violent a fright seized her, that she lost all heart." at last the time came when the triumvirs were expected to appear at fontainebleau on the morrow, to secure the prize of the king's person. soubise and the indefatigable chancellor made a last attempt. five or six times in one day they returned to the charge, although l'hospital mournfully observed that he had abandoned hope. he knew catharine well: she could not be brought to a final resolution.[ ] it was even so. soubise himself was forced to admit it when, at the last moment--almost too late for his own safety--he hurriedly left, catharine still begging him to stand by her, and made his way to his friends. [sidenote: she implores condé's aid.] it seems to have been during this time of painful anxiety that catharine wrote at least the last of those remarkable letters to condé which that prince afterward published in his own justification, and respecting the authenticity of which the queen would have been glad had she been able to make the world entertain doubts. they breathed a spirit of implicit confidence. she called herself his "good cousin," that was not less attached to him than a mother to a son. she enjoined upon him to remember the protection which he was bound to give to "the children, the mother, and the kingdom." she called upon him not to desert her. she declared that, in the midst of so many adverse circumstances, she would be driven almost to despair, "were it not for her trust in god, and the assurance that condé would assist her in preserving the kingdom and service of the king, her son, in spite of those who wished to ruin everything." more than once she told him that his kindness would not go unrequited; and she declared that, if she died before having an opportunity to testify her gratitude, she would charge her children with the duty.[ ] in paris events were rapidly succeeding each other. marshal montmorency, the constable's eldest son, was too upright a man to serve the purposes of the triumvirs; and, with his father's consent and by navarre's authority, he was removed, and cardinal bourbon installed in his place as governor of the city.[ ] a few days after antoine himself came to paris and lodged in the constable's house. here, with guise, saint andré, and the other chief statesmen who were of the same party, conferences were held to which condé and his associates were not invited; and to these irregular gatherings, notwithstanding the absence of the king, the name of the _royal council_ was given.[ ] [sidenote: condé retires to meaux.] there were nine or ten thousand horse--papist and huguenot--under arms in paris.[ ] it was evident that condé and guise could not longer remain in the city without involving it in the most bloody of civil contests. under these circumstances the prince offered, through his brother, the cardinal of bourbon, to accede to the wish of catharine, and leave paris by one gate at the same moment that the triumvirs should leave by another. indeed, without waiting to obtain their promise, he retired[ ] with his body of protestant noblesse to meaux, where he had given a rendezvous to admiral coligny and others whom he had summoned from their homes. this step has generally been stigmatized as the first of condé's egregious mistakes. beza opposed it at the time, and likened the error to that of pompey in abandoning rome;[ ] and the "history of the reformed churches" has perpetuated the comparison.[ ] the same historical parallel was drawn by Étienne pasquier.[ ] but the judicious françois de la noue, surnamed _bras-de-fer_, thought very differently; and we must here, as in many other instances, prefer the opinion of the practical soldier to that of the eminent theologian or the learned jurist. parliament, the clergy, the municipal government, the greater part of the university, and almost all the low populace, with the partisans and servants of the hostile princes and noblemen, were intensely roman catholic.[ ] the three hundred resident protestant gentlemen, with, as many more experienced soldiers, four hundred students, and a few untrained burgesses, were "but as a fly matched with an elephant." the novices of the convents and the priests' chambermaids, armed only with sticks, could have held them in check.[ ] it were better to lose the advantages of the capital than to be overwhelmed within its walls by superior forces, being completely cut off from that part of france where the main strength of the protestants lay. [sidenote: the huguenot summons.] from meaux messengers were sent to the protestant churches in all parts of france to request their aid, both in money and in men. "since," said the letter they bore, "god has brought us to such a point that no one can disturb our repose without violating the protection it has pleased our king to accord us, and consequently without declaring himself an enemy of his majesty and of this kingdom's peace, there is no law, divine or human, that does not permit us to take measures for defence, calling for help on those whom god has given the authority and the will to remedy these evils."[ ] [sidenote: admiral coligny's reluctance.] happily for the huguenot cause, however, the nobles and gentry that favored it had not waited to receive this summons, but had, many of them, already set out to strengthen the forces of the prince. among others, and by far more important than all the rest, came gaspard de coligny, whose absence from court during the few previous weeks has been regarded as one of the most untoward circumstances of the time. at his pleasant castle of châtillon-sur-loing, surrounded by his young family, he received intelligence, first, of the massacre, then of the ominous events that had occurred at the capital. condé sent to solicit his support; his brothers and many friends urged him to rush at once to the rescue. but still, even after the threatening clouds had risen so high that they must soon burst over the devoted heads of the huguenots, the admiral continued to hesitate. every instinct of his courageous nature prompted the skilful defender of st. quentin to place himself at once at the post of danger. but there was one fear that seemed likely to overcome all his martial impulses. _it was the fear of initiating a civil war._ he could not refer to the subject without shuddering, for the horrors of such a contest were so vividly impressed upon his mind that he regarded almost anything as preferable to the attempt to settle domestic difficulties by an appeal to the sword. but the tears and sighs of his wife, the noble charlotte de laval, at length overmastered his reluctance. "to be prudent in men's esteem," she said, "is not to be wise in that of god, who has given you the science of a general that you might use it for the good of his children." when her husband rehearsed again the grounds of his hesitation, and, calling upon her seriously to consider the suffering, the privations, the anxiety, the bereavements, the ignominy, the death which would await not only those dearest to her, but herself, if the struggle should prove unsuccessful, offered her three weeks to make her decision, with true womanly magnanimity she replied: "the three weeks are already past; you will never be conquered by the strength of your enemies. make use of your resources, and bring not upon your head the blood of those who may die within three weeks. i summon you in god's name not to defraud us any more, or i shall be a witness against you at his judgment." so deep was the impression which these words made upon coligny, that, accepting his wife's advice as the voice of heaven, he took horse without further delay, and joined condé and the other protestant leaders.[ ] [sidenote: the king seized and brought to paris.] it was unfortunate that the prince, for a week after leaving paris, should have felt too feeble to make any movement of importance. otherwise, by a rapid march, he might, according to his plan,[ ] have reached fontainebleau in advance of his opponents, and, with the young king and his mother under his protection, have asserted his right as a prince of the blood to defend charles against those who had unjustly usurped the functions of royalty. as it was, the unlucky delay was turned to profit by his enemies. these now took a step that put further deliberation on catharine's part out of the question, and precluded any attempt to place the person of the king in condé's hands. leaving a small garrison in paris, guise proceeded with a strong body of troops to fontainebleau, determined to bring the king and his mother back to paris. persuasion was first employed; but, that failing, the triumvirate were prepared to resort to force. navarre, acting at guise's suggestion, at length told catharine distinctly that, as guardian of the minor king, he must see to it that he did not fall into his brother's hands; as for catharine, she might remain or follow him, as she pleased.[ ] tears and remonstrances were of no avail.[ ] weeping and sad, charles is said to have repeatedly exclaimed against being led away contrary to his will;[ ] but the triumvirs would not be balked of their game, and so brought him with his mother first to melun, then, after a few days, to the prison-like castle of vincennes, and finally to the louvre.[ ] [sidenote: the constable's exploits at the "temples."] [sidenote: d'andelot and condé throw themselves into orleans.] the critical step had been taken to demonstrate that the reign of tolerance, according to the prescriptions of the edict of january, was at an end. the constable, preceding the king to paris, immediately upon his arrival instituted a system of arbitrary arrests. on the next morning (the fourth of april) he visited the "temple of jerusalem,"[ ] one of the two places which had been accorded to the huguenots for their worship outside of the walls. under his direction the pulpit and the benches of the hearers were torn up, and a bonfire of wood and bibles was speedily lighted, to the great delight of the populace of paris. in the afternoon the same exploits were repeated at the other huguenot church, known from its situation, outside of the gate of st. antoine, as "_popincourt_." here, however, not only the benches, but the building itself was burned, and several adjacent houses were involved in the conflagration. having accomplished these outrages and encouraged the people to imitate his lawless example, the aged constable returned to the city. he had well earned the contemptuous name which the huguenots henceforth gave him of "le capitaine _brûlebanc_."[ ] if the triumvirate succeeded, it was plain that all liberty of worship was proscribed. it was even believed that the duchess of guise had been sent to carry a message, in the king's name, to her mother, the aged renée of france, to the effect that if she did not dismiss the huguenot preachers from montargis, and become a good catholic, he would have her shut up for the rest of her life in a convent.[ ] whatever truth there may have been in this story, one thing was certain: in paris it would have been as much as any man's life was worth to appear annoyed at the constable's exploit, or to oppose the search made for arms in suspected houses. every good catholic had a piece of the huguenots' benches or pulpit in his house as a souvenir; "so odious," says a contemporary, "is the new religion in this city."[ ] meantime, on easter monday (the thirtieth of march) condé left meaux at the head of fifteen hundred horse, the flower of the french nobility, "better armed with courage than with corselets"--says françois de la noue. as they approached the capital, the whole city was thrown into confusion, the gates were closed, and the chains stretched across the streets.[ ] but the host passed by, and at st. cloud crossed the seine without meeting any opposition. here the news of the seizure of the person of charles by the triumvirs first reached the prince, and with it one great object of the expedition was frustrated.[ ] the huguenots, however, did not delay, but, instead of turning toward fontainebleau, took a more southerly route directly for the city of orleans. d'andelot, to whom the van had been confided, advanced by a rapid march, and succeeded by a skilful movement in entering the city, of which he took possession in the name of the prince of condé, acting as lieutenant of the king unlawfully held in confinement. catharine de' medici, who, having been forced into the party of the triumvirs, had with her usual flexibility promptly decided to make the most of her position, sent messengers to condé hoping to amuse him with negotiations while a powerful roman catholic detachment should by another road reach orleans unobserved.[ ] but the danger coming to andelot's knowledge, he succeeded in warning condé; and the prince, with the main body of the protestant horse, after a breakneck ride, threw himself, on the second of april, into the city, which now became the headquarters of the religion in the kingdom.[ ] the inhabitants came out to meet him with every demonstration of joy, and received him between double lines of men, women, and children loudly singing the words of the french psalms, so that the whole city resounded with them.[ ] [sidenote: condé's justification.] no sooner had the prince of condé established himself upon the banks of the loire, than he took measures to explain to the world the necessity and propriety of the step upon which he had ventured. he wrote, and he induced the protestant ministers who were with him to write, to all the churches of france, urging them to send him reinforcements of troops and to fill his empty treasury.[ ] at the same time he published a "declaration" in justification of his resort to arms. he recapitulated the successive steps that revealed the violent purposes of the triumvirs--the retreat of the guises and of the constable from court, nemours's attempt to carry the duke of orleans out of the kingdom, the massacre at vassy, guise's refusal to visit the royal court and his defiant progress to the capital, the insolent conduct of montmorency and saint-andré, the pretended _royal_ council held away from the king, the detention of charles and of his mother as prisoners. and from all these circumstances he showed the inevitable inference to be that the triumvirs had for one of their chief objects the extirpation of the religion "which they call new," "either by open violence or by the change of edicts, and the renewal of the most cruel persecutions that have ever been exercised in the world." it was not party interest that had induced him to take up arms, he said, but loyalty to god, to his king, and to his native land, a desire to free charles from unlawful detention, and a purpose to insist upon the execution of the royal edicts, especially that of january, and to prevent new ministers of state from misapplying the sums raised for the payment of the national debts. he warned all lovers of peace not to be astonished at any edicts that might emanate from the royal seal so long as the king remained a prisoner, and he begged catharine to order the triumvirs to lay down their arms. if they did so, he declared that he himself, although of a rank far different from theirs, would consent to follow their example.[ ] [sidenote: stringent articles of association.] the huguenots had thrown off the shackles which a usurping party about the king endeavored to fasten upon them; but they had not renounced the restraints of law. and now, at the very commencement of a great struggle for liberty, they entered into a solemn compact to banish licentious excesses from their army. protesting the purity of their motives, they swore to strive until the king's majority to attain the objects which had united them in a common struggle; but they promised with equal fervor to watch over the morals of their associates, and to suffer nothing that was contrary to god's honor or the king's edicts, to tolerate no idolatrous or superstitious practices, no blasphemy, no uncleanness or theft, no violation of churches by private authority. they declared their intention and desire to hear the word of god preached by faithful ministers in the midst of the camps of war.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot nobles and cities.] the papal party was amazed at the opposition its extreme measures had created. in place of the timid weakling whom the triumvirate had expected, they saw a giant spring from the ground to confront them.[ ] to orleans flocked many of the highest nobles of the land. besides condé--after navarre and bourbon, the prince of the blood nearest to the crown--there were gathered to the protestant standard the three châtillons, prince porcien, count de la rochefoucauld, the sieurs de soubise, de mouy, de saint fal, d'esternay, piennes, rohan, genlis, grammont, montgomery, and others of high station and of large influence and extensive landed possessions.[ ] and, what was still more important, the capture of orleans was but the signal for a general movement throughout france. in a few weeks the huguenots, rising in their unsuspected strength, had rendered themselves masters of cities in almost every province. along the loire, beaugency, blois, tours, and angers declared for the prince of condé; in normandy, rouen, havre, dieppe, and caen; in berry and the neighboring provinces, bourges, la rochelle, poitiers; along the saône and rhône, châlons, mâcon, lyons, vienne, valence, montélimart, tournon, orange; gap and grenoble in dauphiny; almost the whole of the papal "comtât venaissin;" the vivarais; the cevennes; the greater part of languedoc and gascony, with the important cities of montauban, castres, castelnaudary, beziers, pézénas, montpellier, aiguesmortes, and nismes.[ ] in northern france alone, where the number of protestants was small, the huguenots obtained but a slight foothold.[ ] [sidenote: can iconoclasm be repressed?] in the midst of this universal movement there was one point in the compact made by the confederates at orleans, which it was found impossible to execute. how could the churches, with their altars, their statues, their pictures, their relics, their priestly vestments, be guaranteed from invasion? to the huguenot masses they were the temples and instruments of an idolatrous worship. ought christians to tolerate the existence of such abominations, even if sanctioned by the government? it was hard to draw a nice line of distinction between the overthrow of idolatry by public authority and by personal zeal. if there were any difference in the merit of the act, it was in favor of the man who vindicated the true religion at the risk of his own life. nay, the church itself had incontrovertibly given its sanction to this view by placing among the martyrs those primitive christians who had upon their own responsibility entered heathen temples and overthrown the objects of the popular devotion. in those early centuries there had been manifested the same reckless exposure of life, the same supreme contempt for the claims of art in comparison with the demands of religion. the minerva of phidias or praxiteles was no safer from the iconoclastic frenzy of the new convert from heathenism than the rude idol of a less cultivated age. the command, "thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," had not excepted from its prohibition the marvellous products of the greek chisel. it was here, therefore, that the chief insubordination of the huguenot people manifested itself--not in licentious riot, not in bloodshed, not in pillage. calvin, with his high sense of law and order, might in his letters reiterate the warnings against the irregularity which we have seen him uttering on a previous occasion;[ ] the ministers might threaten the guilty with exclusion from the ordinances of the church; condé might denounce the penalty of death. the people could not restrain themselves or be restrained. they must remove what had been a stumbling-block to them and might become a snare to others. they felt no more compunction in breaking an image or tearing in pieces a picture, than a traveller, whom a highwayman has wounded, is aware of, when he destroys the weapons dropped by his assailant in his hurried flight. indeed, they experienced a strange satisfaction in visiting upon the lifeless idol the punishment for the spiritual wrongs received at the hands of false teachers of religion.[ ] [sidenote: it bursts out at caen.] we have an illustration of the way in which the work of demolition was accomplished in events occurring about this time at caen. two or three inhabitants of this old norman city were at rouen when the churches were invaded and sacked by an over-zealous crowd of sympathizers with the "new doctrines." on their return to their native city, they began at once to urge their friends to copy the example of the provincial capital. the news reaching the ears of the magistrates of caen, these endeavored--but to no purpose, as the sequel proved--to calm the feverish pulse of the people. on a friday night (may eighth), the storm broke out, and it raged the whole of the next day. church, chapel, and monastery could testify to its violence. quaint windows of stained glass and rich old organs were dashed in pieces. saints' effigies, to employ the quaint expression of a roman catholic eye-witness, "were massacred." "so great was the damage inflicted, without any profit, that the loss was estimated at more than a hundred thousand crowns." still less excusable were the acts of vandalism which the rabble--ever ready to join in popular commotions and always throwing disgrace upon them--indulged. the beautiful tombs of william, duke of normandy and conqueror of england, and of the duchess-queen mathilda, the pride of caen, which had withstood the ravages of nearly five hundred years, were ruthlessly destroyed. the monument of bishop charles of martigny, who had been ambassador under charles the eighth and louis the twelfth, shared the same fate. the zealous roman catholic who relates these occurrences claims to have striven, although to no purpose, to rescue the ashes of the conqueror from dispersion.[ ] [sidenote: the "idol" of sainte croix.] the contagion spread even to orleans. here, as in other places where the huguenots had prevailed, there were but few of the inhabitants that had not been drawn over to the reformed faith, or at least pretended to embrace it. yet condé, in his desire to convince the world that no partisan hatred moved him, strictly prohibited the intrusion of protestants into the churches, and assured the ecclesiastics of protection so long as they chose to remain in the city. for a time, consequently, their services continued to be celebrated in the presence of the faithful few and with closed doors; but soon, their fears getting the better of their prudence, the priests and monks one by one made their retreat from the protestant capital. on the twenty-first of april, word was brought to condé that some of the churches had been broken into during the preceding night, and that the work of destruction was at that very moment going forward in others. hastening, in company with coligny and other leaders, to the spacious and imposing church of the holy rood (sainte croix), he undertook, with blows and menaces, to check the furious onslaught. seeing a huguenot soldier who had climbed aloft, and was preparing to hurl from its elevated niche one of the saints that graced the wall of the church, the prince, in the first ebullition of his anger, snatched an arquebuse from the hands of one of his followers, and aimed it at the adventurous iconoclast. the latter had seen the act, but was in no wise daunted. not desisting an instant from his pious enterprise, "sir," he cried to condé, "have patience until i shall have overthrown this idol; and then let me die, if that be your pleasure!"[ ] the huguenot soldier's fearless reply sounded the knell of many a sacred painting and statue; for the destruction was accepted as god's work rather than man's.[ ] henceforth little exertion was made to save these objects of mistaken devotion, while the greatest care was taken to prevent the robbery of the costly reliquaries and other precious possessions of the churches, of which inventories were drawn up, and which were used only at the last extremity.[ ] [sidenote: massacre of huguenots at sens.] far different in character from the bloodless "massacres" of images and pictures in cities where the huguenots gained the upper hand, were the massacres of living men wherever the papists retained their superiority. one of the most cruel and inexcusable was that which happened at sens--a city sixty-five or seventy miles toward the south-east from paris--where, on an ill-founded and malicious rumor that the reformed contemplated rising and destroying their roman catholic neighbors, the latter, at the instigation, it is said, of their archbishop, the cardinal of guise, and encouraged by the violent example of constable montmorency at paris,[ ] fell on the protestants, murdered more than a hundred of both sexes and of every age, and threw their dead bodies into the waters of the yonne.[ ] while these victims of a blind bigotry were floating on under the windows of the louvre toward the sea, condé addressed to the queen mother a letter of warm remonstrance, and called upon her to avenge the causeless murder of so many innocent men and women; expressing the fear that, if justice were denied by the king and by herself, the cry of innocent blood would reach high heaven, and god would be moved to inflict those calamities with which the unhappy realm was every day threatened.[ ] a few days before condé penned this appeal, the english ambassador had written and implored his royal mistress to seize the golden opportunity to inspirit the frightened catharine de' medici, panic-stricken by the violent measures of the roman catholic party; assuring her that "not a day passed but that the spanish ambassador, the bishop of rome, or some other papist prince's minister put terror into the queen mother's mind."[ ] but throkmorton's words and cecil's entreaties were alike powerless to induce elizabeth to improve her advantage. the opportunity was fast slipping by, and the calamities foretold by condé were coming on apace. [sidenote: disorders in provence and dauphiny.] in truth, few calamities could exceed in horror those that now befell france. in the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, above all other parts, civil war, ever prolific in evil passions, was already bearing its legitimate fruits. for several years the fertile, sunny hills of provence and dauphiny had enjoyed but little stable peace, and now both sides caught the first notes of the summons to war and hurried to the fray. towns were stormed, and their inhabitants, whether surrendering on composition or at the discretion of the conqueror, found little justice or compassion. the men were more fortunate, in being summarily put to the sword; the women were reserved for the vilest indignities, and then shared the fate of their fathers and husbands. the thirst for revenge caused the protestant leaders and soldiers to perpetrate deeds of cruelty little less revolting than those which disgraced the papal cause; but there was, at least, this to be said in their favor, that not even their enemies could accuse them of those infamous excesses of lewdness of which their opponents were notoriously guilty.[ ] their vengeance was satisfied with the lives, and did not demand the honor of the vanquished. [sidenote: the city of orange.] the little city of orange, capital of william of nassau's principality, contained a growing community of protestants, whom the prince had in vain attempted to restrain. about a year and a half before the outburst of the civil war, william the silent, then a sincere roman catholic,[ ] on receiving complaints from the pope, whose territories about avignon--the comtât venaissin--ran around three sides of the principality, had expressed himself "_marvellously sorry_ to see how those _wicked heresies_ were everywhere spreading, and that they had even penetrated into his principality of orange."[ ] and when he received tidings that the huguenots were beginning to preach, he had written to his governor and council, "to see to it by all means in the world, that no alteration be permitted in our true and ancient religion, and in no wise to consent that those wicked men should take refuge in his principality." as protestantism advanced in orange, he purposed to give instructions to use persuasion and force, "in order to remedy a disorder so pernicious to all christendom."[ ] while he was unwilling to call in french troops, lest he should prejudice his sovereign rights, he declared his desire to be authorized to employ the pontifical soldiers in the work of repression.[ ] but in spite of these restrictive measures, the reformed population increased rather than diminished, and the bishop of the city now called upon fabrizio serbelloni, a cousin of pope pius the fourth, and papal general at avignon, to assist him by driving out the protestants, who, ever since the massacre of vassy, had feared with good reason the assault of their too powerful and hostile neighbors, and had taken up arms in self-defence. they had not, however, apprehended so speedy an attack as serbelloni now made (on the fifth of june), and, taken by surprise, were able to make but a feeble resistance. the papal troops entered the city through the breach their cannon had effected. never did victorious army act more insolently or with greater inhumanity. none were spared; neither the sick on their beds, nor the poor in their asylums, nor the maimed that hobbled through the streets. those were most fortunate that were first despatched. the rest were tortured with painful wounds that prolonged their agonies till death was rather desired than dreaded, or were hurled down upon pikes and halberds, or were hung to pot-hooks and roasted in the fire, or were hacked in pieces. not a few of the women were treated with dishonor; the greater part were hung to doors and windows, and their dead bodies, stripped naked, were submitted to indignities for which the annals of warfare, except among the most ferocious savages, can scarcely supply a parallel. that the almighty might not seem to be insulted in the persons only of living creatures formed in his own image, the fresh impiety was perpetrated of derisively stuffing leaves torn from french bibles into the gaping wounds of the dead lying on this field of carnage. nor did the roman catholics of orange fare much better than their reformed neighbors. mistaken for enemies, they were massacred in the public square, where they had assembled, expecting rather to receive a reward for their services in assisting the pontifical troops to enter, than to atone for their treachery by their own death.[ ] [sidenote: françois de beaumont, baron des adrets.] but the time for revenge soon came around. the barbarous warfare initiated by the adherents of the triumvirate in dauphiny and provence bred or brought forward a leader and soldiers who did not hesitate to repay cruelty with cruelty. françois de beaumont, baron des adrets, was a merciless general, who affected to believe that rigor and strict retaliation were indispensable to remove the contempt in which the huguenots were held, and who knew how by bold movements to appear where least expected, and by vigor to multiply the apparent size of his army. attached to the reformation only from ambition, and breathing a spirit far removed from the meekness of the gospel, he soon awakened the horror of his comrades in arms, and incurred the censure of condé for his barbarities; so that, within a few months, becoming disgusted with the huguenots, he went over to the papal side, and in the second civil war was found fighting against his former associates.[ ] meantime, his brief connection with the huguenots was a blot upon their escutcheon all the more noticeable because of the prevailing purity;[ ] and the injury he inflicted upon the cause of protestantism far more than cancelled the services he rendered at lyons and elsewhere. at pierrelate he permitted his soldiers to take signal vengeance on the garrison for the recent massacre. at mornas the articles of the capitulation, by which the lives of the besieged were guaranteed, were not observed; for the protestant soldiers from orange, recognizing among them the perpetrators of the crimes which had turned their homes into a howling desert, fell upon them and were not--perhaps could not be--restrained by their leader.[ ] the fatal example of orange was but too faithfully copied, and precipitating the prisoners from the summit of a high rock became the favorite mode of execution.[ ] only one of the unfortunates, who happened to break his fall by catching hold of a wild fig-tree growing cut of the side of the cliff, was spared by his enemies.[ ] a number of the naked corpses were afterward placed in an open boat without pilot or tiller, and suffered to float down the rhône with a banner on which were written these words: "o men of avignon! permit the bearers to pass, for they have paid the toll at mornas."[ ] [sidenote: blaise de montluc.] [sidenote: massacre at toulouse.] the atrocities of des adrets and his soldiers in the east were, however, surpassed by those which blaise de montluc inflicted upon the huguenots of the west, or which took place under his sanction. his memoirs, which are among the most authentic materials for the history of the wars in which he took part, present him to us as a remorseless soldier, dead to all feelings of sympathy with human distress, glorying in having executed more huguenots than any other royal lieutenant in france,[ ] pleased to have the people call the two hangmen whom he used to take about with him his "lackeys."[ ] it is not surprising that, under the auspices of such an officer, fierce passions should have had free play. at toulouse, the seat of the most fanatical parliament in france, a notable massacre took place. even in this hot-bed of bigotry the reformed doctrines had made rapid and substantial progress, and the great body of the students in the famous law-school, as well of the municipal government, were favorable to their spread.[ ] the common people, however, were as virulent in their hostility as the parliament itself. they had never been fully reconciled to the publication of the edict of january, and had only been restrained from interference with the worship of the protestants by the authority of the government. of late the huguenots had discovered on what treacherous ground they stood. a funeral procession of theirs had been attacked, and several persons had been murdered. a massacre had been perpetrated in the city of cahors, not far distant from them. in both cases the entire authority of parliament had been exerted to shield the guilty. the huguenots, therefore, resolved to forestall disaster by throwing toulouse into the hands of condé, and succeeded so far as to introduce some companies of soldiers within the walls and to seize the "hôtel de ville." they had, however, miscalculated their strength. the roman catholics were more numerous, and after repeated conflicts they were able to demand the surrender of the building in which the protestants had intrenched themselves. destitute alike of provisions and of the means of defence, and menaced with the burning of their retreat, the latter accepted the conditions offered, and--a part on the day before pentecost, a part after the services of that sunday, one of the chief festivals of the reformed church--they retired without arms, intending to depart for more hospitable cities. scarce, however, had the last detachment left the walls, when the tocsin was sounded, and their enemies, respecting none of their promises, involved them in a horrible carnage. it was the opinion of the best informed that in all three thousand persons perished on both sides during the riot at toulouse, of whom by far the greater number were huguenots. even this effusion of blood was not sufficient. the next day montluc appeared in the city. and now, encouraged by his support, the parliament of toulouse initiated a system of judicial inquiries which were summary in their character, and rarely ended save in the condemnation of the accused. within three months two hundred persons were publicly executed. the protestant leader was quartered. the parliament vindicated its orthodoxy by the expulsion of twenty-two counsellors suspected of a leaning to the reformation; and informers were allured by bribes, as well as frightened by ecclesiastical menaces, in order that the harvest of confiscation might be the greater.[ ] such were the deeds which the roman catholics of southern france have up to our times commemorated by centenary celebrations;[ ] such the pious achievements for which blaise de montluc received from pope pius the fourth the most lavish praise as a zealous defender of the catholic faith.[ ] [sidenote: foreign alliances sought.] meanwhile, about paris and orleans the war lagged. both sides were receiving reinforcements. the ban and rear-ban were summoned in the king's name, and a large part of the levies joined condé as the royal representative in preference to navarre and the triumvirate.[ ] charles the ninth and catharine had consented to publish a declaration denying condé's allegation that they were held in duress.[ ] the guises had sent abroad to spain, to germany, to the german cantons of switzerland, to savoy, to the pope. philip, after the abundant promises with which he had encouraged the french papists to enter upon the war, was not quite sure whether he had better answer the calls now made upon him. he was by no means confident that the love of country of the french might not, after all, prove stronger than the discord engendered by their religious differences, and their hatred of the spaniard than their hatred of their political rivals.[ ] "those stirrings," writes sir thomas chaloner from spain, "have here gevyn matter of great consultation day by day to this king and counsaile. one wayes they devise howe the gwisans may be ayded and assisted by them, esteming for religion sake that the prevaylment of that syde importithe them as the ball of theire eye. another wayes they stand in a jelousie whither theis nombers thus assembled in fraunce, may not possibly shake hands, and sett upon the lowe countries or navarre, both peecs, upon confidence of the peace, now being disprovided of garisons. so ferfurthe as they here repent the revocation of the spanish bands owt of flanders.... so as in case the new bushops against the people's mynd shall need be enstalled, the frenche had never such an opertunyte as they perchauns should fynd at this instant."[ ] to the duke of würtemberg the guises had induced charles and catharine to write, throwing the blame of the civil war entirely upon condé;[ ] but christopher, this time at least, had his eyes wide open, and his reply was not only a pointed refusal to join in the general crusade against the calvinists, but a noble plea in behalf of toleration and clemency.[ ] [sidenote: queen elizabeth's aid invoked.] the huguenots, on the other hand, had rather endeavored to set themselves right in public estimation and to prepare the way for future calls for assistance, than made any present requisitions. elizabeth's ambassador, throkmorton, had been carefully instructed as to the danger that overhung his mistress with all the rest of protestant christendom. he wrote to her that the plot was a general one, including england. "it may please your majesty the papists, within these two days at sens in normandy, have slain and hurt two hundred persons--men and women. your majesty may perceive how dangerous it is to suffer papists that be of great heart and enterprise to lift up their crests so high."[ ] in another despatch he warned her of her danger. "it standeth your majesty upon, for the conservation of your realm in the good terms it is in (thanks be to god), to countenance the protestants as much as you may, until they be set afoot again, i mean in this realm; for here dependeth the great sway of that matter."[ ] [sidenote: cecil's urgency and schemes.] [sidenote: divided sympathies of the english.] cecil himself adopted the same views, and urged them upon elizabeth's attention. not succeeding in impressing her according to his wish, he resorted to extraordinary measures to compass the end. he instructed mundt, his agent in germany, to exert himself to induce the protestant princes to send "special messengers" to england and persuade elizabeth to join in "a confederacy of all parts professing the gospel." in fact, the cunning secretary of state went even farther, and dictated to mundt just what he should write to the queen. he was to tell her majesty "that if she did not attempt the furtherance of the gospel in france, and the keeping asunder of france and spain, she would be in greater peril than any other prince in christendom," for "the papist princes that sought to draw her to their parts meant her subversion"--a truth which, were she to be informed of by any of the german princes, might have a salutary effect.[ ] but the vacillating queen could not be induced as yet to take the same view, and needed the offer of some tangible advantages to move her. no wonder that elizabeth's policy halted. every occurrence across the channel was purposely misrepresented by the emissaries of philip, and the open sympathizers of the roman catholic party at the english court were almost more numerous than the hearty protestants. a few weeks later, a correspondent of throkmorton wrote to him from home: "here are daily bruits given forth by the spanish ambassador, as it is thought, far discrepant from such as i learn are sent from your lordship, and the papists have so great a voice here as they have almost as much credit, the more it is to be lamented. i have not, since i came last over, come in any company where almost the greater part have not in reasoning defended papistry, allowed the guisians' proceedings, and seemed to deface the prince's quarrel and design. how dangerous this is your lordship doth see."[ ] the swiss protestant cantons were reluctant to appear to countenance rebellion. berne sent a few ensigns to lyons at the request of the protestants of that city, but wished to limit them strictly to the defensive, and subsequently she yielded to the urgency of the guises and recalled them altogether.[ ] but as yet no effort was made by condé to call in foreign assistance. the reluctance of admiral coligny, while it did honor to the patriotism which always moved him, seems to have led him to commit a serious mistake. the admiral hoped and believed that the huguenots would prove strong enough to succeed without invoking foreign assistance; moreover, he was unwilling to set the first example of bringing in strangers to arbitrate concerning the domestic affairs of france.[ ] and, indeed, had his opponents been equally patriotic, it is not improbable that his expectation would have been realized. for, if inferior to the enemy in infantry, the huguenots, through the great preponderance of noblemen and gentlemen in their army, were at first far superior in cavalry. [sidenote: diplomatic manoeuvres.] the beaten path of diplomatic manoeuvre was first tried. four times were messengers sent to condé, in the king's name, requiring his submission. four times he responded that he could not lay down his arms until guise should have retired from court and been punished for the massacre of vassy, until the constable and saint andré should have returned to their governments, leaving the king his personal liberty, and until the edict of january should be fully re-established.[ ] these demands the opposing party were unwilling to concede. it is true that a pretence was made of granting the last point, and, on the eleventh of april, an edict, ostensibly in confirmation of that of january, was signed by charles, by the advice of catharine, the king of navarre, the cardinals of bourbon and guise, the duke of guise, the constable, and aumale. but there was a glaring contradiction between the two laws, for paris was expressly excepted from the provisions. in or around the capital no exercises of the reformed religion could be celebrated.[ ] such was the trick by which the triumvirs hoped to take the wind out of the confederates' sails. though the concession could not be accepted by the protestants, it might be alleged to show foreigners the unreasonableness of condé and his supporters. meantime, in reply to the prince's declaration as to the causes for which he had taken up arms, the adherents of guise published in their own vindication a paper, wherein they gravely asserted that, but for the duke's timely arrival, fifteen hundred huguenots, gathered from every part of the kingdom, would have entered paris, and, with the assistance of their confederates within the walls, would have plundered the city.[ ] the month of may witnessed the dreary continuation of the same state of things. on the first, condé wrote to the queen mother, reiterating his readiness to lay down the arms he had assumed in the king's defence and her's, on the same conditions as before. on the fourth, charles, catharine, and antoine replied, refusing to dismiss the guises or to restore the edict of january in reference to paris, but, at the same time, inviting the prince to return to court, and promising that, after he should have submitted, and the revolted cities should have been restored to their allegiance, the triumvirs would retire to their governments.[ ] on the same day two petitions were presented to charles. both were signed by guise, montmorency, and saint andré. in the first they prayed his majesty to interdict the exercise of every other religion save the "holy apostolic and roman," and require that all royal officers should conform to that religion or forfeit their positions; to compel the heretics to restore the churches which had been destroyed; to punish the sacrilegious; to declare rebels all who persisted in retaining arms without permission of the king of navarre. under these conditions they would consent, they said, to leave france--nay, to go to the ends of the world. in the second petition they demanded the submission of the confederates of orleans, the restitution of the places which had been seized, the exaction of an oath to observe the royal edicts, both new and old, and the enforcement of the sole command of navarre over the french armies.[ ] [sidenote: condé's reply to the pretended petition.] condé's reply (may twentieth) was the most bitter, as well as the ablest and most vigorous paper of the initiatory stage of the war. it well deserves a careful examination. the pretended _petition_, louis of bourbon wrote to the queen mother, any one can see, even upon a cursory perusal, to be in effect nothing else than a _decree_ concocted by the duke of guise, constable montmorency, and marshal saint andré, with the assistance of the papal legate and nuncio and the ministers of foreign states. ambition, not zeal for the faith, is the motive. in order to have their own way, not only do the signers refuse to have a prince of the blood near the monarch, but they intend removing and punishing all the worthy members of the royal privy council, beginning with michel de l'hospital, the chancellor. in point of fact, they have already made a ridiculous appointment of six new counsellors. the queen mother is to be banished to chenonceaux, there to spend her time in laying out her gardens. la roche-sur-yon will be sent elsewhere. new instructors are to be placed around the king to teach him riding, jousting, the art of love--anything, in short, to divert his mind from religion and the art of reigning well. the conspiracy is more dangerous than the conspiracy of sulla or cæsar, or that of the roman triumvirs. its authors point to their titles, and allege the benefits they have conferred; but their boasts may easily be answered by pointing to their insatiable avarice, and to the princely revenues they have accumulated during their long connection with the public administration. they speak of the present dangerous state of the country. what was it before the massacre of vassy? after the publication of the edict of january universal peace prevailed. that peace these very petitioners disturbed. what means the coalition of the constable and marshal saint andré? what mean the barbarities lately committed in paris, but that the peace was to be broken by violent means? as to the obedience the petitioners profess to exhibit to the queen, they showed her open contempt when they refused to go to the provinces which they governed under the king's orders; when they came to the capital contrary to her express direction, and that in arms; when by force they dragged the king, her son, and herself from fontainebleau to the louvre. they have accused the huguenots of treating the king as a prisoner, because these desire that the decree drawn up by the advice of the three estates of the realm should be made irrevocable until the majority of charles the ninth; but how was it when three persons, of whom one is a foreigner and the other two are servants of the crown, dictate a _new_ edict, and wish that edict to be absolutely irrevocable? there is no need of lugging the roman catholic religion into the discussion, and undertaking its defence, for no one has thought of attacking it. the demand made by the petitioners for a compulsory subscription to certain articles of theirs is in opposition to immemorial usage; for no subscription has ever been exacted save to the creed of the apostles. it is a second edict, and in truth nothing else than the introduction of that hateful spanish inquisition. ten thousand nobles and a hundred thousand soldiers will not be compelled either by force or by authority to affix their signatures to it. but, to talk of enforcing submission to a roman catholic confession is idle, so long as the duke of guise and the cardinal of lorraine do not retract their own adhesion to the augsburg confession lately given in with such protestations to a german prince. the charge of countenancing the breaking of images the prince would answer by pointing to the penalties he has inflicted in order to repress the irregularity. and yet, if it come to the true desert of punishment, what retribution ought not to be meted out for the crimes perpetrated by the petitioners, or under their auspices and after their examples, at vassy, at sens, at paris, at toulouse, and in so many other places? for the author of the petition should have remembered that it is nowhere written that a dead image ever cried for vengeance; but the blood of man--god's living image--demands it of heaven, and draws it down, though it tarry long. as for the accusation brought against condé and the best part of the french nobility, that they are rebels, the prince hopes soon to meet his accusers in the open field and there decide the question whether a foreigner and two others of such a station as they are shall undertake to judge a prince of the blood. to allege navarre's authority comes with ill-grace from men who wronged that king so openly during the late reign of francis the second. finally, the prince of condé would set over against the petition of the triumvirate, one of his own, containing for its principal articles that the edict of january, which his enemies seek to overturn, shall be observed inviolate; that all the king's subjects of every order and condition shall be maintained in their rights and privileges; that the professors of the reformed faith shall be protected until the majority of charles; that arms shall be laid down on either side; above all, that _foreign_ arms, which he himself, so far from inviting to france, has, up to the present moment, steadfastly declined when voluntarily offered, and which he will never resort to unless compelled by his enemies, shall be banished from the kingdom.[ ] [sidenote: third national synod.] while the clouds of war were thus gathering thick around orleans, within its walls a synod of the reformed churches of france had assembled on the twenty-fifth of april, to deliberate of matters relating to their religious interests. important questions of discipline were discussed and settled, and a day of public fasting and prayer was appointed in view of the danger of a declared civil war.[ ] [sidenote: interview of catharine and condé.] the actual war was fast approaching. the army of the guises, under the nominal command of the king of navarre, was now ready to march in the direction of orleans. before setting out, however, the triumvirs resolved to make sure of their hold upon the capital, and royal edicts (of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of may) were obtained ordering the expulsion from paris of all known protestants.[ ] then, with an army of four thousand foot and three thousand horse, the king of navarre marched toward the city of châteaudun.[ ] on hearing of the movement of his brother's forces, the prince of condé advanced to meet him at the head of six thousand foot and two thousand horse. there were those, however, who still believed it to be possible to avert a collision and settle the matters in dispute by amicable discussion. of this number was catharine de' medici. hastily leaving the castle of vincennes, she hurried to the front, and at the little town of toury, between the two armies, she brought about an interview between condé, the king of navarre, and herself. such was the imbittered feeling supposed to animate both sides, that the escorts of the two princes had been strictly enjoined to avoid approaching each other, lest they should be tempted to indulge in insulting remarks, and from these come to blows. but, to the great surprise of all, they had no sooner met than papist and huguenot rushed into each other's arms and embraced as friends long separated. while the principals were discussing the terms of union, their followers had already expressed by action the accord reigning in their hearts, and the white cloaks of condé's attendants were to be seen indiscriminately mingled with the crimson cloaks of his brother's escort. yet, after all, the interview came to nothing. neither side could accept the only terms the other would offer, and catharine returned disappointed to paris, to be greeted by the populace with the most insulting language for imperilling the orthodoxy of the kingdom.[ ] not, however, altogether despairing of effecting a reconciliation, condé addressed a letter to the king of navarre, entreating him, before it should be too late, to listen to his brotherly arguments. the answer came in a new summons to lay down his arms.[ ] [sidenote: the "loan" of beaugency.] yet, while they had no desire for a reconciliation on any such terms as the huguenots could accept, there were some substantial advantages which the roman catholic leaders hoped to reap under cover of fresh negotiations. all the portion of the valley of the loire lying nearest to paris was in the hands of the confederates of orleans. it was impossible for navarre to reach the southern bank, except by crossing below amboise, and thus exposing the communications of his army with paris to be cut off at any moment. to attain his end with less difficulty, antoine now sent word to his brother that he was disposed to conclude a peace, and proposed a truce of six days. meanwhile, he requested condé to gratify him by the "loan" of the town of beaugency, a few miles below orleans, where he might be more comfortably lodged than in his present inconvenient quarters. the request was certainly sufficiently novel, but that it was granted by condé may appear even more strange. [sidenote: futile negotiations.] this was not the only act of folly in which the huguenot leaders became involved. under pretence of showing their readiness to contribute their utmost to the re-establishment of peace, the constable, guise, and saint andré, after obtaining a declaration from catharine and antoine that their voluntary retreat would do no prejudice to their honor,[ ] retired from the royal court, but went no farther than the neighboring city of châteaudun. the prince of condé, swallowing the bait, did not hesitate a moment to place himself, the very next day, in the hands of the queen mother and his brother, and was led more like a captive than a freeman from beaugency to talsy, where catharine was staying. becoming alarmed, however, at his isolated situation, he wrote to his comrades in arms, and within a few hours so goodly a company of knights appeared, with coligny, andelot, prince porcien, la rochefoucauld, rohan, and other distinguished nobles at their head, that any treacherous plans that may have been entertained by the wily italian princess were rendered entirely futile. she resolved, therefore, to entrap them by soft speeches. with that utter disregard for consistency so characteristic both of her actions and of her words, catharine publicly[ ] thanked the huguenot lords for the services they had rendered the king, who would never cease to be grateful to them, and recognized, for her own part, that her son and she herself owed to them the preservation of their lives. but, after this flattering preamble, she proceeded to make the unpalatable proposition that they should consent to the repeal of the edict so far as paris was concerned, under the guarantee of personal liberty, but without permission to hold public religious worship. the prince and his associates could listen to no such terms. indeed, carried away by the fervor of their zeal, they protested that, rather than surrender the rights of their brethren, they would leave the kingdom. "we shall willingly go into exile," they said, "if our absence will conduce to the restoration of public tranquillity." this assurance was just what catharine had been awaiting. to the infinite surprise of the speakers themselves, she told them that she appreciated their disinterested motives, and accepted their offer; that they should have safe-conducts to whatever land they desired to visit, with full liberty to sell their goods and to receive their incomes; but that their voluntary retirement would last only until the king's majority, which would be declared so soon as he had completed his fourteenth year![ ] it needs scarcely be said that, awkward as was the predicament in which they had placed themselves, the prince and his companions had little disposition to follow out catharine's plan. on their return to the protestant camp, the clamor of the soldiers against any further exposure of the person of their leader to peril, and the opportune publication of an intercepted letter said to have been written by the duke of guise to his brother, the cardinal of lorraine, on the eve of his departure for châteaudun, and disclosing treacherous designs,[ ] decided the huguenot leaders to break off the negotiations.[ ] the long period of comparative inaction was now succeeded by a spasmodic effort at energetic conduct. the six days' truce had scarcely expired when the prince resolved to throw himself unexpectedly upon the neighboring camp of the roman catholics, before montmorency, guise, and saint andré had resumed their accustomed posts. one of those nocturnal attacks, which, under the name of _camisades_, figure so frequently in the military history of the period, was secretly organized, and the protestant soldiers, wearing white shirts over their armor, in order that they might easily recognize each other in the darkness of the night, started with alacrity, under d'andelot's command, on the exciting adventure. but their guides were treacherous, or unskilful, and the enterprise came to naught.[ ] disappointed in this attempt, and unable to force the enemy to give battle, condé turned his attention to beaugency, which the king of navarre had failed to restore, and carried it by storm. he would gladly have followed up the advantage by laying siege to blois and tours, which the triumvirate had taken and treated with the utmost cruelty; but heavy rains, and the impossibility of carrying on military operations on account of the depth of the mud, compelled him to relinquish his project, and reduced the main army to renewed inactivity.[ ] the protracted delays and inexcusable sluggishness of the leaders had borne their natural fruits. many of the protestant gentlemen had left the camp in disgust at the mistakes committed; others had retired to their homes on hearing that their families were exposed to the dangers of war and stood in need of their protection; a few had been corrupted by the arts of the enemy. for it was a circumstance often noticed by contemporaries, that no envoy was ever sent from orleans to the court who did not return, if not demoralized, yet so lukewarm as to be incapable of performing any good service in future.[ ] yet the dispersion of the higher rank of the reformed soldiers, and the consequent weakening of condé's army in cavalry, were attended with this incidental advantage, that they contributed greatly to the strengthening of the party in the provinces, and necessitated a similar division of the opposing forces.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot discipline.] never, perhaps, was there an army that exhibited such excellent discipline as did the army of the protestants in this the first stage of its warfare. never had the morals and religion of soldiers been better cared for. it was the testimony of a soldier, one of the most accomplished and philosophical writers of his times--the brave "bras de fer"--that the preaching of the gospel was the great instrument of imbuing the army with the spirit of order. crimes, he tells us, were promptly revealed; no blasphemy was heard throughout the camp, for it was universally frowned upon. the very implements of gambling--dice and cards--were banished. there were no lewd women among the camp-followers. thefts were unfrequent and vigorously punished. a couple of soldiers were hung for having robbed a peasant of a small quantity of wine.[ ] public prayers were said morning and evening; and, instead of profane or indelicate songs, nothing was heard but the psalms of david. such were the admirable fruits of the careful discipline of admiral coligny, the true leader of the protestant party; and they made a deep impression upon such enthusiastic youths as françois de la noue and téligny. their more experienced author, however, was not imposed upon by these flattering signs. "it is a very fine thing," he told them, "if only it last; but i much fear that these people will spend all their goodness at the outset, and that, two months hence, nothing will remain but malice. i have long commanded infantry, and i know that it often verifies the proverb which says: '_of a young hermit, an old devil!_' if this army does not, we shall give it a good mark."[ ] the prediction was speedily realized; for, although the army of the prince never sought to rival the papal troops in the extent of its license, the standard of soldierly morality was far below that which coligny had desired to establish.[ ] [sidenote: severities of the parliament.] so far as cruelty was concerned, everything in the conduct of their antagonists was calculated to provoke the protestants to bitter retaliation. the army of guise was merciless. if the infuriated huguenots selected the priests that fell into their hands for the especial monuments of their retribution, it was because the priesthood as a body had become the instigators of savage barbarity, instead of being the ministers of peace; because when they did not, like ronsard the poet, themselves buckle on the sword, or revel in blood, like the monks of saint calais,[ ] they still fanned, as they had for years been fanning, the flame of civil war, denouncing toleration or compromise, wielding the weapons of the church to enforce the pious duty of exterminating every foul calumny invented to the disadvantage of the reformers. no wonder, then, that the ecclesiastical dress itself became the badge of deadly and irreconcilable hostility, and that in the course of this unhappy war many a priest was cut down without any examination into his private views or personal history. parliament, too, was setting the example of cruelty by reckless orders amounting almost to independent legislation. by a series of "arrêts" succeeding each other rapidly in the months of june and july, the door was opened wider and wider for popular excess. when the churches of meaux were visited by an iconoclastic rabble on the twenty-sixth of june, the parisian parliament, on the thirtieth of june, employed the disorder as the pretext of a judicial "declaration" that made the culprits liable to all the penalties of treason, and permitted any one to put them to death without further authorization. the populace of paris needed no fuller powers to attack the huguenots, for, within two or three days, sixty men and women had been killed, robbed, and thrown into the river. parliament, therefore, found it convenient to terminate the massacre by a second order restricting the application of the declaration to persons taken in the very act.[ ] a few days later (july, ), other arrêts empowered all inhabitants of towns and villages to take up arms against those who molested priests, sacked churches, or "held conventicles and unlawful assemblies," whether public or secret; and to arrest the ministers, deacons, and other ecclesiastical functionaries for trial, as guilty of treason against god as well as man.[ ] not content with these appeals to popular passion,[ ] however, the parisian judges soon gave practical exemplifications of their intolerant principles; for two royal officers--the "lieutenant general" of pontoise, and the "lieutenant" of senlis--were publicly hung; the former for encouraging the preaching of god's word "in other form than the ancient church" authorized, the latter for "celebrating the lord's supper according to the genevese fashion." these were, according to the curate of st. barthélemi, the first executions at paris for the simple profession of "huguenoterie" since the pardon proclaimed by francis the second at amboise.[ ] a few days later, a new and more explicit declaration pronounced all those who had taken up arms, robbed churches and monasteries, and committed other sacrilegious acts at orleans, lyons, rouen, and various other cities mentioned by name, to be rebels, and deprived them of all their offices. yet, by way of retaliation upon condé for maintaining that he had entered upon the war in order to defend the persons of the king and his mother, unjustly deprived of their liberty, parliament pretended to regard the prince himself as an unwilling captive in the hands of the confederates; and, consequently, excepted him alone from the general attainder.[ ] but the legal fiction does not seem to have been attended with the great success its projectors anticipated.[ ] the people could scarcely credit the statement that the war was waged by the guises simply for the liberation of their mortal enemy, condé, especially when condé himself indignantly repelled the attempt to separate him from the associates with whom he had entered into common engagements, not to add that the reputation of the lorraine family, whose mouthpiece parliament might well be supposed to be, was not over good for strict adherence to truth. meanwhile the triumvirs were more successful in their military operations than the partisans of the prince. their auxiliaries came in more promptly, for the step which condé now saw himself forced to take, in consequence of his opponents' course, they had long since resolved upon. they had received reinforcements from germany, both of infantry and cavalry, under command of the rhinegrave philip of salm and the count of rockendorf; while condé had succeeded in detaching but few of the lutheran troopers by a manifesto in which he endeavored to explain the true nature of the struggle. soldiers from the roman catholic cantons had been allowed a free passage through the spanish franche-comté by the regent of the low countries, margaret of parma. the pope himself contributed liberally to the supply of money for paying the troops.[ ] but the protestant reinforcements from the palatinate and zweibrücken (deux-ponts), and from hesse, which d'andelot, and, after him, gaspard de schomberg, had gone to hasten, were not yet ready; while elizabeth still hesitated to listen to the solicitations of briquemault and robert stuart, the scotchman, who had been successively sent to her court.[ ] [sidenote: military successes of the triumvirs.] [sidenote: fall of bourges.] after effecting the important capture of the city of poitiers, marshal saint andré, at the head of a roman catholic army, had marched, about the middle of august, toward bourges, perhaps the most important place held by the protestants in central france. beneath the walls of this city he joined the main army, under navarre's nominal command, but really led by the duke of guise. the siege was pressed with vigor, for the king was present in person with the "guisards." to the handful of huguenots their assailants appeared to be "a marvellous army of french, germans, reiters, spaniards, and other nations, numbering in all eighty or a hundred thousand men, with the bravest cavalry that could be seen."[ ] and, when twenty or twenty-five cannon opened upon bourges with balls of forty or fifty pounds' weight, and when six hundred and forty discharges were counted on a single day, and every building in the town was shaken to its very foundations, the besieged, numbering only a few hundred men, would have been excusable had they lost heart. instead of this, they obstinately defended their works, repaired the breach by night, and inflicted severe injury on the enemy by nocturnal sallies. to add to the duke's embarrassment, admiral coligny, issuing from orleans, was fortunate enough to cut off an important convoy of provisions and ammunition coming from paris to the relief of the besiegers.[ ] despairing of taking the city by force, they now turned to negotiation. unhappily, m. d'ivoy, in command of the huguenot garrison, was not proof against the seductive offers made him. disregarding the remonstrances of his companions in arms, who pointed to the fact that the enemy had from day to day, through discouragement or from sheer exhaustion, relaxed their assaults, he consented (on the thirty-first of august) to surrender bourges to the army that had so long thundered at its gates. d'ivoy returned to orleans, but condé, accusing him of open perfidy, refused to see him; while the protestants of bourges shared the usual fate of those who trusted the promises of the roman catholic leaders, and secured few of the religious privileges guaranteed by the articles of capitulation.[ ] with the fall of bourges, the whole of central france, as far as to the gates of orleans, yielded to the arms of guise. everywhere the wretched inhabitants of the reformed faith were compelled to submit to gross indignities, or seek safety in flight. to many of these homeless fugitives the friendly castle of montargis, belonging to the duchess of ferrara, to which reference will shortly be made, afforded a welcome refuge.[ ] [sidenote: help from queen elizabeth.] the necessity of obtaining immediate reinforcements had at length brought condé and the other great huguenot lords to acquiesce in the offer of the only terms upon which elizabeth of england could be persuaded to grant them actual support. as the indispensable condition to her interference, she demanded that the cities of havre and dieppe should be placed in her hands. these would be a pledge for the restoration of calais, that old english stronghold which had fallen into the power of the french during the last war, and for whose restoration within eight years there had been an express stipulation in the treaties cateau-cambrésis. this humiliating concession the huguenots reluctantly agreed to make. elizabeth in turn promised to send six thousand english troops (three thousand to guard each of the cities), who should serve under the command of condé as the royal lieutenant, and pledged her word to lend the prince and his associates one hundred and forty thousand crowns toward defraying the expenses of the war.[ ] on the twentieth of september the queen of england published to the world a declaration of the motives that led her to interfere, alleging in particular the usurpation of the royal authority by the guises, and the consequent danger impending over the protestants of normandy through the violence of the duke of aumale.[ ] the tidings of the alliance and of some of its conditions had already reached france, and they rather damaged than furthered the protestant cause. as the english queen's selfish determination to confine her assistance to the protection of the three cities became known, it alarmed even her warmest friends among the french protestants. condé and coligny earnestly begged the queen's ambassador to tell his mistress that "in case her majesty were introduced by their means into havre, dieppe, and rouen with six thousand men, only to keep those places, it would be unto them a great note of infamy." they would seem wantonly to have exposed to a foreign prince the very flower of normandy, in giving into her hands cities which they felt themselves quite able to defend without assistance. so clearly did throkmorton foresee the disastrous consequences of this course, that, even at the risk of offending the queen by his presumption, he took the liberty to warn her that if she suffered the protestants of france to succumb, with minds so alienated from her that they should consent to make an accord with the opposite faction, the possession of the cities would avail her but little against the united forces of the french. he therefore suggested that it might be quite as well for her majesty's interests, "that she should serve the turn of the huguenots as well as her own."[ ] truly, queen elizabeth was throwing away a glorious opportunity of displaying magnanimous disinterestedness, and of conciliating the affection of a powerful party on the continent. in the inevitable struggle between protestant england and papal spain, the possession of such an ally as the best part of france would be of inestimable value in abridging the contest or in deciding the result. but the affection of the huguenots could be secured by no such cold-blooded compact as that which required them to appear in the light of an unpatriotic party whose success would entail the dismemberment of the kingdom. to make such a demand at the very moment when her own ambassador was writing from paris that the people "did daily most cruelly use and kill every person, no age or sex excepted, that they took to be contrary to their religion," was to show but too clearly that not religious zeal nor philanthropic tenderness of heart, so much as pure selfishness, was the motive influencing her.[ ] and yet the english queen was not uninformed of, nor wholly insensible to, the calls of humanity. she could in fact, on occasion, herself set them forth with force and pathos. nothing could surpass the sympathy expressed in her autograph letter to mary of scots, deprecating the resentment of the latter at elizabeth's interference--a letter which, as mr. froude notices, was not written by cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. "far sooner," she wrote, "would i pass over those murders on land; far rather would i leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers--those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child--the cries of the infants at their mothers' breasts--pierce me through. what drug of rhubarb can purge the bile which these tyrannies engender?"[ ] the news of the english alliance, although not unexpected, produced a very natural irritation at the french court. when throkmorton applied to catharine de' medici for a passport to leave the kingdom, the queen persistently refused, telling him that such a document was unnecessary in his case. but she significantly volunteered the information that "some of his nation had lately entered france without asking for passports, who she hoped would speedily return without leave-taking!"[ ] [sidenote: siege of rouen, october.] meanwhile the english movement rather accelerated than retarded the operations of the royal army. after the fall of bourges, there had been a difference of opinion in the council whether orleans or rouen ought first to be attacked. orleans was the centre of huguenot activity, the heart from which the currents of life flowed to the farthest extremities of gascony and languedoc; but it was strongly fortified, and would be defended by a large and intrepid garrison. a siege was more likely to terminate disastrously to the assailants than to the citizens and protestant troops. the admiral laughed at the attempt to attack a city which could throw three thousand men into the breach.[ ] rouen, on the contrary, was weak, and, if attacked before reinforcements were received from england, but feebly garrisoned. yet it was the key of the valley of the seine, and its possession by the huguenots was a perpetual menace of the capital.[ ] so long as it was in their hands, the door to the heart of the kingdom lay wide open to the united army of french and english protestants. very wisely, therefore, the roman catholic generals abandoned their original design[ ] of reducing orleans so soon as bourges should fall, and resolved first to lay siege to rouen. great reason, indeed, had the captors of such strongholds as marienbourg, calais, and thionville, to anticipate that a place so badly protected, so easily commanded, and destitute of any fortification deserving the name, would yield on the first alarm.[ ] it was true that a series of attacks made by the duke of aumale upon fort st. catharine, the citadel of rouen, had been signally repulsed, and that, after two weeks of fighting, on the twelfth of july he had abandoned the undertaking.[ ] but, with the more abundant resources at their command, a better result might now be expected. siege was, therefore, a second time laid, on the twenty-ninth of september, by the king of navarre. the forces on the two sides were disproportionate. navarre, montmorency, and guise were at the head of sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, in addition to a considerable number of german mercenaries. montgomery,[ ] who commanded the protestants, had barely eight hundred trained soldiers.[ ] the rest of the scanty garrison was composed of those of the citizens who were capable of bearing arms, to the number of perhaps four thousand more. but this handful of men instituted a stout resistance. after frequently repulsing the assailants, the double fort of st. catharine, situated near the seine, on the east of the city, and rouen's chief defence, was taken rather by surprise than by force. yet, after this unfortunate loss, the brave huguenots fought only with the greater desperation. their numbers had been reinforced by the accession of some five hundred englishmen of the first detachment of troops which had landed at havre on the third of october, and whom sir adrian poynings had assumed the responsibility of sending to the relief of the beleaguered capital of normandy.[ ] with killigrew of pendennis for their captain, they had taken advantage of a high tide to pass the obstructions of boats filled with stone and sand that had been sunk in the river opposite caudebec, and, with the exception of the crew of one barge that ran ashore, and eleven of whom were hung by the roman catholics, "for having entered the service of the huguenots contrary to the will of the queen of england," they succeeded in reaching rouen.[ ] these, however, were not the only auxiliaries upon whom the huguenot chief could count. the women were inspired with a courage that equalled, and a determination that surpassed, that of their husbands and brothers. they undertook the most arduous labors; they fought side by side on the walls; they helped to repair at night the breaches which the enemy's cannon had made during the day; and after one of the most sanguinary conflicts during the siege, it was found that there were more women killed and wounded than men. yet the courage of the huguenots sustained them throughout the unequal struggle. frequently summoned to surrender, the rouenese would listen to no terms that included a loss of their religious liberty. rather than submit to the usurpation of the guises, they preferred to fall with arms in their hands.[ ] for fall they must. d'andelot was on his way with the troops he had laboriously collected in germany; another band of three thousand englishmen was only detained by the adverse winds; condé himself was reported on his way northward to raise the siege--but none could arrive in time. the king of navarre had been severely wounded in the shoulder, but guise and the constable pressed the city with no less decision. at last the walls on the side of the suburbs of st. hilaire and martainville were breached by the overwhelming fire of the enemy. the population of rouen and its motley garrison, reduced in numbers, worn out with toils and vigils, and disheartened by a combat which ceased on one day only to be renewed under less favorable circumstances on the next, were no longer able to continue their heroic and almost superhuman exertions. [sidenote: fall of rouen.] [sidenote: the norman parliament.] on monday, the twenty-sixth of october, the army of the triumvirate forced its way over the rubbish into rouen, and the richest city of france, outside of paris, fell an unresisting prey to the cupidity of an insubordinate soldiery. rarely had so tempting a prize fallen into the hands of a conquering army; rarely were the exactions of war more remorsely inflicted.[ ] but the barbarities of a licentious army were exceeded in atrocity by the cooler deliberations of the norman parliament. that supreme court, always inimical to the protestants, had retired to the neighboring city of louviers, in order to maintain itself free from huguenot influence. it now returned to rouen and exercised a sanguinary revenge. augustin marlorat, one of the most distinguished among the reformed ministers of france, and the most prominent pastor of the church of rouen, had been thrown into prison; he was now brought before the parliament, and with others was sentenced to death as a traitor and a disturber of the public repose, then dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution and ignominiously hung.[ ] the ferocity of the norman parliament alarming the queen mother, she interfered to secure the observance of the edict of amnesty she had recently prepared. but serious results followed in the case of two prominent partisans of guise who had fallen into condé's hands, and were in prison when the tidings reached orleans. on the recommendation of his council, the prince retaliated by sending to the gallows jean baptiste sapin, a member of the parisian parliament, and the abbé de gastines, who had been captured while travelling in company with an envoy whom the court were sending to spain.[ ] [sidenote: death of antoine de bourbon, king of navarre.] the fall of rouen was followed within a few weeks by the death of the king of navarre. his painful wound was not, perhaps, necessarily mortal, but the restless and vainglorious prince would not remain quiet and allow it to heal. he insisted on being borne in a litter through the breach into the city which had been taken under his nominal command. it was a sort of triumphal procession, marching to the sound of cymbals, and with other marks of victory. but the idle pageant only increased the inflammation in his shoulder. even in his sick-room he allowed himself no time for serious thought; but, prating of the orange-groves of sardinia which he was to receive from the king of spain, and toying with rouhet, the beautiful maid of honor by whom catharine had drawn him into her net, he frittered away the brief remnant of an ignoble life. when visibly approaching his end, he is said, at the suggestion of an italian physician, to have confessed himself to a priest, and to have received the last sacraments of the romish church. yet, with characteristic vacillation he listened, but a few hours later, with attention and apparent devoutness, to the reading of god's word, and answered the remonstrances of his faithful huguenot physician by the assurance that, if he recovered his health, he would openly espouse the augsburg confession, and cause the pure gospel to be preached everywhere throughout france.[ ] his death occurred on the seventeenth of november, , at les andelys, a village on the seine. he had insisted, contrary to his friends' advice, upon being taken by boat from rouen to st. maur-des-fossés, where, within a couple of leagues of paris, he hoped to breathe a purer air; but death overtook him before he had completed half his journey.[ ] had antoine embraced with sincerity and steadfastly maintained either of the two phases of religious belief which divided between them the whole of western christendom, his death would have left a void which could have been filled with difficulty. he was the first prince of the blood, and entitled to the regency. his appearance was prepossessing, his manners courteous. he was esteemed a capable general, and was certainly not destitute of administrative ability. if, with hearty devotion, he had given himself to the reformed views, the authority of his great name and eminent position might have secured for their adherents, if not triumph, at least toleration and quiet. but two capital weaknesses ruined his entire course. the love of empty glory blinded him to his true interests; and the love of sensual pleasure made him an easy dupe. he was robbed of his legitimate claims to the first rank in france by the promise of a shadowy sceptre in some distant region, which every sensible statesman of his time knew from the first that philip the second never had entertained the slightest intention of conferring; while, by the siren voices of her fair maids of honor, catharine de' medici was always sure of being able to lure him on to the most humiliating concessions. deceived by the emissaries of the spanish king and the italian queen mother, antoine would have been an object rather of pity than of disgust, had he not himself played false to the friends who supported him. as it was, he passed off the stage, and scarcely left a single person to regret his departure. huguenots and papists were alike gratified when the world was relieved of so signal an example of inconstancy and perfidy.[ ] antoine left behind him his wife, the eminent jeanne d'albret, and two children--a son, the prince of béarn, soon to appear in history as the leader of the huguenot party, and, on the extinction of the valois line, to succeed to the throne as henry the fourth; and a daughter, catharine, who inherited all her mother's signal virtues. the widow and her children were, at the time of antoine's death, in jeanne's dominions on the northern slopes of the pyrenees, whither they had retired when he had first openly gone over to the side of the guises. there, in the midst of her own subjects, the queen of navarre was studying, more intelligently than any other monarch of her age, the true welfare of her people, while training her son in those principles upon which she hoped to see him lay the foundations of a great and glorious career. [sidenote: the english in havre.] the sagacity of the enemy had been well exhibited in the vigor with which they had pressed the siege of rouen. condé, with barely seven thousand men, had several weeks before shut himself up in orleans, after despatching the few troops at his disposal for the relief of bourges and rouen, and could do nothing beyond making his own position secure, while impatiently awaiting the long-expected reinforcements from england and germany.[ ] the dilatoriness that marked the entire conduct of the war up to this time had borne its natural fruit in the gradual diminution and dispersion of his forces, in the loss of one important city after another, and almost of entire provinces, and, worst of all, in the discouragement pervading all classes of the huguenot population.[ ] now, however, he was on the eve of obtaining relief. two days after the fall of rouen, on the twenty-eighth of october, a second detachment of the english fleet succeeded in overcoming the contrary winds that had detained them ten days in crossing the channel, and landed three thousand troops at the port of havre.[ ] d'andelot had finally been able to gather up his german "reiters" and "lansquenets,"[ ] and was making a brilliant march through alsace, lorraine, burgundy, and champagne, skilfully avoiding the enemy's forces sent out to watch and intercept him.[ ] on the sixth of november, he presented himself before the gates of orleans, and was received with lively enthusiasm by the prince and his small army.[ ] now at length, on the seventh of november, condé could leave the walls which for seven months had sheltered him in almost complete inaction, and within which a frightful pestilence had been making havoc among the flower of the chivalry of france; for, whilst fire and sword were everywhere laying waste the country, heaven had sent a subtle and still more destructive foe to decimate the wretched inhabitants. orleans had not escaped the scourge. the city was crowded with refugees from paris and from the whole valley of the loire. among these strangers, as well as among the citizens, death found many victims. in a few months it was believed that ten thousand persons perished in orleans alone; while in paris, where the disease raged more than an entire year, the number of deaths was much larger.[ ] [sidenote: condé takes the field.] with the four thousand lansquenets and the three thousand reiters brought him from germany,[ ] condé was able to leave a force, under command of d'andelot, sufficient to defend the city of orleans, and himself to take the field with an army of about fifteen thousand men.[ ] "our enemies," he said, "have inflicted two great losses upon us in taking our castles"--meaning bourges and rouen--"but i hope that now we shall have their knights, if they move out upon the board."[ ] as he was leaving orleans, he was waited upon by a deputation of fifty reformed ministers, who urged him to look well to the discipline and purity of the army. they begged him, by salutary punishment, to banish from the camp theft and rapine, and, above all, that more insidious and heaven-provoking sin of licentiousness, which, creeping in, had doubtless drawn down upon the cause such marked signs of the lord's displeasure, that, of all the congregations in france, only the churches of a few islands on the coasts, and the churches of montauban, havre, orleans, lyons, and of the cities of languedoc[ ] and dauphiny, continued to rear their heads through the storm that had prostrated all the rest; and, to this end, they warned him by no means to neglect to afford his soldiers upon the march the same opportunities of hearing god's word and of public prayer which they had enjoyed in orleans.[ ] the huguenot army directed its course northward, and the different divisions united under the walls of pluviers, or pithiviers, a weak place, which surrendered after six hours of cannonading, with little loss to the besieging party. the greater part of the garrison was dismissed unharmed, after having been compelled to give up its weapons. two of the officers, as guilty of flagrant breach of faith and other crimes, were summarily hung.[ ] and here the huguenot cause was stained by an act of cruelty for which no sufficient excuse can be found. several roman catholic priests, detected, in spite of their disguise, among the prisoners, were put to death, without other pretext save that they had been the chief instigators of the resistance which the town had offered. unhappily, the huguenot regarded the priest, and the roman catholic the reformed minister, as the guilty cause of the civil war, and thought it right to vent upon his head the vengeance which his own religion should have taught him to leave to the righteous retribution of a just god. after the fall of pithiviers, no resistance was attempted by Étampes and other slightly garrisoned places of the neighborhood, the soldiers and the clergy taking refuge, before the approach of the army, in the capital. [sidenote: the prince appears before paris.] the prince was now master of the country to the very gates of paris, and it was the opinion of many, including among them the reformer, beza, that the city itself might be captured by a sudden advance, and the war thus ended at a blow.[ ] they therefore recommended that, without delay, the army should hasten forward and attack the terrified inhabitants before guise and the constable should have time to bring the army and the king back from normandy, where they still lingered. the view was so plausible, indeed, that it was adopted by most of the reformed historians, and, being indorsed by later writers, has caused the failure to march directly against the capital to be regarded as a signal error of condé in this campaign. but it would certainly appear hazardous to adopt this conclusion in the face of the most skilful strategists of the age. it has already been seen that françois de la noue, one of the ablest generals of whom the huguenots could ever boast, regarded the idea of capturing paris at the beginning of the struggle, with the comparatively insignificant forces which the prince could bring to the undertaking, as the most chimerical that could be entertained. was it less absurd now, when, if the protestant army had received large accessions, the walls of paris could certainly be held by the citizens for a few days, until an army of fully equal size, under experienced leaders, could be recalled from the lower seine? such, at least, was the conclusion at which admiral coligny, the commanding spirit in the council-chamber and the virtual head of the huguenot army, arrived, when he calmly considered the perils of attacking, with twelve or fifteen thousand men and four pieces of artillery, the largest capital of continental europe--a city whose population amounted to several hundred thousand souls, among whom there was now not a single avowed protestant, and whose turbulent citizens were not unaccustomed to the use of arms. he resolved, therefore, to adopt the more practicable plan of making the city feel the pressure of the war by cutting off its supplies of provisions and by ravaging the surrounding country. thus, paris--"the bellows by whose blasts the war was kept in flames," and "the kitchen that fed it"--would at last become weary of sustaining in idleness an insolent soldiery, and of seeing its villages given over to destruction, and compel the king's advisers to offer just terms of peace, or to seek a solution of the present disputes on the open field.[ ] but, whatever doubt may be entertained respecting the propriety of the plan of the campaign adopted by the prince of condé, there can be none respecting the error committed in not promptly carrying that plan into execution. the army loitered about Étampes instead of pressing on and seizing the bridges across the seine. over these it ought to have crossed, and, entering the fruitful district of brie, to have become master of the rivers by which the means of subsistence were principally brought to paris. with corbeil and lagny in his possession, condé would have held paris in as deadly a grasp as henry the fourth did twenty-eight years later, when alexander of parma was forced to come from flanders to its assistance.[ ] when, at last, the huguenot army took the direction of corbeil, commanding one of the bridges, the news arrived of the death of antoine of navarre. and with this intelligence came fresh messengers from catharine, who had already endeavored more than once by similar means to delay the huguenots in their advance. she now strove to amuse condé with the hope of succeeding his brother as lieutenant-general of the kingdom during charles's minority.[ ] in vain did the soldiers chafe at this new check upon their enthusiasm, in vain did prudent counsellors remonstrate. there was a traitor even in the prince's council, in the person of jean de hangest, sieur de genlis (brother of d'ivoy, the betrayer of bourges), whose open desertion we shall soon have occasion to notice, and this treacherous adviser was successful in procuring a delay of four days.[ ] the respite was not thrown away. before the huguenots were again in motion, corbeil was reinforced and rendered impregnable against any assaults which, with their feeble artillery, they could make upon it. repulsed from its walls, after several days wasted in the vain hope of taking it, the prince moved down the left bank of the seine, and, on the twenty-eighth of november, encamped opposite to paris in the villages of gentilly and arcueil.[ ] new proffers came from catharine; there were new delays on the road. at port à l'anglais a conference with condé had been projected by the queen mother, resulting merely in one between the constable and his nephew coligny--as fruitless as any that had preceded; for montmorency would not hear of tolerating in france another religion besides the roman catholic, and the admiral would rather die a thousand deaths than abandon the point.[ ] under the walls of paris new conferences took place. the parisians worked night and day, strengthening their defences, and making those preparations which are rarely completed except under the spur of an extraordinary emergency. meanwhile, every day brought nearer the arrival of the spanish and gascon auxiliaries whom they were expecting. at a windmill near the suburb of st. marceau, the prince of condé, coligny, genlis, grammont, and esternay met the queen mother, the prince of la roche-sur-yon, the constable, his son marshal montmorency, and gonnor, at a later time known as marshal cossé. on both sides there were professions of the most ardent desire for peace, and "huguenot" and "papist" embraced each other cordially at parting. but the dangerous intimacy soon bore the bitter fruit of open treachery. a _camisade_ had been secretly planned by the huguenots, and the attack was about to be made on the enemy's works, when word was brought that one of the chiefs intrusted with the knowledge of all their plans--the same genlis, who had been the principal advocate of the delays upon the route--had gone over to the enemy, and the enterprise was consequently abandoned.[ ] the deliberations being set on foot by the one party, at least, only in order to gain time, it is not surprising that they accomplished nothing. the court would concede none of the important demands of the prince. it was resolved to exclude protestantism not only from paris, but from lyons, from all the seats of parliaments, from frontier towns, and from cities which had not enjoyed the right of having preaching according to the edict of january. the exercises of the reformed worship could not be tolerated in any place where the court sojourned--a cunning provision which would banish from the royal presence all the princes and high nobility, such as renée of france, condé, and the châtillons, since these could not consent to live without the ordinances of their faith for themselves and their families and retainers. the triumvirs would not agree to the recall of those who had been exiled. they were willing to have all proceedings against the partisans of condé suspended; but they would neither consent that all edicts, ordinances, and sentences framed against the huguenots be declared null and void, nor assent to the restoration of those dignities which had been taken from them. in other words, as the prince remarked, the protestant lords were to put a halter about their own necks for their enemies to tighten whenever the fancy should take them so to do.[ ] at last the parisian defences were completed, and the spanish and gascon troops, to the number of seven thousand men, arrived. then the mask of conciliation was promptly laid aside. two weeks of precious time had been lost, the capital was beyond doubt impregnable, and the unpleasant fact stared the prince in the face that, after leaving a sufficient force to garrison it, the constable and guise might still march out with an army outnumbering his own.[ ] on the tenth of december the huguenot army broke up its encampment, and moved in the direction of chartres, hesitating at first whether to lay siege to that city or to press on to normandy in order to obtain the needed funds and support of the english. the decision was made in a few days to adopt the latter course, and condé had proceeded as far as the vicinity of dreux on the river eure, when he found himself confronted by the enemy, who, enjoying the advantage of possessing the cities and bridges on the route, could advance with greater ease by the principal roads. the triumvirs, so lately declining battle in front of paris, were now as eager as they had before been reluctant to try their fortunes in the open field. no longer having the king of navarre behind whose name and authority to take shelter, they desired to cover their designs by the queen mother's instructions. so, before bringing on the first regular engagement, in which two armies of frenchmen were to undertake each other's destruction, they had sent michel de castelnau, the well-known historian, on the fifteenth of december, to inquire of catharine de' medici whether they should give the huguenots battle. but the queen was too timid, or too cunning, to assume the weighty responsibility which they would have lifted from their own shoulders. "nurse," she jestingly exclaimed, when castelnau announced his mission, calling to the king's old huguenot foster-mother who was close at hand, "the generals have sent to ask a woman's advice about fighting; pray, what is your opinion?" and the envoy could get no more satisfactory answer than that the queen mother referred the whole matter to themselves, as experienced military men.[ ] [sidenote: the battle of dreux, december , .] on the nineteenth of december, , the armies met. the enemy had that morning crossed the eure, and posted himself with sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, and with twenty-two cannon, between two villages covering his wings, and with the city of dreux and the village of tréon behind him as points of refuge in case of defeat. the constable commanded the main body of the army. guise, to rebut the current charge of being the sole cause of the war, affected to lead only his own company of horse in the right wing, which was under marshal saint andré. the prince's army was decidedly inferior in numbers; for, although he had four thousand horse,[ ] his infantry barely amounted to seven thousand or eight thousand men, and he had only five pieces of artillery. yet the first movements of the huguenots were brilliant and effective. condé, with a body of french horse, fell upon the battalion of swiss pikes. it was a furious onset, long remembered as one of the most magnificent cavalry charges of the age.[ ] nothing could stand before it. the solid phalanx was pierced through and through, and the german reiters, pouring into the way opened by the french, rode to and fro, making havoc of the brave but defenceless mountaineers. they even penetrated to the rear, and plundered the camp of the enemy, carrying off the plate from guise's tent. meanwhile coligny was even more successful than the prince. with a part of the huguenot right he attacked and scattered the troops surrounding his uncle, the constable. in the mêlée montmorency himself, while fighting with his usual courage, had his jaw fractured by a pistol-shot, and was taken prisoner. but now the tide turned. the swiss, never for a moment dreaming of retreat or surrender, had promptly recovered from their confusion and closed their ranks. the german infantry, or lansquenets, were brought up to the attack, but first hesitated, and then broke before the terrible array of pikes. d'andelot, ill with fever, had thus far been forced to remain a mere spectator of the contest. but now, seeing the soldiers whom he had been at such pains to bring to the scene of action in ignominious retreat, he threw himself on his horse and labored with desperation to rally them. his pains were thrown away. the lansquenets continued their course, and d'andelot, who scarcely escaped falling into the enemy's hands, probably concurred in the verdict pronounced on them by a contemporary historian, that no more cowardly troops had entered the country in fifty years.[ ] it was at this moment that the duke of guise, who had with difficulty held his impatient horse in reserve on the roman catholic right, gave the signal to his company to follow him, and fell upon the french infantry of the huguenots, imprudently left unprotected by cavalry at some distance in the rear. the move was skilfully planned and well executed. the infantry were routed. condé, coming to the rescue, was unable to accomplish anything. his horse was killed under him, and, before he could be provided with another, he was taken prisoner by damville, a son of the constable. the german reiters now proved to be worth little more than the lansquenets. returning from the pursuit of the fugitives of the constable's division, and perceiving the misfortunes of the infantry, they retired to the cover of a wood, and neither the prayers nor the expostulations of the admiral could prevail on them to face the enemy again that day.[ ] but guise could not follow up his advantage. the battle had lasted five hours. almost the whole of the huguenot cavalry and the remnants of the infantry had been drawn up by coligny in good order on the other side of a ravine; and the darkness would not allow the duke, even had he been so disposed, to renew the engagement.[ ] on either side the loss had been severe. marshal saint andré, montbéron--one of the constable's sons--and many other illustrious roman catholics, were killed. montmorency was a prisoner. the huguenots, if they had lost fewer prominent men and less common soldiers, were equally deprived of their leading general. what was certain was, that the substantial fruits of victory remained in the hands of the duke of guise, to whom naturally the whole glory of the achievement was ascribed. for, although admiral coligny thought himself sufficiently strong to have attacked the enemy on the following day,[ ] if he could have persuaded his crestfallen german auxiliaries to follow him, he deemed it advisable to abandon the march into normandy--difficult under any circumstances on account of the lateness of the season--and to conduct his army back to orleans. this, coligny--never more skilful than in conducting the most difficult of all military operations, a retreat in the presence of an enemy--successfully accomplished.[ ] the first tidings of the battle of dreux were brought to paris by fugitives from the constable's corps. these announced the capture of the commanding general, and the entire rout of the roman catholic army. the populace, intense in its devotion to the old form of faith, and recognizing the fatal character of such a blow,[ ] was overwhelmed with discouragement. but catharine de' medici displayed little emotion. "very well!" she quietly remarked, "_then we shall pray to god in french_."[ ] but the truth was soon known, and the dirge and the _miserere_ were rapidly replaced by the loud _te deum_ and by jubilant processions in honor of the signal success of the roman catholic arms.[ ] [sidenote: riotous conduct of the parisian mob.] recovering from their panic, the parisian populace continued to testify their unimpeachable orthodoxy by daily murders. it was enough, a contemporary writer tells us, if a boy, seeing a man in the streets, but called out, "voylà ung huguenot," for straightway the idle vagabonds, the pedlers, and porters would set upon him with stones. then came out the handicraftsmen and idle apprentices with swords, and thrust him through with a thousand wounds. his dead body, having been robbed of clothes, was afterward taken possession of by troops of boys, who asked nothing better than to "trail" him down to the seine and throw him in. if the victim chanced to be a "town-dweller," the parisians entered his house and carried off all his goods, and his wife and children were fortunate if they escaped with their lives. with the best intentions, marshal montmorency could not put a stop to these excesses; he scarcely succeeded in protecting the households of foreign ambassadors from being involved in the fate of french protestants.[ ] yet the same men that were ready at any time to imbue their hands in the blood of an innocent huguenot, were full of commiseration for a roman catholic felon. a shrewd murderer is said to have turned to his own advantage the religious feeling of the people who had flocked to see him executed. "ah! my masters," he exclaimed when already on the fatal ladder, "i must die now for killing a huguenot who despised our lady; but as i have served our lady always truly, and put my trust in her, so i trust now she will show some miracle for me." thereupon, reports sir thomas smith, the people began to murmur about his having to die for a huguenot, ran to the gallows, beat the hangman, and having cut the fellow's cords, conveyed him away free.[ ] [sidenote: orleans invested.] [sidenote: coligny returns to normandy.] of the triumvirs, at whose instigation the war had arisen, one was dead,[ ] a second was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, the third--the duke of guise--alone remained. navarre had died a month before. on the other hand, the huguenots had lost their chief. yet the war raged without cessation. as soon as the duke of guise had collected his army and had, at rambouillet, explained to the king and court, who had come out to meet him, the course of recent events, he followed the admiral toward orleans. invested by the king with the supreme command during the captivity of the constable, and leading a victorious army, he speedily reduced Étampes and pithiviers, captured by condé on his march to paris. meantime, coligny had taken a number of places in the vicinity of orleans, and his "black riders" had become the terror of the papists of sologne.[ ] not long after guise's approach, fearing that his design was to besiege the city of orleans, coligny threw himself into it. his stay was not long, however. his german cavalry could do nothing in case of a siege, and would only be a burden to the citizens. besides, he was in want of funds to pay them. he resolved, therefore, to strike boldly for normandy.[ ] having persuaded the reiters to dispense with their heavy baggage-wagons,[ ] which had proved so great an incumbrance on the previous march, he started from orleans on the first of february with four thousand troopers, leaving his brother d'andelot as well furnished as practicable to sustain the inevitable siege. the lightness of his army's equipment precluded the possibility of pursuit; its strength secured it an almost undisputed passage.[ ] in a few days it had passed dreux and the scene of the late battle, and at dives, on the opposite side of the estuary of the seine from havre, had received from the english the supplies of money which they had long been desirous of finding means to convey to the huguenots.[ ] the only considerable forces of the guise faction in normandy were on the banks of the river, too busy watching the english at havre to be able to spare any troops to resist coligny. turning his attention to the western shores of the province, he soon succeeded in reducing pont-l'evêque, caen, bayeux, saint lo, and the prospect was brilliant of his soon being able, in conjunction with queen elizabeth's troops, to bring all normandy over to the side of the prince.[ ] meanwhile, however, there were occurring in the centre of the kingdom events destined to give an entirely different turn to the relations of the huguenots and papists in france. to these we must now direct our attention. françois de guise, relieved of the admiral's presence, had begun the siege of orleans four days after the departure of the latter for normandy (on the fifth of february), and manifested the utmost determination to destroy the capital city, as it might be regarded, of the confederates. indeed, when the court, then sojourning at blois, in alarm at the reports sent by marshal de brissac from rouen, respecting coligny's conquests and his own impotence to oppose him, ordered guise to abandon his undertaking and employ his forces in crushing out the flames that had so unexpectedly broken forth in normandy, the duke declined to obey until he should have received further orders, and gave so cogent reasons for pursuing the siege, that the king and his council willingly acquiesced in his plan.[ ] from his independent attitude, however, it is evident that guise was of pasquier's mind, and believed he had gained as much of a victory in the capture of the constable, his friend in arms, but dangerous rival at court, taken by the huguenots at dreux, as by the capture of the prince of condé, his enemy, who had fallen into his hands in the same engagement.[ ] [sidenote: capture of the portereau.] the city of orleans, on the north bank of the loire, was protected by walls originally of no great worth, but considerably strengthened since the outbreak of the civil war. on the opposite side of the river, a suburb, known as the _portereau_, was fortified by weaker walls, in front of which two large bastions had recently been erected. the suburb was connected with orleans by means of a bridge across the loire, of which the end toward the portereau was defended by two towers of the old mediæval construction, known as the "tourelles," and that toward the city by the city wall and a large square tower.[ ] against the portereau the duke directed the first assault, hoping easily to become master of it, and thence attack the city from its weakest side. his plan proved successful beyond his expectations. while making a feint of assailing with his whole army the bastion held by the gascon infantry, he sent a party to scale the bastion guarded by the german lansquenets, who, being taken by surprise, yielded an entrance almost without striking a blow. in a few minutes the portereau was in the hands of guise, and the bridge was crowded with fugitives tumultuously seeking a refuge in the city. orleans itself was nearly involved in the fate of its suburb; for the enemy, following close upon the heels of the fleeing host, was at the very threshold of the "tourelles," when d'andelot, called from his sick-bed by the tumult, posting himself at the entrance with a few gentlemen in full armor, by hard blows beat back the troops, already sanguine of complete success.[ ] a few days later the "tourelles" themselves were scaled and taken.[ ] after so poor a beginning, the small garrison of orleans had sufficient reason to fear the issue of the trial to which they were subjected. but, so far from abandoning their courage, they applied themselves with equal assiduity to their religious and to their military duties. "in addition to the usual sermons and the prayers at the guard-houses, public extraordinary prayers were made at six o'clock in the morning; at the close of which the ministers and the entire people, without exception, betook themselves to work with all their might upon the fortifications, until four in the evening, when every one again attended prayers." everywhere the utmost devotion was manifested, women of all ranks sharing with their husbands and brothers in the toils of the day, or, if too feeble for these active exertions, spending their time in tending the sick and wounded.[ ] [sidenote: "a new and very terrible device."] not only did the huguenots, when they found their supply of lead falling short, make their cannon-balls of bell-metal--of which the churches and monasteries were doubtless the source--and of brass, but they turned this last material to a use till now, it would appear, unheard of. "i have learned this day, the fifteenth instant, of the spaniards," wrote the english ambassador from the royal court, which was at a safe distance, in the city of blois, "that they of orleans shoot brass which is hollow, and so devised within that when it falls it opens and breaks into many pieces with a great fire, and hurts and kills all who are about it. which is a new device and very terrible, for it pierces the house first, and breaks at the last rebound. every man in portereau is fain to run away, they cannot tell whither, when they see where the shot falls."[ ] [sidenote: huguenot reverses.] it could not, however, be denied that there was much reason for discouragement in the general condition of the protestant cause throughout the country. of the places so brilliantly acquired in the spring of the preceding year, the greater part had been lost. normandy and languedoc were the only bright spots on the map of france. lyons still remained in the power of the huguenots, in the south-east; but, though repeated assaults of the duke of nemours had been repulsed, it was threatened with a siege, for which it was but indifferently prepared.[ ] des adrets, the fierce chieftain of the lower rhône, had recently revealed his real character more clearly by betraying the cause he had sullied by his barbarous advocacy, and was now in confinement.[ ] indeed, everything seemed to point to a speedy and complete overthrow of an undertaking which had cost so much labor and suffering,[ ] when an unexpected event produced an entire revolution in the attitude of the contending parties and in the purposes of the leaders. [sidenote: assassination of françois de guise.] this event was the assassination of françois de guise. on the evening of the eighteenth of february, , in company with a gentleman or two, he was riding the round of his works, and arranging for a general attack on the morrow. so confident did he feel of success, that he had that morning written to the queen mother, it is said, that within twenty-four hours he would send her news of the capture of orleans, and that he intended to destroy the entire population, making no discrimination of age or sex, that the very memory of the rebellious city might be obliterated.[ ] at a lonely spot on the road, a man on horseback, who had been lying in wait for him, suddenly made his appearance, and, after discharging a pistol at him from behind, rode rapidly off, before the duke's escort, taken up with the duty of assisting him, had had time to make any attempt to apprehend the assassin. three balls, with which the pistol was loaded, had lodged in guise's shoulder, and the wound, from the first considered dangerous, proved mortal within six days. the murderer had apparently made good his escape; but a strange fatality seemed to attend him. during the darkness he became so confused that, after riding all night, he found himself almost at the very place where the deed of blood had been committed, and was compelled to rest himself and his jaded horse at a house, where he was arrested on suspicion by some of guise's soldiers. taken before their superior officers, he boldly avowed his guilt, and boasted of what he had done. his name he gave as jean poltrot, and he claimed to be lord of mérey, in angoumois; but he was better known, from his dark complexion and his familiarity with the spanish language, by the sobriquet of "l'espagnolet." he was an excitable, melancholy man, whose mind, continually brooding over the wrongs his country and faith had experienced at the hands of guise, had imbibed the fanatical notion that it was his special calling of god to rid the world of "the butcher of vassy," of the single execrable head that was accountable for the torrents of blood which had for a year been flowing in every part of france. after having been a page of m. d'aubeterre, father-in-law of the huguenot leader soubise, mérey, at the beginning of the civil war, had been sent by the daughter of d'aubeterre to her husband, then with condé at orleans. subsequently he had accompanied soubise on his adventurous ride with a few followers from orleans to lyons, when the latter assumed command in behalf of the huguenots. soubise appears to have valued him highly as one of those reckless youths that court rather than shun personal peril, while he shared the common impression that the lad was little better than a fool. true, for years--ever since the tumult of amboise, where his kinsman, la renaudie and another relative had been killed--mérey had been constantly boasting to all whom he met that he would kill the duke of guise; but those who heard him "made no more account of his words than if he had boasted of his intention to obtain the imperial crown."[ ] he had given expression to his purpose at lyons, in the presence of m. de soubise, the huguenot governor, and again to admiral coligny before he started on his expedition to normandy. but the huguenot generals evidently imagined that there was nothing in the speech beyond the prating of a silly braggart. soubise, indeed, advised him to attend to his own duties, and to leave the deliverance of france to almighty god; but neither the admiral nor the soldiers, to whom he often repeated the threat, paid any attention to it. in short, he was regarded as one of those frivolous characters, of whom there is an abundance in every camp, who expect to acquire a cheap notoriety by extravagant stories of their past or prospective achievements, but never succeed in earning more, with all their pains, than the contempt or incredulity of their listeners. still, poltrot was a man of some value as a scout, and coligny had employed him[ ] for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the enemy's movements, and had furnished him at one time with twenty crowns to defray his expenses, at another with a hundred, to procure himself a horse. the spy had made his way to the roman catholic camp, and, by pretending to follow the example of others in renouncing his huguenot associations, had conciliated the duke's favor to such an extent that he excited no suspicion before the commission of the treacherous act. [sidenote: execution of poltrot.] but, if poltrot was a fanatic, he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. when questioned in the presence of the queen and council to discover his accomplices, his constancy wholly forsook him, and he said whatever was suggested. in particular he accused the admiral of having paid him to execute the deed, and beza of having instigated him by holding forth the rewards of another world. la rochefoucauld, soubise, and others were criminated to a minor degree. during his confinement in the prisons of the parisian parliament, to which he was removed, he continually contradicted himself. but his weakness did not save him. he was condemned to be burned with red-hot pincers, to be torn asunder by four horses, and to be quartered. before the execution of this frightful sentence, he was, by order of the court, put to torture. but, instead of reiterating his former accusations, he retracted almost every point.[ ] to purchase a few moments' reprieve, he sought an interview with the first president of the parliament, christopher de thou; and we have it upon the authority of that magistrate's son, the author of an imperishable history of his times, that, entering into greater detail, poltrot persisted constantly in exculpating soubise, coligny, and beza. a few minutes later, beside himself with terror and not knowing what he said in his delirium, he declared the admiral to be innocent; then, at the very moment of execution, he accused not only him, but his brother, d'andelot, of whom he had said little or nothing before.[ ] [sidenote: beza and coligny are accused, but vindicate themselves.] coligny heard in normandy the report of the atrocious charges that had been wrung from poltrot. copies of the assassin's confession were industriously circulated in the camp, and he thus became acquainted with the particulars of the accusation. with beza and la rochefoucauld, who were with him at caen, he published, on the twelfth of march, a long and dignified defence. the reformer for himself declared, that, although he had more than once seen persons ill-disposed toward the duke of guise because of the murders perpetrated by him at vassy, he had never been in favor of proceeding against him otherwise than by the ordinary methods of law. for this reason he had gone to monceaux to solicit justice of charles, of his mother, and of the king of navarre. but the hopes which the queen mother's gracious answer had excited were dashed to the earth by guise's violent resort to arms. holding the duke to be the chief author and promoter of the present troubles, he admitted that he had a countless number of times prayed to god that he would either change his heart or rid the kingdom of him. but he appealed to the testimony of madame de ferrare (renée de france, the mother-in-law of guise), and all who had ever heard him, when he said that never had he publicly mentioned the duke by name. as for poltrot himself, he had never met him. the admiral himself was not less frank. ever since the massacre of vassy he had regarded guise and his party as common enemies of god, of the king, and of the public tranquillity; but never, upon his life and his honor, had he approved of such attacks as that of poltrot. indeed, he had steadfastly employed his influence to deter men from executing any plots against the life of the duke; until, being duly informed that guise and saint andré had incited men to undertake to assassinate condé, d'andelot, and himself, he had desisted from expressing his opposition. the different articles of the confession he proceeded to answer one by one; and he forwarded his reply to the court with a letter to catharine de' medici, in which he earnestly entreated her that the life of poltrot might be spared until the restoration of peace, that he might be confronted with him, and an investigation be made of the entire matter before unsuspected judges. "but do not imagine," he added, "that i speak thus because of any regret for the death of the duke of guise, which i esteem the greatest of blessings to the realm, to the church of god, to myself and my family, and, if improved, the means of giving rest to the kingdom."[ ] the admiral's frankness was severely criticised by some of his friends. he was advised to suppress those expressions that were liable to be perverted to his injury, but he declared his resolution to abide by the consequences of a clear statement of the truth. and indeed, while the worldly wisdom of coligny's censors has received a species of justification in the avidity with which his sincere avowals have been employed as the basis of graver accusations which he repelled, the candor of his defence has set upon his words the indelible impress of veracity which following ages can never fail to read aright. that catharine recognized his innocence is evident from the very act by which she endeavored to make him appear guilty. he had begged that poltrot might be spared till after the conclusion of peace, that he might himself have an opportunity to vindicate his innocence by confronting him in the presence of impartial judges. it was catharine's interest, she thought, to confirm her own power by attaching a stigma to the honor of the châtillons, and so depriving them of much of their influence in the state.[ ] accordingly, on thursday, the eighteenth of march, poltrot was put to death and his mouth sealed forever to further explanations. _the next day the edict of pacification was signed at amboise._[ ] after all, it is evident that coligny's innocence or guilt, in this particular instance, must be judged by his entire course and his well-known character. if his life bears marks of perfidy and duplicity, if the blood of the innocent can be found upon his skirts, then must the verdict of posterity be against him. but if the careful examination of his entire public life, as well as the history of his private relations, reveals a character not only above reproach, but the purest, most beneficent, and most patriotic of all that france can boast in political stations in the sixteenth century, the confused and contradictory allegations of an enthusiast who had not counted the cost of his daring attempt--allegations wrung from him by threats and torture--will not be allowed to weigh for an instant against coligny's simple denial.[ ] [sidenote: various estimates of guise.] of the duke of guise the estimates formed by his contemporaries differed as widely as their political and religious views. with the abbé bruslart he was "the most virtuous, heroic, and magnanimous prince in europe, who for his courage was dreaded by all foreign nations." to the author of the history of the reformed churches his ambition and presumption seemed to have obscured all his virtues.[ ] the roman catholic preachers regarded his death as a stupendous calamity, a mystery of divine providence, which they could only interpret by supposing that the almighty, jealous of the confidence which his people reposed rather in his creature than in himself, had removed the duke of guise in order to take the cause of his own divinity, of his spouse the church, of the king and kingdom, under his own protection.[ ] the bishop of riez wrote and published a highly colored account of the duke's last words and actions, in the most approved style of such posthumous records, and introduced edifying specimens of a theological learning, which, until the moment of his wounding, guise had certainly never possessed, making him, of course, persist to the end in protesting his innocence of the guilt of vassy.[ ] the protestants, while giving him credit for some compunctions of conscience for his persecuting career, and willingly admitting that, but for his pernicious brother, the cardinal of lorraine, he might have run a far different course, were compelled to view his death as a great blessing to france.[ ] [sidenote: renée de france at montargis.] a famous incident, illustrating the perils to which the huguenots of the central provinces were subjected during the siege, is too characteristic to be passed over in silence. more than once, in the course of the war, the town and castle of montargis, the duchess of ferrara's residence, had been threatened on account of the asylum it afforded to defenceless protestants flocking thither from all quarters. when the minds of the roman catholics had become exasperated by nine or ten months of civil war, they formed a settled determination to break up this "nest of huguenots." accordingly the baron de la garde--captain poulain, of mérindol memory--brought an order, in the king's name, from the duke of guise, at that time before the walls of orleans, commanding renée to leave montargis, which had become important for military purposes, and to take up her abode at fontainebleau, st. germain, or vincennes. the duchess replied that it was idle to say that so weak a place as montargis could, without extensive repairs, be of any military importance; and that to remove to any place in the vicinity of paris would be to expose herself to assassination by the fanatical populace. she therefore sent poulain back to the king for further instructions. meantime, poulain was followed by malicorne, a creature of the duke's, at the head of some partisan troops. this presumptuous officer had the impertinence to demand the immediate surrender of the castle, and went so far as to threaten to turn some cannon against it, in case of her refusal. but he little understood the virile courage of the woman with whom he had to do. "malicorne," she answered him, "take care what you undertake. there is not a man in this kingdom that can command me but the king. if you attempt what you threaten, i shall place myself first upon the breach, that i may find out whether you will be audacious enough to kill a king's daughter. moreover, i am not so ill-connected, nor so little loved, but that i have the means of making the punishment of your temerity felt by you and your offspring, even to the very babes in the cradle." the upstart captain was not prepared for such a reception, and, after alleging his commission as the excuse for the insolence of his conduct, delayed an enterprise which the wound and subsequent death of guise entirely broke off.[ ] montargis continued during this and the next civil wars to be a safe refuge for thousands of distressed protestants. a great obstacle to the conclusion of peace was removed by guise's death. there was no one in the roman catholic camp to take his place. the panegyric pronounced upon the duke by the english ambassador, sir thomas smith, may perhaps be esteemed somewhat extravagant, but has at least the merit of coming from one whose sympathies were decidedly adverse to him. "the papists have lost their greatest stay, hope, and comfort. many noblemen and gentlemen did follow the camp and that faction, rather for the love of him than for any other zeal or affection. he was indeed the best captain or general in all france, some will say in all christendom; for he had all the properties which belong [to], or are to be wished in a general: a ready wit and well advised, a body to endure pains, a courage to forsake no dangerous adventures, use and experience to conduct any army, much courtesy in entertaining of all men, great eloquence to utter all his mind. and he was very liberal both of money and honor to young gentlemen, captains, and soldiers; whereby he gat so much love and admiration amongst the nobility and the soldiers in france, that i think, now he is gone, many gentlemen will forsake the camp; and they begin to drop away already. then he was so earnest and so fully persuaded in his religion, that he thought nothing evil done that maintained that sect; and therefore the papists again thought nothing evil bestowed upon him; all their money and treasure of the church, part of their lands, even the honor of the crown of france, they could have found in their hearts to have given him. and so all their joy, hope, and comfort one little stroke of a pistolet hath taken away! such a vanity god can show men's hope to be, when it pleaseth him."[ ] of the four generals on the roman catholic side under whose auspices the war began, three were dead and the fourth was in captivity. the treasury was exhausted. the interest of old debts was left unpaid; new debts had been contracted. less than half the king's revenues were available on account of the places which the huguenots held or threatened. the alienation of one hundred thousand livres of income from ecclesiastical property had been recently ordered, greatly to the annoyance of the clergy. the admiral's progress had of late been so rapid that but two or three important places of lower normandy remained in friendly hands. after the reduction of these he would move down through maine and anjou to orleans, with a better force than had been marshalled at dreux;[ ] the english would gain such a foothold on french soil as it would be difficult to induce them to relinquish. and where could competent generals be secured for the prosecution of hostilities? the post of lieutenant-general, now vacant, had, indeed, been offered to the duke christopher of würtemberg; but what prospect was there that a protestant would consent to conduct a war against protestants?[ ] [sidenote: deliberations for peace.] catharine was urgent for an immediate conclusion of peace. for the purpose of fixing its conditions, condé was brought, under a strong guard, to the camp of the army before orleans, and, on the small "isle aux bouviers" in the middle of the loire, he and the constable, released on their honor, held a preliminary interview on sunday, the seventh of march, .[ ] at first there seemed little prospect of harmonizing their discordant pretensions; for, if the question of the removal of the triumvirs had lost all its practical importance, the old bone of contention remained in the re-establishment of the edict of january. on this point montmorency was inflexible. he had been the prime instrument in expelling protestantism from paris, and had distinguished himself by burning the places of worship. it could hardly be expected that he should rebuild what he had so laboriously torn down. and, whatever had been his first intentions, condé proved less tenacious than might have been anticipated from his previous professions. the fact was, that the younger bourbon was not proof against the wiles employed with so much success against his elder brother. flattered by catharine, he was led to suppose that after all it made little difference whether the full demands of the huguenots were expressly granted in the edict of pacification or not. the queen mother was resolved, so he was assured, to confer upon him the dignity and office of lieutenant-general, left vacant by navarre's death. when this should be his, it would be easy to obtain every practical concession to which the huguenots were entitled. so much pleased was the court with the ardor he displayed, that he was at last permitted to go to orleans on his own princely parole, in order to consult his confederates. the huguenot ministers whose advice he first asked, seeing his irresolution, were the more decided in opposing any terms that did not expressly recognize the edict of january. seventy-two united in a letter (on the ninth of march, ), in which they begged him not to permit the cause to suffer disaster at his hands, and rather to insure an extension, than submit to an abridgment of the liberty promised by the royal ordinance.[ ] from the ministers, however, condé went to the huguenot "noblesse," with whom his arguments of expediency had more weight, and who, weary of the length and privations of the war, and content with securing their own privileges, readily accepted the conditions reprobated by the ministers. the pacification was accordingly agreed upon, on the twelfth of march, and officially published in the form of a royal edict, dated at amboise, on the nineteenth of march, . [sidenote: edict of pacification, march , .] charles the ninth, by advice of his mother, the cardinal of bourbon, the princes of condé and la roche-sur-yon, the dukes of montmorency, aumale, and montpensier, and other members of his privy council, grants, in this document, to all barons, châtellains, and gentlemen possessed of the right to administer "haute justice," permission to celebrate in their own houses the worship of "the religion which they call reformed" in the presence of their families and retainers. the possessors of minor fiefs could enjoy the same privilege, but it extended to their families only. in every bailiwick or sénéchaussée, the protestants should, on petition, receive one city in whose suburbs their religious services might be held, and in all cities where the protestant religion was exercised on the seventh of march of the present year, it should continue in one or two places _inside_ of the walls, to be designated hereafter by the king. the huguenots, while secured in their liberty of conscience, were to restore all churches and ecclesiastical property which they might have seized, and were forbidden to worship according to their rites in the city of paris or its immediate neighborhood. the remaining articles of the peace were of a more personal or temporary interest. foreign troops were to be speedily dismissed; the protestant lords to be fully reinstated in their former honors, offices, and possessions; prisoners to be released; insults based upon the events of the war to be summarily punished. and charles declared that he held his good cousin, the prince of condé, and all the other lords, knights, gentlemen, and burgesses that had served under him, to be his faithful subjects, believing that what they had done was for good ends and for his service.[ ] [sidenote: sir thomas smith's remonstrance.] such was the edict of amboise--a half-way measure, very different from that which was desired on either side. the english ambassador declared he could find no one, whether protestant or papist, that liked the "accord," or thought it would last three weeks. and he added, by way of warning to coligny and condé: "what you, who are the heads and rulers, do, i cannot tell; but every man thinketh that it is but a traine and a deceipt to sever the one of you from another, and all of you from this stronghold [orleans], and then thei will talke with you after another sorte."[ ] he urged the huguenots to learn a lesson from the fate of bourges, rouen, and other cities which had admitted the "papists," and to consider that these fine articles came from the queen mother, the cardinals of bourbon, ferrara, and guise, and others like them, who desired to take the protestants like fish in a net. and he gave d'andelot the significant hint--very significant it was, in view of what afterwards befell his brother gaspard--that the report spread by the enemy respecting poltrot's confession was only a preparation that, _in case any of the huguenot noblemen should be assassinated, it might be said that the deed had been done in just revenge by the guises_, who would not hesitate to sacrifice them either by force or by treason.[ ] [sidenote: coligny's disappointment.] of the other party, catharine de' medici alone was jubilant over the edict. on the contrary, the roman catholic people of paris regarded it as an approval of every sort of impiety and wicked action, and the parliament would register it only after repeated commands (on the twenty-seventh of march), and then with a formal declaration of its reluctance.[ ] but no one was so much disappointed as the admiral. hastening from normandy to orleans, he reached that city on the twenty-third of march, only to find that the peace had been fully concluded several days before. in the council of the confederates, the next day, he spoke his mind freely. he reminded condé that, from the very commencement of hostilities, the triumvirs had offered the restoration of the edict of january with the exclusion of the city of paris; and that never had affairs stood on a better footing than now,[ ] when two of the three chief authors of the war were dead, and the third was a prisoner. but the poor had surpassed the rich in devotion; the cities had given the example to the nobles. in restricting the number of churches to one in a bailiwick, the prince and his counsellors had ruined more churches by a single stroke of the pen than all the forces of their enemies could have overthrown in ten years. coligny's warm remonstrance was heard with some regret for the precipitancy with which the arrangement had been made; but it was too late. the peace was signed. besides, condé was confident that he would soon occupy his brother's place, when the huguenots would obtain all their demands. but while the prince refused to draw back from the articles of peace to which he had pledged himself, he consented to visit the queen mother in company with the admiral, and endeavor to remove some of the restrictions placed upon protestant worship. and catharine was too well satisfied with her success in restoring peace, to refuse the most pressing of the admiral's requests. however, she took good care that none of her promises should be in writing, much less be incorporated in the edict of pacification. "the prince and the admyrall," wrote the special envoy middlemore to queen elizabeth, "have bene twice with the quene mother since my commynge hyther, where the admirall hath bene very earnest for a further and larger lybertye in the course of religion, and so hath obtayned that there shall be preachings within the townes in every balliage, wheras before yt was accordyd but in the suburbs of townes only, and that the gentylmen of the visconte and provoste of parys shall have in theyr houses the same libertye of religion as ys accordyd elzwhere. so as the sayd admyrall doth now seame to lyke well inoughe that he shewyd by the waye to mislyke so muche, which was the harde articles of religion concludyd upon by the prince in his absence."[ ] on sunday, the twenty-eighth of march, --the anniversary of that sunday which they had kept with so much solemnity at meaux, on the eve of their march to orleans--the huguenot nobles and soldiers celebrated the lord's supper, in the simple but grand forms of the geneva liturgy, within the walls of the church of the holy rood, long since stripped of its idolatrous ornaments, and on the morrow began to disperse to the homes from which for a year they had been separated.[ ] the german reiters, at the same time, set out on their march toward champagne, whence they soon after retired to their own country. [sidenote: results of the war.] the war that had just closed undoubtedly constituted a turning-point in the huguenot fortunes. the alliance between the persecuted reformers, on the one hand, and the princes of the blood and the nobility of france, on the other, had borne fruit, and it was not altogether good fruit. the patient confessors, after manfully maintaining their faith through an entire generation against savage attack, and gaining many a convert from the witnesses of their constancy, had grasped the sword thrust into their hands by their more warlike allies. in truth, it would be difficult to condemn them; for it was in self-defence, not against rightful authority, but against the tyranny of a foreign and hostile faction. candidly viewing their circumstances at the distance of three centuries, we can scarcely see how they could have acted otherwise than as they did. yet there was much that, humanly speaking, was unfortunate in the conjuncture. war is a horrible remedy at any time. civil war super-adds a thousand horrors of its own. and a civil war waged in the name of religion is the most frightful of all. the holiest of causes is sure to be embraced from impure motives by a host of unprincipled men, determined in their choice of party only by the hope of personal gain, the lust of power, or the thirst for revenge--a class of auxiliaries too powerful and important to be altogether rejected in an hour when the issues of life or death are pending, even if by the closest and calmest scrutiny they could be thoroughly weeded out--a process beyond the power of mortal man at any time, much more in the midst of the tumult and confusion of war. the huguenots had made the attempt at orleans, and had not shrunk from inflicting the severest punishments, even to death, for the commission of theft and other heinous crimes. they had endeavored in their camp to realize the model of an exemplary christian community. but they had failed, because there were with them those who, neither in peace nor in war, could bring themselves to give to so strict a moral code any other obedience than that which fear exacts. such was the misery of war. such the melancholy alternative to which, more than once, the reformed saw themselves reduced, of perishing by persecution or of saving themselves by exposing their faith to reproach through alliance with men of as little religion or morality as any in the opposite camp. [sidenote: it prevents france from becoming huguenot.] the first civil war prevented france from becoming a huguenot country. this was the deliberate conclusion of a venetian ambassador, who enjoyed remarkable opportunities for observing the history of his times.[ ] the practice of the christian virtue of patience and submission under suffering and insult had made the reformers an incredible number of friends. the waging of war, even in self-defence, and the reported acts of wanton destruction, of cruelty and sacrilege--it mattered little whether they were true or false, they were equally credited and produced the same results--turned the indifference of the masses into positive aversion. it availed the huguenots little in the estimate of the people that the crimes that were almost the rule with their opponents were the exception with them; that for a dozen such as montluc, they were cursed with but one baron des adrets; that the barbarities of the former received the approbation of the roman catholic priesthood, while those of the latter were censured with vehemence by the protestant ministers. partisan spirit refused to hold the scales of justice with equal hand, and could see no proofs of superior morality or devotion in the adherents of the reformed faith. * * * * * [sidenote: huguenot ballads and songs.] besides their psalms, hallowed by so many thrilling associations, the huguenots possessed a whole cycle of song. the meagre portion of this that has come down to us is among the most valuable of the monuments illustrative of their modes of thought and their religious and political aspirations. at the same time it brings vividly before us the great crises of their history. m. henri bordier has done a service not easily estimated at its full worth, by the publication of a considerable collection of the popular songs of the protestants, under the title, "le chansonnier huguenot du xvie siècle" (paris, ). these songs are grouped in four divisions: religious songs, polemic and satirical songs, songs of war, and songs of martyrdom. the three oldest huguenot songs known to exist belong to the first two divisions, and have been saved from destruction by the enemies of their authors, in the very attempt to secure their suppression. they have recently been found upon the records of the parliament of paris, where they obtained a place, thanks to the zeal of the "lieutenant général" of meaux in endeavoring to ferret out the composers of anti-papal ballads. they were entered, without regard to metre, as so much prose. a stanza or two of the song entitled _chanson nouvelle sur le chant: "n'allez plus au bois jouer,"_ and evidently adapted to the tune of a popular ballad of the day, may suffice to indicate the character of the most vigorous of these compositions. it is addressed to michel d'arande, a friend of farel, whom bishop briçonnet had invited to preach the gospel in his diocese of meaux, and begins: ne preschez plus la vérité, maistre michel! contenue en l'evangille, il y a trop grand danger d'estre mené dans la conciergerie. lire, lire, lironfa. il y a trop grand danger d'estre mené dans la conciergerie devant les chapperons fourrez mal informez par gens plains de menterie. lire, lire, lironfa. the "chants religieux," of which m. bordier's collection reproduces twenty-five, are partly poetical paraphrases of the ten commandments, the lord's prayer, etc., and partly original compositions on a variety of themes, such as patient endurance of insult, etc. they display great familiarity with the holy scriptures, and sometimes not a little poetic fire. the "chants polémiques" treat of a number of subjects, prominent among which are the monks and nuns, and the doctrines of the papal church. in one the expiring papacy is represented as summoning to her bedside cardinals, bishops, and other members of the clergy, to witness her last struggles. in another the sorbonne is held up to ridicule, in company with all the mediæval doctors of theology. in a third the poet more seriously combats the belief in purgatory as unscriptural. but it is the mass that bears the brunt of attack. the host figures under the designation, current in the literature of the sixteenth century,[ ] of _le dieu de pâte_, or _le dieu de farine_. the pompous and complicated ceremonial, with its repetitions devoid of meaning for the illiterate spectator, is, on the whole, the favorite object of satire. in strict accordance with the spirit of the rough controversy of the times, little mercy is shown to religious antagonists. there is a good specimen of this style of treatment in an interesting song dating from about , entitled "noel nouveau de la description ou forme et manière de dire la messe, sur ce chant: hari, bouriquet." of the fifteen stanzas of which it is composed, two or three may serve as samples. the preliminary service over, the priest comes to the consecration of the wafer: un morceau de paste il fait adorer; le rompt de sa patte pour le dévorer, le gourmand qu'il est. hari, hari l'asne, le gourmand qu'il est, hari bouriquet! le dieu qu'il faict faire, la bouche le prend; le coeur le digère, le ventre le rend, au fond du retrait! hari, hari l'asne, au fond du retrait, hari bouriquet! le peuple regarde l'yvrongne pinter qui pourtant n'a garde de luy présenter a boire un seul traict. hari, hari l'asne, à boire un seul traict, hari bouriquet! achève et despouille tous ses drapeaux blancs, en sa bourse fouille et y met six blancs. c'est de peur du frais. hari, hari l'asne, c'est de peur du frais, hari bouriquet! a somewhat older song (written before ) purports to be the dirge of the mass uttered by itself--_désolation de la messe expirant en chantant_. the mass in perplexity knows not how to begin the customary service: _spiritus_, _salve_, _requiem_, je ne sçay si je diray bien. quel _introite_, n' _oremus_ je prenne; _sancti_, _agimus_. feray-je des martyrs ou vierges? _de ventre ad te clamamus!_ sonnez là, allumez ces cierges: y a-t-il du pain et du vin? où est le livre et le calice pour faire l'office divin? Ça, cest autel, qu'on le tapisse! hélas, la piteuse police. ame ne me vient secourir. sans chapelain, moine, novice, me faudra-il ainsi périr? pope and cardinals are summoned in vain. no one comes, no one will bring reliquary or consecrated wafer. the mass must finally resign all hope and die: hélas chantant, brayant, virant, tant que le crime romp et blesse puis que voy tost l'ame expirant, dites au moins adieu la messe. a tous faisant mainte promesse ore ai-je tout mon bien quitté veu qu'a la mort tens et abaisse _ite missa est_; donc _ite_, _ite missa est_. the "chants de guerre" furnish a running commentary upon the military events of the last forty years of the sixteenth century, which is not devoid of interest or importance. the hopeful spirit characterizing the earlier ballads is not lost even in the latest; but the brilliant anticipations of a speedy triumph of the truth, found before the outbreak of the first civil war, or immediately thereafter, are lacking in other productions, dating from the close of the reign of henry the third. in a spirited song, presumably belonging to , the poet, adopting the nickname of huguenots given to the protestants by their opponents, retaliates by applying an equally unwelcome term to the roman catholics, and forecasting the speedy overthrow of the papacy: vous appellez huguenots ceux qui jesus veullent suivre, et n'adorent vos marmots de boys, de pierre et de cuyvre. hau, hau, papegots, faictes place aux huguenots. nostre dieu renversera vous et vostre loy romaine, et du tout se mocquera de vostre entreprise vaine. hau, hau, papegots, faictes place aux huguenots. vostre antechrist tombera hors de sa superbe place et christ partout règnera et sa loy pleine de grâce. hau, hau, papegots, faictes place aux huguenots. the current expectation of the protestants is attested in a long narrative ballad by antoine du plain on the siege of lyons ( ), in which charles the ninth figures as another josiah destined to abolish the idolatrous mass: ce roy va chasser l'idole plain de dole cognoissant un tel forfait: selon la vertu royale, et loyale, comme iosias a fait. it is noticeable that the words "va chasser l'idole" are an anagram of the royal title _charles de valois_--an anagram which gave the huguenots no little comfort. the same play upon words appears with a slight variation in a "huictain au peuple de paris, sur l'anagrammatisme du nom du tres-chrestien roy de france, charles de valois ix. de ce nom" (recueil des choses mémorables, , p. ), of which the last line is, "o gentil roy qui _chassa leur idole_." but after the massacre of st. bartholomew's day the hopes of the huguenots were blighted. if the king is not referred to by name, his mother figures as the guilty cause of all the misfortune of france. she is a second helen born for the ruin of her adopted country, according to Étienne de maisonfleur. hélène femme estrangère fut la seule mesnagère qui ruina ilion, et la reine catherine est de france la ruine par l'oracle de léon. "léon" is catharine's uncle, pope leo the tenth, who was said to have predicted the total destruction of whatever house she should be married into. see also the famous libel "discours merveilleux de la vie de catherine de medicis" (ed. of cologne, pierre du marteau, ), p. . the massacre of st. bartholomew's day naturally contributes a considerable fund of laments, etc., to the huguenot popular poetry of the century. a poem apparently belonging to a more remote date, discovered by dr. roullin, and perhaps the only breton song of the kind that has come down to us, is as simple and unaffected a narrative as any of the modern greek _moerologia_ (vaurigaud, essaie sur l'hist. des églises réf. de bretagne, , i. ). it tells the story of a huguenot girl betrayed to the executioner by her own mother. in spite of a few dialectic forms, the verses are easily understood. voulz-vous ouir l'histoire d'une fille d'espit qui n'a pas voulu croire chose que l'on lui dit. --sa mère dit: "ma fille, a la messe allons donc!" --"y aller à la messe, ma mère, ce n'est qu'abus. apportez-moi mes livres avec mes beaux saluts. j'aimerais mieux être brûlée et vantée au grand vent que d'aller à la messe en faussant mon serment." --quand sa très-chère mère eut entendu c' mot là, au bourreau de la ville sa fille elle livra. "bourreau, voilà ma fille! fais à tes volontés; bourreau, fais de ma fille comme d'un meurtrier." quand elle fut sur l'échelle, trois rollons jà montée, elle voit sa mère qui chaudement pleurait. "ho! la cruelle mère qui pleure son enfant après l'avoir livrée dans les grands feux ardents. vous est bien fait, ma mère, de me faire mourir. je vois jesus, mon père, qui, de son beau royaume, descend pour me quérir. son royaume sur terre dans peu de temps viendra, et cependant mon âme en paradis ira." footnotes: [ ] the nuncio alone seems to have thought that the edict would work so well, that "in six months, or a year at farthest, there would not be a single huguenot in france!" his ground of confidence was that many, if not most of the reformed, were influenced, not by zeal for religion, but by cupidity. santa croce to card. borromeo, jan. , , aymon, i. ; cimber et danjou, vi. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. , . the letter is followed by an examination of the edict, article by article, as affecting the protestants. ib. i. - . [ ] abbé bruslart, mém. de condé. i. . barbaro spoke the universal sentiment of the bigoted wing of the papal party when he described "the decree" as "full of concealed poison," as "the most powerful means of advancing the new religion," as "an edict so pestiferous and so poisonous, that it brought all the calamities that have since occurred." tommaseo, rel. des amb. vén., ii. . [ ] claude haton, . "et longtemps depuis ne faisoient sermon qu'ilz _acab_ et _hiésabel_ et leurs persécutions ne fussent mis par eux en avant," etc. in fact, catharine seemed fated to have her name linked to that of the infamous queen of israel. a protestant poem, evidently of a date posterior to the massacre of saint bartholomew, is still extant in the national library of paris, in which the comparison of the two is drawn out at full length. the one was the ruin of israel, the other of france. the one maintained idolatry, the other papacy. the one slew god's holy prophets, the other has slain a hundred thousand followers of the gospel. both have killed, in order to obtain the goods of their victims. but the unkindest verses are the last--even the very dogs will refuse to touch catharine's "carrion." "en fin le jugement fut tel que les chiens mengent jhésabel par une vangeance divine; mais la charongne de catherine sera différente en ce point, car les chiens ne la vouldront point." appendix to mém. de claude haton, ii. , . [ ] _ante_, i. . [ ] mém. de claude haton, , . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. . [ ] abbé bruslart, mém. de condé. i. , . [ ] declaration of feb. , / , du mont, corps diplomatique, v. , . [ ] and, indeed, with modifications which were to render it still more severe. letter of beza to calvin, feb. , , baum, ii., app., . [ ] the registry took place on friday, march th. isambert, xiv. ; la fosse, , who says "ledict édict fut publié en la salle du palais en ung vendredy, e [ e] de ce moys, _là où il y eut bien peu de conseillers et le président baillet qui signèrent_." [ ] the same prelate to whom cardinal lorraine doubtless referred in no complimentary terms, when, at the assembly of the clergy at poissy, he said, "qu'il estoit contrainct de dire, _duodecim sumus, sed unus ex nobis diabolus est_, et passant plus outre, qu'il y avoit ung evesque de la compagnie ... qui avoit revelé ce qui se faisoit en laditte assemblée," etc. journal de bruslart, mém. de condé, i. . [ ] see the document in schlosser, leben des theodor de beze, app., - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. , . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. - ; baum, ii. - . in connection with prof. baum's long and thorough account of the colloquy, beza's correspondence, printed in the appendix, is unusually interesting. [ ] "cardinalium intercessione ac precibus mox soluta sunt omnia." beza to bullinger, march , . baum, ii., app., . [ ] "nihil hoc consilio gratius accidere potuit nostris adversariis quibus iste ludus minime placebat, adeo ut _ipse demochares ... pene sui oblitus in meos amplexus rueret_, et ejus sodales honorifice me salutarent!" beza to calvin, feb. , , ibid., . the venetian barbaro represents this second conference as an extremely efficient means of spreading heresy: "la qual [in san germano] apportò un grandissimo scandalo e pregiudizio alla religion nostra, e diede alla loro, reputazione e fomento maggiore." rel. des amb. vén., ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. . [ ] "qu'il ne s'y mettroit si avant qu'il ne s'en pust aisement tirer." hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_. [ ] see the frank letter of calvin, written to him about this time, in bonnet, lettres franç., ii. ; calvin's letters, amer. ed., iv. . [ ] "that pestilent yle of sardigna!" exclaimed sir thomas smith, a clever diplomatist and a nervous writer, "that the pore crowne of it should enter so farre into the pore navarrian hed (which, i durst warraunt, shall never ware it), [as to] make him destroy his owen countrey, and to forsake the truth knowen!" forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_; de thou, iii. (liv. xxviii.), - . [ ] letter of beza to calvin, feb. , , baum, ii., app., . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., i. . [ ] letter to calvin, feb. , , _apud_ baum, ii., app., , . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] recordon, le protestantisme en champagne (paris, ), from mss. of nicholas pithou, p. . this learned jurist, the equal of his more celebrated brothers in ability, and their superior in moral courage, has left his testimony respecting the beneficent influence of the reformed doctrines upon his fellow-citizens: "a la verité la ville de troyes en général fit une perte incroyable en la rupture de cette Église. car c'était une grande beauté et chose plus que émerveillable de la voir si bien fleurie. il se voyoit en la jeunesse, touchée par la prédication de la parole de dieu, qui auparavant était si dépravée que rien plus, un changement si subit et si étrange que les catholiques mêmes en étoient tout étonnés. car, tels qui au précédent se laissaient aller du tout à leurs voluptez et s'étaient plongez en gourmandises, yvrogneries et jeux défendus, tellement qu'ils y passaient la plus grande et meilleure partie du temps, et faisaient un fort mauvais ménage, depuis qu'ils étaient entrés dans l'Église quittaient du tout leur vie passée et la détestaient, se rangeant et se soumettant allègrement à la discipline ecclésiastique, ce qui était si agréable aux parents de tels personnages, que, quoiqu'ils fussent catholiques, ils en louaient dieu." ibid., pp. , . [ ] "nous avons espérance que non seulement la jeunesse d'icy se façonnera par la main d'un si excellent ouvrier qui nous est venu; mais que les chanoines mesmes de sainte-croix le viendront ouyr en ses leçons, ce qu'ils ont desja déclaré. de quoy sortiront des fruicts surmontant toute expectation." gaberel, hist. de l'égl. de genève, i., pièces justificatives, . [ ] the archives of stuttgart contain the instructive correspondence which the duke of guise had, ever since the previous summer, maintained with the duke of würtemberg. from the letters published in the bulletin of the french protestant historical society (february and march, ), we see that françois endeavored to alienate christopher from the huguenots by representing the latter as bitter enemies of the augsburg confession, and as speaking of it with undisguised contempt. (letter of july , , bull., xxiv. .) christopher made no reply to these statements, but urged his correspondent to a candid examination of religious truth, irrespective of age or prescription, reminding him (letter of nov. , ) that our lord jesus christ "did not say 'i am the _ancient custom_,' but 'i am the _truth_.'" (ibid., xxiv. .) and he added, sensibly enough, that, had the pagan ancestors of both the french and the germans followed the rule of blind obedience to custom, they would certainly never have become christians. [ ] guise's original invitation was for saturday, january st, but christopher pleaded engagements, and named, instead, sunday, feb. th. (ibid., xxiv. , .) [ ] the relation was first noticed and printed by sattler, in his geschichte von würtemberg unter den herzögen. i have used the french translation by m. a. muntz, in the bulletin, iv. ( ) - . [ ] in a letter of würtemberg to guise, written subsequently to the massacre of vassy, he reminds him of the advice he had given him, and of guise's assurances: "vous savez aussi avec quelle asseurance vous m'avez respondu _que l'on vous faisoit grand tort_ de ce que l'on vous vouloit imposer estre cause et autheur de la mort de tant de povres chrestiens qui ont espandu leur sang par ci-devant," etc. mémoires de guise, . [ ] there are some characters with whom mendacity has become so essential a part of their nature, that we cease to wonder at any possible extreme of lying. it was, however, no new thing with the cardinal to assume immaculate innocence. over two years before this time, at the beginning of the reign of francis ii., when bloody persecution was at its height, sir nicholas throkmorton wrote to queen elizabeth, sept. , : "i am enformed that they here begin to persecute againe for religion more than ever they did; and that at paris there are three or four executed for the same, and diverse greate personages threatened shortly to be called to answer for their religion. wherin the cardinal of lorraine having bene spoken unto, within these two daies, hathe said, _that it is not his faulte; and that there is no man that more hateth extremités, then he dothe_; and yet it is knowne that it is, notwithstanding, _alltogither by his occasion_." forbes, state papers, i. , . [ ] bulletin, iv. . de thou's account of the saverne conference (iii. (liv. xxix.) , ) is pretty accurate so far as it goes, but has a more decidedly polemic tone than the duke of würtemberg's memorandum. [ ] throkmorton to the queen, paris, feb. , . state paper office. i have followed closely the condensation in the calendars. [ ] same to cecil, of same date. state paper office. [ ] discours entier de la persécution et cruauté exercée en la ville de vassy, par le duc de guise, le . de mars, ; reprinted in mémoires de condé, iii. - , and cimber et danjou, iv. - . this lengthy huguenot narrative enters into greater details respecting the early history of the church of vassy than any of the other contemporary relations. the account bears every mark of candor and accurate information. [ ] "que son cas estoit bien sale s'il eust esté ministre." [ ] the "destruction du saccagement" has preserved the names of forty-five persons who died by tuesday, march d; the "discours entier" has a complete list of forty-eight that died within a month, and refers to others besides. a contemporary engraving is extant depicting in quaint but lively style the murderous affair. montfaucon reproduces it. so does also m. horace gourjon in a pamphlet entitled "le massacre de vassy" (paris, ). he gives, in addition, an exterior view of the barn in which the huguenots were worshipping. [ ] besides a brief latin memoir of minor importance, there were published two detailed accounts of the massacre written by huguenots. the one is entitled "destruction du saccagement, exerce cruellement par le duc de guise et sa cohorte, en la ville de vassy, le premier jour de mars, . À caens. m.d.lxii.," and having for its epigraph the second verse of the th psalm in marot's poetical version, "the dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth." (the year , it will be remembered, did not commence in france until easter sunday, march th.) the account seems to have been composed on the spot and within a very few days of the occurrence. this may be inferred from the list of those who died being given only up to tuesday, march d. the other narrative: "discours entier de la persecution et cruauté exercée en la ville de vassy," etc., enters into much greater detail, and is preceded by a full account of the early history of the church. it was written and published a little later in the spring of . both memoirs are reprinted in the invaluable archives curieuses of messrs. cimber et danjou, iv. - , and - , as well as in the mémoires de condé, iii. - , - (the former document with the title "relation de l'occasion"), etc. another contemporary account was written in guise's interest, and contains a long extract of a letter of his to the duke of würtemberg: "discours au vray et en abbregé de ce qui est dernièrement aduenu à vassi, y passant monseigneur le duc de guise. a paris. m.d.lxii.... par priuilege expres dudict seigneur." (cimber, iv. - ; mém. de condé, iii. - ). to these authorities must be added guise's vindication in parliament (cimber, iv. , etc., from reg. of parl.; mém. de guise, , etc.), and his letter and that of the cardinal of lorraine to christopher of würtemberg, march (ib. , ). compare j. de serres, de statu rel. et reip. ( ), ii. - ; de thou, iii. , etc.; jehan de la fosse, . davila, bk. iii. in init., is more accurate than castelnau, iii., c. . claude haton's account (mémoires, i. - ) may be classed with the curiosities of literature. this veracious chronicler would have it that a crowd of huguenots, with stones in their hands, and singing at the top of their voices, attempted to prevent the passage of the duke and his company through the outskirts of vassy, where they were apparently worshipping in the open air! of course they were the aggressors. [ ] and yet there is great force in m. sismondi's observation (hist. des français, xviii. ): "malgré leur assertion, il est difficile de ne pas croire qu'au moment où ils se réunissoient en armes pour disputer aux protestans l'exercise public de leur culte que leur accordoit l'édit de janvier, c'etoit un coup prémédité que l'attaque du duc de guise contre une congrégation de huguenots, composée, à ce qu'il assure, en partie de ses vassaux, et qui se trouvoit la première sur son passage à peu de distance de ses terres." [ ] it is extremely unfortunate that mr. froude should have based his account of french affairs at this important point upon so inaccurate and prejudiced a writer as varillas. to be correct in his delineation of these transactions was almost as important for his object, as to be correct in the narration of purely english occurrences. if he desired to avoid the labor, from which he might well wish to be excused, of mastering the great accumulation of contemporary and original french authorities, he might have resorted with propriety, as he has done in the case of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, to henri martin's noble history, or to the history of sismondi, not to speak of soldan, von polenz, and a host of others. varillas wrote, about a century after the events he described, a number of works of slender literary, and still slighter historical value. his "histoire de charles ix." (cologne, )--the work which mr. froude has but too often followed--begins with an adulatory dedication to louis xiv., the first sentence of which sufficiently reveals the author's prepossessions: "sire, it is impossible to write the history of charles ix. without beginning the panegyric of your majesty." no wonder that mr. froude's account of the massacre of vassy (history of england, vii. , ), derived solely from this source (hist. de charles ix., i. , etc.), is as favorable to guise as his most devoted partisan could have desired. but where in the world--even in varillas--did the english historian ever find authority for the statement (vii. ) that, in consequence of the necessity felt by guise for temporizing, a little later "_the affair at vassy was censured in a public decree_"? to have allowed _that_ would have been for guise to admit that he was guilty of murder, and that his enemies had not slandered him when they styled him a "butcher of the human race." the duke _never did_ make such an acknowledgment; on the contrary, he asseverated his innocence in his last breath. what was really done on the occasion referred to was to try to shift the responsibility of the war from the shoulders of the papists to those of the huguenots, by pretending to re-enact the edict of january with restrictions as to the capital. [ ] jean de serres, ii. , ; de thou, iii. , . [ ] "sire, c'est à la vérité à l'Église de dieu, au nom de laquelle je parle, d'endurer les coups, et non pas d'en donner. mais aussi vous plaira-t-il vous souvenir que _c'est une enclume qui a usé beaucoup de marteaux_." hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; pierre de lestoile, journal de henri iii. (ed. petitot), i. ; de thou, iii. , . [ ] journal de jehan de la fosse, , ; santa croce to borromeo, aymon, i. , ; jean de serres, ii. ; chantonnay, _ubi supra_, ii. ; hist, ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; throkmorton to the queen, march th, state paper office; de thou, iii. ; etc. the date was the th of march, according to la fosse; the th, according to languet (ii. ) and throkmorton; the th, according to santa croce; the th, according to j. de serres. i prefer to all the authority of a letter of one chastaigner, written from paris to a friend in poitou on the very day of guise's entry. it is dated march th. "quant aux nouvelles de monsieur de guyse, il est arrivé ce soir en ceste ville, monsieur le connestable et monsieur le maréchal de saint-andré avec luy, et en tout avoient bien deux mil chevaulx, les ungs disent plus." (archives of poitiers, and printed in bulletin, xiii. ( ), , .) [ ] this was not by accident. it had been planned by condé, to show that the huguenots were brave and determined, and it succeeded so well that it not only made an impression on the party of guise, but also largely augmented the courage of his own men. letter of beza to calvin, march , , _apud_ baum, ii., app., . condé had returned to paris by the urgent request of the protestants. jean de serres, ii. . [ ] letter of chastaigner, _ubi supra_. [ ] throkmorton to the queen, march th, state paper office. [ ] "the king of navarre was never so earnest on the protestant side as he is now furious on the papists' part, insomuch as men suspect he will become a persecutor." throkmorton to cecil, march th, state paper office. summary in calendar. [ ] throkmorton to the queen, march , , state paper office. [ ] the same to cecil, same date, state paper office. [ ] "whilst these assemblies were in the town, the queen mother conceived great jealousy (the king of navarre being allied to the said duke [guise]), lest she should be put from the government and the king taken from her hands, to prevent which she left monceaux, her own house, _for orleans_, thinking they were secure there, because the prince of rochesurion (being governor of the king's person and also of orleans) was not conjoined with the king of navarre, the duke of guise, and the constable, in their purposes. the king of navarre, perceiving this, would not consent to the king going to orleans, and, after great disputes betwixt the queen mother and him, she, with the king, were constrained to reside all this easter at fontainebleau." throkmorton to the queen, march, , , state paper office, summary in calendar. [ ] "combien que le chancelier luy dict, qu'il n'y espéroit plus rien, qu'elle n'avoit point de résolution, qu'il la congnoissoit bien." mémoires de la vie de jehan l'archevesque, sieur de soubise, printed from the hitherto unknown ms. in the bulletin, xxiii. ( ), , . [ ] four of the seven letters that constituted the whole correspondence are printed in the mém. de condé, iii. - . jean de serres gives two of them in his comment. de statu rel. et reip., ii. , . they were laid by condé's envoy before the princes of germany, as evidence that he had not taken up arms without the best warrant, and that he could not in any way be regarded as a rebel. they contain no allusion to any promise to lay down his arms so soon as she sent him word--the pretext with which she strove at a later time to palliate, in the eyes of the papal party at home and abroad, a rather awkward step. the curé of mériot, while admitting the genuineness of the letters, observes: "la cautelle et malice de la dame estoit si grande, qu'elle se délectoit de mettre les princes en division et hayne les ungs contre les aultres, affin qu'elle régnast et qu'elle demeurast gouvernante seulle de son filz et du royaume." mém. de cl. haton, i. . the queen mother's exculpatory statements may be examined in le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, i. , . [ ] bruslart, in mém. de condé, i. , ; j. de serres, ii. ; la fosse, ; de thou, iii. . the date is variously given--march th or th. [ ] j. de serres, ii. ; de thou, _ubi supra_; the prince of condé's declaration of the causes which have constrained him to undertake the defence of the royal authority, etc., _ap._ mém. de condé, iii. , etc.; same in latin in j. de serres, ii. . [ ] throkmorton to the queen, march , state paper office. [ ] march d. "ce même jour (lundi xxiii.) le prince de condé s'en partit de paris pour s'en aller à une sienne maison, combien qu'il avoit dict qu'il ne bougeroit de paris que m. de guise ne s'en fut parti." journal anonyme de l'an , _ap._ baum, iii. app., , note. [ ] letter of march th, baum, ii., app., , . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] letter to fonssomme, oeuvres choisies, ii. . [ ] one of the latest exploits of the populace was the disinterring of a huguenot buried in the cemetery of the holy innocents, and throwing his body into a public sewer! march th, journal de jehan de la fosse, . [ ] "je cuide que si les novices des couvens et les chambrières des prestres seulement se fussent presentez à l'impourveue avec des bastons de cotterets (cotrets) ès mains, que cela leur eust fait tenir bride." mém. de la noue, c. ii. [ ] circular letter dated paris, march th, _apud_ baum, ii., app., . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. , (liv. iii., c. ). this striking incident rests on the sole authority of agrippa d'aubigné, who claims to have learned it "de ceux qui estoient de la partie." hotman, who wrote his _gasparis colinii vita_ ( ) at the earnest request of the admiral's _second_ wife, makes no allusion to a story throwing so much lustre upon the _first_. [ ] throkmorton to the queen, april , , state paper office. [ ] "ou il faut que venez avec nous, ou nous emmenerons le roy sans vous." letter of condé to the emperor ferdinand, april th, mém. de condé, iii. , etc. [ ] "alors leurs majestez, ne pouvant mieux, eurent recours à quelques larmes." mém. de castelnau, liv. iii., c. . [ ] "le roy enfant de bonne nature et grande espérance, tesmoignoit non seulement par paroles, mais aussi avec abondance de larmes, extrême dueil et tristesse; et souventefois s'escriant, déploroit sa condition par telles paroles: 'pourquoy ne me laissez-vous? pour quelle raison me voy-je circuy et environné de gens armez? pourquoy contre ma volonté me tirez-vous du lieu où je prenoye mon plaisir? pourquoy deschirez-vous ainsi mon estat en ce mien aage?'" letter of condé, _ubi supra_, iii. . [ ] charles the ninth's entry into paris was a sorry pageant compared with that of guise only a few weeks earlier. "only the merchants and a few counsellors of the city were present," says jehan de la fosse (p. ). the king rode between the queen mother and the king of navarre. according to chamberlain, it was a _sober_, but not a _solemn_ entry (c. to chaloner, april , , state paper office). either when guise returned to paris from fontainebleau, or on his previous entry into the city--it is difficult from claude haton's confused narrative to determine which was intended--the people sang: "blessed is he that cometh in the name of the lord." mémoires, i. . [ ] the singular name of this building is explained by the sign that hung before it. "apvril. en ung samedy. m. anne de montmorenssy, connétable de france, fut devant brasque _en la maison où pendoit pour enseigne la ville de jérusalem_, où preschoient les huguenots, et fist mettre le feu dedans la maison." journal de j. de la fosse, . [ ] la fosse, _ubi supra_; j. de serres, ii. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; de thou, iii. , ; bruslart, mém. de condé, i. ; santa croce to borromeo, april (aymon, i. ); throkmorton to the queen, _ubi supra_. [ ] santa croce to borromeo, april th, aymon, i. , and cimber et danjou, vi. . [ ] chantonnay, _ubi supra_, ii. . [ ] journal de jehan de la fosse, . the "porte st. honoré," before which the huguenots, after passing north of the city, presented themselves (bruslart, mém. de condé, i. ), was in francis i.'s time near the present "palais royal," in the time of louis xiii. near the "madeleine." see the map in dulaure, histoire de paris. [ ] mém de la noue, c. i. the letter of beza to calvin from meaux, march , , shows, however, that even before the prince left that city it was known that the triumvirs had set out for fontainebleau. beza, not apparently without good reason, blamed the improvidence of condé in not forestalling the enemy. "hostes, relicto in urbe non magno præsidio, in aulam abierunt quod difficile non erat et prospicere et impedire. sed aliter visum est certis de causis, quas tamen nec satis intelligo nec probo." baum, ii., app., . [ ] yet, if we may credit the unambiguous testimony of jean de tavannes, catharine did not cease to endeavor to favor the huguenots. he assures us that, a few months later, during the summer, his father, gaspard de tavannes, intercepted at châlons a messenger whom catharine had despatched to her daughter the duchess of savoy ("qui agréoit ces nouvelles opinions") ostensibly as a lute-player. among his effects the prying governor of burgundy found letters signed by the queen mother, containing some rather surprising suggestions. "la royne luy escrivoit qu'elle estoit resolue de favoriser les huguenots, d'où elle espéroit son salut contre le gouvernement du triumvirat ... qu'elle soupçonnoit vouloir oster la couronne à ses enfans; et prioit madame de savoye d'aider lesdits huguenots de lyon, dauphiné et provence, et qu'elle persuadast son mary d'empescher les suisses et levée d'italie des catholiques." mém. de tavannes (petitot ed.), ii. , . tavannes did not dare to detain the messenger, nor to take away his letters; and if, as his son asserts, the enmity of catharine, which the discovery of her secret gained for him, delayed his acquisition of the marshal's baton for ten years, he certainly had some reason to remember and regret his ill-timed curiosity. [ ] mém. de la noue, c. iii.; de thou, iii. ; letter of beza, of april th, baum, ii., app., ; jean de serres, ii. , ; bruslart, mém. de condé, i. . chamberlain (to chaloner, april , ), who on his way from orleans met the first detachment within a mile of that city--"a thousand handsome gentlemen, well mounted, each having two or three daggs, galloping towards him." state paper office. [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] april th. mém. de condé, iii. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii., ; j. de serres, ii. , ; de thou, iii. . the historian of the reformed churches, as well as beza in his letter of march th (baum, ii., app., ), complains bitterly of the slowness and parsimony of the parisian protestants, who seemed to be unable to understand that war was actually upon them. [ ] april th. "déclaration faicte par m. le prince de condé, pour monstrer les raisons qui l'ont contraint d'entreprendre la défence de l'authorité du roy," etc. mém. de condé, iii. - ; jean de serres, ii. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; de thou, iii. - . [ ] traicté d'association, etc., april th. mém. de condé, iii. - ; j. serres, ii. - ; de thou, iii. . [ ] see pasquier's letter to fonssomme, already referred to, which contains a vivid picture of the confusion reigning in paris, the surprise of the papal party, and the delight of the untrained populace at the prospect of war. oeuvres (ed. feugère), ii. - . [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. iii., c. . [ ] ibid., liv. iii., c. . [ ] even so late as may , , the english minister resident at the court, than whom probably no other person in france felt obliged to keep himself better informed, wrote to cecil respecting the prince of condé's strength: "i can assur you att thys dyspatche _he ys the strongest partie_, and in suche state his matter standeth, that _these men_ [the court] _wold fayne have a reasonable end, thoughe yt were with some dishonnour_." mss. state paper office, duc d'aumale, princes de condé, pièces justif., i. . [ ] it is strange that a historian at once so conscientious and generally so well-informed as m. rosseeuw saint-hilaire should, in his histoire d'espagne, ix. , , have made the grave mistake of holding calvin responsible for the excesses of the iconoclasts. see the bulletin, xiv. , etc., for a complete refutation. [ ] like the undeceived dupe in the old athenian comedy, who mournfully laments that he had been led to worship a bit of earthenware as a god: oimoi deilaios, hote kai se chutreoun onta theon hêgêsamên. (aristophanes, clouds, , .) on the other hand, the zealous roman catholic had his arguments for the preservation and worship of images, some of which may strike us as sufficiently whimsical. "i confess," says one, "that god has forbidden idols and idolatry, but he has not forbidden the images (or pictures) which we hold for the veneration of the saints. for if that were so, _he would not have left us the effigy of his holy face_ painted in his likeness, on the cloth which that good lady veronica presented him, which yet to-day is looked upon with so much devotion in the church of st. peter at rome, nor the impression of his holy body represented in the 'saint suaire' which is at chambéry. is it not found that saint luke thrice made with his own hand the portrait of our lady?... that holy evangelist ought certainly to have known the will of his lord and master better than you, my opponent, who wish to interpret the scripture according to your sensuality." discours des guerres de provence (arch. curieuses, iv. , ). of course, the author never dreamed that his _facts_ might possibly be disputed. [ ] les recherches et antiquitez de la ville de caen, par charles de bourgueville, sieur du lieu, de bras, et de brucourt. À caen, . pt. ii. - . from page onward the author gives us a record of notable events in his own lifetime. so also at cléry, it is to be regretted that, not content with greatly injuring the famous church of our lady, the huguenot populace, inflamed by the indiscretion of the priests, desecrated the monuments of the brave dunois, and of louis the eleventh and his queen. hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . according to the author of the "horribles cruautés des huguenots en france" (cimber et danjou, vi. ), they even burned the bones of louis; nor did they respect those of the ancestors of the prince of condé. [ ] "monsieur, ayez patience que j'aie abattu cette idole, et puis que je meure, s'il vous plaît." [ ] "comme étant ce fait plutôt oeuvre de dieu que des hommes." hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . "l'impétuosité des peuples était telle contre les images, qu'il n'était possible aux hommes d'y résister." ibid. ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - . [ ] "ledict moys," says jehan de la fosse in his journal (p. ), "des citoyens de sens tuèrent beaucoup de huguenots, voyant que monsieur le connétable avoict faict brûler popincourt." [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - ; jean de serres, ii. ; de thou, iii. . the massacre commenced on sunday, april th (not th, as the hist. ecclés. states), and was continued the next day or two. according to de serres, the horrors of sens seemed to efface those of vassy itself. read the really terrible paragraph on the subject in the contemporary "remonstrance au roy sur le faict des idoles abbatues et déjettées hors des temples" (mém. de condé, iii. - ), beginning "où sont les meurtres, les boucheries des hommes passés au fil de l'espée, par l'espace de neuf jours en la ville de sens?" the address to the cardinal of guise is not less severe than the address to his brother in the famous "_tigre_": "te suffisoit-il pas, cardinal, que le monde sceust que tu es atheiste, magicien, nécromantien, sans le publier davantage, et faire ouvrir en pleine rue les femmes grosses pour voir le siége de leurs enfans?" p. . white (mass. of st. bartholomew, ) confounds in his account the two brother cardinals, and makes _lorraine_ to have been archbishop of sens. [ ] letter of condé of april th, mém. de condé, iii. , ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; j. de serres, ii. - . [ ] throkmorton to cecil, april , . state paper office. [ ] i will not sully these pages even by a reference to the unnatural and beastly crimes which de thou and other trustworthy historians ascribe to the roman catholic troops, especially the italian part. [ ] so late as january, , he wrote: "quant à la religion, que sa majesté se peult asseuré que je viveray et moreray en icelle." gachard, correspondance de guillaume le taciturne, ii. . [ ] "et suis mervilleusement mari de veoir comme ces méchantes hérésies se augmente partout," etc. [ ] "qu'il fasse tout debvoir du monde, tant par puplication, comme par force (autant qui j'en porrois la avoir) de remédier à telle désordre, qui est si domagable à tout la christienté." [ ] letter to card. granvelle, oct. , , gachard, i. - . [ ] de thou (whose graphic account i have principally followed), iii. - ; j. de serres, ii. , ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., iii. - . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné has inserted in his history (i. - ) an interesting conversation which he held with the baron des adrets, then an old man, a dozen years later, in the city of lyons. in answer to the question, why he had resorted to acts of cruelty unbecoming to his great valor? the baron replied that no one commits cruelty in avenging cruelty; for, if the first measures are _cruelty_, the second are _justice_. his severities, he urged, were needed in order to show proper spirit in view of the past, and proper regard for the future. his soldiers must be forced to commit themselves beyond hope of pardon--they must, especially in a war in which their opponents cloaked themselves with the royal authority, fight without respect of persons. "the soldier cannot be taught," said he with characteristic bluntness, "to carry his sword and his hat in his hand at the same time." when asked what motive he had in subsequently leaving his old comrades in arms, he explained that it was neither fear nor avarice, but disgust at their timid policy and at seeing himself superseded. and to d'aubigné's third question--a somewhat bold one, it must be confessed--why success had never attended his recent undertakings, he answered "with a sigh": "_mon enfant_, nothing is too warm for a captain who has no greater anxiety for victory than have his soldiers. with the huguenots i had _soldiers_; since then i have had only _hucksters_, who cared for nothing but money. the former were moved by apprehension unmingled with fear, and revenge, passion, and honor were the wages they fought for. i could not give those huguenot soldiers _reins_ enough; the others have worn out my _spurs_." [ ] and yet i agree with von polenz, gesch. des franz. calvinismus (gotha, ), ii. , , note, in regarding the roman catholic accounts of des adrets's cruelties and perfidy as very much exaggerated, and in insisting upon the circumstance that the barbarity practised at orange had furnished him not only the example, but the incentive. [ ] according to jean de serres, this leader was the baron des adrets in person; according to de thou, montbrun commanded by the baron's appointment. so also histoire ecclés., iii. . [ ] so at montbrison, the baron des adrets reserved thirty prisoners from the common slaughter to expiate the massacre of orange by a similar method. one of them was observed by des adrets to draw back twice before taking the fatal leap. "what!" said the chief, "do you take _two springs_ to do it?" "i will give you _ten_ to do it!" the witty soldier replied; and the laugh he evoked from those grim lips saved his life. de thou (iii. , ) and others. [ ] j. de serres, ii. ; castelnau, liv., iv. c. ii. but the "discours des guerres de la comté de venayscin et de la prouence ... par le seigneur loys de perussiis, escuyer de coumons, subiect uassal de sa saincteté" (dedicated to "fr. fabrice de serbellon, cousin-germain de n. s. p. et son général en la cité d'avignon et dicte comté,") avignon, , and reprinted in cimber (iv. , etc.), makes no mention of the fig-tree, and regards the preservation as almost miraculous. there is a faithful representation of the ruined château of mornas above the frightful precipice, in count alexander de laborde's magnificent work, les monuments de la france (paris, ), plate . [ ] discours des guerres de la comté de venayscin, etc., ; de thou, iii. . [ ] mém. de blaise de montluc, iii. (petitot ed.): "pouvant dire avec la vérité qu'il n'y a lieutenant de roy en france qui ait plus faict passer d'huguenots par le cousteau ou par la corde, que moy." [ ] "me deliberay d'user de toutes les cruautez que je pourrois." ib., iii. . "je recouvray secrettement deux bourreaux, lesquels on appella depuis mes laquais, parce qu'ils estoient souvent après moy." ib., iii., . consult the succeeding pages for an account of montluc's brutality, which could scarcely be credited, but that montluc himself vouches for it. [ ] since the publication of the edict of january at toulouse (on the th of february), the protestant minister had sworn to observe its provisions before the seneschal, viguier, and capitouls, and, when he preached, these last had been present to prevent disturbance. a place of worship, twenty-four cannes long by sixteen in width ( feet by ), had been built on the spot assigned by the authorities. hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., iii. . [ ] de thou, iii. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., iii. - . [ ] even in , voltaire remonstrated against a jubilee to "thank god for four thousand murders." yet a century later, in , monseigneur desprez, archbishop of toulouse, gave notice of the recurrence of the celebration in these words: "the catholic church always makes it a duty to recall, in the succession of ages, the most remarkable events of its history--particularly those which belong to it in a special manner. it is thus that we are going to celebrate this year the jubilee commemorative of a glorious act accomplished among you three hundred years ago." the archbishop was warm in his admiration of the last centennial procession, "at which were present all the persons of distinction--the religious orders, the officiating minister under his canopy, the red robes, and the members of parliament pressing behind the university, the seneschal, the _bourgeoisie_, and finally a company of soldiers." but the french government, not agreeing with the prelate in the propriety of perpetuating the reminiscence, forbade the procession and all out-door solemnities, and declared "the celebration of a jubilee of the th to the d of may next, enjoined by the archbishop of toulouse, to be nothing less than the commemoration of a mournful and bloody episode of our ancient religious discords." see a letter from a correspondent of the new york evening post, paris, april , . [ ] papal brief of april , : "ista sunt vere catholico viro digna opera, ista haud dubie divina sunt beneficia. agimus omnipotenti deo gratias, qui tam præclaram tibi mentem dedit," etc. soldan, ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. - . [ ] ibid., iii. , april th. [ ] catharine de' medici stated to sir harry sydney, the special english envoy, in may, , that her son-in-law, the king of spain, had offered charles thirty thousand foot and six thousand horse "payd of his owne charge," besides what the duke of savoy and others were ready to furnish. letter of sidney and throkmorton to queen elizabeth, may , , mss. state paper office. duc d'aumale, princes de condé, pièces justif., i. . [ ] sir t. chaloner, ambassador in spain, to sir nicholas throkmorton, may , , haynes, state papers, , . [ ] april th. mém. de condé, iii. - . [ ] may th and th, mém. de condé, iii. - . [ ] froude, history of england, vii. . [ ] throkmorton to the queen, april , , state paper office. [ ] cecil to mundt, march , , state paper office. [ ] wm. hawes to throkmorton, july , , state paper office. [ ] hist. ecclés., iii. - ; de thou, iii. , . [ ] almost all the members of condé's council favored a call upon the german protestant princes for prompt support. but "the admiral broke off this plan of theirs, saying that he would prefer to die rather than consent that those of the religion should be the first to bring foreign troops into france." it was, therefore, concluded to send two gentlemen to germany, to remain there until the conclusion of the war, in order to explain the position of the huguenots. hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] mém. de condé, i. , . cf. baum, ii., app., . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; mém. de condé, i. - , and iii. ; de thou, iii. . [ ] "que sans sa venue à paris, il fust arrivé vers les pasques, plus de quinze centz chevaulx de tous costez du royaume, pour saccager la ville," etc. response à la déclaration que faict le prince de condé, etc. mém. de condé, iii. . [ ] mém. de condé, iii. - ; hist, ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; jean de serres, ii. ; de thou, iii. . [ ] j. de serres, ii. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - ; mém. de condé, iii. , ; de thou, iii. , . [ ] jean de serres, ii. - ; mém. de condé, iii. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - ; de thou, iii. - . it is incredible that, as de thou suggests, this answer should have been penned by montluc, bishop of valence. on the other hand, it bears every mark of having proceeded from the pen of that learned, eloquent, and sprightly writer, theodore beza. as a literary production it fully deserves the warm encomium passed upon it by professor baum: "it is a masterpiece in respect both to the arrangement and to the treatment of the matter; and, with its truly demosthenian strength, may, with confidence, be placed by the side of the most eloquent passages to which the french language can point." baum, theodor beza, ii. . [ ] j. de serres, ii. , etc.; de thou, iii. . see the acts of the third national synod in aymon, tous les synodes, i. - . the second national synod had been held at poitiers, on the tenth of march, . its acts are in aymon, i. - . [ ] j. de serres, ii. ; de thou, iii. ; jehan de la fosse, ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf. ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. . [ ] journal de bruslart, mémoires de condé, i. ; claude haton, i. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf. ii. . [ ] see the prince's affectionate letter to antoine, june th, hist. ecclés. des égl. réf. ii. ; de thou, _ubi supra_; j. de serres, ii. . [ ] mém. de guise, . [ ] it was in the presence of seven knights of the order of st. michael, of the secretaries of state, etc. see condé's long remonstrance against the judgment of the parisian parliament, aug. , . hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; mém. de condé, iii. . [ ] unlucky bishop montluc has received the doubtful credit of having laid this pretty snare for the huguenot chiefs, but with what reason it is beyond my ability to conjecture. the same brain could scarcely have indited the bitter reply to the petition of the triumvirs, and devised the cunning project of entangling their opponents. evidently the bishop of valence has received some honors to which he is not entitled. [ ] mém. de guise, ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . "conclusion," says the duke in his confidence in the success of his project, "la religion réformée, en nous conduisant et tenant bon, comme nous ferons jusques au bout, s'en va aval l'eau, et les admiraux, mal ce qui est possible: toutes nos forces entièrement demeurent, les leurs rompues, les villes rendues sans parler d'édits ne de presches et administration de sacremens à leur mode." a memorandum of eight articles from the triumvirs to navarre, seized at the same time, showed the intention to arrest the prince of condé. ib., ii. . [ ] j. de serres, ii. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_; de thou, iii. - . harangue of bishop spifame to the emperor, le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. - . mémoires de jéhan de l'archevesque, sieur de soubise, bulletin, xxiii. ( ) , . [ ] la noue, c. v., p. ; de thou, iii. , , etc. [ ] j. de serres, ii. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; la noue, c. iv. [ ] la noue, c. vii., p. . "ledict seigneur prince de condé," says jean glaumeau of bourges, in his journal, "voyant qu'il ne pouvoit avoir raison avec son ennemy et qu'il ne le pouvoit rencontrer, ayant une armée de viron trente ou quarante milles hommes, de peur qu'ilz n'adurassent (endurassent) fain ou soif, commence à les séparer et envoya en ceste ville de bourges, tant de cheval que de pied, viron quatre milles, et y arrivèrent le samedi xie jour de juillet." bulletin, v. ( ) . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] "si celle-cy y faut, nous ferons la croix à la cheminée." mém. de la noue, c. vi. , . [ ] the author of the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , regards the failure of the confederates promptly to put to the death--as admiral coligny and others had insisted upon their doing--a baron de courtenay, who had outraged a village girl, and their placing him under a guard from which he succeeded in making his escape, as "the door, so to speak, through which satan entered the camp." [ ] de thou, iii. . [ ] abbé bruslart, mém. de condé, i. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; journal de jehan de la fosse, . the latter erroneously calls it an edict "de par le roi;" but certainly gives the essence of the order according to the popular estimate when he says "qu'il estoit permis au peuple de tuer tout huguenot qu'il trouveroit, d'où vint qu'il y en eust en la ville de paris plusieurs tués et jetés en l'eau." [ ] mém. de condé, i. . text of arrêt of july th, ib., iii. ; of arrêt of july th, ib., iii. . hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_; recordon, p. . [ ] nicholas pithou has left in his mss., which, unfortunately, have not yet been published entire, a thrilling narrative of the savage excesses committed partly by the authorities of troyes, partly by the soldiers and the rabble, under their eyes and with their approval. there is nothing more abominable in the annals of crime than what was committed at this time with the connivance of the ministers of law. the story of the sufferings of pithou's sister, madame de valentigny, will be found of special interest. see recordon, - . [ ] mém. de condé, i. , and hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_. j. de la fosse, , , "pour huguenoterye." even with these judicial executions the people interfered, cutting off the heads of the victims, using them for footballs, and finally burning them. the contemptuous disobedience of the _people_ of paris and their cruelty are frequent topics touched upon in throkmorton's correspondence. he acknowledges himself to be afraid, because of "the daily despites, injuries, and threatenings put in use towards him and his by the insolent, raging people." he sees that "neither the authority of the king, the queen mother, or any other person can be sanctuary" for him; for they "daily most cruelly kill every person (no age or sex excepted) whom they take to be contrary to their religion, notwithstanding daily proclamations under pain of death to the contrary." he declares that the king and his mother are, "for their own safety, constrained to lie at bois de vincennes, not thinking good to commit themselves into the hands of the furious parisians;" and that the chancellor of france, "being the most sincere man of this prince's council," is in as great fear of his life as throkmorton himself, being lodged hard by the bois de vincennes, where he has the protection of the king's guards; and yet even there he has been threatened with a visit from the parisians, and with being killed in his own house. see both of throkmorton's despatches to the queen, of august , , state paper office. one of them is printed in forbes, ii. , etc. [ ] mém. de condé, i. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_; de thou, iii. , ; j. de la fosse, . [ ] it appears from a letter of the nuncio santa croce (april th), that, as early as two months before, the court flattered itself with the hope of deriving great advantages from excluding condé from the ban, and affecting to regard him as a prisoner (aymon, i. , and cimber et danjou, vi. ). "con che pensano," he adds, "di quietar buona parte del popolo, che non sentendo parlar di religione, e parendoli ancora che la guerra si faccia per la liberatione del principe de condé, stara a vedere." [ ] "the byshopp off rome hathe lent these hys cheampions and frends on hundrethe thousand crowns, and dothe pay monthely besyds six thousand sowldiers." throkmorton to the council, july , , forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. , etc.; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , etc. [ ] the number was, in fact, only about , foot and , horse, according to de thou, iii. . [ ] although coligny captured six cannon and over forty wagons of powder, he was compelled reluctantly to destroy, or render useless, and abandon munitions of war of which he stood in great need; for the enemy had taken the precaution to kill or drive away the horses, and the wagons could not be dragged to orleans, a distance of over twenty miles. it happened that sir nicholas throkmorton, whose instructive correspondence furnishes so lucid a commentary upon the events from to , was travelling under escort of the royal train, to take leave of charles ix. at bourges. in the unexpected assault of the huguenots he was stripped of his money and baggage, and even his despatches. under these circumstances he thought it necessary to accompany coligny to orleans. catharine, who knew well throkmorton's sympathy with the protestants, and hated him heartily ("yt is not th' ambassador of englande," he had himself written only a few days earlier, "which ys so greatlye stomackyd and hatyd in this countreye, but yt ys the persone of nicholas throkmorton," forbes, ii. ), would have it that he had purposely thrown himself into the hands of the huguenots. his confidential correspondence with queen elizabeth does not bear out the charge. despatch from orleans, sept. , , forbes, state papers, ii. , etc. catharine assured sir thomas smith, on his arrival at court as english ambassador, that she wished he had been sent before, instead of throkmorton, "for they took him here to be the author of all these troubles," declaring that throkmorton was never well but when he was making some broil, and that he was so "passionate and affectionate" on the huguenots' side, that he cared not what trouble he made. despatch of smith, rouen, nov. , , state paper office. [ ] histoire ecclés., ii. - (the terms of capitulation, ii. , ); mém. de castelnau, liv. iii., c. xi. (who maintains they were implicitly observed); throkmorton, in forbes, state papers, ii. ; davila, bk. iii., p. ; de thou, iii. , . "bituriges turpiter a duce præsidii proditi sese dediderunt, optimis quidem conditionibus, sed quas biduo post perfidiosissimus hostis infregit." beza to bullinger, sept. , , baum, ii., appendix, . m. bourquelot has published a graphic account of the capture of bourges in may, by the huguenots, under montgomery, and of the siege in august, from the ms. journal of jean glaumeau, in the national library (bulletin de l'hist. du prot. fr., v. - ). m. l. lacour reprints in the same valuable periodical (v. - ) a contemporary hymn of some merit, "sur la prise de bourges." we are told that a proverb is even now current in berry, not a little flattering to the huguenot rule it recalls: "l'an mil cinq cent soixante et deux bourges n'avoit prêtres ny gueux." (ibid., v. .) [ ] jean de serres, de statu relig. et reip., ii. , . [ ] this conclusion was arrived at as early as aug. th. froude, hist. of england, vii. . seventy thousand crowns were to be paid to the prince's agents at strasbourg or frankfort so soon as the news should be received of the transfer of havre, thirty thousand more within a month thereafter. the other forty thousand were in lieu of the defence of rouen and dieppe, should it seem impracticable to undertake it. havre was to be held until the prince should have effected the restitution of calais and the adjacent territory according to the treaties of cateau-cambrésis, although the time prescribed by those treaties had not expired, and until the one hundred and forty thousand crowns should have been repaid without interest. the compact, signed by queen elizabeth at hampton court, sept. , , is inserted in du mont, corps diplomatique, v. , , and in forbes, state papers, ii., - . [ ] see the declaration in hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; and forbes, state papers, ii. , . j. de serres, ii. , etc. cf. forbes, state papers, ii. , - . [ ] throkmorton to the queen, sept. , . forbes, state papers, ii. , . [ ] froude, _ubi supra_. in fact, elizabeth assured philip the second--and there is no reason to doubt her veracity in this--that she would recall her troops from france so soon as calais were recovered and peace with her neighbors were restored, and that, in the attempt to secure these ends, she expected the countenance rather than the opposition of her brother of spain. queen elizabeth to the king of spain, sept. , . forbes, state papers, ii. . it is not improbable, indeed, that there were ulterior designs even against havre. "it is ment," her minister cecil wrote to one of his intimate correspondents, "to kepe newhaven in the quene's possession untill callice be eyther delyvered, or better assurance of it then presently we have." but he soon adds that, in a certain emergency, "i think the quene's majestie nead not be ashamed to utter her right to newhaven as parcell of the duchie of normandy." t. wright, queen elizabeth and her times (london, ), i. . [ ] froude, history of england, vii. , . [ ] catharine to throkmorton, Étampes, sept. , , state paper office. [ ] mém. de la noue, c. vii.; de thou, iii. , (liv. xxxi). throkmorton is loud in his praise of the fortifications the huguenots had thrown up, and estimates the soldiers within them at over one thousand horse and five thousand foot soldiers, besides the citizen militia. forbes, ii. . [ ] cuthbert vaughan appreciated the importance of this city, and warned cecil that "if the same, for lack of aid, should be surprised, it might give the french suspicion on our part that the queen meaneth but an appearance of aid, thereby to obtain into her hands such things of theirs as may be most profitable to her, and in time to come most noyful to themselves." forbes, ii. . unfortunately it was not cecil, but elizabeth herself, that restrained the exertions of the troops, and she was hard to move. and so, for lack of a liberal and hearty policy, rouen was suffered to fall, and dieppe was given up without a blow, and warwick and the english found themselves, as it were, besieged in havre. whereas, with those places, they might have commanded the entire triangle between the seine and the british channel. see throkmorton's indignation, and the surprise of condé and coligny, forbes, state papers, ii. , . [ ] in a letter to lansac, aug. , , catharine writes: "nous nous acheminons à bourges pour en déloger le jeune genlis.... l'ayant levé de là, comme je n'y espère grande difficulté, nous tournerons vers orléans pour faire le semblable de ceux qui y sont." le laboureur, i. . [ ] mém. de françois de la noue, c. viii. (p. .) [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , , ; j. de serres, ii. ; de thou, iii. - . [ ] it was undoubtedly a roman catholic fabrication, that montgomery bore on his escutcheon _a helmet pierced by a lance_ (un heaume percé d'une lance), in allusion to the accident by which he had given henry the second his mortal wound, in the joust at the tournelles. abbé bruslart, mém. de condé, i. , who, however, characterizes it as "chose fort dure à croire." [ ] mém. de la noue, c. viii. [ ] when lord robert dudley began to break to the queen the disheartening news that rouen had fallen, elizabeth betrayed "a marvellous remorse that she had not dealt more frankly for it," and instead of exhibiting displeasure at poynings's presumption, seemed disposed to blame him that he had not sent a thousand men instead, for his fault would have been no greater. dudley to cecil, oct. , , forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. ; froude, vii. ; sir thomas smith to throkmorton, paris, oct. , , forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] "but thei will have there preaching still. thei will have libertie of their religion, and thei will have no garrison wythin the towne, but will be masters therof themselves: and upon this point thei stand." despatch of sir thomas smith, poissy, oct. , , forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] the plundering lasted eight days. while the swiss obeyed orders, and promptly desisted, "the french suffered themselves to be killed rather than quit the place whilst there was anything left." castelnau, liv. iii., c. . the _curé_ of mériot waxes jocose over the incidents of the capture: "tout ce qui fut trouvé en armes par les rues et sur les murailles fut passé par le fil de l'espée. la ville fut mise au pillage par les soldatz du camp, qui se firent gentis compaignons. _dieu sçait que ceux qui estoient mal habillez pour leur yver_ (hiver) _ne s'en allèrent sans robbe neufve._ les huguenotz de la ville furent en tout maltraictez," etc. mém. de claude haton, i. . [ ] on the siege of rouen, see the graphic account of de thou, iii. (liv. xxxiii.) - ; the copious correspondence of the english envoys in france, forbes, state papers, vol. ii.; the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - (and marlorat's examination and sentence _in extenso_, - ); j. de serres, ii. ; la noue, c. viii.; davila (interesting, and not so inaccurate here as usual, perhaps because he had a brother-in-law, jean de hemery, sieur de villers, in the roman catholic army, but who greatly exaggerates the huguenot forces), ch. iii. - ; castelnau, liv. iii., c. . [ ] it is to be noted, however, that the order of the prince of condé, in the case of sapin (november , ), makes no mention of the judicial murder of marlorat, but alleges only his complicity with parliament in imprisoning the king, his mother, and the king of navarre, in annulling royal edicts by magisterial orders, in constraining the king's officers to become idolaters, in declaring knights of the order of st. michael and other worthy gentlemen rebels, in ordering the tocsin to be rung, and inciting to assassination, etc. hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , . see bruslart, mém. de condé, i. . when condé was informed that the parisian parliament had gone in red robes to the "sainte chapelle," to hear a requiem mass for counsellor sapin, he laughed, and said that he hoped soon to multiply their _litanies_ and _kyrie eleysons_. hist. ecclés., _ubi supra_. [ ] as early as october th, navarre sent a gentleman to jeanne d'albret, then at pau in béarn, "desiring to have her now to cherish him, and do the part of a wife;" and the messenger told sir thomas smith, with whom he dined that day in evreux, "that the king pretendeth to him, that this punishment [his wounds] came to him well-deserved, for his unkindness in forsaking the truth." forbes, state papers, ii. . the authenticity of the story of antoine of navarre's death-bed repentance is sufficiently attested by the letter written, less than a year later (august, ), by his widow, jeanne d'albret, to the cardinal of armagnac: "où sont ces belles couronnes que vous luy promettiés, et qu'il a acquises à combattre contre la vraye religion et sa conscience; comme la confession dernière qu'il en a faite en sa mort en est seur tesmoignage, et les paroles dites à la royne, en protestation de faire prescher les ministres par tout s'il guerissoit." pierre olhagaray, histoire de foix, béarn, et navarre (paris, ), p. . see also brantôme (edition lalanne), iv. , and the account, written probably by antoine's physician, de taillevis, among the dupuy mss. of the bibliothèque nationale, ibid., iv. . [ ] lestoile (collection michaud et poujoulat), ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , - ; de thou, , ; relation de la mort du roi de navarre, cimber et danjou, iv. , etc. [ ] i am convinced that the historian de thou has drawn of this fickle prince much too charitable a portrait (iii. ). it seems to be saying too much to affirm that "his merit equalled that of the greatest captains of his age;" and if "he loved justice, and was possessed of uprightness," it must be confessed that his dealings with neither party furnish much evidence of the fact. (i retain these remarks, although i find that the criticism has been anticipated by soldan, ii. ). recalling the earlier relations of the men, it is not a little odd that, when the news of navarre's death reached the "holy fathers" of the council then in session in the city of trent, the papal legates and the presidents paid the cardinal of lorraine a formal visit to _condole_ with him on the decease of his dear relative! (acta conc. tridentini, _apud_ martene et durand, amplissima collectio, tom. viii. ). the farce was, doubtless, well played, for the actors were of the best in christendom. [ ] letter of beza to bullinger, sept. , , baum, iii., app., . the huguenots had sustained a heavy loss also in the utter defeat and dispersion by blaise de montluc of some five or six thousand troops of gascony, which the baron de duras was bringing to orleans. [ ] the sentiments of well-informed huguenots are reflected in a letter of calvin, of september, , urging the protestants of languedoc to make collections to defray the expense entailed by d'andelot's levy. "d'entrer en question ou dispute pour reprendre les faultes passées, ce n'est pas le temps. car, quoy qu'il en soit, dieu nous a réduicts à telle extrémité que si vous n'estes secourus de ce costé-là, on ne voit apparence selon les hommes que d'une piteuse et horrible désolation." bonnet, lettres franç., ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés., ii. . [ ] see "capitulation des reytres et lansquenetz levez pour monseigneur le prince de condé, du xviii. d'aoust ," bulletin, xvi. ( ), - . the reiters came chiefly from hesse. [ ] claude haton, no friend to catharine, makes the duke d'aumale, in command of eight or nine thousand troops, avoid giving battle to d'andelot, and content himself with watching his march from lorraine as far as st. florentin, in obedience to secret orders of the queen mother, signed with the king's seal. mémoires, i. , . the fact was that d'andelot adroitly eluded both the duke of nevers, governor of champagne, who was prepared to resist his passage, and marshal saint andré, who had advanced to meet him with thirteen companies of "gens-d'armes" and some foot soldiers. davila, bk. iii. ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxiii.) . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , . the writer ascribes the fall of rouen to the delay of the reiters in assembling at their rendezvous. instead of being ready on the first of october, it was not until the tenth that they had come in sufficient numbers to be mustered in. [ ] eighty thousand, according to the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; twenty-five thousand, according to claude haton, mémoires, , . [ ] letter of beza to bullinger, sept. st, baum, ii., app., ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , ; davila, bk. iii., ; de thou, iii. , . [ ] letter of beza to calvin, dec. , , baum, ii., app., . the authority of beza, who had recently returned from a mission on which he had been sent by condé to germany and switzerland and who wrote from the camp, is certainly to be preferred to that of claude haton, who states the huguenot forces at , men (mémoires, i. ). the prince's chief captains--coligny, andelot, la rochefoucauld, and mouy--haton rates as the best warriors in france after the duke of guise. according to throkmorton's despatches from condé's camp near corbeil, the departure from orleans took place on the th of november, and the prince's french forces amounted only to six thousand foot soldiers, indifferently armed, and about two thousand horse. forbes, state papers, ii. . but this did not include the germans--some seven thousand five hundred men more. ibid., ii. . altogether, he reckons the army at " , horsemen of all sorts and nations, and , footmen." ibid., ii. . [ ] mém. de la noue, c. viii., p. . [ ] the protestants of languedoc held in nismes (nov. - , ) the first, or at least one of the very first, of those "political assemblies" which became more and more frequent as the sixteenth century advanced. here the count of crussol, subsequently duke d'uzès, was urged to accept the office of "head, defender, and conservator" of the reformed party in languedoc. to the count a council was given, and he was requested not to find the suggestion amiss that he should in all important matters, such as treaties with the enemy, consult with the general assembly of the protestants, or at least with the council. by this good office he would demonstrate the closeness of the bond uniting him as head to the body of his native land, besides giving greater assurance to a people too much inclined to receive unfounded impressions ("ung puple souvent trop meticulleux et de legiere impression"). procès-verbal of the assembly of nismes, from ms. bulletin, xxii. ( ), p. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; de thou, iii. . calvin's, or the geneva liturgy, was probably used but in part. special prayers, adapted to the circumstances of the army, had been composed, under the title of "prières ordinaires des soldatz de l'armée conduicte par monsieur le prince de condé, accomodées selon l'occurrence du temps." prof. baum cites a simple, but beautiful evening prayer, which was to be said when the sentinels were placed on guard for the night. theodor beza, ii. , note. [ ] throkmorton (forbes, ii. , ) represents the executions as more general, and as an act of severity, "chiefly in revenge of the great cruelty exercised by the duke of guise and his party at rouen against the soldiers there, but specially against your majesty's subjects." [ ] throkmorton was convinced of the practicability of capturing paris by a rapid movement even from before corbeil: "the whole suburbes on this syde the water is entrenched, where there is sundry bastions and cavaliers to plante th' artillerye on, which is verey daungerous for th' assaylantes. nevertheles, if the prince had used celeritie, in my opinion, with little losse of men and great facilitie he might have woon the suburbes; and then the towne coulde not longe have holden, somme parte of the sayd suburbes havinge domination therof." forbes, ii. . [ ] mémoires de françois de la noue, c. ix., p. (collection michaud et poujoulat). see also davila (bk. iii. ), who represents the advice of the admiral rather to have been to employ the army in recapturing the places along the loire, while condé insisted on trying to become master of paris. de thou, iii. . beza, in his letter of dec. th, says: "quum enim urbs repentino impetu facile capi posset, etc." so also the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] see motley, united netherlands, iii. . [ ] "the prince of condé and his campe having approched the towne of corbeille, and being ready to batter the same, the queene mother sente her principal escuyer, named monsieur de sainte-mesme, with a lettre to the sayd prince, advertisinge him of the deathe of the kinge, his brother. the sayd de sainte-mesme had also in credence to tell the prince from the queene, that she was verey desirous to have an ende of theise troubles: and also that she was willinge that the sayd prince should enjoy his ranke and aucthorité due unto him in this realme.... this the queene mother's lettre and sweete words hathe empeached the battrye and warlyke procedings against corbeill; the prince therby beeing induced to desist from using any violence against his ennemyes. i feare me, that this delaying will torne much to the prince's disadvantage; and that there is no other good meaning at this time in this faire speeche, then there was in the treaty of bogeancy (beaugency) in the monethe of july last." throkmorton to the queen, from essonne, opposite corbeil, nov. , , forbes, ii. . [ ] letter of beza to calvin, dec. th, baum, ii., app., . [ ] ib., _ubi supra_. [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; de thou, iii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. ; de thou, iii. ; mém. de castelnau, liv. iv., c. iv.; forbes, ii. , . even in september, the english ambassador wrote from orleans, "there is greate practise made by the queene mother and others to winne monsieur de janlis and monsieur de grandmont from the prince." forbes, ii. . [ ] "par ce moyen, un chacun de nous trainera son licol, jusques à ce que les dessusdits le serrent à leur appetit." hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . the details of the conferences, with the articles offered on either side, are given at great length, pp. - . [ ] "the queene mother and hyr councelours," wrote throkmorton to elizabeth, four or five days later (dec. , ), "have at the length once agayne showed, howe sincerely they meane in their treatyes. for when their force out of gascoigne together with two thousand five hundred spainardes were arrived, and when they had well trenched and fortefyed the faulxbourges and places of advantage of paris; espienge, that the prince coulde remayne no longer with his campe before paris for lack of victuaill and fourrage, having abused him sufficiently with this treaty eight or ten dayes: the sayd queene mother ... refused utterly the condicions before accorded." forbes, state papers, ii. . it is not strange that the ambassador, after the meagre results of the past five weeks, "could not hope of any great good to be done, until he saw it;" although he was confident that "if matters were handled stoutly and roundly, without delay," the prince might constrain his enemies to accord him favorable conditions. [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. iv., c. iv. [ ] five thousand, according to the duke d'aumale (les princes de condé, i. ). [ ] "quatre-vingtz salades ... lesquels sembloient estre _quatre-vingtz saettes_ du ciel!" explanation of plan of battle sent by guise to the king, reprinted in mém. de condé, iv. . [ ] "etant chose certaine qu'il n'entra de cinquante ans en france des plus couards hommes que ceux-là, bien qu'ils eussent la plus belle apparence du monde." hist. ecclés. ii. . [ ] it ought perhaps, in justice to the reiters, to be noticed that coligny attributes their failure not to cowardice, as in the case of both the french and the german infantry, but to their not understanding orders, and to the occasional absence of an interpreter. [ ] la noue in his commentaries (ed. mich., c. x., p. seq.) makes some interesting observations on the singular incidents of the battle of dreux. the author of the histoire ecclés., ii. , and de thou, iii. , criticise both the roman catholic and the protestant generals. they find the former to blame for not waiting to engage the huguenots until they had reached the rougher country they were approaching, where the superiority of condé in cavalry would have been of little avail. they censure the latter for leaving his own infantry unprotected, and for attacking the enemy's infantry instead of his cavalry. if this had been routed, the other would have made no further resistance. [ ] he had, according to beza's letter to calvin, dec. th (baum, ii. appendix, ), lost only one hundred and fifty of his horsemen; or, according to the histoire ecclés. (ii. ), only twenty-seven. [ ] for details of the battle of dreux, see hist. ecclés., ii. - ; mém. de castelnau, liv. ii., c. v.; de thou, iii. , etc.; pasquier, lettres (ed. feugère), ii. - ; guise's relation, reprinted in mém. de condé, iv. , etc., and letters subsequently written, ibid. iv. , etc.; coligny's brief account, written just after the battle, ibid. iv. - ; the swiss accounts, baum, ii. appendix, - ; vieilleville, liv. viii., c. xxxvi.; davila, , seq. cf. letter of catharine, _ubi infra_, and two plans of the engagement, in vol. v. of mém. de condé. the duc d'aumale gives a good military sketch, i. - . [ ] "et non sans cause," says abbé bruslart; "d'autant que de ceste bataille despendoit tout l'estat de la religion chrestienne et du royaume." mém. de condé, i. . a despatch of smith to the privy council, st. denis, dec. , , gives this first and incorrect account. ms. state paper office. [ ] h. martin, hist. de france, x. . le laboureur, ii. . catharine's own account to her minister at vienna, it is true, is very different. "j'en demeuray près de heures _en une extrême ennuy et fascherie_, et jusques à ce que le s. de losses arriva par-devers moy, qui fut hier sur les neuf heures du matin." letter to the bishop of rennes, dec. , , _apud_ le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. - . [ ] the council of trent, on receiving an account of the battle, dec. th, offered solemn thanksgivings. acta concil. trid. _apud_ martene et durand, ampl. coll., t. viii. , ; letter of the card. of lorraine to the bishop of rennes, french ambassador in germany, _apud_ le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. . [ ] sir thomas smith to cecil, february , , state paper office. [ ] same to same, february , , state paper office. [ ] for marshal saint andré, who had once gravely suggested in the council the propriety of sewing the queen mother up in a bag and throwing her into the river, it is understood that the medici shed few tears. brantôme and le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. . the marshal had been shot by a victim whom he had deprived of his possessions by confiscation. ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] "black devils," guise calls them in a letter of jan. th. "m. de châtillon et ces diables noirs sont à jerjuau." mém. de guise, . [ ] coligny had notified the english court of his intention early in january, and cecil entertained high hopes of the result: "a gentleman is arryved at rye, sent from the admyrall chastillion, who assureth his purpose to prosecute the cause of god and of his contrey, and meaneth to joyne with our power in normandy, which i trust shall make a spedy end of the whole." letter to sir t. smith, january th, wright, q. eliz., i. . [ ] how important a matter this was, may be inferred from the fact that the admiral took pains to dwell upon it, in a letter to queen elizabeth, written two or three days before his departure: "advisant au reste vostre majésté, madame, que j'ay faict condescendre les reistres a laisser tous leur bagages et empechemens en ceste ville (_chose non auparavant ouye_): de sorte que dedans le dix ou douziesme de ce moys de febvrier prochain au plus tard, avec l'aide de dieu, nous serons bien prez du havre de grace," etc. letter from orleans, jan. , , forbes, ii. . [ ] "en cest equipage, nous faisions telle diligence, que souvent nous prévenions la renommée de nous mesmes en plusieurs lieux où nous arrivions." mém. de la noue, c. xi. la noue states the force at two thousand reiters, five hundred french horse, and one thousand mounted arquebusiers. [ ] "the th of that moneth" (february), says stow, "the said admirall came before hunflew with six thousand horsemen, reisters and others of his owne retinues, beside footmen, and one hundred horsemen of the countries thereabout, and about sixe of the clocke at night, there was a great peale of ordinance shot off at newhaven (havre) for a welcome to the sayd admirall." annals (london, ), . the passage is inaccurately quoted by wright, queen eliz., i. , note. [ ] hist. des égl. réf., ii. , ; mém. de castelnau, liv. iv., c. vii. and viii. [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. iv., c. ix. [ ] oeuvres (ed. feugère), ii. ; and again, ii. . [ ] davila, bk. iii., p. . [ ] castelnau (liv. iv., c. ix.), who was present, gives a less graphic account than davila (bk. iii., pp. , ), who was not. hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - ; la noue, c. xi. - . [ ] feb. th--the day before sir thomas smith reached blois. letter to privy council, feb. , , state paper office; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] sir thomas smith to the privy council, feb. th and th, , state paper office, calendar, pp. , . it is now known, of course, that _bombs_ had been occasionally used long before , by the arabs in spain, and others. but this kind of missile was practically a novelty, and was not adopted in ordinary warfare till near a century later. [ ] it was at a most trying moment--when m. de soubise, the protestant governor, found that only two weeks' provisions remained in the city, and therefore felt compelled to issue an order to force some , non-combatants--women, children, and the poor--to leave lyons, that viret, the huguenot pastor, had an opportunity to display the great ascendancy which his eminent piety and discretion had secured him over all ranks in society. according to the newly published memoirs of soubise, viret boldly remonstrated against an act which was equivalent to a surrender of thousands of defenceless persons to certain butchery, and declared that the ordinary rules of military necessity did not apply to a war like this, "in which the poorest has an interest, since we are fighting for the liberty of our consciences," adding his own assurance that help would come from some other quarter. finally the governor yielded, saying: "even should it turn out ill and my reputation suffer, as though i had not done my duty as a captain, yet, at your word, i will do as you ask, being well assured that god will bless my act." bulletin, xxiii. ( ), . it will be remembered that pierre viret had been the able coadjutor of farel in the reformation of geneva, twenty-eight years before. the siege of lyons was made the subject of a lengthy song by antoine du plain (reprinted in the chansonnier huguenot, seq.), containing not a few historical data of importance. [ ] "nous venons maintenans d'estre advertyz de lion par m. de soubize, comme le baron des adrez, ayant esté practiqué par m. de nemours, avoit comploté de faire entrer quelque gendarmerie et gens de pied de m. de nemours dedans rommans, ville du daulphiné: dont il a esté empesché par le sieur de mouvans, et par la noblesse du pays; qui se sont saisiz de sa personne, et le ont mené prisonnier à valence, pour le envoyer en languedoc devers mon frère, naguères cardinal de chastillon, et monsieur de crussol (qui ont presque delivré tout le dict pays de languedoc de la tyrannie des ennemys de dieu et du roy) a fin de le faire punir, et servir d'exemple aux autres deserteurs de dieu, de leur debvoir, et de la patrie." admiral coligny to queen elizabeth, orleans, january , / , forbes, ii. . [ ] the gloomy picture is painted by henri martin, x. , etc. [ ] this statement does not rest upon any documentary proof that i am aware of. it is, however, vouched for by the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . moreover, admiral coligny, in his later defence, expressly states, "on the testimony of men worthy of belief," that guise "was accustomed to boast that, on the capture of the city, he would spare none of the inhabitants, and that no respect would be paid to age or sex." jean de serres, iii. ; mém. de condé, iv. . [ ] mém. de soubise, bulletin, xxiii. ( ) . [ ] not without some hesitation, however. so little confidence in his good judgment did his frivolous appearance inspire, that coligny observed: "i would not trust him, without knowing him better than i do, had not monsieur de soubise sent him to me." mém. de soubise, bulletin, xxiii. ( ) . [ ] the procès verbal of poltrot's examination just before his death, march th, is inserted in the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - . in this he declares that his first testimony was _false_ and extorted by the fear of death, and exculpates soubise, beza, coligny, etc., from having instigated him. he says that when put to torture he will say anything the questioners want him to. accordingly, when so tortured, he accuses them, and when released a moment after the horses have begun to rend him in pieces, he conjures up a plot of the huguenots to sack paris, etc. may it not properly be asked, what such testimony as this is worth? for or against coligny, volumes of it would not affect his character in our estimation. [ ] the direct testimony of jacques auguste de thou, on a matter with which he was evidently intimately acquainted through his father, is unimpeachable, and will outweigh with every unprejudiced mind all the stories of davila, castelnau, etc., founded on mere report. de thou, histoire univ. (liv. xxxiv.), iii. . [ ] poltrot's pretended confession of feb. th, at camp saint hilaire, near saint mesmin, with the replies signed by coligny, la rochefoucauld, and beza to each separate article, is inserted in full in mém. de condé, iv. - , and the hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - . coligny's letter to catharine, ibid., ii. , , mém. de condé, iv. . [ ] that catharine de' medici was no very sincere mourner for guise is sufficiently certain; and it is well known that there were those who believed her to have instigated his murder (see mém. de tavannes, pet. ed., ii. ). this is not surprising when we recall the fact that almost every great crime or casualty that occurred in france, for the space of a generation, was ascribed to her evil influence. still the viscount de tavannes makes too great a draft upon our credulity, when he pretends that she made a frank admission of guilt to his father. "depuis, au voyage de bayonne, passant par dijon, elle dit au sieur de tavannes: 'ceux de guise se vouloient faire roys, je les en ay bien gardé devant orléans.'" the expression "devant orléans" can hardly be tortured into a reference to anything else than guise's assassination. [ ] i entirely agree with prof. baum (theodor beza, ii. ) in regarding "this single circumstance as more than sufficient to demonstrate both the innocence of coligny and his associates, and the consciously guilty fabrication of the accusations." [ ] besides the authorities already referred to, the journal of bruslart, mém. de condé, i. , ; davila, bk. iii. , ; claude haton, i. , etc.; j. de serres, ii. - ; and pasquier, lettres (oeuvres choisies), ii. , may be consulted with advantage. prof. baum's account is, as usual, vivid, accurate, and instructive (theodor beza, ii. , etc.). varillas, anquetil, etc., are scarcely worth examining. there is the ordinary amount of blundering about the simplest matters of chronology. davila places the wounding of guise on the th of february, his death three days later, etc. [ ] mém. de condé, i. ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] claude haton, i. , . [ ] see riez's letter to the king, reprinted in mém. de condé, iv. - , and in cimber and danjou's invaluable collection of contemporary pamphlets and documents, v. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., _ubi supra_. there is extant an affecting letter from the aged renée of ferrara to calvin, in which she complains with deep feeling of the reformed, and especially their preachers, for the severity with which even after his death they attacked the memory of her son-in-law, and even spoke of his eternal condemnation as an ascertained fact. "i know," she said, "that he was a persecutor; but i do not know, nor, to speak freely, do i believe that he was reprobated of god; for he gave signs to the contrary before his death. but they want this not to be mentioned, and they desire to shut the mouths of those who know it." cimber et danjou, v. , etc. calvin's reply of the th of january, , is admirable for its kind, yet firm tone (bonnet, lettres franç. de calvin, ii. , etc., calvin's letters, am. edit., iv. , etc.). he freely condemned the beatification of the king of navarre, while the duke of guise was consigned to perdition. the former was an apostate; the latter an open enemy of the truth of the gospel from the very beginning. indeed, to pronounce upon the doom of a fellow-sinner was both rash and presumptuous, for there is but one judge before whose seat we all must give account. yet, in condemning the authors of the horrible troubles that had befallen france, and which all god's children had felt scarcely less poignantly than renée herself, sprung though she was from the royal stock, it was impossible not to condemn the duke "who had kindled the fire." yea, for himself, although he had always prayed god to show guise mercy, the reformer avowed, in almost the very words of beza, that he had often desired that god would lay his hand upon the duke to free his church of him, unless he would convert him. "and yet i can protest," he added, "that but for me, before the war, active and energetic men would have exerted themselves to destroy him from the face of the earth, whom my sole exhortation restrained." some of the composers of huguenot ballads were bitter enough in their references to guise's death and pompous funeral; see, among others, the songs in the chansonnier huguenot, pp. and . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , . the story is well told in memorials of renée of france, - . de thou (liv. xxx.), iii. , has incorrectly placed this occurrence among the events of the first months of the war. during the second war brantôme once stopped to pay his respects to renée, and saw in the castle over huguenots that had fled there for security. in a letter of may , , calvin speaks of her as "the nursing mother of the poor saints driven out of their homes and knowing not whither to go," and as having made her castle what a princess looking only to this world would regard almost an insult to have it called--"god's hostelry" or "hospital" (ung hostel-dieu). god had, as it were, called upon her by these trials to pay arrears for the timidity of her younger days. lettres franç., ii. (amer. trans., iv. ). [ ] despatch to the queen, blois, february , / , forbes, state papers, ii. . "of the thre things that did let this realme to come to unity and accorde," adds smith, "i take th' one to be taken away. how th' other two wil be now salved--th' one that the papists may relent somwhat of their pertinacie, and the protestants have som affiaunce or trust in there doengs, and so th' one live with th' other in quiet, i do not yet se." [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. iv., c. xii.; davila, bk. iii. ; journal de bruslart, mém. de condé, i. ; letter of catharine to gonnor, march d, ibid., iv. ; hist. ecclés., ii. . [ ] rascalon, catharine's agent, proffered the dignity in a letter of the th of march, and the duke declined it on the th of the same month. at the same time he gave some wholesome advice respecting the observance of the edict, etc. hist. ecclés., ii. - . [ ] "la royne ... y a si vivement procedé, que ayant ordonné que sur la foy de l'un et de l'autre nous nous entreveorions en l'isle aux bouviers, joignant presque les murs de ceste ville, dimenche dernier cela fut executé." condé to sir thomas smith, orleans, march , , forbes, ii. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. , . coupled with demands for the restitution of the edict without restriction or modification, the prohibition of insults, the protection of the churches, the permission to hold synods, the recognition of protestant marriages, and that the religion be no longer styled "new," "inasmuch as it is founded on the ancient teaching of the prophets and apostles," we find the huguenot ministers, true to the spirit of the age, insisting upon "the rigorous punishment of all atheists, libertines, anabaptists, servetists, and other heretics and schismatics." [ ] the text of the edict of amboise is given by isambert, recueil des anc. lois franç., xiv. - ; j. de serres, ii. - ; hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. (liv. iii.) - . see pasquier, lettres (oeuvres choisies), ii. . [ ] smith to the queen, april , , in duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. documents, . [ ] smith to d'andelot, march , , state paper office. [ ] journal de bruslart, mém. de condé, i. : "de expresso regis mandato iteratis vicibus facto." claude haton is scarcely more complimentary than bruslart: "elle (la paix) estoit faicte du tout au désavantage de l'honneur de dieu, de la religion catholicque et de l'authorité du jeune roy et repos public de son royaume." mémoires, i. , . [ ] elizabeth of england was herself, apparently, awakening to the importance of the struggle, and new troops subsidized by her would soon have entered france from the german borders. "this day," writes cecil to sir thomas smith, ambassador at paris, feb. , / , "commission passeth hence to the comte of oldenburg to levy eight thousand footemen and four thousand horse, who will, i truste, passe into france with spede and corradg. he is a notable, grave, and puissant captayn, and fully bent to hazard his life in the cause of religion." th. wright, queen elizabeth and her times, i. . but elizabeth's troops, like elizabeth's money, came too late. of the latter, admiral coligny plainly told smith a few weeks later: "if we could have had the money at newhaven (havre) _but one xiii daies sooner_, we would have talked with them after another sorte, and would not have bene contented with this accord." smith to the queen, april , , in duc d'aumale, i. . [ ] letter from orleans, march , , mss. state paper office, duc d'aumale, i. . [ ] hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . theodore beza was the preacher on this occasion, and betrayed his own disappointment by speaking of the liberty of religion they had received as "not so ample, peradventure, as they would wish, yet such as they ought to thank god for." smith to the queen, march , state paper office. [ ] relazione di correro, . rel. des amb. vén., ii. - . [ ] it appears at least as early as in farel's epistre à tous seigneurs, written in , p. of fick's edition. chapter xiv. the peace of amboise, and the bayonne conference. [sidenote: the restoration of havre demanded.] [sidenote: fall of havre.] scarcely had the edict of amboise been signed when a demand was made upon the english queen for the city of havre, placed in her possession by the huguenots, as a pledge for the restoration of calais in accordance with the treaty of cateau-cambrésis, and as security for the repayment of the large sums she had advanced for the maintenance of the war. but elizabeth was in no favorable mood for listening to this summons. instead of being instructed to evacuate havre, the earl of warwick was reinforced by fresh supplies of arms and provisions, and received orders to defend to the last extremity the only spot in france held by the queen. a formal offer made by condé to secure a renewal of the stipulation by which calais was to be given up in , and to remunerate elizabeth for her expenditures in the cause of the french protestants, was indignantly rejected; and both sides prepared for open war.[ ] the struggle was short and decisive. the french were a unit on the question of a permanent occupation of their soil by foreigners. within the walls of havre itself a plot was formed by the french population to betray the city into the hands of their countrymen; and warwick was forced to expel the natives in order to secure the lives of his own troops.[ ] but no vigilance of the besieged could insure the safety of a detached position on the borders of so powerful a state as france. elizabeth was too weak, or too penurious, to afford the recruits that were loudly called for. and now a new and frightful auxiliary to the french made its appearance. a contagious disease set in among the english troops, crowded into a narrow compass and deprived of their usual allowance of fresh meat and wholesome water. the fearful mortality attending it soon revealed the true character of the scourge. few of those that fell sick recovered. gathering new strength from day to day, it reigned at length supreme in the fated city. soon the daily crowd of victims became too great to receive prompt sepulture, and the corpses lying unburied in the streets furnished fresh fuel for the raging pestilence. seven thousand english troops were reduced in a short time to three thousand, in a few days more to fifteen hundred men.[ ] the hand of death was upon the throat of every survivor. at length, too feeble to man their works, despairing of timely succor, unable to sustain at the same moment the assault of their opponents and the fearful visitation of the almighty, the english consented to surrender; and, on the twenty-eighth of july, a capitulation was signed, in accordance with which, on the next day, havre, with all its fortifications and the ships of war in its harbor, fell once more into the hands of the french.[ ] [sidenote: how the peace was received.] the pacification of amboise, a contemporary chronicler tells us, was received with greater or less cordiality in different localities of france, very much according to the number of protestants they had contained before the war. "this edict of peace was very grievous to hear published and to have executed in the case of the catholics of the peaceable cities and villages where there were very few huguenots. but it was a source of great comfort to the catholics of the cities which were oppressed by the huguenots, as well as of the neighboring villages in which the catholic religion had been intermitted, mass and divine worship not celebrated, and the holy sacraments left unadministered--as in the cities of lyons and orleans, and their vicinity, and in many other cities of poitou and languedoc, where the huguenots were masters or superior in numbers. as the peace was altogether advantageous to the huguenots, they labored hard to have it observed and published."[ ] [sidenote: vexatious delays in normandy.] but to secure publication and observance was not always possible.[ ] not unfrequently the huguenots were denied by the illiberality of their enemies every privilege to which they were entitled by the terms of the edict. at troyes, the roman catholic party, hearing that peace had been made, resolved to employ the brief interval before the edict should be published, and the mayor of the city led the populace to the prisons, where all the huguenots that could be found were at once murdered.[ ] the vexatious delays, and the actual persecution still harder to be borne, which were encountered at rouen, have been duly recorded by an anonymous roman catholic contemporary, as well as in the registers of the city hall and of the norman parliament, and may serve as an indication of what occurred in many other places. from the chapter of the cathedral and the judges of the supreme provincial court, down to the degraded rabble, the entire population was determined to interpose every possible obstacle in the way of the peaceable execution of the new law. before any official communication respecting it reached them, the clergy declared, by solemn resolution, their intention to reserve the right of prosecuting all who had plundered their extensive ecclesiastical domain. the municipality wrote at once to the king, to his mother, and to others at court, imploring that rouen and its vicinity might be exempted from all exercise of the "new religion." parliament sent deputies to charles the ninth to remonstrate against the broad concessions made in favor of the protestants, and, even when compelled to go through the form of a registration, avoided a publication of the edict, in order to gain time for another fruitless protest addressed to the royal government. when it came to the execution of the law, the affair assumed a more threatening aspect. the roman catholics had resolved to resist the return of the "for-issites," or fugitive huguenots. at first they excused their opposition by alleging that there were bandits and criminals of every kind in the ranks of the exiles. next they demanded that a preliminary list of their names and abodes should be furnished, in order that their arms might be taken away. finally they required, with equal perverseness, that, in spite of the express stipulation of the king's rescript, the "for-issites" should return only as private individuals, and should not venture to resume their former offices and dignities. meantime the "for-issites," driven to desperation by the flagrant injustice of which they were the victims, began to retaliate by laying violent hands upon all objects of roman catholic devotion in the neighboring country, and by levying contributions upon the farms and villas of their malignant enemies. the rouenese revenged themselves in turn by wantonly murdering the huguenots whom they found within the city walls. [sidenote: protest of the norman parliament.] the embittered feeling did not diminish at once after the more intrepid of the huguenots had, under military compulsion, been readmitted into rouen. there were daily complaints of ill-usage. but the insolence of the dominant party rose to a still higher pitch when there appeared a royal edict--whether genuine or forged has not as yet been settled--by which the cardinal demands of the huguenots were granted. the alleged concessions may not strike us as very extraordinary. they consisted chiefly in disarming the roman catholics equally with the adherents of the opposite creed, and in erecting a new chamber in parliament to try impartially cases in dispute between the adherents of the two communions.[ ] this was certainly decreeing but a small measure of the equality in the eye of the law which the protestants might claim as a natural and indefeasible right. the citizens of the norman capital, however, regarded the enactment as a monstrous outrage upon society. charles the ninth, happened at this time to be passing through gaillon, a place some ten leagues distant from rouen, on his way to the siege of havre; and damours, the advocate-general, was deputed to bear to him a protest drawn up by parliament. the tone of the paper was scarcely respectful to the monarch; it was positively insulting to the members of the royal council who professed the protestant faith. it predicted the possible loss of normandy, or of his entire kingdom, in case the king pursued a system of toleration. the normans, it said, would not submit to protestant governors, nor to the return of the exiles in arms, nor to their resumption of their former dignities. if the "for-issites" continued their excesses, they would be set upon and killed. the roman catholic burgesses of rouen even proclaimed a conditional loyalty. should the king not see fit to accede to their demands, they declared themselves ready to place the keys of their city in his hands to dispose of at his pleasure, at the same time craving permission to go where they pleased and to take away their property with them. [sidenote: a rude rebuff.] truly the spirit of the "holy league" was already born, though the times were not yet ripe for the promulgation of such tenets. the advocate-general was a fluent speaker, and he had been attended many a weary mile by an enthusiastic escort. parliamentary counsellors, municipal officers, clergy, an immense concourse of the lower stratum of the population--all were at gaillon, ready to applaud his well-turned sentences. but he had chosen an unlucky moment for his oratorical display. his glowing periods were rudely interrupted by one of the princely auditors. this was louis of condé--now doubly important to the court on account of the military undertaking that was on foot--who complained of the speaker's insolent words. so powerful a nobleman could not be despised. and so the voluble damours, with his oration but half delivered, instead of meeting a gracious monarch's approval and returning home amid the plaudits of the multitude, was hastily taken in charge by the archers of the royal guard and carried off to prison. the rest of the rouenese disappeared more rapidly than they had come. the avenues to the city were filled with fugitives as from a disastrous battle. even the grave parliament, which the last winter had been exhibiting its august powers in butchering huguenots by the score, beginning with the arch-heretic augustin marlorat, lost for a moment its self-possession, and took part in the ignominious flight. shame, however, induced it to pause before it had gone too far, and, putting on the gravest face it could summon, it reappeared ere long at gaillon with becoming magisterial gravity. never had there been a more thorough discomfiture.[ ] a few days later the marshal de bourdillon made his entry into rouen with a force of swiss soldiers sufficient to break down all resistance, the "for-issites" were brought in, a new election of municipal officers was held, and comparative quiet was restored in the turbulent city.[ ] [sidenote: commissioners to enforce the edict.] [sidenote: alienation of a profligate court.] [sidenote: profanity a test of catholicity.] so far as a character so undecided could frame any fixed purpose, catharine de' medici was resolved to cement, if possible, a stable peace. the chancellor, michel de l'hospital, still retained his influence over her, and gave to her disjointed plans somewhat of the appearance of a deliberate policy. that policy certainly seemed to mean peace. and to prove this, commissioners were despatched to the more distant provinces, empowered to enforce the execution of the edict of amboise.[ ] yet never was the court less in sympathy with the huguenots than at this moment. if shameless profligacy had not yet reached the height it subsequently attained under the last valois that sat upon the throne of france, it was undoubtedly taking rapid strides in that direction. for the giddy throng of courtiers, living in an atmosphere that reeked with corruption,[ ] the stern morality professed by the lips and exemplified in the lives of gaspard de coligny and his noble brothers, as well as by many another of nearly equal rank, could afford but few attractions. many of these triflers had, it is true, exhibited for a time some leaning toward the reformed faith. but their evanescent affection was merely a fire kindled in the light straw: the fuel was soon consumed, and the brilliant flame which had given rise to such sanguine expectations died out as easily as it sprang up.[ ] when once the novelty of the simple worship in the rude barn, or in the retired fields, with the psalms of marot and beza sung to quaint and stirring melodies, had worn off; when the black gown of the protestant minister had become as familiar to the eye as the stole and chasuble of the officiating priest, and the words of the reformed confession of sins as familiar to the ear as the pontifical litanies and prayers, the "assemblée" ceased to attract the curious from the salons of st. germain and fontainebleau. besides, it was one thing to listen to a scathing account of the abuses of churchmen, or a violent denunciation of the sins of priest and monk, and quite another to submit to a faithful recital of the iniquities of the court, and hear the wrath of god denounced against the profane, the lewd, and the extortionate. there were some incidents, occurring just at the close of the war, that completed the alienation which before had been only partial. the huguenots had attempted by stringent regulations to banish swearing, robbery, and other flagrant crimes from their army. they had punished robbery in many instances with death. they had succeeded so far in doing away with oaths, that their opponents had paid unconscious homage to their freedom from the despicable vice. in those days, when in the civil struggle it was so difficult to distinguish friends from foes, there was one proof of unimpeachable orthodoxy that was rarely disputed. he must be a good catholic who could curse and swear. the huguenot soldier would do neither.[ ] so nearly, indeed, did the huguenot affirmation approach to the simplicity of the biblical precept, that one roman catholic partisan leader of more than ordinary audacity had assumed for the motto on his standard the blasphemous device: "'double 's death' has conquered 'verily.'"[ ] but the strictness with which theft and profanity were visited in the huguenot camp produced but a slight impression, compared with that made by the punishment of death inflicted by a stern judge at orleans, just before the proclamation of peace, on a man and woman found guilty of adultery. almost the entire court cried out against the unheard-of severity of the sentence for a crime which had never before been punished at all. the greater part of these advocates of facile morals had even the indiscretion to confess that they would never consent to accept such people as the huguenots for their masters.[ ] [sidenote: admiral coligny accused.] [sidenote: his defence espoused by condé and the montmorencies.] even after the publication of the edict of amboise, there was one matter left unsettled that threatened to rekindle the flames of civil war. it will be remembered that the murderer of the duke of guise, overcome by terror in view of his fate had charged gaspard de coligny with having instigated the perpetration of the foul crime; that, as soon as he heard the accusation, the admiral had not only answered the allegations, article by article, but had written, earnestly begging that poltrot's execution might be deferred until the return of peace should permit him to be confronted with his accuser. this very reasonable demand, we have seen, had been rejected, and the miserable assassin had been torn into pieces by four horses, upon the place de grève, on the very day preceding that which witnessed the signing of the edict of amboise. if, however, the queen mother had hoped to diminish the difficulties of her position by taking this course, she had greatly miscalculated. in spite of his protestations, and of a second and more popular defence which he now made,[ ] the guises persisted in believing, or in pretending to believe, coligny to be the prime cause of the murder of the head of their family. his very frankness was perverted into a proof of his complicity. the admiral's words, as an eminent historian of our own day observes, bear the seal of sincerity, and we need go for the truth nowhere else than to his own avowals.[ ] but they did not satisfy his enemies. the danger of an open rupture was imminent. coligny was coming to court from his castle of châtillon-sur-loing, with a strong escort of six hundred gentlemen; but so inevitable did a bloody collision within the walls of paris seem to the queen, that she begged condé to dissuade him for the present from carrying out his purpose. meantime, condé and the two montmorencies--the constable and his son, the marshal--espoused coligny's cause as their own, by publicly declaring (on the fifteenth of may) his entire innocence, and announcing that any blow aimed at the châtillons, save by legal process, they would regard and avenge as aimed at themselves.[ ] taking excuse from the unsettled relations of the kingdom with england and at home, the privy council at the same time enjoined both parties to abstain from acts of hostility, and adjourned the judicial investigation until after arms had been laid down.[ ] [sidenote: petition of the guises.] at length, on the twenty-sixth of september--two months after the reduction of havre--the guises renewed their demand with great solemnity. charles was at meulan (on the seine, a few miles below paris), when a procession of mourners entered his presence. it was the family of guise, headed by the late duke's widow, his mother, and his children, coming to sue for vengeance on the murderer. all were clad in the dress that betokened the deepest sorrow, and the dramatic effect was complete.[ ] they brought a petition couched in decided terms, but making no mention of the name of coligny, and signed, not only by themselves, but by three of the bourbons--the cardinal charles, the duke of montpensier, and his son--and by the dukes of longueville and nemours.[ ] under the circumstances, the king could not avoid granting their request and ordering inquisition to be made by the peers in parliament assembled.[ ] but the friends of the absent admiral saw in the proposed investigation only an attempt on the part of his enemies to effect through the forms of law the ruin of the most prominent huguenot of france. it was certain, they urged, that he could expect no justice at the hands of the presidents and counsellors of the parisian parliament. nor did they find it difficult to convince catharine that to permit a public trial would be to reopen old sores and to risk overturning in a single hour the fabric of peace which for six months she had been laboring hard to strengthen.[ ] the king was therefore induced to evoke the consideration of the complaint of the guises to his own grand council. here again new difficulties sprang up. the duchess of guise was as suspicious of the council as coligny of the parliament, and challenged the greater number of its members as too partial to act as judges. in fact, it seemed impossible to secure a jury to settle the matter in dispute. after months spent to no purpose in wrangling, charles determined to remove the question both from the parliament and from the council, and on the fifth of january, , reserved for himself and his mother the duty of adjudication. at the same time, on the ground that the importance of the case demanded the deliberations of a prince of greater age and of more experience than he as yet possessed, and that its discussion at present might prove prejudicial to the tranquillity of the kingdom, he adjourned it for three full years, or until such other time as he might hereafter find to be convenient.[ ] [sidenote: embarrassment of catharine.] the feud between the châtillons and the guises was not, however, the only embarrassment which the government found itself compelled to meet. catharine was in equal perplexity with respect to the engagements she had entered into with the prince of condé. it was part of the misfortune of this improvident princess that each new intrigue was of such a nature as to require a second intrigue to bolster it up. yet she was to live long enough to learn by bitter experience that there is a limit to the extent to which plausible but lying words will pass current. at last the spurious coin was to be returned discredited to her own coffers. catharine had enticed condé into concluding a peace much less favorable to the huguenots than his comrades in arms had expected in view of the state of the military operations and the pecuniary necessities of the court, by the promise that he should occupy the same controlling position in the government as his brother, the king of navarre, held at the time of his death. we have seen that he was so completely hoodwinked that he assured his friends that it was of little consequence how scanty were the concessions made in the edict. he would soon be able, by his personal authority, to secure to "the religion" the largest guarantees. if we may believe catharine herself, he went so far in his enthusiastic desire for peace as to threaten to desert the huguenots, if they declined to embrace the opportunity of reconciliation.[ ] [sidenote: the majority of charles proclaimed.] how to get rid of the troublesome obligation she had assumed, was now the problem; since to fulfil her promise honestly was, for a person of her crooked policy and inordinate ambition, not to be thought of for an instant. the readiest solution was found in abolishing the office of lieutenant-general. this could be done only by declaring the termination of the minority of charles. for this an opportunity presented itself, when, on the seventeenth of august, ,[ ] the queen and her children, with a brilliant retinue, were in the city of rouen, on their return from the successful campaign against havre. that day charles the ninth held a "lit de justice" in the palace of the parliament of normandy. sitting in state, and surrounded by his mother, his younger brothers, and a host of grandees, he proceeded to address the assembled counsellors, pronouncing himself of full age, and, in the capacity of a major king, delivered to them an edict, signed the day before, ordering the observance of his edict of amboise and the complete pacification of his kingdom by a universal laying down of arms.[ ] true, charles was but a few days more than thirteen years of age; but his right to assume the full powers of government was strenuously maintained by chancellor l'hospital, upon whom devolved the task of explaining more fully the king's motives and purposes. then catharine, the author of the pageant, rising, humbly approached her son's throne, and bowed to the boy in token that she resigned into his hands the temporary authority she had held for nearly three years. charles, advancing to meet her, accepted her homage, saying, at the same time, in words that were but too significant and prophetic of the remainder of his reign: "madame ma mère, you shall govern and command as much or more than ever."[ ] [sidenote: charles and the refractory parliament of paris.] the parliament of rouen, flattered at being selected for the instrument in so important an act, published and registered the edict of charles's majority, notwithstanding some unpalatable provisions. not so the parliament of paris. the counsellors of the capital were even more indignant at the slight put upon their claim to precedence, than at the proposed disarming of the roman catholics--a measure particularly distasteful to the riotous population of paris.[ ] the details of their opposition need not, however, find a record here. in the end the firmness of the king, or of his advisers, triumphed. at mantes[ ] charles received a deputation from the recalcitrant judges, with christopher de thou, their first president, at its head. after hearing their remonstrances, he replied to the delegates that, although young and possessed of little experience, he was as truly king of france as any of his predecessors, and that he intended to make himself obeyed as such. to prove, however, that he had not acted inconsiderately in the premises, he called upon the members of his council who were present to speak; and each in turn, commencing with cardinal bourbon, the first prince of the blood, declared that the edict of amboise had been made with his consent and advice, and that he deemed it both useful and necessary. whereupon charles informed the parliamentary committee that he had not adopted this course because he was under any obligation to render to them an account of his actions. "but," said he, "now that i am of age, i wish you to meddle with nothing beyond giving my subjects good and speedy justice. the kings, my predecessors, placed you where you are, in order that they might unburden their consciences, and that their subjects might live in greater security under their obedience, not in order to constitute you my tutors, or the protectors of the realm, or the guardians of my city of paris. you have allowed yourselves to suppose until now that you are all this. i shall not leave you under the delusion; but i command you that, as in my father's and grandfather's time you were accustomed to attend to justice alone, so you shall henceforth meddle with nothing else." he professed to be perfectly willing to listen to their representations when modestly given; but he concluded by threatening them that, if they persisted in their present insolent course, he would find means to convince them that they were not his guardians and teachers, but his servants.[ ] these stout words were shrewdly suspected to come from "the shop of the chancellor,"[ ] whose popularity they by no means augmented. but charles was himself in earnest. a fresh delegation of counsellors was dismissed from the royal presence with menaces,[ ] and the parliament and people of paris were both finally compelled to succumb. parliament registered the edict; the people surrendered their arms--the poor receiving the estimated value of the weapons, the tradesmen and burgesses a ticket to secure their future restoration. as a matter of course, the nobles do not appear at all in the transaction, their immemorial claim to be armed even in time of peace being respected. [sidenote: the pope's bull against princely heretics.] [sidenote: cardinal châtillon.] pope pius the fourth had been as indignant as philip the second himself at the conclusion of peace with the huguenots. he avenged himself as soon as he received the tidings, by publishing, on the seventh of april, , a bull conferring authority upon the inquisitors general of christendom to proceed against heretics and their favorers--even to bishops, archbishops, patriarchs and cardinals--and to cite them before their tribunal by merely affixing the summons to the doors of the inquisition or of the basilica of st. peter. should they fail to appear in person, they might at once be condemned and sentenced. the bull was no idle threat. without delay a number of french prelates were indicted for heresy, and summoned to come to rome and defend themselves. the list was headed by cardinal odet de châtillon, coligny's eldest brother, who had openly espoused the reformed belief, and st. romain, archbishop of aix. caraccioli, who had resigned the bishopric of troyes and had been ordained a protestant pastor, montluc of valence, and others of less note, figured among the suspected.[ ] as they did not appear, a number of these prelates were shortly condemned.[ ] not content with this bold infraction of the gallican liberties, the roman pontiff went a step farther, and, through the congregation of the inquisition, cited jeanne d'albret, queen of navarre, to appear at rome within six months, on pain of being held attainted of heresy, and having her dominions given in possession to the first catholic occupant.[ ] [sidenote: the council protests against the papal bull.] in other words, not only béarn, the scanty remnant of her titular monarchy, but all the lands and property to which the huguenot queen had fallen heir, were to follow in the direction the kingdom of navarre had taken, and go to swell the enormous wealth and dominion of the spanish prince,[ ] who found his interest to lie in the discord and misfortunes of his neighbors. surely such an example would not be without significance to princes and princesses who, like catharine, were wont occasionally to court the heretics on account of their power, and whose loyalty to the papal church could scarcely be supposed, even by the most charitable, to rest on any firmer foundation than self-interest. nor was the lesson thrown away. catharine and michel de l'hospital, and many another, read its import at a glance. but, instead of breaking down their opposition, the papal bull only forearmed them. they saw that queen jeanne's cause was their cause--the cause of any of the valois who, whether upon the ground of heresy or upon any other pretext, might become obnoxious to the see of rome. the royal council of state, therefore, promptly took the matter in hand, in connection with the recent trial of the french prelates, and replied to the papal missive by a spirited protest, which d'oisel, the french ambassador at rome, was commissioned to present. in his monarch's name he was to declare the procedure against the queen of navarre to be not only derogatory to the respect due to the royal dignity, which that princess could claim to an equal degree with the other monarchs of christendom, but injurious to the rights and honor of the king and kingdom, and subversive of civil society. it was unjust, for it was dictated by the enemies of france, who sought to take advantage of the youth of the king and his embarrassments arising from civil wars, to oppress a widow and orphans--the widow and orphan children, indeed, of a king for whom the pope had himself but recently been endeavoring so zealously to secure the restoration of navarre. the malice was apparent from the fact that nothing similar had been undertaken by the holy see against any of the monarchs who had revolted from its obedience within the last forty years. sovereign power had been conferred upon the pope for the salvation of souls, not that he might despoil kings and dispose of kingdoms according to his caprice--an undertaking his predecessors had engaged in hitherto only to their shame and confusion. finally, the king of france begged pius to recall the sentence against queen jeanne, otherwise he would be compelled to employ the remedies resorted to by his ancestors in similar cases, according to the laws of the realm.[ ] not content with this direct appeal, catharine wrote to her son's ambassador in germany to interest the emperor and the king of the romans in an affair that no less vitally affected them.[ ] so vigorous a response seems to have frightened the papal court, and the bull was either recalled or dropped--at least no trace is said to be found in the constitutions of pius the fourth--and the proceedings against the bishops were indefinitely suspended.[ ] but while catharine felt it necessary, for the maintenance of her own authority and of the dignity of the french crown, to enter the lists boldly in behalf of the queen of navarre, she was none the less bent upon confirming that authority by rendering it impossible for the huguenots ever again to take the field in opposition to the crown. a war for the sake of principle was something of which that cynical princess could not conceive. the huguenot party was strong, according to her view, only because of the possession of powerful leaders. the religious convictions of its adherents went for nothing. let the condés, and the colignies, and the porciens, and the la rochefoucaulds be gained over, and the people, deprived of a head, would subordinate their theology to their interest, and unity would be restored under her own rule. it was the same vain belief that alone rendered possible a few years later such a stupendous crime and folly as the st. bartholomew's day massacre. many an obscure and illiterate martyr, who had lost his life during her husband's reign, might have given her a far juster estimate of the future than her macchiavellian education, with all its fancied shrewdness and insight into human character and motives, had furnished her. [sidenote: catharine's attempt to seduce condé from the huguenots.] to overthrow the political influence of the huguenots she must seduce their leaders. of this catharine was sure. with whom, then, should she commence but with the brilliant condé? the calm and commanding admiral, indeed, was the true head and heart of the late war--never more firm and uncompromising than after defeat--as reluctant to renounce war without securing, beyond question, the religious liberty he sought, as he had been averse to take up the sword at all in the beginning. of such a man, however, little hope could be entertained. but louis of bourbon was cast in another mould. excessively small in stature and deformed in person, he was a general favorite; for he was amiable, witty, and talkative.[ ] moreover, he was fond of pleasure to an extent that attracted notice even in that giddy court, and as open to temptation as any of its frivolous denizens.[ ] for such persons catharine knew how to lay snares. never did queen surround herself with more brilliant enticements for the unwary. her maids of honor were at once her spies and the instruments of accomplishing her designs. as she had had a fair rouhet to undermine the constancy of antoine, so she had now an isabeau de limueil to entrap his younger brother. nor did catharine's device prove unsuccessful. condé became involved in an amorous intrigue that shook the confidence of his huguenot friends in his steadfastness and sincerity; while the silly girl whom the queen had encouraged in a course that led to ruin, as soon as her shame became notorious, was ignominiously banished from court--for no one could surpass catharine in the personation of offended modesty.[ ] yet, notwithstanding a disgraceful fall which proved to the satisfaction of a world, always sufficiently sceptical of the depth of religious convictions, that ambition had much more to do with the prince's conduct than any sense of duty, condé was not wholly lost to right feelings. the tears and remonstrances of his wife--the true-hearted Éléonore de roye--dying of grief at his inconstancy, are said to have wrought a marked change in his character.[ ] from that time catharine's power was gone. in vain did she or the guises strive to gain him over to the papal party by offering him, in second marriage, the widow of marshal saint andré, with an ample dower that might well dazzle a prince of the blood with but a beggarly appanage;[ ] or even by proposing to confer upon him the hand of the yet blooming queen of scots,[ ] the prince of condé remained true to the cause he had espoused till his blood stained the fatal field of jarnac. [sidenote: huguenot progress.] but while the queen mother was plying the great with her seductions, while the roman catholic leaders were artfully instilling into the minds of the people the idea that the edict of amboise was only a temporary expedient,[ ] while royal governors, or their lieutenants, like damville--the constable's younger son--at pamiers, were cruelly abusing the protestants whom they ought to have protected,[ ] there was much in the tidings that came especially from southern france to encourage the reformers. in the midst of the confusion and carnage of war the leaven had yet been working. there were even to be found places where the progress of protestantism had rendered the application of the provisions of the edict nearly, if not quite impossible. the little city of milhau, in rouergue,[ ] is a striking and very interesting instance. [sidenote: milhau-en-rouergue.] the edict had expressly directed that all churches should be restored to the roman catholics, and that the protestants should resort for worship to other places, either in the suburbs, or--in the case of cities which the huguenots had held on the seventh of march, --within the walls. but, soon after the restoration of peace, the consuls and inhabitants of milhau presented a petition to charles the ninth, in which they make the startling assertion that the entire population has become protestant ("de la religion"); that for two years or thereabouts they have lived in undisturbed peace, whilst other cities have been the scene of disturbances; and that, at a recent gathering of the inhabitants, they unanimously expressed their desire to live in the exercise of the reformed faith, under the royal permission. by the king's order the petition was referred for examination to the commissioners for the execution of the edict in the province of guyenne. all its statements were found to be strictly correct. there was not one papist within the city; not one man, woman, or child expressed a desire for the re-establishment of the roman catholic ceremonial. the monks had renounced the cowl, the priests their vestments. of their own free will, some of the friars had married, some had taken up useful trades. the prior had voluntarily resigned the greater part of his revenues; retaining one-third for his own support, he had begged that the remainder might be devoted to the preaching of god's word and the maintenance of the poor. the two churches of the place had for eighteen months been used for protestant worship, and there were no other convenient places to be found. indeed, had the churches been given up, there would have been no one to take possession. a careful domiciliary examination by four persons appointed by the royal judge had incontestably established the point. over eight hundred houses were visited, constituting the greater part of the city. the occupants were summoned to express their preferences, and the result was contained in the solemn return of the commission: "we have not found a single person who desired or asked for the mass; but, on the contrary, all demanded the preaching of the word of god, and the administration of his holy sacraments as instituted by himself in that word. and thus we certify by the oath we have taken to god and to the king."[ ] [sidenote: the cry for ministers.] from other places the cry of the churches for ministers to be sent from geneva was unabated. in one town and its environs, so inadequate was a single minister to the discharge of his pastoral duties, that the peasants of the vicinity were compelled to baptize one another's children, or to leave them unbaptized.[ ] at montpellier it is the consuls that beg that their corps of ministers may be doubled; their two pastors cannot preach every day and three times upon sunday, and yet visit the neighboring villages.[ ] [sidenote: establishment of the reformation in béarn.] nowhere, however, was the advance of protestantism so hopeful as in the principality of béarn, whither jeanne d'albret had retired, and where, since her husband's death, she had been dividing her cares between the education of her son, henry of navarre, and the establishment of the reformation. a less courageous spirit than hers[ ] might well have succumbed in view of the difficulties in her way. of the nobility not one-tenth, of the magistracy not one-fifth, were favorable to the changes which she wished to introduce. the clergy were, of course, nearly unanimous in opposition.[ ] she was, however, vigorously and wisely seconded in her efforts by the eminent reformed pastor, merlin, formerly almoner of admiral coligny, whom calvin had sent from geneva at her request.[ ] but when, contrary to his advice, the queen of navarre had summoned a meeting of the estates of her small territory, she detected unexpected symptoms of resistance. she accordingly abstained from broaching the unwelcome topic of reformation. but the deputies of the three orders themselves introduced it. taking occasion from a prohibition she had issued against carrying the host in procession, they petitioned her to maintain them in the religion of their ancestors, in accordance with the promise which the princes of the country were accustomed to make.[ ] fortunately a small minority was found to offer a request of an entirely opposite tenor; and jeanne d'albret, with her characteristic firmness, declared in reply "that she would reform religion in her country, whoever might oppose." so much discontent did this decision provoke that there was danger of open sedition.[ ] these internal obstacles were, however, by no means the only difficulties. the court of pau was disturbed by an uninterrupted succession of rumors of trouble from without. now it was the french king that stood ready to seize the scanty remnants of navarre, or the spaniard that was all prepared for an invasion from the south; anon it was montluc from the side of guyenne, or damville from that of languedoc, who were meditating incursions in the interest of the roman catholic church. "in short," exclaims her indefatigable coadjutor, raymond merlin, "it is wonderful that this princess should be able to persist with constancy in her holy design!"[ ] then came the papal citation, and the necessity to avoid the alienation of the french court which would certainly result from suddenly abolishing the papal rites, especially in view of the circumstance that catharine de' medici had several times begged the queen of navarre by letter to refrain from taking that decided step.[ ] [sidenote: a plan to kidnap jeanne and her children.] it speaks well for the energy and intrepidity of jeanne d'albret, as well as for the wisdom of some of her advisers, that she was able to lay in these troublous times such broad foundations for the protestant system of worship and government as we shall shortly have occasion to see her laying; for she was surrounded by courtiers who beheld in her bold espousal of the reformation the death-blow to their hopes of advancement at paris, and were, consequently, resolute in their opposition. an incident occurring some months later demonstrates that the perils from her treacherous neighbors were not purely imaginary. this event was nothing less than the discovery of a plan to kidnap the queen of navarre and her young son and daughter, and to give them over into the hands of the spanish inquisition. shortly after antoine's death, her enemies in france--among whom, despite his subsequent denial, it is probable that blaise de montluc was one--had devised this plot as a promising means of promoting their interests. they had despatched a trusty agent to prepare a few of their most devoted partisans in guyenne for its execution; he was then to pass into spain, to confer with the duke of alva. the latter part of his instructions had not been fulfilled when the assassination of guise took place. nothing daunted by this mishap, the conspirators ordered their agent to carry out the original scheme. alva received it with favor, and sent the frenchman, with his own approval of the undertaking, to the spanish court, where he held at least three midnight interviews with philip. no design was ever more dear to that prudent monarch's heart than one which combined the rare attractions of secrecy and treachery, particularly if there were a reasonable hope in the end of a little wholesome blood-letting. fortunately, however, the messenger had not been so careful in his conversation but that he disclosed to one of isabella's french servants all that was essential in his commission. the momentous secret soon found its way to the spanish queen's almoner, and finally to the queen herself. the blow impending over her cousin's head terrified isabella, and melted her compassionate heart. she disclosed to the ambassador of charles the ninth the astounding fact that some of the spanish troops then at barcelona, on their way to the campaign in barbary, were to be quietly sent back from the coast to the interior. thence, passing through defiles in the pyrenees, under experienced guides, they were to fall upon the unsuspecting court of the queen of navarre at pau. in such a case, to be forewarned was to be forearmed. the private secretary of the french envoy was despatched to inform jeanne d'albret of her peril, and to notify catharine de' medici of the intended incursion into the french territories. the premature disclosure occasioned the abandonment of the plan; but it is said that philip the second never forgave his unfortunate wife her part in frustrating its execution.[ ] [sidenote: the council of trent closes its sessions.] the month of december, , witnessed the close of that celebrated convocation, the council of trent. this is not the place for the discussion of its extraordinary history, yet it is worth while to note the conclusion of an assembly which exerted so weighty an influence in establishing the dogmas of the papal church. resumed after its long suspension, on the eighteenth of january, , the council from whose deliberations such magnificent results of harmony had been expected, began its work by rendering the breach between the roman catholic and the protestant worlds incurable. fortunately for the roman see, all the leading courts in christendom, although agreed in pronouncing for the necessity of reform, were at variance with one another in respect to the particular objects to be aimed at. it was by a skilful use of this circumstance that the pope was enabled to extricate himself creditably from an embarrassing situation, and to secure every essential advantage. at the reopening of the council, the french and german bishops were not present, and the great majority of the members being poor italian prelates dependent almost for their daily bread upon the good pleasure of the pontiff, it is not surprising that the first step taken was to concede to the pope or his legates the exclusive right to introduce subjects for discussion, as well as the yet more important claim of sitting as judge and ratifying the decisions of the assembled fathers before they became valid. notwithstanding this disgraceful surrender of their independence and authority, the roman see was by no means sure as to the results at which the prelates of the council of trent would arrive. france and the empire demanded radical reforms in the pope and his court, and some concessions to the protestants--the permission of marriage for the priesthood, the distribution of the wine to the laity in the eucharistic sacrament, and the use of the vernacular tongue in a portion, at least, of the public services. the arrival of the cardinal of lorraine and other bishops, in the month of november, , to reinforce the handful of french prelates in attendance, enhanced the apprehensions of pius. for, strange as it may appear to us, even pius suspected charles of favoring innovation--so far had the arch-hypocrite imposed on friend as well as foe by his declaration of adhesion to the augsburg confession! the fact was that there was no lack of dissimulation on any side, and that the prelates who urged reforms were among the most insincere. they had drawn up certain articles without the slightest expectation, and certainly without the faintest desire, to have them accepted. their sole aim seemed to be to shift the blame for the flagrant disorders of the church from their own shoulders to those of the pope. if their suggestions had been seriously entertained and acted upon, no men would have had more difficulty than they in concealing their chagrin.[ ] the monarchs--and it was their ambassadors who, with the papal legates, directed all the most important conclusions--were at heart equally averse to the restoration of canonical elections, and to everything which, by relieving the ecclesiastics of their servile dependence upon the crown, might cut off that perennial fountain for the payment of their debts and for defraying the expenses of their military enterprises, which they had discovered in the contributions wrung from churchmen's purses. thus, in the end, by a series of compromises, in which pope and king each obtained what he was anxious to secure, and sacrificed little for which he really cared, the council managed to confirm the greater number of the abuses it had been expected to remove, and to render indelible the line of demarcation between roman catholic and protestant, which it was to have effaced. [sidenote: cardinal lorraine returns to france,] the cardinal of lorraine returning to france, after the conclusion of the council (the fourth of december, ), made it his first object to secure the ratification of the tridentine decrees. he had now thrown off the mask of moderation, which had caused his friends such needless alarms, and was quite ready to sacrifice (as the nuncio had long since prophesied he would sacrifice)[ ] the interests of france to those of the roman see. but the undertaking was beyond his strength. [sidenote: and unsuccessfully seeks the approval of the decrees of trent.] on lorraine's arrival at court, then stopping at st. maur-sur-marne (january, ), catharine answered his request that the king should approve the conclusions of trent by saying that, if there was anything good in them, the king would gladly approve of it, even if it were not decreed by the council. and, at a supper, to which he was invited the same evening at the quarters of the cardinal of bourbon, he had to put up with a good deal of rough jesting from condé and his boon companions, who plied him with pungent questions respecting the pope and the doings of the holy fathers.[ ] [sidenote: wrangle between lorraine and l'hospital.] a few weeks later lorraine made a more distinct effort to secure recognition for the late council's work. several of the presidents of parliament, the avocat-général, and the procureur du roi had been summoned to court--which, meanwhile, had removed to melun (february, )--to give their advice to the privy council respecting this momentous question. the cardinal's proposition met with little favor. chancellor l'hospital distinguished himself by his determined opposition, and boldly refuted the churchman's arguments. the cardinal had long been chafing at the intractability of the lawyer, who owed his early advancement to the influence of the house of guise, and now could no longer contain his anger. he spoke in a loud and imperious tone, and used taunts that greatly provoked the illustrious bystanders. "it is high time for you to drop your mask," he said to l'hospital, "for, as for myself, i cannot discover what religion you are of. in fact, you seem to have no other religion than to injure as much as possible both me and my house. ingrate that you are, you have forgotten all the benefits you have received at my hands." the chancellor's answer was quiet and dignified. "i shall always be ready, even at the peril of my life, to return my obligations to you. i cannot do it at the expense of the king's honor and welfare." and he added the pointed observation that the cardinal was desirous of effecting, by intrigue, what he had been unable to effect by force of arms. others took up the debate, the old constable himself disclaiming any intention of disputing respecting doctrines which he approved, but expressing his surprise that lorraine should disturb the tranquillity of the kingdom, and take up the cause of the roman pontiff against a king through whose liberality he was in the enjoyment of an annual revenue of three or four hundred thousand francs. catharine, as usual, did her best to allay the irritation; but the cardinal, greatly disappointed, retired to rheims.[ ] [sidenote: opposition of du moulin.] a few months after the scene at melun, the most eminent of french jurists, the celebrated charles du moulin, published an unanswerable treatise, proving that the council of trent had none of the characteristics of a true oecumenical synod, and that its decrees were null and void.[ ] and the parliament of paris, although it ordered the seizure of the book and imprisoned the author for some days, could not be induced to consent to incorporate in the legislation of the country the tridentine decrees, so hostile in spirit to the french legislation.[ ] evidently parliament, although too timid to say so, believed, with du moulin, that the acceptance of the decrees in question "would be against god and against the benefit of jesus christ in the gospel, against the ancient councils, against the majesty of the king and the rights of his crown, against his recent edicts and the edicts of preceding kings, against the liberty and immunity of the gallican church, the authority of the estates and courts of parliament of the kingdom, and the secular jurisdiction."[ ] it was shortly before this time that the report gained currency that charles the ninth had received an embassy from philip of spain and the duke of savoy, inviting him, it was said, to a conference with all other "christian" princes, to be held on the twenty-fifth of march ( ), to swear submission in common to the decrees of trent and devise means for the repression of heresy. but neither charles nor his mother, still very much under the influence of the tolerant chancellor, was disposed to enter upon the path of persecution marked out for them. the conference was therefore, we are told, gracefully, but firmly declined.[ ] the story was but an idle rumor, the absurdity of which is clearly seen from this one fact among many, that philip had not at this time himself accepted and published the tridentine decrees;[ ] while, from various documents that have come down to us, it appears that catharine de' medici had for some months[ ] been projecting a trip that should enable her son to meet several of the neighboring princes, for the purpose of cultivating more friendly relations with them. from this desire, and from the wish, by displaying the young monarch to the inhabitants of the different provinces, to revive the loyalty of his subjects, seriously weakened during the late civil war, apparently arose the project of that well-known "progress" of charles the ninth through the greater part of france, a progress which consumed many successive months. [sidenote: the "progress" of charles ix.] whether the cardinal of lorraine had any direct part, as was commonly reported, in bringing about the journey of the king, is uncertain. he himself wrote to granvelle that he had neither advocated nor opposed it;[ ] but the character of the man has been delineated to little purpose in these pages if the reader is disposed to give any weight to his assertion. certain, however, it is that the huguenots looked upon the project with great suspicion, and that its execution was accepted as a virtual triumph of their opponents. condé and coligny could see as clearly as the cardinal the substantial advantages which a formal visit to the elder branch of the lorraine family might secure to the branch of the family domiciled in france; and they could readily imagine that under cover of this voyage might be concealed the most nefarious designs against the peace of their co-religionists. it is not surprising that many huguenot nobles accepted it as a mark of the loss of favor, and that few of them accompanied the court in its wanderings.[ ] the english ambassador, noting this important fact, made, on his own account, an unfavorable deduction from what he saw, as to the design of the court. "they carry the king about this country now," he observed, "mostly to see the ruins of the churches and religious houses done by the huguenots in this last war. they suppress the losses and hurts the huguenots have suffered."[ ] on the other hand, the roman catholic party received their success as a presage of speedy restoration to full power, and entertained brilliant hopes for the future.[ ] the queen mother was beginning to make fair promises to the papal adherents, and the influence of the admiral and his brothers seemed to be at an end. leaving the palace of fontainebleau, the court passed through sens and troyes to the city of bar-sur-seine, where charles acted as sponsor for his infant nephew, the son of the duke of lorraine. the brilliant _fêtes_ that accompanied the arrival of the king here and elsewhere could not, however, hide from the world one of the chief results, if not designs, of the journey. it was a prominent part of the queen mother's plan to seize the opportunity for carrying out the system of repression toward the huguenots which she had already begun. while there is no reason to suppose that as yet she felt any disposition to lend an ear to the suggestions of spanish emissaries, or of philip himself, for a general massacre, or at least an open war of extermination, she was certainly very willing by less open means to preclude the protestants from ever giving her trouble, or becoming again a formidable power in the state. the most unfavorable reports, in truth, were in circulation against the huguenots. at lyons they were accused of poisoning the wells, or, according to another version of the story, the kitchen-pots, in order to give the impression that the plague was in the city, and so deter the king from coming.[ ] catharine had no need, however, of crediting these calumnious tales in order to be moved to hostile action. her desire was unabated to reign under her son's name, untrammelled by the restraint of the jealous love of liberty cherished by the huguenots. their numbers were large--though not so large as they were then supposed to be. even so intelligent a historian as garnier regards them as constituting nearly one-third of the kingdom.[ ] m. lacretelle is undoubtedly much more correct in estimating them at fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand souls, or barely one-tenth of the entire population of france--a country at that time much more sparsely inhabited, and of which a much larger part of the surface was in inferior cultivation, or altogether neglected, than at present.[ ] but, however small their number in proportion to the papists, the huguenots, from their superior industry and intelligence, from the circumstance that their strength lay in the sturdy middle class and in the nobility, including little of the rabble of the cities and none of that of paris,[ ] were a party that naturally awakened the jealousy of the queen. we need make little account of any exasperation in consequence of such silly devices as the threatening letter said to have been put in catharine's bed-room, warning her that if she did not drive the papists from about her, "she and her l'aubespine" (secretary of state) would feel the dagger.[ ] she was too shrewd not to know that a roman catholic was more likely to have penned it than a huguenot. [sidenote: catharine's new zeal.] in furtherance of the policy to which she had now committed herself, she caused the fortifications of the cities that had been strongholds of the protestants during the late war to be levelled, and in their place erected citadels whereby the huguenots might be kept in subjection.[ ] as easter approached, catharine revealed the altered tone of her mind by notifying her maids of honor that she would suffer none to remain about her but those who were good catholics and submitted to the ordinary test of orthodoxy. there is said to have been but a single girl who declined to go to mass, and preferred to return to her home.[ ] well would it have been if the queen had been as attentive to the morals[ ] as to the orthodoxy of these pleasure-seeking attendants. but, to belong to the "religion ancienne et catholique" was a mantle large enough to cover a multitude of sins. [sidenote: interpretative declarations infringing upon the edict.] [sidenote: declaration of roussillon.] more direct infringements upon the liberty guaranteed by the edict of amboise had already been made or were yet in store. the legislation which could not conveniently be repealed by formal enactment could be rendered null by interpretative declarations. charles was made to proclaim that by the edict he had not intended to permit preaching in places previously belonging to the patrimony of the church, or held as benefices. this was aimed at such prelates of doubtful catholicity as saint romain, archbishop of aix, or the cardinal bishop of beauvais, odet de châtillon. he was made to say, that by the places where protestant worship could be held within the walls, by virtue of its having been exercised on the seventh of march, , were meant only those that had been garrisoned by protestants, and had undergone a successful siege. this stroke of the pen cut off several cities in which protestantism had been maintained without conflict of arms. the huguenot counsellors of the parliament were deprived of the enjoyment of their right to attend the "assemblée," or "protestant congregation," by a gloss which forbade the inhabitants of paris from attending the reformed worship in the neighboring districts. when the court reached lyons, a city which, as we have seen, had been among the foremost in devotion to the protestant cause, a fresh edict, of the twenty-fourth of june, prohibited the reformed rites from being celebrated in any city in which the king might be sojourning. five or six weeks later, at the little town of roussillon, a few miles south of vienne, on the rhône, another and more flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the edict of pacification was incorporated in a declaration purporting to remove fresh uncertainties as to the meaning of its provisions. it forbade the noblemen who might possess the right to maintain protestant services in their castles, to permit any persons but their own families and their vassals to be present. it prohibited the convocation of synods and the collection of money, and enjoined upon ministers of the gospel not to leave their places of residence, nor to open schools for the instruction of the young. but the most vexatious and unjust article of all was that which constrained all priests, monks, and nuns, who during or since the troubles had forsaken their vows and had married, either to resume their monastic profession and dismiss their consorts, or to leave the kingdom. as a penalty for the violation of this command, the men were to be sentenced to the galleys for life, the women to close confinement in prison. i omit in this list of grievances suffered by the huguenots some minor annoyances such as that which compelled the artisan to desist from working in his shop with open doors on the festivals of the roman catholic church.[ ] [sidenote: assaults upon unoffending huguenots.] these legal infractions were not all. everywhere the huguenots had to complain of acts of violence, committed by their papist neighbors, at the instigation of priests and bishops, and not infrequently of the royal governors. little more than a year had passed since peace was restored, and already the victims of religious assassination rivalled in number the martyrs of the days of open persecution. at crevant the protestants were attacked on their way to their "temple;" at tours they were attacked while engaged in worship. at mans the fanatical bishop was the chief instigator of a work of mingled murder and rapine. at vendôme it was the royal governor himself, gilbert de curée, who fell a victim to the hatred of the roman catholic noblesse, and was treacherously killed while hunting.[ ] if anything more was needed to render the violence insupportable, it was found in the fact that any attempt to obtain judicial investigation and redress resulted not in the condemnation of the guilty, but in the personal peril of the complainant.[ ] [sidenote: condé appeals for redress.] smarting under the repeated acts of violence to which at every moment they were liable, and under the successive infringements upon the edict of amboise, the huguenots urged the prince of condé to represent their grievances to the monarch, in the excellence of whose heart they had not yet lost confidence. the protestant leader did not repel the trust. his appeal to charles and to the queen mother was urgent. he showed that, even where the letter of the edict was observed, its spirit was flagrantly violated. the edict provided for a place for preaching in each prefecture, to be selected by the king. in some cases no place had yet been designated. in others, the most inconvenient places had been assigned. sometimes the huguenots of a district would be compelled to go _twenty or twenty-five leagues_ in order to attend divine worship. the declaration affecting the monks and nuns who had forsaken their habit was a violation of the general liberty promised. so also was the prohibition of synods, which, though not expressly mentioned, were implied in the toleration of the religion to which they were indispensably necessary. but it was the prejudice and ill-will, of which the huguenots were the habitual victims at the hands of royal governors and other officers, which moved them most deeply. the evident desire was to find some ground of accusation against them. the ears of the judges were stopped against their appeals for justice. it was enough that they were accused. decrees of confiscation, of the razing of their houses, of death, were promptly given before any examination was made into the truth of their culpability. on a mere rumor of a commotion in the protestant city of montauban, an order was issued to demolish its walls. the case was far otherwise with turbulent roman catholic towns. the people were encouraged to acts of violence toward the huguenots by the impunity of the perpetrators of similar crimes, and by the evident partiality of those who were set to administer justice. out of six or seven score murders of protestants since the peace, not two of the abominable acts had been punished. under such circumstances it would not be surprising if the victims of inordinate cruelty should at length be driven in desperation to take their defence into their own hands.[ ] [sidenote: conciliatory reply of the king.] the king, or his ministers, fearful of a commotion during his absence from paris, answered the letter of the prince with tolerable courtesy, and even made a pretence of desiring to secure justice to his protestant subjects; but the attempt really effected very little. thus, for instance, while sojourning in the city of valence (on the fifth of september, ), charles received a petition of the huguenots of bordeaux, setting forth some of the grievances under which they were groaning, and gave a favorable answer. he permitted them, by this patent, to sing their psalms in their own houses. he declared them free from any obligation to furnish the "pain bénit," and to contribute to the support of roman catholic fraternities. the protestants were not to be molested for possessing or selling copies of the bible. they must not be compelled to deck out their houses in honor of religious processions, nor to swear on st. anthony's arm. they might work at their trades with closed doors, except on sundays and solemn feasts. magistrates were forbidden to take away the children of huguenots, in order to have them baptized according to romish rites. protestants could be elected to municipal offices equally with the adherents of the other faith.[ ] in a similar tone of conciliation the king published an order from roussillon, remitting the fines that had been imposed upon the huguenots of nantes for neglecting to hang tapestry before their houses on corpus christi day, and permitting them henceforth to abstain from an act so offensive to their religious convictions.[ ] [sidenote: protestants excluded from judicial posts.] such local concessions were, however, only the decoys by which the queen mother intended to lure the huguenots on to a fatal security. a few months later, at avignon, catharine caused an ordinance to be published in the king's name, which cardinal santa croce characterized as an excellent one. it excluded protestants from holding judicial seats. catharine told the nuncio that her counsellors had been desirous of extending the same prohibition to all other charges under government, but that she had deterred them. it would have driven the huguenots to desperation, and might have occasioned disturbances. "we shall labor, however," she said, "to exclude them little by little from all their offices." at the same time she expressed her joy that everything was succeeding so well, and privately assured the nuncio "that people were much deceived in her."[ ] and yet such are the paradoxes of history, especially in this age of surprises, that, at the very moment the king was depriving his own protestant subjects of their rights, he was negotiating in behalf of the protestant subjects of his neighbors! the king would not leave avignon--so wrote the english envoy--without reconciling the inhabitants of the comtât venaissin and the principality of orange, whom diversity of religion had brought into collision. and, by the articles of pacification which the ambassador enclosed, the king was seen "to have had a care for others also, having provided a certain liberty of religion even to the pope's own subjects, which he had much difficulty in obtaining."[ ] [sidenote: marshal montmorency checks the parisian mob.] [sidenote: his encounter with cardinal lorraine.] while the queen mother, under cover of her son's authority, followed the new policy of opposition to the huguenots upon which she had now entered, an incident occurred at paris showing that even the roman catholics were not unanimous in their support of the guises and their plan of exterminating heresy. the governor of the metropolis was marshal montmorency, the most worthy of all the constable's sons. he had vigorously exerted himself ever since the king's departure to protect the huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the treaty. a protestant woman, who during the war had been hung in effigy for "huguenoterie," but had returned from her flight since the conclusion of peace, died and was secretly buried by friends, one sunday night, in the "cimetière des innocents." the next morning a rabble, such as only paris could afford, collected with the intention of disinterring the heretic. and they would have accomplished their design, had not marshal montmorency ridden in, sword in hand, and resolved to hang the culprits that very day. "he would assist the huguenots," he is reported to have been in the habit of saying, "because they were the weaker party."[ ] on monday, the eighth of january, , the cardinal of lorraine approached the city in full ecclesiastical dress, with the intention of entering it.[ ] he was attended by his young nephew, the duke of guise, and by an escort of armed men, whom catharine had permitted him to retain in spite of the general prohibition, because of the fears he undoubtedly felt for his personal safety. as he neared paris he was met by a messenger sent by the governor, commanding him to bid his company lay down their arms, or to exhibit his pretended authority. the cardinal, accustomed to domineer over even such old noble families as the montmorencies, would do neither, and attempted to ride defiantly into the city. but the marshal was no respecter of persons. with the troops at his command he met and dispersed the cardinal's escort. lorraine fled as for his life into a shop on the rue saint denis. thence he was secretly conveyed to his own palace, and shortly after he left the city in utter discomfiture, but breathing dire threats against the marshal.[ ] the latter, calling into paris his cousin the admiral, had no difficulty in maintaining order. great was the consternation of the populace, it is true, for the absurd report was circulated that coligny was come to plunder the city, and to seize the parliament house, the cathedral, and the bastile;[ ] and even the first president, de thou, begged him, when he came to the parliament, to explain the reasons of his obeying his cousin's summons, and to imitate the prudence of pompey the great when he entered the city of rome, where cæsar's presence rendered a sedition imminent. the admiral, in reply, gracefully acknowledged the honor which parliament had done him in likening him to pompey, whom he would gladly imitate, he said, because pompey was a patriot. still he saw no appositeness in the comparison, "as there was no cæsar in paris."[ ] [sidenote: the conference at bayonne, june, .] early in the month of june, , charles the ninth and his court reached the neighborhood of the city of bayonne, where, on the very confines of france and spain, a meeting had been arranged between catharine and her daughter isabella, wife of philip the second. catharine's first proposal had been that her royal son-in-law should himself be present. she had urged that great good to christendom might flow from their deliberations. philip the prudent, however, and his confidential adviser, the duke of alva, were suspicious of the design. alva was convinced that catharine had only her own private ends in view.[ ] granvelle observed that little fruit came of these interviews of princes but discord and confusion, and judged that, had not the queen mother strenuously insisted upon improving perhaps the only opportunity which she and her daughter might enjoy of seeing each other, even the interview between the two queens would have been declined.[ ] as it was, however, philip excused himself on the plea of engrossing occupations. such were the circumstances under which the bayonne conference took place--a meeting which cardinal granvelle assured his correspondents was a simple visit of a daughter to her mother,[ ] but to which contemporaries, both roman catholic and protestant, ascribed a far deeper significance. at this meeting, according to jean de serres, writing only four or five years after the event,[ ] a holy league, as it was called, was formed, by the intervention of isabella, for the purpose of re-establishing the authority of the ancient religion and of extirpating the new. france and spain mutually promised to render each other assistance in the good work; and both pledged themselves to the support of the holy see by all the means in their power. philip himself was not present, either, it was conjectured, in order that the league might the better be kept secret, or to avoid the appearance of lowering his dignity before that of the french monarch.[ ] the current belief--until recently almost the universal belief of historians--goes farther, and alleges that in this mysterious conference catharine and alva, who accompanied his master's wife, concocted the plan of that famous massacre whose execution was delayed by various circumstances for seven years. alva was the tempter, and the words with which he recommended his favorite method of dealing with heresy, by destroying its chief upholders, were embodied in the ignoble sentence, "better a salmon's head than ten thousand frogs."[ ] in fact, a general impression that the conference had led to the formation of a distinct plan for the universal destruction of protestantism gained ground almost immediately. within about a month after the queen mother and her daughter had ended their interview, the english ambassador wrote to leicester and cecil that "they of the religion think that there has been at this meeting at bayonne some complot betwixt the pope, the king of spain, and the scottish queen, by their ambassadors, and some say also the papists of england."[ ] [sidenote: no plan of massacre agreed upon.] fortunately, however, we are not left to frame by uncertain conjecture a doubtful story of the transactions of this famous interview. the correspondence of the duke of alva himself with philip the second has been preserved among the manuscripts of simancas, to dispel many inveterate misapprehensions. these letters not only prove that no plan for a massacre of the huguenots was agreed upon by the two parties, but that alva did not even distinctly declare himself in favor of such a plan. they furnish, however, an instructive view, such as can but rarely be so well obtained, of the net of treacherous intrigue which the fingers of philip and his agents were for many years busy day and night in cautiously spreading around the throne of france. [sidenote: june th.] [sidenote: june th.] on thursday, the fourteenth of june, the young spanish queen, with her brilliant train of attendant grandees, crossed the narrow stream forming the dividing line between the two kingdoms, and was conducted by her mother, her brothers and sister, and a crowd of gallant french nobles, to the neighboring town of saint jean de luz. on friday, catharine and charles rode forward to make their solemn entry into bayonne, where they were to await their guests' arrival. before they started, alva had already been at work complimenting such good catholics as the constable, cardinal bourbon, and prince la roche-sur-yon, flattering cardinal guise (his brother of lorraine was absent from court, not yet being fully reinstated in favor), the duke of montpensier, and vain old blaise de montluc. nor were his blandishments thrown away. poor weak guise--the "cardinal des bouteilles" he was called, from the greater acquaintance he had with the wine and good living than with religious or political affairs[ ]--was overcome with emotion and gratitude, and begged alva to implore the catholic king, by the love of god, to look in pity upon an unhappy kingdom, where religion was fast going to ruin. montpensier threw himself into alva's arms, and told him that philip alone was the hope of all the good in france, declaring for himself that he was willing to be torn in pieces in his behalf, and maintaining the meanwhile, that, should that pleasant operation be performed, "philip" would be found written on his heart. to blaise de montluc's self-conceit alva laid siege in no very covert manner, assuring him that his master had not given his consent to catharine's plan for an interview until he had perused a paper written by the grim old warrior's hand, in which he had expressed the opinion that the conference would be productive of wholesome results. the implied praise was all that was needed to induce montluc to explain himself more fully. he was opposed to the exercise of any false humanity. he ascribed the little success that had attended the roman catholic arms in the last struggle to the half-way measures adopted and the attempt to exercise the courtesies of peace in time of war. the combatants on either side addressed their enemies as "my brother" and "my cousin." as for himself, he had made it a rule to spare no man's life, but to wage a war of extermination. to this unburdening of his mind alva replied by giving montluc to understand that, as a good roman catholic, it should be his task to discover the means of inducing charles and his mother to perform their duty, and, if he failed in this, to disclose to philip the course which he must pursue, "since it was impossible to suffer matters to go on, as they were going, to their ruin." what the duty of the french king was, in philip's and alva's view, is evidenced by the advice of the "good" papists which the minister reports to his master with every mark of approbation. it was, in the first place, to banish from the kingdom every protestant minister, and prohibit utterly any exercise of the reformed religion. the provincial governors, whose orthodoxy in almost every case could be relied upon, were to be the instruments in the execution of this work.[ ] but, besides this, it would be necessary to seize a few of the leaders and cut off their heads. five or six, it was suggested, would be all the victims required.[ ] it was, in fact, essentially the plan of operations with which alva undertook a year or two later the reduction of the netherlands to submission to spanish tyranny and the papal church. treacherous imprisonments of the most suspected, which could scarcely have been confined within such narrow numerical limits as alva laid down, together with a "blood council" to complete the work, or with a massacre in which the proprieties of judicial investigation would be less nicely observed--such was the scheme after philip's own heart. but this scheme suited the present frame of mind neither of charles nor of catharine. when the crafty spaniard, cautiously feeling his way, begged the young king to be very careful of his life, "for god, he was convinced, was reserving him to execute a great work by his hands, in the punishment of the offences which were committed in that kingdom,"[ ] charles briskly responded: "oh! to take up arms does not suit me. i have no disposition to consummate the destruction of my kingdom begun in the past wars."[ ] the duke clearly saw that the king was but repeating a lesson that had been taught him by others, and contemptuously dismissed the topic.[ ] [sidenote: catharine and alva.] catharine was not less determined than her son to avoid a resort to arms. it was with difficulty that alva could get her to broach the subject of religion at all. isabella having, at his suggestion, pressed her mother to disclose the secret communication to make which she had sought this interview, catharine referred, with some bitterness, to the distrust of charles and of herself evidently entertained by philip, which would be likely to lead in the end to a renewal of war between france and spain. and she reproached isabella with having so soon allowed herself to become "hispaniolized"[ ]--a charge from which her daughter endeavored to clear herself as best she could. when at last alva succeeded in bringing up the subject, which was, ostensibly at least, so near what philip called his heart, catharine's display of tact was such as to elicit the profound admiration of even so consummate a master in the art of dissimulation as the duke himself. her circumspection, he declared, he had never seen equalled.[ ] she maintained that there was no need of alarm at the condition of religion in france, for everything was going on better than when the edict of pacification was published. "it is your satisfaction at being freed from war that leads you to take so cheerful a view," urged alva. "my master cannot but require the application of a more efficient remedy, since the cause is common to spain; for the disease will spread, and philip has no inclination to lose his crown, or, perhaps, even his head." catharine now insisted upon alva's explaining himself and disclosing his master's plan of action. this alva declined to do. although philip was as conversant with the state of france as she or any other person in the kingdom, yet he preferred to leave to her to decide upon the precise nature of the specific to be administered. catharine pressed the inquiry, but alva continued to parry the question adroitly. he asks if, since the edict of toleration, ground has been gained or lost. decidedly gained, she replies, and proceeds to particularize. but alva is confident that she is deceiving herself or him: it is notorious that things are becoming worse every day. "would you have me understand," interrupts catharine, "that we must resort to arms again?" "i see no present need of assuming them," answers alva, "and my master would not advise you to take them up, unless constrained by other necessity than that which i now see." "what, then, would philip have me do?" asks catharine. "apply a prompt remedy," answers alva; "for sooner or later your enemies will, by their own action, compel you to accept the wager of war, and that, probably, under less favorable circumstances than at present. all philip's thoughts are intent upon the expulsion of that wretched sect of the huguenots, and upon restoring the subjects of the french crown to their ancient obedience, and maintaining the queen mother's legitimate authority." "the king, my son," responds catharine, "publishes whatever edicts he pleases, and is obeyed." "then, if he enjoys such authority over his vassals," breaks in isabella, "why does he not punish those who are rebels both against god and against himself?" that question catharine did not choose to answer. instead of it she had some chimerical schemes to propose--a league between france, spain, and germany, that should give the law to the world, and a confirmation of the bonds that united the royal houses of france and spain by two more marriages, viz.: of don carlos to margaret, her youngest daughter, and of the duke of anjou to the princess of portugal. alva, however, making light of such projects, which could, according to his view, effect nothing more than the bond already connecting the families, was not slow in bringing the conversation back to the religious question. but he soon had reason to complain of catharine's coldness. she had already expressed her mind fully, she said; and she resented, as a want of the respect due to her, the hint that she was more indifferent than previously. she would not fail to do justice, she assured him. that would be difficult, rejoined alva, with a chancellor at the head of the judiciary who could not certainly be expected to apply the remedy needed by the unsound condition of france. "it is his personal enemies," promptly replied catharine, "who, out of hatred, accuse l'hospital of being a bad catholic." "can you deny that he is a huguenot?" asked the spaniard. "i do not regard him as such," calmly answered the french queen. "then you are the only person in the kingdom who is of that opinion!" retorted the duke. "even before i left france, and during the lifetime of my father, king henry," said isabella, interrupting with considerable animation, "your majesty knows that that was his reputation; and you may be certain that so long as he is retained in his present office the good will always be kept in fear and in disfavor, while the bad will find him a support and advocate in all their evil courses. if he were to be confined for a few days only in his own house, you would at once discover the truth of my words, so much better would the interests of religion advance."[ ] but this step catharine was by no means willing to take. nor, when again pressed by alva, who dwelt much on the importance to philip of knowing her intentions as to applying herself in earnest to the good work, so as to be guided in his own actions, would she deign to give any clearer indications. yet she avowed--greatly shocking the orthodox duke thereby[ ]--that she designed, instead of securing the acceptance of the decrees of trent by the french, to convene a council of "good prelates and wise men," to settle a number of matters not of divine or positive prescription, which the fathers of trent had left undecided. alva expressed his extreme astonishment, and reminded her of the colloquy of poissy--the source, as he alleged, of all the present disgraceful situation of france.[ ] but catharine threw the whole blame of the failure of that conference upon the inordinate conceit of the cardinal of lorraine,[ ] and persisted in the plan. the spaniard came to the conclusion that catharine's only design was to avoid having recourse to salutary rigor, and indulged in his correspondence with his master in lugubrious vaticinations respecting the future.[ ] [sidenote: catharine rejects all violent plans.] [sidenote: cardinal granvelle's testimony.] so far, then, was the general belief which has been adopted by the greater number of historians up to our own days from being correct--the belief that catharine framed, at the bayonne conference, with alva's assistance, a plan for the extermination of the protestants by a massacre such as was realized on st. bartholomew's day, --that, on the contrary, the queen mother refused, in a peremptory manner that disgusted the spanish fanatics, every proposition that looked like violence. that we have not read the correspondence of alva incorrectly, and that no letter containing the mythical agreement of catharine ever reached philip, is proved by the tone of the letters that passed between the great agents in the work of persecution in the spanish netherlands. cardinal granvelle, who, in his retreat at besançon, was kept fully informed by the king of spain, or by his chief ministers, of every important event, and who received copies of all the most weighty documents, in a letter to alonso del canto expresses great regret that isabella and alva should have failed in their endeavor to induce catharine de' medici to adopt methods more proper than she was taking to remedy the religious ills of france. she promised marvels, he adds, but was determined to avoid recourse to arms, which, indeed, was not necessary, if she would only act as she should. he was persuaded that the plan she was adopting would entail the ruin of religion and of her son's throne.[ ] [sidenote: festivities and pageantry.] while the policy of two of the most important nations on the face of the globe, in which were involved the interests, temporal and eternal, of millions of men, women, and children, formed the topic of earnest discussion between two women--a mother and her daughter, the mother yet to become infamous for her participation in a bloody tragedy of which she as yet little dreamed--and a spanish grandee doomed to an equally unenviable immortality in the records of human suffering and human crime, the city of bayonne was the scene of an ephemeral gayety that might well convey the impression that such merry-making was not only the sole object of the conference, but the great concern of life.[ ] two nations, floundering in hopeless bankruptcy, yet found money enough to lavish upon costly but unmeaning pageants, while many a noble, to satisfy an ostentatious display, made drafts which an impoverished purse was little able to honor. the banquets and jousts, the triumphal arches with their flattering inscriptions, the shows in which allegory revelled almost to madness--all have been faithfully narrated with a minuteness worthy of a loftier theme.[ ] this is, however, no place for the detailed description which, though entertaining, can be read to advantage only on the pages of the contemporary pamphlets that have come down to us. yet, in the discussion of the more serious concerns of a great religious and political party, we may for a moment pause to gaze at a single show, neither more magnificent nor more dignified than its fellows; but in which the youthful figure of a bearnese destined to play a first part in the world's drama, but up to this time living a life of retirement in his ancestral halls, first makes his appearance among the pomps to which as yet he has been a stranger. the pride of the grandfather whose name he bore, henry of navarre had been permitted, at that whimsical old man's suggestion, to strengthen an already vigorous constitution by athletic sports, and by running barefoot like the poorest peasant over the sides of his native hills. "god designed," writes a companion of his later days who never rekindles more of his youthful fire than when descanting upon his master's varied fortunes, "to prepare an iron wedge wherewith to cleave the hard knots of our calamities."[ ] later in childhood, when both father and grandfather were dead, he was the object of the unremitting care of a mother whose virtues find few counterparts or equals in the women of the sixteenth century; and jeanne d'albret, in a remarkable letter to theodore beza, notes with joy a precocious piety,[ ] which, there is reason to fear, was not hardy enough to withstand the withering atmosphere of a court like that with which he was now making his first acquaintance. one evening there was exhibited in a large hall, well lighted by means of blazing torches, a tournament in which the knights fought on foot.[ ] from a castle where they held an enchanted lady captive, the knights challengers issued, and "received all comers with a thrust of the pike, and five blows with the sword." each champion, on his arrival, endeavored to enter the castle, but was met at the portal by guards "dressed very fantastically in black," and repelled with "lighted instruments." not a few of the less illustrious were captured here. the more exalted in rank reached the donjon, or castle-keep, but as they thought to set foot within it, a trap-door opened and they too found themselves prisoners. it fared better with the princes; for the success of each champion was measured by a rigid heraldic scale. these passed the donjon, but, on a bridge leading to the tower where slept the enchanted lady, a giant confronted them, and in the midst of the combat the bridge was lowered, and they were taken, as had been their predecessors. "the duke of vendôme,[ ] son of the late duke, whom they call in france the prince of navarre--a boy apparently ten or eleven years of age--crossed the bridge, and the giant pretended to surrender; but he too was afterward repulsed like the rest." the duke of orleans--whom the reader will more readily recognize under the title of duke of anjou, which he, about this time, received--next entered the lists. naturally he penetrated further than his namesake of navarre, and "the giant showed more fear of him than of the other;" but a cloud enveloped them both, and "thus the duke vanished from sight." king charles was the last to fight, and for his prowess it was reserved for him to defeat the giant and deliver the lady.[ ] [sidenote: the confraternities.] the author of the pompous show had made a serious mistake. the giant "league," before whom so many a champion failed, it was the lot not of charles, nor of henry of valois, but of the other henry, of navarre, to overcome. that giant was already in existence, although still in his infancy. for some time past the zealous papists, impatient of the sluggish devotion of the court, had been forming "confréries," or fraternities, whose members, bound together by a common oath, were pledged to the support of the roman catholic religion.[ ] the plan was a dangerous one, and it shortly excited the apprehension of the king and his mother. "i am told," charles wrote in july, , to one of his governors, "that in a number of places in my realm there is a talk of establishing an association amongst my subjects, who invite one another to join it. i beg you to take measures to prevent that any be made for any purpose whatsoever; but keep my subjects so far as possible united in the desire to render me duty and obedience."[ ] and to prove the sincerity of his intentions, the french king ordered the late edict of pacification again to be proclaimed by public crier in the streets of the seditious city of paris--a feat which was successfully performed under marshal montmorency's supervision, by the city provost, accompanied by so strong a detachment of archers and arquebusiers, as effectually to prevent popular disturbance.[ ] already there were restless spirits that saw in another civil war fresh opportunity for the advancement of their selfish interests. months ago villegagnon, the betrayer of the brazilian colony of coligny, had written to cardinal granvelle, telling him that he had resigned his dignities and offices in the french court, and had informed catharine de' medici, "that until charles was the declared enemy of the enemies of god and of his church, he would never again bear arms in his service."[ ] the vice-admiral, of whom modesty was never a conspicuous virtue, went so far as to draw a flattering portrait of himself as a second hannibal, vowing eternal enmity to the huguenots.[ ] and nicole de st. rémy, whose only claim to honorable mention was found in her oft-paraded boast that, as a mistress of henry the second, she had borne him a son, and who held in france the congenial post of a spanish spy, suggested the marriage of the cardinal of bourbon in view of the possible contingency of the death of all catharine's sons.[ ] the centre of all intrigue, the storehouse from which every part of france was supplied with material capable of once more enkindling the flames of a destructive civil war, was the house of the spanish resident envoy, frances de alava, successor of the crafty chantonnay, the brother of granvelle. it was he that was in constant communication with all the roman catholic malcontents in france.[ ] catharine endeavored to check this influence, but to no purpose. the fanatical party were bound by a stronger tie of allegiance to philip, the catholic king, than to her, or to the very christian king her son. catharine had particularly enjoined upon the cardinal of lorraine to have no communication with granvelle or with chantonnay, but the prelate's relations with both were never interrupted for a moment.[ ] [sidenote: siege of malta, and french civilities to the sultan.] the fact was that, so far from true was it that a cordial understanding existed between the courts of france and spain, such as the mythical league for the extirpation of heresy presupposes, the distrust and hostility were barely veiled under the ordinary conventionalities of diplomatic courtesy. while catharine and philip's queen were exchanging costly civilities at bayonne, the turks were engaged in a siege of malta, which has become famous for the obstinacy with which it was prosecuted and the valor with which it was repelled. spain had sent a small detachment of troops to the assistance of the grand master, jean de la valette, and his brave knights of st. john, and the pope had contributed ten thousand crowns to their expenses.[ ] yet at this very moment an envoy of the sultan was at the court of the very christian king of france, greatly to the disgust of the spanish visitors and pious catholics in general,[ ] and only waited for the departure of isabella and alva to receive formal presentation to the monarch and his mother.[ ] [sidenote: the constable espouses cardinal châtillon's defence.] meantime, although the queen mother continued her policy of depriving the huguenots of one after another of the privileges to which they were entitled, and replaced protestant governors of towns and provinces by roman catholics, her efforts at repression seemed, for the time at least, to produce little effect. "the true religion is so rooted in france," wrote one who accompanied the royal progress, "that, like a fire, it kindles daily more and more. in every place, from bayonne hither, and for the most part of the journey, there are more huguenots than papists, and the most part of men of quality and mark be of the religion." if the writer, as is probable, was over-sanguine in his anticipations, he could not be mistaken in the size of the great gathering of protestants--full two thousand--for the most part gentlemen and gentlewomen, which he witnessed with his own eyes, brought together at nantes to listen to the preaching of the eloquent perucel.[ ] and it was not an insignificant proof of the futility of any direct attempt to crush the huguenots, that constable montmorency pretty plainly intimated that there were limits which religious proscription must not transcend. the english ambassador wrote from france, late in november, that the pope's new nuncio had within two days demanded that the red cap should be taken from the cardinal of châtillon. but the latter, who chanced to be at court, replied that "what he enjoyed he enjoyed by gift of the crown of france, wherewith the pope had nothing to do." the old constable was even more vehement. "the pope," said he, "has often troubled the quiet of this realm, but i trust he shall not be able to trouble it at this time. i am myself a papist; but if the pope and his ministers go about again to disturb the kingdom, _my sword shall be huguenot_. my nephew shall leave neither cap nor dignity which he has for the pope, seeing the edict gives him that liberty."[ ] [sidenote: the court at moulins.] early in the following year, charles the ninth convoked in the city of moulins, in bourbonnais, near the centre of france, an assembly of notables to deliberate on the interests of the kingdom, which had not yet fully recovered from the desolations of the first civil war. the extensive journey, which had occupied a large part of the two preceding years, had furnished him abundant evidence of the grievances under which his subjects in the various provinces were laboring, and he now summoned all that was most illustrious in france, and especially those noblemen whom he had dismissed to their governments when about to start from his capital, to assist him in discovering the best mode of relief. if the florentine adriani could be credited, there were other and sinister designs in the mind of the court, or, at least, in that of catharine. according to this historian, the plan of the second "sicilian vespers," resolved upon at bayonne, was to have been put into execution at moulins, which, from its strength, was well suited for the scene of so sanguinary a drama; but, although the huguenot chiefs assembled in numbers, their actions betrayed so much suspicion of the roman catholics, and it seemed so difficult to include all in the blow, that the massacre was deferred until the arrival of a more propitious time, which did not come until st. bartholomew's day, .[ ] i need not stop to refute a story which presupposes the adoption of resolutions in the conference of bayonne, which we now know, from documentary evidence, were never for a moment entertained by catharine and her son the king. [sidenote: feigned reconciliation of the guises and coligny.] so far from having any such treacherous design, in point of fact the assembly of moulins was intended in no small degree to serve as a means of healing the dissensions existing among the nobles. the most serious breaches were the feud between the châtillons and the guises on account of the suspected complicity of admiral coligny in the murder of the late duke, and that between marshal montmorency and the cardinal of lorraine, arising out of the affray in january, . both quarrels were settled amicably in the king's presence, with as much sincerity as generally characterizes such reconciliations. coligny declared on oath, in the royal presence, that he was guiltless of guise's murder, neither having been its author nor having consented to it; whereupon the king declared him innocent, and ordered the parties to be reconciled. the command was obeyed, for anne d'este, guise's widow, and cardinal charles of lorraine in turn embraced the admiral, in token of renewed friendship. how much of meaning these caresses contained was to be shown six years later by the active participation of the one in the most famous massacre which the annals of modern history present, and by the exultant rejoicings in which the other indulged when he heard of it. young henry of guise, less hypocritical than his mother and his uncle, held aloof from the demonstration, and permitted the beholders to infer that he was quietly biding his time for vengeance.[ ] [sidenote: the chancellor introduces a measure for the relief of the protestants.] [sidenote: a new altercation between lorraine and the chancellor.] an event of principal importance that occurred during the stay of the court at moulins was a fresh altercation between lorraine and l'hospital. a tolerant but apparently unauthorized act of the chancellor furnished the occasion. the edict of pacification had made provision for the worship of the huguenots in but a small number of places through the kingdom. if living out of reach of these more favored localities, what were they to do, that they might not be compelled to exist without the restraints of religion during their lifetime, and to die without its consolations, nor leave their children unbaptized and uninstructed in the articles of their faith? l'hospital proposed to remedy the evil by permitting the protestants, in such cases, to institute a species of private worship in their houses, and had procured the royal signature to an edict permitting them to call in, as occasion might require, ministers of the gospel from other cities where their regular ministrations were tolerated by the law of amboise.[ ] this edict he had sent forthwith to the different parliaments for registration. the parliament of dijon, in burgundy, however, instead of obeying, promptly despatched two counsellors with a remonstrance to the king.[ ] on arriving at court, the delegation at first found it impossible to gain the royal ear. in such awe did the "maîtres de requêtes"--to whom petitions were customarily entrusted--stand of the grave and severe chancellor--that venerable old man with the white beard, whom brantôme likened to another cato--that none was found bold enough to present the burgundian remonstrance. at last the delegates went to the newly-arrived cardinal, and lorraine readily undertook the task. appearing in the royal council he introduced the matter by expressing "his surprise that the catholics had no means of making themselves heard respecting their grievances." the objectionable edict was read, and all the members of the council declared that they had never before seen or heard of it. cardinal bourbon was foremost in his anger, and declared that if the chancellor had the right to issue such laws on his own responsibility, there was no use in having a council. "sir," said l'hospital, turning to the cardinal of lorraine, "you are already come to sow discord among us!" "i am not come to sow discord, but to prevent you from sowing it as you have done in the past, scoundrel that you are!" was the reply.[ ] "would you prevent these poor people, whom the king has permitted to live with freedom of conscience in the exercise of their religion, from receiving any consolation at all?" asked l'hospital. "yes, i intend to prevent it," answered the cardinal, "for everybody knows that to suffer such things is to tolerate secret preaching; and i shall prevent it so long as i shall have the power, in order to give no opportunity for the growth of such tyrannical practices. and," continued he, "do you, who have become what you now are by my means, dare to tell me that i come to sow discord among you? i shall take good care to keep you from doing what you have done heretofore." the council rose in anger, and passed into the adjoining apartment, where catharine, who had not recovered from a temporary illness, strove to appease them as best she could. charles ordered a new meeting, and, after hearing the deputies from dijon, the king, conformably to the advice of the council, revoked the edict, and issued a prohibition of all exercise of the protestant religion or instruction in its doctrines, save where it had been granted at amboise. the chancellor was strictly enjoined to affix the seal of state to no papers relating to religious affairs without the consent of the royal council. [sidenote: protestantism on the northern frontier.] [sidenote: progress of the reformation at cateau-cambrésis.] for several years the protestants in the northern provinces of france had been busily communicating the religious views they had themselves embraced to their neighbors in artois, flanders, and brabant. this intercourse became exceedingly close about the beginning of the year ; and its result was a renunciation of the papal church and its worship, which was participated in by such large numbers, and effected so instantaneously, that the friends and the foes of the new movement were almost equally surprised. the story of this sudden outburst of the reformatory spirit in valenciennes, tournay, and other places, accompanied--as are all movements that take a strong hold upon the popular feelings--with a certain amount of lawlessness, which expended itself, however, upon inanimate images and held sacred the lives and honor of men and women, has been well told in the histories of the country whose fortunes it chiefly affected.[ ] i may be permitted, therefore, to pass over these indirect results of huguenot influence, and glance at the fortunes of a border town within the present bounds of france, and closely connected with the history of france in the sixteenth century, of which little or no notice has been taken in this connection.[ ] cateau-cambrésis, famous for the treaty by which henry the second bartered away extensive conquests for a few paltry places that had fallen into the hands of the enemy, was, as its name--chastel, château or cateau--imports, a castle and a borough that had grown up about it, both of them on lands belonging to the domain of maximilian of bergen, archbishop and duke of cambray, and prince of the holy roman empire. it was smaller, but relatively far more important three hundred years ago than at the present day. for several years a few "good burgesses," with their families, had timidly studied the holy scriptures in secret, restrained from making an open profession of their faith by the terrible executions which they saw inflicted upon the protestants in the netherlands. but, encouraged by the toleration prevailing in france, they began to cross the frontier, and to frequent the huguenot "assemblées" at crespy, tupigny, and chauny. the distance was not inconsiderable, and the peril was great. the archbishop had not only written a letter, which was read in every parish church, forbidding the singing of marot's psalms and the frequenting of french conventicles, but he had sent his spies to the conventicles to discover cases of disobedience. the huguenots of cateau multiplied in spite of these precautions. "the eyes of the aforesaid spies," writes a witness of the events, "were so holden that they did not even recognize those with whom they conversed." yet, although the huguenots met at home to read the bible and to "sing the psalms which were most appropriate to the persecution and dispersion of the children of god," the town was as quiet as it had ever been. a slight incident, however, revealed the intensity of the fire secretly burning below the surface. a huguenot minister was discovered on whitsunday, in an adjoining village, and brought to cateau. his captors facetiously told the suspected protestants whom they met, that they had brought them a preacher, and that they would have no further occasion for leaving the town in quest of one. but the joke was not so well appreciated as it might have been by the adherents of the reformed faith, who seem by this time to have become extremely numerous. the excitement was intense. when the bailiff of cambrésis was detected, not long after, stealing into the place by night, accompanied by some sixty men, with the intention of carrying the preacher off to cambray, he met with unexpected resistance. a citizen, on his way to his garden outside the walls, was the first to notice the guard of strange arquebusiers at the gate, and ran back to give the alarm. the tocsin was rung, and the inhabitants assembled in arms. it was now the turn of the bailiff to be astonished, and to listen humbly to the remonstrances of the people, indignant that he should have presumed to seize their gates and usurp the functions of the local magistrates. however, the intruders, after being politely informed that, according to strict justice, the whole party might have been summarily put to death, were suffered to beat a hasty retreat; not that so perfect a control could be put upon the ardor of some, but that they "administered sundry blows with the flat of their swords upon the back of the bailiff and a few of his soldiers." [sidenote: interference of the archbishop of cambray.] the incident itself was of trifling importance, for the huguenot minister was promptly given up to the baron of the village where he had been captured, and was taken by his orders to cambray. but it led to serious consequences. threatened by the archiepiscopal city, the protestants of cateau, afraid to go to the french preaching-places, sent for monsieur philippe, minister of tupigny, and held the reformed services just outside of their own walls. alarmed at the progress of protestant doctrines in his diocese, the archbishop convened the estates of cambray, and, on the eighteenth of august, , sent three canons of the cathedral to persuade his subjects of cateau to return to the papal church, and to threaten them with ruin in case of refusal. neither argument nor menace was of any avail. the protestants, who had studied their bibles, were more than a match for the priests, who had not; and, as for the peril, the huguenots quaintly replied: "rather than yield to your demand, we should prefer to have our heads placed at our feet." when asked if they were all of this mind, they reiterated their determination: "were the fires made ready to burn us all, we should enter them rather than accede to your request and return to the mass." these were brave words, but the sturdy huguenots made them good a few months later. [sidenote: the images and pictures overthrown.] scarcely a week had passed before the news reached cateau (on the twenty-fifth of august) that the "idols" had been broken in all the churches of valenciennes, antwerp, ghent, tournay, and elsewhere. although stirred to its very depths by the exciting intelligence, the protestant population still contained itself, and merely consulted convenience by celebrating divine worship within the city walls, in an open cemetery. unfortunately, however, the minister whom the reformed had obtained was ill-suited to these troublous times. monsieur philippe, unlike calvin and the great majority of the ministers of the french protestant church, was rash and impetuous. early the next morning he entered the church of st. martin, in company with three or four other persons, and commenced the work of destruction. altars, statues, pictures, antiphonaries, missals, graduals--all underwent a common fate. from st. martin's the iconoclasts visited in like manner the other ecclesiastical edifices of the town and its suburbs. upon the ruins of the romish superstition the new fabric arose, and monsieur philippe preached the same day in the principal church of cateau, to a large and attentive audience. [sidenote: the protestant claims.] and now began an animated interchange of proclamations on the one hand, and of petitions on the other. the archbishop demanded the unconditional submission of his subjects, and gave no assurances of toleration. the protestants declared themselves ready to give him their unqualified allegiance, as their temporal sovereign, but claimed the liberty to worship god. maximilian referred to the laws and constitutions of the empire of which they formed an integral part. the burgesses answered by showing that they had always been governed in accordance with the "placards" issued by the king of spain for his provinces of the netherlands, and that, whenever they had appealed in times past to the chamber of the empire, as for example at spires, they had not only been repelled, but even punished for their temerity.[ ] they claimed, therefore, the benefit of the "accord" made by the duchess of parma at brussels a few days previously, guaranteeing the exercise of the reformed religion wherever it had heretofore been practised;[ ] while the archbishop, when forced to declare himself, plainly announced that he would not suffer the least deviation from the roman catholic faith. in their perplexity, the protestants had recourse to the count of horn, at tournay, by whom they were received with the utmost kindness. the count even furnished them with a letter to the archbishop, entreating him to be merciful to them.[ ] [sidenote: the archbishop's vengeance.] but nothing was further from the heart of maximilian than mercy. he was the same blind adherent of cardinal granvelle and his policy, whom, a year or two before, brederode, hoogstraaten, and their fellow-revellers had grievously insulted at a banquet given to egmont before his departure for spain; the same treacherous, sanguinary priest who wrote to granvelle respecting valenciennes: "we had better push forward and make an end of all the principal heretics, whether rich or poor, without regarding whether the city will be entirely ruined by such a course."[ ] on monday, the twenty-fourth of march, , the troops of the archbishop appeared before cateau, and the same day the place was surrendered by the treachery of some of the inhabitants. at once cateau became a scene of bloody executions. all that had taken part in the protestant worship were brought before a tribunal, which often tried, condemned, and punished with death upon one and the same day. monsieur philippe, the rash preacher, and one of his deacons seem to have been the first victims. there was no lack of food for the gallows. to have been present at the "preachings," to have partaken of the communion, to have maintained that the protestant was better than the roman catholic religion, to have uttered a jest or drawn a caricature reflecting upon the papal church and its ceremonies--any of these was sufficient reason for sending a man to be hung or beheaded. the duchess's "moderation" had effected thus much, that no one seems to have been burned at the stake. and so, at last, by assiduous but bloody work, the reformation was completely extirpated from cateau cambrésis. it was, at least, a source of mournful satisfaction that scarce one of the sufferers failed to exhibit great constancy and pious resignation in view of death.[ ] [sidenote: the idea of toleration is not understood.] let us return from the flemish borders to france proper, where, notwithstanding attempts at external reconciliation, the breach between the protestants and their roman catholic neighbors was daily widening, where, in fact, the elements of a new war were gathering shape and consistency. it was becoming more and more difficult--especially for a government of temporary shifts and expedients--to control the antagonistic forces incessantly manifesting themselves. the idea of toleration was understood by neither party. the roman catholics of provins were so slow to comprehend the liberty of conscience and religious profession of which the huguenots had wrung a concession in the last edict by force of arms, that they undertook to prosecute the protestants for eating roast lamb and capons during lent. with little more appreciation of the altered posture of affairs, the archbishop of sens (cardinal guise) initiated a trial against a heretical curate of courtenay, according to the rules of canon law, and the latter might have stood but a poor chance to recover his freedom had not the huguenot lord of courtenay seized upon the archbishop's "official" as he was passing his castle, and held him as a hostage to secure the curate's release.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot pleasantries.] it would be asserting too much to say that the protestants were innocent of any infraction upon the letter or spirit of the edict of amboise. they would have been angels, not men, had they been proof against the contagious spirit of raillery that infected the men of the sixteenth century. where they dared, they not unfrequently held up their opponents to ridicule in the coarse style so popular with all classes.[ ] thus a contemporary roman catholic recounts with indignation how prince porcien held a celebration in normandy, and among the games was one in which a "paper castle" was assaulted, and the defenders, dressed as _monks_, were taken prisoners, and were afterward paraded through the streets on asses' backs.[ ] but these buffooneries were harmless sallies contrasted with the insults with which the protestants were treated in every town where they were not numerically preponderating; nor were they anything more than rare occurrences in comparison with the latter. this page of history is compelled to record no violent commotion on the part of the reformed population, save in cases where, as at pamiers (a town not far south of toulouse, near the foot of the pyrenees), they had been goaded to madness by the government deliberately trampling upon their rights of worship, at the instigation of the ecclesiastical authorities.[ ] a trifling accident might then, however, be sufficient to cause their inflamed passions to burst out; and in the disturbances that were likely to ensue, little respect was usually paid to the churches or the monasteries. such are wont to be the unhappy effects of the denial of justice according to the forms of established law. they would have been a hundred-fold more frequent had it not been for the persistent opposition interposed by the huguenot ministers--many of them with calvin carrying the doctrine of passive submission to constituted authority almost to the very verge of apparent pusillanimity. [sidenote: alarm of the protestants.] [sidenote: attempts to murder the admiral and prince porcien.] from month to month the conviction grew upon the protestants that their destruction was agreed upon. there was no doubt with regard to the desire of philip the second; for his course respecting his subjects in the netherlands showed plainly enough that the extermination of heretics was the only policy of which his narrow mind could conceive as pleasing in the sight of heaven. the character of catharine--stealthy, deceitful, regardless of principle--was equally well understood. between such a queen and the trusted minister of such a prince, a secret conference like that of bayonne could not be otherwise than highly suspicious. it is not strange that the huguenots received it as an indubitable fact that the court from this time forward was only waiting for the best opportunity of effecting their ruin; for even intelligent roman catholics, who were not admitted into the confidence of the chief actors in that celebrated interview, came to the same conclusion. those who knew what had actually been said and done might assure the world that the rumors were false; but the more they asseverated the less they were believed. for it is one of the penalties of insincere and lying diplomacy, that when once appreciated in its true character--as it generally is appreciated in a very brief space of time--it loses its persuasive power, and is treated without much investigation as uniform imposture.[ ] with a suspicious vigilance, bred of the very treachery of which they had so often been the victims, the huguenots saw signs of dangers that perhaps were not actually in preparation for them. and certainly there was enough to alarm. not many months after the assembly of moulins a cut-throat by the name of du may was discovered and executed, who had been hired to murder admiral coligny, the most indispensable leader of the party, near his own castle of châtillon-sur-loing.[ ] the last day of the year there was hung a lackey, who pretended that the cardinal of lorraine had tried to induce him to poison the prince of porcien; and, although he retracted his statements at the time of his "amende honorable,"[ ] his first story was generally credited. the rumor was current that in december, , charles received special envoys from the emperor, the pope, and the king of spain, warning him that, unless he should revoke his edict of toleration, they would declare themselves his open enemies.[ ] this was certainly sufficiently incredible, so far as the tolerant maximilian was concerned; but stranger mutations of policy had often been noticed, and, as to pius the fifth and philip, nothing seemed more probable. [sidenote: alva in the netherlands.] [sidenote: the swiss levy.] with the opening of the year the portentous clouds of coming danger assumed a more definite shape. in the neighboring provinces of the netherlands, after a long period of procrastination, philip the second had at length determined to strike a decisive blow. the duchess of parma was to be superseded in the government by a man better qualified than any other in europe for the bloody work assigned him to do. ferdinando de toledo, duke of alva, in his sixtieth year, after a life full of brilliant military exploits, was to undertake a work in flanders such as that which, two years before, he had recommended as the panacea for the woes of france--a work with which his name will ever remain associated in the annals of history. the "beggars" of the low countries, like the huguenots in their last war, had taken up arms in defence of their religious, and, to a less degree, of their civil rights. the "beggars" complained of the violation of municipal privileges and compacts, ratified by oath at their sovereign's accession, as the huguenots pointed to the infringement upon edicts solemnly published as the basis of the pacification of the country; and both refused any longer to submit to a tyranny that had, in the name of religion, sent to the gallows or the stake thousands of their most pious and industrious fellow-citizens. the cause was, therefore, common to the protestants of the two countries, and there was little doubt that should the enemy of either prove successful at home, he would soon be impelled by an almost irresistible impulse to assist his ally in completing his portion of the praiseworthy undertaking. it is true that the huguenots of france were not now in actual warfare with the government; but, that their time would come to be attacked, there was every reason to apprehend. hence, when the duke of alva, in the memorable summer of , set out from piedmont at the head of ten thousand veterans, to thread his way over the alps and along the eastern frontiers of france, through burgundy and lorraine, to the fated scene of his bloody task in the netherlands, the protestants of france saw in this neighboring demonstration a new peril to themselves. in the first moments of trepidation, their leaders in the royal council are said to have acquiesced in, if they did not propose, the levy of six thousand swiss troops, as a measure of defence against the spanish general; and coligny, the same contemporary authority informs us, strongly advocated that they should dispute the duke's passage.[ ] even if this statement be true, they were not long in detecting, or believing that they had detected, proofs that the swiss troops were really intended for the overthrow of protestantism in france, rather than for any service against the duke of alva. letters from rome and spain were intercepted, we learn from françois de la noue, containing evidence of the sinister designs of the court.[ ] the prince of la roche-sur-yon, a prince of the blood, a short time before his death, warned his cousin of condé of the impending danger.[ ] condé, who, within the past few months, had repeatedly addressed the king and his mother in terms of remonstrance and petition for the redress of the oppression under which the huguenots were suffering, but to no purpose, again supplicated the throne, urging in particular that the levy of the swiss be countermanded, since, if they should come, there would be little hope of the preservation of the peace;[ ] while admiral coligny, who found catharine visiting the constable, his uncle, at his palace of chantilly, with faithful boldness exposed to them both the impossibility of retaining the protestants in quiet, when they saw plain indications that formidable preparations were being made for the purpose of overwhelming them. to these remonstrances, however, they received only what they esteemed evasive answers--excuses for not dismissing the swiss, based upon representations of the danger of some spanish incursion, and promises that the just requests of the huguenots should receive the gracious attention of a monarch desirous of establishing his throne by equity.[ ] "the queene returned answer by letters," wrote the english ambassador, norris, to elizabeth, "assuringe him"--condé--"by the faythe of a princesse _et d'une femme de bien_ (for so she termed it), that so long as she might any waies prevayle with the kinge, her sonne, he should never breake the sayd edicte, and therof required him to assure himselfe; and if he coulde come to the courte, he shoulde be as welcome as his owne harte could devise; if not, to passe the tyme without any suspect or jealousie, protesting that there was nothing ment that tended to his indempnitie, what so ever was bruted abrode or conceyved to the contrary, as he should perceyve by the sequele erst it were long."[ ] shall we blame those sturdy, straightforward men, so long fed upon unmeaning or readily-broken promises of redress, if they gave little credit to the royal assurances, and to the more honeyed words of the queen mother? perhaps there existed no sufficient grounds for the immediate alarm of the huguenots. perhaps no settled plan had been formed with the connivance of philip--no "sacred league" of the kind supposed to have been sketched in outline at bayonne--no contemplated massacre of the chiefs, with a subsequent assembly of notables at poitiers, and repeal of all the toleration that had been vouchsafed to the protestants.[ ] all this may have been false; but, if false, it was invested with a wonderful verisimilitude, and to huguenots and papists it had, so far as their actions were concerned, all the effect of truth. at all events the promises of the king could not be trusted. had he not been promising, again and again, for four years? had not every restrictive ordinance, every interpretation of the edict of amboise, every palpable infringement upon its spirit, if not upon its letter, been prefaced by a declaration of charles's intention to maintain the edict inviolate? in the words of an indignant contemporary, "the very name of the edict was employed to destroy the edict itself."[ ] * * * * * [sidenote: the huguenot attempts at colonization in florida.] the huguenot expeditions to florida have been so well sketched by bancroft and parkman, and so fully set forth by their latest historian, m. paul gaffarel, that i need not speak of them in detail. in fact, they belong more intimately to american than to french history. they owed their origin to the enlightened patriotism of coligny, who was not less desirous, as a huguenot, to provide a safe refuge for his fellow protestants, than anxious, as high admiral of france, to secure for his native country such commercial resources as it had never enjoyed. "i am in my house," he wrote in , "studying new measures by which we may traffic and make profit in foreign parts. i hope shortly to bring it to pass that we shall have the best trade in christendom." (gaffarel, histoire de la floride française, paris, , pp. , ). but, although the project of huguenot emigration was conceived in the brain of the great protestant leader, apparently it was heartily approved by catharine de' medici and her son. they certainly were not averse to be relieved of the presence of as many as possible of those whom their religious views, and, still more, their political tendencies, rendered objects of suspicion. "if wishing were in order," catharine (letter to forquevaulx, march , , gaffarel, ) plainly told the spanish ambassador, on one occasion, "i would wish that all the huguenots were in those regions" ("si c'estoit souëter, ie voudrois que touts les huguenots fussent en ce pais-là"). in the discussion that ensued between the courts of paris and madrid, the queen mother never denied that the colonists went not only with her knowledge, but with her consent. in fact, she repudiated with scorn and indignation a suggestion of the possibility that such considerable bodies of soldiers and sailors could have left her son's french dominions without the royal privity (ibid., ). [sidenote: .] the first expedition, under jean ribault, in , was little more than a voyage of discovery. the main body promptly returned to france, the same year, finding that country rent with civil war. the twenty-six or twenty-eight men left behind to hold "charlesfort" (erected probably near the mouth of the south edisto river, in what is now south carolina), disheartened and famishing, nevertheless succeeded in constructing a rude ship and recrossing the atlantic in the course of the next year. [sidenote: .] a second expedition ( ), under rené de laudonnière, who had taken part in the first, was intended to effect a more permanent settlement. a strong earthwork was accordingly thrown-up at a spot christened "caroline," in honor of charles the ninth, and the colony was inaugurated under fair auspices. but improvidence and mismanagement soon bore their legitimate fruits. laudonnière saw himself constrained to build ships for a return to europe, and was about to set sail when the third expedition unexpectedly made its appearance (august , ), under ribault, leader of the first enterprise. [sidenote: .] [sidenote: massacre by menendez.] unfortunately the arrival of this fresh reinforcement was closely followed by the approach of a spanish squadron, commanded by pedro menendez, or melendez, de abila, sent by philip the second expressly to destroy the frenchmen who had been so presumptuous as to settle in territories claimed by his catholic majesty. nature seemed to conspire with their own incompetency to ruin the french. the french vessels, having gone out to attack the spaniards, accomplished nothing, and, meeting a terrible storm, were driven far down the coast and wrecked. "caroline" fell into the hands of menendez, and its garrison was mercilessly put to death. the same fate befell the shipwrecked french from the fleet. those who declared themselves roman catholics were almost the only persons spared by their pitiless assailants. a few women and children were granted their lives; also a drummer, a hornblower, and a few carpenters and sailors, whose services were valuable. laudonnière and a handful of men escaped to the woods, and subsequently to europe. about two hundred soldiers, who threatened to entrench themselves and make a formidable resistance, were able to obtain from menendez a pledge that they should be treated as prisoners of war, which, strange to say, was observed. the rest--many hundreds--were consigned to indiscriminate slaughter; ribault himself was flayed and quartered; and over the dead huguenots was suspended a tablet with this inscription: "hung, not as frenchmen, but as lutherans" (gaffarel, ; de thou, iv. ; ag. d'aubigné, i. ). spain and rome had achieved a grand work. the chaplain mendoza could piously write: "the greatest advantage from our victory, certainly, is the triumph our lord grants us, which will cause his holy gospel to be introduced into these regions." (mendoza, _apud_ gaffarel, ). the report of these atrocities, tardily reaching the old world, called forth an almost universal cry of horror. fair-minded men of both communions stigmatized the conduct of menendez and his companions as sheer murder; for had not the french colonists of florida been attacked before being summoned to surrender, and butchered in cold blood after being denied even such terms as were customarily accorded to turks and other infidels? among princes, philip alone applauded the deed, and seemed only to regret that faith had been kept with any of the detested huguenots (gaffarel, , ). it has been commonly supposed that whatever indignation was shown by catharine de' medici and her son, was merely assumed in deference to the popular clamor, and that but a feeble remonstrance was really uttered. this supineness would be readily explicable upon the hypothesis of the long premeditation of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. if the treacherous murder of admiral coligny and the other great huguenot leaders had indeed been deliberately planned from the time of the bayonne conference in , and would have been executed at moulins in , but for unforeseen circumstances, no protests against the florida butchery could have been sincere. on the other hand, if catharine de' medici was earnest and persistent in her demand for the punishment of menendez, it is not conceivable that her mind should have been then entertaining the project of the parisian matins. the extant correspondence between the french queen mother and her envoy at the court of madrid may fairly be said to set at rest all doubts respecting her attitude. she was indignant, determined, and outspoken. so slowly did news travel in the sixteenth century, that it was not until the eighteenth of february, , that forquevaulx, from madrid, despatched to the king of france a first account of the events that had occurred in florida nearly five months before. the ambassador seems to have expressed becoming indignation in the interviews he sought with the duke of alva, repudiating with dignity the suggestion that the blame should be laid upon coligny, for having abused his authority as admiral to set on foot a piratical expedition into the territories of a friendly prince; and holding forth no encouragement to believe that charles would disavow coligny's acts. he told alva distinctly that menendez was a butcher rather than a good soldier ("plus digne bourreau que bon soldat," forquevaulx to charles ix., march , , gaffarel, ). he declared to him that the turks had never exhibited such inhumanity to their prisoners at castelnovo or at gerbes--in fact, never had barbarians displayed such cruelty. as a frenchman, he assured the spaniard that he shuddered when he thought of so execrable a deed, and that it appeared to him that god would not leave it unpunished (ibid., ). catharine's own language to the spanish ambassador, don francez de alava, was not less frank. "as their common mother," she said, "i can but have an incredible grief at heart, when i hear that between princes so closely bound as friends, allies, and relations, as these two kings, and in so good a peace, and at a time when such great offices of friendship are observed between them, so horrible a carnage has been committed on the subjects of my son, the king of france. i am, as it were, beside myself when i think of it, and cannot persuade myself that the king, your master, will refuse us satisfaction" (catharine to forquevaulx, moulins, march th, gaffarel, ). not content with this plain talking to alava, she "prayed and ordered" forquevaulx to make philip himself understand her desires respecting "the reparation demanded by _so enormous an outrage_." he was to tell his catholic majesty that catharine would never rest content until due satisfaction was made; and that she would feel "marvellous regret" should she not only find that all her pains to establish perpetual friendship between the two kings had been lost, but one day be reproached by charles for having suffered such a stain upon his reputation ("que ... j'aye laissé faire une telle escorne à sa reputation." gaffarel, ). forquevaulx fulfilled his instructions to the very letter, adding, on his own account, that in forty-one years of military service he had never known so execrable an execution. he seems also to have disposed effectually of the spanish claim to florida through right of ancient discovery, by emphasizing the circumstance that menendez, after his victory, thought it necessary to take formal possession of the land. he informed philip that no news could be more welcome to the huguenots than that the subjects of charles had been murdered by those very persons who were expected to strengthen him by their friendship and alliance (forquevaulx to catharine, april th, gaffarel, ). his words had little effect upon any one at the spanish court, save the young queen, who felt the utmost solicitude lest her brother and her husband should become involved in war with each other. ("me sembla qu'il tint à peu qu'elle ne pleurast son soul de crainte qu'il ne survienne quelque alteration." forquevaulx, _ubi supra_, .) but, although no progress was made toward obtaining justice, the french government did not relax its efforts. charles wrote from saint maur, may , , that his will was that forquevaulx should renew his complaint and insist with all urgency upon a reparation of the wrong done him. "you will not cease to tell them," said the king, "that they must not hope that i shall ever be satisfied until i see such a reparation as our friendship demands." (gaffarel, .) [sidenote: sanguinary revenge of de gourgues, april, .] the french ambassador continued to press his claim, and, in particular, to demand the release of the french prisoners, even up to near the time when a private citizen, dominique de gourgues, undertook to avenge his country's wrongs while satisfying his thirst for personal revenge. de gourgues was not, as has usually been supposed, a huguenot; he had even been an adherent of montluc and of the house of guise (gaffarel, ). but, having been captured in war by the spaniards, in , he had been made a galley-slave. from that time he had vowed irreconcilable hatred against the catholic king. he obtained a long-deferred satisfaction when, in april, , he surprised the fort of caroline, slew most of the spanish soldiers, and placed over the remainder--spared only for the more ignominious punishment of hanging upon the same trees to which huguenots had been suspended--the inscription, burned with a hot iron on a pine slab: "i do this not as to spaniards, nor as to seamen, but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers." (the words are given with slight variations. see "la reprinse de la floride par le cappitaine gourgue," reprinted by gaffarel, - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. - ; de thou, iv. - .) footnotes: [ ] froude, hist. of england, vii. . seethe courteous summons of charles, april , , forbes, state papers, ii. , , and elizabeth's answer, may th, ibid., ii. - ; condé's offer in his letter of june , , forbes, ii. . see also the extended correspondence of the english envoys, in the inedited documents published by the duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. - . [ ] froude, vii. ; castelnau, liv. v., c. ii. compare forbes, ii. . [ ] "the plage dothe increace here dayly, wherby our nombres are decayde within these fowr days in soche sorte, as we have not remayning at this present (in all our judgements) able men in this towne. they dye nowe in bothe these peces upon the point of a daye, so as we can not geyt men to burye theym," etc. warwick to the privy council, july , . forbes, ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) - ; mém. de castelnau, liv. v., c. ii. and iii.; cimber et danjou, v. ; stow's annals (london, ), , ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. iv., c. ii. (i. - ); davila, bk. iii. (eng. trans., london, ), p. ; froude, vii. - . consult especially dr. patrick forbes, full view of the public transactions in the reign of queen elizabeth (london, ), vol ii. pp. - . this important collection of letters, to which i have made such frequent reference under the shorter title of "state papers," ends at this point. peace was definitely concluded between france and england by the treaty of troyes, april , (mém. de condé, v. , ). sir nicholas throkmorton, who had long been a prisoner, held to be exchanged against the hostages for the restitution of calais, given in accordance with the treaty of cateau-cambrésis, now returned home. before leaving, however, he had an altercation with his colleague, sir thomas smith, of which the latter wrote a full account. sir nicholas, it seems, in his heat applied some opprobrious epithets to smith, and even called him "traitor"--a charge which the latter repudiated with manly indignation. "nay, thou liest, quoth i; i am as true to the queen as thou any day in the week, and have done her highness as faithful and good service as thou." smith to cecil, april , , state paper office. [ ] mém. de claude haton, i. , . [ ] see the order of the fanatical parliament of toulouse, which it had the audacity to publish with, or instead of, the king's edict. it contains this clause: "ce que estant veu par nous, avons ordonné et ordonnons que, en la ville de thoulouse ni aultres du ressort du parlement d'icelle, ne se fera publicquement ni secrettement aulcun exercice de la nouvelle prétendue religion, en quelque sorte que ce soit, sous peine de la hart. item, que tous ceux qui vouldront faire profession de laditte prétendue religion réformée ayent à se retirer," etc. mém. de claude haton, i. , . [ ] recordon, le protestantisme en champagne, , . [ ] m. floquet, in his excellent history of the norman parliament (ii. ), repudiates as "une de ces exagérations familières à de bèze," the statement of the histoire ecclés. des églises réformées, "that in the parliament of rouen, whatever the cause might be, whoever was known to be of the (reformed) religion, whether plaintiff or defendant, was instantly condemned." yet he quotes below (ii. , , ), from chancellor de l'hospital's speech to that parliament, statements that fully vindicate the justice of the censure. "vous pensez bien faire d'adjuger la cause à celuy que vous estiméz plus homme de bien ou meilleur chrestien; comme s'il estoit question, entre les parties, lequel d'entre eux est meilleur poète, orateur, peintre, artisan, et enfin de l'art, doctrine, force, vaillance, ou autre quelconque suffisance, non de la chose qui est amenée en jugement." and after enumerating other complaints: "ne trouvez point estrange ce que je vous en dy: car souvent sont apportéz au roy de vos jugements qui semblent, de prime face, fort esloignéz de toute droicture et équité." [ ] chron. ms. du xvi. siècle, registres, etc., _apud_ floquet, hist. du parlement de normandie, ii. - . [ ] ibid., ii. . [ ] the father of agrippa d'aubigné was, as his son informs us, one of the commissioners sent on this occasion to guyenne. mémoires d'a. d'aubigné, ed. buchon, . [ ] what else can be said, in view of such well authenticated statements as the following? on his progress through france, to which reference will soon be made, charles the ninth stopped with his court at troyes, where no expense was spared in providing tournaments and games for his amusement. just as he was about to leave the city, and was already booted for his journey, he was detained for a little while that he might witness a novel entertainment. he was taken to a garden where a number of young girls, selected for their extraordinary beauty and entirely nude, executed in his presence the most obscene dances. it was two churchmen that are said to have provided the boy-king with this infamous diversion--cardinal charles of bourbon and cardinal louis of guise. recordon, . [ ] "il est notoire qu'au temps du colloque de poissy la doctrine evangelique y fut proposée en liberté; ce qui causa que plusieurs, tans grands que petits, prindrent goust à icelle. mais, tout ainsi qu'un feu de paille fait grand' flamme, et puis s'esteint incontinent d'autant que la matière défaut, après que ce qu'ils avoient receu comme une nouveauté se fut un peu envieilly en leur coeur, les affections s'amortirent, et la pluspart retourna à l'ancienne cabale de la cour, qui est bien plus propre pour faire rire et piaffer, et pour s'enrichir." mém. de franç. de la noue, c. ii. (ed. mich, et pouj., ). [ ] "quelque chose qu'il sût dire avec blasphêmes horribles--moyen ordinaire à telles gens pour prouver leur religion." hist. ecclés. des églises réformées, ii. . to stuff leaves torn from french bibles into the mouths or wounds of dying or dead huguenots, as we have seen, was a diversion not unknown to their opponents. of course, there is nothing astonishing in the circumstance that the invocation of calvin's liturgy--"notre aide soit au nom de dieu qui a fait le ciel et la terre"--should have been a favorite formula for the beginning of a game of chance, or that the doxology--"louange à dieu de tous ses biens"--["praise god from whom all blessings flow."]--should have been esteemed a fitting ejaculation for the winner. ibid., ii. , . [ ] "'double mort dieu' a vaincu 'certes'; entendant par ce dernier mot ceux de la religion qui condamnent ces juremens et blasphêmes." hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) . [ ] declaration dated châtillon-sur-loing, may , . mém. de condé, iv. - ; and jean de serres, iii. - . [ ] martin, hist. de france, x. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.), , . catharine had been the involuntary instrument of renewing the old friendship between the constable and his nephews, when, on guise's death, she conferred the office of grand master upon his young son, instead of restoring it to anne de montmorency, to whom the dignity had formerly belonged. three months later (aug. , ) condé drew up another paper, assuming the entire responsibility for all the acts of the châtillon brothers during the war: "acte par lequel m. le prince de condé déclare que tout ce que m. l'amiral de coligny et m. d'andelot son frère ont fait pendant les troubles, ils ont fait à sa réquisition et par ses ordres." mém. de condé, iv. . [ ] see martin, x. , . [ ] davila, bk. iii. , and d'aubigné, liv. iv., c. iii. (i. ), both of whom mistake the place of the occurrence, supposing it to have been paris. [ ] copie de la requeste présentée au roy très-chrestien par ceulx de la mayson de guyse, etc. mém. de condé, iv. , . [ ] ibid., iv. . [ ] "c'est un vray moyen pour destruire et gaster en une heure tout le fondement de ce qu'elle a prins grand' peine de bastir depuis six mois." mémoire présenté à la reine-mère, pour empêcher que la maison de guyse n'allât demander justice au parlement de paris, de l'assassinat de françois duc de guise. mém. de condé, iv. - . [ ] arrêt du conseil du roy, par lequel il évoque à sa personne le procès meu entre les maisons de guyse et de chastillon, etc. mém. de condé, iv. . [ ] "ne parlez encore à personne," writes catharine to m. de gonnor (march , ), "des conditions, car j'ay toûjours peur qu'ils ne nous trompent; encore que le prince de condé leur a déclaré que s'ils n'acceptent ces conditions et s'ils ne veulent la paix, qu'il s'en viendra avec le roy mon fils, et se déclarera leur ennemy, chose que je trouve très-bonne." le laboureur, ii. . [ ] not september th, as davila states, nor september th, as d'aubigné seems to assert; but his narrative is confused. [ ] the two documents--address and edict--in mém. de condé, iv. - . [ ] floquet, hist. du parlement de normandie, ii. . the entire scene is very vividly portrayed, ibid., ii. - . bruslart, mém. de condé, i. ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) - ; jean de serres, iii. ; mém. de castelnau, liv. v., c. iv., etc.; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., liv. iv., c. iii. (i. - ); davila, bk. iii. . [ ] "les parisiens furent fort pressés qu'ils eussent à mettres les armes bas," says the metropolitan curate, jean de la fosse, under date of may, , "mais ils n'en volurent jamais rien faire." mém. d'un curé ligueur, , . [ ] a town on the left bank of the seine, four leagues beyond meulan. [ ] mém. de condé (bruslart), sept., , i. - . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. "ces parolles là sont venues de la boutique de monsieur le chancellier et non du roy." [ ] ibid., i. . even after charles's lecture and a still more intemperate address of montluc, bishop of valence, when parliament came to a vote there was a tie. to please catharine, whose entire authority was at stake, the royal council of state gave the extraordinary command that the minute of this vote should be erased from the records of parliament, and the edict instantly registered. this last was forthwith done. de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) , . bruslart (_ubi supra_, i. ) denies that the erasure was actually made as charles had commanded. [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) , etc. [ ] letter of card. de la bourdaisière, rome, oct. , , in which sentence is said to have been pronounced, the day before, on the archbishop of aix, and the bishops of uzès, valence, oléron, lescar, chartres, and troyes. le laboureur, i. , . [ ] monitorium et citatio officii sanctæ inquisitionis contra illustrissimam et serenissimam dominam joannam albretiam, reginam navarræ, mém. de condé, iv. - ; and vauvilliers, histoire de jeanne d'albret, iii. pièces justif., - . it is dated tuesday, september , . de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) . the card. de la bourdaisière (_ubi supra_) merely says: "tout le monde dit à rome, que la reine de navarre fut aussi privée audit consistoire, mais il n'en est rien, bien est-elle citée." mém. de castelnau, liv. v., c. ix. [ ] it needed no very extraordinary penetration to read "philip" under the words of the monitorium: "ita ut in casu contraventionis (quod deus avertat) et contumaciæ, regnum, principatus, ac alia cujuscunque status et dominia hujuscemodi, dentur et dari possint _cuilibet illa occupanti, vel illi aut illis quibus sanctitati suæ et successoribus suis dare et concedere magis placuerit_." [ ] summary of the protest in de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) - ; and vauvilliers, ii. - ; in full in mém. de condé, iv. - . "quant au fait de la reine de navarre, qui est celuy qui importe le plus, ledit sieur d'oysel aura charge de luy faire bien entendre," says catharine in a long letter to bishop bochetel (_ubi infra_), "qu'il n'a nulle autorité et jurisdiction sur ceux qui portent titre de roy ou de reine, et que ce n'est à luy de donner leur estats et royaumes en proye au premier conquerant." [ ] see the interesting letter of catharine to bochetel, bishop of rennes, french ambassador at vienna, dec. , , in which the papal assumption is stigmatized as dangerous to the peace of christendom. "de nostre part nous sommes délibéréz de ne le permettre ny consentir," she says, and she is persuaded that neither ferdinand nor maximilian will consent. le laboureur, i. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) . castelnau (liv. v., c. ix.) gives a wrong impression by his assertion that "the pope could never be induced to reverse the sentence against the queen of navarre." [ ] le laboureur, ii. , ; brantôme, hommes illustres (oeuvres, ix. ). we cannot accept, without much caution, the portraits drawn of the prince by the english while they were still smarting with resentment against him for concluding peace with the king without securing the claims of elizabeth upon calais. "the prince of condé," wrote sir thomas smith, april , , "is thought ... to be waxen almost a new king of navarre. so thei which are most zelous for the religion are marvelously offendid with him; and in great feare, that shortly all wil be worse than ever it was. et quia nunc prodit causam religionis, as they say, dia tên rhathumian autou kai psychrotêta pros ta kala, and begynnes even now gunaikomanein, as the other did; they thinke plainly, that he will declare himself, ere it be long, unkiend to god, to us, and to himself; being won by the papists, either with reward of balaam, or ells with cozbi the midianite, to adjoigne himself to baal-peor." forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] "le bon prince," says brantôme, "estoit aussi mondain qu'un autre, et aimoit autant la femme d'autruy que la sienne, tenant fort du naturel de ceux de la race de bourbon, qui ont esté fort d'amoureuse complexion." hommes illustres, m. le prince de condé. granvelle wrote to the emperor ferdinand from besançon (april , ), that word had come from france, "que le prince de condé y entendoit au service des dames plus qu'en aultre chose, et assez froid en la religion des huguenotz." papiers d'état, vii. . [ ] see bayle's art. on isabeau de limueil; j. de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) , . cf. bolwiller to cardinal granvelle, sept. , , papiers d'état du cardinal de granvelle, viii. . see, however, the statements in chapter xvi. of this history. [ ] his revenue from his county of soissons was not , crowns a year, and he had little from his other possessions (le laboureur, ii. ). secretary courtewille, in his secret report (dec., ), states that the huguenot nobles of the first rank were in general poor--vendôme, condé, coligny, etc.--and that were it not for a monthly sum of , crowns, which the huguenots furnished to condé, and , which the admiral received in similar manner, they would hardly know how to support themselves. papiers d'état du card. de granv., vi. . [ ] mary herself, however, writing to her aunt, the duchess of aerschot (nov. , ), represents the offer of marriage as made by condé, both to her grandmother and to her uncle the cardinal: "à qui il a fait toutes les belles offres du monde." papiers d'état du card. de granv., viii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] ibid., iii. , ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) ; d'aubigné, hist. univ., i. . [ ] on the upper tarn, in the modern department of the aveyron. [ ] the very important documents which exhibit these facts at great length are in the archives of the "mairie" of milhau and in the bibliothèque nationale, and were inedited until printed in the bulletin, ix. ( ) - . among the names of the huguenots of milhau figuring here is that of benoit ferragut, apothecary. [ ] graignan, pour l'église de someyre, à la vénérable compagnie, juin, , gaberel, hist. de l'église de genève, i., pièces justificatives, . "et pourtant, je ne peux pas suffire à tout. les paysans se baptisent les enfants les ungs les autres, ou sont contraincts de les laisser à baptiser." [ ] les consuls de montpellier à la vén. comp., janvier, ( ), ibid., i., pièces just., . [ ] i know of no more beautiful monument of jeanne's courage and piety than the letter she wrote to the cardinal of armagnac, in reply to a letter of the cardinal, dated august , , intended to frighten her into a return to the papal church. it was sent by the same messenger who had brought the letter of armagnac, and it has every mark of having been jeanne's own composition. both letters are given in full by olhagaray, hist. de foix, béarn, et navarre, - , and - ; a summary in vauvilliers, i. - . the queen of navarre boldly avowed her sentiments, but declared her policy to be pacific: "je ne fay rien par force; il n'y a ny mort ny emprisonnement, ny condemnation, qui sont les nerfs de la force." but she refused to recognize armagnac--who was papal legate in provence, guyenne, and languedoc--as having any such office in béarn, proudly writing: "je ne recognois en béarn que dieu auquel je dois rendre conte de la charge qu'il m'a baillée de son peuple." the publication of these letters produced a deep impression favorable to the reformation. [ ] letter of jehan reymond merlin to calvin, pau, july , , printed for the first time in the bulletin, xiv. ( ) , . [ ] olhagaray, hist. de foix, béarn, et navarre, p. ; vauvilliers, hist. de jeanne d'albret, i. . [ ] letter of merlin, _ubi supra_, , ; vauvilliers, i. . [ ] ibid., . "dont plusieurs, voire des grands, s'en allèrent fort mal contens, et singulièrement quelques-uns qu'elle rabroua plus rudement que je n'eusse désiré." merlin adds that all now saw the excellence of his advice, for, had it been followed, "il y auroit apparence que la réformation eust esté faite en ce pays par l'authorité des estats; maintenant il faut qu'elle se fasse de seule puissance absolue de la royne, voyre avec danger." in other parts of france, as well as in béarn, jeanne's reformatory movements were looked upon with great disfavor. upon a glass window at limoges (made about the year , and still in existence, i believe) she is represented, by way of derision, as herself in the pulpit, and preaching to a congregation of eight huguenots seated. underneath is the bitter couplet, "mal sont les gens endoctrinés quand par femme sont sermonés." m. hennin, monuments de l'hist. de france, paris, , tome ix. ( - ) . the statement that this and a somewhat similar representation, also described in this work, came from an old abbey, whose monks thus revenged themselves upon the queen for removing their pulpit, seems to be a mistake. [ ] letter of merlin, _ubi supra_, : "brief c'est merveille que ceste princesse puisse persister constamment en son sainct vouloir." cf. letter of same, dec. , , . [ ] letter of merlin, dec. , , _ubi supra_, . [ ] "récit d'une entreprise faite en l'an contre la reine de navarre et messeigneurs les enfans," etc., etc.; cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, vi. - . the year should be . the best authority is, however, that of de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvi.) - , who states that he simply gives the account as he had it from the lips of secretary rouleau, who brought the tidings to france, and from the children of the domestic of isabella who detected the conspiracy. see, also, léon feer, in bulletin, xxvi. ( ), , etc., , etc. [ ] michel de l'hospital frankly told santa croce that the misfortunes of france came exclusively from the french themselves, "e della vita dei preti, molto sregolata, i quali non vogliono esser riformati, e principalmente quelli del concilio, e poi nelle loro lettere rejiciunt culpam in papam." "io so," adds the nuncio himself, "che sono loro che non vogliono esser riformati, e hanno mandati di quà certi articoli che hanno parimente mandati a roma, circa gli quali io vi posso dir che se sua santita li accordasse, conformamente alle loro petitioni, sariano i più malcontenti del mondo; ma no le hanno fatte ad altro fine che per haver occasione di mostrar di quà, che il papa è quello che non vuole, mentre che sono loro che non vogliono quella riformatione del clero." santa croce to borromeo, march , , aymon, i. , ; cimber et danjou, vi. . [ ] "il quale (cardinal di lorreno) con la morte del suo fratello, havera manco spiriti, e credo io che terra più conto della satisfattione di sua santita che di qua." santa croce to borromeo, blois, march , , shortly after guise's death. aymon, i. ; cimber et danjou, vi. . [ ] "sed hæ nugæ ipsi nequaquam placebant." languet, letter of feb. , , epist. secr., ii. . [ ] letter of santa croce to borromeo, melun, feb. , , aymon, i. , ; letter of beza to bullinger, geneva, march , , simler coll. (zurich) mss.; languet, march , , epist. secr., ii. , . there has been great confusion respecting this altercation between lorraine and l'hospital. according to henri martin (histoire de france, x. ), it took place "à propos d'un nouvel édit qui accordait aux réformés quelques facilités pour l'enseignement et l'exercise de leur religion en maisons privées dans les villes où le culte public leur était interdit." m. jules bonnet has kindly made search for me in the zurich and paris libraries, and obtained corroborative proof of what i already suspected, that m. martin and others had confounded the scene at _melun_ in february, , with another quarrel between the same persons in march, , at _moulins_. see the documents, including the letter of beza referred to above, published together with my inquiries, in the bulletin de la soc. du prot. fr., xxiv. ( ) - . [ ] "conseil sur le fait du concile de trente," etc. mém. de condé, v. - . the dedication to prince porcien is dated may , . see de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvi.) . [ ] du moulin was ordered by a royal letter to be set at large, lyons, june , . [ ] conclusion of "conseil," etc. mém. de condé, v. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvi.), , ; ag. d'aubigné, hist. univ., i. (liv. iv., c. iv.); mém. de castelnau, liv. v., c. vi. [ ] prof. soldan has discussed the matter at great length. gesch. des prot. in frank., ii. , etc. [ ] as early as dec. , , the queen mother had announced to the french ambassador in vienna her son's expected journey, toward the end of february or the beginning of march, to visit his sister, the duchess of lorraine, and her infant son. letter to bochetel, bishop of rennes, le laboureur, i. . see, too, languet's letter of nov. , , epist. secr., ii. . [ ] lorraine to granvelle, _ubi infra_. the progress was resolved upon, it will be seen, before lorraine's return from trent. [ ] "i am going to meet their majesties at châlons," wrote the cardinal of lorraine from tou-sur-marne, between rheims and châlons, april , ; "thence they are to leave for bar, where they will, i think, remain no more than four or five days. i hope that the voyage will be honorable and profitable for our house.... as to our court, it was never so empty of persons belonging to the opposite religion as it is now. the few that are there show very great regret at this voyage, in which i can assure you that i have not meddled at all, either to further or to retard it; only a short time after my return from trent, i succeeded in having nancy changed for bar." papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, vii. . [ ] smith to cecil, tarascon, oct. , , state paper office, calendar. [ ] "assuredly, sir," wrote the cardinal in the letter just cited, "the queen my mistress shows, daily more and more, a strong and holy affection. this evening i have heard, by the cardinal of guise, my brother, who has reached me, many holy intentions of their majesties, which may god give them grace to put into good execution." ibid., _ubi supra_. in a somewhat similar strain granvelle about this time wrote: "i am so strongly assured that religion is going to take a favorable turn in france, that i know not what to say of it. the world in that quarter is so light and variable, that no great grounds of confidence can be assumed. but it is at any rate something that matters are not growing worse." letter to bolwiller, april , , papiers d'état, etc., vii. . [ ] letter of granvelle to the emperor ferdinand, may , , papiers d'état, vii. ; also , . [ ] "les réformés qui formoient presque le tiers du royaume." garnier, hist. de france, xxx. . [ ] "on peut présumer qu'il n'y eut jamais en france plus de quinze on seize cent mille réformés.... la france possédait a peine quinze millions d'habitans. ainsi les protestans n'en formaient guère que le dixième." lacretelle, histoire de france pendant les guerres de religion, ii. , . the entire passage is important. [ ] giov. michiel, rel. des amb. vén., i. . [ ] capefigue, from ms., hist. de la réforme, de la ligue, etc., ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iii., liv. xxxvi. ; mém. de castelnau, l. v., c. x.; pasquier, lettres, iv., , _ap._ capefigue, ii. . [ ] granvelle to the emperor ferdinand, april , , pap. d'état, vii. . [ ] of solicitude on this score, the only evidence i have come across is furnished by the following passage of one of the "occurrences in france," under date of april , , sent to the english government. "orders are also taken in the court that no gentleman shall talk with the queen's maids, except it is in the queen's presence, or in that of madame la princesse de roche-sur-yon, except he be married; and if they sit upon a form or stool, he may sit by her, and if she sit upon the ground he may kneel by her, but not lie long, as the fashion was in this court." state paper office, calendar, . [ ] edict of vincennes, june , , and declarations of paris, dec. , ; of lyons, june , ; and of roussillon, aug. , . isambert, recueil des anc. lois. franç., xiv. , , - , and drion, hist. chronol., i. - . see jean de serres, iii. - , - , and after him, de thou, iii. (liv. xxxv.) , , , . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , , , , etc. de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvi.) , etc. [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. there are no similar cases of assassination on the part of huguenots at this period. that of charry at court seems to have resulted partly from revenge for personal wrongs, partly from mistaken devotion on the part of one of d'andelot's followers to his master's interests. see languet, letter of feb. , , epist. secr., ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. - ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvi.) ; lettres de monseigneur le prince de condé à la roine mère du roy, avec advertissemens depuis donnéz par ledit seigneur prince à leurs majestez, etc, (aug. , , etc.), mém. de condé, v. - . [ ] "articles respondus par le roy en son conseil privé, sur la requeste présentée par plusieurs habitans de la ville de bourdeaux," etc. the signature of the secretary, robertet, was affixed sept. , ; but such was the obstinacy of the judges of bordeaux, that the document was not published in the parliament of that city until nearly eight months later (april , ). mém. de condé, v. - . cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, vi. - . the protestants petitioned for another town in place of st. macaire, which had been assigned them for their religious worship--the most inconveniently situated in the entire "sénéchaussée." they desired a city which they could go to and return from on the same day. they stated that "la plus grande partie des plus notables familles de la ville de bourdeaux est de la religion réformée." this part of their request the king referred to the judgment of the governor. [ ] ordonnance du roi charles ix., août, , nantes ms., bulletin, xiii. ( ), , . [ ] aymon, i. , , and cimber et danjou, archives cur., vi. . as by this time both papists and huguenots knew catharine de' medici to be a woman utterly devoid of moral principle, it may fairly be considered an open question whether there was any one in france more deceived than she was in supposing that she had deceived others. [ ] sir thomas smith to the queen, from tarascon (near avignon), oct. , , enclosing "articles of pacification for those of the religion in venaissin and avignon agreed to by the ministers of the pope and those of the prince of orange, oct. , ." signed by the vice-legate, bishop of fermo, and fabrizio serbellone, state paper office. [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), , , . [ ] "lundi passé, viiie du present mois, ung peu avant les trois heures après midy, monsieur le révérendissime cardinal de lorraine, vestu du robbon et chappeau, ... est entré en paris." account written two days after the occurrence by del rio, attached to the spanish embassy in paris. papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, viii. - . [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vi., c. iii.; jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iii. (liv. xxxvii.) - ; mém. de claude haton, i. - ; journal de jehan de la fosse, - ; condé mss., in duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. ; le livre des marchands (ed. panthéon) , , where the ludicrous features of the scene are, of course, most brightly colored. "j'espère bien aussi m'en resentir ung jour," wrote the cardinal himself, a few weeks later, from joinville. pap. d'état du card. de granvelle, viii. . [ ] jehan de la fosse, . [ ] harangue de l'admiral de france à messieurs de la cour de parlement de paris, du janvier , avec la réponse. papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, viii. - . m. de crussol, in a letter of february , , alludes to the admiral's flattering reception by the clergy and by the sorbonne, "qui sont allé le visiter et offert infiny service;" and states that both parties were gratified by the interview. condé mss., in duc d'aumale, princes de condé, pièces inédits, i. . [ ] philip ii. to alva, dec. , , pap. d'état du card. de granvelle, vii. ; alva to philip ii., dec. , , ib., vii. , . [ ] granvelle to the baron de bolwiller, march , , ib., ix. , . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. "je vous asseure, comme il est véritable, qu'il n'y a aultre chose en cecy que simple visitation de fille à mère." [ ] prof. kluckholn, strangely enough, speaks of jean de serres's commentarii de statu relig., etc., as "zuerst im jahre, , erschienen" (zur geschichte des angeb. bündnisses von bayonne, abhand. der k. bayer. akademie, münchen, , p. ). i have before me the earlier edition of , containing verbatim the passage he quotes, with a single unimportant exception--"ecclesiarum" instead of "religiosorum." [ ] j. de serres, comment, de statu reipublicæ et religionis in gallia regno, carolo ix. rege ( ), iii. . the prince of condé, in his long petition sent to charles, aug. , , at the outbreak of the third civil war, says expressly in reference to events a year preceding the second war: "quandoquidem ego et alii religionis reformatæ viri fuerimus jampridem admoniti de inito baionæ consilio cum hispano, ad eos omnes plane delendos atque exterminandos qui religionem reformatam in tuo regno profiteantur." ibid., iii. . [ ] the remark is said to have been accidentally overheard by henry of navarre, afterward henry the fourth, of whose presence little account was taken in consequence of his youth. (he was just eleven years and a half old.) but his intimate follower, agrippa d'aubigné, would have been likely to give him as authority, had this been the case. he only says: "les plus licentieux faisoient leur profit d'un terme du duc d'alve à baionne, que dix mille grenouilles ne valloient pas la teste d'un saumon." hist. univ., liv. iv., c. v. (i. ). jean de serres, _ubi supra_, iii. , gives the expression in nearly the same words: "satius esse unicum salmonis caput, quam mille ranarum capita habere." [ ] smith to leicester and cecil, july - , , state paper office, calendar, . [ ] "on apelloit ce bon prélat 'le cardinal des bouteilles,'" says lestoile, "pource qu'il les aimoit fort, et ne se mesloit guères d'autres affaires que de celles de la cuisine, où il se connoissoit fort bien, et les entendoit mieux que celles de la religion et de l'estat." in chronicling the death of louis, cardinal of guise, at paris, march , , he records the suggestive fact that "he was the last of the six brothers of the house of guise; yet died he young, at the age of forty-eight years." journal de henri iii., p. (edit. michaud). so closely is the scriptural warning fulfilled, that "bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days." cardinal guise (not cardinal lorraine, as mr. henry white seems to suppose, massacre of st. bartholomew, am. edit., , ) was the abettor of the massacre of vassy. [ ] cartas que el duque de alba scrivió, etc. papiers d'état du cardinal de granvelle, ix. . [ ] "con no mas personas que con cinco ó seys que son el cabo de todo esto, los tomasen á su mano y les cortasen las cabeças," etc. ibid., ix. . [ ] "que mirase mucho por su salud, pues que della dependia todo el bien de la christiandad, y creya que le tenia dios guardado para venir por su mano un gran servicio, que era el castigo de las offensas que en este su reyno se le hazian." cartas que el duque de alba scrivió a su magestad ... que contienen las vistas en bayona, etc. papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, ix. . [ ] "saltó luego con dezirme: 'ó, el tomar las armas no conviene, que yo destruya mi reyno como se començó á hazer con las guerras passadas.'" ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] "como es, descubrí lo que le tenian pedricado; passé á otras materias," etc. ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] "que venia muy española." ibid., ix. . [ ] "ella començó cierto la plática con el mayor tiento que yo he visto tener jamas á nadie en cosa." ibid., ix. . [ ] cartas que el duque de alba scrivió, etc. papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, ix. . [ ] "yo me alteré _terriblemente_ de oírselo, y le dixe que me maravillava mucho." ibid., ix. . [ ] "la junta passada de adonde començáron todas las desverguenças que al presente ay en este reyno." ibid., ix. . [ ] "en la otra el cardenal de lorena havia sido el que avia hecho todo el daño, pensando poder persuadir á los ministros." ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] "parécenos que quiere con esta semblea (i.e., assemblée), que ellos llaman, remendar lo que falta en el rigor necessario al remedio de sus vasallos, y plega á dios no sea," etc. ibid., ix. . [ ] letter of granvelle, aug. , , papiers d'état, ix. . [ ] "depuis l'arrivée n'y eust mention que de festins, récréations et passe-temps de diverses manières." relation du voyage de la reine isabelle d'espagne à bayonne, mss. belgian archives, compte rendu de la commission royale d'histoire, seconde série, ix. ( ) . this paper was drawn up by the secretary of state courtewille, and sent to president viglius. [ ] over the first triumphal arch was a representation of isabella (or elizabeth) trampling mars under foot, with the mottoes _sacer hymen pacem nobis contulit_ and _deus nobis hæc otia fecit_, and below the lines: Élizabeth, de roy fille excellente, vous avez joint ung jour deux rois puissans; france et l'espaigne, en gloire permanente, extolleront voz âges triumphans, etc. over a second arch at the palace gate, which was reached by a street hung with tapestry and decorated with the united arms of france and spain, was suspended a painting of catharine with her three sons and three daughters, and the inscription: c'est à l'entour de royalle couronne que le jardin hespérien floronne: ce sont jardins de si belle féconde, qui aujourd'huy ne trouve sa seconde; ce sont rameaux vigoureux et puissans; ce sont florons de vertu verdissans. royne sans per (paire), de grâce décorée, vous surmontez pallas et cythérée. catharine's portraits scarcely confirm the boast of her panegyrist that she surpassed venus, however well she might match minerva in sagacity. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, histoire universelle, i. . [ ] "le feu bon homme monsieur de la gaucherie y marchoit en rondeur de conscience, et mesme mon filz lui doibt et aux siens cette rasine (racine) de piété qui lui est, par la grasse de dieu, si bien plantée au cueur par bonnes admonitions, que maintenant, dont je loue ce bon dieu, elle produit et branches et fruitz. je lui suplie qu'il luy fasse ceste grasse qu'il continue de bien en mieulx." letter of dec. , , mss. geneva library, bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, xvi. ( ) . [ ] "ung tournoy a pied." [ ] it will be remembered that the spaniards never acknowledged the claim of antoine or his wife to the title of sovereigns of navarre. in all spanish documents, therefore, such as that which we are here following, their son henry is designated only by the dukedom of bourbon-vendôme which he inherited from his father. [ ] relation du voyage de la reine isabelle à bayonne, mss. belgian archives, _ubi supra_, ix. , . [ ] see jean de serres, iii., , for the fraternities of the holy ghost in burgundy. blaise de montluc's proposition of a league with the king as its head had been declined; the monarch needed no other tie to his subjects than that which already bound them together. agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., liv. iv., c. v. (i. .) [ ] letter of charles ix. to m. de matignon, july , , _apud_ capefigue, hist. de la réforme, de la ligue, etc., ii. , . the same letter stipulated for the better protection of the protestants by freeing them from domiciliary visits, etc. [ ] maniquet to gordes, august , , condé mss. in aumale, i. . [ ] letter of villegagnon to granvelle, may , , papiers d'état, vii. . the huguenots figure as "les _aygnos_, c'est-à-dire, en langue de suisse, rebelles et conjurés contre leur prince pour la liberté." [ ] letter of may , , ibid., vii., . [ ] letter of n. de st. rémy, june , . ibid., viii. , . "le peuple l'aymeroit trop mieulx pour roy que nul aultre de bourbon." [ ] catharine never forgave ambassador chantonnay for having boasted that, with throkmorton's assistance, he could overturn the state. "jusqu'à dire que trokmarton, qui estoit ambassadeur d'angleterre au commencement de ces troubles, pour l'intelligence qu'il a avec les huguenots, et luy pour celle qu'il a avec les catholiques de ce royaume, sont suffisans pour subvertir cet estat." letter to the bishop of rennes, dec. , , la laboureur, i. . [ ] granvelle to philip ii., july , . papiers d'état, ix. , , etc. [ ] see alex. sutherland's achievements of the knights of malta (phila., ), ii. , which contains an interesting popular account of this memorable leaguer. [ ] papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, ix. , etc. [ ] giovambatista adriani, istoria de' suoi tempi (ed. of milan, ), ii. . [ ] sir thomas smith to cecil, nantes, oct. , , state paper office, calendar. [ ] sir thomas smith to leicester, nov. , , state paper office. [ ] "al qual tempo si riservò tale esecuzione per alcuni sospetti, che apparivano negli ugonotti, e per difficoltà di condurvegli tutti, e ancora perchè più sicuro luogo era parigi che molino." giovambatista adriani, istoria de' suoi tempi (lib. decimottavo), ii. . [ ] de thou, iii. (liv. xxxix.) - ; castelnau, liv. vi., c. ii.; jehan de la fosse, ; davila, bk. iii. . [ ] the edict, of course, is not to be found in isambert, or any other collection of french laws; but a letter in lestoile (ed. michaud, p. ), to whom we are indebted for most of our knowledge of the event, refers to the very wording of the document ("ce sont les mots de l'édict"). the letter is entitled "mémoire d'un différend meu à moulins en , entre le cardinal de lorraine et le chancellier de l'hôpital," and begins with the words: "je vous advise que _du jour d'hier_," etc. m. bonnet has discovered and published, in the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. franç., xxiv. ( ) - , a second and fuller account, dated moulins, march , (ms. french nat. library, dupuy, t. lxxxvi., f. ). as was seen above (p. ), this altercation has been generally confounded with that of two years earlier. the letter given by lestoile (see above) is also published in mém. de condé, v. , but is referred to the wrong event by the editor. prof. soldan (gesch. des prot. in fr., ii. ), follows the mém. de condé in the reference. [ ] not many months before this occurrence a guest at the prince of orange's table told montigny that there were no huguenots in burgundy--meaning the spanish part, or franche-comté. "if so," replied the unfortunate nobleman, "the burgundians cannot be men of intelligence, since those who have much mind for the most part are huguenots;" a saying which, reported to philip, no doubt made a deep impression on his bigoted soul. pap. d'état du card. de granvelle, vii. , . the burgundians of france were equally intolerant of the reformed doctrines. [ ] "je ne suis venu pour troubler; mais pour empescher que ne troubliez, comme avez faict par le passé, belistre que vous estes." lestoile and mém. de condé, _ubi supra_. [ ] see prescott, philip ii., and motley, rise of the dutch republic. [ ] m. charles l. frossard, of lille, discovered the mss. on which the following account is wholly based, in the archives of the department du nord, preserved in that city. as these papers appear to have been inedited, and are referred to, so far as i can learn, by no previous historian, i have deemed it proper to deviate from the rule to which i have ordinarily adhered, of relating in detail only those events that occurred within the ancient limits of the kingdom of france. however, the reformation at cateau-cambrésis received its first impulses from france. mr. frossard communicated the papers to the bulletin de la société de l'histoire du protestantisme français, iii. ( ), - , - , - . they are of unimpeachable accuracy and authenticity. [ ] lille mss., _ubi supra_, . [ ] "de sorte qu'ils espèrent que lesdits de la requeste et du compromis les adsisteront suyvant leur promesse, à ce qu'ils puissent jouyr de la mesme liberté accordez à bruxelles, asçavoir, que l'exercise de la religion aye lieu par tout où il a esté usité auparavant, comme ceulx du chastel en cambrésis ont eue aussy, et ce seulement par manière de provision, jusques à ce que aultrement il y soict pourveu par le roy avec l'advis des estatz, estimans que le roy ne souffrira rien en son pays qui ne soict conforme ausdites ordonnances de l'empire." lille mss., _ubi supra_. [ ] letter of p. de montmorency, sept. , , lille mss., _ubi supra_. [ ] motley, dutch republic, i. - . [ ] lille mss., _ubi supra_. [ ] mémoires de claude haton, i. , . [ ] the satirical literature of the period would of itself fill a volume. the huguenot songs in derision of the mass are particularly caustic. see m. bordier, le chansonnier huguenot, and the note to the last chapter. the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. franç., x. ( ), , reprints a "dizain" commencing-- "nostre curé est un fin boulanger, qui en son art est sage et bien appris: il vend bien cher son petit pain léger, combien qu'il ait le froment à bon prix." [ ] "chose indigne d'un prince tel qu'il se disoit." journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] see the moderate account of the dispassionate roman catholic de thou, iii. (liv. xxxix.) - . also agrippa d'aubigné, liv. iv., c. vi. (i. ), and discours des troubles advenus en la ville de pamiers, le juin , archives curieuses (cimber et danjou), vi. - . the massacre of protestants at foix was caused by an exaggerated and false account of the commotion at pamiers, carried thither by a fugitive augustinian monk. [ ] the good policy of straightforward dealing on the part of an ambassador is set forth in a noble letter of morvilliers, bishop of orleans, from which i permit myself to quote a few sentences: "il y en a toutesfois qui pensent que, pour estre habille homme, il fault tousjours aller masqué, laquelle opinion j'estime du tout erronée, et celluy qui la suit grandement dêceu. le temps m'a donné quelque expérience des choses; mais je n'ay jamais veu homme, suivant ces chemins obliques, qui n'ait embrouillé les affaires de son maistre, et, luy, perdre beaucoup plus qu'acquérir de réputation; et au contraire ceux, qui se sont conduits prudemment avec la verité, avoir, pour le moins, rapporté de leur négotiation ce fruict et l'honneur d'y avoir faict ce que les hommes, avec le sens et jugement humain, peuvent faire." correspondance diplomatique de bertrand de salignac de la mothe fénélon, vii. . [ ] journal de jehan de la fosse, , ; vie de coligny (cologne, ), - ; gasparis colinii vita, , ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., , . [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] "december ( .) au commencement vinrent plusieurs ambassades à paris, tant de la part de l'empereur, que du pape, que du roy d'espagne, lesquels mandèrent au roy de france, qu'il eust à faire casser l'esdict de janvier, ou autrement qu'ils se déclareroient ennemys." ibid., . the fanatical party affected to regard the edict of amboise, march, , as a mere re-establishment of the edict of january , . [ ] mémoires de castelnau, liv. vi., c. ii. castelnau was certainly in a favorable position for learning the truth respecting these matters; and yet even he speaks of the "holy league," formed at bayonne, as of something beyond controversy. according to a treaty and renewal of alliance between charles the ninth and the roman catholic cantons of switzerland, entered into dec. , , for charles's lifetime, and seven years beyond, the swiss were to furnish him, when attacked, not less than six nor more than sixteen thousand men for the entire war. the success of the negotiation occasioned great rejoicing at paris, and corresponding annoyance in the spanish dominions. du mont, corps diplomatique, v. - ; jehan de la fosse, ; papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, viii. . [ ] mém. de fr. de la noue, c. xi. [ ] he did more than this, according to the belief of the times, as expressed by jean de serres; for, "having been present at the bayonne affair," he brought him irrefragable proof of the "holy league entered into by the kings of france and spain for the ruin of the religion." comment. de statu. rel. et reip., iii. . [ ] yet so much were intelligent observers deceived respecting the signs of the times, that only a little over two months before the actual outbreak of the second civil war (july , ), judge truchon congratulated france on the edifying spectacle of loving accord which the court furnished. "i have this very day," he writes, "seen the king holding, with his left hand, the head of my lord, the prince [of condé], and with his right the head of my lord the cardinal of bourbon, and _playfully trying to strike their foreheads together_. the duke d'aumale was paying his attentions to madame la mareschale [de montmorency.] ... the cardinal of châtillon was not far off. in short, all, without distinction, seemed to me to be so harmonious that i wish there may never be greater divisions in france. it was a fine example for many persons of lower rank," etc. letter to m. de gordes, ms. in archives de condé, duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. , pièces inédites. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . see, also, condé's letter of aug. , . ibid., iii. . [ ] norris to queen elizabeth, aug. , , state paper office, duc d'aumale, pièces inédites, i. . [ ] "sed ne frustra laborare viderentur, de albani consilio, 'satius esse unicum salmonis caput, quam mille ranarum capita habere,' ineunt rationes de intercipiendis optimatum iis, qui religionem sequerentur, condæo, amiralio, andelotio, rupefocaldio aliisque primoribus viris. ratio videbatur præsentissima, ut a rege accerserentur, tanquam consulendi de iis rebus quæ ad regnum constituendum facerent," etc. jean de serres, iii. . it will be remembered that this volume was published the year before the st. bartholomew's massacre. the persons enumerated, with the exception of those that died before , were the victims of the massacre. [ ] "ita edicti nomen usurpabatur, dum edictum revera pessundaretur." jean de serres, iii. . chapter xv. the second civil war and the short peace. [sidenote: coligny's pacific counsels.] [sidenote: rumors of plots to destroy the huguenots.] [sidenote: d'andelots warlike counsels prevail.] [sidenote: cardinal lorraine to be seized and king charles liberated.] a treacherous peace or an open war was now apparently the only alternative offered to the huguenots. in reality, however, they believed themselves to be denied even the unwelcome choice between the two. the threatening preparations made for the purpose of crushing them were indications of coming war, if, indeed, they were not properly to be regarded, according to the view of the great athenian orator in a somewhat similar case, as the first stage in the war itself. the times called for prompt decision. within a few weeks three conferences were held at valéry and at châtillon. ten or twelve of the most prominent huguenot nobles assembled to discuss with the prince of condé and coligny the exigencies of the hour. twice was the impetuosity of the greater number restrained by the calm persuasion of the admiral. convinced that the sword is a fearful remedy for political diseases--a remedy that should never be applied except in the most desperate emergency--coligny urged his friends to be patient, and to show to the world that they were rather forced into war by the malice of their enemies than drawn of their own free choice. but at the third meeting of the chiefs, before the close of the month, they were too much excited by the startling reports reaching them from all sides, to be controlled even by coligny's prudent advice. a great friend of "the religion" at court had sent to the prince and the admiral an account of a secret meeting of the royal council, at which the imprisonment of the former and the execution of the latter was agreed upon. the swiss were to be distributed in equal detachments at paris, orleans, and poitiers, and the plan already indicated--the repeal of the edict of toleration and the proclamation of another edict of opposite tenor--was at once to be carried into effect. "are we to wait," asked the more impetuous, "until we be bound hand and foot and dragged to dishonorable death on parisian scaffolds? have we forgotten the more than three thousand huguenots put to violent deaths since the peace, and the frivolous answers and treacherous delays which have been our only satisfaction?" and when some of the leaders expressed the opinion that delay was still preferable to a war that would certainly expose their motives to obloquy, and entail so much unavoidable misery, the admiral's younger brother, d'andelot, combated with his accustomed vehemence a caution which he regarded as pusillanimous, and pointedly asked its advocates what all their innocence would avail them when once they found themselves in prison and at their enemy's mercy, when they were banished to foreign countries, or were roaming without shelter in the forests and wilds, or were exposed to the barbarous assaults of an infuriated populace.[ ] his striking harangue carried the day. the admiral reluctantly yielded, and it was decided to anticipate the attack of the enemy by a bold defensive movement. some advocated the seizure of orleans, and counselled that, with this refuge in their possession, negotiations should be entered into with the court for the dismissal of the swiss; others that the party should fortify itself by the capture of as many cities as possible. but to these propositions the pertinent reply was made that there was no time for wordy discussions, the controversy must be settled by means of the sword;[ ] and that, of a hundred towns the protestants held at the beginning of the last war, they had found themselves unable to retain a dozen until its close. finally, the prince and his companions resolved to make it the great object of their endeavors to drive the cardinal of lorraine from court and liberate charles from his pernicious influence. this object was to be attained by dispersing the swiss, and by conducting hostilities on a bold plan--rather by the maintenance of an army that could actively take the field,[ ] than by seizing any cities save a few of the most important. on the twenty-ninth of september, the feast-day of st. michael, the huguenots having suddenly risen in all parts of france, condé and coligny, at the head of the troops of the neighboring provinces, were to present themselves at the court, which would be busy celebrating the customary annual ceremonial of the royal order. they would then hand to the king a humble petition for the redress of grievances, for the removal of the cardinal of lorraine, and for the dispersion of the swiss troops, which, instead of being retained near the frontiers of the kingdom which they had ostensibly come to protect, had been advanced to the very vicinity of the capital.[ ] it might be difficult to prevent the enterprise from wearing the appearance of a plot against the king, in whose immediate vicinity the cardinal was; but the event, if prosperous, would demonstrate the integrity of their purpose.[ ] [sidenote: the secret slowly leaks out.] the plan was well conceived, and better executed than such schemes usually are. the great difficulty was to keep so important a secret. it was a singular coincidence that, as in the case of the tumult of amboise, over seven years before, the first intimations of their danger reached the guises from the netherlands.[ ] but the courtiers, whose minds were taken up with the pleasures of the chase, and who dreamed of no such movement, were so far from believing the report, that constable montmorency expressed vexation that it was imagined that the huguenots could get together one hundred men in a corner of the kingdom--not to speak of an army in the immediate vicinity of the capital--without the knowledge of himself, the head of the royal military establishment; while chancellor de l'hospital said that "it was a capital crime for any servant to alarm his prince with false intelligence, or give him groundless suspicions of his fellow-subjects."[ ] the news, however, being soon confirmed from other sources, a spy was sent to châtillon-sur-loing to report upon the admiral's movements. he brought back word that he had found coligny at home, and apparently engrossed in the labors of the vintage--so quietly was the affair conducted until within forty-eight hours of the time appointed for the general uprising.[ ] it was not until hurried tidings came from all quarters that the roads to châtillon and to rosoy--a small place in brie, where the huguenots had made their rendezvous--were swarming with men mounted and armed, that the court took the alarm. [sidenote: flight of the court to paris.] it was almost too late. the huguenots had possession of lagny and of the crossing of the river marne. the king and queen, with their suite, at meaux, were almost entirely unprotected, the six thousand swiss being still at château-thierry, thirty miles higher up the marne. instant orders were sent to bring them forward as quickly as possible, and the night of the twenty-eighth of september witnessed a scene of abject fear on the part of the ladies and not a few of the gentlemen that accompanied charles and his mother. at three o'clock in the morning, under escort of the swiss, who had at last arrived, the court started for paris, which was reached after a dilatory journey that appeared all the longer because of the fears attending it.[ ] the prince of condé, who had been joined as yet only by the forerunners of his army, engaged in a slight skirmish with the swiss; but a small band of four or five hundred gentlemen, armed only with their swords, could do nothing against a solid phalanx of the brave mountaineers, and he was forced to retire. meanwhile marshal montmorency, sent by catharine to dissuade the prince, the admiral, and cardinal châtillon from prosecuting their enterprise, had returned with the message that "the huguenots were determined to defeat the preparations made to destroy them and their religion, which was only tolerated by a conditional edict, revocable by the king at his pleasure."[ ] [sidenote: cardinal lorraine invites alva to invade france.] the cardinal of lorraine did not share in the flight of the court to paris. never able to boast of the possession of overmuch courage, he may have feared for his personal safety; for it was not impossible that he might be sacrificed by a queen rarely troubled with any feelings of humanity, to allay the storm raging about the ship of state; or he may have hoped to be of greater service to his party away from the capital.[ ] however this may be, the cardinal betook himself in hot haste to the city of rheims, but reached his palace only after an almost miraculous escape from capture by his enemies.[ ] once in safety, he despatched two messengers in rapid succession[ ] to brussels, and begged alva to send him an agent with whom he might communicate in confidence. the proposals made when that personage arrived at rheims were sufficiently startling; for, after calling attention to philip's rightful claim to the throne of france, in case of the death of charles and his brothers, he offered in a certain contingency to place in the spanish monarch's hands some strong places that might prove valuable in substantiating that claim. in return, the cardinal wished philip to assume the defence of the papal church in france, and particularly desired him to undertake the protection of his brothers and of himself. the message was not unwelcome either to alva or to his royal master. they were willing, they said, to assist the king of france in combating the huguenots,[ ] and they made no objection to accepting the cities. at the worst, these cities would serve as pledges for the repayment of whatever sums the king of spain might expend in maintaining the roman catholic faith in france. with respect to the propriety of philip's becoming the formal guardian of the guises, alva felt more hesitation, for who knew how matters might turn out? and philip, never quite ready for any important decision, praised his lieutenant's delay, and inculcated further procrastination.[ ] but the succession to the throne of france was worthy of deep consideration. as alva intimated, the famous salic law, under which charles's sister isabella was excluded from the crown, was merely a bit of pleasantry, and force of arms would facilitate the acknowledgment of her claims.[ ] [sidenote: condé at saint denis.] the blow which the huguenots had aimed at the tyrannical government of the cardinal of lorraine had missed its mark, through premature disclosure; but they still hoped to accomplish their design by slower means. shut up in paris, the court might be frightened or starved into compliance before the roman catholic forces could be assembled to relieve the capital. with this object the prince of condé moved around to the north side of the city, and took up his quarters, on the second of october, in the village of saint denis. with the lower seine, which, in one of its serpentine coils, here turns back upon itself, and retreats from the direction of the sea, in his immediate grasp, and within easy striking distance of the upper seine, and its important tributary the marne--the chief sources of the supply of food on which the capital depended--the prince of condé awaited the arrival of his reinforcements, and the time when the hungry parisians should compel the queen to submit, or to send out her troops to an open field. at the same time he burned the windmills that stretched their huge arms on every eminence in the vicinity. it was an ill-advised measure, as are all similar acts of destruction, unless justified by urgent necessity. if it occasioned some distress in paris,[ ] it only embittered the minds of the people yet more, and enabled the municipal authorities to retaliate with some color of equity by seizing the houses of persons known or suspected to be huguenots, and selling their goods to defray part of the expense incurred in defending the city.[ ] [sidenote: the huguenot movement alienates the king.] the attempt "to seize the person of the king"--for such the movement was understood to be by the roman catholic party--was even more unfortunate. it produced in charles an alienation[ ] which the enemies of the huguenots took good care to prevent him from ever completely forgetting. they represented the undertaking of meaux as aimed, not at the counsellors of the monarch, but at the "sacred majesty" itself, and condé and coligny, with their associates, were pictured to the affrighted eyes of the fugitive boy-king as conspirators who respected none of those rights which are so precious in the view of royalty. [sidenote: negotiations opened. the huguenots gradually abate their demands.] [sidenote: constable montmorency the mouthpiece of intolerance.] meantime catharine was not slow in resorting to the arts by which she was accustomed to seek either to avert the evil consequences of her own short-sighted policy, or to gain time to defeat the plans of her opponents.[ ] the huguenots received a deputation consisting of the chancellor, the marshal de vieilleville, and jean de morvilliers--three of the most influential and moderate adherents of the court--through whom charles demanded the reason of the sudden uprising which causelessly threatened his own person and the peace of the realm. the huguenot leaders replied by denying any evil design, and showing that they had armed themselves only in self-defence against the manifested malice of their enemies.[ ] subsequent interviews between condé and the envoys of charles seemed to hold forth some hopes of peace. the king declared himself ready to furnish the protestants with proofs of the uprightness of his intentions, and l'hospital even exhibited the draft of an edict in which their rights should be guaranteed. as this proved unsatisfactory, the prince, at the chancellor's suggestion, submitted the requests of his associates. these related to the banishment of the foreign troops, the permission to come and present their petitions to the king, the confirmation and maintenance of the past edicts, with the repeal of all restrictive interpretations, the assembling of the states general, and the removal of the burdensome imposts under which the people groaned, and which were of advantage only to the crowd of italians and others enjoying extraordinary credit at court.[ ] if the first of these demands were sufficiently bold, the last demand was little calculated to conciliate catharine, who naturally conceived herself doubly insulted by the covert allusion to her own prodigality and by the reference to her countrymen. she found no difficulty in inducing charles to answer through a proclamation sent by a herald to the confederates, commanding condé, coligny, d'andelot, la rochefoucauld, genlis, and the other leaders, by name, to lay down the arms which they had taken up without his consent.[ ] perceiving the mistake they had committed in making requests which, although just and appropriate, were in part but ill-suited to the times, the protestants began to abate their demands. confining themselves to the matter of religion, they now petitioned only for an unrestricted liberty of conscience and worship, confirmed by the repeal of all ordinances or parliamentary decisions conflicting with it. their moderation inspired fresh hopes of averting the resort to arms, and a new conference was held, between the huguenot position and the city of paris, at the hamlet of la chapelle saint denis. it was destined to be the last. constable montmorency, the chief spokesman on the roman catholic side, although really desirous of peace, could not be induced to listen to the only terms on which peace was possible. "the king," he said, "will never consent to the demand for religious toleration throughout france without distinction of persons or places. he has no intention of permanently tolerating two religions. his edicts in favor of the protestants have been intended only as temporary measures; for his purpose is to preserve the old faith by all possible means. he would rather be forced into a war with his subjects than avoid it by concessions that would render him an object of suspicion to neighboring princes."[ ] [sidenote: insincerity of alva's offers of aid.] the simultaneous rising of the huguenots in every quarter of the kingdom, and the immediate seizure of many important cities, had surprised and terrified the court; but it had also stimulated the roman catholic leaders to put forth extraordinary efforts to bring together an army superior to that of their opponents. besides the parisian militia and the troops that flocked in from the more distant provinces, it was resolved to call for the help repeatedly promised by philip of spain and his minister, the duke of alva, when urging charles to break the compacts he had entered into with his reformed subjects. but the assistance actually furnished fell far short of the expectations held forth. when castelnau, after two efforts, the first of which proved unsuccessful,[ ] reached brussels by a circuitous route, he found alva lavish of good wishes, and urgent, like his master, that no arrangement should be made with the rebels before they had suffered condign punishment. but the envoy soon convinced himself that all these protestations meant little or nothing, and that the spaniards were by no means sorry to see the french kingdom rent by civil war. ostensibly, alva was liberal above measure in his offers. he wished to come in person at the head of five thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot, and make short work of the destruction of condé and his followers--a proposition which castelnau, who knew that catharine was quite as jealous of spanish as of huguenot interference in her schemes, felt himself compelled politely to decline; especially as the very briefest term within which alva professed himself ready to move was a full month and a half. for seven or eight days the duke persisted in refusing the spanish troops that were requested,[ ] and in insisting upon his own offer--precious time which, had it been husbanded, might have changed the face of the impending battle before the walls of paris. when, at length, pressed by the envoy for a definite answer or for leave to return, the duke offered to give him, in about three weeks' time, a body of four or five thousand german lansquenets--troops that would have been quite useless to charles, who already had at his disposition as many pikemen as he needed, in the six thousand swiss. all that castelnau was finally able to bring home was an auxiliary force of about seventeen hundred horse, under count aremberg. even now, however, the officer in command was bound by instructions which prevented him from taking the direct road to the beleaguered capital of france, and compelled him to pass westward by beauvais and poissy.[ ] [sidenote: battle of saint denis, nov. , .] [sidenote: the constable is mortally wounded.] the impatience of the parisians, who for more than a month had been inactive spectators, while their city was besieged by an insignificant force and they were deprived of the greater part of their ordinary supplies of food, could scarcely be restrained. they were the more anxious for battle since they had received encouragement by the recapture of a few points of some military importance along the course of the lower seine. unable to resist the pressure any longer, constable anne de montmorency led out his army to give battle to the huguenots on the tenth of november, . rarely has such an engagement been willingly entered into, where the disproportion between the contending parties was so considerable. the constable's army consisted of sixteen thousand foot soldiers (of whom six thousand were swiss, and the remainder in part troops levied in the city of paris) and three thousand horse, and was provided with eighteen pieces of artillery. to meet this force, condé had barely fifteen hundred hastily mounted and imperfectly equipped gentlemen, and twelve hundred foot soldiers, gathered from various quarters and scarcely formed as yet into companies. he had not a single cannon. of his cavalry, only one-fifth part were provided with lances, the rest having swords and pistols. the greater number had no defensive armor; and not a horse was furnished with the leathern _barbe_ with which the knight continued, as in the middle ages, to cover his steed's breast and sides. the constable had wisely chosen a moment when the prince had weakened himself by detaching d'andelot, with five hundred horse and eight hundred arquebusiers, to seize poissy and intercept the count of aremberg.[ ] in the face of such a disparity of numbers and equipment, the huguenots exhibited signal intrepidity.[ ] with coligny thrown forward on the right, in front of the village of saint ouen, and genlis on the left, near aubervilliers, they opened the attack upon the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, who descended from higher ground to meet them. marshal de montmorency, the constable's eldest son, commanding a part of the royal army, alone was successful, and had the valor of his troops been imitated by the rest, the defeat of the huguenots would have been decisive; but the "parisian regiment," despite its gilded armor,[ ] yielded at the first shock of battle and fled in confusion to the walls of paris. their cowardice uncovered the position of the constable, and the cavalry of the prince penetrated to the spot where the old warrior was still fighting hand to hand, with a vigor scarcely inferior to that which he had displayed more than fifty years earlier, in the first italian campaign of francis the first.[ ] a scottish gentleman, according to the most probable account--for the true history of the affair is involved in unusual obscurity--robert stuart by name, rode up to montmorency and demanded his surrender. but the constable, maddened at the suggestion of a fourth captivity,[ ] for all reply struck stuart on the mouth, with the hilt of his sword, so violent a blow that he broke three of his teeth. at that very moment he received, whether from stuart or from another of the scottish gentlemen is uncertain,[ ] a pistol-shot that entered his shoulder and inflicted a mortal wound. at a few paces from him, condé, with his horse killed under him, nearly fell into the hands of the enemy. at last, however, his partisans succeeded in rescuing him, and, while he retired slowly to saint denis, the dying constable was carried to paris, whither the roman catholic army returned at evening.[ ] [sidenote: character of anne de montmorency.] the battle of saint denis was indecisive, and the victory was claimed by both sides. the losses of the huguenots and the roman catholics were about equal--between three and four hundred men--although the number of distinguished huguenot noblemen killed exceeded that of the slain belonging to the same rank in the royal army. if the possession of the field at the end of the day, and the relief of paris, be taken as sufficient evidence, the honor of success belonged to the roman catholic army. but the loss of their chief commander far more than counterbalanced any advantage they may have gained. not that anne de montmorency was a general of remarkable abilities. although he had been present in a large number of important engagements ever since the reign of louis the twelfth, and had proved himself a brave man in all, he was by no means a successful military leader. the late duke of guise had eclipsed his glory, and in a much briefer career had exhibited much more striking tactical skill. the battle of saint denis, it was alleged by many, had itself been marred by his clumsy disposition of his troops. proud and overbearing in his deportment, he alienated even those with whom his warm attachment to the roman catholic church ought to have made him popular. catharine de' medici, we have seen, had long been his enemy. in like manner, even the bigoted populace of paris forgot the pious exploits that had earned him the surname of "le capitaine brûlebanc," and remembered only his suspicious relationship to cardinal châtillon, admiral coligny, and d'andelot, those three intrepid brothers whose uncompromising morality and unswerving devotion to their religious convictions made them, even more than the prince of condé, true representatives of the dreaded huguenot party.[ ] but the loss of the principal general at this important juncture in military affairs dealt a severe blow to the roman catholic cause. there was no other leader of sufficient prominence to put forth an indisputable claim to succeed him. catharine, not sorry to be relieved of so formidable a rival, was resolved that he should have no troublesome successor. accordingly she induced the king to leave the office of constable vacant, and to confer upon her second surviving son, henry, duke of anjou, whose unscrupulous character had already made him her favorite, the supreme command of the army, with the less ambitious title of royal lieutenant-general.[ ] the death of the constable, who survived his wound only a single day, and the subsequent divisions of the court, furnished the prince of condé with an immunity from attack, of which, in view of his great inferiority in number of troops, he deemed it most prudent to take advantage by promptly retiring from his exposed position. besides this, he had now an imperative summons to the eastern frontier of the kingdom. [sidenote: the protestant princes of germany determine to aid the huguenots.] at the very commencement of the war the protestants had sent a deputation to the german princes to solicit their support in a struggle in which the adherents of the augsburg confession were no less vitally interested than the reformed. but bochetel, bishop of rennes, the envoy of charles the ninth, had so skilfully misrepresented the true character of the contest, that the landgrave of hesse, and the electors of saxony and brandenburg, persuaded that political motives, rather than zeal for religion, were the occasion of the revolt, had refused to assist the huguenots, while permitting william of saxony and the marquis of baden to levy troops for the king. to the elector palatine, frederick the third, surnamed "the pious," who from a lutheran had become a calvinist, a special ambassador was despatched in the person of m. de lansac. this gentleman, by more than usually reckless misstatements, sought to persuade the elector to abandon the enterprise of assistance which he had intended to intrust to his second son, john casimir. but his falsehoods were refuted by the straightforward exposé of the prince's agents,[ ] and lansac was only so far successful that the elector consented to delay the departure of the troops until he had sent a messenger to france to acquaint himself with the true state of the case. it needed no more than this to determine him; for the minister whom the elector had intrusted with the commission, after visiting successively the court of the king and the camp of the prince of condé, returned with certain proofs that the representations of bochetel and of lansac were altogether false.[ ] consequently the army which john casimir had gathered was speedily despatched to furnish condé the support the huguenots so much needed. in the letter which the elector palatine sent about the same time to the king of france, the motives of this apparently inimical action are vividly set forth. his envoy, the councillor zuleger, says the elector, has made a careful examination. lansac and his companion have industriously circulated throughout germany the report that the edict of toleration is kept entire, that condé and the protestants have no other object in view but a horrible rebellion against charles to deprive him of his crown, and that the prince has had money struck as if he were king himself.[ ] but zuleger has, on the contrary, reported that when, in the presence of the royal council, he asked for proofs of condé's intention to make himself king, catharine de' medici replied that it was a "mockery," and that, though condé had struck money, both in the late and in the present troubles, it was with the king's inscription and arms, and not as though he were himself king. so far from that, zuleger declares that, during the eleven days of his stay in the prince's camp, he heard prayers offered morning and night for the preservation of the state and for the king's safety. as to the maintenance of the edict, the constable before his death openly affirmed that charles would not permit a free exercise of religion, and never intended the edict of orleans to be other than _provisional_. indeed, the queen-mother remarked to zuleger that it is a privilege of the french monarchs never to make a perpetual edict; to which charles, who was present, promptly responded, "pourquoi non?"[ ] it was to form a junction with the force brought by john casimir that the prince now raised the siege of paris, two or three days subsequently to the battle of saint denis,[ ] and after that d'andelot, disappointed in having had no share in the engagement, had scoured the field, driving back into paris an advanced guard of the enemy, and burning, by way of bravado, some windmills in the very suburbs.[ ] [sidenote: the huguenots go to meet the germans.] [sidenote: treacherous diplomacy.] the purpose of the huguenot leaders could not be mistaken, and catharine was determined to frustrate it. the chief object at which all her intrigues now aimed was to delay the protestant army in its march toward lorraine, until the duke of anjou, at the head of a force which was daily gaining new accessions of strength from the provinces, should be able to overtake condé and bring on a general and decisive action. from saint denis the huguenots had first followed the course of the upper seine to montereau. crossing the stream at this point, coligny, as usual commanding the vanguard, had, at pont-sur-yonne, received a powerful detachment, under the count of la rochefoucauld, which had made its way from the provinces of poitou, saintonge, and guyenne, across the valley of the loire, to reinforce the prince of condé's army.[ ] having effected a junction, the united body had changed its course, recrossed the seine, and countermarched to the river marne, at Épernay and châlons. coligny's skilful manoeuvre had disappointed the queen's plan, and she resorted to her accustomed arts of negotiation. so flattering, indeed, were her promises, that condé, had he not been restrained by the more prudent counsels of his associates (among whom the vidame of chartres was most urgent in his protests against so suicidal a policy), would instantly have relaxed the sinews of war.[ ] a petty act of treachery served to open his eyes, and to prevent the protestants from involving themselves in more serious disaster; for the count de brissac took advantage of a three days' armistice to fall unexpectedly upon an outpost of the prince's army and gain an advantage, which was duly magnified by report at paris into a brilliant victory.[ ] unabashed by this incident, catharine soon after renewed her seductive offers (on the twentieth of december, ). she invited a conference with the cardinal of châtillon and other protestant leaders, and herself went so far as châlons to meet them. thence the scene of the negotiations was transferred to vincennes, in the vicinity of paris, and for a time the prospect of reconciliation was bright and encouraging. the king's envoys consented to the re-establishment of the edict of amboise, without any past or future restrictions, until the decision of the religious question by that mythical assembly which, like a mirage of the desert, ever and anon arose to entrance and disappoint the longing eyes of thoughtful men in this century--a free, universal, and legitimate council of the church. but the hopes founded on these promises were as illusory as any previously conceived. instead of a formal and unambiguous ratification of the terms by charles himself, the cardinal of châtillon was treated only to complaints about the causeless rising of the protestants, and expressions of astonishment that condé had not instantly countermanded the approach of the german auxiliaries on receiving the king's gracious proffers.[ ] [sidenote: catharine implores alva's assistance.] [sidenote: alva's view of accommodations with heretics.] meantime catharine was not idle in soliciting foreign aid. the duke d'aumale--who had also marched to lorraine, in order to meet the germans coming to the assistance of the roman catholics, under command of the marquis of baden--not being strong enough to block the passage of condé's troops, catharine wrote to alva, begging him to send to the duke, in this emergency, two thousand arquebusiers. she warned him that if, through the failure to procure them, the german reiters of john casimir should be permitted to enter the kingdom, she would hold herself exonerated, in the sight of god and of all christian princes, from the blame that might otherwise attach to her for the peace which she would be compelled to make with the heretics.[ ] alva, in reply, declined to send the spanish arquebusiers, who, he said, were needed by him, and could do little good in france; but he added that, if aumale, who was a soldier, would guarantee with this accession to stop the reiters, he would let them go, useful as they were in the netherlands. as to the accommodation with the huguenots, which catharine suggested, he viewed it as a frightful evil, and exclaimed "that it was better to have a kingdom ruined in preserving it for god and the king, than to retain it whole, but without religion, for the advantage of the devil and his partisans, the heretics."[ ] [sidenote: condé and john casimir meet in lorraine.] [sidenote: generosity of the huguenot troops.] about the beginning of the new year the foot-sore huguenot army, after nearly two months of tedious marches through a hostile country, and no less tedious negotiations, reached lorraine, only to find that their german allies had not yet arrived. sick at heart, with a powerful enemy hanging on their rear, and seeking only an opportunity to make a sudden descent upon them, many of the huguenots were disposed to take advantage of the proximity of the german cities to disperse and find a refuge there. but condé, with his never-failing vivacity and cheerfulness, and coligny, with his "grave words," succeeded in checking their despondency until the welcome news of john casimir's approach was announced. he brought six thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of moderate size. his arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of unmingled satisfaction. the reiters, serving from purely mercenary motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns, promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were resolved to go no farther without receiving it. the prince of condé had but two thousand crowns to meet the engagement. in this new perplexity the huguenots, from the leaders down to the very lowest, gave a noble illustration of devotion to their religion's cause. condé and coligny set the example by giving up their plate to replenish the empty coffers of the army. the captains urged, the ministers of the gospel preached, a generous sacrifice of property in the common interest. their exhortations did not fall upon dull ears. money, gold chains, silver, articles of every description, were lavishly contributed. an unpaid army sacrificed its own private property, not only without a murmur, but even joyfully. the very camp-servants vied with their masters, and put them to shame by their superior liberality.[ ] in a short time a sum was raised which, although less than what had been pledged, contented the reiters, who declared themselves ready to follow their huguenot fellow-soldiers into the heart of the kingdom.[ ] well might an army capable of such heroic contempt for personal gain or loss be deemed invincible! [sidenote: the march toward orleans.] and now, with feelings widely different from those which had possessed them in the journey toward lorraine--a movement too nearly akin to a flight to inspire anything but disgust--the huguenot soldiers, over twenty thousand strong, turned their faces once more westward. their late pursuers, no longer seeking an engagement where the result might be worse than doubtful, confined themselves to watching their progress from a safe distance. as all the cities upon their route were in the hands of the roman catholics, the huguenots were forced to take more circuitous and difficult paths through the open country. but the dispositions made by coligny are said to have been so thorough and masterly, that they travelled safely and in comfort.[ ] not that the soldiers, dispersed at night through the villages, were freed from the necessity or the temptation to pillage;[ ] for the poor farmers, robbed of the fruits of their honest toil, frequently had good reason to complain that those who had recently dispensed their own treasure with so liberal a hand were even more lavish of the property of others. but they were far more merciful and considerate toward their enemies than the roman catholic army to its friends. even a curate of brie--no very great lover of the huguenots, who relates with infinite gusto the violation of huguenot women by anjou's soldiers[ ]--admits that, excepting in the matter of the plundering of the churches and the distressing of priests, the roman catholics were a little worse than the heretics.[ ] [sidenote: the "michelade" at nismes.] leaving the huguenot army on its march toward orleans, let us glance at the operations of the party in other quarters of the kingdom. southern france, where the protestants were most numerous, and where the excitable character of the people disposed them more easily than elsewhere to sudden outbreaks, was not behind the north in rising at the appointed time (september, ). at nismes, indeed, a furious commotion broke out--the famous "michelade," as it was called, because it immediately followed the feast-day of st. michael--a commotion whose sanguinary excesses gave it an unenviable notoriety, and brought deep disgrace upon the protestant cause. here the turbulent populace was encouraged by the report that lyons was in friendly hands, and maddened by the intelligence that, besides the common dangers impending over all the huguenots of france, the huguenots of nismes had more particular occasion for fear in the troops of the neighboring comtât venaissin. these troops, it was said, had been summoned by the bishop and chapter of the cathedral of nismes. the mob accordingly took possession of the city, closing the gates, and imprisoning a large number of persons--consuls, priests, and other obnoxious characters. that night the cathedral and the chapter-house witnessed a wild scene of destruction. pictures of the saints, and altars, including everything associated with roman catholic worship, were ruthlessly destroyed. but the most terrible event occurred in the episcopal palace. the bishop was saved from capture and certain death by the intervention of a courageous man, himself a protestant; but others were less fortunate. no fewer than eighty prisoners, brought in detachments to the court of the palace, were butchered in rapid succession, and their corpses thrown promiscuously into a well. the next morning the protestant pastors and elders assembled, and, sending to the ringleaders a minister and a deacon, begged them to discontinue their horrible work. already, however, had returning shame made everybody unwilling to avow his complicity in the crime. quiet was restored. the protestant seneschal and council released such prisoners as had escaped the fate of their comrades, and the bishop himself was sent away under an escort to a place of safety, by order of the very judge whom the clergy had, a year before, sought to deprive of his office as a heretic.[ ] nismes remained in the hands of the protestants through the war. [sidenote: huguenot successes in the south and west.] [sidenote: la rochelle secured for condé.] meanwhile more important movements took place. rené of savoy, son of the count de tende, but better known as cipierre, was condé's agent in assembling the huguenots of provence; but paul de mouvans, whom we have met with before in this history, was the real hero of the region. in dauphiny, montbrun commanded. in bourbonnais and the neighboring provinces west of the rhône, parcenac and verbelai raised three thousand foot and five hundred horse, but sustained so severe a loss while passing through forez, that the number was soon reduced to barely twelve hundred. nearer the pyrenees, seven thousand men were assembled, known as "the army of the viscounts," to which further reference will shortly be made. lyons, one of the huguenot strongholds in the first war, the protestants failed to capture.[ ] but orleans was secured by the skill of françois de la noue, a young champion whose name was destined long to figure in the most brilliant deeds of arms of his party, both in france and in the low countries.[ ] in the west, too, the huguenots made the most important gain of the war in the city of la rochelle, for the next half-century and more their secure refuge on approach of danger. this place, strong by nature, surrounded by low, marshy grounds, rendering it almost unapproachable from the land side, save by the causeways over which the roads ran, with a large and convenient harbor and with easy access to the sea, was already rich and populous. the citizens of la rochelle were noted for their independent spirit, engendered or fostered by their maritime habits. although the great importance of the city dates from the civil wars, when its wharves received the commerce driven from older ports, and when its privateers swept the shores of brittany and the bosom of the english channel, it had long boasted extraordinary privileges, among which the most highly prized was the right to refuse admission to a royal garrison.[ ] besides this, the citizens were accustomed to choose three candidates for the office of major, from whom the king or the royal governor made his selection; and the magistrate thus appointed enjoyed an authority which the rochellois would scarcely concede to their monarch.[ ] la rochelle--whose former orthodoxy father soulier attempts to establish by instancing the sentence which the "présidial" of the city pronounced in against some protestants, condemning them to be dragged on a hurdle with a fagot of sticks bound to their backs, and afterward to be burned, one of them alive[ ]--had been so far affected by the progress of the reformation, that it was perhaps only the fear of losing its trade and privileges that prevented it from openly siding with condé in the first religious war.[ ] by this time, however, protestantism had struck such deep roots, that one of the three candidates for the mayoralty, at the easter elections of , was truchares, a political huguenot. the king was, indeed, warned of his sentiments; but the royal governor, m. de jarnac, supported his claims, and truchares received the requisite confirmation.[ ] still la rochelle hesitated to espouse the protestant side. it was not until midwinter,[ ] that condé, returning from lorraine, commissioned m. de sainte-hermine to assume command of the city in his name; and on the tenth of february, , the mayor and échevins of la rochelle opened their gates to their new friends, with protestations of their purpose to devote their lives and property to the advancement of the common cause. "the sequel proved only too clearly," writes a roman catholic historian, "that they were very sincere in their promises; for, having soon after demolished all the churches, they employed the materials to fortify this city in such a manner that it served from this time forward as a citadel for the protestants, and as a secure retreat for all the apostates and malcontents of the kingdom until it was reduced by louis the thirteenth."[ ] [sidenote: spain and rome oppose the negotiations for peace.] meantime the irresolute queen mother, always oscillating between war and peace, had again begun to treat with the huguenots. between the fifth and twentieth of january she held repeated interviews with cardinal châtillon, d'esternay, and téligny. the bigots took the alarm. the papal nuncio and the ambassadors of spain and scotland did their utmost "to impeach the accord." a post arrived from philip the second, offering a hundred thousand crowns of gold if charles would continue the war. the doctors of the sorbonne remonstrated. all united in a common cry that "it was impossible to have two religions in one realm without great confusion." poor charles was so moved by the stale falsehood, as well as by the large promises made him, that he sent the protestant envoys word that he would treat no further unless condé and his "complices" would send the reiters back to germany, and, wholly disarming, come to him with their ordinary retinues to purge themselves of the attempt made at meaux. [sidenote: cardinal santa croce demands that cardinal châtillon be surrendered to the pope.] [sidenote: retort of marshal montmorency.] even this amount of complaisance on the part of the weak monarch, however, did not satisfy cardinal santa croce, who, on one occasion entering the council chamber (on the twentieth of january), boldly demanded the fulfilment of the queen mother's promise to surrender cardinal châtillon into the pope's hands. catharine did not deny the promise, but interposed the plea that the present was a very unsuitable time, since châtillon had come to court upon the king's safe-conduct. to this the churchman replied that no respect ought to be had toward the cardinal, for he was "an excommunicate person," condemned of schism, and dead in the eyes of the law. up to this point the duke de montmorency, who was present, had kept silence; but now, turning to the queen mother, he is reported by the english ambassador to have made a pungent address. "but, madam," he said, "is it possible that the cardinal châtillon's delivery should come in question, being warranted by the king and your majesty to the contrary, and i myself being made a mean therein? wherefore this matter is odious to be talked of, and against the law of arms and all good civil policy; and i must needs repute them my enemies who go about to make me falsify my promise once made." after these plain words santa croce "departed without attaining his most cruel request."[ ] [sidenote: march of the viscounts to meet condé.] during the first few months after the assumption of arms, the huguenots of southern france, surrounded by domestic enemies, had confined themselves to attempting to secure their own safety and that of their neighbors, by taking the most important cities and keeping in check the forces of the provincial governors--an undertaking in which they met with more success in the districts bordering upon the mediterranean than in those adjoining the bay of biscay. these events, although in themselves important and interesting, would usurp a disproportionate place in this history. while condé was absent from the vicinity of the capital, however, a body of six thousand troops, drawn from the army of the _viscounts_, under mouvans and other experienced southern leaders, undertook a hazardous march from dauphiny, intending to join the prince's army at orleans.[ ] the cities were in the possession of the enemy, the fords were carefully guarded, the entire country was hostile. but the perils which might have deterred less resolute men only enhanced the glory of the success of the gallant huguenots. abandoned by a considerable number of their comrades, who preferred a life of plunder to a fatiguing journey under arms, they met (on the eighth of january, ) and defeated, with a force consisting almost exclusively of infantry, the cavalry which the governor of auvergne and the local nobility had assembled near the village of cognac[ ] to dispute their passage. continuing their march, they reached orleans in time to relieve that city, to whose friendly protection against the roman catholic bands of martinengo and richelieu that infested its neighborhood and threatened its capture condé and the other huguenot leaders of the north had entrusted their wives and children.[ ] [sidenote: siege of chartres.] having stopped a brief time to rest the soldiers after the protracted march, the viscounts turned their victorious arms against the city of blois. after the surrender of this place, they had proceeded down the valley of the loire, and were about to take montrichard, on the cher, when recalled by condé. the prince had by forced marches anticipated the army of anjou, resolving to strike a blow which should be felt at the hostile capital itself, and had selected chartres, an important city about fifty miles in a south-westerly direction from paris, as the most convenient place to besiege.[ ] rapid, however, as had been his advance--and a part of his army had travelled sixty miles in two days--the enemy had sufficient notice of his intention to throw into the city a small force of soldiers; and when condé arrived before the walls (on the twenty-fourth of february, ), he found the place prepared to sustain an attack, in which the courage of the assailants was equalled by the skill and resolution of the defenders. as usual, the huguenots were badly off for artillery; the united armies could only muster five siege-pieces and four light culverines. "for, although the catholics esteem the huguenots to be 'fiery' men," says a quaint old writer, who was as ready with his sword as with his pen, "they have always been poorly provided with such implements. nor have they, like the former, a saint anthony, who, they say, presides over the element in question."[ ] the operations of the siege of chartres were interrupted by fresh negotiations for peace. half a year had the flames of war been desolating the fairest parts of france; yet the court was no nearer the attainment of its ends than at the outbreak of hostilities. if the roman catholic forces had been swollen to about forty thousand men, they were confronted by a huguenot army of twenty-eight or thirty thousand men in the very neighborhood of the capital. the voice of prudence dictated an immediate settlement of the dispute before more lives were sacrificed, more towns and villages destroyed, more treasure squandered. catharine, reigning supreme under her son's name, with her usual inconstancy of purpose, was ready to exchange the war, into which she had plunged france by lending too willing an ear to the suggestions of philip of spain, as they came to her through the cardinal of lorraine and others, and which had produced only bloodshed, devastation of the kingdom, and deeper depression of the finances, for the peace to which michel de l'hospital, her better genius, was constantly urging her by every consideration of policy and justice. [sidenote: chancellor michel de l'hospital's memorial.] in a paper, wherein about this time the chancellor committed to writing the arguments he had often ineffectually employed to persuade the king and his mother, he combats with patriotic indignation the flimsy pretexts of which the priests and the spaniard made use in pressing the continuance of hostilities. "'the king has more men than the huguenots.' true, but we find twice as many battles on record gained by the smaller as by the greater number; in consequence of which fact all princes and nations have recognized the truth that victory is the gift of god. 'the king's cause is the more just.' grant it--yet god makes use of such instruments as he wills to punish our iniquities--the babylonians, for instance, of old, the turks in our own days. the huguenots have thus far succeeded beyond all expectation. they have little money, but what they have they use well, and they can get more. their devotion to their cause is conspicuous. they are not a rabble hastily gotten together, which has risen imprudently, in disorder, without a leader, without discipline. they are experienced, resolute, desperate warriors, with plans formed long ago--men ready to risk everything for the attainment of their matured designs. necessity and despair render them docile and wonderfully subject to discipline; and with this cooperates the high esteem they have conceived of their leaders, whose ambition is restrained, whose union is cemented by the same necessity which the ancients called 'the bond of concord.' on the contrary, the king's camp is rent by quarrels, envy, and rivalry; ambition is unbridled, avarice reigns supreme. with the termination of so wretched a war, there will shine forth a joyous and blessed peace, which i can justly term a 'precious conquest,' since it will render his majesty redoubtable to all europe, which has learned the greatness of the two powers which the king will restore to his own subjection. "the true method of breaking up the leagues of the huguenots is to remove the necessity for forming them. this must be done by treating the huguenots no longer as enemies, but as friends. for, if we examine carefully into the matter, we shall find that hitherto they have been dealt with as rebels; and this has compelled them to resort to all means of self-preservation. this has placed arms in their hands; this has engendered the horrible desolation of france. for the intrigues set on foot against them in all quarters were conducted with so little attempt at secrecy--the disfavor was so evident, the disdain was so apparent, the threats of the rupture of the edict of pacification and of the publication of the decrees of the council of trent were so open, and the injustice of their handling was so manifest, that they had been too dull and stupid, had they not avoided the treachery in store for them.[ ] even brute beasts perceive the coming of the storm, and seek the covert; let us not find fault if men, perceiving it, arm themselves for the encounter. our menaces have been the messengers of our plots, as truly as the lightning is the messenger of the thunderbolt. we have shown them our preparatives; let us, therefore, cease to wonder that they stand ready to start on the first intimation of danger.[ ] when they see that they have no longer anything to fear, they will certainly return to their accustomed occupations."[ ] [sidenote: edict of pacification, longjumeau, march , .] l'hospital was right. the huguenots wanted nothing but security of person and conscience--the latter even more than the former. and they were ready to lay down their arms so soon as the court could bring itself to concede the restoration of the edict of amboise, without the restrictive ordinances and interpretations which had shorn it of most of its value. on this basis negotiations now recommenced. the more prudent huguenots suggested that the party ought to receive at the king's hands some of the cities in their possession, to be held as pledges for the execution of the articles of the compact. but charles and his counsellors resented the proposal as insulting to the dignity of the crown,[ ] and the huguenots, not yet fully appreciating the fickleness or treachery of the court, did not press the demand--a fatal weakness, soon to be atoned for by the speedy renewal of the war on the part of the roman catholics.[ ] after brief consultation the terms of peace were agreed upon, and were incorporated in the royal edict of the twenty-third of march, , known, from the name of the place where it was signed, as the "edict of longjumeau." the cardinal provisions were few: they re-established the supremacy of the edict of amboise, expressly repealing all the interpretations that infringed upon it; and permitted the nobles, who under that law had been allowed to have religious exercises in their castles, to admit strangers as well as their own vassals to the services of the reformed worship. condé and his followers were, at the same time, recognized as good and faithful servants of the crown, and a general amnesty was pronounced covering all acts of hostility, levy of troops, coining of money, and similar offences. on the other hand, the huguenots bound themselves to disband and lay down their arms, to surrender the places they held, to renounce foreign alliances, and to eschew in future all meetings other than those religious gatherings permitted under the last peace. the new edict was not a final and irrevocable law, but was granted "until, by god's grace, all the king's subjects should be reunited in the profession of one and the same religion."[ ] [sidenote: condé favors and coligny opposes the peace.] the huguenots gained by this peace all their immediate demands, and so far the edict might be deemed satisfactory. but what better security had they for its observance more than they had had for the observance of that which had preceded it? coligny, prudent and far-sighted, had shown himself as averse to concluding it without sufficient guarantees for its faithful execution, as he had been opposed to beginning the war a half-year before. the peace, he urged, was intended by the court only as a means of saving chartres, and of afterward overwhelming the reformers;[ ] and he attempted to prove his assertions by the signal instances of bad faith which had provoked the recourse to arms. but condé was impatient. if we may believe agrippa d'aubigné, his old love of pleasure was not without its influence;[ ] but he covered his true motives under the specious pretext afforded him by the huguenot nobles, who, fatigued with the incessant toils of the campaign, reduced to straits by a warfare which they had carried on at their own expense, and longing to revisit homes which had been repeatedly threatened with desolation, had abandoned their standards and scattered to their respective provinces at the first mention of peace.[ ] françois de la noue, more charitable to the prince, regards the universal desire for peace, without much concern respecting its conditions, as the wild blast of a hurricane which the huguenot captains could not resist if they would.[ ] when whole cornets of cavalry started without leave, before the siege of chartres was actually raised, what could generals, deserted by volunteers who had come of their own accord and had served for six months without pay, expect to accomplish? [sidenote: was the court sincere?] [sidenote: a treacherous plot detected. the king indignant.] was the peace of longjumeau--"the patched-up peace," or "the short peace," as it was called; that "wicked little peace," as la noue styles it[ ]--a compact treacherously entered into by the court? this is the old, but constantly recurring question respecting every principal event of this unhappy period; and it is one that rarely admits of an easy or a simple answer. so far as the persons who had been chiefly instrumental in forwarding the negotiations which ended in the peace of longjumeau were concerned, they were chancellor l'hospital and the bishops of orleans and limoges--the most moderate members of the royal council,[ ] whose fair spirit was so conspicuous that for years they had been exposed to insult and open hostility as supposed huguenots. nothing is clearer than that the purpose of these men was the sincere and entire re-establishment of peace on a lasting foundation. the arguments of l'hospital which i have laid before the reader furnish sufficient proof. this party had, through the force of circumstances, temporarily obtained the ascendancy in the council, and now had the ear of the queen mother. but there were by the side of its representatives at the council-board men of an entirely different stamp--advocates of persecution, of extermination; a few, from conscientious motives, preferring, with alva, a kingdom ruined in the attempt to root out heresy, to one flourishing, with heresy tolerated; a larger number--and cardinal lorraine, who had now resumed his seat and his influence, must be classed with these--counting upon deriving personal advantage from the supremacy of the papal faction. it is equally manifest that this party could have acquiesced in the peace, which again formally acknowledged the principle of religious toleration, only with the design of embracing the first favorable opportunity for crushing the huguenots, when scattered and disarmed. their desires, at least, deceived no one of ordinary perspicacity. indeed, the peace came near failing to go into effect at all, in consequence of the discovery of the fact that a "privy council" had been held in the louvre, to which none but sworn enemies of the huguenots were admitted, "wherein was conspired a surprise of orleans, soissons, rochelle, and auxerre," to be executed by four designated leaders, while the protestants were laying down their arms. in an age of salaried spies, it is not astonishing that by ten o'clock the next morning the whole plot was betrayed to cardinal châtillon, who immediately sent word to stay the publication of the peace. when charles heard of it, we are told that he swore, by the faith of a prince, that, if there had been any such conspiracy, it had been formed wholly without his knowledge, and, laying his hand on his breast, said: "this is the cardinal and gascoigne's practice. in spite of them, i will proceed with the peace;" and, commanding pen and ink to be brought, he wrote condé a letter promising a good and sincere observance of the articles agreed upon.[ ] [sidenote: short-sightedness of catharine.] but, besides the two parties, and wavering between them--fluctuating in her own purposes, as false to her own plans as she was to her promises, with no principles either of morality or of government, intent only on grasping power, the enemy of every one that stood in the way of this, even if it were her son or her daughter--was that enigma, catharine de' medici, whose secret has escaped so many simply because they looked for something deep and recondite, when the solution lay almost upon the very surface. was catharine sincerely in favor of peace? she was never sincere. her macchiavellian training, the enforced hypocrisy of her married life, the trimming policy she had thought herself compelled to pursue during the minority of the kings, her two sons, had eaten from her soul, even to its root, truthfulness--that pure plant of heaven's sowing. loving peace only because it freed her from the fears, the embarrassments, the vexations of war--not because she valued human life or human happiness--she embraced it as a welcome expedient to enable her to escape the present perplexities of her position. it is improbable that catharine distinctly premeditated a treacherous blow at the huguenots, simply because she rarely premeditated anything very long. i am aware that this estimate of the queen is quite at variance with the views which have obtained the widest currency; but it is the estimate which history, carefully read, seems to require us to adopt. catharine's plans were proverbially narrow in their scope, never extending much beyond the immediate present. after the catastrophe, which had perhaps been the result of the impulse of the moment, she was not, however, unwilling to accept the homage of those who deemed it a high compliment to her prudence to praise her consummate dissimulation. she probably entered upon the peace of longjumeau without any settled purpose of treachery--unless that state of the soul be in itself treachery that has no fixed intention of upright dealing. but she had not, in adopting the advice of chancellor de l'hospital, renounced the policy of the cardinal of lorraine, in case that policy should at some future time appear to be advantageous; and it was much to be feared that the contingency referred to would soon arrive. catharine, not less than charles himself, resented "the affair of meaux" of the preceding september. it was studiously held up to their eyes by the enemies of the huguenots as an attempt upon the honor, and indeed even upon the personal liberty and life of their majesties. might not catharine and charles be tempted to retaliate by trying the effect of a surprise upon the huguenots themselves? [sidenote: imprudence of the huguenots.] the huguenots had certainly been grossly imprudent in putting themselves at the mercy of a woman whom they had greatly offended, and whose natural place, according to those mysterious sympathies which bind men of similar natures, was with their adversaries. they had been warned by their secret friends at court, some of them by roman catholic relatives.[ ] but the caution was little heeded. it was not long[ ] before those who had been the most strenuous advocates of peace began to admit that the draught they had put to their own lips, and now must needs drink, was likely to prove little to their taste.[ ] [sidenote: judicial murder of rapin, at toulouse.] the parliaments made serious objections to the reception of the edict. toulouse was, as usual, pre-eminent for its intolerance. the king sent rapin, a protestant gentleman who had served with distinction under condé in languedoc, to carry the law to the parliament, and require its official recognition. the choice was unfortunate, for it awakened all the hatred of a court proverbial for its hostility to the reformation. an accusation of matters quite foreign to his mission was trumped up against rapin, and, contrary to all the principles of justice, and notwithstanding the privileged character he bore as the king's envoy, he was arrested, condemned to death, and executed. so atrocious a crime might perhaps have been punished, had not the new commotions to which we shall soon be obliged to pay attention, intervened and screened the culprits from their righteous retribution.[ ] not content with murdering rapin, the parliament of toulouse still refused to register the edict, and not less than four successive orders were sent by the king before his refractory judges yielded an unwilling consent, even then annexing restrictive clauses which they took care to insert in their secret records.[ ] [sidenote: seditious preachers and mobs.] again roman catholic pulpits resounded, as they did whenever any degree of toleration was accorded the protestants, with denunciations of catharine, of charles, of all in the council who had advocated such pernicious views. again ahab and jezebel appear; but while catharine is always jezebel, it is charles that now figures, in place of poor antoine of navarre, as ahab.[ ] again, in the struggle of royalty with priests and monks breathing sedition, it is the churchman who by his arrogance carries off the victory with the common people, while from the sensible he receives merited contempt.[ ] so fine a text as the edict afforded for spirited lenten discourses did not present itself every day, and the clergy of france improved it so well that the passions of their flocks were inflamed to the utmost.[ ] except where their numbers were so large as to command respect, the protestants scarcely dared to return to their homes. [sidenote: riot when the edict is published at rouen.] the very mention of the peace, with its favorable terms for the protestants, was enough to stir up the anger of the ignorant populace. when the parliament of rouen, after agreeing to the edict of longjumeau in private session, threw open its doors (on the third of april, ) to give it official publication, a rabble that had come purposely to create a tumult, interrupted the reading with horrible imprecations against the peace, the huguenots, the edicts, the "prêches," and the magistrates who approved such impious acts. the presidents and counsellors fled for their lives. the populace, as though inspired by some evil spirit, raged and committed havoc in the "palais de justice." the mob opened the prisons and liberated eight or ten roman catholics; then flocked to the ecclesiastical dungeons and would have massacred the protestants that were still confined there, had these not found means to ransom their lives with money. it was not until six days later that the royal edict was read, in the presence of a large military force called in to preserve order.[ ] [sidenote: treatment of the returning huguenots.] in spite of the provisions of the edict, the huguenots wandered about in the open country, avoiding the cities where they were likely to meet with insult and violence, if not death. the protestants of nogent, provins, and bray hesitated for three months, and then we are told that each man watched his opportunity and sought to enter when his roman catholic friends might be on guard to defend him from the insolence of others. [sidenote: at provins.] but the sufferings of the huguenot burgess were not ended when he was once more in his own house. he was studiously treated as a rebel. every movement was suspicious. a roman catholic chronicler, who has preserved in his voluminous diary many of the details that enable us to restore something of its original coloring to the picture of the social and political condition of the times, vividly portrays the misfortunes of the unfortunate huguenots of provins. they were not numerous. one by one, thirty or forty had stealthily crept into town, experiencing no other injury than the coarse raillery of their former neighbors. thereupon the municipal government met and deliberated upon the measures of police to be taken "in order to hold the huguenots in check and in fear, and to avoid any treachery they might intend to put into practice by the introduction of their brother huguenots into the city to plunder and hold it by force." the determination arrived at was that each of the four captains should visit the huguenot houses of his quarter, examine the inmates, and take all the weapons he found, giving a receipt to their owners. this was not the only humiliation to which the protestants were subjected. a proclamation was published forbidding them from receiving any person into their houses, from meeting together under any pretext, from leaving their houses in the evening after seven o'clock in summer, or five in winter, from walking by day or night on the walls, or, indeed, from approaching within two arquebuse shots' distance of them--all upon pain of death! they could not even go into the country without a passport from the bailiff and the captain of the gate, the penalty of transgressing this regulation being banishment. no wonder that the huguenots were irritated, and that most of them wished that they had not returned.[ ] since, however, a royal ordinance of the nineteenth of may expressly enjoined upon all fugitive huguenots to re-enter the cities to which they belonged, and in case of refusal commanded the magistrates to raise a force and attack them as presumptive robbers and enemies of the public peace,[ ] they were perhaps quite as safe within the walls as roaming about outside of them. [sidenote: expedition and fate of de cocqueville.] early in the summer an event occurred on the northern frontier, which, although in itself of little weight, augmented the suspicions which the protestants began to entertain of the spanish tendencies of the government. one seigneur de cocqueville, with a party of french and flemish huguenots, had crossed the northern boundary and invaded philip's netherland provinces. he had, however, been driven back into france. as he was believed to have acted under condé's instructions, that prince was requested by charles to inform him whether cocqueville were in his service. when condé disavowed him, and declined all responsibility for the movement, marshal cossé was directed to march against cocqueville, and, on the eighteenth of july, the huguenot chieftain was captured at the town of saint valéry, in picardy, where he had taken refuge. of twenty-five hundred followers, barely three hundred are said to have been spared. in order to please alva, the flemings received no quarter. the leaders, cocqueville, vaillant, and saint amand, were brought to paris and gibbeted on the place de grève.[ ] [sidenote: attitude of the government suspicious.] [sidenote: garrisons and interpretative ordinances.] the central government itself gave the gravest grounds for fear and suspicion. the huguenots had promptly disbanded. they had lost no time in dismissing their german allies, who, retiring with well-filled pockets to the other side of the rhine, seemed alone to have profited by the intestine commotions of france.[ ] on the contrary, the roman catholic forces showed no disposition to disarm. it is true that, in the first fervor of the ascendancy of the peace party, catharine countermanded a levy of five thousand saxons, much to the annoyance of castelnau, who had by his unwearied diligence brought them in hot haste to réthel on the aisne, only to learn that the preliminaries of peace were on the point of being concluded, and that the troopers were expected to retrace their steps to saxony.[ ] but the swiss and italian soldiers, as well as the french gens-d'armes, were for the most part retained. to humières, who commanded for the king in péronne, charles wrote an explanation of his course: "inasmuch as there are sometimes turbulent spirits so constituted that they neither can nor desire to accommodate themselves so soon to quiet, it has appeared to me extremely necessary to anticipate this difficulty, and act in such a manner that, force and authority remaining on my side, i may be able to keep in check those who might so far forget themselves as to set on foot new disturbances and be the cause of seditious uprising."[ ] large garrisons were thus provided for those towns which had rendered themselves conspicuous in the defence of the huguenots during the late war, and the sufferings of the protestants, upon whom, in preference to their roman catholic neighbors, the insolent soldiers were quartered, were terrible beyond description.[ ] the horrors of the "dragonnades" of the reign of louis the fourteenth were rivalled by these earlier military persecutions. multitudes were despoiled of their goods, hundreds lost their lives at the hands of their cruel guests. france assumed the aspect of a great camp, with sentries posted everywhere to maintain it in peace against some suspected foe. the sea-ports, the bridges, the roads were guarded; the huguenots themselves were placed under a species of surveillance. nor were the old resorts of the court forgotten. again interpretative ordinances were called in to abrogate a portion of the law itself. charles declared in a new proclamation that he had not intended by the edict of longjumeau to include auvergne, nor any district belonging as an appanage to his mother, to anjou, alençon, or the bourbon princes, in the toleration guaranteed by the edict. and thus a very considerable number of protestants were by a single stroke of the pen stripped of the privileges solemnly accorded to them but a few weeks before.[ ] other pledges were as shamelessly broken. the huguenot gentlemen whom the court had attempted to punish by declaring them to have forfeited their honors and dignities, were not reinstated according to the terms of the edict.[ ] [sidenote: oppression by royal governors.] the conduct of individual governors furnished still greater occasion for complaint and alarm. the duke of nemours, who, in marrying anne of este, guise's widow, two years before, seemed also to have espoused all the hatred which the lorraines felt for protestantism, and for the family of the châtillons, its most prominent and faithful defenders, was governor of the provinces of lyonnais and dauphiny. this insubordinate nobleman loudly proclaimed his intention to disregard the edict of longjumeau, as opposed to the roman catholic church and to the king's honor. in vain did the protestants, who were numerous in the city of lyons, demand to be allowed to enjoy the two places of worship they had possessed, before the late troubles, within the city walls. the duke would not listen to their just claims, and the court, in answer to their appeals, only responded that the king did not approve of the holding of protestant services inside of cities, and that a place would shortly be assigned for their use in the vicinity.[ ] unrebuked by the queen or her son for his flagrant disobedience, nemours received nothing but plaudits from the fanatical adherents of the religion he pretended to maintain, and was honored by the pope, pius the fifth (on the fifth of july, ), with a special brief, in which he was praised for being the first to set a resplendent example of resistance to the execution of an unchristian peace.[ ] marshal tavannes, in burgundy, earned equal gratitude for his opposition to the concession of protestant rights. not content with remonstrance respecting a peace which had excited every one "to raise his voice against the king and catharine," and with dark hints of the danger of handling so carelessly a border province like burgundy,[ ] he openly favored the revival of those "confraternities of the holy ghost" which charles had so lately condemned and prohibited. being himself detained by illness, two of his sons were present at a meeting of one of these seditious assemblages, held in dijon, the provincial capital, where, before a great concourse of people, the most inflammatory language was freely uttered.[ ] [sidenote: the "christian and royal league."] [sidenote: insubordination to royal authority.] at troyes, the capital of champagne, a similar association assumed the designation of "the christian and royal league." the document, containing the oath taken by the clergy whom the king's lieutenant had associated with the nobility and the provincial estates in the "holy" bond, is still extant, with the signatures of the bishop, the deans, canons, and inferior ecclesiastics appended.[ ] the primary object was the maintenance of "the true catholic and roman church of god;" and after this the preservation of the crown for the house of valois was mentioned. it was to be sustained "against all persons, without excepting any, save the persons of the king, his sons and brothers, and the queen their mother, and without regard to any relationship or alliance," and "so long as it might please god that the signers should be governed according to the roman and apostolic church."[ ] in less public utterances the spirit of insubordination to the regal authority made itself understood even more clearly. when the formation of such associations was objected to, on the ground of the king's prohibition, the response given by those who pretended to be better informed than the rest was that the cardinal of lorraine could make the matter agreeable to his majesty. others more boldly announced the intention of the roman catholic party, in case charles should refuse to sanction its course, to send him to a monastery for the rest of his days, and elect another king in his place. three months' time was all that these blatant boasters allowed for the utter destruction of the huguenots in france. an end would be made of them as soon as the harvest and vintage were past.[ ] [sidenote: admirable organization of the huguenots.] if the roman catholics had resolved upon a renewal of the war, they certainly had reason to desire a better combination of their forces than they had effected in the late contest. they had been startled and amazed at the rapidity with which, although embracing but an inconsiderable minority of the population, the huguenots had succeeded in massing an army that held at bay that of the king. they admired the completeness of the organization which enabled the prince of condé and the admiral to summon the gentry of the most distant provinces, and bring them to the very vicinity of the court before the movement was suspected even by constable montmorency, who believed himself to be kept advised of the most trifling occurrences that took place in any part of france. the triumph of the huguenots--for was it not a triumph which they had achieved in securing such terms as the edict of longjumeau conceded?--was a disgrace to the papists, who had not known how to use their overwhelming preponderance in numbers. never had a more signal example been given of the superiority of united and zealous sympathy over discordant and soulless counsels.[ ] while their enemies, with nothing in common but their hatred of protestantism, were hampered by the want of concert between their leaders, or cheated of their success by their positive jealousies and quarrels, the huguenots had in their common faith, in their well-ordered form of church government, combining the advantages of great local efficiency with those of a representative union, and in their common danger, the instruments best adapted to secure the ends they desired. "they were so closely bound together by this order and by these objects," wrote the venetian ambassador correro, "that there resulted a concordant will and so perfect a union that it made them prompt in rendering instant obedience and in forming common designs, and most ready to execute the commands of their superiors."[ ] [sidenote: murder runs riot throughout france.] with such associations as "the confraternities of the holy ghost," and "the christian and royal league" springing up in various parts of france, under the express sanction of the provincial governors, and publishing as their chief aim the extirpation of heresy from the realm; with priests and monks, especially those of the new order of jesus, inflaming the passions of the people by seditious preaching, and persuading their hearers that any toleration of heretics was a compact with satan, it is not strange that murder held high carnival wherever the protestants were not so numerous as to be able to stand on the defensive. the victims were of every rank and station, from the obscure peasant to the distinguished cipierre, son of the count de tende and a relative of the duke of savoy, the orders for whose assassination were confidently believed to have issued from the court.[ ] at auxerre, which had been given up by the huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the peace, one hundred and fifty protestants paid with their lives the price of their good faith. their bodies were thrown into the public sewers. in the city of amiens one hundred and fifty persons were slaughtered at one time. instead of punishment, the rioters obtained their object: the reformed worship was forbidden in amiens, or within three leagues of the city.[ ] at clermont the assassins, after plundering the wares of a wealthy merchant, who had refused to hang tapestry before his house at the time of the procession on corpus christi day--la fête-dieu--buried him in a fire made of furniture taken from his own house.[ ] at ligny, in champagne, a huguenot was pursued into the very bedchamber of a royal officer, and there killed. troyes, bourges, rouen, and a host of other places, witnessed the commission of atrocities which it would be rather sickening than profitable to narrate.[ ] in paris itself the murders of huguenots were frequent. "on sunday last," wrote norris, the english envoy, to his royal mistress, "the prince of condé sent a gentleman to the king, to beseech his majesty to administer justice against such as murder them of the religion, and as he entered into the city there were five slain in st. anthony's street, not far from my lodging."[ ] the aggregate of homicides committed within the brief compass of this so-called peace was enormous. jean de serres and agrippa d'aubigné may possibly go somewhat beyond the mark when they state the number of victims in three months--april, may, and june, --at over ten thousand;[ ] but they are substantially correct in saying that the number far exceeded that of the armed huguenots slain during the six months of the preceding war;[ ] for the venetian ambassador, who certainly had no motive for exaggeration, asserts that "the principal cities of the kingdom, notwithstanding the conditions of the peace, refused to readmit 'the preachings' to their territories, and slew many thousands of huguenots who dared to rise and complain."[ ] [sidenote: rochelle and other cities refuse to receive garrisons.] [sidenote: condé and coligny retire.] [sidenote: d'andelot's remonstrance.] while the majority of the cities held by the protestants had, as we have seen, promptly opened their gates to the king, a number, perceiving the dangers to which they were exposed, alarmed by the attitude of the roman catholics, and doubtful of the good faith of the court, declined to allow the garrisons to enter. this was the case with la rochelle, which defended its course by appealing to its privileges, and with montauban, albi, milhau, sancerre, castres, vézelay, and other less important towns.[ ] the events of a few weeks had amply vindicated the wisdom and justice of their refusal. la rochelle even began to repair its fortifications, confident that the papal faction would never rest until it had made the attempt to destroy the great huguenot stronghold in the west. evidently there was no safety for a protestant under the ægis of the edict of longjumeau. the prince of condé dared not resume the government of the province nominally restored to his charge, and retired to noyers, a small town in burgundy, belonging to his wife's dower, where he would be less exposed than in the vicinity of paris to any treacherous attempt upon his person. admiral coligny was not slow in following his example. he abandoned his stately manor of châtillon-sur-loing, where, with a heart saddened by recent domestic affliction,[ ] he had been compelled to exercise a princely hospitality to the crowds that daily thronged to consult with him and to do him honor,[ ] and took up his abode in the castle of tanlay, belonging to his brother d'andelot, and within a few miles of the prince's retreat.[ ] d'andelot himself had recently started for brittany, where his first wife, claude de rieux, had held extensive possessions.[ ] before leaving, however, he had written to catharine de' medici, a letter of remonstrance full of noble sentiments. the occasion was the murder of one of his gentlemen, whom he had sent to the neighboring city of auxerre; but his letter embraced a complete view of "the calamitous state of the poor kingdom," whose misery "was such as to cause the hair of all that heard to stand on end." "not only," said d'andelot, "can we feel no doubt that god will not leave unpunished so much innocent blood, which continues to cry before him for vengeance, as well as so many violations of women and maidens; so many robberies; so much oppression--in one word, every species of iniquity. but, besides this, we can look for nothing else than the near-approaching desolation and ruin of this state: for no one that has read sacred and profane history will be able to deny that such things have always preceded the overthrow of empires and monarchies. i am well aware, madam, that there will be those who, on seeing this letter, will ridicule me, and will say that i am playing the part of prophet or preacher. i am neither the one nor the other, since god has not given me this calling. but i will yet say, with truth, that there is not a man in the kingdom, of any rank or quality, who loves his king and his kingdom better than i do, or who is more grieved at seeing those disorders that i see, which can, in the end, result only in general confusion. i know full well that i shall be met with the taking up of arms, in which i participated, with so many others, on the eve of last st. michael's day, as if we had intended to attack the persons of your majesties, or anything belonging to you, or this state, as was published wherever it was possible, and as is still daily asserted. but, not to undertake other justification, i will only say that, if such wickedness had entered into my heart, though i might conceal it from men, i could not hide it from god, from whom i never have asked forgiveness for it, nor ever shall i." d'andelot proceeded to show that the movement in question had been caused by absolute necessity, and that this was rendered evident to all men by that which was now occurring in every part of france. he told her that it was sufficiently manifest that this universal oppression was only designed to provoke "those of the religion" to such a point that they would lose patience, and to obtain a pretext for attacking and exterminating them. he reminded her that he had often insisted "that opinions in matters of religion can be changed neither by fire nor by force of arms, and that those deem themselves very happy who can lay down their lives for the service of god and for his glory." he warned her of those who, unlike the huguenots, would sacrifice the interests of the state to their own individual ends of ambition or revenge. in conclusion, after alluding to a recent sudden death which much resembled a mark of the divine displeasure upon the murderous assault that had called forth this letter, he exclaimed: "i do not mean to be so presumptuous as to judge the dealings of god; but i do mean to say, with the sure testimony of his word, that all those who violate public faith are punished for it."[ ] [sidenote: catharine takes side with the chancellor's enemies.] that salutary warning had been rung in catharine's ears more than once, and was destined to be repeated again and again, with little effect: "all those who violate public faith are punished for it." l'hospital had but a few months before been urging to a course of political integrity, and pointing out the rock on which all previous plans of pacification had split. there was but one way to secure the advantages of permanent peace, and that was an upright observance of the treaties formed with the huguenots. but catharine was slow to learn the lesson. crooked paths, to her distorted vision, seemed to be the shortest way to success. her italian education had taught her that deceit was better, under all circumstances, than plain dealing, and she could not unlearn the long-cherished theory. whether l'hospital's views were originally the chief motives that influenced her in consenting to the peace of longjumeau, or whether she had acquiesced in it as a cover to treacherous designs, certain it is that she now began to side openly with the chancellor's enemies, and that the cardinal of lorraine regained his old influence in the council. the fanatical sermons that had been a premonitory symptom of the previous wars were again heard with complacency in the court chapel; for, about the month of june, the king appointed as his preachers four of the most blatant advocates of persecution: vigor, a canon of notre dame; de sainte foy; the gray friar, hugonis; and claude de sainctes, whose acquaintance the reformers had made at the colloquy of poissy.[ ] [sidenote: remonstrance of the three marshals.] [sidenote: catharine's intrigues.] there had been a desperate struggle in the royal council ever since the conclusion of the peace. the extreme roman catholics, recognizing the instability of catharine, had long since begun to base their hopes upon henry of anjou's influence. their opponents accepted the issue, and resolved to circumscribe the duke's inordinate powers. three of the marshals of france--montmorency, his brother damville, and vieilleville--presented themselves at a meeting of the royal council held in the queen mother's sick-chamber (on the second of may, ), to remonstrate against anjou's retaining the office of lieutenant-general. even cardinal bourbon supported their movement, and, sinking for the time his extreme religious partisanship, threatened to leave the court, and give the world to understand how much he had at heart the honor of his house and the welfare of his friends. the object of the marshals could not be mistaken: it was nothing less than the overthrow of the cardinal of lorraine, who sought supreme power under cover of anjou's name. the end of the war, remarked the ambassador, sir henry norris, had brought no end to the mortal hatred between the houses of guise and montmorency. the prospect of permanent peace was dark. the king was easy to be seduced, his mother bent upon maintaining these divisions in the court, and anjou so much under the cardinal's influence that it was to be feared that the huguenots would in the end be forced to have recourse once more to arms. in the midst of these perils, the queen mother had been exercising her ingenuity in playing off one party against the other; now giving countenance to the guises, now to the montmorencies. at one time she used limoges, at another morvilliers or sens, in her secret intrigues. presently she resorted to lorraine, and, when jealous of his too great forwardness, would turn to the chancellor himself, "undoing in one day what the cardinal had intended long afore." besides these prominent statesmen, she had not scrupled to take up with meaner tools--men whose elevation boded no good to the commonwealth, and with whom she conferred about the imposition of those onerous taxes which had cost her the forfeiture of the good-will of the people. to add to the confusion, the jealousy between the king and his brother anjou had reappeared, and the chancellor had lost his characteristic courage and avowed his utter despair of being able to stem the fierce tide of human selfishness and passion. cardinal lorraine was realizing his long-cherished hope: "for this one man's authority had been the greatest countermand of his devices."[ ] [sidenote: the court tries to ruin condé and coligny.] the huguenot leaders had entered into engagements to repay to the king the nine hundred thousand francs advanced by him to the german reiters of count casimir. this sum--a large one for the times--charles now called upon condé and coligny to refund, and he expressly commanded that it should not be levied upon the protestant churches, but be raised by those who had taken up arms in the late contest.[ ] it was a transparent attempt to array the masses that had suffered little pecuniarily in the war against the brave men who had not only impoverished themselves, but hazarded their lives in defence of the common cause. nothing less than the financial ruin of the prince and the admiral, who had voluntarily become sureties, seemed likely to satisfy their enemies. [sidenote: téligny sent to carry a reply.] the prince of condé despatched young téligny to carry his spirited reply to this extraordinary demand, and, not confining himself to the exhibition of its flagrant injustice, he recapitulated the daily multiplying infractions upon the edict. the protestants were treated as enemies, he said, and were safe neither at home nor abroad. an open war could not be more bitter.[ ] besides countless general massacres, he complained of the recent assassination of two of his own dependants, and of the surveillance exercised over all the great noblemen "of the religion," who were closely watched in their castles by the commanders of neighboring forces. against himself the unparalleled insult had been shown of placing a garrison in the palace of a prince of the blood. nay, he had arrested a spy caught in the very act of measuring the height of the fortifications of noyers, and sounding the depth of the moat, with a view to a subsequent assault, and the capture not only of the prince, but of the admiral, who frequently came there to see him. he rehearsed the grounds of just alarm which the protestants had in the threats their indiscreet enemies were daily uttering, and in "the confraternities of the holy ghost," defiantly instituted with the approval of the king's own governors. what safety was there for the huguenots when a counsellor of a celebrated parliament had lately asserted, in the presence of an assembly of three thousand persons, "that he had commands from the leading men of the royal council admonishing the catholics that they ought to give no credence to any edicts of the king unless they contained a peculiar mark of authenticity." and he was induced to believe him right, by noticing the fact that, since the establishment of peace, no one had obeyed the royal letters. finally, in decided but respectful language, he remonstrated against the pernicious precedent which the court was allowing to become established, when the express commands of the monarch were set at naught with impunity.[ ] [sidenote: an oath to be exacted of the huguenots.] as the time approached for the blow to be struck that should forever put an end to the exercise of the reformed faith in france, the conspirators began to betray their anxiety lest their nefarious designs might be anticipated and rendered futile by such a measure of defence as that which the huguenots had taken on the eve of michaelmas. they resolved, therefore, if possible, to bind their victims hand and foot; and no more convenient method presented itself than that of involving them in obligations of implicit obedience which would embarrass, if they did not absolutely preclude, any exercise of their wonderful system of combined action. about the beginning of august, charles despatched to all parts of his dominions the form of an oath which was to be demanded of every protestant subject, and the royal officers and magistrates were directed to make lists of those who signed as well as of those who refused to sign it.[ ] "we protest before god, and swear by his name"--so ran the oath--"that we recognize king charles the ninth as our natural sovereign and only prince ... and that we will never take up arms save by his express command, of which he may have notified us by his letters patent duly verified; and that we will never consent to, nor assist with counsel, money, food, or anything else whatsoever, those who shall arm themselves against him or his will. we will make no levy or assessment of money for any purpose without his express commission; and will never enter into any secret leagues, intrigues, or plots, nor engage in any underhand practices or enterprises, but, on the contrary, we promise and swear to notify him or his officers of all that we shall be able to learn and discover that is devised against his majesty.... moreover, we protest that we will not leave the city, whatever necessity may arrive, but will join our hearts, our wills, and our abilities with our fellow-citizens in defence of that city, to which we will always entertain the devotion of true and faithful citizens, whilst the catholics will find in us sincere and fraternal affection: awaiting the time when it may please god to put an end to all troubles, to which we hope that this reconciliation will be a happy prelude."[ ] the trap was not ill contrived, and its bars were strong enough to hold anything that might venture within. fortunately, however, the bait did not conceal the cruel design lurking behind it. why, it might be asked, this new test? was condé, whom the king had only four or five months ago recognized by solemn edict as his "dear cousin and faithful servant and subject," a friend or a foe? had peace been concluded with the huguenots only that they might anew be treated as rebels and enemies? what had become of the prescribed amnesty? was it at all likely that private citizens would bury in oblivion their former dissensions and abstain from mutual insults, when the monarch officially reminded them that there was one class of his subjects whose past conduct made them objects of grave suspicion? while, therefore, the huguenots professed themselves ready to give the king all possible assurances of their loyal devotion, they declined to swear to a form that bore on its face the proof that it was composed, not in accordance with charles's own ideas, but by an enemy of the crown and of public tranquillity. they requested that it might receive such modifications as would permit them to sign it with due regard to their own self-respect and to their religious convictions, and they entreated charles to confirm their liberty of conscience and of religious observance; for, without these privileges, which they valued above their own existence, they were ready to forsake, not only their cities, but their very lives also.[ ] [sidenote: the plot disclosed by an intercepted letter.] at this critical moment the destiny of france was wavering in the balance, and the decision depended upon the answer to be given to the question whether chancellor l'hospital or cardinal lorraine should retain his place in the council. the tolerant policy of the former is too well understood to need an explanation. the designs of the latter are revealed by an intercepted letter that fell into the hands of the huguenots about this time. it was written (on the ninth of august) at the little country-seat named madrid,[ ] whose ruins are still pointed out, near the banks of the seine, on the edge of the bois de boulogne, and not far from the walls of the city of paris. the writer, evidently a devoted partisan of the house of guise, had been entrusted by the cardinal of lorraine[ ] with a glimpse at the designs of the party of which the latter was the declared chief. a proclamation was soon to be made in the king's name, through marshal cossé, to the protestant nobles, assuring them of the monarch's intention to deal kindly and peaceably with them, to preserve their religious liberties, and to treat them as his faithful subjects; and explaining the design of the movement which he was now setting on foot to be merely the reduction of the inhabitants of some insolent cities (those that, like la rochelle, had refused to admit garrisons) to his authority. this announcement, the cardinal proceeded to say, might disturb some good catholics, who would think that their labors and the dangers they had undergone were all in vain. in reality, however, it was only intended to secure the power in the hands of the king, and to take away from the protestant leaders all occasion for assembling, until, being reduced to straits, that rabble, so hostile to the king and the kingdom, should be wholly destroyed. thus the very remnants would be annihilated; for the seed would assuredly spring up again, unless the same course should be pursued as that of which the french had resplendent examples shown them by their neighbors.[ ] meanwhile, until these plans could be carried into effect, as they would doubtless be within the present month, the protestant nobles must be carefully diverted, as some were already showing signs of security, and others of falling into the snare prepared for them. the cardinal, so he informed the writer, was confident, with god's favor, of an easy and most certain victory over the enemies of the faith.[ ] [sidenote: isabella of france again her husband's mouthpiece.] such were the cardinal's intentions as expressed by himself and reported almost word for word[ ] in a letter to which i shall presently have occasion again to direct the reader's attention. it was the policy advocated persistently both by pius the fifth and by philip the second, and embodied in counsel which would have been resented by a court possessed of more self-respect than the french court, as impertinent advice. for, in the report made to catharine by one of her servants at the spanish capital, there is a wonderful similarity in the language employed to that used at the conference of bayonne. isabella of france is again the speaker, though much suspected of uttering rather the sentiments of philip, her husband, who was present,[ ] than her own. again, after expressing the most vehement zeal for the welfare of her native country, she advocated rigorous measures against the huguenots, in phrases almost identical with those which, as the duke of alva relates, she had addressed to her mother three years before. "she told me among other things," says the queen's agent, "that she would never believe that either the king her brother, or you, will ever execute the design already entered into between you (although, by your command, i had notified the king [philip] and herself of your good-will respecting this matter), until she saw it performed; for you had often before made them the same promises, but no result had ever followed. she feared that your majesties might be dissuaded from action by the smooth speeches of certain persons in your court, until the enemy gained the opportunity of forming new designs, not only against the king's authority, but even against yourselves. the apprehension kept her in a constant state of alarm."[ ] [sidenote: king charles entreats his mother to avoid war.] but, although catharine had now given in her adhesion to the spanish and lorraine party, the success of that party was as yet incomplete. l'hospital was still in the privy council, and charles himself greatly preferred the conciliation and peace advocated by the chancellor. the same letter from the pleasure-palace of "madrid," on the banks of the seine, whose contents have already occupied our attention, makes important disclosures respecting the attitude of the unhappy prince, of whom it may be questioned whether his greatest misfortune was that he had so unprincipled a mother, or that he had not sufficient strength of will to resist her pernicious designs. "i observed," wrote this correspondent still further in reference to the cardinal of lorraine, "that he was very much excited on account of a conversation which the king had recently had with the queen, and which he believed to have been suggested to him by others. for the king entreated his mother, almost as a suppliant, 'to take the greatest care lest war should again break out, and that the edict should everywhere be observed: otherwise he foresaw the complete ruin of his kingdom.'[ ] and when the queen alleged the rebellion of the inhabitants of la rochelle, he replied, as he had been instructed beforehand, 'that the rochellois only desired to retain their ancient privileges. their demand was not unreasonable; and even if it were, it was better to make a temporary sacrifice to the welfare of the realm than to plunge in new turmoil. as to the nobles, he was persuaded that they would live peaceably if the edict were properly executed. in short, he was earnestly desirous that matters should be restored to their best and most quiet state.' the queen and very many other illustrious persons have but one object of fervent desire, and that is to see the kingdom of france return to the condition it was in under francis and henry. the queen mother knows that this speech was dictated to him by certain men, and she owes the authors of it no good-will. so much the more anxiously does she desire, in common with a vast multitude of good catholics, to prove to the king that whatever is done in this affair has for its sole object to liberate him from servitude and make him a king in reality, and to expel the pestilence and those infected by it--a result utterly unattainable in any other way."[ ] [sidenote: catharine's animosity against l'hospital.] catharine could not doubt that it was michel de l'hospital that had infused into charles his own just and pacific spirit. from the moment she had come to this conclusion the chancellor's fall was inevitable. the particular occasion of it, however, seems to have been the opposition which he offered to the reception of a papal bull. to relieve the royal treasury, the court had applied to rome for permission to alienate ecclesiastical possessions in france yielding an income of fifty thousand crowns (or one hundred and fifty thousand francs), on the plea that the indebtedness had been incurred in defence of the roman catholic faith. pius the fifth granted the application, but in his bull of the first of august, , he not only made it a condition that the funds should be exclusively employed under the direction of a trustworthy person--and as such he named the cardinal of lorraine--in the extermination of the heretics of france, or their reconciliation with the church of rome, but he ascribed to charles in making the request the declared purpose of continuing a work for which his own means had proved inadequate. the reception of the document was in itself an act of bad faith, and the chancellor resisted it to the utmost of his power, urging that the pontiff should be requested to alter its objectionable form.[ ] [sidenote: another quarrel between lorraine and the chancellor.] another of those painful scenes occurred in the privy council (on the nineteenth of september), of which there had been so many within the past four or five years. again the disputants were the cardinal of lorraine and the chancellor. the former angrily demanded the reason why l'hospital had refused to affix his signature to the bull; whereupon the latter alleged, among many other grounds, that to revoke the edict of pacification, as demanded by the pope, "was the direct way to cause open wars, and to bring the germans into the realm." the cardinal was "much stirred." he called l'hospital a hypocrite; he said that his wife and daughter were calvinists. "you are not the first of your race that has deserved ill of the king," he added. "i am sprung from as honest a race as you are," retorted the other. beside himself with fury, lorraine "gave him the lie, and, rising incontinently out of his chair," would have seized him by the beard, had not marshal montmorency stepped in between them. "madam," said the cardinal, "in great choler," turning to the queen mother, in whose presence the angry discussion took place, "the chancellor is the sole cause of all the troubles in france, and were he in the hands of parliament his head would not tarry on his shoulders twenty-four hours." "on the contrary, madam," rejoined l'hospital, "the cardinal is the original cause of all the mischiefs that have chanced as well to france, within these eight years, as to the rest of christendom. in proof of which i refer him to the common report of even those who most favor him."[ ] [sidenote: the chancellor's fall.] but the chancellor accomplished nothing. catharine had overcome her weak son's partiality for the grave old counsellor by persuading him that, as the chancellor's wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and indeed his entire house, were avowedly huguenots, it was impossible but that he was himself only restrained from making an open profession of protestantism by the fear of losing his present position.[ ] finding himself not only stripped of all influence, and compelled to witness the enactment of measures repugnant to his very nature, but an object of hatred to his associates, michel de l'hospital withdrew from a council board where, as he asserted, even charles himself did not dare to express his opinions freely.[ ] subsequently retiring altogether from the court to his country-seat of vignai, not far from Étampes, he surrendered his insignia of office to a messenger of catharine, who came to recommend him, in the king's name, to take that rest which his advanced years demanded. monsieur de morvilliers succeeded him, with the title of keeper of the seals, but the full powers of chancellor.[ ] in quiet retirement, the venerable judge and legislator lingered more than four years, unhappy only in being spared to see the melancholy results of the rejection of his prudent counsels, the desolation of his native land, and the transformation of an amiable king into a murderer of his own subjects. few days in this eventful reign were more lasting in their consequences than that which beheld the final removal from all direct influence upon the court of the only leading politician or statesman who could have forestalled the horrors of a generation of inhuman wars. [sidenote: the plot.] [sidenote: marshal tavannes its author.] the crisis now rapidly approached. the huguenot chiefs were widely separated from each other--montgomery in normandy, genlis and mouy in picardy, rochefoucauld at angoulême, d'andelot in brittany, condé and coligny in burgundy. the royal court, now entirely in the interest of the guises, resolved to execute the plan which the roman catholic nobles of this faction had sketched to alva three years before at bayonne, by the seizure of five or six of the leaders, as a measure preliminary to the total suppression of protestantism in france. gaspard de tavannes was entrusted with the execution of the most important part of the scheme--the arrest of the prince and the admiral. fourteen companies of gens-d'armes and as many ensigns of infantry stood under his orders, and noyers was closely beset on all sides.[ ] it was at this moment, when secrecy was all important to the success of the plot, that the tidings of the threatening storm reached its destined victims. it has long been believed and reported that tavannes, unwilling to lend himself to unworthy machinations whose execution would have wounded his soldierly pride, took measures to warn condé and coligny of their danger. unfortunately, the story rests on no better authority than his "mémoires," written by a son who has often shown a greater desire to vindicate his father's memory than to maintain historical truth, and who, writing under the rule of the bourbons, had in this case, as in that of the pretended deliverance of henry of navarre and henry of condé, at the great parisian massacre four years later, sufficient inducements for endeavoring to represent the reigning family as indebted to his father for its preservation.[ ] brantôme is consistent with the entire mass of contemporary documents in representing tavannes as the author of the whole scheme; and certainly one who was so deeply implicated in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day cannot have been too humane to think of capturing, or even assassinating, two nobles, although one of them was a prince of the blood. a more probable story is that tavannes was the unintentional instrument of the disclosure, a letter of his having fallen into huguenot hands, containing the words: "the deer is in the net; the game is ready."[ ] but, in point of fact, the huguenots needed no such hints. with their perfect organization, in the face of so treacherous a foe, after so many violations as they had of late witnessed of the royal edict, they were already on their guard, and the hostile preparations had not escaped their notice. [sidenote: condé's last appeal to the king.] when the news first reached him that the troops sent ostensibly to besiege la rochelle were recalled, condé, alarmed by what he heard from every quarter, had begged his mother-in-law, the marchioness de rothelin, to go to the court and entreat the king, in his name, to maintain the sanctity of his engagements, confirmed by repeated oaths. scarcely had she departed, however, before he received fresh and reiterated warnings that his safety depended upon instant escape. he determined, nevertheless, to make a last attempt to avert the horrid prospect of a war which, from the malignant hatred exhibited by all classes of roman catholics, he rightly judged would exceed the previous contests both in duration and in destructiveness. he addressed to his young sovereign a letter explaining the necessity of the step he was about to take, accompanied by a long appeal, of which it would be impracticable to give even a brief summary. every point in the multitudinous grievances of which the huguenots complained was recapitulated. every counter-charge with which the court had endeavored to parry the force of previous remonstrances was satisfactorily answered. in eloquent terms the prince indicted charles, cardinal of lorraine, as the enemy alike of the royal dignity and of the liberties of the people, as the author of all the troubles of france, and the advocate and defender of robbers and murderers.[ ] he reminded the king of the declaration of maximilian, the present emperor of germany, in a letter written before his election to charles himself: "all the wars and all the dissensions that are to-day rife among the christians have originated from two cardinals--granvelle and lorraine."[ ] and he closed the long and eloquent document by protesting, in the sight of god and of all foreign nations, that the huguenot nobles sought the punishment of lorraine and his associates alone, as the guilty causes of all the calamities that portended destruction to the french crown, and would pursue them as perjured violators of the public faith and capital enemies of peace and tranquillity. he therefore hoped that no one would be astonished if he and his allies should henceforth refuse to receive as the king's commands anything that might be decided upon by the royal council, so long as the cardinal might be present at its sessions, but should regard them as fabrications of the cardinal and his fellows. the causes of the misfortunes that might arise must be attributed, not to himself and his huguenot allies, but to the cardinal and his roman catholic confederates.[ ] [sidenote: the flight of the prince and the admiral.] [sidenote: proves wonderfully successful.] having despatched "this testimony of the innocence, integrity, and faith" of himself and of his associates, "to be transmitted to posterity in everlasting remembrance," the prince of condé set out on the same day (the twenty-third of august) from noyers. coligny had joined him, bringing from tanlay his daughter, the future bride of téligny--and, after that nobleman's assassination on st. bartholomew's day, of william of orange, the hero of the revolt of the netherlands--and his young sons, as well as the wife and infant son of his brother d'andelot. condé was himself accompanied by his wife, who was expecting soon to be confined, and by several children. his own servants and those of the admiral, with a few noblemen that came in from the neighborhood, swelled their escort to about one hundred and fifty horse.[ ] with such a handful of men, and embarrassed in their flight by the presence of those whom their age or their sex disqualified for the endurance of the fatigues of a protracted journey, condé and coligny undertook to reach the friendly shelter of the walls of la rochelle. it was a perilous attempt. the journey was one of several hundred miles, through the very heart of france. the cities were garrisoned by their enemies. the bridges and fords were guarded. the difficulties, in fact, were apparently so insurmountable, that the roman catholics seem to have expected that any attempt to escape would be made in the direction of germany, where casimir, their late ally, would doubtless welcome the protestant leaders. this mistake was the only circumstance in their favor, for it diminished the number and the vigilance of the opposing troops. the march was secret and prompt. contrary to all expectation, an unguarded ford was discovered not far from the city of sancerre,[ ] by which, on a sandy bottom, the fugitive huguenots crossed the loire, elsewhere deep and navigable as far as roanne.[ ] if the drought which had so reduced the stream as to render the passage practicable was justly regarded as a providential interposition of heaven in their behalf, the sudden rise of the river immediately afterward, which baffled their pursuers, was not less signal a blessing.[ ] other dangers still confronted them, but their prudence and expedition enabled them to escape them, and on the eighteenth of september[ ] the weary travellers, with numbers considerably increased by reinforcements by the way, entered the gates of la rochelle amid the acclamations of the brave inhabitants. [sidenote: the third civil war opens.] the escape of the prince and the admiral rendered useless all further attempt at the concealment of the treacherous designs of the papal party; and the third religious war dates from this moment. * * * * * [sidenote: the city of la rochelle and its privileges.] the city of la rochelle, said to have become a walled place about , had received many tokens of favor at the hands of its successive masters before the accession of queen alienor, or Éléonore, last duchess of aquitaine. it was by a charter of this princess, in , that the municipality, or "commune," was established. (arcère, hist. de la rochelle, ii., preuves, , .) the terms of the charter are vague; but, as subsequently constituted, the "commune" consisted of one hundred prominent citizens, designated as "pairs," or peers, in whom all power was vested. the first member in dignity was the "maire" or mayor, selected by the seneschal of saintonge from the list of three candidates yearly nominated by his fellow-members. the historian of the city compares him, for power and for the sanctity attaching to his person, to the ancient tribunes of rome. next were the twenty-four "échevins," or aldermen, one-half of whom on alternate years assisted the mayor in the administration of justice. last of all came seventy-five "pairs" having no separate designation, who took part in the election of the mayor, and voted, on important occasions, in the "assemblée générale." (see a historical discussion, arcère, i. - .) from king john lackland, of england, the rochellois are said to have received express exemption from the duty of marching elsewhere in the king's service, without their own consent, and from admitting into their city any troops from abroad. (p. s. callot, la rochelle protestante, , p. .) when, in , after standing a siege of three weeks, la rochelle fell into the hands of louis viii. of france, its new master engaged to maintain all its privileges--a promise which was well observed, for not only did the city lose nothing, but it actually received new favors at the king's hands. (arcère, i. ; callot, .) in , the disasters of the french, consequent upon the battle of poitiers, compelled the monarch to surrender the city of la rochelle to his captors in order to regain his liberty. the concession was reluctantly made, with the most flattering testimony to the past fidelity of the inhabitants (see letters of john ii. of france, to the rochellois, calais, oct., , arcère, ii, preuves, ), and it was with still greater reluctance that the latter consented to carry it into effect. "they made frequent excuses," says froissard, "and would not, for upwards of a year, suffer any englishman to enter their town. the letters were very affecting which they wrote to the king of france, beseeching him, by the love of god, that he would never liberate them of their fidelity, nor separate them from his government and place them in the hands of strangers; for they would prefer being taxed every year one-half of what they were worth, rather than be in the hands of the english." (froissard, i. c. , johnes's trans.) when compelled to yield, it was with the words: "we will honor and obey the english, but our hearts shall never change." edward the third had solemnly confirmed their privileges (callot, ). but la rochelle's unwilling subjection to the english crown was of brief duration. by a plot, somewhat clumsily contrived, but happily executed (aug., ), the commander of the garrison, who did not know how to read, was induced to lead his troops outside of the castle wall for a review. the royal order that had been shown him was no forgery, but had been sent on a previous occasion, and the attesting seal was genuine. at a preconcerted signal, two hundred rochellois rose from ambush, and cut off the return of the english. the latter, finding their antagonists reinforced by two thousand armed citizens under the lead of the mayor himself, soon came to terms, and, withdrawing the few men they had left behind in the castle, accepted the offer of safe transportation by a ship to bordeaux. (see the entertaining account in froissard, i. c. .) the wary rochellois took good care, before even admitting into their city duguesclin, constable of france, with a paltry escort of two hundred men-at-arms, to stipulate that pardon should be extended to those who immediately after the departure of the english had razed the hateful castle to the ground, and that no other should ever be erected; that la rochelle and the country dependent upon it should henceforth form a particular domain under the immediate jurisdiction of the king and his parliament of paris; that its militia should be employed only for the defence of the place; and that la rochelle should retain its mint and the right to coin both "black and white money." (froissard, _ubi supra_, corrected by arcère, i. .) not only did the grateful monarch readily make these concessions, and confirm all la rochelle's past privileges, but, for its "immense services," by a subsequent order he conferred nobility upon the "mayor," "échevins" and "conseillers" of the city, both present and future, as well as upon their children forever. (letters of january , / , arcère, ii., preuves, - .) the extraordinary prerogatives of which this was the origin were recognized and confirmed by subsequent monarchs, especially by louis the eleventh, charles the eighth, louis the twelfth, and francis the first. (callot, .) the resistance of the inhabitants to the exaction of the obnoxious "gabelle," or tax upon salt, did indeed, toward the end of the reign of the last-named king ( ), bring them temporarily under his displeasure; but, with the exception of a modification in their municipal government, made in , and revoked early in the reign of henry the second, the city retained its quasi-independence without interruption until the outbreak of the religious wars. as we have seen (_ante_, p. ), la rochelle was in the scene of the judicial murder of at least two protestants. the constancy of one of the sufferers had been the means of converting many to the reformed doctrines, and among others claude d'angliers, the presiding judge, whose name may still be read at the foot of their sentence. (arcère, i. .) so rapidly had those doctrines spread, that on sunday, may , , the lord's supper was celebrated according to the fashion of geneva, not in one of the churches, but on the great square of the hay-market, in a temporary enclosure shut in on all sides by tapestries and covered with an awning of canvas. more than eight thousand persons took part in the exercises. but if the morning's services were remarkable, the sequel was not less singular. "as the disease of image-breaking was almost universal," says an old chronicler, "it was communicated by contagion to the inhabitants of this city, in such wise that, that very afternoon about three or four o'clock, five hundred men, who were under arms and had just received the same sacrament, went through all the churches and dashed the images in pieces. howbeit it was a folly conducted with wisdom, seeing that this action passed without any one being wounded or injured." (p. vincent, _apud_ callot, , and delmas, .) as usual, the whole affair was condemned by the ministers. although la rochelle had steadily refused, during the earlier part of the first religious war, to declare for the prince of condé, and had maintained a kind of neutrality, the court was in constant fear lest the weight of its sympathies should yet draw it in that direction. it was therefore a matter of great joy when, in october, , the duke of montpensier succeeded, by a ruse meriting the designation of treachery, in throwing himself into la rochelle with a large body of troops. with his arrival the banished roman catholic mass returned, and the protestant ministers were warned to leave at once. (arcère, i. .) for two months after the restoration of peace, the huguenots of la rochelle, embracing almost the entire population, held their religious services, in accordance with the terms of the edict of pacification, in the suburbs of the city. but, on the th of may, , charles the ninth was prevailed to give directions that one or two places should be assigned to the huguenots within the city. this gracious permission was ratified with greater solemnity in letters patent of july th, in which the king declared the motive to be the representations made to him of "the inconveniences and eminent dangers that might arise in our said city of la rochelle, if the preaching and exercise of the pretended reformed religion should continue to be held outside of the said city, being, as it is, a frontier city in the direction of the english, ancient enemies of the inhabitants of that city, where it would be easy for them, by this means, to execute some evil enterprise." (commission of charles ix., to m. de jarnac. this valuable ms., with other mss., carried to dublin at the revocation of the edict of nantes, by m. elie bouhereau, and placed in the marsh library, has recently been restored to la rochelle, in accordance with m. bouhereau's written directions. delmas, .) two years later, charles and his court, returning from their long progress through france, came to la rochelle, and spent three days there (sept., ). a noteworthy incident occurred at his entry. the jealous citizens had not forgotten an immemorial custom which was not without significance. a silken cord had been stretched across the road by which the monarch was to enter, that he might stop and promise to respect the liberties and franchises of la rochelle. constable montmorency was the first to notice the cord, and in some anger and surprise asked whether the magistrates of the city intended to refuse their sovereign admission. the symbolism of the pretty custom was duly explained to him, but for all response the old warrior curtly observed that "such usages had passed out of fashion," and at the same instant cut the cord with his sword. (arcère, i. ; delmas, , .) charles himself refused the request of the mayor that he should swear to maintain the city's privileges. after so inauspicious a beginning of his visit, the inhabitants were not surprised to find the king, during his stay, reducing the "corps-de-ville" from to members, under the presidency of a governor invested with the full powers of the mayor; ordering that the artillery should be seized, two of the towers garrisoned by foreign troops, and the magistrates enjoined to prosecute all ministers that preached sedition; or banishing some of the most prominent protestants from la rochelle. it was characteristic of the government of catharine de' medici--always destitute of a fixed policy, and consequently always recalling one day what it had done the day before--that scarcely two months elapsed before the queen mother put everything back on the footing it had occupied before the royal visit to la rochelle. footnotes: [ ] the most authentic account of these important interviews is that given by françois de la noue in his mémoires, chap. xi. it clearly shows how much davila mistakes in asserting that "the prince, the admiral, and andelot persuaded them, without further delay, to take arms." (eng. trans., london, , bk. iv., p. .) davila's careless remark has led many others into the error of making coligny the advocate, instead of the opposer, of a resort to arms. see also de thou, iv. (liv. xlii.) - , who bases his narrative on that of de la noue, as does likewise agrippa d'aubigné, l. iv., c. vii. (i. ), who uses the expression: "l'amiral voulant endurer toutes extremitez et se confier en l'innocence." [ ] "ains avec le fer." [ ] "une armée gaillarde." la noue, _ubi supra_. [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vi., c. iv., c. v.; la noue, c. xi.; de thou, iv. (liv. xlii.) , . davila, l. iv., p. , alludes to the accusation, extorted from protestant prisoners on the rack, that "the chief scope of this enterprise was to murder the king and queen, with all her other children, that the crown might come to the prince of condé," but admits that it was not generally credited. the curate of saint barthélemi is less charitable; describing the rising of the protestants, he says: "en ung vendredy e se partirent de toutes les villes de france les huguenots, sans qu'on leur eust dit mot, mais ils craignoient que si on venoit au dessein de leur entreprise qui estoit de prendre ou tuer le roy charles neuvième, qu'on ne les saccagea ès villes." journal d'un curé ligueur (j. de la fosse), . [ ] la noue, and de thou, _ubi supra_. [ ] the historian, michel de castelnau, sieur de mauvissière, had been sent as a special envoy to congratulate the duke of alva on his safe arrival, and the duchess of parma on her relief. as he was returning from brussels, he received, from some frenchmen who joined him, a very circumstantial account of the contemplated rising of the huguenots, and, although he regarded the story as an idle rumor, he thought it his duty to communicate it to the king and queen. mémoires, liv. vi., c. iv. [ ] mém. de castelnau, _ubi supra_. it is probable that the french court partook of cardinal granvelle's conviction, expressed two years before, that the huguenots would find it difficult to raise money or procure foreign troops for another war, not having paid for those they had employed in the last war, nor holding the strongholds they then held. letter of may , , papiers d'état, ix. . [ ] mém. du duc de bouillon (ancienne collection), xlvii. . [ ] la fosse, p. , represents charles as exclaiming, when he entered the porte saint denis: "qu'il estoit tenu à dieu, et qu'il y avoit quinze heures qu'il estoit à cheval, et avoit eust trois alarmes." [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vi., c. v.; la noue, c. xiii. (anc. coll., xlvii. - ); de thou, iv. ; j. de serres, iii. - ; la fosse, ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., i. . [ ] "ravi d'avoir allumé le feu de la gùerre," says de thou, iv. . [ ] de thou, _ubi supra_. [ ] the circumstance of two messengers, each bearing letters from the same person, while the letters made no allusion to each other, following one another closely, struck alva as so suspicious, that he actually placed the second messenger under arrest, and only liberated him on hearing from his own agent on his return that the man's credentials were genuine. [ ] alva proposed to detach , men to prevent the entrance of german auxiliaries into france, and protect the netherlands. [ ] letter of alva to philip, nov. , , gachard, correspondance de philippe ii., i., . [ ] "que la ley sálica, que dizien, es baya, y las armas la allanarian." ibid, i. . [ ] the price of wheat, jehan de la fosse tells us (p. ) advanced to fifteen francs per "septier." [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (j. de la fosse), . [ ] in one of charles's first despatches to the lieutenant-governor of dauphiny, wherein he bids him restrain, and, if necessary, attack any huguenots of the province who might undertake to come to condé's assistance, there occurs an expression that smacks of the murderous spirit of st. bartholomew's day: "you shall cut them to pieces," he writes, "without sparing a single person; for the more dead bodies there are, the less enemies remain (car tant plus de mortz, moins d'ennemys!)" charles to gordes, oct. , , ms. in condé archives, d'aumale, i. . [ ] davila (i. ) makes the latter her distinct object in the negotiations: "the queen, to protract the time till supplies of men and other necessary provisions arrived, and to abate the fervor of the enemy, being constrained to have recourse to her wonted arts, excellently dissembling those so recent injuries, etc." [ ] of course "sieur soulier, prêtre" sees nothing but perversity in these grounds. "ils n'alleguèrent que des raisons frivolles pour excuser leur armement." histoire des édits de pacification, . [ ] davila is certainly incorrect in stating that the huguenots demanded "that the queen mother should have nothing to do in the government" (p. ). [ ] october th, soulier, hist. des édits de pacification, . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlii.) - ; jean de serres, iii. , ; davila, bk. iv. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. universelle, l. iv., c. , (i. , ); castelnau, l. vi., c. . [ ] so closely was paris invested on the north, that, although accompanied by an escort of sixty horse, castelnau was driven back into the faubourgs when making an attempt by night to proceed by one of the roads leading in this direction. he was then forced to steal down the left bank of the seine to poissy, before he could find means to avoid the huguenot posts. mémoires, l. vi., c. . [ ] castelnau was instructed to ask for three or four regiments of spanish or italian foot, and for two thousand cavalry of the same nations. [ ] i have deemed it important to go into these details, in order to exhibit in the clearest light the insincerity of philip the second--a prince who could not be straightforward in his dealings, even when the interests of the church, to which he professed the deepest devotion, were vitally concerned. my principal authority is the envoy, michel de castelnau, liv. vi., c. . alva's letter to catharine de' medici, dec., , gachard, correspondance de philippe ii., i. , , sheds some additional light on the transactions. i need not say that, where castelnau and alva differ in their statements, as they do in some essential points, i have had no hesitation in deciding whether the duke or the impartial historian is the more worthy of credit. see, also, de thou, iii. (liv. xli.) . [ ] mém. de fr. de la noue, c. xiv. (ancienne coll., xlvii. ); davila, bk. iv. ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. universelle, i. , ; de thou, iv. ; martin, hist. de france, x. . there is some discrepancy in numbers. there is, however, but little doubt that those given in the text are substantially correct. d'aubigné blunders, and more than doubles the troops of the constable. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné relates an incident which has often been repeated. among the distinguished spectators gathered on the heights of montmartre, overlooking the plain, was a chamberlain of the turkish sultan, the same envoy who had been presented to the king at bayonne. when he saw the three small bodies of huguenots issue in the distance from saint denis, and the three charges, in which so insignificant a handful of men broke through heavy battalions and attacked the opposing general himself, the moslem, in his admiration of their valor, twice cried out: "oh, that the grand seignior had a thousand such men as those soldiers in white, to put at the head of each of his armies! the world would hold out only two years against him." hist. univ., i. . [ ] "autant de volontaires parisiens bien armez et _dorez comme calices_." agrippa d'aubigné, l. iv., c. (i. ). "tenans la bataille desjà achevée, tout ce gros si bien doré print la fuitte." (ibid., i. .) [ ] at marignano, in . [ ] he was taken prisoner by the emperor charles v. at pavia, in company with francis i.; at the battle of saint quentin, in ; and in , at the battle of dreux, by the huguenots. it was rather hard that the story should have obtained currency, according to the curé of mériot, that constable montmorency was shot by a royalist, who saw that he was purposely allowing himself to be enveloped by the troops of condé, in order that he might be taken prisoner, "comme telle avoit jà esté sa coustume en deux batailles!" mém. de claude haton, i. . [ ] even henry of navarre, in a letter of july , , published by prince galitzin (lettres inédites de henry iv., paris, , pp. - ) states that he is unable to say whether it was stuart, "pour n'en sçavoir rien;" but asserts that "il est hors de doubte et assez commung qu'il fut blessé en pleine bataille et combattant, et non de sang froid." [ ] mémoires de fr. de la noue, c. xiv.; jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. , etc.; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., i. - ; castelnau, liv. vi., c. ; claude haton, i. ; jean de la fosse, , ; charles ix. to gordes, nov. , , condé mss., d'aumale, i. . [ ] "la mort dudit connestable fut plaincte de peu de gens du party des catholicques, à cause de la huguenotterie de l'admiral, du card. de chastillon, et d'andelot, ses nepveux, qui estoient, après le prince de condé, chefz des rebelles huguenotz françoys et des plus meschant; et avoient plusieurs personnes ceste oppinion du connestable, qu'il les eust bien retirez de ceste rebellion s'il eust voulu, attendu que tous avoient esté avancez en leurs estatz par le feu roy henry, par son moyen." claude haton, i. . [ ] charles ix. to gordes, nov. , , condé mss., duc d'aumale, i. . [ ] this exposé, committed to writing by the elector palatine's request, and translated for frederick's convenience into german, is published by prof. a. kluckholn, in a monograph read before the bavarian academy of sciences: "zur geschichte des angeblichen bündnisses von bayonne, nebst einem originalbericht über die ursachen des zweiten religionskriegs in frankreich." (abhandlungen, iii. cl., xi. bd., i. abth.) munich, . the huguenot envoys were chastelier pourtaut de latour and francour. the document is probably from the pen of the former (p. ). [ ] de thou, iv. , ; castelnau, liv. vi., c. ; jean de serres, iii. , . agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., i. , . wenceslaus zuleger's report is printed in full by f. w. ebeling, archivalische beiträge, - , and by a. kluckholn, zwei pfälzische gesandtschaftsberichte, etc. abhandl. der bayer. akad., , - . [ ] it is needless to say that no authentic coins or medals bearing condé's head, with the designation of "louis xiii.," have ever been found. after the direct contradiction by catharine de' medici, no other testimony is necessary. the jesuits, however, impudently continued to speak of condé's treason as an undoubted truth, and even gave the legend of the supposed coin as "ludovicus xiii., dei gratia, francorum rex primus christianus." see "plaidoyé de maistre antoine arnauld, advocat en parlement, pour l'université de paris ... contre les jesuites, des et juillet, ." mémoires de la ligue, , . arnauld stigmatizes the calumny as "notoirement fausse." [ ] frederick, elector palatine, to charles ix., heidelberg, jan. , . printed in full in f. w. ebeling, archivalische beiträge, - . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, _ubi supra_. [ ] november th, "hier au soyr, vers les sept heures," says charles to gordes, nov. , , ms. condé arch., d'aumale, i. . the king naturally represents the movement as confused--"une bonne fuyte"--and confidently states that he will follow, and, by a _second_ victory, put a speedy end to the war. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, liv. iv., c. (i. ). [ ] ibid., i. , . [ ] la noue, c. xiv.; de thou, iv. ; jehan de la fosse, , ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . davila, bk. iv., pp. , , represents brissac's attack (which, according to him, was not made till after the expiration of the truce) as a part of a projected general assault. anjou's main body failed to come up, and so condé was saved. the blame was thrown on marshal gonnor (cossé) and on m. de carnavalet, the king's tutor, whom some suspected of unwillingness to allow so much noble blood to be shed. others accused the one of too much friendship with the châtillons, the other of a leaning to heresy ("de sentir le fagot") agrippa d'aubigné, i. . see also cl. haton, i. . these two noblemen were accused of advocating other designs which were very obnoxious to the roman catholic party. "la vérité est," says jehan de la fosse, in his journal, p. , under date of december, , "que aulcuns grands seigneurs entre lesquels on nomme gonor [et] carnavallet donnoient à entendre que si monsieur, frère du roy, voloit prendre une partie de ces gens et les joindre avec le camp des huguenots, qui [qu'ils] le feroient comte de flandre." [ ] de thou, iv. - ; castelnau, liv. vi., c. ; la fosse, . [ ] catharine de' medici to alva, dec. , , gachard, correspondance de philippe ii., i. . [ ] alva to catharine de' medici, dec., , gachard, correspondance de philippe ii., i. , . [ ] it is told of one lackey that he contributed twenty crowns. [ ] the scene is described in an animated manner by françois de la noue, c. xv. (ancienne collection, xlvii. - ); de thou, iv. . "marque le lecteur," writes agrippa d'aubigné, in his nervous style, "un trait qui n'a point d'exemple en l'antiquité, que ceux qui devoient demander paye et murmurer pour n'en avoir point, puissent et veuillent en leur extreme pauvreté contenter une armée avec , livres à quoi se monta cette brave gueuserie; argument aux plus sages d'auprès du roi pour prescher la paix; tenans pour invincible le parti qui a la passion pour difference, et pour solde la nécessité." hist. univ., i. . d'aubigné is mistaken, however, in making the army contribute the entire , . davila and de thou say they raised , ; la noue, over , . [ ] mém. de fr. de la noue, c. xv. [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] mémoires de claude haton, i. - . [ ] ibid., ii. . "et dès lors fut le pillage mis sus par les gens de guerre des deux partis; et firent tous à qui mieux pilleroit et rançonneroit son hoste, jugeant bien en eux que qui plus en pilleroit plus en auroit. les gens de guerre du camp catholicque, excepté le pillage des églises et saccagemens des prebstres, estoient au reste aussi meschans, et quasi plus que les huguenotz." [ ] ménard, hist. de nismes, apud cimber et danjou, vii. , etc.; bouche, histoire gén. de languedoc, v. , . prof. soldan, geschichte des protestantismus in frankreich, ii. - , whose account of an event too generally unnoticed by protestant historians is fair and impartial, calls attention to the following circumstances, which, although they do not excuse in the least its savage cruelties, ought yet to be borne in mind: st, that no woman was killed; d, that only those _men_ were killed who had in some way shown themselves enemies of the protestants; and, d, that there is no evidence of any premeditation. to these i will add, as important in contrasting this massacre with the many massacres in which the huguenots were the victims, the fact that the protestant ministers not only did not instigate, but disapproved, and endeavored as soon as possible to put an end to the murders. [ ] de thou, iv. - . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] henri martin (histoire de france, x. ), on the authority of coustureau, vie du duc de montpensier, states that the rochellois had, after the peace of , bought from catharine de' medici, for , francs, the suppression of the garrison placed in their city by the duke of montpensier, and remarks: "ces , francs coutèrent cher!" the authority, however, is very slender in the absence of all corroborative evidence, and arcère, more than a century ago, showed (histoire de la rochelle, i. ) how improbable, or, rather, impossible the story is. if any gift was made to catharine by the city, it must have been far less than the sum, enormous for the times and place, of , crowns; and, at any rate, it could not have been for the purchase of a privilege already enjoyed for hundreds of years. see the illustrative note at the end of this chapter. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . "plus absolument et avec plus d'obeïsance que les rochellois, qui depuis ont tousjours tenu le parti réformé, n'en ont voulu deferer et rendre aux princes mesmes de leur parti, contre lesquels ils se sont souvent picquez, en resveillant et conservant curieusement leurs privileges." [ ] others were beaten and banished, and suffered the other penalties denounced by the edict of châteaubriant, as soulier goes on to show with much apparent satisfaction. hist. des édits, etc., , . the text of the joint sentence of couraud, constantin, and monjaud is interesting. it is given by delmas, l'Église réformée de la rochelle (toulouse, ), pp. - . [ ] martin, hist. de france, x. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, _ubi supra_; davila, bk. iv. ; de thou, iv. seq.; soulier, . according to arcère, hist. de la rochelle, i. , the mayor's correct name was pontard, sieur de trueil-charays. [ ] the commission was dated from montigny-sur-aube, january , , soulier, . de thou's expression (_ubi supra_), "peu de temps après," is therefore unfortunate. [ ] soulier, hist. des édits de pacification, . [ ] norris to queen elizabeth, january , , state paper office. i retain the quaint old english form in which norris has couched the marshal's speech. it is plain, in view of the perfidy proposed by santa croce, even in the royal council, that condé was not far from right in protesting against the proposed limitation of cardinal châtillon's escort to twenty horse, insisting "que la qualité de mondict sieur le cardinal, qui n'a acoustumé de marcher par païs avecques si peu de train, ny son eage (age) ne permectent pas maintenant de commencer." condé to the duke of anjou, dec. , , ms. bibl. nat., aumale, prince de condé, i. . [ ] the "seven viscounts"--often referred to about this period--were the viscounts of bourniquet, monclar, paulin, caumont, serignan, rapin, and montagut, or montaigu. they headed the protestant gentry of the provinces rouergue, quercy, etc., as far as to the foot of the pyrenees. mouvans held an analogous position in provence, montbrun in dauphiné, and d'acier, younger brother of crussol, in languedoc. agrippa d'aubigné, i. , ; de thou, iv. ; duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. . when "the viscounts" consented, at the earnest solicitation of the second princess of condé, to part with a great part of their troops, they confided them to mouvans, rapin, and poncenac. [ ] the _village_ of cognac, or cognat, near gannat, in the ancient province of auvergne (present department of allier), must not, of course, be confounded with the important _city_ of the same name, on the river charente, nearly two hundred miles further west. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] opinions differed respecting the propriety of the movement. according to la noue, chartres in the hands of the huguenots would have been a "thorn in the foot of the parisians;" while agrippa d'aubigné makes it "a city of little importance, as it was neither at a river crossing, nor a sea-port;" "but," he adds, "in those times places were not estimated by the standard now in vogue." [ ] "car encore que les catholiques estiment les huguenots estre _gens à feu_, si sont-il toujours mal pourveus de tels instrumens," etc. mém. de la noue, c. xviii. for the siege of chartres, besides la noue, see jean de serres, iii. ; de thou, iv., - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. - . [ ] "ils eussent esté par trop lourds et stupides, s'ils n'en eussent évité la feste." [ ] "cessons donc de nous esbahir s'ils ont un pied en l'air et l'oeil en la campagne." [ ] the whole of this remarkable memorial is inserted in the older collection universelle de mémoires, xlv. - . its importance is so great, as reflecting the views of a mind so impartial and liberal as that of chancellor l'hospital, that i make no apology for the prominence i have given to it. besides the omission of much that might be interesting, i have in places rather recapitulated than translated literally the striking remarks of the original. [ ] la noue, c. xviii. [ ] castelnau, who was behind the scenes, assures us that had "the huguenots insisted upon keeping some places in their own hands, for the performance of what was promised, it would have been granted, and, in all probability, have prevented the war from breaking out so soon again," etc. mém., liv. vi., c. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. - ; de thou, iv. , ; davila, bk. iv. ; castelnau, _ubi supra_; agrippa d'aubigné, i. , etc. [ ] "l'amiral maintenoit et remonstroit que cette paix n'estoit que pour sauver chartres, et puis pour assommer separez ceux qu'on ne pourroit vaincre unis." agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] "le prince de condé plus facile, desireux de la cour, où il avoit laissé quelque semence d'amourettes, se servit de ce que plusieurs quittoient l'armée," etc. ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] la noue, c. xviii. [ ] la noue, c. xix. [ ] "la paix fourrée," soulier, histoire des édits de pacification, . "ceste meschante petite paix," la noue, c. xix. agrippa d'aubigné, hist. universelle, i. , and, following him, browning, hist. of the huguenots, i. , and de félice, hist. of the protestants of france, , say that this peace was wittily christened "la paix boiteuse et mal-assise;" but, as we shall see, this designation belongs to the peace of saint germain-en-laye, in , concluding the third religious war. [ ] leopold ranke, civil wars and monarchy in france in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (new york, ), . [ ] norris to cecil, paris, march , , state paper office. [ ] la noue, c. xviii. (anc. coll., ). [ ] a fortnight had not elapsed since the date of the edict of pacification when condé was compelled to call the king's attention to a flagrant outrage committed by foissy, a royalist, against the sieur d'esternay. after having burned esternay's residence at lamothe during the preliminary truce, foissy subsequently to the conclusion of peace returned and completed his work of devastation. condé to charles ix., april , , ms., archives du dép. du nord, _apud_ duc d'aumale, i. . [ ] "nous avons fait la folie, ne trouvons donc estrange si nous la beuvons. toutefois il y a apparence que le breuvage sera amer." la noue, _ubi supra_. [ ] de thou, iv. , ; jean de serres, comm. de statu, etc., iii. ; condé's petition of aug. d, ibid., iii. ; mém. de claude haton, i. - , who, however, makes the singular blunder of placing the incident of rapin's death after the peace of amboise in . the curé's description of the zeal of the toulouse parliament for the roman catholic church confirms everything that protestant writers have said on the subject: "laditte court de parlement avoit tousjours résisté à laditte prétendue religion et faict exécuter ceux qui en faisoient profession, nonobstant édict à ce contraire faict en faveur d'iceux huguenotz." see also raoul de cazenove, rapin-thoyras, sa famille, sa vie, et ses oeuvres (paris, ), - --a truly valuable work, and a worthy tribute to a distinguished ancestry. [ ] "edictum promulgant, hac addita exceptione, _reservatis clausulis quæ secreto senatus commentario continentur_." j. de serres, iii. , ; de thou, _ubi supra_. see the petition of condé of aug. d. j. de serres, iii. , etc. [ ] mém. de claude haton, ii. , etc. [ ] "sire," said a nobleman, after listening to the arguments against the peace made by some of the remonstrants, and to charles's replies, "it is too much to undertake to dispute with these canting knaves; it were better to have them strapped in the kitchen by your turnspits." ibid., ii. . [ ] playing upon the chancellor's name, sainte foy, one of the court preachers, exclaimed in the pulpit: "be not astonished if the huguenots demolish the churches, for they have turned all france into a _hospital_ instead"--"donnant à entendre que par le chancelier nomme hospital, la france estoit pauvre, pourtant qu'il a par trop encore de douceur pour les huguenots qui ont ruiné le pais de france." jehan de la fosse, , . [ ] floquet, hist. du parlement de normandie, iii. - . [ ] mémoires de claude haton, ii. , . similar regulations were made in many other places "cumplurimis in locis." jean de serres, iii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] de thou, iv. , ; castelnau, l. vii., c. ; d'aubigné, i. ; la fosse, ; motley, dutch republic, ii. . [ ] charles was, however, near experiencing trouble with the reiters of duke casimir. he had, by the terms of the agreement with the huguenots, undertaken to advance the , francs which were due, and on failing to fulfil his engagements his unwelcome guests threatened to turn their faces toward paris. mém. de castelnau, liv. vi., c. . at last, with promises of payment at frankfort, the germans were induced to leave france. du mont, corps diplomatique, v. , gives a transcript of casimir's receipt, may , , for , livres, etc. [ ] mémoires de castelnau, liv. vi., c. , c. . duke john william of saxe-weimar was even more vexed at the issue of his expedition than castelnau himself. it was with difficulty that he could be persuaded to accept an invitation to make a visit to the french court. [ ] paris ms., _apud_ soldan, gesch. des prot. in frankreich, ii. . rumor, as is usual in such cases, outstripped even the unwelcome truth, and norris wrote to queen elizabeth that the king had sent secret letters to two hundred and twelve places, charging the governors "to runne uppon them [the huguenots] and put them to the sword." "your majestie will judge," adds norris, "ther is smale place of surety for them of the religion, either in towne or felde." letter of june , , _apud_ d'aumale, les princes de condé, ii. , pièces inédites. [ ] when the protestants at rouen begged protection, the king sent four companies of infantry, which the citizens at first refused to admit. at last they were smuggled in by night, _and quartered upon the huguenots_. floquet, hist. du parlement de normandie, iii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; soldan, ii. . [ ] soldan, ii. . [ ] letter to catharine, april , , ms., _apud_ soldan, ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . petition of condé of aug. d. ibid., iii. , etc. [ ] ms. bibl. nat., _apud_ mém. de claude haton, ii. app., , . less correctly given in lestoile's mémoires. the title is "sermens des associez de la ligue chrestienne et roiale," and the date is june , . [ ] prof. soldan is certainly right (ii. ) in his interpretation of the passage, "tant et si longuement qu'il plaira à dieu que nous serons _par eux_ régis en nostredicte religion apostolique et romaine," which ranke (civil wars and monarchy, p. ), and, following him, von polenz (gesch. des franz. calvinismus, ii. ), have construed as referring to "la maison de valois." involved as is the phraseology, i do not see how the word "eux" can designate any other person or persons than "ledit sr. lieutenant avec mesditz sieurs de la noblesse de cedit gouvernement et autres associez." [ ] jean de serres, iii. . [ ] "den erfolg des letzten krieges," well observes prof. soldan, "hatten die hugenotten nicht ihrer anzahl, sondern der organisation und dem geiste ihres gemeindewesens zu verdanken. diese bewegliche, weitverzweigte, aus einem festen mittelpunkte gleichmässig gelenkte und von eifer für die gemeinsame sache belebte vereinsgliederung hatte über den lahmen und stockenden mechanismus vielfach grösserer, aber in sich selbst uneiniger kräfte einen beschämenden triumph erlangt." geschichte des protestantismus in frankreich, ii. . [ ] relations des amb. vén., ii. . [ ] cipierre, a young nobleman only twenty-two years of age, was returning, with a body-guard of about thirty-five men, from a visit to his cousin, the duke, at nice, where he had been treated with great honor. when approaching fréjus he perceived signs of treachery in a body of men lurking under cover of a grove, and betook himself for safety into the city, now, since his father's death, a part of the province of which his eldest brother was royal governor. the tocsin was rung, and his enemies, originally a band of three hundred men, being swollen by constant accessions to four times that number, the house in which cipierre had taken refuge was assailed. after a heroic defence the small party of defenders surrendered their arms, on assurance that their opponents would at once retire. the papists, however, scarcely made a pretence of fulfilling their compact, for they speedily returned and massacred every one whom they found in the house. cipierre himself was not among the number. to secure him a new breach of faith was necessary. the captain of the murderers pledged his own word to the magistrate that if cipierre would come forth from his hiding-place he would spare his life. he discharged the obligation, so soon as cipierre presented himself, by plunging a dagger into his breast. j. de serres, iii. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] petition of condé, aug. , , j. de serres, iii. , . [ ] vie de coligny (cologne, ), , ; j. de serres, iii. . [ ] ibid., iii. ; recordon, from mss. of n. pithou, - ; ms. mém. historiques des antiquités de troyes, by duhalle, _apud_ bulletin de l'hist. du prot. fr., xvii. ( ) . of the royal edicts guaranteeing the protestants, the last author remarks that "ils firent plus de bruit que de fruit." [ ] duc d'aumale, princes de condé, ii. , pièces justificatives. [ ] j. de serres, iii. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] jean de serres does not expressly state that he refers to the combatants, but i presume this to be his meaning. [ ] relazione di correro, rel. des amb. vén., ii. . [ ] "montauban, etc., faisoient conter les cloux de leurs portes aux garnisons qu'on leur envoyoit." agrippa d'aubigné, i. . it was the _garrisons_ only that were refused; the royal governors were promptly accepted. m. de jarnac, for instance, had no difficulty in securing recognition at la rochelle; but he was not permitted to introduce troops to distress and terrify the citizens. see the letters of the "maire, echevins, conseilliers et pairs," of la rochelle to charles the ninth, april st, june th and th, etc. le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. - . they deny the slanderous accusation that the roman catholics have not been permitted to return since the peace, asserting, on the contrary, that they have greeted them as brethren and fellow-citizens. they appeal to m. de jarnac himself for testimony to the good order of la rochelle. "meanwhile," they say, "we are preserving this city of yours in all tranquillity, and maintain it, under your obedience, with much greater security, devotion, affection, fidelity and loyalty, such as we have received from our predecessors, than would do all others who were strangers and mercenaries, and not its natural subjects and inhabitants." norris to queen elizabeth, june , : "the towne of rochelle hathe now the thirde time bin admonished to render itself to the king." state paper office, duc d'aumale, ii. . [ ] his wife, charlotte de laval, whose brave christian injunctions, as we have seen, decided the reluctant admiral to take up arms in the first religious war (see _ante_, chapter xiii., p. ), lay dying of a disease contracted in her indefatigable labors for the sick and wounded soldiers at orleans, whilst the admiral was at the siege of chartres. on the conclusion of the peace he hastened to her, but was too late to find her alive. in a touching letter, written to her husband after all hope of seeing him again in this world had fled, a letter the substance of which is preserved by one of his biographers (vie de coligny, cologne, , p. ), she lamented the loss of a privilege that would have alleviated the sufferings of her last hours, but consoled herself with the thought of the object for which he was absent. she conjured him, by the love he bore her and to her children, to fight to the last extremity for god and religion; warning him, lest through his habitual respect for the king--a respect which had before made him reluctant to take up arms--he should forget the obligations he owed to god as his first master. she begged him to rear the children she left him in the pure religion, that they might one day be capable of taking his place; and, for their sakes, implored him not to hazard his life unnecessarily. she bade him beware of the house of guise. "i do not know," she added, "whether i ought to say the same thing of the queen mother, as we are forbidden to judge evil of our neighbor; but she has given so many marks of her ambition that a little distrust is excusable." the earlier biographer of coligny (gasparis colinii vita, , p. , etc.) gives an affecting picture of the deep sorrow and pious resignation of the admiral. [ ] somewhat hyperbolically, the biographer of the admiral (vie de coligny, p. ) says that the concourse at châtillon and noyers was so great that the louvre was a desert in comparison! when ten gentlemen left by one gate, twenty entered by another. the churches raised a purse of , crowns, one-half of which was to go to him, and the other half to the prince of condé; but, though nearly ruined by the enormous expenses of his hospitality, he declined to receive his portion. [ ] noyers and tanlay are ten or twelve miles from each other, in the modern department of the yonne. [ ] jean de serres, _ubi supra_. cf. de thou, iv. ; bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr. ( ), iii. . this valuable periodical is mistaken in stating, vii. ( ) , that "d'andelot s'était retiré dans ses terres de bretagne à la conclusion de la paix." he did not leave tanlay until after writing the letter referred to below, and shortly before coligny's arrival: "partant de chez lui, pour se rendre chez son frère andelot, il trouva qu'il étoit allé en bretagne." vie de coligny, . d'andelot was in brittany at the outbreak of the third war. his adventures in escaping to la rochelle will be narrated in the next chapter. mr. henry white is, of course, equally wrong when he says (massacre of st. bartholomew, new york, , p. ): "the admiral had gone to this charming retreat [tanlay], to consult with his brother, to whom it belonged, _and who had joined him there_," and when he mentions d'andelot as in the suite of condé and coligny in their celebrated flight (p. ); "besides which, he (the prince) was accompanied by the admiral and his family, _by andelot_ and his wife," etc. [ ] lettre de françois d'andelot à la royne mère du roy, de tanlay, co me juillet, . ms. library of berne. this letter has been twice printed in the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, iv. ( ) - , and vii. ( ) - . the first reproduction is in one important part more correct than the second. it is not impossible, after all, that the author of the letter was not d'andelot, but his brother, admiral coligny himself; for m. j. tessier mentions (bulletin, xxii. ( ) ), that it exists in manuscript in the paris national library (mss. vc. colbert, , f. ), in the admiral's own handwriting, and signed with his usual signature, _chastillon_. the whole tone, i must confess, seems rather to be his. [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] norris to queen elizabeth, may , , state paper office. [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; davila, bk. iv. ; condé to the king, noyers, june , , ms. paris lib., _apud_ d'aumale, ii. - . [ ] as the prince had described the state of affairs in a letter to the king, of july , : "nous nous voions tuez, pillez, saccagez, les femmes forcées, les filles ravies des mains de leurs pères et mères, les grands mis hors de leurs charges," etc. all this injustice had been committed with complete impunity. in fact, to use his own forcible words, were the king to attempt to punish the outrages done to the protestants, "the trees in france would have more men than leaves upon them"--"tous les arbres seroient plus couvertz d'hommes que de feuilles." ms. paris lib., _apud_ d'aumale, ii. , . [ ] j. de serres, iii. - ; davila, bk. iv. . [ ] the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, ix. ( ) - , published from mss. in the library of the british museum, the letter of charles the ninth to the first president of the parisian parliament, dated "du château de bolongne, ce premier jour d'aoust," enclosing the formula. the pretext is "afin d'oster tout ce doubte et différend qui règne aujourd'huy parmi nos subjectz." the president is to associate with himself the seigneur de nantouillet, provost of the city, and the seigneur de villeroy, "prévôt des marchands." [ ] bulletin, etc., ix. ( ) , ; jean de serres, iii. , etc. [ ] jean de serres (comm. de statu rel. et reipublicæ, iii. - ) inserts the reply of the protestants to the proposed oath, article by article. [ ] built by francis i., and so named because constructed on the plan of the palace in which he lived when a captive in spain. [ ] it is true the writer carefully avoids mentioning the cardinal's name, but there is no difficulty in discovering that he is intended. [ ] "uti nimirum detur opera ut vires penes regem sint, primoresque religionis illius occupentur, omnes conveniendi rationes illis demantur: ut ad illas angustias redacti, quemadmodum facillimum erit, possit hujusmodi colluvies regi regnoque adversaria, plane pessundari, omnesque adeo reliquiæ profligari: quoniam semen profecto esset in dies egerminaturum, nisi ea ratio observaretur, cujus a vicinis nostris adeo luculenta exempla demonstrentur." jean de serres, iii. . [ ] the letter is given entire, with the exception of some matters of no general interest, in the valuable chronicle of this period, by jean de serres (s. l. ), iii. - . [ ] "hæc sunt propemodum ipsa illius verba, quæ conatus sum memoriæ mandare, ut possem ad te de rerum omnium statu certius perscribere." ib., iii. . [ ] "et quoniam tunc vehementius quam assuevisset, rem illam mihi commemoravit, et fortasse regis domini sui, qui ibi tunc erat, mandatu, volui hac de causa te istarum rerum facere certiorem." [ ] this letter, which was also intercepted by the huguenots, is preserved by jean de serres, iii. , . it bears unmistakable marks of authenticity. [ ] condé himself alludes to these words of charles the ninth to his mother, in his letter of august d. referring to the king's aversion to a resort to violence, he says: "quod mihi repetitis literis sæpissime demonstrasti, et nuper quidem reginæ matri, ex eo sermone quem cum illa habebas, quo significabas quantum odiosa tibi esset turbarum renovatio cum nimirum illam orabas, daret operam ut omnia pacificarentur, efficeretque ne rursus ad bella civilia rediretur, quæ non possent non extremum exitium afferre." jean de serres, iii, . [ ] letter _apud_ j. de serres, iii. - . [ ] de thou, iii. ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. , where the sum is erroneously trebled; davila, bk. iv., p. . see also soldan, ii., , and von polenz, ii. . [ ] norris, in a letter to cecil, sept. , , gives almost the very words of the angry contestants. state paper office. [ ] davila, bk. iv. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . [ ] ranke, civil wars and monarchy in france, , . [ ] davila and de thou, _ubi supra_. de thou seems certainly to be wanting in his accustomed accuracy when he represents--iv. (liv. xliv.) , --the submission of the test-oath to the protestants as posterior to, and consequent upon the fall of l'hospital: "la reine délivrée du chancelier, et n'ayant plus personne qui s'opposât à ses volontés, ne songea plus qu'à brouiller les affaires, etc." i have shown that the papal bull which l'hospital opposed was dated at rome on the same day (august , ) on which charles sent his orders to the president of the parisian parliament to administer the oath to the protestants of the capital. yet, as early as on the th of may, , the english ambassador, norris, wrote to cecil that anjou, a cruel enemy of the protestants, had a privy council of which cardinal lorraine was the "chiefest" member, and his own chancellor, who sealed everything submitted to him, "which thing he [the good olde chauncelor of the kinges] hathe so to harte as he is retirid him to his owne house in the towne of paris; and wheras the king's chauncelor i meane, who nether for love nor dread wolde seal enything against the statutes of the realme, or that might be prejudiciall to the same, this of mr. d'anjou's refusithe nothing that is proferid to him." state paper office, duc d'aumale, ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; davila, bk. iv., p. . [ ] see soldan, gesch. des prot. in frankreich, ii. , note . yet condé himself, shortly before the flight from noyers, expressed himself in strikingly confident terms as to tavannes's probity. in a letter to the king, complaining of the treacherous plots formed against himself, july , , the prince says he is sure that tavannes is not privy to these designs, "car je le cognois de trop longue main ennemy de ceulx qui ne veullent qu'entretenir les troubles. parquoy je croy que cecy se faict à son desceu." ms. paris lib., _apud_ d'aumale, ii. . [ ] "le cerf est aux toiles, la chasse est préparée." see anquetil, esprit de la ligue, i. . [ ] "turbarum causas imputamus adversario illi tuo ac tuæ dignitatis hosti cardinali lotharingo et sociis, quorum nimirum pravis consiliis et arcta necessitudine et familiaritate quam cum hispano habent, dissensiones et simultates inter tuos subjectos ab hinc sex annis continuantur, et misere foventur atque aluntur per cædes atque strages, quæ ipsorum nutu quotidie ubique perpetrantur." jean de serres, iii. . "impurusne presbyter, tigris, tyrannus," etc., ibid., iii. . "cardinalis lotharingus, quasi sicariorum ac prædorum patronus," etc., ibid., iii., . [ ] "quodnam item de illo judicium tulerit cæsar maximilianus hodie imperans, cum ad te prescripsit, omnia bella et omnes dissensiones, quæ inter christianos hodie vagantur, proficisci a granvellano et lotharingo cardinalibus." jean de serres, iii. . [ ] this petition or protestation of condé is among the longest public papers of the period, occupying not less than forty-three pages of the invaluable commentarii de statu religionis et reipublicæ of jean de serres. it well repays an attentive perusal, for it contains, in my judgment, the most important and authentic record of the sufferings of the huguenots during the peace. the reader will notice that i have made great use of its authority in the preceding narrative. [ ] jean de serres, iii. . [ ] the place is sufficiently designated by ag. d'aubigné (hist. univ., i. ) "à bonni près sancerre;" by jean de serres (iii. ) "ad sangodoneum vicum (saint godon) qui tribus ferme milliaribus distat ab ea fluminis parte, qua transiit condæus;" by hotman, gasparis colinii vita, (p. ), "ad flumen accessit, quo sancerrani collis radices alluuntur," and by the "vie de coligny" (p. ), "vis à vis de sancerre." it will surprise no one accustomed to the uncertainties and perplexities of historical investigation, that while one author, quoted by henry white (mass. of st. bartholomew, ), puts the crossing "near les rosiers, four leagues below saumur," davila (p. ) places it at roanne. the two spots are, probably, not less than miles apart in a straight line. [ ] see de thou, etc. [ ] recueil des choses mém. (hist. des cinq rois), . the life of coligny ( ), p. , states that the rise took place within _three_ hours after the huguenots crossed. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , and de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . the dates of condé's departure from tanlay and arrival at la rochelle are, as usual, given differently by other authorities. chapter xvi. the third civil war. [sidenote: relative advantages of the roman catholics and huguenots.] [sidenote: enthusiasm of huguenot youth.] [sidenote: enlistment of agrippa d'aubigné.] having narrowly escaped falling into the hands of their treacherous enemies, and finding themselves compelled once more to take up arms in defence of their own lives and the liberties of their fellow-believers, the prince of condé and admiral coligny resolved to institute a vigorous contest. a single glance at the situation, the full dangers of which were now disclosed by the tidings coming from every quarter, was sufficient to convince them that in a bold and decided policy lay their only hope of success. the roman catholics had, it is true, enjoyed rare opportunities for maturing a comprehensive plan of attack; although the sequel seemed to prove that they had turned these opportunities to little practical use. but the huguenots possessed countervailing advantages, in close sympathy with each other, in fervid zeal for their common faith, as well as in an organization all but perfect. simultaneously with their flight from noyers, the prince and the admiral had sent out a summons addressed to the protestants in all parts of the kingdom, and this was responded to with enthusiasm by great numbers of those who had been their devoted followers in the two previous wars. multitudes of young men, also, with imaginations inflamed by the recital of the exploits of their fathers and friends, burned to enroll themselves under such distinguished leaders. many were the stratagems resorted to by these aspirants for military honors. among others, the eminent historian, theodore agrippa d'aubigné, has left an amusing account of the adventures he passed through in reaching the huguenot recruiting station. his prudent guardian had taken the precaution to remove agrippa's clothes every evening, in order to prevent him from carrying out his avowed purpose of entering the army; but one night, on hearing the report of the arquebuse--which a number of his companions, bent on the same course, had fired as a signal near his place of confinement--the youth boldly lowered himself to the ground by the sheets of his bed, and, with bare feet and no other clothing than a shirt, made his way to jonzac. there, after receiving an outfit from some protestant captains, he jotted down at the bottom of the receipt which he gave them in return, the whimsical declaration "that never in his life would he blame the war for having stripped him, since he could not possibly leave it in a sorrier plight than that in which he entered it."[ ] [sidenote: the court proscribes the reformed religion.] the resolution and enthusiasm of the huguenots were greatly augmented by the imprudent course of the court. notwithstanding their own guilty designs, catharine and the cardinal of lorraine were taken by surprise when the news reached them that condé and coligny had escaped, and that the huguenots were everywhere arming. so sudden an outbreak had not been expected; and, while awaiting the muster of that portion of the troops that had been dismissed, but was now summoned to assemble at Étaples on the th of september,[ ] it was thought best to quiet the agitated minds of the people. a declaration was accordingly published, assuring all the adherents of the reformed faith who remained at home and furnished no assistance to the enemy, of the royal protection, charles promising, at the same time, to give a gracious hearing to their grievances.[ ] but, as soon as the roman catholic forces began to collect in large numbers, and the apprehension of a sudden assault by the huguenots died away, the court threw off the mask of conciliation, and charles was made to sign two laws unsurpassed for intolerance. the first purported to be "an irrevocable and perpetual edict." it rehearsed the various steps taken by charles the ninth and his brother francis in reference to the "so-called reformed religion," from the time of the tumult of amboise. it alluded to the edicts of july and of january--the latter adopted by the queen mother, by advice of the cardinals of bourbon and tournon, of the constable, of saint andré, and others, because less objectionable than an edict tolerating the worship of that religion _within_ the walls of the cities. none of these concessions, it asserted, having satisfied the professors of the new faith, who had collected money and raised troops with the intent of establishing another government in place of that which god had instituted, the king now repealed the edicts of toleration, and henceforth prohibited his subjects, of whatever rank and in all parts of his dominions, on pain of confiscation and death, from the exercise of any other religious rites than those of the roman catholic church. all protestant ministers were ordered to leave france within fifteen days. quiet and peaceable laymen were promised toleration until such time as god should deign to bring them back to the true fold; and pardon was offered to all who within twenty days should lay down their arms.[ ] the second edict deprived all protestant magistrates of the offices they held, reserving, however, to those who did not take part in the war, a certain portion of their former revenues.[ ] in order to give greater solemnity to the transaction, charles, clothed in robes of state and with great pomp, repaired to the parliament house, to be present at the publication of the new edicts, and with his own hands threw into the fire and burned up the previous edicts of pacification. "thus did his royal highness of france," writes a contemporary german pamphleteer with intense satisfaction, "as was seemly and becoming to a christian supreme magistrate, _pronounce sentence of death upon all calvinistic and other heresies_."[ ] [sidenote: impolicy of this course.] nothing devised by the papal party could have been better adapted to further the huguenot cause than the course it had adopted. the wholesale proscription of their faith united the protestants, and led every able-bodied man to take up arms against a perfidious government, whose disregard of treaties solemnly made was so shamefully paraded before the world. "these edicts," admits the candid castelnau, "only served to make the whole party rise with greater expedition, and furnished the prince of condé and the admiral with a handle to convince all the protestant powers that they were not persecuted for any disaffection to the government, but purely for the sake of religion."[ ] [sidenote: attempts to make capital of the proscriptive measures.] efforts were not spared by the guisard party to make capital abroad out of the new proscriptive measures. copies of the edicts, translated from the french, were put into circulation beyond the rhine, accompanied by a memorial embodying the views presented by an envoy of charles to some of the roman catholic princes of the empire. the king herein justified himself for his previous clemency by declaring that he had entertained no other idea than that of allowing his subjects of the "pretended" reformed faith time and opportunity for returning to the bosom of the only true church. lovers of peace and good order among the germans were warned that they had no worse enemies than the insubordinate and rebellious huguenots of his very christian majesty's dominions, while the adherents of the augsburg confession were distinctly given to understand that lutheranism was safer with the turk than where calvin's doctrines were professed.[ ] to influence the princes the offices of skilled diplomatists were called into requisition, but to no purpose. when blandy requested the emperor, in charles's name, to prevent any succor from being sent to condé from germany, maximilian replied by counselling his good friend the king to seek means to restore concord and harmony among his subjects, and professing his own inability to restrain the levy of auxiliary troops. and from duke john william, of saxony, the same envoy only obtained expressions of regret that the war so lately suppressed had broken out anew, and of discontent on the part of the german princes at the rumor that charles had been so ill advised as to join in a league made by the pope and the king of spain, with the view of overwhelming the protestants.[ ] [sidenote: a "crusade" preached at toulouse.] on the other hand, the new direction taken by catharine met with the most decided favor on the part of the fanatical populace, and the pulpits resounded with praise of the complete abrogation of all compacts with heresy. the roman catholic party in toulouse acted so promptly, anticipating even the orders of the royal court, as to make it evident that they had been long preparing for the struggle. on sunday, the twelfth of september, a league for the extermination of heresy was published, under the name of a _crusade_. a priest delivered a sermon with the consent of the parliament of toulouse. next day all who desired to join in the bloody work met in the cathedral dedicated to st. stephen--the christian protomartyr having, by an irony of history, more than once been made a witness of acts more congenial to the spirit of his persecutors than to his own--and prepared themselves for their undertaking by a common profession of their faith, by an oath to expose their lives and property for the maintenance of the roman catholic religion, and by confession and communion. this being done, they adopted for their motto the words, "eamus nos, moriamur cum christo," and attached to their dress a white cross to distinguish them from their protestant fellow-citizens. of success they entertained no misgivings. had not attila been defeated, with his three hundred thousand men, not far from toulouse? had not god so blessed the arms of "our good catholics" in the time of louis the eighth, father of st. louis, that eight hundred of them had routed more than sixty thousand heretics? "so that we doubt not," said the new crusaders, "that we shall gain the victory over these enemies of god and of the whole human race; and if some of us should chance to die, our blood will be to us a second baptism, in consequence of which, without any hinderance, we shall pass, with the other martyrs, straight to paradise."[ ] a papal bull, a few months later (on the fifteenth of march, ), gave the highest ecclesiastical sanction to the crusade, and emphasized the complete extermination of the heretics.[ ] [sidenote: fanaticism of the roman catholic preachers.] the faithful, but somewhat garrulous chronicler, who has left us so vivid a picture of the social, religious, and political condition of the city of provins during a great part of the second half of this century, describes a solemn procession in honor of the publication of the new ordinance, which was attended by over two thousand persons, and even by the magistrates suspected of sympathy with the protestants. friar jean barrier, when pressed to preach, took for his text the song of moses: "i will sing unto the lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea." his treatment of the verse was certainly novel, although the exegesis might not find much favor with the critical hebraist. the prince of condé was the _horse_, on whose back were mounted the huguenot ministers and preachers--the _riders_ who drove him hither and thither by their satanic doctrine. although they were not as yet drowned, like pharaoh and his army in the red sea, france had great reason to rejoice and praise god that the king had annulled the edict of january, and other pernicious laws made during his minority. as for himself, said the good friar, he was ready to die, like another simeon, since he had lived to see the edicts establishing "the huguenotic liberty" repealed, and the preachers expelled from france.[ ] [sidenote: the huguenot places of refuge.] similar rejoicings with similar high masses and sermons by enthusiastic monks, were heard in the capital[ ] and elsewhere. but the jubilant strains were sounded rather prematurely; for the victory was yet to be won. the huguenot nobles, invited by condé, were flocking to la rochelle; the protestant inhabitants of the towns, expelled from their homes, were generally following the same impulse. but others, reluctant, or unable to traverse such an expanse of hostile territory, turned toward nearer places of refuge. happily they found a number of such asylums in cities whose inhabitants, alarmed by the marks of treachery appearing in every quarter of france, had refused to receive the garrisons sent to them in the king's name. it was a wonderful providence of god, the historian jean de serres remarks. the fugitive huguenots of the centre and north found the gates of vézelay and of sancerre open to them. those of languedoc and guyenne were safe within the walls of montauban, milhau, and castres. in the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, aubenas, privas, and a few other places afforded a retreat for the women and children, and a convenient point for the muster of the forces of dauphiny.[ ] [sidenote: jeanne d'albret and d'andelot reach la rochelle.] meantime, the queen of navarre, with young prince henry and his sister catharine, started from her dominions near the pyrenees. the court had in vain plied her with conciliatory letters and messages sent in the king's name. gathering her troops together, and narrowly escaping the forces despatched to intercept her, she formed a junction with a very considerable body of troops raised in périgord, auvergne, and the neighboring provinces, under the seigneur de piles, the marquis de montamart, and others, and, after meeting the prince of condé, who came as far as cognac to receive her, found safety in the city of la rochelle.[ ] from an opposite direction, françois d'andelot, whom the outbreak of hostilities overtook while yet in brittany, was warned by condé to hasten to the same point. with his accustomed energy, the young châtillon rapidly collected the protestant noblemen and gentry, not only of that province, but of normandy, touraine, maine, and anjou, and with such experienced leaders as the count of montgomery, the vidame of chartres, and françois de la noue, had reached a point on the loire a few miles above angers. it was his plan to seize and hold the city and bridge of saumur, and thus secure for the huguenots the means of easy communication between the two sides of the important basin intervening between the smaller basins of the seine and the garonne. his expectations, however, were frustrated principally by the good fortune of m. de martigues, who succeeded in making a sudden dash through d'andelot's scattered divisions, and in conveying to the duke of montpensier at saumur so large a reinforcement as to render it impossible for the huguenots to dream of dislodging him.[ ] for a time d'andelot was in great peril. with only about fifteen hundred horse and twenty-five hundred foot,[ ] he stood on the banks of a river swollen by autumnal rains and supposed to be utterly impassable, and in the midst of a country all whose cities were in the hands of the enemy. he had even formed the desperate design of retiring twenty or thirty miles northward, in hope of being able to entice montpensier to follow him so incautiously that he might turn upon him, and, after winning a victory, secure for himself a passage to the sources of the loire or to his allies in germany. at this moment the joyful announcement was made by montgomery that a ford had been discovered. the news proved to be true. the crossing was safe and easy. not a man nor a horse was lost. the interposition of heaven in their behalf was so wonderful, that, as the huguenot troopers reached the southern bank, the whole army, by common and irresistible impulse, broke forth in praise to almighty god, and sang that grand psalm of deliverance--the seventy-sixth.[ ] never had those verses of beza been sung by more thankful hearts or in a nobler temple.[ ] [sidenote: success in poitou, angoumois, etc.] full of courage, the exultant troops of d'andelot now pressed southward. first the city of thouars fell into their hands; then the more important partenay surrendered itself to the huguenots. here, according to the cruel rules of warfare of the sixteenth century, they deemed themselves justified in hanging the commander of the place, who had thrown himself into the castle, for having too obstinately insisted upon standing an assault in a spot incapable of defence, together with some priests who had shared his infatuation.[ ] admiral coligny now met his brother, and the united army, with three cannon brought from la rochelle, forming his entire siege artillery, demanded and obtained the surrender of niort, the size and advantageous position of which made it a bulwark of la rochelle toward the east. angoulême, blaye, cognac, pons, and saintes, were still more valuable acquisitions. in short, within a few weeks, so large a number of cities in the provinces of poitou, angoumois, and saintonge had fallen under the power of the protestants, that they seemed fully to have retrieved the losses they had experienced through the treacherous peace of longjumeau. "in less than two months," writes la noue of his fellow-soldiers, "from poor vagabonds that they were, they found in their hands sufficient means to continue a long war."[ ] and the veteran admiral coligny, amazed at the success attending measures principally planned by himself, was accustomed to repeat with heartfelt thankfulness the exclamation attributed to themistocles: "i should be lost, if i had not been lost!"[ ] [sidenote: affairs in dauphiny, provence, and languedoc.] [sidenote: powerful huguenot army in the south.] [sidenote: it effects a junction with condé's forces.] meantime, in the south-eastern part of france, the provinces of dauphiny, provence, and lower languedoc, the huguenots had not been slow in responding to the call of the prince of condé. the difficulty was rather in assembling their soldiers than in raising them; for there was little lack of volunteers after the repeal of the royal edicts in favor of the protestants. with great trouble the contingents of dauphiny and provence were brought across the rhône, and at alais the baron d'acier[ ] mustered an army to go to the succor of the prince of condé at la rochelle. a roman catholic historian expresses his profound astonishment that the huguenots of this part of the kingdom, when surprised by the violation of the peace, should so speedily have been able to mass a force of twenty-five thousand men, well furnished and equipped, and commanded by the most excellent captains of the age--montbrun, mouvans, pierre-gourde, and others.[ ] the abbé's wonder was doubtless equalled by the consternation which the news spread among the enemies of the huguenots. the roman catholics could bring no army capable of preventing the junction of d'acier's troops with those of condé; but the duke of montpensier succeeded, on the twenty-fifth of october, in inflicting a severe loss upon one of the divisions at messignac, near périgueux. mouvans and pierre-gourde, who were distant from the main body, were attacked in their quarters, by a force under brissac, which they easily repulsed. d'acier, suspecting the design of the enemy, had commanded the huguenot captains to make no pursuit, and to await his own arrival. but brave mouvans was as impatient of orders as he was courageous in battle. disregarding the authority which sat so lightly upon him, he fell into an ambuscade, where he atoned for his rashness by the loss of his own life and the lives of more than a thousand of his companions. after this disaster, d'acier experienced no further opposition, and, on the first of november, he met the advancing army of condé at aubeterre, on the banks of the dronne.[ ] with the new accessions to his army, the prince commanded a force very considerably larger than any he had led in the previous wars. among the conflicting statements, we may find it difficult to fix its numbers. agrippa d'aubigné says that, after the losses consequent upon the defeat of messignac and those resulting from camp diseases, condé's army consisted of only seventeen thousand foot soldiers, and two thousand five hundred horsemen.[ ] a huguenot bulletin, sent from la rochelle for the information of queen elizabeth and the protestants of england, may have given somewhat too favorable a view of the prince's prospects, but was certainly nearer the truth, in assigning him twenty-five thousand arquebusiers and a cavalry force of five or six thousand men.[ ] on the other hand, henry of anjou, who had been placed in nominal command of the roman catholic army, had not yet been able to assemble a much superior, probably not an equal, number of soldiers. the large forces which, according to his ambassador at the english court, charles the ninth could call out,[ ] existed only on paper. the younger tavannes, whose father was the true head of the royal army, gives it but about twenty thousand men.[ ] it was already nearly winter when the armies were collected, and their operations during the remainder of the campaign were indecisive. in the numerous skirmishes that occurred the huguenots usually had the advantage, and sometimes inflicted considerable damage upon the enemy. but the duke of anjou, or the more experienced leaders commanding in his name, studiously avoided a general engagement. the instructions from the court were to wear out the courage and enthusiasm of condé's adherents by protracting a tame and monotonous warfare.[ ] the prince's true policy, on the contrary, lay in decided action. his soldiers were inferior to none in france. the flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled. but, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.[ ] the nobles and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more pitiable class than even the burgesses. the latter, whom devotion to their religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction, had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in great pecuniary distress. it was not, however, possible for condé and coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline, and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time, their design of wresting from his hands the city of saumur, a convenient point of communication with northern france. early in december the vines were frozen in the fields,[ ] disease broke out in either camp, and the soldiers began to murmur at a war which seemed to be waged with the elements rather than with their fellow-men. while anjou's generals, therefore, drew off their troops to saumur, chinon on the vienne, and poitiers, condé's army went into winter quarters a little farther west, at montreuil-bellay, loudun and thouars, but afterward removed, for greater commodity in obtaining provisions, to partenay and niort.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot reprisals and negotiations.] it was while the huguenots lay thus inactive that their leaders deliberated respecting the best means of providing for their support during the coming campaign. jeanne d'albret, whose masculine vigor[ ] had never been displayed more conspicuously than during this war, was present, and assisted by her sage counsels. it was determined, in view of the cruelties exercised upon the protestants in those parts of the kingdom where they had no strongholds, and of the confiscation of their property by judicial decisions, to retaliate by selling the ecclesiastical possessions in the cities that were now under huguenot power, and applying the proceeds to military uses. the order of sale was issued under the names of the young prince of navarre, of condé, coligny, d'andelot and la rochefoucauld, and a guarantee was given by them. as a reprisal the measure was just, and as a warlike expedient nothing could be more prudent; for, while it speedily filled the coffers of the huguenot army, it cut off one great source of the revenues of the court, which had been authorized both by the pope and by the clergy itself to lay these possessions under contribution.[ ] already the temper of the protestant leaders had been sounded by an unaccredited agent of catharine de' medici, who found condé at mirebeau, and entreated him to make those advances toward a peace which would comport better with his dignity as a subject than with that of charles as a king. but the prince, who saw in the mission of an irresponsible mediator only a new attempt to impede the action of the confederates, had dismissed him, after declaring, in the presence of a large number of his nobles, that he had been compelled to resort to arms in order to provide for his own defence. the war was, therefore, directed not against the king, but against those capital enemies of the crown and of the realm, the cardinal of lorraine and his associates. all knew his own vehement desire for peace, of which his late excessive compliance was a sufficient proof; but, since the king was surrounded by his enemies, he intended, with god's favor, to come and present his petitions to his majesty in person.[ ] [sidenote: william of orange attempts to aid the huguenots.] abroad the huguenots had not been idle in endeavoring to secure the support of advantageous alliances. so early as in the month of august, after the disastrous defeat of louis of nassau, at jemmingen, the prince of orange had contemplated the formation of a league for common defence with the prince of condé and admiral coligny. a draft of such an agreement has been preserved; but it is unsigned, and may be regarded rather as indicative of the friendly disposition of the french and dutch patriots than as a compact that was ever formally adopted.[ ] that same autumn william of orange had undertaken an expedition intended to free the netherlands from the tyranny of alva. he had been met with consummate skill. the duke refused to fight, but hung remorselessly on his skirts. the inhabitants of brabant extended no welcome to their liberator. the prince's mercenaries, vexed at their reception, annoyed by the masterly tactics of their enemy, and eager only to return to their homes, clamored for pay and for plunder. orange, outgeneralled, was compelled to abandon the campaign, and would gladly have turned his arms against the oppressors of his fellow-believers in france; but his german troops had enlisted only for the campaign in the netherlands, and peremptorily declined to transfer the field of battle to another country. however, the depth of the meuse, which had become unfordable, furnished more persuasive arguments than could be brought forward by genlis and the huguenots who with him had joined the prince of orange, and the army of the patriots was forced to direct its course southward and to cross the french frontier. [sidenote: consternation and devices of the court.] [sidenote: declaration of the prince of orange.] great was the consternation at the court of charles. paris trembled for its safety, and vigorous were the efforts made to get rid of such dangerous guests. marshal cossé, who commanded for his majesty on the flemish border, was too weak to copy successfully the tactics of alva; but he employed the resources of diplomacy. his secretary, the seigneur de favelles, not content with remonstrating against the prince's violation of the territory of a king with whom he was at peace, endeavored to terrify him by exaggerating the resources of charles the ninth and by fabricating accounts of huguenot reverses. condé, he said, had been forced to recross the river vienne in great confusion; and there was a flattering prospect that he would be compelled to shut himself up in la rochelle; for "monseigneur the duke of anjou" had an irresistible army of six thousand horse and twenty-five or thirty thousand foot, besides the forces coming from provence under the count de tende, the six thousand newly levied swiss brought by the duke d'aumale, and other considerable bodies of troops.[ ] gaspard de schomberg[ ] was despatched on a similar errand by charles himself, and offered the prince, if he came merely desiring to pass in a friendly manner through the country, to furnish him with every facility for so doing. in reply, william of orange, although the refusal of his soldiers to fight against charles[ ] left him no alternative but to embrace the course marked out for him, did not disguise his hearty sympathy with his suffering brethren in france. in view of the attempts made, according to his majesty's edict of september last, to constrain the consciences of all who belonged to the christian religion, and in view of the king's avowed determination to exterminate the pure word of god, and to permit no other religion than the roman catholic--a thing very prejudicial to the neighboring nations, where there was a free exercise of the christian religion--the prince declared his inability to credit the assertions of his majesty, that it was not his majesty's intention to constrain the conscience of any one. he avowed his own purpose to give oppressed christians everywhere all aid, comfort, counsel, and assistance; asserting his conviction that the men who professed "the religion" demanded nothing else than the glory of god and the advancement of his word, while in all matters of civil polity they were ready to render obedience to his majesty. he averred, moreover, that if he should perceive any indications that the huguenots were pursuing any other object than liberty of conscience and security for life and property, he would not only withdraw his assistance from them, but would use the whole strength of his army to exterminate them.[ ] after this declaration, the prince prosecuted his march to strasbourg, where he disbanded his troops, pawning his very plate and pledging his principality of orange, to find the means of satisfying their demands. great was the delight of the royalists, great the disappointment of the huguenots, on hearing that the expedition had vanished in smoke. "the army of the prince of orange," wrote an agent of condé in paris, "after having thrice returned to the king's summons a sturdy answer that it would never leave france until it saw religion re-established, has retreated, in spite of our having given it notice of your intention to avow it. i know not the cause of this sudden movement, for which various reasons are alleged."[ ] william the silent had not, however, relinquished the intention of going to the assistance of the huguenots, whose welfare, next to that of his own provinces, lay near his heart. retaining, therefore, twelve hundred horsemen whom he found better disposed than the rest, he patiently awaited the departure of the new ally of the french protestants, wolfgang, duke of deux-ponts (zweibrücken), in whose company he had determined to cross france with his brothers louis and henry of nassau.[ ] [sidenote: aid sought from england.] [sidenote: generous response of the english people.] [sidenote: bishop jewel's noble plea.] the prince of condé received more immediate and substantial assistance from beyond the channel. when tavannes undertook to capture condé and coligny at noyers, it was in contemplation to seize odet, cardinal of châtillon, the admiral's elder brother,[ ] in his episcopal palace at beauvais. he received, however, timely warning, and made his escape through normandy to england, where queen elizabeth received him at her court with marks of distinguished favor.[ ] his efforts to enlist the sympathies and assistance of the english monarch in behalf of his persecuted countrymen were seconded by cavaignes, who soon arrived as an envoy from condé. cavaignes was instructed to ask material aid--money to meet the engagements made with the duke of deux-ponts, and ships with their armaments to increase the small flotilla of privateersmen, which the protestants had, for the first time, sent out from la rochelle. soon after appeared the vice-admiral, chastelier-pourtaut de latour, under whose command the flotilla had been placed, bearing a letter from the queen of navarre to her sister of england, in which she was entreated to espouse a quarrel that had arisen not from ambition or insubordination, but from the desire, in the first place, to defend religion, and, next, to rescue a king who was being hurried on to ruin by treacherous advisers.[ ] to these reiterated appeals, and to the solicitations for aid addressed to them by other refugees from papal violence who had found their way to the shores of great britain, the subjects of the queen returned a more gracious answer than the queen herself. the exiled huguenot ministers were received with open arms by men who regarded them as champions of a common christianity,[ ] and some protestant noblemen had in a few weeks after their arrival raised for their relief, the sum--considerable for those days--of one hundred pounds sterling. not only the laity, but even the clergy of the church of england, took a tender pride in receiving the "few servants of god"--some three or four thousand--whom providence had thrown upon their shores. they welcomed them to their cities, and resented the attempts of pope and king to secure their extradition. could the pope, who harbored six thousand usurers and twenty thousand courtesans in his own city of rome, call upon the queen of england to deny the right of asylum to "the poor exiles of flanders and france, and other countries, who either lost or left behind them all that they had--goods, lands, and houses--not for adultery, or theft, or treason, but for the profession of the gospel?" "it pleased god," wrote bishop jewel, "here to cast them on land: the queen of her gracious pity hath granted them harbor. is it become so heinous a thing to show mercy?" "they are our brethren," continued their noble-minded advocate, "they live not idly. if they have houses of us, they pay rent for them. they hold not our grounds but by making due recompense. they beg not in our streets, nor crave anything at our hands, but to breathe our air, and to see our sun. they labor truly, they live sparefully. they are good examples of virtue, travail, faith, and patience. the towns in which they abide are happy, for god doth follow them with his blessings."[ ] [sidenote: misgivings of queen elizabeth.] [sidenote: her double-dealing and effrontery.] queen elizabeth was less decidedly in their favor. her court swarmed with creatures of the spanish king, who openly gloried in the victories of the guises. the ambassadors of charles and philip strove to the utmost to render the huguenots odious to her mind, and to give a false coloring to the war raging in france. her jealousy of the royal prerogative was appealed to, by the repeated declaration that the protestants of france were turbulent men, who, for the slightest occasion and upon the most slender suspicion, were ready to have recourse to arms--enthusiasts, who could not be dissuaded from rash enterprises; sectaries, who employed their consistories and their organized form of church government to levy men, to collect arms, munitions of war, and money--rebels, in fine, who could at any moment rise within an hour, and surprise his most christian majesty's cities and provinces. the abrogation of religious liberty was, therefore, not merely advisable, but absolutely necessary. elizabeth was reminded, also, of her own intolerant measures toward the roman catholics of her dominions; and she was assured that her fears of a combined attack on all the protestants were devoid of foundation--that charles had neither taken up arms, nor revoked the edicts of toleration at the desire of any other prince, still less because of the instance of any private individuals, but of his own free will, in order to secure his kingdom.[ ] these arguments, if they did not convince elizabeth, gave her a fair excuse for trying to maintain an appearance of non-intervention, which the perilous position of england seemed to her to dictate. with the problem of scotland and mary stuart yet unsolved--with a very considerable part of the lords and commons of her own kingdom scarcely concealing their affection for the romish faith--she deemed it hazardous to provoke too far the enmity of philip the second, her brother-in-law, and a late suitor for her hand. as if any better way could be found of warding off from her island the assaults of philip than by rendering efficient aid to condé and orange! as if england's dissimulation and refusal to support the "huguenots" and the "gueux" in any other than an underhand way were likely to retard the sailing of the great expedition that was to turn the pope's impotent threats against the "bastard of england" into fearful realities! as if protestantism, everywhere menaced, could hope for glorious success in any other path than a bold and combined defence![ ] unfortunately elizabeth was fairly launched on a sea of deceitful diplomacy, and not even cecil could hold her back. she gave la mothe fénélon, the french envoy, assurances that would have been most satisfactory could he have closed his eyes to the facts that gave these assurances the lie direct. at one time, with an appearance of sincerity, she told the spanish ambassador, it is true, that she could not abandon the family of châtillon, who had long been her friends, whilst she saw the guises, the declared enemies of her person and state, in such authority, both in the council and the field; that she could not feel herself secure, especially since a member of the french council had inadvertently dropped the hint that, after everything had been settled at home, charles would turn his arms against england. she had rather, consequently, anticipate than be anticipated.[ ] but to la mothe fénélon himself she maintained unblushingly that, so far from helping the french protestants, "there was nothing in the world of which she entertained such horror as of seeing a body rising in rebellion against its head, and that she had no notion of associating herself with such a monster."[ ] and again and again she protested that she was not intriguing in france--that she had sent the huguenots no assistance.[ ] at the same time admiral winter had been despatched with four or five ships of war and a fleet of merchantmen, to carry to la rochelle, in answer to the request of condé and of the queen of navarre, , "angelots" and six pieces of cannon and ammunition.[ ] when the ambassador was commissioned to lay before the queen a remonstrance against this flagrant breach of neutrality, and to demand an answer, within fifteen days, respecting her intentions,[ ] elizabeth, in declaring for peace, had the effrontery to assert that the assistance in cannon and powder (for she denied that any money was left at la rochelle) was involuntary, not only with her, but even with the admiral himself. having dropped into the harbor to obtain the wine and other commodities with which his fleet of merchantmen were to be freighted, admiral winter was approached by the governor of the city, who so strongly pressed him to sell or lend them some pieces of artillery and some powder, which they could not do without, that, considering that he, as well as the ships, were in their power, he thought it necessary to comply with a part of their requests, although it was against his will.[ ] such were the paltry falsehoods to which elizabeth's insincere course naturally and directly led. la mothe fénélon was well aware that admiral winter, besides his public commission, had been furnished with a secret order, authorizing him to assist la rochelle, signed by elizabeth's own hand, without which the wary old seaman absolutely refused to go, doubtless fearing that he might be sacrificed when it suited his mistress's crooked policy. what the order contained was no mystery to the french envoy.[ ] neither party in this solemn farce was deceived, but both wanted peace. catharine would have been even more vexed than surprised had elizabeth confessed the truth, and so necessitated a resort to open hostilities.[ ] as the honor of the government was satisfied, even by the notoriously false story of winter's compulsion, there was no necessity for pressing the question of its veracity to an inconvenient length. [sidenote: fruitless sieges and plots.] the cold winter of - passed without signal events, excepting the great mortality among the soldiers of both camps from an epidemic disease--consequent upon exposure to the extraordinary severity of the season--and the fruitless siege of the city of sancerre by the roman catholics. five weeks were the troops of martinengo detained before the walls of this small place, whose convenient proximity to the upper loire rendered it valuable to the huguenots, not only as a means of facilitating the introduction of their expected german auxiliaries into central france, but still more as a refuge for their allies in the neighboring provinces. the bravery of the besieged made them superior to the forces sent to dislodge them. they repulsed, with great loss to their enemies, two successive assaults on different parts of the works, and, at last, gaining new courage from the advantages they had obtained, assumed the offensive, and forced martinengo and the captains by whom he had been reinforced to retire humiliated from the hopeless undertaking.[ ] meantime, in not less than three important cities which the huguenots hoped to gain without striking a blow, the plans of those who were to have admitted the protestants within the walls failed in the execution; and dieppe, havre, and lusignan remained in the power of the roman catholic party.[ ] [sidenote: growing superiority of anjou's forces.] at the opening of the spring campaign the prince of condé found his position relatively to his opponents by no means so favorable as at the close of the previous year. his loss by disease equalled, his loss by desertion exceeded, that of the duke of anjou; for it was impossible for troops serving at their own expense, however zealous they might be for the common cause, to be kept together, especially during a season of inaction, so easily as the forces paid out of the royal treasury. besides this, the duke of anjou had received considerable reinforcements. two thousand two hundred german reiters, under the rhinegrave and bassompierre, had arrived in his camp. they were the first division of a force of five thousand six hundred men who had crossed the rhine, near the end of december, under philibert, marquis of baden, and others. the young count de tende brought three thousand foot soldiers from provence and dauphiny, and smaller bodies came in from other parts of france.[ ] condé, on the contrary, had received scarcely any accessions to his troops. the "viscounts," whose arrival had turned the scale at the conclusion of the last war, lingered in guyenne, with an army of six thousand foot soldiers and a well-appointed cavalry force, preferring to protect the protestant territories about montauban and castres, and to ravage the lands of their enemies, as far as to the gates of toulouse, rather than leave their homes unprotected and join condé. a dispute respecting precedence had not been without some influence in causing the delay, and m. de piles, who had been twice sent to urge them forward, had only succeeded in bringing a corps of one thousand two hundred arquebusiers and two hundred horse.[ ] it was now expected, however, that realizing the vital importance of opposing to anjou a powerful protestant army, the viscounts would abandon their short-sighted policy; and it was the intention of condé and coligny, after effecting a junction, to march with the combined armies to meet the duke of deux-ponts. anticipating this plan, the court had despatched the dukes of aumale and of nemours to guard the entrance into france from the side of germany. there seemed to be danger that the precaution would prove ineffectual through the jealousy existing between the two leaders; but this danger catharine attempted to avert by removing the royal court to metz, where she could exert her personal influence in reconciling the ambitious rivals.[ ] in order to prevent the threatened union of condé and the viscounts, the duke of anjou now left his winter quarters upon the loire and moved southward. on the other hand, the prince of condé left niort, and, pursuing a course nearly parallel, passed through st. jean d'angely to saintes, thence diverging to cognac, on the charente.[ ] [sidenote: the armies meet on the charente.] the charente, although by no means one of the largest rivers of france, well deserves to be called one of the most capricious. for about a quarter of its length it runs in a northwesterly direction. at civray it abruptly turns southward and flows in a meandering course as far as angoulême, receiving on the way the waters of the tardouère (tardoire), and with it almost completely inclosing a considerable tract of land. at angoulême, the old whim regaining supremacy, the charente again bends suddenly westward, and finally empties into the ocean below rochefort, through a narrow arm of the sea known as the pertuis d'antioche. the tract of country included between the river and the shores of the bay of biscay, comprising a large part of the provinces of aunis and saintonge, was in the undisputed possession of the huguenots. they held the right bank of the river, and controlled the bridges. here they intended to await the arrival of the viscounts. jarnac, an important town on this side, a few miles above cognac, admiral coligny with the advance guard of the prince's army had wrested from the enemy. they had also recovered châteauneuf, a small place situated higher up, and midway between jarnac and angoulême. in pursuance of his plan, the duke of anjou, after crossing the charente near ruffec, had moved around to the south side, determined to prevent the junction of the two huguenot armies. once more châteauneuf fell into his hands; but the garrison, after retreating to the opposite bank, had destroyed the bridge behind them. this bridge the roman catholics set themselves at once to repair. at the same time they began the construction of a bridge of boats in the immediate vicinity. while these constructions were pushed forward with great vigor, the royal army marched down as far as cognac and made a feint of attack, but retired after drawing from the walls a furious cannonade. it was now that prudence demanded that the protestant army should withdraw from its advanced position with only the charente between its vanguard and the far superior forces of the enemy. this was the advice of coligny and of others in the council of war. but condé prevented its prompt execution, exclaiming: "god forbid that it should ever be said that a bourbon fled before his enemies!"[ ] [sidenote: battle of jarnac, march , .] the bridges being now practicable, almost the whole army of anjou was thrown across the charente under cover of the darkness, during the night of the twelfth and thirteenth of march, only a small force remaining on the left bank to protect châteauneuf and the passage. so skilfully was this movement effected that it escaped the observation even of those divisions of the protestant army that were close to the point of crossing. when at length the admiral was advised that the enemy were in force on the northern bank, he at once issued the order to fall back toward condé and the main body of the huguenots. unfortunately, the divisions of coligny's command were scattered; some had been discontented with the posts assigned them, and had on their own responsibility exchanged them for others that better suited their fancy. the very command to concentrate was obeyed with little promptness, and the afternoon was more than half spent before coligny, and d'andelot, who was with him, could begin the retreat. never was dilatoriness more ill-timed. the handful of men with the admiral, near the abbey and hamlet of bassac, fought with desperation, but could not ward off the superior numbers of the enemy. la noue, in command of the extreme rear, with great courage drove back the foremost of the roman catholics, but was soon overpowered and taken prisoner. his men were thrown in disorder upon d'andelot, who, by an almost superhuman effort, not only sustained the shock, but retook and for a short time held the abbey. d'andelot was, however, in turn forced to yield the ground. meantime coligny had called upon condé for assistance, and the prince, leaving his infantry to follow, had hurried back with the few horse that were within reach, and now took position on the left. but it was impossible for so unequal a struggle to continue long. the huguenots were outflanked and almost enclosed between their adversaries and the charente. it was a time for desperate and heroic venture. coligny's forces had lost the ground which they had been contesting inch by inch about a raised causeway. condé himself had but three hundred knights. one of his arms he carried in a sling, because of a recent injury. to render his condition yet more deplorable, his thigh had just been broken, as he rode up, by a kick from the unmanageable horse of his brother-in-law, la rochefoucauld. the prince was no coward. turning to his little company of followers, he exclaimed: "my friends, true noblesse of france, here is the opportunity we have long wished for in vain! our god is the god of battles. he loves to be so called. he always declares himself for the right, and never fails to succor those who serve him. he will infallibly protect us, if, after having taken up arms for the liberty of our consciences, we put all our hope in him. come and let us complete what the first charges have begun; and remember in what a state louis of bourbon entered into the combat for christ and for his native land!" thus having spoken, he bent forward, and, at the head of his devoted band, and under an ensign bearing for device the figure of the roman hero marcus curtius and the singularly appropriate motto, "doux le peril pour christ et le pays," he dashed upon a hostile battalion eight hundred strong.[ ] [sidenote: death of louis, prince of condé.] the conflict was, in the judgment of that scarred old huguenot warrior, agrippa d'aubigné, the sharpest and most obstinate in all the civil wars.[ ] at last condé's horse was killed under him, and the prince was unable to extricate himself. the day was evidently lost, and condé, calling two of the enemies' knights with whom he was acquainted, and the life of one of whom he had on a former occasion saved, raised his visor, made himself known, and surrendered. his captors pledged him their word that his life should be spared, and respectfully endeavored to raise him from the ground. just at that moment another horseman rode up. it was montesquiou, captain of anjou's guards, who came directly from his master, and was charged--so it was said--with a secret commission. he drew a pistol as he approached, and, without inquiring into the terms of the capture, shot condé in the back. the shot penetrated between the joints of his armor, and caused almost instantaneous death. so perished a prince even more illustrious for his courage and intrepidity than for his exalted rank--a prince who had conscientiously espoused the reformed faith, and had felt himself constrained by his duty to his god and to his fellow-believers to assert the rights of the oppressed huguenots against illegal persecution. "our consolation," wrote jeanne d'albret a few weeks later, "is that he died on the true bed of honor, both for body and soul, for the service of his god and his king, and the quiet of his fatherland."[ ] so magnanimous a hero could not be insensible to the invasion of his claims as the representative of the family next in the succession to the valois; but i cannot agree with those who believe that, in his assumption of arms in three successive wars, he was influenced solely, or even principally, by selfish or ambitious motives. his devotion to the cause which he had espoused was sincere and whole-souled. if his love of pleasure was a serious blot upon his character, let charity at least reflect upon the fearful corruption of the court in which he had been living from his childhood, and remember that if condé yielded too readily to its fascinations, and fell into shameful excesses, he yet bore with meekness the pointed remonstrances of faithful friends, and in the end shook off the chains with which his enemies had endeavored to bind him fast.[ ] as a soldier, no one could surpass condé for bravery.[ ] if his abilities as a general were not of the very first order, he had at least the good sense to adopt the plans of gaspard de coligny, the true hero of the first four civil wars. the relations between these two men were well deserving of admiration. on the part of condé there was an entire absence of jealousy of the resplendent abilities and well-earned reputation of the admiral. on the part of coligny there was an equal freedom from desire to supplant the prince either in the esteem of his followers or in military rank. coligny was inflexible in his determination to accept no honors or distinctions that might appear to prejudice the respect due by a châtillon to a prince of royal blood.[ ] the prince of condé was, unfortunately, not the only huguenot leader murdered in cold blood at the battle of jarnac. chastelier-pourtaut de latour, who, having lately brought his flotilla back in safety to la rochelle, had hastened to take the field with the protestants, was recognized after his capture as the same nobleman who, five years before, had killed the sieur de charry at paris, and was killed in revenge by some of charry's friends. robert stuart, the brave leader descended from the royal house of scotland, who was said to have slain constable montmorency in the battle of st. denis, was assassinated after he had been talking with the duke of anjou, within hearing and almost in sight of the duke, by one of the constable's adherents.[ ] [sidenote: henry of navarre remonstrates against the perfidy.] these flagrant violations of good faith incurred severe animadversion. a letter is extant, written by young prince henry of navarre, or in his name, to henry of anjou, on the twelfth of july, , about four months after the battle of jarnac. he begins by answering the aspersions cast upon his mother and himself, and by asserting that, if his age (which, however, is not much less than that of anjou) disqualifies him from passing a judgment upon the present state of affairs, he has lived long enough to recognize the instigators of the new troubles as the enemies of the public weal. it is not henry of navarre, whose honors and dignities are all dependent upon the preservation of france, who seeks the ruin of the kingdom; but, rather, they seek its ruin who, in their eagerness to usurp the crown, have gone the length of making genealogical searches to prove their possession of a title superior to that of the valois, "and have learned how to sell the blood of the house of france against itself,[ ] _constraining the king_, as it were, _to make use of his left arm to cut off his right_, so as more easily to wrest his sceptre from him afterward." in reply to the statement of anjou that stuart alone was killed in cold blood, henry of navarre affirms that he can enumerate many others.[ ] "but i shall content myself with merely reminding you of the manner in which the late prince of condé was treated, inasmuch as it touches you, sir, and because it is a matter well known and free of doubt. for his death has left to posterity an example of as noted treachery, bad faith and cruelty as was ever shown, seeing that those, sir, who murdered him could not be deterred from the perpetration of so wicked an act by the respect they owed to the greatness of your blood, to which he had the honor of being so nearly related, and that they dealt with him as they would have done with the most miserable soldier of the whole army."[ ] the huguenot loss in the battle of jarnac was surprisingly small in the number of men killed. it is probable that, including prisoners, they lost about four hundred men, or about twice as many as the roman catholics.[ ] but the loss was in effect much more considerable. the dead and the prisoners were the flower of the french nobility. among those that had fallen into the enemy's hands were the bastard son of antoine of navarre, françois de la noue, soubise, la loue, and others of nearly equal distinction. of infantry the huguenot army lost but few men, as the regiments, with the exception of that of pluviaut, did not enter the engagement at all. coming up too late, and finding themselves in danger of falling into the hands of the enemy's victorious cavalry, they evacuated jarnac, crossed to the left bank of the charente, and, after breaking down the bridge, retreated leisurely toward cognac. admiral coligny, meantime, upon whom the command in chief now devolved, diverged to the right, and conducted the cavalry in safety to saintes. the roman catholic army, apparently satisfied with the success it had gained, made no attempt at pursuit. the duke of anjou entered jarnac in triumph. with him was brought the corpse of the prince of condé, tied to an ass's back, to be afterward exposed by a pillar of the house where anjou lodged--the butt of the sneers and low wit of the soldiers.[ ] in the first glow of exultation over a victory, the real credit of which belonged to gaspard de tavannes,[ ] anjou contemplated erecting a chapel on the spot where condé fell. the better counsels of m. de carnavalet, however, induced him to abandon a design which would have confirmed all the sinister rumors respecting his complicity in the assassination.[ ] the prince's dead body was given up for interment to the prince of navarre, and found a resting-place in the ancestral tomb at vendôme.[ ] [sidenote: exaggerated bulletins.] henry of anjou was not inclined to suffer his victory to pass unnoticed. almost as soon as the smoke of battle had cleared away, a careful description of his exploit was prepared for circulation, and it was no fault of the compiler if the account he gave was not sufficiently flattering to the young prince's vanity. condé's body had not been four days in the hands of the roman catholics, before anjou wrote to his brother, the king of france, announcing the fact that he had already despatched messengers with the precious document to the pope and the duke of florence, to the dukes of savoy, ferrara, parma, and urbino, to the republic of venice and the duke of mantua, and to philip of spain; while copies were also under way, intended for the french ambassadors in england and switzerland, for the parliaments of paris, bordeaux, and toulouse, the "prévôt des marchands," and the "échevins" of the capital, and others.[ ] [sidenote: the pope's sanguinary injunctions.] the exaggerated bulletins of the duke of anjou were received with great demonstrations of joy by all the roman catholic allies of france. pope pius the fifth in particular sent warm congratulations to the "most christian king" and to catharine de' medici. but he was very careful to couple his expressions of thanks with an earnest recommendation to pursue the work so auspiciously begun, even to the extermination of the detested heretics. "the more kindly god has dealt with you and us," he promptly wrote to charles, "the more vigorously and diligently must you make use of the present victory to pursue and destroy the remnants of the enemy, and wholly tear up, not only the roots of an evil so great and which had gathered to itself such strength, but even _the very fibres_ of the roots. unless they be thoroughly extirpated, they will again sprout and grow up (as we have so often heretofore seen happen), where your majesty least expects it." pius pledged his word that charles would succeed in his undertaking, "if no respect for men or for human considerations should be powerful enough to induce him to spare god's enemies, who had spared neither god nor him." "in no other way," he added, "will you be able to appease god, than by avenging the injuries done to god with the utmost severity, by the merited punishment of most accursed men." and he set as a warning before the eyes of the french monarch the example of king saul, who, when commanded by god, through samuel the prophet, so to smite the amalekites, an infidel people, that none should escape, neither man nor woman, neither infant nor suckling, incurred the anger and rejection of the almighty by sparing agag and the best of the spoil, instead of utterly destroying them.[ ] two weeks later the pontiff received the unwelcome tidings that some of the huguenot prisoners taken in the battle of jarnac had been spared. la noue, soubise, and other gentlemen had actually been left alive, and were likely to escape without paying the forfeit due to their crimes. at this dreadful intelligence the righteous indignation of pius was kindled. on one and the same day (the thirteenth of april) he wrote long letters to catharine, to anjou, to the cardinal of lorraine, to the cardinal of bourbon, as well as to charles himself.[ ] of all these letters the tenor was identical. such slackness to execute vengeance would certainly provoke god's patience to anger; the king must visit condign punishment upon the enemies of god and the rebels against his own authority. to the victor of jarnac he was specially urgent, supplicating him to counteract any leanings that might be shown to an impious mercy. "your brother's rebels have disturbed the public tranquillity of the realm. they have, so far as in them lay, subverted the catholic religion, have burned churches, have most cruelly slain the priests of almighty god, have committed numberless other crimes; consequently they deserve to receive those extreme penalties (_supplicia_) that are ordained by the laws. and if any of their number shall attempt, through the intercession of your nobles with the king your brother, to escape the penalties they deserve, it is your duty, in view of your piety to god and zeal for the divine honor, to reject the prayers of all that intercede for them, and to show yourself equally inexorable to all."[ ] [sidenote: the sanguinary action of the parliament of bordeaux.] was it in consequence of the known desire of the occupant of the holy see that the policy of the french courts of justice became more and more sanguinary? we can scarcely doubt that the pope's injunctions had much to do with these increasing severities. beginning in march, , the parliament of bordeaux issued a series of decrees condemning a crowd of protestants to death. the names that appear upon the records within the compass of one year number not less than _twelve hundred and seventeen_. the victims were taken out of all grades of society--from noblemen, military men, judges, priests and monks, down to humble mechanics and laborers. the lists made out by their enemies prove at least one fact which the huguenots had long maintained: that they counted in their ranks representatives of the first families of the country, as well as of every other class of the population. happily sentence was pronounced generally upon the absent, and the barbarous punishment of beheading, quartering, and exposing to the popular gaze, remained unexecuted. but the incidental penalty of the confiscation of the property of reputed huguenots, which, so far from being a mere formal threat, was in fact the principal object contemplated by the prosecution, proved to be sober reality, and the goods of the banished protestants afforded rich plunder to the informers.[ ] [sidenote: queen elizabeth becomes colder.] upon elizabeth of england the first effect of the reported victory at jarnac was clearly marked. her favorite, the earl of leicester, assured the french ambassador that, although the queen was sorry to see those professing her religion maltreated, yet, as queen, she would arm in behalf of charles when fighting against his own subjects.[ ] her own declarations, however, were not so strong, or perhaps, after a little reflection, she took a more hopeful view of the fortunes of the huguenots. for, although she exhibited curiosity to hear the "true" account, which a special messenger from charles the ninth was commissioned to bring her, and received the tidings in a manner satisfactory to the french ambassador, she would not rejoice at the death of condé, whom she held to be a very good and faithful servant of his majesty's crown, and deplored a war which, whether victory inclined to one side or the other, must lead to the diminution of charles's best forces and the ruin of his noblesse.[ ] [sidenote: spirit of the queen of navarre.] in point of fact, however, the defeat which the royalists had flattered themselves would terminate the war, and over which they had sung te deums, weakened the huguenots very little.[ ] the queen of navarre, on hearing the intelligence, hurried to cognac, where she presented herself to the army, and reminded the brave men who heard her voice that, although the prince of condé, their late leader, was dead, the good cause was not dead; and that the courage of such good men ought never to fail. god had provided, and ever would provide, fresh instruments to uphold his own chosen work. her brief address restored the flagging spirits of the fugitives. when she returned to la rochelle, to devise new means of supplying the necessities of the army, she left behind her men resolved to retrieve their recent losses. they did not wait long for an opportunity. the roman catholics, advancing, laid siege to cognac, confident of easy success. but the garrison, which included seven thousand infantry newly levied, received them with determination. sallies were frequent and bloody, and when, at last, the siege was raised, the army of anjou had sacrificed nearly as many men before the walls of a small provincial city as the huguenots had lost on the much vaunted field of jarnac.[ ] [sidenote: the huguenots recover strength.] the events of the next two or three months certainly exhibited no diminution in the power or in the spirit of the huguenots. st. jean d'angely, into which count montgomery had thrown himself, defied the entire army of anjou, and the siege was abandoned. angoulême, an equally tempting morsel, he tried to obtain, but failed. at mucidan, a town somewhat to the south-west of périgueux, he was more successful. but he effected its capture at the expense of the life of brissac, one of his bravest officers--a loss which he attempted to avenge by murdering the garrison, after it had surrendered on condition that life and property should be spared.[ ] within a month or two after the battle of jarnac the protestants at la rochelle wrote, for queen elizabeth's information, that they were more powerful than ever, that piles had brought them , recruits, that d'andelot was soon to bring the viscounts with a large force.[ ] [sidenote: death of d'andelot.] but the course of that indefatigable warrior was now run. d'andelot's excessive labors and constant exposure had brought on a fever to which his life soon succumbed. there were not wanting those, it is true, who ascribed his sudden death, like most of the deaths of important personages in the latter part of this century, to poison; and huguenot and loyal pamphleteers alike laid the crime at the door of catharine de' medici.[ ] but there is no sufficient evidence to substantiate the accusation, and we must not unnecessarily ascribe this base act to a woman already responsible for too many undeniable crimes.[ ] the death of so gallant and true-hearted a nobleman, a faithful and unflinching friend of the reformation from the time when it first began to spread extensively among the higher classes of the french population, and who had amply atoned for a momentary act of weakness, in the time of henry the second, by an uncompromising profession of his religion on every occasion during the reigns of that monarch's two sons, was deeply felt by his comrades in arms. as "colonel-general of the french infantry," he had occupied the first rank in this branch of the service,[ ] and his experience was as highly prized as his impetuous valor upon the field of battle. the brilliancy of his executive abilities seemed to all beholders indispensable to complement the more calm and deliberative temperament of his elder brother. it was natural, therefore, that the admiral, while pouring out his private grief for one who had been so dear to him, in a touching letter to d'andelot's children,[ ] should experience as deep a sorrow for the loss of his wise and efficient co-operation. he might be pardoned a little despondency as he recalled the prophetic words that had dropped from d'andelot's lips during a brief respite from his burning fever: "france shall have many woes to suffer with you, and then without you; but all will in the end fall upon the spaniard!"[ ] the prospect was not bright. peace was yet far distant--peace, which coligny preferred a thousand times to his own life, but would not purchase dishonorably by the sacrifice of civil liberty and of the right to worship his god according to the convictions of his heart and conscience. the burden of the defence of the protestants had appeared sufficiently heavy when condé, a prince of the blood, was alive to share it with him. but now, with the entire charge of maintaining the party against a powerful and determined enemy, who had the advantage of the possession of the person of the king, and thus was able to cloak his ambitious designs with the pretence of the royal authority, and deprived of a brother whom the army had appropriately surnamed "le chevalier sans peur,"[ ] the task might well appear to demand herculean strength. [sidenote: new responsibility imposed on admiral coligny.] henry of navarre had, indeed, just been recognized as general-in-chief, and he was accompanied by his cousin, henry of condé; but navarre was a boy of little more than fifteen, and his cousin was not much older. nothing could for the present be expected from such striplings; and the public, ever ready to look upon the comical side of even the most serious matters, was not slow in nicknaming them the "admiral's two pages."[ ] coligny, however, was not crushed by the new responsibility which devolved upon him. no longer hampered by the authority of one whose counsels often verged on foolhardiness, he soon exhibited his consummate abilities so clearly, that even his enemies were forced to acknowledge that they had never given him the credit he deserved. "it was soon perceived," observes an author by no means friendly to the huguenots, "that the accident (of condé's death) had happened only in order to reveal in all its splendor the merits of the admiral de châtillon. the admiral had had during his entire life very difficult and complicated matters to unravel, and, nevertheless, he had never had any that were not far below his abilities, and in which, consequently, he had no need of exerting his full capacity. thus those qualities that were rarest, and that exalted him most above others, remained hidden, through lack of opportunity, and would apparently have remained always concealed during the lifetime of the prince of condé, because the world would have attributed to the prince all those results to whose accomplishment it could not learn that the admiral had contributed more than had the former. but, after the battle of jarnac had permitted the admiral to exhibit himself fully on the most famous theatre of europe, the calvinists perceived that they were not so unhappy as they thought, since they still had a leader who would prevent them from noticing the loss they had experienced, so many singular qualities had he to repair it."[ ] [sidenote: the duke of deux ponts comes with german auxiliaries.] wolfgang, duke of deux ponts, had at length entered france, and was bringing to the huguenots their long-expected succor. he had seven thousand five hundred reiters from lower germany, six thousand lansquenets from upper germany, and a body of french and flemish gentlemen, under william of orange and his brother, mouy, esternay and others, which may have swelled his army to about seventeen thousand men in all.[ ] in vain did his cousin, the duke of lorraine, attempt to dissuade him, offering to reimburse him the one hundred thousand crowns he had already spent upon the preparations for the expedition. even condé's death did not discourage him. he came, he said, to fight, not for the prince, but for "the cause."[ ] when about entering his most christian majesty's dominions, he had published the reasons of his coming to assist the huguenots. in this paper he treated as pure calumnies the accusations brought by their enemies against condé, coligny, and their associates, and proved his position by quoting the king's own express declaration, in the recent edicts of pacification, "that he recognized everything they had attempted as undertaken by his orders and for the good of the kingdom."[ ] the point was certainly well taken. charles's various declarations were not remarkably consistent. in one, condé was "his faithful servant and subject," and his acts were prompted by the purest of motives. in the next, he and his fellow-huguenots were incorrigible rebels, with whom every method of conciliation had signally failed. but charles did not trouble himself to attempt to smooth away these contradictions. he is even said to have replied to the envoy whom deux ponts sent him (april, ), demanding the restitution of the edict of january and the payment of thirty thousand crowns due to prince casimir, that "deux ponts was too insignificant a personage (_trop petit compagnon_) to undertake to dictate laws to him, and that, as to the money, he would deliberate about _that_ when the duke had laid down his arms."[ ] the secret of this arrogant demeanor is found in the fact that the court believed it impossible for the germans to join coligny. even so late as the middle of may, when deux ponts had penetrated to autun in burgundy, charles regarded the attempt as well nigh hopeless. the fortunes of the huguenots were desperate. "there remains for them as their last resort," he wrote to one of his ambassadors, "but the single hope that the duke of deux ponts will venture so far as to go to find them where they are. but there is little likelihood that an army of strangers, pursued by another of about equal strength--an army destitute of cities of its own, without means of passing the rivers, favored by no one in my kingdom, dying of hunger, so often harassed and put to inconvenience--should be able to make so long a journey without being lost and dissipated of itself, even had i no forces to combat it." "the duke," continued the king, "will soon repent of his mad project of entering france, and attempting to cross the loire, where such good provision has been made to obstruct him."[ ] [sidenote: they overcome all obstacles and join coligny.] [sidenote: death of deux ponts.] charles had not exaggerated the difficulties of the undertaking; but deux ponts, under the blessing of heaven, surmounted them all. the discord between aumale and nemours rendered weak and useless an army that might, in the hands of a single skilful general, have checked or annihilated him.[ ] mouy and his french comrades were good guides. the loire was reached, while aumale and nemours followed at a respectful distance. guerchy, an officer lately belonging to coligny's army, discovered a ford by which a part of the germans crossed. the main body laid siege to the town of la charité, which was soon reduced (on the twentieth of may), the huguenots thus gaining a bridge and stronghold that proved of great utility for their future operations. six days after the king had demonstrated the impossibility of the enterprise, deux ponts was on the western side of the loire.[ ] meantime, coligny and la rochefoucauld were advancing to meet him with the élite of their army and with all the artillery they had. on approaching limoges on the vienne, they learned that the germans had crossed the river and were but two leagues distant. coligny at once took horse, and rode to their encampment, in order to greet and congratulate their leader. he was too late. the general, who had conducted an army five hundred miles through a hostile country, was in the last agonies of death, and on the next day (the eleventh of june) fell a victim to a fever from which he had for some time been suffering. "it is a thing that ought for all time to be remarked as a singular and special act of god," said a bulletin sent by the queen of navarre to queen elizabeth, "that he permitted this prince to traverse so great an extent of country, with a great train of artillery, infantry, and baggage, and in full view of a large army; and to pass so many rivers, and through so many difficult and dangerous places, of such kind that it is not in the memory of man that an army has passed through any similar ones, and by which a single wagon could not be driven without great trouble, so that it appears a dream to those who have not seen it; and that being out of danger, and having arrived at the place where he longed to be, in order to assist the churches of this realm, god should have been pleased, that very day, to take him to himself; and, what is more, that his death should have produced no change or commotion in his army."[ ] duke wolfgang of deux ponts was quietly succeeded in the command of the german troops by count wolrad of mansfeld. a day later the two armies met with lively demonstrations of joy. in honor of the alliance thus cemented a medal was struck, bearing on the one side the names and portraits of jeanne and henry of navarre, and on the other the significant words, "_pax certa, victoria integra, mors honesta_"--the triple object of their desires.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot success at la roche abeille.] the combined army, now numbering about twenty-five thousand men, soon came to blows with the enemy. the duke of anjou, whose forces were somewhat superior in numbers, had approached within a very short distance of coligny, but, unwilling to risk a general engagement, had intrenched himself in an advantageous position. a part of his army, commanded by strozzi, lay at la roche abeille, where it was furiously assaulted by the huguenots. over four hundred royalists were left dead upon the field, and strozzi himself was taken prisoner. the disaster had nearly proved still more serious; but a violent rain saved the fugitives by extinguishing the lighted matches upon which the infantry depended for the discharge of their arquebuses, and by seriously impeding the pursuit of the cavalry.[ ] [sidenote: furlough of anjou's troops.] although the duke of anjou had recently received considerable reinforcements--about five thousand pontifical troops and twelve hundred florentines, under the command of sforza, count of santa fiore[ ]--it was now determined in a military council to disband the greater part of the army, giving to the french forces a short furlough, and, for the most part, trusting to the local garrisons to maintain the royal supremacy in places now in the possession of the roman catholics. in adopting this paradoxical course, the generals seem to have been influenced partly by a desire to furnish the "gentilhommes," serving at their own expense, an opportunity to revisit their homes and replenish their exhausted purses, and thus diminish the temptation to desertion which had thinned the ranks; partly, also, by the hope that the new german auxiliaries of the huguenots would of themselves melt away in a climate to which they were unaccustomed.[ ] [sidenote: huguenot petition to the king.] meanwhile, the admiral, whose power had never been so great as it now was, exhibited the utmost anxiety to avert, if possible, any further effusion of blood. under his auspices a petition was drawn up in the name of the queen of navarre, and the princes, seigneurs, chevaliers, and gentlemen composing the protestant army. a messenger was sent to the duke of anjou to request a passport for the deputies who were to carry it to the court. but the duke was unwilling to terminate a war in which he had (whether deservedly or not) acquired so much reputation, and reluctant to be forced to resume the place of a subject near a brother whose capricious and jealous humor he had already experienced. he therefore either refused or delayed compliance with the admiral's demand.[ ] coligny succeeded, however, in forwarding the document to his cousin francis, marshal of montmorency--a nobleman who, although he had not taken up arms with the huguenots, virtually maintained, on his estates near paris, a neutrality which, from the suspicion it excited, was not without its perils. montmorency laid the petition before catharine and the king. [sidenote: the single purpose of the huguenots.] the voluminous state papers of the period would possess little claim to our attention, were it not for the singleness of purpose which they exhibit as animating the patriotic party through a long succession of bloody wars. the huguenots were no rebels seeking to undermine the authority of the crown, no obstinate democrats striving to carry into execution an impracticable scheme of government,[ ] no partisans struggling to supplant a rival faction. they were not turbulent lovers of change. they had for their leaders princes and nobles with interests all on the side of the maintenance of order, men whose wealth was wasted, whose magnificent palaces were plundered of their rich contents,[ ] whose lives, with the lives of their wives and children, were jeoparded in times of civil commotion. even the unauthorized usurpations of the foreigners from lorraine[ ] would not have been sufficient to move the greater part of them to a resort to the sword. their one purpose, the sole object which they could not renounce, was the securing of religious liberty. the guises--even that cruel and cowardly cardinal with hands dripping with the blood of the martyrs of a score of years--were nothing to them, except as impersonations of the spirit of intolerance and persecution. liberty to worship their god in good conscience was their demand alike after defeats and after successes, under louis de bourbon or under gaspard de coligny. they did, indeed, sympathize with the first family of the blood, deprived of the position near the throne to which immemorial custom entitled it--and what true frenchman did not? but admiral coligny, rather than the prince of condé, was the type of the huguenot of the sixteenth century--coligny, the heroic figure that looms up through the mist of the ages and from among the host of meaner men, invested with all the attributes of essential greatness--pious, loyal, truthful, brave, averse to war and bloodshed, slow to accept provocation, resolute only in the purpose to secure for himself and his children the most important among the inalienable prerogatives of manhood, the freedom of professing and practising his religious faith. the present petition differed little from its predecessors. it reiterated the desire of the huguenots for peace--a desire evidenced on so many occasions, sometimes when prudence might have dictated a course opposite to that which they adopted. the return they had received for their moderation could be read in broken edicts, and in "pacifications" more sanguinary than the wars they terminated. the protestant princes and gentlemen, therefore, entreated charles "to make a declaration of his will respecting the liberty of the exercise of the reformed religion in the form of a solemn, perpetual, and irrevocable edict." they begged him "to be pleased to grant universally to all his subjects, of whatever quality or condition they might be, the free exercise of that religion in all the cities, villages, hamlets, and other places of his kingdom, without any exception, reservation, modification, or restriction as to persons, times, or localities, with the necessary and requisite securities." true, however, to the spirit of the age, which dreaded unbridled license of opinion as much as it did the intolerance of the papal system, the huguenots were careful to preclude the "libertines" from sheltering themselves beneath this protection, by calling upon charles to require of all his subjects the profession of the one or the other religion[ ]--so far were even the most enlightened men of their country and period from understanding what spirit they were of, so far were they from recognizing the inevitable direction of the path they were so laboriously pursuing! it scarcely needs be said that the petition received no attention from a court not yet tired of war. marshal montmorency was compelled to reply to coligny, on the twentieth of july, that charles refused to take notice of anything emanating from the admiral or his associates until they should submit and return to their duty. coligny answered in a letter which closed the negotiations; protesting that since his enemies would listen to no terms of accommodation, he had, at least, the consolation of having done all in his power to avert the approaching desolation of the kingdom, and calling upon god and all the princes of europe to bear witness to the integrity of his purpose.[ ] [sidenote: coligny's plans overruled.] [sidenote: disastrous siege of poitiers.] the huguenots now took some advantage of the temporary weakness of the enemy in the open field. on the one hand they reduced the city of châtellerault and the fortress of lusignan, hitherto deemed impregnable.[ ] on the other, they despatched into béarn the now famous count montgomery, who, joining the "viscounts," was successful in wresting the greater part of that district from the hands of terrides, a skilful captain sent by anjou, and in restoring it to the queen of navarre.[ ] respecting their plan of future operations a great diversity of opinion prevailed among the huguenot leaders. admiral coligny was strongly in favor of pressing on to the north, and laying siege to saumur. with this place in his possession, as it was reasonable to suppose it soon might be, he would enjoy a secure passage across the river loire into brittany, anjou, and more distant provinces, as he already had access by the bridge of la charité to burgundy, champagne, and the german frontier. unfortunately the majority of the generals regarded it as a matter of more immediate importance to capture poitiers, a rich and populous city, said at that time to cover more ground than any other city in france, with the single exception of paris. they supposed that their recent successes at châtellerault and lusignan, on either side of poitiers, and the six pieces of cannon they had taken at lusignan would materially help them. coligny reluctantly yielded to their urgency, and the army which had appeared before poitiers on the twenty-fourth of july, ,[ ] began the siege three days later. it was a serious blunder. the huguenots succeeded, indeed, in capturing a part of the suburbs, and in reducing the garrison to great straits for food; but they were met with great determination, and with a singular fertility of expedient. the count de lude was the royal governor. henry, duke of guise (son of the nobleman assassinated near orleans in ), with his brother charles, duke of mayenne, and other good captains, had thrown himself into poitiers two days before coligny made his appearance. it was guise's first opportunity to prove to the world that he had inherited his father's military genius; and the glory of success principally accrued to him. he met the assailants in the breach, and contested every inch of ground. their progress was obstructed by chevaux-de-frise and other impediments. boiling oil was poured upon them from the walls. burning hoops were adroitly thrown over their heads. pitch and other inflammable substances fell like rain upon their advancing columns. they were not even left unmolested in their camp. a dam was constructed on the river clain, and the inundation spread to the huguenot quarters. to these difficulties raised by man were added the ravages of disease. many of the huguenot generals, and the admiral himself, were disabled, and the mortality was great among the private soldiers. in spite of every obstacle, however, it seemed probable that coligny would carry the day. "the admiral's power exceedeth the king's," wrote cecil to nicholas white: "he is sieging of poitiers, the winning or losing whereof will make an end of the cause. he is entered within the town by assault, but the duke of guise, etc., are entrenched in a stronger part of the town; and without the king give a battle, it is thought that he cannot escape from the admiral."[ ] just at this moment, the duke of anjou, assembling the remnants of his forces, appeared before châtellerault; and the peril to the huguenot city seemed so imminent, that coligny was compelled to raise the siege of poitiers, on the ninth of september, and hasten to its relief. seven weeks of precious time had been lost, and more than two thousand lives had been sacrificed by the huguenots in this ill-advised undertaking. the besieged lost but three or four hundred men.[ ] great was the delight manifested in paris, where, during the prevalence of the siege, solemn processions had gone from notre dame to the shrine of sainte geneviève, to implore the intercession of the patron of the city in behalf of poitiers.[ ] meanwhile the huguenots had been more fortunate on the upper loire, where la charité sustained a siege of four weeks by a force of seven thousand roman catholics under sansac. its works were weak, its garrison small, but every assault was bravely met. in the end the assailants, after severe losses experienced from the enemy and from a destructive explosion of their own magazine, abandoned their enterprise in a panic, on hearing an ill-founded rumor of coligny's approach.[ ] [sidenote: cruelties to the huguenots in the prisons of orleans.] it was fortunate for the protestants of the north and east that they still had sancerre and la charité as asylums from the violence of their enemies. far from their armed companions, there was little protection for their lives or their property. the edict of the preceding september, assuring to peaceable protestants freedom from molestation in their homes, was as much a dead letter as any of its predecessors. the government, the courts of justice, and the populace, were equally eager to oppress them. at orleans the "lieutenant-general" placed all the huguenots of the city, without distinction of age or sex, in the public prisons, upon pretext of providing for the public security. a few days after (on the twenty-first of august) the people, inflamed to fanaticism by seditious priests, attacked these buildings. they succeeded in breaking into the first prison, and every man, woman, and child was murdered. the door of the second withstood all their attempts to gain admission. but the bloodthirsty mob would not be balked of its prey. the whole neighborhood was ransacked for wood and other combustible materials, and willing hands kindled the fire. as the flames rose high above the doomed house, parents who had lost all hope of saving their own lives sought to preserve the lives of their infant children by throwing them to relatives or acquaintances whom they recognized among their persecutors. but there are times when the heart of man knows no pity. the laymen who had been taught that heretics must be exterminated, even to the babe in the cradle, now put into practice the savage lesson they had learned from their spiritual instructors. fathers and brothers took a cruel pleasure in receiving the hapless infants on the point of their pikes, or in despatching them with halberds, reserving the same fate for any of more mature age who might venture to appeal from the devouring flames to their merciless fellow-men. the number of the victims of sword and fire is said to have reached two hundred and eighty persons.[ ] [sidenote: montargis a safe refuge.] [sidenote: flight of the refugees to sancerre.] the tragic end of the huguenots at orleans warned the protestants of the villages and open country of the dangers to which they were exposed. many fled with their wives and children to montargis, where the aged renée of ferrara was still living, the unwilling spectator of commotions which she had foreseen and predicted, and which she had striven to prevent. her palace was still what calvin had called it in the time of the first war, "god's hostelry." renée's royal descent, her connection by marriage with the guises--for henry, the present duke, was her grandson--her well-known aversion to civil war,[ ] and, added to these, that demeanor which ever betrayed a consciousness that she was a king's daughter, had thus far protected her from direct insult, staunch and avowed protestant as she was, and had enabled her to extend to a host of fugitives for religion's sake a hospitality which had not yet been invaded. but, the rancor entertained by the two parties increasing in bitterness as the third conflict advanced, it became more and more difficult to repress the impatience felt by the fanatics of paris to rid themselves of an asylum for the adherents of the hated faith within so short a distance--about seventy miles--of the orthodox capital. montargis was narrowly watched. early in march the duchess was warned, in a letter, of pretended plans formed by the refugees on her lands to succor their friends elsewhere in the vicinity--the writer being no other than the adventurer villegagnon, the former vice-admiral, the betrayer of coligny's huguenot colony to brazil, who was now in the roman catholic service, under the duke of anjou.[ ] but the fresh flood of refugees to montargis rendered further forbearance impossible. the preachers stirred up the people, and the people incited the king. renée was told that she must dismiss the huguenot preachers, or submit to receiving a roman catholic garrison in her castle; that the exercise of the protestant religion could no longer be tolerated, and the fugitives must find another home. the duchess could no longer resist the superior forces of her enemies, and tearfully she provided the miserable huguenots for their journey with such wagons as she could find. the company consisted of four hundred and sixty persons, two-thirds women and infants in the arms of their mothers. scarcely knowing whither to direct their steps, they fled toward the loire, and hastened to place the river between them and their pursuers. the precaution availed them little. they had barely reached the vicinity of châtillon-sur-loire,[ ] when the approach of cartier with a detachment of light horse and mounted arquebusiers was announced; and the defenceless throng, knowing that no pity could be expected from men whose hands had already been imbrued in the blood of their fellow-believers, and being exhorted by their ministers to meet death calmly, knelt down upon the ground and awaited the terrible onset. at that very instant, between the hillocks in another direction, and somewhat nearer to the fugitives, a band of cavalry made its appearance. they numbered some one hundred and twenty men, and, as they rode up, were taken for the advance guard of their persecutors. but, on coming nearer and recognizing some of the kneeling suppliants, the knights threw off their cloaks and displayed their white cassocks, the badge of the adherents of the house of navarre. they were two cornets of huguenot horse, on their way from berry to la charité, under the command of bourry, teil, and other captains. in the midst of the tearful acclamations of the women, their new friends turned upon the exultant pursuers, and so bravely did they fight that the roman catholics soon fled, leaving eighty men and two standards on the field. the huguenot knights, who had so providentially become their deliverers, escorted the fugitives from montargis to sancerre and la charité, where they remained in safety until the conclusion of peace.[ ] [sidenote: the "croix de gastines."] meantime the courts of justice emulated the example of cruelty set them by the government and the mob. in may they began by sending to the gallows on the place maubert, in paris, a student barely twenty-two years of age, for having taught some children the huguenot doctrines (huguenoterie), "without any other crime," the candid chronicler adds. after so fair a beginning there was no difficulty in finding good subjects for hanging. accordingly, on the thirtieth of june, three victims more were sacrificed on the old place de grève, "partly for heresy and for celebrating the lord's supper in their house; partly"--so it was pretended--"for having assisted in demolishing altars." in the great number of similar executions with which the sanguinary records of paris abound, the fate of nicholas croquet and the two de gastines--father and son--would have been forgotten, but for the extraordinary measures taken in respect to the house where the impiety had been committed of celebrating the lord's supper according to the simple scheme of its first institution. the parisian parliament ordered that "the house of the five white crosses, belonging to the de gastines, situated in the rue saint denis," should be razed to the ground, and that upon the site a stone cross should be placed, with an inscription explanatory of the occasion of its erection. that spot was to serve as a public square for all time, and a fine of , livres, with corporal punishment, was imposed upon any one who should ever undertake to build upon it.[ ] it was not foreseen that military exigencies might presently render imperative a reconciliation with the huguenots, and that the "perpetual" decree of parliament, like the "irrevocable" edicts of the king, might be somewhat abridged by stern necessity. [sidenote: ferocity of parliament against coligny and others.] [sidenote: a price set on the head of the admiral.] the work of blood continued. in july two noblemen were decapitated--the baron de laschêne and the baron de courtène--and denunciation of reputed heretics was vigorously prosecuted, by command of parliament and of the city curates.[ ] two months later a cowardly but impotent blow was struck at a more distinguished personage. parliament undertook to try gaspard de coligny, and, having found him guilty of treason (on the thirteenth of september), pronounced him infamous, and offered a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns for his apprehension, with full pardon for any offences the captor might have committed. lest the exploit, however, should be deemed too difficult for execution, a few days later (on the twenty-eighth of september) the same liberal terms were held out to any one who should murder him. as it was not so easy to capture or assassinate a general who was at that moment in command of an army not greatly inferior to that of the duke of anjou, the court gave the parisian populace the cheaper spectacle of a hanging of the admiral in effigy. it was the eve of the festival of "the exaltation of the cross"--tuesday, the thirteenth of september--and the time was deemed appropriate for the execution of so determined an enemy of the worship of that sacred emblem. while coligny's escutcheon was dragged in dishonor through the streets by four horses, the hangman amused the mob by giving to his effigy the traditional tooth-pick, which he was said to be in the habit of continually using--a facetious trait which the curate of st. barthélemi, of course, does not forget to insert in his brief diary.[ ] nevertheless, that the decree of parliament setting a price upon the admiral's head was no child's play, appeared about this time from the abortive plot of one dominique d'albe, who confessed that he had been hired to poison the huguenot chief, and was hanged by order of the princes.[ ] nor was it without practical significance that the decree itself had been translated into latin, italian, spanish, german, flemish, english, and scotch, and scattered broadcast through europe by the partisans of guise. [sidenote: the huguenots weakened.] meantime the condition of the rival armies in western france promised again, in the view of the court, a speedy solution of the military problem. the duke of anjou had of late been heavily reinforced. with the old troops that had returned to his standard, and the new troops that poured in upon him, he had a well-appointed army of about twenty-seven thousand men, of whom one-third were cavalry. coligny, on the contrary, had been so weakened by his losses at the siege of poitiers, and by the desertion of those whom disappointment at the delays and the expense of the service had rendered it impossible to retain, that he was inferior to his antagonist by nine or ten thousand men. he had only eleven or twelve thousand foot and six thousand horse.[ ] the roman catholic general resolved to employ his preponderance of forces in striking a decisive blow. this appeared the more desirable, since it was known that montgomery was returning from the reduction of béarn, bringing with him six or seven thousand veterans--an addition to the huguenot army that would nearly restore the equilibrium. leaving chinon, where he had been for some time strengthening himself, the duke of anjou crossed the swollen river vienne, on the twenty-sixth of september, and started in pursuit of the huguenots. coligny had been resting his army at faye, a small town about midway between chinon and châtellerault. it was here that the attempt upon his life, to which allusion has just been made, was discovered. and it was from this point that the prince of orange started in disguise, and undertook, with forty mounted companions, a perilous journey across france by la charité to montbéliard, for the purpose of raising in germany the fresh troops of which the admiral stood in such pressing need.[ ] [sidenote: battle of moncontour, october , .] the huguenot general had moved westward, secretly averse to giving battle before the arrival of montgomery, but forced to show a readiness to fight by the open impatience of his southern troops, and by the murmurs of the germans, who openly threatened to desert unless they were either paid or led against the enemy. within a couple of leagues of the town of moncontour, soon to gain historic renown, coligny, believing the roman catholics to be near, drew up his own men in order of battle (on the thirtieth of september); but, receiving from his scouts the erroneous information that there were no considerable bodies of the enemy in the neighborhood, he resumed his march toward the town of which la noue had rendered himself master. the army was scarcely in motion before mouy, commanding the rear, was attacked by a heavy detachment of the duke of anjou's vanguard, under the duke of montpensier. mouy's handful of men stood their ground well, now facing the enemy and driving him off, now slowly retreating, and gave the rest of the huguenot army the opportunity of gaining the opposite side of a marshy tract, through which there flowed a small stream. then they themselves crossed, after losing about a hundred of their number. anjou neglected the chance here afforded him of gaining an entire victory; and coligny, after halting for a short time, drew off toward moncontour, which he reached on the next day without further obstruction. the duke spent the night on the battle-field in token of victory, and then started in pursuit; but, in order to avoid attack while crossing the short, but deep river dive, a tributary of the loire which flows by the walls of moncontour, he turned to the left, and, rapidly ascending to its sources, descended again on the opposite bank. [sidenote: coligny wounded.] [sidenote: heavy losses of the huguenots.] the admiral might still have succeeded in avoiding a capital engagement, and in reaching partenay or some other point of safety, had he not been again embarrassed by the mutiny of the germans, who, as usual, were most urgent for pay on the eve of battle. as it was, before they could be quieted, the duke had made up for his considerable détour, and overtook the protestants a short distance beyond moncontour. coligny, having given command of the right wing to count louis of nassau, interposed the left, of which he himself assumed command, between the main body and the enemy, hoping to get off with a mere skirmish.[ ] in this he was disappointed. attacked in force, his troops made a sturdy resistance. the fight resembled in some of its incidents the conflicts of the paladins of a past age. the elder rhinegrave rode thirty paces in front of his roman catholic knights; coligny as far in advance of the protestants. the two leaders met in open field. the rhinegrave was killed on the spot. the admiral received a severe injury in his face. the blood, gushing freely from the wound, nearly strangled him before his visor could be raised. reluctantly he was compelled to retire to the rear of the army. still the tide of battle ran high. the swiss troops of anjou displayed their accustomed valor. it was matched by that of the huguenots, who several times seemed on the point of winning the day, and already shouted, "victory! victory!" the duke of anjou, who, however little he was entitled to the credit of planning the engagement, certainly displayed great courage in the contest itself, was at one time in extreme peril, and the marquis of baden was killed while riding near him. on the other side, the princes of béarn and condé, who had come to the army from partenay, to encourage the soldiers by their presence, endeavored by word and example to sustain the courage of the outnumbered huguenots.[ ] but at the critical moment, when the roman catholic line had begun to give way, marshal cossé, who as yet had not been engaged, advanced with his fresh troops and changed the fortunes of the day. the personal valor of louis of nassau was unavailing. the german reiters, routed and panic-stricken, fled from the field. encountering their own countrymen, the lansquenets or german infantry, they broke through their ranks and threw them into confusion. into the breach thus made the swiss poured in an irresistible flood. inveterate hatred now found ample opportunity for satisfaction. the helpless lansquenets were slaughtered without mercy. no quarter was given. one of the german colonels, who had been the foremost cause of the morning's mutiny, and who had prevented his soldiers from fighting until their wages were paid, now made them tie handkerchiefs to their pikes to show that they surrendered; but they fared no better than the rest.[ ] others kneeled and begged for mercy of their savage foes, crying in broken french, "_bon papiste, bon papiste moi!_" it was all in vain. of four thousand lansquenets that entered the action, barely two hundred escaped with their lives. three thousand french, enveloped by anjou's cavalry, were spared by the duke's express command, but not before one thousand of their companions had been killed. in all, two thousand french foot soldiers and three hundred knights perished on the field, while with the valets and camp-followers the loss was much more considerable. la noue was again a prisoner in the enemy's hands. so also was the famous d'acier. his captor, count santa fiore, received from pius the fifth a severe letter of rebuke for "having failed to obey his commands _to slay at once every heretic that fell into his hands_."[ ] the battle of moncontour, fought on monday, the third of october, , was a thorough success on the side of the guises and of catharine de' medici. compared with it, the battle of jarnac was only an insignificant skirmish. although, under the skilful conduct of louis of nassau and of wolrad of mansfeld, the remnants of the army drew off to airvault and thence to partenay, escaping the pursuit of aumale and biron, the huguenot losses were enormous, and the spirit of the soldiers was, for the time, entirely crushed.[ ] the roman catholics, on the contrary, had lost scarcely any infantry, and barely five hundred horse, although among the cavalry officers were several persons of great distinction. [sidenote: the roman catholics exulting.] [sidenote: extravagance of parliament.] fame magnified the exploit, and exalted the duke of anjou into a hero. charles himself became still more jealous of his brother's growing reputation. pius the fifth, on receipt of the tidings, sent the latter a brief, congratulating him upon his success, renewing his advice to make thorough work of exterminating the heretics, and warning him against a mercy than which there was nothing more cruel.[ ] to foreign courts--especially to those which betrayed a leaning to the protestant side--the most exaggerated accounts of the victory were despatched. a "relation" of the battle of moncontour, with which philip the second was furnished, stated the huguenot loss at fifteen thousand men, eleven cannon, three thousand wagons belonging to the reiters, and eight hundred or nine hundred horses.[ ] for a moment the court believed that the protestants were ruined, and that their entire submission must inevitably ensue.[ ] the parisian parliament, in the excess of its joy, added the third of october to the number, already excessive, of its holidays, declaring that henceforth no pleadings should be held on the anniversary of so glorious a triumph.[ ] about the same time, in order to exhibit more clearly the spirit by which it was animated, the same dignified tribunal gave the order that the bodies of francis d'andelot and his wife should be disinterred and hanged upon a a gibbet![ ] [sidenote: murder of de mouy by maurevel.] [sidenote: the assassin rewarded with the collar of the order.] the roman catholics were, nevertheless, entirely mistaken in their anticipations of the speedy subjugation of their opponents. the latter were disheartened for a few days, but not in the least disposed to give over the struggle. "the reformed were too numerous," a modern historian well remarks, "too well organized, and had struck their roots too deeply, to be subdued by the loss of a few pitched battles."[ ] the prospect at first was, indeed, very dark. it seemed almost impossible for the huguenots to maintain themselves in the region which for a whole year had been the chief field of operations. as anjou advanced southward, partenay was abandoned without a blow, and after occupying it he pushed on toward niort. of this important place the intrepid de mouy had been placed by coligny in command. not content with a bare defence, he sallied out and repulsed the enemy. but his boldness proved fatal to him. there was a roman catholic "gentilhomme," maurevel by name, who, allured by the reward of fifty thousand crowns offered by parliament for the capture or assassination of admiral coligny, had entered the protestant camp with protestations of great disgust with his former patrons the guises, and had vainly sought an opportunity to take the great chieftain's life. three years later that opportunity was to present itself in the streets of paris itself. loth to return to his friends without accomplishing any noteworthy exploit, maurevel joined de mouy, with whom he so ingratiated himself that the general not only supplied him from his purse, but made him a companion and a bed-fellow. as the huguenots were returning to niort, the traitor found the conjuncture he desired. chancing to be left alone with de mouy, he drew a pistol and shot him in the loins; then putting spurs to his horse, reached with ease the advancing columns of anjou. de mouy was taken back to niort mortally wounded. his friends, contrary to his earnest desire, insisted on taking him by boat down the sèvre to la rochelle, where he died. meanwhile niort, in discouragement, surrendered to the roman catholic army.[ ] the assassin was well rewarded. a letter is extant, written by charles the ninth to the duke of anjou, from plessis-lez-tours, on the tenth of october, , in which the king begs his brother to confer on "charles de louvier, sieur de moureveil, being the person who killed mouy," the collar of the royal order of saint michael, to which he had been elected by the knights companions, as a reward for "his signal service;" and to see that he receive from the city of paris a present commensurate with his merits![ ] [sidenote: fatal error of the court.] catharine de' medici and the cardinal of lorraine came from tours, where they had been watching the course of the war, niort, and the plan of future operations was discussed in their presence. almost every place of importance previously held by the huguenots toward the north and east of la rochelle had fallen, even to the almost impregnable lusignan. saint jean d'angely, on the boutonne, was the only remaining outwork, whose capture must precede an attack on the citadel itself. should the victorious army of the king lay siege to saint jean d'angely, or should it continue the pursuit of coligny and the princes, who, in order to divert it from the undertaking, had retired from saint jean d'angely to saintes, and thence, not long after, in the direction of montauban? this was the question that demanded an instant answer. jean de serres informs us that the protestant leaders were extremely anxious that their enemies should adopt the latter course;[ ] yet the best military authorities on both sides declare without hesitation that the failure of the roman catholics to follow it was the one capital error that saved the huguenots, perhaps, from utter destruction. "hundreds of times have i been amazed," says the roman catholic blaise de montluc, "that so many great and wise captains who were with monsieur (the duke of anjou) should have adopted the bad plan of laying sieges, instead of pursuing the princes, who were routed and reduced to such extremities that they had no means of getting to their feet again." and the protestant françois de la noue devotes an entire chapter of his "discourses" to the proof of the assertion that "as the siege of poitiers was the beginning of the mishaps of the huguenots, so that of saint jean was the means of arresting the good fortune of the catholics." what, it may be asked, led to the commission of so fatal an error? the memoirs of tavannes, who advocated the immediate pursuit of the admiral, ascribe it to the reluctance of the montmorencies to permit their cousin to be overwhelmed; to the jealousy felt by cardinal lorraine of the military successes which threw his brother, the duke of aumale, and his nephew, the duke of guise, into obscurity; and to the suggestions of de retz, the king's favorite, who persuaded charles that it was dangerous to permit the renown of anjou to increase yet further.[ ] it must, however, be remembered that the younger tavannes is not always a good authority; and that where, as in the present instance, the glory of his father is affected, he becomes altogether untrustworthy. if we reject his account as apocryphal, which apparently we must do, there still remains good reason to believe that the siege of saint jean d'angely was agreed to by the majority of the roman catholic leaders from the sincere conviction that its reduction, to be followed by the still more important capture of la rochelle, would annihilate the huguenot party in the west, its stronghold and refuge, and that it could then subsist but little longer in other parts of the kingdom. [sidenote: siege of saint jean d'angely.] the defence of saint jean d'angely had been intrusted by coligny to competent hands. de piles had found the fortifications weak and imperfect; he completed and strengthened them.[ ] with a small garrison of huguenots he repaired by night the breaches made by the enemy's cannon during the day, and repelled every attempt to storm the place. when the siege had advanced about two weeks, charles himself, who was resolved not to suffer henry of anjou any longer to win all the laurels of the war, made his appearance in the roman catholic camp, on the twenty-sixth of october, and summoned the garrison to surrender. de piles, however, declined to listen to the commands of the king, even as he had disobeyed those of the duke, taking refuge in the feudal theory that he could give up the place only to the prince of navarre, the royal governor of the province of guyenne, at whose hands he had received it. yet the position of the protestants was growing extremely perilous. during one of the assaults upon the wall, de piles himself became so thoroughly convinced that saint jean would be carried, that he caused a breach to be made in the fortifications in his rear, in order to facilitate the withdrawal of his troops. happily, he had no need of this mode of escape on the present occasion. meanwhile the most honorable terms were offered him. these he refused to accept; but, finding his stock of ammunition rapidly becoming exhausted, he agreed to a truce of ten days, that he might have time to send a messenger to the princes to obtain their orders; promising, in case he received no succor in the interval, to surrender the city on condition that the garrison should be permitted to retire with their horses, arms and personal effects, and that religious liberty should be granted to all the residents. but, before the armistice had quite expired, saint surin, and forty other brave horsemen from angoulême, succeeded in piercing the enemy's lines, and relieved de piles from an engagement into which he had entered with great reluctance. the hostages on both sides were given up, and the siege was renewed with greater fury than ever. in the end, seeing no prospect of sufficient reinforcement to enable him to maintain his position, de piles capitulated (on the second of december) on similar terms to those that he had before declined, and the garrison marched out with flying banners. seven weeks had they detained the entire army of the victors of moncontour before an ill-fortified place. more than six thousand men had died under its walls, by the casualties of war and by the scarcely less destructive diseases that raged in the camp.[ ] one of the ablest and most enterprising of the royal generals--sebastian of luxemburg, viscount of martigues and governor of brittany--had been killed.[ ] of the protestants, only about a hundred and eighty persons perished, nearly the half of them inhabitants of the town; for the men of saint jean d'angely, and even the women and children, had labored industriously in defending their firesides. it was a part of the compact, that, while neither de piles nor his soldiers should serve on the huguenot side for four months, they should be safely conducted without the roman catholic lines. the duc d'aumale and other leaders seem to have endeavored conscientiously to execute the stipulation; but their followers could not resist the temptation to attack the huguenots as they were traversing the suburbs. nearly all were robbed, and a considerable number--as many, according to agrippa d'aubigné, as fell during the siege--were murdered. de piles, on his arrival at angoulême, wrote to demand the punishment of those who had committed so flagrant a breach of faith, and, when he could obtain no satisfaction, sent a herald to the king to declare that he held himself and his fellow-combatants absolved from all obligations, and that they would at once resume their places in the huguenot army.[ ] nearly three months of precious time elapsed since the disastrous rout of moncontour before the royalists completed the reduction of the region adjoining la rochelle. outside of that citadel of french protestantism only the little town of tonnay, on the charente, still held for the prince of navarre. yet so long as la rochelle itself stood firm, the duke of anjou had accomplished little; and la rochelle had made good use of the respite to strengthen its works. every effort to gain a lodgement in its neighborhood had signally failed. the end of december came, and with it cold and discouragement. anjou's army was dwindling away. the king of spain and the pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of october had ended the war, and santa fiore, the pontifical general, sent to rome twenty-six standards, taken by the italians at moncontour--a present from charles the ninth, which pius accepted with great delight, and dedicated as a trophy in the basilica of st. john lateran.[ ] henry of anjou himself was ill, or was unwilling any longer to endure separation from a court of whose pleasures he was inordinately fond; and, resigning the command of the army into the hands of the eldest son of the duke of montpensier, françois de bourbon--generally known as the prince dauphin--he hastened, at the beginning of the new year, to join charles and catharine de' medici at angers. the french troops, meantime, were either furloughed or scattered, and the generals condemned to inaction, while the german reiters and lansquenets and the swiss pikemen were permitted to return to their own homes.[ ] such was the suicidal policy of the roman catholic party--a policy which saved the huguenots from prostration; for it may with truth be affirmed that the errors committed in the siege of saint jean d'angely, and in disbanding the powerful army of anjou, completely obliterated the advantage which had been won on the bloody field of moncontour.[ ] while the protestants had been forced to abandon one important place after another in poitou, saintonge and aunis, they had in other parts of the kingdom been displaying their old enterprise, and had obtained considerable success. vézelay in burgundy, the birthplace of the reformer theodore beza, passed through a fiery ordeal. this ancient town, built upon the brow of a hill, and strong as well by reason of its situation as of its walls constructed in a style that was now becoming obsolete in france, had been captured at the beginning of the war by some of the neighboring huguenot noblemen, who scaled the walls and surprised the garrison. one of the few points the protestants held in the eastern part of the kingdom, it was regarded as a place of the greatest importance to their cause. [sidenote: huguenot successes. vézelay.] within a few weeks vézelay was twice besieged by a roman catholic army under sansac. a vigorous sortie, in which the huguenots destroyed almost all the engines of war of the assailants, on the first occasion caused the siege to be raised. when sansac renewed his attempt he fared no better. the soldiers who had thrown themselves into the place, with the enthusiastic citizens, repelled every attack, and promptly suppressed treacherous plots by putting to death two persons whom they found engaged in revealing their secrets to the enemy. sansac next undertook to reduce vézelay by hunger; but the huguenots broke his lines, aided by their friends in la charité and sancerre, and supplied themselves abundantly with provisions. when, on the sixteenth of december, sansac finally abandoned the fruitless and inglorious undertaking, he had lost, since october, no fewer than fifteen hundred of his soldiers.[ ] [sidenote: brilliant capture of nismes.] the huguenots of sancerre in turn made an attempt to enter bourges, the capital of the province of berry, by promising a large sum of money to the officer second in command of the citadel; but he revealed their plan to his superior, m. de la chastre, governor of the province, and the advanced party which had been admitted within the gates (on the twenty-first of december) fell into the snare prepared for them.[ ] the capture of nismes--"the city of antiquities"--more than compensated for the failure at bourges. rarely has an enterprise of equal difficulty been more patiently prosecuted, or been crowned with more brilliant success. the exiled protestants, a large and important class, had now for many months been subjected to the greatest hardships, and were anxiously watching an opportunity to return to their homes. at last a carpenter presented himself, who had long revolved the matter in his mind, and had discovered a method of introducing the huguenots into the city which promised well. there was a fountain, a short distance from the walls of nismes, known to the ancients by the same name as the city itself--nemausus--whose copious stream, put to good service by the inhabitants, turned a number of mills within the municipal limits. to admit the waters a canal had been built, which, where it pierced the fortifications, was protected by a heavy iron grating. through this wet channel the carpenter resolved that the huguenots should enter nismes. it so happened that a friend of his dwelt in a house which was close to the wall at this spot; with his help he lowered himself by night from a window into the ditch. a cord, which was slackened or drawn tight according as there was danger of detection or apparent security, served to direct his operations. the utmost caution was requisite, and the water-course was too contracted to permit more than a single person to work at once. provided only with a file, the carpenter set himself to sever the stout iron bars. the task was neither pleasant nor easy. night after night he stood in the cold stream, with the mud up to his knees, exposed to wind and rain, and working most industriously when the roar of the elements covered and drowned the noise he made. it was only for a few minutes at a time that he could work; for, as the place was situated between the citadel and the "porte des carmes," a sentry passed it at brief intervals, and was scarcely out of hearing except when he went to ring the bell which announced a change of guard. fifteen nights, chosen from the darkest of the season, were consumed in this perilous undertaking; and each morning, when the approach of dawn compelled him to suspend his labors, the carpenter concealed his progress by means of wax and mud. all this time he had been prudent enough to keep his own counsel; but when, on the fifteenth of november, his work was completed, he called upon the huguenot leaders to follow him into nismes. a detachment of three hundred men was placed at his disposal. when once the foremost were in the town, and had overpowered the neighboring guards, the huguenots obtained an easy success. the clatter of a number of camp-servants, who were mounted on horseback, with orders to ride in every direction, shouting that the city was in the hands of the enemy, contributed to facilitate the capture. most of the soldiers, who should have met and repelled the protestants, shut themselves up in their houses and refused to leave them. in a few minutes, all nismes, with the exception of the castle, which held out a few months longer, was taken.[ ] [sidenote: coligny encouraged.] when admiral coligny, wounded and defeated, was borne on a litter from the field of moncontour, where the hopes of the huguenots had been so rudely dashed to the ground, his heart almost failed him in view of the prospects of the war and of his faith. two persons seemed at this critical juncture to have exercised on his mind a singular influence in restoring him to his accustomed hopefulness. l'estrange, a simple gentleman, was being carried away in a plight similar to his own, when, having been brought to the admiral's side, he looked intently upon him, and then gave expression to his gratitude to heaven, that, in the midst of the chastisements with which it had seen fit to visit his fellow-believers, there was yet so much of mercy shown, in the words, "yet is god very gentle!"[ ]--a friendly reminder, which, the great leader was wont to say, raised him from gloom and turned his thoughts to high and noble resolve.[ ] nor was the heroic queen of navarre found wanting at this crisis. no sooner had she heard of the disaster than she started from la rochelle, and at niort met the admiral, with such remnants of the army as still clung to him. far from yielding to despondency, jeanne d'albret urged the generals to renew the contest; and, having communicated to them a part of her own enthusiasm, returned to la rochelle to watch over the defence of the city, and to lend still more important assistance to the cause, by writing to queen elizabeth and the other allies of the huguenots, correcting the exaggerated accounts of the defeat of moncontour which had been studiously disseminated by the roman catholic party, and imploring fresh assistance. [sidenote: withdrawal of the troops of dauphiny and provence.] as for coligny, his plans were soon formed. the troops of dauphiny and provence, always among the most reluctant to leave their homes, had long been clamoring for permission to return. it was now impossible to retain them. on the fourteenth of october they started from angoulême, whither they had gone without consulting the protestant generals, and, under the leadership of montbrun and mirabel, directed their course toward their native provinces. in two days they reached the river dordogne at souillac, where a part of their body, while seeking to cross, was attacked by the roman catholics, and suffered great loss. the rest pushed forward to aurillac, in auvergne, which had recently been captured by a huguenot captain, and soon found their way to privas, aubenas, and the banks of the rhône.[ ] thence, after refreshing themselves for a few days, they crossed into dauphiny to renew the struggle for their own firesides.[ ] [sidenote: plan of the admiral's bold march.] on the eighteenth of october, four days after the departure of the dauphinese troops from angoulême, coligny set forth from saintes upon an expedition as remarkable for boldness of conception as for its singularly skilful and successful execution--an expedition which is entitled to rank among the most remarkable military operations of modern times.[ ] in the face of an enemy flushed with victory, and himself leading an army reduced to the mere shadow of its former size, the admiral deliberately drew up the plan of a march of eight or nine months, through a hostile territory, and terminating in the vicinity of the capital itself. as sketched by michel de castelnau from the admiral's own words in conversation with him, the objects of the protestant general were principally these: to satisfy the claims of his mutinous german mercenaries by the reduction of some of the enemy's rich cities in guyenne; to strengthen himself by forming a junction with the army of montgomery and such fresh troops as "the viscounts" might be able to raise; to meet on the lower rhône the recruited forces of montbrun and mirabel; thence to turn northward, and, having reached the borders of lorraine, to welcome the germans whom the elector palatine and william of orange would hold in readiness; and, at last, to bring the war to an end by forcing the roman catholics to give battle, under circumstances more advantageous to the reformed, in the immediate vicinity of paris.[ ] [sidenote: he sweeps through guyenne.] coligny's army was chiefly composed of cavalry; of infantry he had but three thousand men.[ ] the young princes of navarre and of condé, whom he wished to accustom to the fatigues of the march and of the battle-field, while endearing them to the huguenots by their participation in the same perils with the meanest private soldier, were his companions, and had commands of their own. he had left la rochefoucauld in la rochelle to protect the city and the queen of navarre. the admiral's course was first directed to montauban, that city which has been the stronghold of protestantism in southern france down to the present time. but the difficulties of the way, and, particularly, the improbability of finding easy means of crossing so near their mouths the successive rivers, which, rising in the mountainous region of auvergne and the cevennes, all flow westward and empty into the garonne, or its wide estuary, the gironde, compelled coligny to make a considerable deflection to the left. he effected the passage of the dordogne at argentat, a little above the spot where montbrun had sustained his recent check, and, after making a feint of throwing himself into auvergne, crossed the lot below cadenac, and reached montauban in safety.[ ] the count of montgomery, returning from his victorious campaign in béarn, had been ordered to be in readiness in this city. but learning that, by an unaccountable delay, he was still in condom, south of the garonne, coligny marched westward to aiguillon, at the confluence of the lot and the garonne. near this place he constructed, with great trouble, a substantial bridge across the garonne, with the intention of transporting his army to the left bank, and ravaging the country far down in the direction of bordeaux. this bold movement was prevented by blaise de montluc, who, adopting the suggestion of another, and appropriating the credit due to the sagacity of this nameless genius, detached one of the numerous floating windmills that were moored in the garonne, and having loaded it with stones, sent it down with the current against coligny's bridge. not only were the chains that bound the structure broken, but the very boats on which it rested were carried away as far as to bordeaux itself. it was with great difficulty that the admiral brought back to the right bank the division of his army that had already crossed, and with it the troops of count montgomery.[ ] the united army now returned to montauban, where, in the midst of a rich district in part friendly to the huguenots, it spent the last days of and the greater part of the month of january, . its numbers had by this time received such large accessions, that coligny wrote to germany that he had six or seven thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot.[ ] as the reformed population of montauban had contributed enough money to satisfy the prince's indebtedness to the importunate reiters and lansquenets,[ ] the troops were enthusiastic in their devotion to the cause, and pushed their raids under the intrepid la loue south of the garonne toward the bay of biscay, as far as mont de marsan and roquefort in the "pays des landes."[ ] [sidenote: "vengeance de rapin."] [sidenote: coligny pushes on to the rhône.] the huguenots now proceeded towards toulouse, but that city was too strongly fortified and garrisoned to tempt them to make an attack. they inflicted, however, a stern retribution upon the vicinity, devoting to destruction the villas and pleasure-grounds of the members of a parliament that had rendered itself infamous for its injustice and blind bigotry. the cruel fate of rapin, murdered according to the forms of law, simply because he was a protestant and brought from the king an edict containing too much toleration to suit the inordinate orthodoxy of these robed fanatics, was yet fresh in the memory of the soldiers, and fired their blood. on ruined and blackened walls, in more than one quarter, could be read subsequently the ominous words, written by no idle braggarts: "_vengeance de rapin!_" leaving the marks of their passage in a desolated district, the huguenots swept on to the friendly city of castres, and thence through lower languedoc, by carcassonne and montpellier, which they made no attempt to reduce, to uzès and nismes. meanwhile piles had from castres made a marauding expedition with a body of picked troops to the very foot of the pyrenees, and, in retaliation for the aid which the spaniards had furnished charles the ninth, had penetrated to perpignan, and ravaged the county of roussillon.[ ] [sidenote: his singular success and its causes.] thus the huguenots--of whom charles had contemptuously written to his ambassador at london, in january, that they were in so miserable a plight that, even since anjou had dismissed all his men-at-arms after the capture of saint jean d'angely, they dared not show their faces[ ]--had pushed an army from the mouth of the gironde to the mouth of the rhône. if viscount monclar had fallen mortally wounded near castres, and brave la loue had been surprised and killed near montpellier, the protestants had, nevertheless, sustained little injury. they had been largely reinforced on the way, both by the local troops that joined them and by chivalric spirits such as m. de piles, who followed them so soon as he was forced to surrender saint jean d'angely; or, like beaudiné and renty, who had been left with la rochefoucauld to guard la rochelle, but who, impatient of long inaction, at length obtained permission to attach themselves to the princes, and caught up with them at castres, after a journey full of hazardous adventures. the huguenot army, says la noue, had been but an insignificant snow-ball when it started on its adventurous course; but the imprudence of its opponents permitted it to roll on, without hinderance, until it grew to a portentous size.[ ] the jealousy existing between montluc and marshal damville, who commanded for the king--the former as lieutenant-general in gascony, and the latter as governor in languedoc--undoubtedly removed many difficulties from the way of admiral coligny; and montluc openly accused his rival, who was a montmorency, of purposely furthering the designs of his heretical cousin. the accusation was a baseless fabrication; yet it obtained, as such stories generally do, a wide currency among the prejudiced and the ignorant, who could explain damville's failure to impede coligny's progress in no more satisfactory way than as the result of collusion between the son and the nephew of the late constable.[ ] [sidenote: the admiral turns toward paris.] [sidenote: his illness interrupts negotiations.] coligny had not yet accomplished his main object. turning northward, and hugging the right bank of the rhône, he prosecuted his undertaking of carrying the war to the very gates of paris. the few small pieces of artillery the protestants possessed, it was now found difficult to drag over rugged hills that descended to the river's edge. they were, therefore, at first transported to the other side, and finally left behind in some castles garrisoned by the huguenots. the recruits that had been expected from dauphiny came in very small numbers, and it was with diminished forces that coligny and the princes, on the twenty-sixth of may, reached saint Étienne, at that time a small town, which modern enterprise and capital has transformed into a great manufacturing city.[ ] a little farther, at st. rambert on the loire, an incident occurred which threatened to blight all the fair hopes the protestants had now again begun to conceive of a speedy and prosperous conclusion of the war. admiral coligny fell dangerously ill, and for a time serious fears were entertained for his life. it was a moment of anxious suspense. never before had the reformed realized the extent to which their fortunes were dependent on a single man. the lesson was a useful one to the young companions of the princes, who, in the midst of the stern discipline of the camp, had shown some disposition to complain of the loss of the more congenial gayety of the court.[ ] louis of nassau, brother of william of orange, and next in command, was the only person among the protestants that could have succeeded to coligny in his responsible position; but even louis of nassau could not exact the respect enjoyed by the admiral, both with his own troops and with the enemy. indeed, it was the conduct of the roman catholics at this juncture that furnished the clearest proof of the indispensable importance to the huguenots of their veteran leader. the negotiations, which must soon be adverted to, had for some time been in progress, and the court displayed considerable anxiety to secure a peace; but the moment it was announced that coligny was likely to die, the deputies from the king broke them off and waited to see the issue. being asked to explain so singular a course, and being reminded that the huguenots had other generals with whom a treaty might be formed in case of coligny's death, it is said that the deputies replied by expressing their surprise that the protestants did not see the weight and authority possessed by their admiral. "were he to die to-day," said they, "to-morrow we should not offer you so much as a glass of water. as if you did not know that the admiral's name goes farther in giving you consideration than had you another army equal in size to that you have at present!"[ ] [sidenote: engagement of arnay-le-duc.] but gaspard de coligny was destined to die a death more glorious for himself, and to leave behind him a name more illustrious than it would have been had he died on the eve of the return of peace to his desolated country. he recovered, and once more advanced with his brave huguenots. and now the distance between the protestant camp and the roman catholic capital was rapidly diminishing. to meet the impending danger, the king ordered marshal cossé, who had succeeded the prince dauphin in command of the new army, to cross into burgundy, check the admiral's course, and, if possible, defeat him. the two armies met on the twenty-fifth of june, in the neighborhood of the small town of arnay-le-duc.[ ] great was the disparity of numbers. cossé had four thousand swiss, six thousand french infantry, three thousand french, german, and italian horse, and twelve cannon. coligny's army had lost so much during its incessant marches through a thousand difficult places, and in a country where desertion or straying from the main body was so easy, that it consisted of but twenty-five hundred arquebusiers and two thousand horsemen, besides a few recruits from dauphiny. the germans, who constituted about one-half of the cavalry, were ill-equipped; but the french horse were as well armed as any corps the huguenots had been able to set on foot. all were hardened by toil and well disciplined. of artillery the admiral was entirely destitute. the armies took position upon opposite hills, separated by a narrow valley, in which flowed a brook fed by some small ponds. cossé made the attack, and attempted to cross the stream; but, after an obstinate fight of seven hours, his troops were compelled to abandon the undertaking with considerable loss. next the entrenchments thrown up by the huguenots in the neighborhood of the ponds were assaulted. here the roman catholics were subjected to a galling fire, and began to yield. afterward, receiving reinforcements, they seemed to be on the point of succeeding, when coligny brought up m. de piles, the hero of saint jean d'angely, who, supported by count montgomery, soon restored the superiority of the huguenots. the enemy was equally unfortunate in the attempt, simultaneously made, to turn the admiral's position; and, foiled at every point, he retired for the day. on the morrow, both armies reappeared in the same order of battle, but neither general was eager to renew a contest in which the advantage was all with those who stood on the defensive, and, after indulging in a brief and ineffective cannonade, the order was given to the roman catholic troops to return to camp.[ ] [sidenote: coligny approaches paris.] after this indecisive combat, coligny, who had no desire to bring on a general engagement before receiving the considerable accession of troops of which he was in expectation, slipped away from cossé, and though hotly pursued by the enemy's cavalry, made his way to the friendly walls of la charité upon the loire. here he busied himself with preparations for further undertakings, and was engaged particularly in providing his army with a few cannon and mortars, of which he had greatly felt the need, when activity was interrupted by a ten days' truce, dating from the fourteenth of july, the precursor of a definite treaty of peace.[ ] at the expiration of the armistice, coligny advanced, toward the end of july, to his castle of châtillon-sur-loing, and distributed his troops in the vicinity of montargis, still nearer paris. marshal cossé, at the same time, moved in a parallel line through joigny, and took up his position at sens, where he could at once protect the capital and prevent the huguenots from making raids in that fertile and populous province, the "Île de france," from which the whole country had derived its name. leaving the admiral and his brave followers here, at the conclusion of an adventurous expedition of over twelve hundred miles, which had consumed more than nine months, let us glance at the negotiations for peace which had long been in progress, and were now at length crowned with success. [sidenote: progress of the negotiations.] [sidenote: the english rebellion affects the terms offered.] so true was it of the combatants in the french civil wars, that they rarely carried on hostilities but they were also treating for peace, that since the battle of moncontour there had hardly elapsed a month without the discussion of the terms on which arms could be laid aside by both parties. scarcely had the first startling impression made by the defeat of the huguenots passed away before catharine de' medici sent that skilful diplomatist, michel de castelnau, to assure the queen of navarre, at la rochelle, of her personal esteem and affection, as well as of her fervent desire to employ her influence with the king, her son, in effecting a pacification based upon just and honorable conditions. jeanne replied in courteous language; but, while she insisted upon her own hearty reciprocation of the queen mother's wish, she also expressed the suspicion which all the reformed entertained of the sincerity of the leading ministers in the french cabinet, whose relations with spain and with the pope showed that they were intent on nothing less than the utter ruin of the huguenots.[ ] in november the matter took a more definite shape, through marshal cossé, who appeared in la rochelle with propositions of peace. this statesman, otherwise moderate in his counsels, was imbued with the notion that the protestants were so discouraged by their late defeat, that they would gladly accept any terms. but the huguenots, having understood that he was empowered merely to offer them liberty of conscience, without the right to the public worship of god, promptly broke off the negotiations.[ ] a month or two later they were induced to believe that the court was disposed to larger concessions, or, if not, that they might at least justify themselves in the eyes of the world by showing that they were neither unreasonable nor desirous of prolonging the horrors of war. two deputies--jean de la fin, sieur de beauvoir la nocle, and charles de téligny: the one sent by the queen of navarre, the other sent by coligny and the princes, who were already far on their journey through the south of france--came to the king at angers, and presented the demands of the huguenots. these demands certainly did not breathe a spirit of craven submission. the huguenots called not only for complete liberty of conscience, but also for the right to hold their religious assemblies through the entire kingdom, without prejudice to their dignities or honors. they stipulated for the annulling of all sentences pronounced against them; the approval of all that they had done, as done for the welfare of the realm; the restitution of their dignities and property, and the giving of good and sufficient securities for the execution of the edict of pacification.[ ] catharine and her counsellors had undoubtedly gained some wholesome experience since cossé's first proposals. they had already discovered that a single pitched battle had not ruined the huguenots; and they now suspected that a number of additional battles might be required to effect that desirable result. it is not astonishing, however, that the queen mother was not yet ready to grant terms which could scarcely have been conceded even on the morrow of an overwhelming defeat. the articles sent by the king to the protestant leaders as a counter-proposal were therefore of a very different character from those which they had submitted. charles offered to the queen of navarre, the princes of navarre and condé, the admiral, and their followers, entire amnesty, and consented to annul all judicial proceedings made against them during these or the late troubles. he would exact no punishment for any treaties which they might have formed with foreign princes, and would restore their goods, honors, and estates. as to the religious question, he would allow them to hold two cities, in which they might do as they pleased, the king placing in each city a capable "gentilhomme" to maintain his authority and the public tranquillity. elsewhere in france he would tolerate no reformed minister, no exercise of any other religion than his own. neither would he guarantee the restitution of the judicial and other offices once held by protestants, since others had bought them, and the money proceeding from the sale had been spent in defraying the expenses of the war; especially as the clergy must look to the courts for the enforcement of their claims for indemnification for the destruction of the churches and other ecclesiastical property. the king professed himself willing to give all reasonable securities for the performance of his promises, but neglected to make any specification of the nature of those securities.[ ] such were the hard conditions offered--all that catharine and the guises were willing to concede at a time when it was hoped that the huguenots would lose the assistance of one of their secret supporters, elizabeth of england; for the earls of westmoreland and northumberland had risen in the north, and they had not only the best wishes, but the ready co-operation of every spanish and french sympathizer. charles himself was writing to his ambassador at london a letter meant to meet the queen's eye, instructing him to congratulate elizabeth on the progress made in suppressing the insurrection; and catharine, by the same messenger, sent a secret letter of the same date, ordering the same diplomatic agent, in case the rebellion was not at an end, to give aid and comfort to the rebels.[ ] catharine and the guises had not lost heart. moved by repeated supplications, pius the fifth at last decided to excommunicate the heretical daughter of henry and anne boleyn. but, as the bull of the twenty-fifth of february, , had been procured solely by the entreaties of the rebel earls, enforced by the intercessions of the guises, and as it was known that philip the second, so far from desiring it, was strongly opposed to the imprudent policy of the pontiff, the document, which pretended to relieve all the queen's subjects of the obligations of their allegiance, was committed to the charge of the cardinal of lorraine, to launch at elizabeth's devoted head whenever the convenient moment should arrive.[ ] at montréal, near carcassonne, the admiral was again overtaken by a royal messenger, who on this occasion was biron, equally distinguished on the field and in the council-chamber. while the protestants replied to his offer that with heartfelt satisfaction they greeted the king's disposition to restore peace to france, and sent to charles, who was then at châteaubriand, in brittany, a delegation consisting of téligny, beauvoir la nocle, and la chassetière, they distinctly stated that no terms could be entertained which should not include liberty of worship. for they declared that "the deprivation of the exercise of their religion was more insupportable to them than death itself."[ ] but, in fact, the huguenot princes and nobles placed little reliance upon the sincerity of the court, and had no hope of peace so long as they treated at a distance from the capital. accordingly, coligny, in his march up the valley of the rhône, when again approached in the king's name by biron, accompanied by henry de mesmes, sieur de malassise, peremptorily declined to enter into a truce which should interrupt the efficiency of his movement.[ ] [sidenote: better conditions proposed.] [sidenote: charles and his mother for peace.] [sidenote: the war fruitless for its authors.] but when at last the admiral reached the loire, and, at la charité and châtillon, was within a few hours of paris, the attitude of the court in relation to the peace seemed to undergo an entire change, and it became evident that the negotiations, which had previously been employed for the mere purpose of amusing the huguenots, were now resorted to with the view of ending a war already protracted far beyond expectation. nor is it difficult to discover some of the circumstances that tended to bring about this radical mutation of policy.[ ] the resources of the kingdom were exhausted. it was no longer possible to furnish the ready money without which the german and other mercenaries, of late constituting a large portion of the royal troops, could not be induced to enter the kingdom. the pope and philip were lavish of nothing beyond promises and exhortations that above all things charles should make no peace with the heretical rebels. indeed, philip had few men, and no money, to spare. the french troops were in great straits. the gentlemen, who, in return for their immunity from all taxation, were bound to serve the monarch in the field at their own expense, had exhausted their available funds in so long a contest, and it was impossible to muster them in such numbers as the war demanded. charles himself had always been averse to war. his tastes were pacific. if he ever emulated the martial glory which his brother anjou had so easily acquired, the feeling was but of momentary duration, and met with little encouragement from his mother. he had, undoubtedly, consented to the initiation of the war only in consequence of the misrepresentations made by those who surrounded him, respecting its necessity and the ease of its prosecution. he had now the strongest reasons for desiring the immediate return of peace. his marriage with the daughter of the emperor had for some months been arranged, but maximilian refused to permit elizabeth to become the queen of a country rent with civil commotion. catharine de' medici, also, from the advocate of war, had become anxious for peace--tardily returning to the conviction which she had often expressed in former years, that the attempt to exterminate the huguenots by force of arms was hopeless. after two years she was no nearer her object than when the cardinal of lorraine persuaded her to endeavor to seize condé at noyers. jarnac had accomplished nothing; moncontour was nearly as barren a victory. a great part of what had been so laboriously effected by anjou's army in the last months of , la noue had been undoing in the first half of .[ ] the protestants, who were, a few months since, shut up in la rochelle, had defeated their enemies at sainte gemme, near luçon, and had retaken fontenay, niort, the isle d'oléron, brouage, and other places. the baron de la garde, who had lately, in the capacity of "general of the galleys," been infesting the seas in the neighborhood of la rochelle, was compelled to retire to bordeaux.[ ] saintes had been besieged and captured, and the huguenots were advancing to the reduction of st. jean d'angely, not long since so dearly won by the roman catholics.[ ] montluc had, it is true, met with success in béarn, where rabasteins was taken and its entire garrison massacred.[ ] but what were these advantages at the foot of the pyrenees, when an army under gaspard de coligny, after sweeping four hundred leagues through the southern and western provinces, was now in the immediate vicinity of paris? his forces, indeed, were small in numbers, but would speedily grow formidable. the french ambassador sent from london the intelligence that letters of credit had been sent from england to hamburg in order to hasten the entrance into france of some twelve or fifteen thousand germans under duke casimir; that twenty-five hundred men were to be despatched from la rochelle to make a descent on some point in normandy or brittany, in conjunction with the ships of the prince of orange; and that the english were to be invited to co-operate.[ ] if it had proved impracticable to prevent the duc de deux ponts from marching across france to join the confederates near the ocean, what hope was there that the king would be able to hinder the union of coligny and casimir? or, why might not both be reinforced by the troops of la noue, who had been accomplishing such exploits in aunis and saintonge? the princes of germany added their intercessions to the stern logic of the conflict. during the festivities in heidelberg, attending the marriage of john casimir, duke of bavaria, and elizabeth, daughter of the elector of saxony, in june, , the elector palatine, the elector of saxony, the margraves george frederick of brandenburg and charles of baden, louis, duke of würtemberg, the landgraves william, philip and george of hesse, and adolphus, duke of holstein, wrote a joint letter to charles the ninth of france, in which they drew his attention to the injury which the long war he was carrying on with his subjects was inflicting upon the states of the empire, and to the necessity of speedily terminating it if he would retain their good-will and friendship. and they assured him that there was no way of accomplishing this result except by permitting the exercise of the reformed religion throughout the kingdom, and abolishing all distinctions between his majesty's subjects of different faiths.[ ] [sidenote: anxiety of cardinal châtillon.] when the war had so signally failed, it is not strange that the king and his mother should have turned once more to the advocates of peace, with whose return to favor the retirement of the guises from court was contemporaneous. yet the protestants, who knew too well from experience the malignity of that hated family, could not but shudder lest they might be putting themselves in the power of their most determined enemies. the queen of navarre wrote to charles urging him to use his own native good sense, and assuring him that she feared "marvellously" that these well-known mischief-makers would lure him into "a patched-up-peace"--_une paix fourrée_--like the preceding pacifications. the object they had in view was, indeed, the ruin of the huguenots; but the first disaster, she warned him, would fall on the monarch and his royal estate.[ ] cardinal châtillon, when sounded by the french ambassador in england, expressed his eagerness for peace. on selfish grounds alone he would be glad to exchange poverty in england for his revenues of one hundred and twenty thousand a year in france. but he had his fears. "remembering that the king, the queen, and monsieur (the duke of anjou), to confirm the last peace, did him the honor to give him their word, placing their own hands in his, and that those who induced them to break it were those very persons with whom he and his associates now had to conclude the proposed peace," he said, "his hair stood upon end with fear." all that the protestants wanted was security. they would be glad to transfer the war elsewhere--a thing his brother the admiral had always desired; and, if admitted to the king's favor, they would render his majesty the most notable service that had been done to the crown for two hundred years.[ ] [sidenote: royal edict of pacification, st. germain, august , .] the terms of the long-desired peace were at last decided upon by the commissioners, among whom téligny and beauvoir la nocle were most prominent on the protestant side, while biron and de mesmes represented the court. on the eighth of august, , they were officially promulgated in a royal edict signed at st. germain-en-laye. there were in this document the usual stipulations respecting amnesty, the prohibition of insults and recriminations, and kindred topics. the liberty of religious profession was guaranteed. respecting worship according to the protestant rites, the provision was of the following character. all nobles entitled to "high jurisdiction"[ ] were permitted to designate one place belonging to them, where they could have religious services for themselves, their families, their subjects, and all who might choose to attend, so long as either they or their families were present. this privilege, in the case of other nobles, was restricted to their families and their friends, not exceeding ten in number. to the queen of navarre a few places were granted in the fiefs which she held of the french crown, where service could be celebrated even in her absence. in addition to these, there was a list of cities, designated by name--two in each of the twelve principal governments or provinces--in which, or in the suburbs of which, the reformed services were allowed; and this privilege was extended to all those places of which the protestants had possession on the first of the present month of august. from all other places--from the royal court and its vicinity to a distance of two leagues, and especially from paris and its vicinity to the distance of ten leagues--protestant worship was strictly excluded. provision was made for protestant burials, to take place in the presence of not more than ten persons. the king recognized the queen of navarre, the prince her son, and the late prince of condé and his son, as faithful relations and servants; their followers as loyal subjects; deux ponts, orange, and his brothers, and wolrad mansfeld, as good neighbors and friends. there was to be a restitution of property, honors, and offices, and a rescission of judicial sentences. to protect the members of the reformed faith in the courts of justice, they were to be permitted to challenge four of the judges in the parliament of paris; six--three in each chamber--in those of rouen, dijon, aix, rennes, and grenoble; and four in each chamber of the parliament of bordeaux. they were to be allowed a peremptory appeal from the parliament of toulouse. to defend the huguenots from popular violence, four cities were to be intrusted to them for a period of two years--la rochelle, montauban, cognac, and la charité--to serve as places of refuge; and the princes of navarre and condé, with twenty of their followers, were to pledge their word for the safe restoration of these cities to the king at the expiration of the designated term.[ ] [sidenote: dissatisfaction of the clergy.] such were the leading features of the edict of pacification that closed the third religious war, by far the longest and most sanguinary conflict that had as yet desolated france. that the terms would be regarded as in the highest degree offensive by the intolerant party at home and abroad was to be expected. the parisian curate, jehan de la fosse, only spoke the common sentiment of the clergy and of the bigoted roman catholics when he said that "it contained articles sufficiently terrible to make france and the king's faithful servants tremble, seeing that the huguenots were reputed as faithful servants, and what they had done held by the king to be agreeable."[ ] it was not astonishing, therefore, that, although the publication of the edict was effected without delay under the eyes of the court at paris, it gave rise in rouen to a serious riot.[ ] the papal nuncio and the spanish ambassador were indignant. both pius and philip had bitterly opposed the negotiations of the early part of the year. now their ambassadors made a fruitless attempt to put off the evil day of peace; the spanish ambassador not only offering three thousand horse and six thousand foot to extirpate the huguenots, but affirming that "there were no conditions to which he was not ready to bind himself, provided that the king would not make peace with the heretics and rebels."[ ] [sidenote: "the limping and unsettled peace."] for the first time in their history, the relations of the huguenots of france to the state were settled, not by a royal declaration which was to be of force until the king should attain his majority, or until the convocation of a general council of the church, but by an edict which was expressly stated to be "_perpetual and irrevocable_." such the protestants, although with many misgivings, hoped that it might prove. it was not, however, an auspicious circumstance that the popular wit, laying hold of the fact that one of the roman catholic commissioners that drew up its stipulations--biron--was lame, while the other--henri de mesmes--was best known as lord of malassise, conferred upon the new compact the ungracious appellation of "_the limping and unsettled peace_"--"la paix boiteuse et mal-assise."[ ] footnotes: [ ] mémoires d'agrippa d'aubigné (ed. buchon), . [ ] jean de serres, iii. . [ ] mém. de claude haton, ii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . [ ] the text of the edict is given by jean de serres, iii. - . see also de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) , ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. ii. la fosse (journal d'un curé ligueur, ), gives the correct date: "septembre. _la veille du saint michel_ (i.e., _sept._ th) fut rompu l'esdict de janvier, et publié dedans le palais esdict au contraire;" while the ambassador la mothe fénélon alludes to it in a despatch to catharine as "votre édict du xxxe de septembre." correspondance diplomatique, i. . [ ] j. de serres, iii. , ; de thou and castelnau, _ubi supra_, recordon, le protestantisme en champagne, , . [ ] zway edict, u. s. w., _ubi infra_, p. . [ ] castelnau, _ubi supra_. [ ] i have before me this interesting publication, of which the first lines of the title-page (inordinately long and comprehensive, after the fashion of the times) run as follows: "zway edict, sampt einer offnen patent der königlichen würden in franckreich, durch welche alle auffrurische predigten, versamblungen und ubung der newen unchristlichen secten und vermainten religion gantz und gar abgeschafft und allain die römische und bäpstische catholische ware religion gestattet werden sollen.... ." [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) , . [ ] "notre sang nous sera ung secong baptême, par quoy sans aucun empeschement, nous irons avec les autres martyrs droit en paradis." publication de la croisade, hist. de languedoc, v. (preuves) , . see the account, ibid., v. . [ ] ibid., v. (preuves) . the laborious author of the hist. de languedoc, v. , makes a singular mistake in saying "that this bull is dated march th, of the year , which proves that the project had been formed several months before its execution." the date of the bull is, indeed, given as stated at the close of the document; but the addition, "pontificatus nostri anno _quarto_," furnishes the means for correcting it. pius v. was not created pope until january , . see de thou, iii. (liv. xxxix.) . [ ] mémoires de claude haton, ii. , . [ ] jehan de la fosse, . [ ] jean de serres, iii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlix.) . de serres (iii. - ) gives interesting extracts of the letters which jeanne wrote to charles, to his mother, to the duke of anjou, and to her brother-in-law, the cardinal of bourbon. she urged the latter, by every consideration of blood and honor, to shake off his shameful servitude to the counsels of the cardinal of lorraine, whom she openly accused of having conspired to murder bourbon, with marshal montmorency and chancellor l'hospital, during a recent illness of the queen. [ ] jean de serres, iii. - ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) , ; d'aubigné, liv. v., c. , (i. - ). [ ] j. de serres, _ubi supra_. [ ] "c'est en judée proprement que dieu s'est acquis un renom; c'est en israël voirement qu'on voit la force de son nom: en salem est son tabernacle, en sion son sainct habitacle." i quote from an edition of the unaltered huguenot psalter ( ). [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ. liv. v., c. (i. ) states the circumstance that the river fell a foot and a half during the four hours consumed in the crossing, and then rose again as opportunely: "mais il s'en fust perdu la pluspart sans un heur nompareil; ce fut que la riviere s'estant diminuée d'un pied et demi durant le passage de quatre heures, se r'enfla sur la fin;" adding in one of those nervous sentences which constitute a principal charm of his writings: "nous dirions avec crainte _ces courtoisies de loire_, si nous n'avions tous ceux qui ont escrit pour gariment." [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] la noue, c. xx. [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . [ ] jacques de crussol, baron d'acier (or, assier), afterwards duke d'uzès, lieutenant-general of the royal armies in languedoc, etc. according to the abbé le laboureur (iii. - ), it was interest that induced him, a few years later, to become a roman catholic. [ ] le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. . the same author elsewhere (ii. - ) states the army as only , . jean de serres, iii. , , and de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) - , give an account of the difficulties encountered in bringing these troops to the place of rendezvous, and enumerate the leaders and contingents of the three provinces. according to the latter, the total was , men. see agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] jean de serres, iii. , , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.), , ; agrippa d'aubigné, _ubi supra_; davila, bk. iv., p. , ; le laboureur, ii. , . it is more than usually difficult to ascertain the loss of the huguenots at messignac. jean de serres, who states it at , and davila, who says that it amounted to , foot and more than , horse, are the extremes. de thou sets it down at more than , ; d'aubigné at , or , ; castelnau at , foot and horse; and le laboureur, following him, at over , men. [ ] hist. univ., liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] "discours envoyé de la rochelle," accompanying la mothe fénélon's despatch of january , . correspondance diplomatique, i. , . another letter of a later date gives even larger figures-- , foot ( , of them arquebusiers) and , or , horse, besides recruits expected from montauban. ibid., i. . [ ] upwards of , horse and ensigns of foot (which we may perhaps reckon at , men). despatch of la mothe fénélon, dec. , , corresp. diplomatique, i. . [ ] mémoires de tavannes, iii. . de thou, iv. , assigns , foot and , horse to condé; and , foot and , horse, exclusive of the swiss (who, according to tavannes, numbered , ), to anjou. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] "resolution qui sembloit la plus nécessaire aux réformez, pource que difficilement pouvoient-ils maintenir une telle troupe sans solde et sans magazins reglez." agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] see "tableau des phénomènes météorologiques, astronomiques, etc., mentionnés dans les mémoires de claude haton." [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . [ ] "cette roine, _n'aiant de femme que le sexe_, l'âme entière aux choses viriles, l'esprit puissant aux grands affaires, le coeur invincible aux adversitez." agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; relation sent from la rochelle, la mothe fénélon, i. . the prince of condé had also made a solemn protestation in writing, and before a large assembly, before entering upon any belligerent acts. the substance of these frequent documents is so similar that i have deemed it unnecessary to do more than refer to it. see j. de serres, iii. , . the huguenot soldiers had, at the same time, taken an oath to support the cause until the achievement of a peace securing the undisturbed enjoyment of life, honors and religious liberty, and to submit to a careful military discipline. ibid., iii. , - , where the oath and a summary of the rules of discipline are inserted. [ ] "projet d'alliance du prince d'orange avec l'amiral de coligny et le prince de condé pour obtenir entière liberté de conscience dans les pays-bas et en france. le--août l'an ." groen van prinsterer, archives de la maison d'orange-nassau, iii. - . [ ] letter of favelles (dec., ), groen van prinsterer, archives, etc., iii. - . [ ] he was not a "maréchal," as mr. motley inadvertently calls him (dutch republic, ii. ), but a very prominent and successful negotiator, whose eulogy m. de thou, an intimate friend, has pronounced in the d book of his history (ix. ). henry, the first count of schomberg made marshal of france, was not born until . [ ] it was generally believed that schomberg, gaining access to the germans through one of the principal officers, to whom he was related, was the occasion of their disaffection. jean de serres, iii. . "il mesnagea si bien la plus part des capitaines," says agrippa d'aubigné, i. , "que quand le prince leur parla d'aller joindre le prince de condé, _il les trouva tous bons théologiens et mauvais partisans_; discourans de la justice des armes, sans oublier le droit des rois et les affaires qu'ils avoient en leur païs. schomberg s'en revint aiant reçeu quelques injures par genlis." [ ] letter of december , , cissonne, in motley, rise of the dutch republic, ii. , . [ ] news-letter from paris, from the huguenot physician of the duke of jarnac, discovered in the gauntlet of the prince of condé, and sent by anjou, with other papers found on his dead body, to king charles. duc d'aumale, princes de condé, pièces inéd., ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; groen van prinsterer, archives, etc., iii. ; motley, dutch republic, ii. ; ag. d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] m. froude falls into a very natural error, in calling him (history of england, am. edit., ix. ) "the _younger_ châtillon." with the exception of a brother who died in early youth, he was the oldest of the family; but his quiet and more sluggish character inclined him to accept the cardinal's hat, when offered to him by his uncle, the constable; and, rich with the revenues of bishoprics and abbeys, he subsequently renounced all his rights as eldest son to his brother gaspard. froude is, however, in good company. even the usually accurate tytler-fraser says of cardinal châtillon: "this high-born ecclesiastic was in most things the reverse of his _elder_ brother d'andelot." england under edward vi. and mary, i. . [ ] lodged by elizabeth in sion house, not far from hampton court, he was accorded more honor than usually fell to the lot of an envoy of royalty. never, says florimond de ræmond, did the queen meet him but she greeted him with a kiss, and it became a popular saying that condé's ambassador was a much more important personage than the envoy of the king of france. de ortu, progressu, et ruina hæreseon (cologne, ), ii. (l. vi., c. ). [ ] the letter of jeanne to elizabeth, oct. , , is inserted in jean de serres, iii. - . [ ] there were many english clergymen with whom the diversity of order in public worship created no prejudice against the reformed churches of france. of this number was william whittingham, dean of durham, who, when he accompanied the earl of warwick, upon the occupation of havre in , conformed the service of the english garrison to that of the resident protestants. understanding that some of his countrymen had made "frivolous" complaints of his action, the dean justified himself by saint augustine's counsel in such matters, and by alleging the disastrous consequences a different course would have produced on the minds of the french protestants, who, he said, "as they had conceived evil of the infinity of our rites and cold proceedings in religion, so if they should have seen us (but in form only, though not in substance), to use the same or like order in ceremonies which the papists had a little afore observed (against whom they now venture goods and body), they would to their great grief have suspected our doings as not sincere, and have feared in time the loss of that liberty which after a sort they had purchased with the bloodshedding of many thousands." and the dean maintains the wisdom of the course pursued, having "perceived that it wrought here a marvellous conjunction of minds between the french and us, and brought singular comfort to all our people." the bishop of london seems to have concurred in these views, as well as cuthbert vaughan, and probably warwick himself. whittingham to cecil, newhaven (havre), dec. , , state paper office. it ought to be added that whittingham, in this letter, expresses in fact a preference for the french forms to the english, as "most agreeable with god's word, most approaching to the form the godly fathers used, best allowed of the learned and godly in these days, and according to the example of the best reformed churches." dean whittingham, who had married the sister of john calvin, was a leader of the puritan party in the church of england, and the editor and principal translator of the "genevan" version of the english bible. his opponents maintained that he was "a man not in holy orders, either according to the anglican or the presbyterian rite." (history of the church of england, by g. g. perry, canon of lincoln, new york, , p. .) but a commission appointed by the queen to look into the matter, after the dean had been excommunicated by the archbishop of york, reported that "william whittingham was ordained in a better sort than even the archbishop himself." (historic origin of the bible, by edwin cone bissell, new york, , p. .) [ ] "a view of a seditious bull sent into england from pius quintus, bishop of rome, ," etc. works of bishop jewel, edited by r. w. jelf, vii. - . [ ] despatch of la mothe fénélon, dec. , , detailing the justification of charles, which he had made in an interview with queen elizabeth, correspondance diplomatique, i. - . [ ] yet no one could speak more courageous words than elizabeth in her own interests. in december, , she requested the ambassador of francis ii. "to write to his master frankly what she was about to say, viz., that she meant to do her best to defend herself: that she was not of such poverty, nor so void of the obedience of her subjects, but she trusted to be able to do this. _she came of the race of lions, and therefore could not sustain the person of a sheep._" communication with the french ambassador, december , , state paper office. [ ] despatch of la mothe fénélon, dec. , , corresp. dipl., i. , . [ ] "qu'elle n'avoit rien en si grand horreur, en ce monde, que de voir ung corps s'esmouvoir contre sa teste, et qu'elle n'avoit garde de s'adjoindre à ung tel monstre." ibid., i. . [ ] ibid., i. - . [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ); de thou, iv. (liv. xliv.) . la mothe fénélon's despatch of january , (corr. dipl. i. , ), states the assistance at cannon and furniture, barrels of powder, , balls, and £ , . [ ] despatch to la mothe fénélon, march , , and "articles presantez à la royne d'angleterre par le sr de la mothe, etc," corresp. diplom., i. , - . [ ] "considérant luy-mesmes et toute la flotte des marchands estre en leur pouvoir, il trouva nécessaire pour luy de condescendre en partie à leurs demandes, _combien quv ce fût contre sa volonté_." coppie du messaige qui a esté declairé par la majesté de la royne et son conseil, par parolle de bouche, à l'amb. du roy de france, par jehan somer, clerc du signet de sa majesté le iiie jour de mars, . corresp. diplom., i. - . [ ] despatch of dec. , , corresp. diplom., i. , . [ ] in his despatch of march , , la mothe fénélon admits to catharine his great perplexity as to how he should act, so as neither to show too little spirit nor to provoke elizabeth to such a declaration as would compel the king, his master, to declare war at so inopportune a time. corresp. diplom., i. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) , ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. . [ ] de thou, iv. , ; castelnau, _ubi supra_. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) , . [ ] the earl of leicester gives charles a more direct part in the war. "the king hathe bene these two monethes about metz in lorrayne, to empeache the entry of the duke of bipounte, who is set forward by the common assent of all the princes protestants in germany, with twelve thousand horsemen, and twenty-five thousand footemen, to assiste the protestants in france, and to make some final end of their garboyles." letter to randolph, ambassador to the emperor of muscovy, may , , wright, queen elizabeth, i. . the facilities, even for diplomatic correspondence, with so distant a country as muscovy, were very scanty. leicester's despatch is accordingly an interesting résumé of the chief events that had occurred in western europe during the past sixty days. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. ; de thou, iv. , etc. [ ] "ja dieu ne plaise qu'on die jamais que bourbon ait fuyt devant ses ennemis." lestoile, . it is probably to this circumstance that the earl of leicester alludes, when he says that "the prince of condé, through his overmuche hardines and little regard to follow the admirall's advise had his arme broken with a courrire shotte," etc. wright, queen elizabeth, i. , . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., liv. v., c. (i. ); de thou, iv. . [ ] d'aubigné, _ubi supra_. a huguenot patriarch, named la vergne, was noticed by agrippa himself fighting in the midst of twenty-five of his nephews and kinsmen. the dead bodies of the old man and of fifteen of his followers fell almost on a single heap, and nearly all the survivors were taken prisoners. [ ] jeanne d'albret to marie de clèves, april, , rochambeau, lettres d'antoine de bourbon et de jehanne d'albret (paris, ), . [ ] i regret to say that the current representations as to the termination of condé's dishonorable attachment to isabeau de limueil are proved by contemporary documents to be erroneous. the tears and remonstrances of his wife Éléonore de roye (see _ante_, chapter xiv.) may have had some temporary effect. but an anonymous letter among the simancas mss., written march , (and consequently more than six months after Éléonore's death, which occurred july , ), portrays him as "hora più che mai passionato per la sua limolia." duc d'aumale, pièces justif., i. . just as calvin (letter of september , , bonnet, lettres franç., ii. ) had rebuked the prince with his customary frankness, warning him respecting his conduct, and saying that "les bonnes gens en seront offenséz, les malins en feront leur risée," so now coligny and the huguenot gentlemen of his suite united with the protestant ministers in begging him to renounce his present course of life, and contract a second honorable marriage. the latter held up to him "il pericolo et infamia propria, et il scandalo commune a tutta la relligione per esserne lui capo;" the former threatened to leave him. i have seen no injurious reports affecting condé's morals after his marriage, november , , to françoise marie d'orléans longueville. duc d'aumale, princes de condé, i. - . [ ] long the idol of the huguenots, both of high or of low degree, he enjoyed a popularity perpetuated in a spirited song ("la chanson du petit homme"), current so far back as the close of the first war, , the refrain of which, alluding to the prince's diminutive stature, is: "_dieu gard' de mal le petit homme!_" chansonnier huguenot, , etc. [ ] the author of the vie de coligny (cologne, ) gives more than one instance of a deference on the part of the subject of his biography which may seem to the reader excessive, but which alone could satisfy the chivalrous feeling of the loyal knight of the sixteenth century. [ ] brantôme (hommes illustres, oeuvres, viii. , ) relates that honorat de savoie, count of villars, begged the duke of anjou to have stuart given over to him, and, having gained his request, murdered him. [ ] "qui par artifices merveilleusement subtils ont bien sceu vandre le sang de la maison de france contre soy-mesmes." [ ] the earl of leicester wrote to randolph: "robert stuart, chastellier, and certaine other worthy gentlemen, to the number of six, were lykewise taken and slayne, as the frenche tearme it, de sang froid." wright, queen elizabeth, i. . see also cardinal châtillon's letter to the elector palatine, june , , in which the writer declares significantly of condé's murder by montesquiou, "ce qu'il n'eust osé entreprendre sans en avoir commandement _des plus grands_." kluckholn, briefe friedrich des frommen, ii. . [ ] letter of henry of navarre to the duke of anjou, "escript au camp d'availle le xiie jour de juillet ." lettres inédites de henry iv. recueillies par le prince augustin galitzin (paris. ), - . [ ] the huguenot loss is given by jean de serres (iii. ) at killed and taken prisoners. agrippa d'aubigné states it at gentilhommes (hist. univ., i. ). the earl of leicester's words are: "in which conflicte was slayne on both sydes, as we heare, not above foure hundred men" (wright, queen elizabeth, i. , ). castelnau speaks of over a hundred huguenot gentlemen slain and an equal number taken prisoners (liv. vii., c. ). the "adviz donné par mr norrys, ambassadeur pour la royne d'angleterre, prins de ses lettres, envoyées de metz, le d'avril" (la mothe fénélon, i. ), agrees with leicester, but is unique in making anjou's loss greater than that of the huguenots. de thou makes the protestants lose . the untruthful davila says, "the huguenots lost not above seven hundred men, but they were most of them gentlemen and cavaliers of note." [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . la fosse and others have preserved one of the good catholic stanzas composed on this occasion: l'an mil cinq cent soixante et neuf entre congnac et châteauneuf fust apporté sur une ânesse le grand ennemi de la messe. (journal d'un curé ligueur, .) [ ] "on donna l'honneur de cette défaicte à m. de tavannes." la fosse, . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) . claude de sainctes, afterward bishop of evreux, who, it will be remembered, figured at the colloquy of poissy, is credited with the suggestion of the chapel. [ ] the principal authorities consulted for the battle of jarnac, or of bassac, as it is also frequently called, from the abbey near which it raged, are: jean de serres, iii. - ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) - ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; ag. d'aubigné, i. - ; le vray discours de la bataille donnée par monsieur le . iour de mars, , entre chasteauneuf et jarnac, etc., avec privilege (cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, vi. , etc.); discours de la bataille donnée par monseigneur, duc d'anjou et de bourbonnoys, ... contre les rebelles ... entre la ville d'angoulesme et jarnac, près d'une maison nommée vibrac appartenant à la dame de mezières; an inaccurate official account, drawn up at metz by neufville on the first reception of the news, and sent by the spanish ambassador, alava, to philip ii.; la mothe fénélon, corr. dip., vii. - ; davila, bk. iv.; the "relation originale" in documents inédits tirés des coll. mss. de la bibliothèque royale (fr. gov.), iv. , etc. compare the excellent narratives of the duc d'aumale and prof. soldan. the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., i. ( ) , gives a representation of a monument, in the form of an obelisk, about eleven feet in height, erected by the department of the charente, in , on the spot where condé fell. a somewhat similar monument, raised in by the count de jarnac, was destroyed during the first french revolution. [ ] anjou to charles ix., march , , duc d'aumale, les princes de condé, ii. . [ ] apostolicarum pii quinti, p. m., epistolarum libri quinque. antverpiæ, , . [ ] pii quinti epist., - . [ ] ibid., , . [ ] boscheron des portes, hist. du parlement de bordeaux (bordeaux, ), i. , . as the huguenots were condemned, not for heresy, but for rebellion, sacrilege, etc., the learned author finds no mention of fagot and flame. [ ] la mothe fénélon. i. - . [ ] despatch of april , , ibid., i. . [ ] it is evident that the results of the battle were designedly exaggerated by the roman catholics at the time, and have been overrated ever since. agrippa d'aubigné alleges that, out of cornets of cavalry in the huguenot army, only fifteen were engaged; and that of over ensigns of infantry, barely _six_--those under pluviaut--came within a league of the battle-field. hist. univ., _ubi supra_. [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) , . de thou reckons the losses of the roman catholics before cognac at more than men. [ ] de thou, iv. , ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. ; j. de serres, iii. , . [ ] la mothe fénélon, i. . and now, to the insulting _quatrain_ already quoted à propos of condé's death, the huguenot soldiers of angoumois replied in rough verses of their own: le prince de condé il a été tué; mais monsieur l'amiral est encore à cheval, avec la rochefoucauld pour achever tous ces papaux. v. bujeaud, chronique protestante de l'angoumois, . [ ] discours merveilleux de la vie de catherine de medicis (cologne, ), . see the atrocious letter to catharine, which the queen found upon her bed, nov. , , and which purports to have been written from lausanne. in the copy published by le laboureur (ii. - ), it is signed "grand champ;" in that which the editor of claude haton gives in an appendix (p. - ) the name is "emille dardani." the date is doubtful. le laboureur is apparently more correct in giving it as "le troisième mois de la quatrième année après la trahison" (st. bartholomew's day). [ ] the vie de coligny (cologne, ), p. , , says nothing to indicate that the author regarded d'andelot's death as other than natural. but hotman's gasparis colinii vita ( ), p. , mentions the suspicion, and considers it confirmed by the saying attributed to birague, afterward chancellor, that "the war would never be terminated by arms alone, but that it might be brought to a close very easily by _cooks_." cardinal châtillon, in a letter to the elector palatine, june , , alludes to his brother's having died of poison as a well-ascertained fact, "comme il est apparent tant par l'anatomie," etc. kluckholn, briefe frederick des frommen, ii . [ ] since the outbreak of the present war, the court had undertaken to deprive d'andelot of his rank, and had divided his duties between brissac and strozzi. brissac had been killed, and strozzi was now recognized by the court as colonel-general. [ ] the letter written from saintes, may , , is inserted in gasparis colinii vita ( ) pp. - , the author remarking, "quam ipsius manum, atque chirographum præ manibus jam habeo." the possession of so many family manuscripts on the part of the anonymous writer of this valuable contemporary account, is explained by the fact that he was no other than the distinguished francis hotman, in whose hands the admiral's widow, jaqueline d'entremont, or antremont, had placed all the documents she possessed, entreating him to undertake the pious task of compiling a life of her husband. in a remarkable letter which has but lately come to light, dated january , (new style ), after an exordium full of those classical allusions of which the age was so fond, she writes: "ne trouvez étrange, je vous supplie, si j'ai essayé de réveiller vostre plume pour laisser à la postérité autant de témoignages de la vertu de feu monseigneur et mari, que nos ennemis la veulent désigner," etc. bulletin, vi. . [ ] "la france aura beaucoup de maux avec vous, et puis sans vous; mais en fin tout tombera sur l'espagnol." agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, _ubi supra_. [ ] berger de xivrey, lettres missives de henri iv. (paris, ), i. . [ ] histoire de charles ix. par le sieur varillas (cologne, ), ii. , . i am glad to embrace this opportunity of quoting a historian in whose statements of facts i have as seldom the good fortune to concur as in his general deductions of principles. m. de thou (iv. ) remarks in a similar spirit: "il fit voir à la france (et ses ennemis même en convinrent) qu'il étoit capable de soutenir lui seul tout le parti protestant dont on croyoit auparavant qu'il ne soutenoit qu'une partie." [ ] ranke (civil wars and monarchy), ; the statement of jean de serres, iii. , would make the total number a little larger; the accounts of agrippa d'aubigné, i. , and de thou, iv. , make it somewhat smaller. [ ] adviz, etc., la mothe fénélon, i. . [ ] de thou, iv. ; jean de serres, iii. - . this was in february. it was the more natural for wolfgang to defend his course, as he was himself an ancient ally of the king of spain. in the papiers d'état du card. de granvelle, ix. , we have the text of a compact formed oct. , : "lettres de service accordées par le roi d'espagne à wolfgang, comte palatin et duc de deux ponts." according to this document, the duke was bound for three years to obey philip's summons, although he refused to pledge himself to do anything directly or indirectly against the augsburg confession or its supporters. [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] letter of charles ix. to la mothe fénélon, may , , corresp. dipl., vii. , . the same incredulity respecting the possibility of deux ponts's enterprise is expressed by the anonymous author of a memorandum of a journey through france, in documents inédits tirés des mss. de la bibl. royale, iv. . it is alluded to in the "remonstrance" of the protestant princes presented after the junction of the armies. jean de serres, iii. . [ ] castelnau, liv. vii., c. . [ ] de thou, iv. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. ; anquetil, esprit de la ligue, i. . [ ] discours envoyé de la rochelle à la royne d'angleterre. la mothe fénélon, ii. , etc. [ ] de thou, iv. ; lestoile, ; j. de serres, iii. ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. . [ ] castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; de thou, iv. ; jean de serres, iii. (who states the roman catholic loss as higher than given in the text). brantôme ascribes the defeat of strozzi to the circumstance that the matches of _his_ troops were put out by the rain, and that his infantry, unsupported by cavalry, was at the mercy of mouy and the huguenot troopers. colonnels fr., oeuvres, ed. lalanne, vi. . but the "discours envoyé de la rochelle à la royne d'angleterre" (la mothe fénélon, ii. ) states that the huguenots would have done much greater execution and perhaps put an end to the dispute, "n'eust été que, tout ce jour là, la pluye fut si extrême et si grande que noz harquebouziers ne pouvoient plus jouer." la roche abeille, or la roche l'abeille, is a hamlet seventeen miles south of limoges. [ ] according to j. a. gabutius, the biographer of pius v. (sec. , p. ), the pope sent , foot and , horse, and cosmo, duke of florence, , foot and horse. besides these, many nobles attached themselves to the expedition as volunteers. santa fiore was instructed to leave france _the moment he should perceive that the heretics were treated with_. "quod si ipse summus copiarum dux, vel de pace vel de rerum compositione quidquam catholicæ religioni damnosum præsentiret; [pius v.] imperavit e vestigio aut converso itinere in italiam remearet, aut ad catholicum exercitum in belgio cum hæreticis bellantem sese conferret et adjungeret." [ ] de thou, iv. ; vie de coligny, ; gasparis colinii vita, ; jean de serres, iii. . charles ix. in a letter to la mothe fénélon, from st. germains des prés, july , , alludes to the successes of the huguenots, whom anjou cannot resist, "ayant donné congé à la pluspart de sa gendarmerye de s'en aller faire ung tour en leurs maisons." corresp. diplom., vii. , . the furlough, which was to expire on the th of august, was afterward extended by anjou to the st of october. [ ] see vie de coligny, ; de thou, iv. ; jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] yet the "guisards" were never tired of asserting the contrary. sir thomas smith tells us that cardinal lorraine maintained to him that "they [the huguenots] desired to bring all to the form of a republic, like geneva." smith records the conversation at length in a letter to cecil, wishing his correspondent to perceive "how he had need of a long spoon that should eat potage with the devil." the discussion must have been an earnest one. sir thomas was not disposed to boast of being a finished courtier. in fact, he declares that, as to framing compliments, he is "the verriest calf and beast in the world," and threatens to get one bizzarro to write him some, which he will get translated (for all sorts of people), and learn them by heart. he managed on this occasion to speak his mind to lorraine pretty freely respecting the real origin of the war (the conversation took place in ), and told the churchman the uncomplimentary truth, that his brother's deed at vassy was the cause of all the troubles. smith to cecil, rouen, nov. , , state paper office. [ ] not to speak of noyers, belonging to condé, coligny's stately residence at châtillon-sur-loing fell into the hands of the enemy. in direct violation of the terms of the capitulation, the palace was robbed of all its costly furniture, which was sent to paris and sold at auction. château-renard, which also was the property of coligny, was taken by the roman catholics, and became the nest of a company of half-soldiers, half-robbers, under an italian--one fretini--who laid under contribution travellers on the road to lyons. de thou, iv. , ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] how deeply the guises felt the taunt that they were strangers in france, appears from a sentence of the cardinal's to the bishop of rennes (trent, nov. , ), wherein, alluding to the recent birth of a son to the duke of lorraine and catharine de' medici's daughter, he says that he is "merveilleusement aise ... pource que sera occasion aux huguenots de ne nous dire plus princes estrangers." le laboureur, ii. . [ ] "copie d'une remonstrance que ceulx de la rochelle ont mandé avoyr envoyée au roy, après l'arrivée du duc de deux ponts." la mothe fénélon, ii. - . in latin, jean de serres, iii. - . gasparis colinii vita, . [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; jean de serres, iii. , ; de thou, _ubi supra_. [ ] "lusignan la pucelle." de thou, iv. ; jean de serres, iii. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) - ; jean de serres, iii. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. : "pressé par les interests et murmures des poictevins, il sentit en cet endroit une des incommoditez qui se trouve aux partis de plusieurs testes; sa prudence donc cedant à sa nécessité," etc. [ ] letter of sept. , , wright, queen elizabeth, i. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. , etc.; castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; de thou, iv. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. , etc. [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. ; de thou, etc. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ); de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) ; jehan de la fosse, . [ ] that renée was, like all the other prominent huguenots, from the very first opposed to a resort to the horrors of war, is certain. agrippa d'aubigné goes farther than this, and asserts (i. ) that she had become estranged from condé in consequence of her blaming the huguenots for their assumption of arms: "blasmant ceux qui portoient les armes, jusques à estre devenus ennemis, le prince de condé et elle, sur cette querelle." i can scarcely credit this account, of which i see no confirmation, unless it be in a letter to an unknown correspondent, in the national library (mss. coll. béthune, , fol. ), of which a translation is given in memorials of renée of france (london, ), , . it is dated montargis, aug. , : "praying you ... to employ yourself, as i know you are accustomed to do, in whatsoever way shall be possible to you, in striving to arrive at a good peace, in which endeavor i, on my part, shall put forth all my power, if it shall please god. and if it cannot be a general one, _at least it shall be to those who desire it, and who belong to us_." who, however, was the correspondent? the subscription, "your good cousin, renée of france," would appear to point to admiral coligny or some one of equal rank. louis de condé was no longer living. [ ] letter of villegagnon to the duchess of ferrara, montereau, march , , _apud_ mém. de claude haton, ii. appendix, . [ ] it must be remembered that this was a different place from châtillon-sur-loing, admiral coligny's residence, which was not more than fifteen miles distant. the places are frequently confounded with each other. the loing is a tributary of the seine, into which it empties below montereau, after flowing by châtillon-sur-loing, montargis, and nemours. [ ] the fullest and most graphic account of this interesting incident i find in agrippa d'aubigné, i. (liv. v., c. ). see de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) , and memorials of renée of france (london, ), - . the huguenot horsemen numbered not eight hundred, as the author last quoted states, but about one hundred and twenty--"six vingts." [ ] the "discours de ce qui avint touchant la croix de gastines, l'an , vers noel" (mémoires de l'état de france sous charles ix., and archives curieuses, vi. , etc.), contains the quaint decree of the parliament. see journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . as actually erected, the monument consisted of a high stone pyramid, surmounted by a gilt crucifix. besides the decree in question, there were engraved some latin verses of so confused a construction that it was suggested that the composer intended to cast ridicule both on the roman catholics and on the huguenots. m. de thou, who was a boy of sixteen at the time--and who, as son of the first president of parliament, and himself, at a later time, a leading member and president _à mortier_ of that body, enjoyed rare advantages for arriving at the truth--declares (iv. ) that the elder gastines was a venerable man, beloved by his neighbors, and, indeed, by the entire city; and that the execution was compassed by a cabal of seditious persons, who, by dint of soliciting the judges, of exciting the people, of inducing them to congregate and follow the judges with threats as they left parliament, succeeded in causing to be punished with death, in the persons of the gastines, an offence which, until then, had been punished only with exile or a pecuniary fine. [ ] jehan de la fosse, , . [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur, ; mém. de castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; de thou, iv. (liv. l) ; gasp. colinii vita ( ), ; memoirs of g. de coligny, , etc. the arrêt of the parliament is in archives curieuses, vi. , etc. the latin life of coligny ( - ) inserts a manly and christian letter, in the author's possession, written (oct. , ) by the admiral to his own children and those of his deceased brother, d'andelot, who were studying at la rochelle, shortly after receiving intelligence of this judicial sentence and of the wanton injury done to his palace at châtillon-sur-loing. "we must follow our head, jesus christ, who himself leads the way," he writes. "men have deprived us of all that it was in their power to take from us, and if it be god's will that we never recover what we have lost, still we shall be happy, and our condition will be a good one, inasmuch as these losses have not arisen from any harm done by us to those who have brought them upon us, but solely from the hatred they bear toward me for the reason that it has pleased god to make use of me in assisting his church." [ ] jean de serres, iii. , ; mem. of coligny, ; de thou, iv. , ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] jean de serres, iii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) ; castelnau, vii., c. . [ ] de thou, iv. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . the place was also known by the name of foie la vineuse. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . [ ] in the heat of the engagement, the excited imaginations of the combatants even saw visions of celestial champions, as theseus was fabled to have appeared at marathon. a renegade protestant captain afterward assured the cardinal of alessandria that on that eventful day he had seen in mid-air an array of warriors with refulgent armor and blood-red swords, threatening the huguenot lines in which he fought; and he had instantly embraced the roman catholic faith, and vowed perpetual service under the banners of the pontiff. there were others, we are told, to corroborate his account of the prodigy. joannis antonii gabutii vita pii quinti papæ (acta sanctorum, maii ), § , pp. , . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . "ne se trouva oncques gens plus fidelles au camp catholicque que lesditz estrangers, et singulièrement les suisses, lesquelz ne pardonnèrent à ung seul de leur nation germanique de ceux qui tombèrent en leurs mains." mém. de claude haton, ii. . [ ] "che non avesse il comandamanto di lui osservato d'ammazzar subito qualunque heretico gli fosse venuto alle mani." catena, vita di pio v., _apud_ white, mass. of st. bartholomew, , and de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) . with singular inconsistency--so impossible is it generally to carry out these horrible theories of extermination--the roman pontiff himself afterward liberated d'acier without exacting any ransom. de thou, _ubi supra_. "si santafiore lui avoit obéï," says an annotator, "jacques de crussol (d'acier) ne se seroit pas converti, et n'auroit pas laissé une si illustre poterité." [ ] on the battle of moncontour, consult j. de serres, iii. - ; de thou, iv. - ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. ; a roman catholic relation in groen van prinsterer, archives de la maison d'orange nassau, iii. - . [ ] "nihil est enim ea pietate misericordiaque crudelius, quæ in impios et ultima supplicia meritos confertur." pius v. to charles ix., oct. , . pii v. epistolæ (antwerp, ), . the french victories of jarnac and moncontour were celebrated by a medal struck at rome, with the legend, "_fecit potentiam in bracchio suo, dispersit superbos_," and a representation of pius kneeling and invoking the aid of heaven against the heretics. in the distance is seen a combat, and above it appears the divine being directing the issue. figured in "le trésor de numismatique et de glyptique, par paul delaroche" (médailles des papes, plate , no. ), paris, . [ ] la mothe fénélon, vii. , etc., from simancas mss. so claude haton, who is rarely behindhand in such matters, makes the protestants lose fifteen thousand or sixteen thousand men. mémoires, ii. . admiral coligny was for a time believed by the court to be dead or mortally wounded, "mais ne fut rien." ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] if we may credit the curate claude, catharine de' medici alone was vexed at the completeness of the rout and the number of huguenots slain, "inasmuch as she gave them as much support as possible, and encouraged them in rebellion, that the civil wars might continue, in which she took pleasure because of the management of affairs they threw into her hands"--"pour le maniment des affaires qu'elle entreprenoit et manioit." mémoires, ii. . [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), . [ ] jehan de la fosse, . the date is stated as "about oct. th." [ ] ranke, civil wars and monarchy in france, i. . [ ] de thou, iv. ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. . the murderer's name is variously written maurevel, moureveil, montrevel, etc. [ ] this letter, respecting which i confess that i find some difficulties, possesses a history of its own. on the th of ventôse, in the second year of the republic, the original was sent to the national convention, which, the next day, ordered its insertion in the official bulletin, and its preservation in the national library, as emanating "from one of the neros of france." see app. to journal de lestoile, ed. michaud, pt. i., p. , , and the revolutionary bulletins. [ ] "ut sese montalbani cum vicecomitibus conjungerent, et sperantes andium, dum se persequeretur, ab san-jani oppugnandæ instituto destiturum." de statu rel. et reip., iii. . [ ] see soldan, iii. , ; anquetil, esprit de la ligue, i. , etc. [ ] with his usual inaccuracy, davila speaks of saint jean d'angely as "excellently fortified" (eng. trans., p. ). [ ] this number, given by agrippa d'aubigné, i. , and by de thou, iv. (liv. xlv.) , seems the most probable. la popelinière swells it to near , (soldan, ii. ), while castelnau, liv. vii., c. , reduces it to "over , ." strange to say, jean de serres, who, writing and publishing this portion of his history within a year after the conclusion of the third civil war, almost uniformly gives the highest estimates of the roman catholic losses, here makes them about , , or lower than any one else. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, who was generous enough to appreciate valor even in an enemy, calls him "celui qui entamoit toutes les parties difficiles, à qui rien n'estoit dur ny hazardeux, qui en tous les exploits de son temps avoit fait les coups de partie" (i. ). lestoile in his journal (p. , ed. mich.) affirms that he was killed just as he had uttered a blasphemous inquiry of the huguenots, where was now their "dieu le fort," and taunted them with his having become "à ceste heure leur dieu le faible." "le dieu, le fort, l'Éternel parlera," was the first line of a favorite huguenot psalm. [ ] on the siege of saint jean d'angely, see j. de serres, iii. , ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. - ; de thou, iv. - ; castelnau, liv. vii., c. . it scarcely needs to be mentioned that davila, bk. v., p. , knows nothing of any treachery on the part of the roman catholics, but duly mentions that de piles did not observe his promise. [ ] davila, bk. v. (eng. tr., p. and ); de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) . gabutius, in his life of pius v., transcribes the exultant inscription, dictated by the pontiff himself (§ , p. ), and claims for the canonized subject of his panegyric the chief credit of the victory. according to him the italians were the first to engage with the heretics, and the last to desist from the pursuit. [ ] davila, bk. th (eng. tr., p. ); mém. de claude haton, ii. . [ ] "l'hiver arriva, il fallut mettre les troupes en quartier; et le fruit d'une victoire si complette, l'effort d'une armée royale si formidable, fut la prise de quelques places médiocres, pendant que la rochelle, la plus utile de toutes, restoit aux vaincus, et que les princes rétablissoient les affaires, à l'aide d'un délai qu'ils n'avoient point osé se promettre." anquetil, l'esprit de la ligue, i. . [ ] j. de serres, iii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) , , who makes the loss in the first siege men, and in the second over , horsemen; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., l. v., c. (i. , ), who states the total at , foot and near horse; while castelnau, l. vii., c. , speaks of but in all. vézelay, famous in the history of the crusades (see michaud, hist. des croisades, ii. ) as the place where st. bernard in preached the cross to an immense throng from all parts of christendom, is equidistant from bourges and dijon, and a little north of a line uniting these two cities. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ); j. de serres, iii. . about twenty prisoners were taken, to whom their captors promised their lives. afterward there were strenuous efforts made, especially by the priests, to have them put to death as rebels and traitors. m. de la chastre resisted the pressure, disregarding even a severe order of the parliament of paris, accompanied by the threat of the enormous fine of , marks of gold, which bade him send them to the capital. (hist. du berry, etc., par m. louis raynal, , iv, , _apud_ bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., iv. ( ) .) even charles ix. wrote to him, but the governor was inflexible. his noble reply has come to light, dated jan. , , just one month after the failure of the protestant scheme. after urging the danger of retaliation by the huguenots of la charité and sancerre upon the prisoners they held, to the number of more than forty, and the inexpediency of accustoming the people of bourges to bloody executions which they would not fail to repeat, he concludes his remonstrance in these striking words: "nevertheless, sire, if you should find it expedient, for the good of your service, to put them to death, the channel of the courts of justice is the most proper, without recompensing my services, or sullying my reputation with a stain that will ever be a ground of reproach against me. and i beg you, sire, to make use of me in other matters more worthy of a gentleman having the heart of his ancestors, who for five hundred years have served their king without stain of treachery or act unworthy of a gentleman." inedited letter, _apud_ bulletin, _ubi supra_, , . m. de la chastre became one of the marshals of france. he conducted, three years later, the terrible siege of sancerre, famous in history. he had the reputation among the huguenots of being very severe, if not bloodthirsty--a reputation which he deserved, if he was, as henry of navarre styles him, "un des principaux exécuteurs de la sainct barthélemy." (deposition in the trial of la mole, coconnas, etc. archives curieuses, viii. .) la chastre tried to clear himself of the imputation, by recalling the events of . to jean de léry he maintained "qu'il n'est point sanguinaire, ainsi qu'on a opinion, comme aussi il l'avoit desjà bien monstré aux autres troubles, lorsqu'il avoit en sa puissance les sieurs d'espeau, baron de renty, et le capitaine fontaine, qui est en son armée: car encores que la cour du parlement de paris luy fist commandement de les représenter, à peine de , marcs d'or, il ne le voulut faire." jean de léry, "discours de l'extrême famine ... dans la ville de sancerre," archives curieuses, viii. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) - ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. , ); jean de serres, iii. , . [ ] "si est-ce que dieu est très-doux." [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, l. v., c. (i. ). the words were, as m. douen reminds us (clément marot et le psautier huguenot, , ) the first line of the seventy-third psalm of the huguenot psalter. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) ; jean de serres, iii. . [ ] ibid., iii. , etc. [ ] even in december, languet could scarcely imagine that coligny would not return and winter at la rochelle. letter of dec. , , epist. secr., i. . [ ] mém. de castelnau, liv. vii., c. . [ ] at least, so says agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. , (liv. v., cs. and ). the two authorities are not in exact agreement, de thou stating that coligny went to montauban before his march to meet montgomery, while d'aubigné makes him follow the left bank of the dordogne down to aiguillon. gasparis colinii vita ( ), , , supports de thou. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvi.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ); gasparis colinii vita ( ), . the author of this valuable and authentic life of the admiral gives a full description of the bridge. professor soldan is mistaken in saying that the bridge was not yet completed (geschichte des prot. in frank., ii. ). it had been completed, and two days had been spent in taking over the german cavalry ("opere effecto, biduoque in traducendis germanis equitibus consumpto") when the disaster occurred. [ ] languet, letter of january , , epist. secretæ, i. . [ ] gasparis colinii vita ( ), ; vie de coligny (cologne, ), , where the account of the expedition, however, is full of blunders. mr. browning, following this untrustworthy authority, makes admiral coligny cross the garonne and pass through béarn, on his way from saintes to montauban! a glance at the map of france will show that this would have required a much greater bend to the right than he in reality made to the left, since béarn lay entirely south of the river adour. to reach béarn by land _before_ crossing the garonne, as the "vie" evidently imagines he did, would almost have required aladdin's lamp. in fact, the entire passage is a jumble of the exploits of montgomery and coligny. [ ] la popelinière, _apud_ soldan, ii. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) - ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. , ); davila, bk. v., p. ; raoul de cazenove, "rapin-thoyras, sa famille," etc., , . [ ] la mothe fénélon, vii. . [ ] "l'imprudence des catholiques, lesquels laissant rouler, sans nul empeschement, ceste petite pelote de neige, en peu de temps elle _se fit grosse comme une maison_." mém. de la noue, c. xxix. [ ] of course, davila (bk. v., p. , ), who rarely rejects a good story of intrigue, especially if there be a dainty bit of treachery connected with it, adopts unhesitatingly the popular rumor of marshal damville's infidelity to his trust. [ ] st. Étienne possessed already, at the time the "vie de coligny" was written, that branch of industry which still constitutes one of its chief sources of wealth. it was described as a "petite ville fameuse par la quantité d'armes qui s'y fait, et qui se transportent dans les païs étrangers, en sorte que c'est ce qui nourrit presque toute la province." p. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. ). [ ] gasparis colinii vita, , . [ ] arnay-le-duc, or rené-le-duc, as the place was indifferently called, is situated about thirty miles south-west of dijon, on the road to autun. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) - ; agrippa d'aubigné, liv. v., c. (i. - ); castelnau, liv. vii., c. ; davila, bk. v. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . davila attributes to the connivance of marshal cossé the escape of the protestants from arnay-le-duc. this is consistent with the same writer's statement that it was the marshal's intentional slowness that enabled coligny to seize upon arnay-le-duc and post himself so advantageously. [ ] castelnau, liv. vii., c. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . [ ] the articles, a copy of which was sent to the ambassador at the court of elizabeth, in a letter from angers, feb. , , are printed in la mothe fénélon, vii. - . i omit reference in the text to the articles prohibiting foreign alliances and the levy of money, prescribing the dismissal of foreign troops, etc. the two cities referred to in the fifth article are rather to be regarded as places of worship--the only places in the kingdom where protestant worship would be tolerated--than as pledges for the performance of the projected edict, as prof. soldan apparently regards them chiefly, if not exclusively. geschichte des prot. in frankreich, ii. . [ ] charles to ambassador, jan. th; letter of catharine, same date; la mothe fénélon, vii. , . [ ] see froude, history of england, x. . etc. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . cf. soulier, hist. des édits de pacification, . [ ] de thou, iv. . it was at st. Étienne in forez, that the incident occurred. [ ] for a fuller discussion of these circumstances than the limits of this history will permit me to give, i must refer the reader to the work of prof. soldan, geschichte des protestantismus in frankreich, ii. . [ ] la noue was one of the most modest, as well as one of the most capable of generals. "i have felt myself so much the more obliged to speak of it," writes the historian de thou respecting the battle of sainte gemme, "as la noue, the most generous of men, who has written on the civil wars with as much fidelity as judgment, always disposed to render conspicuous the merit of others, and very reserved respecting his own, has not said a word of this victory." de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . [ ] brantôme has written the eulogy of this personage, whose true name was antoine escalin. he was first ambassador at constantinople, where his good services secured his appointment as general of the galleys. after undergoing the displeasure of the king, and a three years' imprisonment for his participation in the massacre of the vaudois, he was reinstated in office. subsequently he was temporarily displaced by the grand prior, and by the marquis of elbeuf. it is an odd mistake of mr. henry white (mass. of st. bartholomew, p. , note) when he says: "in the religious wars he sided with the huguenots." brantôme says: "il haïssoit mortellement ces gens-là." [ ] de thou, iv. - ; agrippa d'aubigné, i. - . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] la mothe fénélon, iii. , . despatch of june st. [ ] de thou, iv. , ; kluckholn, briefe friedrich des frommen, ii. . [ ] la mothe fénélon, iii. , . [ ] letter of april , , rochambeau, lettres d'antoine de bourbon et de jehanne d'albret (paris, ), . [ ] chassanée in his "consuetudines ducatus burgundiæ, fereque totius galliæ" (lyons, ), , defines the "haute justice" by the possession of the power of life and death: "de secundo vero gradu meri imperii, seu altæ justiciæ, est habere gladii potestatem ad animadvertendum in facinorosos homines." [ ] see the edict itself in jean de serres, iii. - ; summaries in de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) , , and agrippa d'aubigné, i. , . [ ] journal d'un curé ligueur, . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] castelnau, liv. vii., c. . the work of this very fair-minded historian terminates with the conclusion of the peace. de thou, iv. (liv. xlvii.) . [ ] "on la disoit boiteuse et mal-assise," says henri de mesmes himself in his account of these transactions, adding with a delicate touch of sarcasm: "je n'en ay point vû depuis vingt-cinq ans qui ait guère duré." le laboureur, add. aux mém. de castelnau, ii. . prof. soldan has already exposed the mistake of sismondi and others, who apply the popular nickname to the preceding peace of longjumeau. see _ante_, chap. xv. chapter xvii. the peace of saint germain. [sidenote: sincerity of the peace.] a problem of cardinal importance here confronts us, in the inquiry whether the peace which had at length dawned upon france was or was not concluded in good faith by the young king and his advisers. was the treaty a necessity forced upon the court by the losses of men and treasure sustained during three years of almost continual civil conflict? were the queen mother and those in whose hands rested the chief control of affairs, really tired of a war in which nothing was to be gained and everything was in jeopardy, a war whose most brilliant successes had been barren of substantial fruits, and had, in the sequel, been stripped of the greater part of their glory by the masterly conduct of a defeated opponent? or, was the peace only a prelude to the massacre--a skilfully devised snare to entrap incautious and credulous enemies? the latter view is that which was entertained by the majority of the contemporaries of the events, who, whether friends or foes of charles and catharine, whether papists or protestants, could not avoid reading the treaty of pacification in the light of the occurrences of the "bloody nuptials." the huguenot author of the "tocsin against the murderers" and capilupi, author of the appreciative "stratagem of charles the ninth"--however much they may disagree upon other points--unite in regarding the royal edict as a piece of treachery from beginning to end. it was even believed by many of the most intelligent protestants that the massacre was already perfected in the minds of its authors so far back as the conference of bayonne, five years before the peace of st. germain, in accordance with the suggestions of philip the second and of alva. this last supposition, however, has been overthrown by the discovery of the correspondence of alva himself, in which he gives an account of the discussions which he held with catharine de' medici on that memorable occasion. for we have seen that, far from convincing the queen mother of the necessity for adopting sanguinary measures to crush the huguenots, the duke constantly deplores to his master the obstinacy of catharine in still clinging to her own views of toleration. it seems equally clear that the peace of st. germain was no part of the project of a contemplated massacre of the protestants. the montmorencies, not the guises, were in power, and were responsible for it. the influence of the former had become paramount, and that of the latter had waned. the cardinal of lorraine had left the court in disgust and retired to his archbishopric of rheims, when he found that the policy of war, to which he and his family were committed, was about to be abandoned. even in the earlier negotiations he had no part, while the queen mother and the moderate morvilliers were omnipotent.[ ] and when francis walsingham made his appearance at the french court, to congratulate charles the ninth upon the restoration of peace, he found his strongest reasons of hope for its permanence, next to the disposition and the necessities of the king, in the royal "misliking toward the house of guise, who have been the nourishers of these wars,"[ ] and in the increase of the royal "favor to montmorency, a chief worker of this peace, who now carrieth the whole sway of the court, and is restored to the government of paris."[ ] at home and abroad, the peace was equally opposed by those who could not have failed to be its warmest advocates had it been treacherously designed. we have already seen that both pope pius the fifth, and the king of spain insisted upon a continuance of the war, and offered augmented assistance, in case the government would pledge itself to make no compact with the heretical rebels. the pontiff especially was unremitting in his persuasions and threats; denouncing the righteous judgment of god upon the king who preferred personal advantage to the claims of religion, and reminding him that the divine anger was wont to punish the sins of rulers by taking away their kingdoms and giving them to others.[ ] the project of a massacre of protestants, had it in reality been entertained by the french court while adopting the peace, could scarcely have been kept so profound a secret from the king and the pontiff who had long been urging a resort to such measures, nor would pius and philip have been suffered through ignorance to persist in so open a hostility to the compact which was intended to render its execution feasible. [sidenote: the designs of catharine de' medici.] if the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, as enacted on the fatal sunday of august, was not premeditated in the form it then assumed--if the peace of st. germain was not, as so many have imagined, a trick to overwhelm the huguenots taken unawares--are we, therefore, to believe that the idea of such a deed of blood was as yet altogether foreign to the mind of catharine de' medici? i dare not affirm that it was. on the contrary, there is reason to believe that the conviction that she might some day find herself in a position in which she could best free herself from entanglement by some such means had long since lodged in her mind. it was not a strange or repulsive notion to the careful student of the code of morality laid down in "il principe." alva had familiarized her with it, and the civil wars had almost invested it in her eyes with the appearance of justifiable retaliation. she had gloated in secret over the story of the queen blanche, mother of louis the ninth, and her successful struggle with her son's insubordinate nobles, telling her countryman, the venetian ambassador correro, with a significant laugh such as she was wont occasionally to indulge in, that she would be very sorry to have it known that she had been reading the old manuscript chronicle, for they would at once infer that she had taken the castilian princess as her pattern.[ ] more unscrupulous than the mother of st. louis, she had revolved in her mind various schemes for strengthening her authority at the expense of the lives of a few of the more prominent huguenot chiefs, convinced, as she was, that protestantism would cease to exist in france with the destruction of its leaders. but, despite pontifical injunctions and spanish exhortations, she formed no definite plans; or, if she did, it was only to unravel on the morrow what she had woven the day before. what barbaro said of her at one critical juncture was true of her generally in all such deliberations: "her irresolution is extreme; she conceives new plans from hour to hour; within the compass of a single day, between morning and evening, she will change her mind three times.[ ]" [sidenote: charles the ninth in earnest.] [sidenote: he tears out the record against cardinal châtillon.] while it is scarcely possible to believe catharine to have been more sincere in the adoption of this peace than in any other event of her life, we may feel some confidence that her son was really in favor of peace for its own sake. he was weary of the war, jealous of his brother anjou, disgusted with the guises, and determined to attempt to conciliate his huguenot subjects, whom he had in vain been trying to crush. apparently he wished to make of the amnesty, which the edict formally proclaimed, a veritable act of oblivion of all past offences, and intended to regard the huguenots, in point of fact as well as in law, as his faithful subjects. an incident which occurred about two months after the conclusion of peace, throws light upon the king's new disposition. cardinal odet de châtillon, deprived by the pope of his seat in the roman consistory, had, on motion of cardinal bourbon, been declared by the parisian parliament to have lost his bishopric of beauvais, on account of his rebellion and his adoption of protestant sentiments. all such judicial proceedings had indeed been declared null and void by the terms of the pacification, but the parliaments showed themselves very reluctant to regard the royal edict. in october, , charles the ninth happening to be a guest of marshal montmorency at his palace of Écouen, a few leagues north of paris, sent orders to christopher de thou, the first president, to wait upon him with the parliamentary records. aware of the king's object, de thou, pleading illness, sent four of his counsellors instead; but these were ignominiously dismissed, and the presence of the chief judge was again demanded. when de thou at last appeared, charles greeted him roughly. "here you are," he said, "and not very ill, thank god! why do you go counter to my edicts? i owe our cousin, cardinal bourbon, no thanks for having applied for and obtained sentence against the house of châtillon, _which has done me so much service, and took up arms for me_." then calling for the records, he ordered the president to point out the proceedings against the admiral's brother, and, on finding them, tore out with his own hand three leaves on which they were inscribed; and on having his attention directed by the marshal, who stood by, to other places bearing upon the same case, he did not hesitate to tear these out also.[ ] [sidenote: his assurances to walsingham.] [sidenote: gracious answer to the german electors.] to all with whom he conversed charles avowed his steadfast purpose to maintain the peace inviolate. he called it his own peace. he told walsingham, "he willed him to assure her majesty, that the only care he presently had was to entertain the peace, whereof the queen of navarre and the princes of the religion could well be witnesses, as also generally the whole realm."[ ] and the shrewd diplomatist believed that the king spoke the truth;[ ] although, when he looked at the adverse circumstances with which charles was surrounded, and the vicious and irreligious education he had received, there was room for solicitude respecting his stability.[ ] there was, indeed, much to strengthen the hands of charles in his new policy of toleration. on the twenty-sixth of november he married, with great pomp and amid the display of the popular delight, elizabeth, daughter of the emperor maximilian the second. this union, far from imperilling the permanence of the peace in france,[ ] was likely to render it more lasting, if the bridegroom could be induced to copy the conciliatory and politic example of his father-in-law. not long after charles received at villers-cotterets an embassy sent by the three protestant electors of germany and the other powerful princes of the same faith. they congratulated him upon the suppression of civil disorder in france, and entreated him to maintain freedom of worship in his dominions such as existed in germany and even in the dominions of the grand turk; lending an ear to none who might attempt to persuade him that tranquillity could not subsist in a kingdom where there was more than one religion. charles made a gracious answer, and the german ambassadors retired, leaving the friends of the huguenots to entertain still better hopes for the recent treaty.[ ] [sidenote: catharine warned by the huguenots.] [sidenote: infringement on the edict at orange.] it cannot be denied, however, that the huguenots could see much that was disquieting and calculated to prevent them from laying aside their suspicions. there were symptoms of the old constitutional timidity on the part of catharine de' medici. she showed signs of so far yielding to the inveterate enemies of the huguenots as to abstain from insisting upon the concession of public religious worship where it had been accorded by the edict of st. germain. no wonder that the huguenots, on their side, warned her, with friendly sincerity and frankness, that, should she refuse to entertain their just demands, _the present peace would be only a brief truce, the prelude to a relentless civil war_. "we will all die," was their language, "rather than forsake our god and our religion, which we can no more sustain without public exercise than could a body live without food and drink."[ ] not only did the courts throw every obstacle in the way of the formal recognition of the law establishing the rights of the huguenots, but the outbreaks of popular hatred against the adherents of the purer faith were alarming evidence that the chronic sore had only been healed over the surface, and that none of the elements of future disorder and bloodshed were wanting. thus, in the little city and principality of orange, the roman catholic populace, taking advantage of the supineness of the governor and of the consuls, introduced within the walls, under cover of a three days' religious festival, a large number of ruffians from the adjoining comtât venaissin. this was early in february, . now began a scene of rapine and bloodshed that might demand detailed mention, were it not that at the frequent repetition of such ghastly recitals the stoutest heart sickens. men, and even mere boys, of the reformed faith were butchered in their homes, in the arms of their wives or their mothers. the goods of protestants were plundered and openly sold to the highest bidder. of many, a ransom was exacted for their safety. the work went on for two weeks. at last a deputy from orange reached the huguenot princes and the admiral at la rochelle, and count louis of nassau, who was still there, wrote to charles with such urgency, in the name of his brother, the prince of orange, that measures were taken to repress and punish the disorder.[ ] [sidenote: the protestants at rouen attacked, march , .] a much more serious infringement upon the protection granted to the protestants by the edict, took place at rouen about a month later. unable to celebrate their worship within the city walls, the protestants had gone out one sunday morning to the place assigned them for this purpose in the suburbs. meantime a body of four hundred roman catholics posted themselves in ambush near the gates to await their return. when the unsuspecting huguenots, devoutly meditating upon the solemnities in which they had been engaged, made their appearance, they were greeted first with imprecations and blasphemies, then with a murderous attack. between one hundred and one hundred and twenty are said to have been killed or wounded. the punishment of this audacious violation of the rights of the protestants was at first left by parliament to the inferior or presidial judges, and the investigation dragged. the judges were threatened as they went to court: "si l'on sçavoit que vous eussiez informé, on vous creveroit les yeux; si vous y mectez la main, on vous coupera la gorge!" the people broke into the prisons and liberated the accused. the civic militia refused to interfere. it was evident that no justice could be obtained from the local magistrates. the king, however, on receiving the complaints of the huguenots, displayed great indignation, and despatched montmorency to rouen with twenty-seven companies of soldiers, and a commission authorized to try the culprits. the greater part of these, however, had fled. only five persons received the punishment of death; several hundred fugitives were hung in effigy. montmorency attempted to secure the protestants against further aggression by disarming the entire population, with the exception of four hundred chosen men, and by compelling the parliament, on the fifteenth of may, to swear to observe the edict of pacification--precautions whose efficacy we shall be able to estimate more accurately by the events of the following year.[ ] [sidenote: the "croix de gastines" again.] the strength of the popular hatred of the huguenots was often too great for even the government to cope with. the rabble of the cities would hear of no upright execution of the provisions respecting the oblivion of past injuries, and resisted with pertinacity the attempt to remove the traces of the old conflict. the parisians gave the most striking evidence of their unextinguished rancor in the matter of the "croix de gastines," a monument of religious bigotry, the reasons for whose erection in have been sufficiently explained in a previous chapter.[ ] more than a year had passed since the promulgation of the royal edict of pacification annulling all judgments rendered against protestants since the death of henry the second; and yet the croix de gastines still stood aloft on its pyramidal base, upon the site of the huguenot place of meeting. several times, at the solicitation of the protestants, the government ordered its demolition. the municipal officers of paris declined to obey, because it had not been erected by them; the parliament, because, as they alleged, the sentence was just and they could not retract; the provost of paris, because he was not above parliament, which had placed it there.[ ] charles himself wrote with his own hand to the provost: "you deliberate whether to obey me, and whether you will have that fine pyramid overturned. i forbid you to appear in my presence until it be cast down."[ ] the end was not yet. the monks preached against the sacrilege of lowering the cross. maître vigor, on the first sunday of advent, praised the people of paris for having opposed the demolition, maintaining that they had acted "only from zeal for god, who upon the cross suffered for us." "the people," he declared, "had never murmured when they had taken down gaspard de coligny, who had been hung in effigy, and _would soon, god willing, be hung in very deed!_"[ ] meantime, the mob of paris exhibited its zeal for the honor of the cross by assailing the soldiers sent to tear down the "croix de gastines," and by breaking open and plundering the contents of several huguenot houses. it was not until the provost had called in the assistance of marshal montmorency, and the latter had killed a few of the seditious parisians who opposed his progress, and hung one man to the windows of a neighboring house, that the disturbance ceased. the pyramid was then destroyed, and the cross transferred to the cimetière des innocents, where it is said to have remained until the outbreak of the french revolution.[ ] the "plucking down of the cross" was a distasteful draught to the fanatics. "the common people," wrote an eye-witness, "ease their stomacks onely by uttering seditious words, which is borne withal, for that was doubted. the protestants by the overthrow of this cross receive greater comfort, and the papists the contrary."[ ] [sidenote: projected marriage of anjou to queen elizabeth.] the huguenot leaders, rejoicing at any evidence of the royal favor, desired to strengthen it and render it more stable. for this purpose they found a rare opportunity in projecting matrimonial alliances. queen elizabeth, of england, was yet unmarried, a princess of acknowledged ability, and reigning over a kingdom, which, if it had not at that time attained the wealth of industry and commerce which it now possesses, was, at least, one of the most illustrious in christendom. where could a more advantageous match be sought for henry of anjou, the french monarch's brother? true, the tudor princess was no longer young, and her personal appearance was scarcely praised, except by her courtiers. she had been a candidate for many projected nuptials, but in none had the disparity of age been so great as in the present case, for, being a maiden of thirty-seven, she lacked but a single year of being twice as old as anjou.[ ] besides these objections, and independently of the difference of creed between the queen and anjou, she had the unenviable reputation of being irresolute, fickle, and capricious. and yet, in spite of all these difficulties, the match was seriously proposed and entertained in the autumn and winter succeeding the ratification of peace. it is worthy of notice that the scheme originated with the french protestants. cardinal châtillon, the admiral's brother, and the vidame of chartres, both of them zealous partisans of the reformation, and at this time engaged in negotiations in england, were the first to make mention of the plan, and probably it took its rise in their minds. their object was manifest: if france could be united to protestant england by so distinguished a marriage, the permanence of the peace of st. germain might be regarded as secure. under such auspices, the huguenots, long proscribed and persecuted, might hope for such favor and toleration as they had never yet enjoyed. catharine de' medici, when approached on the subject, gave indications of hearty acquiescence. of late there had been a growing estrangement between the french and spanish courts. the selfishness and arrogance of philip and his ministers had been particularly evident and offensive during the late war. it was sufficiently clear that the catholic king opposed the peace less from hatred of heresy or of rebellion, than because of his scarcely disguised hope of profiting by the misfortunes of france. the queen mother was consequently quite inclined to tighten the bonds of amity and friendship with england, when those that had previously existed with spain were loosened. the prospect of a crown for her favorite son was an alluring one--doubly so, because of nostradamus's prophecy that she would see all her sons upon the throne, to which she gave a superstitious credence, trembling lest it should involve in its fulfilment their untimely death. it is true that, in view of elizabeth's age, she would have preferred to marry the duke of anjou to some princess of the royal house of england, whom elizabeth might first have proclaimed her heir and successor.[ ] however, as the english queen was, perhaps, even more reluctant than the majority of mankind to be reminded of her advancing years and of her mortality, catharine's ambassador may have deemed it advisable to be silent regarding the suggestion of so palpable a "memento mori," and contented himself with offering for her own acceptance the hand of one whom he recommended as "the most accomplished prince living, and the most deserving her good graces."[ ] elizabeth received the proposal with courtesy, merely alluding to the great difference between her age and anjou's, but admitted her apprehension lest, since "she was already one whose kingdom rather than herself was to be wedded," she might marry one who would honor her as a queen rather than love her as a woman. in fact, the remembrance of the amours of the father and grandfather made her suspicious of the son, and the names of madame d'estampes and of madame de valentinois (diana of poitiers) inspired her with no little fear. all which coy suggestions la mothe fénélon, astute courtier that he was, knew well how to answer.[ ] [sidenote: machinations to dissuade anjou.] soon, however, the difficulty threatened to be the unwillingness of the suitor, rather than the reluctance of the lady. henry of anjou was the head of the roman catholic party in france. charles's orthodoxy might be suspected; there was no doubt of his brother's. his intimacy with the guises, his successes as general of the royal forces in what was styled a war in defence of religion, were guarantees of his devotion to the papal cause. all his prestige would be lost if he married the heretical daughter of henry the eighth and anne boleyn. hence desperate efforts were made to deter him--efforts which did not escape the argus-eyed walsingham. "the pope, the king of spain, and the rest of the confederates, upon the doubt of a match between the queen, my mistress, and monsieur, do seek, by what means they can, to dissuade and draw him from the same. they offer him to be the head and chief executioner of the league against the turk, a thing now newly renewed, though long ago meant; which league is thought to stretch to as many as they repute to be turks, although better christians than themselves. the cause of the cardinal of lorraine's repair hither from rheims, as it is thought, was to this purpose."[ ] [sidenote: charles indignant at the interference.] charles the ninth was indignant at this interference, and said: "if this matter go forward, it behooveth me to make some counter-league," having his eye upon the german protestant princes and elizabeth.[ ] besides, there were at this juncture other reasons for displeasure, especially with spain. charles and his mother had received a rebuff from sebastian of portugal, to whom they had offered margaret of valois in marriage. the young king had replied, through malicorne, "that they were both young, and that therefore about eight years hence that matter might be better talked of," "which disdainful answer," the english ambassador wrote from the french court, "is accepted here in very ill part, and is thought not to be done without the counsel of spain."[ ] [sidenote: alençon to be substituted as suitor.] with henry of anjou, however, much to the disgust and disappointment of his mother, the "league" succeeded too well. scarcely had a month passed, before catharine was compelled to write to the envoy in england, telling him that henry had heard reports unfavorable to elizabeth's character, and positively declined to marry her.[ ] in her extreme perplexity at this unexpected turn of events, the queen mother suggested to la mothe fénélon that perhaps the duke of alençon would do as well, and might step into the place which his brother had so ungallantly abandoned.[ ] now, as this alençon was a beardless boy of sixteen, and, unlike charles and henry, small for his age, it is not surprising that la mothe declared himself utterly averse to making any mention of him for the present, lest the queen should come to the very sensible conclusion that the french were "making sport of her."[ ] [sidenote: anjou's new ardor.] [sidenote: elizabeth interposes obstacles.] but there was at present no need of resorting to substitution. for a time the ardor of anjou was rekindled, and rapidly increased in intensity. catharine first wrote that anjou "condescended" to marry elizabeth;[ ] presently, that "he desired infinitely to espouse her."[ ] a month or two later he declared to walsingham: "i must needs confess that, through the great commendation that is made of the queen your mistress, for her rare gifts as well of mind as of body, being (as even her very enemies say) the rarest creature that was in europe these five hundred years; my affection, grounded upon so good respects, hath now made me yield to be wholly hers."[ ] on the other hand, elizabeth began to exhibit such coldness that her most intimate servants doubted her sincerity in the entire transaction. with more candor than courtiers usually exhibit in urging a suit which they suspect to be distasteful to their sovereign, lord burleigh, the earl of leicester, and sir francis walsingham used every means of persuading the queen to decisive action. "my very good lord," wrote walsingham, on the fourteenth of may, , "the protestants here do so earnestly desire this match; and on the other side, the papists do so earnestly seek to impeach the same, as it maketh me the more earnest in furthering of the same. besides, when i particularly consider her majesty's state, both at home and abroad, so far forth as my poor eyesight can discern; and how she is beset with foreign peril, the execution whereof stayeth only upon the event of this match, i do not see how she can stand if this matter break off."[ ] lord burleigh, in perplexity on account of elizabeth's conduct, exclaimed that "he was not able to discern what was best;" but added: "surely i see no continuance of her quietness without a marriage, and therefore i remit the success to almighty god."[ ] the situation of elizabeth's servants was, indeed, extremely embarrassing. their mistress had laid an insuperable obstacle in the way. she did not, indeed, require anjou to abjure his faith, but her demands virtually involved this. not only did she refuse to grant the duke, by the articles of marriage, public or even private worship for himself and his attendants, according to the rites of the roman catholic church, but she wished to bind him to make no request to that effect after marriage.[ ] in vain did catharine protest that this was to require him to become an atheist, and her own advisers solemnly warn her that this could but lead to an entire rupture of the negotiations. under the pretence of excluding all exercise of popery from england, the queen disappointed the ardent hopes of thousands of sincere and thorough protestants in france and of many more in england, who viewed the marriage as by far the most advisable cure--far better than a simple treaty of peace--for the ills of both kingdoms. "if you find not in her majesty," wrote walsingham to leicester, "a resolute determination to marry--a thing most necessary for our staggering state--then were it expedient to take hold of amity, which may serve to ease us for a time, though our disease requireth another remedy;" and again, a few days later (on the third of august, ): "my lord, if neither marriage nor amity may take place, the poor protestants here do think then their case desperate. they tell me so with tears, and therefore i do believe them. and surely, if they say nothing, beholding the present state here, i could not but see it most apparent."[ ] [sidenote: papal and spanish efforts.] the fears of the protestants were not baseless. as the marriage, and the consequent close friendship with england, seemed to insure the growth and spread of the reformed faith,[ ] the failure of both was an almost unmistakable portent of the triumph of the opposite party and of the renewal of persecution and bloodshed. and so also the fanatical roman catholics read the signs of the times, and again they plied anjou with their seductions. "great practices are here for the impeachment of this match," wrote the english ambassador, near the end of july, . "the papal nuncio, spain, and portugal, are daily courtiers to dissuade this match. the clergy here have offered monsieur a great pension, to stay him from proceeding. in conclusion, there is nothing left undone, that may be thought fit to hinder."[ ] [sidenote: vexation of catharine at anjou's fresh scruples.] and these intrigues were not fruitless. anjou now declared to his mother that he would not go to england without public assurances that he should enjoy the liberty to exercise his own religion. he was unwilling even to trust the queen's word, as catharine and charles would have wished him to do. catharine meantime expressed her vexation in her despatches to la mothe fénélon.[ ] "we strongly suspect," she said, "that villequier, lignerolles, or sarret, or possibly all three, may be the authors of these fancies. if we succeed in obtaining some certainty respecting this matter, i assure you that they will repent of it."[ ] but she added that, should the negotiation unfortunately fail, she was resolved to put forth all her efforts in behalf of her son alençon, who would be more easily suited.[ ] in fact, while anjou was indifferent, or perhaps disgusted at the obstacles raised in the way of the marriage, and was unwilling to sacrifice his attachment to the party in connection with which he had obtained whatever distinction he possessed; and while elizabeth, who was by no means blind, saw clearly enough that she was likely to get a husband who would regard his bride rather as an incumbrance than as an acquisition,[ ] there were two persons who were as eager as elizabeth's advisers, or the huguenots themselves, to see the match effected. these were charles the ninth and catharine de' medici, both of whom just now gave abundant evidence of their disposition to draw closer to england and to the huguenots of france and the gueux of holland, while suffering the breach between france and spain to become more marked. [sidenote: louis of nassau confers with the king.] count louis of nassau, ever since the conclusion of peace, had remained with the huguenots within the walls of la rochelle. at the repeated solicitations of his brother, the prince of orange, he had entered into correspondence with the king, and urged him to embrace an opportunity such as might never return, to endear himself to the netherlanders, and add materially to the extent and power of france by espousing the cause of constitutional rights. his advances were so favorably received that he now came in disguise, accompanied by la noue, téligny, and genlis, to confer with charles upon the subject. they met at lumigny-en-brie, whither the king had gone to indulge in his favorite pastime of the chase, and on several consecutive days held secret conferences.[ ] louis was a nobleman whose history and connections entitled him to respect; but his frank and sincere character was a still more powerful advocate in his behalf.[ ] he proved to the king how justly he might interfere in defence of the low countries, where philip was seeking "to plant, by inquisition, the foundation of a most horrible tyranny, the overthrow of all freedoms and liberties." he traced the course of events since the humiliating treaty of cateau-cambrésis, and added: "if you think in conscience and honor you may not become the protector of this people, you should do well to forbear, for otherwise the success cannot be gained. if you think you may, then weigh in policy how beneficial it will be for you, and how much your father would have given, to have had the like opportunity offered unto him that is now presented unto you gratis; which, if you refuse, the like you must never look for." both charles and his mother appeared well pleased with the proposal, and the king, who had listened attentively to the recital of the follies into which philip had fallen in consequence of listening to evil advice, exclaimed: "similar counsellors, by violating my edict, wellnigh brought me into like terms with my subjects, wherefrom ensued the late troubles; but now, thank god, he has opened my eyes to discern what their meaning was." next, louis showed that success was not difficult. the roman catholics and the protestants in the netherlands equally detested the tyranny of the spaniards. the towns were ready to receive garrisons. philip had not in the whole country over three thousand troops upon whose fidelity he could rely. the addition of a dozen ships to those already possessed by the patriots would enable them effectually to prevent the landing of spanish reinforcements. in short, the netherlands were ripe for a division which would amply recompense france and the german princes, as well as queen elizabeth, should she, as was hoped, consent to take part in the enterprise: for the provinces of flanders and artois, which had once belonged to the french crown, would gladly give themselves up to charles; brabant, gelderland, and luxemburg would be restored to the empire; and holland, zealand, and the rest of the islands would fall to the share of the queen.[ ] [sidenote: admiral coligny consulted.] [sidenote: he marries jacqueline d'entremont.] so favorably did charles and his mother, with those counsellors to whom the secret was intrusted, receive the count's advances, that it was clearly advisable to bring them into communication with admiral coligny, to whose conduct the enterprise, if adopted, must be confided, and for whom the young king expressed great esteem. indeed, so urgently was the admiral invited, and so intimately did the success or failure of the attempt to enlist france in the flemish war seem to be dependent upon his personal influence, that gaspard de coligny, despite the ill-concealed solicitude of many of his more suspicious friends, consented to trust himself in the king's hands. as for himself, the admiral had little desire to leave the secure retreat of la rochelle. here he was surrounded by friends. here his happiness had been enhanced by two marriages which promised to add greatly to the wealth and influence he already possessed. jacqueline d'entremont, the widow of a brave officer killed in the civil wars, had long entertained an admiration, which she made no attempt to disguise, for the bravery and piety of the stern leader of the huguenots. possessed of very extensive estates in the dominions of the duke of savoy, she had also the qualities of mind and disposition which fitted her to become the wife of so upright and magnanimous a man. the proposals of marriage are said to have come from her relatives, nor did the lady herself hesitate to express the wish before her death to become the marcia of the new cato.[ ] the nuptials were celebrated with great pomp at la rochelle, whither jacqueline, after having been married by proxy,[ ] was escorted by a goodly train of huguenot nobles. great were the rejoicings of the people, but not less great the anger of the duke of savoy, who, as jacqueline's feudal lord, claimed the right to dispose of her hand, and had peremptorily forbidden her to marry the admiral. the barbarous revenge which emmanuel philibert too soon found it in his power to inflict upon the unfortunate widow of coligny forms the subject for one of the darkest pages of modern history.[ ] under no less auspicious circumstances was consummated the union of coligny's daughter, louise de châtillon, to téligny, a young noble whose skill as a diplomatist seemed to have destined him to hold a foremost rank among statesmen. scarcely less unhappy, however, than her step-mother, louise was to behold both her father and her husband perish in a single hour by the same dreadful catastrophe. [sidenote: accepts the invitation to court.] was it foolish rashness or overweening presumption that led the admiral to leave the new home he had made within the strong defences of la rochelle; or was he moved solely by a conscientious persuasion that he had no right to consider personal danger when the great interests of his country and his faith were at stake? the former view has not been without its advocates, some of whom have gloried in finding the proofs of a judicial blindness sent by heaven to hasten the self-induced destruction of the huguenots. a more careful consideration of all the circumstances of the case, illustrated by a better appreciation of coligny's character, rather induces me to adopt the opposite conclusion. certainly the noble language of coligny in reply to the warnings of his friends, both now and later, when he was about to venture within the walls of paris, displayed no unconsciousness of the perils by which he was environed. "better, however, were it," he said, "to die a thousand deaths, than by undue solicitude for life to be the occasion of keeping up distrust throughout an entire kingdom." about the beginning of september, , charles and his court repaired to blois, on the banks of the loire.[ ] the avowed object of the movement was to meet coligny and the protestant princes. "there are many practices (intrigues) to overthrow this journey," wrote walsingham, about the middle of the preceding month, "but the king sheweth himself to be very resolute. i am most constantly assured that the king conceiveth of no subject that he hath, better than of the admiral, and great hope there is that the king will use him in matters of greatest trust; for of himself he beginneth to see the insufficiency of others--some, for that they are more addicted to others than to himself; others, for that they are more spanish than french, or else given more to private pleasures than public. there is none of any account within this realm, whose as well imperfections as virtues, he knoweth not. those that do love him, do lament that he is so much given to pleasure: they hope the admiral's access unto the court will yield some redress in that case. queen mother, seeing her son so well affected towards him, laboreth by all means to cause him to think well of her. she seemeth much to further the meeting."[ ] [sidenote: his honorable reception.] nothing could surpass the honorable reception of the admiral, when, on the twelfth of september, he arrived with a small retinue at court in the city of blois. on first coming into the royal presence, he humbly kneeled, but charles graciously lifted him up, and embraced him, calling him his father, and protesting that he regarded this as one of the happiest days of his life, since he saw the war ended and tranquillity confirmed by coligny's return. "you are as welcome," said he, "as any gentleman that has visited my court in twenty years." and in the same interview, he expressed his joy in words upon which subsequent events placed a sinister construction, but which nevertheless appear to have been uttered in good faith: "at last we have you with us, and you will not leave us again whenever you wish."[ ] nor was catharine behind her son in affability. she surprised the courtiers by honoring the huguenot leader with a kiss. and even anjou, who chanced to be indisposed, received him in his bedchamber with a show of friendliness. more substantial tokens of favor followed. the same person, who, as the principal general of the rebels, had been attainted of treason, his castle and possessions being confiscated or destroyed by decree of the first parliament of france, and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns being set upon his head, now received from the king's private purse the unsolicited gift of one hundred thousand livres, to make good his losses during the war. moreover, he was presented with the revenues of his lately deceased brother, the cardinal odet de châtillon, for the space of one year, and was intrusted with the lucrative office of guardian of the house of laval during the minority of its heir. indeed, throughout his stay at blois, which was protracted through several weeks, coligny was the favored confidant of charles, who sometimes even made him preside in the royal council.[ ] moreover, it was doubtless at coligny's suggestion that the king at this time wrote to the duke of savoy interceding for those waldenses who in the recent wars had aided the french protestants in arms, and who since their return to the ducal dominions had experienced severe persecution on that account. "i desire," he says in this letter, "to make a request of you, a request of no ordinary character, but as earnest as you could possibly receive from me--that, just as for the love of me you have treated your subjects in this matter with unusual rigor, so you would be pleased, for my sake, and by reason of my prayer and special recommendation, to receive them into your benign grace, and reinstate them in the possessions which have for this cause been confiscated." he added that he desired not only to exhibit to his protestant subjects his intention to execute his edict, but to extend to their allies from abroad the same love and protection.[ ] [sidenote: disgust of the guises and of alva.] these and other marks of honorable distinction shown to the acknowledged head of the huguenots, must have been excessively distasteful both to the guises and to the spaniard. the former now retired from court, and left charles completely in the hands of the montmorencies and the admiral.[ ] earlier in the year, the duke of alva had met with a signal rebuff at the hands of the french, when, in return for the aid furnished to charles by his catholic majesty during the late wars, he requested him to supply him with german reiters, to allow him to levy in france troops to serve against the prince of orange, and to detain the fleet which was said to be preparing for the prince at la rochelle. the first two demands were peremptorily refused, while the ships, it was replied, were intended merely to make reprisals upon the spaniards, who had taken some protestant vessels, drowned a part of their crew in the ocean, and delivered others into the power of the inquisition, and could not be interfered with.[ ] the spanish ambassador had borne with the offensiveness of this answer; but the favor with which the huguenots were now received, and the openness with which the flemish war was discussed, rendered his further stay impossible. it is true that the interviews of louis of nassau with the king were held with great secrecy, and that charles even had the effrontery to deny that he had met the brother of orange at all.[ ] it was impossible to deny that philip's subjects were despoiled by vessels which issued with impunity from la rochelle. but, although the ambassador declared that these grievances must be redressed, or war would ensue, he was bluntly informed by charles that "philip might not look to give laws to france." catharine partook of her son's indignation, the more so as she seems at this time to have shared in the current belief that her daughter elizabeth had been poisoned by her royal husband.[ ] at last, in november, the ambassador withdrew from court, without taking leave of the king, after having, in scarcely disguised contempt,[ ] given away to the monks the silver plate which charles had presented to him. [sidenote: charles gratified.] while the new policy of conciliation and toleration thus disgusted one, at least, of those foreign powers which had spurred on the government to engage in suicidal civil contests, it was at home producing the beneficent results hoped for by its authors. charles himself appeared to be daily more convinced of its excellence. in a letter to president du ferrier, the french envoy at constantinople, written during the admiral's stay at blois, he exposed for the sultan's benefit the reasons for the mutation in his treatment of the huguenots, and for the cordial reception he had given coligny at his court. "you know," he said, "that this kingdom fell into discord and division, in which it still is involved. i forgot no prescription which i thought might cure it of this ulcerous wound; at one time trying mild remedies, at others applying the most caustic, without sparing my own person, or those whom nature made most dear to me.... but, having at length discovered that only time could alleviate the ill, and _that those who were at the windows were very glad to see the game played at my expense_,[ ] i had recourse to my original plan, which was that of mildness; and by good advice i made my edict of pacification, which is the seal of public faith, under whose benign influence peace and quiet have been restored." and referring to coligny's arrival, he added: "you know that experience is dearly bought and is worth much. i must therefore tell you that the chief result which i hoped from his coming begins already to develop, inasmuch as the greater part of my subjects, who lately lived in some distrust, have by this demonstration gained such assurance of my kindness and affection, that all partisan feeling and faction are visibly beginning to fade away."[ ] [sidenote: proposed marriage of henry of navarre and the king's sister.] besides the flemish project, an important domestic affair engaged the attention of the king and his counsellors at the time of coligny's visit. this was the proposed marriage of young henry, the prince of béarn, and after his mother's death heir of the crown of navarre, to margaret of valois, the youngest sister of charles the ninth. margaret, who had lately entered upon her twentieth year, was a year and a half older than the prince.[ ] in a court and a state of society where the birth of a daughter was the signal for the initiation of an unlimited number of matrimonial projects, it is not surprising that this match, among many others, was talked of in the very infancy of the parties, perhaps with little expectation that anything would ever come of it. the prince was a sprightly boy, and, it is said, so delighted his namesake, henry the second, that the monarch playfully asked him whether he would like to be his son-in-law--a question which the boy found no difficulty in answering in the affirmative. in fact, the matter went so far that, when the young bearnese was little over three years of age, antoine of bourbon wrote to his sister, the duchess of nevers, with undisguised delight, of "the favor the king has been pleased to show me by the agreement between us for the marriage of madam margaret, his daughter, with my eldest son--a thing which i accept as so particular a token of his good grace, that i am now at rest and satisfied with what i could most ardently desire in this world."[ ] but the boy's mother had not been inclined to accept the king's offer to take and educate him with his own children.[ ] she was not very familiar with the disorders of the royal court; but she had seen enough to convince her that the quiet plains at the foot of the pyrenees could furnish a safer school of manners and morals. more than once the idea of the connection between the crowns of france and navarre was revived, and in catharine bethought herself of it as a means of detaching the unfortunate antoine from the triumvirs, whose cause he had espoused with such strange infatuation.[ ] but other plans soon diverted the ambitious mind of the italian queen. moreover, the civil wars between protestants and roman catholics made the marriage of the daughter of the "very christian king" to the son of the most obstinate huguenot in france appear to be out of the range of propriety or likelihood. meantime, margaret's union with sebastian of portugal was seriously discussed.[ ] the tiresome negotiations ended in january, , with a haughty refusal of her hand, dictated, as we have seen, by philip himself. a few weeks later, as margaret informs us in her mémoires--which may generally be credited, except where the fair author's love affairs are concerned--the prince of navarre began again to be mentioned as an available candidate for her hand. she expressly states that it was from the montmorencies that the first suggestion came[ ]--that is, from françois de montmorency, the constable's oldest son. this nobleman, while he had inherited a great part of his father's influence, as the head of one of the most honorable feudal families in france, having its seat in the very neighborhood of the capital, had ranged himself with the party opposed to that with which anne had been identified, and, although in outward profession a roman catholic, was in full sympathy with the liberal political views of his cousin, admiral coligny. this fact effectually disposes of the story that the marriage was proposed, however much it may subsequently have been entertained, as a trap to ensnare the huguenots, thus thrown off their guard. marshal biron, another statesman of the same type, was the messenger to carry the royal proposals to la rochelle. he pictured to the queen of navarre in glowing colors the advantages that would flow from this alliance, the strength it would impart to the friends of mutual toleration, the consternation and dismay it would carry into the camp of the enemy. at the same time he declared that charles the ninth felt confident that, although he had not as yet obtained from the pope the dispensation which the relationship subsisting between the parties, as well as their religious differences, rendered necessary, pius the fifth would ultimately place no obstacle in the way. jeanne d'albret gratefully acknowledged the honor offered by the king to her son, but, before accepting it, professed herself compelled to consult her spiritual advisers respecting the question whether such a marriage might in good conscience be entered into by a member of the reformed church.[ ] as for margaret herself, she gives us in her mémoires little light as to the state of her own feelings at this time. if we may imagine her so indifferent, she demurely expressed her acquiescence in whatever her mother might decide, but begged her to remember that "she was very catholic," and that "she would be very sorry to marry any one who was not of her religion."[ ] a few months later, however, when the prospects of the marriage became less bright, because of the difficulties arising from religion, it would seem that, with a perversity not altogether unexampled, margaret became more anxious to have it consummated. at least, francis walsingham writes to lord burleigh: "the gentlewoman, being most desirous thereof, falleth to reading of the bible, and to the use of the prayers used by them of the religion."[ ] [sidenote: the anjou match abandoned.] meanwhile, the project of a marriage between elizabeth and anjou had, as we have seen, been virtually abandoned. the matter of religion was the ostensible stumbling-block; it can scarcely have been the real difficulty on either side. as to anjou, the sincerity of his religious convictions is certainly not above suspicion. but he was the head of a party in his brother's kingdom, a party that professed unalterable devotion to the "holy see" and the old faith. if the eternal rewards of his fidelity to the papacy were at all problematical, there was no doubt whatever in his mind of the advantage of so powerful support as that which the ecclesiastics of france could give him. he was resolved not to throw away this advantage by openly agreeing to renounce all exercise of his own religion in england, and this, too, without the certainty that the concession would secure to him the hand of the queen. and, unfortunately, it was impossible for him to gain this certainty. elizabeth was already pretty well understood. her fancies and freaks it was beyond the power of the most astute of her ministers to predict or to comprehend. if the barrier of religion were demolished, there was no possibility of telling what more formidable works might be unmasked. and so henry, rather more sensible upon this point than even catharine and charles, who would have had him shrink from no concessions, made a virtue of necessity, definitely withdrew from competition for the hand of a woman for whose personal appearance it was impossible for him to entertain any admiration; whose moral character, he had often been told and he more than half suspected, was bad;[ ] and told his friends, and probably believed, that he had had a narrow escape. the queen, on the other hand, was perhaps not conscious of insincerity of purpose. she must marry, if not from inclination, for protection's sake--the protection of her subjects and herself--so all the world told her; and a marriage that would secure to england the support of france against spain was the best. but that she sought excuses for not taking the duke of anjou is evident, even though she strove to make it appear to others, as well as to herself, that the refusal came at last from him.[ ] and she had her advisers--subjects who in secret aspired to her hand, or others--who, in an underhand way, stimulated her aversion to henry. it is not unlikely that the earl of leicester, despite his ardent protestations of zealous support of the match, was the most insidious of its opponents. "while 'the poor huguenots' were telling walsingham in tears that an affront from england would bring back the guises, and end in a massacre of themselves, leicester was working privately upon the queen, who was but too willing to listen to him, feeding her through the ladies of the bedchamber with stories that anjou was infected with a loathsome disease, and assisting his penelope to unravel at night the web which she had woven under cecil's direction in the day."[ ] [sidenote: the praise of alençon.] so the negotiation of a marriage between queen elizabeth and the duke of anjou, after being virtually dead for about a half-year, breathed its last in january, . but the full accord between the two kingdoms was too important to the interests of both, and the opportunity of obtaining a crown for one of her sons too precious in the eye of catharine. accordingly the discussion of the terms of the treaty of amity was pressed with still greater zeal, while the french envoy to england was instructed to offer alençon to elizabeth in place of his brother. and now were the wits of the statesmen on both sides of the channel exercised to find good reasons why the match would be no incongruous one. unfortunately, alençon, as already stated, was short even for his age; but this was no insuperable obstacle. "nay," said catharine de' medici to sir thomas smith, when she was sounding him respecting his mistress's disposition, "he is not so little; he is so high as you, or very near." "for that matter, madam," replied smith, "i for my part make small account, if the queen's majestie can fancie him. for _pipinus brevis_, who married _bertha_, the king of almain's daughter, was so little to her, that he is standing in aquisgrave, or moguerre, a church in almain, she taking him by the hand, and his head not reaching to her girdle; and yet he had by her charlemain, the great emperor and king of france, which is reported to be almost a giant's stature."[ ] it was not so easy to dispose of the disparity in years,[ ] and perhaps still less of alençon's disfigurement by small-pox; for that unlucky prince added this to the long catalogue of his misfortunes. the course of the treaty for mutual defence was, happily, somewhat smoother than that of the matchmaking. on the eighteenth of april the treaty was formally concluded,[ ] and shortly after, marshal montmorency and m. de foix were despatched to administer the oath to queen elizabeth. this solemn ceremony was performed on sunday, the fifteenth of june. the deputies were received with every mark of distinction, and the marshal was publicly presented by the queen with the insignia of the order of the garter.[ ] the commission of the french envoys instructed them to press upon elizabeth the alençon marriage as a powerful means of cementing the alliance; and it empowered them to expend money to the extent of ten or twelve thousand crowns in buying the consent of those lords who had hitherto opposed the union. the earl of leicester, whose straightforwardness may have been suspected, was to be tempted by the special offer of some french heiress in marriage, the name of mademoiselle de bourbon being suggested.[ ] but the marriage was not destined to be accomplished, although the negotiations were kept up until the very time of the massacre, and elizabeth sent to catharine de' medici her hearty acknowledgment of the honor she had done her _in offering her all her sons successively_.[ ] at the very moment when the fearful blow fell which was to render any such marriage impossible, catharine was planning and proposing an interview between elizabeth on the one side, and herself and alençon on the other. that the dignity of neither party might be compromised, it was suggested that the meeting might take place some calm day on the water between dover and boulogne.[ ] elizabeth had reconsidered her partial refusal, and encouraged the project; the nobles, the ladies of the court, the council, all favored it; and in a letter written four days after the streets of paris flowed with blood, but before the appalling intelligence had reached him, the french ambassador wrote to catharine: "all who are well affected cry to us, 'let my lord the duke come!'"[ ] [sidenote: pope pius the fifth alarmed.] [sidenote: the cardinal of alessandria sent to paris.] [sidenote: the king's assurances.] it cannot be supposed that such a leaning could be manifested toward the huguenot party, and such amity concluded with the protestant kingdom of england, without arousing grave solicitude on the part of the pope and other roman catholic sovereigns of europe. pius the fifth determined, if possible, to deter charles from permitting the hateful marriage between his sister and the heretical prince of navarre. he therefore promptly despatched his nephew, the cardinal of alessandria,[ ] first to sebastian of portugal, whom he found no great difficulty in persuading again to entertain the project of a marriage with margaret of valois, and thence, with the utmost haste, to the court of charles the ninth.[ ] the legate, when admitted to an audience, unfolded at great length the grievances of the pontiff--the mission of a heretic, formerly a bishop, as envoy to constantinople, the rumored opposition of the king to the holy league against the turk, but especially the contemplated nuptials of a daughter of france with the son of jeanne d'albret. charles replied to these charges in the most politic manner. he prayed that the earth might open and swallow him up, rather than that he should stand in the way of so illustrious and holy league as that against the infidel. as to his zeal for the christian faith, he demonstrated it--albeit some might object that the fraternal affection which was reported to subsist between the parties hardly rendered this argument convincing--by the fact of his having exposed, in its defence, his dearest brother, the duke of anjou, to all the perils of war. by civil war the resources of his kingdom had been so weakened that they barely sufficed for its protection. he justified the navarrese marriage by alleging the remarkable traits which made henry superior to any other prince of the bourbon family, and by the great benefit which religion would gain from his conversion. in short, charles was profuse in protestations of his sincere determination to maintain the catholic faith; and, drawing a valuable diamond ring from his finger, he presented it to the legate as a pledge, he said, of his unalterable fidelity to the holy see, and a token that he would more than redeem his promises. the cardinal legate, however, declined to receive the gift, saying that he was amply satisfied with the plighted word of so great a king, a security more firm than any other pledge that could be given to him.[ ] such seem to have been the assurances given by charles on this celebrated occasion, vague and indefinite, but calculated to allay to a certain extent the anxiety of the head of the papal church.[ ] there is good reason to believe that the king's intention of fulfilling them, not to say his plan for doing so, was equally undefined; although, so far as his own faith was concerned, he had no thought of abandoning the church of his fathers. the expressions by means of which charles is made to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated massacre,[ ] of which, however the case may stand with respect to his mother, it is all but certain that he had at this time no idea, can only be regarded as fabulous additions of which the earliest disseminators of the story were altogether ignorant. the fact that the cardinal legate's rejection of the ring was publicly known[ ] seems to be a sufficient proof that it was offered simply as a pledge of the king's general fidelity to the holy see, not of his intention to violate his edict and murder his protestant subjects. the government made the attempt in like manner to quiet the people, whom even the smallest amount of concession and favor to the huguenots rendered suspicious; and the words uttered for this purpose were often so flattering to the roman catholics, that, in the light of subsequent events, they seem to have a reference to acts of treachery to which they were not intended to apply. [sidenote: jeanne d'albret becomes more favorable to her son's marriage.] the doubt propounded by jeanne d'albret to the reformed ministers, respecting the lawfulness of a mixed marriage, having been satisfactorily answered, and the devout queen being convinced that the union of henry and margaret would rather tend to advance the cause to which she subordinated all her personal interests, than retard it by casting reproach upon it, the project was more warmly entertained on both sides. yet the subject was not without serious difficulty. of this the religious question was the great cause. to the english ambassadors, walsingham and smith, jeanne declared (on the fourth of march, ) in her own forcible language, "that now she had the wolf by the ears, for that, in concluding or not concluding the marriage, she saw danger every way; and that no matter (though she had dealt in matters of consequence) did so much trouble her as this, for that she could not tell how to resolve." she could neither bring herself to consent that her son with his bride should reside at the royal court without any exercise of his own religion--a course which would not only tend to make him an atheist, but cut off all hope of the conversion of his wife--nor that margaret of valois should be guaranteed the permission to have mass celebrated whenever she came into jeanne's own domains in béarn, a district which the queen "had cleansed of all idolatry." for margaret would by her example undo much of that which had been so assiduously labored for, and the roman catholics who had remained would become "more unwilling to hear the gospel, they having a staff to lean to."[ ] [sidenote: her solicitude.] it was this uncertainty about margaret's course, and the consequent gain or loss to the protestant faith, that rendered it almost impossible for jeanne d'albret to master her anxiety. "in view," she wrote to her son, "of margaret's judgment and the credit she enjoys with the queen her mother and the king and her brothers, if she embrace 'the religion,' i can say that we are the most happy people in the world, and not only our house but all the kingdom of france will share in this happiness.... if she remain obstinate in her religion, being devoted to it, as she is said to be, it cannot be but that this marriage will prove the ruin, first, of our friends and our lands, and such a support to the papists that, with the good-will the queen mother bears us, we shall be ruined with the churches of france." it would almost seem that a prophetic glimpse of the future had been accorded to the queen of navarre. "my son, if ever you prayed god, do so now, i beg you, as i pray without ceasing, that he may assist me in this negotiation, and that this marriage may not be made in his anger for our punishment, but in his mercy for his own glory and our quiet."[ ] but there were other grounds for solicitude. catharine de' medici was the same deceitful woman she had always been. she would not allow jeanne d'albret to see either charles or margaret, save in her presence. she misrepresented the queen's words, and, when called to an account, denied the report with the greatest effrontery. she destroyed all the hopes jeanne had entertained of frank discussion. [sidenote: the queen of navarre is treated with tantalizing insincerity.] "you have great reason to pity me," the queen of navarre wrote to her faithful subject in béarn, "for never was i so disdainfully treated at court as i now am.... everything that had been announced to me is changed. they wish to destroy all the hopes with which they brought me."[ ] catharine showed no shame when detected in open falsehood. she told jeanne d'albret that her son's governor had given her reason to expect that henry would consent to be married by proxy according to the romish ceremonial. but when she was hard pressed and saw that jeanne did not believe her, she coolly rejoined: "well, at any rate, he told me something." "i am quite sure of it, madam, but it was something that did not approach that!" "thereupon," writes jeanne in despair, "she burst out laughing; for, observe, she never speaks to me without trifling."[ ] [sidenote: she is shocked at the morals of the court.] but it was particularly the abominable immorality of the royal court that alarmed the queen of navarre for the safety of her only son, should he be called to sojourn there. the lady margaret, she wrote--and her words deserve the more notice on account of the infamy into which the life as yet apparently so guileless was to lead--"is handsome, modest, and graceful; but nurtured in the most wicked and corrupt society that ever was. i have not seen a person who does not show the effects of it. your cousin, the marquise, is so changed in consequence of it, that there is no appearance of religion, save that she does not go to mass; for, as for her mode of life, excepting idolatry, she acts like the papists, and my sister the princess still worse.... i would not for the world that you were here to live. it is on this account that i want you to marry, and your wife and you to come out of this corruption; for although i believed it to be very great, i find it still greater. here it is not the men that solicit the women, but the women the men. were you here, you would never escape but by a remarkable exercise of god's mercy.... i abide by my first opinion, that you must return to béarn. my son, you can but have judged from my former letters, that they only try to separate you from god and from me; you will come to the same conclusion from this last, as well as form some idea respecting the anxiety i am in on your account. i beg you to pray earnestly to god; for you have great need of his help at all times, and above all at this time. i pray to him that you may obtain it, that he may give you, my son, all your desires."[ ] [sidenote: death of jeanne d'albret, june , .] such were the anxieties of the queen of navarre in behalf of a son whom she had carefully reared, hoping to see in him a pillar of the protestant faith. she was to be spared the sight both of those scenes in his life which might have flushed her cheek with pride, and of other scenes which would have caused her to blush with shame. at length the last difficulties in the way of henry of navarre's marriage, so far as the court and the queen were concerned, were removed.[ ] charles and catharine no longer insisted that margaret should be allowed the mass when in béarn; while jeanne reluctantly abandoned her objections to the celebration of the marriage ceremony in the city of paris. accordingly, about the middle of may the queen of navarre left blois and came to the capital for the purpose of devoting her attention to the final arrangements for the wedding. she had not, however, been long in paris before she fell sick of a violent fever, to which it became evident that she must succumb. we are told by a writer who regards this as a manifest provocation of heaven, that one of her last acts before her sudden illness had been a visit to the louvre to petition the king that, on the approaching festival of corpus christi (fête-dieu), the "idol," as she styled the wafer, might not be borne in solemn procession past the house in which she lodged; and that the king had granted her request.[ ] during the short interval before her death she exhibited the same devotion as previously to the purer christianity she had embraced, mingled with affectionate solicitude for her son and daughter, so soon to be left orphans. her constancy and fortitude proved her worthy of all the eulogies that were lavished upon her.[ ] on monday, the ninth of june, she died, sincerely mourned by the huguenots, who felt that in her they had lost one of their most able and efficient supports, the weakness of whose sex had not made her inferior to the most active and resolute man of the party. even catharine de' medici, who had hated her with all her cowardly heart, made some show of admiring her virtues, now that she was no longer formidable and her straightforward policy had ceased to thwart the underhanded and shifting diplomacy in which the queen mother delighted. yet the report gained currency that jeanne had been poisoned at catharine's instigation. she had, it was said, bought gloves of monsieur rené, the queen mother's perfumer[ ]--a man who boasted of his acquaintance with the italian art of poisoning--and had almost instantly felt the effects of some subtle powder with which they were impregnated. to contradict this and other sinister stories, the king ordered an examination of her remains to be made; but no corroborative evidence was discovered. it is true that the physicians are said to have avoided, ostensibly through motives of humanity, any dissection of the brain, where alone the evidence could have been found.[ ] be this as it may, the charge of poisoning is met so uniformly in the literature of the sixteenth century, on occasion of every sudden death, that the most credulous reader becomes sceptical as to its truth, and prefers to indulge the hope that perhaps the age may not have been quite so bad as it was represented by contemporaries. the prince of béarn now became king of navarre; and, as the court went into mourning for the deceased queen, his nuptials with margaret of valois were deferred until the month of august. [sidenote: coligny and the boy king.] admiral coligny, instead of returning to la rochelle after his friendly reception at the court at blois, had gone to châtillon, where his ruined country-seat and devastated plantations had great need of his presence.[ ] here he was soon afterward joined by his wife, travelling from la rochelle with a special safe-conduct from the king, the preamble of which declared charles's will and intention to retain coligny near his own person, "in order to make use of him in his most grave and important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtue is sufficiently known and tried."[ ] coligny was not left long in his rural retirement. charles expressed, and probably felt, profound disgust with his former advisers, and knew not whom to trust. on one occasion, about this time, he held a conversation with téligny respecting the flemish war. téligny had just entreated his majesty not to mention to the queen mother the details into which he entered--a promise which charles readily gave, and swore with his ordinary profanity to observe. and then the poor young king, with a desperation which must enlist our sympathy in his behalf, undertook to explain to coligny's son-in-law his own solitude in the midst of a crowded court. there was no one, he said, upon whom he could rely for sound counsel, or for the execution of his plans. tavannes was prudent, indeed; but, having been anjou's lieutenant, and almost the author of his victories, would oppose a war that threatened to obscure his laurels. vieilleville was wedded to his cups. cossé was avaricious, and would sell all his friends for ten crowns. montmorency alone was good and trustworthy, but so given to the pleasures of the chase that he would be sure to be absent at the very moment his help was indispensable.[ ] it is not strange, under these circumstances, that charles should have turned with sincere respect, and almost with a kind of affection, to that stern old huguenot warrior, upright, honorable, pious, a master of the art of war, never more to be dreaded than after the reverses which he accepted as lessons from a father's hands. as for coligny himself, his task was not one of his own seeking. but he pitied from his heart the boy-king--still more boyish in character than in years--as he pitied and loved france. above all, he was unwilling to omit anything that might be vitally important for the progress of the gospel in his native land and abroad. his eyes were not blind to his danger. when, at the king's request, he came to paris, he received letters of remonstrance for his imprudence, from all parts of france. he was reminded that other monarchs before charles had broken their pledges. huss had been burned at constance notwithstanding the emperor's safe conduct, and the maxim that no faith need be kept with heretics had obtained a mournful currency.[ ] to these warnings admiral coligny replied at one moment with some annoyance, indignant that his young sovereign should be so suspected; at another, with more calmness, magnanimously dismissing all solicitude for himself in comparison with the great ends he had in view. when he was urged to consider that other huguenots, less hated by the papists than he was, had been treacherously assassinated--as was the general opinion then--andelot, cardinal châtillon, and lately the queen of navarre--his reply was still the same: "i am well aware that it is against me principally that the enmity is directed. and yet how great a misfortune will it be for france, if, for the sake of my individual preservation, she must be kept in perpetual alarm and be plunged on every occasion into new troubles! or, what benefit will it be to me to live thus in continual distrust of the king? if my prince wishes to slay me, he can accomplish his will in any part of the realm. as a royal officer, i cannot in honor refuse to comply with the summons of the king, meantime committing myself to the providence of him who holds in his hand the hearts of kings and princes, and has numbered my years--nay, the very hairs of my head. if i succeed in going in arms to the low countries, i hope that i may do signal service, and change hatred into good-will. but, if i fall there, at least the enmity against me will cease, and perhaps men will live in peace, without its being needful to set a whole world in commotion for the protection of the life of a single man."[ ] [sidenote: the dispensation delayed.] [sidenote: the king's earnestness.] the juncture was critical, although the future still looked auspicious. charles was resolved that the marriage of his sister should go forward, and seemed almost as resolute, when he had thus secured peace at home between papist and huguenot, to embark in a war against spain--the natural enemy of french repose and greatness. gregory the thirteenth--for pius the fifth had died on the first of may, , although his maxims and his counsels were unhappily still alive, and endowed with a mischievous activity--refused to grant the dispensation for the marriage except on impossible conditions.[ ] but charles was too impatient to await his caprice. "my dear aunt," he once said to the queen of navarre, a short time before her death, "i honor you more than the pope, and i love my sister more than i fear him. i am not indeed a huguenot, but neither am i a blockhead; and if the pope play the fool too much, i will myself take margot," his common nickname for his sister, "by the hand, and give her away in marriage in full prêche."[ ] charles was apparently equally in earnest in his intention to maintain his edict for the advantage of the huguenots. accordingly he published a new declaration to this effect, and sent it to his governors, accompanied with a letter expressive of his great gratification that the spirit of distrust was everywhere giving place to confidence, a proof of which was to be found in the recent restitution of the four cities of la rochelle, montauban, la charité, and cognac, by those in whose hands they were intrusted by the edict of st. germain.[ ] and charles's correspondence shows still further that the projects urged by coligny, louis of nassau, and other prominent patriots, had made a deep impression upon his imagination, now that for the first time the prospect of a truly noble campaign opened before him. in carrying out the extensive plan against the spanish king, it was indispensable--so thought the wisest politicians of the time--to secure the co-operation of the turk. the extent of philip's dominions in the old and the new world, the prestige of his successes, the enormous treasure he was said to derive yearly from his colonial establishments in the indies, all gave him a reputation for power which a more critical examination would have dissipated; but the time for this had not yet arrived. consequently charles had sent his ambassador to constantinople, intending through him to conclude an alliance offensive and defensive with the moslems. and his declarations to the half-protestant prelate were explicit enough: "all my humors conspire to make me oppose the greatness of the spaniards, and i am deliberating how i may therein conduct myself the most skilfully that i can."[ ] "i have concluded a league with the queen of england--a circumstance which, with the understanding i have with the princes of germany, puts the spaniards in a wonderful jealousy."[ ] not only so, but he instructs the ambassador to inform the grand seignior that he has a large number of vessels ready, with twelve or fifteen thousand troops about to embark, ostensibly to protect his own harbors, "but in reality intended to keep the catholic king uneasy, and to give boldness to those beggars of the netherlands to bestir themselves and form such enterprises as they already have done."[ ] if these assurances had been addressed to a protestant prince, it would readily be comprehended that they might have had for their object to lull his co-religionists into a fatal security. but, as they were intended only for a mohammedan ruler, i can see no room for the suspicion that charles was at this time animated by anything else than an unfeigned desire to realize the plan of coligny, of a confederacy that should shatter the much-vaunted empire of philip the second. [sidenote: mons and valenciennes captured.] an event now occurred which for a time raised high the hopes of the french huguenots. this was the capture of the important cities of mons and valenciennes. to count louis of nassau the credit of this bold and successful stroke was due. with the secret connivance of charles, he had recruited in france a body of five hundred horsemen and a thousand foot soldiers, among whom, as was natural, the huguenot element predominated. with these he now set foot again in the netherlands. the success that first attended his enterprise was owing, however, rather to a well executed trick than to any practical exhibition of generalship; for the gates of mons were opened from within by a party that had entered on the previous day in the disguise of wine-merchants.[ ] nevertheless the capture of mons, the capital of the province of hainault (on saturday, the twenty-fourth of may), was so brilliant an exploit, coming as it did close upon the heels of other reverses of the duke of alva, that the french huguenots and all who sympathized with them may be pardoned for having indulged even in somewhat extravagant demonstrations of joy. they seem to have believed that it was pretty nearly over with that hated instrument of spanish tyranny. they fancied that, with his five hundred horse, louis might penetrate the country by a rapid movement, and either take alva prisoner, or, if the duke should retire to antwerp, raise the whole country in revolt.[ ] [sidenote: catharine's indecision.] [sidenote: queen elizabeth inspires no confidence.] for the next two months the huguenot leaders were indefatigable in their efforts to persuade charles to take open and decided ground against spain; but they were met by anjou and the party in his interest with arguments drawn from the difficulty or injustice of the undertaking, and by the suggestion that elizabeth, as was her wont, would be likely to withdraw so soon as she saw france once engaged in war with her powerful neighbor, and to use charles's embarrassments as a means of securing private advantages. in point of fact, charles was personally unwilling to commit himself until sure of england's support. meanwhile, catharine, from whose argus-eyed inspection nothing that was debated in the royal presence, openly or secretly, ever escaped notice, awaited with her accustomed irresolution elizabeth's decision, before herself deciding whether to throw her influence into the scale with coligny (of whose growing favor with her son she had begun to entertain some suspicion), or with anjou and the spaniards. but elizabeth was as ever a riddle, not only to her allies, but even to her most confidential advisers. certainly she was no friend to philip and alva; yet she would not abruptly enter into war against them. she could not help seeing that the interests of her person and of her kingdom, to say nothing of her protestant faith, were bound up in the success of the prince of orange, who was about to cross the rhine with twenty-five thousand germans for the relief of mons, now invested by alva. for the duke wisely regarded the recapture of this place as the first step in extricating himself from his present embarrassments. in such a strife as that upon which elizabeth must before long enter, whether with or without her consent, the cordial alliance of france would be valuable beyond computation. and yet, with a fatal perversity, she dallied with the proposal of marriage. one day she would not hear of alençon, alleging that his age and personal blemishes placed the matter out of all consideration. on another she gave hopes, and agreed to take a month's consideration.[ ] thus she tantalized her suitor. thus she convinced the cunning italian woman who, although she made no present show of holding the reins of power in france, was ready at any moment to resume them, that there was no reliance to be placed on england's promise of support against philip.[ ] [sidenote: rout of genlis.] the golden opportunity was in truth fast slipping away. alva had struck promptly at that opponent whose thrust was likely to be most deadly. mons must soon fall. a french huguenot force, under command of jean de hangest, sieur de genlis, was sent forward to relieve it. but the frenchman was no match for the cooler prudence of his antagonist,[ ] and suffered himself, on the march, to be surprised (on the nineteenth of july) and taken prisoner by don frederick of toledo and chiappin vitelli. of his army, barely one hundred foot soldiers found their way into the beleaguered town. twelve hundred were killed on the field of battle--almost in sight of mons--and a much larger number butchered by the peasantry of the neighborhood.[ ] a handful of officers and men, scarcely more fortunate, shared the captivity of their commander, and were destined to have their fortunes depend for a considerable time upon the fluctuating interests of two unprincipled courts.[ ] the rout of genlis was not in itself a decisive event. while coligny could bring forward a far more numerous army, and orange was in command of a considerable german force, the loss of this small detachment was but one of those many reverses that are to be looked for in every war. but, happening under the peculiar circumstances of the hour, it was invested with a consequence disproportioned to its real importance. the fate of the french huguenots was quivering in the balance. the papal party was known to be bitterly opposed to the war against spain, and to be merely awaiting an opportunity to strike a deadly blow at the heretics whom the royal edict still protected. catharine was undecided; but, with her, indecision was the ordinary prelude to the sudden adoption of some one of many conflicting projects, which had been long brooded over, but between which the choice was, in the end, the result rather of accident, caprice, or temporary impressions, than of calm deliberation. [sidenote: it determines catharine to take the spanish side.] [sidenote: loss of the golden opportunity.] this reverse at mons, limited in its extent as it was, would be likely, so the huguenot leaders of france foresaw--and they were not mistaken--to determine catharine to take the spanish side. with the queen mother in favor of spain and intolerance, experience had taught them that there was little to expect from her weak son's intentions, however good they might be. the only ground of hope for orange and the netherlands, and the only prospect for security and religious toleration at home, lay in the success of the flemish project at paris; and of this but a single chance seemed to remain--in elizabeth's finally espousing their cause with some good degree of resolution. "such of the religion," wrote walsingham to lord burleigh, inclosing the particulars of the disaster of genlis, "as before slept in security, begin now to awake and to see their danger, and do therefore conclude that, unless this enterprise in the low countries have good success, their cause groweth desperate."[ ] to the earl of leicester walsingham was still more explicit in his warnings: "the gentlemen of the religion, since the late overthrow of genlis, weighing what dependeth upon the prince of orange's overthrow, have made demonstration to the king, that, his enterprise lacking good success, it shall not then lie in his power to maintain his edict. they therefore desire him to weigh whether it were better to have foreign war with advantage, or inward war to the ruin of himself and his estate.[ ] the king being not here, his answer is not yet received. they hope to receive some such resolution as the danger of the cause requireth. in the meantime, the marshal (montmorency) desired me to move your lordship to deal with her majesty to know whether she, upon overture to be made to the king, cannot be content to join with him in assistance of this poor prince." and the faithful ambassador did not forget to remind his mistress that the success of philip in flanders was still more dangerous for elizabeth than for charles.[ ] [sidenote: the admiral retains his courage.] meantime, admiral coligny, although disappointed at the rout of the vanguard of the expedition which was to have been fitted out for the liberation of the netherlands, and yet more at the coolness which it had occasioned among those who up to this moment had been not unfriendly, did not yield to despondency, but labored all the more strenuously to engage charles in an undertaking fitted to call forth the nobler faculties of his soul, and to free him from the thraldom under narrow-minded and interested counsellors to which he had been subject all his life long. even before genlis's defeat (in june, ), the admiral had presented an extended paper, wherein the justice and the fair prospects of the war had been set forth with rare force and cogency.[ ] it may be that now, under the influence of a sincere and unselfish devotion that took no account of personal risks, the admiral distinctly told his young master that he could never be a king in the true sense until he should emancipate himself from his mother's control, and until he should find, outside of france, some occupation for his brother henry of anjou, such as the vacancy of the polish throne seemed to offer.[ ] such frankness would have been patriotic and timely, although a politician, influenced only by a regard for his own safety, would have regarded it as foolhardy in the extreme. [sidenote: charles and catharine at montpipeau.] this advice, promptly and faithfully reported to catharine by the spies she kept around the king's person,[ ] was the last drop in the cup of coligny's offences. charles, at the time of her discovery of this fact, was absent from court, seeking a few days' recreation at montpipeau. thither his mother, now really alarmed for the continuance of her influence, pursued him in precipitate haste.[ ] shutting herself up with him apart from his followers, she burst into tears and plied charles with an artful harangue. for this woman, who had a masculine will and a heart as cold and devoid of pity as the most utter scepticism could make it, had the ability to counterfeit the feminine tenderness which she did not possess. "i had not thought it possible," she said amid her sobs to her son, who trembled like a culprit detected in his crime, "i had not thought it possible that, in return for my pains in rearing you--in return for my preservation of your crown, of which both huguenots and catholics were desirous of robbing you, and after having sacrificed myself and incurred such risks in your behalf, you would have been willing to make me so miserable a requital. you hide yourself from me, your mother, and take counsel of your enemies. you snatch yourself from my arms that saved you, in order to rest in the arms of those who wished to murder you. i know that you hold secret deliberations with the admiral. you desire inconsiderately to plunge into a war with spain, and so to expose your kingdom, as well as yourself and us, a prey to 'those of the religion.' if i am so miserable, before compelling me to witness such a sight, give me permission to withdraw to my birthplace,[ ] and send away your brother, who may well style himself unfortunate in having employed his life for the preservation of yours. give him at least time to get out of danger and from the presence of enemies made in your service--the huguenots, who do not wish for a war with spain, but for a french war and a subversion of all estates, which will enable them to gain a secure footing."[ ] [sidenote: rumors of elizabeth's desertion of her allies.] such was a portion of the queen mother's crafty speech. but there was another point upon which she doubtless touched, and which she used to no little purpose. a report had reached her from england to the effect that queen elizabeth had decided to issue a proclamation recalling the english who had gone to flushing to assist the patriots. the story was false; so the secretary, sir thomas smith, subsequently assured walsingham. elizabeth neither had done so, nor intended anything of the kind.[ ] but it was wonderfully like the usual practice of henry the eighth's daughter, and catharine believed it, and looked with horror at the precipice before which she stood. deserted by her faithless ally, france was entering single-handed a contest of life or death with the world-empire of spain. in fact, the english ambassador ascribed to the receipt of this intelligence alone both the queen mother's tears and entreaties at montpipeau and the king's altered policy. "touching flemish matters," he wrote to lord burleigh, "the king had proceeded to an open dealing, had he not received advertisement out of england, that her majesty meant to revoke such of her subjects as are presently in flanders; whereupon such of his council here as incline to spain, have put the queen mother in such a fear, that the enterprise cannot but miscarry without the assistance of england, as she with tears had dissuaded the king for the time, who otherwise was very resolute."[ ] catharine had not mistaken her power over the feeble intellect and the inconstant will of her son. terrified less by the prospect of a huguenot supremacy which she held forth, than by the menace of her withdrawal and that of anjou, charles, who was but too well acquainted with their cunning and ambition, admitted his fault in concealing his plans, and promised obedience for the future.[ ] [sidenote: charles thoroughly cast down.] it was a sore disappointment to admiral coligny. the young king had, until this time, shown himself so favorable, that "commissions were granted, ready to have been sealed, for the levying of men in sundry provinces." but he had now lost all his enthusiasm, and spoke coldly of the enterprise.[ ] gaspard de coligny did not, however, even now lose courage or forsake the post of duty to which god and his country evidently called him. in truth, the superiority of his mental and moral constitution, less evident in prosperity, now became resplendent, and chained the attention of every beholder. "how perplexed the admiral is, who foreseeth the mischief that is like to follow, if assistance come not from above," wrote walsingham, full of admiration, to the earl of leicester, "your lordship may easily guess. and surely to say truth, he never showed greater magnanimity, nor never was better followed nor more honored of those of the religion than now he is, which doth not a little appal the enemies. in this storm he doth not give over the helm. he layeth before the king and his council the peril and danger of his estate, and though he cannot obtain what he would, yet doth he obtain somewhat from him."[ ] [sidenote: coligny partially succeeds in reassuring him.] so wrote that shrewd observer, sir francis walsingham, just two weeks before the bloody sunday of the massacre, and eight days before the marriage of navarre, little suspecting, in spite of his anxiety, the flood of misery which was so soon to burst upon that devoted land. to all human foresight there was still hope that charles, weak, nerveless, addicted to pleasure, but not yet quite lost to a sense of honor, might yet be induced to adopt a policy which would place france among the foremost champions of intellectual and civil liberty, and transfer to the north of the pyrenees the prosperity which the spanish monarchs had misused and had employed only as an instrument of oppression and degradation. and, indeed, coligny was partially successful; for the impression made upon charles by his mother's complaints and menaces at montpipeau gradually wore away, and again he listened with apparent interest to the manly arguments of the great huguenot leader. [sidenote: elizabeth toys with dishonorable proposals from netherlands.] [sidenote: fatal results.] could elizabeth at this moment have brought herself to a more noble course, could she for once have forgotten to "deal under hand," and help secretly while in public she disavowed--could she, in short, have realized for a single instant her responsibility as a great protestant princess, and been willing to expose even her own life to peril in order to secure to the reformation a chance of fair play, it might not even now have been too late. but what was she doing at this very moment? according to the admission of her own secretary, she was engaged in detaining volunteers from the netherlands, on the pretext of "fearing too much disorder there through lack of some good head;" and "gently answering with a dilatory and doubtful answer" the duke of alva, when he demanded the revocation of the queen's subjects in netherlands.[ ] was she projecting anything still more dishonorable? the spanish envoy in england, anton de guaras, affirms it, in a letter of the thirtieth of june to the duke of alva; and we have no means of disproving his assertions. in his account of a private audience granted him by queen elizabeth, the ambassador writes: "she told me that emissaries were coming every day from flushing to her, proposing to place the town in her hands. if it was for the service of his majesty, and if his majesty approved, she said that she would accept their offer. with the english who were already there, and with others whom she would send over for the purpose, it would be easy for her to take entire possession of the place, and she would then make it over to the duke of alva or to any one whom the duke would appoint to receive it."[ ] guaras can scarcely be suspected of misrepresenting the conversation upon so important a topic and in a confidential communication to the spanish governor of the netherlands. the most charitable construction of elizabeth's words seems to be that they were a clumsy attempt to propitiate the duke "with a dilatory answer," as sir thomas smith somewhat euphemistically expresses it, and that she had no intention of making good her engagements. but it was a sad blunder on her part, and likely to be ruinous to her friends, the french protestants. alva was not slow in concluding that elizabeth's offer was of greater value as documentary proof of her untrustworthy character, than as a means of recovering flushing. "there is no positive proof," remarks the historian to whom we are indebted for an acquaintance with the letter of guaras, "that alva communicated elizabeth's offers to the queen mother and the king of france, but he was more foolish than he gave the world reason to believe him to be if he let such a weapon lie idle in his writing-desk."[ ] and so that inconstant, unprincipled italian woman, on whose fickle purpose the fate of thousands was more completely dependent than even her contemporaries as yet knew, at last reached the definite persuasion that elizabeth was preparing to play her false, at the very moment when coligny was hurrying her son into war with spain. even if france should prove victorious, catharine's own influence would be thrown into perpetual eclipse by that of the admiral and his associates. this result the queen mother resolved promptly to forestall, and for that purpose fell back upon a scheme which had probably been long floating dimly in her mind. * * * * * [sidenote: mémoires de michel de la huguerye.] the _mémoires inédits de michel de la huguerye_, of which the first volume was recently published (paris, ), under the auspices of the national historical society, present some interesting points, and deserve a special reference. at first sight, the disclosures, with which the author tells us he was favored, would seem to establish the bad faith of the court in entering upon the peace of st. germain, and the long premeditation of the succeeding massacre. a closer examination of the facts, assuming la huguerye's thorough veracity, shows that this is a mistake. la huguerye may, indeed, have been informed by companions on the way to italy, who supposed him to be a partisan of the guises, that a great blow would be struck at the huguenots when the proper time arrived; and la huguerye may have been confident that he was telling the truth, when, about martinmas (november th), , he stated to de briquemault, that "the king, seeing that he could not attain his object by way of arms without greatly weakening--nay, endangering his kingdom, had resolved upon taking another road, by which, in a single day, he would cleanse his whole state." he may have been assured, on what he deemed good authority, that the pope was in the plot, and would keep the king of spain from doing anything that might interfere with the execution, and have inferred that, the peace being a treacherous one, the only hope of the huguenots lay in skilfully enlisting charles in its maintenance, contrary to his original purpose. so he was confirmed in his belief by the contents of the despatches of the spanish ambassador at the french court, treacherously submitted to the huguenots by an unfaithful agent of the envoy. but the former statements were, at most, little better than rumors, to which the circumstances of the hour gave color. the air was full of dark hints; but, apparently, they had no more solid foundation than the fact that, in an age abounding in perfidious schemes, the protestants had already placed themselves partially in the power of their great enemies, and were likely soon to be more completely in their hands. the information received by la huguerye was a very different thing from an authoritative avowal of a concealed purpose made by catharine or by charles himself. on the other hand, the assurances in the spanish despatches were just of the same general nature as others with which the french government endeavored to quiet philip, alva, and the roman pontiff himself. the only other peculiarity of la huguerye to which i shall allude is his studied misrepresentation of the character of jeanne d'albret, queen of navarre. contrary to the uniform portraiture given by contemporaries of both religious parties, she here appears as "an inconsiderate woman (femme légère), with little forethought," "known to be jealous of the authority of the admiral," "whom she thwarted by her authority as much as was possible, at whatever cost or danger it might be." she had "intermeddled with affairs in the last war, unsolicited and of her own accord, not so much for conscience' sake, as because of the hatred her house bore to the popes, sole cause of the loss of the kingdom of navarre, and especially through jealousy of the late prince of condé, whom she saw to be in the enjoyment of such credit, and to be so well followed, that she suspected great injury might result to her son in the event of his succession to the throne." she was, consequently, "not very sorry" to hear of condé's death at jarnac. having been disappointed in securing for her son the sole (nominal) command of the huguenots, she vented her vengeance upon coligny, whom she held responsible for the association of the young condé in the leadership with his cousin. from that time forward she took every opportunity to cross the admiral, with the view of compelling him to retire in disgust from the management of affairs. in one of the speeches--sallustian, i suspect--in which the mémoires abound, count louis of nassau is represented as lamenting: "it is a great pity to have to do with a woman who has no other counsel than her own head, which is too little and light (légère) to contain so many reasons and precautions, and who is of such weight in matters of so great consequence. and the mischief is that she has such an aversion to the admiral through foolish jealousy," etc. at last the admiral is goaded on to unpardonable imprudence. in the spring of he yields to the importunities of marshal cossé, and goes from la rochelle to the royal court at blois: "weary of being near this princess, he exposed himself to the evident peril, of which he had had advices and arguments enough." to all this misrepresentation, the remarks of la huguerye's editor, the baron de ruble, are a sufficient answer: "no other historian of the period, catholic or huguenot, has accused the queen of navarre of so much jealousy, frivolity, and spite. to the calumnies of la huguerye we should oppose the verdict which every impartial judge can pronounce respecting this princess, in accordance with the letters published by the marquis de rochambeau and the testimony of contemporaries." footnotes: [ ] "la royne et mons de morvillier trettent eus deus seulz avecques eus, _ce sont aujourdhuy les grans cous_." see two important letters of lorraine to his sister-in-law, the duchess of nemours, april th and may , , in soldan, geschichte d. prot. in frank., ii. appendix, , , from mss. of the bibliothèque nationale. [ ] "though of late the cardinal of lorrain hath had access to the king's presence, yet is he not repaired in credit, neither dealeth he in government." walsingham to leicester, aug. , , digges, compleat ambassador, p. . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. yet it is but fair to add that walsingham notes that "the great conference that is between the queen mother and the cardinal breedeth some doubt of some practise to impeach the same." [ ] letter of april , , pii quinti epistolæ, . [ ] relations des amb. vén. (tommaseo), ii. . correro's relation is of . [ ] baschet, la diplomatie vénitienne, p. . [ ] the only account of this striking occurrence which i have seen is given by jehan de la fosse, p. . [ ] walsingham and norris to elizabeth, jan. , , digges, . [ ] "the best ground of continuance," he writes to leicester, "that i can learn, by those that can best judge, is the king's own inclination, which is thought sincerely to be bent that way." jan. , , digges, . [ ] "thus, sir, you see, for that he is not settled in religion, how he is carried away with worldly respects, a common misery to those of his calling." ibid., . [ ] walsingham to leicester, aug. , , digges, . [ ] de thou, iv. - . see digges, . [ ] letter of the queen of navarre to the queen mother, dec. , , rochambeau, lettres d'antoine de bourbon et de jehanne d'albret (paris, ), . a few lines of this admirable paper (which is, however, much mutilated) may be quoted as having an almost prophetic significance: "et vous diray, madame, les larmes aus yeulx, avecq une afection pure et entière que, s'il ne plaist au roy et à vous nous aseureur nos tristes demandes, que je ne puis espérer qu'une treve ... en ce royaulme par ceste guerre siville, car nous y mourrons tous plustost que quiter nostre dieu et nostre religion, laquelle nous ne pouvons tenir sans exersise, non plus qu'un corps ne sauré vivre sans boire et manger.... je vous en ay dit le seul moyen; ayés pitié de tant de sang répandu, de tant d'impiétés commises en la ... de ceste guerre et _que vous ne pourrez bien d'un seul mot faire cesser_." "et sur cella, madame, je supliray dieu qui tient les cueurs des roys en sa main disposer celui du roi et le vostre à mectre le repos en ce royaulme à sa gloire et contentement de vos majestés, _maugré le complot de m. le cardinal de lorrayne_, dont il a descouvert la trame à villequagnon," etc. [ ] discours du massacre fait à orange, from the mém. de l'état de france sous charles ix., archives curieuses, vi. - ; de thou, iv. . [ ] floquet, histoire du parlement du normandie, iii. - , whose account is in great part derived from the registers of the parliament and the archives of the hôtel de ville of rouen. de thou, iv. (liv. l.) , certainly greatly underestimates the number of protestants killed, when he limits it to _five_. [ ] see _ante_, chapter xvi. [ ] jehan de la fosse (sept., ), . [ ] ibid. (nov., ), . [ ] jehan de la fosse (dec., ), . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ); de thou, iv. (liv. l.) - ; discours de ce qui avint touchant la croix de gastines (from mém. de l'état de charles ix.), in cimber et danjou, arch. cur., vi. , ; jehan de la fosse, _ubi supra_. according to the recently published journal of la fosse, charles the ninth expressed himself to the preachers of paris, who had come to remonstrate with him in language which may at first sight appear somewhat suspicious: "attestant ledict roy vouloir vivre et mourir en la religion de ses prédécesseurs roys, religion catholique et romaine, toutefois qu'il avoit fait abattre la croix pour certaine cause laquelle il vouloit taire et avoir faict plusieurs choses contre sa conscience, toutefois par contrainte à cause du temps, et supplioit les prédicateurs n'avoir mauvaise opinion de luy" (pp. , ). there is good reason, however, to believe that the secret reason which the king was unwilling to name was not a contemplated massacre of the protestants, but rather the navarrese and english marriages, and the war with spain in the netherlands. [ ] walsingham to burleigh, dec. , , digges, p. . "marshal montmorency repaired to this town the third of this moneth accompanied with horse. the next day after his arrival he and the marshal de coss conferred with the chief of this town about the plucking down of the cross, which was resolved on, and the same put in execution, the masons employed in that behalf being guarded by certain harquebusiers." [ ] queen elizabeth was born september , ; henry was born in september, (the day is variously given as the th, th, and st), and was just nineteen. [ ] letter of catharine to la mothe fénélon, oct. , , correspondance diplomatique, vii. - . [ ] despatch of la mothe fénélon, dec. , . ibid., vol. iii. , . [ ] and with a freedom which might be mistaken for arcadian simplicity, did we not know that innocence was no characteristic of either court in that age. "j'en cognoissoys ung," he told her, "qui estoit nay à tant de sortes de vertu, qu'il ne failloit doubter qu'elle n'en fût fort honnorée et singulièrement bien aymée, et dont j'espèrerois qu'au bout de neuf mois après, elle se trouveroit mère d'ung beau filz," etc. la mothe fénélon, iii. , , . [ ] despatch to cecil, jan. , , digges, . [ ] ibid., . [ ] digges, . [ ] catharine to la mothe fénélon, feb. , , corresp. diplom., vii. ; and walsingham to cecil, feb. , , digges, . [ ] catharine, _ubi supra_. [ ] la mothe fénélon, march , , ibid., iv. , . the ambassador exhibits his own incredulity respecting the stories circulated to the queen's disadvantage. [ ] to la mothe fénélon, feb. , , ibid., vii. . [ ] to the same, march , , ibid., vii. . [ ] walsingham to burleigh, may , , digges, . [ ] digges, . [ ] ibid., . [ ] "so it doth appear, if he would omit that demand, and put it in silence, yet will her majestie straitly capitulate with him, that he shall in no way demand it hereafter at her hands. which scruple, i believe, will utterly break off the matter; wherefore i am in small hope that any marriage will grow this way." leicester to walsingham, july , , digges, . [ ] digges, , . [ ] a league with france, walsingham maintained, would be an advancement of the gospel there and everywhere, and "though it yieldeth not so much _temporal_ profit, yet in respect of the _spiritual fruit_ that thereby may insue, i think it worth the imbracing." ibid., p. . [ ] digges, . [ ] anjou's humor, she told him, "me faict bien grande peyne." letter of july , , corresp. diplom., vii. . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. this expression deserves to be noticed particularly, inasmuch as it effectually disposes of the story--which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as a fable--that the assassination of lignerolles, a little over four months later (december, ), was compassed by charles ix. and his mother, because they discovered that he had become possessed of the secret of the projected massacre of st. bartholomew. if these royal personages had anything to do with the murder, which is very improbable, they hated lignerolles for marring the plan of the english match, which they so much desired. [ ] "je suis résolue de faire tous mes efforts pour réheussir pour mon fils d'alençon, qui ne sera pas si difficile." ibid., vii. . [ ] it must be admitted that some indignation on queen elizabeth's part was pardonable, if, as we learn from la mothe fénélon (despatch of may , ), she had heard that a certain person of high rank in the french court had recommended anjou to marry the english "granny"--"ceste vieille"--and administer to her, under some pretext, a "french potion"--"un breuvage de france"--so as to become a widower within six months of the wedding day. then he might marry mary, queen of scots, and reign with her peaceably over the whole island! correspondance diplomatique, iv. . however sincere or zealous elizabeth may have been previously, i doubt whether she ever forgave the suggestion, or the fair princess whose charms were thus exalted above her own. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. l.) . [ ] "i would your lordship knew the gentleman," enthusiastically writes walsingham (august th, ) to the earl of leicester. "for courage abroad and counsell at home they give him here the reputation to be another [name in cipher]. he is in speech eloquent and pithy; but which is chiefest, he is in religion, as religious in life as he is sincere in profession. i hope god hath raised him up in these days, to serve for an instrument for the advancement of his glory." digges, . in another letter, without date, the ambassador speaks of him as "surely the rarest gentleman which i have talked withal since i came to france," ibid., . [ ] the substance of louis of nassau's secret interviews is best given by walsingham in a long communication, of august , , to lord burleigh, digges, - . [ ] "contre les deffences et proscriptions de son duc, qui à plat avoit refusé le roi de souffrir ce mariage, elle s'en vint à la rochelle pour avoir nom avant de mourir (ainsi qu'elle disoit) la martia de caton." agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] "a quoi ses ennemis trouvèrent à redire, publiant qu'il n'apartenoit qu'aux _princes_ d'épouser par procurateur. mais ceux qui parloient des choses sans passion, imputoient ces sortes de discours à médisance, soûtenant de leur côté qu'il ne pouvoit faire autrement, puisqu'il n'y avoit pas de sureté pour lui à l'aller épouser," etc. vie de coligny, . [ ] a very interesting account of the long imprisonment of coligny's widow is to be found in count jules delaborde's monograph, "jacqueline d'entremont," _apud_ bulletin de la société de l'hist. du prot. fr., xvi. ( ) - . [ ] a few months before the admiral's departure from la rochelle, there had been held in this huguenot asylum a convocation of historical importance. the sessions of the seventh national synod, lasting from the second to the eleventh of april, , were consumed in important deliberations respecting the doctrines and discipline of the reformed church (see aymon, tous les synodes, i. - ). the queen of navarre, the princes of navarre and condé, count louis of nassau, and admiral coligny were present. at the request of the synod, they added their signatures to those of the ministers and elders, upon three copies of the confession of faith, engrossed on parchment, which were to be kept at la rochelle, in béarn, and at geneva respectively (see the eighth general article). the moderator on this occasion was theodore beza, who had been specially invited to france. the reformer was certainly not destitute of courage, for he could not have forgotten the dangers to which he had been exposed on previous visits to france. they were even greater than beza himself probably knew. in june, , after the conclusion of the first civil war, there was a rumor at brussels that beza could not return to geneva, because of a quarrel he had had with calvin. thereupon, the duchess of parma, regent of the netherlands, suspecting that he might be tempted to come through the spanish dominions, issued secret orders that the frontiers should be watched, and offered a reward of one thousand florins to any one who should bring him, dead or alive. he was described as "homme de moïenne stature, ayant barbe à demy blanche, et le visage hault et large." letters of the duchess of parma, june th and th, , _apud_ charles paillard, histoire des troubles religieux de valenciennes (paris and brussels, , ), iii. , , . [ ] walsingham to burleigh, aug. , , digges, . the ambassador informs elizabeth, in this letter, of the intense desire of the french protestants that she should express to the french envoy her approval of the invitation extended to the princes and coligny, and should say "that so rare a subject as the admiral is was not to be suffered to live in such a corner as rochelle." it was thought that her commendations would greatly advance his credit with the king. [ ] i know not on what authority miss freer states (henry iii. of france, his court and times, i. ) that "even coligny was startled at the ominous significance of these words; the shadow, however, vanished before the warmth and frankness of charles's manner." compare agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] walsingham's account in a letter of la mothe fénélon (corresp. dipl., iv. , ), its accuracy being vouched for by a letter of charles ix. himself (ibid., vii. ); tocsain contre les massacreurs, cimber et danjou, vii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. l.) . [ ] charles ix. to emmanuel philibert, blois, sept. , , _apud_ leger, hist. gén. des églises vaudoises (leyden, ), i. , . [ ] "durant ce moys, gaspard de coligny, remis par l'édit de pacification en l'estat d'admiral, fut mandé par le roy et vint de la rochelle trouver le roy à bloys, et se retira hors de la cour toute la maison de guise, de sorte que le roy estoit gouverné par ledit admiral et montmorency." jehan de la fosse, journal d'un curé ligueur, . [ ] walsingham to cecil, march , . digges, , . [ ] "and as for conference had with the count lewis of nassau, he told him, that he was misinformed;" first letter of walsingham to burleigh, of aug. th, digges, . yet the second letter of the same date gives a detailed account of this conference. it must be admitted that the diplomacy of the sixteenth century was sufficiently barefaced in its impostures. louis of nassau told walsingham of an enterprise of strozzi against spain, determined upon by charles ix. "onely to amaze the king there;" but, as to strozzi, "the king here meaneth notwithstanding to disallow [him] openly." ibid., . [ ] digges, . [ ] jehan de la fosse, . [ ] "et que ceulx qui estoient à la fenestre estoient bien aises de veoir jouer le jeu à mes despens." it is scarcely necessary to say that this characteristic expression alludes primarily to the king of spain and the duke of alva in the netherlands. [ ] charrière, négociations de la france dans le levant, documents inédits (publ. by the imperial government), paris, , iii. . cf. sir james mackintosh, hist. of england, vol. iii., app. a., pp. , , audience of sr. de la bourdaizière at rome, cir. sept., . [ ] margaret being born may , , and henry of navarre, dec. , . [ ] letter of march , / , rochambeau, lettres d'antoine de bourbon et de jehanne d'albret (paris, ), . the story of the promise of margaret by her father to henry of navarre is confirmed by a letter of charles ix., now in the national library, dated october , . "the queen of navarre," he writes to ferralz (ferrails), at rome, "has several times invited me to do her son the honor to marry him to my sister, _whereby also the promise would be fulfilled which my father gave to the late king of navarre_." fr. von raumer, briefe aus paris (leipsic, ), i. . [ ] mlle. vauvilliers, hist. de jeanne d'albret (paris, ), i. . [ ] soldan, gesch. des prot. in frankreich, ii. . [ ] "i thinke," wrote sir thomas smith, as early as january , , "your majestie hath understood of the marriage practized betwixt the prince of portugall and madame margaret, the king's sister." forbes, state papers, ii. . [ ] mémoires et lettres de marguerite de valois, edited by m. f. guessard (publications of the french historical society), paris, , . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. l.) , . notwithstanding the frequent assertions in royal letters (as, for instance, in one which i have already quoted), that the queen of navarre herself urged the marriage, it is certain that she did not initiate it, while it is even maintained that she was only brought to consent by threats. "la reine fut ouie un temps sans vouloir approuver ledit mariage, jusqu'à cette extrémité qu'on la menaça de faire declarer son fils illegitime, à cause du mariage qui avoit été contracté entre elle et le duc de cleves. enfin vaincue, elle declare qu'elle n'en esperait que tout malheur." fr. von raumer, briefe aus paris, i. . [ ] mémoires de marg. de valois, . the absurdity of the story that margaret was averse to this marriage, because of a romantic attachment to young henry of guise, is sufficiently clear from the circumstance that the duke of guise had been married for some time when the match between the prince of navarre and margaret of valois was first talked of in earnest. he married, on the th of september, , catharine of cleves, widow of prince porcien. ("_hodie_ celebrantur lutetiæ ducis guisii, qui ducit in uxorem viduam principis portiani," etc. languet, sept. , , epist. secr., i. .) it is not probable that margaret would object to the advantageous marriage with henry of navarre on account of her affection for a former lover, who, at the time of her nuptials, had been for two years married to another woman. [ ] digges, . [ ] "la reyna mi madre," said anjou one day to a lady, "muestra tener pena de que esta desbaratado mi casamiento, y yo estoy el mas contento hombre del mundo de haber escapado de casar con una puta publica." francis de alava to philip, may , , _apud_ froude, hist. of eng., x. . [ ] she gravely proposed to her council to have a stipulation for the restitution of calais inserted in the articles of marriage, and burleigh, sussex, and leicester had some difficulty in persuading her to omit the mention. lord burleigh, june , , digges, . [ ] froude, hist. of england, x. . this statement, in itself sufficiently credible in view of leicester's subsequent career, rests on a passage in a ms. from simancas, which mr. froude inserts in a foot-note. [ ] despatch of march , , digges, . [ ] unless by means of la mothe fénélon's arithmetic, who, in conversation with queen elizabeth, maintained that, since her majesty was at least _nine_ years younger in her _disposition_, and alençon _eight_ years older _in manly vigor_, both parties were of precisely the same age, namely, twenty-seven! corresp. diplom., v. , etc. [ ] la mothe fénélon, vii. ; dumont, corps diplomatique, v., - . it cannot but be regarded as a singular instance of elizabeth's irresolution and of that perversity with which she was wont to try the patience of her council almost beyond endurance, that she gravely proposed to include in the treaty an article providing for the _protection_ of the king of spain--a stipulation against which walsingham earnestly protested as the climax of folly, since it was certain "that the end of this league is onely to bridle his greatness." digges, . [ ] "the like hath not been seen in any man's memory," wrote lord burleigh. montmorency received "a cupboard of plate gilt," "a great cup of gold of ounces," etc. digges, ; de thou, iv. (liv. li.) , . [ ] la mothe fénélon, vii. . [ ] ibid., v. . [ ] ibid., vii. - . [ ] "que monseigneur le duc vienne!" despatch of aug. , . corresp. diplom., v. . [ ] pius the fifth--saint pius, for his name is commemorated in the prayers of the church on the th of may--was, we are told by his biographer, a model of severity to his own kindred; and, if the fact that he elevated his grand-nephew, michael bonelli, to the sacred college should be alleged as casting some doubt upon this characteristic of his, we must hasten to add that he did so, we are assured, only in consequence of the urgent solicitations of cardinal farnese and others. he deserves the credit, however, of yielding to their persuasions with reasonable promptness, for the nomination of his nephew took place within two months of the pope's accession. michael, being like his uncle a native of the vicinity of alessandria, in piedmont, naturally succeeded to the designation of "il cardinale alessandrino," which pius relinquished on assuming the tiara. gabutius, vita pii quinti papæ, _apud_ acta sanctorum (bolandi) maii, § , p. . [ ] the guises, in the same spirit, had at one time proposed as a candidate for margaret's hand the cardinal of este, for whom they hoped easily to obtain from the pope a dispensation from his vow of celibacy. walsingham to cecil, feb. , , digges, . [ ] capilupi, lo stratagema di carlo ix., , orig. edit., p. ; gabutius, vita pii quinti, _ubi supra_, § - , p. . [ ] so also says tavannes: "il est renvoyé avec paroles générales que sa majesté ne feroit rien au prejudice de l'obéissance de sa saincteté." mémoires (ed. petitot), iii. . tavannes is explicit in his declarations that the massacre was not premeditated. "tant s'en faut que l'on pensast faire la sainct barthélemy à ces nopces, que sans madame, fille du roy, qui y avoit inclination, il se deslioit" (iii. ). "l'entreprise de la sainct barthélemy, qui n'estoit pas seulement pourpensée, et dont la naissance vint de l'imprudence huguenotte." ibid., iii. . [ ] _e.g._: "si j'avois quelque autre moyen de me vanger de mes ennemis, je ne ferois point ce mariage; mais je n'en ai point d'autre moyen que cetui-ci." cardinal d'ossat's letter of sept. , , to villeroy, lettres (ed. of ), ii. . it must be noticed that d'ossat had a particular purpose in producing testimony to show that charles ix. _constrained_ his sister to marry, as it would assist him in obtaining a divorce for henry iv. if, as d'ossat affirms, the cardinal of alessandria exclaimed, on hearing of the massacre, "god be praised! the king of france has kept his word to me," this would agree equally well with the supposition that charles ix. had contented himself with general promises. [ ] "_the foolish cardinal_," wrote sir thomas smith, english ambassador at the french court during walsingham's temporary absence (march , / ), "went away as wise as he came; he neither brake the marriage with navarre, nor got no dismes of the church of france, nor perswaded the king to enter into the league with the turk, nor to accept the tridentine, or to break off treaty with us; and _the foolishest part of all, at his going away, he refused a diamond which the king offered him of crowns_, yet he was here highly feasted. he and his train cost the king above crowns a day, as they said." digges, . gabutius adds that after the death of pius v.--probably after the massacre--charles ix. sent the ring to the cardinal with this inscription upon the bezel: "non minus hæc solida est pietas, ne pietas possit mea sanguine solvi." vita pii quinti, _ubi supra_, § , p. . the inscription had doubtless been cut since the first proffer of the ring. it appears to me most probable that the ring was offered by charles to the cardinal with the idea that its acceptance would bind him to support the king in his suit for a dispensation for the marriage of henry and margaret, and that the prudent churchman declined it for the same reason. subsequently, with the same view, charles sent it to his ambassador at rome, m. de ferralz, instructing him to give it to the cardinal of alessandria. but ferralz, on consultation with the cardinal of ferrara and others in the french interest, came to the conclusion that the gift would be useless, and so retained it, at the same time notifying his master. the reason may have been either that alessandria had too little influence, since his uncle's death, to effect what was desired, or that the matter was of less consequence when once charles had resolved to go on with the marriage without waiting further for the dispensation. so i understand charles's words to ferralz (aug. , ): "j'ai aussi sceu par vostre dicte mémoire, que par l'avis de mon cousin le cardinal de ferrare, _vous avez retenu le diamant que je vous avois envoyé pour le donner de ma part au cardinal alexandrin_, puisque mon dict cousin et mes autres ministres trouvent que _le don seroit inutile et perdu_." mackintosh, iii., app. c., p. . [ ] despatch of march , , digges, , . it must be noticed that the permission to have mass celebrated in béarn had been purposely left out in the original basis. [ ] jeanne d'albret to henry of navarre, tours, feb. , , rochambeau, lettres d'antoine de bourbon et de jehanne d'albret (paris, ), . [ ] jeanne d'albret to m. de beauvoir, blois, march , , ibid., . [ ] "'il m'a donc dit quelque chose.' 'je croy bien qu'ouy, madame, mais c'est quelque chose qui n'approche point de cela.' elle se prist à rire, car nottez qu'elle ne parle à moy qu'en badinant." same letter, ibid., . how keenly jeanne felt this treatment may be inferred from a characteristic sentence: "je vous diray encores que je m'esbahis comme je peux porter les traverses que j'ay, car _l'on me gratte, l'on me picque, l'on me flatte, l'on me brave, l'on me veult tirer les vers du nez_, sans se laisser aller, bref je n'ay que martin _seul qui marche droict, encores qu'il ait la goutte_, et m. le comte (nassau) qui me faict tous les bons offices qu'il peut." same letter, ibid., . [ ] the letter is inserted entire in la laboureur, additions aux mém. de castelnau, i. - . there is much in this letter that lends probability to miss freer's view (henry iii., i. ) that catharine had at this time begun to be opposed to an alliance which she feared might result in the diminution of her influence at court, and that she therefore "sought, by denying all that had before been conceded, and by proposing in lieu conditions which she knew jeanne could not accept, to throw the odium of a rupture on the queen of navarre." [ ] the contract of marriage was signed at blois, april th. [ ] jehan de la fosse (journal d'un curé ligueur), , . [ ] see an interesting account of the queen of navarre's last days, her will, etc., in vauvilliers, hist. de jeanne d'albret, iii. - . [ ] he is said already to have obtained the surname of "l'empoisonneur de la reine." vauvilliers, iii. . [ ] vauvilliers, hist. de jeanne d'albret, _ubi supra_. unfortunately for the "glove" theory, the reveille-matin des massacreurs, written within the next year (see p. , cimber and danjou, "du mois d'aoust _dernier passé_"), makes jeanne to have died in consequence of a drink (un boucon) given her at a festival at which anjou was present. so in the eusebii philadelphi dialogi, (the same book virtually), jeanne dies, "veneno in quibusdam epulis propinato, quibus dux andegavensis intererat, ut quidem mihi a domestico ipsius aliquo narratum est," i. , . the testimony of the physicians, who seem to have been unprejudiced, is given in a note in cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, vii. , . [ ] it is said that charles ix. suggested to him the propriety of this visit, accompanying the suggestion by the words: "i know that you are fond of gardening"--a sly reference to the occasion when coligny, just before the explosion of the second civil war, was found by the royal spies busily engaged in his vineyards, pruning-hook in hand, and, by his apparent engrossment in the labors of the field, dispelled the suspicions of a huguenot rising. it was ominous, according to these writers, that charles should at this moment recall the circumstances of that narrow escape at meaux from falling into the hands of the huguenots. agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. . [ ] "estant nostre vouloir et intention le retenir près de nous pour nous servir de luy en nos plus graves et importans affaires, comme ministre digne, la vertu duquel est assez cogneue et expérimentée." ms. passport dated september , , biblioth. nat., _apud_ bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, xvi. ( ) . [ ] le tocsain contre les massacreurs (orig. ed., rheims, ), . [ ] le reveille-matin des françois et de leurs voisins. composé par eusebe philadelphe cosmopolite, en forme de dialogues. a edinbourg, de l'imprimerie de jaques james. avec permission. . _apud_ cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, vii. . dialogi euseb. philadelphi. edimburgi, , i. . [ ] le tocsain contre les massacreurs, (archives curieuses). so jean de tavannes--a writer certainly not prejudiced in coligny's favor--gives him credit for preferring to hazard his life rather than renew the civil war. yet he adds: "il ne voyoit ny ne prevoyoit ce qui n'estoit pour lors, d'autant plus qu'il n'y avoit encor rien de resolu contre luy, quoy que les ignorans des affaires d'estat ayent escrit ou dit." mémoires de gaspard de tavannes (ed. petitot), iii. . [ ] these were four in number: that navarre should make a secret profession of the catholic faith, express a desire for the dispensation, restore ecclesiastical property in his domains, and marry margaret before the church. charles ix. to ferralz (ferrails), july , , _apud_ mackintosh, iii., appendix iii.; fr. von raumer, briefe aus paris (leipsic, ), i. . [ ] journal de lestoile, p. ; le reveille-matin des français, etc.; arch. curieuses, vii. ; dialogi eusebii philadelphi, i. ; vauvilliers, iii. ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. :--"ce vieux bigot avec ses cafarderies fait perdre un bon temps à ma grosse soeur margot." [ ] charles ix. to mandelot, blois, may , , correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot, gouverneur de lyons, edited by p. paris (paris, ), pp. - . also charrière, négociations du levant, iii. . [ ] "toutes mes fantaisies sont bandées pour m'opposer à la grandeur des espagnols," etc. henri de valois et la pologne en , par le marquis de noailles ( vols., paris, ), i. . [ ] de noailles, i. . [ ] "de tenir le roy catholique en cervelle, et donner hardiesse à ces gueulx des païs-bas de se remuer et entreprendre," etc. ibid., i. . [ ] de thou, iv. ; motley, dutch republic, ii. , etc. [ ] "thence with great celerity the count lodovick should send horse to bruxels under the conduct of m. de la nue (noue), where if he hap to find the duke of alva, it will grow to short wars, in respect of the intelligence they have with the town, who undertook with the aid of soldiers to take the duke prisoner. if he retires to antwerp, as it is thought he wil, then it is likely that all the whole country will revolt. i the rather credit this news for that it agreeth with the plot laid by count lodovick, before his departure hence," etc. walsingham to burleigh, paris, may , , digges, . [ ] queen elizabeth to walsingham, july , , digges, - . [ ] "more tremendous issues," mr. froude forcibly remarks, "were hanging upon elizabeth's decision than she knew of. but she did know that france was looking to her reply--was looking to her general conduct, to ascertain whether she would or would not be a safe ally in a war with spain, and that on her depended at that moment whether the french government would take its place once for all on the side of the reformation." history of england, x. . [ ] in fact, he was acting in violation of the instructions of louis of nassau, by whom he had been despatched for aid to france. apprehending danger, nassau repeatedly bid him avoid the direct road to mons, and make a circuit through the territory of cambray, and effect a junction with the prince of orange. genlis justified his neglect of these directions by alleging the orders of admiral coligny. de thou, iv. . [ ] motley, dutch republic, ii. , ; de thou, iv. , etc. [ ] it may be noted, by way of anticipation, that genlis, after an imprisonment of over a year, was secretly strangled by alva's command, in the castle of antwerp. with characteristic mendacity, the duke spread the report that the prisoner had died a natural death. ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] walsingham to burleigh, july , , digges, . [ ] it was such arguments as these that afterward, when everything that might be so employed as to justify or palliate the atrocity of coligny's assassination was eagerly laid hold of, were construed as threats of a huguenot rising, in case charles should refuse to engage in the flemish war. compare, _e.g._, the unsigned extract found by soldan (ii. ) in the national library of paris, no. , fol. . but does it need a word to prove that the reference was to a _papal_ rising, or, at least, papal compulsion to violate the edict of toleration? [ ] walsingham to leicester, july , , digges, , . [ ] this document was written by the illustrious philippe du plessis mornay, then a youth twenty-three years of age, and bears the impress of his vigorous mind. de thou gives an excellent summary (iv., liv. li., - ); and it may be found entire in the mémoires de du plessis mornay (ii. - ). morvilliers, bishop of orleans, and keeper of the seals until birague's appointment in january, , was requested by the king to prepare the answer of the opposite party in the royal council--a task which he discharged with great ability. summary in de thou, iv. (liv. li.) - , and agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , . jean de tavannes's memoirs of his father contain arguments of marshal tavannes and of the duke of anjou. dictated by the marshal, against undertaking the flemish war, as both unjust and impolitic. [ ] mémoires de tavannes (ed. petitot), iii. . [ ] in this case the chief spy, according to the tocsain contre les massacreurs, p. , and the younger tavannes, was phizes, sieur de sauve, the king's private secretary for the flemish matter; and tavannes is certainly correct in making a chief element in catharine's influence, "la puissance que ladicte royne a sur ses enfans par ses créatures qu'elle leur a donné pour serviteurs dez leur enfance." mémoires, , . [ ] in fact, catharine, who spared neither herself nor her attendants in her furious driving in her "_coche_" on such occasions, lost one or more of the horses, which dropped dead. tocsain contre les massacreurs, p. . [ ] or, only to her estates in auvergne, according to the tocsain, pp. , . it will be remembered that catharine's mother was a french heiress of the famous family of la tour d'auvergne. [ ] the younger tavannes, in the memoirs of his father (edit. petitot), iii. , , gives the most complete summary of this remarkable conversation; but it is substantially the same as the briefer sketch in the tocsain contre les massacreurs de france, rheims , pp. , --a treatise of which the preface (l'imprimeur aux lecteurs, dated june , ) shows that it was written before the death of charles ix., but the publication of which was from time to time deferred in the vain hope that the authors of the inhuman massacre might yet repent. the new and "more detestable perfidy, fury, and impetuosity" of which the huguenots were the victims in the first years of henry iii.'s reign, finally brought it to the light. the _archives curieuses_ contain only a part of the treatise. [ ] smith to walsingham, aug. , , digges, . [ ] walsingham to burleigh, aug. , , digges, . this news and the interview, which must have taken place about the first week of august, are the burden of three letters written by walsingham on the same day. "herein nothing prevailed so much as the tears of his mother," he wrote to leicester, "who without the army of england cannot consent to any open dealing. and because they are, as i suppose, assured by their ambassadors that her majesty will not intermeddle, they cannot be induced to make any overture" (p. ). walsingham was disheartened at the loss of so critical an opportunity. "pleasure and youth will not suffer us to take profit of advantages, and those who rule under [over] us are fearfull and irresolute." [ ] mém. de tavannes, iii. . [ ] walsingham to leicester, aug. , , digges, . [ ] "i am requested to desire your lordship to hold him excused in that he writeth not," he adds, "for that at this time he is overwhelmed with affairs." walsingham to leicester, aug. , , digges, . [ ] sir thomas smith's plea in her behalf is interesting and plausible, but will not receive the sanction of any one who takes into account the vast difference in the positions of elizabeth and charles, or considers the principles of which the former was, or should have been, the advocate. the good secretary, i need not remind my reader, was never reluctant to parade his latinity: "if you there [in france] do _tergiversari_ and work _tam timide_ and underhand with open and outward edicts, besides excuses at rome and at venice by your ambassadors, you, i say, which have regem expertem otii, laboris amantem, cujus gens bellicosa jampridem assueta est cædibus tam exterioris quam vestri sanguinis, quid faciemus gens otiosa et paci assueta, quibus imperat regina, et ipsa pacis atque quietis amantissima." smith to walsingham, aug. , , digges, . [ ] puntos de cartas de anton de guaras al duque de alva, june th: ms. simancas, _apud_ froude, x. . [ ] froude, x. . chapter xviii. the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. [sidenote: the huguenot nobles reach paris.] the marriage of henry of navarre and margaret of valois had been delayed in consequence of the death of the bridegroom's mother, but could now no longer be deferred. the young queen of charles the ninth was soon to become a mother, and it was desirable that she should have the opportunity to leave the crowded and unhealthy capital as soon as possible. jeanne d'albret's objection to the celebration of the wedding in paris had been overruled. the bride herself, indifferent enough, to all appearance, on other points, was resolute as to this matter--she would have her nuptials celebrated in no provincial town. accordingly, the king of navarre, followed by eight hundred gentlemen of his party, as well as by his cousin the prince of condé, and the admiral, made his solemn entry into the city, which so few of his adherents were to leave alive. although still clad in mourning for the loss of the heroic queen of navarre, they bore no unfavorable comparison with the gay courtiers, who, with anjou and alençon at their head, came out to escort them into paris with every mark of respect.[ ] [sidenote: betrothal of henry and margaret.] the betrothal took place in the palace of the louvre, on sunday the seventeenth of august. afterward there was a supper and a ball; and when these came to an end, margaret was conducted by her mother, her brothers, and a stately retinue, to the episcopal palace, on the Île de la cité, adjoining the cathedral, there, according to the immemorial custom of the princesses of the blood, to pass the night before her wedding. no papal dispensation had arrived. gregory xiii. was as obstinate as his predecessor in the pontifical chair, in denying the requests of the french envoys to rome.[ ] but charles was determined to proceed; and, in order to silence the opposition of the cardinal of bourbon, who still refused to perform the ceremony without the pope's approval, a forged letter was shown to him, purporting to come from the cardinal of lorraine, or the royal ambassador at rome, and announcing that the bull of dispensation had actually been sealed, and would shortly arrive.[ ] preparations had been made for the wedding in a style of magnificence extraordinary even for that age of reckless expenditure. to show their cordial friendship and fidelity, charles and his brothers, anjou and alençon, and henry and his cousin of condé, assumed a costume precisely alike--a light yellow satin, covered with silver embroidery, and enriched with pearls and precious stones. margaret wore a violet velvet dress with fleurs-de-lis. her train was adorned with the same emblems. she was wrapped in a royal mantle, and had upon her head an imperial crown glittering with pearls, diamonds, and other gems of incalculable value. the queens were resplendent in cloth of gold and silver.[ ] a lofty platform had been erected in front of the grand old pile of notre dame. hither margaret was brought in great pomp, from the palace of the bishop of paris, escorted by the king, by catharine de' medici, by the dukes of anjou and alençon, and by the guises, the marshals, and other great personages of the realm. upon the platform she met henry of navarre, with his cousins condé and conty, admiral coligny, count de la rochefoucauld, and a numerous train of protestant lords from all parts of the kingdom. in the sight of an immense throng, the nuptial ceremony was performed by the cardinal of bourbon, henry's uncle, according to the form which had been previously agreed upon.[ ] the bridal procession then entered the cathedral by a lower platform, which extended through the nave to the choir. here henry, having placed his bride before the grand altar to hear mass, himself retired with his protestant companions to the episcopal palace, and waited for the service to be over. when notified of its conclusion by marshal damville, henry and his suite returned to the choir, and with his bride and all the attending grandees soon sat down to a sumptuous dinner in the episcopal palace. among those who had been admitted to the choir of notre dame after the close of the mass, was the son of the first president of parliament, young jacques auguste de thou, the future historian. happening to come near admiral coligny, he looked with curious and admiring gaze upon the warrior whose virtues and abilities had combined to raise the house of châtillon to its present distinction. he saw him point out to his cousin damville the flags and banners taken from the huguenots on the fields of jarnac and moncontour, still suspended from the walls of the cathedral, mournful trophies of a civil contest. "these will soon be torn down," de thou heard coligny say, "and in their place others more pleasing to the eye will be hung up." the words had unmistakable reference to the victories which he hoped soon to win in a war against spain. it is not strange, however, that the malevolent endeavored to prove that they contained an allusion to the renewal of a domestic war, which it is certain that the admiral detested with his whole heart.[ ] [sidenote: entertainment in the louvre.] later in the day, a magnificent entertainment was given by charles in the louvre to the municipality of paris, the members of parliament, and other high officers of justice. supper was succeeded by a short ball, and this in turn by one of those allegorical representations in which french fancy and invention at this period ran wanton. through the great vaulted saloon of the louvre a train of wonderful cars was made slowly to pass. some were rocks of silver, on whose summits sat in state the king's brothers, navarre, condé, the prince dauphin, guise, or angoulême. on others sea-monsters disported themselves, and the pagan gods of the water, somewhat incongruously clothed in cloth of gold or various colors, serenely looked on. charles himself rode in a chariot shaped like a sea-horse, the curved tail of which supported a shell holding neptune and his trident. when the pageant stopped for a moment, singers of surpassing skill entertained the guests. Étienne le roy, the king's especial favorite, distinguished himself by the power and beauty of his voice.[ ] the entertainment was prolonged far into the night; but admiral coligny, before giving himself repose, snatched from sleep a few minutes to write a letter to his wife, whom he had left in châtillon. it is the last which has been preserved, and is otherwise important because of the light it throws upon the hopes and fears of the great huguenot at this critical time. [sidenote: coligny's letter to his wife.] "my darling," he said, "i write this bit of a letter to tell you that to-day the marriage of the king's sister and the king of navarre took place. three or four days will be spent in festivities, masks, and mock combats. after that the king has assured me and given me his promise, that he will devote a few days to attending to a number of complaints which are made in various parts of the kingdom, touching the infraction of the edict. it is but reasonable that i should employ myself in this matter, so far as i am able; for, although i have infinite desire to see you, yet should i feel great regret, and i believe that you would likewise, were i to fail to occupy myself in such an affair with all my ability. but this will not delay so much the departure from this city, but that i think that the court will leave it at the beginning of next week. if i had in view only my own satisfaction, i should take much greater pleasure in going to see you, than in being in this court, for many reasons which i shall tell you. but we must have more regard for the public than for our own private interests. i have many other things to tell you, when i am able to see you, for which i am so anxious that you must not think that i waste a day or an hour. what remains for me to say is that to-day, at four o'clock after noon, the bride's mass was said. meanwhile, the king of navarre walked about in a court with all those of the religion who accompanied him. other incidents occurred which i will reserve to relate to you; but first i must see you. and meantime i pray our lord, my darling, to keep you in his holy guard and protection. from paris, this eighteenth day of august, . _mandez-moy comme se porte le petit ou petite._ ... i assure you that i shall not be anxious to attend all the festivities and combats that are to take place during these next days. your very good husband and friend, chÂtillon."[ ] [sidenote: festivities and mock combats.] the festivities and combats--so distasteful to a statesman who recognized the critical condition of french affairs, and regarded this merry-making as ill-timed--pursued their uninterrupted course through tuesday, wednesday, and thursday of that eventful week. but the description of most of the elaborate pageants would contribute little to the value of our conceptions of the character of the age. an exception may perhaps be made in favor of an ingenious tournament that took place on wednesday in the hôtel bourbon. here the isles of the blessed, the elysian fields, and tartarus were represented by means of costly mechanisms. charles and his brothers figured as knights defending paradise, which navarre and others, dressed as knights-errant, endeavored to enter by force of arms, but were repulsed and thrust into tartarus. after some time the defeated champions were rescued from their perilous situation by the compassion of their victors, and the performance terminated in a startling, but harmless display of fireworks.[ ] as the assailants were mostly protestants, the defenders roman catholics, it was not strange that a sinister interpretation was soon put upon the strange plot; but, unless we are to suppose the authors of the massacre, whose success depended upon the surprise of the victims, so infatuated as to wish to forewarn them of their fate, it is scarcely credible that they intended to prefigure the ruin of the reformed faith in france. [sidenote: huguenot grievances to be redressed.] the time that had been allotted to pleasure was fast passing. the king was soon to meet coligny, according to his promise, for the transaction of important business relating both to the internal and to the foreign affairs of france. there were religious grievances to be redressed. the admiral was particularly anxious to bring to the king's notice the flagrant outrage recently perpetrated in troyes, where a fanatical roman catholic populace, indignant that the huguenots, through the kindness of marie de clèves, the betrothed of the prince of condé,[ ] had been permitted to hold their worship so near the city as her castle of isle-au-mont, scarcely three leagues distant,[ ] had met the protestants on their return from service with aggravated insult, and had killed in the arms of its nurse an infant that had just been baptized according to the reformed rites.[ ] catharine and her son anjou saw with consternation that the impression made by the "tears of montpipeau" was already in a great degree obliterated, and feared the complete destruction of their influence if charles were longer permitted to have intercourse with coligny. in that case a flemish war would be almost inevitable. charles's anger against the spaniards had kindled anew when he heard of alva's inhumanity to genlis and his fellow-prisoners. but, when he was informed that alva had put french soldiers to the torture, in order to extract the admission of their monarch's complicity in the enterprise, his passion was almost ungovernable, as he asked his attendants again and again: "do you know that the duke of alva is putting me on trial?"[ ] it seems to have been at this juncture that catharine and her favorite son came to the definite determination to put the great huguenot out of the way. henry of anjou is here his own accuser. in that strange confession which he made to his physician, miron,[ ] shortly after his arrival in cracow--a confession made under the influence, not so much of remorse, as of the annoyance occasioned by the continual reminders of the massacre which were thrown in his way as he travelled to assume the throne of poland--he gives us a partial view of the development of the murderous plot. [sidenote: jealousy of catharine and anjou.] [sidenote: the duchess of nemours and henry of guise.] several times had anjou and catharine perceived that, whenever charles had conversed in private with the admiral, his demeanor was visibly changed toward them. he no longer exhibited his accustomed respect for his mother or his wonted kindness for his brother. once, in particular--and it was, so anjou tells us, only a few days before st. bartholomew's day--henry happened to enter the room just after coligny had gone out. instantly the king's countenance betrayed extreme anger. he began to walk furiously to and fro, taking great strides, and keeping his eyes fixed upon his brother with an expression that boded no good, but without uttering a word. again and again he placed his hand on his dagger, and anjou expected nothing less than that his brother would attack him. at last, taking advantage of an opportunity when charles's back was turned, he hastily retreated from the room. this circumstance led catharine and anjou to compare their observations and their plans. "both of us," says henry, "were easily persuaded, and became, as it were, certain that it was the admiral who had impressed some evil and sinister opinion of us upon the king. we resolved from that moment to rid ourselves of him, and to concert the means of doing so with the duchess of nemours. to her alone we believed that we might safely disclose our purpose, on account of the mortal hatred which we knew that she bore to him."[ ] the duchess of nemours was born of an excellent mother; for she was anne d'este, daughter of renée of france, the younger child of louis the twelfth. in her youth, at the court of her father, the duke of ferrara, and in society with that prodigy of feminine precocity, olympia morata, she had shown evidences of extraordinary intellectual development and of a kindly disposition.[ ] although she subsequently married francis of guise, the leading persecutor of the protestants, she had not so lost her sympathy with the oppressed as to witness without tears and remonstrances the atrocious executions by which the tumult of amboise was followed. but the assassination of her husband turned any affection or compassion she may have entertained for protestantism into violent hatred. against coligny, whom, in spite of his protestations, she persisted in believing to be the instigator of poltrot's crime, she bore an implacable enmity; and now, having so often failed in obtaining satisfaction from the king by judicial process, she eagerly accepted the opportunity of avenging herself by a deed more dastardly than that which she laid to the charge of her enemy. entering heartily into the project which catharine and anjou laid before her, the duchess of nemours enlisted the co-operation of her son, henry of guise, and her brother-in-law, the duke of aumale, and herself arranged the details of the plan, which was at once to be put into execution.[ ] [sidenote: was the massacre long premeditated?] [sidenote: salviati's testimony.] such was the germ of the massacre as yet not resolved upon, which, rapidly developing, was to involve the murder of thousands of innocent persons throughout france. in opposition to the opinion that became almost universal among the protestants, and gained nearly equal currency among the roman catholics--that the butchery had long been contemplated, and that charles was privy to it--and notwithstanding the circumstances that seem to give color to this opinion,[ ] i am compelled to acquiesce in the belief expressed by the papal nuncio, salviati, who, in his despatches, written in cipher to the cardinal secretary of state, could certainly have had no motive to disguise his real sentiments, and whom it is impossible to suppose ignorant of any scheme for the general extirpation of the protestants, had such a scheme existed for any considerable length of time: "as to all the statements that will be made respecting the firing upon the admiral and his death, different from that which i have written to you, you will in time find out how true they are. madame the regent, having come to be at variance with him [the admiral], and having decided upon this step a few days before, caused him to be fired upon. this was _without the knowledge of the king_, but with the participation of the duke of anjou, the duchess of nemours, and her son, the duke of guise. if the admiral had died at once, no others would have been slain. but, inasmuch as he survived, and they apprehended that some great calamity might happen should he draw closer to the king, they resolved to throw aside shame, and to have him killed together with the rest. and this was put into execution that very night."[ ] [sidenote: the king's cordiality.] as the hour approached, coligny exhibited no apprehension of special danger. others, however, more suspicious, or possessed of less faith in heaven, felt alarm; and some acted upon their fears. the very "goodness" of the king terrified one. another said that he had rather be saved with fools than perish with the wise, and hastily forsook the capital. dark hints had been thrown out by courtiers--such surmises were naturally bred by the defenceless position of the protestants in the midst of a population so hostile to their faith as the population of paris--that more blood than wine would be spilled at this wedding. and there were rumors of some mysterious enterprise afloat; so, at least, it was said after the occurrence. but coligny moved not from the post which he believed had been assigned to his keeping. on wednesday charles assured him, with laughing countenance, that if the admiral would but give him four days more for amusement, he would not stir from paris until he had contented him;[ ] and the sturdy old huguenot made no objection when the king, in order to prevent any disturbance which the partisans of guise might occasion in seeking a quarrel with the followers of the house of châtillon, proposed to introduce a considerable force of soldiers into the city. "my father," said charles, with his usual appearance of affection, "you know that you have promised not to give any cause of offence to the guises so long as you remain here; and they have in like manner promised to respect you and all yours. i am fully persuaded that you will keep your word; but i am not so well assured of their good faith as of yours; for, besides the fact that it is they that would avenge themselves, i know their bravadoes and the favor this populace bears to them."[ ] [sidenote: coligny is wounded, august .] on friday morning, the twenty-second of august, admiral coligny went to the louvre, to attend a meeting of the royal council, at which henry of anjou presided. it was between ten and eleven o'clock, when, according to the more primitive hours then kept, he left the palace to return home for dinner.[ ] meeting charles just coming out of a chapel in front of the louvre, he retraced his steps, and accompanied him to the tennis-court, where he left him playing with guise, against téligny and another nobleman. accompanied by about a dozen gentlemen, he again sallied forth, but had not proceeded over a hundred paces when from behind a lattice an arquebuse was fired at him.[ ] the admiral had been walking slowly, intently engaged in reading a petition which had just been handed to him. the shot had been well aimed, and might have proved fatal, had not the victim at that very moment turned a little to one side. as it was, of the three balls with which the arquebuse was loaded, one took off a finger of his right hand, and another lodged in his left arm, making an ugly wound. supported by de guerchy and des pruneaux, between whom he had previously been walking, coligny was carried to his house in the little rue de béthisy,[ ] only a few steps farther on. as he went he pointed out to his friends the house from which the shot had been fired. to a gentleman who expressed the fear that the balls were poisoned, he replied with composure: "nothing will happen but what it may please god to order."[ ] the attempted assassination had happened in front of the cloisters of st. germain l'auxerrois. the house was recognized as one belonging to the duchess dowager of guise, in which villemur, the former tutor of young henry of guise, had lodged. the door was found locked; but the indignant followers of coligny soon burst it open. they found within only a woman and a lackey. the assassin, after firing, had fled to the rear of the house. there he found a horse awaiting him; this he exchanged at the porte saint antoine for a fresh spanish jennet. he was out of paris almost before pursuit was fairly undertaken. subsequent investigation left no doubt as to his identity. it was that same maurevel of infamous memory, who during the third civil war had traitorously shot de mouy, after insinuating himself into his friendship, and sharing his room and his bed. the king's assassin, "le tueur du roi"--a designation he had obtained when charles or his advisers gave a special reward for that exploit[ ]--had been selected by catharine, anjou and the guises, as possessing both the nerve and the experience that were requisite to make sure of coligny's death. it was found that he had been placed in the house by de chailly, "maître d'hôtel" of the king, and that the horse by means of which he effected his escape had been brought to the door by the groom of the duke of guise.[ ] [sidenote: agitation of the king.] charles was still in the tennis-court, when de piles came in, sent by coligny, to inform him of the bloody infraction of the edict of pacification. on hearing the intelligence, the king was violently agitated. throwing down his racket, he exclaimed: "am i, then, never to have peace? what! always new troubles?" and retired to his room in the louvre, with a countenance expressive of great dejection.[ ] and when, later in the day, the king of navarre, the prince of condé, and la rochefoucauld, after seeing coligny's wounds dressed, came to the palace and begged him for permission to leave a city in which there was no security for their lives, charles swore to them, with his accustomed profanity, that he would inflict upon the author and abettors of the crime so signal a punishment that coligny and his friends would be satisfied, and posterity have a warning example. coligny had received the wound, he said, but the smart was _his_. catharine, who was present, chimed in, and declared the outrage so flagrant, that just retribution must speedily be meted out, or insolence would be pushed so far as that the king would be attacked in his own palace.[ ] [sidenote: coligny courageous.] meantime the admiral bore his sufferings with serenity, and, far from needing any comfort his friends could give him, himself administered consolation to the noblemen around his bed. his sufferings were acute. amboise paré, the famous surgeon of the king, himself a huguenot, was called in; but the instruments at hand were dull, and it was not until the third attempt that he could satisfactorily amputate the wounded finger. "my friends," said coligny to merlin, his minister, and to other friends, "why do you weep? as for me, i think myself happy in having received these wounds for the name of god." and when merlin exhorted him "to thank god for his mercy in preserving his mental faculties sound and entire, and to continue to divert his thoughts and feelings from his assassin and his wounds, and to turn them, as he was doing, from all things else to god, since it was from his hands that he had received them," the admiral's reply was, that sincerely and from the heart he forgave the person who had wounded him, and those who had instigated him, holding it for certain that it was beyond their power to injure him, since, should they even kill him, death would be an assured passage to life.[ ] thus, with quiet submission, and with edifying prayers which it would be too long to insert, the admiral de coligny passed those hours which his enemies subsequently, in their desperate attempts to justify or palliate the most abominable of crimes, represented as given up to infamous plots against king and state. [sidenote: he is visited by the king and his mother.] that afternoon, between two and three o'clock, charles visited the wounded man, at the suggestion of téligny and damville; for coligny had expressed a desire to see the monarch, that he might communicate certain matters which concerned him greatly, but of which he feared there was no one else that would inform him.[ ] the king came, accompanied by his mother, his brothers, the duke of montpensier, cardinal bourbon, marshals damville, tavannes and cossé, count de retz, and the younger montmorencies, thoré and méru.[ ] the interview was kind and reassuring. the admiral, who lay upon his bed, heartily thanked the king for the honor he had deigned to do him, and for the measures he had already taken in his behalf. and charles praised the patience and magnanimity exhibited by coligny, and bade him be of good courage. then more important topics were introduced. there were three points respecting which the admiral wished to speak to charles. the first was his own loyalty, which, however much it had been maligned by his enemies, he desired now solemnly to reaffirm, in the presence of him before whose bar he might soon be called to stand, and he declared that the sole cause of the hostility he had aroused was his attempt to set bounds to the fury of those who presumed to violate royal edicts. next, he commended to the king the flemish project. never had any predecessor of charles enjoyed so splendid an opportunity as now offered, when several cities of the netherlands had declared their desire for his favor and protection. but these advances were openly derided by some of the courtiers about the king; while state secrets were so badly kept, that "one could not turn an egg, nor utter a word in the council, but it was forthwith reported to the duke of alva." and, indeed, what else could be expected, since those who were present, and even his own brothers, communicated to foreigners and enemies the king's most confidential deliberations? he earnestly begged charles to apply a prompt remedy to this matter in future. the last point was the observance of the edict of pacification. what opinion would foreign nations form of the king, if he suffered a law solemnly made, and frequently confirmed by oath, to be openly trampled upon? in proof of this assertion, he alleged the recent attack upon the protestants of troyes returning from their place of worship, the tragic termination of which has already been noticed. to that part of coligny's remarks which related to the war in flanders, it is said that charles made no direct reply; but he declared that he had never suspected the admiral's loyalty, and that he accounted him a good man, and a great and generous captain. there was not another man in the kingdom whom he would prefer to him. and he again asseverated his intention to enforce a religious observance of his edicts; for which purpose, indeed, he had recently despatched commissioners into all the provinces, as the queen could inform him. "that is true, monsieur l'amiral," said catharine, "and you know it." "yes, madam," he replied, "commissioners have been sent, among whom are some that condemned me to be hung, and set a price of fifty thousand crowns on my head." "then," rejoined charles, "we must send others who are open to no suspicion." again he promised with his accustomed oath to see that the attempt upon the admiral's life should be so punished that the retribution would be forever remembered;[ ] after which he inquired whether coligny were satisfied with the judges whom he had appointed to conduct the investigation. coligny replied that he committed himself in this matter to the king's prudence, but suggested that cavaignes, the recently appointed maître de requêtes, and two other huguenots be added to the commission. the king and de retz both endeavored to persuade the admiral to permit himself to be transported, for safety's sake, to the louvre; but coligny's friends would not consent to a removal which might endanger his life. charles requested, before he left, to see the ball extracted from the wounded arm, and examined it with apparent curiosity. catharine took it next, and said that she was glad that it had been removed, for she remembered that, when the duke of guise was shot, the physicians repeatedly said that, even if the ball were poisoned, there was no danger to be apprehended when once the ball was taken out. many afterward regarded it as a significant circumstance that the queen mother's mind should have reverted on this occasion to the murder of which the lorraine family still persisted in accusing coligny of having been the instigator.[ ] [sidenote: catharine attempts to break up the conference.] such was, according to the solitary huguenot who was present by coligny's bed, and who survived the subsequent massacre, the substance of the conversation at this celebrated interview. but, if we may credit the account which purports to have been given by henry of anjou, there was an incident which he failed to mention. at a certain point in the conversation coligny asked to be allowed to speak to the king in private, a request which charles willingly granted, motioning henry and catharine to withdraw. they accordingly retired to the middle of the room, where they remained standing during the suspicious colloquy. meanwhile their apprehensions were awakened as they noticed that there were more than two hundred gentlemen and captains of the admiral's party in this and an adjacent room and below stairs. the sad looks of the huguenots, their gestures expressive of discontent, their suppressed whispers, as they passed to and fro, before and behind the queen and her favorite son, with less respect than the latter thought was due to them, impressed them with the idea that they were objects of distrust. catharine afterward admitted to henry that never in her life was she so glad to get out of any other place. her impatience soon impelled her to cut short the conference between charles and coligny--much to the regret of charles--on the pretext that longer conversation might retard the sick man's recovery. scarcely had the royal party left the admiral's lodgings, when catharine began to ply charles with questions respecting coligny's private communication. several times he absolutely refused to satisfy her curiosity. but at last, losing all patience, he roughly answered her with an oath: "what the admiral told me was true: kings are recognized as such in france only so far as they have the power to reward or punish their subjects and servants; and this power and the management of the affairs of the entire state have insensibly slipped into your hands. but this authority of yours, the admiral told me, may some day become highly prejudicial both to me and to my whole kingdom, and i ought to look upon it with suspicion, and to be on my guard. of this he had desired, as one of my best and most faithful subjects, to warn me before he died. well then, _mon dieu_, since you will know it, this is what the admiral was telling me." "this was uttered," anjou subsequently said, "with so much passion and fury, that the speech cut us to the heart. we concealed our emotion as best we could, and vindicated ourselves. this discourse we pursued from the admiral's lodgings to the louvre. there, after having left the king in his own room, we retired to that of the queen, my mother, who was nettled and offended in the highest degree by this language of the admiral to the king, and still more by the credit the king seemed to give it, fearing that this might occasion some change in our affairs and in the conduct of the state. to be frank, we found ourselves so unprovided with counsel and understanding, that, being unable to come to any determination at that time, we separated, deferring the matter until the morrow."[ ] [sidenote: charles writes letters expressing his displeasure.] meantime, charles, not content with closing all the gates of paris, save two, which were to be strictly guarded, and with ordering a speedy judicial investigation, despatched, on the very day of the attempt on coligny's life, a circular letter to all the governors of the provinces, and a similar letter to his ambassadors at foreign courts, declarative of his profound displeasure at this audacious crime. in the former he said: "i am at once sending in every direction in pursuit of the perpetrator, with a view to catch him and inflict such punishment upon him as is required by a deed so wicked, so displeasing, and, moreover, so inconvenient; for the reparation of which i wish to forget nothing." and lest any persons, whether protestants or roman catholics, should be aroused by this news to make a disturbance of the peace, he called upon all the governors to explain the full circumstances of the case. "assure every one," he wrote, "that it is my intention to observe inviolate my edict of pacification, and so strictly to punish those who contravene its provisions, that men may judge how sincere is my will."[ ] in a similar strain he wrote to his ambassador in england, that he was "infinitely sorry" (infiniment marry), and that he desired him to acquaint queen elizabeth with his determination to cause such signal justice to be executed, that every one in his realm might take example therefrom. "monsieur de la mothe fénélon," he added in a postscript, "i must not forget to tell you that this wicked act proceeds from the enmity between his [the admiral's] house and the guises. i shall know how to provide that they involve none of my subjects in their quarrels; for i intend that my edict of pacification be observed in all points."[ ] [sidenote: the vidame de chartres advises the huguenots to leave paris.] not long after the king had left coligny's room, the admiral was visited by jean de ferrières, vidame de chartres, a leading huguenot, who came to condole with him. he also had a more practical object in view. in a conference of the great nobles of the reformed faith, held in the room adjoining the admiral's, he advocated the instant departure of the protestants from paris, and urged it at considerable length. he saw in the event of the day the first act of a tragedy whose catastrophe could not be long deferred. the huguenots had thrust their head into the very jaws of the lion; it were prudent to draw it out while it was yet time. but this sensible advice, based less upon any distinct evidence of a plot for their destruction than upon the obvious temptation which their defenceless situation offered to a woman proverbially unscrupulous, was overruled by the majority of those present. téligny, in particular, the accomplished and amiable son-in-law of coligny, opposed a scheme which not only might endanger the admiral's life, but would certainly displease the king, by betraying distrust of his ability or his inclination to defend his protestant subjects.[ ] saturday morning came, and with it a report from coligny's physicians, announcing that his wounds would not prove serious. meanwhile the investigation into the attempted assassination was pursued, and disclosed more and more evidence of the complicity of the guises. the young duke and his uncle aumale, conscious of the suspicion in which they were held, and fearful perhaps of the king's anger, should the part they had taken become known, prepared to retire from paris, and came to charles to ask for leave of absence, telling him at the same time that they had long noticed that their services were not pleasing to him. charles, with little show of courtesy, bade them depart. should they prove guilty, he said, he would find means to bring them to justice.[ ] [sidenote: catharine and anjou come to a final decision.] and now the time had arrived when catharine and the duke of anjou must come to a final decision respecting the means of extricating themselves from their present embarrassments. maurevel's shot had done no execution. coligny was likely to recover, to be more than ever the idol of the huguenots, to become more than ever the favorite of the king. in that case the influence of catharine and her younger son would be irretrievably lost; especially if the judicial investigation now in progress should reveal the fact that they were the prime movers in the plan of assassination. certainly neither henry of guise nor his mother would consent to bear the entire responsibility. more than that, the huguenots were uttering loud demands for justice, which to guilty consciences sounded like threats of retribution. we must here recur to henry of anjou's own account of this critical period; for that strange confession throws the only gleam of light upon the process by which the young king was moved to the adoption of a course whereby he earned the reputation--of which it will be difficult to divest him--of a monster of cruelty. "i went," says anjou, "to see my mother, who had already risen. i was filled with anxiety, as also she was on her side. we adopted at that time no other determination than to despatch the admiral by whatever means possible. as artifice and cunning could no longer be employed, we must proceed by open measures. but, to do this, we must bring the king to this same resolution. we decided that we would go in the afternoon to his private room, and would bring in the duke of nevers, marshals tavannes and retz, and chancellor birague, solely to obtain their advice as to the means we should employ in executing the plan upon which my mother and i had already agreed. [sidenote: they ply charles with arguments.] "as soon as we had entered the room in which the king my brother was, my mother began to represent to him that the party of the huguenots was arming against him on account of the wounding of the admiral, the latter having sent several despatches to germany to make a levy of ten thousand horse, and to the cantons of switzerland for another levy of ten thousand foot; that most of the french captains belonging to the huguenot party had already left in order to raise troops within the kingdom; and that the time and place of assembling had been fixed upon. let so powerful an army as this once be joined to their french troops--a thing which was only too practicable--and the king's forces would not be half sufficient to resist them, in view of the intrigues and leagues they had, inside and outside of the kingdom, with many cities, communities, and nations. of this she had good and certain advices. their allies were to revolt in conjunction with the huguenots under pretext of the public good; and for him (charles), being weak in pecuniary resources, she saw no place of security in france. and, indeed, there was besides a new consequence of which she wished to warn him. it was that all the catholics, wearied by so long a war, and vexed by so many sorts of calamities, were determined to put an end to them. in case he refused to follow their counsel, they also had determined among themselves to elect a captain-general to undertake their protection, and to form a league offensive and defensive against the huguenots. thus he would remain alone, enveloped in great danger, and without power or authority. all france would be seen armed by two great parties, over which he would have no command, and from which he could exact just as little obedience. but, to ward off so great a danger, a peril impending over him and his entire state, so much ruin, and so many calamities which were in preparation and just at hand, and the murder of so many thousands of men--to avert all these misfortunes, a single thrust of the sword would suffice--the admiral, the head and author of all the civil wars, alone need be put to death. the designs and enterprises of the huguenots would perish with him; and the catholics, satisfied with the sacrifice of two or three men, would remain obedient to him (the king)." such arguments, and many more of a similar character, does henry tell us that he and his wily mother addressed to the unhappy charles. at first their words irritated him, and, without convincing, drove him into a frenzy of excitement. a little later, giving credit to the oft-repeated assertions of his false advisers, and his imagination becoming inflamed by the picture of the dangers surrounding him which they so skilfully painted, he would, nevertheless, hear nothing of the crime to which he was urged, but began anxiously to consult those who were present whether there were no other means of escape. each man gave his opinion in succession; and each supported catharine's views, until it came to the turn of retz, who, contrary to the expectation of the conspirators, gave expression to more noble sentiments.[ ] if any one were justified in hating coligny and his faction, he said, it was himself, maligned, as he had been, both in france and abroad; but he was unwilling, in avenging private wrongs, to involve france and its royal family in dishonor. the king would justly be taxed with perfidy, and all confidence in his word or in public faith would be lost. henceforth it would be impossible to treat for terms of peace in those new civil wars in which the french must be involved, and of which their children would not see the end. [sidenote: the king consents reluctantly.] these wholesome words at first struck speechless the advocates of murder. then they undertook, by repeating their arguments, to destroy the effect of the prophetic warning to which the king had just listened. they succeeded but too well. "that instant," says henry of anjou, "we perceived a sudden change, a strange and wonderful metamorphosis in the king. he placed himself on our side, and adopted our opinion, going much beyond us and to more criminal lengths; since, whereas before it was difficult to persuade him, now we had to restrain him. for, rising and addressing us, while imposing silence upon us, he told us in anger and fury, swearing by god's death that, 'since we thought it good that the admiral should be killed, he would have it so; but that with him all the huguenots of france must be killed, in order that not one might remain to reproach him hereafter; and that we should promptly see to it.' and going out furiously, he left us in his room, where we deliberated the rest of the day, during the evening, and for a good part of the night, and decided upon that which seemed advisable for the execution of such an enterprise."[ ] this is the strange record of the change by which charles, from being the friend of admiral coligny, became the accomplice in his murder and in countless other assassinations throughout france. the admission of his guilt by one of the principal actors in the tragedy is so frank and undisguised that we find it difficult to believe that the narrative can have emanated from his lips. but the freaks of a burdened conscience are not to be easily accounted for. the most callous or reticent criminal sometimes is aroused to a recognition of his wickedness, and burns to communicate to another the fearful secret whose deposit has become intolerable to himself. and fortunately the confession of the princely felon does not stand alone. the son of another of the wretches who persuaded charles to imbrue his hands in the blood of his subjects has given us the account which he undoubtedly received from his father shortly before his death, and we find the two statements to be in substantial agreement. tavannes says: "the king notified (of the attempt upon coligny's life), is offended, and threatens the guises, not knowing whence the blow came. after a while, he is appeased by the queen, assisted by the sieur de retz. they make his majesty angry with the huguenots--a vice peculiar to his majesty, who is of choleric humor. they induce him to believe that they have discovered an enterprise of the huguenots directed against him. he is reminded of the designs of meaux and of amboise. suddenly gained over, as his mother had promised herself that he would be, he abandons the huguenots, and remains sorry, with the rest, that the wound had not proved mortal."[ ] [sidenote: few victims selected at first.] and now, the assassination of the admiral having received the king's approval, it only remained to decide upon the number of protestants who should be involved with him in a common destruction, and to perfect the arrangements for the execution of the murderous plot. how many, and who were the victims whose sacrifice was predetermined? this is a question which, with our present means of information, we are unable to answer. catharine, it is true, used to declare in later times that she contemplated no general massacre; that she took upon her conscience the blood of only five or six persons;[ ] and, although the unsupported assertion of so perfidious a woman is certainly not entitled to any great consideration, we can readily see that the heads of half a dozen leaders might have fully contented her. she was not seeking for revenge so much as paving the way for her ambition. there were few huguenots who were apparently so powerful as to interfere with her projects. coligny, their acknowledged head; the count of montgomery, personally hated as the occasion of the death of her husband, henry the second, in the ill-fated tournament; the vidame of chartres; and la rochefoucauld--these were doubtless of the number. would she have desired to include the king of navarre and the prince of condé? not the former, on account of his recent marriage with her daughter. yet to whom the bourbons were indebted for the omission of their names from the proscriptive roll we cannot tell. after the accession of henry the fourth, it became the interest of all the families concerned to put the conduct of their ancestors in the most favorable light. thus, jean de tavannes states that his father saved the life of the bearnese in that infamous conclave; but so little did the latter believe him, that, on the contrary, he persistently refused to confer upon him the marshal's baton, which he would otherwise have received, on the ground that gaspard de tavannes was an instigator of the massacre.[ ] [sidenote: religious hatred.] thus much must be held to be clearly established: that fancied political exigencies demanded the assassination of only very few persons; that personal hatred, on the part of the principal or of the minor conspirators, added many more; that a still greater number were murdered in cold blood, simply that their spoils might enrich the assassins. what part must be assigned to religious zeal?[ ] to any true outgrowth of religion, none at all; but much to the malice and the depraved moral teachings of its professed representatives. the hatred of protestantism, engendered in the minds of the people by long years devoted to traducing the character and designs of the reformers, now bore fruit after its own kind, in revolting crimes of every sort; while the lesson, sedulously inculcated by priests, bishops, and monks, that obstinate heretics might righteously be, and ought to be exterminated from the face of the earth, permitted many a parisian burgess to commit acts from which any but the most diabolic nature would otherwise have recoiled in horror. but of the measure of the responsibility of the roman pontiff and his clergy for this stupendous crime, it will be necessary to speak in the sequel. [sidenote: precautionary measures.] in devising the plan for the destruction of the huguenots, the queen mother and her council were greatly assisted by the course pursued by the huguenots themselves, and by the very circumstances of the case. under pretence of taking measures to secure the safety of the protestants, the "quarteniers" could go, without exciting suspicion, from house to house, and make a complete list of all belonging to the reformed church.[ ] the same excuse served to justify the court in posting a body of twelve hundred arquebusiers, a part along the river, a part in the immediate neighborhood of coligny's residence.[ ] and now the protestants themselves, startled by the unusual commotion which they noticed in the city, and by the frequent passage to and fro of men carrying arms, sent a gentleman to the louvre to ask the king for a few guards to protect the dwelling of their wounded leader. the request was only for five or six guards; but charles, feigning astonishment and deep regret that there should be any reason for such apprehensions, insisted, at the suggestion of his brother anjou, who stood by, upon despatching fifty, under command of cosseins. so well known was the captain's hostility to coligny and the protestants, that thoré, montmorency's brother, whispered to the huguenot messenger as he withdrew: "you could not have been given in guard to a worse enemy;" but the royal direction was so positive that no remonstrance seemed possible. accordingly, cosseins and his arquebusiers took possession, in the king's name, of two shops adjoining coligny's abode.[ ] with as little ceremony, rambouillet, the "maréchal des logis," turned the roman catholic gentlemen out of the lodgings he had previously assigned them in the rue de béthisy, and gave the quarters to the protestant gentlemen instead.[ ] the reason assigned for this action was that the huguenots might be nearer to each other and to the admiral, for mutual protection; the real object seems to have been to sweep them more easily into the common net of destruction. and yet the majority of the huguenot leaders were not alive to the dangers of their situation. in a second conference held late on saturday, the vidame of chartres was almost alone in urging instant retreat. navarre, condé, and others thought it sufficient to demand justice, and the departure of the guises, as possessing dangerous credit with the common people. téligny again dwelt upon the wrong done to charles in distrusting his sincerity, and deprecated a course that might naturally irritate him. one bouchavannes was noticed in the conference--a professed protestant, but suspiciously intimate with catharine, retz, and other avowed enemies of the faith. he said nothing, but listened attentively. so soon as the meeting was over, bouchavannes went to the louvre and related the discussion to the queen mother.[ ] the traitor's report, doubtless grossly exaggerated, is supposed to have decided catharine to prompt action. it is certain, at least, that the calumnious perversion of the speeches and resolutions of the huguenot conference was employed to inflame the passions of the mob, as well as to justify the atrocities of the morrow in the eyes of the world. [sidenote: orders issued to the prévôt des marchands.] it was now late in the evening of saturday, the twenty-third of august. coligny had been writing to his friends throughout france, recommending them to be quiet, and informing them of the investigations now in progress. god and the king, he said, would do justice. his wounds were not mortal, thank god. if his _arm_ was wounded, his _brain_ was yet sound.[ ] meantime, the original framers of the murderous plot had called in the guises, who in reality had not left paris.[ ] it had been arranged that the execution should be intrusted to them, in conjunction with the bastard of angoulême, charles's natural brother, and marshal tavannes. and now at last we emerge from the mist that envelops many of the preliminaries of the night of horrors. the records of the hôtel de ville contain the first documentary evidence of the coming massacre. there is no longer any doubt, unfortunately, of charles's approval and complicity. "this day, the twenty-third day of august, very late in the evening," charles sends for charron, "prévôt des marchands," to come to the louvre. here, in the presence of the queen mother, the duke of anjou and other princes and lords, his majesty "declares that he has received intelligence that those of the new religion intend to make a rising by conspiracy against himself and his state, and to disturb the peace of his subjects and of his city of paris; and that this very night some great personages of the said new religion and rebels have conspired against him and his said state, going to such lengths as to send his majesty some arrogant messages which sounded like menaces." consequently, in order to protect himself and the royal family, charles directs the prévôt to seize the keys of all the gates of the city, and to keep them carefully closed, in order to prevent any one from entering or leaving paris. he also commands him to remove all the boats moored along the seine, so as to prevent any one from crossing the river; and to put under arms all captains, lieutenants, ensigns, and burgesses capable of doing military duty.[ ] the orders were faithfully and promptly obeyed. long before morning dawned they had been transmitted successively to the lower municipal officers, quarteniers, dizainiers, etc.; the wherry-men had been stopped, and the troops and burgesses of paris having armed themselves as best they could, were assembled ready for action in front of the hôtel de ville, on that famous place de grève, so often drenched in martyr's blood.[ ] [sidenote: the first shot and the bell of st. germain l'auxerrois.] to the guilty plotters that was a sleepless night. unable to rest quietly, at a little before dawn, catharine with her two elder sons found her way to the portal of the louvre, adjoining the tennis court. there, in a chamber overlooking the "bassecour," they sat down to await the beginning of their treacherous enterprise. if we may believe henry of anjou, none of them as yet realized its full horrors; but as they quietly watched in that hour of stillness for the first signs of the coming outbreak, the report of a pistol-shot reached their ears. instantly it wrought a marvellous revulsion in their feelings. whether the shot wounded or killed any one, they knew not; but it brought up vividly to their imaginations the results of the terrible deluge of blood whose flood-gates they had raised. hastily they send a servant to the duke of guise, and countermand the instructions of the evening, and bid him do no injury to the admiral. it is too late! the messenger soon returns with the tidings that coligny is already dead, that the work is about to begin in all the rest of the city. this news produces a fresh change. with one of those fluctuations which are so easy for souls that have no firm or established principles, but shift according to the deceptive, ever-varying tide of apparent interest, the mother and her sons return heartily to their former purpose. the die is cast, the deed is half done; let it be fully and boldly consummated. no room now for pity or regret.[ ] it was a sunday morning, the twenty-fourth of august--a day sacred in the roman calendar to the memory of saint bartholomew. torches and blazing lights had been burning all night in the streets, to render the task easy. the houses in which protestants lodged had been distinctly marked with a white cross. the assassins themselves had agreed upon badges for mutual recognition--a white cross on the hat, and a handkerchief tied about the right arm. the signal for beginning was to be given by the great bell of the "palais de justice" on the island of the old "cité."[ ] the preparations had not been so cautiously made but that they attracted the notice of some of the huguenots living near coligny. going out to inquire the meaning of the clash of arms, and the unusual light in the streets, they received the answer that there was to be a mock combat in the louvre--a pleasure castle was to be assaulted for the king's diversion.[ ] but, as they went farther and approached the louvre, their eyes were greeted by the sight of more torches and a great number of armed men. the guards, full of the contemplated plot, could not refrain from insults. it soon came to blows, and a gascon soldier wounded a protestant gentleman with his halberd. it may have been at this time that the shot was fired which catharine and her sons heard from the open window of the louvre. declaring that the fury of the troops could no longer be restrained, the queen now gave orders to ring the bell of the neighboring church of st. germain l'auxerrois.[ ] [sidenote: murder of admiral coligny.] meantime henry of guise, henry of valois, the bastard of angoulême, and their attendants, had reached the admiral's house. the wounded man was almost alone. could there be any clearer proof of the rectitude of his purpose, of the utter falsity of the charges of conspiracy with which his enemies afterward attempted to blacken his memory?[ ] guerchy and other protestant gentlemen had expressed the desire to spend the night with him; but his son-in-law, téligny, full of confidence in charles's good intentions, had declined their offers, and had, indeed, himself gone to his own lodgings, not far off, in the rue st. honoré.[ ] with coligny were merlin, his chaplain, paré, the king's surgeon, his ensign cornaton, la bonne, yolet, and four or five servants. in the court below there were five of navarre's swiss guards on duty.[ ] coligny, awakened by the growing noise in the streets, had at first felt no alarm, so implicitly did he rely upon the protestations of charles, so confident was he that cosseins and his guards would readily quell any rising of the parisians.[ ] but now some one knocks at the outer door, and demands an entrance in the king's name. word is given to la bonne, who at once descends and unlocks. it is cosseins, followed by the soldiers whom he commands. no sooner does he pass the threshold than he stabs la bonne with his dagger. next he seeks the admiral's room, but it is not easy to reach it, for the brave swiss, even at the risk of their own lives, defend first the door leading to the stairs, and then the stairs themselves. and now coligny could no longer doubt the meaning of the uproar. he rose from his bed, and, wrapping his dressing-gown about him, asked his chaplain to pray; and while merlin endeavored to fulfil his request, he himself in audible petitions invoked jesus christ as his god and saviour, and committed to his hands again the soul he had received from him. it was then that the person to whom we are indebted for this account--and he can scarcely have been another than cornaton--rushed into the room. when paré asked him what the disturbance imported, he turned to the admiral and said: "my lord, it is god that is calling us to himself! the house has been forced, and we have no means of resistance!" to whom the admiral, unmoved by fear, and even, as all who saw him testified, without the least change of countenance, replied: "for a long time have i kept myself in readiness for death. as for you, save yourselves, if you can. it were in vain for you to attempt to save my life. i commend my soul to the mercy of god." obedient to his directions, all that were with him, save nicholas muss or de la mouche, his faithful german interpreter, fled to the roof, and escaped under cover of the darkness. one of coligny's swiss guards had been shot at the foot of the stairs. when cosseins had removed the barricade of boxes that had been erected farther up, the swiss in his own company, whose uniform of green, white, and black, showed them to belong to the duke of anjou, found their countrymen on the other side, but did them no harm. cosseins following them, however, no sooner saw these armed men, than he ordered his arquebusiers to shoot, and one of them fell dead. it was a german follower of guise, named besme, who first reached and entered coligny's chamber, and who for the exploit was subsequently rewarded with the hand of a natural daughter of the cardinal of lorraine. cosseins, attin, sarlaboux, and others, were behind him. "is not this the admiral?" said besme of the wounded man, whom he found quietly seated and awaiting his coming. "i am he," coligny calmly replied. "young man, thou oughtest to have respect for my old age and my feebleness; but thou shalt not, nevertheless, shorten my life."[ ] there were those who asserted that he added: "at least, would that some man, and not this blackguard, put me to death." but most of the murderers--and among them attin, who confessed that never had he seen any one more assured in the presence of death--affirmed that coligny said nothing beyond the words first mentioned. no sooner had besme heard the admiral's reply, than, with a curse, he struck him with his sword, first in the breast, and then on the head.[ ] the rest took part, and quickly despatched him. in the court below, guise was impatiently waiting to hear that his mortal enemy was dead. "besme," he cried out at last, "have you finished?" "it is done," the assassin replied. "monsieur le chevalier (the bastard of angoulême) will not believe it," again said guise, "unless he sees him with his own eyes. throw him out of the window!" besme and sarlaboux promptly obeyed the command. when the lifeless remains lay upon the pavement of the court, henry of guise stooped down and with his handkerchief wiped away the blood from the admiral's face. "i recognize him," he said; "it is he himself!" then, after ignobly kicking the face of his fallen antagonist, he went out gayly encouraging his followers: "come, soldiers, take courage; we have begun well. let us go on to the others, for so the king commands!" and often through the day guise repeated the words, "the king commands; it is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!" just then a bell was heard, and the cry was raised that the huguenots were in arms to kill the king.[ ] as for admiral coligny's body, after the head had been cut off by an italian of the guard of the duke de nevers, the trunk was treated with every indignity. the hands were cut off, and it was otherwise mutilated in a shameless manner. three days was it dragged about the streets by a band of inhuman boys.[ ] meantime the head had been carried to the louvre, where, after catharine and charles had sufficiently feasted their eyes on the spectacle, it was embalmed and sent to rome, a grateful present to the cardinal of lorraine and pope gregory the thirteenth.[ ] it has been questioned whether the ghastly trophy ever reached its destination. indeed, the french court seems to have become ashamed of its inhumanity, and to have regretted that so startling a token of its barbarous hatred had been allowed to go abroad. accordingly, soon after the departure of the courier, a second courier was despatched in great haste to mandelot, governor of lyons, bidding him stop the first and take away from him the admiral's head. he arrived too late, however; four hours before mandelot received the king's letter, "a squire of the duke of guise, named pauli," had passed through the city, doubtless carrying the precious relic.[ ] that it was actually placed in the hands of the cardinal of lorraine at rome, need not be doubted. [sidenote: coligny's character and work.] gaspard de coligny was in his fifty-sixth year at the time of his death. for twelve years he had been the most prominent man in the huguenot party, occupying a position secured to him not more by his resplendent abilities as a general than by the respect exacted by high moral principles. with the light and frivolous side of french character he had little in common. it was to a sterner and more severe class that he belonged--a class of which michel de l'hospital might be regarded as the type. men who had little affinity with them, and bore them still less resemblance, but who could not fail to admire their excellence, were wont to liken both the great huguenot warrior and the chancellor to that cato whose grave demeanor and imposing dignity were a perpetual censure upon the flippancy and lax morality of his countrymen. although not above the ordinary height of men, his appearance was dignified and commanding. in speech he was slow and deliberate. his prudence, never carried to the extreme of over-caution, was signalized on many occasions. success did not elate him; reverses did not dishearten him. the siege of the city of st. quentin, into which he threw himself with a handful of troops, and which he long defended against the best soldiers of spain, displayed on a conspicuous stage his military sagacity, his indomitable determination, and the marvellous control he maintained over his followers. it did much to prevent philip from reaping more substantial fruits from the brilliant victory gained by count egmont on the feast-day of st. lawrence.[ ] it was, however, above all in the civil wars that his abilities shone forth resplendent. equally averse to beginning war without absolute necessity, and to ending it without securing the objects for which it had been undertaken, he was the good genius whose wholesome advice was frequently disregarded, but never without subsequent regret on the part of those who had slighted it. we have seen, in a former chapter,[ ] the touching account given by agrippa d'aubigné of the appeal of the admiral's wife, which alone was successful in moving him to overcome his almost invincible repugnance to taking up arms, even in behalf of a cause which he knew to be most holy. i find a striking confirmation of the accuracy of the report in a passage of his will, wherein he defends himself from the calumnies of his enemies.[ ] "and forasmuch as i have learned that the attempt has been made to impute to me a purpose to attack the persons of the king, the queen, and the king's brothers, i protest before god that i never had any such will or desire, and that i never was present at any place where such plans were ever proposed or discussed. and as i have also been accused of ambition in taking up arms with those of the reformed religion, i make the same protestation, that only zeal for religion, together with fear for my own life, compelled me to assume them. and, indeed, i must confess my weakness, and that the greatest fault which i have always committed in this respect has been that i have not been sufficiently alive to the acts of injustice and the slaughter to which my brethren were subjected, and that the dangers and the traps that were laid for myself were necessary to move me to do what i have done. but i also declare before god, that i tried every means in my power, in order so long as possible to maintain peace, fearing nothing so much as civil disturbances and wars, and clearly foreseeing that these would bring after them the ruin of this kingdom, whose preservation i have always desired and labored for to the utmost of my ability." to coligny's strategy too much praise could scarcely be accorded. the venetian ambassador, contarini, in the report of his mission to the senate, in the early part of the year , expressed his amazement that the admiral, a simple gentleman with slender resources, had waged war against his own powerful sovereign, who was assisted by the king of spain and by a few german and several italian princes; and that, in spite of many battles lost, he preserved so great a reputation that the reiters and lansquenets never rebelled, although their wages were much in arrears, and their booty was often lost in adverse combats. he was, in fact, said the enthusiastic italian, entitled to be held in higher esteem than hannibal, inasmuch as the carthaginian general retained the respect of foreign nations by being uniformly victorious; but the admiral retained it, although his cause was almost always unsuccessful.[ ] but all coligny's military achievements pale in the light of his manly and unaffected piety. it is as a type of the best class among the huguenot nobility that he deserves everlasting remembrance. from his youth he had been plunged in the engrossing pursuits of a soldier's life; but he was not ashamed, so soon as he embraced the views of the reformers, to acknowledge the superior claims of religion upon his time and his allegiance. he gloried in being a christian. the influence of his faith was felt in every action of his life. in the busiest part of an active life, he yet found time for the recognition of god; and, whether in the camp or in his castle of châtillon-sur-loing, he consecrated no insignificant portion of the day to devotion. of the ordinary life of admiral coligny, the anonymous author of his life, who had himself been an inmate in his house, has left an interesting description, derived from what he himself saw and heard: "as soon as he had risen from bed, which was always at an early hour, putting on his morning-gown, and kneeling, as did those who were with him, he himself prayed in the form which is customary with the churches of france. after this, while waiting for the commencement of the sermon, which was delivered on alternate days, accompanied with psalmody, he gave audience to the deputies of the churches who were sent to him, or devoted the time to public business. this he resumed for a while after the service was over, until the hour for dinner. when that was come, such of his domestic servants as were not prevented by necessary engagements elsewhere, met in the hall where the table was spread, standing by which, with his wife at his side, if there had been no preaching service, he engaged with them in singing a psalm, and then the ordinary blessing was said. "on the removal of the cloth, rising and standing with his wife and the rest of the company, he either returned thanks himself or called on his minister to do so. such, also, was his practice at supper, and, finding that the members of his household could not, without much discomfort, attend prayers so late as at bedtime--an hour, besides, which the diversity of his occupations prevented from being regularly fixed--his orders were that, so soon as supper was over, a psalm should be sung and prayer offered. it cannot be told how many of the french nobility began to establish this religious order in their own families, after the example of the admiral, who used often to exhort them to the practice of true piety, and to warn them that it was not enough for the father of a family to live a holy and religious life, if he did not by his example bring all his people to the same rule. "on the approach of the time for the celebration of the lord's supper, calling together all the members of his household, he told them that he had to render an account to god, not only of his own life, but also of their behavior, and reconciled such of them as might have had differences.... moreover, he regarded the institution of colleges for youth, and of schools for the instruction of children, a singular benefit from god, and called the school a seminary of the church and an apprenticeship of piety; holding that ignorance of letters had introduced into both church and state that thick darkness in which the tyranny of the pope had had its birth and increase.... this conviction led him to lay out a large sum in building a college at châtillon, and there he maintained three very learned professors of hebrew, greek, and latin, respectively, and a number of students. "there could not be a stronger proof of his integrity, and of the moderation of his desires with respect to the possession of property, than that, notwithstanding the high offices he held, and the opportunities they afforded, as is usual with courtiers, of attending to his own interests and acquiring great wealth, he did not increase his patrimonial estates by a single acre; and, although he was an excellent economist, yet the number of persons of high rank, and, indeed, of all conditions, that came to consult him on public affairs from all parts of france, obliged him to draw largely on the savings effected by his good management; so that he left to his heirs not less than forty thousand livres of debts, besides six thousand livres of interest which he paid annually to his creditors."[ ] such was the christian hero whom his enemies represented as breathing out menaces upon the bed on which maurevel's arquebuse had laid him, and as exclaiming: "if my arm is wounded, my head is not. if i have to lose my arm, i shall get the head of those who are the cause of it. they intended to kill me; i shall anticipate them." such was the disinterested patriot whom, in the infatuation of their lying fabrications, the murderers of paris, their hands still reeking with the blood of thousands of women and children incontestably innocent of any crime laid to the charge of their husbands or fathers, pictured as plotting the wholesale assassination of the royal family--even to the very henry of navarre whose wedding he had come to honor by his presence--that he might place upon the throne of france that stubborn heretic, the prince of condé![ ] [sidenote: murder of huguenot nobles in the louvre.] while the murder of coligny was in course of execution, or but shortly after, a tragedy not less atrocious was enacted in the royal palace itself. a number of huguenot gentlemen of the highest distinction were lodged in the louvre. charles, after the admiral's wound, had suggested to the king of navarre that he would do well to invite some of his friends to act as a guard against any attack that might be made upon him by the duke of guise, whom he characterized as a "mauvois garçon."[ ] late on saturday night, as margaret of valois informs us in her memoirs, and long after she and her husband had retired, these huguenot lords, gathered around henry of navarre's bed to the number of thirty, had discussed the occurrences of the last two eventful days, and declared their purpose to go to the king on the morrow and demand the punishment of the guises. margaret herself had been purposely kept in ignorance of the plan for the extirpation of the protestants. for, if the huguenots suspected her, because she was a roman catholic, the papists suspected her equally because she had married a protestant. on parting with her mother for the night, her elder sister claude, duchess of lorraine, who happened to be on a visit to the french court, had vainly attempted to detain margaret, expressing with tears the apprehension that some evil would befall her. but catharine had peremptorily sent her to bed, assuring her with words which, seen in the light of subsequent revelations, approach the climax of profanity: "that, if god pleased, she would receive no injury."[ ] so deep was the impression of impending danger made upon margaret's mind, that she remained awake, she tells us, until morning, when her husband arose, saying that he would go and divert himself with a game of tennis until charles should awake. after his departure, the queen of navarre, relieved of her misgivings, as the night was now spent, ordered her maid to lock her door, and composed herself to sleep.[ ] meantime the protestant gentlemen who accompanied navarre, and all the others who lodged in the louvre, had been disarmed by nançay, captain of the guard. in this defenceless condition ten or twelve of their number were conducted, one by one, to the gate of the building. here soldiers stood in readiness, and despatched them with their halberds as they successively made their appearance. such was the fate of the brave pardaillan, of st. martin, of boursis, of beauvais, former tutor of henry of navarre, and of others; some of whom in a loud voice called upon charles, whom they saw at a window, an approving spectator of the butchery, to remember the solemn pledges he had given them. m. de piles--that brave huguenot captain, whose valor, if it did not save st. jean d'angely in the third civil war, had at least detained the entire roman catholic army for seven weeks before fortifications that were none of the best, and rendered moncontour a field barren of substantial fruits[ ]--was the object of special hatred, and his conduct was particularly remarked for its magnanimity. observing among the bystanders a roman catholic acquaintance in whose honor he might perhaps confide, he stripped himself of his cloak, and would have handed it to him, with the words: "de piles makes you a present of this; remember hereafter the death of him who is now so unjustly put to death!" "mon capitaine," answered the other, fearful of incurring the enmity of catharine and charles, "i am not of the company of these persons. i thank you for your cloak; but i cannot take it upon such conditions." the next moment m. de piles fell, pierced by the halberd of one of the archers of the guard. "these are the men," cried the murderers at their bloody work, "who resorted to violence, in order to kill the king afterward."[ ] one of the victims marked out for the slaughter escaped the death of his fellows. margaret of valois had not been long asleep, when her slumbers were rudely disturbed by loud blows struck upon the door, and shouts of "navarre! navarre!" her attendant, supposing it to be henry himself, hastily opened the door; when there rushed in instead, a huguenot nobleman, the viscount de léran,[ ] wounded in the arm by sword and halberd, and pursued by four archers. in his terror he threw himself on margaret's bed, and when she jumped up, in doubt of what could be the meaning of this strange incident, he clung to her night-dress which was drenched with his blood. nançay angrily reproved the indiscretion of his soldiers, and margaret, leaving the huguenot in her room to have his wounds dressed, suffered herself to be conducted to the chamber of her sister, the duchess of lorraine. it was but a few steps; but, on the way, a huguenot was killed at three paces' distance from her, and two others--the first gentleman of the king of navarre, and his first valet-de-chambre--ran to her imploring her to save their lives. she sought and obtained the favor on her knees before catharine and charles.[ ] a few other huguenots who were in the louvre were ready to purchase their lives at any price, even to that of abjuring their faith. they obtained pardon on promising the king to comply with all his commands; and this, we are told, "the more easily, as charles very well knew that they had little or no religion."[ ] [sidenote: navarre and condé spared.] the king of navarre and the prince of condé were spared, although there were not wanting those who would gladly have seen the ruin of the family of bourbon. navarre was brother-in-law of charles, and condé of the duke of nevers; this may have guaranteed their safety. both of the young princes, however, were summoned into the king's presence, where charles, acknowledging the murder of coligny, the great cause of disturbances, and the similar acts then perpetrated throughout the city, as sanctioned by his authority, sternly told the two youths that he intended no longer to tolerate two religions in his dominions. he desired them, therefore, to conform to that creed which had been professed by all his predecessors, and which he intended to uphold. they must renounce the profane doctrines they had embraced, and return to the catholic and roman religion. if they refused, they must expect to suffer the treatment which had just been experienced by so many others.[ ] the replies of the two princes were singularly unlike. henry of navarre, bold enough where only physical bravery was demanded, exhibited for the first time that lamentable absence of moral courage which was to render his life, in its highest relations, a splendid failure. his countenance betrayed agitation and faint-heartedness.[ ] with great "humility"--almost whining, it would appear--he begged that his own life and the life of condé might be spared, and reminded charles of his promised protection. "he would act," he said, "so as to satisfy his majesty; yet he besought him to remember that conscience was a great thing, and that it was hard to renounce the religion in which one had been brought up from infancy." on the other hand, henry of condé, in no way abashed,[ ] declared "that he could not believe that his royal cousin intended to violate a promise confirmed by so solemn an oath. as to fealty, he had always been an obedient subject of the king, and would ever be. touching his religion, if the king had given him the exercise of its worship, god had given him the knowledge of it; and to him he must needs give up an account. so far as his body and his possessions were concerned, they were in the king's hands to dispose of as he might choose. yet it was his own determination to remain constant in his religion, which he would always maintain to be the true religion, even should he be compelled to lay down his life for it." so stout an answer kindled the anger of charles, who was in no mood to meet with opposition. he called condé "a rebel," "a seditious man," and "the son of a seditious father," and warned him that he would lose his head, if, within three days, he should not think better of the matter.[ ] [sidenote: the massacre becomes general.] and now the great bell of the "palais de justice" pealed forth the tocsin. about the louvre the work of blood had begun when catharine, impatient, and fearful lest charles's resolution should again waver at the last moment, gave orders to anticipate the appointed time by ringing the bell of the neighboring church of st. germain l'auxerrois. but now the loud and unusual clangor from the tower of the parliament house carried the warning far and wide. all paris awoke. the conspirators everywhere recognized the stipulated signal, and spread among the excited townsmen the wildest and most extravagant reports. a foul plot, formed by the huguenots, against the king, his mother, and his brothers, had come to light. they had killed more than fifteen of the royal guards. the king, therefore, commanded that quarter should not be given to a single huguenot.[ ] nothing more was needed to inflame the popular hatred of the huguenots, nor to prepare the rabble for an indiscriminate slaughter of the protestants. [sidenote: la rochefoucauld and téligny fall.] among the earliest victims of this day of carnage was count de la rochefoucauld. this witty and lively young noble had been in the louvre until a late hour on saturday night, diverting himself with the king, with whom he was a great favorite. apparently in his anxiety to save la rochefoucauld's life, charles invited, and even urged him, to spend the night in the royal "garde-robe;" but the count, suspecting no danger, insisted on returning to his lodgings, while the king reluctantly abandoned his boon companion to his fate, rather than betray his secret. early awakened from his sleep at his lodgings by loud knocking at the door and by demands for admission in the king's name, and seeing a band of masked men enter, he recalled charles's threat at parting, that he would come and administer to him a whipping. the practical joke would not have been unlike many of the mad antics of the royal jester, and la rochefoucauld, addressing himself to the person whom he supposed to be his majesty in disguise, begged him to treat him with humanity. his deception was not long continued; for the maskers, after rifling his trunks, drew him from his place of concealment and murdered him. his lifeless body was dragged through the streets of paris.[ ] téligny was, perhaps, even more unfortunate than the rest, because he awoke too late to the fact that his own blind confidance in the word of a faithless prince had been a chief instrument of involving his father-in-law and his friends in destruction. he was among the first to pay the penalty of his credulity. more than one of the parties sent to destroy him, it is said, overcome by compassion for his youth and manly beauty, or by respect for his graceful manners and extraordinary learning, left their commission unexecuted. to avoid further peril, he ascended to the roof, from which he made his way to an adjoining house; but he had not gone far before he was seen and shot with an arquebuse by one of the duke of anjou's guards.[ ] [sidenote: self-defense of a few nobles.] the huguenots, attacked in the midst of their slumbers by the courtiers and the soldiers of the royal guard,[ ] among whom were prominent the swiss of charles or his brother, or by the people of paris, who every moment swelled the ranks of the assassins, were too much taken by surprise to offer even the slightest resistance. guerchy, the same gentleman who had offered his services to coligny the night before, is almost the only man reported to have fought for his life. with his sword in his right hand, and winding his cloak around his left arm, he defended himself for a long time, though the breastplates of his enemies were proof against his blows. at last, he fell, overborne by numbers.[ ] the lieutenant de la mareschaussée, if not more determined, was better prepared for the combat. all day long, with a single soldier as his comrade, he defended his house against the assailants, expecting at every moment to be relieved from his perilous situation by the king. but, far from meriting such confidence on the part of his subjects, charles was indignant at his prolonged resistance, and sent a powerful detachment of guards, with orders to bring him the lieutenant's head. the brave huguenot, however, still maintained the unequal siege, and fought till his last breath. the soldiers had only the poor satisfaction of pillaging his house, of dragging his sick daughter naked through the streets until she died of maltreatment, and of wounding and imprisoning his wife.[ ] [sidenote: victims of personal hatred.] personal hatred, jealousy, cupidity, mingled with religious and political zeal, and private ends were attained in fulfilling the king's murderous commands. bussy d'amboise, meeting his protestant cousin, the marquis de renel (half-brother of the late prince of porcien), by a well-directed blow with his poniard rid himself of an unpleasant suit at law which renel had come to paris to prosecute. [sidenote: adventure of young la force.] the case of caumont de la force was still more revolting. his daughter, madame de la châtaigneraie, in accordance with the shameless code of morals in vogue at the french court, had taken for her lover archan, captain of the guard of henry of anjou; and it was to gratify her covetousness that archan obtained from the duke the order to despatch la force and his two sons. the plan was successfully executed so far as the father and his elder son were concerned. the second, a boy of twelve, escaped by his remarkable presence of mind and self-control. certain that his youth would excite no pity in the breast of his inhuman assailants, when his father and his brother fell at his side and he perceived himself covered with their blood, he dropped down with the exclamation that he was dead. so perfectly did he counterfeit death, all that long day, that, although his body was examined by successive bands of plunderers, and deprived not only of every valuable, but even of its clothing, he did not by a motion betray that he was alive. most of these persons applauded the crime. it was well, they said, to kill the little wolves with the greater. but, toward evening, a more humane person came, who, while engaged in drawing off a stocking which had been left on the boy's foot, gave expression to his abhorrence of the bloody deed. to his astonishment the boy raised his head, and whispered, "i am not dead." the compassionate man at once commanded him not to stir, and went home; but as soon as it was dark he returned with a cloak, which he threw about young la force's shoulders, and bade him follow. it was no easy matter to thread the streets unmolested; but his guide dispelled the suspicions of those who questioned him respecting the boy by declaring that it was his nephew whom he had found drunk, and was going to whip soundly for it. in the end the young nobleman reached the arsenal, where his relative, marshal biron, was in command. even there, however, the avarice of his unnatural sister pursued him. vexed that, on account of his preservation, she must fail to secure the entire inheritance of the family, madame de la châtaigneraie tried to effect herself what she had not been able to do by means of another; she visited the marshal in the arsenal, and, after expressing great joy that her brother had been saved, begged to be permitted to see and care for him. biron thought it necessary, in order to preserve the boy's life, to deny her request.[ ] [sidenote: pitiless butchery.] the frenzy that had fallen upon paris affected all classes alike. every feeling of pity seemed to have been blotted out. natural affection disappeared. a man's foes were those of his own household. on the plea of religious zeal the most barbarous acts were committed. spire niquet, a poor bookbinder, whose scanty earnings barely sufficed to support the wants of his seven children, was half-roasted in a bonfire made of his own books, and then dragged to the river and drowned.[ ] the weaker sex was not spared in the universal carnage, and, as in a town taken by assault, suffered outrages that were worse than death. matron and maiden alike welcomed as merciful the blow that liberated them from an existence now rendered insupportable. women approaching maternity were selected for more excruciating torments, and savage delight was exhibited in destroying the unborn fruit of the womb. nor was any rank respected. madame d'yverny, the niece of cardinal briçonnet, was recognized, as she fled, by the costly underclothing that appeared from beneath the shabby habit of a nun which she had assumed; and, after suffering every indignity, upon her refusal to go to mass, was thrown from a bridge into the seine and drowned.[ ] occasionally the women rivalled the cruelty of the men. a poor carpenter, of advanced age, with whom the author of the "tocsain contre les massacreurs" was personally acquainted, had been taken by night and cast into the river. he swam, however, to a bridge, and succeeded in climbing up by its timbers, and so fled naked to the house of a relative near the "cousture sainte catherine," where his wife had taken refuge. but, instead of welcoming him, his wife drove him away, and he was soon recaptured and killed.[ ] it is related that the daughter of one jean de coulogne, a mercer of the "palais," betrayed her own mother to death, and subsequently married one of the murderers.[ ] the very innocence of childhood furnished no sufficient protection--so literally did the pious catholics of paris interpret the oft-repeated exhortations of their holy father to exterminate not only the roots of heresy, but the very fibres of the roots.[ ] two infants, whose parents had just been murdered, were carried in a hod and cast into the seine. a little girl was plunged naked in the blood of her father and mother, with horrible oaths and threats that, if she should become a huguenot, the like fate would befall her. and a crowd of boys, between nine and ten years of age, was seen dragging through the streets the body of a babe yet in its swaddling-clothes, which they had fastened to a rope by means of a belt tied about its neck.[ ] [sidenote: shamelessness of the court ladies.] [sidenote: anjou encourages the assassins.] the bodies of the more inconspicuous victims lay for hours in whatever spot they happened to be killed; but the court required ocular demonstration that the leaders of the huguenots who had been most prominent in the late wars were really dead. accordingly the naked corpses of soubise, of guerchy, of beaudiné, d'acier's brother, and of others, were dragged from all quarters to the square in front of the louvre. there, as an indignant contemporary writes, extended in a long row, they lay exposed to the view of the varlets, of whom when alive they had been the terror.[ ] cruelty and lust are twin sisters: when the one is at hand, the other is generally not far distant. the court of catharine de' medici was noted for its impurity, as it was infamous for its recklessness of human life. it was not out of keeping with its general reputation that toward evening a bevy of ladies--among them the queen mother--tripped down the palace stairs to feast their eyes upon the sight of the uncovered dead.[ ] indeed, the king, the queen mother, and their intimate friends seemed to be in an ecstasy of joy. they indulged in boisterous laughter[ ] as the successive reports of the municipal authorities, from hour to hour, brought in tidings of the extent of the massacre.[ ] "the war is now ended in reality," they were heard to say, "and we shall henceforth live in peace."[ ] the duke of anjou took a more active part. in the street and on the pont de notre dame he was to be seen encouraging the assassins.[ ] the duke of montpensier was surpassed by no one in his zealous advocacy of the murderous work. "let every man exert himself to the utmost," he cried, as he rode through the streets, "if he wishes to prove himself a good servant to the king."[ ] tavannes, if we may believe brantôme's account, endeavored to rival him, and, all day long, as he rode about amid the carnage, amused himself by facetiously crying to the people: "bleed! bleed! the doctors say that bleeding is as good in the month of august as in may."[ ] of the duke of alençon it was noticed that, alone of catharine's sons, he took no part in the massacre. the protestants even regarded him as their friend, and the rumor was current that the pity he exhibited excited the indignation of his mother and brothers. indeed, catharine, it was said, openly told him that, if he ventured to meddle with her plans, she would put him in a sack and throw him into the river.[ ] [sidenote: wonderful escapes.] of the pastors of the church of paris, it was noticed as a remarkable circumstance that but two--buirette and desgorris--were killed; for it was certain that no lives were more eagerly sought than theirs.[ ] but several protestant pastors had wonderful escapes. the celebrated d'espine--the converted monk who took part in the colloquy of poissy--was in company with madame d'yverny when her disguise was discovered, but he was not recognized.[ ] in the case of merlin, chaplain of admiral coligny, the divine interposition seemed almost as distinct as in that of the prophet elijah. after reluctantly leaving coligny, at his earnest request, and clambering over the roof of a neighboring house, he fell through an opening into a garret full of hay. not daring to show himself, since he knew not whether he would encounter friends or foes, he remained for three days in this retreat, his sole food an egg which a hen daily laid within his reach.[ ] the future minister of henry the fourth, maximilien de béthune, duke of sully, at this time a boy of twelve and a student in the college of burgundy in paris, has left us in his "economies royales" a thrilling account of his escape. awakened, about three o'clock in the morning, by the uproar in the streets, his tutor and his valet-de-chambre went out to learn the occasion of it, and never returned. they were doubtless among the first victims. sully's trembling host--a protestant who consented through fear to abjure his faith--now came in, and advised the youth to save his life by going to mass. sully was not prepared to take this counsel, and, so putting on his scholar's gown, he ventured upon the desperate step of trying to reach the college. a horrible scene presented itself to view. everywhere men were breaking into houses, or slaughtering their captives in the public streets, while the cry of "kill the huguenots" was heard on all sides. sully himself owed his preservation to two thick volumes of "heures"--romish books of devotion--which he had the presence of mind to take under his arm, and which effectually disarmed the suspicions of the three successive bands of soldiers that stopped him. at the college, after with difficulty gaining admission, he incurred still greater danger. happily the principal, m. du faye, was a kind-hearted man. in vain was he urged, by two priests who were his guests, to surrender the huguenot boy to death, saying that the order was to massacre even the very babes at the breast. du faye would not consent; and after having secretly kept sully locked up for three days in a closet, he found means to restore him to his friends.[ ] [sidenote: death of the philosopher ramus.] no loss was more sensibly felt by the scientific world than that of the learned pierre de la ramée, or ramus, a philosopher second to none of his day. the professor might possibly have escaped if his only offence had been his protestant views; but ramus had had the temerity to attack aristotle, and to attempt to reform the faulty pronunciation of the latin language. for these unpardonable sins he was tracked to the cellar in which he had hidden, by a band of robbers under the guidance of jacques charpentier, a jealous rival, with whom he had had acrimonious discussions. after being compelled to give up a considerable sum of money, he was despatched with daggers, and thrown from an upper window into the court of his college. never was philosophic heterodoxy more thoroughly punished; for if the whipping, dragging through the filthy streets, and dismembering of a corpse by indignant students with the approval of their teachers, could atone for such grave errors, the anger of the illustrious stagirite must have been fully appeased. if anything can clearly exhibit the depth of moral degradation to which roman catholic france had fallen, it is the fact that charpentier unblushingly accepted the praise which was liberally showered upon him for his participation in this disgraceful affair.[ ] [sidenote: president pierre de la place.] scarcely less signal a misfortune to france was the murder of pierre de la place, president of the cour d'aides, whose excellent "commentaries on the state of religion and the republic" constitute one of our best guides through the short reign of francis the second and the early part of the reign of charles the ninth. this eminent jurist, even more distinguished as a writer on christian morals than as a historian, had first embraced the reformation at a time when the recent martyrdom of anne du bourg served as a significant reminder of the perils attending a profession of protestant views. president de la place had been visited in his house early in the morning, on the first day of the massacre, by captain michel, an arquebusier of the king, who, entering boldly with his weapons and with the white napkin bound on his left arm, informed him of the death of coligny, and the fate in reserve for the rest of the huguenots. the soldier pretended that the king wished to exempt la place from the general slaughter, and bade him accompany him to the louvre. however, a gift of a thousand crowns induced the fellow instead to lead the president's daughter and her husband to a place of safety in the house of a roman catholic friend. but la place himself, after having applied at three different houses belonging to persons of his acquaintance and been denied admission, was compelled to return to his home and there await his doom. a day passed, during which la place and his wife were subjected to constant alarms. at length new orders came in the king's name, enjoining upon him without fail to repair instantly to the palace. the meaning was unmistakable; it was the road to death. but neither the huguenot's piety nor his courage failed him. he gently raised his wife, who had fallen on her knees to beg the messenger to save her husband's life, and reminded her that she should have recourse to god alone, not to an arm of flesh. and he sternly rebuked his eldest son, who, in a moment of weakness, had placed a white cross on his hat, in the hope of saving his life. "the true cross we must wear," he said, "is the trials and afflictions sent to us by god as sure pledges of the bliss and eternal life he has prepared for his own followers." it was with unruffled composure that he bade his weeping friends farewell. his apprehensions were soon realized; he was despatched by murderers who had been waiting for him, and before long his body was floating down the seine toward the sea.[ ] [sidenote: regnier and vezins.] from such instances of inhumanity it is a relief to turn to one of a few incidents wherein the finer feelings triumphed over prejudice, difference of religious tenets, and even personal hatred. there were in paris two gentlemen, named vezins and regnier, of good families in the province of quercy in southern france. both were equally distinguished for their valor; but their dispositions were singularly unlike, for while the huguenot regnier was noted for his gentle manners, the roman catholic vezins, who was lieutenant of the governor, the viscount of villars, had acquired unenviable notoriety because of his ferocity. between the two there had for some time existed a mortal feud, which their common friends had striven in vain to heal. while the massacre was at its height, regnier was visited by his enemy, vezins. the latter, after effecting an entrance into the house by breaking down the door, fiercely ordered the huguenot--who, well assured that his last hour was come, had fallen upon his knees to implore the mercy of god--to rise and follow him. a horse stood saddled at the door, upon which regnier was told to mount. in his enemy's train he rode unharmed through the streets of paris, then through the gates of the city. still vezins, without vouchsafing a word of explanation, kept on his way toward cahors, the capital of quercy, whither he had been despatched by the government.[ ] for many successive days the journey lasted. the prisoner was well guarded, but he was also well lodged and fed. at last the party reached the very castle of regnier, and here his captor broke the long silence. "as you have seen," said he, "it would have depended only on myself to take advantage of the opportunity which i have long been seeking; but i should be ashamed to avenge myself in this way upon a man so brave as you. in settling our quarrel i desire that the danger shall be equal. be well assured that you will find me as ready to decide our dispute in a manner becoming gentlemen, as i have been eager to save you from inevitable destruction." it need scarcely be said that the huguenot could not find words sufficiently strong to express his gratitude; but vezins merely replied: "i leave it to you to choose whether you wish me to be your friend or your enemy; i saved your life only to enable you to make your election." with these words he abruptly left him and rode away, nor would he ever consent even to take back the horse upon which he had brought regnier in safety so many leagues.[ ] [sidenote: escape of montgomery and chartres.] [sidenote: charles himself fires at them from the louvre.] a number of the huguenot noblemen were lodged on the southern side of the seine, outside of the walls, in the faubourg saint germain. count montgomery, the vidame of chartres, beauvoir la nocle, and frontenay, a member of the powerful rohan family, were among the most distinguished. after the admiral, there were certainly no huguenots whom catharine was more anxious to destroy than montgomery and chartres. accordingly the massacre, which began near the louvre, was to have been executed simultaneously upon them, and the work was intrusted to m. de maugiron. but the delay of the roman catholics saved them. marcel, the former prévôt des marchands, who had been instructed to furnish one thousand men, was not ready in time; and dumas, who was to have acted as guide, overslept the appointed hour. about five o'clock in the morning a huguenot succeeded in swimming across the river, and carried to montgomery the first tidings of the events of the last two hours. the count at once notified his comrades, but, although there were among them those who had been most urgent to leave paris immediately after maurevel's attack upon coligny, few of the nobles would harbor the thought that charles was so lost to honor as to have plotted the assassination of his invited guests. they preferred to believe that the king was himself in danger through a sudden commotion occasioned by the guises. acting upon this theory, the huguenots proceeded in a body toward the seine, intending to cross and lend assistance to the royal cause; but, on reaching the river's bank, they were speedily undeceived. they saw a band of two hundred soldiers of the royal guard coming toward them in boats, and discharging their arquebuses, with cries of "_tue! tue!_"--"kill! kill!" charles himself was descried at a window of the louvre, looking with approval upon the scene. there is good authority also, for the story that, in his eagerness to exterminate the huguenots, charles snatched an arquebuse from the hand of an attendant, and fired at them, exclaiming, "let us shoot, _mort dieu_, they are fleeing!"[ ] montgomery and his companions had by this time recognized their mistake, and hesitated no longer to flee from the perfidious capital. they promptly took to horse, and rode hard to reach normandy and the sea. this part of the prey was, however, too precious to be permitted to escape. accordingly, guise, aumale, the bastard of angoulême, and a number of "gentilhommes tueurs," started in pursuit. but an accident prevented them from overtaking the huguenots. when guise and his party reached the porte de bussy[ ]--the gate leading from the city into the faubourg in which the protestants had been lodging--which was closed in accordance with the king's orders, they found that they had been provided by mistake with the wrong key, and the delay experienced in finding the right one afforded montgomery an advantage in the race, of which he made good use.[ ] [sidenote: the massacre continues.] the carnival of blood, which had been so successfully ushered in on that ill-starred sunday of august, was maintained on the succeeding days with little abatement of its frenzied excitement. paris soon resembled a vast charnel-house. the dead or dying lay in the open streets and squares, they blocked the doors and carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards. when the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains was accomplished, the seine became the receptacle. besides those huguenots whom their murderers dragged to the bridges or wharves to despatch by drowning, both by day and by night wagons laden with the corpses of men and women, and even of young children, were driven down to the river and emptied of their human freight. but the current of the crooked seine refused to carry away from the capital all these evidences of guilt. the shores of its first curve, from paris to the bridge of st. cloud, were covered with putrefying remains, which the municipality were compelled to inter, through fear of their generating a pestilence. and so we read, in the registers of the hôtel-de-ville, of a payment of fifteen livres tournois, on the ninth of september, for the burial of the dead bodies found near the convent of chaillot, and of a second payment of twenty livres on the twenty-third, for the burial of eleven hundred more, near chaillot, auteuil, and st. cloud.[ ] [sidenote: not a popular movement.] [sidenote: plunder of the rich.] the massacre was not in its origin a popular outbreak. it sprang from the ambition and vindictive passions of the queen mother, and others, whom the ministers of a corrupt religion had long accustomed to the idea that the extermination of heretics is not a sin, but the highest type of piety. the people were called in only as assistants. probably the first intention was only to hold the municipal forces in readiness to overcome any resistance which the protestants might offer. but the massacre succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of the conspirators. very few of the victims defended themselves or their property; scarcely one roman catholic was slain. and now the populace, having had a taste of blood, could no longer be restrained. whether the plunder of the protestants entered into the original calculations of catharine and her advisers, may perhaps be doubted. but there is no question as to the turn which the affair soon took in the minds of those engaged in it. pillage was not always countenanced by church and state: as a violation of the second table of the law, it was, under ordinary circumstances, atoned for by penance and ecclesiastical censures; as a breach of the royal edicts, it was likely to be punished with hanging or still more painful modes of execution. consequently, when by furnishing arms the civil power authorized the most severe measures against those whom it accused of foul conspiracy against the king, and when the professed minister of christ and his gospel of peace blessed the work of exterminating god's enemies and the king's, there was no lack of men willing to profit by the rare and unexpected opportunity. nor did the courtiers disdain dishonest gain. the duke of anjou was known to have enriched himself by the plunder of the shop of baduère, the king's jeweller.[ ] noblemen, besides robbing their victims of money, extorted from them, in return for a promise to spare their lives, deeds of valuable lands, or papers resigning in their favor high offices in the government. it was frequently the case that, after giving such presents, the huguenot was put out of the way at once, in order to prevent him from ever retracting. thus, martial de loménie, a secretary of the king, was murdered in prison, after having resigned his office in favor of marshal retz, and sold to him his estate of versailles, at such a price as the latter chose to name, in the vain hope that this would secure him liberty and life.[ ] the extent to which robbery was carried on the occasion of the massacre is reluctantly conceded in the pamphlet, which was published immediately after, as an apology of the court for the hideous crime; and an attempt is made to justify it, which is worthy of the source from which it drew its inspiration: "now this good-will of the people to sustain and defend its prince, to espouse his quarrel, and to hate those who are not of his religion, is very praiseworthy; and if in this execution [the massacre] some pillaging has taken place, we must excuse the fury of a people impelled by a worthy zeal--a zeal hard to be restrained and bridled when once excited."[ ] [sidenote: orders issued to lay down arms.] [sidenote: little heed given to them.] but, despite panegyrists, the massacre had not been in progress many hours before the very magistrates of the city appear to have become apprehensive lest the movement might assume dangerous dimensions. it was only about eleven o'clock on sunday morning, as the registers of the hôtel de ville inform us, when charles was waited upon by the prévôt des marchands and the échevins. they came to inform him that "a number of persons, partly belonging to the suite of his majesty, partly to that of the princes, princesses, and lords of the court--gentlemen, archers of the king's body-guard, soldiers of his suite, as well as all sorts of people mingled with them and under their authority--were plundering and pillaging many houses and killing many persons in the streets." this was certainly no news to charles; but as he desired, now that the massacre had begun, not to enrich the roman catholic inhabitants of paris, but to fill his own coffers, he deemed it best to prohibit any further action on their part, and to leave the rest of the work to his own commissioned servants. accordingly the municipal authorities were directed to ride through the city with all the troops at their disposal, and to see to it, both by day and night, that the bloodshed and robbery should cease. "sir william guerrier"--thus runs one of the commissions to the "quarteniers" issued from the central bureau of the city, in pursuance of these directions--"give commandment to all burgesses and inhabitants of your quarter, who to-day have taken up arms _according to the king's order_, to lay them down, and to retire and remain quietly in their houses, ... according to the king's command conveyed to us by my lord of nevers." and this document is accompanied with another, of the same date, applying to soldiers of the guard or others, who should pillage or maltreat protestants, and threatening them with punishment. such a proclamation, it is well known, was made by trumpet at about five o'clock that afternoon. the registers tell us that the instructions were so well carried out that all disorder "was at once appeased and ceased." they contain, however, a distinct refutation of this falsehood, in the frequent repetition of similar orders and the variety of forms in which the same statements are made on subsequent days. again and again does the king direct that soldiers be placed at the head of every street to prevent robbery and murder;[ ] the guards either were never posted, or, as is more likely, became foremost in the work which they were sent to repress. indeed, the instructions given on monday to visit all the houses in the city and its suburbs where there were any protestants, and obtain their names and surnames,[ ] afforded an opportunity which was not permitted to slip by unimproved, for the exaction of heavy bribes, as well as for more open plunder and violence. so notorious was it, nearly a week after the butchery began, that the massacre had only abated in intensity, that, on the thirtieth of august, measures were adopted to prevent any wrong from being done to foreign merchants sojourning in paris, and especially to the german, english, and flemish students of the university.[ ] [sidenote: miracle of the "cimetière des innocents."] the smile of heaven, it was said by the roman catholic clergy, rested upon the effort to extirpate heresy in france. they convinced the people of the truth of their assertion by pointing to an unusual phenomenon which they declared to be evidently miraculous. in the cimetière des innocents and before a small chapel of the virgin mary, there grew a white hawthorn, which, according to some accounts, had for several years been to all appearance dead. great then was the surprise of those who, on the eventful st. bartholomew's day, beheld the tree covered with a great profusion of blossoms as fragrant as those flowers which the hawthorn usually puts forth in may. it was true that no good reason could be assigned why the wonder might not with greater propriety be explained, as the protestants afterward suggested, rather as a mark of heaven's sympathy with oppressed innocence. but no doubts entered the minds of the parisian ecclesiastics. they spread abroad the fame of the prodigy. they rang the church-bells in token of joy, and invited the blood-stained populace to witness the sight, and gain new courage in their murderous work. it may well be doubted whether either the hawthorn or the virgin of the neighboring chapel wrought the wonderful cures recorded by the curate of mériot.[ ] but certainly the reported intervention of heaven setting its seal upon treacherous assassination prolonged the slaughter of huguenots. "it seemed," says claude haton, reflecting the popular belief, "that god, by this miracle, approved and accepted as well-pleasing to him the catholic uprising and the death of his great enemy the admiral and his followers, who for twelve years had been audaciously rending his seamless coat, which is his true church and his bride."[ ] and so, what with the encouragement afforded by the wonderful thorn-tree of the cimetière des innocents--what with the continuous fair weather, which was interpreted after the same manner, the task of extirpating the heretical huguenots was prosecuted with a perseverance that never flagged. it is true that the greater part of the work was done in the first three or four days; but it was not terminated for several weeks, and many a huguenot, coming out of his place of concealment with the hope that time might have caused the passions of his enemies to become less violent, was murdered in cold blood by those who coveted his property. several thousand persons were butchered in paris alone during the first few days, besides these later victims; precisely how many, it is useless and perhaps impossible to fix with certainty.[ ] [sidenote: the king's first letter to mandelot.] meantime it became necessary to explain to the world the extraordinary tragedy which had been enacted on so conspicuous a stage. each of the different parties to the nefarious compact, with that easy faith which characterizes great criminals, had expected to satisfy its own resentment at the sole expense of the honor and reputation of the others. the king and his mother, while securing the death of coligny and a few other personal enemies, were not unwilling to have the world believe that the entire occurrence had been an outburst of the old animosity of the guises against the châtillons. in fact, this was distinctly stated in the circular letter of charles ix., despatched on the very sunday on which the massacre began, to the governors of the principal cities of the realm. "monsieur de mandelot"--so runs one of these extraordinary epistles--"you have learned what i wrote to you, the day before yesterday, respecting the wounding of the admiral, and how that i was about to do my utmost in the investigation of the case and the punishment of the guilty, wherein nothing has been forgotten. since then it has happened that the members of the house of guise, and the other lords and gentlemen who are their adherents, and who have no small influence in this city, as everybody knows, having received certain information that the friends of the admiral intended to avenge this wound upon them--since they suspected them of being its cause and occasion--became so much excited that, between the one party and the other, there arose a great and lamentable commotion. the body of guards which had been posted around the admiral's house was overpowered, and he was killed with some other gentlemen, as there have also been others massacred in various parts of this city. this was done so furiously that it was impossible to apply such a remedy as could have been desired; for i had as much as i could do in employing my guards and other forces to retain my superiority in this castle of the louvre,[ ] so as afterward to take measures for allaying the commotion throughout the city. at the present hour it has, thank god, subsided! it occurred through the private quarrel which has long existed between these two houses. always foreseeing that some bad consequences would result from it, i have heretofore done all that i could to appease it, as every one knows. there is in this nothing leading to the rupture of the edict of pacification, which, on the contrary, i intend to be maintained as much as ever."[ ] in view of the undeniable fact that charles affixed his signature to this letter in the midst of a horrible massacre for which he himself had given the signal, which he still directed, and concerning whose progress he received hourly bulletins from the municipal authorities, it must be admitted that the king showed himself no novice in the ignoble art of shameless misrepresentation. [sidenote: guise throws the responsibility on the king.] guise, on his part, was not less solicitous to relieve himself of responsibility, and to lay the burden upon the king's shoulders. we have seen that, at the very moment of coligny's assassination, he began to repeat the words: "it is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!" as his warrant for the crime. as the massacre grew in extent he and his associates became more reluctant to be held accountable for it,[ ] and at last they forced charles to acknowledge himself its sole author. the queen mother and anjou, it is said, were mainly instrumental in leading the monarch to take this unexpected step. his original intention had been to compel the guises to leave the capital immediately after the death of coligny--a movement which would have given color to the theory of their guilt. but it was not difficult for catharine and henry to convince him that by so doing he would only render more irreconcilable the enmity between the guises and the montmorencies, who plainly exhibited their intention to exact vengeance for the death of their illustrious kinsman, the admiral. in short, he would purchase brief respite from trouble at the price of a fresh civil war, more cruel than any which had preceded.[ ] [sidenote: the king accepts it.] [sidenote: the "lit de justice."] it was on tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth of august, that the king formally and publicly assumed the weighty responsibility. after hearing a solemn mass, to render thanks to almighty god for his happy deliverance from his enemies, charles, accompanied by his brothers, the dukes of anjou and alençon, by the king of navarre, and by a numerous body of his principal lords, proceeded to the parliament house, and there, in the presence of all the chambers, held his "lit de justice."[ ] he opened this extraordinary meeting by an address, in which he dilated upon the intolerable insults he had, from his very childhood, experienced at the hands of coligny, and many other culprits, who had made religion a pretext for rebellion. his attempts to secure peace by large concessions had emboldened coligny so far that he had at last ventured to conspire to kill him, his mother, and his brothers, and even the king of navarre, although a huguenot like himself; intending to place the prince of condé upon the throne, and subsequently to put him also out of the way, and appropriate the regal authority after the destruction of the entire royal family. in order to ward off so horrible a blow, he had, he said, been compelled to resort to extreme measures of rigor. he desired all men to know that the steps taken on the preceding sunday for the punishment of the guilty had been in accordance with his orders. he is even reported to have gone farther, and to have invoked the aid of parliament in condemning the memory and confiscating the property of those against whom he had alleged such abominable crimes.[ ] [sidenote: servile reply of parliament.] [sidenote: christopher de thou.] to this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. christopher de thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. and he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of louis the eleventh: "_qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare._" the solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of pibrac, the "avocat-général," to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and robbery--a request which charles readily granted.[ ] never had the supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ignobly than when it listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification an organized massacre perpetrated unblushingly under its very eyes. as for the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor palliate.[ ] we may credit his assertion that his father remonstrated with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him in public, and that christopher de thou marked his detestation of that ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of statius: excidat illa dies ævo, ne postera credant sæcula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa nocte tegi propriæ patiamur crimina gentis. but we cannot forget that this was not the first time that christopher de thou "accommodated" his words or his actions to the supposed "exigencies of the times." he was a member of that commission that sentenced louis of condé to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of francis the second. since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the parisian parliament. his voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against gaspard de coligny. if we concede to his son that no one was of a less sanguinary or of a milder disposition than president de thou, we must also insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or conscientiousness.[ ] [sidenote: ineffectual effort to inculpate coligny.] but it was not a simple congratulatory address that charles, or his mother, required of his parliament. tyrannical power is rarely satisfied with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily obtains from them, a positive indorsement of its schemes of successful villainy. it was necessary--especially, as we shall see later, after the cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of europe on receipt of the tidings of the massacre in paris and elsewhere--to palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain huguenots, and above all to coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and the royal family. and here again the parliament of paris was as pliant as its rulers could desire. coligny's papers, both in paris and at châtillon-sur-loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever been entertained by him. in default of something better, therefore, the queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two passages of these private manuscripts. in one--it was, we are told, the will of the admiral, written toward the end of the third civil war[ ]--he dissuaded charles from assigning to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority of the crown. catharine triumphantly showed it to alençon. "see!" said she; "this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and respected!" "i know not," replied the young prince, "how much of a friend he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the king."[ ] with walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the murdered hero of queen elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success. "to the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him," said catharine de' medici one day to the english ambassador, "you may see a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son, this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your mistress, and the king of spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of this crown." "to that i answered," says walsingham, "that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject to the crown of france, and the queen's majestie, my mistress, made the more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the same."[ ] [sidenote: coligny's memory declared infamous.] [sidenote: petty indignities.] the complete absence of proof of all designs save the most patriotic, and, on the other hand, the clear evidence that coligny sought for the quiet and growth of the religious community to which he belonged, only in connection with the honor and prosperity of his own country, did not deter the pliant parliament from pursuing the course prescribed for it. a little more than two months after the massacre of st. bartholomew's day (october the twenty-seventh, ), the admiral's sentence was formally pronounced. he was proclaimed a traitor and the author of a conspiracy against the king; his goods were confiscated, his memory declared infamous. his children were degraded from their rank as nobles, and pronounced "ignoble, villains, _roturiers_, infamous, unworthy, and incapable of making a will, or of holding offices, dignities or possessions in france." it was ordered that his castle of châtillon-sur-loing should be razed to the ground, never to be rebuilt, and that the site should be sown with salt; that the trees of the park should be cut down to half their height, and a monumental pillar be erected on the spot, with a copy of this decree inscribed upon it. his portraits and statues were to be destroyed; his arms, wherever found, to be dragged at the horse's tail and publicly destroyed by the hangman; his body--if any fragments could be obtained, or, if not, his effigy--was to be dragged on a hurdle, and hung first on the grève and then on a loftier gibbet at montfaucon. finally, public prayers and a solemn procession were ordered to take place in paris on every successive anniversary of the feast of st. bartholomew.[ ] thus was the memory of one of the noblest characters that illustrated the sixteenth century pursued with envenomed hatred, after death had placed coligny himself beyond the power of the murderous queen mother to inflict more substantial injury upon him. to his mortal remains all that malice could do had already been done. what remained of a mutilated body had been taken from the hands of those precocious criminals, the boys of paris, and hung up by the feet upon the gallows at montfaucon.[ ] a great part of the capital had gone out to look upon the grateful sight. charles the ninth was of the number of the visitors, and, when others showed signs of disgust at the stench arising from the putrefaction of a corpse long unburied, is said to have exclaimed "that the smell of a dead enemy is very sweet."[ ] great was the merriment of the low populace; copious were the effusions of wit. jacques copp de vellay, in his poetical diatribe, published with privilege--"le déluge des huguenotz"--sings with great delight of mont-faulcon, où les attend ce grand gaspar au curedent, attaché par les piedz sans teste.[ ] at last, four or five days after coligny's death, a body of thirty or forty horse, sent by marshal montmorency, took down the remains by night, and gave them decent burial.[ ] [sidenote: a jubilee procession.] [sidenote: charles declares that he will maintain his edict.] not content with the public admission of his responsibility for the massacre which he had made before the parliament, charles with his court participated two days later (thursday, the twenty-eighth of august) in the celebration of a jubilee, and walked in a procession through the streets of paris; at successive "stations" rendering thanks to heaven, with fair show of devotion, for the preservation of his own life, and the lives of his brothers and of _the king of navarre_. it would have served greatly to give a color of plausibility to the report of the conspiracy of the huguenots, could navarre and condé have been prevailed upon to appear in the king's company on this occasion. but it must be mentioned to their honor, that they were proof against the persuasions as well as the threats of charles.[ ] the same day a royal declaration was published, reiterating the allegations made in the palais de justice, but protesting that the king was determined to maintain his edict of pacification. as, however, the protestants were forbidden for the present from holding any public or private assemblies for worship, it must be admitted that they were not far wrong in regarding the declaration as only another part of the trap cunningly devised for their destruction.[ ] [sidenote: forced conversion of navarre and condé.] although the conversion of the young king of navarre and his cousin, the prince of condé, did not occur until some weeks later, it may be appropriately mentioned here. no means were left untried to gain them over to the roman catholic religion. the sophistries of monks were supplemented by the more dangerous persuasions of a renegade protestant minister, hugues sureau du rosier, formerly one of the pastors of the church of orleans.[ ] whatever excuse his arguments may have furnished by covering their renunciation of their faith with the decent cloak of conviction, _fear_ was certainly the chief instrument in effecting the desired change in the huguenot princes. there is no room for doubt that the character of charles underwent a marked change, as we shall see later, from the time that he consented to the massacre. he became more sullen, more violent, more impatient of contradiction or opposition. it is not at all unlikely that a mind never fully under control of reason, and now assuredly thrown from its poise by a desperation engendered of remorse for the fearful crime he had reluctantly approved, at times formed the resolution to kill the obstinate king of navarre and his cousin. on one occasion charles is said to have been deterred by the supplications of his young wife from going in person to destroy them.[ ] at length, when the alternative of death or the bastile was the only one presented, the courage of the bourbons began to falter. navarre was the first to yield, and his sister, the excellent catharine de bourbon, followed his example. on the thirteenth of september the ambassador walsingham wrote: "they prepare bastile for some persons of quality. it is thought that it is for the prince of condé and his brethren."[ ] but three days later (the sixteenth of september) he wrote again: "on sunday last, which was the fourteenth of this month, the young princess of condé was constrained to go to mass, being threatened otherwise to go to prison, and so consequently to be made away. the prince of condé hath also yielded to hear mass upon sunday next, being otherwise threatened to go to the bastile, where he is not like long to serve."[ ] such conversions did not promise to prove very sincere. they were accepted, however, by the king and his mother; although both navarre and condé were detained at court rather as prisoners than as free princes. pope gregory the thirteenth received the submission of both cousins to the authority of the see of rome, recognized the validity of their marriages, and formally admitted them to his favor, by a special bull of the twenty-seventh of october, .[ ] in return for these concessions henry of navarre repealed the ordinances which his mother had made for the government of béarn, and re-established the roman catholic worship.[ ] footnotes: [ ] mémoires de marguerite de valois, , . [ ] no dispensation was ever granted until _after_ the marriage, and after henry of navarre's simulated conversion to roman catholicism. then, of course, there was no need of further hesitation, and the document was granted, of which a copy is printed in documents historiques inédits, i. - . the bull is dated oct. , . there is, then, no necessity for mr. henry white's uncertainty (massacre of st. bartholomew, ): "the new pope, gregory xiii., appears to have been more compliant, or the letter stating that a dispensation was on the road must have been a forgery." [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lii.), ; lo stratagema di carlo ix. rè di francia, contro gli ugonotti, rebelli di dio e suoi; descritto dal signor camillo capilupi, e mandato di roma al signor alfonzo capilupi. ce stratageme est cy après mis en françois avec un avertissement au lecteur. . orig. ed., p. . [ ] mémoires de l'estat de france sous charles ix. (cimber et danjou, vii. .) [ ] "avec certain formulaire que les uns et les autres n'improuvoyent point." mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, vii. . [ ] as de thou here speaks as an eye-witness of the marriage, i follow his description very closely. histoire univ., iv. (liv. lii.) , . agrippa d'aubigné was not in paris (mémoires, édit. panthéon, p. ), and his account is meagre and deficient in originality. hist. univ., ii. (liv. i., c. ). it is quite in keeping with the brave gascon's character, that, having come to paris some days before, in order to obtain a commission to command a company of soldiers which he had raised for the war in flanders, he had been obliged to leave almost instantly upon his arrival, because he had acted as the second of a friend in a duel, and wounded in the face an archer who endeavored to arrest him. tavannes makes coligny suggest the removal of the ensigns taken from the protestants as "marques de troubles," and playfully claim for himself the , crowns promised to any one who should bring the admiral's head. mémoires, éd. petitot, iii. . [ ] mémoires de l'État, _ubi supra_, pp. , ; de thou, _ubi supra_. i have not deemed it out of place to describe some of the diversions with which the french court occupied itself on the eve of the massacre. the connection between reckless merriment and cold-blooded cruelty is often startlingly close. besides this, the finances of the country were so hopelessly involved, as the consequence of the late civil wars, that this lavish expenditure was particularly ill-timed. if old gaspard de tavannes was as blunt as his son represents him to have been, he gave charles some good, but, like most good, unheeded advice. "sire," said he, à propos of the extravagance of the court at guise's marriage in , "you should make a feast, and instead of the singers who are brought in artificial clouds, you should bring those who would tell you this truth: 'you are dolts! you spend your money in festivals, in pomps and masks, and do not pay your men-at-arms nor your soldiers; foreigners will beat you!'" mémoires, éd. petitot, iii. . [ ] i had translated this letter from the copy given by the mémoires de l'estat de france (_apud_ archives curieuses, vii. , ), which agrees substantially with, and was probably derived from, the version given in hotman's gasparis colinii vita ( ), , . on comparing it, however, with the transcript of the original autograph in the remarkable collection of the late col. henri tronchin, given by m. jules bonnet in the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, i. ( ), , i discover extraordinary discrepancies, and find that, in addition to a different phraseology in every sentence, one clause is inserted by hotman of which there is not a trace in the tronchin ms. i refer to the words: "soyez asseurée de ma part que, parmi ces festins et passe-temps, _je ne donneray fascherie à personne_"--which would, of course, point to the prevailing fears of a collision between the admiral and the young duke of guise, or his retainers, whose hatred of coligny was so well known that charles ix. had issued a special injunction to the parties to keep the peace. the letter contains at the commencement of the postscript a playful allusion to the hope of his wife soon to be a mother. [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . the mechanical part of these exhibitions was well executed. in the "_enfer_" there were "un grand nombre de diables et petis diabloteaux faisans infinies singeries et tintamarres avec une grande roue tournant dedans ledit enfer, toute environnée de clochettes." the singer, Étienne le roy, was again the "deus ex machina," coming from heaven and returning thither, in the character of mercury mounted upon a gigantic bird. the final explosion inspired so much consternation among the spectators, that it effectually cleared the hall. [ ] they were married at blandy, a castle belonging to the marquise de rothelin, near melun, where its ruins are still to be seen (saint-fargeau, dict. des communes de france, s. v.), about a week before the marriage of navarre, august , . tocsain contre les massacreurs (arch. curieuses, vii. ). marie of cleves was a daughter of the duke of nevers, and sister of catharine of cleves, prince porcien's widow, whom henry of guise had married in sept., . journal de jehan de la fosse, . [ ] it is astonishing to see what considerable distances the protestants were obliged to go in order to enjoy any religious privileges, and what fatigue they willingly underwent in order to avail themselves of them. in , immediately after the close of the first civil war, instead of being assigned a place for worship in the suburbs, according to the terms of the edict, the protestants of troyes were told to go to céant-en-othe--full _eight leagues_, or about _twenty-four miles_; nor could they obtain justice by any remonstrances with the court! as they went to céant, in spite of its inconvenient distance, and of the death of several children taken thither to be baptized, the romanists, in , actually proposed to remove the protestant _prêche_ still farther off, to villenauxe, _thirteen leagues from troyes!_ happily, after a while, they availed themselves of the hospitality of a feudal lord nearer by. recordon, le protestantisme en champagne (mss. of n. pithou), , etc., , . [ ] ibid., pp. , . the roman catholics of troyes sent, about the middle of august, two deputies to get the protestant place of worship removed from isle-au-mont, who were present at the massacre. [ ] baschet, la diplomatie vénitienne, p. . [ ] this confession exists in manuscript in the national library of paris (fonds de bouhier, ), under the heading: "discours du roy henry troisiesme à un personnage d'honneur et de qualité estant près de sa majesté, sur les causes et motifs de la st. barthélemy." it is printed in an appendix to the mémoires de villeroy (petitot ed., xliv. - ). its authenticity is vouched for by matthieu, the historiographer of louis xiii., and is corroborated by its remarkable agreement with what we can learn from other sources. cf., especially, soldan, frankreich und die bartholomäusnacht, - . some suppose that m. de souvré, and not miron, was the person with whom the conversation at cracow was held. martin, hist. de france, x. . [ ] discours du roy henry iii., mém. de villeroy, , . [ ] see j. bonnet, vie d'olympia morata (paris, ), , etc. [ ] discours du roy henry iii., ibid., p. . the nuncio, salviati, informs us that young guise urged his mother herself to kill coligny. [ ] the article on the massacre in the north british review for october, --an article to which i shall have occasion more than once to refer--brings forward a number of passages in the diplomatic correspondence, especially of the minor italian states, pointing in this direction. they can all, i am convinced, be satisfactorily explained, without admitting the conclusion, to which the writer evidently leans, of a _distinct_, though not a _long_ premeditation. [ ] "mad. la regente venuta in differenza di lui, risolvendosi pochi giorni prima, gli la fece tirare, e senza saputa del re, ma con participatione di m. di angiu, di mad. de nemours, e di m. di guisa suo figlio; e se moriva subito non si ammazzava altri," etc. salviati, desp. of sept. , , _apud_ mackintosh, hist. of england, vol. iii., appendix k. it will be remembered that these despatches were given to sir james mackintosh by m. de châteaubriand, who had obtained them from the vatican. i need not say how much more trustworthy are the secret despatches of one so well informed as the nuncio, than the sensational "stratagema" of capilupi, which pretends (ed. of , p. ) that _charles_ placed maurevel in the house from which he shot at coligny, on discovering that the admiral had formed the plan of firing paris the next night. to believe these champions of orthodoxy, the huguenots were born with a special passion for incendiary exploits. it does not seem to strike them that burning and pillaging paris would not be likely to appear to coligny a probable means of furthering the war in flanders. besides, what need is there of any such huguenot plot, even according to capilupi's own view, since he carries back the premeditation of the massacre on the part of charles at least four years? [ ] le reveille-matin des françois, etc., archives curieuses, vii. ; eusebii philadelphi dialogi ( ), i. . it has been customary to interpret this language and similar expressions as covertly referring to the massacre which was then four days off. but this seems absurd. certainly, if charles was privy to the plan for coligny's murder, he must have expected him to be killed on friday--that is, within less than two days. if so, what peculiar significance in the _four_ days? for, if a general massacre had been at first contemplated, no interval of two days would have been allowed. everybody must have known that if the arquebuse shot had done its work, and coligny had been killed on the spot, every huguenot would have been far from the walls of paris long before sunday. as it was, it was only the admiral's confidence, and the impossibility of moving him with safety, that detained them. [ ] capilupi, lo stratagema di carlo ix., . orig. ed., pp. , , and the concurrent french version, pp. , . this version is incorporated _verbatim_ in the mémoires de l'estat de france sous charles ix. (archives curieuses), vii. , . in like manner the "mémoires," which are in great part a mere compilation, take page after page from the "reveille-matin." [ ] "ainsi qu'il sortoit presentement du louvre, pour aller disner en son logis." charles's letter of the same day to la mothe fénélon, corresp. dipl., vii. . [ ] it is of little moment whether the assassin at his window was screened by a lattice, or by a curtain, as de thou says, or by bundles of straw, as capilupi states. i prefer the account of the "reveille-matin," as the author tells us that he was one of the twelve or fifteen gentlemen in coligny's suite--"entre lesquels j'estoy" (p. ). so the latin ed., euseb. philad. dialogi, i. . [ ] the rue de béthisy was the continuation of the rue des fossés saint germain l'auxerrois, through which he was walking when he was shot. in the sixteenth century the street bore the former name, beginning at the rue de l'arbre sec, at the corner of which coligny appears to have lodged. in later times the name was confined to the part east of rue de roule. dulaure, histoire de paris, iv. . the extension of the rue de rivoli, under the auspices of napoleon iii., has not only destroyed the house in which coligny was murdered, but obliterated the rue de béthisy itself. [ ] "qu'il n'aviendroit que ce qu'il plairoit à dieu." reveille-matin, ; euseb. philad. dialogi ( ), i. ; mémoires de l'estat, . [ ] see _ante_, chapter xvi. [ ] reveille-matin, _ubi sup._, ; and euseb. philad. dialogi. i. , ; mémoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._, , etc.; jean de serres ( ), iv. fol. ; tocsain contre les massacreurs (orig. ed.), , etc.; registres du bureau de la ville de paris (archives curieuses, vii. ); despatch of salviati of aug. . app. f to mackintosh, hist. of england, iii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; jehan de la fosse, , ; baschet. la diplomatie vénit., . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._, ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fols. , ; reveille-matin, ; euseb. philad. dial., i. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, archives cur., vii. ; reveille-matin, ; mémoires de l'estat, . [ ] gasparis colinii vita ( ), - ; mémoires de l'estat de charles ix., _ubi supra_, - . the two accounts are evidently from the same hand. [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] damville, méru and thoré, were sons of the constable. their eldest brother, marshal francis de montmorency, whose greatest vice was his sluggishness and his devotion to his ease, had left paris a few days before, on the pretext of going to the chase. his absence at the time of the massacre was supposed to have saved not only his life, but that of his brothers. the guises would gladly have destroyed a family whose influence and superior antiquity had for a generation been obnoxious to their ambitious designs; but it was too hazardous to leave the head of the family to avenge his murdered brothers. [ ] there was no need of going far, coligny responded, to discover the author. "qu'on en demande à monsieur de guise, il dira qui est celuy qui m'a presté une telle charité; mais dieu ne me soit jamais en aide si je demande vengeance d'un tel outrage." mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , . [ ] gasparis colinii vita, - ; mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, - . the two accounts agree almost word for word. there is a briefer narrative in reveille-matin, , ; and euseb. philad. dialogi, i. . [ ] discours du roy henry iii., _ubi supra_, - . [ ] le roi à mandelot, août, correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot (paris, ), , . [ ] corresp. dipl. de la mothe fénélon, vii. , . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , . [ ] ibid., . [ ] there is here, however, a direct contradiction, which i shall not attempt to reconcile, between the account of henry and that of the younger tavannes, who represents retz as one of the most violent in his recommendations. according to tavannes, it was his father, marshal tavannes, that advocated moderation. in other respects the two accounts are strongly corroborative of each other. [ ] discours du roy henry iii., - . [ ] mémoires de gaspard de saulx, seigneur de tavannes, by his son, jean de saulx, vicomte de tavannes (petitot edition), iii. , . [ ] "reginam quidem certum est dictitare solitam, edita strage, 'se tantum _sex_ hominum interfectorum sanguinem in suam conscientiam recipere.'" jean de serres (ed. of ), iv., fol. . the whole passage is interesting. [ ] "le roy henry quatriesme disoit que ce qu'il ne m'avoit tenu promesse estoit en vengeance des services faicts par le sieur de tavannes mon père aux batailles de jarnac et montcontour, mais le principal, parce qu'il l'accusoit d'avoir conseillé la sainct barthélemy; ce qu'il disoit à ses familiers, et à tort, parce que ledict sieur de tavannes en ce temps-là fut cause qu'il ne courust la mesme fortune que le sieur admiral de coligny." mémoires de tavannes (petitot edit.), iii. . [ ] to ascribe the conduct of catharine de' medici herself to any such motive is the extreme of absurdity. even the author of the "tocsain contre les massacreurs" rejects the supposition without hesitation. (original edition, p. .) catharine was certainly a free-thinker, probably an atheist. [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] ibid., . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , . [ ] ibid., ; gasparis colinii vita ( ), . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] reveille-matin, _ubi supra_, ; mémoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._, . [ ] capilupi, , ; mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, , . [ ] extrait des registres et croniques du bureau de la ville de paris, archives curieuses, vii. . [ ] the successive orders are given in the archives curieuses, vii. - . [ ] discours du roy henry iii., . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, ; jean de serres, iv. ( ), fol. . [ ] jean de serres, iv. ( ), fol. . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, , ; jean de serres ( ), iv. . [ ] the startling inconsistency evidently struck capilupi very strongly, for he tries to reconcile it, but succeeds only poorly. according to him, it was either a ruse to throw charles ix. off his guard by a pretence of confidence in his good faith, or an act of consummate folly. any way, great thanks are due to heaven! "et sia stato fatto questo da lui, ò con arte, per dimostrar di non dubitare della fede del re, per tanto più assicurar sua maestà, fin che fosse in termine d'effettuar i diabolici suoi pensieri; ò vero scioccamente, non diffidando veramente di cosa alcuna; in tutti modi si ha da riconoscer da gratia particolare di dio," etc. lo stratagema di carlo ix., , . [ ] the topography of the massacre is made the subject of a paper, entitled: "les victimes de la saint-barthélemy," bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., ix. ( ) - . [ ] g. colinii vita ( ), . mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, , ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. ; reveille-matin, ; euseb. philad. dialogi ( ), , . [ ] joh. wilh. von botzheim, in his narrative, gives several versions of the words. according to one they were: "_behem_--'n'est tu pas admiral?' _admiralius_--'ouy, je le suis. mais vous estes bien un jeune souldat pour parler ainsi avec un vieil capitaine, pour le moins au respect de ma vielesse.' _behem_--'je suis assez aage (agé) por te faire ta reste.'" cyclopica illa atque inaudita hactenus detestanda atque execranda laniena, quæ facta est lutetia, aureliis, etc., published in f. w. ebeling, archivalische beiträge zur geschichte frankreichs unter carl ix. (leipsic, ), , . [ ] capilupi puts in besme's mouth the words: "now, traitor, restore to me the blood of my master, which thou didst impiously take away from me!" it is not at all improbable that he used some such expression. lo stratagema di carlo ix., . [ ] jean de serres, de statu reipub. et rel. ( ), iv., fols. , ; mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, - ; vita gasparis colinii castellonii, magni quondam franciæ amirallii (_sine loco_, ), pp. - ; - . these latter accounts, which agree perfectly, are the best. reveille-matin, _ubi sup._, , and euseb. philad. dialogi ( ), i. , ; tocsain contre les massacreurs (rheims, ), - ; capilupi, lo stratagema di carlo ix. ( ), , etc.; journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), , ; relation of olaegui, secretary of d. de cuñiga, spanish ambassador at paris; particularités inédites sur la st. barthélemi, gachard in bulletins de l'académie royale de belgique, xvi. ( ), , ; alva's bulletin prepared for distribution, ibid., ix. ( ), . both are very inaccurate. de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ). [ ] "le lundy d'après, ayant la teste ostée et les parties honteuses coupées _par les petits enfans_, fut d'iceulx petits enfans qui estoient jusques au nombre de ou , traîné, le ventre en haut, parmy les ruisseaux de la ville de paris." jehan de la fosse, . see the long account in von botzheim's narration, _ubi supra_, . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] letter of mandelot to charles ix., sept. , , correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot (edited by p. paris, paris, ), - . [ ] of this memorable enterprise coligny has left "mémoires" which are contained in the collection of petitot, etc. it is the only military treatise we possess coming from the admiral's hand, and it enters into the subject with technical minuteness. the destruction by his royal murderers of the admiral's papers (including diaries that would have thrown great light upon the transactions of the last two years of his life), see vita gasparis colinii ( ), i. , was an irretrievable loss to history. we are told also of a much more recent act of vandalism, not even palliated by the miserable excuse of political expediency: "in , an inhabitant of châtillon having discovered in the solitary remaining tower of the old castle a walled chamber wherein were the archives of the coligny family and of the family of luxemburg, burned all the papers from motives of private interest. some fragments that escaped this conflagration, and which are preserved in the mairie, prove that a correspondence between catharine de' medici and coligny had been laid away in this repository." bulletin de la société de l'histoire du prot. français, iii. ( ) . [ ] _ante_, chapter xiii. [ ] testament olographe de l'amiral coligny, bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, i. ( ) , etc. the authenticity of this document, though called in question on historical grounds, has been conclusively established by m. jules bonnet, bulletin, xxiv. ( ) - . [ ] albèri, relazioni venete, vol. iv., st series, _apud_ baschet, la diplomatie vénitienne, i. , . there is, however, the greatest improbability in the story that coligny advanced such claims in his own behalf as his admirers made for him. we may reject as apocryphal--for they stand in palpable contradiction with the whole tenor of his utterances--the words ascribed by lord macaulay to the great huguenot hero (history of england, new york, , iv. ): "'in one respect,' said the admiral coligni, 'i may claim superiority over alexander, over scipio, over cæsar. they won great battles, it is true. i have lost four great battles; and yet i show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever.'" cf. davila, bk. v., p. . [ ] vita gasparis colinii ( ), pp. - , translated by d. d. scott, under the title, "memoirs of the admiral de coligny," - . i have abridged the account by omitting some less important particulars. [ ] discours sur les causes de l'exécution faicte és personnes de ceux qui avoient conjuré contre le roy et son estat. a paris, à l'olivier de p. l'huillier, rue st. jacques. . _avec privilège._ (archives curieuses, vii. - .) capilupi, lo stratagema di carlo ix., , p. . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. ; reveille-matin, ; eusebii philadelphi dialogi, i. . [ ] "la royne ma mère respond, que s'il plaisoit à dieu je n'auroit point de mal; mais quoy que ce fust, il falloit que j'allasse, de peur de leur faire soupçonner quelque chose qui empeschast l'effect." [ ] mémoires de marguerite de valois, , . [ ] see _ante_, chapter xvi. [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. ; reveille-matin, ; eusebii philadelphi dialogi, i. ; tocsain contre les massacreurs, , . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ). [ ] mémoires de marguerite de valois, . [ ] reveille-matin, _ubi supra_, ; euseb. philad. dialogi, i. ; mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . charles was not generally so complaisant. fervaques in vain interceded for his friend captain moneins. tocsain, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. ; reveille-matin, ; euseb. philadelphi dial., i. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] "avec une contenance fort esmeue et abatue." mém. de l'estat. "humilissimo animo et consternate ore." jean de serres, _ubi supra_. [ ] jean de serres's "_consternatiori_ tamen animo" is an evident misprint for "_constantiori_ tamen animo." [ ] mémoires de l'estat, , ; jean de serres, iv., fol. _verso_; reveille-matin, ; eusebii philad. dial. ( ), i. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. (liv. i., c. ). [ ] eusebii phil. dialogi, i. , ; reveille-matin, _ubi sup._, , copied _verbatim_ in mém. de l'estat, . the reveille-matin removes the apparent contradiction between the various accounts respecting the bell that gave the signal for the massacre by showing that _both_ bells were rung. so also agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ), after mentioning how catharine, for the time being, removed charles's hesitation by alleging the necessity of cutting off the corrupt members in order to save the church, the bride of christ, and citing the saying: "che pietà lor ser crudele. che crudeltà lor ser pietosa," adds: "le roi se resout, et elle avance le tocsain du palais, en faisant sonner _une heure et demie_ devant celui de sainct germain de l'auxerrois." by neglecting the clue thus given, the chronological order of the events of the day has been lost by a number of historians. it will be noticed that the number of the royal guards reported to have been slain was, strangely enough, derived from that of the huguenot gentlemen butchered in the louvre by those very guards. the story may have been perpetuated by misapprehension of the facts; it could have arisen only from wilful falsehood. [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs (rheims, ), , ; reveille-matin, ; eusebii philadelphi dialogi, i. ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; euseb. philad. dialogi, _ubi supra_. [ ] "the courtiers and the soldiers of the royal guard were the executioners of this commission on the (huguenot) noblesse, terminating, they said, by the sword and general disorder, those processes which pens and paper and the order of justice had hitherto failed to bring to an issue." reveille-matin, _ubi supra_, ; eusebii philad. dialogi, i ; mémoires de l'estat, . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, , . [ ] reveille-matin, _ubi supra_, , ; eusebii philad. dial., i. ; mém. de l'estat, ; jean de serres ( ), iv. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . the minor details of the story are given, with variations, by different authors. d'aubigné gives us biron's answer to the commands and menaces with which madame de la châtaigneraie sought to gain possession of young la force: "i would certainly intrust him in the hands of his relative, in order to take care of him, but not in the hands of his next heir, who took too great care of him yesterday morning," ii. . it must be noted, however, that the "mémoires authentiques de jacques nompar de caumont, duc de la force, maréchal de france, recueillis par le marquis de la grange" (paris, ), i. - , so far from accusing the sister of la force, ascribe the persistent attempts to secure his death solely to archan (or larchant), who had _married_ this sister; and they state that, at her death, she left her property, including what she had inherited from her husband, to her brother. [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, [ ] mém. de l'estat, ; tocsain contre les massacreurs, , ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; claude haton, ii. ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] tocsain, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, . [ ] "radices, atque etiam radicum fibras, funditus evellas." pii quinti epistolæ, . see _ante_, chapter xvi., p. . [ ] mém. de l'estat, . the children of other cities emulated the example of those of paris. in provins, in the month of october, , a huguenot, jean crespin, after having been hung by the officers of justice, was taken down from the gallows by "les petis enfans de provins, _de l'âge de douze ans et au dessoubz_," to the number of more than one hundred. by these mimic judges he was declared unworthy to be dragged save by his feet, and, his punishment by hanging being reckoned too light, he was roasted in a fire of straw, and presently thrown into the river. numbers of older persons looked on, approving and encouraging the children; a few good catholics were grieved to see such cruelty practised on a dead body. mém. de claude haton, ii. - . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] "on en remarqua qui avoient les yeux attachés sur le corps du baron du pont, pour voir si elles y trouveroient quelque cause ou quelque marque de l'impuissance qu'on lui reprochoit." de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . see euseb. philadelphi dial., i. , and jean de serres ( ) iv., fol. . [ ] "le roy, la royne mère, et leurs courtisans, rioyent à gorge desployée." mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . [ ] the prévôt, échevins, etc., "du tout, auroient, d'heure en heure, rendu compte et tesmoignage à sadicte majesté." extrait des registres et croniques du bureau de la ville de paris, archives curieuses, vii. . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_. [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, rheims, , p. . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] brantôme, homines illustres français, m. de thavannes. [ ] "declarant (alençon) qu'il ne pouvoit approuver vn tel desordre, ny qu'on rompit si ouvertement la foy promise, qui fut cause que sa mere luy dit en termes clairs que s'il bougeoit elle le feroit ietter dans vn sac aual l'eau." tocsain contre les massacreurs, . [ ] ib., . [ ] de thou, iv. . [ ] his son, jacques merlin, at a later time pastor at la rochelle, although he does not mention the particulars of his father's escape, in the journal published for the first time by m. gaberel in an appendix to the second vol. of his histoire de l'église de genève, pp. - , alludes to it--"fut deliuré par une grace de dieu spéciale" (p. ). [ ] mémoires de sully (london, ), i. pp. , . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , etc. de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) , . strange to say, von botzheim was so far misinformed, that he makes charpentier _weep_ for the fate of ramus! archival. beiträge, p. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; mémoires de l'estat de france sous charles ix. (cimber et danjou, vii. - , and in m. buchon's biographical notice prefixed to the "commentaires"). an appreciative chapter on pierre de la place and his works may be read in victor bujeaud, chronique protestante de l'angoumois (angoulême, ), - . [ ] cahors is over miles in a straight line from paris, more than miles-- leagues--by the roads. [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. . [ ] the incident of charles ix.'s firing upon the huguenots has been of late the subject of much discussion. m. fournier and m. méry have denied the existence, in , of the pavilion at which tradition makes the king to have stationed himself. see bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, v. ( ) , etc. it has, i think, been conclusively shown that they are mistaken. the pavilion _was_ in existence. but, besides, there is no reason why an incident should be deemed apocryphal because of a popular mistake in assigning the spot of its occurrence. the "reveille-matin" and the eusebii philadelphi dialogi, published in , are the earliest documents that refer to it. they place charles at the window of his own room. so does brantôme, writing considerably later. jean de serres (in the fourth vol. of his commentaria de statu, etc. (fol. ), published in ) says: "regem quoque ex hypæthrio (_i.e._, from a covered gallery) aiunt, adhibitis, ut solebat, diris contenta voce conclamare, et tormento etiam ipsum ejaculari." agrippa d'aubigné alludes to it not only in his histoire universelle (ii. , ), but in his tragiques (bulletin, vii. ), a poem which he commenced as early as in (see bulletin, x. ). m. henri bordier has been so fortunate as to discover and has reprinted a contemporary engraving of the massacre, in which charles is represented as excitedly looking on the slaughter from a window in the louvre, while behind him stand two halberdiers and several noblemen (bulletin, x. , ). the question is discussed in an able and exhaustive manner by mm. fournier, ludovic lalanne, bernard, berty, bordier, and others, in the bulletin, v. - ; vi. - ; vii. - ; x. - , - , - . [ ] the porte de bussy, or bucy, was the first gate toward the west on the southern side of the seine. during the reign of francis i. and his successors of the house of valois, the walls of paris were of small compass. in this quarter their general direction is well marked out by the rue mazarine. the circuit started from the tour de nesle, which was nearly opposite the eastern front of the louvre--the short rue de bussy fixes the situation of the gate where guise was delayed. a little west of this is the abbey church of st. germain-des-prés, which gave its name to the suburb opposite the louvre and the tuileries. this quaint pile--the oldest church, or, indeed, edifice of any kind in paris--after being built in the sixth century, and injured by the normans in the ninth, was rebuilt and dedicated in a.d., by alexander iii. in person. on that occasion the bishop of paris was not even permitted by the jealous monks to be present, on the ground that the abbey of st. germain-des-prés was exempt from his jurisdiction. the pontiff confirmed their position, and his sermon, instead of being an exposition of the gospel, was devoted to setting forth the privileges accorded to the abbey by st. germain, bishop of paris, in . dulaure, histoire de paris, ii. - . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, , ; reveille-matin, - ; mém. de l'estat, - . [ ] see henry white, massacre of st. bartholomew, p. . [ ] valued at from , to , crowns, reveille-matin, ; mém. de l'estat, . the interesting anonymous letter from heidelberg, dec. , , published first by the marquis de noailles in his "henri de valois et la pologne en " (paris, ), iii. , from the mss. of prince czartoryski, alludes to the costly jewels which henry, now king-elect of poland, made to the elector palatine, his host, and remarks: "fortasse magna hæc fuisse videbitur liberalitas et rege digna, at parva certe vel nulla potius fuit, si vel sumptibus quos illustrissimus noster princeps in deducendo et excipiendo hoc hospite sustinuit conferamus, vel si unde hæc dona sint profecta expendamus. ipse siquidem rex (henry) ne teruncium pro iis solvisse, sed ex taberna cujusdam prædivitis aurifabri parisiensis, quam scelerati sui ministri in strage illa nobilium ut alias multas diripuerunt, accepisse ea fertur." [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . versailles, which thus passed into the hands of the family of marshal retz--the gondi family--was an old castle situated in the midst of an almost unbroken forest. the gondi family sold it to louis xiii., who built a hunting lodge, afterward transmuted by louis xiv. into the magnificent palace, which, for more than a century, was the favorite residence of the most splendid court in europe. the mode in which the title was acquired did not augur well for the justice or the morality which was to reign there. m. l. lacour has contributed an animated sketch, "versailles et les protestants de france," to the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., viii. ( ) - . [ ] discours sur les causes de l'exécution, _ubi supra_, . [ ] royal orders of aug. th, aug. th, etc. order of the prévôt des marchands, aug. th. registres du bureau de la ville, archives curieuses, vii. - . euseb. philadelphi dialog., i. . [ ] registres du bureau de la ville, pp. , . [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] "aucuns malades languissans, ayant ouy ce miracle, se firent porter audit cymetière pour veoir laditte espine; lesquelz, estans là avec ferme foy, firent leur prière à dieu en l'honneur de nostre dame la vierge marie et devant son ymage qui est en laditte chapelle, pour recouvrer leur santé, et, après leur oraison faicte, s'en retournèrent en leurs maisons sains et guaris de leur maladie, chose très-véritable et bien approuvèe." mém. de claude haton, ii. . [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_; tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; reveille-matin, , ; mém. de l'estat, ; jean de serres, iv., fol. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] dr. white (massacre of st. bartholomew, ) has tabulated the estimates, nine in number, afforded by twenty-one distinct authorities. the lowest estimate-- , victims--is that of the abbé caveyrac, whose undisguised aim was to place the number as low as possible, so as to palliate the atrocity of the massacre. being based apparently upon the number of the _names_ of victims that have been recorded, it may be dismissed as unworthy of consideration. the highest estimate, of , , though adopted by such writers as the authors of the reveille-matin and the mémoires de l'estat de france, is vague or excessive. the tocsain and agrippa d'aubigné are, perhaps, too moderate in respectively stating the number as , and , . on the whole, it appears to me, the contribution of paris to the massacre of the huguenots may be set down with the greatest probability at between , and , persons of all ages and conditions. von botzheim, who estimates the total at , (f. w. ebeling, archivalische beiträge, p. ), makes of these to be women (ibid., p. ). [ ] in other letters charles had even the effrontery to represent the king of navarre as having been in like danger with his brothers and himself. see eusebii philadelphi dialog. ( ), i. : "se quidem metu propriæ salutis in arcem luparam (the louvre) compulsum illic se continuisse, una cum fratre charissimo rege navarræ, et dilectissimo principe condensi, ut in communi periculo eundem fortunæ exitum experirentur!" [ ] correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot, - . letter to the governor of burgundy, _apud_ mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, - . [ ] it was undoubtedly with the object of showing that they were not the prime movers in the massacre, or, as the author of the mém. de l'estat expresses himself, that they had no particular quarrel save with admiral coligny, that henry of guise and his uncle actually rescued a few huguenots from the hands of those who were about to put them to death. reveille-matin, ; mémoires de l'estat, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , from reveille-matin, ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) , ; euseb. philad. dial., i. . [ ] it was while charles was on his way to the palais de justice that a gentleman in his train, and not far from him, was recognized as being a protestant, and was killed. the king, hearing the disturbance, turned around; but, on being informed that it was a huguenot whom they were putting to death, lightly said: "let us go on. would to god that he were the last!" reveille-matin, (copied in mém. de l'estat, ); euseb. philad. dial., i. . [ ] de thou, whom i have chiefly followed, iv. (liv. lii.) ; tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; reveille-matin, , ; euseb. phil. dial., i. ; mém. de l'estat, ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. ; capilupi, ; relation of olaegui, secretary of don diego de cuñiga, spanish ambassador at paris, to be laid before philip ii., simancas mss., _apud_ bulletins de l'acad. roy. des sciences, etc., de belgique, vol. xvi. ( ) . [ ] de thou, tocsain, etc., _ubi supra_. [ ] returning to the unpleasant theme in a subsequent book of his noble history (iv. (liv. liii.) ), jacques auguste de thou remarks, with an integrity which cannot swerve even out of consideration for filial respect: "ce qu'il y avoit de déplorable, étoit de voir des personnes respectables par leur piété, leur science, et leur intégrité, revêtues des premières charges du royaume, ennemies d'ailleurs de tout déguisement et de tout artifice, tels que morvilliers, de thou, pibrac, montluc et bellièvre, louer contre leurs sentimens, ou excuser par complaisance une action qu'ils détestoient dans le coeur, sans y être engagés par aucun motif de crainte ou d'espérance; mais dans la fausse persuasion où ils étoient que les circonstances présentes et le bien de l'État demandoient qu'ils tinssent ce langage." [ ] the case stands much worse if we accept the statement of the author of the mémoires de l'estat de france sous charles ix., who, after contrasting the honorable conduct of president la vaquerie, in the time of louis xi., with that of christopher de thou, adds: "mais cestui-ci n'avoit garde de faire le semblable; il prend trop de plaisir à toute sorte d'injustice pour s'y vouloir opposer." (_ubi supra_, pp. , .) so, also, euseb. philad. dial., i. : "nam quomodo sese injustitiæ viriliter opponeret, qui ex ea tam uberes fructus colligit?" the mém. de l'estat accuse him of having instigated the murder of rouillard--a counsellor of parliament and canon of notre dame, and one of a very few roman catholics that were assassinated--because the latter loved justice, and had prosecuted one of the first president's friends (p. ). according to the historian de thou, on the other hand (iv. ), rouillard was "homme inquiet, querelleux, et ennemi des officiers des compagnies de ville." [ ] the passage is not in the will in the admiral's own handwriting, dated archiac, june , , a facsimile of which has been accurately lithographed by the french protestant historical society, and which has also been printed in the bulletin, i. ( ) - . see _ante_, p. , . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, ; gasparis colinii vita ( ), . [ ] "the said discourse was all written with his own hand." walsingham to smith, sept. , ; digges, , ; mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, ; gasparis colinii vita, , . [ ] jean de serres ( ), iv., fols. , ; eusebii philadelphi dial. ( ), i. , ; reveille-matin, - ; de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) , . for many years the disgraceful commemorative procession was faithfully observed. [ ] the slight eminence of montfaucon, the tyburn of paris, was between the faubourg st. martin and the faubourg du temple, near the site of the hôpital st. louis. see dulaure, atlas de paris. [ ] "il les en reprit et leur dist: 'je ne bousche comme vous autres, car l'odeur de son ennemy est très-bonne'--odeur certes point bonne et la parolle aussi mauvaise." brantôme, le roy charles ix., edit. lalanne, v. . the original authority for this odious remark is papyrius masson ( ) in his life of charles ix., which brantôme had under his eyes: "servis foetorem non ferentibus, hostis mortui odor bonus est inquit." le laboureur, iii. . [ ] le deluge des huguenots avec leur tumbeau, . reprinted in archives curieuses, vii. - . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, rheims, , p. . it has been well remarked by a writer in the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français (iii. ) as one of the paradoxes of history, that coligny's mangled remains, "after being carefully subjected to the most ignominious treatment, were saved from the annihilation to which they appeared to be infallibly condemned, and have been transmitted from place to place, and from hand to hand, until our own days, and better preserved for three centuries than many other illustrious corpses carefully laid up in costly mausoleums!" marshal montmorency placed the admiral's body in a lead coffin in his castle of chantilly, whence he sent it to montauban. françois de coligny brought it back to châtillon-sur-loing, when, in , the sentence of parliament was formally rescinded. in it was taken to maupertuis and placed in a black marble sarcophagus. since it has been resting in its new tomb under the ruins of that part of the castle of châtillon where coligny was probably born. bulletin, iii. - . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; reveille-matin, ; euseb. philadelphi dial., i. ; mém. de l'estat, ; jean de serres, iv., fol. _verso_. [ ] the text of the declaration is to be found in the mémoires de claude haton, ii. - , in the recueil des anciennes lois françaises (isambert), xiv. , etc., and in the mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, - . see de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . the reveille-matin calls attention (p. ) to the circumstance that in the first copies of the document the name of navarre did not occur; but that in the next issue the admiral's unhappy and detestable conspiracy was represented as directed against "la personne dudit sieur roy et contre son estat, la royne sa mère, messieurs ses frères, _le roy de navarre_, princes et seigneurs estans près d'eulx." the policy of introducing navarre, and, by implication, condé, among the proposed victims of the huguenots, was certainly sufficiently bold and reckless. see _ante_, p. . [ ] see de thou, iv. (liv. liii.), ; jean de serres, iv., fols. , . [ ] euseb. philadelphi dial., i. . [ ] digges, , . [ ] ibid., [ ] documents historiques inédits, i. - . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. . chapter xix. the massacre in the provinces, and the reception of the tidings abroad. [sidenote: the massacre in the provinces.] the massacre of st. bartholomew's day would have been terrible enough had it been confined to paris, for its victims in that single city were to be reckoned by thousands. charles the ninth himself, on the third day, admitted in a letter to mondoucet, his envoy in the netherlands, that "a very great number of the adherents of the new religion who were in this city had been massacred and cut to pieces."[ ] but this was little in comparison with the multitudes that were yet to lose their lives in other parts of france. here, however, the enterprise assumed a different character. not only did it not commence on the same day as in the capital, but it began at different dates in different places. it is evident that there had been no well-concerted plan long entertained and freely communicated to the governors of the provinces and cities. on the contrary, the greatest variety of procedure prevailed--all tending, nevertheless, to the same end of the total destruction of the protestants. and this was intended from the very moment the project of the parisian butchery was hastily and inconsiderately adopted by the king. charles meant to be as good as his word when he announced his determination that not a single huguenot should survive to reproach him with what he had done. more frightful than his most passionate outburst of bloodthirsty frenzy is the cool calculation with which he, or the minister who wrote the words he subscribed, predicts the chain of successive murders in provincial france, scarcely one of which had as yet been attempted. "_it is probable_," he said, in the same letter of the twenty-sixth of august, that has just been cited, "_that the fire thus kindled will go coursing through all the cities of my kingdom_, which, following the example of what has been done in this city, will assure themselves of all the adherents of the said religion."[ ] [sidenote: verbal orders.] no mere surmise, founded upon the probable effects of the exhibition of cruelty in paris, led to the penning of this sentence. charles had purposely fired the train which was to explode with the utmost violence at almost every point of his wide dominions. "as it has pleased god," he wrote to mondoucet, "to bring matters to the state in which they now are, i do not intend to neglect the opportunity not only to re-establish, if i shall be able, lasting quietness in my kingdom, but also to serve christendom."[ ] accordingly, secret orders, for the most part verbal, had already been sent in all directions, commanding the provinces to imitate the example set by paris. the reality of these orders does not rest upon conjecture, but is attested by documentary evidence over the king's own hand. as we have seen in the last chapter, charles published, on the twenty-eighth of august, a declaration of his motives and intentions. this was despatched to the governors of the provinces and to other high officers, in company with a circular letter, of which the final sentence deserves particular notice. "moreover," says the king, "whatever verbal command i may have given to those whom i sent to you, as well as to my other governors and lieutenants-general, at a time when i had just reason to fear some inauspicious events, from having discovered the conspiracy which the admiral was making against me, i have revoked and revoke it completely, intending that nothing therein contained be put into execution by you or by others; for such is my pleasure."[ ] [sidenote: instructions to montsoreau at saumur.] what was the import of these orders? the manuscripts in the archives of angers seem to leave no room for doubt. this city was the capital of the duchy of anjou, given in appanage to henry, the king's brother, and was, consequently, under his special government. on tuesday, the twenty-sixth of august, the duke sent to the governor of saumur a short note running thus: "monsieur de montsoreau, i have instructed the sieur de puigaillard to write to you respecting a matter that concerns the service of the king, my lord and brother, as well as my own. you will, therefore, not fail to believe and to do whatever he may tell you, just as if it were i myself." in the same package with these credentials montsoreau[ ] received a letter from puigaillard, like himself a knight of the royal order of st. michael, which reveals only too clearly the purpose of the king and his brother. "monsieur mon compagnon, i will not fail to acquaint you with the fact that, on sunday morning the king caused a very great execution to be made against the huguenots; so much so that the admiral and all the huguenots that were in this city were killed. and his majesty's will is that the same be done wherever there are any to be found. accordingly, if you desire ever to do a service that may be agreeable to the king and to monsieur (the duke of anjou), you must go to saumur with the greatest possible number of your friends, and put to death all that you can find there of the principal huguenots.... having made this execution at saumur, i beg you to go to angers and do the same, with the assistance of the captain of the castle. and you must not expect to receive any other command from the king, nor from monseigneur, for they will send you none, inasmuch as they depend upon what i write you. you must use diligence in this affair, and lose as little time as possible. i am very sorry that i cannot be there to help you in putting this into execution."[ ] [sidenote: two kinds of letters.] the statement of the author of the mémoires de l'estat de france is, therefore, in full agreement with the ascertained facts of the case. he informs us that, soon after the parisian massacre commenced, the secret council by which the plan had been drawn up despatched two widely differing kinds of letters. the first were of a private character, and were addressed to governors of cities and to seditious roman catholics where there were many protestants, by which they were instigated to murder and rapine;[ ] the others were public, and were addressed to the same functionaries, their object being to amuse and entrap the professors of the reformed faith. and in addition to the double sets of written instructions, the same author says that messengers were sent to various points, to give orders for special executions.[ ] we shall not find it very difficult to account for the rapidity with which the massacre spread to the provincial towns--of which the secretary of the spanish ambassador, in his hurried journey from paris to madrid, was an eye-witness[ ]--if we bear in mind the previous ripeness of the lowest classes of the roman catholic population for the perpetration of any possible acts of insult and injury toward their protestant fellow-citizens. the time had come for the seed sown broadcast by monk and priest in lenten and advent discourses to bear its legitimate harvest in the pitiless murder of heretics. [sidenote: the massacre at meaux.] meaux was naturally one of the first of smaller cities to catch the contagion from the capital. not only was it the nearest city that contained any considerable body of huguenots, but, if we may credit the report current among them, catharine, in virtue of her rank as countess of meaux, had placed it first upon the roll. it is not impossible that the circumstance that this was the cradle of protestantism in france may have secured it this distinction. about the middle of sunday afternoon a courier reached meaux, and at once made his way to the residence of the procureur-du-roi, one cosset. the nature of the message he bore may be inferred from the fact that secret orders were at once given to those persons upon whom cosset thought that he could rely, to be in readiness about nightfall. so completely had every outlet from paris been sealed, that it had proved almost impossible for a protestant to find the means of escaping to carry the tidings abroad. consequently the adherents of the reformed faith were yet in ignorance of the impending catastrophe. at the time appointed, cosset and his followers seized the gates of meaux. it was the hour when the peaceable and unsuspecting people were at supper. the protestants could now easily be found, and few escaped arrest, either that evening or on the succeeding day. happily, however, a large number of huguenots resided in a quarter of meaux known as the "grand marché," and separated from the main part of the town by the river marne. the inhabitants of the grand marché received timely warning of their danger; and the men fled by night for temporary refuge to the neighboring villages. it was scarcely dawn on monday morning when the work of plunder begun. by eight o'clock little was left of the goods of the huguenots on this side of the marne, and the pillagers crossed the bridge to the grand marché. finding only the women, who had remained in the vain hope of saving their family possessions, the papists wreaked their fury upon them. about twenty-five of these unhappy persons were murdered in cold blood;[ ] others were so severely beaten that they died within a few days; a few were shamefully dishonored. in most cases, if not in all, outward acquiescence in the ceremonies of the roman catholic church would have saved the lives of the victims, but the huguenot women were constant and would yield no hypocritical consent. one poor woman, the wife of "nicholas the cap-maker," was being dragged to mass, when her bold and impolitic expressions of detestation of the service so enraged her conductors, that, being at that moment upon the bridge which unites the two portions of the city, they stabbed her and threw her body into the river. in a short time the grand marché, which the precise chronicler tells us contained more than four hundred houses, was robbed of everything which could be removed, for not the most insignificant article escaped the cupidity of the roman catholic populace.[ ] these were but the preliminaries of the general massacre. the prisons were full of huguenots, whom it was necessary to put out of the way. late in the day, on tuesday the twenty-sixth, cosset and his band made their appearance. they were provided with a list of their destined victims, more than two hundred in number. of a score or two the names have been preserved, with their respective avocations. they were merchants, judicial officers, industrious artisans--in short, the representatives of the better class of the population of meaux. not one escaped. the murderous band were stationed in the courtyard of the prison, while cosset, armed with a pistol in either hand, mounted the steps, and by his roll summoned the protestants to the slaughter awaiting them below. the bloody work was long and tedious. the assassins adjourned awhile for their supper, and, unable to complete the task before weariness blunted the edge of their ferocity, reserved a part of the protestants for the next day. none the less was the task accomplished with thoroughness, and the exultant cutthroats now had leisure to pursue the fugitives of the grand marché to the villages in which they had taken refuge.[ ] [sidenote: the massacre at troyes.] the news of the parisian massacre reached troyes, the flourishing capital of champagne, on tuesday, the twenty-sixth of august, and spread great alarm among the protestants, who, with the recent disturbances[ ] still fresh in their memories, apprehended immediate death. but their enemies for the time confined themselves to closing the gates to prevent their escape. it was not until saturday, the thirtieth, that the "bailli," anne de vaudrey, sieur de st. phalle, sent throughout the city and brought all the protestants to the prisons. meantime one of the most turbulent of the roman catholics, named pierre belin, had been in paris, having been deputed, some weeks before, to endeavor to procure the removal of the place of worship of the reformed from the castle of isle-au-mont, two or three leagues from the city, to some more distant and inconvenient spot. he remained in the capital until the saturday after the massacre, and started that day for troyes, with a copy of the declaration of thursday forbidding injury to the persons and goods of unoffending protestants, and ordering the release of any that might have been imprisoned. it was believed, indeed, that he was commissioned to give the declaration to the bailli for publication. on wednesday, the third of september, he reached troyes. as he rode through the streets, he inquired again and again whether the huguenots at troyes were all killed as they were elsewhere. when interrogated by peaceable roman catholics respecting a rumor that the king had revoked his sanguinary orders, he boldly denied its truth, accompanying his words with oaths and imprecations. finding the bailli, he had no difficulty in persuading him to suppress the royal order, and to convene a council, at which belin was introduced as the bearer of verbal instructions, and a bishop was brought forward to confirm them. belin and the bishop maintained that the royal pleasure was that the heretics of troyes should all be murdered on the following saturday night, without distinction of rank, sex, or age, and their bodies be exposed in the streets to the sight of those who should on the morrow join in a solemn procession to be held in honor of the achievement. a writing attached to the neck of each was to contain the words: "seditious persons and rebels against the king, who have conspired against his majesty." the task of butchering the helpless huguenots in the prison was first proposed to the public hangman. he refused to take any part in it: this, he said, was no duty of his office, and he would consent to perform it only when all the forms of law should have been observed. other persons were found more pliable, and, under the leadership of one perremet, the bloody scenes of the prison of meaux were re-enacted, on thursday, the fourth day of september, in that of troyes. how many were the victims we know not; we have, however, the names of over thirty, apparently the most prominent of the number. others were assassinated in the streets. at last, when all had been done that malice could effect, the king's declaration, which promised protection to the huguenots, was published on friday, the fifth of september.[ ] [sidenote: the great bloodshed at orleans.] in orleans, a city once the headquarters of the huguenots, where their iconoclastic assaults upon the churches during the first civil war had left permanent memorials of their former supremacy, the massacre assumed the largest proportions. one of the king's court preachers, arnauld sorbin, better known as m. de sainte foy, had written from paris letters instigating the inhabitants of orleans to imitate the example of the capital, and the letters came to hand with the earliest tidings of the parisian massacre. the first murder took place on monday. m. de champeaux, a royal counsellor and a protestant, who as yet was in ignorance of the events of st. bartholomew's day, received late on monday the visit of tessier, surnamed la court, the leader of the assassins of orleans, and some of his followers. imagining it to be a friendly call--for they were acquaintances--champeaux received them courteously, and invited them to sup with him. the meal over, his guests recounted the story of the tragic occurrence at paris, and, before he was well over his surprise and horror, asked him for his purse. the unhappy host, still mistaking the character of those whom he had entertained, at first regarded the demand as a pleasantry; but when he had been convinced of his error and had complied, his treacherous visitors instantly stabbed him to death in his very dining-room.[ ] the general butchery began on tuesday night, in the neighborhood of the ramparts, where the protestants were most numerous, and from wednesday to saturday there was no intermission in the slaughter. here, more even than elsewhere, the murderers distinguished themselves by their profanity and their undisguised hatred of the protestant faith and worship. "where is your god?" "where are your prayers and your psalms?" "where is the god they invoke so much? let him save, if he can." such were the expressions with which the blows of the assassin were interlarded. at times he thought to aggravate his victim's sufferings by singing snatches of favorite psalms from the huguenot psalm-book. it might be the forty-third, so appropriate to the condition of oppressed innocence, in its quaint old french garb: revenge-moi, pren la querelle de moi, seigneur, de ta merci, contre la gent fausse et cruelle: de l'homme rempli de cautelle, et en sa malice endurci, delivre moi aussi. or it might be the fifty-first--the words never more sincerely accepted, even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the sistine chapel or in st. peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for their christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang or drawled the familiar lines: misericorde au povre vicieux, dieu tout-puissant, selon ta grand' clemence.[ ] "these execrable outrages," adds the chronicler who gives us this interesting information, "did not in the least unnerve the protestants, who died with great constancy; and, if some were shaken (as were some, but in very small numbers), this in no wise lessened the patience and endurance of the rest."[ ] the number of the killed was great. the murderers themselves boasted of the slaughter of more than twelve hundred men and of one hundred and fifty women, besides a large number of children of nine years old and under. and there was a dreary uniformity in the method of their death. they were shot with pistols, then stripped, and dragged to the river, or thrown into the city moat.[ ] but it is, after all, not the numbers of nameless victims whose honorable deaths leave no distinct impression upon the mind, but the individual instances of christian heroism, teaching lessons of imitable human virtues, that speak most directly to the sympathies of the reader of an age so long posterior. the records of french protestantism are full of these, and one or two of the most striking that occurred in orleans deserve mention. m. de coudray--whom the roman catholics had in vain endeavored on previous occasions to shake--seeing his house beset and no prospect of deliverance, himself opened the door of his dwelling to the murderers, telling them, with wonderful assurance of faith: "you do but hasten the coming of that blessedness which i have long been expecting."[ ] whereupon they killed him, in the midst of his invocation of his god. another huguenot, de st. thomas, a schoolmaster, died uttering words as courageous as ever fell from lips of early christian martyrs: "why! do you think that you move me by your blasphemies and acts of cruelty? it is not within your power to deprive me of the assurance of the grace of my god. strike as much as you please; i fear not your blows."[ ] sometimes the dying men were allowed a few moments to utter a final prayer; but, if their zeal led them too far, their impatient murderers cut short their devotions with oaths and curses, and exclaimed: "here are people that take a great while to pray to their god!"[ ] of resistance there was little, so far were the huguenots from having collected arms and prepared for such a conspiracy as was imputed to them. if a huguenot teacher of fencing killed one or two of his assailants, or if a few gentlemen at different places kept them at bay awhile with stones or other missiles, this, so far from proving their evil intentions, on the contrary, furnishes undeniable proof of the very different results that might have ensued had their means of defence been equal to their courage. for fifteen days after the principal massacre the work went on more quietly, the dead bodies being still thrown into the ditch--where wolves, which in the sixteenth century abounded in the valley of the loire, were permitted to feed upon them undisturbed--or into the river, of whose fish, fattened upon this human carrion, the people feared to eat.[ ] [sidenote: massacre at bourges.] at bourges the news of the massacre was received late on tuesday. meantime, some of the more sagacious of the huguenots (among others, the celebrated francis hotman, at this time a professor of law in the university of bourges), alarmed by the wounding of admiral coligny, had fled from the city. even after the news came, the massacre was but partial. although the mayor, jean joupitre, had received sealed orders (lettres de cachet) instructing him as to the part he was to take, the municipal officers, knowing the ill-will the guises had always borne to the huguenots, were in doubt how far the king countenanced the bloody work. but the royal letter of the thirtieth of august, accompanying the declaration of the twenty-eighth, to which reference was made above,[ ] so far from putting an end to the disorder, only rendered it more general. bourges became the scene of another of those butcheries of huguenots first gathered in the public prisons, of which there are so many similar instances that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the orders to effect them emanated from a single source at court.[ ] [sidenote: at angers.] we have already been admitted to the secret of the instructions sent by the duke of anjou, through puigaillard, to m. de montsoreau, for the destruction of the huguenots of saumur and angers. certainly there was on his part no lack of readiness to fulfil his sanguinary commission; but the local officers were less zealous, and many of the protestants were merely thrown into prison. montsoreau's first exploit at angers deserves particular mention. m. de la rivière, the first reformed pastor of paris, of whom i have spoken in a previous chapter, was at this time residing in angers, and montsoreau seems to have been acquainted with him. going straight to his house, the governor met the pastor's wife, whom, according to the gallant custom prevailing, especially among the trench courtiers, he first kissed, and then inquired for her husband. he was told that he was walking in his garden, and thither his hostess led him. after courteously embracing him, montsoreau thus abruptly disclosed the object of his visit: "monsieur de la rivière, do you know why i am come? the king has ordered me to kill you, and that at once. i have a special commission to this effect, as you will know from these letters." while saying this he exhibited a pistol which he held in his hand. "i know of no crime that i have done," calmly replied de la rivière; and then, after obtaining permission to offer a brief prayer to god, he fearlessly presented his breast to the cowardly assassin. montsoreau did not complete the extermination of the huguenots of angers, and puigaillard soon after arrived to prosecute it; but the protestant prisoners whom he was to have murdered knew his venal disposition, and found little difficulty in purchasing their liberation.[ ] [sidenote: butchery at lyons.] the important city of lyons, inhabited by a population intensely hostile to the reformation, had for its governor m. de mandelot, a decided partisan of the roman catholic faction. the municipal authorities, however, either surpassed him in zeal, or, as is more probable, were less apprehensive of the dangers to be incurred by assuming the responsibility of a massacre; for of all the "échevins," only two opposed the violent measures of their associates. the written protest which they insisted upon entering on the official records is still extant.[ ] the first tidings of the wounding of coligny by maurevel reached lyons on wednesday morning, the twenty-seventh of august, in a letter from charles the ninth to governor mandelot, similar in tenor to those which were despatched to every other part of france.[ ] although the king spoke only of displeasure at the outrage, and of his determination to avenge it, the populace interpreted the event according to their wishes, and instantly circulated reports of the murder of the admiral and all his adherents. the roman catholics, long discontented with the toleration extended to those who dissented from the creed of the dominant church, were jubilant and menacing; the protestants were disheartened, but exhibited a self-control only to be accounted for by the long years of oppression which had wellnigh broken their spirit. the next day came the news of the events of sunday, and, in the afternoon, letters from masso and rubys, prominent citizens of lyons then at paris, who said that they had been instructed by the king to order the authorities to copy the example of the capital. the fanatical party was now clamorous; but mandelot, cautious and politic, would act on no such instructions, although he had taken the precaution of closing the gates, and of commanding the protestants, on pain of imprisonment, to remain in their houses. friday morning came, and with it the arrival of sieur du peyrat from court, bearing the royal letter written on the day of the massacre, in which it was represented as the exclusive work of the guises, and the king strenuously enjoined the maintenance of the edict of pacification.[ ] these were the _public_ instructions sent to mandelot; but they were not all. there is a suspicious little postscript to the letter: "monsieur de mandelot, you will give credit to the bearer respecting the matter which i have charged him to tell you."[ ] what these verbal orders were which the king, not venturing to commit to paper, commissioned du peyrat to communicate, the reply of the governor himself distinctly reveals; it was the arrest of the protestants and the confiscation of their property.[ ] still more perplexed as to what course to pursue, mandelot held a long private conference with the messenger, while the échevins impatiently awaited its conclusion. the governor now called in the municipal officers for consultation, and with them agreed to order the immediate imprisonment of the huguenots. he was not, however, even yet fully convinced of the propriety of this step, for scarcely had he given the order when he recalled it.[ ] fearing that the troops at his disposal might prove insufficient, and dreading with good reason lest the employment of the city militia for this purpose might lead to scenes of disorder which he would find himself powerless to control, he preferred to send for such reinforcements as the neighboring noblemen of the province could furnish.[ ] meantime, the commotion throughout lyons had rapidly increased. on thursday and friday nights many members of the reformed church had been dragged from their houses as if to prison, but most of them had been barbarously despatched by the way. among others, one of the ministers, monsieur jacques l'anglois, was stabbed and thrown into the river. on saturday morning mandelot, seeing the confusion hourly increasing, deemed it impolitic to wait any longer for the troops he was expecting, and resolved upon effecting his purpose by ruse. he therefore published a proclamation by sound of trumpet, bidding all the huguenots to assemble at his house to hear the good pleasure of the king. the huguenots, deceived by the professions of his majesty, came in great numbers; but no sooner had they all arrived, than they were seized by the soldiers and hurried away to prison. the common prison, "la roanne," being too contracted to contain so large a multitude, three hundred or more were placed in that of the archbishop's palace, and others in the cloisters of the celestine monks and the gray friars. at the same time an inventory was being made of all the goods belonging to protestants throughout the city. these measures, instead of allaying, only inflamed the passions of the populace the more. that night the murders surpassed those of the previous nights in number and atrocity, and when sunday morning dawned the people were ready for still greater excesses. at about eight o'clock they entered unopposed the gray friars, and butchered every huguenot they found. two hours later, assuming the forms of law, a self-constituted commission, headed by andré mornieu, one of the échevins or aldermen, presenting themselves successively at the archiepiscopal prison and at the roanne, summoned the inmates to abjure their faith and go to mass. only thirty persons in the one, and about twenty in the other, consented. these were sent to the celestine monastery and afterward released. of the others a careful list was drawn up. their fate was sealed; but an unexpected difficulty arose. the public hangman refused to execute the sentence of an unauthorized tribunal. so did the soldiers. at last assassins were obtained from the ranks of the turbulent inhabitants. about three o'clock that afternoon the archbishop's prison was visited. to describe with minuteness the scene of horror that ensued would scarcely be possible. two hundred and sixty-three persons,[ ] of the very best and most industrious part of the population of lyons,[ ] called by name according to the roll previously made, were murdered in rapid succession. never was there an exhibition of more pitiless cruelty. meanwhile, where was the governor? he had gone, in company with the commandant of the citadel, to suppress a threatened disturbance in the faubourg de la guillotière, on the left bank of the rhône. he returned only in time to find the deed done, and to disperse those who had gone to the roanne to repeat it there. his demonstrations of anger were loud, and a liberal reward was offered for the detection of any that had participated in the slaughter.[ ] but this did not prevent the same body of cutthroats from visiting the roanne, soon after nightfall, and despatching all the protestants that were there, to the number of about seventy. many of them, by an excess of barbarity, the assassins tied together by a single rope, and threw, while yet alive, into the water. on the following day the bodies which had not yet found a watery grave were carried to the other side of the saône, where, stripped and mangled, they were about to be buried in the cemetery of the abbaye d'esnay, when the monks refused them admission into the consecrated ground, and pointed to the rhône as a more fitting destination. even now they were not spared further mutilation; for an apothecary of lyons, having initiated the murderers into the valuable properties of human fat as a medicinal substance, the miserable remains were put to new use before being consigned to the river. down to the mediterranean these ghastly witnesses of the ferocity of the passions of the lyonnese roman catholics carried fear and disgust, and for weeks the inhabitants of arles and other places carefully abstained from drinking the water of the polluted stream.[ ] [sidenote: responsibility of mandelot.] the part which mandelot took in this awful tragedy has been very differently estimated, but i am inclined to think that the governor is not chargeable with any direct responsibility for the butchery in the prisons of lyons. certainly this seems to be established by his letter to the king, written in the morning of the day on which it occurred; for he would scarcely have expressed his great desire and hope to be able to prevent any outbreak, if he had planned, or even foreseen, the events of the evening.[ ] the story must therefore be apocryphal, that mandelot, in commissioning one of the chief assassins to execute the bloody work, blasphemously said: "i intrust the whole to you, and, as jesus christ said to saint peter, whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."[ ] it was, however, no conscientious scruple that deterred the governor from actively taking part. mandelot was scandalously anxious to obtain his part of the plunder, and was not ashamed to appear as a suppliant for the confiscated property of the huguenots almost before their bodies were cold.[ ] but he was unwilling, without the express orders of his sovereign, written with his own hand, to commit an act which, the more successful it might be, was the more certain to be disavowed and punished. he was right: a subordinate could not be too careful in dealing with so treacherous a court. [sidenote: the massacre at rouen.] few cities were so ripe for the massacre of the protestants as the capital of normandy. there the passions of the roman catholics, inflamed by the civil wars, had not been suffered to cool. even in the provincial parliament the papists could hardly submit to receive into their deliberations again the five or six huguenot counsellors who had been expelled or had fled at the outbreak of hostilities, but whom the edict of pacification restored to their ancient functions and dignity; and the secret registers, among other unfortunate scenes, chronicle particularly a violent discussion, degenerating into angry altercation between president vialard and the huguenot member maynet.[ ] the bloody assault of the populace of rouen upon the reformed in march, , mentioned in a previous page,[ ] had been but slightly punished. few of the guilty failed to escape from the city, and the sole penalty suffered had been an execution in effigy. these turbulent men had ever since that time been watching an opportunity to return. they were now burning with a desire to signalize their advent by bloody reprisals. monsieur de carouge, governor of the city, was, however, a just and upright man,[ ] and they could not hope for countenance in their plans from him. in fact, the contemporary accounts inform us that he received from the king repeated orders to exterminate the huguenots of rouen,[ ] which he could not bring himself to execute, and that he sent messengers to remonstrate with his majesty who returned without succeeding in shaking his determination; and hereupon the governor found himself obliged to shut himself up in the castle, and permit the work which had been intrusted to others also, to take its course.[ ] the secret records of parliament, however, reveal the fact that carouge received from paris the order to leave rouen and visit other portions of normandy, in order to restore the quiet and peace which had been much disturbed of late. the real, though perhaps not the ostensible object of this commission was to rid the city of the presence of a magistrate whose well known integrity might render it futile to attempt a massacre of the innocent. the records also show that, contrary to the current report, both the municipal authorities and the parliament, greatly alarmed at the danger menacing rouen in case of his departure, implored him to remain;[ ] but that the king's peremptory commands left him no discretion, and he was obliged to leave the unhappy city to its fate. the able historian of the norman parliament has rightly observed that the governor, whether he left rouen because he could not consent to execute the barbarous injunctions that were sent him, or because his character was so well known that the court was unwilling to intrust them to him, is equally deserving of praise; and not without reason does this writer claim similar respect for the judicial body which manifested its desire to save everything, by retaining him at rouen.[ ] here, as elsewhere, a great part of the protestants had been arrested and placed in the prisons, to shield them from popular violence. the governor believed this to be the safest place for them; and at least one instance is known of a father who was so convinced of it that he brought thither his huguenot son, whom he might have sent out of the city.[ ] the storm, so long delayed, broke out at last on wednesday, the seventeenth of september, and lasted four entire days. the gates were closed, and the organized bands of murderers, under the leadership of laurent de maromme, one of the most sanguinary of the turbulent men who had returned from banishment, and of a priest, claude montereul, curate of the church of st. pierre, had undisputed possession of the city. first they slaughtered like sheep the prisoners in the spacious "conciergerie" of the parliament house and in the other prisons of the city. next they burst into the houses, and nearly every atrocity which history is compelled at any time reluctantly to chronicle, was perpetrated on unresisting men, on tender women, on unoffending children. not less than five hundred persons, and perhaps even more, perished in a butchery, whose details i gladly pass over in silence.[ ] grim humor and charity were incongruously mingled with the most brutal inhumanity. the assassins jocularly denominated their work one of "accommodating" their victims;[ ] and the clothes of the protestants--whose bodies were buried in great ditches outside of the porte cauchoise--after having been carefully washed, were piously distributed among the poor.[ ] the tragedy finished, the farce of an investigation was instituted by the officers of justice, but no punishment was ever inflicted upon any roman catholic, other than that which could be recognized in the retributive judgments befalling a few of the most notable, and especially the cruel maromme, at the hand of god.[ ] [sidenote: at toulouse.] the previous character of toulouse, as among the most sanguinary cities of france, was already sufficiently well established. if behind some of the rest on this occasion in the number of victims, toulouse was inferior only because its previous massacres had rendered it a suspicious place of sojourn in the eyes of the huguenots. here, too, notwithstanding deceitful proclamations guaranteeing safety and protection, the protestants were gathered into the public prisons and jails attached to monasteries; and after having been reserved for several weeks, on receipt of orders from paris were butchered to the number of two or three hundred. among others, some protestant members of parliament were hung in their long red gowns to the branches of a great elm growing in the court of the parliament house.[ ] the miscreants that voluntarily assumed the functions of executioners were in this case drawn in great part from the more unruly class of the law students of the university.[ ] it is needless to add that here, as elsewhere, the opportunity for plunder was by no means neglected. [sidenote: at bordeaux.] the procedure in bordeaux was so extraordinary, and is so authentically related in a letter of a prominent judicial officer who was present, as well as in the records of the parliament of guyenne, that the story of its massacre must be added to the notices already given. at first the city was quiet, and the friends of order congratulated themselves that their efforts had been successful in removing the stigma which previous transactions had affixed to its escutcheon. meantime this policy, united to the fear of a fate similar to that which had befallen their fellow-believers elsewhere, is said to have led to a great number of conversions to the roman catholic church.[ ] but there were those who were unwilling that their prey should so easily escape them. on the fifth of september, m. de montferrand, governor of bordeaux, affecting to have information of a general plot on the part of the huguenots of the city, had sought and obtained permission of the parliament to introduce three hundred soldiers from abroad. he had thereupon forbidden the celebration of protestant worship, hitherto held at a distance of three leagues from bordeaux, on the plain between the garonne and the jalle.[ ] meantime the churches resounded with the violent denunciations of a famous preacher, friar edmond auger or augier, "a great scourge for heresy," as his partisans styled him. he exhorted his hearers to imitate the example of paris, and accused the royal officers of indolence and pusillanimity. at this juncture the governor received a visit from monsieur de montpézat, son-in-law of villars, the newly appointed admiral. what the latter told him is unknown. but, on the third of october, montferrand having given out that he had received from the king a roll of names of forty of the chief men of the place, whom he was commissioned to put to death without judge or trial, set about his bloody work. persistently refusing to exhibit his warrant, for three days the governor butchered the citizens at will.[ ] one member of parliament, against whom he bore a personal grudge, he stabbed with his own hand. the murderers wore red bonnets supplied by one of the "jurats" or aldermen of the city. they executed their commission so thoroughly that the number of the slain was reported as two hundred and sixty-four persons, all protestants. if any one be mercifully inclined to regard this statement as an exaggeration, and to base upon this instance a general theory that throughout france the number of the victims has been grossly over-estimated, let him read the following entry made in the records of the parliament of bordeaux, and recently brought to light; he will learn from this not only the approximate number of the slain as given by the chief agent in the bloody work, but the anxiety which the latter felt that he should receive due credit for his share in the great undertaking of the destruction of the french protestants: "on the ninth of october, the sieur de montferrand, having been summoned to the court, among other things said, 'that he had been informed that there were some members of the court who had written to the sieur admiral de villars, royal lieutenant in guyenne, that the said de montferrand had killed, on the day of the execution by him made, october the third, only ten or twelve men, a thing (under correction of the court) wholly false, inasmuch as there had been more than two hundred and fifty slain; and he would show the list to any one who might desire to see it.'"[ ] the same hand that placed upon the parliamentary registers this shameless and atrocious boast, for the benefit of those that should come after, has briefly noted the assassination of two members of parliament itself, with an absence of comment in which we can read the evidence of fear. "from the talk of to-day it appears that messieurs jean de guilloche and pierre de sevyn were killed as belonging to the new religion."[ ] the tardy and flagrantly unnecessary effusion of blood at bordeaux exercised no mean influence in emboldening the huguenots of la rochelle to persevere in their refusal to admit the emissaries of charles the ninth. [sidenote: why the massacre was not universal.] the massacre was, however, neither universal throughout france, nor equally destructive in all places where it occurred. the reason for this is to be found partly in the geographical distribution of the huguenots, partly in the temper of the people, partly in the policy or the humanity of the governors of cities and provinces. where the number of protestants was small, and especially where they had never rendered themselves formidable, it was not easy for the clergy to excite the people to that frenzy of sectarian hatred under the influence of which they were willing to imbrue their hands in the blood of peaceable neighbors. in such places--in provins, for instance--the huguenots generally kept themselves as far as possible out of sight, while a few of the more timid consented to place a white cross on their hats, a convenient badge of roman catholicism which some were willing to assume, when they would rather have died than go to mass.[ ] [sidenote: policy of the guises.] in the province of champagne the protestants were spared any general massacre by the prudent foresight of the guises, to whom its government was confided. the duke, in order to free himself from the imputation of being the author of the bloody plot, and to prove that his private resentment did not extend beyond admiral coligny and a few other chiefs, had himself taken several huguenots in paris under his special protection. with the same object in view, he made his province an exception to the widespread slaughter.[ ] [sidenote: spurious accounts of clemency.] [sidenote: bishop le hennuyer, of lisieux.] others, however, were, merciful from more honorable motives. a number of instances of clemency are mentioned. it is not, indeed, always safe to accept the stories, some of which are suspicious from their very form, while others are manifest inventions of an age when tolerance had become more popular than persecution. to the category of fable we are compelled to assign the famous response which le hennuyer, bishop of lisieux, is reported, by authors writing long after the event, as having returned to the lieutenant sent to him by charles the ninth. history is occasionally capricious, but she has rarely indulged in a more remarkable freak than when putting into the mouth of an advocate of persecution, a courtier and the almoner of the king, who was not even in his diocese, but undoubtedly in paris itself, at the time the incident is said to have occurred, this declamatory speech: "no, no, sir; i oppose, and shall always oppose, the execution of such an order. i am the shepherd of the church of lisieux, and the people i am commanded to slaughter are my flock. although at present wanderers, having strayed from the fold intrusted to me by jesus christ the great shepherd, they may, nevertheless, return. i do not read in the gospel that the shepherd should suffer the blood of his sheep to be shed; on the contrary, i find there that he is bound to pour out his own blood and give his own life for them. take the order back, for it shall never be executed so long as i live."[ ] [sidenote: kind offices of matignon at caen and alençon;] [sidenote: of longueville and gordes;] fortunately, there are other instances on record which are not apocryphal. monsieur de matignon seems to have saved caen and alençon from becoming the scenes of general massacres, and thus to have endeared himself to the protestants of both places.[ ] the duke of longueville prevented the massacre from extending to his province of picardy.[ ] gordes, governor of dauphiny, who had obtained advancement by the assistance of the montmorency influence, excused himself, when repeatedly urged to kill the huguenots, on the plea that montbrun and others of their leaders were alive and out of his reach, and that any attempt of the kind would only lead to still greater difficulties. he therefore waited for more direct instructions. when, in his letter of the fifth of september, in reference to a clause in the king's letter just received, he stated that he had received no verbal orders, but merely his letters of the twenty-second, twenty-fourth, and twenty-eighth of august, charles replied bidding him give himself no solicitude as to them, as they were addressed only to a few persons who happened to be near him,[ ] and enjoined upon him to enforce the royal "declaration," and cause all murder and rapine to cease in his government. yet even here a number of huguenots were imprisoned, and a few lost their lives at romans.[ ] [sidenote: of tende in provence.] the manly boldness of the comte de tende is said in like manner to have saved the protestants of provence. receiving from the hands of la mole, a gentleman of arles and servant of the duke of alençon, a letter from the secret council ordering him to massacre all the huguenots in his province, the governor replied: "i do not believe that such commands have emanated from the king's free will; but some of the members of his council have usurped the royal authority in order to satisfy their own passions. i need no more conclusive testimony than the letters which his majesty sent me a few days ago, by which he threw upon the guises the blame for this massacre of paris. i prefer to obey these first letters, as more befitting the royal dignity. besides, this last order is so cruel and barbarous, that even were the king himself in person to command me to put it into execution, i would not do it." the magnanimity of the count spared provence the horrors of a repetition of the massacres of mérindol and cabrières, but perhaps cost him his own life, for he soon after died at avignon, and rumor ascribed his death to poison. the infamous count de retz, catharine's favorite, succeeded him as governor.[ ] saint héran, governor of auvergne, is said to have replied in very similar words; but as he managed to induce a great part of the protestants within his jurisdiction to apostatize, less notice was taken of his insubordination.[ ] [sidenote: viscount d'orthez at bayonne.] perhaps the most striking instance of a magnanimous refusal to comply with the bloody mandate of the parisian court, was that of viscount d'orthez,[ ] governor of bayonne. this nobleman was not only of a violent and imperious temper, but on other occasions so severe in his treatment of the protestants of the border city, that the king was obliged to write to him to moderate his rigor. when, however, the messenger from paris (who on his way had caused an indiscriminate slaughter to be made of all the men, women and children who had taken refuge in the prisons of dax) delivered his orders to the viscount, the latter returned the following laconic answer: "sire, i have communicated your majesty's commands to your faithful inhabitants and warriors in the garrison. i have found among them only good citizens and brave soldiers, but not one hangman. for this reason they and i very humbly beg your majesty to employ our arms and our lives in all things possible, however hazardous they may be, as we are, so long as our lives shall last, your very humble, etc."[ ] [sidenote: the municipality of nantes.] nor were the municipal authorities in some places behind the royal governors in their determination to have no part in the nefarious designs of the court. at nantes, the mayor, échevins, and judges received from paris, on the eighth of september, a letter of the duke of montpensier-bourbon, governor of brittany, in which, after narrating the discovery of the pretended conspiracy of coligny and his adherents, and their consequent assassination, he added: "by this his majesty's intention respecting the treatment which the huguenots are to receive in the other cities is sufficiently evident, as well as the means by which some assured rest may be expected in our poor catholic church."[ ] but the municipal and judicial officers of nantes, instead of following the bloody path thus marked out for them by the governor of their province, "held a meeting in the town hall, and swore to maintain their previous oath not to violate the edict of pacification published in favor of the calvinists, and forbade the inhabitants from indulging in any excess against them."[ ] [sidenote: uncertain number of the victims.] such are the general outlines and a few details of a massacre the full horrors of which it is outside of the province and beyond the ability of history to relate. nor is it even possible to set down figures that may be relied upon as expressing the true number of those who were unjustly put to death. the difficulty experienced by a well informed contemporary, has not been removed; notwithstanding the careful investigations of those who earnestly desired "that posterity might not-be deprived of what it needed to know, in order that it might become wiser at the expense of others."[ ] we shall be safe in supposing that the number of huguenot victims throughout france was somewhere between twenty thousand, as conjectured by de thou and la popelinière, and thirty thousand, as stated by jean de serres and the mémoires de l'estat de france, rather than in adopting the extreme views of sully and perefixe, the latter of whom swells the count of the slain to one hundred thousand men, women, and children.[ ] it can scarcely have been much less than the lower number i have suggested. [sidenote: news of the massacre received at rome.] [sidenote: public thanksgivings.] while the massacre begun on st. bartholomew's day was spreading with the speed of some foul contagion to the most distant parts of france, the tidings had been carried beyond its boundaries, and excited a thrill of delight, or a cry of execration, according to the character and sympathies of those to whom they came. nowhere was the surprise greater, nor the joy more intense, than at rome. pope gregory, like his predecessor, had been very sceptical respecting the pious intentions of the french court. nuncios and legates brought them, it is true, a great profusion of brilliant assurances, on the part of catharine and charles, of devotion to the roman church, and to the interests of the pontifical see, but accompanied by lugubrious vaticinations of their own, based upon the tolerant course on which the king, under coligny's guidance, had entered. the cardinal of alessandria had made little account of the ring offered him by charles as a pledge of his sincerity, and preferred to wait for the proof which the sequel might exhibit. the last defiant act of the french monarch, in marrying his sister to a professed heretic, and within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the church, without obtaining the pope's dispensation, served to confirm all the sinister suspicions entertained at rome. under these circumstances the papal astonishment and rejoicing can well be imagined, when couriers sent by the guises brought the intelligence of the massacre to the cardinal of lorraine, and when letters from the king of france and from the nuncio salviati in paris to the pope himself confirmed its accuracy. salviati's letters having been read in the full consistory, on the sixth of september, the pontiff and the cardinals resolved to go at once in solemn procession to the church of san marco, there to render thanks to god for the signal blessing conferred upon the roman see and all christendom. a solemn mass was appointed for the succeeding monday, and a jubilee published for the whole christian world. in the evening the cannon from the castle of san angelo, and firearms discharged here and there throughout the city, proclaimed to all the joy felt for so signal a victory over the enemies of the church. for three successive nights there was a general illumination. cardinal orsini, who seems to have been on the point of starting for france as a special legate to urge the court to withdraw from the course of toleration, now received different instructions, and was commissioned to congratulate charles, and to encourage him to pursue the path upon which he had entered. charles of lorraine, as was natural, distinguished himself for his demonstrations of joy. he made a present of one thousand crowns to the bearer of such glad tidings.[ ] under his auspices a brilliant celebration of the event took place in the church of san luigi de' francesi, which was magnificently decorated for the occasion. gregory himself, attended by his cardinals and bishops, by princes, foreign ambassadors, and large numbers of nobles and of the people, walked thither under the pontifical canopy, and high mass was said. the cardinal of lorraine had affixed above the entrance a pompous declaration, in the form of a congratulatory notice from charles the ninth to gregory and the "sacred college of cardinals," wherein the very christian king renders thanks to heaven that, "inflamed by zeal for the lord god of hosts, like a smiting angel divinely sent, he had suddenly destroyed by a single slaughter almost all the heretics and enemies of his kingdom." the latinity of the placard might not be above reproach; but it is certain that its sentiments received the cordial approval of the assembled prelates.[ ] set forth in golden characters, and decorated with festive leaves and ribbons,[ ] it proclaimed that the hierarchy of the roman church had no qualms of conscience in indorsing the traitorous deed of charles and catharine. but still more unequivocal proofs were not wanting. a well known medal was struck in honor of the event, bearing on the one side the head of the pope and the words "gregorius xiii. pont. max. an. i.," and on the other an angel with cross and sword pursuing the heretics, and the superscription, "ugonottorum strages, ."[ ] [sidenote: paintings by vasari in the vatican.] by the order of the pope, the famous vasari painted in the sala regia of the vatican palace several pictures representing different scenes in the parisian massacre. upon one an inscription was placed which tersely expressed the true state of the case: "pontifex colinii necem probat."[ ] the paintings may still be seen in the magnificent room which serves as antechamber to the sistine chapel.[ ] to the french ambassador, m. de ferralz, gregory expressed in the most extravagant terms his satisfaction, and that of the college of cardinals, not only with the events of paris, but with the news daily coming to rome of similar massacres in progress in different cities of france. he convinced ferralz that no more delightful tidings could have reached the pontifical court. the battle of lepanto could not compare with it. "tell your master," said he to the envoy at the conclusion of his audience, "that this event has given me a hundred times more pleasure than fifty victories like that which the league obtained over the turk last year." in the excess of his joy he did not forget to enjoin on every one he spoke to, especially all frenchmen, to light bonfires in honor of the massacre, hinting that whoever should fail to do so must be unsound in the faith.[ ] a few weeks later, the pontiff shocked even some devout roman catholics by allowing cardinal lorraine and the french ambassador to present to him maurevel, the assassin who had fired the arquebuse shot at admiral coligny.[ ] [sidenote: french boasts go for nothing.] "the pontiff," says his countryman, the historian adriani, "and all italy universally rejoiced greatly, and forgave the king and queen their previous dissimulation."[ ] for the french at rome now pretended that the massacre had long been planned by their monarch, and that every favor to the huguenots for the past two years had been shown to them merely for the purpose of lulling them into a false security. the pope accepted the plea without troubling himself much whether it were true or not, satisfied as he was with the event. but not so the spanish envoy at the roman court, don juan de cuñiga. "the french wish to give the impression," he wrote to his master, "that the king meditated this blow from the time he made peace with the huguenots; and, in order that it may be believed that he was capable of preparing it and concealing it until the proper time for the execution, they attribute to him stratagems which do not seem allowable even against heretics and rebels. i deem it certain that, if the shooting of the arquebuse at the admiral was a thing projected a few days beforehand, and authorized by the king, all the rest was inspired by circumstances."[ ] equally positive, though not at all doubtful respecting the morality of the transaction, and more jubilant, was the nuncio salviati, in paris. while desiring that the cardinal secretary "should kiss the feet of his holiness in his name," and "rejoicing with him in the bowels of his heart at the blessed and honorable commencement of his pontificate,"[ ] while declaring that, despite his previous belief that the court of france would not much longer tolerate the admiral's arrogance, he would never have imagined the tenth part of what he now saw with his own eyes, he also stated he could not bring himself to believe that, had the admiral been killed by maurevel's shot, so much would have been done by a great deal.[ ] now, however, "the queen intended not only to revoke the edict of pacification, but by means of justice to restore the ancient observance of the catholic faith." [sidenote: catharine writes to philip, her son-in-law.] there was another monarch whose joy was not less sincere than gregory's. this was philip of spain. catharine had not delayed writing to her royal son-in-law. in her endeavor to make capital out of the massacre she betrayed great satisfaction at her supposed masterly stroke of policy. her letter--a misspelled scrawl--furnishes a fresh illustration of the fact that singular shrewdness in planning and executing criminal projects is not incompatible with a trust, amounting almost to fatuity, in the unsuspecting credulity of others. catharine actually imagined that she could, by her counterfeit piety, impose upon one who knew her character so well as philip of spain. therefore she was lavish of the use of the name of the deity to cover her own villainy. "monsieur my son," she wrote, "i entertain no doubt that you will appreciate, as we do, the happiness god has conferred upon us in giving the king, my son, the means of ridding himself of his subjects, rebels against god and himself, and [rejoice] that it has pleased him graciously to preserve him and us all from the cruelty of their hands. for this we are assured that you will praise god with us, as well on our account as for the advantage that will accrue to all christendom, and to the service, and honor, and glory of god. this, we hope, will soon be made known, and the fruit thereof be perceived.[ ] by this event we afford the testimony of our good and upright intentions, which have never tended but to his honor. and i rejoice still more that this occasion will confirm and augment the friendship between your majesty and the king your brother--which is the thing i desire most of all in this world."[ ] [sidenote: the delight of philip the second.] philip had good reason to be glad. to all human appearance it had depended only upon the word of charles to secure, at once and forever, the independence from the spanish tyranny of the provinces on the lower rhine, which, under william of orange, were battling for religious and civil freedom. true, genlis and his small forces had been captured or destroyed; but what were they in comparison with the men whom the french king could have marshalled under the command of coligny, la noue, and other experienced leaders? and now charles, at a single stroke, had cut off all prospect of obtaining the sovereignty of the netherlands or of any part, had assassinated his own generals in their beds, had butchered in cold blood those who would gladly have marched as soldiers to achieve his conquests, and had freed philip from all fear of french interference in behalf of the dutch patriots. no wonder then, that, when a courier, sent by the spanish ambassador at paris, with tidings of the events of st. bartholomew's day, reached madrid, on the evening of saturday, the seventh of september--so slowly did news travel in those days--philip was almost beside himself with joy.[ ] "he showed so much gayety, contrary to his native temperament and custom," the french envoy, st. goard, wrote to his master, "that he was evidently more delighted than with all the pieces of good fortune that had ever befallen him; and he called to him his familiars to tell them that he knew that your majesty was his good brother, and that he saw that there was no one else in the world that deserved the title of 'very christian.'" not content with gloating over the bloody bulletin with his cronies, he promptly sent his secretary, cayas, to congratulate the french ambassador, and to inform him that "the king his master was going that very hour to st. jerome, to render all manner of thanks to god, and to pray that in matters of so great importance his majesty might be sustained by his hand." when, the next morning, st. goard had been very graciously admitted to an audience, he tells us that philip--the man who rarely or never gave a hearty or manly expression to his feelings--"began to laugh, and, with demonstrations of extreme pleasure and satisfaction, praised your majesty as having earned your title of 'very christian,' telling me there was no king that could claim to be your companion, either in valor or in prudence." it was natural that philip should chiefly extol charles's alleged dissimulation, and dwell on the happiness of christendom saved from a frightful war. it was equally politic for st. goard to chime in, and echo his master's praise. but there was sound truth in the concluding remark he made to philip: "however this may be, _sire, you must confess that you owe your netherlands to his majesty, the king of france_."[ ] [sidenote: charles instigates the murder of french prisoners.] [sidenote: the duke of alva jubilant but wary.] we have also more direct testimony to philip's delight at the parisian massacre, in the form of a letter from the monarch to the duke of alva. in this extraordinary communication, worthy of the depraved source from which it emanated, the bloodthirsty king does not attempt to conceal the satisfaction with which he has received the tidings of charles's "honorable and christian resolution to rid himself of the admiral and other important personages," both for religion's sake and because the king of france will now be a firmer friend to the spanish crown--since neither the german protestants nor elizabeth will trust him any longer--a circumstance which will have a decided influence upon the restoration of his authority in the netherlands. another matter upon which he touches, places in the clearest light the infamy to which charles and his council had sunk, and the hypocrisy of philip the catholic himself. until the very moment of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, charles had been earnestly desirous of saving the lives of the french huguenots who had been taken prisoners with genlis near mons; while, by the most barefaced assumptions of innocence, he endeavored to induce the spaniard to believe that he was in no way responsible for genlis's undertaking.[ ] now, however, it is charles himself who, by his envoys at madrid and brussels, begs from philip the murder of his own french subjects, lest they return to do mischief in france. not only the soldiers taken with genlis, but the garrison of mons, if that city, as now seemed all but certain, should fall into alva's hands, must be put to death.[ ] "if alva object," he wrote to mondoucet, "that your request is the same thing as tacitly requiring him to kill the prisoners and cut to pieces the garrison of mons, you will tell him that that is precisely what he ought to do, and that he will inflict a very great wrong upon himself and upon all christendom if he shall do otherwise."[ ] drawing his inspiration from the same source, st. goard said to philip himself: "one of the greatest services that can be done for christendom, will be to capture mons and put everybody to the edge of the sword."[ ] and so philip thought too; for he not only wrote to alva that the sooner the earth were freed of such bad plants, the less solicitude would be necessary in future, but he scribbled with his own hand on the draft of the letter: "i desire, if you have not already rid the world of them, you should do it at once and let me know, for i see no reason for delay."[ ] the more clear-headed alva, however, saw reasons not only for delay, but for extending to some of the prisoners a counterfeit mercy; for he soon replied to his master, that "he was not at all of opinion that it was best to cut off the heads of genlis and the other french prisoners, as the king of france asked him to do. he had resolved to do so before the admiral's death, but now things had changed. charles must know that philip has in his power men capable of giving him great trouble."[ ] none the less, however, did alva communicate the glad tidings to all parts of the netherlands, and cause solemn te deums to be sung in the churches.[ ] "these occurrences," he wrote to count bossu, governor of holland, "come so marvellously apropos in this conjunction for the affairs of the king our master, that nothing could be more timely. for this we cannot sufficiently render thanks to the divine goodness."[ ] philip promptly sent the marquis d'ayamonte to congratulate charles and the queen mother.[ ] alva had already a special envoy at the french court, who returned soon after the massacre to brussels. on asking catharine what reply he should carry back, the italian princess, intoxicated with her success, impiously said: "i do not know that i can make any other answer than that which jesus christ gave to st. john's disciples, 'go and show again those things which ye have seen and heard--the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.'" "and do not forget," she added, "to say to the duke of alva, 'blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.'"[ ] such was the new gospel of blood and rapine with which it was proposed to replace the bible in the vernacular, and the psalms of david translated by marot and beza! [sidenote: england's horror.] [sidenote: perplexity of the french ambassador at london.] but spain and rome were only exceptions. from almost every part of the civilized world there arose a loud and unanimous cry of execration. it was natural, however, that the feeling of horror should be deepest in the neighboring protestant countries, whose religion and liberties seemed to be menaced with destruction by the treacherous blow. above all, in england with whose queen a matrimonial treaty had for months been pending, the abhorrence of the crime and its perpetrators was the more intense because of the violence of the revulsion. resident frenchmen were startled at the sudden change. the warmest friends of france became its open enemies, loudly reproaching the broken faith of the king, and pouring curses upon the people that had exercised such indignities upon unoffending citizens. if we may believe la mothe fénélon, the men who customarily wore arms indulged in much insulting bravado and in threats directed against any one that dared to gainsay them.[ ] the french ambassador has himself left on record the description of a remarkable interview which he had with queen elizabeth. rarely had a diplomatic agent been placed in a more embarrassing position. his letters and despatches from home were of the most contradictory character. scarcely had he, with protestations of sincerity and truthfulness, published the account of events in paris which was sent him, when new instructions arrived recalling, modifying, or contradicting the former. first, with the startling news of the disturbance of the peace, by admiral coligny's wounding, came a letter from the king, expressing "infinite displeasure" at the "bad" and "unhappy" act, and a resolution to inflict "very exemplary justice." to which this postscript was appended: "monsieur de la mothe fénélon, i will not forget to tell you that this wicked act proceeds from the enmity between the admiral's house and the guises, and that i have taken steps to prevent their involving my subjects in their quarrels, for i intend that my edict of pacification shall be observed in every point."[ ] two days later charles wrote again, communicating intelligence of the massacre, beginning with the murder of coligny, in almost the identical words of the circular he was sending to mandelot and other governors of provinces and important cities.[ ] still it is the work of the guises, and he himself has had enough to do in protecting his own person in the castle of the louvre. he wishes queen elizabeth to be assured that he has no part in the deed,[ ] and, in fact, that all should know that he entertains great displeasure for what has so unfortunately happened, and that it is the thing which he detests more than anything else.[ ] and he adds in a tone of well counterfeited innocence: "i have near me my brother the king of navarre, and my cousin the prince of condé, to share in the same fortune with me."[ ] after receiving and spreading abroad these explanations, what must have been the unfortunate ambassador's perplexity and annoyance, when he received, but too late, a brief letter written on monday, the day after the massacre began, containing these words: "as we are beginning to discover the conspiracy which the adherents of the pretended reformed religion had entered into against me, my mother and my brothers, you will not speak of the particulars of the disturbance, nor of its occasion until you receive fuller and more certain intelligence from me; for, by to-night or to-morrow morning, i hope to have cleared up the whole matter."[ ] no wonder the courier to whom the last letter was intrusted was bidden ride with all speed to overtake the other; nor that la mothe fénélon hardly knew how to extricate himself from the dilemma in which the king his master had placed him. had not charles, by throwing all the blame, in his first letter, upon the guises and by positively denying any participation of his own, unambiguously proclaimed his ignorance up to that moment of any huguenot conspiracy? how, then, could the french envoy go to the same englishmen to whom he had made known the contents of this despatch, and tell them that the king was the author of the deed he had stigmatized as most detestable, and that the motive that had impelled him reluctantly to order the slaughter of the huguenots was a conspiracy which he did not discover until a day or two after he gave the order? yet this was the contradictory story which was sketched in the letter of the twenty-fifth of august, and more fully elaborated in subsequent despatches.[ ] [sidenote: his cold reception by queen elizabeth.] the crestfallen ambassador is said--and the authority for the disputed statement is no less than that of the members of the queen's council, burleigh, leicester, knowles, thomas smith, and croft--to have exclaimed bitterly "that he was ashamed to be counted a frenchman."[ ] at first he believed that an audience would be denied him; and when the queen at last vouchsafed to see him at woodstock, it was only after he had waited three days in oxford, while elizabeth and her council met frequently to deliberate upon the contents of walsingham's despatches. he was admitted to the private apartments of the queen, where he found her majesty surrounded by the lords of the council and the principal ladies of the court, awaiting his coming in profound silence. elizabeth advanced to meet him, and greeted him with a countenance on which sorrow and severity were mingled with more kindly feelings. drawing the ambassador aside to a window, she began the discourse with a dignity which few sovereigns have ever known better how to assume. she gave particular expression to the regret she felt in hearing such tidings from a prince in whom she had had more confidence than in any other living monarch. and when the ambassador had stammered out the lying excuse based upon "the horrible ingratitude and perverse intentions of the huguenots" against his master, and had tragically recounted the sorrow of charles at being constrained to cut off an arm to save the rest of the body, she replied that she hoped that if the informations against the admiral and his were confirmed by investigation, the king "might be excused in some part, both toward god and the world, in permitting the admiral's enemies by force to prevent his enterprises." but she would not admit that even then the cruelty of the mode of punishment was capable of defence, most of all in the case of coligny, who, "being in his bed, lamed both on the right hand and left arm, lying in danger under the care of chyrurgions, being also guarded about his private house with a number of the king's guard, might have been, by a word of the king's mouth, brought to any place to have answered when and how the king should have thought meet." but she preferred to ascribe the fault, not to charles, but to those around him whose age and knowledge "ought in such case to have foreseen how offenders ought to be justified with the sword of the prince, and not with the bloody swords of murderers, being also the mortal enemies of the party murdered."[ ] elizabeth's council was even more outspoken. "doubtless," said they, "the most heinous act that has occurred in the world, since the crucifixion of jesus christ, is that which has been recently committed by the french; an act which the italians and the spaniards, ardent as they are, are far from applauding in their heart, since it was a deed too full of blood, for the greater part innocent, and too much suspected of fraud, which had violated the pledged security of a great king, and disturbed the serenity of the royal nuptials of his sister, insupportable to be heard by the ears of princes, and abominable to all classes of subjects, perpetrated contrary to all law, divine or human, and without a parallel among all acts ever undertaken in the presence of any prince, and which has even rather involved the king of france in danger than rescued him from it."[ ] [sidenote: the ambassador disheartened.] the success of the french ambassador, therefore, was not flattering. the most that he could do was to correct the impression that the massacre was only a part of a more general plan for the extirpation of protestantism everywhere. but when the news came of the barbarous butchery of huguenots in lyons and elsewhere; when villiers, fuguerel, and other protestant ministers escaping from france, brought to london the report that one hundred thousand victims to religious intolerance had fallen since st. bartholomew's day;[ ] when english merchants who had witnessed the scenes of horror at rouen returned, bringing a true account of what had occurred; when they overturned the audacious assertion that religion had nothing to do with the deed, by declaring that the huguenots whose lives were spared were constrained to go to mass; that numbers had lost their lives who might have saved them by consenting to take part in services which they regarded as idolatrous; that there were instances of children taken from their parents, and forcibly rebaptized; when, in short, every assertion of la mothe fénélon was disproved, the irritation of the english grew deeper. and at last the french ambassador was forced to confess that they would believe neither him nor the despatches that he occasionally produced, saying that the event, which is wont to give the lie to words and letters, showed them what they had to fear.[ ] the life of mary, queen of scots, was in danger. there were many who regarded it as a measure of self-defence to put to death so open a sympathizer with the work of persecution. la mothe fénélon, disheartened, promised catharine de' medici to do all that he could to promote the interests of france, but the chief influence must come from the king and herself. "otherwise," he said, "your word will come to be of no authority, and i shall become ridiculous in everything that i tell them or promise them in your name."[ ] [sidenote: letter of sir thomas smith.] about the same time one of the most acute statesmen, one of the most vigorous writers of the age, sir thomas smith, himself a former ambassador at the french court, correctly and eloquently expressed the universal feeling of true protestants in england, in a letter to walsingham which has become deservedly famous. "what warrant can the french make, now seals and words of princes being traps to catch innocents and bring them to the butchery? if the admiral and all those murdered on that bloody bartholomew day were guilty, why were they not apprehended, imprisoned, interrogated, and judged, but so much made of as might be, within two hours of the assumation? is that the manner to handle men either culpable or suspected? so is the journeyer slain by the robber; so is the hen of the fox; so is the hind of the lion; so abel of cain; so the innocent of the wicked; so abner of joab. but grant they were guilty--they dreamt treason that night in their sleep; what did the innocent men, women, and children at lyons? what did the sucking children and their mothers at roan (rouen) deserve? at cane (caen)? at rochel?... will god, think you, still sleep? will not their blood ask vengeance; shall not the earth be accursed that hath sucked up the innocent blood poured out like water upon it?... i am glad you shall come home, and would wish you were at home, out of that country so contaminate with innocent blood, that the sun cannot look upon it but to prognosticate the wrath and vengeance of god. the ruin and desolation of jerusalem could not come till all the christians were either killed there or expelled thence."[ ] [sidenote: catharine's unsuccessful representations.] neither catharine nor charles was insensible to the impression made upon the english court by the french atrocities. it became important to furnish, if possible, some more convincing proofs of the existence of a huguenot plot, since the assurances of both monarch and ambassador had lost all weight. the papers of the admiral, both in paris and in his castle of châtillon-sur-loing, had been searched in vain for anything which, even after the murder, might seem to justify the king in violating his pledged word and every principle of law and right. not a scrap of a letter could be found inculpating him. not the slightest approach to a hint that it would be well to make way with the king or any of the royal family. the most private manuscripts of the admiral, unlike those of many courtiers even in our own day, contained not a disrespectful expression, nothing that could be twisted into a mark of disaffection or treason. catharine could lay her hand upon nothing that suited her purpose better than the paper, which, as stated in a former chapter,[ ] she showed to walsingham, wherein he advised charles to keep elizabeth and philip "as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of his crown." but the finesse of the queen mother failed of accomplishing its object; for neither elizabeth nor walsingham would think less of coligny for proving himself faithful to his own sovereign's interests. elizabeth's incredulity was, doubtless, enhanced by the hypocritical pretence of catharine that her son intended to maintain his edict of pacification in full force.[ ] "the king's meaning is," the queen mother once said to the english envoy, "that the huguenots shall enjoy the liberty of their conscience." "what, madam," observed walsingham, "and the exercise of their religion too?" "no," catharine replied, "my son will have exercise but of one religion in his realm." "then, how can it agree, that the observation of the edict, whereof you willed me to advertise the queen my mistress, that the same should continue in his former strength?" interposed walsingham. to that catharine answered "that they had discovered certain matters of late, that they saw it necessary to abolish all exercise of the same." "why, madam," said the puzzled and somewhat pertinacious diplomatist, "will you have them live without exercise of religion?" "even," quoth catharine, who fancied that she had discovered a pertinent retort, "even as your mistress suffereth the catholics of england." but the ambassador could not be so easily silenced. parrying the home thrust, and trenching on an uncourtly bluntness of speech, he quietly called attention to a distinction which her majesty had not perhaps observed. "my mistress did never promise them anything by edict; if she had, she would not fail to have performed it." after that, there was plainly nothing more to be said, and catharine resorted to the usual refuge of worsted argument, and said: "the queen your mistress must direct the government of her own country, and the king my son his own."[ ] [sidenote: briquemault and cavaignes hung for alleged conspiracy.] some victims were needed to be immolated upon the altar of justice to atone for the alleged huguenot conspiracy. they were found in briquemault and cavaignes, two distinguished protestants. the former, a knight of the royal order, had, contrary to all rules of international law, been forcibly taken from the house of the english ambassador, whither he had fled for refuge.[ ] it was not difficult for the court to obtain what was desired from the cowardly parliament over which christopher de thou presided. convicted by false testimony, and complaining that even their own words were falsified by their partial judges, the two protestants were publicly hung on the place de grève. it was noticed that they both died exhibiting great fortitude,[ ] and protesting to the last that they had neither taken part in, nor even heard of any plot against the king or the state. charles, hardened by the sight of so much blood, wished to witness in person this new spectacle also, and not only looked on from a neighboring window, but, as it was too dark to see the sufferers distinctly, ordered torches to be lighted, and diverted himself with great laughter in observing their expiring agonies. the king of navarre and the prince of condé were likewise forced to be present, in order to give color to the absurd story that one or both had been included among those whom coligny and the huguenots had intended to murder. an hour after, and the parisian populace cut down the bodies, dragged them in contumely through the streets, and amused themselves by stabbing them, shooting at them, and maiming them. it was an additional aggravation of the judicial crime and the king's ill-timed merriment, that the execution took place on the evening of the day upon which the young queen of france gave birth to charles's only legitimate child--a daughter, whom the salic law excluded from the succession to the throne. still unconvinced of coligny's guilt, even by the conviction and death of briquemault and cavaignes, queen elizabeth very frankly expressed to la mothe fénélon her deep regret that her brother, the french king, had profaned the day of his daughter's birth by the sanguinary spectacle he had that evening gone to behold.[ ] [sidenote: the news in scotland;] in scotland, when the news of the massacre arrived, the aged reformer, john knox, summoned all his remaining energy to preach a last time before the regent and the estates. in the midst of his sermon, turning to du croc, the french ambassador, who was present, he sternly addressed to him these prophetic words: "go tell your king that sentence has gone out against him, that god's vengeance shall never depart from him nor his house, that his name shall remain an execration to the posterities to come, and that none that shall come of his loins shall enjoy that kingdom unless he repent." the indignant ambassador called upon the regent "to check the tongue which was reviling an anointed king;" but the regent refused to silence the minister of god, and suffered du croc to leave edinburgh in anger.[ ] [sidenote: in germany;] monsieur de vulcob, the french ambassador at the court of the emperor of germany, was equally unsuccessful in convincing that monarch of the truth of the story contained in his despatches from paris. the emperor did not disguise his great disappointment and sorrow, nor his belief that the murderous project had been known for weeks before at rome.[ ] it need scarcely be said that the negotiations of schomberg, who had been sent to procure an offensive and defensive alliance between the protestant princes of germany and the crown of france, were rendered abortive by the advent of tidings of the treacherous massacre at paris. like the rest of the diplomatists sent out from france, the able envoy to germany had been left in profound ignorance of the blow that was to disturb all his calculations. he had even been empowered to promise that charles would assume toward the enterprise of william of orange the same position that the princes would take; and he seemed likely to be successful in inducing the princes to make common cause with his master. to schomberg, as to the rest, there had been despatched, on the very day that coligny was wounded, a narrative of that event to be laid before the protestant princes--a narrative wherein the occurrence was deplored; wherein charles stated that he had taken just such measures for the apprehension of the perpetrator of the crime as he would have taken had the victim been one of his own brothers; wherein he promised to spare neither diligence nor trouble, and to inflict condign punishment, "in order that all men might know that no greater misdeed could have been committed in his kingdom, nor more displeasing to himself;" wherein he protested his unalterable determination to maintain completely and sedulously his edict of pacification.[ ] but to schomberg, as to the other french ambassadors, there had come subsequent tidings and despatches giving the lie to all these assurances. and now, as he wrote home with some bitterness, "all his negotiations had ended in smoke."[ ] their highnesses "could not get it out of their heads" that the events of st. bartholomew's day were premeditated, with the view of enabling the duke of alva to make way with the forces of the prince of orange. so high did feeling run, that the rumor prevailed that schomberg had been thrown into prison as an accomplice in the perfidy, and that coligny's death was about to be avenged upon him.[ ] instead of forming an alliance with charles, the landgrave of hesse and the three protestant electors began instantly to concert measures of defence against what they verily believed to be a general war of extermination, set on foot by the pope and his followers, in pursuance of the resolutions of the council of trent. "the princes of the augsburg confession," wrote landgrave william to the electors of saxony and brandenburg, "can see in this inhuman incident, as in a mirror, how the papists are disposed toward all the professors of the pure doctrine. the pope and his party follow even at this day the rule which they followed respecting john huss in the council of constance. when it is their interest so to act, they do not deem themselves bound to keep any faith with heretics.... last year the pope and his followers obtained a glorious victory over the turk. it is of the very nature of victories that they commonly make the victors more insolent." to frederick the pious, elector palatine, the landgrave wrote a day later: "there is nothing better for us germans than to have nothing to do with them; for neither credit nor confidence can be reposed in them." "i marvel greatly," he added, "that the admiral and the other huguenot gentlemen, although they, too, had doubtless studied macchiavelli's 'il principe'--_the italian bible_[ ]--should have been so trustful, and should not have been too much upon their guard to suffer themselves to be enticed unarmed into so suspicious a place."[ ] [sidenote: in poland.] montluc, bishop of valence, had just been sent to poland to endeavor to secure the vacant throne for henry of anjou. his ultimate success and its consequences will be seen in another place. but now the attempt seemed desperate. the bishop, who was the most wily and experienced negotiator the french court possessed, and was fully conscious of his rare qualifications, was vexed almost beyond endurance at the stupidity of the king and queen who had employed him. "by the despatch i send the king, and by what the dean of die will tell you," he wrote (on the twentieth of november) to one of the secretaries of state, "you will learn how this unfortunate blast from france has sunk the ship which we had already brought to the mouth of the harbor. you may imagine how well pleased the person who was in command of it has reason to be when he sees that by another's fault he loses the fruit of his labors. i say another's fault, for, since a desire was felt for this kingdom, the execution which has been made might and ought to have been deferred."[ ] again and again montluc begged that there might be no repetition of such cruelties, suggesting that an edict, guaranteeing that no one's conscience should be constrained, might be made or fabricated. if the king had no intention of carrying it into effect, he could at least send it to the governors, with private orders to make such disposition of it as he pleased.[ ] but, above all, there must be no fresh outrages done to the protestants. "if between this and the day of the election there were to come the news of some cruelty," he wrote in midwinter, "we could do nothing, even had we here ten millions in gold with which to gain men over. the king and the duke of anjou will have to consider whether a purpose of revenge is of more moment to them, than the acquisition of a kingdom."[ ] [sidenote: sympathy of the genevese.] the ministers of geneva, somewhat removed from the mists that prevented the greater part of the huguenot leaders from descrying the perils environing them, had long foreseen the coming catastrophe, and had in vain implored admiral coligny, in particular, to have a greater care for his safety. "how often have i predicted it to him! how often have i warned him!" exclaimed theodore beza, in the first paroxysm of grief at the assassination of his noble friend.[ ] the city government, participating in the same apprehensions, early in the fatal month of august, , instructed some of the reformed ministers who had occasion to revisit their native land on private business, to hasten out of a country where they were exposed to the treachery of a florentine woman.[ ] their solicitude was only too well grounded. on saturday, the thirtieth of august, some merchants arrived in geneva from lyons, with the appalling intelligence that their protestant countrymen were everywhere the victims of unparalleled cruelty. from the inn they went on without delay to the city hall, and narrated to the magistrates the revolting atrocities of which they had been eye-witnesses. they besought the city to prepare hospitable shelter and food for the throng of refugees who would soon make their appearance, having scarce escaped the bloody snares in which their brethren in great numbers had lost their lives.[ ] "the frightful news," writes the historian of the genevan church, describing the scene, "courses through the city with the speed of lightning: the shops are closed, and the citizens assemble on the public squares. they know, by past experience, the burdens and sacrifices that await men of good-will. within doors, the women get in readiness an abundance of clothing, of medicines, and of food. the magistrates send wagons and litters to the villages of the district of gex; and the peasants with their pastors take their station upon the border, to obtain intelligence and to render assistance to the first that may arrive. they have not long to wait. on the first of september a few travellers make their appearance, pale, worn out with fatigue, scarcely answering the greeting they receive. they cannot credit the reality of their deliverance. for days death has been lying in wait for them at the threshold of every village. soon their numbers increase. the wounded uncover the wounds they have carefully concealed, that they might not be taken for reformers. they declare that, since the twenty-sixth of august, the country and the cities have been deluged with the blood of their brethren."[ ] nobly did the citizens of the little commonwealth welcome the scarred and bleeding confessors of their faith, contending with magnanimous rivalry for the most cruelly mangled, and carrying them in triumph into their homes and to their frugal boards. not one refugee was suffered to find his way to the city hall; and there was no need of any public distribution of alms.[ ] within a few days twenty-three hundred families of french protestants were gathered in the hospitable inclosure of geneva. besides those that subsequently returned to france, on the arrival of more propitious times, more than two hundred of these families yet remain, comprising the most honorable citizens of the republic.[ ] a solemn fast was instituted. in the presence of the remarkable assembly gathered in the old cathedral of saint pierre, no word of threatening, no prayer for vengeance was uttered. but a firm conviction of the power and goodness of god seemed to dwell in every heart, and was uttered in impressive words by theodore beza--since calvin's death, eight years before, the leading theologian of geneva. "the hand of the lord is not shortened," said the reformer. "he will not suffer a hair of our head to fall to the ground without his will. let us not, therefore, be at all affrighted because of the plot of the men who have unjustly devised to put us all to death with our wives and our children. let us rather be assured, that, if the lord has ordained to deliver all or any of us, none shall be able to resist him. if it shall please him that we all die, let us not fear; for it is our father's good pleasure to give us another home, which is the heavenly kingdom, in which there is no change, no poverty, no want, no tear, no crying, no mourning, no sorrow, but, on the contrary, eternal joy and blessedness. it is far better to be lodged with the beggar lazarus in the bosom of abraham, than with the rich man, with cain, with saul, with herod, or with judas, in hell. meanwhile, we must drink the cup which the lord has prepared for us, each according to his portion. we must not be ashamed of the cross of christ, nor be loth to drink the gall of which he has first drunk: knowing that our sorrow shall be turned into joy, and that we shall laugh in our turn, when the wicked shall weep and gnash their teeth."[ ] twenty huguenot pastors from france were among the refugees, and were kindly invited to take part in the honorable office of preaching in the churches. they preferred, however, to sit among the hearers, and listen to the sermons of beza and his venerated colleagues.[ ] [sidenote: their generosity and danger.] heaven smiled on the generous hospitality of the little republic. the plague, which had been raging in geneva, disappeared simultaneously with the arrival of the fugitives from france.[ ] still the burden which their hosts had assumed was by no means light. they were not rich, and the rigorous winter that followed would have reduced them to great straits even without this additional drain upon their resources. besides, they had incurred the dangerous enmity of the king of france. while professing deep gratitude to the genevese for the advice they had given to the protestants of nismes to liberate the agents of the royal court, who had been sent to procure their destruction, but had been discovered and incarcerated, charles the ninth was in secret plotting the ruin of the city which furnished an asylum to so many of his persecuted subjects. at one time the danger was imminent. the duke of savoy was reported to have collected an army of eighteen thousand men near chambéry and annecy, while rumors of domestic treachery took so definite a form, that it was said that two hundred papal soldiers in the disguise of protestant refugees were lurking in geneva itself. on the other hand, the roman catholic cantons of fribourg and soleure, when on the point of joining berne and zurich in sending assistance, undertook to stipulate for the reinstatement of the mass within the walls of geneva; and the genevese, who, whatever other faults they might possess, were no cowards, declined an alliance upon such conditions.[ ] but the threatened contest of arms never came. by one of those strange turns of affairs, which, from their frequent recurrence in the history of geneva, an impartial beholder can scarcely interpret otherwise than as interpositions of providence in behalf of a city that was destined for ages to be a safe refuge for the oppressed confessors of a purer faith, the storm was dissipated as rapidly as it had gathered. the bodily ailments of charles the ninth were, humanly speaking, the salvation of geneva.[ ] in other parts of switzerland the king of france made great efforts to counteract the injurious influence upon his interests which the intelligence of the massacre could but exert. almost immediately after the events of the last week of august, the royal ambassador, monsieur de la fontaine, and the treasurer whom the french monarch was accustomed to keep in switzerland, were instructed to write out an account for the benefit of his majesty's "best and perfect friends," "the magnificent seigniors," wherein among the numerous falsehoods with which they attempted to feed the unsophistical mountaineers, was at least a single truth: "this young and magnanimous prince, since his accession to the throne, has, so to speak, reaped only thorns in place of a sceptre."[ ] [sidenote: impression at baden.] a little later m. de bellièvre, his special envoy at the diet of baden, was profuse in assurances to the effect that the deed was not premeditated, but had been rendered necessary by the machinations of the admiral--"a wretched man, or rather, not a man, but a furious and irreconcilable beast who had lost all fear of god and man." he particularly defended the king from all responsibility for the excesses that had been committed, insisting that it was the people that "had taken the bit in its teeth," while charles, anjou, and alençon, did their best to check its mad impetuosity, and catharine felt "unspeakable regret."[ ] but the envoy had little reason to congratulate himself upon his success. "sire," he wrote with some disgust to his master, "it is all but impossible to get it out of the heads of the protestants, that your majesty's intention is to join the rest of the catholic princes, in order by force to put (the decrees of) the council of trent into execution in their countries." they would not be satisfied entirely by bellièvre's plausible explanations. "simple and rude people are violently excited by such things, and are very difficult to be reassured."[ ] [sidenote: medals and vindications.] charles the ninth stood convicted in the eyes of the world of a great crime. no elaborate vindications, by their sophistry, or by barefaced misstatements of facts, could clear him, in the judgment of impartial men of either creed, from the guilt of such a butchery of his subjects as scarcely another monarch on record had ever perpetrated. medals were early struck in honor of the event, upon which "valor and piety"--the king's motto--were represented as gloriously exhibited in the destruction of rebels and heretics.[ ] but the wise regarded it as "a cruelty worse than scythian," and deplored the realm where "_neither piety nor justice_ restrained the malice and sword of the raging populace."[ ] the protestants of all countries--and they were his natural allies against spanish ambition for world-empire--had forever lost confidence in the honor of charles of valois. multis minatur, qui uni facit, injuriam. "if that king be author and doer of this act," wrote the earl of leicester, expressing the common judgment of the civilized world, "shame and confusion light upon him; be he never so strong in the sight of men, the lord hath not his power for naught.... if he continue in confirming the fact, and allowing the persons that did it, then must he be a prince detested of all honest men, what religion soever they have; for as his fact was ugly, so was it inhumane. for whom should a man trust, if not his prince's word; and these men he hath put to slaughter, not only had his word, but his writing, and not public, but private, with open proclamations and all other manner of declarations that could be devised for the safety, which now being violated and broken, who can believe and trust him?"[ ] [sidenote: disastrous effects of the massacre on charles himself.] upon the king himself the results of the fearful atrocities which he had been induced by his mother and brother to sanction, were equally lasting and disastrous. the change was startling even to those who were its chief cause: from a gentle boy he had become transformed into a morose and cruel man. "the king is grown now so bloody-minded," writes one who enjoyed good opportunities of observing him, "as they that advised him thereto do repent the same, and do fear that the old saying will prove true," "_malum consilium consultori pessimum_."[ ] the story of the frenzy of charles who, on one occasion, seemed to be resolved to take the lives of navarre and condé, unless they should instantly recant, and was only prevented by the entreaties of his young wife, may be exaggerated.[ ] but certain it is that the unhappy king was the victim of haunting memories of the past, which, while continually robbing him of peace of mind, sometimes drove him to the borders of madness. agrippa d'aubigné tells us, on the often repeated testimony of henry of navarre, that one night, a week after the massacre, charles leaped up in affright from his bed, and summoned his gentlemen of the bedchamber, as well as his brother-in-law, to listen to a confused sound of cries of distress and lamentations, similar to that which he had heard on the eventful night of the butchery. so convinced was he that his ears had not deceived him, that he gave orders that the new attack which he fancied to be made upon the partisans of montmorency should at once be repressed by his guards. it was not until the soldiers returned with the assurance that everything was quiet throughout the city, that he consented to retire to his rest again. for an entire week the delusive cries seemed to return at the self-same hour.[ ] these fancies--the creations of his fevered brain--may soon have left him, not to return until the general closing in at the death-bed. but there were marks of the violence of the passions of which he was the victim in his altered mien and deportment. even before the event that has fixed upon him an infamous notoriety, he acted at times like a madman in the indulgence of his whims and coarse tastes. sir thomas smith, five months before the fatal st. bartholomew's day, wrote of "his inordinate hunting, so early in the morning and so late at night, without sparing frost, snow or rain, and in so desperate doings as makes her (his mother) and them that love him to be often in great fear."[ ] but now the picture, as faithfully drawn by the friendly hand of the venetian ambassador, early in the year , is still more pitiful. his countenance had become sad and forbidding. when obliged to give audience to the representatives of foreign powers, as well as in his ordinary interviews, he avoided the glance of those who addressed him. he bent his head toward the ground and shut his eyes. at short intervals he would open them with a start, and in a moment, as though the effort caused him pain, he would close them again with no less suddenness. "it is feared," adds the writer, "that the spirit of vengeance has taken possession of him; formerly he was only severe, now his friends dread lest he will become cruel." he must at all hazards find hard work to do. he was on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours, and pursued the same deer for two or three days, stopping only to take nourishment, or snatch a little rest at night. his hands were scarred and callous. when in the palace, his passion for violent exercise drove him to the forge, where for three or four hours he would work without intermission, with a ponderous hammer fashioning a cuirass or some other piece of armor, and exhibiting more pride in being able to tire out his gentle competitors, than in more royal accomplishments.[ ] we have no means of tracing accurately the influence of the massacre upon others. the abbé brantôme, however, early pointed out the remarkable fact that of those who took a principal part in the work of murder and rapine many soon after met with violent deaths, either at the siege of la rochelle or in the ensuing wars, and that the riches they had so iniquitously accumulated profited them little.[ ] [sidenote: how far was the roman church responsible?] before dismissing the consideration of the stupendous crime for which divine vengeance--to use the words of sully--"made france atone by twenty-six consecutive years of disaster, carnage, and horror,"[ ] it is at once interesting and important to glance at a historical question which still agitates the world, and for a correct and impartial solution of which we are, perhaps, more favorably situated than were even the contemporaries of the event. i allude to the inquiry respecting the extent to which the roman church, and the pope in particular, must be held responsible for the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. so far as queen catharine was concerned (and the same is true of some of her advisers), it is admitted by all that no zeal for religion controlled her conduct. a dissolute and ambitious woman, and, moreover, almost an avowed atheist, she could not have acted from a sincere but mistaken belief that it was her duty to exterminate heresy. but among the inferior agents it can scarcely be doubted that there were some who believed themselves to be doing god service in ridding the world of the enemies of his church. had not the preachers in their sermons extolled the deed as the most meritorious that could be performed, and as furnishing an unquestionable passport to paradise? the number, however, of these _religious_ assassins--if so we may style them--could be but small in comparison with the multitude of those to whom religion served merely as a pretext, while cupidity or partisan hatred was the true motive; men who, nevertheless, derived their incentive from the lessons of their spiritual guides, and who would never have dreamed of giving loose rein to their passions, but for the suggestions of these sanguinary teachers. at the bar of history the priesthood that countenanced assassination must be held no less accountable for the actions of this class than for the deeds of more sincere devotees. it is immaterial to the question of the responsibility of the papal church, whether the queen mother and the king's ministers were honest, or were roman catholics, or, indeed, christians only in name. if the pope had for years, by letter and by his accredited agents, been insinuating that the life of a heretic was a thing of little value; if he systematically advocated a war of extermination, and opposed every negotiation for peace, every truce, every edict of pacification that did not look to the annihilation of the huguenots; if he had familiarized the minds of king and queen with the thought of justifiable massacre, it is of little importance to ascertain whether his too ready pupils executed the injunction from a pure desire to further the interests of the papal see, or with more selfish designs. unfortunately for humanity and for religion, the course i have indicated was that which had been consistently and indefatigably pursued during the entire pontificate of pius the fifth, and during the few months that had elapsed since the election of his successor. [sidenote: gregory probably not aware of the intended massacre.] contrary to the firm persuasion of the protestants who wrote contemporary accounts of the massacre, we must in all probability, as we have already seen,[ ] acquit gregory the thirteenth of any knowledge of the disaster impending over the admiral and the huguenots. it was what he wished for and prayed for, but with little hope of seeing the accomplishment. in fact, he was brought to the verge of despair in respect to the hold of the papacy upon the kingdom of france. nuncio salviati, at paris, had, indeed, conceived the hope that some disaster would befall the huguenots in consequence of coligny's imprudence and the desperation of the queen mother and of the roman catholic party at finding the authority slipping from their hands. but his astonishment and that of the pontiff at the general massacre of the protestants was surpassed only by their common delight. the fragments of the despatches from salviati to the roman secretary of state, which have been suffered to find their way into print, seem to settle this point beyond all controversy. [sidenote: pius the fifth instigates the french court.] [sidenote: he indorses the cruelties of alva.] we have in previous chapters seen the pope assisting charles with money and troops in the prosecution of the last two wars against the huguenots. but this aid was accompanied with perpetual exhortations to do the work thoroughly, and not to repeat the mistakes committed by his predecessors. "that heresy cannot be tolerated in the same kingdom with the worship of the catholic religion," writes pius the fifth to sigismund augustus of poland, "is proved by that very example of the kingdom of france, which your majesty brings up for the purpose of excusing yourself. if the former kings of france had not suffered this evil to grow by neglect and indulgence, they would easily have been able to extirpate heresy and secure the peace and quiet of their realm."[ ] of all the leaders of the day, the duke of alva alone earned, by his unrelenting destruction of heretics, the unqualified approval of the pontiff. when the tidings of the successes of the "blood council" reached rome, pius could not contain himself for joy. he must congratulate the duke, and spur him on in a course upon which the blessing of heaven so manifestly rested. "nothing can occur to us," said he, "more glorious for the dignity of the church, or more delightful to the truly paternal disposition of our mind to all men, than when we perceive that warriors and very brave generals, such as we previously knew you to be and now find you in this most perilous war, consult not their own interest, nor their own glory alone, but war in behalf of that almighty god who stands ready to crown his soldiers contending for him and his glory, not with a corruptible crown, but with one that is eternal and fadeth not away."[ ] [sidenote: he repeatedly counsels exterminating the huguenots.] with this express indorsement of alva's merciless cruelty before us, it is not difficult to understand what pius demanded of charles of france. early in , while sending the duke of sforza with auxiliaries, he wrote to the king: "when god shall by his kindness have given to you and to us, as we hope, the victory, it will be your duty to punish the heretics and their leaders with all severity, and thus justly to avenge not only your own wrongs, but those of almighty god: in order that, by your execution of the righteous judgment of god, they may pay the penalty which they have deserved by their crimes."[ ] after the battle of jarnac and condé's death, we have seen that pius wrote promptly, bidding charles "pursue and destroy the remnants of the enemy, and wholly tear up not only the roots of an evil so great and which had gathered to itself such strength, but even the very fibres of the roots." he begged him not to spare those who had not spared god nor their king.[ ] to catharine and to the duke of anjou, to the cardinal of bourbon, and to the cardinal of lorraine, the same language was addressed. again and again the pope held up the example of saul, who disregarded the commands of the lord through samuel and spared the amalekites, as a solemn warning against disobedience. to the queen mother he said: "under no circumstances and from no considerations ought the enemies of god to be spared.[ ] if your majesty shall continue, as heretofore, to seek with right purpose of mind and a simple heart the honor of almighty god, and shall assail the foes of the catholic religion openly and freely even to extermination,[ ] be well assured that the divine assistance will never fail, and that still greater victories will be prepared by god for you and for the king your son, until, _when all shall have been destroyed_, the pristine worship of the catholic religion shall be restored to that most illustrious realm."[ ] the duke of anjou was urged to incite his brother to punish the rebels with great severity, and to be inexorable in refusing the prayers of all who would intercede for them.[ ] charles was given to understand that if, induced by any motives, he should defer the punishment of god's enemies, he would certainly tempt the divine patience to change to anger.[ ] the victory of moncontour furnished an occasion for fresh exhortations to the king not to neglect to inflict upon the enemies of almighty god the punishments fixed by the laws. "for what else would this be," said pius, "than to make of no effect the blessing of god, namely, victory itself, whose fruit indeed consists in this, that by just punishment the execrable heretics, common enemies, having been taken away, the former peace and tranquillity should be restored to the kingdom. and do not allow yourself, by the suggestion of the empty name of pity, to be deceived so far as to seek, by pardoning divine injuries, to obtain false praise for compassion; for nothing is more cruel than that pity and compassion which is extended to the impious and those who deserve the worst of torments."[ ] the work begun by victories in the field was, therefore, to be completed by the institution of inquisitors of the faith in every city, and the adoption of such other measures as might, with god's help, at length create the kingdom anew and restore it to its former state.[ ] as often as rumors of negotiations for peace reached him, pius was in anguish of soul, and wrote to charles, to catharine, to anjou, to the french cardinals, in almost the same words. he protested that, as light has no communion with darkness, so no compact between catholics and heretics could be other than feigned and full of treachery.[ ] as the prospect of peace grew more distinct, his prognostications of coming disaster grew darker, and sounded almost like threats. even if the heretics, in concluding the peace, had no intention of laying snares, god would put it into their minds as a punishment to the king. "now, how fearful a thing it is to fall into the hands of the living god, who is wont not only to chastise the corrupt manners of men by war, but, on account of the sins of kings and people, to dash kingdoms in pieces, and to transfer them from their ancient masters to new ones, is too evident to need to be proved by examples."[ ] when at last the peace of saint germain was definitely concluded, the pope did not cease to lament over "a pacification in which the conquered heretics imposed upon the victorious king conditions so horrible and so pernicious that he could not speak of them without tears." and he expressed at the same time his paternal fears lest the young charles and those who had consented to the unholy compact would be given over to a reprobate mind, that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear.[ ] to his last breath pius retained the same thirst for the blood of the heretics of france. he violently opposed the marriage of the king's sister to henry of navarre, and instructed his envoy at the french court to bring up again that "matter of conciliation so fatal to the catholics."[ ] his last letters are as sanguinary as his first. meanwhile his acts corresponded with his words, and left the king of france and his mother in no doubt respecting the value which the pretended vicegerent of god upon earth, and the future saint,[ ] set upon the life of a heretic; for, when the town of mornas was on one occasion captured by the roman catholic forces, and a number of prisoners were taken, pius--"such," his admiring biographer informs us, "was his burning zeal for religion"--ransomed them from the hands of their captors, that he might have the satisfaction of ordering their public execution in the pontifical city of avignon![ ] and when the same holy father learned that count santa fiore, the commander of the papal troops sent to charles's assistance, had accepted the offer of a ransom for the life of a distinguished huguenot nobleman, he wrote to him complaining bitterly that he had disobeyed his orders, which were that every heretic that fell into his hands should straightway be put to death.[ ] as, however, pius wanted not huguenot treasure, but huguenot blood, with more consistency than at first appears, he ordered the captive nobleman whose head had been spared to be released without ransom.[ ] with such continual papal exhortations to bloodshed, before us, with such suggestive examples of the treatment which heretics ought, according to the pontiff, to receive, and in the light of the extravagant joy displayed at rome over the consummation of the massacre, we can scarcely hesitate to find the head of the roman catholic church guilty--if not, by a happy accident, of having known or devised the precise mode of its execution, at least of having long instigated and paved the way for the commission of the crime. without the teachings of pius the fifth, the conspiracy of catharine and anjou would have been almost impossible. without the preaching of priests and friars at lent and advent, the passions of the low populace could not have been inflamed to such a pitch as to render it capable of perpetrating atrocities which will forever render the reign of charles the ninth infamous in the french annals. * * * * * [sidenote: a german account of the massacre at orleans.] one of the most vivid accounts of the massacre in any city outside of paris is the contemporary narrative of johann wilhelm von botzheim, a young german, who was at the time pursuing his studies in orleans. it forms the sequel to the description of the parisian massacre, to which reference has already been made several times, and was first published by dr. f. w. ebeling, in his "archivalische beiträge zur geschichte frankreichs unter carl ix." (leipsic, ), - . it was also translated into french by m. charles read, for the number of the bulletin de la société de l'histoire du protestantisme français issued on the occasion of the tercentenary of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. the chief interest of the narration centres in the anxieties and dangers of the little community of germans in attendance upon the famous law school. besides this, however, much light is thrown upon the general features of the bloody transactions. the first intimation of coligny's wounding reached the protestants as they were returning from the prêche, but created less excitement because of the statement accompanying it, that charles was greatly displeased at the occurrence. that night a messenger arrived with letters addressed to the provost of the city, announcing the death of the admiral and the huguenots of paris, and enjoining the like execution at orleans. although the letters bore the royal seal, the information they contained appeared so incredible that the provost commanded the messenger to be imprisoned until two captains, whom he at once despatched to paris, returned bringing full confirmation of the story. the provost, a man averse to bloodshed, issued, early on monday morning as a precautionary measure, an order to guard the city gates. but the control of affairs rapidly passed out of his hands, and, threatened with death because of his moderate counsels, the provost was himself forced to take refuge for safety in the citadel. ten captains at the head of as many bands of soldiers, ruled the city, and were foremost in the work of murder and rapine that now ensued. but there were other bands engaged in the same occupation, not to speak of single persons acting strictly on their own account. moreover, four hundred ruffians came in from the country, intent upon making up for losses which they pretended to have sustained during the late civil wars. they showed no mercy to the huguenots that fell into their hands. of the protestants scarcely one made resistance, so hopeless was their situation. pierre pillier, a bell founder, had indeed barred his door with iron, but, finding that his assailants were on the point of forcing the entrance, he first threw his money from a window, and then, seizing his opportunity when the miscreants were scrambling for their prize, deluged them with molten lead, after which he set fire to his house, and perished, with his wife and children, in the flames. there is, happily, no need of repeating here the shocking details of the butchery told by the student. as a german, and not generally known to be a protestant, he managed to escape the fate of his huguenot friends, but he witnessed, and was forced to appear to applaud, the most revolting exhibitions both of cruelty and of selfishness. his favorite professor, the venerable françois taillebois, after having been twice plundered by bands of marauders, was treacherously conducted by the second band to the loire, despatched with the dagger, and thrown into the river. "the last lecture, which he gave on monday at nine o'clock," says his pupil, "was on the _lex cornelia_ [de sicariis] of which he made the demonstration by the sacrifice of his own life." it is pitiful to read that even professors in the university were not ashamed to enrich their libraries by the plunder of the law-books of their colleagues, or of their scholars. the writer traced his own copies of alciat, of mynsinger and "speculator," to the shelves of laurent godefroid, professor of the pandects, and the entire library of his brother bernhard to those of his neighbor, dr. beaupied, professor of canon law. in the midst of the almost universal unchaining of the worst passions of human or demoniacal nature, it is pleasant to note a few exceptions. some roman catholics were found not only unwilling to imbrue their hands in the blood of their huguenot neighbors and friends, but actually ready to incur personal peril in rescuing them from assassination. such magnanimity, however, was very rare. all respect for authority human or divine, all sense of shame or pity, all fear of hell and hope of heaven, seemed to have been obliterated from the breasts of the murderers. the blasphemous words of the furious captain gaillard, when opposed in his plan to destroy botzheim and his fellow germans, truly expressed the sentiments which others might possibly have hesitated to utter so distinctly. "par la mort dieu! il faut qu'il soit.... il n'y a ny dieu, ny diable, ny juge qui me puisse commander. vostre vie est en ma puissance, il fault mourir.... baillez-moy mon espée, je tuerai l'ung après l'autre, je ne saurois tuer trestous à la fois avec la pistolle." men, with blood-stained hands and clothes, boasted over their cups of having plundered and murdered thirty, forty, fifty men each. at last, on saturday afternoon, after the huguenots had been almost all killed, an edict was published prohibiting murder and pillage on pain of death. gallows, too, were erected in nearly every street, to hang the disobedient; but not a man was hung, and the murders still continued. soon after a second edict directed the restoration of stolen property to its rightful owners; it was a mere trick to entice any remaining huguenot from his refuge and secure his apprehension and death. the huguenots were not even able to recover, at a later time, the property they had intrusted to their roman catholic friends in time of danger, and did not dare to bring the latter before courts of justice. the huguenots killed at orleans, in this writer's opinion, were at least fifteen hundred, perhaps even two thousand, in number. footnotes: [ ] charles ix. to mondoucet, august th, compte rendu de la com. roy. d'histoire, brussels, , iv. . [ ] "estant croiable que ce feu ainsy allumé ira courant par toutes les villes de mon royaume, lesquelles, à l'exemple de ce qui s'est faict en cestedite ville, s'assureront de tous ceulx de ladite religion." charles to mondoucet, aug. th, _ubi supra_, iv. [ ] "car puisqu'il a pleu à dieu conduire les choses ès termes où elles sont, je ne veulx négliger l'occasion, non seulement pour remectre, s'il m'est possible, ung perpétuel repos en mon royaume, mais aussy servir à la chrestienté." [ ] "au surplus, quelque commandement verbal que j'aye peu faire à ceulx que j'aye envoyé tant devers vous que autres gouverneurs ... j'ay révocqué et révocque tout celà, ne voulant que par vous ne autres en soit aucune chose exécuté." charles ix. to mandelot, governor of lyons, correspondance, etc. (paris, ), , ; the same to the mayor of bourges, mém. de l'estat (archives curieuses), vii. . the variations of language are trifling. [ ] he seems at this time to have been at his castle of montsoreau, situated six or seven miles above saumur, on the left bank of the loire, and within a short distance of candes. m. de montsoreau himself is described as "gentilhomme de poictou fort renommé pour beaucoup de pillages et violences, qui finalement luy ont fait perdre la vie, ayant esté tué depuis en qualité de meurtrier." mém. l'estat, . [ ] these letters, and some others relating to the massacre at angers, contained in the archives of the municipality, are printed in the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, xi. ( ) - . [ ] i know, however, of no letters of this kind signed by charles ix. himself. they all seem to have been written by his inferior agents, such as puigaillard in the case of saumur, or masso and rubys in that of lyons. the advantage of this course was apparent. the king could not be _proved_ to have ordered any massacre; he could throw off the responsibility upon others. on the other hand, such politic governors as mandelot were naturally reluctant to act upon instructions which could at any moment be disavowed. the verbal messages of charles himself would seem, from the mandelot correspondence, to have been less definite--perhaps going to no greater lengths than to order the arrest of the persons and the sequestration of the effects of the huguenots. may we not naturally suppose that the king and his council counted upon such subsequent massacres of the imprisoned protestants as occurred in many places? [ ] mémoires de l'estat, , . compare de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] relation of olaegui, simancas mss., bulletins de l'académie royale de belgique, xvi. ( ) , . [ ] the names of nine are given. archives curieuses, vii. . [ ] the procureur cosset did not neglect his own interests, if, as we are informed, his house and courtyard were so full of stolen furniture that it was scarcely possible to enter the premises. [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _apud_ archives curieuses, vii. - . [ ] see _ante_, chapter xviii., p. . [ ] recordon, le protestantisme en champagne (from the mss. of n. pithou, seigneur de chamgobert), paris, , - ; mém. de l'estat, archives curieuses, vii. - . [ ] dr. henry white, besides mistaking the huguenot for the papist, has incorrectly stated the circumstances. massacre of st. bartholomew, . see mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, , and de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, . "le mesme fut fait à paris et en d'autres lieux aussi," writes the same historian. [ ] ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] ibid., . [ ] mémoires de l'estat de france, _ubi supra_, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, , . [ ] ibid., , . [ ] a horrible story is told of the discovery of some human relics several weeks later. ibid., . [ ] see _ante_, p. . [ ] mém. de l'estat, - . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, - . "puigaillard ... homme au reste indigne de vivre pour l'acte détestable par luy commis en la personne de sa première femme tuée à sa sollicitation pour en espouser une autre qu'il entretenoit." (p. .) [ ] registres consulaires, _apud_ "la saint-barthélemy à lyon et le gouverneur mandelot," by m. puyroche, p. . this monograph which i quote from the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, in which it first appeared (vol. xviii., , pp. - , - , and - ), is by far the most accurate and complete treatise on this subject, and contains a fund of fresh information based upon unpublished manuscripts, especially the local records. [ ] charles ix. to mandelot, aug. , , correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot, published by p. paris, (pp. , ). a portion of this letter has already been given. [ ] charles ix. to mandelot, aug. , , correspondance, etc., - . [ ] "monsieur de mandelot, vous croirez le present porteur de ce que je luy ay donné charge de vous dire." ibid., . [ ] "suivant icelles (the king's letters of aug. d and th) et _ce que le sieur du perat m'auroit dict de sa part_, je n'auroit failly pourveoir par toutz moyens à la seureté de ceste ville: _sy bien, sire, que et les cors_ (corps) _et les biens de ceulx de la relligion auroient esté saisiz et mis soubz votre main_ sans aucun tumulte ny scandale." mandelot to charles ix., sept. , , correspondance, etc., . [ ] puyroche, . [ ] "il n'était pas d'avis," dit-il, "que tout le peuple s'en mêlat, craignant quelque désordre, mêmement un sac." puyroche, . [ ] "quelques deux cens," says mandelot to charles ix., sept. d; but he was anxious to make the number as small as possible. jean de masso, "receveur général" (sept. st), says, "sept à huit vingt," and sieur talaize (sept. d), "deux cent soixante et trois." so also coste (sept. d). puyroche, , . [ ] mandelot tells charles ix. (sept. th) that he had sent all the _poorer_ huguenots to other prisons; that he had left here only the rich and those who had borne arms for the protestant cause. to exhibit his own incorruptibility, he added that there were among them, of his own certain knowledge, at least twenty who would have paid a ransom of thirty thousand or even forty thousand crowns, "qui estoit assez," he significantly adds, "pour tenter ung homme corruptible." correspondance du roi charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot, , . [ ] correspondance, etc., p. , . [ ] puyroche, la saint-barthélemy à lyon et le gouverneur mandelot, _ubi supra_; mém. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, - ; crespin, hist. des martyrs, , p. , etc., _apud_ Époques de l'église de lyon (lyon, ), - ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) - , etc.; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. , etc. the number of huguenots killed is variously estimated, by some as high as from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred (crespin, _ubi supra_). it must have been not less than seven hundred or eight hundred; for private letters written immediately after the occurrence by prominent and well-informed roman catholics state it at about seven hundred, and they would certainly not be inclined to exaggerate. the rumor at paris even then set it at twelve hundred. see the letters in puyroche, - . among the one hundred and twenty-three names that have been preserved, the most interesting is that of claude goudimel, who set marot's and beza's psalms to music, and who was killed by envious rivals. at the time of his death he was engaged in adapting the psalms to a more elaborate arrangement, according to a contemporary writer: "excellent musicien, et la mémoire duquel sera perpétuelle pour avoir heureusement besogné les psaumes de david en français, la plupart desquels il a mis en musique en forme de motets à quatre, cinq, six et huit parties, et sans la mort eût tôt après rendu cette oeuvre accomplie." sommaire et vrai discours de la félonie. etc, puyroche, . [ ] "faisant cependant contenir ce peuple par toutes les remontrances et raisons que je puis leur persuader de ne s'émouvoir à aucune sedition ni tumulte, comme je m'aperçois qu'il y en peut avoir quelque danger auquel toutes fois j'espère prévenir." mandelot to charles ix., aug. , , puyroche, . this letter is not contained in paulin paris, correspondance de charles ix. et du sieur de mandelot. [ ] mém. de l'estat, ; de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) . [ ] "je ne veulx estre le premier à en demander à votre majesté; m'asseurant que si elle a commencé par quelques autres, elle me faict tant d'honneur de ne m'oblier (oublier)." mandelot to charles ix., september , , correspondance, p. . i find the clearest evidence both of mandelot's having had no hand in the massacres of august st, and of his utter want of principle, in the craven apology he makes, in his letter of september th, for not having done more, on the ground that he only knew his majesty's pleasure as it were in a shadow, and very late, and that he had rather feared the king would be angry at what the people had done, than that so little had been done! "la pouvant asseurer sur ma vie que si elle n'a esté satisfaitte en ce faict icy, je n'en ay aucune coulpe, n'ayant sceu quelle estoit sa volunté que par umbre, encores bien tard et à demy; et ay craint, sire, que votre majesté fust plustost courroucée de ce que le peuple auroit faict, que de trop peu, d'aultant que par toutes les autres provinces circonvoysines il ne s'est rien touché." correspondance, etc., , . [ ] it is given word for word, from the ms. registers of the parliament, by floquet, hist. du parlement de normandie, iii. - . [ ] _ante_, chapter xvii., p. . [ ] "encor qu'il se soit tousjours monstré fort peu amy de telles inhumanitez." mémoires de l'estat, . [ ] "receut lettres du roy qui luy mandoit et commandoit expressément d'exterminer tous ceux qui faisoyent profession de la religion audit lieu, sans en excepter aucun." mém. de l'estat, arch. cur., vii. . [ ] ibid., . [ ] "il n'y a aultre que vous," said they, "qui puisse commander aux armes céans, contenir le peuple en l'obéissance au roy, et la ville en paix." reg. secr. du parlement, septembre, , _apud_ floquet, . see also reg. de l'hôtel-de-ville de rouen, septembre, _ibid._ [ ] floquet, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _apud_ archives curieuses, vii. . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, _apud_ arch. curieuses, vii. ; floquet, iii. . floquet is incorrect in stating that the names of only about a hundred are known. we have (mém. de l'estat. archives curieuses, vii. - ) a partial list of men, whose names and trades are generally given, and of women--that is , besides a reference to many others whose names the writer did not obtain. [ ] "les autres estoyent _accommodez_ à coups de dague. les massacreurs usoyent de ce mot _accommoder_, l'accommodans à leur bestiale et diabolique cruauté." mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, . [ ] mém. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, . [ ] ibid., . the story of the massacre is well told in the mém. de l'estat, and by m. floquet, whose original sources of information throw a flood of light upon the transactions; also by de thou, iv. (liv. lii.) ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. . [ ] one of them, jean coras, had committed an unpardonable offence. when passing in with the protestant army through roquemadour, in the province of quercy, he had taken advantage of the opportunity to examine the relics of st. amadour, of whom the monks boasted that they possessed not only the bones, but also some of the flesh. he was never forgiven for having exhibited the close resemblance of the holy remains to a shoulder of mutton. de thou, iv. , note. [ ] mém. de l'estat, archives curieuses, vii. - ; de thou, _ubi supra_; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , (liv. i., c. ); jean de serres ( ), iv., fol. . [ ] president lagebaston even says that, had this been suffered to go on a week longer--so rapidly were the protestants flocking to the mass--there would not have been eight huguenots in town. [ ] registers of parliament, in boscheron des portes, hist. du parl. de bordeaux (bordeaux, ), i. . [ ] letter of president lagebaston to charles ix., october , , mackintosh, hist. of england, iii., app. e, - . see also de thou, iv. , , and agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . lagebaston was "first president" of the bordalese parliament, but, so far from being able to prevent the massacre, received information that his own name was on montferrand's list, and fled to the castle of ha, whence he wrote to the king. his remonstrances against a butchery based upon a pretended order which was not exhibited, his delineation of the impolitic and disgraceful work, and his reasons why an execution, that might have been necessary to crush a secret conspiracy at paris, was altogether unnecessary in a city "six or seven score leagues distant," where there could be no thought of a conspiracy, render his letter very interesting. [ ] registres du parlement, boscheron des portes, i. , . [ ] boscheron des portes, _ubi supra_. [ ] claude haton waxes facetious when describing the sudden popularity acquired by the sign of the cross, and the numbers of rosaries that could be seen in the hands, or tied to the belt, of fugitive huguenot ladies. [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, . see _ante_, chapter xviii., p. . [ ] de félice, hist. of the protestants of france (new york, ), , and henry white, , from maimbourg, histoire du calvinisme, . i refer the reader to mr. l. d. paumier's exhaustive discussion of the story in his paper, "la saint-barthélemy en normandie," bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, vi. ( ), - . mr. paumier has also completely demolished the scanty foundation on which rested the similar story told of sigognes, governor of dieppe, pp. - . see also m. c. osmont de courtisigny's monograph, "jean le hennuyer et les huguenots de lisieux en ," in the bulletin, xxvi. ( ) , etc. [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, ; odolant desnos, mémoires historiques sur la ville d'alençon, ii. , _apud_ bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. français, viii. ( ), . the truth of the story as to alençon seems to be proved by the circumstance that when, in february, , matignon marched against alençon, in order to suppress the conspiracy which the duke, charles's youngest brother, had entered into to prevent henry of anjou from succeeding peaceably to the throne of france, the grateful protestants at once opened their gates to him. ibid., , bulletin, _ubi supra_. [ ] tocsain, . [ ] "par lesquelles vous me mandez n'avoir receu aucun commandement verbal de moy, ains seulement mes lettres du , et du passé, dont ne vous mettrez en aucune peine, car elles s'adressoyent seulement à quelques-uns qui s'estoyent trouvez près de moy." charles ix. to gordes, sept. , , archives curieuses, vii. , . [ ] ibid., , . [ ] mémoires de l'estat, archives curieuses, vii. , ; de thou, iv. . the tocsain contre les massacreurs, however, p. , gives credit instead to m. de carces. [ ] dr. white has shown some reasons for doubting the accuracy of the story. among the dulaure mss. is preserved a full account of the manner in which a protestant, fleeing from paris, fell in with the messenger who was carrying the order to st. hérem or héran, and robbed him of his instructions. the protestant hastened on to warn his brethren of their danger, while the messenger could only relate to the governor the contents of the lost despatch. notwithstanding this, eighty huguenots were murdered in one city (aurillac) of this province. massacre of st. bartholomew, , . [ ] adiram d'aspremont. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. (liv. i., c. ). the authenticity of this letter has been much disputed, partly because of the viscount's severe and cruel character (which, however, d'aubigné himself notices when he tells the story), partly because it rests on the sole authority of d'aubigné. it is to be observed, however, that although he alone relates it, he alludes to it in several of his works, as _e.g._, in his tragiques. but the truth of the incident is apparently placed beyond all legitimate doubt by its intimate and necessary connection with an event which d'aubigné narrates considerably later in his history, and from personal knowledge. hist. univ., ii. , (liv. iii., c. ). in , d'aubigné, having lost much of henry of navarre's favor through his fidelity or his bluntness (see mém. de d'aubigné, éd. panth., p. ), retired from nérac to the neighboring town of castel-jaloux, of which he was in command. making a foray at the head of a small detachment of huguenot soldiers, he fell in with and easily routed a roman catholic troop, consisting of a score of light horsemen belonging to viscount d'orthez, and a number of men raised at bayonne and dax, who were conducting three young ladies condemned at bordeaux to be beheaded. the vanquished roman catholics threw themselves on the ground and sued for mercy. on hearing who they were, d'aubigné called to him all those who came from bayonne and then cried out to his followers to treat the rest in memory of the massacre in the prisons of dax. the huguenots needed no further reminder. it was not long before they had cut to pieces the twenty-two men from dax who had fallen into their hands. on the other hand they restored to the soldiers of bayonne their horses and arms, and, after dressing their wounds in a neighboring village, sent them home to tell their governor, viscount d'orthez, "that they had seen the different treatment the huguenots accorded to _soldiers_ and to _hangmen_." a week later, a herald from bayonne arrived at castel-jaloux, with worked scarfs and handkerchiefs for the entire huguenot band. nor did the exchange of courtesies end here. the mad notion seized henry of navarre to accept an invitation to a feast extended to him by the bayonnese. six huguenots accompanied him, of whom d'aubigné was one. the table was sumptuous, the presents were rare and costly. d'aubigné being recognized, was overwhelmed with thanks, "his courtesy being much more liberally repaid than he had deserved;" while the king of navarre and his huguenots, at the table, "at the expense of the rest of france, extolled to heaven the rare and unexampled act and glory of the men of bayonne." it is certainly an easier supposition that d'aubigné has faithfully reproduced d'orthez's letter to charles ix., than that he has manufactured so long and consistent a story. the discussion in the bulletin de la soc. de l'histoire du prot. franç. is full, xi. - , , etc., xii. . [ ] letter of louis de bourbon, duke of montpensier, aug. th (it should evidently be the th; for the duke speaks of coligny as killed "ledit jour d'hier," and the mythical huguenot plot was to have been executed "hier ou aujourd'hui"). bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., i. ( ) , and soldan, geschichte des prot. in frankreich, ii., app., . [ ] the words are those of an inscription of the seventeenth or the early part of the eighteenth century, in the hôtel de ville of nantes. bulletin, i. ( ) . [ ] mém. de l'estat, archives cur., vii. , . [ ] see a table in white, massacre of st. bartholomew, . [ ] narrative appended to capilupi, stratagema di carlo ix. ( ). the cardinal's adulatory letter to charles ix., on receipt of the king's missive, is strongly corroborative of the view to which everything forces us, that the massacre was not long definitely premeditated. "sire," he said, "estant arrivé le sieur de beauville avecques lettres de vostre majesté, qui confirmoyent les nouvelles des tres-crestiennes et héroicques délibération et exéquutions faictes non-seulement à paris, mais aussi partout voz principales villes, je m'asseure qu'il vous plaira bien me tant honorer ... que de vous asseurer que entre tous voz très humbles subjects, je ne suis le dernier à an (en) louer dieu et à me resjouir. et véritablement, sire, c'est tout le myeus (mieux) que j'eusse osé jamais désirer ni espérer. je me tienz asseuré que des ce commencement les actions de vostre majesté accroistront chacung jour à la gloire de dieu et à l'immortalité de vostre nom," etc. card. lorraine to the king, rome, sept. , , mss. nat. library, _apud_ lestoile, éd. michaud et poujoulat, , , note. [ ] conjouissance de mr. le cardinal de lorraine, au nom du roy, faicte au pape, le vije jour de sept. , sur la mort de l'admiral et ses complices. correspondance diplom. de la mothe fénélon, vii. , . also jean de serres ( ) iv., fol. , and in a french translation appended to capilupi, lo stratagema di carlo ix. ( ), - , and reproduced in mém. de l'estat, arch, cur., vii. . [ ] "literis romanis aureis majusculis descriptum, festa fronte velatum, ac lemniscatum, et supra limen aedis sancti ludovici romæ affixum." [ ] the genuineness of this medal, in spite of the clumsy attempts made to discredit it, is established beyond all possible doubt. the jesuit bonanni, in his "numismata pontificum" ( vols. fol., rome, ), has figured and described it as no. of the medals of gregory xiii. a translation of his account and a facsimile of the medal may be seen in the bulletin de la société de l'hist. du prot. français, i. ( ) - . it is also admirably represented in the trésor de numismatique (delaroche, etc., paris, ), médailles des papes, plate , no. . the late alexander thomson, esq., of banchory, aberdeenshire, purchased at the papal mint in the city of rome, in or , among other medals for which he applied, not less than seven copies of this medal, six of them struck off expressly for him from the original die still in possession of the mint. see his own account, given in his memoir by professor smeaton, and reproduced in the _new york evangelist_ of october , . [ ] recueil des lettres missives de henri iv., i. . [ ] see pistolesi, il museo vaticano descritto ed illustrato (roma, ) vol. viii. . there are three paintings, of which the first represents "the king of france sitting in parliament, and approving and ordering that the death of gaspard coligny, grand admiral of france, and declared to be head of the huguenots, be registered." "the mischance of coligny is delineated in the following picture in a spacious square, among many heads of streets (capistrade) and façades of temples. the admiral, clothed in the french costume of that period, is carried in the arms of several military men; although lifeless (estinto, read rather, _faint_), he still preserves in his countenance threatening and terrible looks." the third is the massacre of st. bartholomew's day itself, in which the beholder scarcely knows which to admire most, the artistic skill of the painter, or his success in bringing into a narrow compass so many of the most revolting incidents of the tragedy--the murder of men in the streets, the butchery of helpless and unoffending women, the throwing of coligny's remains from the window of his room, etc. dr. henry white gives a sketch of this painting, taken from de potter's lettres de pie v. of the fresco representing the wounding of coligny there is an engraving in pistolesi, _ubi supra_, vol. viii. plate . by an odd mistake, both the text and the index to the plates, make this belong to the reconciliation of frederick barbarossa and the pontificate of alexander iii.--on what grounds it is hard to imagine. the character of the wound of the person borne in the arms of his companions, indicated by _the loss of two fingers of his right hand_, from which the blood is seen to be dropping, leaves no doubt that he is the admiral coligny. unfortunately, pistolesi's splendid work is disfigured by other blunders, or typographical errors, equally gross. in describing other paintings of the same sala regia (pp. , ), he assigns, or is made by the types to assign, various events in the quarrel of barbarossa and adrian iv. and alexander iii., to the years , , , etc. [ ] ferralz to charles ix., rome, sept. , , _apud_ north british review, oct., , p. . [ ] prospero count arco to the emperor, rome, nov. , , _ubi supra_. [ ] "il pontefice, e universalmente tutta d'italia grandemente se ne rallegrò, facendo pardonare cotale effetto al re e alla reina, che molte cose avevano sostenuto di fare in benefizio di quella parte." g. b. adriani, istoria de' suoi tempi, ii. . [ ] cuñiga to philip, sept. th, simancas mss. gachard, bull. de l'acad. de bruxelles, xvi. , . [ ] "a. n. s. mi faccia gratia di basciar i piedi in nome mio, col quale mi rallegro con le viscere del cuore che sia piaciuto alla dva. msa. d'incaminar, nel principio del suo pontificato, si felicemente e honoratamente le cose di questo regno." salviati to card. sec. of state, aug. , mackintosh, iii., app. g., p. . [ ] "non si risolvo a credere che si fusse fatto tanto a un pezzo." ibid., _ubi supra_. [ ] "de quoy nous aseurons que en leoures dieu aveques nous, tant pour nostre particulier coment pour le bien qui en reviendré à toute la cretienté et au service et honeur et gloyre de dieu," etc. [ ] "et randons par cet ayfect le temognage de nos bonnes et droyctes yntantions, cor ne les avons jeamés eu aultre que tendant à son honneur," etc. letter of catharine de' medici to philip ii., aug. , , in musée des archives nationales; documents originaux de l'hist. de france, exposés dans l'hôtel soubise (published by the gen. directory of the archives, ), p. . [ ] philip had evidently no intimation that a massacre was in contemplation. when mr. motley says (united netherlands, i. ): "it is as certain that philip knew beforehand, and testified his approbation of the massacre of st. bartholomew, as that he was the murderer of orange," the statement must be interpreted in accordance with that other statement in the same author's earlier work (rise of the dutch republic, ii. ): "the crime was not committed with the connivance of the spanish government. on the contrary, the two courts were at the moment bitterly opposed to each other," etc. as the eminent historian can scarcely be supposed to contradict himself on so important a point, we must understand him to mean that philip had, indeed, long since instigated catharine and her son to rid themselves of the huguenot leaders by some form of treachery or other, but was quite ignorant of, and unprepared for, the particular means adopted by them for compassing the end. [ ] st. goard to charles, sept. th, bodel nijenhuis, supplement to groen van prinsterer, archives de la maison d'orange nassau, - . st. goard was not deceived by philip's pious congratulations. "ce faict," he writes to catharine, a week later (ibid., pp. , ), "a esté aussi bien pris de se (ce) roy comme on le peult penser, _pour luy estre tant profitable pour ses affaires_; toutesfois, comme il est le prince du monde qui sçait et faict le plus profession de dissimuler toutes choses, si n'a il sceu celler en ceste-cy le plaisir qu'il en a reçeu, et encores que je infère touts ses mouvements procedder du bien que en recepvoient ses affaires, lesquelles il voioit pour desplorer sans ce seul remedde, si a il faict croire à tout le monde par ces aparens (apparences) que c'estoit pour le respect du bon succez que voz majestez avoient eu en si haultes entreprises, tantost louant le filz d'avoir une telle mère, l'aiant si bien gardé," etc. [ ] see the mondoucet correspondence, compte rendu de la commission royale d'histoire, second series, iv. (brux., ), - , pub. by m. emile gachet, especially the letter of charles ix. of aug. th, . [ ] "el dicho embaxador me propusó ... con grande instancia, que sin dilacion se devia executar la justicia en janlis (genlis) y en los otros sus complices que hay estan presos, y en los que se tomassen en mons." philip to alva, sept. th. simancas mss. gachard, particularités inédits sur la st. barthélemy, bulletin de l'académie royale de belgique, xvi. ( ), . [ ] charles ix. to mondoucet, aug. st, mondoucet correspondence, p. ; see also another letter of the same date, p. . [ ] "estant _l'un plus grands services_ que se puisse faire pour la chrestienté, que de la _prendre et passer tout au fil de l'espée_." st. goard to charles ix., sept. th, supp. to archives de la maison d'orange nassau, . [ ] philip to alva, _ubi supra_. [ ] alva to philip, oct. th, gachard, correspondance de philippe ii. (brux., ), ii. . [ ] mondoucet to charles ix., aug. th, bull. de l'acad. roy. de brux. [ ] bulletin de l'acad. roy. de bruxelles, ix. ( ), . [ ] philip to alva, _ubi supra_. [ ] bulletin of alva from the report of his agent, the seigneur de gomicourt, published by m. gachard, from mss. of mons, in bull. de l'acad. de bruxelles, ix. ( ), , etc. [ ] despatch of sept. , , correspondance diplomatique, v, . [ ] charles ix. to la mothe fénélon, aug. , , corresp. dipl., vii. , . [ ] see _ante_, chap, xviii., p. . [ ] "ni que j'y aye aucune volonté." [ ] "c'est bien la chose que je déteste le plus." [ ] despatch of aug. th, corresp. diplom., vii. , . [ ] charles ix. to la mothe fénélon, aug. , , ibid., , . [ ] charles ix., aug. th and th, corresp. dipl., vii. , etc., and a justificatory "instruction à m. de la mothe fénélon." [ ] letter of burleigh, etc., sept. th, to walsingham, digges, . the truth of the statement is called in question by m. cooper, editor of la mothe fénélon's correspondance diplomatique. [ ] the interview is described both by la mothe fénélon (corresp. diplom., v. - ), and by the english council, despatch of sept. th to walsingham (digges, - ). hume has a graphic account, history of england, chap. xl. [ ] this striking, and, certainly, somewhat undiplomatic speech is reported by the ambassador himself in his despatches (corresp. dipl., v. ). it looks as if the honest frenchman was not sorry to let the court know some of the severe criticisms that were uttered respecting a crime with which he had no sympathy. la mothe fénélon tells of the impression, proved erroneous by the king's letter, "qu'ilz avoient que ce fût ung acte projecté de longtemps, et que vous heussiez accordé avecques le pape et le roy d'espaigne de faire servir les nopces de madame, vostre seur, avec le roy de navarre, à une telle exécution pour y atraper, à la foys, toutz les principaulx de la dicte religion assemblés." la mothe fénélon to charles, sept. , , _ubi supra_, v. . [ ] la mothe fénélon endeavored, he says, to persuade the english that there were not over five thousand, and that catharine and charles were sorry that one hundred could not have answered. corr. diplom., v. . [ ] see the despondent despatch of october d, corresp. diplom., v., - . [ ] la mothe fénélon to catharine, ibid., v. . [ ] letter of sept. th, digges, . [ ] see _ante_, chapter xviii., p. . [ ] as well as by the queen mother's assurances respecting the massacre in the provinces--too heavy a draft upon the credulity of her royal sister. "pour ce qu'ilz disent que, voyant les meurtres qui ont esté faictz en plusieurs villes de ce royaume par les catholiques contre les huguenotz, ils ne se peuvent asseurer de l'intantion et volonté du roy, qu'ilz n'en voyent quelque punission et justice et ses édictz mieux observés, _elle cognoistra bientost que ce qui est advenu ès autres lieux que en ceste ville, a esté entièrement contre la volonté du roy_, mon dict sieur et filz, lequel a délibéré d'en faire faire telle pugnition et y establir bientost ung si bon ordre que ung chascun cognoistra quelle a esté en cest endroit son intantion." catharine to la mothe fénélon, cor. dipl., vii. . [ ] walsingham to sir thomas smith, sept. th, digges, . [ ] tocsain contre les massacreurs, . [ ] it is true that when their sentences were read to them, and particularly that portion which branded with infamy their innocent children, the courage of the old man of seventy, briquemault, momentarily failed, and he condescended to offer to do great services to the king in retaking la rochelle whose fortifications he had himself begun; and when this proposal was rejected, it is said that he made more humiliating advances. but the constancy and pious exhortations of his younger companion, who sustained his own courage by repeating many of the psalms in latin, recalled briquemault to himself, and from that moment "he had nothing but contempt for death." de thou (iv. ), a youth of nineteen, who was present in the chapel when the sentence was read, remembered the incident well. cf. agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (bk. i., c. ). walsingham, when he says in his letter of nov. , , that "cavannes (cavaignes) showed himself void of all magnanimity, etc.," has evidently confused the persons. here is an instance where the later account of an eye-witness--de thou--is entitled to far more credit than the contemporary statement of one whose means of obtaining information were not so good. [ ] "n'ayant regret sinon que vous ayez voulu profaner le jour de sa nayssence par ung si fascheus espectacle qu'allastes voir en grève." corresp. diplom. de la mothe fénélon, v. ; tocsain contre les massacreurs, , ; reveille-matin, arch, cur., vii. ; walsingham to smith, nov. , , digges, , . [ ] froude, x. , . [ ] "entre autres choses, il me dist qu'on luy avoit escript de rome, n'avoit que trois semaines ou environ, sur le propos des noces du roy de navarre en ces propres termes: 'que à ceste heure que tous les oyseaux estoient en cage, on les pouvoit prendre tous ensemble.'" m. de vulcob to charles ix., presburg, sept. th, _apud_ de noailles, henri de valois et la pologne en (paris, ), iii., pièces just., . [ ] see in kluckholn, briefe friedrich des frommen, ii. , a short letter of charles ix. to the elector palatine, aug. , , referring him for details to the account which schomberg would give him verbally; and, ibid., ii. , , the narrative signed by charles ix. and brulart, secretary of state, in a translation evidently made at the time for the elector's use. [ ] "toute ma negociation s'en estoit allée en fumée." schomberg to m. de limoges, nov. th, de noailles, iii. . [ ] a large number of schomberg's despatches are inserted in de noailles, iii. , etc. [ ] "als die sonder zweifel _die welsche bibel_ 'el principe macchiavelli' auch studirt." [ ] landgrave william to the electors of saxony and brandenburg, cassel, sept. , ; same to frederick, elector palatine, sept, th. a. kluckholn, briefe friedrich des frommen, ii. - . [ ] bp. of valence to m. brulart, konin, nov. th, colbert mss. _apud_ de noailles, iii. . [ ] montluc to charles ix., january , , de noailles, iii. . does not the frank suggestion furnish a clue to the method which was sometimes practised in other cases? [ ] montluc to brulart, jan. , , de noailles, iii. . the worthy bishop, who was certainly at any time more at home in the cabinet than in the church, did not intermit his toil or yield to discouragement. if we may believe him, he "had not leisure so much as to say his prayers." the panegyrists of the massacre, and especially charpentier, had done him good service by their writings, and at one time he greatly desired that the learned doctor might be sent to his assistance, particularly as (to use his own words) "all the suite of monsieur de l'isle and myself do not know enough of latin to admit a deacon to orders, even at puy in auvergne." _ubi supra._ [ ] beza to thomas tilius, sept. , , bulletin, vii. . [ ] registres de la compagnie, er août, , _apud_ gaberel, histoire de l'église de genève, ii. . [ ] reg. du conseil, août, ; reg. de la compagnie, gaberel, ii. . [ ] gaberel, ii. , . [ ] ibid., ii. . [ ] ibid., ii. . see also in the pièces justificatives, pp. - : "liste des réfugiés de la st. barthélemy dont les familles existent de nos jours à genève." [ ] gaberel, ii. . the author of the really able and learned article on the massacre, in the north british review for october, , conveys an altogether unfounded and cruel impression, not only with regard to beza, but respecting his fellow protestants, in these sentences: "the very men whose own brethren had perished in france were not hearty or unanimous in execrating the deed. there were huguenots who thought that their party had brought ruin on itself, by provoking its enemies and following the rash counsels of ambitious men. this was the opinion of their chief, theodore beza, himself," etc. the belief of beza that the french protestants had merited even so severe a chastisement as this at the hands of god, by reason of the ambition of some and the unbelief or lack of spirituality of others, was a very different thing from failing to execrate the deed with heartiness. if the words of bullinger to hotman, quoted in support of the first sentence ("sunt tamen qui hoc factum et excusare et defendere tentant") really referred to protestants at all, it can only have been to an insignificant number who took the position from a love of singularity, and who were below contempt. the execration of the deed was pre-eminently unanimous and hearty. [ ] gaberel, ii. . [ ] beza to t. tilius, dec. , , bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., vii. . [ ] gaberel, ii. - . [ ] nearly four years later, on the th of june, , monsieur de chandieu received the news of the publication of henry iii.'s edict of peace permitting the refugees to return home. all the protestants who had not adopted switzerland as their future country congregated at geneva. a solemn religious service was held in the church of saint pierre, where french and genevese united in that favorite huguenot psalm (the th)-- la voici l'heureuse journée que dieu a faite à plein désir-- the same which the soldiers of henry iv. set up on the field of coutras (agrippa d'aubigné, iii. ). m. de chandieu then rendered thanks in tender and affectionate terms to all the departments of government, exclaiming: "we shall always regard the church of geneva as our benefactress and our mother; and from all the french reformed churches will arise, every sunday, words of blessing, in remembrance of your admirable benefits to us." the next day the refugees started for their homes, accompanied, as far as the border, by a great crowd of citizens. gaberel, ii. , . [ ] les ambassadeurs de charles ix. aux cantons suisses protestants, bulletin, iii. - . a copy was sent by beza to the consuls of montauban, together with a letter, oct. . . also mém. de l'estat (arch. cur., vii. - .) [ ] harangue de m. de bellièvre aux suisses à la diette tenue à baden, mackintosh, hist. of england, iii., appendix l. [ ] bellièvre to charles ix., baden, dec. , , mackintosh, app. l, p. . de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) . [ ] as early as september d the superintendent of the mint submitted specimens of two kinds of commemorative medals: the one bearing the devices, "_virtus in rebelles_" and "_pietas excitavit justitiam_;" and the other, "_charles ix. dompteur des rebelles, le aoust _." the mém. de l'estat (archives cur., vii. - ) contain the elaborate description furnished by the designer, accompanied with comments by the protestant author. the trésor de numismatique, etc. (paul delaroche, etc.), med. françaises, pt. d, plate , nos. , , and , gives facsimiles of _three_ medals, the first two mentioned above, and a third on which charles figures as hercules armed with sword and torch confronting the three-headed hydra of heresy. the motto is, "ne ferrum temnat, simul ignibus obsto." [ ] smith to walsingham, digges, . [ ] leicester to walsingham, sept. th, digges, . [ ] walsingham to smith, nov. , digges, . the politic montluc, bishop of valence, seems to allude to the same alteration in his master: "au diable soyt la cause qui de tant de maux est cause, et qui d'ung bon roy et humain, s'il en fust jamais, l'ont contrainct de mectre la main au sang, qui est un morceau si friant, que jamais prince n'en tasta qu'il n'y voulust revenir." de noailles, iii. , . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ). [ ] letter of may , / , digges, . [ ] relation of sigismondo cavalli. i follow the résumé of baschet, la diplomatie vénitienne, , . [ ] "leurs butins et richesses ne leur proffitarent point, non plus qu'à plusieurs massacreurs, sacquemens, pillardz et paillards de la feste de sainct-barthélemy que j'ay cogneu, au moins des principaux, qui ne vesquirent guières longtemps qu'ils ne fussent tuez au siége de la rochelle, et autres guerres qui vindrent emprès, et qui furent aussi pauvres que devant. aussi, comme disoient les espagnolz pillards, '_que el diablo les avia dado, el diablo les avia llevado_.'" oeuvres, i. (ed. of hist. soc. of fr., ). i need only refer to the fate of the famous assassin who boasted of having killed four hundred men that day with his own arm, and who afterward, having embraced a hermit's life, was finally hung for the crime of murdering travellers (agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ); and to that of coconnas, put to death for the part he took in the conspiracy of which i shall shortly have to speak. [ ] mémoires de sully, i. , . [ ] see _ante_, p. - . [ ] apostolicarum pii quinti epistolarum libri quinque. letter of march , , p. . [ ] pii quinti epistolæ, . [ ] ibid., . [ ] ibid., . see _ante_, chapter xvi, p. . [ ] "nullo modo, nullisque de causis, hostibus dei parcendum est." [ ] "catholicæ religionis hostes aperte ac libere ad internecionem usque oppugnaverit." ibid., . [ ] "deletis omnibus," etc. ibid., . [ ] ibid., , . [ ] ibid., . [ ] "nec vero, vano pietatis nomine objecto, te eo usque decipi sinas, ut condonandis divinis injuriis falsam tibi misericordiæ laudem quæras: nihil est enim ea pietate misericordiaque crudelius, quæ in impios et ultima supplicia meritos confertur." ibid., . [ ] "hæreticæ pravitatis inquisitores per singulas civitates constituere." ibid., . [ ] letter of jan. , , ibid., . [ ] letter of april , , ibid., . [ ] letter to cardinal bourbon, sept. , , ibid., , . [ ] letter to charles ix., january , , ibid., . [ ] saint pius v. is, i believe, the only pope that has been canonized since saint celestine v., near the end of the thirteenth century. [ ] "qui autem a militibus captivi ducebantur, eos pius pretio redemptos, in jusque sibi vindicatos, atque avenionem perductos, publico supplicio afficiendos _pro ardenti suo religionis studio_ decrevit." gabutius, vita pii quinti, acta sanctorum maii, § , p. . [ ] "id pius ubi cognovit, de comite sanctæ floræ conquestus est, quod jussa non fecisset, dudum imperantis, _necandos protinus esse hæreticos omnes quoscumque ille capere potuisset_." ibid., § . it must not be forgotten that, in holding these sentiments, pius v. did not stand alone; his predecessors on the pontifical throne were of the same mind. we have seen the anger of paul iv., in , upon learning that henry ii. had spared d'andelot (see _ante_, chapter viii., vol. i., p. ). paul was for instantaneous execution, and _did not believe a heretic could ever be converted_. he told the french ambassador "que c'estoit abus d'estimer que un hérétique revint jamais; que ce n'estoit que toute dissimulation, et que c'estoit un mal où il ne falloit que le feu, et soubdain!" the last expression is a clue to the attitude of the roman see to heresy under every successive occupant of the papal throne. letter of la bourdaisière to the constable, rome, feb. , , ms. nat. lib. paris, bulletin, xxvii. ( ) . [ ] gabutius, _ubi supra_. chapter xx. the sequel of the massacre, to the death of charles the ninth. [sidenote: widespread terror.] the blow had been struck by which the huguenots were to be exterminated. if a single adherent of the reformed faith still lived in paris, he dared not show his face. france had, as usual, copied the example of the capital, and there were few districts to which the fratricidal plot had not extended. enough blood had been shed, it would seem, to satisfy the most sanguinary appetite. after the massacre in which the admiral and all the most noted leaders had perished--after the defection of henry of navarre and his more courageous cousin, it was confidently expected that the feeble remnants of the huguenots, deprived of their head, could easily be reduced to submission. the stipulation of charles the ninth, when yielding a reluctant consent to the infamous project, would be fulfilled: not one of the hated sect would remain to reproach him with his crime. and, in point of fact, throughout the greater number of the cities of france, even where there had been no actual massacre, so widespread was the terror, that every protestant had either fled from the country or sought safety in concealment, if he had not actually apostatized from the faith.[ ] [sidenote: la rochelle and other cities in protestant hands.] but when the storm had spent its first fury, and it became once more possible to look around and measure its frightful effects, it was found that the devastation was not universal. a few cities held for the huguenots. la rochelle and sancerre--the former on the western coast, the latter in the centre of france--with montauban, nismes, milhau, aubenas, privas, and certain other places of minor importance in the south, closed their gates, and refused to receive the royal governors sent them from paris.[ ] not that there were wanting those, even among the protestants, who interposed conscientious scruples, and denied the right of resistance to the authority of the king;[ ] but with the vast majority the dictates of self-preservation prevailed over the slavish doctrine of unquestioning submission. the right to worship god as he commands cannot, they argued, be abridged even by the legitimate sovereign; and in this case there is even the greatest probability that he acts under constraint, or that wily courtiers forge his name, since the most contradictory orders emanate ostensibly from him. [sidenote: nismes.] such was the attitude assumed by the brave inhabitants of nismes. here the roman catholics had displayed a more charitable disposition than in many other places. the "juge mage," on receipt of secret orders to massacre the protestants, instead of complying, gave directions for assembling the extraordinary council, consisting of the magistrates and most notable citizens. by this council, upon his recommendation, it was unanimously resolved to close all the gates of nismes, with the exception of one. this was to be guarded in turn by the roman catholics and the protestants. all the citizens were directed to take a common oath that they would assist each other without distinction of creed, and maintain order and security, in obedience to the king's authority, and according to the provisions of his edict of pacification. it was a solemn scene when all those present in the great municipal meeting, the vicar-general of the diocese among the number, with uplifted hands called upon god to witness their engagement.[ ] the oath was well observed. the viscount of joyeuse, acting as lieutenant-governor of charles in languedoc, at first approved the compact; for the king's early letters, as we have seen, expressed indignation at coligny's murder, and ascribed it to the personal enmity of the guises. but the viscount took a different view of the matter when the monarch, throwing off the mask, himself accepted the responsibility. joyeuse now called on the citizens of nismes to lay down their arms, to expel all the refugees, and to receive a garrison. but the nismois firmly declined the summons, grounding their refusal partly on their duty to themselves, partly on the manifest inhumanity of surrendering their fellow-citizens to certain butchery. as was true in more than one instance, it was the _people_ that, by their decision, saved the rich from the inevitable results of their own timid counsels. most of the judges of the royal court of justice, and most of the opulent citizens, advocated a surrender of nismes to joyeuse, which must have been the prelude to a fresh and perhaps indiscriminate massacre.[ ] [sidenote: montauban.] scarcely less important to the protestants of southern france was the refuge they found in montauban. regnier, the same huguenot gentleman who had himself been rescued from slaughter at paris by the magnanimity of vezins,[ ] was the instrument of its deliverance. on finding himself safe, his first impulse was to hasten to montauban and urge his brethren to adopt instant measures for self-defence. but despair had taken possession of the inhabitants. they had heard that the dreaded black cavalry of the ferocious montluc, the men-at-arms of fontenille, and other troops, were on the march against them. their enemies were already reported to be so near the city as castel-sarrasin. not a gate, therefore, would the panic-stricken citizens close; not a sword would they draw. nothing was left but for regnier, with the little band of less than forty followers he had gathered, to abandon the devoted place. as he was wandering about the country, uncertain whither to betake himself, he unexpectedly fell in with the very enemy before whom montauban was quailing. neither regnier nor his handful of followers hesitated. it was a glorious opportunity for the display of heroism in a good cause, for there were ten roman catholics to one protestant. happily the ground was favorable to the display of individual prowess; a river and a tributary brook rendered the field so contracted that only a few men could fight abreast. "brethren and comrades," cried regnier, "whether for life or for combat, there is no other road than this." then putting forward a detachment of ten horsemen headed by an experienced leader, when he saw the enemy pause to put on their helmets, he seized the opportunity in true huguenot fashion to act as the minister of his followers, and uttered a brief prayer, devout and courageous. next came the charge, such as those men of iron determination knew well how to make. the van of the enemy made no attempt to resist them; the cavalry in the centre was driven back in confusion upon the mounted arquebusiers of the rear. the fight became in a few minutes a disgraceful rout, and for a whole league the handful of huguenots continued the pursuit. of nearly four hundred royalists, eighty were killed and fifty captured. when regnier, returning to montauban, brought the flags of the enemy and a body of prisoners outnumbering his own band, the citizens renounced their fears, accepted the omen as a pledge of divine assistance, and cast in their lot with their brethren of la rochelle.[ ] [sidenote: la rochelle the centre of interest.] for la rochelle had now become the centre of interest, and montauban, nismes, and even sancerre, whose brave and obstinate siege will soon occupy us, were for the time almost wholly dismissed from consideration. the strongly fortified protestant town, the only point upon the shores of the ocean which during the former civil wars had defied every assault of the papal leaders, was now the safe and favorite refuge of the huguenots, and the coveted prey of the enemy. within a very short time after the massacre, a stream of fugitives set in toward la rochelle. it was not long before her hospitable walls sheltered fifty of the protestant nobles of the neighboring provinces, fifty-five ministers, and fifteen hundred soldiers, chiefly from saintonge, aunis, and poitou. among the new-comers were not a few who had with difficulty escaped from the bloody scenes at paris.[ ] all were inspired with the same courage, all possessed by the same determination to sell their lives as dear as possible; for the successive accounts of the cruelties perpetrated in all parts of france left no doubt respecting the fate of the rochellois should they too succumb. [sidenote: a spurious letter of catharine de' medici.] and there were not wanting circumstances of an alarming nature. at brouage, then a flourishing port some twenty-five miles south of la rochelle, a considerable body of troops had been gathered under philip strozzi, the chief officer of the french infantry, while a fleet was in course of preparation under the well-known baron de la garde. this occurred previously to the massacre. the force, it was given out, was intended for a secret expedition against the spaniards. while the huguenots of coligny, forming a junction with the troops of william of orange, should attack alva in flanders, strozzi and la garde were to make a diversion upon the coasts of spain itself. but the inhabitants of la rochelle gave little credit to this explanation, and even the personal assurances of the admiral had not entirely removed their fears that their own destruction was intended. it is not strange, therefore, that they accepted the massacre of st. bartholomew's day as a complete demonstration of the correctness of their suspicions, and at once took measures for protecting their city against surprise or open assault. nor is it altogether easy to ascertain how far their apprehensions were unfounded. there were intelligent and well-informed contemporary writers, who felt no doubt that strozzi was waiting with sealed orders for the coming of the fatal twenty-fourth of august. two months before, they say, there had been sent him by catharine de' medici a packet which he was strictly forbidden to open until that day. it proved to be a letter of instruction couched in these words: "strozzi, i notify you that this day, the twenty-fourth of august, the admiral and all the huguenots who were with him here have been slain. consequently, take diligent measures to make yourself master of la rochelle, and do to the huguenots who shall fall into your hands the same that we have done to those who were here. take good heed that you fail not, insomuch as you fear to displease the king my son, and myself. catharine."[ ] if, as i can but believe, this letter be spurious, none the less may it serve to indicate how firmly the persuasion was fixed in the minds of the protestants that insidious designs were cherished against la rochelle. [sidenote: designs upon the city.] it was not long before those designs began to develop. strozzi, to whom the inhabitants had sent a deputation, avowedly to obtain explanations respecting the circumstances of the massacre, but in reality to discover the plans of the government, graciously offered some companies of his soldiers for their protection. but the rochellois with equal politeness declined to accept such help. meanwhile, they set themselves vigorously at work, and not only organized the inhabitants and refugees into companies for military defence, but repaired and manned the fortifications, and introduced a great abundance of provisions and munitions of war into the city.[ ] a few days later, letters were received from charles himself, which, while endeavoring to calm the minds of the inhabitants respecting recent occurrences, promised them full protection in their religious rights, proclaimed the king's unaltered determination to maintain his edict, and called upon them to receive with due submission m. de biron, whom he sent them to be their governor. no better choice could have been made among the roman catholics; for biron, it was currently reported, so far from approving of severity, had himself narrowly escaped being involved in the massacre, and had owed his safety mainly to the fact that he was in command at the arsenal. the shrewd rochellois, however, while they greeted the king's assurances with all outward show of credit, were not willing to be duped. they listened respectfully to the king's envoys, and professed themselves his most devoted subjects; but they begged to be excused from receiving marshal biron as their governor until the troops of strozzi should have been removed from their dangerous proximity to the city, and until the fleet should have set sail from brouage. nor, indeed, could biron himself obtain better conditions, when, having sought an interview with the deputies of la rochelle outside of the walls, he entreated them, with sincere or well-feigned emotion, to forestall the ruin impending over them.[ ] in vain did he humor their claim, dating from regal concessions and long prescription, that la rochelle need receive no garrison but of her own municipal militia.[ ] in vain did he offer to make his entry with but one or two followers, and promise that, when they had duly submitted, he would secure them from injury at the hands of the royal troops, and would relieve them of the presence of a fleet. the citizens were inflexible. the experience of castres, where lately the credulous inhabitants had inconsiderately admitted a governor sent them by the king, and had paid for their folly with their lives, confirmed them in the resolution rather to die with sword in hand than to be slaughtered like sheep.[ ] two months (september and october) passed in fruitless negotiations--precious time, which the citizens put to good service in preparing for the inevitable struggle. it was not until the eighth of november that the first skirmish took place, in which one of two royal galleys sent to reconnoitre the situation of la rochelle was captured and brought into harbor by some huguenot boats that had sailed out intending to secure the neighboring Île de ré for the protestant cause.[ ] [sidenote: mission of la noue.] meantime the court, reluctant to undertake an enterprise so formidable as the regular siege of la rochelle seemed likely to prove, resorted to pacific measures, and resolved to employ for the purpose a person the most unlikely to be selected by roman catholics. this was none other than the famous françois de la noue, a protestant leader not less remarkable for generalship than for literary ability, of whose "political and military discourses," written during a later captivity, it has been said with justice that, in perspicuity, force, and good judgment, they are not inferior to the most celebrated commentaries of antiquity.[ ] la noue was with louis of nassau in the city of mons when the news of admiral coligny's murder, and of the consequent failure of the promised support of france, reached him. mons soon after surrendered to the duke of alva, and la noue scarcely knew whither to turn for refuge, when he received from his old friend, the duke of longueville, governor of picardy, a cordial invitation to return to france. not without many misgivings, he visited paris, where, contrary to his expectations, charles greeted him very graciously, and even restored to him the confiscated property of his wife's murdered brother, téligny. taking advantage of the moment, the king now requested la noue to undertake the task of mediating between the government and la rochelle, and thus preventing the outbreak of a new civil war and the effusion of more blood. at first la noue positively declined the appointment; but the king was urgent, and the arguments which he adduced coincided with the huguenot's own impressions of the hopelessness of a struggle undertaken by a single city against the united forces of the most powerful kingdom of christendom. it was only after the most solemn protestations of charles, that he would not make use of him as an instrument to deceive and ruin his protestant brethren, that la noue reluctantly consented to accept a commission from which he was more likely to reap embarrassment than glory. [sidenote: he is badly received by the rochellois.] and certainly his first reception by the rochellois was far from flattering. in a conference with the deputies of the city, in the suburban village of tadon[ ]--for la noue was not permitted to enter the walls--the burghers clearly revealed the suspicion with which they viewed him. they bluntly told him, after listening to the propositions he brought from the king, "that they had come to confer with m. de la noue, but that they did not recognize him in the person before them. the brave warrior so closely bound to them in former years, and who had lost an arm in their defence, had a different heart, never came to them with vain hopes, nor, under the guise of friendship, invited them to conferences destined only to betray them."[ ] but, in spite of this somewhat uncourteous reception, the well-known and trusted integrity of the great huguenot captain soon broke through the thin crust of coolness, which, after all, was rather assumed than really felt. la noue was suffered to enter the city, and at the échevinage, or city hall, was permitted to lay before the general assembly, or municipal government, as well as the other citizens, the full extent of the king's concessions. amnesty for the past, confirmation of the city's privileges, passports for any who might wish to remove to england or germany, safe return for those whom fear had banished, free exercise of the protestant religion in two quarters of the city, with three ministers to be chosen by the people and approved by the governor--all this he offered. on the other hand, a new church must be built for the roman catholics, the strangers who had lately come must remove elsewhere, and, of course, the governor must be admitted, although the king kindly consented to let them designate any other sufficiently distinguished and capable person, if they preferred to do so.[ ] [sidenote: the royal proposals rejected.] neither the exposition of the terms of the royal clemency, nor the dark picture drawn of the ruin overhanging the city, shook the constancy of its brave advocates. they replied that they would consent to receive neither garrison nor royal governor, and they exhibited to la noue their charters granted by charles the fifth, and ratified both by louis the eleventh and by the reigning monarch. they added, "that, with god's help, they hoped not to be caught in their beds as their brethren had been at the parisian matins."[ ] yet, even after this conference, the rochellois were so far from losing their respect for la noue, that they made him three propositions: either he might remain in la rochelle as a private citizen; or he might assume the military command, as their commander-in-chief; or, if he should prefer so to do, he might pass over into england in one of their vessels. la noue went to consult with marshal biron and others, and shortly returned. with their full concurrence he accepted the military command--the unparalleled anomaly being thus exhibited of a general of great experience and high reputation voluntarily given by the besiegers to the besieged, because of the confidence they entertained that by his moderation and pacific inclination he would restrain the excesses of the mob and hasten the return of peace.[ ] [sidenote: marshal biron appears before la rochelle.] [sidenote: beginning of the fourth religious war.] and now the siege, which the court had long hesitated to undertake, began in earnest. on the fourth of december, marshal biron approached la rochelle with seven ensigns of horse and eighteen companies of foot, and two larger cannon.[ ] meantime the most strenuous efforts were put forth to collect an adequate besieging force. when milder measures failed to secure prompt obedience, recourse was had to threats, and the nobles were summoned on pain, in case of disobedience, of losing their privileges, and being reduced to the rank of "roturiers." the menace had its effect, and in the month of january, , the force under biron had swollen to sixty companies of foot, with not less than thirty-seven large cannon--a considerable provision of artillery for that period.[ ] [sidenote: description of la rochelle.] the city of la rochelle occupies the head of a deep bay, stretching in a north-easterly direction from the ocean, and serving at present as the large and convenient harbor for its extensive commerce. the old town, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, covered only a small part of the area since inclosed by walls. a narrow peninsula, protected on the one side by a sheet of water and on the other by marshes, offered a tempting site, and was first occupied. the larger inlet on the west was the old, and probably for a long time the only haven; but long before the middle of the sixteenth century the action of the tide, which washes in great quantities of sand, combining with the gradual deposit of alluvium made by the neighboring springs, had converted this inlet into a marsh--"les marais salans"--intersected by ditches and used only in the manufacture of salt. the marsh itself has since been entirely reclaimed. the "new" harbor, as the smaller inlet was still called, at the period of which i am speaking, was of much inferior capacity, and was included within the circuit of the walls.[ ] a chain, extended between the two towers guarding its narrow entrance, effectually precluded the passage of hostile vessels. for considerably more than one-half of their circuit, the walls of la rochelle were inaccessible to the land forces; and the deep foss skirting them was full of water, except on the north and north-east. the fortifications, everywhere formidable, had, therefore, been constructed with extraordinary care in these directions; for it was here that the brunt of the attack must be borne. with puritan simplicity and faith, the reformed inhabitants of la rochelle had named the strong work at the northwestern angle of the circuit the "bastion de l'Évangile," or the "bastion of the gospel." it was appropriately supported on the right by the "cavalier de l'Épître." other forts, such as that of cognes at the north-eastern angle, were but little inferior in importance; it was evident, however, that upon the ability of the rochellois to defend the bastion de l'Évangile must depend the salvation of the city.[ ] [sidenote: resoluteness of the rochellois.] but the chief strength of the city was to be found in the manly resolution of the inhabitants to secure for themselves and their children the right to worship god according to the purer faith, or perish in the attempt. an incident occurring about this time served to illustrate and to confirm their courage. a short distance in advance of the bastion de l'Évangile there stood a solitary windmill, which, on account of its advantageous position, the rochellois were anxious to retain. the captain to whose guard it was intrusted, recognizing the ease with which he might be surprised and cut off, took the precaution to draw off at dusk the small detachment which he had placed there by day, leaving but a single soldier to act as sentry. meantime, strozzi had determined to capture the mill. this he attempted to do, taking advantage of a moonlight night. to the two culverines brought to play upon him, the solitary defender could answer only with his arquebuse; but so briskly did he fire, and so well did he counterfeit the voices of others, that the assailants believed an entire company to be present. at last, when he no longer could hold out, the soldier only surrendered after stipulating for the life of himself and his entire band. notwithstanding his promise, strozzi, when once his astonishment at the appearance of the single actor who had played so many parts had given place to anger at the deceit practised upon him, was in favor of hanging the huguenot for his audacity. but biron would only consent to have him sent to the galleys, a punishment which he escaped by finding means to slip away from the hands of the royalists.[ ] [sidenote: their military strength.] the entire military force of the besieged comprised about thirteen hundred regular troops, besides two thousand citizens, well armed and drilled, and under competent captains. there was an abundance of powder, of wine, biscuit, and other provisions, although of wheat there was but little.[ ] meantime assistance was anxiously expected from england, and the courage of the common people, incited by the exhortations of the ministers, did not flag, notwithstanding the feebler spirit of the rich and the actual desertion of a few leaders.[ ] the besiegers were not idle. besides occupying positions north, east, and south of the city, which effectually cut off communication from the land side, they built forts on opposite sides of the outer harbor, and stranded at the entrance a large carack, which was made firm in its position with stones and sand. the work, when provided with guns and troops, commanded the passage, and was christened "le fort de l'aiguille." in vain did the rochellois attempt to destroy or capture it; the carack, while it proved unavailing to prevent the entrance of an occasional vessel laden with grain or ammunition, remained the most formidable point in the possession of the enemy. [sidenote: henry, duke of anjou, appointed to conduct the siege.] in order to give her favorite son a new opportunity to acquire military distinction, the queen mother now persuaded charles to permit the duke of anjou to conduct the siege. he arrived before la rochelle about the middle of february,[ ] with a brilliant train of princes and nobles, among whom were alençon, guise, aumale, and montluc, besides henry of navarre and his cousin condé, who, as they had to sustain the rôle of good roman catholics, could scarcely avoid taking part in the campaign against their former brethren. in the ordinances soon after published by anjou, he seems to have hoped to weaken the huguenots by copying their own strictness of moral discipline. the very catholic practice of profane swearing, in which his majesty was so proficient, was prohibited on pain of severe punishment; and it was prescribed that a sermon should daily be preached in the camp.[ ] a good round oath none the less continued to be received by the soldiers, in all doubtful cases, as a sufficient proof of loyalty to mother church, nor did they cease because of the ordinance from ridiculing the idea that such good christians as they needed preaching, which was well enough for unevangelized pagans.[ ] [sidenote: the besieged pray and fight.] in view of the impending peril, the protestants had recourse, as their custom was, to prayer and fasting. the sixteenth and eighteenth of february were days of public humiliation. from their knees the huguenots went with redoubled courage to the ramparts. the crisis had at length arrived. a series of furious assaults were given, directed principally against the northern wall and the bastion de l'Évangile. it was in one of these attacks, on the third of march, that the duke of aumale was killed. by the besieged the death of so eminent a member of the house of lorraine was interpreted as a signal judgment of god upon the most cruel member of a persecuting family--another presage that the sword should never depart from the princely stock which had begun the war, until it should be altogether destroyed. the royalists, on the other hand, found in it a great source of regret; while catharine, terrified at the danger to which her son might be exposed, wrote one of her ill-spelt letters to montpensier, entreating him and the other veterans not to suffer any of the princes to go imprudently near the walls.[ ] [sidenote: bravery of the women.] it does not enter into the plan of this history to detail the progress of the siege. let it suffice to say that the enemy was met at every point and repulsed. not content with simply defending their walls, the huguenots made sorties, in which many of anjou's followers were slain. sometimes dressing in the uniform of those they had killed or taken prisoners, they returned and penetrated into the hostile camp, learned the plans of the assailants, and cut off more than one man of note. the presence of women among them became an element of strength; for these, surmounting the weakness of their sex, did good service in the mines, or, donning armor, defended the breach and drove the enemy into the ditch.[ ] it was remarked that, as the supply of fresh provisions diminished, the lack was in some degree compensated by such an abundance of cockles on the sands as had never before been known. if the protestants regarded this incident as a providential interposition in their behalf,[ ] the roman catholics sought to account for it by supposing that the operations of the siege had permitted the fish to multiply undisturbed.[ ] however this might be, the women of la rochelle sallied forth to husband this new resource; but their imprudence in straying beyond the range of the guns was rewarded with insolent outrage on the part of such of the enemy as were in the vicinity. even this circumstance the huguenots knew how to turn to advantage. disguising themselves in feminine attire, a troop of huguenot soldiers, a day or two later, issued from the city when the tide was out, apparently bent on the same errand. it was not long before the royalists undertook to repeat a diversion which seemed to offer little danger to them. scarcely, however, had they approached when the clumsy costume was hastily thrown aside, and the assailants discovered too late the trap into which they had fallen. many a hot-headed soldier of anjou atoned for his temerity with his life.[ ] [sidenote: la noue retires. failure of diplomacy.] the ordinary wiles of catharine were not left untried; but she effected little or nothing by negotiation. the people were not so easily cajoled and duped as their leaders had often been, and would accept no terms except such as the court utterly refused to offer--the restoration of the privileges conferred by the edict, its confirmation by oath, and the interchange of hostages, to be kept in some neutral state in germany, with entire liberty of worship and exemption from royal garrison in and around la rochelle, montauban, nismes, and sancerre.[ ] even françois de la noue became impatient at the excessive caution which the huguenots seemed to him to display, and, redeeming the promise he had given the king before he took command, retired from the city (on the eleventh of march) when all hope of reconciliation had apparently disappeared. with wonderful prudence he had managed to forfeit the confidence of neither party. yet on some occasions, it must be admitted, his self-control was sorely tried. for example, at one time a minister--not long after deposed from the sacred office--so far forgot himself in the heat of angry discussion as to give la noue a sound box upon the ear. even then the great captain refused to order the offender's punishment, and confined himself to sending him, under guard, to his wife, with directions to keep him carefully until he should recover his reason.[ ] [sidenote: english aid miscarries.] the assistance which la rochelle had counted upon receiving from england never came. count montgomery was a skilful negotiator. if he was unable to prevail upon elizabeth to give open countenance to the huguenots, on account of the league recently entered into, which retz had been specially sent by charles to confirm, he at least succeeded in obtaining a sum of forty thousand francs from various english, french, and flemish sympathizers, with which he was permitted, notwithstanding protests from paris, to fit out a fleet. elizabeth, indeed, so far overcame her scruples as to allow a large vessel of her own to follow. but when montgomery's squadron reached the roads of la rochelle, the fifty-three ships of which it was composed, and which carried eighteen hundred or two thousand men, were so small and badly-appointed--in short, so inferior in strength to the fewer vessels of the king standing off the entrance--that they avoided coming to close quarters, stood off to belle isle, and finally returned to england. queen elizabeth, at all times very doubtful respecting the propriety of assisting subjects against their monarch, had meantime disowned the enterprise as piratical, and expressed the hope the culprits might be destroyed. it was not, in this case, merely her customary dissimulation. the plundering by some french and netherland sailors of the vessel on which the earl of worcester was proceeding, in the queen's name, to stand as sponsor at the baptism of charles's infant daughter, had greatly incensed her.[ ] not, however, that elizabeth lost any of that remarkable interest which she had always taken in count montgomery, or felt at all inclined to give him up to the french government for his breach of the peace. for when, a little later, a demand was made for the culprit, she assured the ambassador of charles that she could swear she was ignorant that the count was in her dominions. "but," she added, "were he to come, i would answer your master as his father answered my sister, queen mary, when he said, 'i will not consent to be the hangman of the queen of england.' so his majesty, the king of france, must excuse me if i can no more act as executioner of those of my religion than king henry would discharge a similar office in the case of those that were not of his religion."[ ] [sidenote: huguenot successes in the south.] [sidenote: sommières.] [sidenote: villeneuve.] in other parts of france it had fared no better with the attempt to crush the huguenots. montauban and nismes still held out. various places in the south-east fell into huguenot hands. the siege of sommières, near nismes, by the roman catholics, was so obstinate, and the garrison capitulated on such favorable terms, that the protestants were rather elated than discouraged. marshal damville had assailed it only in order to save his credit, and the little town detained him nearly two months,--from the eleventh of february to the ninth of april. every device was employed to retard his success. streams of boiling oil were poured upon the heads of the assailants, and red-hot hoops of iron were dexterously tossed over their shoulders. in the end the garrison marched out with all the honors of war.[ ] the huguenots surprised villeneuve, near the rhône, by effecting an entrance, much as they had entered nismes in , through the grated opening by which the waters of a sewer issued from the walls.[ ] [sidenote: beginning of the siege of sancerre.] but it was sancerre which, next to la rochelle, occasioned the court the greatest annoyance, both because of its central position[ ] and because of its comparative proximity to paris. here the protestants of berry and the adjacent provinces had found a welcome refuge. citizens and refugees refused to admit a royal garrison, and foiled the attempt to capture the place by escalade. treachery was at work, and, as usual, it was most rife among the richer class. by their connivance the citadel or castle was surprised by the troops sent by the governor of the province, m. de la chastre; but it was retaken on the same day.[ ] notwithstanding this warning, the people of sancerre took none of the precautions which their situation demanded, apparently unable to believe that, when such a city as la rochelle was in revolt, the king would undertake to subdue so small a place as sancerre. there were no stores of provisions, and the buildings in proximity to the walls, from which an enemy could incommode the city, had not been torn down, when, between the third and ninth of january, , a force of five thousand foot and five hundred horse, under la chastre, besides many nobles and gentlemen of the vicinage, made its appearance before the walls. the inhabitants now discovered their capital mistakes, but it was too late to remedy them. hunger began almost immediately to make itself felt, while the places they had neglected to destroy or preoccupy proved very convenient to the royalists for the next two or three months, during which it was attempted to take sancerre by assault. yet the direct attack proved a failure, and, on the twentieth of march, the siege was changed to a blockade. forts were erected in the most advantageous spots, and a wide trench was dug around the entire city.[ ] sancerre was to be tried by the severe ordeal of hunger; and certainly the most frightful among ancient sieges can scarcely be said to have surpassed in horror that of this small city.[ ] [sidenote: the incipient famine.] did not the sufferings of the heroic inhabitants claim our sympathy, we might read with entertainment the singular devices they resorted to in grappling with a terrible foe whose insidious advances were more difficult to oppose than the open assaults of the enemy. for the famine of sancerre boasts of a historian more copious and minute than josephus or livy. in reading the narrative of the famous jean de léry[ ]--the same writer to whom we are indebted for an authentic account of villegagnon's unfortunate scheme of american colonization--we seem to be perusing a great pathological treatise. never was physician more watchful of his patient's symptoms than léry with his hand upon the pulse of famishing sancerre. it would almost seem that the restless huguenot, who united in his own person the opposite qualifications of clergyman and soldier, desired to make his little work a useful guide in similar circumstances, for a portion of it, at least, has been appropriately styled "a cookery book for the besieged."[ ] early in the siege, not without some qualms, the inhabitants made trial of the flesh of a horse accidentally killed. next an ass, and then the mules, of which there was a considerable number, were brought to the shambles. the butchers were now ordered to sell this new kind of meat, and a maximum price was fixed. for a fortnight the supply of cats held out, after which rats and mice became the chief staple of food. dog-flesh was next reluctantly tasted, and found, as our conscientious chronicler observes, to be somewhat sweet and insipid.[ ] and so the spring of passed away, and summer came; but no succor arrived for the beleaguered city. on the contrary, there came the disheartening tidings from the west that a peace had been concluded by the huguenots of la rochelle, in which no mention was made of sancerre. [sidenote: losses of the royal army before la rochelle.] [sidenote: roman catholic processions.] so successful had been the defence of the citadel of protestantism on the shores of the ocean, so unexpectedly large the royal losses, that the court was only waiting for a decent pretext to abandon the unfortunate siege. pestilence added its victims to those of the sword, and it was currently reported that forty thousand of the besiegers were swept away by their combined assaults.[ ] a more careful enumeration, however, shows that, while the rochellois, out of thirty-one hundred soldiers, lost thirteen hundred, including twenty-eight "pairs," the king, out of a little more than forty thousand troops, had lost twenty-two thousand, ten thousand of whom died in the breach or in engagements elsewhere. nor was the loss of officers trifling; two hundred had died, including fifty of great distinction, and five "maîtres de camp."[ ] and, with all this expenditure of life, and with the heavy drafts upon the public treasure, little or nothing had been accomplished. meanwhile, in other parts of france there existed a scarcity of food amounting almost to a famine; nor had the solemn processions to the shrines of the saints--processions for the most part rendered contemptible by the irreverent conduct both of the clergymen and the laity that took part in them[ ]--averted the wrath of heaven. the poor suffered extremely. selfishness gained such ascendancy in some towns, that cruel ruses were adopted to remove the destitute that had taken refuge within their walls. it was not strange that the extraordinary mortality which soon fell upon the well-to-do burghers was viewed by many as a direct punishment sent by the almighty.[ ] [sidenote: election of henry of anjou to the crown of poland.] the event which came just in time to free the court from its embarrassment was the election of henry of anjou to the vacant throne of poland. we have already witnessed the perplexity of bishop montluc when the tidings of the massacre first reached him.[ ] if he could have denied its reality, he would have done so. this being impossible, he was forced to content himself with misrepresenting the origin of the slaughter, slandering the admiral and the other victims, and circulating the calumnies of charpentier and others who prated about a huguenot conspiracy. a judicious distribution of french gold assisted his own eloquent sophistry; and the duke of anjou, portrayed as a chivalric prince and one who was not ill-affected to religious liberty, was chosen king over his formidable rivals. charles and catharine were alike delighted. the former could scarcely find words to express his joy[ ] at the prospect of being freed from the presence of a brother whom he feared, and perhaps hated; while the queen mother's gratification was even more intense at the peaceful solution of the prophecy of nostradamus, than at the elevation of her favorite son. [sidenote: edict of pacification, boulogne, july, .] the peace between the king and the rochellois was concluded in june, and was formally promulgated in july, , in a royal edict from boulogne. the chief provision was that the protestants in the cities of la rochelle, montauban, and nismes should enjoy entire freedom of public worship, while their brethren throughout the kingdom should have liberty of conscience and the right to sell their property and remove wherever they might choose, whether within or without the realm. only gentlemen and others enjoying high jurisdiction, who had remained constant in their faith, and had taken up arms with the three cities, were to be allowed to collect their friends to the number of ten to witness their marriages and baptisms, according to the custom of the reformed church. even this privilege could not be exercised within the distance of two leagues from the royal court or from the city of paris; nor did the edict confer the right to preach or celebrate the lord's supper.[ ] la rochelle, nismes, and montauban gained their point, and were to be exempted from receiving garrisons or having citadels built, with the condition that they should for two years constantly keep four of their principal citizens at court as pledges of their fidelity. all promises of abjuration were declared null and void. amnesty was proclaimed, and, to cap the climax of absurdity, the brave huguenots who had defended their homes for months against charles were solemnly declared to be held the king's "good, loyal, and faithful subjects and servants." [sidenote: meagre results of the war.] the results of the war on the king's side were certainly very meagre. to have fought for the greater part of a year with the miserable huguenots that had escaped the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and then to conclude the war by such a peace, was certainly ignominious enough for charles and his mother. for the huguenot party was now, more than ever, a recognized power in the state, with three strongholds--one in the west and two in the south. into no one of these could a royal garrison be introduced. la rochelle, in particular, having repulsed every assault of the best army that could be brought against it, was acknowledged invincible by the exemptions accorded to it in common with nismes and montauban. it was hardly by such expectations that charles had been prevailed upon to throw down the gage of war to his subjects of the reformed faith. [sidenote: the siege and famine of sancerre continue.] meanwhile, the inhabitants of sancerre, not even named in the edict,[ ] had been sustained under appalling difficulties by the confident hope of assistance from the south. but the hope was long deferred, and they grew sick at heart. the prospect was already dark enough, when, on the second of june, a protestant soldier, who had made his way into the city through the enemy's lines, brought the depressing announcement that no aid must be expected from languedoc for six weeks. as but little wheat remained in sancerre, the immediate effect of the intelligence was that liberty was given to some seventy of the poor to leave the city walls. at the same time the daily ration was limited to half a pound of grain. a week later it was reduced to one-quarter of a pound. not long after only a single pound was doled out once a week, and by the end of the month the supply entirely gave out. the beginning of july reduced the besieged to the necessity of tasking their ingenuity to make palatable food of the hides of cattle, next of the skins of horses, dogs, and asses. the stock of even this unsavory material soon became exhausted; whereupon, not very unnaturally, parchment was turned to good account. manuscripts a good century old were eaten with relish. soaked for a couple of days in water, and afterward boiled as much longer, when they became glutinous they were fried, like tripe, or prepared with herbs and spices, after the manner of a hodge-podge. the writer who is our authority for these culinary details, informs us that he had seen the dish devoured with eagerness while the original letters written upon the parchment were still legible.[ ] but the urgent necessities of their situation did not suffer the half-famished inhabitants to stop here. with the proverbial ingenuity of their nation, they turned their attention to the parchment on old drums, and subjected to the skilful hands of cooks the discarded hoofs, horns, and bones of animals, the harness of horses, and even refuse scraps of leather. there seemed to be nothing they could not lay under contribution to furnish at least a little nutriment. and yet ghastly hunger little by little tightened her relentless embrace. almost all the children under twelve years of age died. in the universal reign of famine there were at last found those who were ready to repeat the horrible crime of feeding upon the flesh of their own kindred. it was discovered that a husband and wife, with a neighboring crone, had endeavored to satisfy the gnawings of hunger by eating a newly dead child. their guilt came speedily to light, and was punished according to the severe code of the sixteenth century. the father was sentenced by the council to be burned alive; his wife to be strangled and her body consigned to the flames; while the corpse of the old woman who had instigated the foul deed but had meanwhile died, was ordered to be dug up and burned. but the feeling of the great majority of the besieged was far removed from that despair which prompts to an inhuman disregard of natural decency and affection. near the close of july a boy of barely ten years, as he lay on his death-bed, said to his weeping parents: "why do you weep thus at seeing me die of hunger? i do not ask bread, mother; i know you have none. but since god wills that i die thus, we must accept it cheerfully. was not that holy man lazarus hungry? have i not so read in the bible?"[ ] the catastrophe could not much longer be deferred. within the city speedy death stared every man in the face. permission had, we have seen, been accorded to the poor, early in june, to go forth from the city walls; but the besieging force had mercilessly driven them back when they attempted to gain the open country. numbers, unwilling to accept a second time the fatal hospitality of the city, preferred to remain in their exposed situation, miserably dragging out a precarious existence by subsisting upon snails, buds of trees and shrubs--even to the very grass of the field. [sidenote: sancerre capitulates.] happily for sancerre, the political exigencies of the royal court insured for the besieged protestants, in the inevitable capitulation, more favorable terms than they might otherwise have obtained. as early as the eighteenth of july, léry had been informed at a parley, by a former acquaintance on the roman catholic side, that a general peace had been concluded, and that henry of anjou had been elected to the throne of poland. this first intimation was discredited by the cautious protestants, not unused to the wiles of the enemy. but when, some twenty days later (on the sixth of august), the statement was confirmed, and the sancerrois received the additional assurance that they would be mildly treated, their surprise knew no bounds. the terms of surrender were easily arranged. a ransom of forty thousand livres was to be exacted from the city. on the thirty-first of august, m. de la chastre made his solemn entry into sancerre, accompanied by a band of roman catholic priests chanting a _te deum_ over his success. as was too frequently the case, the promise of immunity to the inhabitants was but poorly kept. scarcely had two weeks passed before the "bailli" johanneau,[ ] summoned from his house by the archers of the prévôt, on the plea that m. de la chastre desired his presence, was treacherously murdered on the way to the governor's house. besides assassination, other infractions of the capitulation were committed; the gates of the city were burned, the walls dismantled, many of the houses torn down. in fact, so unmercifully was sancerre harried, partly by the troops, partly by the peasantry of the neighborhood, and by the "bailli" of berry, that the reformed church of this place seems to have been, for the time, completely dispersed.[ ] thus ended a siege which had lasted some eight months. the besieged had lost only eighty-four men by the direct effects of warfare; but more than five hundred persons perished during the last six weeks of sheer starvation.[ ] sancerre owed its release from the horrors of the siege in great part to the same causes that had powerfully contributed to the conclusion of the peace. the polish ambassadors, coming to proffer the crown to the king's brother, henry of anjou, were about to reach the french court. they were already not a little surprised at the discovery that the statements and promises made in the king's name by that not over-scrupulous negotiator, montluc, bishop of valence, were impudent impostures, fabricated for no other purpose than to secure at all hazards the success of the french candidate for the polish throne. to exhibit to them at this critical juncture the edifying spectacle of a royal governor of the province of berry engaged in the reduction of a city the only crime of which was its desire to enjoy religious liberty--this would have been a dangerous venture. consequently it was no fortuitous coincidence that sancerre capitulated the very day the polish ambassadors made their appearance. [sidenote: reception of the polish ambassadors.] we shall not dwell upon the pomp attending their reception. the banquet held in the new palace of the tuileries was brilliant. in the pageant succeeding it was displayed a massive rock of silver, with sixteen nymphs in as many niches, personating the provinces of the french kingdom. when, after some verses well sung but indifferently composed, these nymphs descended from their elevation, and took part in an intricate maze of dance, the polish spectators remarked, in the excess of their admiration, that the french ballet was something that could be imitated by none of the kings of the earth. "i would rather," dryly adds a contemporary historian, "that they had said as much respecting our _armies_."[ ] [sidenote: discontent of the south with the terms of peace.] the protestants of southern france had been included in the edict of pacification. in fact, nismes and montauban were as distinctly referred to by name as la rochelle.[ ] but the terms of peace were not to the taste of the enterprising and self-reliant huguenots of languedoc and guyenne. they had learned, during the last ten years, to distrust all assurances emanating from the court, even when claiming the authority of the king's name. experience had taught them that previous edicts were framed simply to secure the destruction of those whom open warfare had failed to destroy.[ ] without, therefore, either definitely accepting or rejecting the terms offered them, the protestants of nismes applied to marshal damville, who, at the conclusion of the peace, found himself with the royal troops at the hamlet of milhaud, a league or two from their gates,[ ] for a fortnight's suspension of hostilities. the request being granted, a truce was established which was extended by successive prolongations beyond the beginning of the next year.[ ] [sidenote: assembly of milhau and montauban.] meantime the protestants, notified by the duke of anjou of the conclusion of the peace, sent messengers to his camp requesting that as the matter was one vitally affecting the entire protestant population, they might receive permission to meet, under protection of the royal authority, and deliberate respecting it. the king's consent having been obtained, protestant deputies from almost all parts of the kingdom came together, late in the month of august, , in the city of milhau-en-rouergue, from which they shortly transferred their sessions to montauban. [sidenote: military organization of the huguenots.] this important assembly resolved to accept no peace unless based upon equitable terms and secured by ample guarantees. in view of the possibility of the recurrence of war, provision was made for a complete military organization of the huguenot resources in the south of france. for this purpose languedoc was divided into two "généralités" or governments--the government of nismes, or lower languedoc, placed under command of m. de saint romain, and that of upper languedoc, with montauban for its chief city, to which the viscount de paulin was assigned as military chief. both governments were in turn subdivided into dioceses or particular governments, each furnished with a governor and a deliberative assembly. it was provided that in nismes and montauban respectively a council should be convened consisting of deputies from all the dioceses of the government, and that to this council, together with the governor, should be intrusted the administration of the finances, with authority to impose taxes alike upon protestants and roman catholics. the organization, it was estimated, could readily place twenty thousand men in the field.[ ] such were the first attempts to perfect a system of warfare forced upon the huguenots by the treacherous assaults of their enemies--a fatal necessity of instituting a state within a state, foreboding nothing but ruin to france. [sidenote: petition to the king.] one of the chief results of the deliberations at montauban was the preparation of a petition to be laid before the king. this paper, which has come down to us with the signatures of the viscounts, barons, and other adherents of the huguenot party, was intended to be an expression not only of their own individual views, but also of the sentiments of the churches they represented.[ ] the language is sharp and incisive, the demands are unmistakably bold. for a sufficient justification of their recent words and actions, the huguenots of guyenne point the monarch to his own letter of the twenty-fourth of august, , by which constraint was laid upon them to assume arms. they call upon charles, in accordance with the promise contained in that letter, to follow up the traces there alleged to have been found regarding the murder of gaspard de coligny, to appoint impartial judges for this purpose, and to execute exemplary justice upon the guilty. not satisfied with claiming the annulling of all judicial proceedings, the destruction of all monuments erected to perpetuate the memory of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and the abolition of processions instituted by the parliaments of paris and toulouse with the same end in view, they call on charles to make a declaration "that justly and for good reasons have 'those of the religion' taken arms, resisting and warring in these last troubles, as constrained thereto by the violent acts with which they have been assailed and driven to distraction." they next demand those concessions which alone can make the position of the protestants in france secure and endurable--freedom of worship and church discipline established by perpetual provision, irrespective of place or time; the right of honorable burial; immunity from taxation for the support of roman catholic ceremonies; admission to schools and colleges; just regulations as to marriage; amnesty; the power to hold civil office, etc. they request permission to levy a sum of one hundred and twenty thousand livres among themselves to pay off the indebtedness incurred by them in past wars. and they go so far as not only to stipulate that the king of france shall renounce all leagues he may have contracted with the enemies of his protestant subjects for their destruction, but even to propose that he shall conclude a defensive alliance with the protestant states of germany, switzerland, england, and scotland. meanwhile, in order to prevent the recurrence of "a conspiracy and sicilian vespers," of which the huguenots would be the victims, they ask to be permitted to hold forever the guard of those cities which they now have in their possession, and in addition some other cities in each of the provinces of the realm. the protestant cities, it is stipulated, shall retain their walls and munitions, and the royal governors shall enter them accompanied only by a small retinue. the observance of these articles the huguenots insist shall be solemnly sworn in privy and public council, and by the inhabitants of all places, the oath to be renewed every five years.[ ] such stout demands did the protestants of the south and south-west address to charles the ninth on the first anniversary of the fatal matins of paris. they were, it must be admitted, somewhat different from what might have been expected, a brief year before, from the fugitives who made their escape from the bloody sword of their enemies. moreover, the terms laid down by the huguenots of lower languedoc and nismes were conceived in the same brave language, and their demands were virtually identical. huguenot troops, paid by the king, to garrison both the cities now in the hands of the protestants, and two cities in each of the sixteen provinces required for additional protection; free worship irrespective of place; new parliaments in all the provinces, with protestant judges to administer justice to protestants; liberty to levy tithes for the support of reformed churches; punishment of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocities of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, as robbers and disturbers of the public peace.[ ] the tiers État of provence and dauphiny added to the demands of languedoc and guyenne an urgent petition in favor of the reduction of the onerous imposts under which the country was groaning.[ ] [sidenote: "les fronts d'airain."] [sidenote: catharine's bitter reply.] the bearers of these demands were well able to give them forcible and fearless enunciation--yolet, philippi, chavagnac, and others of the men known by the expressive designation of "les fronts d'airain."[ ] assuredly a brow of brass was not out of place, when the protestant deputies, after a delay of some weeks, were reluctantly admitted to an audience. charles the ninth and his court were at this time at villers-cotterets, on their way to the eastern frontiers of france, accompanying the newly elected king of poland as he slowly and unwillingly journeyed toward the capital of a kingdom regarded by him in the light of a detestable place of exile. contemporary writers inform us that yolet and his companions were in no degree overawed by the splendor of the scene, and made no weak abatement in the terms they had been instructed to propose. charles heard them through with patient attention. he was not a little astonished at the extent of their demands, we may be certain; but he made no comment upon the courageous assertion of protestant rights. not so with the queen mother. when the deputies had at length finished their harangue, catharine could no longer contain her indignation. "why," she exclaimed with marked bitterness of tone, "if your condé himself were alive and in the heart of the kingdom with twenty thousand horse and fifty thousand foot, and held the chief cities in his power, he would not make half so great demands!"[ ] [sidenote: the huguenots firm.] despite the unwelcome character of the claims of the huguenot deputies, some answer must be given. it was found impossible to induce the envoys to modify them. they denied that they had the power, even if they had the inclination, to alter the action of those who had sent them. they were therefore dismissed with expressions of good-will and the assurance that two royal commissioners, the duc d'uzès and the chevalier de caylus, would be sent to treat with the delegates whom the huguenots might choose. marshal damville, governor of the province, was to participate in the negotiations and to appoint some city in the vicinity of montauban where they might be held. charles was to hear the result of their conference on his return from the german borders. meanwhile he promised to instruct damville to put an end to all hostilities, provided the huguenots should desist from everything tending to provoke retaliation.[ ] the tiers État received the answer to their petition more promptly. it was naturally to the effect that a return to the meagre scale of imposts under louis xi. was utterly impracticable, in view of the burdens of the treasury arising from recent wars and the pensions yearly payable to various members of the royal family.[ ] [sidenote: progress of the court to the borders of france.] [sidenote: decline of the health of charles ix.] it would be out of place to describe here at any length the slow progress of the french court as it escorted the king of poland to the borders of the realm. to none of the principal personages taking part was it the occasion of much satisfaction. catharine was as reluctant to part from henry, her favorite son, as he was himself averse to exchange the pleasures of the louvre and saint germain for the crown of an unruly and half-civilized kingdom. as for charles, the gratification he could not conceal at the prospect of being soon freed from the presence of a brother whom he both disliked and feared was more than counterbalanced by the rapid decline of his own health. the boy of eleven, whom the venetian ambassador had described about the time of his accession to the throne as handsome, amiable, and graceful in appearance, quick, vivacious, and humane--in short, as possessing every quality from which a great prince and a great king might be expected,[ ] was now a man of twenty-three. but his constitution, never robust, had gained nothing. the violent exercises to which he had been addicted even as a child, and which, though princely, had been pronounced dangerous by the ambassador, had been incessantly practised--the ball, horsemanship, arms--and bodily feebleness, not strength, had been the result. other excesses had contributed to hasten the catastrophe. more than all, if we may believe the testimony of those who were familiar with the young monarch's later life, the mental and moral experience of the last eighteen months left their impress on his physical system. charles, with the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, had lost all the elasticity of youth. remorse for complicity in the crime then perpetrated co-operated with the persuasion of the uselessness and complete failure of the attempt to exterminate the huguenots, and the consciousness of having incurred the indelible mark of hatred and detestation of an impartial posterity. even in his sleeping hours the curse of the murdered victims pursued him and disturbed his rest. neither by day nor by night could he banish the remembrance of the time when blood ran so freely in the streets of paris. no attentive observer could doubt that the end was drawing near. the court had gone no farther on its way to lorraine than the little town of vitry-le-français, on the river marne, when charles fell so seriously ill as to be unable to prosecute his journey. as was usual in such cases, while the physicians alleged as a sufficient explanation of the attack the king's immoderate exercise in the chase and in blowing the trumpet, the more suspicious frequenters of the court and the credulous people did not hesitate to invent the story that he had been poisoned. but by whom the crime had been committed was not settled. some ascribed it to catharine, others to henry of anjou, while others still laid the guilt at the door of a person of less note, whose honor the licentious king had offended.[ ] [sidenote: project of an english match renewed.] meanwhile, neither the monarch's feeble health, nor the journeying of the court, interrupted the prosecution of those diplomatic intrigues from which catharine still looked for valuable results. the election of henry to the polish crown left but one of her sons upon whom the regal dignity had not been conferred. the prophecy of nostradamus might have its complete fulfilment if only a kingdom could be found for alençon.[ ] otherwise the superstitious queen mother did not doubt that she was fated to see not only charles, but henry also die, to make place for her youngest child on the throne of france. la mothe fénélon was therefore instructed to put forth every exertion to bring queen elizabeth to the point of consenting definitely to wed a prince her junior by about a score of years. nor did the negotiations appear altogether hopeless. the suitor was, indeed, we have seen, as insignificant in body as he was contemptible in intellectual ability. moreover, the deep traces left on his face by the small-pox rendered him sufficiently ungainly. the blemish was said to be increasing, instead of diminishing, with his years.[ ] but the french courtiers might perhaps have overcome this impediment had elizabeth been able to see it to be her interest to contract such close relations with her neighbors across the channel. as it was, an agreement was actually made that alençon should visit england and press his suit in person; but when the time arrived for him to cross to dover, catharine justified the despatch of marshal de retz in his place, on the plea of her son's illness. the excuse may have contained some truth,[ ] for, albeit francis of alençon had received the baptismal name of hercules, he was a puny weakling, from whom no labors could ever be expected, but rather a dull existence of sloth and imbecility. it was, however, a stretch even of diplomatic assurance, for la mothe fénélon to suggest to the virgin queen of england, as he deliberately reports that he did, that alençon's malady was probably due to his disappointment at elizabeth's failure to reciprocate his honest affection![ ] possibly his mother and his brother the king may about this time have begun to realize how impolitic it would be to strengthen overmuch the personal consideration of the young prince. disgusted with the subordinate position assigned him at court, and especially with the failure of his efforts to obtain the appointment of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, lately held by henry of anjou, alençon was even now drifting into an association with the political and religious malcontents whose existence could not altogether be ignored. the french ambassador at the english court was, however, instructed by no means to let the projected marriage drop.[ ] with the patriots in the low countries and with the protestant princes of germany, the french agents were in even more active conference. in the netherlands there was a possibility of securing some high position for anjou or alençon, in germany a chance to divert the imperial crown from the hapsburg to the valois family, it may reasonably be doubted whether the project was ever distinctly entertained, as the historian de thou asserts,[ ] of conferring upon anjou the command in chief of the confederates in flanders, where it was expected that he would have a well equipped fleet at his disposition; for the correspondence of gaspard de schomberg, the french agent, contains no allusion to the proposal. certainly, however, france was, at least, anxious that england should gain no advantage over her in this part of europe. in fact, nothing but the natural fear entertained of the great power and apparently limitless resources of spain deterred both elizabeth and charles from attempting to secure the sovereignty of the revolted netherlands. [sidenote: intrigues with the german princes.] in germany the field for intrigue was more open. the imperial dignity had not yet become purely hereditary. in choosing a new king of the romans, the presumptive heir of the german empire, the three protestant electors, if they could but secure the concurrence of one of the four roman catholic electors, might have it in their power to correct the mistake committed by frederick the wise of saxony, a half-century earlier, in declining the crown in favor of charles of spain. schomberg was therefore instructed to recommend to the protestants of germany and the low countries, that one of their own number should be placed in the line of succession to the empire, or, if they could find no german protestant prince sufficiently powerful to oppose the hapsburgs, that the dignity should be offered to the king of france. this was a somewhat startling suggestion to emanate from a king who, but a brief twelvemonth before had been butchering his protestant subjects by tens of thousands. but the sixteenth century furnishes not a few paradoxes equally remarkable. both protestants and roman catholics often found it convenient to have very short memories. in this case, however, the proposal to set aside the son of the tolerant maximilian the second in behalf of a son of catharine de' medici met with little favor at the hands of one at least of the protestant leaders. the landgrave of hesse declared he would have nothing to do with a project intended solely to sow divisions in the empire. the french, since the successful issue of their intrigues in poland, he said, had become so arrogant that they thought they must be nothing less than masters of the whole world.[ ] as for himself, he was quite satisfied with the present emperor, whom he prayed that god might long preserve, and then graciously provide them in his place with a pious christian leader who should rule the empire well and faithfully.[ ] [sidenote: death of count louis of nassau.] at blamont, in the duchy of lorraine, catharine took leave of the king of poland. here the old ally of the huguenots, louis of nassau, accompanied by duke christopher, younger son of the elector palatine, met them. louis had been unremitting in his efforts to obtain french assistance in the desperate struggle in which he and his brother were engaged. if words and assurances could be of any worth, he was successful. catharine promised in charles's name that france would not be behind the german protestant princes in rendering assistance to the dutch patriots. louis was so cordially received by the queen mother, and especially by alençon, that he departed greatly encouraged with the prospect. alençon had pressed the dutch patriot's hand, and whispered in his ear: "i now have the government, as my brother, the king of poland formerly had it, and i shall devote myself wholly to seconding the efforts of the prince of orange."[ ] the promised succor from france nassau never received. four months later (on the fourteenth of april, ) the brave young count, in company with his friend and comrade, duke christopher, lost his life in the fatal battle of mook, on the banks of the meuse.[ ] not the prince of orange nor holland alone, but the entire protestant world deplored the untimely death of one of the boldest and most unselfish of the champions of religion and liberty. with the details of the journey of henry of anjou to take possession of his new kingdom, we cannot here concern ourselves. one incident, however, naturally connects itself with the fortunes of the french huguenots. [sidenote: anjou's reception at heidelberg.] [sidenote: frankness of the elector palatine.] after traversing alsace, henry and his suite presented themselves, unwelcome guests, at heidelberg, capital of the palatinate. the elector, frederick the third, and his subjects were, perhaps, equally displeased at the arrival of the prime mover in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. but, while the people felt some freedom in the expression of their disgust, motives of state policy prevented their prince from openly displaying his antipathy. however, he neither could nor would conceal the lively remembrance in which the events of august, , were still held by him. it was on friday, the eleventh of december, that the french party, under the escort of a large body of soldiers sent out to do them honor, ascended to the castle, then as now occupying a commanding site overlooking the valley of the neckar.[ ] the king of poland was somewhat surprised when, on entering the portal, instead of the elector, the rhinegrave, with two french refugees escaped from the massacre, came to escort him to the rooms prepared for his reception. frederick had directed the rhinegrave to request henry to excuse this apparent discourtesy on the ground of his feeble health. it is more probable that the true motive was the elector's desire to avoid incurring, by too great complaisance, the displeasure of the emperor, who was naturally much irritated at the success of the french intrigues in poland. when, later, frederick made his tardy appearance, it was only to greet anjou in a brief address, reserving for the morrow their more extended conference. on saturday the elector politely conducted his guest through his extensive picture gallery. pausing before one painting the face of which was protected from sight, he ordered an attendant to draw aside the curtain. to his astonishment, henry found himself confronted with a life-like portrait of gaspard de coligny. to the question, "does your royal highness recognize the subject?" henry replied with sufficient composure: "i do; it is the late admiral of france." "yes," rejoined frederick, "it is the admiral--a man whom i have found, of all the french nobles, the most zealous for the glory of the french name; and i am not afraid to assert that in him the king and all france have sustained an irreparable loss." elsewhere henry's attention was directed to a large painting representing the very scenes of the massacre, and he was asked whether he could distinguish any of the victims. nor did frederick confine himself to these casual references. in pointed terms he exposed to the young valois both the sin and the mistaken policy of the events of a twelvemonth since. the slaughter of the admiral and of so many other innocent men and women had not only provoked the divine retribution, but had diminished not a little the reputation and influence of the french with all orders of persons in germany.[ ] henry listened with commendable patience to the old elector's denunciations, alleging by way of excuse that the french court had been under the influence of the passions then running high, and readily promised great caution and tolerance in future.[ ] he did, indeed, strike on his breast and begged frederick to believe him that things had occurred otherwise than had been reported. but his auditor dryly remarked that he was fully informed of what had taken place in france.[ ] as the elector also took occasion to remind anjou of sundry miserable deaths of notorious persecutors, such as herod the great, herod agrippa, and maxentius; as he openly ridiculed the absurd suggestion that coligny, a wounded man, with both arms disabled in consequence of maurevel's shot, planned on his bed an attack on the king; and as, furthermore, he plainly denounced the shocking immorality of catharine de' medici's court ladies--it must be confessed that frederick the pious, on the present occasion, made more of a virtue of frankness than of diplomacy.[ ] on sunday the french left heidelberg, with little regret on their own part or on that of their hosts. not to speak of their treatment by the elector, which even the historian de thou regarded as scarcely comporting with the dignity with which henry was invested,[ ] the followers of the polish king met with frequent insults, both in coming and in going. one of them relates how he heard cries of "those dogs from lorraine! those italian traitors!" and a german eye-witness of the scenes expresses it as his opinion that the french nobles would not have been safe had they not been escorted by the palatine troops. the sight of "that notable cut-throat, the duke of nevers," of the marshal de retz, of captain du gast, and "very many others of that band of villains who so cruelly butchered the admiral and other nobles in paris," provoked the populace almost beyond endurance. the very diamonds and jewels presented by henry on his departure, to the elector and to the ladies of his court, aroused the popular indignation; for they were known, as we have already seen, to have constituted a part of the plunder of a certain rich huguenot jeweller, whose shop had been robbed at the time of the parisian matins.[ ] there were not wanting those who would even have counselled the worthy elector to follow the course indicated by the spanish grandee, who informed charles the fifth that he intended to burn his castle to the ground so soon as the traitorous constable de bourbon had relieved it of his polluting presence.[ ] [sidenote: last days of chancellor de l'hospital.] meantime, within the borders of france all was ferment and disquiet. the roman catholic element, comprising the overwhelming majority of the people, had become split into two factions, both animated by inextinguishable hatred, and each resolved to compass the destruction of the other. of conciliatory measures there was a dearth. among the men of wide influence there was no one to take the place of the virtuous michel de l'hospital. that truly great statesman had died nine months before (on the thirteenth of march, ). the storm of war at that moment raging about la rochelle was a fit expression of the utter failure of the aged chancellor's policy. for a dozen years there had not been a candid and sincere effort made to restore tranquillity to france which had not either originated with him or received his cordial support. but of the sanguine hopes of ultimate success entertained in the earlier stages of his political career, he retained little toward its close. the last years of his presence at court witnessed an uninterrupted struggle between the chancellor and that family of guise which he had come to regard as the prime cause of the misery afflicting the kingdom. more than once the latent personal hostility had broken out in an open quarrel between l'hospital and the cardinal of lorraine. two or three exciting scenes of recrimination, which the tact of catharine de' medici was scarcely able to allay, have met us in this history. at length, when the third civil war burst forth, l'hospital, seeing himself altogether powerless to resist the more violent counsels then in the ascendant, had received permission to retire from the royal court to his estate in the vicinity of Étampes.[ ] it was none the less an exile that it wore the appearance of a voluntary withdrawal. birague discharged the real functions of the chancellor's office. finally, after barely escaping a violent death in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, the chancellor received, in january, , the formal order to give up the guardianship of the seals, which for more than four years had been only nominally under his control. his touching reply to the royal summons is the last production of the chancellor's pen that has come down to us. interposing no obstacle to the execution of the king's will, the writer invoked the testimony of the queen mother that, in all things pertaining to the royal interests, "he had been forgetful rather of his own advantage than of the king's service, and had always followed _the great royal road_, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, and giving himself to no private faction." "and now," he added, "that my maladies and my age have rendered me useless to do you service, just as you have seen the old galleys in the port of marseilles, which, though dismantled, are yet regarded with pleasure, so i very humbly beg you to view me both in my present state and my past, which shall be an instruction and an example to all your subjects to do you good service. god give you grace to choose servants and counsellors more competent than i have been, and as affectionate and devoted to your service as i am." the closing words were characteristic of the life-long advocate of toleration: a recommendation of gentleness and clemency, in imitation of a long-suffering and pardoning god.[ ] two months later michel de l'hospital ended his eventful life. france could ill afford to lose at this juncture a magistrate[ ] so upright--a statesman who "had the lilies of france in his heart."[ ] [sidenote: the party of the "politiques."] [sidenote: hotman's franco-gallia.] since the siege of la rochelle, or more properly since the day of the massacre, a new party had been forming, of those who could not bring themselves to approve the cruel acts of the court, or who, for any reason, were jealous of the faction now in power. as opposed to the italian counsellors by whom the queen mother had surrounded the throne, it was pre-eminently a french or patriotic party. it demanded the expulsion of florentines and of lorrainers from the kingdom, or at least from the management of public affairs. the "malcontents," or "politiques," as they now began to be called,[ ] demanded a return to the former usages of the kingdom, in accordance with which the most important decisions were never made without consulting the states general. two books appearing about this time made a deep impression. in an anonymous treatise entitled "franco-gallia," the authorship of which was speedily traced to the eminent jurist francis hotman, attention was drawn to the original constitution of the kingdom; and the writer showed by irrefragable proofs that the regal dignity was not hereditary like a private possession, but was a gift of the people, which they could as lawfully transfer from one to another, as originally confer. the participation of women in the administration of the government was declared to be abhorrent to the ideas of the founders of the french monarchy.[ ] in another work appearing not long after, the principle was enunciated that an unbounded obedience is due to the almighty alone, while obedience to human magistrates is in its very nature subject to limitations and exceptions. the supreme authority of kings and other high magistrates was explained to be of such a nature "that if they violate the laws, to the observance of which they have bound themselves by oath, and become manifest tyrants, giving no room for better counsels, then it is lawful for the inferior magistrates to make provision both for themselves and for those committed to their charge, and oppose the tyrant."[ ] the circumstance is not without significance that in a huguenot work, published early in the succeeding year, the guilty king who authorized the butchery of his innocent subjects on st. bartholomew's day, is for the first time distinctly designated as the "tyrant."[ ] [sidenote: treacherous attempt on la rochelle.] the lesson that no trust could be reposed in charles and his court was one which the world had learned pretty thoroughly before this; and the events at la rochelle during the month of december, , were well calculated to prevent it from being forgotten. the definite peace, made five months before, guaranteed the safety of the protestants, and secured to them the free exercise of their religious rights. none the less was a project set on foot to introduce a royal garrison into the city by treachery. m. de biron and other captains had been unable to conceal their disgust at the abandonment of the siege of la rochelle, when, as they pretended, it must very shortly have fallen into the king's hands, and biron had been soundly berated by anjou for his pains. he had not, however, given up the notion of making himself master of the huguenot stronghold, and there were others in the royal army intent upon the same end. a scheme to smuggle soldiers through the gates, in wagons covered with branches of trees, was so freely talked of that it reached the citizens' ears, and only augmented their suspicions. a more serious plot was set on foot, in accordance with which one jacques du lyon, seigneur de grandfief, prominent in the late defence of la rochelle, was to gain possession of one of the city gates, and admit puigaillard, who, for this purpose, had massed considerable numbers of royal soldiers at nuaillé, on the east, and at saint-vivien, on the south of la rochelle. happily the treacherous design was itself betrayed by an accomplice. grandfief was killed while defending himself against those who had been sent to arrest him. several of the supposed leaders[ ] were condemned to be broken on the wheel, and the barbarous sentence was executed. the papers discovered in the house of grandfief clearly proved that the plot had received the full approval not only of biron, but of the queen mother herself. after inflicting summary vengeance on the miserable instruments of perfidy, the rochellois, therefore, addressed their complaints to the french court. it need not surprise us, however, to learn that they received in reply letters from charles not only disowning the conspiracy, but assuring them that he heartily detested it, and approved the rigorous measures adopted.[ ] [sidenote: the huguenots reassemble at milhau.] [sidenote: they complete their organization.] shortly before the discovery of the conspiracy at la rochelle, the huguenots had again assembled at milhau-en-rouergue. the delegates, about one hundred in number, represented very fully the gentry and tiers état of the south and south-west of france, while a few names from the central and northern provinces indicated the weaker hold gained by protestantism in that portion of the kingdom.[ ] ostensibly meeting, with the royal permission, to receive the report of the commissioners sent to the king, and to entertain the terms proposed by marshal damville, the huguenots availed themselves of the opportunity to perfect the organization of their party which had been sketched in previous political assemblies. accepting it as notorious that, whether in time of peace, or of open war, or of truce, the protestants were in peril from the daily intrigues and assaults of their enemies, all tending to their complete ruin, the huguenot assembly renewed and swore to maintain a permanent union comprising all their brethren of the same faith not only in france proper, but in the papal comtât venaissin, the principality of orange, and other districts less closely united to the crown. to this end they determined that the "states general," composed of a delegate from the nobility, the tiers état, and the magistracy of each "généralité" or government, should meet every six months; while the particular assemblies of the governments should be convened at least as often as once in three months. the functions of the generals and their councils were expressly limited to the military and financial concerns of the huguenots, with other matters of public interest. they were strictly forbidden from intermeddling, under any pretext, with the discharge of civil or criminal justice. this last function was to be referred to the royal courts, save that, instead of appealing to the parliaments, known to be too hostile to protestantism to afford hope of obtaining justice, arbitrators were to be chosen by the protestants among themselves.[ ] not forgetting their common religious bond, the huguenots at milhau declared it to be the duty of the ministers of god's word and of the consistories to keep watch over criminal and dissolute behavior, and denounce it for punishment to the civil magistrate. at the same time, in order that the ministers might be the better able to devote themselves to their sacred functions, it was directed that they be regularly paid from the common funds "without making any further use of notices (billettes) or other unworthy and illusory methods, as has been done heretofore, to the great scandal of all good people." the levy of imposts and the creation of loans were made the exclusive right of the particular states, while the administration of the funds arising from the royal revenues was to be intrusted to the provincial councils.[ ] such were the chief features in a plan for organization evidently looking to the speedy renewal of the warfare temporarily suspended by virtue of the truce. [sidenote: the duke of alençon.] while the revelation of the treacherous attempt of the royal party upon la rochelle proved to the politiques, or malcontents, the impossibility of relying upon the assurances given in the name of charles the ninth, the resolutions of the huguenots in milhau encouraged them in their project to remove the present advisers of the king. in the absence of any better leader, they looked to the duke of alençon as their head. he alone of the royal family was guiltless of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. his antagonism to anjou and to his mother was well known. it was even reported that he had himself been exposed to serious danger by reason of his avowed sympathy with the imprisoned king of navarre and his cousin of condé. in fact, he was himself little better than a captive at the court of charles--eyed with suspicion, unable to obtain favors for his friends, and vainly suing to be appointed to the office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom. it was perhaps not strange that, in looking about for a nominal head, the politiques should have settled upon alençon, who received their overtures with undisguised satisfaction and large promises of support. and yet there could scarcely have been a more unhappy selection. of the feeble children of catharine de' medici, he was undoubtedly the feeblest. he possessed neither the courage to undertake nor the fortitude to prosecute any really bold enterprise. all who had the misfortune at any time to credit his plighted word discovered in their own cases a fresh and pointed application of the warning against putting trust in princes. of him busbec, the emperor's ambassador, gave a life-like delineation when he characterized him as "a prince who allowed himself to be ensnared by the bad counsels of unskilful ministers, who could not distinguish friends from flatterers, nor a great from a good reputation; ready to undertake, still more ready to desist; always inconstant, restless, and frivolous; always prepared to disturb the best established tranquillity."[ ] [sidenote: glandage plunders the city of orange.] circumstances almost beyond their control seemed now to be forcing the huguenots to make common cause with the malcontents. yet there were not wanting those who looked upon the alliance as more likely to retard than to advance their true interests, and who pointed with convincing force to the disastrous results of a similar union in the time of the tumult of amboise, fourteen years before. the cloak of the reformed name, they argued, would certainly be assumed by men having no desire for a reformation of manners or morals--men whose lives would only dishonor the cause with which they were supposed to be identified. nor was the fear an idle one, as was shown by an incident that occurred about this very time. the truce which had been made for languedoc did not extend to the comtât venaissin. naturally enough, there were many in the huguenot ranks who, remembering past injuries received at the hands of the troops of the pope, were not unwilling to turn their arms in this direction. but their leader was no huguenot. m. de glandage, a gentleman of dauphiny, was a soldier of fortune, and would doubtless have fought with as little reluctance against the protestants as for them, had it been to his advantage to enlist under the papal standard. as it was otherwise, he made himself master of the city of orange, with the assistance of a party of citizens, and expelled berchon, who, in the name of william the silent, had strictly abstained from acts of hostility against the neighboring pontifical towns. not so with the new governor of orange. the city became the starting-point for a continuous series of incursions. it was not war, but open rapine. the very traders were plundered of their wares when they fell into his hands. one might have fancied that a mediæval robber-baron had reappeared on the banks of the rhône. it was true that glandage, making a virtue of bluntness, was wont to say that "there was nothing huguenot about him but the point of his sword." none the less did his violent acts bring discredit upon the huguenots.[ ] [sidenote: montbrun's exploits in dauphiny.] although war had not yet been formally resumed, there were parts of france in which it already raged, or rather where peace had never been restored. this was the case in particular on both banks of the rhône, in dauphiny and in vivarez and the adjoining districts. so rapid had been the movements of the veteran huguenot chief montbrun, and so successful every blow he struck, that terror spread far and wide. important towns fell into his hands; a rich abbey but a few miles from grenoble was plundered, and the silent monks of st. bruno, in the secluded retreat of the grande chartreuse--the mother house of their order--were glad to summon troops to defend their rich fields from a similar fate.[ ] from lyons to avignon the huguenots were stronger than the king's forces.[ ] [sidenote: la rochelle resumes arms. beginning of the fifth religious war.] but the time for hollow truce and a desultory and irregular warfare was rapidly passing away. it was but little more than a month after the beginning of the new year before the conflagration again burst forth. the protestants of all parts of the kingdom were at length of one mind; there was no room for doubt that any hopes offered them had as their sole object to sow discord among the adherents of the reformed faith. if anything had been wanting to prove this, it was made clear by the refusal of the court to extend the benefits of the edict of pacification of july, , to the whole of france. the limitation of the liberty of worship by the provisions of that edict to la rochelle, montauban, and nismes, was evidently intended to render the inhabitants of the three strongest huguenot cities selfishly indifferent to the injustice done to their brethren in other parts of france. in fact, this result was partially effected in the first of the cities named. the rochellois were at first very reluctant to resume hostilities, and began to plead conscientious scruples forbidding them to break the compact made with the king. happily their hesitation was removed by françois de la noue, who, returning in a capacity entirely different from that in which he had last appeared, used all the arts of persuasion to induce the huguenot stronghold by the sea to become again the rallying-point for the protestants of the west. it was not difficult to show the citizens, when once they would listen to reason, that the starving of sancerre and numberless murders of adherents of the reformed doctrine throughout france were violations of the peace quite sufficient to justify its formal abrogation by the injured party. the fears dictated by apparent weakness were dispelled by pointing to the signal success that had crowned the arms of montbrun in dauphiny,[ ] while the reluctance of loyal subjects to rise in arms against their lawful sovereign, even in order to redress great wrongs, unless authorized by the leadership of a prince of the blood, was answered by the assurance that they would have a head of much higher rank than any under whose protection the huguenots had heretofore taken the field.[ ] it was clear that the personage thus hinted at could be no other than the king's brother. no wonder that the rochellois yielded to la noue's arguments, for almost every roman catholic whose hands were clean of the blood shed in the massacre applauded the justice of the new uprising.[ ] [sidenote: diplomacy tried in vain.] the city of la rochelle began again to repair its shattered walls, and la noue was unanimously appointed to the chief command of the huguenots in saintonge and the adjacent regions. in the effort next made to prevent the great protestant leader from espousing the side of his brethren, and to persuade the city of la rochelle to rest content with the guarantees offered by the edict of , and remain neutral in the coming conflict, catharine and her advisers signally failed. the royal envoys--biron, strozzi and pinart--were, indeed, courteously treated by la noue, frontenay, and mirambeau, who repeatedly came out to meet them at the village of ernandes. but the huguenots, in reply to their reiterated request, declined absolutely to abate a single important point in their demands. they would not hear the suggestion that by the edict of boulogne, in , previous ordinances had been repealed, but persisted in assuming that charles had always intended that the edict of should remain in force, and, in proof of this, they alleged one of the king's own declarations after the massacre. they insisted that the privileges accorded to the three privileged cities of la rochelle, montauban, and nismes, should be extended to the protestant nobility throughout the kingdom; and when biron and his companions reluctantly consented that the right to have baptism and marriage celebrated in their houses be conceded to all protestant noblemen who enjoyed the right of "haute justice," and who had always remained constant in their religious opinions, la noue protested against the restriction to baptism and marriage. "we desire to worship god freely," he said, "and you give only a part of what we need for the exercise of our religion. what you offer is a snare to catch us again and expose us to greater peril than we were ever in before. but we would much rather die with arms in our hands than be involved again in such disasters." in vain did the royalists assure them that the king was ready to grant the protestants complete liberty of conscience and protection against their enemies, but could not give them what they demanded. in vain did they repeat in substance the famous exclamation of catharine de' medici, and say, among other arguments: "you could make no greater demands if the king had nothing ready, and you had a large and powerful army, with all the advantages you could desire; whereas, we know full well that you are feeble in every direction, and that the king has great forces, as you yourselves must be aware." the huguenots had the massacre of st. bartholomew's day on their tongues continually,[ ] and could not be fed with fair promises. they required securities. first, charles must give them a city in each province of the kingdom, as a refuge in case they were assailed. next, the maintenance of the promises made to them must be guaranteed by the signatures of the princes of the blood and all the chief nobles, by governors, by lieutenants-general, and by the gentry of the provinces, as well as by the chief inhabitants of the towns. hostages must be interchanged. while the last and most remarkable proposal of all was, "that his majesty, on his part, and the huguenots, on theirs, should place a large sum of money in the hands of some german prince, who should promise to employ it in levying and paying a body of reiters to be used against that party which should violate the peace." all this was to be registered in the various parliaments and in the inferior courts of the bailiwicks and sénéchaussées. the king was further requested to call the states general within three months, to give the royal edict of pacification their formal sanction.[ ] we need not be surprised that a conference to which the two parties brought views so diametrically opposed, should have proved utterly abortive. [sidenote: the "politiques" make an unsuccessful rising.] it scarcely falls within the province of this history to narrate in detail the unsuccessful attempt of the malcontents, made some weeks before the negotiations just described, to overthrow the government, whose bad counsels were believed to be the cause of the misery under which france was groaning; for the alliance between the malcontents and the huguenots was only fortuitous and partial. a few words of explanation, however, seem to be necessary. the plan contemplated a simultaneous uprising on the tenth of march. the day had been selected by la noue himself, who rightly judged that the license and uproar indulged in by the populace up to a late hour in the night of "mardi gras" (shrove tuesday) would greatly facilitate the military undertaking.[ ] alençon and the king of navarre, who, since the massacre immediately succeeding his nuptials, had found himself less a guest than a captive at court, were to flee secretly to sedan, where they would find safety under the protection of the duc de bouillon. for the influence of this great nobleman, together with the still more powerful support of the montmorency family, was given to the projected movement. but the timidity and vacillation of alençon frustrated the well-conceived design. ten days or a fortnight before the set time for the escape of the princes from court, navarre, who, under pretext of hunting, had been allowed to leave the royal palace of saint germain, received a secret visit from m. de guitry, a gentleman who had succeeded in bringing into the vicinity an armed body of the confederates. the meeting took place by night, in navarre's bedchamber, in the little hamlet of st. prix.[ ] on the morrow guitry found means to confer with m. de thoré, turenne, and la nocle, "all in despair by reason of alençon's variable moods."[ ] this feeble prince, it would seem, was not even yet decided, and trembled at the peril he might run in attempting to reach sedan. under these circumstances the plan of flight was modified. guitry was instructed to bring his force nearer to st. germain, and wait for alençon and navarre, who, under his escort, were to gain mantes, a little farther down the seine, and perhaps ultimately join the confederates near la rochelle. guitry waited in vain: alençon and navarre never came. [sidenote: flight of the court from st. germain.] either alençon himself, or la mole, his favorite, in his name, betrayed the project to the queen mother. the discovery of a body of armed men in the vicinity, albeit they gave assurance that they meant no injury to the king, threw the entire court into consternation. catharine, reminding charles that her soothsayers had long since warned her of saint germain as a place that boded no good to her or hers, was among the first to flee, leaving the king, who was ill with quartan fever, to follow the next day.[ ] the court partook of catharine's terror, and imitated her example. layman and churchman vied in haste to gain paris, whence in a few days they retreated in a more leisurely manner to the safer refuge of the castle of vincennes. while some hurried by the main road, or picked their way along the banks of the seine, others took to boats as a less dangerous means of conveyance. but, among those who joined in the disorderly flight, there were some who retained their composure sufficiently to note the ludicrous features of the scene. long after they recalled with undisguised amusement the terror-stricken countenances of the new chancellor and of three french cardinals, as, mounted on fiery italian or spanish steeds, they clung with both hands to the saddle-bow, evidently fearing their horses even more than the dreaded huguenot.[ ] it was a very pretty farce; but the tragedy was yet to come. [sidenote: a second failure.] [sidenote: alençon and navarre examined.] a second attempt at flight made by alençon and navarre also failed, through the treachery of one of those to whom the secret had been confided. alençon and navarre were now placed under close guard, and subjected to long and repeated examinations before a royal commission. alençon was sufficiently craven in his bearing, and did not hesitate by his admissions to involve in ruin the minor instruments in the execution of the plan. navarre, in his answers to the interrogatories, displayed a courageous frankness. he was not, in truth, content with a simple denial of the evil designs attributed to him. on the contrary, he availed himself of the opportunity to rehearse the grievances under which he had been suffering for nearly two years. detained at court only to find himself an object of suspicion, his ears had been filled with successive rumors of an approaching massacre, a second st. bartholomew's day, when he would not be spared in the general destruction. these rumors had, indeed, been declared false by the duke of anjou, before the walls of la rochelle, but that prince had failed to keep the promises made before his departure for poland--to commend navarre to the royal favor. consequently he had been subjected to the indignity of frequently being refused admission to the presence of charles, while seeing la chastre, and others of those who had figured most prominently among the actors in the parisian matins, freely received at the king's rising. he had at length resolved to leave the court in company with his cousin of alençon, partly in order to consult his own safety, partly that he might restore order in his estates of béarn and navarre, now suffering from his protracted absence. when his design had come to the queen mother's knowledge, he had explained the motives of his action to her, and obtained the promise of her protection. subsequently there had reached him the intelligence that he was to be imprisoned with alençon in the castle of vincennes; whereupon he had renewed the attempt to escape the impending peril. in his second examination, in the presence of catharine de' medici and his uncle, cardinal bourbon, henry reiterated his statements respecting the alarming reports that continually reached him. at one time he learned that it was decided that, should margaret of navarre bear a son, the luckless father would be put out of the way, in order that the child might inherit his dignities. at another time, in the very chamber of king charles, the opinion had been boldly uttered, that, so long as a single member of the house of bourbon should survive, there would always be war in france. nor had the young prince dared to complain of these menaces.[ ] it was no part of catharine de' medici's plan, at this juncture, to wreak her vengeance for the blow that had been aimed at her authority, either upon her son or upon her son-in-law. the montmorencies, also, though suspected and long since the objects of jealousy, ultimately escaped with little difficulty. it is true that the eldest brother, marshal françois de montmorency, was enticed to the court, as was also another marshal, m. de cossé, and that both were thrown into the bastile. but the younger montmorencies, thoré and méru, had escaped, while their more energetic brother marshal damville, was too firmly fixed in the governorship of languedoc, to be removed without a struggle. it was hardly prudent to drive so influential a family to extremities. moreover, catharine was too wise to desire the utter destruction of a clan whose authority might on occasion be employed, as it had often been in the past, as a counterpoise to the formidable power of the guises. [sidenote: execution of la mole and coconnas.] some victims of inferior rank were needed. they were found in the persons of joseph boniface de la mole and hannibal, count de coconnas, who, with one m. de tourtray, expiated their error and that of their superiors, on the place de grève. the cruel procedure known as the administration of justice in the sixteenth century has no more striking illustration than in the barbarous torture, including the terrible trial by water, inflicted upon these wretched men. by such means it was not difficult to extort admissions which the prisoner was likely to retract at a subsequent time. consequently it is not quite clear, even with the full record before us, how far la mole and coconnas were really implicated. as for the sufferers themselves, there was little about them to call forth our special sympathy. la mole, of handsome appearance, but of cowardly disposition, was a firm believer in the magic that passed current in his day, and was questioned on the rack respecting the object of a waxen figure found among his effects. he admitted he had employed it for sorcery, to advance his suit with a lady whose love he sought. coconnas, an italian, instead of inviting contempt for his poltroonery, inspires aversion for his crimes. no assassin had distinguished himself more at the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. we are inclined to believe the contemporary chronicler, who states that charles the ninth himself averred that he had never liked coconnas since hearing the latter's sanguinary boast that he had redeemed as many as thirty huguenots from the hands of the populace, only that he might induce them to abjure their religion, under promise of life, and afterward enjoy the satisfaction of murdering them by inches under his dagger.[ ] had coconnas and la mole been persons more entitled to our respect, we might have pitied their misfortune in falling into the hands of a royal commission with whom the evidence of the guilt of the prisoners was apparently of less weight than the desire to gratify the court by their condemnation. the first president of parliament, christopher de thou, again headed the commission. the same pliant tool of despotism who had signed the death-warrant of prince louis of condé, just before the sudden close of the brief reign of francis the second, and had congratulated charles the ninth, twelve years later, in the name of the judiciary of the kingdom, on the "piety" he had displayed in butchering his unoffending subjects, again obeyed with docility the instructions of his superiors, and suppressed those more generous sentiments, which, if we may credit his son's account, he secretly entertained. [sidenote: condé retires to germany.] meantime the arrests and judicial proceedings at the capital did not delay the military enterprise in which the huguenots and malcontents were alike embarked. more fortunate than his cousin of navarre, the prince of condé, chancing to be in picardy at the outbreak of the pretended conspiracy of st. germain, took thoré's advice and fled out of the kingdom to strasbourg.[ ] himself free from the dangers encompassing his confederates in france, he was able to assist them materially by addressing personal solicitations to the german princes, and by superintending the levy of auxiliary troops. [sidenote: reasons for the success of the huguenots in face of great difficulties.] the huguenots were entering in good earnest upon the fifth religious war, and used their successes with such moderation as to conciliate even hostile populations. their enemies, judging only from superficial indications, might wonder at their strange recuperative energies. catharine might exclaim, in amazement at their progress and presumption, that "the huguenots were like cats, for, in falling, they always alighted on their feet."[ ] but those who looked into the matter more closely saw that this was no mere accident. a contemporary writer, who is also a declared antagonist, praises their prudence and good conduct at the present juncture. "we must not be astonished," he remarks, "if in a short time the protestants carry through such great repairs and so difficult to be believed. no sooner have they set foot in a place than they consider its position and deliberate as to what can be done to render it strong, or at least tenable. in all diligence they execute their decisions and enterprises, however great and difficult they may be, by the good order they practise and by a prompt obedience to the commands given them. so that i confess that they surpass us in prudence and conduct. moreover, so soon as they are in a place, they appoint persons in whom they have the greatest confidence, to collect the king's revenues, as well as the income of the ecclesiastics and of those bearing arms against them, without regard for any save the gentilhommes. their receipts are faithfully applied to the benefit of their cause, and they know how to employ these sums so well, that with little money they carry on great enterprises. so far as possible they relieve the poor husbandmen. in this they conform to the fashion of the indians, who, in time of war, do not injure the laborers, their families, their beasts of burden, and the implements used in cultivating the earth, but abstain from burning their houses and villages, and leave them in peace, deeming the tillers of the ground to be ministers of the common weal and the nursing fathers of the other estates.[ ] ... if necessity constrain them to make use of the husbandmen, they bring them to it as freely and graciously as possible, more by fair words than by force, employing caresses, and meantime protecting their cattle, their harvests, and all their property. when marching through the country, without indulging in insolence, abusive language, or plunder, they eat what they find in the houses, and keep their soldiers under good control. they instantly establish in the places they hold a council of the most capable and experienced persons.... this they convene daily and for so long a time as their affairs demand, and here they listen to the complaints made to them, whether by word of mouth or by written petition, and answer as well as they can to the satisfaction of the plaintiffs."[ ] [sidenote: montgomery lands in normandy.] [sidenote: he is forced to surrender and is taken prisoner.] about the same time that condé was leaving france for germany, another huguenot leader was entering it from the opposite quarter. count montgomery, who from england had come to the island of jersey, suddenly made his appearance in western normandy. in this province the huguenots had lately made themselves masters of the important town of saint lô, as well as of domfront on the borders of the province of maine.[ ] to these gains montgomery soon added carentan, an important point on the north, which he took care to provision. he seemed likely, indeed, to bring all this extensive territory under the power of the protestants. his brilliant career was, however, destined to be very brief. the royal forces sent against him under matignon were strong, his own troops were few. from saint lô, where he was besieged, he succeeded by a bold dash in escaping with a small company of horse; but at domfront, whither he betook himself in hope of receiving reinforcements from the south, his manly defence availed nothing. against an army of four thousand foot and one thousand horse, besides a large number of roman catholic gentlemen serving at their own charges, the little band of not over ninety arquebusiers and fifty horse could offer no protracted resistance. domfront, strong in itself, was commanded by neighboring heights, and the walls, through long neglect, had become so weak that they crumbled and fell at the very first cannonade. montgomery, deserted by some of his soldiers and enfeebled by the loss of others, was compelled to surrender to the besieging army. the story was current that he had received a pledge of life and liberty at the hands of matignon.[ ] but agrippa d'aubigné is undoubtedly correct in declaring that the report was a mistaken one, and that montgomery barely received the assurance that he would be placed in the hands of the king alone. "there have been only too many acts of perfidy in france, without the invention of others," says this historian. "if there were any infractions of the capitulation, they were in the case of some other gentlemen and soldiers, who were maltreated or slain."[ ] [sidenote: delight of catharine de' medici.] there was one person to whom the capture of count montgomery was peculiarly gratifying. catharine de' medici had never forgotten the murderous wound montgomery's lance had inflicted upon her husband in the rough tournament held in honor of isabella's nuptials. true, the count had entered the lists with henry only by the king's express command, and the fatal effects of the blow that shattered henry's visor and drove the splintered stock into his eye, were due to no malicious intent. nevertheless, montgomery was never sincerely forgiven; and when the slayer of the father was captured fighting against the son, catharine resolved that no considerations of pity should prevent his expiating his unintended crime. nor was the roman catholic party loth to see summary punishment inflicted upon montgomery in revenge for the blow he had struck the "noblesse" of béarn and the frightful slaughter of their partisans he had authorized, five years before, during the third civil war, at the storming of orthez.[ ] on the other hand, the parisian populace was excited by the revival of the false rumor already referred to, that count montgomery, glorying in the mischance whereby france was robbed of her king, had substituted for his ancestral coat of arms a novel escutcheon of his own device, whereon was figured a broken lance.[ ] it need not surprise us, therefore, that though guiltless of any crime of which the law of even that cruel age ordinarily took cognizance, the huguenot leader, after being placed on the rack in the vain attempt to obtain from him admissions criminating his associates, was condemned, as a traitor found in arms against his king, to be beheaded and quartered, on the place de grève, on the twenty-sixth of june, . [sidenote: execution of montgomery on the place de grève.] both enemies and friends unite in testifying to the fortitude with which count montgomery underwent the execution of his severe sentence. roman catholic writers, indeed, hint that he may have received profit from the ministrations of five or six theological doctors, to whom they represent him as gladly listening.[ ] but protestant historians give us a circumstantial account that seems better entitled to credit, and leaves no room for doubt that gabriel de montgomery died constant to the faith which he had embraced in his retirement, after the death of henry the second. he refused to confess to the famous vigor, archbishop of narbonne, and would neither kiss the crucifix offered to him by the priest who rode with him in the tumbrel, nor listen to his words, nor even look at him. to a gray friar, who attempted to convince him that he was in error and had been deceived, he replied: "how deceived? if i have been deceived, it was by members of your own order; for the first person that ever gave me a bible in french, and bade me read it, was a franciscan like yourself. and therein i learned the religion that i now hold, which is the only true religion. having lived in it ever since, i wish, by the grace of god, to die in it to-day." on the scaffold, after a touching address to the spectators, he recited in a loud voice the apostles' creed, in the confession of which he protested that he died, and then, "having made his prayer to god after the manner of those of the (reformed) religion,"[ ] manfully offered his neck to the executioner's sword.[ ] but the scene just described belongs strictly to the reign of the next french monarch. the capture of montgomery at domfront had been followed, within three days, by the death of the young king against whom the count had been fighting. [sidenote: last days of charles ix.] it is difficult to determine the exact proportions in which physical weakness and remorse for the past entered as ingredients of the malady that cut short the life of charles the ninth. it may not be prudent to accept implicitly all the stories told by contemporaries respecting the wretched fancies to which the king became a victim. but it would be carrying historical scepticism to the very verge of absurdity to reject the whole series of reports that come down to us respecting the strange hallucinations of charles during the last months of his life. de thou, perhaps the most candid and dispassionate historian of the period, has left the statement on record that, ever since st. bartholomew's day, charles, who at no time slept well, used frequently to have his rest broken by the sudden recollection of its dreadful scenes. to lull him to repose, his attendants had no resource but singing, the king being passionately fond of music and of poetry.[ ] agrippa d'aubigné corroborates the statement, adding, on the authority of high noblemen who had been present, that the king would awake trembling and groaning, and that his agitation was sure to find expression in frightful imprecations and words expressive of utter despair.[ ] with the growing certainty of his approaching death, the mental distress of charles proportionately increased. his old huguenot nurse, to whom he talked without reserve, was the witness of the startling conflict through which he was passing in his last hours. while sitting near his bedside on one occasion, she was suddenly recalled from a revery by the sound of the sighs and sobs of the royal patient. to her solicitous questions as to the cause of his distress, she received the most piteous exclamations, interrupted by weeping: "ah, my nurse, my friend, how much blood! how many murders! ah, what wicked counsels have i had! my god, have pity upon me and pardon me! i know not where i am; so perplexed and agitated have they made me. what will become of me? what shall i do? i am lost; i know it full well." the pious attendant's earnest exhortations and consoling words had little effect in dispelling the gloom that had settled on the termination of a life so auspiciously begun. she might pray, in his hearing, that the blood of the murdered huguenots might be on the heads of those who gave the young king such treacherous advice. she might encourage and urge him to rest in the confidence that, in view of his penitence, god would not impute to him his crime, but cover him with the mantle of christ's righteousness.[ ] her words had little power to dissipate his extreme despondency. [sidenote: distress of his young queen.] for months the life of charles had been despaired of. now he was visibly dying. the news of the capture of montgomery, which his mother came to announce to him with a delight she neither was able nor anxious to hide, brought him no pleasure. he had, he said, ceased to care for these things. meanwhile, catharine, if not altogether devoid of natural affection--if not experiencing unmingled satisfaction at the prospect that the sceptre was likely to pass into the hands of her favorite son, the king of poland--at least took care to provide for the contingency of charles's speedy death, by obtaining, on the twenty-ninth of may, letters to the governors of provinces, and the next day the more authoritative letters patent conferring upon her the regency until the return of henry from poland.[ ] more sincere in her sorrow, the young queen elizabeth, charles's wife, endeavored to ward off the stroke of heaven by solemn processions. for nine successive days, laying aside all tokens of her royal rank, simply clad, and with uncovered face, she walked barefooted, and accompanied by a large number of poor boys and girls, from the wood of vincennes, where the court still lingered, to the city of paris. after devoutly praying for the king's recovery at the sainte-chapelle and at the shrine of notre dame, she returned from her pilgrimage in the same painful and humble manner, her ladies and the officers of her court following at a respectful distance.[ ] upon sorbin, the king's confessor, devolved the duty of administering to charles the last rites of religion--sorbin, who was accustomed to speak of the perfidy and cruelty of the massacre as true magnanimity and gentleness. it has been well remarked that, in all the dark drama of guilt and retribution upon which the curtain was about to fall, no part is more tragic than the scene in which the last words preparing the soul for judgment were spoken by such a confessor as sorbin to such a penitent as charles.[ ] under such spiritual guidance the unhappy boy-king may possibly have expressed the sentiment which the priest ascribes to him at the hour of death: that his greatest regret was that he had not seen the reformation wholly crushed.[ ] on sunday, may the thirtieth, , the festival of pentecost, charles died, late in the afternoon.[ ] almost his last words had been of congratulation that he left no son to inherit the throne, since he knew very well that france had need of a man, and that under a child both king and kingdom were wretched.[ ] [sidenote: death of charles.] the general usage was not violated in the present instance. charles, like a host of prominent princes and statesmen of the sixteenth century, was currently reported to have fallen a victim to the poisoner's art, then in its prime. nor did the examination made after his death, though clearly proving that the event had a natural cause, suffice to clear away the unhappy impression.[ ] the huguenots had, perhaps, more reason than others to regard the circumstances attending it as strange, if not miraculous. that the king, whose guilty acquiescence in the murderous scheme of catharine, anjou, and guise, had deluged his realm in blood, should himself have perished of a malady that caused blood to exude from every pore in his body,[ ] was certainly sufficiently singular to arrest the attention of the world. the phenomenon has been shown beyond all question to have many parallels in the annals of medicine.[ ] but the coincidence was so remarkable that we scarcely wonder that, in the eyes of many, it partook of a supernatural character. thus perished, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, a prince whom fair natural endowments seemed to have destined to play a creditable, if not a resplendent part in the history of his period; but whom the evil counsels and examples of his mother, and the corrupt education which, designedly or through an unfortunate accident, she had given him, had so depraved, that his morals were regarded with disgust and reprobation by an age by no means scrupulously pure.[ ] [sidenote: the funeral rites.] the forty days' funeral rites were performed in honor of the deceased king with all the detail of pomp customary on such occasions. for forty days, on a bed of cloth of gold, lay in state the life-like effigy of charles of valois, dressed in crimson and blue satin, and in ermine, with a jewelled crown upon its head, and with sceptre and other emblems of royalty at its side. for forty days the service of the king's table remained unchanged, and the pleasing fiction was maintained that the monarch was yet alive. the gentlemen in waiting, the cupbearer, the pantler, the carver, and all the retinue of servants who, as in feudal times, appeared at the royal meals, discharged each his appointed office with punctilious precision. courses of viands were brought on in regular succession, and as regularly removed from the board. a cardinal or prelate blessed the table before the empty show of a meal, and rendered thanks at its conclusion. only at the close, by the sad repetition of the de profundis, and other psalms appropriate to funeral occasions, did the pageant differ materially from many a scene of convivial entertainment in which charles had taken part. when the prescribed term of waiting was at length over, the miserable show ended, the effigy was replaced by the bier, funeral decorations took the place of festive emblems, and the body of the late king was laid in its last resting-place.[ ] [sidenote: had persecution, war, and treachery succeeded?] the courtiers had already turned their eyes from the dead monarch to the successor whose speedy return from poland all eagerly awaited. henry the third had already precipitately fled from cracow, and was on his way to assume his ancestral throne. he was to find the kingdom plunged in disquiet, a prey to internal discord fostered by foreign princes. neither huguenot nor roman catholic was satisfied. a full half-century from the first promulgation of the reformed doctrines by lefèvre d'Étaples found the friends of the purer faith more resolute than ever in its assertion, despite fire, massacre, and open warfare. no candid beholder could deny that the system of persecution had thus far proved an utter failure. it remained to be seen whether the new king would choose to repeat a dangerous experiment. footnotes: [ ] jean de serres, commentaria de statu rel. et reipublicæ, iv., fol. _verso_. i have made use, up to , of the first edition of this work, published in three volumes in , my copy being one formerly belonging to the library of ludovico manini, the last doge of venice. from on i refer to the edition of , which comprises a fourth and rarer volume, bringing down the history to the close of the reign of charles. a comparison between this edition and the later edition of brings out the interesting circumstance that many huguenots of little courage, who at first apostatized, afterward returned to their old faith. thus, the edition of reads (iv. _v._): "vix enim dici possit, quam multi ad primum illum impetum a religione resiluerint, mortis amittendarumque facultatum metu, _quorum plerique etiamnum hærent in luto_." the words i have italicized are omitted in the edition of , as quoted by soldan, ii. . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] ib., _ubi supra_. [ ] borrel, histoire de l'église réformée de nîmes (toulouse, ), pp. , , from archives of the hôtel-de-ville. [ ] j. de serres, iv., fols. - ; borrel, hist. de l'égl. réf. de nîmes, , ; de thou, iv. . [ ] see _ante_, chapter xviii., p. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, hist. univ., ii. (liv. i., c. ). neither de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) , nor j. de serres (either in his commentaria de statu rel. et reip., iv. , or in his inventaire général de l'histoire de france, genève, ), makes any allusion to regnier's combat, while the former expressly, and the latter by implication, refer to his agency in persuading the inhabitants of montauban to espouse the protestant cause in arms. i incline to think, nevertheless, that d'aubigné has neither misplaced nor exaggerated a brilliant little affair which was certainly to his taste. [ ] j. de serres, de statu, etc., iv., fol. ; de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) . [ ] reveille-matin, ; eusebii philadelphi dialogi ( ), i. . [ ] arcère, histoire de la rochelle, i. . the records of the customs showed that , casks of wine were brought in. an ample supply of powder was also secured by offering a bonus of ten per cent, to all that imported it from abroad. [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. ; de thou, iv. . [ ] "affirmabant vero haudquaquam se facere contra officium et antiqua sua privilegia, per quæ illis tribueretur exemptio ab omni præterquam ex sua civitate delecto ab ipsis præsidio, et facultas sese suis armis custodiendi." such was the claim of the rochellois in answer to strozzi's summons. jean de serres, iv. . [ ] arcère, i. . [ ] ibid., i. ; de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) ; j. de serres, iv., fols. , . [ ] delmas, Église réf. de la rochelle, , . the same author cites henry iv.'s eulogy: "il était grand homme de guerre, et plus grand homme de bien." see also de thou's strong expressions, viii. (liv. cii.) . [ ] see the detailed "carte du pays d'aulnis, avec les isles de ré, d'oléron, et provinces voisines, dressée en ," prefixed to the first volume of arcère, histoire de la rochelle. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , (liv. i., c. ); de thou, iv. (liv. liii.) - ; jean de serres, iv., fol. ; arcère, i. - . [ ] arcère, i. , partly on ms. authority. [ ] ibid., i. . [ ] the attitude of the huguenot general had been and yet was one of the strangest. that he was able in the end to extricate himself without a stain attaching to his honor is still more remarkable. both king and protestants understood full well that he would counsel nothing which was not for the interest of both; and it was, therefore, no violation of his duty as envoy of charles, if, as jean de serres informs us, when urging an amicable arrangement, he privately advised the rochellois to admit no one into the city in the king's name, before receiving ample provisions for their security. commentarii de statu religionis et reipublicæ, iv., fol. . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] ibid., iv., fol. . [ ] see the very clear account in the "description chorographique de l'aulnis," by arcère, prefixed to his history of la rochelle, i. , etc. [ ] compare arcère, i. , etc., and, especially, his plan of the city in . see also jean de serres, iv., fol. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lv.) - ; d'aubigné, ii. , (liv. i., c. ). [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lv.) ; arcère, i. . [ ] de thou, iv. ; jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] _e.g._, of virolet, jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] feb. th, according to j. de serres, iv., fol. . arcère (i. ) says feb. th. [ ] arcère, i. . [ ] so, at least, brantôme expressed himself. he was with the army before la rochelle. [ ] letter of catharine, march th, arcère, i. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lvi.) ; arcère, i. , ; jean de serres, iv., fol. , etc. [ ] the poor, according to jean de serres, came to use the shell-fish in lieu of bread. if, as he assures us on the authority of men deserving credit, the supply ceased almost on that precise day upon which the royal army left the neighborhood, after the conclusion of peace, the reformed may be pardoned for regarding the fact as a miracle little inferior to that of the manna which never failed the ancient israelites until they set foot in canaan. commentarii de statu religionis et reipublicæ, iv. _verso_. "dont lez reformez ont encores les tableaux en leurs maisons pour mémoire comme d'un miracle," writes agrippa d'aubigné, about forty years later (hist. universelle, , ii. ). [ ] arcère, i. , . [ ] arcère, _ubi supra_. [ ] arcère, i. , . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lvi.) ; arcère, i. ; d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ). [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. (liv. i., c. ); de thou, iv. , , , etc. [ ] la mothe fénélon to charles ix., june , . corresp. diplom., v. . [ ] jean de serres (iv., fol. ) states the length of the siege of sommières as _four_ months, and the loss of men as five thousand killed. the recueil des choses mémorables, (p. ), ascribed to the same author, reduces the loss one-half. cf. de thou, iv. - . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fols. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. lvi.) , . [ ] "in ipso regni umbilico." jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] ibid., iv., fols. , , ; ag. d'aubigné, ii. , ; de thou, iv. (liv. liv.) - . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. , . [ ] "ut ierosolymitanæ, samaritanæ, saguntinæ famis memoriam exæquare, nisi et exsuperare videatur." ibid., iv., fol. . [ ] "discours de l'extrême famine, cherté de vivre, chairs, et autres choses non acoustumées pour la nourriture de l'homme, dont les assiégez dans la ville de sancerre ont été affligez." . reprinted in archives curieuses, viii. - . [ ] edward smedley, history of the reformed religion in france (london, ), ii. . [ ] "fade et douceastre," p. . [ ] de thou, iv. (liv. lvi.) . as early as on the twelfth of april, such was the discouragement felt in paris, that orders were published to make "paradises" in each parish, and to institute processions, to supplicate the favor of heaven, in view of the repulses experienced by the roman catholics before la rochelle. journal d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), p. . [ ] histoire du siége de la rochelle par le duc d'anjou en , par a. genet, capitaine du génie; _apud_ bulletin de la société de l'histoire du prot. français, ii. ( ) , . [ ] mémoires de claude haton, ii. . [ ] at troyes, for instance, where the poor who had flocked to the city were invited to meet at one of the gates, to receive each a loaf of bread and a piece of money. this done, they saw the gates closed upon them, and were informed from the ramparts that they must go elsewhere to find their living until the next harvest. claude haton, ii. . [ ] _ante_, chapter xix., p. . [ ] here is his letter to henry: "mon frère. dieu nous a fait la grasse que vous estes ellu roy de poulogne. j'en suis si ayse que je ne sçay que vous mander. je loue dieu de bon coeur; pardonnés moy, l'ayse me garde d'escrire. je ne sceay que dire. mon frère, je avons receu vostre lestre. je suis vostre bien bon frère et amy, charles." ms. bibliothèque nationale, _apud_ haton, ii. . [ ] the edict says expressly (art. th): "et y faire seulement les baptesmes et mariages à leur façon accoustumée sans plus grande assemblée, outre les parens, parrins et marrines, jusques au nombre de dix." text in agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , etc., and haag, france protestante, x. (documents) - . jean de serres (iv., fol. , etc.) and von polenz (gesch. des franz. calvinismus, ii. ) give a correct synopsis; but soldan is wrong in including among the concessions "den hausgottesdienst" (ii. ), and de thou still more incorrect when he speaks of "les prêches et la cène" (iv., liv. lvi. ). [ ] according to davila, sancerre was _not comprehended_ in the terms made with the rochellois, "because it was not a free town under the king's absolute dominion as the rest, but under the seigniory of the counts of sancerre." london trans. of , . [ ] jean de léry, discours de l'extrême famine, etc., - . [ ] jean de léry, . [ ] styled also, in the articles of capitulation, "_le gouverneur par élection_ de ladite ville." he was an able and influential magistrate, who had been elected to the governorship of his native city at the time of the former troubles. léry, - . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné (hist. univ., ii. ) distinctly represents la chastre as desirous of destroying the entire city; while léry (p. ) and davila (p. ) are in doubt whether johanneau's murder was not effected by his orders. yet léry himself records a conversation he held about this time with la chastre (p. ), in which the latter protested that he was not, as commonly reported, of a sanguinary disposition, and appealed for corroboration to his merciful treatment of some huguenot prisoners that fell into his hands in the third civil war, whom he refused to surrender to the parisian parliament when formally summoned to do so. claude de la chastre's noble letter to charles ix., of january , (bulletin, iv. ), seems to be a sufficient voucher for his veracity. see _ante_, chapter xvi., p. . [ ] jean de léry, . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, i. . it would be a great relief could we believe that inordinate fondness for the dance was the chief vice of the french court. unfortunately the moral turpitude of the king and his favorites rests upon less suspicious grounds than the revolting stories told on hearsay by the unfriendly writer of the eusebii philadelphi dialogi (edinburgi, ), ii. , . the "affair of nantouillet," occurring just about the time of the polish ambassadors' arrival in paris, is only too authentic. the "prévôt de paris," m. de nantouillet (cf. _ante_, chapter xv., page , note), grandson of cardinal du prat, chancellor of france under francis i., offended anjou by somewhat contemptuously declining the hand of the duke's discarded mistress, mademoiselle de châteauneuf. the lady easily induced her princely lover to avenge her wounded vanity. one evening charles ix., the new king of poland, the king of navarre, the grand prior of france, and their attendants, presented themselves at the stately mansion of nantouillet, on the southern bank of the seine, opposite the louvre, and demanded that a banquet be prepared for them. though the royal party was masked, the unwilling host knew his guests but too well, and dared not deny their peremptory command. in the midst of the carousal, at a preconcerted signal, the king's followers began to ransack the house, maltreating the occupants, wantonly destroying the costly furniture, appropriating the silver plate, and breaking open doors and coffers in search of money. the next day even paris itself was indignant at the base conduct of its king. to the first president of parliament, who that day visited the palace and informed charles of the current rumors respecting his having been present and conniving at the pillage, the despicable monarch denied their truth with his customary horrible imprecation. but when the president expressed his great satisfaction, and said that parliament would at once institute proceedings to discover and punish the guilty, charles promptly responded: "by no means. you will lose your trouble;" and he added a significant threat for nantouillet, that, should he pursue his attempt to obtain satisfaction, he would find that he had to do with an opponent infinitely his superior. euseb. phil. dialogi, ii. , ; jean de serres, iv., fol. , _verso_; d'aubigné, ii. ; de thou, iv. (liv. lvi.) . [ ] article th. text in agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] j. de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] this hamlet must not be confounded with the important town of milhaud, or milhau-en-rouergue, mentioned below, nearly seventy miles farther west. [ ] histoire du languedoc, v. . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fols. , ; de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; histoire du languedoc, v. . it ought to be noted that the montauban assembly in reality did little more than confirm the regulations drawn up by previous and less conspicuous political assemblies of the huguenots held at anduze in february, and at réalmont, in may, . this clearly appears from references to that earlier legislation contained in the more complete "organization" adopted four months later at milhau. see the document in haag, france protestante, x. (pièces justificatives) , . m. jean loutchitzki has published in the bulletin, xxii. ( ) - , a list of the political assemblies much fuller than given by any previous writer. [ ] as it is of interest to fix the geographical distribution of the provinces represented, i give the list contained in the preamble: "guyenne, vivaretz, gevaudan, sénéschaussée de toloze, auvergne, haute et basse marche, quercy, périgord, limosin, agenois, armignac, cominges, coustraux, bigorre, albret, foix, lauraguay, albigeois, païs de castres et villelargue, mirepoix, carcassonne, et autres païs et provinces adjacentes." [ ] requête de l'assemblée de montauban, in haag, la france protestante, x. (pièces just.) - . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fols. , ; de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) , ; agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . [ ] histoire du languedoc, v. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, _ubi supra_. [ ] jean de serres, iv. (lib. xii.) fol. ; d'aubigné and de thou, _ubi supra_. see also languet (epistolæ secretæ, i. ), who, writing november , , considers the huguenots to be virtually demanding the re-enactment of the edict of january, . [ ] de thou and d'aubigné, _ubi supra_. hist. du languedoc, v. : "pourvû que lesdits de la religion donnent ordre de leur part, qu'il ne soit entrepris aucune chose au contraire, comme il est avenu ces jours passés, ce que je leur défens très-expressement." charles ix. to damville, oct. , . unfortunately, neither the promise nor the condition was observed over scrupulously. [ ] the king's aunt, the duchess of savoy, his mother, and his brothers of anjou and alençon. [ ] relazione di giov. michiel, , tommaseo, i. - . [ ] de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) . [ ] of this queen elizabeth reminded la mothe fénélon in a conversation reported by him june , , corr. dipl., v. , . [ ] la mothe fénélon to charles ix., july , , corr. dipl., v. . [ ] the story was certainly not invented by his mother, "comme il estoit sorty de sa dernière maladye _aussy jaune que cuyvre, tout bouffy, deffiguré, bien fort petit et mince_." no wonder that leicester, while expressing the hope that the account might be false, hinted that it operated against the proposed marriage. la mothe fénélon to charles ix., november , , correspondance diplomatique, v. . [ ] despatch of aug. , ibid., v. . [ ] the correspondence of la mothe fénélon, as preserved, is not destitute of interest. see volumes v. and vi., _passim_; as also le laboureur, additions à castelnau, vol. iii., pp. , _seq._ [ ] de thou, v. . [ ] "achten's dafür dieweil es den franzosen gelungen das sie das königreich polen ann sich practicirt, das sie darvon so hochmüthig wordenn das sie müssen nun hern der ganze weltt werdenn." [ ] letters of landgrave william, sept. th, oct. th and nov. th, , groen van prinsterer, iv. *, *, *. see also soldan, ii. - , who, as usual, is very full and satisfactory in everything bearing upon the relations of france to germany. rudolph, maximilian's son, who succeeded his father three years later, was unfortunately far from embodying the excellences desired by the landgrave. it may be questioned whether the protestants of germany would have fared worse even under a valois than under this degenerate hapsburger. [ ] louis of nassau to william of orange, december, . groen van prinsterer, iv. - . [ ] motley, rise of the dutch republic, ii. - . j. de serres, iv., fol. , gives the date as april th. this volume of serres was published in the succeeding year, . [ ] the writer of an anonymous letter (now in the library of prince czartoryski), who saw henry as he rode into heidelberg, with louis of nassau on his right hand, and duke christopher, the elector's son, on his left, thus describes his personal appearance: "homo procera statura, corpore gracili, facie oblonga pallida, oculis paululum prominentibus, vultu subtruculento, indutus pallio holoserico rubri coloris." heidelberg letter "de transitu henrici," etc., dec. , , _apud_ marquis de noailles, henri de valois et la pologne (paris, ), iii. (pièces justif.), . [ ] germany seems to have been full of blind rumors of treacherous designs on the part of its french neighbors. i have before me a pamphlet of little historical value, and evidently intended for popular circulation, entitled "entdeckung etlicher heimlichen practicken, so jetzund vorhanden wider unser geliebtes vatterland, die teutsche nation, was man gäntzlich willens und ins werck zubringen, gegen den evangelischen fürgenommen habe, durch einen guthertzigen und getrewen christen unserm vatterland zu gütem an tag geben. m.d.lxxiii." [ ] de thou, v. (liv. lvii.), ; mém. de pierre de lestoile (éd. michaud et poujoulat), i. . [ ] "was sich in franckreich zugetragen, weiss man auch." [ ] the minute of the conversation drawn up by the elector palatine with his own hand, and printed by lalanne in the appendix to the fourth volume of his edition of brantôme's works ( - ), is by far the most trustworthy source of information we possess. on the last count of the elector's indictment, anjou's defence was certainly very lame: "dass ich selbst an seines altvatters hof gesehen _que ç'a été une cour fort dissolue_, aber seines brudern und frau mutter hof demselbigen bey weitem nicht zu vergleichen." ibid., . [ ] "c'est ce qui fit croire à bien des gens, que l'electeur n'avoit pas recu un hôte comme henri aussi poliment qu'il le devoit." de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) . [ ] heidelberg letter of dec. , , czartoryski mss., de noailles, pièces justif., iii. . see _ante_, p. . [ ] heidelberg letter, _ubi supra_, iii. . [ ] jean de serres (edit. ), iii. ; a. d'aubigné, i. , "pource que le chancelier de l'hospital ne pouvoit travailler de coeur en mesme temps aux violentes depesches de thavanes, de montluc et autres, et aux douceurs du mareschal de cossé, il ne fallut qu'un souspir de probité pour lui faire oster les sceaux; ce que fit la roine en le relegant en sa maison près estampes jusques à la fin de ses jours." see also languet's letter of september , . [ ] chancellor de l'hospital to charles ix., january , , copy discovered in the mss. of the national library, paris, by prof. soldan, and printed in appendix xi. of his history. [ ] _ante_, chapter xv., p. , note. [ ] "m. le chancelier de l'hospital qui avoit les fleurs de lys dans le coeur." journal de lestoile, p. . [ ] "politici (novum enim hoc nomen ex novo negotio sub hoc tempus natum)." jean de serres, iv., fol. . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fols. - . the dedication of hotman's franco-gallia to the elector palatine is dated august , . [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. . serres gives an extended summary of the work, whose author is unknown to him, fols. - . [ ] eusebii philadelphi dialog., ii. , _et passim_. see also the tocsain contre les massacreurs, which, although published as late as , was written before the death of charles the ninth (see the address of the printer, dated june , ), where the king is directly compared to the emperor nero. archives curieuses, vii. . [ ] they had, however, generally retracted their admissions of complicity made on the rack. [ ] jean de serres, iv., fol. ; de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) , ; arcère, histoire de la ville de la rochelle, i. - ; languet, letter of feb. , , i. . [ ] see the list of members in the protocol of the proceedings first published in the bulletin de la société de l'hist. du prot. français, x. ( ) - . [ ] in this, as in other particulars, the political assembly of milhau merely re-enacted the provisions of the assembly of réalmont. for the dates of the early political assemblies of the huguenots, which must of course be carefully distinguished from their synods or ecclesiastical assemblies, see the list in the bulletin, etc., xxii. ( ) . [ ] text of the document embodying the resolutions of the political assembly of milhau, in haag, la france protestante (vol. x.), pièces justificatives, - . the correct date seems to be dec. th, instead of th; bulletin, as above, x. . cf. also léonce anquez, histoire des assemblées politiques des réformés de france ( - ), paris, , - . [ ] lettres d'auger gislen, seigneur de busbec, amb. de l'emp. rodolphe ii. auprès de henri iii. cimber et danjou, archives curieuses, x. . [ ] "dictitabat se religionem reformatam minime probare; ensis tantum sui mucronem esse religiosum: id est, se non religionis doctrinam, sed religiosorum causam sequi. hujusmodi exemplis magnæ offensiones adversus religiosos conflabantur." jean de serres, iv., fol. . the reader needs perhaps to be reminded that _religiosi_ here stands as the equivalent for the french designation of the huguenots as "ceux de la religion." [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. , (liv. ii., c. ); jean de serres, iv., fol. . of "la grande chartreuse," which lies ten miles north of grenoble, see a good account in r. töpffer, voyages en zigzag, seconde série. [ ] languet, epistolæ secretæ, i. , etc. [ ] e. arnaud, histoire des protestants du dauphiné aux xvie, xviie et xviiie siècles, paris, , i. - ; ch. charronet, les guerres de religion et la société protestante dans les hautes-alpes ( - ), gap., , p. , etc. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; de thou, v. (liv. lvii.), . [ ] "fere omnes qui non fuerunt participes cædis amiralii et aliorum, dicunt, huguenotos merito corripere arma ad tutandam suam salutem, cum nihil observetur eorum quæ hactenus fuerunt ipsis promissa." languet, letter of april , , epistolæ secretæ, i. . [ ] "et parmy leurs discours se representoient a chacun coup la journée de st. barthélemy." [ ] the interesting particulars of the conference we obtain from two long and very important despatches of biron to charles ix., dated, the one, ernandes, april th, the other, april th and th, , mss. imperial lib. of st. petersburg, communicated to the bulletin de la soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., xxii. ( ) - , by m. jean loutchitzki. [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. . shrove tuesday fell, in , on march th. [ ] ten miles from the château de st. germain, and about the same distance from the palace of the louvre. a part of the old forest yet remains. [ ] i follow agrippa d'aubigné, who here must be regarded as excellent authority, for not only was he present, but it was by his means ("par ma conduitte") that guitry was introduced into navarre's chamber. hist. univ., ii. . [ ] jean de serres (iv., fol. ) and the mémoires de l'estat (archives curieuses, "discours de l'entreprise de st. germain," viii. - ) give the last of february for the date of the discovery of the undertaking of alençon; but, from a comparison of letters, prof. soldan has shown (ii. ) that it really was march st. [ ] it is agrippa d'aubigné (hist. univ., ii. ) who depicts the scene. as he seems to have been present on the occasion, we may rely upon the truthfulness of the groundwork of his sketch, while ascribing a little of the coloring to the free hand of the artist. [ ] the testimony of navarre and others is preserved, and has been published, together with the interrogatories, in the archives curieuses, viii. - . [ ] pierre de lestoile, mémoires (éd. michaud et poujoulat), . languet, letter of may , , ii. , . [ ] jean de serres, iv. ; languet, letter of may , , ii. . [ ] "je sçais bien que ce sont des chats que vos huguenots, qui se retrouvent tousjours sur leurs pieds." mém. de pierre de lestoile (éd. michaud et poujoulat), . [ ] "ains les laissant en paix comme ministres de l'utilité commune, et pères nourriciers des autres estats." [ ] p. brisson, hist. et vray discours des guerres civiles ès pays de poictou, _apud_ histoire des protestants et des églises réf. du poitou, par auguste lièvre (poitiers, ), i. , . [ ] de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) . [ ] de thou, v. ; olhagaray, hist. de foix, etc., . miss freer ("henry iii., king of france, his court and times," i. ) accepts the statement without question, while prof. soldan, ii. , rejects it, basing his action upon a passage in another treatise of d'aubigné than that referred to below, viz.: "choses notables et qui semblent dignes de l'histoire," in archives curieuses, viii. . [ ] hist. univ., ii. . see a contemporary account: "la prinse du comte de montgommery dedans le chasteau de donfron ... le jeudy xxvii. de may, mil cinq cens soixante et quatorze. a paris, . avec privilege." archives curieuses, viii. - . [ ] aug. , ; see olhagaray, histoire de foix, béarn, et navarre (paris, ), pp. , . according to this author, "le voyage de béarn, et le coup de navarreux sur la noblesse du païs luy cousta cela," _i.e._, his execution. ib., p. . [ ] mémoires d'un curé ligueur (jehan de la fosse), pp. , . see _ante_, chapter xiii., p. . chantonnay (despatch of may , ) speaks of montgomery as "se ventant que la plus belle et digne oeuvre que se soit jamais faicte en france, fut le coup de lance dont il tua le roy henry. je m'esbayhis comme la royne le peult dissimuler." mém. de condé, ii. . [ ] "discours de la mort et exécution de gabriel comte de montgommery, par arrest de la court, pour les conspirations et menees par luy commises, contre le roy et son estat. qui fut à paris, le vingtsixiesme de iuing, . a paris, . avec priv." (archives cur., viii. - .) [ ] doubtless repeating the words of the confession of sins, beginning: "seigneur dieu, père eternel et tout-puissant," etc., a form loved by the huguenots, and often on the lips of martyrs for the faith. [ ] mémoires de lestoile, i. . agrippa d'aubigné gives us (ii. ) a full account of montgomery's address, which he himself heard, mounted, as he informs us, "en croupe" behind m. de fervaques, to whom montgomery bade farewell just before his death. the huguenot captain made but two requests of the bystanders: "the first, that they would tell his children, whom the judges had declared to be degraded to the rank of 'roturiers,' that, if they had not virtue of nobility enough to reassert their position, their father consented to the act; as for the other request, he conjured them, by the respect due to the words of a dying man, not to represent him to others as beheaded for any of the reasons assigned in his judicial condemnation--his wars, expeditions, and ensigns won--subjects of frivolous praise to vain men--but to make him the companion in cause and in death of so many simple persons according to the world--old men, young men, and poor women--who in that same place (the place de grève) had endured fire and knife." d'aubigné's narrative, as usual, is vivid, and mentions somewhat trivial details, which, however, are additional pledges of its accuracy; _e.g._, he alludes to the fact that, having spoken as above to those who stood on the side toward the river, he repeated his remarks to those on the other side of the place de grève, beginning with the words, "i was saying to the men yonder," etc. [ ] de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) . [ ] hist. univ., ii. (liv. ii.) . [ ] mémoires de pierre de lestoile (éd. michaud et poujoulat), i. . [ ] de thou, v. ; text in isambert, recueil des anc. lois fr., xiv. . [ ] mémoires de claude haton, ii. [ ] north british review, oct., , p. . [ ] or, as sorbin expressed it, "qu'il voyoit l'idole calvinesque n'estre encores du tout chassée." le vray resveille-matin des calvinistes, , ibid., _ubi supra_. the expression, it will be noticed, contains a distinct reference to the anagram upon the name of "charles de valois"--"va chasser l'idole," upon which the huguenots had founded brilliant hopes. see _ante_, chapter xiii., p. . on the other hand, since the massacre, some huguenot had discovered that from the same name could be obtained the appropriate words "_chasseur déloyal_." recueil des choses mémorables ( ), . [ ] languet, ii. . [ ] agrippa d'aubigné, ii. ; de thou, v. (liv. lvii.) . charles left but one legitimate child, a daughter, born oct. , , who died in her sixth year. [ ] claude haton, never more himself than when recounting the circumstances of a case of murder, whether by sword or by poison, fully credits the story; but the letter of catharine to m. de matignon, written on the st of may, gives an intelligible account of the results of the medical examination establishing the pulmonary nature of the king's disease. [ ] jean de serres, comment de statu, etc., iv., fol. . [ ] see examples given by white (massacre of st. bartholomew, ) and others. [ ] de thou and others ascribe to albert de gondy, count of retz, one of charles's early instructors and a creature of catharine de' medici, the unenviable credit of having taught the young monarch never to tell the truth, and to use those horrible imprecations which startled even the profane when coming from the lips of a dying man. de thou, v. , etc. see also jean de serres, iv., fol. , and brantôme, le roy charles ixe. [ ] see the contemporary pamphlet, "le trespas et obsèques du très-chrestien roy de france, charles ixe. de ce nom;" reprinted in cimber et danjou, archives curieuses. index. a. abasement of the people, fruits of the, i. . "accommodating" the huguenots of rouen, ii. . "accord," the protestants of cateau-cambrésis claim the benefit of the, ii. . acier, baron d' (jacques de crussol), ii. , . acier, d', younger brother of crussol, ii. , note. adrets, françois de beaumont, baron des, a merciless general of the huguenots, ii. ; his vindication of his course, ii. , note; his cruelty, ii. , ; deserts the huguenots, ii. . adriani, giovambatista, the historian, his assertion that a plan for "sicilian vespers" was to have been executed at moulins, ii. ; on the rejoicing in italy over the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . agen, in guyenne, persecution at, i. . agenois, protestantism in, i. . "agimus a gagné père eternel," meaning of the expression, i. . aiguillon, ii. . airvault, ii. . aix, parliament of, i. ; iniquitous order respecting the waldenses or vaudois, i. . see vaudois of provence. alava, frances de, spanish ambassador at paris, ii. . albi, refuses to admit a garrison, ii. . albigenses, i. ; accused of manichæism, i. . albret, jeanne d'. see navarre, queen of. aleander, papal nuncio, his hopes respecting lefèvre d'Étaples, i. . alençon, city of, saved from becoming a scene of massacre by m. de matignon, ii. . alençon, francis of, fourth son of henry ii., baptized hercules, i. ; to be substituted for anjou, as a suitor for the hand of queen elizabeth, ii. ; his praise, ii. ; he takes no part in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and is threatened by his mother, ii. , ; his reply to her attempt to estrange him from the admiral, ii. ; la mothe fénélon instructed to press his suit with queen elizabeth, ii. ; his disfigurement, ii. ; he is offered as candidate for election as king of the romans, ii. ; the proposal is declined, ii. ; chosen by the party of the "politiques" as their head, ii. ; his untrustworthy character, ii. , ; his irresolution, ii. . alessandria, the cardinal of, despatched as legate to paris, ii. ; charles ix.'s assurances to him, ii. - , . alexander iii. dedicates the abbey of st. germain-des-prés, ii. , note. alienor, or Éléonore, last duchess of aquitaine, her charter given to la rochelle in , ii. . allens, m. d', i. . alva, duke of, is one of the ambassadors of philip ii., and a hostage for the execution of the treaty of cateau-cambrésis, i. ; declines the joint expedition proposed by henry ii. for the destruction of geneva, i. ; is suspicious of the proposed conference at bayonne, ii. (see bayonne, conference of); sent to netherlands, ii. ; alarm caused by his march, ii. ; he is invited by cardinal lorraine to enter france, ii. ; he procrastinates, ib.; insincerity of his offers, ii. ; sends a few troops under count aremberg, ii. ; is again called upon for aid, ii. ; his view of accommodations with heretics, ii. ; opposes the peace of saint germain, ii. ; he receives a signal rebuff from charles ix., ii. , ; exults over the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, but hesitates from policy to put the huguenot prisoners to death, ii. ; earns the approval of pius v. by his butcheries, ii. , . amboise, the peace of, march , , terminating the first civil war, ii. ; its terms condemned, ii. , ; coligny's disappointment at, ii. , ; the terms in many places not observed, ii. ; commissioners sent out to enforce the execution of the edict, ii. ; the parliament of paris sternly reproved by the king for its failure to record the edict, ii. , ; the edict infringed upon by interpretative declarations, ii. . amboise, the tumult of, causes of, i. , seq.; assembly of nantes, i. ; chronology of the tumult, i. ; the plot betrayed, i. ; dismay of the royal court, i. ; bloody executions following, i. . "amende honorable," i. . amiens, one hundred and fifty huguenots murdered at, ii. . amnesty, the edict of, march, , i. ; its terms ostensibly extended, but explained away, i. , . anagram of charles de valois (charles ix.), ii. . andelot, françois d', younger brother of admiral coligny, favors the reformation, i. ; denounced as a heretic by cardinal granvelle, i. ; his visit to brittany, ib.; he is summoned by henry ii., before whom he makes a manly defence of his faith, i. , ; is imprisoned, i. ; his temporary weakness, i. ; disappointment of the pope at his escape from the stake, i. , note; is consulted by catharine de' medici, i. ; throws himself into orleans, ii. ; returns with reinforcements from germany, ii. ; is left in orleans by condé, ii. ; his warlike counsels at the outbreak of the second civil war prevail, ii. ; sent to intercept count of aremberg, ii. ; spirited remonstrance (ascribed to him) addressed to catharine de' medici, ii. , ; his escape from brittany to la rochelle, ii. ; his death ii. ; his character and exploits, ii. , . ange, l', orator for the tiers état in the states general of orleans, i. . angers, massacre of, ii. , . anglois, jacques l', a protestant minister, murdered at rouen, ii. . angoulême, ii. . angoulême, bastard of, ii. , , . angoulême, margaret of, afterward queen of navarre, sister of francis i., i. , ; birth and studies, i. ; personal appearance, i. ; political influence, i. ; married first to duke of alençon, ib.; goes to spain to visit her captive brother, ib.; marriage to henry, king of navarre, i. ; corresponds with bishop briçonnet, i. ; her heptameron, i. ; her sanguine hopes, i. ; her correspondence with count von hohenlohe, ib.; favors protestant preachers, i. ; attacked in the college of navarre, i. ; her "miroir de l'âme pécheresse," ib.; fruitless intercessions in the matter of the placards of , i. ; she yields to the influence of the "libertines," i. , ; her address to the parliament of bordeaux, i. . "annats," i. . anjou, henry, duke of (afterward henry iii., see henry of valois); he is appointed by charles ix. lieutenant-general, and placed in supreme command of the army, ii. ; endeavors to prevent the junction of condé and the germans, ii. ; his forces at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. ; his army goes into winter quarters, ii. ; his growing superiority in numbers, ii. ; endeavors to prevent the southern huguenots from reinforcing condé, ii. ; throws his troops in front of condé, ii. ; obtains a victory at jarnac, march , , ii. , ; sends off exaggerated bulletins from the battle-field, ii. , ; receives congratulations and sanguinary injunctions from pius v., ii. ; he furloughs his troops, ii. ; relieves poitiers, ii. ; his army strengthened, ii. ; defeats the huguenots at moncontour, ii. - ; loses the advantages gained, through the mistake committed at st. jean d'angely, ii. , seq.; disbands a great part of his army, ii. ; leaves the remainder in the prince dauphin's hands, ib.; his projected marriage to queen elizabeth, ii. , seq.; machinations to dissuade him, ii. ; indignation of charles at, ib.; his new ardor, ii. ; papal and spanish efforts, ii. ; the match abandoned, ii. ; his confession respecting the origin of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day ii. ; his jealousy of coligny's influence, ib.; he and his mother resolve upon the death of the admiral, ii. ; they call in the help of the duchess of nemours and henry of guise, ib.; he visits the wounded admiral, ii. ; plies charles ix. with arguments to frighten him into authorizing a massacre of the huguenots, ii. , ; he rides through the streets of paris encouraging the assassins, ii. ; enriches himself from the plunder of the jeweller baduère, ii. ; helps to persuade charles ix. to assume the responsibility of the massacre, ii. ; his letter to montsoreau, governor of saumur, ii. ; sent to assume command of the army besieging la rochelle, ii. ; issues stringent ordinances after the example of the huguenots, ib.; he is elected king of poland, ii. ; his reception at heidelberg by the elector palatine, frederick the pious, ii. , seq.; his personal appearance, ii. , note; his lying assertions and the elector's frank remonstrance, ii. , . antoine de bourbon-vendôme, king of navarre. see navarre, antoine, king of. aosta, story of calvin's labors at, i. . arande, michel d', i. , ; his reply to farel, i. . aremberg count, sent by alva to france, ii. , . arnay-le-duc, battle of, june , , ii. , seq. arras, bishop of. see granvelle, cardinal. arras, execution of vaudois at, i. . artois and flanders, i. ; ii. . assembly, a political, of the huguenots, held in nismes, nov., , ii. ; a military organization of the huguenots provided for by the assembly of montauban, aug., , ii. ; previous assemblies, ii. , note; the organization perfected in the assembly of milhau, dec. , , ii. - . astrology, popular belief in, i. . aubenas, a huguenot place of refuge, ii. . aubigné, agrippa d', at amboise, i. ; his father's exclamation, i. ; his testimony as to chancellor l'hospital's complicity with the conspirators of amboise, i. ; his father appointed a commissioner for the execution of the edict of pacification of amboise, ii. ; his enlistment in the huguenot army, ii. ; on the firing of charles ix. on the huguenots at the massacre, ii. ; on the magnanimous reply of the viscount d'orthez to the king, ii. , note; on the effect of the massacre on the king himself, ii. , ; his account of regnier's deliverance of montauban, ii. ; of the death of count montgomery, ii. , , note. aubigné, merle d'. see merle. audeberte, anne her martyrdom, i, . auger, or augier, edmond, his violent sermons at bordeaux, ii. . aumale, claude, duke of, i. ; marries a daughter of diana of poitiers, i. ; his jealousy of the duke of nemours, ii. ; pursues the huguenots, ii. ; helps arrange the plan for assassinating coligny, ii. ; receives a rough answer from charles ix., ii. ; pursues montgomery, ii. ; is killed before la rochelle, march , , ii. . aurillac, ii. . autun, the "mice" of, i. . auxerre, assassination of huguenots at, ii. . avenelles, des, betrays the designs of la renaudie to the guises, i. . "aventuriers," i. . avignon, i. ; popes at, i. . ayamonte, marquis d', sent by philip ii. to congratulate charles ix. on the massacre of the huguenots, ii. . "aygnos," for huguenots, ii. , note. b. "babylonish captivity," i. . baden, marquis of, ii. , . baden, the swiss diet of, ii. . baduère, a rich jeweller in paris and a huguenot, great plunder obtained by the duke of anjou from his shop, ii. , . ballads, huguenot, ii. - . balue, cardinal, i. . barbaro, a venetian ambassador, regards the conference of saint germain as an efficient means of spreading heresy, ii. ; on catharine de' medici, ii. . barrier, a franciscan monk and curate at provins, his remarks to the people when ordered to make proclamation of the king's tolerant order, i. , note; his seditious sermon on the edict of january, ii. , ; at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. . bassompierre, ii. . battle of pavia, feb , , i. ; of saint quentin, aug. , , i. ; of dreux, dec. , , ii. ; of saint denis, nov. , , ii. - ; of jarnac, march , , ii. , ; of la roche abeille, ii. ; of moncontour, oct. , , ii. - ; of arnay-le-duc, june and , , ii. . baum, professor, on the reply of condé to the "petition" of the triumvirs, ii. . bayonne, conference of, june, , ii. , seq.; proposed by catharine de' medici, ib.; looked upon with suspicion by philip ii. and alva, ii. , ; current misapprehensions respecting its object, ii. , ; what was actually proposed, ii. ; charles declares himself against war, ii. ; the discussion between alva, catharine, and isabella, ii. - ; no plan of extermination adopted or even proposed, ii. ; festivities and pageantry, ii. - ; the assertion of adriani that the "sicilian vespers" projected at bayonne were to have been executed at moulins, ii. ; some of the appointed victims, ii. , note. béarn, i. ; establishment of the reformation in, ii. , seq.; montgomery takes a great part of, ii. . beaudiné, ii. , . beaugency "loaned" by condé to the king of navarre, ii. ; retaken by the huguenots, ii. . beauvais, riot at, occasioned by the suspected protestantism of cardinal châtillon, bishop of the city, i. , seq. beauvoir la nocle, a huguenot negotiator, ii. , , ; escapes from the massacre, ii. - , . bécanis, vidal de, an inquisitor, i. . beda, or bédier, natalis, i. , , . belin, an agent in the massacre of troyes, ii. , . bellay, guillaume du, i. ; labors for conciliation, i. ; his representations at smalcald to the german princes, i. ; makes in the name of francis i., a protestant confession, i. ; is instructed to investigate the history and character of the waldenses of mérindol, i. ; his favorable report, i. . bellay, jean du, bishop of paris, leans to the reformed doctrine, i. . bellièvre, his lying representations to the swiss respecting the admiral, the massacre, etc., ii. , . berchon, governor of orange, expelled, ii. . berne, canton of, intercedes for the relatives of farel, but receives a rough answer from francis i., i. ; again applies to him, with similar results, i. ; intercedes for the five scholars of lausanne, i. ; other intercessions, i. , , ; sends troops to the aid of the huguenots, but afterward recalls them, ii. . berquin, louis de, i. ; his character, i. ; becomes a reformer, i. ; prosecuted and imprisoned but released by order of the king, i. ; becomes acquainted with erasmus, ib.; his second imprisonment, i. ; and release, i. ; intercessions of margaret of angoulême, i. ; his third arrest, i. , seq.; his execution, i. ; elegies on, i. . berthault, an evangelical preacher, i. . béthisy, rue de, ii. , note. beza, or de bèze, theodore, efforts in behalf of the persecuted protestants of paris, i. ; consulted as to revolution, i. ; dissuades the french protestants from armed resistance, i. ; his comment upon the edict of amnesty, i. ; invited by antoine of bourbon to nérac, i. ; he returns to geneva, i. ; he is invited to the colloquy of poissy, i. ; urged by the protestants of paris to come, i. ; his hesitation, but final consent, i. ; he reaches st. germain, ib.; his previous history, i. , ; he has a flattering reception, i. ; distrusts chancellor l'hospital, ib.; has a discussion with cardinal lorraine, who professes to be satisfied, i. , ; his diffidence, i. ; his retort to the sneer of a cardinal, i. ; his prayer and address, i. - ; he is interrupted by an outcry of the theologians of the sorbonne, i. ; his brilliant success, i. ; his frankness justified, i. ; he asks a hearing to answer cardinal lorraine, i. ; his reply, i. , ; he skilfully parries the cardinal's demand that he should subscribe to the augsburg confession, ib.; his remarks on romish "vocation," i. ; and a proper and amicable conference, i. ; he excites the anger of the prelates, i. ; replies to lainez, i. ; at the conference of saint germain, i. , seq.; is begged by catharine de' medici, condé and coligny to remain in france, i. ; his anxiety to restrain the protestants from violence, i. ; urges the huguenots to obey the edict of january, ii. ; he demands the punishment of the authors of the massacre of vassy, ii. ; his noble answer to the king of navarre, ii. ; he is the probable author of condé's reply to the "petition" of the triumvirs, ii. ; his view of the practicability of taking paris, ii. ; he is accused by poltrot of having instigated the murder of the duke of guise, ii. ; he vindicates his innocence, ii. ; he is moderator of the seventh national synod, ii. , note; a price set on his head by the duchess of parma, ib.; his remarks on coligny's death, ii. ; his sermon on the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. ; his lively sympathy with the persecuted huguenots, ii. , note. bible, old translations of, unfaithful, i. , ; translation of lefèvre, i. ; eagerly bought, i. ; sale of french translations, i. ; translated by olivetanus, i. . birague at the blood council, ii. . biron pursues the huguenots after the battle of moncontour, ii. ; negotiates with coligny, ii. , ; carries to the queen of navarre the proposal of the marriage of henry of navarre to margaret of valois, ii. ; in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. ; sent to la rochelle as governor, ii. ; is not received, ib.; ii. , , , ; his new negotiations before la rochelle ii. , . blamont, ii. . blasphemous taunts addressed to the huguenots at orleans in the massacre, ii. ; see also, ii. , . blaye, ii. . blondel, executed at toulouse, for singing a profane hymn of marot at corpus christi, i. . bochetel, bishop of rennes, his false representations to the german princes respecting the huguenots, ii. . boissière, claude de la, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . bombs, used by the protestant garrison of orleans, ii. . boniface viii., pope, i. . book-pedlers from switzerland, i. . books, war upon, i. ; not to be sold by pedlers, i. . bordeaux, parliament of, i. ; sanguinary action of, after the battle of jarnac, ii. . bordeaux, the boldness of the "lutherans" of, according to the archbishop of the city, i. ; oppression to which the protestants were subjected, ii. ; massacre of, oct., , ii. - . boscheron des portes, president, gives credit to an alleged admission of disloyal intentions on the part of la renaudie, i. - . bossuet, bishop of meaux his admiration of the sagacity of the cardinal of lorraine, i. . botzheim, johann wilhelm von his account of the massacre at orleans, ii. , seq. bouchavannes, ii. . bouchet, jean, his "deploration," i. . bouillon, duc de, ii. . boulogne, edict of pacification of, july, , ii. . bouquin, jean, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . bourbon, antoine of. see antoine, king of navarre. bourbon, cardinal his speech to the notables i. ; exhorts francis to prove himself "very christian," i. ; he is made governor of paris in place of marshal montmorency, ii. ; his anger at l'hospital's action in behalf of the scattered protestants, ii. . bourg, anne du, a learned and upright member of the parliament of paris, makes an eloquent plea for religious liberty in the "mercuriale," i. ; his arrest, i. ; his trial and successive appeals, i. ; his officious advocate, i. ; his message to the protestants of paris, ib.; his deportment in the bastile, i. ; intercession of the elector palatine in his behalf, ib.; his pathetic and eloquent speech i. ; his death, i. ; a disastrous blow to the established church, i. ; account of florimond de ræmond, i. , . bourg, jean du, a wealthy draper, executed, i. . bourges, captured by marshal saint andré, ii. , ; violence at, ii. ; unsuccessful attempt upon, ii. ; massacre of protestants at, ii. , . bourges, council of, i. ; provincial council of, i. . bourniquet, viscount of, ii. , note. bourry, a protestant captain, ii. . bouteiller, abbé, confers with the protestants at poissy, i. ; his doctrinal views, i. . brandenburg, the elector of, declines to help the huguenots, ii. . brantôme, the abbé de, his eulogy of renée de france, i. ; on the massacre of vassy, ii. ; on the firing of charles ix. on the huguenots, ii. , note; on the chief actors in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . brazil, a protestant colony sent to, under villegagnon, i. ; fails through villegagnon's hostility to protestantism, i. . bresse, i. , . bretagne, jacques, "vierg" of autun, his able speech for the "tiers état" at the states general of pontoise, i. . briçonnet, guillaume, bishop of meaux, i. ; invites lefèvre and farel, i. ; his warning, i. ; his weakness, i. , , ; his synodal decree, i. ; cited before parliament, i. ; becomes the jailer of the "lutherans," i. ; his correspondence with margaret of angoulême, i. . briquemault, execution of, oct. , , for alleged complicity in a huguenot conspiracy against the king, ii. , . brouage, ii. . browning, w. s., his error as to the authorship of the "vie de coligny," i. , note. brugière, execution of, i. . budé, guillaume, i. . burgundians, their intolerance of the reformation, ii. . burleigh, lord (see also cecil), promotes the match between the duke of anjou and queen elizabeth, ii. . busbec, his delineation of the character of the duke of alençon, ii. . bussy, or bucy, porte de, ii. . bussy d'amboise murders the marquis de renel, ii. . c. cabrières, destruction of i. . caen, in normandy, protestant assemblies in, i. ; iconoclasm at, ii. ; saved from becoming a scene of massacre, by m. de matignon, ii. . caillaud, president, exceptional fairness of, i. . calais, captured by francis, duke of guise, i. . calvin, john, the real author of rector cop's address, i. ; his flight from paris, i. ; his language respecting francis i. and charles v., i. ; becomes the apologist of the protestants, i. ; his birth and training, ib.; studies at paris, orleans, and bourges, i. ; is a pupil of melchior wolmar, ib.; translates seneca "de clementia," i. ; his flight to angoulême, i. ; traditions respecting his preaching, ib.; he resigns his benefices, ib.; reaches basle, i. ; writes his "christian institutes," i. ; the original edition in latin, ib.; the preface, i. , ; it has no effect in allaying persecution, but achieves distinction for its author, i. ; he revises the bible of olivetanus, i. ; he visits italy, ib.; said to have labored at aosta, i. ; passing through geneva, is detained by the urgency of farel, i. ; becomes the head of the commonwealth, i. ; his views respecting church and state, ib.; respecting the punishment of heresy, i. ; approves of the execution, but not the burning of servetus, i. ; his fault the fault of the age, ib.; he shuns notoriety, i. ; his character and natural endowments, i. ; he is consulted by protestants in every quarter of europe, ib.; his constant toils, ib.; he encounters bitter opposition, but obtains the support of the people, i. ; estimate of his character by Étienne pasquier, i. ; his great influence, according to the venetian michiel, ib.; writes against the nicodemites and libertines, i. ; consoles protestant church of paris, i. ; and writes to stir up intercession in behalf of the prisoners, ib.; his liturgy, i. , seq.; pseudo-roman edition of, i. , ; consulted as to revolution, i. ; dissuades from armed resistance, foreseeing civil war, i. ; endeavors to repress the tendency to iconoclasm, i. ; why he was not invited to the colloquy of poissy, i. ; his letter to renée de france respecting the duke of guise, ii. . cambray, the archbishop of, ii. , , ; his vengeance upon cateau-cambrésis, ii. . "camisade," attempted, ii. . capilupi, author of "lo stratagema," ii. , etc. caraffa, cardinal, nephew of paul iv., negotiates the breaking of the truce of vaucelles, i. ; his character, ib. carnavalet, m. de, ii. . caroli, pierre, wearies out beda, i. . caroline, a strong earthwork thrown up by the huguenots in florida, ii. . carouge, m. de, at rouen, ii. , seq. cartier, ii. . castelnau, baron de, treacherous capture of, i. . castelnau, michel de, sieur de mauvissière, the historian, sent by the triumvirs to catharine before the battle of dreux, ii. ; sent by charles ix. to congratulate alva, ii. , note; ii. , ; his sketch of coligny's plan of march, ii. , . castel-sarrasin, ii. . castres refuses to admit a garrison, in , ii. ; a huguenot place of refuge, ii. , . cateau-cambrésis, the peace of, april , , i. ; its disgraceful and disastrous conditions, i. ; a secret treaty for the extermination of the protestants supposed, without sufficient reason, to have been drawn up at the same time, i. - ; the reformation in, ii. - ; iconoclasm at, ii. ; the protestants claim the benefit of the "accord," ib. cathari, i. , . catharine de' medici, i. ; credits the predictions of nostradamus, i. ; her marriage to henry of orleans, afterward henry ii, i. ; dissatisfaction of french people, ib.; her dream the night before henry ii is mortally wounded, i. ; assumes an important part in the government, i. ; her timidity and dissimulation, i. ; she dismisses diana of poitiers, ib.; her alliance with the guises, i. ; asks aid of philip ii, and receives promises, i. ; is appealed to by the persecuted protestants, i. ; she encourages them, i. ; her favorite psalm, ib.; she receives a second and more urgent appeal, i. ; her indignation at the stories of the orgies in "la petite genève," i. ; she declares that the protestants are men of their word, i. ; she consults coligny at the time of the tumult of amboise and receives good advice, i. , ; receives a letter from the huguenots signed theophilus, i. ; consults regnier de la planche, i. ; rejects the advances of the guises, just before the death of francis ii, i. ; and makes terms with navarre who yields the regency without a struggle, i. ; her adroitness in the management of navarre, i. ; the difficulties confronting her, i. ; her letter to her daughter isabella, i. ; her determination to hold the colloquy of poissy, i. ; her excuses to the pope and philip ii., i. ; warns her son charles against gross superstition and against innovation, ib., note; her letter to pius iv., i. , ; its effect at rome, i. ; she is much pleased with the results of the first interview between beza and cardinal lorraine, i. ; she consents that the prelates shall not act as judges in the colloquy at poissy, but will not have the decree put in writing, i. ; she is resolute that the colloquy should be held, i. ; refuses cardinal tournon's request to interrupt it, i. ; her premature delight at the reported accord in the conference of saint germain, i. ; her financial success with the prelates, i. ; her crude notion of a conference, i. ; is compared by roman catholic preachers to jezebel, ii. ; causes the retirement of constable montmorency, ii. ; sends for the guises, ib.; after the massacre of vassy, orders the duke of guise to enter paris, but invites him to come to court with a small suite, ii. ; her anxiety, ii. ; she removes with the king from monceaux to melun, ii. ; and thence to fontainebleau, ii. ; soubise's account of her painful indecision, ib.; her letters to condé imploring his help, ii., , ; is brought back to paris, ii. ; tavannes's view of her inclination to the huguenots, ii. ; her terror, ii. ; unites in a declaration that the king is not in duress, ii. ; confers with condé, with a view to peace, ii. ; her crafty negotiations, ii. ; her speech to throkmorton respecting the english in normandy, ii. ; delays condé by negotiations before paris, ii. ; her reply when consulted by the triumvirs as to the propriety of engaging the huguenots, ii. , ; her exclamation on receiving false tidings from the battle of dreux, ii. ; her promises to condé at the peace of amboise, ii. ; huguenot songs respecting, ii. ; her embarrassment in respect to the fulfilment of her promises, ii. ; resolves to declare the majority of charles ix., ii. ; she endeavors to seduce condé from the huguenots, ii. ; her alienation from the huguenots, ii. , ; commands her maids of honor to go to mass, ii. ; her regulation respecting the deportment of gentlemen, ii. , note; proposes the conference at bayonne, ii. (see bayonne, conference of); she opposes violent measures, ii. - ; forbids cardinal lorraine to hold communication with granvelle and chantonnay, ii. ; she gives assurances to condé just before the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; she favors the colonization of florida by the huguenots, ii. ; her resolute demands for satisfaction for the murder of the colonists, ii. , ; she exonerates the huguenots from disloyal acts and intentions, ii. ; her treacherous diplomacy, ii. , ; again invokes alva's help, ii. ; cardinal santa croce, the papal nuncio, claims the fulfilment of her promise to surrender cardinal châtillon to the pope, ii. , ; she inclines toward peace, ii. ; she is never sincere, ii. ; her short-sightedness, ii. ; sides with l'hospital's enemies, ii. ; her intrigues, ii. ; entreated by charles ix. to avoid war, ii. ; her animosity against l'hospital, whom she suspects of having prompted her son, ii. ; she receives congratulations and sanguinary recommendations from pope pius v., after the battle of jarnac, ii. ; negotiates for peace, ii. ; her duplicity, ii. ; inclines to peace, ii. ; was she sincere in concluding the peace of saint germain? ii. ; her study of the example of queen blanche, ii. ; her character, according to barbaro, ib.; she is warned by the queen of navarre, ii. ; she proposes to substitute alençon for anjou, as suitor for the hand of queen elizabeth, ii. ; her vexation at the fresh scruples of anjou, ii. ; she treats the queen of navarre with tantalizing insincerity, ii. , ; she awaits queen elizabeth's decision, ii. ; the rout of genlis determines her to take the spanish side, ii. ; she follows charles ix. to montpipeau and breaks down her son's resolution, ii. , ; she is terrified by rumors of elizabeth's desertion of her allies, ii. ; her jealousy of coligny's influence, ii. ; she and anjou resolve to put him out of the way, ii. ; declares to the huguenots that the attack on coligny must be punished, ii. ; she visits the wounded admiral, ii. ; looks with suspicion on the private conference of charles and coligny, ii. ; she cuts it short, and on the way to the louvre discovers the advice of coligny, ii. ; learning that coligny's wound will not prove fatal, she adopts extreme measures, ii. ; she plies charles with arguments to terrify him into authorizing a massacre of the huguenots, ii. , ; he yields reluctantly, ii. ; catharine takes the responsibility upon herself for only six deaths, ii. ; goes down to the square in front of the louvre, with her ladies, to view the naked corpses of the huguenot leaders, ii. ; persuades charles to assume the responsibility of the massacre, ii. ; her unsuccessful attempt to alienate the sympathy of queen elizabeth from coligny, ii. ; her lying representation of the massacre in the provinces as having been contrary to the king's will, ib., note; not influenced by religious motives, ii. ; spurious letter of, to philip strozzi, ii. ; her anxiety for the safety of henry of anjou, ii. ; her flight from st. germain, ii. ; her delight at the capture of count montgomery, ii. , ; she obtains from charles ix. the regency until the return of henry of anjou from poland, ii. . caturce, jean de, executed at toulouse, i. . caumont, viscount of, ii. , note. cavaignes, his execution, oct. , , for alleged complicity in a huguenot conspiracy, ii. ; his magnanimity, ii. , note. cavalry, french, i. . caylus, chevalier de, ii. . cecil urges elizabeth to aid the huguenots, and plans for this effect, ii. ; on siege of poitiers, ii. . see burleigh. cental, vaudois villages belonging to the noble house of, i. , . chailly, m. de, ii. . châlons-sur-marne, the call for protestant ministers in the vicinity of, i. . "chambre ardente," a separate and special chamber of parliament, to try heresy, established first at rouen, by francis i., i. ; afterward at paris, by henry ii., i. ; under francis ii., i. . champeaux, m. de, ii. . chancellor of france, his oath, i. . chancellor of the university, i. . "change of religion involves change of government," accepted as an aphorism, i. , . chantonnay, ambassador of philip ii., alarmed at the violence of the proscriptive plans formed before the death of francis ii., i. ; his insolent threats, ii. ; his boast that, with throkmorton, he could overturn the state, ii. . chapot, john, a printer from dauphiny, executed at paris, i. . charente, the river, ii. . charité, la, on the loire, ii. ; siege of, , . charles vii. publishes the pragmatic sanction, i. . charles viii. confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . charles maximilian, second son of henry ii., afterward king as charles ix., i. ; his accession, dec. , , i. ; transfer of power consequent upon, i. ; financial embarrassment and religious dissension, i. ; he writes to the magistrates of geneva to stop the coming of protestant ministers, i. ; their prompt and complete vindication, i. ; he issues a new and tolerant order, i. ; which is opposed by parliament, i. ; publishes the "edict of july," by which all protestant conventicles are still prohibited, i. ; his conversation with his mother about superstition and innovation, i. , note; orders the restitution of churches, i. ; hopes entertained by the protestants respecting him, i. ; his curiosity as to the mass, i. ; his health, ib., note; issues an order favorable to the huguenots, i. ; publishes the "edict of january," in accordance with which the huguenots cease to be outlaws, i. , ; retires from monceaux to melun, ii. ; and thence to fontainebleau, ii. ; is hurried back to paris by navarre and guise, ii. ; his declaration that he is not held in duress, ii. ; his edict of april , , ostensibly re-enacting, but really annulling the edict of january, ii. ; receives reinforcements from germany and switzerland, ii. , ; issues his edict of pacification, amboise, march , , terminating the first civil war, ii. ; demands of queen elizabeth the restoration of havre, ii. ; he proclaims his own majority, rouen, aug. , , ii. ; he sternly reproves the refractory parliament of paris, ii. , ; his "progress" through france, ii. , seq.; his interpretative edicts and declarations infringe upon the edict of pacification, ii. , ; to condé's appeal, ii. ; he makes a conciliatory reply, ii. ; he reconciles the inhabitants of orange and the comtât venaissin, ii. ; he reaches bayonne, ii. (see bayonne, conference of); forbids the formation of confraternities, ii. ; his edict obtained by chancellor l'hospital, for the relief of the scattered huguenots, ii. , ; he is reported to have been threatened by philip ii. and the pope, ii. ; his flight from meaux to paris, at the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; his sanguinary injunctions to gordes, ii. , note; he is alienated from the huguenots by the attempt of meaux, ii. ; is moved by spain, rome, and the sorbonne, to decline further negotiations with condé, ii. ; he issues the edict of pacification, longjumeau, march , , terminating the second civil war, ii. ; his indignation at a treacherous plan formed to violate the peace, ii. ; his proclamation that he had not, in the edict of longjumeau, intended to include auvergne, etc., ii. ; entreats his mother to avoid war, ii. ; his edicts of sept., , proscribing the reformed religion, ii. , ; impolicy of this action, ii. ; attempt to make capital out of them, ib.; receives congratulations and sanguinary injunctions from pope pius v., after the battle of jarnac, ii. ; treats the duke of deux-ponts' declaration with contempt, ii. ; rewards maurevel for the murder of de mouy with the collar of the order, ii. ; his letter, ib.; offers the huguenots impossible terms, ii. , ; becomes strongly inclined to peace, ii. ; he issues the edict of pacification, saint germain, aug. , , terminating the third civil war, ii. , seq.; his earnestness as to the peace, ii. ; he tears out the record of proceedings against cardinal châtillon from the parliamentary registers, ii. ; his assurances to walsingham, ib.; his gracious answer to the german princes, ii. ; he orders the "croix de gastines" to be taken down, ii. , ; indignant at the attempts to dissuade anjou from marrying queen elizabeth, ii. ; and at the affront received from sebastian of portugal, ib.; his gracious reception of coligny at blois, ii. ; he intercedes with the duke of savoy in behalf of the waldenses of piedmont, ii. ; he denies that he has seen louis of nassau at all, ii. ; expresses gratification at the progress of conciliation in his dominions, ii. ; enters into a treaty of amity with queen elizabeth, april , , ii. ; his assurances to the cardinal of alessandria, ii. - ; he expresses to téligny his disgust with his present counsellors, ii. ; his earnestness respecting the navarre marriage, ii. ; publishes anew the edict of pacification, ib.; the flemish project inflames his imagination, ii. , ; the more after the capture of valenciennes and mons, ii. ; his mother, following him to montpipeau, by her tears succeeds in breaking down his resolution, ii. - ; he is thoroughly cast down, ii. ; coligny partially succeeds in reassuring him, ii. ; his anger at hearing that alva had put some french soldiers to the torture, ii. ; his menacing deportment toward anjou, ii. ; he gives coligny assurances that he will soon attend to protestant grievances, ii. ; his agitation on learning of coligny's wound, ii. ; his promise of punishment, ii. ; he visits admiral coligny, ii. ; his private conference, ii. ; he reveals its character to the queen mother, ii. ; he writes to his governors and ambassadors expressing his extreme displeasure at the infraction of his edict, ii. ; he is plied with arguments to frighten him into authorizing the massacre of the huguenots, ii. , ; he reluctantly consents, ii. ; but stipulates that not one huguenot shall be spared to reproach him, ib.; sends cosseins to guard coligny, ii. ; issues orders to the prévôt des marchands to seize the keys of the gates, and the boats upon the seine, ii. ; he commands navarre and condé to abjure protestantism, ii. ; fires an arquebuse at the fleeing huguenots, ii. ; he is waited upon by the municipal officers, ii. ; his first letter to mandelot throwing the blame for the massacre upon the guises, ii. ; assumes the responsibility for the massacre, ii. ; his speech at the "lit de justice," ib.; his words at montfaucon, ii. ; he declares that he will maintain the edict of pacification, ii. ; change in his character after the massacre, ii. ; his letter of aug. , , to mondoucet, predicting the massacre in the provinces, ii. ; the verbal orders, ib.; his declaration of aug. , ib.; his letter to mandelot of aug. , ii. , ; the double set of letters, ii. ; instigates the murder of french prisoners by the duke of alva, ii. ; his letters to la mothe fénélon, ii. , ; he profanes the day of his daughter's birth by witnessing the execution of briquemault and cavaignes, ii. ; plots the destruction of geneva, ii. ; his guilt in the eyes of the world, ii. ; disastrous effects of the massacre on the king himself, ii. , ; sends la noue to treat with the rochellois, ii. ; his joy at the election of anjou as king of poland, ii. ; issues his edict of pacification, boulogne, july, , terminating the fourth civil war, ii. , ; takes part in the disgraceful "affair of nantouillet," ii. , ; decline of his health, ii. ; his illness at vitry le-français, ii. ; his last days, ii. ; distress of his young queen, ii. ; representations of sorbin his confessor, ii. ; his death, may , , ii. , ; his funeral rites, ii. , . charles, duke of orleans, youngest son of francis i, represents himself to the german princes as favoring the reformation, i. , ; his death, i. . charlesfort, ii. . charpentier, jacques, instigates the murder of his rival professor, pierre de la ramée, or ramus, ii. . charpentier, pierre, a protestant jurist, who escapes from the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, bribed by the king to write a justification of the massacre for circulation abroad, ii. , . chartres, besieged by the huguenots under the prince of condé, ii. . chartres, françois de vendôme, vidame of, thrown into the bastile, i. . chartres, jean de ferrières, vidame of, ii. , ; advises the huguenots to leave paris, ii. , , ; escapes from the massacre, ii. - . chartreuse, la grande, ii. . chassanée, barth. de, on church of the virgin "parituræ," i. ; he declares "lutheranism" in france suppressed, i. ; his defence of the "mice of autun," i. ; his clemency to the waldenses, ib.; his definition of "haute justice," ii. , note. chassetière, la, ii. . chastelier-pourtaut de latour, ii. , ; treacherously murdered at jarnac, . chastre, m. de la, governor of berry, his noble letter to the king refusing to put to death some captured huguenots, ii. , , note; ii. , note; lays siege to sancerre, ii. ; his character, ii. , note. châtaigneraie, madame de la, ii. , , note. châteaubriand, edict of, june , , i. ; its effects, i. . châtellain, jean, of metz, i. ; his trial and execution, i. , . châtellerault taken by the huguenots, ii. . châtillon, odet de, cardinal, elder brother of admiral coligny, appointed by paul iv. one of the three inquisitors-general, i. ; his protestant proclivities, ib.; riot at beauvais in consequence of the suspicion that he is a protestant, i. , seq.; his communion under both forms, i. ; he is cited by the pope, ii. ; the papal nuncio demands that the red cap be taken from him, ii. ; the constable assumes his defence, ii. , ; treats with catharine, ii. ; cardinal santa croce, the papal nuncio, claims the fulfilment of catharine de' medici's promise to surrender him to the pope, ii. ; his escort of twenty horse, ib., note; his reception by queen elizabeth, ii. ; his anxiety respecting the peace, ii. ; charles ix tears out the record against him from the parliamentary registers, ii. , ; death of, ii. . châtillon-sur-loire, ii. . chavagnac, ii. . christaudins, a nickname for the french protestants i. . christopher, duke, younger son of the elector palatine, ii. , . churches, order for the restitution of the, i. ; the surrender of, urged by beza, ii. . cipierre (rené of savoy, son of the count of tende), ii. ; murder of, ii. , . cities, privileges of, i. . clemangis, nicholas de, i. , . clemency, spurious account of, ii. . clement vii., pope, his brief and bull indorsing the inquisitorial commission, i. , seq.; gives lands of heretics to first comer, i. ; meets francis i. at marseilles, i ; proposes to him a crusade, i. . clergy, wealth and power of, i. ; plurality of benefices, ib.; non-residence, i. ; revenues, ib.; morals of, i. ; have no regard for the spiritual wants of the people, i. ; before the concordat, i. , ; aversion to use of the french language, i. ; ignorance of the bible, i. ; sad straits of, i. ; alone, make no progress, i. . clerici, nicholas, dean of the sorbonne, i. . clermont, murder at, ii. . cléry, violence of the iconoclasts at, ii. . cleves, marie of, daughter of the duke of nevers, marries henry of condé, ii. , note; permits the protestants of troyes to worship at isle-au-mont, ib. coconnas, a leading actor in the massacre of st bartholomew's day, his fate, ii. ; he is executed on the place de grève, ii. , . cocqueville, expedition of, into flanders, and its fate, ii. , . coct, anemond de, i. . cognac, ii. , , . cognat, or cognac, village in auvergne, near which the "viscounts" defeat the forces collected to oppose them, ii. . coin, a strange, i. . coligny, gaspard de, admiral of france, sends a protestant colony to brazil, i. ; when converted to protestantism, i. ; opposes the breaking of the truce of vaucelles i. ; is consulted by catharine de' medici at the time of the tumult of amboise, and gives her sound advice, i. , ; presents two huguenot petitions at fontainebleau, i. , ; his speech, i. ; quintin forced to apologize to, i. ; he presents a huguenot petition to the states general of orleans, i. ; declares that the "edict of july" can never be executed, i. ; his reluctance to take up arms, ii. ; his wife's remonstrance, ii. ; his aversion to calling in foreign assistance, ii. ; his remarks on the discipline of the huguenot army, ii. ; on the practicability of capturing paris, ii. ; his success with the huguenot right at dreux, ii. , ; draws off the army after the defeat, to orleans, ii. ; takes a number of places in sologne, ii. ; returns to normandy, ib.; his successes, ii. ; he is accused by poltrot of having instigated the murder of guise, ii. ; he vindicates his innocence, ii. ; his manly frankness, ib.; his innocence established, ii. ; his defence espoused by condé and the montmorencies, ii. ; the petition of the guises aimed at him, ii. ; the settlement of the feud delayed, ii. ; he comes to paris, on marshal montmorency's invitation, ii. ; is likened by parliament to pompey the great, ib.; is reconciled to the guises at moulins, ii. ; attempt to assassinate, ii. ; remonstrates with catharine de' medici, before the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; projects the huguenot colonization of florida, ii. ; opposes taking up arms at the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; at the battle of st. denis, ii. ; opposes the peace of longjumeau, ii. ; death of his wife, charlotte de laval, ii. ; he retires to tanlay, ii. ; he is possibly the author of the spirited remonstrance attributed to d'andelot, ii. , ; attempt of court to ruin, ii. ; plot to seize, ii. ; his flight to la rochelle, ii. ; his exclamation at the great success of the huguenots at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. ; his relations with the prince of condé, ii. ; after the death of condé at jarnac, draws off the cavalry to saintes, ii. ; his new responsibility, ii. ; his greatness, ii. ; success of a part of his army at la roche abeille, ii. ; his castle plundered, ii. ; wishes to lay siege to saumur, ii. ; reluctantly consents to lay siege to poitiers, ib.; declared infamous by parliament, and a price set on his head, ii. , ; his remarks upon the injuries done to him, ii. , note; his army weakened, ii. ; starts to meet montgomery, ib.; wounded and defeated at moncontour, ii. - ; encouraged by l'estrange, ii. ; his bold plan of march, ii. ; he sweeps through guyenne, ii. ; his wonderful success, ii. ; turns toward paris, ii. ; his illness interrupts negotiations, ib.; he engages marshal cossé at arnay-le-duc, ii. ; approaches paris, ii. , ; he is consulted respecting the flemish project, ii. ; he marries his second wife, jacqueline d'entremont, ib.; marriage of his daughter louise de châtillon to téligny, ii. ; he accepts an invitation to come to court at blois, ib.; his honorable reception, ii. ; he receives a present of one hundred thousand livres from the king, ib.; revisits châtillon-sur-loing, ii. ; accepts the king's invitation to paris, ii. ; he is remonstrated with as to his imprudence, but replies magnanimously, ii. , ; he retains his courage after the rout of genlis, ii. ; the memorial on the advantages of a flemish war, ib.; his magnanimity under discouragement, ii. ; he is partially successful in reassuring the king, ii. ; at the marriage of henry of navarre, ii. ; his last letter to his wife, ii. ; catharine and anjou resolve to despatch him, ii. ; they call in the duchess of nemours and henry of guise, ib.; coligny receives assurances from the king that he will soon pay attention to the huguenot complaints, ii. ; he is wounded by maurevel, aug. , , ii. ; his intrepidity, ii. ; he is visited by charles and catharine, ii. - ; he dictates letters to his friends, requesting them to remain quiet, ii. ; his house is entered by cosseins and his band, ii. ; he is stabbed by besme and despatched by others, ii. ; his body is thrown into the court, where henry of guise recognizes and kicks it, ii. ; his body is ignominiously treated, ib.; the head is sent on to rome, ii. ; his character and work, ib.; his reluctance to resort to arms, ii. ; destruction of his papers, ib., note; his will, ii. , note; his ability as a general, ib.; a remark ascribed to him by lord macaulay, ii. , note; his daily life, ii. ; a patron of learning, ii. ; his integrity, ii. ; the attempt of catharine to inculpate him, ii. ; his memory declared infamous, his castle razed, etc., ii. ; indignities to his remains, , ; his burial-place, ii. , note; walsingham defends his memory, ii. . collége royal, founded, i. ; opposed by the sorbonne, i. . colloquy of poissy. see poissy, colloquy of. commission to try lutherans, i. ; a new form of inquisition, i. ; its powers, i. ; indorsed and enlarged by the pope, ib. compiègne, edict of july , , i. . comtât venaissin, i. ; history of, i. ; montbrun in, i. ; the inhabitants of, reconciled by charles ix. to those of orange, ii. ; included in the huguenot scheme of organization, ii. . concordat of leo x. and francis i., i. , ; excites dissatisfaction, i. ; opposed by parliament, ib.; reluctantly registered, i. ; opposed by the university, ib.; advantageous to the crown, i. . condé, henry, prince of, son of louis: he and his cousin, henry of navarre, are recognized as generals-in-chief of the huguenots, ii. ; nicknamed "one of the admiral's pages," ib.; at moncontour, ii. ; at paris, ii. , ; he is commanded by the king to abjure protestantism, and threatened, ii. ; his brave reply, ii. ; his forced conversion, ii. , ; he escapes to germany, ii. , . condé, louis de bourbon, prince of, favors the reformation, i. ; his peril after the tumult of amboise, i. ; he is summoned by francis ii., ib.; his defiance and guise's offer, i. ; pressure upon him to come to orleans, i. ; his infatuation, i. ; is arrested on his reaching court, i. ; his remark to his brother the cardinal of bourbon, ib.; his courage, i. ; his wife repulsed, i. ; he is tried by a commission and is sentenced to death, i. , ; he is cleared by parliament, i. ; and reconciled to guise, i. ; revives the courage of the protestants at court, ii. ; he demands the punishment of the author of the massacre of vassy, ii. , ; meets guise entering paris, ii. ; receives letters from catharine imploring his help, ii. , ; retires from paris to meaux, ii. ; his course justified by la noue, ib.; he is too weak to anticipate the triumvirs at fontainebleau, ii. ; throws himself into orleans, ii. , ; publishes a justification of his assumption of arms, ii. ; his measures to repress iconoclasm, ii. , ; replies to the petition of the triumvirs, ii. - ; eloquence of the reply, ii. ; holds an interview with catharine de' medici, ii. ; "loans" beaugency to the king of navarre, ii. ; he retakes it, and furloughs a part of his army, ii. ; he takes the field, ii. ; is urged by the protestant ministers to enforce morality in the army, ii. ; captures pithiviers, ii. ; appears before paris, ib.; his delay, ii. ; suffers himself to be amused with fruitless conferences, ii. , ; engages the enemy at dreux, ii. ; is taken prisoner, ii. ; settles with the constable the terms of peace, ii. ; is deceived by the assurances of catharine de' medici, ii. ; he complains of the insolent speech of damours, ii. ; he espouses the defence of coligny against the guises, ii. ; he is enticed by catharine de' medici, ii. ; his amorous intrigue with isabeau de limueil, ii. ; death of his wife, Éléonore de roye, ib.; he disappoints catharine by remaining steadfast to the huguenot cause, ii. ; remonstrates with the government just before the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; at st. denis, ii. ; gives the battle of st. denis, nov. , , ii. ; he is exonerated by catharine de' medici from the charge of disloyal acts and intentions, ii. ; goes to meet the germans, ii. , ; meets john casimir and his army, ii. ; marches towards orleans, ii. ; favors the peace of longjumeau, ii. ; retires to noyers, ii. ; attempt of court to ruin, ii. ; his answer, ii. ; plot to seize, ii. ; his last appeal, ii. ; his flight to la rochelle, ii. ; his forces, ii. ; goes into winter quarters, ii. ; endeavors to join the auxiliaries from the south, ii. ; is wounded and treacherously killed in the battle of jarnac, march , , ii. , ; his character, ii. , ; his body treated with ignominy, ii. , . conference, rumored, between roman catholic princes, for the extirpation of heresy, ii. . confession of faith of the french protestant churches, i. . confraternities, institution of, ii. ; forbidden by charles ix., ii. ; tavannes favors the revival of, ii. ; the "christian and royal league" formed at troyes, ib. contarini, a venetian ambassador, his estimate of admiral coligny as a general, ii. , . controversial pamphlets against the protestants, i. , . conty, ii. . cop, rector, his extraordinary address before the university, i. ; his threatened arrest and flight, i. . coras, jean, a protestant member of the parliament of toulouse, put to death, ii. . cornu, pierre, his remark on pauvan's speech, i. . correro, venetian ambassador, on the number of huguenots murdered during the short peace, ii. ; on catharine de' medici, ii. . cossé, marshal, ii. , , ; engages coligny at arnay-le-duc, ii. ; negotiates for peace, ii. ; the king's estimate of, ii. ; thrown into the bastile, ii. . cosseins sent with fifty guards ostensibly for coligny's protection, ii. . cosset, an agent in the massacre at meaux, ii. - . coucy, declaration of, july , , extends a partial forgiveness, i. . coudray, m. de, his courageous and pious death, ii. . courault, an evangelical preacher, i. . court of france, change in its sentiments respecting the reformation, i. ; fatal error of, ii. ; flight from saint germain, ii. . courtenay, the sieur de, ii. . courtène, baron de, decapitated, ii. . courteville, or courtewille, secretary of philip ii., sent on a secret mission, i. . "cramp-rings," their use, i. . crevant, the protestants of, attacked, ii. . croc, du, french ambassador in scotland, ii. . croquet, nicholas, put to death at paris, for celebrating the lord's supper, ii. . crusade, a, preached at toulouse, ii. ; is indorsed by a papal bull, ii. . crussol, antoine de, count, appointed by a political assembly at nismes, head and conservator of the reformed party in languedoc, ii. ; cf. ii. . crussol, madame de, her remark to cardinal lorraine, i. . cuñiga, don juan de, spanish envoy at rome, denies the premeditation of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . curée, royal governor of vendôme, killed by the roman catholic noblesse, ii. . d. damours, advocate-general in the parliament of rouen, makes a violent and seditious speech before charles ix. at gaillon, ii. ; on condé's complaint he is arrested, ib. damville, marshal, ii. , , , , , . dauphin, prince, name given to the son of the duke of montpensier, ii. . dauphiny, orders for the extermination of the huguenots in, sent out in the name of francis ii., i. ; disorders and bloodshed in, ii. ; troops of, withdraw from the west, ii. ; gordes refuses to massacre the protestants of, ii. ; demands of the tiers état of, ii. ; exploits of montbrun in, ii , . dax, massacre in the prisons of, ii. , note. decemvirate, the bloody, i. . declarations, royal. see edicts. dehors, a merchant of rouen, hung for reproving the seditious populace, i. . demochares, or de mouchy, a doctor of the sorbonne and an inquisitor of the faith, his controversial pamphlet, i. . désiré, artus, despatched by the sorbonne to invoke the aid of philip ii., i. , . deux ponts, reinforcements to the huguenots from, ii. ; the duke of, comes with german auxiliaries, ii. ; his declaration treated with contempt by charles ix., ii. ; succeeds in penetrating france, and bringing to coligny reinforcements, ii. ; his death, ii. , . diana of poitiers, duchess of valentinois, i. , ; the infatuation of henry ii. for her, ; undertakes to silence a poor tailor arrested as a protestant, i. ; instigates persecution in order to secure the confiscated property of the protestants, i. ; is dismissed from court on the accession of francis ii., i. . dieppe, protestant assemblies in, i. ; great protestant "temple" destroyed, ib. "dieu de pâte," an opprobrious designation of the roman catholic host, ii. . domfront, ii. . douen, o., author of clément marot et le psautier huguenot, ii. . "dragonnades," ii. . dreux, the battle of, dec. , , ii. , seq.; mistakes of both sides at, , note. du chesne, or quercu, i. , . duprat, cardinal, i. , . e. ebeling, f. w., ii. . ecclesiastical discipline adopted by the french protestant churches, i. . Écouen, the magnificent seat of the montmorency family, i. . edicts, declarations, and ordinances, royal: edict of francis i., january , , abolishing the art of printing, i. ; declaration of coucy, july , , extending partial forgiveness, i. ; edict of lyons, may , , i. ; edict of fontainebleau, june , , cutting off appeal, i. ; letters patent of lyons, august , , enjoining vigilance, i. ; ordinance of paris, july , , defining the provinces of the lay and ecclesiastical judges, and making heresy punishable as sedition, i. , ; henry ii.'s edict of fontainebleau, dec. , , against books from geneva, i. ; edict of paris, nov. , , conferring power of arrest for heresy upon the ecclesiastical judges, i. ; edict of châteaubriand, june , , removing appeal from the presidial judges, i. ; edicts establishing the spanish inquisition in france, , i. , ; edict of compiègne, july , , confirming the papal appointment of three inquisitors-general, i. , ; francis ii.'s edict of amnesty, amboise, march, , i. ; restrictive edict of march , , i. ; edict of romorantin, may, , continuing the persecution, i. , ; charles ix.'s letters-patent, fontainebleau, april , , enjoining toleration and permitting the return of exiles, i. , ; "edict of july," july , , forbidding conventicles, etc., i. ; edict for the restitution of the churches, oct. , , i. ; royal letters interpreting previous edicts, i. ; "edict of january," january , , recognizing huguenot rights, i. , ; declaration of the king that he is not in duress, ii. ; edict of april , , ostensibly re-enacting, but really annulling the edict of january, ii. ; edict of pacification, amboise, march , , terminating the first civil war, ii. ; restrictive declarations infringing upon the edict of amboise, ii. , ; declaration of roussillon, aug. , , ii. , ; other declarations, ii. , note; edict, in , for the relief of the scattered huguenots, ii. , ; edict of pacification, longjumeau, march , , terminating the second civil war, ii. ; charles ix. throws the edicts of pacification into the fire, ii. ; proscriptive edicts of sept., , ib.; edict of pacification, saint germain, aug. , , terminating the third civil war, ii. - ; edict of pacification, boulogne, july, , terminating the fourth civil war, ii. , . edward iii., of england, confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . eidgenossen, explanation of name of huguenots, i. . elbeuf, marquis of, i. . elector palatine, frederick iii., the pious, intercedes for anne du bourg, and desires to make him professor of law in the university of heidelberg, i. ; sends theologians to france, who come too late for the colloquy of poissy, i. ; sends his son, john casimir, to help the huguenots in the second civil war, ii. ; he previously sends zuleger to see the state of affairs in france, ii. , ; receives henry of anjou, king elect of poland, at heidelberg, ii. . elizabeth, queen, of england, her help invoked, ii. , ; her hard conditions, ii. ; her declaration, sept. , , ii. ; her aid rather damages than furthers the protestant cause, ib.; her letter to mary of scots, ii. ; her tardy recognition of the importance of the huguenot struggle, ii. ; she is summoned to restore havre, ii. ; her misgivings as to helping the huguenots in the third civil war, ii. ; her double-dealing and effrontery, ii. - ; her coldness after the huguenot defeat at jarnac, ii. ; projected marriage with the duke of anjou, ii. , seq.; proposition to substitute alençon, ii. ; anjou's new ardor, ib.; she interposes obstacles, ib.; the anjou match abandoned, ; alençon suggested in his place and duly lauded, ii. ; enters into a treaty of amity with france, april , , ii. ; her perversity, ib., note; she inspires the french with no confidence, ii. ; rumors that she means to desert her allies, ii. , ; she toys with dishonorable proposals from the netherlands, ii. ; her cold reception of la mothe fénélon after the massacre, ii. ; declaration of her council, ii. ; she censures charles ix. for profaning the day of his daughter's birth by witnessing the execution of briquemault and cavaignes, ii. , ; she secretly sends assistance to la rochelle, ii. ; she disowns the enterprise of montgomery after its failure, ib.; she refuses to become executioner for the king of france, ii. . england, divided sympathies of the english, ii. ; generous response of the english people, ii. ; its horror at the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. ; great irritation in, ii. . english rebellion, the, encourages the french court in the war against the huguenots, ii. . entremont, jacqueline d', marries admiral coligny, ii. . epilepsy cured by kings and queens of england, i. . escars, d', a treacherous servant of antoine, king of navarre, ii. . esnay, the inhumanity of the monks of, ii. . espense, claude d', speech of, at the colloquy of poissy, i. ; confers with the protestants, i. . espine, jean de l', a converted carmelite monk, and a minister at the colloquy of poissy i. , ; in the conference of saint germain, ; his escape on st. bartholomew's day, ii. . essarts, in poitou, persecution at, i. . este, anne d', daughter of renée de france, married successively to the duke of guise and the duke of nemours, at the hollow reconciliation at moulins, ii. ; she enters readily into the plan for assassinating admiral coligny, ii. , . esternay, m. d', his residence burned, ii. ; comes to the help of the huguenots, ii. . estrange, l', encourages coligny, ii. . estrapade, an ingenious contrivance for prolonging the torture of protestant martyrs, i. , . Étampes captured by condé, ii. ; retaken by guise, ii. . Étienne, or stephens, robert, on the ignorance of the bible on the part of the clergy, i. . expiatory procession, the great, of january , , i. - . f. faculty of arts, its displeasure at the proceedings against the rector, nicholas cop, i. . farel, guillaume, i. ; his devotion, i. ; invited to meaux, i. ; goes to dauphiny, i. ; at montbéliard, i. ; intercession of berne for his relatives, i. ; probably not the author of the placard of , i. ; labors in geneva, i. ; urges calvin to remain at geneva, i. ; his recollections, i. ; his efforts for the persecuted at paris, i. ; his liturgy, i. . "fashion of geneva," the, i. , seq. fat, human, put to a new use by an apothecary of lyons, ii. . faur, du, his speech in the "mercuriale" of , i. ; his arrest, i. . ferralz, m. de, ii. . ferrara, duchess of. see renée de france. ferrara, ippolito d'este, cardinal of, sent as legate to france, i. ; his character, i. ; his reception by the french people, i. , ; chancellor l'hospital opposes his recognition, i. , ; his intrigues and success, i. , ; ii. . feudal system, decline of, i. . fiefs, absorbed in royal domain, i. . fisher, bishop of rochester, writes against lefèvre, i. . five scholars of lausanne, the, martyrdom of, i. , seq. florida, the huguenot attempts to colonize, ii. ; the first expedition, , ii. ; the second expedition, , ii. , ; the third expedition and its disastrous close, ii. ; efforts of the french government to obtain satisfaction from philip ii., ii. , ; sanguinary revenge of dominique de gourgues, ii. . florimond de ræmond, his remarks on the effects of the execution of du bourg and others, i. , . foix, catharine de, her remark to john d'albret, i. . foix, m. de, ii. . foix, progress of protestantism in, i. . folion, nicholas, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . fontaine, m. de la, writes a lying account of the french massacre, in order to deceive the swiss, ii. . fontainebleau, the assembly of notables, august , , i. ; speech of chancellor l'hospital, i. ; admiral coligny presents two petitions for the huguenots, i. , ; speeches of montluc, i. ; of marillac, i. ; of coligny, i. ; rejoinder of guise, i. ; speech of cardinal lorraine, i. ; the results, i. ; the states general to be convened, and, meantime, all punishment for the matter of religion to cease, ib. fontainebleau, edict of, given by francis i., june , , i. ; by henry ii., dec. , , i. ; letters-patent of, by charles ix., april , , i. . fontenay, ii. . fontenille, ii. . fool, court, sensible remark of the, i. . forquevaulx, french ambassador at madrid, insists upon satisfaction for the murder of the huguenot colonists in florida, ii. . fosse, voré de la, sent on a mission to melanchthon, i. . france, at accession of francis i., i. ; territorial development, i. ; subdivision in tenth century, i. ; foremost kingdom of christendom, i. ; contrast with england, i. ; assimilation of language, etc., i. ; military resources, i. ; infested by highwaymen, i. ; changes in boundaries during the sixteenth century, i. ; population of in the sixteenth century, ii. . francis i., his reply to charles v., i. ; and to montmorency, i. ; his concordat with the pope, i. ; haughty demeanor toward the parliament, i. ; and university, i. ; his acquirements overrated, i. ; patronage of art, ib.; founds the collége royal, i. ; interferes for lefèvre, i. ; his personal appearance, i. ; character and tastes, i. , ; he is said miraculously to cure the king's evil, ib.; contrasted with charles v., i. ; his religious convictions, and fear of innovation, i. ; loose morals, i. , ; anxiety for papal support, i. ; at madrid, abdicates in favor of the dauphin, i. ; his captivity, i. ; he violates his pledges to charles v., i. ; his pecuniary straits, i. ; assembles the notables ib.; promises to prove himself "very christian," i. ; treats with the germans, i. ; and with henry viii., i. ; his interview with clement vii., ib.; declines the pope's proposal of a crusade, i. ; rejects the intercession of the bernese, i. ; his letter to the bishop of paris ordering him to authorize two counsellors of parliament to proceed against the "lutherans,", i. ; favorably impressed by melanchthon's plan of reconciliation, i. ; his anger when a copy of the placard of is posted on his bedchamber door, i. ; which is enhanced by political considerations, i. ; his disgraceful edict abolishing the art of printing i. ; the edict suspended, i. ; orders an expiatory procession, i. ; he takes part in it with great apparent devoutness, i. ; his memorable speech in the episcopal palace, i. ; his declaration of coucy, july , , extending a partial forgiveness, i. ; is said to have been begged by paul iii. to moderate his cruelty, i. ; his clemency dictated by policy, i. ; his letter to the german princes in extenuation of his conduct, i. ; formally invites melanchthon, i. ; acquiesces in the sorbonne's condemnation of melanchthon's articles, i. ; his representations through du bellay to the german princes at smalcald, i. ; du bellay makes, in his name, a protestant confession, i. ; he does not deceive the germans, i. ; his edict of lyons, may , , i. ; rejects the intercession of strasbourg, zurich, and berne, ib.; his orthodoxy no longer questioned, i. ; how viewed by the reformers in his later days, i. ; issues the edict of fontainebleau, june , , cutting off appeal, i. ; his letters-patent from lyons, august , , i. ; his declaration at angoulême, respecting "sacramentarians," i. ; his ordinance of paris, july , , making heresy punishable as treason, i. ; gives force of law to the sorbonne's twenty-five articles, i. ; sends a letter of pardon to the waldenses of provence, i. ; delays the execution of the arrêt de mérindol, i. ; is led by calumnious accusations to revoke his order, i. ; his death, i. ; impartial estimates of his character, ib.; his three sons, i. ; confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . francis, the dauphin, son of francis i., his death, i. . francis ii., eldest son of henry ii., and husband of mary, queen of scots: his accession, i. ; his edict of amnesty, i. ; makes the duke of guise his lieutenant-general, with absolute power, i. , ; extends the terms of the amnesty, i. ; but explains it away by another edict, i. , ; he is visibly affected by the executions of amboise, i. ; he is made to order the extermination of the huguenots of dauphiny, i. ; issues the edict of romorantin, i. ; universal commotion in his kingdom, i. , ; he convokes the notables at fontainebleau, i. ; declares that he takes coligny's presentation of the huguenot petition in good part, i. ; is urged to stab antoine, king of navarre, but cannot muster courage to do it, i. , ; sends for navarre and condé, i. ; orders the arrest and trial of condé, i. ; further designs for the extermination of the huguenots before the termination of his reign, i. , ; his failing health, i. ; his death, i. ; saves the huguenots, i. ; recognized as a direct answer to their prayers, i. ; his mean funeral obsequies, "the enemy of the huguenots being buried like a huguenot," ib. "franco-gallia," by françois hotman, a book touching on the royal authority, ii. . francour, francoeur, or francourt, goes with beza to demand punishment for the massacre of vassy, ii. , . frederick iii., the pious. see elector palatine. freer, miss, on coligny's reception at blois, and his alleged alarm, ii. , note. french language, aversion of clergy for, i. . fribourg, the canton of, ii. . "fribours," a nickname for the protestants, i. . froissy, his outrageous conduct toward m d'esternay, ii. . froment, the reformer, labors in geneva, i. . frontenay, or fontenay, m. de, escapes from the massacre, ii. - ; negotiates with biron, ii. . "fronts d'airain," ii. . froude, james anthony, mistakes in his account of the colloquy of poissy, i. , note; his singularly inaccurate account of french affairs about the time of the massacre of vassy, ii. , ; his error respecting cardinal châtillon, ii. , note; his remarks on the fatal policy of queen elizabeth, ii. . g. gaillard, captain, his blasphemy and fury at the massacre in orleans, ii. , . gallars, nicholas des, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. ; takes part in the conference of saint germain, i. . gallican liberties, the, i. . garde, baron de la. see poulain. garnier, m., incorrectly estimates the huguenots as constituting nearly one-third of the population of france, ii. . garrisons in huguenot towns, ii. . gastines, abbé de, executed by order of condé, by way of retaliation, ii. . "gastines, croix de," ii. ; erected on the site of the house of the gastines, put to death for having celebrated the lord's supper, ib.; character of the elder gastines, ii. ; the cross taken down by order of the king, ii. , . geneva becomes the centre of protestant activity, i. ; secures its independence with the assistance of francis i. and the bernese, i. ; according to the venetian suriano "the mine from which the ore of heresy is extracted," i. ; war upon books from, i. ; the "five from geneva" executed at chambéry, i. ; danger menacing the city, i. ; a joint expedition against it proposed by henry ii., but declined by the duke of alva, i. ; character and influence of the ministers from, i. ; their numbers, i. ; books from, destroyed, i. ; the children in languedoc, according to villars, all know the geneva catechism by heart, i. ; charles ix. writes to the magistrates of geneva to stop the coming of protestant ministers, i. ; their answer, i. ; sympathy of the citizens for the huguenots escaped from the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , seq.; a fast appointed at ii. ; its hospitality and danger, ii. ; good advice given to nismes, ib.; the city saved by the illness of charles ix., ib. geneva, little, a part of paris so called from the number of protestants inhabiting it, i. ; pretended orgies in, i. . genlis, a knight of the order, forsakes condé and goes over to the enemy, ii. , . genlis, jean de hangest, seigneur de, ii. ; rout of july , , ii. ; he is taken prisoner, ib.; his death, ib., note. german protestant princes are not deceived by du bellay's representations in the name of francis i., i. ; nor by those of the duke of orleans, i. ; intercede for the vaudois of provence, i. ; for the persecuted protestants, i. , ; their aid invoked by the huguenots in the second civil war, ii. ; intercession of the, ii. ; after the massacre, ii. , seq. german troops, insubordination of, ii. . germany, rumors of treacherous designs on the part of france after the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , note. gerson, john, i. , . giustiniano, marino, the venetian ambassador reports the reasons francis i. had assigned to him for abating the severity of the persecution of the protestants, i. . glandage, m. de, plunders the city of orange, ii. ; declares that only the point of his sword is huguenot, ii. . gondy, albert de. see retz. gordes, governor of dauphiny, refuses to allow the protestants to be massacred, ii. . goudimel, an excellent musician, sets the psalms of marot and beza to music in several parts, ii. , note; he is murdered, ib. governors, royal, oppression of protestants by, ii. . grandfief, m. de, ii. . grand marché, a part of meaux inhabited by huguenots, massacre at, ii. - . granvelle, cardinal, his conference with the cardinal of lorraine, i. . gravelines, the rout of, i. . gregory xiii., pope, receives the submission of the king of navarre and the prince of condé, recognizes the validity of their marriages, and admits them to his favor, by a bull of oct. , , ii. ; his incredulity as to the "pious" intentions of charles ix. and catharine de' medici, ii. , ; orders public rejoicings at rome over the news of the massacre of the protestants, ii. , ; commemorative medals, ii. ; commemorative paintings by vasari, ii. ; his extravagant expressions of joy, ii. ; gives audience to maurevel, ib. grignan, count de, governor of provence, i. . grimaudet, françois, representative of the tiers état of anjou, his scathing exposure of the morals of the clergy, i. . gualtieri, sebastiano, bishop of viterbo, nuncio to france, i. ; his despondency and recall, i. , ; hated by catharine de' medici, on account of his boorish ways, i. . guerchy, ii. , ; he defends himself on st. bartholomew's day, but is overpowered and killed, ii. , . guilloche jean de, a protestant member of the parliament of bordeaux, killed, ii. . guillotière, faubourg de la, at lyons, ii. . guise, the family of, i. ; warning of francis i. against, ib. guise, claude, duke of, i. ; his six sons, i . guise, francis, duke of, i. ; his great credit with henry ii., i. , ; his character, i. ; captures the city of calais, i. ; his great power on the accession of francis ii., i. , ; indignation against him and his brother, i. ; their confidence before the tumult of amboise, i. ; the duke is made lieutenant-general of the kingdom, i. , ; his perplexity, i. ; his angry rejoinder to coligny at the assembly of fontainebleau, i. ; he and lorraine make advances to catharine de' medici, which she refuses, i. ; their alarm on the accession of charles ix., i. ; with montmorency and st. andré forms the triumvirate, i. , ; his exultation over the "edict of july," i. ; goes with his brothers to meet the duke of würtemberg at saverne, ii. ; his lying assurances, ii. ; he proceeds to vassy, ii. ; where a bloody massacre takes place, ii. ; pamphlets respecting the massacre, ii. , ; he attempts to vindicate himself from being the author of the massacre, ii. ; is forbidden by catharine de' medici to enter paris, but is invited to come with a small suite to court, ii. ; makes a triumphal entry into paris, ii. ; meets condé and the protestants going to a "prêche," ii. ; brings charles ix. and catharine de' medici back to paris, ii. ; sends for foreign aid, ii. ; reply of his adherents to condé's declaration, ii. ; an intercepted letter of, ii. , note; his good generalship at dreux, ii. ; retakes pithiviers and Étampes, ii. ; lays siege to orleans, ii. ; captures the portereau, ii. ; is shot by poltrot, feb , , ii. ; beza and coligny, accused of having instigated the murder, vindicate themselves, ii. , seq.; his character, ii. , , ; the petition of his family aimed at coligny, ii. ; the settlement of the feud delayed, ii. ; the hollow reconciliation at moulins, ii. . see triumvirs. guise, henry, duke of, son of francis, throws himself into poitiers, ii. ; marries catharine of cleves, widow of prince porcien, ii. ; his aid called in by catharine de' medici and anjou in the assassination of coligny, ii. ; he comes to take leave of charles, and receives a rough answer, ii. ; goes with a band to assassinate coligny, ii. ; kicks the dead body of the admiral, ii. ; pursues montgomery and his companions, ii. ; throws the responsibility of the massacre upon the king, ii. ; policy of, in rescuing a few huguenots, ii. , note; in making his province of champagne an exception to the massacre, ii. . guise, louis, cardinal of, younger brother of the cardinal of lorraine, i ; at saverne, ii. ; author of the massacre of sens, ii. ; at the bayonne conference, ii. ; tries a heretical curate, ii. . guitry, m. de, ii. . h. hans, jean de, a seditious preacher, i. . haton, claude, on morals of clergy, i. , ; on their non-residence and plurality, i. ; complains of huguenot boldness, i. ; his singular account of the massacre of vassy, ii. ; on the miracle of the cimetière des innocents, ii. ; on the rosaries in the hands of huguenot ladies, ii. . "haute justice" ii. , note. havre, the english in, ii. ; surrender of, demanded of queen elizabeth, ii. ; fall of, july , , ii. . heidelberg, reception of henry of anjou at, ii. . hennuyer, le, bishop of lisieux, apocryphal speech ascribed to, ii. . henry of orleans, afterwards henry ii., married to catharine de' medici, i. ; ascends the throne, march , , i. ; his insubordination, i. ; his great bodily vigor, ib.; his character, i. ; his inordinate love of pleasure, ib.; is ruled by diana of poitiers, constable montmorency, and cardinal lorraine, ib.; his court, according to dr. wotton, i. ; rapacity of the courtiers, i. , ; is persuaded to persecute the protestants to atone for his immoral life. i. ; publishes an edict, fontainebleau, dec. , , against books from geneva, etc., i. ; witnesses the execution of a poor tailor of the rue st. antoine, i. ; his edict conferring power of arrest for heresy upon ecclesiastical judges, paris, nov. , , i. ; he issues the edict of châteaubriand, june , , removing appeal from the decisions of presidial judges, i. ; his more than papal strictness, i. ; makes repeated attempts to introduce the spanish inquisition, i. , , ; he breaks the truce of vaucelles at the solicitation of pope paul iv., and renews war with philip ii., i. ; issues the edict of compiègne, july , , i. ; rejects the swiss intercession after the affair of the rue st. jacques, i. ; compels parliament to register the inquisition edict, i. ; his indignation at the psalm-singing on the pré aux clercs, i. ; summons françois d'andelot, whom he orders to be imprisoned, i. , ; desperate schemes to obtain money, i. ; makes the treaty of cateau-cambrésis with philip of spain and mary of england, i. ; communicates to william, prince of orange, his own designs and those of philip ii. against the protestants, i. ; proposes a joint french and spanish expedition against geneva, i. ; attends a _mercuriale_ of the parliament of paris, i. ; orders the arrest of du bourg and other counsellors, i. ; marriage festivities for his daughter, i. ; is mortally wounded by montgomery in the tournament, june , , i. ; his death, july , , i. ; epigrams upon the event, i. . henry of valois, third son of henry ii., afterward king of france as henry iii., baptized first edward alexander, i. ; is made duke of anjou. see anjou, duke of. heptameron of the queen of navarre, i. , seq. heresy, views of calvin respecting the punishment of, i. ; made punishable as treason by francis i., i. . herminjard, m., on briçonnet's defection, i. . hesse, the landgrave of, his opinion of the representations of the guises, ii. ; declines to help the huguenots, ii. ; his distrust after the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. ; will have nothing to do with the candidature of alençon for king of the romans, ii. . heu, gaspard de, his judicial assassination, i. , . hospital, michel de l', chancellor, i. ; rebukes parliament of bordeaux, i. ; his character, i. ; little good expected of him, ib.; one of the original conspirators of amboise, ib.; speech at the assembly of fontainebleau, i. ; refuses to sign the sentence of the prince of condé, i. ; his address at the opening of the states general of orleans, i. ; declares the co-existence of two religions impossible, ib.; and that names of factions must be abolished, i. ; his strange representation of the character of previous persecutions, ib., note; he is distrusted by beza, i. ; his speech at the opening of the colloquy of poissy, i. ; he opposes the ratification of the plenary powers of the papal legate, i. ; his speech to the notables at saint germain, i. ; entreats catharine to throw herself into the arms of the huguenots, ii. ; his danger from the fury of the paris populace, ii. ; his censure of the norman parliament, ii. , note; his language to santa croce respecting the lives of french priests, ii. , note; he is attacked by cardinal lorraine in the royal council at melun, feb., , ii. , ; sends out, without the authority of the council, an edict for the relief of the scattered huguenots, ii. , ; his altercation at moulins with cardinal lorraine, ii. ; envoy to the huguenots, ii. ; his striking memorial counselling just and pacific treatment of the huguenots, ii. , ; catharine de' medici sides with his enemies, ii. ; her animosity against him, because she suspects him of having prompted charles ix. to entreat her to avoid war, ii. ; another quarrel of l'hospital and lorraine respecting the chancellor's refusal to affix his signature to a papal bull, ii. , ; his fall from power, ii. ; he retires to vignai, ii. , ; his last days, ii. ; his farewell letter to the king, ii. ; his death, ii. . host, reverence for, i. . hotman, françois, author of the "vita gasparis colinii," i. ; also of the "epistre au tigre de la france," i. ; his escape from the massacre of bourges, ii. ; his "franco-gallia," ii. . hugh capet, count of paris, i. . hugonis, a violent roman catholic preacher, ii. . huguenots, various explanations of the origin of the designation, i. - ; message of the escaped prisoners of tours, i. ; they petition francis ii. at fontainebleau for liberty of worship, i. ; general plans of extermination formed by their enemies before the death of francis, i. , ; the spanish ambassador, chantonnay, alarmed at the intemperance and violence of the scheme, i. , note; return of huguenot exiles, i. ; popular curiosity to hear their psalms and sermons, i. ; their growing boldness, i. ; they are said to have , churches, i. ; difficulty of restraining their impetuosity, i. ; romish complaints of their boldness, i. ; immense crowds at the prêches, ii. ; massacred at vassy, ii. ; summoned to meaux, ii. ; they seize orleans, which becomes their centre during the first civil war, ii. ; they justify their assumption of arms, ii. ; their stringent articles of association, ii. , ; nobles and cities that espouse their cause, ii. ; their strict discipline, ii. ; cruelty at pithiviers, ii. ; reverses of, ii. , ; their ballads and songs, ii. - ; they lose favor at court, ii. , , ; progress of, ii. ; they are accused of poisoning the wells in lyons, ii. ; number of huguenots in france, ib.; assaults upon unoffending huguenots at crevant, tours, mans, and vendôme, ii. ; no redress obtained, ib.; various acts of oppression, ii. ; excluded from judicial posts, ii. ; progress of, ii. ; huguenot pleasantries, ii. ; they suspect treacherous designs, ii. ; alarmed by the march of alva and the swiss levy, ii. , ; they plan to seize cardinal lorraine and liberate charles ix., ii. ; the sudden rising, ii. ; they abate their demands at the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. ; admiration of the sultan's envoy for their bravery at the battle of st. denis, ii. , note; they solicit the help of the german princes, ii. ; they are exonerated by catharine de' medici from the charge of disloyalty, ii. ; their generous sacrifices, ii. ; their imprudence in concluding the peace of longjumeau without guarantees, ii. ; treatment of returning huguenots, ii. ; deprived of their rights by interpretative ordinances, etc., ii. ; admirable organization of, ii. ; oath to be exacted of, ii. ; the plot against them disclosed by an intercepted letter, ii. ; advantages at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. ; enthusiasm of their youth, ib.; the protestant religion proscribed, ii. ; their places of refuge, ii. ; great successes in poitou, angoumois, etc., ii. ; the great army collected in southern france joins condé, ii. ; negotiations and reprisals, ii. ; they suffer defeat at jarnac, ii. , seq.; they recover strength, ii. ; their success at la roche abeille, ii. ; they send a petition to the king, ii. , , ; their single purpose, ii. , ; they commit a serious blunder in laying siege to poitiers, ii. ; flight of refugees from montargis, ii. ; defeated at moncontour, ii. - ; their heavy losses, ii. ; their terms of peace, ii. ; their successes compensate for their defeats, ii. ; the huguenot nobles flock to paris to attend the marriage of henry of navarre, ii. ; many alarmed by the king's cordiality, ii. ; their constancy in the massacre at orleans, ii. , , etc.; return of many who had apostatized, ii. , note; discontent of the huguenots of the south with the terms on the edict of pacification of boulogne, ii. ; they obtain a truce from marshal damville, ib.; military organization of, provided for in the political assembly of milhau and montauban, ii. ; their bold demands contained in a petition to the king, ii. , ; demands of lower languedoc and nismes, ii. ; those of the tiers état of provence and dauphiny, ib.; indignation of catharine de' medici at their boldness, ii. ; they remain firm, ib.; they reassemble at milhau, and perfect their organization, dec. , , ii. - ; injury to their cause, arising from their alliance with the "politiques," or malcontents, ii. ; the huguenots resume arms, , undertaking the fifth civil war, ii. ; failure of the conferences between biron and the huguenots, ii. , ; their stout demands, ii. ; some reasons of their military successes, ii. , ; failure of persecution, war, and treachery, of which they had been the victims, ii. . see coligny, condé, etc. huguerye, michel de la, his mémoires inédits, ii. ; his assertions as to the premeditation of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ib.; his misrepresentation of the character of jeanne d'albret, queen of navarre, ii. . i. iconoclasm at paris, i. , ; by a monk at troyes, for a "pious" object, i. ; in various parts of france, i. ; at montauban, i. , ; can it be repressed? ii. ; stringent but ineffectual measures against, ii. ; at caen, ii. ; at orleans, ii. ; at valenciennes, etc., ii. ; at cateau-cambrésis, ii. . images, whimsical defence of, ii. . impatience with "public idols," i. ; repressed by calvin, ib. inconsistency of the laws and practice of the courts, i. . indiscreet partisans of reform, i. . informers against the protestants, i. . inquisition, the, is jealously watched in france, i. (see commission to try lutherans); also, i. . inquisition, spanish, proposition to introduce into france, i. ; opposed by parliament and withdrawn, i. ; a second attempt ib.; manly speech of president séguier against it, i. ; a third attempt, i. , ; the pope appoints three inquisitors-general, i. ; the papal bull confirmed by henry ii., i. ; the inquisition edict registered by henry in a "lit de justice," i. . insubordination to royal authority, ii. . interpretative ordinances, ii. . isabella, or elizabeth, daughter of henry ii. of france and catharine de' medici, born april , , married to philip ii. of spain, june, , i. ; discloses the plot to kidnap jeanne d'albret, queen of navarre, ii. ; her discussion with her mother in the bayonne conference, ii. - ; again her husband's mouthpiece, ii. . "italian bible," the, macchiavelli's il principe, ii. , note. ivoy, m. d', surrenders bourges, ii. ; treachery of his brother before paris, ii. . j. january, the edict of, by charles ix. (january , ), a celebrated ordinance, i. ; marks the termination of the period of persecution according to the forms of law, i. ; inconsistencies of, ii. ; the huguenot leaders urge its observance, ib.; opposition of the papal party, ii. . jarnac, battle of, march , , ii. , ; the loss small in numbers, ii. ; exaggerated bulletins of, ii. , . "jerusalem," temple de, one of the protestant places of worship at paris, destroyed by constable montmorency, ii. . jewel, bishop, on the french protestant refugees, ii. . john casimir, son of the elector palatine, comes to the assistance of the huguenots, and meets condé in lorraine, ii. ; letter of the princes assembled at his marriage, ii. . john lackland, king of england, confers upon the inhabitants of la rochelle exemption from the duty of marching elsewhere or receiving a garrison from abroad, ii. . joupitre, jean, mayor of bourges, ii. . joyeuse, viscount of, ii. . julius ii., pope, his bull giving navarre to the first comer, believed to be a forgery, i. . julius iii., pope, his bull permitting the use of eggs, butter, and cheese, to be eaten during lent, condemned and burned by order of henry ii. and parliament, i. . july, the edict of, by charles ix. (july , ), a severe measure, prohibiting conventicles for preaching or celebrating the sacraments, i. ; exultation of guise, i. ; admiral coligny declares that it cannot be executed, ib.; disappointment of protestants, ib. jumièges, at the fair of, a friar pulled from the pulpit, and another preacher put in his place, i. . jurieu, pierre, his remarks respecting the origin of the name "huguenot," i. . justice, abuses in administration of, i. . k. killigrew of pendennis reaches rouen, ii. . king, the "fons omnis jurisdictionis," i. ; emperor in his own dominions, ib. king's authority, checks upon, i. . king's evil, cured by the touch of the french monarchs, i. . knox, john on the affair of the rue st. jacques, i. , , ; his sermon on the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and his denunciation of charles ix., ii. . l. la court, ii. . lacretelle, m., estimates the huguenots as numbering , , souls, or one-tenth of the population of france, ii. . la force, jacques nompar de caumont, duke of, his wonderful escape in the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , . lagebaston, president of the parliament of bordeaux, ii. . lainez, second general of the order of jesus, makes an intemperate speech at poissy, i. ; compares the protestant ministers to apes and foxes, i. . lambert, françois, first monk converted, i. ; his history, i. ; his imprudent appeals, i. ; his marriage and his death, ib. languedoc, fifteen cities in this province receive protestant ministers, i. ; the children learn religion only from the geneva catechism, ib.; of twenty-two bishops in languedoc, all but five or six non-residents, ib. languet, hubert his description of the persecution under francis ii., i. ; of the confusion after the tumult of amboise, i. . lansac, a special envoy of charles ix. to germany, his unscrupulous misrepresentations, ii. , ; "lansquenets," i. . laschêne, a protestant nobleman, decapitated at paris, ii. . laudonnière rené de, leads the second colonial expedition to florida, ii. ; escapes from the massacre of the huguenots, and succeeds in returning to france, ii. . lausanne, the "five scholars of," arrested, i. ; tried and executed, i. , . leclerc, jean, a wool-carder of meaux, tears down a papal bull, i. ; he is branded, i. ; and burned alive at metz, i. . leclerc, pierre, a minister and martyr at meaux, i. , . le coq, his evangelical sermon, i. . "le dieu le fort," ii. . lefèvre d'Étaples, jacques, i. , ; restores letters to france, i. ; his studies, ib.; devotion, i. ; his commentary on the pauline epistles, i. ; foresees the reformation, ib.; controversy with beda, i. ; invited to meaux, i. ; spiritual progress of, i. ; translates the new testament, i. ; his exultation, i. ; retires to strasbourg, i. - ; tutor of the duke of orleans, i. ; librarian at blois, ib.; hopes entertained by aleander respecting, i. ; mental sufferings and death, i. , . leicester, earl of, ii. , ; it is proposed to offer him the hand of mademoiselle de bourbon, ii. ; on charles ix. and the massacre, ii. , . le laboureur, on the massacre of vassy, ii. . lent, the pope's bull permitting eggs, butter, and cheese to be eaten during the fast, condemned by parliament, and publicly burned, i. ; negligent observance of, in court of charles ix., i. . leo x., his concordat, i. , . léran, viscount de, wounded and pursued into the room of margaret of valois, on st. bartholomew's day, ii. . léry, jean, goes to brazil with villegagnon, and, on his return, writes a history of the expedition, i. ; ii. , note; his account of the siege of sancerre, ii. , , - . "lettres de cachet," ii. . lhomme, or lhommet, martin, a bookseller, hung for having a copy of the "tigre" in his possession, i. . libertine party, the, i. , . lieutenant de la mareschaussée, his ineffectual defence and death on st. bartholomew's day, ii. . ligny, violence at, ii. . limousin, protestantism in, i. . limueil, isabeau de, her amorous intrigue with the prince of condé, ii. , . "lit de justice," i. , ; ii. . liturgies of farel and calvin, i. , , , seq., . livry, the hermit of, i. . loménie, martial de, a secretary of the king. marshal retz obtains his office and his estate of versailles, and then causes him to be murdered, ii. . longjumeau, edict of pacification of, march , , ii. ; the peace opposed by coligny, and favored by condé, ii. ; discussion of the question of the sincerity of the court, ii. , ; the edict thrown into the fire by charles ix. in the parliament house, ii. . longjumeau sieur de, assault upon his house, i. . longueville, duke of, prevents the massacre of the protestants from extending to picardy, ii. . lorraine, charles, cardinal of, i. ; he exchanges the title of cardinal of guise for that of cardinal of lorraine, i. ; various estimates of his character, i. , ; his servility toward diana of poitiers, i. ; hypocrisy to the swiss envoys, i. ; his conference with cardinal granvelle, i. ; his great power on the accession of francis ii., i. ; indignation of the people against him and his brother, i. ; message he receives from the escaped huguenot prisoners of tours, i. ; perplexity of, i. ; his politic speech at fontainebleau, i. ; his hypocritical assurances to throkmorton, i. , note; pasquinade against, i. ; a virulent pamphlet against him entitled "epistre au tigre de la france," i. , - ; effrontery of, in offering to represent the three orders at the states general, i. ; favors the holding of the colloquy of poissy, i. ; he meets beza and professes to be well satisfied, i. , ; but subsequently boasts that he overthrew beza in the first interview, i. ; his speech in reply to beza, i. , ; he demands of the huguenot ministers subscription to the augsburg confession, i. ; retires in disgust from saint germain, i. ; goes with his brothers to meet the duke of würtemberg at saverne, ii. ; his lying assurances, ii. , ; he declares himself, on oath, guiltless of the death of any man for religion's sake, ii. ; he returns to france from the council of trent, and unsuccessfully seeks the approval of the decrees, ii. ; his wrangle at melun, feb, , with chancellor l'hospital, ii. , ; his encounter with marshal montmorency in paris, ii. ; forbidden by catharine to hold communication with granvelle and chantonnay, ii. ; he disregards the prohibition, ib.; his altercation with l'hospital at moulins, ii. ; the huguenots plan to seize him, ii. ; his flight to rheims, ii. ; he invites alva to enter france, ii. ; his plot revealed, ii. , ; makes another attack upon l'hospital, and is prevented by marshal montmorency from making a bodily assault, ii. ; his jealousy of anjou, ii. ; retires from court at the peace of saint germain, ii. ; his rejoicing at rome over the news of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , . lorraine, john, first cardinal of, i. ; his many ecclesiastical benefices, ib. lorraine, mary of, married to james v. of scotland, i. . loue, la, taken prisoner at jarnac, ii. , ; killed near montpellier, ii. . louis viii., of france, confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . louis ix., st louis, disliked in périgord, i. ; his pragmatic sanction, i. . louis xi., his aversion to assembling the states general, i. ; consents to abrogate the pragmatic sanction, i. ; subsequently re-enacts it, i. ; confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . louis xii., re-enacts the pragmatic sanction, i. ; his motto, ib.; confirms the privileges of la rochelle, ii. . louise de savoie, mother of francis i., i. , ; encourages reformed preachers, i. ; regent, i. ; change in her attitude, i. , . lude, count of, ii. . luns, philippine de, a young lady of wealth and rank, strangled and burned at paris, i. . lusignan, "la pucelle," taken by the huguenots, ii. . luther, his teachings condemned by the sorbonne, i. ; wide circulation of his works, i. ; his books proscribed, ib.; his letters respecting melanchthon's projected visit to france, i. , . "lutherans," rage of populace of paris against, i. . lyon, jacques du, seigneur de grandfief, plots to surrender la rochelle, ii. . lyons, frontier town at accession of francis i., i. ; council of, i. ; inspection of books at great fairs of, i. ; in the hands of maligny, i. ; besieged, ii. ; huguenots accused of poisoning wells in, ii. ; massacre at, ii. , seq. m. macaulay, lord, a remark ascribed by him to admiral coligny, ii. , note. macchiavelli's il principe, "the italian bible," ii. , note. mackintosh, sir james, receives from m. de châteaubriand important documents bearing upon the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . macon, persecution at, i. . madrid, a royal country-seat, ii. . madrid, treaty of, declared null, i. . magic, resort to, i. . maigret, friar aimé, preaches at lyons, i. . malassise, m. de, henry de mesmes, ii. , , . maligny seizes lyons, but, not being supported, fails to keep the place, i. . malot, jean, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . malta, siege of, by the turks, in , ii. . mandelot, m. de, governor of lyons, ii. ; his perplexity, ii. ; his responsibility for the massacre in lyons, ii. ; a suppliant for the spoils of the huguenots, ii. . mangin, a martyr at meaux, i. , ; mans, protestants of, plundered or killed, ii. . mansfeld, count of. see wolrad. marcel, prévôt des marchands, ii. , etc. marché-aux-pourceaux, i. . marcourt, antoine, probable author of the placard of , i. . "mardi gras," the rising of, ii. . margaret of valois, youngest daughter of henry ii., born may , , her hand declined by sebastian of portugal, ii. ; proposed marriage to henry of navarre, ii. ; the proposal comes from the montmorencies, ii. ; absurdity of the story of a romantic attachment of margaret, in , to henry of guise, ii. , note; she is said to be at first indifferent, afterward anxious to marry henry of navarre, ii. , ; described by jeanne d'albret, ii. ; the betrothal, ii. ; the marriage, ii. ; the entertainment in the louvre, ii. ; on the morning of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . marillac, bishop of vienne, i. ; his speech at fontainebleau, i. , . marlorat, augustin, a prominent huguenot minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. ; in the conference of saint germain, i. ; he is hung by order of the parliament of rouen, ii. . maromme, laurent de, a leader of the murderers at rouen, ii. , . marot, clément, i. ; his flight to ferrara, i. . marsac, louis de, his words at the stake, i. . marshals, remonstrance of the, ii. . martigues, sebastian of luxemburg, viscount of, ii. ; his impiety, ib., note. martin theodoric, of beauvais, his elegies on louis de berquin, i. ; remarks respecting barthélemi milon, i. . martyr, peter, or pietro martiro vermigli, a native of florence and a reformer, invited to the colloquy of poissy, i. ; his arrival, i. ; his speech, i. ; takes part in the conference of saint germain, i. ; his candid paper, i. . martyrs, protestant, constancy of, i. ; ingenious contrivance for prolonging their sufferings, ib. mary, queen of scots, wife of francis ii., i. ; ii. , . mass, roman catholic, songs against, ii. , seq. massacre, of protestants in holy week, , i. ; of vassy, march , , ii. ; of sens, april , , ii. , ; of orange, june , , ii. ; of toulouse, ii. - ; of troyes, ii. , ; of roman catholics at nismes ii. , ; in prisons of orleans, aug. , , ii. ; of the garrison of rabasteins, ii. ; at paris (see massacre of st. bartholomew's day); of meaux, aug. and , , ii. - ; of troyes, sept. , , ii. , ; of orleans, ii. seq.; of bourges, sept. , , ii. , ; of angers, ii. , ; of lyons, ii. - ; of rouen, sept., , ii. - ; of toulouse, ii. , ; of bordeaux, oct, , ii. - ; why the massacre is not universal, ii. , ; cases of mercy, ii. , . massacre of st. bartholomew's day, in paris, the question of its premeditation, chapter xvii. passim; la huguerye's statements, ii. , ; a significant mock combat, ii. ; the plan as sketched by anjou, ii. seq.; salviati's testimony respecting the want of premeditation and the ignorance of the king, ii. , ; coligny wounded, ii. ; catharine and anjou resolve upon extreme measures, ii. ; the blood council, ii. , seq.; charles reluctantly consents, ii. ; few victims selected at first, ii. ; religious hatred as a motive, ii. ; precautions taken, ib.; the municipal officers of paris called in, ii. ; murder of coligny, ii. , seq.; of huguenot leaders in the louvre, ii. , seq.; on the signal bell from the palais de justice, the massacre becomes general, ii. ; the part taken by the courtiers and the royal guard, ii. ; pitiless butchery, ii. ; shamelessness of the court ladies, ii. ; wonderful escapes, ii. ; the dead bodies buried by the municipality of paris, ii. ; the massacre not at first a popular movement, ii. , ; pillage of the rich, ii. ; action of the municipal officers, ii. ; ineffectual orders issued to lay down arms, ii. ; miracle of the hawthorn of the cimetière des innocents, ii. ; number of the victims in paris, ii. ; speech of the king at the "lit de justice," ii. ; servility of parliament, ii. ; coligny's memory declared infamous, ii. ; the verbal orders, ii. ; two kinds of letters sent out, ii. ; uncertain number of victims, ii. . masso, an agent in the massacre at lyons, ii. , note; , . matignon, m. de, saves the protestants of caen and alençon from massacre, ii. . maubert, place, ii. . maurevel murders de mouy, ii. ; he is rewarded with the collar of the order, ii. ; wounds admiral coligny, ii. , . "mauvais garçons," highwaymen, i. . maximilian, emperor of germany, styles the french king "a king of asses," i. ; ii. , etc. may, du, attempts to assassinate admiral coligny, ii. . mayenne, charles, duke of, son of francis, duke of guise, ii. . maynet, a huguenot member of the parliament of rouen, ii. . mazurier, martial, i. , , , . medici family, the, is reputed to be destined to be fatal to christendom, i. . meaux, reformation at, i. seq., , , , , ; new persecutions at, i. ; the "fourteen of meaux," i. ; their execution, i. ; iconoclasm at, ii. ; consequent severity of the parliament of paris, ib.; massacre at, aug. and , , ii. - . medals, commemorative of the junction of the huguenots and their german allies, ii. ; of the battles of jarnac and moncontour, ii. , note; of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , , . melanchthon, i. ; answers the sorbonne's condemnation of luther, i. ; visited by a french agent, i. ; draws up a plan of reconciliation, ib.; his extravagant concessions, i. ; his own misgivings, i. ; his plan makes a favorable impression on francis i., ib.; is entreated to come to france, i. ; his perplexity, i. ; he is formally invited by francis, and consents, i. ; but fails to obtain permission from the elector of saxony, i. ; his chagrin, i. ; his articles reprobated by the sorbonne, i. ; approves of the execution of servetus, i. . menendez, or melendez, de abila, sent by philip ii. to destroy the huguenot settlements in florida, ii. ; his cruelty and success, ib. mercenary troops, i. . "mercuriale," nature of, i. ; henry ii. goes in person to one of the parliament of paris, june , , i. ; that of june , , i. , seq. mérindol, some inhabitants of, summoned to aix, i. ; the infamous "arrêt de mérindol," november , , i. ; preparations to carry it into effect, i. ; it is delayed by friendly interposition, i. ; the place is taken and destroyed, i. . merle, d'aubigné, a singular mistake of, i. . merlin, jehan reymond, a protestant pastor, at the colloquy of poissy, i. ; counsels moderation to the queen of navarre, ii. ; chaplain of coligny, ii. , ; his wonderful escape, ii. . méru, a younger montmorency, ii. , note, . messignac, huguenot loss at, ii. . metz, labors of jean châtellain at, i. ; anger of the people at his execution, i. . "michelade," the, at nismes, ii. , . milhau-en-rouergue, calls for ministers, i. ; the entire population becomes protestant, ii. ; refuses to admit a garrison, ii. ; a huguenot place of refuge, ii. ; political huguenot assembly at, ii. ; second assembly, dec. , , at which the scheme of organization is perfected, ii. - . miracles popular, i. ; miracle of the hawthorn tree of the cimetière des innocents, ii. . milon, barthélemi, a paralytic, executed, i. ; remarks of martin theodoric, of beauvais, respecting ib. minard, president, assassination of, i. . ministers, protestant, the popular clamor for, i. ; their moderation, i. , ; the demand unabated for, ii. . mirabel, a huguenot leader, ii. . mirambeau, a huguenot negotiator, ii. . miron, the duke of anjou's confession to, ii. . mole, la, one of the party of the politiques, ii. ; he is executed on the place de grève, ii. , . monastic orders incur contempt, i. . monclar, viscount of, ii. , . moncontour, battle of, oct , , ii. seq.; exultation of the roman catholic party after, ii. ; medals struck at rome, ib., note; extravagant action of parliament, ii. . money coined by the huguenots, with the name and arms of charles ix., ii. . mons, capture of, by count louis of nassau, ii. . montagut, or montaigu, viscount of, ii. , note. montargis, the residence of the duchess of ferrara, affords a safe refuge to the huguenots, ii. , ; flight of huguenots from montargis to sancerre, ii. . montauban, the protestants of, being maligned, vindicate their loyalty, i. ; beg that no more ex-monks be sent into france as protestant ministers, ib.; iconoclasm at, i. , ; it refuses to admit a garrison in, , ii. ; a huguenot place of refuge, ii. ; coligny at, ii. ; becomes, through regnier's agency, a protestant stronghold, ii. ; political huguenot assembly at, ii. ; it provides for a military organization of the huguenots, ib. montbéliard, farel at, i. . montbrun, nephew of cardinal tournon, a huguenot leader, in the comtât venaissin, etc., i. ; ii. , , , , ; his exploits in dauphiny, ii. , . mont de marsan, ii. . montecuccoli, count of, accused of having poisoned the dauphin, francis, and drawn asunder by four horses, i. . montélimart, huguenots of, i. . montereul, claude a curate, active in the massacre of rouen, ii. . montesquiou, captain of anjou's guards, treacherously murders the prince of condé, ii. . montferrand, m. de, governor of bordeaux, ii. ; his brutal boast before the parliament that he had killed more than two hundred and fifty persons, ii. . montgomery, gabriel, count of, captain of the scotch guard, mortally wounds henry ii. in the tournament, i. ; commands the protestants at rouen, ii. ; escapes with d'andelot to la rochelle, at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. , ; throws himself into st. jean d'angely, ii. ; takes for the huguenots a great part of béarn, ii. ; goes to coligny's assistance, ii. ; his raids, ii. , ; escapes from the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. - ; obtains help from england for la rochelle, ii. ; queen elizabeth's interest in him, ib.; he lands in normandy, ii. ; takes carentan, ib.; is taken prisoner at domfront, ii. ; delight of catharine de' medici, ii. , ; his sentence and execution, ii. ; his constancy, ii. . montigny's remark as to the burgundians, ii. . montluc, bishop of valence, his speech in the assembly of notables of fontainebleau, i. , ; his description of the protestant ministers, i. , ; his evangelical preaching, i. ; confers with the protestants at poissy, i. ; cardinal lorraine's reference to him in the colloquy of poissy, ii. ; at the conference of saint germain, ib.; he is erroneously credited with writing condé's reply to the triumvirs, etc., ii. , ; he is sent to secure the election of anjou to the throne of poland, ii. ; his embarrassment, ii. , , note; his success, ii. , . montluc, blaise de, a cruel general, ii. , ; at toulouse, ii. , ; is praised by pius iv. for his part in the massacre, ii. ; his conversation with alva at the bayonne conference, ii. ; breaks down coligny's bridge of boats, ii. ; accuses damville, ii. ; succeeds in béarn, ii. , . montmorency, anne de, grand master and constable, i. ; his ancient family and valor, i. ; his cruelty, i. , ; his unpopularity, i. ; disgraced by francis i., but recalled by henry ii., i. ; opposes the breaking of the truce of vaucelles, i. ; taken prisoner at the battle of st. quentin, i. ; favors the peace of cateau-cambrésis, i. ; his fall from power at the accession of francis ii., i. ; retires to his estates, i. , ; his wealth, ib.; indignation of catharine de' medici with him, i. ; his disgust at the progress of protestantism and the popular demand for restitution, i. ; joins in the triumvirate, notwithstanding his son's remonstrances, i. , ; disappointment of the protestants at, i. , note; his exploits at paris in burning the protestant preaching-places earn him the title of "le capitaine brûlebanc," ii. ; is taken prisoner at the battle of dreux, ii. ; he espouses the defence of coligny, ii. ; he takes sides against cardinal lorraine at melun, ii. ; opposes the nuncio's demand that the red cap be taken away from cardinal châtillon, ii. , ; at the conference of la chapelle saint denis declares that the king will not tolerate two religions, ii. ; he is mortally wounded in the battle of saint denis, ii. ; three times a prisoner in previous wars, ib., note; his character and exploits, ii. ; his conduct on entering la rochelle, ii. . see triumvirs. montmorency, françois de, marshal, eldest son of the constable, remonstrates with his father on the formation of the triumvirate, i. ; he is temporarily removed from the governorship of paris, ii. ; his inability to check the excesses of the turbulent mob, ii. ; espouses coligny's defence, ii. ; takes energetic measures with the parisians, ii. ; his encounter with cardinal lorraine, ii. , ; he brings coligny to paris, ii. ; proclaims the edict of amboise by public crier, ii. ; hollow reconciliation with the guises, ii. ; at saint denis, ii. ; his retort to catharine de' medici, when santa croce demands the surrender of cardinal châtillon to the pope, ii. ; remonstrance of, ii. ; reply to coligny, ii. ; proposes the marriage of henry of navarre to margaret of valois, ii. ; his honorable reception by queen elizabeth, ii. ; charles's estimate of, ii. ; thrown into the bastile, ii. . montpézat, m. de, ii. . montpellier, gathering of huguenots for worship in the large school-rooms, i. , ; the chapter of the cathedral introduces a garrison, whereupon the protestants rise and strip the churches, i. , ; the consuls write to geneva to double their corps of protestant ministers, ii. . montpensier, the duke of, at the bayonne conference, ii. ; incites the massacre of protestants, ii. , . montpipeau, the "tears" of, ii. , . montréal, ii. . montsoreau, m. de, his letter to puigaillard, ii. ; he treacherously murders m. de la rivière, ii. . morata, olympia, her precocity, i. . morel, françois de, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . mornas, cruelty of huguenots at, ii. , . mornieu, andré, an échevin, heads the murderers of lyons, ii. . mortier, du, a privy councillor, refuses to sign the sentence of the prince of condé, i. . morvilliers, bishop of orleans, a skilful negotiator, his noble words on straightforward diplomacy, ii. , note; royal envoy, ii. , , , ; replies to coligny's memorial, ii. , note. mothe fénélon, la, french ambassador in england, his recommendation of the duke of anjou, ii. ; his perplexity in defending the massacre, ii. ; declares himself ashamed to be counted a frenchman, ii. ; his cold reception by queen elizabeth, ib.; confesses that he is not believed, ii. ; he is instructed to press the suit of alençon for queen elizabeth's hand, ii. . motley, mr. j. l., ii. , note, . mouchy, de, apologizes for using french language, i. ; at the conference of saint germain, ii. ; his delight at its dismissal, ii. . moulin, charles du, a jurist, writes an able treatise against the council of trent, ii. , . moulins, the assembly of notables at, in , ii. ; alleged plan of the "sicilian vespers" to be executed at, ib.; reconciliation of coligny and the guises, and of the montmorencies and guises at, ii. ; fresh encounter of cardinal lorraine and chancellor l'hospital at, ii. , . mouvans, a huguenot leader in provence, i. ; his message to the duke of guise, i. ; ii. , , . mouy, m. de, ii. , ; murdered by maurevel, ii. . mucidan, ii. . muntz, on clemangis, i. . murderer, the, of a huguenot rescued, ii. . n. nançay, captain of the guard, superintends the butchery of the huguenot leaders in the louvre, ii. . nantes, the protestants of, not to be compelled to hang tapestry on corpus christi day, ii. ; the municipality of, refuses to massacre the protestants, ii. . nantouillet, the affair of, ii. , , note. nassau, louis, count of, brother of the prince of orange, enters france with the duke of deux-ponts, ii. ; at moncontour, ii. , , ; confers with charles ix. and urges him to espouse the cause of the netherlands, ii. , ; captures mons and valenciennes, ii. ; receives from charles ix. assurances of help for the prince of orange, ii. ; his death, ii. . navarre conquered by the spanish, i. ; little left to the king, i. . navarre, bastard of, taken prisoner at jarnac, ii. . navarre, antoine de bourbon-vendôme, king of, husband of jeanne d'albret, favors the reformation, i. ; rejects montmorency's advances, i. ; his irresolution and pusillanimity, i. , ; wants indemnity for the kingdom of navarre, i. ; is received at court with studied discourtesy, ib.; is deaf to remonstrance, i. ; meets fresh indignity, i. ; his irresolution embarrasses montbrun at lyons, i. ; invites beza to nérac, i. ; his short-lived zeal, i. ; pressure upon him and condé to force them to come to orleans, ib.; his concessions, i. ; at limoges the huguenot gentry offer him aid, i. ; he dismisses his escort, i. ; his infatuation, ib.; reaches orleans, i. ; is treated almost like a prisoner, ib.; his danger, i. ; makes an ignominious compact with catharine de' medici just before the death of francis ii., i. ; his opportunity at charles ix.'s accession, i. ; his contemptible character, ib.; his humiliation, i. ; he receives more consideration in consequence of the bold demands of the particular estates of paris, i. ; his assurances to m. gluck, the danish ambassador, that he would have the gospel preached throughout france ib.; he invites beza to the colloquy of poissy, i. ; his urgency, i. ; he is plied by the arts of the papal legate, i. ; his apostasy, ii. ; his defence of guise after the massacre of vassy, ii. ; and beza's reply, ii. ; has become "all spanish now," ii. ; seizes charles ix. and brings him back to paris, ii. ; he is mortally wounded at the siege of rouen, ii. ; his last hours and death, ii. ; his character, ii. ; extravagant eulogy of de thou, ii. ; mourning at the council of trent, ib.; his delight at the prospective marriage of his son to margaret of valois, ii. . navarre, henry of, son of antoine de bourbon-vendôme and jeanne d'albret, queen of navarre, afterward henry iv. of france, born dec. , . takes part in a tournament at the bayonne conference, ii. ; remonstrates against the perfidy displayed by the roman catholics in the murder of condé and other protestants at jarnac, ii. ; with his cousin condé, he becomes nominal general-in-chief of the huguenots, ii. ; they are nicknamed "the admiral's pages," ib.; at moncontour, ii. ; proposed marriage of henry to margaret of valois, ii. seq.; by the death of his mother he becomes king of navarre, june , , ii. ; the papal dispensation delayed, ii. ; the betrothal, ii. ; the marriage, ii. ; a significant mock combat, ii. ; complains to the king of the attack on coligny, ii. ; his name not on the proscriptive roll, ii. ; he is summoned by charles ix. and ordered to abjure the protestant religion, ii. ; his very humble reply, ii. ; his name associated with the royal family as having been an object of the pretended huguenot conspiracy, ii. ; his forced conversion, ii. , ; his submission accepted by pope gregory xiii. and the validity of his marriage recognized, ii. ; he re-establishes the roman catholic church in béarn, ib.; attempts flight, ii. , ; his examination and defence, ii. , . navarre, jeanne d'albret, queen of, daughter of henry, king of navarre, and margaret of angoulême, sister of francis i., marries antoine of bourbon-vendôme, i. ; reluctantly embraces the reformation, i. , ; her constancy, ii. ; her letter to the cardinal of armagnac, ii. ; she is cited to rome and threatened with deposition as a heretic, sept. , , ii. ; the royal council protests against the infraction of national liberties, and the insult to royalty, ii. ; she establishes the reformation in béarn, ii. ; meets much opposition, ii. ; spanish and other plots against, ii. ; a plot to kidnap her and her children, ii. , ; goes to la rochelle at the beginning of the third civil war, ii. ; her spirited letters, ib.; her words on condé's death, ii. ; her courage after the battle of jarnac, ii. ; her offices after the defeat of moncontour, ii. ; negotiates with catharine de' medici for peace, ii. ; her letter warning the queen mother respecting the observance of the peace, ii. , and note; her reply to the royal proposal of a marriage of henry of navarre to margaret of valois, ii. ; she becomes more favorable to it, ii. ; her solicitude, ii. ; she is treated with tantalizing insincerity, ib.; she is shocked at the morals of the court, ii. ; she goes to paris, ii. ; her last illness and death, ii. , ; the story that she was poisoned, ii. ; her character and motives traduced by the mémoires inédits de michel de la huguerye, ii. . navarre, margaret of. see angoulême, margaret of. navy, french, i. . negotiations for peace of st. germain, ii. seq. nemours, duchess of. see este, anne d'. nemours, duke of, fails to keep his word pledged to the baron de castelnau, i. , ; marries the widow of the duke of guise, and oppresses the protestants of lyonnais and dauphiny, ii. ; praised by pius v. in a special brief, ib.; his jealousy of aumale, ii. . nevers, duke of, at the blood council, ii. . new testament, the, translated by lefèvre, i. . new york, huguenot church of, i. . nicodemites, the, i. , , . niort, ii. , , , . niquet, spire, a poor bookbinder, roasted in a fire made of his own books, in the massacre of paris, ii. . nismes, great concourse of the huguenots of, i. ; huguenots guard the gates, i. ; massacre of roman catholics by the protestants, known as the "michelade," ii. ; brilliant capture of, by the huguenots in the third civil war, ii. , ; in protestant hands, in , ii. , ; obtains a truce, ii. . normandy, progress of protestantism in, i. ; burdens of taxation in, i. ; popular awakening in, i. ; admiral coligny's successes in (feb., ), ii. . see rouen. non-residence of clergy, claude haton on, i. . norris, sir henry, english ambassador, on the murder of protestants in paris, ii. ; on the condition of the french court, ii. . northumberland, earl of, his rebellion, ii. . nostradamus, predictions of, i. ; ii. . notables, assemblies of, i. ; assembly at fontainebleau, i. . noue, françois de la, justifies condé's military conduct in evacuating paris, ii. ; his description of the discipline of the huguenot army, ii. , ; on the irresistible desire for peace in , ii. ; taken prisoner at jarnac, ii. ; also at moncontour, ii. ; his success at sainte gemme, ii. , ; he is sent by charles ix. to treat with la rochelle, ii. ; he is badly received, ii. ; he is subsequently chosen leader, ii. ; he retires when the hope of reconciliation disappears, ii. ; persuades the huguenots to enter upon the fifth religious war, , ii. . o. oath to be exacted of the huguenots, ii. . ossat, d', cardinal, ii. . obedience, spirit of, pervading all classes, i. . oecolampadius, his correspondence with lefèvre, i. . official, or vicar, duties of i. . olaegui, secretary of the spanish ambassador, reports the rapid spread of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day to the provinces, ii. . olivetanus, or olivetan, pierre robert, translates the bible for the vaudois, i. . olivier, chancellor, at first refuses to seal the royal commission to the duke of guise, making him lieutenant-general of france, with absolute powers, i. ; his remark as to the cardinal of lorraine, and death, i. , . oppède, jean meynier, baron d', first president of the parliament of aix, i. , seq.; his death, i. . orange, city and principality of, i. , ; origin of protestantism in, ii. ; great regret of the prince of orange, ib.; massacre of protestants at, ii. ; the inhabitants reconciled by charles ix. to those of the comtât venaissin, ii. ; infringement upon the peace at, ii. ; included in the huguenot scheme of organization, ii. ; plundered by m. de glandage, ii. . orange, william the silent, prince of, learns from henry ii. the designs of philip and himself for the extermination of the protestants, i. ; attempts to assist the huguenots, ii. ; outgeneralled by alva, ib.; enters france and terrifies the court, ii. ; the insubordination of his troops compels him to retire, ib.; his declaration, ii. ; re-enters france with the duke of deux-ponts, ii. ; goes to germany to obtain reinforcements for coligny, ii. , . ordinances, royal. see edicts. organization of the huguenots, admirable, ii. . orgies, pretended, in "la petite genève," i. . orleans, the "ghost" of, i. , ; progress of protestantism at, ii. ; the canons of the cathedral promise to attend the protestant theological lectures, ii. ; seized by condé, it becomes the huguenot centre during the first civil war, ii. ; iconoclasm at, ii. ; left by condé and coligny in d'andelot's hands, ii. , ; besieged by guise, ii. ; capture of the portereau, ii. ; use of bombs by the garrison, ii. ; massacre of huguenots in the prisons of, aug. , , ii. ; the great massacre of, , ii. , seq.; a german account of the same, ii. - . orsini, cardinal, ii. . orthez, viscount d', governor of bayonne, magnanimously refuses to murder the protestants, ii. . ory, oriz, or oritz, inquisitor of the faith, i. , . p. "paix boiteuse et mal-assise," ii. . pamiers, persecution at, ii. ; huguenot commotion at, ii. . pamphlets against the guises, i. ; cardinal lorraine has twenty-two on his table directed against himself, i. ; the "epistre au tigre de la france," i. , . panier, paris, a doctor of civil law, put to death, i. . parcenac, ii. . paris, nobles flock to, i. ; learns obedience, i. ; wealth and population, i. ; persecution at, i. , ; first protestant church organized, i. ; the example followed elsewhere, i. ; alarm at, after defeat of st. quentin, i. ; progress of protestantism in, i. , ; immense crowds at the huguenot preaching, ii. ; fanaticism of the people, ii. , ; their delight at the prospect of war, ii. ; their fury, ii. ; approached by condé, ii. ; insubordination and riot at, ii. , ; the people disarmed, ii. ; the citizen soldiers at the battle of saint denis, ii. ; processions at ii. ; line of the walls in the sixteenth century, ii. ; the municipal officers call the king's attention to the massacre, ii. . parliament of bordeaux, i. . parliament of paris, i. ; claims right of remonstrance, i. ; humored by the crown, i. ; protests against repeal of pragmatic sanction, i. ; opposes the concordat, i. ; reluctantly registers it, i. ; proceeds vigorously against the "lutherans," i. ; denounced by the sorbonne as altogether heretical i. ; its inconsistent sentences, i. ; the mercuriale of , i. , seq.; different issues of the trials of the five imprisoned judges, i. ; the mercuriale of , i. , seq.; diversity of sentiment in, i. , ; its decision embodied in the "edict of july," i. ; its opposition to the edict of january, ii. ; which it reluctantly registers, ii. ; its excessive severity, ii. ; it affects to regard condé as a prisoner in the hands of the protestant confederates, ii. ; sternly reproved by charles ix. for failing to record the edict of amboise, ii. , ; declares coligny infamous, and sets a price on his head, ii. , ; extravagance after the victory of moncontour, ii. ; its servile reply to charles ix., ii. ; it declares coligny's memory infamous, ii. . parliament of rouen, or normandy, puts to death augustin marlorat, ii. . see rouen. parliaments, provincial, i. . parma, duchess of, regent of the netherlands, sets a price on the head of theodore beza, ii. , note. partenay falls into the hands of the huguenots, ii. . pasquier, Étienne, on barbarism at the university, i. ; his estimate of calvin, i. ; on paris at the beginning of the first civil war, ii. . pasquinade against the cardinal of lorraine, i. . patriarche, the, a protestant place of worship, i. , . paul iii., pope, his alleged intercession for the protestants, i. ; grounds of doubt respecting it, i. . paul iv., pope, his disappointment at the escape of andelot from the stake, i. ; ii. ; believes that no heretic can be converted, ib. paulin, viscount of, ii. , note; . pauvan, jacques, i. ; his theses, i. ; burned on the place de grève, i. . pavia, battle of, feb. , , i. . peace of amboise, march , , terminating the first civil war, ii. ; peace of longjumeau, or "short" peace, after the second civil war, ii. ; number of protestants murdered during, ii. ; peace of st germain, after the third civil war, ii. . people, rights of, overlooked, i. ; "incomparable kindness of," i. ; submission to nobles, i. . périgord, protestantism in, i. . perry, mr. g. g., his remarks on whittingham, ii. . persecution, failure of, i. ; more systematic, i. ; severity of, i. , . petit, guillaume, the king's confessor, i. . petition of the triumvirs, ii. . peyrat, m. du, ii. . pézénas, in languedoc, i. . philip the fair and pope boniface viii., i. . philip ii., king of spain, offers aid to catharine de' medici, i. ; opposed to a french national council, i. ; plots with the pope, ib; his aid invoked by the sorbonne i. , ; his threats of invasion, i. ; his message to catharine de' medici, i. ; he is commended by the pope, i. ; he sends courteville on a secret mission, ib.; hesitates to aid the french roman catholics, ii. ; his offers on paper, ib.; looks with suspicion on the projected conference at bayonne, ii. ; is said to have threatened charles ix., ii. ; he approves alva's procrastinating policy respecting assistance to the guises, ii. ; offers , crowns if charles will continue the war against the huguenots, ii. ; recalls his troops, ii. ; opposes the peace, ii. , ; his ambassador leaves the french court in disgust, after giving away the silver plate charles had given him, ii. ; his delight at hearing of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii., seq. philippe, m., an inconsiderate minister at cateau-cambrésis, leads the iconoclasts, ii. ; he is executed, ii. . philippi, ii. . pibrac, avocat-général, ii. . picardy, the duke of longueville prevents the massacre of the protestants from extending to, ii. . pierre-gourde, m. de, ii. . piles, m. de, ii. ; his brave defence of st. jean d'angely, ii. ; ravages the spanish county of roussillon, ii. , , ; his murder at the louvre on st. bartholomew's day, ii. . pinart, ii. . pithiviers, or pluviers, captured by condé, ii. ; retaken by guise, ii. . pius iv., pope, his solicitude respecting france, i. ; sends the cardinal of ferrara as legate, ib.; commends philip ii., i. ; praises blaise de montluc, by a brief, for his part in the massacre of toulouse, ii. ; his bull against princely heretics, april , , ii. . pius v., pope, is said to have threatened charles ix., ii. ; his nuncio tries to prevent peace being concluded with the huguenots, ii. ; praises the duke of nemours for his severity, ii. ; approves by a bull the crusade at toulouse, ii. ; his sanguinary injunctions after the battle of jarnac, ii. , ; severely reproves santa fiore for sparing any heretics, ii. , ; his congratulatory letters after the battle of moncontour, ii. ; recalls his troops ii. ; his bull against queen elizabeth, ii. ; opposes the peace ii. , , ; alarmed at the prospects of the huguenot ascendancy in france, he despatches his nephew, the cardinal of alessandria, as legate, to paris, ii. ; the king's assurances, ii. - ; the conditions required for granting a dispensation for the marriage of henry of navarre and margaret of valois, ii. , note; gives no dispensation until after the marriage, his bull being dated oct , , ii. ; his letters to charles, catharine, anjou, etc., instigating them to exterminate the heretics, ii. , seq.; his thirst for huguenot blood, ii. , ; redeems the huguenot captives of mornas in order to have the satisfaction of ordering their public execution, ii. . placard, the, of . féret sent to neufchâtel to have it printed, i. ; its authorship, ib.; its publication opposed by courault and other prudent reformers, i. ; its contents, ib.; it produces great popular excitement in paris, i. ; a copy posted on the door of the king's bedchamber, ib.; anger of francis i., ib.; barbarous executions consequent upon it, i. , ; marks an epoch in the history of the huguenots, i. . placard, the year of the, i. , etc. placards and pasquinades, both for and against the reformed doctrines, i. . place, pierre de la, president of the cour d'aides, and a historian, murdered in the massacre at paris, ii. . plague, the, in paris and orleans, ii. . planche, regnier de la, consulted by catharine de' medici, i. . pleasantries, huguenot, ii. . plessis mornay, philippe du, writes for coligny a memorial on the flemish project, ii. . poissy, the prelates at, i. ; beza and other french protestants invited to a conference, i. ; wrangling of the prelates, i. ; their demand, i. ; their character, i. . poissy, the colloquy of, the huguenots petition for fair treatment at, i. ; vexatious delay, i. ; the huguenots determine to leave unless their petition is granted, i. ; an informal decree in their favor, ib.; the last efforts of the sorbonne to prevent the conference prove abortive, i. ; the huguenot ministers and delegates of churches proceed from st. germain to poissy, i. ; list of the former, ib.; the assembly in the nuns' refectory, i. ; the prelates, i. ; diffidence of beza, i. ; chancellor l'hospital's oration at the opening, ib.; the huguenots are summoned, i. ; a cardinal's sneer and beza's retort, i. ; beza's prayer and address, i. - ; he is interrupted by the theologians of the sorbonne with cries of "blasphemy!" i. ; cardinal tournon tries to cut short the conference, i. ; but catharine declines to permit its interruption, i. ; advantages gained, ib.; the prelates' notion of a conference, i. ; arrival of peter martyr, i. ; cardinal lorraine replies to beza, i. ; cardinal tournon's new demand, i. ; beza asks a hearing, ib.; he replies, i. , ; speeches of claude d'espense and claude de sainctes, i. ; cardinal lorraine's demand that the huguenot ministers should subscribe to the augsburg confession, i. ; beza's reply, i. - ; anger of the prelates, i. ; speeches of martyr and lainez, i. ; close of the colloquy, i. ; is followed by a private conference, i. ; and the arrival of five protestant theologians from germany, i. ; causes of the failure of the colloquy, i. . poitiers, demands of the clergy at, i. ; captured by the king, ii. ; siege of, by the huguenots, ii. , . poland, news of the massacre, how received in, ii. ; henry of anjou elected king, ii. ; ambassadors from, come to france, ii. ; their magnificent reception, ib. "politiques," or malcontents, the party of the, ii. ; their unsuccessful rising, ii. . poltrot, jean, de mérey, assassinates françois de guise, ii. ; his history, ii. ; his torture and execution, ii. ; accuses beza and coligny of having instigated the murder, ii. . poncher, bishop of paris, i. . pons, ii. . pont, baron du, ii. . popincourt, a protestant place of worship at paris, destroyed by constable montmorency, ii. . populace, cruelty of, i. . porcien, the prince of, ii. ; attempt to assassinate, ii. . poulain, poulin, or polin, otherwise called baron de la garde, i. ; ii. , . pragmatic sanction of st louis, i. ; of bourges, i. , ; anger of the pope at, i. ; abrogated, i. ; re-enacted, i. , ; abrogated by francis i., i. ; still recognized by parliament, i. ; its restoration demanded, i. . pré aux clercs, the public grounds of the university, psalm-singing on the, i. . prelates, french, cited to rome and condemned, ii. . prerogative, royal, books upon, ii. , . presidial judges, no appeal from their decisions in cases of heresy, i. . primacy of france divided between the archbishops of lyons and sens, i. . princes, scanty revenues of, i. . prior, the grand, of france, i. ; at saverne, ii. . privas, a huguenot place of refuge, ii. . processions, indecent, i. ; expiatory, i. , and especially, i. , etc.; to intercede for help in the war against la rochelle, ii. . profane oaths a test of catholicity, ii. , . profligacy of the court, the, ii. , note; alienation of, from the huguenots, ii. . protestants of france, appeal to the swiss and germans, i. ; persecuted in various places, i. , ; the tongues of the victims cut out, i. ; or iron balls forced into their mouths, i. ; place a remonstrance in the chamber of henry ii., i. ; they appeal to catharine de' medici, i. ; a second and more urgent appeal, i. . see huguenots. protestantism, causes of its sudden development in the last years of henry ii. and the reign of francis ii., i. - . provence, huguenots of, under mouvans, i. ; disorders and bloodshed in, ii. ; saved from witnessing a massacre of the protestants in by the magnanimity of the count de tende, ii. ; demands of the tiers état of, ii. . provins, preaching of friars at, ii. , , ; intolerance at, ii. , , . psalms, versified by marot and beza, sung on the pré aux clercs, i. ; indignation of henry ii. at, i. ; set to music for worship by bourgeois and others, especially by goudimel, in several parts, ii. , note. puigaillard, ii. , , , , . punishments, barbarous, i. ; especially for heresy, i. . puyroche, m., his monograph on the massacre at lyons, ii. , note. q. quercu, or de chesne, i. , . quintin, jean, orator for the clergy in the states general of orleans, makes a speech of insufferable arrogance, i. ; he pictures the sad straits of the clergy, and asks for the restoration of the pragmatic sanction, i. ; his word for the down-trodden people, i. ; he is compelled to apologize to admiral coligny, ib. r. rabasteins, massacre of the garrison of, ii. . ramée, pierre de la, or ramus, assassinated at the instigation of charpentier, ii. . rapin, a protestant gentleman sent by the king, judicially murdered by the parliament of toulouse, ii. . "rapin, vengeance de," ii. . rapin, viscount of, ii. , note. read, m. charles, i. ; ii. . rector of the university, i. . reform, abortive efforts at, i. . reformation, the french, becomes a popular movement, i. . regnier, a huguenot gentleman of quercy, spared in the massacre at paris, through the magnanimity of his personal enemy vezins, ii. ; by his bravery and determination saves montauban for the huguenots, ii. , . "reiters," i. . relics, reverence for, i. ; great variety of, i. . renaissance, era of the, i. . renaudie, godefroy de barry, seigneur de la, leader in the tumult of amboise, i. ; assembles the malcontents at nantes, i. ; is betrayed by des avenelles, i. ; his death, i. ; his body hung and quartered, i. ; inscription over his remains, ib.; an alleged admission of disloyal intentions on his part, i. . renée de france, duchess of ferrara, her hospitality, i, ; her court, i. ; her eulogy by brantôme, i. ; on her return to france, rebukes the duke of guise, i. ; affords a safe asylum to the huguenots at montargis, ii. , , , ; her letter to calvin respecting the duke of guise, ii. ; her answer to malicorne, ii. ; her aversion to war, ii. , note. renel, marquis de, murdered by bussy d'amboise, ii. . rentigny, madame de, courageously refuses a pardon based on recantation, and is executed as a protestant, i. . renty, ii. . representative government, long break in history of, i. ; demanded by the "tiers état" at pontoise, i. . rescue of protestant prisoners, i. . retz, de, count and marshal (albert de gondy), ii. , ; at the blood council, ii. , , ; obtains the office and property of loménie, including versailles, and then causes him to be put to death, ii. , , . re-union of romanists and protestants, hopes of, long entertained, i. . rhinegrave, the, ii. , , . ribault, jean leads the first expedition to colonize florida, ii. ; returns to florida in command of the third expedition, ii. ; flayed and quartered by the spaniards, ib. rivière, m. de la, first protestant pastor of paris, i. ; he is treacherously murdered, at angers, by m. de montsoreau, ii. . roanne, la, the common prison of lyons, ii. ; butchery of huguenots in, ii. . roche abeille, la, huguenot victory at, ii. . rochefort, de, orator for the noblesse in the states general of orleans, i. . rochefoucauld, count de la, escapes into germany, hearing of the proscriptive plans of the court, i. ; ii. , , , ; he is murdered on st. bartholomew's day, ii. . rochelle, la, the city of, secured for the prince of condé by the skill of françois de la noue, ii. , seq.; the alleged payment to catharine de' medici, in order to be free from a garrison, ib., note; execution of protestants at, in , ii. , ; refuses, in , to receive a garrison, ii. ; its government and privileges, ii. - ; iconoclasm at, ii. ; places for protestant worship in, accorded by charles ix., ib.; constable montmorency's roughness, ii. ; becomes a city of refuge, ii. ; strengthens its works, ii. ; the tidings of the massacre at bordeaux determine it to refuse to admit the emissaries of charles ix., ii. ; in protestant hands, ii. ; a great number of refugees in, ii. ; refuses to receive biron, who is sent as royal governor, ii. ; first skirmish before, ii. ; mission of la noue to, ib.; he is badly received, ii. ; the rochellois reject the royal proposals, ii. ; they make advances to la noue, ib.; description of la rochelle, ii. , ; resoluteness of the rochellois, ii. ; their military strength, ii. ; they fight and pray, ii. ; bravery of the women, ii. ; determination of the inhabitants, ii. ; la noue retires, ib.; the promised aid from england miscarries, ii. ; great losses of the royal army before, ii. ; treacherous attempt upon, dec., , ii. ; the severe punishment for it approved by charles ix., ii. ; resumes arms, at the persuasion of la noue, in the beginning of the fifth religious war, , ii. . roche-sur-yon, la, prince of, his warning respecting the danger impending over the huguenots from the designs adopted at bayonne, ii. . rochetti, louis de, an inquisitor, becomes a protestant and is burned alive at toulouse i. . roma, de, a dominican monk, his threat, i. ; his cruelty, i. . roman church, how far responsible for the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , seq. romans, the huguenots of, i. . rome, quarrels of france with, i. ; protestants never more exposed to disaster than when such quarrels exist, ib.; the couriers going to, stripped of their dispatches on the frontiers, i. ; rejoicings at, over the news of the massacre of the protestants in france, ii. . romorantin, the edict of, may, , i. . ronsard, the poet, takes the sword against the huguenots, ii. . roquefort, ii. . rouen, capital of normandy, persecution at, i. ; rescue of a protestant bookbinder at, i. ; protestant assemblies in, i. ; seven thousand gather in the new market-place and sing psalms, i. ; besieged by the king, ii. ; makes a brave defence, ii. ; its fall, ib.; vexatious delays in publishing the edict of amboise at, ii. ; partiality of parliament, ii. ; its protest against the return of protestant exiles, ii. ; it meets with a decided rebuff, ii. , ; riot when the edict of pacification of longjumeau is published at, ii. ; troops quartered upon the huguenots, ii. ; violence at, ii. ; protestants attacked at, march , , ii. ; massacre of, ii. - . roussel, gérard, i. , , , , ; retires to strasbourg, i. ; his excessive caution, i. ; his theology and fortunes, i. ; his death, i. . roussillon, county of, spanish, ravaged by m. de piles, ii. . roussillon, declaration of aug. , , infringing upon the edict of pacification of amboise, ii. , . roy, Étienne le, a singer ii. , . "royal council," the name given to meetings at which the king is not present, ii. . roye, Éléonore de, wife of louis de condé, her grief and death, ii. , , note. roye, madame de, mother-in-law of condé, arrested, i. ; but subsequently declared innocent, i. . ruble, baron de, his remarks respecting la huguerye's misrepresentation of the character of the queen of navarre, ii. . rubys, an agent in the massacre at lyons, ii. , note, . russanges, de, a goldsmith, betrays the protestants of paris, i. . s. sacramentarians excepted from the pardon extended in the declaration of coucy, i. . sadolet, bishop, his kindness to the waldenses or vaudois of provence, i. . sague, an agent of the king of navarre, arrested, i. . sainctes, claude de, his speech at the colloquy of poissy, i. ; complains of huguenot boldness, i. ; a violent advocate of persecution, ii. . "saint," the prefix of, insisted upon by the sorbonne, i. . saint andré, jacques d'albon, marshal of, i. ; his rapid advancement, i. ; makes terms with the guises, i. ; his influence with constable montmorency, i. ; becomes one of the triumvirs, i. , ; he returns a defiant answer to catharine de' medici, when ordered to go to his government, ii. ; lays siege to and takes bourges, ii. , ; is killed in the battle of dreux, ii. ; enmity of catharine de' medici toward, ii. . see triumvirs. saint denis, battle of, nov. , , ii. . saint Étienne, ii. . saint germain, conference of, , i. ; its article on the eucharist rejected by the roman catholic prelates, i. ; assembly of notables at, i. ; conference of, january , , ii. ; its profitless discussions, ii. ; delight of mouchy and his companions at its close, ii. , ; flight of the court from, ii. . saint germain, the edict of pacification of, ending the third civil war, aug. , , ii. ; dissatisfaction of the clergy, ii. ; sincerity of the peace, ii. . saint-germain-des-prés, the old abbey of, ii. , note. saint germain l'auxerrois, church of, i. ; bell of, ii. , , note. saint goard, ii. , . saint héran, governor of auvergne, his reported magnanimity, ii. . saint hippolyte, wolfgang schuch at, i. . saint jacques, rue, affair of, sept. , , i. , ; savage treatment of the prisoners, i. ; malicious rumors respecting protestants, i. ; trials and executions, i. . saint jean d'angely, ii. ; disastrous siege of, by the roman catholic army, ii. , seq. saint lô, in normandy, i. ; ii. , . saint médard, the "tumult" of, i. , seq. saint michael's day, the huguenots to rise upon (sept. , ), ii. ; the secret leaks out, ii. . saint paul, françois de, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . saint quentin, defeat of, august , , i. . saint rémy, nicole de, a mistress of henry ii., and a spanish spy, suggests the marriage of cardinal bourbon in the contingency of the death of all catharine de' medici's sons, ii. , . saint romain, archbishop of aix, cited by the pope, ii. , . saint romain, m. de, ii. . saint thomas, m. de, ii. . sainte chapelle, founded by saint louis, its relics, i. . sainte foy, de, or arnauld sorbin, a violent roman catholic preacher, ii. ; instigates the massacre of orleans, ii. ; acts as confessor of charles ix. before his death, ii. . sainte gemme, la noue's success at, ii. . saintes, ii. , . salcède, sentenced to be boiled alive for counterfeiting, i. . salic law, the, a bit of pleasantry, ii. . salignac, abbé, confers with the protestants at poissy, i. ; his professed sympathy with the reformation, and his timidity, i. , . salviati, papal nuncio in france, his testimony respecting the want of premeditation of the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and the king's ignorance, ii. , , , , . sancerre refuses to admit a garrison, in , ii. ; ford near, ii. ; a huguenot place of refuge, ii. ; fruitless siege of, by martinengo, ii. ; siege of, in , ii. ; incipient famine in, ii. ; terrible straits of, ii. , ; capitulation of, ii. . sansac, ii. , . santa croce, cardinal, sent as nuncio to france, i. ; his reluctance, i. ; his alarm at the time of the assembly of notables at saint germain, i. ; he claims the surrender of cardinal châtillon to the pope, ii. , . santa fiore, pontifical general in france, his instructions, ii. , note; severely reproved by pius v. for having spared any heretics that fell into his hands, ii. , ; recalled, . sapin, a member of the parliament of paris, executed by order of condé, by way of retaliation, ii. . saumur, ii. , , , . saunier, or saulnier, matthieu, i. . saverne, conference of, between the duke of würtemberg and the guises, ii, - . savoy, duke of, intercession of charles ix. with, in behalf of the waldenses, or vaudois, of piedmont, ii. ; collects an army to overwhelm geneva, ii. . saxony, the elector of, refuses to let melanchthon go to france, i. ; his severe language to the reformer, ib.; refuses to help the huguenots, ii. . schism, the, i. . schmidt, professor c., on roussel's mysticism, i. . schomberg, gaspard de, a negotiator, ii. , , , , . schuch, wolfgang, tragic end of, i. . sebastian, king of portugal, affronts charles ix. by declining the hand of margaret of valois, ii. . sébeville, pierre de, i. . séguier, president of the parliament of paris, makes a manly speech against the introduction of the spanish inquisition, i. , ; his leaning to protestantism, i. . senlis, the bishop of, translates the "hours" of margaret of angoulême in a protestant fashion, i. . sens, provincial council of, i. ; its decrees against heresy, i. ; persecution at, i. ; massacre of, ii. , . serbelloni, fabrizio, cousin of pope pius iv., massacres the protestants at orange, ii. , . serignan, viscount of, ii. , note. sermons, seditious and fanatical, ii. , , , . serres, jean de, the historian, ii. , note, et al. servetus, michael, burned contrary to the desire of calvin, i. ; his execution approved by melanchthon and other reformers, ib. sevyn, pierre de, a protestant member of the parliament of bordeaux, killed, ii. . shakerley, thomas, organist of the cardinal of ferrara, papal legate: he is a spy in the pay of throkmorton, i. , note; his account of the french court, ib. sigismund augustus, king of poland, letter of pius v. to him, ii. . sismondi, m. de, on the massacre of vassy, ii. . smith, sir thomas, his account of the riotous conduct of the parisian mob, ii. , ; his tribute to the duke of guise, ii. ; his remonstrance against the edict of pacification of amboise, ii. ; his altercation with sir nicholas throkmorton, ii. ; his words as to the prince of condé, ii. , note; his view of the design of the "progress" of charles ix., ii ; on the growth of protestantism in france, ii. ; his account of an interview with the cardinal of lorraine, ii. , note; his account of the offer of a ring by charles ix. to the cardinal of alessandria, ii. , note; his plea for queen elizabeth, ii. , note; his letter respecting the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . soldan, professor, his view respecting the cities offered by the king to the huguenots, ii. , note; as to the terms of the edict of boulogne, ii. , note. soleure, the canton of, ii. . sommières, brave defence of, ii. . sorbin. see sainte foy, de. sorbonne, or theological faculty, i. ; its great authority, i. ; its intolerance, i. ; declaration of, i. ; condemns luther's teachings, i. ; its recommendations, i. ; reprobates melanchthon's articles, i. ; publishes twenty-five articles of faith, march , , i. ; denounces the parliament of paris as heretical, i. ; despatches artus désiré to invoke the aid of philip ii., i. , ; declares it impossible to have two religions in a kingdom without confusion, ii. . soubise, m. de, entreats catharine to throw herself into the arms of the huguenots, ii. ; at lyons, ii. ; his humanity, ib.; taken prisoner at jarnac, ii. . souillac, huguenot reverse at, ii. . spanish ambassador's house in paris the centre of intrigue, ii. . spanish troops recalled, ii. . states general an object of suspicion, i. ; rarely convoked, i. ; compensating advantages, i. . states general of orleans, elections for, i. ; complaints inserted in the "cahiers," ib.; demands of clergy at poitiers, i. ; opening of, dec. , , i. ; the chancellor's address, i. ; cardinal lorraine's effrontery, i. ; de rochefort's address for the noblesse, ib.; l'ange for the tiers état, i. ; jean quintin's arrogant speech for the clergy, ib.; admiral coligny presents a huguenot petition, i. ; the states prorogued, ib.; meanwhile persecution to cease, i. ; meet at pontoise, i. ; speech of bretagne, _vierg_ of autun, for the tiers état, i. ; demands of the tiers état, i. ; representative government, religious toleration and an impartial council insisted upon, i. ; the prelates at poissy, i. ; an invitation extended to beza and other frenchmen, i. . strasbourg intercedes for protestants of france, i. ; but receives an unsatisfactory reply, i. . strozzi, philip, ii. , , , , . stuart, a scotch gentleman, said to have shot the constable in the battle of saint denis, ii. ; murdered in cold blood at jarnac, ii. . sturm, john, lecturer in paris, and afterward rector of the university of strasbourg, writes to beg melanchthon to come to france, i. . sully, maximilien de béthune, duke of, his escape in the massacre of paris, ii. . sureau du rosier, hugues, an instrument in the forced conversion of navarre and condé, ii. . suriano, michel, a venetian ambassador, his account of the protestant ministers, i. ; his lugubrious account of france, i. . swiss, hesitation of the protestant cantons to seem to countenance rebellion, ii. ; bravery at the battle of dreux, ii. ; levy of six thousand men sent for, ii. ; causes distrust among the huguenots, ib.; they escort charles ix. to paris, ii. ; after the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. . sympathy of the judges with the protestants, i. . synod, the first national, held in paris, may, , i. - ; the second, poitiers, march , , ii. , note; the third, orleans, april , , ii. ; the seventh, la rochelle, april - , , ii. . t. tadon, ii. . tailor of the rue st. antoine, his bold speech and execution, i. , . talaize, ii. , note. tanquerel, a doctor of the sorbonne, declares that the pope can depose heretical kings, i. . tavannes, gaspard de, marshal, remonstrates against the peace, and favors the revival of the confraternities, ii. , ; author of plot to seize condé and coligny, ii. , ; the king's estimate of his character, ii. ; his blunt advice, ii. , note; at the council of blood, ii. , note; he rides through the streets of paris encouraging the "blood-letting," ii. . teil, a protestant captain, ii. . téligny, ii. , , , , ; marries louise de châtillon, daughter of admiral coligny, ii. ; a conversation with charles ix., ii. , ; opposes the proposition of the vidame de chartres to leave paris, as a mark of distrust of the king, ii. , ; he is among the first victims of the massacre, ii. . tende, the count of, ii. ; he refuses to massacre the protestants in provence, ii. ; his speedy death attributed to poison, ib. terrides, a captain of anjou, ii. . tessier, ii. . theatrical effects, i. . theophilus, letter signed, to catharine de' medici, i. . thionville, brilliant capture of, i. . thoré, a younger montmorency, ii. , , , . thou, christopher de, first president of the parliament of paris, member of the commission that condemned condé to death, i ; his son's attempt to clear the memory of, i. ; ii. ; his unmanly speech at the "lit de justice," when charles ix. assumes the responsibility of the massacre, ii. ; presides at the trial of la mole and coconnas, ii. . thou, jacques auguste, de, the historian, son of christopher, ii. , note; at the marriage of henry of navarre to margaret of valois, ii. ; on his father's part in the action of parliament at the time of the massacre, ii. , note. thouars falls into the hands of the huguenots, ii. . "three bishoprics," the, i. . throkmorton, sir nicholas, english ambassador, his account of the wound of henry ii., i. ; of the dismay after the tumult of amboise, i. ; of the perplexity of the guises, i. ; his information respecting plans of philip ii. and the pope, i. , ; respecting the illness of francis ii., i. ; his account of matters at the french court, february , , ii. , ; urges cecil to induce queen elizabeth to put away the candles and cross from the altar in her royal chapel, ii. ; regards the huguenots as the stronger party, ii. ; entreats queen elizabeth to inspirit catharine de' medici, ii. ; invokes her aid for the huguenots, ii. ; is captured by the huguenots and remains with them, ii. ; is hated by catharine de' medici, ib.; his frankness with queen elizabeth, ii. ; he asks her to help heartily, ii. ; his altercation with sir thomas smith, ii. ; chantonnay's boast that with his assistance he could overturn the state, ii. . tiers État, its patient endurance, i. ; its radical demands at the states general of pontoise, i. seq. "tiger, letter to the, of france," a virulent pamphlet against cardinal lorraine, i. - ; written by françois hotman, i. . title-pages, deceptive, i. . toledo, don frederick of, routs genlis and takes him prisoner, ii. . toleration, religious, demanded by the tiers état at pontoise, i. . toulouse, execution of jean de caturce at, i. ; character of the city according to protestant and roman catholic authors, ib; massacre of huguenots at, may, , ii. - ; commemorated in , but the commemoration forbidden by the french government in , ii. ; the parliament, instead of publishing the edict of amboise, forbids the profession of the reformed religion, ii. ; the parliament of, murders judicially m. rapin, a protestant gentleman sent by the king, ii. ; reluctantly registers the edict of pacification of , ii. ; a "crusade" preached at, ii. ; massacre of, in , ii. , . tour, jean de la, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . tournon, cardinal of, i. ; his arguments to dissuade francis i. from intercourse with heretics, i. ; instigates the persecution of protestants, i. ; his reported bad faith, i. ; tries to cut short the colloquy of poissy, i. ; his new demand, i. . tours, the protestants of, attacked while at worship, ii. . tourtray m. de, executed on the place de grève, ii. . toussain, pierre, on the timidity of lefèvre and gérard roussel, i. . trade despised, i. . traps for heretics, i. . treacherous diplomacy, ii. . treaty of amity between charles ix. and queen elizabeth, april , , ii. . treaty of cateau-cambrésis, i. . trent, the council of, closes its sessions, dec., , ii. ; confirms the abuses of the roman catholic church, and renders indelible the line of demarcation between the two religions, ii. , ; cardinal lorraine makes a fruitless attempt to have the decrees received in france, ii. ; able treatise of du moulin against them, ii. , . triumvirate, the, formed by montmorency, guise, and st. andré, i. , ; a spurious statement of its objects, i. - ; it retires in disgust from saint germain, i. . triumvirs, petition of, ii. ; they amuse condé before paris with negotiations until reinforcements arrive, ii. , ; they consult catharine de' medici respecting the engagement, ii. , . "trivium" and "quadrivium," i. . trouillas, an advocate, pretended orgies in the house of, i. ; he insists on being put on trial for these orgies, and not for heresy, and is tardily released, i. , . troyes, progress of protestantism in, i. ; great crowds at the huguenot services, ii. ; massacre of huguenots in the prisons of, ii. , ; formation of the "christian and royal league" at, ii. ; violence at, ii. ; protestants returning from worship attacked, ii. , ; massacre of, sept , , ii. , . truchares, a political huguenot, mayor of la rochelle, ii. . truchon, a judge, much edified by the signs of concord, just before the outbreak of the second civil war, ii. . tuileries, new palace of the, built by catharine de' medici, ii. . turenne, ii. . turks, french civilities to, ii. . tytler-fraser, mr., ii. , note. u. university of paris, i. ; the four nations, i. ; the faculties, ib.; chancellor and rector, i. ; number of its students, i. ; gives name to a quarter of the city, i. ; barbarism at, i. . unlettered persons forbidden to discuss matters of faith, i. . uzès, duke of, ii. . v. val, du, bishop of séez, confers with the protestants at poissy, i. . valence, huguenots of, seize the church of the franciscans, i. ; a public assembly of the citizens, i. ; progress of good morals, ib.; orders sent for the extermination of the protestants, i. ; treacherous treatment of, i. . valenciennes captured by count louis of nassau, ii. . valéry, ii. . valette, jean de la, grand master of the knights of malta, ii. . varillas, m, an untrustworthy historian, ii. , ; his good remarks respecting admiral coligny, ii. . vasari paints three pictures in the vatican, by order of pope gregory xiii. to commemorate the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, ii. , and note. vassy, a town in champagne, part of the dower of mary, queen of scots, ii. ; establishment of the huguenot church at, ii. , ; arrival of the duke of guise, ii. ; massacre of, march , , ii. , ; pamphlets respecting it, ii. , ; upon whom rests the guilt of the butchery, ii. - . vatable, i. . vaud, pays de, conquered by berne, i. . "vauderie," crime of, i. . vaudrey, anne de, bailli of troyes, an agent in the massacre of troyes, ii. , . vaudois, execution of, at arras, i. . vaudois, or waldenses, of piedmont, mission of the four "evangelical" cantons in their behalf, i. ; charles ix. intercedes in their behalf with the duke of savoy, ii. . vaudois, or waldenses, of provence, i. ; their industry and thrift, ib.; their villages in the comtât venaissin, i. ; they send delegates to the swiss and german reformers, i. ; their doctrines and practices, ib.; cause the bible to be translated by olivetanus, i. ; preliminary persecutions of, i. ; iniquitous order of the parliament of aix against, i. ; followed by the "arrêt de mérindol," i. ; temporarily saved by chassanée, i. ; report of du bellay respecting their character and history, i. ; pardoned by francis i., i. ; are again summoned by the parliament of aix, ib.; they publish a new confession, i. ; stealthy organization of an expedition against, i. ; villages burned, and the inhabitants butchered, i. , ; destruction of mérindol, i. ; destruction of cabrières, i. ; of la coste, i. ; the results, i. ; francis led to give his approval to the massacre, i. ; an investigation ordered, ib.; impunity of most of the culprits, i. . venaissin, comtât. see comtât venaissin. venetian ambassadors, opinions of, i. . verbal orders respecting the massacre in the provinces, ii. , . verbelai, ii. . verez, de, throws himself into geneva with a body of french soldiers, i. . vergne, la, ii. . versailles, the title how obtained by the king, ii. . vertueil, the king of navarre dismisses his escort at, i. . "very christian king," title of, i. . vézelay, birthplace of theodore beza, i. ; refuses to admit a garrison in , ii. ; a place of refuge, ii. ; sustains a successful siege, ii. , . vezins, a roman catholic gentleman of quercy, magnanimously saves the life of his personal enemy, the huguenot regnier, ii. , . vialard, president, at rouen, ii. . vieilleville, marshal of, magnanimously refuses to take advantage of a royal patent giving him a share of the confiscated property of heretics, i. ; sent as envoy to the huguenots, ii. ; remonstrance of, ii. ; the king's estimate of, ii. . "vierg," the designation of an officer at autun, i. . vigor, archbishop of narbonne, a violent roman catholic preacher, ii. , , . villars, count de, burns books from geneva at pont st. esprit, i. ; influences constable montmorency, i. ; appointed admiral after the death of coligny, ii. , . villegagnon, vice-admiral of brittany, sent with a protestant colony to brazil, i. ; founds fort coligny, i. ; becomes an enemy of the protestants, i. ; and brings ruin on the expedition, i. ; vows eternal enmity to the huguenots, ii. ; writes to renée of france, ii. . villemadon's letter of remonstrance to catharine de' medici, i. . villemongys, i. . villeneuve, capture of, by the huguenots, ii. . viole, claude, his speech in the "mercuriale" of , i. . virel, jean, a minister at the colloquy of poissy, i. . viret, the reformer, intercedes for the poor non-combatants at lyons, ii. . visconte, affair in the house of, i. . "viscounts," the army of the, ii. ; they march to meet condé, and defeat the troops collected by the governor of auvergne at cognac, or cognat, ii. ; relieve orleans, ib.; take blois, ib.; list of the viscounts, ii. , note. visions of celestial hosts, ii. . vitelli, chiappin, routs genlis and takes him prisoner, ii. . vivarez, montbrun's exploits in, ii. . voré de la fosse sent to melanchthon, i. ; his interviews with him, and his letters, i. . vulcob, m. de, french ambassador to the emperor of germany, ii. . w. waldenses. see vaudois. walsingham, francis, on the peace of saint germain, ii. ; receives the assurances of the king as to his intention to observe the peace, ii. ; on the attempts to dissuade anjou from marrying queen elizabeth, ii. ; on the english marriage and the anxiety of the huguenots, ii. ; his enthusiastic description of count louis of nassau, ii. , note; urges queen elizabeth to advocate the invitation of coligny to court, ii. , note; he sets forth the critical nature of the situation, ii. ; he mentions rumors of elizabeth's desertion of her allies, ii. ; he praises coligny's magnanimity, ii. ; his reply to catharine de' medici respecting coligny's loyalty, ii. , ; on the forced conversions of navarre and condé, ii. ; his conversation with the queen mother as to the maintenance of the edict of pacification, ii. , . war, the first civil, or religious, april, , to march , , ii. - ; its results, ii. ; it prevents france from becoming huguenot, ii. ; the second civil war, sept., , to march , , ii. - ; the third civil war, sept., , to aug. , , ii. - ; the fourth civil war, dec., , to july, , ii. - ; meagre results of, ii. ; beginning of the fifth civil war, , ii. . westmoreland, earl of, his rebellion, ii. . white, henry, dr., the remark respecting cardinal lorraine which he ascribes to beza, i. ; cf. also ii. , , , note, , note. whittingham, wm., dean of durham, ii. , note. winter, severity of the, - , ii. , . winter, admiral, carries money, cannon, and ammunition to la rochelle, ii. . wolmar, melchior, i. ; a teacher of calvin, i. . wolrad, count of mansfeld, succeeds the duke of deux-ponts in command of the german auxiliaries of the huguenots, ii. , , . worship, protestant places of, assigned at the most inconvenient distances, ii. , , note, , note. wotton, dr., his view of the court of henry ii. of france, i. . wringle, pierre de, or van, the printer of serrières, near neufchâtel, i. . würtemberg, christopher, duke of, sends theologians to poissy, who come too late for the colloquy, i. ; meets the guises at saverne, ii. ; he remonstrates with them respecting the persecution of the huguenots, ii. ; his judgment on the whole matter, ii. ; he declines the offer of the post of lieutenant-general of the king, ii. . y. year, the old french, begins at easter, i. . yolet, ii. . yverny, madame d', butchered in the massacre at paris, ii. . z. zuleger, a councillor of the elector palatine, sent to france to see the state of affairs at the time of the second civil war, ii. ; he reports favorably to the huguenots, ii. . zurich, intercedes for the french protestants, i. ; but receives an unsatisfactory reply, i. ; intercedes with henry ii., after the affair of the rue st. jacques, with little success, i. , . exiled for the faith; a tale of the huguenot persecution, by w.h.g. kingston. ________________________________________________________________________ not a very long book. though technically well-written it is a bit annoying as it contains several passages of ranting against the behaviour of the catholics. no doubt this was justified at the time, but in this day and age it is a bit out of place to be reminded of it. the audiobook comes out at about five hours. ________________________________________________________________________ exiled for the faith, a tale of the huguenot persecution, by w.h.g. kingston. chapter one. a tale of the huguenot persecution. the two cousins. "just what brought you to france, fair cousin?" the question was put by a beautiful girl scarcely yet verging on womanhood to a fine intelligent youth, two or three years her senior, as they paced slowly on together through the gardens of the louvre on the banks of the seine, flowing at that period bright and clear amid fields and groves. before them rose the stately palace lately increased and adorned by henry the second, the then reigning monarch of france, with its lofty towers, richly carved columns, and numerous rows of windows commanding a view over the city on one side, and across green fields and extensive forests, and far up and down the river on the other. the walk along which the young people were proceeding was shaded by tall trees, the thick boughs of which kept off the rays of the sun, shining brightly on the gay flowers and glittering fountains, seen in the open space beyond them. the young girl had the air and manner of a grown-up person, with that perfect self-possession which seems natural to those brought up in the atmosphere of a court. her companion's manner formed a contrast to hers; but though evidently not at all at his ease, as a brave man does when called upon to encounter danger, he had braced himself up to face those he might have to meet, who would, he naturally felt, look down on him on account of his travel-stained dress, his scottish accent, and rustic appearance. "in truth, cousin mary, i left scotland as many of our countrymen are compelled to do, to seek my fortune abroad, and have come with letters of introduction to several noblemen and others; among them to admiral coligny, my father's old comrade in arms. our castle is well-nigh in ruins, and my estate yields scarcely revenue sufficient to supply me with clothes and arms, much less to restore it as i wished to have done. i have already made two voyages to far-off lands, and come back no richer than i went, and have at length resolved to take service in the navy of france, in which i may hope to carve out my way to distinction, with the help of the admiral." "he may be ready enough to receive you and afford you his patronage; but i warn you, cousin nigel, that he may be less able to forward your interests than you may suppose. he is known to hold the principles of the leaders of those dangerous people the protestants, who are hated and feared at court, where the guises, the brothers of the queen regent of scotland, have of late gained the chief influence. take my advice, cousin nigel, seek some more profitable patron, and have nothing to do with the huguenots." "i thank you for your advice, cousin. i must confess, however, that i do not hold the opinion you express of the protestants, but on the contrary, am greatly inclined to agree with their principles. i lately heard a wonderful preacher, one john knox, who has appeared in scotland, and brought thousands to see the gross errors of the papal system. he proves clearly that the pope of rome has no real ground for his pretensions to be the head of christ's church on earth; that he cannot be the successor of the apostle peter, who never was bishop of rome; but that he is rather the successor of the great heathen high priest, whose idolatries he perpetuates and supports, and that therefore he and his cardinals and priests are impostors, who should on no account be obeyed. he clearly explains indeed that those who rule in the seven-hilled city represent no other than the scarlet woman spoken of in the apocalypse, their system being in truth the mystery of iniquity." "oh, dreadful!" exclaimed the young lady. "why, cousin nigel, you are a rank heretic, and were you to express such opinions as these in public, your life would be in danger. hundreds of frenchmen have already been burned for holding opinions not half as bad as those you have expressed. i am almost afraid to listen to you; not that we trouble ourselves much about such matters at court, where people are allowed to think what they like, provided they do not utter their thoughts too loudly, or in the hearing of the doctors of the sarbonne (the theological college of france), who have of late become rigidly orthodox, and are resolved to put down the reformers. i must advise you, at all events, to keep your own counsel; and if you are still determined to apply to admiral coligny, as your views agree with his, they will be in your favour." "thank you for your advice, sweet cousin," answered nigel. "i will follow it so far as not to parade my opinions; but should they be attacked, i shall be ready, if necessary, to defend them either with my tongue or my sword." "you are not likely to be called upon to use either of those formidable weapons, provided you are discreet," said the young lady, laughing. "you may occasionally at court hear the protestants satirised, or made subjects of lampoons; but it would be folly to take notice of such trivialities, and you would be in continual hot water with worthy people, perfectly ready otherwise to treat you as a friend. i will speak to some i know, who will assist your object and forward you to the admiral, should you determine to seek his patronage." "i would rather trust to so great and good a man than to any one else i have heard of in france," said nigel; "and am anxious, as soon as possible, to make myself known to him." by this time the young people had got within a few paces of the termination of the shady walk, when before them appeared a gay company of ladies and gentlemen, most of the former being very young, while the latter were, on the contrary, advanced in life, as their snowy locks and white beards betokened, though they were richly dressed, and were doing their utmost to assume a youthful and _debonair_ manner. nigel on seeing the gay company instinctively drew back into a recess by the side of the walk, unwilling, if possible, to present himself before them. his cousin being ready to humour him, placed herself on a garden seat, and invited him to sit by her. perhaps she was unwilling that the interview with her near relative should be brought to an end sooner than could be helped. they could from this spot observe what was going forward without being seen. merry laughter came from the party of gaily dressed people who passed along the walks, several approaching near enough to allow their features easily to be distinguished. "who are those?" asked nigel, as several young people came slowly by, following a fair girl, whose beautiful countenance and graceful figure distinguished her from the rest, though many of her companions were scarcely less lovely. so thought the young scotchman, as he stood watching them with admiring eyes. "the first is our lady mary, about to wed the dauphin of france," answered his cousin. "you must, as a loyal scot, be introduced to her. perchance if you are inclined to take service at court you may obtain a post, though his majesty king henry does not generally bestow such without an ample equivalent." [note: three scottish young ladies were sent over to france to attend on queen mary. they were mary seton, mary beaton, and mary carmichael, and were named the queen's maries.] "my taste does not lead me to covet such an honour," said nigel. "i should soon weary of having to dress in fine clothes and spend my time in idleness, waiting in ante-chambers, or dangling after the lords and ladies of the court. pardon me, sweet cousin, for saying so. i came to france to seek for more stirring employment than such a life could afford. i will do my _devoir_ to our young queen, and must then proceed on my journey to find the admiral. had it not been for the packet of letters with which i was entrusted, as also for the sake of seeing you, i should not have come to paris at all. but tell me, who are her majesty's attendants? there is one whose countenance, were i long to gaze at it, would, i am sure, become indelibly fixed on my heart. what a sweet face! how full of expression, and yet how modest and gentle!" "they are my two sister maries, mary beaton and mary carmichael; but it is neither of them you speak of. i see now; the damsel you describe is constance de tourville, whose father, by-the-by, is a friend of coligny's. the admiral, i am informed, is staying with the count at this very time, and when i tell constance who you are, she will, i am sure, find an excuse for despatching an attendant with you to her father. i can without difficulty make you known to her, as the etiquette of the court is not very rigid, or i should not have been allowed to wander about the gardens with a gallant young gentleman like yourself, albeit you claim to be my cousin and an old playmate." "i see several gentlemen among the fair damsels, so i conclude that my presence is not altogether an irregularity," said nigel. "they are privileged persons, however," said mary seton. "that sickly youth who has just joined the queen and is awkwardly endeavouring to make himself agreeable is her affianced husband, the dauphin. for my part i would rather not be a queen than be compelled to wed so miserable an object; but i am talking treason. here comes one of the queen's uncles, the duke de guise--that tall, dark, ill-favoured gentleman. he is, notwithstanding, one of the most powerful men in france, and intends to be more powerful still when his niece and her young husband ascend the throne. but come; the party are moving on, and as constance de tourville is lingering behind, we can quickly overtake her, and when i have made you known to her, you can tell her of your wish to see the admiral." nigel felt very unwilling to quit his hiding-place, but his cousin, taking him by the hand, playfully led him forward. they quickly overtook the interesting girl of whom they had been speaking. nigel, as he was introduced, made a bow which would not have disgraced the most polished gentleman at court. the young lady smiled as she cast a glance at his handsome, honest countenance, with the glow of health on it, increased somewhat by the blush which rose on finding himself in circumstances so unusual to him. "my cousin nigel melvin has come with an introduction to the admiral, who is, i understand, staying with your father, and he desires to set out to the chateau, though i would fain persuade him to take service at the court, instead of tempting the dangers of the sea, which he has the extraordinary taste to desire." "our house steward, maitre leroux, is at present in paris, and will return to-morrow; and should your cousin desire his escort, i will direct him to await his orders," said the young lady in a sweet voice. "where are you lodging, fair sir?" "i arrived but this morning, and left my valise at l'auberge de l'ange," answered nigel. "i know not where that is; but maitre leroux will easily find it out, and will call for you at any hour you may name." "a thousand thanks, lady, for your kindness," answered nigel. "i gladly accept your offer, and shall be ready to set out at early dawn if the landlord will permit me to depart at that hour." "maitre leroux will be at the palace this evening to receive a letter i am sending home, and i will direct him to call as you desire, though, as he loves his ease, he perchance may not be ready to commence the journey at quite so early an hour as you name." while constance was speaking, one of the ladies in attendance on the young queen turned back and beckoned to mary seton, who, hurrying forward, left nigel with her friend. "you will surely not take your cousin's advice, and seek for a post at this frivolous court," said constance hurriedly, again looking up at nigel's countenance. "catholics alone are in favour, while the protestants are detested. to which party do you belong?" "i might say to neither, as i am not a frenchman," answered nigel, surprised at the young lady's question. "at the same time i have heartily abjured the errors of rome." "i am glad to hear it; i thought so," said constance. "i myself am a protestant. i am here on sufferance, or rather a hostage, and would gladly return to my home if i had permission. persevering efforts have been made to pervert me, but i have had grace to remain firm to the true faith, and now i am simply exposed to the shafts of ridicule, and the wit and sneers of those who hold religious truth in contempt. you may be astonished at my thus venturing to speak to you, a perfect stranger, but i am sure that i may trust mary seton's cousin; and if you have the opportunity, i will beg you to tell my father or the good admiral what i say. i dare not write on the subject, nor can i venture to send a verbal message by maitre leroux." "i faithfully promise to convey your sentiments to either one or the other," answered nigel, casting a glance of admiration at the young girl, who could thus stand alone in her innocence amid the follies of that vicious and frivolous court. "as to accepting a place at court, even should it be offered me, i would refuse it, for my tastes lead me to seek my fortune on the wild ocean or in foreign lands; and it is with this object that i am about to visit the admiral, who will, i have been led to hope, forward my views." "you cannot apply to a wiser or truer man in france," answered constance. she was about to say more, when they were rejoined by mary seton, who came-to conduct nigel into the presence of the queen. "as a loyal scot you are bound to pay your _devoir_ to her majesty," she said. "though neither of us have much recollection of our native wilds, we still regard our country with affection." nigel felt that there was no escaping, and mustering courage, went boldly forward till he reached the spot where the young queen was standing with several lords and ladies in attendance. though unaccustomed to courts, he had too much native dignity to be overawed, and bending on his knee he lifted the hand of the young queen to his lips and reverently kissed it. mary bestowed on him one of those fascinating smiles which in after years bound many a victim to her feet, and bidding him rise, questioned him about the affairs of scotland, and various particulars regarding her lady mother the regent, from whom he had been the bearer of a package. nigel, gaining courage, replied discreetly to the young queen's questions. the dauphin, however, made some remark which induced her to dismiss her countryman, when nigel fell back to where he had left constance, who had been rejoined by his cousin. "you comported yourself admirably, and i congratulate you," said the latter. "you will, i am sure, after a little experience become a perfect courtier." "i would not advise him to make the experiment," said constance. "there is little fear of it," answered nigel. "i hope ere long to find myself on the wide ocean, where i may breathe the free air of heaven, which i much prefer to the atmosphere of a court; but i must crave your pardon, fair ladies, for showing a disinclination to live where i might bask in the sunshine of your smiles." "that speech is truly worthy of a courtier," said mary seton, laughing. "come, come, cousin, change your mind. constance, you will help me to bring this gentleman to reason?" "i would not attempt to influence him, even if i could," answered the young lady. "he has decided wisely. in your heart you know, mary, that he is right; you yourself despise the miserable butterflies who hover round us with their sweet speeches, empty heads, and false hearts." constance de tourville was continuing in the same strain, when the young queen, with her attendants and the other ladies and gentlemen of the court, was seen moving towards the palace, and she and mary seton were compelled to follow them. while nigel was paying his parting adieus to the young ladies, a sigh escaped his cousin as he pressed her hand to his lips, for she knew the probability that they might not meet again. her heart was still faithful to scotland, and she loved her kith and kindred. "remember," said constance, as he paid her the same mark of respect. "be careful what you say to strangers; but you may trust maitre leroux; he is honest." chapter two. a walk through paris. on reaching the gate of the palace, nigel had met the captain of the scottish guard, norman leslie, a distant relative, by whose means he had gained admission to the palace, and had been able to enjoy the interview with his cousin, mary seton. "how fared it with you, nigel, among the gay ladies of the court?" asked the captain, one of those careless characters, who receive their pay and fight accordingly, very little troubled as to the justice of the cause they support. "i had a talk with my cousin, and had the honour of paying my _devoirs_ to the queen," answered nigel, cautiously. "having now no longer any business in paris, i am about to set out on a visit to admiral coligny. can you direct me to my hostelry, at the sign of the angel, and tell me where i can find a steed to carry me on my journey? for, albeit it would best suit my purse to trudge on foot, i would wish to present myself to the admiral in a way suitable to the character of a scottish gentleman." "as i am off guard i will accompany you, my good kinsman, and will assist you in procuring a horse," was the answer. nigel gladly accepted leslie's offer, and the two scotchmen set forth together. nigel, being totally ignorant of the city, had no notion in what direction they were going. they were passing through the rue saint antoine, when they saw before them a large crowd thronging round a party of troopers and a body of men-at-arms, who were escorting between them several persons, their hands bound behind their backs, and mostly without hats, the soldiers urging them on with the points of their swords or pikes; nigel also observed among them three or four women, who were treated with the same barbarous indignity as the men. "who are those unhappy people?" he asked. "heretics on their way to prison, to be burnt, probably, in a few days for the amusement of the king, who, ambitious of surpassing his sister sovereign, queen mary of england, and to exhibit his love for religion, manages to put to death ten times as many as she ventures to send to the stake, unless they recant, when they will have the honour of being strangled or hung instead," answered leslie, in a nonchalant tone. "he and his counsellors are determined to extirpate heresy; but as the protestants are numbered by hundreds of thousands, and as there are a good many men of high rank and wealth among them, his majesty has undertaken a difficult task." "i pray that he may alter his mind, or fail in the attempt," exclaimed nigel, indignantly. "i may whisper amen; although, as the foolish people bring the punishment on their own heads, i am not inclined to throw down the gauntlet in their cause, and must e'en do my duty and carry out the orders of the master whose bread i eat," said leslie. nigel did not reply, but he felt more than ever determined not to take service on shore, however tempting the offers he might receive. leslie told him that of late years, throughout france, many hundreds, nay, thousands of persons, after being broken on the wheel, or having had their tongues cut out, or being tortured in some other way, had been burnt at the stake for their religious opinions; but that, notwithstanding, the protestants increased in numbers, and that, for his part, though himself a faithful son of the church, he thought that a wiser plan might have been adopted. "for my part, i believe that had not the pope and the priests and monks interfered, and worked up some of our fanatic nobles and the ignorant populace to persecute their fellow-countrymen, they might have lived together on friendly terms; and, for the life of me, i cannot see why people should not be allowed to worship god according to the dictates of their consciences," added the shrewd scotchman, with a shrug of his shoulders. nigel, who had only heard rumours of such proceedings, felt his blood boil with indignation, and instinctively touching the hilt of his sword, he vowed that he was ready to do battle in the cause of justice and humanity. his kinsman, who saw the act, smiled; and divining his thoughts, said, "let me advise you to avoid interference in quarrels not your own, unless you receive a due recompense in pay, and then the less you trouble yourself about the rights of the case the better. come along. the first thing we are to do is to look out for your steed. honest jacques cochut will supply you with one which will bear you from one end of france to the other, and an attendant to bring the animal back. it will be more economical than purchasing a horse, unless you have a long journey to make." nigel accompanied his friend to the stables of jacques cochut, to whom leslie was well known. a strong and active steed was soon engaged, with the promise that it should be ready at the door of the hostelry at an early hour next morning. leslie, leaving nigel at the angel inn, returned to his duty at the palace, while the latter, having ordered his supper, retired to his room to think over the events of the day. it is needless to say that constance de tourville frequently recurred to his thoughts. he had heard enough to make him understand the dangerous position of the protestants in france, even of the highest rank, and the fearful persecutions to which all classes were exposed. from the remarks constance had made, it was evident that she herself was exposed to much annoyance, if not danger, even within the precincts of the palace, and he earnestly hoped that he might have an opportunity of speaking to her father, and obtaining her release. he had sat for some time when he was aroused by a knock at the door, and the servant of the inn announced that a person desired to speak with him. "let him come in," said nigel; and a respectable-looking man, somewhat advanced in life, as was shown by his silvery locks, stepped forward. "i am attached to the house of the count de tourville, whose daughter despatched me to seek you out, and place myself at your service." "come in, my friend," said nigel, offering him a chair. "you are, i presume, maitre leroux, and i am grateful to the young lady for her kindness, of which i will gladly avail myself. shall you be ready to set out to-morrow morning?" "i had intended to do so, but business will keep me in paris for another day," answered maitre leroux; "and if you, fair sir, do not object to remain, i will gladly set forth with you at any hour you may name on the following morning. you may, in the mean time, find amusement in this big city of paris." nigel, who was pleased with maitre leroux, though anxious to continue his journey, willingly agreed to wait for the purpose of having his escort. "but i have engaged my horse for to-morrow," he added. "i will easily settle that matter with jacques cochut; and if you will accept of my company i will call for you, and show you some of the sights of our city, as you will, alone, be unable to find your way about the streets, and may chance to lose yourself, or get into some difficulty." "thank you," said nigel. "i shall indeed be glad of your society, for, except a kinsman in the guards, i know no one in the whole of paris." these arrangements having been made, maitre leroux took his departure; and nigel was not sorry, soon after supper, to throw himself on his bed, and seek the repose which even his well-knit limbs required. nigel, who slept longer than was his wont, waited at the inn some time for maitre leroux. he was afraid to go out, lest the steward might arrive during his absence. at length his guide appeared. "i have been detained longer than i expected," said maitre leroux; "but monsieur will pardon me. we have still time to see much of the city." they set out, and during their walk visited many places of interest, of which the steward gave the history to the young scotchman. "your paris buildings surpass those of our bonny edinburgh in size and number, i must confess," remarked nigel; "but still we have our holyrood, and our castle, and the situation of our city is unrivalled, i am led to believe, by that of any other in the world." "as i have not seen your city i am unable to dispute the point," answered the steward. "would you like to visit one of our courts of justice? though not open to the public, i may be able to gain admittance, and i am deeply interested in the case, albeit it would be wise not to show that, and having a stranger with me will be a sufficient excuse." "under those circumstances i will gladly accompany you," said nigel. they soon reached the portals of a large building, through which, after some hesitation on the part of the guards, the steward and his companion were admitted. nigel observed that maitre leroux slipped some money into the hands of two or three people, this silver key evidently having its usual power of opening doors otherwise closed. going through a side door they reached a large hall, crowded with persons. among those seated were numerous ecclesiastics, a judge in his robes, and lawyers and their clerks while a strong body of men-at-arms were guarding a party of some fifty or sixty persons, who, from their position and attitudes, were evidently prisoners. they were men of different ranks; several, from their costume, being gentlemen, and others citizens and artisans. there were a few women among them also. all looked deadly pale, but their countenances exhibited firmness and determination. "of what crime have these people been guilty?" asked nigel. "of a fearful one in the eyes of their judges," answered maitre leroux. "they have been worshipping god according to the dictates of their consciences, and were found assembled together in a house at meaux, listening to the gospel of the mild and loving saviour. they have already been put to the torture to compel them to recant and betray their associates, but it has not produced the desired effect. in vain their advocate has pleaded their cause. listen! the judge is about to pronounce their sentence." dreadful indeed that was. with blasphemous expressions, which cannot be repeated, the condemned were sentenced to be carried back to meaux; fourteen, after being again put to the torture, were to be burnt alive in the market-place; most of the others were to be hung up by their shoulders during the execution of their brethren, and then to be flogged and imprisoned for life in a monastery, while the remainder were to receive somewhat less severe, though still grievous punishment. the hardy young scot almost turned sick with horror and indignation as he heard the sentence; and putting his hand to his sword, he was about to cry out and demand, in the name of justice, that instead of being punished, the prisoners should be released, when his companion grasped him by the arm, whispering, "be calm, my friend; such events are so common in france, that we have grown accustomed to them. hundreds have already died as these men are about to die; and we, their countrymen, have been compelled to look on without daring to raise our voices in their cause, or, as you are inclined to do, to draw a sword for their defence." maitre leroux, after exchanging a few sentences in an undertone with three or four people they met, whose sad countenances showed the interest they took in the condemned, led his young friend from the so-called hall of justice. on their way they looked into the magnificent church of notre dame. priests in gorgeous dresses were chanting mass; music was pealing through the building, and incense was ascending to the roof. "impious mockery," muttered nigel. "well may calvin and john knox desire the overthrow of such a system, and desire to supplant it by the true faith of the gospel." "hush! hush! my young friend," whispered maitre leroux, hurrying him out of the church, regretting that he had entered it. "though many may think as you do, it's dangerous to utter such opinions in this place." "can nothing be done to save these poor men?" asked nigel. "surely the king cannot desire the destruction of his subjects?" "the king, like gallio, cares for none of these things. he is taught to believe that the priests are the best supporters of his crown: and, at all events, he knows that they allow him full licence in the indulgence of his pleasures, which the protestants, he supposes, would be less inclined to do." "i would that i were out of this city of paris, and away from france itself," said nigel. "many think and feel as you do, and are acting upon it," answered the steward. "already many thousand men of science and clever artisans have left, to carry their knowledge and industry to other lands; and others, in all directions, are preparing to follow. you will hear more about the matter when you visit the admiral, and my good master, who does not look unmoved on such proceedings. more on the subject it would not become me to say. not long ago an edict was issued, by which all the old laws on heresy were revived, it being the resolution of the king to purge and clear the country of all those who are deemed heretics. magistrates are ordered to search unceasingly for them, and to make domiciliary visits in quest of forbidden books, while the informer is to obtain one-third of the heretic's confiscated property. should a person be acquitted of heresy in any ordinary court of justice, he may be again tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal, thus depriving him of all chances of escape. even interference on behalf of a heretic is made penal, and should a person be suspected, he must exhibit a certificate of orthodoxy, or run the risk of being condemned. you see, therefore, young sir, that i am right in recommending caution as to what you say; not that these edicts have the effect expected, for calvinism increases rapidly, and the stream of emigration continues from all parts of the kingdom." they walked on in silence, nigel meditating on what he had heard. "some fresh air will do you good after the scenes we have witnessed," observed maitre leroux. "we will take a turn in the pre-aux-clercs. it is but a short distance past the invalides." it was evening, and a number of people were thronging that pleasant meadow on the banks of the seine, the hyde park of that period. a party of young men coming by struck up one of the hymns of marot, a translation of one of the psalms of david, written some years before by the protestant poet. others joined in, and evidently sang them heartily; several other parties, as they passed along, were indulging in the same melodies. "how is it, after what you have told me, that the people venture to sing these hymns?" asked nigel. "i know them well, for they have already been introduced into our protestant congregations in scotland." "they became the favourites of the king and court before they had the significance they now possess," answered the steward; "and it is only thus that many who hate the papal system can give expression to their sentiments. before long, however, i fear that they will be prohibited, or those who sing them will be marked as suspected. alas, alas! our lovely france will be deprived of all freedom of thought, opinion, and action." the worthy maitre leroux seemed greatly out of spirits as they took their way back to the inn. they parted at the door, for nigel felt no inclination to go forth again, and the steward had business, he said, to attend to. he promised to call for nigel at an early hour the next morning to set out for meaux, undertaking to direct jacques cochut to have his horses in readiness. chapter three. the visit to the admiral. maitre leroux did not call at as early an hour as nigel expected. his own horse and attendant had been at the door for some time before the steward made his appearance. he had an ample apology to offer, having been employed in an important matter till late at night. "come," he said, "we will make up for it. the lateness of the hour matters not, for, with your permission, we will halt on the road, so as to arrive early at the chateau to-morrow." they set out, followed by their two attendants. after leaving the gates of paris they continued some distance along the banks of the marne. the road was rough in places, and often deep in dust; full of holes and ruts in others, which made it necessary for the riders to hold a tight rein on their steeds, and prevented them generally from going out of a walk. maitre leroux carried a brace of huge pistols in his holsters, while nigel had a sword and a light arquebus, both their attendants being also armed; so that they were well able to defend themselves against any small party of marauders such as infested the roads in the neighbourhood of the capital. "we must make but a short stage to-day," said maitre leroux. "in truth, i am unwilling to travel late in the evening, and prefer stopping at the house of a friend to taking up our quarters at an inn where we might meet with undesirable companions." "but i shall be intruding on your friend," said nigel. "pardon me; you will, on the contrary, be heartily welcomed. i am very sure of your principles, and they agree with those of our host and his family, so you need not be under the restraint which would be necessary were we to sleep at a public inn." these arguments at once overcame any scruples nigel might have felt at going to a stranger's house uninvited. it yet wanted a couple of hours to sunset when they reached a good-sized mansion, though not possessing the pretensions of a nobleman's chateau. the owner, a man advanced in life, of gentlemanly refined manner, received maitre leroux in a friendly way, and on hearing from him who nigel was, welcomed him cordially. nigel was conducted into a saloon, where he was introduced to his host's wife and daughters and several other members of the family. supper was quickly prepared, and nigel found himself at once at home. as soon as the meal was over several other persons came in, some apparently of the same rank as the host, and others of an inferior order, but all staid and serious in their demeanour. the doors and windows were then carefully closed, and nigel observed that two of the party went out armed with swords and pistols, apparently to watch the approach to the house. a large bible was now produced, and several of the party drew forth smaller editions from beneath their garments. the host then offered up a prayer, and opening the bible, read a portion, commenting as he proceeded. a hymn was then sung and more of the scriptures read, after which the host delivered an address full of gospel truth, while he exhorted his hearers to hold fast to the faith, but at the same time remarked that they would be justified in flying from persecution if no other means could be found of avoiding it at home. he reminded all present, however, that their duty was to pray for their persecutors, and however cruelly treated, not to return evil for evil. nigel was reminded of various meetings of the same character he had attended in scotland, where, however, every man could speak out boldly, without the fear of interruption which seemed to pervade the minds of those present. he now knew that his host was one of the many protestants existing in the country who ventured thus in secret to worship god according to their consciences, even though running the risk of being condemned to death as heretics. after the guests had retired, the family spent some time in singing marot's hymns. "ah!" said the host, "it is only in praising god and reading his blessed words that we can take any pleasure. it is our consolation and delight, and enables us without complaining to endure the sad condition to which bigotry and tyranny have reduced our unhappy country. the only prospect now before us is exile, or imprisonment and death." nigel answered without hesitation that he felt much satisfaction in again having the opportunity of worshipping, as he had been accustomed to do at home, according to his conscience, and hearing the bible read and faithfully explained. his host wishing him and his companion a friendly farewell, and expressing a hope that he should see him again, they took their departure at an early hour the next morning. they had proceeded some distance when they entered a forest, through the centre of which the high road passed. they had been pushing on rather faster than usual, maitre leroux being anxious to get through it as soon as possible, when they saw before them a body of soldiers. as they got nearer they found that they were escorting a number of prisoners seated in rough country carts, into which they were fastened with heavy chains. "who are these unhappy people?" inquired nigel. "the same we saw condemned in paris," answered maitre leroux with a sigh. "if we do not wish to share their fate we must exhibit no sympathy for them, as the wretches who have them in charge would rejoice to add to their number. as it will be impossible to pass them at present, we will drop slowly behind." "would that i had a band of protestant scots with me, we would soon set them at liberty!" exclaimed nigel. "hush, hush! my friend," whispered the steward; "it becomes us not to fight with carnal weapons; such is dr calvin's advice." just at that moment a voice exclaimed, "brethren, remember him who is in heaven above!" some of the rear-guard immediately turned round, and with drawn swords dashed furiously towards nigel and maitre leroux, believing, evidently, that one of them had uttered the exclamation they had heard. they both drew up, for flight would have been useless, when, just as the troopers had got some fifty yards from them, a man advanced from among the trees and repeated the words in a loud tone. he was instantly seized by the soldiers, and being dragged back along them, was thrown into one of the carts among the other prisoners. his appearance probably saved the lives of nigel and his companion, for the doughty scot had drawn his sword, and would have fought desperately before he would have yielded himself a prisoner. "pull in your rein, i entreat you," said the steward; "we must not turn round, and the sooner we let these people get to a distance from us, the better." nigel, seeing that it would be hopeless to attempt assisting the unfortunate man, did as his companion advised, and they accordingly waited till the troopers were out of sight, taking good care not again to overtake them. their progress was thus considerably delayed, and not till they came to a road passing outside the town of meaux did they again venture to push forward. they managed before sunset to reach the chateau de tourville, a high conical-roofed pile, with numerous towers and a handsome gateway. maitre leroux, conducting nigel to a waiting-room near the entrance, went at once to the count, taking his letter of introduction. nigel had not been left long alone when the steward returned with the request that he would accompany him to the hall, where, he told him, he would find the count and admiral with several other persons. nigel, not being troubled by bashfulness, quickly followed his guide. the count, who was of middle age and handsome, courteously rose from his seat at the top of the table to welcome him. at the right hand of the count nigel observed a person of middle height, ruddy complexion, and well-proportioned figure, with a calm and pleasant, if not decidedly handsome countenance. on the other side sat a tall man, whose sunburnt features, though regular, wore an expression which at the first glance gave nigel the feeling that he was not a person in whom he would place implicit confidence, though directly afterwards, as he again looked at him, his manner seemed so frank and easy, that the impression vanished. several other persons of different ages, and apparently of somewhat inferior rank, sat on either side of the table. "which of those two can be the admiral?" thought nigel; "the last looks most like a naval commander." "the lady mary seton, your cousin, and my daughter, have written in your favour, young sir, and i am glad to see you at the chateau; you have, i understand, also a letter of introduction to admiral coligny, to whom allow me to make you known." saying this, the count presented nigel to the gentleman on his right side, who requested the person next him to move further down, bidding nigel to take the vacant seat. nigel observed that the meal was over, but the count ordered the servant to bring in some viands for the newly arrived guest. "as i take no wine you will allow me to read the letter brought by this young gentleman," said the admiral, turning to the count; "i never defer looking at an epistle if it can possibly be helped." the count bowed his acquiescence, and the admiral quickly glanced over the letter which nigel had presented to him. "i shall be glad to forward your object," he said, turning round with a calm smile, and playing with a straw, which he was wont to carry in his mouth. "fortunately, i have an opportunity of doing so. i am about to fit out an expedition to form a settlement in the southern part of america, and if your qualifications are such as i am led to believe, i will appoint you as an officer on board one of the ships. you will have but little time to remain idle in france, as we wish the ships to sail as soon as the emigrants who are going on board them can be collected. they will undoubtedly be anxious without delay to leave our unhappy country, where they are constantly subjected to the cruel persecutions of their opponents in religious opinions. would the service i propose suit your taste?" "though i might wish to engage in some more warlike expedition, yet i am willing and glad to go wherever you, sir, may think fit to send me," answered nigel. "well spoken, young man," said the admiral. "war is a necessity which cannot be avoided, but there are other employments in which a person may nobly engage with far greater advantage to himself and his fellow-creatures. such is the work in which i desire to employ you--the noble undertaking of founding a new colony, and planting the banner of pure religion and civilisation in the far-off wilds of the western world." the admiral spoke on for some time in the same strain, till nigel felt inspired with the same noble enthusiasm which animated the bosom of the brave and enlightened nobleman who was speaking to him. many questions were put to him concerning his nautical knowledge and religious belief, to which he answered in a satisfactory manner. "i believe you are well suited for the undertaking, and i will forthwith make you known to the commander of the expedition, my friend captain villegagnon," said the admiral. the dark man nigel had remarked, hearing his name mentioned, looked toward him. nigel bowed. the admiral, after explaining nigel's qualifications, went on to inquire what posts were vacant in the squadron? "that of the second officer on board my own ship, the _madeline_; and i shall be pleased to have a seaman of experience to fill it, although he is not a native of france," answered the captain. "you may consider your appointment as settled, my young friend," said the admiral. "i will desire my secretary to make it out, and as you assure me that you are a true protestant, i willingly appoint you, such being the religious opinions of all those who are about to form the colony of antarctic france, which i trust will be well-established under the wise government of monsieur villegagnon. many other ships will sail forth with emigrants seeking an asylum from the persecutions they are subjected to in france on account of their religious opinions." nigel warmly thanked the admiral for the prompt way in which he had met his request. "say nothing about that, my young friend; we are too glad to find protestant officers ready to engage in the expedition," was the answer. the conversation now became general, and the plans for the future colony were freely discussed, the count, who appeared as much interested as the admiral, taking a leading part--indeed, nigel gathered from what he heard, that he himself intended to go out among the first colonists. the idea of establishing the colony had been started, so nigel understood, by monsieur villegagnon, who had chosen the bay of nitherohy, since known as that of rio de janeiro, as the site of the first town to be built. it was a place which he had visited some years before on a trading voyage, when he and his companions had been well received by the natives, though they were at enmity with the portuguese, already established in the country, who claimed it as their own. this latter circumstance monsieur villegagnon remarked was of little consequence, as they were few in numbers, and, with the assistance of the natives, could easily be driven out. the repast being over, the admiral rose from the table, the other guests following his example. calling to captain villegagnon, he took him and nigel into the deep recess of a window to have some further conversation on the subject of the proposed colony. "monsieur de villegagnon sets out to-morrow to take command of the squadron, and you will do well to accompany him, young sir," he said, turning to nigel. "you will thus be able to superintend the fitting out of your ship, and see that the stores come on board, and that proper accommodation is prepared for the emigrants; many are of rank and position in society, and there are merchants, soldiers, and artificers, and you will have to consider how best to find room for them. i am glad to say that the king himself takes great interest in the success of the colony, and under the able management of so skilled a leader as he who has been appointed to the command, we may hope that the flag of france will wave proudly ere long over many portions of the continent." "it will not be my fault if the noble enterprise fails to succeed," said the captain, drawing himself up proudly, and then bowing to the admiral in acknowledgment of the compliment. "my chief satisfaction is, however, that a home will be found for so many of the persecuted protestants who are compelled for conscience sake to leave their native land." "you are right, my friend; that is a noble sentiment," observed the admiral; "and i would urge our friends who are dissatisfied with the state of affairs at home to place themselves under your command." "from the expressions our host has uttered, i may hope that he also will render valuable aid to our undertaking," observed the captain. "no one, be assured, more warmly enters into our views," answered the admiral, "and he will both with his purse and influence assist us, if he does not do so in a more effectual way." they were soon after joined by the count, who requested the captain to reserve two cabins for some persons who intended going on board just before the squadron put to sea. from the conversation which ensued, nigel found that most of the persons present purposed joining the expedition. they were all, he found from the remarks they made, protestants, and haters of the system of persecution which had so long been the curse of france. most of them had already disposed of their possessions, and were only waiting till the squadron was completely equipped to go on board. among them was a protestant minister, and, notwithstanding the edicts against meeting for public or private worship, the doors of the chateau being closed, before retiring to rest all the inmates were collected, the bible was read and prayers offered up, those for the success of the undertaking and the preservation of the persons about to embark not being forgotten. maitre leroux accompanied nigel to his chamber. he expressed his pleasure on hearing that he had obtained the object of his wishes. "would that i could accompany you," he said, with a sigh; "but my duty compels me to remain, and watch over my master's property, should he be called away. ah, he is a kind, good master, and his daughter is an angel. i would lay down my life for her sake, should she be deprived of her father--and we never know what may happen in these times. alack! i fear that she is in society little congenial to her taste and opinion, for she is a true protestant, as was her sainted mother, now in heaven." nigel felt deeply interested in listening to the garrulous steward's account of his young mistress, and encouraged him to go on. she had been compelled, against her father's and her own wish, to reside at court, for the evident purpose of perverting her faith; "but she is too sound and too wise to allow them to succeed," he added, "though i would the dear young lady were back with us again." chapter four. what nigel overheard. all arrangements having been made, the next morning, shortly after the sun had risen, captain villegagnon, with a considerable party, were ready to set out for havre de grace, the port at which the squadron was fitting out. they purposed to avoid paris, but had to pass through meaux on their way to join the high road leading to havre. the good admiral and monsieur de tourville came out to wish them farewell as they mounted their horses, and maitre leroux was waiting at a little distance, where he might have a few last words with nigel. "farewell, my young friend," he said, putting a small testament into his hand; "you will find this an inestimable treasure. i dare not keep it long, as it is considered treason for a frenchman to possess god's word, though i have hidden away another copy to which i may go when unobserved to refresh my soul; and, mark you, should my master and young mistress ever have occasion to seek for your assistance, you will, i am sure, afford it." "i promise you that i will most gladly," answered nigel, wondering what the old steward could mean. wishing his worthy friend good-bye, he pushed on to overtake his travelling companions. on entering meaux, they found the town in a strange commotion, the people all rushing with eager looks to the market-place, in which, as they reached it, they found a large crowd assembled. they caught sight of a number of high gibbets erected at intervals round it, while in the centre was a circle of stakes surrounded by faggots. the travellers would have passed on, but the dense crowd prevented them from moving, and their leader himself showed no inclination to press forward. presently shouts arose, and, the crowd opening, a horse was seen dragging a hurdle, on which a human being lay bound, the blood flowing from his mouth. a party of soldiers next appeared with a number of persons, their hands bound behind them, in their midst; while priests, carrying lighted tapers, were seen among them, apparently trying to gain their attention. some of the prisoners were singing a hymn of marot's, and all carried their heads erect, advancing fearlessly to the place of execution. on arriving, they were seized by savage-looking men, while some were speedily hoisted up to the gibbets by their shoulders, where they hung, enduring, it was evident, the greatest agony. fourteen of the party were then bound to as many stakes, the unhappy man on the hurdle being the first secured. among them nigel recognised the person who had been seized in the forest on the previous day for shouting, "brethren, remember him who is in heaven above." though the cords were drawn so tight as to cut into their wrists and ankles, no one uttered a cry for mercy, but, lifting their eyes to heaven, continued singing, or exhorting their companions to be firm. the faggots being now piled round them, the priests retired, uttering curses on their heads; while bands of music struck up to drown the voices of the sufferers. at the sight of two men approaching with torches, the people raised loud shouts of savage joy, and one of the piles of faggots surrounding the stake, that to which the chief person, whose tongue had been cut out, was bound, was speedily kindled. "all! all! let them all be burned together," shouted the mob, dancing frantically. the other piles were quickly lighted, the smoke ascending from the fourteen fires forming a dark canopy overhead. the victims, as long as they could be distinguished, were seen with their eyes turned to heaven, singing and praising god with their last breath. the savage fury of the ignorant populace was not yet satiated. those who had been hung up by the shoulders were now taken down, and so dreadfully flogged, that some of them petitioned that they might be thrown into the flames amid the ashes of their martyred friends; but this was a mercy their cruel executioners had no intention of affording them. bleeding, they were dragged off to be imprisoned in a monastery, where they were to be shut up for life. at length villegagnon, who had looked on with perfect indifference, called to his companions to follow, and, the crowd beginning to disperse, they were able with less difficulty to advance. the lowest of the rabble only had exulted in the dreadful scene; the greater number of the people exhibited very different feelings. nigel observed many in tears, or with downcast looks, returning to their homes; others exchanging glances of indignation; and he heard several exclaiming, "they died in a righteous cause. may we have grace to suffer as they have done." "truly, as i have heard it said in scotland, `the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,'" observed nigel to another of his companions, whose tears and groans showed the grief he suffered at the spectacle he had just witnessed. villegagnon kept his party together, for more than once some of the more ferocious persons of the mob cast suspicious looks at them, and mutterings arose, "who are these? they have the air of lutherans, or they would look more joyous at the destruction of heretics." "i hold the king's commission, and these are under my orders," cried villegagnon. "make way, good people, make way, and allow us to proceed on our journey." still the mob pressed round, and where showing a determination to stop the travellers, when a monk stepped forward, and exclaimed, "i know that gentleman, and he is a true son of the church. interfere not, at your peril, with him and his companions." nigel fancied that he observed glances of intelligence exchanged between the captain and the monk, who had so opportunely come to their rescue. the mob, at length pacified, drew back, and the party were allowed to leave the town without being again molested. they pushed on as fast as their horses could go. "we have had a happy escape," observed nigel's companion, "for although a large portion of the population of meaux are protestant, yet the rabble, supported by the troops and some of the government authorities, have the upper hand, and it would have fared ill with us had we been stopped and our object discovered." night had already set in when they reached a hostelry where they were to remain till the morning. as most of the travellers were fatigued, they retired to rest as soon as supper was over, with their saddles as pillows, and their cloaks wrapped round them, lying down in the chief saloon, wherever space could be found. nigel, with two or three others, sat up some time longer, when, having got his saddle and cloak, intending to seek repose, he found every place occupied. while hunting about, he entered a small room in which were a couple of truckle bedsteads. neither was occupied. "i am in luck," he said to himself, and placing his saddle and other property by his side, having taken off his riding boots and some of his clothes, he threw himself upon one of the beds which stood in a corner. drawing the coverlid over him, he was soon, sailor-like, fast asleep. after some time, he was awakened by hearing the door open, and, looking up, he saw two persons enter the room. one was villegagnon, who carried a lamp in his hand; the other was, he saw by the person's costume, an ecclesiastic. they advanced across the room towards the window, where stood a table and a couple of chairs. villegagnon threw himself into one of them, with his back towards him, the other imitating his example. the latter produced writing materials, and several papers, which villegagnon held to the lamp to read. "you have made a happy commencement of your work, my friend," said the priest. "if you carry it out thoroughly, the church, the duke of guise, and the cardinal of lorraine will be deeply indebted to you. twenty calvinist nobles, and some four score of the commonalty, have, i see, determined to accompany you, and they will entice many more. we shall be glad to be rid of them at present out of france, and we will then send out a larger number of faithful catholics, so that you will reap the honour of founding a french colony in the new world, the church will triumph, and the calvinists be extirpated." "but the proceeding smacks somewhat of treachery, and it can matter but little to you at home whether the colony is established by calvinists or catholics, so that it is firmly grounded and adds to the honour and glory of france," observed villegagnon. "nay, nay, my friend," said the priest, putting his hand on the captain's arm; "remember that the means sanctifies the end. we can allow no calvinists to exist, either here or abroad. they would be continually coming back with their pestiferous doctrines, or, finding themselves in the majority, would speedily put an end to our holy church. they must be extirpated, root and branch." "i have no wish to support the protestants, as thou knowest right well, reverend father," answered the captain; "but they are countrymen, and fight well, and labour well, and count among their number the cleverest mechanics in france. i know not how it is, but it seems to me that everywhere the most intelligent men have become calvinists." "their father satan gives them wisdom. take care, captain, that you are not carried away by their doctrines. the true faith will triumph, depend on that," said the priest, frowning as he spoke. "your arguments are conclusive. it will not be my fault if the plan miscarries," answered villegagnon. "i will keep on the mask till i feel myself strong enough to throw it off." "you will do well. do not be in a hurry. we must get as many of these pestiferous sectarians into the net as possible." further conversation of the same character was held between the two worthies for some time. nigel had found himself most unintentionally acting the part of an eavesdropper. he had at first felt inclined to start up and make the captain and priest aware of his presence; but as the conversation went on he felt that he was justified in thus learning the character of the leader of the expedition, whose evil intentions he hoped he might be the means of counteracting. he determined, therefore, to appear to be fast asleep should they, on quitting the room, discover him. as he saw them rise, he closed his eyes. he heard their footsteps as they approached the door. just then the light which villegagnon carried fell upon him. "i had no idea that anyone was in the room," whispered the captain, holding the lamp towards nigel. "who is he?" asked the priest, in a low voice. "a young pig of a scotchman, whom the admiral insisted on my taking on board as an officer." "should he have overheard what was said, he might interfere with our proceedings," observed the priest. "your dagger would most speedily settle the question, and prevent mischief." "i am not fond of killing sleeping men, holy father," answered the captain, in a somewhat indignant tone. "even had the youth been awake, he is so little acquainted with french that he could not have understood what we were saying; but, you see, he is fast asleep. i, however, will keep an eye upon him, and shall soon learn whether he knows anything. if he does, we have frequently dark and stormy nights at sea, when men get knocked overboard. such may be his fate; you understand me." "a good idea. i will trust to your discretion," said the priest, and, greatly to nigel's relief, they left the room. he remained awake, considering how he should act. at length he heard some one enter the room; it was the captain, who, just taking a glance at him, threw himself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. at early dawn nigel awoke, and, putting on his garments, went down into the yard to get some water to wash his hands and face. the rest of the party were soon on foot. the captain met him in the morning with a smiling countenance, and, as he did not even allude to his having shared his room, nigel thought it better to say nothing about the matter. he looked about for the priest, but he was nowhere to be found, nor did nigel hear any one allude to him. it was evident that he had come and gone secretly. the rest of the journey to havre was performed without any other incident worthy of note. three stout ships were found in the harbour, already in a forward state of equipment. nigel went on board the _madeline_, with several of his travelling companions, and at once took possession of the cabin intended for his use. the officers and the crew, as far as he could learn, were all protestants, as were undoubtedly the passengers who had already come on board. he found plenty of occupation in receiving and stowing the provisions and stores, and in setting up the rigging and bending sails. he was thus kept actively employed for several days, till the _madeline_, the most advanced ship, was fully ready for sea. all the passengers, he observed, came off at night, to avoid the observation of their countrymen. although the ships were already crowded with almost as many people as they could carry, there were still two vacant cabins on board the _madeline_. chapter five. under weigh--arrival. morn had just broken; a southerly wind blew gently down the harbour, and captain villegagnon gave the order to lift the heavy anchors from their oozy beds. "a boat is coming from the shore and pulling rapidly towards us," said nigel to the captain. "the people on board her are making signals. shall we stop weighing the anchor?" "yes, without doubt," answered the commander, looking towards the boat. "i thought that they had abandoned their design. we are still to have the advantage of the count's assistance and company." nigel looked eagerly towards the approaching boat. besides the rowers, there were several passengers, two of whom he saw were females, and at length, as they approached, he recognised the count de tourville. his heart began to beat more violently than it was wont to do. he felt almost sure that the lady by the count's side was his daughter constance. all doubt in a few minutes was set at rest, when the count, leading his daughter, came up the broad ladder which had been lowered to allow them to ascend. constance gave him a smile of recognition as he bowed low, as did the other officers standing round, to welcome her and her father on board. the squadron was now quickly under weigh, and gliding rapidly down the river. the weather looked fine, and all hoped for a prosperous voyage. many who had narrowly escaped with their lives from the romanists began to breathe more freely as the ships, under all sail, stood down the channel. yet there were sad hearts on board, for they were leaving their beloved france a prey to civil strife, and their fellow religionists to the horrors of persecution, so that for the time they forgot their high hopes of founding another france in the new world. as nigel paced the deck in the performance of his duty, he was often able to stop and speak to the count and his daughter, and to render her those attentions which a lady so frequently requires on board ship. often they stood together watching the distant shore or passing vessels, or the porpoises as they gambolled in the waves. insensibly they became more and more drawn together, constance told him of the difficulty she had experienced in escaping from the court. had not her father himself, at a great risk, gone to paris, she would have been unable to accomplish her object. fortunately for her, a relative residing in the capital having fallen ill, had sent an earnest request to see her. she had been allowed to go, and had the same night left paris with her father in disguise, travelling night and day in time to reach havre just as the ship was on the point of sailing. "we may hope now, however, to get far away from the follies of courts and the trickeries of politics to found a new home where, with none but true protestants around us, we may enjoy the exercise of our religion undisturbed," she said, looking up at her companion with a smile. "i trust that it may be so," said nigel. "what! have you any doubts on the subject?" she asked. "i would not willingly throw a dark shade across the prospect you contemplate," he answered, "but we should be prepared for disappointment, and i believe few on board have thought sufficiently of the difficulties and dangers we shall have to encounter." nigel had expressed his thoughts more plainly than he had intended, and he regretted immediately afterwards having said so much. the conversation he had overheard at the inn frequently recurred to him, and considerably damped his ardour. to whom could he venture to communicate the knowledge he had obtained of the commander's character? who would, indeed, believe the young foreigner thus bringing so serious an accusation against the officer selected by coligny himself, and of considerable renown as a naval chief? if he were not accused of malicious motives, the meeting would be looked upon as having only taken place in his dreams, for he should have to confess that he remained perfectly still during the time, with his eyes closed, as the captain and priest entered and quitted the room. he resolved, therefore, simply to keep a watch on villegagnon, and to endeavour, if possible, to counteract his schemes. sometimes he thought of speaking to count de tourville, for he had, at all events, full confidence in his honour and discretion; but even he, knowing how much the admiral esteemed villegagnon, might disbelieve him. he was compelled, therefore, to keep the knowledge he had obtained shut up in his own bosom. his chief satisfaction arose from the thought that constance de tourville was on board, and that it would be his joy and pride to defend her from all danger. the weather, which had hitherto been fine, gave signs of changing. the wind shifted more to the west, and dark clouds came rolling up. the vessels, instead of gliding smoothly on, were now tossed about. the storm increased. the sails were reduced to the smallest proportions, but yet the stout ships could with difficulty battle with the waves. under other circumstances, the emigrants would have loudly petitioned to put back; but as it was, they were afraid, should they again set foot in france, of being seized by their persecutors; nevertheless, as the storm increased, the terror of the emigrants, unaccustomed to the sea, became greater and greater. loud cries of alarm arose; some mourned their folly in having left their native shores to perish in the ocean. nigel and the other officers did their utmost to calm their fears, and assured them that should the ships be in real clanger they would return to the port. constance was among the few ladies who exhibited no undue alarm, and expressed their confidence in the skill of the officers. but even they at length acknowledged that they should be thankful could they find themselves again safe in port. the count de tourville especially was unwilling to return; but for his daughter's sake, however, he at length consented to ask the captain to do what he considered best for the safety of the ships. "they will probably, if we continue at sea, become so battered, that we shall hardly reach our destination," was the answer. the signal thereon was hoisted from the commander's ship, and the squadron stood back for france. on making the land, they found that they were to the eastward of the port from which they started, and at length they entered that of dieppe. here several of the artificers, and even some of the men of higher rank, resolved to abandon the expedition, rather than again risk the dangers of the sea. their places, however, were supplied by others collected by the captain, who had gone on shore for the purpose. so many of these men were received on board each of the ships, that they became overcrowded; but the captain silenced all complaints by asserting that, if they would consent to suffer a little present inconvenience, they would have a greater number to defend themselves against any enemies they might meet with. once more the squadron sailed, and succeeded in getting clear of the channel. they had not, however, been long at sea before nigel began to suspect the character of the new-comers, of which his own ship carried the greater number. they herded together, and showed little respect to the services which the chaplain was wont to hold on board for the spiritual benefit of the colonists. they were even seen to mock while he preached, till complaints, being made to the captain, he ordered them to behave themselves. day after day the ships sailed on, keeping close together, the wind being fair and moderate. sometimes it fell a calm, when the officers and gentlemen calvinists of the different ships visited one another, and discussed their plans for the future. the chief delight, however, of most on board was to hold religious services, which they could now do without fear of interruption; and hymns of praise arose from amid the desert ocean, their voices, when the ships were close to each other, uniting together in harmony. often had constance expressed her feelings at the thought that they might in future thus worship god. before, however, they reached their destination, they encountered several violent gales, during which, whenever his duty would allow him, nigel made his way to the side of constance to afford her comfort and support. "do not be afraid," he said; "our ships are strong, and our commander experienced. i have been in a worse found vessel in a more violent gale, and we reached port in safety." "but the waves look so terrible, threatening every moment to come down and overwhelm us," said constance, who was seated on deck, gazing at the tumultuous ocean. "remember, god tells us that it is he who rules the waves; and should it be his will, they cannot hurt us," answered nigel. "yes, yes," said constance; "i was wrong to express fear. happy are we who possess the bible, of which the followers of the tyrant pope and his pretended priests are deprived." "think how many thousands of our countrymen would thankfully go through far greater dangers than we are enduring to reach a country where they may enjoy freedom from persecution," observed nigel. the young couple, however, talked on many other subjects; and when the storm ceased, and favourable breezes wafted them over the ocean, their spirits rose, and they spoke of the happy future in store for them. nigel, however, was not altogether free from anxiety. he could not forget the conversation he had overheard between the captain and priest, though sometimes he almost fancied that it must have been a dream, villegagnon was so courteous and polite to all his passengers, and expressed sentiments so in accordance with theirs. at length "land! land!" was shouted from the mast-head. the goal of their hopes was near, and the ships, getting close together, glided with a fair breeze towards the magnificent bay of nitherohy. lofty and fantastic mountains, then unnamed by europeans, rose out of the blue waters before them. on the left, appeared the conical-shaped height, since known as the sugar loaf. further on, on the same side, the three brothers reared their heads to the skies, and still more to the south was seen the corcovada and gavia, the green mountains of the three brothers strongly contrasting with the latter-named peaks, while the distant ranges of the blue mountains rose in the interior. on the right was seen another range of varied-shaped heights, extending far away to the north. passing beneath the lofty sugar loaf, the flotilla sailed through the entrance, when the magnificent land-locked expanse opened out before them, surrounded on all sides by hills and lofty mountains; while lovely little verdant and palm-clad islands appeared dotting the dark bosom of the water. words, indeed, fail to describe the beautiful and varied scenery. the anchors were dropped close to one of the first isles they reached. on this spot villegagnon told the eager crowd who surrounded him that he had determined to form the first settlement of the new colony. here, at the entrance of the harbour, and surrounded by water, they might defy the attacks of enemies from without, or the portuguese or natives who might venture to dispute their possession of the country. from this they might extend to others on either side, and then form a settlement on the shore, thus advancing till they had brought under subjection the whole of the surrounding country. the settlers expressed their satisfaction at the captain's plan, as they gazed at the richly coloured woods which covered the sides of the surrounding hills, at the purple blooming quaresma, the snake-like cacti, and the gorgeous flowering parasites hanging down even from the jagged and precipitous sides of the sugar loaf, and the rich verdure starting forth from every nook and crevice of the fantastically shaped rocks. scarcely had the anchor been dropped, than the sun set behind the distant mountains, and, as darkness rapidly followed, they remained on board during the night. next morning, constance and her father came on deck, where they found the young lieutenant attending to his duties. again they gazed with renewed pleasure at the wild and the sublime outline of the surrounding mountains with their varied combinations, while the richness and beauty of colouring thrown over and around the whole, by the purple and rose colours and ethereal blue of the sky, imparted to the scene a beauty which no fancy sketch of fairyland could surpass. as they turned their eyes towards the nearest shore of the main land, they saw the beach and fringing rocks covered by a multitude of natives, waving green boughs as a sign of welcome; while, on the heights above, they had kindled numerous bonfires, to show their satisfaction at the arrival of the french, whom they believed had come to protect them from their enemies, the portuguese. preparations were being made on board the ships to land the officers and artisans, with materials for building the proposed fort. villegagnon, in his barge of state, proceeded towards the shore to open negotiations with the native chiefs. he had requested the count de tourville to accompany him, and constance begged that she might also go. as it was a mission of peace, no danger was apprehended; and it was thought that a lady being seen in the boat would give further assurance to the natives of the pacific intentions of their visit. nigel, being one of the tallest and best-looking of the officers, was selected to steer the barge. four other boats followed at a short distance. their crews were fully armed, but were ordered to keep their weapons out of sight, and only to advance should the indians show any sign of hostility. as the barge neared the shore, a tall and dignified chief, his dress of the richest skins, and ornamented with gaily-coloured feathers, with a circle of plumes on his head, holding an unstrung bow of great strength in his hand, was seen standing on the beach to receive the new-comers. by his side was a youth, strongly resembling him in features, bearing his shield and quiver, and also handsomely dressed, while other chiefs were drawn up in a semi-circle a short distance behind him, with the rest of his people collected on either side. he advanced a few paces with dignified steps, and, stretching forth his hand to offer a friendly grasp to the captain as he landed, announced himself as tuscarora, chief of the tamoyos. according to indian custom, he made a long harangue, welcoming the strangers to his country, and assuring them of his friendship. "you come at a fortunate moment, when your aid may render us essential service in assisting us to defend ourselves against the assaults of a tribe of white men, who, for some years past, have attempted to establish themselves on our shores. they call us idolaters, and pretend to be of a religion which hates idolaters; but they themselves have numerous figures of men and women, before which they bow down and worship, and they fail not to shoot or cruelly ill-treat those of our people who fall into their hands; we, therefore, do not trust to their religion or promises." the chief concluded by assuring the french that they were welcome to take possession of the island off which their ships lay, or of any other they might select in the bay. villegagnon replied that he and his people came in the character of true friends to the indians, and his great object was to obtain their friendship and support, and that their religion taught them to consider all worshippers of figures and pictures and any visible object as idolaters; their desire being to serve the great spirit who watched over the indians as well as over themselves, and that by their acts they would show that they were worthy of the confidence their new friends were evidently disposed to place in them. he expressed a hope, also, that by an exchange of commodities, and by mutual support, they would learn to regard each other as brothers. during this address the indians preserved the most perfect silence, though the eyes of the young chief, who stood by his father's side, wandered towards the boat in which the rest of the visitors still retained their seats. an attendant, now advancing, lighted the calumet of peace, which tuscarora presented to the captain, who, after drawing a few whiffs, returned it to the chief, who performed the same ceremony. the rest of the party now landing, the pipe was passed round among them. constance, who stood by her father's side, regarded the scene with much interest. she could not avoid remarking the glances of admiration which the young chief cast at her, and was compelled more than once to turn round and speak to nigel, who remained close to her. he himself observed the looks of the young chief, which created an undefined feeling in his breast, though his pride forbade him in any way to exhibit it. "these indians are of a far more martial and gallant bearing than i had supposed; but still they are savages, and we should be wise if we are on our guard against them," he observed to constance. this was said aside, while villegagnon was replying to the address delivered by the tamoyo chief, who then introduced the handsome youth standing by his side as his son tecumah, "who will ever, as he regards my injunctions, be a friend and ally of the french," he added. the young man in a few words expressed his desire to act according to his father's wishes, winding up, as he pointed to the sky, "should tecumah fail to fulfil his promise, may the great spirit punish him as he will deserve." thus far the interview had passed off in a most satisfactory manner. the chief expressed his desire to visit his new allies, but villegagnon thought it prudent to decline the honour till the fort was erected, and the colonists were in a position to defend themselves, and at the same time to make such a show of their strength as might overawe the indians, in whom they were not inclined to place more than a very limited amount of confidence. the portuguese were at this time settled in a town which they called saint vincente, about fifty miles to the south, the first colony founded by them under martin alfonso de souza; and as there were many brave adventurers among them, villegagnon thought it probable that as soon as they heard of his arrival, they would send an expedition against him. the meeting with the chiefs having been brought to a conclusion, the boats returned to the ships, on board which every one was now engaged in landing stores for the construction of the proposed fort. as numerous trees grew on the island, they were cut down, and formed an abundance of material for the purpose. the artisans, who knew the importance of speed, laboured assiduously, and the work made rapid progress. the chief fort was built on the eastern side of the island, to resist the attack of a hostile fleet; and in the course of a few days the guns were mounted, and the colonists considered themselves fully prepared for defence. houses were also commenced, and those weary of their long confinement on board ship hoped soon to take up their residence on shore. the natives brought over in their canoes an abundant supply of provisions, and, delighted with the beauty of the climate, the settlers felt thankful that their steps had been directed to so happy a spot, and looked forward with confidence to the time when they might see a handsome city rise on the shores of the bay. now, too, they could all meet together to read god's word, and to listen to the preaching of their minister without dread of interruption. the chief of the tamoyos, with his son tecumah, attended by a number of the principal men of the tribe, arrived in a fleet of canoes to pay their promised visit to the white men. villegagnon received them at the head of his seamen, and all the settlers drawn up under arms. the indians were evidently much struck by the martial appearance of their new allies, and almost as much so by the progress which had been made in the settlement, as the fort, with its guns, and the houses, were already erected. it was a sabbath morning, and at the usual hour a bell summoned the settlers to worship. tuscarora seemed to fancy that some magical ceremony was going forward, and was afraid to enter; but tecumah, less superstitious than his father, and prompted by curiosity, begged leave to attend, accompanied by several other young men. though they were unable to comprehend a word, their countenances exhibited the most perfect seriousness and apparent interest in what was going forward. the count, who had observed tecumah, whose eyes, indeed, had seldom been turned away from the spot where he and his daughter sat, sent for the interpreter to inquire of the young chief what opinion he had formed. "it is clear to me that you worship a great unknown spirit, and that you sing to him songs of praise, while your teachers exhort you to love and obey him, and he is, i am sure, pleased with such worship. i remarked how it differs from that of the portuguese, who make idols of painted wood, and bow before them as if such things could hear, or understand, or give help to the foolish men who put faith in such nonsense." "and is such the opinion you have formed without having the principles of our faith explained to you?" asked the count, astonished at the intelligence displayed by the young chief. "i have said what i conceive to be the truth," answered tecumah. "i would like to know more of your faith, since it enables you to be as wise and powerful as i see you are. some time since, during an interval of peace, i visited the settlement of the portuguese. there i saw bearded men bowing down, some before a cross with a figure nailed on it, others before a woman with a child in her arms; others, again, were adoring an infant in a cradle; and others, men and women, in long robes, with books or staffs in their hands. some were worshipping even pictures, and i thought that all these things were the gods of the portuguese. when they told me that the woman with the child in her arms was the holy virgin, and that the child was also a god, i could stop to hear no more, feeling sure that the great spirit to whom the indian looks up as god would be displeased with such blasphemy." "undoubtedly he is," said the count; "but had you inquired further, you would have been told that the figure on the cross and the child in the woman's arms and the one in the cradle represented the same person, the saviour of mankind, who is now in heaven, at the right hand of god." "then, how can he be in heaven and on earth at the same time?" asked the indian. "and if he is in heaven, surely men of sense should lift up their hearts to him there, and not bow before figures which can have no resemblance to him; for i observed that even the infants differed from each other. and who, tell me, does the figures of the woman represent?" "she was one especially honoured among women, but who the saviour expressly showed he did not desire should be worshipped," answered the count. "she was chosen to be the earthly mother of the son of god, who so loved the world, that he desired to become man, that he might be punished instead of all men; for all, being by nature sinful, deserve punishment, and god, who is all just and all merciful, decreed that all who believe that jesus, his son, was punished for our sins, should have those sins washed away, and be received into favour again by him. thus, jesus came into the world as an infant, grew up to manhood, and, after setting an example to mankind by the obedient, pure, holy life he led, he allowed himself to be put to the most cruel of deaths on the cross, such as the vilest of malefactors were alone considered deserving of. to prove that he was god, by his own will and power he rose again and ascended into heaven, there to be the advocate and mediator of those he had redeemed. through him alone the prayers of those who believe in him can be offered and be received acceptably by god." the young chief listened attentively to what the count said. "this is very wonderful, very wonderful," he observed, after being for some time lost in meditation. "i would wish to hear more about the matter; yet it strikes me as strange that god should allow his name to be profaned, and these senseless images to be worshipped instead of himself." "you are right, my friend," said the count. "god is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. he is also long-suffering and kind, and therefore he does not punish men as they deserve, that they may have an opportunity of turning from their sins and being reconciled to him." the count gladly took the opportunity of explaining further the truths of the christian faith to the young chief, who seemed to drink in eagerly every word he heard. it was the first of many visits he paid, and often was his canoe to be seen, as the shades of evening drew on, skimming across the tranquil waters of the harbour towards the mainland. the indians received such entertainment on their first visit as the french could afford; and while it was yet daylight they returned in their canoes to the shore. one evening the count and his daughter were sitting in their house with several guests, among whom nigel was one. they had met to read god's word and to sing the hymns of marot, which the french protestants loved so well. the weather, hitherto fine, had, before sunset, given signs of changing. dark clouds were seen gathering eastward, and already a damp and chilly wind blew up the harbour's mouth, while the sea rolled in, sending its billows with an angry roar against the foundations of the new fort. as the tempest increased, a gun fired from each of the ships summoned their respective officers and men on board, and nigel had unwillingly to hasten away from the house of his friend. it was not without difficulty that the boats reached the ships. the topmasts and topgallant masts were sent down on deck, and fresh anchors were got out. the settlers, as they saw the masts of the ships through the gloom, rolling from side to side, and watched the furious waves rushing in from the sea, began to tremble for their safety. they had, however, to think of themselves. the wind rapidly increased, the tall trees still remaining on the island bent before it, and the waves washed over the walls of the fort with relentless fury, threatening every moment to overwhelm them. villegagnon, who had remained on shore, fearing that the guns might be lost, ordered them to be dragged out of the fort to a place of safety. it was a task of no slight danger, for already the woodwork trembled at each assault of the billows, and scarcely were the guns removed than, crash succeeding crash, large fragments of the fort, the construction of which had cost them so many days of labour, were rent away, and either carried off by the retiring seas, or thrown high up on the shore. constance de tourville anxiously watched the progress of the storm. she had accompanied her father and several of their friends to watch the ships which lay in the harbour exposed to its fury. they could see the foaming waves dashing against them, and breaking high over their bows. soon one was seen to be moving, when a single sail was set, and away she sped into the darkness up the harbour. the others dragged their anchors, or were torn from them, and were likewise compelled to seek for safety in some sheltered spot. with good pilots on board, this might easily have been done, but no one had a knowledge of the upper parts of the harbour, and it was impossible to say in what direction they might seek for safety. that night was one of deep anxiety to all the settlers. the furious waves, surging round the little island, swept over the lower parts, and threatened at times to overwhelm it. many of the trees, deprived of the support of their neighbours, which had been cut down, bent before the gale. branches of some were torn away, others were broken off, and some uprooted from the ground. several of the newly built houses were unroofed, and others were thrown down altogether by the wind. that of the count stood firm, and he and his daughter gladly offered shelter to as many of their friends as it could contain. constance, who had had a sleepless night, waiting till dawn broke, sallied forth to look for the ships. not one of them was in sight. in vain she made inquiries of those who had come, like herself, to look for them. no boats remained on shore; indeed, with the waters of the harbour tossing about as furiously as they were, even the largest could not have made her way amidst them. the indians, from whom alone they could obtain any information, dared not venture across, and thus they must remain in ignorance of what had become of the ships till, the tempest being over, those which had escaped destruction should return. "vain is the help of man. in god let us put our trust. he may think fit to preserve them; if not, we must say with confidence, `his will be done,'" said the minister laporte, addressing those assembled on the beach. chapter six. nigel's return to france. meantime the governor had been surveying the damages committed by the storm, and, summoning the count and other leading people, announced his intention of abandoning the island before more labour had been expended, and settling on another higher up the harbour. all approved of his proposal, for though they saw that the island was well placed for defence, it was also exposed to the fury of the sea when excited by tempests. they now awaited anxiously for news of the ships, but still the wind blew furiously up the harbour, and would prevent them from coming down, even should they have escaped shipwreck. fears were entertained that they might have been cast on the northern shore, when their crews would most probably have fallen into the hands of the portuguese. for two days more the tempest continued, and the hearts of the colonists remained agitated with doubts and fears. the third morning broke bright and clear, the clouds dispersed, and the wind, changing, blew with a gentle breath down the harbour. had a boat remained on the island she would have been sent in search of the missing ships. some proposed building a flat-bottomed raft, which might be finished in a few hours and serve to navigate the smooth waters of the bay. villegagnon gave the order to commence the work, and already it had made some progress, when a shout was raised of "a sail! a sail!" it was one of the ships standing down before the wind from the upper part of the harbour. another and another appeared, till at length the minds of the colonists were set at rest. they all had had narrow escapes, but had succeeded in bringing up under the lee of different islands, where, the water being smooth, they had ridden out the storm. every one capable of labouring immediately set to work to re-ship the guns, and stores, and even the woodwork of the houses and forts, to convey them to an island villegagnon had fixed on in a more secure part of the harbour. the task occupied several days, and sorely tried the patience of those who were anxious at once to commence their intended agricultural pursuits. the advantages possessed by the new spot selected were evidently superior to those of lange island which they had left. the count proposed that the name of their patron, "admiral coligny," should be given to their present resting-place, and he was supported by the leading colonists. the governor, with a bad grace, consented, though it was evident that he had intended to bestow his own name on their new acquisition. with the exception of the losses caused by the storm, all hitherto seemed to be going on well; and nigel began to hope that villegagnon had abandoned his design, and really intended to establish a colony on the principles proposed by the admiral. he was glad, indeed, that he had not spoken of his suspicions to constance or her father, as they must have been, had he done so, greatly troubled about the future. he, in common with all the officers and men of the expedition, was busily engaged from morn till night in erecting the new fortifications, which were laid out on a much larger scale, and were built far more substantially than the last had been. the colonists' dwellings were also re-erected, and, wood being abundant, many of them were of considerable size, though only one story in height. within the fort were the barracks for the soldiers, while a number of houses to afford shelter to the inhabitants, should the settlement be attacked, were erected. the larger residences were scattered about over the island, and a village sprang up on the shores of the chief landing-place. it was, however, well protected by the fort, off which lay the ships, and it was considered that while they remained it would be secured against an attack. four smaller forts were also built on commanding situations in the more accessible parts of the island, so villegagnon considered that the settlement was well able to resist the assaults of either a civilised or barbarous foe. the friendly disposition shown by the tamoyos, the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood, gave him no anxiety on the latter account; while, although by this time the portuguese settlement in the south had greatly increased, the portuguese had shown no disposition to advance towards the shores of the bay of nitherohy. it was the intention of the french to form a settlement on the southern shore of the bay as soon as their numbers were sufficiently increased; and villegagnon, relying on his secure position, resolved at length to send back the fleet for reinforcements. nigel had in the mean time been a frequent visitor at the house of the count de tourville, where he ever received that friendly welcome which made him hope that he would not disapprove of his aspiring to the hand of constance, who appeared to have no doubts on the subject. she knew that nigel was of noble birth though destitute of fortune, and she felt sure that her father would not refuse to give her to one, her equal in birth, who was of her own religion, and whose heart was hers, while he was well able to protect her. they had not hitherto spoken of love, but they were mutually aware of the state of each other's affections, the most perfect confidence existing between them. occasionally a holiday was allowed, when nigel, having one of the ship's boats at his command, took the count and his daughter, with other friends, across the bay, to visit its picturesque shores and the many lovely islands resting on its bosom. the party had gone higher up the bay than they had hitherto ventured to do, and reaching a small island which appeared to be uninhabited, they went on shore, proposing to dine and wander through its shady woods. the seamen remained near the boat, while constance and two lady friends, with the officers and other gentlemen who formed the party, proceeded to a clear spot beneath the shade of some lofty trees, where for awhile they could enjoy the sea breeze, while discussing the viands they had brought. the repast being over, the three ladies strolled along the beach to the western end of the island, for the purpose of enjoying the view which extended almost to the extreme limit of the harbour. constance's two friends had seated themselves on the bank, while she, attracted by some flowers which grew near the edge of the water ran forward to examine them. she was on the point of picking one of gorgeous hue when a canoe, paddled by a single indian, unobserved by her, darted round the point and approached the beach. the occupant sprang lightly on shore, when a cry from her companions made her look up, and she saw a tall and handsome native, with a circlet of feathers on his head, and a cloak and kilt richly adorned, standing before her. her first impulse was to fly, but, giving another glance at the stranger, she recognised tecumah, the young chief of the tamoyos. she had already acquired some knowledge of the language. "what brings you here?" she asked. "we thought that none of your people were on the island." she felt that it was better to speak, although she was not altogether free from fear. the respectful attitude of the young chief, however, reassured her. "i often come here," he answered. "seeing your boat approaching, i waited for an opportunity of speaking to you, lady. for days and days i have longed for it. since my eyes first rested on your countenance it has never been absent from my heart. my ambition has been to become like your people, and to gain the knowledge they possess, and thus be worthy of leading you home as my bride." such in substance was what the young chief said, although his address was far longer, and more full of figurative expressions than have been here given. constance at first could not understand what he said, but when its meaning broke on her she felt no small amount of alarm and uneasiness, yet her right feeling would not allow her to treat young tecumah, savage though he was, either with contempt or anger. "you have surprised and pained me," she answered gently. "it is not the custom of the maidens of my country to wed with those of another race or of a different faith," she answered. "i grieve to hurt your feelings but what you have asked can never be granted. continue, as heretofore, to be the friend of my people, and you will also remain my friend. let me now return to my companions, for they cannot fail to be surprised at seeing you; only let me ask that you will never repeat what you have just said, and banish me, i pray you, from your thoughts." "not while tecumah breathes the air of heaven can your form be banished from his heart. oh, ask him not to perform a task beyond his power," answered the indian. "he obeys you now, as you will find he is ever ready to do. farewell." saying this, greatly to the relief of constance, the indian with slow steps returned to his canoe, while she hastened back to her companions. "who is he? what object brought him here?" asked one of the young ladies in a tone of alarm. "he certainly did not appear unfriendly," remarked the other. "i should say, constance, judging from his manner, that he is a devoted admirer of you. come, my dear, confess--did he not ask you to become his bride? ah! i thought so," she continued, observing the colour rising on constance's cheek. "i cannot reply to you!" exclaimed constance, feeling excessively annoyed at her friend's remarks. "you would not for a moment suppose that i should listen to such a proposal. i scarcely, indeed, could understand what he said. but we must not remain here, and it will be well if we return immediately to the boat, lest more of the savages should be lying concealed in the island and intrude themselves on us." this last observation induced her companions eagerly to follow her advice, evidently more alarmed than she was, and as they hurried on they frequently looked back, expecting to see a party of dark-skinned warriors suddenly start forth from the forest near them. they, however, reached their friends in safety. on finding themselves safe on board the boat they recovered their spirits, and the other ladies even ventured to banter constance about her indian admirer. nigel naturally inquired what had happened. constance then told him of the sudden appearance of the indian, but the expression of her countenance prevented him from asking further questions. the expedition, which all agreed had been a very pleasant one, terminated without any further incident worthy of note. nigel, as usual, spent the evening at the count's house; and he and constance found an opportunity before the other guests arrived, for strolling out in the woods behind the house, through which several walks had already been cut. she then frankly told him what had occurred, begging him, at the same time, not to be anxious on that account, as she had every reason to believe that the young chief would not again molest her. "i trust not, dearest constance!" exclaimed nigel, taking her hand. "would that i had a right to protect you. will you consent to become mine if your father will give his permission?" constance gave him her hand. he spoke of his want of fortune, but he reminded her that he had a strong arm and willing heart, qualifications of no slight importance in a new colony, and he had every reason to hope that he should be able to maintain her. she agreed that he should immediately speak to the count, and he offered to throw up his commission and cast in his fortune with her father and his associates; and before they returned to the house many a plan for the future was agreed on. the count, almost to their surprise, without offering any objections, entered into all their views; and nigel determined the next morning to ask permission from the captain to quit his ship and settle on shore. "impossible, sir," was the answer. "were i to give you the permission you ask all the officers and men would be desiring to turn settlers. i intend to send the ship back immediately, and you must be prepared to attend to your duty." in vain nigel expostulated; villegagnon threatened to put him in irons and send him back as a mutineer if he refused to obey his orders. the ships were rapidly got ready for the voyage. nigel, with a sad heart, bade farewell to constance. "rest confident of my love," she whispered. "we must wait till you can obtain the admiral's sanction to quit the service. my father will write to him on the subject, and i doubt not that he will grant your request." still, though constance spoke with confidence, the hearts of the young people were sad, for they could not help thinking of the many dangers which they both would have to encounter. those to which constance might be exposed rose up before nigel. the settlement might be attacked by the portuguese, or the natives might prove treacherous, and he could not forget his doubts of villegagnon's honesty. constance thought of the storms and the enemies nigel might have to encounter during his voyage, and the risk he might run of being treated as a heretic by the roman catholics on returning to france. with forebodings she could not overcome, she saw the ship's sails spread to the wind as they glided out of the harbour. the voyage to europe was accomplished without any disaster. while the ships were refitting, nigel, accompanied by monsieur billard, captain of the _vesta_, one of the ships of the squadron, made a journey to rouen, where the admiral had come to meet a number of persons who proposed embarking. the advantages to be gained in the new colony had spread among the protestants of france, and persons of all ranks and from all quarters were eager to embark. the undertaking was especially favoured by calvin, farel, and other protestant ministers, who hoped ere long to see a large and flourishing community of their fellow-believers established in the new world, where many of those suffering in europe might fly for refuge. rouen was a large and populated place in those days, and the new emigrants had no difficulty in finding accommodation. nigel and captain billard called on the admiral at his hotel, and were received with great courtesy and kindness. nigel presented the count's letter. "i am sorry, my young friend, for one reason, that you desire to quit the navy of france, for i feel sure that you would have risen to distinction," observed the admiral, "although i may congratulate you on another account; and i, therefore, do not hesitate to grant your request. you will, i hope, succeed in the new position you have chosen." nigel thanked the admiral, and afterwards, accompanied by captain billard, went to call on several persons of distinction who were about to proceed with them to nitherohy. he had particularly wished to go on to tourville to see his old friend the steward, so as to be able to give to the count a report of the state of his property. so eager, however, were the emigrants to set out, that the ships were got ready with unusual rapidity, and he had no time to make the journey. he was walking in the evening through the streets, when he caught sight of a person in ecclesiastical dress, whose features he recognised, and on a second glance he felt sure that they were those of the very man he had seen in company with villegagnon. he suspected that the priest was there for no good purpose. the jesuit regarded him with his keen grey eyes, and evidently recognised him, and when nigel and his companion passed on, followed them at a distance. the next morning, accompanied by a number of emigrants, they set out for havre. most of the party were men who followed civil occupations; the gentlemen, however, carrying swords, while a few among them had pistols. on reaching honfleur they found a large crowd assembled in the market-place, through which they had to pass on their way to the boats, which were waiting to carry them on board their ships. in the crowd nigel again caught sight of the priest, who was speaking to the people around him. "come, come, my friends," cried captain billard, who rode at the head of the party; "we wish to react the boats waiting for us." "they are heretics, despisers of the holy virgin and the saints!" cried some one from the crowd. "down with them. cut them to pieces. let none escape." scarcely were the words uttered than a shower of stones was hurled at the heads of the protestant emigrants, who immediately drew their swords to defend themselves, while they forced their way through the crowd. scarcely, however, had they got many yards before they were met by a body of men, some with firearms, and others with spears and axes. "we must fight for our lives, my friends," cried captain billard. "on! on! but keep together." the bold front which he and his companions showed for a time kept back their assailants; but a voice, which nigel recognised as that of the priest, was heard shouting, "down with them! down with them!" and the mob again pressed them close. many were wounded, and nigel, with grief, saw his friend fall from his horse, shot through the body. he in vain endeavoured to rescue him. the savages dragged him into their midst, hacking and hewing his inanimate form. nigel, seeing that he and his friends would be cut to pieces, urged them to keep close together; and by desperate efforts they at length cut their way down to the boats, from which the seamen, who were fortunately armed, leapt on shore, and, furiously charging the mob, turned them back and kept them at bay while the emigrants embarked. on counting their numbers, it was found that, beside the captain, three others had fallen, while many were wounded. providentially the women and children, with their baggage, had been sent on the day before from rouen, or the whole party would have been cut to pieces. on reaching havre, nigel and two other officers went on shore to complain of the outrage, but could obtain no redress from the authorities, who merely shrugged their shoulders and declared they could not restrain the religious zeal of the people. the anchors were speedily got up, and with sad hearts the emigrants left their native shores. a fair wind carried the squadron down channel, and for some time the voyage was prosperous. before, however, they reached the latitude of madeira the weather changed, and a heavy gale coming on, sorely tried the imperfectly prepared ships. the officers, exerting themselves to the utmost, encouraged their men, and the pumps were kept going till the storm ceased and the leaks could be got at and stopped. when the ships, which had been scattered by the gale, again joined company, all were found to have been sorely battered. one had lost her topmasts, another her bowsprit, and the rest some two or more spars. they had no friendly port into which they could put, as madeira was in the hands of the portuguese, so they had to wait for a calm to repair their more serious damages. the line was crossed without having the opportunity, and when within three or four days' sail of their destination, some strange ships were seen ahead, apparently waiting for them. there could be no doubt that the strangers were portuguese. a consultation was held by the captains whether they should try to escape by altering their course, or stand boldly on and attack the enemy. water and provisions were running short, and should they take to flight, days and even weeks might elapse before they could gain their port. they determined, therefore, to stand on, and should an attempt be made to stop them, to fight bravely as long as their ships should swim. their enemies were not to be despised, they knew, for the portuguese of those days were renowned for their hardihood and courage. five sail were counted, the number of their own ships, so that each would have an antagonist to contend with. the french, under all sail, keeping close together in line, stood towards the headmost of the enemy's ships, which were somewhat separated from each other. nigel's being the leading ship of the french squadron, first came up with the headmost one of the enemy's ships. they were sailing, it must be understood, on two sides of an angle, the french before the wind, the portuguese close hauled. captain beauport, the commander of the _madeline_, immediately hauled his wind and poured in his broadside at close quarters, bringing the enemy's mizenmast, with its large mizen, down on deck. the effect was to make the ship pay off before the wind, and expose her stern to the fire of the _madeline's_ guns, which had been rapidly reloaded and run out. captain beauport then running up on the larboard side of the portuguese, so as to place himself between her and the rest of the enemy, continued the fight broadside to broadside, while he threw out a signal to his consorts to attack the other ships of the enemy. they, though considerably larger than the french, after exchanging a few shots at a distance, put up their helms and ran off before the wind, leaving the first ship attacked by captain beauport to her fate. this was soon settled, for though her guns and crew greatly outnumbered those of the _madeline_, so many of her people had been killed and wounded, that as the french ship ran alongside for the purpose of boarding the enemy, the crew of the latter hauled down their flag and cried for quarter. this was immediately given, and efforts were made to stop the shot-holes through which the water was running into the prize. there seemed very little prospect of keeping her afloat. her crew and passengers were in despair, and were eager to take refuge on board their captor. many of the men, instead of endeavouring to save the ship, fell down on their knees, invoking the virgin and saints to assist them. captain beauport and his officers, however, soon stirred them up, and insisted on their going below and attending to their duty. among the passengers were two priests, who seemed especially anxious to save some cases and packages, loudly calling on their countrymen to assist them. "never mind your baggage, my friends," said nigel. "let the men attend to their work. if your property is lost, patience. we must first save all the water and provisions, in case the ship should go down, as it will be difficult enough to feed all your people from our own stores." "but, monsieur officer, our property is invaluable," cried the priests. "it cannot be replaced. you do not know what precious things we have got." "precious or not, they must stay where they are till the shot-holes are plugged, unless you choose to carry them yourselves." "oh, sacrilegious heretic, we will be revenged on you some day," muttered one of the priests, while the other hurled some curses at nigel's head, to which he did not stop to listen, remembering the proverb that "curses, like birds, go home to roost at night." by plugging the shot-holes and setting strong gangs to work the pumps, the prize was kept afloat sufficiently long to get out some of the provisions and water, as well as a portion of her cargo. the priests again loudly called on their countrymen to assist them in transferring the goods to the _madeline_, though few of them showed any disposition to do so, but by the assistance of the french crew, their valuables were at length got out of the sinking ship. the rest of the fleet had now come up, and the prisoners were distributed among them. the priests, however, would not desert their baggage, which, they insisted, was their own private property. "if it is found to be so on inspection you shall retain it," observed captain beauport; "but as the cases may possibly contain munitions of war, we cannot allow them without examination to fall into the hands of your countrymen." the priests protested that there was nothing warlike in them, but the captain was determined to have the cases examined. on opening them one was found to contain a large coarsely painted figure of the virgin and child, another half a dozen small figure of saints, the third was full of flat leaden figures and crosses. "what are these?" asked the captain, coming to a fourth, full of small boxes and parcels. "those," answered the priest, who was looking indignantly on, "are the bones of saints and martyrs. let them not be touched, i beseech you, by sacrilegious hands." each package was labelled, a score or more having the name of saint anthony. "why, you must have got two or three saints' bodies here," exclaimed the captain. "only a very small portion of one, indeed," answered the priest; "a hair from his beard or a paring from his toe-nail is of value equal to the whole of his leg." "and what are these other packages?" inquired the captain. "each contains some precious relic, efficacious in curing every disease to which the human body is liable," answered the priest. "nonsense!" exclaimed the captain; "we cannot allow such rubbish to remain on board." "you will be guilty of horrible sacrilege and unheard-of cruelty to the settlers and poor natives, if you throw these precious relics into the sea, and deprive them of the benefits they will bring." "we will see about it," answered the captain. "what are these bales?" he asked, pointing to some canvas packages, which he ordered his men to rip open. the priests made no reply. they were found to contain sheets of paper, printed some in portuguese and some in latin, but all sealed with the seals of the ecclesiastical courts in portugal or at rome. they were, indeed, "indulgences," or "pardons" for various sins mentioned in the romish rubric, the prices, which varied from half a dollar to seven dollars, being marked upon each, the latter being for murder and the most heinous offences of every possible kind, which cannot be mentioned. "why, i see none for heresy, or sacrilege, or calling the pope and his cardinals gross impostors, and you two worthies are arrant rogues and fools, or we might have become purchasers to a large amount!" exclaimed the captain indignantly. "heave this trumpery overboard, and you, senhores priests, may be thankful that you have been deprived of the means of cheating your countrymen and deceiving the ignorant natives by your abominable impostures." the sailors, with shouts of satisfaction, forthwith hove overboard the boxes of relics, the bales of "indulgences," and the leaden charms, which quickly sank to the bottom. some cases of trumpery rosaries were found and dispatched the same way. the images, or rather the idols, for such the natives would have regarded them, were lowered overboard, and went bobbing about astern of the ship, and the water soon washing off the paint, reduced them to the appearance of shapeless logs. there were still several cases of crucifixes of all sizes, having the appearance of silver but were found to be of iron, covered with the thinnest tinsel. the priests pleaded hard to have them preserved. "no," said captain beauport, firmly; "i will be no party to your impostures. these are images as well as the others, and more blasphemous still, seeing that they have in no way the appearance of the crucified saviour; and he himself has said, `thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for i the lord thy god am a jealous god'--and that i am sure you would have taught the natives to do, for your own people do the same; and so, to prevent you or others from thus offending god, they must be put overboard with the rest of your idols." the priests swore oaths deep, but not loud, that they would be revenged on the heretics--oaths which they fully intended to keep. sail was now made, and the ships stood towards the land. they had not gone far, however, before the signal was made from the prize that the water was again rushing in. the _madeline_ and the other ships sent their boats to her assistance, but all the efforts of the crew could not keep her afloat, and they had barely time to escape from her, when she went down head foremost, with most of her cargo on board. as the french had no desire to retain their prisoners, they steered into a small port some way to the southward of nitherohy. here the portuguese were put on shore, with a supply of provisions and such arms as were required to enable them to protect themselves against the natives, who, they averred, would otherwise attack and cut them off--an event, considering the cruelties they had already begun to practise on the unfortunate indians, very likely to happen. a bright look-out was kept during the time for the enemy's squadron, but it did not appear; and the french, favoured by a fair wind, steered for nitherohy, which they were all eager to reach. nigel's heart beat with anxiety. besides knowing that the portuguese, in considerable force, were in the neighbourhood, and being uncertain as to the fidelity of the fickle indians, he could not forget his suspicions regarding villegagnon, and he dreaded to hear that the governor had carried out the treacherous designs which he believed him to entertain. all eyes were directed towards the island-fortress, as the ship sailed up the harbour. great was the satisfaction of the voyagers as they beheld the flag of france blowing out above the fortifications. cheers burst from their throats, and a salute fired from the shore was returned by the ships, as, gliding on, they came to an anchor before the landing-place. chapter seven. treachery. villegagnon stood waiting on shore to receive the new-comers, who landed amid the cheers of their countrymen. he expressed himself highly pleased with this accession of strength to the community, and loudly declared that he believed ere long their protestant colony would be established on a firm basis. his letters, he said, informed him that many thousands of french settlers were about to sail and join them. nigel hastened on shore as soon as his duties would allow, and was welcomed with all the marks of affection he could desire by constance, and kindly greeted by her father. great progress had been made, the count told him, and he hoped that they should soon be able to form a settlement on the mainland. "but we have been so happy here, that i should be sorry to move," said constance, pointing to a pretty garden seen from the window of their sitting-room. "think of all the pains we have bestowed on it, and, should it be deserted, in a few months, in this climate, it would again become a wilderness." "we must keep it as our country residence, and come here occasionally from our house in the new city," observed the count; "or perhaps you and nigel will like to make it your home." "oh, that will be delightful," exclaimed constance, "though i suspect that nigel will require a larger sphere of action than this little island would afford." they talked much more about the future, which, to the eyes of constance, looked bright and happy. the count, however, when alone with nigel, expressed his anxiety on several accounts. the governor had of late shown especial favour to the men he had collected to supply the place of those who had abandoned the expedition; and they were engaged in erecting a building, which it was very evident was intended for a church. why there should be any secrecy about the matter the count could not tell; but it was a suspicious circumstance, as chiefly those who had refused to attend at the protestant service were engaged on it. still the governor professed to be as warm a protestant as ever. "have you any suspicions of the honesty of his intentions?" asked nigel. "from this circumstance, and others which may seem trifling, suspicions have arisen in my mind," answered the count. nigel then told him the reason he himself had to doubt the governor's honesty. "i wish that you had told me of this before," said the count. "i should probably have returned with you to europe, rather than have supported such a man by remaining. however, your explanations satisfy me that you acted, as you thought, for the best. we must now endeavour to counteract his designs." they agreed not to speak to constance about their suspicions of the governor, as the matter would not fail to make her anxious. nigel had to return to his ship at night; but, early the next morning, he again went on shore to visit his friends, intending also to apply to the governor to be discharged from the naval service. as he was nearing the landing-place, he observed a canoe, urged on towards the shore with rapid strokes by an indian who plied his paddle, now on one side, now on the other. in the stern sat another person, a young girl, whose dark tresses were ornamented with a wreath of natural flowers, which gave an additional charm to her beautiful features, the rest of her costume being also adorned with gaily-coloured feathers, further increasing the picturesqueness of her appearance. she lightly stepped out of the canoe, followed by her companion, who hauled it up on the beach at the same time that nigel landed. they together made their way to the village as if well accustomed to traverse the path. nigel was a few paces behind them, and observed that they entered the house of the minister, monsieur laporte. on reaching the count's house, he mentioned the circumstance to his friends, and inquired who the indians were. "they must be, without doubt, the young chief tecumah and his sister cora, who come frequently to receive from our good minister instruction in the truths of christianity, of which, i trust, they have gained considerable knowledge," answered constance. "first the young chief came by himself, and then he begged permission to bring his sister. she is a sweet young creature; a perfect child of nature; and has already become even a more faithful believer than her brother, who cannot, as yet, understand why he should not destroy his enemies wherever he can find them." constance had before told nigel of her meeting with tecumah; she now assured him that the young chief seemed to have got over any attachment he might have felt for her, so nigel felt no sensations of jealousy. nigel proceeded afterwards to call on the governor to present his letter from the admiral. villegagnon received him in his usual courteous manner, and complimented him on his gallantry with the portuguese. when, however, he read the letter, his manner changed. "the admiral does not command here," he observed, "and i require officers on board my ships. i cannot accept your resignation." nigel expostulated in vain. instead, however, of at once refusing to serve, he resolved to take time to consider the matter. he went back to consult the count, who advised him to do nothing rashly; as, should he throw up his commission and come to live on shore, he would offend the governor and put himself completely in his power. while they were speaking, tecumah and cora, with monsieur laporte, came to the house, to pay their respects, they said, to the count and his daughter. tecumah recognised nigel, and spoke to him in a way which showed that he desired his friendship. while constance was conversing with cora in a mixture of their respective languages, each doing her utmost to make herself understood and understand what the other said, nigel found that tecumah had made considerable progress in his knowledge of french; also, which was of more consequence, he was well acquainted with the fundamental truths of christianity. had they, however, touched his heart? there was the question; his actions alone would show that. nigel inquired about the state of the country. tecumah assured him that his own tribe and those in alliance with them were sincerely attached to the french. "but others in the north, who have had emissaries from the portuguese among them, are not to be trusted," he observed. the portuguese themselves were also increasing rapidly in numbers, and their town of saint vincente was already of some size. "my people, however, will keep a vigilant watch on their proceedings, and i will give you notice, should we gain any intelligence of an expedition being prepared. should one come, with your ship's and with the assistance of our tribe, you will, without doubt, be able to drive back your enemies," he added. while the young people were speaking, the count drew monsieur laporte aside, and was earnestly discussing with him the state of affairs. the minister looked grave. "we must trust to him who overrules all things for his own wise purposes," he observed; "and should reverses overtake us, we must not lose confidence in his love and justice." nothing occurred for some time to interrupt the usual occupations of the colony. at length, one morning a signal from the fort announced that a fleet was in sight. the gunners were summoned to the batteries; all the men got under arms, and the ships prepared for battle; getting springs on their cables, so as to haul themselves into a position to defend the landing-place. as the ships approached, they were, to the infinite satisfaction of those on shore, seen to have the french flag flying at their mast-heads. there were five large ships and two smaller ones. it was hoped that they were bringing reinforcements of sound protestants who would establish their faith in the land, and contribute to the material progress of the colony. as they drew nearer, salutes were exchanged, and they came to an anchor close to the fleet. the voyagers when they landed were warmly received by their countrymen, who did their best to treat them hospitably. there were people of all ranks, and from all parts of france. several who had come in one of the larger ships were known to the count, who received them into his house. they stated that the fleet consisted originally of but three ships; but, as they were on the point of sailing, they were joined by two others conveying persons of whom they had been able to obtain no certain information. villegagnon received all in his usual courteous way, but it was observed that he paid the most attention to those on board the latter ships. before long it was whispered that among those people had been seen two men, who, though in secular dresses, were recognised as having been romish priests. still, though the people who had come in these two ships did not make their appearance at the protestant place of worship to return thanks for their safe voyage, they were not seen to practise any of the rites of the romish church. unpleasant rumours were, however, going about among the settlers, and the people asked one another how it was that the governor, who had professed to form a pure protestant colony, should have allowed romanists to come out among them. no satisfactory answer could be given to these questions, and some thought that the new-comers were possibly lately converted from rome, and would soon come to receive instruction from monsieur laporte. others, however, shook their heads, and observed that, had they been new converts, they would have exhibited more zeal, and would have been the first to join hands with the older brethren; instead of that, they associated entirely with the suspicious characters who had all along shown a disrespect to the protestant form of worship. all the settlers were, however, so busy in erecting dwellings, and cultivating the ground, that no one had time for polemical discussions. thus matters went on for some time till the church was finished. after it was roofed over, no persons, except those employed on it, were allowed to enter. numerous cases, which had formed part of the cargo of one of the ships, were landed and conveyed to it, and a large bell was hoisted up into the tower. one sunday morning the bell began to toll forth in a way which astonished the protestant settlers. the church was thrown open, and those who had been suspected by their fellow-colonists were seen with triumphant looks wending their way towards it. some of the protestants, influenced by curiosity, went in, and, on their return, reported that they had seen the two priests clad in their sacerdotal dresses, standing before a richly adorned altar, with a crucifix over it, and the figure of the virgin and child, with those of several saints placed in chapels on either side. mass, with all its accompaniments, was being performed, while the governor himself was taking part in the ceremony. the count de tourville, and several other leading protestants, called on him afterwards to express their astonishment and regret at what had happened. he received them with a haughty air, and declared that it was his intention, for the good of the colony, to encourage both forms of worship equally. the count expostulated. "the colony," he observed, "had been established for the express purpose of affording a home to protestants, where they could, regarding religious matters, avoid those dissensions which had sprung up in the old country." "you may still worship as you think fit; but others, who discover that they have erred in quitting the catholic church, have a right to enjoy the form which suits them best. i, as governor of this colony, am bound to please all parties, and i desire to hear no more complaints on the subject," he answered. the deputation, being thus dismissed, retired to consult what steps should be taken. though the protestants still outnumbered the romanists, the whole of the former could not be relied on, while the latter formed a compact body, most of them being thoroughly drilled by the priests, who had done their utmost to excite their fanaticism, while it was evident that they were supported by the governor. the protestants, therefore, arrived at the conclusion, as people often do under similar circumstances, that nothing could be done, and that they must wait the course of events. the two priests appeared to be quiet, well-disposed men; they made no outward show, but were observed to be going about quietly, from house to house, especially among the soldiers; and every sunday saw an increase in their congregation. the count watched these proceedings with feelings of dismay. monsieur laporte exerted himself among his congregation, and urged them to study their bibles, and to seek to live lives consistent with their christian profession. many listened to him and followed his advice; but there were not a few careless ones who went over to join the party of the governor and the priests. the women were induced to go to the church to listen to an organ which had been brought out from france, while one of the priests, who was a good musician, instructed them in the art of singing. fresh saints were set up, and additional ornaments were introduced, and on festal occasions the whole church was wreathed with flowers, imitating the custom of the heathens at their feasts of "flora," and other festivals. these attracted the careless and giddy among the young, who found the idolatrous system, which their fathers had repudiated, well suited to their tastes. thus rapidly the traitor villegagnon and his priests won over the larger part of the population. in vain the elder people, who had seen the effects of romanism in the old country, warned them and protested against the fearful errors which were being introduced. many of the young girls and youths were induced to go to confession and receive absolution for their past sins; the result being that they sinned and sinned again with their eyes open, under the belief that they could be again absolved. morality, which had been strictly maintained among the settlers, fast disappeared. the priests now openly sold indulgences, and went from house to house abusing those who refused to purchase them, and warned them that they would be considered as protestants and heretics. the count and other protestant elders, met and discussed what was to be done, but they had to confess themselves powerless. the minister preached more earnestly, and some few were won back to the truth; but the popular party still increased daily. the governor, it was observed, promoted only professed romanists, and managed by degrees to dismiss the protestant officers. villegagnon at length threw off the thin mask he had hitherto worn, and declared that the majority being in favour of rome, the settlement must become what he called a catholic colony. the protestants complained loudly of the governor's treachery; and several of them were arrested on charge of mutiny, and for plotting against the established authorities. captain beauport coming on shore one day, as he was on the point of returning to his boat, was seized and carried off to a prison villegagnon had lately erected in the fortress. he was not informed of the crime of which he was accused, nor could he conceive what it was, as he had carefully abstained from making any remarks on the conduct of his chief. the following day he was brought into the public hall of the fort, where the governor was seated as judge, supported by several of the officers whom he had promoted. one of the crew of the _madeline_, with the two priests, appeared as his accusers, and his officers and several of his men were ordered on shore as witnesses, nigel being among them. when the priests were called on to make their statements, one of them charged the brave captain with the crime of sacrilege, which, as it had been brought to his notice, he said that he felt bound to make it public. a seaman, then stepping forward, stated that by his orders, a number of holy images, crucifixes, and sacred relics captured from the portuguese, intended for the conversion of the heathen and the comfort of believers, had been sacrilegiously thrown overboard on their voyage to nitherohy. "of what immense value they would have been to us in the conversion of the heathen had they been preserved!" exclaimed one of the priests. "they were undoubtedly offered to us by heaven, to enable us to convert the barbarous natives." nigel and the other officers were then called on for their evidence. they had to confess that they saw the articles mentioned thrown overboard; but nigel observed, as they were part of the cargo of the prize, he could not suppose that the captain in any way acted contrary to what he was fully justified in doing. "beware, lest you are made a party to his crime!" exclaimed one of the priests. "i know well the malignant and impious disposition of your countrymen, and, had you not been imbued by their sentiments, you would have endeavoured to prevent so sacrilegious an act from being committed." the governor, as judge, declared that no further evidence was necessary. in vain the captain asserted that he had acted as he believed right. the priests shouted out that he deserved to die, and the traitor, villegagnon, forthwith pronouncing him guilty, condemned him to death. nigel, on quitting the court, hastened to the residence of the count, to tell him of the result of the trial. "this must not be," he said, on hearing it. "it would be a most atrocious murder. every protestant in the settlement must unite, and insist on having his life spared. it would be useless to petition; we must _demand_ our rights." nigel fully agreed with the count, and other leading protestants coming in were of the same opinion. "we must stake our lives on the issue," exclaimed one of the boldest. the count observed, that as it was their lives and liberties were in jeopardy, and that a bold front could alone save them. on separating they went among their friends to stir them up to action. that night every true protestant capable of bearing arms assembled, and the next morning marched together to the fort. on their way they met a roman catholic, who thought that captain beauport had been unjustly condemned, and willingly undertook to convey to the governor the resolution to which they had arrived. they waited, advantageously posted for defence on the brow of a hill a short distance outside the fort, while their envoy went forward with their message to the governor. they had also sent messages on board the ships, the officers and crews of most of which were sound protestants, and would, they had every reason to believe, support them in their endeavour to rescue the brave officer, who was loved and honoured by all, especially by his own crew. while waiting the return of their envoy, a messenger arrived from the fleet conveying the promise of the officers and men to afford them their full support. this made them still more determined to remain firm to their purpose. their envoy soon afterwards returned with the reply of the governor, stating that he would take their demands into consideration. on hearing this, they desired him to go back again, insisting that whether right or wrong, with regard to the act, it was committed on the high seas, beyond the jurisdiction of the governor, and that, if guilty, captain beauport must be sent to france to be tried. the governor, finding so strong a force opposed to him, saw that he had been premature in showing his colours, and that it would be his wisest course to try and conciliate those whom he could not for the present crush. he accordingly, accompanied by several officers, went out to meet the protestants. in the blandest style he could assume he assured them that he wished to act fairly towards both parties. he therefore stated his readiness to send captain beauport home for trial, and inquired whether any of the colonists who were dissatisfied with his government would wish to return to their native land. the idea had not before been entertained by them. several, however, at once replied that they were willing to return home, and others said that they would take the matter into consideration. "captain beauport, then, will be kept in safe custody, till the ships are ready to sail," said the governor. "they will be prepared in a few days; and, before that time, i wish to be informed of the number who desire to embark." the protestants, on receiving this announcement, returned to their homes. these were mostly situated together, and, as they had now ample proofs of the treachery of the governor, they stationed men on the look-out to give notice, should he send a force to attack them, that they might immediately reassemble and defend themselves. a meeting was held to discuss their future prospects. a considerable number of the most influential people resolved to return to france, hoping to live there in obscurity, or to make their way to geneva. some, among whom was the count, resolved to go to england, should he find france in the same unsettled state as he left it. nigel was now thankful that he had not abandoned the naval service, as he hoped that the _madeline_ would be sent home, and that he might again have the happiness of having constance and her father on board. still, the prospects of all the party were gloomy enough: many of them had embarked all their fortunes in the undertaking, and they would return without the means of support to their native shores. on the following day, a considerable number of the colonists sent in their names as desirous of returning, when they were informed, to their dismay, that the three smallest ships only would be got ready to receive them. reports had before been spread that so weatherbeaten and unseaworthy were these ships, that they were not again to be sent to europe, but to be retained in the harbour for the protection of the colony. nigel was almost in despair at receiving this information. he urged the count rather to remain than to run the risk of the voyage. the count, influenced by his daughter, was greatly disposed to follow the advice of nigel, who observed that the _madeline_ would probably before long be sent home, and that he might then take a passage on board her. the whole community were in a state of alarm; and it was increased when the governor sent directing them to be prepared to embark on the following day, with the information that only two of the ships could be got ready. that night the greater number of them met in their place of worship, to offer up their prayers to god, that he would protect them from the dangers they might have to encounter during their intended voyage. the meeting was almost concluded; monsieur laporte, in a loving address, was exhorting them to hold fast to the gospel, whatever persecutions they might have to endure, when a loud knocking was heard at the door of the chapel. on its being opened, an indian appeared in full war costume, with one of those formidable bows in his hand, with which the tamayas boasted they could send a shaft through the mail-clad body of a foe and fix him to a tree. "i am tecumah!" he exclaimed. "many here know me as a faithful friend of the french. i come to give you warning that a large force of your enemies and ours are on their way down the harbour to attack the island. they consist of portuguese and their indian allies the tuparas, who have transported their boats and canoes overland from the place where they have been secretly built for the purpose. they come in expectation of taking you by surprise, when, should they gain the victory, not a human being they may discover will be left alive. they have sworn to exterminate you and us by all the false saints they have taught their indian friends to worship." some doubted the information brought by tecumah; but the count and monsieur laporte urged their countrymen to believe him, as they well knew the warm affection with which he regarded them, and were convinced that he would not have alarmed them needlessly. some time was thus lost, but at length it was agreed that the count, with two other of the principal persons, should at once haste with tecumah to carry the information to the governor, and urge him to take steps for the protection of the settlement. unhappily, the protestant officers having all been removed from their posts, there was no one of authority in the congregation to send a direct order on board the ships to prepare for action. the night was unusually dark; not a breath of wind rippled the surface of the mighty estuary; and the ships, which were at anchor close together off the usual landing-place near the fort, could not move to any other position, where they might assist in the defence of the island, three sides of which were thus left unprotected. the enemy would certainly make their attack where they would not be exposed to the fire of the ships or that of the fort. chapter eight. attacked by enemies. tecumah urged the count and his friends to make all haste. even now he feared that there would be barely time for the french to assemble and prevent the enemy from landing. once on shore both parties would be on equal terms, and the most numerous would probably gain the victory. he had despatched a messenger, however, he said, to his father, to come with his warriors to the assistance of their friends, as, unfortunately, they were at a distance from their usual dwelling-place, engaged in hunting, and might not be able quickly to collect. the count had sent word to nigel to warn him and the other officers of the squadron to be prepared for an attack, and also to entreat as many as could be spared to come on shore to be in readiness for the defence of the island. the protestants had also got under arms, so that they might be able to march in any direction where their presence might be required. the governor received the count and his companions in the haughty and insolent manner he had of late assumed, and at first appeared inclined to discredit the account tecumah had brought; but when the young indian, with all the eloquence of his race, assured him of the truth of his statement, and warned him of the danger of delay, he changed his tone. he was too sagacious an officer not to see in reality that the warning must not be despised, but, without deigning to thank the count and his companions for the information they had brought, he desired them to go back to their friends. they obeyed his orders; while tecumah, having fulfilled his mission, hurried away to his canoe, intending to cross to the mainland for the purpose of urging his tribe to use all speed in coming to the assistance of the french. the governor, meantime, ordered the troops to get under arms, and sent off a despatch to the ships, directing the captains, some to get under weigh and to sail round to the other side of the island, others to remain ready for an attack near the landing-place. the calm, however, prevented the first part of his order from being obeyed. the whole population of the island was speedily aroused, and began to assemble at a central spot appointed by the governor. scouts were also sent out along the shore, and every precaution was taken which the sagacity of an experienced officer like villegagnon could suggest. the women and children, whose houses were in the more exposed situations, were brought to the fort, though it was hoped that the enemy might be driven back before they could effect a landing. scarcely, however, had the armed men collected, than the sound of firing was heard coming from the end of the island, where a little bay was situated. it was a spot which afforded an easy landing-place; but a fort had been built upon it, which it was supposed was of sufficient strength to drive back any enemy who might approach it. several shots followed the first, and then came through the calm night air the sounds of strife, the victorious warwhoops of the indians, and the shrieks and cries of the conquered. "forward, my men, and drive back the enemy," exclaimed villegagnon. "the fort has, i fear, been surprised, and the garrison cut to pieces, and, if so, the enemy have landed, and we must be prepared to encounter them on shore." saying this, the governor, who was not destitute of courage, led forward the main body of his men, while he despatched a messenger to the ships with an order for the seamen to advance to his support. the count with a small number of his men was ordered to keep in the rear, to act as he might think necessary. the darkness of the night prevented the french from seeing their invaders. they had not got far when they found themselves in the face of a force which they could only estimate by the hot fire which was opened on them. they fired in return with equal vigour, but it was soon evident that they were greatly outnumbered. several of them fell. showers of bullets whistled amidst them, while flights of arrows came flying into their ranks. in vain the governor endeavoured to repel the foe. at last he gave the order to sound the retreat, intending to fall back on the fort. the unseen enemy pressed him hard, and their fire increased rather than diminished, showing that more had landed. the count had now led his men up to take part in the fight, but they could do no more than check the advance of the enemy, and prevent them from overpowering the party under the governor. even the bravest began to despair of success. the flashes of the guns lighted up the darkness of the night, and where the fire was the hottest there the governor and count de tourville threw themselves fearlessly, exposing their own lives to encourage their followers. it was very evident that they had not only indians, but civilised europeans to fight against. notwithstanding their bravery, they were quickly driven back; and, before long, the count saw that his own and the surrounding houses would be exposed to destruction. at length a shout was heard on one side. it was recognised as coming from the body of seamen who were advancing to their support. the governor immediately despatched an officer to lead them to a position he wished them to occupy; but, before they had reached it, they found themselves engaged with a strong party of the enemy who had been sent to intercept them. the fight was now raging in two quarters, but still the enemy appeared to be gaining ground. constance de tourville had remained at home unwilling to desert the house till compelled to do so. several other ladies, whose houses were in more exposed situations, had come there for shelter, and stood listening with anxious hearts to the hot strife going forward within a short distance. at length some of the party proposed that they should fly to the fort; though, dreading the governor, they were unwilling, if it could be avoided, to place themselves in his power. constance preferred remaining, her father having promised to send timely notice to her should the french find themselves compelled to retreat. the sounds of the battle came nearer and nearer. several of the ladies declared that they could remain no longer, and hurried to the door to make their escape; constance remained firm. "i will obey my father," she said; "and when he sends me word that it is time to fly, i will go." the other ladies, influenced by her example, hesitated, when a shower of bullets came whistling above their heads, and shouts and shrieks and cries of the combatants sounded as if they were close at hand. it was too evident that such was the case. constance herself began to await anxiously for the order from her father to quit the house; when suddenly, in addition to the other sounds, a chorus of wild warwhoops burst on their ears. the savage cries were replied to by the shouts and cheers of the french. the musketry rattled as loud as ever, but none of the shots came near them. in truth, the tamoyos had arrived just at the moment the governor had determined to retreat and take shelter in the fort, leaving the rest of the island to the mercy of the invaders. tecumah was at the head of his tribe, who fought with the most desperate fury against their hereditary enemies the tuparas. the portuguese were now in their turn compelled to retreat; the french and indians pressed them hard, and, finding their expectation of surprising the settlement defeated, they took to flight towards the bay where they had left their boats. nigel had landed with a naval force, and, feeling that he was fighting for everything he held dear, he was regardless of his own safety. again and again he led his men on against greatly superior numbers of the enemy, but till the arrival of tecumah and his party all his efforts had been in vain. again he was leading them on, when he felt himself struck by a bullet, and, staggering a few paces, fell to the ground. still he called on his men to advance. the portuguese and tuparas every now and then faced about in order to cover the embarkation of those who first reached the boats. their bravery secured the retreat of their friends, but the greater portion of the rear-guard were overtaken and cut to pieces, while the main body shoved off from the shore and made their escape. constance and her friends had been anxiously awaiting the issue of the strife. when they heard the sounds of battle receding, their courage rose, and they hoped that their countrymen were gaining the victory. still they were left for a long interval. at length constance determined to go out and ascertain what had taken place. they provided themselves with lanterns, several of which had been brought to the house by those who had taken refuge in it, and, aided by their light, they went courageously forward. they had a higher motive also. they knew too well that many must have fallen, and they hoped to carry succour to some of the wounded, who might have been left behind by their advancing comrades. after going some way, they reached a spot where the strife had been hottest. here lay friends and foes mingled together, frenchman and portuguese; the indians only being distinguished by their war-paint and fantastic costume. on all the bullet, or arrow, or the deadly hatchet, had done its work. as they cast their lanterns on the forms stretched on the ground they saw that their help could not avail. the wounded had either been carried off by their companions, or had dragged themselves away to seek assistance. still they persevered in their mission of mercy, searching for others who might be still breathing. they were attracted by the sound of a groan, which proceeded from a spot not far off. again all was silent. "here is a wounded man!" exclaimed one of the ladies, calling to constance. "he is a naval officer, i see, by his dress." constance and her other friends hurried to the spot, and, by the light of a lantern cast on the countenance of the officer, constance saw at a glance that he was nigel. she threw herself on the ground, and endeavoured, with the help of her companions, to staunch the blood flowing from a wound in his side. he was pale as death, but another groan escaping from his lips showed her that he still breathed. at length they succeeded in stopping the effusion of blood. she called on his name, but he was too weak to answer, though once she felt, as she took his hand, a slight pressure returned, which showed that he recognised her voice. "oh, marie, hasten to the house, and entreat some of our friends to come and assist in carrying him there!" she exclaimed to one of her companions. "bring a bed, or a door torn from its hinges, on which he can be placed. we must not allow him to remain here longer than is possible. quick, my dear, if you love me!" her friend hurried away, eager to bring assistance which the young officer so greatly needed. constance in the mean time sat by the side of nigel, resting his head on her arm, while she bent over him, and assured herself that he still breathed. though dreading every moment to hear his last sigh, with loving and gentle words she endeavoured to recall him to consciousness. how fearfully long the time seemed. the sounds of the strife still going forward reached her ears, though she scarcely heeded them, for all her thoughts and all her feelings were centred on nigel. anxiously she and her friend waited the arrival of the party from the house. the latter every now and then got up and advanced a few paces to listen. at length lights were seen in the distance, and footsteps were heard approaching. constance uttered an exclamation of thankfulness when she saw her friends approaching with a litter they had hastily constructed with three poles supporting a mattress. with gentle care nigel was placed upon it, and the ladies lifting it from the ground proceeded towards the house. soon after they had reached it, the count arrived with the intelligence that the enemy had been driven off the island, and that the boats of the squadron had gone in pursuit of them. his sorrow at hearing of nigel's dangerous state was very great, and, ordering restoratives to be given him, he immediately set off in search of the surgeon, who had come out with the first party of the settlers, and had remained faithful to the truth. he happily discovered him attending to some of the wounded men who had been carried to one of the neighbouring houses. as soon as he could leave them he hastened to nigel's side. after examining his wound, he expressed a hope that, by constant watchfulness and care, he would recover, though the loss of blood had greatly exhausted him, and all would depend on his being kept perfectly quiet. one thing was certain, that he would be unable to move for many weeks to come, without risking his life. on hearing the surgeon's report, constance entreated her father not to carry out his intention of proceeding to europe. "i will certainly on no account leave him," he answered. "possibly the ships may be delayed, or the governor will be unwilling to let them sail, on the probability of the island being again attacked; but if so, he must treat the protestants with more justice than he has been doing for some time, and we must live in hopes that fresh arrivals from europe will again turn the scale in our favour." whether or not the governor suspected that the protestants hoped, with increased numbers, to recover their influence, it was difficult to say. the next day was devoted to rejoicings for the victory. the bells of the romish church rang out, the fort fired salutes, and a procession with crucifixes, banners, and images, marched through the island. the priests sang praises in honour of the virgin mary, whom they asserted had given them the victory, in answer to their petitions. the protestants assembled in their place of worship to return thanks to god for their deliverance. while the service, which had taken place at an earlier hour than usual, was going forward, an officer and party of soldiers arrived in front of the chapel. without knocking, or asking for admission, the officer entered the chapel with his hat on his head, and, in a loud voice, exclaimed-- "i bring you an order from the governor to disperse. he will allow of no meetings, except in the church he has built for the use of the colony." "allow us, sir, to finish the service in which we are engaged," answered the minister, in a deep tone. "it may be the last many of us will enjoy for some time to come." "my orders are to put a stop to your meeting," said the officer. "if you refuse to obey, i must use force to compel you." several of the persons present showed an inclination to dispute the point, but the minister and count urged them to yield obedience to the orders of the governor, and they quickly departed, when the officer, closing the door, put a seal on it, cautioning the people not again to enter, the governor having threatened severely to punish any who might do so. with sad hearts they returned to their homes. the victory over their enemies, instead of having improved their condition, appeared to have made it still more unbearable. many who had before intended to remain on the island now determined to proceed in the ships which the governor announced would sail in a couple of days. when, however, they went on board to arrange their sleeping places they found the vessels in so battered and unseaworthy a condition, and so overrun with vermin, that many resolved to remain rather than undergo the risk of a voyage on board them. the officers and crews confessed that they were very unwilling to sail; at the same time, as they were all protestants, they were anxious to get away from the island. the governor had also threatened them with punishment should they refuse. they promised, for their own sakes, as well as for that of their passengers, to repair the ships as much as time would allow. indeed, the crews were already working hard to fit them for sea. if the governor would permit them to remain another week, they might, it was hoped, be placed in a tolerably efficient state to cross the atlantic. the governor, however, would only allow them two more days, at the end of which time he insisted that all who intended to go must embark. a third of the original number, therefore, abandoned their purpose and resolved to remain and endure all the indignities to which they were likely to be subjected, while the rest, with many forebodings, went on board the two ships. they were, as it was, much overcrowded, and it was with difficulty that they could obtain sufficient provisions for the voyage, the governor asserting that no more could be spared from the stores of the garrison. when all were on board, and the anchors were about to be weighed, captain beauport was led out from prison in chains under a strong guard, and, not being allowed to communicate with any of his friends on shore, was conveyed on board; the captain to whose charge he was committed being directed by the governor to deliver up his prisoner to the authorities at the first port at which he could touch, charged with rebellion and heresy. captain dupre merely replied that he would do his duty, as far as he had the power. he was a silent undemonstrative man, not given unnecessarily to express his opinions. he had never shown a disposition to disregard the orders of the governor, who was, therefore, persuaded that he would carry them out on the present occasion. with sad hearts those remaining saw their countrymen sail away. they were anxious about their fate; but they had still greater cause to be anxious about their own. in the mean time, nigel, under constance's unremitting care, and that of the good surgeon who remained, was progressing favourably. some days passed before he had sufficient strength to speak, and not till more than a week had elapsed would the surgeon allow him to be told what had happened; he was then deeply grieved to hear that the count and constance had remained behind for his sake. he dreaded even more than they did the treachery and cruelty of villegagnon, knowing him as he did to be so completely under the influence of the priests. "he is but a wretched tool in their hands; and they, acting according to the dictates of their accursed system, which they call `the church,' are determined to drive every protestant out of the island, so that they may again be masters over the consciences of all the inhabitants. why," exclaimed poor nigel to constance, "did i not denounce the traitor to the admiral, who would not then, i feel convinced, have trusted the colony to his government? even had i failed to convince him, it would have been better to have been dismissed, and to have sought my fortune elsewhere. but then, constance, i should not have met you; and even now, if god wills that i should recover, i may be the means of preserving you from the dangers by which you are surrounded." "you acted as you believed right, and you must not blame yourself," said constance. "we must trust in god, and remember that, whatever happens, he orders all things for the best. should he permit these wicked men to triumph, let us feel sure that he has some object in view, though we may not see it." the count also exonerated nigel from any blame, and was much inclined to find fault with himself for having quitted france, instead of remaining at his post, and looking after his dependants. "we are but weak fallible creatures at best," he observed. "we often fancy that we are following god's will when we are pursuing only the promptings of our own inclinations. it shows how absolutely necessary it is to seek for guidance at the throne of grace in all our actions, even in what we may consider the most minute. when we remember that the hairs of our head are all numbered, and that god has told us that not a sparrow falls to the ground but he knows of it, we should remember that no act is too minute and inconsiderable to seek for counsel from him regarding it. i might say that at every word we utter we should ask him to direct us, for a single word may have an effect for good or for evil on those who hear it." still nigel was not satisfied with himself. few people can be so, when they review their past actions, unless they have acted as the count advised, and sought for guidance from above. for a short time the protestant settlers were left to act as they thought fit; but their place of worship continued shut up, and they were not allowed to enter it. they met, however, at each other's houses to read the scriptures and offer up prayer and praise together. but they thought it wise to do so with closed doors, and they always had some one on the watch outside to give notice of the approach of any of the papists. indeed, they found it necessary to use the same precautions which they had been accustomed to employ in france. they were now subjected to the same persecuting spirit as that from which they had attempted to escape. their only hope of being freed from their present galling condition was by a large influx of protestant settlers, when the scales might be again turned in their favour. would villegagnon, however, allow such to land? in all probability he would send them over to settle on the southern shore. this state of affairs continued for some weeks, during which nigel slowly recovered, much owing to the loving care of constance, and the skill of their friend the surgeon. at length his health was considered fairly re-established. the count, however, advised him not to return to his ship until absolutely compelled to do so; indeed, having the permission of the admiral to quit the service, villegagnon could not legally insist on his remaining in it. "indeed, my dear friend," said the count, "i feel that my own life is so uncertain, and should i be taken away, my daughter would be left without a protector in whom i could place confidence, that i desire forthwith to commit her to your care. you will, i know, devote yourself to her, and, as far as a human being has power, defend her from all dangers." nigel grasped the count's hand, and with a proud joy at his heart, promised not to disappoint his expectations. he took no vain oath: he did not call on god to witness that he intended to fulfil his promise, for he and the count knew that what he uttered was heard in heaven, and required no other ratification. constance willingly agreed to her father's wishes, and it was settled that in a few days the marriage ceremony should be performed by their minister and friend, monsieur laporte. their love was mutual and equally intense, and they felt that they could together face the dangers of many sorts surrounding them far better than apart. constance implicitly confided in nigel, and he felt unspeakable pride and joy in having the power of supporting and protecting her. chapter nine. proceedings of "the inquisition." ten days had passed since nigel and constance were united. he had not ventured beyond the precincts of the garden; and it might have been supposed that captain villegagnon had forgotten his existence, as no order had been sent him to join his ship. he intended, should he receive one again, to plead the admiral's permission to quit the service, coligny having indeed accepted his resignation. as long, however, as he was not interfered with he resolved to remain quiet. he employed his time in assisting the count in the cultivation of the ground, and in devising plans for the future. rumours were abroad that the governor intended on the arrival of fresh colonists to found a town on the north side of the harbour, to be named nitherohy. the count determined to move there, and to purchase a plot of land on which to build a residence and form an estate, as he hoped before that time to receive remittances from his steward. "i should not have thought of it, my dear nigel, had it not been for you and constance," he observed. "though as regards myself all worldly pride and ambition have been laid aside, i should like to see you the master of a property suitable to your birth and education." the idea was naturally consonant with nigel's wishes, and he promised to labour hard in bringing the proposed estate into cultivation. "it will afford me ample employment for the future," he observed; "and employment, of course, i must have." tecumah and cora had during this time made frequent visits to the island. tecumah was welcomed by the governor, as he was always well informed of the movements of the portuguese and hostile indians, besides having already rendered important services to the colony. the governor only looked on him in the light of an intelligent young savage and a faithful ally to the french. he had, however, already advanced in a knowledge of christian truth, and had become an earnest and believing follower of the lord. he one day came over to report that a party of the tuparas had been seen on the high ground beyond the southern extremity of the harbour, making their way to the portuguese settlement. he advised that boats should be sent out and advanced posts stationed, to give due notice of an attack, should one be contemplated. these arrangements having been made, the governor invited tecumah to accompany him in a walk to a part of the island which he was about to visit. the strains of solemn music reached their ears. tecumah attentively listened with much delight, and inquired whence they proceeded. "the ministers of our religion are performing a sacred service, my friend," answered the governor. "if you please, we will enter and pay our devotions to the holy virgin and saints." "i thought that christians worship god alone," observed the indian. "of course, so we do," said the governor; "but we worship also, in a different way, the mother of god and his holy saints and apostles." "i have heard that god is a jealous god, and will have none other gods worshipped but himself," said the indian. "but the mother of god; surely he will have us worship her?" observed the governor. "the bible does not say so," answered tecumah, boldly. "when jesus hung on the cross he said to john, `behold thy mother,' and to his mother, `behold thy son;' and looking round on his disciples, he once observed, when he was told that his mother and brethren were near, `behold my mother, and my brethren.'" "where did you learn all that?" asked the governor, in an angry tone. "from one of your good ministers; and i am sure he spoke the truth," answered tecumah, innocently. "he shall suffer for it," muttered the governor. they had just then reached the door of the church, and tecumah followed the governor, who went up towards the so-called "holy altar." the indian gazed around with astonishment at the gorgeous drapery, the images, the lighted candles, and the large silver crucifix, with the figure of the virgin on one side, and saint john on the other, and the vases of flowers, and numerous other ornaments. he said not a word during the whole ceremony, but watched attentively what took place. there was the usual chanting in latin, and so-called prayers muttered over in the same language; while the church was filled with incense from censers waved to and fro. then, during a solemn silence, the chief officiating priest lifted up something (what it was he could not make out) above his head. he then observed that they put something into their mouths and drank wine, which they had mixed with water from a silver cup. then the people came up and the priests put something into their mouths, and there was more chanting and prayers in an unknown tongue. then those who had been on their knees rose and filed out of the church, laughing and talking and making jokes with each other. tecumah followed the governor, anxious to know what had taken place, and inquired what the priests were about when they muttered prayers over the silver dish and wine. "they were then performing the greatest miracle of our church," answered the governor. "they were converting the wafer and wine into the body and blood of christ." "what?" asked the indian. "christ has assumed his glorified body, and is now in heaven at the right hand of god. which body, may i ask, do they think they eat, his human body or his glorified body? i cannot understand the matter." "nor can i enlighten you," answered the governor, looking much perplexed. "i am not fond of having such questions put to me." "pardon me if i ask one more," said the indian, who was eager to gain information on the subject. "what were they doing when they lifted the wafer above their heads?" "they were then offering up to god the great sacrifice, the real body and blood of his dear son." "christ was once offered up as a sacrifice for sinners on the cross," said the indian; "surely they cannot offer him again?" "our church says they can; and that's all we know about the matter," answered the governor, in a tone of irritation. "let me then ask you another question," said tecumah. "what were they doing when they ate the wafers and drank the wine, and then put the wafers into the mouths of the people?" "they were eating the real body and drinking the blood of christ," answered the governor, "and feeding the people with the body, for the priests alone are allowed to drink the blood. they were, in other words, performing the sacrifice of the mass." "what?" exclaimed the indian, starting back. "it is too solemn a thing to joke about; but do you wish to make me believe that the people can really believe that they eat the body of their god, and that human beings can change pieces of paste into that body? no, no, no! monsieur governor. we indians have not a knowledge of the numerous arts you frenchmen possess, but we are not so foolish as to believe such a gross imposture as that. i am afraid that your priests are like our medicine-men, in whom we trusted till we found them to be rogues and deceivers." these words were uttered by tecumah in a loud, indignant tone, and were overheard by one of the priests, who, having changed his gorgeous robes, had followed the governor out of the church in order to speak to him. "beware, young man, what you say!" he exclaimed, in an angry tone. "how can you understand the mysteries of our faith? but i know well where you received your instruction, and he who taught you shall have his just reward." tecumah stood calmly listening to the priest's angry threats. "he who taught me is under the protection of my tribe," he answered, "and those who injure him will be our foes. i now see that you are one of the men who played the tricks in the church hard by, and deceived the people by persuading them that you have the power which belongs to god alone, to work a miracle." these words so enraged the priest, that he would have struck the indian had he dared. the governor observed his anger, and being well aware of the importance of not offending their indian allies, on whose support their very existence depended, now interfered and tried to soothe the angry priest as well as tecumah. the latter, however, felt more scorn than anger towards the man whom he, with his acute and unprejudiced mind, looked upon as guilty of practising a gross imposture, and he was therefore quickly pacified; but the priest, grinding his teeth, continued to mutter threats of vengeance, till the governor, drawing him aside, reminded him of the importance of not offending the indians. "you may do what you like with the heretic minister," he observed; "but the services of these indians are required, and we cannot afford to lose them." "the guilty one shall feel the vengeance of our church, then," answered the priest. "we cannot allow a doctrine which so greatly supports our authority to be called in question." "of course not, my friend, of course not," said the governor; "though, as men of sense, you and i no more believe in it than does that clever young indian." "as to that, monsieur governor, we keep our opinions to ourselves," said the priest, with as near an approach to a laugh as he ever indulged in. "at the same time, the sooner we put that acute, clever-minded young indian out of the way, together with his instructor, monsieur laporte, the better for the maintenance of our holy religion." the countenance of the priest had assumed its usual undemonstrative expression as he continued, "listen, monsieur governor. i believe that the count de tourville and his daughter and son-in-law are equally dangerous. that young indian and his sister are constantly at their house, and have imbibed their pestiferous notions from them. i have had my eye on them for some time, when they were not aware that they were watched. i do my duty in looking after the spiritual interests of my countrymen,"--the priest crossed his arms and cast his eyes on the ground--"but i feel that my humble efforts unaided are not sufficient. when our community increases, we shall have many of these accursed protestants among us, and it will be absolutely necessary to devise effectual means for the preservation of our authority. i would therefore suggest the establishment of the holy inquisition, by which alone heresy can be rooted out. it will prove our zeal for religion, and gain the approbation of our patrons, the excellent duke de guise and his brother, the cardinal of lorraine." "you will have my permission to carry out your plan as you may wish, holy father," said the governor. "you may exercise your authority on our countrymen as you may deem necessary to bring them under the wholesome control of the church; but i cannot have the indians interfered with until we are strong enough to do without them. when we are, you will have my full permission to manage them as you think best for the purpose of bringing them into the true fold; but in the mean time their savage relatives may not understand your object in burning them for the good of their souls, and may be apt in their ignorance to revenge their deaths by cutting us to pieces." "i understand your wise policy," answered the priest. "we will bide our time, then, for commencing the conversion of the indians. but i have your permission to act towards the count and his family, and that pestiferous heretic minister, as i may judge necessary for the full establishment of the faith in our colony?" "certainly, certainly," answered the governor; "i willingly grant you all the power you ask." the priest returned into the church to hear the confessions of several of his congregation, who were waiting to get absolution that they might sin again without having too great a load on their shoulders; as also to put out the candles, which he in his hurry had left burning. the governor returned to the fort, while tecumah went to pay his usual visit to monsieur laporte. he naturally expressed his astonishment at what he had seen and heard. "surely," he exclaimed, "sensible men do not really believe that, by the words of a priest, jesus christ, sitting at the right hand of god, really does allow his body to descend into the bits of paste which the priest puts into the mouths of the people. the bible, as you read it to me, says that he is seated at the right hand of god, to make intercession for us sinners, and that he acts as our great high priest." "i cannot tell what the poor ignorant people may really believe, though it does seem astounding that they should be so imposed on by their priests," answered monsieur laporte. "it was many centuries even before the corrupted church of rome introduced the dogma or notion, which was invented by a monk in the eighth century, when it was eagerly seized upon by the pope, who saw that it would enable him and his army of subordinates to become sacrificing priests, which would give them immense influence over the minds of people, if they could persuade them to believe it. they had taught the great mass of the people to believe in the power of dead men's bones and other relics to work miracles; in the heathen notion of purgatory for cleansing the soul by fire; to worship idols with the names of saints; to pray for the dead; and to pray to dead men whom they had dubbed saints, as well as to put faith in many other abominable falsehoods. they found, therefore, no difficulty in persuading the more ignorant people to believe this most blasphemous fable, which from henceforth became one of the most powerful engines for increasing the influence of the priests over the minds of men, though many, both learned and unlearned persons in our own and other countries loudly protested against the novel doctrine, as contrary to the true meaning of our lord's language at the last supper and the teaching and practice of the apostles." "i thought that you and other sensible men could not possibly believe so outrageous a notion, and so contrary to god's word," observed tecumah. "but how comes it that men can be so wicked as to teach what is in direct opposition to the bible?" "influenced by satan, they make use of every means, however impious, to gain an influence over their fellow-creatures. it has been the same everywhere from the earliest ages of the world. they are like your medicine-men, whom you now know to be gross impostors. in all countries there have been found men, for their own ends, or for the support of the authority they serve, willing to deceive their fellow men, in many instances, as is often the case with these priests of rome, being deceived themselves. our only sure guide and prevention against such impostures is the study of god's word and constant obedience to its holy precepts. as jesus withstood the temptations of satan by replying to him with the scriptures, so must we arm ourselves, and ever be ready to withstand our foes, in whatever form they come, by the same blessed word of god. a sure sign that the romish system is the invention of satan is that it dreads the word, and whenever it has the power, keeps it from the people or grossly misinterprets its meaning." "i would that i could have that blessed book translated into the language of my people," exclaimed tecumah. "i can now understand it in french, and may be able to explain it to those who are willing to hear me; but i should desire to send it throughout the whole country, that all the native tribes might hear the glad tidings that there is a loving saviour ready to receive them into the kingdom." the above conversation occupied a much longer time than we have in repeating it, and both the minister and young chief used very different language to that which has been employed. tecumah showed by his questions and replies how completely he understood it, and how his pure unprejudiced mind revolted against the falsehoods of rome, while it quickly embraced the truth of the gospel. after quitting monsieur laporte, he paid a visit to the count. he found nigel hard at work in the garden, and constance helping him. he repeated to them what he had seen and the impression formed on his mind, and they explained the truth much as the minister had done; to which constance added an account of the horrible system of the confessional, which she had heard from some of her papist friends, who had been subjected to it, and the abominable questions which had been put to them by the priests. "that alone would have been sufficient to convince me that this system is not of god. and he tells us from the mouth of the apostle paul that we may come boldly to the throne of grace, trusting in the all cleansing blood of jesus; and jesus himself says, `come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and i will give you rest.' i am sure that he never refuses to hear when a human being comes trusting to his blood shed on calvary. monsieur laporte was reading from the epistle of timothy a prophecy that there should come `some who shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which god hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth,' who would advocate will-worship and their own good deeds in opposition to the all perfect atonement of jesus. such truly is what the priests of rome teach, though nearly for a thousand years after christ came christian ministers, whom they acknowledged as belonging to their communion, were allowed to marry like other men; and certainly those who did so were less corrupt than the celibates who, having no family ties, became the servile tools of rome's tyranny." constance had now to go in to prepare for dinner, and nigel then asked tecumah what remarks he had made to the governor and the priest. the indian told him. "you spoke truly; but knowing what these priests are, i fear much that they will endeavour to entrap you; and if they find that they cannot compel you to believe in their false doctrines and to acknowledge their authority, they will use other means to bring about your destruction." "i will be watchful, and keep out of their power," said tecumah. "i fear much, though, that they will equally endeavour to persecute you whom they look upon as my instructor; but i will be on the watch, and try to defend you as well as myself." tecumah spent the rest of the day with his friends, and it was late in the evening when his canoe was seen gliding rapidly across the harbour towards the mainland. villegagnon and the priests did not long allow the protestant settlers to remain in quiet. the governor announced that he had received orders from france to allow no bibles to remain in the hands of any of the people, declaring that they made a bad use of them by seeking an excuse from their pages for rebellion. the count resolved to go in person to the governor, and reminding him that he had ever been loyal, to claim exemption from the tyrannical law. he went, but was haughtily told that rich and poor must be treated alike, and that no exception would be made in his favour. should he not deliver up all the bibles in his house, he must be prepared for the consequences. monsieur laporte and the good surgeon were treated in the same manner. nigel, however, resolved, as he was not a frenchman, not to part with his bible; and, in case a domiciliary visit should be paid by the "inquisitors," having placed it in a box and buried it in the garden among some thick trees, he and constance could thus take it out and read it, which they did every day, without risk, as they supposed, of being discovered. before long a party of men appeared, headed by an officer, with an authority from the governor to collect all the bibles and protestant sermons and hymns to be found. the count, knowing that resistance was vain, delivered up those he possessed, protesting, however, against the injustice of the act. "that's not our affair, count de tourville," answered the officer; "but i will report what you say to the governor. now, let me ask you, have you any other books?" "i have given you all that are to my knowledge in the house," answered the count. "if you are not satisfied you must search for them." "we cannot take the word of an heretic," said the officer, insolently. "we intend to search, and if we find any it will be the worse for you." providentially, nigel was away, and thus escaped having questions asked him. poor constance endeavoured to console her father while the officers were searching in every corner and cranny of the house. no books, however, were discovered; and at length, threatening to pay another visit shortly, the inquisitors went away to search other houses in the neighbourhood; and in two or three, meeting with opposition, they carried the owners off to prison. the most severe sufferer was monsieur laporte, the whole of whose library was carried off, all his books more or less being of a theological character. the following day, in an open space in front of the fort, a pile of faggots was seen, when the books were brought forth from the house into which they had been thrown. most of the population turned out to witness the expected sight, shouting and jeering as book after book was thrown on the pile, to which fire had been set. as each fresh batch of books began to burn they shouted loudly, and when it was seen that most of the books were bibles, their shouts and cries and fierce execrations grew louder and louder. this went on till all were consumed. the protestants remained at home during the period, sorrowful and cast down. no one knew what persecutions they might be doomed to bear. monsieur laporte went from house to house, endeavouring to console and support his flock, reminding them all of the sufferings christ's people had been called on to bear from the earliest days to the present time, and urging them to keep in view that crown of glory which he had prepared for all who hold fast to the truth. so much had his faithful and gentle character won the love of all except the most brutal, that many even among those who had been perverted regarded him with affection, while the priests, hearing him so highly spoken of, were afraid for the present to persecute him further. they were, however, very active among his congregation, whom they endeavoured by soft words and plausible arguments to win over; but finding that they did not succeed, as in reality only the frivolous and irreligious had hitherto been gained to their side, they determined to use harsher measures. one evening nigel and constance had gone to their bower in the woods, where, concealed by the thickness of the surrounding foliage, they took out their bible and sat down on a bench nigel had placed there. he had been reading for some time to his young wife, occasionally stopping to explain a verse or to ask her opinion; now turning back and comparing text with text, both of them being so absorbed that they did not know how long they had been thus engaged, when they were suddenly aroused by hearing a footstep, and looking up they saw a priest standing before them, while a little way off appeared a party of armed men. "you have been discovered engaged in an unlawful act, monsieur nigel, by which you have made yourself liable to the just vengeance of the law!" exclaimed the priest, in a triumphant tone. "you have been suspected for some time. in the name of the governor, therefore, i order you to yield yourself prisoner. take this gentleman into custody," he added, turning to the armed men, who, as he spoke, sprang eagerly forward. nigel was too much astonished for the moment to reply. constance uttered a cry of alarm, and clung to his arm. "you cannot, you must not take him from me!" she exclaimed, in a terrified tone. "you are equally guilty, young lady, in listening to him," said the priest. "in all probability _you_ will share his fate." "oh, let me go with him now, then, if you insist on taking him," she said, still holding nigel's arm. "no, no, lady. don't fancy that you will be allowed to keep him company," said the priest, in a harsher tone. "for the present you may remain with your father, till the governor thinks fit to summon you." "fly rather to the faithful indians," whispered nigel; "do not put yourself in the traitor's power." he could say no more, for the armed men seizing him took him off, while the priest held constance in his arms. she in vain struggled to free herself from his loathsome grasp, while she entreated to be set free, ever and anon uttering shrieks for help; but not till the priest was sure that the party with nigel were out of sight did he allow her to escape, when seeing her father, who had been attracted by her cries, coming from the house, she flew towards him, the priest in the mean time hurrying after his companions. it was fortunate for him that he got away, for the count, with a thick stick in his hand, forgetting the danger of doing so, would have made him feel the effects of his just anger. "oh, save him, save him! they have seized nigel. what will they do to him?" cried constance, as she sank into her father's arms. the count saw that pursuit was hopeless, for the priest, tucking up his long dress to enable him to scramble over the fences, had already got to a considerable distance; besides, it would have been vain to attempt rescuing nigel from a party of armed men. the count could only say, "trust in god, my child. he alone can help us." poor constance, overcome with grief and terror, could scarcely, even with her father's assistance, reach the house. he placed her on a couch by his side, vainly endeavouring to console her. he indeed feared that the priests would not allow them to escape with impunity, and he guessed truly that it had been only for the sake of inflicting a greater cruelty that nigel had first been carried off. monsieur laporte with the good doctor happily came in, having heard a rumour of what had occurred. both were required, for constance became seriously ill; but the words of the former were of more value than any medicine the latter could prescribe. the minister at once turned to god's word; not to the book itself, for that he did not dare to carry about, but to the numerous blessed texts which he had committed to memory, and from these he was able to draw that effectual comfort which could alone avail with the poor young wife. no one dared to speak of the future, for they knew well the bitter hatred felt by the governor and priests towards nigel, and that they would rejoice at having a victim in their power on whom they would wreak their vengeance. while they were seated with constance and the count, tecumah and his sister arrived, on their way to pay their usual visit to monsieur laporte. they were overwhelmed with grief and indignation when they heard what had occurred. cora threw herself by the side of constance, and poured out her expressions of sympathy from her woman's heart. indian as she was, she could feel for her white sister, her affectionate tones tending somewhat to soothe her friend's outraged feelings. "do not give up hope," she whispered. "we will gladly devote our lives, if necessary, to save him. we indians are accustomed to do many things which would astonish the white people, and if a friend is in danger, every one of our tribe is ready to help him." "they dare not kill him!" exclaimed tecumah, "and if a hair of his head is injured i will arouse our people, and instead of being friends and ready to fight on their side, we will come over with our strong bows and attack them." "even for the sake of a friend we would not urge you to use violent measures," said the minister. "remember the precepts of our blessed lord and master; he who was ever mild, gentle, and forgiving, doing good to those who injured him." "yes, i know that, and desire to obey our saviour's law; but he does not forbid us to help our friends," exclaimed the young indian. chapter ten. imprisonment and rescue. tecumah and his sister remained for some time with their friend. tecumah then accompanied the minister to his house. they passed on their way through the count's garden, as it afforded them a shorter cut than the public path. as they got to the further end of the garden they turned aside to visit the spot where nigel had been seized. on reaching it, tecumah sprang forward, for there he saw before him on the ground the bible, which the priest, in his eagerness to hold back constance, had let drop, and had forgotten to take with him when the count appeared. "blessed book!" exclaimed tecumah. "let me be its guardian. your cruel persecutors shall not burn it while i have it in charge, and you may come over to read it, or when the search is over i will bring it back to you." to this proposal monsieur laporte willingly agreed; and while the indian, wrapping it up carefully, concealed it beneath his cloak, the minister closed the box in which it was wont to be put, and covered it over again with earth and leaves. cora begged that she might be allowed to continue with constance till the following morning or longer. "we were not observed coming into the house," she said, "and it will not be known that i am here. i have my reasons for wishing to remain." the count and constance of course agreed to what cora wished. before her brother quitted the house she had a short and earnest conversation with him. tecumah, having spent some time with the minister, hurried to his canoe and rapidly crossed to the north side of the harbour. meanwhile, nigel was dragged along by his captors. he had been so completely surprised that it was impossible for him to escape; and finding this, he walked along without making any further resistance. the priest soon overtook the party. in vain nigel tried to learn from him what had become of constance. "it's not my duty to answer questions," he replied; "but i have some, notwithstanding, to ask you. how is it that, knowing the orders of the governor, you ventured to read that book from which you draw all your heresies?" "i am not aware that i have drawn anything but truth through the teaching of the holy spirit," answered nigel. "that is the notion all you heretics hold!" exclaimed the priest. "it is the origin of your pestiferous principles." "i was not prohibited from reading it in my own country, and i claim as a scotchman the right to do so wherever i am," answered nigel. "no person of whatever country has the right to act contrary to the commands of the catholic church," answered the priest, furiously; "and that church positively forbids laymen from reading the bible, or putting their own interpretations on it, therefore to whatever nation you belong you are under its rule, and are equally guilty. but i waste words in arguing with a heretic. your only hope of escape from death is to recant without delay and become a faithful catholic, and the governor, at my intercession, will overlook your offence. come, you will be wise; so give up your errors." "never will i give up my faith," answered nigel, firmly. "ah, my young friend, you say so now; but think of the advantages you will gain. you will at once be restored to your young wife, and will undoubtedly be raised to a post of honour and wealth in our new settlement; and when the count dies you will inherit his property and found a noble family in antarctic france." nigel felt that the temptations held out were powerful, but he prayed that were they ten times more so he might have grace to resist them. he doubted also very much whether the wily priest was not mocking him. he knew full well from the accounts he had heard in france of the treachery of which the emissaries of rome were guilty, and he would not place any confidence in the most specious promises any of them might have made to him. he therefore let the priest talk on, endeavouring as far as he could not to listen to him. at length the fort was reached. nigel was forthwith thrust into a cell, ordinarily used for the confinement of a refractory or drunken soldier, and was there left to his own meditations. he walked up and down, considering what he should do and what he should say. now and again he stopped, and earnestly prayed for guidance and direction. the governor and priests were too eager to condemn the protestants to allow an accused person to remain long in prison without trial. that very afternoon nigel was carried into the public hall where the governor held his court. the priest was his accuser, and the men by whom he was captured were the witnesses against him. of course he had no defence to make, except his claim of right to read whatever books he pleased. "before he is condemned there is another charge of a still more heavy nature," said the governor. "stand forward, men, and say what you have got to state;" and nigel was, to his astonishment, charged with abetting captain beauport in heaving overboard the images of the saints, the relics, and papal dispensations. "even had i actually assisted i should only have been obeying the orders of my superior officer," said nigel. "you confess that you were guilty of standing by and witnessing such a proceeding without remonstrating?" exclaimed one of the priests who was seated near the governor. "such enormities must meet with severe punishment, or our holy religion will be held in disrespect." "undoubtedly captain beauport escaped with too lenient a sentence," said the governor, "though probably the vengeance of heaven has overtaken him ere this: he and all on board the ship in which he sailed are beneath the ocean." "because one has escaped, are other criminals to go unpunished?" exclaimed the priest who had before spoken. "death by shooting or hanging would be too mild a sentence: he deserves the stake, unless by confessing his fault and abjuring his errors he returns to the loving bosom of our holy church." similar remarks were made by the other priest in a manner not usual in a court of law. for some time this mockery of a trial went on. nigel prayed for strength, for he felt how greatly he needed it. he stood calm and apparently unmoved, listening to the abusive remarks of the vindictive priests. no one raised a voice in his favour. there might have been many who felt for him, but they feared to speak. the men who were judging him were also his accusers. still he felt bound to defend himself, although he knew full well that the most able defence would not avail him. he pleaded that, with regard to reading the bible, he was a foreigner and was but doing what was allowed in his own country; that he was not even attempting to make proselytes, and was simply obeying the command of his lord to search the scriptures. and that, as to the second accusation, whether or not he approved of what had been done, had he acted otherwise and interfered, he would have been guilty of an infraction of naval discipline; therefore he could not be made answerable for what had been done. "he acknowledges himself guilty of sacrilege, for ecclesiastical law is above all other law, and that would have compelled him to interfere," cried the priest. "death, death, to the heretic!" and several voices echoed the savage cry. "you are undoubtedly guilty of the crime alleged against you, monsieur lieutenant," said the governor, after consulting in an undertone with the two priests at his side. "your being a foreigner, as you are in the service of france, will not avail you. you will have two days given you to consider whether you will recant, and if not, your sentence is `that you be bound to a stake, with fire kindled around you till your body is consumed, and your soul is carried off by the emissaries of satan, who are certainly waiting for it.'" nigel listened calmly while the governor was pronouncing his terrible doom--one to which the church of rome had already condemned tens of thousands of human beings for simply reading the bible. without being allowed to say another word, he was seized by the guards waiting the beck of the governor, and dragged out of the court. instead, however, of being led back to the prison where he had previously been confined, he found that he was actually leaving the fort. the governor was, in truth, afraid to keep him there, for a considerable number of the _madeline's_ crew, who were much attached to him, were doing duty on shore, and, although they attended the romish service, he was well aware that still in their hearts they were protestants, and he feared that they might rescue him and assist in his escape. the priests had of late erected close to the church a small building which they intended should serve as an inquisitorial prison where they might keep in confinement any heretics on whom they were desirous of expending their religious zeal. to this place nigel was taken, and thrust into one of its dungeons built especially under the priests' directions. it was, in truth, little better than a pit dug in the ground, with a small aperture towards the roof to admit light. on this occasion they had obtained a party of soldiers from the governor to guard their prison. nigel had not been long shut up in this dreadful place when night came on, and he was left in total darkness, with only a bundle of dry grass on which to lie down and rest himself. brave as he was, he could not but look forward with painful feelings to the fate prepared for him. he thought, however, more of his young wife and the poor count. he feared, too, that the hatred of the priests might drag them into the same fate. perhaps even now they were seized and accused of crimes for which their tyrannical oppressors might condemn them to death. sleep was impossible, while the darkness prevented him from pacing up and down his narrow cell, which would have been some relief to his tortured mind. he felt for the pile of grass and lay down, considering that it would be wiser to try and obtain some rest to prepare himself for the future trials he would have to go through. the sudden destruction of all his happiness, separation from his beloved constance, and the agonising death speedily to overtake him, made him have recourse to prayer to obtain that strength ever awarded to those who seek it from on high. nigel had been sleeping for some time, when, suddenly awaking, he became conscious that some one was in the vault, by hearing a footstep and a low sound of breathing. a feeling of horror for a moment ran through him. could it be an assassin sent by the governor or priests to put him secretly to death, and so to save themselves from carrying out the sentence passed on him, from which even they might shrink, aware of the horror it would create among the greater number of the colonists, who, not having been educated in their school, would, whatever their religious sentiments, look at it with disapprobation. still, for himself it would matter nothing, except being deprived of a few hours of life, and he would thus be saved from the tortures of the flames. such thoughts rapidly passed through his mind; but in another moment he had nerved himself, like a brave man, to meet whatever might occur. his very natural feeling was to struggle desperately with his supposed assassin. he might even gain the victory and thus make his escape. full of youth and strength, he felt that it would be better far to die struggling bravely, should the guard set upon him, than to sink down tamely where he lay. springing to his feet, he stood with his arms prepared for defence. "hush!" said a voice. "i thought you were still sleeping. make no noise--give me your hand and come quickly; there is not a moment to lose." nigel knew by the voice and the mode of expression that it was the indian cora who spoke. he put out his hand and felt it grasped by her small and delicate fingers. to his surprise he found himself led almost instantly into a narrow passage, with room sufficient only for one person to pass through at a time. "stoop low," said cora, as she conducted him into apparently a small alcove on one side. "step back and remain a moment," she added, disengaging her hand, immediately after which he heard a grating sound as if a heavy stone were being moved. quickly returning, she again took his hand, and led him down a slope of some feet, and then again along a level; when once more they ascended another slope, at the top of which, mounting a few steps, he found himself standing in the open air, surrounded by a thick grove, beyond which he could distinguish the wooden tower of the church. once more cora desired him to remain, while she was engaged in closing up the aperture through which they had emerged. putting her finger on her lips to enforce silence, she once more led him forward at a rapid rate, keeping under the shelter of the trees; where the gloom was such that he could not possibly by himself have made his way. at length they reached a small beach with low cliffs on either side. keeping under their shade they proceeded till he discovered a canoe concealed beneath a rock. cora, without requiring his assistance, quickly launched it, and then again taking his hand, bade him, in a whisper, step in and lie down his length at the bottom. instantly grasping a paddle, she began to make her way rapidly from the shore. she had not got far, when a voice from the cliff hailed, ordering the canoe immediately to come back. cora took no notice, but paddled on with renewed efforts. again the person on the cliff shouted, and threatened to fire if his orders were not obeyed. a few seconds only had passed when a shot whistled close to the canoe. cora bravely paddled on. the man on the cliff must have reloaded quickly, for soon afterwards another shot came, but happily without touching the canoe. the darkness must have soon hid so small an object from the soldier's sight, though the shore was still visible. a third and fourth shot followed, but still wider of the mark. cora did not relax her efforts till they had got more than half way across the harbour. she then stopped for a moment to listen, but no sound of oars indicated that they were pursued. "we are safe now," she said, "and you may raise yourself; but don't attempt to stand up. thankful i am that we have escaped. i have no fear for myself, but i dreaded every moment lest you might have been retaken by your cruel enemies. my brother gave me the task to do, and i gladly accepted it. he himself has gone to summon our tribe to arms, having resolved to rescue you by force had my undertaking failed." "i am most grateful to you," said nigel. "but by what wonderful means were you able to enter my prison and liberate me without apparent difficulty?" "by means which these cruel priests themselves afforded," answered cora. "when they were building their prison-house, tecumah and i happened to pass that way and observed that they were placing it on the ground once occupied by an ancient temple at which, in days gone by, our tribe were wont to worship. one of our medicine-men, who had listened to the truth from tecumah's mouth, told us that there were several passages running underground which had possibly been undiscovered by the builders. he is a sagacious man, and, finding that the new building was intended for a prison, advised us to visit the ancient passage and endeavour to keep it concealed, so that a way might be made if necessary into the dungeon. `the whites treat us at present with respect,' he observed; `but the time may come when they may act towards us as the portuguese have long been acting towards the indians in their neighbourhood, imprisoning and murdering those who refuse to adopt their faith.' my brother accordingly, with several other young men, led by the medicine-man, paid numerous visits, at night, to the place, unknown to the french. it was thus discovered that an underground passage was being formed between some of the cells of the prison and the church. fortunately this was found out before the old passage was cut through, and by placing a large stone, turning on a sort of hinge, on one side, they were able to secure a way into the new passage without betraying the existence of their own. by constantly being on the watch, they ascertained that only one cell had as yet been formed into which the passage led. i had resolved when you were made prisoner to attempt your rescue even from the fort; but when i found that you were carried to the priests' prison my hopes of success arose. i had one night, from curiosity, gone with my brother to visit the spot. we then discovered that the door which led into your prison had no lock, but was merely closed with smooth sliding bolts. i thus knew my way, and was able to set you free." nigel had no doubt that the object of the passage was to enable the priests either to work on the minds of the prisoners by pretended miraculous appearances; or else, should they desire to murder one of their captives, to convey the body secretly away. he, indeed, knew that such arrangements were common throughout europe, and that numberless impostures had thus been carried out. they quickly reached the shore, which had of late been entirely deserted by the tamoyos, who had, influenced by what had been told them by tecumah, moved some distance further inland. cora, who feared that the direction they had taken would be suspected by the french, when nigel's escape was discovered, advised that they should go forward till he was safe among her tribe. dark as the night was, she knew her way, and, light and active, she led him forward at a rapid rate. they had gone some distance, when she exclaimed, "here come my brother and his people. they will indeed rejoice to find you free." nigel was welcomed by tecumah and his party. they were on their way to the shore, intending immediately to cross, and hoping before daylight to reach the prison. tecumah, in his anxiety to save nigel, had induced his followers to swear that they would rescue him by force if they could succeed in no other way. their intention was to attack the guards and break open the prison, expecting to get off again before the governor and his people had time to pursue them. nigel assured them how thankful he was that they had not been compelled to resort to such a proceeding. too probably the governor and priests would wreak their vengeance on his wife and father-in-law. as it was, he felt very anxious as to what would happen when his escape was discovered. it would certainly baffle the sagacity of the priests to ascertain how it had been accomplished, and would undoubtedly make them more savage, as they might naturally suspect that some of their own followers had proved treacherous, and yet not know whom to accuse. "they shall not injure the count or any of our friends," exclaimed tecumah. "we can distinguish between the true men and the bad. the last, as god's word tells us, are always the most numerous, and it shall be our care to defend the innocent and weaker ones. my people shall remain ready with their canoes to cross over at a moment's notice, while i go to the island and learn what has taken place." nigel expressed his wish to accompany the tamoyos, but both tecumah and cora urged him to proceed to a further distance, as, should the governor suspect where he had gone, he would in all probability send an expedition over to bring him back, and as they would refuse to give him up, an open rupture would be the consequence. nigel at last agreed to accompany cora to her father's abode, which was above five miles from the shore of the harbour, while tecumah carried out his proposed project. leaving his people encamped on the shore with their canoes ready to embark, he paddled across towards the island. he was well aware of the risk he was running, for the governor, should he suspect that he had been instrumental in rescuing nigel, would in all probability seize him and shut him up in prison. he had taken the precaution, however, of charging the next chief in common after him to come across and demand his liberation. daylight broke as he reached the place at which he was accustomed to land. he proceeded at once to the house of the count, who was already on foot, and he had the satisfaction of giving him tidings of nigel's safety. "the knowledge that he is free will restore life to my poor daughter," said the count. "but we are still in the power of the governor and those revengeful priests, and i fear much that they will not allow us long to remain in quiet." "then come over and live with us!" exclaimed tecumah. "we will build a house for you and hunt for you, and do our utmost to enable you to live as you are now doing." "we cannot be thus burdensome to you; and we should have no means of paying your people for labouring in our service," answered the count. "still, i am most grateful to you, and will think over the matter." constance came out of her room as soon as she had risen to thank tecumah, who then, hoping that his friends would not be interfered with, went on to see the minister. he had been there for some time, and was about to return, when one of the count's servants rushed into the house, out of breath from running. "sad news, monsieur laporte!" he explained. "just ten minutes ago one of those ill-conditioned priests, with half a dozen ruffians of soldiers, came to my master's house and carried him and madame nigel off on an accusation of having assisted monsieur nigel to escape, and of reading the bible. what will they do with them? they say monsieur nigel was condemned to be burnt, and they will burn them in revenge;" and the poor fellow wrung his hands and burst into tears. "god will protect them, though i don't see how," said the minister. "alas! alas! these persecutors of ours have already put many innocent persons to death, and will not scruple to destroy all those who oppose them." "they must not be allowed to suffer," exclaimed tecumah, when he heard what had occurred. "i will away to my people before they can stop me; and we will one and all perish before we allow a hair of their heads to be injured." "i would seek to avoid bloodshed, and must urge you, my friend, to try peaceable measures _first_," said monsieur laporte. "we will endeavour, at all events, to rescue the innocent. you, my friend, come with me; you are in danger here, for they will assuredly seize you," said the indian, taking the minister's hand. "i must remain at the post where duty calls me," answered monsieur laporte. "i may be the means of leading some perishing soul to turn to god, and should i be imprisoned with my friends i may be a comfort to them. but bear my love and blessing to nigel, should i be destined never again to see him." at length tecumah, finding that the minister was firm, set off, keeping himself concealed as much as possible among the trees, and made his way to his canoe. he had scarcely pushed off from the shore, when he saw several people rushing down to the beach. they had, he guessed rightly, been sent to capture him. there was no boat near at hand or they would have pursued him, though had they done so, his light canoe would quickly have left them astern. on landing, he found his father and several other chiefs. he narrated to them what had occurred, but, greatly to his disappointment, he found that they objected to do anything which might put an end to the peaceable terms on which they had hitherto lived with the french. they had seen how the portuguese treated the indians who opposed them, and they dreaded, they said, the vengeance of the white men. tecumah was indignant. the white men who now were in the ascendency were no longer deserving of their friendship, he argued. by treachery and deceit they had overcome those who were their proper leaders, and they were even now about to put them to a cruel death. tuscarora was grieved that his son's friends should suffer; but he could not for their sakes risk the safety of his tribe. again tecumah addressed them with all the eloquence of which he was master. "if," he observed, "they were treacherous towards their own people, they would surely be more likely to ill-treat their dark-skinned allies should it at any time be to their interest to do so, and it would be better to strike a blow at once and prevent them from doing harm, rather than allow them, after they had cut off all those who were worthy of confidence, to destroy us." tecumah saw that he was winning many to his side, and persevered. at length one of the chiefs proposed that he should be allowed to go over with a select body of men, and rescue the prisoners. to this tuscarora agreed, and tecumah was obliged to content himself with this plan, trusting that no harm would be done in the mean time to the count and his daughter. some hours had passed when, as tecumah was eagerly waiting on the beach for the moment fixed for the expedition to set out, he saw a canoe paddling down the harbour. he recognised it as one of those sent up the estuary to keep watch and to give timely notice of the approach of an enemy. as the occupant leapt on shore, he exclaimed-- "haste! haste! the portuguese and tuparas, and several other tribes in alliance with them, are on the war-path. they have hundreds of canoes, and they will soon after nightfall attack the island unless they first land and try to destroy us." chapter eleven. capture of the fort. constance and her father, rudely dragged from their home, were hurried off to the fort. no allowance was made for the weakness of her sex, and no pity was shown her by the savage priests, who, supposing that she was not aware of her husband's escape, endeavoured still more to wound her feelings by telling her that he was condemned to death, and that, unless she and her father recanted, they would meet with the same fate. "silence, priest, silence! it is cowardly and unmanly to speak thus to my daughter," exclaimed the count. "add not insult to the injury you have already inflicted. we have broken no laws; we have done harm to no one; and we find ourselves treated as if we were the vilest of malefactors." the count's address had no effect upon the priest, who took a cruel pleasure in annoying them. such is ever the character of the emissaries of rome when they are in the ascendency and are opposed; when in the minority, they are humble and meek, plausible and silver-tongued; and when there are none to oppose them, haughty, indolent, sensual, and self-indulgent. such they have been in all ages and in every country, with the exception of the devoted jesuit slaves, who have gone forth to carry their spurious gospel into heathen lands. on arriving at the fort, the mockery of a trial was gone through; the priest's myrmidons swore to having seen constance reading the bible, and that, as the crime had been committed on the count's property, he was therefore equally guilty. having been a lawyer in his youth, the count was able to defend himself, and had a jury of twelve honest men been present, he would have undoubtedly been acquitted; but, unhappily, that system being unknown among the french, he had no such advantage. the governor and the priest, exasperated at nigel's escape, grossly abused him, and interrupted him with shouts and execrations whenever he especially pointed to the proofs of his innocence. the count, of course, defended constance, and argued that she was but listening to her husband, whom she was bound to obey, and was therefore guiltless. "it is false!" exclaimed the priest, starting up; "her duty to the church is above all others. it was for her to denounce her husband rather than to listen to him. such heretical notions as yours, count de tourville, must be destroyed. the church would lose her authority and power were they to prevail." "ma foi!" exclaimed the count; "in that case no husband can venture to trust his wife with the slightest secret. it would not be confided to her keeping, but to that of the confessor. for that reason, and many others, we repudiate the system you, for your own ends, are anxious to maintain. i advise those who are husbands never to tell to their wives words they would not have known where the system prevails." "silence! count de tourville," exclaimed the priest, foaming with rage, "you shall answer for these insulting words." the count, it must be confessed, regretted having touched on the subject, as it was like throwing pearls to swine; but he felt for the moment that he might shield his daughter by drawing the anger of the priests on himself. the mockery of a trial came to a conclusion, and the governor, who had taken upon himself the office of judge and inquisitor-general, found the count and his daughter guilty of the crimes with which they were charged, and condemned them both to death. in consequence of nigel's escape, the priest begged that they might be kept for safe custody in the prison within the fort; the same wretched place in which nigel had first been confined, and utterly unfit for the reception of any female. poor constance shuddered as she was led into it. her father begged that he might send to his house for such necessaries as his daughter required, but his request was roughly refused. it was not without difficulty even that he obtained some matting, and a few armfuls of rushes on which she might rest. "lie down, my child," said the count to constance, when they were at length left alone. "we will not altogether despair, but look to him who is always ready to protect us. you require rest; and we know not what we may have to go through." constance obeyed her father, while he continued pacing up and down the narrow space allowed him, to collect his thoughts. he harboured no ill-feeling towards his persecutors, but, following the example of his master, he prayed for their forgiveness, while he looked forward with joy, rather than fear, to the time when he should be welcomed into his presence. he knew, too, that his beloved daughter, should her life be taken, would bear him company to that home where their saviour had gone before to prepare a place for all those who love him. the night passed on. constance was sleeping. still the count felt no desire to lie down and rest. the whole fort seemed wrapped in silence, except when the voice of a distant sentry reached his ear. the silence was suddenly broken by a shot fired from the fort. others followed in rapid succession. then arose loud shouts and shrieks, and the indian warwhoop rising above all others. constance started from her slumbers, and clung to her father. the noises grew louder and louder. "the fort is attacked. the enemy are scaling the walls!" exclaimed the count. "both parties are fighting desperately. constance, there is hope for us, for even the portuguese would scarcely wish to injure those who are unable to oppose them." the sounds of strife increased. the count could with difficulty judge how the fight was going. supporting his daughter on his arm, he awaited the issue. the great guns roared, the bullets rattled, and presently there came an uproar which showed that the assailants had gained the fort, and the shriek and cries of the combatants, and other sounds of a desperate struggle, approached their prison. just at that juncture the warwhoops of apparently a fresh party burst forth within the fort. the count recognised the cry as that of the tamoyos. on they came from the opposite side of the fort, and the battle seemed to rage hotter than ever. in the midst of the fierce turmoil the door of their prison was burst open, and tecumah, leaping in, seized constance in his arms, while a companion took charge of the count, and hurried him off. "i promised to save you or perish," said the indian. "we had a hard matter to enter the fort, and it will be no less difficult to escape; but i have succeeded thus far, and trust to place you in safety." these words were uttered hurriedly, as tecumah, surrounded by a faithful band, was fighting his way across the fort, in all parts of which a furious battle was raging; the portuguese and their indian allies, the tuparas, having forced an entrance, being engaged with the french and tamoyos, who were struggling desperately for life. bullets were whizzing and arrows flying in all directions; the fierce shouts and shrieks of the combatants sounding above the clash of steel and the rattle of musketry. numbers and discipline favoured the portuguese, who had well trained their native allies, while the french mistrusted each other, and had but little confidence in the natives, who, however, were gallantly doing their utmost to assist them, headed by their brave chief, tuscarora. tecumah and his faithful band had but one object in view, to rescue constance and her father. like a wedge, with their most stalwart warriors in the van, they fought their way through the mass of foes entering the fort towards the outlet which had allowed the latter ingress. several of their number fell; scarcely one escaped a wound. still constance was untouched. often they were almost overwhelmed. still on they went, their track marked by the bodies of their foes, and many of their own party. the gateway was reached. constance felt tecumah stagger. a fear seized her that he had received a wound; but no cry escaped him, and, recovering himself, he bore her onwards. scarcely had they emerged into the open, when they encountered a fresh party of the portuguese. the tamoyos halted for a moment to draw their bows, and not a shaft failed to pierce a foe, the shower of bullets, which came in return, passing mostly over their heads. "on! on!" shouted tecumah, though his voice no longer rang with its usual clear tone. constance observed with grief that he was faint and hoarse. his band, obeying him, turned round and shot their arrows as they advanced. scarcely, however, had they moved forward, when the portuguese, seeing the handful of men opposed to them, fiercely charged their ranks, tecumah and only a few of the warriors surrounding him, having got some way in advance, escaping the onslaught; the rest, who had the count in charge, were compelled to halt, in a vain endeavour to withstand their overwhelming foes. the darkness enabled tecumah, and the few who remained by him, to push on without being observed. "on! on!" again cried tecumah. "the rest will follow when they have driven back our enemies." "oh, my father! my father! where is he?" exclaimed constance. tecumah did not answer her. making their way towards the shore, they reached it at length. "where are the canoes?" exclaimed tecumah, looking along the beach where they had been left hauled up. his companions dispersed on either side to look for them. their cries told what had happened. some had been sent adrift, and others had been battered in, and utterly destroyed by a band of tuparas, as the tamoyos truly surmised. "we must make our way to the spot where they have left their canoes," exclaimed tecumah; and he again attempted to lift up constance, who had earnestly entreated to be placed on the ground. the din of battle still sounded as loud as ever, and the rattle of musketry was heard close at hand. it was evident that the combatants were approaching the shore. "on! on!" again cried tecumah; and, lifting up constance, he was staggering forward, when, faint from loss of blood, he sank on the ground. at that moment an indian rushed out of the wood behind them. "fly! fly! our enemies are at hand. all, all have been cut to pieces. i alone have escaped." his arm, as he spoke, dropped by his side, while the blood flowed rapidly from his head, giving evidence of the truth of his assertion. constance was kneeling down, trying to staunch the blood flowing from tecumah's wound. he raised himself on one arm. "think not of me," he said, "but endeavour, with my faithful friends, who will accompany you, to find concealment among the rocks." "we cannot leave you," answered constance; "better to yield ourselves prisoners, than to allow you to perish alone." "you know not the nature of our enemies," said tecumah, faintly; "they spare no one. fly, fly, while there is time." the sounds of fighting were drawing rapidly nearer. all prospect of escape seemed cut off. constance gazed up for a moment from the task at which she was engaged. bullets were striking the branches of the trees a short distance from them. her heart sank with grief. she felt the probability that her father had been cut off with the rest of the brave tamoyos. just then one of the indians exclaimed, "see, see! a canoe approaches." constance cast a glance across the waters, and caught a glimpse of a canoe emerging from the darkness. it rapidly approached the beach. the shouts of the indians showed that friends were on board. their hails were answered. in another moment nigel leapt on shore. tecumah recognised him. "save her first--care not for me," he exclaimed. nigel was not likely to disobey such a command, and, taking constance in his arms, he bore her to the canoe. "oh, save our brave friend," she cried, as she pressed her lips to her husband's, who immediately sprang back to the beach, and, listening not to tecumah's request to be allowed to die where he lay, he carried him, with the assistance of the indians who still had strength to exert themselves, to the canoe. holding the steering paddle in her hands, stood cora. the instant her brother and nigel were on board, she gave it a dexterous turn, and the canoe shot away from the shore, impelled by the strokes of two lads who formed the crew. nigel and an indian seized two other paddles, and with all their strength urged on the canoe. there was no time to be lost; already they could see a number of dark forms emerging from the wood, while numerous bullets splashed into the water astern. the veil of night would prove their best protection, and every effort was made to get ahead. cora, believing that they could no longer be seen, directed the canoe on a different course, to one side parallel with the shore, thus avoiding the bullets which were fired in the direction it had last been seen. after going on for some distance, she again steered directly for the opposite shore, which her keen sight could distinguish through the darkness. meantime, constance, seated at the bottom of the canoe, supported tecumah's head. he gently took her hand, and pressed it to his lips. "i have more to thank you for than i can express by words," he whispered, in a low, faltering voice. "i first followed a shadow, but you showed me the glorious reality, and led me to him, whom to know is life eternal. i die happy, resting in his love, with the thought also that i have preserved your life to be a blessing to one who is worthy of you. i am going quickly, but do not mourn aloud, lest you paralyse the efforts of our friends." constance felt the hand which held hers relax its grasp, and ere long she knew that the spirit of the young indian had taken its flight to the realms of bliss. she placed his hand on his breast, and, obeying his dying injunctions, refrained from giving way to her feelings. not till they were near the north shore, and safe for the present from their enemies, did she speak. she then endeavoured to prepare cora for the discovery of her brother's death. "i feared it was so," replied cora, when constance had told her clearly what had happened. "i know, however, that no joy on earth could be more exquisite than that he felt in the consciousness that he had given his life to save yours. i must not mourn for him as those who have no hope. we must not remain here," continued cora, as they disembarked from the canoe. "they will certainly pursue us, and we shall not be in safety till we reach our village, where the remnant of our tribe is collected. alas! there will be bitter grief and loud wailing for the many who have, i fear, fallen." with perfect calmness cora gave directions to her people to convey the body of her brother, and follow quickly, while she led nigel, who supported constance, through the woods. faint and overcome with grief as constance was, cora urged, notwithstanding, that they should continue their course without stopping, for she felt convinced that a fearful loss had overtaken her tribe from the account which the last-arrived indian had given her. he had, he affirmed, before tecumah and his party had cut their way out of the fort, seen tuscarora and many of their tribe shot down by the enemy; and he had also witnessed the death of the count. nigel questioned him narrowly, but could elicit nothing that could shake his testimony. sad, indeed, as cora had expected, was the way in which they were received at her village, and it was feared, indeed, that even it might be attacked while there only remained the old men and boys for its defence. it was proposed, therefore, that they should move further into the country; but cora urged them to remain, and, as a precaution against surprise, sent out scouts to give timely notice of the appearance of an enemy, or the return of their friends. they all, however, packed up their property, and remained prepared for instant flight. chapter twelve. conclusion. just as dawn was breaking, a warrior was seen approaching the village. his bow was broken; his dress torn and besmeared with blood. the inhabitants, who were on the watch, anxiously went out to meet him. he hung down his head without uttering a word, and not for some time could he be induced to speak. at length, a groan bursting from his breast, he exclaimed-- "all, all, are lost! in vain our warriors, led by tuscarora, fought to the last. one after another they were shot down by the bullets of the white faces, or cut to pieces by the war hatchets of the hated tuparas. our french allies, deserting the fort, fought their way to their boats, and, embarking, fled to their ships, leaving us to our fate. two only with myself escaped by leaping over the walls, and swimming to a canoe floating by. both of my companions were wounded. as we were paddling on, as fast as our strength would allow, we caught sight of a canoe with two portuguese boats in pursuit. we were unobserved, but we had too much reason to fear that the canoe was overtaken. just as we reached the shore, the paddles dropped from the hands of my two companions, and they sank down from loss of blood. when i called to them, they gave no answer. they were both dead. i waited in vain for the arrival of our friends, but none appeared, and i at length came on to bring the sad tidings." as the wounded warrior finished his narrative, loud wailings rose from the women in the camp. no threats of vengeance were uttered, for they felt their utter helplessness, and they knew that they themselves might become the prey of any of their foes who might be induced to attack them. at length an old man arose in their midst. "give not way to despair, my daughters," he exclaimed; "you have still many sons. we will fly with them to a place of safety, and there teach them how their brave fathers fought and died with their faces to the foe. they will grow up, and, hearing of their deeds, will imitate their valour, and revenge the deaths of their sires." the words of the aged warrior restored the drooping courage of the poor women, and they resolved to follow his counsel. a few men, who from sickness or other causes had not gone forth to battle, and the youths who had not sufficient strength to draw their mighty bows, vowed to defend them and the chief's daughter to the last gasp. cora deputed the old warrior to take the lead, and, as they believed the tuparas, flushed with victory, would ere long pursue them, they immediately set out on their sad journey to the north. surrounding nigel and constance, they vowed fidelity, promising to obey the last behests of their beloved young chief tecumah, and to afford them all the support in their power. a small band only of the bravest and most active remained behind to collect any stragglers who might arrive, and to cover the retreat of the main body. nigel, communicating with the old chief, found that he proposed proceeding northward to a region bordering the sea, inhabited by a scanty tribe, with whom the tamoyos were on friendly terms, the former having been driven from their own hunting-grounds by a more powerful tribe. this intelligence was satisfactory to nigel and constance, as they thus had hopes of being able to communicate with some english or french ship which might appear off the shore. the spot to which the tamoyos were directing their course was at length gained. it was a deep wide valley, surrounded by rugged hills, and could not be approached towards the sea except by a narrow gorge, which could be defended by a few brave men, who could lie concealed among the rocks, and hurl down stones on the heads of invaders. the indians carried with them, as was their custom, cuttings and roots of fruit trees and plants, which they had cultivated in their native district. without loss of time, they began erecting huts and laying out plantations, the old men and women being generally employed in such occupations, while the young men went out hunting, they having at present to depend on the produce of the chase for their subsistence. the tribe showed the greatest attention to nigel and constance, whom they considered committed to their care by their beloved young chief, doing their utmost to secure their comfort and convenience. indeed, they treated them with the same respect they bestowed on cora, who was now the acknowledged chieftainess of the tribe. they built a cottage after the model of those they had seen on the island, and laid out a garden, which they planted with fruit trees and vegetables. nigel and his wife in return, aided by cora, instructed them in gospel truth. they also taught them, as far as they had the means, the arts of civilised life. thus the days went rapidly by. still, though the young couple enjoyed much happiness, they could not help wishing to return to europe, while they often thought, with grief, of the loss of the count and of their other beloved friend. besides the account brought by the indian who escaped from the fort, they could gain no further tidings of their fate. nigel would, had he had himself only to consider, have set out to try and ascertain what had become of the colony, but he could not bring himself to leave constance, even though he had full confidence in the fidelity of their indian friends. cora, to whom constance expressed nigel's wishes, at length promised to send out a scout, who would endeavour to find out what had happened. nigel gladly accepted cora's offer. nearly a month had passed since the scout set out, and fears were entertained that he had perished. at last, however, one evening, he was seen descending the side of the hill, along the steep and difficult path by which, as has been said, the valley could alone be reached from the southward; he was accompanied by a white man, whose tottering steps he supported in the difficult descent. as they approached the village, the gaunt form and haggard features of the latter prevented nigel, who went out to meet them, from recognising him. "you don't know me, monsieur lieutenant; i am jacques baville, whom you knew well as a true protestant. i assisted the escape of our good minister, laporte, who was committed to the care of some of the brave indians by the young chief tecumah. we fought our way to the water's side, and embarked in a canoe; but before we had got far, we were chased by two of the enemy's boats, and captured. we expected instant death, but were reserved for a more cruel fate. we were conveyed to the south shore, where we heard that the forts on the island had all been destroyed, and our countrymen, with the traitor villegagnon, had sailed away, leaving most of the protestants to the cruel vengeance of our foes. to commemorate their victory, the portuguese had resolved, we found, on building a city. one of the first edifices erected was a prison, into which the good minister and several other persons were thrown; while the tamoyos, who had been taken prisoners, with two other artisans, like myself, were employed, with many people of other tribes, who had been reduced to slavery by the portuguese, in labouring at the work going forward. a church was next built, and filled full of idols for the people to worship. as soon as it was finished, the minister and other captives were led from the prison, and dragged into it, when they were ordered to worship, as the other people were doing. they refused, however, to how their heads to the saints, or other false gods, but stood motionless, with their arms folded. the priests, on this, reviled them, and threatened them with death if they refused. still they were firm, declaring that they would not mock god with such senseless ceremonies. on this they were taken back to prison; and we, seeing how they behaved, resolved to imitate them. several times they were carried before the priests, who sat in the church to try them for what was called their heresy. the trial was still going on when two priests arrived, who declared they had been on board a portuguese ship, bringing over numerous images and relics and indulgences to saint vincente, when she was captured by a french man-of-war, the captain of which had sacrilegiously thrown them into the sea. i, of course, knew that they spoke of the _madeline_; and, as you remember, monsieur lieutenant, i was on board, i began to fear that i might be recognised. monsieur laporte, of course, stated that he was not there, and could, therefore, not be considered guilty of the act of which they complained, supposing that it had taken place. the priests, however, who were eager to find some one on whom to wreak their vengeance, declared that it mattered nothing, even had he not been there, as the act was performed by those of his faith, and was the result of the pernicious doctrines he taught. he defended himself nobly, but was condemned to be burnt alive in the centre of a wide spot, which had been marked out for a square. "hoping that i had not been recognised by the priests, i was making my way out of the church, when the keen eyes of one of them fell on me. he instantly ordered me to be seized, and at once declared that he had seen me on board the _madeline_, engaged in throwing the trumpery overboard. i would not deny this, but said that i was but doing my duty, and obeying my captain, and that, had he ordered me to throw the two priests themselves overboard, to look after their saints, i should certainly have done so. this enraged them more than ever, and they threatened to burn me with the minister. as i was, however, known to be a good carpenter, the civil officers were not willing to lose my services, and i was sent back to prison. "in vain they tried to make the good minister recant. he refused to do so. they promised him his life and full pardon, and a good post under government, but he refused all their offers, saying that he would rather die a hundred deaths than abandon the faith of the pure gospel. the next day he was led to the place of execution. we were compelled to be present. the faggots were piled round him. some of the people, moved with pity, cried out that he should be strangled first, and the executioner himself seemed unwilling to light the pile; when one of the priests, seizing the torch, set fire to the faggots, which quickly blazed up, and our good minister's soul went to that happy home prepared for him. the priests, having caught sight of me, insisted that i should be thrown into prison to await their pleasure, which i knew very well would be ere long to burn me at the stake. "some of our countrymen, i am sorry to say, recanted, and were set free, but others held fast. i determined, however, if i could, to make my escape, should i have strength enough to do so; for we were so poorly fed that i expected, before long, to be starved. all the prisoners had hitherto been confined in a common cell; but after i was condemned, i was placed in one by myself. it was in a new part of the prison, which i had actually been employed in building. the whole structure was of wood, though, at the same time, very strong. i knew that i could not make my way through the walls, nor underground, as the stakes were driven down deep, and no human strength could force them up; but i recollected the way i had put on the roof; and, though the slabs were heavy, i was certain that i could force one of them up sufficiently to allow me to get through. i had not been long shut up, when a priest came, and endeavoured to make me recant, picturing the horrible tortures i should suffer in this world, and in the next, if i refused. i asked him whence he got his authority. he answered from the church. i replied that the bible was before the church; and that the bible says, `whosoever believeth on me shall not perish, but have everlasting life;' and that, though he might burn my body, christ could save my soul. he replied that the bible must not be interpreted by laymen, and that the church had alone the power to explain it. i observed that the church of christ had ever explained it exactly as i did, and to that church i belonged; that the system which he called `the church,' was built up at rome by pagan priests, and had ever since been employed in adding falsehood to falsehood, for the sake of imposing on the minds of the people, and compelling them to do their will; and that, if he wished to serve christ, he must leave his false church, as thousands of my countrymen had done, and tens of thousands in germany and england, or that he himself would perish eternally. without saying another word, he left the cell, and i felt pretty sure would not come back again. "i had a sheath knife, which i had managed to conceal inside my trousers, and immediately set to work, and wrenched up a stool fixed against the wall. there were several nails in it, which i cut out; and then, making a couple of deep notches in one of the angles of the wall, i fixed the bench a certain height below the roof, which enabled me, by standing on it, to force up one of the slabs with my back. knowing where the nails were driven in, i carefully cut around them, making as little noise as possible. it was, i calculated, about midnight when i had finished my preparations. the slab lifted even more easily than i had expected. i listened for some minutes, expecting to hear the tread of a sentry, but not a sound reached my ears. i had great hopes that he had fallen asleep. creeping through, i replaced the slab, and dropped without noise to the ground. there were numerous indians in the camp, many of whom had canoes, for the purpose of fishing. without loss of time, i crept away, stooping low down, so that, had i been seen, i might be mistaken, in the darkness, for a large dog, or some wild animal prowling about in search of food. i thus, without interruption, made my way down to the shore. there were several canoes hauled up, as i had expected, with paddles left in them. to launch one and to shove off did not occupy much time. the night was dark, but i could make out the opposite shore. with all my might i paddled towards it. on landing, i shoved off the canoe, in the hopes that it would float away, and thus not betray the direction i had taken. scarcely had i got a hundred yards from the beach, when i encountered this my friend, who conducted me here. i am grieved to bring such tidings, and i fear much that those who remain will be put to death, if they refuse to abandon their faith; and i pray that they may have grace and spirit to continue in it. but i myself must not boast, as i know not what torture and starvation would have led me to do." nigel and constance heard, with deep sorrow, this account of the martyrdom of their beloved friend and minister; but they were comforted with the knowledge that he had exchanged a life of trial and suffering for a glorious existence in heaven. several months passed by. jacques baville completely recovered, and was of great assistance in improving their cottage home. he felt, however, even a greater longing than they did to return to his native land. "ships may come and go, and we may not see them, unless we are constantly on the watch," he observed. "i have bethought me of building a hut on the height near the shore; and if you, monsieur lieutenant, will supply me with food, i will undertake to keep a bright look-out as long as my eyes last me. we will have a flagstaff and flag, and it will not be my fault if we don't manage to communicate with any ship which appears off the coast." nigel gladly entered into honest jacques's plan, and assisted him in building his hut, and putting up a flagstaff. still week after week passed by, and jacques had always the same answer to give when nigel visited him. nigel himself had ample occupation in cultivating his garden, varied by hunting expeditions with the indians. he was returning home one evening, when, as he approached his cottage, constance came running out to meet him. her agitation would scarcely allow her to speak. "come, nigel, come! i have been longing for your arrival," she exclaimed, taking his hand. "an old friend has arrived, and is waiting to see you." she led him on, when great was his joy and surprise to see standing in the porch, with outstretched hands, his former commander, captain beauport. they entered the cottage, when, sitting down, the captain briefly narrated his history, and the circumstances which had brought him again to the coast of south america. he little expected to find nigel and constance alive. the crew and passengers of the ship which was conveying him as a prisoner to france, who were all protestants, had insisted on his liberation; and the commander, who was well-disposed towards him, had, without much difficulty, yielded to their wishes. by great exertions the ships had been kept afloat; and, after enduring severe hardships, had reached hennebonne, in france. here the commander, as directed, delivered his despatches to the chief magistrate, who, providentially for the passengers, was a staunch protestant. on opening them, he found that the traitor, villegagnon, had denounced them as arch-heretics, worthy of the stake, and advised that they should be immediately delivered up to punishment. the worthy magistrate, indignant at the treachery with which they had been treated, assisted them by every means in his power; while captain beauport, knowing that his life would not be safe should he remain in france, immediately embarked on board a vessel bound for england. he there found many protestant friends, who had fled to escape the fearful persecutions to which they were subjected in france. by their means he obtained the command of an english ship. he had made two or three short voyages, and had, some time before, come out on an exploring expedition to south america, from which he was returning. he was sailing northward, on his way to england, when he observed jacques baville's signal. as may be supposed, nigel and constance, with honest jacques, did not lose the opportunity of returning with him. they parted from cora with sincere regret. "it is but natural that you should wish to dwell in your own country, and among your own people," said the indian girl. "my love makes me wish to accompany you, but my duty compels me to remain with my tribe. on our hearts your images will remain engraved as long as they beat with life." she, with all her people, attended them to the beach, as they put off towards the ship, which lay at anchor in the harbour. as long as any object was visible on the shore, cora was seen waving her adieus. the sails were spread to the wind, and the ship glided out into the ocean on her destined course towards the shores of england. they reached that land of freedom in safety, and nigel resolved to take up his residence here, with his young wife, rather than expose her to the dangers to which she would be subjected in her native land. he wrote to honest maitre leroux, who had heard from the count of constance's marriage, and was ready to pay over to nigel the rents of the estate. during the occasional intervals of peace, nigel paid several visits to tourville, and, on the death of the steward, sold the estate, and invested the money in an english property, both he and his wife agreeing that it was far better to live on moderate means in a land where they could enjoy the blessings of civil and religious liberty, than in any country under the galling yoke of papal tyranny. the end. [transcriber's note: obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. the author's spelling has been maintained.] the huguenots in france by dr. samuel smiles author of "self help" london george routledge and sons, limited broadway house, ludgate hill mdcccciii london and county printing works, bazaar buildings, london, w.c. contents. the huguenots in france after the revocation of the edict of nantes. chapter page i. revocation of the edict of nantes........................... ii. effects of the revocation--church in the desert............ iii. claude brousson, the huguenot advocate..................... iv. claude brousson, pastor and martyr......................... v. outbreak in languedoc...................................... vi. insurrection of the camisards.............................. vii. exploits of cavalier...................................... viii. end of the camisard insurrection.......................... ix. galley-slaves for the faith............................... x. antoine court............................................. xi. reorganization of the church in the desert................ xii. the church in the desert--paul rabaut..................... xiii. end of the persecutions--the french revolution............ memoirs of distinguished huguenot refugees. i. story of samuel de pÉchels................................ ii. captain rapin, author of the "history of england"......... iii. captain riou, r.n......................................... a visit to the country of the vaudois. i. introductory--early persecutions of the vaudois........... ii. the valley of the romanche--brianÇon...................... iii. val louise--history of felix neff......................... iv. the vaudois mountain-refuge of dormilhouse................ v. guillestre and the valley of queyras...................... vi. the valley of the pelice -- la tour -- angrogna -- the pra de tour............................................... vii. the glorious return: an episode in the history of the italian vaudois........................................... maps. page the country of the cevennes...................................... "the country of felix neff" (dauphiny).......................... the valley of luserne........................................... preface. in preparing this edition for the press, i have ventured to add three short memoirs of distinguished huguenot refugees and their descendants. though the greatest number of huguenots banished from france at the revocation of the edict of nantes were merchants and manufacturers, who transferred their skill and arts to england, which was not then a manufacturing country; a large number of nobles and gentry emigrated to this and other countries, leaving their possessions to be confiscated by the french king. the greater number of the nobles entered the armies of the countries in which they took refuge. in holland, they joined the army of the prince of orange, afterwards william iii., king of england. after driving the armies of louis xiv. out of ireland, they met the french at ramilies, blenheim, and malplacquet, and other battles in the low countries. a huguenot engineer directed the operations at the siege of namur, which ended in its capture. another conducted the siege of lille, which was also taken. but perhaps the greatest number of huguenot nobles entered the prussian service. their descendants revisited france on more than one occasion. they overran the northern and eastern parts of france in and ; and last of all they vanquished the descendants of their former persecutors at sedan in . sedan was, prior to the revocation of the edict of nantes, the renowned seat of protestant learning; while now it is known as the scene of the greatest military catastrophe which has occurred in modern history. the prime minister of france, m. jules simon, not long ago recorded the fateful effects of louis xiv.'s religious intolerance. in discussing the perpetual ecclesiastical questions which still disturb france, he recalled the fact that not less than eighty of the german staff in the late war were representatives of protestant families, driven from france by the revocation of the edict of nantes. the first of the appended memoirs is that of samuel de péchels, a noble of languedoc, who, after enduring great privations, reached england through jamaica, and served as a lieutenant in ireland under william iii. many of his descendants have been distinguished soldiers in the service of england. the second is captain rapin, who served faithfully in ireland, and was called away to be tutor to the young duke of portland. he afterwards spent his time at wesel on the rhine, where he wrote his "history of england." the third is captain riou, "the gallant and the good," who was killed at the battle of copenhagen. these memoirs might be multiplied to any extent; but those given are enough to show the good work which the huguenots and their descendants have done in the service of england. introduction. six years since, i published a book entitled _the huguenots: their settlements, churches, and industries, in england and ireland_. its object was to give an account of the causes which led to the large migrations of foreign protestants from flanders and france into england, and to describe their effects upon english industry as well as english history. it was necessary to give a brief _résumé_ of the history of the reformation in france down to the dispersion of the huguenots, and the suppression of the protestant religion by louis xiv. under the terms of the revocation of the edict of nantes. under that act, the profession of protestantism was proclaimed to be illegal, and subject to the severest penalties. hence, many of the french protestants who refused to be "converted," and had the means of emigrating, were under the necessity of leaving france and endeavouring to find personal freedom and religious liberty elsewhere. the refugees found protection in various countries. the principal portion of the emigrants from languedoc and the south-eastern provinces of france crossed the frontier into switzerland, and settled there, or afterwards proceeded into the states of prussia, holland, and denmark, as well as into england and ireland. the chief number of emigrants from the northern and western seaboard provinces of france, emigrated directly into england, ireland, america, and the cape of good hope. in my previous work, i endeavoured to give as accurate a description as was possible of the emigrants who settled in england and ireland, to which, the american editor of the work (the hon. g. p. disosway) has added an account of those who settled in the united states of america. but besides the huguenots who contrived to escape from franco during the dragonnades which preceded and the persecutions which followed the revocation of the edict of nantes, there was still a very large number of huguenots remaining in france who had not the means wherewith to fly from their country. these were the poorer people, the peasants, the small farmers, the small manufacturers, many of whom were spoiled of their goods for the very purpose of preventing them from emigrating. they were consequently under the necessity of remaining in their native country, whether they changed their religion by force or not. it is to give an account of these people, as a supplement to my former book, that the present work is written. it is impossible to fix precisely the number of the huguenots who left france to avoid the cruelties of louis xiv., as well as of those who perforce remained to endure them. it shakes one's faith in history to observe the contradictory statements published with regard to french political or religious facts, even of recent date. a general impression has long prevailed that there was a massacre of st. bartholemew in paris in the year ; but even that has recently been denied, or softened down into a mere political squabble. it is not, however, possible to deny the fact that there was a revocation of the edict of nantes in , though it has been vindicated as a noble act of legislation, worthy even of the reputation and character of louis the great. no two writers agree as to the number of french citizens who were driven from their country by the revocation. a learned roman catholic, mr. charles butler, states that only , persons "retired" from france; whereas m. capefigue, equally opposed to the reformation, who consulted the population tables of the period (although the intendants made their returns as small as possible in order to avoid the reproach of negligence), calculates the emigration at , souls, namely, , ministers, , elders, , gentlemen, the remainder consisting almost entirely of traders and artisans. these returns, quoted by m. capefigue, were made only a few years after the revocation, although the emigration continued without intermission for many years later. m. charles coquerel says that whatever horror may be felt for the massacre of st. bartholomew of , the persecutions which preceded and followed the act of revocation in , "kept france under a perpetual st. bartholomew for about sixty years." during that time it is believed that more than , , frenchmen either left the kingdom, or were killed, imprisoned, or sent to the galleys in their efforts to escape. the intendant of saintonge, a king's officer, not likely to exaggerate the number of emigrants, reported in , long before the emigration had ceased, that his province had lost , reformers. languedoc suffered far more; whilst boulainvilliers reports that besides the emigrants who succeeded in making their escape, the province lost not fewer than , persons by premature death, the sword, strangulation, and the wheel. the number of french emigrants who resorted to england may be inferred from the fact that at the beginning of last century there were not fewer than _thirty-five_ french protestant churches in london alone, at a time when the population of the metropolis was not one-fourth of what it is now; while there were other large french settlements at canterbury, norwich, southampton, bristol, exeter, &c., as well as at dublin, lisburn, portarlington, and other towns in ireland. then, with respect to the much larger number of protestants who remained in france after the revocation of the edict of nantes, there is the same difference of opinion. a deputation of huguenot pastors and elders, who waited upon the duc de noailles in informed him that there were then , , protestant _families_ in france. thirty years after that date, louis xiv. proclaimed that there were no protestants whatever in france; that protestantism had been entirely suppressed, and that any one found professing that faith must be considered as a "relapsed heretic," and sentenced to imprisonment, the galleys, or the other punishments to which protestants were then subject. after an interval of about seventy-five years, during which protestantism (though suppressed by the law) contrived to lead a sort of underground life--the protestants meeting by night, and sometimes by day, in caves, valleys, moors, woods, old quarries, hollow beds of rivers, or, as they themselves called it, "in the desert"--they at length contrived to lift their heads into the light of day, and then rabaut st. etienne stood up in the constituent assembly at paris, in , and claimed the rights of his protestant fellow-countrymen--the rights of " , , useful citizens." louis xvi. granted them an edict of tolerance, about a hundred years after louis xiv. had revoked the edict of nantes; but the measure proved too late for the king, and too late for france, which had already been sacrificed to the intolerance of louis xiv. and his jesuit advisers. after all the sufferings of france--after the cruelties to which her people have been subjected by the tyranny of her monarchs and the intolerance of her priests,--it is doubtful whether she has yet learnt wisdom from her experience and trials. france was brought to ruin a century ago by the jesuits who held the entire education of the country in their hands. they have again recovered their ground, and the congreganistes are now what the jesuits were before. the sans-culottes of were the pupils of the priests; so were the communists of .[ ] m. edgar quinet has recently said to his countrymen: "the jesuitical and clerical spirit which has sneaked in among you and all your affairs has ruined you. it has corrupted the spring of life; it has delivered you over to the enemy.... is this to last for ever? for heaven's sake spare us at least the sight of a jesuits' republic as the coronation of our century." [footnote : m. simiot's speech before the national assembly, th march, .] in the midst of these prophecies of ruin, we have m. veuillot frankly avowing his ultramontane policy in the _univers_. he is quite willing to go back to the old burnings, hangings, and quarterings, to prevent any freedom of opinion about religious matters. "for my part," he says, "i frankly avow my regret not only that john huss was not burnt sooner, but that luther was not burnt too. and i regret further that there has not been some prince sufficiently pious and politic to have made a crusade against the protestants." m. veuillot is perhaps entitled to some respect for boldly speaking out what he means and thinks. there are many amongst ourselves who mean the same thing, without having the courage to say so--who hate the reformation quite as much as m. veuillot does, and would like to see the principles of free examination and individual liberty torn up root and branch. with respect to the proposed crusade against protestantism, it will be seen from the following work what the "pious and politic" louis xiv. attempted, and how very inefficient his measures eventually proved in putting down protestantism, or in extending catholicism. louis xiv. found it easier to make martyrs than apostates; and discovered that hanging, banishment, the galleys, and the sword were not amongst the most successful of "converters." the history of the huguenots during the time of their submergence as an "underground church" is scarcely treated in the general histories of france. courtly writers blot them out of history as louis xiv. desired to blot them out of france. most histories of france published in england contain little notice of them. those who desire to pursue the subject further, will obtain abundant information, more particularly from the following works:-- elie bÉnoÎt: _histoire de l'Édit de nantes._ charles coquerel: _histoire des Églises du désert._ napoleon peyrat: _histoire des pasteurs du désert._ antoine court: _histoire des troubles de cevennes._ edmund hughes: _histoire de la restauration du protestantisme en france au xviii. siècle._ a. bonnemÈre: _histoire des camisardes._ adolphe michel: _louvois et les protestantes._ athanase coquerel fils; _les forçats pour la foi, &c., &c._ it remains to be added that part of this work--viz., the "wars of the camisards," and the "journey in the country of the vaudois"--originally appeared in _good words_. s.s. london, _october_, . the huguenots in france. chapter i. revocation of the edict of nantes. the revocation of the edict of nantes was signed by louis xiv. of france, on the th of october, , and published four days afterwards. although the revocation was the personal act of the king, it was nevertheless a popular measure, approved by the catholic church of france, and by the great body of the french people. the king had solemnly sworn, at the beginning of his reign, to maintain, the tolerating edict of henry iv.--the huguenots being amongst the most industrious, enterprising, and loyal of his subjects. but the advocacy of the king's then catholic mistress, madame de maintenon, and of his jesuit confessor, père la chaise, overcame his scruples, and the deed of revocation of the edict was at length signed and published. the aged chancellor, le tellier, was so overjoyed at the measure, that on affixing the great seal of france to the deed, he exclaimed, in the words of simeon, "lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation." three months later, the great bossuet, the eagle of meaux, preached the funeral sermon of le tellier; in the course of which he testified to the immense joy of the church at the revocation of the edict. "let us," said he, "expand our hearts in praises of the piety of louis. let our acclamations ascend to heaven, and let us say to this new constantine, this new theodosius, this new marcian, this new charlemagne, what the thirty-six fathers formerly said in the council of chalcedon: 'you have affirmed the faith, you have exterminated the heretics; it is a work worthy of your reign, whose proper character it is. thanks to you, heresy is no more. god alone can have worked this marvel. king of heaven, preserve the king of earth: it is the prayer of the church, it is the prayer of the bishops.'"[ ] [footnote : bossuet, "oraison funèbre du chancelier letellier."] madame de maintenon also received the praises of the church. "all good people," said the abbé de choisy, "the pope, the bishops, and all the clergy, rejoice at the victory of madame de maintenon." madame enjoyed the surname of director of the affairs of the clergy; and it was said by the ladies of st. cyr (an institution founded by her), that "the cardinals and the bishops knew no other way of approaching the king save through her." it is generally believed that her price for obtaining the king's consent to the act of revocation, was the withdrawal by the clergy of their opposition to her marriage with the king; and that the two were privately united by the archbishop of paris at versailles, a few days after, in the presence of père la chaise and two more witnesses. but louis xiv. never publicly recognised de maintenon as his wife--never rescued her from the ignominious position in which she originally stood related to him. people at court all spoke with immense praises of the king's intentions with respect to destroying the huguenots. "killing them off" was a matter of badinage with the courtiers. madame de maintenon wrote to the duc de noailles, "the soldiers are killing numbers of the fanatics--they hope soon to free languedoc of them." that picquante letter-writer, madame de sévigné, often referred to the huguenots. she seems to have classed them with criminals or wild beasts. when residing in low brittany during a revolt against the gabelle, a friend wrote to her, "how dull you must be!" "no," replied madame de sévigné, "we are not so dull--hanging is quite a refreshment to me! they have just taken twenty-four or thirty of these men, and are going to throw them off." a few days after the edict had been revoked, she wrote to her cousin bussy, at paris: "you have doubtless seen the edict by which the king revokes that of nantes. there is nothing so fine as that which it contains, and never has any king done, or ever will do, a more memorable act." bussy replied to her: "i immensely admire the conduct of the king in destroying the huguenots. the wars which have been waged against them, and the st. bartholomew, have given some reputation to the sect. his majesty has gradually undermined it; and the edict he has just published, maintained by the dragoons and by bourdaloue,[ ] will soon give them the _coup de grâce_." [footnote : bourdaloue had just been sent from the jesuit church of st. louis at paris, to montpellier, to aid the dragoons in converting the protestants, and bringing them back to the church.] in a future letter to count bussy, madame de sévigné informed him of "a dreadfully fatiguing journey which her son-in-law m. de grignan had made in the mountains of dauphiny, to pursue and punish the miserable huguenots, who issued from their holes, and vanished like ghosts to avoid extermination." de baville, however, the lieutenant of languedoc, kept her in good heart. in one of his letters, he said, "i have this morning condemned seventy-six of these wretches (huguenots), and sent them to the galleys." all this was very pleasant to madame de sévigné. madame de scuderi, also, more moderately rejoiced in the act of revocation. "the king," she wrote to bussy, "has worked great marvels against the huguenots; and the authority which he has employed to unite them to the church will be most salutary to themselves and to their children, who will be educated in the purity of the faith; all this will bring upon him the benedictions of heaven." even the french academy, though originally founded by a huguenot, publicly approved the deed of revocation. in a discourse uttered before it, the abbé tallemand exclaimed, when speaking of the huguenot temple at charenton, which had just been destroyed by the mob, "happy ruins, the finest trophy france ever beheld!" la fontaine described heresy as now "reduced to the last gasp." thomas corneille also eulogized the zeal of the king in "throttling the reformation." barbier d'aucourt heedlessly, but truly, compared the emigration of the protestants "to the departure of the israelites from egypt." the academy afterwards proposed, as the subject of a poem, the revocation of the edict of nantes, and fontenelle had the fortune, good or bad, of winning the prize. the philosophic la bruyère contributed a maxim in praise of the revocation. quinault wrote a poem on the subject; and madame deshoulières felt inspired to sing "the destruction of heresy." the abbé de rancé spoke of the whole affair as a prodigy: "the temple of charenton destroyed, and no exercise of protestantism, within the kingdom; it is a kind of miracle, such as we had never hoped to have seen in our day." the revocation was popular with the lower class, who went about sacking and pulling down the protestant churches. they also tracked the huguenots and their pastors, where they found them evading or breaking the edict of revocation; thus earning the praises of the church and the fines offered by the king for their apprehension. the provosts and sheriffs of paris represented the popular feeling, by erecting a brazen statue of the king who had rooted out heresy; and they struck and distributed medals in honour of the great event. the revocation was also popular with the dragoons. in order to "convert" the protestants, the dragoons were unduly billeted upon them. as both officers and soldiers were then very badly paid, they were thereby enabled to live at free quarters. they treated everything in the houses they occupied as if it were their own, and an assignment of billets was little loss than the consignment of the premises to the military, to use for their own purposes, during the time they occupied them.[ ] [footnote : sir john reresby's travels and memoirs.] the revocation was also approved by those who wished to buy land cheap. as the huguenots were prevented holding their estates unless they conformed to the catholic religion, and as many estates were accordingly confiscated and sold, land speculators, as well as grand seigneurs who wished to increase their estates, were constantly on the look-out for good bargains. even before the revocation, when the huguenots were selling their land in order to leave the country, madame de maintenon wrote to her nephew, for whom she had obtained from the king a grant of , francs, "i beg of you carefully to use the money you are about to receive. estates in poitou may be got for nothing; the desolation of the huguenots will drive them to sell more. you may easily acquire extensive possessions in poitou." the revocation was especially gratifying to the french catholic church. the pope, of course, approved of it. _te deums_ were sung at rome in thanksgiving for the forced conversion of the huguenots. pope innocent xi. sent a brief to louis xiv., in which he promised him the unanimous praises of the church, "amongst all the proofs," said he, "which your majesty has given of natural piety, not the least brilliant is the zeal, truly worthy of the most christian king, which has induced you to revoke all the ordinances issued in favour of the heretics of your kingdom."[ ] [footnote : pope innocent xi.'s letter of november th, .] the jesuits were especially elated by the revocation. it had been brought about by the intrigues of their party, acting on the king's mind through madame de maintenon and père la chaise. it enabled them to fill their schools and nunneries with the children of protestants, who were compelled by law to pay for their education by jesuit priests. to furnish the required accommodation, nearly the whole of the protestant temples that had not been pulled down were made over to the jesuits, to be converted into monastic schools and nunneries. even bossuet, the "last father of the church," shared in the spoils of the huguenots. a few days after the edict had been revoked, bossuet applied for the materials of the temples of nauteuil and morcerf, situated in his diocese; and his majesty ordered that they should be granted to him.[ ] [footnote : "louvois et les protestants," par adolphe michel, p. .] now that protestantism had been put down, and the officers of louis announced from all parts of the kingdom that the huguenots were becoming converted by thousands, there was nothing but a clear course before the jesuits in france. for their religion was now the favoured religion of the state. it is true there were the jansenists--declared to be heretical by the popes, and distinguished for their opposition to the doctrines and moral teaching of the jesuits--who were suffering from a persecution which then drove some of the members of port royal into exile, and eventually destroyed them. but even the jansenists approved the persecution of the protestants. the great arnault, their most illustrious interpreter, though in exile in the low countries, declared that though the means which louis xiv. had employed had been "rather violent, they had in nowise been unjust." but protestantism being declared destroyed, and jansenism being in disgrace, there was virtually no legal religion in france but one--that of the roman catholic church. atheism, it is true, was tolerated, but then atheism was not a religion. the atheists did not, like the protestants, set up rival churches, or appoint rival ministers, and seek to draw people to their assemblies. the atheists, though they tacitly approved the religion of the king, had no opposition to offer to it--only neglect, and perhaps concealed contempt. hence it followed that the court and the clergy had far more toleration for atheism than for either protestantism or jansenism. it is authentically related that louis xiv. on one occasion objected to the appointment of a representative on a foreign mission on account of the person being supposed to be a jansenist; but on its being discovered that the nominee was only an atheist, the objection was at once withdrawn.[ ] [footnote : _quarterly review._] at the time of the revocation, when the king and the catholic church were resolved to tolerate no religion other than itself, the church had never seemed so powerful in france. it had a strong hold upon the minds of the people. it was powerful in its leaders and its great preachers; in fact, france has never, either before or since, exhibited such an array of preaching genius as bossuet, bourdaloue, fléchier, and massillon. yet the uncontrolled and enormously increased power conferred upon the french church at that time, most probably proved its greatest calamity. less than a hundred years after the revocation, the church had lost its influence over the people, and was despised. the deists and atheists, sprung from the church's bosom, were in the ascendant; and voltaire, rousseau, diderot, and mirabeau, were regarded as greater men than either bossuet, bourdaloue, fléchier, or massillon. not one of the clergy we have named, powerful orators though they were, ever ventured to call in question the cruelties with which the king sought to compel the protestants to embrace the dogmas of their church. there were no doubt many catholics who deplored the force practised on the huguenots; but they were greatly in the minority, and had no power to make their opposition felt. some of them considered it an impious sacrilege to compel the protestants to take the catholic sacrament--to force them to accept the host, which catholics believed to be the veritable body of christ, but which the huguenots could only accept as bread, over which some function had been performed by the priests, in whose miraculous power of conversion they did not believe. fénélon took this view of the forcible course employed by the jesuits; but he was in disgrace as a jansenist, and what he wrote on the subject remained for a long time unknown, and was only first published in . the duc de saint-simon, also a jansenist, took the same view, which he embodied in his "memoirs;" but these were kept secret by his family, and were not published for nearly a century after his death. thus the catholic church remained triumphant. the revocation was apparently approved by all, excepting the huguenots. the king was flattered by the perpetual conversions reported to be going on throughout the country--five thousand persons in one place, ten thousand in another, who had abjured and taken the communion--at once, and sometimes "instantly." "the king," says saint-simon, "congratulated himself on his power and his piety. he believed himself to have renewed the days of the preaching of the apostles, and attributed to himself all the honour. the bishops wrote panegyrics of him; the jesuits made the pulpits resound with his praises.... he swallowed their poison in deep draughts."[ ] [footnote : "memoirs of the duke of saint-simon," translated by bayle st. john, vol. iii. p .] louis xiv. lived for thirty years after the edict of nantes had been revoked. he had therefore the fullest opportunity of observing the results of the policy he had pursued. he died in the hands of the jesuits, his body covered with relics of the true cross. madame de maintenon, the "famous and fatal witch," as saint-simon called her, abandoned him at last; and the king died, lamented by no one. he had banished, or destroyed, during-his reign, about a million of his subjects, and those who remained did not respect him. many regarded him as a self-conceited tyrant, who sought to save his own soul by inflicting penance on the backs of others. he loaded his kingdom with debt, and overwhelmed his people with taxes. he destroyed the industry of france, which had been mainly supported by the huguenots. towards the end of his life he became generally hated; and while his heart was conveyed to the grand jesuits, his body, which was buried at st. denis, was hurried to the grave accompanied by the execrations of the people. yet the church remained faithful to him to the last. the great massillon preached his funeral sermon; though the message was draped in the livery of the court. "how far," said he, "did louis xiv. carry his zeal for the church, that virtue of sovereigns who have received power and the sword only that they may be props of the altar and defenders of its doctrine! specious reasons of state! in vain did you oppose to louis the timid views of human wisdom, the body of the monarchy enfeebled by the flight of so many citizens, the course of trade slackened, either by the deprivation of their industry, or by the furtive removal of their wealth! dangers fortify his zeal. the work of god fears not man. he believes even that he strengthens his throne by overthrowing that of error. the profane temples are destroyed, the pulpits of seduction are cast down. the prophets of falsehood are torn from their flocks. at the first blow dealt to it by louis, heresy falls, disappears, and is reduced either to hide itself in the obscurity whence it issued, or to cross the seas, and to bear with it into foreign lands its false gods, its bitterness, and its rage."[ ] [footnote : funeral oration on louis xiv.] whatever may have been the temper which the huguenots displayed when they were driven from france by persecution, they certainly carried with them something far more valuable than rage. they carried with them their virtue, piety, industry, and valour, which proved the source of wealth, spirit, freedom, and character, in all those countries--holland, prussia, england, and america--in which these noble exiles took refuge. we shall next see whether the huguenots had any occasion for entertaining the "rage" which the great massillon attributed to them. chapter ii. effects of the revocation. the revocation struck with civil death the entire protestant population of france. all the liberty of conscience which they had enjoyed under the edict of nantes, was swept away by the act of the king. they were deprived of every right and privilege; their social life was destroyed; their callings were proscribed; their property was liable to be confiscated at any moment; and they were subjected to mean, detestable, and outrageous cruelties. from the day of the revocation, the relation of louis xiv. to his huguenot subjects was that of the tyrant and his victims. the only resource which remained to the latter was that of flying from their native country; and an immense number of persons took the opportunity of escaping from france. the edict of revocation proclaimed that the huguenot subjects of france must thenceforward be of "the king's religion;" and the order was promulgated throughout the kingdom. the prime minister, louvois, wrote to the provincial governors, "his majesty desires that the severest rigour shall be shown to those who will not conform to his religion, and those who seek the foolish glory of wishing to be the last, must be pushed to the utmost extremity." the huguenots were forbidden, under the penalty of death, to worship publicly after their own religious forms. they were also forbidden, under the penalty of being sent to the galleys for life, to worship privately in their own homes. if they were overheard singing their favourite psalms, they were liable to fine, imprisonment, or the galleys. they were compelled to hang out flags from their houses on the days of catholic processions; but they were forbidden, under a heavy penalty, to look out of their windows when the corpus domini was borne along the streets. the huguenots were rigidly forbidden to instruct their children in their own faith. they were commanded to send them to the priest to be baptized and brought up in the roman catholic faith, under the penalty of five hundred livres fine in each case. the boys were educated in jesuit schools, the girls in nunneries, the parents being compelled to pay the required expenses; and where the parents were too poor to pay, the children were at once transferred to the general hospitals. a decree of the king, published in december, , ordered that every child of _five years_ and upwards was to be taken possession of by the authorities, and removed from its protestant parents. this decree often proved a sentence of death, not only to the child, but to its parents. the whole of the protestant temples throughout france were subject to demolition. the expelled pastors were compelled to evacuate the country within fifteen days. if, in the meantime, they were found performing their functions, they were liable to be sent to the galleys for life. if they undertook to marry protestants, the marriages were declared illegal, and the children bastards. if, after the expiry of the fifteen days, they were found lingering in france, the pastors were then liable to the penalty of death. protestants could neither be born, nor live, nor die, without state and priestly interference. protestant _sages-femmes_ were not permitted to exercise their functions; protestant doctors were prohibited from practising; protestant surgeons and apothecaries were suppressed; protestant advocates, notaries, and lawyers were interdicted; protestants could not teach, and all their schools, public and private, were put down. protestants were no longer employed by the government in affairs of finance, as collectors of taxes, or even as labourers on the public roads, or in any other office. even protestant grocers were forbidden to exercise their calling. there must be no protestant librarians, booksellers, or printers. there was, indeed, a general raid upon protestant literature all over france. all bibles, testaments, and books of religious instruction, were collected and publicly burnt. there were bonfires in almost every town. at metz, it occupied a whole day to burn the protestant books which had been seized, handed over to the clergy, and condemned to be destroyed. protestants were even forbidden to hire out horses, and protestant grooms were forbidden to give riding lessons. protestant domestics were forbidden to hire themselves as servants, and protestant mistresses were forbidden to hire them under heavy penalties. if they engaged protestant servants, they were liable to be sent to the galleys for life. they were even prevented employing "new converts." artisans were forbidden to work without certificates that their religion was catholic. protestant apprenticeships were suppressed. protestant washerwomen were excluded from their washing-places on the river. in fact, there was scarcely a degradation that could be invented, or an insult that could be perpetrated, that was not practised upon those poor huguenots who refused to be of "the king's religion." even when protestants were about to take refuge in death, their troubles were not over. the priests had the power of forcing their way into the dying man's house, where they presented themselves at his bedside, and offered him conversion and the viaticum. if the dying man refused these, he was liable to be seized after death, dragged from the house, pulled along the streets naked, and buried in a ditch, or thrown upon a dunghill.[ ] [footnote : such was, in fact, the end of a man so distinguished as m. paul chenevix, councillor of the court of metz, who died in , the year after the revocation. although of the age of eighty, and so illustrious for his learning, his dead body was dragged along the streets on a hurdle and thrown upon a dunghill. see "huguenot refugees and their descendants," under the name _chenevix_. the present archbishop of dublin is descended from his brother philip chenevix, who settled in england shortly after the revocation.] for several years before the revocation, while the persecutions of the huguenots had been increasing, many had realised their means, and fled abroad into switzerland, germany, holland, and england. but after the revocation, emigration from france was strictly forbidden, under penalty of confiscation of the whole goods and property of the emigrant. any person found attempting to leave the country, was liable to the seizure of all that belonged to him, and to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys; one half the amount realised by the sale of the property being paid to the informers, who thus became the most active agents of the government. the act also ordered that all landed proprietors who had left france before the revocation, should return within four months, under penalty of confiscation of all their property. amongst those of the king's subjects who were the most ready to obey his orders were some of the old huguenot noble families, such as the members of the houses of bouillon, coligny, rohan, tremouille, sully, and la force. these great vassals, whom a turbulent feudalism had probably in the first instance induced to embrace protestantism, were now found ready to change their profession of religion in servile obedience to the monarch. the lesser nobility were more faithful and consistent. many of them abandoned their estates and fled across the frontier, rather than live a daily lie to god by forswearing the religion of their conscience. others of this class, on whom religion sat more lightly, as the only means of saving their property from confiscation, pretended to be converted to roman catholicism; though, we shall find, that these "new converts," as they were called, were treated with as much suspicion on the one side as they were regarded with contempt on the other. there were also the huguenot manufacturers, merchants, and employers of labour, of whom a large number closed their workshops and factories, sold off their goods, converted everything into cash, at whatever sacrifice, and fled across the frontier into switzerland--either settling there, or passing through it on their way to germany, holland, or england. it was necessary to stop this emigration, which was rapidly diminishing the population, and steadily impoverishing the country. it was indeed a terrible thing for frenchmen, to tear themselves away from their country--frenchmen, who have always clung so close to their soil that they have rarely been able to form colonies of emigration elsewhere--it was breaking so many living fibres to leave france, to quit the homes of their fathers, their firesides, their kin, and their race. yet, in a multitude of cases, they were compelled to tear themselves by the roots out of the france they so loved. yet it was so very easy for them to remain. the king merely required them to be "converted." he held that loyalty required them to be of "his religion." on the th of october, , the day after he had signed the act of revocation, la reynée, lieutenant of the police of paris, issued a notice to the huguenot tradespeople and working-classes, requiring them to be converted instantly. many of them were terrified, and conformed accordingly. next day, another notice was issued to the huguenot bourgeois, requiring them to assemble on the following day for the purpose of publicly making a declaration of their conversion. the result of those measures was to make hypocrites rather than believers, and they took effect upon the weakest and least-principled persons. the strongest, most independent, and high-minded of the huguenots, who would _not_ be hypocrites, resolved passively to resist them, and if they could not be allowed to exercise freedom of conscience in their own country, they determined to seek it elsewhere. hence the large increase in the emigration from all parts of france immediately after the act of revocation had been proclaimed.[ ] all the roads leading to the frontier or the sea-coast streamed with fugitives. they went in various forms and guises--sometimes in bodies of armed men, at other times in solitary parties, travelling at night and sleeping in the woods by day. they went as beggars, travelling merchants, sellers of beads and chaplets, gipsies, soldiers, shepherds, women with their faces dyed and sometimes dressed in men's clothes, and in all manner of disguises. [footnote : it is believed that , emigrants left france through religious persecution during the twenty years previous to the revocation, and that , escaped during the twenty years after that event. m. charles coquerel estimates the number of protestants in france at that time to have been two millions of _men_ ("Églises du désert," i. ) the number of protestant pastors was about one thousand--of whom six hundred went into exile, one hundred were executed or sent to the galleys, and the rest are supposed to have accepted pensions as "new converts."] to prevent this extensive emigration, more violent measures were adopted. every road out of france was posted with guards. the towns, highways, bridges, and ferries, were all watched; and heavy rewards were promised to those who would stop and bring back the fugitives. many were taken, loaded with irons, and dispatched by the most public roads through france--as a sight to be seen by other protestants--to the galleys at marseilles, brest, and other ports. as they went along they were subject to every sort of indignity in the towns and villages through which they passed. they were hooted, stoned, spit upon, and loaded with insult. many others went by sea, in french as well as in foreign ships. though the sailors of france were prohibited the exercise of the reformed religion, under the penalty of fines, corporal punishment, and seizure of the vessels where the worship was allowed, yet many of the emigrants contrived to get away by the help of french ship captains, masters of sloops, fishing-boats, and coast pilots--who most probably sympathized with the views of those who wished to fly their country rather than become hypocrites and forswear their religion. a large number of emigrants, who went hurriedly off to sea in little boats, must have been drowned, as they were never afterwards heard of. there were also many english ships that appeared off the coast to take the flying huguenots away by night. they also escaped in foreign ships taking in their cargoes in the western harbours. they got cooped up in casks or wine barraques, with holes for breathing places; others contrived to get surreptitiously into the hold, and stowed themselves away among the goods. when it became known to the government that many protestants were escaping in this way, provision was made to meet the case; and a royal order was issued that, before any ship was allowed to set sail for a foreign port, the hold should be fumigated with deadly gas, so that any hidden huguenot who could not otherwise be detected, might thus be suffocated![ ] [footnote : we refer to "the huguenots: their settlements, churches, and industries in england and ireland," where a great many incidents are given relative to the escape of refugees by land and sea, which need not here be repeated.] in the meantime, however, numerous efforts were being made to convert the huguenots. the king, his ministers, the dragoons, the bishops, and clergy used all due diligence. "everybody is now missionary," said the fascinating madame de sévigné; "each has his mission--above all the magistrates and governors of provinces, _helped by the dragoons_. it is the grandest and finest thing that has ever been imagined and executed."[ ] [footnote : letter to the president de moulceau, november th, .] the conversions effected by the dragoons were much more sudden than those effected by the priests. sometimes a hundred or more persons were converted by a single troop within an hour. in this way murillac converted thousands of persons in a week. the regiment of ashfeld converted the whole province of poitou in a month. de noailles was very successful in his conversions. he converted nismes in twenty-four hours; the day after he converted montpellier; and he promised in a few weeks to deliver all lower languedoc from the leprosy of heresy. in one of his dispatches soon after the revocation, he boasted that he had converted nobility and gentry, ministers, and , individuals of various classes. the quickness of the conversions effected by the dragoons is easily to be accounted for. the principal cause was the free quartering of soldiers in the houses of the protestants. the soldiers knew what was the object for which they were thus quartered. they lived freely in all ways. they drank, swore, shouted, beat the heretics, insulted their women, and subjected them to every imaginable outrage and insult. one of their methods of making converts was borrowed from the persecutions of the vaudois. it consisted in forcing the feet of the intended converts into boots full of boiling grease, or they would hang them up by the feet, sometimes forgetting to cut them down until they were dead. they would also force them to drink water perpetually, or make them sit under a slow dripping upon their heads until they died of madness. sometimes they placed burning coals in their hands, or used an instrument of torture resembling that known in scotland as the thumbscrews.[ ] many of their attempts at conversion were accompanied by details too hideous to be recorded. [footnote : thumbscrews were used in the reign of james ii. louis and james borrowed from each other the means of converting heretics; but whether the origin of the thumbscrew be french or scotch is not known.] of those who would not be converted, the prisons were kept full. they were kept there without the usual allowance of straw, and almost without food. in winter they had no fire, and at night no lamp. though ill, they had no doctors. besides the gaoler, their only visitors were priests and monks, entreating them to make abjuration. of course many died in prison--feeble women, and aged and infirm men. in the society of obscene criminals, with whom many were imprisoned, they prayed for speedy deliverance by death, and death often came to their help. more agreeable, but still more insulting, methods of conversion were also attempted. louis tried to bribe the pastors by offering them an increase of annual pay beyond their former stipends. if there were a protestant judge or advocate, louvois at once endeavoured to bribe him over. for instance, there was a heretical syndic of strasbourg, to whom louvois wrote, "will you be converted? i will give you , livres of pension.--will you not? i will dismiss you." of course many of the efforts made to convert the huguenots proved successful. the orders of the prime minister, the free quarters afforded to the dragoons, the preachings and threatenings of the clergy, all contributed to terrify the protestants. the fear of being sent to the galleys for life--the threat of losing the whole of one's goods and property--the alarm of seeing one's household broken up, the children seized by the priests and sent to the nearest monkery or nunnery for maintenance and education--all these considerations doubtless had their effect in increasing the number of conversions. persecution is not easy to bear. to have all the powers and authorities employed against one's life, interests, and faith, is what few can persistently oppose. and torture, whether it be slow or sudden, is what many persons, by reason of their physical capacity, have not the power to resist. even the slow torment of dragoons quartered in the houses of the heretics--their noise and shoutings, their drinking and roistering, the insults and outrages they were allowed to practise--was sufficient to compel many at once to declare themselves to be converted. indeed, pain is, of all things, one of the most terrible of converters. one of the prisoners condemned to the galleys, when he saw the tortures which the victims about him had to endure by night and by day, said that sufferings such as these were "enough to make one conform to buddhism or mahommedanism as well as to popery"; and doubtless it was force and suffering which converted the huguenots, far more than love of the king or love of the pope. by all these means--forcible, threatening, insulting, and bribing--employed for the conversion of the huguenots, the catholics boasted that in the space of three months they had received an accession of five hundred thousand new converts to the church of rome. but the "new converts" did not gain much by their change. they were forced to attend mass, but remained suspected. even the dragoons who converted them, called them dastards and deniers of their faith. they tried, if they could, to avoid confession, but confess they must. there was the fine, confiscation of goods, and imprisonment at the priest's back. places were set apart for them in the churches, where they were penned up like lepers. a person was stationed at the door with a roll of their names, to which they were obliged to answer. during the service, the most prominent among them were made to carry the lights, the holy water, the incense, and such things, which to huguenots were an abomination. they were also required to partake of the host, which protestants regarded as an awful mockery of the glorious godhead. the duc de saint-simon, in his memoirs, after referring to the unmanly cruelties practised by louis xiv. on the huguenots, "without the slightest pretext or necessity," characterizes this forced participation in the eucharist as sacrilegious and blasphemous folly, notwithstanding that nearly all the bishops lent themselves to the practice. "from simulated abjuration," he says, "they [the huguenots] are dragged to endorse what they do not believe in, and to receive the divine body of the saint of saints whilst remaining persuaded that they are only eating bread which they ought to abhor. such is the general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. from torture to abjuration, and from that to the communion, there were only twenty-four hours' distance; and the executioners were the conductors of the converts, and their witnesses. those who in the end appeared to have become reconciled, when more at leisure did not fail, by their flight or their behaviour, to contradict their pretended conversion."[ ] [footnote : "memoirs of the duke of saint-simon," bayle st. john's translation, iii. .] indeed, many of the new converts, finding life in france to be all but intolerable, determined to follow the example of the huguenots who had already fled, and took the first opportunity of disposing of their goods and leaving the country. one of the first things they did on reaching a foreign soil, was to attend a congregation of their brethren, and make "reconnaisances," or acknowledgment of their repentance for having attended mass and pretended to be converted to the roman catholic church.[ ] at one of the sittings of the threadneedle street huguenot church in london, held in may, --two years after the revocation--not fewer than members were again received into the church which, by force, they had pretended to abandon. [footnote : see "the huguenots: their settlements, &c., in england and ireland," chap. xvi.] not many pastors abjured. a few who yielded in the first instance through terror and stupor, almost invariably returned to their ancient faith. they were offered considerable pensions if they would conform and become catholics. the king promised to augment their income by one-third, and if they became advocates or doctors in law, to dispense with their three years' study, and with the right of diploma. at length, most of the pastors had left the country. about seven hundred had gone into switzerland, holland, prussia, england, and elsewhere. a few remained going about to meetings of the peasantry, at the daily risk of death; for every pastor taken was hung. a reward of , livres was promised to whoever should take a pastor, or cause him to be taken. the punishment of death was also pronounced against all persons who should be discovered attending such meetings. nevertheless, meetings of the protestants continued to be held, with pastors or without. they were, for the most part, held at night, amidst the ruins of their pulled-down temples. but this exposed them to great danger, for spies were on the alert to inform upon them and have them apprehended. at length they selected more sheltered places in remote quarters, where they met for prayer and praise, often resorting thither from great distances. they were, however, often surprised, cut to pieces by the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet. fulcran rey was one of the most celebrated of the early victims. he was a native of nismes, twenty-four years old. he had just completed his theological studies; but there were neither synods to receive him to pastoral ordination, nor temples for him to preach in. the only reward he could earn by proceeding on his mission was death, yet he determined to preach. the first assemblies he joined were in the neighbourhood of nismes, where his addresses were interrupted by assaults of the dragoons. the dangers to his co-religionaries were too great in the neighbourhood of this populous town; and he next went to castres and the vaunage; after which he accepted an invitation to proceed into the less populous districts of the cevennes. he felt the presentiment of death upon him in accepting the invitation; but he went, leaving behind him a letter to his father, saying that he was willing, if necessary, to give his life for the cause of truth. "oh! what happiness it would give me," he said, "if i might be found amongst the number of those whom the lord has reserved to announce his praise and to die for his cause!" his apostolate was short but glorious. he went from village to village in the cevennes, collected the old worshippers together, prayed and preached to them, encouraging all to suffer in the name of christ. he remained at this work for about six weeks, when a spy who accompanied him--one whom he had regarded as sincere a huguenot as himself--informed against him for the royal reward, and delivered him over to the dragoons. rey was at first thrown into prison at anduze, when, after a brief examination by the local judge, he was entrusted to thirty soldiers, to be conveyed to alais. there he was subjected to further examination, avowing that he had preached wherever he had found faithful people ready to hear him. at nismes, he was told that he had broken the law, in preaching contrary to the king's will. "i obey the law of the king of kings," he replied; "it is right that i should obey god rather than man. do with me what you will; i am ready to die." the priests, the judges, and other persons of influence endeavoured to induce him to change his opinions. promises of great favours were offered him if he would abjure; and when the intendant baville informed him of the frightful death before him if he refused, he replied, "my life is not of value to me, provided i gain christ." he remained firm. he was ordered to be put to the torture. he was still unshaken. then he was delivered over to the executioner. "i am treated," he said, "more mildly than my saviour." on his way to the place of execution, two monks walked by his side to induce him to relent, and to help him to die. "let me alone," he said, "you annoy me with your consolations." on coming in sight of the gallows at beaucaire, he cried, "courage, courage! the end of my journey is at hand. i see before me the ladder which leads to heaven." the monks wished to mount the ladder with him. "return," said he, "i have no need of your help. i have assistance enough from god to take the last step of my journey." when he reached the upper platform, he was about, before dying, to make public his confession of faith. but the authorities had arranged beforehand that this should be prevented. when he opened his mouth, a roll of military drums muffled his voice. his radiant look and gestures spoke for him. a few minutes more, and he was dead; and when the paleness of death spread over his face, it still bore the reflex of joy and peace in which he had expired. "there is a veritable martyr," said many even of the catholics who were witnesses of his death. it was thought that the public hanging of a pastor would put a stop to all further ministrations among the huguenots. but the sight of the bodies of their brethren hung on the nearest trees, and the heads of their pastors rolling on the scaffold, did not deter them from continuing to hold religious meetings in solitary places, more especially in languedoc, viverais, and the provinces in the south-east of france. between the year , when fulcran rey was hanged at beaucaire, and the year , when claude brousson was hanged at montpellier, not fewer than seventeen pastors were publicly executed; namely, three at nismes, two at st. hippolyte and marsillargues in the cevennes, and twelve on the peyrou at montpellier--the public place on which protestant christians in the south of france were then principally executed. there has been some discussion lately as to the massacre of the huguenots about a century before this period. it has been held that the st. bartholomew massacre was only a political squabble, begun by the huguenots, in which they got the worst of it. the number of persons killed on the occasion has been reduced to a very small number. it has been doubted whether the pope had anything to do with the medal struck at rome, bearing the motto _ugonottorum strages_ ("massacre of the huguenots"), with the pope's head on one side, and an angel on the other pursuing and slaying a band of flying heretics. whatever may be said of the massacre of st. bartholomew, there can be no mistake about the persecutions which preceded and followed the revocation of the edict of nantes. they were continued for more than half a century, and had the effect of driving from france about a million of the best, most vigorous, and industrious of frenchmen. in the single province of languedoc, not less than a hundred thousand persons (according to boulainvilliers) were destroyed by premature death, one-tenth of whom perished by fire, strangulation, or the wheel. it could not be said that louis xiv. and the priests were destroying france and tearing its flesh, and that frenchmen did not know it. the proclamations, edicts and laws published against the huguenots were known to all frenchmen. bénoît[ ] gives a list of three hundred and thirty-three issued by louis xiv. during the ten years subsequent to the revocation, and they were continued, as we shall find, during the succeeding reign. [footnote : "histoire de l'Édit de nantes," par elie bénoît.] "we have," says m. charles coquerel, "a horror of st. bartholomew! will foreigners believe it, that france observed a code of laws framed in the same infernal spirit, which maintained _a perpetual st. bartholomew's day in this country for about sixty years_! if they cannot call us the most barbarous of people, their judgment will be well founded in pronouncing us the most inconsistent."[ ] [footnote : "histoire des Églises du désert," par charles coquerel, i. .] m. de félice, however, will not believe that the revocation of the edict of nantes was popular in france. he takes a much more patriotic view of the french people. he cannot believe them to have been wilfully guilty of the barbarities which the french government committed upon the huguenots. it was the king, the priests, and the courtiers only! but he forgets that these upper barbarians were supported by the soldiers and the people everywhere. he adds, however, that if the revocation _were_ popular, "it would be the most overwhelming accusation against the church of rome, that it had thus educated and fashioned france."[ ] there is, however, no doubt whatever that the jesuits, during the long period that they had the exclusive education of the country in their hands, _did_ thus fashion france; for, in , the people educated by them treated king, jesuits, priests, and aristocracy, in precisely the same manner that they had treated the huguenots about a century before. [footnote : de felice's "history of the protestants of france," book iii. sect. .] chapter iii. claude brousson, the huguenot advocate. to give an account in detail of the varieties of cruelty inflicted on the huguenots, and of the agonies to which they were subjected for many years before and after the passing of the act of revocation, would occupy too much space, besides being tedious through the mere repetition of like horrors. but in order to condense such an account, we think it will be more interesting if we endeavour to give a brief history of the state of france at that time, in connection with the biography of one of the most celebrated huguenots of his period, both in his life, his piety, his trials, and his endurance--that of claude brousson, the advocate, the pastor, and the martyr of languedoc. claude brousson was born at nismes in . he was designed by his parents for the profession of the law, and prosecuted his studies at the college of his native town, where he graduated as doctor of laws. he commenced his professional career about the time when louis xiv. began to issue his oppressive edicts against the huguenots. protestant advocates were not yet forbidden to practise, but they already laboured under many disabilities. he continued, however, for some time to exercise his profession, with much ability, at castres, castelnaudry, and toulouse. he was frequently employed in defending protestant pastors, and in contesting the measures for suppressing their congregations and levelling their churches under existing edicts, some time before the revocation of the edict of nantes had been finally resolved upon. thus, in , he was engaged in disputing the process instituted against the ministers and elders of the church at nismes, with the view of obtaining an order for the demolition of the remaining protestant temple of that city.[ ] the pretext for suppressing this church was, that a servant girl from the country, being a catholic, had attended worship and received the sacrament from the hands of m. peyrol, one of the ministers. [footnote : john locke passed through nismes about this time. "the protestants at nismes," he said, "have now but one temple, the other being pulled down by the king's order about four years since. the protestants had built themselves an hospital for the sick, but that is taken from them; a chamber in it is left for the sick, but never used, because the priests trouble them when there. notwithstanding these discouragements [this was in , _before_ the revocation], i do not find many go over; one of them told me, when i asked them the question, that the papists did nothing but by force or by money."--king's _life of locke_, i. .] brousson defended the case, observing, at the conclusion of his speech, that the number of protestants was very great at nismes; that the ministers could not be personally acquainted with all the people, and especially with occasional visitors and strangers; that the ministers were quite unacquainted with the girl, or that she professed the roman catholic religion: "facts which rendered it probable that she was sent to the temple for the purpose of furnishing an occasion for the prosecution." sentence was for the present suspended. another process was instituted during the same year for the suppression of the protestant church at uzes, and another for the demolition of the large protestant temple at montpellier. the pretext for destroying the latter was of a singular character. a protestant pastor, m. paulet, had been bribed into embracing the roman catholic religion, in reward for which he was appointed counsellor to the presidial court of montpellier. but his wife and one of his daughters refused to apostatize with him. the daughter, though only between ten and eleven years old, was sent to a convent at teirargues, where, after enduring considerable persecution, she persisted in her steadfastness, and was released after a twelvemonth's confinement. five years later she was again seized and sent to another convent; but, continuing immovable against the entreaties and threats of the abbess and confessor, she was again set at liberty. an apostate priest, however, who had many years before renounced the protestant faith, and become director and confessor of the nuns at teirargues, forged two documents; the one to show that while at the convent, mdlle. paulet had consented to embrace the catholic religion, and the other containing her formal abjuration. it was alleged that her abjuration had been signified to isaac dubourdieu, of montpellier, one of the most distinguished pastors of the french church; but that, nevertheless, he had admitted her to the sacrament. this, if true, was contrary to law; upon which the catholic clergy laid information against the pastor and the young lady before the parliament of toulouse, when they obtained sentence of imprisonment against the former, and the penance of _amende honorable_ against the latter. the demolition of temples was the usual consequence of convictions like these. the duc de noailles, lieutenant-general of the province, entered the city on the th of october, , accompanied by a strong military force; and at a sitting of the assembly of the states which shortly followed, the question of demolishing the protestant temple at montpellier was brought under consideration. four of the protestant pastors and several of the elders had before waited upon de noailles to claim a respite until they should have submitted their cause to the king in council. the request having been refused, one of the deputation protested against the illegality of the proceedings, and had the temerity to ask his excellency whether he was aware that there were eighteen hundred thousand protestant families in france? upon which the duke, turning to the officer of his guard, said, "whilst we wait to see what will become of these eighteen hundred thousand protestant families, will you please conduct these gentlemen to the citadel?"[ ] [footnote : when released from prison, gaultier escaped to berlin and became minister of a large protestant congregation there. isaac dubourdieu escaped to england, and was appointed one of the ministers of the savoy church in london.] the great temple of montpellier was destroyed immediately on receipt of the king's royal mandate. it required the destruction of the place within twenty-four hours; "but you will give me pleasure," added the king, in a letter to de noailles, "if you accomplish it in two." it was, perhaps, scarcely necessary, after the temple had been destroyed, to make any effort to justify these high-handed proceedings. but mdlle. paulet, on whose pretended conversion to catholicism the proceedings had been instituted, was now requested to admit the authenticity of the documents. she was still imprisoned in toulouse; and although entreated and threatened by turns to admit their truth, she steadfastly denied their genuineness, and asking for a pen, she wrote under each of them, "i affirm that the above signature was not written by my hand.--isabeau de paulet." of course the documents were forged; but they had answered their purpose. the protestant temple of montpellier lay in ruins, and isabeau de paulet was recommitted to prison. on hearing of this incident, brousson remarked, "this is what is called instituting a process against persons _after_ they have been condemned"--a sort of "jedwood justice." the repetition of these cases of persecution--the demolition of their churches, and the suppression of their worship--led the protestants of the cevennes, viverais, and dauphiny to combine for the purpose of endeavouring to stem the torrent of injustice. with this object, a meeting of twenty-eight deputies took place in the house of brousson, at toulouse, in the month of may, . as the assembly of the states were about to take steps to demolish the protestant temple at montauban and other towns in the south, and as brousson was the well-known advocate of the persecuted, the deputies were able to meet at his house to conduct their deliberations, without exciting the jealousy of the priests and the vigilance of the police. what the meeting of protestant deputies recommended to their brethren was embodied in a measure, which was afterwards known as "the project." the chief objects of the project were to exhort the protestant people to sincere conversion, and the exhibition of the good life which such conversion implies; constant prayer to the holy spirit to enable them to remain steadfast in their profession and in the reading and meditation of the scriptures; encouragements to them to hold together as congregations for the purpose of united worship; "submitting themselves unto the common instructions and to the yoke of christ, in all places wheresoever he shall have established the true discipline, although the edicts of earthly magistrates be contrary thereto." at the same time, brousson drew up a petition to the sovereign, humbly requesting him to grant permission to the huguenots to worship god in peace after their consciences, copies of which were sent to louvois and the other ministers of state. on this and other petitions, brousson observes, "surely all the world and posterity will be surprised, that so many respectful petitions, so many complaints of injuries, and so many solid reasons urged for their removal, produced no good result whatever in favour of the protestants." the members of the churches which had been interdicted, and whose temples had been demolished, were accordingly invited to assemble in private, in the neighbouring fields or woods--not in public places, nor around the ruins of their ancient temples--for the purpose of worshipping god, exciting each other to piety by prayer and singing, receiving instruction, and celebrating the lord's supper. various meetings were accordingly held, in the following month of july, in the cevennes and viverais. at st. hypolite, where the temple of the protestants had been destroyed, about four thousand persons met in a field near the town, when the minister preached to them from the text--"render unto cæsar the things which are cæsar's, and unto god the things which are god's." the meeting was conducted with the utmost solemnity; and a catholic priest who was present, on giving information to the bishop of nismes of the transaction, admitted that the preacher had advanced nothing but what the bishop himself might have spoken. the dragoons were at once sent to st. hypolite to put an end to these meetings, and to "convert" the protestants. the town was almost wholly protestant. the troops were quartered in numbers in every house; and the people soon became "new converts." the losses sustained by the inhabitants of the cevennes from this forced quartering of the troops upon them--and anduze, sauvé, st. germain, vigan, and ganges were as full of them as st. hypolite--may be inferred from the items charged upon the inhabitants of st. hypolite alone[ ]:-- to the regiment of montpezat, for a billet for sixty-five days , livres. to the three companies of red dragoons, for ninety-five days , " to three companies of villeneuve's dragoons, for thirty days , " to three companies of the blue dragoons of languedoc, for three months and nine days , " to a company of cravates (troopers) for fourteen days , " to the transport of three hundred and nine companies of cavalry and infantry , " to provisions for the troops , " to damage sustained by the destruction done by the soldiers, of furniture, and losses by the seizure of property, &c. , " ---------- total , [footnote : claude brousson, "apologie du projet des réformés."] meetings of the persecuted were also held, under the terms of "the project," in viverais and dauphiny. these meetings having been repeated for several weeks, the priests of the respective districts called upon their bishops for help to put down this heretical display. the bishop of valence (daniel de cosmac) accordingly informed them that he had taken the necessary steps, and that he had been apprised that twenty thousand soldiers were now on their march to the south to put down the protestant movement. on their arrival, the troops were scattered over the country, to watch and suppress any meetings that might be held. the first took place on the th of august, at chateaudouble, a manufacturing village in drome. the assembly was surprised by a troop of dragoons; but most of the congregation contrived to escape. those who were taken were hung upon the nearest trees. another meeting was held about a fortnight later at bezaudun, which was attended by many persons from bourdeaux, a village about half a league distant. while the meeting was at prayer, intelligence was brought that the dragoons had entered bourdeaux, and that it was a scene of general pillage. the bourdeaux villagers at once set out for the protection of their families. the troopers met them, and suddenly fell upon them. a few of the villagers were armed, but the principal part defended themselves with stones. of course they were overpowered; many were killed by the sword, and those taken prisoners were immediately hanged. a few, who took to flight, sheltered themselves in a barn, where the soldiers found them, set fire to the place, and murdered them as they endeavoured to escape from the flames. one young man was taken prisoner, david chamier,[ ] son of an advocate, and related to some of the most eminent protestants in france. he was taken to the neighbouring town of montelimar, and, after a summary trial, he was condemned to be broken to death upon the wheel. the sentence was executed before his father's door; but the young man bore his frightful tortures with astonishing courage. [footnote : the grandfather of this chamier drew up for henry iv. the celebrated edict of nantes. the greater number of the chamiers left france. several were ministers in london and maryland, u.s. captain chamier is descended from the family.] the contumacious attitude of the protestants after so many reports had reached louis xiv. of their entire "conversion," induced him to take more active measures for their suppression. he appointed marshal saint-ruth commander of the district--a man who was a stranger to mercy, who breathed only carnage, and who, because of his ferocity, was known as "the scourge of the heretics." daniel de cosmac, bishop of valence, had now the help of saint-ruth and his twenty thousand troops. the instructions saint-ruth received from louvois were these: "amnesty has no longer any place for the viverais, who continue in rebellion after having been informed of the king's gracious designs. in one word, you are to cause such a desolation in that country that its example may restrain all other huguenots, and may teach them how dangerous it is to rebel against the king." this was a work quite congenial to saint-ruth[ ]--rushing about the country, scourging, slaughtering, laying waste, and suppressing the assemblies--his soldiers rushing upon their victims with cries of "death or the mass!" [footnote : saint-ruth was afterwards, in , sent to ireland to take the command of the army fighting for james ii. against william iii. there, saint-ruth had soldiers, many of them huguenots banished from france, to contend with; and he was accordingly somewhat less successful than in viverais, where his opponents were mostly peasants and workmen, armed (where armed at all) with stones picked from the roads. saint-ruth and his garrison were driven from athlone, where a huguenot soldier was the first to mount the breach. the army of william iii., though eight thousand fewer in number, followed saint-ruth and his irish army to the field of aughrim. his host was there drawn up in an almost impregnable position--along the heights of kilcommeden, with the castle of aughrim on his left wing, a deep bog on his right, and another bog of about two miles extending along the front, and apparently completely protecting the irish encampment. nevertheless, the english and huguenot army under ginckle, bravely attacked it, forced the pass to the camp, and routed the army of saint-ruth, who himself was killed by a cannon-ball. the principal share of this victory was attributed to the gallant conduct of the three regiments of huguenot horse, under the command of the marquess de ruvigny (himself a banished huguenot nobleman) who, in consequence of his services, was raised to the irish peerage, under the title of earl of galway.] tracking the protestants in this way was like "a hunt in a great enclosure." when the soldiers found a meeting of the people going on, they shot them down at once, though unarmed. if they were unable to fly, they met death upon their knees. antoine court recounts meetings in which as many as between three and four hundred persons, old men, women, and children, were shot dead on the spot. de cosmac, the bishop, was very active in the midst of these massacres. when he went out to convert the people, he first began by sending out saint-ruth with the dragoons. afterwards he himself followed to give instructions for their "conversion," partly through favours, partly by money. "my efforts," he himself admitted, "were not always without success; yet i must avow that the fear of the dragoons, and of their being quartered in the houses of the heretics, contributed much more to their conversion than anything that i did." the same course was followed throughout the cevennes. it would be a simple record of cruelty to describe in detail the military proceedings there: the dispersion of meetings; the hanging of persons found attending them; the breaking upon the wheel of the pastors captured, amidst horrible tortures; the destruction of dwellings and of the household goods which they contained. but let us take the single instance of homel, formerly pastor of the church at soyon. homel was taken prisoner, and found guilty of preaching to his flock after his temple had been destroyed. for this offence he was sentenced to be broken to death upon the wheel. to receive this punishment he was conducted to tournon, in viverais, where the jesuits had a college. he first received forty blows of the iron bar, after which he was left to languish with his bones broken, for forty hours, until he died. during his torments, he said: "i count myself happy that i can die in my master's service. what! did my glorious redeemer descend from heaven and suffer an ignominious death for my salvation, and shall i, to prolong a miserable life, deny my blessed saviour and abandon his people?" while his bones were being broken on the wheel, he said to his wife: "farewell, once more, my beloved spouse! though you witness my bones broken to shivers, yet is my soul filled with inexpressible joy." after life was finally extinct, his heart was taken to chalençon to be publicly exhibited, and his body was exposed in like manner at beauchatel. de noailles, the governor, when referring in one of his dispatches to the heroism displayed by the tortured prisoners, said: "these wretches go to the wheel with the firm assurance of dying martyrs, and ask no other favour than that of dying quickly. they request pardon of the soldiers, but there is not one of them that will ask pardon of the king." to return to claude brousson. after his eloquent defence of the huguenots of montauban--the result of which, of course, was that the church was ordered to be demolished--and the institution of processes for the demolition of fourteen more protestant temples, brousson at last became aware that the fury of the catholics and the king was not to be satisfied until they had utterly crushed the religion which he served. brousson was repeatedly offered the office of counsellor of parliament, equivalent to the office of judge, if he would prove an apostate; but the conscience of brousson was not one that could be bought. he also found that his office of defender of the doomed huguenots could not be maintained without personal danger, whilst (as events proved) his defence was of no avail to them; and he resolved, with much regret, to give up his profession for a time, and retire for safety and rest to his native town of nismes. he resided there, however, only about four months. saint-ruth and de noailles were now overawing upper languedoc with their troops. the protestants of nismes had taken no part in "the project;" their remaining temple was still open. but they got up a respectful petition to the king, imploring his consideration of their case. roman catholics and protestants, they said, had so many interests in common, that the ruin of the one must have the effect of ruining the other,--the flourishing manufactures of the province, which were mostly followed by the protestants, being now rapidly proceeding to ruin. they, therefore, implored his majesty to grant them permission to prosecute their employments unmolested on account of their religious profession; and lastly, they conjured the king, by his piety, by his paternal clemency, and by every law of equity, to grant them freedom of religious worship. it was of no use. the hearts of the king, his clergy, and his ministers, were all hardened against them. a copy of the above petition was presented by two ministers of nismes and several influential gentlemen of lower languedoc to the duke de noailles, the governor of the province. he treated the deputation with contempt, and their petition with scorn. writing to louvois, the king's prime minister, de noailles said: "astonished at the effrontery of these wretched persons, i did not hesitate to send them all prisoners to the citadel of st. esprit (in the cevennes), telling them that if there had been _petites maisons_[ ] enough in languedoc i should not have sent them there." [footnote : the prisons of languedoc were already crowded with protestants, and hundreds had been sent to the galleys at marseilles.] nismes was now placed under the same ban as vivarais, and denounced as "insurrectionary." to quell the pretended revolt, as well as to capture certain persons who were supposed to have been accessory to the framing of the petition, a detachment of four hundred dragoons was ordered into the place. one of those to be apprehended was claude brousson. hundreds of persons knew of his abode in the city, but notwithstanding the public proclamation (which he himself heard from the window of the house where he was staying), and the reward offered for his apprehension, no one attempted to betray him. after remaining in the city for three days, he adopted a disguised dress, passed out of the crown gate, and in the course of a few days found a safe retreat in switzerland. peyrol and icard, two of the protestant ministers whom the dragoons were ordered to apprehend, also escaped into switzerland, peyrol settling at lausanne, and icard becoming the minister of a huguenot church in holland. but although the ministers had escaped, all the property they had left behind them was confiscated to the crown. hideous effigies of them were prepared and hung on gibbets in the market-place of nismes by the public executioner, the magistrates and dragoons attending the sham proceeding with the usual ceremony. at lausanne, where claude brousson settled for a time, he first attempted to occupy himself as a lawyer; but this he shortly gave up to devote himself to the help of the persecuted huguenots. like jurieu and others in holland, who flooded europe with accounts of the hideous cruelties of louis xiv. and his myrmidons the clergy and dragoons, he composed and published a work, addressed to the roman catholic party as well as to the protestants of all countries, entitled, "the state of the reformed church of france." he afterwards composed a series of letters specially addressed to the roman catholic clergy of france. but expostulation was of no use. with each succeeding year the persecution became more bitter, until at length, in , the edict was revoked. in september of that year brousson learnt that the protestant church of his native city had been suppressed, and their temple given over to a society of female converters; that the wives and daughters of the protestants who refused to abjure their faith had been seized and imprisoned in nunneries and religious seminaries; and that three hundred of their husbands and fathers were chained together and sent off in one day for confinement in the galleys at marseilles. the number of huguenots resorting to switzerland being so great,[ ] and they often came so destitute, that a committee was formed at lausanne to assist the emigrants, and facilitate their settlement in the canton, or enable them to proceed elsewhere. brousson was from the first an energetic member of this committee. part of their work was to visit the protestant states of the north, and find out places to which the emigrants might be forwarded, as well as to collect subscriptions for their conveyance. [footnote : within about three weeks no fewer than seventeen thousand five hundred french emigrants passed into lausanne. two hundred protestant ministers fled to switzerland, the greater number of whom settled in lausanne, until they could journey elsewhere.] in november , a month after the revocation, brousson and la porte set out for berlin with this object. la porte was one of the ministers of the cevennes, who had fled before a sentence of death pronounced against him for having been concerned in "the project." at berlin they were received very cordially by the elector of brandenburg, who had already given great assistance to the huguenot emigrants, and expressed himself as willing to do all that he could for their protection. brousson and la porte here met the rev. david ancillon, who had been for thirty-three years pastor at metz,[ ] and was now pastor of the elector at berlin; gaultier, banished from montpellier; and abbadie, banished from saumur--all ministers of the huguenot church there; with a large number of banished ministers and emigrant protestants from all the provinces of france. [footnote : ancillon was an eminently learned man. his library was one of the choicest that had ever been collected, and on his expulsion from metz it was pillaged by the jesuits. metz, now part of german lorraine, was probably not so ferociously dragooned as other places. yet the inhabitants were under the apprehension that the massacre of st. bartholomew was about to be repeated upon them on christmas day, , the soldiers of the garrison having been kept under arms all night. the protestant churches were all pulled down, the ministers were expelled, and many of their people followed them into germany. there were numerous protestant soldiers in the metz garrison, and the order of the king was that, like the rest of his subjects, they should become converted. many of the officers resigned and entered the service of william of orange, and many of the soldiers deserted. the bribe offered for the conversion of privates was as follows: common soldiers and dragoons, two pistoles per head; troopers, three pistoles per head. the protestants of alsace were differently treated. they constituted a majority of the population; alsace and strasbourg having only recently been seized by louis xiv. it was therefore necessary to be cautious in that quarter; for violence would speedily have raised a revolution in the province which would have driven them over to germany, whose language they spoke. louvois could therefore only proceed by bribing; and he was successful in buying over some of the most popular and influential men.] the elector suggested to brousson that while at berlin he should compose a summary account of the condition of the french protestants, such as should excite the interest and evoke the help of the protestant rulers and people of the northern states. this was done by brousson, and the volume was published, entitled "letters of the protestants of france who have abandoned all for the cause of the gospel, to other protestants; with a particular letter addressed to protestant kings, electors, rulers, and magistrates." the elector circulated this volume, accompanying it with a letter written in his name, to all the princes of the continent professing the augsburg confession; and it was thus mainly owing to the elector's intercession that the huguenots obtained the privilege of establishing congregations in several of the states of germany, as well as in sweden and denmark. brousson remained nearly five months at berlin, after which he departed for holland to note the progress of the emigration in that country, and there he met a large number of his countrymen. nearly two hundred and fifty huguenot ministers had taken refuge in holland; there were many merchants and manufacturers who had set up their branches of industry in the country; and there were many soldiers who had entered the service of william of orange. while in holland, brousson resided principally with his brother, a banished huguenot, who had settled at amsterdam as a merchant. having accomplished all that he could for his huguenot brethren in exile, brousson returned to lausanne, where he continued his former labours. he bethought him very much of the protestants still remaining in france, wandering like sheep without shepherds, deprived of guidance, books, and worship--the prey of ravenous wolves,--and it occurred to him whether the protestant pastors had done right in leaving their flocks, even though by so doing they had secured the safety of their own lives. accordingly, in , he wrote and published a "letter to the pastors of france at present in protestant states, concerning the desolation of their own churches, and their own exile." in this letter he says:--"if, instead of retiring before your persecutors, you had remained in the country; if you had taken refuge in forests and caverns; if you had gone from place to place, risking your lives to instruct and rally the people, until the first shock of the enemy was past; and had you even courageously exposed yourselves to martyrdom--as in fact those have done who have endeavoured to perform your duties in your absence--perhaps the examples of constancy, or zeal, or of piety you had discovered, might have animated your flocks, revived their courage, and arrested the fury of your enemies." he accordingly exhorted the protestant ministers who had left france to return to their flocks at all hazards. this advice, if acted on, was virtually condemning the pastors to death. brousson was not a pastor. would _he_ like to return to france at the daily risk of the rack and the gibbet? the protestant ministers in exile defended themselves. bénoît, then residing in germany, replied in a "history and apology for the retreat of the pastors." another, who did not give his name, treated brousson's censure as that of a fanatic, who meddled with matters beyond his vocation. "you who condemn the pastors for not returning to france at the risk of their lives," said he, "_why do you not first return to france yourself?_" brousson was as brave as his words. he was not a pastor, but he might return to the deserted flocks, and encourage and comfort them. he could no longer be happy in his exile at lausanne. he heard by night the groans of the prisoners in the tower of constance, and the noise of the chains borne by the galley slaves at toulon and marseilles. he reproached himself as if it were a crime with the repose which he enjoyed. life became insupportable to him and he fell ill. his health was even despaired of; but one day he suddenly rose up and said to his wife, "i must set out; i will go to console, to relieve, to strengthen my brethren, groaning under their oppressions." his wife threw herself at his feet. "thou wouldst go to certain death," she said; "think of me and thy little children." she implored him again and again to remain. he loved his wife and children, but he thought a higher duty called him away from them. when his friends told him that he would be taken prisoner and hung, he said, "when god permits his servants to die for the gospel, they preach louder from the grave than they did during life." he remained unshaken. he would go to the help of the oppressed with the love of a brother, the faith of an apostle, and the courage of a martyr. brousson knew the danger of the office he was about to undertake. there had, as we have seen, been numerous attempts made to gather the protestant people together, and to administer consolation to them by public prayers and preaching. the persons who conducted these services were not regular pastors, but only private members of their former churches. some of them were very young men, and they were nearly all uneducated as regards clerical instruction. one of the most successful was isaac vidal, a lame young man, a mechanic of colognac, near st. hypolite, in the cevennes. his self-imposed ministrations were attended by large numbers of people. he preached for only six months and then died--a natural death, for nearly all who followed him were first tortured and then hung. we have already referred to fulcran rey, who preached for about nine months, and was then executed. in the same year were executed meyrueis, by trade a wool-carder, and rocher, who had been a reader in one of the protestant churches. emanuel dalgues, a respectable inhabitant of salle, in the cevennes, also received the crown of martyrdom. ever since the revocation of the edict, he had proclaimed the gospel o'er hill and dale, in woods and caverns, to assemblies of the people wherever he could collect them. he was executed in . three other persons--gransille, mercier, and esclopier--who devoted themselves to preaching, were transported as slaves to america; and david mazel, a boy twelve years of age, who had a wonderful memory, and preached sermons which he had learned by heart, was transported, with his father and other frequenters of the assemblies, to the carribee islands. at length brousson collected about him a number of huguenots willing to return with him into france, in order to collect the protestant people together again, to pray with them, and even to preach to them if the opportunity occurred. brousson's companions were these: francis vivens, formerly a schoolmaster in the cevennes; anthony bertezene, a carpenter, brother of a preacher who had recently been condemned to death; and seven other persons named papus, la pierre, serein, dombres, poutant, boisson, and m. de bruc, an aged minister, who had been formerly pastor of one of the churches in the cevennes. they prepared to enter france in four distinct companies, in the month of july, . chapter iv. claude brousson, pastor and martyr. brousson left lausanne on the nd of july, accompanied by his dear friend, the rev. m. de bruc. the other members of the party had preceded them, crossing the frontier at different places. they all arrived in safety at their destination, which was in the mountain district of the cevennes. they resorted to the neighbourhood of the aigoual, the centre of a very inaccessible region--wild, cold, but full of recesses for hiding and worship. it was also a district surrounded by villages, the inhabitants of which were for the most part protestant. the party soon became diminished in number. the old pastor, de bruc, found himself unequal to the fatigue and privations attending the work. he was ill and unable to travel, and was accordingly advised by his companions to quit the service and withdraw from the country. persecution also destroyed some of them. when it became known that assemblies for religious observances were again on foot, an increased force of soldiers was sent into the district, and a high price was set on the heads of all the preachers that could be apprehended. the soldiers scoured the country, and, helped by the paid spies, they shortly succeeded in apprehending boisson and dombres, at st. paul's, north of anduze, in the cevennes. they were both executed at nismes, being first subjected to torture on the rack, by which their limbs were entirely dislocated. they were then conveyed to the place of execution, praying and singing psalms on the way, and finished their course with courage and joy. when brousson first went into the cevennes, he did not undertake to preach to the people. he was too modest to assume the position of a pastor; he merely undertook, as occasion required, to read the scriptures in protestant families and in small companies, making his remarks and exhortations thereupon. he also transcribed portions of his own meditations on the scriptures, and gave them away for distribution from hand to hand amongst the people. when it was found that his instructions were much appreciated, and that numbers of people assembled to hear him read and exhort, he was strongly urged to undertake the office of public instructor amongst them, especially as their ministers were being constantly diminished by execution. he had been about five months in the cevennes, and was detained by a fall of snow on one of the mountains, where his abode was a sheepcote, when the proposal that he should become a preacher was first made to him. vivens was one of those who most strongly supported the appeal made to brousson. he spent many hours in private prayer, seeking the approval of god for the course he was about to undertake. vivens also prayed in the several assemblies that brousson might be confirmed, and that god would be pleased to pour upon him his holy spirit, and strengthen him so that he might become a faithful and successful labourer in this great calling. brousson at length consented, believing that duty and conscience alike called upon him to give the best of his help to the oppressed and persecuted protestants of the mountains. "brethren," he said to them, when they called upon him to administer to them the holy sacrament of the eucharist--"brethren, i look above you, and hear the most high god calling me through your mouths to this most responsible and sacred office; and i dare not be disobedient to his heavenly call. by the grace of god i will comply with your pious desires; dedicate and devote myself to the work of the ministry, and spend the remainder of my life in unwearied pains and endeavours for promoting god's glory, and the consolation of precious souls." brousson received his call to the ministry in the cevennes amidst the sound of musketry and grapeshot which spread death among the ranks of his brethren. he was continuously tracked by the spies of the jesuits, who sought his apprehension and death; and he was hunted from place to place by the troops of the king, who followed him in his wanderings into the most wild and inaccessible places. the perilous character of his new profession was exhibited only a few days after his ordination, by the apprehension of olivier souverain at st. jean de gardonenque, for preaching the gospel to the assemblies. he was at once conducted to montpellier and executed on the th of january, . during the same year, dumas, another preacher in the cevennes, was apprehended and fastened by the troopers across a horse in order to be carried to montpellier. his bowels were so injured and his body so crushed by this horrible method of conveyance, that dumas died before he was half way to the customary place of martyrdom. then followed the execution of david quoite, a wandering and hunted pastor in the cevennes for several years. he was broken on the wheel at montpellier, and then hanged. "the punishment," said louvreleuil, his tormentor, "which broke his bones, did not break his hardened heart: he died in his heresy." after quoite, m. bonnemère, a native of the same city, was also tortured and executed in like manner on the peyrou. all these persons were taken, executed, destroyed, or imprisoned, during the first year that brousson commenced his perilous ministry in the cevennes. about the same time three women, who had gone about instructing the families of the destitute protestants, reading the scriptures and praying with them, were apprehended by baville, the king's intendant, and punished. isabeau redothière, eighteen years of age, and marie lintarde, about a year younger, both the daughters of peasants, were taken before baville at nismes. "what! are you one of the preachers, forsooth?" said he to redothière. "sir," she replied, "i have exhorted my brethren to be mindful of their duty towards god, and when occasion offered, i have sought god in prayer for them; and, if your lordship calls that preaching, i have been a preacher." "but," said the intendant, "you know that the king has forbidden this." "yes, my lord," she replied, "i know it very well, but the king of kings, the god of heaven and earth, he hath commanded it." "you deserve death," replied baville. but the intendant awarded her a severer fate. she was condemned to be imprisoned for life in the tower of constance, a place echoing with the groans of women, most of whom were in chains, perpetually imprisoned there for worshipping god according to conscience. lintarde was in like manner condemned to imprisonment for life in the castle of sommières, and it is believed she died there. nothing, however, is known of the time when she died. when a woman was taken and imprisoned in one of the king's torture-houses, she was given up by her friends as lost. a third woman, taken at the same time, was more mercifully dealt with. anne montjoye was found assisting at one of the secret assemblies. she was solicited in vain to abjure her faith, and being condemned to death, was publicly executed. shortly after his ordination, brousson descended from the upper cevennes, where the hunt for protestants was becoming very hot, into the adjacent valleys and plains. there it was necessary for him to be exceedingly cautious. the number of dragoons in languedoc had been increased so as to enable them regularly to patrol the entire province, and a price had been set upon brousson's head, which was calculated to quicken their search for the flying pastor. brousson was usually kept informed by his huguenot friends of the direction taken by the dragoons in their patrols, and hasty assemblies were summoned in their absence. the meetings were held in some secret place--some cavern or recess in the rocks. often they were held at night, when a few lanterns were hung on the adjacent trees to give light. sentinels were set in the neighbourhood, and all the adjoining roads were watched. after the meeting was over the assemblage dispersed in different directions, and brousson immediately left for another district, travelling mostly by night, so as to avoid detection. in this manner he usually presided at three or four assemblies each week, besides two on the sabbath day--one early in the morning and another at night. at one of his meetings, held at boucoiran on the gardon, about half way between nismes and anduze, a protestant nobleman--a _nouveau convertis_, who had abjured his religion to retain his estates--was present, and stood near the preacher during the service. one of the government spies was present, and gave information. the name of the protestant nobleman was not known. but the intendant, to strike terror into others, seized six of the principal landed proprietors in the neighbourhood--though some of them had never attended any of the assemblies since the revocation--and sent two of them to the galleys, and the four others to imprisonment for life at lyons, besides confiscating the estates of the whole to the crown. brousson now felt that he was bringing his friends into very great trouble, and, out of consideration for them, he began to think of again leaving france. the dragoons were practising much cruelty on the protestant population, being quartered in their houses, and at liberty to plunder and extort money to any extent. they were also incessantly on the look out for the assemblies, being often led by mounted priests and spies to places where they had been informed that meetings were about to be held. their principal object, besides hanging the persons found attending, was to seize the preachers, more especially brousson and vivens, believing that the country would be more effectually "converted," provided they could be seized and got out of the way. brousson, knowing that he might be seized and taken prisoner at any moment, had long considered whether he ought to resist the attempts made to capture him. he had at first carried a sword, but at length ceased to wear it, being resolved entirely to cast himself on providence; and he also instructed all who resorted to his meetings to come to them unarmed. in this respect brousson differed from vivens, who thought it right to resist force by force; and in the event of any attempt being made to capture him, he considered it expedient to be constantly provided with arms. yet he had only once occasion to use them, and it was the first and last time. the reward of ten thousand livres being now offered for the apprehension of brousson and vivens, or five thousand for either, an active search was made throughout the province. at length the government found themselves on the track of vivens. one of his known followers, valderon, having been apprehended and put upon the rack, was driven by torture to reveal his place of concealment. a party of soldiers went in pursuit, and found vivens with three other persons, concealed in a cave in the neighbourhood of alais. vivens was engaged in prayer when the soldiers came upon him. his hand was on his gun in a moment. when asked to surrender he replied with a shot, not knowing the number of his opponents. he followed up with two other shots, killing a man each time, and then exposing himself, he was struck by a volley, and fell dead. the three other persons in the cave being in a position to hold the soldiers at defiance for some time, were promised their lives if they would surrender. they did so, and with the utter want of truth, loyalty, and manliness that characterized the persecutors, the promise was belied, and the three prisoners were hanged, a few days after, at alais. vivens' body was taken to the same place. the intendant sat in judgment upon it, and condemned it to be drawn through the streets upon a hurdle and then burnt to ashes. brousson was becoming exhausted by the fatigues and privations he had encountered during his two years' wanderings and preachings in the cevennes; and he not only desired to give the people a relaxation from their persecution, but to give himself some absolutely necessary rest. he accordingly proceeded to nismes, his birthplace, where many people knew him; and where, if they betrayed him, they might easily have earned five thousand livres. but so much faith was kept by the protestants amongst one another, that brousson felt that his life was quite as safe amongst his townspeople as it had been during the last two years amongst the mountaineers of the cevennes. it soon became known to the priests, and then to the intendant, that brousson was resident in concealment at nismes; and great efforts were accordingly made for his apprehension. during the search, a letter of brousson's was found in the possession of m. guion, an aged minister, who had returned from switzerland to resume his ministry, according as he might find it practicable. the result of this discovery was, that guion was apprehended, taken before the intendant, condemned to be executed, and sent to montpellier, where he gave up his life at seventy years old--the drums beating, as usual, that nobody might hear his last words. the house in which guion had been taken at nismes was ordered to be razed to the ground, in punishment of the owner who had given him shelter. after spending about a month at nismes, brousson was urged by his friends to quit the city. he accordingly succeeded in passing through the gates, and went to resume his former work. his first assembly was held in a commodious place on the gardon, between valence, brignon, and st. maurice, about ten miles distant from nismes. although he had requested that only the protestants in the immediate neighbourhood should attend the meeting, so as not to excite the apprehensions of the authorities, yet a multitude of persons came from uzes and nismes, augmented by accessions from upwards of thirty villages. the service was commenced about ten o'clock, and was not completed until midnight. the concourse of persons from all quarters had been so great that the soldiers could not fail to be informed of it. accordingly they rode towards the place of assemblage late at night, but they did not arrive until the meeting had been dissolved. one troop of soldiers took ambush in a wood through which the worshippers would return on their way back to uzes. the command had been given to "draw blood from the conventicles." on the approach of the people the soldiers fired, and killed and wounded several. about forty others wore taken prisoners. the men were sent to the galleys for life, and the women were thrown into gaol at carcassone--the tower of constance being then too full of prisoners. after this event, the government became more anxious in their desire to capture brousson. they published far and wide their renewed offer of reward for his apprehension. they sent six fresh companies of soldiers specially to track him, and examine the woods and search the caves between uzes and alais. but brousson's friends took care to advise him of the approach of danger, and he sped away to take shelter in another quarter. the soldiers were, however, close upon his heels; and one morning, in attempting to enter a village for the purpose of drying himself--having been exposed to the winter's rain and cold all night--he suddenly came upon a detachment of soldiers! he avoided them by taking shelter in a thicket, and while there, he observed another detachment pass in file, close to where he was concealed. the soldiers were divided into four parties, and sent out to search in different directions, one of them proceeding to search every house in the village into which brousson had just been about to enter. the next assembly was held at sommières, about eight miles west of nismes. the soldiers were too late to disperse the meeting, but they watched some of the people on their return. one of these, an old woman, who had been observed to leave the place, was shot on entering her cottage; and the soldier, observing that she was attempting to rise, raised the butt end of his gun and brained her on the spot. the hunted pastors of the cevennes were falling off one by one. bernard saint paul, a young man, who had for some time exercised the office of preacher, was executed in . one of the brothers du plans was executed in the same year, having been offered his life if he would conform to the catholic religion. in the following year paul colognac was executed, after being broken to death on the wheel at masselargais, near to which he had held his last assembly. his arms, thighs, legs, and feet were severally broken with the iron bar some hours before the _coup de grace_, or deathblow, was inflicted. colognac endured his sufferings with heroic fortitude. he was only twenty-four. he had commenced to preach at twenty, and laboured at the work for only four years. brousson's health was fast giving way. every place that he frequented was closely watched, so that he had often to spend the night under the hollow of a rock, or under the shelter of a wood, exposed to rain and snow,--and sometimes he had even to contend with a wolf for the shelter of a cave. often he was almost perishing for want of food; and often he found himself nearly ready to die for want of rest. and yet, even in the midst of his greatest perils, his constant thought was of the people committed to him, and for whose eternal happiness he continued to work. as he could not visit all who wished to hear him, he wrote out sermons that might be read to them. his friend henry poutant, one of those who originally accompanied him from switzerland and had not yet been taken prisoner by the soldiers, went about holding meetings for prayer, and reading to the people the sermons prepared for them by brousson. for the purpose of writing out his sermons, brousson carried about with him a small board, which he called his "wilderness table." with this placed upon his knees, he wrote the sermons, for the most part in woods and caves. he copied out seventeen of these sermons, which he sent to louis xiv., to show him that what "he preached in the deserts contained nothing but the pure word of god, and that he only exhorted the people to obey god and to give glory to him." the sermons were afterwards published at amsterdam, in , under the title of "the mystic manna of the desert." one would have expected that, under the bitter persecutions which brousson had suffered during so many years, they would have been full of denunciation; on the contrary, they were only full of love. his words were only burning when he censured his hearers for not remaining faithful to their church and to their god. at length, the fury of brousson's enemies so increased, and his health was so much impaired, that he again thought of leaving france. his lungs were so much injured by constant exposure to cold, and his voice had become so much impaired, that he could not preach. he also heard that his family, whom he had left at lausanne, required his assistance. his only son was growing up, and needed education. perhaps brousson had too long neglected those of his own household; though he had every confidence in the prudence and thoughtfulness of his wife. accordingly, about the end of , brousson made arrangements for leaving the cevennes. he set out in the beginning of december, and arrived at lausanne about a fortnight later, having been engaged on his extraordinary mission of duty and peril for four years and five months. he was received like one rescued from the dead. his health was so injured, that his wife could scarcely recognise her husband in that wan, wasted, and weatherbeaten creature who stood before her. in fact, he was a perfect wreck. he remained about fifteen months in switzerland, during which he preached in the huguenots' church; wrote out many of his pastoral letters and sermons; and, when his health had become restored, he again proceeded on his travels into foreign countries. he first went into holland. he had scarcely arrived there, when intelligence reached him from montpellier of the execution, after barbarous torments, of his friend papus,--one of those who had accompanied him into the cevennes to preach the gospel some six years before. there were now very few of the original company left. on hearing of the martyrdom of papus, brousson, in a pastoral letter which he addressed to his followers, said: "he must have died some day; and as he could not have prolonged his life beyond the term appointed, how could his end have been more happy and more glorious? his constancy, his sweetness of temper, his patience, his humility, his faith, his hope, and his piety, affected even his judges and the false pastors who endeavoured to seduce him, as also the soldiers and all that witnessed his execution. he could not have preached better than he did by his martyrdom; and i doubt not that his death, will produce abundance of fruit." while in holland, brousson took the opportunity of having his sermons and many of his pastoral letters printed at amsterdam; after which he proceeded to make a visit to his banished huguenot friends in england. he also wished to ascertain from personal inquiry the advisability of forwarding an increased number of french emigrants--then resident in switzerland--for settlement in this country. in london, he met many of his friends from the south of france--for there were settled there as ministers, graverol of nismes, satur of montauban, four ministers from montpellier for whom he had pleaded in the courts at toulouse--the two dubourdieus and the two berthaus--fathers and sons. there were also la coux from castres, de joux from lyons, roussillon from montredon, mestayer from st. quentin, all settled in london as ministers of huguenot churches. after staying in england for only about a month, brousson was suddenly recalled to holland to assume the office to which he was appointed without solicitation, of preacher to the walloon church at the hague. though his office was easy--for he had several colleagues to assist him in the duties--and the salary was abundant for his purposes, while he was living in the society of his wife and family--brousson nevertheless very soon began to be ill at ease. he still thought of the abandoned huguenots "in the desert"; without teachers, without pastors, without spiritual help of any kind. when he had undertaken the work of the ministry, he had vowed that he would devote his time and talents to the support and help of the afflicted church; and now he was living at ease in a foreign country, far removed from those to whom he considered his services belonged. these thoughts were constantly recurring and pressing upon his mind; and at length he ceased to have any rest or satisfaction in his new position. accordingly, after only about four months' connection with the church at the hague, brousson decided to relinquish the charge, and to devote himself to the service of the oppressed and afflicted members of his native church in france. the dutch government, however, having been informed of his perilous and self-sacrificing intention, agreed to continue his salary as a pastor of the walloon church, and to pay it to his wife, who henceforth abode at the hague. brousson determined to enter france from the north, and to visit districts that were entirely new to him. for this purpose he put himself in charge of a guide. at that time, while the protestants were flying from france, as they continued to do for many years, there were numerous persons who acted as guides for those not only flying from, but entering the country. those who guided protestant pastors on their concealed visits to france, were men of great zeal and courage--known to be faithful and self-denying--and thoroughly acquainted with the country. they knew all the woods, and fords, and caves, and places of natural shelter along the route. they made the itinerary of the mountains and precipices, of the byways and deserts, their study. they also knew of the dwellings of the faithful in the towns and villages where huguenots might find relief and shelter for the night. they studied the disguises to be assumed, and were prepared with a stock of phrases and answers adapted for every class of inquiries. the guide employed by brousson was one james bruman--an old huguenot merchant, banished at the revocation, and now employed in escorting huguenot preachers back to france, and escorting flying huguenot men, women, and children from it.[ ] the pastor and his guide started about the end of august, . they proceeded by way of liége; and travelling south, they crossed the forest of ardennes, and entered france near sedan. [footnote : many of these extraordinary escapes are given in the author's "huguenots: their settlements, churches, and industries, in england and ireland."] sedan, recently the scene of one of the greatest calamities that has ever befallen france, was, about two centuries ago, a very prosperous place. it was the seat of a great amount of protestant learning and protestant industry. one of the four principal huguenot academies of france was situated in that town. it was suppressed in , shortly before the revocation, and its professors, bayle, abbadie, basnage, brazy, and jurieu, expelled the country. the academy buildings themselves had been given over to the jesuits--the sworn enemies of the huguenots. at the same time, sedan had been the seat of great woollen manufactures, originally founded by flemish protestant families, and for the manufacture of arms, implements of husbandry, and all kinds of steel and iron articles.[ ] at the revocation, the protestants packed up their tools and property, suddenly escaped across the frontier, near which they were, and went and established themselves in the low countries, where they might pursue their industries in safety. sedan was ruined, and remained so until our own day, when it has begun to experience a little prosperity from the tourists desirous of seeing the place where the great french army surrendered. [footnote : there were from eighty to ninety establishments for the manufacture of broadcloth in sedan, giving employment to more than two thousand persons. these, together with the iron and steel manufactures, were entirely ruined at the revocation, when the whole of the protestant mechanics went into exile, and settled for the most part in holland and england.] when brousson visited the place, the remaining protestants resided chiefly in the suburban villages of givonne and daigny. he visited them in their families, and also held several private meetings, after which he was induced to preach in a secluded place near sedan at night. this assembly, however, was reported to the authorities, who immediately proceeded to make search for the heretic preacher. a party of soldiers, informed by the spies, next morning invested the house in which brousson slept. they first apprehended bruman, the guide, and thought that in him they had secured the pastor. they next rummaged the house, in order to find the preacher's books. but brousson, hearing them coming in, hid himself behind the door, which, being small, hardly concealed his person. after setting a guard all round the house, ransacking every room in it, and turning everything upside down, they left it; but two of the children, seeing brousson's feet under the door, one of them ran after the officer of the party, and exclaimed to him, pointing back, "here, sir, here!" but the officer, not understanding what the child meant, went away with his soldiers, and brousson's life was, for the time, saved. the same evening, brousson changed his disguise to that of a wool-comber, and carrying a parcel on his shoulder, he set out on the same evening with another guide. he visited many places in which protestants were to be found--in champagne, picardy, normandy, nevernois, and burgundy. he also visited several of his friends in the neighbourhood of paris. we have not many details of his perils and experiences during his journey. but the following passage is extracted from a letter addressed by him to a friend in holland: "i assure you that in every place through which i passed, i witnessed the poor people truly repenting their fault (_i.e._ of having gone to mass), weeping day and night, and imploring the grace and consolations of the gospel in their distress. their persecutors daily oppress them, and burden them with taxes and imposts; but the more discerning of the roman catholics acknowledge that the cruelties and injustice done towards so many innocent persons, draw down misery and distress upon the kingdom. and truly it is to be apprehended that god will abandon its inhabitants to their wickedness, that he may afterwards pour down his most terrible judgments upon that ungrateful and vaunting country, which has rejected his truth and despised the day of visitation." during the twelve months that brousson was occupied with his perilous journey through france, two more of his friends in the cevennes suffered martyrdom--la porte on the th of february, , and henri guerin on the nd of june following. both were broken alive on the wheel before receiving the _coup de grace_. towards the close of the year, brousson arrived at basle, from whence he proceeded to visit his friends throughout the cantons of switzerland, and then he returned to holland by way of the rhine, to rejoin his family at the hague. at that time, the representatives of the allies were meeting at ryswick the representatives of louis xiv., who was desirous of peace. brousson and the french refugee ministers resident in holland endeavoured to bring the persecutions of the french protestants under the notice of the conference. but louis xiv. would not brook this interference. he proposed going on dealing with the heretics in his own way. "i do not pretend," he said, "to prescribe to william iii. rules about his subjects, and i expect the same liberty as to my own." finding it impossible to obtain redress for his fellow-countrymen under the treaty of ryswick, which was shortly after concluded, brousson at length prepared to make his third journey into france in the month of august . he set out greatly to the regret of his wife, who feared it might be his last journey, as indeed it proved to be. in a letter which he wrote to console her, from some remote place where he was snowed up about the middle of the following december, he said: "i cannot at present enter into the details of the work the lord has given me grace to labour in; but it is the source of much consolation to a large number of his poor people. it will be expedient that you do not mention where i am, lest i should be traced. it may be that i cannot for some time write to you; but i walk under the conduct of my god, and i repeat that i would not for millions of money that the lord should refuse me the grace which renders it imperative for me to labour as i now do in his work."[ ] [footnote : the following was the portraiture of brousson, issued to the spies and police: "brousson is of middle stature, and rather spare, aged forty to forty-two, nose large, complexion dark, hair black, hands well formed."] when the snow had melted sufficiently to enable brousson to escape from the district of dauphiny, near the high alps, where he had been concealed, he made his way across the country to the viverais, where he laboured for some time. here he heard of the martyrdom of the third of the brothers du plans, broken on the wheel and executed like the others on the peyrou at montpellier. during the next nine months, brousson laboured in the north-eastern provinces of languedoc (more particularly in the cevennes and viverais), orange, and dauphiny. he excited so much interest amongst the protestants, who resorted from a great distance to attend his assemblies, that the spies (who were usually pretended protestants) soon knew of his presence in the neighbourhood, and information was at once forwarded to the intendant or his officers. persecution was growing very bitter about this time. by orders of the bishops the protestants were led by force to mass before the dragoons with drawn swords, and the shops of merchants who refused to go to mass regularly were ordered to be closed. their houses were also filled with soldiers. "the soldiers or militia," said brousson to a friend in holland, "frequently commit horrible ravages, breaking open the cabinets, removing every article that is saleable, which are often purchased by the priests at insignificant prices; the rest they burn and break up, after which the soldiers are removed; and when the sufferers think themselves restored to peace, fresh billets are ordered upon them. many are consequently induced to go to mass with weeping and lamentation, but a great number remain inflexible, and others fly the kingdom." when it became known that brousson, in the course of his journeyings, had arrived, about the end of august, , in the neighbourhood of nismes, baville was greatly mortified; and he at once offered a reward of six hundred louis d'or for his head. brousson nevertheless entered nismes, and found refuge amongst his friends. he had, however, the imprudence to post there a petition to the king, signed by his own hand, which had the effect of at once setting the spies upon his track. leaving the city itself, he took refuge in a house not far from it, whither the spies contrived to trace him, and gave the requisite information to the intendant. the house was soon after surrounded by soldiers, and was itself entered and completely searched. brousson's host had only had time to make him descend into a well, which had a niche in the bottom in which he could conceal himself. the soldiers looked down the well a dozen times, but could see nothing. brousson was not in the house; he was not in the chimneys; he was not in the outhouses. he _must_ be in the well! a soldier went down the well to make a personal examination. he was let down close to the surface of the water, and felt all about. there was nothing! feeling awfully cold, and wishing to be taken out, he called to his friends, "there is nothing here, pull me up." he was pulled up accordingly, and brousson was again saved. the country about nismes being beset with spies to track the protestants and prevent their meetings, brousson determined to go westward and visit the scattered people in rouerge, pays de foix, and bigorre, proceeding as far as bearn, where a remnant of huguenots still lingered, notwithstanding the repeated dragooning to which the district had been subjected. it was at oberon that he fell into the hands of a spy, who bore the same name as a protestant friend to whom his letter was addressed. information was given to the authorities, and brousson was arrested. he made no resistance, and answered at once to his name. when the judas who had betrayed him went to m. pénon, the intendant of the province, to demand the reward set upon brousson's head, the intendant replied with indignation, "wretch! don't you blush to look upon the man in whose blood you traffic? begone! i cannot bear your presence!" brousson was sent to pau, where he was imprisoned in the castle of foix, at one time the centre of the reformation movement in the south of france--where calvin had preached, where jeanne d'albret had lived, and where henry iv. had been born. from pau, brousson was sent to montpellier, escorted by dragoons. at toulouse the party took passage by the canal of languedoc, which had then been shortly open. at somail, during the night, brousson saw that all the soldiers were asleep. he had but to step on shore to regain his liberty; but he had promised to the intendant of bearn, who had allowed him to go unfettered, that he would not attempt to escape. at agade there was a detachment of a hundred soldiers, ready to convey the prisoner to baville, intendant of languedoc. he was imprisoned in the citadel of montpellier, on the th october, . baville, who knew much of the character of brousson--his peacefulness, his piety, his self-sacrifice, and his noble magnanimity--is said to have observed on one occasion, "i would not for a world have to judge that man." and yet the time had now arrived when brousson was to be judged and condemned by baville and the presidial court. the trial was a farce, because it had been predetermined that brousson should die. he was charged with preaching in france contrary to the king's prohibition. this he admitted; but when asked to whom he had administered the sacrament, he positively refused to disclose, because he was neither a traitor nor informer to accuse his brethren. he was also charged with having conspired to introduce a foreign army into france under the command of marshal schomberg. this he declared to be absolutely false, for he had throughout his career been a man of peace, and sought to bring back christ's followers by peaceful means only. his defence was of no avail. he was condemned to be racked, then to be broken on the wheel, and afterwards to be executed. he received the sentence without a shudder. he was tied on the rack, but when he refused to accuse his brethren he was released from it. attempts were made by several priests and friars to add him to the number of "new converts," but these were altogether fruitless. all that remained was to execute him finally on the public place of execution--the peyrou. the peyrou is the pride of modern montpellier. it is the favourite promenade of the place, and is one of the finest in europe. it consists of a broad platform elevated high above the rest of the town, and commanding extensive views of the surrounding country. in clear weather, mont ventoux, one of the alpine summits, may be seen across the broad valley of the rhône on the east, and the peak of mont canizou in the pyrenees on the west. northward stretches the mountain range of the cevennes, the bold pic de saint-loup the advanced sentinel of the group; while in the south the prospect is bounded by the blue line of the mediterranean. the peyrou is now pleasantly laid out in terraced walks and shady groves, with gay parterres of flowers--the upper platform being surrounded with a handsome stone balustrade. an equestrian statue of louis xiv. occupies the centre of the area; and a triumphal arch stands at the entrance to the promenade, erected to commemorate the "glories" of the same monarch, more particularly the revocation by him of the edict of nantes--one of the entablatures of the arch displaying a hideous figure, intended to represent a huguenot, lying trampled under foot of the "most christian king." the peyrou was thus laid out and ornamented in the reign of his successor, louis xv., "the well-beloved," during which the same policy for which louis xiv. was here glorified by an equestrian statue and a triumphal arch continued to be persevered in--of imprisoning, banishing, hanging, or sending to the galleys such of the citizens of france as were not of "the king's religion." but during the reign of louis xiv. himself, the peyrou was anything but a pleasure-ground. it was the infamous place of the city--the _place de grève_--a desert, barren, blasted table-land, where sometimes half-a-dozen decaying corpses might be seen swinging from the gibbets on which they had been hung. it was specially reserved, because of its infamy, for the execution of heretics against rome; and here, accordingly, hundreds of huguenot martyrs--whom power, honour, and wealth failed to bribe or to convert--were called upon to seal their faith with their blood. brousson was executed at this place on the th of november, . it was towards evening, while the sun was slowly sinking behind the western mountains, that an immense multitude assembled on the peyrou to witness the martyrdom of the devoted pastor. not fewer than twenty thousand persons were there, including the principal nobility of the city and province, besides many inhabitants of the adjoining mountain district of the cevennes, some of whom had come from a great distance to be present. in the centre of the plateau, near where the equestrian statue of the great king now stands, was a scaffold, strongly surrounded by troops to keep off the crowd. two battalions, drawn up in two lines facing each other, formed an avenue of bayonets between the citadel, near at hand, and the place of execution. a commotion stirred the throng; and the object of the breathless interest excited shortly appeared in the person of a middle-sized, middle-aged man, spare, grave, and dignified in appearance, dressed in the ordinary garb of a pastor, who walked slowly towards the scaffold, engaged in earnest prayer, his eyes and hands lifted towards heaven. on mounting the platform, he stood forward to say a few last words to the people, and give to many of his friends, whom he knew to be in the crowd, his parting benediction. but his voice was instantly stifled by the roll of twenty drums, which continued to beat a quick march until the hideous ceremony was over, and the martyr, claude brousson, had ceased to live.[ ] [footnote : the only favour which brousson's judges showed him at death was as regarded the manner of carrying his sentence into execution. he was condemned to be broken alive on the wheel, and then strangled; whereas by special favour the sentence was commuted into strangulation first and the breaking of his bones afterwards. so that while brousson's impassive body remained with his persecutors to be broken, his pure unconquered spirit mounted in triumph towards heaven.] strange are the vicissitudes of human affairs! not a hundred years passed after this event, before the great grandson of the monarch, at whose instance brousson had laid down his life, appeared upon a scaffold in the place louis xiv. in paris, and implored permission to say his few last words to the people. in vain! his voice was drowned by the drums of santerre! chapter v. outbreak in languedoc. although the arbitrary measures of the king were felt all over france, they nowhere excited more dismay and consternation than in the province of languedoc. this province had always been inhabited by a spirited and energetic people, born lovers of liberty. they were among the earliest to call in question the despotic authority over mind and conscience claimed by the see of rome. the country is sown with the ashes of martyrs. long before the execution of brousson, the peyrou at montpellier had been the calvary of the south of france. as early as the twelfth century, the albigenses, who inhabited the district, excited the wrath of the popes. simple, sincere believers in the divine providence, they rejected rome, and took their stand upon the individual responsibility of man to god. count de foix said to the legate of innocent iii.: "as to my religion, the pope has nothing to do with it. every man's conscience must be free. my father has always recommended to me this liberty, and i am content to die for it." a crusade was waged against the albigenses, which lasted for a period of about sixty years. armies were concentrated upon languedoc, and after great slaughter the heretics were supposed to be exterminated. but enough of the people survived to perpetuate the love of liberty in their descendants, who continued to exercise a degree of independence in matters of religion and politics almost unknown in other parts of france. languedoc was the principal stronghold of the huguenots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and when, in , louis xiv. revoked the edict of nantes, which interdicted freedom of worship under penalty of confiscation, banishment, and death, it is not surprising that such a policy should have occasioned widespread consternation, if not hostility and open resistance. at the period of the revocation there were, according to the intendant of the province, not fewer than , protestants in languedoc, and these formed the most skilled, industrious, enterprising, and wealthy portion of the community. they were the best farmers, vine-dressers, manufacturers, and traders. the valley of vaunage, lying to the westward of nismes, was one of the richest and most highly cultivated parts of france. it contained more than sixty temples, its population being almost exclusively protestant; and it was known as "the little canaan," abounding as it did in corn, and wine, and oil. the greater part of the commerce of the south of france was conducted by the protestant merchants of nismes, of whom the intendant wrote to the king in , "if they are still bad catholics, at any rate they have not ceased to be very good traders." the marquis d'aguesseau bore similar testimony to the intelligent industry of the huguenot population. "by an unfortunate fatality," said he, "in nearly every kind of art the most skilful workmen, as well as the richest merchants, belong to the pretended reformed religion." the marquis, who governed languedoc for many years, was further of opinion that the intelligence of the protestants was in a great measure due to the instructions of their pastors. "it is certain," said he, "that one of the things which holds the huguenots to their religion is the amount of information which they receive from their instructors, and which it is not thought necessary to give in ours. the huguenots _will_ be instructed, and it is a general complaint amongst the new converts not to find in our religion the same mental and moral discipline they find in their own." baville, the intendant, made an observation to a similar effect in a confidential communication which he made to the authorities at paris in , in which he boasted that the protestants had now all been converted, and that there were , new converts in languedoc. "generally speaking," he said, "the new converts are much better off, being more laborious and industrious than the old catholics of the province. the new converts must not be regarded as catholics; they almost all preserve in their heart their attachment to their former religion. they may confess and communicate as much as you will, because they are menaced and forced to do so by the secular power. but this only leads to sacrilege. to gain them, _their hearts must be won_. it is there that religion resides, and it can only be solely established by effecting that conquest." from the number, as well as the wealth and education, of the protestants of languedoc, it is reasonable to suppose that the emigration from this quarter of france should have been very considerable during the persecutions which followed the revocation. of course nearly all the pastors fled, death being their punishment if they remained in france. hence many of the most celebrated french preachers in holland, germany, and england were pastors banished from languedoc. claude and saurin both belonged to the province; and among the london preachers were the dubourdieus, the bertheaus, graverol, and pégorier. it is also interesting to find how many of the distinguished huguenots who settled in england came from languedoc. the romillys and layards came from montpellier; the saurins from nismes; the gaussens from lunel; and the bosanquets from caila;[ ] besides the auriols, arnauds, péchels, de beauvoirs, durands, portals, boileaus, d'albiacs, d'oliers, rious, and vignoles, all of whom belonged to the huguenot landed gentry of languedoc, who fled and sacrificed everything rather than conform to the religion of louis xiv. [footnote : there are still gaussens at st. mamert, in the department of gard; and some of the bosanquet family must have remained on their estates or returned to protestantism, as we find a bosanquet of caila broken alive at nismes, because of his religion, on the th september, , after which his corpse was publicly exposed on the montpellier high road.] when brousson was executed at montpellier, it was believed that protestantism was finally dead. at all events, it was supposed that those of the protestants who remained, without becoming converted, were at length reduced to utter powerlessness. it was not believed that the smouldering ashes contained any sparks that might yet be fanned into flames. the huguenot landed proprietors, the principal manufacturers, the best of the artisans, had left for other countries. protestantism was now entirely without leaders. the very existence of protestantism in any form was denied by the law; and it might perhaps reasonably have been expected that, being thus crushed out of sight, it would die. but there still remained another important and vital element--the common people--the peasants, the small farmers, the artisans, and labouring classes--persons of slender means, for the most part too poor to emigrate, and who remained, as it were, rooted to the soil on which they had been born. this was especially the case in the cevennes, where, in many of the communes, almost the entire inhabitants were protestants; in others, they formed a large proportion of the population; while in all the larger towns and villages they were very numerous, as well as widely spread over the whole province. * * * * * the mountainous district of the cevennes is the most rugged, broken, and elevated region in the south of france. it fills the department of lozère, as well as the greater part of gard and herault. the principal mountain-chain, about a hundred leagues in length, runs from north-east to south-west, and may almost be said to unite the alps with the pyrenees. from the centre of france the surface rises with a gradual slope, forming an inclined plane, which reaches its greatest height in the cevennic chain, several of the summits of which are about five thousand five hundred feet above the sea level. its connection with the alpine range is, however, broken abruptly by the deep valley of the rhône, running nearly due north and south. the whole of this mountain district maybe regarded as a triangular plateau rising gradually from the northwest, and tilted up at its south-eastern angle. it is composed for the most part of granite, overlapped by strata belonging to the jurassic-system; and in many places, especially in auvergne, the granitic rocks have been burst through by volcanoes, long since extinct, which rise like enormous protuberances from the higher parts of the platform. towards the southern border of the district, the limestone strata overlapping the granite assume a remarkable development, exhibiting a series of flat-topped hills bounded by perpendicular cliffs some six or eight hundred feet high. "these plateaux," says mr. scrope, in his interesting account of the geology of central france, "are called 'causses' in the provincial dialect, and they have a singularly dreary and desert aspect from the monotony of their form and their barren and rocky character. the valleys which separate them are rarely of considerable width. winding, narrow, and all but impassable cliff-like glens predominate, giving to the cevennes that peculiarly intricate character which enabled its protestant inhabitants, in the beginning of the last century, to offer so stubborn and gallant a resistance to the atrocious persecutions of louis xiv." such being the character of this mountain district--rocky, elevated, and sterile--the people inhabiting it, though exceedingly industrious, are for the most very poor. sheep-farming is the principal occupation of the people of the hill country; and in the summer season, when the lower districts are parched with drought, tens of thousands of sheep may be seen covering the roads leading to the upper cevennes, whither they are driven for pasture. there is a comparatively small breadth of arable land in the district. the mountains in many places contain only soil enough to grow juniper-bushes. there is very little verdure to relieve the eye--few turf-clad slopes or earth-covered ledges to repay the tillage of the farmer. even the mountains of lower elevation are for the most part stony deserts. chestnut-trees, it is true, grow luxuriantly in the sheltered places, and occasionally scanty crops of rye on the lower mountain-sides. mulberry-trees also thrive in the valleys, their leaves being used for the feeding of silkworms, the rearing of which forms one of the principal industries of the district. even in the immediate neighbourhood of nismes--a rich and beautiful town, abounding in roman remains, which exhibit ample evidences of its ancient grandeur--the country is arid, stony, and barren-looking, though here the vine, the olive, and the fig-tree, wherever there is soil enough, grow luxuriantly in the open air. indeed, the country very much resembles in its character the land of judea, being rocky, parched, and in many places waste, though in others abounding in corn and wine and oil. in the interior parts of the district the scenery is wild and grand, especially in the valleys lying under the lofty mountain of lozère. but the rocks and stones are everywhere in the ascendant. a few years ago we visited the district; and while proceeding in the old-fashioned diligence which runs between alais and florac--for the district is altogether beyond the reach of railways--a french contractor, accompanying a band of italian miners, whom he was taking into the mountains to search for minerals, pointing to the sterile rocks, exclaimed to us, "messieurs, behold the very poorest district in france! it contains nothing but juniper-bushes! as for its agriculture, it produces nothing; manufactures, nothing; commerce, nothing! _rien, rien, rien!_" the observation of this french _entrepreneur_ reminds us of an anecdote that telford, the scotch engineer, used to relate of a countryman with reference to his appreciation of scotch mountain beauty. an english artist, enraptured by the scenery of ben macdhui, was expatiating on its magnificence, and appealed to the native guide for confirmation of his news. "i dinna ken aboot the scenery," replied the man, "but there's plenty o' big rocks and stanes; an' the kintra's awfu' puir." the same observation might doubtless apply to the cevennes. yet, though the people may be poor, they are not miserable or destitute, for they are all well-clad and respectable-looking peasants, and there is not a beggar to be seen in the district. but the one country, as the other, grows strong and brave men. these barren mountain districts of the cevennes have bred a race of heroes; and the men are as simple and kind as they are brave. hospitality is a characteristic of the people, which never fails to strike the visitor accustomed to the exactions which are so common along the hackneyed tourist routes. as in other parts of france, the peasantry here are laborious almost to excess. robust and hardy, they are distinguished for their perseverance against the obstacles which nature constantly opposes to them. out-door industry being suspended in winter, during which they are shut up in their cabins for nearly six months by the ice and snow, they occupy themselves in preparing their wool for manufacture into cloth. the women card, the children spin, the men weave; and each cottage is a little manufactory of drugget and serge, which is taken to market in spring, and sold in the low-country towns. such was the industry of the cevennes nearly two hundred years since, and such it remains to the present day. the people are of a contented nature, and bear their poverty with cheerfulness and even dignity. while they partake of the ardour and strong temper which characterize the inhabitants of the south of france, they are probably, on the whole, more grave and staid than frenchmen generally, and are thought to be more urbane and intelligent; and though they are unmanageable by force, they are remarkably accessible to kindness and moral suasion. such, in a few words, are the more prominent characteristics of the country and people of the cevennes. * * * * * when the popular worship of the mountain district of languedoc--in which the protestants constituted the majority of the population--was suppressed, great dismay fell upon the people; but they made no signs of resistance to the royal authority. for a time they remained comparatively passive, and it was at first thought they were indifferent. their astonished enemies derisively spoke of them as displaying "the patience of a huguenot,"--the words having passed into a proverb. but their persecutors did not know the stuff of which these mountaineers were made. they had seen their temples demolished one after another, and their pastors banished, leaving them "like poor starved sheep looking for the pasture of life." next they heard that such of their pastors as had been apprehended for venturing to minister to them in "the desert" had been taken to nismes and montpellier and hanged. then they began to feel excited and indignant. for they could not shake off their own belief and embrace another man's, even though that man was their king. if louis xiv. had ordered them to believe that two and two make six, they could not possibly believe, though they might pretend to do so, that it made any other number than four. and so it was with the king's order to them to profess a faith which they could not bring their minds to believe in. these poor people entertained the conviction that they possessed certain paramount rights as men. of these they held the right of conscience to be one of the principal. they were willing to give unto cæsar the things that were cæsar's; but they could not give him those which belonged unto god. and if they were forced to make a choice, then they must rather disobey their king than the king of kings. though deprived of their leaders and pastors, the dispossessed huguenots emerged by degrees from their obscurity, and began to recognise each other openly. if their temples were destroyed, there remained the woods and fields and mountain pastures, where they might still meet and worship god, even though it were in defiance of the law. having taken counsel together, they resolved "not to forsake the assembling of themselves together;" and they proceeded, in all the protestant districts in the south of france--in viverais, dauphiny, and the cevennes--to hold meetings of the people, mostly by night, for worship--in woods, in caves, in rocky gorges, and in hollows of the hills. then began those famous assemblies of "the desert," which were the nightmare of louvois and the horror of louis xiv. when it came to the knowledge of the authorities that such meetings were being held, large bodies of troops were sent into the southern provinces, with orders to disperse them and apprehend the ringleaders. these orders were carried out with much barbarity. amongst various assemblies which were discovered and attacked in the cevennes, were those of auduze and vigan, where the soldiers fell upon the defenceless people, put the greater number to the sword, and hanged upon the nearest trees those who did not succeed in making their escape. the authorities waited to see the effect of these "vigorous measures;" but they were egregiously disappointed. the meetings in the desert went on as before, and even increased in number. then milder means were tried. other meetings were attacked in like manner, and the people found attending them taken prisoners. they were then threatened with death unless they became converted, and promised to attend mass. they declared that they preferred death. a passion for martyrdom even seemed to be spreading amongst the infatuated people! then the peasantry began secretly to take up arms for their defence. they had thus far been passive in their resistance, and were content to brave death provided they could but worship together. at length they felt themselves driven in their despair to resist force by force--acting, however, in the first place, entirely on the defensive--"leaving the issue," to use the words of one of their solemn declarations, "to the providence of god." they began--these poor labourers, herdsmen, and wool-carders--by instituting a common fund for the purpose of helping their distressed brethren in surrounding districts. they then invited such as were disposed to join them to form themselves into companies, so as to be prepared to come together and give their assistance as occasion required. when meetings in the desert were held, it became the duty of these enrolled men to post themselves as sentinels on the surrounding heights, and give notice of the approach of their enemies. they also constituted a sort of voluntary police for their respective districts, taking notice of the changes of the royal troops, and dispatching information by trusty emissaries, intimating the direction of their march. the intendant, baville, wrote to louvois, minister of louis xiv. during the persecutions, expressing his surprise and alarm at the apparent evidences of organization amongst the peasantry. "i have just learned," said he in one letter,[ ] "that last sunday there was an assembly of nearly four hundred men, many of them armed, at the foot of the mountain of lozère. i had thought," he added, "that the great lesson taught them at vigan and anduze would have restored tranquillity to the cevennes, at least for a time. but, on the contrary, the severity of the measures heretofore adopted seems only to have had the effect of exasperating and hardening them in their iniquitous courses." [footnote : october , .] * * * * * as the massacres had failed, the question next arose whether the inhabitants might not be driven into exile, and the country entirely cleared of them. "they pretend," said louvois, "to meet in 'the desert;' why not take them at their word, and make the cevennes _really_ a desert?" but there were difficulties in the way of executing this plan. in the first place, the protestants of languedoc were a quarter of a million in number. and, besides, if they were driven out of it, what would become of the industry and the wealth of this great province--what of the king's taxes? the duke de noailles advised that it would be necessary to proceed with some caution in the matter. "if his majesty," he wrote to baville, "thinks there is no other remedy than changing the whole people of the cevennes, it would be better to begin by expelling those who are not engaged in commerce, who inhabit inaccessible mountain districts, where the severity of the climate and the poverty of the soil render them rude and barbarous, as in the case of those people who recently met at the foot of the lozère. should the king consent to this course, it will be necessary to send here at least four additional battalions of foot to execute his orders."[ ] [footnote : noailles to baville, th october, .] an attempt was made to carry out this measure of deportation of the people, but totally failed. with the aid of spies, stimulated by high rewards, numerous meetings in the desert were fallen upon by the troops, and those who were not hanged were transported--some to italy, some to switzerland, and some to america. but transportation had no terrors for the people, and the meetings continued to be held as before. baville then determined to occupy the entire province with troops, and to carry out a general disarmament of the population. eight regiments of regular infantry were sent into the cevennes, and fifty regiments of militia were raised throughout the province, forming together an army of some forty thousand men. strong military posts were established in the mountains, and new forts and barracks were erected at alais, anduze, st. hyppolyte, and nismes. the mountain-roads being almost impassable, many of them mere mule paths, baville had more than a hundred new high-roads and branch-roads constructed and made practicable for the passage of troops and transport of cannon. by these means the whole country became strongly occupied, but still the meetings in the desert went on. the peasantry continued to brave all risks--of exile, the galleys, the rack, and the gibbet--and persevered in their assemblies, until the very ferocity of their persecutors became wearied. the people would not be converted either by the dragoons or the priests who were stationed amongst them. in the dead of the night they would sally forth to their meetings in the hills; though their mountains were not too steep, their valleys not too secluded, their denies not too impenetrable to protect them from pursuit and attack, for they were liable at any moment to be fallen upon and put to the sword. the darkness, the dangers, the awe and mystery attending these midnight meetings invested them with an extraordinary degree of interest and even fascination. it is not surprising that under such circumstances the devotion of these poor people should have run into fanaticism and superstition. singing the psalms of marot by night, under the shadow of echoing rocks, they fancied they heard the sounds of heavenly voices filling the air. at other times they would meet amidst the ruins of their fallen sanctuaries, and mysterious sounds of sobbing and wailing and groaning would seem as if to rise from the tombs of their fathers. * * * * * under these distressing circumstances--in the midst of poverty, suffering, and terror--a sort of religious hysteria suddenly developed itself amongst the people, breaking out and spreading like many other forms of disease, and displaying itself chiefly in the most persecuted quarters of dauphiny, viverais, and the cevennes. the people had lost their pastors; they had not the guidance of sober and intelligent persons; and they were left merely to pray and to suffer. the terrible raid of the priests against the protestant books had even deprived most of the huguenots of their bibles and psalm-books, so that they were in a great measure left to profit by their own light, such as it was. the disease to which we refer, had often before been experienced, under different forms, amongst uneducated people when afflicted by terror and excitement; such, for instance, as the brotherhood of the flagellants, which followed the attack of the plague in the middle ages; the dancing mania, which followed upon the black death; the child's pilgrimages, the convulsionaires, the revival epilepsies and swoons, which have so often accompanied fits of religious devotion worked up into frenzy; these diseases being merely the result of excitement of the senses, which convulse the mind and powerfully affect the whole nervous system. the "prophetic malady," as we may call it, which suddenly broke out amongst the poor huguenots, began with epileptic convulsions. they fell to the ground senseless, foamed at the mouth, sobbed, and eventually revived so far as to be able to speak and "prophesy," like a mesmerised person in a state of _clairvoyance_. the disease spread rapidly by the influence of morbid sympathy, which, under the peculiar circumstances we have described, exercises an amazing power over human minds. those who spoke with power were considered "inspired." they prayed and preached ecstatically, the most inspired of the whole being women, boys, and even children. one of the first "prophets" who appeared was isabel vincent, a young shepherdess of crest, in dauphiny, who could neither read nor write. her usual speech was the patois of her country, but when she became inspired she spoke perfectly, and, according to michelet, with great eloquence. "she chanted," he says, "at first the commandments, then a psalm, in a low and fascinating voice. she meditated a moment, then began the lamentation of the church, tortured, exiled, at the galleys, in the dungeons: for all those evils she blamed our sins only, and called all to penitence. then, starting anew, she spoke angelically of the divine goodness." boucher, the intendant of the province, had her apprehended and examined. she would not renounce. "you may take my life," she said, "but god will raise up others to speak better things than i have done." she was at last imprisoned at grenoble, and afterwards in the tower of constance. as isabel vincent had predicted, many prophets followed in her steps, but they did not prophesy as divinely as she. they denounced "woe, woe" upon their persecutors. they reviled babylon as the oppressor of the house of israel. they preached the most violent declamations against rome, drawn from the most lugubrious of the prophets, and stirred the minds of their hearers into the most furious indignation. the rapidity with which the contagion of convulsive prophesying spread was extraordinary. the adherents were all of the poorer classes, who read nothing but the bible, and had it nearly by heart. it spread from dauphiny to viverais, and from thence into the cevennes. "i have seen," said marshal villars, "things that i could never have believed if they had not passed under my own eyes--an entire city, in which all the women and girls, without exception, appeared possessed by the devil; they quaked and prophesied publicly in the streets."[ ] [footnote : "vie du maréchal de villars," i. .] flottard says there were eight thousand persons in one province who had inspiration. all were not, however, equally inspired. there were four degrees of ecstasy: first, the being called; next, the inspiration; then, the prophesy; and, lastly, the gift, which was the inspiration in the highest degree. all this may appear ludicrous to some. and yet the school of credulity is a very wide one. even in these enlightened times in which we live, we hear of tables turning, spelling out words, and "prophesying" in their own way. there are even philosophers, men of science, and literati who believe in spiritualists that rise on sofas and float about in the air, who project themselves suddenly out of one window and enter by another, and do many other remarkable things. and though our spiritual table-rapping and floating about may seem to be of no possible use, the "prophesying" of the camisards was all but essential to the existence of the movement in which they were engaged. the population became intensely excited by the prevalence of this enthusiasm or fanaticism. "when a huguenot assembly," says brueys, "was appointed, even before daybreak, from all the hamlets round, the men, women, boys, girls, and even infants, came in crowds, hurrying from their huts, pierced through the woods, leapt over the rocks, and flew to the place of appointment."[ ] [footnote : brueys, "histoire du fanaticisme de notre temps."] mere force was of no avail against people who supposed themselves to be under supernatural influences. the meetings in the desert, accordingly, were attended with increased and increasing fascination, and baville, who had reported to the king the entire pacification and conversion of languedoc, to his dismay found the whole province bursting with excitement, which a spark at any moment might fire into frenzy. and that spark was shortly afterwards supplied by the archpriest chayla, director of missions at pont-de-montvert. although it was known that many of the peasantry attended the meetings armed, there had as yet been no open outbreak against the royal authority in the cevennes. at cheilaret, in the vivarais, there had been an encounter between the troops and the peasantry; but the people were speedily dispersed, leaving three hundred dead and fifty wounded on the field. the intendant baville, after thus pacifying the vivarais, was proceeding on his way back to montpellier, escorted by some companies of dragoons and militia, passing through the cevennes by one of the new roads he had caused to be constructed along the valley of the tarn, by pont-de-montvert to florac. what was his surprise, on passing through the village of pont-de-montvert, to hear the roll of a drum, and shortly after to perceive a column of rustics, some three or four hundred in number, advancing as if to give him battle. baville at once drew up his troops and charged the column, which broke and fled into an adjoining wood. some were killed and others taken prisoners, who were hanged next day at st. jean-du-gard. a reward of five hundred louis d'or was advertised for the leader, who was shortly after tracked to his hiding-place in a cavern situated between anduze and alais, and was there shot, but not until after he had killed three soldiers with his fusil. after this event persecution was redoubled throughout the cevennes. the militia ran night and day after the meetings in the desert. all persons found attending them, who could be captured, were either killed on the spot or hanged. two companies of militia were quartered in pont-de-montvert at the expense of the inhabitants; and they acted under the direction of the archpriest du chayla. this priest, who was a native of the district, had been for some time settled as a missionary in siam engaged in the conversion of buddhists, and on his return to france he was appointed to undertake the conversion of the people of the cevennes to the faith of rome. * * * * * the village of pont-de-montvert is situated in the hollow of a deep valley formed by the mountain of lozère on the north, and of bougès on the south, at the point at which two streams, descending from their respective summits, flow into the tarn. the village is separated by these streams into three little hamlets, which are joined together by the bridge which gives its name to the place. the addition of "mont vert," however, is a misnomer; for though seated at the foot of a steep mountain, it is not green, but sterile, rocky, and verdureless. the village is best reached from florac, from which it is about twenty miles distant. the valley runs east and west, and is traversed by a tolerably good road, which at the lower part follows the windings of the tarn, and higher up runs in and out along the mountain ledges, at every turn presenting new views of the bold, grand, and picturesque scenery which characterizes the wilder parts of the cevennes. along this route the old mule-road is still discernible in some places--a difficult, rugged, mountain path, which must have kept the district sealed up during the greater part of the year, until baville constructed the new road for the purpose of opening up the country for the easier passage of troops and munitions of war. a few poor hamlets occur at intervals along the road, sometimes perched on apparently inaccessible rocks, and at the lower part of the valley an occasional château is to be seen, as at miral, picturesquely situated on a height. but the country is too poor by nature--the breadth of land in the bottom of the ravine being too narrow and that on the mountain ledges too stony and sterile--ever to have enabled it to maintain a considerable population. on all sides little is to be seen but rocky mountain sides, stony and precipitous, with bold mountain peaks extending beyond them far away in the distance. pont-de-montvert is the centre of a series of hamlets, the inhabitants of which were in former times almost exclusively protestant, as they are now; and where meetings in the desert were of the most frequent occurrence. strong detachments of troops were accordingly stationed there and at florac for the purpose of preventing the meetings and overawing the population. besides soldiers, the authorities also established missions throughout the cevennes, and the principal inspector of these missions was the archpriest chayla. the house in which he resided at pont-de-montvert is still pointed out. it is situated near the north end of the bridge over the tarn; but though the lower part of the building remains as it was in his time, the upper portion has been for the most part rebuilt. chayla was a man of great force of character--zealous, laborious, and indefatigable--but pitiless, relentless, and cruel. he had no bowels of compassion. he was deaf to all appeals for mercy. with him the penalty of non-belief in the faith of rome was imprisonment, torture, death. eight young priests lived with him, whose labours he directed; and great was his annoyance to find that the people would not attend his ministrations, but continued to flock after their own prophet-preachers in the desert. moral means having failed, he next tried physical. he converted the arched cellars of his dwelling into dungeons, where he shut up those guilty of contumacy; and day by day he put them to torture. it seems like a satire on religion to say that, in his attempt to convert souls, this vehement missionary made it one of his principal studies to find out what amount of agony the bodies of those who differed from him would bear short of actual death. he put hot coals into their hands, which they were then made to clench; wrapped round their fingers cotton steeped in oil, which was then set on fire; besides practising upon them the more ordinary and commonplace tortures. no wonder that the archpriest came to be detested by the inhabitants of pont-de-montvert. at length, a number of people in the district, in order to get beyond reach of chayla's cruelty, determined to emigrate from france and take refuge in geneva. they assembled one morning secretly, a cavalcade of men and women, and set out under the direction of a guide who knew the mountain paths towards the east. when they had travelled a few hours, they fell into an ambuscade of militia, and were marched back to the archpriest's quarters at pont-de-montvert. the women were sent to mende to be immured in convents, and the men were imprisoned in the archpriest's dungeons. the parents of some of the captives ran to throw themselves at his feet, and implored mercy for their sons; but chayla was inexorable. he declared harshly that the prisoners must suffer according to the law--that the fugitives must go the galleys, and their guide to the gibbet. on the following sunday, the rd of july, , one of the preaching prophets, pierre seguier of magistavols, a hamlet lying to the south of pont-de-montvert, preached to an assembly on the neighbouring mountain of bougès; and there he declared that the lord had ordered him to take up arms to deliver the captives and exterminate the archpriest of moloch. another and another preacher followed in the same strain, the excited assembly encouraging them by their cries, and calling upon them to execute god's vengeance on the persecutors of god's people. that same night seguier and his companions went round amongst the neighbouring hamlets to summon an assemblage of their sworn followers for the evening of the following day. they met punctually in the altefage wood, and under the shadow of three gigantic beech trees, the trunks of which were standing but a few years ago, they solemnly swore to deliver their companions and destroy the archpriest. when night fell, a band of fifty determined men marched down the mountain towards the bridge, led by seguier. twenty of them were armed with guns and pistols. the rest carried scythes and hatchets. as they approached the village, they sang marot's version of the seventy-fourth psalm. the archpriest heard the unwonted sound as they came marching along. thinking it was a nocturnal assembly, he cried to his soldiers, "run and see what this means." but the doors of the house were already invested by the mountaineers, who shouted out for "the prisoners! the prisoners!" "back, huguenot canaille!" cried chayla from the window. but they only shouted the louder for "the prisoners!" the archpriest then directed the militia to fire, and one of the peasants fell dead. infuriated, they seized the trunk of a tree, and using it as a battering-ram, at once broke in the door. they next proceeded to force the entrance to the dungeon, in which they succeeded, and called upon the prisoners to come forth. but some of them were so crippled by the tortures to which they had been subjected, that they could not stand. at sight of their sufferings the fury of the assailants increased, and, running up the staircase, they called out for the archpriest. "burn the priest and the satellites of baal!" cried their leader; and heaping together the soldiers' straw beds, the chairs, and other combustibles, they set the whole on fire. chayla, in the hope of escaping, jumped from a window into the garden, and in the fall broke his leg. the peasants discovered him by the light of the blazing dwelling. he called for mercy. "no," said seguier, "only such mercy as you have shown to others;" and he struck him the first blow. the others followed. "this for my father," said the next, "whom you racked to death!" "this for my brother," said another, "whom you sent to the galleys!" "this for my mother, who died of grief!" this for my sister, my relatives, my friends, in exile, in prison, in misery! and thus blow followed blow, fifty-two in all, half of which would probably have been mortal, and the detested chayla lay a bleeding mass at their feet! [illustration: map of the country of the cevennes.] chapter vi. insurrection of the camisards. the poor peasants, wool-carders, and neatherds of the cevennes, formed only a small and insignificant section of the great body of men who were about the same time engaged in different countries of europe in vindicating the cause of civil and religious liberty. for this cause, a comparative handful of people in the low countries, occupying the dutch united provinces, had banded themselves together to resist the armies of spain, then the most powerful monarchy in the world. the struggle had also for some time been in progress in england and scotland, where it culminated in the revolution of ; and it was still raging in the vaudois valleys of piedmont. the object contended for in all these cases was the same. it was the vindication of human freedom against royal and sacerdotal despotism. it could only have been the direst necessity that drove a poor, scattered, unarmed peasantry, such as the people of the cevennes, to take up arms against so powerful a sovereign as louis xiv. their passive resistance had lasted for fifteen long years, during which many of them had seen their kindred racked, hanged, or sent to the galleys; and at length their patience was exhausted, and the inevitable outburst took place. yet they were at any moment ready to lay down their arms and return to their allegiance, provided only a reasonable degree of liberty of worship were assured to them. this, however, their misguided and bigoted monarch, would not tolerate; for he had sworn that no persons were to be suffered in his dominions save those who were of "the king's religion." the circumstances accompanying the outbreak of the protestant peasantry in the cevennes in many respects resembled those which attended the rising of the scotch covenanters in . both were occasioned by the persistent attempts of men in power to enforce a particular form of religion at the point of the sword. the resisters of the policy were in both cases calvinists;[ ] and they were alike indomitable and obstinate in their assertion of the rights of conscience. they held that religion was a matter between man and his god, and not between man and his sovereign or the pope. the peasantry in both cases persevered in their own form of worship. in languedoc, the mountaineers of the cevennes held their assemblies in "the desert;" and in scotland, the "hill-folk" of the west held their meetings on the muirs. in the one country as in the other, the monarchy sent out soldiers as their missionaries--louis xiv. employing the dragoons of louvois and baville, and charles ii. those of claverhouse and dalzell. these failing, new instruments of torture were invented for their "conversion." but the people, in both cases, continued alike stubborn in their adherence to their own simple and, as some thought, uncouth form of faith. [footnote : whether it be that calvinism is eclectic as regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon individual character, certain it is that the calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other--the calvinists of geneva and holland, the huguenots of france, the covenanters of scotland, and the puritans of old and new england, seeming, as it were, to be but members of the same family. it is curious to speculate on the influence which the religion of calvin--himself a frenchman--might have exercised on the history of france, as well as on the individual character of frenchmen, had the balance of forces carried the nation bodily over to protestantism (as was very nearly the case) towards the end of the sixteenth century. heinrich heine has expressed the opinion that the western races contain a large proportion of men for whom the moral principle of judaism has a strong elective affinity; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the old testament certainly seems to have exercised a much more powerful influence on the minds of religious reformers than the new. "the jews," says heine, "were the germans of the east, and nowadays the protestants in german countries (england, scotland, america, germany, holland) are nothing more nor less than ancient oriental jews."] the french calvinist peasantry, like the scotch, were great in their preachers and their prophets. both devoted themselves with enthusiasm to psalmody, insomuch that "psalm-singers" was their nickname in both countries. the one had their clement marot by heart, the other their sternhold and hopkins. huguenot prisoners in chains sang psalms in their dungeons, galley slaves sang them as they plied at the oar, fugitives in the halting-places of their flight, the condemned as they marched to the gallows, and the camisards as they rushed into battle. it was said of the covenanters that "they lived praying and preaching, and they died praying and fighting;" and the same might have been said of the huguenot peasantry of the cevennes. the immediate cause of the outbreak of the insurrection in both countries was also similar. in the one case, it was the cruelty of the archpriest chayla, the inventor of a new machine of torture called "the squeezers,"[ ] and in the other the cruelty of archbishop sharpe, the inventor of that horrible instrument called "the iron boot," that excited the fury of the people; and the murder of the one by seguier and his band at pont-de-montvert, as of the other by balfour of burley and his companions on magus muir, proved the signal for a general insurrection of the peasantry in both countries. both acts were of like atrocity; but they corresponded in character with the cruelties which had provoked them. insurrections, like revolutions, are not made of rose-water. in such cases, action and reaction are equal; the violence of the oppressors usually finding its counterpart in the violence of the oppressed. [footnote : the instrument is thus described by cavalier, in his "memoirs of the wars of the cevennes," london, : "this inhuman man had invented a rack (more cruel, if it be possible, than that usually made use of) to torment these poor unfortunate gentlemen and ladies; which was a beam he caused to be split in two, with vices at each end. every morning he would send for these poor people, in order to examine them, and if they refused to confess what he desired, he caused their legs to be put in the slit of the beam, and there squeezed them till the bones cracked," &c., &c. (p. ).] the insurrection of the french peasantry proved by far the most determined and protracted of the two; arising probably from the more difficult character of the mountain districts which they occupied and the quicker military instincts of the people, as well as because several of their early leaders and organizers were veteran soldiers who had served in many campaigns. the scotch insurgents were suppressed by the english army under the duke of monmouth in less than two months after the original outbreak, though their cause eventually triumphed in the revolution of ; whereas the peasantry of the cevennes, though deprived of all extraneous help, continued to maintain a heroic struggle for several years, but were under the necessity of at last succumbing to the overpowering military force of louis xiv., after which the huguenots of france continued to be stamped out of sight, and apparently out of existence, for nearly a century. * * * * * in the preceding chapter, we left the archpriest chayla a corpse at the feet of his murderers. several of the soldiers found in the château were also killed, as well as the cook and house-steward, who had helped to torture the prisoners. but one of the domestics, and a soldier, who had treated them with kindness, were, at their intercession, pardoned and set at liberty. the corpses were brought together in the garden, and seguier and his companions, kneeling round them--a grim and ghastly sight--sang psalms until daybreak, the uncouth harmony mingling with the crackling of the flames of the dwelling overhead, and the sullen roar of the river rushing under the neighbouring bridge. when the grey of morning appeared, the men rose from their knees, emerged from the garden, crossed the bridge, and marched up the main street of the village. the inhabitants had barricaded themselves in their houses, being in a state of great fear lest they should be implicated in the murder of the archpriest. but seguier and his followers made no further halt in pont-de-montvert, but passed along, still singing psalms, towards the hamlet of frugères, a little further up the valley of the tarn. seguier has been characterised as "the danton of the cevennes." this fierce and iron-willed man was of great stature--bony and dark-visaged, without upper teeth, his hair hanging loose over his shoulders--and of a wild and mystic appearance, occasioned probably by the fits of ecstasy to which he was subject, and the wandering life he had for so many years led as a prophet-preacher in the desert. this terrible man had resolved upon a general massacre of the priests, and he now threw himself upon frugères for the purpose of carrying out the enterprise begun by him at pont-de-montvert. the curé of the hamlet, who had already heard of chayla's murder, fled from his house at sound of the approaching psalm-singers, and took refuge in an adjoining rye-field. he was speedily tracked thither, and brought down by a musket-ball; and a list of twenty of his parishioners, whom he had denounced to the archpriest, was found under his cassock. from frugères the prophet and his band marched on to st. maurice de ventalong, so called because of the winds which at certain seasons blow so furiously along the narrow valley in which it is situated; but the prior of the convent, having been warned of the outbreak, had already mounted his horse and taken to flight. here seguier was informed of the approach of a body of militia who were on his trail; but he avoided them by taking refuge on a neighbouring mountain-side, where he spent the night with his companions in a thicket. next morning, at daybreak, he descended the mountain, crossed the track of his pursuers, and directed himself upon st. andré de lancèze. the whole country was by this time in a state of alarm; and the curé of the place, being on the outlook, mounted the clock-tower and rang the tocsin. but his parishioners having joined the insurgents, the curé was pursued, captured in the belfry, and thrown from its highest window. the insurgents then proceeded to gut the church, pull down the crosses, and destroy all the emblems of romanism on which they could lay their hands. seguier and his band next hurried across the mountains towards the south, having learnt that the curés of the neighbourhood had assembled at st. germain to assist at the obsequies of the archpriest chayla, whose body had been brought thither from pont-de-montvert on the morning after his murder. when seguier was informed that the town and country militia were in force in the place, he turned aside and went in another direction. the curés, however, having heard that seguier was in the neighbourhood, fled panic-stricken, some to the château of portes, others to st. andré, while a number of them did not halt until they had found shelter within the walls of alais, some twenty miles distant. thus four days passed. on the fifth night seguier appeared before the château of ladevèze, and demanded the arms which had been deposited there at the time of the disarmament of the peasantry. the owner replied by a volley of musketry, which killed and wounded several of the insurgents, at the same time ringing the alarm-bell. seguier, furious at this resistance, at once burst open the gates, and ordered a general massacre of the household. this accomplished, he ransacked the place of its arms and ammunition, and before leaving set the castle on fire, the flames throwing a lurid glare over the surrounding country. seguier's band then descended the mountain on which the château is situated, and made for the north in the direction of cassagnas, arriving at the elevated plateau of font-morte a little before daybreak. in the meantime, baville, the intendant of the province, was hastening to pont-de-montvert to put down the insurrection and avenge the death of the archpriest. the whole country was roused. troops were dispatched in hot haste from alais; the militia were assembled from all quarters and marched upon the disturbed district. the force was placed under the orders of captain poul, an old soldier of fortune, who had distinguished himself in the german wars, and in the recent crusade against the italian vaudois. it was because of the individual prowess which captain poul had displayed in his last campaign, that, at the peace of ryswick, baville requested that he should be attached to the army of languedoc, and employed in putting down the insurgents of the cevennes. captain poul was hastening with his troops to florac when, having been informed of the direction in which seguier and his band had gone, he turned aside at barre, and after about an hour's march eastward, he came up with them at font-morte. they suddenly started up from amongst the broom where they had lain down to sleep, and, firing off their guns upon the advancing host, without offering any further resistance, fled in all directions. poul and his men spurred after them, cutting down the fugitives. coming up with seguier, who was vainly trying to rally his men, poul took him prisoner with several others, and they were forthwith chained and marched to florac. as they proceeded along the road, poul said to seguier, "well, wretch! now i have got you, how do you expect to be treated after the crimes you have committed?" "as i would myself have treated you, had i taken you prisoner," was the reply. seguier stood before his judges calm and fearless. "what is your name?" he was asked. "pierre seguier." "why do they call you esprit?" "because the spirit of god is in me." "your abode?" "in the desert, and shortly in heaven." "ask pardon of the king!" "we have no other king but the eternal." "have you no feeling of remorse for your crimes?" "my soul is as a garden full of shady groves and of peaceful fountains." seguier was condemned to have his hands cut off at the wrist, and he burnt alive at pont-de-montvert. nouvel, another of the prisoners, was broken alive at ladevèze, and bonnet, a third, was hanged at st. andré. they all suffered without flinching. seguier's last words, spoken amidst the flames, were, "brethren, wait, and hope in the eternal. the desolate carmel shall yet revive, and the solitary lebanon shall blossom as the rose!" thus perished the grim, unflinching prophet of magistavols, the terrible avenger of the cruelties of chayla, the earliest leader in the insurrection of the camisards! it is not exactly known how or when the insurgents were first called camisards. they called themselves by no other name than "the children of god" (_enfants de dieu_); but their enemies variously nicknamed them "the barbets," "the vagabonds," "the assemblers," "the psalm-singers," "the fanatics," and lastly, "the camisards." this name is said to have been given them because of the common blouse or camisole which they wore--their only uniform. others say that it arose from their wearing a white shirt, or camise, over their dress, to enable them to distinguish each other in their night attacks; and that this was not the case, is partly countenanced by the fact that in the course of the insurrection a body of peasant royalists took the field, who designated themselves the "_white_ camisards," in contradistinction from the others. others say the word is derived from _camis_, signifying a roadrunner. but whatever the origin of the word may be, the camisards was the name most commonly applied to the insurgents, and by which they continue to be known in local history. * * * * * captain poul vigorously followed up the blow delivered at font-morte. he apprehended all suspected persons in the upper cevennes, and sent them before the judges at florac. unable to capture the insurgents who had escaped, he seized their parents, their relations, and families, and these were condemned to various punishments. but what had become of the insurgents themselves? knowing that they had nothing but death to expect, if taken, they hid themselves in caves known only to the inhabitants of the district, and so secretly that poul thought they had succeeded in making their escape from france. the intendant baville arrived at the same conclusion, and he congratulated himself accordingly on the final suppression of the outbreak. leaving sundry detachments of troops posted in the principal villages, he returned to alais, and invited the fugitive priests at once to return to their respective parishes. after remaining in concealment for several days, the surviving insurgents met one night to consult as to the steps they were to take, with a view to their personal safety. they had by this time been joined by several sympathizers, amongst others by three veteran soldiers--laporte, espérandieu, and rastelet--and by young cavalier, who had just returned from geneva, where he had been in exile, and was now ready to share in the dangers of his compatriots. the greater number of those present were in favour of bidding a final adieu to france, and escaping across the frontier into switzerland, considering that the chances of their offering any successful resistance to their oppressors, were altogether hopeless. but against this craven course laporte raised his voice. "brethren," said he, "why depart into the land of the stranger? have we not a country of our own, the country of our fathers? it is, you say, a country of slavery and death! well! free it! and deliver your oppressed brethren. never say, 'what can we do? we are few in number, and without arms!' the god of armies shall be our strength. let us sing aloud the psalm of battles, and from the lozère even to the sea israel will arise! as for arms, have we not our hatchets? these will bring us muskets! brethren, there is only one course worthy to be pursued. it is to live for our country; and, if need be, to die for it. better die by the sword than by the rack or the gallows!" from this moment, not another word was said of flight. with one voice, the assembly cried to the speaker, "be our chief! it is the will of the eternal!" "the eternal be the witness of your promises," replied laporte; "i consent to be your chief!" he assumed forthwith the title of "colonel of the children of god," and named his camp "the camp of the eternal!" laporte belonged to an old huguenot family of the village of massoubeyran, near anduze. they were respectable peasants, some of whom lived by farming and others by trade. old john laporte had four sons, of whom the eldest succeeded his father as a small farmer and cattle-breeder, occupying the family dwelling at massoubeyran, still known there as the house of "laporte-roland." it contains a secret retreat, opening from a corner of the floor, called the "cachette de roland," in which the celebrated chief of this name, son of the owner, was accustomed to take refuge; and in this cottage, the old bible of roland's father, as well as the halbert of roland himself, continue to be religiously preserved. two of laporte's brothers were protestant ministers. one of them was the last pastor of collet-de-deze in the cevennes. banished because of his faith, he fled from france at the revocation, joined the army of the prince of orange in holland, and came over with him to england as chaplain of one of the french regiments which landed at torbay in . another brother, also a pastor, remained in the cevennes, preaching to the people in the desert, though at the daily risk of his life, and after about ten years' labour in this vocation, he was apprehended, taken prisoner to montpellier, and strangled on the peyrou in the year . the fourth brother was the laporte whom we have just described in undertaking the leadership of the hunted insurgents remaining in the upper cevennes. he had served as a soldier in the king's armies, and at the peace of ryswick returned to his native village, the year after his elder brother had suffered martyrdom at montpellier. he settled for a time at collet-de-deze, from which his other brother had been expelled, and there he carried on the trade of an ironworker and blacksmith. he was a great, brown, brawny man, of vehement piety, a constant frequenter of the meetings in the desert, and a mighty psalm-singer--one of those strong, massive, ardent-natured men who so powerfully draw others after them, and in times of revolution exercise a sort of popular royalty amongst the masses. the oppression which had raged so furiously in the district excited his utmost indignation, and when he sought out the despairing insurgents in the mountains, and found that they were contemplating flight, he at once gave utterance to the few burning words we have cited, and fixed their determination to strike at least another blow for the liberty of their country and their religion. the same evening on which laporte assumed the leadership (about the beginning of august, ) he made a descent on three roman catholic villages in the neighbourhood of the meeting-place, and obtained possession of a small stock of powder and balls. when it became known that the insurgents were again drawing together, others joined them. amongst these were castonet, a forest-ranger of the aigoal mountain district in the west, who brought with him some twelve recruits from the country near vebron. shortly after, there arrived from vauvert the soldier catinet, bringing with him twenty more. next came young cavalier, from ribaute, with another band, armed with muskets which they had seized from the prior of st. martin, with whom they had been deposited. meanwhile laporte's nephew, young roland, was running from village to village in the vaunage, holding assemblies and rousing the people to come to the help of their distressed brethren in the mountains. roland was a young man of bright intelligence, gifted with much of the preaching power of his family. his eloquence was of a martial sort, for he had been bred a soldier, and though young, had already fought in many battles. he was everywhere received with open arms in the vaunage. "my brethren," said he, "the cause of god and the deliverance of israel is at stake. follow us to the mountains. no country is better suited for war--we have the hill-tops for camps, gorges for ambuscades, woods to rally in, caves to hide in, and, in case of flight, secret tracts trodden only by the mountain goat. all the people there are your brethren, who will throw open their cabins to you, and share their bread and milk and the flesh of their sheep with you, while the forests will supply you with chestnuts. and then, what is there to fear? did not god nourish his chosen people with manna in the desert? and does he not renew his miracles day by day? will not his spirit descend upon his afflicted children? he consoles us, he strengthens us, he calls us to arms, he will cause his angels to march before us! as for me, i am an old soldier, and will do my duty!"[ ] [footnote : brueys, "histoire de fanatisme;" peyrat, "histoire des pasteurs du désert."] these stirring words evoked an enthusiastic response. numbers of the people thus addressed by roland declared themselves ready to follow him at once. but instead of taking with him all who were willing to join the standard of the insurgents, he directed them to enrol and organize themselves, and await his speedy return; selecting for the present only such as were in his opinion likely to make efficient soldiers, and with these he rejoined his uncle in the mountains. the number of the insurgents was thus raised to about a hundred and fifty--a very small body of men, contemptible in point of numbers compared with the overwhelming forces by which they were opposed, but all animated by a determined spirit, and commanded by fearless and indomitable leaders. the band was divided into three brigades of fifty each; laporte taking the command of the companions of seguier; the new-comers being divided into two bodies of like number, who elected roland and castanet as their respective chiefs. laporte occupied the last days of august in drilling his troops, and familiarising them with the mountain district which was to be the scene of their operations. while thus engaged, he received an urgent message from the protestant herdsmen of the hill-country of vebron, whose cattle, sheep, and goats a band of royalist militia, under colonel miral, had captured, and were driving northward towards florac. laporte immediately ran to their help, and posted himself to intercept them at the bridge of tarnon, which they must cross. on the militia coming up, the camisards fell upon them furiously, on which they took to flight, and the cattle were driven back in triumph to the villages. laporte then led his victorious troops towards collet, the village in which his brother had been pastor. the temple in which he ministered was still standing--the only one in the cevennes that had not been demolished, the seigneur of the place intending to convert it into a hospital. collet was at present occupied by a company of fusiliers, commanded by captain cabrières. on nearing the place, laporte wrote to this officer, under an assumed name, intimating that a religious assembly was to be held that night in a certain wood in the neighbourhood. the captain at once marched thither with his men, on which laporte entered the village, and reopened the temple, which had continued unoccupied since the day on which his brother had gone into exile. all that night laporte sang psalms, preached, and prayed by turns, solemnly invoking the help of the god of battles in this holy war in which he was engaged for the liberation of his country. shortly before daybreak, laporte and his companions retired from the temple, and after setting fire to the roman catholic church, and the houses of the consul, the captain, and the curé, he left the village, and proceeded in a northerly direction. that same morning, captain poul arrived at the neighbouring valley of st. germain, for the purpose of superintending the demolition of certain protestant dwellings, and then he heard of laporte's midnight expedition. he immediately hastened to collet, assembled all the troops he could muster, and put himself on the track of the camisards. after a hot march of about two hours in the direction of coudouloux, poul discerned laporte and his band encamped on a lofty height, from the scarped foot of which a sloping grove of chestnuts descended into the wide grassy plain, known as the "champ domergue." the chestnut grove had in ancient times been one of the sacred places of the druids, who celebrated their mysterious rites in its recesses, while the adjoining mountains were said to have been the honoured haunts of certain of the divinities of ancient gaul. it was therefore regarded as a sort of sacred place, and this circumstance was probably not without its influence in rendering it one of the most frequent resorts of the hunted protestants in their midnight assemblies, as well as because it occupied a central position between the villages of st. frézal, st. andéol, dèze, and violas. laporte had now come hither with his companions to pray, and they were so engaged when the scouts on the look-out announced the approach of the enemy. poul halted his men to take breath, while laporte held a little council of war. what was to be done? laporte himself was in favour of accepting battle on the spot, while several of his lieutenants advised immediate flight into the mountains. on the other hand, the young and impetuous cavalier, who was there, supported the opinion of his chief, and urged an immediate attack; and an attack was determined on accordingly. the little band descended from their vantage-ground on the hill, and came down into the chestnut wood, singing the sixty-eighth psalm--"let god arise, let his enemies be scattered." the following is the song itself, in the words of marot. when the huguenots sang it, each soldier became a lion in courage. "que dieu se montre seulement et l'on verra dans un moment abandonner la place; le camp des ennemies épars, Épouvanté de toutes parts, fuira devant sa face. on verra tout ce camp s'enfuir, comme l'on voit s'évanouir; une épaisse fumée; comme la cire fond au feu, ainsi des méchants devant dieu, la force est consumée. l'Éternel est notre recours; nous obtenons par son secours, plus d'une déliverance. c'est lui qui fut notre support, et qui tient les clefs de la mort, lui seul en sa puissance. a nous défendre toujours prompt, il frappe le superbe front de la troupe ennemie; on verra tomber sous ses coups ceux qui provoquent son courroux par leur méchante vie." this was the "marseillaise" of the camisards, their war-song in many battles, sung by them as a _pas de charge_ to the music of goudimal. poul, seeing them approach from under cover of the wood, charged them at once, shouting to his men, "charge, kill, kill the barbets!"[ ] but "the barbets," though they were only as one to three of their assailants, bravely held their ground. those who had muskets kept up a fusillade, whilst a body of scythemen in the centre repulsed poul, who attacked them with the bayonet. several of these terrible scythemen were, however, slain, and three were taken prisoners. [footnote : the "barbets" (or "water-dogs") was the nickname by which the vaudois were called, against whom poul had formerly been employed in the italian valleys.] laporte, finding that he could not drive poul back, retreated slowly into the wood, keeping up a running fire, and reascended the hill, whither poul durst not follow him. the royalist leader was satisfied with remaining master of the hard-fought field, on which many of his soldiers lay dead, together with a captain of militia. the camisard chiefs then separated, laporte and his band taking a westerly direction. the royalists, having received considerable reinforcements, hastened from different directions to intercept him, but he slipped through their fingers, and descended to pont-de-montvert, from whence he threw himself upon the villages situated near the sources of the western gardon. at the same time, to distract the attention of the royalists, the other camisard leaders descended, the one towards the south, and the other towards the east, disarming the roman catholics, carrying off their arms, and spreading consternation wherever they went. meanwhile, count broglie, captain poul, colonel miral, and the commanders of the soldiers and militia all over the cevennes, were hunting the protestants and their families wherever found, pillaging their houses, driving away their cattle, and burning their huts; and it was evident that the war on both sides was fast drifting into one of reprisal and revenge. brigands, belonging to neither side, organized themselves in bodies, and robbed protestants and catholics with equal impartiality. one effect of this state of things was rapidly to increase the numbers of the disaffected. the dwellings of many of the protestants having been destroyed, such of the homeless fugitives as could bear arms fled into the mountains to join the camisards, whose numbers were thus augmented, notwithstanding the measures taken for their extermination. laporte was at last tracked by his indefatigable enemy, captain poul, who burned to wipe out the disgrace which he conceived himself to have suffered at champ-domergue. information was conveyed to him that laporte and his band were in the neighbourhood of molezon on the western gardon, and that they intended to hold a field-meeting there on sunday, the nd of october. poul made his dispositions accordingly. dividing his force into two bodies, he fell upon the insurgents impetuously from two sides, taking them completely by surprise. they hastily put themselves in order of battle, but their muskets, wet with rain, would not fire, and laporte hastened with his men to seek the shelter of a cliff near at hand. while in the act of springing from one rock to another, he was seen to stagger and fall. he had been shot dead by a musket bullet, and his career was thus brought to a sudden close. his followers at once fled in all directions. poul cut off laporte's head, as well as the heads of the other camisards who had been killed, and sent them in two baskets to count broglie. next day the heads were exposed on the bridge of anduze; the day after on the castle wall of st. hypolite; after which these ghastly trophies of poul's victory were sent to montpellier to be permanently exposed on the peyrou. such was the end of laporte, the second leader of the camisards. seguier, the first, had been chief for only six days; laporte, the second, for only about two months. again baville supposed the pacification of the cevennes to be complete. he imagined that poul, in cutting off laporte's head, had decapitated the insurrection. but the camisard ranks had never been so full as now, swelled as they were by the persecutions of the royalists, who, by demolishing the homes of the peasantry, had in a measure forced them into the arms of the insurgents. nor were they ever better supplied with leaders, even though laporte had fallen. no sooner did his death become known, than the "children of god" held a solemn assembly in the mountains, at which roland, castanet, salomon, abraham, and young cavalier were present; and after lamenting the death of their chief, they with one accord elected laporte's nephew, roland, as his successor. * * * * * a few words as to the associates of roland, whose family and origin have already been described. andré castanet of massavaque, in the upper cevennes, had been a goatherd in his youth, after which he worked at his father's trade of a wool-carder. an avowed huguenot, he was, shortly after the peace of ryswick, hunted out of the country because of his attending the meetings in the desert; but in he returned to preach and to prophesy, acting also as a forest-ranger in the aigoal mountains. of all the chiefs he was the greatest controversialist, and in his capacity of preacher he distinguished himself from his companions by wearing a wig. there must have been something comical in his appearance, for brueys describes him as a little, squat, bandy-legged man, presenting "the figure of a little bear." but it was an enemy who drew the picture. next there was salomon conderc, also a wool-carder, a native of the hamlet of mazelrode, south of the mountain of bougès. for twenty years the condercs, father and son, had been zealous worshippers in the desert--salomon having acted by turns as bible-reader, precentor, preacher, and prophet. we have already referred to the gift of prophesying. all the leaders of the camisards were prophets. elie marion, in his "théâtre sacré de cevennes," thus describes the influence of the prophets on the camisard war:-- "we were without strength and without counsel," says he; "but our inspirations were our succour and our support. they elected our leaders, and conducted them; they were our military discipline. it was they who raised us, even weakness itself, to put a strong bridle upon an army of more than twenty thousand picked soldiers. it was they who banished sorrow from our hearts in the midst of the greatest peril, as well as in the deserts and the mountain fastnesses, when cold and famine oppressed us. our heaviest crosses were but lightsome burdens, for this intimate communion that god allowed us to have with him bore up and consoled us; it was our safety and our happiness." many of the condercs had suffered for their faith. the archpriest chayla had persecuted them grievously. one of their sisters was seized by the soldiery and carried off to be immured in a convent at mende, but was rescued on the way by salomon and his brother jacques. of the two, salomon, though deformed, had the greatest gift in prophesying, and hence the choice of him as a leader. abraham mazel belonged to the same hamlet as conderc. they were both of the same age--about twenty-five--of the same trade, and they were as inseparable as brothers. they had both been engaged with seguier's band in the midnight attack on pont-de-montvert, and were alike committed to the desperate enterprise they had taken in hand. the tribe of mazel abounds in the cevennes, and they had already given many martyrs to the cause. some emigrated to america, some were sent to the galleys; oliver mazel, the preacher, was hanged at montpellier in , jacques mazel was a refugee in london in , and in all the combats of the cevennes there were mazels leading as well as following. nicholas joany, of genouillac, was an old soldier, who had seen much service, having been for some time quartermaster of the regiment of orleans. among other veterans who served with the camisards, were espérandieu and rastelet, two old sub-officers, and catinat and ravenel, two thorough soldiers. of these catinat achieved the greatest notoriety. his proper name was mauriel--abdias mauriel; but having served as a dragoon under marshal catinat in italy, he conceived such an admiration for that general, and was so constantly eulogizing him, that his comrades gave him the nickname of catinat, which he continued to bear all through the camisard war. but the most distinguished of all the camisard chiefs, next to roland, was the youthful john cavalier, peasant boy, baker's apprentice, and eventually insurgent leader, who, after baffling and repeatedly defeating the armies of louis xiv., ended his remarkable career as governor of jersey and major-general in the british service. cavalier was a native of ribaute, a village on the gardon, a little below anduze. his parents were persons in humble circumstances, as may be inferred from the fact that when john was of sufficient age he was sent into the mountains to herd cattle, and when a little older he was placed apprentice to a baker at anduze. his father, though a protestant at heart, to avoid persecution, pretended to be converted to romanism, and attended mass. but his mother, a fervent calvinist, refused to conform, and diligently trained her sons in her own views. she was a regular attender of meetings in the desert, to which she also took her children. cavalier relates that on one occasion, when a very little fellow, he went with her to an assembly which was conducted by claude brousson; and when he afterwards heard that many of the people had been apprehended for attending it, of whom some were hanged and others sent to the galleys, the account so shocked him that he felt he would then have avenged them if he had possessed the power. as the boy grew up, and witnessed the increasing cruelty with which conformity was enforced, he determined to quit the country; and, accompanied by twelve other young men, he succeeded in reaching geneva after a toilsome journey of eight days. he had not been at geneva more than two months, when--heart-sore, solitary, his eyes constantly turned towards his dear cevennes--he accidentally heard that his father and mother had been thrown into prison because of his flight--his father at carcassone, and his mother in the dreadful tower of constance, near aiguesmortes, one of the most notorious prisons of the huguenots. he at once determined to return, in the hope of being able to get them set at liberty. on his reaching ribaute, to his surprise he found them already released, on condition of attending mass. as his presence in his father's house might only serve to bring fresh trouble upon them--he himself having no intention of conforming--he went up for refuge into the mountains of the cevennes. the young cavalier was present at the midnight meeting on the bougès, at which it was determined to slay the archpriest chayla. he implored leave to accompany the band; but he was declared to be too young for such an enterprise, being a boy of only sixteen, so he was left behind with his friends. being virtually an outlaw, cavalier afterwards joined the band of laporte, under whom he served as lieutenant during his short career. at his death the insurrection assumed larger proportions, and recruits flocked apace to the standard of roland, laporte's successor. harvest-work over, the youths of the lower cevennes hastened to join him, armed only with bills and hatchets. the people of the vaunage more than fulfilled their promise to roland, and sent him five hundred men. cavalier also brought with him from ribaute a further number of recruits, and by the end of autumn the camisards under arms, such as they were, amounted to over a thousand men. roland, unable to provide quarters or commissariat for so large a number, divided them into five bodies, and sent them into their respective cantonments (so to speak) for the winter. roland himself occupied the district known as the lower cevennes, comprising the gardonnenque and the mountain district situated between the rivers vidourle and the western gardon. that part of the upper cevennes, which extends between the anduze branch of the gardon and the river tarn, was in like manner occupied by a force commanded by abraham hazel and solomon conderc, while andrew castanet led the people of the western cevennes, comprising the mountain region of the aigoal and the esperou, near the sources of the gardon d'anduze and the tarnon. the rugged mountain district of the lozère, in which the tarn, the ceze, and the alais branch of the gardon have their origin, was placed under the command of joany. and, finally, the more open country towards the south, extending from anduze to the sea-coast, including the districts around alais, uzes, nismes, as well as the populous valley of the vaunage, was placed under the direction of young cavalier, though he had scarcely yet completed his seventeenth year. these chiefs were all elected by their followers, who chose them, not because of any military ability they might possess, but entirely because of their "gifts" as preachers and "prophets." though roland and joany had been soldiers, they were also preachers, as were castanet, abraham, and salomon; and young cavalier had already given remarkable indications of the prophetic gift. hence, when it became the duty of the band to which he belonged to select a chief, they passed over the old soldiers, espérandieu, raslet, catinat, and ravenel, and pitched upon the young baker lad of ribaute, not because he could fight, but because he could preach; and the old soldiers cheerfully submitted themselves to his leadership. the portrait of this remarkable camisard chief represents him as a little handsome youth, fair and ruddy complexioned, with lively and prominent blue eyes, and a large head, from whence his long fair hair hung floating over his shoulders. his companions recognised in him a supposed striking resemblance to the scriptural portrait of david, the famous shepherd of israel. the camisard legions, spread as they now were over the entire cevennes, and embracing lower languedoc as far as the sea, were for the most part occupied during the winter of - in organizing themselves, obtaining arms, and increasing their forces. the respective districts which they occupied were so many recruiting-grounds, and by the end of the season they had enrolled nearly three thousand men. they were still, however, very badly armed. their weapons included fowling-pieces, old matchlocks, muskets taken from the militia, pistols, sabres, scythes, hatchets, billhooks, and even ploughshares. they were very short of powder, and what they had was mostly bought surreptitiously from the king's soldiers, or by messengers sent for the purpose to nismes and avignon. but roland, finding that such sources of supply could not be depended upon, resolved to manufacture his own powder. a commissariat was also established, and the most spacious caves in the most sequestered places were sought out and converted into magazines, hospitals, granaries, cellars, arsenals, and powder factories. thus mialet, with its extensive caves, was the head-quarters of roland; bouquet and the caves at euzet, of cavalier; cassagnacs and the caves at magistavols, of salomon; and so on with the others. each chief had his respective canton, his granary, his magazine, and his arsenal. to each retreat was attached a special body of tradesmen--millers, bakers, shoemakers, tailors, armourers, and other mechanics; and each had its special guards and sentinels. we have already referred to the peculiar geological features of the cevennes, and to the limestone strata which embraces the whole granitic platform of the southern border almost like a frame. as is almost invariably the case in such formations, large caves, occasioned by the constant dripping of water, are of frequent occurrence; and those of the cevennes, which are in many places of great extent, constituted a peculiar feature in the camisard insurrection. there is one of such caves in the neighbourhood of the protestant town of ganges, on the river herault, which often served as a refuge for the huguenots, though it is now scarcely penetrable because of the heavy falls of stone from the roof. this cavern has two entrances, one from the river herault, the other from the mendesse, and it extends under the entire mountain, which separates the two rivers. it is still known as the "camisards' grotto." there are numerous others of a like character all over the district; but as those of mialet were of special importance--mialet, "the metropolis of the insurrection," being the head-quarters of roland--it will be sufficient if we briefly describe a visit paid to them in the month of june, . * * * * * the town of anduze is the little capital of the gardonnenque, a district which has always been exclusively protestant. even at the present day, of the , inhabitants of anduze, , belong to that faith; and these include the principal proprietors, cultivators, and manufacturers of the town and neighbourhood. during the wars of religion, anduze was one of the huguenot strongholds. after the death of henry iv. the district continued to be held by the duc de rohan, the ruins of whose castle are still to be seen on the summit of a pyramidal hill on the north of the town. anduze is jammed in between the precipitous mountain of st. julien, which rises behind it, and the river gardon, along which a modern quay-wall extends, forming a pleasant promenade as well as a barrier against the furious torrents which rush down from the mountains in winter. a little above the town, the river passes through a rocky gorge formed by the rugged grey cliffs of peyremale on the one bank and st. julien on the other. the bare precipitous rocks rise up on either side like two cyclopean towers, flanking the gateway of the cevennes. the gorge is so narrow at bottom that there is room only for the river running in its rocky bed below, and a roadway along either bank--that on the eastern side having been partly formed by blasting out the cliff which overhangs it. after crossing the five-arched bridge which spans the gardon, the road proceeds along the eastern bank, up the valley towards mialet. it being market-day at anduze, well-clad peasants were flocking into the town, some in their little pony-carts, others with their baskets or bundles of produce, and each had his "bon jour, messieurs!" for us as we passed. so long as the road held along the bottom of the valley, passing through the scattered hamlets and villages north of the town, our little springless cart got along cleverly enough. but after we had entered the narrower valley higher up, and the cultivated ground became confined to a little strip along either bank, then the mountain barriers seemed to rise in front of us and on all sides, and the road became winding, steep, and difficult. a few miles up the valley, the little hamlet of massoubeyran, consisting of a group of peasant cottages--one of which was the birthplace of roland, the camisard chief--was seen on a hill-side to the right; and about two miles further on, at a bend of the road, we came in sight of the village of mialet, with its whitewashed, flat-roofed cottages--forming a little group of peasants' houses lying in the hollow of the hills. the principal building in it is the protestant temple, which continues to be frequented by the inhabitants; the _annuaire protestant_ for - , stating the protestant population of the district to be , . strange to say, the present pastor, m. seguier, bears the name of the first leader of the camisard insurrection; and one of the leading members of the consistory, m. laporte, is a lineal descendant of the second and third leaders. from its secluded and secure position among the hills, as well as because of its proximity to the great temelac road constructed by baville, which passed from anduze by st. jean-de-gard into the upper cevennes, mialet was well situated as the head-quarters of the camisard chief. but it was principally because of the numerous limestone caves abounding in the locality, which afforded a ready hiding-place for the inhabitants in the event of the enemies' approach, as well as because they were capable of being adapted for the purpose of magazines, stores, and hospitals, that mialet became of so much importance as the citadel of the insurgents. one of such caverns or grottoes is still to be seen about a mile below mialet, of extraordinary magnitude. it extends under the hill which rises up on the right-hand side of the road, and is entered from behind, nearly at the summit. the entrance is narrow and difficult, but the interior is large and spacious, widening out in some places into dome-shaped chambers, with stalactites hanging from the roof. the whole extent of this cavern cannot be much less than a quarter of a mile, judging from the time it took to explore it and to return from the furthest point in the interior to the entrance. the existence of this place had been forgotten until a few years ago, when it was rediscovered by a man of anduze, who succeeded in entering it, but, being unable to find his way out, he remained there for three days without food, until the alarm was given and his friends came to his rescue and delivered him. immediately behind the village of mialet, under the side of the hill, is another large cavern, with other grottoes branching out of it, capable, on an emergency, of accommodating the whole population. this was used by roland as his principal magazine. but perhaps the most interesting of these caves is the one used as a hospital for the sick and wounded. it is situated about a mile above mialet, in a limestone cliff almost overhanging the river. the approach to it is steep and difficult, up a footpath cut in the face of the rock. at length a little platform is reached, about a hundred feet above the level of the river, behind which is a low wall extending across the entrance to the cavern. this wall is pierced with two openings, intended for two culverins, one of which commanded the road leading down the pass, and the other the road up the valley from the direction of the village. the outer vault is large and roomy, and extends back into a lofty dome-shaped cavern about forty feet high, behind which a long tortuous vault extends for several hundred feet. the place is quite dry, and sufficiently spacious to accommodate a large number of persons; and there can be no doubt as to the uses to which it was applied during the wars of the cevennes. the person who guided us to the cave was an ordinary working man of the village--apparently a blacksmith--a well-informed, intelligent person--who left his smithy, opposite the protestant temple at which our pony-cart drew up, to show us over the place; and he took pride in relating the traditions which continue to be handed down from father to son relating to the great camisard war of the cevennes. chapter vii. exploits of cavalier. the country round nismes, which was the scene of so many contests between the royalists and the camisard insurgents at the beginning of last century, presents nearly the same aspect as it did then, excepting that it is traversed by railways in several directions. the railway to montpellier on the west, crosses the fertile valley of the vaunage, "the little canaan," still rich in vineyards as of old. that to alais on the north, proceeds for the most part along the valley of the gardon, the names of the successive stations reminding the passing traveller of the embittered contests of which they were the scenes in former times: nozières, boucoiran, ners, vezenobres, and alais itself, now a considerable manufacturing town, and the centre of an important coal-mining district. the country in the neighbourhood of nismes is by no means picturesque. though undulating, it is barren, arid, and stony. the view from the tour magne, which is very extensive, is over an apparently skeleton landscape, the bare rocks rising on all sides without any covering of verdure. in summer the grass is parched and brown. there are few trees visible; and these mostly mulberry, which, when, cropped, have a blasted look. yet, wherever soil exists, in the bottoms, the land is very productive, yielding olives, grapes, and chestnuts in great abundance. as we ascend the valley of the gardon, the country becomes more undulating and better wooded. the villages and farmhouses have all an old-fashioned look; not a modern villa is to be seen. we alight from the train at the ners station--ners, where cavalier drove montrevel's army across the river, and near which, at the village of martinargues, he completely defeated the royalists under lajonquière. we went to see the scene of the battle, some three miles to the south-east, passing through a well-tilled country, with the peasants busily at work in the fields. from the high ground behind ners a fine view is obtained of the valley of the gardon, overlooking the junction of its two branches descending by alais and anduze, the mountains of the cevennes rising up in the distance. to the left is the fertile valley of beaurivage, celebrated in the pastorals of florian, who was a native of the district. descending the hill towards ners, we were overtaken by an aged peasant of the village, with a scythe over his shoulder, returning from his morning's work. there was the usual polite greeting and exchange of salutations--for the french peasant is by nature polite--and a ready opening was afforded for conversation. it turned out that the old man had been a soldier of the first empire, and fought under soult in the desperate battle of toulouse in . he was now nearly eighty, but was still able to do a fair day's work in the fields. inviting us to enter his dwelling and partake of his hospitality, he went down to his cellar and fetched therefrom a jug of light sparkling wine, of which we partook. in answer to an inquiry whether there were any protestants in the neighbourhood, the old man replied that ners was "all protestant." his grandson, however, who was present, qualified this sweeping statement by the remark, _sotto voce_, that many of them were "nothing." the conversation then turned upon the subject of cavalier and his exploits, when our entertainer launched out into a description of the battle of martinargues, in which the royalists had been "toutes abattus." like most of the protestant peasantry of the cevennes, he displayed a very familiar acquaintance with the events of the civil war, and spoke with enthusiasm and honest pride of the achievements of the camisards. * * * * * we have in previous chapters described the outbreak of the insurrection and its spread throughout the upper cevennes; and we have now rapidly to note its growth and progress to its culmination and fall. while the camisards were secretly organizing their forces under cover of the woods and caves of the mountain districts, the governor of languedoc was indulging in the hope that the insurrection had expired with the death of laporte and the dispersion of his band. but, to his immense surprise, the whole country was suddenly covered with insurgents, who seemed as if to spring from the earth in all quarters simultaneously. messengers brought him intelligence at the same time of risings in the mountains of the lozère and the aigoal, in the neighbourhoods of anduze and alais, and even in the open country about nismes and calvisson, down almost to the sea-coast. wherever the churches had been used as garrisons and depositories of arms, they were attacked, stormed, and burnt. cavalier says he never meddled with any church which had not been thus converted into a "den of thieves;" but the other leaders were less scrupulous. salomon and abraham destroyed all the establishments and insignia of their enemies on which they could lay hands--crosses, churches, and presbyteries. the curé of saint-germain said of castanet in the aigoal that he was "like a raging torrent." roland and joany ran from village to village ransacking dwellings, châteaux, churches, and collecting arms. knowing every foot of the country, they rapidly passed by mountain tracks from one village to another; suddenly appearing in the least-expected quarters, while the troops in pursuit of them had passed in other directions. cavalier had even the hardihood to descend upon the low country, and to ransack the catholic villages in the neighbourhood of nismes. by turns he fought, preached, and sacked churches. about the middle of november, , he preached at aiguevives, a village not far from calvisson, in the vaunage. count broglie, commander of the royal troops, hastened from nismes to intercept him. but pursuing cavalier was like pursuing a shadow; he had already made his escape into the mountains. broglie assembled the inhabitants of the village in the church, and demanded to be informed who had been present with the camisard preacher. "all!" was the reply: "we are all guilty." he seized the principal persons of the place and sent them to baville. four were hanged, twelve were sent to the galleys, many more were flogged, and a heavy fine was levied on the entire village. meanwhile, cavalier had joined roland near mialet, and again descended upon the low country, marching through the villages along the valley of the vidourle, carrying off arms and devastating churches. broglie sent two strong bodies of troops to intercept them; but the light-footed insurgents had already crossed the gardon. a few days later (december th), they were lying concealed in the forest of vaquières, in the neighbourhood of cavalier's head-quarters at euzet. their retreat having been discovered, a strong force of soldiers and militia was directed upon them, under the command of the chevalier montarnaud (who, being a new convert, wished to show his zeal), and captain bimard of the nismes militia. they took with them a herdsman of the neighbourhood for their guide, not knowing that he was a confederate of the camisards. leading the royalists into the wood, he guided them along a narrow ravine, and hearing no sound of the insurgents, it was supposed that they were lying asleep in their camp. suddenly three sentinels on the outlook fired off their pieces. at this signal ravenel posted himself at the outlet of the defile, and cavalier and catinat along its two sides. raising their war-song, the sixty-eighth psalm the camisards furiously charged the enemy. captain bimard fell at the first fire. montarnaud turned and fled with such of the soldiers and militia as could follow him; and not many of them succeeded in making their escape from the wood. "after which complete victory," says cavalier, "we returned to the field of battle to give our hearty thanks to almighty god for his extraordinary assistance, and afterwards stripped the corpses of the enemy, and secured their arms. we found a purse of one hundred pistoles in captain bimard's pocket, which was very acceptable, for we stood in great need thereof, and expended part of it in buying hats, shoes, and stockings for those who wanted them, and with the remainder bought six great mule loads of brandy, for our winter's supply, from a merchant who was sending it to be sold at anduze market."[ ] [footnote : "memoirs of the wars of the cevennes," p. .] on the sunday following, cavalier held an assembly for public worship near monteze on the gardon, at which about five hundred persons were present. the governor of alais, being informed of the meeting, resolved to put it down with a strong hand; and he set out for the purpose at the head of a force of about six hundred horse and foot. a mule accompanied him, laden with ropes with which to bind or hang the rebels. cavalier had timely information, from scouts posted on the adjoining hills, of the approach of the governor's force, and though the number of fighting men in the camisard assembly was comparatively small, they resolved to defend themselves. sending away the women and others not bearing arms, cavalier posted his little band behind an old entrenchment on the road along which the governor was approaching, and awaited his attack. the horsemen came on at the charge; but the camisards, firing over the top of the entrenchment, emptied more than a dozen saddles, and then leaping forward, saluted them with a general discharge. at this, the horsemen turned and fled, galloping through the foot coming up behind them, and throwing them into complete disorder. the camisards pulled off their coats, in order the better to pursue the fugitives. the royalists were in full flight, when they were met by a reinforcement of two hundred men of marsilly's regiment of foot. but these, too, were suddenly seized by the panic, and turned and fled with the rest, the camisards pursuing them for nearly an hour, in the course of which they slew more than a hundred of the enemy. besides the soldiers' clothes, of which they stripped the dead, the camisards made prize of two loads of ammunition and a large quantity of arms, which they were very much in need of, and also of the ropes with which the governor had intended to hang them. emboldened by these successes, cavalier determined on making an attack on the strong castle of servas, occupying a steep height on the east of the forest of bouquet. cavalier detested the governor and garrison of this place because they too closely watched his movements, and overlooked his head-quarters, which were in the adjoining forest; and they had, besides, distinguished themselves by the ferocity with which they attacked and dispersed recent assemblies in the desert. cavalier was, however, without the means of directly assaulting the place, and he waited for an opportunity of entering it, if possible, by stratagem. while passing along the road between alais and lussan one day, he met a detachment of about forty men of the royal army, whom he at once attacked, killing a number of them, and putting the rest to flight. among the slain was the commanding officer of the party, in whose pockets was found an order signed by count broglie directing all town-majors and consuls to lodge him and his men along their line of march. cavalier at once determined on making use of this order as a key to open the gates of the castle of servas. he had twelve of his men dressed up in the clothes of the soldiers who had fallen, and six others in their ordinary camisard dress bound with ropes as prisoners of war. cavalier himself donned the uniform of the fallen officer; and thus disguised and well armed, the party moved up the steep ascent to the castle. on reaching the outer gate cavalier presented the order of count broglie, and requested admittance for the purpose of keeping his pretended camisard prisoners in safe custody for the night. he was at once admitted with his party. the governor showed him round the ramparts, pointing out the strength of the place, and boasting of the punishments he had inflicted on the rebels. at supper cavalier's soldiers took care to drop into the room, one by one, apparently for orders, and suddenly, on a signal being given, the governor and his attendants were seized and bound. at the same time the guard outside was attacked and overpowered. the outer gates were opened, the camisards rushed in, the castle was taken, and the garrison put to the sword. cavalier and his band carried off with them to their magazine at bouquet all the arms, ammunition, and provisions they could find, and before leaving they set fire to the castle. there must have been a large store of gunpowder in the vaults of the place besides what the camisards carried away, for they had scarcely proceeded a mile on their return journey when a tremendous explosion took place, shaking the ground like an earthquake, and turning back, they saw the battlements of the detested château servas hurled into the air. shortly after, roland repeated at sauvé, a little fortified town hung along the side of a rocky hill a few miles to the south of anduze, the stratagem which cavalier had employed at servas, and with like success. he disarmed the inhabitants, and carried off the arms and provisions in the place: and though he released the commandant and the soldiers whom he had taken prisoners, he shot a persecuting priest and a capuchin monk, and destroyed all the insignia of popery in sauvé. these terrible measures caused a new stampede of the clergy all over the cevennes. the nobles and gentry also left their châteaux, the merchants their shops and warehouses, and took refuge in the fortified towns. even the bishops of mende, uzes, and alais barricaded and fortified their episcopal palaces, and organized a system of defence as if the hordes of attila had been at their gates. with each fresh success the camisards increased in daring, and every day the insurrection became more threatening and formidable. it already embraced the whole mountain district of the cevennes, as well as a considerable extent of the low country between nismes and montpellier. the camisard troops, headed by their chiefs, marched through the villages with drums beating in open day, and were quartered by billet on the inhabitants in like manner as the royal regiments. roland levied imposts and even tithes throughout his district, and compelled the farmers, at the peril of their lives, to bring their stores of victual to the "camp of the eternal." in the midst of all, they held their meetings in the desert, at which the chiefs preached, baptized, and administered the sacrament to their flocks. the constituted authorities seemed paralyzed by the extent of the insurrection, and the suddenness with which it spread. the governor of the province had so repeatedly reported to his royal master the pacification of languedoc, that when this last and worst outbreak occurred he was ashamed to announce it. the peace at ryswick had set at liberty a large force of soldiers, who had now no other occupation than to "convert" the protestants and force them to attend mass. about five hundred thousand men were now under arms for this purpose--occupied as a sort of police force, very much to their own degradation as soldiers. a large body of this otherwise unoccupied army had been placed under the direction of baville for the purpose of suppressing the rebellion--an army of veteran horse and foot, whose valour had been tried in many hard-fought battles. surely it was not to be said that this immense force could be baffled and defied by a few thousand peasants, cowherds, and wool-carders, fighting for what they ridiculously called their "rights of conscience!" baville could not believe it; and he accordingly determined again to apply himself more vigorously than ever to the suppression of the insurrection, by means of the ample forces placed at his disposal. again the troops were launched against the insurgents, and again and again they were baffled in their attempts to overtake and crush them. the soldiers became worn out by forced marches, in running from one place to another to disperse assemblies in the desert. they were distracted by the number of places in which the rebels made their appearance. cavalier ran from town to town, making his attacks sometimes late at night, sometimes in the early morning; but before the troops could come up he had done all the mischief he intended, and was perhaps fifty miles distant on another expedition. if the royalists divided themselves into small bodies, they were in danger of being overpowered; and if they kept together in large bodies, they moved about with difficulty, and could not overtake the insurgents, "by reason," said cavalier, "we could go further in three hours than they could in a whole day; regular troops not being used to march through woods and mountains as we did." at length the truth could not be concealed any longer. the states of languedoc were summoned to meet at montpellier, and there the desperate state of affairs was fully revealed. the bishops of the principal dioceses could with difficulty attend the meeting, and were only enabled to do so by the assistance of strong detachments of soldiers--the camisards being masters of the principal roads. they filled the assembly with their lamentations, and declared that they had been betrayed by the men in power. at their urgent solicitation, thirty-two more companies of catholic fusiliers and another regiment of dragoons were ordered to be immediately embodied in the district. the governor also called to his aid an additional regiment of dragoons from rouergue; a battalion of marines from the ships-of-war lying at marseilles and toulon; a body of miguelets from roussillon, accustomed to mountain warfare; together with a large body of irish officers and soldiers, part of the irish brigade. * * * * * and how did it happen that the self-exiled irish patriots were now in the cevennes, helping the army of louis xiv. to massacre the camisards by way of teaching them a better religion? it happened thus: the banishment of the huguenots from france, and their appearance under william iii. in ireland to fight at the boyne and augrhim, contributed to send the irish brigade over to france--though it must be confessed that the irish brigade fought much better for louis xiv. than they had ever done for ireland. after the surrender of limerick in , the principal number of the irish followers of james ii. declared their intention of abandoning ireland and serving their sovereign's ally the king of france. the irish historians allege that the number of the brigade at first amounted to nearly thirty thousand men.[ ] though, they fought bravely for france, and conducted themselves valiantly in many of her great battles, they were unfortunately put forward to do a great deal of dirty work for louis xiv. one of the first campaigns they were engaged in was in savoy, under catinat, in repressing the vaudois or barbets. [footnote : o'callaghan's "history of the irish brigades in the service of france," p. .] the vaudois peasantry were for the most part unarmed, and their only crime was their religion. the regiments of viscount clare and viscount dillon, principally distinguished themselves against the vaudois. the war was one of extermination, in which many of the barbets were killed. mr. o'connor states that between the number of the alpine mountaineers cut off, and the extent of devastation and pillage committed amongst them by the irish, catinat's commission was executed with terrible fidelity; the memory of which "has rendered their name and nation odious to the vaudois. six generations," he remarks, "have since passed, away, but neither time nor subsequent calamities have obliterated the impression made by the waste and desolation of this military incursion."[ ] because of the outrages and destruction committed upon the women and children in the valleys in the absence of their natural defenders, the vaudois still speak of the irish as "the foreign assassins." [footnote : ibid., p. .] the brigade having thus faithfully served louis xiv. in piedmont, were now occupied in the same work in the cevennes. the historian of the brigade does not particularise the battles in which they were engaged with the camisards, but merely announces that "on several occasions, the irish appear to have distinguished themselves, especially their officers." * * * * * when cavalier heard of the vast additional forces about to be thrown into the cevennes, he sought to effect a diversion by shifting the theatre of war. marching down towards the low country with about two hundred men, he went from village to village in the vaunage, holding assemblies of the people. his whereabouts soon became known to the royalists, and captain bonnafoux, of the calvisson militia, hearing that cavalier was preaching one day at the village of st. comes, hastened to capture him. bonnafoux had already distinguished himself in the preceding year, by sabring two assemblies surprised by him at vauvert and caudiac, and his intention now was to serve cavalier and his followers in like manner. galloping up to the place of meeting, the captain was challenged by the camisard sentinel; and his answer was to shoot the man dead with his pistol. the report alarmed the meeting, then occupied in prayer; but rising from their knees, they at once formed in line and advanced to meet the foe, who turned and fled at their first discharge. cavalier next went southward to caudiac, where he waited for an opportunity of surprising aimargues, and putting to the sword the militia, who had long been the scourge of the protestants in that quarter. he entered the latter town on a fair day, and walked about amongst the people; but, finding that his intention was known, and that his enterprise was not likely to succeed, he turned aside and resolved upon another course. but first it was necessary that his troops should be supplied with powder and ammunition, of which they had run short. so, disguising himself as a merchant, and mounted on a horse with capacious saddlebags, he rode off to nismes, close at hand, to buy gunpowder. he left his men in charge of his two lieutenants, ravanel and catinat, who prophesied to him that during his absence they would fight a battle and win a victory. count broglie had been promptly informed by the defeated captain bonnafoux that the camisards were in the neighbourhood; and he set out in pursuit of them with a strong body of horse and foot. after several days' search amongst the vineyards near nismes and the heathery hills about milhaud, broglie learnt that the camisards were to be found at caudiac. but when he reached that place he found the insurgents had already left, and taken a northerly direction. broglie followed their track, and on the following day came up with them at a place called mas de gaffarel, in the val de bane, about three miles west of nismes, the royalists consisted of two hundred militia, commanded by the count and his son, and two troops of dragoons, under captain la dourville and the redoubtable captain poul. the camisards had only time to utter a short prayer, and to rise from their knees and advance singing their battle psalm, when poul and his dragoons were upon them. their charge was so furious that ravanel and his men were at first thrown into disorder; but rallying, and bravely fighting, they held their ground. captain poul was brought to the ground by a stone hurled from a sling by a young vauvert miller named samuelet; count broglie himself was wounded by a musket-ball, and many of his dragoons lay stretched on the field. catinat observing the fall of poul, rushed forward, cut off his head with a sweep of his sabre, and mounting poul's horse, almost alone chased the royalists, now flying in all directions. broglie did not draw breath until he had reached the secure shelter of the castle of bernis. while these events were in progress, cavalier was occupied on his mission of buying gunpowder in nismes. he was passing along the esplanade--then, as now, a beautiful promenade--when he observed from the excitement of the people, running about hither and thither, that something alarming had occurred. on making inquiry he was told that "the barbets" were in the immediate neighbourhood, and it was even feared they would enter and sack the city. shortly after, a trooper was observed galloping towards them at full speed along the montpellier road, without arms or helmet. he was almost out of breath when he came up, and could only exclaim that "all is lost! count broglie and captain poul are killed, and the barbets are pursuing the remainder of the royal troops into the city!" the gates were at once ordered to be shut and barricaded; the _générale_ was beaten; the troops and militia were mustered; the priests ran about in the streets crying, "we are undone!" some of the roman catholics even took shelter in the houses of the protestants, calling upon them to save their lives. but the night passed, and with it their alarm, for the camisards did not make their appearance. next morning a message arrived from count broglie, shut up in the castle of bernis, ordering the garrison to come to his relief. in the meantime, cavalier, with the assistance of his friends in nismes, had obtained the articles of which he was in need, and prepared to set out on his return journey. the governor and his detachment were issuing from the western gate as he left, and he accompanied them part of the way, still disguised as a merchant, and mounted on his horse, with a large portmanteau behind him, and saddlebags on either side full of gunpowder and ammunition. the camisard chief mixed with the men, talking with them freely about the barbets and their doings. when he came to the st. hypolite road he turned aside; but they warned him that if he went that way he would certainly fall into the hands of the barbets, and lose not only his horse and his merchandise, but his life. cavalier thanked them for their advice, but said he was not afraid of the barbets, and proceeded on his way, shortly rejoining his troop at the appointed rendez-vous. the camisards crossed the gardon by the bridge of st. nicholas, and were proceeding towards their head-quarters at bouquet, up the left bank of the river, when an attempt was made by the chevalier de st. chaptes, at the head of the militia of the district, to cut off their retreat. but ravanel charged them with such fury as to drive the greater part into the gardon, then swollen by a flood, and those who did not escape by swimming were either killed or drowned. thus the insurrection seemed to grow, notwithstanding all the measures taken to repress it. the number of soldiers stationed in the province was from time to time increased; they were scattered in detachments all over the country, and the camisards took care to give them but few opportunities of exhibiting their force, and then only when at a comparative disadvantage. the royalists, at their wits' end, considered what was next to be done in order to the pacification of the country. the simple remedy, they knew, was to allow these poor simple people to worship in their own way without molestation. grant them this privilege, and they were at any moment ready to lay down their arms, and resume their ordinary peaceful pursuits. but this was precisely what the king would not allow. to do so would be an admission of royal fallibility which neither he nor his advisers were prepared to make. to enforce conformity on his subjects, louis xiv. had already driven some half-a-million of the best of them into exile, besides the thousands who had perished on gibbets, in dungeons, or at the galleys. and was he now to confess, by granting liberty of worship to these neatherds, carders, and peasants, that the rigorous policy of "the most christian king" had been an entire mistake? it was resolved, therefore, that no such liberty should be granted, and that these peasants, like the rest of the king's subjects, were to be forced, at the sword's point if necessary, to worship god in _his_ way, and not in theirs. viewed in this light, the whole proceeding would appear to be a ludicrous absurdity, but for its revolting impiety and the abominable cruelties with which it was accompanied. yet the royalists even blamed themselves for the mercy which they had hitherto shown to the protestant peasantry; and the more virulent amongst them urged that the whole of the remaining population that would not at once conform to the church of rome, should forthwith be put to the sword! brigadier julien, an apostate protestant, who had served under william of orange in ireland, and afterwards under the duke of savoy in piedmont, disappointed with the slowness of his promotion, had taken service under louis xiv., and was now employed as a partizan chief in the suppression of his former co-religionists in languedoc. like all renegades, he was a bitter and furious persecutor; and in the councils of baville his voice was always raised for the extremest measures. he would utterly exterminate the insurgents, and, if necessary, reduce the country to a desert. "it is not enough," said he, "merely to kill those bearing arms; the villages which supply the combatants, and which give them shelter and sustenance, ought to be burnt down: thus only can the insurrection be suppressed." in a military point of view julien was probably right; but the savage advice startled even baville. "nothing can be easier," said he, "than to destroy the towns and villages; but this would be to make a desert of one of the finest and most productive districts of languedoc." yet baville himself eventually adopted the very policy which he now condemned. in the first place, however, it was determined to pursue and destroy cavalier and his band. eight hundred men, under the count de touman, were posted at uzes; two battalions of the regiment of hainault, under julien, at anduze; while broglie, with a strong body of dragoons and militia, commanded the passes at st. ambrose. these troops occupied, as it were, the three sides of a triangle, in the centre of which cavalier was known to be in hiding in the woods of bouquet. converging upon him simultaneously, they hoped to surround and destroy him. but the camisard chief was well advised of their movements. to draw them away from his magazines, cavalier marched boldly to the north, and slipping through between the advancing forces, he got into broglie's rear, and set fire to two villages inhabited by catholics. the three bodies at once directed themselves upon the burning villages; but when they reached them cavalier had made his escape, and was nowhere to be heard of. for four days they hunted the country between the garden and the ceze, beating the woods and exploring the caves; and then they returned, harassed and vexed, to their respective quarters. while the royalists were thus occupied, cavalier fell upon a convoy of provisions which colonel marsilly was leading to the castle of mendajols, scattered and killed the escort, and carried off the mules and their loads to the magazines at bouquet. during the whole of the month of january, the camisards, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather, were constantly on the move, making their appearance in the most unexpected quarters; roland descending from mialet on anduze, and rousing broglie from his slumbers by a midnight fusillade; castanet attacking st. andré, and making a bonfire of the contents of the church; joany disarming genouillac; and lafleur terrifying the villages of the lozère almost to the gates of mende. although the winters in the south of france, along the shores of the mediterranean, are comparatively mild and genial, it is very different in the mountain districts of the interior, where the snow lies thick upon the ground, and the rivers are bound up by frost. cavalier, in his memoirs, describes the straits to which his followers were reduced in that inclement season, being "destitute of houses or beds, victuals, bread, or money, and left to struggle with hunger, cold, snow, misery, and poverty." "general broglie," he continues, "believed and hoped that though he had not been able to destroy us with the sword, yet the insufferable miseries of the winter would do him that good office. yet god almighty prevented it through his power, and by unexpected means his providence ordered the thing so well that at the end of the winter we found ourselves in being, and in a better condition than we expected.... as for our retiring places, we were used in the night-time to go into hamlets or sheepfolds built in or near the woods, and thought ourselves happy when we lighted upon a stone or piece of timber to make our pillows withal, and a little straw or dry leaves to lie upon in our clothes. we did in this condition sleep as gently and soundly as if we had lain upon a down bed. the weather being extremely cold, we had a great occasion for fire; but residing mostly in woods, we used to get great quantity of faggots and kindle them, and so sit round about them and warm ourselves. in this manner we spent a quarter of a year, running up and down, sometimes one way and sometimes another, through great forests and upon high mountains, in deep snow and upon ice. and notwithstanding the sharpness of the weather, the small stock of our provisions, and the marches and counter-marches we were continually obliged to make, and which gave us but seldom the opportunity of washing the only shirt we had upon our back, not one amongst us fell sick. one might have perceived in our visage a complexion as fresh as if we had fed upon the most delicious meats, and at the end of the season we found ourselves in a good disposition heartily to commence the following campaign."[ ] [footnote : cavalier's "memoirs of the wars of the cevennes," pp. - .] the campaign of , the third year of the insurrection, began unfavourably for the camisards. the ill-success of count broglie as commander of the royal forces in the cevennes, determined louis xiv.--from whom the true state of affairs could no longer be concealed--to supersede him by marshal montrevel, one of the ablest of his generals. the army of languedoc was again reinforced by ten thousand of the best soldiers of france, drawn from the armies of germany and italy. it now consisted of three regiments of dragoons and twenty-four battalions of foot--of the irish brigade, the miguelets, and the languedoc fusiliers--which, with the local militia, constituted an effective force of not less than sixty thousand men! such was the irresistible army, commanded by a marshal of france, three lieutenant-generals, three major-generals, and three brigadier-generals, now stationed in languedoc, to crush the peasant insurrection. no wonder that the camisard chiefs were alarmed when the intelligence reached them of this formidable force having been set in motion for their destruction. the first thing they determined upon was to effect a powerful diversion, and to extend, if possible, the area of the insurrection. for this purpose, cavalier, at the head of eight hundred men, accompanied by thirty baggage mules, set out in the beginning of february, with the object of raising the viverais, the north-eastern quarter of languedoc, where the camisards had numerous partizans. the snow was lying thick upon the ground when they set out; but the little army pushed northward, through rochegude and barjac. at the town of vagnas they found their way barred by a body of six hundred militia, under the count de roure. these they attacked with great fury and speedily put to flight. but behind the camisarde was a second and much stronger royalist force, eighteen hundred men, under brigadier julien, who had hastened up from lussan upon cavalier's track, and now hung upon his rear in the forest of vagnas. next morning the camisards accepted battle, fought with their usual bravery, but having been trapped into an ambuscade, they were overpowered by numbers, and at length broke and fled in disorder, leaving behind them their mules, baggage, seven drums, and a quantity of arms, with some two hundred dead and wounded. cavalier himself escaped with difficulty, and, after having been given up for lost, reached the rendez-vous at bouquet in a state of complete exhaustion, ravanel and catinat having preceded him thither with, the remains of his broken army. roland and cavalier now altered their tactics. they resolved to avoid pitched battles such as that at vagnas, where they were liable to be crushed at a blow, and to divide their forces into small detachments constantly on the move, harassing the enemy, interrupting their communications, and falling upon detached bodies whenever an opportunity for an attack presented itself. to the surprise of montrevel, who supposed the camisards finally crushed at vagnas, the intelligence suddenly reached him of a multitude of attacks on fortified posts, burning of châteaux and churches, captures of convoys, and defeats of detached bodies of royalists. joany attacked genouillac, cut to pieces the militia who defended it, and carried off their arms and ammunition, with other spoils, to the camp at faux-des-armes. shortly after, in one of his incursions, he captured a convoy of forty mules laden with cloth, wine, and provisions for lent; and, though hotly pursued by a much superior force, he succeeded in making his escape into the mountains. castanet was not less active in the west--sacking and burning catholic villages, and putting their inhabitants to the sword by way of reprisal for similar atrocities committed by the royalists. at the same time, montrevel pillaged and burned euzet and st. jean de ceirarges, villages inhabited by protestants; and there was not a hamlet but was liable at any moment to be sacked and destroyed by one or other of the contending parties. nor was roland idle. being greatly in want of arms and ammunition, as well as of shoes and clothes for his men, he collected a considerable force, and made a descent, for the purpose of obtaining them, on the rich and populous towns of the south; more particularly on the manufacturing town of ganges, where the camisards had many friends. although roland, to divert the attention of montrevel from ganges, sent a detachment of his men into the neighbourhood of nismes to raise the alarm there, it was not long before a large royalist force was directed against him. hearing that montrevel was marching upon ganges, roland hastily left for the north, but was overtaken near pompignan by the marshal at the head of an army of regular horse and foot, including several regiments of local militia, miguelets, marines, and irish. the royalists were posted in such a manner as to surround the camisards, who, though they fought with their usual impetuosity, and succeeded in breaking through the ranks of their enemies, suffered a heavy loss in dead and wounded. roland himself escaped with difficulty, and with his broken forces fled through durfort to his stronghold at mialet. after the battle, marshal montrevel returned to ganges, where he levied a fine of ten thousand livres on the protestant population, giving up their houses to pillage, and hanging a dozen of those who had been the most prominent in abetting the camisards during their recent visit. at the game time, he reported to head-quarters at paris that he had entirely destroyed the rebels, and that languedoc was now "pacified." much to his surprise, however, not many weeks elapsed before cavalier, who had been laid up by the small-pox during roland's expedition to ganges, again appeared in the field, attacking convoys, entering the villages and carrying off arms, and spreading terror anew to the very gates of nismes. he returned northwards by the valley of the rhône, driving before him flocks and herds for the provisioning of his men, and reached his retreat at bouquet in safety. shortly after, he issued from it again, and descended upon ners, where he destroyed a detachment of troops under colonel de jarnaud; next day he crossed the gardon, and cut up a reinforcement intended for the garrison of sommières; and the day after he was heard of in another place, attacking a convoy, and carrying off arms, ammunition, and provisions. montrevel was profoundly annoyed at the failure of his efforts thus far to suppress the insurrection. it even seemed to increase and extend with every new measure taken to crush it. a marshal of france, at the head of sixty thousand men, he feared lest he should lose credit with his friends at court unless he were able at once to root out these miserable cowherds and wool-carders who continued to bid defiance to the royal authority which he represented; and he determined to exert himself with renewed vigour to exterminate them root and branch. in this state of irritation the intelligence was one day brought to the marshal while sitting over his wine after dinner at nismes, that an assembly of huguenots was engaged in worship in a mill situated on the canal outside the port-des-carmes. he at once ordered out a battalion of foot, marched on the mill, and surrounded it. the soldiers burst open the door, and found from two to three hundred women, children, and old men engaged in prayer; and proceeded to put them to the sword. but the marshal, impatient at the slowness of the butchery, ordered the men to desist and to fire the place. this order was obeyed, and the building, being for the most part of wood, was soon wrapped in flames, from amidst which rose the screams of women and children. all who tried to escape were bayoneted, or driven back into the burning mill. every soul perished--all excepting a girl, who was rescued by one of montrevel's servants. but the pitiless marshal ordered both the girl and her deliverer to be put to death. the former was hanged forthwith, but the lackey's life was spared at the intercession of some sisters of mercy accidentally passing the place. in the same savage and relentless spirit, montrevel proceeded to extirpate the huguenots wherever found. he caused all suspected persons in twenty-two parishes in the diocese of nismes to be seized and carried off. the men were transported to north america, and the women and children imprisoned in the fortresses of roussillon. but the most ruthless measures were those which were adopted in the upper cevennes: there nothing short of devastation would satisfy the marshal. thirty-two parishes were completely laid waste; the cattle, grain, and produce which they contained were seized and carried into the towns of refuge garrisoned by the royalists--alais, anduze, florac, st. hypolite, and nismes--so that nothing should be left calculated to give sustenance to the rebels. four hundred and sixty-six villages and hamlets were reduced to mere heaps of ashes and blackened ruins, and such of their inhabitants as were not slain by the soldiery fled with their families into the wilderness. all the principal villages inhabited by the protestants were thus completely destroyed, together with their mills and barns, and every building likely to give them shelter. mialet was sacked and burnt--roland, still suffering from his wounds, being unable to strike a blow in defence of his stronghold. st. julien was also plundered and levelled, and its inhabitants carried captive to montpellier, where the women and children were imprisoned, and the men sent to the galleys. when cavalier heard of the determination of montrevel to make a desert of the country, he sent word to him that for every huguenot village destroyed he would destroy two inhabited by the romanists. thus the sacking and burning on the one side was immediately followed by increased sacking and burning on the other. the war became one of mutual destruction and extermination, and the unfortunate inhabitants on both sides were delivered over to all the horrors of civil war. so far, however, from the camisards being suppressed, the destruction of the dwellings of the huguenots only served to swell their numbers, and they descended from their mountains upon the catholics of the plains in increasing force and redoubled fury. montlezan was utterly destroyed--all but the church, which was strongly barricaded, and resisted cavalier's attempts to enter it. aurillac, also, was in like manner sacked and gutted, and the destroying torrent swept over all the towns and villages of the cevennes. cavalier was so ubiquitous, so daring, and often so successful in his attacks, that of all the camisard leaders he was held to be the most dangerous, and a high price was accordingly set upon his head by the governor. hence many attempts were made to betray him. he was haunted by spies, some of whom even succeeded in obtaining admission to his ranks. more than once the spies were detected--it was pretended through prophetic influence--and immediately shot. but on one occasion cavalier and his whole force narrowly escaped destruction through the betrayal of a pretended follower. while the royalists were carrying destruction through the villages of the upper cevennes, cavalier, salomon, and abraham, in order to divert them from their purpose, resolved upon another descent into the low country, now comparatively ungarrisoned. with this object they gathered together some fifteen hundred men, and descended from the mountains by collet, intending to cross the gardon at beaurivage. on sunday, the th of april, they halted in the wood of malaboissière, a little north of mialet, for a day's preaching and worship; and after holding three services, which were largely attended, they directed their steps to the tower of belliot, a deserted farmhouse on the south of the present high road between alais and anduze. the house had been built on the ruins of a feudal castle, and took its name from one of the old towers still standing. it was surrounded by a dry stone wall, forming a court, the entrance to which was closed by hurdles. on their arrival at this place late at night, the camisards partook of the supper which had been prepared for them by their purveyor on the occasion--a miller of the neighbourhood, named guignon--whose fidelity was assured not only by his apparent piety, but by the circumstance that two of his sons belonged to cavalier's band. no sooner, however, had the camisards lain down to sleep than the miller, possessed by the demon of gold, set out directly for alais, about three miles distant, and, reaching the quarters of montrevel, sold the secret of cavalier's sleeping-place to the marshal for fifty pieces of gold, and together with it the lives of his own sons and their fifteen hundred companions. the marshal forthwith mustered all the available troops in alais, consisting of eight regiments of foot (of which one was irish) and two of dragoons, and set out at once for the tower of belliot, taking the precaution to set a strict guard upon all the gates, to prevent the possibility of any messenger leaving the place to warn cavalier of his approach. the royalists crept towards the tower in three bodies, so as to cut off their retreat in every direction. meanwhile, the camisards, unapprehensive of danger, lay wrapped in slumber, filling the tower, the barns, the stables, and outhouses. the night was dark, and favoured the royalists' approach. suddenly, one of their divisions came upon the advanced camisard sentinels. they fired, but were at once cut down. those behind fled back to the sleeping camp, and raised the cry of alarm. cavalier started up, calling his men "to arms," and, followed by about four hundred, he precipitated himself on the heads of the advancing columns. driven back, they rallied again, more troops coming up to their support, and again they advanced to the attack. to his dismay, cavalier found the enemy in overwhelming force, enveloping his whole position. by great efforts he held them back until some four or five hundred more of his men had joined him, and then he gave way and retired behind a ravine or hollow, probably forming part of the fosse of the ancient château. having there rallied his followers, he recrossed the ravine to make another desperate effort to relieve the remainder of his troop shut up in the tower. a desperate encounter followed, in the midst of which two of the royalist columns, mistaking each other for enemies in the darkness, fired into each other and increased the confusion and the carnage. the moon rose on this dreadful scene, and revealed to the royalists the smallness of the force opposed to them. the struggle was renewed again and again; cavalier still seeking to relieve those shut up in the tower, and the royalists, now concentrated and in force, to surround and destroy him. at length, after the struggle had lasted for about five hours, cavalier, in order to save the rest of his men, resolved on retiring before daybreak; and he succeeded in effecting his retreat without being pursued by the enemy. the three hundred camisards who continued shut up in the tower refused to surrender. they transformed the ruin into a fortress, barricading every entrance, and firing from every loophole. when their ammunition was expended, they hurled stones, joists, and tiles down upon their assailants from the summit of the tower. for four more hours they continued to hold out. cannon were sent for from alais, to blow in the doors; but before they arrived all was over. the place had been set on fire by hand grenades, and the imprisoned camisards, singing psalms amidst the flames to their last breath, perished to a man. this victory cost montrevel dear. he lost some twelve hundred dead and wounded before the fatal tower of belliot; whilst cavalier's loss was not less than four hundred dead, of whom a hundred and eighteen were found at daybreak along the brink of the ravine. one of these was mistaken for the body of cavalier; on which montrevel, with characteristic barbarity, ordered the head to be cut off and sent to _cavalier's mother_ for identification! from the slight glimpses we obtain of the _man_ montrevel in the course of these deplorable transactions, there seems to have been something ineffably mean and spiteful in his nature. thus, on another occasion, in a fit of rage at having been baffled by the young camisard leader, he dispatched a squadron of dragoons to ribaute for the express purpose of pulling down the house in which cavalier had been born! a befitting sequel to this sanguinary struggle at the tower of belliot was the fate of guignon, the miller, who had betrayed the sleeping camisards to montrevel. his crime was discovered. the gold was found upon him. he was tried, and condemned to death. the camisards, under arms, assembled to see the sentence carried out. they knelt round the doomed man, while the prophets by turn prayed for his soul, and implored the clemency of the sovereign judge. guignon professed the utmost contrition, besought the pardon of his brethren, and sought leave to embrace for the last time his two sons--privates in the camisard ranks. the two young men, however, refused the proffered embrace with a gesture of apparent disgust; and they looked on, the sad and stern spectators of the traitor's punishment. again montrevel thought he had succeeded in crushing the insurrection, and that he had cut off its head with that of the camisard chief. but his supposed discovery of the dead body proved an entire mistake; and not many days elapsed before cavalier made his appearance before the gates of alais, and sent in a challenge to the governor to come out and fight him. and it is to be observed that by this time a fiercely combative spirit, of fighting for fighting's sake, began to show itself among the camisards. thus, castanet appeared one day before the gates of meyreuis, where the regiment of cordes was stationed, and challenged the colonel to come out and fight him in the open; but the challenge was declined. on another occasion, cavalier in like manner challenged the commander of vic to bring out thirty of his soldiers and fight thirty camisards. the challenge was accepted, and the battle took place; they fought until ten men only remained alive on either side, but the camisards were masters of the field. montrevel only redoubled his efforts to exterminate the camisards. he had no other policy. in the summer of the pope (clement xi.) came to his assistance, issuing a bull against the rebels as being of "the execrable race of the ancient albigenses," and promising "absolute and general remission of sins" to all such as should join the holy militia of louis xiv. in "exterminating the cursed heretics and miscreants, enemies alike of god and of cæsar." a special force was embodied with this object--the florentines, or "white camisards"--distinguished by the white cross which they wore in front of their hats. they were for the most part composed of desperadoes and miscreants, and went about pillaging and burning, with so little discrimination between friend and foe, that the catholics themselves implored the marshal to suppress them. these florentines were the perpetrators of such barbarities that roland determined to raise a body of cavalry to hunt them down; and with that object, catinat, the old dragoon, went down to the camargues--a sort of island-prairies lying between the mouths of the rhône--where the arabs had left a hardy breed of horses; and there he purchased some two hundred steeds wherewith to mount the camisard horse, to the command of which catinat was himself appointed. it is unnecessary to particularise the variety of combats, of marchings and countermarchings, which occurred during the progress of the insurrection. between the contending parties, the country was reduced to a desert. tillage ceased, for there was no certainty of the cultivator reaping the crop; more likely it would be carried off or burnt by the conflicting armies. beggars and vagabonds wandered about robbing and plundering without regard to party or religion; and social security was entirely at an end. meanwhile, montrevel still called for more troops. of the twenty battalions already entrusted to him, more than one-third had perished; and still the insurrection was not suppressed. he hoped, however, that the work was now accomplished; and, looking to the wasted condition of the country, that the famine and cold of the winter of - would complete the destruction of such of the rebels as still survived. during the winter, however, the camisard chiefs had not only been able to keep their forces together, but to lay up a considerable store of provisions and ammunition, principally by captures from the enemy; and in the following spring they were in a position to take the field in even greater force than ever. they, indeed, opened the campaign by gaining two important victories over the royalists; but though they were their greatest, they were also nearly their last. the battle of martinargues was the cannæ of the camisards. it was fought near the village of that name, not far from ners, early in the spring of . the campaign had been opened by the florentines, who, now that they had made a desert of the upper cevennes, were burning and ravaging the protestant villages of the plain. cavalier had put himself on their track, and pursued and punished them so severely, that in their distress they called upon montrevel to help them, informing him of the whereabouts of the camisards. a strong royalist force of horse and foot was immediately sent in pursuit, under the command of brigadier lajonquière. he first marched upon the protestant village of lascours, where cavalier had passed the previous night. the brigadier severely punished the inhabitants for sheltering the camisards, putting to death four persons, two of them girls, whom he suspected to be cavalier's prophetesses. on the people refusing to indicate the direction in which the camisards had gone, he gave the village up to plunder, and the soldiers passed several hours ransacking the place, in the course of which they broke open and pillaged the wine-cellars. meanwhile, cavalier and his men had proceeded in a northerly direction, along the right bank of the little river droude, one of the affluents of the gardon. a messenger from lascours overtook him, telling him of the outrages committed on the inhabitants of the village; and shortly after, the inhabitants of lascours themselves came up--men, women, and children, who had been driven from their pillaged homes by the royalist soldiery. cavalier was enraged at the recital of their woes; and though his force was not one-sixth the strength of the enemy, he determined to meet their advance and give them battle. placing the poor people of lascours in safety, the camisard leader took up his position on a rising ground at the head of a little valley close to the village of martinargues. cavalier himself occupied the centre, his front being covered by a brook running in the hollow of a ravine. ravanel and catinat, with a small body of men, were posted along the two sides of the valley, screened by brushwood. the approaching royalists, seeing before them only the feeble force of cavalier, looked upon his capture as certain. "see!" cried lajonquière, "at last we have hold of the barbets we have been so long looking for!" with his dragoons in the centre, flanked by the grenadiers and foot, the royalists advanced with confidence to the charge. at the first volley, the camisards prostrated themselves, and the bullets went over their heads. thinking they had fallen before his fusillade, the commander ordered his men to cross the ravine and fall upon the remnant with the bayonet. instantly, however, cavalier's men started to their feet, and smote the assailants with a deadly volley, bringing down men and horses. at the same moment, the two wings, until then concealed, fired down upon the royalists and completed their confusion. the camisards, then raising their battle-psalm, rushed forward and charged the enemy. the grenadiers resisted stoutly, but after a few minutes the entire body--dragoons, grenadiers, marines, and irish--fled down the valley towards the gardon, and the greater number of those who were not killed were drowned, lajonquière himself escaping with difficulty. in this battle perished a colonel, a major, thirty-three captains and lieutenants, and four hundred and fifty men, while cavalier's loss was only about twenty killed and wounded. a great booty was picked up on the field, of gold, silver, jewels, ornamented swords, magnificent uniforms, scarfs, and clothing, besides horses, as well as the plunder brought from lascours. the opening of the lascours wine-cellars proved the ruin of the royalists, for many of the men were so drunk that they were unable either to fight or fly. after returning thanks to god on the battle-field, cavalier conducted the rejoicing people of lascours back to their village, and proceeded to his head-quarters at bouquet with his booty and his trophies. another encounter shortly followed at the bridge of salindres, about midway between auduze and st. jean du gard, in which roland inflicted an equally decisive defeat on a force commanded by brigadier lalande. informed of the approach of the royalists, roland posted his little army in the narrow, precipitous, and rocky valley, along the bottom of which runs the river gardon. dividing his men into three bodies, he posted one on the bridge, another in ambuscade at the entrance to the defile, and a third on the summit of the precipice overhanging the road. the royalists had scarcely advanced to the attack of the bridge, when the concealed camisards rushed out and assailed their rear, while those stationed above hurled down rocks and stones, which threw them into complete disorder. they at once broke and fled, rushing down to the river, into which they threw themselves; and but for roland's neglect in guarding the steep footpath leading to the ford at the mill, the whole body would have been destroyed. as it was, they suffered heavy loss, the general himself escaping with difficulty, leaving his white-plumed hat behind him in the hands of the camisards. chapter viii. end of the camisard insurrection. the insurrection in the cevennes had continued for more than two years, when at length it began to excite serious uneasiness at versailles. it was felt to be a source of weakness as well as danger to france, then at war with portugal, england, and savoy. what increased the alarm of the french government was the fact that the insurgents were anxiously looking abroad for help, and endeavouring to excite the protestant governments of the north to strike a blow in their behalf. england and holland had been especially appealed to. large numbers of huguenot soldiers were then serving in the english army; and it was suggested that if they could effect a landing on the coast of languedoc, and co-operate with the camisards, it would at the same time help the cause of religious liberty, and operate as a powerful diversion in favour of the confederate armies, then engaged with the armies of france in the low countries and on the rhine. in order to ascertain the feasibility of the proposed landing, and the condition of the camisard insurgents, the ministry of queen anne sent the marquis de miremont, a huguenot refugee in england, on a mission to the cevennes; and he succeeded in reaching the insurgent camp at st. felix, where he met roland and the other leaders, and arranged with them for the descent of a body of huguenot soldiers on the coast. in the month of september, , the english fleet was descried in the gulf of lyons, off aiguesmortes, making signals, which, however, were not answered. marshal montrevel had been warned of the intended invasion; and, summoning troops from all quarters, he so effectually guarded the coast, that a landing was found impracticable. though cavalier was near at hand, he was unable at any point to communicate with the english ships; and after lying off for a few days, they spread their sails, and the disheartened camisards saw their intended liberators disappear in the distance. the ministers of louis xiv. were greatly alarmed by this event. the invasion had been frustrated for the time, but the english fleet might return, and eventually succeed in effecting a landing. the danger, therefore, had to be provided against, and at once. it became clear, even to louis xiv. himself, that the system of terror and coercion which had heretofore been exclusively employed against the insurgents, had proved a total failure. it was accordingly determined to employ some other means, if possible, of bringing this dangerous insurrection to an end. in pursuance of this object, montrevel, to his intense mortification, was recalled, and the celebrated marshal villars, the victor of hochstadt and friedlingen, was appointed in his stead, with full powers to undertake and carry out the pacification of languedoc. villars reached nismes towards the end of august, ; but before his arrival, montrevel at last succeeded in settling accounts with cavalier, and wiped out many old scores by inflicting upon him the severest defeat the camisard arms had yet received. it was his first victory over cavalier, and his last. cavalier's recent successes had made him careless. having so often overcome the royal troops against great odds, he began to think himself invincible, and to despise his enemy. his success at martinargues had the effect of greatly increasing his troops; and he made a descent upon the low country in the spring of , at the head of about a thousand foot and two hundred horse. appearing before bouciran, which he entered without resistance, he demolished the fortifications, and proceeded southwards to st. géniès, which he attacked and took, carrying away horses, mules, and arms. next day he marched still southward to caveirac, only about three miles east of nismes. montrevel designedly published his intention of taking leave of his government on a certain day, and proceeding to montpellier with only a very slender force--pretending to send the remainder to beaucaire, in the opposite direction, for the purpose of escorting villars, his successor, into the city. his object in doing this was to deceive the camisard leader, and to draw him into a trap. the intelligence became known to cavalier, who now watched the montpellier road, for the purpose of inflicting a parting blow upon his often-baffled enemy. instead, however, of montrevel setting out for montpellier with a small force, he mustered almost the entire troops belonging to the garrison of nismes--over six thousand horse and foot--and determined to overwhelm cavalier, who lay in his way. montrevel divided his force into several bodies, and so disposed them as completely to surround the comparatively small camisard force, near langlade. the first encounter was with the royalist regiment of firmarcon, which cavalier completely routed; but while pursuing them too keenly, the camisards were assailed in flank by a strong body of foot posted in vineyards along the road, and driven back upon the main body. the camisards now discovered that a still stronger battalion was stationed in their rear; and, indeed, wherever they turned, they saw the royalists posted in force. there was no alternative but cutting their way through the enemy; and cavalier, putting himself at the head of his men, led the way, sword in hand. a terrible struggle ensued, and the camisards at last reached the bridge at rosni; but there, too, the royalists were found blocking the road, and crowding the heights on either side. cavalier, to avoid recognition, threw off his uniform, and assumed the guise of a simple camisard. again he sought to force his way through the masses of the enemy. his advance was a series of hand-to-hand fights, extending over some six miles, and the struggle lasted for nearly the entire day. more than a thousand dead strewed the roads, of whom one half were camisards. the royalists took five drums, sixty-two horses, and four mules laden with provisions, but not one prisoner. when villars reached nismes and heard of this battle, he went to see the field, and expressed his admiration at the skill and valour of the camisard chief. "here is a man," said he, "of no education, without any experience in the art of war, who has conducted himself under the most difficult and delicate circumstances as if he had been a great general. truly, to fight such a battle were worthy of cæsar!" indeed, the conduct of cavalier in this struggle so impressed marshal villars, that he determined, if possible, to gain him over, together with his brave followers, to the ranks of the royal army. villars was no bigot, but a humane and honourable man, and a thorough soldier. he deplored the continuance of this atrocious war, and proceeded to take immediate steps to bring it, if possible, to a satisfactory conclusion. in the meantime, however, the defeat of the camisards had been followed by other reverses. during the absence of cavalier in the south, the royalist general lalande, at the head of five thousand troops, fell upon the joint forces of roland and joany at brenoux, and completely defeated them. the same general lay in wait for the return of cavalier with his broken forces, to his retreat near euzet; and on his coming up, the royalists, in overpowering numbers, fell upon the dispirited camisards, and inflicted upon them another heavy loss. but a greater calamity, if possible, was the discovery and capture of cavalier's magazines in the caverns near euzet. the royalist soldiers, having observed an old woman frequently leaving the village for the adjoining wood with a full basket and returning with an empty one, suspected her of succouring the rebels, arrested her, and took her before the general. when questioned at first she would confess nothing; on which she was ordered forthwith to be hanged. when taken to the gibbet in the market-place, however, the old woman's resolution gave way, and she entreated to be taken back to the general, when she would confess everything. she then acknowledged that she had the care of an hospital in the adjoining wood, and that her daily errands had been thither. she was promised pardon if she led the soldiers at once to the place; and she did so, a battalion following at her heels. advancing into the wood, the old woman led the soldiers to the mouth of a cavern, into which she pointed, and the men entered. the first sight that met their eyes was a number of sick and wounded camisards lying upon couches along ledges cut in the rock. they were immediately put to death. entering further into the cavern, the soldiers were surprised to find in an inner vault an immense magazine of grain, flour, chestnuts, beans, barrels of wine and brandy; farther in, stores of drugs, ointment, dressings, and hospital furnishings; and finally, an arsenal containing a large store of sabres, muskets, pistols, and gunpowder, together with the materials for making it; all of which the royalists seized and carried off. lalande, before leaving euzet, inflicted upon it a terrible punishment. he gave it up to pillage, then burnt it to the ground, and put the inhabitants to the sword--all but the old woman, who was left alone amidst the corpses and ashes of the ruined village. lalande returned in triumph to alais, some of his soldiers displaying on the points of their bayonets the ears of the slain camisards. other reverses followed in quick succession. salomon was attacked near pont-de-montvert, the birthplace of the insurrection, and lost some eight hundred of his men. his magazines at magistavols were also discovered and ransacked, containing, amongst other stores, twenty oxen and a hundred sheep. thus, in four combats, the camisards lost nearly half their forces, together with a large part of their arms, ammunition, and provisions. the country occupied by them had been ravaged and reduced to a state of desert, and there seemed but little prospect of their again being able to make head against their enemies. the loss of life during the last year of the insurrection had been frightful. some twenty thousand men had perished--eight thousand soldiers, four thousand of the roman catholic population, and from seven to eight thousand protestants. villars had no sooner entered upon the functions of his office than he set himself to remedy this dreadful state of things. he was encouraged in his wise intentions by the baron d'aigalliers, a protestant nobleman of high standing and great influence, who had emigrated into england at the revocation, but had since returned. this nobleman entertained the ardent desire of reconciling the king with his protestant subjects; and he was encouraged by the french court to endeavour to bring the rebels of the cevennes to terms. one of the first things villars did, was to proceed on a journey through the devastated districts; and he could not fail to be horrified at the sight of the villages in ruins, the wasted vineyards, the untilled fields, and the deserted homesteads which met his eyes on every side. wherever he went, he gave it out that he was ready to pardon all persons--rebels as well as their chiefs--who should lay down their arms and submit to the royal clemency; but that, if they continued obstinate and refused to submit, he would proceed against them to the last extremity. he even offered to put arms in the hands of such of the protestant population as would co-operate with him in suppressing the insurrection. in the meantime, the defeated camisards under roland were reorganizing their forces, and preparing again to take the field. they were unwilling to submit themselves to the professed clemency of villars, without some sufficient guarantee that their religious rights--in defence of which they had taken up arms--would be respected. roland was already establishing new magazines in place of those which had been destroyed; he was again recruiting his brigades from the protestant communes, and many of those who had recovered from their wounds again rallied under his standard. at this juncture, d'aigalliers suggested to villars that a negotiation should be opened directly with the camisard chiefs to induce them to lay down their arms. roland refused to listen to any overtures; but cavalier was more accessible, and expressed himself willing to negotiate for peace provided his religion was respected and recognised. and cavalier was right. he saw clearly that longer resistance was futile, that it could only end in increased devastation and destruction; and he was wise in endeavouring to secure the best possible terms under the circumstances for his suffering co-religionists. roland, who refused all such overtures, was the more uncompromising and tenacious of purpose; but cavalier, notwithstanding his extreme youth, was by far the more practical and politic of the two. there is no doubt also that cavalier had begun to weary of the struggle. he became depressed and sad, and even after a victory he would kneel down amidst the dead and wounded, and pray to god that he would turn the heart of the king to mercy, and help to re-establish the ancient temples throughout the land. an interview with cavalier was eventually arranged by lalande. the brigadier invited him to a conference, guaranteeing him safe conduct, and intimating that if he refused the meeting, he would be regarded as the enemy of peace, and held responsible before god and man for all future bloodshed. cavalier replied to lalande's invitation, accepting the interview, indicating the place and the time of meeting. catinat, the camisard general of horse, was the bearer of cavalier's letter, and he rode on to alais to deliver it, arrayed in magnificent costume. lalande was at table when catinat was shown in to him. observing the strange uniform and fierce look of the intruder, the brigadier asked who he was. "catinat!" was the reply. "what," cried lalande, "are you the catinat who killed so many people in beaucaire?" "yes, it is i," said catinat, "and i only endeavoured to do my duty." "you are hardy, indeed, to dare to show yourself before me." "i have come," said the camisard, "in good faith, persuaded that you are an honest man, and on the assurance of my brother cavalier that you would do me no harm. i come to deliver you his letter." and so saying, he handed it to the brigadier. hastily perusing the letter, lalande said, "go back to cavalier, and tell him that in two hours i shall be at the bridge of avène with only ten officers and thirty dragoons." the interview took place at the time appointed, on the bridge over the avène, a few miles south of alais. cavalier arrived, attended by three hundred foot and sixty camisard dragoons. when the two chiefs recognised each other, they halted their escorts, dismounted, and, followed by some officers, proceeded on foot to meet each other. lalande had brought with him cavalier's younger brother, who had been for some time a prisoner, and presented him, saying, "the king gives him to you in token of his merciful intentions." the brothers, who had not met since their mother's death, embraced and wept. cavalier thanked the general; and then, leaving their officers, the two went on one side, and conferred together alone. "the king," said lalande, "wishes, in the exercise of his clemency, to terminate this war amongst his subjects; what are your terms and your demands?" "they consist of three things," replied cavalier: "liberty of worship; the deliverance of our brethren who are in prison and at the galleys; and, if the first condition be refused, then free permission to leave france." "how many persons would wish to leave the kingdom?" asked lalande. "ten thousand of various ages and both sexes." "ten thousand! it is impossible! leave might possibly be granted for two, but certainly not for ten." "then," said cavalier, "if the king will not allow us to leave the kingdom, he will at least re-establish our ancient edicts and privileges?" lalande promised to report the result of the conference to the marshal, though he expressed a doubt whether he could agree to the terms proposed. the brigadier took leave of cavalier by expressing the desire to be of service to him at any time; but he made a gross and indelicate mistake in offering his purse to the camisard chief. "no, no!" said cavalier, rejecting it with a look of contempt, "i wish for none of your gold, but only for religious liberty, or, if that be refused, for a safe conduct out of the kingdom." lalande then asked to be taken up to the camisard troop, who had been watching the proceedings of their leader with great interest. coming up to them in the ranks, he said, "here is a purse of a hundred louis with which to drink the king's health." their reply was like their leader's, "we want no money, but liberty of conscience." "it is not in my power to grant you that," said the general, "but you will do well to submit to the king's will." "we are ready," said they, "to obey his orders, provided he grants our just demands; but if not, we are prepared to die arms in hand." and thus ended this memorable interview, which lasted for about two hours; lalande and his followers returning to alais, while cavalier went with his troop in the direction of vezenobres. cavalier's enemies say that in the course of his interview with lalande he was offered honours, rewards, and promotion, if he would enter the king's service; and it is added that cavalier was tempted by these offers, and thereby proved false to his cause and followers. but it is more probable that cavalier was sincere in his desire to come to fair terms with the king, observing the impossibility, under the circumstances, of prolonging the struggle against the royal armies with any reasonable prospect of success. if cavalier were really bribed by any such promises of promotion, at all events such promises were never fulfilled; nor did the french monarch reward him in any way for his endeavours to bring the camisard insurrection to an end. it was characteristic of roland to hold aloof from these negotiations, and refuse to come to any terms whatever with "baal." as if to separate himself entirely from cavalier, he withdrew into the upper cevennes to resume the war. at the very time that cavalier was holding the conference with the royalist general at the bridge of the avène, roland and joany, with a body of horse and foot, waylaid the count de tournou at the plateau of font-morte--the place where seguier, the first camisard leader, had been defeated and captured--and suddenly fell upon the royalists, putting them to flight. a rich booty fell into the hands of the camisards, part of which consisted of the quarter's rental of the confiscated estate of salgas, in the possession of the king's collector, viala, whom the royalist troops were escorting to st. jean de gard. the collector, who had made himself notorious for his cruelty, was put to death after frightful torment, and his son and nephew were also shot. so far, therefore, as roland and his associates were concerned, there appeared to be no intention of surrender or compromise; and villars was under the necessity of prosecuting the war against them to the last extremity. in the meantime, cavalier was hailed throughout the low country as the pacificator of languedoc. the people on both sides had become heartily sick of the war, and were glad to be rid of it on any terms that promised peace and security for the future. at the invitation of marshal villars, cavalier proceeded towards nismes, and his march from town to town was one continuous ovation. he was eagerly welcomed by the population; and his men were hospitably entertained by the garrisons of the places through which they passed. every liberty was allowed him; and not a day passed without a religious meeting being held, accompanied with public preaching, praying, and psalm-singing. at length cavalier and his little army approached the neighbourhood of nismes, where his arrival was anticipated with extraordinary interest. the beautiful old city had witnessed many strange sights; but probably the entry of the young camisard chief was one of the most remarkable of all. this herd-boy and baker's apprentice of the cevennes, after holding at bay the armies of france for nearly three years, had come to negotiate a treaty of peace with its most famous general. leaving the greater part of his cavalry and the whole of his infantry at st. césaire, a few miles from nismes, cavalier rode towards the town attended by eighteen horsemen commanded by catinat. on approaching the southern gate, he found an immense multitude waiting his arrival. "he could not have been more royally welcomed," said the priest of st. germain, "had he been a king." cavalier rode at the head of his troop gaily attired; for fine dress was one of the weaknesses of the camisard chiefs. he wore a tight-fitting doeskin coat ornamented with gold lace, scarlet breeches, a muslin cravat, and a large beaver with a white plume; his long fair hair hanging over his shoulders. catinat rode by his side on a high-mettled charger, attracting all eyes by his fine figure, his martial air, and his magnificent costume. cavalier's faithful friend, daniel billard, rode on his left; and behind followed his little brother in military uniform, between the baron d'aigalliers and lacombe, the agents for peace. the cavalcade advanced through the dense crowd, which could with difficulty be kept back, past the roman amphitheatre, and along the rue st. antoine, to the garden of the récollets, a franciscan convent, nearly opposite the elegant roman temple known as the maison carrée.[ ] alighting from his horse at the gate, and stationing his guard there under the charge of catinat, cavalier entered the garden, and was conducted to marshal villars, with whom was baville, intendant of the province; baron sandricourt, governor of nismes; general lalande, and other dignitaries. cavalier looked such a mere boy, that villars at first could scarcely believe that it was the celebrated camisard chief who stood before him. the marshal, however, advanced several steps, and addressed some complimentary words to cavalier, to which he respectfully replied. [footnote : the nismes theatre now occupies part of the jardin des récollets.] the conference then began and proceeded, though not without frequent interruptions from baville, who had so long regarded cavalier as a despicable rebel, that he could scarcely brook the idea of the king's marshal treating with him on anything like equal terms. but the marshal checked the intendant by reminding him that he had no authority to interfere in a matter which the king had solely entrusted to himself. then turning to cavalier, he asked him to state his conditions for a treaty of peace. cavalier has set forth in his memoirs the details of the conditions proposed by him, and which he alleges were afterwards duly agreed to and signed by villars and baville, on the th of may, , on the part of the king. the first condition was liberty of conscience, with the privilege of holding religious assemblies in country places. this was agreed to, subject to the protestant temples not being rebuilt. the second--that all protestants in prison or at the galleys should be set at liberty within six weeks from the date of the treaty--was also agreed to. the third--that all who had left the kingdom on account of their religion should have liberty to return, and be restored to their estates and privileges--was agreed to, subject to their taking the oath of allegiance. the fourth--as to the re-establishment of the parliament of languedoc on its ancient footing--was promised consideration. the fifth and sixth--that the province should be free from capitation tax for ten years, and that the protestants should hold montpellier, cette, perpignan, and aiguesmortes, as cautionary towns--were refused. the seventh--that those inhabitants of the cevennes whose houses had been burnt during the civil war should pay no imposts for seven years--was granted. and the eighth--that cavalier should raise a regiment of dragoons to serve the king in portugal--was also granted. these conditions are said to have been agreed to on the distinct understanding that the insurrection should forthwith cease, and that all persons in arms against the king should lay them down and submit themselves to his majesty's clemency. the terms having been generally agreed to, cavalier respectfully took his leave of the marshal, and returned to his comrades at the gate. but catinat and the camisard guard had disappeared. the conference had lasted two hours, during which cavalier's general of horse had become tired of waiting, and gone with his companions to refresh himself at the sign of the golden cup. on his way thither, he witched the world of nismes with his noble horsemanship, making his charger bound and prance and curvet, greatly to the delight of the immense crowd that followed him. on the return of the camisard guard to the récollets, cavalier mounted his horse, and, escorted by them, proceeded to the hôtel de la poste, where he rested. in the evening, he came out on the esplanade, and walked freely amidst the crowd, amongst whom were many ladies, eager to see the camisard hero, and happy if they could but hear him speak, or touch his dress. he then went to visit the mother of daniel, his favourite prophet, a native of nismes, whose father and brother were both prisoners because of their religion. returning to the hotel, cavalier mustered his guard, and set out for calvisson, followed by hundreds of people, singing together as they passed through the town gate the rd psalm--"behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" cavalier remained with his companions at calvisson for eight days, during which he enjoyed the most perfect freedom of action. he held public religious services daily, at first amidst the ruins of the demolished protestant temple, and afterwards, when the space was insufficient, in the open plain outside the town walls. people came from all quarters to attend them--from the vaunage, from sommières, from lunel, from nismes, and even from montpellier. as many as forty thousand persons are said to have resorted to the services during cavalier's sojourn at calvisson. the plains resounded with preaching and psalmody from morning until evening, sometimes until late at night, by torchlight. these meetings were a great cause of offence to the more bigoted of the roman catholics, who saw in them the triumph of their enemies. they muttered audibly against the policy of villars, who was tolerating if not encouraging heretics--worthy, in their estimation, only of perdition. fléchier, bishop of nismes, was full of lamentations on the subject, and did not scruple to proclaim that war, with all its horrors, was even more tolerable than such a peace as this. unhappily, the peace proved only of short duration, and cavalier's anticipations of unity and brotherly love were not destined to be fulfilled. whether roland was jealous of the popularity achieved by cavalier, or suspected treachery on the part of the royalists, or whether he still believed in the ability of his followers to conquer religious liberty and compel the re-establishment of the ancient edicts by the sword, does not clearly appear. at all events, he refused to be committed in any way by what cavalier had done; and when the treaty entered into with villars was submitted to roland for approval, he refused to sign it. a quarrel had almost occurred between the chiefs, and hot words passed between them. but cavalier controlled himself, and still hoped to persuade roland to adopt a practicable course, and bring the unhappy war to a conclusion. it was at length agreed between them that a further effort should be made to induce villars to grant more liberal terms, particularly with respect to the rebuilding of the protestant temples; and cavalier consented that salomon should accompany him to an interview with the marshal, and endeavour to obtain such a modification of the treaty as should meet roland's views. accordingly, another meeting shortly after took place in the garden of the récollets at nismes, cavalier leaving it to salomon to be the spokesman on the occasion. but salomon proved as uncompromising as his chief. he stated his _ultimatum_ bluntly and firmly--re-establishment of the edict of nantes, and complete liberty of conscience. on no other terms, he said, would the camisards lay down their arms. villars was courtly and polite as usual, but he was as firm as salomon. he would adhere to the terms that had been agreed to, but could not comply with the conditions proposed. the discussion lasted for two hours, and at length became stormy and threatening on the part of salomon, on which the marshal turned on his heel and left the apartment. cavalier's followers had not yet been informed of the conditions of the treaty into which he had entered with villars, but they had been led to believe that the edict was to be re-established and liberty of worship restored. their suspicions had already been roused by the hints thrown out by ravanel, who was as obdurate as roland in his refusal to lay down his arms until the edict had been re-established. while cavalier was still at nismes, on his second mission to villars, accompanied by salomon, ravanel, who had been left in charge of the troop at calvisson, assembled the men, and told them he feared they were being betrayed--that they were to be refused this free exercise of their religion in temples of their own, but were to be required to embark as king's soldiers on shipboard, perhaps to perish at sea. "brethren," said he, "let us cling by our own native land, and live and die for the eternal." the men enthusiastically applauded the stern resolve of ravanel, and awaited with increasing impatience the return of the negotiating chief. on cavalier's return to his men, he found, to his dismay, that instead of being welcomed back with the usual cordiality, they were drawn up in arms under ravanel, and received him in silence, with angry and scowling looks. he upbraided ravanel for such a reception, on which the storm immediately burst. "what is the treaty, then," cried ravanel, "that thou hast made with this marshal?" cavalier, embarrassed, evaded the inquiry; but ravanel, encouraged by his men, proceeded to press for the information. "well," said cavalier, "it is arranged that we shall go to serve in portugal." there was at once a violent outburst from the ranks. "traitor! coward! then thou hast sold us! but we shall have no peace--no peace without our temples." at sound of the loud commotion and shouting, vincel, the king's commissioner, who remained at calvisson pending the negotiations, came running up, and the men in their rage would have torn him to pieces, but cavalier threw himself in their way, exclaiming, "back, men! do him no harm, kill me instead." his voice, his gesture, arrested the camisards, and vincel turned and fled for his life. ravanel then ordered the _générale_ to be beaten. the men drew up in their ranks, and putting himself at their head, ravanel marched them out of calvisson by the northern gate. cavalier, humiliated and downcast, followed the troop--their leader no more. he could not part with them thus--the men he had so often led to victory, and who had followed him so devotedly--but hung upon their rear, hoping they would yet relent and return to him as their chief. catinat, his general of horse, observing cavalier following the men, turned upon him. "whither wouldst thou go, traitor?" cried catinat. what! catinat, of all others, to prove unfaithful? yet it was so! catinat even, presented his pistol at his former chief, but he did not fire. cavalier would not yet turn back. he hung upon the skirts of the column, entreating, supplicating, adjuring the men, by all their former love for him, to turn, and follow him. but they sternly marched on, scarcely even deigning to answer him. ravanel endeavoured to drive him back by reproaches, which at length so irritated cavalier, that he drew his sword, and they were about to rush at each other, when one of the prophets ran between them and prevented bloodshed. cavalier did not desist from following them for several miles, until at length, on reaching st. estève, the men were appealed to as to whom they would follow, and they declared themselves for ravanel. cavalier made a last appeal to their allegiance, and called out, "let those who love me, follow me!" about forty of his old adherents detached themselves from the ranks, and followed cavalier in the direction of nismes. but the principal body remained with ravanel, who, waving his sabre in the air, and shouting, "vive l'Épée de l'Éternel!" turned his men's faces northward and marched on to rejoin roland in the upper cevennes. cavalier was completely prostrated by the desertion of his followers. he did not know where next to turn. he could not rejoin the camisard camp nor enter the villages of the cevennes, and he was ashamed to approach villars, lest he should be charged with deceiving him. but he sent a letter to the marshal, informing him of the failure of his negotiations, the continued revolt of the camisards, and their rejection of him as their chief. villars, however, was gentle and generous; he was persuaded that cavalier had acted loyally and in good faith throughout, and he sent a message by the baron d'aigalliers, urgently inviting him to return to nismes and arrange as to the future. cavalier accordingly set out forthwith, accompanied by his brother and the prophet daniel, and escorted by the ten horsemen and thirty foot who still remained faithful to his person. it is not necessary further to pursue the history of cavalier. suffice it to say that, at the request of marshal villars, he proceeded to paris, where he had an unsatisfactory interview with louis xiv.; that fearing an intention on the part of the roman catholic party to make him a prisoner, he fled across the frontier into switzerland; that he eventually reached england, and entered the english army, with the rank of colonel; that he raised a regiment of refugee frenchmen, consisting principally of his camisard followers, at the head of whom he fought most valiantly at the battle of almanza; that he was afterwards appointed governor of jersey, and died a major-general in the british service in the year , greatly respected by all who knew him. * * * * * although cavalier failed in carrying the treaty into effect, so far as he was concerned, his secession at this juncture proved a deathblow to the insurrection. the remaining camisard leaders endeavoured in vain to incite that enthusiasm amongst their followers which had so often before led them to victory. the men felt that they were fighting without hope, and as it were with halters round their necks. many of them began to think that cavalier had been justified in seeking to secure the best terms practicable; and they dropped off, by tens and fifties, to join their former leader, whose head-quarters for some time continued to be at vallabergue, an island in the rhône a little above beaucaire. the insurgents were also in a great measure disarmed by marshal villars, who continued to pursue a policy of clemency, and at the same time of severity. he offered a free pardon to all who surrendered themselves, but threatened death to all who continued to resist the royal troops. in sign of his clemency, he ordered the gibbets which had for some years stood _en permanence_ in all the villages of the cevennes, to be removed; and he went from town to town, urging all well-disposed people, of both religions, to co-operate with him in putting an end to the dreadful civil war that had so long desolated the province. moved by the marshal's eloquent appeals, the principal towns along the gardon and the vidourle appointed deputies to proceed in a body to the camp of roland, and induce him if possible to accept the proffered amnesty. they waited upon him accordingly at his camp of st. felix and told him their errand. but his answer was to order them at once to leave the place on pain of death. villars himself sent messengers to roland--amongst others the baron d'aigalliers--offering to guarantee that no one should be molested on account of his religion, provided he and his men would lay down their arms; but roland remained inflexible--nothing short of complete religious liberty would induce him to surrender. roland and joany were still at the head of about a thousand men in the upper cevennes. pont-de-montvert was at the time occupied by a body of miguelets, whom they determined if possible to destroy. dividing their army into three bodies, they proceeded to assail simultaneously the three quarters of which the village is composed. but the commander of the miguelets, informed of roland's intention, was prepared to receive him. one of the camisard wings was attacked at the same time in front and rear, thrown into confusion and defeated; and the other wings were driven back with heavy loss. this was roland's last battle. about a month later--in august, --while a body of camisards occupied the château of castelnau, not far from ners, the place was suddenly surrounded at night by a body of royalist dragoons. the alarm was raised, and roland, half-dressed, threw himself on horseback and fled. he was pursued, overtaken, and brought to a stand in a wood, where, setting his back to a tree he defended himself bravely for a time against overpowering numbers, but was at last shot through the heart by a dragoon, and the camisard chief lay dead upon the ground. the insurrection did not long survive the death of roland. the other chiefs wandered about from place to place with their followers, but they had lost heart and hope, and avoided further encounters with the royal forces. one after another of them surrendered. castanet and catinat both laid down their arms, and were allowed to leave france for switzerland, accompanied by twenty-two of their men. joany also surrendered with forty-six of his followers. one by one the other chiefs laid down their arms--all excepting abraham and ravanel, who preferred liberty and misery at home to peace and exile abroad. they continued for some time to wander about in the upper cevennes, hiding in the woods by day and sleeping in caves by night--hunted, deserted, and miserable. and thus at last was languedoc pacified; and at the beginning of january, , marshal villars returned to versailles to receive the congratulations and honours of the king. several futile attempts were afterwards made by the banished leaders to rekindle the insurrection from its embers, catinat and castanet, wearied of their inaction at geneva, stole back across the frontier and rejoined ravanel in the cevennes; but their rashness cost them their lives. they were all captured and condemned to death. castanet and salomon were broken alive on the wheel on the peyrou at montpellier, and catinat, ravanel, with several others, were burnt alive on the place de la beaucaire at nismes. the last to perish were abraham and joany. the one was shot while holding the royal troops at bay, firing upon them from the roof of a cottage at mas-de-couteau; the other was captured in the mountains near the source of the tarn. he was on his way to prison, tied behind a trooper, like rob roy in scott's novel, when, suddenly freeing himself from his bonds while crossing the bridge of pont-de-montvert, he slid from the horse, and leapt over the parapet into the tarn. the soldiers at once opened fire upon the fugitive, and he fell, pierced with many balls, and was carried away in the torrent. and thus pont-de-montvert, which had seen the beginning, also saw the end of the insurrection. chapter ix. galley-slaves for the faith. after the death of the last of the camisard leaders, there was no further effort at revolt. the huguenots seemed to be entirely put down, and protestantism completely destroyed. there was no longer any resistance nor protest. if there were any huguenots who had not become catholics, they remained mute. force had at last succeeded in stifling them. a profound quiet reigned for a time throughout france. the country had become a circle, closely watched by armed men--by dragoons, infantry, archers, and coastguards--beyond which the huguenots could not escape without running the risk of the prison, the galley, or the gibbet. the intendants throughout the kingdom flattered louis xiv., and louis xiv. flattered himself, that the huguenots had either been converted, extirpated, or expelled the kingdom. the king had medals struck, announcing the "_extinction of heresy_." a proclamation to this effect was also published by the king, dated the th of march, , declaring the entire conversion of the french huguenots, and sentencing those who, after that date, relapsed from catholicism to protestantism, to all the penalties of heresy. what, then, had become of the huguenots? they were for the moment prostrate, but their life had not gone out of them. many were no doubt "converted." they had not strength to resist the pains and penalties threatened by the state if they refused. they accordingly attended mass, and assisted in ceremonies which at heart they detested. though they blushed at their apostasy, they were too much broken down and weary of oppression and suffering to attempt to be free. but though many huguenots pretended to be "converted," the greater number silently refrained. they held their peace and bided their time. meanwhile, however, they were subject to all the annoyances of persecution. persecution had seized them from the day of their birth, and never relaxed its hold until the day of their death. every new-born child must be taken to the priest to be baptized. when the children had grown into boys and girls, they must go to school and be educated, also by the priest. if their parents refused to send them, the children were forcibly seized, taken away, and brought up in the jesuit schools and nunneries. and lastly, when grown up into young men and women, they must be married by the priest, or their offspring be declared illegitimate. the huguenots refused to conform to all this. nevertheless, it was by no means easy to continue to refuse obeying the priest. the priest was well served with spies, though the principal spy in every parish was himself. there were also numerous other professional spies--besides idlers, mischief-makers, and "good-natured friends." in time of peace, also, soldiers were usually employed in performing the disgraceful duty of acting as spies upon the huguenots. the huguenot was ordered to attend mass under the penalty of fine and imprisonment. supposing he refused, because he did not believe that the priest had the miraculous power of converting bread and wine into something the very opposite. the priest insisted that he did possess this power, and that he was supported by the state in demanding that the huguenot _must_ come and worship his transubstantiation of bread into flesh and wine into blood. "i do not believe it," said the huguenot. "but i _order_ you to come, for louis xiv. has proclaimed you to be a converted catholic, and if you refuse you will be at once subject to all the penalties of heresy." it was certainly very difficult to argue with a priest who had the hangman at his back, or with the king who had his hundred thousand dragoons. and so, perhaps, the threatened huguenot went to mass, and pretended to believe all that the priest had said about his miraculous powers. but many resolutely continued to refuse, willing to incur the last and heaviest penalties. then it came to be seen that protestantism, although, declared defunct by the king's edict, had not in fact expired, but was merely reposing for a time in order to make a fresh start forward. the huguenots who still remained in france, whether as "new converts" or as "obstinate heretics," at length began to emerge from their obscurity. they met together in caves and solitary places--in deep and rocky gorges--in valleys among the mountains--where they prayed together, sang together their songs of david, and took counsel one with another. at length, from private meetings for prayer, religious assemblies began to be held in the desert, and preachers made their appearance. the spies spread about the country informed the intendants. the meetings were often surprised by the military. sometimes the soldiers would come upon them suddenly, and fire into the crowd of men, women, and children. on some occasions a hundred persons or more would be killed upon the spot. of those taken prisoners, the preachers were hanged or broken on the wheel, the women were sent to prison, and the children, to nunneries, while the men were sent to be galley-slaves for life.[ ] [footnote : in the viverais and elsewhere they sang the song of the persecuted church:-- "nos filles dans les monastères, nos prisonniers dans les cachots. nos martyrs dont le sang se répand à grands flots, nos confesseurs sur les galères, nos malades persécutés, nos mourants exposés à plus d'une furie, nos morts traînés à la voierie, te disent (ô dieu!) nos calamités."] the persecutions to which huguenot women and children were exposed caused a sudden enlargement of all the prisons and nunneries in france. many of the old castles were fitted up as gaols, and even their dungeons were used for the incorrigible heretics. one of the worst of these was the tour de constance in the town of aiguesmortes, which is to this day remembered with horror as the principal dungeon of the huguenot women. the town of aiguesmortes is situated in the department of gard, close to the mediterranean, whose waters wash into the salt marshes and lagunes by which it is surrounded. it was erected in the thirteenth century for philip the bold, and is still interesting as an example of the ancient feudal fortress. the fosse has since been filled up, on account of the malaria produced by the stagnant water which it contained. the place is approached by a long causeway raised above the marsh, and the entrance to the tower is spanned by an ancient gatehouse. in advance of the tower, to the north, in an angle of the wall, is a single, large round tower, which served as a citadel. it is sixty-six feet in diameter and ninety feet high, surmounted by a lighthouse turret of thirty-four feet. it consists of two large vaulted apartments, the staircase from the one to the other being built within the wall itself, which is about eighteen feet thick. the upper chamber is dimly lighted by narrow chinks through the walls. the lowest of the apartments is the dungeon, which is almost without light and air. in the centre of the floor is a hole connected with a reservoir of water below. this tour de constance continued to be the principal prison for huguenot women in france for a period of about a hundred years. it was always horribly unhealthy; and to be condemned to this dungeon was considered almost as certain though a slower death than to be condemned to the gallows. sixteen huguenot women confined there in died within five months. most of them were the wives of merchants of nismes, or of men of property in the district. when the prisoners died off, the dungeon was at once filled up again with more victims, and it was rarely, if ever, empty, down to a period within only a few years before the outbreak of the french revolution. the punishment of the men found attending religious meetings, and taken prisoners by the soldiers, was to be sentenced to the galleys, mostly for life. they were usually collected in large numbers, and sent to the seaports attached together by chains. they were sent openly, sometimes through the entire length of the kingdom, by way of a show. the object was to teach the horrible delinquency of professing protestantism; for it could not be to show the greater beautifulness and mercifulness of catholicism. the punishment of the chain varied in degree. sometimes it was more cruel than at other times. this depended upon the drivers of the prisoners. marteilhe describes the punishment during his conveyance from havre to marseilles in the winter of .[ ] the chain to which he belonged did not reach marseilles until the th january, . the season was bitterly cold; but that made no difference in the treatment of huguenot prisoners. [footnote : "autobiography of a french protestant condemned to the galleys because of his religion." rotterdam, . (since reprinted by the religious tract society.)] the chain consisted of a file of prisoners, chained one to another in various ways. on this occasion, each pair was fastened by the neck with a thick chain three feet long, in the middle of which was a round ring. after being thus chained, the pairs were placed in file, couple behind couple, when another long thick chain was passed through the rings, thus running along the centre of the gang, and the whole were thus doubly-chained together. there were no less than four hundred prisoners in the chain described by marteilhe. the number had, however, greatly fallen off through deaths by barbarous treatment before it reached marseilles. it must, however, be added, that the whole gang did not consist of huguenots, but only a part of it--the huguenots being distinguished by their red jackets. the rest consisted of murderers, thieves, deserters, and criminals of various sorts. the difficulty which the prisoners had in marching along the roads was very great; the weight of chain which each member had to carry being no less than one hundred and fifty pounds. the lodging they had at night was of the worst description. while at paris, the galley-slaves were quartered in the château de la tournelle, which was under the spiritual direction of the jesuits. the gaol consisted of a large cellar or dungeon, fitted with huge beams of oak fixed close to the floor. thick iron collars were attached by iron chains to the beams. the collar being placed round the prisoner's neck, it was closed and riveted upon an anvil with heavy blows of a hammer. twenty men in pairs were thus chained to each beam. the dungeon was so large that five hundred men could thus be fastened up. they could not sleep lying at full length, nor could they sleep sitting or standing up straight; the beam to which they were chained being too high in the one case and too low in the other. the torture which they endured, therefore, is scarcely to be described. the prisoners were kept there until a sufficient number could be collected to set out in a great chain for marseilles. when they arrived at the first stage out of paris, at charenton, after a heavy day's fatigue, their lodging was no better than before. a stable was found in which they were chained up in such a way that they could with difficulty sit down, and then only on a dung-heap. after they had lain there for a few hours, the prisoners' chains were taken off, and they were turned out into the spacious courtyard of the inn, where they were ordered to strip off their clothes, put them down at their feet, and march over to the other side of the courtyard. the object of this proceeding was to search the pockets of the prisoners, examine their clothes, and find whether they contained any knives, files, or other tools which might be used for cutting the chains. all money and other valuables or necessaries that the clothes contained were at the same time taken away. the night was cold and frosty, with a keen north wind blowing; and after the prisoners had been exposed to it for about half an hour, their bodies became so benumbed that they could scarcely move across the yard to where their clothes were lying. next morning it was found that eighteen of the unfortunates were happily released by death. it is not necessary to describe the tortures endured by the galley-slaves to the end of their journey. one little circumstance may, however, be mentioned. while marching towards the coast, the exhausted huguenots, weary and worn out by the heaviness of their chains, were accustomed to stretch out their little wooden cups for a drop of water to the inhabitants of the villages through which they passed. the women, whom they mostly addressed, answered their entreaties with the bitterest spite. "away, away!" they cried; "you are going where you will have _water enough_!" when the gang or chain reached the port at which the prisoners were to be confined, they were drafted on board the different galleys. these were for the most part stationed at toulon, but there were also other galleys in which huguenots were imprisoned--at marseilles, dunkirk, brest, st. malo, and bordeaux. let us briefly describe the galley of those days. the royal galley was about a hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet broad, and was capable of containing about five hundred men. it had fifty benches for rowers, twenty-five on each side. between these two rows of benches was the raised middle gallery, commonly called the waist of the ship, four feet high and about three or four feet broad. the oars were fifty feet long, of which thirty-seven feet were outside the ship and thirteen within. six men worked at each oar, all chained to the same bench. they had to row in unison, otherwise they would be heavily struck by the return rowers both before and behind them. they were under the constant command of the _comite_ or galley-slave-driver, who struck all about him with his long whip in urging them to work. to enable his strokes to _tell_, the men sat naked while they rowed.[ ] their dress was always insufficient, summer and winter--the lower part of their bodies being covered with a short red jacket and a sort of apron, for their manacles prevented them wearing any other dress. [footnote : le comite ou chef de chiourme, aidé de deux _sous-comites_, allait et venait sans cesse sur le coursier, frappant les forçats à coup de nerfs de boeuf, comme un cocher ses chevaux. pour rendre les coups plus sensible et pour économiser les vêtements, _les galériens étaient nus_ quand ils ramaient.--athanase coquerel fils. _les forçats pour la foi_, .] the chain which bound each rower to his bench was fastened to his leg, and was of such a length as to enable his feet to come and go whilst rowing. at night, the galley-slave slept where he sat--on the bench on which he had been rowing all day. there was no room for him to lie down. he never quitted his bench except for the hospital or the grave; yet some of the huguenot rowers contrived to live upon their benches for thirty or forty years! during all these years they toiled in their chains in a hell of foul and disgusting utterance, for they were mixed up with thieves and the worst of criminals. they ate the bread and drank the waters of bitterness. they seemed to be forsaken by the world. they had no one to love them, for most had left their families behind them at home, or perhaps in convents or prisons. they lived under the constant threats of their keepers, who lashed them to make them row harder, who lashed them to make them sit up, or lashed them to make them lie down. the chevalier langeron, captain of _la palme_, of which marteilhe was at first a rower, used to call the _comite_ to him and say, "go and refresh the backs of these huguenots with a salad of strokes of the whip." for the captain, it seems, "held the most jesuitical sentiments," and hated his huguenot prisoners far worse than his thieves or his murderers.[ ] [footnote : "the autobiography of a french protestant," .] and yet, at any moment, a word spoken would have made these huguenots free. the catholic priests frequently visited the galleys and entreated them to become converted. if "converted," and the huguenots would only declare that they believed in the miraculous powers of the clergy, their chains would fall away from their limbs at once; and they would have been restored to the world, to their families, and to liberty! and who would not have declared themselves "converted," rather than endure these horrible punishments? yet by far the greater number of the huguenots did not. they could not be hypocrites. they would not lie to god. rather than do this, they had the heroism--some will call it the obstinacy--to remain galley-slaves for life! many of the galley-slaves did not survive their torture long. men of all ages and conditions, accustomed to indoor life, could not bear the exposure to the sun, rain, and snow, which the punishment of the galley-slave involved. the old men and the young soon succumbed and died. middle-aged men survived the longest. but there was always a change going on. when the numbers of a galley became thinned by death, there were other huguenots ready to be sent on board--perhaps waiting in some inland prison until another "great chain" could be made up for the seaports, to go on board the galley-ships, to be manacled, tortured, and killed off as before. such was the treatment of the galley-slaves in time of peace. but the galleys were also war-ships. they carried large numbers of armed men on board. sometimes they scoured the mediterranean, and protected french merchant-ships against the sallee rovers. at other times they were engaged in the english channel, attacking dutch and english ships, sometimes picking up a prize, at other times in actual sea-fight. when the service required, they were compelled to row incessantly night and day, without rest, save in the last extremity; and they were treated as if, on the first opportunity, in sight of the enemy, they would revolt and betray the ship; hence they were constantly watched by the soldiers on board, and if any commotion appeared amongst them, they were shot down without ceremony, and their bodies thrown into the sea. loaded cannons were also placed at the end of the benches of rowers, so as to shoot them down in case of necessity. whenever an enemy's ship came up, the galley-slaves were covered over with a linen screen, so as to prevent them giving signals to the enemy. when an action occurred, they were particularly exposed to danger, for the rowers and their oars were the first to be shot at--just as the boiler or screw of a war-steamer would be shot at now--in order to disable the ship. the galley-slaves thus suffered much more from the enemy's shot than the other armed men of the ship. the rowers benches were often filled with dead, before the soldiers and mariners on board had been touched. marteilhe, while a galley-slave on board _la palme_, was engaged in an adventure which had nearly cost him his life. four french galleys, after cruising along the english coast from dover to the downs, got sight of a fleet of thirty-five merchant vessels on their way from the texel to the thames, under the protection of one small english frigate. the commanders of the galleys, taking counsel together, determined to attack the frigate (which they thought themselves easily able to master), and so capture the entire english fleet. the captain of the frigate, when he saw the galleys approach him, ordered the merchantmen to crowd sail and make for the thames, the mouth of which they had nearly reached. he then sailed down upon the galleys, determined to sacrifice his ship if necessary for the safety of his charge. the galleys fired into him, but he returned never a shot. the captain of the galley in which marteilhe was, said, "oh, he is coming to surrender!" the frigate was so near that the french musqueteers were already firing full upon her. all of a sudden the frigate tacked and veered round as if about to fly from the galleys. the frenchmen called out that the english were cowards in thus trying to avoid the battle. if they did not surrender at once, they would sink the frigate! the english captain took no notice. the frigate then turned her stern towards the galley, as if to give the frenchmen an opportunity of boarding her. the french commander ordered the galley at once to run at the enemy's stern, and the crew to board the frigate. the rush was made; the galley-slaves, urged by blows of the whip, rowing with great force. the galley was suddenly nearing the stern of the frigate, when by a clever stroke of the helm the ship moved to one side, and the galley, missing it, rushed past. all the oars on that side were suddenly broken off, and the galley was placed immediately under the broadside of the enemy. then began the english part of the game. the french galley was seized with grappling irons and hooked on to the english broadside. the men on board the galley were as exposed as if they had been upon a raft or a bridge. the frigate's guns, which were charged with grapeshot, were discharged full upon them, and a frightful carnage ensued. the english also threw hand grenades, which went down amongst the rowers and killed many. they next boarded the galley, and cut to pieces all the armed men they could lay hold of, only sparing the convicts, who could make no attempt at defence. the english captain then threw off the galley, which he had broadsided and disarmed, in order to look after the merchantmen, which some of the other galleys had gone to intercept on their way to the mouth of the thames. some of the ships had already been captured; but the commanders of the galleys, seeing their fellow-commodores flying signals of distress, let go their prey, and concentrated their attack upon the frigate. this they surrounded, and after a very hard struggle the frigate was captured, but not until the english captain had ascertained that all the fleet of which he had been in charge had entered the thames and were safe. in the above encounter with the english frigate marteilhe had nearly lost his life. the bench on which he was seated, with five other slaves, was opposite one of the loaded guns of the frigate. he saw that it must be discharged directly upon them. his fellows tried to lie down flat, while marteilhe himself stood up. he saw the gunner with his lighted match approach the touchhole; then he lifted up his heart to god; the next moment he was lying stunned and prostrate in the centre of the galley, as far as the chain would allow him to reach. he was lying across the body of the lieutenant, who was killed. a long time passed, during which the fight was still going on, and then marteilhe came to himself, towards dark. most of his fellow-slaves were killed. he himself was bleeding from a large open wound on his shoulder, another on his knee, and a third in his stomach. of the eighteen men around him he was the only one that escaped, with his three wounds. the dead were all thrown into the sea. the men were about to throw marteilhe after them, but while attempting to release him from his chain, they touched the wound upon his knee, and he groaned heavily. they let him remain where he lay. shortly after, he was taken down to the bottom of the hold with the other men, where he long lay amongst the wounded and dying. at length he recovered from his wounds, and was again returned to his bench, to re-enter the horrible life of a galley-slave. there was another mean and unmanly cruelty, connected with this galley-slave service, which was practised only upon the huguenots. if an assassin or other criminal received a wound in the service of the state while engaged in battle, he was at once restored to his liberty; but if a huguenot was wounded, he was never released. he was returned to his bench and chained as before; the wounds he had received being only so many additional tortures to be borne by him in the course of his punishment. marteilhe, as we have already stated, was disembarked when he had sufficiently recovered, and marched through the entire length of france, enchained with other malefactors. on his arrival at marseilles, he was placed on board the galley _grand réale_, where he remained until peace was declared between england and france by the treaty of utrecht.[ ] [footnote : "autobiography of a french protestant," - .] queen anne of england, at the instigation of the marquis de rochegade, then made an effort to obtain the liberation of protestants serving at the galleys; and at length, out of seven hundred and forty-two huguenots who were then enslaved, a hundred and thirty-six were liberated, of whom marteilhe was one. he was thus enabled to get rid of his inhuman countrymen, and to spend the remainder of his life in holland and england, where protestants were free. chapter x. antoine court almost at the very time that louis xiv. was lying on his death-bed at versailles, a young man conceived the idea of re-establishing protestantism in france! louis xiv. had tried to enter heaven by superstition and cruelty. on his death-bed he began to doubt whether he "had not carried his authority too far."[ ] but the jesuits tried to make death easy for him, covering his body with relics of the true cross. [footnote : saint-simon and dangeau.] very different was the position of the young man who tried to undo all that louis xiv., under the influence of his mistress de maintenon, and his jesuit confessor, père la chase,[ ] had been trying all his life to accomplish. he was an intelligent youth, the son of huguenot parents in viverais, of comparatively poor and humble condition. he was, however, full of energy, activity, and a zealous disposition for work. observing the tendency which protestantism had, while bereft of its pastors, to run into gloomy forms of fanaticism, antoine court conceived the idea of reviving the pastorate, and restoring the proscribed protestant church of france. it was a bold idea, but the result proved that antoine court was justified in entertaining it. [footnote : amongst the many satires and epigrams with which louis xiv. was pursued to the grave, the following epitaph may be given:-- "ci gist le mari de thérèse de la montespan le mignon, l'esclave de la maintenon, le valet du père la chaise." at the death of louis xiv., voltaire, an _élève_ of the jesuits, was appropriately coming into notice. at the age of about twenty he was thrown into the bastille; for having written a satire on louis xiv., of which the following is an extract:-- "j'ai vu sous l'habit d'une femme un démon nous donner la loi; elle sacrifia son dieu, sa foi, son âme, pour séduire l'esprit d'un trop crédule roi. * * * * * j'ai vu l'hypocrite honoré: j'ai vu, c'est dire tout, le jésuite adoré: j'ai vu ces maux sous le règne funeste d'un prince que jadis la colère céleste accorda, par vengeance, à nos désirs ardens: j'ai vu ces maux, et je n'ai pas vingt ans." voltaire denied having written this satire.] louis xiv. died in august, . during that very month, court summoned together a small number of huguenots to consider his suggestions. the meeting was held at daybreak, in an empty quarry near nismes, which has already been mentioned in the course of this history. but it may here be necessary to inform the reader of the early life of this enthusiastic young man. antoine court was born at villeneuve de berg, in viverais, in the year . religious persecution was then at its height; assemblies were vigorously put down; and all pastors taken prisoners were hanged on the peyrou at montpellier. court was only four years old when his father died, and his mother resolved, if the boy lived, to train him up so that he might consecrate himself to the service of god. he was still very young while the camisard war was in progress, but he heard a great deal about it, and vividly remembered all that he heard. antoine court, like many protestant children, was compelled to attend a jesuit school in his neighbourhood. though but a boy he abhorred the mass. with protestants the mass was then the symbol of persecution; it was identified with the revocation of the edict--the dragonnades, the galleys, the prisons, the nunneries, the monkeries, and the jesuits. the mass was not a matter of knowledge, but of fear, of terror, and of hereditary hatred. at school, the other boys were most bitter against court, because he was the son of a huguenot. every sort of mischief was practised upon him, for little boys are generally among the greatest of persecutors. court was stoned, worried, railed at, laughed at, spit at. when leaving school, the boys called after him "he, he! the eldest son of calvin!" they sometimes pursued him with clamour and volleys of stones to the door of his house, collecting in their riotous procession all the other catholic boys of the place. sometimes they forced him into church whilst the mass was being celebrated. in fact, the boy's hatred of the mass and of catholicism grew daily more and more vehement. all these persecutions, together with reading some of the books which came under his notice at home, confirmed his aversion to the jesuitical school to which he had been sent. at the same time he became desirous of attending the secret assemblies, which he knew were being held in the neighbourhood. one day, when his mother set out to attend one of them, the boy set out to follow her. she discovered him, and demanded whither he was going. "i follow you, mother," said he, "and i wish you to permit me to go where you go. i know that you go to pray to god, and will you refuse me the favour of going to do so with you?" she shed tears at his words, told him of the danger of attending the assembly, and strongly exhorted him to secrecy; but she allowed him to accompany her. he was at that time too little and weak to walk the whole way to the meeting; but other worshippers coming up, they took the boy on their shoulders and carried him along with them. at the age of seventeen, court began to read the bible at the assemblies. one day, in a moment of sudden excitement, common enough at secret meetings, he undertook to address the assembly. what he said was received with much approval, and he was encouraged to go on preaching. he soon became famous among the mountaineers, and was regarded as a young man capable of accomplishing great things. as he grew older, he at length determined to devote his life to preaching and ministering to the forsaken and afflicted protestants. it was a noble, self-denying work, the only earthly reward for which was labour, difficulty, and danger. his mother was in great trouble, for antoine was her only remaining son. she did not, however, press him to change his resolution. court quoted to her the text, "whoever loves father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me." after this, she only saw in her son a victim consecrated, like another abraham, to the divine service. after arriving at his decision, court proceeded to visit the huguenots in low languedoc, passing by uzes to nismes, and preaching wherever he could draw assemblies of the people together. his success during this rapid excursion induced him to visit dauphiny. there he met brunel, another preacher, with knapsack on his back, running from place to place in order to avoid spies, priests, and soldiers. the two were equally full of ardour, and they went together preaching in many places, and duly encouraging each other. from dauphiny, court directed his steps to marseilles, where the royal galleys stationed there contained about three hundred huguenot galley-slaves. he penetrated these horrible floating prisons, without being detected, and even contrived to organize amongst them a regular system of secret worship. then he returned to nismes, and from thence went through the cevennes and the viverais, preaching to people who had never met for protestant worship since the termination of the wars of the camisards. to elude the spies, who began to make hot search for him, because of the enthusiasm which he excited, court contrived to be always on the move, and to appear daily in some fresh locality. the constant fatigue which he underwent undermined his health, and he was compelled to remain for a time inactive at the mineral waters of euzet. this retirement proved useful. he began to think over what might be done to revivify the protestant religion in france. remember that he was at that time only nineteen years of age! it might be thought presumptuous in a youth, comparatively uninstructed, even to dream of such a subject. the instruments of earthly power--king, pope, bishops, priests, soldiers, and spies--were all arrayed against him. he had nothing to oppose to them but truth, uprightness, conscience, and indefatigable zeal for labour. when court had last met the few protestant preachers who survived in languedoc, they were very undecided about taking up his scheme. they had met at nismes to take the sacrament in the house of a friend. there were bombonnoux (an old camisard), crotte, corteiz, brunel, and court. without coming to any decision, they separated, some going to switzerland, and others to the south and west of france. it now rested with court, during his sickness, to study and endeavour to arrange the method of reorganization of the church. the huguenots who remained in france were then divided into three classes--the "new converts," who professed catholicism while hating it; the lovers of the ancient protestant faith, who still clung to it; and, lastly, the more ignorant, who still clung to prophesying and inspiration. these last had done the protestant church much injury, for the intelligent classes generally regarded them as but mere fanatics. court found it would be requisite to keep the latter within the leading-strings of spiritual instruction, and to encourage the "new converts" to return to the church of their fathers by the re-establishment of some efficient pastoral service. he therefore urged that religious assemblies must be continued, and that discipline must be established by the appointment of elders, presbyteries, and synods, and also by the training up of a body of young pastors to preach amongst the people, and discipline them according to the rules of the protestant church. nearly thirty years had passed since it had been disorganized by the revocation of the edict of nantes, so that synods, presbyteries, and the training of preachers had become almost forgotten. the first synod was convened by court, and held in the abandoned quarry near nismes, above referred to, in the very same month in which louis xiv. breathed his last. it was a very small beginning. two or three laymen and a few preachers[ ] were present, the whole meeting numbering only nine persons. the place in which the meeting was held had often before been used as a secret place of worship by the huguenots. religious meetings held there had often been dispersed by the dragoons, and there was scarcely a stone in it that had not been splashed by huguenot blood. and now, after protestantism had been "finally suppressed," antoine court assembled his first synod to re-establish the proscribed religion! [footnote : edmund hughes says the preachers were probably rouviere (or crotte), jean huc, jean vesson, etienne arnaud, and durand.] the first meeting took place on the st of august, , at daybreak. after prayer, court, as moderator, explained his method of reorganization, which was approved. the first elders were appointed from amongst those present. a series of rules and regulations was resolved upon and ordered to be spread over the entire province. the preachers were then charged to go forth, to stir up the people and endeavour to bring back the "new converts." they lost no time in carrying out their mission. the first districts in which they were appointed to work were those of mende, alais, viviers, uzes, nismes, and montpellier, in languedoc--districts which, fifteen years before, had been the scenes of the camisard war. there, in unknown valleys, on hillsides, on the mountains, in the midst of hostile towns and villages, the missionaries sought out the huts, the farms, and the dwellings of the scattered, concealed, and half-frightened huguenots. amidst the open threats of the magistrates and others in office, and the fear of the still more hateful priests and spies, they went from house to house, and prayed, preached, advised, and endeavoured to awaken the zeal of their old allies of the "religion." the preachers were for the most part poor, and some of them were labouring men. they were mostly natives of languedoc. jean vesson, a cooper by trade, had in his youth been "inspired," and prophesied in his ecstasy. mazelet, now an elderly man, had formerly been celebrated among the camisards, and preached with great success before the soldiers of roland. at forty he was not able to read or write; but having been forced to fly into switzerland, he picked up some education at geneva, and had studied divinity under a fellow-exile. bombonnoux had been a brigadier in the troop of cavalier. after his chief's defection he resolved to continue the war to the end, by preaching, if not by fighting. he had been taken prisoner and imprisoned at montpellier, in . two of his camisard friends were first put upon the rack, and then, while still living, thrown upon a pile and burnt to death before his eyes. but the horrible character of the punishment did not terrify him. he contrived to escape from prison at montpellier, and then went about convoking assemblies and preaching to the people as before. besides these, there were huc, corteiz, durand, arnaud, brunel, and rouviere or crotte, who all went about from place to place, convoking assemblies and preaching. there were also some local preachers, as they might be called--old men who could not move far from home--who worked at their looms or trades, sometimes tilling the ground by day, and preaching at night. amongst these were monteil, guillot, and bonnard, all more than sixty years of age. court, because of his youth and energy, seems to have been among the most active of the preachers. one day, near st. hypolite, a chief centre of the huguenot population, he convoked an assembly on a mountain side, the largest that had taken place for many years. the priests of the parish gave information to the authorities; and the governor of alais offered a reward of fifty pistoles to anyone who would apprehend and deliver up to him the young preacher. troops were sent into the district; upon which court descended from the mountains towards the towns of low languedoc, and shortly after he arrived at nismes. at nismes, court first met jacques roger, who afterwards proved of great assistance to him in his work. roger had long been an exile in wurtemburg. he was originally a native of boissieres, in languedoc, and when a young man was compelled to quit france with his parents, who were huguenots. his heart, however, continued to draw him towards his native country, although it had treated himself and his family so cruelly. as roger grew older, he determined to return to france, with the object of helping his friends of the "religion." a plan had occurred to him, like that which antoine court was now endeavouring to carry into effect. the joy with which roger encountered court at nismes, and learnt his plans, may therefore be conceived. the result was, that roger undertook to "awaken" the protestants of dauphiny, and to endeavour to accomplish there what court was already gradually effecting in languedoc. roger held his first synod in dauphiny in august, , at which seven preachers and several elders or _anciens_ assisted. in the meantime antoine court again set out to visit the churches which had been reconstructed along the banks of the gardon. he had been suffering from intermittent fever, and started on his journey before he was sufficiently recovered. having no horse, he walked on foot, mostly by night, along the least known by-paths, stopping here and there upon his way. at length he became so enfeebled and ill as to be unable to walk further. he then induced two men to carry him. by crossing their hands over each other, they took him up between them, and carried him along on this improvised chair. court found a temporary lodging with a friend. but no sooner had he laid himself down to sleep, than the alarm was raised that he must get up and fly. a spy had been observed watching the house. court rose, put on his clothes, and though suffering great pain, started afresh. the night was dark and rainy. by turns shivering with cold and in an access of fever, he wandered alone for hours across the country, towards the house of another friend, where he at last found shelter. such were the common experiences of these wandering, devoted, proscribed, and heroic ministers of the gospel. their labours were not carried on without encountering other and greater dangers. now that the protestants were becoming organized, it was not so necessary to incite them to public worship. they even required to be restrained, so that they might not too suddenly awaken the suspicion or excite the opposition of the authorities. thus, at the beginning of , the preacher vesson held an open assembly near anduze. it was surprised by the troops; and seventy-two persons made prisoners, of whom the men were sent to the galleys for life, and the women imprisoned in the tour de constance. vesson was on this occasion reprimanded by the synod, for having exposed his brethren to unnecessary danger. while there was the danger of loss of liberty to the people, there was the danger of loss of life to the pastors who were bold enough to minister to their religious necessities. etienne arnaud having preached to an assembly near alais, was taken prisoner by the soldiers. they took him to montpellier, where he was judged, condemned, and sent back to alais to be hanged. this brave young man gave up his life with great courage and resignation. his death caused much sorrow amongst the protestants, but it had no effect in dissuading the preachers and pastors from the work they had taken in hand. there were many to take the place of arnaud. young bètrine offered himself to the synod, and was accepted. scripture readers were also appointed, to read the bible at meetings which preachers were not able to attend. there was, however, a great want of bibles amongst the protestants. one of the first things done by the young king louis xv.--the "well-beloved" of the jesuits--on his ascending the throne, was to issue a proclamation ordering the seizure of bibles, testaments, psalm-books, and other religious works used by the protestants. and though so many books had already been seized and burnt in the reign of louis xiv., immense piles were again collected and given to the flames by the executioners. "our need of books is very great," wrote court to a friend abroad; and the same statement was repeated in many of his letters. his principal need was of bibles and testaments; for every huguenot knew the greater part of the psalms by heart. when a testament was obtained, it was lent about, and for the most part learnt off. the labour was divided in this way. one person, sometimes a boy or girl, of good memory, would undertake to learn one or more chapters in the gospels, another a certain number in the epistles, until at last a large portion of the book was committed to memory, and could be recited at the meetings of the assemblies. and thus also it happened, that the conversation of the people, as well as the sermons of their preachers, gradually assumed a strongly biblical form. strong appeals were made to foreign protestants to supply the people with books. the refugees who had settled in switzerland, holland, and england sent the huguenots remaining in france considerable help in this way. they sent many testaments and psalm-books, together with catechisms for the young, and many devotional works written by french divines residing in holland and england--by drelincourt, saurin, claude and others. these were sent safely across the frontier in bales, put into the hands of colporteurs, and circulated amongst the protestants all over the south of france. the printing press of geneva was also put in requisition; and court had many of his sermons printed there and distributed amongst the people. until this time, court had merely acted as a preacher; and it was now determined to ordain and consecrate him as a pastor. the ceremony, though, comparatively unceremonious, was very touching. a large number of protestants in the vaunage assembled on the night of the st november, , and, after prayer, court rose and spoke for some time of the responsible duties of the ministry, and of the necessity and advantages of preaching. he thanked god for having raised up ministers to serve the church when so many of her enemies were seeking for her ruin. he finally asked the whole assembly to pray for grace to enable him to fulfil with renewed zeal the duties to which, he was about to be called, together with all the virtues needed for success. at these touching words the assembled hearers shed tears. then corteiz, the old pastor, drew near to court, now upon his knees, and placing a bible upon his head, in the name of jesus christ, and with the authority of the synod, gave him power to exercise all the functions of the ministry. cries of joy were heard on all sides. then, after further prayer, the assembly broke up in the darkness of the night. the plague which broke out in helped the progress of the new church. the protestants thought the plague had been sent as a punishment for their backsliding. piety increased, and assemblies in the desert were more largely attended than before. the intendants ceased to interfere with them, and the soldiers were kept strictly within their cantonments. more preachers were licensed, and more elders were elected. many new churches were set up throughout languedoc; and the department of the lozère, in the cevennes, became again almost entirely protestant. roger and villeveyre were almost equally successful in dauphiny; and saintonge, normandy, and poitou were also beginning to maintain a connection with the protestant churches of languedoc. chapter xi. reorganization of the church in the desert. the organization of the church in the desert is one of the most curious things in history. secret meetings of the huguenots had long been held in france. they were began several years before the act of revocation was proclaimed, when the dragonnades were on foot, and while the protestant temples were being demolished by the government. the huguenots then arranged to meet and hold their worship in retired places. as the meetings were at first held, for the most part, in languedoc, and as much of that province, especially in the district of the cevennes, is really waste and desert land, the meetings were at first called "assemblies in the desert," and for nearly a hundred years they retained that name. when court began to reorganize the protestant church in france, shortly after the camisard war, meetings in the desert had become almost unknown. there were occasional prayer-meetings, at which chapters of the bible were read or recited by those who remembered them, and psalms were sung; but there were few or no meetings at which pastors presided. court, however, resolved not only to revive the meetings of the church in the desert, but to reconstitute the congregations, and restore the system of governing them according to the methods of the huguenot church. the first thing done in reconstituting a congregation, was to appoint certain well-known religious men, as _anciens_ or elders. these were very important officers. they formed the church in the first instance; for where there were no elders, there was no church. they were members of the _consistoire_ or presbytery. they looked after the flock, visited them in their families, made collections, named the pastors, and maintained peace, order, and discipline amongst the people. though first nominated by the pastors, they were elected by the congregation; and the reason for their election was their known ability, zeal, and piety. the elder was always present at the assemblies, though the minister was absent. he prevented the members from succumbing to temptation and falling away; he censured scandal; he kept up the flame of religious zeal, and encouraged the failing and helpless; he distributed amongst the poorest the collections made and intrusted to him by the church. we have said that part of the duty of the elders was to censure scandal amongst the members. if their conduct was not considered becoming the christian life, they were not visited by the pastors and were not allowed to attend the assemblies, until they had declared their determination to lead a better life. what a punishment for infraction of discipline! to be debarred attending an assembly, for being present at which, the pastor, if detected, might be hanged, and the penitent member sent to the galleys for life![ ] [footnote : c. coquerel, "Église du désert," i. .] the elders summoned the assemblies. they gave the word to a few friends, and these spread the notice about amongst the rest. the news soon became known, and in the course of a day or two, the members of the congregation, though living perhaps in distant villages, would be duly informed of the time and place of the intended meeting. it was usually held at night,--in some secret place--in a cave, a hollow in the woods, a ravine, or an abandoned farmstead. men, women, and even children were taken thither, after one, two, or sometimes three leagues' walking. the meetings were always full of danger, for spies were lurking about. catholic priests were constant informers; and soldiers were never far distant. but besides the difficulties of spies and soldiers, the meetings were often dispersed by the rain in summer, or by the snow in winter. after the camisard war, and before the appearance of court, these meetings rarely numbered more than a hundred persons. but court and his fellow-pastors often held meetings at which more than two thousand people were present. on one occasion, not less than four thousand persons attended an assembly in lower languedoc. when the meetings were held by day, they were carefully guarded and watched by sentinels on the look-out, especially in those places near which garrisons were stationed. the fleetest of the young men were chosen for this purpose. they watched the garrison exits, and when the soldiers made a sortie, the sentinels communicated by signal from hill to hill, thus giving warning to the meeting to disperse. but the assemblies were mostly held at night; and even then the sentinels were carefully posted about, but not at so great a distance. the chief of the whole organization was the pastor. first, there were the members entitled to church, privileges; next the _anciens_; and lastly the pastors. as in presbyterianism, so in huguenot calvinism, its form of government was republican. the organization was based upon the people who elected their elders; then upon the elders who selected and recommended the pastors; and lastly upon the whole congregation of members, elders, and pastors (represented in synods), who maintained the entire organization of the church. there were three grades of service in the rank of pastor--first students, next preachers, and lastly pastors. wonderful that there should have been students of a profession, to follow which was almost equal to a sentence of death! but there were plenty of young enthusiasts ready to brave martyrdom in the service of the proscribed church. sometimes it was even necessary to restrain them in their applications. court once wrote to pierre durand, at a time when the latter was restoring order and organization in viverais: "sound and examine well the persons offering themselves for your approval, before permitting them to enter on this glorious employment. secure good, virtuous men, full of zeal for the cause of truth. it is piety only that inspires nobility and greatness of soul. piety sustains us under the most extreme dangers, and triumphs over the severest obstacles. the good conscience always marches forward with its head erect." when the character of the young applicants was approved, their studies then proceeded, like everything else connected with the proscribed religion, in secret. the students followed the professor and pastor in his wanderings over the country, passing long nights in marching, sometimes hiding in caves by day, or sleeping under the stars by night, passing from meeting to meeting, always with death looming before them. "i have often pitched my professor's chair," said court, "in a torrent underneath a rock. the sky was our roof, and the leafy branches thrown out from the crevices in the rock overhead, were our canopy. there i and my students would remain for about eight days; it was our hall, our lecture-room, and our study. to make the most of our time, and to practise the students properly, i gave them a text of scripture to discuss before me--say the first eleven verses of the fifth chapter of luke. i would afterwards propose to them some point of doctrine, some passage of scripture, some moral precept, or sometimes i gave them some difficult passages to reconcile. after the whole had stated their views upon the question under discussion, i asked the youngest if he had anything to state against the arguments advanced; then the others were asked in turn; and after they had finished, i stated the views which i considered most just and correct. when the more advanced students were required to preach, they mounted a particular place, where a pole had been set across some rocks in the ravine, and which for the time served for a pulpit. and when they had delivered themselves, the others were requested by turns to express themselves freely upon the subject of the sermon which they had heard." when the _proposant_ or probationer was considered sufficiently able to preach, he was sent on a mission to visit the churches. sometimes he preached the approved sermons of other pastors; sometimes he preached his own sermons, after they had been examined by persons appointed by the synod. after a time, if approved by the moderator and a committee of the synod, the _proposant_ was licensed to preach. his work then resembled that of a pastor; but he could not yet administer the sacrament. it was only when he had passed the synod, and been appointed by the laying on of hands, that he could exercise the higher pastoral functions. then, with respect to the maintenance of the pastors and preachers, court recounts, not without pride, that for the ten years between and (excepting the years which he spent at geneva), he served the huguenot churches without receiving a farthing. his family and friends saw to the supply of his private wants. with respect to the others, they were supported by collections made at the assemblies; and, as the people were nearly all poor, the amount collected was very small. on one occasion, three assemblies produced a halfpenny and six half-farthings. but a regular system of collecting moneys was framed by the synods (consisting of a meeting of pastors and elders), and out of the common fund so raised, emoluments were assigned, first to those preachers who were married, and afterwards to those who were single. in either case the pay was very small, scarcely sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. the students for the ministry were at first educated by court and trained to preach, while he was on his dangerous journeys from one assembly in the desert to another. nor was the supply of preachers sufficient to visit the congregations already organized. court had long determined, so soon as the opportunity offered, of starting a school for the special education of preachers and pastors, so that the work he was engaged in might be more efficiently carried on. he at first corresponded with influential french refugees in england and holland with reference to the subject. he wrote to basnage and saurin, but they received his propositions coolly. he wrote to william wake, then archbishop of canterbury, who promised his assistance. at last court resolved to proceed into switzerland, to stir up the french refugees disposed to help him in his labours. arrived at geneva, court sought out m. pictet, to whom he explained the state of affairs in france. it had been rumoured amongst the foreign protestants that fanaticism and "inspiration" were now in the ascendant among the protestants of france. court showed that this was entirely a mistake, and that all which the proscribed huguenots in france wanted, was a supply of properly educated pastors. the friends of true religion, and the enemies of fanaticism, ought therefore to come to their help and supply them with that of which they stood most in need. if they would find teachers, court would undertake to supply them with congregations. and huguenot congregations were rapidly increasing, not only in languedoc and dauphiny, but in normandy, picardy, poitou, saintonge, bearn, and the other provinces. at length the subject became matured. it was not found desirable to establish the proposed school at geneva, that city being closely watched by france, and frequently under the censure of its government for giving shelter to refugee frenchmen. it was eventually determined that the college for the education of preachers should begin at lausanne. it was accordingly commenced in the year , and established under the superintendence of m. duplan. a committee of refugees called the "society of help for the afflicted faithful," was formed at lausanne to collect subscriptions for the maintenance of the preachers, the pastors, and the seminary. these were in the first place received from huguenots settled in switzerland, afterwards increased by subscriptions obtained from refugees settled in holland, germany, and england. the king of england subscribed five hundred guineas yearly. duplan was an indefatigable agent. in fourteen years he collected fourteen thousand pounds. by these efforts the number of students was gradually increased. they came from all parts of france, but chiefly from languedoc. between (the year in which it was started) and , ninety students had passed through the seminary. when the students had passed the range of study appointed by the professors, they returned from switzerland to france to enter upon the work of their lives. they had passed the school for martyrdom, and were ready to preach to the assemblies--they had paved their way to the scaffold! the preachers always went abroad with their lives in their hands. they travelled mostly by night, shunning the open highways, and selecting abandoned routes, often sheep-paths across the hills, to reach the scene of their next meeting. the trace of their steps is still marked upon the soil of the cevennes, the people of the country still speaking of the solitary routes taken by their instructors when passing from parish to parish, to preach to their fathers. they were dressed, for disguise, in various ways; sometimes as peasants, as workmen, or as shepherds. on one occasion, court and duplan travelled the country disguised as officers! the police heard of it, and ordered their immediate arrest, pointing out the town and the very house where they were to be taken. but the preachers escaped, and assumed a new dress. when living near nismes, court was one day seated under a tree composing a sermon, when a party of soldiers, hearing that he was in the neighbourhood, came within sight. court climbed up into the tree, where he remained concealed among the branches, and thus contrived to escape their search. on another occasion, he was staying with a friend, in whose house he had slept during the previous night. a detachment of troops suddenly surrounded the house, and the officer knocked loudly at the door. court made his friend go at once to bed pretending to be ill, while he himself cowered down in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. his wife slowly answered the door, which the soldiers were threatening to blow open. they entered, rummaged the house, opened all the chests and closets, sounded the walls, examined the sick man's room, and found nothing! court himself, as well as the other pastors, worked very hard. on one occasion, court made a round of visits in lower languedoc and in the cevennes, at first alone, and afterwards accompanied by a young preacher. in the space of two months and a few days he visited thirty-one churches, holding assemblies, preaching, and administering the sacrament, during which he travelled over three hundred miles. the weather did not matter to the pastors--rain nor snow, wind nor storm, never hindered them. they took the road and braved all. even sickness often failed to stay them. sickness might weaken but did not overthrow them. the spies and police so abounded throughout the country, and were so active, that they knew all the houses in which the preachers might take refuge. a list of these was prepared and placed in the hands of the intendant of the province.[ ] if preachers were found in them, both the shelterers and the sheltered knew what they had to expect. the whole property and goods of the former were confiscated and they were sent to the galleys for life; and the latter were first tortured by the rack, and then hanged. the houses in which preachers were found were almost invariably burnt down. [footnote : it has since been published in the "bulletin de la société du protestantisme français."] notwithstanding the great secrecy with which the whole organization proceeded, preachers were frequently apprehended, assemblies were often surprised, and many persons were imprisoned and sent to the galleys for life. each village had its chief spy--the priest; and beneath the priest there were a number of other spies--spies for money, spies for cruelty, spies for revenge. was an assembly of huguenots about to be held? a spy, perhaps a traitor, would make it known. the priest's order was sufficient for the captain of the nearest troop of soldiers to proceed to disperse it. they marched and surrounded the assembly. a sound of volley-firing was heard. the soldiers shot down, hanged, or made prisoners of the unlawful worshippers. punishments were sudden, and inquiry was never made into them, however brutal. there was the fire for bibles, testaments, and psalm-books; galleys for men; prisons and convents for women; and gibbets for preachers. in a large number of prisoners were captured in the famous old quarry near nismes, long the seat of secret protestant worship. but the troops surrounded the meeting suddenly, and the whole were taken. the women were sent for life to the tour de constance, and the men, chained in gangs, were sent all through france to la rochelle, to be imprisoned in the galleys there. the ambassador of england made intercession for the prisoners, and their sentence was commuted into one of perpetual banishment from france. they were accordingly transported to new orleans on the mississippi, to populate the rising french colony in that quarter of north america. thus crimes abounded, and cruelty when practised upon huguenots was never investigated. the seizure and violation of women was common. fathers knew the probable consequence when their daughters were seized. the daughter of a huguenot was seized at uzes, in , when the father immediately died of grief. two sisters were seized at the same place to be "converted," and their immediate relations were thrown into gaol in the meantime. this was a common proceeding. the tour de constance was always filling, and kept full. the dying were tortured. if they refused the viaticum they were treated as "damned persons." when jean de molènes of cahors died, making a profession of protestantism, his body was denounced as damned, and it was abandoned without sepulture. a woman who addressed some words of consolation to joseph martin when dying was condemned to pay a fine of six thousand livres, and be imprisoned in the castle of beauregard; and as for martin, his memory was declared to be damned for ever. many such outrages to the living and dead were constantly occurring.[ ] gaolers were accustomed to earn money by exhibiting the corpses of huguenot women at fairs, inviting those who paid for admission, to walk up and "see the corpse of a damned person."[ ] [footnote : edmund hughes, "histoire de la restauration du protestantisme en france," ii. .] [footnote : bénoît, "edit de nantes," v. .] notwithstanding all these cruelties, protestantism was making considerable progress, both in languedoc and dauphiny. in reorganizing the church, the whole country had been divided into districts, and preachers and pastors endeavoured to visit the whole of their members with as much regularity as possible. thus languedoc was divided into seven districts, and to each of those a _proposant_ or probationary preacher was appointed. the presbyteries and synods met regularly and secretly in a cave, or the hollow bed of a river, or among the mountains. they cheered each other up, though their progress was usually over the bodies of their dead friends. for any pastor or preacher to be apprehended, was, of course, certain death. thus, out of thirteen huguenots who were found worshipping in a private apartment at montpellier, in , vesson, the pastor, and bonicel and antoine comte, his assistants, were at once condemned and hanged on the peyrou, the other ten persons being imprisoned or sent to the galleys for life. shortly after, huc, the aged pastor, was taken prisoner in the cevennes, brought to montpellier, and hanged in the same place. a reward of a thousand livres was offered by bernage, the intendant, for the heads of the remaining preachers, the fatal list comprising the names of court, cortez, durand, rouviere, bombonnoux, and others. the names of these "others" were not mentioned, not being yet thought worthy of the gibbet. and yet it was at this time that the bishop of alais made an appeal to the government against the toleration shown to the huguenots! in , he sent a long memorial to paris, alleging that catholicism was suffering a serious injury; that not only had the "new converts" withdrawn themselves from the catholic church, but that the old catholics themselves were resorting to the huguenot assemblies; that sometimes their meetings numbered from three to four thousand persons; that their psalms were sometimes overheard in the surrounding villages; that the churches were becoming deserted, the curés in some parishes not being able to find a single catholic to serve at mass; that the protestants had ceased to send their children to school, and were baptized and married without the intervention of the church. in consequence of these representations, the then regent, the duke of bourbon, sent down an urgent order to the authorities to carry out the law--to prevent meetings, under penalty of death to preachers, and imprisonment at the galleys to all who attended them, ordering that the people should be _forced_ to go to church and the children to school, and reviving generally the severe laws against protestantism issued by louis xiv. the result was that many of the assemblies were shortly after attacked and dispersed, many persons were made prisoners and sent to the galleys, and many more preachers were apprehended, racked, and hanged. repeated attempts were made to apprehend antoine court, as being the soul of the renewed protestant organization. a heavy reward was offered for his head. the spies and police hunted after him in all directions. houses where he was supposed to be concealed were surrounded by soldiers at night, and every hole and corner in them ransacked. three houses were searched in one night. court sometimes escaped with great difficulty. on one occasion he remained concealed for more than twenty hours under a heap of manure. his friends endeavoured to persuade him to leave the country until the activity of the search for him had passed. since the year , court had undertaken new responsibilities. he had become married, and was now the father of three children. he had married a young huguenot woman of uzes. he first met her in her father's house, while he was in hiding from the spies. while he was engaged in his pastoral work his wife and family continued to live at uzes. court was never seen in her company, but could only visit his family secretly. the woman was known to be of estimable character, but it gave rise to suspicions that she had three children without a known father. the spies were endeavouring to unravel the secret, tempted by the heavy reward offered for court's head. one day the new commandant of the town, passing before the door of the house where court's wife lived, stopped, and, pointing to the house, put some questions to the neighbours. court was informed of this, and immediately supposed that his house had become known, that his wife and family had been discovered and would be apprehended. he at once made arrangements for having them removed to geneva. they reached that city in safety, in the month of april, . shortly after, court, still wandering and preaching about languedoc, became seriously ill. he feared for his wife, he feared for his family, and conceived the design of joining them in switzerland. a few months later, exhausted by his labours and continued illness, he left languedoc and journeyed by slow stages to geneva. he was still a young man, only thirty-three; but he had worked excessively hard during the last dozen years. since the age of fourteen, in fact, he had evangelized languedoc. shortly before court left france for switzerland, the preacher, alexandre roussel, was, in the year , added to the number of martyrs. he was only twenty-six years of age. the occasion on which he was made prisoner was while attending an assembly near vigan. the whole of the people had departed, and roussel was the last to leave the meeting. he was taken to montpellier, and imprisoned in the citadel, which had before held so many huguenot pastors. he was asked to abjure, and offered a handsome bribe if he would become a catholic. he refused to deny his faith, and was sentenced to die. when antoine court went to offer consolation to his mother, she replied, "if my son had given way i should have been greatly distressed; but as he died with constancy, i thank god for strengthening him to perform this last work in his service." court did not leave his brethren in france without the expostulations of his friends. they alleged that his affection for his wife and family had cooled his zeal for god's service. duplan and cortez expostulated with him; and the churches of languedoc, which he himself had established, called upon him to return to his duties amongst them. but court did not attend to their request. his determination was for the present unshaken. he had a long arrears of work to do in quiet. he had money to raise for the support of the suffering church of france, and for the proper maintenance of the college for students, preachers, and pastors. he had to help the refugees, who still continued to leave france for switzerland, and to write letters and rouse the protestant kingdoms of the north, as brousson had done before him some thirty years ago. the city of berne was very generous in its treatment of court and the huguenots generally. the bernish government allotted court a pension of five hundred livres a-year--for he was without the means of supporting his family--all his own and his wife's property having been seized and sequestrated in france. court preached with great success in the principal towns of switzerland, more particularly at berne, and afterwards at lausanne, where he spent the rest of his days. though he worked there more peacefully, he laboured as continuously as ever in the service of the huguenot churches. he composed addresses to them; he educated preachers and pastors for them; and one of his principal works, while at lausanne, was to compose a history of the huguenots in france subsequent to the revocation of the edict of nantes. what he had done for the reorganization of the huguenot church in france may be thus briefly stated. court had begun his work in , at which time there was no settled congregation in the south of france. the huguenots were only ministered to by occasional wandering pastors. in , the year in which court finally left france, there were in lower languedoc organized, though secretly governed, churches; in upper languedoc, ; in the cevennes, ; in the lozère ; and in viverais, churches. there were now over , recognised protestants in languedoc alone. the ancient discipline had been restored; churches had been organized; a seminary for the education of preachers and pastors had been established; and protestantism was extending in dauphiny, bearn, saintonge,[ ] and other quarters. [footnote : in , a deputation from guyenne, royergue, and poitou, appeared before the languedoc synod, requesting preachers and pastors to be sent to them. the synod agreed to send maroger as preacher. bètrine (the first of the lausanne students) and grail were afterwards sent to join him. protestantism was also reawakening in saintonge and picardy, and pastors from languedoc journeyed there to administer the sacrament. preachers were afterwards sent to join them, to awaken the people, and reorganize the congregations.] such were, in a great measure, the results of the labours of antoine court and his assistants during the previous fifteen years. chapter xii. the church in the desert, - --paul rabaut. the persecutions of the huguenots increased at one time and relaxed at another. when france was at war, and the soldiers were fighting in flanders or on the rhine, the bishops became furious, and complained bitterly to the government of the toleration shown to the protestants. the reason was that there were no regiments at liberty to pursue the huguenots and disperse their meetings in the desert. when the soldiers returned from the wars, persecution began again. it usually began with the seizing and burning of books. the book-burning days were considered amongst the great days of fête. one day in june, , the intendant of languedoc visited nismes, escorted by four battalions of troops. on arriving, the principal catholics were selected, and placed as commissaries to watch the houses of the suspected huguenots. at night, while the inhabitants slept, the troops turned out, and the commissaries pointed out the huguenot houses to be searched. the inmates were knocked up, the soldiers entered, the houses were rummaged, and all the books that could be found were taken to the hôtel de ville. a few days after a great _auto-da-fé_ was held. the entire catholic population turned out. there were the four battalions of troops, the gendarmes, the catholic priests, and the chief dignitaries; and in their presence all the huguenot books were destroyed. they were thrown into a pile on the usual place of execution, and the hangman set fire to this great mass of bibles, psalm-books, catechisms, and sermons.[ ] the officers laughed, the priests sneered, the multitude cheered. these bonfires were of frequent occurrence in all the towns of languedoc. [footnote : e. hughes, "histoire de la restauration, du protestantisme en france," ii. .] but if the priests hated the printed word, still more did they hate the spoken word. they did not like the bible, but they hated the preachers. fines, _auto-da-fés_, condemnation to the galleys, seizures of women and girls, and profanation of the dead, were tolerable punishments, but there was nothing like hanging a preacher. "nothing," said saint-florentin to the commandant of la devese, "can produce more impression than hanging a preacher; and it is very desirable that you should immediately take steps to arrest one of them." the commandant obeyed orders, and apprehended pierre durand. he was on his way to baptize the child of one of his congregation, who lived on a farm in viverais. an apparent peasant, who seemed to be waiting his approach, offered to conduct him to the farm. durand followed him. the peasant proved to be a soldier in disguise. he led durand directly into the midst of his troop. there he was bound and carried off to montpellier. durand was executed at the old place--the peyrou--the soldiers beating their drums to stifle his voice while he prayed. his corpse was laid beside that of alexandre roussel, under the rampart of the fortress of montpellier. durand was the last of the preachers in france who had attended the synod of . they had all been executed, excepting only antoine court, who was safe in switzerland. the priests were not so successful with claris, the preacher, who contrived to escape their clutches. claris had just reached france on his return from the seminary at lausanne. he had taken shelter for the night with a protestant friend at foissac, near uzes. scarcely had he fallen asleep, when the soldiers, informed by the spies, entered his chamber, bound him, and marched him off on foot by night, to alais. he was thrown into gaol, and was afterwards judged and condemned to death. his friends in alais, however, secretly contrived to get an iron chisel passed to him in prison. he raised the stone of a chamber which communicated with his dungeon, descended to the ground, and silently leapt the wall. he was saved. pastors and preachers continued to be tracked and hunted with renewed ardour in saintonge, poitou, gascony, and dauphiny. "the chase," as it was called, was better organized than it had been for twenty years previously. the catholic clergy, however, continued to complain. the chase, they said, was not productive enough! the hangings of pastors were too few. the curates of the cevennes thus addressed the intendants: "you do not perform your duty: you are neither active enough nor pitiless enough;"[ ] and they requested the government to adopt more vigorous measures. [footnote : e. hughes, ii. . coquerel, "l'Église dans le désert," i. .] the intendants, who were thus accused, insisted that they _had_ done their duty. they had hanged all the huguenot preachers that the priests and their spies had discovered and brought to them. they had also offered increased rewards for the preachers' heads. if protestantism counted so large a number of adherents, _they_ were surely not to blame for that! had the priests themselves done _their_ duty? thus the intendants and the curés reproached each other by turns. and yet the pastors and preachers had not been spared. they had been hanged without mercy. they knew they were in the peril of constant death. "i have slept fifteen days in a meadow," wrote cortez, the pastor, "and i write this under a tree." morel, the preacher, when attending an assembly, was fired at by the soldiers and died of his wounds. pierre dortial was also taken prisoner when holding an assembly. the host with whom he lived was condemned to the galleys for life; the arrondissement in which the assembly had been held was compelled to pay a fine of three thousand livres; and dortial himself was sentenced to be hanged. when the aged preacher was informed of his sentence he exclaimed: "what an honour for me, oh my god! to have been chosen from so many others to suffer death because of my constancy to the truth." he was executed at nismes, and died with courage. in france was at war, and the huguenots enjoyed a certain amount of liberty. the edicts against them were by no means revoked; their execution was merely suspended. the provinces were stripped of troops, and the clergy could no longer call upon them to scatter the meetings in the desert. hence the assemblies increased. the people began to think that the commandants of the provinces had received orders to shut their eyes, and see nothing of the proceedings of the huguenots. at a meeting held in a valley between calvisson and langlade, in languedoc, no fewer than ten thousand persons openly met for worship. no troops appeared. there was no alarm nor surprise. everything passed in perfect quiet. in many other places, public worship was celebrated, the sacrament was administered, children were baptized, and marriages were celebrated in the open day.[ ] [footnote : although marriages by the pastors had long been declared illegal, they nevertheless married and baptized in the desert. after , the number of protestant marriages greatly multiplied, though it was known that the issue of such marriages were declared, by the laws of france to be illegal. many of the protestants of dauphiny went across the frontier into switzerland, principally to geneva, and were there married.] the catholics again urgently complained to the government of the increasing number of huguenot meetings. the bishop of poitiers complained that in certain parishes of his diocese there was not now a single catholic. low poitou contained thirty protestant churches, divided into twelve arrondissements, and each arrondissement contained about seven thousand members. the procureur-général of normandy said, "all this country is full of huguenots." but the government had at present no troops to spare, and the catholic bishops and clergy must necessarily wait until the war with the english and the austrians had come to an end. antoine court paid a short visit to languedoc in , to reconcile a difference which had arisen in the church through the irregular conduct of pastor boyer. court was received with great enthusiasm, and when boyer was re-established in his position as pastor, after making his submission to the synod, a convocation of huguenots was held near sauzet, at which thousands of people were present. court remained for about a month in france, preaching almost daily to immense audiences. at nismes, he preached at the famous place for huguenot meetings--in the old quarry, about three miles from the town. there were about twenty thousand persons present, ranged, as in an amphitheatre, along the sides of the quarry. it was a most impressive sight. peasants and gentlemen mixed together. even the "beau monde" of nismes was present. everybody thought that there was now an end of the persecution.[ ] [footnote : of the preachers about this time ( - ) the best known were morel, foriel, mauvillon, voulaud, corteiz, peyrot, roux, gauch, coste, dugnière, blachon, gabriac, déjours, rabaut, gibert, mignault, désubas, dubesset, pradel, morin, defferre, loire, pradon,--with many more. defferre restored protestantism in berne. loire (a native of st. omer, and formerly a catholic), viala, préneuf, and prudon, were the apostles of normandy, rouergue, guyenne, and poitou.] in the meantime the clergy continued to show signs of increasing irritation. they complained, denounced, and threatened. various calumnies were invented respecting the huguenots. the priests of dauphiny gave out that roger, the pastor, had read an edict purporting to be signed by louis xv. granting complete toleration to the huguenots! the report was entirely without foundation, and roger indignantly denied that he had read any such edict. but the report reached the ears of the king, then before ypres with his army; on which he issued a proclamation announcing that the rumour publicly circulated that it was his intention to tolerate the huguenots was absolutely false. no sooner had the war terminated, and the army returned to france, than the persecutions recommenced as hotly as ever. the citizens of nismes, for having recently encouraged the huguenots and attended court's great meeting, were heavily fined. all the existing laws for the repression and destruction of protestantism were enforced. suspected persons were apprehended and imprisoned without trial. a new "hunt" was set on foot for preachers. there were now plenty of soldiers at liberty to suppress the meetings in the desert, and they were ordered into the infested quarters. in a word, persecution was let loose all over france. nor was it without the usual results. it was very hot in dauphiny. there a detachment of horse police, accompanied by regular troops and a hangman, ran through the province early in , spreading terror everywhere. one of their exploits was to seize a sick old huguenot, drag him from his bed, and force him towards prison. he died upon the road. in february, it was ascertained that the huguenots met for worship in a certain cavern. the owner of the estate on which the cavern was situated, though unaware of the meetings, was fined a thousand crowns, and imprisoned for a year in the castle of cret. next month, louis ranc, a pastor, was seized at livron while baptizing an infant, taken to die, and hanged. he had scarcely breathed his last, when the hangman cut the cord, hewed off the head, and made a young protestant draw the corpse along the streets of die. in the month of april, , jacques roger, the old friend and coadjutor of court--the apostle of dauphiny as court had been of languedoc--was taken prisoner and conducted to grenoble. roger was then eighty years old, worn out with privation and hard work. he was condemned to death. he professed his joy at being still able to seal with his blood the truths he had so often proclaimed. on his way to the scaffold, he sang aloud the fifty-first psalm. he was executed in the place du breuil. after he had hung for twenty-four hours, his body was taken down, dragged along the streets of grenoble, and thrown into the isère. at grenoble also, in the same year, seven persons were condemned to the galleys. a young woman was publicly whipped at the same place for attending a huguenot meeting. seven students and pastors who could not be found, were hanged in effigy. four houses were demolished for having served as asylums for preachers. fines were levied on all sides, and punishments of various kinds were awarded to many hundred persons. thus persecution ran riot in dauphiny in the years and . in languedoc it was the same. the prisons and the galleys were always kept full. dragoons were quartered in the huguenot villages, and by this means the inhabitants were soon ruined. the soldiers pillaged the houses, destroyed the furniture, tore up the linen, drank all the wine, and, when they were in good humour, followed the cattle, swine, and fowl, and killed them off sword in hand. montauban, an old huguenot town, was thus ruined in the course of a very few months. one day, in a languedoc village, a soldier seized a young girl with a foul intention. she cried aloud, and the villagers came to her rescue. the dragoons turned out in a body, and fired upon the people. an old man was shot dead, a number of the villagers were taken prisoners, and, with their hands tied to the horses' tails, were conducted for punishment to montauban. all the towns and villages in upper languedoc were treated with the same cruelty. nismes was fined over and over again. viverais was treated with the usual severity. m. désubas, the pastor, was taken prisoner there, and conducted to vernoux. as the soldiers led him through the country to prison, the villagers came out in crowds to see him pass. many followed the pastor, thinking they might be able to induce the magistrates of vernoux to liberate him. the villagers were no sooner cooped up in a mass in the chief street of the town, than they were suddenly fired upon by the soldiers. thirty persons were killed on the spot, more than two hundred were wounded, and many afterwards died of their wounds. désubas, the pastor, was conducted to nismes, and from nismes to montpellier. while on his way to death at montpellier, some of his peasant friends, who lived along the road, determined to rescue him. but when paul rabaut heard of the proposed attempt, he ran to the place where the people had assembled and held them back. he was opposed to all resistance to the governing power, and thought it possible, by patience and righteousness, to live down all this horrible persecution. désubas was judged, and, as usual, condemned to death. though it was winter time, he was led to his punishment almost naked; his legs uncovered, and only in thin linen vest over his body. arrived at the gallows, his books and papers were burnt before his eyes, and he was then delivered over to the executioner. a jesuit presented a crucifix for him to kiss, but he turned his head to one side, raised his eyes upwards, and was then hanged. the same persecution prevailed over the greater part of france. in saintonge, elie vivien, the preacher, was taken prisoner, and hanged at la rochelle. his body remained for twenty-four hours on the gallows. it was then placed upon a forked gibbet, where it hung until the bones were picked clean by the crows and bleached by the wind and the sun.[ ] [footnote : e. hughes, "histoire de la restauration," &c., ii. .] the same series of persecutions went on from one year to another. it was a miserable monotony of cruelty. there was hanging for the pastors; the galleys for men attending meetings in the desert; the prisons and convents for women and children. wherever it was found that persons had been married by the huguenot pastors, they were haled before the magistrate, fined and imprisoned, and told that they had been merely living in concubinage, and that their children were illegitimate. sometimes it was thought that the persecutors would relent. france was again engaged in a disastrous war with england and austria; and it was feared that england would endeavour to stir up a rebellion amongst the huguenots. but the pastors met in a general synod, and passed resolutions assuring the government of their loyalty to the king,[ ] and of their devotion to the laws of france! [footnote : on the st of november, , the ministers of languedoc met in haste, and wrote to the intendant, le nain: "monseigneur, nous n'avons aucune connaissance de ces gens qu'on appelle émissaires, et qu'on dit être envoyés des pays étrangers pour solliciter les protestants à la révolte. nous avons exhorté, et nous nous proposons d'exhorter encore dans toutes les occasions, nos troupeaux à la soumission au souverain et à la patience dans les afflictions, et de nous écarter jamais de la pratique de ce précepte: craignez dieu et honorez le roi."] their "loyalty" proved of no use. the towns of languedoc were as heavily fined as before, for attending meetings in the desert.[ ] children were, as usual, taken away from their parents and placed in jesuit convents. le nain apprehended jean desjours, and had him hanged at montpellier, on the ground that he had accompanied the peasants who, as above recited, went into vernoux after the martyr désubas. [footnote : près de saint-ambroix (cevennes) se tint un jour une assemblée. survint un détachement. les femmes et les filles furent dépouillées, violées, et quelques hommes furent blessés.--e. hughes, _histoire de la restauration, &c._, ii. .] the catholics would not even allow protestant corpses to be buried in peace. at levaur a well-known huguenot died. two of his friends went to dig a grave for him by night; they were observed by spies and informed against. by dint of money and entreaties, however, the friends succeeded in getting the dead man buried. the populace, stirred up by the white penitents (monks), opened the grave, took out the corpse, sawed the head from the body, and prepared to commit further outrages, when the police interfered, and buried the body again, in consideration of the large sum that had been paid to the authorities for its interment. the populace were always wild for an exhibition of cruelty. in provence, a protestant named montague died, and was secretly interred. the catholics having discovered the place where he was buried determined to disinter him. the grave was opened, and the corpse taken out. a cord was attached to the neck, and the body was hauled through the village to the music of a tambourine and flageolet. at every step it was kicked or mauled by the crowd who accompanied it. under the kicks the corpse burst. the furious brutes then took out the entrails and attached them to poles, going through the village crying, "who wants preachings? who wants preachings?"[ ] [footnote : antoine court, "mémoire historique," .] to such a pitch of brutality had the kings of france and their instigators, the jesuits--who, since the revocation of the edict, had nearly the whole education of the country in their hands--reduced the people; from whom they were themselves, however, to suffer almost an equal amount of indignity. in the midst of these hangings and cruelties, the bishops again complained bitterly of the tolerance granted to the huguenots. m. de montclus, bishop of alais, urged "that the true cause of all the evils that afflict the country was the relaxation of the laws against heresy by the magistrates, that they gave themselves no trouble to persecute the protestants, and that their further emigration from the kingdom was no more to be feared than formerly." it was, they alleged, a great danger to the country that there should be in it two millions of men allowed to live without church and outside the law.[ ] [footnote : see "memorial of general assembly of clergy to the king," in _collection des procès-verbaux_, .] the afflicted church at this time had many misfortunes to contend with. in , the noble, self-denying, indefatigable claris died--one of the few protestant pastors who died in his bed. in , the eloquent young preacher, françois benezet,[ ] was taken and hanged at montpellier. meetings in the desert were more vigorously attacked and dispersed, and when surrounded by the soldiers, most persons were shot; the others were taken prisoners. [footnote : the king granted livres of reward to the spy who detected benezet and procured his apprehension by the soldiers.] the huguenot pastors repeatedly addressed louis xv. and his ministers, appealing to them for protection as loyal subjects. in they addressed the king in a new memorial, respectfully representing that their meetings for public worship, sacraments, baptisms, and marriages, were matters of conscience. they added: "your troops pursue us in the deserts as if we were wild beasts; our property is confiscated; our children are torn from us; we are condemned to the galleys; and although our ministers continually exhort us to discharge our duty as good citizens and faithful subjects, a price is set upon their heads, and when they are taken, they are cruelly executed." but louis xv. and his ministers gave no greater heed to this petition than they had done to those which had preceded it. after occasional relays the catholic persecutions again broke out. in there was a considerable emigration in consequence of a new intendant having been appointed to languedoc. the catholics called upon him to put in force the powers of the law. new brooms sweep clean. the intendant proceeded to carry out the law with such ferocity as to excite great terror throughout the province. meetings were surrounded; prisoners taken and sent to the galleys; and all the gaols and convents were filled with women and children. the emigration began again. many hundred persons went to holland; and a still larger number went to settle with their compatriots as silk and poplin weavers in dublin. the intendant of languedoc tried to stop their flight. the roads were again watched as before. all the outlets from the kingdom were closed by the royalist troops. many of the intending emigrants were made prisoners. they were spoiled of everything, robbed of their money, and thrown into gaol. nevertheless, another large troop started, passed through switzerland, and reached ireland at the end of the year. at the same time, emigration was going on from normandy and poitou, where persecution was compelling the people to fly from their own shores and take refuge in england. this religious emigration of was, however, almost the last which took place from france. though the persecutions were drawing to an end, they had not yet come to a close. in , the young pastor tessier (called lafage), had just returned from lausanne, where he had been pursuing his studies for three years. he had been tracked by a spy to a certain house, where he had spent the night. next morning the house was surrounded by soldiers. tessier tried to escape by getting out of a top window and running along the roofs of the adjoining houses. a soldier saw him escaping and shot at him. he was severely wounded in the arm. he was captured, taken before the intendant of languedoc, condemned, and hanged in the course of the same day. religious meetings also continued to be surrounded, and were treated in the usual brutal manner. for instance, an assembly was held in lower languedoc on the th of august, , for the purpose of ordaining to the ministry three young men who had arrived from lausanne, where they had been educated. a number of pastors were present, and as many as from ten to twelve thousand men, women, and children were there from the surrounding country. the congregation was singing a psalm, when a detachment of soldiers approached. the people saw them; the singing ceased; the pastors urging patience and submission. the soldiers fired; every shot told; and the crowd fled in all directions. the meeting was thus dispersed, leaving the murderers--in other words, the gallant soldiers--masters of the field; a long track of blood remaining to mark the site on which the prayer-meeting had been held. it is not necessary to recount further cruelties and tortures. assemblies surrounded and people shot; preachers seized and hanged; men sent to the galleys; women sent to the tour de constance; children carried off to the convents--such was the horrible ministry of torture in france. when court heard of the re-inflictions of some old form of torture--"alas," said he, "there is nothing new under the sun. in all times, the storm of persecution has cleansed the threshing-floor of the lord." and yet, notwithstanding all the bitterness of the persecution, the number of protestants increased. it is difficult to determine their numbers. their apologists said they amounted to three millions;[ ] their detractors that they did not amount to four hundred thousand. the number of itinerant pastors, however, steadily grew. in there were pastors at work, with probationary preachers and students. in there were pastors, preachers, and students. [footnote : ripert de monclar, procureur-général, writing in , says: "according to the jurisprudence of this kingdom, there are no french protestants, and yet, according to the truth of facts, there are three millions. these imaginary beings fill the towns, provinces, and rural districts, and the capital alone contains sixty thousand of them."] then followed the death of antoine court himself in switzerland--after watching over the education and training of preachers at the lausanne seminary. feeling his powers beginning to fail, he had left lausanne, and resided at timonex. there, assisted by his son court de gébelin, professor of logic at the college, he conducted an immense correspondence with french protestants at home and abroad. court's wife died in , to his irreparable loss. his "rachel," during his many years of peril, had been his constant friend and consoler. unable, after her death, to live at timonex, so full of cruel recollections, court returned to lausanne. he did not long survive his wife's death. while engaged in writing the history of the reformed church of france, he was taken ill. his history of the camisards was sent to press, and he lived to revise the first proof-sheets. but he did not survive to see the book published. he died on the th june, , in the sixty-fourth year of his age. from the time of court's death--indeed from the time that court left france to settle at lausanne--paul rabaut continued to be looked upon as the leader and director of the proscribed huguenot church. rabaut originally belonged to bedarieux in languedoc. he was a great friend of pradel's. rabaut served the church at nismes, and pradel at uzes. both spent two years at lausanne in - . court entertained the highest affection for rabaut, and regarded him as his successor. and indeed he nobly continued the work which court had begun. besides being zealous, studious, and pious, rabaut was firm, active, shrewd, and gentle. he stood strongly upon moral force. once, when the huguenots had become more than usually provoked by the persecutions practised on them, they determined to appear armed at the assemblies. rabaut peremptorily forbade it. if they persevered, he would forsake their meetings. he prevailed, and they came armed only with their bibles. the directness of rabaut's character, the nobility of his sentiments, the austerity of his life, and his heroic courage, evidently destined him as the head of the work which court had begun. antoine court! paul rabaut! the one restored protestantism in france, the other rooted and established it. rabaut's enthusiasm may be gathered from the following extract of a letter which he wrote to a friend at geneva: "when i fix my attention upon the divine fire with which, i will not say jesus christ and the apostles, but the reformed and their immediate successors, burned for the salvation of souls, it seems to me that, in comparison with them, we are ice. their immense works astound me, and at the same time cover me with confusion. what would i not give to resemble them in everything laudable!" rabaut had the same privations, perils, and difficulties to undergo as the rest of the pastors in the desert. he had to assume all sorts of names and disguises while he travelled through the country, in order to preach at the appointed places. he went by the names of m. paul, m. denis, m. pastourel, and m. theophile; and he travelled under the disguises of a common labourer, a trader, a journeyman, and a baker. he was condemned to death, as a pastor who preached in defiance of the law; but his disguises were so well prepared, and the people for whom he ministered were so faithful to him, that the priests and other spies never succeeded in apprehending him. singularly enough, he was in all other respects in favour of the recognition of legal authority, and strongly urged his brethren never to adopt any means whatever of forcibly resisting the king's orders. many of the military commanders were becoming disgusted with the despicable and cowardly business which the priests called upon them to do. thus, on one occasion, a number of protestants had assembled at the house of paul rabaut at nismes, and, while they were on their knees, the door was suddenly burst open, when a man, muffled up, presented himself, and throwing open his cloak, discovered the military commandant of the town. "my friends," he said, "you have paul rabaut with you; in a quarter of an hour i shall be here with my soldiers, accompanied by father ----, who has just laid the information against you." when the soldiers arrived, headed by the commandant and the father, of course no paul rabaut was to be found. "for more than thirty years," says one of paul rabaut's biographers, "caverns and huts, whence he was unearthed like a wild animal, were his only habitation. for a long time he dwelt in a safe hiding-place that one of his faithful guides had provided for him, under a pile of stones and thorn-bushes. it was discovered at length by a shepherd, and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when he was forced to abandon the place, he still regretted this retreat, which was more fit for savage beasts than men." yet this hut of piled stones was for some time the centre of protestant affairs in france. all the faithful instinctively turned to rabaut when assailed by fresh difficulties and persecutions, and acted on his advice. he obtained the respect even of the catholics themselves, because it was known that he was a friend of peace, and opposed to all risings and rebellions amongst his people. once he had the courage to present a petition to the marquis de paulmy, minister of war, when changing horses at a post-house between nismes and montpellier. rabaut introduced himself by name, and the marquis knew that it was the proscribed pastor who stood before him. he might have arrested and hanged rabaut on the spot; but, impressed by the noble bearing of the pastor, he accepted the petition, and promised to lay it before the king. chapter xiii end of the persecutions--the french revolution. in the year , the execution of an unknown protestant at toulouse made an extraordinary noise in europe. protestant pastors had so often been executed, that the punishment had ceased to be a novelty. sometimes they were simply hanged; at other times they were racked, and then hanged; and lastly, they were racked, had their larger bones broken, and were then hanged. yet none of the various tortures practised on the protestant pastors had up to that time excited any particular sensation in france itself, and still less in europe. cruelty against french huguenots was so common a thing in those days, that few persons who were of any other religion, or of no religion at all, cured anything about it. the protestants were altogether outside the law. when a protestant meeting was discovered and surrounded, and men, women, and children were at once shot down, no one could call the murderers in question, because the meetings were illegal. the persons taken prisoners at the meetings were brought before the magistrates and sentenced to punishments even worse than death. they might be sent to the galleys, to spend the remainder of their lives amongst thieves, murderers, and assassins. women and children found at such meetings might also be sentenced to be imprisoned in the tour de constance. there were even cases of boys of twelve years old having been sent to the galleys for life, because of having accompanied their parents to "the preaching."[ ] [footnote : athanase coquerel, "les forçats pour la foi," .] the same cruelties were at that time practised upon the common people generally, whether they were huguenots or not. the poor creatures, whose only pleasure consisted in sometimes hunting a protestant, were so badly off in some districts of france that they even fed upon grass. the most distressed districts in france were those in which the bishops and clergy were the principal owners of land. they were the last to abandon slavery, which continued upon their estates until after the revolution. all these abominations had grown up in france, because the people had begun to lose the sense of individual liberty. louis xiv. had in his time prohibited the people from being of any religion different from his own. "his majesty," said his prime minister louvois, "will not suffer any person to remain in his kingdom who shall not be of his religion." and louis xv. continued the delusion. the whole of the tyrannical edicts and ordinances of louis xiv. continued to be maintained. it was not that louis xiv. and louis xv. were kings of any virtue or religion. both were men of exceedingly immoral habits. we have elsewhere described louis xiv., but louis xv., the well-beloved, was perhaps the greatest profligate of the two. madame de pompadour, when she ceased to be his mistress, became his procuress. this infamous woman had the command of the state purse, and she contrived to build for the sovereign a harem, called the parc-aux-cerfs, in the park of versailles, which cost the country at least a hundred millions of francs.[ ] the number of young girls taken from paris to this place excited great public discontent; and though morals generally were not very high at that time, the debauchery and intemperance of the king (for he was almost constantly drunk)[ ] contributed to alienate the nation, and to foster those feelings of hatred which broke forth without restraint in the ensuing reign. [footnote : "madame de pompadour découvrit que louis xv. pourrait lui-même s'amuser à faire l'éducation de ces jeunes malheureuses. de petites filles de neuf à douze ans, lorsqu'elles avaient attiré les regards de la police par leur beauté, étaient enlevées à leurs mères par plusieurs artifices, conduites à versailles, et retenues dans les parties les plus élevées et les plus inaccessibles des petits appartements du roi.... le nombre des malheureuses qui passèrent successivement à parc-aux-cerfs est immense; à leur sortie elles étaient mariées à des hommes vils ou crédules auxquels elles apportaient une bonne dot. quelques unes conservaient un traitement fort considerable." "les dépenses du parc-aux-cerfs, dit lacratelle, se payaient avec des acquits du comptant. il est difficile de les évaluer; mais il ne peut y avoir aucune exagération à affirmer qu'elles coûtèrent plus de millions à l'État. dans quelques libelles on les porte jusqu'à un milliard."--sismondi, _histoire de française_, brussels, , xx. - . the account given by sismondi of the debauches of this persecutor of the huguenots is very full. it is _not_ given in the "old court life of france," recently written by a lady.] [footnote : sismondi, xx. .] in the midst of all this public disregard for virtue, a spirit of ribaldry and disregard for the sanctions of religion had long been making its appearance in the literature of the time. the highest speculations which can occupy the attention of man were touched with a recklessness and power, a brilliancy of touch and a bitterness of satire, which forced the sceptical productions of the day upon the notice of all who studied, read, or delighted in literature;--for those were the days of voltaire, rousseau, condorcet, and the great men of "the encyclopædia." while the king indulged in his vicious pleasures, and went reeking from his debaucheries to obtain absolution from his confessors, the persecution of the protestants went on as before. nor was it until public opinion (such as it was) was brought to bear upon the hideous incongruity that religious persecutions were at once brought summarily to an end. the last executions of huguenots in france because of their protestantism occurred in . francis rochette, a young pastor, twenty-six years old, was laid up by sickness at montauban. he recovered sufficiently to proceed to the waters of st. antonin for the recovery of his health, when he was seized, together with his two guides or bearers, by the burgess guard of the town of caussade. the three brothers grenier endeavoured to intercede for them; but the mayor of caussade, proud of his capture, sent the whole of the prisoners to gaol. they were tried by the judges of toulouse on the th of february. rochette was condemned to be hung in his shirt, his head and feet uncovered, with a paper pinned on his shirt before and behind, with the words written thereon--"_ministre de la religion prétendue réformée._" the three brothers grenier, who interfered on behalf of rochette, were ordered to have their heads taken off for resisting the secular power; and the two guides, who were bearing the sick rochette to st. antonin for the benefit of the waters, were sent to the galleys for life. barbarous punishments such as these were so common when protestants were the offenders, that the decision, of the judges did not excite any particular sensation. it was only when jean calas was shortly after executed at toulouse that an extraordinary sensation was produced--and that not because calas was a protestant, but because his punishment came under the notice of voltaire, who exposed the inhuman cruelty to france, europe, and the world at large. the reason why protestant executions terminated with the death of calas was as follows:--the family of jean calas resided at toulouse, then one of the most bigoted cities in france. toulouse swarmed with priests and monks, more spanish than french in their leanings. they were great in relics, processions, and confraternities. while "mealy-mouthed" catholics in other quarters were becoming somewhat ashamed of the murders perpetrated during the massacre of st. bartholomew, and were even disposed to deny them, the more outspoken catholics of toulouse were even proud of the feat, and publicly celebrated the great southern massacre of st. bartholomew which took place in . the procession then held was one of the finest church commemorations in the south; it was followed by bishops, clergy, and the people of the neighbourhood, in immense numbers. calas was an old man of sixty-four, and reduced to great weakness by a paralytic complaint. he and his family were all protestants excepting one son, who had become a catholic. another of the sons, however, a man of ill-regulated life, dissolute, and involved in pecuniary difficulties, committed suicide by hanging himself in an outhouse. on this, the brotherhood of white penitents stirred up a great fury against the protestant family in the minds of the populace. the monks alleged that jean calas had murdered his son because he wished to become a catholic. they gave out that it was a practice of the protestants to keep an executioner to murder their children who wished to abjure the reformed faith, and that one of the objects of the meetings which they held in the desert, was to elect this executioner. the white penitents celebrated mass for the suicide's soul; they exhibited his figure with a palm branch in his hand, and treated him as a martyr. the public mind became inflamed. a fanatical judge, called david, took up the case, and ordered calas and his whole family to be sent to prison. calas was tried by the court of toulouse. they tortured the whole family to compel them to confess the murder;[ ] but they did not confess. the court wished to burn the mother, but they ended by condemning the paralytic father to be broken alive on the wheel.[ ] the parliament of toulouse confirmed the atrocious sentence, and the old man perished in torments, declaring to the last his entire innocence. the rest of the family were discharged, although if there had been any truth in the charge for which jean calas was racked to death, they must necessarily have been his accomplices, and equally liable to punishment. [footnote : sismondi, xx. .] [footnote : to be broken alive on the wheel was one of the most horrible of tortures, a bequest from ages of violence and barbarism. it was preserved in france mainly for the punishment of protestants. the prisoner was extended on a st. andrew's cross, with eight notches cut on it--one below each arm between the elbow and wrist, another between each elbow and the shoulders, one under each thigh, and one under each leg. the executioner, armed with a heavy triangular bar of iron, gave a heavy blow on each of these eight places, and broke the bone. another blow was given in the pit of the stomach. the mangled victim was lifted from the cross and stretched on a small wheel placed vertically at one of the ends of the cross, his back on the upper part of the wheel, his head and feet hanging down. there the tortured creature hung until he died. some lingered five or six hours, others much longer. this horrible method of torture was only abolished at the french revolution in .] the ruined family left toulouse and made for geneva, then the head-quarters of protestants from the south of france. and here it was that the murder of jean calas and the misfortunes of the calas family came under the notice of voltaire, then living at ferney, near geneva. in the midst of the persecutions of the protestants a great many changes had been going on in france. although the clergy had for more than a century the sole control of the religious education of the people, the people had not become religious. they had become very ignorant and very fanatical. the upper classes were anything but religious; they were given up for the most part to frivolity and libertinage. the examples of their kings had been freely followed. though ready to do honour to the court religion, the higher classes did not believe in it. the press was very free for the publication of licentious and immoral books, but not for protestant bibles. a great work was, however, in course of publication, under the editorship of d'alembert and diderot, to which voltaire, rousseau, and others contributed, entitled "the encyclopædia." it was a description of the entire circle of human knowledge; but the dominant idea which pervaded it was the utter subversion of religion. the abuses of the church, its tyranny and cruelty, the ignorance and helplessness in which it kept the people, the frivolity and unbelief of the clergy themselves, had already condemned it in the minds of the nation. the writers in "the encyclopædia" merely gave expression to their views, and the publication of its successive numbers was received with rapture. in the midst of the free publication of obscene books, there had also appeared, before the execution of calas, the marquis de mirabeau's "ami des hommes," rousseau's "Émile," the "contrat social," with other works, denying religion of all kinds, and pointing to the general downfall, which was now fast approaching. when the calas family took refuge in geneva, voltaire soon heard of their story. it was communicated to him by m. de végobre, a french refugee. after he had related it, voltaire said, "this is a horrible story. what has become of the family?" "they arrived in geneva only three days ago." "in geneva!" said voltaire; "then let me see them at once." madame calas soon arrived, told him the whole facts of the case, and convinced voltaire of the entire innocence of the family. voltaire was no friend of the huguenots. he believed the huguenot spirit to be a republican spirit. in his "siècle de louis xiv.," when treating of the revocation of the edict of nantes, he affirmed that the reformed were the enemies of the state; and though he depicted feelingly the cruelties they had suffered, he also stated clearly that he thought they had deserved them. voltaire probably owed his hatred of the protestants to the jesuits, by whom he was educated. he was brought up at the jesuit college of louis le grand, the chief persecutor of the huguenots. voltaire also owed much of the looseness of his principles to his godfather, the abbé chateauneuf, grand-prior of vendôme, the abbé de chalieu, and others, who educated him in an utter contempt for the doctrines they were appointed and paid to teach. it was when but a mere youth that father lejay, one of voltaire's instructors, predicted that he would yet be the coryphæus of deism in france. nor was voltaire better pleased with the swiss calvinists. he encountered some of the most pedantic of them while residing at lausanne and geneva.[ ] at the latter place, he covered with sarcasm the "twenty-four periwigs"--the protestant council of the city. they would not allow him to set up a theatre in geneva, so he determined to set up one himself at la chatelaine, about a mile off, but beyond the genevese frontier. his object, he professed, was "to corrupt the pedantic city." the theatre is still standing, though it is now used only as a hayloft. the box is preserved from which voltaire cheered the performance of his own and other plays. [footnote : while voltaire lived at lausanne, one of the baillies (the chief magistrates of the city) said to him: "monsieur de voltaire, they say that you have written against the good god: it is very wrong, but i hope he will pardon you.... but, monsieur de voltaire, take very good care not to write against their excellencies of berne, our sovereign lords, for be assured that they will _never_ forgive you."] but though voltaire hated protestantism like every other religion, he also hated injustice. it was because of this that he took up the case of the calas family, so soon as he had become satisfied of their innocence. but what a difficulty he had to encounter in endeavouring to upset the decision of the judges, and the condemnation of calas by the parliament of toulouse. moreover, he had to reverse their decision against a dead man, and that man a detested huguenot. nevertheless voltaire took up the case. he wrote letters to his friends in all parts of france. he wrote to the sovereigns of europe. he published letters in the newspapers. he addressed the duke de choiseul, the king's secretary of state. he appealed to philosophers, to men of letters, to ladies of the court, and even to priests and bishops, denouncing the sentence pronounced against calas,--the most iniquitous, he said, that any court professing to act in the name of justice had ever pronounced. ferney was visited by many foreigners, from germany, america, england, and russia; as well as by numerous persons of influence in france. to all these he spoke vehemently of calas and his sentence. he gave himself no rest until he had inflamed the minds of all men against the horrible injustice. at length, the case of calas became known all over france, and in fact all over europe. the press of paris rang with it. in the boudoirs and salons, calas was the subject of conversation. in the streets, men meeting each other would ask, "have you heard of calas?" the dead man had already become a hero and a martyr! an important point was next reached. it was decided that the case of calas should be remitted to a special court of judges appointed to consider the whole matter. voltaire himself proceeded to get up the case. he prepared and revised the memorials, he revised all the pleadings of the advocates, transforming them into brief, conclusive arguments, sparkling with wit, reason, and eloquence. the revision of the process commenced. the people held their breaths while it proceeded. at length, in the spring of --four years after calas had been broken to death on the wheel--four years after voltaire had undertaken to have the unjust decision of the toulouse magistrates and parliament reversed, the court of judges, after going completely over the evidence, pronounced the judgment to have been entirely unfounded! the decree was accordingly reversed. jean calas was declared to have been innocent. the man was, however, dead. but in order to compensate his family, the ministry granted , francs to calas's widow, on the express recommendation of the court which reversed the abominable sentence.[ ] [footnote : it may be added that, after the reversal of the sentence, david, the judge who had first condemned calas, went insane, and died in a madhouse.] the french people never forgot voltaire's efforts in this cause. notwithstanding all his offences against morals and religion, voltaire on this occasion acted on his best impulses. many years after, in , he visited paris, where he was received with immense enthusiasm. he was followed in the streets wherever he went. one day when passing along the pont royal, some person asked, "who is that man the crowd is following?" "ne savez vous pas," answered a common woman, "que c'est le sauveur de calas!" voltaire was more touched with this simple tribute to his fame than with all the adoration of the parisians. it was soon found, however, that there were many persons still suffering in france from the cruelty of priests and judges; and one of these occurred shortly after the death of calas. one of the ordinary practices of the catholics was to seize the children of protestants and carry them off to some nunnery to be educated at the expense of their parents. the priests of toulouse had obtained a _lettre de cachet_ to take away the daughter of a protestant named sirven, to compel her to change her religion. she was accordingly seized and carried off to a nunnery. she manifested such reluctance to embrace catholicism, and she was treated with such cruelty, that she fled from the convent in the night, and fell into a well, where she was found drowned. the prejudices of the catholic bigots being very much excited about this time by the case of calas, blamed the family of sirven (in the same manner as they had done that of calas) with murdering their daughter. foreseeing that they would be apprehended if they remained, the whole family left the city, and set out for geneva. after they left, sirven was in fact sentenced to death _par contumace_. it was about the middle of winter when they set out, and sirven's wife died of cold on the way, amidst the snows of the jura. on his arrival at geneva, sirven stated his case to voltaire, who took it up as he had done that of calas. he exerted himself as before. advocates of the highest rank offered to conduct sirven's case; for public opinion had already made considerable progress. sirven was advised to return to toulouse, and offer himself as a prisoner. he did so. the case was tried with the same results as before; the advocates, acting under voltaire's instructions and with his help, succeeded in obtaining the judges' unanimous decision that sirven was innocent of the crime for which he had already been sentenced to death. after this, there were no further executions of protestants in france. but what became of the huguenots at the galleys, who still continued to endure a punishment from day to day, even worse than death itself?[ ] although, they were often cut off by fever, starvation, and exposure, many of them contrived to live on to a considerable age. after the trials of calas and sirven, the punishment of the galleys was evidently drawing to an end. only two persons were sent to the galleys during the year in which pastor rochette was hanged. but a circumstance came to light respecting one of the galley-slaves who had been liberated in that very year ( ), which had the effect of eventually putting an end to the cruelty. [footnote : the huguenots sometimes owed their release from the galleys to money payments made by protestants (but this was done secretly), the price of a galley-slave being about a thousand crowns; sometimes they owed it to the influence of protestant princes; but never to the voluntary mercy of the catholics. in , while france was at war with england, and prussia was quietly looking on, antoine court made an appeal to frederick the great, and at his intervention with louis xv. thirty galley-slaves were liberated. the margrave of bayreuth, culmbach and his wife, the sister of the great frederick, afterwards visited the galleys at toulon, and succeeded in obtaining the liberation of several galley-slaves.] the punishment was not, however, abolished by christian feeling, or by greater humanity on the part of the catholics; nor was it abolished through the ministers of justice, and still less by the order of the king. it was put an end to by the stage! as voltaire, the deist, terminated the hanging of protestants, so did fenouillot, the player, put an end to their serving as galley-slaves. the termination of this latter punishment has a curious history attached to it. it happened that a huguenot meeting for worship was held in the neighbourhood of nismes, on the first day of january, . the place of meeting was called the lecque,[ ] situated immediately north of the tour magne, from which the greater part of the city has been built. it was a favourable place for holding meetings; but it was not so favourable for those who wished to escape. the assembly had scarcely been constituted by prayer, when the alarm was given that the soldiers were upon them! the people fled on all sides. the youngest and most agile made their escape by climbing the surrounding rocks. [footnote : this secret meeting-place of the huguenots is well known from the engraved picture of boze.] amongst these, jean fabre, a young silk merchant of nismes, was already beyond reach of danger, when he heard that his father had been made a prisoner. the old man, who was seventy-eight, could not climb as the others had done, and the soldiers had taken him and were leading him away. the son, who knew that his father would be sentenced to the galleys for life, immediately determined, if possible, to rescue him from this horrible fate. he returned to the group of soldiers who had his father in charge, and asked them to take him prisoner in his place. on their refusal, he seized his father and drew him from their grasp, insisting upon them taking himself instead. the sergeant in command at first refused to adopt this strange substitution; but, conquered at last by the tears and prayers of the son, he liberated the aged man and accepted jean fabre as his prisoner. jean fabre was first imprisoned at nismes, where he was prevented seeing any of his friends, including a certain young lady to whom he was about shortly to be married. he was then transferred to montpellier to be judged; where, of course, he was condemned, as he expected, to be sent to the galleys for life. with this dreadful prospect before him, of separation from all that he loved--from his father, for whom he was about to suffer so much; from his betrothed, who gave up all hope of ever seeing him again--and having no prospect of being relieved from his horrible destiny, his spirits failed, and he became seriously ill. but his youth and christian resignation came to his aid, and he finally recovered. the protestants of nismes, and indeed of all languedoc, were greatly moved by the fate of jean fabre. the heroism of his devotion to his parent soon became known, and the name of the volunteer convict was in every mouth. the duc de mirepoix, then governor of the province, endeavoured to turn the popular feeling to some account. he offered pardon to fabre and turgis (who had been taken prisoner with him) provided paul rabaut, the chief pastor of the desert, a hard-working and indefatigable man, would leave france and reside abroad. but neither fabre, nor rabaut, nor the huguenots generally, had any confidence in the mercy of the catholics, and the proposal was coldly declined. fabre was next sent to toulon under a strong escort of cavalry. he was there registered in the class of convicts; his hair was cut close; he was clothed in the ignominious dress of the galley-slave, and placed in a galley among murderers and criminals, where he was chained to one of the worst. the dinner consisted of a porridge of cooked beans and black bread. at first he could not touch it, and preferred to suffer hunger. a friend of fabre, who was informed of his starvation, sent him some food more savoury and digestible; but his stomach was in such a state that he could not eat even that. at length he became accustomed to the situation, though the place was a sort of hell, in which he was surrounded by criminals in rags, dirt, and vermin, and, worst of all, distinguished for their abominable vileness of speech. he was shortly after seized with a serious illness, when he was sent to the hospital, where he found many huguenot convicts imprisoned, like himself, because of their religion.[ ] [footnote : letter of jean fabre, in athanase coquerel's "forçats pour la foi," - .] repeated applications were made to saint-florentin, the secretary of state, by fabre's relatives, friends, and fellow protestants for his liberation, but without result. after he had been imprisoned for some years, a circumstance happened which more than anything else exasperated his sufferings. the young lady to whom he was engaged had an offer of marriage made to her by a desirable person, which her friends were anxious that she should accept. her father had been struck by paralysis, and was poor and unable to maintain himself as well as his daughter. he urged that she should give up fabre, now hopelessly imprisoned for life, and accept her new lover. fabre himself was consulted on the subject; his conscience was appealed to, and how did he decide? it was only after the bitterest struggle, that he determined on liberating his betrothed. he saw no prospect of his release, and why should he sacrifice her? let her no longer be bound up with his fearful fate, but be happy with another if she could. the young lady yielded, though not without great misgivings. the day for her marriage with her new lover was fixed; but, at the last moment, she relented. her faithfulness and love for the heroic galley-slave had never been shaken, and she resolved to remain constant to him, to remain unmarried if need be, or to wait for his liberation until death! it is probable that her noble decision determined fabre and fabre's friends to make a renewed effort for his liberation. at last, after having been more than six years a galley-slave, he bethought him of a method of obtaining at least a temporary liberty. he proposed--without appealing to saint-florentin, who was the bitter enemy of the protestants--to get his case made known to the duc de choiseul, minister of marine. this nobleman was a just man, and it had been in a great measure through his influence that the judgment of calas had been reconsidered and reversed. fabre, while on the rowers' bench, had often met with a m. johannot, a french protestant, settled at frankfort-on-maine, to whom he stated his case. it may be mentioned that huguenot refugees, on their visits to france, often visited the protestant prisoners at the galleys, relieved their wants, and made intercession for them with the outside world. it may also be incidentally mentioned that this m. johannot was the ancestor of two well-known painters and designers, alfred and tony, who have been the illustrators of some of our finest artistic works. johannot made the case of fabre known to some french officers whom he met at frankfort, interested them greatly in his noble character and self-sacrifice, and the result was that before long fabre obtained, directly from the duc de choiseul, leave of absence from the position of galley-slave. the annoyance of saint-florentin, minister of state, was so well-known, that fabre, on his liberation, was induced to conceal himself. nor could he yet marry his promised wife, as he had not been discharged, but was only on leave of absence; and saint-florentin obstinately refused to reverse the sentence that had been pronounced against him. in the meantime, fabre's name was becoming celebrated. he had no idea, while privately settled at ganges as a silk stocking maker, that great people in france were interesting themselves about his fate. the duchesse de grammont, sister of the duc de choiseul, had heard about him from her brother; and the prince de beauvau, governor of languedoc, the duchesse de villeroy, and many other distinguished personages, were celebrating his heroism. inquiry was made of the sergeant who had originally apprehended fabre, upon his offering himself in exchange for his father (long since dead), and the sergeant confirmed the truth of the noble and generous act. at the same time, m. alison, first consul at nismes, confirmed the statement by three witnesses, in presence of the secretary of the prince de beauvau. the result was, that jean fabre was completely exonerated from the charge on account of which he had been sent to the galleys. he was now a free man, and at last married the young lady who had loved him so long and so devotedly. one day, to his extreme surprise, fabre received from the duc de choiseul a packet containing a drama, in which he found his own history related in verse, by fenouillot de falbaire. it was entitled "the honest criminal." fabre had never been a criminal, except in worshipping god according to his conscience, though that had for nearly a hundred years been pronounced a crime by the law of france. the piece, which was of no great merit as a tragedy, was at first played before the duchesse de villeroy and her friends, with great applause, mdlle. clairon playing the principal female part. saint-florentin prohibited the playing of the piece in public, protesting to the last against the work and the author. voltaire played it at ferney, and queen marie antoinette had it played in her presence at versailles. it was not until that the piece was played in the theatres of paris, when it had a considerable success. we do not find that any protestants were sent to be galley-slaves after , the year that calas was executed. a reaction against this barbarous method of treating men for differences of opinion seems to have set in; or, perhaps, it was because most men were ceasing to believe in the miraculous powers of the priests, for which the protestants had so long been hanged and made galley-slaves. after the liberation of fabre in , other galley-slaves were liberated from time to time. thus, in the same year, jean albiges and jean barran were liberated after eight years of convict life. they had been condemned for assisting at protestant assemblies. next year, maurice was liberated; he had been condemned for life for the same reason. while voltaire had been engaged in the case of calas he asked the duc de choiseul for the liberation of a galley-slave. the man for whom he interceded, had been a convict twenty years for attending a protestant meeting. of course, voltaire cared nothing for his religion, believing catholicism and protestantism to be only two forms of the same superstition. the name of this galley-slave was claude chaumont. like nearly all the other convicts he was a working man--a little dark-faced shoemaker. some protestant friends he had at geneva interceded with voltaire for his liberation. on chaumont's release in , he waited upon his deliverer to thank him. "what!" said voltaire, on first seeing him, "my poor little bit of a man, have they put _you_ in the galleys? what could they have done with you? the idea of sending a little creature to the galley-chain, for no other crime than that of praying to god in bad french!"[ ] voltaire ended by handing the impoverished fellow a sum of money to set him up in the world again, when he left the house the happiest of men. [footnote : "voltaire et les genevois," par j. gaberel, - .] we may briefly mention a few of the last of the galley-slaves. daniel bic and jean cabdié, liberated in , for attending religious meetings. both were condemned for life, and had been at the galley-chain for ten years. jean pierre espinas, an attorney, of st. felix de châteauneuf, in viverais, who had been condemned for life for having given shelter to a pastor, was released in , at the age of sixty-seven, after being chained at the galleys for twenty-five years. jean raymond, of fangères, the father of six children, who had been a galley-slave for thirteen years, was liberated in . alexandre chambon, a labourer, more than eighty years old, condemned for life in , for attending a religious meeting, was released in , on the entreaty of voltaire, after being a galley-slave for twenty-eight years. his friends had forgotten him, and on his release he was utterly destitute and miserable.[ ] [footnote : "lettres inédites des voltaire," publiées par athanase coquerel fils, .] in , three galley-slaves were liberated from their chains. andré guisard, a labourer, aged eighty-two, jean roque, and louis tregon, of the same class, all condemned for life for attending religious meetings. they had all been confined at the chain for twenty years. the two last galley-slaves were liberated in , during the first year of the reign of louis xvi., and close upon the outbreak of the french revolution. they had been quite forgotten, until court de gébelin, son of antoine court, discovered them. when he applied for their release to m. de boyne, minister of marine, he answered that there were no more protestant convicts at the galleys; at least, he believed so. shortly after, turgot succeeded boyne, and application was made to him. he answered that there was no need to recommend such objects to him for liberation, as they were liberated already. on the two old men being told they were released, they burst into tears; but were almost afraid of returning to the world which no longer knew them. one of them was antoine rialle, a tailor of aoste, in dauphiny, who had been condemned by the parliament of grenoble to the galleys for life "for contravening the edicts of the king concerning religion." he was seventy-eight years old, and had been a galley-slave for thirty years. the other, paul achard, had been a shoemaker of châtillon, also in dauphiny. he was condemned to be a galley-slave for life by the parliament of grenoble, for having given shelter to a pastor. achard had also been confined at the galleys for thirty years. it is not known when the last huguenot women were liberated from the tour de constance, at aiguesmortes. it would probably be about the time when the last huguenots were liberated from the galleys. an affecting picture has been left by an officer who visited the prison at the release of the last prisoners. "i accompanied," he says, "the prince de beauvau (the intendant of languedoc under louis xvi.) in a survey which he made of the coast. arriving at aiguesmortes, at the gate of the tour de constance, we found at the entrance the principal keeper, who conducted us by dark steps through a great gate, which opened with an ominous noise, and over which was inscribed a motto from dante--'lasciate ogni speranza voi che'ntrate.' "words fail me to describe the horror with which we regarded a scene to which we were so unaccustomed--a frightful and affecting picture, in which the interest was heightened by disgust. we beheld a large circular apartment, deprived of air and of light, in which fourteen females still languished in misery. it was with difficulty that the prince smothered his emotion; and doubtless it was the first time that these unfortunate creatures had there witnessed compassion depicted upon a human countenance; i still seem to behold the affecting apparition. they fell at our feet, bathed in tears, and speechless, until, emboldened by our expressions of sympathy, they recounted to us their sufferings. alas! all their crime consisted in having been attached to the same religion as henry iv. the youngest of these martyrs was more than fifty years old. she was but _eight_ when first imprisoned for having accompanied her mother to hear a religious service, and her punishment had continued until now!"[ ] [footnote : froissard, "nismes et ses environs," ii. .] after the liberation of the last of the galley-slaves there were no further apprehensions nor punishments of protestants. the priests had lost their power; and the secular authority no longer obeyed their behests. the nation had ceased to believe in them; in some places they were laughed at; in others they were detested. they owed this partly to their cruelty and intolerance, partly to their luxury and self-indulgence amidst the poverty of the people, and partly to the sarcasms of the philosophers, who had become more powerful in france than themselves. "it is not enough," said voltaire, "that we prove intolerance to be horrible; we must also prove to the french that it is ridiculous." in looking back at the sufferings of the huguenots remaining in france since the revocation of the edict of nantes; at the purity, self-denial, honesty, and industry of their lives; at the devotion with which they adhered to religious duty and the worship of god; we cannot fail to regard them--labourers and peasants though they were--as amongst the truest, greatest, and worthiest heroes of their age. when society in france was falling to pieces; when its men and women were ceasing to believe in themselves and in each other; when the religion of the state had become a mass of abuse, consistent only in its cruelty; when the debauchery of its kings[ ] had descended through the aristocracy to the people, until the whole mass was becoming thoroughly corrupt; these poor huguenots seem to have been the only constant and true men, the only men holding to a great idea, for which they were willing to die--for they were always ready for martyrdom by the rack, the gibbet, or the galleys, rather than forsake the worship of god freely and according to conscience. [footnote : such was the dissoluteness of the manners of the court, that no less than , , francs of the public debt, or £ , , sterling, had been incurred for expenses too ignominious to bear the light, or even to be named in the public accounts. it appears from an authentic document, quoted in soulavie's history, that in the sixteen months immediately preceding the death of louis xv., madame du barry (originally a courtesan,) had drawn from the royal treasury no less than , , francs, or equal to about £ , of our present money. ["histoire de la décadence de la monarchie française," par soulavie l'aîné, iii. .] "la corruption," says lacretelle, "entrait dans les plus paisibles ménages, dans les familles les plus obscures. elle [madame du barri] était savamment et longtemps combinée par ceux qui servaient les débauches de louis. des émissaires étaient employées à séduire des filles qui n'étaient point encore nubiles, à combattre dans de jeunes femmes des principes de pudeur et de fidélité. amant de grade, il livrait à la prostitution publique celles de ses sujettes qu'il avait prématurement corrompues. il souffrait que les enfans de ses infâmes plaisirs partageassent la destinée obscure et dangereuse de ceux qu'un père n'avoue point." lacretelle, _histoire de france pendant le xviii siècle_, iii. - .] but their persecution was now in a great measure at an end. it is true the protestants were not recognised, but they nevertheless held their worship openly, and were not interfered with. when louis xvi. succeeded to the throne in , on the administration of the oath for the extermination of heretics denounced by the church, the archbishop of toulouse said to him: "it is reserved for you to strike the final blow against calvinism in your dominions. command the dispersion of the schismatic assemblies of the protestants, exclude the sectarians, without distinction, from all offices of the public administration, and you will insure among your subjects the unity of the true christian religion." no attention was paid to this and similar appeals for the restoration of intolerance. on the contrary, an edict of toleration was issued by louis xvi. in , which, though granting a legal existence to the protestants, nevertheless set forth that "the catholic, apostolic, and roman religion alone shall continue to enjoy the right of public worship in our realm." opinion, however, moved very fast in those days. the declaration of rights of overthrew the barriers which debarred the admission of protestants to public offices. on the question of tolerance, rabaut saint-etienne, son of paul rabaut, who sat in the national assembly for nismes, insisted on the freedom of the protestants to worship god after their accustomed forms. he said he represented a constituency of , , of whom , were protestants. the penal laws against the worship of the reformed, he said, had never been formally abolished. he claimed the rights of frenchmen for two millions of useful citizens. it was not toleration he asked for, _it was liberty_. "toleration!" he exclaimed; "sufferance! pardon! clemency! ideas supremely unjust towards the protestants, so long as it is true that difference of religion, that difference of opinion, is not a crime! toleration! i demand that toleration should be proscribed in its turn, and deemed an iniquitous word, dealing with us as citizens worthy of pity, as criminals to whom pardon is to be granted!"[ ] [footnote : "history of the protestants of france," by g. de félice, book v. sect. i.] the motion before the house was adopted with a modification, and all frenchmen, without distinction of religious opinions, were declared admissible to all offices and employments. four months later, on the th march, , rabaut saint-etienne himself, son of the long proscribed pastor of the desert, was nominated president of the constituent assembly, succeeding to the chair of the abbé montesquieu. he did not, however, occupy the position long. in the struggles of the convention he took part with the girondists, and refused to vote for the death of louis xvi. he maintained an obstinate struggle against the violence of the mountain. his arrest was decreed; he was dragged before the revolutionary tribunal, and condemned to be executed within twenty-four hours. the horrors of the french revolution hide the doings of protestantism and catholicism alike for several years, until buonaparte came into power. he recognised catholicism as the established religion, and paid for the maintenance of the bishops and priests. he also protected protestantism, the members of which were entitled to all the benefits secured to the other christian communions, "with the exception of pecuniary subvention." the comparative liberty which the protestants of france had enjoyed under the republic and the empire seemed to be in some peril at the restoration of the bourbons. the more bigoted roman catholics of the south hailed their return as the precursors of renewed persecution: and they raised the cry of "un dieu, un roi, une foi." the protestant mayor of nismes was publicly insulted, and compelled to resign his office. the mob assembled in the streets and sang ferocious songs, threatening to "make black puddings of the blood of the calvinists' children."[ ] another st. bartholomew was even threatened; the protestants began to conceal themselves, and many fled for refuge to the upper cevennes. houses were sacked, their inmates outraged, and in many cases murdered. [footnote : see the rev. mark wilks's "history of the persecutions endured by the protestants of the south of france, , , ." longmans, .] the same scenes occurred in most of the towns and villages of the department of gard; and the authorities seemed to be powerless to prevent them. the protestants at length began to take up arms for their defence; the peasantry of the cevennes brought from their secret places the rusty arms which their fathers had wielded more than a century before; and another camisard war seemed imminent. in the meantime, the subject of the renewed protestant persecutions in the south of france was, in may, , brought under the notice of the british house of commons by sir samuel romilly--himself the descendant of a languedoc huguenot--in a powerful speech; and although the motion was opposed by the government, there can be little doubt that the discussion produced its due effect; for the bourbon government, itself becoming alarmed, shortly after adopted vigorous measures, and the persecution was brought to an end. since that time the protestants of france have remained comparatively unmolested. evidences have not been wanting to show that the persecuting spirit of the priest-party has not become extinct. while the author was in france in , to visit the scenes of the wars of the camisards, he observed from the papers that a french deputy had recently brought a case before the assembly, in which a catholic curé of ville-d'avray refused burial in the public cemetery to the corpse of a young english lady, because she was a protestant, and remitted it to the place allotted for criminals and suicides. the body accordingly lay for eighteen days in the cabin of the gravedigger, until it could be transported to the cemetery of sèvres, where it was finally interred. but the people of france, as well as the government, have become too indifferent about religion generally, to persecute any one on its account. the nation is probably even now suffering for its indifference, and the spectacle is a sad one. it is only the old, old story. the sins of the fathers are being visited on the children. louis xiv. and the french nation of his time sowed the wind, and their descendants at the revolution reaped the whirlwind. and who knows how much of the sufferings of france during the last few years may have been due to the ferocious intolerance, the abandonment to vicious pleasures, the thirst for dominion, and the hunger for "glory," which above all others characterized the reign of that monarch who is in history miscalled "the great?" it will have been noted that the chief scenes of the revival of protestantism described in the preceding pages occurred in languedoc and the south of france, where the chief strength of the huguenots always lay. the camisard civil war which happened there, was not without its influence. the resolute spirit which it had evoked survived. the people were purified by suffering, and though they did not conquer civil liberty, they continued to live strong, hardy, virtuous lives. when protestantism was at length able to lift up its head after so long a period of persecution, it was found that, during its long submergence, it had lost neither in numbers, in moral or intellectual vigour, nor in industrial power. to this day the protestants of languedoc cherish the memory of their wanderings and worshippings in the desert; and they still occasionally hold their meetings in the old frequented places. not far from nismes are several of these ancient meeting-places of the persecuted, to which we have above referred. one of them is about two miles from the city, in the bed of a mountain torrent. the worshippers arranged themselves along the slopes of the narrow valley, the pastor preaching to them from the grassy level in the hollow, while sentinels posted on the adjoining heights gave warning of the approach of the enemy. another favourite place of meeting was the hollow of an ancient quarry called the echo, from which the romans had excavated much of the stone used in the building of the city. the congregation seated themselves around the craggy sides, the preacher's pulpit being placed in the narrow pass leading into the quarry. notwithstanding all the vigilance of the sentinels, many persons of both sexes and various ages were often dragged from the echo to imprisonment or death. even after the persecutions had ceased, these meeting-places continued to be frequented by the protestants of nismes, and they were sometimes attended by five or six thousand persons, and on sacrament days by even double that number. although the protestants of languedoc for the most part belong to the national reformed church, the independent character of the people has led them to embrace protestantism in other forms. thus, the evangelical church is especially strong in the south, whilst the evangelical methodists number more congregations and worshippers in languedoc than in all the rest of france. there are also in the cevennes several congregations of moravian brethren. but perhaps one of the most curious and interesting issues of the camisard war is the branch of the society of friends still existing in languedoc--the only representatives of that body in france, or indeed on the european continent. when the protestant peasants of the cevennes took up arms and determined to resist force by force, there were several influential men amongst them who kept back and refused to join them. they held that the gospel they professed did not warrant them in taking up arms and fighting, even against the enemies who plundered and persecuted them. and when they saw the excesses into which the camisards were led by the war of retaliation on which they had entered, they were the more confirmed in their view that the attitude which the rebels had assumed, was inconsistent with the christian religion. after the war had ceased, these people continued to associate together, maintaining a faithful testimony against war, refusing to take oaths, and recognising silent worship, without dependence on human acquirements. they were not aware of the existence of a similar body in england and america until the period of the french revolution, when some intercourse began to take place between them. in , stephen grellet, an american friend, of french origin, visited languedoc, and held many religious meetings in the towns and villages of the lower cevennes, which were not only attended by the friends of congenies, st. hypolite, granges, st. grilles, fontane's, vauvert, quissac, and other places in the neighbourhood of nismes, but by the inhabitants at large, roman catholics as well as protestants. at that time, as now, congenies was regarded as the centre of the district principally inhabited by the friends, and there they possess a large and commodious meeting-house, built for the purpose of worship. at the time of stephen grellet's visit, he especially mentioned louis majolier as "a father and a pillar" amongst the little flock.[ ] and it may not be unworthy to note that the daughter of the same louis majolier is at the present time one of the most acceptable female preachers of the society of friends in england. [footnote : "life of stephen grellet," third edition. london, .] it may also be mentioned, in passing, that there still exist amongst the vosges mountains the remnants of an ancient sect--the anabaptists of munster--who hold views in many respects similar to those of the friends. amongst other things, they testify against war as unchristian, and refuse under any circumstances to carry arms. rather than do so, they have at different times suffered imprisonment, persecution, and even death. the republic of respected their scruples, and did not require the anabaptists to fight in the ranks, but employed them as pioneers and drivers, while napoleon made them look after the wounded on the field of battle, and attend to the waggon train and ambulances.[ ] and we understand that they continue to be similarly employed down to the present time. [footnote : michel, "les anabaptistes des vosges." paris, .] * * * * * it forms no part of our subject to discuss the present state of the french protestant church. it has lost no part of its activity during the recent political changes. although its clergy had for some time been supported by the state, they had not met in public synod until june, , after an interval of more than two hundred years. during that period many things had become changed. rationalism had invaded evangelicalism. without a synod, or a settled faith, the protestant churches were only so many separate congregations, often representing merely individual interests. in fact, the old huguenot church required reorganization; and great results are expected from the proceedings adopted at the recently held synod of the french protestant church.[ ] [footnote : the best account of the proceedings at this synod is given in _blackwood's magazine_ for january, .] with respect to the french catholic church, its relative position to the protestants remains the same as before. but it has no longer the power to persecute. the gallican church has been replaced by the ultramontane church, but its impulses are no kindlier, though it has become "infallible." the principal movement of the catholic priests of late years has been to get up appearances of the virgin. the virgin appears, usually, to a child or two, and pilgrimages are immediately got up to the scene of her visit. by getting up religious movements of this kind, the priests and their followers believe that france will yet be helped towards the _revanche_, which she is said to long for. but pilgrimages will not make men; and if france wishes to be free, she will have to adopt some other methods. bismarck will never be put down by pilgrimages. it was a sad saying of father hyacinthe at geneva, that "france is bound to two influences--superstition and irreligion." memoirs of distinguished huguenot refugees. i. story of samuel de pÉchels. when louis xiv. revoked the edict of nantes, he issued a number of decrees or edicts for the purpose of stamping out protestantism in france. each decree had the effect of an act of parliament. louis combined in himself the entire powers of the state. the king's word was law. "_l'état c'est moi_" was his maxim. the decrees which louis issued were tyrannical, brutal, and cowardly. some were even ludicrous in their inhumanity. thus protestant grooms were forbidden to give riding-lessons; protestant barbers were forbidden to cut hair; protestant washerwomen were forbidden to wash clothes; protestant servants were forbidden to serve either roman catholic or protestant mistresses. they must all be "converted." a profession of the roman catholic faith was required from simple artisans--from shoemakers, tailors, masons, carpenters, and such-like--before they were permitted to labour at their respective callings. the cruelty went further. protestants were forbidden to be employed as librarians and printers. they could not even be employed as labourers upon the king's highway. they could not serve in any public office whatever. they were excluded from the collection of the taxes, and from all government departments. protestant apothecaries must shut up their shops. protestant advocates were forbidden to plead before the courts. protestant doctors were forbidden to practise medicine and surgery. the _sages-femmes_ must necessarily be of the roman catholic religion. the cruelty was extended to the family. protestant parents were forbidden to instruct their children in their own faith. they were enjoined, under a heavy penalty, to have their children baptized by the roman catholic priest, and brought up in the roman catholic religion. when the law was disobeyed, the priests were empowered to seize and carry off the children, and educate them, at the expense of the parents, in monasteries and nunneries. then, as regards the profession of the protestant religion:--it was decreed by the king, that all the protestant temples in france should be demolished, or converted to other uses. protestant pastors were ordered to quit the country within fifteen days after the date of the revocation of the edict of nantes. if found in the country after that period, they were condemned to death. a reward of five thousand five hundred livres was offered for the apprehension of any protestant pastor. when apprehended he was hung. protestant worship was altogether prohibited. if any protestants were found singing psalms, or engaged in prayer, in their own houses, they were liable to have their entire property confiscated, and to be sent to the galleys for life. these monstrous decrees were carried into effect--at a time when france reigned supreme in the domain of intellect, poetry, and the arts--in the days of racine, corneille, molière--of bossuet, bourdaloue, and fénélon. louis xiv. had the soldier, the hangman, and the priest at his command; but they all failed him. they could imprison, they could torture, they could kill, they could make the protestants galley-slaves; they could burn their bibles, and deprive them of everything that they valued; but the impregnable rights of conscience defied them. the only thing left for the protestants was to fly from france in all directions. they took refuge in switzerland, germany, holland, and england. the flight from france had begun before the revocation of the edict of nantes, but after that act the flight rapidly increased. not less than a million of persons are supposed to have escaped from france in consequence of the revocation. steps were, however, taken by the king to stop the emigration. he issued a decree ordering that the property and goods of all those protestants who had already escaped should be confiscated to the crown, unless they returned within three months from the date of the revocation. then, with respect to the protestants who remained in france, he decreed that all french_men_ found attempting to escape were to be sent to the galleys for life; and that all french_women_ found attempting to escape were to be imprisoned for life. the spies who denounced the fugitive protestants were rewarded by the apportionment of half their goods. this decree was not, however, considered sufficiently severe, and it was shortly after followed by another, proclaiming that any captured fugitives, as well as any person found acting as their guide, should be condemned to death. another royal decree was issued respecting those fugitives who attempted to escape by sea. it was to the effect, that before any ship was allowed to set sail for a foreign port, the hold should be fumigated with a deadly gas, so that any hidden huguenot who could not otherwise be detected, might be suffocated to death. these measures, however, did not seem to have the effect of "converting" the french protestants. the dragonnades were next resorted to. louis xiv. was pleased to call the dragoons his booted missionaries, _ses missionnaires bottés_. the dragonnades are said to have been the invention of michel de marillac, whose name will doubtless descend to infamous notoriety, like those of catherine de médicis, the guises, and the authors of the massacre of st. bartholomew. yet there was not much genius displayed in the invention of the dragonnades. it merely consisted in this: whenever it was found that a town abounded with huguenots, the dragoons, hussars, and troops of various kinds were poured into it, and quartered on the inhabitants. twenty, thirty, or forty were quartered together, according to the size of the house. they occupied every room; they beat their drums and blew their trumpets; they smoked, drank, and swore, without any regard to the infirm, the sick, or the dying, until the inmates were "converted." the whole army of france was let loose upon the huguenots. they had been beaten out of holland by the dutch calvinists; and they could now fearlessly take their revenge out of their unarmed huguenot fellow-countrymen. whenever they quartered themselves in a dwelling, it was, for the time being, their own. they rummaged the cellars, drank the wines, ordered the best of everything, pillaged the house, and treated everybody who belonged to it as a slave. the huguenots were not only compelled to provide for the entertainment of their guests, but to pay them their wages. the superior officers were paid fifteen francs a day, the lieutenants nine francs, and the common soldiers three francs. if the money was not paid, the household furniture, the horses and cows, and all the other articles that could be seized, were publicly sold. no wonder that so many huguenots were "converted" by the dragoons. forty thousand persons were converted in poitou. the regiment of asfeld was the instrument of their conversion. a company and a half of dragoons occupied the house of a single lady at poitiers until she was converted to the roman catholic faith. what bravery! the huguenots of languedoc were amongst the most obstinate of all. they refused to be converted by the priests; and then louis xiv. determined to dragonnade them. about sixty thousand troops were concentrated on the province. noailles, the governor, shortly after wrote to the king that he had converted the city of nismes in twenty-four hours. twenty thousand converts had been made in montauban; and he promised that by the end of the month there would be no more huguenots left in languedoc. many persons were doubtless converted by force, or by the fear of being dragonnaded; but there were also many more who were ready to run all risks rather than abjure their faith. of those who abjured, the greater number took the first opportunity of flying from france, by land or by sea, and taking refuge in switzerland, germany, holland, or england. many instances might be given of the heroic fortitude with which the huguenots bore the brutality of their enemies; but, for the present, it may be sufficient to mention the case of the de péchels of montauban. the citizens of montauban had been terribly treated before and after the revocation of the edict of nantes. the town had been one of the principal huguenot places of refuge in france. hence its population was principally protestant. its university had been shut up. its churches had been levelled to the ground. its professors and pastors had been banished from france. and now it was to be dragonnaded. the town was filled with troops, who were quartered on the protestants. one of the burgesses called upon the intendant, threw himself at his feet, and prayed to be delivered from the dragoons. "on one condition only!" replied dubois, "that you become a catholic." "i cannot," said the townsman, "because, if the sultan quartered twenty janissaries on me, i might, for the same reason, be forced to become a turk." although many of the townsmen pretended to be converted, the protestant chiefs held firm to their convictions, and resisted all persuasions, promises, and threats, to induce them to abjure their religion. amongst them were samuel de péchels de la boissonade and the marquise de sabonnières, his wife, who, in the midst of many trials and sorrows, preferred to do their duty to every other consideration. the family of de péchels had long been settled at montauban. being regarded as among the heads of the protestant party in montauban, they were marked out by the king's ministers for the most vigorous treatment. when the troops entered the town on the th of august, , they treated the inhabitants as if the town had been taken by assault. the officers and soldiers vied with each other in committing acts of violence. they were sanctioned by the magistrate, who authorised their excesses, in conformity with the king's will. tumult and disorder prevailed everywhere. houses were broken into. persons of the reformed religion, without regard to age, sex, or condition, were treated with indignity. they were sworn at, threatened, and beaten. their families were turned out of doors. every room in the house was entered and ransacked of its plate, silk, linen, and clothes. when the furniture was too heavy to be carried away, it was demolished. the mirrors were slashed with swords, or shot at with pistols. in short, so far as regarded their household possessions, the greater number of the protestants were completely ruined. samuel de péchels de la boissonade had no fewer than thirty-eight dragoons and fusiliers quartered upon him. it was intended at first to quarter these troopers on roupeiroux, the king's adjutant; but having promptly changed his religion to avoid the horrors of the dragonnade, they were removed to the house of de péchels, and he was ordered by chevalier duc, their commander, to pay down the money which he had failed to get from roupeiroux, during the days that the troopers should have occupied his house. de péchels has himself told the story of his sufferings, and we proceed to quote his own words:-- "soon after," he says, "my house was filled with officers, troopers, and their horses, who took possession of every room with such unfeeling harshness that i could not reserve a single one for the use of my family; nor could i make these unfeeling wretches listen to my declaration that i was ready to give up all that i possessed without resistance. doors were broken open, boxes and cupboards forced. they liked better to carry off what belonged to me in this violent manner than to take the keys which my wife and i, standing on either side, continued to offer. the granaries served for the reception of their horses among the grain and meal, which the wretches, with the greatest barbarity, made them trample underfoot. the very bread destined for my little children, like the rest, was contemptuously trodden down by the horses. "nothing could stop the brutality of these madmen. i was thrust out into the street with my wife, now very near her confinement, and four very young children, taking nothing with me but a little cradle and a small supply of linen, for the babe whose birth was almost momentarily expected. the street being full of people, diverted at seeing us thus exposed, we were delayed some moments near the door, during which we were pitilessly drenched by the troopers, who amused themselves at the windows with emptying upon our heads pitchers of water, to add to their enjoyment of our sad condition. "from this moment i gave up both house and goods to be plundered, without having in view any place of refuge but the street, ill suited, it must be owned, for such a purpose, and especially so to a woman expecting her confinement hourly, and to little children of too tender an age to make their own way--some of them, indeed, being unable to walk or speak--and having no hope but in the mercy of god and his gracious protection." de péchels proceeded to the house of marshal boufflers, commander of the district, thinking it probable that a man of honour, such as he was supposed to be, would discourage such barbarities, and place the dragoons under some sort of military control. but no! the marshal could not be found. he carefully kept out of the way of all protestant complainants. de péchels, however, met chevalier duc, who commanded the soldiers that had turned him out of his house. in answer to the expostulations of de péchels, the chevalier gave him to understand that the same treatment would be continued unless he "changed his religion." "then," answered de péchels, "by god's help i never will." at length, when de péchels' house had been thoroughly stripped, and the dragoons had decamped elsewhere, he received an order to return, in order to entertain another detachment of soldiers. the criminal judge, who had possession of the keys, entered the house, and found it in extreme disorder. "i was obliged to remain in it," says de péchels, "amidst dirt and vermin, in obedience to the intendant's orders, reiterated in the strictest manner by the criminal judge, that i should await the arrival of a fresh party of lodgers, who accordingly came on the day following." the new party consisted of six soldiers of the regiment of fusiliers, who called themselves simply "missionaries," as distinct from the "booted missionaries" who had just left. they were savage at not finding anything to plunder, their predecessors having removed everything in the shape of booty. the fusiliers were shortly followed by six soldiers of dampier's regiment, who were still more ferocious. they gave de péchels and his wife no peace day or night; they kept the house in a constant uproar; swore and sang obscene songs, and carried their insolence to the utmost pitch. at length de péchels was forced to quit the house, on account of his wife, who was near the time of her confinement. these are his own words:-- "for a long time we were wandering through the streets, no one daring to offer us an asylum, as the ordinance of the intendant imposed a fine of four or five hundred livres[ ] upon any one who should receive protestants into their houses. my mother's house had long been filled with soldiers, as well as that of my sister de darassus; and not knowing where to go, i suffered great agony of mind for fear my poor wife should give birth to her infant in the street. in this lamentable plight, the good providence of god led us to the house of mdlle. de guarrison, my wife's sister, from whence, most fortunately, a large number of soldiers, with their officers, were issuing. they had occupied it for some time, and had allowed the family no rest. now they were changing their quarters, to continue their lawless mission in some country town. the stillness of the house after their departure induced us to enter it at once, and hardly had my wife accepted the bed mdlle. de guarrison offered her, than she was happily delivered of a daughter, blessed be god, who never leaves himself without a witness to those who fear his name. [footnote : the french livre was worth three francs, or about two shillings and sixpence english money.] "that same evening a great number of soldiers arrived, and took up their quarters in m. de guarrison's house, and two days after, this burden was augmented by the addition of a colonel, a captain, and two lieutenants, with a large company of soldiers and several servants, all of whom conducted themselves with a degree of violence scarcely to be described. they had no regard for the owners of the house, but robbed them with impunity. they had no pity for my poor wife, weak and ill as she was; nor for the helpless children, who suffered much under these miserable conditions. "officers, soldiers, and servants pillaged the house with odious rivalry, took possession of all the rooms, drove out the owners, and obliged the poor sick woman (by their continual threats and abominable conduct) to get up and try to retire to some other place. she crept into the courtyard, where, with her infant, she was detained in the cold for a long time by the soldiers, who would not allow her to quit the premises. at length, however, my poor wife got into the street, still, however, guarded by soldiers, who would not allow her to go out of their sight, or to speak with any one. she complained to the intendant of their cruel ways, but instead of procuring her any relief, he aggravated her affliction, ordering the soldiers to keep strict watch over her, never to leave her, and to inform him with what persons she found a refuge, that he might make them pay the penalty." de péchels' wife was thus under the necessity of sleeping, with her babe and her children, in the street. after all was quiet, they sought for a door-step, and lay down for the night under the stars. madame de péchels at length found temporary shelter. mademoiselle de delada, a friend of the intendant, touched by the poor woman's sad condition, implored the magistrate's permission to give her refuge; and being a well-known roman catholic, she was at length permitted to take madame de péchels and her babe into her house, but on condition that four soldiers should still keep her in view. she remained there for a short time, until she was able to leave her bed, when she was privily removed to a country house belonging to mademoiselle de delada, not far from the town of montauban. to return to samuel de péchels. his house was still overflowing with soldiers. they proceeded to wreck what was left of his household effects; they carried off and sold his papers and his library, which was considerable. some of the soldiers of dampier's regiment carried off in a sack a pair of brass chimney dogs, the shovel and tongs, a grate, and some iron spits, the wretched remains of his household furniture. they proceeded to lay waste his farms and carry off his cattle, selling the latter by public auction in the square. they next pulled down his house, and sold the materials. after this, ten soldiers were quartered in a neighbouring tavern, at de péchels' expense. not being able to pay the expenses, the intendant sent some archers to him to say that he would be carried off to prison unless he changed his religion. to that proposal he answered, as before, that "by the help of god he would never make that change, and that he was quite prepared to go to any place to which his merciful saviour might lead him." he was accordingly taken, into custody, and placed, for a time, in the royal château. on the same day, his sister de darassus was committed to prison. still holding steadfast by his faith, de péchels was, after a month's imprisonment at montauban, removed to the prison of cahors, where he was put into the lowest dungeon. "by the grace of my saviour," said he, "i strengthened myself more in my determination to die rather than renounce the truth." after lying for more than three months in the dampest mould of the lowest dungeon in the prison of cahors, and being still found immovable in his faith, de péchels was ordered to be taken to the citadel of montpellier, to wait there until he could be transported to america. his wife, the marquise de sabonnières, having heard of his condemnation (though he was never tried), determined to see him before he left france for ever. the road from cahors to montpellier did not pass through montauban, but a few miles to the east of it. having spent the night in prayer to god, that he might endow her with firmness to sustain the trials of a scene, which was as heroic in her as it was touching to those who witnessed it, she went forth in the morning to wait along the roadside for the arrival of the illustrious body of prisoners, who were on their way, some to the galleys, some to banishment, some to imprisonment, and some to death. at length the glorious band arrived. they were chained two and two. they were for the most part ladies and gentlemen who had refused to abjure their religion. among them were m. desparvés, a gentleman from the neighbourhood of laitoure, old and blind, led by his wife; m. de la rességuerie, of montauban, and many more. madame de péchels implored leave of the guard who conducted the prisoners to have an interview with her husband. it was granted. she had been supplied with the fortitude for which she had so ardently and piously prayed to god during the whole of the past night. it seemed as if some supernatural power had prompted the discourse with her husband, which softened the hearts of those who, up to that time, had appeared inaccessible to the sentiments of humanity. the superintendent allowed the noble couple to pray together; after which they were separated without the least weakness betraying itself on the part of madame de péchels, who remained unmoved, whilst all the bystanders were melted into tears. the procession of guards and prisoners then went on its way. the trials of madame de péchels were not yet ended. though she had parted with her husband, who was now on his way to banishment, she had still the children with her; and, cruellest torture of all! these were now to be torn from her. one evening a devoted friend came to inform her that a body of men were to arrive next morning and take her children, even the baby from her breast, and immure them in a convent. she was also informed that she herself was to be seized and imprisoned. the intelligence fell like a thunderbolt upon the tender mother. what was she to do? was she to abjure her religion? she prayed for help from god. part of the night was thus spent before she could make up her mind to part from her innocent children, who were to be brought up in a religion at variance with her own. in any case, a separation was necessary. could she not fly, like so many other protestant women, and live in hopes of better days to come? it was better to fly from france than encounter the horrors of a french prison. before she parted with her children she embraced them while they slept; she withdrew a few steps to tear herself from them, and again she came back to bid them a last farewell! at length, urged by the person who was about to give her a refuge in his house, she consented to follow him. the man was a weaver by trade, and all day long he carried on his work in the only room which he possessed. madame de péchels passed the day in a recess, concealed by the bed of her entertainers, and in the evening she came out, and the good people supplied her with what was necessary. she passed six months in this retreat, without any one knowing what had become of her. it was thought that she had taken refuge in some foreign country. numbers of ladies had already been able to make their escape. the frontier was strictly guarded by troops, police, and armed peasantry. the high-roads as well as the byways were patrolled day and night, and all the bridges were strongly guarded. but the fugitives avoided the frequented routes. they travelled at night, and hid themselves during the day. there were protestant guides who knew every pathway leading out of france, through forests, wastes, or mountain paths, where no patrols were on the watch; and they thus succeeded in leading thousands of refugee protestants across the frontier. and thus it was that madame de péchels was at length enabled, with the help of a guide, to reach geneva, one of the great refuges of the huguenots. on arrival there she felt the loss of her children more than ever. she offered to the guide who had conducted her all the money that she possessed to bring her one or other of her children. the eldest girl, then nine or ten years old, was communicated with, but having already tasted the pleasure of being her own mistress, she refused the proposal to fly into switzerland to join her mother. her son jacob was next communicated with. he was seven years old. he was greatly moved at the name of his mother, and he earnestly entreated to be taken to where she was. the guide at once proceeded to fulfil his engagement. the boy fled with him from france, passing for his son. the way was long--some five hundred miles. the journey occupied them about three weeks. they rested during the day, and travelled at night. they avoided every danger, and at length the faithful guide was able to place the loving son in the arms of his noble and affectionate mother. samuel de péchels was condemned to banishment without the shadow of a trial. he could not be dragooned into denying his faith, and he was therefore imprisoned, preparatory to his expulsion from france. "i was told," he said, "by the sieur raoul, roqueton (or chief archer) to the intendant of montauban, that if i would not change my religion, he had orders from the king and the intendant to convey me to the citadel of montpellier, from thence to be immediately shipped for america. my reply was, that i was ready to go forthwith whithersoever it was god's pleasure to lead me, and that assuredly, by god's help, i would make no change in my religion." after five months' imprisonment at cahors, he was taken out and marched, as already related, to the citadel of montpellier. the citadel adjoins the peyrou, a lofty platform of rock, which commands a splendid panoramic view of the surrounding country. it is now laid out as a pleasure-ground, though it was then the principal hanging-place of the languedoc protestants. brousson, and many other faithful pastors of the "church in the desert," laid down their lives there. half-a-dozen decaying corpses might sometimes be seen swinging from the gibbets on which the ministers had been hung. a more bitter fate was, however, reserved for de péchels. after about a month's imprisonment in the citadel, he was removed to aiguesmortes, under the charge of several mounted archers and foot soldiers. he was accompanied by fourteen protestant ladies and gentlemen, on their way to perpetual imprisonment, to the galleys, or to banishment. aiguesmortes was the principal fortified dungeon in the south of france, used for the imprisonment of huguenots who refused to be converted. it is situated close to the mediterranean, and is surrounded by lagunes and salt marshes. it is a most unhealthy place; and imprisonment at aiguesmortes was considered a slower but not a less certain death than hanging. sixteen huguenot women were confined there in , and the whole of them died within five months. when the prisoners died off, the place was at once filled again. the castle of aiguesmortes was thus used as a prison for nearly a hundred years. de péchels gives the following account of his journey from montpellier to aiguesmortes:--"mounted on asses, harnessed in the meanest manner, without stirrups, and with wretched ropes for halters, we entered aiguesmortes, and were there locked up in the tower of constance, with thirty other male prisoners and twenty women and girls, who had also been brought hither, tied two and two. the men were placed in an upper apartment of the tower, and the women and girls below, so that we could hear each other pray to god and sing his praises with a loud voice." de péchels did not long remain a prisoner at aiguesmortes. he was shortly after put on board a king's ship bound for marseilles. he was very ill during the voyage, suffering from seasickness and continual fainting fits. on reaching marseilles he was confined in the hospital prison used for common felons and galley-slaves. it was called the chamber of darkness, because of its want of light. the single apartment contained two hundred and thirty prisoners. some of them were chained together, two and two; others, three and three. the miserable palliasses on which they slept had been much worn by the galley-slaves, who had used them during their illnesses. the women were separated from the men by a linen cloth attached to the ceiling, which was drawn across every evening, and formed the only partition between them. as may easily be supposed, the condition of the prisoners was frightful. the swearing of the common felons was mixed with the prayers of the huguenots. the guards walked about all night to keep watch and ward over them. they fell upon any who assembled and knelt together, separating them and swearing at them, and mercilessly ill-treating them, men and women alike. "but all their strictness and rage," says de péchels, "could not prevent one from seeing always, in different parts of the dungeon, little groups upon their knees, imploring the mercy of god and singing his praises, whilst others kept near the guards so as to hinder them from interfering with the little bands of worshippers." at length the time arrived for the embarkation of the huguenots for america. on the th of september, , de péchels, with fifty-eight men and twenty-one women, was put on board a _flûte_ called the _mary_--the french _flûte_ consisting of a heavy narrow-sterned vessel, called in england a "pink." de péchels was carefully separated from all with whom he had formed habits of intimacy, and whose presence near him would doubtless have helped him to bear the bitterness of his fate. on the same day, ninety prisoners of both sexes were embarked in another ship, named the _concord_, bound for the same destination. the two vessels set sail in the first place for toulon, in order to obtain an escort of two ships-of-war. the voyage was very disastrous. three hours after the squadron had left toulon, the _mary_ was nearly dashed against a rock, owing to the roughness of the weather. three days after, a frightful storm arose, and dashed the prisoners against each other. all were sick; indeed, de péchels' malady lasted during the entire voyage. the squadron first cast anchor amongst the formentera islands, off the coast of spain, where they took in water. on the next day they anchored in the straits of gibraltar for the same purpose. they next sailed for cadiz, but a strong west wind having set in, the ship was forced back to the road of gibraltar. after waiting there for three days they again started, under the shelter of a dutch fleet of eighteen sail, "which," says de péchels, "providentially saved us from falling into the hands of the algerine corsairs, some of whom had appeared in sight, and from whose hands god, in his great mercy, delivered us." as if the algerine corsairs would have treated the huguenots worse than their own king was now treating them. the algerine corsairs would have sold them into slavery; whilst the french king was transporting them to america for the same purpose. at length the squadron reached cadiz roads. many ships were there--english as well as dutch. when the foreigners heard of the state and misfortunes of the huguenots on board the french ships, they came to visit them in their anchoring ground, and were profuse in their charity to the prisoners for conscience' sake confined in the two french vessels. "god, who never leaves himself without witness, brought us consolation and relief from this town, where superstition and bigotry reign in their fullest force." as it was in de péchels' day, so it is now. at length the french squadron set sail for america. the voyage was tedious and miserable. there were about a hundred and thirty prisoners on board. seventy of them were sick felons, chained with heavy irons. being useless for the french galleys, they were now being transported to america, to be sold as slaves. the imprisoned huguenots--men and women--were fifty-nine in number. they were crammed into a part of the ship that could scarcely hold them. they could not stand upright; nor could they lie down. they had to lie upon each other. the den was moreover very dark, the only light that entered it being through the narrow hatchway; and even this was often closed. the wonder is that they were not suffocated outright. the burning heat of the sun shining on the deck above them, the never-ceasing fire of the kitchen, which was situated alongside their place of confinement, created such a stifling heat, that the prisoners had to take off their shirts to relieve their agony. the horrid stench arising from so many persons being crowded together, and the entire want of the means of cleanliness, caused the inmates to become covered with vermin. they were also tormented by the intolerable thirst which no means were taken to allay. their feeding was horrible; for they must be kept alive in some way, in order that the intentions of their gracious sovereign might be carried into effect. one day they had stinking salt beef; the next, cod fish half boiled; then peas as hard as when they were put into the pot; and at other times, dried cod fish, or rank cheese. these things, together with the violent motion of the sea, occasioned severe sickness, from which many of the sufferers were relieved by death. this deplorable voyage extended over five months. here is de péchels' account of the sufferings of the prisoners, written in his own words:-- "the intense and suffocating heat, the horrible odour, the maddening swarm of vermin that devoured us, the incessant thirst and wretched fare, sufficed not to satisfy our overseers. they sometimes struck us rudely, and very often threw down sea-water upon us, when they saw us engaged in prayer and praise to god. the common talk of these enemies of the truth was how they would hang, when they came to america, every man who would not go to mass, and how they would deliver the women to the natives. but far from being frightened at these threats, or even moved by all the barbarities of which we were the victims, many of us felt a secret joy that we were chosen to suffer for the holy name of jesus, who strengthened us with a willingness to die for his sake. for myself, these menaces had been so often repeated during my imprisonments, that they had become familiar; insomuch that, far from being shaken by them any more than by the sufferings to which it had pleased my saviour to call me, i considered them as transient things, not worthy to be weighed against the glory to come, and such as would procure me a weight of glory supremely excellent. 'blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'" on the nd of january, , the island of san domingo came in sight. it was for the most part inhabited by savages. the french had a settlement on the west coast of the island, and the spaniards occupied the eastern part. dense forests separated the two settlements. the _mary_ coasted along the island, and afterwards made sail for guadaloupe, another colony belonging to the french. the ship seemed as yet to have had no proper destination, for, four days later, the _mary_ weighed her anchor, and sailed to st. christopher, another island partly belonging to the french. "it was well situated," says de péchels, "as may readily be believed, when i add that it possessed a colony of jesuits--an order which never selects a bad situation. the jesuits here are very rich and in high repute. two of the fraternity, having come on board, were received by the crew with every demonstration of respect; and on their retirement, three guns were fired as a mark of honour to the distinguished visitors." the huguenots were still under hatches,--weary, longing, wretched, and miserable. they were most anxious to be put on shore--anywhere, even among savages. but the _mary_ had not yet arrived at her destination. she again set sail, and passed st. kitts, st. eustace, st. croix, porto rico, and at length again reached san domingo. the ship dropped anchor before port au prince, the residence of the governor. the galley-slaves were disembarked and sold. some of the huguenots were also sold for slaves, though de péchels was not among them. the rest were transferred to the _maria_, a king's ship, commanded by m. de beauguay, who treated the prisoners with much humanity. the ship then set sail for léogane, another part of the colony, where the remaining huguenots were disembarked. they were quartered on the inhabitants at the pleasure of the governor. de péchels says that he passed his time at this place in tranquillity, waiting till it might please god to afford him an opportunity of escaping from his troubles. he visited the inhabitants, especially those of his own religious persuasion--a circumstance which gave much umbrage to the dominican monks. they ordered some of the bigots among their parishioners to lodge a complaint against him with the governor, to the effect that he was hindering his fellow-prisoners from becoming roman catholics, and preventing those who had become so from going to mass. he accordingly received a verbal command from m. dumas, the king's lieutenant, to repair immediately to avache (probably la vache), an island about a hundred leagues distant from léogane. he was accordingly despatched by ship to avache, which he reached on the th of june. he was put in charge of captain laurans, a renowned freebooter, and was specially lodged under his roof. the captain was ordered never to lose sight of his prisoner. de péchels suffered much at this place in consequence of the intense heat, and the insects, mosquitoes, and horrible flies by which he was surrounded. "and yet," he says, "god in his great mercy willed that in this very place i should find the means of escaping from my exile, and making my way to the english island of jamaica. on the th of august a little shallop of that generous nation, in its course from the island of st. thomas to jamaica, stopped at avache to water and take provisions. two months already had i watched for such an opportunity, and now that god had presented me with this, i thought it should not be neglected. so fully was i persuaded of this, that without reflecting upon the smallness of the shallop, i put myself on board with victuals for four days, although assured that the passage would only occupy three. but instead of performing the passage in three days, as we had thought, it was ten days before we made the island, during the whole of which time i was constantly unwell from bad weather and consequent seasickness. during the last three days i suffered also from hunger, my provisions being spent, with the exception of some little wretched food, salt and smoky, which the sailors eat to keep themselves from starving. god, in his great compassion, preserved me from all dangers, and brought me happily to jamaica, where, however, i thought to leave my bones." the voyage was followed by a serious illness. de péchels was obliged to take to his bed, where he lay for fifteen days prostrated by fever, accompanied by incessant pains in his head. after the fever had left him, he could neither walk nor stand. by slow degrees his strength returned. he was at length able to walk; and he then began to make arrangements for setting out for england. on the st of october he embarked on board an english vessel bound for london. during his voyage north he suffered from cold, as much as he had before suffered from heat. at length the coast of england was sighted. two days after, the ship reached the downs; and on the nd of december it was borne up the thames by the tide, to within about seven miles from london bridge. there the ship stopped to discharge part of her cargo; and de péchels, having taken his place on board a small sloop for the great city, arrived there at ten o'clock the same night. on arrival in london, de péchels proceeded to make inquiry amongst his huguenot friends--who had by that time reached england in great numbers--for his wife, his children, his mother, and his sisters. alas! what disappointment! he found no wife, no child, nor any relation ready to welcome him. his wife, however, was living at geneva, with their only son; for the youngest had died at montauban during de péchels' exile. his daughters were still at montauban--the eldest in a convent. his mother and youngest sister were both in prison--the one at moissac, the other at auvillard. a message was, however, sent to madame de péchels, that her husband was now in england, and longing to meet her. it was long before the message reached madame de péchels; and still longer before she could join her husband in london. while at geneva, she had maintained herself and her son by the work of her hands. on receiving the message she immediately set out, but her voyage could not fail to be one of hardship to a person in her reduced circumstances. we are not informed how she and her son contrived to travel the long distance of eight hundred miles (by way of the rhine and holland) from geneva to london; but at length she reached the english capital, when she had the mortification to find that her husband was not there, but had left london for ireland only four days before. during the absence of her husband, madame de péchels, whose courage never abandoned her, chose rather to stoop to the most toilsome labours than to have recourse to the charity of the government, of which many, less self-helping, or perhaps more necessitous, did not scruple to take advantage. we must now revert to the circumstances under which de péchels left london for ireland. at the time when he arrived in england, the country was in the throes of a revolution. only a month before, william of orange had landed at torbay, with a large body of troops, a considerable proportion of which consisted of huguenot officers and soldiers. there were three strong regiments of huguenot infantry, and a complete squadron of huguenot cavalry. marshal schomberg, next in command to william of orange, was a banished huguenot; and many of his principal officers were french. james ii. had so distinctly shown his disposition to carry back the nation to the roman catholic religion, that the prince of orange, on his landing at torbay, was hailed as the deliverer of england. his troops advanced direct upon london. he was daily joined by fresh adherents; by the gentry, officers, and soldiers. there was scarcely a show of resistance; and when he entered london, james was getting on board a smack in the thames, and slinking ignominiously out of his kingdom. towards the end of june, , william and mary were proclaimed king and queen of great britain; and they were solemnly crowned at westminster about three months after. but james ii. had not yet been got rid of. in the spring of he landed at kinsale, in ireland, with substantial help obtained from the french king. before many weeks had elapsed, forty thousand irish stood in arms to support his cause. it was clear that william iii. must fight for his throne, and that ireland was to be the battle-field. he accordingly called his forces together again--for the greater part had been disbanded--when he prepared to take the field in person. four huguenot regiments were at once raised, three infantry regiments, and one cavalry regiment. the cavalry regiment was raised by marshal schomberg, its colonel. it was composed of french gentlemen, privates as well as officers. de péchels was offered a commission in the regiment, which he cheerfully accepted. he assumed the name of his barony, la boissonade, as was common in those days; and he acted as lieutenant in the company of la fontain. the regiment, when completed, was at once despatched to the north of ireland to join the little army of about ten thousand protestants, who had already laid siege to and taken the fortified town of carrickfergus. schomberg's regiment embarked from chester, on monday, the th of august, ; and on the following saturday the squadron arrived in belfast lough. the troopers were landed a little to the west of carrickfergus, and marched along the road towards belfast, which is still known as "troopers' lane." next day the duke moved on in pursuit of the enemy. the regiment passed through belfast, which was then a very small place. it consisted of a few streets of thatched cottages, grouped around what is now known as the high street of belfast. schomberg's regiment joined the infantry and the enniskilleners, who were encamped in a wood on the west of the town. next morning the little army started in pursuit of the enemy, who, though in much greater numbers, fled before them, laying waste the country. at night schomberg's troops encamped at lisburn; on the following day at dromore; on the third at brickclay (this must be loughbrickland); and then on to newry. all the villages they passed were either burnt or burning. at length they heard that james's irish army was at newry, and that the duke of berwick (james's natural son) was in possession of the town with a strong body of horse. but before schomberg could reach the place the duke of berwick had evacuated it, leaving the town in flames. the duke had fled with such haste that he had left some of his baggage behind him, and thrown his cannon into the river. schomberg ordered his cavalry to advance rapidly upon dundalk, in order to prevent the town from sharing the same fate as newry. this forced march took the enemy by surprise. they suddenly abandoned dundalk, without burning it, and never paused until they had reached the entrenched camp of king james. the weather had now become cold, dreary, and rainy. provisions were scarcely to be had. the people of dundalk were themselves starving. strong bodies of cavalry foraged the country, but were able to find next to nothing in the shape of food for themselves, or corn for their horses. the ships from england, laden with provisions which ought to have arrived at belfast, were forced back by contrary winds. thus the army was becoming rapidly famished. disease soon made its appearance, and carried off the men by hundreds. schomberg's camp, outside dundalk, was situated by the side of a marsh--a most unwholesome position; but the marsh protected him from the enemy, who were not far off. the rain and snow continued; the men and the horses were perpetually drenched; and scouring winds blew across the camp. ague, dysentery, and fever everywhere prevailed. dalrymple has recorded that of fifteen thousand men who belonged to schomberg's army, not less than eight thousand perished. under these circumstances, the greatly reduced force broke up from their cantonments and went into winter quarters. schomberg's cavalry regiment was stationed at lurgan, then a small village, which happily had not been burnt. de péchels was one of those who had been sick in camp, and was disabled from pursuing the campaign further. after remaining for some weeks at lurgan, he obtained leave from the duke of schomberg to return to london. and there, after the lapse of four years, he found and embraced his beloved and noble wife. de péchels continued invalided, and was unable to rejoin the army of king william. "after some stay in london," he says, in the memoir from which the above extracts are made, "it was the king's pleasure to exempt from further service certain officers specified by name, and to assign them a pension. through a kind providence i was included in the number. when i had lived in london on the pension which it had pleased the king to allow those officers who were no longer in a position to serve him, until the st of august, , i then left that city, in company with my wife and son, to remove into ireland, whither my pension was transferred." de péchels accordingly arrived in dublin, where he spent the rest of his days in peace and quiet. he lived to experience the truth of the promise "that every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." de péchels died in , at a ripe old age, in his eighty-seventh year, and was interred in the huguenot cemetery in the neighbourhood of dublin. and what of the children left by de péchels at montauban? the two daughters who were torn from their mother's care, and immured in a convent, were brought up in the roman catholic faith. the little boy, who was also taken from her, died shortly after. the daughters accordingly secured the possession of the family estates. the eldest married m. de cahuzac, and the youngest, who was taken as a babe from her mother's breast, married m. de st. sardos; and the descendants of the latter still possess la boissonade, which exists as an old château near montauban. it was left for jacob de péchels, the only son of samuel de péchels and his wife, the marquise de sabonnières, to build up the family fortunes in england. following the military instincts of the french, he entered the english army at an early age. his name was entered "pechell" in his war office commission. probably this change of name originated in the disposition of the naturalised huguenots to adopt names of an english sound rather than to retain their french names. numerous instances of this have already been given.[ ] jacob pechell was a gallant officer. he rose in the army, step by step. he fought through the wars in the low countries, under marlborough and ligonier, the latter being a huguenot like himself. he rose through the various grades of ensign, lieutenant, captain, and major, until he attained the rank of colonel of the th regiment. colonel pechell married an irish heiress, jane elizabeth boyd, descended from the earls of kilmarnock. by her he had three sons and a daughter. samuel, the eldest, studied law, and became a master in chancery. george and paul obedient to their military instincts, entered the army, and became distinguished officers. george was killed at carthagena, and it was left for paul to maintain the fortunes of the family. [footnote : in "the huguenots in england and ireland," , , last edition.] in those days the exiled huguenots and their descendants lived very much together. they married into each other's families. the richer helped the poorer. there were distinguished french social circles, where, though their country was forbidden them, they delighted to speak in their own language. like many others, the pechells intermarried with huguenot families. thus samuel pechell married the daughter of françois gaultier, esq., and his sister mary married brigadier-general cailland, of aston rowant. among the distinguished french nobles in london was the marquis de montandre, descended from the de la rochefoucaulds, one of the greatest families in france. de montandre was a field-marshal in the english army, having rendered important services in the spanish war. his wife was daughter of baron de spanheim, ambassador extraordinary for the king of prussia, and descended from another protestant refugee. the field-marshal left his fortune to his wife, and when she died, she left samuel pechell, master in chancery, her sole executor and residuary legatee. the sum of money to which he became entitled on her decease amounted to upwards of £ , . but mr. pechell, from a highly sensitive conscience--such as is rarely equalled--did not feel himself perfectly justified in acquiring so large a fortune until he knew that there were no relations of the testatrix in existence, whose claim to inherit the property might be greater than his own. he therefore collected all her effects, and put them into chancery, in order that those who could make good their claims by kindred to the marchioness might do so before the chancellor. accordingly, one family from berlin and another from geneva appeared, and claimed, and obtained the inheritance. these relations, in acknowledgment of the kindness and honesty of mr. pechell, resolved on presenting him with a set of sèvres china, which was at that time beyond all price in value. it could only be had as a great favour from the manufactory at sèvres, and was only purchased by, or presented to, crowned heads.[ ] [footnote : this china is now at castle goring, and, with the whole of the family documents, is in the possession of the dowager lady burrell.] paul pechell, who had entered the army, became a distinguished officer, and rose to the rank of general. in he was created a baronet, and married mary, the only daughter and heiress of thomas brooke, esq., of pagglesham, essex. his eldest son, sir thomas, was a major-general in the army, and was for some time m.p. for downton. the second son, augustus, was appointed receiver-general of the post office in , and of the customs in . many of his descendants still survive, and the baronetcy reverted to his second son. he was succeeded by his two sons, one of whom became rear-admiral, and the other vice-admiral. the latter, sir george richard brooke pechell, entered the royal navy in , and served with distinction in several engagements. after the peace, he represented the important borough of brighton in parliament for twenty-four years. he married the daughter and coheir of cecil, lord zouche, and added castle goring to part of the ancient possessions of the bisshopp family, which she inherited at her father's death. william cecil pechell, the only son of sir george, again following the military instincts of his race, entered the army, and became captain of the th regiment, with which he served during the crimean war. he fell leading on his men to repel an attack made by the russians on the advanced trenches before sebastopol, on the rd of september, . he was beloved and deeply lamented by all who knew him; and sorrow at his loss was expressed by the queen, by the commander-in-chief, by the whole of the light division, and by the mayor and principal inhabitants of brighton. a statue of captain pechell, by noble, was erected by public subscription, and now stands in the pavilion at brighton. ii. captain rapin, author of the "history of england." when louis xiv. revoked the edict of nantes, he expelled from france nearly all his subjects who would not conform to the roman catholic religion. he drove out the manufacturers, who were for the most part protestants, and thus destroyed the manufacturing supremacy of france. he expelled protestants of every class--advocates, judges, doctors, artists, scientists, teachers, and professors. and, last of all, he expelled the protestant soldiers and sailors. according to vauban, , tried soldiers, , sailors, and officers left france, and entered into foreign service. some went to england, some to holland, and some to prussia. those who took refuge in holland entered the service of william, prince of orange. most of them accompanied him to torbay in . they fought against the armies of louis xiv. at the boyne, at athlone, and at aughrim, and finally drove the french out of ireland. the sailors also did good service under the flags of england and holland. they distinguished themselves at the sea-fight off la hogue, where the english and dutch fleets annihilated the expedition prepared by louis xiv. for a descent upon england. the expatriated french soldiers occasionally revisited the country of their birth, not as friends, but as enemies. they encountered the armies of louis xiv. in all the battles of the low countries. they fought at ramilies, blenheim, and malplacquet. a huguenot engineer directed the operations at the siege of namur, which ended in the capture of the fortress. another huguenot engineer conducted the operations at lisle, which was also taken by the allied forces. while there, a flying party, consisting chiefly of french huguenots, penetrated as far as the neighbourhood of paris, when they nearly succeeded in carrying off the dauphin. the huguenot officers who took refuge in prussia entered the service of frederick william, elector of brandenburg. some were raised to the highest offices in his army. marshal schomberg was one of the number. but when he found that william of orange was assembling a large force in holland for the purpose of making a descent upon england, he requested leave to join him; and his friend prince frederick william, though with great regret, at length granted him permission to leave the prussian service. the subject of the following narrative was a french refugee, who entered the service of william of orange. to find the beginning of his ancestry, we must reach far back into history. the rapins were supposed to have been driven from the campagna of rome during the persecutions of nero. they took refuge in one of the wildest and most picturesque valleys of the alps. in we find the rapins established near saint-jean de la maurienne, in savoy, close upon the french frontier. saint-jean de la maurienne was so called because of the supposed relic of the bones of st. john the baptist, which had been deposited there by a female pilgrim, sainte thècle, who was, it is supposed, a rapin by birth. the fief of chaudane en valloires was the patrimony of the rapins, which they long continued to hold. in the descendants of the family endeavoured to prove, from the numerous titles which they possessed, that they had been nobles for eight or nine hundred years. the home of the rapins was situated in the country of the vaudois. in the vaudois descended from their mountains and preached the gospel in the valleys of savoy. the pope appealed to the king of france, who sent an army into the district. the vaudois were crushed. those who remained fled back to the mountains. nevertheless the reformed religion spread in the district. an italian priest, raphaël bordeille, even preached the gospel in the cathedral of saint-jean de maurienne. but he was suddenly arrested. he was seized, tried for the crime of heresy, and burnt in front of the cathedral on holy thursday, in passion week, . though the rapin family held many high offices in church and state, several of them attached themselves to the reformed religion. three brothers at length left their home in savoy, and established themselves in france during the reign of francis i. without entering into their history during the long-continued religious wars which devastated the south of france, it may be sufficient to state that two of the brothers took an active part under condé. antoine de rapin held important commands at toulouse, at montauban, at castres and montpellier. philibert de rapin, his younger brother, was one of the most valiant and trusted officers of the reformed party. he was selected by the prince of condé to carry into languedoc the treaty of peace signed at longjumeaux on the th march, . feeling safe under the royal commission, he presented to the parliament at toulouse the edict with which he was intrusted. he then retired to his country house at grenade, on the outskirts of toulouse. he was there seized like a criminal, brought before the judges, and sentenced to be beheaded in three days. the treaty was thus annulled. war went on as before. two years after, the army of coligny appeared before toulouse. the houses and châteaux of the councillors of parliament were burnt, and on their smoking ruins were affixed the significant words, "_vengeance de rapin_." philibert de rapin's son pierre embraced the career of arms almost from his boyhood. he served under the prince of navarre. he was almost as poor as the prince. one day he asked him for some pistoles to replace a horse which had been killed under him in action. the prince replied, "i should like to give you them, but do you see i have only three shirts!" pierre at length became seigneur and baron of manvers, though his château was destroyed and burnt during his absence with the army. destructions of the same kind were constantly taking place throughout the whole of france. but, to the honour of humanity, it must be told that when his château was last destroyed, the catholic gentlemen of the neighbourhood brought their labourers to the place, and tilled and sowed his abandoned fields. when rapin arrived eight months later, he was surprised and gratified to find his estate in perfect order. this was a touching proof of the esteem with which this protestant gentleman was held by his catholic neighbours. pierre de rapin died in at the age of eighty-nine. he left twenty-two children by his second wife. his eldest son jean succeeded to the estate of manvers and to the title of baron. like his father, he was a soldier. he first served under the prince of orange, who was then a french prince, head of the principality of orange. he served under the king of france in the war with spain. he was a frank and loyal soldier, yet firmly attached to the faith of his fathers. he belonged to the old huguenot phalanx, who, as the duke de mayenne said, "were always ready for death, from father to son." after the wars were over, he gave up the sword for the plough. his château was in ruins, and he had to live in a very humble way until his fortunes were restored. he used to say that his riches consisted in his four sons, who were all worthy of the name they bore. jacques de rapin, seigneur de thoyras, was the second son of pierre de rapin. thoyras was a little hamlet near grenade, adjacent to the baronial estate of manvers. jacques studied the law. he became an advocate, and practised with success, for about fifty years, at castres and other cities and towns in the south of france. when the edict of nantes was revoked, the protestants were no longer permitted to practise the law, and he was compelled to resign his profession. he died shortly after, but the authorities would not even allow his corpse to be buried in the family vault. they demolished his place of interment, and threw his body into a ditch by the side of the road. in the meantime paul de rapin, son of jean, baron de manvers, had married the eldest daughter of jacques, seigneur de thoyras. paul, like many of his ancestors, entered the army. he served with distinction under the duke of luxembourg in holland, flanders, and italy, yet he never rose above the rank of captain. on his death in , his widow and two daughters (being protestants) were apprehended in their château at manvers, and incarcerated in convents at montpellier and toulouse. her sons were also taken away, and placed in other convents. they were only liberated after five years' confinement. madame de rapin then resolved to quit france entirely. she contrived to reach holland, and established her family at utrecht. her brother-in-law, daniel de rapin, had already escaped from france, and achieved the position of colonel in the dutch service. raoul de cazenove, the author of "rapin-thoyras, sa famille, sa vie, et ses oeuvres," says, "the women of the house of rapin distinguished themselves more than once by like courage. strengthened and fortified by persecutions, the reformed were willing to die in exile, far from their beloved children who had been violently snatched from them, but leaving with them a holy heritage of example and of firmness in their faith. the pious lessons of their mothers, profoundly engraved on the hearts of their daughters, sufficed more than once to save them from apostasy, which was rendered all the more easy by the feebleness of their youth and the perfidious suggestions by which they were surrounded." we return to paul de rapin-thoyras, second son of madame de rapin. he was born at castres in . he received his first lessons at home. he learnt the latin rudiments, but his progress was not such as to please his father. he was then sent to the academy at puylaurens, where the protestant noblesse of the south of france were still permitted to send their sons. the celebrated bayle was educated there. but in the academy of puylaurens was suppressed, as that of montauban had been a few years before; and then young rapin was sent to saumur, one of the few remaining schools in france where protestants were allowed to be educated. rapin finished his studies and returned home. he wished to enter the army, but his father was so much opposed to it, that he at length acceded to his desires and commenced the study of the law. he was already prepared for being received to the office of advocate, when the royal edict was passed which prevented protestants from practising before the courts; and, indeed, prevented them from following any profession whatever. immediately after the death of his father, paul de rapin, accompanied by his younger brother solomon, emigrated from france and proceeded into england. it was not without a profound feeling of sadness that rapin-thoyras left his native country. he left his widowed mother in profound grief, arising from the recent death of her husband. she was now exposed to persecutions which were bitterer by far than the perils of exile. it was at her express wish that rapin left his native country and emigrated to england. and yet it was for france that his fathers had shed their blood and laid down their lives. but france now repelled the descendants of her noblest sons from her bosom. shortly after his arrival in london, rapin made the acquaintance of the abbé of denbeck, nephew of the bishop of tournay. the abbé was an intimate friend of rapin's uncle, pélisson, a man notorious in those times for buying up consciences with money. louis xiv. consecrated to this traffic one-third of the benefices which fell to the crown during their vacancy. they were left vacant for the purpose of paying for the abjurations of the heretics. pélisson had the administration of the fund. he had been born a protestant, but he abjured his religion, and from a convert he became a converter. voltaire says of him, in his "siècle de louis xiv.," "much more a courtier than a philosopher, pélisson changed his religion and made a fortune." pélisson wrote to his friend the abbé of denbeck, then in london at the court of james ii., to look after his nephew rapin-thoyras, and endeavour to bring him over to the true faith. it is even said that pélisson offered rapin the priory of saint-orens d'auch if he would change his religion. the abbé did his best. he introduced rapin to m. de barillon, then ambassador at the english court. james ii. was then the pensioner of france, and accordingly had many intimate transactions with the french ambassador. m. de barillon received the young refugee with great kindness, and, at the recommendation of the abbé and pélisson, offered to present him to the king. their object was to get rapin appointed to some public office, and thereby help his conversion. but rapin fled from the temptation. though no great theologian, he felt it to be wrong to be thus entrapped into a faith which was not his own; and without much reasoning about his belief, but merely acting from a sense of duty, he left london at once and embarked for holland. at utrecht he joined his uncle, daniel de rapin, who was in command of a company of cadets wholly composed of huguenot gentlemen and nobles. daniel had left the service of france on the th of october, , three days after the revocation of the edict of nantes. he was then captain of a french regiment in picardy, but he could no longer, without denying his god, serve his country and his king. in fact, he was compelled, like all other protestant officers, to leave france unless he would at once conform to the king's faith. rapin was admitted to the company of refugee cadets commanded by his uncle. he was now twenty-seven years old. his first instincts had been military, and now he was about to pursue the profession of arms in his adopted country. his first prospects were not brilliant. he was put under a course of discipline, his pay amounting to only sixpence a day. indeed, the states-general of holland were at first unwilling to take so large a number of refugee frenchmen into their service; but on the prince of orange publicly declaring that he would himself pay the expenses of maintaining the military refugees, they hesitated no longer, but voted money enough to enrol them in their service. the prince of orange had now a large body of troops at his command. no one knew for what purpose they were enrolled. some thought they were intended for an attack upon france in revenge for louis' devastation of holland a few years before. james ii. never dreamt that they were intended for a descent upon the coasts of england. yet he was rapidly alienating the loyalty of his subjects by hypocrisy, by infidelity to the laws of england, and by unmitigated persecution of those who differed from him in religious belief. in this state of affairs england looked to the prince of orange for help. william iii. was doubly related to the royal family of england. he was nephew of charles i. and son-in-law of james ii. his wife was the heiress-presumptive to the british throne. above all, he was a protestant, while james ii. was a roman catholic. "here," said the archbishop of rheims of the latter, "is a good sort of man who has lost his three kingdoms for a mass!" william was at length ready with his troops. louis xiv. suddenly withdrew his army from flanders and poured them into germany. william seized the opportunity. a fleet of more than six hundred vessels, including fifty men-of-war, assembled at helvoetsluys, near the mouth of the maas. the troops were embarked with great celerity. william hoisted his flag with the words emblazoned on it, "the protestant religion and liberties of england," and underneath the motto of the house of nassau, _je maintiendra_--"i will maintain." the fleet set sail on the th october, the english admiral herbert leading the van, the prince of orange commanding the main body of the fleet, and the dutch vice-admiral evertzen bringing up the rear. the wind was fair. it was the "protestant wind" that the people of england had so long been looking for. in a few hours the strong eastern breeze had driven the fleet half across the sea that divides the dutch and english coasts. then the wind changed. it began to blow from the west. the wind increased until it blew a violent tempest. the fleet seemed to be in the midst of a cyclone. the ships were blown hither and thither, so that in less than two hours the fleet was completely dispersed. at daybreak next morning scarce two ships could be seen together. the several ships returned to their rendez-vous at goeree, in the maas. they returned in a miserable condition--some with their sails blown away, some without their bulwarks, some without their masts. many ships were still missing. the horses had suffered severely. they had been stowed away in the holds and driven against each other during the storm. many had been suffocated, others had their legs broken, and had to be killed when the vessels reached the shore. the banks at goeree were covered with dead horses taken from the ships. four hundred had been lost. rapin de thoyras and m. de chavernay, commanding two companies of french huguenots, were on board one of the missing ships. the frightful tempest had separated them from the fleet. they had been driven before the wind as far as the coast of norway. they thought that each moment might be their last. but the sailors were brave, and the ship was manageable. after enduring a week's storm the wind at last abated. the ship was tacked, and winged its way towards the south. at length, after about eight days' absence, they rejoined the fleet, which had again assembled in the maas. there were now only two vessels missing, containing four companies of the holstein regiment, and about sixty french huguenot officers. in the meantime the prince of orange had caused all the damages in the combined fleet to be repaired. new horses were embarked, new men were added to the army, and new ships were hired for the purpose of accommodating them. the men-of-war were also increased. after eleven days the fleet was prepared to put to sea again. on the st of november, , the armament started on its second voyage for the english coast. the fleet at first steered northward, and it was thought to be the prince's intention to land at the mouth of the humber. but a violent east wind having begun to blow during the night, the fleet steered towards the south-eastern coast of england; after which the ships shortened sail for fear of accidents. the same wind that blew the english and dutch fleet towards the channel, had the effect of keeping king james's fleet in the thames, where they remained anchored at gunfleet, sixty-one men-of-war, under command of admiral lord dartmouth. on the rd of november, the fleet under the prince of orange entered the english channel, and lay between calais and dover to wait for the ships that were behind. "it is easy," says rapin thoyras, "to imagine what a glorious show the fleet made. five or six hundred ships in so narrow a channel, and both the english and french shores covered with numberless spectators, are no common sight. for my part, who was then on board the fleet, i own it struck me extremely." sunday, the th of november, was the prince's birthday, and it was dedicated to devotion. the fleet was then off the isle of wight. sail was slackened during the performance of divine service. the fleet then sped on its way down-channel, in order that the troops might be landed at dartmouth or torbay; but during the night the wind freshened, and the fleet was carried beyond the desired ports. soon after, however, the wind changed to the south, when the fleet tacked in splendid order, and made for the shore in torbay. the landing was effected with such diligence and tranquillity that the whole army was on shore before night. there was no opposition to the landing. king james's army greatly outnumbered that of the prince of orange. it amounted to about forty thousand troops, exclusive of the militia. but the king's forces had been sent northward to resist the anticipated landing of the delivering army at the mouth of the humber, so that the south-west of england was nearly stripped of troops. nor could the king depend upon his forces. the king had already outraged and insulted the gallant noblemen and gentlemen who had heretofore been the bulwark of his throne. he had imprisoned the bishops, dismissed protestant clergymen from their livings, refused to summon a parliament, and caused terror and dismay throughout england and scotland. he had created discontent throughout the army by his dismissal of protestant officers, and the king now began to fear that the common soldiers themselves would fail to serve him in his time of need. his fears proved prophetic. when the army of the prince of orange advanced from brixton (where it had landed) to exeter, and afterwards to salisbury and london, it was joined by noblemen, gentlemen, officers, and soldiers. lord churchill, afterwards duke of marlborough, lord cornbury, with four regiments of dragoons, passed over to the prince of orange. the prince of denmark, the king's son-in-law, deserted him. his councillors abandoned him. his mistresses left him. the country was up against him. at length the king saw no remedy before him but a precipitate flight. the account given by rapin of james's departure from england is somewhat ludicrous. the queen went first. on the night between the th and th of december she crossed the thames in disguise. she waited under the walls of a church at lambeth until a coach could be got ready for her at the nearest inn. she went from thence to gravesend, where she embarked with the prince of wales on a small vessel, which conveyed them safely to france. the king set out on the following night. he entered a small boat at whitehall, dressed in a plain suit and a bob wig, accompanied by a few friends. he threw the great seal into the water, from whence it was afterwards dragged up by a fisherman's net. before he left, he gave the earl of feversham orders to disband the army without pay, in order, probably, to create anarchy after his flight. james reached the south shore of the thames. he travelled, with relays of horses, to emley ferry, near the island of sheppey. he went on board the little vessel that was to convey him to a french frigate lying in the mouth of the thames ready to transport him to france. the wind blew strong, and the vessel was unable to sail. the fishermen of the neighbourhood boarded the vessel in which the king was. they took him for the chaplain of sir edward hales, one of his attendants. they searched the king, and found upon him four hundred guineas and several valuable seals and jewels, which they seized. a constable was present who knew the king, and he ordered restitution of the valuables which had been taken from him. the king wished to be gone, but the people by a sort of violence conducted him to a public inn in the town of feversham. he then sent for the earl of winchelsea, lord-lieutenant of the county, who prevailed upon him not to leave the kingdom, but to return to london. and to london he went. the prince of orange was by this time at windsor. on the king's arrival in london he was received with acclamations, as if he had returned from victory. he resumed possession of his palace. he published a proclamation, announcing that having been given to understand that divers outrages had been committed in various parts of the kingdom, by burning, pulling down, and defacing of houses, he commanded all lord-lieutenants, &c., to prevent such outrages for the future, and suppress all riotous assemblies. this was his last public act. he was without an army. he had few friends. the dutch guards arrived in london, and took possession of st. james's and whitehall. the prince of orange sent three lords to the king to desire his majesty's departure for ham--a house belonging to the duchess of lauderdale; but the king desired them to tell the prince that he wished rather to go to rochester. the prince gave his consent. next morning the king entered his barge, accompanied by four earls, six of the yeomen of his guard, and about a hundred of the dutch guard, commanded by a colonel of the regiment. they arrived at gravesend, where the king entered his coach, and proceeded across the country to rochester. in the meantime, barillon, the french ambassador, was requested to leave england. st. ledger, a french refugee, was requested to attend him and see him embark. while they were on the road st. ledger could not forbear saying to the ambassador, "sir, had any one told you a year ago that a french refugee should be commissioned to see you out of england, would you have believed it?" to which the ambassador answered, "sir, cross over with me to calais, and i will give you an answer." shortly after, james embarked in a small french ship, which landed him safely at ambleteuse, a few miles north of boulogne; while the army of william marched into london amidst loud congratulations, and william himself took possession of the palace of st. james's, which the recreant king had left for his occupation. james ii. fled from england at the end of december, . louis xiv. received him courteously, and entertained him and his family at st. germain and versailles. but he could scarcely entertain much regard for the abdicated monarch. james had left his kingdom in an ignominious manner. though he was at the head of a great fleet and army, he had not struck a single blow in defence of his kingly rights and now he had come to the court of louis xiv. to beg for the assistance of a french fleet and army to recover his throne. though england had rejected james, ireland was still in his favour. the lord-deputy tyrconnel was devoted to him; and the irish people, excepting those of the north, were ready to fight for him. about a hundred thousand irishmen were in arms. half were soldiers; the rest were undrilled rapparees. james was urged by messengers from ireland to take advantage of this state of affairs. he accordingly begged louis xiv. to send a french army with him into ireland to help him to recover his kingdom. but the french monarch, who saw before him the prospect of a continental war, was unwilling to send a large body of troops out of his kingdom. but he did what he could. he ordered the brest fleet to be ready. he put on board arms and ammunition for ten thousand men. he selected four hundred french officers for the purpose of disciplining the irish levies. count rosen, a veteran warrior, was placed in command. over a hundred thousand pounds of money was also put on board. when the fleet was ready to sail, james took leave of his patron, louis xiv. "the best thing that i can wish you," said the french king, "is that i may never see you again in this world." the fleet sailed from brest on the th of march, , and reached kinsale, in the south of ireland, four days later. james ii. was received with the greatest rejoicing. next day he went on to cork; he was received by the earl of tyrconnel, who caused one of the magistrates to be executed because he had declared for the prince of orange. the news went abroad that the king had landed. he entered dublin on the th of march, and was received in a triumphant manner. all roman catholic ireland was at his feet. the protestants in the south were disarmed. there was some show of resistance in the north; but no doubt was entertained that enniskillen and derry, where the protestants had taken refuge, would soon be captured and protestantism crushed. the prince of orange, who had now been proclaimed king at westminster, found that he must fight for his throne, and that ireland was to be the battle-field. londonderry was crowded with protestants, who held out for william iii. james believed that the place would fall without a blow. count rosen was of the same opinion. the irish army proceeded northwards without resistance. the country, as far as the walls of derry, was found abandoned by the population. everything valuable had been destroyed by bands of rapparees. there was great want of food for the army. nevertheless, james proceeded as far as derry. confident of success, he approached within a hundred yards of the southern gate, when he was received with a shout of "no surrender!" the cannon were fired from the nearest bastion. one of james's officers was killed by his side. then he fled. a few days later he was on his way to dublin, accompanied by count rosen. londonderry, after an heroic contest, was at length relieved. a fleet from england, laden with food, broke the boom which had been thrown by the irish army across the entrance to the harbour. the ships reached the quay at ten o'clock at night. the whole population were there to receive them. the food was unloaded, and the famished people were at length fed. three days after, the irish army burnt their huts, and left the long-beleaguered city. they retreated along the left bunk of the boyne to strabane. while the irish forces were lying there, the news of another disaster reached them. the duke of berwick lay with a strong detachment of irish troops before enniskillen. he had already gained some advantage over the protestant colonists, and the command reached him from dublin that he was immediately to attack them. the irish were five thousand in number; the enniskilleners under three thousand. an engagement took place at newton butler. the enniskillen horse swept the irish troops before them. fifteen hundred were put to the sword, and four hundred prisoners were taken. seven pieces of cannon, fourteen barrels of powder, and all the drums and colours were left in the hands of the victors. the irish army were then at strabane, on their retreat from londonderry. they at once struck their tents, threw their military stores into the river, and set out in full retreat for the south. in the meantime a french fleet had landed at bantry bay, with three thousand men on board, and a large convoy of ammunition and provisions. william iii., on his part, determined, with the consent of the english parliament, to send a force into ireland to encounter the french and irish forces under king james. william's troops consisted of english, scotch, dutch, and danes, with a large admixture of french huguenots. there were a regiment of huguenot horse, of eight companies, commanded by the duke of schomberg, and three regiments of huguenot foot, commanded by la mellonière, du cambon, and la caillemotte. schomberg, the old huguenot chief, was put in command of the entire force. rapin accompanied the expedition as a cadet. the army assembled at highlake, about sixteen miles from chester. about ninety vessels of all sorts were assembled near the mouth of the dee. part of the army was embarked on the th of august, and set sail for ireland. about ten thousand men, horse and foot, were landed at bangor, near the southern entrance to belfast lough. parties were sent out to scour the adjacent country, and to feel for the enemy. this done, the army set out for belfast. james's forces had abandoned the place, and retired to carrickfergus, some ten miles from belfast, on the north coast of the lough. carrickfergus was a fortified town. the castle occupies a strong position on a rock overlooking the lough. the place formed a depôt for james's troops, and schomberg therefore determined to besiege the fortress. rapin has written an account of william's campaigns in england and ireland; but with becoming modesty he says nothing about his own achievements. we must therefore supply the deficiency. before the siege of carrickfergus, he had been appointed ensign in lord kingston's regiment. he was helped to this office by his uncle daniel, who accompanied the expedition. several regiments of schomberg's army were detached from belfast to carrickfergus, to commence the siege. among these was lord kingston's regiment. on their approach, the enemy beat a parley. they desired to march out with arms and baggage. schomberg refused, and the siege began. the trenches were opened, the batteries were raised, and the cannon thundered against the walls of the old town. several breaches were made. the attacks were pursued with great vigour for four days, when a general assault was made. the besieged hoisted the white flag. after a parley, it was arranged that the irish should surrender the place, and march out with their arms, and as much baggage as they could carry on their backs. carrickfergus was not taken without considerable loss to the besiegers. lieutenant briset, of the flemish guards, was killed by the first shot fired from the castle. the marquis de venours was also killed while leading the huguenot regiments to the breach. rapin distinguished himself so much during the siege that he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. he was at the same time transferred to another regiment, and served under lieutenant-general douglas during the rest of the campaign. more troops having arrived from england, schomberg marched with his augmented army to lisburn, drummore, and loughbrickland. here the enniskillen horse joined them, and offered to be the advanced guard of the army. the enniskilleners were a body of irregular horsemen, of singularly wild and uncouth appearance. they rode together in a confused body, each man being attended by a mounted servant, bearing his baggage. the horsemen were each mounted and accoutred after their own fashion, without any regular dress, or arms, or mode of attack. they only assumed a hasty and confused line when about to rush into action. they fell on pell-mell. yet they were the bravest of the brave, and were never deterred from attacking by inequality of numbers. they were attended by their favourite preachers, who urged them on to deeds of valour, and encouraged them "to purge the land of idolatry." thus reinforced, schomberg pushed on to newry. the irish were in force there, under command of the duke of berwick. but although it was a very strong place, the irish abandoned the town, first setting fire to it. this news having been brought to schomberg, he sent a trumpet to the duke of berwick, acquainting him that if they went on to burn towns in that barbarous manner, he would give no quarter. this notice seems to have had a good effect, for on quitting dundalk the retreating army did no harm to the town. schomberg encamped about a mile north of dundalk, in a low, moist ground, where he entrenched his army. count rosen was then at drogheda with about twenty thousand men, far outnumbering the forces under schomberg. about the end of september, king james's army approached the lines of dundalk. they drew up in order of battle. the english officers were for attacking the enemy, but schomberg advised them to refrain. a large party of horse appeared within cannon shot, but they made no further attempt. in a day or two after james drew off his army to ardee, count rosen indignantly exclaiming, "if your majesty had ten kingdoms, you would lose them all." in the meantime, schomberg remained entrenched in his camp. the enniskilleners nevertheless made various excursions, and routed a body of james's troops marching towards sligo. great distress fell upon schomberg's army. the marshy land on which they were encamped, the wet and drizzly weather, the scarcity and badness of the food, caused a raging sickness to break out. great numbers were swept away by disease. among the officers who died were sir edward deering, of kent; colonel wharton, son of lord wharton; sir thomas gower and colonel hungerford, two young gentlemen of distinguished merit. two thousand soldiers died in the camp. many afterwards perished from cold and hunger. schomberg at length left the camp at dundalk, and the remains of his army went into winter quarters. rapin shared all the suffering of the campaign. when the army retreated northward, rapin was sent with a party of soldiers to occupy a fortified place between stranorlar and donegal. it commanded the pass of barnes gap. this is perhaps the most magnificent defile in ireland. it is about four miles long. huge mountains rise on either side. the fortalice occupied by rapin is now in ruins. it stands on a height overlooking the northern end of the pass. it is now called barrack hill. the rapparees who lived at the lower end of the gap were accustomed to come down upon the farming population of the lowland country on the banks of the rivers finn and mourne, and carry off all the cattle that they could seize; rapin was accordingly sent with a body of troops to defend the lowland farmers from the rapparees. besides, it was found necessary to defend the pass against the forces of king james, who then occupied sligo and the neighbouring towns, under the command of general sarsfield. schomberg was very much blamed by the english parliament for having effected nothing decisive in ireland. but what could he do? he had to oppose an army more than three times stronger in numbers than his own. king william, rapin says, wrote twice to him, "pressing him to put somewhat to the venture." but his army was wasted by disease, and had he volunteered an encounter and been defeated, his whole army, and consequently all ireland, would have been lost, for he could not have made a regular retreat. "his sure way," says rapin, "was to preserve his army, and that would save ulster and keep matters entire for another year. and therefore, though this conduct of his was blamed by some, yet better judges thought that the managing of this campaign as he did was one of the greatest parts of his life." winter passed. nothing decisive had been accomplished on either side. part of ulster was in the hands of william; the remainder of ireland was in the hands of james. schomberg's army was wasted by famine and disease. james made no use of his opportunity to convert his athletic peasants into good soldiers. on the contrary, schomberg recruited his old regiments, drilled them constantly, and was ready to take the field at the approach of spring. his first achievement was the capture of charlemont, midway between armagh and dungannon. it was one of the strongest forts in the north of ireland. it overlooked the blackwater, and commanded an important pass. it was surrounded by a morass, and approachable only by two narrow causeways. when teague o'regan, who commanded the fort, was summoned to surrender, he replied, "schomberg is an old rogue, and shall not have this castle!" but caillemotte, with his huguenot regiments, sat down before the fortress, and starved the garrison into submission. captain francis rapin, cousin of our hero, was killed during the siege. the armies on both sides were now receiving reinforcements. louis xiv. sent seven thousand two hundred and ninety men of all ranks to the help of james, under the command of count lauzun. they landed at cork in march, , and marched at once to dublin. lauzun described the country as a chaos such as he had read of in the book of genesis. on his arrival at dublin, lauzun was appointed commander-in-chief of the irish army, and took up his residence in the castle. on the other hand, schomberg's forces were recruited by seven thousand danes, under a treaty which william iii. had entered into with the king of denmark. new detachments of english and scotch, of huguenots, dutch, flemings, and brandenburgers, were also added to the allied army. william landed at carrickfergus on the th of june. he passed on to belfast, where he met schomberg, the prince of wurtemberg, major-general kirk, and other general officers. he then pushed on to lisburn, the head-quarters of his army. he there declared that he would not let the grass grow under his feet, but would pursue the war with the utmost vigour. he ordered the whole army to assemble at loughbrickland. he found them to consist of sixty-two squadrons of cavalry and fifty-two battalions of infantry--in all, thirty-six thousand english, dutch, french, danes, and germans, well appointed in every respect. lieutenant-general douglas commanded the advance-guard--to which rapin belonged--and william iii., schomberg, and st. gravenmore commanded the main body. william iii. had no hesitation in entering at once on the campaign. he had been kept too long in london by parliamentary turmoil, by intrigues between whigs and tories, and sometimes by treachery on both sides. but now that he was in the field his spirits returned, and he determined to lose not a day in measuring swords with his enemy. he had very little time to spare. he must lose or win his crown; though his determination was to win. accordingly he marched southward without delay. william had been in ireland six days before james knew of his arrival. the passes between newry and dundalk had been left unguarded--passes where a small body of well-disciplined troops might easily have checked the advance of william's army. dundalk was abandoned. ardee was abandoned. the irish army were drawn up in a strong position on the south of the boyne to arrest the progress of the invading army. james had all the advantages that nature could give him. he had a deep river in front, a morass on his left, and the narrow bridge of slane on his right. behind was a rising ground stretching along the whole of the field. in the rear lay the church and village of donore, and the pass of duleek. drogheda lay towards the mouth of the river, where the green and white flags of ireland and france were flying, emblazoned with the harp and the lilies. william never halted until he reached the summit of a rising ground overlooking the beautiful valley of the boyne. it is about the most fertile ground in ireland. as he looked from east to west, william said to one of his staff, "behold a land worth fighting for!" rapin was there, and has told the story of the crossing of the boyne. he says that the forces of king james, lying on the other side of the river, amounted to about the same number as those under king william. they included more than seven thousand veteran french soldiers. there was a splendid body of irish horse, and about twenty thousand irish foot. james's officers were opposed to a battle; they wished to wait for the large fleet and the additional forces promised by louis xiv. but james resolved to maintain his position, and thought that he might have one fair battle for his crown. "but," says rapin, "notwithstanding all his advantages--the deep river in front, the morass on his right, and the rising ground behind him--he ordered a ship to be prepared for him at waterford, that in case of a defeat he might secure his retreat to france." on the morning of the th of june, william ordered his whole army to move by break of day by three lines towards the river, about three miles distant. the king marched in front. by nine o'clock they were within two miles of drogheda. observing a hill east of the enemy, the king rode up to view the enemy's camp. he found it to lie all along the river in two lines. here he had a long consultation with his leading officers. he then rode to the pass at old bridge, within musket-shot of the ford; next he rode westward, so as to take a full view of the enemy's camp. he fixed the place where his batteries were to be planted, and decided upon the spot where his army was to cross the river on the following day. the irish on the other side of the river had not been unobservant of the king's movements. they could see him riding up and down the banks, for they were not sixty yards apart. the duke of berwick, the viceroy tyrconnel, general sarsfield, and other officers were carefully watching his movements. while the army was marching up the river-side, william dismounted and sat down upon a rising ground to partake of some refreshments, for he had been on horseback since early dawn. during this time a party of irish horse on the other side brought forward two field-pieces through a ploughed field, and planted them behind a hedge. they took their sight and fired. the first shot killed a man and two horses close by the king. william immediately mounted his horse. the second gun was not so well aimed. the shot struck the water, but rising _en ricochet_, it slanted on the king's right shoulder, took a piece out of his coat, and tore the skin and the flesh. william rode away stooping in his saddle. the earl of coningsby put a handkerchief over the wound, but william said "there was no necessity, the bullet should have come nearer." the enemy, seeing the discomfiture of the king's party, and that he rode away wounded, spread abroad the news that he was killed. "they immediately," says rapin, "set up a shout all over their camp, and drew down several squadrons of their horse upon a plain towards the river, as if they meant to pass and pursue the english army. nay, the report of the king's death flew presently to dublin, and from thence spread as far as paris, where the people were encouraged to express their joy by bonfires and illuminations." in the meantime william returned to his tent, where he had his wound dressed, and again mounted and showed himself to the whole army, in order to dissipate their apprehensions. he remained on horseback until nine at night, though he had been up since one o'clock in the morning. william then called a council of war, and declared his resolution of forcing the river next day. schomberg opposed this, but finding the king determined, he urged that a strong body of horse and foot should be sent to slane bridge that night, so as to be able to cross the bridge and get between the enemy and the pass of duleek, which lay behind king james's army. this advice, if followed, might perhaps have ended the war in one campaign. such is rapin's opinion. the proposal was, however, rejected; and it was determined to cross the river in force on the following morning. william inspected the troops at midnight. he rode along the whole army by torchlight, and after giving out the password "westminster," he returned to his tent for a few hours' sleep. the shades of night lay still over that sleeping host. the stars looked down in peace on these sixty thousand brethren of the same human family, ready to rise with the sun and imbrue their hands in each other's blood. tyrannical factions and warring creeds had set them at enmity with each other, and turned the sweetness and joy of their nature into gall and bitterness. the night was quiet. the murmur of the river fell faintly on the ear. a few trembling lights gleamed through the dark from the distant watchtowers of drogheda. the only sounds that rose from the vast host that lay encamped in the valley of the boyne were the challenges of the sentinels to each other as they paced their midnight rounds. the sun rose clear and beautiful. it was the first day of july--a day for ever memorable in the history of ireland as well as england. the _générale_ was beat in the camp of william before daybreak, and as soon as the sun was up the battle began. lieutenant-general douglas marched towards the right with six battalions of foot, accompanied by count schomberg (son of the marshal) with twenty-four squadrons of horse. they crossed the river below the bridge of slane, and though opposed by the irish, they drove them back and pressed them on towards duleek. when it was supposed that the left wing had crossed the boyne, the dutch blue guards, beating a march till they reached the river's edge, went in eight or ten abreast, the water reaching above their girdles. when they had gained the centre of the stream they were saluted with a tremendous fire from the irish foot, protected by the breastworks, lanes, and hedges on the farther side of the river. nevertheless they pushed on, formed in two lines, and drove the irish before them. several irish battalions were brought to bear upon them, but without effect. then a body of irish cavalry assailed them, but still they held their ground. william, seeing his troops hardly pressed, sent across two huguenot regiments and one english regiment to their assistance. but a regiment of irish dragoons, at the moment of their reaching the shore, fell upon their flank, broke their ranks, and put many of them to the sword. colonel caillemotte, leader of the huguenots, received a mortal wound. he was laid on a litter and carried to the rear. as he met his men coming up to the help of their comrades, he called out, "a la gloire, mes enfants! à la gloire!" a squadron of danish horse forded the river, but the irish dragoons, in one of their dashing charges, broke and defeated them, and drove them across the river in great confusion. duke schomberg, who was in command of the centre, seeing that the day was going against king william, and that the french huguenots were fighting without their leader, crossed the river and put himself at their head. pointing to the frenchmen in james's ranks, he cried out to his men, "allons, messieurs, voilà vos persécuteurs!" the words were scarcely out of his mouth when a troop of james's guards, returning full speed to their main body, fell furiously upon the duke and inflicted two sword cuts upon his head. the regiment of cambon began at once to fire upon the enemy, but by a miss shot they hit the duke. "they shot the duke," says rapin, "through the neck, of which he instantly died, and m. foubert, alighting to receive him, was shot in the arm." the critical moment had arrived. the centre of william's army was in confusion. their leaders, schomberg and caillemotte, were killed. the men were waiting for orders. they were exposed to the galling fire of the irish infantry and cavalry. king james was in the rear on the hill of dunmore surrounded by his french body-guard. he was looking down upon the field of battle, viewing now here, now there. it is even said that when he saw the irish dragoons routing the cavalry and riding down the broken infantry of william, he exclaimed, "spare! oh, spare my english subjects!" the firing had now lasted uninterruptedly for more than an hour, when william seized the opportunity of turning the tide of battle against his spiritless adversary. putting himself at the head of the left wing, he crossed the boyne by a dangerous and difficult ford a little lower down the river; his cavalry for the most part swimming across the tide. the ford had been left unguarded, and the whole soon reached the opposite bank in safety. but even there the horse which william rode sank in a bog, and he was forced to alight until the horse was got out. he was helped to remount, for the wound in his shoulder was very painful. so soon as the troops were got into sufficient order, william drew his sword, though his wound made it uneasy for him to wield it. he then marched on towards the enemy. when the irish saw themselves menaced by william's left wing, they halted, and retired towards dunmore. but gaining courage, they faced about and fell upon the english horse. they gave way. the king then rode up to the enniskilleners, and asked, "what they would do for him?" not knowing him, the men were about to shoot him, thinking him to be one of the enemy. but when their chief officer told them that it was the king who wanted their help, they at once declared their intention of following him. they marched forward and received the enemy's fire. the dutch troops came up, at the head of whom william placed himself. "in this place," says rapin, "duke schomberg's regiment of horse, composed of french protestants, and strengthened by an unusual number of officers, behaved with undaunted resolution, like men who fought for a nation amongst whom themselves and their friends had found shelter against the persecution of france." ginckel's troops now arrived on the scene; but they were overpowered by the irish horse, and forced to give way. sir albert cunningham's and colonel levison's dragoons then came up, and enabled ginckel's troops to rally; and the irish were driven up the hill, after an hour's hard fighting. james's lieutenant-general, hamilton, was taken prisoner and brought before the king. he was asked "whether the irish would fight any more?" "yes," he answered; "upon my honour i believe they will." the irish slowly gave way, their dragoons charging again and again, to cover the retreat of the foot. at dunmore they made a gallant stand, driving back the troops of william several times. the farmstead of sheephouse was taken and retaken again and again. at last the irish troops slowly retreated up the hill. the french troops had scarcely been engaged. sarsfield implored james to put himself at their head, and make a last fight for his crown. six thousand fresh men coming into action, when the army of william was exhausted by fatigue, might have changed the fortune of the day. but james would not face the enemy. he put himself at the head of the french troops and sarsfield's regiment--the first occasion on which he had led during the day--and set out for dublin, leaving the rest of his army to shift for themselves. the irish army now poured through the pass of duleek. they were pursued by count schomberg at the head of the left wing of william's army. the pursuit lasted several miles beyond the village of duleek, when the count was recalled by express orders of the king. the irish army retreated in good order, and they reached dublin in safety. james was the first to carry thither the news of his defeat. on reaching dublin castle, he was received by lady tyrconnel, the wife of the viceroy. "madam," said he, "your countrymen can run well." "not quite so well as your majesty," was her retort, "for i see that you have won the race." the opinion of the irish soldiers may be understood from their saying, after their defeat, "change generals, and we will fight the battle over again." "james had no royal quality about him," says an able catholic historian; "nature had made him a coward, a monk, and a gourmand; and, in spite of the freak of fortune that had placed him on a throne, and seemed inclined to keep him there, she vindicated her authority, and dropped him ultimately in the niche that suited him-- 'the meanest slave of france's despot lord.'" william halted on the field that james had occupied in the morning. the troops remained under arms all night. the loss of life was not so great as was expected. on william's side not more than four hundred men were killed; but amongst them were duke schomberg, colonel caillemotte, and dr. george walker, the defender of derry. "king james's whole loss in this battle," says rapin, "was generally computed at fifteen hundred men, amongst whom were the lord dungan, the lord carlingford, sir neil o'neil, colonel fitzgerald, the marquis d'hocquincourt, and several prisoners, the chief of whom was lieutenant-general hamilton, who, to do him justice, behaved with great courage, and kept the victory doubtful, until he was taken prisoner." on the following day drogheda surrendered without resistance. the garrison laid down their arms, and departed for athlone. james stayed at dublin for a night, and on the following morning he started for waterford, causing the bridges to be broken down behind him, for fear of being pursued by the allied forces. he then embarked on a ship-of-war, and was again conveyed to france. william's army proceeded slowly to dublin. the duke of ormond entered the city two days after the battle of the boyne, at the head of nine troops of horse. on the next day the king, with his whole army, marched to finglas, in the neighbourhood of dublin; and on the th of july he entered the city, and proceeded to st. patrick's church, to return thanks for his victory. the whole of the irish army proceeded towards athlone and limerick, intending to carry on the war behind the shannon. william sent a body of his troops, under lieutenant-general douglas, to athlone, while he himself proceeded to reduce and occupy the towns of the south. rapin followed his leader, and hence his next appearance at the siege of athlone. rapin conducted himself throughout the irish campaign as a true soldier. he was attentive, accurate, skilful, and brave. he did the work he had to do without any fuss; but he _did_ it. lieutenant-general douglas, under whom he served, soon ascertained his merits, saw through his character, and became much attached to him. he promoted him to the rank of aide-de-camp, so that he might have this able frenchman continually about his person. douglas proceeded westward, with six regiments of horse and ten of foot, to reduce athlone. but the place was by far too strong for so small a force to besiege, and still less to take it. athlone had always been a stronghold. for centuries the bridge and castle had formed the great highway into connaught. the irish town is defended on the eastern side by the shannon, a deep and wide river, almost impossible to pass in the face of a hostile army. douglas summoned the irish garrison to surrender. colonel richard grace, the gallant old governor, returned a passionate defiance. "these are my terms," he said, discharging a pistol at the messenger: "when my provisions are consumed, i will defend my trust until i have eaten my boots." abandoning as indefensible the english part of the town, situated on the east side of the shannon, grace set fire to it, and retired with all his forces to the western side, blowing up an arch of the bridge behind him. the english then brought up the few cannon they had with them, and commenced battering the walls. the irish had more cannon, and defended themselves with vigour. the besiegers made a breach in the castle, but it was too high and too small for an assault. "notwithstanding this," says rapin, "the firing continued very brisk on both sides; but the besiegers having lost mr. neilson, their best gunner, and the cavalry suffering very much for want of forage; and at the same time it being reported that sarsfield was advancing with fifteen thousand men to relieve the place, douglas held a council of war, wherein it was thought fit to raise the siege, which he accordingly did on the th, having lost near four hundred men before the town, the greatest part of whom died of sickness." thus, after a week's ineffectual siege, douglas left athlone, and made all haste to rejoin the army of william, which had already reduced the most important towns in the south of ireland. on the th of august he rejoined william at cahirconlish, a few miles west of limerick. the flower of the irish army was assembled at limerick. the duke of berwick and general sarsfield occupied the city with their forces. the french general, boileau, commanded the garrison. the besieged were almost as numerous as the besiegers. william, by garrisoning the towns of which he took possession, had reduced his forces to about twenty thousand men. limerick was fortified by walls, batteries, and ramparts. it was also defended by a castle and citadel. it had always been a place of great strength. the chivalry of the anglo-norman monarch, the ironsides of cromwell, had been defeated under its walls; and now the victorious army of william iii. was destined to meet with a similar repulse. limerick is situated in an extensive plain, watered by the noble shannon. the river surrounds the town on three sides. like athlone, the city is divided into the english and irish towns, connected together by a bridge. the english town was much the strongest. it was built upon an island, surrounded by morasses, which could at any time be flooded on the approach of an enemy. the town was well supplied with provisions--all clare and galway being open to it, from whence it could draw supplies. notwithstanding the strength of the fortress, william resolved to besiege it. he was ill supplied with cannon, having left his heavy artillery at dublin. he had only a field train with him, which was quite insufficient for his purpose. william's advance-guards drove the irish outposts before them; the pioneers cutting down the hedges and filling up the ditches, until they came to a narrow pass between two bogs, where a considerable body of irish horse and foot were assembled to dispute the pass. two field-pieces were brought up, which played with such effect upon the irish horse that they soon quitted their post. at the same time colonel earle, at the head of the english foot, attacked the irish who were firing through the hedges, so that they also retired after two hours' fighting. the irish were driven to the town walls, and william's forces took possession of two important positions, cromwell's fort and the old chapel. the danes also occupied an old danish fort, built by their ancestors, of which they were not a little proud. the army being thus posted, a trumpeter was sent, on the th of august, to summon the garrison to surrender. general boileau answered, that he intended to make a vigorous defence of the town with which his majesty had intrusted him. in the meantime, william had ordered up his train of artillery from dublin. they were on their way to join him, when a spy from william's camp went over to the enemy, and informed them of the route, the motions, and the strength of the convoy. sarsfield at once set out with a strong body of horse. he passed the shannon in the night, nine miles above limerick, lurked all day in the mountains near ballyneety, and waited for the approach of the convoy. the men of william's artillery, seeing no enemy, turned out their horses to graze, and went to sleep in the full sense of security. sarsfield's body of horse came down upon them, slew or dispersed the convoy, and took possession of the cannon. sarsfield could not, however, take the prizes into limerick. he therefore endeavoured to destroy them. cramming the guns with powder up to their muzzles, and burying their mouths deep in the earth, then piling the stores, waggons, carriages, and baggage over them, he laid a train and fired it, just as sir john lanier, with a body of cavalry, was arriving to rescue the convoy. the explosion was tremendous, and was heard at the camp of william, more than seven miles off. sarsfield's troops returned to limerick in triumph. notwithstanding these grievous discouragements, william resolved to persevere. he recovered two of the guns, which remained uninjured. he obtained others from waterford. the trenches were opened on the th of august. a battery was raised below the fort to the right of the trenches. firing went on on both sides. several redoubts were taken. by the th, the trenches were advanced to within thirty paces of the ditch near st. john's gate, and a breach was made in the walls about twelve yards wide. the assault was ordered to take place on the th. the english grenadiers took the lead, supported by a hundred french officers and volunteers. the enemy were dislodged from the covered way and the two forts which guarded the breach on each side. the assailants entered the breach, but they were not sufficiently supported. the irish rallied. they returned to the charge, helped by the women, who pelted the besiegers with stones, broken bottles, and such other missiles as came readily to hand. a brandenburg regiment having assailed and taken the black battery, it was blown up by an explosion, which killed many of the men. in fine, the assault was vigorously repulsed; and william's troops retreated to the main body, with a loss of six hundred men killed on the spot and as many mortally wounded. rapin was severely wounded. a musket shot hit him in the shoulder, and completely disabled him. his brother solomon was also wounded. his younger brother fell dead by his side. they belonged to the "forlorn hope," and were volunteers in the assault on the breach. rapin was raised to the rank of captain. the siege of limerick was at once raised. the heavy baggage and cannon were sent away on the th of august, and the next day the army decamped and marched towards clonmel. the king intrusted the command of his army to lieutenant-general ginckel, and set sail for england from duncannon fort, near waterford, on the th of september. the campaign was not yet over. the earl of marlborough landed near cork with four thousand men. reinforced by four thousand danes and french huguenots, he shortly succeeded in taking the fortified towns of cork and kinsale. after garrisoning these places the earl returned to england. general ginckel went into winter quarters at mullingar, in westmeath. the french troops, under command of count lauzun, went into galway. lauzun shortly after returned to france, and st. ruth was sent over to take command of the french and irish army. but they hung about galway doing nothing. in the meantime ginckel was carefully preparing for the renewal of the campaign. he was reinforced by an excellent body of troops from scotland, commanded by general mackay. he was also well supplied, through the vigilance of william, with all the necessaries of war. rapin's friend, colonel lord douglas, pressed him to accompany him to flanders as his aide-de-camp; but the wound in his shoulder still caused him great pain, and he was forced to decline the appointment. strange to say, his uncle pélisson--the converter, or rather the buyer, of so many romish converts in france--sent him a present of fifty pistoles through his cousin m. de la bastide, which consoled him greatly during his recovery. general ginckel broke up his camp at mullingar at the beginning of june, and marched towards athlone. the irish had assembled a considerable army at ballymore, about midway between mullingar and athlone. they had also built a fort there, and intended to dispute the passage of ginckel's army. a sharp engagement took place when his forces came up. the irish were defeated, with the loss of over a thousand prisoners and all their baggage. ginckel then appeared before athlone, but the second resistance of the besieged was much less successful than the first. st. ruth, the french general, treated the irish officers and soldiers under his command with supercilious contempt. he admitted none of their officers into his councils. he was as ignorant of the army which he commanded as of the country which he occupied. nor was he a great general. he had been principally occupied in france in hunting and hanging the poor protestants of dauphiny and the cevennes. he had never fought a pitched battle; and his incapacity led to the defeat of the irish at athlone, and afterwards at aughrim. st. ruth treated his english adversaries with as much contempt as he did his irish followers. when he heard that the english were about to cross the shannon, he said "it was impossible for them to take the town, and be so near with an army to succour it." he added that he would give a thousand louis if they _durst_ attempt it. to which sarsfield retorted, "spare your money and mind your business; for i know that no enterprise is too difficult for british courage to attempt." ginckel took possession of the english town after some resistance, when the irish army retreated to the other side of the shannon. batteries were planted, pontoons were brought up, and the siege began with vigour. ginckel attempted to get possession of the bridge. one of the arches was broken down, on the connaught side of the river. under cover of a heavy fire, a party of ginckel's men succeeded in raising a plank-work for the purpose of spanning the broken arch. the work was nearly completed, when a sergeant and ten bold scots belonging to maxwell's brigade on the irish side, pushed on to the bridge; but they were all slain. a second brave party was more successful than the first. they succeeded in throwing all the planks and beams into the river, only two men escaping with their lives. ginckel then attempted to repair the broken arch by carrying a close gallery on the bridge, in order to fill up the gap with heavy planks. all was ready, and an assault was ordered for next day. it was resolved to cross the shannon in three places--one body to cross by the narrow ford below the bridge, another by the pontoons above it, while the main body was to force the bridge itself. on the morning of the intended crossing, the irish sent a volley of grenades among the wooden work of the bridge, when some of the fascines took fire, and the whole fabric was soon in a blaze. the smoke blew into the faces of the english, and it was found impossible to cross the river that day. a council of war was held, to debate whether it was advisable to renew the attack or to raise the siege and retreat. the cannonade had now continued for eight days, and nothing had been gained. some of the officers were for withdrawing, but the majority were in favour of making a general assault on the following day--seeing more danger in retreating than in advancing. the duke of wurtemberg, major-generals mackay, talmash, ruvigny, tetleau, and colonel cambon urged "that no brave action could be performed without hazard; and that the attempt was like to be attended with success." moreover, they proffered themselves to be the first to pass the river and attack the enemy. the assault was therefore agreed upon. the river was then at the lowest state at which it had been for years. next morning, at six o'clock--the usual hour for relieving guards--the detachments were led down to the river. captain sands led the first party of sixty grenadiers. they were supported by another strong detachment of grenadiers and six battalions of foot. they went into the water twenty abreast, clad in armour, and pushed across the ford a little below the bridge. the stream was very rapid, and the passage difficult, by reason of the great stones which lay at the bottom of the river. the guns played over them from the batteries and covered their passage. the grenadiers reached the other side amidst the fire and smoke of their enemies. they held their ground and made for the bridge. some of them laid planks over the broken arch, and others helped at preparing the pontoons. thus the whole of the english army were able to cross to the irish side of the river. in less than half an hour they were masters of the town. the irish were entirely surprised. they fled in all directions, and lost many men. the besiegers did not lose above fifty. st. ruth, the irish commander-in-chief, seemed completely idle during the assault. it is true he ordered several detachments to drive the english from the town after it had been taken; but, remembering that the fortifications of athlone, nearest to his camp, had not been razed, and that they were now in possession of the enemy, he recalled his troops, and decamped from before athlone that very night. in a few days ginckel followed him, and inflicted on his army a terrible defeat at the battle of aughrim. with that, however, we have nothing to do at present, but proceed to follow the fortunes of rapin. rapin entered athlone with his regiment, and conducted himself with his usual valour. ginckel remained only a few days in the place, in order to repair the fortifications. that done, he set out in pursuit of the enemy. he left two regiments in the castle, one of which was that to which rapin belonged. the soldiers, who belonged to different nationalities, had many contentions with each other. the officers stood upon their order of precedence. the men were disposed to quarrel. aided by a friend, a captain like himself, rapin endeavoured to pacify the men, and to bring the officers to reason. by his kind, gentle, and conciliatory manner, he soon succeeded in restoring quiet and mutual confidence; and during his stay at athlone no further disturbance occurred among the garrison. rapin was ordered to kilkenny, where he had a similar opportunity of displaying his qualities of conciliation. a quarrel had sprung up between the chief magistrate of the town and the officers of the garrison. rapin interceded, and by his firmness and moderation he reconciled all differences; and, at the same time, he gained the respect and admiration of both the disputing parties. by this time the second siege of limerick had occurred. ginckel surrounded the city, and battered the walls and fortresses for six weeks. the french and irish armies at length surrendered. fourteen thousand irish marched out with the honours of war. a large proportion of them joined the army of louis xiv., and were long after known as "the irish brigade." although they fought valiantly and honourably in many well-known battles, they were first employed in louis' persecution of the protestants in the vaudois and cevennes mountains. their first encounter was with the camisards, under cavalier, their peasant leader. they gained no glory in that campaign, but a good deal of discredit. in the meantime ireland had been restored to peace. after the surrender of limerick no further resistance was offered to the arms of william iii. a considerable body of english troops remained in ireland to garrison the fortresses. rapin's regiment was stationed at kinsale, and there he rejoined it in . he made the intimate friendship of sir james waller, the governor of the town. sir james was a man of much intelligence, a keen observer, and an ardent student. by his knowledge of political history, he inspired rapin with a like taste, and determined him at a later period in his life to undertake what was a real want at the time, an intelligent and readable history of england. rapin was suddenly recalled to england. he was required to leave his regiment and report himself to king william. no reason was given; but with his usual obedience to orders he at once set out. he did not leave ireland without regret. he was attached to his numerous huguenot comrades, and he hoped yet to rise to higher guides in the king's service. by special favour he was allowed to hand over his company to his brother solomon, who had been wounded at the first siege of limerick. his brother received the promotion which he himself had deserved, and afterwards became lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. rapin's fortune led him in quite another direction. it turned out that, by the recommendation of the earl of galway (formerly the marquis de ruvigny, another french huguenot), he had been recalled to london for the purpose of being appointed governor and tutor to lord woodstock, son of bentinck, earl of portland, one of king william's most devoted servants. lord galway was consulted by the king as to the best tutor for the son of his friend. he knew of rapin's valour and courage during his campaigns in ireland; he also knew of his discretion, his firmness, and his conciliatory manners, in reconciling the men under his charge at athlone and kilkenny; and he was also satisfied about his thoughtfulness, his delicacy of spirit, his grace and his nobleness--for he had been bred a noble, though he had first served as a common soldier in the army of william. the king immediately approved the recommendation of lord galway. he knew of rapin's courage at the battle of the boyne; and he remembered--as every true captain does remember--the serious wound he had received while accompanying the forlorn hope at the first siege of limerick. hence the sudden recall of rapin from ireland. on his arrival in london he was presented to the king, and immediately after he entered upon his new function of conducting the education of the future duke of portland. henry, lord woodstock, was then about fifteen. being of delicate health, he had hitherto been the object of his father's tender care, and it was not without considerable regret that lord portland yielded to the request of the king and handed over his son to the government of m. rapin. though of considerable intelligence, the powers of his heart were greater than those of his head. thus rapin had no difficulty in acquiring the esteem and affection of his pupil. portland house was then the resort of the most eminent men of the whig party, through whose patriotic assistance the constitution of england was placed in the position which it now occupies. rapin was introduced by lord woodstock to his friends. having already mastered the english language, he had no difficulty in understanding the conflicting opinions of the times. he saw history developing itself before his eyes. he heard with his ears the discussions which eventuated in acts of parliament, confirming the liberties of the english people, the liberty of speech, the liberty of writing, the liberty of doing, within the limits of the common law. all this was of great importance to rapin. it prepared him for writing his afterwards famous works, his "history of england," and his dissertation on the whigs and tories. rapin was not only a man of great accomplishments, but he had a remarkable aptitude for languages. he knew french and english, as well as italian, spanish, and german. he had an extraordinary memory, and a continuous application and perseverance, which enabled him to suck the contents of many volumes, and to bring out the facts in future years during the preparation of his works. his memory seems to have been of the same order as that of lord macaulay, who afterwards made use of his works, and complimented his predecessor as to their value. according to the custom of those days, the time arrived when rapin was required to make "the grand tour" with his pupil and friend, lord woodstock. this was considered the complement of english education amongst the highest classes. it was thought necessary that young noblemen should come in contact with foreigners, and observe the manners and customs of other countries besides their own; and that thus they might acquire a sort of cosmopolitan education. archbishop leighton even considered a journey of this sort as a condition of moral perfection. he quoted the words of the latin poet: "homo sum, et nihil hominem à me alienum puto." no one could be better fitted than rapin to accompany the young lord on his foreign travels. they went to holland, germany, france, spain, and italy. rapin diligently improved himself, while instructing his friend. he taught him the languages of the countries through which they passed; he rendered him familiar with greek and latin; he rendered him familiar with the principles of mathematics. he also studied with him the destinies of peoples and of kings, and pointed out to him the divine will accomplishing itself amidst the destruction of empires. withal he sought to penetrate the young soul of the friend committed to his charge with that firmness of belief and piety of sentiment which pervaded his own. it was while in italy that the earl of portland, at the instigation of rapin, requested copies to be made for him of the rarest and most precious medals in point of historic interest; and also to purchase for him objects of ancient workmanship. hence rapin was able to secure for him the _portland vase_, now in the british museum, one of the most exquisite products of roman and etruscan ceramic art. in , the earl of portland was sent by william iii. as ambassador to the court of louis xiv., in connection with the negotiations as to the spanish succession. lord woodstock attended the embassy, and rapin accompanied him. they were entertained at versailles. persecution was still going on in france, although about eight hundred thousand persons had already left the country. rapin at one time thought of leaving lord woodstock for a few days, and making a rapid journey south to visit his friends near toulouse. but the thought of being made a prisoner and sent to the galleys for life stayed him, and he remained at versailles until the return of the embassy. rapin remained with lord woodstock for thirteen years. in the meantime he had married, at the hague, marie anne testart, a refugee from saint-quentin. jean rou describes her as a true helpmeet for him, young, beautiful, rich, and withal virtuous, and of the most pleasing and gentle temper in the world. her riches, however, were not great. she had merely, like rapin, rescued some portion of her heritage from the devouring claws of her persecutors. rapin accumulated very little capital during his tutorship of lord woodstock; but to compensate him, the king granted him a pension of £ a year, payable by the states of holland, until he could secure some better income. rapin lived for some time at the hague. while there he joined a society of learned french refugees. among them were rotolf de la denèse, basnage de beauval, and jean rou, secretary to the states-general. one of the objects of the little academy was to translate the psalms anew into french verse; but before the version was completed, rapin was under the necessity of leaving the hague. william iii., his patron, died in , when his pension was stopped. he was promised some remunerative employment, but he was forgotten amidst the press of applicants. at length he removed to the little town of wesel, on the lower rhine, in the beginning of may, . he had a wife and four children to maintain, and living was much more reasonable at wesel than at the hague. his wife's modest fortune enabled him to live there to the end of his days. wesel was also a resort of the french refugees--persons of learning and taste, though of small means. it was at his modest retreat at wesel that rapin began to arrange the immense mass of documents which he had been accumulating during so many years, relating to the history of england. the first work which he published was "a dissertation on the origin and nature of the english constitution." it met with great success, and went through many editions, besides being translated into nearly all the continental languages. he next proceeded with his great work, "the history of england." during his residence in ireland and england, he had read with great interest all books relating to the early history of the government of england. he began with, the history of england after the norman conquest; but he found that he must begin at the beginning. he studied the history of the anglo-saxons, but found it "like a vast forest, where the traveller, with great difficulty, finds a few narrow paths to guide his wandering steps. it was this, however, that inspired him with the design of clearing this part of the english history, by removing the rubbish, and carrying on the thread so as to give, at least, a general knowledge of the earlier history." then he went back to julius cæsar's account of his invasion of britain, for the purpose of showing how the saxons came to send troops into this country, and now the conquest which had cost them so much was at last abandoned by the romans. he then proceeded, during his residence in england, with his work of reading and writing; but when he came to the reign of henry ii. he was about to relinquish his undertaking, when an unexpected assistance not only induced him to continue it, but to project a much larger history of england than he had at first intended. this unexpected assistance was the publication of rymer's "foedera," at the expense of the british government. the volumes as they came out were sent to rapin by le clerc (another refugee), a friend of lord halifax, who was one of the principal promoters of the publication. this book was of infinite value to rapin in enabling him to proceed with his history. he prepared abstracts of seventeen volumes (now in the cottonian collection), to show the relation of the acts narrated in rymer's "foedera" to the history of england. he was also able to compare the facts stated by english historians with, those of the neighbouring states, whether they were written in latin, french, italian, or spanish. the work was accomplished with great labour. it occupied seventeen years of rapin's life. the work was published at intervals. the first two volumes appeared in november, . during the following year six more volumes were published. the ninth and tenth volumes were left in manuscript ready for the press. they ended with the coronation of william and mary at westminster. besides, he left a large number of mss., which were made use of by the editor of the continuation of rapin's history. rapin died at wesel in , at the age of sixty-four. his work, the cause of his fatal illness, was almost his only pleasure. he was worn out by hard study and sedentary confinement, and at last death came to his rescue. he had struggled all his life against persecution; against the difficulties of exile; against the enemy; and though he did not die on the field of battle, he died on the breach pen in hand, in work and duty, striving to commemorate the independence through which a noble people had worked their way to ultimate freedom and liberty. the following epitaph was inscribed over his grave:-- "ici le casque et la science, l'esprit vif, la solidité, la politesse et la sincérité ont fait une heureuse alliance, dont le public a profité." the first edition of rapin's history, consisting of ten volumes, was published at the hague by rogessart. the rev. david durand added two more volumes to the second edition, principally compiled from the memoranda left by rapin at his death. the twelfth volume concluded the reign of william iii. the fourth edition appeared in . being originally composed and published in french, the work was translated into english by mr. n. tindal, who added numerous notes. two editions wore published simultaneously in london, and a third translation was published some sixty years later. the book was attacked by the jacobite authors, who defended the stuart party against the statements of the author. in those fanatical times impartiality was nothing to them. a man must be emphatically for the stuarts, or against them. yet the work of rapin held its ground, and it long continued to be regarded as the best history that had up to that time been written. the rapin family are now scattered over the world. some remain in holland, some have settled in switzerland, some have returned to france, but the greater number are prussian subjects. james, the only son of rapin, studied at cleves, then at antwerp, and at thirty-one he was appointed to the important office of director of the french colonies at stettin and stargardt. charles, rapin's eldest brother, was a captain of infantry in the service of prussia. two sons of louis de rapin were killed in the battles of smolensko and leipsic. many of the rapins attained high positions in the military service of prussia. colonel philip de rapin-thoyras was the head of the family in prussia. he was with the allied army in their war of deliverance against france in the years , , and . he was consequently decorated with the cross and the military medal for his long and valued services to the country of his adoption. the handsome volume by raoul de cazenove, entitled "rapin-thoyras, sa famille, sa vie, et ses oeuvres," to which we are indebted for much of the above information, is dedicated to this distinguished military chief. iii. captain riou, r.n. "brave hearts! to britain's pride once so faithful and so true, on the deck of fame that died, with the gallant good riou: soft sigh the winds of heaven o'er their grave!" campbell's _battle of the baltic_. the words in which campbell describes captain riou in his noble ode are nearly identical with those used by lord nelson himself when alluding to his death in the famous despatch relative to the battle of copenhagen. these few but pregnant words, "the gallant and the good," constitute nearly all the record that exists of the character of this distinguished officer, though it is no slight glory to have them embalmed in the poetry of campbell and the despatches of nelson. having had the good fortune, in the course of recent inquiries as to the descendants of illustrious huguenots in england, to become acquainted with the principal events in captain riou's life, drawn from family papers, i now propose to supplement lord nelson's brief epitome of his character by the following memoir of this distinguished seaman. captain riou was descended from the ancient riou family of vernoux, in languedoc, of whom early mention is made in french history, several members of it having specially distinguished themselves as generals in the wars in spain. like many other noble families of languedoc in the seventeenth century, the rious were staunch huguenots; and when, in , louis xiv. determined to stamp out protestantism in france, and revoked the edict of nantes, the principal members of the family, refusing to conform, left the country, and their estates were confiscated by the crown. estienne riou, heir to the estate at vernoux, was born after the death of his father, who was a man of eminent repute in his neighbourhood; and he did not leave france until his eleventh year, when he fled with his paternal uncle, matthew labrune, across the frontier, and took refuge with him at berne, in switzerland. there the uncle engaged in business as a merchant, while the nephew, when of sufficient age, desirous of following the usual career of his family, went into piedmont to join the little huguenot army from england, then engaged in assisting the duke of savoy against the armies of the french king. estienne was admitted a cadet in lord galway's regiment, then engaged in the siege of casale; and he remained with it for two years, when, on the army returning to england, he received an honourable discharge, and went back to reside for a time with his bachelor uncle at berne. in both uncle and nephew left switzerland to settle in london as merchants, bringing with them a considerable capital. they exported english manufactured goods to the east indies, holland, germany, and italy; and imported large quantities of raw silk, principally from spain and italy, carrying on their business with uniform probity and credit. in course of time estienne married magdalen baudoin, the daughter of a refugee gentleman from touraine,--the members of refugee families usually intermarrying for several generations after their settlement in england. the issue of this marriage was an only son, stephen riou, who, like his ancestors, embraced the profession of arms, rising to be captain in the horse grenadier guards. he afterwards attended the confederate forces in flanders as an engineer, and on the conclusion of peace, he travelled for nearly four years through the principal countries of europe, accompanying sir p. ker porter on his embassy to constantinople. he afterwards settled, married, and had two sons,--philip, the elder, who entered the royal artillery, and died senior colonel at woolwich in ; and edward, the second son, who entered the navy--the subject of the present memoir. edward riou was born at mount ephraim, near faversham, on the th november, . the family afterwards removed to london, where edward received his education, partly at the marylebone grammar school and partly at home, where his father superintended his instruction in fortification, and navigation. though of peculiarly sweet and amiable disposition, young riou displayed remarkable firmness and even fearlessness as a boy. he rejoiced at all deeds of noble daring, and it was perhaps his love of adventure that early determined his choice of a profession; for, even when a very little fellow, he was usually styled by the servants and by his playmates, "the noble captain." accordingly, when only twelve years old, he went to sea as midshipman on board admiral pye's ship, the _harfleur_; from whence, in the following year, he was removed to the _romney_, captain keith elphinstone, on the newfoundland station; and on the return of the ship to england in , he had the good fortune to be appointed midshipman on board the _discovery_, captain charles clarke, which accompanied captain cook in the _resolution_ in his last voyage round the world. nothing could have been more to the mind of our sailor-boy than this voyage of adventure and discovery, in company with the greatest navigator of the age. the _discovery_ sailed from the downs on the th of june, but had no sooner entered the channel than a storm arose which did considerable damage to the ship, which was driven into portland roads. at plymouth, the _discovery_ was joined by the _resolution_; but as the former had to go into harbour for repairs, captain cook set sail for the cape alone, leaving orders for captain clarke to follow him there. the _discovery_ at length put to sea, and after a stormy voyage joined captain cook in table bay on the th of august. before setting sail on the longer voyage, riou had the felicity of being transferred to the _resolution_, under the command of captain cook himself. it is not necessary that we should describe this celebrated voyage, with which every boy is familiar--its storms and hurricanes; the landings on islands where the white man's face had never been seen before; the visits to the simple natives of huahine and otaheite, then a little eden; the perilous coasting along the north american seaboard to behring's straits, in search of the north-western passage; and finally, the wintering of the ships at owyhee, where captain cook met his cruel death, of which young riou was a horror-struck spectator from the deck of the _resolution_, on the morning of the th of february, . after about four years' absence on this voyage, so full of adventure and peril, riou returned to england with the _resolution_, and was shortly after appointed lieutenant of the sloop _scourge_, captain knatchbull, commander, which took part, under lord rodney, in the bombardment and capture of st. eustatia. here riou was so severely wounded in the eye by a splinter that he lost his sight for many months. in march, , he was removed to the _mediator_, forty-four guns, commanded by captain luttrell, and shared in the glory which attached to the officers and crew of that ship through its almost unparalleled achievement of the th of december of that year. it was at daybreak that the _mediator_ sighted five sail of the enemy, consisting of the _ménagère_, thirty-six guns _en flûte_; the _eugène_, thirty-six; and the _dauphin royal_, twenty-eight (french); in company with the _alexander_, twenty-eight guns, and another brig, fourteen (american), formed in line of battle to receive the _mediator_, which singly bore down upon them. the skilful seamanship and dashing gallantry of the english disconcerted the combinations of the enemy, and after several hours' fighting two of their vessels fell out of the line, and went away, badly crippled, to leeward. about an hour later the _alexander_ was cut off, the _mediator_ wearing between her and her consorts, and in ten minutes she struck. a chase then ensued after the larger vessels, and late in the evening the _ménagère_, being raked within pistol shot, hailed for quarter. the rest of the squadron escaped, and the gallant _mediator_, having taken possession of her two prizes, set sail with them for england, arriving in cawsand bay on the th of december. in the year following, captain luttrell, having been appointed to the _ganges_, took with him mr. riou as second lieutenant. he served in this ship until the following summer, when he retired for a time on half-pay, devoting himself to study and continental travel until march, , when we find him serving under admiral elliot as second lieutenant of the _salisbury_. it was about this time that he submitted to the admiralty a plan, doubtless suggested by his voyage with captain cook, "for the discovery and preservation of a passage through the continent of north america, and for the increase of commerce to this kingdom." the plan was very favourably received, but as war seemed imminent, no steps were then taken to carry it into effect. the young officer had, however, by this time recommended himself for promotion by his admirable conduct and his good service; and in the spring of he was appointed to the command of the _guardian_, forty-four guns, armed _en flûte_, which was under orders to take out stores and convicts to new south wales. in a chatty, affectionate letter written to his widowed mother, from on shipboard at the cape while on the voyage out, he says,--"i have no expectation, after the promotion that took place before i left england, of finding myself master and commander on my return." after speculating as to what might happen in the meantime while he was so far from home, and expressing an anxiety which was but natural on the part of an enterprising young officer eager for advancement in his profession, he proceeded,--"politics must take a great turn, i think, by the time of my return. war will likely be begun; in that case we may bring a prize in with us. but our foresight is short--and mine particularly so. i hardly ever look forward to beyond three months. 'tis in vain to be otherwise, for providence, which directs all things, is inscrutable." and he concluded his letter thus,--"now for port jackson. i shall sail to-night if the wind is fair. god for ever bless you." but neither riou nor the ill-fated _guardian_ ever reached port jackson! a fortnight after setting sail from the cape, while the ship was driving through a thick fog (in lat. · , long. ) a severe shock suddenly called riou to the deck, where an appalling spectacle presented itself. the ship had struck upon an iceberg. a body of floating ice twice as high as the masthead was on the lee beam, and the ship appeared to be entering a sort of cavern in its side. in a few minutes the rudder was torn away, a severe leak was sprung, and all hands worked for bare life at the pumps. the ship became comparatively unmanageable, and masses of overhanging ice threatened every moment to overwhelm her. at length, by dint of incessant efforts, the ship was extricated from the ice, but the leak gained fearfully, and stores, cattle, guns, booms, everything that could be cut away, was thrown overboard. it was all in vain. the ship seemed to be sinking; and despair sat on every countenance save that of the young commander. he continued to hope even against hope. at length, after forty-eight hours of incessant pumping, a cry arose for "the boats," as presenting the only chance of safety. riou pleaded with the men to persevere, and they went on bravely again at the pumps. but the dawn of another day revealed so fearful a position of affairs that the inevitable foundering of the ship seemed to be a matter of minutes rather than of hours. the boats were hoisted out, discipline being preserved to the last. riou's servant hastened to him to ask what boat he would select to go in, that he himself might take a place beside him. his answer was that "he would stay by the ship, save her if he could, and if needs be sink with her, but that the people were at liberty to consult their own safety." he then sat down and wrote the following letter to the admiralty, giving it in charge to mr. clements, the master, whose boat was the only one that ever reached land:-- "her majesty's ship _guardian_, "_december, ._ "if any part of the officers or crew of the _guardian_ should ever survive to reach home, i have only to say that their conduct, after the fatal stroke against an island of ice, was admirable and wonderful in everything that relates to their duties, considered either as private men or in his majesty's service. as there seems no possibility of my remaining many hours in this world, i beg leave to recommend to the consideration of the admiralty a sister, to whom, if my conduct or services should be found deserving any memory, favour might be shown, together with a widowed mother. "i am, sir, with great respect, "your ever obedient servant, "edward riou. "philip stephens, esq., "admiralty." about half the crew remained with riou, some because they determined to stand by their commander, and others because they could not get away in the boats, which, to avoid being overcrowded, had put off in haste, for the most part insufficiently stored and provided. the sea, still high, continued to make breaches over the ship, and many were drowned in their attempts to reach the boats. those who remained were exhausted by fatigue; and, without the most distant hope of life, some were mad with despair. a party of these last contrived to break open the spirit-room, and found a temporary oblivion in intoxication. "it is hardly a time to be a disciplinarian," wrote riou in his log, which continues a valued treasury in his family, "when only a few more hours of life seem to present themselves; but this behaviour greatly hurts me." this log gives a detailed account, day by day, of the eight weeks' heroic fortitude and scientific seamanship which preserved the _guardian_ afloat until she got into the track of ships, and was finally towed by dutch whalers into table bay, cape of good hope. the master's boat, in which were also the purser and chaplain, had by a miracle been picked up, and those officers, on their return to england, reported to the admiralty "the total loss of the _guardian_". they also at the same time spoke of riou's noble conduct in terms of such enthusiasm as to awaken general admiration, and occasion the greatest regret at his loss. accordingly, when the admiralty received from his own hand the unexpected intelligence of his safety, his widowed mother and only sister had the affectionate sympathy of all england. lord hood himself, before unknown to the family, hastened to their house with the news, calling to the servants as he ran up the stairs to "throw off their mourning!" the following was riou's brief letter to his mother, which he found time to scrawl and send off by a ship just leaving table bay for england as the poor helpless _guardian_ was being towed in:-- "cape of good hope, "_february, , _. "dearest,--god has been merciful. i hope you have no fatal accounts of the _guardian_. i am safe; i am well, notwithstanding you may hear otherwise. join with me in prayer to that blessed saviour who hath hung over my ship for two months, and kept thy dear son safe, to be, i hope, thankful for almost a miracle. i can say no more because i am hurried, and the ship sails for england this afternoon. "yours ever and ever, "edward riou." riou remained many months at the cape trying to patch up the _guardian_, and repair it so as to bring it back to port; but all his exertions were fruitless, and in october the admiralty despatched the _sphinx_ ship-of-war to bring him and the survivors of his crew to england, where they landed shortly after. there was, of course, the usual court-martial held upon him for the loss of his ship, but it was merely a matter of form. at its conclusion he was complimented by the court in the warmest terms; and "as a mark of the high consideration in which the magnanimity of his conduct was held, in remaining by his ship from an exalted sense of duty when all reasonable prospects of saving her were at an end," he received the special thanks of the admiralty, was made commander, and at the same time promoted to the rank of post captain. no record exists of the services of captain riou from the date of his promotion until , when we find him in command of his majesty's ship _rose_, assisting in the reduction of martinique. he was then transferred to the _beaulieu_, and remained cruising in the west indian seas till his health became so injured by the climate that he found himself compelled to solicit his recall, and he consequently returned to england in the _theseus_ in the following year. shortly after, in recognition of his distinguished services, he was appointed to the command of the royal yacht, the _princess augusta_, in which he remained until the spring of . so soon as his health was sufficiently re-established, he earnestly solicited active employment, and he was accordingly appointed to the command of the fine frigate, the _amazon_, thirty-eight guns, whose name afterwards figured so prominently in nelson's famous battle before copenhagen. after cruising about in her on various stations, and picking up a few prizes, the _amazon_, early in , was attached to sir hyde parker's fleet, destined for the baltic. the last letter which riou wrote home to his mother was dated sunday, the th march, "at the entrance to the sound;" and in it he said:--"it yet remains in doubt whether we are to fight the danes, or whether they will be our friends." already, however, nelson was arranging his plan of attack, and on the following day, the th, the admiral and all the artillery officers were on board the _amazon_, which proceeded to examine the northern channel outside copenhagen harbour. it was on this occasion that riou first became known to nelson, who was struck with admiration at the superior discipline and seamanship which were observable on board the frigate during the proceedings of that day. early in the evening of the st of april the signal to prepare for action was made; and lord nelson, with riou and foley, on board the _elephant_--all the other officers having returned to their respective ships--arranged the order of battle on the following day. what remains to be told of riou is matter of history. the science and skill in navigation which made nelson intrust to him the last soundings, and place under his command the fire-ships which were to lead the way on the following morning,--the gallantry with which the captain of the _amazon_ throw himself, _impar congressus_, under the fearful fire of the trekroner battery, to redeem the failure threatened by the grounding of the ships of the line,--have all been told with a skilful pen, and forms a picture of a great sailor's last hours, which is cherished with equal pride in the affections of his family and the annals of his country. sir hyde parker's signal to "leave off action," which nelson, putting his telescope to his blind eye, refused to see, was seen, by riou and reluctantly obeyed. indeed, nothing but that signal for retreat saved the _amazon_ from destruction, though it did not save its heroic commander. as he unwillingly drew off from the destructive fire of the battery he mournfully exclaimed, "what will nelson think of us!" his clerk had been killed by his side. he himself had been wounded in the head by a splinter, but continued to sit on a gun encouraging his men, who were falling in numbers around him. "come then, my boys," he cried, "let us all die together." scarcely had he uttered the words, when a raking shot cut him in two. and thus, in an instant, perished the "gallant good riou," at the early age of thirty-nine. riou was a man of the truest and tenderest feelings, yet the bravest of the brave. his private correspondence revealed the most endearing qualities of mind and heart, while the nobility of his actions was heightened by lofty christian sentiment, and a firm reliance on the power and mercy of god. his chivalrous devotion to duty in the face of difficulty and danger heightened the affectionate admiration with which he was regarded, and his death before copenhagen was mourned almost as a national bereavement. the monument erected to his memory in st. paul's cathedral represented, however inadequately, the widely felt sorrow which pervaded all classes at the early death of this heroic officer. "except it had been nelson himself," says southey, "the british navy could not have suffered a severer loss." captain riou's only sister married colonel lyde browne, who closed his honourable career of twenty-three years' active service in dublin, on july rd, . within two years of her bitter mourning for the death of her brother, she had also to mourn for the loss of her husband. he was colonel of the st fusiliers. he was hastening to the assistance of lord kilwarden on the fatal night of emmett's rebellion, when he was basely assassinated. he was buried in the churchyard of st. paul's, dublin, where his brother officers erected a marble tablet to his memory. he left an only daughter, who was married, in , to m. g. benson, esq., of lulwyche hall, salop. it is through this lady that we have been permitted to inspect the family papers relating to the life and death of captain riou. a visit to the country of the vaudois. [illustration: "the country of felix neff." (dauphiny.)] chapter i. introductory. dauphiny is one of the least visited of all the provinces of france. it occupies a remote corner of the empire, lying completely out of the track of ordinary tourists. no great road passes through it into italy, the piedmontese frontier of which it adjoins; and the annual streams of english and american travellers accordingly enter that kingdom by other routes. even to frenchmen, who travel little in their own country and still less in others, dauphiny is very little known; and m. joanne, who has written an excellent itinerary of the south of france, almost takes the credit of having discovered it. yet dauphiny is a province full of interest. its scenery almost vies with that of switzerland in grandeur, beauty, and wildness. the great mountain masses of the alps do not end in savoy, but extend through the south-eastern parts of france, almost to the mouths of the rhône. packed closer together than in most parts of switzerland, the mountains of dauphiny are furrowed by deep valleys, each with its rapid stream or torrent at bottom, in some places overhung by precipitous rocks, in others hemmed in by green hills, over which are seen the distant snowy peaks and glaciers of the loftier mountain ranges. of these, mont pelvoux--whose double pyramid can be seen from lyons on a clear day, a hundred miles off--and the aiguille du midi, are among the larger masses, rising to a height little short of mont blanc itself. from the ramparts of grenoble the panoramic view is of wonderful beauty and grandeur, extending along the valleys of the isère and the drac, and across that of the romanche. the massive heads of the grand chartreuse mountains bound the prospect to the north; and the summits of the snow-clad dauphiny alps on the south and east present a combination of bold valley and mountain scenery, the like of which is not to be seen in france, if in europe. but it is not the scenery, or the geology, or the flora of the province, however marvellous these may be, that constitutes the chief interest for the traveller through these dauphiny valleys, so much as the human endurance, suffering, and faithfulness of the people who have lived in them in past times, and of which so many interesting remnants still survive. for dauphiny forms a principal part of the country of the ancient vaudois or waldenses--literally, the people inhabiting the _vaux_, or valleys--who for nearly seven hundred years bore the heavy brunt of papal persecution, and are now, after all their sufferings, free to worship god according to the dictates of their conscience. the country of the vaudois is not confined, as is generally supposed, to the valleys of piedmont, but extends over the greater part of dauphiny and provence. from the main ridge of the cottian alps, which, divide france from italy, great mountain spurs are thrown out, which run westward as well as eastward, and enclose narrow strips of pasturage, cultivable land, and green shelves on the mountain sides, where a poor, virtuous, and hard-working race have long contrived to earn a scanty subsistence, amidst trials and difficulties of no ordinary kind,--the greatest of which, strange to say, have arisen from the pure and simple character of the religion they professed. the tradition which exists among them is, that the early christian missionaries, when travelling from italy into gaul by the roman road passing over mont genèvre, taught the gospel in its primitive form to the people of the adjoining districts. it is even surmised that st. paul journeyed from rome into spain by that route, and may himself have imparted to the people of the valleys their first christian instruction. the italian and gallic provinces in that quarter were certainly christianized in the second century at the latest, and it is known that the early missionaries were in the habit of making frequent journeys from the provinces to rome. wherefore it is reasonable to suppose that the people of the valleys would receive occasional visits from the wayfaring teachers who travelled by the mountain passes in the immediate neighbourhood of their dwellings. as years rolled on, and the church at rome became rich and allied itself with the secular power, it gradually departed more and more from its primitive condition,[ ] until at length it was scarcely to be recognised from the paganism which it had superseded. the heathen gods were replaced by canonised mortals; venus and cupid by the virgin and child; lares and penates by images and crucifixes; while incense, flowers, tapers, and showy dresses came to be regarded as essential parts of the ceremonial of the new religion as they had been of the old. madonnas winked and bled again, as the statues of juno and pompey had done before; and stones and relics worked miracles as in the time of the augurs. [footnote : the ancient vaudois had a saying, known in other countries--"religion brought forth wealth, and the daughter devoured the mother;" and another of like meaning, but less known--"when the bishops' croziers became golden, the bishops themselves became wooden."] attempts were made by some of the early bishops to stem this tide of innovation. thus, in the fourth, century, ambrose, bishop of milan, and philastrius, bishop of brescia, acknowledging no authority on earth as superior to that of the bible, protested against the introduction of images in churches, which they held to be a return to paganism. four centuries later, claude, bishop of turin, advanced like views, and opposed with energy the worship of images, which he regarded as absolute idolatry. in the meanwhile, the simple vaudois, shut up in their almost inaccessible valleys, and knowing nothing of these innovations, continued to adhere to their original primitive form of worship; and it clearly appears, from a passage in the writings of st. ambrose, that, in his time, the superstitions which prevailed elsewhere had not at all extended into the mountainous regions of his diocese. the vaudois church was never, in the ordinary sense of the word, a "reformed" church, simply because it had not become corrupted, and did not stand in need of "reformation." it was not the vaudois who left the church, but the roman church that left them in search of idols. adhering to their primitive faith, they never recognised the paramount authority of the pope; they never worshipped images, nor used incense, nor observed mass; and when, in the course of time, these corruptions became known to them, and they found that the western church had ceased to be catholic, and become merely roman; they openly separated from it, as being no longer in conformity with the principles of the gospel as inculcated in the bible and delivered to them by their fathers. their ancient manuscripts, still extant, attest to the purity of their doctrines. they are written, like the nobla leyçon, in the romance or provençal--the earliest of the modern classical languages, the language of the troubadours--though now only spoken as a _patois_ in dauphiny, piedmont, sardinia, the north of spain, and the balearic isles.[ ] [footnote : sismondi, "littérature du midi de l'europe," i. .] if the age counts for anything, the vaudois are justified in their claim to be considered one of the oldest churches in europe. long before the conquest of england by the normans, before the time of wallace and bruce in scotland, before england had planted its foot in ireland, the vaudois church existed. their remoteness, their poverty, and their comparative unimportance as a people, for a long time protected them from interference; and for centuries they remained unnoticed by rome. but as the western church extended its power, it became insatiable for uniformity. it would not tolerate the independence which characterized the early churches, but aimed at subjecting them to the exclusive authority of rome. the vaudois, however, persisted in repudiating the doctrines and formularies of the pope. when argument failed, the church called the secular arm to its aid, and then began a series of persecutions, extending over several centuries, which, for brutality and ferocity, are probably unexampled in history. to crush this unoffending but faithful people, rome employed her most irrefragable arguments--the curses of lucius and the horrible cruelties of innocent--and the "vicar of christ" bathed the banner of the cross in a carnage from which the wolves of romulus and the eagles of cæsar would have turned with loathing. long before the period of the reformation, the vaudois valleys were ravaged by fire and sword because of the alleged heresy of the people. luther was not born until ; whereas nearly four centuries before, the vaudois were stigmatized as heretics by rome. as early as , we find pope urban ii. describing val louise, one of the dauphiny valleys--then called vallis gyrontana, from the torrent of gyr, which flows through it--as "infested with heresy." in , hot persecution raged all over dauphiny, extending to the albigeois of the south of france, as far as lyons and toulouse; one of the first martyrs being pierre waldo, or waldensis,[ ] of lyons, who was executed for heresy by the archbishop of lyons in . [footnote : it has been surmised by some writers that the waldenses derived their name from this martyr; but being known as "heretics" long before his time, it is more probable that they gave the name to him than that he did to them.] of one of the early persecutions, an ancient writer says: "in the year , pope innocent ii. ordered the bishop of metz rigorously to prosecute the vaudois, especially because they read the sacred books in the vulgar tongue."[ ] from time to time, new persecutions were ordered, and conducted with ever-increasing ferocity--the scourge, the brand, and the sword being employed by turns. in , while luther was still in his cradle, pope innocent viii. issued a bull of extermination against the vaudois, summoning all true catholics to the holy crusade, promising free pardon to all manner of criminals who should take part in it, and concluding with the promise of the remission of sins to every one who should slay a heretic.[ ] the consequence was, the assemblage of an immense horde of brigands, who were let loose on the valleys of dauphiny and piedmont, which they ravaged and pillaged, in company with eighteen thousand regular troops, jointly furnished by the french king and the duke of savoy. [footnote : jean leger, "histoire générale des Églises Évangéliques des vallées de piedmont, ou vaudoises." leyde, . part ii. .] [footnote : leger, ii. - .] sometimes the valleys were under the authority of the kings of france, sometimes under that of the dukes of savoy, whose armies alternately overran them; but change of masters and change of popes made little difference to the vaudois. it sometimes, however, happened, that the persecution waxed hotter on one side of the cottian alps, while it temporarily relaxed on the other; and on such occasions the french and italian vaudois were accustomed to cross the mountain passes, and take refuge in each others' valleys. but when, as in the above case, the kings, soldiers, and brigands, on both sides, simultaneously plied the brand and the sword, the times were very troublous indeed for these poor hunted people. they had then no alternative but to climb up the mountains into the least accessible places, or hide themselves away in dens and caverns with their families, until their enemies had departed. but they were often, tracked to their hiding-places by their persecutors, and suffocated, strangled, or shot--men, women, and children. hence there is scarcely a hiding-place along the mountain-sides of dauphiny but has some tradition connected with it relating to those dreadful times. in one, so many women and children were suffocated; in another, so many perished of cold and hunger; in a third, so many were ruthlessly put to the sword. if these caves of dauphiny had voices, what deeds of horror they could tell! * * * * * what is known as the easter massacre of made an unusual sensation in europe, but especially in england, principally through the attitude which oliver cromwell assumed in the matter. persecution had followed persecution for nearly four hundred years, and still the vaudois were neither converted nor extirpated. the dukes of savoy during all that time pursued a uniform course of treachery and cruelty towards this portion of their subjects. sometimes the vaudois, pressed by their persecutors, turned upon them, and drove them ignominiously out of their valleys. then the reigning dukes would refrain for a time; and, probably needing their help in one or other of the wars in which they were constantly engaged, would promise them protection and privileges. but such promises were invariably broken; and at some moment when the vaudois were thrown off their guard by his pretended graciousness, the duke for the time being would suddenly pounce upon them and carry fire and sword through their valleys. indeed, the dukes of savoy seem to have been about the most wrong-headed line of despots that ever cursed a people by their rule. their mania was soldiering, though they were oftener beaten than victorious. they were thrashed out of dauphiny by france, thrashed out of geneva by the citizens, thrashed out of the valleys by their own peasantry; and still they went on raising armies, making war, and massacring their vaudois subjects. being devoted servants of the pope, in they concurred with him in the establishment of a branch of the society _de propaganda fide_ at turin, which extended over the whole of piedmont, for the avowed purpose of extirpating the heretics. on palm sunday, the beginning of holy week, the society commenced active proceedings. the army of savoy advanced suddenly upon la tour, and were let loose upon the people. a general massacre began, accompanied with shocking brutalities, and continued for more than a week. in many hamlets not a cottage was left standing, and such of the people as had not been able to fly into the upper valleys were indiscriminately put to the sword. and thus was easter celebrated. the noise of this dreadful deed rang through europe, and excited a general feeling of horror, especially in england. cromwell, then at the height of his power, offered the fugitive vaudois an asylum in ireland; but the distance which lay between was too great, and the vaudois asked him to help them in some other way. forthwith, he addressed letters, written by his secretary, john milton,[ ] to the principal european powers, calling upon them to join him in putting a stop to these horrid barbarities committed upon an unoffending people. cromwell did more. he sent the exiles £ , out of his own purse; appointed a day of humiliation and a general collection all over england, by which some £ , were raised; and dispatched sir samuel morland as his plenipotentiary to expostulate in person with the duke of savoy. moreover, a treaty was on the eve of being signed with france; and cromwell refused to complete it until cardinal mazarin had undertaken to assist him in getting right done to the people of the valleys. [footnote : it was at this time that milton wrote his noble sonnet, beginning-- "avenge, o lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones lie scattered on the alpine mountains cold," &c.] these energetic measures had their effect. the vaudois who survived the massacre were permitted to return to their devastated homes, under the terms of the treaty known as the "patents of grace," which was only observed, however, so long as cromwell lived. at the restoration, charles ii. seized the public fund collected for the relief of the vaudois, and refused to remit the annuity arising from the interest thereon which cromwell had assigned to them, declaring that he would not pay the debts of a usurper! after that time, the interest felt in the vaudois was very much of a traditional character. little was known as to their actual condition, or whether the descendants of the primitive vaudois church continued to exist or not. though english travellers--amongst others, addison, smollett, and sterne--passed through the country in the course of last century, they took no note of the people of the valleys. and this state of general ignorance as to the district continued down to within about the last fifty years, when quite a new interest was imparted to the subject through the labours and researches of the late dr. gilly, prebendary of durham. it happened that that gentleman was present at a meeting of the society for promoting christian knowledge, in the year , when a very touching letter was read to the board, signed "frederick peyrani, minister of pramol," requesting the assistance of the society in supplying books to the vaudois churches of piedmont, who were described as maintaining a very hard struggle with poverty and oppression. dr. gilly was greatly interested by the reading of this letter. indeed, the subject of it so strongly arrested his attention, that he says it "took complete possession of him." he proceeded to make search for information about the vaudois, but could find very little that was definite or satisfactory respecting them. then it was that he formed the determination of visiting the valleys and ascertaining the actual condition of the people in person. his visit was made in , and in the course of the following year dr. gilly published the result in his "narrative of an excursion to the mountains of piedmont." the book excited much interest, not only in england, but in other countries; and a movement was shortly after set on foot for the relief and assistance of the vaudois. a committee was formed, and a fund was raised--to which the emperor of russia and the kings of prussia and holland contributed--with the object, in the first place, of erecting a hospital for the sick and infirm vaudois at la tour, in the valley of luzern. it turned out that the money raised was not only sufficient for this purpose, but also to provide schools and a college for the education of pastors, which were shortly after erected at the same place. in , dr. gilly made a second visit to the piedmontese valleys, partly in order to ascertain how far the aid thus rendered to the poor vaudois had proved effectual, and also to judge in what way certain further sums placed at his disposal might best be employed for their benefit.[ ] it was in the course of his second visit that dr. gilly became aware of the fact that the vaudois were not confined to the valleys of piedmont, but that numerous traces of them were also to be found on the french side of the alps, in dauphiny and provence. he accordingly extended his journey across the col de la croix into france, and cursorily visited the old vaudois district of val fressinières and val queyras, of which an account will be given in the following chapters. it was while on this journey that dr. gilly became acquainted with the self-denying labours of the good felix neff among those poor outlying christians, with whose life and character he was so fascinated that he afterwards wrote and published the memoir of neff, so well known to english readers. [footnote : dr. gilly's narrative of his second visit to the valleys was published in , under the title of "waldensian researches."] since that time occasional efforts have been made in aid of the french vaudois, though those on the italian side have heretofore commanded by far the larger share of interest. there have been several reasons for this. in the first place, the french valleys are much less accessible; the roads through some of the most interesting valleys are so bad that they can only be travelled on foot, being scarcely practicable even for mules. there is no good hotel accommodation in the district, only _auberges_, and these of an indifferent character. the people are also more scattered, and even poorer than they are on the italian side of the alps. then the climate is much more severe, from the greater elevation of the sites of most of the vaudois villages; so that when pastors were induced to settle there, the cold, and sterility, and want of domestic accommodation, soon drove them away. it was to the rigour of the climate that felix neff was eventually compelled to succumb. yet much has been done of late years for the amelioration of the french vaudois; and among the most zealous workers in their behalf have been the rev. mr. freemantle, rector of claydon, bucks, and mr. edward milsom, the well-known merchant of lyons. it was in the year that the rev. mr. freemantle first visited the vaudois of dauphiny. his attention was drawn to the subject while editing the memoir of a young english clergyman, the rev. spencer thornton, who had taken felix neff for his model; and he was thereby induced to visit the scene of neff's labours, and to institute a movement on behalf of the people of the french valleys, which has issued in the erection of schools, churches, and pastors' dwellings in several of the most destitute places. it is curious and interesting to trace the influence of personal example on human life and action. as the example of oberlin in the ban de la roche inspired felix neff to action, so the life of felix neff inspired that of spencer thornton, and eventually led mr. freemantle to enter upon the work of extending evangelization among the vaudois. in like manner, a young french pastor, m. bost, also influenced by the life and labours of neff, visited the valleys some years since, and wrote a book on the subject, the perusal of which induced mr. milsom to lend a hand to the work which the young genevese missionary had begun. and thus good example goes on ever propagating itself; and though the tombstone may record "hic jacet" over the crumbling dust of the departed, his spirit still lives and works through other minds--stimulates them to action, and inspires them with hope--"allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way." * * * * * a few words as to the origin of these fragmentary papers. in chalking out a summer holiday trip, one likes to get quite away from the ordinary round of daily life and business. half the benefits of such a trip consists in getting out of the old ruts, and breathing fresh air amidst new surroundings. but this is very difficult if you follow the ordinary tourist's track. london goes with you and elbows you on your way, accompanied by swarms of commissionaires, guides, and beggars. you encounter london people on the righi, on the wengern alp, and especially at chamouni. think of being asked, as i once was on entering the pavilion at montanvert, after crossing the mer de glace from the mauvais pas, "pray, can you tell me what was the price of brighton stock when you left town?" there is no risk of such rencontres in dauphiny, whose valleys remain in almost as primitive a state as they were hundreds of years ago. accordingly, when my friend mr. milsom, above mentioned, invited me to accompany him in one of his periodical visits to the country of the vaudois, i embraced the opportunity with pleasure. i was cautioned beforehand as to the inferior accommodation provided for travellers through the district. tourists being unknown there, the route is not padded and cushioned as it is on all the beaten continental rounds. english is not spoken; bass's pale ale has not yet penetrated into dauphiny; nor do you encounter london tourists carrying their tin baths about with them as you do in switzerland. only an occasional negotiant comes up from gap or grenoble, seeking orders in the villages, for whom the ordinary auberges suffice. where the roads are practicable, an old-fashioned diligence may occasionally be seen plodding along, freighted with villagers bound for some local market; but the roads are, for the most part, as silent as the desert. such being the case, the traveller in the valleys must be prepared to "rough it" a little. i was directed to bring with me only a light knapsack, a pair of stout hob-nailed shoes, a large stock of patience, and a small parcel of insect powder. the knapsack and the shoes i found exceedingly useful, indeed indispensable; but i had very little occasion to draw upon either my stock of patience or insect powder. the french are a tidy people, and though their beds, stuffed with maize chaff, may be hard, they are tolerably clean. the food provided in the auberges is doubtless very different from what one is accustomed to at home; but with the help of cheerfulness and a good digestion that difficulty too may be got over. indeed, among the things that most strikes a traveller through france, as characteristic of the people, is the skill with which persons of even the poorest classes prepare and serve up food. the french women are careful economists and excellent cooks. nothing is wasted. the _pot au feu_ is always kept simmering on the hob, and, with the help of a hunch of bread, a good meal may at any time be made from it. even in the humblest auberge, in the least frequented district, the dinner served up is of a quality such as can very rarely be had in any english public-house, or even in most of our country inns. cooking seems to be one of the lost arts of england, if indeed it ever possessed it; and our people are in the habit, through want of knowledge, of probably _wasting_ more food than would sustain many another nation. but in the great system of national education that is to be, no one dreams of including as a branch of it skill in the preparation and economy in the use of human food. there is another thing that the traveller through france may always depend upon, and that is civility. the politeness of even the french poor to each other is charming. they respect themselves, and they respect each other. i have seen in france what i have not yet seen in england--young working men walking out their aged mothers arm in arm in the evening, to hear the band play in the "place," or to take a turn on the public promenade. but the french are equally polite to strangers. a stranger lady may travel all through the rural districts of france, and never encounter a rude look; a stranger gentleman, and never receive a rude word. that the french are a self-respecting people is also evinced by the fact that they are a sober people. drunkenness is scarcely known in france; and one may travel all through it and never witness the degrading sight of a drunken man. the french are also honest and thrifty, and exceedingly hard-working. the industry of the people is unceasing. indeed it is excessive; for they work sunday and saturday. sunday has long ceased to be a sabbath in france. there is no day of rest there. before the revolution, the saints' days which the church ordered to be observed so encroached upon the hours required for labour, that in course of time sunday became an ordinary working day. and when the revolution abolished saints' days and sabbath days alike, sunday work became an established practice. what the so-called friends of the working classes are aiming at in england, has already been effected in france. the public museums and picture-galleries are open on sunday. but you look for the working people there in vain. they are at work in the factories, whose chimneys are smoking as usual; or building houses, or working in the fields, or they are engaged in the various departments of labour. the government works all go on as usual on sundays. the railway trains run precisely as on week days. in short, the sunday is secularised, or regarded but as a partial holiday.[ ] [footnote : i find the following under the signature of "an operative bricklayer," in the _times_ of the th july, : "i found there were a great number of men in paris that worked on the buildings who were not residents of the city. the bricklayers are called _limousins_; they come from the old province le limousin, where they keep their home, and many of them are landowners. they work in paris in the summer time; they come up in large numbers, hire a place in paris, and live together, and by so doing they live cheap. in the winter time, when they cannot work on the buildings, they go back home again and take their savings, and stop there until the spring, which is far better than it is in london; when the men cannot work they are hanging about the streets. it was with regret that i saw so many working on the sunday desecrating the sabbath. i inquired why they worked on sunday; they told me it was to make up the time they lose through wet and other causes. i saw some working with only their trousers and shoes on, with a belt round their waist to keep their trousers up. their naked back was exposed to the sun, and was as brown as if it had been dyed, and shone as if it had been varnished. i asked if they had any hard-working hearty old men. they answered me "no; the men were completely worn out by the time they reached forty years." that was a clear proof that they work against the laws of nature. i thought to myself--glory be to you, o englishmen, you know the fourth commandment; you know the value of the seventh day, the day of rest!"] as you pass through the country on sundays, as on week-days, you see the people toiling in the fields. and as dusk draws on, the dark figures may be seen moving about so long as there is light to see by. it is the peasants working the land, and it is _their own_. such is the "magical influence of property," said arthur young, when he observed the same thing. it is to be feared, however, that the french peasantry are afflicted with the disease which sir walter scott called the "earth-hunger;" and there is danger of the gravel getting into their souls. anyhow, their continuous devotion to bodily labour, without a seventh day's rest, cannot fail to exercise a deteriorating effect upon their physical as well as their moral condition; and this we believe it is which gives to the men, and especially to the women of the country, the look of a prematurely old and overworked race. chapter ii. the valley of the romanche--brianÇon. the route from grenoble to the frontier fortress of briançon lies for the most part up the valley of the romanche, which presents a variety of wild and beautiful scenery. in summer the river is confined within comparatively narrow limits; but in autumn and spring it is often a furious torrent, flooding the low-lying lands, and forcing for itself new channels. the mountain heights which bound it, being composed for the most part of schist, mica slate, and talcose slate, large masses become detached in winter--split off by the freezing of the water behind them--when they descend, on the coming of thaw, in terrible avalanches of stone and mud. sometimes the masses are such as to dam up the river and form temporary lakes, until the accumulation of force behind bursts the barrier, and a furious flood rushes down the valley. by one of such floods, which occurred a few centuries since, through the bursting of the hike of st. laurent in the valley of the romanche, a large part of grenoble was swept away, and many of the inhabitants were drowned. the valley of the romanche is no sooner entered, a few miles above grenoble, than the mountains begin to close, the scenery becomes wilder, and the fury of the torrent is evinced by the masses of débris strewed along its bed. shortly after passing the picturesque defile called l'Étroit, where the river rushes through a deep cleft in the rocks, the valley opens out again, and we shortly come in sight of the ancient town of vizille--the most prominent building in which is the château of the famous duc de lesdiguières, governor of the province in the reign of henry iv., and constable of france in that of louis xiii. * * * * * wherever you go in dauphiny, you come upon the footmarks of this great soldier. at grenoble there is the constable's palace, now the prefecture; and the beautiful grounds adjoining it, laid out by himself, are now the public gardens of the town. between grenoble and vizille there is the old road constructed by him, still known as "le chemin du connétable." at st. bonnet, in the valley of the drac, formerly an almost exclusively protestant town, known as "the geneva of the high alps," you are shown the house in which the constable was born; and a little lower down the same valley, in the commune of glaizil, on a hill overlooking the drac, stand the ruins of the family castle; where the constable was buried. the people of the commune were in the practice of carrying away the bones from the family vault, believing them to possess some virtue as relics, until the prefect of the high alps ordered it to be walled up to prevent the entire removal of the skeletons. in the early part of his career, lesdiguières was one of the most trusted chiefs of henry of navarre, often leading his huguenot soldiers to victory; capturing town after town, and eventually securing possession of the entire province of dauphiny, of which henry appointed him governor. in that capacity he carried out many important public works--made roads, built bridges, erected fourteen fortresses, and enlarged and beautified his palace at grenoble and his château at vizille. he enjoyed great popularity during his life, and was known throughout his province as "king of the mountains." but he did not continue staunch either to his party or his faith. as in the case of many of the aristocratic leaders of those times, lesdiguières' religion was only skin deep. it was but a party emblem--a flag to fight under, not a faith to live by. so, when ambition tempted him, and the constable's baton dangled before his eyes, it cost the old soldier but little compunction to abandon the cause which he had so brilliantly served in his youth. to secure the prize which he so coveted, he made public abjuration of his faith in the church, of st. andrew's at grenoble in , in the presence of the marquis de crequi, the minister of louis xiii., who, immediately after lesdiguières' first mass, presented him with the constable's baton. but the lesdiguières family has long since passed away, and left no traces. at the revolution, the constable's tomb was burst open, and his coffin torn up. his monument was afterwards removed to gap, which, when a huguenot, he had stormed and ravaged. his château at vizille passed through different hands, until in it came into the possession of the périer family, to which the celebrated casimir périer belonged. the great gothic hall of the château has witnessed many strange scenes. in , shortly after his investment as constable, lesdiguières entertained louis xiii. and his court there, while on his journey into italy, in the course of which he so grievously ravaged the vaudois villages. in , the estates of dauphiny met there, and prepared the first bold remonstrance against aristocratic privileges, and in favour of popular representation, which, in a measure, proved the commencement of the great revolution. and there too, in , felix neff preached to large congregations, who were so anxious and attentive that he always after spoke of the place as his "dear vizille;" and now, to wind up the vicissitudes of the great hall, it is used as a place for the printing of bandana handkerchiefs! * * * * * when neff made his flying visits to vizille, he was temporarily stationed at mens, which was the scene of his first labours in dauphiny. the place lies not far from vizille, away among the mountains towards the south. during the wars of religion, and more especially after the revocation of the edict of nantes, mens became a place of refuge for the protestants, who still form about one-half of its population. although, during the long dark period of religious persecution which followed the revocation, the protestants of mens and the neighbouring villages did not dare to show themselves, and worshipped, if at all, only in their dwellings, in secret, or in "the desert," no sooner did the revolution set them at liberty than they formed themselves again into churches, and appointed pastors; and it was to serve them temporarily in that capacity that felix neff first went amongst them, and laboured there and at vizille with such good effect. * * * * * not far from mens is a place which has made much more noise in the world--no other than la salette, the scene of the latest roman "miracle." la salette is one of the side-valleys of the large valley of the drac, which joins the romanche a few miles above grenoble. there is no village of la salette, but a commune, which is somewhat appropriately called la salette-fallavaux, the latter word being from _fallax vallis_, or "the lying valley." about twenty-seven years ago, on the th of september, , two children belonging to the hamlet of abladens--the one a girl of fourteen, the other a boy of twelve years old--came down from the lofty pasturage of mont gargas, where they had been herding cattle, and told the following strange story. they had seen the virgin mary descend from heaven with a crucifix suspended from her neck by a gold chain, and a hammer and pincers suspended from the chain, but without any visible support. the figure sat down upon a large stone, and wept so piteously as shortly to fill a large pool with her tears. when the story was noised abroad, people came from all quarters, and went up the mountain to see where the virgin had sat. the stone was soon broken off in chips and carried away as relics, but the fountain filled with the tears is still there, tasting very much, like ordinary spring water. two priests of grenoble, disgusted at what they believed to be an imposition, accused a young person of the neighbourhood, one mdlle. de lamerlière, as being the real author of the pretended miracle, on which she commenced an action against them for defamation of character. she brought the celebrated advocate jules favre from paris to plead her cause, but the verdict was given in favour of the two priests. the "miracle" was an imposture! notwithstanding this circumstance, the miracle came to be generally believed in the neighbourhood. the number of persons who resorted to the place with money in their pockets steadily increased. the question was then taken up by the local priests, who vouched for the authenticity of the miracle seen by the two children. the miracle was next accepted by rome.[ ] a church was built on the spot by means of the contributions of the visitors--l'Église de la salette--and thither pilgrims annually resort in great numbers, the more devout climbing the hill, from station to station, on their knees. as many as four thousand persons of both sexes, and of various ages, have been known to climb the hill in one day--on the anniversary of the appearance of the apparition--notwithstanding the extreme steepness and difficulties of the ascent. [footnote : an authorised account was prepared by cardinal wiseman for english readers, entitled "manual of the association of our lady of reconciliation of la salette," and published as a tract by burns, , portman street, in . since i passed through the country in , the germans have invaded france, the surrender has occurred at sedan, the commune has been defeated at paris, but our lady of la salette is greater than ever. a temple of enormous dimensions has risen in her honour; the pilgrims number over , yearly, and the sale of the water from the holy well, said to have sprung from the virgin's tears, realises more than £ , . since the success of la salette, the virgin has been making repeated appearances in france. her last appearance was in a part of alsace which is strictly catholic. the virgin appeared, as usual, to a boy of the mature age of six, "dressed in black, floating in the air, her hands bound with chains,"--a pretty strong religio-political hint. when a party of the th bavarian cavalry was posted in bettweiler, the virgin ceased to make her appearance.] * * * * * as a pendant to this story, another may be given of an entirely different character, relating to the inhabitants of another commune in the same valley, about midway between la salette and grenoble. in , while the discussion about the miracle at la salette was still in progress, the inhabitants of notre-dame-de-comiers, dissatisfied with the conduct of their curé, invited m. fermaud, pastor of the protestant church at grenoble, to come over and preach to them, as they were desirous of embracing protestantism. the pastor, supposing that they were influenced by merely temporary irritation against their curé, cautioned the deputation that waited upon him as to the gravity of their decision in such a matter, and asked them to reflect further upon it. for several years m. fermaud continued to maintain the same attitude, until, in , a formal petition was delivered to him by the mayor of the place, signed by forty-three heads of families, and by nine out of the ten members of the council of the commune, urging him to send them over a minister of the evangelical religion. even then he hesitated, and recommended the memorialists to appeal to the bishop of the diocese for redress of the wrongs of which he knew they complained, but in vain, until at length, in the beginning of , with the sanction of the consistory of grenoble a minister was sent over to comiers to perform the first acts of protestant worship, including baptism and marriage; and it was not until october in the same year that pastor fermaud himself went thither to administer the sacrament to the new church. the service was conducted in the public hall of the commune, and was attended by a large number of persons belonging to the town and neighbourhood. the local clergy tried in vain to check the movement. quite recently, when the curé entered one of the schools to inscribe the names of the children who were to attend their first mass, out of fifteen of the proper age eleven answered to the interrogatory of the priest, "monsieur, nous sommes protestantes." the movement has also extended into the neighbouring communes, helped by the zeal of the new converts, one of whom is known in the neighbourhood as "père la bible," and it is possible that before long it may even extend to la salette itself. * * * * * the route from vizille up the valley of the romanche continues hemmed in by rugged mountains, in some places almost overhanging the river. at séchilienne it opens out sufficiently to afford space for a terraced garden, amidst which stands a handsome château, flanked by two massive towers, commanding a beautiful prospect down the valley. the abundant water which rushes down from the mountain behind is partly collected in a reservoir, and employed to feed a _jet d'eau_ which rises in a lofty column under the castle windows. further up, the valley again contracts, until the gorge de loiret is passed. the road then crosses to the left bank, and used to be continued along it, but the terrible torrent of washed it away for miles, and it has not yet been reconstructed. temporary bridges enable the route to be pursued by the old road on the right bank, and after passing through several hamlets of little interest, we arrive at length at the cultivated plain hemmed in by lofty mountains, in the midst of which bourg d'oisans lies seated. this little plain was formerly occupied by the lake of st. laurent, formed by the barrier of rocks and débris which had tumbled down from the flank of the petite voudène, a precipitous mountain escarpment overhanging the river. at this place, the strata are laid completely bare, and may be read like a book. for some distance along the valley they exhibit the most extraordinary contortions and dislocations, impressing the mind with the enormous natural forces that must have been at work to occasion such tremendous upheavings and disruptions. elie de beaumont, the french geologist, who has carefully examined the district, says that at the montagne d'oisans he found the granite in some places resting upon the limestone, cutting through the calcareous beds, rising like a wall and lapping over them. on arriving at bourg d'oisans, we put up at the hôtel de milan close by the bridge; but though dignified with the name of hotel, it is only a common roadside inn. still, it is tolerably clean, and in summer the want of carpets is not missed. the people were civil and attentive, their bread wholesome, their pottage and bouilli good--being such fare as the people of the locality contrive to live and thrive upon. the accommodation of the place is, indeed, quite equal to the demand; for very few travellers accustomed to a better style of living pass that way. when the landlady was asked if many tourists had passed this year, she replied, "tourists! we rarely see such travellers here. you are the first this season, and perhaps you may be the last." yet these valleys are well worthy of a visit, and an influx of tourists would doubtless have the same effect that it has already had in switzerland and elsewhere, of greatly improving the hotel accommodation throughout the district. there are many domestic arrangements, costing very little money, but greatly ministering to cleanliness and comfort, which might very readily be provided. but the people themselves are indifferent to them, and they need the requisite stimulus of "pressure from without." one of the most prominent defects--common to all the inns of dauphiny--having been brought under the notice of the landlady, she replied, "c'est vrai, monsieur; mais--il laisse quelque chose à desirer!" how neatly evaded! the very defect was itself an advantage! what would life be--what would hotels be--if there were not "something left to be desired!" the view from the inn at the bridge is really charming. the little river which runs down the valley, and becomes lost in the distance, is finally fringed with trees--alder, birch, and chestnut. ridge upon ridge of mountain rises up behind on the right hand and the left, the lower clothed with patches of green larch, and the upper with dark pine. above all are ranges of jagged and grey rocks, shooting up in many places into lofty peaks. the setting sun, shining across the face of the mountain opposite, brings out the prominent masses in bold relief, while the valley beneath hovers between light and shadow, changing almost from one second to another as the sun goes down. in the cool of the evening, we walked through the fields across the plain, to see the torrent, visible from the village, which rushes from the rocky gorge on the mountain-side to join its waters to the romanche. all along the valleys, water abounds--sometimes bounding from the heights, in jets, in rivulets, in masses, leaping from rock to rock, and reaching the ground only in white clouds of spray, or, as in the case of the little river which flows alongside the inn at the bridge, bursting directly from the ground in a continuous spring; these waterfalls, and streams, and springs being fed all the year through by the immense glaciers that fill the hollows of the mountains on either side the valley. though the scenery of bourg d'oisans is not, as its eulogists allege, equal to that of switzerland, it will at least stand a comparison with that of savoy. its mountains are more precipitous and abrupt, its peaks more jagged, and its aspect more savage and wild. the scenery of mont pelvoux, which is best approached from bourg d'oisans, is especially grand and sublime, though of a wild and desolate character. the road from bourg d'oisans to briançon also presents some magnificent scenery; and there is one part of it that is not perhaps surpassed even by the famous via mala leading up to the splügen. it is about three miles above bourg d'oisans, from which we started early next morning. there the road leaves the plain and enters the wild gorge of freney, climbing by a steep road up the rampe des commières. the view from the height when gained is really superb, commanding an extremely bold and picturesque valley, hemmed in by mountains. the ledges on the hillsides spread out in some places so as to afford sufficient breadths for cultivation; occasional hamlets appear amidst the fields and pine-woods; and far up, between you and the sky, an occasional church spire peeps up, indicating still loftier settlements, though how the people contrive to climb up to those heights is a wonder to the spectator who views them from below. the route follows the profile of the mountain, winding in and out along its rugged face, scarped and blasted so as to form the road. at one place it passes along a gallery about six hundred feet in length, cut through a precipitous rock overhanging the river, which dashes, roaring and foaming, more than a thousand feet below, through the rocky abyss of the gorge de l'infernet. perhaps there is nothing to be seen in switzerland finer of its kind than the succession of charming landscapes which meet the eye in descending this pass. beyond the village of freney we enter another defile, so narrow that in places there is room only for the river and the road; and in winter the river sometimes plays sad havoc with the engineer's constructions. above this gorge, the romanche is joined by the ferrand, an impetuous torrent which comes down from the glaciers of the grand rousses. immediately over their point of confluence, seated on a lofty promontory, is the village of mizoën--a place which, because of the outlook it commands, as well as because of its natural strength, was one of the places in which the vaudois were accustomed to take refuge in the times of the persecutions. further on, we pass through another gallery in the rock, then across the little green valley of chambon to le dauphin, after which the scenery becomes wilder, the valley--here called the combe de malaval (the "cursed valley")--rocky and sterile, the only feature to enliven it being the cascade de la pisse, which falls from a height of over six hundred feet, first in one jet, then becomes split by a projecting rock into two, and finally reaches the ground in a shower of spray. shortly after we pass another cascade, that of the riftort, which also joins the romanche, and marks the boundary between the department of the isère and that of the hautes alpes, which we now enter. more waterfalls--the sau de la pucelle, which falls from a height of some two hundred and fifty feet, resembling the staubbach--besides rivulets without number, running down the mountain-sides like silver threads; until we arrive at la grave, a village about five thousand feet above the sea-level, directly opposite the grand glaciers of tabuchet, pacave, and vallon, which almost overhang the romanche, descending from the steep slopes of the gigantic aiguille du midi, the highest mountain in the french alps,--being over , feet above the level of the sea. after resting some two hours at la grave, we proceeded by the two tunnels under the hamlet of ventelong--one of which is and the other , feet long--to the village of villard d'arene, which, though some five thousand feet above the level of the sea, is so surrounded by lofty mountains that for months together the sun never shines on it. from thence a gradual ascent leads up to the summit of the col de lauteret, which divides the valley of the romanche from that of the guisanne. the pastures along the mountain-side are of the richest verdure; and so many rare and beautiful plants are found growing there that m. rousillon has described it as a "very botanical eden." here jean jacques rousseau delighted to herborize, and here the celebrated botanist mathonnet, originally a customs officer, born at the haggard village of villard d'arene, which we have just passed, cultivated his taste for natural history, and laid the foundations of his european reputation. the variety of temperature which exists along the mountain-side, from the bottom to the summit, its exposure to the full rays of the sun in some places, and its sheltered aspect in others, facilitate the growth of an extraordinary variety of beautiful plants and wild flowers. in the low grounds meridional plants flourish; on the middle slopes those of genial climates; while on the summit are found specimens of the flora of lapland and greenland. thus almost every variety of flowers is represented in this brilliant natural garden--orchids, cruciferæ, leguminæ, rosaceæ, caryophyllæ, lilies of various kinds, saxifrages, anemones, ranunculuses, swertia, primula, varieties of the sedum, some of which are peculiar to this mountain, and are elsewhere unknown. after passing the hospice near the summit of the col, the valley of the guisanne comes in sight, showing a line of bare and rugged mountains on the right hand and on the left, with a narrow strip of land in the bottom, in many parts strewn with stones carried down by the avalanches from the cliffs above. shortly we come in sight of the distant ramparts of briançon, apparently closing in the valley, the snow-clad peak of monte viso rising in the distance. halfway between the col and briançon we pass through the village of monestier, where, being a saint's day, the bulk of the population are in the street, holding festival. the place was originally a roman station, and the people still give indications of their origin, being extremely swarthy, black-haired, and large-eyed, evidently much more italian than french. but though the villagers of monestier were taking holiday, no one can reproach them with idleness. never was there a more hard-working people than the peasantry of these valleys. every little patch of ground that the plough or spade can be got into is turned to account. the piles of stone and rock collected by the sides of the fields testify to the industry of the people in clearing the soil for culture. and their farming is carried on in the face of difficulties and discouragements of no ordinary character, for sometimes the soil of many of the little farms will be swept away in a night by an avalanche of snow in winter or of stones in spring. the wrecks of fields are visible all along the valley, especially at its upper part. lower down it widens, and affords greater room for culture; the sides of the mountains become better wooded; and, as we approach the fortress of briançon, with its battlements seemingly piled one over the other up the mountain-sides, the landscape becomes exceedingly bold and picturesque. when passing the village of villeneuve la salle, a few miles from briançon, we were pointed to a spot on the opposite mountain-side, over the pathway leading to the col de l'echuada, where a cavern was discovered a few years since, which, upon examination, was found to contain a considerable quantity of human bones. it was one of the caves in which the hunted vaudois were accustomed to take refuge during the persecutions; and it continued to be called by the peasantry "la roche armée"--the name being thus perpetuated, though the circumstances in which it originated had been forgotten. the fortress of briançon, which we entered by a narrow winding roadway round the western rampart, is the frontier fortress which guards the pass from italy into france by the road over mont genèvre. it must always have been a strong place by nature, overlooking as it does the valley of the durance on the one hand, and the mountain road from italy on the other, while the river clairée, running in a deep defile, cuts it off from the high ground to the south and east. the highest part of the town is the citadel, or fort du château, built upon a peak of rock on the site of the ancient castle. it was doubtless the nucleus round which the early town became clustered, until it filled the lower plateau to the verge of the walls and battlements. there being no room for the town to expand, the houses are closely packed together and squeezed up, as it were, so as to occupy the smallest possible space. the streets are narrow, dark, gloomy, and steep, being altogether impassable for carriages. the liveliest sight in the place is a stream of pure water, that rushes down an open conduit in the middle of the principal street, which is exceedingly steep and narrow. the town is sacrificed to the fortifications, which dominate everywhere. with the increasing range and power of cannon, they have been extended in all directions, until they occupy the flanks of the adjoining mountains and many of their summits, so that the original castle now forms but a comparatively insignificant part of the fortress. the most important part of the population is the soldiery--the red-trousered missionaries of "civilisation," according to the gospel of louis napoleon, published a short time before our visit. other missionaries, are, however, at work in the town and neighbourhood; and both at briançon and villeneuve protestant stations have been recently established, under the auspices of the protestant society of lyons. in former times, the population of briançon included a large number of protestants. in the year , three years after the massacre of st. bartholomew, they were so numerous and wealthy as to be able to build a handsome temple, almost alongside the cathedral, and it still stands there in the street called rue du temple, with the motto over the entrance, in old french, "cerches et vos troveres." but at the revocation of the edict of nantes, the temple was seized by the king and converted into a granary, and the protestants of the place were either executed, banished, or forced to conform to the papal religion. since then the voice of protestantism has been mute in briançon until within the last few years, during which a mission has been in operation. some of the leading persons in the town have embraced the reform faith, amongst others the professor of literature in the public college; but he had no sooner acknowledged to the authorities the fact of his conversion, than he was dismissed from his office, though he has since been appointed to a more important profession at nice. the number of members is, however, as yet very small, and the mission has to contend with limited means, and to carry on its operations in the face of many obstructions and difficulties. * * * * * what are the prospects of the extension of protestantism in france? various answers have been given to the question. some think that the prevailing dissensions among french protestants interpose a serious barrier in the way of progress. others, more hopeful, think, that these divisions are only the indications of renewed life and vigour, of the friction of mind with mind, which evinces earnestness, and cannot fail to lead to increased activity and effort. the observations of a young protestant pastor on this point are worth repeating. "protestantism," said he, "is based on individualism: it recognises the free action of the human mind; and so long as the mind acts freely there will be controversy. the end of controversy is death. true, there is much incredulity abroad; but the incredulity is occasioned by the incredibilities of popery. let the ground once be cleared by free inquiry, and our church will rise up amidst the ruins of superstition and unbelief, for man _must_ have religion; only it must be consistent with reason on the one hand, and with divine revelation on the other. i for one do not fear the fullest and freest inquiry, having the most perfect confidence in the triumph of the truth." it is alleged by others that the bald form in which protestantism is for the most part presented abroad, is not conformable with the "genius" of the men of celtic and latin race. however this may be, it is too generally the case that where frenchmen, like italians and spaniards, throw off roman catholicism, they do not stop at rejecting its superstitions, but reject religion itself. they find no intermediate standpoint in protestantism, but fly off into the void of utter unbelief. the same tendency characterizes them in politics. they seem to oscillate between cæsarism and red republicanism; aiming not at reform so much as revolution. they are averse to any _via media_. when they have tried constitutionalism, they have broken down. so it has been with protestantism, the constitutionalism of christianity. the huguenots at one time constituted a great power in france; but despotism in politics and religion proved too strong for them, and they were persecuted, banished, and stamped for a time out of existence, or at least out of sight. protestantism was more successful in germany. was it because it was more conformable to the "genius" of its people? when the germans "protested" against the prevailing corruptions in the church, they did not seek to destroy it, but to reform it. they "stood upon the old ways," and sought to make them broader, straighter, and purer. they have pursued the same course in politics. cooler and less impulsive than their gallican neighbours, they have avoided revolutions, but are constantly seeking reforms. of this course england itself furnishes a notable example. it is certainly a remarkable fact, that the stronghold of protestantism in france was recently to be found among the population of germanic origin seated along the valley of the rhine; whereas in the western districts protestantism is split up by the two irreconcilable parties of evangelicals and rationalists. at the same time it should be borne in mind that alsace did not become part of france until the year , and that the lutherans of that province were never exposed to the ferocious persecutions to which the evangelical protestants of old france were subjected, before as well as after the revocation of the edict of nantes. in languedoc, in dauphiny, and in the southern provinces generally, men and women who professed protestantism were liable to be hanged or sent to the galleys, down to nearly the end of the last century. a protestant pastor who exercised his vocation did so at the daily peril of his life. nothing in the shape of a protestant congregation was permitted to exist, and if protestants worshipped together, it was in secret, in caves, in woods, among the hills, or in the "desert." yet protestantism nevertheless contrived to exist through this long dark period of persecution, and even to increase. and when at length it became tolerated, towards the close of the last century, the numbers of its adherents appeared surprising to those who had imagined it to be altogether extinct. indeed, looking at the persistent efforts made by louis xiv. to exterminate the huguenots, and to the fact that many hundred thousand of the best of them emigrated into foreign countries, while an equal number are supposed to have perished in prison, on the scaffold, at the galleys, and in their attempts to escape, it may almost be regarded as matter of wonder that the Église reformée--the church of the old huguenots--should at the present day number about a thousand congregations, besides the five hundred lutheran congregations of alsatia, and that the protestants of france should amount, in the whole, to about two millions of souls. chapter iii. val louise--history of felix neff. some eight miles south of briançon, on the road to fort dauphin, a little river called the gyronde comes down from the glaciers of mont pelvoux, and falls into the durance nearly opposite the village of la bessie. this river flows through val louise, the entrance into which can be discerned towards the northwest. near the junction of the rivers, the ruins of an embattled wall, with entrenchments, are observed extending across the valley of the durance, a little below the narrow pass called the "pertuis-rostan," evidently designed to close it against an army advancing from the south. the country people still call those ruins the "walls of the vaudois;"[ ] and according to tradition a great vaudois battle was fought there; but of any such battle history makes no mention. [footnote : a gap in the mountain-wall to the left, nearly over la bessie, is still known as "la porte de hannibal," through which, it is conjectured, that general led his army. but opinion, which is much divided as to the route he took, is more generally in favour of his marching up the isère, and passing into italy by the little st. bernard.] indeed, so far as can be ascertained, the vaudois of dauphiny rarely if ever fought battles. they were too few in number, too much scattered among the mountains, and too poor and ill-armed, to be able to contend against the masses of disciplined soldiery that were occasionally sent into the valleys. all that they did was to watch, from their mountain look-outs, their enemies' approach, and hide themselves in caves; or flee up to the foot of the glaciers till they had passed by. the attitude of the french vaudois was thus for the most part passive; and they very rarely, like the italian vaudois, offered any determined or organized resistance to persecution. hence they have no such heroic story to tell of battles and sieges and victories. their heroism was displayed in patience, steadfastness, and long-suffering, rather than in resisting force by force; and they were usually ready to endure death in its most frightful forms rather than prove false to their faith. the ancient people of these valleys formed part of the flock of the archbishop of embrun. but history exhibits him as a very cruel shepherd. thus, in , there appears this remarkable entry in the accounts current of the bailli of embrun: "item, for persecuting the vaudois, eight sols and thirty deniers of gold," as if the persecution of the vaudois had become a regular department of the public service. what was done with the vaudois when they were seized and tried at embrun further appears from the records of the diocese. in , twelve of the inhabitants of val louise were strangled at embrun by the public executioner; and in , a hundred and fifty inhabitants of the same valley were burned alive at the same place by order of the inquisitor borelli. but the most fatal of all the events that befell the inhabitants of val louise was that which occurred about a century later, in , when nearly the whole of the remaining population of the valley were destroyed in a cavern near the foot of mont pelvoux. this dreadful massacre was perpetrated by a french army, under the direction of albert catanée, the papal legate. the army had been sent into piedmont with the object of subjugating or destroying the vaudois on the italian side of the alps, but had returned discomfited to briançon, unable to effect their object. the legate then determined to take his revenge by an assault upon the helpless and unarmed french vaudois, and suddenly directed his soldiers upon the valleys of fressinières and louise. the inhabitants of the latter valley, surprised, and unable to resist an army of some twenty thousand men, abandoned their dwellings, and made for the mountains with all haste, accompanied by their families, and driving their flocks before them. on the slope of mont pelvoux, about a third of the way up, there was formerly a great cavern, on the combe of capescure, called la balme-chapelle--though now nearly worn away by the disintegration of the mountain-side--in which the poor hunted people contrived to find shelter. they built up the approaches to the cavern, filled the entrance with rocks, and considered themselves to be safe. but their confidence proved fatal to them. the count la palud, who was in command of the troops, seeing that it was impossible to force the entrance, sent his men up the mountain provided with ropes; and fixing them so that they should hang over the mouth of the cavern, a number of the soldiers slid down in full equipment, landing on the ledge right in front of the concealed vaudois. seized with a sudden panic, and being unarmed, many of them precipitated themselves over the rocks and were killed. the soldiers slaughtered all whom they could reach, after which they proceeded to heap up wood at the cavern mouth which they set on fire, and thus suffocated the remainder. perrin says four hundred children were afterwards found in the cavern, stifled, in the arms of their dead mothers, and that not fewer than three thousand persons were thus ruthlessly destroyed. the little property of the slaughtered peasants was ordered by the pope's legate to be divided amongst the vagabonds who had carried out his savage orders. the population having been thus exterminated, the district was settled anew some years later, in the reign of louis xii., who gave his name to the valley; and a number of "good and true catholics," including many goitres and idiots,[ ] occupied the dwellings and possessed the lands of the slaughtered vaudois. there is an old saying that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," but assuredly it does not apply to val louise, where the primitive christian church has been completely extinguished. [footnote : it has been noted that these unfortunates abound most in the villages occupied by the new settlers. thus, of the population of the village of st. crepin, in the valley of the durance, not fewer than one-tenth are deaf and dumb, with a large proportion of idiots.] there were other valleys in the same neighbourhood, whither we are now wending, where the persecution, though equally ferocious, proved less destructive; the inhabitants succeeding in making their escape into comparatively inaccessible places in the mountains before they could be put to the sword. for instance, in val fressinières--also opening into the valley of the durance a little lower down than val louise--the vaudois church has never ceased to exist, and to this day the majority of the inhabitants belong to it. from the earliest times the people of the valley were distinguished for their "heresy;" and as early as the fourteenth century eighty persons of fressinières and the neighbouring valley of argentières,--willing to be martyrs rather than apostates,--were burnt at embrun because of their religion. in the following century ( ) we find ninety-nine informations laid before john lord archbishop of embrun against supposed heretics of val fressinières. the suspected were ordered to wear a cross upon their dress, before and behind, and not to appear at church without displaying such crosses. but it further appears from the records, that, instead of wearing the crosses, most of the persons so informed against fled into the mountains and hid themselves away in caves for the space of five years. the nest steps taken by the archbishop are described in a latin manuscript,[ ] of which the following is a translation:-- "also, that in consequence of the above, the monk francis splireti, of the order of mendicants, professor in theology, was deputed in the quality of inquisitor of the said valleys; and that in the year , on the st of january, knowing that those of freyssinier had relapsed into infamous heresy, and had not obeyed their orders, nor carried the cross on their dress, but on the contrary had received their excommunicated and banished brethren without delivering them over to the church, sent to them new citation, to which not having appeared, an adjournment of their condemnation as hardened heretics, when their goods would be confiscated, and themselves handed over the secular power, was made to the th of june; but they remaining more obstinate than ever, so much so that no hope remains of bringing them back, all persons were forbidden to hold any communication whatsoever with them without permission of the church, and it was ordered by the procureur fiscal that the aforesaid inquisitor do proceed, without further notice, to the execution of his office." [footnote : this was one of the mss deposited by samuel morland (oliver cromwell's ambassador to piedmont) at cambridge in , and is quoted by jean leger in his history of the vaudois churches.] what the execution of the inquisitor's office meant, is, alas! but too well known. bonds and imprisonment, scourgings and burnings at embrun. the poor people appealed to the king of france for help against their persecutors, but in vain. in the inhabitants of fressinières appeared by a procurator at paris, on the occasion of the new sovereign, louis xii., ascending the throne. but as the king was then seeking the favour of a divorce from his wife, anne of brittany, from pope alexander vi., he turned a deaf ear to their petition for mercy. on the contrary, louis confirmed all the decisions of the clergy, and in return for the divorce which he obtained, he granted to the pope's son, the infamous cæsar borgia, that very part of dauphiny inhabited by the vaudois, together with the title of duke of valentinois. they had appealed, as it were, to the tiger for mercy, and they were referred to the vulture. the persecution of the people of the valleys thus suffered no relaxation, and all that remained for them was flight into the mountains, to places where they were most likely to remain unmolested. hence they fled up to the very edge of the glaciers, and formed their settlements at almost the farthest limits of vegetation. there the barrenness of the soil, the inhospitality of the climate, and the comparative inaccessibility of their villages, proved their security. of them it might be truly said, that they "wandered about in sheepskins and goat-skins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth." yet the character of these poor peasants was altogether irreproachable. even louis xii. said of them, "would to god that i were as good a christian as the worst of these people!" the wonder is that, in the face of their long-continued persecutions, extending over so many centuries, any remnant of the original population of the valleys should have been preserved. long after the time of louis xii. and cæsar borgia, the french historian, de thou (writing in ), thus describes the people of val fressinières: "notwithstanding their squalidness, it is surprising that they are very far from being uncultivated in their morals. they almost all understand latin; and are able to write fairly enough. they understand also as much of french as will enable them to read the bible and to sing psalms; nor would you easily find a boy among them who, if he were questioned as to the religious opinions which they hold in common with the waldenses, would not be able to give from memory a reasonable account of them."[ ] [footnote : de thou's history, book xxvii.] after the promulgation of the edict of nantes, the vaudois enjoyed a brief respite from their sufferings. they then erected temples, appointed ministers, and worshipped openly. this, however, only lasted for a short time, and when the edict was revoked, and persecution began again, in the reign of louis xiv., their worship was suppressed wherever practicable. but though the vaudois temples were pulled down and their ministers banished, the roman catholics failed to obtain a footing in the valley. some of the pastors continued to brave the fury of the persecutors, and wandered about from place to place among the scattered flocks, ministering to them at the peril of their lives. rewards were offered for their apprehension, and a sort of "hue and cry" was issued by the police, describing their age, and height, and features, as if they had been veritable criminals. and when they were apprehended they were invariably hanged. as late as the parliament of grenoble condemned their pastor berenger to death for continuing to preach to congregations in the "desert." this religious destitution of the vaudois continued to exist until a comparatively recent period. the people were without either pastors or teachers, and religion had become a tradition with them rather than an active living faith. still, though poor and destitute, they held to their traditional belief, and refused to conform to the dominant religion. and so they continued until within the last forty years, when the fact of the existence of these remnants of the ancient vaudois in the valleys of the high alps came to the knowledge of felix neff, and he determined to go to their help and devote himself to their service. * * * * * one would scarcely expect to find the apostle of the high alps in the person of a young swiss soldier of artillery. yet so it was. in his boyhood, neff read plutarch, which filled his mind with admiration of the deeds of the great men of old. while passing through the soldier phase of his career the "memoirs of oberlin" accidentally came under his notice, the perusal of which gave quite a new direction to his life. becoming impressed by religion, his ambition now was to be a missionary. leaving the army, in which he had reached the rank of sergeant at nineteen, he proceeded to prepare himself for the ministry, and after studying for a time, and passing his preliminary examinations, he was, in conformity with the custom of the geneva church, employed on probation as a lay helper in parochial work. in this capacity neff first went to mens, in the department of isère, where he officiated in the absence of the regular pastor, as well as occasionally at vizille, for a period of about two years. it was while residing at mens that the young missionary first heard of the existence of the scattered communities of primitive christians on the high alps, descendants of the ancient vaudois; and his mind became inflamed with the desire of doing for them what oberlin had done for the poor protestants of the ban de la roche. "i am always dreaming of the high alps," he wrote to a friend, "and i would rather be stationed there than under the beautiful sky of languedoc." but it was first necessary that he should receive ordination for the ministry; and accordingly in , when in his twenty-fifth year, he left mens with that object. he did not, however, seek ordination by the national church of geneva, which, in his opinion, had in a great measure ceased to hold evangelical truth; but he came over to london, at the invitation of mr. cook and mr. wilks, two congregational ministers, by whom he was duly ordained a minister in the independent chapel, poultry. shortly after his return to france, neff, much to his own satisfaction, was invited as pastor to the very district in which he so much desired to minister--the most destitute in the high alps. before setting out he wrote in his journal, "to-morrow, with the blessing of god, i mean to push for the alps by the sombre and picturesque valley of l'oisan." after a few days, the young pastor was in the scene of his future labours; and he proceeded to explore hamlet after hamlet in search of the widely-scattered flock committed to his charge, and to arrange his plans for the working of his extensive parish. but it was more than a parish, for it embraced several of the most extensive, rugged, and mountainous arrondissements of the high alps. though the whole number of people in his charge did not amount to more than six or seven hundred, they lived at great distances from each other, the churches to which he ministered being in some cases as much as eighty miles apart, separated by gorges and mountain-passes, for the most part impassable in winter. neff's district extended in one direction from vars to briançon, and in another from champsaur in the valley of the drac to san veran on the slope of monte viso, close to the italian frontier. his residence was fixed at la chalp, above queyras, but as he rarely slept more than three nights in one place, he very seldom enjoyed its seclusion. the labour which neff imposed upon himself was immense; and it was especially in the poorest and most destitute districts that he worked the hardest. he disregarded alike the summer's heat and the winter's cold. his first visit to dormilhouse, in val fressinières, was made in january, when the mountain-paths were blocked with ice and snow; but, assembling the young men of the village, he went out with them armed with hatchets, and cut steps in the ice to enable the worshippers from the lower hamlets to climb up to service in the village church. the people who first came to hear him preach at violens brought wisps of straw with them, which they lighted to guide them through the snow, while others, who had a greater distance to walk, brought pine torches. nothing daunted, the valiant soldier, furnished with a stout staff and shod with heavy-nailed shoes, covered with linen socks to prevent slipping on the snow, would set out with his wallet on his back across the col d'orcières in winter, in the track of the lynx and the chamois, with the snow and sleet beating against his face, to visit his people on the other side of the mountain. his patience, his perseverance, his sweetness of temper, were unfailing. "ah!" said one unbelieving thomas of val fressinières in his mountain patois, "you have come among us like a woman who attempts to kindle a fire with green wood; she exhausts her breath in blowing it to keep the little flame alive, but the moment she quits it, it is instantly extinguished." neff nevertheless laboured on with hope, and neither discouragement nor obstruction slackened his efforts. and such labours could not fail of their effect. he succeeded in inspiring the simple mountaineers with his own zeal, he evoked their love, and excited their enthusiastic admiration. when he returned to dormilhouse after a brief absence, the whole village would turn out and come down the mountain to meet and embrace him. "the rocks, the cascades, nay, the very glaciers," he wrote to a friend, "all seemed animated, and presented a smiling aspect; the savage country became agreeable and dear to me from the moment its inhabitants were my brethren." unresting and indefatigable, neff was always at work. he exhorted the people in hovels, held schools in barns in which he taught the children, and catechised them in stables. his hand was in every good work. he taught the people to sing, he taught them to read, he taught them to pray. to be able to speak to them familiarly, he learnt their native patois, and laboured at it like a schoolboy. he worked as a missionary among savages. the poor mountaineers had been so long destitute of instruction, that everything had as it were to be begun with them from the beginning. sharing in their hovels and stables, with their squalor and smoke, he taught them how to improve them by adding chimneys and windows, and showed how warmth might be obtained more healthfully than by huddling together in winter-time with the cattle. he taught them manners, and especially greater respect for women, inculcating the lesson by his own gentleness and tender deference. out of doors, he showed how they might till the ground to greater advantage, and introduced an improved culture of the potato, which more than doubled the production. observing how the pastures of dormilhouse were scorched by the summer sun, he urged the adoption of a system of irrigation. the villagers were at first most obstinate in their opposition to his plans; but he persevered, laid out a canal, and succeeded at last in enlisting a body of workmen, whom he led out, pickaxe in hand, himself taking a foremost part in the work; and at last the waters were let into the canal amidst joy and triumph. at violens he helped to build and finish the chapel, himself doing mason-work, smith-work, and carpenter-work by turns. at dormilhouse a school was needed, and he showed the villagers how to build one; preparing the design, and taking part in the erection, until it was finished and ready for use. in short, he turned his hand to everything--nothing was too high or too low for this noble citizen of two worlds. at length, a serious accident almost entirely disabled him. while on one of his mountain journeys, he was making a détour amongst a mass of rocky débris, to avoid the dangers of an avalanche, when he had the misfortune to fall and severely sprain his knee. he became laid up for a time, and when able to move, he set out for his mother's home at geneva, in the hope of recovering health and strength; for his digestive powers were also by this time seriously injured. when he went away, the people of the valleys felt as if they should never see him more; and their sorrow at his departure was heart-rending. after trying the baths of plombiéres without effect, he proceeded onwards to geneva, which he reached only to die; and thus this good and noble soldier--one of the bravest of earth's heroes--passed away to his eternal reward at the early age of thirty-one. * * * * * the valley of fressinières--the principle scene of neff's labours--joins the valley of the durance nearly opposite the little hamlet of la roche. there we leave the high road from briançon to fort dauphin, and crossing the river by a timber bridge, ascend the steep mountain-side by a mule path, in order to reach the entrance to the valley of fressinières, the level of which is high above that of the durance. not many years since, the higher valley could only be approached from this point by a very difficult mountain-path amidst rocks and stones, called the ladder, or pas de l'Échelle. it was dangerous at all times, and quite impassable in winter. the mule-path which has lately been made, though steep, is comparatively easy. what the old path was, and what were the discomforts of travelling through this district in neff's time, may be appreciated on a perusal of the narrative of the young pastor bost, who in determined to make a sort of pilgrimage to the scenes of his friend's labours some seventeen years before. m. bost, however, rather exaggerates the difficulties and discomforts of the valleys than otherwise. he saw no beauty nor grandeur in the scenery, only "horrible mountains in a state of dissolution" and constantly ready to fall upon the heads of massing travellers. he had no eyes for the picturesque though gloomy lake of la roche, but saw only the miserable hamlet itself. he slept in the dismal little inn, as doubtless neff had often done before, and was horrified by the multitudinous companions that shared his bed; and, tumbling out, he spent the rest of the night on the floor. the food was still worse--cold _café noir_, and bread eighteen months old, soaked in water before it could be eaten. his breakfast that morning made him ill for a week. then his mounting up the pas de l'Échelle, which he did not climb "without profound emotion," was a great trouble to him. of all this we find not a word in the journals or letters of neff, whose early life as a soldier had perhaps better inured him to "roughing it" than the more tender bringing-up of pastor bost. as we rounded the shoulder of the hill, almost directly overlooking the ancient roman town of rama in the valley of the durance underneath, we shortly came in sight of the little hamlet of palons, a group of "peasants' nests," overhung by rocks, with the one good house in it, the comfortable parsonage of the protestant pastor, situated at the very entrance to the valley. although the peasants' houses which constitute the hamlet of palons are still very poor and miserable, the place has been greatly improved since neff's time, by the erection of the parsonage. it was found that the pastors who were successively appointed to minister to the poor congregations in the valley very soon became unfitted for their work by the hardships to which they were exposed; and being without any suitable domestic accommodation, one after another of them resigned their charge. to remedy this defect, a movement was begun in by the rev. mr. freemantle, rector of claydon, bucks, assisted by the foreign aid society and a few private friends, with the object of providing pastors' dwellings, as well as chapels when required, in the more destitute places. the movement has already been attended with considerable success; and among its first results was the erection in of the comfortable parsonage of palons, the large lower room of which also serves the purpose of a chapel. the present incumbent is m. charpiot, of venerable and patriarchal aspect, whose white hairs are a crown of glory--a man beloved by his extensive flock, for his parish embraces the whole valley, about twelve miles in extent, including the four villages of ribes, violens, minsals, and dormilhouse; other pastors having been appointed of late years to the more distant stations included in the original widely-scattered charge of felix neff. the situation of the parsonage and adjoining grounds at palons is charmingly picturesque. it stands at the entrance to the defile which leads into val fressinières, having a background of bold rocks enclosing a mountain plateau known as the "camp of catinat," a notorious persecutor of the vaudois. in front of the parsonage extends a green field planted with walnut and other trees, part of which is walled off as the burying-ground of the hamlet. alongside, in a deep rocky gully, runs the torrent of the biasse, leaping from rock to rock on its way to the valley of the durance, far below. this fall, or cataract, is not inappropriately named the "gouffouran," or roaring gulf; and its sullen roar is heard all through the night in the adjoining parsonage. the whole height of the fall, as it tumbles from rock to rock, is about four hundred and fifty feet; and about halfway down, the water shoots into a deep, dark cavern, where it becomes completely lost to sight. the inhabitants of the hamlet are a poor hard-working people, pursuing their industry after very primitive methods. part of the biasse, as it issues from the defile, is turned aside here and there to drive little fulling-mills of the rudest construction, where the people "waulk" the cloth of their own making. in the adjoining narrow fields overhanging the gouffouran, where the ploughs are at work, the oxen are yoked to them in the old roman fashion, the pull being by a bar fixed across the animals' foreheads. in the neighbourhood of palons, as at various other places in the valley, there are numerous caverns which served by turns in early times as hiding-places and as churches, and which were not unfrequently consecrated by the vaudois with their blood. one of these is still known as the "glesia," or "Église." its opening is on the crest of a frightful precipice, but its diameter has of late years been considerably reduced by the disintegration of the adjoining rock. neff once took captain cotton up to see it, and chanted the _te deum_ in the rude temple with great emotion. palons is, perhaps, the most genial and fertile spot in the valley; it looks like a little oasis in the desert. indeed, neff thought the soil of the place too rich for the growth of piety. "palons," said he in his journal, "is more fertile than the rest of the valley, and even produces wine: the consequence is, that there is less piety here." neff even entertained the theory that the poorer the people the greater was their humility and fervour, and the less their selfishness and spiritual pride. thus, he considered "the fertility of the commune of champsaur, and its proximity to the high road and to gap, great stumbling-blocks." the loftiest, coldest, and most barren spots--such as san veran and dormilhouse--were, in his opinion, by far the most promising. of the former he said, "it is the highest, and consequently the most pious, village in the valley of queyras;" and of the inhabitants of the latter he said, "from the first moment of my arrival i took them to my heart, and i ardently desired to be unto them even as another oberlin." chapter iv. the vaudois mountain-refuge of dormilhouse. the valley of fressinières could never have maintained a large population. though about twelve miles in extent, it contains a very small proportion of arable land--only a narrow strip, of varying width, lying in the bottom, with occasional little patches of cultivated ground along the mountain-sides, where the soil has settled on the ledges, the fields seeming in many cases to hang over precipices. at the upper end of the valley, the mountains come down so close to the river biasse that no space is left for cultivation, and the slopes are so rocky and abrupt as to be unavailable even for pasturage, excepting of goats. yet the valley seems never to have been without a population, more or less numerous according to the rigour of the religious persecutions which prevailed in the neighbourhood. its comparative inaccessibility, its inhospitable climate, and its sterility, combined to render it one of the most secure refuges of the vaudois in the middle ages. it could neither be easily entered by an armed force, nor permanently occupied by them. the scouts on the hills overlooking the durance could always see their enemies approach, and the inhabitants were enabled to take refuge in caves in the mountain-sides, or flee to the upper parts of the valley, before the soldiers could clamber up the steep pas de l'Échelle, and reach the barricaded defile through which the biasse rushes down the rocky gorge of the gouffouran. when the invaders succeeded in penetrating this barrier, they usually found the hamlets deserted and the people fled. they could then only wreak their vengeance on the fields, which they laid waste, and on the dwellings, which they burned; and when the "brigands" had at length done their worst and departed, the poor people crept back to their ruined homes to pray, amidst their ashes, for strength to enable them to bear the heavy afflictions which they were thus called upon to suffer for conscience' sake. the villages in the lower part of the valley were thus repeatedly ravaged and destroyed. but far up, at its extremest point, a difficult footpath led, across the face almost of a precipice, which the persecutors never ventured to scale, to the hamlet of dormilhouse, seated on a few ledges of rock on a lofty mountain-side, five thousand feet above the level of the sea; and this place, which was for centuries a mountain fastness of the persecuted, remains a vaudois settlement to this day. an excursion to this interesting mountain hamlet having been arranged, our little party of five persons set out for the place on the morning of the st of july, under the guidance of pastor charpiot. though the morning was fine and warm, yet, as the place of our destination was situated well up amongst the clouds, we were warned to provide ourselves with umbrellas and waterproofs, nor did the provision prove in vain. we were also warned that there was an utter want of accommodation for visitors at dormilhouse, for which we must be prepared. the words scratched on the window of the norwegian inn might indeed apply to it: "here the stranger may find very good entertainment--_provided he bring it with him_!" we accordingly carried our entertainment with us, in the form of a store of blankets, bread, chocolate, and other articles, which, with the traveller's knapsacks, were slung across the back of a donkey. after entering the defile, an open part of the valley was passed, amidst which the little river, at present occupying very narrow limits, meandered; but it was obvious from the width of the channel and the débris widely strewn about, that in winter it is a roaring torrent. a little way up we met an old man coming down driving a loaded donkey, with whom one of our party, recognising him as an old acquaintance, entered into conversation. in answer to an inquiry made as to the progress of the good cause in the valley, the old man replied very despondingly. "there was," he said, "a great lack of faith, of zeal, of earnestness, amongst the rising generation. they were too fond of pleasures, too apt to be led away by the fleeting vanities of this world." it was only the old story--the complaint of the aged against the young. when this old peasant was a boy, his elders doubtless thought and said the same of him. the generation growing old always think the generation still young in a state of degeneracy. so it was forty years since, when felix neff was amongst them, and so it will be forty years hence. one day neff met an old man near mens, who recounted to him the story of the persecutions which his parents and himself had endured, and he added: "in those times there was more zeal than there is now; my father and mother used to cross mountains and forests by night, in the worst weather, at the risk of their lives, to be present at divine service performed in secret; but now we are grown lazy: religious freedom is the deathblow to piety." an hour's walking brought us to the principal hamlet of the commune, formerly called fressinières, but now known as les ribes, occupying a wooded height on the left bank of the river. the population is partly roman catholic and partly protestant. the roman catholics have a church here, the last in the valley, the two other places of worship higher up being protestant. the principal person of les ribes is m. baridon, son of the joseph baridon, receiver of the commune, so often mentioned with such affection in the journal of neff. he is the only person in the valley whose position and education give him a claim to the title of "monsieur;" and his house contains the only decent apartment in the val fressinières where pastors and visitors could be lodged previous to the erection, by mr. freemantle, of the pleasant little parsonage at palons. this apartment in the baridons' house neff used to call the "prophet's chamber." half an hour higher up the valley we reached the hamlet of violens, where all the inhabitants are protestants. it was at this place that neff helped to build and finish the church, for which he designed the seats and pulpit, and which he opened and dedicated on the th of august, , the year before he finally left the neighbourhood. violens is a poor hamlet situated at the bottom of a deep glen, or rocky abyss, called la combe; the narrow valleys of dauphiny, like those of devon, being usually called combes, doubtless from the same original celtic word _cwm_, signifying a hollow or dingle. a little above violens the valley contracts almost to a ravine, until we reach the miserable hamlet of minsals, so shut in by steep crags that for nine months of the year it never sees the sun, and during several months in winter it lies buried in snow. the hamlet consists for the most part of hovels of mud and stone, without windows or chimneys, being little better than stables; indeed, in winter time, for the sake of warmth, the poor people share them with their cattle. how they contrive to scrape a living out of the patches of soil rescued from the rocks, or hung upon the precipices on the mountain-side, is a wonder. one of the horrors of this valley consists in the constant state of disintegration of the adjoining rocks, which, being of a slaty formation, frequently break away in large masses, and are hurled into the lower grounds. this, together with the fall of avalanches in winter, makes the valley a most perilous place to live in. a little above minsals, only a few years since, a tremendous fall of rock and mud swept over nearly the whole of the cultivated ground, since which many of the peasantry have had to remove elsewhere. what before was a well-tilled meadow, is now only a desolate waste, covered with rocks and débris. another of the horrors of the place is its liability to floods, which come rushing down, from the mountains, and often work sad havoc. sometimes a fall of rocks from the cliffs above dams up the bed of the river, when a lake accumulates behind the barrier until it bursts, and the torrent swoops down the valley, washing away fields, and bridges, and mills, and hovels. even the stouter-built dwelling of m. baridon at les ribes was nearly carried away by one of such inundations twelve years ago. it stands about a hundred yards from the mountain-stream which comes down from the pic de la séa. one day in summer a storm burst over the mountain, and the stream at once became swollen to a torrent. the inmates of the dwelling thought the house must eventually be washed away, and gave themselves up to prayer. the flood, bearing with it rolling rocks, came nearer and nearer, until it reached a few old walnut trees on a line with the torrent. a rock of some thirty feet square tumbled against one of the trees, which staggered and bent, but held fast and stopped the rock. the débris at once rolled upon it into a bank, the course of the torrent was turned, and the dwelling and its inmates were saved. another incident, illustrative of the perils of daily life in val fressinières, was related to me by mr. milsom while passing the scene of one of the mud and rock avalanches so common in the valley. etienne baridon, a member of the same les ribes family, an intelligent young man, disabled for ordinary work by lameness and deformity, occupied himself in teaching the children in the protestant school at violens, whither he walked daily, accompanied by the pupils from les ribes. one day, a heavy thunderstorm burst over the valley, and sent down an avalanche of mud, débris, and boulders, which rolled quite across the valley and extended to the river. the news of the circumstance reached etienne when in school at violens; the road to les ribes was closed; and he was accordingly urged to stay over the night with the children. but thinking of the anxiety of their parents, he determined to guide them back over the fall of rocks if possible. arrived at the place, he found the mass still on the move, rolling slowly down in a ridge of from ten to twenty feet high, towards the river. supported by a stout staff; the lame baridon took first one child and then another upon his hump-back; and contrived to carry them across in safety; but while making his last journey with the last child, his foot slipped and his leg got badly crushed among the still-rolling stones. he was, however, able to extricate himself, and reached les ribes in safety with all the children. "this etienne," concluded mr. milsom, "was really a noble fellow, and his poor deformed body covered the soul of a hero." at length, after a journey of about ten miles up this valley of the shadow of death, along which the poor persecuted vaudois were so often hunted, we reached an apparent _cul-de-sac_ amongst the mountains, beyond which further progress seemed impracticable. precipitous rocks, with their slopes of débris at foot, closed in the valley all round, excepting only the narrow gullet by which we had come; but, following the footpath, a way up the mountain-side gradually disclosed itself--a zigzag up the face of what seemed to be a sheer precipice--and this we were told was the road to dormilhouse. the zigzag path is known as the tourniquet. the ascent is long, steep, and fatiguing. as we passed up, we observed that the precipice contained many narrow ledges upon which soil has settled, or to which it has been carried. some of these are very narrow, only a few yards in extent, but wherever there is room for a spade to turn, the little patches bear marks of cultivation; and these are the fields of the people of dormilhouse! far up the mountain, the footpath crosses in front of a lofty cascade--la pisse du dormilhouse--which leaps from the summit of the precipice, and sometimes dashes over the roadway itself. looking down into the valley from this point, we see the biasse meandering like a thread in the hollow of the mountains, becoming lost to sight in the ravine near minsals. we have now ascended to a great height, and the air feels cold and raw. when we left palons, the sun was shining brightly, and its heat was almost oppressive, but now the temperature feels wintry. on our way up, rain began to fall; as we ascended the tourniquet the rain became changed to sleet; and at length, on reaching the summit of the rising ground from which we first discerned the hamlet of dormilhouse, on the first day of july, the snow was falling heavily, and all the neighbouring mountains were clothed in the garb of winter. this, then, is the famous mountain fastness of the vaudois--their last and loftiest and least accessible retreat when hunted from their settlements in the lower valleys hundreds of years ago. driven from rock to rock, from alp to alp, they clambered up on to this lofty mountain-ledge, five thousand feet high, and made good their settlement, though at the daily peril of their lives. it was a place of refuge, a fortress and citadel of the faithful, where they continued to worship god according to conscience during the long dark ages of persecution and tyranny. the dangers and terrors of the situation are indeed so great, that it never could have been chosen even for a hiding-place, much less for a permanent abode, but from the direst necessity. what the poor people suffered while establishing themselves on these barren mountain heights no one can tell, but they contrived at length to make the place their home, and to become inured to their hard life, until it became almost a second nature to them. the hamlet of dormilhouse is said to have existed for nearly six hundred years, during which the religion of its inhabitants has remained the same. it has been alleged that the people are the descendants of a colony of refugee lombards; but m. muston, and others well able to judge, after careful inquiry on the spot, have come to the conclusion that they bear all the marks of being genuine descendants of the ancient vaudois. in features, dress, habits, names, language, and religious doctrine, they have an almost perfect identity with the vaudois of piedmont at the present day. dormilhouse consists of about forty cottages, inhabited by some two hundred persons. the cottages are perched "like eagles' nests," one tier ranging over another on the rocky ledges of a steep mountain-side. there is very little soil capable of cultivation in the neighbourhood, but the villagers seek out little patches in the valley below and on the mountain shelves, from which they contrive to grow a little grain for home use. the place is so elevated and so exposed, that in some seasons even rye will not ripen at dormilhouse, while the pasturages are in many places inaccessible to cattle, and scarcely safe for sheep. the principal food of the people is goats' milk and unsifted rye, which they bake into cakes in the autumn, and these cakes last them the whole year--the grain, if left unbaked, being apt to grow mouldy and spoil in so damp an atmosphere. besides, fuel is so scarce that it is necessary to exercise the greatest economy in its use, every stick burnt in the village having to be brought from a distance of some twelve miles, on the backs of donkeys, by the steep mountain-path leading up to the hamlet. hence, also, the unsavoury means which they are under the necessity of adopting to economize warmth in the winter, by stabling the cattle with themselves in the cottages. the huts are for the most part wretched constructions of stone and mud, from which fresh air, comfort, and cleanliness seem to be entirely excluded. excepting that the people are for the most part comfortably dressed, in clothing of coarse wool, which they dress and weave themselves, their domestic accommodation and manner of living are centuries behind the age; and were a stranger suddenly to be set down in the village, he could with difficulty be made to believe that he was in the land of civilised frenchmen. the place is dreary, stern, and desolate-looking even in summer. thus, we entered it with the snow falling on the st of july! few of the balmy airs of the sweet south of france breathe here. in the hollow of the mountains the heat may be like that of an oven; but here, far up on the heights, though the air may be fresh and invigorating at times, when the wind blows it often rises to a hurricane. here the summer comes late and departs early. while flowers are blooming in the valleys, not a bud or blade of corn is to be seen at dormilhouse. at the season when vegetation is elsewhere at its richest, the dominant features of the landscape are barrenness and desolation. the very shapes of the mountains are rugged, harsh, and repulsive. right over against the hamlet, separated from it by a deep gully, rises up the grim, bare gramusac, as black as a wall, but along the ledges of which, the hunters of dormilhouse, who are very daring and skilful, do not fear to stalk the chamois. but if the place is thus stern and even appalling in summer, what must it be in winter? there is scarcely a habitation in the village that is not exposed to the danger of being carried away by avalanches or falling rocks. the approach to the mountain is closed by ice and snow, while the rocks are all tapestried with icicles. the _tourmente_, or snow whirlwind, occasionally swoops up the valley, tears the roofs from the huts, and scatters them in destruction. here is a passage from neff's journal, vividly descriptive of winter life at dormilhouse:-- "the weather has been rigorous in the extreme; the falls of snow are very frequent, and when it becomes a little milder, a general thaw takes place, and our hymns are often sung amid the roar of the avalanches, which, gliding along the smooth face of the glacier, hurl themselves from precipice to precipice, like vast cataracts of silver." writing in january, he says:-- "we have been buried in four feet of snow since of st of november. at this very moment a terrible blast is whirling the snow in thick blinding clouds. travelling is exceedingly difficult and even dangerous among these valleys, particularly in the neighbourhood of dormilhouse, by reason of the numerous avalanches falling everywhere.... one sunday evening our scholars and many of the dormilhouse people, when returning home after the sermon at violens, narrowly escaped an avalanche. it rolled through a narrow defile between two groups of persons: a few seconds sooner or later, and it would have plunged the flower of our youth into the depths of an unfathomable gorge.... in fact, there are very few habitations in these parts which are not liable to be swept away, for there is not a spot in the narrow corner of the valley which can be considered absolutely safe. but terrible as their situation is, they owe to it their religion, and perhaps their physical existence. if their country had been more secure and more accessible, they would have been exterminated like the inhabitants of val louise." such is the interesting though desolate mountain hamlet to the service of whose hardy inhabitants the brave felix neff devoted himself during the greater part of his brief missionary career. it was characteristic of him to prefer to serve them because their destitution was greater than that which existed in any other quarter of his extensive parish; and he turned from the grand mountain scenery of arvieux and his comfortable cottage at la chalp, to spend his winters in the dismal hovels and amidst the barren wastes of dormilhouse. when neff first went amongst them, the people were in a state of almost total spiritual destitution. they had not had any pastor stationed amongst them for nearly a hundred and fifty years. during all that time they had been without schools of any kind, and generation after generation had grown up and passed away in ignorance. yet with all the inborn tenacity of their race, they had throughout refused to conform to the dominant religion. they belonged to the vaudois church, and repudiated romanism. there was probably a protestant church existing at dormilhouse previous to the revocation, as is shown by the existence of an ancient vaudois church-bell, which was hid away until of late years, when it was dug up and hung in the belfry of the present church. in , the roman catholics endeavoured to effect a settlement in the place, and then erected the existing church, with a residence for the curé. but the people, though they were on the best of terms with the curé, refused to enter his church. during the twenty years that he ministered there, it is said the sole congregation consisted of his domestic servant, who assisted him at mass. the story is still told of the curé bringing up from les ribes a large bag of apples--an impossible crop at dormilhouse--by way of tempting the children to come to him and receive instruction. but they went only so long as the apples lasted, and when they were gone the children disappeared. the curé complained that during the whole time he had been in the place he had not been able to get a single person to cross himself. so, finding he was not likely to be of any use there, he petitioned his bishop to be allowed to leave; on which, his request being complied with, the church was closed. this continued until the period of the french revolution, when religious toleration became recognised. the dormilhouse people then took possession of the church. they found in it several dusty images, the basin for the holy water, the altar candlesticks, and other furniture, just as the curé had left them many years before; and they are still preserved as curiosities. the new occupants of the church whitewashed the pictures, took down the crosses, dug up the old vaudois bell and hung it up in the belfry, and rang the villagers together to celebrate the old worship again. but they were still in want of a regular minister until the period when felix neff settled amongst them. a zealous young preacher, henry laget, had before then paid them a few visits, and been warmly welcomed; and when, in his last address, he told them they would see his face no more, "it seemed," said a peasant who related the incident to neff, "as if a gust of wind had extinguished the torch which was to light us in our passage by night across the precipice." and even neff's ministry, as we have above seen, only lasted for the short space of about three years. some years after the death of neff, another attempt was made by the roman catholics to establish a mission at dormilhouse. a priest went up from les ribes accompanied by a sister of mercy from gap--"the pearl of the diocese," she was called--who hired a room for the purpose of commencing a school. to give _éclat_ to their enterprise, the archbishop of embrun himself went up, clothed in a purple dress, riding a white horse, and accompanied by a party of men bearing a great red cross, which he caused to be set up at the entrance to the village. but when the archbishop appeared, not a single inhabitant went out to meet him; they had all assembled in the church to hold a prayer-meeting, and it lasted during the whole period of his visit. all that he accomplished was to set up the great red cross, after which he went down the tourniquet again; and shortly after, the priest and the sister of mercy, finding they could not obtain a footing, also left the village. somehow or other, the red cross which had been set up mysteriously disappeared, but how it had been disposed of no one would ever reveal. it was lately proposed to commemorate the event of the archbishop's visit by the erection of an obelisk on the spot where he had set up the red cross; and a tablet, with a suitable inscription, was provided for it by the rev. mr. freemantle, of claydon. but when he was told that the site was exposed to the full force of the avalanches descending from the upper part of the mountain in winter, and would speedily be swept away, the project of the memorial pillar was abandoned, and the tablet was inserted, instead, in the front wall of the village church, where it reads as follows:-- À la gloire de dieu dont de les temps anciens et À travers le martyr de leurs pÈres a maintenu À dormilhouse la foi donne aux saints et la connaissance de la parole les habitants ont ÉlevÉ cette pierre mdccclxiv. having thus described the village and its history, a few words remain to be added as to the visit of our little party of travellers from palons. on reaching the elevated point at which the archbishop had set up the red cross, the whole of the huts lay before us, and a little way down the mountain-side we discerned the village church, distinguished by its little belfry. leaving on our right the swiss-looking châlet with overhanging roof, in which neff used to lodge with the baridon-verdure family while at dormilhouse, and now known as "felix neff's house," we made our way down a steep and stony footpath towards the school-house adjoining the church, in front of which we found the large ash trees, shading both church and school, which neff himself had planted. arrived at the school-house, we there found shelter and accommodation for the night. the schoolroom, fitted with its forms and desks, was our parlour, and our bedrooms, furnished with the blankets we had brought with us, were in the little chambers adjoining. at eight in the evening the church bell rang for service--the summoning bell. the people had been expecting the visit, and turned out in full force, so that at nine o'clock, when the last bell rang, the church was found filled to the door. every seat was occupied--by men on one side, and by women on the other. the service was conducted by mr. milsom, the missionary visitor from lyons, who opened with prayer, then gave out the twenty-third psalm, which was sung to an accompaniment on the harmonium; then another prayer, followed by the reading of a chapter in the new testament, was wound up by an address, in which the speaker urged the people to their continuance in well-doing. in the course of his remarks he said: "be not discouraged because the results of your labours may appear but small. work on and faint not, and god will give the spiritual increase. pastors, teachers, and colporteurs are too often ready to despond, because the fruit does not seem to ripen while they are watching it. but the best fruit grows slowly. think how the apostles laboured. they were all poor men, but men of brave hearts; and they passed away to their rest long before the seed which they planted grew up and ripened to perfection. work on then in patience and hope, and be assured that god will at length help you." mr. milsom's address was followed by another from the pastor, and then by a final prayer and hymn, after which the service was concluded, and the villagers dispersed to their respective homes a little after ten o'clock. the snow had ceased falling, but the sky was still overcast, and the night felt cold and raw, like february rather than july. the wonder is, that this community of dormilhouse should cling to their mountain eyrie so long after the necessity for their living above the clouds has ceased; but it is their home, and they have come to love it, and are satisfied to live and die there. rather than live elsewhere, they will walk, as some of them do, twelve miles in the early morning, to their work down in the valley of the durance, and twelve miles home again, in the evenings, to their perch on the rocks at dormilhouse. they are even proud of their mountain home, and would not change it for the most smiling vineyard of the plains. they are like a little mountain clan--all baridons, or michels, or orcieres, or bertholons, or arnouds--proud of their descent from the ancient vaudois. it is their boast that a roman catholic does not live among them. once, when a young shepherd came up from the valley to pasture his flock in the mountains, he fell in love with a maiden of the village, and proposed to marry her. "yes," was the answer, with this condition, that he joined the vaudois church. and he assented, married the girl, and settled for life at dormilhouse.[ ] [footnote : since the date of our visit, we learn that a sad accident--strikingly illustrative of the perils of village life at dormilhouse--has befallen this young shepherd, by name jean joseph lagier. one day in october, , while engaged in gathering wood near the brink of the precipice overhanging minsals, he accidently fell over and was killed on the spot, leaving behind him a widow and a large family. he was a person of such excellent character and conduct, that he had been selected as colporteur for the neighbourhood.] * * * * * the next morning broke clear and bright overhead. the sun shone along the rugged face of the gramusac right over against the hamlet, bringing out its bolder prominences. far below, the fleecy clouds were still rolling themselves up the mountain-sides, or gradually dispersing as the sun caught them on their emerging from the valley below. the view was bold and striking, displaying the grandeur of the scenery of dormilhouse in one of its best aspects. setting out on the return journey to palons, we descended the face of the mountain on which dormilhouse stands, by a steep footpath right in front of it, down towards the falls of the biasse. looking back, the whole village appeared above us, cottage over cottage, and ledge over ledge, with its stern background of rocky mountain. immediately under the village, in a hollow between two shoulders of rock, the cascade of the biasse leaps down into the valley. the highest leap falls in a jet of about a hundred feet, and the lower, divided into two by a projecting ledge, breaks into a shower of spray which falls about a hundred and fifty feet more into the abyss below. even in switzerland this fall would be considered a fine object; but in this out-of-the-way place, it is rarely seen except by the villagers, who have water and cascades more than enough. we were told on the spot, that some eighty years since an avalanche shot down the mountain immediately on to the plateau on which we stood, carrying with it nearly half the village of dormilhouse; and every year the avalanches shoot down at the same place, which is strewn with the boulders and débris that extend far down into the valley. at the bottom of the tourniquet we joined m. charpiot, accompanying the donkey laden with the blankets and knapsacks, and proceeded with him on our way down the valley towards his hospitable parsonage at palons. chapter v. guillestre and the valley of queyras. we left palons on a sharp, bright morning in july, with the prospect of a fine day before us, though there had been a fall of snow in the night, which whitened the tops of the neighbouring hills. following the road along the heights on the right bank of the biasse, and passing the hamlet of chancellas, another favourite station of neff's, a rapid descent led us down into the valley of the durance, which we crossed a little above the village of st. crepin, with the strong fortress of mont dauphin before us a few miles lower down the valley. this remote corner in the mountains was the scene of much fighting in early times between the roman catholics and the huguenots, and afterwards between the french and the piedmontese. it was in this neighbourhood that lesdiguières first gave evidence of his skill and valour as a soldier. the massacre of st. bartholomew at paris in had been followed by like massacres in various parts of france, especially in the south. the roman catholics of dauphiny, deeming the opportunity favourable for the extirpation of the heretical vaudois, dispatched the military commandant of embrun against the inhabitants of val fressinières at the head of an army of twelve hundred men. lesdiguières, then scarce twenty-four years old, being informed of their march, hastily assembled a huguenot force in the valley of the drac, and, crossing the col d'orcières from champsaur into the valley of the durance, he suddenly fell upon the enemy at st. crepin, routed them, and drove them down the valley to embrun. twelve years later, during the wars of the league, lesdiguières distinguished himself in the same neighbourhood, capturing embrun, guillestre, and château queyras, in the valley of the guil, thereby securing the entire province for his royal master, henry of navarre. the strong fortress of mont dauphin, at the junction of the guil with the durance, was not constructed until a century later. victor-amadeus ii., when invading the province with a piedmontese army, at sight of the plateau commanding the entrance of both valleys, exclaimed, "there is a pass to fortify." the hint was not neglected by the french general, catinat, under whose directions the great engineer, vauban, traced the plan of the present fortifications. it is a very strong place, completely commanding the valley of the durance, while it is regarded as the key of the passage into italy by the guil and the col de la croix. guillestre is a small old-fashioned town, situated on the lowest slope of the pine-clad mountain, the tête de quigoulet, at the junction of the rioubel and the chagne, rivulets in summer but torrents in winter, which join the guil a little below the town. guillestre was in ancient times a strong place, and had for its lords the archbishops of embrun, the ancient persecutors of the vaudois. the castle of the archbishop, flanked by six towers, occupied a commanding site immediately overlooking the town; but at the french revolution of , the first thing which the archbishop's flock did was to pull his castle in pieces, leaving not one stone upon another; and, strange to say, the only walled enclosure now within its precincts is the little burying-ground of the guillestre protestants. one memorable stone has, however, been preserved, the stone trough in which the peasants were required to measure the tribute of grain payable by them to their reverend seigneurs. it is still to be seen laid against a wall in an open space in front of the church. it happened that the fair of guillestre, which is held every two months, was afoot at the time of our visit. it is frequented by the people of the adjoining valleys, of which guillestre is the centre, as well as by piedmontese from beyond the italian frontier. on the principal day of the fair we found the streets filled with peasants buying and selling beasts. they were apparently of many races. amongst them were many well-grown men, some with rings in their ears--horse-dealers from piedmont, we were told; but the greater number were little, dark, thin, and poorly-fed peasants. some of them, dark-eyed and tawny-skinned, looked like arabs, possibly descendants of the saracens who once occupied the province. there were one or two groups of gipsies, differing from all else; but the district is too poor to be much frequented by people of that race. the animals brought for sale showed the limited resources of the neighbourhood. one hill-woman came along dragging two goats in milk; another led a sheep and a goat; a third a donkey in foal; a fourth a cow in milk; and so on. the largest lot consisted of about forty lambs, of various sizes and breeds, which had been driven down from the cool air of the mountains, and, gasping with heat, were cooling their heads against the shady side of a stone wall. there were several lots of pigs, of a bad but probably hardy sort--mostly black, round-backed, long-legged, and long-eared. in selling the animals, there was the usual chaffering, in shrill patois, at the top of the voice--the seller of some poor scraggy beast extolling its merits, the intending buyer running it down as a "misérable bossu," &c., and disputing every point raised in its behalf, until the contest of words rose to such a height--men, women, and even children, on both sides, taking part in it--that the bystander would have thought it impossible they could separate without a fight. but matters always came to a peaceable conclusion, for the french are by no means a quarrelsome people. there were also various other sorts of produce offered for sale--wool, undressed sheepskins, sticks for firewood, onions and vegetable produce, and considerable quantities of honeycomb; while the sellers of scythes, whetstones, caps, and articles of dress, seemed to meet with a ready sale for their wares, arranged on stalls in the open space in front of the church. altogether, the queer collection of beasts and their drivers, who were to be seen drinking together greedily and promiscuously from the fountains in the market-place; the steep streets, crowded with lean goats and cows and pigs, and their buyers and sellers; the braying of donkeys and the shrieking of chafferers, with here and there a goitred dwarf of hideous aspect, presented a picture of an alpine mountain fair, which, once seen, is not readily forgotten. there is a similar fair held at the village of la bessie, before mentioned, a little higher up the durance, on the road to briançon; but it is held only once a year, at the end of october, when the inhabitants of dormilhouse come down in a body to lay in their stock of necessaries for the winter. "there then arrives," says m. albert, "a caravan of about the most singular character that can be imagined. it consists of nearly the whole population of the mountain hamlet, who resort thither to supply themselves with the articles required for family use during the winter, such as leather, lint, salt, and oil. these poor mountaineers are provided with very little money, and, to procure the necessary commodities, they have recourse to barter, the most ancient and primitive method of conducting trade. hence they bring with them rye, barley, pigs, lambs, chamois skins and horns, and the produce of their knitting during the past year, to exchange for the required articles, with which they set out homeward, laden as they had come." * * * * * the same circumstances which have concurred in making guillestre the seat of the principal fair of the valleys, led felix neff to regard it as an important centre of missionary operations amongst the vaudois. in nearly all the mountain villages in its neighbourhood descendants of the ancient vaudois are to be found, sometimes in the most remote and inaccessible places, whither they had fled in the times of the persecutions. thus at vars, a mountain hamlet up the torrent rioubel, about nine miles from guillestre, there is a little christian community, which, though under the necessity of long concealing their faith, never ceased to be vaudois in spirit.[ ] then, up the valley of the guil, and in the lateral valleys which join it, there are, in some places close to the mountain barrier which divides france from italy, other villages and hamlets, such as arvieux, san veran, fongilarde, &c., the inhabitants of which, though they concealed their faith subsequent to the revocation of the edict of nantes, never conformed to roman catholicism, but took the earliest opportunity of declaring themselves openly so soon as the dark period of persecution had passed by. [footnote : the well-known alpine missionary, j. l. rostan, of whom an interesting biography has recently been published by the rev. a. j. french, for the wesleyan conference, was a native of vars. he was one of the favourite pupils of felix neff, with whom he resided at dormilhouse in - ; neff saying of him: "among the best of my pupils, as regards spiritual things and secular too, is jean rostan, of vars: he is probably destined for the ministry; such at least is my hope." neff bequeathed to him the charge of his parish during his temporary absence, but he never returned; and shortly after, rostan left, to pursue his studies at montauban. he joined the methodist church, settled and ministered for a time in la vaunage and the cevennes, afterwards labouring as a missionary in the high alps, and eventually settled as minister of the church at lisieux, jersey, in charge of which he died, july, .] the people of these scattered and distant hamlets were, however, too poor to supply themselves with religious instructors, and they long remained in a state of spiritual destitution. felix neff's labours were too short, and scattered over too extensive a field, to produce much permanent effect. besides, they were principally confined to the village of dormilhouse, which, as being the most destitute, had, he thought, the greatest claim upon his help; and at his death comparatively little had been done or attempted in the guillestre district. but he left behind him what was worth more than any endowment of money, a noble example, which still lives, and inspires the labourers who have come after him. it was not until within the last twenty years that a few vaudois families of guillestre began to meet together for religious purposes, which they did at first in the upper chamber of an inn. there the rev. mr. freemantle found them when paying his first visit to the valleys in . he was rejoiced to see the zeal of the people, holding to their faith in the face of considerable opposition and opprobrium; and he exerted himself to raise the requisite funds amongst his friends in england to provide the guillestre vaudois with a place of worship of their own. his efforts were attended with success; and in a comfortable parsonage, with a commodious room for public worship, was purchased for their use. a fund was also provided for the maintenance of a settled ministry; a pastor was appointed; and in a congregation of from forty to seventy persons attended worship every sunday. mr. freemantle, in a communication with which he has favoured us, says: "our object has not been to make an aggression upon the roman catholics, but to strengthen the hands and establish the faith of the vaudois. and in so doing we have found, not unfrequently, that when an interest has been excited among the roman catholic population of the district, there has been some family or hereditary connection with ancestors who were independent of the see of rome, and such have again joined themselves to the faith of their fathers." the new movement was not, however, allowed to proceed without great opposition. the "momiers," or mummers--the modern nickname of the vaudois--were denounced by the curé of the place, and the people were cautioned, as they valued their souls' safety, against giving any countenance to their proceedings. the curé was doubtless seriously impressed by the gravity of the situation; and to protect the parish against the assaults of the evil one, he had a large number of crosses erected upon the heights overlooking the town. on one occasion he had a bad dream, in which he beheld the valley filled with a vast assembly come to be judged; and on the site of the judgment-seat which he saw in his dream, he set up, on the summit of the come chauve, a large tin cross hearted with wood. we were standing in the garden in front of the parsonage at guillestre late in the evening, when m. schell, the pastor, pointing up to the height, said, "there you see it now; that is the curé's erection." the valley below lay in deep shadow, while the cross upon the summit brightly reflected the last rays of the setting sun. the curé, finding that the "momiers" did not cease to exist, next adopted the expedient of preaching them down. on the occasion of the fête napoleon, , when the rev. mr. freemantle visited guillestre for the purpose of being present at the vaudois services on sunday, the th of august, the curé preached a special sermon to his congregation at early morning mass, telling them that an englishman had come into the town with millions of francs to buy up the souls of guillestre, and warning them to abstain from such men. the people were immediately filled with curiosity to know what it was that this stranger had come all the way from england to do, backed by "millions of francs." many of them did not as yet know that there was such a thing as a vaudois church in guillestre; but now that they did know, they were desirous of ascertaining something about the doctrines taught there. the consequence was, that a crowd of people--amongst whom were some of the highest authorities in the town, the registrar, the douaniers, the chief of a neighbouring commune, and persons of all classes--assembled at noon to hear m. de faye, the protestant pastor, who preached to them an excellent sermon under the trees of the parsonage orchard, while a still larger number attended in the afternoon. when the curé heard of the conduct of his flock he was greatly annoyed. "what did you hear from the heretics?" he asked of one of the delinquents. "i heard _your_ sermon in the morning, and a sermon _upon charity_ in the afternoon," was the reply. great were the surprise and excitement in guillestre when it became known that the principal sergeant of gendarmerie--the very embodiment of law and order in the place--had gone over and joined the "momiers" with his wife and family. m. laugier was quite a model gendarme. he was a man of excellent character, steady, sensible, and patient, a diligent self-improver, a reader of books, a botanist, and a bit of a geologist. he knew all the rare mountain plants, and had a collection of those that would bear transplantation, in his garden at the back of the town. no man was more respected in guillestre than the sergeant. his long and faithful service entitled him to the _médaille militaire_, and it would have been awarded to him, but for the circumstance which came to light, and which he did not seek to conceal, that he had joined the protestant connexion. not only was the medal withheld, but influence was used to get him sent away from the place; and he was packed off to a station in the mountains at château queyras. though this banishment from guillestre was intended as a punishment, it only served to bring out the sterling qualities of the sergeant, and to ensure his eventual reward. it so happened that the station at château queyras commanded the approaches into an extensive range of mountain pasturage. although not required specially to attend to their safety, our sergeant had nevertheless carefully noted the flocks and herds as they went up the valleys in the spring. when winter approached, they were all brought down again from the mountains for safety. the winter of that year set in early and severely. the sergeant, making his observations on the flocks as they passed down the valley, noted that one large flock of about three thousand sheep had not yet made its appearance. the mountains were now covered with snow, and he apprehended that the sheep and their shepherds had been storm-stayed. summoning to his assistance a body of men, he set out at their head in search of the lost flock. after a long, laborious, and dangerous journey--for the snow by this time lay deep in the hollows of the hills--he succeeded in discovering the shepherds and the sheep, almost reduced to their last gasp--the sheep, for want of food, actually gnawing each other's tails. with great difficulty the whole were extricated from their perilous position, and brought down the mountains in safety. no representation was made to head-quarters by the authorities of guillestre of the conduct of the protestant sergeant in the matter; but when the shepherds got down to gap, they were so full of the sergeant's praises, and of his bravery in rescuing them and their flock from certain death, that a paragraph descriptive of the affair was inserted in the local papers, and was eventually copied into the parisian journals. then it was that an inquiry was made into his conduct, and the result was so satisfactory that the sergeant was at once decorated not only with the _médaille militaire_, but with the _médaille de sauvetage_--a still higher honour; and, shortly after, he was allowed to retire from the service on full pay. he then returned to his home and family at guillestre, where he now officiates as _regent_ of the vaudois church, reading the prayers and conducting the service in the absence of the stated minister. * * * * * we spent a sunday in the comfortable parsonage at guillestre. there was divine service in the temple at half-past ten a.m., conducted by the regular pastor, m. schell, and instruction and catechizing of the children in the afternoon. the pastor's regular work consists of two services at guillestre and vars on alternate sundays, with sunday-school and singing lesson; and on week days he gives religious instruction in the guillestre school. the missionary's wife is a true "helpmeet," and having been trained as a deaconess at strasbourg, she regularly visits the poor, occasionally assisting them with medical advice. another important part of the work at guillestre is the girls' school, for which suitable premises have been taken; and it is conducted by an excellent female teacher. here not only the usual branches of education are taught, but domestic industry of different kinds. through the instrumentality of mr. milsom, glove-sewing has been taught to the girls, and it is hoped that by this and similar efforts this branch of home manufacture may become introduced in the high alps, and furnish profitable employment to many poor persons during their long and dreary winter. by the aid of a special fund, a few girl boarders, belonging to scattered protestant families who have no other means for the education of their children, are also received at the school. the girls seem to be extremely well taken care of, and the house, which we went over, is a very pattern of cleanliness and comfort. * * * * * the route from guillestre into italy lies up the valley of the guil, through one of the wildest and deepest gorges, or rather chasms, to be found in europe. brockedon says it is "one of the finest in the alps." m. bost compares it to the moutier-grand-val, in the canton of berne, but says it is much wilder. he even calls it frightful, which it is not, except in rainy weather, when the rocks occasionally fall from overhead. at such times people avoid travelling through the gorge. m. bost also likens it to the via mala, though here the road, at the narrowest and most precipitous parts, runs in the _bottom_ of the gorge, in a ledge cut in the rock, there being room only for the river and the road. it is only of late years that the road has been completed, and it is often partly washed away in winter, or covered with rock and stones brought down by the torrent. when neff travelled the gorge, it was passable only on foot, or on mule-back. yet light-footed armies have passed into italy by this route. lesdiguières clambered over the mountains and along the guil to reach château queyras, which he assaulted and took. louis xiii. once accompanied a french army about a league up the gorge, but he turned back, afraid to go farther; and the hamlet at which his progress was arrested is still called maison du roi. about three leagues higher up, after crossing the guil from bank to bank several times, in order to make use of such ledges of the rock as are suitable for the road, the gorge opens into the combe du queyras, and very shortly the picturesque-looking castle of queyras comes in sight, occupying the summit of a lofty conical rock in the middle of the valley. as we approached château queyras the ruins of a building were pointed out by mr. milsom in the bottom of the valley, close by the river-side. "that," said he, "was once the protestant temple of the place. it was burnt to the ground at the revocation. you see that old elm-tree growing near it. that tree was at the same time burnt to a black stump. it became a saying in the valley that protestantism was as dead as that stump, and that it would only reappear when that dead stump came to life! and, strange to say, since felix neff has been here, the stump _has_ come to life--you see how green it is--and again protestantism is like the elm-tree, sending out its vigorous offshoots, in the valley." château queyras stands in the centre of the valley of the guil, which is joined near this point by two other valleys, the combe of arvieux joining it on the right bank, and that of san veran on the left. the heads of the streams which traverse these valleys have their origin in the snowy range of the cottian alps, which form the boundary between france and italy. as in the case of the descendants of the ancient vaudois at dormilhouse, they are here also found at the farthest limit of vegetation, penetrating almost to the edge of the glacier, where they were least likely to be molested. the inhabitants of arvieux were formerly almost entirely protestant, and had a temple there, which was pulled down at the revocation. from that time down to the revolution they worshipped only in secret, occasionally ministered to by vaudois pastors, who made precarious visits to them from the italian valleys at the risk of their lives. above arvieux is the hamlet of la chalp, containing a considerable number of protestants, and where neff had his home--a small, low cottage undistinguishable from the others save by its whitewashed front. its situation is cheerful, facing the south, and commanding a pleasant mountain prospect, contrasting strongly with the barren outlook and dismal hovels of dormilhouse. but neff never could regard the place as his home. "the inhabitants," he observed in his journal, "have more traffic, and the mildness of the climate appears somehow or other not favourable to the growth of piety. they are zealous protestants, and show me a thousand attentions, but they are at present absolutely impenetrable." the members of the congregation at arvieux, indeed, complained of his spending so little of his time among them; but the comfort of his cottage at la chalp, and the comparative mildness of the climate of arvieux, were insufficient to attract him from the barren crags but warm hearts of dormilhouse. the village of san veran, which lies up among the mountains some twelve miles to the east of arvieux, on the opposite side of the val queyras, was another of the refuges of the ancient vaudois. it is at the foot of the snowy ridge which divides france from italy. dr. gilly says, "there is nothing fit for mortal to take refuge in between san veran and the eternal snows which mantle the pinnacles of monte viso." the village is , feet above the level of the sea, and there is a provincial saying that san veran is the highest spot in europe where bread is eaten. felix neff said, "it is the highest, and consequently the most pious, in the valley of queyras." dr. gilly was the second englishman who had ever found his way to the place, and he was accompanied on the occasion by mrs. gilly. "the sight of a female," he says, "dressed entirely in linen, was a phenomenon so new to those simple peasants, whose garments are never anything but woollen, that pizarro and his mail-clad companions were not greater objects of curiosity to the peruvians than we were to these mountaineers." not far distant from san veran are the mountain hamlets of pierre grosse and fongillarde, also ancient retreats of the persecuted vaudois, and now for the most part inhabited by protestants. the remoteness and comparative inaccessibility of these mountain hamlets may be inferred from the fact that in , when the protestants of france were for the first time since the revocation of the edict of nantes permitted to worship in public without molestation, four years elapsed before the intelligence reached san veran. we have now reached almost the extreme limits of france; italy lying on the other side of the snowy peaks which shut in the upper valleys of the alps. in neff's time the parish of which he had charge extended from san veran, on the frontier, to champsaur, in the valley of the drac, a distance of nearly eighty miles. his charge consisted of the scattered population of many mountain hamlets, to visit which in succession involved his travelling a total distance of not less than one hundred and eighty miles. it was, of course, impossible that any single man, no matter how inspired by zeal and devotion, could do justice to a charge so extensive. the difficulties of passing through a country so wild and rugged were also very great, especially in winter. neff records that on one occasion he took six hours to make the journey, in the midst of a snow-storm which completely hid the footpath, from his cottage at la chalp to san veran, a distance of only twelve miles. the pastors who succeeded neff had the same difficulties to encounter, and there were few to be found who could brave them. the want of proper domestic accommodation for the pastors was also felt to be a great hindrance. accordingly, one of the first things to which the rev. mr. freemantle directed his attention, when he entered upon his noble work of supplying the spiritual destitution of the french vaudois, was to take steps not only to supply the poor people with more commodious temples, but also to provide dwelling-houses for the pastors. and in the course of a few years, helped by friends in england, he has been enabled really to accomplish a very great deal. the extensive parish of neff is now divided into five sub-parishes--that of fressinières, which includes palons, violins, and dormilhouse, provided with three temples, a parsonage, and schools; arvieux, with the hamlets of brunissard (where worship was formerly conducted in a stable) and la chalp, provided with two temples, a parsonage, and schools; san veran, with fongillarde and pierre grosse, provided with three temples, a parsonage, and a school; st. laurent du cros and champsaur, in the valley of the drac, provided with a temple, school, &c., principally through the liberality of lord monson; and guillestre and vars, provided with two temples, a parsonage, and a girls' school. a temple, with a residence for a pastor, has also of late years been provided at briançon, with a meeting-place also at the village of villeneuve. such are the agencies now at work in the district of the high alps, helped on by a few zealous workers in england and abroad. while the object of the pastors, in the words of mr. freemantle, is "not to regard themselves as missionaries to proselytize roman catholics, but as ministers residing among their own people, whose faith, and love, and holiness they have to promote," they also endeavour to institute measures with the object of improving the social and domestic condition of the vaudois. thus, in one district--that of st. laurent du cros--a _banque de prévoyance_, or savings-bank, has been established; and though it was at first regarded with suspicion, it has gradually made its way and proved of great value, being made use of by the indigent roman catholics as well as protestant families of the district. such efforts and such agencies as these cannot fail to be followed by blessings, and to be greatly instrumental for good. our last night in france was spent in the miserable little town of abries, situated immediately at the foot of the alpine ridge which separates france from italy. on reaching the principal hotel, or rather auberge, we found every bed taken; but a peep into the dark and dirty kitchen, which forms the entrance-hall of the place, made us almost glad that there was no room for us in that inn. we turned out into the wet streets to find a better; but though we succeeded in finding beds in a poor house in a back lane, little can be said in their praise. we were, however, supplied with a tolerable dinner, and contrived to pass the night in rest, and to start refreshed early on the following morning on our way to the vaudois valleys of piedmont. [illustration: valley of luserne.] chapter vi. the valley of the pelice--la tour--angrogna--the pra du tour. the village of abries is situated close to the alpine ridge, the summit of which marks the boundary between france and italy. on the other side lie the valleys of piedmont, in which the french vaudois were accustomed to take refuge when persecution ravaged their own valleys, passing by the mountain-road we were now about to travel, as far as la tour, in the valley of the pelice. although there are occasional villages along the route, there is no good resting-place for travellers short of la tour, some twenty-six miles distant from abries; and as it was necessary that we should walk the distance, the greater part of the road being merely a track, scarcely practicable for mules, we were up betimes in the morning, and on our way. the sun had scarcely risen above the horizon. the mist was still hanging along the mountain-sides, and the stillness of the scene was only broken by the murmur of the guil running in its rocky bed below. passing through the hamlet of monta, where the french douane has its last frontier station, we began the ascent; and soon, as the sun rose and the mists cleared away, we saw the profile of the mountain up which we were climbing cast boldly upon the range behind us on the further side of the valley. a little beyond the ravine of the combe de la croix, along the summit of which the road winds, we reached the last house within the french frontier--a hospice, not very inviting in appearance, for the accommodation of travellers. a little further is the col, and passing a stone block carved with the fleur-de-lis and cross of savoy, we crossed the frontier of france and entered italy. on turning a shoulder of the mountain, we looked down upon the head of the valley of the pelice, a grand and savage scene. the majestic, snow-capped monte viso towers up on the right, at the head of the valley, amidst an assemblage of other great mountain masses. from its foot seems to steal the river pelice, now a quiet rivulet, though in winter a raging torrent. right in front, lower down the valley, is the rocky defile of mirabouc, a singularly savage gorge, seemingly rent asunder by some tremendous convulsion of nature; beyond and over which extends the valley of the pelice, expanding into that of the po, and in the remote distance the plains of piedmont; while immediately beneath our feet, as it were, but far below, lies a considerable breadth of green pasture, the bergerie of pra, enclosed on all sides by the mountains over which we look. the descent from the col down into the pra is very difficult, in some places almost precipitous--far more abrupt than on the french side, where the incline up to the summit is comparatively easy. the zigzag descends from one rock to another, along the face of a shelving slope, by a succession of notches (from which the footpath is not inappropriately termed _la coche_) affording a very insecure footing for the few mules which occasionally cross the pass. dr. gilly crossed here from la tour with mrs. gilly in , when about to visit the french valleys; but he found the path so difficult and dangerous, that the lady had to walk nearly the whole way. as we descended the mountain almost by a succession of leaps, we overtook m. gariod, deputy judge of gap, engaged in botanizing among the rocks; and he informed us that among the rarer specimens he had collected in the course of his journey on the summit were the _polygonum alpinum_ and _silene vallesia_, above monta; the _leucanthemum alpinum_, near the hospice; the _linaria alpina_ and _cirsium spinosissimus_ on the col; while the _lloydia serotina_, _arabis alpina_, _phyteuma hemisphericum_, and _rhododendrum ferrugineum_, were found all over the face of the rocky descent to the pra. at the foot of the _coche_ we arrived at the first house in italy, the little auberge of the pra, a great resort of sportsmen, who come to hunt the chamois in the adjoining mountains during the season. here is also the usual customs station, with a few officers of the italian douane, to watch the passage of merchandise across the frontier. the road from hence to la tour is along the river pelice, which is kept in sight nearly the whole way. a little below the pra, where it enters the defile of mirabouc, the path merely follows what is the bed of the torrent in winter. the descent is down ledges and notches, from rock to rock, with rugged precipices overhanging the ravine for nearly a mile. at its narrowest part stand the ruins of the ancient fort of mirabouc, built against the steep escarpments of the mountain, which, in ancient times, completely commanded and closed the defile against the passage of an enemy from that quarter. and difficult though the col de la croix is for the passage of an army, it has on more than one occasion been passed by french detachments in their invasion of italy. it is not until we reach bobi, or bobbio, several miles lower down the pelice, that we at last feel we are in italy. here the valley opens out, the scenery is soft and inviting, the fields are well tilled, the vegetation is rich, and the clusters of chestnut-trees in magnificent foliage. we now begin to see the striking difference between the french and the italian valleys. the former are precipitous and sterile, constant falls of slaty rock blocking up the defiles; while here the mountains lay aside their savage aspects, and are softened down into picturesquely wooded hills, green pastures, and fertile fields stretching along the river-sides, yielding a rich territory for the plough. yet, beautiful and peaceful though this valley of the pelice now appears, there is scarcely a spot in it but has been consecrated by the blood of martyrs to the cause of liberty and religion. in the rugged defile of the mirabouc, which we have just passed, is the site of a battle fought between the piedmontese troops and the vaudois peasants, at a place called the pian-del-mort, where the persecuted, turning upon the persecutors, drove them back, and made good their retreat to their mountain fastnesses. bobi itself was the scene of many deadly struggles. a little above the village, on a rocky plateau, are the remains of an ancient fort, near the hamlet of sibaud, where the vaudois performed one of their bravest exploits under henri arnaud, after their "glorious return" from exile,--near which, on a stone still pointed out, they swore fidelity to each other, and that they would die to the last man rather than abandon their country and their religion. near bobi is still to be seen a remarkable illustration of english interest long ago felt in the people of these valleys. this is the long embankment or breakwater, built by a grant from oliver cromwell, for the purpose of protecting the village against the inundations of the pelice, by one of which it was nearly destroyed in the time of the protectorate. it seems strange indeed that england should then have stretched out its hand so far, to help a people so poor and uninfluential as the vaudois; but their sufferings had excited the sympathies of all europe, and of protestant england in particular, which not only sent them sympathy, but substantial succour. cromwell also, through the influence of cardinal mazarin, compelled the duke of savoy to suspend for a time the persecution of his subjects,--though shortly after the protector's death it waxed hotter than ever. all down the valley of the pelice, we come upon village after village--la piante, villar, and cabriol--which have been the scenes sometimes of heroic combats, and sometimes of treacherous massacres. yet all the cruelty of grand dukes and popes during centuries did not avail in turning the people of the valley from their faith. for they continue to worship after the same primitive forms as they did a thousand years ago; and in the principal villages and hamlets, though romanism has long been supported by the power of the state and the patronage of the church, the protestant vaudois continue to constitute the majority of the population. rising up on the left of the road, between villar and la tour, are seen the bold and almost perpendicular rocks of castelluzzo, terminating in the tower-like summit which has given to them their name. on the face of these rocks is one of the caverns in which the vaudois were accustomed to hide their women and children when they themselves were forced to take the field. when dr. gilly first endeavoured to discover this famous cavern in , he could not find any one who could guide him to it. tradition said it was half way down the perpendicular face of the rock, and it was known to be very difficult to reach; but the doctor could not find any traces of it. determined, however, not to be baffled, he made a second attempt a month later, and succeeded. he had to descend some fifty feet from the top of the cliff by a rope ladder, until a platform of rock was reached, from which the cavern was entered. it was found to consist of an irregular, rugged, sloping gallery in the face of the rock, of considerable extent, roofed in by a projecting crag. it is quite open to the south, but on all other sides it is secure; and it can only be entered from above. such were the places to which the people of the valleys were driven for shelter in the dark days so happily passed away. one of the best indications of the improved _régime_ that now prevails, shortly presented itself in the handsome vaudois church, situated at the western entrance of the town of la tour, near to which is the college for the education of vaudois pastors, together with residences for the clergy and professors. the founding of this establishment, as well as of the hospital for the poor and infirm vaudois, is in a great measure due to the energetic zeal of the dr. gilly so often quoted above, whose writings on behalf of the faithful but destitute protestants of the piedmontese valleys, about forty years since, awakened an interest in their behalf in england, as well as in foreign countries, which has not yet subsided. more enthusiastic, if possible, even than dr. gilly, was the late general beckwith, who followed up, with extraordinary energy, the work which the other had so well begun. the general was an old peninsular veteran, who had followed the late duke of wellington through most of his campaigns, and lost a leg while serving under him at the battle of waterloo. hence the designation of him by a roman catholic bishop in an article published by him in one of the italian journals, as "the adventurer with the wooden leg." the general's attention was first attracted to the subject of the vaudois in the following curiously accidental way. being a regular visitor at apsley house, he called on the duke one morning, and, finding him engaged, he strolled into the library to spend an idle half-hour among the books. the first he took up was dr. gilly's "narrative," and what he read excited so lively an interest in his mind that he went direct to his bookseller and ordered all the publications relative to the vaudois church that could be procured. the general's zeal being thus fired, he set out shortly after on a visit to the piedmontese valleys. he returned to them again and again, and at length settled at la tour, where he devoted the remainder of his life and a large portion of his fortune to the service of the vaudois church and people. he organized a movement for the erection of schools, of which not fewer than one hundred and twenty were provided mainly through his instrumentality in different parts of the valleys, besides restoring and enlarging the college at la tour, erecting the present commodious dwellings for the professors, providing a superior school for the education of pastors' daughters, and contributing towards the erection of churches wherever churches were needed. the general was so zealous a missionary, so eager for the propagation of the gospel, that some of his friends asked him why he did not preach to the people. "no," said he; "men have their special gifts, and mine is _a brick-and-mortar gift_." the general was satisfied to go on as he had begun, helping to build schools, colleges, and churches for the vaudois, wherever most needed. his crowning work was the erection of the grand block of buildings on the viale del ré at turin, which not only includes a handsome and commodious vaudois church, but an english church, and a vaudois hospital and schools, erected at a cost of about fourteen thousand pounds, principally at the cost of the general himself, generously aided by mr. brewin and other english contributors. nor were the people ungrateful to their benefactor. "let the name of general beckwith be blessed by all who pass this way," says an inscription placed upon one of the many schools opened through his efforts and generosity; and the whole country responds to the sentiment. to return to la tour. the style of the buildings at its western end--the church, college, residences, and adjoining cottages, with their pretty gardens in front, designed, as they have been, by english architects--give one the idea of the best part of an english town. but this disappears as you enter the town itself, and proceed through the principal street, which is long, narrow, and thoroughly italian. the situation of the town is exceedingly fine, at the foot of the vandalin mountain, near the confluence of the river angrogna with the pelice. the surrounding scenery is charming; and from the high grounds, north and south of the town, extensive views may be had in all directions--especially up the valley of the pelice, and eastward over the plains of piedmont--the whole country being, as it were, embroidered with vineyards, corn-fields, and meadows, here and there shaded with groves and thickets, spread over a surface varied by hills, and knolls, and undulating slopes. the size, importance, industry, and central situation of la tour have always caused it to be regarded as the capital of the valleys. one-half of the vaudois population occupies the valley of the pelice and the lateral valley of angrogna; the remainder, more widely scattered, occupying the valleys of pérouse and pragela, and the lateral valley of st. martin--the entire number of the protestant population in the several valleys amounting to about twenty thousand. although, as we have already said, there is scarcely a hamlet in the valleys but has been made famous by the resistance of its inhabitants in past times to the combined tyranny of the popes of rome and the dukes of savoy, perhaps the most interesting events of all have occurred in the neighbourhood of la tour, but more especially in the valley of angrogna, at whose entrance it stands. the wonder is, that a scattered community of half-armed peasantry, without resources, without magazines, without fortresses, should have been able for any length of time to resist large bodies of regular troops--italian, french, spanish, and even irish!--led by the most experienced commanders of the day, and abundantly supplied with arms, cannon, ammunition, and stores of all kinds. all that the people had on their side--and it compensated for much--was a good cause, great bravery, and a perfect knowledge of the country in which, and for which, they fought. though the vaudois had no walled towns, their district was a natural fortress, every foot of which was known to them--every pass, every defile, every barricade, and every defensible position. resistance in the open country, they knew, would be fatal to them. accordingly, whenever assailed by their persecutors, they fled to their mountain strongholds, and there waited the attack of the enemy. one of the strongest of such places--the thermopylæ of the vaudois--was the valley of angrogna, up which the inhabitants of la tour were accustomed to retreat on any sudden invasion by the army of savoy. the valley is one of exquisite beauty, presenting a combination of mingled picturesqueness and sublimity, the like of which is rarely to be seen. it is hemmed in by mountains, in some places rounded and majestic, in others jagged and abrupt. the sides of the valley are in many places finely wooded, while in others well-tilled fields, pastures, and vineyards slope down to the river-side. orchards are succeeded by pine-woods, and these again by farms and gardens. sometimes a little cascade leaps from a rock on its way to the valley below; and little is heard around, save the rippling of water, and the occasional lowing of cattle in the pastures, mingled with the music of their bells. shortly after entering the valley, we passed the scene of several terrible struggles between the vaudois and their persecutors. one of the most famous spots is the plateau of rochemalan, where the heights of st. john abut upon the mountains of angrogna. it was shortly after the fulmination of a bull of extermination against the vaudois by pope innocent viii., in , that an army of eighteen thousand regular french and piedmontese troops, accompanied by a horde of brigands to whom the remission of sins was promised on condition of their helping to slay the heretics, encircled the valleys and proceeded to assail the vaudois in their fastnesses. the papal legate, albert catanée, archdeacon of cremona, had his head-quarters at pignerol, from whence he superintended the execution of the pope's orders. first, he sent preaching monks up the valleys to attempt the conversion of the vaudois before attacking them with arms. but the peasantry refused to be converted, and fled to their strongholds in the mountains. then catanée took the field at the head of his army, advancing upon angrogna. he extended his lines so as to enclose the entire body of heretics, with the object of cutting them off to a man. the vaudois, however, defended themselves resolutely, though armed only with pikes, swords, and bows and arrows, and everywhere beat back the assailants. the severest struggle occurred at rochemalan, which the crusaders attacked with great courage. but the vaudois had the advantage of the higher ground, and, encouraged by the cries and prayers of the women, children, and old men whom they were defending, they impetuously rushed forward and drove the papal troops downhill in disorder, pursuing them into the very plain. the next day the papalini renewed the attack, ascending by the bottom of the valley, instead of by the plateau on which they had been defeated. but one of those dense mists, so common in the alps, having settled down upon the valley, the troops became confused, broken up, and entangled in difficult paths; and in this state, marching apprehensively, they were fallen upon by the vaudois and again completely defeated. many of the soldiers slid over the rocks and were drowned in the torrent,--the chasm into which the captain of the detachment (saquet de planghère) fell, being still known as _toumpi de saquet_, or saquet's hole. the resistance of the mountaineers at other points, in the valleys of pragela and st. martin, having been almost equally successful, catanée withdrew the papal army in disgust, and marched it back into france, to wreak his vengeance on the defenceless vaudois of the val louise, in the manner described in a preceding chapter. less than a century later, a like attempt was made to force the entrance to the valley of angrogna, by an army of italians and spaniards, under the command of the count de la trinité. a proclamation had been published, and put up in the villages of angrogna, to the effect that all would be destroyed by fire and sword who did not forthwith return to the church of rome. and as the peasantry did not return, on the nd november, , the count advanced at the head of his army to extirpate the heretics. the vaudois were provided with the rudest sort of weapons; many of them had only slings and cross-bows. but they felt strong in the goodness of their cause, and prepared to defend themselves to the death. as the count's army advanced, the vaudois retired until they reached the high ground near rochemalan, where they took their stand. the enemy followed, and halted in the valley beneath, lighting their bivouac fires, and intending to pass the night there. before darkness fell, however, an accidental circumstance led to an engagement. a vaudois boy, who had got hold of a drum, began beating it in a ravine close by. the soldiers, thinking a hostile troop had arrived, sprang up in disorder and seized their arms. the vaudois, on their part, seeing the movement, and imagining that an attack was about to be made on them, rushed forward to repel it. the soldiers, surprised and confused, for the most part threw away their arms, and fled down the valley. irritated by this disgraceful retreat of some twelve hundred soldiers before two hundred peasants, the count advanced a second time, and was again, repulsed by the little band of heroes, who charged his troops with loud shouts of "viva jesu christo!" driving the invaders in confusion down the valley. it may be mentioned that the object of the savoy general, in making this attack, was to force the valley, and capture the strong position of the pra du tour, the celebrated stronghold of the vaudois, from whence we shall afterwards find them, again driven back, baffled and defeated. a hundred years passed, and still the vaudois remained unconverted and unexterminated. the marquis of pianesse now advanced upon angrogna--always with the same object, "ad extirpandos hereticos," in obedience to the order of the propaganda. on this occasion not only italian and spanish but irish troops were engaged in a combined effort to exterminate the vaudois. the irish were known as "the assassins" by the people of the valleys, because of their almost exceptional ferocity; and the hatred they excited by their outrages on women and children was so great, that on the assault and capture of st. legont by the vaudois peasantry, an irish regiment surprised in barracks was completely destroyed. a combined attack was made on angrogna on the th of june, . on that day four separate bodies of troops advanced up the heights from different directions, thereby enclosing the little vaudois army of three hundred men assembled there, and led by the heroic javanel. this leader first threw himself upon the head of the column which advanced from rocheplate, and drove it downhill. then he drew off his little body towards rochemalan, when he suddenly found himself opposed by the two bodies which had come up from st. john and la tour. retiring before them, he next found himself face to face with the fourth detachment, which had come up from pramol. with the quick instinct of military genius, javanel threw himself upon it before the beaten rocheplate detachment were able to rally and assail him in flank; and he succeeded in cutting the pramol force in two and passing through it, rushing up to the summit of the hill, on which he posted himself. and there he stood at bay. this hill is precipitous on one side, but of comparatively easy ascent on the side up which the little band of heroes had ascended. at the foot of the slope the four detachments, three thousand against three hundred, drew up and attacked him; but firing from a distance, their aim was not very deadly. for five hours javanel resisted them as he best could, and then, seeing signs of impatience and hesitation in the enemy's ranks, he called out to his men, "forward, my friends!" and they rushed downhill like an avalanche. the three thousand men recoiled, broke, and fled before the three hundred; and javanel returned victorious to his entrenchments before angrogna. yet, again, some eight years later, in , was this neighbourhood the scene of another contest, and again was javanel the hero. on this occasion, the marquis de fleury led the troops of the duke of savoy, whose object, as before, was to advance up the valley, and assail the vaudois stronghold of pra du tour; and again the peasantry resisted them successfully, and drove them back into the plains. javanel then went to rejoin a party of the men whom he had posted at the "gates of angrogna" to defend the pass up the valley; and again he fell upon the enemy engaged in attempting to force a passage there, and defeated them with heavy loss. such are among the exciting events which have occurred in this one locality in connection with the vaudois struggle for country and liberty. let us now proceed up the valley of angrogna, towards the famous stronghold of the pra du tour, the object of those repeated attacks of the enemy in the neighbourhood of rochemalan. as we advance, the mountains gradually close in upon the valley, leaving a comparatively small width of pasture land by the river-side. at the hamlet of serre the carriage road ends; and from thence the valley grows narrower, the mountains which enclose it become more rugged and abrupt, until there is room enough only for a footpath along a rocky ledge, and the torrent running in its deep bed alongside. this continues for a considerable distance, the path in some places being overhung by precipices, or encroached upon by rocks and boulders fallen from the heights, until at length we emerge from the defile, and find ourselves in a comparatively open space, the famous pra du tour; the defile we have passed, alongside the torrent and overhung by the rocks, being known as the barricade. the pra du tour, or meadow of the tower, is a little amphitheatre surrounded by rugged and almost inaccessible mountains, situated at the head of the valley of angrogna. the steep slopes bring down into this deep dell the headwaters of the torrent, which escape among the rocks down the defile we have just ascended. the path up the defile forms the only approach to the pra from the valley, but it is so narrow, tortuous, and difficult, that the labours of only a few men in blocking up the pathway with rocks and stones that lie ready at hand, might at any time so barricade the approach as to render it impracticable. the extremely secluded position of the place, its natural strength and inaccessibility, and its proximity to the principal vaudois towns and villages, caused it to be regarded from the earliest times as their principal refuge. it was their fastness, their fortress, and often their home. it was more--it was their school and college; for in the depths of the pra du tour the pastors, or _barbas_,[ ] educated young men for the ministry, and provided for the religious instruction of the vaudois population. [footnote : _barba_--a title of respect; in the vaudois dialect literally signifying an _uncle_.] it was the importance of the pra du tour as a stronghold that rendered it so often the object of attack through the valley of angrogna. when the hostile troops of savoy advanced upon la tour, the inhabitants of the neighbouring valleys at once fled to the pra, into which they drove their cattle, and carried what provisions they could; there constructing mills, ovens, houses, and all that was requisite for subsistence, as in a fort. the men capable of bearing arms stood on their guard to defend the passes of the vachére and roussine, at the extreme heads of the valley, as well as the defile of the barricade, while other bodies, stationed lower down, below the barricade, prepared to resist the troops seeking to force an entrance up the valley; and hence the repeated battles in the neighbourhood of rochemalan above described. on the occasion of the defeat of the count de la trinité by the little vaudois band near the village of angrogna, in november, , the general drew off, and waited the arrival of reinforcements. a large body of spanish veterans having joined him, in the course of the following spring he again proceeded up the valley, determined, if possible, to force the barricade--the royal forces now numbering some seven thousand men, all disciplined troops. the peasants, finding their first position no longer tenable in the face of such numbers, abandoned angrogna and the lower villages, and retired, with the whole population, to the pra du tour. the count followed them with his main army, at the same time directing two other bodies of troops to advance upon the place round by the mountains, one by the heights of the vachére, and another by les fourests. the defenders of the pra would thus be assailed from three sides at once, their forces divided, and victory rendered certain. but the count did not calculate upon the desperate bravery of the defenders. all three bodies were beaten back in succession. for four days the count made every effort to force the defile, and failed. two colonels, eight captains, and four hundred men fell in these desperate assaults, without gaining an inch of ground. on the fifth day a combined attack was made with the reserve, composed of spanish companies, but this, too, failed; and the troops, when ordered to return to the charge, refused to obey. the count, who commanded, is said to have wept as he sat on a rock and looked upon so many of his dead--the soldiers themselves exclaiming, "god fights for these people, and we do them wrong!" about a hundred years later, the marquis de pianesse, who, like the count de la trinité, had been defeated at rochemalan, made a similar attempt to surprise the vaudois stronghold, with a like result. the peasants were commanded on this occasion by john leger, the pastor and historian. those who were unarmed hurled rocks and stones on the assailants from the heights; and the troops being thus thrown into confusion, the vaudois rushed from behind their ramparts, and drove them in a state of total rout down the valley. on entering the pra du tour, one of the most prominent objects that meets the eye is the roman catholic chapel recently erected there, though the few inhabitants of the district are still almost entirely protestant. the roman catholic church has, however, now done what the roman catholic armies failed to do--established itself in the midst of the vaudois stronghold, though by no means in the hearts of the people. desirous of ascertaining, if possible, the site of the ancient college, we proceeded up the pra, and hailed a young woman whom we observed crossing the rustic bridge over the pêle, one of the mountain rivulets running into the torrent of angrogna. inquiring of her as to the site of the college, she told us we had already passed it, and led us back to the place--up the rocky side of the hill leading to the vachére--past the cottage where she herself lived, and pointed to the site: "there," she said, "is where the ancient college of the vaudois stood." the old building has, however, long since been removed, the present structure being merely part of a small farmsteading. higher up the steep hill-side, on successive ledges of rock, are the ruins of various buildings, some of which may have been dwellings, and one, larger than the rest, on a broader plateau, with an elder-tree growing in the centre, may possibly have been the temple. from the higher shelves on this mountain-side the view is extremely wild and grand. the acclivities which surround the head of the pra seem as if battlemented walls; the mountain opposite throws its sombre shadow over the ravine in which the torrent runs; whilst, down the valley, rock seems piled on rock, and mountain on mountain. all is perfectly still, and the silence is only audible by the occasional tinkling of a sheep-bell, or the humming of a bee in search of flowers on the mountain-side. so peaceful and quiet is the place, that it is difficult to believe it could ever have been the scene of such deadly strife, and rung with the shouts of men thirsting for each other's blood. after lingering about the place until the sun was far on his way towards the horizon, we returned, by the road we had come, the valley seeming more beautiful than ever under the glow of evening, and arrived at our destination about dusk, to find the fireflies darting about the streets of la tour. the next day saw us at turin, and our summer excursion at an end. mr. milsom, who had so pleasantly accompanied me through the valleys, had been summoned to attend the death-bed of a friend at antibes, and he set out on the journey forthwith. while still there, he received a telegram intimating the death of his daughter at allevard, near grenoble, and he arrived only in time to attend her funeral. two months later, he lost another dear daughter; shortly after, his mother-in-law died; and in the following december he himself died suddenly of heart disease, and followed them to the grave. one could not but conceive a hearty liking for edward milsom--he was such a thoroughly good man. he was a native of london, but spent the greater part of his life at lyons, in france, where he long since settled and married. he there carried on a large business as a silk merchant, but was always ready to give a portion of his time and money to help forward any good work. he was an "ancien," or elder, of the evangelical church at lyons, originally founded by adolphe monod, to whom he was also related by marriage. some years since he was very much interested by the perusal of pastor bost's account of his visit to the scene of felix neff's labours in the high alps. he felt touched by the simple, faithful character of the people, and keenly sympathised with their destitute condition. "here," said he, "is a field in which i may possibly be of some use." and he at once went to their help. he visited the district of fressinières, including the hamlet of dormilhouse, as well as the more distant villages of arvieux and sans veran, up the vale of queyras; and nearly every year thereafter he devoted a certain portion of his time in visiting the poorer congregations of the district, giving them such help and succour as lay in his power. his repeated visits made him well known to the people of the valleys, who valued him as a friend, if they did not even love him as a brother. his visits were also greatly esteemed by the pastors, who stood much in need of encouragement and help. he cheered the wavering, strengthened the feeble-hearted, and stimulated all to renewed life and action. wherever he went, a light seemed to shine in his path; and when he departed, he was followed by many blessings. in one place he would arrange for the opening of a new place of worship; in another, for the opening of a boys' school; in a third, for the industrial employment of girls; and wherever there was any little heartburning or jealousy to be allayed, he would set himself to remove it. his admirable tact, his unfailing temper, and excellent good sense, rendered him a wise counsellor and a most successful conciliator. the last time mr. milsom visited england, towards the end of , he was occupied, as usual, in collecting subscriptions for the poor vaudois of the high alps. now that the good "merchant missionary" has rested from his labours, they will indeed feel the loss of their friend. who is to assume his mantle? chapter vii the glorious return: an episode in the history of the italian vaudois. what is known as the glorious return, or re-entry of the exiled vaudois in to resume possession of the valleys from which they had been banished, will always stand out as one of the most remarkable events in history. if ever a people fairly established their right to live in their own country, and to worship god after their own methods, the vaudois had surely done so. they had held conscientiously and consistently to their religion for nearly five hundred years, during which they laboured under many disabilities and suffered much persecution. but the successive dukes of savoy were no better satisfied with them as subjects than before. they could not brook that any part of their people should be of a different form of religion from that professed by themselves; and they continued, at the instance of successive popes, to let slip the dogs of war upon the valleys, in the hopes of eventually compelling the vaudois to "come in" and make their peace with the church. the result of these invasions was almost uniform. at the first sudden inroad of the troops, the people, taken by surprise, usually took to flight; on which their dwellings were burnt and their fields laid waste. but when they had time to rally and collect their forces, the almost invariable result was that the piedmontese were driven out of the valleys again with ignominy and loss. the duke's invasion of was, however, attended with greater success than usual. his armies occupied the greater part of the valleys, though the vaudois still held out, and made occasional successful sallies from their mountain fastnesses. at length, the protestants of the swiss confederation, taking compassion on their co-religionists in piedmont, sent ambassadors to the duke of savoy at turin to intercede for their relief; and the result was the amnesty granted to them in that year under the title of the "patents of grace." the terms were very hard, but they were agreed to. the vaudois were to be permitted to re-occupy their valleys, conditional on their rebuilding all the catholic churches which had been destroyed, paying to the duke an indemnity of fifty thousand francs, and ceding to him the richest lands in the valley of luzerna--the last relics of their fortunes being thus taken from them to remunerate the barbarity of their persecutors. it was also stipulated by this treaty, that the pastors of the vaudois churches were to be natives of the district only, and that they were to be at liberty to administer religious instruction in their own manner in all the vaudois parishes, excepting that of st. john, near la tour, where their worship was interdicted. the only persons excepted from the terms of the amnesty were javanel, the heroic old captain, and jean leger, the pastor-historian, the most prominent leaders of the vaudois in the recent war, both of whom were declared to be banished the ducal dominions. under this treaty the vaudois enjoyed peace for about thirty years, during which they restored the cultivation of the valleys, rebuilt the villages, and were acknowledged to be among the most loyal, peaceable, and industrious of the subjects of savoy. there were, however, certain parts of the valleys to which the amnesty granted by the duke did not apply. thus, it did not apply to the valleys of pérouse and pragela, which did not then form part of the dominions of savoy, but were included within the french frontier. it was out of this circumstance that a difficulty arose with the french monarch, which issued in the revival of the persecution in the valleys, the banishment of the vaudois into switzerland, and their eventual "glorious return" in the manner we are about briefly to narrate. when louis xiv. of france revoked the edict of nantes in , and interdicted all protestant worship throughout his dominions, the law of course applied to the valleys of pérouse and pragela as to the other parts of france. the vaudois pastors were banished, and the people were forbidden to profess any other religion than that prescribed by the king, under penalty of confiscation of their goods, imprisonment, or banishment. the vaudois who desired to avoid these penalties while they still remained staunch to their faith, did what so many frenchmen then did--they fled across the frontier and took refuge in foreign lands. some of the inhabitants of the french valleys went northward into switzerland, while others passed across the mountains towards the south, and took refuge in the valley of the pelice, where the vaudois religion continued to be tolerated under the terms of the amnesty above referred to, which had been granted by the duke of savoy. the french king, when he found his huguenot subjects flying in all directions rather than remain in france and be "converted" to roman catholicism, next tried to block up the various avenues of escape, and to prevent the rulers of the adjoining countries from giving the fugitives asylum. great was his displeasure when he heard of the flight of the vaudois of pérouse and pragela into the adjoining valleys. he directed the french ambassador at turin to call upon the duke of savoy, and require him to prevent their settlement within his dominions. at the same time, he called upon the duke to take steps to compel the conversion of his people from the pretended reformed faith, and offered the aid of his troops to enforce their submission, "at whatever cost." the duke was irritated at the manner in which he was approached. louis xiv. was treating him as a vassal of france rather than as an independent sovereign. but he felt himself to be weak, and comparatively powerless to resent the insult. so he first temporised, then vacillated, and being again pressed by the french king, he eventually yielded. the amnesty was declared to be at an end, and the vaudois were ordered forthwith to become members of the church of rome. an edict was issued on the st of january, , forbidding the exercise by the vaudois of their religion, abolishing their ancient privileges, and ordering the demolition of all their places of worship. pastors and schoolmasters who refused to be converted were ordered to quit the country within fifteen days, on pain of death and confiscation of their goods. all refugee protestants from france were ordered to leave under the same penalty. all children born of protestant parents were to be compulsorily educated as roman catholics. this barbarous measure was merely a repetition by the duke of savoy in piedmont of what his master louis xiv. had already done in france. the vaudois expostulated with their sovereign, but in vain. they petitioned, but there was no reply. they requested the interposition of the swiss government as before, but the duke took no notice of their memorial. the question of resistance was then discussed; but the people were without leaders. javanel was living in banishment at geneva--old and worn out, and unable to lead them. besides, the vaudois, before taking up arms, wished to exhaust every means of conciliation. ambassadors next came from switzerland, who urged them to submit to the clemency of the duke, and suggested that they should petition him for permission to leave the country! the vaudois were stupefied by the proposal. they were thus asked, without a contest, to submit to all the ignominy and punishment of defeat, and to terminate their very existence as a people! the ambassadors represented that resistance to the combined armies of savoy, france, and spain, without leaders, and with less than three thousand combatants, was little short of madness. nevertheless, a number of the vaudois determined not to leave their valleys without an attempt to hold them, as they had so often successfully done before. the united armies of france and savoy then advanced upon the valleys, and arrangements were made for a general attack upon the vaudois position on easter monday, , at break of day,--the duke of savoy assailing the valley of luzerna, while catinat, commander of the french troops, advanced on st. martin. catinat made the first attack on the village of st. germain, and was beaten back with heavy loss after six hours' fighting. henry arnaud, the huguenot pastor from die in dauphiny, of which he was a native, particularly distinguished himself by his bravery in this affair, and from that time began to be regarded as one of the most promising of the vaudois leaders. catinat renewed the attack on the following day with the assistance of fresh troops; and he eventually succeeded in overcoming the resistance of the handful of men who opposed him, and sweeping the valley of st. martin. men, women, and children were indiscriminately put to the sword. in some of the parishes no resistance was offered, the inhabitants submitting to the duke's proclamation; but whether they submitted or not, made no difference in their treatment, which was barbarous in all cases. meanwhile, the duke of savoy's army advanced from the vale of luzerna upon the celebrated heights of angrogna, and assailed the vaudois assembled there at all points. the resistance lasted for an entire day, and when night fell, both forces slept on the ground upon which they had fought, kindling their bivouac fires on both sides. on the following day the attack was renewed, and again the battle raged until night. then don gabriel of savoy, who was in command, resolved to employ the means which catinat had found so successful: he sent forward messengers to inform the vaudois that their brethren of the val st. martin had laid down their arms and been pardoned, inviting them to follow their example. the result of further parley was, that on the express promise of his royal highness that they should receive pardon, and that neither their persons nor those of their wives or children should be touched, the credulous vaudois, still hoping for fair treatment, laid down their arms, and permitted the ducal troops to take possession of their entrenchments! the same treacherous strategy proved equally successful against the defenders of the pra du tour. after beating back their assailants and firmly holding their ground for an entire day, they were told of the surrender of their compatriots, promised a full pardon, and assured of life and liberty, on condition of immediately ceasing further hostilities. they accordingly consented to lay down their arms, and the impregnable fastness of the pra du tour, which had never been taken by force, thus fell before falsehood and perfidy. "the defenders of this ancient sanctuary of the church," says dr. huston, "were loaded with irons; their children were carried off and scattered through the roman catholic districts; their wives and daughters were violated, massacred, or made captives. as for those that still remained, all whom the enemy could seize became a prey devoted to carnage, spoliation, fire, excesses which cannot be told, and outrages which it would be impossible to describe."[ ] [footnote : huston's "israel of the alps," translated by montgomery; glasgow, ; vol. i. p. .] "all the valleys are now exterminated," wrote a french officer to his friends; "the people are all killed, hanged, or massacred." the duke, victor amadeus, issued a decree, declaring the vaudois to be guilty of high treason, and confiscating all their property. arnaud says as many as eleven thousand persons were killed, or perished in prison, or died of want, in consequence of this horrible easter festival of blood. six thousand were taken prisoners, and the greater number of these died in gaol of hunger and disease. when the prisons were opened, and the wretched survivors were ordered to quit the country, forbidden to return to it on pain of death, only about two thousand six hundred contrived to struggle across the frontier into switzerland. and thus at last the vaudois church seemed utterly uprooted and destroyed. what the dukes of savoy had so often attempted in vain was now accomplished. a second st. bartholomew had been achieved, and rome rang with _te deums_ in praise of the final dispersion of the vaudois. the pope sent to victor amadeus ii. a special brief, congratulating him on the extirpation of heresy in his dominions; and piedmontese and savoyards, good catholics, were presented with the lands from which the vaudois had been driven. those of them who remained in the country "unconverted" were as so many scattered fugitives in the mountains--sheep wandering about without a shepherd. some of the vaudois, for the sake of their families and homes, pretended conversion; but these are admitted to have been comparatively few in number. in short, the "israel of the alps" seemed to be no more, and its people utterly and for ever dispersed. pierre allix, the huguenot refugee pastor in england, in his "history of the ancient churches of piedmont," dedicated to william iii., regarded the vaudois church as obliterated--"their present desolation seeming so universal, that the world looks upon them no otherwise than as irrecoverably lost, and finally destroyed." three years passed. the expelled vaudois reached switzerland in greatly reduced numbers, many women and children having perished on their mountain journey. the inhabitants of geneva received them with great hospitality, clothing and feeding them until they were able to proceed on their way northward. some went into brandenburg, some into holland, while others settled to various branches of industry in different parts of switzerland. many of them, however, experienced great difficulty in obtaining a settlement. those who had entered the palatinate were driven thence by war, and those who had entered wurtemburg were expelled by the grand duke, who feared incurring the ire of louis xiv. by giving them shelter and protection. hence many little bands of the vaudois refugees long continued to wander along the valley of the rhine, unable to find rest for their weary feet. there were others trying to earn, a precarious living in geneva and lausanne, and along the shores of lake leman. some of these were men who had fought under javanel in his heroic combats with the piedmontese; and they thought with bitter grief of the manner in which they had fallen into the trap of catinat and the duke of savoy, and abandoned their country almost without a struggle. then it was that the thought occurred to them whether they might not yet strike a blow for the recovery of their valleys! the idea seemed chimerical in the extreme. a few hundred destitute men, however valiant, to think of recovering a country defended by the combined armies of france and savoy! javanel, the old vaudois hero, disabled by age and wounds, was still alive--an exile at geneva--and he was consulted on the subject. javanel embraced the project with, enthusiasm; and the invasion of the valleys was resolved upon! a more daring, and apparently more desperate enterprise, was never planned. who was to be their leader? javanel himself was disabled. though his mind was clear, and his patriotic ardour unquenched, his body was weak; and all that he could do was to encourage and advise. but he found a noble substitute in henry arnaud, the huguenot refugee, who had already distinguished himself in his resistance to the troops of savoy. and arnaud was now ready to offer up his life for the recovery of the valleys. the enterprise was kept as secret as possible, yet not so close as to prevent the authorities of berne obtaining some inkling of their intentions. three confidential messengers were first dispatched to the valleys to ascertain the disposition of the population, and more particularly to examine the best route by which an invasion might be made. on their return with the necessary information, the plan was settled by javanel, as it was to be carried out by arnaud. in the meantime, the magistrates of geneva, having obtained information as to the intended movement, desirous of averting the hostility of france and savoy, required javanel to leave their city, and he at once retired to ouchy, a little farther up the lake. the greatest difficulty experienced by the vaudois in carrying out their enterprise was the want of means. they were poor, destitute refugees, without arms, ammunition, or money to buy them. to obtain the requisite means, arnaud made a journey into holland, for the purpose of communicating the intended project to william of orange. william entered cordially into the proposed plan, recommended arnaud to several huguenot officers, who afterwards took part in the expedition, supplied him with assistance in money, and encouraged him to carry out the design. several private persons in holland--amongst others the post-master-general at leyden--also largely contributed to the enterprise. at length all was ready. the men who intended to take part in the expedition came together from various quarters. some came from brandenburg, others from bavaria and distant parts of switzerland; and among those who joined them was a body of french huguenots, willing to share in their dangers and their glory. one of their number, captain turrel, like arnaud, a native of die in dauphiny, was even elected as the general of the expedition. their rendez-vous was in the forest of prangins, near nyon, on the north bank of the lake of geneva; and there, on the night of the th of august, , they met in the hollow recesses of the wood. fifteen boats had been got together, and lay off the shore. after a fervent prayer by the pastor-general arnaud, imploring a blessing upon the enterprise, as many of the men as could embark got into the boats. as the lake is there at its narrowest, they soon rowed across to the other side, near the town of yvoire, and disembarked on the shore of savoy. arnaud had posted sentinels in all directions, and the little body waited the arrival of the remainder of their comrades from the opposite shore. they had all crossed the lake by two o'clock in the morning; and about eight hundred men, divided into nineteen companies,[ ] each provided with its captain, were now ready to march. [footnote : of the nineteen companies three were composed of the vaudois of angrogna; those of bobi and st. john furnished two each; and those of la tour, villar, prarustin, prali, macel, st. germain, and pramol, furnished one each. the remaining six companies were composed of french huguenot refugees from dauphiny and languedoc under their respective officers. besides these, there were different smaller parties who constituted a volunteer company. the entire force of about eight hundred men was marshalled in three divisions--vanguard, main body, and rearguard--and this arrangement was strictly observed in the order of march.] at the very commencement, however, they met with a misfortune. one of the pastors, having gone to seek a guide in the village near at hand, was seized as a prisoner by the local authorities, and carried off. on this, the vaudois, seeing that they were treated as enemies, sent a party to summon yvoire to open its gates, and it obeyed. the lord of the manor and the receiver of taxes were taken as hostages, and made to accompany the troop until they reached the next commune, when they were set at liberty, and replaced by other hostages. when it became known that the little army of vaudois had set out on their march, troops were dispatched from all quarters to intercept them and cut them off; and it was believed that their destruction was inevitable. "what possible chance is there," asked the _historic mercury_ of the day, "of this small body of men penetrating to their native country through the masses of french and piedmontese troops accumulating from all sides, without being crushed and exterminated?" "it is impossible," wrote the _leyden gazette_, "notwithstanding whatever precautions they may take, that the vaudois can extricate themselves without certain death, and the court of savoy may therefore regard itself safe so far as they are concerned." no sooner had the boats left the shore at nyon for the further side of the lake than the young seigneur of prangins, who had been watching their movements, rode off at full speed to inform the french resident at geneva of the departure of the vaudois; and orders were at once dispatched to lyons for a strong body of cavalry to march immediately towards savoy to cut them off. but the vaudois had well matured their plans, and took care to keep out of reach of the advancing enemy. their route at first lay up the valleys towards the mountains, whose crests they followed, from glacier to glacier, in places almost inaccessible to regular troops, and thus they eluded the combined forces of france and savoy, which, vainly endeavoured to bar their passage. the first day's march led them into the valley of the arve, by the col de voirons, from which they took their last view of the peaceful lake of geneva; thence they proceeded by the pyramidal mountain called the mole to the little town of viu, where they rested for two hours, starting again by moonlight, and passing through st. joire, where the magistrates brought out a great cask of wine, and placed it in the middle of the street for their refreshment. the little army, however, did not halt there, but marched on to the bare hill of carman, where, after solemn prayer, they encamped about midnight, sleeping on the bare ground. next day found them in front of the small walled town of cluse, in the rocky gorge of the arve. the authorities shut the gates, on which the vaudois threatened to storm the place, when the gates were opened, and they marched through the town, the inhabitants standing under arms along both sides of the street. here the vaudois purchased a store of food and wine, which they duly paid for. they then proceeded on to sallanches, where resistance was threatened. they found a body of men posted on the wooden bridge which there separated the village of st. martin from sallanches; but rushing forward, the defenders of the bridge fled, and the little army passed over and proceeded to range themselves in order of battle over against the town, which was defended by six hundred troops. the vaudois having threatened to burn the town, and kill the hostages whom they had taken on the slightest show of resistance, the threat had its effect, and they were permitted to pass without further opposition, encamping for the night at a little village about a league further on. and thus closed the second day's march. the third day they passed over the mountains of lez pras and haute luce, seven thousand feet above the sea-level, a long and fatiguing march. at one place the guide lost his way, and rain fell heavily, soaking the men to the skin. they spent a wretched night in some empty stables at the hamlet of st. nicholas de verose; and started earlier than usual on the following morning, addressing themselves to the formidable work of climbing the col bonhomme, which they passed with the snow up to their knees. they were now upon the crest of the alps, looking down upon the valley of the isère, into which they next descended. they traversed the valley without resistance, passing through st. germain and scez, turning aside at the last-mentioned place up the valley of tignes, thereby avoiding the french troops lying in wait for them in the neighbourhood of moutiers, lower down the valley of the isère. later in the evening they reached laval, at the foot of mont iseran; and here arnaud, for the first time during eight days, snatched a few hours' sleep on a bed in the village. the sixth day saw the little army climbing the steep slopes of mont iseran, where the shepherds gave them milk and wished them god-speed; but they warned them that a body of troops lay in their way at mont cenis. on they went--over the mountain, and along the crest of the chain, until they saw bonneval in the valley beneath them, and there they descended, passing on to bessant in the valley of the arc, where they encamped for the night. next day they marched on mont cenis, which they ascended. as they were crossing the mountain a strange incident occurred. the vaudois saw before them a large convoy of mules loaded with baggage. and shortly after there came up the carriage and equipage of some grand personage. it proved to be cardinal ranuzzi, on his way to rome to take part in the election of pope alexander viii. the vaudois seized the mules carrying the baggage, which contained important documents compromising louis xiv. with victor amadeus; and it is said that in consequence of their loss, the cardinal, who himself aspired to the tiara, afterwards died of chagrin, crying in his last moments, "my papers! oh, my papers!" the passage of the great and little cenis was effected with great difficulty. the snow lay thick on the ground, though it was the month of august, and the travellers descended the mountain of tourliers by a precipice rather than a road. when night fell, they were still scattered on the mountain, and lay down to snatch a brief sleep, overcome with hunger and fatigue. next morning they gathered together again, and descended into the sterile valley of the gaillon, and shortly after proceeded to ascend the mountain opposite. they were now close upon the large towns. susa lay a little to the east, and exilles was directly in their way. the garrison of the latter place came out to meet them, and from the crest of the mountain rolled large stones and flung grenades down upon the invaders. here the vaudois lost some men and prisoners, and finding the further ascent impracticable, they retreated into the valley from which they had come, and again ascended the steep slope of tourliers in order to turn the heights on which the french troops were posted. at last, after great fatigue and peril, unable to proceed further, they gained the crest of the mountain, and sounded their clarions to summon the scattered body. after a halt of two hours they proceeded along the ridge, and perceived through the mist a body of soldiers marching along with drums beating; it was the garrison of exilles. the vaudois were recognised and followed by the soldiers at a distance. proceeding a little further, they came in sight of the long valley of the doire, and looking down into it, not far from the bridge of salabertrans, they discerned some thirty-six bivouac fires burning on the plain, indicating the presence of a large force. these were their enemies--a well-appointed army of some two thousand five hundred men--whom they were at last to meet in battle. nothing discouraged, they descended into the valley, and the advanced guard shortly came in contact with the enemy's outposts. firing between them went on for an hour and a half, and then night fell. the vaudois leaders held a council to determine what they should do; and the result was, that an immediate attack was resolved upon, in three bodies. the principal attack was made on the bridge, the passage of which was defended by a strong body of french soldiers, under the command of colonel de larrey. on the advance of the vaudois in the darkness, they were summoned to stand, but continued to advance, when the enemy fired a volley on them, killing three men. then the vaudois brigade rushed to the bridge, but seeing a strong body on the other side preparing to fire again, arnaud called upon his men to lie down, and the volley went over their heads. then turrel, the vaudois captain, calling out "forward! the bridge is won!" the vaudois jumped to their feet and rushed on. the two wings at the same time concentrated their fire on the defenders, who broke and retired, and the bridge was won. but at the further side, where the french were in overpowering numbers, they refused to give way, and poured down their fire on their assailants. the vaudois boldly pressed on. they burst through the french, force, cutting it in two; and fresh men pouring over, the battle was soon won. the french, commander was especially chagrined at having been beaten by a parcel of cowherds. "is it possible," he exclaimed, "that i have lost both the battle and my honour?" the rising moon showed the ground strewed with about seven hundred dead; the vaudois having lost only twenty-two killed and eight wounded. the victors filled their pouches with ammunition picked up on the field, took possession of as many arms and as much provisions as they could carry, and placing the remainder in a heap over some barrels of powder, they affixed a lighted match and withdrew. a tremendous explosion shook the mountains, and echoed along the valley, and the remains of the french camp were blown to atoms. the vaudois then proceeded at once to climb the mountain of sci, which had to be crossed in order to enter the valley of pragelas. it was early on a sabbath morning, the ninth day of their march, that the vaudois reached the crest of the mountain overlooking fenestrelles, and saw spread out before them the beloved country which they had come to win. they halted for the stragglers, and when these had come up, arnaud made them kneel down and thank god for permitting them again to see their native land; himself offering up an eloquent prayer, which cheered and strengthened them for further effort. and then they descended into the valley of pragelas, passing the river clusone, and halting to rest at the little village of la traverse. they were now close to the vaudois strongholds, and in a country every foot of which was familiar to most of them. but their danger was by no means over; for the valleys were swarming with dragoons and foot-soldiers; and when they had shaken off those of france, they had still to encounter the troops of savoy. late in the afternoon the little army again set out for the valley of st. martin, passing the night in the mountain hamlet of jussand, the highest on the col du pis. next day they descended the col near seras, and first came in contact with the troops of savoy; but these having taken to flight, no collision occurred; and on the following day the vaudois arrived, without further molestation, at the famous balsille. this celebrated stronghold is situated in front of the narrow defile of macel, which leads into the valley of st. martin. it is a rampart of rock, standing at the entrance to the pass, and is of such natural strength, that but little art was needed to make it secure against any force that could be brought against it. there is only one approach to it from the valley of st. martin, which is very difficult; a portion of the way being in a deep wooded gorge, where a few men could easily arrest the progress of an army. the rock itself consists of three natural stages or terraces, the highest part rising steep as a wall, being surmounted by a natural platform. the mountain was well supplied with water, which gushed forth in several places. caverns had been hollowed out in the sides of the rocks, which served as hiding-places during the persecutions which so often ravaged the valleys; and these were now available for storehouses and barracks. the place was, indeed, so intimately identified with the past sufferings and triumphs of the vaudois, and it was, besides, so centrally situated, and so secure, that they came to regard its possession as essential to the success of their enterprise. the aged javanel, who drew up the plan of the invasion before the eight hundred set out on their march, attached the greatest importance to its early occupation. "spare no labour nor pains," he said, in the memorandum of directions which he drew up, "in fortifying this post, which will be your most secure fortress. do not quit it unless in the utmost extremity.... you will, of course, be told that you cannot hold it always, and that rather than not succeed in their object, all france and italy will gather together against you.... but were it the whole world, and only yourselves against all, fear ye the almighty alone, who is your protection." on the arrival of the vaudois at the balsille, they discerned a small body of troops advancing towards them by the col du pis, higher up the valley. they proved to be piedmontese, forty-six in number, sent to occupy the pass. they were surrounded, disarmed, and put to death, and their arms were hid away amongst the rocks. no quarter was given on either side during this war; the vaudois had no prisons in which to place their captives; and they themselves, when taken, were treated not as soldiers, but as bandits, being instantly hung on the nearest trees. the vaudois did not, however, yet take up their permanent position at the balsille, being desirous of rousing the valleys towards the south. the day following, accordingly, they marched to pralis, in the valley of the germanasca, when, for the first time since their exile, they celebrated divine worship in one of the temples of their ancestors. they were now on their way towards the valley of the pelice, to reach which it was necessary that they should pass over the col julian. an army of three thousand piedmontese barred their way, but nothing daunted by the great disparity of force, the vaudois, divided into three bodies, as at salabertrans, mounted to the assault. as they advanced, the piedmontese cried, "come on, ye devil's barbets, there are more than three thousand of us, and we occupy all the posts!" in less than half an hour the whole of the posts were carried, the pass was cleared, and the piedmontese fled down the further side of the mountain, leaving all their stores behind them. on the following day the vaudois reached bobi, drove out the new settlers, and resumed possession of the lands of the commune. thus, after the lapse of only fourteen days, this little band of heroes had marched from the shores of the lake of geneva, by difficult mountain-passes, through bands of hostile troops, which they had defeated in two severe fights, and at length reached the very centre of the vaudois valleys, and entered into possession of the "promised land." they resolved to celebrate their return to the country of their fathers by an act of solemn worship on the sabbath following. the whole body assembled on the hill of silaoud, commanding an extensive prospect of the valley, and with their arms piled, and resting under the shade of the chestnut-trees which crown the hill, they listened to an eloquent sermon from the pastor montoux, who preached to them standing on a platform, consisting of a door resting upon two rocks, after which they chanted the th psalm, to the clash of arms. they then proceeded to enter into a solemn covenant with each other, renewing the ancient oath of union of the valleys, and swearing never to rest from their enterprise, even if they should be reduced to only three or four in number, until they had "re-established in the valleys the kingdom of the gospel." shortly after, they proceeded to divide themselves into two bodies, for the purpose of occupying simultaneously, as recommended by javanel, the two valleys of the pelice and st. martin. but the trials and sufferings they had already endured were as nothing compared with those they were now about to experience. armies concentrated on them from all points. they were pressed by the french on the north and west, and by the piedmontese on the south and east. encouraged by their success at bobi, the vaudois rashly attacked villar, lower down the valley, and were repulsed with loss. from thence they retired up the valley of rora, and laid it waste; the enemy, in like manner, destroying the town of bobi and laying waste the neighbourhood. the war now became one of reprisals and mutual devastation, the two parties seeking to deprive each other of shelter and the means of subsistence. the vaudois could only obtain food by capturing the enemy's convoys, levying contributions from the plains, and making incursions into dauphiny. the enterprise on which they had entered seemed to become more hopeless from day to day. this handful of men, half famished and clothed in rags, had now arrayed against them twenty-two thousand french and sardinians, provided with all the munitions of war. that they should have been able to stand against them for two whole months, now fighting in one place, and perhaps the next day some twenty miles across the mountains in another, with almost invariable success, seems little short of a miracle. but flesh and blood could not endure such toil and privations much longer. no wonder that the faint-hearted began to despair. turrel, the military commander, seeing no chance of a prosperous issue, withdrew across the french frontier, followed by the greater number of the vaudois from dauphiny;[ ] and there remained only the italian vaudois, still unconquered in spirit, under the leadership of their pastor-general arnaud, who never appeared greater than in times of difficulty and danger. [footnote : the greater number of them, including turrel, were taken prisoners and shot, or sent to the galleys, where they died. this last was the fate of turrel.] with his diminished forces, and the increasing numbers of the enemy, arnaud found it impossible to hold both the valleys, as intended; besides, winter was approaching, and the men must think of shelter and provisions during that season, if resistance was to be prolonged. it was accordingly determined to concentrate their little force upon the balsille, and all haste was made to reach that stronghold without further delay. their knowledge of the mountain heights and passes enabled them to evade their enemies, who were watching for them along the valleys, and they passed from the heights of rodoret to the summit of the balsille by night, before it was known that they were in the neighbourhood. they immediately set to work to throw up entrenchments and erect barricades, so as to render the place as secure as possible. foraging parties were sent out for provisions, to lay in for the winter, and they returned laden with corn from the valley of pragelas. at the little hamlet of balsille they repaired the mill, and set it a-going, the rivulet which flowed down from the mountain supplying abundance of water-power. it was at the end of october that the little band of heroes took possession of the balsille, and they held it firmly all through the winter. for more than six months they beat back every force that was sent against them. the first attack was made by the marquis d'ombrailles at the head of a french detachment; but though the enemy reached the village of balsille, they were compelled to retire, partly by the bullets of the defenders, and partly by the snow, which was falling heavily. the marquis de parelles next advanced, and summoned the vaudois to surrender; but in vain. "our storms are still louder than your cannon," replied arnaud, "and yet our rocks are not shaken." winter having set in, the besiegers refrained for a time from further attacks, but strictly guarded all the passes leading to the fortress; while the garrison, availing themselves of their knowledge of the locality, made frequent sorties into the adjoining valleys, as well as into those of dauphiny, for the purpose of collecting provisions, in which they were usually successful. when the fine weather arrived, suitable for a mountain campaign, the french general, catinat, assembled a strong force, and marched into the valley, determined to make short work of this little nest of bandits on the balsille. on sunday morning, the th of april, , while arnaud was preaching to his flock, the sentinels on the look-out discovered the enemy's forces swarming up the valley. soon other bodies were seen approaching by the col du pis and the col du clapier, while a french regiment, supported by the savoyard militia, climbed mont guinevert, and cut off all retreat in that quarter. in short, the balsille was completely invested. a general assault was made on the position on the nd of may, under the direction of general catinat in person. three french regiments, supported by a regiment of dragoons, opened the attack in front; colonel de parat, who commanded the leading regiment, saying to his soldiers as they advanced, "my friends, we must sleep to-night in that barrack," pointing to the rude vaudois fort on the summit of the balsille. they advanced with great bravery; but the barricade could not be surmounted, while they were assailed by a perfect storm of bullets from the defenders, securely posted above. catinat next ordered the troops stationed on the guinevert to advance from that direction, so as to carry the position from behind. but the assailants found unexpected intrenchments in their way, from behind which the vaudois maintained a heavy fire, that eventually drove them back, their retreat being accelerated by a shower of stones and a blinding fall of snow and hail. in the meantime, the attack on the bastion in front continued, and the vaudois, seeing the french troops falling back in disorder, made a vigorous sortie, and destroyed the whole remaining force, excepting fifteen men, who fled, bare-headed and without arms, and carried to the camp the news of their total defeat. a savoyard officer thus briefly described the issue of the disastrous affair in a letter to a friend: "i have only time to tell you that the french have failed in their attack on the balsille, and they have been obliged to retire after having lost one hundred and fifty soldiers, three captains, besides subalterns and wounded, including a colonel and a lieutenant-colonel who have been made prisoners, with the two sergeants who remained behind to help them. the lieutenant-colonel was surprised at finding in the fort some nineteen or twenty officers in gold and silver lace, who treated him as a prisoner of war and very humanely, even allowing him to go in search of the surgeon-major of his regiment for the purpose of bringing him into the place, and doing all that was necessary." catinat did not choose again to renew the attack in person, or to endanger his reputation by a further defeat at the hands of men whom he had described as a nest of paltry bandits, but entrusted the direction of further operations to the marquis de féuquières, who had his laurels still to win, while catinat had his to lose. the balsille was again completely invested by the th of may, according to the scheme of operations prepared by catinat, and the marquis received by anticipation the title of "conqueror of the barbets." the entire mountain was surrounded, all the passes were strongly guarded, guns were planted in positions which commanded the vaudois fort, more particularly on the guinevert; and the capture or extermination of the vaudois was now regarded as a matter of certainty. the attacking army was divided into five corps. each soldier was accompanied by a pioneer carrying a fascine, in order to form a cover against the vaudois bullets as they advanced. several days elapsed before all the preliminaries for the grand attack were completed, and then the marquis ordered a white flag to be hoisted, and a messenger was sent forward, inviting a parley with the defenders of the balsille. the envoy was asked what he wanted. "your immediate surrender!" was the reply. "you shall each of you receive five hundred louis d'or, and good passports for your retirement to a foreign country; but if you resist, you will be infallibly destroyed." "that is as the lord shall will," replied the vaudois messenger. the defenders refused to capitulate on any terms. the marquis himself then wrote to the vaudois, offering them terms on the above basis, but threatening, in case of refusal, that every man of them would be hung. arnaud's reply was heroic. "we are not subjects," he said, "of the king of france; and that monarch not being master of this country, we can enter into no treaty with his servants. we are in the heritage which our fathers have left to us, and we hope, with the help of the god of armies, to live and die in it, even though there may remain only ten of us to defend it." that same night the vaudois made a vigorous sortie, and killed a number of the besiegers: this was their final answer to the summons to surrender. on the th of may the battery on mont guinevert was opened, and the enemy's cannon began to play upon the little fort and bastions, which, being only of dry stones, were soon dismantled. the assault was then made simultaneously on three sides; and after a stout resistance, the vaudois retired from their lower intrenchments, and retreated to those on the higher ledges of the mountain. they continued their resistance until night, and then, taking counsel together, and feeling that the place was no longer defensible in the face of so overpowering a force, commanded, as it was, at the same time by the cannon on the adjoining heights, they determined to evacuate the balsille, after holding it for a period of nearly seven months. a thick mist having risen up from the valley, the vaudois set out, late at night, under the guidance of captain poulat, a native of the district, who well knew the paths in the mountains. they climbed up on to the heights above, over icy slopes, passing across gaping crevices and along almost perpendicular rocks, admitting of their passage only in single file, sometimes dragging themselves along on their bellies, clinging to the rocks or to the tufts of grass, occasionally resting and praying, but never despairing. at length they succeeded, after a long détour of the mountain crests, in gaining the northern slope of guinevert. here they came upon and surprised the enemy's outpost, which fled towards the main body; and the vaudois passed on, panting and half dead with fatigue. when the morning broke, and the french proceeded to penetrate the last redoubt on the balsille, lo, it was empty! the defenders had abandoned it, and they could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the dangerous mountain escarpment by which they had escaped in the night. looking across the valley, far off, they saw the fugitives, thrown into relief by the snow amidst which they marched, like a line of ants, apparently making for the mass of the central alps. for three days they wandered from place to place, gradually moving southwards, their object now being to take up their position at the pra du tour, the ancient fortress of the barbas in the valley of angrogna. before, however, they could reach this stronghold, and while they were still at pramol in the valley of perosa, news of the most unexpected kind reached them, which opened up the prospect of their deliverance. the news was no other than this--savoy had declared war against france! a rupture between the two powers had for some time been imminent. louis xiv. had become more and more exacting in his demands on the duke of savoy, until the latter felt himself in a position of oppressive vassalage. louis had even intimated his intention of occupying verrua and the citadel of turin; and the duke, having previously ascertained through his cousin, prince eugène, the willingness of the emperor of austria, pressed by william of orange, to assist him in opposing the pretensions of france, he at length took up his stand and declared war against louis. the vaudois were now a power in the state, and both parties alike appealed to them for help, promising them great favours. but the vaudois, notwithstanding the treachery and cruelty of successive dukes of savoy, were true to their native prince. they pledged themselves to hold the valleys and defend the mountain passes against france. in the first engagements which took place between the french and the piedmontese, the latter were overpowered, and the duke became a fugitive. where did he find refuge? in the valleys of the vaudois, in a secluded spot in the village of rora, behind the pelice, he found a safe asylum amidst the people whose fathers he had hunted, proscribed, and condemned to death. but the tide of war turned, and the french were eventually driven out of piedmont. many of the vaudois, who had settled in brandenburg, holland, and switzerland, returned and settled in the valleys; and though the dukes of savoy, with their accustomed treachery, more than once allowed persecution to recommence, their descendants continue to enjoy the land, and to worship after the manner of their fathers down to the present day. the vaudois long laboured under disabilities, and continued to be deprived of many social and civil rights. but they patiently bided their time; and the time at length arrived. in their emancipation was one of the great questions of north italy. it was taken up and advocated by the most advanced minds of piedmont. the petition to charles albert in their favour was in a few days covered with the names of its greatest patriots, including those of balbo, cavour, and d'azeglio. their emancipation was at length granted, and the vaudois now enjoy the same rights and liberties as the other subjects of victor emanuel. nor is the vaudois church any longer confined to the valleys, but it has become extended of late years all over italy--to milan, florence, brescia, verona, genoa, leghorn, naples, palermo, cataneo, venice, and even to rome itself. in most of these places there are day-schools and sunday-schools, besides churches. the new church at venice, held in the cavagnis palace, seems to have proved especially successful, the sunday services being regularly attended by from three to four hundred persons; while the day-schools in connection with the churches at turin, leghorn, naples, and cataneo have proved very successful. thus, in the course of a few years, thirty-three vaudois churches and stations, with about an equal number of schools, have been established in various parts of italy. the missionaries report that the greatest difficulties they have to encounter arise from the incredulity and indifference which are the natural heritage of the romish church; but that, nevertheless, the work makes satisfactory progress--the good seed is being planted, and will yet bring forth its increase in god's due time. finally, it cannot but be acknowledged that the people of the valleys, in so tenaciously and conscientiously adhering to their faith, through good and through evil, during so many hundred years, have set a glorious example to piedmont, and have possibly been in no small degree instrumental in establishing the reign of right and of liberty in italy. index. aiguesmortes, huguenot prison at, , , . albigenses, . anabaptists of munster, - . anduze, visit to, . angrogna, valley of, ; fighting in, - , . arnaud, henry, , ; leads back the vaudois, - ; defends the balsille, - . athlone, siege of, - , - . balsille, the, ; defence of, - ; given up, . baridon, etienne, - . barillon, m. de, , - . baville on the protestants of languedoc, , ; occupies the cevennes, ; at pont-de-montvert, . beauval, basnage de, . beauvau, prince de, - . beckwith, general, . berwick, duke of, - , , . bibles, destruction and scarcity of, - . boileau, general, - . bonnafoux repulsed by camisards, . book-burning, , - . bordeille, raphaël, . bourg d'oisans, - . boyne, battle of the, - . briançon, - . briset, lieut., death of, . broglie, count, - , ; superseded, . brousson, claude, ; advocate for protestant church at nismes, ; meeting in house of, ; petition by, ; escape from nismes, ; at lausanne, , ; at berlin, ; in the cevennes, - , ; reward offered for, ; at nismes, ; preaching of, - ; to lausanne, england, and holland, - ; at sedan, ; through france, - ; portraiture of, (note); to nismes again, ; taken, tried, and executed, - . browne, col. lyde, . brueys on fanaticism in languedoc, . bull of clement xi. against camisards, . caillemotte, col., ; death of, , . calas, jean, ; executed, ; case taken up by voltaire, - ; reversal of judgment on, - . calvinism and race, (note). calvinists, french and scotch, compared, . cambon, col., . camisards, the origin of name, ; led by laporte, ; organization of, - ; encounter troops, - , ; war-song of, ; organized by roland, - ; successes of, - , , - ; spread of insurrection of, - ; measures against, , - ; defeat of, at vagnas, ; defeat of, near pompignan, ; success of, at martinargues, - ; bull against, ; success at salindres, - ; defeated near nismes, - ; reverses of, - ; success at font-morte, - ; defeated at pont-de-montvert, and end of insurrection, - . camisards, white, - . carrickfergus, siege of, . castanet, andré, , , , , . cavalier, john, joins insurgents, , ; family of, ; to geneva, ; to the cevennes, ; portrait of, ; in lower languedoc, ; defeats royalists, - ; takes château servas, - ; repulses bonnafoux, ; at nismes, - ; successes of, ; winter campaign, - ; at vagnas, - , ; betrayed at tower of belliot, - ; at martinargues, - ; at rosni, ; his cave magazines, - ; his interview with lalande, - ; attempts peace, ; his interviews with villars, - ; deserted by followers, - ; to england, and subsequent career, . caves in the cevennes, , - ; at la tour, . cazenove, raoul de, , . cevennes, the, persecutions in, , - , ; secret meetings in, , - ; executions in, , - ; description of, - ; arming of the people, - ; occupied by troops, ; prophetic mania in, ; encounter at pont-de-montvert, ; outbreak against du chayla, - ; map of, ; protestants of, compared with covenanters, - ; organization in, - ; caves in, , - ; visit to, - ; present inhabitants of, , - ; devastation of, - . champ domergue, battle at, . charlemont, capture of, . château queyras, . chaumont, . chayla, du, - , . chenevix, (note). choiseul, duc de, . claris, . colognac, execution of, . comiers, . conderc, salomon, , . "conversions," rapid, . converts, - , - . cook, captain, last voyage round the world, ; cruel death, . court profligacy, (note). court, antoine, - ; organizes school for preachers, ; marriage of, ; retires to switzerland, ; results of his work, - ; in languedoc, . covenanters compared with protestants of the cevennes, - . cromwell, - , . d'aguesseau's opinion of protestants of languedoc, - . dauphiny, map of, ; aspect of, - . delada, mdlle. de, . denbeck, abbé of, - . denèse, rotolf de la, . desert, assemblies in the, - , - . desparvés, m., . dormilhouse, , - . dortial, . douglas, lieut.-general, - , . dragonnades, - , , - , ; horrors of, . drogheda, surrender of, . dumas, death of, . dundalk, schomberg's army at, - . durand, pierre, . easter massacre of the vaudois, - . england attempts to assist the camisards, - . enniskilleners, the, . evertzen, vice-admiral, . execution of pastors, . fabre, jean, ; sent to galleys, - ; obtains leave of absence, ; exonerated, ; life dramatized, and result, . fermaud, pastor, . freemantle, rev. mr., visits of, to the vaudois, , , . french labouring classes, present condition of, - . freney, gorge of, . fusiliers, missionary, . galley, description of, - ; use in war, - . galley-slaves, treatment of, - ; liberation of protestants, , (note), - . galway, earl of, . gilly, dr., visit to the vaudois, - , , . ginckel, lieut.-general, , _et seq._ glorious return of the vaudois, - . grace, col. richard, . guarrison, mdlle. de, . guerin, death of, . guignon betrays cavalier, ; executed, . guil, valley of the, . guillestre, - . guion executed, . herbert, admiral, . homel, tortures and death of, . hood, lord, . huguenots, the (see _camisards_); emigrations of, , - , , , ; persecution of, after camisard insurrection, - ; as galley-slaves, - ; brought together by court, - ; reorganization of, - ; outrages on, ; great assemblies of, - ; last of the executions, ; last of the galley-slaves, - ; character of, - ; later history of, - ; decrees against, - ; in england, ; foreign services of, - . ireland and james ii., _et seq._ irish brigade, - , . iron boot, the, . james ii., flight of, , ; lands with an army in ireland, , ; campaign against william iii., _et seq._, _et seq._; deserted, ; taken prisoner, ; his last proclamation, ; at the french court, ; cowardice, , - ; catholic estimate of his character, . joany, nicholas, insurgent leader, , , . johannot, . julien, brigadier, , - . lagier, jean, , (note). lajonquière defeated at martinargues, - . lalande, his interview with cavalier, - . languedoc (see _cevennes_), early liberty in, ; albigenses in, ; protestants of, - ; industry of, ; emigration from, after revocation, , ; arming of people of, - ; outbreak of fanaticism in, - ; present inhabitants of, - . laporte, leader of camisards, - ; organizes insurgents, ; at collet, ; at champ domergue, ; killed at molezon, . la salette, ; miracle of, - . la tour, - . laugier at guillestre, ; at château queyras, . lausanne, school for preachers at, ; society of help at, - . lauteret, col de, . lauzun, count, , . lesdiguières, duc de, - , . limerick, siege of, - , . lintarde, marie, imprisonment of, . locke, john, on protestants of nismes, (note). londonderry, siege of, . louis xiv., , , , . louis xv., . louis xvi., ; maxim of, ; his decrees against protestants, - ; his mode of stopping the emigration of huguenots, - ; expulsion of protestants, ; assists james ii., . luttrell, capt., brilliant naval achievement of, . mackay, major-general, , . marillac, michel de, inventor of the dragonnades, . marion on influence of camisard prophets, . marlborough, earl of, . marteilhe, autobiography of, , - . martinargues, battle at, - . massillon on louis xiv., . mazel, abraham, , . mialet, visit to, - . milsom, edward, , , - . missionaries, booted, . montandre, marquis de, . montauban, persecutions at, - . montpellier, protestant church at, - ; the peyron at, ; execution of brousson at, , . montrevel, marshal, in languedoc, ; at pompignan, ; adopts extermination, ; at tower of belliot, - ; character of, ; recalled, ; defeats cavalier, - . nantes, revocation of edict of, and its results, - , , - , ; contemporary opinion upon, - ; enactments of edict of revocation, - , - . neff, felix, - ; life of, , ; his account of winter at dormilhouse, ; his charge, . nelson, lord, eulogium on capt. riou, ; at the battle of copenhagen, - . ners, visit to, . newton butler, engagement at, . nismes, protestant church at, ; petition from, ; brousson at, , ; guion at, ; country about, , - ; success of camisards near, ; cavalier at, - , - ; treaty of, - ; huguenot meetings at, . ormond, duke of, . palons, - . paulet, mdlle., forgeries in name of, - . pechell, augustus, . pechell, capt. william cecil, . pechell, col. jacob, . pechell, paul, . pechell, samuel, extraordinary probity of, . pechell, sir g. r. brooke, . pechell, sir thomas, . péchels de la boissonade, samuel de, narrative of his persecutions, _et seq._; imprisonment, , - ; meeting with his wife, ; condemned to banishment, ; embarkation, ; sails for america, ; sufferings, - ; reaches the west indies, ; illness and arrival in london, ; accepts a commission in the english army, ; campaign in ireland, ; return to london, ; removal with his wife and son to dublin, ; death of, ; his descendants, . péchels, family of, . péchels, madame de, inhumanity towards, - ; touching interview with her husband, ; further trials, ; escape to geneva, ; in london, ; reunited to her husband, . pelice, valley of the, . pélisson, . pont-de-montvert, outbreak at, - ; description of, - ; end of camisard insurrection at, - . portland, earl of, , . portland vase, . poul, captain, in upper cevennes, ; at champ domergue, - ; takes laporte at molezon, ; defeated and killed near nismes, - . pra du tour, - , . preachers, education of, - ; hardships of, - , - . project, the, . "protestant wind," the, . protestantism in france, present chances of, . quoite, execution of, . rapin, capt. paul, birth and education, - ; emigrates to england, ; embarks for holland, ; a cadet in the dutch army, ; sails for england, ; encounters a storm, ; with the army of william iii., _et seq._; aide-de-camp, ; wounded and promoted, ; conciliatory spirit, - ; at kinsale, ; tutor to lord woodstock, ; presented to the king, ; makes the "grand tour" with his pupil, - ; secures the portland vase, ; marriage, ; at the hague and wesel, ; his "dissertation on the origin and nature of the english constitution," ; "history of england," - ; death of, . rapin, daniel de, . rapin family, - , . rapin, solomon, , . ravanel, insurgent leader, defeats royalists near nismes, ; near bouquet, ; supplants cavalier, - ; death of, . redothière, isabeau, . rességuerie, m. de la, . rey, fulcran, his preaching and death, - . riou, capt., r.n., lord nelson's opinion of, ; ancestry, - ; birth and education, ; becomes a midshipman, ; accompanies capt. cook in his last voyage, ; witnesses the murder of the captain, ; return to england and appointed lieutenant, ; a sharer in the glory of capt. luttrell's brilliant achievement, ; appointed to the command of the _guardian_, ; letters to his mother, , ; his ship strikes upon an iceberg, ; remains with the vessel, ; letter to the admiralty, ; extract from his log, ; rescued by dutch whalers, and return to england, ; receives the special thanks of the admiralty, ; commander of the royal yacht _princess augusta_, ; at the battle of copenhagen, - ; death of, ; his character, - ; monument in st. paul's cathedral, . rochemalan, vaudois struggles at, - . roger, jacques, . roland, nephew of laporte, ; insurgent leader, ; succeeds laporte, ; in lower cevennes, ; organizes camisards, - ; takes sauvé, ; at pompignan, ; at salindres, - ; at font-morte, - ; at pont-de-montvert, ; death of, . romanche, valley of the, , . rosen, count, ; indignation against king james, . rostan, alpine missionary, (note). rou, jean, - . roussel, alexandre, . ruvigny, major-general, . st. bartholomew, doubt thrown upon massacre of, . saint-etienne, rabout, - . st. hypolite, meeting at, . saint-ruth, marshal, ; in ireland, (note), _et seq._ saint-simon on the treatment of converts, . sands, captain, . san veran, . sarsfield, general, - , . savoy and france, war declared, . savoy, duke of, takes refuge with the vaudois, . schomberg, marshal, _et seq._, , _et seq._; death of, . schomberg, count, . sedan, prosperity of, before revocation, - ; brousson at, - . seguier, pierre, insurgent leader, , ; at frugères, ; at font-morte, ; taken, tried, and executed, - . sirven, ; case of, taken up by voltaire, . society of friends in languedoc, - . souverain executed, . squeezers, the, (note). synod of french protestant church, . talmash, major-general, . telford, anecdote of, . testart, marie anne, . tetleau, major-general, . toleration, edict of, . "troopers' lane," . tyrconnel, earl of, - . tyrconnel, lady, retort to king james, . val fressinières, - , - . val louise, ; massacre at, . vaudois, the country of, ; early christianity of, - ; early persecutions of, ; easter massacre of, - ; visits of dr. gilly to, - , , ; passiveness of, - ; massacre of, at val louise, ; persecutions of, - , , , - , - ; refuges of, , , , , ; struggles of, at rochemalan, - ; flight at the revocation, ; apparently exterminated, ; in switzerland, ; prepare to return, ; arnaud appointed leader, ; assisted by william of orange, ; the glorious return of, - ; struggles of, at the balsille, ; assist duke of savoy, ; emancipation of, - . venours, marquis de, death of, . vesson, , . vidal, isaac, preacher, . villars, marshal, on prophetic mania in languedoc, ; appointed to command in languedoc, ; at nismes, ; clemency of, - ; treats with cavalier, , ; suppresses insurrection of camisards, . vincent, isabel, prophetess, , . vivens, death of, . voltaire, takes up case of calas, - ; takes up case of sirven, ; case of chaumont, . waldenses, the, . walker, dr. george, death of, . waller, sir james, . wheel, punishment of the, (note). william of orange lands in england, ; proclaimed king, ; campaign against james ii., _et seq._, _et seq._; his fleet, - ; wounded, ; death of, . woodstock, lord, - . wurtemberg, duke of, , . printed by virtue and co., limited, city road, london. villegagnon, by w.h.g. kingston. ________________________________________________________________________ the date is sometime during the reign of philip and mary, the catholic interlude between the protestant times of henry the eighth and his son edward the sixth, and queen elizabeth. religious intolerance was at an extreme, with burnings at the stake and other very nasty tortures being applied to persons of an opposite sect. nigel melvin comes to the court of france with some letters to deliver. his young cousin mary seton is with him in the opening scene, and she introduces him to the young royals who happen to be walking in the same garden. we find that there are several with protestant leanings even in that setting. nigel is conducted to a house where he is to find admiral coligny, who is setting up an expedition to found a protestant colony the other side of the atlantic in the bay now known as rio de janeiro, and idea that had been propounded by monsieur villegagnon. nigel is given command of one of the ships. they set off for havre, where the vessels are, but on the way nigel overhears a conversation between villegagnon and a monk, which makes it plain that villegagnon is no protestant, and that there is a dubious motive in all these plans. on arrival at rio they meet with a local indian chief who warns them about some white settlers nearby who appear to have a religion not at all satisfactory to indian tastes. these are the portuguese, catholics. they are permitted to settle on any island in the bay. there is a gale and it becomes plain they must move to a more sheltered island than the one they started on. nigel falls in love with the fair lady constance, but so also does the indian, tecumah. nigel returns to france to pick up more protestant emigrants, who have to run the gauntlet of a catholic mob apparently led by the monk who had been plotting before the first voyage, with villegagnon. the voyage proceeds well but the five french ships were attacked by five portuguese, whom they routed except for one, which they captured. they were unable to shut up the shot-holes in her, and she sinks. on arrival in brazil they set her passengers and crew ashore in a portuguese-held part of the territory, and continue to their settlement in the bay of rio. thereafter the story gets more and more exciting, and we hope that you will read it for yourself. ________________________________________________________________________ villegagnon, by w.h.g. kingston. chapter one. the two cousins. "and what brought you to france, fair cousin?" the question was put by a beautiful girl scarcely yet verging on womanhood to a fine intelligent youth, two or three years her senior, as they paced slowly on together through the gardens of the louvre on the banks of the seine, flowing at that period bright and clear amid fields and groves. before them rose the stately palace lately increased and adorned by henry the second, the then reigning monarch of france, with its lofty towers, richly carved columns, and numerous rows of windows commanding a view over the city on one side, and across green fields and extensive forests, and far up and down the river on the other. the walk along which the young people were proceeding was shaded by tall trees, the thick boughs of which kept off the rays of the sun, shining brightly on the gay flowers and glittering fountains, seen in the open space beyond them. the young girl had the air and manner of a grown-up person, with that perfect self-possession which seems natural to those brought up in the atmosphere of a court. her companion's manner formed a contrast to hers; but though evidently not at all at his ease, as a brave man does when called upon to encounter danger, he had braced himself up to face those he might have to meet, who would, he naturally felt, look down on him on account of his travel-stained dress, his scottish accent, and rustic appearance. "in truth, cousin mary, i left scotland as many of our countrymen are compelled to do, to seek my fortune abroad, and have come with letters of introduction to several noblemen and others; among them to admiral coligny, my father's old comrade in arms. our castle is well-nigh in ruins, and my estate yields scarcely revenue sufficient to supply me with clothes and arms, much less to restore it as i wished to have done. i have already made two voyages to far-off lands, and come back no richer than i went, and have at length resolved to take service in the navy of france, in which i may hope to carve out my way to distinction, with the help of the admiral." "he may be ready enough to receive you and afford you his patronage; but i warn you, cousin nigel, that he may be less able to forward your interests than you may suppose. he is known to hold the principles of the leaders of those dangerous people the protestants, who are hated and feared at court, where the guises, the brothers of the queen regent of scotland, have of late gained the chief influence. take my advice, cousin nigel, seek some more profitable patron, and have nothing to do with the huguenots." "i thank you for your advice, cousin. i must confess, however, that i do not hold the opinion you express of the protestants, but on the contrary, am greatly inclined to agree with their principles. i lately heard a wonderful preacher, one john knox, who has appeared in scotland, and brought thousands to see the gross errors of the papal system. he proves clearly that the pope of rome has no real ground for his pretensions to be the head of christ's church on earth; that he cannot be the successor of the apostle peter, who never was bishop of rome; but that he is rather the successor of the great heathen high priest, whose idolatries he perpetuates and supports, and that therefore he and his cardinals and priests are impostors, who should on no account be obeyed. he clearly explains indeed that those who rule in the seven-hilled city represent no other than the scarlet woman spoken of in the apocalypse, their system being in truth the mystery of iniquity." "oh, dreadful!" exclaimed the young lady. "why, cousin nigel, you are a rank heretic, and were you to express such opinions as these in public, your life would be in danger. hundreds of frenchmen have already been burned for holding opinions not half as bad as those you have expressed. i am almost afraid to listen to you; not that we trouble ourselves much about such matters at court, where people are allowed to think what they like, provided they do not utter their thoughts too loudly, or in the hearing of the doctors of the sarbonne (the theological college of france), who have of late become rigidly orthodox, and are resolved to put down the reformers. i must advise you, at all events, to keep your own counsel; and if you are still determined to apply to admiral coligny, as your views agree with his, they will be in your favour." "thank you for your advice, sweet cousin," answered nigel. "i will follow it so far as not to parade my opinions; but should they be attacked, i shall be ready, if necessary, to defend them either with my tongue or my sword." "you are not likely to be called upon to use either of those formidable weapons, provided you are discreet," said the young lady, laughing. "you may occasionally at court hear the protestants satirised, or made subjects of lampoons; but it would be folly to take notice of such trivialities, and you would be in continual hot water with worthy people, perfectly ready otherwise to treat you as a friend. i will speak to some i know, who will assist your object and forward you to the admiral, should you determine to seek his patronage." "i would rather trust to so great and good a man than to any one else i have heard of in france," said nigel; "and am anxious, as soon as possible, to make myself known to him." by this time the young people had got within a few paces of the termination of the shady walk, when before them appeared a gay company of ladies and gentlemen, most of the former being very young, while the latter were, on the contrary, advanced in life, as their snowy locks and white beards betokened, though they were richly dressed, and were doing their utmost to assume a youthful and _debonnaire_ manner. nigel on seeing the gay company instinctively drew back into a recess by the side of the walk, unwilling, if possible, to present himself before them. his cousin being ready to humour him, placed herself on a garden seat, and invited him to sit by her. perhaps she was unwilling that the interview with her near relative should be brought to an end sooner than could be helped. they could from this spot observe what was going forward without being seen. merry laughter came from the party of gaily dressed people who passed along the walks, several approaching near enough to allow their features easily to be distinguished. "who are those?" asked nigel, as several young people came slowly by, following a fair girl, whose beautiful countenance and graceful figure distinguished her from the rest, though many of her companions were scarcely less lovely. so thought the young scotchman, as he stood watching them with admiring eyes. "the first is our lady mary, about to wed the dauphin of france," answered his cousin. "you must, as a loyal scot, be introduced to her. perchance if you are inclined to take service at court you may obtain a post, though his majesty king henry does not generally bestow such without an ample equivalent." "my taste does not lead me to covet such an honour," said nigel. "i should soon weary of having to dress in fine clothes and spend my time in idleness, waiting in ante-chambers, or dangling after the lords and ladies of the court. pardon me, sweet cousin, for saying so. i came to france to seek for more stirring employment than such a life could afford. i will do my _devoir_ to our young queen, and must then proceed on my journey to find the admiral. had it not been for the packet of letters with which i was entrusted, as also for the sake of seeing you, i should not have come to paris at all. but tell me, who are her majesty's attendants? there is one whose countenance, were i long to gaze at it, would, i am sure, become indelibly fixed on my heart. what a sweet face! how full of expression, and yet how modest and gentle!" "they are my two sister maries, mary beaton and mary carmichael [see note]; but it is neither of them you speak of. i see now; the damsel you describe is constance de tourville, whose father, by-the-by, is a friend of coligny's. the admiral, i am informed, is staying with the count at this very time, and when i tell constance who you are, she will, i am sure, find an excuse for despatching an attendant with you to her father. i can without difficulty make you known to her, as the etiquette of the court is not very rigid, or i should not have been allowed to wander about the gardens with a gallant young gentleman like yourself, albeit you claim to be my cousin and an old playmate." "i see several gentlemen among the fair damsels, so i conclude that my presence is not altogether an irregularity," said nigel. "they are privileged persons, however," said mary seton. "that sickly youth who has just joined the queen and is awkwardly endeavouring to make himself agreeable is her affianced husband, the dauphin. for my part i would rather not be a queen than be compelled to wed so miserable an object; but i am talking treason. here comes one of the queen's uncles, the duke de guise--that tall, dark, ill-favoured gentleman. he is, notwithstanding, one of the most powerful men in france, and intends to be more, powerful still when his niece and her young husband ascend the throne. but come; the party are moving, on, and as constance de tourville is lingering behind, we can quickly overtake her, and when i have made you known to her, you can tell her of your wish to see the admiral." nigel felt very unwilling to quit his hiding-place, but his cousin, taking him by the hand, playfully led him forward. they quickly overtook the interesting girl of whom they had been speaking. nigel, as he was introduced, made a bow which would not have disgraced the most polished gentleman at court. the young lady smiled as she cast a glance at his handsome, honest countenance, with the glow of health on it, increased somewhat by the blush which rose on finding himself in circumstances so unusual to him. "my cousin nigel melvin has come with an introduction to the admiral, who is, i understand, staying with your father, and he desires to set out to the chateau, though i would fain persuade him to take service at the court, instead of tempting the dangers of the sea, which he has the extraordinary taste to desire." "our house steward, maitre leroux, is at present in paris, and will return to-morrow; and should your cousin desire his escort, i will direct him to await his orders," said the young lady in a sweet voice. "where are you lodging, fair sir?" "i arrived but this morning, and left my valise at l'auberge de l'ange," answered nigel. "i know not where that is; but maitre leroux will easily find it out, and will call for you at any hour you may name." "a thousand thanks, lady, for your kindness," answered nigel, "i gladly accept your offer, and shall be ready to set out at early dawn if the landlord will permit me to depart at that hour." "maitre leroux will be at the palace this evening to receive a letter i am sending home, and i will direct him to call as you desire, though, as he loves his ease, he perchance may not be ready to commence the journey at quite so early an hour as you name." while constance was speaking, one of the ladies in attendance on the young queen turned back and beckoned to mary seton, who, hurrying forward, left nigel with her friend. "you will surely not take your cousin's advice, and seek for a post at this frivolous court," said constance hurriedly, again looking up at nigel's countenance. "catholics alone are in favour, while the protestants are detested. to which party do you belong?" "i might say to neither, as i am not a frenchman," answered nigel, surprised at the young lady's question. "at the same time i have heartily abjured the errors of rome." "i am glad to hear it; i thought so," said constance. "i myself am a protestant. i am here on sufferance, or rather a hostage, and would gladly return to my home if i had permission. persevering efforts have been made to pervert me, but i have had grace to remain firm to the true faith, and now i am simply exposed to the shafts of ridicule, and the wit and sneers of those who hold religious truth in contempt. you may be astonished at my thus venturing to speak to you, a perfect stranger, but i am sure that i may trust mary seton's cousin; and if you have the opportunity, i will beg you to tell my father or the good admiral what i say. i dare not write on the subject, nor can i venture to send a verbal message by maitre leroux." "i faithfully promise to convey your sentiments to either one or the other," answered nigel, casting a glance of admiration at the young girl, who could thus stand alone in her innocence amid the follies of that vicious and frivolous court. "as to accepting a place at court, even should it be offered me, i would refuse it, for my tastes lead me to seek my fortune on the wild ocean or in foreign lands; and it is with this object that i am about to visit the admiral, who will, i have been led to hope, forward my views." "you cannot apply to a wiser or truer man in france," answered constance. she was about to say more, when they were rejoined by mary seton, who came to conduct nigel into the presence of the queen. "as a loyal scot you are bound to pay your _devoir_ to her majesty," she said. "though neither of us have much recollection of our native wilds, we still regard our country with affection." nigel felt that there was no escaping, and mustering courage, went boldly forward till he reached the spot where the young queen was standing with several lords and ladies in attendance. though unaccustomed to courts, he had too much native dignity to be overawed, and bending on his knee he lifted the hand of the young queen to his lips and reverently kissed it. mary bestowed on him one of those fascinating smiles which in after years bound many a victim to her feet, and bidding him rise, questioned him about the affairs of scotland, and various particulars regarding her lady mother the regent, from whom he had been the bearer of a package. nigel, gaining courage, replied discreetly to the young queen's questions. the dauphin, however, made some remark which induced her to dismiss her countryman, when nigel fell back to where he had left constance, who had been rejoined by his cousin. "you comported yourself admirably, and i congratulate you," said the latter. "you will, i am sure, after a little experience become a perfect courtier." "i would not advise him to make the experiment," said constance. "there is little fear of it," answered nigel. "i hope ere long to find myself on the wide ocean, where i may breathe the free air of heaven, which i much prefer to the atmosphere of a court; but i must crave your pardon, fair ladies, for showing a disinclination to live where i might bask in the sunshine of your smiles." "that speech is truly worthy of a courtier," said mary seton, laughing. "come, come, cousin, change your mind. constance, you will help me to bring this gentleman to reason?" "i would not attempt to influence him, even if i could," answered the young lady. "he has decided wisely. in your heart you know, mary, that he is right; you yourself despise the miserable butterflies who hover round us with their sweet speeches, empty heads, and false hearts." constance de tourville was continuing in the same strain, when the young queen, with her attendants and the other ladies and gentlemen of the court, was seen moving towards the palace, and she and mary seton were compelled to follow them. while nigel was paying his parting adieus to the young ladies, a sigh escaped his cousin as he pressed her hand to his lips, for she knew the probability that they might not meet again. her heart was still faithful to scotland, and she loved her kith and kindred. "remember," said constance, as he paid her the same mark of respect. "be careful what you say to strangers: but you may trust maitre leroux; he is honest." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ note. three scottish young ladies were sent over to france to attend on queen mary. they were mary seton, mary beaton, and mary carmichael, and were named the queen's maries. chapter two. a walk through paris. on reaching the gate of the palace, nigel had met the captain of the scottish guard, norman leslie, a distant relative, by whose means he had gained admission to the palace, and had been able to enjoy the interview with his cousin, mary seton. "how fared it with you, nigel, among the gay ladies of the court?" asked the captain, one of those careless characters, who receive their pay and fight accordingly, very little troubled as to the justice of the cause they support. "i had a talk with my cousin, and had the honour of paying my _devoirs_ to the queen," answered nigel, cautiously. "having now no longer any business in paris, i am about to set out on a visit to admiral coligny. can you direct me to my hostelry, at the sign of the angel, and tell me where i can find a steed to carry me on my journey? for, albeit it would best suit my purse to trudge on foot, i would wish to present myself to the admiral in a way suitable to the character of a scottish gentleman." "as i am off guard i will accompany you, my good kinsman, and will assist you in procuring a horse," was the answer. nigel gladly accepted leslie's offer, and the two scotchmen set forth together. nigel, being totally ignorant of the city, had no notion in what direction they were going. they were passing through the rue saint antoine, when they saw before them a large crowd thronging round a party of troopers and a body of men-at-arms, who were escorting between them several persons, their hands bound behind their backs, and mostly without hats, the soldiers urging them on with the points of their swords or pikes; nigel also observed among them three or four women, who were treated with the same barbarous indignity as the men. "who are those unhappy people?" he asked. "heretics on their way to prison, to be burnt, probably, in a few days for the amusement of the king, who, ambitious of surpassing his sister sovereign, queen mary of england, and to exhibit his love for religion, manages to put to death ten times as many as she ventures to send to the stake, unless they recant, when they will have the honour of being strangled or hung instead," answered leslie, in a nonchalant tone. "he and his counsellors are determined to extirpate heresy; but as the protestants are numbered by hundreds of thousands, and as there are a good many men of high rank and wealth among them, his majesty has undertaken a difficult task." "i pray that he may alter his mind, or fail in the attempt," exclaimed nigel, indignantly. "i may whisper amen; although, as the foolish people bring the punishment on their own heads, i am not inclined to throw down the gauntlet in their cause, and must e'en do my duty and carry out the orders of the master whose bread i eat," said leslie. nigel did not reply, but he felt more than ever determined not to take service on shore, however tempting the offers he might receive. leslie told him that of late years, throughout france, many hundreds, nay, thousands of persons, after being broken on the wheel, or having had their tongues cut out, or being tortured in some other way, had been burnt at the stake for their religious opinions; but that, notwithstanding, the protestants increased in numbers, and that, for his part, though himself a faithful son of the church, he thought that a wiser plan might have been adopted. "for my part, i believe that had not the pope and the priests and monks interfered, and worked up some of our fanatic nobles and the ignorant populace to persecute their fellow-countrymen, they might have lived together on friendly terms; and, for the life of me, i cannot see why people should not be allowed to worship god according to the dictates of their consciences," added the shrewd scotchman, with a shrug of his shoulders. nigel, who had only heard rumours of such proceedings, felt his blood boil with indignation, and instinctively touching the hilt of his sword, he vowed that he was ready to do battle in the cause of justice and humanity. his kinsman, who saw the act, smiled; and divining his thoughts, said, "let me advise you to avoid interference in quarrels not your own, unless you receive a due recompense in pay, and then the less you trouble yourself about the rights of the case the better. come along. the first thing we are to do is to look out for your steed. honest jacques cochut will supply you with one which will bear you from one end of france to the other, and an attendant to bring the animal back. it will be more economical than purchasing a horse, unless you have a long journey to make." nigel accompanied his friend to the stables of jacques cochut, to whom leslie was well known. a strong and active steed was soon engaged, with the promise that it should be ready at the door of the hostelry at an early hour next morning. leslie, leaving nigel at the angel inn, returned to his duty at the palace, while the latter, having ordered his supper, retired to his room to think over the events of the day. it is needless to say that constance de tourville frequently recurred to his thoughts. he had heard enough to make him understand the dangerous position of the protestants in france, even of the highest rank, and the fearful persecutions to which all classes were exposed. from the remarks constance had made, it was evident that she herself was exposed to much annoyance, if not danger, even within the precincts of the palace, and he earnestly hoped that he might have an opportunity of speaking to her father, and obtaining her release. he had sat for some time when he was aroused by a knock at the door, and the servant of the inn announced that a person desired to speak with him. "let him come in," said nigel; and a respectable-looking man, somewhat advanced in life, as was shown by his silvery locks, stepped forward. "i am attached to the house of the count de tourville, whose daughter despatched me to seek you out, and place myself at your service." "come in, my friend," said nigel, offering him a chair. "you are, i presume, maitre leroux, and i am grateful to the young lady for her kindness, of which i will gladly avail myself. shall you be ready to set out to-morrow morning?" "i had intended to do so, but business will keep me in paris for another day," answered maitre leroux; "and if you, fair sir, do not object to remain, i will gladly set forth with you at any hour you may name on the following morning. you may, in the mean time, find amusement in this big city of paris." nigel, who was pleased with maitre leroux, though anxious to continue his journey, willingly agreed to wait for the purpose of having his escort. "but i have engaged my horse for to-morrow," he added. "i will easily settle that matter with jacques cochut; and if you will accept of my company i will call for you, and show you some of the sights of our city, as you will, alone, be unable to find your way about the streets, and may chance to lose yourself, or get into some difficulty." "thank you," said nigel. "i shall indeed be glad of your society, for, except a kinsman in the guards, i know no one in the whole of paris." these arrangements having been made, maitre leroux took his departure; and nigel was not sorry, soon after supper, to throw himself on his bed, and seek the repose which even his well-knit limbs required. nigel, who slept longer than was his wont, waited at the inn some time for maitre leroux. he was afraid to go out, lest the steward might arrive during his absence. at length his guide appeared. "i have been detained longer than i expected," said maitre leroux; "but monsieur will pardon me. we have still time to see much of the city." they set out, and during their walk visited many places of interest, of which the steward gave the history to the young scotchman. "your paris buildings surpass those of our bonny edinburgh in size and number, i must confess," remarked nigel; "but still we have our holyrood, and our castle, and the situation of our city is unrivalled, i am led to believe, by that of any other in the world." "as i have not seen your city i am unable to dispute the point," answered the steward. "would you like to visit one of our courts of justice? though not open to the public, i may be able to gain admittance, and i am deeply interested in the case, albeit it would be wise not to show that, and having a stranger with me will be a sufficient excuse." "under those circumstances i will gladly accompany you," said nigel. they soon reached the portals of a large building, through which, after some hesitation on the part of the guards, the steward and his companion were admitted. nigel observed that maitre leroux slipped some money into the hands of two or three people, this silver key evidently having its usual power of opening doors otherwise closed. going through a side door they reached a large hall, crowded with persons. among those seated were numerous ecclesiastics, a judge in his robes, and lawyers and their clerks; while a strong body of men-at-arms were guarding a party of some fifty or sixty persons, who, from their position and attitudes, were evidently prisoners. they were men of different ranks; several, from their costume, being gentlemen, and others citizens and artisans. there were a few women among them also. all looked deadly pale, but their countenances exhibited firmness and determination. "of what crime have these people been guilty?" asked nigel. "of a fearful one in the eyes of their judges," answered maitre leroux. "they have been worshipping god according to the dictates of their consciences, and were found assembled together in a house at meaux, listening to the gospel of the mild and loving saviour. they have already been put to the torture to compel them to recant and betray their associates, but it has not produced the desired effect. in vain their advocate has pleaded their cause. listen! the judge is about to pronounce their sentence." dreadful indeed that was. with blasphemous expressions, which cannot be repeated, the condemned were sentenced to be carried back to meaux; fourteen, after being again put to the torture, were to be burnt alive in the market-place; most of the others were to be hung up by their shoulders during the execution of their brethren, and then to be flogged and imprisoned for life in a monastery, while the remainder were to receive somewhat less severe, though still grievous punishment. the hardy young scot almost turned sick with horror and indignation as he heard the sentence; and putting his hand to his sword, he was about to cry out and demand, in the name of justice, that instead of being punished, the prisoners should be released, when his companion grasped him by the arm, whispering, "be calm, my friend; such events are so common in france, that we have grown accustomed to them. hundreds have already died as these men are about to die; and we, their countrymen, have been compelled to look on without daring to raise our voices in their cause, or, as you are inclined to do, to draw a sword for their defence." maitre leroux, after exchanging a few sentences in an undertone with three or four people they met, whose sad countenances showed the interest they took in the condemned, led his young friend from the so-called hall of justice. on their way they looked into the magnificent church of notre dame. priests in gorgeous dresses were chanting mass; music was pealing through the building, and incense was ascending to the roof. "impious mockery," muttered nigel. "well may calvin and john knox desire the overthrow of such a system, and desire to supplant it by the true faith of the gospel." "hush! hush! my young friend," whispered maitre leroux, hurrying him out of the church, regretting that he had entered it. "though many may think as you do, it's dangerous to utter such opinions in this place." "can nothing be done to save these poor men?" asked nigel. "surely the king cannot desire the destruction of his subjects?" "the king, like gallio, cares for none of these things. he is taught to believe that the priests are the best supporters of his crown: and, at all events, he knows that they allow him full licence in the indulgence of his pleasures, which the protestants, he supposes, would be less inclined to do." "i would that i were out of this city of paris, and away from france itself," said nigel. "many think and feel as you do, and are acting upon it," answered the steward. "already many thousand men of science and clever artisans have left, to carry their knowledge and industry to other lands; and others, in all directions, are preparing to follow. you will hear more about the matter when you visit the admiral, and my good master, who does not look unmoved on such proceedings. more on the subject it would not become me to say. not long ago an edict was issued, by which all the old laws on heresy were revived, it being the resolution of the king to purge and clear the country of all those who are deemed heretics. magistrates are ordered to search unceasingly for them, and to make domiciliary visits in quest of forbidden books, while the informer is to obtain one-third of the heretic's confiscated property. should a person be acquitted of heresy in any ordinary court of justice, he may be again tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal, thus depriving him of all chances of escape. even interference on behalf of a heretic is made penal, and should a person be suspected, he must exhibit a certificate of orthodoxy, or run the risk of being condemned. you see, therefore, young sir, that i am right in recommending caution as to what you say; not that these edicts have the effect expected, for calvinism increases rapidly, and the stream of emigration continues from all parts of the kingdom." they walked on in silence, nigel meditating on what he had heard. "some fresh air will do you good after the scenes we have witnessed," observed maitre leroux. "we will take a turn in the pre-aux-clercs. it is but a short distance past the invalides." it was evening, and a number of people were thronging that pleasant meadow on the banks of the seine, the hyde park of that period. a party of young men coming by struck up one of the hymns of marot, a translation of one of the psalms of david, written some years before by the protestant poet. others joined in, and evidently sang them heartily; several other parties, as they passed along, were indulging in the same melodies. "how is it, after what you have told me, that the people venture to sing these hymns?" asked nigel. "i know them well, for they have already been introduced into our protestant congregations in scotland." "they became the favourites of the king and court before they had the significance they now possess," answered the steward; "and it is only thus that many who hate the papal system can give expression to their sentiments. before long, however, i fear that they will be prohibited, or those who sing them will be marked as suspected. alas, alas! our lovely france will be deprived of all freedom of thought, opinion, and action." the worthy maitre leroux seemed greatly out of spirits as they took their way back to the inn. they parted at the door, for nigel felt no inclination to go forth again, and the steward had business, he said, to attend to. he promised to call for nigel at an early hour the next morning to set out for meaux, undertaking to direct jacques cochut to have his horses in readiness. chapter three. the visit to the admiral. maitre leroux did not call at as early an hour as nigel expected. his own horse and attendant had been at the door for some time before the steward made his appearance. he had an ample apology to offer, having been employed in an important matter till late at night. "come," he said, "we will make up for it. the lateness of the hour matters not, for, with your permission, we will halt on the road, so as to arrive early at the chateau to-morrow." they set out, followed by their two attendants. after leaving the gates of paris they continued some distance along the banks of the marne. the road was rough in places, and often deep in dust; full of holes and ruts in others, which made it necessary for the riders to hold a tight rein on their steeds, and prevented them generally from going out of a walk. maitre leroux carried a brace of huge pistols in his holsters, while nigel had a sword and a light arquebus, both their attendants being also armed; so that they were well able to defend themselves against any small party of marauders such as infested the roads in the neighbourhood of the capital. "we must make but a short stage to-day," said maitre leroux. "in truth, i am unwilling to travel late in the evening, and prefer stopping at the house of a friend to taking up our quarters at an inn where we might meet with undesirable companions." "but i shall be intruding on your friend," said nigel. "pardon me; you will, on the contrary, be heartily welcomed. i am very sure of your principles, and they agree with those of our host and his family, so you need not be under the restraint which would be necessary were we to sleep at a public inn." these arguments at once overcame any scruples nigel might have felt at going to a stranger's house uninvited. it yet wanted a couple of hours to sunset when they reached a good-sized mansion, though not possessing the pretensions of a nobleman's chateau. the owner, a man advanced in life, of gentlemanly refined manner, received maitre leroux in a friendly way, and on hearing from him who nigel was, welcomed him cordially. nigel was conducted into a saloon, where he was introduced to his host's wife and daughters and several other members of the family. supper was quickly prepared, and nigel found himself at once at home. as soon as the meal was over several other persons came in, some apparently of the same rank as the host, and others of an inferior order, but all staid and serious in their demeanour. the doors and windows were then carefully closed, and nigel observed that two of the party went out armed with swords and pistols, apparently to watch the approach to the house. a large bible was now produced, and several of the party drew forth smaller editions from beneath their garments. the host then offered up a prayer, and opening the bible, read a portion, commenting as he proceeded. a hymn was then sung and more of the scriptures read, after which the host delivered an address full of gospel truth, while he exhorted his hearers to hold fast to the faith, but at the same time remarked that they would be justified in flying from persecution if no other means could be found of avoiding it at home. he reminded all present, however, that their duty was to pray for their persecutors, and however cruelly treated, not to return evil for evil. nigel was reminded of various meetings of the same character he had attended in scotland, where, however, every man could speak out boldly, without the fear of interruption which seemed to pervade the minds of those present. he now knew that his host was one of the many protestants existing in the country who ventured thus in secret to worship god according to their consciences, even though running the risk of being condemned to death as heretics. after the guests had retired, the family spent some time in singing marot's hymns. "ah!" said the host, "it is only in praising god and reading his blessed words that we can take any pleasure. it is our consolation and delight, and enables us without complaining to endure the sad condition to which bigotry and tyranny have reduced our unhappy country. the only prospect now before us is exile, or imprisonment and death." nigel answered without hesitation that he felt much satisfaction in again having the opportunity of worshipping, as he had been accustomed to do at home, according to his conscience, and hearing the bible read and faithfully explained. his host wishing him and his companion a friendly farewell, and expressing a hope that he should see him again, they took their departure at an early hour the next morning. they had proceeded some distance when they entered a forest, through the centre of which the high road passed. they had been pushing on rather faster than usual, maitre leroux being anxious to get through it as soon as possible, when they saw before them a body of soldiers. as they got nearer they found that they were escorting a number of prisoners seated in rough country carts, into which they were fastened with heavy chains. "who are these unhappy people?" inquired nigel. "the same we saw condemned in paris," answered maitre leroux with a sigh. "if we do not wish to share their fate we must exhibit no sympathy for them, as the wretches who have them in charge would rejoice to add to their number. as it will be impossible to pass them at present, we will drop slowly behind." "would that i had a band of protestant scots with me, we would soon set them at liberty!" exclaimed nigel. "hush, hush! my friend," whispered the steward; "it becomes us not to fight with carnal weapons; such is dr calvin's advice." just at that moment a voice exclaimed, "brethren, remember him who is in heaven above!" some of the rear-guard immediately turned round, and with drawn swords dashed furiously towards nigel and maitre leroux, believing, evidently, that one of them had uttered the exclamation they had heard. they both drew up, for flight would have been useless, when, just as the troopers had got some fifty yards from them, a man advanced from among the trees and repeated the words in a loud tone. he was instantly seized by the soldiers, and being dragged back along them, was thrown into one of the carts among the other prisoners. his appearance probably saved the lives of nigel and his companion, for the doughty scot had drawn his sword, and would have fought desperately before he would have yielded himself a prisoner. "pull in your rein, i entreat you," said the steward; "we must not turn round, and the sooner we let these people get to a distance from us, the better." nigel, seeing that it would be hopeless to attempt assisting the unfortunate man, did as his companion advised, and they accordingly waited till the troopers were out of sight, taking good care not again to overtake them. their progress was thus considerably delayed, and not till they came to a road passing outside the town of meaux did they again venture to push forward. they managed before sunset to reach the chateau de tourville, a high conical-roofed pile, with numerous towers and a handsome gateway. maitre leroux, conducting nigel to a waiting-room near the entrance, went at once to the count, taking his letter of introduction. nigel had not been left long alone when the steward returned with the request that he would accompany him to the hall, where, he told him, he would find the count and admiral with several other persons. nigel, not being troubled by bashfulness, quickly followed his guide. the count, who was of middle age and handsome, courteously rose from his seat at the top of the table to welcome him. at the right hand of the count nigel observed a person of middle height, ruddy complexion, and well-proportioned figure, with a calm and pleasant, if not decidedly handsome countenance. on the other side sat a tall man, whose sunburnt features, though regular, wore an expression which at the first glance gave nigel the feeling that he was not a person in whom he would place implicit confidence, though directly afterwards, as he again looked at him, his manner seemed so frank and easy, that the impression vanished. several other persons of different ages, and apparently of somewhat inferior rank, sat on either side of the table. "which of those two can be the admiral?" thought nigel; "the last looks most like a naval commander." "the lady mary seton, your cousin, and my daughter, have written in your favour, young sir, and i am glad to see you at the chateau; you have, i understand, also a letter of introduction to admiral coligny, to whom allow me to make you known." saying this, the count presented nigel to the gentleman on his right side, who requested the person next him to move further down, bidding nigel to take the vacant seat. nigel observed that the meal was over, but the count ordered the servant to bring in some viands for the newly arrived guest. "as i take no wine you will allow me to read the letter brought by this young gentleman," said the admiral, turning to the count; "i never defer looking at an epistle if it can possibly be helped." the count bowed his acquiescence, and the admiral quickly glanced over the letter which nigel had presented to him. "i shall be glad to forward your object," he said, turning round with a calm smile, and playing with a straw, which he was wont to carry in his mouth. "fortunately, i have an opportunity of doing so. i am about to fit out an expedition to form a settlement in the southern part of america, and if your qualifications are such as i am led to believe, i will appoint you as an officer on board one of the ships. you will have but little time to remain idle in france, as we wish the ships to sail as soon as the emigrants who are going on board them can be collected. they will undoubtedly be anxious without delay to leave our unhappy country, where they are constantly subjected to the cruel persecutions of their opponents in religious opinions. would the service i propose suit your taste?" "though i might wish to engage in some more warlike expedition, yet i am willing and glad to go wherever you, sir, may think fit to send me," answered nigel. "well spoken, young man," said the admiral. "war is a necessity which cannot be avoided, but there are other employments in which a person may nobly engage with far greater advantage to himself and his fellow-creatures. such is the work in which i desire to employ you--the noble undertaking of founding a new colony, and planting the banner of pure religion and civilisation in the far-off wilds of the western world." the admiral spoke on for some time in the same strain, till nigel felt inspired with the same noble enthusiasm which animated the bosom of the brave and enlightened nobleman who was speaking to him. many questions were put to him concerning his nautical knowledge and religious belief, to which he answered in a satisfactory manner. "i believe you are well suited for the undertaking, and i will forthwith make you known to the commander of the expedition, my friend captain villegagnon," said the admiral. the dark man nigel had remarked, hearing his name mentioned, looked toward him. nigel bowed. the admiral, after explaining nigel's qualifications, went on to inquire what posts were vacant in the squadron? "that of the second officer on board my own ship, the _madeline_; and i shall be pleased to have a seaman of experience to fill it, although he is not a native of france," answered the captain. "you may consider your appointment as settled, my young friend," said the admiral. "i will desire my secretary to make it out, and as you assure me that you are a true protestant, i willingly appoint you, such being the religious opinions of all those who are about to form the colony of antarctic france, which i trust will be well-established under the wise government of monsieur villegagnon. many other ships will sail forth with emigrants seeking an asylum from the persecutions they are subjected to in france on account of their religious opinions." nigel warmly thanked the admiral for the prompt way in which he had met his request. "say nothing about that, my young friend; we are too glad to find protestant officers ready to engage in the expedition," was the answer. the conversation now became general, and the plans for the future colony were freely discussed, the count, who appeared as much interested as the admiral, taking a leading part--indeed, nigel gathered from what he heard, that he himself intended to go out among the first colonists. the idea of establishing the colony had been started, so nigel understood, by monsieur villegagnon, who had chosen the bay of nitherohy, since known as that of rio de janeiro, as the site of the first town to be built. it was a place which he had visited some years before on a trading voyage, when he and his companions had been well received by the natives, though they were at enmity with the portuguese, already established in the country, who claimed it as their own. this latter circumstance monsieur villegagnon remarked was of little consequence, as they were few in numbers, and, with the assistance of the natives, could easily be driven out. the repast being over, the admiral rose from the table, the other guests following his example. calling to captain villegagnon, he took him and nigel into the deep recess of a window to have some further conversation on the subject of the proposed colony. "monsieur de villegagnon sets out to-morrow to take command of the squadron, and you will do well to accompany him, young sir," he said, turning to nigel. "you will thus be able to superintend the fitting out of your ship, and see that the stores come on board, and that proper accommodation is prepared for the emigrants; many are of rank and position in society, and there are merchants, soldiers, and artificers, and you will have to consider how best to find room for them. i am glad to say that the king himself takes great interest in the success of the colony, and under the able management of so skilled a leader as he who has been appointed to the command, we may hope that the flag of france will wave proudly ere long over many portions of the continent." "it will not be my fault if the noble enterprise fails to succeed," said the captain, drawing himself up proudly, and then bowing to the admiral in acknowledgment of the compliment. "my chief satisfaction is, however, that a home will be found for so many of the persecuted protestants who are compelled for conscience sake to leave their native land." "you are right, my friend; that is a noble sentiment," observed the admiral; "and i would urge our friends who are dissatisfied with the state of affairs at home to place themselves under your command." "from the expressions our host has uttered, i may hope that he also will render valuable aid to our undertaking," observed the captain. "no one, be assured, more warmly enters into our views," answered the admiral, "and he will both with his purse and influence assist us, if he does not do so in a more effectual way." they were soon after joined by the count, who requested the captain to reserve two cabins for some persons who intended going on board just before the squadron put to sea. from the conversation which ensued, nigel found that most of the persons present purposed joining the expedition. they were all, he found from the remarks they made, protestants, and haters of the system of persecution which had so long been the curse of france. most of them had already disposed of their possessions, and were only waiting till the squadron was completely equipped to go on board. among them was a protestant minister, and, notwithstanding the edicts against meeting for public or private worship, the doors of the chateau being closed, before retiring to rest all the inmates were collected, the bible was read and prayers offered up, those for the success of the undertaking and the preservation of the persons about to embark not being forgotten. maitre leroux accompanied nigel to his chamber. he expressed his pleasure on hearing that he had obtained the object of his wishes. "would that i could accompany you," he said, with a sigh; "but my duty compels me to remain, and watch over my master's property, should he be called away. ah, he is a kind, good master, and his daughter is an angel. i would lay down my life for her sake, should she be deprived of her father--and we never know what may happen in these times. alack! i fear that she is in society little congenial to her taste and opinion, for she is a true protestant, as was her sainted mother, now in heaven." nigel felt deeply interested in listening to the garrulous steward's account of his young mistress, and encouraged him to go on. she had been compelled, against her father's and her own wish, to reside at court, for the evident purpose of perverting her faith; "but she is too sound, and too wise to allow them to succeed," he added, "though i would the dear young lady were back with us again." chapter four. what nigel overheard. all arrangements having been made, the next morning, shortly after the sun had risen, captain villegagnon, with a considerable party, were ready to set out for havre de grace, the port at which the squadron was fitting out. they purposed to avoid paris, but had to pass through meaux on their way to join the high road leading to havre. the good admiral and monsieur de tourville came out to wish them farewell as they mounted their horses, and maitre leroux was waiting at a little distance, where he might have a few last words with nigel. "farewell, my young friend," he said, putting a small testament into his hand; "you will find this an inestimable treasure. i dare not keep it long, as it is considered treason for a frenchman to possess god's word, though i have hidden away another copy to which i may go when unobserved to refresh my soul; and, mark you, should my master and young mistress ever have occasion to seek for your assistance, you will, i am sure, afford it." "i promise you that i will most gladly," answered nigel, wondering what the old steward could mean. wishing his worthy friend good-bye, he pushed on to overtake his travelling companions. on entering meaux, they found the town in a strange commotion, the people all rushing with eager looks to the market-place, in which, as they reached it, they found a large crowd assembled. they caught sight of a number of high gibbets erected at intervals round it, while in the centre was a circle of stakes surrounded by faggots. the travellers would have passed on, but the dense crowd prevented them from moving, and their leader himself showed no inclination to press forward. presently shouts arose, and, the crowd opening, a horse was seen dragging a hurdle, on which a human being lay bound, the blood flowing from his mouth. a party of soldiers next appeared with a number of persons, their hands bound behind them, in their midst; while priests, carrying lighted tapers, were seen among them, apparently trying to gain their attention. some of the prisoners were singing a hymn of marot's, and all carried their heads erect, advancing fearlessly to the place of execution. on arriving, they were seized by savage-looking men, while some were speedily hoisted up to the gibbets by their shoulders, where they hung, enduring, it was evident, the greatest agony. fourteen of the party were then bound to as many stakes, the unhappy man on the hurdle being the first secured. among them nigel recognised the person who had been seized in the forest on the previous day for shouting, "brethren, remember him who is in heaven above." though the cords were drawn so tight as to cut into their wrists and ankles, no one uttered a cry for mercy, but, lifting their eyes to heaven, continued singing, or exhorting their companions to be firm. the faggots being now piled round them, the priests retired, uttering curses on their heads; while bands of music struck up to drown the voices of the sufferers. at the sight of two men approaching with torches, the people raised loud shouts of savage joy, and one of the piles of faggots surrounding the stake, that to which the chief person, whose tongue had been cut out, was bound, was speedily kindled. "all! all! let them all be burned together," shouted the mob, dancing frantically. the other piles were quickly lighted, the smoke ascending from the fourteen fires forming a dark canopy overhead. the victims, as long as they could be distinguished, were seen with their eyes turned to heaven, singing and praising god with their last breath. the savage fury of the ignorant populace was not yet satiated. those who had been hung up by the shoulders were now taken down, and so dreadfully flogged, that some of them petitioned that they might be thrown into the flames amid the ashes of their martyred friends; but this was a mercy their cruel executioners had no intention of affording them. bleeding, they were dragged off to be imprisoned in a monastery, where they were to be shut up for life. at length villegagnon, who had looked on with perfect indifference, called to his companions to follow, and, the crowd beginning to disperse, they were able with less difficulty to advance. the lowest of the rabble only had exulted in the dreadful scene; the greater number of the people exhibited very different feelings. nigel observed many in tears, or with downcast looks, returning to their homes; others exchanging glances of indignation; and he heard several exclaiming, "they died in a righteous cause. may we have grace to suffer as they have done." "truly, as i have heard it said in scotland, `the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,'" observed nigel to another of his companions, whose tears and groans showed the grief he suffered at the spectacle he had just witnessed. villegagnon kept his party together, for more than once some of the more ferocious persons of the mob cast suspicious looks at them, and mutterings arose, "who are these? they have the air of lutherans, or they would look more joyous at the destruction of heretics." "i hold the king's commission, and these are under my orders," cried villegagnon. "make way, good people, make way, and allow us to proceed on our journey." still the mob pressed round, and where showing a determination to stop the travellers, when a monk stepped forward, and exclaimed, "i know that gentleman, and he is a true son of the church. interfere not, at your peril, with him and his companions." nigel fancied that he observed glances of intelligence exchanged between the captain and the monk, who had so opportunely come to their rescue. the mob, at length pacified, drew back, and the party were allowed to leave the town without being again molested. they pushed on as fast as their horses could go. "we have had a happy escape," observed nigel's companion, "for although a large portion of the population of meaux are protestant, yet the rabble, supported by the troops and some of the government authorities, have the upper hand, and it would have fared ill with us had we been stopped and our object discovered." night had already set in when they reached a hostelry where they were to remain till the morning. as most of the travellers were fatigued, they retired to rest as soon as supper was over, with their saddles as pillows, and their cloaks wrapped round them, lying down in the chief saloon, wherever space could be found. nigel, with two or three others, sat up some time longer, when, having got his saddle and cloak, intending to seek repose, he found every place occupied. while hunting about, he entered a small room in which were a couple of truckle bedsteads. neither was occupied. "i am in luck," he said to himself, and placing his saddle and other property by his side, having taken off his riding boots and some of his clothes, he threw himself upon one of the beds which stood in a corner. drawing the coverlid over him, he was soon, sailor-like, fast asleep. after some time, he was awakened by hearing the door open, and, looking up, he saw two persons enter the room. one was villegagnon, who carried a lamp in his hand; the other was, he saw by the person's costume, an ecclesiastic. they advanced across the room towards the window, where stood a table and a couple of chairs. villegagnon threw himself into one of them, with his back towards him, the other imitating his example. the latter produced writing materials, and several papers, which villegagnon held to the lamp to read. "you have made a happy commencement of your work, my friend," said the priest. "if you carry it out thoroughly, the church, the duke of guise, and the cardinal of lorraine will be deeply indebted to you. twenty calvinist nobles, and some four score of the commonalty, have, i see, determined to accompany you, and they will entice many more. we shall be glad to be rid of them at present out of france, and we will then send out a larger number of faithful catholics, so that you will reap the honour of founding a french colony in the new world, the church will triumph, and the calvinists be extirpated." "but the proceeding smacks somewhat of treachery, and it can matter but little to you at home whether the colony is established by calvinists or catholics, so that it is firmly grounded and adds to the honour and glory of france," observed villegagnon. "nay, nay, my friend," said the priest, putting his hand on the captain's arm; "remember that the means sanctifies the end. we can allow no calvinists to exist, either here or abroad. they would be continually coming back with their pestiferous doctrines, or, finding themselves in the majority, would speedily put an end to our holy church. they must be extirpated, root and branch." "i have no wish to support the protestants, as thou knowest right well, reverend father," answered the captain; "but they are countrymen, and fight well, and labour well, and count among their number the cleverest mechanics in france. i know not how it is, but it seems to me that everywhere the most intelligent men have become calvinists." "their father satan gives them wisdom. take care, captain, that you are not carried away by their doctrines. the true faith will triumph, depend on that," said the priest, frowning as he spoke. "your arguments are conclusive. it will not be my fault if the plan miscarries," answered villegagnon. "i will keep on the mask till i feel myself strong enough to throw it off." "you will do well. do not be in a hurry. we must get as many of these pestiferous sectarians into the net as possible." further conversation of the same character was held between the two worthies for some time. nigel had found himself most unintentionally acting the part of an eavesdropper. he had at first felt inclined to start up and make the captain and priest aware of his presence; but as the conversation went on he felt that he was justified in thus learning the character of the leader of the expedition, whose evil intentions he hoped he might be the means of counteracting. he determined, therefore, to appear to be fast asleep should they, on quitting the room, discover him. as he saw them rise, he closed his eyes. he heard their footsteps as they approached the door. just then the light which villegagnon carried fell upon him. "i had no idea that anyone was in the room," whispered the captain, holding the lamp towards nigel. "who is he?" asked the priest, in a low voice. "a young pig of a scotchman, whom the admiral insisted on my taking on board as an officer." "should he have overheard what was said, he might interfere with our proceedings," observed the priest. "your dagger would most speedily settle the question, and prevent mischief." "i am not fond of killing sleeping men, holy father," answered the captain, in a somewhat indignant tone. "even had the youth been awake, he is so little acquainted with french that he could not have understood what we were saying; but, you see, he is fast asleep. i, however, will keep an eye upon him, and shall soon learn whether he knows anything. if he does, we have frequently dark and stormy nights at sea, when men get knocked overboard. such may be his fate; you understand me." "a good idea. i will trust to your discretion," said the priest, and, greatly to nigel's relief, they left the room. he remained awake, considering how he should act. at length he heard some one enter the room; it was the captain, who, just taking a glance at him, threw himself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. at early dawn nigel awoke, and, putting on his garments, went down into the yard to get some water to wash his hands and face. the rest of the party were soon on foot. the captain met him in the morning with a smiling countenance, and, as he did not even allude to his having shared his room, nigel thought it better to say nothing about the matter. he looked about for the priest, but he was nowhere to be found, nor did nigel hear any one allude to him. it was evident that he had come and gone secretly. the rest of the journey to havre was performed without any other incident worthy of note. three stout ships were found in the harbour, already in a forward state of equipment. nigel went on board the _madeline_, with several of his travelling companions, and at once took possession of the cabin intended for his use. the officers and the crew, as far as he could learn, were all protestants, as were undoubtedly the passengers who had already come on board. he found plenty of occupation in receiving and stowing the provisions and stores, and in setting up the rigging and bending sails. he was thus kept actively employed for several days, till the _madeline_, the most advanced ship, was fully ready for sea. all the passengers, he observed, came off at night, to avoid the observation of their countrymen. although the ships were already crowded with almost as many people as they could carry, there were still two vacant cabins on board the _madeline_. chapter five. under weigh--arrival. morn had just broken; a southerly wind blew gently down the harbour, and captain villegagnon gave the order to lift the heavy anchors from their oozy beds. "a boat is coming from the shore and pulling rapidly towards us," said nigel to the captain. "the people on board her are making signals. shall we stop weighing the anchor?" "yes, without doubt," answered the commander, looking towards the boat. "i thought that they had abandoned their design. we are still to have the advantage of the count's assistance and company." nigel looked eagerly towards the approaching boat. besides the rowers, there were several passengers, two of whom he saw were females, and at length, as they approached, he recognised the count de tourville. his heart began to beat more violently than it was wont to do. he felt almost sure that the lady by the count's side was his daughter constance. all doubt in a few minutes was set at rest, when the count, leading his daughter, came up the broad ladder which had been lowered to allow them to ascend. constance gave him a smile of recognition as he bowed low, as did the other officers standing round, to welcome her and her father on board. the squadron was now quickly under weigh, and gliding rapidly down the river. the weather looked fine, and all hoped for a prosperous voyage. many who had narrowly escaped with their lives from the romanists began to breathe more freely as the ships, under all sail, stood down the channel. yet there were sad hearts on board, for they were leaving their beloved france a prey to civil strife, and their fellow religionists to the horrors of persecution, so that for the time they forgot their high hopes of founding another france in the new world. as nigel paced the deck in the performance of his duty, he was often able to stop and speak to the count and his daughter, and to render her those attentions which a lady so frequently requires on board ship. often they stood together watching the distant shore or passing vessels, or the porpoises as they gambolled in the waves. insensibly they became more and more drawn together. constance told him of the difficulty she had experienced in escaping from the court. had not her father himself, at a great risk, gone to paris, she would have been unable to accomplish her object. fortunately for her, a relative residing in the capital having fallen ill, had sent an earnest request to see her. she had been allowed to go, and had the same night left paris with her father in disguise, travelling night and day in time to reach havre just as the ship was on the point of sailing. "we may hope now, however, to get far away from the follies of courts and the trickeries of politics to found a new home where, with none but true protestants around us, we may enjoy the exercise of our religion undisturbed," she said, looking up at her companion with a smile. "i trust that it may be so," said nigel. "what! have you any doubts on the subject?" she asked. "i would not willingly throw a dark shade across the prospect you contemplate," he answered, "but we should be prepared for disappointment, and i believe few on board have thought sufficiently of the difficulties and dangers we shall have to encounter." nigel had expressed his thoughts more plainly than he had intended, and he regretted immediately afterwards having said so much. the conversation he had overheard at the inn frequently recurred to him, and considerably damped his ardour. to whom could he venture to communicate the knowledge he had obtained of the commander's character? who would, indeed, believe the young foreigner thus bringing so serious an accusation against the officer selected by coligny himself, and of considerable renown as a naval chief? if he were not accused of malicious motives, the meeting would be looked upon as having only taken place in his dreams, for he should have to confess that he remained perfectly still during the time, with his eyes closed, as the captain and priest entered and quitted the room. he resolved, therefore, simply to keep a watch on villegagnon, and to endeavour, if possible, to counteract his schemes. sometimes he thought of speaking to count de tourville, for he had, at all events, full confidence in his honour and discretion; but even he, knowing how much the admiral esteemed villegagnon, might disbelieve him. he was compelled, therefore, to keep the knowledge he had obtained shut up in his own bosom. his chief satisfaction arose from the thought that constance de tourville was on board, and that it would be his joy and pride to defend her from all danger. the weather, which had hitherto been fine, gave signs of changing. the wind shifted more to the west, and dark clouds came rolling up. the vessels, instead of gliding smoothly on, were now tossed about. the storm increased. the sails were reduced to the smallest proportions, but yet the stout ships could with difficulty battle with the waves. under other circumstances, the emigrants would have loudly petitioned to put back; but as it was, they were afraid, should they again set foot in france, of being seized by their persecutors; nevertheless, as the storm increased, the terror of the emigrants, unaccustomed to the sea, became greater and greater. loud cries of alarm arose; some mourned their folly in having left their native shores to perish in the ocean. nigel and the other officers did their utmost to calm their fears, and assured them that should the ships be in real danger they would return to the port. constance was among the few ladies who exhibited no undue alarm, and expressed their confidence in the skill of the officers. but even they at length acknowledged that they should be thankful could they find themselves again safe in port. the count de tourville especially was unwilling to return; but for his daughter's sake, however, he at length consented to ask the captain to do what he considered best for the safety of the ships. "they will probably, if we continue at sea, become so battered, that we shall hardly reach our destination," was the answer. the signal thereon was hoisted from the commander's ship, and the squadron stood back for france. on making the land, they found that they were to the eastward of the port from which they started, and at length they entered that of dieppe. here several of the artificers, and even some of the men of higher rank, resolved to abandon the expedition, rather than again risk the dangers of the sea. their places, however, were supplied by others collected by the captain, who had gone on shore for the purpose. so many of these men were received on board each of the ships, that they became overcrowded; but the captain silenced all complaints by asserting that, if they would consent to suffer a little present inconvenience, they would have a greater number to defend themselves against any enemies they might meet with. once more the squadron sailed, and succeeded in getting clear of the channel. they had not, however, been long at sea before nigel began to suspect the character of the new-comers, of which his own ship carried the greater number. they herded together, and showed little respect to the services which the chaplain was wont to hold on board for the spiritual benefit of the colonists. they were even seen to mock while he preached, till complaints, being made to the captain, he ordered them to behave themselves. day after day the ships sailed on, keeping close together, the wind being fair and moderate. sometimes it fell a calm, when the officers and gentlemen calvinists of the different ships visited one another, and discussed their plans for the future. the chief delight, however, of most on board was to hold religious services, which they could now do without fear of interruption; and hymns of praise arose from amid the desert ocean, their voices, when the ships were close to each other, uniting together in harmony. often had constance expressed her feelings at the thought that they might in future thus worship god. before, however, they reached their destination, they encountered several violent gales, during which, whenever his duty would allow him, nigel made his way to the side of constance to afford her comfort and support. "do not be afraid," he said; "our ships are strong, and our commander experienced. i have been in a worse found vessel in a more violent gale, and we reached port in safety." "but the waves look so terrible, threatening every moment to come down and overwhelm us," said constance, who was seated on deck, gazing at the tumultuous ocean. "remember, god tells us that it is he who rules the waves; and should it be his will, they cannot hurt us," answered nigel. "yes, yes," said constance; "i was wrong to express fear. happy are we who possess the bible, of which the followers of the tyrant pope and his pretended priests are deprived." "think how many thousands of our countrymen would thankfully go through far greater dangers than we are enduring to reach a country where they may enjoy freedom from persecution," observed nigel. the young couple, however, talked on many other subjects; and when the storm ceased, and favourable breezes wafted them over the ocean, their spirits rose, and they spoke of the happy future in store for them. nigel, however, was not altogether free from anxiety. he could not forget the conversation he had overheard between the captain and priest, though sometimes he almost fancied that it must have been a dream, villegagnon was so courteous and polite to all his passengers, and expressed sentiments so in accordance with theirs. at length "land! land!" was shouted from the mast-head. the goal of their hopes was near, and the ships, getting close together, glided with a fair breeze towards the magnificent bay of nitherohy. lofty and fantastic mountains, then unnamed by europeans, rose out of the blue waters before them. on the left, appeared the conical-shaped height, since known as the sugar loaf. further on, on the same side, the three brothers reared their heads to the skies, and still more to the south was seen the corcovada and gavia, the green mountains of the three brothers strongly contrasting with the latter-named peaks, while the distant ranges of the blue mountains rose in the interior. on the right was seen another range of varied-shaped heights, extending far away to the north. passing beneath the lofty sugar loaf, the flotilla sailed through the entrance, when the magnificent land-locked expanse opened out before them, surrounded on all sides by hills and lofty mountains; while lovely little verdant and palm-clad islands appeared dotting the dark bosom of the water. words, indeed, fail to describe the beautiful and varied scenery. the anchors were dropped close to one of the first isles they reached. on this spot villegagnon told the eager crowd who surrounded him that he had determined to form the first settlement of the new colony. here, at the entrance of the harbour, and surrounded by water, they might defy the attacks of enemies from without, or the portuguese or natives who might venture to dispute their possession of the country. from this they might extend to others on either side, and then form a settlement on the shore, thus advancing till they had brought under subjection the whole of the surrounding country. the settlers expressed their satisfaction at the captain's plan, as they gazed at the richly coloured woods which covered the sides of the surrounding hills, at the purple blooming quaresma, the snake-like cacti, and the gorgeous flowering parasites hanging down even from the jagged and precipitous sides of the sugar loaf, and the rich verdure starting forth from every nook and crevice of the fantastically shaped rocks. scarcely had the anchor been dropped, than the sun set behind the distant mountains, and, as darkness rapidly followed, they remained on board during the night. next morning, constance and her father came on deck, where they found the young lieutenant attending to his duties. again they gazed with renewed pleasure at the wild and the sublime outline of the surrounding mountains with their varied combinations, while the richness and beauty of colouring thrown over and around the whole, by the purple and rose colours and ethereal blue of the sky, imparted to the scene a beauty which no fancy sketch of fairyland could surpass. as they turned their eyes towards the nearest shore of the main land, they saw the beach and fringing rocks covered by a multitude of natives, waving green boughs as a sign of welcome; while, on the heights above, they had kindled numerous bonfires, to show their satisfaction at the arrival of the french, whom they believed had come to protect them from their enemies, the portuguese. preparations were being made on board the ships to land the officers and artisans, with materials for building the proposed fort. villegagnon, in his barge of state, proceeded towards the shore to open negotiations with the native chiefs. he had requested the count de tourville to accompany him, and constance begged that she might also go. as it was a mission of peace, no danger was apprehended; and it was thought that a lady being seen in the boat would give further assurance to the natives of the pacific intentions of their visit. nigel, being one of the tallest and best-looking of the officers, was selected to steer the barge. four other boats followed at a short distance. their crews were fully armed, but were ordered to keep their weapons out of sight, and only to advance should the indians show any sign of hostility. as the barge neared the shore, a tall and dignified chief, his dress of the richest skins, and ornamented with gaily-coloured feathers, with a circle of plumes on his head, holding an unstrung bow of great strength in his hand, was seen standing on the beach to receive the new-comers. by his side was a youth, strongly resembling him in features, bearing his shield and quiver, and also handsomely dressed, while other chiefs were drawn up in a semi-circle a short distance behind him, with the rest of his people collected on either side. he advanced a few paces with dignified steps, and, stretching forth his hand to offer a friendly grasp to the captain as he landed, announced himself as tuscarora, chief of the tamoyos. according to indian custom, he made a long harangue, welcoming the strangers to his country, and assuring them of his friendship. "you come at a fortunate moment, when your aid may render us essential service in assisting us to defend ourselves against the assaults of a tribe of white men, who, for some years past, have attempted to establish themselves on our shores. they call us idolaters, and pretend to be of a religion which hates idolaters; but they themselves have numerous figures of men and women, before which they bow down and worship, and they fail not to shoot or cruelly ill-treat those of our people who fall into their hands; we, therefore, do not trust to their religion or promises." the chief concluded by assuring the french that they were welcome to take possession of the island off which their ships lay, or of any other they might select in the bay. villegagnon replied that he and his people came in the character of true friends to the indians, and his great object was to obtain their friendship and support, and that their religion taught them to consider all worshippers of figures and pictures and any visible object as idolaters; their desire being to serve the great spirit who watched over the indians as well as over themselves, and that by their acts they would show that they were worthy of the confidence their new friends were evidently disposed to place in them. he expressed a hope, also, that by an exchange of commodities, and by mutual support, they would learn to regard each other as brothers. during this address the indians preserved the most perfect silence, though the eyes of the young chief, who stood by his father's side, wandered towards the boat in which the rest of the visitors still retained their seats. an attendant, now advancing, lighted the calumet of peace, which tuscarora presented to the captain, who, after drawing a few whiffs, returned it to the chief, who performed the same ceremony. the rest of the party now landing, the pipe was passed round among them. constance, who stood by her father's side, regarded the scene with much interest. she could not avoid remarking the glances of admiration which the young chief cast at her, and was compelled more than once to turn round and speak to nigel, who remained close to her. he himself observed the looks of the young chief, which created an undefined feeling in his breast, though his pride forbade him in any way to exhibit it. "these indians are of a far more martial and gallant bearing than i had supposed; but still they are savages, and we should be wise if we are on our guard against them," he observed to constance. this was said aside, while villegagnon was replying to the address delivered by the tamoyo chief, who then introduced the handsome youth standing by his side as his son tecumah, "who will ever, as he regards my injunctions, be a friend and ally of the french," he added. the young man in a few words expressed his desire to act according to his father's wishes, winding up, as he pointed to the sky, "should tecumah fail to fulfil his promise, may the great spirit punish him as he will deserve." thus far the interview had passed off in a most satisfactory manner. the chief expressed his desire to visit his new allies, but villegagnon thought it prudent to decline the honour till the fort was erected, and the colonists were in a position to defend themselves, and at the same time to make such a show of their strength as might overawe the indians, in whom they were not inclined to place more than a very limited amount of confidence. the portuguese were at this time settled in a town which they called saint vincente, about fifty miles to the south, the first colony founded by them under martin alfonso de souza; and as there were many brave adventurers among them, villegagnon thought it probable that as soon as they heard of his arrival, they would send an expedition against him. the meeting with the chiefs having been brought to a conclusion, the boats returned to the ships, on board which every one was now engaged in landing stores for the construction of the proposed fort. as numerous trees grew on the island, they were cut down, and formed an abundance of material for the purpose. the artisans, who knew the importance of speed, laboured assiduously, and the work made rapid progress. the chief fort was built on the eastern side of the island, to resist the attack of a hostile fleet; and in the course of a few days the guns were mounted, and the colonists considered themselves fully prepared for defence. houses were also commenced, and those weary of their long confinement on board ship hoped soon to take up their residence on shore. the natives brought over in their canoes an abundant supply of provisions, and, delighted with the beauty of the climate, the settlers felt thankful that their steps had been directed to so happy a spot, and looked forward with confidence to the time when they might see a handsome city rise on the shores of the bay. now, too, they could all meet together to read god's word, and to listen to the preaching of their minister without dread of interruption. the chief of the tamoyos, with his son tecumah, attended by a number of the principal men of the tribe, arrived in a fleet of canoes to pay their promised visit to the white men. villegagnon received them at the head of his seamen, and all the settlers drawn up under arms. the indians were evidently much struck by the martial appearance of their new allies, and almost as much so by the progress which had been made in the settlement, as the fort, with its guns, and the houses, were already erected. it was a sabbath morning, and at the usual hour a bell summoned the settlers to worship. tuscarora seemed to fancy that some magical ceremony was going forward, and was afraid to enter; but tecumah, less superstitious than his father, and prompted by curiosity, begged leave to attend, accompanied by several other young men. though they were unable to comprehend a word, their countenances exhibited the most perfect seriousness and apparent interest in what was going forward. the count, who had observed tecumah, whose eyes, indeed, had seldom been turned away from the spot where he and his daughter sat, sent for the interpreter to inquire of the young chief what opinion he had formed. "it is clear to me that you worship a great unknown spirit, and that you sing to him songs of praise, while your teachers exhort you to love and obey him, and he is, i am sure, pleased with such worship. i remarked how it differs from that of the portuguese, who make idols of painted wood, and bow before them as if such things could hear, or understand, or give help to the foolish men who put faith in such nonsense." "and is such the opinion you have formed without having the principles of our faith explained to you?" asked the count, astonished at the intelligence displayed by the young chief. "i have said what i conceive to be the truth," answered tecumah. "i would like to know more of your faith, since it enables you to be as wise and powerful as i see you are. some time since, during an interval of peace, i visited the settlement of the portuguese. there i saw bearded men bowing down, some before a cross with a figure nailed on it, others before a woman with a child in her arms; others, again, were adoring an infant in a cradle; and others, men and women, in long robes, with books or staffs in their hands. some were worshipping even pictures, and i thought that all these things were the gods of the portuguese. when they told me that the woman with the child in her arms was the holy virgin, and that the child was also a god, i could stop to hear no more, feeling sure that the great spirit to whom the indian looks up as god would be displeased with such blasphemy." "undoubtedly he is," said the count; "but had you inquired further, you would have been told that the figure on the cross and the child in the woman's arms and the one in the cradle represented the same person, the saviour of mankind, who is now in heaven, at the right hand of god." "then, how can he be in heaven and on earth at the same time?" asked the indian. "and if he is in heaven, surely men of sense should lift up their hearts to him there, and not bow before figures which can have no resemblance to him; for i observed that even the infants differed from each other. and who, tell me, does the figures of the woman represent?" "she was one especially honoured among women, but who the saviour expressly showed he did not desire should be worshipped," answered the count. "she was chosen to be the earthly mother of the son of god, who so loved the world, that he desired to become man, that he might be punished instead of all men; for all, being by nature sinful, deserve punishment, and god, who is all just and all merciful, decreed that all who believe that jesus, his son, was punished for our sins, should have those sins washed away, and be received into favour again by him. thus, jesus came into the world as an infant, grew up to manhood, and, after setting an example to mankind by the obedient, pure, holy life he led, he allowed himself to be put to the most cruel of deaths on the cross, such as the vilest of malefactors were alone considered deserving of. to prove that he was god, by his own will and power he rose again and ascended into heaven, there to be the advocate and mediator of those he had redeemed. through him alone the prayers of those who believe in him can be offered and be received acceptably by god." the young chief listened attentively to what the count said, "this is very wonderful, very wonderful," he observed, after being for some time lost in meditation. "i would wish to hear more about the matter; yet it strikes me as strange that god should allow his name to be profaned, and these senseless images to be worshipped instead of himself." "you are right, my friend," said the count. "god is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. he is also long-suffering and kind, and therefore he does not punish men as they deserve, that they may have an opportunity of turning from their sins and being reconciled to him." the count gladly took the opportunity of explaining further the truths of the christian faith to the young chief, who seemed to drink in eagerly every word he heard. it was the first of many visits he paid, and often was his canoe to be seen, as the shades of evening drew on, skimming across the tranquil waters of the harbour towards the mainland. the indians received such entertainment on their first visit as the french could afford; and while it was yet daylight they returned in their canoes to the shore. one evening the count and his daughter were sitting in their house with several guests, among whom nigel was one. they had met to read god's word and to sing the hymns of marot, which the french protestants loved so well. the weather, hitherto fine, had, before sunset, given signs of changing. dark clouds were seen gathering eastward, and already a damp and chilly wind blew up the harbour's mouth, while the sea rolled in, sending its billows with an angry roar against the foundations of the new fort. as the tempest increased, a gun fired from each of the ships summoned their respective officers and men on board, and nigel had unwillingly to hasten away from the house of his friend. it was not without difficulty that the boats reached the ships. the topmasts and topgallant masts were sent down on deck, and fresh anchors were got out. the settlers, as they saw the masts of the ships through the gloom, rolling from side to side, and watched the furious waves rushing in from the sea, began to tremble for their safety. they had, however, to think of themselves. the wind rapidly increased, the tall trees still remaining on the island bent before it, and the waves washed over the walls of the fort with relentless fury, threatening every moment to overwhelm them. villegagnon, who had remained on shore, fearing that the guns might be lost, ordered them to be dragged out of the fort to a place of safety. it was a task of no slight danger, for already the woodwork trembled at each assault of the billows, and scarcely were the guns removed than, crash succeeding crash, large fragments of the fort, the construction of which had cost them so many days of labour, were rent away, and either carried off by the retiring seas, or thrown high up on the shore. constance de tourville anxiously watched the progress of the storm. she had accompanied her father and several of their friends to watch the ships which lay in the harbour exposed to its fury. they could see the foaming waves dashing against them, and breaking high over their bows. soon one was seen to be moving, when a single sail was set, and away she sped into the darkness up the harbour. the others dragged their anchors, or were torn from them, and were likewise compelled to seek for safety in some sheltered spot. with good pilots on board, this might easily have been done, but no one had a knowledge of the upper parts of the harbour, and it was impossible to say in what direction they might seek for safety. that night was one of deep anxiety to all the settlers. the furious waves, surging round the little island, swept over the lower parts, and threatened at times to overwhelm it. many of the trees, deprived of the support of their neighbours, which had been cut down, bent before the gale. branches of some were torn away, others were broken off, and some uprooted from the ground. several of the newly built houses were unroofed, and others were thrown down altogether by the wind. that of the count stood firm, and he and his daughter gladly offered shelter to as many of their friends as it could contain. constance, who had had a sleepless night, waiting till dawn broke, sallied forth to look for the ships. not one of them was in sight. in vain she made inquiries of those who had come, like herself, to look for them. no boats remained on shore; indeed, with the waters of the harbour tossing about as furiously as they were, even the largest could not have made her way amidst them. the indians, from whom alone they could obtain any information, dared not venture across, and thus they must remain in ignorance of what had become of the ships till, the tempest being over, those which had escaped destruction should return. "vain is the help of man. in god let us put our trust. he may think fit to preserve them; if not, we must say with confidence, `his will be done,'" said the minister laporte, addressing those assembled on the beach. chapter six. nigel's return to france. meantime the governor had been surveying the damages committed by the storm, and, summoning the count and other leading people, announced his intention of abandoning the island before more labour had been expended, and settling on another higher up the harbour. all approved of his proposal, for though they saw that the island was well placed for defence, it was also exposed to the fury of the sea when excited by tempests. they now awaited anxiously for news of the ships, but still the wind blew furiously up the harbour, and would prevent them from coming down, even should they have escaped shipwreck. fears were entertained that they might have been cast on the northern shore, when their crews would most probably have fallen into the hands of the portuguese. for two days more the tempest continued, and the hearts of the colonists remained agitated with doubts and fears. the third morning broke bright and clear, the clouds dispersed, and the wind, changing, blew with a gentle breath down the harbour. had a boat remained on the island she would have been sent in search of the missing ships. some proposed building a flat-bottomed raft, which might be finished in a few hours and serve to navigate the smooth waters of the bay. villegagnon gave the order to commence the work, and already it had made some progress, when a shout was raised of "a sail! a sail!" it was one of the ships standing down before the wind from the upper part of the harbour. another and another appeared, till at length the minds of the colonists were set at rest. they all had had narrow escapes, but had succeeded in bringing up under the lee of different islands, where, the water being smooth, they had ridden out the storm. every one capable of labouring immediately set to work to reship the guns, and stores, and even the woodwork of the houses and forts, to convey them to an island villegagnon had fixed on in a more secure part of the harbour. the task occupied several days, and sorely tried the patience of those who were anxious at once to commence their intended agricultural pursuits. the advantages possessed by the new spot selected were evidently superior to those of lange island which they had left. the count proposed that the name of their patron, "admiral coligny," should be given to their present resting-place, and he was supported by the leading colonists. the governor, with a bad grace, consented, though it was evident that he had intended to bestow his own name on their new acquisition. with the exception of the losses caused by the storm, all hitherto seemed to be going on well; and nigel began to hope that villegagnon had abandoned his design, and really intended to establish a colony on the principles proposed by the admiral. he was glad, indeed, that he had not spoken of his suspicions to constance or her father, as they must have been, had he done so, greatly troubled about the future. he, in common with all the officers and men of the expedition, was busily engaged from morn till night in erecting the new fortifications, which were laid out on a much larger scale, and were built far more substantially than the last had been. the colonists' dwellings were also re-erected, and, wood being abundant, many of them were of considerable size, though only one storey in height. within the fort were the barracks for the soldiers, while a number of houses to afford shelter to the inhabitants, should the settlement be attacked, were erected. the larger residences were scattered about over the island, and a village sprang up on the shores of the chief landing-place. it was, however, well protected by the fort, off which lay the ships, and it was considered that while they remained it would be secured against an attack. four smaller forts were also built on commanding situations in the more accessible parts of the island, so villegagnon considered that the settlement was well able to resist the assaults of either a civilised or barbarous foe. the friendly disposition shown by the tamoyos, the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood, gave him no anxiety on the latter account; while, although by this time the portuguese settlement in the south had greatly increased, the portuguese had shown no disposition to advance towards the shores of the bay of nitherohy. it was the intention of the french to form a settlement on the southern shore of the bay as soon as their numbers were sufficiently increased; and villegagnon, relying on his secure position, resolved at length to send back the fleet for reinforcements. nigel had in the mean time been a frequent visitor at the house of the count de tourville, where he ever received that friendly welcome which made him hope that he would not disapprove of his aspiring to the hand of constance, who appeared to have no doubts on the subject. she knew that nigel was of noble birth though destitute of fortune, and she felt sure that her father would not refuse to give her to one, her equal in birth, who was of her own religion, and whose heart was hers, while he was well able to protect her. they had not hitherto spoken of love, but they were mutually aware of the state of each other's affections, the most perfect confidence existing between them. occasionally a holiday was allowed, when nigel, having one of the ship's boats at his command, took the count and his daughter, with other friends, across the bay, to visit its picturesque shores and the many lovely islands resting on its bosom. the party had gone higher up the bay than they had hitherto ventured to do, and reaching a small island which appeared to be uninhabited, they went on shore, proposing to dine and wander through its shady woods. the seamen remained near the boat, while constance and two lady friends, with the officers and other gentlemen who formed the party, proceeded to a clear spot beneath the shade of some lofty trees, where for awhile they could enjoy the sea breeze, while discussing the viands they had brought. the repast being over, the three ladies strolled along the beach to the western end of the island, for the purpose of enjoying the view which extended almost to the extreme limit of the harbour. constance's two friends had seated themselves on the bank, while she, attracted by some flowers which grew near the edge of the water ran forward to examine them. she was on the point of picking one of gorgeous hue when a canoe, paddled by a single indian, unobserved by her, darted round the point and approached the beach. the occupant sprang lightly on shore, when a cry from her companions made her look up, and she saw a tall and handsome native, with a circlet of feathers on his head, and a cloak and kilt richly adorned, standing before her. her first impulse was to fly, but, giving another glance at the stranger, she recognised tecumah, the young chief of the tamoyos. she had already acquired some knowledge of the language. "what brings you here?" she asked. "we thought that none of your people were on the island." she felt that it was better to speak, although she was not altogether free from fear. the respectful attitude of the young chief, however, reassured her. "i often come here," he answered. "seeing your boat approaching, i waited for an opportunity of speaking to you, lady. for days and days i have longed for it. since my eyes first rested on your countenance it has never been absent from my heart. my ambition has been to become like your people, and to gain the knowledge they possess, and thus be worthy of leading you home as my bride." such in substance was what the young chief said, although his address was far longer, and more full of figurative expressions than have been here given. constance at first could not understand what he said, but when its meaning broke on her she felt no small amount of alarm and uneasiness, yet her right feeling would not allow her to treat young tecumah, savage though he was, either with contempt or anger. "you have surprised and pained me," she answered gently. "it is not the custom of the maidens of my country to wed with those of another race or of a different faith," she answered. "i grieve to hurt your feelings but what you have asked can never be granted. continue, as heretofore, to be the friend of my people, and you will also remain my friend. let me now return to my companions, for they cannot fail to be surprised at seeing you; only let me ask that you will never repeat what you have just said, and banish me, i pray you, from your thoughts." "not while tecumah breathes the air of heaven can your form be banished from his heart. oh, ask him not to perform a task beyond his power," answered the indian. "he obeys you now, as you will find he is ever ready to do. farewell." saying this, greatly to the relief of constance, the indian with slow steps returned to his canoe, while she hastened back to her companions. "who is he? what object brought him here?" asked one of the young ladies in a tone of alarm. "he certainly did not appear unfriendly," remarked the other. "i should say, constance, judging from his manner, that he is a devoted admirer of you. come, my dear, confess--did he not ask you to become his bride? ah! i thought so," she continued, observing the colour rising on constance's cheek. "i cannot reply to you!" exclaimed constance, feeling excessively annoyed at her friend's remarks. "you would not for a moment suppose that i should listen to such a proposal. i scarcely, indeed, could understand what he said. but we must not remain here, and it will be well if we return immediately to the boat, lest more of the savages should be lying concealed in the island and intrude themselves on us." this last observation induced her companions eagerly to follow her advice, evidently more alarmed than she was, and as they hurried on they frequently looked back, expecting to see a party of dark-skinned warriors suddenly start forth from the forest near them. they, however, reached their friends in safety. on finding themselves safe on board the boat they recovered their spirits, and the other ladies even ventured to banter constance about her indian admirer. nigel naturally inquired what had happened. constance then told him of the sudden appearance of the indian, but the expression of her countenance prevented him from asking further questions. the expedition, which all agreed had been a very pleasant one, terminated without any further incident worthy of note. nigel, as usual, spent the evening at the count's house; and he and constance found an opportunity before the other guests arrived, for strolling out in the woods behind the house, through which several walks had already been cut. she then frankly told him what had occurred, begging him, at the same time, not to be anxious on that account, as she had every reason to believe that the young chief would not again molest her. "i trust not, dearest constance!" exclaimed nigel, taking her hand. "would that i had a right to protect you. will you consent to become mine if your father will give his permission?" constance gave him her hand. he spoke of his want of fortune, but he reminded her that he had a strong arm and willing heart, qualifications of no slight importance in a new colony, and he had every reason to hope that he should be able to maintain her. she agreed that he should immediately speak to the count, and he offered to throw up his commission and cast in his fortune with her father and his associates; and before they returned to the house many a plan for the future was agreed on. the count, almost to their surprise, without offering any objections, entered into all their views; and nigel determined the next morning to ask permission from the captain to quit his ship and settle on shore. "impossible, sir," was the answer. "were i to give you the permission you ask all the officers and men would be desiring to turn settlers. i intend to send the ship back immediately, and you must be prepared to attend to your duty." in vain nigel expostulated; villegagnon threatened to put him in irons and send him back as a mutineer if he refused to obey his orders. the ships were rapidly got ready for the voyage. nigel, with a sad heart, bade farewell to constance. "rest confident of my love," she whispered. "we must wait till you can obtain the admiral's sanction to quit the service. my father will write to him on the subject, and i doubt not that he will grant your request." still, though constance spoke with confidence, the hearts of the young people were sad, for they could not help thinking of the many dangers which they both would have to encounter. those to which constance might be exposed rose up before nigel. the settlement might be attacked by the portuguese, or the natives might prove treacherous, and he could not forget his doubts of villegagnon's honesty. constance thought of the storms and the enemies nigel might have to encounter during his voyage, and the risk he might run of being treated as a heretic by the roman catholics on returning to france. with forebodings she could not overcome, she saw the ship's sails spread to the wind as they glided out of the harbour. the voyage to europe was accomplished without any disaster. while the ships were refitting, nigel, accompanied by monsieur billard, captain of the _vesta_, one of the ships of the squadron, made a journey to rouen, where the admiral had come to meet a number of persons who proposed embarking. the advantages to be gained in the new colony had spread among the protestants of france, and persons of all ranks and from all quarters were eager to embark. the undertaking was especially favoured by calvin, farel, and other protestant ministers, who hoped ere long to see a large and flourishing community of their fellow-believers established in the new world, where many of those suffering in europe might fly for refuge. rouen was a large and populated place in those days, and the new emigrants had no difficulty in finding accommodation. nigel and captain billard called on the admiral at his hotel, and were received with great courtesy and kindness. nigel presented the count's letter. "i am sorry, my young friend, for one reason, that you desire to quit the navy of france, for i feel sure that you would have risen to distinction," observed the admiral, "although i may congratulate you on another account; and i, therefore, do not hesitate to grant your request. you will, i hope, succeed in the new position you have chosen." nigel thanked the admiral, and afterwards, accompanied by captain billard, went to call on several persons of distinction who were about to proceed with them to nitherohy. he had particularly wished to go on to tourville to see his old friend the steward, so as to be able to give to the count a report of the state of his property. so eager, however, were the emigrants to set out, that the ships were got ready with unusual rapidity, and he had no time to make the journey. he was walking in the evening through the streets, when he caught sight of a person in ecclesiastical dress, whose features he recognised, and on a second glance he felt sure that they were those of the very man he had seen in company with villegagnon. he suspected that the priest was there for no good purpose. the jesuit regarded him with his keen grey eyes, and evidently recognised him, and when nigel and his companion passed on, followed them at a distance. the next morning, accompanied by a number of emigrants, they set out for havre. most of the party were men who followed civil occupations; the gentlemen, however, carrying swords, while a few among them had pistols. on reaching honfleur they found a large crowd assembled in the market-place, through which they had to pass on their way to the boats, which were waiting to carry them on board their ships. in the crowd nigel again caught sight of the priest, who was speaking to the people around him. "come, come, my friends," cried captain billard, who rode at the head of the party; "we wish to react the boats waiting for us." "they are heretics, despisers of the holy virgin and the saints!" cried some one from the crowd. "down with them. cut them to pieces. let none escape." scarcely were the words uttered than a shower of stones was hurled at the heads of the protestant emigrants, who immediately drew their swords to defend themselves, while they forced their way through the crowd. scarcely, however, had they got many yards before they were met by a body of men, some with firearms, and others with spears and axes. "we must fight for our lives, my friends," cried captain billard. "on! on! but keep together." the bold front which he and his companions showed for a time kept back their assailants; but a voice, which nigel recognised as that of the priest, was heard shouting, "down with them! down with them!" and the mob again pressed them close. many were wounded, and nigel, with grief, saw his friend fall from his horse, shot through the body. he in vain endeavoured to rescue him. the savages dragged him into their midst, hacking and hewing his inanimate form. nigel, seeing that he and his friends would be cut to pieces, urged them to keep close together; and by desperate efforts they at length cut their way down to the boats, from which the seamen, who were fortunately armed, leapt on shore, and, furiously charging the mob, turned them back and kept them at bay while the emigrants embarked. on counting their numbers, it was found that, beside the captain, three others had fallen, while many were wounded. providentially the women and children, with their baggage, had been sent on the day before from rouen, or the whole party would have been cut to pieces. on reaching havre, nigel and two other officers went on shore to complain of the outrage, but could obtain no redress from the authorities, who merely shrugged their shoulders and declared they could not restrain the religious zeal of the people. the anchors were speedily got up, and with sad hearts the emigrants left their native shores. a fair wind carried the squadron down channel, and for some time the voyage was prosperous. before, however, they reached the latitude of madeira the weather changed, and a heavy gale coming on, sorely tried the imperfectly prepared ships. the officers, exerting themselves to the utmost, encouraged their men, and the pumps were kept going till the storm ceased and the leaks could be got at and stopped. when the ships, which had been scattered by the gale, again joined company, all were found to have been sorely battered. one had lost her topmasts, another her bowsprit, and the rest some two or more spars. they had no friendly port into which they could put, as madeira was in the hands of the portuguese, so they had to wait for a calm to repair their more serious damages. the line was crossed without having the opportunity, and when within three or four days' sail of their destination, some strange ships were seen ahead, apparently waiting for them. there could be no doubt that the strangers were portuguese. a consultation was held by the captains whether they should try to escape by altering their course, or stand boldly on and attack the enemy. water and provisions were running short, and should they take to flight, days and even weeks might elapse before they could gain their port. they determined, therefore, to stand on, and should an attempt be made to stop them, to fight bravely as long as their ships should swim. their enemies were not to be despised, they knew, for the portuguese of those days were renowned for their hardihood and courage. five sail were counted, the number of their own ships, so that each would have an antagonist to contend with. the french, under all sail, keeping close together in line, stood towards the headmost of the enemy's ships, which were somewhat separated from each other. nigel's being the leading ship of the french squadron, first came up with the headmost one of the enemy's ships. they were sailing, it must be understood, on two sides of an angle, the french before the wind, the portuguese close hauled. captain beauport, the commander of the _madeline_, immediately hauled his wind and poured in his broadside at close quarters, bringing the enemy's mizenmast, with its large mizen, down on deck. the effect was to make the ship pay off before the wind, and expose her stern to the fire of the _madeline's_ guns, which had been rapidly reloaded and run out. captain beauport then running up on the larboard side of the portuguese, so as to place himself between her and the rest of the enemy, continued the fight broadside to broadside, while he threw out a signal to his consorts to attack the other ships of the enemy. they, though considerably larger than the french, after exchanging a few shots at a distance, put up their helms and ran off before the wind, leaving the first ship attacked by captain beauport to her fate. this was soon settled, for though her guns and crew greatly outnumbered those of the _madeline_, so many of her people had been killed and wounded, that as the french ship ran alongside for the purpose of boarding the enemy, the crew of the latter hauled down their flag and cried for quarter. this was immediately given, and efforts were made to stop the shot-holes through which the water was running into the prize. there seemed very little prospect of keeping her afloat. her crew and passengers were in despair, and were eager to take refuge on board their captor. many of the men, instead of endeavouring to save the ship, fell down on their knees, invoking the virgin and saints to assist them. captain beauport and his officers, however, soon stirred them up, and insisted on their going below and attending to their duty. among the passengers were two priests, who seemed especially anxious to save some cases and packages, loudly calling on their countrymen to assist them. "never mind your baggage, my friends," said nigel. "let the men attend to their work. if your property is lost, patience. we must first save all the water and provisions, in case the ship should go down, as it will be difficult enough to feed all your people from our own stores." "but, monsieur officer, our property is invaluable," cried the priests. "it cannot be replaced. you do not know what precious things we have got." "precious or not, they must stay where they are till the shot-holes are plugged, unless you choose to carry them yourselves." "oh, sacrilegious heretic, we will be revenged on you some day," muttered one of the priests, while the other hurled some curses at nigel's head, to which he did not stop to listen, remembering the proverb that "curses, like birds, go home to roost at night." by plugging the shot-holes and setting strong gangs to work the pumps, the prize was kept afloat sufficiently long to get out some of the provisions and water, as well as a portion of her cargo. the priests again loudly called on their countrymen to assist them in transferring the goods to the _madeline_, though few of them showed any disposition to do so, but by the assistance of the french crew, their valuables were at length got out of the sinking ship. the rest of the fleet had now come up, and the prisoners were distributed among them. the priests, however, would not desert their baggage, which, they insisted, was their own private property. "if it is found to be so on inspection you shall retain it," observed captain beauport; "but as the cases may possibly contain munitions of war, we cannot allow them without examination to fall into the hands of your countrymen." the priests protested that there was nothing warlike in them, but the captain was determined to have the cases examined. on opening them one was found to contain a large coarsely painted figure of the virgin and child, another half a dozen small figure of saints, the third was full of flat leaden figures and crosses. "what are these?" asked the captain, coming to a fourth, full of small boxes and parcels. "those," answered the priest, who was looking indignantly on, "are the bones of saints and martyrs. let them not be touched, i beseech you, by sacrilegious hands." each package was labelled, a score or more having the name of saint anthony. "why, you must have got two or three saints' bodies here," exclaimed the captain. "only a very small portion of one, indeed," answered the priest; "a hair from his beard or a paring from his toe-nail is of value equal to the whole of his leg." "and what are these other packages?" inquired the captain. "each contains some precious relic, efficacious in curing every disease to which the human body is liable," answered the priest. "nonsense!" exclaimed the captain; "we cannot allow such rubbish to remain on board." "you will be guilty of horrible sacrilege and unheard-of cruelty to the settlers and poor natives, if you throw these precious relics into the sea, and deprive them of the benefits they will bring." "we will see about it," answered the captain. "what are these bales?" he asked, pointing to some canvas packages, which he ordered his men to rip open. the priests made no reply. they were found to contain sheets of paper, printed some in portuguese and some in latin, but all sealed with the seals of the ecclesiastical courts in portugal or at rome. they were, indeed, "indulgences", or "pardons" for various sins mentioned in the romish rubric, the prices, which varied from half a dollar to seven dollars, being marked upon each, the latter being for murder and the most heinous offences of every possible kind, which cannot be mentioned. "why, i see none for heresy, or sacrilege, or calling the pope and his cardinals gross impostors, and you two worthies are arrant rogues and fools, or we might have become purchasers to a large amount!" exclaimed the captain indignantly. "heave this trumpery overboard, and you, senhores priests, may be thankful that you have been deprived of the means of cheating your countrymen and deceiving the ignorant natives by your abominable impostures." the sailors, with shouts of satisfaction, forthwith hove overboard the boxes of relics, the bales of "indulgences", and the leaden charms, which quickly sank to the bottom. some cases of trumpery rosaries were found and dispatched the same way. the images, or rather the idols, for such the natives would have regarded them, were lowered overboard, and went bobbing about astern of the ship, and the water soon washing off the paint, reduced them to the appearance of shapeless logs. there were still several cases of crucifixes of all sizes, having the appearance of silver but were found to be of iron, covered with the thinnest tinsel. the priests pleaded hard to have them preserved. "no," said captain beauport, firmly; "i will be no party to your impostures. these are images as well as the others, and more blasphemous still, seeing that they have in no way the appearance of the crucified saviour; and he himself has said, `thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for i the lord thy god am a jealous god'--and that i am sure you would have taught the natives to do, for your own people do the same; and so, to prevent you or others from thus offending god, they must be put overboard with the rest of your idols." the priests swore oaths deep, but not loud, that they would be revenged on the heretics--oaths which they fully intended to keep. sail was now made, and the ships stood towards the land. they had not gone far, however, before the signal was made from the prize that the water was again rushing in. the _madeline_ and the other ships sent their boats to her assistance, but all the efforts of the crew could not keep her afloat, and they had barely time to escape from her, when she went down head foremost, with most of her cargo on board. as the french had no desire to retain their prisoners, they steered into a small port some way to the southward of nitherohy. here the portuguese were put on shore, with a supply of provisions and such arms as were required to enable them to protect themselves against the natives, who, they averred, would otherwise attack and cut them off--an event, considering the cruelties they had already begun to practise on the unfortunate indians, very likely to happen. a bright look-out was kept during the time for the enemy's squadron, but it did not appear; and the french, favoured by a fair wind, steered for nitherohy, which they were all eager to reach. nigel's heart beat with anxiety. besides knowing that the portuguese, in considerable force, were in the neighbourhood, and being uncertain as to the fidelity of the fickle indians, he could not forget his suspicions regarding villegagnon, and he dreaded to hear that the governor had carried out the treacherous designs which he believed him to entertain. all eyes were directed towards the island-fortress, as the ship sailed up the harbour. great was the satisfaction of the voyagers as they beheld the flag of france blowing out above the fortifications. cheers burst from their throats, and a salute fired from the shore was returned by the ships, as, gliding on, they came to an anchor before the landing-place. chapter seven. treachery. villegagnon stood waiting on shore to receive the new-comers, who landed amid the cheers of their countrymen. he expressed himself highly pleased with this accession of strength to the community, and loudly declared that he believed ere long their protestant colony would be established on a firm basis. his letters, he said, informed him that many thousands of french settlers were about to sail and join them. nigel hastened on shore as soon as his duties would allow, and was welcomed with all the marks of affection he could desire by constance, and kindly greeted by her father. great progress had been made, the count told him, and he hoped that they should soon be able to form a settlement on the mainland. "but we have been so happy here, that i should be sorry to move," said constance, pointing to a pretty garden seen from the window of their sitting-room. "think of all the pains we have bestowed on it, and, should it be deserted, in a few months, in this climate, it would again become a wilderness." "we must keep it as our country residence, and come here occasionally from our house in the new city," observed the count; "or perhaps you and nigel will like to make it your home." "oh, that will be delightful," exclaimed constance, "though i suspect that nigel will require a larger sphere of action than this little island would afford." they talked much more about the future, which, to the eyes of constance, looked bright and happy. the count, however, when alone with nigel, expressed his anxiety on several accounts. the governor had of late shown especial favour to the men he had collected to supply the place of those who had abandoned the expedition; and they were engaged in erecting a building, which it was very evident was intended for a church. why there should be any secrecy about the matter the count could not tell; but it was a suspicious circumstance, as chiefly those who had refused to attend at the protestant service were engaged on it. still the governor professed to be as warm a protestant as ever. "have you any suspicions of the honesty of his intentions?" asked nigel. "from this circumstance, and others which may seem trifling, suspicions have arisen in my mind," answered the count. nigel then told him the reason he himself had to doubt the governor's honesty. "i wish that you had told me of this before," said the count. "i should probably have returned with you to europe, rather than have supported such a man by remaining. however, your explanations satisfy me that you acted, as you thought, for the best. we must now endeavour to counteract his designs." they agreed not to speak to constance about their suspicions of the governor, as the matter would not fail to make her anxious. nigel had to return to his ship at night; but, early the next morning, he again went on shore to visit his friends, intending also to apply to the governor to be discharged from the naval service. as he was nearing the landing-place, he observed a canoe, urged on towards the shore with rapid strokes by an indian who plied his paddle, now on one side, now on the other. in the stern sat another person, a young girl, whose dark tresses were ornamented with a wreath of natural flowers, which gave an additional charm to her beautiful features, the rest of her costume being also adorned with gaily-coloured feathers, further increasing the picturesqueness of her appearance. she lightly stepped out of the canoe, followed by her companion, who hauled it up on the beach at the same time that nigel landed. they together made their way to the village as if well accustomed to traverse the path. nigel was a few paces behind them, and observed that they entered the house of the minister, monsieur laporte. on reaching the count's house, he mentioned the circumstance to his friends, and inquired who the indians were. "they must be, without doubt, the young chief tecumah and his sister cora, who come frequently to receive from our good minister instruction in the truths of christianity, of which, i trust, they have gained considerable knowledge," answered constance. "first the young chief came by himself, and then he begged permission to bring his sister. she is a sweet young creature; a perfect child of nature; and has already become even a more faithful believer than her brother, who cannot, as yet, understand why he should not destroy his enemies wherever he can find them." constance had before told nigel of her meeting with tecumah; she now assured him that the young chief seemed to have got over any attachment he might have felt for her, so nigel felt no sensations of jealousy. nigel proceeded afterwards to call on the governor to present his letter from the admiral. villegagnon received him in his usual courteous manner, and complimented him on his gallantry with the portuguese. when, however, he read the letter, his manner changed. "the admiral does not command here," he observed, "and i require officers on board my ships. i cannot accept your resignation." nigel expostulated in vain. instead, however, of at once refusing to serve, he resolved to take time to consider the matter. he went back to consult the count, who advised him to do nothing rashly; as, should he throw up his commission and come to live on shore, he would offend the governor and put himself completely in his power. while they were speaking, tecumah and cora, with monsieur laporte, came to the house, to pay their respects, they said, to the count and his daughter. tecumah recognised nigel, and spoke to him in a way which showed that he desired his friendship. while constance was conversing with cora in a mixture of their respective languages, each doing her utmost to make herself understood and understand what the other said, nigel found that tecumah had made considerable progress in his knowledge of french; also, which was of more consequence, he was well acquainted with the fundamental truths of christianity. had they, however, touched his heart? there was the question; his actions alone would show that. nigel inquired about the state of the country. tecumah assured him that his own tribe and those in alliance with them were sincerely attached to the french. "but others in the north, who have had emissaries from the portuguese among them, are not to be trusted," he observed. the portuguese themselves were also increasing rapidly in numbers, and their town of saint vincente was already of some size. "my people, however, will keep a vigilant watch on their proceedings, and i will give you notice, should we gain any intelligence of an expedition being prepared. should one come, with your ships and with the assistance of our tribe, you will, without doubt, be able to drive back your enemies," he added. while the young people were speaking, the count drew monsieur laporte aside, and was earnestly discussing with him the state of affairs. the minister looked grave. "we must trust to him who overrules all things for his own wise purposes," he observed; "and should reverses overtake us, we must not lose confidence in his love and justice." nothing occurred for some time to interrupt the usual occupations of the colony. at length, one morning a signal from the fort announced that a fleet was in sight. the gunners were summoned to the batteries; all the men got under arms, and the ships prepared for battle; getting springs on their cables, so as to haul themselves into a position to defend the landing-place. as the ships approached, they were, to the infinite satisfaction of those on shore, seen to have the french flag flying at their mast-heads. there were five large ships and two smaller ones. it was hoped that they were bringing reinforcements of sound protestants who would establish their faith in the land, and contribute to the material progress of the colony. as they drew nearer, salutes were exchanged, and they came to an anchor close to the fleet. the voyagers when they landed were warmly received by their countrymen, who did their best to treat them hospitably. there were people of all ranks, and from all parts of france. several who had come in one of the larger ships were known to the count, who received them into his house. they stated that the fleet consisted originally of but three ships; but, as they were on the point of sailing, they were joined by two others conveying persons of whom they had been able to obtain no certain information. villegagnon received all in his usual courteous way, but it was observed that he paid the most attention to those on board the latter ships. before long it was whispered that among those people had been seen two men, who, though in secular dresses, were recognised as having been romish priests. still, though the people who had come in these two ships did not make their appearance at the protestant place of worship to return thanks for their safe voyage, they were not seen to practise any of the rites of the romish church. unpleasant rumours were, however, going about among the settlers, and the people asked one another how it was that the governor, who had professed to form a pure protestant colony, should have allowed romanists to come out among them. no satisfactory answer could be given to these questions, and some thought that the new-comers were possibly lately converted from rome, and would soon come to receive instruction from monsieur laporte. others, however, shook their heads, and observed that, had they been new converts, they would have exhibited more zeal, and would have been the first to join hands with the older brethren; instead of that, they associated entirely with the suspicious characters who had all along shown a disrespect to the protestant form of worship. all the settlers were, however, so busy in erecting dwellings, and cultivating the ground, that no one had time for polemical discussions. thus matters went on for some time till the church was finished. after it was roofed over, no persons, except those employed on it, were allowed to enter. numerous cases, which had formed part of the cargo of one of the ships, were landed and conveyed to it, and a large bell was hoisted up into the tower. one sunday morning the bell began to toll forth in a way which astonished the protestant settlers. the church was thrown open, and those who had been suspected by their fellow-colonists were seen with triumphant looks wending their way towards it. some of the protestants, influenced by curiosity, went in, and, on their return, reported that they had seen the two priests clad in their sacerdotal dresses, standing before a richly adorned altar, with a crucifix over it, and the figure of the virgin and child, with those of several saints placed in chapels on either side. mass, with all its accompaniments, was being performed, while the governor himself was taking part in the ceremony. the count de tourville, and several other leading protestants, called on him afterwards to express their astonishment and regret at what had happened. he received them with a haughty air, and declared that it was his intention, for the good of the colony, to encourage both forms of worship equally. the count expostulated. "the colony," he observed, "had been established for the express purpose of affording a home to protestants, where they could, regarding religious matters, avoid those dissensions which had sprung up in the old country." "you may still worship as you think fit; but others, who discover that they have erred in quitting the catholic church, have a right to enjoy the form which suits them best. i, as governor of this colony, am bound to please all parties, and i desire to hear no more complaints on the subject," he answered. the deputation, being thus dismissed, retired to consult what steps should be taken. though the protestants still outnumbered the romanists, the whole of the former could not be relied on, while the latter formed a compact body, most of them being thoroughly drilled by the priests, who had done their utmost to excite their fanaticism, while it was evident that they were supported by the governor. the protestants, therefore, arrived at the conclusion, as people often do under similar circumstances, that nothing could be done, and that they must wait the course of events. the two priests appeared to be quiet, well-disposed men; they made no outward show, but were observed to be going about quietly, from house to house, especially among the soldiers; and every sunday saw an increase in their congregation. the count watched these proceedings with feelings of dismay. monsieur laporte exerted himself among his congregation, and urged them to study their bibles, and to seek to live lives consistent with their christian profession. many listened to him and followed his advice; but there were not a few careless ones who went over to join the party of the governor and the priests. the women were induced to go to the church to listen to an organ which had been brought out from france, while one of the priests, who was a good musician, instructed them in the art of singing. fresh saints were set up, and additional ornaments were introduced, and on festal occasions the whole church was wreathed with flowers, imitating the custom of the heathens at their feasts of "flora," and other festivals. these attracted the careless and giddy among the young, who found the idolatrous system, which their fathers had repudiated, well suited to their tastes. thus rapidly the traitor villegagnon and his priests won over the larger part of the population. in vain the elder people, who had seen the effects of romanism in the old country, warned them and protested against the fearful errors which were being introduced. many of the young girls and youths were induced to go to confession and receive absolution for their past sins; the result being that they sinned and sinned again with their eyes open, under the belief that they could be again absolved. morality, which had been strictly maintained among the settlers, fast disappeared. the priests now openly sold indulgences, and went from house to house abusing those who refused to purchase them, and warned them that they would be considered as protestants and heretics. the count and other protestant elders, met and discussed what was to be done, but they had to confess themselves powerless. the minister preached more earnestly, and some few were won back to the truth; but the popular party still increased daily. the governor, it was observed, promoted only professed romanists, and managed by degrees to dismiss the protestant officers. villegagnon at length threw off the thin mask he had hitherto worn, and declared that the majority being in favour of rome, the settlement must become what he called a catholic colony. the protestants complained loudly of the governor's treachery; and several of them were arrested on charge of mutiny, and for plotting against the established authorities. captain beauport coming on shore one day, as he was on the point of returning to his boat, was seized and carried off to a prison villegagnon had lately erected in the fortress. he was not informed of the crime of which he was accused, nor could he conceive what it was, as he had carefully abstained from making any remarks on the conduct of his chief. the following day he was brought into the public hall of the fort, where the governor was seated as judge, supported by several of the officers whom he had promoted. one of the crew of the _madeline_, with the two priests, appeared as his accusers, and his officers and several of his men were ordered on shore as witnesses, nigel being among them. when the priests were called on to make their statements, one of them charged the brave captain with the crime of sacrilege, which, as it had been brought to his notice, he said that he felt bound to make it public. a seaman, then stepping forward, stated that by his orders, a number of holy images, crucifixes, and sacred relics captured from the portuguese, intended for the conversion of the heathen and the comfort of believers, had been sacrilegiously thrown overboard on their voyage to nitherohy. "of what immense value they would have been to us in the conversion of the heathen had they been preserved!" exclaimed one of the priests. "they were undoubtedly offered to us by heaven, to enable us to convert the barbarous natives." nigel and the other officers were then called on for their evidence. they had to confess that they saw the articles mentioned thrown overboard; but nigel observed, as they were part of the cargo of the prize, he could not suppose that the captain in any way acted contrary to what he was fully justified in doing. "beware, lest you are made a party to his crime!" exclaimed one of the priests. "i know well the malignant and impious disposition of your countrymen, and, had you not been imbued by their sentiments, you would have endeavoured to prevent so sacrilegious an act from being committed." the governor, as judge, declared that no further evidence was necessary. in vain the captain asserted that he had acted as he believed right. the priests shouted out that he deserved to die, and the traitor, villegagnon, forthwith pronouncing him guilty, condemned him to death. nigel, on quitting the court, hastened to the residence of the count, to tell him of the result of the trial. "this must not be," he said, on hearing it. "it would be a most atrocious murder. every protestant in the settlement must unite, and insist on having his life spared. it would be useless to petition; we must _demand_ our rights." nigel fully agreed with the count, and other leading protestants coming in were of the same opinion. "we must stake our lives on the issue," exclaimed one of the boldest. the count observed, that as it was their lives and liberties were in jeopardy, and that a bold front could alone save them. on separating they went among their friends to stir them up to action. that night every true protestant capable of bearing arms assembled, and the next morning marched together to the fort. on their way they met a roman catholic, who thought that captain beauport had been unjustly condemned, and willingly undertook to convey to the governor the resolution to which they had arrived. they waited, advantageously posted for defence on the brow of a hill a short distance outside the fort, while their envoy went forward with their message to the governor. they had also sent messages on board the ships, the officers and crews of most of which were sound protestants, and would, they had every reason to believe, support them in their endeavour to rescue the brave officer, who was loved and honoured by all, especially by his own crew. while waiting the return of their envoy, a messenger arrived from the fleet conveying the promise of the officers and men to afford them their full support. this made them still more determined to remain firm to their purpose. their envoy soon afterwards returned with the reply of the governor, stating that he would take their demands into consideration. on hearing this, they desired him to go back again, insisting that whether right or wrong, with regard to the act, it was committed on the high seas, beyond the jurisdiction of the governor, and that, if guilty, captain beauport must be sent to france to be tried. the governor, finding so strong a force opposed to him, saw that he had been premature in showing his colours, and that it would be his wisest course to try and conciliate those whom he could not for the present crush. he accordingly, accompanied by several officers, went out to meet the protestants. in the blandest style he could assume he assured them that he wished to act fairly towards both parties. he therefore stated his readiness to send captain beauport home for trial, and inquired whether any of the colonists who were dissatisfied with his government would wish to return to their native land. the idea had not before been entertained by them. several, however, at once replied that they were willing to return home, and others said that they would take the matter into consideration. "captain beauport, then, will be kept in safe custody, till the ships are ready to sail," said the governor. "they will be prepared in a few days; and, before that time, i wish to be informed of the number who desire to embark." the protestants, on receiving this announcement, returned to their homes. these were mostly situated together, and, as they had now ample proofs of the treachery of the governor, they stationed men on the look-out to give notice, should he send a force to attack them, that they might immediately reassemble and defend themselves. a meeting was held to discuss their future prospects. a considerable number of the most influential people resolved to return to france, hoping to live there in obscurity, or to make their way to geneva. some, among whom was the count, resolved to go to england, should he find france in the same unsettled state as he left it. nigel was now thankful that he had not abandoned the naval service, as he hoped that the _madeline_ would be sent home, and that he might again have the happiness of having constance and her father on board. still, the prospects of all the party were gloomy enough: many of them had embarked all their fortunes in the undertaking, and they would return without the means of support to their native shores. on the following day, a considerable number of the colonists sent in their names as desirous of returning, when they were informed, to their dismay, that the three smallest ships only would be got ready to receive them. reports had before been spread that so weatherbeaten and unseaworthy were these ships, that they were not again to be sent to europe, but to be retained in the harbour for the protection of the colony. nigel was almost in despair at receiving this information. he urged the count rather to remain than to run the risk of the voyage. the count, influenced by his daughter, was greatly disposed to follow the advice of nigel, who observed that the _madeline_ would probably before long be sent home, and that he might then take a passage on board her. the whole community were in a state of alarm; and it was increased when the governor sent directing them to be prepared to embark on the following day, with the information that only two of the ships could be got ready. that night the greater number of them met in their place of worship, to offer up their prayers to god, that he would protect them from the dangers they might have to encounter during their intended voyage. the meeting was almost concluded; monsieur laporte, in a loving address, was exhorting them to hold fast to the gospel, whatever persecutions they might have to endure, when a loud knocking was heard at the door of the chapel. on its being opened, an indian appeared in full war costume, with one of those formidable bows in his hand, with which the tamayas boasted they could send a shaft through the mail-clad body of a foe and fix him to a tree. "i am tecumah!" he exclaimed. "many here know me as a faithful friend of the french. i come to give you warning that a large force of your enemies and ours are on their way down the harbour to attack the island. they consist of portuguese and their indian allies the tuparas, who have transported their boats and canoes overland from the place where they have been secretly built for the purpose. they come in expectation of taking you by surprise, when, should they gain the victory, not a human being they may discover will be left alive. they have sworn to exterminate you and us by all the false saints they have taught their indian friends to worship." some doubted the information brought by tecumah; but the count and monsieur laporte urged their countrymen to believe him, as they well knew the warm affection with which he regarded them, and were convinced that he would not have alarmed them needlessly. some time was thus lost, but at length it was agreed that the count, with two other of the principal persons, should at once haste with tecumah to carry the information to the governor, and urge him to take steps for the protection of the settlement. unhappily, the protestant officers having all been removed from their posts, there was no one of authority in the congregation to send a direct order on board the ships to prepare for action. the night was unusually dark; not a breath of wind rippled the surface of the mighty estuary; and the ships, which were at anchor close together off the usual landing-place near the fort, could not move to any other position, where they might assist in the defence of the island, three sides of which were thus left unprotected. the enemy would certainly make their attack where they would not be exposed to the fire of the ships or that of the fort. chapter eight. attacked by enemies. tecumah urged the count and his friends to make all haste. even now he feared that there would be barely time for the french to assemble and prevent the enemy from landing. once on shore both parties would be on equal terms, and the most numerous would probably gain the victory. he had despatched a messenger, however, he said, to his father, to come with his warriors to the assistance of their friends, as, unfortunately, they were at a distance from their usual dwelling-place, engaged in hunting, and might not be able quickly to collect. the count had sent word to nigel to warn him and the other officers of the squadron to be prepared for an attack, and also to entreat as many as could be spared to come on shore to be in readiness for the defence of the island. the protestants had also got under arms, so that they might be able to march in any direction where their presence might be required. the governor received the count and his companions in the haughty and insolent manner he had of late assumed, and at first appeared inclined to discredit the account tecumah had brought; but when the young indian, with all the eloquence of his race, assured him of the truth of his statement, and warned him of the danger of delay, he changed his tone. he was too sagacious an officer not to see in reality that the warning must not be despised, but, without deigning to thank the count and his companions for the information they had brought, he desired them to go back to their friends. they obeyed his orders; while tecumah, having fulfilled his mission, hurried away to his canoe, intending to cross to the mainland for the purpose of urging his tribe to use all speed in coming to the assistance of the french. the governor, meantime, ordered the troops to get under arms, and sent off a despatch to the ships, directing the captains, some to get under weigh and to sail round to the other side of the island, others to remain ready for an attack near the landing-place. the calm, however, prevented the first part of his order from being obeyed. the whole population of the island was speedily aroused, and began to assemble at a central spot appointed by the governor. scouts were also sent out along the shore, and every precaution was taken which the sagacity of an experienced officer like villegagnon could suggest. the women and children, whose houses were in the more exposed situations, were brought to the fort, though it was hoped that the enemy might be driven back before they could effect a landing. scarcely, however, had the armed men collected, than the sound of firing was heard coming from the end of the island, where a little bay was situated. it was a spot which afforded an easy landing-place; but a fort had been built upon it, which it was supposed was of sufficient strength to drive back any enemy who might approach it. several shots followed the first, and then came through the calm night air the sounds of strife, the victorious warwhoops of the indians, and the shrieks and cries of the conquered. "forward, my men, and drive back the enemy," exclaimed villegagnon. "the fort has, i fear, been surprised, and the garrison cut to pieces, and, if so, the enemy have landed, and we must be prepared to encounter them on shore." saying this, the governor, who was not destitute of courage, led forward the main body of his men, while he despatched a messenger to the ships with an order for the seamen to advance to his support. the count with a small number of his men was ordered to keep in the rear, to act as he might think necessary. the darkness of the night prevented the french from seeing their invaders. they had not got far when they found themselves in the face of a force which they could only estimate by the hot fire which was opened on them. they fired in return with equal vigour, but it was soon evident that they were greatly outnumbered. several of them fell. showers of bullets whistled amidst them, while flights of arrows came flying into their ranks. in vain the governor endeavoured to repel the foe. at last he gave the order to sound the retreat, intending to fall back on the fort. the unseen enemy pressed him hard, and their fire increased rather than diminished, showing that more had landed. the count had now led his men up to take part in the fight, but they could do no more than check the advance of the enemy, and prevent them from overpowering the party under the governor. even the bravest began to despair of success. the flashes of the guns lighted up the darkness of the night, and where the fire was the hottest there the governor and count de tourville threw themselves fearlessly, exposing their own lives to encourage their followers. it was very evident that they had not only indians, but civilised europeans to fight against. notwithstanding their bravery, they were quickly driven back; and, before long, the count saw that his own and the surrounding houses would be exposed to destruction. at length a shout was heard on one side. it was recognised as coming from the body of seamen who were advancing to their support. the governor immediately despatched an officer to lead them to a position he wished them to occupy; but, before they had reached it, they found themselves engaged with a strong party of the enemy who had been sent to intercept them. the fight was now raging in two quarters, but still the enemy appeared to be gaining ground. constance de tourville had remained at home unwilling to desert the house till compelled to do so. several other ladies, whose houses were in more exposed situations, had come there for shelter, and stood listening with anxious hearts to the hot strife going forward within a short distance. at length some of the party proposed that they should fly to the fort; though, dreading the governor, they were unwilling, if it could be avoided, to place themselves in his power. constance preferred remaining, her father having promised to send timely notice to her should the french find themselves compelled to retreat. the sounds of the battle came nearer and nearer. several of the ladies declared that they could remain no longer, and hurried to the door to make their escape; constance remained firm. "i will obey my father," she said; "and when he sends me word that it is time to fly, i will go." the other ladies, influenced by her example, hesitated, when a shower of bullets came whistling above their heads, and shouts and shrieks and cries of the combatants sounded as if they were close at hand. it was too evident that such was the case. constance herself began to await anxiously for the order from her father to quit the house; when suddenly, in addition to the other sounds, a chorus of wild warwhoops burst on their ears. the savage cries were replied to by the shouts and cheers of the french. the musketry rattled as loud as ever, but none of the shots came near them. in truth, the tamoyos had arrived just at the moment the governor had determined to retreat and take shelter in the fort, leaving the rest of the island to the mercy of the invaders. tecumah was at the head of his tribe, who fought with the most desperate fury against their hereditary enemies the tuparas. the portuguese were now in their turn compelled to retreat; the french and indians pressed them hard, and, finding their expectation of surprising the settlement defeated, they took to flight towards the bay where they had left their boats. nigel had landed with a naval force, and, feeling that he was fighting for everything he held clear, he was regardless of his own safety. again and again he led his men on against greatly superior numbers of the enemy, but till the arrival of tecumah and his party all his efforts had been in vain. again he was leading them on, when he felt himself struck by a bullet, and, staggering a few paces, fell to the ground. still he called on his men to advance. the portuguese and tuparas every now and then faced about in order to cover the embarkation of those who first reached the boats. their bravery secured the retreat of their friends, but the greater portion of the rear-guard were overtaken and cut to pieces, while the main body shoved off from the shore and made their escape. constance and her friends had been anxiously awaiting the issue of the strife. when they heard the sounds of battle receding, their courage rose, and they hoped that their countrymen were gaining the victory. still they were left for a long interval. at length constance determined to go out and ascertain what had taken place. they provided themselves with lanterns, several of which had been brought to the house by those who had taken refuge in it, and, aided by their light, they went courageously forward. they had a higher motive also. they knew too well that many must have fallen, and they hoped to carry succour to some of the wounded, who might have been left behind by their advancing comrades. after going some way, they reached a spot where the strife had been hottest. here lay friends and foes mingled together, frenchman and portuguese; the indians only being distinguished by their war-paint and fantastic costume. on all the bullet, or arrow, or the deadly hatchet, had done its work. as they cast their lanterns on the forms stretched on the ground they saw that their help could not avail. the wounded had either been carried off by their companions, or had dragged themselves away to seek assistance. still they persevered in their mission of mercy, searching for others who might be still breathing. they were attracted by the sound of a groan, which proceeded from a spot not far off. again all was silent. "here is a wounded man!" exclaimed one of the ladies, calling to constance. "he is a naval officer, i see, by his dress." constance and her other friends hurried to the spot, and, by the light of a lantern cast on the countenance of the officer, constance saw at a glance that he was nigel. she threw herself on the ground, and endeavoured, with the help of her companions, to staunch the blood flowing from a wound in his side. he was pale as death, but another groan escaping from his lips showed her that he still breathed. at length they succeeded in stopping the effusion of blood. she called on his name, but he was too weak to answer, though once she felt, as she took his hand, a slight pressure returned, which showed that he recognised her voice. "oh, marie, hasten to the house, and entreat some of our friends to come and assist in carrying him there!" she exclaimed to one of her companions. "bring a bed, or a door torn from its hinges, on which he can be placed. we must not allow him to remain here longer than is possible. quick, my dear, if you love me!" her friend hurried away, eager to bring assistance which the young officer so greatly needed. constance in the mean time sat by the side of nigel, resting his head on her arm, while she bent over him, and assured herself that he still breathed. though dreading every moment to hear his last sigh, with loving and gentle words she endeavoured to recall him to consciousness. how fearfully long the time seemed. the sounds of the strife still going forward reached her ears, though she scarcely heeded them, for all her thoughts and all her feelings were centred on nigel. anxiously she and her friend waited the arrival of the party from the house. the latter every now and then got up and advanced a few paces to listen. at length lights were seen in the distance, and footsteps were heard approaching. constance uttered an exclamation of thankfulness when she saw her friends approaching with a litter they had hastily constructed with three poles supporting a mattress. with gentle care nigel was placed upon it, and the ladies lifting it from the ground proceeded towards the house. soon after they had reached it, the count arrived with the intelligence that the enemy had been driven off the island, and that the boats of the squadron had gone in pursuit of them. his sorrow at hearing of nigel's dangerous state was very great, and, ordering restoratives to be given him, he immediately set off in search of the surgeon, who had come out with the first party of the settlers, and had remained faithful to the truth. he happily discovered him attending to some of the wounded men who had been carried to one of the neighbouring houses. as soon as he could leave them he hastened to nigel's side. after examining his wound, he expressed a hope that, by constant watchfulness and care, he would recover, though the loss of blood had greatly exhausted him, and all would depend on his being kept perfectly quiet. one thing was certain, that he would be unable to move for many weeks to come, without risking his life. on hearing the surgeon's report, constance entreated her father not to carry out his intention of proceeding to europe. "i will certainly on no account leave him," he answered. "possibly the ships may be delayed, or the governor will be unwilling to let them sail, on the probability of the island being again attacked; but if so, he must treat the protestants with more justice than he has been doing for some time, and we must live in hopes that fresh arrivals from europe will again turn the scale in our favour." whether or not the governor suspected that the protestants hoped, with increased numbers, to recover their influence, it was difficult to say. the next day was devoted to rejoicings for the victory. the bells of the romish church rang out, the fort fired salutes, and a procession with crucifixes, banners, and images, marched through the island. the priests sang praises in honour of the virgin mary, whom they asserted had given them the victory, in answer to their petitions. the protestants assembled in their place of worship to return thanks to god for their deliverance. while the service, which had taken place at an earlier hour than usual, was going forward, an officer and party of soldiers arrived in front of the chapel. without knocking, or asking for admission, the officer entered the chapel with his hat on his head, and, in a loud voice, exclaimed-- "i bring you an order from the governor to disperse. he will allow of no meetings, except in the church he has built for the use of the colony." "allow us, sir, to finish the service in which we are engaged," answered the minister, in a deep tone. "it may be the last many of us will enjoy for some time to come." "my orders are to put a stop to your meeting," said the officer. "if you refuse to obey, i must use force to compel you." several of the persons present showed an inclination to dispute the point, but the minister and count urged them to yield obedience to the orders of the governor, and they quickly departed, when the officer, closing the door, put a seal on it, cautioning the people not again to enter, the governor having threatened severely to punish any who might do so. with sad hearts they returned to their homes. the victory over their enemies, instead of having improved their condition, appeared to have made it still more unbearable. many who had before intended to remain on the island now determined to proceed in the ships which the governor announced would sail in a couple of days. when, however, they went on board to arrange their sleeping places they found the vessels in so battered and unseaworthy a condition, and so overrun with vermin, that many resolved to remain rather than undergo the risk of a voyage on board them. the officers and crews confessed that they were very unwilling to sail; at the same time, as they were all protestants, they were anxious to get away from the island. the governor had also threatened them with punishment should they refuse. they promised, for their own sakes, as well as for that of their passengers, to repair the ships as much as time would allow. indeed, the crews were already working hard to fit them for sea. if the governor would permit them to remain another week, they might, it was hoped, be placed in a tolerably efficient state to cross the atlantic. the governor, however, would only allow them two more days, at the end of which time he insisted that all who intended to go must embark. a third of the original number, therefore, abandoned their purpose and resolved to remain and endure all the indignities to which they were likely to be subjected, while the rest, with many forebodings, went on board the two ships. they were, as it was, much overcrowded, and it was with difficulty that they could obtain sufficient provisions for the voyage, the governor asserting that no more could be spared from the stores of the garrison. when all were on board, and the anchors were about to be weighed, captain beauport was led out from prison in chains under a strong guard, and, not being allowed to communicate with any of his friends on shore, was conveyed on board; the captain to whose charge he was committed being directed by the governor to deliver up his prisoner to the authorities at the first port at which he could touch, charged with rebellion and heresy. captain dupre merely replied that he would do his duty, as far as he had the power. he was a silent undemonstrative man, not given unnecessarily to express his opinions. he had never shown a disposition to disregard the orders of the governor, who was, therefore, persuaded that he would carry them out on the present occasion. with sad hearts those remaining saw their countrymen sail away. they were anxious about their fate; but they had still greater cause to be anxious about their own. in the mean time, nigel, under constance's unremitting care, and that of the good surgeon who remained, was progressing favourably. some days passed before he had sufficient strength to speak, and not till more than a week had elapsed would the surgeon allow him to be told what had happened; he was then deeply grieved to hear that the count and constance had remained behind for his sake. he dreaded even more than they did the treachery and cruelty of villegagnon, knowing him as he did to be so completely under the influence of the priests. "he is but a wretched tool in their hands; and they, acting according to the dictates of their accursed system, which they call `the church,' are determined to drive every protestant out of the island, so that they may again be masters over the consciences of all the inhabitants. why," exclaimed poor nigel to constance, "did i not denounce the traitor to the admiral, who would not then, i feel convinced, have trusted the colony to his government? even had i failed to convince him, it would have been better to have been dismissed, and to have sought my fortune elsewhere. but then, constance, i should not have met you; and even now, if god wills that i should recover, i may be the means of preserving you from the dangers by which you are surrounded." "you acted as you believed right, and you must not blame yourself," said constance. "we must trust in god, and remember that, whatever happens, he orders all things for the best. should he permit these wicked men to triumph, let us feel sure that he has some object in view, though we may not see it." the count also exonerated nigel from any blame, and was much inclined to find fault with himself for having quitted france, instead of remaining at his post, and looking after his dependants. "we are but weak fallible creatures at best," he observed. "we often fancy that we are following god's will when we are pursuing only the promptings of our own inclinations. it shows how absolutely necessary it is to seek for guidance at the throne of grace in all our actions, even in what we may consider the most minute. when we remember that the hairs of our head are all numbered, and that god has told us that not a sparrow falls to the ground but he knows of it, we should remember that no act is too minute and inconsiderable to seek for counsel from him regarding it. i might say that at every word we utter we should ask him to direct us, for a single word may have an effect for good or for evil on those who hear it." still nigel was not satisfied with himself. few people can be so, when they review their past actions, unless they have acted as the count advised, and sought for guidance from above. for a short time the protestant settlers were left to act as they thought fit; but their place of worship continued shut up, and they were not allowed to enter it. they met, however, at each other's houses to read the scriptures and offer up prayer and praise together. but they thought it wise to do so with closed doors, and they always had some one on the watch outside to give notice of the approach of any of the papists. indeed, they found it necessary to use the same precautions which they had been accustomed to employ in france. they were now subjected to the same persecuting spirit as that from which they had attempted to escape. their only hope of being freed from their present galling condition was by a large influx of protestant settlers, when the scales might be again turned in their favour. would villegagnon, however, allow such to land? in all probability he would send them over to settle on the southern shore. this state of affairs continued for some weeks, during which nigel slowly recovered, much owing to the loving care of constance, and the skill of their friend, the surgeon. at length his health was considered fairly re-established. the count, however, advised him not to return to his ship until absolutely compelled to do so; indeed, having the permission of the admiral to quit the service, villegagnon could not legally insist on his remaining in it. "indeed, my dear friend," said the count, "i feel that my own life is so uncertain, and should i be taken away, my daughter would be left without a protector in whom i could place confidence, that i desire forthwith to commit her to your care. you will, i know, devote yourself to her, and, as far as a human being has power, defend her from all dangers." nigel grasped the count's hand, and with a proud joy at his heart, promised not to disappoint his expectations. he took no vain oath: he did not call on god to witness that he intended to fulfil his promise, for he and the count knew that what he uttered was heard in heaven, and required no other ratification. constance willingly agreed to her father's wishes, and it was settled that in a few days the marriage ceremony should be performed by their minister and friend, monsieur laporte. their love was mutual and equally intense, and they felt that they could together face the dangers of many sorts surrounding them far better than apart. constance implicitly confided in nigel, and he felt unspeakable pride and joy in having the power of supporting and protecting her. chapter nine. proceedings of "the inquisition." ten days had passed since nigel and constance were united. he had not ventured beyond the precincts of the garden; and it might have been supposed that captain villegagnon had forgotten his existence, as no order had been sent him to join his ship. he intended, should he receive one again, to plead the admiral's permission to quit the service, coligny having indeed accepted his resignation. as long, however, as he was not interfered with he resolved to remain quiet. he employed his time in assisting the count in the cultivation of the ground, and in devising plans for the future. rumours were abroad that the governor intended on the arrival of fresh colonists to found a town on the north side of the harbour, to be named nitherohy. the count determined to move there, and to purchase a plot of land on which to build a residence and form an estate, as he hoped before that time to receive remittances from his steward. "i should not have thought of it, my dear nigel, had it not been for you and constance," he observed. "though as regards myself all worldly pride and ambition have been laid aside, i should like to see you the master of a property suitable to your birth and education." the idea was naturally consonant with nigel's wishes, and he promised to labour hard in bringing the proposed estate into cultivation. "it will afford me ample employment for the future," he observed; "and employment, of course, i must have." tecumah and cora had during this time made frequent visits to the island. tecumah was welcomed by the governor, as he was always well informed of the movements of the portuguese and hostile indians, besides having already rendered important services to the colony. the governor only looked on him in the light of an intelligent young savage and a faithful ally to the french. he had, however, already advanced in a knowledge of christian truth, and had become an earnest and believing follower of the lord. he one day came over to report that a party of the tuparas had been seen on the high ground beyond the southern extremity of the harbour, making their way to the portuguese settlement. he advised that boats should be sent out and advanced posts stationed, to give due notice of an attack, should one be contemplated. these arrangements having been made, the governor invited tecumah to accompany him in a walk to a part of the island which he was about to visit. the strains of solemn music reached their ears. tecumah attentively listened with much delight, and inquired whence they proceeded. "the ministers of our religion are performing a sacred service, my friend," answered the governor. "if you please, we will enter and pay our devotions to the holy virgin and saints." "i thought that christians worship god alone," observed the indian. "of course, so we do," said the governor; "but we worship also, in a different way, the mother of god and his holy saints and apostles." "i have heard that god is a jealous god, and will have none other gods worshipped but himself," said the indian. "but the mother of god; surely he will have us worship her?" observed the governor. "the bible does not say so," answered tecumah, boldly, "when jesus hung on the cross he said to john, `behold thy mother,' and to his mother, `behold thy son;' and looking round on his disciples, he once observed, when he was told that his mother and brethren were near, `behold my mother, and my brethren.'" "where did you learn all that?" asked the governor, in an angry tone. "from one of your good ministers; and i am sure he spoke the truth," answered tecumah, innocently. "he shall suffer for it," muttered the governor. they had just then reached the door of the church, and tecumah followed the governor, who went up towards the so-called "holy altar." the indian gazed around with astonishment at the gorgeous drapery, the images, the lighted candles, and the large silver crucifix, with the figure of the virgin on one side, and saint john on the other, and the vases of flowers, and numerous other ornaments. he said not a word during the whole ceremony, but watched attentively what took place. there was the usual chanting in latin, and so-called prayers muttered over in the same language; while the church was filled with incense from censers waved to and fro. then, during a solemn silence, the chief officiating priest lifted up something (what it was he could not make out) above his head. he then observed that they put something into their mouths and drank wine, which they had mixed with water from a silver cup. then the people came up and the priests put something into their mouths, and there was more chanting and prayers in an unknown tongue. then those who had been on their knees rose and filed out of the church, laughing and talking and making jokes with each other. tecumah followed the governor, anxious to know what had taken place, and inquired what the priests were about when they muttered prayers over the silver dish and wine. "they were then performing the greatest miracle of our church," answered the governor. "they were converting the wafer and wine into the body and blood of christ." "what?" asked the indian. "christ has assumed his glorified body, and is now in heaven at the right hand of god. which body, may i ask, do they think they eat, his human body or his glorified body? i cannot understand the matter." "nor can i enlighten you," answered the governor, looking much perplexed. "i am not fond of having such questions put to me." "pardon me if i ask one more," said the indian, who was eager to gain information on the subject. "what were they doing when they lifted the wafer above their heads?" "they were then offering up to god the great sacrifice, the real body and blood of his dear son." "christ was once offered up as a sacrifice for sinners on the cross," said the indian; "surely they cannot offer him again?" "our church says they can; and that's all we know about the matter," answered the governor, in a tone of irritation. "let me then ask you another question," said tecumah. "what were they doing when they ate the wafers and drank the wine, and then put the wafers into the mouths of the people?" "they were eating the real body and drinking the blood of christ," answered the governor, "and feeding the people with the body, for the priests alone are allowed to drink the blood. they were, in other words, performing the sacrifice of the mass." "what?" exclaimed the indian, starting back. "it is too solemn a thing to joke about; but do you wish to make me believe that the people can really believe that they eat the body of their god, and that human beings can change pieces of paste into that body? no, no, no! monsieur governor. we indians have not a knowledge of the numerous arts you frenchmen possess, but we are not so foolish as to believe such a gross imposture as that. i am afraid that your priests are like our medicine-men, in whom we trusted till we found them to be rogues and deceivers." these words were uttered by tecumah in a loud, indignant tone, and were overheard by one of the priests, who, having changed his gorgeous robes, had followed the governor out of the church in order to speak to him. "beware, young man, what you say!" he exclaimed, in an angry tone. "how can you understand the mysteries of our faith? but i know well where you received your instruction, and he who taught you shall have his just reward." tecumah stood calmly listening to the priest's angry threats. "he who taught me is under the protection of my tribe," he answered, "and those who injure him will be our foes. i now see that you are one of the men who played the tricks in the church hard by, and deceived the people by persuading them that you have the power which belongs to god alone, to work a miracle." these words so enraged the priest, that he would have struck the indian had he dared. the governor observed his anger, and being well aware of the importance of not offending their indian allies, on whose support their very existence depended, now interfered and tried to soothe the angry priest as well as tecumah. the latter, however, felt more scorn than anger towards the man whom he, with his acute and unprejudiced mind, looked upon as guilty of practising a gross imposture, and he was therefore quickly pacified; but the priest, grinding his teeth, continued to mutter threats of vengeance, till the governor, drawing him aside, reminded him of the importance of not offending the indians. "you may do what you like with the heretic minister," he observed; "but the services of these indians are required, and we cannot afford to lose them." "the guilty one shall feel the vengeance of our church, then," answered the priest. "we cannot allow a doctrine which so greatly supports our authority to be called in question." "of course not, my friend, of course not," said the governor; "though, as men of sense, you and i no more believe in it than does that clever young indian." "as to that, monsieur governor, we keep our opinions to ourselves," said the priest, with as near an approach to a laugh as he ever indulged in. "at the same time, the sooner we put that acute, clever-minded young indian out of the way, together with his instructor, monsieur laporte, the better for the maintenance of our holy religion." the countenance of the priest had assumed its usual undemonstrative expression as he continued, "listen, monsieur governor. i believe that the count de tourville and his daughter and son-in-law are equally dangerous. that young indian and his sister are constantly at their house, and have imbibed their pestiferous notions from them. i have had my eye on them for some time, when they were not aware that they were watched. i do my duty in looking after the spiritual interests of my countrymen"--the priest crossed his arms and cast his eyes on the ground--"but i feel that my humble efforts unaided are not sufficient. when our community increases, we shall have many of these accursed protestants among us, and it will be absolutely necessary to devise effectual means for the preservation of our authority. i would therefore suggest the establishment of the holy inquisition, by which alone heresy can be rooted out. it will prove our zeal for religion, and gain the approbation of our patrons, the excellent duke de guise and his brother, the cardinal of lorraine." "you will have my permission to carry out your plan as you may wish, holy father," said the governor. "you may exercise your authority on our countrymen as you may deem necessary to bring them under the wholesome control of the church; but i cannot have the indians interfered with until we are strong enough to do without them. when we are, you will have my full permission to manage them as you think best for the purpose of bringing them into the true fold; but in the mean time their savage relatives may not understand your object in burning them for the good of their souls, and may be apt in their ignorance to revenge their deaths by cutting us to pieces." "i understand your wise policy," answered the priest. "we will bide our time, then, for commencing the conversion of the indians. but i have your permission to act towards the count and his family, and that pestiferous heretic minister, as i may judge necessary for the full establishment of the faith in our colony?" "certainly, certainly," answered the governor; "i willingly grant you all the power you ask." the priest returned into the church to hear the confessions of several of his congregation, who were waiting to get absolution that they might sin again without having too great a load on their shoulders; as also to put out the candles, which he in his hurry had left burning. the governor returned to the fort, while tecumah went to pay his usual visit to monsieur laporte. he naturally expressed his astonishment at what he had seen and heard. "surely," he exclaimed, "sensible men do not really believe that, by the words of a priest, jesus christ, sitting at the right hand of god, really does allow his body to descend into the bits of paste which the priest puts into the mouths of the people. the bible, as you read it to me, says that he is seated at the right hand of god, to make intercession for us sinners, and that he acts as our great high priest." "i cannot tell what the poor ignorant people may really believe, though it does seem astounding that they should be so imposed on by their priests," answered monsieur laporte. "it was many centuries even before the corrupted church of rome introduced the dogma or notion, which was invented by a monk in the eighth century, when it was eagerly seized upon by the pope, who saw that it would enable him and his army of subordinates to become sacrificing priests, which would give them immense influence over the minds of people, if they could persuade them to believe it. they had taught the great mass of the people to believe in the power of dead men's bones and other relics to work miracles; in the heathen notion of purgatory for cleansing the soul by fire; to worship idols with the names of saints; to pray for the dead; and to pray to dead men whom they had dubbed saints, as well as to put faith in many other abominable falsehoods. they found, therefore, no difficulty in persuading the more ignorant people to believe this most blasphemous fable, which from henceforth became one of the most powerful engines for increasing the influence of the priests over the minds of men, though many, both learned and unlearned persons in our own and other countries loudly protested against the novel doctrine, as contrary to the true meaning of our lord's language at the last supper and the teaching and practice of the apostles." "i thought that you and other sensible men could not possibly believe so outrageous a notion, and so contrary to god's word," observed tecumah. "but how comes it that men can be so wicked as to teach what is in direct opposition to the bible?" "influenced by satan, they make use of every means, however impious, to gain an influence over their fellow-creatures. it has been the same everywhere from the earliest ages of the world. they are like your medicine-men, whom you now know to be gross impostors. in all countries there have been found men, for their own ends, or for the support of the authority they serve, willing to deceive their fellow men, in many instances, as is often the case with these priests of rome, being deceived themselves. our only sure guide and prevention against such impostures is the study of god's word and constant obedience to its holy precepts. as jesus withstood the temptations of satan by replying to him with the scriptures, so must we arm ourselves, and ever be ready to withstand our foes, in whatever form they come, by the same blessed word of god. a sure sign that the romish system is the invention of satan is that it dreads the word, and whenever it has the power, keeps it from the people or grossly misinterprets its meaning." "i would that i could have that blessed book translated into the language of my people," exclaimed tecumah. "i can now understand it in french, and may be able to explain it to those who are willing to hear me; but i should desire to send it throughout the whole country, that all the native tribes might hear the glad tidings that there is a loving saviour ready to receive them into the kingdom." the above conversation occupied a much longer time than we have in repeating it, and both the minister and young chief used very different language to that which has been employed. tecumah showed by his questions and replies how completely he understood it, and how his pure unprejudiced mind revolted against the falsehoods of rome, while it quickly embraced the truth of the gospel. after quitting monsieur laporte, he paid a visit to the count. he found nigel hard at work in the garden, and constance helping him. he repeated to them what he had seen and the impression formed on his mind, and they explained the truth much as the minister had done; to which constance added an account of the horrible system of the confessional, which she had heard from some of her papist friends, who had been subjected to it, and the abominable questions which had been put to them by the priests. "that alone would have been sufficient to convince me that this system is not of god. and he tells us from the mouth of the apostle paul that we may come boldly to the throne of grace, trusting in the all cleansing blood of jesus; and jesus himself says, `come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and i will give you rest.' i am sure that he never refuses to hear when a human being comes trusting to his blood shed on calvary. monsieur laporte was reading from the epistle of timothy a prophecy that there should come `some who shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which god hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth,' who would advocate will-worship and their own good deeds in opposition to the all perfect atonement of jesus. such truly is what the priests of rome teach, though nearly for a thousand years after christ came christian ministers, whom they acknowledged as belonging to their communion, were allowed to marry like other men; and certainly those who did so were less corrupt than the celibates who, having no family ties, became the servile tools of rome's tyranny." constance had now to go in to prepare for dinner, and nigel then asked tecumah what remarks he had made to the governor and the priest. the indian told him. "you spoke truly; but knowing what these priests are, i fear much that they will endeavour to entrap you; and if they find that they cannot compel you to believe in their false doctrines and to acknowledge their authority, they will use other means to bring about your destruction." "i will be watchful, and keep out of their power," said tecumah. "i fear much, though, that they will equally endeavour to persecute you whom they look upon as my instructor; but i will be on the watch, and try to defend you as well as myself." tecumah spent the rest of the day with his friends, and it was late in the evening when his canoe was seen gliding rapidly across the harbour towards the mainland. villegagnon and the priests did not long allow the protestant settlers to remain in quiet. the governor announced that he had received orders from france to allow no bibles to remain in the hands of any of the people, declaring that they made a bad use of them by seeking an excuse from their pages for rebellion. the count resolved to go in person to the governor, and reminding him that he had ever been loyal, to claim exemption from the tyrannical law. he went, but was haughtily told that rich and poor must be treated alike, and that no exception would be made in his favour. should he not deliver up all the bibles in his house, he must be prepared for the consequences. monsieur laporte and the good surgeon were treated in the same manner. nigel, however, resolved, as he was not a frenchman, not to part with his bible; and, in case a domiciliary visit should be paid by the "inquisitors," having placed it in a box and buried it in the garden among some thick trees, he and constance could thus take it out and read it, which they did every day, without risk, as they supposed, of being discovered. before long a party of men appeared, headed by an officer, with an authority from the governor to collect all the bibles and protestant sermons and hymns to be found. the count, knowing that resistance was vain, delivered up those he possessed, protesting, however, against the injustice of the act. "that's not our affair, count de tourville," answered the officer; "but i will report what you say to the governor. now, let me ask you, have you any other books?" "i have given you all that are to my knowledge in the house," answered the count. "if you are not satisfied you must search for them." "we cannot take the word of an heretic," said the officer, insolently. "we intend to search, and if we find any it will be the worse for you." providentially, nigel was away, and thus escaped having questions asked him. poor constance endeavoured to console her father while the officers were searching in every corner and cranny of the house. no books, however, were discovered; and at length, threatening to pay another visit shortly, the inquisitors went away to search other houses in the neighbourhood; and in two or three, meeting with opposition, they carried the owners off to prison. the most severe sufferer was monsieur laporte, the whole of whose library was carried off, all his books more or less being of a theological character. the following day, in an open space in front of the fort, a pile of faggots was seen, when the books were brought forth from the house into which they had been thrown. most of the population turned out to witness the expected sight, shouting and jeering as book after book was thrown on the pile, to which fire had been set. as each fresh batch of books began to burn they shouted loudly, and when it was seen that most of the books were bibles, their shouts and cries and fierce execrations grew louder and louder. this went on till all were consumed. the protestants remained at home during the period, sorrowful and cast down. no one knew what persecutions they might be doomed to bear. monsieur laporte went from house to house, endeavouring to console and support his flock, reminding them all of the sufferings christ's people had been called on to bear from the earliest days to the present time, and urging them to keep in view that crown of glory which he had prepared for all who hold fast to the truth. so much had his faithful and gentle character won the love of all except the most brutal, that many even among those who had been perverted regarded him with affection, while the priests, hearing him so highly spoken of, were afraid for the present to persecute him further. they were, however, very active among his congregation, whom they endeavoured by soft words and plausible arguments to win over; but finding that they did not succeed, as in reality only the frivolous and irreligious had hitherto been gained to their side, they determined to use harsher measures. one evening nigel and constance had gone to their bower in the woods, where, concealed by the thickness of the surrounding foliage, they took out their bible and sat down on a bench nigel had placed there. he had been reading for some time to his young wife, occasionally stopping to explain a verse or to ask her opinion; now turning back and comparing text with text, both of them being so absorbed that they did not know how long they had been thus engaged, when they were suddenly aroused by hearing a footstep, and looking up they saw a priest standing before them, while a little way off appeared a party of armed men. "you have been discovered engaged in an unlawful act, monsieur nigel, by which you have made yourself liable to the just vengeance of the law!" exclaimed the priest, in a triumphant tone. "you have been suspected for some time. in the name of the governor, therefore, i order you to yield yourself prisoner. take this gentleman into custody," he added, turning to the armed men, who, as he spoke, sprang eagerly forward. nigel was too much astonished for the moment to reply. constance uttered a cry of alarm, and clung to his arm. "you cannot, you must not take him from me!" she exclaimed, in a terrified tone. "you are equally guilty, young lady, in listening to him," said the priest. "in all probability you will share his fate." "oh, let me go with him now, then, if you insist on taking him," she said, still holding nigel's arm. "no, no, lady. don't fancy that you will be allowed to keep him company," said the priest, in a harsher tone. "for the present you may remain with your father, till the governor thinks fit to summon you." "fly rather to the faithful indians," whispered nigel; "do not put yourself in the traitor's power." he could say no more, for the armed men seizing him took him off, while the priest held constance in his arms. she in vain struggled to free herself from his loathsome grasp, while she entreated to be set free, ever and anon uttering shrieks for help; but not till the priest was sure that the party with nigel were out of sight did he allow her to escape, when seeing her father, who had been attracted by her cries, coming from the house, she flew towards him, the priest in the mean time hurrying after his companions. it was fortunate for him that he got away, for the count, with a thick stick in his hand, forgetting the danger of doing so, would have made him feel the effects of his just anger. "oh, save him, save him! they have seized nigel. what will they do to him?" cried constance, as she sank into her father's arms. the count saw that pursuit was hopeless, for the priest, tucking up his long dress to enable him to scramble over the fences, had already got to a considerable distance; besides, it would have been vain to attempt rescuing nigel from a party of armed men. the count could only say, "trust in god, my child. he alone can help us." poor constance, overcome with grief and terror, could scarcely, even with her father's assistance, reach the house. he placed her on a couch by his side, vainly endeavouring to console her. he indeed feared that the priests would not allow them to escape with impunity, and he guessed truly that it had been only for the sake of inflicting a greater cruelty that nigel had first been carried off. monsieur laporte with the good doctor happily came in, having heard a rumour of what had occurred. both were required, for constance became seriously ill; but the words of the former were of more value than any medicine the latter could prescribe. the minister at, once turned to god's word; not to the book itself, for that he did not dare to carry about, but to the numerous blessed texts which he had committed to memory, and from these he was able to draw that effectual comfort which could alone avail with the poor young wife. no one dared to speak of the future, for they knew well the bitter hatred felt by the governor and priests towards nigel, and that they would rejoice at having a victim in their power on whom they would wreak their vengeance. while they were seated with constance and the count, tecumah and his sister arrived, on their way to pay their usual visit to monsieur laporte. they were overwhelmed with grief and indignation when they heard what had occurred. cora threw herself by the side of constance, and poured out her expressions of sympathy from her woman's heart. indian as she was, she could feel for her white sister, her affectionate tones tending somewhat to soothe her friend's outraged feelings. "do not give up hope," she whispered, "we will gladly devote our lives, if necessary, to save him. we indians are accustomed to do many things which would astonish the white people, and if a friend is in danger, every one of our tribe is ready to help him." "they dare not kill him!" exclaimed tecumah, "and if a hair of his head is injured i will arouse our people, and instead of being friends and ready to fight on their side, we will come over with our strong bows and attack them." "even for the sake of a friend we would not urge you to use violent measures," said the minister. "remember the precepts of our blessed lord and master; he who was ever mild, gentle, and forgiving, doing good to those who injured him." "yes, i know that, and desire to obey our saviour's law; but he does not forbid us to help our friends," exclaimed the young indian. chapter ten. imprisonment and rescue. tecumah and his sister remained for some time with their friend. tecumah then accompanied the minister to his house. they passed on their way through the count's garden, as it afforded them a shorter cut than the public path. as they got to the further end of the garden they turned aside to visit the spot where nigel had been seized. on reaching it, tecumah sprang forward, for there he saw before him on the ground the bible, which the priest, in his eagerness to hold back constance, had let drop, and had forgotten to take with him when the count appeared. "blessed book!" exclaimed tecumah. "let me be its guardian. your cruel persecutors shall not burn it while i have it in charge, and you may come over to read it, or when the search is over i will bring it back to you." to this proposal monsieur laporte willingly agreed; and while the indian, wrapping it up carefully, concealed it beneath his cloak, the minister closed the box in which it was wont to be put, and covered it over again with earth and leaves. cora begged that she might be allowed to continue with constance till the following morning or longer. "we were not observed coming into the house," she said, "and it will not be known that i am here. i have my reasons for wishing to remain." the count and constance of course agreed to what cora wished. before her brother quitted the house she had a short and earnest conversation with him. tecumah, having spent some time with the minister, hurried to his canoe and rapidly crossed to the north side of the harbour. meanwhile, nigel was dragged along by his captors. he had been so completely surprised that it was impossible for him to escape; and finding this, he walked along without making any further resistance. the priest soon overtook the party. in vain nigel tried to learn from him what had become of constance. "it's not my duty to answer questions," he replied; "but i have some, notwithstanding, to ask you. how is it that, knowing the orders of the governor, you ventured to read that book from which you draw all your heresies?" "i am not aware that i have drawn anything but truth through the teaching of the holy spirit," answered nigel. "that is the notion all you heretics hold!" exclaimed the priest. "it is the origin of your pestiferous principles." "i was not prohibited from reading it in my own country, and i claim as a scotchman the right to do so wherever i am," answered nigel. "no person of whatever country has the right to act contrary to the commands of the catholic church," answered the priest, furiously; "and that church positively forbids laymen from reading the bible, or putting their own interpretations on it, therefore to whatever nation you belong you are under its rule, and are equally guilty. but i waste words in arguing with a heretic. your only hope of escape from death is to recant without delay and become a faithful catholic, and the governor, at my intercession, will overlook your offence. come, you will be wise; so give up your errors." "never will i give up my faith," answered nigel, firmly. "ah, my young friend, you say so now; but think of the advantages you will gain. you will at once be restored to your young wife, and will undoubtedly be raised to a post of honour and wealth in our new settlement; and when the count dies you will inherit his property and found a noble family in antarctic france." nigel felt that the temptations held out were powerful, but he prayed that were they ten times more so he might have grace to resist them. he doubted also very much whether the wily priest was not mocking him. he knew full well from the accounts he had heard in france of the treachery of which the emissaries of rome were guilty, and he would not place any confidence in the most specious promises any of them might have made to him. he therefore let the priest talk on, endeavouring as far as he could not to listen to him. at length the fort was reached. nigel was forthwith thrust into a cell, ordinarily used for the confinement of a refractory or drunken soldier, and was there left to his own meditations. he walked up and down, considering what he should do and what he should say. now and again he stopped, and earnestly prayed for guidance and direction. the governor and priests were too eager to condemn the protestants to allow an accused person to remain long in prison without trial. that very afternoon nigel was carried into the public hall where the governor held his court. the priest was his accuser, and the men by whom he was captured were the witnesses against him. of course he had no defence to make, except his claim of right to read whatever books he pleased. "before he is condemned there is another charge of a still more heavy nature," said the governor. "stand forward, men, and say what you have got to state;" and nigel was, to his astonishment, charged with abetting captain beauport in heaving overboard the images of the saints, the relics, and papal dispensations. "even had i actually assisted i should only have been obeying the orders of my superior officer," said nigel. "you confess that you were guilty of standing by and witnessing such a proceeding without remonstrating?" exclaimed one of the priests who was seated near the governor. "such enormities must meet with severe punishment, or our holy religion will be held in disrespect." "undoubtedly captain beauport escaped with too lenient a sentence," said the governor, "though probably the vengeance of heaven has overtaken him ere this: he and all on board the ship in which he sailed are beneath the ocean." "because one has escaped, are other criminals to go unpunished?" exclaimed the priest who had before spoken. "death by shooting or hanging would be too mild a sentence: he deserves the stake, unless by confessing his fault and abjuring his errors he returns to the loving bosom of our holy church." similar remarks were made by the other priest in a manner not usual in a court of law. for some time this mockery of a trial went on. nigel prayed for strength, for he felt how greatly he needed it. he stood calm and apparently unmoved, listening to the abusive remarks of the vindictive priests. no one raised a voice in his favour. there might have been many who felt for him, but they feared to speak. the men who were judging him were also his accusers. still he felt bound to defend himself, although he knew full well that the most able defence would not avail him. he pleaded that, with regard to reading the bible, he was a foreigner and was but doing what was allowed in his own country; that he was not even attempting to make proselytes, and was simply obeying the command of his lord to search the scriptures. and that, as to the second accusation, whether or not he approved of what had been done, had he acted otherwise and interfered, he would have been guilty of an infraction of naval discipline; therefore he could not be made answerable for what had been done. "he acknowledges himself guilty of sacrilege, for ecclesiastical law is above all other law, and that would have compelled him to interfere," cried the priest. "death, death, to the heretic!" and several voices echoed the savage cry. "you are undoubtedly guilty of the crime alleged against you, monsieur lieutenant," said the governor, after consulting in an undertone with the two priests at his side. "your being a foreigner, as you are in the service of france, will not avail you. you will have two days given you to consider whether you will recant, and if not, your sentence is `that you be bound to a stake, with fire kindled around you till your body is consumed, and your soul is carried off by the emissaries of satan, who are certainly waiting for it.'" nigel listened calmly while the governor was pronouncing his terrible doom--one to which the church of rome had already condemned tens of thousands of human beings for simply reading the bible. without being allowed to say another word, he was seized by the guards waiting the beck of the governor, and dragged out of the court. instead, however, of being led back to the prison where he had previously been confined, he found that he was actually leaving the fort. the governor was, in truth, afraid to keep him there, for a considerable number of the _madeline's_ crew, who were much attached to him, were doing duty on shore, and, although they attended the romish service, he was well aware that still in their hearts they were protestants, and he feared that they might rescue him and assist in his escape. the priests had of late erected close to the church a small building which they intended should serve as an inquisitorial prison where they might keep in confinement any heretics on whom they were desirous of expending their religious zeal. to this place nigel was taken, and thrust into one of its dungeons built especially under the priests' directions. it was, in truth, little better than a pit dug in the ground, with a small aperture towards the roof to admit light. on this occasion they had obtained a party of soldiers from the governor to guard their prison. nigel had not been long shut up in this dreadful place when night came on, and he was left in total darkness, with only a bundle of dry grass on which to lie down and rest himself. brave as he was, he could not but look forward with painful feelings to the fate prepared for him. he thought, however, more of his young wife and the poor count. he feared, too, that the hatred of the priests might drag them into the same fate. perhaps even now they were seized and accused of crimes for which their tyrannical oppressors might condemn them to death. sleep was impossible, while the darkness prevented him from pacing up and down his narrow cell, which would have been some relief to his tortured mind. he felt for the pile of grass and lay down, considering that it would be wiser to try and obtain some rest to prepare himself for the future trials he would have to go through. the sudden destruction of all his happiness, separation from his beloved constance, and the agonising death speedily to overtake him, made him have recourse to prayer to obtain that strength ever awarded to those who seek it from on high. nigel had been sleeping for some time, when, suddenly awaking, he became conscious that some one was in the vault, by hearing a footstep and a low sound of breathing. a feeling of horror for a moment ran through him. could it be an assassin sent by the governor or priests to put him secretly to death, and so to save themselves from carrying out the sentence passed on him, from which even they might shrink, aware of the horror it would create among the greater number of the colonists, who, not having been educated in their school, would, whatever their religious sentiments, look at it with disapprobation. still, for himself it would matter nothing, except being deprived of a few hours of life, and he would thus be saved from the tortures of the flames. such thoughts rapidly passed through his mind; but in another moment he had nerved himself, like a brave man, to meet whatever might occur. his very natural feeling was to struggle desperately with his supposed assassin. he might even gain the victory and thus make his escape. full of youth and strength, he felt that it would be better far to die struggling bravely, should the guard set upon him, than to sink down tamely where he lay. springing to his feet, he stood with his arms prepared for defence. "hush!" said a voice. "i thought you were still sleeping. make no noise--give me your hand and come quickly; there is not a moment to lose." nigel knew by the voice and the mode of expression that it was the indian cora who spoke. he put out his hand and felt it grasped by her small and delicate fingers. to his surprise he found himself led almost instantly into a narrow passage, with room sufficient only for one person to pass through at a time. "stoop low," said cora, as she conducted him into apparently a small alcove on one side. "step back and remain a moment," she added, disengaging her hand, immediately after which he heard a grating sound as if a heavy stone were being moved. quickly returning, she again took his hand, and led him down a slope of some feet, and then again along a level; when once more they ascended another slope, at the top of which, mounting a few steps, he found himself standing in the open air, surrounded by a thick grove, beyond which he could distinguish the wooden tower of the church. once more cora desired him to remain, while she was engaged in closing up the aperture through which they had emerged. putting her finger on her lips to enforce silence, she once more led him forward at a rapid rate, keeping under the shelter of the trees; where the gloom was such that he could not possibly by himself have made his way. at length they reached a small beach with low cliffs on either side. keeping under their shade they proceeded till he discovered a canoe concealed beneath a rock. cora, without requiring his assistance, quickly launched it, and then again taking his hand, bade him, in a whisper, step in and lie down his length at the bottom. instantly grasping a paddle, she began to make her way rapidly from the shore. she had not got far, when a voice from the cliff hailed, ordering the canoe immediately to come back. cora took no notice, but paddled on with renewed efforts. again the person on the cliff shouted, and threatened to fire if his orders were not obeyed. a few seconds only had passed when a shot whistled close to the canoe. cora bravely paddled on. the man on the cliff must have reloaded quickly, for soon afterwards another shot came, but happily without touching the canoe. the darkness must have soon hid so small an object from the soldier's sight, though the shore was still visible. a third and fourth shot followed, but still wider of the mark. cora did not relax her efforts till they had got more than half way across the harbour. she then stopped for a moment to listen, but no sound of oars indicated that they were pursued. "we are safe now," she said, "and you may raise yourself; but don't attempt to stand up. thankful i am that we have escaped. i have no fear for myself, but i dreaded every moment lest you might have been retaken by your cruel enemies. my brother gave me the task to do, and i gladly accepted it. he himself has gone to summon our tribe to arms, having resolved to rescue you by force had my undertaking failed." "i am most grateful to you," said nigel. "but by what wonderful means were you able to enter my prison and liberate me without apparent difficulty?" "by means which these cruel priests themselves afforded," answered cora. "when they were building their prison-house, tecumah and i happened to pass that way and observed that they were placing it on the ground once occupied by an ancient temple at which, in days gone by, our tribe were wont to worship. one of our medicine-men, who had listened to the truth from tecumah's mouth, told us that there were several passages running underground which had possibly been undiscovered by the builders. he is a sagacious man, and, finding that the new building was intended for a prison, advised us to visit the ancient passage and endeavour to keep it concealed, so that a way might be made if necessary into the dungeon. `the whites treat us at present with respect,' he observed; `but the time may come when they may act towards us as the portuguese have long been acting towards the indians in their neighbourhood, imprisoning and murdering those who refuse to adopt their faith.' my brother accordingly, with several other young men, led by the medicine-man, paid numerous visits, at night, to the place, unknown to the french. it was thus discovered that an underground passage was being formed between some of the cells of the prison and the church. fortunately this was found out before the old passage was cut through, and by placing a large stone, turning on a sort of hinge, on one side, they were able to secure a way into the new passage without betraying the existence of their own. by constantly being on the watch, they ascertained that only one cell had as yet been formed into which the passage led. i had resolved when you were made prisoner to attempt your rescue even from the fort; but when i found that you were, carried to the priests' prison my hopes of success arose. i had one night, from curiosity, gone with my brother to visit the spot. we then discovered that the door which led into your prison had no lock, but was merely closed with smooth sliding bolts. i thus knew my way, and was able to set you free." nigel had no doubt that the object of the passage was to enable the priests either to work on the minds of the prisoners by pretended miraculous appearances; or else, should they desire to murder one of their captives, to convey the body secretly away. he, indeed, knew that such arrangements were common throughout europe, and that numberless impostures had thus been carried out. they quickly reached the shore, which had of late been entirely deserted by the tamoyos, who had, influenced by what had been told them by tecumah, moved some distance further inland. cora, who feared that the direction they had taken would be suspected by the french, when nigel's escape was discovered, advised that they should go forward till he was safe among her tribe. dark as the night was, she knew her way, and, light and active, she led him forward at a rapid rate. they had gone some distance, when she exclaimed, "here come my brother and his people. they will indeed rejoice to find you free." nigel was welcomed by tecumah and his party. they were on their way to the shore, intending immediately to cross, and hoping before daylight to reach the prison. tecumah, in his anxiety to save nigel, had induced his followers to swear that they would rescue him by force if they could succeed in no other way. their intention was to attack the guards and break open the prison, expecting to get off again before the governor and his people had time to pursue them. nigel assured them how thankful he was that they had not been compelled to resort to such a proceeding. too probably the governor and priests would wreak their vengeance on his wife and father-in-law. as it was, he felt very anxious as to what would happen when his escape was discovered. it would certainly baffle the sagacity of the priests to ascertain how it had been accomplished, and would undoubtedly make them more savage, as they might naturally suspect that some of their own followers had proved treacherous, and yet not know whom to accuse. "they shall not injure the count or any of our friends," exclaimed tecumah. "we can distinguish between the true men and the bad. the last, as god's word tells us, are always the most numerous, and it shall be our care to defend the innocent and weaker ones. my people shall remain ready with their canoes to cross over at a moment's notice, while i go to the island and learn what has taken place." nigel expressed his wish to accompany the tamoyos, but both tecumah and cora urged him to proceed to a further distance, as, should the governor suspect where he had gone, he would in all probability send an expedition over to bring him back, and as they would refuse to give him up, an open rupture would be the consequence. nigel at last agreed to accompany cora to her father's abode, which was above five miles from the shore of the harbour, while tecumah carried out his proposed project. leaving his people encamped on the shore with their canoes ready to embark, he paddled across towards the island. he was well aware of the risk he was running, for the governor, should he suspect that he had been instrumental in rescuing nigel, would in all probability seize him and shut him up in prison. he had taken the precaution, however, of charging the next chief in common after him to come across and demand his liberation. daylight broke as he reached the place at which he was accustomed to land. he proceeded at once to the house of the count, who was already on foot, and he had the satisfaction of giving him tidings of nigel's safety. "the knowledge that he is free will restore life to my poor daughter," said the count. "but we are still in the power of the governor and those revengeful priests, and i fear much that they will not allow us long to remain in quiet." "then come over and live with us!" exclaimed tecumah. "we will build a house for you and hunt for you, and do our utmost to enable you to live as you are now doing." "we cannot be thus burdensome to you; and we should have no means of paying your people for labouring in our service," answered the count. "still, i am most grateful to you, and will think over the matter." constance came out of her room as soon as she had risen to thank tecumah, who then, hoping that his friends would not be interfered with, went on to see the minister. he had been there for some time, and was about to return, when one of the count's servants rushed into the house, out of breath from running. "sad news, monsieur laporte!" he explained. "just ten minutes ago one of those ill-conditioned priests, with half a dozen ruffians of soldiers, came to my master's house and carried him and madame nigel off on an accusation of having assisted monsieur nigel to escape, and of reading the bible. what will they do with them? they say monsieur nigel was condemned to be burnt, and they will burn them in revenge;" and the poor fellow wrung his hands and burst into tears. "god will protect them, though i don't see how," said the minister. "alas! alas! these persecutors of ours have already put many innocent persons to death, and will not scruple to destroy all those who oppose them." "they must not be allowed to suffer," exclaimed tecumah, when he heard what had occurred. "i will away to my people before they can stop me; and we will one and all perish before we allow a hair of their heads to be injured." "i would seek to avoid bloodshed, and must urge you, my friend, to try peaceable measures _first_," said monsieur laporte. "we will endeavour, at all events, to rescue the innocent. you, my friend, come with me; you are in danger here, for they will assuredly seize you," said the indian, taking the minister's hand. "i must remain at the post where duty calls me," answered monsieur laporte. "i may be the means of leading some perishing soul to turn to god, and should i be imprisoned with my friends i may be a comfort to them. but bear my love and blessing to nigel, should i be destined never again to see him." at length tecumah, finding that the minister was firm, set off, keeping himself concealed as much as possible among the trees, and made his way to his canoe. he had scarcely pushed off from the shore, when he saw several people rushing down to the beach. they had, he guessed rightly, been sent to capture him. there was no boat near at hand or they would have pursued him, though had they done so, his light canoe would quickly have left them astern. on landing, he found his father and several other chiefs. he narrated to them what had occurred, but, greatly to his disappointment, he found that they objected to do anything which might put an end to the peaceable terms on which they had hitherto lived with the french. they had seen how the portuguese treated the indians who opposed them, and they dreaded, they said, the vengeance of the white men. tecumah was indignant. the white men who now were in the ascendency were no longer deserving of their friendship, he argued. by treachery and deceit they had overcome those who were their proper leaders, and they were even now about to put them to a cruel death. tuscarora was grieved that his son's friends should suffer; but he could not for their sakes risk the safety of his tribe. again tecumah addressed them with all the eloquence of which he was master. "if," he observed, "they were treacherous towards their own people, they would surely be more likely to ill-treat their dark-skinned allies should it at any time be to their interest to do so, and it would be better to strike a blow at once and prevent them from doing harm, rather than allow them, after they had cut off all those who were worthy of confidence, to destroy us." tecumah saw that he was winning many to his side, and persevered. at length one of the chiefs proposed that he should be allowed to go over with a select body of men, and rescue the prisoners. to this tuscarora agreed, and tecumah was obliged to content himself with this plan, trusting that no harm would be done in the mean time to the count and his daughter. some hours had passed when, as tecumah was eagerly waiting on the beach for the moment fixed for the expedition to set out, he saw a canoe paddling down the harbour. he recognised it as one of those sent up the estuary to keep watch and to give timely notice of the approach of an enemy. as the occupant leapt on shore, he exclaimed-- "haste! haste! the portuguese and tuparas, and several other tribes in alliance with them, are on the war-path. they have hundreds of canoes, and they will soon after nightfall attack the island unless they first land and try to destroy us." chapter eleven. capture of the fort. constance and her father, rudely dragged from their home, were hurried off to the fort. no allowance was made for the weakness of her sex, and no pity was shown her by the savage priests, who, supposing that she was not aware of her husband's escape, endeavoured still more to wound her feelings by telling her that he was condemned to death, and that, unless she and her father recanted, they would meet with the same fate. "silence, priest, silence! it is cowardly and unmanly to speak thus to my daughter," exclaimed the count. "add not insult to the injury you have already inflicted. we have broken no laws; we have done harm to no one; and we find ourselves treated as if we were the vilest of malefactors." the count's address had no effect upon the priest, who took a cruel pleasure in annoying them. such is ever the character of the emissaries of rome when they are in the ascendency and are opposed; when in the minority, they are humble and meek, plausible and silver-tongued; and when there are none to oppose them, haughty, indolent, sensual, and self-indulgent. such they have been in all ages and in every country, with the exception of the devoted jesuit slaves, who have gone forth to carry their spurious gospel into heathen lands. on arriving at the fort, the mockery of a trial was gone through; the priest's myrmidons swore to having seen constance reading the bible, and that, as the crime had been committed on the count's property, he was therefore equally guilty. having been a lawyer in his youth, the count was able to defend himself, and had a jury of twelve honest men been present, he would have undoubtedly been acquitted; but, unhappily, that system being unknown among the french, he had no such advantage. the governor and the priest, exasperated at nigel's escape, grossly abused him, and interrupted him with shouts and execrations whenever he especially pointed to the proofs of his innocence. the count, of course, defended constance, and argued that she was but listening to her husband, whom she was bound to obey, and was therefore guiltless. "it is false!" exclaimed the priest, starting up; "her duty to the church is above all others. it was for her to denounce her husband rather than to listen to him. such heretical notions as yours, count de tourville, must be destroyed. the church would lose her authority and power were they to prevail." "ma foi!" exclaimed the count; "in that case no husband can venture to trust his wife with the slightest secret. it would not be confided to her keeping, but to that of the confessor. for that reason, and many others, we repudiate the system you, for your own ends, are anxious to maintain. i advise those who are husbands never to tell to their wives words they would not have known where the system prevails." "silence! count de tourville," exclaimed the priest, foaming with rage, "you shall answer for these insulting words." the count, it must be confessed, regretted having touched on the subject, as it was like throwing pearls to swine; but he felt for the moment that he might shield his daughter by drawing the anger of the priests on himself. the mockery of a trial came to a conclusion, and the governor, who had taken upon himself the office of judge and inquisitor-general, found the count and his daughter guilty of the crimes with which they were charged, and condemned them both to death. in consequence of nigel's escape, the priest begged that they might be kept for safe custody in the prison within the fort; the same wretched place in which nigel had first been confined, and utterly unfit for the reception of any female. poor constance shuddered as she was led into it. her father begged that he might send to his house for such necessaries as his daughter required, but his request was roughly refused. it was not without difficulty even that he obtained some matting, and a few armfuls of rushes on which she might rest. "lie down, my child," said the count to constance, when they were at length left alone. "we will not altogether despair, but look to him who is always ready to protect us. you require rest; and we know not what we may have to go through." constance obeyed her father, while he continued pacing up and down the narrow space allowed him, to collect his thoughts. he harboured no ill-feeling towards his persecutors, but, following the example of his master, he prayed for their forgiveness, while he looked forward with joy, rather than fear, to the time when he should be welcomed into his presence. he knew, too, that his beloved daughter, should her life be taken, would bear him company to that home where their saviour had gone before to prepare a place for all those who love him. the night passed on. constance was sleeping. still the count felt no desire to lie down and rest. the whole fort seemed wrapped in silence, except when the voice of a distant sentry reached his ear. the silence was suddenly broken by a shot fired from the fort. others followed in rapid succession. then arose loud shouts and shrieks, and the indian warwhoop rising above all others. constance started from her slumbers, and clung to her father. the noises grew louder and louder. "the fort is attacked. the enemy are scaling the walls!" exclaimed the count. "both parties are fighting desperately. constance, there is hope for us, for even the portuguese would scarcely wish to injure those who are unable to oppose them." the sounds of strife increased. the count could with difficulty judge how the fight was going. supporting his daughter on his arm, he awaited the issue. the great guns roared, the bullets rattled, and presently there came an uproar which showed that the assailants had gained the fort, and the shriek and cries of the combatants, and other sounds of a desperate struggle, approached their prison. just at that juncture the warwhoops of apparently a fresh party burst forth within the fort. the count recognised the cry as that of the tamoyos. on they came from the opposite side of the fort, and the battle seemed to rage hotter than ever. in the midst of the fierce turmoil the door of their prison was burst open, and tecumah, leaping in, seized constance in his arms, while a companion took charge of the count, and hurried him off. "i promised to save you or perish," said the indian. "we had a hard matter to enter the fort, and it will be no less difficult to escape; but i have succeeded thus far, and trust to place you in safety." these words were uttered hurriedly, as tecumah, surrounded by a faithful band, was fighting his way across the fort, in all parts of which a furious battle was raging; the portuguese and their indian allies, the tuparas, having forced an entrance, being engaged with the french and tamoyos, who were struggling desperately for life. bullets were whizzing and arrows flying in all directions; the fierce shouts and shrieks of the combatants sounding above the clash of steel and the rattle of musketry. numbers and discipline favoured the portuguese, who had well trained their native allies, while the french mistrusted each other, and had but little confidence in the natives, who, however, were gallantly doing their utmost to assist them, headed by their brave chief, tuscarora. tecumah and his faithful band had but one object in view, to rescue constance and her father. like a wedge, with their most stalwart warriors in the van, they fought their way through the mass of foes entering the fort towards the outlet which had allowed the latter ingress. several of their number fell; scarcely one escaped a wound. still constance was untouched. often they were almost overwhelmed. still on they went, their track marked by the bodies of their foes, and many of their own party. the gateway was reached. constance felt tecumah stagger. a fear seized her that he had received a wound; but no cry escaped him, and, recovering himself, he bore her onwards. scarcely had they emerged into the open, when they encountered a fresh party of the portuguese. the tamoyos halted for a moment to draw their bows, and not a shaft failed to pierce a foe, the shower of bullets, which came in return, passing mostly over their heads. "on! on!" shouted tecumah, though his voice no longer rang with its usual clear tone. constance observed with grief that he was faint and hoarse. his band, obeying him, turned round and shot their arrows as they advanced. scarcely, however, had they moved forward, when the portuguese, seeing the handful of men opposed to them, fiercely charged their ranks, tecumah and only a few of the warriors surrounding him, having got some way in advance, escaping the onslaught; the rest, who had the count in charge, were compelled to halt, in a vain endeavour to withstand their overwhelming foes. the darkness enabled tecumah, and the few who remained by him, to push on without being observed. "on! on!" again cried tecumah. "the rest will follow when they have driven back our enemies." "oh, my father! my father! where is he?" exclaimed constance. tecumah did not answer her. making their way towards the shore, they reached it at length. "where are the canoes?" exclaimed tecumah, looking along the beach where they had been left hauled up. his companions dispersed on either side to look for them. their cries told what had happened. some had been sent adrift, and others had been battered in, and utterly destroyed by a band of tuparas, as the tamoyos truly surmised. "we must make our way to the spot where they have left their canoes," exclaimed tecumah; and he again attempted to lift up constance, who had earnestly entreated to be placed on the ground. the din of battle still sounded as loud as ever, and the rattle of musketry was heard close at hand. it was evident that the combatants were approaching the shore. "on! on!" again cried tecumah; and, lifting up constance, he was staggering forward, when, faint from loss of blood, he sank on the ground. at that moment an indian rushed out of the wood behind them. "fly! fly! our enemies are at hand. all, all have been cut to pieces. i alone have escaped." his arm, as he spoke, dropped by his side, while the blood flowed rapidly from his head, giving evidence of the truth of his assertion. constance was kneeling down, trying to staunch the blood flowing from tecumah's wound. he raised himself on one arm. "think not of me," he said, "but endeavour, with my faithful friends, who will accompany you, to find concealment among the rocks." "we cannot leave you," answered constance; "better to yield ourselves prisoners, than to allow you to perish alone." "you know not the nature of our enemies," said tecumah, faintly; "they spare no one. fly, fly, while there is time." the sounds of fighting were drawing rapidly nearer. all prospect of escape seemed cut off. constance gazed up for a moment from the task at which she was engaged. bullets were striking the branches of the trees a short distance from them. her heart sank with grief. she felt the probability that her father had been cut off with the rest of the brave tamoyos. just then one of the indians exclaimed, "see, see! a canoe approaches." constance cast a glance across the waters, and caught a glimpse of a canoe emerging from the darkness. it rapidly approached the beach. the shouts of the indians showed that friends were on board. their hails were answered. in another moment nigel leapt on shore. tecumah recognised him. "save her first--care not for me," he exclaimed. nigel was not likely to disobey such a command, and, taking constance in his arms, he bore her to the canoe. "oh, save our brave friend," she cried, as she pressed her lips to her husband's, who immediately sprang back to the beach, and, listening not to tecumah's request to be allowed to die where he lay, he carried him, with the assistance of the indians who still had strength to exert themselves, to the canoe. holding the steering paddle in her hands, stood cora. the instant her brother and nigel were on board, she gave it a dexterous turn, and the canoe shot away from the shore, impelled by the strokes of two lads who formed the crew. nigel and an indian seized two other paddles, and with all their strength urged on the canoe. there was no time to be lost; already they could see a number of dark forms emerging from the wood, while numerous bullets splashed into the water astern. the veil of night would prove their best protection, and every effort was made to get ahead. cora, believing that they could no longer be seen, directed the canoe on a different course, to one side parallel with the shore, thus avoiding the bullets which were fired in the direction it had last been seen. after going on for some distance, she again steered directly for the opposite shore, which her keen sight could distinguish through the darkness. meantime, constance, seated at the bottom of the canoe, supported tecumah's head. he gently took her hand, and pressed it to his lips. "i have more to thank you for than i can express by words," he whispered, in a low, faltering voice. "i first followed a shadow, but you showed me the glorious reality, and led me to him, whom to know is life eternal. i die happy, resting in his love, with the thought also that i have preserved your life to be a blessing to one who is worthy of you. i am going quickly, but do not mourn aloud, lest you paralyse the efforts of our friends." constance felt the hand which held hers relax its grasp, and ere long she knew that the spirit of the young indian had taken its flight to the realms of bliss. she placed his hand on his breast, and, obeying his dying injunctions, refrained from giving way to her feelings. not till they were near the north shore, and safe for the present from their enemies, did she speak. she then endeavoured to prepare cora for the discovery of her brother's death. "i feared it was so," replied cora, when constance had told her clearly what had happened. "i know, however, that no joy on earth could be more exquisite than that he felt in the consciousness that he had given his life to save yours. i must not mourn for him as those who have no hope. we must not remain here," continued cora, as they disembarked from the canoe. "they will certainly pursue us, and we shall not be in safety till we reach our village, where the remnant of our tribe is collected. alas! there will be bitter grief and loud wailing for the many who have, i fear, fallen." with perfect calmness cora gave directions to her people to convey the body of her brother, and follow quickly, while she led nigel, who supported constance, through the woods. faint and overcome with grief as constance was, cora urged, notwithstanding, that they should continue their course without stopping, for she felt convinced that a fearful loss had overtaken her tribe from the account which the last-arrived indian had given her. he had, he affirmed, before tecumah and his party had cut their way out of the fort, seen tuscarora and many of their tribe shot down by the enemy; and he had also witnessed the death of the count. nigel questioned him narrowly, but could elicit nothing that could shake his testimony. sad, indeed, as cora had expected, was the way in which they were received at her village, and it was feared, indeed, that even it might be attacked while there only remained the old men and boys for its defence. it was proposed, therefore, that they should move further into the country; but cora urged them to remain, and, as a precaution against surprise, sent out scouts to give timely notice of the appearance of an enemy, or the return of their friends. they all, however, packed up their property, and remained prepared for instant flight. chapter twelve. conclusion. just as dawn was breaking, a warrior was seen approaching the village. his bow was broken; his dress torn and besmeared with blood. the inhabitants, who were on the watch, anxiously went out to meet him. he hung down his head without uttering a word, and not for some time could he be induced to speak. at length, a groan bursting from his breast, he exclaimed-- "all, all, are lost! in vain our warriors, led by tuscarora, fought to the last. one after another they were shot down by the bullets of the white faces, or cut to pieces by the war hatchets of the hated tuparas. our french allies, deserting the fort, fought their way to their boats, and, embarking, fled to their ships, leaving us to our fate. two only with myself escaped by leaping over the walls, and swimming to a canoe floating by. both of my companions were wounded. as we were paddling on, as fast as our strength would allow, we caught sight of a canoe with two portuguese boats in pursuit. we were unobserved, but we had too much reason to fear that the canoe was overtaken. just as we reached the shore, the paddles dropped from the hands of my two companions, and they sank down from loss of blood. when i called to them, they gave no answer. they were both dead. i waited in vain for the arrival of our friends, but none appeared, and i at length came on to bring the sad tidings." as the wounded warrior finished his narrative, loud wailings rose from the women in the camp. no threats of vengeance were uttered, for they felt their utter helplessness, and they knew that they themselves might become the prey of any of their foes who might be induced to attack them. at length an old man arose in their midst. "give not way to despair, my daughters," he exclaimed; "you have still many sons. we will fly with them to a place of safety, and there teach them how their brave fathers fought and died with their faces to the foe. they will grow up, and, hearing of their deeds, will imitate their valour, and revenge the deaths of their sires." the words of the aged warrior restored the drooping courage of the poor women, and they resolved to follow his counsel. a few men, who from sickness or other causes had not gone forth to battle, and the youths who had not sufficient strength to draw their mighty bows, vowed to defend them and the chief's daughter to the last gasp. cora deputed the old warrior to take the lead, and, as they believed the tuparas, flushed with victory, would ere long pursue them, they immediately set out on their sad journey to the north. surrounding nigel and constance, they vowed fidelity, promising to obey the last behests of their beloved young chief tecumah, and to afford them all the support in their power. a small band only of the bravest and most active remained behind to collect any stragglers who might arrive, and to cover the retreat of the main body. nigel, communicating with the old chief, found that he proposed proceeding northward to a region bordering the sea, inhabited by a scanty tribe, with whom the tamoyos were on friendly terms, the former having been driven from their own hunting-grounds by a more powerful tribe. this intelligence was satisfactory to nigel and constance, as they thus had hopes of being able to communicate with some english or french ship which might appear off the shore. the spot to which the tamoyos were directing their course was at length gained. it was a deep wide valley, surrounded by rugged hills, and could not be approached towards the sea except by a narrow gorge, which could be defended by a few brave men, who could lie concealed among the rocks, and hurl down stones on the heads of invaders. the indians carried with them, as was their custom, cuttings and roots of fruit trees and plants, which they had cultivated in their native district. without loss of time, they began erecting huts and laying out plantations, the old men and women being generally employed in such occupations, while the young men went out hunting, they having at present to depend on the produce of the chase for their subsistence. the tribe showed the greatest attention to nigel and constance, whom they considered committed to their care by their beloved young chief, doing their utmost to secure their comfort and convenience. indeed, they treated them with the same respect they bestowed on cora, who was now the acknowledged chieftainess of the tribe. they built a cottage after the model of those they had seen on the island, and laid out a garden, which they planted with fruit trees and vegetables. nigel and his wife in return, aided by cora, instructed them in gospel truth. they also taught them, as far as they had the means, the arts of civilised life. thus the days went rapidly by. still, though the young couple enjoyed much happiness, they could not help wishing to return to europe, while they often thought, with grief, of the loss of the count and of their other beloved friend. besides the account brought by the indian who escaped from the fort, they could gain no further tidings of their fate. nigel would, had he had himself only to consider, have set out to try and ascertain what had become of the colony, but he could not bring himself to leave constance, even though he had full confidence in the fidelity of their indian friends. cora, to whom constance expressed nigel's wishes, at length promised to send out a scout, who would endeavour to find out what had happened. nigel gladly accepted cora's offer. nearly a month had passed since the scout set out, and fears were entertained that he had perished. at last, however, one evening, he was seen descending the side of the hill, along the steep and difficult path by which, as has been said, the valley could alone be reached from the southward; he was accompanied by a white man, whose tottering steps he supported in the difficult descent. as they approached the village, the gaunt form and haggard features of the latter prevented nigel, who went out to meet them, from recognising him. "you don't know me, monsieur lieutenant; i am jacques baville, whom you knew well as a true protestant. i assisted the escape of our good minister, laporte, who was committed to the care of some of the brave indians by the young chief tecumah. we fought our way to the water's side, and embarked in a canoe; but before we had got far, we were chased by two of the enemy's boats, and captured. we expected instant death, but were reserved for a more cruel fate. we were conveyed to the south shore, where we heard that the forts on the island had all been destroyed, and our countrymen, with the traitor villegagnon, had sailed away, leaving most of the protestants to the cruel vengeance of our foes. to commemorate their victory, the portuguese had resolved, we found, on building a city. one of the first edifices erected was a prison, into which the good minister and several other persons were thrown; while the tamoyos, who had been taken prisoners, with two other artisans, like myself, were employed, with many people of other tribes, who had been reduced to slavery by the portuguese, in labouring at the work going forward. a church was next built, and filled full of idols for the people to worship. as soon as it was finished, the minister and other captives were led from the prison, and dragged into it, when they were ordered to worship, as the other people were doing. they refused, however, to bow their heads to the saints, or other false gods, but stood motionless, with their arms folded. the priests, on this, reviled them, and threatened them with death if they refused. still they were firm, declaring that they would not mock god with such senseless ceremonies. on this they were taken back to prison; and we, seeing how they behaved, resolved to imitate them. several times they were carried before the priests, who sat in the church to try them for what was called their heresy. the trial was still going on when two priests arrived, who declared they had been on board a portuguese ship, bringing over numerous images and relics and indulgences to saint vincente, when she was captured by a french man-of-war, the captain of which had sacrilegiously thrown them into the sea. i, of course, knew that they spoke of the _madeline_; and, as you remember, monsieur lieutenant, i was on board, i began to fear that i might be recognised. monsieur laporte, of course, stated that he was not there, and could, therefore, not be considered guilty of the act of which they complained, supposing that it had taken place. the priests, however, who were eager to find some one on whom to wreak their vengeance, declared that it mattered nothing, even had he not been there, as the act was performed by those of his faith, and was the result of the pernicious doctrines he taught. he defended himself nobly, but was condemned to be burnt alive in the centre of a wide spot, which had been marked out for a square. "hoping that i had not been recognised by the priests, i was making my way out of the church, when the keen eyes of one of them fell on me. he instantly ordered me to be seized, and at once declared that he had seen me on board the _madeline_, engaged in throwing the trumpery overboard. i would not deny this, but said that i was but doing my duty, and obeying my captain, and that, had he ordered me to throw the two priests themselves overboard, to look after their saints, i should certainly have done so. this enraged them more than ever, and they threatened to burn me with the minister. as i was, however, known to be a good carpenter, the civil officers were not willing to lose my services, and i was sent back to prison. "in vain they tried to make the good minister recant. he refused to do so. they promised him his life and full pardon, and a good post under government, but he refused all their offers, saying that he would rather die a hundred deaths than abandon the faith of the pure gospel. the next day he was led to the place of execution. we were compelled to be present. the faggots were piled round him. some of the people, moved with pity, cried out that he should be strangled first, and the executioner himself seemed unwilling to light the pile; when one of the priests, seizing the torch, set fire to the faggots, which quickly blazed up, and our good minister's soul went to that happy home prepared for him. the priests, having caught sight of me, insisted that i should be thrown into prison to await their pleasure, which i knew very well would be ere long to burn me at the stake. "some of our countrymen, i am sorry to say, recanted, and were set free, but others held fast. i determined, however, if i could, to make my escape, should i have strength enough to do so; for we were so poorly fed that i expected, before long, to be starved. all the prisoners had hitherto been confined in a common cell; but after i was condemned, i was placed in one by myself. it was in a new part of the prison, which i had actually been employed in building. the whole structure was of wood, though, at the same time, very strong. i knew that i could not make my way through the walls, nor underground, as the stakes were driven down deep, and no human strength could force them up; but i recollected the way i had put on the roof; and, though the slabs were heavy, i was certain that i could force one of them up sufficiently to allow me to get through. i had not been long shut up, when a priest came, and endeavoured to make me recant, picturing the horrible tortures i should suffer in this world, and in the next, if i refused. i asked him whence he got his authority. he answered from the church. i replied that the bible was before the church; and that the bible says, `whosoever believeth on me shall not perish, but have everlasting life;' and that, though he might burn my body, christ could save my soul. he replied that the bible must not be interpreted by laymen, and that the church had alone the power to explain it. i observed that the church of christ had ever explained it exactly as i did, and to that church i belonged; that the system which he called `the church,' was built up at rome by pagan priests, and had ever since been employed in adding falsehood to falsehood, for the sake of imposing on the minds of the people, and compelling them to do their will; and that, if he wished to serve christ, he must leave his false church, as thousands of my countrymen had done, and tens of thousands in germany and england, or that he himself would perish eternally. without saying another word, he left the cell, and i felt pretty sure would not come back again. "i had a sheath knife, which i had managed to conceal inside my trousers, and immediately set to work, and wrenched up a stool fixed against the wall. there were several nails in it, which i cut out; and then, making a couple of deep notches in one of the angles of the wall, i fixed the bench a certain height below the roof, which enabled me, by standing on it, to force up one of the slabs with my back. knowing where the nails were driven in, i carefully cut around them, making as little noise as possible. it was, i calculated, about midnight when i had finished my preparations. the slab lifted even more easily than i had expected. i listened for some minutes, expecting to hear the tread of a sentry, but not a sound reached my ears. i had great hopes that he had fallen asleep. creeping through, i replaced the slab, and dropped without noise to the ground. there were numerous indians in the camp, many of whom had canoes, for the purpose of fishing. without loss of time, i crept away, stooping low down, so that, had i been seen, i might be mistaken, in the darkness, for a large dog, or some wild animal prowling about in search of food. i thus, without interruption, made my way down to the shore. there were several canoes hauled up, as i had expected, with paddles left in them. to launch one and to shove off did not occupy much time. the night was dark, but i could make out the opposite shore. with all my might i paddled towards it. on landing, i shoved off the canoe, in the hopes that it would float away, and thus not betray the direction i had taken. scarcely had i got a hundred yards from the beach, when i encountered this my friend, who conducted me here. i am grieved to bring such tidings, and i fear much that those who remain will be put to death, if they refuse to abandon their faith; and i pray that they may have grace and spirit to continue in it. but i myself must not boast, as i know not what torture and starvation would have led me to do." nigel and constance heard, with deep sorrow, this account of the martyrdom of their beloved friend and minister; but they were comforted with the knowledge that he had exchanged a life of trial and suffering for a glorious existence in heaven. several months passed by. jacques baville completely recovered, and was of great assistance in improving their cottage home. he felt, however, even a greater longing than they did to return to his native land. "ships may come and go, and we may not see them, unless we are constantly on the watch," he observed. "i have bethought me of building a hut on the height near the shore; and if you, monsieur lieutenant, will supply me with food, i will undertake to keep a bright look-out as long as my eyes last me. we will have a flagstaff and flag, and it will not be my fault if we don't manage to communicate with any ship which appears off the coast." nigel gladly entered into honest jacques's plan, and assisted him in building his hut, and putting up a flagstaff. still week after week passed by, and jacques had always the same answer to give when nigel visited him. nigel himself had ample occupation in cultivating his garden, varied by hunting expeditions with the indians. he was returning home one evening, when, as he approached his cottage, constance came running out to meet him. her agitation would scarcely allow her to speak. "come, nigel, come! i have been longing for your arrival," she exclaimed, taking his hand. "an old friend has arrived, and is waiting to see you." she led him on, when great was his joy and surprise to see standing in the porch, with outstretched hands, his former commander, captain beauport. they entered the cottage, when, sitting down, the captain briefly narrated his history, and the circumstances which had brought him again to the coast of south america. he little expected to find nigel and constance alive. the crew and passengers of the ship which was conveying him as a prisoner to france, who were all protestants, had insisted on his liberation; and the commander, who was well-disposed towards him, had, without much difficulty, yielded to their wishes. by great exertions the ships had been kept afloat; and, after enduring severe hardships, had reached hennebonne, in france. here the commander, as directed, delivered his despatches to the chief magistrate, who, providentially for the passengers, was a staunch protestant. on opening them, he found that the traitor, villegagnon, had denounced them as arch-heretics, worthy of the stake, and advised that they should be immediately delivered up to punishment. the worthy magistrate, indignant at the treachery with which they had been treated, assisted them by every means in his power; while captain beauport, knowing that his life would not be safe should he remain in france, immediately embarked on board a vessel bound for england. he there found many protestant friends, who had fled to escape the fearful persecutions to which they were subjected in france. by their means he obtained the command of an english ship. he had made two or three short voyages, and had, some time before, come out on an exploring expedition to south america, from which he was returning. he was sailing northward, on his way to england, when he observed jacques baville's signal. as may be supposed, nigel and constance, with honest jacques, did not lose the opportunity of returning with him. they parted from cora with sincere regret. "it is but natural that you should wish to dwell in your own country, and among your own people," said the indian girl. "my love makes me wish to accompany you, but my duty compels me to remain with my tribe. on our hearts your images will remain engraved as long as they beat with life." she, with all her people, attended them to the beach, as they put off towards the ship, which lay at anchor in the harbour. as long as any object was visible on the shore, cora was seen waving her adieus. the sails were spread to the wind, and the ship glided out into the ocean on her destined course towards the shores of england. they reached that land of freedom in safety, and nigel resolved to take up his residence here, with his young wife, rather than expose her to the dangers to which she would be subjected in her native land. he wrote to honest maitre leroux, who had heard from the count of constance's marriage, and was ready to pay over to nigel the rents of the estate. during the occasional intervals of peace, nigel paid several visits to tourville, and, on the death of the steward, sold the estate, and invested the money in an english property, both he and his wife agreeing that it was far better to live on moderate means in a land where they could enjoy the blessings of civil and religious liberty, than in any country under the galling yoke of papal tyranny. marie by laura e. richards author of "captain january," "melody," "queen hildegarde," "narcissa," etc. to e. t. t. contents. chapter i. marie ii. "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" iii. abby rock iv. possession v. courtship vi. wedlock vii. looking back viii. a flower in the snow ix. madame x. de arthenay's vigil xi. vita nuova marie. chapter i. marie. marie was tired. she had been walking nearly the whole day, and now the sun was low in the west, and long level rays of yellow light were spreading over the country, striking the windows of a farmhouse here and there into sudden flame, or resting more softly on tree-tops and hanging slopes. they were like fiddle-bows, marie thought; and at the thought she held closer something that she carried in her arms, and murmured over it a little, as a mother coos over her baby. it seemed a long time since she had run away from the _troupe_: she would forget all about them soon, she thought, and their ugly faces. she shivered slightly as she recalled the face of "le boss" as it was last bent upon her, frowning and dark, and as ugly as a hundred devils, she was quite sure. ah, he would take away her violin--le boss! he would give it to his own girl, whom she, marie, had taught till she could play a very little, enough to keep the birds from flying away when they saw her, as they otherwise might; she was to have the violin, the lady, one's own heart and life, and marie was to have a fiddle that he had picked up anywhere, found on an ash-heap, most likely! ah, and now he had lost the lady and marie too, and who would play for him this evening, and draw the children out of the houses? _he_! let some one tell marie that! it had not been hard, the running away, for no one would ever have thought of marie's daring to do such a thing. she belonged to le boss, as much as the tent or the ponies, or his own ugly girl: so they all thought in the _troupe_, and so marie herself had thought till that day; that is, she had not thought at all. while she could play all the time, and had often quite enough to eat, and always something, a piece of bread in the hand if no more,--and la patronne, le boss's wife, never too unkind, and sometimes even giving her a bit of ribbon for the lady's neck when there was to be a special performance,--why, who would have thought of running away? she had been with them so long, those others, and that time in france was so long ago,--hundreds of years ago! so no one had thought of noticing when she dropped behind to tune her violin and practise by herself; it was a thing she did every day, they all knew, for she could not practise when the children pulled her gown all the time, and wanted to dance. she had chosen the place well, having been on the lookout for it all day, ever since le boss told her what he meant to do,--that infamy which the good god would never have allowed, if he had not been perhaps tired with the many infamies of le boss, and forgotten to notice this one. she had chosen the place well! a little wood dipped down to the right, with a brook running beyond, and across the brook a sudden sharp rise, crowned with a thick growth of birches. she had played steadily as she passed through the wood and over the stream, and only ceased when she gained the brow of the hill and sprang like a deer down the opposite slope. no one had seen her go, she was sure of that; and now they could never tell which way she had turned, and would be far more likely to run back along the road. how they would shout and scream, and how le boss would swear! ah, no more would he swear at marie because people did not always give money, being perhaps poor themselves, or unwilling to give to so ugly a face as his girl's, who carried round the dish. no more! and la patronne would be sorry perhaps a little,--she had the good heart, la patronne, under all the fat,--and old billy, he would be too sorry, she was sure. poor old billy! it was cruel to leave him, when he had such joy of her playing, the good old man, and a hard life taking care of the beasts, and bearing all the blame if any of them died through hunger. but it would have been sadder for old billy to see her die, marie, and she would have died, of course she would! to live without the lady, a pretty life that would be! far sooner would one go at once to the good god, where the angels played all day, even if one were not allowed to play oneself just at first. afterward, of course, when they found out how she had played down here, it would be otherwise. meanwhile, all these thoughts did not keep marie from being tired, and hungry too; and she was glad enough to see some brown roofs clustered together at a little distance, as she turned a corner of the road. a village! good! here would be children, without doubt; and where there were children, marie was among friends. she stopped for a moment, to push back her hair, which had fallen down in the course of her night, and to tie the blue handkerchief neatly over it, and shake the dust from her bare feet. they were pretty feet, so brown and slender! she had shoes, but they were in the wagon; la patronne took care of all the sunday clothes, and there had been no chance to get at anything, even if she could have been hampered by such things as shoes, with the lady to carry. it did not in the least matter about shoes, when it was summer: when the road was hot, one walked in the cool grass at the side; when there was no grass--eh, one waited till one came to some. they were only for state, these shoes. they were stiff and hard, and the heel-places hurt: it was different for la patronne, who wore stockings under hers. but here were the houses, and it was time to play. they were pleasant-looking houses, marie thought, they looked as if persons lived in them who stayed at home and spun, as the women did in brittany. ah, that it was far away, brittany! she had almost forgotten it, and now it all seemed to come back to her, as she gazed about her at the houses, some white, some brown, all with an air of thrift and comfort, as becomes a new england village. that white house there, with the bright green blinds! that pleased her eye. and see! there was a child's toy lying on the step, a child's face peeping out of the window. decidedly, she had arrived. marie took out her violin, and tuned it softly, with little rustling, whispering notes, speaking of perfect accord between owner and instrument; then she looked up at the child and smiled, and began to play "en revenant d'auvergne." it was a tune that the little people always loved, and when one heard it, the feet began to dance before the head. sure enough, the door opened in another moment, and the child came slipping out: not with flying steps, as a city child would come, to whom wandering musicians were a thing of every day; but shyly, with sidelong movements, clinging to the wall as it advanced, and only daring by stealth to lift its eyes to the strange woman with the fiddle, a sight never seen before in its little life. but marie knew all about the things that children think. what was she but a child herself? she had little knowledge of grown persons, and regarded them all as ogres, more or less, except old billy, and la patronne, who really meant to be kind. "come, lit' girl!" she said in her clear soft voice. "come and dance! for you i play, for you i sing too, if you will. ah, the pretty song, 'en revenant d'auvergne!'" and she began to sing as she played: "eh, gai, coco! eh, gai, coco! eh, venez voir la danse du petit marmot! eh, venez voir la danse du petit marmot!" the little girl pressed closer against the wall, her eyes wide open, her finger in her mouth, yet came nearer and nearer, drawn by the smile as well as the music. presently another came running up, and another; then the boys, who had just brought their cows home and were playing marbles on the sly, behind the brown barn, heard the sound of the fiddle and came running, stuffing their gains into their pockets as they ran. then mrs. piper, who was always foolish about music, her neighbors said, came to her door, and mrs. post opposite, who was as deaf as her namesake, came to see what susan piper was after, loitering round the door when the men-folks were coming in to their supper: and so with one thing and another, marie had quite a little crowd around her, and was feeling happy and pleased, and sure that when she stopped playing and carried round her handkerchief knotted at the four corners so as to form a bag, the pennies would drop into it as fast, yes, and maybe a good deal faster, than if le boss's ugly daughter was carrying it, with her nose turned up and one eye looking round the corner to see where her hair was gone to. ah, le boss, what was he doing this evening for his music, with no marie and no lady! and it was just at this triumphant moment that jacques de arthenay came round the corner and into the village street. chapter ii. "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" there had been de arthenays in the village ever since it became a village: never many of them, one or two at most in a generation; not a prolific stock, but a hardy and persistent one. no one knew when the name had dropped its soft french sound, and taken the harsh anglo-saxon accent. it had been so with all the old french names, the l'homme-dieus and des isles and beaulieus; the air, or the granite, or one knows not what, caused an ossification of the consonants, a drying up of the vowels, till these names, once soft and melodious, became more angular, more rasping in utterance, than ever smith or jones could be. they were huguenots, the d'arthenays. a friend from childhood of st. castin, jacques d'arthenay had followed his old companion to america at the time when the revocation of the edict of nantes rendered france no safe dwelling-place for those who had no hinges to their knees. a stern, silent man, this d'arthenay, like most of his race: holding in scorn the things of earthly life, brooding over grievances, given to dwelling much on heaven and hell, as became his time and class. leaving castle and lands and all earthly ties behind them, he and his wife came out of sodom, as they expressed it, and turned not their faces, looking steadfastly forward to the wilderness where they were to worship god in his own temple, the virgin forest. it had been a terrible shock to find the baron de st. castin fallen away from religion and civilisation, living in savage pomp with his savage wives, the daughters of the great chief modocawando. there could be no such companionship as this for the sieur d'arthenay and his noble wife; the friendship of half a lifetime was sternly repudiated, and d'arthenay cast in his lot with the little band of huguenot settlers who were striving to win their livelihood from the rugged soil of eastern maine. it was bitter bread that they ate, those french settlers. we read the story again and again, each time with a fresh pang of pity and regret; but it is not of them that this tale is told. jacques d'arthenay died in his wilderness, and his wife followed him quickly, leaving a son to carry on the name. the gravestone of these first d'arthenays was still to be seen in the old burying-ground: they had been the first to be buried there. the old stone was sunk half-way in the earth, and was gray with moss and lichens; but the inscription was still legible, if one looked close, and had patience to decipher the crabbed text. "jacques st. george, sieur d'arthenay et de vivonne. mort en foi et en esperance, me decembre, ." then a pair of mailed hands, clasped as in sign of friendship or loyalty, and beneath them again, the words, "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" the story was that the son of this first sieur d'arthenay had been exposed to some dire temptation, whether of love or of ambition was not clearly known, and had been in danger of turning from the faith of his people and embracing that of rome. he came one day to meditate beside his father's grave, hoping perhaps to draw some strength, some inspiration, from the memories of that stern and righteous huguenot; and as he sat beside the stone, lo! a mailed hand appeared, holding a sword, and graved with the point of the sword on the stone, the old motto of his father's house,-- "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" and he had been strengthened, and lived and died in the faith of his father. many people in the village scouted this story, and called it child's foolishness, but there were some who liked to believe it, and who pointed out that these words were not carved deeply and regularly, like the rest of the inscription, but roughly scratched, as if with a sharp point. and that although merely so scratched, they had never been effaced, but were even more easily read than the carven script. among those who held it for foolishness was the present jacques de arthenay. he was perhaps the fifth in descent from the old huguenot, but he might have been his own son or brother. the huguenot doctrines had only grown a little colder, a little harder, turned into new england orthodoxy as it was understood fifty years ago. he thought little of his french descent or his noble blood. he pronounced his name jakes, as all his neighbors did; he lived on his farm, as they lived on theirs. if it was a better farm, the land in better condition, the buildings and fences trimmer and better cared for, that was in the man, not in his circumstances. he was easily leader among the few men whose scattered dwellings made up the village of sea meadows (commonly pronounced semedders.) his house did not lie on the little "street," as that part of the road was called where some half-dozen houses were clustered together, with their farms spreading out behind them, and the post-office for the king-pin; yet no important step would be taken by the villagers without the advice and approval of jacques de arthenay. briefly, he was a born leader; a masterful man, with a habit of thinking before he spoke; and when he said a thing must be done, people were apt to do it. he was now thirty years old, without kith or kin that any one knew of; living by himself in a good house, and keeping it clean and decent, almost as a woman might; not likely ever to change his condition, it was supposed. this was the man who happened to come into the street on some errand, that soft summer evening, at the very moment when marie was feeling lifted up by the light of joy in the children's faces, and was telling herself how good it was that she had come this way. hearing the sound of the fiddle, de arthenay stopped for a moment, and his face grew dark as night. he was a religious man, as sternly so as his huguenot ancestor, but wearing his religion with a difference. he knew all music, except psalm-tunes, to be directly from the devil. even as to the psalm-tunes themselves, it seemed to him a dreadful thing that worship could not be conducted without this compromise with evil, this snare to catch the ear; and he harboured in the depth of his soul thoughts about the probable frivolity of david, which he hardly voiced even to himself. the fiddle, in particular, he held to be positively devilish, both in its origin and influence; those who played this unholy instrument were bound to no good place, and were sure to gain their port, in his opinion. being thus minded, it was with a shock of horror that he heard the sound of a fiddle in the street of his own village, not fifty yards from the meeting-house itself. after a moment's pause, he came wrathfully down the street; his height raised him a head and shoulders above the people who were ringed around the little musician, and he looked over their heads, with his arm raised to command, and his lips opened to forbid the shameful thing. then--he saw marie's face; and straightway his arm dropped to his side, and he stood without speaking. the children looked up at him, and moved away, for they were always afraid of him, and at this moment his face was dreadful to see. yet it was nothing dreadful that he looked upon. marie was standing with her head bent down over her violin, in a pretty way she had. a light, slight figure, not short, yet with a look that spoke all of youth and morning grace. she wore a little blue gown, patched and faded, and dusty enough after her day's walk; her feet were dusty too, but slender and delicately shaped. her face was like nothing that had been seen in those parts before, and the beauty of it seemed to strike cold to the man's heart, as he stood and gazed with unwilling eyes, hating the feeling that constrained him, yet unable for the moment to restrain it or to turn his eyes away. she had that clear, bright whiteness of skin that is seen only in frenchwomen, and only here and there among these; whiteness as of fire behind alabaster. her hair was black and soft, and the lashes lay like jet on her cheek, as she stood looking down, smiling a little, feeling so happy, so pleased that she was pleasing others. and now, when she raised her eyes, they were seen to be dark and soft, too; but with what fire in their depths, what sunny light of joy,--the joy of a child among children! de arthenay started, and his hands clenched themselves unconsciously. marie started, too, as she met the stern gaze fixed upon her, and the joyous light faded from her eyes. rudely it broke in upon her pleasant thoughts,--this vision of a set, bearded face, with cold blue eyes that yet had a flame in them, like a spark struck from steel. the little song died on her lips, and unconsciously she lowered her bow, and stood silent, returning helplessly the look bent so sternly upon her. when jacques de arthenay found himself able to speak at last, he started at the sound of his own voice. "who are you?" he asked. "how did you come here, young woman?" marie held out her fiddle with a pretty, appealing gesture. "i come--from away!" she said, in her broken english, that sounded soft and strange to his ears. "i do no harm. i play, to make happy the children, to get bread for me." "who came with you?" de arthenay continued. "who are your folks?" marie shook her head, and a light crept into her eyes as she thought of le boss. "i have nobodies'" she said. "i am with myself, _sauf le violon_; i mean, wiz my fiddle. monsieur likes not music, no?" she looked wistfully at him, and something seemed to rise up in the man's throat and choke him. he made a violent motion, as if to free himself from something. what had happened to him,--was he suddenly possessed, or was he losing his wits? he tried to force his voice back into its usual tone, tried even to speak gently, though his heart was beating so wildly at the way she looked, at the sweet notes of her voice, like a flute in its lower notes, that he could hardly hear his own words. "no, no music!" he said. "there must be no music here, among christian folks. put away that thing, young woman. it is an evil thing, bringing sin, and death, which is the wages of sin, with it. how came you here, if you have no one belonging to you?" falteringly, her sweet eyes dropped on the ground, with only now and then a timid, appealing glance at this terrible person, this awful judge who had suddenly dropped from the skies, marie told her little story, or as much of it as she thought needful. she had been with bad people, playing for them, a long time, she did not know how long. and then they would take away her violin, and she would not stay, and she ran away from them, and had walked all day, and--and that was all. a little sob shook her voice at the last words; she had not realised before how utterly alone she was. the delight of freedom, of getting away from her tyrants, had been enough at first, and she had been as it were on wings all day, like a bird let loose from its cage; now the little bird was weary, and the wings drooped, and there was no nest, not even a friendly cage where one would find food and drink, a sudden passion of pity--he supposed it was pity--shook the strong man. he felt a wild impulse to catch the little shrinking creature in his arms and bear her away to his own home, to warm and cheer and comfort her. was there ever before anything in the world so sweet, so helpless, so forlorn? he looked around. the children were all gone; he stood alone in the street with the foreign woman, and night was falling. it was at this moment that abby rock, who had been watching from her window for the past few minutes, opened her door and came out, stepping quietly toward them, as if they were just the people she had expected to see. de arthenay hailed her as an angel from heaven; and yet abby did not look like an angel. "abby!" he cried. "come here a minute, will you?" "good evening, jacques!" said abby, in her quiet voice. "good evening to you!" she added, speaking kindly to the little stranger. "i was coming to see if you wouldn't like to step into my house and rest you a spell. why, my heart!" she cried, as marie raised her head at the sound of the friendly voice, "you're nothing but a child. come right along with me, my dear. alone, are ye, and night coming on!" "that's right, abby!" cried de arthenay, with feverish eagerness. "yes, yes, take her home with you and make her comfortable. she is a stranger, and has no friends, so she says. i--i'll see you in the morning about her. take her! take her in where she will be comfortable, and i'll--" "i'll pay you well for it," was what he was going to say, but abby's quiet look stopped the words on his lips. why should he pay her for taking care of a stranger, of whom he knew no more than she did; whom he had never seen till this moment?--why, indeed! and she was as well able to pay for the young woman's keep as he was to say the least. all this de arthenay saw, or fancied he saw, in abby rock's glance. he turned away, muttering something about seeing them in the morning; then, with an abrupt bow, which yet was not without grace, he strode swiftly down the street and took his way home. chapter iii. abby rock. if abby rock's kitchen was not heaven, it seemed very near it to marie that evening. she found herself suddenly in an atmosphere of peace and comfort of which her life had heretofore known nothing. the evening had fallen chill outside, but here all was warm and light and cheerful, and the warmth and cheer seemed to be embodied in the person of the woman who moved quickly to and fro, stirring the fire, putting the kettle on the hob (for those were the days of the open fire, of crane and kettle, and picturesque, if not convenient, housekeeping), drawing a chair up near the cheerful blaze. marie felt herself enfolded with comfort. a shawl was thrown over her shoulders; she was lifted like a child, and placed in the chair by the fireside; and now, as she sat in a dream, fearing every moment to wake and find herself back in the old life again, a cup of tea, hot and fragrant, was set before her, and the handkerchief tenderly loosened from her neck, while a kind voice bade her drink, for it would do her good. "you look beat out, and that's the fact," said abby rock. "to-morrow you shall tell me all about it, but you no need to say a single word to-night, only just set still and rest ye. i'm a lone woman here. i buried my mother last june, and i'm right glad to have company once in a while. abby rock, my name is; and perhaps if you'd tell me yours, we should feel more comfortable like, when we come to sit down to supper. what do you say?" her glance was so kind, her voice so cordial and hearty, that marie could have knelt down to thank her. "i am marie," she said, smiling back into the kind eyes. "only marie, nossing else." "maree!" repeated abby rock. "well, it's a pretty name, sure enough; has a sound of 'mary' in it, too, and that was my mother's name. but what was your father's name, or your mother's, if so be your father ain't living now?" marie shook her head. "i never know!" she said. "all the days i lived with mere jeanne in the village, far away, oh, far, over the sea." "over the sea?" said abby. "you mean the bay, don't you,--some of those french settlements down along the shore?" but marie meant the sea, it appeared; for her village was in france, in eretagne, and there she had lived till the day when mere jeanne died, and she was left alone, with no-one belonging to her. mere jeanne was not her mother, no! nor yet her grandmother,--only her mother's aunt, but good, abby must understand, good as an angel, good as abby herself. and when she was dead, there was only her son, jeannot, and he had married a devil,--but yes!--as abby exclaimed, and held up her hands in reproof,--truly a devil of the worst kind; and one day, when jeannot was away, this wife had sold her, marie, to another devil, le boss, who made the tours in the country for to sing and to play. and he had brought her away to this country, over very dreadful seas, where one went down into the grave at every instant, and then up again to the clouds, but leaving one's stomach behind one--ah, but terrible! others were with them, oh, yes!--this in response to abby's question, for in spite of her good resolutions, curiosity was taking possession of her, and it was evidently a relief to marie to pour out her little tale in a sympathetic ear,--many others. la patronne, the wife of le boss, who was like a barrel, but not bad, when she could see through the fat, not bad in every way; and there was old billy, who took care of the horses and dogs, and he was her friend, and she loved him, and he had always the good word for her even when he was very drunk, too drunk to speak to any one else. and then there was the daughter of le boss, who would in all probability never die, for she was so ugly that she would not be admitted into the other world, where, mere jeanne said, even monsieur the great devil himself was good-looking, save for his expression. also there were the boys who tumbled and rode on the ponies, and--and--and ozer people. and with this mane's head dropped forward, and she was asleep. it seemed a pity to wake her when supper was ready, but abby knew just how good her rolls were, and knew that the child must be famished; and sure enough, after a little nap, marie was ready to wake and sit up at the little round table, and be fed like a baby with everything good that abby could think of. the fare had not been dainty in the travelling troupe of le boss. the fine white bread, the golden butter, the bit of broiled fish, smoking hot, seemed viands of paradise to the hungry girl. she laughed for pleasure, and her eyes shone like stars. it was like the chateau, she said, where everything was gold and silver,--the chateau where madame la comtesse lived. as for abby herself, marie gravely informed her that she was an angel. abby laughed, not ill pleased. "i don't look special like angels," she said; "that is, if the pictures i've seen are correct. not much wings and curls and white robes about me, maree. and who ever heard of an angel in a check apurn, i want to know?" but marie was not to be turned aside. it was well known, she said, that angels could not come to earth undisguised in these days. it had something to do with the jews, she did not know exactly what. mere jeanne had told her, but she forgot just how it was. but as to their not coming at all, that would be out of the question, for how would the good god know what was going on down here, or know who was behaving well and meriting a crown of glory, and who should go down into the pit? did not abby see that? abby privately thought that here was strange heathen talk to be going on in her kitchen; but she said nothing, only gave her guest more jam, and said she was eating nothing,--the proper formula for a good hostess, no matter how much the guest may have devoured. it was true, as has been said before, that abby rock was not fair to outward view. nature had been in a crabbed mood when she fashioned this gaunt, angular form, these gnarled, unlovely features. an uncharitable neighbour, in describing abby, once said that she looked as if she had swallowed an old cedar fence-rail and shrunk to it; and the description was apt enough so far as the body went. her skin, eyes, and hair were of different shades (yet not so very different) of greyish brown; her nose was long and knotty, her mouth and chin apparently taken at random from a box of misfits. yes, the cedar fence-rail came as near to it as anything could. yet somehow, no one who had seen the light of kindness in those faded eyes, and heard the sweet, cordial tones of that quiet voice, thought much about their owner's looks. people said it was a pity abby wasn't better favoured, and then they thought no more about it, but were simply thankful that she existed. she had led the life that many an ugly saint leads, here in new england, and the world over. nurse and drudge for the pretty younger sister, the pride and joy of her heart, till she married and went away to live in a distant state; then drudge and nurse for the invalid mother, broken down by unremitting toil. no toil would ever break abby down, for she was a strong woman; she had never worked too hard that she was aware of; but--she had always worked, and never done anything else. no lover had ever looked into her eyes or taken her hand tenderly. not likely! she would say to herself with a scornful sniff, eyeing her homely face in the glass. men weren't such fools as they looked. one or two had wanted to marry her house, as she expressed it, and had asked for herself into the bargain, not seeing how they could manage it otherwise. they were not to blame for wanting the house, she thought with some complacency, as she glanced round her sitting-room. everything in the room shone and twinkled. the rugs were beautifully made, and the floor under them in the usual dining-table condition ascribed ever since books were written to the model housewife. the corner cupboards held treasures of blue and white that it makes one ache to think of to-day, and some pieces of india china besides, brought over seas by some sea-going rock of a former generation: and there were silver spoons in the iron box under abby's bed, and the dragon tea-pot on the high narrow mantel-piece was always full, but not with tea-leaves. yes, and there was no better cow in the village than abby's, save those two fancy heifers that jacques de arthenay had lately bought. altogether, she did not wonder that some of the weaker brethren, who found their own farms "hard sledding," should think enough of her pleasant home to be willing to take her along with it, since they could do no better; but they did not get it. abby found life very pleasant, now that grief was softened down into tender recollection. to be alone, and able to do things just when she wanted to do them, and in her own way; to consider what she herself liked to eat, and to wear, and to do; to feel that she could come and go, rise up and lie down, at her own will,--was strange but pleasant to her. how long the pleasure would have lasted is another question, for the woman's nature was to love and to serve; but just now there was no doubt that she was enjoying her freedom. and now she had taken in this little stranger, just because she felt like it; it was a new luxury, a new amusement, that was all. such a pretty little creature, so soft and young, and with that brightness in her face! sister lizzie was light-complected, and this child didn't favour her, not the least mite; yet it was some like the same feeling, as if it were a kitten or a pretty bird to take care of, and feed and pet. so thought abby, as she tucked up marie in sister lizzie's little white bed, in the pink ribbon chamber, as she had named it in sport, after she had let lizzie furnish it to her taste, that last year before she was married. the child looked about her as if it were a palace, instead of a lean-to chamber with a sloping roof. she had never seen anything like this in her life, since those days when she went to the chateau. she touched the white walls softly, and passed her hand over the pink mats on the bureau with wondering awe. and then she curled up in the white bed when abby bade her, as like a kitten as anything could be. "oh, you are good, good!" cried the child, whom the warmth and comfort and kindness seemed to have lifted into another world from the cold, sordid one in which she had lived so long. she caught the kind hard knotted hand, and kissed it; but abby snatched it away, and blushed to her eyebrows, feeling that something improper had occurred. "there! there!" she said, half confused, half reproving. "you don't want to do such things as that! i've done no more than was right, and you alone and friendless, and night coming on. go to sleep now, like a good girl, and we'll see in the morning." so marie went to sleep in sister lizzie's bed, with her fiddle lying across her feet, since she could not sleep a wink otherwise, she said; and when abby went downstairs the room seemed cold, and she thought how she missed lizzie, and wondered if it wouldn't be pleasant to keep this pretty creature for a spell, and do for her a little, and make her up some portion of clothing. there was a real good dress of lizzie's, hanging this minute in the press upstairs: she had a good mind to take it out at once and see what could be done to it; perhaps--and abby did not go to bed very early herself that night. chapter iv. possession. jacques de arthenay went home that night like a man possessed. he was furious with himself, with the strange woman who had thus set his sober thoughts in a whirl, with the very children in the street who had laughed and danced and encouraged her in her sinful music, to her own peril and theirs. he thought it was only anger that so held his mind; yet once in his house, seated on the little stool before his fire, he found himself still in the street, still looking down into that lovely childish face that lifted itself so innocently to his, still smitten to the heart by the beauty of it, and by the fear that he saw in it of his own stern aspect. he had never looked upon any woman before. he had been proud of it,--proud of his strength and cleverness, that needed no meddlesome female creature coming in between him and his business, between him and his religion. he had not let his hair and beard grow, knowing nothing of such practices, but in heart he had been a nazarite from his youth up,--serving god in his harsh, unloving way; loving god, as he thought; certainly loving nothing else, if it were not the dumb creatures, to whom he was always kind and just. and now--what had happened to him? he asked himself the question sternly, sitting there before the cheerful blaze, yet neither seeing nor feeling it. the answer seemed to cry itself in his ears, to write itself before his eyes in letters of fire. the thing had happened that happens in the story books, that really comes to pass once in a hundred years, they say. he had seen the one woman in the world that he wanted for his own, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. she was a stranger, a vagabond, trading in iniquity, and gaining her bread by the corruption of souls of men and children; and he loved her, he longed for her, and the world meant nothing to him henceforth unless he could have her. he put the thought away from him like a snake, but it came back and curled round his heart, and made him cold and then hot and then cold again. was he not a professing christian, bound by the strictest ties? yes! how she looked, standing there with the children about her, the little slender figure swaying to and fro to the music, the pretty head bent down so lovingly, the dark eyes looking here and there, bright and shy, like those of a wild creature so gentle in its nature that it knew no fear. but he had taught her fear! yes, he saw it grow under his eyes, just as the love grew in his own heart at the same moment. love! what sort of word was that for him to be using, even in his mind? to-morrow she would be gone, this wandering fiddler, and all this would be forgotten in a day, for he had the new cattle to see to, and a hundred things of importance. but was anything else of importance save just this one girl? and if he should let her go on her way, out into the world again, to certain perdition, would not the guilt be partly his? he, who saw and knew the perils and pitfalls, might he not snatch this child from the fire and save her soul alive?--no! he would begone, as soon as morning came, and take this sinful body of his away from temptation. how soon would abby get through her morning work, so that he might with some fair pretext go to the house to see how the stranger had slept, and how she had fared? it would be cowardly to drop the burden on abby's shoulders, she only a woman like the rest of them, even if she had somewhat more sense. so jacques de arthenay sat by his fire till it was cold and dead, a miserable and a wrathful man; and he too slept little that night. but marie slept long and peacefully in sister lizzie's bed, and looked so pretty in her sleep that abby came three times to wake her, and three times went away again, unable to spoil so perfect a picture. at last, however, the dark eyes opened of their own accord, and marie began to chirp and twitter, like a bird at daybreak in its nest; only instead of daybreak, it was eight o'clock in the morning, a most shocking hour for anybody to be getting up. but abby had been in the habit of spoiling her sister, who had a theory that she was never able to do anything early in the morning, and so it was much more considerate for her to stay in bed and keep out of abby's way. this is a comfortable theory. "i suppose you've been an early riser, though?" said abby, as she poured the coffee, looking meanwhile approvingly at the figure of her guest, neatly attired in a pink and white print gown, which fitted her in a truly astonishing manner, proving, abby thought in her simple way, that it had really been a "leading,"--her bringing the stranger home last night. "oh, but yes," marie answered. "i help always old billy wiz the dogs first, they must be exercise, and do their tricks, and then they are feed. so hungry they are, the dogs! it make very hard not first to feed them, _hein_?" "is--william--feeble?" abby inquired, with some hesitation. "feeble, no!" said marie, with a little laugh. "but old, you know, and when he is too much drunk it take away his mind; so then i help him, that le boss does not find out that and beat him. for he is good, you see, old billy, and we make comrades togezzer always." "dear me!" said abby, doubtfully. "it don't seem as if you ought to be going with--with that kind of person, maree. we don't associate with drinking men, here in these parts. i don't know how it is where you come from." oh, there, marie said, it was different. there the drink did not make men crazy. this was a country where the devil had so much power, you see, that it made it hard for poor folks like old billy, who would do well enough in her country, and at the worst take a little too much at a feast or a wedding. but in those cases, the saints took very good care that nothing should happen to them. she did not know what the saints did in this country, or indeed, if there were any. "oh, maree!" cried abby, scandalised. "i guess i wouldn't talk like that, if i was you. you--you, ain't a papist, are you,--a catholic?" oh, no! mere jeanne was of the reformed religion, and had brought marie up so. it was a misfortune, madame the countess always said; but marie preferred to be as mere jeanne had been. the catholic girls in the village said that mere jeanne had gone straight to the pit, but that proved that they were ignorant entirely of the things of religion. why, le boss was a catholic, he; and everybody knew that he had the evil eye, and that it was not safe to come near him without making the horns. "for the land's sake!" cried abby rock, dropping her dish-cloth into the sink, "what are you talking about, child?" "but, the horns!" marie answered innocently. "when a person has the evil eye, you not make at him the horns, so way?" and she held out the index and little finger of her right hand, bending the other fingers down. "so!" she said; "when they so are held, the evil eye has no power. what you do here to stop him?" "we don't believe in any such a thing!" abby replied, with, some severity. "why, maree, them's all the same as heathen notions, like witchcraft and such. we don't hold by none of those things in this country at all, and i guess you'd better not talk about 'em." marie's eyes opened wide. "but," she said, "_c'est une chose_,--it is a thing that all know. as for le boss, you know--listen!" she came nearer to abby, and lowered her voice. "one night old billy forgot to do, i know not what, but somesing. so when le boss found it out, he look at him, so,"--drawing her brows down and frowning horribly, with the effect of looking like an enraged kitten,--"and say noasing at all. you see?" "well," replied abby. "i suppose mebbe he thought it was an accident, and might have happened to any one." "not--at--all!" cried marie, with dramatic emphasis, throwing out her hand with a solemn gesture. "what happen that same night? old billy fall down the bank and break his leg!" she paused, and nodded like a little mandarin, to point the moral of her tale. "maree!" remonstrated abby rock, "don't tell me you believe such foolishness as that! he'd have fallen down all the same if nobody had looked anigh him. why, good land! i never heard of such notions." "so it is!" marie insisted. "le boss look at him, and he break his leg. i see the break! anozer day," she continued, "coco, he is a boy that makes tumble, and he was hungry, and he took a don't from the table to eat it--" "took a what?" asked abby. "a don't, what you call. round, wiz a hole to put your finger!" explained marie. "only in america they make zem. not of such things in bretagne, never. coco took the don't, and le boss catch him, and look at him again, so! well, yes! in two hour he is sick, that boy, and after zat for a week. a-a-a-h! yes, le boss! only at me he not dare to look, for i have the charm, and he know that, and he is afraid. aha, yes, he is afraid of marie too, when he wish to make devil work. "and here," she cried, turning suddenly upon abby, "you say you have no such thing, abiroc,"--this was the name she had given her hostess,--"and here, too, is the evil eye, first what i see in this place, except the dear little children. a man yesterday came while i played, and looked--but, frightful! ah!" she started from her seat by the window, and retreated hastily to the corner. "he comes, the same man! put me away, abiroc! put me away! he is bad, he is wicked! i die if he look at me!" and she ran hastily out of the room, just as jacques de arthenay entered it. chapter v. courtship. marie could hardly be persuaded to come back into the sitting-room; and when she did at length come, it was only to sit silent in the corner, with one hand held behind her, and her eyes fixed steadfastly on the floor. in vain abby rock tried to draw her into the conversation, telling her how she, abby, and mr. de arthenay had been talking about her, and how they thought she'd better stay right on where she was for a spell, till she was all rested up, and knew what she wanted to do. mr. de arthenay would be a friend to her, and no one could be a better one, as she'd find. but marie only said that monsieur was very kind, and never raised her eyes to his. de arthenay, on his part, was no more at ease. he could not take his eyes from the slender figure, so shrinking and modest, or the lovely downcast face. he had no words to tell her all that was in his heart, nor would he have told it if he could. it was still a thing of horror to him,--a thing that would surely be cast out as soon as he came to himself; and how better could he bring himself to his senses than by facing this dream, this possession of the night, and crushing it down, putting it out of existence? so he sat still, and gazed at the dream, and felt its reality in every fibre of his being; and poor good abby sat and talked for all three, and wondered what to goodness was coming of all this. she wondered more and more as the days went on. it became evident to her that de arthenay, her stern, silent neighbour, who had never so much as looked at a woman before, was "possessed" about her little guest. marie, on the other hand, continued to regard him with terror, and never failed to make the horns secretly when he appeared; yet day after day he came, and sat silent in the sitting-room, and gazed at marie, and wrestled with the devil within him. he never doubted that it was the devil. there was no awkwardness to him in sitting thus silent; it was the habit of his life: he spoke when he had occasion to say anything; for the rest, he considered over-much speech as one of the curses of our fallen state. but abby "felt as if she should fly," as she expressed it to herself, while he sat there. a pall of silence seemed to descend upon the room, generally so cheerful: the french girl cowered under it, and seemed to shrink visibly, like a dumb creature in fright. and when he was gone, she would spring up and run like a deer to her own little room, and seize her violin, and play passionately, the instrument crying under her hands, like a living creature, protesting against grief, against silence and darkness, and the fear of something unknown, which seemed to be growing out of the silence. sometimes abby thought the best thing to do would be to open the door of the cage, and let the little stray bird flutter out, as she had fluttered in those few days ago, by chance--was it by chance? but the bird was so willing to stay; was so happy, except when that silent shadow fell upon the cheerful house; so sweet, so grateful for little kindnesses (and who would not be kind to her, abby thought!); such a singing, light, pretty creature to look at and listen to! and the house had been so quiet since mother died; and after all, it was pleasant to have some one to do for and "putter round." the neighbours said, there! now abby rock was safe to live, for she had got another baby to take care of; she'd ha' withered up and blown away if she had gone on living alone, with no one to make of. and what talks they had, abby and marie! the latter told all about her early childhood with the good old woman whom she called mere jeanne, and explained how she came to have the lady, and to play as she did. the countess, it appeared, lived up at the castle; a great lady, oh, but very great, and beautiful as the angels. she was alone there, for the count was away on a foreign mission, and she had no child, the countess. so one day she saw marie, when the latter was bringing flowers to the gardener's wife, who was good to her; and the countess called the child to her, and took her on her knee, and talked with her. ah, she was good, the countess, and lovely! after that marie was brought to the castle every day, and the countess played to her of the violin, and marie knew all at once that this was the best thing in the world, and the dearest, and the one to die for, you understand. (but abby did not understand in the least.) so when madame the countess saw how it was, she taught marie, and got her the lady, the violin which was marie's life and soul; and she let come down from paris a great teacher, and they all played together, the countess his friend, for many years his pupil, and the great violinist, and marie, the little peasant girl in her blue gown and cap. he said she was a born musician, marie: of course, he was able to see things, being of the same nature; but mere jeanne was unhappy, and said no good would come of it. yes, well, what is to be, you know, that will be, and nossing else. the great teacher died, and there was an end of him. and after a while monsieur the count came home, and carried away the countess to live in paris, and so--and--so--that was all! "but not all!" cried the child, springing from her seat, and raising her head, which had drooped for a moment. "not all! for i have the music, see, abiroc! all days of my life i can make music, make happy, make joy of myself and ozerbodies. when i take her; madame, so, in my hand, i can do what i will, no? people have glad thinks, sorry thinks; what marie tells them to have, that have they. _ah! la tonne aventure, oh gai_!" and she would throw her head back and begin to play, and play till the chairs almost danced on their four legs. de arthenay never heard the fiddle. abby managed it somehow, she hardly knew how or why. he had never spoken about the evil thing, as he would have called it, since that first day; perhaps he thought that abby had taken it away, as a pious church member should, and destroyed it from the face of the earth. at all events there was no mention of it, and the only sound he heard when he approached the house was the whir of abby's wheel (for women still spun then, in that part of the country), or the one voice he cared to hear in the world, uplifted in some light godless song. so things went on for a while; and then came a change. one day marie came into the sitting-room, hearing abby call her. it was the hour of de arthenay's daily visit, and he sat silent in the corner, as usual; but abby had an open letter in her hand, and was crying softly, with her apron hiding her good homely face. "maree," said the good woman, "i've got bad news. my sister lizzie that i've told you so much about, she's dreadful sick, and i've got to go right out and take care of her. thank you, dear!" (as she felt marie's arms round her on the instant, and the soft voice murmured little french sympathies in her ear), "you're real good, i'm sure, and i know you feel for me. i've got to go right off to-morrow or next day, soon as i can get things to rights and see to the stock and things. but what is troubling me is you, maree. i don't see what is to become of you, poor child, unless--well, now, you come here and sit down by me, and listen to what mr. de arthenay has to say to you. you know he's ben your friend, maree, ever sence you come; so you listen to him, like a good girl." abby was in great trouble: indeed, she was the most agitated of the three, for it was with outward calm, at least, that de arthenay spoke; and marie listened quietly, too, plaiting her apron, between her fingers, and forgetting for the moment to make the horns with her left hand. briefly, he asked her to be his wife; to come home with him, and keep his house, and share good and evil with him. he would take care of her, he said, and--and--he trusted the lord would bless the union. if his voice shook now and then, if he kept his eyes lowered, that neither woman should see the light and the struggle in them, that was his own affair; he spoke quietly to the end, and then drew a long breath, feeling that he had come through better than he had expected. abby looked for an outburst of some kind from marie, whether of tears or of sudden childish fear or anger; but neither came. marie thanked monsieur, and said he was very kind, very kind indeed. she would like to think about it a little, if they pleased; she would do all she could to please them, but she was very young, and she would like to take time, if monsieur thought it not wrong: and so rising from her seat, she made a little courtesy, with her eyes still on the ground, and slipped away out of the room, and was gone. the others sat looking at each other, neither ready to speak first. finally abby reflected that jacques would not speak, at all unless she began, so she said, with a sigh between the words; "i guess it'll be all right, jacques. it's only proper that she should have time to think it over, and she such a child. not but what it's a great chance for her," she added hastily. "my! to get a good home, and a good provider, as i make no doubt you would be, after the life she's led, traipsin' here and there, and livin' with darkened heathens, or as bad. but--but--you'll be kind to her, won't you, jacques? she--she's not a woman yet, in her feelin's, as you might say. she ain't nothin' but a baby to our girls about here, that's brought up to see with their eyes and talk with their mouths. you'll have patience with her, if her ways are a good deal different from what you were used to; along back in your mother's time?" but here good abby paused, for she saw that de arthenay heard not a word of her well-meant discourse. he sat brooding in the corner, as was his wont, but with a light in his eyes and a color in his cheek that abby had never seen before. "jacques de arthenay, you are fairly possessed!" she said, in rather an awestruck voice, as he rose abruptly to bid her good-day. "i don't believe you can think of anything except that child." "so more i can!" said the man, looking at her with bright, hard eyes. "nothing else! she is my life!" and with that he turned hastily to the door and was gone. "his life!" repeated abby, gazing after him as he strode away down the street. "much like his life she is, the pretty creetur! and she saying that fiddle was her life, only yesterday! how are all these lives going to work together? that's what i want to know!" and she shook her head, and went back to her spinning. there was no doubt in abby's mind about marie's answer, when she grew a little used to the new idea. her silent suitor was many years older than she, it was true, but as she said to him, what a chance for the friendless wanderer! and if he loved her now, how much more he would love her when he came to know her well, and see all her pretty ways about the house, like a kitten or a bird. and she would respect and admire him, that was certain, abby thought. he was a pictur' of a man, when he got his store clothes on, and nobody had ever had a word to say against him. he was no talker, but some thought that was no drawback in the married state. abby remembered how sister lizzie's young husband had tormented her with foolish questions during the week he bad spent with them at the time of the marriage: a spruce young clerk from a city store, not knowing one end of a hoe from the other, and asking questions all the time, and not remembering anything you told him long enough for it to get inside his head; though there was room enough inside for consid'able many ideas, abby thought. yes, certainly, if so be one had to be portioned with a husband, the one that said least would be the least vexation in the end. so she was content, on the whole, and glad that marie took it all so quietly and sensibly, and made no doubt the girl was turning it over in her mind, and making ready a real pretty answer for jacques when he called the next day. yes, marie was turning it over in her mind, but not just in the way her good hostess supposed. only one thought came to her, but that thought filled her whole mind; she must get away,--away at once from this place, from the stern man with the evil eye, who wanted to take her and kill her slowly, that he might have the pleasure of seeing her die. ah, she knew, marie! had she not seen wicked people before? but she would not tell abiroc, for it would only grieve her, and she would talk, talk, and marie wanted no talking. she only wanted to get away, out into the open fields once more, where nobody would look at her or want to marry her, and where roads might be found leading away to golden cities, full of children who liked to hear play the violin, and who danced when one played it well. early next morning, while abby was out milking the cows, marie stole away. she put on her little blue gown again; ah! how old and faded it looked beside the fresh, pretty-prints that abby would always have her wear! but it was her own, and when she had it on, and the old handkerchief tied under her chin once more, and madame in her box, ready to go with her the world over, why, then she felt that she was marie once more; that this had all been a mistake, this sojourn among the strange, kind people who spoke so loud and through such long noses; that now her life was to begin, as she had really meant it to begin when she ran away from le boss and his hateful tyranny. out she slipped, in the sweet, fresh morning. no-one saw her go, for the village was a busy place at all times, and at this early hour every man and woman was busy in barn or kitchen. at one house a child knocked at the window, a child for whom she had played and sung many times. he stood there in his little red nightgown, and nodded and laughed; and marie nodded back, smiling, and wondered if he would ever run away, and ever know how good, how good it was, to be alone, with no one else in the world to say, "do this!" or "do that!" just as she came out, the sun rose over the hill, and looking at the fiery ball marie perceived that it danced in the sky. yes, assuredly, so it was! there was the same wavering motion that she had seen on every fair easter day that she could remember. she thought how mere jeanne had first called her attention, to it, when she was little, little, just able to toddle, and had told her that the sun danced so on easter morning, for joy that the good lord had risen from the dead; and so it was a lesson for us all, and we must dance on easter day, if we never danced all the rest of the year. ah, how they danced at home there in the village! but now, it was not easter at all, and yet the sun danced; what should it mean? and it came to marie's mind that perhaps the good lord had told it to dance, for a sign to her that all would go well, and that she was doing quite right to run away from persons with the evil eye. when you came to think of it, what was more probable? they always said, those girls in the village, that the saints did the things they asked them to do. when barbe lost her gold earring, did not saint joseph find it for her, and tell her to look among the potato-parings that had been thrown out the day before? and there, sure enough, it was, and the pigs never touching it, because they had been told not to touch! well, and if the saints could do that, it would be a pity indeed if the good lord could not make the sun dance when he felt like doing a kind thing for a poor girl. with the dazzle of that dancing sun still in her eyes, with happy thoughts filling her mind, marie turned the corner of the straggling road that was called a street by the people who lived along it,--turned the corner, and almost fell into the arms of a man, who was coming in the opposite direction. both uttered a cry at the same moment: marie first giving a little startled shriek, but her voice dying away in terrified silence as she saw the man's face; the latter uttering a shout of delight, of fierce and cruel triumph, that rang out strangely in the quiet morning air. for this was le boss! a man with a bloated, cruel face, sodden with drink and inflamed with all fierce and inhuman passions; a strong man, who held the trembling girl by the shoulder as if she were a reed, and gazed into her face with eyes of fiendish triumph; an angry man, who poured out a torrent of furious words, reproaching, threatening, by turns, as he found his victim once more within his grasp, just when he had given up all hope of finding her again. ah, but he had her now, though! let her try it again, to run away! she would find even this time that she had enough, but another time--and on and on, as a coarse and brutal man can go on to a helpless creature that is wholly in his power. marie was silent, cowering in his grasp, looking about with hunted, despairing eyes. there was nothing to do, no word to say that would help. it had all been a mistake,--the sun dancing, the heavens bending down to aid and cheer her,--all had been a mistake, a lie. there was nothing now for the rest of her life but this,--this brutality that clutched and shook her slender figure, this hatred that hissed venomous words in her ear. this was the end, forever, till death should come to set her free. but what was this? what was happening? for the hateful voice faltered, the grasp on her shoulder weakened, the blaze of the fierce eyes turned from her. a cry was heard, a wild, inarticulate cry of rage, of defiance; the next moment something rushed past her like a flash; there was a brief struggle, a shout, an oath, then a heavy fall. when the bewildered child could clear her eyes from the mist of fright that clouded them, le boss was lying on the ground; and towering over him like an avenging spirit, his blue eyes aflame, his strong hands clenched for another blow, stood jacques de arthenay. just what happened next, marie never quite knew. words were said as in a dream. was it a real voice that was saying: "this is my wife, you dog! take yourself out of my sight, before worse comes to you!" was it real? and did le boss, gathering himself up from the grass with foul curses, too horrible to think of--did he make reply that she was his property, that he had bought her, paid for her, and would have his own! and then the other voice again, saying, "i tell you she is my wife, the wife of a free man. speak, mary, and tell him you are my wife!" and did she--with those blue eyes on her, which she had never met before, but which now caught and chained her gaze, so that she could not look away, try as she might--did she of her own free will answer, "yes, monsieur, i am your wife, if you say it; if you will keep me from him, monsieur!" then--marie did not know what came then. there were more words between the two men, loud and fierce on one side, low and fierce on the other; and then le boss was gone, and she was walking back to the house with the man who had saved her, the man to whom she belonged now; the strong man, whose hand, holding hers as they walked, trembled far more than her own. but marie did not feel as if she should ever tremble again. for that one must be alive, must have strength in one's limbs; and was she dead, she wondered, or only asleep? and would she wake up some happy moment, and find herself in the little white bed at abiroc's house, or better still, out in the blessed fields, alone with the birds under the free sky? chapter vi. wedlock. they were married that very day. abby begged piteously for a little delay, that she might make clothes, and give her pretty pet a "good send-off;" but de arthenay would not hear of it. mary was his wife in the sight of god; let her become so in the sight of man! so a white gown was found and put on the little passive creature, and good abby, crying with excitement, twined some flowers in the soft dark hair, and thought that even sister lizzie, in her blue silk dress and chip bonnet, had not made so lovely a bride as this stranger, this wandering child from no one knew where. the wedding took place in abby's parlor, with only abby herself and a single neighbour for witnesses. a little crowd gathered round the door, however, to see how jacques de arthenay looked when he'd made a fool of himself, as they expressed it. they were in a merry mood, the friendly neighbours, and had sundry jests ready to crack upon the bridegroom when he should appear; but when he finally stood in the doorway, with the little pale bride on his arm, it became apparent that jests were not in order. people calc'lated that jacques was in one of his moods, and was best not to be spoke with just that moment; besides, 't was no time for them to be l'iterin' round staring, with all there was to be done. so the crowd melted away, and only abby followed the new-married couple to their own home. she, walking behind in much perturbation of spirit, noticed that on the threshold marie stumbled, and seemed about to fall, and that jacques lifted her in his arms as if she were a baby, and carried her into the room. he had not seemed to notice till that moment that the child was carrying her violin-case, though to be sure it was plain enough to see, but as he lifted her, it struck against the door-jamb, and he glanced down and saw it. when abby came in (for this was to be her good-by to them, as she was to leave that afternoon for her sister's home), de arthenay had the case in his hand, and was speaking in low, earnest tones. "you cannot have this thing, mary! it is a thing of evil, and may not be in a christian household. you are going to leave all those things behind you now, and there must be nothing to recall that life with those bad people. i will burn the evil thing now, and it shall be a sweet savour to the lord, even a marriage sacrifice." as he spoke he opened the case, and taking out the violin, laid it across his knee, intending to break it into pieces; but at this marie broke out into a cry, so wild, so piercing, that he paused, and abby ran to her and took her in, her arms, and pressed her to her kind breast, and comforted her as one comforts a little child. then she turned to the stern-eyed bridegroom. "jacques," she pleaded, "don't do it! don't do such a thing on your wedding-day, if you have a heart in you. don't you see how she feels it? put the fiddle away, if you don't want it round; put it up garret, and let it lay there, till she's wonted a little to doing without it. take it now out of her sight and your own, jacques de arthenay, or you'll be sorry for it when you have done a mischief you can't undo." abby wondered afterward what power had spoken in her voice; it must have had some unusual force, for de arthenay, after a moment's hesitation, did as she bade him,--turned slowly and left the room, and the next moment was heard mounting the garret stairs. while he was gone, she still held marie in her arms, and begged her not to tremble so, and told her that her husband was a good man, a kind man, that he had never hurt any one in his life except evil-doers, and had been a good son and a good brother to his own people while they lived. then she bade the child look around at her new home, and see how neat and good everything was, and how tastefully jacques had arranged it all for her. "why, he vallies the ground you step on, child!" she cried. "you don't want to be afraid of him, dear. you can do anything you're a mind to with him, i tell you. see them flowers there, in the chaney bowl! now he never looked at a flower in his life, jacques didn't; but knowing you set by them, he went out and picked them pretty ones o' purpose. now i call that real thoughtful, don't you, maree?" so the good soul talked on, soothing the girl, who said no word, only trembled, and gazed at her with wide, frightened eyes; but abby's heart was heavy within her, and she hardly heard her own cheery words. what kind of union was this likely to be, with such a beginning! why had she not realised, before it was too late, how set jacques was in his ways, and how he never would give in to the heathen notions and fiddling ways of the foreign child? sadly the good woman bade farewell to the bridal couple, and left them alone in their new home. on the threshold she turned back for a moment, and had a moment's comfort; for jacques had taken marie's hands in his own, and was gazing at her with such love in his eyes that it must have melted a stone, abby thought; and perhaps marie thought so too, for she forgot to make the horns, and smiled back, a little faint piteous smile, into her husband's face. so abby went away to the west, to tend her sister, and jacques and marie de arthenay began their life together. it was not so very terrible, marie found after a while. of course a person could not always help it, to have the evil eye; it had happened that even the best of persons had it, and sometimes without knowing it. the catholic girls at home in the village had a saint who always carried her eyes about in a plate because they were evil, and she was afraid of hurting some one with them. (poor saint lucia! this is a new rendering of thy martyrdom!) yes, indeed! marie was no catholic, but she had seen the picture, and knew that it was so. and oh, he did mean to be kind, her husband! that saw itself more and more plainly every day. then, there was great pleasure in the housekeeping. marie was a born housewife, with delicate french hands, and an inborn skill in cookery, the discovery of which gave her great delight. everything in the kitchen was fresh and clean and sweet, and in the garden were fruits, currants and blackberries and raspberries, and every kind of vegetable that grew in the village at home, with many more that were strange to her. she found never-ending pleasure in concocting new dishes, little triumphs of taste and daintiness, and trying them on her silent husband. sometimes he did not notice them at all, but ate straight on, not knowing a delicate fricassee from a junk of salt beef; that was very trying. but again he would take notice, and smile at her with the rare sweet smile for which she was beginning to watch, and praise the prettiness and the flavor of what was set before him. but sometimes, too, dreadful things happened. one day marie had tried her very best, and had produced a dish for supper of which she was justly proud,--a little _friture_ of lamb, delicate golden-brown, with crimson beets and golden carrots, cut in flower-shapes, neatly ranged around. such a pretty dish was never seen, she thought; and she had put it on the best platter, the blue platter with the cow and the strawberries on it; and when she set it before her husband, her dark eyes were actually shining with pleasure, and she was thinking that if he were very pleased, but very, very, she might possibly have courage to call him "mon ami," which she had thought several times of doing. it had such a friendly sound, "mon ami!" but alas! when de arthenay came to the table he was in one of his dark moods; and when his eyes fell on the festal dish, he started up, crying out that the devil was tempting him, and that he and his house should be lost through the wiles of the flesh; and so caught up the dish and flung it on the fire, and bade his trembling wife bring him a crust of dry bread. poor marie! she was too frightened to cry, though all her woman's soul was in arms at the destruction of good food, to say nothing of the wound to her house-wifely pride. she sat silent, eating nothing, only making believe, when her husband looked her way, to crumble a bit of bread. and when that wretched meal was over, jacques called her to his side, and took out the great black bible, and read three chapters of denunciation from jeremiah, that made marie's blood chill in her veins, and sent her shivering to her bed. the next day he would eat nothing but indian meal porridge, and the next; and it was a week before marie ventured to try any more experiments in cookery. marie had a great dread of the black bible. she was sure it was a different bible from the one which mere jeanne used to read at home, for that was full of lovely things, while this was terrible. sometimes jacques would call her to him and question her, and that was really too frightful for anything. perhaps he had been reading aloud, as he was fond of doing in the evenings, some denunciatory passage from the psalms or the prophets. "mary," he would say, turning to her, as she sat with her knitting in the corner, "what do you think of that passage?" "i think him horreebl'," marie would answer. "why do you read of such things, jacques! why you not have the good bible, as we have him in france, why?" "there is but one bible, mary, but one in the world; and it is all good and beautiful, only our sinful eyes cannot always see the glory of it." "ah, but no!" marie would persist, shaking her head gravely. "mere jeanne's bible was all ozer, so i tell you. not black and horreebl', no! but red, all red, wiz gold on him, and in his side pictures, all bright and preetty, and good words, good ones, what make the good feel in my side. yes, that is the bible i have liked." "mary, i tell you it was no bible, unless it was this very one. they bind it in any colour they like, don't you see, child? it isn't the cover that makes the book. i fear you weren't brought up a christian, mary. it is a terrible thing to think of, my poor little wife. you must let me teach you; you must talk with elder beach on sunday afternoons. assuredly he will help you, if i am found unworthy." but marie would have none of this. she was a christian, she maintained as stoutly as her great fear of her husband would permit. she had been baptized, and taught all that one should be taught. but it was all different. her bible told that we must love people, but love everybody, always, all times; and this black book said that we must kill them with swords, and dash them against stones, and pray bad things to happen to them. it stood to reason that it was not the same bible, _hein_? at this jacques de arthenay started, and took himself by the hair with both hands, as he did when something moved him strongly. "those were bad people, mary!" he cried. "don't you see? they withstood the elect, and they were slain. and we must think about these things, and think of our sins, and the sins of others as a warning to ourselves. sin is awful, black, horrible! and its wages is death,--death, do you hear?" when he cried out in this way, like a wild creature, marie did not dare to speak again; but she would murmur under her breath in french, as she bent lower over her knitting, "nevertheless, mere jeanne's good lord was good, and yours--"; and then she would quietly turn a hairpin upside down in her hair, for it was quite certain that if she caught jacques's eye when he was in this mood, her hand would wither, or her hair fall out, or at the very least the cream all sour in the pans; and when one's hands were righteously busy, as with knitting, one might make the horns with other things, and a hairpin was very useful. she wished she had a little coral hand, such as she had once seen at a fair, with the fingers making the horns in the proper manner; it would be a great convenience, she thought with a sigh. but he was always sorry after these dark times; and when he sat and held her hand, as he did sometimes, silent for the most part, but gazing at her with eyes of absolute, unspeakable love, marie was pleased, almost content: as nearly content as one could be with the half of one's life taken away. chapter vii. looking back. the half of a life! for so marie counted the loss of her violin. she never spoke of this--to whom should she speak? in her husband's eyes it was a thing accursed, she knew. she almost hoped he had forgotten about the precious treasure that lay so quietly in some dark nook in the lonely garret; for as long as he did not think of it, it was safe there, and she should not feel that terrible anguish that had seemed to rend body and soul when she saw him lay the violin across his knee to break it. and abby came not, and gave no sign; and there was no one else. she saw little of the neighbours at first. the women looked rather askance at her, and thought her little better than a fool, even if she had contrived to make one of jacques de arthenay. she never seemed to understand their talk, and had a way of looking past them, as if unaware of their presence, that was disconcerting, when one thought well of oneself. but marie was not a fool, only a child; and she did not look at the women simply because she was not thinking of them. with the children, however, it was different marie felt that she would have a great deal to say to the children, if only she had the half of her that could talk to them. ah, how she would speak, with madame on her arm! what wonders she could tell them, of fairies and witches, of flowers that sang and birds that danced! but this other part of her was shy, and she did not feel that she had anything worth saying to the little ones, who looked at her with half-frightened, half-inviting eyes when they passed her door. by-and-by, however, she mustered up courage, and called one or two of them to her, and gave them flowers from her little garden. also a pot of jam with a spoon in it proved an eloquent argument in favour of friendship; and after a while the children fell into a way of sauntering past with backward glances, and were always glad to come in when marie knocked on the window, or came smiling to the door, with her handkerchief tied under her chin and her knitting in her hand. it was only when her husband was away that this happened; marie would not for worlds have called a child to meet her husband's eyes, those blue eyes of which, she stood in such terror, even when she grew to love them. one little boy in particular came often, when the first shyness had worn away. he was an orphan, like marie herself: a pretty, dark-eyed little fellow, who looked, she fancied, like the children at home in france. he did not expect her to talk and answer questions, but was content to sit, as she loved to do, gazing at the trees or the clouds that went sailing by, only now and then uttering a few quiet words that seemed in harmony with the stillness all around. i have said that jacques de arthenay's house lay somewhat apart from the village street. it was a pleasant house, long and low, painted white, with vines trained over the lower part. directly opposite was a pine grove, and here marie and her little friend loved to sit, listening to the murmur of the wind in the dark feathery branches. it was the sound of the sea, marie told little petie. as to how it got there, that was another matter; but it was undoubtedly the sound of the sea, for she had been at sea, and recognised it at once. "what does it say?" asked the child one day. "of words," said marie, "i hear not any, petie. but it wants always somesing, do you hear? it is hongry always, and makes moans for the sorry thinks it has in its heart." "i am hungry in my stomach, not in my heart," objected petie. but marie nodded her head sagely. "yes," she said. "it is that you know not the deeference, petie, bit-ween those. to be hongry at the stomach, that is made better when you eat cakes, do you see, or _pot_atoes. but when the heart is hongry, then--ah, yes, that is ozer thing." and she nodded again, and glanced up at the attic window, and sighed. it was a long time before she spoke of her past life; but when she found that petie had no sharp-eyed mother at home, only a deaf great-aunt who asked no questions, she began to give him little glimpses of the circus world, which filled him with awe and rapture. it was hardly a real circus, only a little strolling _troupe_, with some performing dogs, and a few trained horses and ponies, and two tight-rope dancers; then there were two other musicians, and marie herself, besides le boss and his family, and old billy, who took care of the horses and did the dirty work. it was about the dogs that petie liked best to hear; of the wonderful feats of monsieur george, the great brindled greyhound, and the astonishing sagacity of coquelicot, the poodle. "monsieur george, he could jump over anything, yes! he was always jump, jump, all day long, to practise himself. over our heads all, that was nothing, yet he did it always when we come in the tent, _pour saluer_, to say the how you do. but one day come in a man to see le boss, very tall, oh, like mountains, and on him a tall hat. and monsieur george, he not stopped to measure with his eye, for fear he be too late with the _politesse_, and he jump, and carry away the man's hat, and knock him down and come plomp, down on him. yes, very funny! the man got a bottle in his hat, and that break, and run all over him, and he say, oh, he say all things what you think of. but monsieur george was so 'shamed, he go away and hide, and not for a week we see him again. le boss think that man poison him, and he goes to beat him; but that same day monsieur george come back, and stop outside the tent and call us all to come out. and when we come, he run back, and say, 'look here, what i do!' and he jump, and go clean over the tent, and not touch him wiz his foot. yes, i saw it: very fine dog, monsieur george! but coquelicot, he have more thinking than monsieur george. he very claiver, coquelicot! some of zem think him a witch, but i think not that. he have minds, that was all. but his legs so short, and that make him hate monsieur george." "my legs are short," objected petie, stretching out a pair of plump calves, "but that doesn't make me hate people." "ah, but if you see a little boy what can walk over the roof of the house, you want the same to do it, _n'est-ce-pas_?" cried marie. "you try, and try, and when you cannot jump, you think that not a so nize little boy as when his legs were short. so boy, so dog. coquelicot, all his life he want to jump like monsieur george, and all his life he cannot jump at all. you say to him, 'coquelicot, are you foolishness? you can do feefty things and george not one of zem: you can read the letters, and find the things in the pocket, and play the ins_tru_ment, and sing the tune to make die people of laughing, yet you are not _con_tent. let him have in peace his legs, monsieur george, then!' but no! and every time monsieur george come down from the great jump, coquelicot is ready, and bite his legs so hard what he can." petie laughed outright. "i think that's awful funny!" he said. "i say, mis' de arthenay, i'd like to seen him bite his legs. did he holler?" "monsieur george? he cry, and go to his bed. all the dogs, they afraid of coquelicot, because he have the minds. and he, coquelicot, he fear nossing, except madame when she is angry." "who was she?" asked petie,--"a big dog?" "ah, dog, no!" cried marie, her face flushing. "madame my violon, my life, my pleasure, my friend. ah, _mon dieu_, what friend have i?" her breast heaved, and she broke into a wild fit of crying, forgetting the child by her side, forgetting everything in the world save the hunger at her heart for the one creature to whom she could speak, and who could speak in turn to her. petie sat silent, frightened at the sudden storm of sobs and tears. what had he done, he wondered? at length he mustered courage to touch his friend's arm softly with his little hand. "i didn't go to do it!" he said. "don't ye cry, mis' de arthenay! i don't know what i did, but i didn't go to do it, nohow." marie turned and looked at him, and smiled through her tears. "dear little petie!" she said, stroking the curly head, "you done nossing, little petie. it was the honger, no more! oh, no more!" she caught her breath, but choked the sob back bravely, and smiled again. something woke in her child heart, and bade her not sadden the heart of the younger child with a grief which was not his. it is one of the lessons of life, and it was well with marie that she learned it early. "madame, my violon," she resumed after a pause, speaking cheerfully, and wiping her eyes with her apron, "she have many voices, petie; tousand voices, like all birds, all winds, all song in the world; and she have an angry voice, too, deep down, what make you tr-remble in your heart, if you are bad. _bien_! sometime coquelicot, he been bad, very bad. he know so much, that make him able for the bad, see, like for the good. yes! sometime, he steal the sugar; sometime he come in when we make music, and make wiz us yells, and spoil the music; sometime he make the horreebl' faces at the poppies and make scream them with fear." "kin poppies scream?" asked petie, opening great eyes of wonder. "my! ourn can't. we've got big red ones, biggest ever you see, but i never heerd a sound out of 'em." explanations ensued, and a digression in favour of the six puppies, whose noses were softer and whose tails were funnier than anything else in the known, world; and then-- "so coquelicot, he come and he sit down before the poppies, and he open his mouth, so!" here marie opened her pretty mouth, and tried to look like a malicious poodle,--with singular lack of success; but petie was delighted, and clapped his hands and laughed. "and then," marie went on, "lisette, she is the poppies' mother, and she hear them, and she come wiz yells, too, and try to drive coquelicot, but he take her wiz his teeth and shake her, and throw her away, and go on to make faces, and all is horreebl' noise, to wake deads. so old billy call me, and i come, and i go softly behind coquelicot, and down i put me, and madame speak in her angry voice justly in coquelicot's ear. 'la la! tra la li la!' deep down like so, full wiz angryness, terreebl', yes! and coquelicot he jump, oh my! oh my! never he could jump so of all his life. and the tail bit-ween his legs, and there that he run, run, as if all devils run after him. yes, funny, petie, vairy funny!" she laughed, and petie laughed in violent, noisy peals, as children love to do, each gust of merriment fanning the fire for another, till all control is lost, and the little one drops into an irrepressible fit of the "giggles." so they sat under the pine-trees, the two children, and laughed, and marie forgot the hunger at her heart; till suddenly she looked and saw her husband standing near, leaning on his rake and gazing at her with grave, uncomprehending eyes. then the laugh froze on her lips, and she rose hastily, with the little timid smile which was all she had for jacques (yet he was hungry too, so hungry! and knew not what ailed him!) and went to meet him; while petie ran away through the grove, as fast as his little legs would carry him. chapter viii. a flower in the snow. the winter, when it came, was hard for marie. she had never known severe weather before, and this season it was bitter cold. people shook their heads, and said that old times had come again, and no mistake. there was eager pride in the lowest mercury, and the man whose thermometer registered thirty degrees below zero was happier than he who could boast but of twenty-five. there was not so much snow as in milder seasons, but the cold held without breaking, week after week: clear weather; no wind, but the air taking the breath from the dryness of it, and in the evening the haze hanging blue and low that tells of intensest cold. as the snow fell, it remained. the drifts and hollows never changed their shape, as in a soft or a windy season, but seemed fixed as they were for all time. across the road from jacques de arthenay's house, a huge drift had been piled by the first snowstorm of the winter. nearly as high as the house it was, and its top combed forward, like a wave ready to break; and in the blue hollow beneath the curling crest was the likeness of a great face. a rock cropped out, and ice had formed upon its surface, so that the snow fell away from it. the explanation was simple enough; jacques de arthenay, coming and going at his work, never so much as looked at it; but to marie it was a strange and a dreadful thing to see. night and morning, in the cold blue light of the winter moon and the bright hard glitter of the winter sun, the face was always there, gazing in at her through the window, seeing everything she did, perhaps--who could tell?--seeing everything she thought. she changed her seat, and drew down the blind that faced the drift; yet it had a strange fascination for her none the less, and many times in the day she would go and peep through the blind, and shiver, and then come away moaning in a little way that she had when she was alone. it was pitiful to see how she shrank from the cold,--the tender creature who seemed born to live and bloom with the flowers, perhaps to wither with them. sometimes it seemed to her as if she could not bear it, as if she must run away and find the birds, and the green and joyous things that she loved. the pines were always green, it is true, in the little grove across the way; but it was a solemn and gloomy green, to her child's mind,--she had not yet learned to love the steadfast pines. sometimes she would open the door with a wild thought of flying out, of flying far away, as the birds did, and rejoining them in southern countries where the sun was warm, and not a fire that froze while it lighted one. so cold! so cold! but when she stood thus, the little wild heart beating fiercely in her, the icy blast would come and chill her into quiet again, and turn the blood thick, so that it ran slower in her veins; and she would think of the leagues and leagues of pitiless snow and ice that lay between her and the birds, and would close the door again, and go back to her work with that little weary moan. her husband was very kind in these days; oh, very kind and gentle. he kept the dark moods to himself, if they came upon him, and tried even to be gay, though he did not know how to set about it. if he had ever known or looked at a child, this poor man, he would have done better; but it was not a thing that he had ever thought of, and he did not yet know that marie was a child. sometimes when she saw him looking at her with the grave, loving, uncomprehending look that so often followed her as she moved about, she would come to him and lay her head against his shoulder, and remain quiet so for many minutes; but when he moved to stroke her dark head, and say, "what is it, mary? what troubles you?" she could only say that it was cold, very cold, and then go away again about her work. sometimes an anguish would seize him, when he saw how pale and thin she grew, and he would send for the village doctor, and beg him to give her some "stuff" that would make her plump and rosy again; but the good man shook his head, and said she needed nothing, only care and kindness,--kindness, he repeated, with some emphasis, after a glance at de arthenay's face, and good food. "cheerfulness," he said, buttoning up his fur coat under his chin,--"cheerfulness, mr. de arthenay, and plenty of good things to eat. that's all she needs." and he went away wondering whether the little creature would pull through the winter or not. and jacques did not throw the food into the fire any more; he even tried to think about it, and care about it. and he got out the farmer's almanac,--yes, he did,--and tried reading the jokes aloud, to see if they would amuse mary; but they did not amuse her in the least, or him either, so that was given up. and so the winter wore on. it had to end sometime; even that winter could not last forever. the iron grasp relaxed: fitfully at first, with grim clutches and snatches at its prey, gripping it the closer because it knew the time was near when all power would go, drop off like a garment, melt away like a stream. the unchanging snow-forms began to shift, the keen outlines wavered, grew indistinct, fell into ruin, as the sun grew warm again, and sent down rays that were no longer like lances of diamond. the glittering face in the hollow of the great drift lost its watchful look, softened, grew dim and blurred; one morning it was gone. that day marie sang a little song, the first she had sung through all the long, cruel season. she drew up the blind and gazed out; she wrapped a shawl round her head and went and stood at the door, afraid of nothing now, not even thinking of making those tiresome horns. she was aware of something new in the air she breathed. it was still cold, but with a difference; there was a breathing as of life, where all had been dry, cold death. there was a sense of awakening everywhere; whispers seemed to come and go in the tops of the pine-trees, telling of coming things, of songs that would be sung in their branches, as they had been sung before; of blossoms that would spring at their feet, brightening the world with gold and white and crimson. life! life stirring and waking everywhere, in sky and earth; soft clouds sweeping across the blue, softening its cold brightness, dropping rain as they go; sap creeping through the ice-bound stems, slowly at first, then running freely, bidding the tree awake and be at its work, push out the velvet pouch that holds the yellow catkin, swell and polish the pointed leaf-buds: life working silently under the ground, brown seeds opening their leaves to make way for the tender shoot that shall draw nourishment from them and push its way on and up while they die content, their work being done; roots creeping here and there, threading their way through the earth, softening, loosening, sucking up moisture and sending it aloft to carry on the great work,--life everywhere, pulsing in silent throbs, the heart-beats of nature; till at last the time is ripe, the miracle is prepared, and "in green underwood and cover blossom by blossom the spring begins." marie too, the child-woman, standing in her doorway, felt the thrill of new life; heard whispers of joy, but knew not what they meant; saw a radiance in the air that was not all sunlight; was conscious of a warmth at her heart which she had never known in her merriest days. what did it all mean? nay, she could not tell, she was not yet awake. she thought of her friend, of the silent voice that had spoken so often and so sweetly to her, and the desire grew strong upon her. if she died for it, she must play once more on her violin. there came a day in spring when the desire mastered the fear that was in her. it was a perfect afternoon, the air a-lilt with bird-songs, and full of the perfume of early flowers. her husband was ploughing in a distant field, and surely would not return for an hour or two; what might one not do in an hour? she called her little friend, petie, who was hovering about the door, watching for her. quickly, with fluttering breath, she told him what she meant to do, bade him be brave and fear nothing; locked the door, drew down the blinds, and closed the heavy wooden shutters; turned to the four corners of the room, bowing to each corner, as she muttered some words under her breath; and then, catching the child's hand in hers, began swiftly and lightly to mount the attic stairs. chapter x. de akthenay's vigil. was it a _loup-garou_ in the attic? was it a _loup-garou_ that drew that long, sighing breath, as of a soul in pain; was it a _loup-garou_ that now groped its way to the other staircase, that which led up from the woodshed, pausing now and then, and going blindly, and breathing still heavily and slow? de arthenay had come up to the attic in search of something, tools, maybe, or seeds, or the like, for many odd things were stowed away under the over-hanging rafters. he heard steps, and stood still, knowing that it must be his wife who was coming up, and thinking to have pleasure just by watching her as she went on some little household errand, such as brought himself. she would know nothing of his presence, and so she would be free, unrestrained by any shyness or--or fear; if it was fear. so he had stood in his dark corner, and had seen little, indeed, but heard all; and it was a wild and a miserable man that crept down the narrow stairway and out into the fresh air. he did not know where he was going. he wandered on and on, hearing always that sound in his ears, the soft, sweet tones of the accursed instrument that was wiling his wife, his own, his beloved, to her destruction. the child, too, how would it be for him? but the child was a smaller matter. perhaps,--who knows? a child can live down sin. but mary, whom he fancied saved, cured, the evil thing rooted out of her heart and remembrance! mary; mary! he kept saying her name over and over to himself, sometimes aloud, in a passion of reproach, sometimes softly, broodingly, with love and pathos unutterable. what power there was in that wicked voice! he had never rightly heard it before, never, save that instant when she stood playing in the village street, and he saw her for a moment and loved her forever. oh, he had heard, to be sure, this or that strolling fiddler,--godless, tippling wretches, who rarely came to the village, and never set foot there twice, he thought with pride. but this, this was different! what power! what sweetness, filling his heart with rapture even while his spirit cried out against it! what voices, entreating, commanding, uplifting! nay, what was he saying? and who did not know that satan could put on an angel's look when it pleased him? and if a look, why not a voice? when had a fiddle played godly tunes, chant or psalm? when did it do aught else but tempt the foolish to their folly, the wicked to their iniquity? mary! mary! how lovely she was, in the faint gleams of light that fell about her, there in the dim old attic! he felt her beauty, almost, more than he saw it. and all this year, while he had thought her growing in grace, silently, indeed, but he hoped truly, she had been hankering for the forbidden thing, had been planning deceit in her heart, and had led away the innocent child to follow unrighteousness with her. he would go back, and do what he should have done a year ago,--what he would have done, had he not yielded to the foolish talk of a foolish woman. he would go back, and burn the fiddle, and silence forever that sweet, insidious music, with its wicked murmurs that stole into a man's heart--even a man's, and one who knew the evil, and abhorred it. the smoke of it once gone up to heaven, there would be an end. he should have his wife again, his own, and nothing should come between them more. yes, he would go back, in a little while, as soon as those sounds had died away from his ears. what was the song she sung there? "'tis long and long i have loved thee! i'll ne'er forget thee more." she would forget it, though, surely, surely, when it was gone, breathed out in flame and ashes: when he could say to her, "there is no more any such thing in my house and yours, mary, mary." how tenderly he would tell her, though! it would hurt, yes! but not so much as her look would hurt him when he told her. ah, she loved the wooden thing best! he was dumb, and it spoke to her in a thousand tones! even he had understood some of them. there was one note that was like his mother's voice when she lifted it up in the hymn she loved best,--his gentle mother, dead so long, so long ago. she--why, she loved music; he had forgotten that. but only psalms, only godly hymns, never anything else. what devil whispered in his ear, "she never heard anything else. she would have loved this too, this too, if she had had the chance, if she had heard mary play!" he put his hands to his ears, and almost ran on. where was he going? he did not ask, did not think. he only knew that it was a relief to be walking, to get farther and farther away from what he loved and fain would cherish, from what he hated and would fain destroy. the grass grew long and rank under his feet; he stumbled, and paused for a moment, out of breath, to look about him. he was in the old burying-ground, the grey stones rearing their heads to peer at him as he hurried on. ah, there was one stone here that belonged to him. he had not been in the place since he was a child; he cared nothing about the dead of long ago: but now the memory of it all came back upon him, and he sought and found the grey sunken stone, and pulled away the grass from it, and read the legend with eyes that scarcely saw what they looked at. "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" and the place was free from moss, as they always said; the rude scratch, as of a sharp-pointed instrument. did it mean anything? he dropped beside it for a minute, and studied the stone; then rose and went his way again, still wandering on and on, he knew not whither. darkness came, and he was in the woods, stumbling here and there, driven as by a strong wind, scorched as by a flame. at last he sank down at the foot of a great oak-tree, in a place he knew well, even in the dark: he could go no farther. "d'arthenay, tenez foi!" it whispered in his ears, and seemed for a little to drown the haunting notes of the violin. he, the calvinist, the practical man, who believed in two things outside the visible world, a great hell and a small heaven, now felt spirits about him, saw visions that were not of this life. his ancestor, the huguenot, stood before him, in cloak and band; in one hand a bible, in the other a drawn dagger. his dark eyes pierced like a sword-thrust; his lips moved; and though no sound came, jacques knew the words they framed. "tenez foi! keep the faith that i brought across the sea, leaving for it fair fields and vineyards, castle and tower and town. keep the faith for which i bled, for which i died here in the wilderness, leaving only these barren acres, and the stone that bears my last word, my message to those who should come after me. keep the faith for which my fair wife faded and died, far away from home and friends! let no piping or jigging or profane sound be in thy house, but let it be the house of fasting and of prayer, even as my house was. keep faith! if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee!" who else was there,--what gentle, pallid ghost, with sad, faint eyes? the face was dim and shadowy, for he had been a little child when his mother died. she was speaking too, but what were these words she was saying? "keep faith, my son! ay! but keep it with your wife too, the child you wedded whether she would or no, and from whom you are taking the joy of childhood, the light of youth. keep faith as the sun keeps it, as the summer keeps it, not as winter and the night." what did that mean? keep faith with her, with his wife? how else should he do it but by saving her from the wrath to come, by plucking her as a flower out of the mire? "what shall i save but her soul, yea, though her body perish?" he spoke out in his trouble, and the vision seemed to shrink and waver under his gaze; but the faint voice sighed again,--or was it only the wind in the pine-trees?--"care thou for her earthly life, her earthly joy, for god is mindful of her soul." but then the deeper note struck in again,--or was it only a stronger gust, that bowed the branches, and murmured through all the airy depths above him? "keep the faith! thou art a man, and wilt thou be drawn away by women, of whom the best are a stumbling-block and a snare for the feet? destroy the evil thing! root it out from thy house! what are joys of this world, that we should think of them? do they not lead to destruction, even the flowery path of it, going down to the mouth of the pit, and with no way leading thence? who is the woman for whose sake thou wilt lose thine own soul? if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out!" so the night went on, and the voices, or the wind, or his own soul, cried, and answered, and cried again: and no peace came. the night passed. as it drew to a close, all sound, all motion, died away; the darkness folded him close, like a mantle; the silence pressed upon him like hands that held him down. like a log the man lay at the foot of the great tree, and his soul lay dead within him. at last a change came; or did he sleep, and dream of a change? a faint trembling in the air, a faint rustling that lost itself almost before it reached the ear. it was gone, and all was still once more; yet with a difference. the darkness lay less heavily: one felt that it hid many things, instead of filling the world with itself alone. hark! the murmur again, not lost this time, but coming and going, lightly, softly, brushing here and there, soft dark wings fanning the air, making it ever lighter, thinner. gradually the veil lifted; things stood out, black against black, then black against grey; straight majesty of tree-trunks, bending lines of bough and spray, tender grace of ferns. and now, what is this? a sound from the trees themselves,--no multitudinous murmur this time, but a single note, small and clear and sweet, breaking like a golden arrow of sound through the cloudy depths. chirp, twitter! and again from the next tree, and the next, and now from all the trees, short triads, broken snatches, and at last the full chorus of song, choir answering to choir, the morning hymn of the forest. now, in the very tree beneath which the man lay, chrysostom, the thrush, took up his parable, and preached his morning sermon; and if it had been set to words, they might have been something like these:-- "sing! sing, brothers, sisters, little tender ones in the nest! sing, for the morning is come, and god has made us another day. sing! for praise is sweet, and our sweetest notes must show it forth. song is the voice that god has given us to tell forth his goodness, to speak gladly of the wondrous things he hath made. sing, brothers and sisters! be joyful, be joyful in the lord! all sorrow and darkness is gone away, away, and light is here, and morning, and the world wakes with us to gladness and the new day. sing, and let your songs be all of joy, joy, lest there be in the wood any sorrowing creature, who might go sadly through the day for want of a voice of cheer, to tell him that god is love, is love. wake from thy dream, sad heart, if the friendly wood hold such an one! sorrow is night, and night is good, for rest, and for seeing of many stars, and for coolness and sweet odours; but now awake, awake, for the day is here, and the sun arises in his might,--the sun, whose name is joy, is joy, and, whose voice is praise. sing, sing, and praise the lord!" so the bird sang, praising god, and the other birds, from tree and shrub, answered as best they might, each with his song of praise; and the man, lying motionless beneath the great tree, heard, and listened, and understood. still he lay there, with wide open eyes, while the golden morning broke over him, and the light came sifting down, through the leaves, checkering all the ground with gold. the wood now glowed with colour, russet and green and brown, wine-like red of the tree-trunks where the sun struck aslant on them, soft yellow greens where the young ferns uncurled their downy heads. the air was sweet, sweet, with the smell of morning; was the whole world new since last night? suddenly from the road near by (for he had gone round in a circle, and the wooded hollow where he lay was out of sight but not out of hearing of the country road which skirted the woods for many miles), from the road near by came the sound of voices,--men's voices, which fell strange and harsh on his ears, open for the first time to the music of the world, and still ringing with the morning hymn of joy. what were these harsh voices saying? "they think she'll live now?" "yes, she'll pull through, unless she frets herself bad again about jacques. nobody'd heerd a word of him when i come away." "been out all night, has he?" "yes! went away without saying anything to her or anybody, far as i can make out. been gone since yesterday afternoon, and some say--" the voices died away, and then the footsteps, and silence fell once more. chapter xi. vita nuova. de arthenay never knew how he reached home that day. the spot where he had been lying was several miles from the white cottage, yet he was conscious of no time, no distance. it seemed one burning moment, a moment never to be forgotten while he lived, till he found himself at the foot of the outer stairway, the stair that led to the attic. she might still be living, and he would not go to her without the thing she craved, the thing which could speak to her in the voice she understood. again a moment of half-consciousness, and he was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, looking in with blind eyes of dread. what should he see? what still form might break the outline of that white bed which she always kept so smooth and trim? the silence cried out to him with a thousand voices, threatening, condemning, blasting; but the next moment it was broken. "mon ami!" said marie. the words were faint, but there was a tone in them that had never been there before. "jacques, mon ami, you are here! you did not go to leave me?" the mist cleared from the man's eyes. he did not see abby rock, sitting by the bed, crying with joyful indignation; if he had seen her, it would not have been in the least strange for her to be there. he saw nothing--the world held nothing--but the face that looked at him from the pillow, the pale face, all soft and worn, yet full of light, full--was it true, or was he dreaming in the wood?--of love, of joy. "come in, jacques!" said abby, wondering at the look of the man. "don't make a noise, but come in and sit down!" de arthenay did not move, but held out the violin in both hands with a strange gesture of submission. "i have brought it, mary!" he said. "you shall always have it now. i--i have learned a little--i know a little, now, of what it means. i hadn't understanding before, mary. i meant no unkindness to you." abby laughed softly. "jacques de arthenay, come here!" she said. "what do you suppose maree's thinking of fiddles now? come here, man alive, and see your boy!" but marie laid one hand softly on the violin, as it lay on the bed beside her,--the hand that was not patting the baby; then she laid it, still softly, shyly, on her husband's head as he knelt beside her. "jacques, mon ami," she whispered, "you are good! i too have learned. i was a child always, i knew nothing. see now, i love always madame, my friend, and she is mine; but this, this is yours too, and mine too, our life, our own. jacques, now we both know, and god, he tell us! see, the same god, only we did not know the first times. now, always we know, and not forget! not forget!" the baby woke and stirred. the tiny hand was outstretched and touched its father's hand, and a thrill ran through him from head to foot, softening the hard grain, melting, changing the fibre of his being. the husk that in those lonely hours in the forest had been loosened, broken, now fell away from him, and a new man knelt by the white bed, silent, gazing from child to wife with eyes more eloquent than any words could be. the baby's hand rested in his, and marie laid her own over it; and abby rock rose and went away, closing the door softly after her. the end. marguerite de navarre memoirs of marguerite de valois memoirs of marguerite de valois queen of navarre written by herself being historic memoirs of the courts of france and navarre list of illustrations marguerite de valois--etching by mercier bussi d' amboise--painting in the versailles gallery duc de guise--painting in the versailles gallery catherine de' medici--original etching by mercier henri vi. and la fosseuse--painting by a. p. e. morton a scene at henri's court--original photogravure publisher's note. the first volume of the court memoir series will, it is confidently anticipated, prove to be of great interest. these letters first appeared in french, in , just thirteen years after the death of their witty and beautiful authoress, who, whether as the wife for many years of the great henri of france, or on account of her own charms and accomplishments, has always been the subject of romantic interest. the letters contain many particulars of her life, together with many anecdotes hitherto unknown or forgotten, told with a saucy vivacity which is charming, and an air vividly recalling the sprightly, arch demeanour, and black, sparkling eyes of the fair queen of navarre. she died in , aged sixty-three. these letters contain the secret history of the court of france during the seventeen eventful years - . the events of the seventeen years referred to are of surpassing interest, including, as they do, the massacre of st. bartholomew, the formation of the league, the peace of sens, and an account of the religious struggles which agitated that period. they, besides, afford an instructive insight into royal life at the close of the sixteenth century, the modes of travelling then in vogue, the manners and customs of the time, and a picturesque account of the city of liege and its sovereign bishop. as has been already stated, these memoirs first appeared in french in . they were, thirty years later, printed in london in english, and were again there translated and published in . translator's preface. the memoirs, of which a new translation is now presented to the public, are the undoubted composition of the celebrated princess whose name they bear, the contemporary of our queen elizabeth; of equal abilities with her, but of far unequal fortunes. both elizabeth and marguerite had been bred in the school of adversity; both profited by it, but elizabeth had the fullest opportunity of displaying her acquirements in it. queen elizabeth met with trials and difficulties in the early part of her life, and closed a long and successful reign in the happy possession of the good-will and love of her subjects. queen marguerite, during her whole life, experienced little else besides mortification and disappointment; she was suspected and hated by both protestants and catholics, with the latter of whom, though, she invariably joined in communion, yet was she not in the least inclined to persecute or injure the former. elizabeth amused herself with a number of suitors, but never submitted to the yoke of matrimony. marguerite, in compliance with the injunctions of the queen her mother, and king charles her brother, married henri, king of navarre, afterwards henri iv. of france, for whom she had no inclination; and this union being followed by a mutual indifference and dislike, she readily consented to dissolve it; soon after which event she saw a princess, more fruitful but less prudent, share the throne of her ancestors, of whom she was the only representative. elizabeth was polluted with the blood of her cousin, the queen of scots, widow of marguerite's eldest brother. marguerite saved many huguenots from the massacre of st. bartholomew's day, and, according to brantome, the life of the king, her husband, whose name was on the list of the proscribed. to close this parallel, elizabeth began early to govern a kingdom, which she ruled through the course of her long life with severity, yet gloriously, and with success. marguerite, after the death of the queen her mother and her brothers, though sole heiress of the house of valois, was, by the salic law, excluded from all pretensions to the crown of france; and though for the greater part of her life shut up in a castle, surrounded by rocks and mountains, she has not escaped the shafts of obloquy. the translator has added some notes, which give an account of such places as are mentioned in the memoirs, taken from the itineraries of the time, but principally from the "geographie universelle" of vosgien; in which regard is had to the new division of france into departments, as well as to the ancient one of principalities, archbishoprics, bishoprics, generalities, chatellenies, balliages, duchies, seigniories, etc. in the composition of her memoirs, marguerite has evidently adopted the epistolary form, though the work came out of the french editor's hand divided into three (as they are styled) books; these three books, or letters, the translator has taken the liberty of subdividing into twenty-one, and, at the head of each of them, he has placed a short table of the contents. this is the only liberty he has taken with the original memoirs, the translation itself being as near as the present improved state of our language could be brought to approach the unpolished strength and masculine vigour of the french of the age of henri iv. this translation is styled a new one, because, after the translator had made some progress in it, he found these memoirs had already been made english, and printed, in london, in the year , thirty years after the first edition of the french original. this translation has the following title: "the grand cabinet counsels unlocked; or, the most faithful transaction of court affairs, and growth and continuance of the civil wars in france, during the reigns of charles the last, henry iii., and henry iv., commonly called the great. most excellently written, in the french tongue, by margaret de valois, sister to the two first kings, and wife of the last. faithfully translated by robert codrington, master of arts;" and again as "memorials of court affairs," etc., london, . the memoirs of queen marguerite contained the secret history of the court of france during the space of seventeen years, from to , and they end seven years before henri iii., her brother, fell by the hands of clement, the monk; consequently, they take in no part of the reign of henri iv. (as mr. codrington has asserted in his title-page), though they relate many particulars of the early part of his life. marguerite's memoirs include likewise the history nearly of the first half of her own life, or until she had reached the twenty-ninth year of her age; and as she died in , at the age of sixty-three years, there remain thirty-four years of her life, of which little is known. in , when she was forty-five years old, her marriage with henri was dissolved by mutual consent,--she declaring that she had no other wish than to give him content, and preserve the peace of the kingdom; making it her request, according to brantome, that the king would favour her with his protection, which, as her letter expresses, she hoped to enjoy during the rest of her life. sully says she stipulated only for an establishment and the payment of her debts, which were granted. after henri, in , had fallen a victim to the furious fanaticism of the monk ravaillac, she lived to see the kingdom brought into the greatest confusion by the bad government of the queen regent, marie de medici, who suffered herself to be directed by an italian woman she had brought over with her, named leonora galligai. this woman marrying a florentine, called concini, afterwards made a marshal of france, they jointly ruled the kingdom, and became so unpopular that the marshal was assassinated, and the wife, who had been qualified with the title of marquise d'ancre, burnt for a witch. this happened about the time of marguerite's decease. it has just before been mentioned how little has been handed down to these times respecting queen marguerite's history. the latter part of her life, there is reason to believe, was wholly passed at a considerable distance from court, in her retirement (so it is called, though it appears to have been rather her prison) at the castle of usson. this castle, rendered famous by her long residence in it, has been demolished since the year . it was built on a mountain, near a little town of the same name, in that part of france called auvergne, which now constitutes part of the present departments of the upper loire and puy-de-dome, from a river and mountain so named. these memoirs appear to have been composed in this retreat. marguerite amused herself likewise, in this solitude, in composing verses, and there are specimens still remaining of her poetry. these compositions she often set to music, and sang them herself, accompanying her voice with the lute, on which she played to perfection. great part of her time was spent in the perusal of the bible and books of piety, together with the works of the best authors she could procure. brantome assures us that marguerite spoke the latin tongue with purity and elegance; and it appears, from her memoirs, that she had read plutarch with attention. marguerite has been said to have given in to the gallantries to which the court of france was, during her time, but too much addicted; but, though the translator is obliged to notice it, he is far from being inclined to give any credit to a romance entitled, "le divorce satyrique; ou, les amours de la reyne marguerite de valois," which is written in the person of her husband, and bears on the title-page these initials: d. r. h. q. m.; that is to say, "du roi henri quatre, mari." this work professes to give a relation of marguerite's conduct during her residence at the castle of usson; but it contains so many gross absurdities and indecencies that it is undeserving of attention, and appears to have been written by some bitter enemy, who has assumed the character of her husband to traduce her memory. ["le divorce satyrique" is said to have been written by louise marguerite de lorraine, princesse de conti, who is likewise the reputed author of "the amours of henri iv.," disguised under the name of alcander. she was the daughter of the due de guise, assassinated at blois in , and was born the year her father died. she married francois, prince de conti, and was considered one of the most ingenious and accomplished persons belonging to the french court in the age of louis xiii. she was left a widow in , and died in .] m. pierre de bourdeille, seigneur de brantome, better known by the name of brantome, wrote the memoirs of his own times. he was brought up in the court of france, and lived in it during the reigns of marguerite's father and brothers, dying at the advanced age of eighty or eighty-four years, but in what year is not certainly known. [the author of the "tablettes de france," and "anecdotes des rois de france," thinks that marguerite alludes to brantome's "anecdotes" in the beginning of her first letter, where she says: "i should commend your work much more were i myself not so much praised in it." (according to the original: "je louerois davantage votre oeuvre, si elle ne me louoit tant.") if so, these letters were addressed to brantome, and not to the baron de la chataigneraie, as mentioned in the preface to the french edition. in letter i. mention is made of madame de dampierre, whom marguerite styles the aunt of the person the letter is addressed to. she was dame d'honneur, or lady of the bedchamber, to the queen of henri iii., and brantome, speaking of her, calls her his aunt. indeed, it is not a matter of any consequence to whom these memoirs were addressed; it is, however, remarkable that louis xiv. used the same words to boileau, after hearing him read his celebrated epistle upon the famous passage of the rhine; and yet louis was no reader, and is not supposed to have adopted them from these memoirs. the thought is, in reality, fine, but might easily suggest itself to any other. "cela est beau," said the monarch, "et je vous louerois davantage, si vous m'aviez moins loue." (the poetry is excellent, and i should praise you more had you praised me less.)] he has given anecdotes of the life of marguerite, written during her before-mentioned retreat, when she was, as he says ("fille unique maintenant restee, de la noble maison de france"), the only survivor of her illustrious house. brantome praises her excellent beauty in a long string of laboured hyperboles. ronsard, the court poet, has done the same in a poem of considerable length, wherein he has exhausted all his wit and fancy. from what they have said, we may collect that marguerite was graceful in her person and figure, and remarkably happy in her choice of dress and ornaments to set herself off to the most advantage; that her height was above the middle size, her shape easy, with that due proportion of plumpness which gives an appearance of majesty and comeliness. her eyes were full, black, and sparkling; she had bright, chestnut-coloured hair, and a complexion fresh and blooming. her skin was delicately white, and her neck admirably well formed; and this so generally admired beauty, the fashion of dress, in her time, admitted of being fully displayed. such was queen marguerite as she is portrayed, with the greatest luxuriance of colouring, by these authors. to her personal charms were added readiness of wit, ease and gracefulness of speech, and great affability and courtesy of manners. this description of queen marguerite cannot be dismissed without observing, if only for the sake of keeping the fashion of the present times with her sex in countenance, that, though she had hair, as has been already described, becoming her, and sufficiently ornamental in itself, yet she occasionally called in the aid of wigs. brantome's words are: "l'artifice de perruques bien gentiment faconnees." [ladies in the days of ovid wore periwigs. that poet says to corinna: "nunc tibi captivos mittet germania crines; culta triumphatae munere gentis eris." (wigs shall from captive germany be sent; 'tis with such spoils your head you ornament.) these, we may conclude, were flaxen, that being the prevailing coloured hair of the germans at this day. the translator has met with a further account of marguerite's head-dress, which describes her as wearing a velvet bonnet ornamented with pearls and diamonds, and surmounted with a plume of feathers.] i shall conclude this preface with a letter from marguerite to brantome; the first, he says, he received from her during her adversity ('son adversite' are his words),--being, as he expresses it, so ambitious ('presomptueux') as to have sent to inquire concerning her health, as she was the daughter and sister of the kings, his masters. ("d'avoir envoye scavoir de ses nouvelles, mais quoy elle estoit fille et soeur de mes roys.") the letter here follows: "from the attention and regard you have shown me (which to me appears less strange than it is agreeable), i find you still preserve that attachment you have ever had to my family, in a recollection of these poor remains which have escaped its wreck. such as i am, you will find me always ready to do you service, since i am so happy as to discover that my fortune has not been able to blot out my name from the memory of my oldest friends, of which number you are one. i have heard that, like me, you have chosen a life of retirement, which i esteem those happy who can enjoy, as god, out of his great mercy, has enabled me to do for these last five years; having placed me, during these times of trouble, in an ark of safety, out of the reach, god be thanked, of storms. if, in my present situation, i am able to serve my friends, and you more especially, i shall be found entirely disposed to it, and with the greatest good-will." there is such an air of dignified majesty in the foregoing letter, and, at the same time, such a spirit of genuine piety and resignation, that it cannot but give an exalted idea of marguerite's character, who appears superior to ill-fortune and great even in her distress. if, as i doubt not, the reader thinks the same, i shall not need to make an apology for concluding this preface with it. the following latin verses, or call them, if you please, epigram, are of the composition of barclay, or barclaius, author of "argenis," etc. on marguerite de valois, queen of navarre. dear native land! and you, proud castles! say (where grandsire,[ ] father,[ ] and three brothers[ ] lay, who each, in turn, the crown imperial wore), me will you own, your daughter whom you bore? me, once your greatest boast and chiefest pride, by bourbon and lorraine,[ ] when sought a bride; now widowed wife,[ ] a queen without a throne, midst rocks and mountains [ ] wander i alone. nor yet hath fortune vented all her spite, but sets one up,[ ] who now enjoys my right, points to the boy,[ ] who henceforth claims the throne and crown, a son of mine should call his own. but ah, alas! for me 'tis now too late [ ] to strive 'gainst fortune and contend with fate; of those i slighted, can i beg relief [ ] no; let me die the victim of my grief. and can i then be justly said to live? dead in estate, do i then yet survive? last of the name, i carry to the grave all the remains the house of valois have. . francois i. . henri ii. . francois ii., charles ix., and henri iii. . henri, king of navarre, and henri, duc de guise. . alluding to her divorce from henri iv.. . the castle of usson . marie de' medici, whom henri married after his divorce from marguerite. . louis xiii., the son of henri and his queen, marie de' medici. . alluding to the differences betwixt marguerite and henri, her husband. . this is said with allusion to the supposition that she was rather inclined to favour the suit of the due de guise and reject henri for a husband. contents letter i. introduction.--anecdotes of marguerite's infancy.--endeavours used to convert her to the new religion.--she is confirmed in catholicism.--the court on a progress.--a grand festivity suddenly interrupted.--the confusion in consequence. letter ii. message from the duc d'anjou, afterwards henri iii., to king charles his brother and the queen-mother.--her fondness for her children.--their interview.--anjou's eloquent harangue.--the queen-mother's character. discourse of the duc d'anjou with marguerite.--she discovers her own importance.--engages to serve her brother anjou.--is in high favour with the queenmother. letter iii. le guast.--his character.--anjou affects to be jealous of the guises.--dissuades the queen-mother from reposing confidence in marguerite.--she loses the favour of the queen-mother and falls sick.--anjou's hypocrisy.--he introduces de guise into marguerite's sick chamber.--marguerite demanded in marriage by the king of portugal.--made uneasy on that account.--contrives to relieve herself.--the match with portugal broken off. letter iv. death of the queen of navarre--marguerite's marriage with her son, the king of navarre, afterwards henri iv. of france.--the preparations for that solemnisation described.--the circumstances which led to the massacre of the huguenots on st. bartholomew's day. letter v. the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. letter vi. henri, duc d'anjou, elected king of poland, leaves france.--huguenot plots to withdraw the duc d'alencon and the king of navarre from court.--discovered and defeated by marguerite's vigilance.--she draws up an eloquent defence, which her husband delivers before a committee from the court of parliament.--alencon and her husband, under a close arrest, regain their liberty by the death of charles ix. letter vii. accession of henri iii.--a journey to lyons.--marguerite's faith in supernatural intelligence. letter viii. what happened at lyons. letter ix. fresh intrigues.--marriage of henri iii.--bussi arrives at court and narrowly escapes assassination. letter x. bussi is sent from court.--marguerite's husband attacked with a fit of epilepsy.--her great care of him.--torigni dismissed from marguerite's service.--the king of navarre and the duc d'alencon secretly leave the court. letter xi. queen marguerite under arrest.--attempt on torigni's life.--her fortunate deliverance. letter xii. the peace of sens betwixt henri iii. and the huguenots. letter xiii. the league.--war declared against the huguenots.--queen marguerite sets out for spa. letter xiv. description of queen marguerite's equipage.--her journey to liege described.--she enters with success upon her mission.--striking instance of maternal duty and affection in a great lady.--disasters near the close of the journey. letter xv. the city of liege described.--affecting story of mademoiselle de tournon.--fatal effects of suppressed anguish of mind. letter xvi. queen marguerite, on her return from liege, is in danger of being made a prisoner.--she arrives, after some narrow escapes, at la fere. letter xvii. good effects of queen marguerite's negotiations in flanders.--she obtains leave to go to the king of navarre her husband, but her journey is delayed.--court intrigues and plots.--the duc d'alencon again put under arrest. letter xviii. the brothers reconciled.--alencon restored to his liberty. letter xix. the duc d'alencon makes his escape from court.--queen marguerite's fidelity put to a severe trial. letter xx. queen marguerite permitted to go to the king her husband.--is accompanied by the queenmother.--marguerite insulted by her husband's secretary.--she harbours jealousy.--her attention to the king her husband during an indisposition.--their reconciliation.--the war breaks out afresh.--affront received from marechal de biron. letter xxi. situation of affairs in flanders.--peace brought about by duc d'alencon's negotiation.--marechal de biron apologises for firing on nerac.--henri desperately in love with fosseuse.--queen marguerite discovers fosseuse to be pregnant, which she denies.--fosseuse in labour. marguerite's generous behaviour to her.--marguerite's return to paris. history of the house of valois. [author unknown] marguerite de valois. book . letter i. introduction.--anecdotes of marguerite's infancy.--endeavours used to convert her to the new religion.--she is confirmed in catholicism.--the court on a progress.--a grand festivity suddenly interrupted.--the confusion in consequence. i should commend your work much more were i myself less praised in it; but i am unwilling to do so, lest my praises should seem rather the effect of self-love than to be founded on reason and justice. i am fearful that, like themistocles, i should appear to admire their eloquence the most who are most forward to praise me. it is the usual frailty of our sex to be fond of flattery. i blame this in other women, and should wish not to be chargeable with it myself. yet i confess that i take a pride in being painted by the hand of so able a master, however flattering the likeness may be. if i ever were possessed of the graces you have assigned to me, trouble and vexation render them no longer visible, and have even effaced them from my own recollection. so that i view myself in your memoirs, and say, with old madame de rendan, who, not having consulted her glass since her husband's death, on seeing her own face in the mirror of another lady, exclaimed, "who is this?" whatever my friends tell me when they see me now, i am inclined to think proceeds from the partiality of their affection. i am sure that you yourself, when you consider more impartially what you have said, will be induced to believe, according to these lines of du bellay: "c'est chercher rome en rome, et rien de rome en rome ne trouver." ('tis to seek rome, in rome to go, and rome herself at rome not know.) but as we read with pleasure the history of the siege of troy, the magnificence of athens, and other splendid cities, which once flourished, but are now so entirely destroyed that scarcely the spot whereon they stood can be traced, so you please yourself with describing these excellences of beauty which are no more, and which will be discoverable only in your writings. if you had taken upon you to contrast nature and fortune, you could not have chosen a happier theme upon which to descant, for both have made a trial of their strength on the subject of your memoirs. what nature did, you had the evidence of your own eyes to vouch for, but what was done by fortune, you know only from hearsay; and hearsay, i need not tell you, is liable to be influenced by ignorance or malice, and, therefore, is not to be depended on. you will for that reason, i make no doubt, be pleased to receive these memoirs from the hand which is most interested in the truth of them. i have been induced to undertake writing my memoirs the more from five or six observations which i have had occasion to make upon your work, as you appear to have been misinformed respecting certain particulars. for example, in that part where mention is made of pau, and of my journey in france; likewise where you speak of the late marechal de biron, of agen, and of the sally of the marquis de camillac from that place. these memoirs might merit the honourable name of history from the truths contained in them, as i shall prefer truth to embellishment. in fact, to embellish my story i have neither leisure nor ability; i shall, therefore, do no more than give a simple narration of events. they are the labours of my evenings, and will come to you an unformed mass, to receive its shape from your hands, or as a chaos on which you have already thrown light. mine is a history most assuredly worthy to come from a man of honour, one who is a true frenchman, born of illustrious parents, brought up in the court of the kings my father and brothers, allied in blood and friendship to the most virtuous and accomplished women of our times, of which society i have had the good fortune to be the bond of union. i shall begin these memoirs in the reign of charles ix., and set out with the first remarkable event of my life which fell within my remembrance. herein i follow the example of geographical writers, who, having described the places within their knowledge, tell you that all beyond them are sandy deserts, countries without inhabitants, or seas never navigated. thus i might say that all prior to the commencement of these memoirs was the barrenness of my infancy, when we can only be said to vegetate like plants, or live, like brutes, according to instinct, and not as human creatures, guided by reason. to those who had the direction of my earliest years i leave the task of relating the transactions of my infancy, if they find them as worthy of being recorded as the infantine exploits of themistocles and alexander,--the one exposing himself to be trampled on by the horses of a charioteer, who would not stop them when requested to do so, and the other refusing to run a race unless kings were to enter the contest against him. amongst such memorable things might be related the answer i made the king my father, a short time before the fatal accident which deprived france of peace, and our family of its chief glory. i was then about four or five years of age, when the king, placing me on his knee, entered familiarly into chat with me. there were, in the same room, playing and diverting themselves, the prince de joinville, since the great and unfortunate duc de guise, and the marquis de beaupreau, son of the prince de la roche-sur-yon, who died in his fourteenth year, and by whose death his country lost a youth of most promising talents. amongst other discourse, the king asked which of the two princes that were before me i liked best. i replied, "the marquis." the king said, "why so? he is not the handsomest." the prince de joinville was fair, with light-coloured hair, and the marquis de beaupreau brown, with dark hair. i answered, "because he is the best behaved; whilst the prince is always making mischief, and will be master over everybody." this was a presage of what we have seen happen since, when the whole court was infected with heresy, about the time of the conference of poissy. it was with great difficulty that i resisted and preserved myself from a change of religion at that time. many ladies and lords belonging to court strove to convert me to huguenotism. the duc d'anjou, since king henri iii. of france, then in his infancy, had been prevailed on to change his religion, and he often snatched my "hours" out of my hand, and flung them into the fire, giving me psalm books and books of huguenot prayers, insisting on my using them. i took the first opportunity to give them up to my governess, madame de curton, whom god, out of his mercy to me, caused to continue steadfast in the catholic religion. she frequently took me to that pious, good man, the cardinal de tournon, who gave me good advice, and strengthened me in a perseverance in my religion, furnishing me with books and chaplets of beads in the room of those my brother anjou took from me and burnt. many of my brother's most intimate friends had resolved on my ruin, and rated me severely upon my refusal to change, saying it proceeded from a childish obstinacy; that if i had the least understanding, and would listen, like other discreet persons, to the sermons that were preached, i should abjure my uncharitable bigotry; but i was, said they, as foolish as my governess. my brother anjou added threats, and said the queen my mother would give orders that i should be whipped. but this he said of his own head, for the queen my mother did not, at that time, know of the errors he had embraced. as soon as it came to her knowledge, she took him to task, and severely reprimanded his governors, insisting upon their correcting him, and instructing him in the holy and ancient religion of his forefathers, from which she herself never swerved. when he used those menaces, as i have before related, i was a child seven or eight years old, and at that tender age would reply to him, "well, get me whipped if you can; i will suffer whipping, and even death, rather than be damned." i could furnish you with many other replies of the like kind, which gave proof of the early ripeness of my judgment and my courage; but i shall not trouble myself with such researches, choosing rather to begin these memoirs at the time when i resided constantly with the queen my mother. immediately after the conference of poissy, the civil wars commenced, and my brother alencon and myself, on account of our youth, were sent to amboise, whither all the ladies of the country repaired to us. with them came your aunt, madame de dampierre, who entered into a firm friendship with me, which was never interrupted until her death broke it off. there was likewise your cousin, the duchesse de rais, who had the good fortune to hear there of the death of her brute of a husband, killed at the battle of dreux. the husband i mean was the first she had, named m. d'annebaut, who was unworthy to have for a wife so accomplished and charming a woman as your cousin. she and i were not then so intimate friends as we have become since, and shall ever remain. the reason was that, though older than i, she was yet young, and young girls seldom take much notice of children, whereas your aunt was of an age when women admire their innocence and engaging simplicity. i remained at amboise until the queen my mother was ready to set out on her grand progress, at which time she sent for me to come to her court, which i did not quit afterwards. of this progress i will not undertake to give you a description, being still so young that, though the whole is within my recollection, yet the particular passages of it appear to me but as a dream, and are now lost. i leave this task to others, of riper years, as you were yourself. you can well remember the magnificence that was displayed everywhere, particularly at the baptism of my nephew, the duc de lorraine, at bar-le-duc; at the meeting of m. and madame de savoy, in the city of lyons; the interview at bayonne betwixt my sister, the queen of spain, the queen my mother, and king charles my brother. in your account of this interview you would not forget to make mention of the noble entertainment given by the queen my mother, on an island, with the grand dances, and the form of the salon, which seemed appropriated by nature for such a purpose, it being a large meadow in the middle of the island, in the shape of an oval, surrounded on every aide by tall spreading trees. in this meadow the queen my mother had disposed a circle of niches, each of them large enough to contain a table of twelve covers. at one end a platform was raised, ascended by four steps formed of turf. here their majesties were seated at a table under a lofty canopy. the tables were all served by troops of shepherdesses dressed in cloth of gold and satin, after the fashion of the different provinces of france. these shepherdesses, during the passage of the superb boats from bayonne to the island, were placed in separate bands, in a meadow on each side of the causeway, raised with turf; and whilst their majesties and the company were passing through the great salon, they danced. on their passage by water, the barges were followed by other boats, having on board vocal and instrumental musicians, habited like nereids, singing and playing the whole time. after landing, the shepherdesses i have mentioned before received the company in separate troops, with songs and dances, after the fashion and accompanied by the music of the provinces they represented,--the poitevins playing on bagpipes; the provencales on the viol and cymbal; the burgundians and champagners on the hautboy, bass viol, and tambourine; in like manner the bretons and other provincialists. after the collation was served and the feast at an end, a large troop of musicians, habited like satyrs, was seen to come out of the opening of a rock, well lighted up, whilst nymphs were descending from the top in rich habits, who, as they came down, formed into a grand dance, when, lo! fortune no longer favouring this brilliant festival, a sudden storm of rain came on, and all were glad to get off in the boats and make for town as fast as they could. the confusion in consequence of this precipitate retreat afforded as much matter to laugh at the next day as the splendour of the entertainment had excited admiration. in short, the festivity of this day was not, forgotten, on one account or the other, amidst the variety of the like nature which succeeded it in the course of this progress. letter ii. message from the duc d'anjou, afterwards henri iii., to king charles his brother and the queen-mother.--her fondness for her children.--their interview.--anjou's eloquent harangue.--the queen-mother's character. discourse of the duc d'anjou with marguerite.--she discovers her own importance.--engages to serve her brother anjou.--is in high favour with the queenmother. at the time my magnanimous brother charles reigned over france, and some few years after our return from the grand progress mentioned in my last letter, the huguenots having renewed the war, a gentleman, despatched from my brother anjou (afterwards henri iii. of france), came to paris to inform the king and the queen my mother that the huguenot army was reduced to such an extremity that he hoped in a few days to force them to give him battle. he added his earnest wish for the honour of seeing them at tours before that happened, so that, in case fortune, envying him the glory he had already achieved at so early an age, should, on the so much looked-for day, after the good service he had done his religion and his king, crown the victory with his death, he might not have cause to regret leaving this world without the satisfaction of receiving their approbation of his conduct from their own mouths, a satisfaction which would be more valuable, in his opinion, than the trophies he had gained by his two former victories. i leave to your own imagination to suggest to you the impression which such a message from a dearly beloved son made on the mind of a mother who doted on all her children, and was always ready to sacrifice her own repose, nay, even her life, for their happiness. she resolved immediately to set off and take the king with her. she had, besides myself, her usual small company of female attendants, together with mesdames de rais and de sauves. she flew on the wings of maternal affection, and reached tours in three days and a half. a journey from paris, made with such precipitation, was not unattended with accidents and some inconveniences, of a nature to occasion much mirth and laughter. the poor cardinal de bourbon, who never quitted her, and whose temper of mind, strength of body, and habits of life were ill suited to encounter privations and hardships, suffered greatly from this rapid journey. we found my brother anjou at plessis-les-tours, with the principal officers of his army, who were the flower of the princes and nobles of france. in their presence he delivered a harangue to the king, giving a detail of his conduct in the execution of his charge, beginning from the time he left the court. his discourse was framed with so much eloquence, and spoken so gracefully, that it was admired by all present. it appeared matter of astonishment that a youth of sixteen should reason with all the gravity and powers of an orator of ripe years. the comeliness of his person, which at all times pleads powerfully in favour of a speaker, was in him set off by the laurels obtained in two victories. in short, it was difficult to say which most contributed to make him the admiration of all his hearers. it is equally as impossible for me to describe in words the feelings of my mother on this occasion, who loved him above all her children, as it was for the painter to represent on canvas the grief of iphigenia's father. such an overflow of joy would have been discoverable in the looks and actions of any other woman, but she had her passions so much under the control of prudence and discretion that there was nothing to be perceived in her countenance, or gathered from her words, of what she felt inwardly in her mind. she was, indeed, a perfect mistress of herself, and regulated her discourse and her actions by the rules of wisdom and sound policy, showing that a person of discretion does upon all occasions only what is proper to be done. she did not amuse herself on this occasion with listening to the praises which issued from every mouth, and sanction them with her own approbation; but, selecting the chief points in the speech relative to the future conduct of the war, she laid them before the princes and great lords, to be deliberated upon, in order to settle a plan of operations. to arrange such a plan a delay of some days was requisite. during this interval, the queen my mother walking in the park with some of the princes, my brother anjou begged me to take a turn or two with him in a retired walk. he then addressed me in the following words: "dear sister, the nearness of blood, as well as our having been brought up together, naturally, as they ought, attach us to each other. you must already have discovered the partiality i have had for you above my brothers, and i think that i have perceived the same in you for me. we have been hitherto led to this by nature, without deriving any other advantage from it than the sole pleasure of conversing together. so far might be well enough for our childhood, but now we are no longer children. you know the high situation in which, by the favour of god and our good mother the queen, i am here placed. you may be assured that, as you are the person in the world whom i love and esteem the most, you will always be a partaker of my advancement. i know you are not wanting in wit and discretion, and i am sensible you have it in your power to do me service with the queen our mother, and preserve me in my present employments. it is a great point obtained for me, always to stand well in her favour. i am fearful that my absence may be prejudicial to that purpose, and i must necessarily be at a distance from court. whilst i am away, the king my brother is with her, and has it in his power to insinuate himself into her good graces. this i fear, in the end, may be of disservice to me. the king my brother is growing older every day. he does not want for courage, and, though he now diverts himself with hunting, he may grow ambitious, and choose rather to chase men than beasts; in such a case i must resign to him my commission as his lieutenant. this would prove the greatest mortification that could happen to me, and i would even prefer death to it. under such an apprehension i have considered of the means of prevention, and see none so feasible as having a confidential person about the queen my mother, who shall always be ready to espouse and support my cause. i know no one so proper for that purpose as yourself, who will be, i doubt not, as attentive to my interest as i should be myself. you have wit, discretion, and fidelity, which are all that are wanting, provided you will be so kind as to undertake such a good office. in that case i shall have only to beg of you not to neglect attending her morning and evening, to be the first with her and the last to leave her. this will induce her to repose a confidence and open her mind to you. "to make her the more ready to do this, i shall take every opportunity, to commend your good sense and understanding, and to tell her that i shall take it kind in her to leave off treating you as a child, which, i shall say, will contribute to her own comfort and satisfaction. i am well convinced that she will listen to my advice. do you speak to her with the same confidence as you do to me, and be assured that she will approve of it. it will conduce to your own happiness to obtain her favour. you may do yourself service whilst you are labouring for my interest; and you may rest satisfied that, after god, i shall think i owe all the good fortune which may befall me to yourself." this was entirely a new kind of language to me. i had hitherto thought of nothing but amusements, of dancing, hunting, and the like diversions; nay, i had never yet discovered any inclination of setting myself off to advantage by dress, and exciting an admiration of my person and figure. i had no ambition of any kind, and had been so strictly brought up under the queen my mother that i scarcely durst speak before her; and if she chanced to turn her eyes towards me i trembled, for fear that i had done something to displease her. at the conclusion of my brother's harangue, i was half inclined to reply to him in the words of moses, when he was spoken to from the burning bush: "who am i, that i should go unto pharaoh? send, i pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send." however, his words inspired me with resolution and powers i did not think myself possessed of before. i had naturally a degree of courage, and, as soon as i recovered from my astonishment, i found i was quite an altered person. his address pleased me, and wrought in me a confidence in myself; and i found i was become of more consequence than i had ever conceived i had been. accordingly, i replied to him thus: "brother, if god grant me the power of speaking to the queen our mother as i have the will to do, nothing can be wanting for your service, and you may expect to derive all the good you hope from it, and from my solicitude and attention for your interest. with respect to my undertaking such a matter for you, you will soon perceive that i shall sacrifice all the pleasures in this world to my watchfulness for your service. you may perfectly rely on me, as there is no one that honours or regards you more than i do. be well assured that i shall act for you with the queen my mother as zealously as you would for yourself." these sentiments were more strongly impressed upon my mind than the words i made use of were capable of conveying an idea of. this will appear more fully in my following letters. as soon as we were returned from walking, the queen my mother retired with me into her closet, and addressed the following words to me: "your brother has been relating the conversation you have had together; he considers you no longer as a child, neither shall i. it will be a great comfort to me to converse with you as i would with your brother. for the future you will freely speak your mind, and have no apprehensions of taking too great a liberty, for it is what i wish." these words gave me a pleasure then which i am now unable to express. i felt a satisfaction and a joy which nothing before had ever caused me to feel. i now considered the pastimes of my childhood as vain amusements. i shunned the society of my former companions of the same age. i disliked dancing and hunting, which i thought beneath my attention. i strictly complied with her agreeable injunction, and never missed being with her at her rising in the morning and going to rest at night. she did me the honour, sometimes, to hold me in conversation for two and three hours at a time. god was so gracious with me that i gave her great satisfaction; and she thought she could not sufficiently praise me to those ladies who were about her. i spoke of my brother's affairs to her, and he was constantly apprised by me of her sentiments and opinion; so that he had every reason to suppose i was firmly attached to his interest. letter iii. le guast.--his character.--anjou affects to be jealous of the guises.--dissuades the queen-mother from reposing confidence in marguerite.--she loses the favour of the queen-mother and falls sick.--anjou's hypocrisy.--he introduces de guise into marguerite's sick chamber.--marguerite demanded in marriage by the king of portugal.--made uneasy on that account.--contrives to relieve herself.--the match with portugal broken off. i continued to pass my time with the queen my mother, greatly to my satisfaction, until after the battle of moncontour. by the same despatch that brought the news of this victory to the court, my brother, who was ever desirous to be near the queen my mother, wrote her word that he was about to lay siege to st. jean d'angely, and that it would be necessary that the king should be present whilst it was going on. she, more anxious to see him than he could be to have her near him, hastened to set out on the journey, taking me with her, and her customary train of attendants. i likewise experienced great joy upon the occasion, having no suspicion that any mischief awaited me. i was still young and without experience, and i thought the happiness i enjoyed was always to continue; but the malice of fortune prepared for me at this interview a reverse that i little expected, after the fidelity with which i had discharged the trust my brother had reposed in me. soon after our last meeting, it seems, my brother anjou had taken le guast to be near his person, who had ingratiated himself so far into his favour and confidence that he saw only with his eyes, and spoke but as he dictated. this evil-disposed man, whose whole life was one continued scene of wickedness, had perverted his mind and filled it with maxims of the most atrocious nature. he advised him to have no regard but for his own interest; neither to love nor put trust in any one; and not to promote the views or advantage of either brother or sister. these and other maxims of the like nature, drawn from the school of machiavelli, he was continually suggesting to him. he had so frequently inculcated them that they were strongly impressed on his mind, insomuch that, upon our arrival, when, after the first compliments, my mother began to open in my praise and express the attachment i had discovered for him, this was his reply, which he delivered with the utmost coldness: "he was well pleased," he said, "to have succeeded in the request he had made to me; but that prudence directed us not to continue to make use of the same expedients, for what was profitable at one time might not be so at another." she asked him why he made that observation. this question afforded the opportunity he wished for, of relating a story he had fabricated, purposely to ruin me with her. he began with observing to her that i was grown very handsome, and that m. de guise wished to marry me; that his uncles, too, were very desirous of such a match; and, if i should entertain a like passion for him, there would be danger of my discovering to him all she said to me; that she well knew the ambition of that house, and how ready they were, on all occasions, to circumvent ours. it would, therefore, be proper that she should not, for the future, communicate any matter of state to me, but, by degrees, withdraw her confidence. i discovered the evil effects proceeding from this pernicious advice on the very same evening. i remarked an unwillingness on her part to speak to me before my brother; and, as soon as she entered into discourse with him, she commanded me to go to bed. this command she repeated two or three times. i quitted her closet, and left them together in conversation; but, as soon as he was gone, i returned and entreated her to let me know if i had been so unhappy as to have done anything, through ignorance, which had given her offence. she was at first inclined to dissemble with me; but at length she said to me thus: "daughter, your brother is prudent and cautious; you ought not to be displeased with him for what he does, and you must believe what i shall tell you is right and proper." she then related the conversation she had with my brother, as i have just written it; and she then ordered me never to speak to her in my brother's presence. these words were like so many daggers plunged into my breast. in my disgrace, i experienced as much grief as i had before joy on being received into her favour and confidence. i did not omit to say everything to convince her of my entire ignorance of what my brother had told her. i said it was a matter i had never heard mentioned before; and that, had i known it, i should certainly have made her immediately acquainted with it. all i said was to no purpose; my brother's words had made the first impression; they were constantly present in her mind, and outweighed probability and truth. when i discovered this, i told her that i felt less uneasiness at being deprived of my happiness than i did joy when i had acquired it; for my brother had taken it from me, as he had given it. he had given it without reason; he had taken it away without cause. he had praised me for discretion and prudence when i did not merit it, and he suspected my fidelity on grounds wholly imaginary and fictitious. i concluded with assuring her that i should never forget my brother's behaviour on this occasion. hereupon she flew into a passion and commanded me not to make the least show of resentment at his behaviour. from that hour she gradually withdrew her favour from me. her son became the god of her idolatry, at the shrine of whose will she sacrificed everything. the grief which i inwardly felt was very great and overpowered all my faculties, until it wrought so far on my constitution as to contribute to my receiving the infection which then prevailed in the army. a few days after i fell sick of a raging fever, attended with purple spots, a malady which carried off numbers, and, amongst the rest, the two principal physicians belonging to the king and queen, chappelain and castelan. indeed, few got over the disorder after being attacked with it. in this extremity the queen my mother, who partly guessed the cause of my illness, omitted nothing that might serve to remove it; and, without fear of consequences, visited me frequently. her goodness contributed much to my recovery; but my brother's hypocrisy was sufficient to destroy all the benefit i received from her attention, after having been guilty of so treacherous a proceeding. after he had proved so ungrateful to me, he came and sat at the foot of my bed from morning to night, and appeared as anxiously attentive as if we had been the most perfect friends. my mouth was shut up by the command i had received from the queen our mother, so that i only answered his dissembled concern with sighs, like burrus in the presence of nero, when he was dying by the poison administered by the hands of that tyrant. the sighs, however, which i vented in my brother's presence, might convince him that i attributed my sickness rather to his ill offices than to the prevailing contagion. god had mercy on me, and supported me through this dangerous illness. after i had kept my bed a fortnight, the army changed its quarters, and i was conveyed away with it in a litter. at the end of each day's march, i found king charles at the door of my quarters, ready, with the rest of the good gentlemen belonging to the court, to carry my litter up to my bedside. in this manner i came to angers from st. jean d'angely, sick in body, but more sick in mind. here, to my misfortune, m. de guise and his uncles had arrived before me. this was a circumstance which gave my good brother great pleasure, as it afforded a colourable appearance to his story. i soon discovered the advantage my brother would make of it to increase my already too great mortification; for he came daily to see me, and as constantly brought m. de guise into my chamber with him. he pretended the sincerest regard for de guise, and, to make him believe it, would take frequent opportunities of embracing him, crying out at the same time, "would to god you were my brother!" this he often put in practice before me, which m. de guise seemed not to comprehend; but i, who knew his malicious designs, lost all patience, yet did not dare to reproach him with his hypocrisy. as soon as i was recovered, a treaty was set on foot for a marriage betwixt the king of portugal and me, an ambassador having been sent for that purpose. the queen my mother commanded me to prepare to give the ambassador an audience; which i did accordingly. my brother had made her believe that i was averse to this marriage; accordingly, she took me to task upon it, and questioned me on the subject, expecting she should find some cause to be angry with me. i told her my will had always been guided by her own, and that whatever she thought right for me to do, i should do it. she answered me, angrily, according as she had been wrought upon, that i did not speak the sentiments of my heart, for she well knew that the cardinal de lorraine had persuaded me into a promise of having his nephew. i begged her to forward this match with the king of portugal, and i would convince her of my obedience to her commands. every day some new matter was reported to incense her against me. all these were machinations worked up by the mind of le guast. in short, i was constantly receiving some fresh mortification, so that i hardly passed a day in quiet. on one side, the king of spain was using his utmost endeavours to break off the match with portugal, and m. de guise, continuing at court, furnished grounds for persecuting me on the other. still, not a single person of the guises ever mentioned a word to me on the subject; and it was well known that, for more than a twelvemonth, m. de guise had been paying his addresses to the princesse de porcian; but the slow progress made in bringing this match to a conclusion was said to be owing to his designs upon me. as soon as i made this discovery i resolved to write to my sister, madame de lorraine, who had a great influence in the house of porcian, begging her to use her endeavours to withdraw m. de guise from court, and make him conclude his match with the princess, laying open to her the plot which had been concerted to ruin the guises and me. she readily saw through it, came immediately to court, and concluded the match, which delivered me from the aspersions cast on my character, and convinced the queen my mother that what i had told her was the real truth. this at the same time stopped the mouths of my enemies and gave me some repose. at length the king of spain, unwilling that the king of portugal should marry out of his family, broke off the treaty which had been entered upon for my marriage with him. letter iv. death of the queen of navarre--marguerite's marriage with her son, the king of navarre, afterwards henri iv. of france.--the preparations for that solemnisation described.--the circumstances which led to the massacre of the huguenots on st. bartholomew's day. some short time after this a marriage was projected betwixt the prince of navarre, now our renowned king henri iv., and me. the queen my mother, as she sat at table, discoursed for a long time upon the subject with m. de meru, the house of montmorency having first proposed the match. after the queen had risen from table, he told me she had commanded him to mention it to me. i replied that it was quite unnecessary, as i had no will but her own; however, i should wish she would be pleased to remember that i was a catholic, and that i should dislike to marry any one of a contrary persuasion. soon after this the queen sent for me to attend her in her closet. she there informed me that the montmorencys had proposed this match to her, and that she was desirous to learn my sentiments upon it. i answered that my choice was governed by her pleasure, and that i only begged her not to forget that i was a good catholic. this treaty was in negotiation for some time after this conversation, and was not finally settled until the arrival of the queen of navarre, his mother, at court, where she died soon after. whilst the queen of navarre lay on her death-bed, a circumstance happened of so whimsical a nature that, though not of consequence to merit a place in the history, it may very well deserve to be related by me to you. madame de nevers, whose oddities you well know, attended the cardinal de bourbon, madame de guise, the princesse de conde, her sisters, and myself to the late queen of navarre's apartments, whither we all went to pay those last duties which her rank and our nearness of blood demanded of us. we found the queen in bed with her curtains undrawn, the chamber not disposed with the pomp and ceremonies of our religion, but after the simple manner of the huguenots; that is to say, there were no priests, no cross, nor any holy water. we kept ourselves at some distance from the bed, but madame de nevers, whom you know the queen hated more than any woman besides, and which she had shown both in speech and by actions,--madame de nevers, i say, approached the bedside, and, to the great astonishment of all present, who well knew the enmity subsisting betwixt them, took the queen's hand, with many low curtseys, and kissed it; after which, making another curtsey to the very ground, she retired and rejoined us. a few months after the queen's death, the prince of navarre, or rather, as he was then styled, the king, came to paris in deep mourning, attended by eight hundred gentlemen, all in mourning habits. he was received with every honour by king charles and the whole court, and, in a few days after his arrival, our marriage was solemnised with all possible magnificence; the king of navarre and his retinue putting off their mourning and dressing themselves in the most costly manner. the whole court, too, was richly attired; all which you can better conceive than i am able to express. for my own part, i was set out in a most royal manner; i wore a crown on my head with the 'coet', or regal close gown of ermine, and i blazed in diamonds. my blue-coloured robe had a train to it of four ells in length, which was supported by three princesses. a platform had been raised, some height from the ground, which led from the bishop's palace to the church of notre-dame. it was hung with cloth of gold; and below it stood the people in throngs to view the procession, stifling with heat. we were received at the church door by the cardinal de bourbon, who officiated for that day, and pronounced the nuptial benediction. after this we proceeded on the same platform to the tribune which separates the nave from the choir, where was a double staircase, one leading into the choir, the other through the nave to the church door. the king of navarre passed by the latter and went out of church. but fortune, which is ever changing, did not fail soon to disturb the felicity of this union. this was occasioned by the wound received by the admiral, which had wrought the huguenots up to a degree of desperation. the queen my mother was reproached on that account in such terms by the elder pardaillan and some other principal huguenots, that she began to apprehend some evil design. m. de guise and my brother the king of poland, since henri iii. of france, gave it as their advice to be beforehand with the huguenots. king charles was of a contrary opinion. he had a great esteem for m. de la rochefoucauld, teligny, la noue, and some other leading men of the same religion; and, as i have since heard him say, it was with the greatest difficulty he could be prevailed upon to give his consent, and not before he had been made to understand that his own life aid the safety of his kingdom depended upon it. the king having learned that maurevel had made an attempt upon the admiral's life, by firing a pistol at him through a window,--in which attempt he failed, having wounded the admiral only in the shoulder,--and supposing that maurevel had done this at the instance of m. de guise, to revenge the death of his father, whom the admiral had caused to be killed in the same manner by poltrot, he was so much incensed against m. de guise that he declared with an oath that he would make an example of him; and, indeed, the king would have put m. de guise under an arrest, if he had not kept out of his sight the whole day. the queen my mother used every argument to convince king charles that what had been done was for the good of the state; and this because, as i observed before, the king had so great a regard for the admiral, la noue, and teligny, on account of their bravery, being himself a prince of a gallant and noble spirit, and esteeming others in whom he found a similar disposition. moreover, these designing men had insinuated themselves into the king's favour by proposing an expedition to flanders, with a view of extending his dominions and aggrandising his power, knew would secure to themselves an influence over his royal and generous mind. upon this occasion, the queen my mother represented to the king that the attempt of m. de guise upon the admiral's life was excusable in a son who, being denied justice, had no other means of avenging his father's death. moreover, the admiral, she said, had deprived her by assassination, during his minority and her regency, of a faithful servant in the person of charri, commander of the king's body-guard, which rendered him deserving of the like treatment. notwithstanding that the queen my mother spoke thus to the king, discovering by her expressions and in her looks all the grief which she inwardly felt on the recollection of the loss of persons who had been useful to her; yet, so much was king charles inclined to save those who, as he thought, would one day be serviceable to him, that he still persisted in his determination to punish m. de guise, for whom he ordered strict search to be made. at length pardaillan, disclosing by his menaces, during the supper of the queen my mother, the evil intentions of the huguenots, she plainly perceived that things were brought to so near a crisis, that, unless steps were taken that very night to prevent it, the king and herself were in danger of being assassinated. she, therefore, came to the resolution of declaring to king charles his real situation. for this purpose she thought of the marechal de rais as the most proper person to break the matter to the king, the marshal being greatly in his favour and confidence. accordingly, the marshal went to the king in his closet, between the hours of nine and ten, and told him he was come as a faithful servant to discharge his duty, and lay before him the danger in which he stood, if he persisted in his resolution of punishing m. de guise, as he ought now to be informed that the attempt made upon the admiral's life was not set on foot by him alone, but that his (the king's) brother the king of poland, and the queen his mother, had their shares in it; that he must be sensible how much the queen lamented charri's assassination, for which she had great reason, having very few servants about her upon whom she could rely, and as it happened during the king's minority,--at the time, moreover, when france was divided between the catholics and the huguenots, m. de guise being at the head of the former, and the prince de conde of the latter, both alike striving to deprive him of his crown; that through providence, both his crown and kingdom had been preserved by the prudence and good conduct of the queen regent, who in this extremity found herself powerfully aided by the said charri, for which reason she had vowed to avenge his death; that, as to the admiral, he must be ever considered as dangerous to the state, and whatever show he might make of affection for his majesty's person, and zeal for his service in flanders, they must be considered as mere pretences, which he used to cover his real design of reducing the kingdom to a state of confusion. the marshal concluded with observing that the original intention had been to make away with the admiral only, as the most obnoxious man in the kingdom; but maurevel having been so unfortunate as to fail in his attempt, and the huguenots becoming desperate enough to resolve to take up arms, with design to attack, not only m. de guise, but the queen his mother, and his brother the king of poland, supposing them, as well as his majesty, to have commanded maurevel to make his attempt, he saw nothing but cause of alarm for his majesty's safety,--as well on the part of the catholics, if he persisted in his resolution to punish m. de guise, as of the huguenots, for the reasons which he had just laid before him. letter v. the massacre of st. bartholomew's day. king charles, a prince of great prudence, always paying a particular deference to his mother, and being much attached to the catholic religion, now convinced of the intentions of the huguenots, adopted a sudden resolution of following his mother's counsel, and putting himself under the safeguard of the catholics. it was not, however, without extreme regret that he found he had it not in his power to save teligny, la noue, and m. de la rochefoucauld. he went to the apartments of the queen his mother, and sending for m. de guise and all the princes and catholic officers, the "massacre of st. bartholomew" was that night resolved upon. immediately every hand was at work; chains were drawn across the streets, the alarm-bells were sounded, and every man repaired to his post, according to the orders he had received, whether it was to attack the admiral's quarters, or those of the other huguenots. m. de guise hastened to the admiral's, and besme, a gentleman in the service of the former, a german by birth, forced into his chamber, and having slain him with a dagger, threw his body out of a window to his master. i was perfectly ignorant of what was going forward. i observed every one to be in motion: the huguenots, driven to despair by the attack upon the admiral's life, and the guises, fearing they should not have justice done them, whispering all they met in the ear. the huguenots were suspicious of me because i was a catholic, and the catholics because i was married to the king of navarre, who was a huguenot. this being the case, no one spoke a syllable of the matter to me. at night, when i went into the bedchamber of the queen my mother, i placed myself on a coffer, next my sister lorraine, who, i could not but remark, appeared greatly cast down. the queen my mother was in conversation with some one, but, as soon as she espied me, she bade me go to bed. as i was taking leave, my sister seized me by the hand and stopped me, at the same time shedding a flood of tears: "for the love of god," cried she, "do not stir out of this chamber!" i was greatly alarmed at this exclamation; perceiving which, the queen my mother called my sister to her, and chid her very severely. my sister replied it was sending me away to be sacrificed; for, if any discovery should be made, i should be the first victim of their revenge. the queen my mother made answer that, if it pleased god, i should receive no hurt, but it was necessary i should go, to prevent the suspicion that might arise from my staying. i perceived there was something on foot which i was not to know, but what it was i could not make out from anything they said. the queen again bade me go to bed in a peremptory tone. my sister wished me a good night, her tears flowing apace, but she did not dare to say a word more; and i left the bedchamber more dead than alive. as soon as i reached my own closet, i threw myself upon my knees and prayed to god to take me into his protection and save me; but from whom or what, i was ignorant. hereupon the king my husband, who was already in bed, sent for me. i went to him, and found the bed surrounded by thirty or forty huguenots, who were entirely unknown to me; for i had been then but a very short time married. their whole discourse, during the night, was upon what had happened to the admiral, and they all came to a resolution of the next day demanding justice of the king against m. de guise; and, if it was refused, to take it themselves. for my part, i was unable to sleep a wink the whole night, for thinking of my sister's tears and distress, which had greatly alarmed me, although i had not the least knowledge of the real cause. as soon as day broke, the king my husband said he would rise and play at tennis until king charles was risen, when he would go to him immediately and demand justice. he left the bedchamber, and all his gentlemen followed. as soon as i beheld it was broad day, i apprehended all the danger my sister had spoken of was over; and being inclined to sleep, i bade my nurse make the door fast, and i applied myself to take some repose. in about an hour i was awakened by a violent noise at the door, made with both hands and feet, and a voice calling out, "navarre! navarre!" my nurse, supposing the king my husband to be at the door, hastened to open it, when a gentleman, named m. de teian, ran in, and threw himself immediately upon my bed. he had received a wound in his arm from a sword, and another by a pike, and was then pursued by four archers, who followed him into the bedchamber. perceiving these last, i jumped out of bed, and the poor gentleman after me, holding me fast by the waist. i did not then know him; neither was i sure that he came to do me no harm, or whether the archers were in pursuit of him or me. in this situation i screamed aloud, and he cried out likewise, for our fright was mutual. at length, by god's providence, m. de nangay, captain of the guard, came into the bed-chamber, and, seeing me thus surrounded, though he could not help pitying me, he was scarcely able to refrain from laughter. however, he reprimanded the archers very severely for their indiscretion, and drove them out of the chamber. at my request he granted the poor gentleman his life, and i had him put to bed in my closet, caused his wounds to be dressed, and did not suffer him to quit my apartment until he was perfectly cured. i changed my shift, because it was stained with the blood of this man, and, whilst i was doing so, de nangay gave me an account of the transactions of the foregoing night, assuring me that the king my husband was safe, and actually at that moment in the king's bedchamber. he made me muffle myself up in a cloak, and conducted me to the apartment of my sister, madame de lorraine, whither i arrived more than half dead. as we passed through the antechamber, all the doors of which were wide open, a gentleman of the name of bourse, pursued by archers, was run through the body with a pike, and fell dead at my feet. as if i had been killed by the same stroke, i fell, and was caught by m. de nangay before i reached the ground. as soon as i recovered from this fainting-fit, i went into my sister's bedchamber, and was immediately followed by m. de mioflano, first gentleman to the king my husband, and armagnac, his first valet de chambre, who both came to beg me to save their lives. i went and threw myself on my knees before the king and the queen my mother, and obtained the lives of both of them. five or six days afterwards, those who were engaged in this plot, considering that it was incomplete whilst the king my husband and the prince de conde remained alive, as their design was not only to dispose of the huguenots, but of the princes of the blood likewise; and knowing that no attempt could be made on my husband whilst i continued to be his wife, devised a scheme which they suggested to the queen my mother for divorcing me from him. accordingly, one holiday, when i waited upon her to chapel, she charged me to declare to her, upon my oath, whether i believed my husband to be like other men. "because," said she, "if he is not, i can easily procure you a divorce from him." i begged her to believe that i was not sufficiently competent to answer such a question, and could only reply, as the roman lady did to her husband, when he chid her for not informing him of his stinking breath, that, never having approached any other man near enough to know a difference, she thought all men had been alike in that respect. "but," said i, "madame, since you have put the question to me, i can only declare i am content to remain as i am;" and this i said because i suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him. letter vi. henri, duc d'anjou, elected king of poland, leaves france.--huguenot plots to withdraw the duc d'alencon and the king of navarre from court.--discovered and defeated by marguerite's vigilance.--she draws up an eloquent defence, which her husband delivers before a committee from the court of parliament.--alencon and her husband, under a close arrest, regain their liberty by the death of charles ix. we accompanied the king of poland as far as beaumont. for some months before he quitted france, he had used every endeavour to efface from my mind the ill offices he had so ungratefully done me. he solicited to obtain the same place in my esteem which he held during our infancy; and, on taking leave of me, made me confirm it by oaths and promises. his departure from france, and king charles's sickness, which happened just about the same time, excited the spirit of the two factions into which the kingdom was divided, to form a variety of plots. the huguenots, on the death of the admiral, had obtained from the king my husband, and my brother alencon, a written obligation to avenge it. before st. bartholomew's day, they had gained my brother over to their party, by the hope of securing flanders for him. they now persuaded my husband and him to leave the king and queen on their return, and pass into champagne, there to join some troops which were in waiting to receive them. m. de miossans, a catholic gentleman, having received an intimation of this design, considered it so prejudicial to the interests of the king his master, that he communicated it to me with the intention of frustrating a plot of so much danger to themselves, and to the state. i went immediately to the king and the queen my mother, and informed them that. i had a matter of the utmost importance to lay before them; but that i could not declare it unless they would be pleased to promise me that no harm should ensue from it to such as i should name to them, and that they would put a stop to what was going forward without publishing their knowledge of it. having obtained my request, i told them that my brother alencon and the king my husband had an intention, on the very next day, of joining some huguenot troops, which expected them, in order to fulfil the engagement they had made upon the admiral's death; and for this their intention, i begged they might be excused, and that they might be prevented from going away without any discovery being made that their designs had been found out. all this was granted me, and measures were so prudently taken to stay them, that they had not the least suspicion that their intended evasion was known. soon after, we arrived at st. germain, where we stayed some time, on account of the king's indisposition. all this while my brother alencon used every means he could devise to ingratiate himself with me, until at last i promised him my friendship, as i had before done to my brother the king of poland. as he had been brought up at a distance from court, we had hitherto known very little of each other, and kept ourselves at a distance. now that he had made the first advances, in so respectful and affectionate a manner, i resolved to receive him into a firm friendship, and to interest myself in whatever concerned him, without prejudice, however, to the interests of my good brother king charles, whom i loved more than any one besides, and who continued to entertain a great regard for me, of which he gave me proofs as long as he lived. meanwhile king charles was daily growing worse, and the huguenots constantly forming new plots. they were very desirous to get my brother the duc d'alencon and the king my husband away from court. i got intelligence, from time to time, of their designs; and, providentially, the queen my mother defeated their intentions when a day had been fixed on for the arrival of the huguenot troops at st. germain. to avoid this visit, we set off the night before for paris, two hours after midnight, putting king charles in a litter, and the queen my mother taking my brother and the king my husband with her in her own carriage. they did not experience on this occasion such mild treatment as they had hitherto done, for the king going to the wood of vincennes, they were not permitted to set foot out of the palace. this misunderstanding was so far from being mitigated by time, that the mistrust and discontent were continually increasing, owing to the insinuations and bad advice offered to the king by those who wished the ruin and downfall of our house. to such a height had these jealousies risen that the marechaux de montmorency and de cosse were put under a close arrest, and la mole and the comte de donas executed. matters were now arrived at such a pitch that commissioners were appointed from the court of parliament to hear and determine upon the case of my brother and the king my husband. my husband, having no counsellor to assist him, desired me to draw up his defence in such a manner that he might not implicate any person, and, at the same time, clear my brother and himself from any criminality of conduct. with god's help i accomplished this task to his great satisfaction, and to the surprise of the commissioners, who did not expect to find them so well prepared to justify themselves. as it was apprehended, after the death of la mole and the comte de donas, that their lives were likewise in danger, i had resolved to save them at the hazard of my own ruin with the king, whose favour i entirely enjoyed at that time. i was suffered to pass to and from them in my coach, with my women, who were not even required by the guard to unmask, nor was my coach ever searched. this being the case, i had intended to convey away one of them disguised in a female habit. but the difficulty lay in settling betwixt themselves which should remain behind in prison, they being closely watched by their guards, and the escape of one bringing the other's life into hazard. thus they could never agree upon the point, each of them wishing to be the person i should deliver from confinement. but providence put a period to their imprisonment by a means which proved very unfortunate for me. this was no other than the death of king charles, who was the only stay and support of my life,--a brother from whose hands i never received anything but good; who, during the persecution i underwent at angers, through my brother anjou, assisted me with all his advice and credit. in a word, when i lost king charles, i lost everything. letter vii. accession of henri iii.--a journey to lyons.--marguerite's faith in supernatural intelligence. after this fatal event, which was as unfortunate for france as for me, we went to lyons to give the meeting to the king of poland, now henri iii. of france. the new king was as much governed by le guast as ever, and had left this intriguing, mischievous man behind in france to keep his party together. through this man's insinuations he had conceived the most confirmed jealousy of my brother alencon. he suspected that i was the bond that connected the king my husband and my brother, and that, to dissolve their union, it would be necessary to create a coolness between me and my husband, and to work up a quarrel of rivalship betwixt them both by means of madame de sauves, whom they both visited. this abominable plot, which proved the source of so much disquietude and unhappiness, as well to my brother as myself, was as artfully conducted as it was wickedly designed. many have held that god has great personages more immediately under his protection, and that minds of superior excellence have bestowed on them a good genius, or secret intelligencer, to apprise them of good, or warn them against evil. of this number i might reckon the queen my mother, who has had frequent intimations of the kind; particularly the very night before the tournament which proved so fatal to the king my father, she dreamed that she saw him wounded in the eye, as it really happened; upon which she awoke, and begged him not to run a course that day, but content himself with looking on. fate prevented the nation from enjoying so much happiness as it would have done had he followed her advice. whenever she lost a child, she beheld a bright flame shining before her, and would immediately cry out, "god save my children!" well knowing it was the harbinger of the death of some one of them, which melancholy news was sure to be confirmed very shortly after. during her very dangerous illness at metz, where she caught a pestilential fever, either from the coal fires, or by visiting some of the nunneries which had been infected, and from which she was restored to health and to the kingdom through the great skill and experience of that modern asculapius, m. de castilian, her physician--i say, during that illness, her bed being surrounded by my brother king charles, my brother and sister lorraine, several members of the council, besides many ladies and princesses, not choosing to quit her, though without hopes of her life, she was heard to cry out, as if she saw the battle of jarnac: "there! see how they flee! my son, follow them to victory! ah, my son falls! o my god, save him! see there! the prince de conde is dead!" all who were present looked upon these words as proceeding from her delirium, as she knew that my brother anjou was on the point of giving battle, and thought no more of it. on the night following, m. de losses brought the news of the battle; and, it being supposed that she would be pleased to hear of it, she was awakened, at which she appeared to be angry, saying: "did i not know it yesterday?" it was then that those about her recollected what i have now related, and concluded that it was no delirium, but one of those revelations made by god to great and illustrious persons. ancient history furnishes many examples of the like kind amongst the pagans, as the apparition of brutus and many others, which i shall not mention, it not being my intention to illustrate these memoirs with such narratives, but only to relate the truth, and that with as much expedition as i am able, that you may be the sooner in possession of my story. i am far from supposing that i am worthy of these divine admonitions; nevertheless, i should accuse myself of ingratitude towards my god for the benefits i have received, which i esteem myself obliged to acknowledge whilst i live; and i further believe myself bound to bear testimony of his goodness and power, and the mercies he hath shown me, so that i can declare no extraordinary accident ever befell me, whether fortunate or otherwise, but i received some warning of it, either by dream or in some other way, so that i may say with the poet "de mon bien, on mon mal, mon esprit m'est oracle." (whate'er of good or ill befell, my mind was oracle to tell.) and of this i had a convincing proof on the arrival of the king of poland, when the queen my mother went to meet him. amidst the embraces and compliments of welcome in that warm season, crowded as we were together and stifling with heat, i found a universal shivering come over me, which was plainly perceived by those near me. it was with difficulty i could conceal what i felt when the king, having saluted the queen my mother, came forward to salute me. this secret intimation of what was to happen thereafter made a strong impression on my mind at the moment, and i thought of it shortly after, when i discovered that the king had conceived a hatred of me through the malicious suggestions of le guast, who had made him believe, since the king's death, that i espoused my brother alencon's party during his absence, and cemented a friendship betwixt the king my husband and him. letter viii. what happened at lyons. an opportunity was diligently sought by my enemies to effect their design of bringing about a misunderstanding betwixt my brother alencon, the king my husband, and me, by creating a jealousy of me in my husband, and in my brother and husband, on account of their mutual love for madame de sauves. one afternoon, the queen my mother having retired to her closet to finish some despatches which were likely to detain her there for some time, madame de nevers, your kinswoman, madame de rais, another of your relations, bourdeille, and surgeres asked me whether i would not wish to see a little of the city. whereupon mademoiselle de montigny, the niece of madame usez, observing to us that the abbey of st. pierre was a beautiful convent, we all resolved to visit it. she then begged to go with us, as she said she had an aunt in that convent, and as it was not easy to gain admission into it, except in the company of persons of distinction. accordingly, she went with us; and there being six of us, the carriage was crowded. over and above those i have mentioned, there was madame de curton, the lady of my bedchamber, who always attended me. liancourt, first esquire to the king, and camille placed themselves on the steps of torigni's carriage, supporting themselves as well as they were able, making themselves merry on the occasion, and saying they would go and see the handsome nuns, too. i look upon it as ordered by divine providence that i should have mademoiselle de montigny with me, who was not well acquainted with any lady of the company, and that the two gentlemen just mentioned, who were in the confidence of king henri, should likewise be of the party, as they were able to clear me of the calumny intended to be fixed upon me. whilst we were viewing the convent, my carriage waited for us in the square. in the square many gentlemen belonging to the court had their lodgings. my carriage was easily to be distinguished, as it was gilt and lined with yellow velvet trimmed with silver. we had not come out of the convent when the king passed through the square on his way to see quelus, who was then sick. he had with him the king my husband, d'o------, and the fat fellow ruff. the king, observing no one in my carriage, turned to my husband and said: "there is your wife's coach, and that is the house where bide lodges. bide is sick, and i will engage my word she is gone upon a visit to him. go," said he to ruff, "and see whether she is not there." in saying this, the king addressed himself to a proper tool for his malicious purpose, for this fellow ruffs was entirely devoted to le guast. i need not tell you he did not find me there; however, knowing the king's intention, he, to favour it, said loud enough for the king my husband to hear him: "the birds have been there, but they are now flown." this furnished sufficient matter for conversation until they reached home. upon this occasion, the king my husband displayed all the good sense and generosity of temper for which he is remarkable. he saw through the design, and he despised the maliciousness of it. the king my brother was anxious to see the queen my mother before me, to whom he imparted the pretended discovery, and she, whether to please a son on whom she doted, or whether she really gave credit to the story, had related it to some ladies with much seeming anger. soon afterwards i returned with the ladies who had accompanied me to st. pierre's, entirely ignorant of what had happened. i found the king my husband in our apartments, who began to laugh on seeing me, and said: "go immediately to the queen your mother, but i promise you you will not return very well pleased." i asked him the reason, and what had happened. he answered: "i shall tell you nothing; but be assured of this, that i do not give the least credit to the story, which i plainly perceive to be fabricated in order to stir up a difference betwixt us two, and break off the friendly intercourse between your brother and me." finding i could get no further information on the subject from him, i went to the apartment of the queen my mother. i met m. de guise in the antechamber, who was not displeased at the prospect of a dissension in our family, hoping that he might make some advantage of it. he addressed me in these words: "i waited here expecting to see you, in order to inform you that some ill office has been done you with the queen." he then told me the story he had learned of d'o------, who, being intimate with your kinswoman, had informed m. de guise of it, that he might apprise us. i went into the queen's bedchamber, but did not find my mother there. however, i saw madame de nemours, the rest of the princesses, and other ladies, who all exclaimed on seeing me: "good god! the queen your mother is in such a rage; we would advise you, for the present, to keep out of her sight." "yes," said i, "so i would, had i been guilty of what the king has reported; but i assure you all i am entirely innocent, and must therefore speak with her and clear myself." i then went into her closet, which was separated from the bedchamber by a slight partition only, so that our whole conversation could be distinctly heard. she no sooner set eyes upon me than she flew into a great passion, and said everything that the fury of her resentment suggested. i related to her the whole truth, and begged to refer her to the company which attended me, to the number of ten or twelve persons, desiring her not to rely on the testimony of those more immediately about me, but examine mademoiselle montigny, who did not belong to me, and liancourt and camille, who were the king's servants. she would not hear a word i had to offer, but continued to rate me in a furious manner; whether it was through fear, or affection for her son, or whether she believed the story in earnest, i know not. when i observed to her that i understood the king had done me this ill office in her opinion, her anger was redoubled, and she endeavoured to make me believe that she had been informed of the circumstance by one of her own valets de chambre, who had himself seen me at the place. perceiving that i gave no credit to this account of the matter, she became more and more incensed against me. all that was said was perfectly heard by those in the next room. at length i left her closet, much chagrined; and returning to my own apartments, i found the king my husband there, who said to me: "well, was it not as i told you?" he, seeing me under great concern, desired me not to grieve about it, adding that "liancourt and camille would attend the king that night in his bedchamber, and relate the affair as it really was; and to-morrow," continued he, "the queen your mother will receive you in a very different manner." "but, monsieur," i replied, "i have received too gross an affront in public to forgive those who were the occasion of it; but that is nothing when compared with the malicious intention of causing so heavy a misfortune to befall me as to create a variance betwixt you and me." "but," said he, "god be thanked, they have failed in it." "for that," answered i, "i am the more beholden to god and your amiable disposition. however," continued i, "we may derive this good from it, that it ought to be a warning to us to put ourselves upon our guard against the king's stratagems to bring about a disunion betwixt you and my brother, by causing a rupture betwixt you and me." whilst i was saying this, my brother entered the apartment, and i made them renew their protestations of friendship. but what oaths or promises can prevail against love! this will appear more fully in the sequel of my story. an italian banker, who had concerns with my brother, came to him the next morning, and invited him, the king my husband, myself, the princesses, and other ladies, to partake of an entertainment in a garden belonging to him. having made it a constant rule, before and after i married, as long as i remained in the court of the queen my mother, to go to no place without her permission, i waited on her, at her return from mass, and asked leave to be present at this banquet. she refused to give any leave, and said she did not care where i went. i leave you to judge, who know my temper, whether i was not greatly mortified at this rebuff. whilst we were enjoying this entertainment, the king, having spoken with liancourt, camille, and mademoiselle montigny, was apprised of the mistake which the malice or misapprehension of ruff had led him into. accordingly, he went to the queen my mother and related the whole truth, entreating her to remove any ill impressions that might remain with me, as he perceived that i was not deficient in point of understanding, and feared that i might be induced to engage in some plan of revenge. when i returned from the banquet before mentioned, i found that what the king my husband had foretold was come to pass; for the queen my mother sent for me into her back closet, which was adjoining the king's, and told me that she was now acquainted with the truth, and found i had not deceived her with a false story. she had discovered, she said, that there was not the least foundation for the report her valet de chambre had made, and should dismiss him from her service as a bad man. as she perceived by my looks that i saw through this disguise, she said everything she could think of to persuade me to a belief that the king had not mentioned it to her. she continued her arguments, and i still appeared incredulous. at length the king entered the closet, and made many apologies, declaring he had been imposed on, and assuring me of his most cordial friendship and esteem; and thus matters were set to rights again. letter ix. fresh intrigues.--marriage of henri iii.--bussi arrives at court and narrowly escapes assassination. after staying some time at lyons, we went to avignon. le guast, not daring to hazard any fresh imposture, and finding that my conduct afforded no ground for jealousy on the part of my husband, plainly perceived that he could not, by that means, bring about a misunderstanding betwixt my brother and the king my husband. he therefore resolved to try what he could effect through madame de sauves. in order to do this, he obtained such an influence over her that she acted entirely as he directed; insomuch that, by his artful instructions, the passion which these young men had conceived, hitherto wavering and cold, as is generally the case at their time of life, became of a sudden so violent that ambition and every obligation of duty were at once absorbed by their attentions to this woman. this occasioned such a jealousy betwixt them that, though her favours were divided with m. de guise, le guast, de souvray, and others, any one of whom she preferred to the brothers-in-law, such was the infatuation of these last, that each considered the other as his only rival. to carry on de guast's sinister designs, this woman persuaded the king my husband that i was jealous of her, and on that account it was that i joined with my brother. as we are ready to give ear and credit to those we love, he believed all she said. from this time he became distant and reserved towards me, shunning my presence as much as possible; whereas, before, he was open and communicative to me as to a sister, well knowing that i yielded to his pleasure in all things, and was far from harbouring jealousy of any kind. what i had dreaded, i now perceived had come to pass. this was the loss of his favour and good opinion; to preserve which i had studied to gain his confidence by a ready compliance with his wishes, well knowing that mistrust is the sure forerunner of hatred. i now turned my mind to an endeavour to wean my brother's affection from madame de sauves, in order to counterplot le guast in his design to bring about a division, and thereby to effect our ruin. i used every means with my brother to divert his passion; but the fascination was too strong, and my pains proved ineffectual. in anything else, my brother would have suffered himself to be ruled by me; but the charms of this circe, aided by that sorcerer, le guast, were too powerful to be dissolved by my advice. so far was he from profiting by my counsel that he was weak enough to communicate it to her. so blind are lovers! her vengeance was excited by this communication, and she now entered more fully into the designs of le guast. in consequence, she used all her art to, make the king my husband conceive an aversion for me; insomuch that he scarcely ever spoke with me. he left her late at night, and, to prevent our meeting in the morning, she directed him to come to her at the queen's levee, which she duly attended; after which he passed the rest of the day with her. my brother likewise followed her with the greatest assiduity, and she had the artifice to make each of them think that he alone had any place in her esteem. thus was a jealousy kept up betwixt them, and, in consequence, disunion and mutual ruin. we made a considerable stay at avignon, whence we proceeded through burgundy and champagne to rheims, where the king's marriage was celebrated. from rheims we came to paris, things going on in their usual train, and le guast prosecuting his designs, with all the success he could wish. at paris my brother was joined by bussi, whom he received with all the favour which his bravery merited. he was inseparable from my brother, in consequence of which i frequently saw him, for my brother and i were always together, his household being equally at my devotion as if it were my own. your aunt, remarking this harmony betwixt us, has often told me that it called to her recollection the times of my uncle, m. d'orleans, and my aunt, madame de savoie. le guast thought this a favourable circumstance to complete his design. accordingly, he suggested to madame de sauves to make my husband believe that it was on account of bussi that i frequented my brother's apartments so constantly. the king my husband, being fully informed of all my proceedings from persons in his service who attended me everywhere, could not be induced to lend an ear to this story. le guast, finding himself foiled in this quarter, applied to the king, who was well inclined to listen to the tale, on account of his dislike to my brother and me, whose friendship for each other was unpleasing to him. besides this, he was incensed against bussi, who, being formerly attached to him, had now devoted himself wholly to my brother,--an acquisition which, on account of the celebrity of bussi's fame for parts and valour, redounded greatly to my brother's honour, whilst it increased the malice and envy of his enemies. the king, thus worked upon by le guast, mentioned it to the queen my mother, thinking it would have the same effect on her as the tale which was trumped up at lyons. but she, seeing through the whole design, showed him the improbability of the story, adding that he must have some wicked people about him, who could put such notions in his head, observing that i was very unfortunate to have fallen upon such evil times. "in my younger days," said she, "we were allowed to converse freely with all the gentlemen who belonged to the king our father, the dauphin, and m. d'orleans, your uncles. it was common for them to assemble in the bedchamber of madame marguerite, your aunt, as well as in mine, and nothing was thought of it. neither ought it to appear strange that bussi sees my daughter in the presence of her husband's servants. they are not shut up together. bussi is a person of quality, and holds the first place in your brother's family. what grounds are there for such a calumny? at lyons you caused me to offer her an affront, which i fear she will never forget." the king was astonished to hear his mother talk in this manner, and interrupted her with saying: "madame, i only relate what i have heard." "but who is it," answered she, "that tells you all this? i fear no one that intends you any good, but rather one that wishes to create divisions amongst you all." as soon as the king had left her she told me all that had passed, and said: "you are unfortunate to live in these times." then calling your aunt, madame de dampierre, they entered into a discourse concerning the pleasures and innocent freedoms of the times they had seen, when scandal and malevolence were unknown at court. le guast, finding this plot miscarry, was not long in contriving another. he addressed himself for this purpose to certain gentlemen who attended the king my husband. these had been formerly the friends of bussi, but, envying the glory he had obtained, were now become his enemies. under the mask of zeal for their master, they disguised the envy, which they harboured in their breasts. they entered into a design of assassinating bussi as he left my brother to go to his own lodgings, which was generally at a late hour. they knew that he was always accompanied home by fifteen or sixteen gentlemen, belonging to my brother, and that, notwithstanding he wore no sword, having been lately wounded in the right arm, his presence was sufficient to inspire the rest with courage. in order, therefore, to make sure work, they resolved on attacking him with two or three hundred men, thinking that night would throw a veil over the disgrace of such an assassination. le guast, who commanded a regiment of guards, furnished the requisite number of men, whom he disposed in five or six divisions, in the street through which he was to pass. their orders were to put out the torches and flambeaux, and then to fire their pieces, after which they were to charge his company, observing particularly to attack one who had his right arm slung in a scarf. fortunately they escaped the intended massacre, and, fighting their way through, reached bussi's lodgings, one gentleman only being killed, who was particularly attached to m. de bussi, and who was probably mistaken for him, as he had his arm likewise slung in a scarf. an italian gentleman, who belonged to my brother, left them at the beginning of the attack, and came running back to the louvre. as soon as he reached my brother's chamber door, he cried out aloud: "busai is assassinated!" my brother was going out, but i, hearing the cry of assassination, left my chamber, by good fortune not being undressed, and stopped my brother. i then sent for the queen my mother to come with all haste in order to prevent him from going out, as he was resolved to do, regardless of what might happen. it was with difficulty we could stay him, though the queen my mother represented the hazard he ran from the darkness of the night, and his ignorance of the nature of the attack, which might have been purposely designed by le guast to take away his life. her entreaties and persuasions would have been of little avail if she had not used her authority to order all the doors to be barred, and taken the resolution of remaining where she was until she had learned what had really happened. bussi, whom god had thus miraculously preserved, with that presence of mind which he was so remarkable for in time of battle and the most imminent danger, considering within himself when he reached home the anxiety of his master's mind should he have received any false report, and fearing he might expose himself to hazard upon the first alarm being given (which certainly would have been the case, if my mother had not interfered and prevented it), immediately despatched one of his people to let him know every circumstance. the next day busai showed himself at the louvre without the least dread of enemies, as if what had happened had been merely the attack of a tournament. my brother exhibited much pleasure at the sight of busai, but expressed great resentment at such a daring attempt to deprive him of so brave and valuable a servant, a man whom le guast durst not attack in any other way than by a base assassination. letter x. bussi is sent from court.--marguerite's husband attacked with a fit of epilepsy.--her great care of him.--torigni dismissed from marguerite's service.--the king of navarre and the duc d'alencon secretly leave the court. the queen my mother, a woman endowed with the greatest prudence and foresight of any one i ever knew, apprehensive of evil consequences from this affair, and fearing a dissension betwixt her two sons, advised my brother to fall upon some pretence for sending bussi away from court. in this advice i joined her, and, through our united counsel and request, my brother was prevailed upon to give his consent. i had every reason to suppose that le guast would take advantage of the reencounter to foment the coolness which already existed betwixt my brother and the king my husband into an open rupture. bussi, who implicitly followed my brother's directions in everything, departed with a company of the bravest noblemen that were about the latter's person. bussi was now removed from the machinations of le guast, who likewise failed in accomplishing a design he had long projected,--to disunite the king my husband and me. one night my husband was attacked with a fit, and continued insensible for the space of an hour,--occasioned, i supposed, by his excesses with women, for i never knew anything of the kind to happen to him before. however, as it was my duty so to do, i attended him with so much care and assiduity that, when he recovered, he spoke of it to every one, declaring that, if i had not perceived his indisposition and called for the help of my women, he should not have survived the fit. from this time he treated me with more kindness, and the cordiality betwixt my brother and him was again revived, as if i had been the point of union at which they were to meet, or the cement that joined them together. le guast was now at his wit's end for some fresh contrivance to breed disunion in the court. he had lately persuaded the king to remove from about the person of the queen-consort a princess of the greatest virtue and most amiable qualities, a female attendant of the name of changi, for whom the queen entertained a particular esteem, as having been brought up with her. being successful in this measure, he now thought of making the king my husband send away torigni, whom i greatly regarded. the argument he used with the king was, that young princesses ought to have no favourites about them. the king, yielding to this man's persuasions, spoke of it to my husband, who observed that it would be a matter that would greatly distress me; that if i had an esteem for torigni it was not without cause, as she had been brought up with the queen of spain and me from our infancy; that, moreover, torigni was a young lady of good understanding, and had been of great use to him during his confinement at vincennes; that it would be the greatest ingratitude in him to overlook services of such a nature, and that he remembered well when his majesty had expressed the same sentiments. thus did he defend himself against the performance of so ungrateful an action. however, the king listened only to the arguments of le guast, and told my husband that he should have no more love for him if he did not remove torigni from about me the very next morning. he was forced to comply, greatly contrary to his will, and, as he has since declared to me, with much regret. joining entreaties to commands, he laid his injunctions on me accordingly. how displeasing this separation was i plainly discovered by the many tears i shed on receiving his orders. it was in vain to represent to him the injury done to my character by the sudden removal of one who had been with me from my earliest years, and was so greatly, in my esteem and confidence; he could not give an ear to my reasons, being firmly bound by the promise he had made to the king. accordingly, torigni left me that very day, and went to the house of a relation, m. chastelas. i was so greatly offended with this fresh indignity, after so many of the kind formerly received, that i could not help yielding to resentment; and my grief and concern getting the upper hand of my prudence, i exhibited a great coolness and indifference towards my husband. le guast and madame de sauves were successful in creating a like indifference on his part, which, coinciding with mine, separated us altogether, and we neither spoke to each other nor slept in the same bed. a few days after this, some faithful servants about the person of the king my husband remarked to him the plot which had been concerted with so much artifice to lead him to his ruin, by creating a division, first betwixt him and my brother, and next betwixt him and me, thereby separating him from those in whom only he could hope for his principal support. they observed to him that already matters were brought to such a pass that the king showed little regard for him, and even appeared to despise him. they afterwards addressed themselves to my brother, whose situation was not in the least mended since the departure of bussi, le guast causing fresh indignities to be offered him daily. they represented to him that the king my husband and he were both circumstanced alike, and equally in disgrace, as le guast had everything under his direction; so that both of them were under the necessity of soliciting, through him, any favours which they might want of the king, and which, when demanded, were constantly refused them with great contempt. moreover, it was become dangerous to offer them service, as it was inevitable ruin for any one to do so. "since, then," said they, "your dissensions appear to be so likely to prove fatal to both, it would be advisable in you both to unite and come to a determination of leaving the court; and, after collecting together your friends and servants, to require from the king an establishment suitable to your ranks." they observed to my brother that he had never yet been put in possession of his appanage, and received for his subsistence only some certain allowances, which were not regularly paid him, as they passed through the hands of le guast, and were at his disposal, to be discharged or kept back, as he judged proper. they concluded with observing that, with regard to the king my husband, the government of guyenne was taken out of his hands; neither was he permitted to visit that or any other of his dominions. it was hereupon resolved to pursue the counsel now given, and that the king my husband and my brother should immediately withdraw themselves from court. my brother made me acquainted with this resolution, observing to me, as my husband and he were now friends again, that i ought to forget all that had passed; that my husband had declared to him that he was sorry things had so happened, that we had been outwitted by our enemies, but that he was resolved, from henceforward, to show me every attention and give me every proof of his love and esteem, and he concluded with begging me to make my husband every show of affection, and to be watchful for their interest during their absence. it was concerted betwixt them that my brother should depart first, making off in a carriage in the best manner he could; that, in a few days afterwards, the king my husband should follow, under pretence of going on a hunting party. they both expressed their concern that they could not take me with them, assuring me that i had no occasion to have any apprehensions, as it would soon appear that they had no design to disturb the peace of the kingdom, but merely to ensure the safety of their own persons, and to settle their establishments. in short, it might well be supposed that, in their present situation, they had danger to themselves from such reason to apprehend as had evil designs against their family. accordingly, as soon as it was dusk, and before the king's supper-time, my brother changed his cloak, and concealing the lower part of his face to his nose in it, left the palace, attended by a servant who was little known, and went on foot to the gate of st. honore, where he found simier waiting for him in a coach, borrowed of a lady for the purpose. my brother threw himself into it, and went to a house about a quarter of a league out of paris, where horses were stationed ready; and at the distance of about a league farther, he joined a party of two or three hundred horsemen of his servants, who were awaiting his coming. my brother was not missed till nine o'clock, when the king and the queen my mother asked me the reason he did not come to sup with them as usual, and if i knew of his being indisposed. i told them i had not seen him since noon. thereupon they sent to his apartments. word was brought back that he was not there. orders were then given to inquire at the apartments of the ladies whom he was accustomed to visit. he was nowhere to be found. there was now a general alarm. the king flew into a great passion, and began to threaten me. he then sent for all the princes and the great officers of the court; and giving orders for a pursuit to be made, and to bring him back, dead or alive, cried out: "he is gone to make war against me; but i will show him what it is to contend with a king of my power." many of the princes and officers of state remonstrated against these orders, which they observed ought to be well weighed. they said that, as their duty directed, they were willing to venture their lives in the king's service; but to act against his brother they were certain would not be pleasing to the king himself; that they were well convinced his brother would undertake nothing that should give his majesty displeasure, or be productive of danger to the realm; that perhaps his leaving the court was owing to some disgust, which it would be more advisable to send and inquire into. others, on the contrary, were for putting the king's orders into execution; but, whatever expedition they could use, it was day before they set off; and as it was then too late to overtake my brother, they returned, being only equipped for the pursuit. i was in tears the whole night of my brother's departure, and the next day was seized with a violent cold, which was succeeded by a fever that confined me to my bed. meanwhile my husband was preparing for his departure, which took up all the time he could spare from his visits to madame de sauves; so that he did not think of me. he returned as usual at two or three in the morning, and, as we had separate beds, i seldom heard him; and in the morning, before i was awake, he went to my mother's levee, where he met madame de sauves, as usual. this being the case, he quite forgot his promise to my brother of speaking to me; and when he went, away, it was without taking leave of me. the king did not show my husband more favour after my brother's evasion, but continued to behave with his former coolness. this the more confirmed him in the resolution of leaving the court, so that in a few days, under the pretence of hunting, he went away. letter xi. queen marguerite under arrest.--attempt on torigni's life.--her fortunate deliverance. the king, supposing that i was a principal instrument in aiding the princes in their desertion, was greatly incensed against me, and his rage became at length so violent that, had not the queen my mother moderated it, i am inclined to think my life had been in danger. giving way to her counsel, he became more calm, but insisted upon a guard being placed over me, that i might not follow the king my husband, neither have communication with any one, so as to give the princes intelligence of what was going on at court. the queen my mother gave her consent to this measure, as being the least violent, and was well pleased to find his anger cooled in so great a degree. she, however, requested that she might be permitted to discourse with me, in order to reconcile me to a submission to treatment of so different a kind from what i had hitherto known. at the same time she advised the king to consider that these troubles might not be lasting; that everything in the world bore a double aspect; that what now appeared to him horrible and alarming, might, upon a second view, assume a more pleasing and tranquil look; that, as things changed, so should measures change with them; that there might come a time when he might have occasion for my services; that, as prudence counselled us not to repose too much confidence in our friends, lest they should one day become our enemies, so was it advisable to conduct ourselves in such a manner to our enemies as if we had hopes they should hereafter become our friends. by such prudent remonstrances did the queen my mother restrain the king from proceeding to extremities with me, as he would otherwise possibly have done. le guast now endeavoured to divert his fury to another object, in order to wound me in a most sensitive part. he prevailed on the king to adopt a design for seizing torigni, at the house of her cousin chastelas, and, under pretence of bringing her before the king, to drown her in a river which they were to cross. the party sent upon this errand was admitted by chastelas, not suspecting any evil design, without the least difficulty, into his house. as soon as they had gained admission they proceeded to execute the cruel business they were sent upon, by fastening torigni with cords and locking her up in a chamber, whilst their horses were baiting. meantime, according to the french custom, they crammed themselves, like gluttons, with the best eatables the house afforded. chastelas, who was a man of discretion, was not displeased to gain time at the expense of some part of his substance, considering that the suspension of a sentence is a prolongation of life, and that during this respite the king's heart might relent, and he might countermand his former orders. with these considerations he was induced to submit, though it was in his power to have called for assistance to repel this violence. but god, who hath constantly regarded my afflictions and afforded me protection against the malicious designs of my enemies, was pleased to order poor torigni to be delivered by means which i could never have devised had i been acquainted with the plot, of which i was totally ignorant. several of the domestics, male as well as female, had left the house in a fright, fearing the insolence and rude treatment of this troop of soldiers, who behaved as riotously as if they were in a house given up to pillage. some of these, at the distance of a quarter of a league from the house, by god's providence, fell in with ferte and avantigni, at the head of their troops, in number about two hundred horse, on their march to join my brother. ferte, remarking a labourer, whom he knew to belong to chastelas, apparently in great distress, inquired of him what was the matter, and whether he had been ill-used by any of the soldiery. the man related to him all he knew, and in what state he had left his master's house. hereupon ferte and avantigni resolved, out of regard to me, to effect torigni's deliverance, returning thanks to god for having afforded them so favourable an opportunity of testifying the respect they had always entertained towards me. accordingly, they proceeded to the house with all expedition, and arrived just at the moment these soldiers were setting torigni on horseback, for the purpose of conveying her to the river wherein they had orders to plunge her. galloping into the courtyard, sword in hand, they cried out: "assassins, if you dare to offer that lady the least injury, you are dead men!" so saying, they attacked them and drove them to flight, leaving their prisoner behind, nearly as dead with joy as she was before with fear and apprehension. after returning thanks to god and her deliverers for so opportune and unexpected a rescue, she and her cousin chastelas set off in a carriage, under the escort of their rescuers, and joined my brother, who, since he could not have me with him, was happy to have one so dear to me about him. she remained under my brother's protection as long as any danger was apprehended, and was treated with as much respect as if she had been with me. whilst the king was giving directions for this notable expedition, for the purpose of sacrificing torigni to his vengeance, the queen my mother, who had not received the least intimation of it, came to my apartment as i was dressing to go abroad, in order to observe how i should be received after what had passed at court, having still some alarms on account of my husband and brother. i had hitherto confined myself to my chamber, not having perfectly recovered my health, and, in reality, being all the time as much indisposed in mind as in body. my mother, perceiving my intention, addressed me in these words: "my child, you are giving yourself unnecessary trouble in dressing to go abroad. do not be alarmed at what i am going to tell you. your own good sense will dictate to you that you ought not to be surprised if the king resents the conduct of your brother and husband, and as he knows the love and friendship that exist between you three, should suppose that you were privy to their design of leaving the court. he has, for this reason, resolved to detain you in it, as a hostage for them. he is sensible how much you are beloved by your husband, and thinks he can hold no pledge that is more dear to him. on this account it is that the king has ordered his guards to be placed, with directions not to suffer you to leave your apartments. he has done this with the advice of his counsellors, by whom it was suggested that, if you had your free liberty, you might be induced to advise your brother and husband of their deliberations. i beg you will not be offended with these measures, which, if it so please god, may not be of long continuance. i beg, moreover, you will not be displeased with me if i do not pay you frequent visits, as i should be unwilling to create any suspicions in the king's mind. however, you may rest assured that i shall prevent any further steps from being taken that may prove disagreeable to you, and that i shall use my utmost endeavours to bring about a reconciliation betwixt your brothers." i represented to her, in reply, the great indignity that was offered to me by putting me under arrest; that it was true my brother had all along communicated to me the just cause he had to be dissatisfied, but that, with respect to the king my husband, from the time torigni was taken from me we had not spoken to each other; neither had he visited me during my indisposition, nor did he even take leave of me when he left court. "this," says she, "is nothing at all; it is merely a trifling difference betwixt man and wife, which a few sweet words, conveyed in a letter, will set to rights. when, by such means, he has regained your affections, he has only to write to you to come to him, and you will set off at the very first opportunity. now, this is what the king my son wishes to prevent." letter xii. the peace of sens betwixt henri iii. and the huguenots. the queen my mother left me, saying these words. for my part, i remained a close prisoner, without a visit from a single person, none of my most intimate friends daring to come near me, through the apprehension that such a step might prove injurious to their interests. thus it is ever in courts. adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd; the object of persecution being sure to be shunned by his nearest friends and dearest connections. the brave grillon was the only one who ventured to visit me, at the hazard of incurring disgrace. he came five or six times to see me, and my guards were so much astonished at his resolution, and awed by his presence, that not a single cerberus of them all would venture to refuse him entrance to my apartments. meanwhile, the king my husband reached the states under his government. being joined there by his friends and dependents, they all represented to him the indignity offered to me by his quitting the court without taking leave of me. they observed to him that i was a princess of good understanding, and that it would be for his interest to regain my esteem; that, when matters were put on their former footing, he might derive to himself great advantage from my presence at court. now that he was at a distance from his circe, madame de sauves, he could listen to good advice. absence having abated the force of her charms, his eyes were opened; he discovered the plots and machinations of our enemies, and clearly perceived that a rupture could not but tend to the ruin of us both. accordingly, he wrote me a very affectionate letter, wherein he entreated me to forget all that had passed betwixt us, assuring me that from thenceforth he would ever love me, and would give me every demonstration that he did so, desiring me to inform him of what was going on at court, and how it fared with me and my brother. my brother was in champagne and the king my husband in gascony, and there had been no communication betwixt them, though they were on terms of friendship. i received this letter during my imprisonment, and it gave me great comfort under that situation. although my guards had strict orders not to permit me to set pen to paper, yet, as necessity is said to be the mother of invention, i found means to write many letters to him. some few days after i had been put under arrest, my brother had intelligence of it, which chagrined him so much that, had not the love of his country prevailed with him, the effects of his resentment would have been shown in a cruel civil war, to which purpose he had a sufficient force entirely at his devotion. he was, however, withheld by his patriotism, and contented himself with writing to the queen my mother, informing her that, if i was thus treated, he should be driven upon some desperate measure. she, fearing the consequence of an open rupture, and dreading lest, if blows were once struck, she should be deprived of the power of bringing about a reconciliation betwixt the brothers, represented the consequences to the king, and found him well disposed to lend an ear to her reasons, as his anger was now cooled by the apprehensions of being attacked in gascony, dauphiny, languedoc, and poitou, with all the strength of the huguenots under the king my husband. besides the many strong places held by the huguenots, my brother had an army with him in champagne, composed chiefly of nobility, the bravest and best in france. the king found, since my brother's departure, that he could not, either by threats or rewards, induce a single person among the princes and great lords to act against him, so much did every one fear to intermeddle in this quarrel, which they considered as of a family nature; and after having maturely reflected on his situation, he acquiesced in my mother's opinion, and begged her to fall upon some means of reconciliation. she thereupon proposed going to my brother and taking me with her. to the measure of taking me, the king had an objection, as he considered me as the hostage for my husband and brother. she then agreed to leave me behind, and set off without my knowledge of the matter. at their interview, my brother represented to the queen my mother that he could not but be greatly dissatisfied with the king after the many mortifications he had received at court; that the cruelty and injustice of confining me hurt him equally as if done to himself; observing, moreover, that, as if my arrest were not a sufficient mortification, poor torigni must be made to suffer; and concluding with the declaration of his firm resolution not to listen to any terms of peace until i was restored to my liberty, and reparation made me for the indignity i had sustained. the queen my mother being unable to obtain any other answer, returned to court and acquainted the king with my brother's determination. her advice was to go back again with me, for going without me, she said, would answer very little purpose; and if i went with her in disgust, it would do more harm than good. besides, there was reason to fear, in that case, i should insist upon going to my husband. "in short," says she, "my daughter's guard must be removed, and she must be satisfied in the best way we can." the king agreed to follow her advice, and was now, on a sudden, as eager to reconcile matters betwixt us as she was herself. hereupon i was sent for, and when i came to her, she informed me that she had paved the way for peace; that it was for the good of the state, which she was sensible i must be as desirous to promote as my brother; that she had it now in her power to make a peace which would be as satisfactory as my brother could desire, and would put us entirely out of the reach of le guast's machinations, or those of any one else who might have an influence over the king's mind. she observed that, by assisting her to procure a good understanding betwixt the king and my brother, i should relieve her from that cruel disquietude under which she at present laboured, as, should things come to an open rupture, she could not but be grieved, whichever party prevailed, as they were both her sons. she therefore expressed her hopes that i would forget the injuries i had received, and dispose myself to concur in a peace, rather than join in any plan of revenge. she assured me that the king was sorry for what had happened; that he had even expressed his regret to her with tears in his eyes, and had declared that he was ready to give me every satisfaction. i replied that i was willing to sacrifice everything for the good of my brothers and of the state; that i wished for nothing so much as peace, and that i would exert myself to the utmost to bring it about. as i uttered these words, the king came into the closet, and, with a number of fine speeches, endeavoured to soften my resentment and to recover my friendship, to which i made such returns as might show him i harboured no ill-will for the injuries i had received. i was induced to such behaviour rather out of contempt, and because it was good policy to let the king go away satisfied with me. besides, i had found a secret pleasure, during my confinement, from the perusal of good books, to which i had given myself up with a delight i never before experienced. i consider this as an obligation i owe to fortune, or, rather, to divine providence, in order to prepare me, by such efficacious means, to bear up against the misfortunes and calamities that awaited me. by tracing nature in the universal book which is opened to all mankind, i was led to the knowledge of the divine author. science conducts us, step by step, through the whole range of creation, until we arrive, at length, at god. misfortune prompts us to summon our utmost strength to oppose grief and recover tranquillity, until at length we find a powerful aid in the knowledge and love of god, whilst prosperity hurries us away until we are overwhelmed by our passions. my captivity and its consequent solitude afforded me the double advantage of exciting a passion for study, and an inclination for devotion, advantages i had never experienced during the vanities and splendour of my prosperity. as i have already observed, the king, discovering in me no signs of discontent, informed me that the queen my mother was going into champagne to have an interview with my brother, in order to bring about a peace, and begged me to accompany her thither and to use my best endeavours to forward his views, as he knew my brother was always well disposed to follow my counsel; and he concluded with saying that the peace, when accomplished, he should ever consider as being due to my good offices, and should esteem himself obliged to me for it. i promised to exert myself in so good a work, which i plainly perceived was both for my brother's advantage and the benefit of the state. the queen my mother and i set off for sens the next day. the conference was agreed to be held in a gentleman's chateau, at a distance of about a league from that place. my brother was waiting for us, accompanied by a small body of troops and the principal catholic noblemen and princes of his army. amongst these were the duc casimir and colonel poux, who had brought him six thousand german horse, raised by the huguenots, they having joined my brother, as the king my husband and he acted in conjunction. the treaty was continued for several days, the conditions of peace requiring much discussion, especially such articles of it as related to religion. with respect to these, when at length agreed upon, they were too much to the advantage of the huguenots, as it appeared afterwards, to be kept; but the queen my mother gave in to them, in order to have a peace, and that the german cavalry before mentioned might be disbanded. she was, moreover, desirous to get my brother out of the hands of the huguenots; and he was himself as willing to leave them, being always a very good catholic, and joining the huguenots only through necessity. one condition of the peace was, that my brother should have a suitable establishment. my brother likewise stipulated for me, that my marriage portion should be assigned in lands, and m. de beauvais, a commissioner on his part, insisted much upon it. my mother, however, opposed it, and persuaded me to join her in it, assuring me that i should obtain from the king all i could require. thereupon i begged i might not be included in the articles of peace, observing that i would rather owe whatever i was to receive to the particular favour of the king and the queen my mother, and should, besides, consider it as more secure when obtained by such means. the peace being thus concluded and ratified on both sides, the queen my mother prepared to return. at this instant i received letters from the king my husband, in which he expressed a great desire to see me, begging me, as soon as peace was agreed on, to ask leave to go to him. i communicated my husband's wish to the queen my mother, and added my own entreaties. she expressed herself greatly averse to such a measure, and used every argument to set me against it. she observed that, when i refused her proposal of a divorce after st. bartholomew's day, she gave way to my refusal, and commended me for it, because my husband was then converted to the catholic religion; but now that he had abjured catholicism, and was turned huguenot again, she could not give her consent that i should go to him. when i still insisted upon going, she burst into a flood of tears, and said, if i did not return with her, it would prove her ruin; that the king would believe it was her doing; that she had promised to bring me back with her; and that, when my brother returned to court, which would be soon, she would give her consent. we now returned to paris, and found the king well satisfied that we had made a peace; though not, however, pleased with the articles concluded in favour of the huguenots. he therefore resolved within himself, as soon as my brother should return to court, to find some pretext for renewing the war. these advantageous conditions were, indeed, only granted the huguenots to get my brother out of their hands, who was detained near two months, being employed in disbanding his german horse and the rest of his army. etext editor's bookmarks: adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd comeliness of his person, which at all times pleads powerfully everything in the world bore a double aspect hearsay liable to be influenced by ignorance or malice hopes they (enemies) should hereafter become our friends i should praise you more had you praised me less it is the usual frailty of our sex to be fond of flattery mistrust is the sure forerunner of hatred necessity is said to be the mother of invention never approached any other man near enough to know a difference not to repose too much confidence in our friends prefer truth to embellishment rather out of contempt, and because it was good policy the massacre of st. bartholomew's day to embellish my story i have neither leisure nor ability troubles might not be lasting young girls seldom take much notice of children this ebook was produced by david widger, widger@cecomet.net the works of frederick schiller translated from the german illustrated preface to the edition. the present is the best collected edition of the important works of schiller which is accessible to readers in the english language. detached poems or dramas have been translated at various times since the first publication of the original works; and in several instances these versions have been incorporated into this collection. schiller was not less efficiently qualified by nature for an historian than for a dramatist. he was formed to excel in all departments of literature, and the admirable lucidity of style and soundness and impartiality of judgment displayed in his historical writings will not easily be surpassed, and will always recommend them as popular expositions of the periods of which they treat. since the publication of the first english edition many corrections and improvements have been made, with a view to rendering it as acceptable as possible to english readers; and, notwithstanding the disadvantages of a translation, the publishers feel sure that schiller will be heartily acceptable to english readers, and that the influence of his writings will continue to increase. the history of the revolt of the netherlands was translated by lieut. e. b. eastwick, and originally published abroad for students' use. but this translation was too strictly literal for general readers. it has been carefully revised, and some portions have been entirely rewritten by the rev. a. j. w. morrison, who also has so ably translated the history of the thirty years war. the camp of wallenstein was translated by mr. james churchill, and first appeared in "frazer's magazine." it is an exceedingly happy version of what has always been deemed the most untranslatable of schiller's works. the piccolomini and death of wallenstein are the admirable version of s. t. coleridge, completed by the addition of all those passages which he has omitted, and by a restoration of schiller's own arrangement of the acts and scenes. it is said, in defence of the variations which exist between the german original and the version given by coleridge, that he translated from a prompter's copy in manuscript, before the drama had been printed, and that schiller himself subsequently altered it, by omitting some passages, adding others, and even engrafting several of coleridge's adaptations. wilhelm tell is translated by theodore martin, esq., whose well-known position as a writer, and whose special acquaintance with german literature make any recommendation superfluous. don carlos is translated by r. d. boylan, esq., and, in the opinion of competent judges, the version is eminently successful. mr. theodore martin kindly gave some assistance, and, it is but justice to state, has enhanced the value of the work by his judicious suggestions. the translation of mary stuart is that by the late joseph mellish, who appears to have been on terms of intimate friendship with schiller. his version was made from the prompter's copy, before the play was published, and, like coleridge's wallenstein, contains many passages not found in the printed edition. these are distinguished by brackets. on the other hand, mr. mellish omitted many passages which now form part of the printed drama, all of which are now added. the translation, as a whole, stands out from similar works of the time ( ) in almost as marked a degree as coleridge's wallenstein, and some passages exhibit powers of a high order; a few, however, especially in the earlier scenes, seemed capable of improvement, and these have been revised, but, in deference to the translator, with a sparing hand. the maid of orleans is contributed by miss anna swanwick, whose translation of faust has since become well known. it has been. carefully revised, and is now, for the first time, published complete. the bride of messina, which has been regarded as the poetical masterpiece of schiller, and, perhaps of all his works, presents the greatest difficulties to the translator, is rendered by a. lodge, esq., m. a. this version, on its first publication in england, a few years ago, was received with deserved eulogy by distinguished critics. to the present edition has been prefixed schiller's essay on the use of the chorus in tragedy, in which the author's favorite theory of the "ideal of art" is enforced with great ingenuity and eloquence. the history of the revolt of the netherlands. contents. author's preface introduction book i.----earlier history of the netherlands up to the sixteenth century book ii.---cardinal granvella book iii.--conspiracy of the nobles book iv.---the iconoclasts trial and execution of counts egmont and horn siege of antwerp by the prince of parma, in the years and the author's preface. many years ago, when i read the history of the belgian revolution in watson's excellent work, i was seized with an enthusiasm which political events but rarely excite. on further reflection i felt that this enthusiastic feeling had arisen less from the book itself than from the ardent workings of my own imagination, which had imparted to the recorded materials the particular form that so fascinated me. these imaginations, therefore, i felt a wish to fix, to multiply, and to strengthen; these exalted sentiments i was anxious to extend by communicating them to others. this was my principal motive for commencing the present history, my only vocation to write it. the execution of this design carried me farther than in the beginning i had expected. a closer acquaintance with my materials enabled me to discover defects previously unnoticed, long waste tracts to be filled up, apparent contradictions to be reconciled, and isolated facts to be brought into connection with the rest of the subject. not so much with the view of enriching my history with new facts as of seeking a key to old ones, i betook myself to the original sources, and thus what was originally intended to be only a general outline expanded under my hands into an elaborate history. the first part, which concludes with the duchess of parma's departure from the netherlands, must be looked upon only as the introduction to the history of the revolution itself, which did not come to an open outbreak till the government of her successor. i have bestowed the more care and attention upon this introductory period the more the generality of writers who had previously treated of it seemed to me deficient in these very qualities. moreover, it is in my opinion the more important as being the root and source of all the subsequent events. if, then, the first volume should appear to any as barren in important incident, dwelling prolixly on trifles, or, rather, should seem at first sight profuse of reflections, and in general tediously minute, it must be remembered that it was precisely out of small beginnings that the revolution was gradually developed; and that all the great results which follow sprang out of a countless number of trifling and little circumstances. a nation like the one before us invariably takes its first steps with doubts and uncertainty, to move afterwards only the more rapidly for its previous hesitation. i proposed, therefore, to follow the same method in describing this rebellion. the longer the reader delays on the introduction the more familiar he becomes with the actors in this history, and the scene in which they took a part, so much the more rapidly and unerringly shall i be able to lead him through the subsequent periods, where the accumulation of materials will forbid a slowness of step or minuteness of attention. as for the authorities of our history there is not so much cause to complain of their paucity as of their extreme abundance, since it is indispensable to read them all to obtain that clear view of the whole subject to which the perusal of a part, however large, is always prejudicial. from the unequal, partial, and often contradictory narratives of the same occurrences it is often extremely difficult to seize the truth, which in all is alike partly concealed and to be found complete in none. in this first volume, besides de thou, strada, reyd, grotius, meteren, burgundius, meursius, bentivoglio, and some moderns, the memoirs of counsellor hopper, the life and correspondence of his friend viglius, the records of the trials of the counts of hoorne and egmont, the defence of the prince of orange, and some few others have been my guides. i must here acknowledge my obligations to a work compiled with much industry and critical acumen, and written with singular truthfulness and impartiality. i allude to the general history of the united netherlands which was published in holland during the present century. besides many original documents which i could not otherwise have had access to, it has abstracted all that is valuable in the excellent works of bos, hooft, brandt, le clerc, which either were impossible for me to procure or were not available to my use, as being written in dutch, which i do not understand. an otherwise ordinary writer, richard dinoth, has also been of service to me by the many extracts he gives from the pamphlets of the day, which have been long lost. i have in vain endeavored to procure the correspondence of cardinal granvella, which also would no doubt have thrown much light upon the history of these times. the lately published work on the spanish inquisition by my excellent countryman, professor spittler of gottingen, reached me too late for its sagacious and important contents to be available for my purpose. the more i am convinced of the importance of the french history, the more i lament that it was not in my power to study, as i could have wished, its copious annals in the original sources and contemporary documents, and to reproduce it abstracted of the form in which it was transmitted to me by the more intelligent of my predecessors, and thereby emancipate myself from the influence which every talented author exercises more or less upon his readers. but to effect this the work of a few years must have become the labor of a life. my aim in making this attempt will be more than attained if it should convince a portion of the reading public of the possibility of writing a history with historic truth without making a trial of patience to the reader; and if it should extort from another portion the confession that history can borrow from a cognate art without thereby, of necessity, becoming a romance. weimar, michaelmas fair, . introduction. of those important political events which make the sixteenth century to take rank among the brightest of the world's epochs, the foundation of the freedom of the netherlands appears to me one of the most remarkable. if the glittering exploits of ambition and the pernicious lust of power claim our admiration, how much more so should an event in which oppressed humanity struggled for its noblest rights, where with the good cause unwonted powers were united, and the resources of resolute despair triumphed in unequal contest over the terrible arts of tyranny. great and encouraging is the reflection that there is a resource left us against the arrogant usurpations of despotic power; that its best- contrived plans against the liberty of mankind may be frustrated; that resolute opposition can weaken even the outstretched arm of tyranny; and that heroic perseverance can eventually exhaust its fearful resources. never did this truth affect me so sensibly as in tracing the history of that memorable rebellion which forever severed the united netherlands from the spanish crown. therefore i thought it not unworth the while to attempt to exhibit to the world this grand memorial of social union, in the hope that it may awaken in the breast of my reader a spirit-stirring consciousness of his own powers, and give a new and irrefragible example of what in a good cause men may both dare and venture, and what by union they may accomplish. it is not the extraordinary or heroic features of this event that induce me to describe it. the annals of the world record perhaps many similar enterprises, which may have been even bolder in the conception and more brilliant in the execution. some states have fallen after a nobler struggle; others have risen with more exalted strides. nor are we here to look for eminent heroes, colossal talents, or those marvellous exploits which the history of past times presents in such rich abundance. those times are gone; such men are no more. in the soft lap of refinement we have suffered the energetic powers to become enervate which those ages called into action and rendered indispensable. with admiring awe we wonder at these gigantic images of the past as a feeble old man gazes on the athletic sports of youth. not so, however, in the history before us. the people here presented to our notice were the most peaceful in our quarter of the globe, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit which stamps a lofty character even on the most insignificant actions. the pressure of circumstances with its peculiar influence surprised them and forced a transitory greatness upon them, which they never could have possessed and perhaps will never possess again. it is, indeed, exactly this want of heroic grandeur which renders this event peculiarly instructive; and while others aim at showing the superiority of genius over chance, i shall here paint a scene where necessity creates genius and accident makes heroes. if in any case it be allowable to recognize the intervention of providence in human affairs it is certainly so in the present history, its course appears so contradictory to reason and experience. philip ii., the most powerful sovereign of his line--whose dreaded supremacy menaced the independence of europe--whose treasures surpassed the collective wealth of all the monarchs of christendom besides--whose ambitious projects were backed by numerous and well-disciplined armies --whose troops, hardened by long and bloody wars, and confident in past victories and in the irresistible prowess of this nation, were eager for any enterprise that promised glory and spoil, and ready to second with prompt obedience the daring genius of their leaders--this dreaded potentate here appears before us obstinately pursuing one favorite project, devoting to it the untiring efforts of a long reign, and bringing all these terrible resources to bear upon it; but forced, in the evening of his reign, to abandon it--here we see the mighty philip ii. engaging in combat with a few weak and powerless adversaries, and retiring from it at last with disgrace. and with what adversaries? here, a peaceful tribe of fishermen and shepherds, in an almost-forgotten corner of europe, which with difficulty they had rescued from the ocean; the sea their profession, and at once their wealth and their plague; poverty with freedom their highest blessing, their glory, their virtue. there, a harmless, moral, commercial people, revelling in the abundant fruits of thriving industry, and jealous of the maintenance of laws which had proved their benefactors. in the happy leisure of affluence they forsake the narrow circle of immediate wants and learn to thirst after higher and nobler gratifications. the new views of truth, whose benignant dawn now broke over europe, cast a fertilizing beam on this favored clime, and the free burgher admitted with joy the light which oppressed and miserable slaves shut out. a spirit of independence, which is the ordinary companion of prosperity and freedom, lured this people on to examine the authority of antiquated opinions and to break an ignominious chain. but the stern rod of despotism was held suspended over them; arbitrary power threatened to tear away the foundation of their happiness; the guardian of their laws became their tyrant. simple in their statecraft no less than in their manners, they dared to appeal to ancient treaties and to remind the lord of both indies of the rights of nature. a name decides the whole issue of things. in madrid that was called rebellion which in brussels was simply styled a lawful remonstrance. the complaints of brabant required a prudent mediator; philip ii. sent an executioner. the signal for war was given. an unparalleled tyranny assailed both property and life. the despairing citizens, to whom the choice of deaths was all that was left, chose the nobler one on the battle-field. a wealthy and luxurious nation loves peace, but becomes warlike as soon as it becomes poor. then it ceases to tremble for a life which is deprived of everything that had made it desirable. in an instant the contagion of rebellion seizes at once the most distant provinces; trade and commerce are at a standstill, the ships disappear from the harbors, the artisan abandons his workshop, the rustic his uncultivated fields. thousands fled to distant lands, a thousand victims fell on the bloody field, and fresh thousands pressed on. divine, indeed, must that doctrine be for which men could die so joyfully. all that was wanting was the last finishing hand, the enlightened, enterprising spirit, to seize on this great political crisis and to mould the offspring of chance into the ripe creation of wisdom. william the silent, like a second brutus, devoted himself to the great cause of liberty. superior to all selfishness, he resigned honorable offices which entailed on him obectionable duties, and, magnanimously divesting himself of all his princely dignities, he descended to a state of voluntary poverty, and became but a citizen of the world. the cause of justice was staked upon the hazardous game of battle; but the newly-raised levies of mercenaries and peaceful husbandmen were unable to withstand the terrible onset of an experienced force. twice did the brave william lead his dispirited troops against the tyrant. twice was he abandoned by them, but not by his courage. philip ii. sent as many reinforcements as the dreadful importunity of his viceroy demanded. fugitives, whom their country rejected, sought a new home on the ocean, and turned to the ships of their enemy to satisfy the cravings both of vengeance and of want. naval heroes were now formed out of corsairs, and a marine collected out of piratical vessels; out of morasses arose a republic. seven provinces threw off the yoke at the same time, to form a new, youthful state, powerful by its waters and its union and despair. a solemn decree of the whole nation deposed the tyrant, and the spanish name was erased from all its laws. for such acts no forgiveness remained; the republic became formidable only because it was impossible for her to retrace her steps. but factions distracted her within; without, her terrible element, the sea itself, leaguing with her oppressors, threatened her very infancy with a premature grave. she felt herself succumb to the superior force of the enemy, and cast herself a suppliant before the most powerful thrones of europe, begging them to accept a dominion which she herself could no longer protect. at last, but with difficulty--so despised at first was this state that even the rapacity of foreign monarchs spurned her opening bloom--a stranger deigned to accept their importunate offer of a dangerous crown. new hopes began to revive her sinking courage; but in this new father of his country destiny gave her a traitor, and in the critical emergency, when the foe was in full force before her very gates, charles of anjou invaded the liberties which he had been called to protect. in the midst of the tempest, too, the assassin's hand tore the steersman from the helm, and with william of orange the career of the infant republic was seemingly at an end, and all her guardian angels fled. but the ship continued to scud along before the storm, and the swelling canvas carried her safe without the pilot's help. philip ii. missed the fruits of a deed which cost him his royal honor, and perhaps, also, his self-respect. liberty struggled on still with despotism in obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were fought; a brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field of glory, and flanders and brabant were the schools which educated generals for the coming century. a long, devastating war laid waste the open country; victor and vanquished alike waded through blood; while the rising republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry, and out of the ruins of despotism erected the noble edifice of its own greatness. for forty years lasted the war whose happy termination was not to bless the dying eye of philip; which destroyed one paradise in europe to form a new one out of its shattered fragments; which destroyed the choicest flower of military youth, and while it enriched more than a quarter of the globe impoverished the possessor of the golden peru. this monarch, who could expend nine hundred tons of gold without oppressing his subjects, and by tyrannical measures extorted far more, heaped, moreover, on his exhausted people a debt of one hundred and forty millions of ducats. an implacable hatred of liberty swallowed up all these treasures, and consumed on the fruitless task the labor of a royal life. but the reformation throve amidst the devastations of the sword, and over the blood of her citizens the banner of the new republic floated victorious. this improbable turn of affairs seems to border on a miracle; many circumstances, however, combined to break the power of philip, and to favor the progress of the infant state. had the whole weight of his power fallen on the united provinces there had been no hope for their religion or their liberty. his own ambition, by tempting him to divide his strength, came to the aid of their weakness. the expensive policy of maintaining traitors in every cabinet of europe; the support of the league in france; the revolt of the moors in granada; the conquest of portugal, and the magnificent fabric of the escurial, drained at last his apparently inexhaustible treasury, and prevented his acting in the field with spirit and energy. the german and italian troops, whom the hope of gain alone allured to his banner, mutinied when he could no longer pay them, and faithlessly abandoned their leaders in the decisive moment of action. these terrible instruments of oppression now turned their dangerous power against their employer, and wreaked their vindictive rage on the provinces which remained faithful to him. the unfortunate armament against england, on which, like a desperate gamester, he had staked the whole strength of his kingdom, completed his ruin; with the armada sank the wealth of the two indies, and the flower of spanish chivalry. but in the very same proportion that the spanish power declined the republic rose in fresh vigor. the ravages which the fanaticism of the new religion, the tyranny of the inquisition, the furious rapacity of the soldiery, and the miseries of a long war unbroken by any interval of peace, made in the provinces of brabant, flanders, and hainault, at once the arsenals and the magazines of this expensive contest, naturally rendered it every year more difficult to support and recruit the royal armies. the catholic netherlands had already lost a million of citizens, and the trodden fields maintained their husbandmen no longer. spain itself had but few more men to spare. that country, surprised by a sudden affluence which brought idleness with it, had lost much of its population, and could not long support the continual drafts of men which were required both for the new world and the netherlands. of these conscripts few ever saw their country again; and these few having left it as youths returned to it infirm and old. gold, which had become more common, made soldiers proportionately dearer; the growing charm of effeminacy enhanced the price of the opposite virtues. wholly different was the posture of affairs with the rebels. the thousands whom the cruelty of the viceroy expelled from the southern netherlands, the huguenots whom the wars of persecution drove from france, as well as every one whom constraint of conscience exiled from the other parts of europe, all alike flocked to unite themselves with the belgian insurgents. the whole christian world was their recruiting ground. the fanaticism both of the persecutor and the persecuted worked in their behalf. the enthusiasm of a doctrine newly embraced, revenge, want, and hopeless misery drew to their standard adventurers from every part of europe. all whom the new doctrine had won, all who had suffered, or had still cause of fear from despotism, linked their own fortunes with those of the new republic. every injury inflicted by a tyrant gave a right of citizenship in holland. men pressed towards a country where liberty raised her spirit-stirring banner, where respect and security were insured to a fugitive religion, and even revenge on the oppressor. if we consider the conflux in the present day of people to holland, seeking by their entrance upon her territory to be reinvested in their rights as men, what must it have been at a time when the rest of europe groaned under a heavy bondage, when amsterdam was nearly the only free port for all opinions? many hundred families sought a refuge for their wealth in a land which the ocean and domestic concord powerfully combined to protect. the republican army maintained its full complement without the plough being stripped of hands to work it. amid the clash of arms trade and industry flourished, and the peaceful citizen enjoyed in anticipation the fruits of liberty which foreign blood was to purchase for them. at the very time when the republic of holland was struggling for existence she extended her dominions beyond the ocean, and was quietly occupied in erecting her east indian empire. moreover, spain maintained this expensive war with dead, unfructifying gold, that never returned into the hand which gave it away, while it raised to her the price of every necessary. the treasuries of the republic were industry and commerce. time lessened the one whilst it multiplied the other, and exactly in the same proportion that the resources of the spanish government became exhausted by the long continuance of the war the republic began to reap a richer harvest. its field was sown sparingly with the choice seed which bore fruit, though late, yet a hundredfold; but the tree from which philip gathered fruit was a fallen trunk which never again became verdant. philip's adverse destiny decreed that all the treasures which he lavished for the oppression of the provinces should contribute to enrich them. the continual outlay of spanish gold had diffused riches and luxury throughout europe; but the increasing wants of europe were supplied chiefly by the netherlanders, who were masters of the commerce of the known world, and who by their dealings fixed the price of all merchandise. even during the war philip could not prohibit his own subjects from trading with the republic; nay, he could not even desire it. he himself furnished the rebels with the means of defraying the expenses of their own defence; for the very war which was to ruin them increased the sale of their goods. the enormous suns expended on his fleets and armies flowed for the most part into the exchequer of the republic, which was more or less connected with the commercial places of flanders and brabant. whatever philip attempted against the rebels operated indirectly to their advantage. the sluggish progress of this war did the king as much injury as it benefited the rebels. his army was composed for the most part of the remains of those victorious troops which had gathered their laurels under charles v. old and long services entitled them to repose; many of them, whom the war had enriched, impatiently longed for their homes, where they might end in ease a life of hardship. their former zeal, their heroic spirit, and their discipline relaxed in the same proportion as they thought they had fully satisfied their honor and their duty, and as they began to reap at last the reward of so many battles. besides, the troops which had been accustomed by their irresistible impetuosity to vanquish all opponents were necessarily wearied out by a war which was carried on not so much against men as against the elements; which exercised their patience more than it gratified their love of glory; and where there was less of danger than of difficulty and want to contend with. neither personal courage nor long military experience was of avail in a country whose peculiar features gave the most dastardly the advantage. lastly, a single discomfiture on foreign ground did them more injury than any victories gained over an enemy at home could profit them. with the rebels the case was exactly the reverse. in so protracted a war, in which no decisive battle took place, the weaker party must naturally learn at last the art of defence from the stronger; slight defeats accustomed him to danger; slight victories animated his confidence. at the beginning of the war the republican army scarcely dared to show itself in the field; the long continuance of the struggle practised and hardened it. as the royal armies grew wearied of victory, the confidence of the rebels rose with their improved discipline and experience. at last, at the end of half a century, master and pupil separated, unsubdued, and equal in the fight. again, throughout the war the rebels acted with more concord and unanimity than the royalists. before the former had lost their first leader the government of the netherlands had passed through as many as five hands. the duchess of parma's indecision soon imparted itself to the cabinet of madrid, which in a short time tried in succession almost every system of policy. duke alva's inflexible sternness, the mildness of his successor requescens, don john of austria's insidious cunning, and the active and imperious mind of the prince of parma gave as many opposite directions to the war, while the plan of rebellion remained the same in a single head, who, as he saw it clearly, pursued it with vigor. the king's greatest misfortune was that right principles of action generally missed the right moment of application. in the commencement of the troubles, when the advantage was as yet clearly on the king's side, when prompt resolution and manly firmness might have crushed the rebellion in the cradle, the reigns of government were allowed to hang loose in the hands of a woman. after the outbreak had come to an open revolt, and when the strength of the factious and the power of the king stood more equally balanced, and when a skilful flexible prudence could alone have averted the impending civil war, the government devolved on a man who was eminently deficient in this necessary qualification. so watchful an observer as william the silent failed not to improve every advantage which the faulty policy of his adversary presented, and with quiet silent industry he slowly but surely pushed on the great enterprise to its accomplishment. but why did not philip ii. himself appear in the netherlands? why did he prefer to employ every other means, however improbable, rather than make trial of the only remedy which could insure success? to curb the overgrown power and insolence of the nobility there was no expedient more natural than the presence of their master. before royalty itself all secondary dignities must necessarily have sunk in the shade, all other splendor be dimmed. instead of the truth being left to flow slowly and obscurely through impure channels to the distant throne, so that procrastinated measures of redress gave time to ripen ebullitions of the moment into acts of deliberation, his own penetrating glance would at once have been able to separate truth from error; and cold policy alone, not to speak of his humanity, would have saved the land a million citizens. the nearer to their source the more weighty would his edicts have been; the thicker they fell on their objects the weaker and the more dispirited would have become the efforts of the rebels. it costs infinitely more to do an evil to an enemy in his presence than in his absence. at first the rebellion appeared to tremble at its own name, and long sheltered itself under the ingenious pretext of defending the cause of its sovereign against the arbitrary assumptions of his own viceroy. philip's appearance in brussels would have put an end at once to this juggling. in that case, the rebels would have been compelled to act up to their pretence, or to cast aside the mask, and so, by appearing in their true shape, condemn themselves. and what a relief for the netherlands if the king's presence had only spared them those evils which were inflicted upon them without his knowledge, and contrary to his will. [ ] what gain, too, even if it had only enabled him to watch over the expenditure of the vast sums which, illegally raised on the plea of meeting the exigencies of the war, disappeared in the plundering hands of his deputies. what the latter were compelled to extort by the unnatural expedient of terror, the nation would have been disposed to grant to the sovereign majesty. that which made his ministers detested would have rendered the monarch feared; for the abuse of hereditary power is less painfully oppressive than the abuse of delegated authority. his presence would have saved his exchequer thousands had he been nothing more than an economical despot; and even had he been less, the awe of his person would have preserved a territory which was lost through hatred and contempt for his instruments. in the same manner, as the oppression of the people of the netherlands excited the sympathy of all who valued their own rights, it might have been expected that their disobedience and defection would have been a call to all princes to maintain their own prerogatives in the case of their neighbors. but jealousy of spain got the better of political sympathies, and the first powers of europe arranged themselves more or less openly on the side of freedom. although bound to the house of spain by the ties of relationship, the emperor maximilian ii. gave it just cause for its charge against him of secretly favoring the rebels. by the offer of his mediation he implicitly acknowledged the partial justice of their complaints, and thereby encouraged them to a resolute perseverance in their demands. under an emperor sincerely devoted to the interests of the spanish house, william of orange could scarcely have drawn so many troops and so much money from germany. france, without openly and formally breaking the peace, placed a prince of the blood at the head of the netherlandish rebels; and it was with french gold and french troops that the operations of the latter were chiefly conducted. [ ] elizabeth of england, too, did but exercise a just retaliation and revenge in protecting the rebels against their legitimate sovereign; and although her meagre and sparing aid availed no farther than to ward off utter ruin from the republic, still even this was infinitely valuable at a moment when nothing but hope could have supported their exhausted courage. with both these powers philip at the time was at peace, but both betrayed him. between the weak and the strong honesty often ceases to appear a virtue; the delicate ties which bind equals are seldom observed towards him whom all men fear. philip had banished truth from political intercourse; he himself had dissolved all morality between kings, and had made artifice the divinity of cabinets. without once enjoying the advantages of his preponderating greatness, he had, throughout life, to contend with the jealousy which it awakened in others. europe made him atone for the possible abuses of a power of which in fact he never had the full possession. if against the disparity between the two combatants, which, at first sight, is so astounding, we weigh all the incidental circumstances which were adverse to spain, but favorable to the netherlands, that which is supernatural in this event will disappear, while that which is extraordinary will still remain--and a just standard will be furnished by which to estimate the real merit of these republicans in working out their freedom. it must not, however, be thought that so accurate a calculation of the opposing forces could have preceded the undertaking itself, or that, on entering this unknown sea, they already knew the shore on which they would ultimately be landed. the work did not present itself to the mind of its originator in the exact form which it assumed when completed, any more than the mind of luther foresaw the eternal separation of creeds when he began to oppose the sale of indulgences. what a difference between the modest procession of those suitors in brussels, who prayed for a more humane treatment as a favor, and the dreaded majesty of a free state, which treated with kings as equals, and in less than a century disposed of the throne of its former tyrant. the unseen hand of fate gave to the discharged arrow a higher flight, and quite a different direction from that which it first received from the bowstring. in the womb of happy brabant that liberty had its birth which, torn from its mother in its earliest infancy, was to gladden the so despised holland. but the enterprise must not be less thought of because its issue differed from the first design. man works up, smooths, and fashions the rough stone which the times bring to him; the moment and the instant may belong to him, but accident develops the history of the world. if the passions which co-operated actively in bringing about this event were only not unworthy of the great work to which they were unconsciously subservient--if only the powers which aided in its accomplishment were intrinsically noble, if only the single actions out of whose great concatenation it wonderfully arose were beautiful then is the event grand, interesting, and fruitful for us, and we are at liberty to wonder at the bold offspring of chance, or rather offer up our admiration to a higher intelligence. the history of the world, like the laws of nature, is consistent with itself, and simple as the soul of man. like conditions produce like phenomena. on the same soil where now the netherlanders were to resist their spanish tyrants, their forefathers, the batavi and belgee, fifteen centuries before, combated against their roman oppressors. like the former, submitting reluctantly to a haughty master, and misgoverned by rapacious satraps, they broke off their chain with like resolution, and tried their fortune in a similar unequal combat. the same pride of conquest, the same national grandeur, marked the spaniard of the sixteenth century and the roman of the first; the same valor and discipline distinguished the armies of both, their battle array inspired the same terror. there as here we see stratagem in combat with superior force, and firmness, strengthened by unanimity, wearying out a mighty power weakened by division; then as now private hatred armed a whole nation; a single man, born for his times, revealed to his fellow-slaves the dangerous secret of their power, and brought their mute grief to a bloody announcement. "confess, batavians," cries claudius civilis to his countrymen in the sacred grove, "we are no longer treated, as formerly, by these romans as allies, but rather as slaves. we are handed over to their prefects and centurions, who, when satiated with our plunder and with our blood, make way for others, who, under different names, renew the same outrages. if even at last rome deigns to send us a legate, he oppresses us with an ostentatious and costly retinue, and with still more intolerable pride. the levies are again at hand which tear forever children from their parents, brothers from brothers. now, batavians, is our time. never did rome lie so prostrate as now. let not their names of legions terrify you. there is nothing in their camps but old men and plunder. our infantry and horsemen are strong; germany is allied to us by blood, and gaul is ready to throw off its yoke. let syria serve them, and asia and the east, who are used to bow before kings; many still live who were born among us before tribute was paid to the romans. the gods are ever with the brave." solemn religious rites hallowed this conspiracy, like the league of the gueux; like that, it craftily wrapped itself in the veil of submissiveness, in the majesty of a great name. the cohorts of civilis swear allegiance on the rhine to vespasian in syria, as the league did to philip ii. the same arena furnished the same plan of defence, the same refuge to despair. both confided their wavering fortunes to a friendly element; in the same distress civilis preserves his island, as fifteen centuries after him william of orange did the town of leyden--through an artificial inundation. the valor of the batavi disclosed the impotency of the world's ruler, as the noble courage of their descendants revealed to the whole of europe the decay of spanish greatness. the same fecundity of genius in the generals of both times gave to the war a similarly obstinate continuance, and nearly as doubtful an issue; one difference, nevertheless, distinguishes them: the romans and batavians fought humanely, for they did not fight for religion. [ ] more modern historians, with access to the records of the spanish inquisition and the private communications between phillip ii. and his various appointees to power in the netherlands, rebut shiller's kind but naive thought. to the contrary, phillip ii. was most critical of his envoys lack of severity. see in particular the "rise of the dutch republic" and the other works of john motley on the history of the netherlands all of which are available at project gutenberg.--d.w. [ ] a few french generals who were by and large ineffective; and many promises of gold which were undelivered.--d.w. book i. earlier history of the netherlands up to the sixteenth century. before we consider the immediate history of this great revolution, it will be advisable to go a few steps back into the ancient records of the country, and to trace the origin of that constitution which we find it possessed of at the time of this remarkable change. the first appearance of this people in the history of the world is the moment of its fall; their conquerors first gave them a political existence. the extensive region which is bounded by germany on the east, on the south by france, on the north and northwest by the north sea, and which we comprehend under the general name of the netherlands, was, at the time when the romans invaded gaul, divided amongst three principal nations, all originally of german descent, german institutions, and german spirit. the rhine formed its boundaries. on the left of the river dwelt the belgae, on its right the frisii, and the batavi on the island which its two arms then formed with the ocean. all these several nations were sooner or later reduced into subjection by the romans, but the conquerors themselves give us the most glorious testimony to their valor. the belgae, writes caesar, were the only people amongst the gauls who repulsed the invasion of the teutones and cimbri. the batavi, tacitus tells us, surpassed all the tribes on the rhine in bravery. this fierce nation paid its tribute in soldiers, and was reserved by its conquerors, like arrow and sword, only for battle. the romans themselves acknowledged the batavian horsemen to be their best cavalry. like the swiss at this day, they formed for a long time the body-guard of the roman emperor; their wild courage terrified the dacians, as they saw them, in full armor, swimming across the danube. the batavi accompanied agricola in his expedition against britain, and helped him to conquer that island. the frieses were, of all, the last subdued, and the first to regain their liberty. the morasses among which they dwelt attracted the conquerors later, and enhanced the price of conquest. the roman drusus, who made war in these regions, had a canal cut from the rhine into the flevo, the present zuyder zee, through which the roman fleet penetrated into the north sea, and from thence, entering the mouths of the ems and the weser, found an easy passage into the interior of germany. through four centuries we find batavian troops in the roman armies, but after the time of honorius their name disappears from history. presently we discover their island overrun by the franks, who again lost themselves in the adjoining country of belgium. the frieses threw off the yoke of their distant and powerless rulers, and again appearad as a free, and even a conquering people, who governed themselves by their own customs and a remnant of roman laws, and extended their limits beyond the left bank of the rhine. of all the provinces of the netherlands, friesland especially had suffered the least from the irruptions of strange tribes and foreign customs, and for centuries retained traces of its original institutions, of its national spirit and manners, which have not, even at the present day, entirely disappeared. the epoch of the immigration of nations destroyed the original form of most of these tribes; other mixed races arose in their place, with other constitutions. in the general irruption the towns and encampments of the romans disappeared, and with them the memorials of their wise government, which they had employed the natives to execute. the neglected dikes once more yielded to the violence of the streams and to the encroachments of the ocean. those wonders of labor, and creations of human skill, the canals, dried up, the rivers changed their course, the continent and the sea confounded their olden limits, and the nature of the soil changed with its inhabitants. so, too, the connection of the two eras seems effaced, and with a new race a new history commences. the monarchy of the franks, which arose out of the ruins of roman gaul, had, in the sixth and seventh centuries, seized all the provinces of the netherlands, and planted there the christian faith. after an obstinate war charles martel subdued to the french crown friesland, the last of all the free provinces, and by his victories paved a way for the gospel. charlemagne united all these countries, and formed of them one division of the mighty empire which he had constructed out of germany, france, and lombardy. as under his descendants this vast dominion was again torn into fragments, so the netherlands became at times german, at others french, or then again lotheringian provinces; and at last we find them under both the names of friesland and lower lotheringia. with the franks the feudal system, the offspring of the north, also came into these lands, and here, too, as in all other countries, it degenerated. the more powerful vassals gradually made themselves independent of the crown, and the royal governors usurped the countries they were appointed to govern. but the rebellions vassals could not maintain their usurpations without the aid of their own dependants, whose assistance they were compelled to purchase by new concessions. at the same time the church became powerful through pious usurpations and donations, and its abbey lands and episcopal sees acquired an independent existence. thus were the netherlands in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries split up into several small sovereignties, whose possessors did homage at one time to the german emperor, at another to the kings of france. by purchase, marriages, legacies, and also by conquest, several of these provinces were often united under one suzerain, and thus in the fifteenth century we see the house of burgundy in possession of the chief part of the netherlands. with more or less right philip the good, duke of burgundy, had united as many as eleven provinces under his authority, and to these his son, charles the bold, added two others, acquired by force of arms. thus imperceptibly a new state arose in europe, which wanted nothing but the name to be the most flourishing kingdom in this quarter of the globe. these extensive possessions made the dukes of burgundy formidable neighbors to france, and tempted the restless spirit of charles the bold to devise a scheme of conquest, embracing the whole line of country from the zuyder zee and the mouth of the rhine down to alsace. the almost inexhaustible resources of this prince justify in some measure this bold project. a formidable army threatened to carry it into execution. already switzerland trembled for her liberty; but deceitful fortune abandoned him in three terrible battles, and the infatuated hero was lost in the melee of the living and the dead. [a page who had seen him fall a few days after the battle conducted the victors to the spot, and saved his remains from an ignominious oblivion. his body was dragged from out of a pool, in which it was fast frozen, naked, and so disfigured with wounds that with great difficulty he was recognized, by the well-known deficiency of some of his teeth, and by remarkably long finger-nails. but that, notwithstanding the marks, there were still incredulous people who doubted his death, and looked for his reappearance, is proved by the missive in which louis xi. called upon the burgundian states to return to their allegiance to the crown of france. "if," the passage runs, "duke charles should still be living, you shall be released from your oath to me." comines, t. iii., preuves des memoires, , .] the sole heiress of charles the bold, maria, at once the richest princess and the unhappy helen of that time, whose wooing brought misery on her inheritance, was now the centre of attraction to the whole known world. among her suitors appeared two great princes, king louis xi. of france, for his son, the young dauphin, and maximilian of austria, son of the emperor frederic iii. the successful suitor was to become the most powerful prince in europe; and now, for the first time, this quarter of the globe began to fear for its balance of power. louis, the more powerful of the two, was ready to back his suit by force of arms; but the people of the netherlands, who disposed of the hand of their princess, passed by this dreaded neighbor, and decided in favor of maximilian, whose more remote territories and more limited power seemed less to threaten the liberty of their country. a deceitful, unfortunate policy, which, through a strange dispensation of heaven, only accelerated the melancholy fate which it was intended to prevent. to philip the fair, the son of maria and maximilian, a spanish bride brought as her portion that extensive kingmdom which ferdinand and isabella had recently founded; and charles of austria, his son, was born lord of the kingdoms of spain, of the two sicilies, of the new world, and of the netherlands. in the latter country the commonalty emancipated themselves much earlier than in other; feudal states, and quickly attained to an independent political existence. the favorable situation of the country on the north sea and on great navigable rivers early awakened the spirit of commerce, which rapidly peopled the towns, encouraged industry and the arts, attracted foreigners, and diffused prosperity and affluence among them. however contemptuously the warlike policy of those times looked down upon every peaceful and useful occupation, the rulers of the country could not fail altogether to perceive the essential advantages they derived from such pursuits. the increasing population of their territories, the different imposts which they extorted from natives and foreigners under the various titles of tolls, customs, highway rates, escort money, bridge tolls, market fees, escheats, and so forth, were too valuable considerations to allow them to remain indifferent to the sources from which they were derived.. their own rapacity made them promoters of trade, and, as often happens, barbarism itself rudely nursed it, until at last a healthier policy assumed its place. in the course of time they invited the lombard merchants to settle among them, and accorded to the towns some valuable privileges and an independent jurisdiction, by which the latter acquired uncommon extraordinary credit and influence. the numerous wars which the counts and dukes carried on with one another, or with their neighbors, made them in some measure dependent on the good-will of the towns, who by their wealth obtained weight and consideration, and for the subsidies which they afforded failed not to extort important privileges in return. these privileges of the commonalties increased as the crusades with their expensive equipment augumented the necessities of the nobles; as a new road to europe was opened for the productions of the east, and as wide-spreading luxury created new wants to their princes. thus as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries we find in these lands a mixed form of governmeut, in which the prerogative of the sovereign is greatly limited by the privileges of the estates; that is to say, of the nobility, the clergy, and the municipalities. these, under the name of states, assembled as often as the wants of the province required it. without their consent no new laws were valid, no war could be carried on, and no taxes levied, no change made in the coinage, and no foreigner admitted to any office of government. all the provinces enjoyed these privileges in common; others were peculiar to the various districts. the supreme government was hereditary, but the son did not enter on the rights of his father before he had solemnly sworn to maintain the existing constitution. necessity is the first lawgiver; all the wants which had to be met by this constitution were originally of a commercial nature. thus the whole constitution was founded on commerce, and the laws of the nation were adapted to its pursuits. the last clause, which excluded foreigners from all offices of trust, was a natural consequence of the preceding articles. so complicated and artificial a relation between the sovereign and his people, which in many provinces was further modified according to the peculiar wants of each, and frequently of some single city, required for its maintenance the liveliest zeal for the liberties of the country, combined with an intimate acquaintance with them. from a foreigner neither could well be expected. this law, besides, was enforced reciprocally in each particular province; so that in brabant no fleming, in zealand no hollander, could hold office; and it continued in force even after all these provinces were united under one government. above all others, brabant enjoyed the highest degree of freedom. its privileges were esteemed so valuable that many mothers from the adjacent provinces removed thither about the time of their accouchment, in order to entitle their children to participate, by birth, in all the immunities of that favored country; just as, says strada, one improves the plants of a rude climate by removing them to the soil of a milder. after the house of burgundy had united several provinces under its dominion, the separate provincial assemblies which, up to that time, had been independent tribunals, were made subject to a supreme court at malines, which incorporated the various judicatures into one body, and decided in the last resort all civil and criminal appeals. the separate independence of the provinces was thus abolished, and the supreme power vested in the senate at malines. after the death of charles the bold the states did not neglect to avail themselves of the embarassment of their duchess, who, threatened by france, was consequently in their power. holland and zealand compelled her to sign a great charter, which secured to them the most important sovereign rights. the people of ghent carried their insolence to such a pitch that they arbitrarily dragged the favorites of maria, who had the misfortune to displease them, before their own tribunals, and beheaded them before the eyes of that princess. during the short government of the duchess maria, from her father's death to her marriage, the commons obtained powers which few free states enjoyed. after her death her husband, maximilian, illegally assumed the government as guardian of his son. offended by this invasion of their rights, the estates refused to acknowledge his authority, and could only be brought to receive him as a viceroy for a stated period, and under conditions ratified by oath. maximilian, after he became roman emperor, fancied that he might safely venture to violate the constitution. he imposed extraordinary taxes on the provinces, gave official appointments to burgundians and germans, and introduced foreign troops into the provinces. but the jealousy of these republicans kept pace with the power of their regent. as he entered bruges with a large retinue of foreigners, the people flew to arms, made themselves masters of his person, and placed him in confinement in the castle. in spite of the intercession of the imperial and roman courts, he did not again obtain his freedom until security had been given to the people on all the disputed points. the security of life and property arising from mild laws, and, an equal administration of justice, had encouraged activity and industry. in continual contest with the ocean and rapid rivers, which poured their violence on the neighboring lowlands, and whose force it was requisite to break by embankments and canals, this people had early learned to observe the natural objects around them; by industry and perseverance to defy an element of superior power; and like the egyptian, instructed by his nile, to exercise their inventive genius and acuteness in self- defence. the natural fertility of their soil, which favored agriculture and the breeding of cattle, tended at the same time to increase the population. their happy position on the sea and the great navigable rivers of germany and france, many of which debouched on their coasts; the numerous artificial canals which intersected the land in all directions, imparted life to navigation; and the facility of internal communication between the provinces, soon created and fostered a commercial spirit among these people. the neighboring coasts, denmark and britain, were the first visited by their vessels. the english wool which they brought back employed thousands of industrious hands in bruges, ghent, and antwerp; and as early as the middle of the twelfth century cloths of flanders were extensively worn in france and germany. in the eleventh century we find ships of friesland in the belt, and even in the levant. this enterprising people ventured, without a compass, to steer under the north pole round to the most northerly point of russia. from the wendish towns the netherlands received a share in the levant trade, which, at that time, still passed from the black sea through the russian territories to the baltic. when, in the thirteenth century, this trade began to decline, the crusades having opened a new road through the mediterranean for indian merchandise, and after the italian towns had usurped this lucrative branch of commerce, and the great hanseatic league had been formed in germany, the netherlands became the most important emporium between the north and south. as yet the use of the compass was not general, and the merchantmen sailed slowly and laboriously along the coasts. the ports on the baltic were, during the winter months, for the most part frozen and inaccessible. ships, therefore, which could not well accomplish within the year the long voyage from the mediterranean to the belt, gladly availed theniselves of harbors which lay half-way between the two, with an immense continent behind them with which navigable streams kept up their communication, and towards the west and north open to the ocean by commodious harbors, this country appeared to be expressly formed for a place of resort for different nations, and for a centre of commerce. the principal towns of the netherlands were established marts. portuguese, spaniards, italians, french, britons, germans, danes, and swedes thronged to them with the produce of every country in the world. competition insured cheapness; industry was stimulated as it found a ready market for its productions. with the necessary exchange of money arose the commerce in bills, which opened a new and fruitful source of wealth. the princes of the country, acquainted at last with their true interest, encouraged the merchant by important immunities, and neglected not to protect their commerce by advantageous treaties with foreign powers. when, in the fifteenth century, several provinces were united under one rule, they discontinued their private wars, which had proved so injurious, and their separate interests were now more intimately connected by a common government. their commerce and affluence prospered in the lap of a long peace, which the formidable power of their princes extorted from the neighboring monarchs. the burgundian flag was feared in every sea, the dignity of their sovereign gave support to their undertakings, and the enterprise of a private individual became the affair of a powerful state. such vigorous protection soon placed them in a position even to renounce the hanseatic league, and to pursue this daring enemy through every sea. the hanseatic merchants, against whom the coasts of spain were closed, were compelled at last, however reluctantly, to visit the flemish fairs, and purchase their spanish goods in the markets of the netherlands. bruges, in flanders, was, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the central point of the whole commerce of europe, and the great market of all nations. in the year a hundred and fifty merchant vessels were counted entering the harbor of sluys it one time. besides the rich factories of the hanseatic league, there were here fifteen trading companies, with their countinghouses, and many factories and merchants' families from every european country. here was established the market of all northern products for the south, and of all southern and levantine products for the north. these passed through the sound, and up the rhine, in hanseatic vessels to upper germany, or were transported by landcarriage to brunswick and luneburg. as in the common course of human affairs, so here also a licentious luxury followed prosperity. the seductive example of philip the good could not but accelerate its approach. the court of the burgundian dukes was the most voluptuous and magnificent in europe, italy itself not excepted. the costly dress of the higher classes, which afterwards served as patterns to the spaniards, and eventually, with other burgundian customs, passed over to the court of austria, soon descended to the lower orders, and the meanest citizen nursed his person in velvet and silk. [philip the good was too profuse a prince to amass treasures; nevertheless charles the bold found accumulated among his effects, a greater store of table services, jewels, carpets, and linen than three rich princedoms of that time together possessed, and over and above all a treasure of three hundred thousand dollars in ready money. the riches of this prince, and of the burgundian people, lay exposed on the battle-fields of granson, murten and nancy. here a swiss soldier drew from the finger of charles the bold, that celebrated diamond which was long esteemed the largest in europe, which even now sparkles in the crown of france as the second in size, but which the unwitting finder sold for a florin. the swiss exchanged the silver they found for tin, and the gold for copper, and tore into pieces the costly tents of cloth of gold. the value of the spoil of silver, gold, and jewels which was taken has been estimated at three millions. charles and his army had advanced to the combat, not like foes who purpose battle, but like conquerors who adorn themselves after victory.] comines, an author who travelled through the netherlands about the middle of the fifteenth century, tells us that pride had already attended their prosperity. the pomp and vanity of dress was carried by both sexes to extravagance. the luxury of the table had never reached so great a height among any other people. the immoral assemblage of both sexes at bathing-places, and such other places of reunion for pleasure and enjoyment, had banished all shame--and we are not here speaking of the usual luxuriousness of the higher ranks; the females of the common class abandoned themselves to such extravagances without limit or measure. but how much more cheering to the philanthropist is this extravagance than the miserable frugality of want, and the barbarous virtues of ignorance, which at that time oppressed nearly the whole of europe! the burgundian era shines pleasingly forth from those dark ages, like a lovely spring day amid the showers of february. but this flourishing condition tempted the flemish towns at last to their ruin; ghent and bruges, giddy with liberty and success, declared war against philip the good, the ruler of eleven provinces, which ended as unfortunately as it was presumptuously commenced. ghent alone lost many thousand men in an engagement near havre, and was compelled to appease the wrath of the victor by a contribution of four hundred thousand gold florins. all the municipal functionaries, and two thousand of the principal citizens, went, stripped to their shirts, barefooted, and with heads uncovered, a mile out of the town to meet the duke, and on their knees supplicated for pardon. on this occasion they were deprived of several valuable privileges, all irreparable loss for their future commerce. in the year they engaged in a war, with no better success, against maximilian of austria, with a view to, deprive him of the guardianship of his son, which, in contravention of his charter, he had unjustly assumed. in the town of bruges placed the archduke himself in confinement, and put some of his most eminent ministers to death. to avenge his son the emperor frederic iii. entered their territory with an army, and, blockading for ten years the harbor of sluys, put a stop to their entire trade. on this occasion amsterdam and antwerp, whose jealousy had long been roused by the flourishing condition of the flemish towns, lent him the most important assistance. the italians began to bring their own silk-stuffs to antwerp for sale, and the flemish cloth-workers likewise, who had settled in england, sent their goods thither; and thus the town of bruges lost two important branches of trade. the hanseatic league had long been offended at their overweening pride; and it now left them and removed its factory to antwerp. in the year all the foreign merchants left the town except only a few spaniards; but its prosperity faded as slowly as it had bloomed. antwerp received, in the sixteenth century, the trade which the luxuriousness of the flemish towns had banished; and under the government of charles v. antwerp was the most stirring and splendid city in the christian world. a stream like the scheldt, whose broad mouth, in the immediate vicinity, shared with the north sea the ebb and flow of the tide, and could carry vessels of the largest tonnage under the walls of antwerp, made it the natural resort for all vessels which visited that coast. its free fairs attracted men of business from all countries. [two such fairs lasted forty days, and all the goods sold there were duty free.] the industry of the nation had, in the beginning of this century, reached its greatest height. the culture of grain, flax, the breeding of cattle, the chase, and fisheries, enriched the peasant; arts, manufactures, and trade gave wealth to the burghers. flemish and brabantine manufactures were long to be seen in arabia, persia, and india. their ships covered the ocean, and in the black sea contended with the genoese for supremacy. it was the distinctive characteristic of the seaman of the netherlands that he made sail at all seasons of the year, and never laid up for the winter. when the new route by the cape of good hope was discovered, and the east india trade of portugal undermined that of the levant, the netherlands did not feel the blow which was inflicted on the italian republics. the portuguese established their mart in brabant, and the spices of calicut were displayed for sale in the markets of antwerp. hither poured the west indian merchandise, with which the indolent pride of spain repaid the industry of the netherlands. the east indian market attracted the most celebrated commercial houses from florence, lucca, and genoa; and the fuggers and welsers from augsburg. here the hanse towns brought the wares of the north, and here the english company had a factory. here art and nature seemed to expose to view all their riches; it was a splendid exhibition of the works of the creator and of the creature. their renown soon diffused itself through the world. even a company of turkish merchants, towards the end of this century, solicited permission to settle here, and to supply the products of the east by way of greece. with the trade in goods they held also the exchange of money. their bills passed current in the farthest parts of the globe. antwerp, it is asserted, then transacted more extensive and more important business in a single month than venice, at its most flourishing period, in two whole years. in the year the hanseatic league held its solemn meetings in this town, which had formerly assembled in lubeck alone. in the exchange was erected, at that time the most splendid in all europe, and which fulfilled its proud inscription. the town now reckoned one hundred thousand inhabitants. the tide of human beings, which incessantly poured into it, exceeds all belief. between two hundred and two hundred and fifty ships were often seen loading at one time in its harbor; no day passed on which the boats entering inwards and outwards did not amount to more than five hundred; on market days the number amounted to eight or nine hundred. daily more than two hundred carriages drove through its gates; above two thousand loaded wagons arrived every week from germany, france, and lorraine, without reckoning the farmers' carts and corn-vans, which were seldom less than ten thousand in number. thirty thousand hands were employed by the english company alone. the market dues, tolls, and excise brought millions to the government annually. we can form some idea of the resources of the nation from the fact that the extraordinary taxes which they were obliged to pay to charles v. towards his numerous wars were computed at forty millions of gold ducats. for this affluence the netherlands were as much indebted to their liberty as to the natural advantages of their country. uncertain laws and the despotic sway of a rapacious prince would quickly have blighted all the blessings which propitious nature had so abundantly lavished on them. the inviolable sanctity of the laws can alone secure to the citizen the fruits of his industry, and inspire him with that happy confidence which is the soul of all activity. the genius of this people, developed by the spirit of commerce, and by the intercourse with so many nations, shone in useful inventions; in the lap of abundance and liberty all the noble arts were carefully cultivated and carried to perfection. from italy, to which cosmo de medici had lately restored its golden age, painting, architecture, and the arts of carving and of engraving on copper, were transplanted into the netherlands, where, in a new soil, they flourished with fresh vigor. the flemish school, a daughter of the italian, soon vied with its mother for the prize; and, in common with it, gave laws to the whole of europe in the fine arts. the manufactures and arts, on which the netherlanders principally founded their prosperity, and still partly base it, require no particular enumeration. the weaving of tapestry, oil painting, the art of painting on glass, even pocketwatches and sun-dials were, as guicciardini asserts, originally invented in the netherlands. to them we are indebted for the improvement of the compass, the points of which are still known by flemish names. about the year the invention of typography is ascribed to laurence koster, of haarlem; and whether or not he is entitled to this honorable distinction, certain it is that the dutch were among the first to engraft this useful art among them; and fate ordained that a century later it should reward its country with liberty. the people of the netherlands united with the most fertile genius for inventions a happy talent for improving the discoveries of others; there are probably few mechanical arts and manufactures which they did not either produce or at least carry to a higher degree of perfection. up to this time these provinces had formed the most enviable state in europe. not one of the burgundian dukes had ventured to indulge a thought of overturning the constitution; it had remained sacred even to the daring spirit of charles the bold, while he was preparing fetters for foreign liberty. all these princes grew up with no higher hope than to be the heads of a republic, and none of their territories afforded them experience of a higher authority. besides, these princes possessed nothing but what the netherlands gave them; no armies but those which the nation sent into the field; no riches but what the estates granted to them. now all was changed. the netherlands had fallen to a master who had at his command other instruments and other resources, who could arm against them a foreign power. [the unnatural union of two such different nations as the belgians and spaniards could not possibly be prosperous. i cannot here refrain from quoting the comparison which grotius, in energetic language, has drawn between the two. "with the neighboring nations," says he, "the people of the netherlands could easily maintain a good understanding, for they were of a similar origin with themselves, and had grown up in the same manner. but the people of spain and of the netherlands differed in almost every respect from one another, and therefore, when they were brought together clashed the more violently. both had for many centuries been distinguished in war, only the latter had, in luxurious repose, become disused to arms, while the former had been inured to war in the italian and african campaigns; the desire of gain made the belgians more inclined to peace, but not less sensitive of offence. no people were more free from the lust of conquest, but none defended its own more zealously. hence the numerous towns, closely pressed together in a confined tract of country; densely crowded with a foreign and native population; fortified near the sea and the great rivers. hence for eight centuries after the northern immigration foreign arms could not prevail against them. spain, on the contrary, often changed its masters; and when at last it fell into the hands of the goths, its character and its manners had suffered more or less from each new conqueror. the people thus formed at last out of these several admixtures is described as patient in labor, imperturbable in danger, equally eager for riches and honor, proud of itself even to contempt of others, devout and grateful to strangers for any act of kindness, but also revengeful, and of such ungovernable passions in victory as so regard neither conscience nor honor in the case of an enemy. all this is foreign to the character of the belgian, who is astute but not insidious, who, placed midway between france and germany, combines in moderation the faults and good qualities of both. he is not easily to be imposed upon, nor is he to be insulted with impunity. in veneration for the deity, too, he does not yield to the spaniard; the arms of the northmen could not make him apostatize from christianity when he had once professed it. no opinion which the church condemns had, up to this time, empoisoned the purity of his faith. nay, his pious extravagance went so far that it became requisite to curb by laws the rapacity of his clergy. in both people loyalty to their rulers is equally innate, with this difference, that the belgian places the law above kings. of all the spaniards the castilians require to be, governed with the most caution; but the liberties which they arrogate for themselves they do not willingly accord to others. hence the difficult task to their common ruler, so to distribute his attention, and care between the two nations that neither the preference shown to the castilian should offend the belgian, nor the equal treatment of the belgian affront the haughty spirit of the castilian."--grotii annal. belg. l. . . . seq.] charles v. was an absolute monarch in his spanish dominions; in the netherlands he was no more than the first citizen. in the southern portion of his empire he might have learned contempt for the rights of individuals; here he was taught to respect them. the more he there tasted the pleasures of unlimited power, and the higher he raised his opinion of his own greatness, the more reluctant he must have felt to descend elsewhere to the ordinary level of humanity, and to tolerate any check upon his arbitrary authority. it requires, indeed, no ordinary degree of virtue to abstain from warring against the power which imposes a curb on our most cherished wishes. the superior power of charles awakened at the same time in the netherlands that distrust which always accompanies inferiority. never were they so alive to their constitutional rights, never so jealous of the royal prerogative, or more observant in their proceedings. under, his reign we see the most violent outbreaks of republican spirit, and the pretensions of the people carried to an excess which nothing but the increasing encroachments of the royal power could in the least justify. a sovereign will always regard the freedom of the citizen as an alienated fief, which he is bound to recover. to the citizen the authority of a sovereign is a torrent, which, by its inundation, threatens to sweep away his rights. the belgians sought to protect themselves against the ocean by embankments, and against their princes by constitutional enactments. the whole history of the world is a perpetually recurring struggle between liberty and the lust of power and possession; as the history of nature is nothing but the contest of the elements and organic bodies for space. the netherlands soon found to their cost that they had become but a province of a great monarchy. so long as their former masters had no higher aim than to promote their prosperity, their condition resembled the tranquil happiness of a secluded family, whose head is its ruler. charles v. introduced them upon the arena of the political world. they now formed a member of that gigantic body which the ambition of an individual employed as his instrument. they ceased to have their own good for their aim; the centre of their existence was transported to the soul of their ruler. as his whole government was but one tissue of plans and manoeuvres to advance his power, so it was, above all things, necessary that he should be completely master of the various limbs of his mighty empire in order to move them effectually and suddenly. it was impossible, therefore, for him to embarrass himself with the tiresome mechanism of their interior political organization, or to extend to their peculiar privileges the conscientious respect which their republican jealousy demanded. it was expedient for him to facilitate the exercise of their powers by concentration and unity. the tribunal at malines had been under his predecessor an independent court of judicature; he subjected its decrees to the revision of a royal council, which he established in brussels, and which was the mere organ of his will. he introduced foreigners into the most vital functions of their constitution, and confided to them the most important offices. these men, whose only support was the royal favor, would be but bad guardians of privileges which, moreover, were little known to them. the ever-increasing expenses of his warlike government compelled him as steadily to augment his resources. in disregard of their most sacred privileges he imposed new and strange taxes on the provinces. to preserve their olden consideration the estates were forced to grant what he had been so modest as not to extort; the whole history of the government of this monarch in the netherlands is almost one continued list of imposts demanded, refused, and finally accorded. contrary to the constitution, he introduced foreign troops into their territories, directed the recruiting of his armies in the provinces, and involved them in wars, which could not advance even if they did not injure their interest, and to which they had not given their consent. he punished the offences of a free state as a monarch; and the terrible chastisement of ghent announced to the other provinces the great change which their constitution had already undergone. the welfare of the country was so far secured as was necessary to the political schemes of its master; the intelligent policy of charles would certainly not violate the salutary regiment of the body whose energies he found himself necessitated to exert. fortunately, the opposite pursuits of selfish ambition, and of disinterested philanthropy, often bring about the same end; and the well-being of a state, which a marcus aurelius might propose to himself as a rational object of pursuit, is occasionally promoted by an augustus or a louis. charles v. was perfectly aware that commerce was the strength of the nation, and that the foundation of their commerce was liberty. he spared its liberty because he needed its strength. of greater political wisdom, though not more just than his son, he adapted his principles to the exigencies of time and place, and recalled an ordinance in antwerp and in madrid which he would under other circumstances have enforced with all the terrors of his power. that which makes the reign of charles v. particularly remarkable in regard to the netherlands is the great religious revolution which occurred under it; and which, as the principal cause of the subsequent rebellion, demands a somewhat circumstantial notice. this it was that first brought arbitrary power into the innermost sanctuary of the constitution; taught it to give a dreadful specimen of its might; and, in a measure, legalized it, while it placed republican spirit on a dangerous eminence. and as the latter sank into anarchy and rebellion monarchical power rose to the height of despotism. nothing is more natural than the transition from civil liberty to religious freedom. individuals, as well as communities, who, favored by a happy political constitution, have become acquainted with the rights of man, and accustomed to examine, if not also to create, the law which is to govern them; whose minds have been enlightened by activity, and feelings expanded by the enjoyments of life; whose natural courage has been exalted by internal security and prosperity; such men will not easily surrender themselves to the blind domination of a dull arbitrary creed, and will be the first to emancipate themselves from its yoke. another circumstance, however, must have greatly tended to diffuse the new religion in these countries. italy, it might be objected, the seat of the greatest intellectual culture, formerly the scene of the most violent political factions, where a burning climate kindles the blood with the wildest passions--italy, among all the european countries, remained the freest from this change. but to a romantic people, whom a warm and lovely sky, a luxurious, ever young and ever smiling nature, and the multifarious witcheries of art, rendered keenly susceptible of sensuous enjoyment, that form of religion must naturally have been better adapted, which by its splendid pomp captivates the senses, by its mysterious enigmas opens an unbounded range to the fancy; and which, through the most picturesque forms, labors to insinuate important doctrines into the soul. on the contrary, to a people whom the ordinary employments of civil life have drawn down to an unpoetical reality, who live more in plain notions than in images, and who cultivate their common sense at the expense of their imagination--to such a people that creed will best recommend itself which dreads not investigation, which lays less stress on mysticism than on morals, and which is rather to be understood then to be dwelt upon in meditation. in few words, the roman catholic religion will, on the whole, be found more adapted to a nation of artists, the protestant more fitted to a nation of merchants. on this supposition the new doctrines which luther diffused in germany, and calvin in switzerland, must have found a congenial soil in the netherlands. the first seeds of it were sown in the netherlands by the protestant merchants, who assembled at amsterdam and antwerp. the german and swiss troops, which charles introduced into these countries, and the crowd of french, german, and english fugitives who, under the protection of the liberties of flanders, sought to escape the sword of persecution which threatened them at home, promoted their diffusion. a great portion of the belgian nobility studied at that time at geneva, as the university of louvain was not yet in repute, and that of douai not yet founded. the new tenets publicly taught there were transplanted by the students to their various countries. in an isolated people these first germs might easily have been crushed; but in the market-towns of holland and brabant, the resort of so many different nations, their first growth would escape the notice of government, and be accelerated under the veil of obscurity. a difference in opinion might easily spring up and gain ground amongst those who already were divided in national character, in manners, customs, and laws. moreover, in a country where industry was the most lauded virtue, mendicity the most abhorred vice, a slothful body of men, like that of the monks, must have been an object of long and deep aversion. hence, the new religion, which opposed these orders, derived an immense advantage from having the popular opinion on its side. occasional pamphlets, full of bitterness and satire, to which the newly-discovered art of printing secured a rapid circulation, and several bands of strolling orators, called rederiker, who at that time made the circuit of the provinces, ridiculing in theatrical representations or songs the abuses of their times, contributed not a little to diminish respect for the romish church, and to prepare the people for the reception of the new dogmas. the first conquests of this doctrine were astonishingly rapid. the number of those who in a short time avowed themselves its adherents, especially in the northern provinces, was prodigious; but among these the foreigners far outnumbered the natives. charles v., who, in this hostile array of religious tenets, had taken the side which a despot could not fail to take, opposed to the increasing torrent of innovation the most effectual remedies. unhappily for the reformed religion political justice was on the side of its persecutor. the dam which, for so many centuries, had repelled human understanding from truth was too suddenly torn away for the outbreaking torrent not to overflow its appointed channel. the reviving spirit of liberty and of inquiry, which ought to have remained within the limits of religious questions, began also to examine into the rights of kings. while in the commencement iron fetters were justly broken off, a desire was eventually shown to rend asunder the most legitimate and most indispensable of ties. even the holy scriptures, which were now circulated everywhere, while they imparted light and nurture to the sincere inquirer after truth, were the source also whence an eccentric fanaticism contrived to extort the virulent poison. the good cause had been compelled to choose the evil road of rebellion, and the result was what in such cases it ever will be so long as men remain men. the bad cause, too, which had nothing in common with the good but the employment of illegal means, emboldened by this slight point of connection, appeared in the same company, and was mistaken for it. luther had written against the invocation of saints; every audacious varlet who broke into the churches and cloisters, and plundered the altars, called himself lutheran. faction, rapine, fanaticism, licentiousness robed themselves in his colors; the most enormous offenders, when brought before the judges, avowed themselves his followers. the reformation had drawn down the roman prelate to a level with fallible humanity; an insane band, stimulated by hunger and want, sought to annihilate all distinction of ranks. it was natural that a doctrine, which to the state showed itself only in its most unfavorable aspect, should not have been able to reconcile a monarch who had already so many reasons to extirpate it; and it is no wonder, therefore, that be employed against it the arms it had itself forced upon him. charles must already have looked upon himself as absolute in the netherlands since he did not think it necessary to extend to these countries the religious liberty which be had accorded to germany. while, compelled by the effectual resistance of the german princes, he assured to the former country a free exercise of the new religion, in the latter he published the most cruel edicts for its repression. by these the reading of the evangelists and apostles; all open or secret meetings to which religion gave its name in ever so slight a degree; all conversations on the subject, at home or at the table, were forbidden under severe penalties. in every province special courts of judicature were established to watch over the execution of the edicts. whoever held these erroneous opinions was to forfeit his office without regard to his rank. whoever should be convicted of diffusing heretical doctrines, or even of simply attending the secret meetings of the reformers, was to be condemned to death, and if a male, to be executed by the sword, if a female, buried alive. backsliding heretics were to be committed to the flames. not even the recantation of the offender could annul these appalling sentences. whoever abjured his errors gained nothing by his apostacy but at farthest a milder kind of death. the fiefs of the condemned were also confiscated, contrary to the privileges of the nation, which permitted the heir to redeem them for a trifling fine; and in defiance of an express and valuable privilege of the citizens of holland, by which they were not to be tried out of their province, culprits were conveyed beyond the limits of the native judicature, and condemned by foreign tribunals. thus did religion guide the hand of despotism to attack with its sacred weapon, and without danger or opposition, the liberties which were inviolable to the secular arm. charles v., emboldened by the fortunate progress of his arms in germany, thought that he might now venture on everything, and seriously meditated the introduction of the spanish inquisition in the netherlands. but the terror of its very name alone reduced commerce in antwerp to a standstill. the principal foreign merchants prepared to quit the city. all buying and selling ceased, the value of houses fell, the employment of artisans stopped. money disappeared from the hands of the citizen. the ruin of that flourishing commercial city was inevitable had not charles v. listened to the representations of the duchess of parma, and abandoned this perilous resolve. the tribunal, therefore, was ordered not to interfere with the foreign merchants, and the title of inquisitor was changed unto the milder appellation of spiritual judge. but in the other provinces that tribunal proceeded to rage with the inhuman despotism which has ever been peculiar to it. it has been computed that during the reign of charles v. fifty thousand persons perished by the hand of the executioner for religion alone. when we glance at the violent proceedings of this monarch we are quite at a loss to comprehend what it was that kept the rebellion within bounds during his reign, which broke out with so much violence under his successor. a closer investigation will clear up this seeming anomaly. charles's dreaded supremacy in europe had raised the commerce of the netherlands to a height which it had never before attained. the majesty of his name opened all harbors, cleared all seas for their vessels, and obtained for them the most favorable cornmercial treaties with foreign powers. through him, in particular, they destroyed the dominion of the hanse towns in the baltic. through him, also, the new world, spain, italy, germany, which now shared with them a common ruler, were, in a measure, to be considered as provinces of their own country, and opened new channels for their commerce. he had, moreover, united the remaining six provinces with the hereditary states of burgundy, and thus given to them an extent and political importance which placed them by the side of the first kingdoms of europe. [he had, too, at one time the intention of raising it to a kingdom; but the essential points of difference between the provinces, which extended from constitution and manners to measures and weights, soon made him abandon this design. more important was the service which he designed them in the burgundian treaty, which settled its relation to the german empire. according to this treaty the seventeen provinces were to contribute to the common wants of the german empire twice as much as an electoral prince; in case of a turkish war three times as much; in return for which, however, they were to enjoy the powerful protection of this empire, and not to be injured in any of their various privileges. the revolution, which under charles' son altered the political constitution of the provinces, again annulled this compact, which, on account of the trifling advantage that it conferred, deserves no further notice.] by all this he flattered the national pride of this people. moreover, by the incorporation of gueldres, utrecht, friesland, and groningen with these provinces, he put an end to the private wars which had so long disturbed their commerce; an unbroken internal peace now allowed them to enjoy the full fruits of their industry. charles was therefore a benefactor of this people. at the same time, the splendor of his victories dazzled their eyes; the glory of their sovereign, which was reflected upon them also, had bribed their republican vigilance; while the awe-inspiring halo of invincibility which encircled the conqueror of germany, france, italy, and africa terrified the factious. and then, who knows not on how much may venture the man, be he a private individual or a prince, who has succeeded in enchaining the admiration of his fellow-creatures! his repeated personal visits to these lands, which he, according to his own confession, visited as often as ten different times, kept the disaffected within bounds; the constant exercise of severe and prompt justice maintained the awe of the royal power. finally, charles was born in the netherlands, and loved the nation in whose lap he had grown up. their manners pleased him, the simplicity of their character and social intercourse formed for him a pleasing recreation from the severe spanish gravity. he spoke their language, and followed their customs in his private life. the burdensome ceremonies which form the unnatural barriers between king and people were banished from brussels. no jealous foreigner debarred natives from access to their prince; their way to him was through their own countrymen, to whom he entrusted his person. he spoke much and courteously with them; his deportment was engaging, his discourse obliging. these simple artifices won for him their love, and while his armies trod down their cornfields, while his rapacious imposts diminished their property, while his governors oppressed, his executioners slaughtered, he secured their hearts by a friendly demeanor. gladly would charles have seen this affection of the nation for himself descend upon his son. on this account he sent for him in his youth from spain, and showed him in brussels to his future subjects. on the solemn day of his abdication he recommended to him these lands as the richest jewel in his crown, and earnestly exhorted him to respect their laws and privileges. philip ii. was in all the direct opposite of his father. as ambitious as charles, but with less knowledge of men and of the rights of man, he had formed to himself a notion of royal authority which regarded men as simply the servile instruments of despotic will, and was outraged by every symptom of liberty. born in spain, and educated under the iron discipline of the monks, he demanded of others the same gloomy formality and reserve as marked his own character. the cheerful merriment of his flemish subjects was as uncongenial to his disposition and temper as their privileges were offensive to his imperious will. he spoke no other language but the spanish, endured none but spaniards about his person, and obstinately adhered to all their customs. in vain did the loyal ingenuity of the flemish towns through which he passed vie with each other in solemnizing his arrival with costly festivities. [the town of antwerp alone expended on an occasion of this kind two hundred and sixty thousand gold florins.] philip's eye remained dark; all the profusion of magnificence, all the loud and hearty effusions of the sincerest joy could not win from him one approving smile. charles entirely missed his aim by presenting his son to the flemings. they might eventually have endured his yoke with less impatience if he had never set his foot in their land. but his look forewarned them what they had to expect; his entry into brussels lost him all hearts. the emperor's gracious affability with his people only served to throw a darker shade on the haughty gravity of his son. they read in his countenance the destructive purpose against their liberties which, even then, he already revolved in his breast. forewarned to find in him a tyrant they were forearmed to resist him. the throne of the netherlands was the first which charles v. abdicated. before a solemn convention in brussels he absolved the states-general of their oath, and transferred their allegiance to king philip, his son. "if my death," addressing the latter, as he concluded, "had placed you in possession of these countries, even in that case so valuable a bequest would have given me great claims on your gratitude. but now that of my free will i transfer them to you, now that i die in order to hasten your enjoyment of them, i only require of you to pay to the people the increased obligation which the voluntary surrender of my dignity lays upon you. other princes esteem it a peculiar felicity to bequeath to their children the crown which death is already ravishing from then. this happiness i am anxious to enjoy during my life. i wish to be a spectator of your reign. few will follow my example, as few have preceded me in it. but this my deed will be praised if your future life should justify my expectations, if you continue to be guided by that wisdom which you have hitherto evinced, if you remain inviolably attached to the pure faith which is the main pillar of your throne. one thing more i have to add: may heaven grant you also a son, to whom you may transmit your power by choice, and not by necessity." after the emperor had concluded his address philip kneeled down before him, kissed his hand, and received his paternal blessing. his eyes for the last time were moistened with a tear. all present wept. it was an hour never to be forgotten. this affecting farce was soon followed by another. philip received the homage of the assembled states. he took the oath administered in the following words: "i, philip, by the grace of god, prince of spain, of the two sicilies, etc., do vow and swear that i will be a good and just lord in these countries, counties, and duchies, etc.; that i will well and truly hold, and cause to be held, the privileges and liberties of all the nobles, towns, commons, and subjects which have been conferred upon them by my predecessors, and also the customs, usages and rights which they now have and enjoy, jointly and severally, and, moreover, that i will do all that by law and right pertains to a good and just prince and lord, so help me god and all his saints." the alarm which the arbitrary government of the emperor had inspired, and the distrust of his son, are already visible in the formula of this oath, which was drawn up in far more guarded and explicit terms than that which had been administered to charles v. himself and all the dukes in burgundy. philip, for instance, was compelled to swear to the maintenance of their customs and usages, what before his time had never been required. in the oath which the states took to him no other obedience was promised than such as should be consistent with the privileges of the country. his officers then were only to reckon on submission and support so long as they legally discharged the duties entrusted to them. lastly, in this oath of allegiance, philip is simply styled the natural, the hereditary prince, and not, as the emperor had desired, sovereign or lord; proof enough how little confidence was placed in the justice and liberality of the new sovereign. philip ii., ruler of the netherlands. philip ii. received the lordship of the netherlands in the brightest period of their prosperity. he was the first of their princes who united them all under his authority. they now consisted of seventeen provinces; the duchies of brabant, limburg, luxembourg, and gueldres, the seven counties of artois, hainault, flanders, namur, zutphen, holland, and zealand, the margravate of antwerp, and the five lordships of friesland, mechlin (malines), utrecht, overyssel, and groningen, which, collectively, formed a great and powerful state able to contend with monarchies. higher than it then stood their commerce could not rise. the sources of their wealth were above the earth's surface, but they were more valuable and inexhaustible and richer than all the mines in america. these seventeen provinces which, taken together, scarcely comprised the fifth part of italy, and do not extend beyond three hundred flemish miles, yielded an annual revenue to their lord, not much inferior to that which britain formerly paid to its kings before the latter had annexed so many of the ecclesiastical domains to their crown. three hundred and fifty cities, alive with industry and pleasure, many of them fortified by their natural position and secure without bulwarks or walls; six thousand three hundred market towns of a larger size; smaller villages, farms, and castles innumerable, imparted to this territory the aspect of one unbroken flourishing landscape. the nation had now reached the meridian of its splendor; industry and abundance had exalted the genius of the citizen, enlightened his ideas, ennobled his affections; every flower of the intellect had opened with the flourishing condition of the country. a happy temperament under a severe climate cooled the ardor of their blood, and moderated the rage of their passions; equanimity, moderation, and enduring patience, the gifts of a northern clime; integrity, justice, and faith, the necessary virtues of their profession; and the delightful fruits of liberty, truth, benevolence, and a patriotic pride were blended in their character, with a slight admixture of human frailties. no people on earth was more easily governed by a prudent prince, and none with more difficulty by a charlatan or a tyrant. nowhere was the popular voice so infallible a test of good government as here. true statesmanship could be tried in no nobler school, and a sickly artificial policy had none worse to fear. a state constituted like this could act and endure with gigantic energy whenever pressing emergencies called forth its powers and a skilful and provident administration elicited its resources. charles v. bequeathed to his successor an authority in these provinces little inferior to that of a limited monarchy. the prerogative of the crown had gained a visible ascendancy over the republican spirit, and that complicated machine could now be set in motion, almost as certainly and rapidly as the most absolutely governed nation. the numerous nobility, formerly so powerful, cheerfully accompanied their sovereign in his wars, or, on the civil changes of the state, courted the approving smile of royality. the crafty policy of the crown had created a new and imaginary good, of which it was the exclusive dispenser. new passions and new ideas of happiness supplanted at last the rude simplicity of republican virtue. pride gave place to vanity, true liberty to titles of honor, a needy independence to a luxurious servitude. to oppress or to plunder their native land as the absolute satraps of an absolute lord was a more powerful allurement for the avarice and ambition of the great, than in the general assembly of the state to share with the monarch a hundredth part of the supreme power. a large portion, moreover, of the nobility were deeply sunk in poverty and debt. charles v. had crippled all the most dangerous vassals of the crown by expensive embassies to foreign courts, under the specious pretext of honorary distinctions. thus, william of orange was despatched to germany with the imperial crown, and count egmont to conclude the marriage contract between philip and queen mary. both also afterwards accompanied the duke of alva to france to negotiate the peace between the two crowns, and the new alliance of their sovereign with madame elizabeth. the expenses of these journeys amounted to three hundred thousand florins, towards which the king did not contribute a single penny. when the prince of orange was appointed generalissimo in the place of the duke of savoy he was obliged to defray all the necessary expenses of his office. when foreign ambassadors or princes came to brussels it was made incumbent on the nobles to maintain the honor of their king, who himself always dined alone, and never kept open table. spanish policy had devised a still more ingenious contrivance gradually to impoverish the richest families of the land. every year one of the castilian nobles made his appearance in brussels, where he displayed a lavish magnificence. in brussels it was accounted an indelible disgrace to be distanced by a stranger in such munificence. all vied to surpass him, and exhausted their fortunes in this costly emulation, while the spaniard made a timely retreat to his native country, and by the frugality of four years repaired the extravagance of one year. it was the foible of the netherlandish nobility to contest with every stranger the credit of superior wealth, and of this weakness the government studiously availed itself. certainly these arts did not in the sequel produce the exact result that had been calculated on; for these pecuniary burdens only made the nobility the more disposed for innovation, since he who has lost all can only be a gainer in the general ruin. the roman church had ever been a main support of the royal power, and it was only natural that it should be so. its golden time was the bondage of the human intellect, and, like royalty, it had gained by the ignorance and weakness of men. civil oppression made religion more necessary and more dear; submission to tyrannical power prepares the mind for a blind, convenient faith, and the hierarchy repaid with usury the services of despotism. in the provinces the bishops and prelates were zealous supporters of royalty, and ever ready to sacrifice the welfare of the citizen to the temporal advancement of the church and the political interests of the sovereign. numerous and brave garrisons also held the cities in awe, which were at the same time divided by religious squabbles and factions, and consequently deprived of their strongest support--union among themselves. how little, therefore, did it require to insure this preponderance of philip's power, and how fatal must have been the folly by which it was lost. but philip's authority in these provinces, however great, did not surpass the influence which the spanish monarchy at that time enjoyed throughout europe. no state ventured to enter the arena of contest with it. france, its most dangerous neighbor, weakened by a destructive war, and still more by internal factions, which boldly raised their heads during the feeble government of a child, was advancing rapidly to that unhappy condition which, for nearly half a century, made it a theatre of the most enormous crimes and the most fearful calamities. in england elizabeth could with difficulty protect her still tottering throne against the furious storms of faction, and her new church establishment against the insidious arts of the romanists. that country still awaited her mighty call before it could emerge from a humble obscurity, and had not yet been awakened by the faulty policy of her rival to that vigor and energy with which it finally overthrew him. the imperial family of germany was united with that of spain by the double ties of blood and political interest; and the victorious progress of soliman drew its attention more to the east than to the west of europe. gratitude and fear secured to philip the italian princes, and his creatures ruled the conclave. the monarchies of the north still lay in barbarous darkness and obscurity, or only just began to acquire form and strength, and were as yet unrecognized in the political system of europe. the most skilful generals, numerous armies accustomed to victory, a formidable marine, and the golden tribute from the west indies, which now first began to come in regularly and certainly--what terrible instruments were these in the firm and steady hand of a talented prince under such auspicious stars did king philip commence his reign. before we see him act we must first look hastily into the deep recesses of his soul, and we shall there find a key to his political life. joy and benevolence were wholly wanting in the composition of his character. his temperament, and the gloomy years of his early childhood, denied him the former; the latter could not be imparted to him by men who had renounced the sweetest and most powerful of the social ties. two ideas, his own self and what was above that self, engrossed his narrow and contracted mind. egotism and religion were the contents and the title- page of the history of his whole life. he was a king and a christian, and was bad in both characters; he never was a man among men, because he never condescended but only ascended. his belief was dark and cruel; for his divinity was a being of terror, from whom he had nothing to hope but everything to fear. to the ordinary man the divinity appears as a comforter, as a saviour; before his mind it was set up as an image of fear, a painful, humiliating check to his human omnipotence. his veneration for this being was so much the more profound and deeply rooted the less it extended to other objects. he trembled servilely before god because god was the only being before whom he had to tremble. charles v. was zealous for religion because religion promoted his objects. philip was so because he had real faith in it. the former let loose the fire and the sword upon thousands for the sake of a dogma, while be himself, in the person of the pope, his captive, derided the very doctrine for which he had sacrificed so much human blood. it was only with repugnance and scruples of conscience that philip resolved on the most just war against the pope, and resigned all the fruits of his victory as a penitent malefactor surrenders his booty. the emperor was cruel from calculation, his son from impulse. the first possessed a strong and enlightened spirit, and was, perhaps, so much the worse as a man; the second was narrow-minded and weak, but the more upright. both, however, as it appears to me, might have been better men than they actually were, and still, on the whole, have acted on the very same principles. what we lay to the charge of personal character of an individual is very often the infirmity, the necessary imperfection of universal human nature. a monarchy so great and so powerful was too great a trial for human pride, and too mighty a charge for human power. to combine universal happiness with the highest liberty of the individual is the sole prerogative of infinite intelligence, which diffuses itself omnipresently over all. but what resource has man when placed in the position of omnipotence? man can only aid his circumscribed powers by classification; like the naturalist, he establishes certain marks and rules by which to facilitate his own feeble survey of the whole, to which all individualities must conform. all this is accomplished for him by religion. she finds hope and fear planted in every human breast; by making herself mistress of these emotions, and directing their affections to a single object, she virtually transforms millions of independent beings into one uniform abstract. the endless diversity of the human will no longer embarrasses its ruler--now there exists one universal good, one universal evil, which he can bring forward or withdraw at pleasure, and which works in unison with himself even when absent. now a boundary is established before which liberty must halt; a venerable, hallowed line, towards which all the various conflicting inclinations of the will must finally converge. the common aim of despotism and of priestcraft is uniformity, and uniformity is a necessary expedient of human poverty and imperfection. philip became a greater despot than his father because his mind was more contracted, or, in other words, he was forced to adhere the more scrupulously to general rules the less capable he was of descending to special and individual exceptions. what conclusion could we draw from these principles but that philip ii. could not possibly have any higher object of his solicitude than uniformity, both in religion and in laws, because without these he could not reign? and yet he would have shown more mildness and forbearance in his government if he had entered upon it earlier. in the judgment which is usually formed of this prince one circumstance does not appear to be sufficiently considered in the history of his mind and heart, which, however, in all fairness, ought to be duly weighed. philip counted nearly thirty years when he ascended the spanish throne, and the early maturity of his understanding had anticipated the period of his majority. a mind like his, conscious of its powers, and only too early acquainted with his high expectations, could not brook the yoke of childish subjection in which he stood; the superior genius of the father, and the absolute authority of the autocrat, must have weighed heavily on the self-satisfied pride of such a son. the share which the former allowed him in the government of the empire was just important enough to disengage his mind from petty passions and to confirm the austere gravity of his character, but also meagre enough to kindle a fiercer longing for unlimited power. when he actually became possessed of uncontrolled authority it had lost the charm of novelty. the sweet intoxication of a young monarch in the sudden and early possession of supreme power; that joyous tumult of emotions which opens the soul to every softer sentiment, and to which humanity has owed so many of the most valuable and the most prized of its institutions; this pleasing moment had for him long passed by, or had never existed. his character was already hardened when fortune put him to this severe test, and his settled principles withstood the collision of occasonal emotion. he had had time, during fifteen years, to prepare himself for the change; and instead of youthful dallying with the external symbols of his new station, or of losing the morning of his government in the intoxication of an idle vanity, he remained composed and serious enough to enter at once on the full possession of his power so as to revenge himself through the most extensive employment of it for its having been so long withheld from him. the tribunal of the inquisition philip ii. no sooner saw himself, through the peace of chateau-cambray, in undisturbed enjoyment of his immense territory than he turned his whole attention to the great work of purifying religion, and verified the fears of his netherlandish subjects. the ordinances which his father had caused to be promulgated against heretics were renewed in all their rigor, and terrible tribunals, to whom nothing but the name of inquisition was wanting, were appointed to watch over their execution. but his plan appeared to him scarcely more than half-fulfilled so long as he could not transplant into these countries the spanish inquisition in its perfect form--a design in which the emperor had already suffered shipwreck. the spanish inquisition is an institution of a new and peculiar kind, which finds no prototype in the whole course of time, and admits of comparison with no ecclesiastical or civil tribunal. inquisition had existed from the time when reason meddled with what is holy, and from the very commencement of scepticism and innovation; but it was in the middle of the thirteenth century, after some examples of apostasy had alarmed the hierarchy, that innocent iii. first erected for it a peculiar tribunal, and separated, in an unnatural manner, ecclesiastical superintendence and instruction from its judicial and retributive office. in order to be the more sure that no human sensibilities or natural tenderness should thwart the stern severity of its statutes, he took it out of the hands of the bishops and secular clergy, who, by the ties of civil life, were still too much attached to humanity for his purpose, and consigned it to those of the monks, a half-denaturalized race of beings who had abjured the sacred feelings, of nature, and were the servile tools of the roman see. the inquisition was received in germany, italy, spain, portugal, and france; a franciscan monk sat as judge in the terrible court, which passed sentence on the templars. a few states succeeded either in totally excluding or else in subjecting it to civil authority. the netherlands had remained free from it until the government of charles v.; their bishops exercised the spiritual censorship, and in extraordinary cases reference was made to foreign courts of inquisition; by the french provinces to that of paris, by the germans to that of cologne. but the inquisition which we are here speaking of came from the west of europe, and was of a different origin and form. the last moorish throne in granada had fallen in the fifteenth century, and the false faith of the saracens had finally succumbed before the fortunes of christianity. but the gospel was still new, and but imperfectly established in this youngest of christian kingdoms, and in the confused mixture of heterogeneous laws and manners the religions had become mixed. it is true the sword of persecution had driven many thousand families to africa, but a far larger portion, detained by the love of climate and home, purchased remission from this dreadful necessity by a show of conversion, and continued at christian altars to serve mohammed and moses. so long as prayers were offered towards mecca, granada was not subdued; so long as the new christian, in the retirement of his house, became again a jew or a moslem, he was as little secured to the throne as to the romish see. it was no longer deemed sufficient to compel a perverse people to adopt the exterior forms of a new faith, or to wed it to the victorious church by the weak bands of ceremonials; the object now was to extirpate the roots of an old religion, and to subdue an obstinate bias which, by the slow operation of centuries, had been implanted in their manners, their language, and their laws, and by the enduring influence of a paternal soil and sky was still maintained in its full extent and vigor. if the church wished to triumph completely over the opposing worship, and to secure her new conquest beyond all chance of relapse, it was indispensable that she should undermine the foundation itself on which the old religion was built. it was necessary to break to pieces the entire form of moral character to which it was so closely and intimately attached. it was requisite to loosen its secret roots from the hold they had taken in. the innermost depths of the soul; to extinguish all traces of it, both in domestic life and in the civil world; to cause all recollection of it to perish; and, if possible, to destroy the very susceptibility for its impressions. country and family, conscience and honor, the sacred feelings of society and of nature, are ever the first and immediate ties to which religion attaches itself; from these it derives while it imparts strength. this connection was now to be dissolved; the old religion was violently to be dissevered from the holy feelings of nature, even at the expense of the sanctity itself of these emotions. thus arose that inquisition which, to distinguish it from the more humane tribunals of the same name, we usually call the spanish. its founder was cardinal ximenes, a dominican monk. torquemada was the first who ascended its bloody throne, who established its statutes, and forever cursed his order with this bequest. sworn to the degradation of the understanding and the murder of intellect, the instruments it employed were terror and infamy. every evil passion was in its pay; its snare was set in every joy of life. solitude itself was not safe from it; the fear of its omnipresence fettered the freedom of the soul in its inmost and deepest recesses. it prostrated all the instincts of human nature before it yielded all the ties which otherwise man held most sacred. a heretic forfeited all claims upon his race; the most trivial infidelity to his mother church divested him of the rights of his nature. a modest doubt in the infallibility of the pope met with the punishment of parricide and the infamy of sodomy; its sentences resembled the frightful corruption of the plague, which turns the most healthy body into rapid putrefaction. even the inanimate things belonging to a heretic were accursed. no destiny could snatch the victim of the inquisition from its sentence. its decrees were carried in force on corpses and on pictures, and the grave itself was no asylum from its tremendous arm. the presumptuous arrogance of its decrees could only be surpassed by the inhumanity which executed them. by coupling the ludicrous with the terrible, and by amusing the eye with the strangeness of its processions, it weakened compassion by the gratification of another feeling; it drowned sympathy in derision and contempt. the delinquent was conducted with solemn pomp to the place of execution, a blood-red flag was displayed before him, the universal clang of all the bells accompanied the procession. first came the priests, in the robes of the mass and singing a sacred hymn; next followed the condemned sinner, clothed in a yellow vest, covered with figures of black devils. on his head he wore a paper cap, surmounted by a human figure, around which played lambent flames of fire, and ghastly demons flitted. the image of the crucified saviour was carried before, but turned away from the eternally condemned sinner, for whom salvation was no longer available. his mortal body belonged to the material fire, his immortal soul to the flames of bell. a gag closed his mouth, and prevented him from alleviating his pain by lamentations, from awakening compassion by his affecting tale, and from divulging the secrets of the holy tribunal. he was followed by the clergy in festive robes, by the magistrates, and the nobility; the fathers who had been his judges closed the awful procession. it seemed like a solemn funeral procession, but on looking for the corpse on its way to the grave, behold! it was a living body whose groans are now to afford such shuddering entertainment to the people. the executions were generally held on the high festivals, for which a number of such unfortunate sufferers were reserved in the prisons of the holy house, in order to enhance the rejoicing by the multitude of the victims, and on these occasions the king himself was usually present. he sat with uncovered head, on a lower chair than that of the grand inquisitor, to whom, on such occasions, he yielded precedence; who, then, would not tremble before a tribunal at which majesty must humble itself? the great revolution in the church accomplished by luther and calvin renewed the causes to which this tribunal owed its first origin; and that which, at its commencement, was invented to clear the petty kingdom of granada from the feeble remnant of saracens and jews was now required for the whole of christendom. all the inquisitions in portugal, italy, germany, and france adopted the form of the spanish; it followed europeans to the indies, and established in goa a fearful tribunal, whose inhuman proceedings make us shudder even at the bare recital. wherever it planted its foot devastation followed; but in no part of the world did it rage so violently as in spain. the victims are forgotten whom it immolated; the human race renews itself, and the lands, too, flourish again which it has devastated and depopulated by its fury; but centuries will elapse before its traces disappear from the spanish character. a generous and enlightened nation has been stopped by it on its road to perfection; it has banished genius from a region where it was indigenous, and a stillness like that which hangs over the grave has been left in the mind of a people who, beyond most others of our world, were framed for happiness and enjoyment. the first inquisitor in brabant was appointed by charles v. in the year . some priests were associated with him as coadjutors; but he himself was a layman. after the death of adrian vi., his successor, clement vii., appointed three inquisitors for all the netherlands; and paul iii. again reduced them to two, which number continued until the commencement of the troubles. in the year , with the aid and approbation of the states, the edicts against heretics were promulgated, which formed the foundation of all that followed, and in which, also, express mention is made of the inquisition. in the year , in consequence of the rapid increase of sects, charles v. was under the necessity of reviving and enforcing these edicts, and it was on this occasion that the town of antwerp opposed the establishment of the inquisition, and obtained an exemption from its jurisdiction. but the spirit of the inquisition in the netherlands, in accordance with the genius of the country, was more humane than in spain, and as yet had never been administered by a foreigner, much less by a dominican. the edicts which were known to everybody served it as the rule of its decisions. on this very account it was less obnoxious; because, however severe its sentence, it did not appear a tool of arbitrary power, and it did not, like the spanish inquisition, veil itself in secrecy. philip, however, was desirous of introducing the latter tribunal into the netherlands, since it appeared to him the instrument best adapted to destroy the spirit of this people, and to prepare them for a despotic government. he began, therefore, by increasing the rigor of the religious ordinances of his father; by gradually extending the power of the inquisitors; by making the proceedings more arbitrary, and more independent of the civil jurisdiction. the tribunal soon wanted little more than the name and the dominicans to resemble in every point the spanish inquisition. bare suspicion was enough to snatch a citizen from the bosom of public tranquillity, and from his domestic circle; and the weakest evidence was a sufficient justification for the use of the rack. whoever fell into its abyss returned no more to the world. all the benefits of the laws ceased for him; the maternal care of justice no longer noticed him; beyond the pale of his former world malice and stupidity judged him according to laws which were never intended for man. the delinquent never knew his accuser, and very seldom his crime, --a flagitious, devilish artifice which constrained the unhappy victim to guess at his error, and in the delirium of the rack, or in the weariness of a long living interment, to acknowledge transgressions which, perhaps, had never been committed, or at least had never come to the knowledge of his judges. the goods of the condemned were confiscated, and the informer encouraged by letters of grace and rewards. no privilege, no civil jurisdiction was valid against the holy power; the secular arm lost forever all whom that power had once touched. its only share in the judicial duties of the latter was to execute its sentences with humble submissiveness. the consequences of such an institution were, of necessity, unnatural and horrible; the whole temporal happiness, the life itself, of an innocent man was at the mercy of any worthless fellow. every secret enemy, every envious person, had now the perilous temptation of an unseen and unfailing revenge. the security of property, the sincerity of intercourse were gone; all the ties of interest were dissolved; all of blood and of affection were irreparably broken. an infectious distrust envenomed social life; the dreaded presence of a spy terrified the eye from seeing, and choked the voice in the midst of utterance. no one believed in the existence of an honest man, or passed for one himself. good name, the ties of country, brotherhood, even oaths, and all that man holds sacred, were fallen in estimation. such was the destiny to which a great and flourishing commercial town was subjected, where one hundred thousand industrious men had been brought together by the single tie of mutual confidence,--every one indispensable to his neighbor, yet every one distrusted and distrustful,--all attracted by the spirit of gain, and repelled from each other by fear,--all the props of society torn away, where social union was the basis of all life and all existence. other encroachments on the constitution of the netherlands. no wonder if so unnatural a tribunal, which had proved intolerable even to the more submissive spirit of the spaniard, drove a free state to rebellion. but the terror which it inspired was increased by the spanish troops, which, even after the restoration of peace, were kept in the country, and, in violation of the constitution, garrisoned border towns. charles v. had been forgiven for this introduction of foreign troops so long as the necessity of it was evident, and his good intentions were less distrusted. but now men saw in these troops only the alarming preparations of oppression and the instruments of a detested hierarchy. moreover, a considerable body of cavalry, composed of natives, and fully adequate for the protection of the country, made these foreigners superfluous. the licentiousness and rapacity, too, of the spaniards, whose pay was long in arrear, and who indemnified themselves at the expense of the citizens, completed the exasperation of the people, and drove the lower orders to despair. subsequently, when the general murmur induced the government to move them from the frontiers and transport them into the islands of zealand, where ships were prepared for their deportation, their excesses were carried to such a pitch that the inhabitants left off working at the embankments, and preferred to abandon their native country to the fury of the sea rather than to submit any longer to the wanton brutality of these lawless bands. philip, indeed, would have wished to retain these spaniards in the country, in order by their presence to give weight to his edicts, and to support the innovations which he had resolved to make in the constitution of the netherlands. he regarded them as a guarantee for the submission of the nation and as a chain by which he held it captive. accordingly, he left no expedient untried to evade the persevering importunity of the states, who demanded the withdrawal of these troops; and for this end he exhausted all the resources of chicanery and persuasion. at one time he pretended to dread a sudden invasion by france, although, torn by furious factions, that country could scarce support itself against a domestic enemy; at another time they were, he said, to receive his son, don carlos, on the frontiers; whom, however, he never intended should leave castile. their maintenance should not be a burden to the nation; he himself would disburse all their expenses from his private purse. in order to detain them with the more appearance of reason he purposely kept back from them their arrears of pay; for otherwise he would assuredly have preferred them to the troops of the country, whose demands he fully satisfied. to lull the fears of the nation, and to appease the general discontent, he offered the chief command of these troops to the two favorites of the people, the prince of orange and count egmont. both, however, declined his offer, with the noble-minded declaration that they could never make up their minds to serve contrary to the laws of the country. the more desire the king showed to have his spaniards in the country the more obstinately the states insisted on their removal. in the following diet at ghent he was compelled, in the very midst of his courtiers, to listen to republican truth. "why are foreign hands needed for our defence?" demanded the syndic of ghent. "is it that the rest of the world should consider us too stupid, or too cowardly, to protect ourselves? why have we made peace if the burdens of war are still to oppress us? in war necessity enforced endurance; in peace our patience is exhausted by its burdens. or shall we be able to keep in order these licentious bands which thine own presence could not restrain? here, cambray and antwerp cry for redress; there, thionville and marienburg lie waste; and, surely, thou hast not bestowed upon us peace that our cities should become deserts, as they necessarily must if thou freest them not from these destroyers? perhaps then art anxious to guard against surprise from our neighbors? this precaution is wise; but the report of their preparations will long outrun their hostilities. why incur a heavy expense to engage foreigners who will not care for a country which they must leave to-morrow? hast thou not still at thy command the same brave netherlanders to whom thy father entrusted the republic in far more troubled times? why shouldest thou now doubt their loyalty, which, to thy ancestors, they have preserved for so many centuries inviolate? will not they be sufficient to sustain the war long enough to give time to thy confederates to join their banners, or to thyself to send succor from the neighboring country?" this language was too new to the king, and its truth too obvious for him to be able at once to reply to it. "i, also, am a foreigner," he at length exclaimed, "and they would like, i suppose, to expel me from the country!" at the same time he descended from the throne, and left the assembly; but the speaker was pardoned for his boldness. two days afterwards he sent a message to the states that if he had been apprised earlier that these troops were a burden to them he would have immediately made preparation to remove them with himself to spain. now it was too late, for they would not depart unpaid; but he pledged them his most sacred promise that they should not be oppressed with this burden more than four months. nevertheless, the troops remained in this country eighteen months instead of four; and would not, perhaps, even then have left it so soon if the exigencies of the state had not made their presence indispensable in another part of the world. the illegal appointment of foreigners to the most important offices of the country afforded further occasion of complaint against the government. of all the privileges of the provinces none was so obnoxious to the spaniards as that which excluded strangers from office, and none they had so zealously sought to abrogate. italy, the two indies, and all the provinces of this vast empire, were indeed open to their rapacity and ambition; but from the richest of them all an inexorable fundamental law excluded them. they artfully persuaded their sovereign that his power in these countries would never be firmly established so long as he could not employ foreigners as his instruments. the bishop of arras, a burgundian by birth, had already been illegally forced upon the flemings; and now the count of feria, a castilian, was to receive a seat and voice in the council of state. but this attempt met with a bolder resistance than the king's flatterers had led him to expect, and his despotic omnipotence was this time wrecked by the politic measures of william of orange and the firmness of the states. william of orange and count egmont. by such measures, did philip usher in his government of the netherlands, and such were the grievances of the nation when he was preparing to leave them. he had long been impatient to quit a country where he was a stranger, where there was so much that opposed his secret wishes, and where his despotic mind found such undaunted monitors to remind him of the laws of freedom. the peace with france at last rendered a longer stay unnecessary; the armaments of soliman required his presence in the south, and the spaniards also began to miss their long-absent king. the choice of a supreme stadtholder for the netherlands was the principal matter which still detained him. emanuel philibert, duke of savoy, had filled this place since the resignation of mary, queen of hungary, which, however, so long as the king himself was present, conferred more honor than real influence. his absence would make it the most important office in the monarchy, and the most splendid aim for the ambition of a subject. it had now become vacant through the departure of the duke, whom the peace of chateau-cambray had restored to his dominions. the almost unlimited power with which the supreme statholder would be entrusted, the capacity and experience which so extensive and delicate an appointment required, but, especially, the daring designs which the government had in contemplation against the freedom of the country, the execution of which would devolve on him, necessarily embarrassed the choice. the law, which excluded all foreigners from office, made an exception in the case of the supreme stadtholder. as he could not be at the same time a native of all the provinces, it was allowable for him not to belong to any one of them; for the jealousy of the man of brabant would concede no greater right to a fleming, whose home was half a mile from his frontier, than to a sicilian, who lived in another soil and under a different sky. but here the interests of the crown itself seemed to favor the appointment of a native. a brabanter, for instance, who enjoyed the full confidence of his countrymen if he were a traitor would have half accomplished his treason before a foreign governor could have overcome the mistrust with which his most insignificant measures would be watched. if the government should succeed in carrying through its designs in one province, the opposition of the rest would then be a temerity, which it would be justified in punishing in the severest manner. in the common whole which the provinces now formed their individual constitutions were, in a measure, destroyed; the obedience of one would be a law for all, and the privilege, which one knew not how to preserve, was lost for the rest. among the flemish nobles who could lay claim to the chief stadtholdership, the expectations and wishes of the nation were divided between count egmont and the prince of orange, who were alike qualified for this high dignity by illustrious birth and personal merits, and by an equal share in the affections of the people. their high rank placed them both near to the throne, and if the choice of the monarch was to rest on the worthiest it must necessarily fall upon one of these two. as, in the course of our history, we shall often have occasion to mention both names, the reader cannot be too early made acquainted with their characters. william i., prince of orange, was descended from the princely german house of nassau, which had already flourished eight centuries, had long disputed the preeminence with austria, and had given one emperor to germany. besides several extensive domains in the netherlands, which made him a citizen of this republic and a vassal of the spanish monarchy, he possessed also in france the independent princedom of orange. william was born in the year , at dillenburg, in the country of nassau, of a countess stolberg. his father, the count of nassau, of the same name, had embraced the protestant religion, and caused his son also to be educated in it; but charles v., who early formed an attachment for the boy, took him when quite young to his court, and had him brought up in the romish church. this monarch, who already in the child discovered the future greatness of the man, kept him nine years about his person, thought him worthy of his personal instruction in the affairs of government, and honored him with a confidence beyond his years. he alone was permitted to remain in the emperor's presence when he gave audience to foreign ambassadors--a proof that, even as a boy, he had already begun to merit the surname of the silent. the emperor was not ashamed even to confess openly, on one occasion, that this young man had often made suggestions which would have escaped his own sagacity. what expectations might not be formed of the intellect of a man who was disciplined in such a school. william was twenty-three years old when charles abdicated the government, and had already received from the latter two public marks of the highest esteem. the emperor had entrusted to him, in preference to all the nobles of his court, the honorable office of conveying to his brother ferdinand the imperial crown. when the duke of savoy, who commanded the imperial army in the netherlands, was called away to italy by the exigency of his domestic affairs, the emperor appointed him commander-in-chief against the united representations of his military council, who declared it altogether hazardous to oppose so young a tyro in arms to the experienced generals of france. absent, and unrecommended by any, he was preferred by the monarch to the laurel- crowned band of his heroes, and the result gave him no cause to repent of his choice. the marked favor which the prince had enjoyed with the father was in itself a sufficient ground for his exclusion from the confidence of the son. philip, it appears, had laid it down for himself as a rule to avenge the wrongs of the spanish nobility for the preference which charles v. had on all important occasions shown to his flemish nobles. still stronger, however, were the secret motives which alienated him from the prince. william of orange was one of those lean and pale men who, according to caesar's words, "sleep not at night, and think too much," and before whom the most fearless spirits quail. the calm tranquillity of a never-varying countenance concealed a busy, ardent soul, which never ruffled even the veil behind which it worked, and was alike inaccessible to artifice and love; a versatile, formidable, indefatigable mind, soft, and ductile enough to be instantaneously moulded into all forms; guarded enough to lose itself in none; and strong enough to endure every vicissitude of fortune. a greater master in reading and in winning men's hearts never existed than william. not that, after the fashion of courts, his lips avowed a servility to which his proud heart gave the lie; but because he was neither too sparing nor too lavish of the marks of his esteem, and through a skilful economy of the favors which mostly bind men, he increased his real stock in them. the fruits of his meditation were as perfect as they were slowly formed; his resolves were as steadily and indomitably accomplished as they were long in maturing. no obstacles could defeat the plan which he had once adopted as the best; no accidents frustrated it, for they all had been foreseen before they actually occurred. high as his feelings were raised above terror and joy, they were, nevertheless, subject in the same degree to fear; but his fear was earlier than the danger, and he was calm in tumult because he had trembled in repose. william lavished his gold with a profuse hand, but he was a niggard of his movements. the hours of repast were the sole hours of relaxation, but these were exclusively devoted to his heart, his family, and his friends; this the modest deduction he allowed himself from the cares of his country. here his brow was cleared with wine, seasoned by temperance and a cheerful disposition; and no serious cares were permitted to enter this recess of enjoyment. his household was magnificent; the splendor of a numerous retinue, the number and respectability of those who surrounded his person, made his habitation resemble the court of a sovereign prince. a sumptuous hospitality, that master-spell of demagogues, was the goddess of his palace. foreign princes and ambassadors found here a fitting reception and entertainment, which surpassed all that luxurious belgium could elsewhere offer. a humble submissiveness to the government bought off the blame and suspicion which this munificence might have thrown on his intentions. but this liberality secured for him the affections of the people, whom nothing gratified so much as to see the riches of their country displayed before admiring foreigners, and the high pinnacle of fortune on which he stood enhanced the value of the courtesy to which he condescended. no one, probably, was better fitted by nature for the leader of a conspiracy than william the silent. a comprehensive and intuitive glance into the past, the present, and the future; the talent for improving every favorable opportunity; a commanding influence over the minds of men, vast schemes which only when viewed from a distance show form and symmetry; and bold calculations which were wound up in the long chain of futurity; all these faculties he possessed, and kept, moreover, under the control of that free and enlightened virtue which moves with firm step even on the very edge of the abyss. a man like this might at other times have remained unfathomed by his whole generation; but not so by the distrustful spirit of the age in which he lived. philip ii. saw quickly and deeply into a character which, among good ones, most resembled his own. if he had not seen through him so clearly his distrust of a man, in whom were united nearly all the qualities which he prized highest and could best appreciate, would be quite inexplicable. but william had another and still more important point of contact with philip ii. he had learned his policy from the same master, and had become, it was to be feared, a more apt scholar. not by making machiavelli's 'prince' his study, but by having enjoyed the living instruction of a monarch who reduced the book to practice, had he become versed in the perilous arts by which thrones rise and fall. in him philip had to deal with an antagonist who was armed against his policy, and who in a good cause could also command the resources of a bad one. and it was exactly this last circumstance which accounts for his having hated this man so implacably above all others of his day, and his having had so supernatural a dread of him. the suspicion which already attached to the prince was increased by the doubts which were entertained of his religious bias. so long as the emperor, his benefactor, lived, william believed in the pope; but it was feared, with good ground, that the predilection for the reformed religion, which had been imparted into his young heart, had never entirely left it. whatever church he may at certain periods of his life have preferred each might console itself with the reflection that none other possessed him more entirely. in later years he went over to calvinism with almost as little scruple as in his early childhood he deserted the lutheran profession for the romish. he defended the rights of the protestants rather than their opinions against spanish oppression; not their faith, but their wrongs, had made him their brother. these general grounds for suspicion appeared to be justified by a discovery of his real intentions which accident had made. william had remained in france as hostage for the peace of chateau-cambray, in concluding which he had borne a part; and here, through the imprudence of henry ii., who imagined he spoke with a confidant of the king of spain, he became acquainted with a secret plot which the french and spanish courts had formed against protestants of both kingdoms. the prince hastened to communicate this important discovery to his friends in brussels, whom it so nearly concerned, and the letters which he exchanged on the subject fell, unfortunately, into the hands of the king of spain. philip was less surprised at this decisive disclosure of william's sentiments than incensed at the disappointment of his scheme; and the spanish nobles, who had never forgiven the prince that moment, when in the last act of his life the greatest of emperors leaned upon his shoulders, did not neglect this favorable opportunity of finally ruining, in the good opinion of their king, the betrayer of a state secret. of a lineage no less noble than that of william was lamoral, count egmont and prince of gavre, a descendant of the dukes of gueldres, whose martial courage had wearied out the arms of austria. his family was highly distinguished in the annals of the country; one of his ancestors, had, under maximilian, already filled the office of stadtholder over holland. egmont's marriage with the duchess sabina of bavaria reflected additional lustre on the splendor of his birth, and made him powerful through the greatness of this alliance. charles v. had, in the year , conferred on him at utrecht the order of the golden fleece; the wars of this emperor were the school of his military genius, and the battle of st. quentin and gravelines made him the hero of his age. every blessing of peace, for which a commercial people feel most grateful, brought to mind the remembrance of the victory by which it was accelerated, and flemish pride, like a fond mother, exulted over the illustrious son of their country, who had filled all europe with admiration. nine children who grew up under the eyes of their fellow- citizens, multiplied and drew closer the ties between him and his fatherland, and the people's grateful affection for the father was kept alive by the sight of those who were dearest to him. every appearance of egmont in public was a triumphal procession; every eye which was fastened upon him recounted his history; his deeds lived in the plaudits of his companions-in-arms; at the games of chivalry mothers pointed him out to their children. affability, a noble and courteous demeanor, the amiable virtues of chivalry, adorned and graced his merits. his liberal soul shone forth on his open brow; his frank-heartedness managed his secrets no better than his benevolence did his estate, and a thought was no sooner his than it was the property of all. his religion was gentle and humane, but not very enlightened, because it derived its light from the heart and not from, his understanding. egmont possessed more of conscience than of fixed principles; his head had not given him a code of its own, but had merely learnt it by rote; the mere name of any action, therefore, was often with him sufficient for its condemnation. in his judgment men were wholly bad or wholly good, and had not something bad or something good; in this system of morals there was no middle term between vice and virtue; and consequently a single good trait often decided his opinion of men. egmont united all the eminent qualities which form the hero; he was a better soldier than the prince of orange, but far inferior to him as a statesman; the latter saw the world as it really was; egmont viewed it in the magic mirror of an imagination that embellished all that it reflected. men, whom fortune has surprised with a reward for which they can find no adequate ground in their actions, are, for the most part, very apt to forget the necessary connection between cause and effect, and to insert in the natural consequences of things a higher miraculous power to which, as caesar to his fortune, they at last insanely trust. such a character was egmont. intoxicated with the idea of his own merits, which the love and gratitude of his fellow-citizens had exaggerated, he staggered on in this sweet reverie as in a delightful world of dreams. he feared not, because he trusted to the deceitful pledge which destiny had given him of her favor, in the general love of the people; and he believed in its justice because he himself was prosperous. even the most terrible experience of spanish perfidy could not afterwards eradicate this confidence from his soul, and on the scaffold itself his latest feeling was hope. a tender fear for his family kept his patriotic courage fettered by lower duties. because he trembled for property and life he could not venture much for the republic. william of orange broke with the throne because its arbitrary power was offensive to his pride; egmont was vain, and therefore valued the favors of the monarch. the former was a citizen of the world; egmont had never been more than a fleming. philip ii. still stood indebted to the hero of st. quentin, and the supreme stadtholdership of the netherlands appeared the only appropriate reward for such great services. birth and high station, the voice of the nation and personal abilities, spoke as loudly for egmont as for orange; and if the latter was to be passed by it seemed that the former alone could supplant him. two such competitors, so equal in merit, might have embarrassed philip in his choice if he had ever seriously thought of selecting either of them for the appointment. but the pre-eminent qualities by which they supported their claim to this office were the very cause of their rejection; and it was precisely the ardent desire of the nation for their election to it that irrevocably annulled their title to the appointment. philip's purpose would not be answered by a stadtholder in the netherlands who could command the good-will and the energies of the people. egmont's descent from the duke of gueldres made him an hereditary foe of the house of spain, and it seemed impolitic to place the supreme power in the hands of a man to whom the idea might occur of revenging on the son of the oppressor the oppression of his ancestor. the slight put on their favorites could give no just offence either to the nation or to themselves, for it might be pretended that the king passed over both because he would not show a preference to either. the disappointment of his hopes of gaining the regency did not deprive the prince of orange of all expectation of establishing more firmly his influence in the netherlands. among the other candidates for this office was also christina, duchess of lorraine, and aunt of the king, who, as mediatrix of the peace of chateau-cambray, had rendered important service to the crown. william aimed at the hand of her daughter, and he hoped to promote his suit by actively interposing his good offices for the mother; but he did not reflect that through this very intercession he ruined her cause. the duchess christina was rejected, not so much for the reason alleged, namely, the dependence of her territories on france made her an object of suspicion to the spanish court, as because she was acceptable to the people of the netherlands and the prince of orange. margaret of parma regent of the netherlands. while the general expectation was on the stretch as to whom the fature destines of the provinces would be committed, there appeared on the frontiers of the country the duchess margaret of parma, having been summoned by the king from italy to assume the government. margaret was a natural daughter of charles v. and of a noble flemish lady named vangeest, and born in . out of regard for the honor of her mother's house she was at first educated in obscurity; but her mother, who possessed more vanity than honor, was not very anxious to preserve the secret of her origin, and a princely education betrayed the daughter of the emperor. while yet a child she was entrusted to the regent margaret, her great-aunt, to be brought up at brussels under her eye. this guardian she lost in her eighth year, and the care of her education devolved on queen mary of hungary, the successor of margaret in the regency. her father had already affianced her, while yet in her fourth year, to a prince of ferrara; but this alliance being subsequently dissolved, she was betrothed to alexander de medicis, the new duke of florence, which marriage was, after the victorious return of the emperor from africa, actually consummated in naples. in the first year of this unfortunate union, a violent death removed from her a husband who could not love her, and for the third time her hand was disposed of to serve the policy of her father. octavius farnese, a prince of thirteen years of age and nephew of paul iii., obtained, with her person, the duchies of parma and piacenza as her portion. thus, by a strange destiny, margaret at the age of maturity was contracted to a boy, as in the years of infancy she had been sold to a nman. her disposition, which was anything but feminine, made this last alliance still more unnatural, for her taste and inclinations were masculine, and the whole tenor of her life belied her sex. after the example of her instructress, the queen of hungary, and her great-aunt, the duchess mary of burgundy, who met her death in this favorite sport, she was passionately fond of hunting, and had acquired in this pursuit such bodily vigor that few men were better able to undergo its hardships and fatigues. her gait itself was so devoid of grace that one was far more tempted to take her for a disguised man than for a masculine woman; and nature, whom she had derided by thus transgressing the limits of her sex, revenged itself finally upon her by a disease peculiar to men--the gout. these unusual qualities were crowned by a monkish superstition which was infused into her mind by ignatius loyola, her confessor and teacher. among the charitable works and penances with which she mortified her vanity, one of the most remarkable was that, during passion-week she yearly washed, with her own hands, the feet of a number of poor men (who were most strictly forbidden to cleanse themselves beforehand), waited on them at table like a servant, and sent them away with rich presents. nothing more is requisite than this last feature in her character to account for the preference which the king gave her over all her rivals; but his choice was at the same time justified by excellent reasons of state. margaret was born and also educated in the netherlands. she had spent her early youth among the people, and had acquired much of their national manners. two regents (duchess margaret and queen mary of hungary), under whose eyes she had grown up, had gradually initiated her into the maxims by which this peculiar people might be most easily governed; and they would also serve her as models. she did not want either in talents; and possessed, moreover, a particular turn for business, which she had acquired from her instructors, and had afterwards carried to greater perfection in the italian school. the netherlands had been for a number of years accustomed to female government; and philip hoped, perhaps, that the sharp iron of tyranny which he was about to use against them would cut more gently if wielded by the hands of a woman. some regard for his father, who at the time was still living, and was much attached to margaret, may have in a measure, as it is asserted, influenced this choice; as it is also probable that the king wished to oblige the duke of parma, through this mark of attention to his wife, and thus to compensate for denying a request which he was just then compelled to refuse him. as the territories of the duchess were surrounded by philip's italian states, and at all times exposed to his arms, he could, with the less danger, entrust the supreme power into her hands. for his full security her son, alexander farnese, was to remain at his court as a pledge for her loyalty. all these reasons were alone sufficiently weighty to turn the king's decision in her favor; but they became irresistible when supported by the bishop of arras and the duke of alva. the latter, as it appears, because he hated or envied all the other competitors, the former, because even then, in all probability, he anticipated from the wavering disposition of this princess abundant gratification for his ambition. philip received the new regent on the frontiers with a splendid cortege, and conducted her with magnificent pomp to ghent, where the states general had been convoked. as he did not intend to return soon to the netherlands, he desired, before he left them, to gratify the nation for once by holding a solemn diet, and thus giving a solemn sanction and the force of law to his previous regulations. for the last time he showed himself to his netherlandish people, whose destinies were from henceforth to be dispensed from a mysterious distance. to enhance the splendor of this solemn day, philip invested eleven knights with the order of the golden fleece, his sister being seated on a chair near himself, while he showed her to the nation as their future ruler. all the grievances of the people, touching the edicts, the inquisition, the detention of the spanish troops, the taxes, and the illegal introduction of foreigners into the offices and administration of the country were brought forward in this diet, and were hotly discussed by both parties; some of them were skilfully evaded, or apparently removed, others arbitrarily repelled. as the king was unacquainted with the language of the country, he addressed the nation through the mouth of the bishop of arras, recounted to them with vain-glorious ostentation all the benefits of his government, assured them of his favor for the future, and once more recommended to the estates in the most earnest manner the preservation of the catholic faith and the extirpation of heresy. the spanish troops, he promised, should in a few months evacuate the netherlands, if only they would allow him time to recover from the numerous burdens of the last war, in order that he might be enabled to collect the means for paying the arrears of these troops; the fundamental laws of the nation should remain inviolate, the imposts should not be grievously burdensome, and the inquisition should administer its duties with justice and moderation. in the choice of a supreme stadtholder, he added, he had especially consulted the wishes of the nation, and had decided for a native of the country, who had been brought up in their manners and customs, and was attached to them by a love to her native land. he exhorted them, therefore, to show their gratitude by honoring his choice, and obeying his sister, the duchess, as himself. should, he concluded, unexpected obstacles oppose his return, he would send in his place his son, prince charles, who should reside in brussels. a few members of this assembly, more courageous than the rest, once more ventured on a final effort for liberty of conscience. every people, they argued, ought to be treated according to their natural character, as every individual must in accordance to his bodily constitution. thus, for example, the south may be considered happy under a certain degree of constraint which would press intolerably on the north. never, they added, would the flemings consent to a yoke under which, perhaps, the spaniards bowed with patience, and rather than submit to it would they undergo any extremity if it was sought to force such a yoke upon them. this remonstrance was supported by some of the king's counsellors, who strongly urged the policy of mitigating the rigor of religious edicts. but philip remained inexorable. better not reign at all, was his answer, than reign over heretics! according to an arrangement already made by charles v., three councils or chambers were added to the regent, to assist her in the administration of state affairs. as long as philip was himself present in the netherlands these courts had lost much of their power, and the functions of the first of them, the state council, were almost entirely suspended. now that he quitted the reins of government, they recovered their former importance. in the state council, which was to deliberate upon war and peace, and security against external foes, sat the bishop of arras, the prince of orange, count egmont, the president of the privy council, viglius van zuichem van aytta, and the count of barlaimont, president of the chamber of finance. all knights of the golden fleece, all privy counsellors and counsellors of finance, as also the members of the great senate at malines, which had been subjected by charles v. to the privy council in brussels, had a seat and vote in the council of state, if expressly invited by the regent. the management of the royal revenues and crown lands was vested in the chamber of finance, and the privy council was occupied with the administration of justice, and the civil regulation of the country, and issued all letters of grace and pardon. the governments of the provinces which had fallen vacant were either filled up afresh or the former governors were confirmed. count egmont received flanders and artois; the prince of orange, holland, zealand, utrecht, and west friesland; the count of aremberg, east friesland, overyssel, and groningen; the count of mansfeld, luxemburg; barlaimont, namur; the marquis of bergen, hainault, chateau-cambray, and valenciennes; the baron of montigny, tournay and its dependencies. other provinces were given to some who have less claim to our attention. philip of montmorency, count of hoorn, who had been succeeded by the count of megen in the government of gueldres and ziitphen, was confirmed as admiral of the belgian navy. every governor of a province was at the same time a knight of the golden fleece and member of the council of state. each had, in the province over which he presided, the command of the military force which protected it, the superintendence of the civil administration and the judicature; the governor of flanders alone excepted, who was not allowed to interfere with the administration of justice. brabant alone was placed under the immediate jurisdiction of the regent, who, according to custom, chose brussels for her constant residence. the induction of the prince of orange into his governments was, properly speaking, an infraction of the constitution, since he was a foreigner; but several estates which he either himself possessed in the provinces, or managed as guardian of his son, his long residence in the country, and above all the unlimited confidence the nation reposed in him, gave him substantial claims in default of a real title of citizenship. the military force of the low countries consisted, in its full complement, of three thousand horse. at present it did not much exceed two thousand, and was divided into fourteen squadrons, over which, besides the governors of the provinces, the duke of arschot, the counts of hoogstraten, bossu, roeux, and brederode held the chief command. this cavalry, which was scattered through all the seventeen provinces, was only to be called out on sudden emergencies. insufficient as it was for any great undertaking, it was, nevertheless, fully adequate for the maintenance of internal order. its courage had been approved in former wars, and the fame of its valor was diffused through the whole of europe. in addition to this cavalry it was also proposed to levy a body of infantry, but hitherto the states had refused their consent to it. of foreign troops there were still some german regiments in the service, which were waiting for their pay. the four thousand spaniards, respecting whom so many complaints had been made, were under two spanish generals, mendoza and romero, and were in garrison in the frontier towns. among the belgian nobles whom the king especially distinguished in these new appointments, the names of count egmont and william of orange stand conspicuous. however inveterate his hatred was of both, and particularly of the latter, philip nevertheless gave them these public marks of his favor, because his scheme of vengeance was not yet fully ripe, and the people were enthusiastic in their devotion to them. the estates of both were declared exempt from taxes, the most lucrative governments were entrusted to them, and by offering them the command of the spaniards whom he left behind in the country the king flattered them with a confidence which he was very far from really reposing in them. but at the very time when he obliged the prince with these public marks of his esteem he privately inflicted the most cruel injury on him. apprehensive lest an alliance with the powerful house of lorraine might encourage this suspected vassal to bolder measures, he thwarted the negotiation for a marriage between him and a princess of that family, and crushed his hopes on the very eve of their accomplishment,--an injury which the prince never forgave. nay, his hatred to the prince on one occasion even got completely the better of his natural dissimulation, and seduced him into a step in which we entirely lose sight of philip ii. when he was about to embark at flushing, and the nobles of the country attended him to the shore, he so far forgot himself as roughly to accost the prince, and openly to accuse him of being the author of the flemish troubles. the prince answered temperately that what had happened had been done by the provinces of their own suggestion and on legitimate grounds. no, said philip, seizing his hated, and shaking it violently, not the provinces, but you! you! you! the prince stood mute with astonishment, and without waiting for the king's embarkation, wished him a safe journey, and went back to the town. thus the enmity which william had long harbored in his breast against the oppressor of a free people was now rendered irreconcilable by private hatred; and this double incentive accelerated the great enterprise which tore from the spanish crown seven of its brightest jewels. philip had greatly deviated from his true character in taking so gracious a leave of the netherlands. the legal form of a diet, his promise to remove the spaniards from the frontiers, the consideration of the popular wishes, which had led him to fill the most important offices of the country with the favorites of the people, and, finally, the sacrifice which he made to the constitution in withdrawing the count of feria from the council of state, were marks of condescension of which his magnanimity was never again guilty. but in fact he never stood in greater need of the good-will of the states, that with their aid he might, if possible, clear off the great burden of debt which was still attached to the netherlands from the former war. he hoped, therefore, by propitiating them through smaller sacrifices to win approval of more important usurpations. he marked his departure with grace, for he knew in what hands he left them. the frightful scenes of death which he intended for this unhappy people were not to stain the splendor of majesty which, like the godhead, marks its course only with beneficence; that terrible distinction was reserved for his representatives. the establishment of the council of state was, however, intended rather to flatter the vanity of the belgian nobility than to impart to them any real influence. the historian strada (who drew his information with regard to the regent from her own papers) has preserved a few articles of the secret instructions which the spanish ministry gave her. amongst other things it is there stated if she observed that the councils were divided by factions, or, what would be far worse, prepared by private conferences before the session, and in league with one another, then she was to prorogue all the chambers and dispose arbitrarily of the disputed articles in a more select council or committee. in this select committee, which was called the consulta, sat the archbishop of arras, the president viglius, and the count of barlaimont. she was to act in the same manner if emergent cases required a prompt decision. had this arrangement not been the work of an arbitrary despotism it would perhaps have been justified by sound policy, and republican liberty itself might have tolerated it. in great assemblies where many private interests and passions co-operate, where a numerous audience presents so great a temptation to the vanity of the orator, and parties often assail one another with unmannerly warmth, a decree can seldom be passed with that sobriety and mature deliberation which, if the members are properly selected, a smaller body readily admits of. in a numerous body of men, too, there is, we must suppose, a greater number of limited than of enlightened intellects, who through their equal right of vote frequently turn the majority on the side of ignorance. a second maxim which the regent was especially to observe, was to select the very members of council who had voted against any decree to carry it into execution. by this means not only would the people be kept in ignorance of the originators of such a law, but the private quarrels also of the members would be restrained, and a greater freedom insured in voting in compliance with the wishes of the court. in spite of all these precautions philip would never have been able to leave the netherlands with a quiet mind so long as he knew that the chief power in the council of state, and the obedience of the provinces, were in the hands of the suspected nobles. in order, therefore, to appease his fears from this quarter, and also at the same time to assure himself of the fidelity of the regent, be subjected her, and through her all the affairs of the judicature, to the higher control of the bishop of arras. in this single individual he possessed an adequate counterpoise to the most dreaded cabal. to him, as to an infallible oracle of majesty, the duchess was referred, and in him there watched a stern supervisor of her administration. among all his contemporaries granvella was the only one whom philip ii. appears to have excepted from his universal distrust; as long as he knew that this man was in brussels he could sleep calmly in segovia. he left the netherlands in september, , was saved from a storm which sank his fleet, and landed at laredo in biscay, and in his gloomy joy thanked the deity who had preserved him by a detestable vow. in the hands of a priest and of a woman was placed the dangerous helm of the netherlands; and the dastardly tyrant escaped in his oratory at madrid the supplications, the complaints, and the curses of the people. marguerite de navarre memoirs of marguerite de valois memoirs of marguerite de valois queen of navarre being historic memoirs of the courts of france and navarre book iii. history of the house of valois. [author unknown] charles, comte de valois, was the younger brother of philip the fair, and therefore uncle of the three sovereigns lately dead. his eldest son philip had been appointed guardian to the queen of charles iv.; and when it appeared that she had given birth to a daughter, and not a son, the barons, joining with the notables of paris and the, good towns met to decide who was by right the heir to the throne, "for the twelve peers of france said and say that the crown of france is of such noble estate that by no succession can it come to a woman nor to a woman's son," as froissart tells us. this being their view, the baby daughter of charles iv. was at once set aside; and the claim of edward iii. of england, if, indeed, he ever made it, rested on isabella of france, his mother, sister of the three sovereigns. and if succession through a female had been possible, then the daughters of those three kings had rights to be reserved. it was, however, clear that the throne must go to a man, and the crown was given to philip of valois, founder of a new house of sovereigns. the new monarch was a very formidable person. he had been a great feudal lord, hot and vehement, after feudal fashion; but he was now to show that he could be a severe master, a terrible king. he began his reign by subduing the revolted flemings on behalf of his cousin louis of flanders, and having replaced him in his dignities, returned to paris and there held high state as king. and he clearly was a great sovereign; the weakness of the late king had not seriously injured france; the new king was the elect of the great lords, and they believed that his would be a new feudal monarchy; they were in the glow of their revenge over the flemings for the days of courtrai; his cousins reigned in hungary and naples, his sisters were married to the greatest of the lords; the queen of navarre was his cousin; even the youthful king of england did him homage for guienne and ponthieu. the barons soon found out their mistake. philip vi., supported by the lawyers, struck them whenever he gave them opening; he also dealt harshly with the traders, hampering them and all but ruining them, till the country was alarmed and discontented. on the other hand, young edward of england had succeeded to a troubled inheritance, and at the beginning was far weaker than his rival; his own sagacity, and the advance of constitutional rights in england, soon enabled him to repair the breaches in his kingdom, and to gather fresh strength from the prosperity and good-will of a united people. while france followed a more restricted policy, england threw open her ports to all comers; trade grew in london as it waned in paris; by his marriage with philippa of hainault, edward secured a noble queen, and with her the happiness of his subjects and the all-important friendship of the low countries. in the followers of philip vi. persuaded louis of flanders to arrest the english merchants then in flanders; whereupon edward retaliated by stopping the export of wool, and jacquemart van arteveldt of ghent, then at the beginning of his power, persuaded the flemish cities to throw off all allegiance to their french-loving count, and to place themselves under the protection of edward. in return philip vi. put himself in communication with the scots, the hereditary foes of england, and the great wars which were destined to last years, and to exhaust the strength of two strong nations, were now about to begin. they brought brilliant and barren triumphs to england, and, like most wars, were a wasteful and terrible mistake, which, if crowned with ultimate success, might, by removing the centre of the kingdom into france, have marred the future welfare of england, for the happy constitutional development of the country could never have taken place with a sovereign living at paris, and french interests becoming ever more powerful. fortunately, therefore, while the war evoked by its brilliant successes the national pride of englishmen, by its eventual failure it was prevented from inflicting permanent damage on england. the war began in and ended in ; the epochs in it are the treaty of bretigny in , the treaty of troyes in , the final expulsion of the english in . the french king seems to have believed himself equal to the burdens of a great war, and able to carry out the most far-reaching plans. the pope was entirely in his hands, and useful as a humble instrument to curb and harass the emperor. philip had proved himself master of the flemish, and, with help of the king of scotland, hoped so to embarrass edward iii. as to have no difficulty in eventually driving him to cede all his french possessions. while he thought it his interest to wear out his antagonist without any open fighting, it was edward's interest to make vigorous and striking war. france therefore stood on the defensive; england was always the attacking party. on two sides, in flanders and in brittany, france had outposts which, if well defended, might long keep the english power away from her vitals. unluckily for his side, philip was harsh and raw, and threw these advantages away. in flanders the repressive commercial policy of the count, dictated from paris, gave edward the opportunity, in the end of , of sending the earl of derby, with a strong fleet, to raise the blockade of cadsand, and to open the flemish markets by a brilliant action, in which the french chivalry was found powerless against the english yeoman-archers; and in edward crossed over to antwerp to see what forward movement could be made. the other frontier war was that of brittany, which began a little later ( ). the openings of the war were gloomy and wasteful, without glory. edward did not actually send defiance to philip till , when he proclaimed himself king of france, and quartered the lilies of france on the royal shield. the flemish proved a very reed; and though the french army came up to meet the english in the vermando country, no fighting took place, and the campaign of ended obscurely. norman and genoese ships threatened the southern shores of england, landing at southampton and in the isle of wight unopposed. in edward returned to flanders; on his way he attacked the french fleet which lay at sluys, and utterly destroyed it. the great victory of sluys gave england for centuries the mastery of the british channel. but, important as it was, it gave no success to the land campaign. edward wasted his strength on an unsuccessful siege of tournia, and, ill-supported by his flemish allies, could achieve nothing. the french king in this year seized on guienne; and from scotland tidings came that edinburgh castle, the strongest place held by the english, had fallen into the hands of douglas. neither from flanders nor from guienne could edward hope to reach the heart of the french power; a third inlet now presented itself in brittany. on the death of john iii. of brittany, in , jean de montfort, his youngest brother, claimed the great fief, against his niece jeanne, daughter of his elder brother guy, comte de penthievre. he urged that the salic law, which had been recognised in the case of the crown, should also apply to this great duchy, so nearly an independent sovereignty. jeanne had been married to charles de blois, whom john iii. of brittany had chosen as his heir; charles was also nephew of king philip, who gladly espoused his cause. thereon jean de montfort appealed to edward, and the two kings met in border strife in brittany. the bretons sided with john against the influence of france. both the claimants were made prisoners; the ladies carried on a chivalric warfare, jeanne de montfort against jeanne de blois, and all went favourably with the french party till philip, with a barbarity as foolish as it was scandalous, tempted the chief breton lords to paris and beheaded them without trial. the war, suspended by a truce, broke out again, and the english raised large forces and supplies, meaning to attack on three sides at once,--from flanders, brittany, and guienne. the flemish expedition came to nothing; for the people of ghent in murdered jacques van arteveldt as he was endeavouring to persuade them to receive the prince of wales as their count, and edward, on learning this adverse news, returned to england. thence, in july, , he sailed for normandy, and, landing at la hogue, overran with ease the country up to paris. he was not, however, strong enough to attack the capital, for philip lay with a large army watching him at st. denis. after a short hesitation edward crossed the seine at poissy, and struck northwards, closely followed by philip. he got across the somme safely, and at crecy in ponthieu stood at bay to await the french. though his numbers were far less than theirs, he had a good position, and his men were of good stuff; and when it came to battle, the defeat of the french was crushing. philip had to fall back with his shattered army; edward withdrew unmolested to calais, which he took after a long siege in . philip had been obliged to call up his son john from the south, where he was observing the english under the earl of derby; thereupon the english overran all the south, taking poitiers and finding no opposition. queen philippa of hainault had also defeated and taken david of scotland at neville's cross. the campaign of - was on all hands disastrous to king philip. he sued for and obtained a truce for ten months. these were the days of the "black death," which raged in france from to , and completed the gloom of the country, vexed by an arbitrary and grasping monarch, by unsuccessful war, and now by the black cloud of pestilence. in king philip died, leaving his crown to john of normandy. he had added two districts and a title to france: he bought montpellier from james of aragon, and in also bought the territories of humbert, dauphin of vienne, who resigned the world under influence of the revived religion of the time, a consequence of the plague, and became a carmelite friar. the fief and the title of dauphin were granted to charles, the king's grandson, who was the first person who attached that title to the heir to the french throne. apart from these small advantages, the kingdom of france had suffered terribly from the reign of the false and heartless philip vi. nor was france destined to enjoy better things under john "the good," one of the worst sovereigns with whom she has been cursed. he took as his model and example the chivalric john of bohemia, who had been one of the most extravagant and worthless of the princes of his time, and had perished in his old age at crecy. the first act of the new king was to take from his kinsman, charles "the bad" of navarre, champagne and other lands; and charles went over to the english king. king john was keen to fight; the states general gave him the means for carrying on war, by establishing the odious "gabelle" on salt, and other imposts. john hoped with his new army to drive the english completely out of the country. petty war began again on all the frontiers,--an abortive attack on calais, a guerilla warfare in brittany, slight fighting also in guienne. edward in landed at calais, but was recalled to pacify scotland; charles of navarre and the duke of lancaster were on the breton border; the black prince sailed for bordeaux. in he rode northward with a small army to the loire, and king john, hastily summoning all his nobles and fief-holders, set out to meet him. hereon the black prince, whose forces were weak, began to retreat; but the french king outmarched and intercepted him near poitiers. he had the english completely in his power, and with a little patience could have starved them into submission; instead, he deemed it his chivalric duty to avenge crecy in arms, and the great battle of poitiers was the result ( th september, ). the carnage and utter ruin of the french feudal army was quite incredible; the dead seemed more than the whole army of the black prince; the prisoners were too many to be held. the french army, bereft of leaders, melted away, and the black prince rode triumphantly back to bordeaux with the captive king john and his brave little son in his train. a two years' truce ensued; king john was carried over to london, where he found a fellow in misfortune in david of scotland, who had been for eleven years a captive in english hands. the utter degradation of the nobles, and the misery of the country, gave to the cities of france an opportunity which one great man, etienne marcel, provost of the traders at paris, was not slow to grasp. he fortified the capital and armed the citizens; the civic clergy made common cause with him; and when the dauphin charles convoked the three estates at paris, it was soon seen that the nobles had become completely discredited and powerless. it was a moment in which a new life might have begun for france; in vain did the noble order clamour for war and taxes,--they to do the war, with what skill and success all men now knew, and the others to pay the taxes. clergy, however, and burghers resisted. the estates parted, leaving what power there was still in france in the hands of etienne marcel. he strove in vain to reconcile charles the dauphin with charles of navarre, who stood forward as a champion of the towns. very reluctantly did marcel entrust his fortunes to such hands. with help of lecocq, bishop of laon, he called the estates again together, and endeavoured to lay down sound principles of government, which charles the dauphin was compelled to accept. paris, however, stood alone, and even there all were not agreed. marcel and bishop lecocq, seeing the critical state of things, obtained the release of charles of navarre, then a prisoner. the result was that ere long the dauphin-regent was at open war with navarre and with paris. the outbreak of the miserable peasantry, the jacquerie, who fought partly for revenge against the nobles, partly to help paris, darkened the time; they were repressed with savage bloodshed, and in the dauphin's party in paris assassinated the only great man france had seen for long. with etienne marcel's death all hope of a constitutional life died out from france; the dauphin entered paris and set his foot on the conquered liberties of his country. paris had stood almost alone; civic strength is wanting in france; the towns but feebly supported marcel; they compelled the movement to lose its popular and general character, and to become a first attempt to govern france from paris alone. after some insincere negotiations, and a fear of desultory warfare, in which edward iii. traversed france without meeting with a single foe to fight, peace was at last agreed to, at bretigny, in may, . by this act edward iii. renounced the french throne and gave up all he claimed or held north of the loire, while he was secured in the lordship of the south and west, as well as that part of northern picardy which included calais, guines, and ponthieu. the treaty also fixed the ransom to be paid by king john. france was left smaller than she had been under philip augustus, yet she received this treaty with infinite thankfulness; worn out with war and weakness, any diminution of territory seemed better to her than a continuance of her unbearable misfortunes. under charles, first as regent, then as king, she enjoyed an uneasy rest and peace for twenty years. king john, after returning for a brief space to france, went back into his pleasant captivity in england, leaving his country to be ruled by the regent the dauphin. in he died, and charles v., "the wise," became king in name, as he had now been for some years in fact. this cold, prudent, sickly prince, a scholar who laid the foundations of the great library in paris by placing mss. in three chambers in the louvre, had nothing to dazzle the ordinary eye; to the timid spirits of that age he seemed to be a malevolent wizard, and his name of "wise" had in it more of fear than of love. he also is notable for two things: he reformed the current coin, and recognised the real worth of du guesclin, the first great leader of mercenaries in france, a grim fighting-man, hostile to the show of feudal warfare, and herald of a new age of contests, in which the feudal levies would fall into the background. the invention of gunpowder in this century, the incapacity of the great lords, the rise of free lances and mercenary troops, all told that a new era had arrived. it was by the hand of du guesclin that charles overcame his cousin and namesake, charles of navarre, and compelled him to peace. on the other hand, in the breton war which followed just after, he was defeated by sir john chandos and the partisans of jean de montfort, who made him prisoner; the treaty of guerande, which followed, gave them the dukedom of brittany; and charles v., unable to resist, was fair to receive the new duke's homage, and to confirm him in the duchy. the king did not rest till he had ransomed du guesclin from the hands of chandos; he then gave him commission to raise a paid army of freebooters, the scourge of france, and to march with them to support, against the black prince, the claims of henry of trastamare to the crown of castile. successful at first by help of the king of aragon, he was made constable of spain at the coronation of henry at burgos. edward the black prince, however, intervened, and at the battle of najara ( ) du guesclin was again a prisoner in english hands, and henry lost his throne. fever destroyed the victorious host, and the black prince, withdrawing into gascony, carried with him the seeds of the disorder which shortened his days. du guesclin soon got his liberty again; and charles v., seeing how much his great rival of england was weakened, determined at last on open war. he allied himself with henry of trastamare, listened to the grievances of the aquitanians, summoned the black prince to appear and answer the complaints. in , henry defeated pedro, took him prisoner, and murdered him in a brawl; thus perished the hopes of the english party in the south. about the same time charles v. sent open defiance and declaration of war to england. without delay, he surprised the english in the north, recovering all ponthieu at once; the national pride was aroused; philip, duke of burgundy, who had, through the prudent help of charles, lately won as a bride the heiress of flanders, was stationed at rouen, to cover the western approach to paris, with strict orders not to fight; the aquitanians were more than half french at heart. the record of the war is as the smoke of a furnace. we see the reek of burnt and plundered towns; there were no brilliant feats of arms; the black prince, gloomy and sick, abandoned the struggle, and returned to england to die; the new governor, the earl of pembroke, did not even succeed in landing: he was attacked and defeated off rochelle by henry of castile, his whole fleet, with all its treasure and stores, taken or sunk, and he himself was a prisoner in henry's hands. du guesclin had already driven the english out of the west into brittany; he now overran poitou, which received him gladly; all the south seemed to be at his feet. the attempt of edward iii. to relieve the little that remained to him in france failed utterly, and by poitou was finally lost to england. charles set himself to reduce brittany with considerable success; a diversion from calais caused plentiful misery in the open country; but, as the french again refused to fight, it did nothing to restore the english cause. by england held nothing in france except calais, cherbourg, bayonne, and bordeaux. edward iii., utterly worn out with war, agreed to a truce, through intervention of the pope; it was signed in . in , on its expiring, charles, who in two years had sedulously improved the state of france, renewed the war. by sea and land the english were utterly overmatched, and by charles was master of the situation on all hands. now, however, he pushed his advantages too far; and the cold skill which had overthrown the english, was used in vain against the bretons, whose duchy he desired to absorb. languedoc and flanders also revolted against him. france was heavily burdened with taxes, and the future was dark and threatening. in the midst of these things, death overtook the coldly calculating monarch in september, . little had france to hope from the boy who was now called on to fill the throne. charles vi. was not twelve years old, a light-wined, handsome boy, under the guardianship of the royal dukes his uncles, who had no principles except that of their own interest to guide them in bringing up the king and ruling the people. before charles vi. had reached years of discretion, he was involved by the french nobles in war against the flemish cities, which, under guidance of the great philip van arteveldt, had overthrown the authority of the count of flanders. the french cities showed ominous signs of being inclined to ally themselves with the civic movement in the north. the men of ghent came out to meet their french foes, and at the battle of roosebek ( ) were utterly defeated and crushed. philip van arteveldt himself was slain. it was a great triumph of the nobles over the cities; and paris felt it when the king returned. all movement there and in the other northern cities of france was ruthlessly repressed; the noble reaction also overthrew the "new men" and the lawyers, by whose means the late king had chiefly governed. two years later, the royal dukes signed a truce with england, including ghent in it; and louis de male, count of flanders, having perished at the same time, marguerite his daughter, wife of philip of burgundy, succeeded to his inheritance ( .) thus began the high fortunes of the house of burgundy, which at one time seemed to overshadow emperor and king of france. in , another of the brothers, louis, duc d'anjou, died, with all his italian ambitions unfulfilled. in , charles vi., under guidance of his uncles, declared war on england, and exhausted all france in preparations; the attempt proved the sorriest failure. the regency of the dukes became daily more unpopular, until in charles dismissed his two uncles, the dukes of burgundy and berri, and began to rule. for a while all went much better; he recalled his father's friends and advisers, lightened the burdens of the people, allowed the new ministers free hand in making prudent government; and learning how bad had been the state of the south under the duc de berri, deprived him of that command in . men thought that the young king, if not good himself, was well content to allow good men to govern in his name; at any, rate, the rule of the selfish dukes seemed to be over. their bad influences, however, still surrounded him; an attempt to assassinate olivier de clisson, the constable, was connected with their intrigues and those of the duke of brittany; and in setting forth to punish the attempt on his favourite the constable, the unlucky young king, who had sapped his health by debauchery, suddenly became mad. the dukes of burgundy and berri at once seized the reins and put aside his brother the young duc d'orleans. it was the beginning of that great civil discord between burgundy and orleans, the burgundians and armagnacs, which worked so much ill for france in the earlier part of the next century. the rule of the uncles was disastrous for france; no good government seemed even possible for that unhappy land. an obscure strife went on until , when duke philip of burgundy died, leaving his vast inheritance to john the fearless, the deadly foe of louis d'orleans. paris was with him, as with his father before him; the duke entered the capital in , and issued a popular proclamation against the ill-government of the queen-regent and orleans. much profession of a desire for better things was made, with small results. so things went on until , when, after the duc de berri, who tried to play the part of a mediator, had brought the two princes together, the duc d'orleans was foully assassinated by a burgundian partisan. the duke of burgundy, though he at first withdrew from paris, speedily returned, avowed the act, and was received with plaudits by the mob. for a few years the strife continued, obscure and bad; a great league of french princes and nobles was made to stem the success of the burgundians; and it was about this time that the armagnac name became common. paris, however, dominated by the "cabochians," the butchers' party, the party of the "marrowbones and cleavers," and entirely devoted to the burgundians, enabled john the fearless to hold his own in france; the king himself seemed favourable to the same party. in the princes were obliged to come to terms, and the burgundian triumph seemed complete. in the wheel went round, and we find the armagnacs in paris, rudely sweeping away all the cabochians with their professions of good civic rule. the duc de berri was made captain of paris, and for a while all went against the burgundians, until, in , duke john was fain to make the first peace of arras, and to confess himself worsted in the strife. the young dauphin louis took the nominal lead of the national party, and ruled supreme in paris in great ease and self-indulgence. the year before, henry v. had succeeded to the throne of england,--a bright and vigorous young man, eager to be stirring in the world, brave and fearless, with a stern grasp of things beneath all,--a very sheet-anchor of firmness and determined character. almost at the very opening of his reign, the moment he had secured his throne, he began a negotiation with france which boded no good. he offered to marry catharine, the king's third daughter, and therewith to renew the old treaty of bretigny, if her dower were normandy, maine, anjou, not without a good sum of money. the french court, on the other hand, offered him her hand with aquitaine and the money, an offer rejected instantly; and henry made ready for a rough wooing in arms. in he crossed to harfleur, and while parties still fought in france, after a long and exhausting siege, took the place; thence he rode northward for calais, feeling his army too much reduced to attempt more. the armagnacs, who had gathered at rouen, also pushed fast to the north, and having choice of passage over the somme, amiens being in their hands, got before king henry, while he had to make a long round before he could get across that stream. consequently, when, on his way, he reached azincourt, he found the whole chivalry of france arrayed against him in his path. the great battle of azincourt followed, with frightful ruin and carnage of the french. with a huge crowd of prisoners the young king passed on to calais, and thence to england. the armagnacs' party lay buried in the hasty graves of azincourt; never had there been such slaughter of nobles. still, for three years they made head against their foes; till in the duke of burgundy's friends opened paris's gates to his soldiers, and for the time the armagnacs seemed to be completely defeated; only the dauphin charles made feeble war from poitiers. henry v. with a fresh army had already made another descent on the normandy coast; the dukes of anjou, brittany, and burgundy made several and independent treaties with him; and it seemed as though france had completely fallen in pieces. henry took rouen, and although the common peril had somewhat silenced the strife of faction, no steps were taken to meet him or check his course; on the contrary, matters were made even more hopeless by the murder of john, duke of burgundy, in , even as he was kneeling and offering reconciliation at the young dauphin's feet. the young duke, philip, now drew at once towards henry, whom his father had apparently wished with sincerity to check; paris, too, was weary of the armagnac struggle, and desired to welcome henry of england; the queen of france also went over to the anglo-burgundian side. the end of it was that on may , , was signed the famous treaty of troyes, which secured the crown of france to henry, by the exclusion of the dauphin charles, whenever poor mad charles vi., should cease to live. meanwhile, henry was made regent of france, promising to maintain all rights and privileges of the parliament and nobles, and to crush the dauphin with his armagnac friends, in token whereof he was at once wedded to catharine of france, and set forth to quell the opposition of the provinces. by christmas all france north of the loire was in english hands. all the lands to the south of the river remained firmly fixed in their allegiance to the dauphin and the armagnacs, and these began to feel themselves to be the true french party, as opposed to the foreign rule of the english. for barely two years that rule was carried on by henry v. with inflexible justice, and northern france saw with amazement the presence of a real king, and an orderly government. in king henry died; a few weeks later charles vi. died also, and the face of affairs began to change, although, at the first, charles vii. the "well-served," the lazy, listless prince, seemed to have little heart for the perils and efforts of his position. he was proclaimed king at mehun, in berri, for the true france for the time lay on that side of the loire, and the regent bedford, who took the reins at paris, was a vigorous and powerful prince, who was not likely to give way to an idle dreamer. at the outset charles suffered two defeats, at crevant in , and at verneuil in , and things seemed to be come to their worst. yet he was prudent, conciliatory, and willing to wait; and as the english power in france--that triangle of which the base was the sea-line from harfleur to calais, and the apex paris--was unnatural and far from being really strong; and as the relations between bedford and burgundy might not always be friendly, the man who could wait had many chances in his favour. before long, things began to mend; charles wedded marie d'anjou, and won over that great house to the french side; more and more was he regarded as the nation's king; symptoms of a wish for reconciliation with burgundy appeared; the most vehement armagnacs were sent away from court. causes of disagreement also shook the friendship between burgundy and england. feeling the evils of inaction most, bedford in decided on a forward movement, and sent the earl of salisbury to the south. he first secured his position on the north of the loire, then, crossing that river, laid siege to orleans, the key to the south, and the last bulwark of the national party. all efforts to vex or dislodge him failed; and the attempt early in to stop the english supplies was completely defeated at bouvray; from the salt fish captured, the battle has taken the name of "the day of the herrings." dunois, bastard of orleans, was, wounded; the scots, the king's body-guard, on whom fell ever the grimmest of the fighting, suffered terribly, and their leader was killed. all went well for bedford till it suited the duke of burgundy to withdraw from his side, carrying with him a large part of the fighting power of the besiegers. things were already looking rather gloomy in the english camp, when a new and unexpected rumour struck all hearts cold with fear. a virgin, an amazon, had been raised up as a deliverer for france, and would soon be on them, armed with mysterious powers. a young peasant girl, one jeanne d'arc, had been brought up in the village of domremy, hard by the lorraine border. the district, always french in feeling, had lately suffered much from burgundian raids; and this young damsel, brooding over the treatment of her village and her country, and filled with that strange vision-power which is no rare phenomenon in itself with young girls, came at last to believe with warm and active faith in heavenly appearances and messages, all urging her to deliver france and her king. from faith to action the bridge is short; and ere long the young dreamer of seventeen set forth to work her miracle. her history is quite unique in the world; and though probably france would ere many years have shaken off the english yoke, for its strength was rapidly going, still to her is the credit of having proved its weakness, and of having asserted the triumphant power of a great belief. all gave way before her; charles vii., persuaded doubtless by his mother-in-law, yolande of aragon, who warmly espoused her cause, listened readily to the maiden's voice; and as that voice urged only what was noble and pure, she carried conviction as she went. in the end she received the king's commission to undertake the relief of orleans. her coming was fresh blood to the defence; a new spirit seemed to be poured out on all her followers, and in like manner a deep dejection settled down on the english. the blockade was forced, and, in eight days the besiegers raised the siege and marched away. they withdrew to jargeau, where they were attacked and routed with great loss. a little later talbot himself, who had marched to help them, was also defeated and taken. then, compelling charles to come out from his in glorious ease, she carried him triumphantly with her to rheims, where he was duly crowned king, the maid of orldans standing by, and holding aloft the royal standard. she would gladly have gone home to domremy now, her mission being accomplished; for she was entirely free from all ambitious or secondary aims. but she was too great a power to be spared. northern france was still in english hands, and till the english were cast out her work was not complete; so they made her stay, sweet child, to do the work which, had there been any manliness in them, they ought to have found it easy to achieve for themselves. the dread of her went before her,--a pillar of cloud and darkness to the english, but light and hope to her countrymen. men believed that she was called of god to regenerate the world, to destroy the saracen at last, to bring in the millennial age. her statue was set up in the churches, and crowds prayed before her image as before a popular saint. the incapacity and ill-faith of those round the king gave the english some time to recover themselves; bedford and burgundy drew together again, and steps were taken to secure paris. when, however, jeanne, weary of courtly delays, marched, contemptuous of the king, as far as st. denis, friends sprang up on every side. in normandy, on the english line of communications, four strong places were surprised; and bedford, made timid as to his supplies, fell back to rouen, leaving only a small garrison in paris. jeanne, ill-supported by the royal troops, failed in her attack on the city walls, and was made prisoner by the burgundians; they handed her over to the english, and she was, after previous indignities, and such treatment as chivalry alone could have dealt her, condemned as a witch, and burnt as a relapsed heretic at rouen in . betrayed by the french court, sold by the burgundians, murdered by the english, unrescued by the people of france which she so much loved, jeanne d'arc died the martyr's death, a pious, simple soul, a heroine of the purest metal. she saved her country, for the english power never recovered from the shock. the churchmen who burnt her, the frenchmen of the unpatriotic party, would have been amazed could they have foreseen that nearly years afterwards, churchmen again would glorify her name as the saint of the church, in opposition to both the religious liberties and the national feelings of her country. the war, after having greatly weakened the noblesse, and having caused infinite sufferings to france, now drew towards a close; the duke of burgundy at last agreed to abandon his english allies, and at a great congress at arras, in , signed a treaty with charles vii. by which he solemnly came over to the french side. on condition that he should get auxerre and macon, as well as the towns on and near the river somme, he was willing to recognise charles as king of france. his price was high, yet it was worth all that was given; for, after all, he was of the french blood royal, and not a foreigner. the death of bedford, which took place about the same time, was almost a more terrible blow to the fortunes of the english. paris opened her gates to her king in april, ; the long war kept on with slight movements now and then for several years. the next year was marked by the meeting of the states general, and the establishment, in principle at least, of a standing army. the estates petitioned the willing king that the system of finance in the realm should be remodelled, and a permanent tax established for the support of an army. thus, it was thought, solidity would be given to the royal power, and the long-standing curse of the freebooters and brigands cleared away. no sooner was this done than the nobles began to chafe under it; they scented in the air the coming troubles; they, took as their head, poor innocents, the young dauphin louis, who was willing enough to resist the concentration of power in royal hands. their champion of , the leader of the "praguerie," as this new league was called, in imitation, it is said, of the hussite movement at prague, the enthusiastic defender of noble privilege against the royal power, was the man who afterwards, as louis xi., was the destroyer of the noblesse on behalf of royalty. some of the nobles stood firmly by the king, and, aided by them and by an army of paid soldiers serving under the new conditions, charles vii., no contemptible antagonist when once aroused, attacked and overthrew the praguerie; the cities and the country people would have none of it; they preferred peace under a king's strong hand. louis was sent down to the east to govern dauphiny; the lessons of the civil war were not lost on charles; he crushed the freebooters of champagne, drove the english out of pontois in , moved actively up and down france, reducing anarchy, restoring order, resisting english attacks. in the last he was loyally supported by the dauphin, who was glad to find a field for his restless temper. he repulsed the english at dieppe, and put down the comte d'armagnac in the south. during the two years' truce with england which now followed, charles vii. and louis drew off their free-lances eastward, and the dauphin came into rude collision with the swiss not far from basel, in . some sixteen hundred mountaineers long and heroically withstood at st. jacob the attack of several thousand frenchmen, fighting stubbornly till they all perished. the king and dauphin returned to paris, having defended their border-lands with credit, and having much reduced the numbers of the lawless free-lances. the dauphin, discontented again, was obliged once more to withdraw into dauphiny, where he governed prudently and with activity. in , the last scene of the anglo-french war began. in that year english adventurers landed on the breton coast; the duke called the french king to his aid. charles did not tarry this time; he broke the truce with england; he sent dunois into normandy, and himself soon followed. in both duchies, brittany and normandy, the french were welcomed with delight: no love for england lingered in the west. somerset and talbot failed to defend rouen, and were driven from point to point, till every stronghold was lost to them. dunois then passed into guienne, and in a few-months bayonne, the last stronghold of the english, fell into his hands ( ). when talbot was sent over to bordeaux with five thousand men to recover the south, the old english feeling revived, for england was their best customer, and they had little in common with france. it was, however, but a last flicker of the flame; in july, , at the siege of castillon, the aged talbot was slain and the war at once came to an end; the south passed finally into the kingdom of france. normandy and guienne were assimilated to france in taxation and army organisation; and all that remained to england across the channel was calais, with havre and guines castle. her foreign ambitions and struggles over, england was left to consume herself in civil strife, while france might rest and recover from the terrible sufferings she had undergone. the state of the country had become utterly wretched. with the end of the english wars new life began to gleam out on france; the people grew more tranquil, finding that toil and thrift bore again their wholesome fruits; charles vii. did not fail in his duty, and took his part in restoring quiet, order, and justice in the land. the french crown, though it had beaten back the english, was still closely girt in with rival neighbours, the great dukes on every frontier. all round the east and north lay the lands of philip of burgundy; to the west was the duke of brittany, cherishing a jealous independence; the royal dukes, berri, bourbon, anjou, are all so many potential sources of danger and difficulty to the crown. the conditions of the nobility are altogether changed; the old barons have sunk into insignificance; the struggle of the future will lie between the king's cousins and himself, rather than with the older lords. a few non-royal princes, such as armagnac, or saint-pol, or brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard dunois or the constables du guesclin and clisson, grow to greater prominence; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the king's brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection under louis xiv. directly after the expulsion of the english, troubles began between king charles vii. and the dauphin louis; the latter could not brook a quiet life in dauphiny, and the king refused him that larger sphere in the government of normandy which he coveted. against his father's will, louis married charlotte of savoy, daughter of his strongest neighbour in dauphiny; suspicion and bad feeling grew strong between father and son; louis was specially afraid of his father's counsellors; the king was specially afraid of his son's craftiness and ambition. it came to an open rupture, and louis, in , fled to the court of duke philip of burgundy. there he lived at refuge at geneppe, meddling a good deal in burgundian politics, and already opposing himself to his great rival, charles of charolais, afterwards charles the bold, the last duke of burgundy. bickerings, under his bad influence, took place between king and duke; they never burst out into flame. so things went on uncomfortably enough, till charles vii. died in and the reign of louis xi. began. between father and son what contrast could be greater? charles vii., "the well-served," so easygoing, so open and free from guile; louis xi., so shy of counsellors, so energetic and untiring, so close and guileful. history does but apologise for charles, and even when she fears and dislikes louis, she cannot forbear to wonder and admire. and yet louis enslaved his country, while charles had seen it rescued from foreign rule; charles restored something of its prosperity, while louis spent his life in crushing its institutions and in destroying its elements of independence. a great and terrible prince, louis xi. failed in having little or no constructive power; he was strong to throw down the older society, he built little in its room. most serious of all was his action with respect to the district of the river somme, at that time the northern frontier of france. the towns there had been handed over to philip of burgundy by the treaty of arras, with a stipulation that the crown might ransom them at any time, and this louis succeeded in doing in . the act was quite blameless and patriotic in itself, yet it was exceedingly unwise, for it thoroughly alienated charles the bold, and led to the wars of the earlier period of the reign. lastly, as if he had not done enough to offend the nobles, louis in attacked their hunting rights, touching them in their tenderest part. no wonder that this year saw the formation of a great league against him, and the outbreak of a dangerous civil war. the "league of the public weal" was nominally headed by his own brother charles, heir to the throne; it was joined by charles of charolais, who had completely taken the command of affairs in the burgundian territories, his father the old duke being too feeble to withstand him; the dukes of brittany, nemours, bourbon, john of anjou, duke of calabria, the comte d'armagnac, the aged dunois, and a host of other princes and nobles flocked in; and the king had scarcely any forces at his back with which to withstand them. his plans for the campaign against the league were admirable, though they were frustrated by the bad faith of his captains, who mostly sympathised with this outbreak of the feudal nobility. louis himself marched southward to quell the duc de bourbon and his friends, and returning from that task, only half done for lack of time, he found that charles of charolais had passed by paris, which was faithful to the king, and was coming down southwards, intending to join the dukes of berri and brittany, who were on their way towards the capital. the hostile armies met at montleheri on the orleans road; and after a strange battle--minutely described by commines--a battle in which both sides ran away, and neither ventured at first to claim a victory, the king withdrew to corbeil, and then marched into paris ( ). there the armies of the league closed in on him; and after a siege of several weeks, louis, feeling disaffection all around him, and doubtful how long paris herself would bear for him the burdens of blockade, signed the peace of conflans, which, to all appearances, secured the complete victory to the noblesse, "each man carrying off his piece." instantly the contented princes broke up their half-starved armies and went home, leaving louis behind to plot and contrive against them, a far wiser man, thanks to the lesson they had taught him. they did not let him wait long for a chance. the treaty of conflans had given the duchy of normandy to the king's brother charles; he speedily quarrelled with his neighbour, the duke of brittany, and louis came down at once into normandy, which threw itself into his arms, and the whole work of the league was broken up. the comte de charolais, occupied with revolts at dinan and liege, could not interfere, and presently his father, the old duke philip, died ( ), leaving to him the vast lordships of the house of burgundy. and now the "imperial dreamer," charles the bold, was brought into immediate rivalry with that royal trickster, the "universal spider," louis xi. charles was by far the nobler spirit of the two: his vigour and intelligence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts to render his father's dissolute and careless rule into a well-ordered lordship, all these things marked him out as the leading spirit of the time. his territories were partly held under france, partly under the empire: the artois district, which also may be taken to include the somme towns, the county of rhetel, the duchy of bar, the duchy of burgundy, with auxerre and nevers, were feudally in france; the rest of his lands under the empire. he had, therefore, interests and means of interference on either hand; and it is clear that charles set before himself two different lines of policy, according as he looked one way or the other. at the time of duke philip's death a new league had been formed against louis, embracing the king of england, edward iv., the dukes of burgundy and brittany, and the kings of aragon and castile. louis strained every nerve, he conciliated paris, struck hard at disaffected partisans, and in convoked the states general at tours. the three estates were asked to give an opinion as to the power of the crown to alienate normandy, the step insisted upon by the duke of burgundy. their reply was to the effect that the nation forbids the crown to dismember the realm; they supported their opinion by liberal promises of help. thus fortified by the sympathy of his people, louis began to break up the coalition. he made terms with the duc de bourbon and the house of anjou; his brother charles was a cipher; the king of england was paralysed by the antagonism of warwick; he attacked and reduced brittany; burgundy, the most formidable, alone remained to be dealt with. how should he meet him?--by war or by negotiation? his court was divided in opinion; the king decided for himself in favour of the way of negotiation, and came to the astonishing conclusion that he would go and meet the duke and win him over to friendship. he miscalculated both his own powers of persuasion and the force of his antagonist's temper. the interview of peronne followed; charles held his visitor as a captive, and in the end compelled him to sign a treaty, of peace, on the basis of that of conflans, which had closed the war of the public weal. and as if this were not sufficient humiliation, charles made the king accompany him on his expedition to punish the men of liege, who, trusting to the help of louis, had again revolted ( ). this done, he allowed the degraded monarch to return home to paris. an assembly of notables of tours speedily declared the treaty of perrone null, and the king made some small frontier war on the duke, which was ended by a truce at amiens, in . the truce was spent in preparation for a fresh struggle, which louis, to whom time was everything, succeeded in deferring from point to point, till the death of his brother charles, now duc de guienne, in , broke up the formidable combination. charles the bold at once broke truce and made war on the king, marching into northern france, sacking towns and ravaging the country, till he reached beauvais. there the despair of the citizens and the bravery of the women saved the town. charles raised the siege and marched on rouen, hoping to meet the duke of brittany; but that prince had his hands full, for louis had overrun his territories, and had reduced him to terms. the duke of burgundy saw that the coalition had completely failed; he too made fresh truce with louis at senlis ( ), and only, deferred, he no doubt thought, the direct attack on his dangerous rival. henceforth charles the bold turned his attention mainly to the east, and louis gladly saw him go forth to spend his strength on distant ventures; saw the interview at treves with the emperor frederick iii., at which the duke's plans were foiled by the suspicions of the germans and the king's intrigues; saw the long siege of the neusz wearing out his power; bought off the hostility of edward iv. of england, who had undertaken to march on paris; saw charles embark on his swiss enterprise; saw the subjugation of lorraine and capture of nancy ( ), the battle of granson, the still more fatal defeat of morat ( ), and lastly the final struggle of nancy, and the duke's death on the field (january, ). while duke charles had thus been running on his fate, louis xi. had actively attacked the larger nobles of france, and had either reduced them to submission or had destroyed them. as duke charles had left no male heir, the king at once resumed the duchy of burgundy, as a male fief of the kingdom; he also took possession of franche comte at the same time; the king's armies recovered all picardy, and even entered flanders. then mary of burgundy, hoping to raise up a barrier against this dangerous neighbour, offered her hand, with all her great territories, to young maximilian of austria, and married him within six months after her father's death. to this wedding is due the rise to real greatness of the house of austria; it begins the era of the larger politics of modern times. after a little hesitation louis determined to continue the struggle against the burgundian power. he secured franche comte, and on his northern frontier retook arras, that troublesome border city, the "bonny carlisle" of those days; and advancing to relieve therouenne, then besieged by maximilian, fought and lost the battle of guinegate ( ). the war was languid after this; a truce followed in , and a time of quiet for france. charles the dauphin was engaged to marry the little margaret, maximilian's daughter, and as her dower she was to bring franche comte and sundry places on the border line disputed between the two princes. in these last days louis xi. shut himself up in gloomy seclusion in his castle of plessis near tours, and there he died in . a great king and a terrible one, he has left an indellible mark on the history of france, for he was the founder of france in its later form, as an absolute monarchy ruled with little regard to its own true welfare. he had crushed all resistance; he had enlarged the borders of france, till the kingdom took nearly its modern dimensions; he had organised its army and administration. the danger was lest in the hands of a feeble boy these great results should be squandered away, and the old anarchy once more raise its head. for charles viii., who now succeeded, was but thirteen years old, a weak boy whom his father had entirely neglected, the training of his son not appearing to be an essential part of his work in life. the young prince had amused himself with romances, but had learnt nothing useful. a head, however, was found for him in the person of his eldest sister anne, whom louis xi. had married to peter ii., lord of beaujeu and duc de bourbon. to her the dying king entrusted the guardianship of his son; and for more than nine years anne of france was virtual king. for those years all went well. with her disappearance from the scene, the controlling hand is lost, and france begins the age of her italian expeditions. when the house of anjou came to an end in , and anjou and maine fell in to the crown, there fell in also a far less valuable piece of property, the claim of that house descended from charles, the youngest brother of saint louis, on the kingdom of naples and sicily. there was much to tempt an ambitious prince in the state of italy. savoy, which held the passage into the peninsula, was then thoroughly french in sympathy; milan, under lodovico sforza, "il moro," was in alliance with charles; genoa preferred the french to the aragonese claimants for influence over italy; the popular feeling in the cities, especially in florence, was opposed to the despotism of the medici, and turned to france for deliverance; the misrule of the spanish kings of naples had made naples thoroughly discontented; venice was, as of old, the friend of france. tempted by these reasons, in charles viii. set forth for italy with a splendid host. he displayed before the eyes of europe the first example of a modern army, in its three well-balanced branches of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. there was nothing in italy to withstand his onslaught; he swept through the land in triumph; charles believed himself to be a great conqueror giving law to admiring subject-lands; he entered pisa, florence, rome itself. wherever he went his heedless ignorance, and the gross misconduct of his followers, left behind implacable hostility, and turned all friendship into bitterness. at last he entered naples, and seemed to have asserted to the full the french claim to be supreme in italy, whereas at that very time his position had become completely untenable. a league of italian states was formed behind his back; lodovico il moro, ferdinand of naples, the emperor, pope alexander vi., ferdinand and isabella, who were now welding spain into a great and united monarchy, all combined against france; and in presence of this formidable confederacy charles viii. had to cut his way home as promptly as he could. at fornovo, north of the apennines, he defeated the allies in july, ; and by november the main french army had got safely out of italy. the forces left behind in naples were worn out by war and pestilence, and the poor remnant of these, too, bringing with them the seeds of horrible contagious diseases, forced their way back to france in . it was the last effort of the king. his health was ruined by debauchery in italy, repeated in france; and yet, towards the end of his reign, he not merely introduced italian arts, but attempted to reform the state, to rule prudently, to solace the poor; wherefore, when he died in , the people lamented him greatly, for he had been kindly and affable, brave also on the battle-field; and much is forgiven to a king. his children died before him, so that louis d'orleans, his cousin, was nearest heir to the throne, and succeeded as louis xii. by his accession in he reunited the fief of orleans county to the crown; by marrying anne of brittany, his predecessor's widow, he secured also the great duchy of brittany. the dispensation of pope alexander vi., which enabled him to put away his wife jeanne, second daughter of louis xi., was brought into france by caesar borgia, who gained thereby his title of duke of valentinois, a large sum of money, a french bride, and promises of support in his great schemes in italy. his ministers were men of real ability. georges d'amboise, archbishop of rouen, the chief of them, was a prudent and a sagacious ruler, who, however, unfortunately wanted to be pope, and urged the king in the direction of italian politics, which he would have done much better to have left alone. louis xii. was lazy and of small intelligence; georges d'amboise and caesar borgia, with their italian ambitions, easily made him take up a spirited foreign policy which was disastrous at home. utterly as the last italian expedition had failed, the french people were not yet weary of the adventure, and preparations for a new war began at once. in the king crossed the alps into the milanese, and carried all before him for a while. the duchy at first accepted him with enthusiasm; but in it had had enough of the french and recalled lodovico, who returned in triumph to milan. the swiss mercenaries, however, betrayed him at novara into the hands of louis xii., who carried him off to france. the triumph of the french in was also the highest point of the fortunes of their ally, caesar borgia, who seemed for a while to be completely successful. in this year louis made a treaty at granada, by which he and ferdinand the catholic agreed to despoil frederick of naples; and in louis made a second expedition into italy. again all seemed easy at the outset, and he seized the kingdom of naples without difficulty; falling out, however, with his partner in the bad bargain, ferdinand the catholic, he was speedily swept completely out of the peninsula, with terrible loss of honour, men, and wealth. it now became necessary to arrange for the future of france. louis xii. had only a daughter, claude, and it was proposed that she should be affianced to charles of austria, the future statesman and emperor. this scheme formed the basis of the three treaties of blois ( ). in , by the treaty of granada, louis had in fact handed naples over to spain; now by the three treaties he alienated his best friends, the venetians and the papacy, while he in fact also handed milan over to the austrian house, together with territories considered to be integral parts of france. the marriage with charles came to nothing; the good sense of some, the popular feeling in the country, the open expressions of the states general of tours, in , worked against the marriage, which had no strong advocate except queen anne. claude, on intercession of the estates, was affianced to frangois d'angouleme, her distant cousin, the heir presumptive to the throne. in louis made war on venice; and in the following year the famous treaty of cambrai was signed by georges d'amboise and margaret of austria. it was an agreement for a partition of the venetian territories,--one of the most shameless public deeds in history. the pope, the king of aragon, maximilian, louis xii., were each to have a share. the war was pushed on with great vigour: the battle of agnadello ( th may, ) cleared the king's way towards venice; louis was received with open arms by the north italian towns, and pushed forward to within eight of venice. the other princes came up on every side; the proud "queen of the adriatic" was compelled to shrink within her walls, and wait till time dissolved the league. this was not long. the pope, julius ii., had no wish to hand northern italy over to france; he had joined in the shameless league of cambrai because he wanted to wrest the romagna cities from venice, and because he hoped to entirely destroy the ancient friendship between venice and france. successful in both aims, he now withdrew from the league, made peace with the venetians, and stood forward as the head of a new italian combination, with the swiss for his fighting men. the strife was close and hot between pope and king; louis xii. lost his chief adviser and friend, georges d'amboise, the splendid churchman of the age, the french wolsey; he thought no weapon better than the dangerous one of a council, with claims opposed to those of the papacy; first a national council at tours, then an attempted general council at pisa, were called on to resist the papal claims. in reply julius ii. created the holy league of , with ferdinand of aragon, henry viii. of england, and the venetians as its chief members, against the french. louis xii. showed vigour; he sent his nephew gaston de foix to subdue the romagna and threaten the venetian territories. at the battle of ravenna, in , gaston won a brilliant victory and lost his life. from that moment disaster dogged the footsteps of the french in italy, and before winter they had been driven completely out of the peninsula; the succession of the medicean pope, leo x., to julius ii., seemed to promise the continuance of a policy hostile to france in italy. another attempt on northern italy proved but another failure, although now louis xii., taught by his mishaps, had secured the alliance of venice; the disastrous defeat of la tremoille, near novara ( ), compelled the french once more to withdraw beyond the alps. in this same year an army under the duc de longueville, endeavouring to relieve therouenne, besieged by the english and maximilian, the emperor-elect, was caught and crushed at guinegate. a diversion in favour of louis xii., made by james iv. of scotland, failed completely; the scottish king was defeated and slain at flodden field. while his northern frontier was thus exposed, louis found equal danger threatening him on the east; on this aide, however, he managed to buy off the swiss, who had attacked the duchy of burgundy. he was also reconciled with the papacy and the house of austria. early in the death of anne of brittany, his spouse, a lady of high ambitions, strong artistic tastes, and humane feelings towards her bretons, but a bad queen for france, cleared the way for changes. claude, the king's eldest daughter, was now definitely married to francois d'angouleme, and invested with the duchy of brittany; and the king himself, still hoping for a male heir to succeed him, married again, wedding mary tudor, the lovely young sister of henry viii. this marriage was probably the chief cause of his death, which followed on new year's day, . his was, in foreign policy, an inglorious and disastrous reign; at home, a time of comfort and material prosperity. agriculture flourished, the arts of italy came in, though (save in architecture) france could claim little artistic glory of her own; the organisation of justice and administration was carried out; in letters and learning france still lagged behind her neighbours. the heir to the crown was francois d'angouleme, great-grandson of that louis d'orleans who had been assassinated in the bad days of the strife between burgundians and armagnacs, in , and great-great-grandson of charles v. of france. he was still very young, very eager to be king, very full of far-reaching schemes. few things in history are more striking than the sudden change, at this moment, from the rule of middle-aged men or (as men of fifty were then often called) old men, to the rule of youths,--from sagacious, worldly-prudent monarchs--to impulsive boys,--from henry vii. to henry viii., from louis xii. to frangois i, from ferdinand to charles. on the whole, frangois i. was the least worthy of the three. he was brilliant, "the king of culture," apt scholar in renaissance art and immorality; brave, also, and chivalrous, so long as the chivalry involved no self-denial, for he was also thoroughly selfish, and his personal aims and ideas were mean. his reign was to be a reaction from that of louis xii. from the beginning, francois chose his chief officers unwisely. in antoine du prat, his new chancellor, he had a violent and lawless adviser; in charles de bourbon, his new constable, an untrustworthy commander. forthwith he plunged into italian politics, being determined to make good his claim both to naples and to milan; he made most friendly arrangements with the archduke charles, his future rival, promising to help him in securing, when the time came, the vast inheritances of his two grandfathers, maximilian, the emperor-elect, and ferdinand of aragon; never was a less wise agreement entered upon. this done, the italian war began; francois descended into italy, and won the brilliant battle of marignano, in which the french chivalry crushed the swiss burghers and peasant mercenaries. the french then overran the north of italy, and, in conjunction with the venetians, carried all before them. but the triumphs of the sword were speedily wrested from him by the adroitness of the politician; in an interview with leo x. at bologna, francois bartered the liberties of the gallican church for shadowy advantages in italy. the 'pragmatic sanction of bourgea', which now for nearly a century had secured to the church of france independence in the choice of her chief officers, was replaced by a concordat, whereby the king allowed the papacy once more to drain the wealth of the church of france, while the pope allowed the king almost autocratic power over it. he was to appoint to all benefices, with exception of a few privileged offices; the pope was no longer to be threatened with general councils, while he should receive again the annates of the church. the years which followed this brilliantly disastrous opening brought little good to france. in the death of ferdinand the catholic placed charles on the throne of spain; in the death of maximilian threw open to the young princes the most dazzling prize of human ambition,--the headship of the holy roman empire. francois i., charles, and henry viii. were all candidates for the votes of the seven electors, though the last never seriously entered the lists. the struggle lay between francois, the brilliant young prince, who seemed to represent the new opinions in literature and art, and charles of austria and spain, who was as yet unknown and despised, and, from his education under the virtuous and scholastic adrian of utrecht, was thought likely to represent the older and reactionary opinions of the clergy. after a long and sharp competition, the great prize fell to charles, henceforth known to history as that great monarch and emperor, charles v. the rivalry between the princes could not cease there. charles, as representative of the house of burgundy, claimed all that had been lost when charles the bold fell; and in the war broke out between him and francois, the first of a series of struggles between the two rivals. while the king wasted the resources of his country on these wars, his proud and unwise mother, louise of savoy, guided by antoine du prat, ruled, to the sorrow of all, at home. the war brought no glory with it: on the flemish frontier a place or two was taken; in biscay fontarabia fell before the arms of france; in italy francois had to meet a new league of pope and emperor, and his troops were swept completely out of the milanese. in the midst of all came the defection of that great prince, the constable de bourbon, head of the younger branch of the bourbon house, the most powerful feudal lord in france. louise of savoy had enraged and offended him, or he her; the king slighted him, and in the constable made a secret treaty with charles v. and henry viii., and, taking flight into italy, joined the spaniards under lannoy. the french, who had again invaded the milanese, were again driven out in ; on the other hand, the incursions of the imperialists into picardy, provence, and the southeast were all complete failures. encouraged by the repulse of bourbon from marseilles, francois i. once more crossed the alps, and overran a great part of the valley of the po; at the siege of pavia he was attacked by pescara and bourbon, utterly defeated and taken prisoner ( th february, ); the broken remnants of the french were swept out of italy at once, and francois i. was carried into spain, a captive at madrid. his mother, best in adversity, behaved with high pride and spirit; she overawed disaffection, made preparations for resistance, looked out for friends on every side. had francois been in truth a hero, he might, even as a prisoner, have held his own; but he was unable to bear the monotony of confinement, and longed for the pleasures of france. on this mean nature charles v. easily worked, and made the captive monarch sign the treaty of madrid (january , ), a compact which francois meant to break as soon as he could, for he knew neither heroism nor good faith. the treaty stipulated that francois should give up the duchy of burgundy to charles, and marry eleanor of portugal, charles's sister; that francois should also abandon his claims on flanders, milan, and naples, and should place two sons in the emperor's hands as hostages. following the precedent of louis xi. in the case of normandy, he summoned an assembly of nobles and the parliament of paris to cognac, where they declared the cession of burgundy to be impossible. he refused to return to spain, and made alliances wherever he could, with the pope, with venice, milan, and england. the next year saw the ruin of this league in the discomfiture of clement vii., and the sack of rome by the german mercenaries under bourbon, who was killed in the assault. the war went on till , when francois, having lost two armies in it, and gained nothing but loss and harm, was willing for peace; charles v., alarmed at the progress of the turks, was not less willing; and in august, , the famous treaty, of cambrai, "the ladies' peace," was agreed to by margaret of austria and louise of savoy. though charles v. gave up all claim on the duchy of burgundy, he had secured to himself flanders and artois, and had entirely cleared french influences out of italy, which now became firmly fixed under the imperial hand, as a connecting link between his spanish and german possessions. francois lost ground and credit by these successive treaties, conceived in bad faith, and not honestly carried out. no sooner had the treaty of cambrai been effectual in bringing his sons back to france, than francois began to look out for new pretexts and means for war. affairs were not unpromising. his mother's death in left him in possession of a huge fortune, which she had wrung from defenceless france; the powers which were jealous of austria, the turk, the english king, the members of the smalkald league, all looked to francois as their leader; clement vii., though his misfortunes had thrown him into the emperor's hands, was not unwilling to treat with france; and in by the compact of marseilles the pope broke up the friendship between francois and henry viii., while he married his niece catherine de' medici to henri, the second son of francois. this compact was a real disaster to france; the promised dowry of catherine--certain italian cities--was never paid, and the death of clement vii. in made the political alliance with the papacy a failure. the influence of catherine affected and corrupted french history for half a century. preparations for war went on; francois made a new scheme for a national army, though in practice he preferred the tyrant's arm, the foreign mercenary. from his day till the revolution the french army was largely composed of bodies of men tempted out of other countries, chiefly from switzerland or germany. while the emperor strove to appease the protestant princes of germany by the peace of kadan ( ), francois strengthened himself with a definite alliance with soliman; and when, on the death of francesco sforza, duke of milan, who left no heirs, charles seized the duchy as its overlord, francois, after some bootless negotiation, declared war on his great rival ( ). his usual fortunes prevailed so long as he was the attacking party: his forces were soon swept out of piedmont, and the emperor carried the war over the frontier into provence. that also failed, and charles was fain to withdraw after great losses into italy. the defence of provence--a defence which took the form of a ruthless destruction of all its resources--had been entrusted to anne de montmorency, who henceforward became constable of france, and exerted great influence over francois i. though these two campaigns, the french in italy and the imperialist in provence, had equally failed in , peace did not follow till , when, after the terrible defeat of ferdinand of austria by the turks, charles was anxious to have free hand in germany. under the mediation of paul iii. the agreement of nice was come to, which included a ten years' truce and the abandonment by francois of all his foreign allies and aims. he seemed a while to have fallen completely under the influence of the sagacious emperor. he gave way entirely to the church party of the time, a party headed by gloomy henri, now dauphin, who never lost the impress of his spanish captivity, and by the constable anne de montmorency; for a time the artistic or renaissance party, represented by anne, duchesse d'etampes, and catherine de' medici, fell into disfavour. the emperor even ventured to pass through france, on his way from spain to the netherlands. all this friendship, however, fell to dust, when it was found that charles refused to invest the duc d'orleans, the second son of francois, with the duchy of milan, and when the emperor's second expedition against the sea-power of the turks had proved a complete failure, and charles had returned to spain with loss of all his fleet and army. then francois hesitated no longer, and declared war against him ( ). the shock the emperor had suffered inspirited all his foes; the sultan and the protestant german princes were all eager for war; the influence of anne de montmorency had to give way before that of the house of guise, that frontier family, half french, half german, which was destined to play a large part in the troubled history of the coming half-century. claude, duc de guise, a veteran of the earliest days of francois, was vehemently opposed to charles and the austro-spanish power, and ruled in the king's councils. this last war was as mischievous as its predecessors no great battles were fought; in the frontier affairs the combatants were about equally fortunate; the battle of cerisolles, won by the french under enghien ( ), was the only considerable success they had, and even that was almost barren of results, for the danger to northern france was imminent; there a combined invasion had been planned and partly executed by charles and henry viii., and the country, almost undefended, was at their mercy. the two monarchs, however, distrusted one another; and charles v., anxious about germany, sent to francois proposals for peace from crespy couvrant, near laon, where he had halted his army; francois, almost in despair, gladly made terms with him. the king gave up his claims on flanders and artois, the emperor his on the duchy of burgundy; the king abandoned his old neapolitan ambition, and charles promised one of the princesses of the house of austria, with milan as her dower, to the duc d'orleans, second son of francois. the duke dying next year, this portion of the agreement was not carried out. the peace of crespy, which ended the wars between the two great rivals, was signed in autumn, , and, like the wars which led to it, was indecisive and lame. charles learnt that with all his great power he could not strike a fatal blow at france; france ought to have learnt that she was very weak for foreign conquest, and that her true business was to consolidate and develop her power at home. henry viii. deemed himself wronged by this independent action on the part of charles, who also had his grievances with the english monarch; he stood out till , and then made peace with francois, with the aim of forming a fresh combination against charles. in the midst of new projects and much activity, the marrer of man's plots came on the scene, and carried off in the same year, , the english king and francois i., leaving charles v. undisputed arbiter of the affairs of europe. in this same year he also crushed the protestant princes at the battle of muhlberg. in the reign of francois i. the court looked not unkindly on the reformers, more particularly in the earlier years. henri ii., who succeeded in , "had all the faults of his father, with a weaker mind;" and as strength of mind was not one of the characteristics of francois i., we may imagine how little firmness there was in the gloomy king who now reigned. party spirit ruled at court. henri ii., with his ancient mistress, diane de poitiers, were at the head of one party, that of the strict catholics, and were supported by old anne de montmorency, most unlucky of soldiers, most fanatical of catholics, and by the guises, who chafed a good deal under the stern rule of the constable. this party had almost extinguished its antagonists; in the struggle of the mistresses, the pious and learned anne d'etampes had to give place to imperious diane, catherine, the queen, was content to bide her time, watching with italian coolness the game as it went on; of no account beside her rival, and yet quite sure to have her day, and ready to play parties against one another. meanwhile, she brought to her royal husband ten sickly children, most of whom died young, and three wore the crown. of the many bad things she did for france, that was perhaps among the worst. on the accession of henri ii. the duchy of brittany finally lost even nominal independence; he next got the hand of mary, queen of scots, then but five years old, for the dauphin francois; she was carried over to france; and being by birth half a guise, by education and interests of her married life she became entirely french. it was a great triumph for henri, for the protector somerset had laid his plans to secure her for young edward vi.; it was even more a triumph for the guises, who saw opened out a broad and clear field for their ambition. at first henri ii. showed no desire for war, and seemed to shrink from rivalry or collision with charles v. he would not listen to paul iii., who, in his anxiety after the fall of the protestant power in germany in , urged him to resist the emperor's triumphant advance; he seemed to show a dread of war, even among his neighbours. after he had won his advantage over edward vi., he escaped the war which seemed almost inevitable, recovered boulogne from the english by a money payment, and smoothed the way for peace between england and scotland. he took much interest in the religious question, and treated the calvinists with great severity; he was also occupied by troubles in the south and west of france. meanwhile, a new pope, julius iii., was the weak dependent of the emperor, and there seemed to be no head left for any movement against the universal domination of charles v. his career from to was, to all appearance, a triumphal march of unbroken success. yet germany was far from acquiescence; the princes were still discontented and watchful; even ferdinand of austria, his brother, was offended by the emperor's anxiety to secure everything, even the imperial crown for his son philip; maurice of saxony, that great problem of the age, was preparing for a second treachery, or, it may be, for a patriotic effort. these german malcontents now appealed to henri for aid; and at last henri seemed inclined to come. he had lately made alliance with england, and in formed a league at chambord with the german princes; the old connection with the turk was also talked of. the germans agreed to allow' him to hold (as imperial vicar, not as king of france) the "three bishoprics," metz, verdun, and toul; he also assumed a protectorate over the spiritual princes, those great bishops and electors of the rhine, whose stake in the empire was so important. the general lines of french foreign politics are all here clearly marked; in this henri ii. is the forerunner of henri iv. and of louis xiv.; the imperial politics of napoleon start from much the same lines; the proclamations of napoleon iii. before the franco-german war seemed like thin echoes of the same. early in maurice of saxony struck his great blow at his master in the tyrol, destroying in an instant all the emperor's plans for the suppression of lutheran opinions, and the reunion of germany in a catholic empire; and while charles v. fled for his life, henri ii. with a splendid army crossed the frontiers of lorraine. anne de montmorency, whose opposition to the war had been overborne by the guises, who warmly desired to see a french predominance in lorraine, was sent forward to reduce metz, and quickly got that important city into his hands; toul and verdun soon opened their gates, and were secured in reality, if not in name, to france. eager to undertake a protectorate of the rhine, henri ii. tried also to lay hands on strasburg; the citizens, however, resisted, and he had to withdraw; the same fate befell his troops in an attempt on spires. still, metz and the line of the vosges mountains formed a splendid acquisition for france. the french army, leaving strong garrisons in lorraine, withdrew through luxemburg and the northern frontier; its remaining exploits were few and mean, for the one gleam of good fortune enjoyed by anne de montmorency, who was unwise and arrogant, and a most inefficient commander, soon deserted him. charles v., as soon as he could gather forces, laid siege to metz, but, after nearly three months of late autumnal operations, was fain to break up and withdraw, baffled and with loss of half his army, across the rhine. though some success attended his arms on the northern frontier, it was of no permanent value; the loss of metz, and the failure in the attempt to take it, proved to the worn-out emperor that the day of his power and opportunity was past. the conclusions of the diet of augsburg in settled for half a century the struggle between lutheran and catholic, but settled it in a way not at all to his mind; for it was the safeguard of princely interests against his plans for an imperial unity. weary of the losing strife, yearning for ease, ordered by his physicians to withdraw from active life, charles in the course of and resigned all his great lordships and titles, leaving philip his son to succeed him in italy, the netherlands, and spain, and his brother ferdinand of austria to wear in his stead the imperial diadem. these great changes sundered awhile the interests of austria from those of spain. henri endeavoured to take advantage of the check in the fortunes of his antagonists; he sent anne de montmorency to support gaspard de coligny, the admiral of france, in picardy, and in harmony with paul iv., instructed francois, duc de guise, to enter italy to oppose the duke of alva. as of old, the french arms at first carried all before them, and guise, deeming himself heir to the crown of naples (for he was the eldest great-grandson of rene ii., titular king of naples), pushed eagerly forward as far as the abruzzi. there he was met and outgeneraled by alva, who drove him back to rome, whence he was now recalled by urgent summons to france; for the great disaster of st. quentin had laid paris itself open to the assault of an enterprising enemy. with the departure of guise from italy the age of the italian expeditions comes to an end. on the northern side of the realm things had gone just as badly. philibert of savoy, commanding for philip with spanish and english troops, marched into france as far as to the somme, and laid siege to st. quentin, which was bravely defended by amiral de coligny. anne de montmorency, coming up to relieve the place, managed his movements so clumsily that he was caught by count egmont and the flemish horse, and, with incredibly small loss to the conquerors, was utterly routed ( ). montmorency himself and a crowd of nobles and soldiers were taken; the slaughter was great. coligny made a gallant and tenacious stand in the town itself, but at last was overwhelmed, and the place fell. terrible as these mishaps were to france, philip ii. was not of a temper to push an advantage vigorously; and while his army lingered, francois de guise came swiftly back from italy; and instead of wasting strength in a doubtful attack on the allies in picardy, by a sudden stroke of genius he assaulted and took calais (january, ), and swept the english finally off the soil of france. this unexpected and brilliant blow cheered and solaced the afflicted country, while it finally secured the ascendency of the house of guise. the duke's brother, the cardinal de lorraine, carried all before him in the king's councils; the dauphin, betrothed long before, was now married to mary of scots; a secret treaty bound the young queen to bring her kingdom over with her; it was thought that france with scotland would be at least a match for england joined with spain. in the same year, , the french advance along the coast, after they had taken dunkirk and nieuport, was finally checked by the brilliant genius of count egmont, who defeated them at gravelinea. all now began to wish for peace, especially montmorency, weary of being a prisoner, and anxious to get back to court, that he might check the fortunes of the guises; philip desired it that he might have free hand against heresy. and so, at cateau-cambresis, a peace was made in april, , by which france retained the three bishoprics and calais, surrendering thionville, montmedy, and one or two other frontier towns, while she recovered ham and st. quentin; the house of savoy was reinstated by philip, as a reward to philibert for his services, and formed a solid barrier for a time between france and italy; cross-marriages between spain, france, and savoy were arranged;--and finally, the treaty contained secret articles by which the guises for france and granvella for the netherlands agreed to crush heresy with a strong hand. as a sequel to this peace, henri ii. held a great tournament at paris, at which he was accidentally slain by a scottish knight in the lists. the guises now shot up into abounded power. on the guise side the cardinal de lorraine was the cleverest man, the true head, while francois, the duke, was the arm; he showed leanings towards the lutherans. on the other side, the head was the dull and obstinate anne de montmorency, the constable, an unwavering catholic, supported by the three coligny brothers, who all were or became huguenots. the queen-mother catherine fluctuated uneasily between the parties, and though catholic herself, or rather not a protestant, did not hesitate to befriend the huguenots, if the political arena seemed to need their gallant swords. their noblest leader was coligny, the admiral; their recognised head was antoine, king of navarre, a man as foolish as fearless. he was heir presumptive to the throne after the valois boys, and claimed to have charge of the young king. though the guises had the lead at first, the huguenots seemed, from their strong aristocratic connections, to have the fairer prospects before them. thirty years of desolate civil strife are before us, and we must set it all down briefly and drily. the prelude to the troubles was played by the huguenots, who in , guided by la renaudie, a perigord gentleman, formed a plot to carry off the young king; for francois ii. had already treated them with considerable severity, and had dismissed from his councils both the princes of the blood royal and the constable de montmorency. the plot failed miserably and la renaudie lost his life; it only secured more firmly the authority of the guises. as a counterpoise to their influence, the queen-mother now conferred the vacant chancellorship on one of the wisest men france has ever seen, her lord bacon, michel de l'hopital, a man of the utmost prudence and moderation, who, had the times been better, might have won constitutional liberties for his country, and appeased her civil strife. as it was, he saved her from the inquisition; his hand drew the edicts which aimed at enforcing toleration on france; he guided the assembly of notables which gathered at fontainebleau, and induced them to attempt a compromise which moderate catholics and calvinists might accept, and which might lessen the power of the guises. this assembly was followed by a meeting of the states general at orleans, at which the prince de conde and the king of navarre were seized by the guises on a charge of having had to do with la renaudie's plot. it would have gone hard with them had not the sickly king at this very time fallen ill and died ( ). this was a grievous blow to the guises. now, as in a moment, all was shattered; catherine de medici rose at once to the command of affairs; the new king, charles ix., was only, ten years old, and her position as regent was assured. the guises would gladly have ruled with her, but she had no fancy for that; she and chancellor de l'hopital were not likely to ally themselves with all that was severe and repressive. it must not be forgotten that the best part of her policy was inspired by the chancellor de l'hopital. now it was that mary stuart, the queen-dowager, was compelled to leave france for scotland; her departure clearly marks the fall of the guises; and it also showed philip of spain that it was no longer necessary for him to refuse aid and counsel to the guises; their claims were no longer formidable to him on the larger sphere of european politics; no longer could mary stuart dream of wearing the triple crown of scotland, france, and england. the tolerant language of l'hopital at the states general of orleans in satisfied neither side. the huguenots were restless; the bourbon princes tried to crush the guises, in return for their own imprisonment the year before; the constable was offended by the encouragement shown to the huguenots; it was plain that new changes impended. montmorency began them by going over to the guises; and the fatal triumvirate of francois, duc de guise, montmorency, and st. andre the marshal, was formed. we find the king of spain forthwith entering the field of french intrigues and politics, as the support and stay of this triumvirate. parties take a simpler format once, one party of catholics and another of huguenots, with the queen-mother and the moderates left powerless between them. these last, guided still by l'hopital, once more convoked the states general at pontoise: the nobles and the third estate seemed to side completely with the queen and the moderates; a controversy between huguenots and jesuits at poissy only added to the discontent of the catholics, who were now joined by foolish antoine, king of navarre. the edict of january, , is the most remarkable of the attempts made by the queen-mother to satisfy the huguenots; but party-passion was already too strong for it to succeed; civil war had become inevitable. the period may be divided into four parts: ( ) the wars before the establishment of the league ( - ); ( ) the period of the st. bartholomew ( - ); ( ) the struggle of the new politique party against the leaguers ( - ); ( ) the efforts of henri iv. to crush the league and reduce the country to peace ( - ). the period can also be divided by that series of agreements, or peaces, which break it up into eight wars: . the war of , on the skirts of which philip of spain interfered on one side, and queen elizabeth with the calvinistic german princes on the other, showed at once that the huguenots were by far the weaker party. the english troops at havre enabled them at first to command the lower seine up to rouen; but the other party, after a long siege which cost poor antoine of navarre his life, took that place, and relieved paris of anxiety. the huguenots had also spread far and wide over the south and west, occupying orleans; the bridge of orleans was their point of junction between poitou and germany. while the strength of the catholics lay to the east, in picardy, and at paris, the huguenot power was mostly concentrated in the south and west of france. conde, who commanded at orleans, supported by german allies, made an attempt on paris, but finding the capital too strong for him, turned to the west, intending to join the english troops from havre. montmorency, however, caught him at dreux; and in the battle that ensued, the marshal of france, saint-andre, perished; conde was captured by the catholics, montmorency by the huguenots. coligny, the admiral, drew off his defeated troops with great skill, and fell back to beyond the loire; the duc de guise remained as sole head of the catholics. pushing on his advantage, the duke immediately laid siege to orleans, and there he fell by the hand of a huguenot assassin. both parties had suffered so much that the queen-mother thought she might interpose with terms of peace; the edict of amboise (march, ) closed the war, allowing the calvinists freedom of worship in the towns they held, and some other scanty privileges. a three years' quiet followed, though all men suspected their neighbours, and the high catholic party tried hard to make catherine sacrifice l'hopital and take sharp measures with the huguenots. they on their side were restless and suspicious, and it was felt that another war could not be far off. intrigues were incessant, all men thinking to make their profit out of the weakness of france. the struggle between calvinists and catholics in the netherlands roused much feeling, though catherine refused to favour either party. she collected an army of her own; it was rumoured that she intended to take the huguenots by surprise and annihilate them. in autumn, , their patience gave way, and they raised the standard of revolt, in harmony with the heroic netherlanders. conde and the chatillons beleaguered paris from the north, and fought the battle of st. denis, in which the old constable, anne de montmorency, was killed. the huguenots, however, were defeated and forced to withdraw, conde marching eastward to join the german troops now coming up to his aid. no more serious fighting followed; the peace of longjumeau (march, ), closed the second war, leaving matters much as they were. the aristocratic resistance against the catholic sovereigns, against what is often called the "catholic reaction," had proved itself hollow; in germany and the netherlands, as well as in france, the protestant cause seemed to fail; it was not until the religious question became mixed up with questions as to political rights and freedom, as in the low countries, that a new spirit of hope began to spring up. the peace of longjumeau gave no security to the huguenot nobles; they felt that the assassin might catch them any day. an attempt to seize condo and coligny failed, and served only to irritate their party; cardinal chatillon escaped to england; jeanne of navarre and her young son henri took refuge at la rochelle; l'hopital was dismissed the court. the queen-mother seemed to have thrown off her cloak of moderation, and to be ready to relieve herself of the huguenots by any means, fair or foul. war accordingly could not fail to break out again before the end of the year. conde had never been so strong; with his friends in england and the low countries, and the enthusiastic support of a great party of nobles and religious adherents at home, his hopes rose; he even talked of deposing the valois and reigning in their stead. he lost his life, however, early in , at the battle of jarnac. coligny once more with difficulty, as at dreux, saved the broken remnants of the defeated huguenots. conde's death, regarded at the time by the huguenots as an irreparable calamity, proved in the end to be no serious loss; for it made room for the true head of the party, henri of navarre. no sooner had jeanne of navarre heard of the mishap of jarnac than she came into the huguenot camp and presented to the soldiers her young son henri and the young prince de conde, a mere child. her gallant bearing and the true soldier-spirit of coligny, who shone most brightly in adversity, restored their temper; they even won some small advantages. before long, however, the duc d'anjou, the king's youngest brother, caught and punished them severely at moncontour. both parties thenceforward wore themselves out with desultory warfare. in august, , the peace of st. germain-en-laye closed the third war and ended the first period. . it was the most favourable peace the huguenots had won as yet; it secured them, besides previous rights, four strongholds. the catholics were dissatisfied; they could not sympathise with the queen-mother in her alarm at the growing strength of philip ii., head of the catholics in europe; they dreaded the existence and growing influence of a party now beginning to receive a definite name, and honourable nickname, the politiques. these were that large body of french gentlemen who loved the honour of their country rather than their religious party, and who, though catholics, were yet moderate and tolerant. a pair of marriages now proposed by the court amazed them still more. it was suggested that the duc d'anjou should marry queen elizabeth of england, and henri of navarre, marguerite de valois, the king's sister. charles ii. hoped thus to be rid of his brother, whom he disliked, and to win powerful support against spain, by the one match, and by the other to bring the civil wars to a close. the sketch of a far-reaching resistance to philip ii. was drawn out; so convinced of his good faith was the prudent and sagacious william of orange, that, on the strength of these plans, he refused good terms now offered him by spain. the duc d'alencon, the remaining son of catherine, the brother who did not come to the throne, was deeply interested in the plans for a war in the netherlands; anjou, who had withdrawn from the scheme of marriage with queen elizabeth, was at this moment a candidate for the throne of poland; while negotiations respecting it were going on, marguerite de valois was married to henri of navarre, the worst of wives [?? d.w.] to a husband none too good. coligny, who had strongly opposed the candidature of anjou for the throne of poland, was set on by an assassin, employed by the queen-mother and her favourite son, and badly wounded; the huguenots were in utmost alarm, filling the air with cries and menaces. charles showed great concern for his friend's recovery, and threatened vengeance on the assassins. what was his astonishment to learn that those assassins were his mother and brother! catherine worked on his fears, and the plot for the great massacre was combined in an instant. the very next day after the king's consent was wrung from him, th august, , the massacre of st. bartholomew's day took place. the murder of coligny was completed; his son-in-law teligny perished; all the chief huguenots were slain; the slaughter spread to country towns; the church and the civil power were at one, and the victims, taken at unawares, could make no resistance. the two bourbons, henri and the prince de conde, were spared; they bought their lives by a sudden conversion to catholicism. the chief guilt of this great crime lies with catherine de' medici; for, though it is certain that she did not plan it long before, assassination was a recognised part of her way of dealing with huguenots. a short war followed, a revolt of the southern cities rather than a war. they made tenacious and heroic resistance; a large part of the royal forces sympathised rather with them than with the league; and in july, , the edict of boulogne granted them even more than they, had been promised by the peace of st. germain. . we have reached the period of the "wan of the league," as the four later civil wars are often called. the last of the four is alone of any real importance. just as the peace of la rochelle was concluded, the duc d'anjou, having been elected king of poland, left france; it was not long before troubles began again. the duc d'alencon was vexed by his mother's neglect; as heir presumptive to the crown he thought he deserved better treatment, and sought to give himself consideration by drawing towards the middle party; catherine seemed to be intriguing for the ruin of that party--nothing was safe while she was moving. the king had never held up his head since the st. bartholomew; it was seen that he now was dying, and the queen-mother took the opportunity of laying hands on the middle party. she arrested alencon, montmorency, and henri of navarre, together with some lesser chiefs; in the midst of it all charles ix. died ( ), in misery, leaving the ill-omened crown to henri of anjou, king of poland, his next brother, his mother's favourite, the worst of a bad breed. at the same time the fifth civil war broke out, interesting chiefly because it was during its continuance that the famous league was actually formed. henri iii., when he heard of his brother's death, was only too eager to slip away like a culprit from poland, though he showed no alacrity in returning to france, and dallied with the pleasures of italy for months. an attempt to draw him over to the side of the politiques failed completely; he attached himself on the contrary to the guises, and plunged into the grossest dissipation, while he posed himself before men as a good and zealous catholic. the politiques and huguenots therefore made a compact in , at milhaud on the tarn, and chose the prince de conde as their head; henri of navarre escaped from paris, threw off his forced catholicism, and joined them. against them the strict catholics seemed powerless; the queen-mother closed this war with the peace of chastenoy (may, ), with terms unusually favourable for both politiques and huguenots: for the latter, free worship throughout france, except at paris; for the chiefs of the former, great governments, for alencon a large central district, for conde, picardy, for henri of navarre, guienne. to resist all this the high catholic party framed the league they had long been meditating; it is said that the cardinal de lorraine had sketched it years before, at the time of the later sittings of the council of trent. lesser compacts had already been made from time to time; now it was proposed to form one great league, towards which all should gravitate. the head of the league was henri, duc de guise the second, "balafre," who had won that title in fighting against the german reiters the year before, when they entered france under condo. he certainly hoped at this time to succeed to the throne of france, either by deposing the corrupt and feeble henri iii., "as pippin dealt with hilderik," or by seizing the throne, when the king's debaucheries should have brought him to the grave. the catholics of the more advanced type, and specially the jesuits, now in the first flush of credit and success, supported him warmly. the headquarters of the movement were in picardy; its first object, opposition to the establishment of conde as governor of that province. the league was also very popular with the common folk, especially in the towns of the north. it soon found that paris was its natural centre; thence it spread swiftly across the whole natural france; it was warmly supported by philip of spain. the states general, convoked at blois in , could bring no rest to france; opinion was just as much divided there as in the country; and the year saw another petty war, counted as the sixth, which was closed by the peace of bergerac, another ineffectual truce which settled nothing. it was a peace made with the politiques and huguenots by the court; it is significant of the new state of affairs that the league openly refused to be bound by it, and continued a harassing, objectless warfare. the duc d'anjou (he had taken that title on his brother henri's accession to the throne) in deserted the court party, towards which his mother had drawn him, and made friends with the calvinists in the netherlands. the southern provinces named him "defender of their liberties;" they had hopes he might wed elizabeth of england; they quite mistook their man. in "the gallants' war" broke out; the leaguers had it all their own way; but henri iii., not too friendly to them, and urged by his brother anjou, to whom had been offered sovereignty over the seven united provinces in , offered the insurgents easy terms, and the treaty of fleix closed the seventh war. anjou in the netherlands could but show his weakness; nothing went well with him; and at last, having utterly wearied out his friends, he fled, after the failure of his attempt to secure antwerp, into france. there he fell ill of consumption and died in . this changed at once the complexion of the succession question. hitherto, though no children seemed likely to be born to him, henri iii. was young and might live long, and his brother was there as his heir. now, henri iii. was the last prince of the valois, and henri of navarre in hereditary succession was heir presumptive to the throne, unless the salic law were to be set aside. the fourth son of saint louis, robert, comte de clermont, who married beatrix, heiress of bourbon, was the founder of the house of bourbon. of this family the two elder branches had died out: john, who had been a central figure in the war of the public weal, in ; peter, husband of anne of france, in ; neither of them leaving heirs male. of the younger branch francois died in , and the famous constable de bourbon in . this left as the only representatives of the family, the comtes de la marche; of these the elder had died out in , and the junior alone survived in the comtes de vendome. the head of this branch, charles, was made duc de vendome by francois i. in ; he was father of antoine, duc de vendome, who, by marrying the heroic jeanne d'albret, became king of navarre, and of louis, who founded the house of conde; lastly, antoine was the father of henri iv. he was, therefore, a very distant cousin to henri iii; the houses of capet, of alencon, of orleans, of angouleme, of maine, and of burgundy, as well as the elder bourbons, had to fall extinct before henri of navarre could become heir to the crown. all this, however, had now happened; and the huguenots greatly rejoiced in the prospect of a calvinist king. the politique party showed no ill-will towards him; both they and the court party declared that if he would become once more a catholic they would rally to him; the guises and the league were naturally all the more firmly set against him; and henri of navarre saw that he could not as yet safely endanger his influence with the huguenots, while his conversion would not disarm the hostility of the league. they had before, this put forward as heir to the throne henri's uncle, the wretched old cardinal de bourbon, who had all the faults and none of the good qualities of his brother antoine. under cover of his name the duc de guise hoped to secure the succession for himself; he also sold himself and his party to philip of spain, who was now in fullest expectation of a final triumph over his foes. he had assassinated william the silent; any day elizabeth or henri of navarre might be found murdered; the domination of spain over europe seemed almost secured. the pact of joinville, signed between philip, guise, and mayenne, gives us the measure of the aims of the high catholic party. paris warmly sided with them; the new development of the league, the "sixteen of paris," one representative for each of the districts of the capital, formed a vigorous organisation and called for the king's deposition; they invited henri, duc de guise, to paris. soon after this henri iii. humbled himself, and signed the treaty of nemours ( ) with the leaguers. he hereby became nominal head of the league and its real slave. the eighth war, the "war of the three henries," that is, of henri iii. and henri de guise against henri of navarre, now broke out. the pope made his voice heard; sixtus excommunicated the bourbons, henri and conde, and blessed the leaguers. for the first time there was some real life in one of these civil ware, for henri of navarre rose nobly to the level of his troubles. at first the balance of successes was somewhat in favour of the leaguers; the political atmosphere grew even more threatening, and terrible things, like lightning flashes, gleamed out now and again. such, for example, was the execution of mary stuart, queen of scots, in . it was known that philip ii. was preparing to crush england. elizabeth did what she could to support henri of navarre; he had the good fortune to win the battle of contras, in which the duc de joyeuse, one of the favourites of henri iii., was defeated and killed. the duc de guise, on the other hand, was too strong for the germans, who had marched into france to join the huguenots, and defeated them at vimroy and auneau, after which he marched in triumph to paris, in spite of the orders and opposition of. the king, who, finding himself powerless, withdrew to chartres. once more henri iii. was obliged to accept such terms as the leaguers chose to impose; and with rage in his heart he signed the "edict of union" ( ), in which he named the duc de guise lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and declared that no heretic could succeed to the throne. unable to endure the humiliation, henri iii. that same winter, assassinated the duc and the cardinal de guise, and seized many leaders of the league, though he missed the duc de mayenne. this scandalous murder of the "king of paris," as the capital fondly called the duke, brought the wretched king no solace or power. his mother did not live to see the end of her son; she died in this the darkest period of his career, and must have been aware that her cunning and her immoral life had brought nothing but misery to herself and all her race. the power of the league party seemed as great as ever; the duc de mayenne entered paris, and declared open war on henri iii., who, after some hesitation, threw himself into the hands of his cousin henri of navarre in the spring of . the old politique party now rallied to the king; the huguenots were stanch for their old leader; things looked less dark for them since the destruction of the spanish armada in the previous summer. the swiss, aroused by the threats of the duke of savoy at geneva, joined the germans, who once more entered northeastern france; the leaguers were unable to make head either against them or against the armies of the two kings; they fell back on paris, and the allies hemmed them in. the defence of the capital was but languid; the populace missed their idol, the duc de guise, and the moderate party, never extinguished, recovered strength. all looked as if the royalists would soon reduce the last stronghold of the league, when henri iii. was suddenly slain by the dagger of a fanatical half-wined priest. the king had only time to commend henri of navarre to his courtiers as his heir, and to exhort him to become a catholic, before he closed his eyes, and ended the long roll of his vices and crimes. and thus in crime and shame the house of valois went down. for a few years, the throne remained practically vacant: the heroism of henri of navarre, the loss of strength in the catholic powers, the want of a vigorous head to the league,--these things all sustained the bourbon in his arduous struggle; the middle party grew in strength daily, and when once henri had allowed himself to be converted, he became the national sovereign, the national favourite, and the high catholics fell to the fatal position of an unpatriotic faction depending on the arm of the foreigner. . the civil wars were not over, for the heat of party raged as yet unslaked; the politiques could not all at once adopt a huguenot king, the league party had pledged itself to resist the heretic, and henri at first had little more than the huguenots at his back. there were also formidable claimants for the throne. charles ii. duc de lorraine, who had married claude, younger daughter of henri il, and who was therefore brother-in-law to henri iii., set up a vague claim; the king of spain, philip ii., thought that the salic law had prevailed long enough in france, and that his own wife, the elder daughter of henri iii. had the best claim to the throne; the guises, though their head was gone, still hoping for the crown, proclaimed their sham-king, the cardinal de bourbon, as charles x., and intrigued behind the shadow of his name. the duc de mayenne, their present chief, was the most formidable of henri's opponents; his party called for a convocation of states general, which should choose a king to succeed, or to replace, their feeble charles x. during this struggle the high catholic party, inspired by jesuit advice, stood forward as the admirers of constitutional principles; they called on the nation to decide the question as to the succession; their jesuit friends wrote books on the sovereignty of the people. they summoned up troops from every side; the duc de lorraine sent his son to resist henri and support his own claim; the king of spain sent a body of men; the league princes brought what force they could. henri of navarre at the same moment found himself weakened by the silent withdrawal from his camp of the army of henri iii.; the politique nobles did not care at first to throw in their lot with the huguenot chieftain; they offered to confer on henri the post of commander-in-chief, and to reserve the question as to the succession; they let him know that they recognised his hereditary rights, and were hindered only by his heretical opinions; if he would but be converted they were his. henri temporised; his true strength, for the time, lay in his huguenot followers, rugged and faithful fighting men, whose belief was the motive power of their allegiance and of their courage. if he joined the politiques at their price, the price of declaring himself catholic, the huguenots would be offended if not alienated. so he neither absolutely refused nor said yes; and the chief catholic nobles in the main stood aloof, watching the struggle between huguenot and leaguer, as it worked out its course. henri, thus weakened, abandoned the siege of paris, and fell back; with the bulk of his forces he marched into normandy, so as to be within reach of english succour; a considerable army went into champagne, to be ready to join any swiss or german help that might come. these were the great days in the life of henri of navarre. henri showed himself a hero, who strove for a great cause--the cause of european freedom--as well as for his own crown. the duc de mayenne followed the huguenots down into the west, and found henri awaiting him in a strong position at arques, near dieppe; here at bay, the "bearnais" inflicted a heavy blow on his assailants; mayenne fell back into picardy; the prince of lorraine drew off altogether; and henri marched triumphantly back to paris, ravaged the suburbs and then withdrew to tours, where he was recognised as king by the parliament. his campaign of had been most successful; he had defeated the league in a great battle, thanks to his skilful use of his position at arques, and the gallantry of his troops, which more than counterbalanced the great disparity in numbers. he had seen dissension break out among his enemies; even the pope, sixtus, had shown him some favour, and the politique nobles were certainly not going against him. early in henri had secured anjou, maine, and normandy, and in march defeated mayenne, in a great pitched battle at ivry, not far from dreux. the leaguers fell back in consternation to paris. henri reduced all the country round the capital, and sat down before it for a stubborn siege. the duke of parma had at that time his hands full in the low countries; young prince maurice was beginning to show his great abilities as a soldier, and had got possession of breda; all, however, had to be suspended by the spaniards on that side, rather than let henri of navarre take paris. parma with great skill relieved the capital without striking a blow, and the campaign of ended in a failure for henri. the success of parma, however, made frenchmen feel that henri's was the national cause, and that the league flourished only by interference of the foreigner. were the king of navarre but a catholic, he should be a king of france of whom they might all be proud. this feeling was strengthened by the death of the old cardinal de bourbon, which reopened at once the succession question, and compelled philip of spain to show his hand. he now claimed the throne for his daughter elisabeth, as eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of henri ii. all the neighbours of france claimed something; frenchmen felt that it was either henri iv. or dismemberment. the "bearnais" grew in men's minds to be the champion of the salic law, of the hereditary principle of royalty against feudal weakness, of unity against dismemberment, of the nation against the foreigner. the middle party, the politiques of europe,--the english, that is, and the germans,--sent help to henri, by means of which he was able to hold his own in the northwest and southwest throughout . late in the year the violence of the sixteen of paris drew on them severe punishment from the duc de mayenne; and consequently the duke ceased to be the recognised head of the league, which now looked entirely to philip ii. and parma, while paris ceased to be its headquarters; and more moderate counsels having taken the place of its fierce fanaticism, the capital came under the authority of the lawyers and citizens, instead of the priesthood and the bloodthirsty mob. henri, meanwhile, who was closely beleaguering rouen, was again outgeneralled by parma, and had to raise the siege. parma, following him westward, was wounded at caudebec; and though he carried his army triumphantly back to the netherlands, his career was ended by this trifling wound. he did no more, and died in . in , mayenne, having sold his own claims to philip of spain, the opposition to henri looked more solid and dangerous than ever; he therefore thought the time was come for the great step which should rally to him all the moderate catholics. after a decent period of negotiation and conferences, he declared himself convinced, and heard mass at st. denis. the conversion had immediate effect; it took the heart out of the opposition; city after city came in; the longing for peace was strong in every breast, and the conversion seemed to remove the last obstacle. the huguenots, little as they liked it, could not oppose the step, and hoped to profit by their champion's improved position. their ablest man, sully, had even advised henri to make the plunge. in , paris opened her gates to henri, who had been solemnly crowned, just before, at chartres. he was welcomed with immense enthusiasm, and from that day onwards has ever been the favourite hero of the capital. by only one foe remained,--the spanish court. the league was now completely broken up; the parliament of paris gladly aided the king to expel the jesuits from france. in november, , henri declared war against spain, for anything was better than the existing state of things, in which philip's hand secretly supported all opposition: the war in was far from being successful for henri; he was comforted, however, by receiving at last the papal absolution, which swept away the last scruples of france. by rewards and kindliness,--for henri was always willing to give and had a pleasant word for all, most of the reluctant nobles, headed by the duc de mayenne himself, came in in the course of . still the war pressed very heavily, and early in the capture of amiens by the spaniards alarmed paris, and roused the king to fresh energies. with help of sully (who had not yet received the title by which he is known in history) henri recovered amiens, and checked the spanish advance. it was noticed that while the old leaguers came very heartily to the king's help, the huguenots hung back in a discontented and suspicious spirit. after the fall of amiens the war languished; the pope offered to mediate, and henri had time to breathe. he felt that his old comrades, the offended huguenots, had good cause for complaint; and in april, , he issued the famous edict of nantes, which secured their position for nearly a century. they got toleration for their opinions; might worship openly in all places, with the exception of a few towns in which the league had been strong; were qualified to hold office in financial posts and in the law; had a protestant chamber in the parliaments. immediately after the publication of the edict of nantes, the treaty of vervins was signed. though henri by it broke faith with queen elizabeth, he secured an honourable peace for his country, an undisputed kingship for himself. it was the last act of philip ii., the confession that his great schemes were unfulfilled, his policy a failure. etext editor's bookmarks: from faith to action the bridge is short much is forgiven to a king parliament aided the king to expel the jesuits from france the record of the war is as the smoke of a furnace marguerite de navarre memoirs of marguerite de valois memoirs of marguerite de valois queen of navarre written by herself being historic memoirs of the courts of france and navarre book ii. letter xiii. the league.--war declared against the huguenots.--queen marguerite sets out for spa. at length my brother returned to court, accompanied by all the catholic nobility who had followed his fortunes. the king received him very graciously, and showed, by his reception of him, how much he was pleased at his return. bussi, who returned with my brother, met likewise with a gracious reception. le guast was now no more, having died under the operation of a particular regimen ordered for him by his physician. he had given himself up to every kind of debauchery; and his death seemed the judgment of the almighty on one whose body had long been perishing, and whose soul had been made over to the prince of demons as the price of assistance through the means of diabolical magic, which he constantly practised. the king, though now without this instrument of his malicious contrivances, turned his thoughts entirely upon the destruction of the huguenots. to effect this, he strove to engage my brother against them, and thereby make them his enemies and that i might be considered as another enemy, he used every means to prevent me from going to the king my husband. accordingly he showed every mark of attention to both of us, and manifested an inclination to gratify all our wishes. after some time, m. de duras arrived at court, sent by the king my husband to hasten my departure. hereupon, i pressed the king greatly to think well of it, and give me his leave. he, to colour his refusal, told me he could not part with me at present, as i was the chief ornament of his court; that he must, keep me a little longer, after which he would accompany me himself on my way as far as poitiers. with this answer and assurance, he sent m. de duras back. these excuses were purposely framed in order to gain time until everything was prepared for declaring war against the huguenots, and, in consequence, against the king my husband, as he fully designed to do. as a pretence to break with the huguenots, a report was spread abroad that the catholics were dissatisfied with the peace of sens, and thought the terms of it too advantageous for the huguenots. this rumour succeeded, and produced all that discontent amongst the catholics intended by it. a league was formed: in the provinces and great cities, which was joined by numbers of the catholics. m. de guise was named as the head of all. this was well known to the king, who pretended to be ignorant of what was going forward, though nothing else was talked of at court. the states were convened to meet at blois. previous to the opening of this assembly, the king called my brother to his closet, where were present the queen my mother and some of the king's counsellors. he represented the great consequence the catholic league was to his state and authority, even though they should appoint de guise as the head of it; that such a measure was of the highest importance to them both, meaning my brother and himself; that the catholics had very just reason to be dissatisfied with the peace, and that it behoved him, addressing himself to my brother, rather to join the catholics than the huguenots, and this from conscience as well as interest. he concluded his address to my brother with conjuring him, as a son of france and a good catholic, to assist him with his aid and counsel in this critical juncture, when his crown and the catholic religion were both at stake. he further said that, in order to get the start of so formidable a league, he ought to form one himself, and become the head of it, as well to show his zeal for religion as to prevent the catholics from uniting under any other leader. he then proposed to declare himself the head of a league, which should be joined by my brother, the princes, nobles, governors, and others holding offices under the government. thus was my brother reduced to the necessity of making his majesty a tender of his services for the support and maintenance of the catholic religion. the king, having now obtained assurances of my brother's assistance in the event of a war, which was his sole view in the league which he had formed with so much art, assembled together the princes and chief noblemen of his court, and, calling for the roll of the league, signed it first himself, next calling upon my brother to sign it, and, lastly, upon all present. the next day the states opened their meeting, when the king, calling upon the bishops of lyons, ambrune, vienne, and other prelates there present, for their advice, was told that, after the oath taken at his coronation, no oath made to heretics could bind him, and therefore he was absolved from his engagements with the huguenots. this declaration being made at the opening of the assembly, and war declared against the huguenots, the king abruptly dismissed from court the huguenot, genisac, who had arrived a few days before, charged by the king my husband with a commission to hasten my departure. the king very sharply told him that his sister had been given to a catholic, and not to a huguenot; and that if the king my husband expected to have me, he must declare himself a catholic. every preparation for war was made, and nothing else talked of at court; and, to make my brother still more obnoxious to the huguenots, he had the command of an army given him. genisac came and informed me of the rough message he had been dismissed with. hereupon i went directly to the closet of the queen my mother, where i found the king. i expressed my resentment at being deceived by him, and at being cajoled by his promise to accompany me from paris to poitiers, which, as it now appeared, was a mere pretence. i represented that i did not marry by my own choice, but entirely agreeable to the advice of king charles, the queen my mother, and himself; that, since they had given him to me for a husband, they ought not to hinder me from partaking of his fortunes; that i was resolved to go to him, and that if i had not their leave, i would get away how i could, even at the hazard of my life. the king answered: "sister, it is not now a time to importune me for leave. i acknowledge that i have, as you say, hitherto prevented you from going, in order to forbid it altogether. from the time the king of navarre changed his religion, and again became a huguenot, i have been against your going to him. what the queen my mother and i are doing is for your good. i am determined to carry on a war of extermination until this wretched religion of the huguenots, which is of so mischievous a nature, is no more. consider, my sister, if you, who are a catholic, were once in their hands, you would become a hostage for me, and prevent my design. and who knows but they might seek their revenge upon me by taking away your life? no, you shall not go amongst them; and if you leave us in the manner you have now mentioned, rely upon it that you will make the queen your mother and me your bitterest enemies, and that we shall use every means to make you feel the effects of our resentment; and, moreover, you will make your husband's situation worse instead of better." i went from this audience with much dissatisfaction, and, taking advice of the principal persons of both sexes belonging to court whom i esteemed my friends, i found them all of opinion that it would be exceedingly improper for me to remain in a court now at open variance with the king my husband. they recommended me not to stay at court whilst the war lasted, saying it would be more honourable for me to leave the kingdom under the pretence of a pilgrimage, or a visit to some of my kindred. the princesse de roche-sur-yon was amongst those i consulted upon the occasion, who was on the point of setting off for spa to take the waters there. my brother was likewise present at the consultation, and brought with him mondoucet, who had been to flanders in quality of the king's agent, whence he was just returned to represent to the king the discontent that had arisen amongst the flemings on account of infringements made by the spanish government on the french laws. he stated that he was commissioned by several nobles, and the municipalities of several towns, to declare how much they were inclined in their hearts towards france, and how ready they were to come under a french government. mondoucet, perceiving the king not inclined to listen to his representation, as having his mind wholly occupied by the war he had entered into with the huguenots, whom he was resolved to punish for having joined my brother, had ceased to move in it further to the king, and addressed himself on the subject to my brother. my brother, with that princely spirit which led him to undertake great achievements, readily lent an ear to mondoucet's proposition, and promised to engage in it, for he was born rather to conquer than to keep what he conquered. mondoucet's proposition was the more pleasing to him as it was not unjust, it being, in fact, to recover to france what had been usurped by spain. mondoucet had now engaged himself in my brother's service, and was to return to flanders' under a pretence of accompanying the princesse de roche-sur-yon in her journey to spa; and as this agent perceived my counsellers to be at a loss for some pretence for my leaving court and quitting france during the war, and that at first savoy was proposed for my retreat, then lorraine, and then our lady of loretto, he suggested to my brother that i might be of great use to him in flanders, if, under the colour of any complaint, i should be recommended to drink the spa waters, and go with the princesse de roche-sur-yon. my brother acquiesced in this opinion, and came up to me, saying: "oh, queen! you need be no longer at a loss for a place to go to. i have observed that you have frequently an erysipelas on your arm, and you must accompany the princess to spa. you must say, your physicians had ordered those waters for the complaint; but when they, did so, it was not the season to take them. that season is now approaching, and you hope to have the king's leave to go there." my brother did not deliver all he wished to say at that time, because the cardinal de bourbon was present, whom he knew to be a friend to the guises and to spain. however, i saw through his real design, and that he wished me to promote his views in flanders. the company approved of my brother's advice, and the princesse de roche-sur-yon heard the proposal with great joy, having a great regard for me. she promised to attend me to the queen my mother when i should ask her consent. the next day i found the queen alone, and represented to her the extreme regret i experienced in finding that a war was inevitable betwixt the king my husband and his majesty, and that i must continue in a state of separation from my husband; that, as long as the war lasted, it was neither decent nor honourable for me to stay at court, where i must be in one or other, or both, of these cruel situations either that the king my husband should believe that i continued in it out of inclination, and think me deficient in the duty i owed him; or that his majesty should entertain suspicions of my giving intelligence to the king my husband. either of these cases, i observed, could not but prove injurious to me. i therefore prayed her not to take it amiss if i desired to remove myself from court, and from becoming so unpleasantly situated; adding that my physicians had for some time recommended me to take the spa waters for an erysipelas--to which i had been long subject--on my arm; the season for taking these waters was now approaching, and that if she approved of it, i would use the present opportunity, by which means i should be at a distance from court, and show my husband that, as i could not be with him, i was unwilling to remain amongst his enemies. i further expressed my hopes that, through her prudence, a peace might be effected in a short time betwixt the king my husband and his majesty, and that my husband might be restored to the favour he formerly enjoyed; that whenever i learned the news of so joyful an event, i would renew my solicitations to be permitted to go to my husband. in the meantime, i should hope for her permission to have the honour of accompanying the princesse de roche-sur-yon, there present, in her journey to spa. she approved of what i proposed, and expressed her satisfaction that i had taken so prudent a resolution. she observed how much she was chagrined when she found that the king, through the evil persuasions of the bishops, had resolved to break through the conditions of the last peace, which she had concluded in his name. she saw already the ill effects of this hasty proceeding, as it had removed from the king's council many of his ablest and best servants. this gave her, she said, much concern, as it did likewise to think i could not remain at court without offending my husband, or creating jealousy and suspicion in the king's mind. this being certainly what was likely to be the consequence of my staying, she would advise the king to give me leave to set out on this journey. she was as good as her word, and the king discoursed with me on the subject without exhibiting the smallest resentment. indeed, he was well pleased now that he had prevented me from going to the king my husband, for whom he had conceived the greatest animosity. he ordered a courier to be immediately despatched to don john of austria,--who commanded for the king of spain in flanders,--to obtain from him the necessary passports for a free passage in the countries under his command, as i should be obliged to cross a part of flanders to reach spa, which is in the bishopric of liege. all matters being thus arranged, we separated in a few days after this interview. the short time my brother and i remained together was employed by him in giving me instructions for the commission i had undertaken to execute for him in flanders. the king and the queen my mother set out for poitiers, to be near the army of m. de mayenne, then besieging brouage, which place being reduced, it was intended to march into gascony and attack the king my husband. my brother had the command of another army, ordered to besiege issoire and some other towns, which he soon after took. for my part, i set out on my journey to flanders accompanied by the princesse de roche-sur-yon, madame de tournon, the lady of my bedchamber, madame de mouy of picardy, madame de chastelaine, de millon, mademoiselle d'atric, mademoiselle de tournon, and seven or eight other young ladies. my male attendants were the cardinal de lenoncourt, the bishop of langres, and m. de mouy, seigneur de picardy, at present father-in-law to the brother of queen louise, called the comte de chalingy, with my principal steward of the household, my chief esquires, and the other gentlemen of my establishment. letter xiv. description of queen marguerite's equipage.--her journey to liege described.--she enters with success upon her mission.--striking instance of maternal duty and affection in a great lady.--disasters near the close of the journey. the cavalcade that attended me excited great curiosity as it passed through the several towns in the course of my journey, and reflected no small degree of credit on france, as it was splendidly set out, and made a handsome appearance. i travelled in a litter raised with pillars. the lining of it was spanish velvet, of a crimson colour, embroidered in various devices with gold and different coloured silk thread. the windows were of glass, painted in devices. the lining and windows had, in the whole, forty devices, all different and alluding to the sun and its effects. each device had its motto, either in the spanish or italian language. my litter was followed by two others; in the one was the princesse de roche-sur-yon, and in the other madame de tournon, my lady of the bedchamber. after them followed ten maids of honour, on horseback, with their governess; and, last of all, six coaches and chariots, with the rest of the ladies and all our female attendants. i took the road of picardy, the towns in which province had received the king's orders to pay me all due honours. being arrived at le catelet, a strong place, about three leagues distant from the frontier of the cambresis, the bishop of cambray (an ecclesiastical state acknowledging the king of spain only as a guarantee) sent a gentleman to inquire of me at what hour i should leave the place, as he intended to meet me on the borders of his territory. accordingly i found him there, attended by a number of his people, who appeared to be true flemings, and to have all the rusticity and unpolished manners of their country. the bishop was of the house of barlemont, one of the principal families in flanders. all of this house have shown themselves spaniards at heart, and at that time were firmly attached to don john. the bishop received me with great politeness and not a little of the spanish ceremony. although the city of cambray is not so well built as some of our towns in france, i thought it, notwithstanding, far more pleasant than many of these, as the streets and squares are larger and better disposed. the churches are grand and highly ornamented, which is, indeed, common to france; but what i admired, above all, was the citadel, which is the finest and best constructed in christendom. the spaniards experienced it to be strong whilst my brother had it in his possession. the governor of the citadel at this time was a worthy gentleman named m. d'ainsi, who was, in every respect, a polite and well-accomplished man, having the carriage and behaviour of one of our most perfect courtiers, very different from the rude incivility which appears to be the characteristic of a fleming. the bishop gave us a grand supper, and after supper a ball, to which he had invited all the ladies of the city. as soon as the ball was opened he withdrew, in accordance with the spanish ceremony; but m. d'ainsi did the honours for him, and kept me company during the ball, conducting me afterwards to a collation, which, considering his command at the citadel, was, i thought, imprudent. i speak from experience, having been taught, to my cost, and contrary to my desire, the caution and vigilance necessary to be observed in keeping such places. as my regard for my brother was always predominant in me, i continually had his instructions in mind, and now thought i had a fair opportunity to open my commission and forward his views in flanders, this town of cambray, and especially the citadel, being, as it were, a key to that country. accordingly i employed all the talents god had given me to make m. d'ainsi a friend to france, and attach him to my brother's interest. through god's assistance i succeeded with him, and so much was m. d'ainsi pleased with my conversation that he came to the resolution of soliciting the bishop, his master, to grant him leave to accompany me as, far as namur, where don john of austria was in waiting to receive me, observing that he had a great desire to witness so splendid an interview. this spanish fleming, the bishop, had the weakness to grant m. d'ainsi's request, who continued following in my train for ten or twelve days. during this time he took every opportunity of discoursing with me, and showed that, in his heart, he was well disposed to embrace the service of france, wishing no better master than the prince my brother, and declaring that he heartily despised being under the command of his bishop, who, though his sovereign, was not his superior by birth, being born a private gentleman like himself, and, in every other respect, greatly his inferior. leaving cambray, i set out to sleep at valenciennes, the chief city of a part of flanders called by the same name. where this country is divided from cambresis (as far as which i was conducted by the bishop of cambray), the comte de lalain, m. de montigny his brother, and a number of gentlemen, to the amount of two or three hundred, came to meet me. valenciennes is a town inferior to cambray in point of strength, but equal to it for the beauty of its squares, and churches,--the former ornamented with fountains, as the latter are with curious clocks. the ingenuity of the germans in the construction of their clocks was a matter of great surprise to all my attendants, few amongst whom had ever before seen clocks exhibiting a number of moving figures, and playing a variety of tunes in the most agreeable manner. the comte de lalain, the governor of the city, invited the lords and gentlemen of my train to a banquet, reserving himself to give an entertainment to the ladies on our arrival at mons, where we should find the countess his wife, his sister-in-law madame d'aurec, and other ladies of distinction. accordingly the count, with his attendants, conducted us thither the next day. he claimed a relationship with the king my husband, and was, in reality, a person who carried great weight and authority. he was much dissatisfied with the spanish government, and had conceived a great dislike for it since the execution of count egmont, who was his near kinsman. although he had hitherto abstained from entering into the league with the prince of orange and the huguenots, being himself a steady catholic, yet he had not admitted of an interview with don john, neither would he suffer him, nor any one in the interest of spain, to enter upon his territories. don john was unwilling to give the count any umbrage, lest he should force him to unite the catholic league of flanders, called the league of the states, to that of the prince of orange and the huguenots, well foreseeing that such a union would prove fatal to the spanish interest, as other governors have since experienced. with this disposition of mind, the comte de lalain thought he could not give me sufficient demonstrations of the joy he felt by my presence; and he could not have shown more honour to his natural prince, nor displayed greater marks of zeal and affection. on our arrival at mons, i was lodged in his house, and found there the countess his wife, and a court consisting of eighty or a hundred ladies of the city and country. my reception was rather that of their sovereign lady than of a foreign princess. the flemish ladies are naturally lively, affable, and engaging. the comtesse de lalain is remarkably so, and is, moreover, a woman of great sense and elevation of mind, in which particular, as well as in air and countenance, she carries a striking resemblance to the lady your cousin. we became immediately intimate, and commenced a firm friendship at our first meeting. when the supper hour came, we sat down to a banquet, which was succeeded by a ball; and this rule the count observed as long as i stayed at mons, which was, indeed, longer than i intended. it had been my intention to stay at mons one night only, but the count's obliging lady prevailed on me to pass a whole week there. i strove to excuse myself from so long a stay, imagining it might be inconvenient to them; but whatever i could say availed nothing with the count and his lady, and i was under the necessity of remaining with them eight days. the countess and i were on so familiar a footing that she stayed in my bedchamber till a late hour, and would not have left me then had she not imposed upon herself a task very rarely performed by persons of her rank, which, however, placed the goodness of her disposition in the most amiable light. in fact, she gave suck to her infant son; and one day at table, sitting next me, whose whole attention was absorbed in the promotion of my brother's interest,--the table being the place where, according to the custom of the country, all are familiar and ceremony is laid aside,--she, dressed out in the richest manner and blazing with diamonds, gave the breast to her child without rising from her seat, the infant being brought to the table as superbly habited as its nurse, the mother. she performed this maternal duty with so much good humour, and with a gracefulness peculiar to herself, that this charitable office--which would have appeared disgusting and been considered as an affront if done by some others of equal rank--gave pleasure to all who sat at table, and, accordingly, they signified their approbation by their applause. the tables being removed, the dances commenced in the same room wherein we had supped, which was magnificent and large. the countess and i sitting side by side, i expressed the pleasure i received from her conversation, and that i should place this meeting amongst the happiest events of my life. "indeed," said i, "i shall have cause to regret that it ever did take place, as i shall depart hence so unwillingly, there being so little probability, of our meeting again soon. why did heaven deny, our being born in the same country!" this was said in order to introduce my brother's business. she replied: "this country did, indeed, formerly belong to france, and our lawyers now plead their causes in the french language. the greater part of the people here still retain an affection for the french nation. for my part," added the countess, "i have had a strong attachment to your country ever since i have had the honour of seeing you. this country has been long in the possession of the house of austria, but the regard of the people for that house has been greatly, weakened by the death of count egmont, m. de horne, m. de montigny, and others of the same party, some of them our near relations, and all of the best families of the country. we entertain the utmost dislike for the spanish government, and wish for nothing so much as to throw off the yoke of their tyranny; but, as the country is divided betwixt different religions, we are at a loss how to effect it if we could unite, we should soon drive out the spaniards; but this division amongst ourselves renders us weak. would to god the king your brother would come to a resolution of reconquering this country, to which he has an ancient claim! we should all receive him with open arms." this was a frank declaration, made by the countess without premeditation, but it had been long agitated in the minds of the people, who considered that it was from france they were to hope for redress from the evils with which they were afflicted. i now found i had as favourable an opening as i could wish for to declare my errand. i told her that the king of france my brother was averse to engaging in foreign war, and the more so as the huguenots in his kingdom were too strong to admit of his sending any large force out of it. "my brother alencon," said i, "has sufficient means, and might be induced to undertake it. he has equal valour, prudence, and benevolence with the king my brother or any of his ancestors. he has been bred to arms, and is esteemed one of the bravest generals of these times. he has the command of the king's army against the huguenots, and has lately taken a well-fortified town, called issoire, and some other places that were in their possession. you could not invite to your assistance a prince who has it so much in his power to give it; being not only a neighbour, but having a kingdom like france at his devotion, whence he may expect to derive the necessary aid and succour. the count your husband may be assured that if he do my brother this good office he will not find him ungrateful, but may set what price he pleases upon his meritorious service. my brother is of a noble and generous disposition, and ready to requite those who do him favours. he is, moreover, an admirer of men of honour and gallantry, and accordingly is followed by the bravest and best men france has to boast of. i am in hopes that a peace will soon be reestablished with the huguenots, and expect to find it so on my return to france. if the count your husband think as you do, and will permit me to speak to him on the subject, i will engage to bring my brother over to the proposal, and, in that case, your country in general, and your house in particular, will be well satisfied with him. if, through your means, my brother should establish himself here, you may depend on seeing me often, there being no brother or sister who has a stronger affection for each other." the countess appeared to listen to what i said with great pleasure, and acknowledged that she had not entered upon this discourse without design. she observed that, having perceived i did her the honour to have some regard for her, she had resolved within herself not to let me depart out of the country without explaining to me the situation of it, and begging me to procure the aid of france to relieve them from the apprehensions of living in a state of perpetual war or of submitting to spanish tyranny. she thereupon entreated me to allow her to relate our present conversation to her husband, and permit them both to confer with me on the subject the next day. to this i readily gave my consent. thus we passed the evening in discourse upon the object of my mission, and i observed that she took a singular pleasure in talking upon it in all our succeeding conferences when i thought proper to introduce it. the ball being ended, we went to hear vespers at the church of the canonesses, an order of nuns of which we have none in france. these are young ladies who are entered in these communities at a tender age, in order to improve their fortunes till they are of an age to be married. they do not all sleep under the same roof, but in detached houses within an enclosure. in each of these houses are three, four, or perhaps six young girls, under the care of an old woman. these governesses, together with the abbess, are of the number of such as have never been married. these girls never wear the habit of the order but in church; and the service there ended, they dress like others, pay visits, frequent balls, and go where they please. they were constant visitors at the count's entertainments, and danced at his balls. the countess thought the time long until the night, when she had an opportunity of relating to the count the conversation she had with me, and the opening of the business. the next morning she came to me, and brought her husband with her. he entered into a detail of the grievances the country laboured under, and the just reasons he had for ridding it of the tyranny of spain. in doing this, he said, he should not consider himself as acting against his natural sovereign, because he well knew he ought to look for him in the person of the king of france. he explained to me the means whereby my brother might establish himself in flanders, having possession of hainault, which extended as far as brussels. he said the difficulty lay in securing the cambresis, which is situated betwixt hainault and flanders. it would, therefore, be necessary to engage m. d'ainsi in the business. to this i replied that, as he was his neighbour and friend, it might be better that he should open the matter to him; and i begged he would do so. i next assured him that he might have the most perfect reliance on the gratitude and friendship of my brother, and be certain of receiving as large a share of power and authority as such a service done by a person of his rank merited. lastly, we agreed upon an interview betwixt my brother and m. de montigny, the brother of the count, which was to take place at la fere, upon my return, when this business should be arranged. during the time i stayed at mons, i said all i could to confirm the count in this resolution, in which i found myself seconded by the countess. the day of my departure was now arrived, to the great regret of the ladies of mons, as well as myself. the countess expressed herself in terms which showed she had conceived the warmest friendship for me, and made me promise to return by way of that city. i presented the countess with a diamond bracelet, and to the count i gave a riband and diamond star of considerable value. but these presents, valuable as they were, became more so, in their estimation, as i was the donor. of the ladies, none accompanied me from this place, except madame d'aurec. she went with me to namur, where i slept that night, and where she expected to find her husband and the duc d'arscot, her brother-in-law, who had been there since the peace betwixt the king of spain and the states of flanders. for though they were both of the party of the states, yet the duc d'arscot, being an old courtier and having attended king philip in flanders and england, could not withdraw himself from court and the society of the great. the comte de lalain, with all his nobles, conducted me two leagues beyond his government, and until he saw don john's company in the distance advancing to meet me. he then took his leave of me, being unwilling to meet don john; but m. d'ainsi stayed with me, as his master, the bishop of cambray, was in the spanish interest. this gallant company having left me, i was soon after met by don john of austria, preceded by a great number of running footmen, and escorted by only twenty or thirty horsemen. he was attended by a number of noblemen, and amongst the rest the duc d'arscot, m. d'aurec, the marquis de varenbon, and the younger balencon, governor, for the king of spain, of the county of burgundy. these last two, who are brothers, had ridden post to meet me. of don john's household there was only louis de gonzago of any rank. he called himself a relation of the duke of mantua; the others were mean-looking people, and of no consideration. don john alighted from his horse to salute me in my litter, which was opened for the purpose. i returned the salute after the french fashion to him, the duc d'arscot, and m. d'aurec. after an exchange of compliments, he mounted his horse, but continued in discourse with me until we reached the city, which was not before it grew dark, as i set off late, the ladies of mons keeping me as long as they could, amusing themselves with viewing my litter, and requiring an explanation of the different mottoes and devices. however, as the spaniards excel in preserving good order, namur appeared with particular advantage, for the streets were well lighted, every house being illuminated, so that the blaze exceeded that of daylight. our supper was served to us in our respective apartments, don john being unwilling, after the fatigue of so long a journey, to incommode us with a banquet. the house in which i was lodged had been newly furnished for the purpose of receiving me. it consisted of a magnificent large salon, with a private apartment, consisting of lodging rooms and closets, furnished in the most costly manner, with furniture of every kind, and hung with the richest tapestry of velvet and satin, divided into compartments by columns of silver embroidery, with knobs of gold, all wrought in the most superb manner. within these compartments were figures in antique habits, embroidered in gold and silver. the cardinal de lenoncourt, a man of taste and curiosity, being one day in these apartments with the duc d'arscot, who, as i have before observed, was an ornament to don john's court, remarked to him that this furniture seemed more proper for a great king than a young unmarried prince like don john. to which the duc d'arscot replied that it came to him as a present, having been sent to him by a bashaw belonging to the grand seignior, whose son she had made prisoners in a signal victory obtained over the turks. don john having sent the bashaw's sons back without ransom, the father, in return, made him a present of a large quantity of gold, silver, and silk stuffs, which he caused to be wrought into tapestry at milan, where there are curious workmen in this way; and he had the queen's bedchamber hung with tapestry representing the battle in which he had so gloriously defeated the turks. the next morning don john conducted us to chapel, where we heard mass celebrated after the spanish manner, with all kinds of music, after which we partook of a banquet prepared by don john. he and i were seated at a separate table, at a distance of three yards from which stood the great one, of which the honours were done by madame d'aurec. at this table the ladies and principal lords took their seats. don john was served with drink by louis de gonzago, kneeling. the tables being removed, the ball was opened, and the dancing continued the whole afternoon. the evening was spent in conversation betwixt don john and me, who told me i greatly resembled the queen his mistress, by whom he meant the late queen my sister, and for whom he professed to have entertained a very high esteem. in short, don john manifested, by every mark of attention and politeness, as well to me as to my attendants, the very great pleasure he had in receiving me. the boats which were to convey me upon the meuse to liege not all being ready, i was under the necessity of staying another day. the morning was passed as that of the day before. after dinner, we embarked on the river in a very beautiful boat, surrounded by others having on board musicians playing on hautboys, horns, and violins, and landed at an island where don john had caused a collation to be prepared in a large bower formed with branches of ivy, in which the musicians were placed in small recesses, playing on their instruments during the time of supper. the tables being removed, the dances began, and lasted till it was time to return, which i did in the same boat that conveyed me thither, and which was that provided for my voyage. the next morning don john conducted me to the boat, and there took a most polite and courteous leave, charging m. and madame d'aurec to see me safe to huy, the first town belonging to the bishop of liege, where i was to sleep. as soon as don john had gone on shore, m. d'ainsi, who remained in the boat, and who had the bishop of cambray's permission to go to namur only, took leave of me with many protestations of fidelity and attachment to my brother and myself. but fortune, envious of my hitherto prosperous journey, gave me two omens of the sinister events of my return. the first was the sudden illness which attacked mademoiselle de tournon, the daughter of the lady of my bedchamber, a young person, accomplished, with every grace and virtue, and for whom i had the most perfect regard. no sooner had the boat left the shore than this young lady was seized with an alarming disorder, which, from the great pain attending it, caused her to scream in the most doleful manner. the physicians attributed the cause to spasms of the heart, which, notwithstanding the utmost exertions of their skill, carried her off a few days after my arrival at liege. as the history of this young lady is remarkable, i shall relate it in my next letter. the other omen was what happened to us at huy, immediately upon our arrival there. this town is built on the declivity of a mountain, at the foot of which runs the river meuse. as we were about to land, there fell a torrent of rain, which, coming down the steep sides of the mountain, swelled the river instantly to such a degree that we had only time to leap out of the boat and run to the top, the flood reaching the very highest street, next to where i was to lodge. there we were forced to put up with such accommodation as could be procured in the house, as it was impossible to remove the smallest article of our baggage from the boats, or even to stir out of the house we were in, the whole city being under water. however, the town was as suddenly relieved from this calamity as it had been afflicted with it, for, on the next morning, the whole inundation had ceased, the waters having run off, and the river being confined within its usual channel. leaving huy, m. and madame d'aurec returned to don john at namur, and i proceeded, in the boat, to sleep that night at liege. letter xv. the city of liege described.--affecting story of mademoiselle de tournon.--fatal effects of suppressed anguish of mind. the bishop of liege, who is the sovereign of the city and province, received me with all the cordiality and respect that could be expected from a personage of his dignity and great accomplishments. he was, indeed, a nobleman endowed with singular prudence and virtue, agreeable in his person and conversation, gracious and magnificent in his carriage and behaviour, to which i may add that he spoke the french language perfectly. he was constantly attended by his chapter, with several of his canons, who are all sons of dukes, counts, or great german lords. the bishopric is itself a sovereign state, which brings in a considerable revenue, and includes a number of fine cities. the bishop is chosen from amongst the canons, who must be of noble descent, and resident one year. the city is larger than lyons, and much resembles it, having the meuse running through it. the houses in which the canons reside have the appearance of noble palaces. the streets of the city are regular and spacious, the houses of the citizens well built, the squares large, and ornamented with curious fountains. the churches appear as if raised entirely of marble, of which there are considerable quarries in the neighbourhood; they are all of them ornamented with beautiful clocks, and exhibit a variety of moving figures. the bishop received me as i landed from the boat, and conducted me to his magnificent residence, ornamented with delicious fountains and gardens, set off with galleries, all painted, superbly gilt, and enriched with marble, beyond description. the spring which affords the waters of spa being distant no more than three or four leagues from the city of liege, and there being only a village, consisting of three or four small houses, on the spot, the princesse de roche-sur-yon was advised by her physicians to stay at liege and have the waters brought to her, which they assured her would have equal efficacy, if taken after sunset and before sunrise, as if drunk at the spring. i was well pleased that she resolved to follow the advice of the doctors, as we were more comfortably lodged and had an agreeable society; for, besides his grace (so the bishop is styled, as a king is addressed his majesty, and a prince his highness), the news of my arrival being spread about, many lords and ladies came from germany to visit me. amongst these was the countess d'aremberg, who had the honour to accompany queen elizabeth to mezieres, to which place she came to marry king charles my brother, a lady very high in the estimation of the empress, the emperor, and all the princes in christendom. with her came her sister the landgravine, madame d'aremberg her daughter, m. d'aremberg her son, a gallant and accomplished nobleman, the perfect image of his father, who brought the spanish succours to king charles my brother, and returned with great honour and additional reputation. this meeting, so honourable to me, and so much to my satisfaction, was damped by the grief and concern occasioned by the loss of mademoiselle de tournon, whose story, being of a singular nature, i shall now relate to you, agreeably to the promise i made in my last letter. i must begin with observing to you that madame de tournon, at this time lady of my bedchamber, had several daughters, the eldest of whom married m. de balencon, governor, for the king of spain, in the county of burgundy. this daughter, upon her marriage, had solicited her mother to admit of her taking her sister, the young lady whose story i am now about to relate, to live with her, as she was going to a country strange to her, and wherein she had no relations. to this her mother consented; and the young lady, being universally admired for her modesty and graceful accomplishments, for which she certainly deserved admiration, attracted the notice of the marquis de varenbon. the marquis, as i before mentioned, is the brother of m. de balencon, and was intended for the church; but, being violently enamoured of mademoiselle de tournon (whom, as he lived in the same house, he had frequent opportunities of seeing), he now begged his brother's permission to marry her, not having yet taken orders. the young lady's family, to whom he had likewise communicated his wish, readily gave their consent, but his brother refused his, strongly advising him to change his resolution and put on the gown. thus were matters situated when her mother, madame de tournon, a virtuous and pious lady, thinking she had cause to be offended, ordered her daughter to leave the house of her sister, madame de balencon, and come to her. the mother, a woman of a violent spirit, not considering that her daughter was grown up and merited a mild treatment, was continually scolding the poor young lady, so that she was for ever with tears in her eyes. still, there was nothing to blame in the young girl's conduct, but such was the severity of the mother's disposition. the daughter, as you may well suppose, wished to be from under the mother's tyrannical government, and was accordingly delighted with the thoughts of attending me in this journey to flanders, hoping, as it happened, that she should meet the marquis de varenbon somewhere on the road, and that, as he had now abandoned all thoughts of the church, he would renew his proposal of marriage, and take her from her mother. i have before mentioned that the marquis de varenbon and the younger balencon joined us at namur. young balencon, who was far from being so agreeable as his brother, addressed himself to the young lady, but the marquis, during the whole time we stayed at namur, paid not the least attention to her, and seemed as if he had never been acquainted with her. the resentment, grief, and disappointment occasioned by a behaviour so slighting and unnatural was necessarily stifled in her breast, as decorum and her sex's pride obliged her to appear as if she disregarded it; but when, after taking leave, all of them left the boat, the anguish of her mind, which she had hitherto suppressed, could no longer be restrained, and, labouring for vent, it stopped her respiration, and forced from her those lamentable outcries which i have already spoken of. her youth combated for eight days with this uncommon disorder, but at the expiration of that time she died, to the great grief of her mother, as well as myself. i say of her mother, for, though she was so rigidly severe over this daughter, she tenderly loved her. the funeral of this unfortunate young lady was solemnised with all proper ceremonies, and conducted in the most honourable manner, as she was descended from a great family, allied to the queen my mother. when the day of interment arrived, four of my gentlemen were appointed bearers, one of whom was named la boessiere. this man had entertained a secret passion for her, which he never durst declare on account of the inferiority of his family and station. he was now destined to bear the remains of her, dead, for whom he had long been dying, and was now as near dying for her loss as he had before been for her love. the melancholy procession was marching slowly, along, when it was met by the marquis de varenbon, who had been the sole occasion of it. we had not left namur long when the marquis reflected upon his cruel behaviour towards this unhappy young lady; and his passion (wonderful to relate) being revived by the absence of her who inspired it, though scarcely alive while she was present, he had resolved to come and ask her of her mother in marriage. he made no doubt, perhaps, of success, as he seldom failed in enterprises of love; witness the great lady he has since obtained for a wife, in opposition to the will of her family. he might, besides, have flattered himself that he should easily have gained a pardon from her by whom he was beloved, according to the italian proverb, "che la forza d'amore non riguarda al delitto" (lovers are not criminal in the estimation of one another). accordingly, the marquis solicited don john to be despatched to me on some errand, and arrived, as i said before, at the very instant the corpse of this ill-fated young lady was being borne to the grave. he was stopped by the crowd occasioned by this solemn procession. he contemplates it for some time. he observes a long train of persons in mourning, and remarks the coffin to be covered with a white pall, and that there are chaplets of flowers laid upon the coffin. he inquires whose funeral it is. the answer he receives is, that it is the funeral of a young lady. unfortunately for him, this reply fails to satisfy his curiosity. he makes up to one who led the procession, and eagerly asks the name of the young lady they are proceeding to bury. when, oh, fatal answer! love, willing to avenge the victim of his ingratitude and neglect, suggests a reply which had nearly deprived him of life. he no sooner hears the name of mademoiselle de tournon pronounced than he falls from his horse in a swoon. he is taken up for dead, and conveyed to the nearest house, where he lies for a time insensible; his soul, no doubt, leaving his body to obtain pardon from her whom he had hastened to a premature grave, to return to taste the bitterness of death a second time. having performed the last offices to the remains of this poor young lady, i was unwilling to discompose the gaiety of the society assembled here on my account by any show of grief. accordingly, i joined the bishop, or, as he is called, his grace, and his canons, in their entertainments at different houses, and in gardens, of which the city and its neighbourhood afforded a variety. i was every morning attended by a numerous company to the garden, in which i drank the waters, the exercise of walking being recommended to be used with them. as the physician who advised me to take them was my own brother, they did not fail of their effect with me; and for these six or seven years which are gone over my head since i drank them, i have been free from any complaint of erysipelas on my arm. from this garden we usually proceeded to the place where we were invited to dinner. after dinner we were amused with a ball; from the ball we went to some convent, where we heard vespers; from vespers to supper, and that over, we had another ball, or music on the river. letter xvi. queen marguerite, on her return from liege, is in danger of being made a prisoner.--she arrives, after some narrow escapes, at la fere. in this manner we passed the six weeks, which is the usual time for taking these waters, at the expiration of which the princesse de roche-sur-yon was desirous to return to france; but madame d'aurec, who just then returned to us from namur, on her way to rejoin her husband in lorraine, brought us news of an extraordinary change of affairs in that town and province since we had passed through it. it appeared from this lady's account that, on the very day we left namur, don john, after quitting the boat, mounted his horse under pretence of taking the diversion of hunting, and, as he passed the gate of the castle of namur, expressed a desire of seeing it; that, having entered, he took possession of it, notwithstanding he held it for the states, agreeably to a convention. don john, moreover, arrested the persons of the duc d'arscot and m. d'aurec, and also made madame d'aurec a prisoner. after some remonstrances and entreaties, he had set her husband and brother-in-law at liberty, but detained her as a hostage for them. in consequence of these measures, the whole country was in arms. the province of namur was divided into three parties: the first whereof was that of the states, or the catholic party of flanders; the second that of the prince of orange and the huguenots; the third, the spanish party, of which don john was the head. by letters which i received just at this time from my brother, through the hands of a gentleman named lescar, i found i was in great danger of falling into the hands of one or other of these parties. these letters informed me that, since my departure from court, god had dealt favourably with my brother, and enabled him to acquit himself of the command of the army confided to him, greatly to the benefit of the king's service; so that he had taken all the towns and driven the huguenots out of the provinces, agreeably to the design for which the army was raised; that he had returned to the court at poitiers, where the king stayed during the siege of brouage, to be near to m. de mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the court is a proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the king no service whatever; and that bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before and during this last war, had done great personal service, and had lost a brother at the storming of issoire, was very coolly received, and even as maliciously persecuted as in the time of le guast; in consequence of which either he or bussi experienced some indignity or other. he further mentioned that the king's favourites had been practising with his most faithful servants, maugiron, la valette, mauldon, and hivarrot, and several other good and trusty men, to desert him, and enter into the king's service; and, lastly, that the king had repented of giving me leave to go to flanders, and that, to counteract my brother, a plan was laid to intercept me on my return, either by the spaniards, for which purpose they had been told that i had treated for delivering up the country to him, or by the huguenots, in revenge of the war my brother had carried on against them, after having formerly assisted them. this intelligence required to be well considered, as there seemed to be an utter impossibility of avoiding both parties. i had, however, the pleasure to think that two of the principal persons of my company stood well with either one or another party. the cardinal de lenoncourt had been thought to favour the huguenot party, and m. descarts, brother to the bishop of lisieux, was supposed to have the spanish interest at heart. i communicated our difficult situation to the princesse de roche-sur-yon and madame de tournon, who, considering that we could not reach la fere in less than five or six days, answered me, with tears in their eyes, that god only had it in his power to preserve us, that i should recommend myself to his protection, and then follow such measures as should seem advisable. they observed that, as one of them was in a weak state of health, and the other advanced in years, i might affect to make short journeys on their account, and they would put up with every inconvenience to extricate me from the danger i was in. i next consulted with the bishop of liege, who most certainly acted towards me like a father, and gave directions to the grand master of his household to attend me with his horses as far as i should think proper. as it was necessary that we should have a passport from the prince of orange, i sent mondoucet to him to obtain one, as he was acquainted with the prince and was known to favour his religion. mondoucet did not return, and i believe i might have waited for him until this time to no purpose. i was advised by the cardinal de lenoncourt and my first esquire, the chevalier salviati, who were of the same party, not to stir without a passport; but, as i suspected a plan was laid to entrap me, i resolved to set out the next morning. they now saw that this pretence was insufficient to detain me; accordingly, the chevalier salviati prevailed with my treasurer, who was secretly a huguenot, to declare he had not money enough in his hands to discharge the expenses we had incurred at liege, and that, in consequence, my horses were detained. i afterwards discovered that this was false, for, on my arrival at la fere, i called for his accounts, and found he had then a balance in his hands which would have enabled him to pay, the expenses of my family for six or seven weeks. the princesse de roche-sur-yon, incensed at the affront put upon me, and seeing the danger i incurred by staying, advanced the money that was required, to their great confusion; and i took my leave of his grace the bishop, presenting him with a diamond worth three thousand crowns, and giving his domestics gold chains and rings. having thus taken our leave, we proceeded to huy, without any other passport than god's good providence. this town, as i observed before, belongs to the bishop of liege, but was now in a state of tumult and confusion, on account of the general revolt of the low countries, the townsmen taking part with the netherlanders, notwithstanding the bishopric was a neutral state. on this account they paid no respect to the grand master of the bishop's household, who accompanied us, but, knowing don john had taken the castle of namur in order, as they supposed, to intercept me on my return, these brutal people, as soon as i had got into my quarters, rang the alarm-bell, drew up their artillery, placed chains across the streets, and kept us thus confined and separated the whole night, giving us no opportunity to expostulate with them on such conduct. in the morning we were suffered to leave the town without further molestation, and the streets we passed through were lined with armed men. from there we proceeded to dinant, where we intended to sleep; but, unfortunately for us, the townspeople had on that day chosen their burghermasters, a kind of officers like the consuls in gascony and france. in consequence of this election, it was a day of tumult, riot, and debauchery; every one in the town was drunk, no magistrate was acknowledged. in a word, all was in confusion. to render our situation still worse, the grand master of the bishop's household had formerly done the town some ill office, and was considered as its enemy. the people of the town, when in their sober senses, were inclined to favour the party of the states, but under the influence of bacchus they paid no regard to any party, not even to themselves. as soon as i had reached the suburbs, they were alarmed at the number of my company, quitted the bottle and glass to take up their arms, and immediately shut the gates against me. i had sent a gentleman before me, with my harbinger and quartermasters, to beg the magistrates to admit me to stay one night in the town, but i found my officers had been put under an arrest. they bawled out to us from within, to tell us their situation, but could not make themselves heard. at length i raised myself up in my litter, and, taking off my mask, made a sign to a townsman nearest me, of the best appearance, that i was desirous to speak with him. as soon as he drew near me, i begged him to call out for silence, which being with some difficulty obtained, i represented to him who i was, and the occasion of my journey; that it was far from my intention to do them harm; but, to prevent any suspicions of the kind, i only begged to be admitted to go into their city with my women, and as few others of my attendants as they thought proper, and that we might be permitted to stay there for one night, whilst the rest of my company remained within the suburbs. they agreed to this proposal, and opened their gates for my admission. i then entered the city with the principal persons of my company, and the grand master of the bishop's household. this reverend personage, who was eighty years of age, and wore a beard as white as snow, which reached down to his girdle, this venerable old man, i say, was no sooner recognised by the drunken and armed rabble than he was accosted with the grossest abuse, and it was with difficulty they were restrained from laying violent hands upon him. at length i got him into my lodgings, but the mob fired at the house, the walls of which were only of plaster. upon being thus attacked, i inquired for the master of the house, who, fortunately, was within. i entreated him to speak from the window, to some one without, to obtain permission for my being heard. i had some difficulty to get him to venture doing so. at length, after much bawling from the window, the burghermasters came to speak to me, but were so drunk that they scarcely knew what they said. i explained to them that i was entirely ignorant that the grand master of the bishop's household was a person to whom they had a dislike, and i begged them to consider the consequences of giving offence to a person like me, who was a friend of the principal lords of the states, and i assured them that the comte de lalain, in particular, would be greatly displeased when he should hear how i had been received there. the name of the comte de lalain produced an instant effect, much more than if i had mentioned all the sovereign princes i was related to. the principal person amongst them asked me, with some hesitation and stammering, if i was really a particular friend of the count's. perceiving that to claim kindred with the count would do me more service than being related to all the powers in christendom, i answered that i was both a friend and a relation. they then made me many apologies and conges, stretching forth their hands in token of friendship; in short, they now behaved with as much civility as before with rudeness. they begged my pardon for what had happened, and promised that the good old man, the grand master of the bishop's household, should be no more insulted, but be suffered to leave the city quietly, the next morning, with me. as soon as morning came, and while i was preparing to go to hear mass, there arrived the king's agent to don john, named du bois, a man much attached to the spanish interest. he informed me that he had received orders from the king my brother to conduct me in safety on my return. he said that he had prevailed on don john to permit barlemont to escort me to namur with a troop of cavalry, and begged me to obtain leave of the citizens to admit barlemont and his troop to enter the town that; they might receive my orders. thus had they concerted a double plot; the one to get possession of the town, the other of my person. i saw through the whole design, and consulted with the cardinal de lenoncourt, communicating to him my suspicions. the cardinal was as unwilling to fall into the hands of the spaniards as i could be; he therefore thought it advisable to acquaint the townspeople with the plot, and make our escape from the city by another road, in order to avoid meeting barlemont's troop. it was agreed betwixt us that the cardinal should keep du bois in discourse, whilst i consulted the principal citizens in another apartment. accordingly, i assembled as many as i could, to whom i represented that if they admitted barlemont and his troop within the town, he would most certainly take possession of it for don john. i gave it as my advice to make a show of defence, to declare they would not be taken by surprise, and to offer to admit barlemont, and no one else, within their gates. they resolved to act according to my counsel, and offered to serve me at the hazard of their lives. they promised to procure me a guide, who should conduct me by a road by following which i should put the river betwixt me and don john's forces, whereby i should be out of his reach, and could be lodged in houses and towns which were in the interest of the states only. this point being settled, i despatched them to give admission to m. de barlemont, who, as soon as he entered within the gates, begged hard that his troop might come in likewise. hereupon, the citizens flew into a violent rage, and were near putting him to death. they told him that if he did not order his men out of sight of the town, they would fire upon them with their great guns. this was done with design to give me time to leave the town before they could follow in pursuit of me. m. de barlemont and the agent, du bois, used every argument they could devise to persuade me to go to namur, where they said don john waited to receive me. i appeared to give way to their persuasions, and, after hearing mass and taking a hasty dinner, i left my lodgings, escorted by two or three hundred armed citizens, some of them engaging barlemont and du bois in conversation. we all took the way to the gate which opens to the river, and directly opposite to that leading to namur. du bois and his colleague told me i was not going the right way, but i continued talking, and as if i did not hear them. but when we reached the gate i hastened into the boat, and my people after me. m. de barlemont and the agent du bois, calling out to me from the bank, told me i was doing very wrong and acting directly contrary to the king's intention, who had directed that i should return by way of namur. in spite of all their remonstrances we crossed the river with all possible expedition, and, during the two or three crossings which were necessary to convey over the litters and horses, the citizens, to give me the more time to escape, were debating with barlemont and du bois concerning a number of grievances and complaints, telling them, in their coarse language, that don john had broken the peace and falsified his engagements with the states; and they even rehearsed the old quarrel of the death of egmont, and, lastly, declared that if the troop made its appearance before their walls again, they would fire upon it with their artillery. i had by this means sufficient time to reach a secure distance, and was, by the help of god and the assistance of my guide, out of all apprehensions of danger from barlemont and his troop. i intended to lodge that night in a strong castle, called fleurines, which belonged to a gentleman of the party of the states, whom i had seen with the comte de lalain. unfortunately for me, the gentleman was absent, and his lady only was in the castle. the courtyard being open, we entered it, which put the lady into such a fright that she ordered the bridge to be drawn up, and fled to the strong tower.--[in the old french original, 'dongeon', whence we have 'duugeon'.]--nothing we could say would induce her to give us entrance. in the meantime, three hundred gentlemen, whom don john had sent off to intercept our passage, and take possession of the castle of fleurines; judging that i should take up my quarters there, made their appearance upon an eminence, at the distance of about a thousand yards. they, seeing our carriages in the courtyard, and supposing that we ourselves had taken to the strong tower, resolved to stay where they were that night, hoping to intercept me the next morning. in this cruel situation were we placed, in a courtyard surrounded by a wall by no means strong, and shut up by a gate equally as weak and as capable of being forced, remonstrating from time to time with the lady, who was deaf to all our prayers and entreaties. through god's mercy, her husband, m. de fleurines, himself appeared just as night approached. we then gained instant admission, and the lady was greatly reprimanded by her husband for her incivility and indiscreet behaviour. this gentleman had been sent by the comte de lalain, with directions to conduct me through the several towns belonging to the states, the count himself not being able to leave the army of the states, of which he had the chief command, to accompany me. this was as favourable a circumstance for me as i could wish; for, m. de fleurines offering to accompany me into france, the towns we had to pass through being of the party of the states, we were everywhere quietly and honourably received. i had only the mortification of not being able to visit mons, agreeably to my promise made to the comtesse de lalain, not passing nearer to it than nivelle, seven long leagues distant from it. the count being at antwerp, and the war being hottest in the neighbourhood of mons, i thus was prevented seeing either of them on my return. i could only write to the countess by a servant of the gentleman who was now my conductor. as soon as she learned i was at nivelle, she sent some gentlemen, natives of the part of flanders i was in, with a strong injunction to see me safe on the frontier of france. i had to pass through the cambresis, partly in favour of spain and partly of the states. accordingly, i set out with these gentlemen, to lodge at cateau cambresis. there they took leave of me, in order to return to mons, and by them i sent the countess a gown of mine, which had been greatly admired by her when i wore it at mons; it was of black satin, curiously embroidered, and cost nine hundred crowns. when i arrived at cateau-cambresis, i had intelligence sent me that a party of the huguenot troops had a design to attack me on the frontiers of flanders and france. this intelligence i communicated to a few only of my company, and prepared to set off an hour before daybreak. when i sent for my litters and horses, i found much such a kind of delay from the chevalier salviati as i had before experienced at liege, and suspecting it was done designedly, i left my litter behind, and mounted on horseback, with such of my attendants as were ready to follow me. by this means, with god's assistance, i escaped being waylaid by my enemies, and reached catelet at ten in the morning. from there i went to my house at la fere, where i intended to reside until i learned that peace was concluded upon. at la fere i found a messenger in waiting from my brother, who had orders to return with all expedition, as soon as i arrived, and inform him of it. my brother wrote me word, by that messenger, that peace was concluded, and the king returned to paris; that, as to himself, his situation was rather worse than better; that he and his people were daily receiving some affront or other, and continual quarrels were excited betwixt the king's favourites and bussi and my brother's principal attendants. this, he added, had made him impatient for my return, that he might come and visit me. i sent his messenger back, and, immediately after, my brother sent bussi and all his household to angers, and, taking with him fifteen or twenty attendants, he rode post to me at la fere. it was a great satisfaction to me to see one whom i so tenderly loved and greatly honoured, once more. i consider it amongst the greatest felicities i ever enjoyed, and, accordingly, it became my chief study to make his residence here agreeable to him. he himself seemed delighted with this change of situation, and would willingly have continued in it longer had not the noble generosity of his mind called him forth to great achievements. the quiet of our court, when compared with that he had just left, affected him so powerfully that he could not but express the satisfaction he felt by frequently exclaiming, "oh, queen! how happy i am with you. my god! your society is a paradise wherein i enjoy every delight, and i seem to have lately escaped from hell, with all its furies and tortures!" letter xvii. good effects of queen marguerite's negotiations in flanders.--she obtains leave to go to the king of navarre her husband, but her journey is delayed.--court intrigues and plots.--the duc d'alencon again put under arrest. we passed nearly two months together, which appeared to us only as so many days. i gave him an account of what i had done for him in flanders, and the state in which i had left the business. he approved of the interview with the comte de lalain's brother in order to settle the plan of operations and exchange assurances. accordingly, the comte de montigny arrived, with four or five other leading men of the county of hainault. one of these was charged with a letter from m. d'ainsi, offering his services to my brother, and assuring him of the citadel of cambray. m. de montigny delivered his brother's declaration and engagement to give up the counties of hainault and artois, which included a number of fine cities. these offers made and accepted, my brother dismissed them with presents of gold medals, bearing his and my effigies, and every assurance of his future favour; and they returned to prepare everything for his coming. in the meanwhile my brother considered on the necessary measures to be used for raising a sufficient force, for which purpose he returned to the king, to prevail with him to assist him in this enterprise. as i was anxious to go to gascony, i made ready for the journey, and set off for paris, my brother meeting me at the distance of one day's journey. at st. denis i was met by the king, the queen my mother, queen louise, and the whole court. it was at st. denis that i was to stop and dine, and there it was that i had the honour of the meeting i have just mentioned. i was received very graciously, and most sumptuously entertained. i was made to recount the particulars of my triumphant journey to liege, and perilous return. the magnificent entertainments i had received excited their admiration, and they rejoiced at my narrow escapes. with such conversation i amused the queen my mother and the rest of the company in her coach, on our way to paris, where, supper and the ball being ended, i took an opportunity, when i saw the king and the queen my mother together, to address them. i expressed my hopes that they would not now oppose my going to the king my husband; that now, by the peace, the chief objection to it was removed, and if i delayed going, in the present situation of affairs, it might be prejudicial and discreditable to me. both of them approved of my request, and commended my resolution. the queen my mother added that she would accompany me on my journey, as it would be for the king's service that she did so. she said the king must furnish me with the necessary means for the journey, to which he readily assented. i thought this a proper time to settle everything, and prevent another journey to court, which would be no longer pleasing after my brother left it, who was now pressing his expedition to flanders with all haste. i therefore begged the queen my mother to recollect the promise she had made my brother and me as soon as peace was agreed upon, which was that, before my departure for gascony, i should have my marriage portion assigned to me in lands. she said that she recollected it well, and the king thought it very reasonable, and promised that it should be done. i entreated that it might be concluded speedily, as i wished to set off, with their permission, at the beginning of the next month. this, too, was granted me, but granted after the mode of the court; that is to say, notwithstanding my constant solicitations, instead of despatch, i experienced only delay; and thus it continued for five or six months in negotiation. my brother met with the like treatment, though he was continually urging the necessity for his setting out for flanders, and representing that his expedition was for the glory and advantage of france,--for its glory, as such an enterprise would, like piedmont, prove a school of war for the young nobility, wherein future montlucs, brissacs, termes, and bellegardes would be bred, all of them instructed in these wars, and afterwards, as field-marshals, of the greatest service to their country; and it would be for the advantage of france, as it would prevent civil wars; for flanders would then be no longer a country wherein such discontented spirits as aimed at novelty could assemble to brood over their malice and hatch plots for the disturbance of their native land. these representations, which were both reasonable and consonant with truth, had no weight when put into the scale against the envy excited by this advancement of my brother's fortune. accordingly, every delay was used to hinder him from collecting his forces together, and stop his expedition to flanders. bussi and his other dependents were offered a thousand indignities. every stratagem was tried, by day as well as by night, to pick quarrels with bussi,--now by quelus, at another time by grammont, with the hope that my brother would engage in them. this was unknown to the king; but maugiron, who had engrossed the king's favour, and who had quitted my brother's service, sought every means to ruin him, as it is usual for those who have given offence to hate the offended party. thus did this man take every occasion to brave and insult my brother; and relying upon the countenance and blind affection shown him by the king, had leagued himself with quelus, saint-luc, saint-maigrin, grammont, mauleon, hivarrot, and other young men who enjoyed the king's favour. as those who are favourites find a number of followers at court, these licentious young courtiers thought they might do whatever they pleased. some new dispute betwixt them and bussi was constantly starting. bussi had a degree of courage which knew not how to give way to any one; and my brother, unwilling to give umbrage to the king, and foreseeing that such proceedings would not forward his expedition, to avoid quarrels and, at the same time, to promote his plans, resolved to despatch bussi to his duchy of alencon, in order to discipline such troops as he should find there. my brother's amiable qualities excited the jealousy of maugiron and the rest of his cabal about the king's person, and their dislike for bussi was not so much on his own account as because he was strongly attached to my brother. the slights and disrespect shown to my brother were remarked by every one at court; but his prudence, and the patience natural to his disposition, enabled him to put up with their insults, in hopes of finishing the business of his flemish expedition, which would remove him to a distance from them and their machinations. this persecution was the more mortifying and discreditable as it even extended to his servants, whom they strove to injure by every means they could employ. m. de la chastre at this time had a lawsuit of considerable consequence decided against him, because he had lately attached himself to my brother. at the instance of maugiron and saint-luc, the king was induced to solicit the cause in favour of madame de senetaire, their friend. m. de la chastre, being greatly injured by it, complained to my brother of the injustice done him, with all the concern such a proceeding may be supposed to have occasioned. about this time saint-luc's marriage was celebrated. my brother resolved not to be present at it, and begged of me to join him in the same resolution. the queen my mother was greatly uneasy on account of the behaviour of these young men, fearing that, if my brother did not join them in this festivity, it might be attended with some bad consequence, especially as the day was likely to produce scenes of revelry and debauch; she, therefore, prevailed on the king to permit her to dine on the wedding-day at st. maur, and take my brother and me with her. this was the day before shrove tuesday; and we returned in the evening, the queen my mother having well lectured my brother, and made him consent to appear at the ball, in order not to displease the king. but this rather served to make matters worse than better, for maugiron and his party began to attack him with such violent speeches as would have offended any one of far less consequence. they said he needed not to have given himself the trouble of dressing, for he was not missed in the afternoon; but now, they supposed, he came at night as the most suitable time; with other allusions to the meanness of his figure and smallness of stature. all this was addressed to the bride, who sat near him, but spoken out on purpose that he might hear it. my brother, perceiving this was purposely said to provoke an answer and occasion his giving offence to the king, removed from his seat full of resentment; and, consulting with m. de la chastre, he came to the resolution of leaving the court in a few days on a hunting party. he still thought his absence might stay their malice, and afford him an opportunity the more easily of settling his preparations for the flemish expedition with the king. he went immediately to the queen my mother, who was present at the ball, and was extremely sorry to learn what had happened, and imparted her resolution, in his absence, to solicit the king to hasten his expedition to flanders. m. de villequier being present, she bade him acquaint the king with my brother's intention of taking the diversion of hunting a few days; which she thought very proper herself, as it would put a stop to the disputes which had arisen betwixt him and the young men, maugiron, saint-luc, quelus, and the rest. my brother retired to his apartment, and, considering his leave as granted, gave orders to his domestics to prepare to set off the next morning for st. germain, where he should hunt the stag for a few days. he directed the grand huntsman to be ready with the hounds, and retired to rest, thinking to withdraw awhile from the intrigues of the court, and amuse himself with the sports of the field. m. de villequier, agreeably to the command he had received from the queen my mother, asked for leave, and obtained it. the king, however, staying in his closet, like rehoboam, with his council of five or six young men, they suggested suspicions in his mind respecting my brother's departure from court. in short, they worked upon his fears and apprehensions so greatly, that he took one of the most rash and inconsiderate steps that was ever decided upon in our time; which was to put my brother and all his principal servants under an arrest. this measure was executed with as much indiscretion as it had been resolved upon. the king, under this agitation of mind, late as it was, hastened to the queen my mother, and seemed as if there was a general alarm and the enemy at the gates, for he exclaimed on seeing her: "how could you, madame, think of asking me to let my brother go hence? do you not perceive how dangerous his going will prove to my kingdom? depend upon it that this hunting is merely a pretence to cover some treacherous design. i am going to put him and his people under an arrest, and have his papers examined. i am sure we shall make some great discoveries." at the time he said this he had with him the sieur de cosse, captain of the guard, and a number of scottish archers. the queen my mother, fearing, from the king's haste and trepidation, that some mischief might happen to my brother, begged to go with him. accordingly, undressed as she was, wrapping herself up in a night-gown, she followed the king to my brother's bedchamber. the king knocked at the door with great violence, ordering it to be immediately opened, for that he was there himself. my brother started up in his bed, awakened by the noise, and, knowing that he had done nothing that he need fear, ordered cange, his valet de chambre, to open the door. the king entered in a great rage, and asked him when he would have done plotting against him. "but i will show you," said he, "what it is to plot against your sovereign." hereupon he ordered the archers to take away all the trunks, and turn the valets de chambre out of the room. he searched my brother's bed himself, to see if he could find any papers concealed in it. my brother had that evening received a letter from madame de sauves, which he kept in his hand, unwilling that it should be seen. the king endeavoured to force it from him. he refused to part with it, and earnestly entreated the king would not insist upon seeing it. this only excited the king's anxiety the more to have it in his possession, as he now supposed it to be the key to the whole plot, and the very document which would at once bring conviction home to him. at length, the king having got it into his hands, he opened it in the presence of the queen my mother, and they were both as much confounded, when they read the contents, as cato was when he obtained a letter from caesar, in the senate, which the latter was unwilling to give up; and which cato, supposing it to contain a conspiracy against the republic, found to be no other than a love-letter from his own sister. but the shame of this disappointment served only to increase the king's anger, who, without condescending to make a reply to my brother, when repeatedly asked what he had been accused of, gave him in charge of m. de cosse and his scots, commanding them not to admit a single person to speak with him. it was one o'clock in the morning when my brother was made a prisoner in the manner i have now related. he feared some fatal event might succeed these violent proceedings, and he was under the greatest concern on my account, supposing me to be under a like arrest. he observed m. de cosse to be much affected by the scene he had been witness to, even to shedding tears. as the archers were in the room he would not venture to enter into discourse with him, but only asked what was become of me. m. de cosse answered that i remained at full liberty. my brother then said it was a great comfort to him to hear that news; "but," added he, "as i know she loves me so entirely that she would rather be confined with me than have her liberty whilst i was in confinement, i beg you will go to the queen my mother, and desire her to obtain leave for my sister to be with me." he did so, and it was granted. the reliance which my brother displayed upon this occasion in the sincerity of my friendship and regard for him conferred so great an obligation in my mind that, though i have received many particular favours since from him, this has always held the foremost place in my grateful remembrance. by the time he had received permission for my being with him, daylight made its appearance. seeing this, my brother begged m. de cosse to send one of his archers to acquaint me with his situation, and beg me to come to him. letter xviii. the brothers reconciled.--alencon restored to his liberty. i was ignorant of what had happened to my brother, and when the scottish archer came into my bedchamber, i was still asleep. he drew the curtains of the bed, and told me, in his broken french, that my brother wished to see me. i stared at the man, half awake as i was, and thought it a dream. after a short pause, and being thoroughly awakened, i asked him if he was not a scottish archer. he answered me in the affirmative. "what!" cried i, "has my brother no one else to send a message by?" he replied he had not, for all his domestics had been put under an arrest. he then proceeded to relate, as well as he could explain himself, the events of the preceding night, and the leave granted my brother for my being with him during his imprisonment. the poor fellow, observing me to be much affected by this intelligence, drew near, and whispered me to this purport: "do not grieve yourself about this matter; i know a way of setting your brother at liberty, and you may depend upon it, that i will do it; but, in that case, i must go off with him." i assured him that he might rely upon being as amply rewarded as he could wish for such assistance, and, huddling on my clothes, i followed him alone to my brother's apartments. in going thither, i had occasion to traverse the whole gallery, which was filled with people, who, at another time, would have pressed forward to pay their respects to me; but, now that fortune seemed to frown upon me, they all avoided me, or appeared as if they did not see me. coming into my brother's apartments, i found him not at all affected by what had happened; for such was the constancy of his mind, that his arrest had wrought no change, and he received me with his usual cheerfulness. he ran to meet me, and taking me in his arms, he said, "queen! i beg you to dry up your tears; in my present situation, nothing can grieve me so much as to find you under any concern; for my own part, i am so conscious of my innocence and the integrity of my conduct, that i can defy the utmost malice of my enemies. if i should chance to fall the victim of their injustice, my death would prove a more cruel punishment to them than to me, who have courage sufficient to meet it in a just cause. it is not death i fear, because i have tasted sufficiently of the calamities and evils of life, and am ready to leave this world, which i have found only the abode of sorrow; but the circumstance i dread most is, that, not finding me sufficiently guilty to doom me to death, i shall be condemned to a long, solitary imprisonment; though i should even despise their tyranny in that respect, could i but have the assurance of being comforted by your presence." these words, instead of stopping my tears, only served to make them stream afresh. i answered, sobbing, that my life and fortune were at his devotion; that the power of god alone could prevent me from affording him my assistance under every extremity; that, if he should be transported from that place, and i should be withheld from following him, i would kill myself on the spot. changing our discourse, we framed a number of conjectures on what might be the probable cause of the king's angry proceedings against him, but found ourselves at a loss what to assign them to. whilst we were discussing this matter the hour came for opening the palace gates, when a simple young man belonging to bussi presented himself for entrance. being stopped by the guard and questioned as to whither he was going, he, panic-struck, replied he was going to m. de bussi, his master. this answer was carried to the king, and gave fresh grounds for suspicion. it seems my brother, supposing he should not be able to go to flanders for some time, and resolving to send bussi to his duchy of alencon as i have already mentioned, had lodged him in the louvre, that he might be near him to take instructions at every opportunity. l'archant, the general of the guard, had received the king's commands to make a search in the louvre for him and simier, and put them both under arrest. he entered upon this business with great unwillingness, as he was intimate with bussi, who was accustomed to call him "father." l'archant, going to simier's apartment, arrested him; and though he judged bussi was there too, yet, being unwilling to find him, he was going away. bussi, however, who had concealed himself under the bed, as not knowing to whom the orders for his arrest might be given, finding he was to be left there, and sensible that he should be well treated by l'archant, called out to him, as he was leaving the room, in his droll manner: "what, papa, are you going without me? don't you think i am as great a rogue as that simier?" "ah, son," replied l'archant, "i would much rather have lost my arm than have met with you!" bussi, being a man devoid of all fear, observed that it was a sign that things went well with him; then, turning to simier, who stood trembling with fear, he jeered him upon his pusillanimity. l'archant removed them both, and set a guard over them; and, in the next place, proceeded to arrest m. de la chastre, whom he took to the bastille. meanwhile m. de l'oste was appointed to the command of the guard which was set over my brother. this was a good sort of old man, who had been appointed governor to the king my husband, and loved me as if i had been his own child. sensible of the injustice done to my brother and me, and lamenting the bad counsel by which the king was guided, and being, moreover, willing to serve us, he resolved to deliver my brother from arrest. in order to make his intention known to us he ordered the scottish archers to wait on the stairs without, keeping only, two whom he could trust in the room. then taking me aside, he said: "there is not a good frenchman living who does not bleed at his heart to see what we see. i have served the king your father, and i am ready to lay down my life to serve his children. i expect to have the guard of the prince your brother, wherever he shall chance to be confined; and, depend upon it, at the hazard of my life, i will restore him to his liberty. but," added he, "that no suspicions may arise that such is my design, it will be proper that we be not seen together in conversation; however, you may, rely upon my word." this afforded me great consolation; and, assuming a degree of courage hereupon, i observed to my brother that we ought not to remain there without knowing for what reason we were detained, as if we were in the inquisition; and that to treat us in such a manner was to consider us as persons of no account. i then begged m. de l'oste to entreat the king, in our name, if the queen our mother was not permitted to come to us, to send some one to acquaint us with the crime for which we were kept in confinement. m. de combaut, who was at the head of the young counsellors, was accordingly sent to us; and he, with a great deal of gravity, informed us that he came from the king to inquire what it was we wished to communicate to his majesty. we answered that we wished to speak to some one near the king's person, in order to our being informed what we were kept in confinement for, as we were unable to assign any reason for it ourselves. he answered, with great solemnity, that we ought not to ask of god or the king reasons for what they did; as all their actions emanated from wisdom and justice. we replied that we were not persons to be treated like those shut up in the inquisition, who are left to guess at the cause of their being there. we could obtain from him, after all we said, no other satisfaction than his promise to interest himself in our behalf, and to do us all the service in his power. at this my brother broke out into a fit of laughter; but i confess i was too much alarmed to treat his message with such indifference, and could scarcely, refrain from talking to this messenger as he deserved. whilst he was making his report to the king, the queen my mother kept her chamber, being under great concern, as may well be supposed, to witness such proceedings. she plainly foresaw, in her prudence, that these excesses would end fatally, should the mildness of my brother's disposition, and his regard for the welfare of the state, be once wearied out with submitting to such repeated acts of injustice. she therefore sent for the senior members of the council, the chancellor, princes, nobles, and marshals of france, who all were greatly scandalised at the bad counsel which had been given to the king, and told the queen my mother that she ought to remonstrate with the king upon the injustice of his proceedings. they observed that what had been done could not now be recalled, but matters might yet be set upon a right footing. the queen my mother hereupon went to the king, followed by these counsellors, and represented to him the ill consequences which might proceed from the steps he had taken. the king's eyes were by this time opened, and he saw that he had been ill advised. he therefore begged the queen my mother to set things to rights, and to prevail on my brother to forget all that had happened, and to bear no resentment against these young men, but to make up the breach betwixt bussi and quelus. things being thus set to rights again, the guard which had been placed over my brother was dismissed, and the queen my mother, coming to his apartment, told him he ought to return thanks to god for his deliverance, for that there had been a moment when even she herself despaired of saving his life; that since he must now have discovered that the king's temper of mind was such that he took the alarm at the very imagination of danger, and that, when once he was resolved upon a measure, no advice that she or any other could give would prevent him from putting it into execution, she would recommend it to him to submit himself to the king's pleasure in everything, in order to prevent the like in future; and, for the present, to take the earliest opportunity of seeing the king, and to appear as if he thought no more about the past. we replied that we were both of us sensible of god's great mercy in delivering us from the injustice of our enemies, and that, next to god, our greatest obligation was to her; but that my brother's rank did not admit of his being put in confinement without cause, and released from it again without the formality of an acknowledgment. upon this, the queen observed that it was not in the power even of god himself to undo what had been done; that what could be effected to save his honour, and give him satisfaction for the irregularity of the arrest, should have place. my brother, therefore, she observed, ought to strive to mollify the king by addressing him with expressions of regard to his person and attachment to his service; and, in the meantime, use his influence over bussi to reconcile him to quelus, and to end all disputes betwixt them. she then declared that the principal motive for putting my brother and his servants under arrest was to prevent the combat for which old bussi, the brave father of a brave son, had solicited the king's leave, wherein he proposed to be his son's second, whilst the father of quelus was to be his. these four had agreed in this way to determine the matter in dispute, and give the court no further disturbance. my brother now engaged himself to the queen that, as bussi would see he could not be permitted to decide his quarrel by combat, he should, in order to deliver himself from his arrest, do as she had commanded. the queen my mother, going down to the king, prevailed with him to restore my brother to liberty with every honour. in order to which the king came to her apartment, followed by the princes, noblemen, and other members of the council, and sent for us by m. de villequier. as we went along we found all the rooms crowded with people, who, with tears in their eyes, blessed god for our deliverance. coming into the apartments of the queen my mother, we found the king attended as i before related. the king desired my brother not to take anything ill that had been done, as the motive for it was his concern for the good of his kingdom, and not any bad intention towards himself. my brother replied that he had, as he ought, devoted his life to his service, and, therefore, was governed by his pleasure; but that he most humbly begged him to consider that his fidelity and attachment did not merit the return he had met with; that, notwithstanding, he should impute it entirely to his own ill-fortune, and should be perfectly satisfied if the king acknowledged his innocence. hereupon the king said that he entertained not the least doubt of his innocence, and only desired him to believe he held the same place in his esteem he ever had. the queen my mother then, taking both of them by the hand, made them embrace each other. afterwards the king commanded bussi to be brought forth, to make a reconciliation betwixt him and quelus, giving orders, at the same time, for the release of simier and m. de la chastre. bussi coming into the room with his usual grace, the king told him he must be reconciled with quelus, and forbade him to say a word more concerning their quarrel. he then commanded them to embrace. "sire," said bussi, "if it is your pleasure that we kiss and are friends again, i am ready to obey your command;" then, putting himself in the attitude of pantaloon, he went up to queus and gave him a hug, which set all present in a titter, notwithstanding they had been seriously affected by the scene which had passed just before. many persons of discretion thought what had been done was too slight a reparation for the injuries my brother had received. when all was over, the king and the queen my mother, coming up to me, said it would be incumbent on me to use my utmost endeavours to prevent my brother from calling to mind anything past which should make him swerve from the duty and affection he owed the king. i replied that my brother was so prudent, and so strongly attached to the king's service, that he needed no admonition on that head from me or any one else; and that, with respect to myself, i had never given him any other advice than to conform himself to the king's pleasure and the duty he owed him. letter xix. the duc d'alencon makes his escape from court.--queen marguerite's fidelity put to a severe trial. it was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and no one present had yet dined. the queen my mother was desirous that we should eat together, and, after dinner, she ordered my brother and me to change our dress (as the clothes we had on were suitable only to our late melancholy situation) and come to the king's supper and ball. we complied with her orders as far as a change of dress, but our countenances still retained the impressions of grief and resentment which we inwardly felt. i must inform you that when the tragi-comedy i have given you an account of was over, the queen my mother turned round to the chevalier de seurre, whom she recommended to my brother to sleep in his bedchamber, and in whose conversation she sometimes took delight because he was a man of some humour, but rather inclined to be cynical. "well," said she, "m. de seurre, what do you think of all this?" "madame, i think there is too much of it for earnest, and not enough for jest." then addressing himself to me, he said, but not loud enough for the queen to hear him: "i do not believe all is over yet; i am very much mistaken if this young man" (meaning my brother) "rests satisfied with this." this day having passed in the manner before related, the wound being only skinned over and far from healed, the young men about the king's person set themselves to operate in order to break it out afresh. these persons, judging of my brother by themselves, and not having sufficient experience to know the power of duty over the minds of personages of exalted rank and high birth, persuaded the king, still connecting his case with their own, that it was impossible my brother should ever forgive the affront he had received, and not seek to avenge himself with the first opportunity. the king, forgetting the ill-judged steps these young men had so lately induced him to take, hereupon receives this new impression, and gives orders to the officers of the guard to keep strict watch at the gates that his brother go not out, and that his people be made to leave the louvre every evening, except such of them as usually slept in his bedchamber or wardrobe. my brother, seeing himself thus exposed to the caprices of these headstrong young fellows, who led the king according to their own fancies, and fearing something worse might happen than what he had yet experienced, at the end of three days, during which time he laboured under apprehensions of this kind, came to a determination to leave the court, and never more return to it, but retire to his principality and make preparations with all haste for his expedition to flanders. he communicated his design to me, and i approved of it, as i considered he had no other view in it than providing for his own safety, and that neither the king nor his government were likely to sustain any injury by it. when we consulted upon the means of its accomplishment, we could find no other than his descending from my window, which was on the second story and opened to the ditch, for the gates were so closely watched that it was impossible to pass them, the face of every one going out of the louvre being curiously examined. he begged of me, therefore, to procure for him a rope of sufficient strength and long enough for the purpose. this i set about immediately, for, having the sacking of a bed that wanted mending, i sent it out of the palace by a lad whom i could trust, with orders to bring it back repaired, and to wrap up the proper length of rope inside. when all was prepared, one evening, at supper-time, i went to the queen my mother, who supped alone in her own apartment, it being fast-day and the king eating no supper. my brother, who on most occasions was patient and discreet, spurred on by the indignities he had received, and anxious to extricate himself from danger and regain his liberty, came to me as i was rising from table, and whispered to me to make haste and come to him in my own apartment. m. de matignon, at that time a marshal, a sly, cunning norman, and one who had no love for my brother, whether he had some knowledge of his design from some one who could not keep a secret, or only guessed at it, observed to the queen my mother as she left the room (which i overheard, being near her, and circumspectly watching every word and motion, as may well be imagined, situated as i was betwixt fear and hope, and involved in perplexity) that my brother had undoubtedly an intention of withdrawing himself, and would not be there the next day; adding that he was assured of it, and she might take her measures accordingly. i observed that she was much disconcerted by this observation, and i had my fears lest we should be discovered. when we came into her closet, she drew me aside and asked if i heard what matignon had said. i replied: "i did not hear it, madame, but i observe that it has given you uneasiness." "yes," said she, "a great deal of uneasiness, for you know i have pledged myself to the king that your brother shall not depart hence, and matignon has declared that he knows very well he will not be here to-morrow." i now found myself under a great embarrassment; i was in danger either of proving unfaithful to my brother, and thereby bringing his life into jeopardy, or of being obliged to declare that to be truth which i knew to be false, and this i would have died rather than be guilty of. in this extremity, if i had not been aided by god, my countenance, without speaking, would plainly have discovered what i wished to conceal. but god, who assists those who mean well, and whose divine goodness was discoverable in my brother's escape, enabled me to compose my looks and suggested to me such a reply as gave her to understand no more than i wished her to know, and cleared my conscience from making any declaration contrary to the truth. i answered her in these words: "you cannot, madame, but be sensible that m. de matignon is not one of my brother's friends, and that he is, besides, a busy, meddling kind of man, who is sorry to find a reconciliation has taken place with us; and, as to my brother, i will answer for him with my life in case he goes hence, of which, if he had any design, i should, as i am well assured, not be ignorant, he never having yet concealed anything he meant to do from me." all this was said by me with the assurance that, after my brother's escape, they would not dare to do me any injury; and in case of the worst, and when we should be discovered, i had much rather pledge my life than hazard my soul by a false declaration, and endanger my brother's life. without scrutinising the import of my speech, she replied: "remember what you now say,--you will be bound for him on the penalty of your life." i smiled and answered that such was my intention. then, wishing her a good night, i retired to my own bedchamber, where, undressing myself in haste and getting into bed, in order to dismiss the ladies and maids of honour, and there then remaining only my chamber-women, my brother came in, accompanied by simier and cange. rising from my bed, we made the cord fast, and having looked out, at the window to discover if any one was in the ditch, with the assistance of three of my women, who slept in my room, and the lad who had brought in the rope, we let down my brother, who laughed and joked upon the occasion without the least apprehension, notwithstanding the height was considerable. we next lowered simier into the ditch, who was in such a fright that he had scarcely strength to hold the rope fast; and lastly descended my brother's valet de chambre, cange. through god's providence my brother got off undiscovered, and going to ste. genevieve, he found bussi waiting there for him. by consent of the abbot, a hole had been made in the city wall, through which they passed, and horses being provided and in waiting, they mounted, and reached angers without the least accident. whilst we were lowering down cange, who, as i mentioned before, was the last, we observed a man rising out of the ditch, who ran towards the lodge adjoining to the tennis-court, in the direct way leading to the guard-house. i had no apprehensions on my own account, all my fears being absorbed by those i entertained for my brother; and now i was almost dead with alarm, supposing this might be a spy placed there by m. de matignon, and that my brother would be taken. whilst i was in this cruel state of anxiety, which can be judged of only by those who have experienced a similar situation, my women took a precaution for my safety and their own, which did not suggest itself to me. this was to burn the rope, that it might not appear to our conviction in case the man in question had been placed there to watch us. this rope occasioned so great a flame in burning, that it set fire to the chimney, which, being seen from without, alarmed the guard, who ran to us, knocking violently at the door, calling for it to be opened. i now concluded that my brother was stopped, and that we were both undone. however, as, by the blessing of god and through his divine mercy alone, i have, amidst every danger with which i have been repeatedly surrounded, constantly preserved a presence of mind which directed what was best to be done, and observing that the rope was not more than half consumed, i told my women to go to the door, and speaking softly, as if i was asleep, to ask the men what they wanted. they did so, and the archers replied that the chimney was on fire, and they came to extinguish it. my women answered it was of no consequence, and they could put it out themselves, begging them not to awake me. this alarm thus passed off quietly, and they went away; but, in two hours afterward, m. de cosse came for me to go to the king and the queen, my mother, to give an account of my brother's escape, of which they had received intelligence by the abbot of ste. genevieve. it seems it had been concerted betwixt my brother and the abbot, in order to prevent the latter from falling under disgrace, that, when my brother might be supposed to have reached a sufficient distance, the abbot should go to court, and say that he had been put into confinement whilst the hole was being made, and that he came to inform the king as soon as he had released himself. i was in bed, for it was yet night; and rising hastily, i put on my night-clothes. one of my women was indiscreet enough to hold me round the waist, and exclaim aloud, shedding a flood of tears, that she should never see me more. m. de cosse, pushing her away, said to me: "if i were not a person thoroughly devoted to your service, this woman has said enough to bring you into trouble. but," continued he, "fear nothing. god be praised, by this time the prince your brother is out of danger." these words were very necessary, in the present state of my mind, to fortify it against the reproaches and threats i had reason to expect from the king. i found him sitting at the foot of the queen my mother's bed, in such a violent rage that i am inclined to believe i should have felt the effects of it, had he not been restrained by the absence of my brother and my mother's presence. they both told me that i had assured them my brother would not leave the court, and that i pledged myself for his stay. i replied that it was true that he had deceived me, as he had them; however, i was ready still to pledge my life that his departure would not operate to the prejudice of the king's service, and that it would appear he was only gone to his own principality to give orders and forward his expedition to flanders. the king appeared to be somewhat mollified by this declaration, and now gave me permission to return to my own apartments. soon afterwards he received letters from my brother, containing assurances of his attachment, in the terms i had before expressed. this caused a cessation of complaints, but by no means removed the king's dissatisfaction, who made a show of affording assistance to his expedition, but was secretly using every means to frustrate and defeat it. letter xx. queen marguerite permitted to go to the king her husband.--is accompanied by the queenmother.--marguerite insulted by her husband's secretary.--she harbours jealousy.--her attention to the king her husband during an indisposition.--their reconciliation.--the war breaks out afresh.--affront received from marechal de biron. i now renewed my application for leave to go to the king my husband, which i continued to press on every opportunity. the king, perceiving that he could not refuse my leave any longer, was willing i should depart satisfied. he had this further view in complying with my wishes, that by this means he should withdraw me from my attachment to my brother. he therefore strove to oblige me in every way he could think of, and, to fulfil the promise made by the queen my mother at the peace of sens, he gave me an assignment of my portion in territory, with the power of nomination to all vacant benefices and all offices; and, over and above the customary pension to the daughters of france, he gave another out of his privy purse. he daily paid me a visit in my apartment, in which he took occasion to represent to me how useful his friendship would be to me; whereas that of my brother could be only injurious,--with arguments of the like kind. however, all he could say was insufficient to prevail on me to swerve from the fidelity i had vowed to observe to my brother. the king was able to draw from me no other declaration than this: that it ever was, and should be, my earnest wish to see my brother firmly established in his gracious favour, which he had never appeared to me to have forfeited; that i was well assured he would exert himself to the utmost to regain it by every act of duty and meritorious service; that, with respect to myself, i thought i was so much obliged to him for the great honour he did me by repeated acts of generosity, that he might be assured, when i was with the king my husband i should consider myself bound in duty to obey all such commands as he should be pleased to give me; and that it would be my whole study to maintain the king my husband in a submission to his pleasure. my brother was now on the point of leaving alencon to go to flanders; the queen my mother was desirous to see him before his departure. i begged the king to permit me to take the opportunity of accompanying her to take leave of my brother, which he granted; but, as it seemed, with great unwillingness. when we returned from alencon, i solicited the king to permit me to take leave of himself, as i had everything prepared for my journey. the queen my mother being desirous to go to gascony, where her presence was necessary for the king's service, was unwilling that i should depart without her. when we left paris, the king accompanied us on the way as far as his palace of dolinville. there we stayed with him a few days, and there we took our leave, and in a little time reached guienne, which belonging to, and being under the government of the king my husband, i was everywhere received as queen. my husband gave the queen my mother a meeting at wolle, which was held by the huguenots as a cautionary town; and the country not being sufficiently quieted, she was permitted to go no further. it was the intention of the queen my mother to make but a short stay; but so many accidents arose from disputes betwixt the huguenots and catholics, that she was under the necessity of stopping there eighteen months. as this was very much against her inclination, she was sometimes inclined to think there was a design to keep her, in order to have the company of her maids of honour. for my husband had been greatly smitten with dayelle, and m. de thurene was in love with la vergne. however, i received every mark of honour and attention from the king that i could expect or desire. he related to me, as soon as we met, the artifices which had been put in practice whilst he remained at court to create a misunderstanding betwixt him and me; all this, he said, he knew was with a design to cause a rupture betwixt my brother and him, and thereby ruin us all three, as there was an exceeding great jealousy entertained of the friendship which existed betwixt us. we remained in the disagreeable situation i have before described all the time the queen my mother stayed in gascony; but, as soon as she could reestablish peace, she, by desire of the king my husband, removed the king's lieutenant, the marquis de villars, putting in his place the marechal de biron. she then departed for languedoc, and we conducted her to castelnaudary; where, taking our leave, we returned to pau, in bearn; in which place, the catholic religion not being tolerated, i was only allowed to have mass celebrated in a chapel of about three or four feet in length, and so narrow that it could scarcely hold seven or eight persons. during the celebration of mass, the bridge of the castle was drawn up to prevent the catholics of the town and country from coming to assist at it; who having been, for some years, deprived of the benefit of following their own mode of worship, would have gladly been present. actuated by so holy and laudable a desire, some of the inhabitants of pau, on whitsunday, found means to get into the castle before the bridge was drawn up, and were present at the celebration of mass, not being discovered until it was nearly over. at length the huguenots espied them, and ran to acquaint le pin, secretary to the king my husband, who was greatly in his favour, and who conducted the whole business relating to the new religion. upon receiving this intelligence, le pin ordered the guard to arrest these poor people, who were severely beaten in my presence, and afterwards locked up in prison, whence they were not released without paying a considerable fine. this indignity gave me great offence, as i never expected anything of the kind. accordingly, i complained of it to the king my husband, begging him to give orders for the release of these poor catholics, who did not deserve to be punished for coming to my chapel to hear mass, a celebration of which they had been so long deprived of the benefit. le pin, with the greatest disrespect to his master, took upon him to reply, without waiting to hear what the king had to say. he told me that i ought not to trouble the king my husband about such matters; that what had been done was very right and proper; that those people had justly merited the treatment they met with, and all i could say would go for nothing, for it must be so; and that i ought to rest satisfied with being permitted to have mass said to me and my servants. this insolent speech from a person of his inferior condition incensed me greatly, and i entreated the king my husband, if i had the least share in his good graces, to do me justice, and avenge the insult offered me by this low man. the king my husband, perceiving that i was offended, as i had reason to be, with this gross indignity, ordered le pin to quit our presence immediately; and, expressing his concern at his secretary's behaviour, who, he said, was overzealous in the cause of religion, he promised that he would make an example of him. as to the catholic prisoners, he said he would advise with his parliament what ought to be done for my satisfaction. having said this, he went to his closet, where he found le pin, who, by dint of persuasion, made him change his resolution; insomuch that, fearing i should insist upon his dismissing his secretary, he avoided meeting me. at last, finding that i was firmly resolved to leave him, unless he dismissed le pin, he took advice of some persons, who, having themselves a dislike to the secretary, represented that he ought not to give me cause of displeasure for the sake of a man of his small importance,--especially one who, like him, had given me just reason to be offended; that, when it became known to the king my brother and the queen my mother, they would certainly take it ill that he had not only not resented it, but, on the contrary, still kept him near his person. this counsel prevailed with him, and he at length discarded his secretary. the king, however, continued to behave to me with great coolness, being influenced, as he afterwards confessed, by the counsel of m. de pibrac, who acted the part of a double dealer, telling me that i ought not to pardon an affront offered by such a mean fellow, but insist upon his being dismissed; whilst he persuaded the king my husband that there was no reason for parting with a man so useful to him, for such a trivial cause. this was done by m. de pibrac, thinking i might be induced, from such mortifications, to return to france, where he enjoyed the offices of president and king's counsellor. i now met with a fresh cause for disquietude in my present situation, for, dayelle being gone, the king my husband placed his affections on rebours. she was an artful young person, and had no regard for me; accordingly, she did me all the ill offices in her power with him. in the midst of these trials, i put my trust in god, and he, moved with pity by my tears, gave permission for our leaving pau, that "little geneva;" and, fortunately for me, rebours was taken ill and stayed behind. the king my husband no sooner lost sight of her than he forgot her; he now turned his eyes and attention towards fosseuse. she was much handsomer than the other, and was at that time young, and really a very amiable person. pursuing the road to montauban, we stopped at a little town called eause, where, in the night, the king my husband was attacked with a high fever, accompanied with most violent pains in his head. this fever lasted for seventeen days, during which time he had no rest night or day, but was continually removed from one bed to another. i nursed him the whole time, never stirring from his bedside, and never putting off my clothes. he took notice of my extraordinary tenderness, and spoke of it to several persons, and particularly to my cousin m-----, who, acting the part of an affectionate relation, restored me to his favour, insomuch that i never stood so highly in it before. this happiness i had the good fortune to enjoy during the four or five years that i remained with him in gascony. our residence, for the most part of the time i have mentioned, was at nerac, where our court was so brilliant that we had no cause to regret our absence from the court of france. we had with us the princesse de navarre, my husband's sister, since married to the duc de bar; there were besides a number of ladies belonging to myself. the king my husband was attended by a numerous body of lords and gentlemen, all as gallant persons as i have seen in any court; and we had only to lament that they were huguenots. this difference of religion, however, caused no dispute among us; the king my husband and the princess his sister heard a sermon, whilst i and my servants heard mass. i had a chapel in the park for the purpose, and, as soon as the service of both religions was over, we joined company in a beautiful garden, ornamented with long walks shaded with laurel and cypress trees. sometimes we took a walk in the park on the banks of the river, bordered by an avenue of trees three thousand yards in length. the rest of the day was passed in innocent amusements; and in the afternoon, or at night, we commonly had a ball. the king was very assiduous with fosseuse, who, being dependent on me, kept herself within the strict bounds of honour and virtue. had she always done so, she had not brought upon herself a misfortune which has proved of such fatal consequence to myself as well as to her. but our happiness was too great to be of long continuance, and fresh troubles broke out betwixt the king my husband and the catholics, and gave rise to a new war. the king my husband and the marechal de biron, who was the king's lieutenant in guienne, had a difference, which was aggravated by the huguenots. this breach became in a short time so wide that all my efforts to close it were useless. they made their separate complaints to the king. the king my husband insisted on the removal of the marechal de biron, and the marshal charged the king my husband, and the rest of those who were of the pretended reformed religion, with designs contrary to peace. i saw, with great concern, that affairs were likely soon to come to an open rupture; and i had no power to prevent it. the marshal advised the king to come to guienne himself, saying that in his presence matters might be settled. the huguenots, hearing of this proposal, supposed the king would take possession of their towns, and, thereupon, came to a resolution to take up arms. this was what i feared; i was become a sharer in the king my husband's fortune, and was now to be in opposition to the king my brother and the religion i had been bred up in. i gave my opinion upon this war to the king my husband and his council, and strove to dissuade them from engaging in it. i represented to them the hazards of carrying on a war when they were to be opposed against so able a general as the marechal de biron, who would not spare them, as other generals had done, he being their private enemy. i begged them to consider that, if the king brought his whole force against them, with intention to exterminate their religion, it would not be in their power to oppose or prevent it. but they were so headstrong, and so blinded with the hope of succeeding in the surprise of certain towns in languedoc and gascony, that, though the king did me the honour, upon all occasions, to listen to my advice, as did most of the huguenots, yet i could not prevail on them to follow it in the present situation of affairs, until it was too late, and after they had found, to their cost, that my counsel was good. the torrent was now burst forth, and there was no possibility of stopping its course until it had spent its utmost strength. before that period arrived, foreseeing the consequences, i had often written to the king and the queen my mother, to offer something to the king my husband by way of accommodating matters. but they were bent against it, and seemed to be pleased that matters had taken such a turn, being assured by marechal de biron that he had it in his power to crush the huguenots whenever he pleased. in this crisis my advice was not attended to, the dissensions increased, and recourse was had to arms. the huguenots had reckoned upon a force more considerable than they were able to collect together, and the king my husband found himself outnumbered by marechal de biron. in consequence, those of the pretended reformed religion failed in all their plans, except their attack upon cahors, which they took with petards, after having lost a great number of men, m. de vezins, who commanded in the town, disputing their entrance for two or three days, from street to street, and even from house to house. the king my husband displayed great valour and conduct upon the occasion, and showed himself to be a gallant and brave general. though the huguenots succeeded in this attempt, their loss was so great that they gained nothing from it. marechal de biron kept the field, and took every place that declared for the huguenots, putting all that opposed him to the sword. from the commencement of this war, the king my husband doing me the honour to love me, and commanding me not to leave him, i had resolved to share his fortune, not without extreme regret, in observing that this war was of such a nature that i could not, in conscience, wish success to either side; for if the huguenots got the upper hand, the religion which i cherished as much as my life was lost, and if the catholics prevailed, the king my husband was undone. but, being thus attached to my husband, by the duty i owed him, and obliged by the attentions he was pleased to show me, i could only acquaint the king and the queen my mother with the situation to which i was reduced, occasioned by my advice to them not having been attended to. i, therefore, prayed them, if they could not extinguish the flames of war in the midst of which i was placed, at least to give orders to marechal de biron to consider the town i resided in, and three leagues round it, as neutral ground, and that i would get the king my husband to do the same. this the king granted me for nerac, provided my husband was not there; but if he should enter it, the neutrality was to cease, and so to remain as long as he continued there. this convention was observed, on both sides, with all the exactness i could desire. however, the king my husband was not to be prevented from often visiting nerac, which was the residence of his sister and me. he was fond of the society of ladies, and, moreover, was at that time greatly enamoured with fosseuse, who held the place in his affections which rebours had lately occupied. fosseuse did me no ill offices, so that the king my husband and i continued to live on very good terms, especially as he perceived me unwilling to oppose his inclinations. led by such inducements, he came to nerac, once, with a body of troops, and stayed three days, not being able to leave the agreeable company he found there. marechal de biron, who wished for nothing so much as such an opportunity, was apprised of it, and, under pretence of joining m. de cornusson, the seneschal of toulouse, who was expected with a reinforcement for his army, he began his march; but, instead of pursuing the road, according to the orders he had issued, he suddenly ordered his troops to file off towards nerac, and, before nine in the morning, his whole force was drawn up within sight of the town, and within cannon-shot of it. the king my husband had received intelligence, the evening before, of the expected arrival of m. de cornusson, and was desirous of preventing the junction, for which purpose he resolved to attack him and the marshal separately. as he had been lately joined by m. de la rochefoucauld, with a corps of cavalry consisting of eight hundred men, formed from the nobility of saintonge, he found himself sufficiently strong to undertake such a plan. he, therefore, set out before break of day to make his attack as they crossed the river. but his intelligence did not prove to be correct, for de cornusson passed it the evening before. my husband, being thus disappointed in his design, returned to nerac, and entered at one gate just as marechal de biron drew up his troops before the other. there fell so heavy a rain at that moment that the musketry was of no use. the king my husband, however, threw a body of his troops into a vineyard to stop the marshal's progress, not being able to do more on account of the unfavourableness of the weather. in the meantime, the marshal continued with his troops drawn up in order of battle, permitting only two or three of his men to advance, who challenged a like number to break lances in honour of their mistresses. the rest of the army kept their ground, to mask their artillery, which, being ready to play, they opened to the right and left, and fired seven or eight shots upon the town, one of which struck the palace. the marshal, having done this, marched off, despatching a trumpeter to me with his excuse. he acquainted me that, had i been alone, he would on no account have fired on the town; but the terms of neutrality for the town, agreed upon by the king, were, as i well knew, in case the king my husband should not be found in it, and, if otherwise, they were void. besides which, his orders were to attack the king my husband wherever he should find him. i must acknowledge on every other occasion the marshal showed me the greatest respect, and appeared to be much my friend. during the war my letters have frequently fallen into his hands, when he as constantly forwarded them to me unopened. and whenever my people have happened to be taken prisoners by his army, they were always well treated as soon as they mentioned to whom they belonged. i answered his message by the trumpeter, saying that i well knew what he had done was strictly agreeable to the convention made and the orders he had received, but that a gallant officer like him would know how to do his duty without giving his friends cause of offence; that he might have permitted me the enjoyment of the king my husband's company in nerac for three days, adding, that he could not attack him, in my presence, without attacking me; and concluding that, certainly, i was greatly offended by his conduct, and would take the first opportunity of making my complaint to the king my brother. letter xxi. situation of affairs in flanders.--peace brought about by duc d'alencon's negotiation.--marechal de biron apologises for firing on nerac.--henri desperately in love with fosseuse.--queen marguerite discovers fosseuse to be pregnant, which she denies.--fosseuse in labour. marguerite's generous behaviour to her.--marguerite's return to paris. the war lasted some time longer, but with disadvantage to the huguenots. the king my husband at length became desirous to make a peace. i wrote on the subject to the king and the queen my mother; but so elated were they both with marechal de biron's success that they would not agree to any terms. about the time this war broke out, cambray, which had been delivered up to my brother by m. d'ainsi, according to his engagement with me, as i have before related, was besieged by the forces of spain. my brother received the news of this siege at his castle of plessis-les-tours, whither he had retired after his return from flanders, where, by the assistance of the comte de lalain, he had been invested with the government of mons, valenciennes, and their dependencies. my brother, being anxious to relieve cambray, set about raising an army, with all the expedition possible; but, finding it could not be accomplished very speedily, he sent forward a reinforcement under the command of m. de balagny, to succour the place until he arrived himself with a sufficient force to raise the siege. whilst he was in the midst of these preparations this huguenot war broke out, and the men he had raised left him to incorporate themselves with the king's army, which had reached gascony. my brother was now without hope of raising the siege, and to lose cambray would be attended with the loss of the other countries he had just obtained. besides, what he should regret more, such losses would reduce to great straits m. de balagny and the gallant troops so nobly defending the place. his grief on this occasion was poignant, and, as his excellent judgment furnished him with expedients under all his difficulties, he resolved to endeavour to bring about a peace. accordingly he despatched a gentleman to the king with his advice to accede to terms, offering to undertake the treaty himself. his design in offering himself as negotiator was to prevent the treaty being drawn out to too great a length, as might be the case if confided to others. it was necessary that he should speedily relieve cambray, for m. de balagny, who had thrown himself into the city as i have before mentioned, had written to him that he should be able to defend the place for six months; but, if he received no succours within that time, his provisions would be all expended, and he should be obliged to give way to the clamours of the inhabitants, and surrender the town. by god's favour, the king was induced to listen to my brother's proposal of undertaking a negotiation for a peace. the king hoped thereby to disappoint him in his expectations in flanders, which he never had approved. accordingly he sent word back to my brother that he should accept his proffer of negotiating a peace, and would send him for his coadjutors, m. de villeroy and m. de bellievre. the commission my brother was charged with succeeded, and, after a stay of seven months in gascony, he settled a peace and left us, his thoughts being employed during the whole time on the means of relieving cambray, which the satisfaction he found in being with us could not altogether abate. the peace my brother, made, as i have just mentioned, was so judiciously framed that it gave equal satisfaction to the king and the catholics, and to the king my husband and the huguenots, and obtained him the affections of both parties. he likewise acquired from it the assistance of that able general, marechal de biron, who undertook the command of the army destined to raise the siege of cambray. the king my husband was equally gratified in the marshal's removal from gascony and having marechal de matignon in his place. before my brother set off he was desirous to bring about a reconciliation betwixt the king my husband and mareohal de biron, provided the latter should make his apologies to me for his conduct at nerac. my brother had desired me to treat him with all disdain, but i used this hasty advice with discretion, considering that my brother might one day or other repent having given it, as he had everything to hope, in his present situation, from the bravery of this officer. my brother returned to france accompanied by marechal de biron. by his negotiation of a peace he had acquired to himself great credit with both parties, and secured a powerful force for the purpose of raising the siege of cambray. but honours and success are followed by envy. the king beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. he had been for seven months, while my brother and i were together in gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. he pretended to believe (what the king my husband can easily prove to be false) that i instigated him to go to war that i might procure for my brother the credit of making peace. this is not at all probable when it is considered the prejudice my brother's affairs in, flanders sustained by the war. but envy and malice are self-deceivers, and pretend to discover what no one else can perceive. on this frail foundation the king raised an altar of hatred, on which he swore never to cease till he had accomplished my brother's ruin and mine. he had never forgiven me for the attachment i had discovered for my brother's interest during the time he was in poland and since. fortune chose to favour the king's animosity; for, during the seven months that my brother stayed in gascony, he conceived a passion for fosseuse, who was become the doting piece of the king my husband, as i have already mentioned, since he had quitted rebours. this new passion in my brother had induced the king my husband to treat me with coldness, supposing that i countenanced my brother's addresses. i no sooner discovered this than i remonstrated with my brother, as i knew he would make every sacrifice for my repose. i begged him to give over his pursuit, and not to speak to her again. i succeeded this way to defeat the malice of my ill-fortune; but there was still behind another secret ambush, and that of a more fatal nature; for fosseuse, who was passionately fond of the king my husband, but had hitherto granted no favours inconsistent with prudence and modesty, piqued by his jealousy of my brother, gave herself up suddenly to his will, and unfortunately became pregnant. she no sooner made this discovery, than she altered her conduct towards me entirely from what it was before. she now shunned my presence as much as she had been accustomed to seek it, and whereas before she strove to do me every good office with the king my husband, she now endeavoured to make all the mischief she was able betwixt us. for his part, he avoided me; he grew cold and indifferent, and since fosseuse ceased to conduct herself with discretion, the happy moments that we experienced during the four or five years we were together in gascony were no more. peace being restored, and my brother departed for france, as i have already related, the king my husband and i returned to nerac. we were no sooner there than fosseuse persuaded the king my husband to make a journey to the waters of aigues-caudes, in bearn, perhaps with a design to rid herself of her burden there. i begged the king my husband to excuse my accompanying him, as, since the affront that i had received at pau, i had made a vow never to set foot in bearn until the catholic religion was reestablished there. he pressed me much to go with him, and grew angry at my persisting to refuse his request. he told me that his little girl (for so he affected to call fosseuse) was desirous to go there on account of a colic, which she felt frequent returns of. i answered that i had no objection to his taking her with him. he then said that she could not go unless i went; that it would occasion scandal, which might as well be avoided. he continued to press me to accompany him, but at length i prevailed with him to consent to go without me, and to take her with him, and, with her, two of her companions, rebours and ville-savin, together with the governess. they set out accordingly, and i waited their return at baviere. i had every day news from rebours, informing me how matters went. this rebours i have mentioned before to have been the object of my husband's passion, but she was now cast off, and, consequently, was no friend to fosseuse, who had gained that place in his affection she had before held. she, therefore, strove all she could to circumvent her; and, indeed, she was fully qualified for such a purpose, as she was a cunning, deceitful young person. she gave me to understand that fosseuse laboured to do me every ill office in her power; that she spoke of me with the greatest disrespect on all occasions, and expressed her expectations of marrying the king herself, in case she should be delivered of a son, when i was to be divorced. she had said, further, that when the king my husband returned to baviere, he had resolved to go to pau, and that i should go with him, whether i would or not. this intelligence was far from being agreeable to me, and i knew not what to think of it. i trusted in the goodness of god, and i had a reliance on the generosity of the king my husband; yet i passed the time i waited for his return but uncomfortably, and often thought i shed more tears than they drank water. the catholic nobility of the neighbourhood of baviere used their utmost endeavours to divert my chagrin, for the month or five weeks that the king my husband and fosseuse stayed at aigues-caudes. on his return, a certain nobleman acquainted the king my husband with the concern i was under lest he should go to pau, whereupon he did not press me on the subject, but only said he should have been glad if i had consented to go with him. perceiving, by my tears and the expressions i made use of, that i should prefer even death to such a journey, he altered his intentions and we returned to nerac. the pregnancy of fosseuse was now no longer a secret. the whole court talked of it, and not only the court, but all the country. i was willing to prevent the scandal from spreading, and accordingly resolved to talk to her on the subject. with this resolution, i took her into my closet, and spoke to her thus: "though you have for some time estranged yourself from me, and, as it has been reported to me, striven to do me many ill offices with the king my husband, yet the regard i once had for you, and the esteem which i still entertain for those honourable persons to whose family you belong, do not admit of my neglecting to afford you all the assistance in my power in pour present unhappy situation. i beg you, therefore, not to conceal the truth, it being both for your interest and mine, under whose protection you are, to declare it. tell me the truth, and i will act towards you as a mother. you know that a contagious disorder has broken out in the place, and, under pretence of avoiding it, i will go to mas-d'agenois, which is a house belonging to the king my husband, in a very retired situation. i will take you with me, and such other persons as you shall name. whilst we are there, the king will take the diversion of hunting in some other part of the country, and i shall not stir thence before your delivery. by this means we shall put a stop to the scandalous reports which are now current, and which concern you more than myself." so far from showing any contrition, or returning thanks for my kindness, she replied, with the utmost arrogance, that she would prove all those to be liars who had reported such things of her; that, for my part, i had ceased for a long time to show her any marks of regard, and she saw that i was determined upon her ruin. these words she delivered in as loud a tone as mine had been mildly expressed; and, leaving me abruptly, she flew in a rage to the king my husband, to relate to him what i had said to her. he was very angry upon the occasion, and declared he would make them all liars who had laid such things to her charge. from that moment until the hour of her delivery, which was a few months after, he never spoke to me. she found the pains of labour come upon her about daybreak, whilst she was in bed in the chamber where the maids of honour slept. she sent for my physician, and begged him to go and acquaint the king my husband that she was taken ill. we slept in separate beds in the same chamber, and had done so for some time. the physician delivered the message as he was directed, which greatly embarrassed my husband. what to do he did not know. on the one hand, he was fearful of a discovery; on the other, he foresaw that, without proper assistance, there was danger of losing one he so much loved. in this dilemma, he resolved to apply to me, confess all, and implore my aid and advice, well knowing that, notwithstanding what had passed, i should be ready to do him a pleasure. having come to this resolution, he withdrew my curtains, and spoke to me thus: "my dear, i have concealed a matter from you which i now confess. i beg you to forgive me, and to think no more about what i have said to you on the subject. will you oblige me so far as to rise and go to fosseuse, who is taken very ill? i am well assured that, in her present situation, you will forget everything and resent nothing. you know how dearly i love her, and i hope you will comply with my request." i answered that i had too great a respect for him to be offended at anything he should do, and that i would go to her immediately, and do as much for her as if she were a child of my own. i advised him, in the meantime, to go out and hunt, by which means he would draw away all his people, and prevent tattling. i removed fosseuse, with all convenient haste, from the chamber in which the maids of honour were, to one in a more retired part of the palace, got a physician and some women about her, and saw that she wanted for nothing that was proper in her situation. it pleased god that she should bring forth a daughter, since dead. as soon as she was delivered i ordered her to be taken back to the chamber from which she had been brought. notwithstanding these precautions, it was not possible to prevent the story from circulating through the palace. when the king my husband returned from hunting he paid her a visit, according to custom. she begged that i might come and see her, as was usual with me when any one of my maids of honour was taken ill. by this means she expected to put a stop to stories to her prejudice. the king my husband came from her into my bedchamber, and found me in bed, as i was fatigued and required rest, after having been called up so early. he begged me to get up and pay her a visit. i told him i went according to his desire before, when she stood in need of assistance, but now she wanted no help; that to visit her at this time would be only exposing her more, and cause myself to be pointed at by all the world. he seemed to be greatly displeased at what i said, which vexed me the more as i thought i did not deserve such treatment after what i had done at his request in the morning; she likewise contributed all in her power to aggravate matters betwixt him and me. in the meantime, the king my brother, always well informed of what is passing in the families of the nobility of his kingdom, was not ignorant of the transactions of our court. he was particularly curious to learn everything that happened with us, and knew every minute circumstance that i have now related. thinking this a favourable occasion to wreak his vengeance on me for having been the means of my brother acquiring so much reputation by the peace he had brought about, he made use of the accident that happened in our court to withdraw me from the king my husband, and thereby reduce me to the state of misery he wished to plunge me in. to this purpose he prevailed on the queen my mother to write to me, and express her anxious desire to see me after an absence of five or six years. she added that a journey of this sort to court would be serviceable to the affairs of the king my husband as well as my own; that the king my brother himself was desirous of seeing me, and that if i wanted money for the journey he would send it me. the king wrote to the same purpose, and despatched manique, the steward of his household, with instructions to use every persuasion with me to undertake the journey. the length of time i had been absent in gascony, and the unkind usage i received on account of fosseuse, contributed to induce me to listen to the proposal made me. the king and the queen both wrote to me. i received three letters, in quick succession; and, that i might have no pretence for staying, i had the sum of fifteen hundred crowns paid me to defray the expenses of my journey. the queen my mother wrote that she would give me the meeting in saintonge, and that, if the king my husband would accompany me so far, she would treat with him there, and give him every satisfaction with respect to the king. but the king and she were desirous to have him at their court, as he had been before with my brother; and the marechal de matignon had pressed the matter with the king, that he might have no one to interfere with him in gascony. i had had too long experience of what was to be expected at their court to hope much from all the fine promises that were made to me. i had resolved, however, to avail myself of the opportunity of an absence of a few months, thinking it might prove the means of setting matters to rights. besides which, i thought that, as i should take fosseuse with me, it was possible that the king's passion for her might cool when she was no longer in his sight, or he might attach himself to some other that was less inclined to do me mischief. it was with some difficulty that the king my husband would consent to a removal, so unwilling was he to leave his fosseuse. he paid more attention to me, in hopes that i should refuse to set out on this journey to france; but, as i had given my word in my letters to the king and the queen my mother that i would go, and as i had even received money for the purpose, i could not do otherwise. and herein my ill-fortune prevailed over the reluctance i had to leave the king my husband, after the instances of renewed love and regard which he had begun to show me. etext editor's bookmarks: envy and malice are self-deceivers honours and success are followed by envy lovers are not criminal in the estimation of one another situated as i was betwixt fear and hope the pretended reformed religion there is too much of it for earnest, and not enough for jest those who have given offence to hate the offended party this ebook was produced by david widger, widger@cecomet.net book ii. cardinal granvella. anthony perenot, bishop of arras, subsequently archbishop of malines, and metropolitan of all the netherlands, who, under the name of cardinal granvella, has been immortalized by the hatred of his contemporaries, was born in the year , at besancon in burgundy. his father, nicolaus perenot, the son of a blacksmith, had risen by his own merits to be the private secretary of margaret, duchess of savoy, at that time regent of the netherlands. in this post he was noticed for his habits of business by charles v., who took him into his own service and employed him in several important negotiations. for twenty years he was a member of the emperor's cabinet, and filled the offices of privy counsellor and keeper of the king's seal, and shared in all the state secrets of that monarch. he acquired a large fortune. his honors, his influence, and his political knowledge were inherited by his son, anthony perenot, who in his early years gave proofs of the great capacity which subsequently opened to him so distinguished a career. anthony had cultivated at several colleges the talents with which nature had so lavishly endowed him, and in some respects had an advantage over his father. he soon showed that his own abilities were sufficient to maintain the advantageous position which the merits of another had procured him. he was twenty-four years old when the emperor sent him as his plenipotentiary to the ecclesiastical council of trent, where he delivered the first specimen of that eloquence which in the sequel gave him so complete an ascendancy over two kings. charles employed him in several difficult embassies, the duties of which he fulfilled to the satisfaction of his sovereign, and when finally that emperor resigned the sceptre to his son he made that costly present complete by giving him a minister who could help him to wield it. granvella opened his new career at once with the greatest masterpiece of political genius, in passing so easily from the favor of such a father into equal consideration with such a son. and he soon proved himself deserving of it. at the secret negotiations of which the duchess of lorraine had, in , been the medium between the french and spanish ministers at peronne, he planned, conjointly with the cardinal of lorraine, that conspiracy against the protestants which was afterwards matured, but also betrayed, at chateau-cambray, where perenot likewise assisted in effecting the so-called peace. a deeply penetrating, comprehensive intellect, an unusual facility in conducting great and intricate affairs, and the most extensive learning, were wonderfully united in this man with persevering industry and never- wearying patience, while his enterprising genius was associated with thoughtful mechanical regularity. day and night the state found him vigilant and collected; the most important and the most insignificant things were alike weighed by him with scrupulous attention. not unfrequently he employed five secretaries at one time, dictating to them in different languages, of which he is said to have spoken seven. what his penetrating mind had slowly matured acquired in his lips both force and grace, and truth, set forth by his persuasive eloquence, irresistibly carried away all hearers. he was tempted by none of the passions which make slaves of most men. his integrity was incorruptible. with shrewd penetration he saw through the disposition of his master, and could read in his features his whole train of thought, and, as it were, the approaching form in the shadow which outran it. with an artifice rich in resources he came to the aid of philip's more inactive mind, formed into perfect thought his master's crude ideas while they yet hung on his lips, and liberally allowed him the glory of the invention. granvella understood the difficult and useful art of depreciating his own talents; of making his own genius the seeming slave of another; thus he ruled while he concealed his sway. in this manner only could philip ii. be governed. content with a silent but real power, granvella did not grasp insatiably at new and outward marks of it, which with lesser minds are ever the most coveted objects; but every new distinction seemed to sit upon him as easily as the oldest. no wonder if such extraordinary endowments had alone gained him the favor of his master; but a large and valuable treasure of political secrets and experiences, which the active life of charles v. had accumulated, and had deposited in the mind of this man, made him indispensable to his successor. self-sufficient as the latter was, and accustomeded to confide in his own understanding, his timid and crouching policy was fain to lean on a superior mind, and to aid its own irresolution not only by precedent but also by the influence and example of another. no political matter which concerned the royal interest, even when philip himself was in the netherlands, was decided without the intervention of granvella; and when the king embarked for spain he made the new regent the same valuable present of the minister which he himself had received from the emperor, his father. common as it is for despotic princes to bestow unlimited confidence on the creatures whom they have raised from the dust, and of whose greatness they themselves are, in a measure, the creators, the present is no ordinary instance; pre-eminent must have been the qualities which could so far conquer the selfish reserve of such a character as philip's as to gain his confidence, nay, even to win him into familiarity. the slightest ebullition of the most allowable self-respect, which might have tempted him to assert, however slightly, his claim to any idea which the king had once ennobled as his own, would have cost him his whole influence. he might gratify without restraint the lowest passions of voluptuousness, of rapacity, and of revenge, but the only one in which he really took delight, the sweet consciousness of his own superiority and power, he was constrained carefully to conceal from the suspicious glance of the despot. he voluntarily disclaimed all the eminent qualities, which were already his own, in order, as it were, to receive them a second time from the generosity of the king. his happiness seemed to flow from no other source, no other person could have a claim upon his gratitude. the purple, which was sent to him from rome, was not assumed until the royal permission reached him from spain; by laying it down on the steps of the throne he appeared, in a measure, to receive it first from the hands of majesty. less politic, alva erected a trophy in antwerp, and inscribed his own name under the victory, which he had won as the servant of the crown--but alva carried with him to the grave the displeasure of his master. he had invaded with audacious hand the royal prerogative by drawing immediately at the fountain of immortality. three times granvella changed his master, and three times he succeeded in rising to the highest favor. with the same facility with which he had guided the settled pride of an autocrat, and the sly egotism of a despot, he knew how to manage the delicate vanity of a woman. his business between himself and the regent, even when they were in the same house, was, for the most part, transacted by the medium of notes, a custom which draws its date from the times of augustus and tiberius. when the regent was in any perplexity these notes were interchanged from hour to hour. he probably adopted this expedient in the hope of eluding the watchful jealousy of the nobility, and concealing from them, in part at least, his influence over the regent. perhaps, too, he also believed that by this means his advice would become more permanent; and, in case of need, this written testimoney would be at hand to shield him from blame. but the vigilance of the nobles made this caution vain, and it was soon known in all the provinces that nothing was determined upon without the minister's advice. granvella possessed all the qualities requisite for a perfect statesman in a monarchy governed by despotic principles, but was absolutely unqualified for republics which are governed by kings. educated between the throne and the confessional, he knew of no other relation between man and man than that of rule and subjection; and the innate consciousness of his own superiority gave him a contempt for others. his policy wanted pliability, the only virtue which was here indispensable to its success. he was naturally overbearing and insolent, and the royal authority only gave arms to the natural impetuosity of his disposition and the imperiousness of his order. he veiled his own ambition beneath the interests of the crown, and made the breach between the nation and the king incurable, because it would render him indispensable to the latter. he revenged on the nobility the lowliness of his own origin; and, after the fashion of all those who have risen by their own merits, he valued the advantages of birth below those by which he had raised himself to distinction. the protestants saw in him their most implacable foe; to his charge were laid all the burdens which oppressed the country, and they pressed the more heavily because they came from him. nay, he was even accused of having brought back to severity the milder sentiments to which the urgent remonstrances of the provinces had at last disposed the monarch. the netherlands execrated him as the most terrible enemy of their liberties, and the originator of all the misery which subsequently came upon them. . philip had evidently left the provinces too soon. the new measures of the government were still strange to the people, and could receive sanction and authority from his presence alone; the new machines which he had brought into play required to be kept in motion by a dreaded and powerful hand, and to have their first movements watched and regulated. he now exposed his minister to all the angry passions of the people, who no longer felt restrained by the fetters of the royal presence; and he delegated to the weak arm of a subject the execution of projects in which majesty itself, with all its powerful supports, might have failed. the land, indeed, flourished; and a general prosperity appeared to testify to the blessings of the peace which had so lately been bestowed upon it. an external repose deceived the eye, for within raged all the elements of discord. if the foundations of religion totter in a country they totter not alone; the audacity which begins with things sacred ends with things profane. the successful attack upon the hierarchy had awakened a spirit of boldness, and a desire to assail authority in general, and to test laws as well as dogmas--duties as well as opinions. the fanatical boldness with which men had learned to discuss and decide upon the affairs of eternity might change its subject matter; the contempt for life and property which religious enthusiasm had taught could metamorphose timid citizens into foolhardy rebels. a female government of nearly forty years had given the nation room to assert their liberty; continual wars, of which the netherlands had been the theatre, had introduced a license with them, and the right of the stronger had usurped the place of law and order. the provinces were filled with foreign adventurers and fugitives; generally men bound by no ties of country, family, or property, who had brought with them from their unhappy homes the seeds of insubordination and rebellion. the repeated spectacles of torture and of death had rudely burst the tenderer threads of moral feeling, and had given an unnatural harshness to the national character. still the rebellion would have crouched timorously and silently on the ground if it had not found a support in the nobility. charles v. had spoiled the flemish nobles of the netherlands by making them the participators of his glory, by fostering their national pride, by the marked preference he showed for them over the castilian nobles, and by opening an arena to their ambition in every part of his empire. in the late war with france they had really deserved this preference from philip; the advantages which the king reaped from the peace of chateau- cambray were for the most part the fruits of their valor, and they now sensibly missed the gratitude on which they had so confidently reckoned. moreover, the separation of the german empire from the spanish monarchy, and the less warlike spirit of the new government, had greatly narrowed their sphere of action, and, except in their own country, little remained for them to gain. and philip now appointed his spaniards where charles v. had employed the flemings. all the passions which the preceding government had raised and kept employed still survived in peace; and in default of a legitimate object these unruly feelings found, unfortunately, ample scope in the grievances of their country. accordingly, the claims and wrongs which had been long supplanted by new passions were now drawn from oblivion. by his late appointments the king had satisfied no party; for those even who obtained offices were not much more content than those who were entirely passed over, because they had calculated on something better than they got. william of orange had received four governments (not to reckon some smaller dependencies which, taken together, were equivalent to a fifth), but william had nourished hopes of flanders and brabant. he and count egmont forgot what had really fallen to their share, and only remembered that they had lost the regency. the majority of the nobles were either plunged into debt by their own extravagance, or had willingly enough been drawn into it by the government. now that they were excluded from the prospect of lucrative appointments, they at once saw themselves exposed to poverty, which pained them the more sensibly when they contrasted the splendor of the affluent citizens with their own necessities. in the extremities to which they were reduced many would have readily assisted in the commission even of crimes; how then could they resist the seductive offers of the calvinists, who liberally repaid them for their intercession and protection? lastly, many whose estates were past redemption placed their last hope in a general devastation, and stood prepared at the first favorable moment to cast the torch of discord into the republic. this threatening aspect of the public mind was rendered still more alarming by the unfortunate vicinity of france. what philip dreaded for the provinces was there already accomplished. the fate of that kingdom prefigured to him the destiny of his netherlands, and the spirit of rebellion found there a seductive example. a similar state of things had under francis i. and henry ii. scattered the seeds of innovation in that kingdom; a similar fury of persecution and a like spirit of faction had encouraged its growth. now huguenots and catholics were struggling in a dubious contest; furious parties disorganized the whole monarchy, and were violently hurrying this once-powerful state to the brink of destruction. here, as there, private interest, ambition, and party feeling might veil themselves under the names of religion and patriotism, and the passions of a few citizens drive the entire nation to take up arms. the frontiers of both countries merged in walloon flanders; the rebellion might, like an agitated sea, cast its waves as far as this: would a country be closed against it whose language, manners, and character wavered between those of france and belgium? as yet the government had taken no census of its protestant subjects in these countries, but the new sect, it was aware, was a vast, compact republic, which extended its roots through all the monarchies of christendom, and the slighest disturbance in any of its most distant members vibrated to its centre. it was, as it were, a chain of threatening volcanoes, which, united by subterraneous passages, ignite at the same moment with alarming sympathy. the netherlands were, necessarily, open to all nations, because they derived their support from all. was it possible for philip to close a commercial state as easily as he could spain? if he wished to purify these provinces from heresy it was necessary for him to commence by extirpating it in france. it was in this state that granvella found the netherlands at the beginning of his administration ( ). to restore to these countries the uniformity of papistry, to break the co-ordinate power of the nobility and the states, and to exalt the royal authority on the ruins of republican freedom, was the great object of spanish policy and the express commission of the new minister. but obstacles stood in the way of its accomplishment; to conquer these demanded the invention of new resources, the application of new machinery. the inquisition, indeed, and the religious edicts appeared sufficient to check the contagion of heresy; but the latter required superintendence, and the former able instruments for its now extended jurisdiction. the church constitution continued the same as it had been in earlier times, when the provinces were less populous, when the church still enjoyed universal repose, and could be more easily overlooked and controlled. a succession of several centuries, which changed the whole interior form of the provinces, had left the form of the hierarchy unaltered, which, moreover, was protected from the arbitrary will of its ruler by the particular privileges of the provinces. all the seventeen provinces were parcelled out under four bishops, who had their seats at arras, tournay, cambray, and utrecht, and were subject to the primates of rheims and cologne. philip the good, duke of burgundy, had, indeed, meditated an increase in the number of bishops to meet the wants of the increasing population; but, unfortunately, in the excitement of a life of pleasure had abandoned the project. ambition and lust of conquest withdrew the mind of charles the bold from the internal concerns of his kingdom, and maximilian had already too many subjects of dispute with the states to venture to add to their number by proposing this change. a stormy reign prevented charles v. from the execution of this extensive plan, which philip ii. now undertook as a bequest from all these princes. the moment had now arrived when the urgent necessities of the church would excuse the innovation, and the leisure of peace favored its accomplishment. with the prodigious crowd of people from all the countries of europe who were crowded together in the towns of the netherlands, a multitude of religious opinions had also grown up; and it was impossible that religion could any longer be effectually superintended by so few eyes as were formerly sufficient. while the number of bishops was so small their districts must, of necessity, have been proportionally extensive, and four men could not be adequate to maintain the purity of the faith through so wide a district. the jurisdiction which the archbishops of cologne and rheims exercised over the netherlands had long been a stumbling-block to the government, which could not look on this territory as really its own property so long as such an important branch of power was still wielded by foreign hands. to snatch this prerogative from the alien archbishops; by new and active agents to give fresh life and vigor to the superintendence of the faith, and at the same time to strengthen the number of the partisans of government at the diet, no more effectual means could be devised than to increase the number of bishops. resolved upon doing this philip ii. ascended the throne; but he soon found that a change in the hierarchy would inevitably meet with warm opposition from the provinces, without whose consent, nevertheless, it would be vain to attempt it. philip foresaw that the nobility would never approve of a measure which would so strongly augment the royal party, and take from the aristocracy the preponderance of power in the diet. the revenues, too, for the maintenance of these new bishops must be diverted from the abbots and monks, and these formed a considerable part of the states of the realm. he had, besides, to fear the opposition of the protestants, who would not fail to act secretly in the diet against him. on these accounts the whole affair was discussed at rome with the greatest possible secrecy. instructed by, and as the agent of, granvella, francis sonnoi, a priest of louvain, came before paul iv. to inform him how extensive the provinces were, how thriving and populous, how luxurious in their prosperity. but, he continued, in the immoderate enjoyment of liberty the true faith is neglected, and heretics prosper. to obviate this evil the romish see must have recourse to extraordinary measures. it was not difficult to prevail on the romish pontiff to make a change which would enlarge the sphere of his own jurisdiction. paul iv. appointed a tribunal of seven cardinals to deliberate upon this important matter; but death called him away, and he left to his successor, pius iv., the duty of carrying their advice into execution. the welcome tidings of the pope's determination reached the king in zealand when he was just on the point of setting sail for spain, and the minister was secretly charged with the dangerous reform. the new constitution of the hierarchy was published in ; in addition to the then existing four bishoprics thirteen new ones were established, according to the number of seventeen provinces, and four of them were raised into archbishoprics. six of these episcopal sees, viz., in antwerp, herzogenbusch, ghent, bruges, ypres, and ruremonde, were placed under the archbishopric of malines; five others, haarlem, middelburg, leuwarden, deventer, and groningen, under the archbishopric of utrecht; and the remaining four, arras, tournay, st. omer, and namur, which lie nearest to france, and have language, character, and manners in common with that country, under the archbishopric of cambray. malines, situated in the middle of brabant and in the centre of all the seventeen provinces, was made the primacy of all the rest, and was, with several rich abbeys, the reward of granvella. the revenues of the new bishoprics were provided by an appropriation of the treasures of the cloisters and abbeys which had accumulated from pious benefactions during centuries. some of the abbots were raised to the episcopal throne, and with the possession of their cloisters and prelacies retained also the vote at the diet which was attached to them. at the same time to every bishopric nine prebends were attached, and bestowed on the most learned juris-consultists and theologians, who were to support the inquisition and the bishop in his spiritual office. of these, the two who were most deserving by knowledge, experience, and unblemished life were to be constituted actual inquisitors, and to have the first voice in the synods. to the archbishop of malines, as metropolitan of all the seventeen provinces, the full authority was given to appoint, or at discretion depose, archbishops and bishops; and the romish see was only to give its ratification to his acts. at any other period the nation would have received with gratitude and approved of such a measure of church reform since it was fully called for by circumstances, was conducive to the interests of religion, and absolutely indispensable for the moral reformation of the monkhood. now the temper of the times saw in it nothing but a hateful change. universal was the indignation with which it was received. a cry was raised that the constitution was trampled under foot, the rights of the nation violated, and that the inquisition was already at the door, and would soon open here, as in spain, its bloody tribunal. the people beheld with dismay these new servants of arbitrary power and of persecution. the nobility saw in it nothing but a strengthening of the royal authority by the addition of fourteen votes in the states' assembly, and a withdrawal of the firmest prop of their freedom, the balance of the royal and the civil power. the old bishops complained of the diminution of their incomes and the circumscription of their sees; the abbots and monks had not only lost power and income, but had received in exchange rigid censors of their morals. noble and simple, laity and clergy, united against the common foe, and while all singly struggled for some petty private interest, the cry appeared to come from the formidable voice of patriotism. among all the provinces brabant was loudest in its opposition. the inviolability of its church constitution was one of the important privileges which it had reserved in the remarkable charter of the "joyful entry,"--statutes which the sovereign could not violate without releasing the nation from its allegiance to him. in vain did the university of louvain assert that in disturbed times of the church a privilege lost its power which had been granted in the period of its tranquillity. the introduction of the new bishoprics into the constitution was thought to shake the whole fabric of liberty. the prelacies, which were now transferred to the bishops, must henceforth serve another rule than the advantage of the province of whose states they had been members. the once free patriotic citizens were to be instruments of the romish see and obedient tools of the archbishop, who again, as first prelate of brabant, had the immediate control over them. the freedom of voting was gone, because the bishops, as servile spies of the crown, made every one fearful. "who," it was asked, "will after this venture to raise his voice in parliament before such observers, or in their presence dare to protect the rights of the nation against the rapacious hands of the government? they will trace out the resources of the provinces, and betray to the crown the secrets of our freedom and our property. they will obstruct the way to all offices of honor; we shall soon see the courtiers of the king succeed the present men; the children of foreigners will, for the future, fill the parliament, and the private interest of their patron will guide their venal votes." "what an act of oppression," rejoined the monks, "to pervert to other objects the pious designs of our holy institutions, to contemn the inviolable wishes of the dead, and to take that which a devout charity had deposited in our chests for the relief of the unfortunate and make it subservient to the luxury of the bishops, thus inflating their arrogant pomp with the plunder of the poor?" not only the abbots and monks, who really did suffer by this act of appropriation, but every family which could flatter itself with the slightest hope of enjoying, at some time or other, even in the most remote posterity, the benefit of this monastic foundation, felt this disappointment of their distant expectations as much as if they had suffered an actual injury, and the wrongs of a few abbot-prelates became the concern of a whole nation. historians have not omitted to record the covert proceedings of william of orange during this general commotion, who labored to conduct to one end these various and conflicting passions. at his instigation the people of brabant petitioned the regent for an advocate and protector, since they alone, of all his flemish subjects, had the misfortune to unite, in one and the same person, their counsel and their ruler. had the demand been granted, their choice could fall on no other than the prince of orange. but granvella, with his usual presence of mind, broke through the snare. "the man who receives this office," he declared in the state council, "will, i hope, see that he divides brabant with the king!" the long delay of the papal bull, which was kept back by a misunderstanding between the romish and spanish courts, gave the disaffected an opportunity to combine for a common object. in perfect secrecy the states of brabant despatched an extraordinary messenger to pins iv. to urge their wishes in rome itself. the ambassador was provided with important letters of recommendation from the prince of orange, and carried with him considerable sums to pave his way to the father of the church. at the same time a public letter was forwarded from the city of antwerp to the king of spain containing the most urgent representations, and supplicating him to spare that flourishing commercial town from the threatened innovation. they knew, it was stated, that the intentions of the monarch were the best, and that the institution of the new bishops was likely to be highly conducive to the maintenance of true religion; but the foreigners could not be convinced of this, and on them depended the prosperity of their town. among them the most groundless rumors would be as perilous as the most true. the first embassy was discovered in time, and its object disappointed by the prudence of the regent; by the second the town of antwerp gained so far its point that it was to remain without a bishop, at least until the personal arrival of the king, which was talked of. the example and success of antwerp gave the signal of opposition to all the other towns for which a new bishop was intended. it is a remarkable proof of the hatred to the inquisition and the unanimity of the flemish towns at this date that they preferred to renounce all the advantages which the residence of a bishop would necessarily bring to their local trade rather than by their consent promote that abhorred tribunal, and thus act in opposition to the interests of the whole nation. deventer, ruremond, and leuwarden placed themselves in determined opposition, and ( ) successfully carried their point; in the other towns the bishops were, in spite of all remonstrances, forcibly inducted. utrecht, haarlem, st. omer, and middelburg were among the first which opened their gates to them; the remaining towns followed their example; but in malines and herzogenbusch the bishops were received with very little respect. when granvella made his solemn entry into the former town not a single nobleman showed himself, and his triumph was wanting in everything that could make it real, because those remained away over whom it was meant to be celebrated. in the meantime, too, the period had elapsed within which the spanish troops were to have left the country, and as yet there was no appearance of their being withdrawn. people perceived with terror the real cause of the delay, and suspicion lent it a fatal connection with the inquisition. the detention of these troops, as it rendered the nation more vigilant and distrustful, made it more difficult for the minister to proceed with the other innovations, and yet he would fain not deprive himself of this powerful and apparently indispensable aid in a country where all hated him, and in the execution of a commission to which all were opposed. at last, however, the regent saw herself compelled by the universal murmurs of discontent, to urge most earnestly upon the king the necessity of the withdrawal of the troops. "the provinces," she writes to madrid, "have unanimously declared that they would never again be induced to grant the extraordinary taxes required by the government as long as word was not kept with them in this matter. the danger of a revolt was far more imminent than that of an attack by the french protestants, and if a rebellion was to take place in the netherlands these forces would be too weak to repress it, and there was not sufficient money in the treasury to enlist new." by delaying his answer the king still sought at least to gain time, and the reiterated representations of the regent would still have remained ineffectual, if, fortunately for the provinces, a loss which he had lately suffered from the turks had not compelled him to employ these troops in the mediterranean. he, therefore, at last consented to their departure: they were embarked in in zealand, and the exulting shouts of all the provinces accompanied their departure. meanwhile granvella ruled in the council of state almost uncontrolled. all offices, secular and spiritual, were given away through him; his opinion prevailed against the unanimous voice of the whole assembly. the regent herself was governed by him. he had contrived to manage so that her appointment was made out for two years only, and by this expedient he kept her always in his power. it seldom happened that any important affair was submitted to the other members, and if it really did occur it was only such as had been long before decided, to which it was only necessary for formality's sake to gain their sanction. whenever a royal letter was read viglius received instructions to omit all such passages as were underlined by the minister. it often happened that this correspondence with spain laid open the weakness of the government, or the anxiety felt by the regent, with which it was not expedient to inform the members, whose loyalty was distrusted. if again it occurred that the opposition gained a majority over the minister, and insisted with determination on an article which he could not well put off any longer, he sent it to the ministry at madrid for their decision, by which he at least gained time, and in any case was certain to find support.--with the exception of the count of barlaimont, the president viglius, and a few others, all the other counsellors were but superfluous figures in the senate, and the minister's behavior to them marked the small value which he placed upon their friendship and adherence. no wonder that men whose pride had been so greatly indulged by the flattering attentions of sovereign princes, and to whom, as to the idols of their country, their fellow-citizens paid the most reverential submission, should be highly indignant at this arrogance of a plebeian. many of them had been personally insulted by granvella. the prince of orange was well aware that it was he who had prevented his marriage with the princess of lorraine, and that he had also endeavored to break off the negotiations for another alliance with the princess of savoy. he had deprived count horn of the government of gueldres and zutphen, and had kept for himself an abbey which count egmont had in vain exerted himself to obtain for a relation. confident of his superior power, he did not even think it worth while to conceal from the nobility his contempt for them, and which, as a rule, marked his whole administration; william of orange was the only one with whom be deemed it advisable to dissemble. although he really believed himself to be raised far above all the laws of fear and decorum, still in this point, however, his confident arrogance misled him, and he erred no less against policy than he shined against propriety. in the existing posture of affairs the government could hardly have adopted a worse measure than that of throwing disrespect on the nobility. it had it in its power to flatter the prejudices and feelings of the aristocracy, and thus artfully and imperceptibly win them over to its plans, and through them subvert the edifice of national liberty. now it admonished them, most inopportunely, of their duties, their dignity, and their power; calling upon them even to be patriots, and to devote to the cause of true greatness an ambition which hitherto it had inconsiderately repelled. to carry into effect the ordinances it required the active co-operation of the lieutenant-governors; no wonder, however, that the latter showed but little zeal to afford this assistance. on the contrary, it is highly probable that they silently labored to augment the difficulties of the minister, and to subvert his measures, and through his ill-success to diminish the king's confidence in him, and expose his administration to contempt. the rapid progress which in spite of those horrible edicts the reformation made during granvella's administration in the netherlands, is evidently to be ascribed to the lukewarmness of the nobility in opposing it. if the minister had been sure of the nobles he might have despised the fury of the mob, which would have impotently dashed itself against the dreaded barriers of the throne. the sufferings of the citizens lingered long in tears and sighs, until the arts and the example of the nobility called forth a louder expression of them. meanwhile the inquisitions into religion were carried on with renewed vigor by the crowd of new laborers ( , ), and the edicts against heretics were enforced with fearful obedience. but the critical moment when this detestable remedy might have been applied was allowed to pass by; the nation had become too strong and vigorous for such rough treatment. the new religion could now be extirpated only by the death of all its professors. the present executions were but so many alluring exhibitions of its excellence, so many scenes of its triumphs and radiant virtue. the heroic greatness with which the victims died made converts to the opinions for which they perished. one martyr gained ten new proselytes. not in towns only, or villages, but on the very highways, in the boats and public carriages disputes were held touching the dignity of the pope, the saints, purgatory, and indulgences, and sermons were preached and men converted. from the country and from the towns the common people rushed in crowds to rescue the prisoners of the holy tribunal from the hands of its satellites, and the municipal officers who ventured to support it with the civil forces were pelted with stones. multitudes accompanied the protestant preachers whom the inquisition pursued, bore them on their shoulders to and from church, and at the risk of their lives concealed them from their persecutors. the first province which was seized with the fanatical spirit of rebellion was, as had been expected, walloon flanders. a french calvinist, by name lannoi, set himself up in tournay as a worker of miracles, where he hired a few women to simulate diseases, and to pretend to be cured by him. he preached in the woods near the town, drew the people in great numbers after him, and scattered in their minds the seeds of rebellion. similar teachers appeared in lille and valenciennes, but in the latter place the municipal functionaries succeeded in seizing the persons of these incendiaries; while, however, they delayed to execute them their followers increased so rapidly that they became sufficiently strong to break open the prisons and forcibly deprive justice of its victims. troops at last were brought into the town and order restored. but this trifling occurrence had for a moment withdrawn the veil which had hitherto concealed the strength of the protestant party, and allowed the minister to compute their prodigious numbers. in tournay alone five thousand at one time had been seen attending the sermons, and not many less in valenciennes. what might not be expected from the northern provinces, where liberty was greater, and the seat of government more remote, and where the vicinity of germany and denmark multiplied the sources of contagion? one slight provocation had sufficed to draw from its concealment so formidable a multitude. how much greater was, perhaps, the number of those who in their hearts acknowledged the new sect, and only waited for a favorable opportunity to publish their adhesion to it. this discovery greatly alarmed the regent. the scanty obedience paid to the edicts, the wants of the exhausted treasury, which compelled her to impose new taxes, and the suspicious movements of the huguenots on the french frontiers still further increased her anxiety. at the same time she received a command from madrid to send off two thousand flemish cavalry to the army of the queen mother in france, who, in the distresses of the civil war, had recourse to philip ii. for assistance. every affair of faith, in whatever land it might be, was made by philip his own business. he felt it as keenly as any catastrophe which could befall his own house, and in such cases always stood ready to sacrifice his means to foreign necessities. if it were interested motives that here swayed him they were at least kingly and grand, and the bold support of his principles wins our admiration as much as their cruelty withholds our esteem. the regent laid before the council of state the royal will on the subject of these troops, but with a very warm opposition on the part of the nobility. count egmont and the prince of orange declared that the time was illchosen for stripping the netherlands of troops, when the aspect of affairs rendered rather the enlistment of new levies advisable. the movements of the troops in france momentarily threatened a surprise, and the commotions within the provinces demanded, more than ever, the utmost vigilance on the part of the government. hitherto, they said, the german protestants had looked idly on during the struggles of their brethren in the faith; but will they continue to do so, especially when we are lending our aid to strengthen their enemy? by thus acting shall we not rouse their vengeance against us, and call their arms into the northern netherlands? nearly the whole council of state joined in this opinion; their representations were energetic and not to be gainsaid. the regent herself, as well as the minister, could not but feel their truth, and their own interests appeared to forbid obedience to the royal mandate. would it not be impolitic to withdraw from the inquisition its sole prop by removing the larger portion of the army, and in a rebellious country to leave themselves without defence, dependent on the arbitrary will of an arrogant aristocracy? while the regent, divided between the royal commands, the urgent importunity of her council, and her own fears, could not venture to come to a decision, william of orange rose and proposed the assembling of the states general. but nothing could have inflicted a more fatal blow on the supremacy of the crown than by yielding to this advice to put the nation in mind of its power and its rights. no measure could be more hazardous at the present moment. the danger which was thus gathering over the minister did not escape him; a sign from him warned the regent to break off the consultation and adjourn the council. "the government," he writes to madrid, "can do nothing more injurious to itself than to consent to the assembling of the states. such a step is at all times perilous, because it tempts the nation to test and restrict the rights of the crown; but it is many times more objectionable at the present moment, when the spirit of rebellion is already widely spread amongst us; when the abbots, exasperated at the loss of their income, will neglect nothing to impair the dignity of the bishops; when the whole nobility and all the deputies from the towns are led by the arts of the prince of orange, and the disaffected can securely reckon on the assistance of the nation." this representation, which at least was not wanting in sound sense, did not fail in having the desired effect on the king's mind. the assembling of the states was rejected once and forever, the penal statutes against the heretics were renewed in all their rigor, and the regent was directed to hasten the despatch of the required auxiliaries. but to this the council of state would not consent. all that she obtained was, instead of the troops, a supply of money for the queen mother, which at this crisis was still more welcome to her. in place, however, of assembling the states, and in order to beguile the nation with, at least, the semblance of republican freedom, the regent summoned the governors of the provinces and the knights of the golden fleece to a special congress at brussels, to consult on the present dangers and necessities of the state. when the president, viglius, had laid before them the matters on which they were summoned to deliberate, three days were given to them for consideration. during this time the prince of orange assembled them in his palace, where he represented to them the necessity of coming to some unanimous resolution before the next sitting, and of agreeing on the measures which ought to be followed in the present dangerous state of affairs. the majority assented to the propriety of this course; only barlaimont, with a few of the dependents of the cardinal, had the courage to plead for the interests of the crown and of the minister. "it did not behoove them," he said, "to interfere in the concerns of the government, and this previous agreement of votes was an illegal and culpable assumption, in the guilt of which he would not participate;"--a declaration which broke up the meeting without any conclusion being come to. the regent, apprised of it by the count barlaimont, artfully contrived to keep the knights so well employed during their stay in the town that they could find no time for coming to any further secret understanding; in this session, however, it was arranged, with their concurrence, that florence of montmorency, lord of montigny, should make a journey to spain, in order to acquaint the king with the present posture of affairs. but the regent sent before him another messenger to madrid, who previously informed the king of all that had been debated between the prince of orange and the knights at the secret conference. the flemish ambassador was flattered in madrid with empty protestations of the king's favor and paternal sentiments towards the netherlands, while the regent was commanded to thwart, to the utmost of her power, the secret combinations of the nobility, and, if possible, to sow discord among their most eminent members. jealousy, private interest, and religious differences had long divided many of the nobles; their share in the common neglect and contempt with which they were treated, and a general hatred of the minister had again united them. so long as count egmont and the prince of orange were suitors for the regency it could not fail but that at times their competing claims should have brought them into collision. both had met each other on the road to glory and before the throne; both again met in the republic, where they strove for the same prize, the favor of their fellow-citizens. such opposite characters soon became estranged, but the powerful sympathy of necessity as quickly reconciled them. each was now indispensable to the other, and the emergency united these two men together with a bond which their hearts would never have furnished. but it was on this very uncongeniality of disposition that the regent based her plans; if she could fortunately succeed in separating them she would at the same time divide the whole flemish nobility into two parties. through the presents and small attentions by which she exclusively honored these two she also sought to excite against them the envy and distrust of the rest, and by appearing to give count egmont a preference over the prince of orange she hoped to make the latter suspicious of egmont's good faith. it happened that at this very time she was obliged to send an extraordinary ambassador to frankfort, to be present at the election of a roman emperor. she chose for this office the duke of arschot, the avowed enemy of the prince, in order in some degree to show in his case how splendid was the reward which hatred against the latter might look for. the orange faction, however, instead of suffering any diminution, had gained an important accession in count horn, who, as admiral of the flemish marine, had convoyed the king to biscay, and now again took his seat in the council of state. horn's restless and republican spirit readily met the daring schemes of orange and egmont, and a dangerous triumvirate was soon formed by these three friends, which shook the royal power in the netherlands, but which terminated very differently for each of its members. ( .) meanwhile montigny had returned from his embassy, and brought back to the council of state the most gracious assurance of the monarch. but the prince of orange had, through his own secret channels of intelligence, received more credible information from madrid, which entirely contradicted this report. by these means be learnt all the ill services which granvella had done him and his friends with the king, and the odious appellations which were there applied to the flemish nobility. there was no help for them so long as the minister retained the helm of government, and to procure his dismissal was the scheme, however rash and adventurous it appeared, which wholly occupied the mind of the prince. it was agreed between him and counts horn and egmont to despatch a joint letter to the king, and, in the name of the whole nobility, formally to accuse the minister, and press energetically for his removal. the duke of arschot, to whom this proposition was communicated by count egmont, refused to concur in it, haughtily declaring that he was not disposed to receive laws from egmont and orange; that he had no cause of complaint against granvella, and that he thought it very presumptuous to prescribe to the king what ministers he ought to employ. orange received a similar answer from the count of aremberg. either the seeds of distrust which the regent had scattered amongst the nobility had already taken root, or the fear of the minister's power outweighed the abhorrence of his measures; at any rate, the whole nobility shrunk back timidly and irresolutely from the proposal. this disappointment did not, however, discourage them. the letter was written and subscribed by all three ( ). in it granvella was represented as the prime cause of all the disorders in the netherlands. so long as the highest power should be entrusted to him it would, they declared, be impossible for them to serve the nation and king effectually; on the other hand, all would revert to its former tranquillity, all opposition be discontinued, and the government regain the affections of the people as soon as his majesty should be pleased to remove this man from the helm of the state. in that case, they added, neither exertion nor zeal would be wanting on their part to maintain in these countries the dignity of the king and the purity of the faith, which was no less sacred to them than to the cardinal, granvella. secretly as this letter was prepared still the duchess was informed of it in sufficient time to anticipate it by another despatch, and to counteract the effect which it might have had on the king's mind. some months passed ere an answer came from madrid. it was mild, but vague. "the king," such was its import, "was not used to condemn his ministers unheard on the mere accusations of their enemies. common justice alone required that the accusers of the cardinal should descend from general imputations to special proofs, and if they were not inclined to do this in writing, one of them might come to spain, where he should be treated with all respect." besides this letter, which was equally directed to all three, count egmont further received an autograph letter from the king, wherein his majesty expressed a wish to learn from him in particular what in the common letter had been only generally touched upon. the regent, also, was specially instructed how she was to answer the three collectively, and the count singly. the king knew his man. he felt it was easy to manage count egmont alone; for this reason he sought to entice him to madrid, where he would be removed from the commanding guidance of a higher intellect. in distinguishing him above his two friends by so flattering a mark of his confidence, he made a difference in the relation in which they severally stood to the throne; how could they, then, unite with equal zeal for the same object when the inducements were no longer the same? this time, indeed, the vigilance of orange frustrated the scheme; but the sequel of the history will show that the seed which was now scattered was not altogether lost. ( .) the king's answer gave no satisfaction to the three confederates; they boldly determined to venture a second attempt. "it had," they wrote, "surprised them not a little, that his majesty had thought their representations so unworthy of attention. it was not as accusers of the minister, but as counsellors of his majesty, whose duty it was to inform their master of the condition of his states, that they had despatched that letter to him. they sought not the ruin of the minister, indeed it would gratify them to see him contented and happy in any other part of the world than here in the netherlands. they were, however, fully persuaded of this, that his continued presence there was absolutely incompatible with the general tranquillity. the present dangerous condition of their native country would allow none of them to leave it, much less to take so long a journey as to spain on granvella's account. if, therefore, his majesty did not please to comply with their written request, they hoped to be excused for the future from attendance in the senate, where they were only exposed to the mortification of meeting the minister, and where they could be of no service either to the king or the state, but only appeared contemptible in their own sight. in conclusion, they begged his majesty would not take ill the plain simplicity of their languge, since persons of their character set more value on acting well than on speaking finely." to the same purport was a separate letter from count egmont, in which he returned thanks for the royal autograph. this second address was followed by an answer to the effect that "their representations should be taken into consideration, meanwhile they were requested to attend the council of state as heretofore." it was evident that the monarch was far from intending to grant their request; they, therefore, from this tune forth absented themselves from the state council, and even left brussels. not having succeeded in removing the minister by lawful means they sought to accomplish this end by a new mode from which more might be expected. on every occasion they and their adherents openly showed the contempt which they felt for him, and contrived to throw ridicule on everything he undertook. by this contemptuous treatment they hoped to harass the haughty spirit of the priest, and to obtain through his mortified self-love what they had failed in by other means. in this, indeed, they did not succeed; but the expedient on which they had fallen led in the end to the ruin of the minister. the popular voice was raised more loudly against him so soon as it was perceived that be had forfeited the good opinion of the nobles, and that men whose sentiments they had been used blindly to echo preceded them in detestation of him. the contemptuous manner in which the nobility now treated him devoted him in a measure to the general scorn and emboldened calumny which never spares even what is holiest and purest, to lay its sacrilegious hand on his honor. the new constitution of the church, which was the great grievance of the nation, had been the basis of his fortunes. this was a crime that could not be forgiven. every fresh execution--and with such spectacles the activity of the inquisitors was only too liberal--kept alive and furnished dreadful exercise to the bitter animosity against him, and at last custom and usage inscribed his name on every act of oppression. a stranger in a land into which he had been introduced against its will; alone among millions of enemies; uncertain of all his tools; supported only by the weak arm of distant royalty; maintaining his intercourse with the nation, which he had to gain, only by means of faithless instruments, all of whom made it their highest object to falsify his actions and misrepresent his motives; lastly, with a woman for his coadjutor who could not share with him the burden of the general execration--thus he stood exposed to the wantonness, the ingratitude, the faction, the envy, and all the evil passions of a licentious, insubordinate people. it is worthy of remark that the hatred which he had incurred far outran the demerits which could be laid to his charge; that it was difficult, nay impossible, for his accusers to substantiate by proof the general condemnation which fell upon him from all sides. before and after him fanaticism dragged its victims to the altar; before and after him civil blood flowed, the rights of men were made a mock of, and men themselves rendered wretched. under charles v. tyranny ought to have pained more acutely through its novelty; under the duke of alva it was carried to far more unnatural lengths, insomuch that granvella's administration, in comparison with that of his successor, was even merciful; and yet we do not find that his contemporaries ever evinced the same degree of personal exasperation and spite against the latter in which they indulged against his predecessor. to cloak the meanness of his birth in the splendor of high dignities, and by an exalted station to place him if possible above the malice of his enemies, the regent had made interest at rome to procure for him the cardinal's hat; but this very honor, which connected him more closely with the papal court, made him so much the more an alien in the provinces. the purple was a new crime in brussels, and an obnoxious, detested garb, which in a measure publicly held forth to view the principles on which his future conduct would be governed. neither his honorable rank, which alone often consecrates the most infamous caitiff, nor his talents, which commanded esteem, nor even his terrible omnipotence, which daily revealed itself in so many bloody manifestations, could screen him from derision. terror and scorn, the fearful and the ludicruous, were in his instance unnaturally blended. [the nobility, at the suggestion of count egmont, caused their servants to wear a common livery, on which was embroidered a fool's cap. all brussels interpreted it for the cardinal's hat, and every appearance of such a servant renewed their laughter; this badge of a fool's cap, which was offensive to the court, was subsequently changed into a bundle of arrows--an accidental jest which took a very serious end, and probably was the origin of the arms of the republic. vit. vigl. t. ii. thuan. . the respect for the cardinal sunk at last so low that a caricature was publicly placed in his own hand, in which he was represented seated on a heap of eggs, out of which bishops were crawling. over him hovered a devil with the inscription--"this is my son, hear ye him!"] odious rumors branded his honor; murderous attempts on the lives of egmont and orange were ascribed to him; the most incredible things found credence; the most monstrous, if they referred to him or were said to emanate from him, surprised no longer. the nation had already become uncivilized to that degree where the most contradictory sentiments prevail side by side, and the finer boundary lines of decorum and moral feeling are erased. this belief in extraordinary crimes is almost invariably their immediate precursor. but with this gloomy prospect the strange destiny of this man opens at the same time a grander view, which impresses the unprejudiced observer with pleasure and admiration. here he beholds a nation dazzled by no splendor, and restrained by no fear, firmly, inexorably, and unpremeditatedly unanimous in punishing the crime which had been committed against its dignity by the violent introduction of a stranger into the heart of its political constitution. we see him ever aloof and ever isolated, like a foreign hostile body hovering over a surface which repels its contact. the strong hand itself of the monarch, who was. his friend and protector, could not support him against the antipathies of the nation which had once resolved to withhold from him all its sympathy. the voice of national hatred was all powerful, and was ready to forego even private interest, its certain gains; his alms even were shunned, like the fruit of an accursed tree. like pestilential vapor, the infamy of universal reprobation hung over him. in his case gratitude believed itself absolved from its duties; his adherents shunned him; his friends were dumb in his behalf. so terribly did the people avenge the insulted majesty of their nobles and their nation on the greatest monarch of the earth. history has repeated this memorable example only once, in cardinal mazarin; but the instance differed according to the spirit of the two periods and nations. the highest power could not protect either from derision; but if france found vent for its indignation in laughing at its pantaloon, the netherlands hurried from scorn to rebellion. the former, after a long bondage under the vigorous administration of richelieu, saw itself placed suddenly in unwonted liberty; the latter had passed from ancient hereditary freedom into strange and unusual servitude; it was as natural that the fronde should end again in subjection as that the belgian troubles should issue in republican independence. the revolt of the parisians was the offspring of poverty; unbridled, but not bold, arrogant, but without energy, base and plebeian, like the source from which it sprang. the murmur of the netherlands was the proud and powerful voice of wealth. licentiousness and hunger inspired the former; revenge, life, property, and religion were the animating motives of the latter. rapacity was mazarin's spring of action; granvella's lust of power. the former was humane and mild; the latter harsh, imperious, cruel. the french minister sought in the favor of his queen an asylum from the hatred of the magnates and the fury of the people; the netherlandish minister provoked the hatred of a whole nation in order to please one man. against mazarin were only a few factions and the mob they could arm; an entire and united nation against granvella. under the former parliament attempted to obtain, by stealth, a power which did not belong to them; under the latter it struggled for a lawful authority which he insidiously had endeavored to wrest from them. the former had to contend with the princes of the blood and the peers of the realm, as the latter had with the native nobility and the states, but instead of endeavoring, like the former, to overthrow the common enemy, in the hope of stepping themselves into his place, the latter wished to destroy the place itself, and to divide a power which no single man ought to possess entire. while these feelings were spreading among the people the influence of the minister at the court of the regent began to totter. the repeated complaints against the extent of his power must at last have made her sensible how little faith was placed in her own; perhaps, too, she began to fear that the universal abhorrence which attached to him would soon include herself also, or that his longer stay would inevitably provoke the menaced revolt. long intercourse with him, his instruction and example, had qualified her to govern without him. his dignity began to be more oppressive to her as he became less necessary, and his faults, to which her friendship had hitherto lent a veil, became visible as it was withdrawn. she was now as much disposed to search out and enumerate these faults as she formerly had been to conceal them. in this unfavorable state of her feelings towards the cardinal the urgent and accumulated representations of the nobles began at last to find access to her mind, and the more easily, as they contrived to mix up her own fears with their own. "it was matter of great astonishment," said count egmont to her, "that to gratify a man who was not even a fleming, and of whom, therefore, it must be well known that his happiness could not be dependent on the prosperity of this country, the king could be content to see all his netherlandish subjects suffer, and this to please a foreigner, who if his birth made him a subject of the emperor, the purple had made a creature of the court of rome." "to the king alone," added the count, "was granvella indebted for his being still among the living; for the future, however, he would leave that care of him to the regent, and he hereby gave her warning." as the majority of the nobles, disgusted with the contemptuous treatment which they met with in the council of state, gradually withdrew from it, the arbitrary proceedings of the minister lost the last semblance of republican deliberation which had hitherto softened the odious aspect, and the empty desolation of the council chamber made his domineering rule appear in all its obnoxiousness. the regent now felt that she had a master over her, and from that moment the banishment of the minister was decided upon. with this object she despatched her private secretary, thomas armenteros, to spain, to acquaint the king with the circumstances in which the cardinal was placed, to apprise him of the intimations she had received of the intentions of the nobles, and in this manner to cause the resolution for his recall to appear to emanate from the king himself. what she did not like to trust to a letter armenteros was ordered ingeniously to interweave in the oral communication which the king would probably require from him. armenteros fulfilled his commission with all the ability of a consummate courtier; but an audience of four hours could not overthrow the work of many years, nor destroy in philip's mind his opinion of his minister, which was there unalterably established. long did the monarch hold counsel with his policy and his interest, until granvella himself came to the aid of his wavering resolution and voluntarily solicited a dismissal, which, he feared, could not much longer be deferred. what the detestation of all the netherlands could not effect the contemptuous treatment of the nobility accomplished; he was at last weary of a power which was no longer feared, and exposed him less to envy than to infamy. perhaps as some have believed he trembled for his life, which was certainly in more than imaginary danger; perhaps he wished to receive his dismissal from the king under the shape of a boon rather than of a sentence, and after the example of the romans meet with dignity a fate which he could no longer avoid. philip too, it would appear, preferred generously to accord to the nation a request rather than to yield at a later period to a demand, and hoped at least to merit their thanks by voluntarily conceding now what necessity would ere long extort. his fears prevailed over his obstinacy, and prudence overcame pride. granvella doubted not for a moment what the decision of the king would be. a few days after the return of armenteros he saw humility and flattery disappear from the few faces which had till then servilely smiled upon him; the last small crowd of base flatterers and eyeservants vanished from around his person; his threshold was forsaken; he perceived that the fructifying warmth of royal favor had left him. detraction, which had assailed him during his whole administration, did not spare him even in the moment of resignation. people did not scruple to assert that a short time before he laid down his office he had expressed a wish to be reconciled to the prince of orange and count egmont, and even offered, if their forgiveness could be hoped for on no other terms, to ask pardon of them on his knees. it was base and contemptible to sully the memory of a great and extraordinary man with such a charge, but it is still more so to hand it down uncontradicted to posterity. granvella submitted to the royal command with a dignified composure. already had he written, a few months previously, to the duke of alva in spain, to prepare him a place of refuge in madrid, in case of his having to quit the netherlands. the latter long bethought himself whether it was advisable to bring thither so dangerous a rival for the favor of his king, or to deny so important a friend such a valuable means of indulging his old hatred of the flemish nobles. revenge prevailed over fear, and he strenuously supported granvella's request with the monarch. but his intercession was fruitless. armenteros had persuaded the king that the minister's residence in madrid would only revive, with increased violence, all the complaints of the belgian nation, to which his ministry had been sacrificed; for then, he said, he would be suspected of poisoning the very source of that power, whose outlets only he had hitherto been charged with corrupting. he therefore sent him to burgundy, his native place, for which a decent pretext fortunately presented itself. the cardinal gave to his departure from brussels the appearance of an unimportant journey, from which he would return in a few days. at the same time, however, all the state counsellors, who, under his administration, had voluntarily excluded themselves from its sittings, received a command from the court to resume their seats in the senate at brussels. although the latter circumstance made his return not very credible, nevertheless the remotest possibility of it sobered the triumph which celebrated his departure. the regent herself appears to have been undecided what to think about the report; for, in a fresh letter to the king, she repeated all the representations and arguments which ought to restrain him from restoring this minister. granvella himself, in his correspondence with barlaimont and viglius, endeavored to keep alive this rumor, and at least to alarm with fears, however unsubstantial, the enemies whom he could no longer punish by his presence. indeed, the dread of the influence of this extraordinary man was so exceedingly great that, to appease it, he was at last driven even from his home and his country. after the death of pius iv., granvella went to rome, to be present at the election of a new pope, and at the same time to discharge some commissions of his master, whose confidence in him remained unshaken. soon after, philip made him viceroy of naples, where he succumbed to the seductions of the climate, and the spirit which no vicissitudes could bend voluptuousness overcame. he was sixty-two years old when the king allowed him to revisit spain, where he continued with unlimited powers to administer the affairs of italy. a gloomy old age, and the self- satisfied pride of a sexagenarian administration made him a harsh and rigid judge of the opinions of others, a slave of custom, and a tedious panegyrist of past times. but the policy of the closing century had ceased to be the policy of the opening one. a new and younger ministry were soon weary of so imperious a superintendent, and philip himself began to shun the aged counsellor, who found nothing worthy of praise but the deeds of his father. nevertheless, when the conquest of portugal called philip to lisbon, he confided to the cardinal the care of his spanish territories. finally, on an italian tour, in the town of mantua, in the seventy-third year of his life, granvella terminated his long existence in the full enjoyment of his glory, and after possessing for forty years the uninterrupted confidence of his king. ( .) immediately upon the departure of the minister, all the happy results which were promised from his withdrawal were fulfilled. the disaffected nobles resumed their seats in the council, and again devoted themselves to the affairs of the state with redoubled zeal, in order to give no room for regret for him whom they had driven away, and to prove, by the fortunate administration of the state, that his services were not indispensable. the crowd round the duchess was great. all vied with one another in readiness, in submission, and zeal in her service; the hours of night were not allowed to stop the transaction of pressing business of state; the greatest unanimity existed between the three councils, the best understanding between the court and the states. from the obliging temper of the flemish nobility everything was to be had, as soon as their pride and self-will was flattered by confidence and obliging treatment. the regent took advantage of the first joy of the nation to beguile them into a vote of certain taxes, which, under the preceding administration, she could not have hoped to extort. in this, the great credit of the nobility etfectually supported her, and she soon learned from this nation the secret, which had been so often verified in the german diet--that much must be demanded in order to get a little. with pleasure did the regent see herself emancipated from her long thraldom; the emulous industry of the nobility lightened for her the burden of business, and their insinuating humility allowed her to feel the full sweetness of power. ( ). granvella had been overthrown, but his party still remained. his policy lived in his creatures, whom he left behind him in the privy council and in the chamber of finance. hatred still smouldered amongst the factious long after the leader was banished, and the names of the orange and royalist parties, of the patriots and cardinalists still continued to divide the senate and to keep up the flames of discord. viglius van zuichem van aytta, president of the privy council, state counsellor and keeper of the seal, was now looked upon as the most important person in the senate, and the most powerful prop of the crown and the tiara. this highly meritorious old man, whom we have to thank for some valuable contributions towards the history of the rebellion of the low countries, and whose confidential correspondence with his friends has generally been the guide of our narrative, was one of the greatest lawyers of his time, as well as a theologian and priest, and had already, under the emperor, filled the most important offices. familiar intercourse with the learned men who adorned the age, and at the head of whom stood erasmus of rotterdam, combined with frequent travels in the imperial service, had extended the sphere of his information and experience, and in many points raised him in his principles and opinions above his contemporaries. the fame of his erudition filled the whole century in which he lived, and has handed his name down to posterity. when, in the year , the connection of the netherlands with the german empire was to be settled at the diet of augsburg, charles v. sent hither this statesman to manage the interests of the provinces; and his ability principally succeeded in turning the negotiations to the advantage of the netherlands. after the death of the emperor, viglius was one of the many eminent ministers bequeathed to philip by his father, and one of the few in whom be honored his memory. the fortune of the minister, granvella, with whom he was united by the ties of an early acquaintance, raised him likewise to greatness; but he did not share the fall of his patron, because he had not participated in his lust of power; nor, consequently, the hatred which attached to him. a residence of twenty years in the provinces, where the most important affairs were entrusted to him, approved loyalty to his king, and zealous attachment to the roman catholic tenets, made him one of the most distinguished instruments of royalty in the netherlands. viglius was a man of learning, but no thinker; an experienced statesman, but without an enlightened mind; of an intellect not sufficiently powerful to break, like his friend erasmus, the fetters of error, yet not sufficiently bad to employ it, like his predecessor, granvella, in the service of his own passions. too weak and timid to follow boldly the guidance of his reason, he preferred trusting to the more convenient path of conscience; a thing was just so soon as it became his duty; he belonged to those honest men who are indispensable to bad ones; fraud reckoned on his honesty. half a century later he would have received his immortality from the freedom which he now helped to subvert. in the privy council at brussels he was the servant of tyranny; in the parliament in london, or in the senate at amsterdam, he would have died, perhaps, like thomas more or olden barneveldt. in the count barlaimont, the president of the council of finance, the opposition had a no less formidable antagonist than in viglius. historians have transmitted but little information regarding the services and the opinions of this man. in the first part of his career the dazzling greatness of cardinal granvella seems to have cast a shade over him; after the latter had disappeared from the stage the superiority of the opposite party kept him down, but still the little that we do find respecting him throws a favorable light over his character. more than once the prince of orange exerted himself to detach him from the interests of the cardinal, and to join him to his own party--sufficient proof that he placed a value on the prize. all his efforts failed, which shows that he had to do with no vacillating character. more than once we see him alone, of all the members of the council, stepping forward to oppose the dominant faction, and protecting against universal opposition the interests of the crown, which were in momentary peril of being sacrificed. when the prince of orange had assembled the knights of the golden fleece in his own palace, with a view to induce them to come to a preparatory resolution for the abolition of the inquisition, barlaimont was the first to denounce the illegality of this proceeding and to inform the regent of it. some time after the prince asked him if the regent knew of that assembly, and barlaitnont hesitated not a moment to avow to him the truth. all the steps which have been ascribed to him bespeak a man whom neither influence nor fear could tempt, who, with a firm courage and indomitable constancy, remained faithful to the party which he had once chosen, but who, it must at the same time be confessed, entertained too proud and too despotic notions to have selected any other. amongst the adherents of the royal party at brussels, we have, further, the names of the duke of arschot, the counts of mansfeld, megen, and aremberg--all three native netherlanders; and therefore, as it appeared, bound equally with the whole netherlandish nobility to oppose the hierarchy and the royal power in their native country. so much the more surprised must we feel at their contrary behavior, and which is indeed the more remarkable, since we find them on terms of friendship with the most eminent members of the faction, and anything but insensible to the common grievances of their country. but they had not self-confidence or heroism enough to venture on an unequal contest with so superior an antagonist. with a cowardly prudence they made their just discontent submit to the stern law of necessity, and imposed a hard sacrifice on their pride because their pampered vanity was capable of nothing better. too thrifty and too discreet to wish to extort from the justice or the fear of their sovereign the certain good which they already possessed from his voluntary generosity, or to resign a real happiness in order to preserve the shadow of another, they rather employed the propitious moment to drive a traffic with their constancy, which, from the general defection of the nobility, had now risen in value. caring little for true glory, they allowed their ambition to decide which party they should take; for the ambition of base minds prefers to bow beneath the hard yoke of compulsion rather than submit to the gentle sway of a superior intellect. small would have been the value of the favor conferred had they bestowed themselves on the prince of orange; but their connection with royalty made them so much the more formidable as opponents. there their names would have been lost among his numerous adherents and in the splendor of their rival. on the almost deserted side of the court their insignificant merit acquired lustre. the families of nassau and croi (to the latter belonged the duke of arschot) had for several reigns been competitors for influence and honor, and their rivalry had kept up an old feud between their families, which religious differences finally made irreconcilable. the house of croi from time immemorial had been renowned for its devout and strict observance of papistic rites and ceremonies; the counts of nassau had gone over to the new sect--sufficient reasons why philip of croi, duke of arschot, should prefer a party which placed him the most decidedly in opposition to the prince of orange. the court did not fail to take advantage of this private feud, and to oppose so important an enemy to the increasing influence of the house of nassau in the republic. the counts mansfeld and megen had till lately been the confidential friends of count egmont. in common with him they had raised their voice against the minister, had joined him in resisting the inquisition and the edicts, and had hitherto held with him as far as honor and duty would permit. but at these limits the three friends now separated. egmont's unsuspecting virtue incessantly hurried him forwards on the road to ruin; mansfeld and megen, admonished of the danger, began in good time to think of a safe retreat. there still exist letters which were interchanged between the counts egmont and mansfeld, and which, although written at a later period, give us a true picture of their former friendship. "if," replied count mansfeld to his friend, who in an amicable manner had reproved him for his defection to the king, "if formerly i was of opinion that the general good made the abolition of the inquisition, the mitigation of the edicts, and the removal of the cardinal granvella necessary, the king has now acquiesced in this wish and removed the cause of complaint. we have already done too much against the majesty of the sovereign and the authority of the church; it is high time for us to turn, if we would wish to meet the king, when he comes, with open brow and without anxiety. as regards my own person, i do not dread his vengeance; with confident courage i would at his first summons present myself in spain, and boldly abide my sentence from his justice and goodness. i do not say this as if i doubted whether count egrnont can assert the same, but he will act prudently in looking more to his own safety, and in removing suspicion from his actions. if i hear," he says, in conclusion, "that he has allowed my admonitions to have their due weight, our friendship continues; if not, i feel myself in that case strong enough to sacrifice all human ties to my duty and to honor." the enlarged power of the nobility exposed the republic to almost a greater evil than that which it had just escaped by the removal of the minister. impoverished by long habits of luxury, which at the same time had relaxed their morals, and to which they were now too much addicted to be able to renounce them, they yielded to the perilous opportunity of indulging their ruling inclination, and of again repairing the expiring lustre of their fortunes. extravagance brought on the thirst for gain, and this introduced bribery. secular and ecclesiastical offices were publicly put up to sale; posts of honor, privileges, and patents were sold to the highest bidder; even justice was made a trade. whom the privy council had condemned was acquitted by the council of state, and what the former refused to grant was to be purchased from the latter. the council of state, indeed, subsequently retorted the charge on the two other councils, but it forgot that it was its own example that corrupted them. the shrewdness of rapacity opened new sources of gain. life, liberty, and religion were insured for a certain sum, like landed estates; for gold, murderers and malefactors were free, and the nation was plundered by a lottery. the servants and creatures of the state, counsellors and governors of provinces, were, without regard to rank or merit, pushed into the most important posts; whoever had a petition to present at court had to make his way through the governors of provinces and their inferior servants. no artifice of seduction was spared to implicate in these excesses the private secretary of the duchess, thomas armenteros, a man up to this time of irreproachable character. by pretended professions of attachment and friendship a successful attempt was made to gain his confidence, and by luxurious entertainments to undermine his principles; the seductive example infected his morals, and new wants overcame his hitherto incorruptible integrity. he was now blind to abuses in which he was an accomplice, and drew a veil over the crimes of others in order at the same time to cloak his own. with his knowledge the royal exchequer was robbed, and the objects of the government were defeated through a corrupt administration of its revenues. meanwhile the regent wandered on in a fond dream of power and activity, which the flattery of the nobles artfully knew how to foster. the ambition of the factious played with the foibles of a woman, and with empty signs and an humble show of submission purchased real power from her. she soon belonged entirely to the faction, and had imperceptibly changed her principles. diametrically opposing all her former proceedings, even in direct violation of her duty, she now brought before the council of state, which was swayed by the faction, not only questions which belonged to the other councils, but also the suggestions which viglius had made to her in private, in the same way as formerly, under granvella's administration, she had improperly neglected to consult it at all. nearly all business and all influence were now diverted to the governors of provinces. all petitions were directed to them, by them all lucrative appointments were bestowed. their usurpations were indeed carried so far that law proceedings were withdrawn from the municipal authorities of the towns and brought before their own tribunals. the respectability of the provincial courts decreased as theirs extended, and with the respectability of the municipal functionaries the administration of justice and civil order declined. the smaller courts soon followed the example of the government of the country. the spirit which ruled the council of state at brussels soon diffused itself through the provinces. bribery, indulgences, robbery, venality of justice, were universal in the courts of judicature of the country; morals degenerated, and the new sects availed themselves of this all-pervading licentiousness to propagate their opinions. the religious indifference or toleration of the nobles, who, either themselves inclined to the side of the innovators, or, at least, detested the inquisition as an instrument of despotism, had mitigated the rigor of the religious edicts, and through the letters of indemnity, which were bestowed on many protestants, the holy office was deprived of its best victims. in no way could the nobility more agreeably announce to the nation its present share in the government of the country than by sacrificing to it the hated tribunal of the inquisition--and to this inclination impelled them still more than the dictates of policy. the nation passed in a moment from the most oppressive constraint of intolerance into a state of freedom, to which, however, it had already become too unaccustomed to support it with moderation. the inquisitors, deprived of the support of the municipal authorities, found themselves an object of derision rather than of fear. in bruges the town council caused even some of their own servants to be placed in confinement, and kept on bread and water, for attempting to lay hands upon a supposed heretic. about this very time the mob in antwerp, having made a futile, attempt to rescue a person charged with heresy from the holy office, there was placarded in the public market- place an inscription, written in blood, to the effect that a number of persons had bound themselves by oath to avenge the death of that innocent person. from the corruption which pervaded the whole council of state, the privy council, and the chamber of finance, in which viglius and barlaimont were presidents, had as yet, for the most part, kept themselves pure. as the faction could not succeed in insinuating their adherents into those two councils the only course open to them was, if possible, to render both inefficient, and to transfer their business to the council of state. to carry out this design the prince of orange sought to secure the co-operation of the other state counsellors. "they were called, indeed, senators," he frequently declared to his adherents, "but others possessed the power. if gold was wanted to pay the troops, or when the question was how the spreading heresy was to be repressed, or the people kept in order, then they were consulted; although in fact they were the guardians neither of the treasury nor of the laws, but only the organs through which the other two councils operated on the state. and yet alone they were equal to the whole administration of the country, which had been uselessly portioned out amongst three separate chambers. if they would among themselves only agree to reunite to the council of state these two important branches of government, which had been dissevered from it, one soul might animate the whole body." a plan was preliminarily and secretly agreed on, in accordance with which twelve new knights of the fleece were to be added to the council of state, the administration of justice restored to the tribunal at malines, to which it originally belonged, the granting of letters of grace, patents, and so forth, assigned to the president, viglius, while the management of the finances should be committed to it. all the difficulties, indeed, which the distrust of the court and its jealousy of the increasing power of the nobility would oppose to this innovation were foreseen and provided against. in order to constrain the regent's assent, some of the principal officers of the army were put forward as a cloak, who were to annoy the court at brussels with boisterous demands for their arrears of pay, and in case of refusal to threaten a rebellion. it was also contrived to have the regent assailed with numerous petitions and memorials complaining of the delays of justice, and exaggerating the danger which was to be apprehended from the daily growth of heresy. nothing was omitted to darken the picture of the disorganized state of society, of the abuse of justice, and of the deficiency in the finances, which was made so alarming that she awoke with terror from the delusion of prosperity in which she had hitherto cradled herself. she called the three councils together to consult them on the means by which these disorders were to be remedied. the majority was in favor of sending an extraordinary ambassador to spain, who by a circumstantial and vivid delineation should make the king acquainted with the true position of affairs, and if possible prevail on him to adopt efficient measures of reform. this proposition was opposed by viglius, who, however, had not the slighest suspicion of the secret designs of the faction. "the evil complained of," he said, "is undoubtedly great, and one which can no longer be neglected with impunity, but it is not irremediable by ourselves. the administration of justice is certainly crippled, but the blame of this lies with the nobles themselves; by their contemptuous treatment they have thrown discredit on the municipal authorities, who, moreover, are very inadequately supported by the governors of provinces. if heresy is on the increase it is because the secular arm has deserted the spiritual judges, and because the lower orders, following the example of the nobles, have thrown off all respect for those in authority. the provinces are undoubtedly oppressed by a heavy debt, but it has not been accumulated, as alleged, by any malversation of the revenues, but by the expenses of former wars and the king's present exigences; still wise and prudent measures of finance might in a short time remove the burden. if the council of state would not be so profuse of its indulgences, its charters of immunity, and its exemptions; if it would commence the reformation of morals with itself, show greater respect to the laws, and do what lies in its power to restore to the municipal functionaries their former consideration; in short, if the councils and the governors of provinces would only fulfil their own duties the present grounds of complaint would soon be removed. why, then, send an ambassador to spain, when as yet nothing has occurred to justify so extraordinary an expedient? if, however, the council thinks otherwise, he would not oppose the general voice; only he must make it a condition of his concurrence that the principal instruction of the envoy should be to entreat the king to make them a speedy visit." there was but one voice as to the choice of an envoy. of all the flemish nobles count egmont was the only one whose appointment would give equal satisfaction to both parties. his hatred of the inquisition, his patriotic and liberal sentiments, and the unblemished integrity of his character, gave to the republic sufficient surety for his conduct, while for the reasons already mentioned he could not fail to be welcome to the king. moreover, egmont's personal figure and demeanor were calculated on his first appearance to make that favorable impression which goes co far towards winning the hearts of princes; and his engaging carriage would come to the aid of his eloquence, and enforce his petition with those persuasive arts which are indispensable to the success of even the most trifling suits to royalty. egmont himself, too, wished for the embassy, as it would afford him the opportunity of adjusting, personally, matters with his sovereign. about this time the council, or rather synod, of trent closed its sittings, and published its decrees to the whole of christendom. but these canons, far from accomplishing the object for which the synod was originally convened, and satisfying the expectation of religious parties, had rather widened the breach between them, and made the schism irremediable and eternal. the labors of the synod instead of purifying the romish church from its corruptions had only reduced the latter to greater definiteness and precision, and invested them with the sanction of authority. all the subtilties of its teaching, all the arts and usurpations of the roman see, which had hitherto rested more on arbitrary usage, were now passed into laws and raised into a system. the uses and abuses which during the barbarous times of ignorance and superstition had crept into christianity were now declared essential parts of its worship, and anathemas were denounced upon all who should dare to contradict the dogmas or neglect the observances of the romish communion. all were anathematized who should either presume to doubt the miraculous power of relics, and refuse to honor the bones of martyrs, or should be so bold as to doubt the availing efficacy of the intercession of saints. the power of granting indulgences, the first source of the defection from the see of rome, was now propounded in an irrefragable article of faith; and the principle of monasticism sanctioned by an express decree of the synod, which allowed males to take the vows at sixteen and females at twelve. and while all the opinions of the protestants were, without exception, condemned, no indulgence was shown to their errors or weaknesses, nor a single step taken to win them back by mildness to the bosom of the mother church. amongst the protestants the wearisome records of the subtle deliberations of the synod, and the absurdity of its decisions, increased, if possible, the hearty contempt which they had long entertained for popery, and laid open to their controversialists new and hitherto unnoticed points of attack. it was an ill-judged step to bring the mysteries of the church too close to the glaring torch of reason, and to fight with syllogisms for the tenets of a blind belief. moreover, the decrees of the council of trent were not satisfactory even to all the powers in communion with rome. france rejected them entirely, both because she did not wish to displease the huguenots, and also because she was offended by the supremacy which the pope arrogated to himself over the council; some of the roman catholic princes of germany likewise declared against it. little, however, as philip ii. was pleased with many of its articles, which trenched too closely upon his own rights, for no monarch was ever more jealous of his prerogative; highly as the pope's assumption of control over the council, and its arbitrary, precipitate dissolution had offended him; just as was his indignation at the slight which the pope had put upon his ambassador; he nevertheless acknowedged the decrees of the synod, even in its present form, because it favored his darling object--the extirpation of heresy. political considerations were all postponed to this one religious object, and he commanded the publication and enforcement of its canons throughout his dominions. the spirit of revolt, which was diffused through the belgian provinces, scarcely required this new stimulus. there the minds of men were in a ferment, and the character of the romish church had sunk almost to the lowest point of contempt in the general opinion. under such circumstances the imperious and frequently injudicious decrees of the council could not fail of being highly offensive; but philip ii. could not belie his religious character so far as to allow a different religion to a portion of his subjects, even though they might live on a different soil and under different laws from the rest. the regent was strictly enjoined to exact in the netherlands the same obedience to the decrees of trent which was yielded to them in spain and italy. they met, however, with the warmest opposition in the council of state at brussels. "the nation," william of orange declared, "neither would nor could acknowledge them, since they were, for the most part, opposed to the fundamental principles of their constitution; and, for similar reasons, they had even been rejected by several roman catholic princes." the whole council nearly was on the side of orange; a decided majority were for entreating the king either to recall the decrees entirely or at least to publish them under certain limitations. this proposition was resisted by viglius, who insisted on a strict and literal obedience to the royal commands. "the church," he said, "had in all ages maintained the purity of its doctrines and the strictness of its discipline by means of such general councils. no more efficacious remedy could be opposed to the errors of opinion which had so long distracted their country than these very decrees, the rejection of which is now urged by the council of state. even if they are occasionally at variance with the constitutional rights of the citizens this is an evil which can easily be met by a judicious and temperate application of them. for the rest it redounds to the honor of our sovereign, the king of spain, that he alone, of all the princes of his time, refuses to yield his better judgment to necessity, and will not, for any fear of consequences, reject measures which the welfare of the church demands, and which the happiness of his subjects makes a duty." but the decrees also contained several matters which affected the rights of the crown itself. occasion was therefore taken of this fact to propose that these sections at least should be omitted from the proclimation. by this means the king might, it was argued, be relieved from these obnoxious and degrading articles by a happy expedient; the national liberties of the netherlands might be advanced as the pretext for the omission, and the name of the republic lent to cover this encroachment on the authority of the synod. but the king had caused the decrees to be received and enforced in his other dominions unconditionally; and it was not to be expected that he would give the other roman catholic powers such an example of opposition, and himself undermine the edifice whose foundation he had been so assiduous in laying. count egmont in spain. count egmont was despatched to spain to make a forcible representation to the king on the subject of these decrees; to persuade him, if possible, to adopt a milder policy towards his protestant subjects, and to propose to him the incorporation of the three councils, was the commission he received from the malcontents. by the regent he was charged to apprise the monarch of the refractory spirit of the people; to convince him of the impossibility of enforcing these edicts of religion in their full severity; and lastly to acquaint him with the bad state of the military defences and the exhausted condition of the exchequer. the count's public instructions were drawn up by the president viglius. they contained heavy complaints of the decay of justice, the growth of heresy, and the exhaustion of the treasury. he was also to press urgently a personal visit from the king to the netherlands. the rest was left to the eloquence of the envoy, who received a hint from the regent not to let so fair an opportunity escape of establishing himself in the favor of his sovereign. the terms in which the count's instructions and the representations which he was to make to the king were drawn up appeared to the prince of orange far too vague and general. "the president's statement," he said, "of our grievances comes very far short of the truth. how can the king apply the suitable remedies if we conceal from him the full extent of the evil? let us not represent the numbers of the heretics inferior to what it is in reality. let us candidly acknowledge that they swarm in every province and in every hamlet, however small. neither let us disguise from him the truth that they despise the penal statutes and entertain but little reverence for the government. what good can come of this concealment? let us rather openly avow to the king that the republic cannot long continue in its present condition. the privy council indeed will perhaps pronounce differently, for to them the existing disorders are welcome. for what else is the source of the abuse of justice and the universal corruption of the courts of law but its insatiable rapacity? how otherwise can the pomp and scandalous luxury of its members, whom we have seen rise from the dust, be supported if not by bribery? do not the people daily complain that no other key but gold can open an access to them; and do not even their quarrels prove how little they are swayed by a care for the common weal? are they likely to consult the public good who are the slaves of their private passions? do they think forsooth that we, the governors of the provinces are, with our soldiers, to stand ready at the beck and call of an infamous lictor? let them set bounds to their indulgences and free pardons which they so lavishly bestow on the very persons to whom we think it just and expedient to deny them. no one can remit the punishment of a crime without sinning against the society and contributing to the increase of the general evil. to my mind, and i have no hesitation to avow it, the distribution amongst so many councils of the state secrets and the affairs of government has always appeared highly objectionable. the council of state is sufficient for all the duties of the administration; several patriots have already felt this in silence, and i now openly declare it. it is my decided conviction that the only sufficient remedy for all the evils complained of is to merge the other two chambers in the council of state. this is the point which we must endeavor to obtain from the king, or the present embassy, like all others, will be entirely useless and ineffectual." the prince now laid before the assembled senate the plan which we have already described. viglius, against whom this new proposition was individually and mainly directed, and whose eyes were now suddenly opened, was overcome by the violence of his vexation. the agitation of his feelings was too much for his feeble body, and he was found, on the following morning, paralyzed by apoplexy, and in danger of his life. his place was supplied by jaachim hopper, a member of the privy council at brussels, a man of old-fashioned morals and unblemished integrity, the president's most trusted and worthiest friend. [vita vigl. . the person from whose memoirs i have already drawn so many illustrations of the times of this epoch. his subsequent journey to spain gave rise to the correspondence between him and the president, which is one of the most valuable documents for our history.] to meet the wishes of the orange party he made some additions to the instructions of the ambassador, relating chiefly to the abolition of the inquisition and the incorporation of the three councils, not so much with the consent of the regent as in the absence of her prohibition. upon count egmont taking leave of the president, who had recovered from his attack, the latter requested him to procure in spain permission to resign his appointment. his day, he declared, was past; like the example of his friend and predecessor, granvella, he wished to retire into the quiet of private life, and to anticipate the uncertainty of fortune. his genius warned him of impending storm, by which he could have no desire to be overtaken. count egmont embarked on his journey to spain in january, , and was received there with a kindness and respect which none of his rank had ever before experienced. the nobles of castile, taught by the king's example to conquer their feelings, or rather, true to his policy, seemed to have laid aside their ancient grudge against the flemish nobility, and vied with one another in winning his heart by their affability. all his private matters were immediately settled to his wishes by the king, nay, even his expectations exceeded; and during the whole period of his stay he had ample cause to boast of the hospitality of the monarch. the latter assured him in the strongest terms of his love for his belgian subjects, and held out hopes of his acceding eventually to the general wish, and remitting somewhat of the severity of the religious edicts. at the same time, however, he appointed in madrid a commission of theologians to whom he propounded the question, "is it necessary to grant to the provinces the religious toleration they demand?" as the majority of them were of opinion that the peculiar constitution of the netherlands, and the fear of a rebellion might well excuse a degree of forbearance in their case, the question was repeated more pointedly. "he did not seek to know," he said, "if he might do so, but if he must." when the latter question was answered in the negative, he rose from his seat, and kneeling down before a crucifix prayed in these words: "almighty majesty, suffer me not at any time to fall so low as to consent to reign over those who reject thee!" in perfect accordance with the spirit of this prayer were the measures which he resolved to adopt in the netherlands. on the article of religion this monarch had taken his resolution once forever; urgent necessity might, perhaps, have constrained him temporarily to suspend the execution of the penal statutes, but never, formally, to repeal them entirely, or even to modify them. in vain did egmont represent to him that the public execution of the heretics daily augmented the number of their followers, while the courage and even joy with which they met their death filled the spectators with the deepest admiration, and awakened in them high opinions of a doctrine which could make such heroes of its disciples. this representation was not indeed lost upon the king, but it had a very different effect from what it was intended to produce. in order to prevent these seductive scenes, without, however, compromising the severity of the edicts, he fell upon an expedient, and ordered that in future the executions should take place in private. the answer of the king on the subject of the embassy was given to the count in writing, and addressed to the regent. the king, when he granted him an audience to take leave, did not omit to call him to account for his behavior to granvella, and alluded particularly to the livery invented in derision of the cardinal. egmmont protested that the whole affair had originated in a convivial joke, and nothing was further from their meaning than to derogate in the least from the respect that was due to royalty. "if he knew," he said, "that any individual among them had entertained such disloyal thoughts be himself would challenge him to answer for it with his life." at his departure the monarch made him a present of fifty thousand florins, and engaged, moreover, to furnish a portion for his daughter on her marriage. he also consigned to his care the young farnese of parma, whom, to gratify the regent, his mother, he was sending to brussels. the king's pretended mildness, and his professions of regard for the belgian nation, deceived the open-hearted fleming. happy in the idea of being the bearer of so much felicity to his native country, when in fact it was more remote than ever, he quitted madrid satisfied beyond measure to think of the joy with which the provinces would welcome the message of their good king; but the opening of the royal answer in the council of state at brussels disappointed all these pleasing hopes. "although in regard to the religious edicts," this was its tenor, "his resolve was firm and immovable, and he would rather lose a thousand lives than consent to alter a single letter of it, still, moved by the representations of count egmont, he was, on the other hand, equally determined not to leave any gentle means untried to guard the people against the delusions of heresy, and so to avert from them that punishment which must otherwise infallibly overtake them. as he had now learned from the count that the principal source of the existing errors in the faith was in the moral depravity of the clergy, the bad instruction and the neglected education of the young, he hereby empowered the regent to appoint a special commission of three bishops, and a convenient number of learned theologians, whose business it should be to consult about the necessary reforms, in order that the people might no longer be led astray through scandal, nor plunge into error through ignorance. as, moreover, he had been informed that the public executions of the heretics did but afford them an opportunity of boastfully displaying a foolhardy courage, and of deluding the common herd by an affectation of the glory of martyrdom, the commission was to devise means for putting in force the final sentence of the inquisition with greater privacy, and thereby depriving condemned heretics of the honor of their obduracy." in order, however, to provide against the commission going beyond its prescribed limits philip expressly required that the bishop of ypres, a man whom he could rely on as a determined zealot for the romish faith, should be one of the body. their deliberaations were to be conducted, if possible, in secrecy, while the object publicly assigned to them should be the introduction of the tridentine decrees. for this his motive seems to have been twofold; on the one hand, not to alarm the court of rome by the assembling of a private council; nor, on the other, to afford any encouragement to the spirit of rebellion in the provinces. at its sessions the duchess was to preside, assisted by some of the more loyally disposed of her counsellors, and regularly transmit to philip a written account of its transactions. to meet her most pressing wants he sent her a small supply in money. he also gave her hopes of a visit from himself; first, however, it was necessary that the war with the turks, who were then expected in hostile force before malta, should be terminated. as to the proposed augmentation of the council of state, and its union with the privy council and chamber of finance, it was passed over in perfect silence. the duke of arschot, however, who is already known to us as a zealous royalist, obtained a voice and seat in the latter. viglius, indeed, was allowed to retire from the presidency of the privy council, but he was obliged, nevertheless, to continue to discharge its duties for four more years, because his successor, carl tyssenaque, of the council for netherlandish affairs in madrid, could not sooner be spared. severer religious edicts--universal opposition of the nation. scarcely was egmont returned when severer edicts against heretics, which, as it were, pursued him from spain, contradicted the joyful tidings which he had brought of a happy change in the sentiments of the monarch. they were at the same time accompanied with a transcript of the decrees of trent, as they were acknowledged in spain, and were now to be proclaimed in the netherlands also; with it came likewise the death warrants of some anabaptists and other kinds of heretics. "the count has been beguiled," william the silent was now heard to say, "and deluded by spanish cunning. self-love and vanity have blinded his penetration; for his own advantage he has forgotten the general welfare." the treachery of the spanish ministry was now exposed, and this dishonest proceeding roused the indignation of the noblest in the land. but no one felt it more acutely than count egmont, who now perceived himself to have been the tool of spanish duplicity, and to have become unwittingly the betrayer of his own country. "these specious favors then," he exclaimed, loudly and bitterly, "were nothing but an artifice to expose me to the ridicule of my fellow-citizens, and to destroy my good name. if this is the fashion after which the king purposes to keep the promises which he made to me in spain, let who will take flanders; for my part, i will prove by my retirement from public business that i have no share in this breach of faith." in fact, the spanish ministry could not have adopted a surer method of breaking the credit of so important a man--than by exhibiting him to his fellow citizens, who adored him, as one whom they had succeeded in deluding. meanwhile the commission had been appointed, and had unanimously come to the following decision: "whether for the moral reformation of the clergy, or for the religious instruction of the people, or for the education of youth, such abundant provision had already been made in the decrees of trent that nothing now was requisite but to put these decrees in force as speedily as possible. the imperial edicts against the heretics already ought on no account to be recalled or modified; the courts of justice, however, might be secretly instructed to punish with death none but obstinate heretics or preachers, to make a difference between the different sects, and to show consideration to the age, rank, sex, or disposition of the accused. if it were really the case that public executions did but inflame fanaticism, then, perhaps, the unheroic, less observed, but still equally severe punishment of the galleys, would be well-adapted to bring down all high notions of martyrdom. as to the delinquencies which might have arisen out of mere levity, curiosity, and thoughtlessness it would perhaps be sufficient to punish them by fines, exile, or even corporal chastisement." during these deliberations, which, moreover, it was requisite to submit to the king at madrid, and to wait for the notification of his approval of them, the time passed away unprofitably, the proceedings against the sectaries being either suspended, or at least conducted very supinely. since the recall of granvella the disunion which prevailed in the higher councils, and from thence had extended to the provincial courts of justice, combined with the mild feelings generally of the nobles on the subject of religion, had raised the courage of the sects, and allowed free scope to the proselytizing mania of their apostles. the inquisitors, too, had fallen into contempt in consequence of the secular arm withdrawing its support, and in many places even openly taking their victims under its protection. the roman catholic part of the nation. had formed great expectations from the decrees of the synod of trent, as well as from egmont's embassy to spain; but in the latter case their hopes had scarcely been justified by the joyous tidings which the count had brought back, and, in the integrity of his heart, left nothing undone to make known as widely as possible. the more disused the nation had become to severity in matters pertaining to religion the more acutely was it likely to feel the sudden adoption of even still more rigorous measures. in this position of affairs the royal rescript arrived from spain in answer to the proposition of the bishops and the last despatches of the regent. "whatever interpretation (such was its tenor) count egmont may have given to the king's verbal communications, it had never in the remotest manner entered his mind to think of altering in the slightest degree the penal statutes which the emperor, his father, had five-and-thirty years ago published in the provinces. these edicts he therefore commanded should henceforth be carried rigidly into effect, the inquisition should receive the most active support from the secular arm, and the decrees of the council of trent be irrevocably and unconditionally acknowledged in all the provinces of his netherlands. he acquiesced fully in the opinion of the bishops and canonists as to the sufficiency of the tridentine decrees as guides in all points of reformation of the clergy or instruction of the people; but he could not concur with them as to the mitigation of punishment which they proposed in consideration either of the age, sex, or character of individuals, since he was of opinion that his edicts were in no degree wanting in moderation. to nothing but want of zeal and disloyalty on the part of judges could he ascribe the progress which heresy had already made in the country. in future, therefore, whoever among them should be thus wanting in zeal must be removed from his office and make room for a more honest judge. the inquisition ought to pursue its appointed path firmly, fearlessly, and dispassionately, without regard to or consideration of human feelings, and was to look neither before nor behind. he would always be ready to approve of all its measures however extreme if it only avoided public scandal." this letter of the king, to which the orange party have ascribed all the subsequent troubles of the netherlands, caused the most violent excitement amongst the state counsellors, and the expressions which in society they either accidentally or intentionally let fall from them with regard to it spread terror and alarm amongst the people. the dread of the spanish inquisition returned with new force, and with it came fresh apprehensions of the subversion of their liberties. already the people fancied they could hear prisons building, chains and fetters forging, and see piles of fagots collecting. society was occupied with this one theme of conversation, and fear kept no longer within bounds. placards were affixed to houses of the nobles in which they were called upon, as formerly rome called on her brutus, to come forward and save expiring freedom. biting pasquinades were published against the new bishops--tormentors as they were called; the clergy were ridiculed in comedies, and abuse spared the throne as little as the romish see. terrified by the rumors which were afloat, the regent called together all the counsellors of state to consult them on the course she ought to adopt in this perilous crisis. opinion varied and disputes were violent. undecided between fear and duty they hesitated to come to a conclusion, until at last the aged senator, viglius, rose and surprised the whole assembly by his opinion. "it would," he said, "be the height of folly in us to think of promulgating the royal edict at the present moment; the king must be informed of the reception which, in all probability, it will now meet. in the meantime the inquisitors must be enjoined to use their power with moderation, and to abstain from severity." but if these words of the aged president surprised the whole assembly, still greater was the astonishment when the prince of orange stood up and opposed his advice. "the royal will," he said, "is too clearly and too precisely stated; it is the result of too long and too mature deliberation for us to venture to delay its execution without bringing on ourselves the reproach of the most culpable obstinacy." "that i take on myself," interrupted viglius; "i oppose myself to, his displeasure. if by this delay we purchase for him the peace of the netherlands our opposition will eventually secure for us the lasting gratitude of the king." the regent already began to incline to the advice of viglius, when the prince vehemently interposing, "what," he demanded," what have the many representations which we have already made effected? of what avail was the embassy we so lately despatched? nothing! and what then do we wait for more? shall we, his state counsellors, bring upon ourselves the whole weight of his displeasure by determining, at our own peril, to render him a service for which he will never thank us?" undecided and uncertain the whole assembly remained silent; but no one had courage enough to assent to or reply to him. but the prince had appealed to the fears of the regent, and these left her no choice. the consequences of her unfortunate obedience to the king's command will soon appear. but, on the other hand, if by a wise disobedience she had avoided these fatal consequences, is it clear that the result would not have been the same? however she had adopted the most fatal of the two counsels: happen what would the royal ordinance was to be promulgated. this time, therefore, faction prevailed, and the advice of the only true friend of the government, who, to serve his monarch, was ready to incur his displeasure, was disregarded. with this session terminated the peace of the regent: from this day the netherlands dated all the trouble which uninterruptedly visited their country. as the counsellors separated the prince of orange said to one who stood nearest to him, "now will soon be acted a great tragedy." [the conduct of the prince of orange in this meeting of the council has been appealed to by historians of the spanish party as a proof of his dishonesty, and they have availed themselves over and over again to blacken his character. "he," say they, "who had, invariably up to this period, both by word and deed, opposed the measures of the court so long as he had any ground to fear that the king's measures could be successfully carried out, supported them now for the first time when he was convinced that a scrupulous obedience to the royal orders would inevitably prejudice him. in order to convince the king of his folly in disregarding his warnings; in order to be able to boast, 'this i foresaw,' and 'i foretold that,' he was willing to risk the welfare of his nation, for which alone he had hitherto professed to struggle. the whole tenor of his previous conduct proved that he held the enforcement of the edicts to be an evil; nevertheless, he at once becomes false to his own convictions and follows an opposite course; although, so far as the nation was concerned, the same grounds existed as had dictated his former measures; and he changed his conduct simply that the result might be different to the king." "it is clear, therefore," continue his adversaries, "that the welfare of the nation had less weight with him than his animosity to his sovereign. in order to gratify his hatred to the latter he does not hesitate to sacrifice the former." but is it then true that by calling for the promulgation of these edicts he sacrificed the nation? or, to speak more correctly, did he carry the edicts into effect by insisting on their promulgation? can it not, on the contrary, be shown with far more probability that this was really the only way effectually to frustrate them? the nation was in a ferment, and the indignant people would (there was reason to expect, and as viglius himself seems to have apprehended) show so decided a spirit of opposition as must compel the king to yield. "now," says orange, "my country feels all the impulse necessary for it to contend successfully with tyranny! if i neglect the present moment the tyrant will, by secret negotiation and intrigue, find means to obtain by stealth what by open force he could not. the some object will be steadily pursued, only with greater caution and forbearance; but extremity alone can combine the people to unity of purpose, and move them to bold measures." it is clear, therefore, that with regard to the king the prince did but change his language only; but that as far as the people was concerned his conduct was perfectly consistent. and what duties did he owe the king apart from those he owed the republic? was he to oppose an arbitary act in the very moment when it was about to entail a just retribution on its author? would he have done his duty to his country if he had deterred its oppressor from a precipitate step which alone could save it from its otherwise unavoidable misery?] an edict, therefore, was issued to all the governors of provinces, commanding them rigorously to enforce the mandates of the emperor against heretics, as well as those which had been passed under the present government, the decrees of the council of trent, and those of the episcopal commission, which had lately sat to give all the aid of the civil force to the inquisition, and also to enjoin a similar line of conduct on the officers of government under them. more effectually to secure their object, every governor was to select from his own council an efficient officer who should frequently make the circuit of the province and institute strict inquiries into the obedience shown by the inferior officers to these commands, and then transmit quarterly, to the capital an exact report of their visitation. a copy of the tridentine decrees, according to the spanish original, was also sent to the archbishops and bishops, with an intimation that in case of their needing the assistance of the secular power, the governors of their diocese, with their troops, were placed at their disposal. against these decrees no privilege was to avail; however, the king willed and commanded that the particular territorial rights of the provinces and towns should in no case be infringed. these commands, which were publicly read in every town by a herald, produced an effect on the people which in the fullest manner verified the fears of the president viglius and the hopes of the prince of orange. nearly all the governors of provinces refused compliance with them, and threatened to throw up their appointments if the attempt should be made to compel their obedience. "the ordinance," they wrote back, "was based on a statement of the numbers of the sectaries, which was altogether false." [the number of the heretics was very unequally computed by the two parties according as the interests and passions of either made its increase or diminution desirable, and the same party often contradicted itself when its interest changed. if the question related to new measures of oppression, to the introduction of the inquisitional tribunals, etc., the numbers of the protestants were countless and interminable. if, on the other hand, the question was of lenity towards them, of ordinances to their advantage, they were now reduced to such an insignificant number that it would not repay the trouble of making an innovation for this small body of ill-minded people.] "justice was appalled at the prodigious crowd of victims which daily accumulated under its hands; to destroy by the flames fifty thousand or sixty thousand persons from their districts was no commission for them." the inferior clergy too, in particular, were loud in their outcries against the decrees of trent, which cruelly assailed their ignorance and corruption, and which moreover threatened them with a reform they so much detested. sacrificing, therefore, the highest interests of their church to their own private advantage, they bitterly reviled the decrees and the whole council, and with liberal hand scattered the seeds of revolt in the minds of the people. the same outcry was now revived which the monks had formerly raised against the new bishops. the archbishop of cambray succeeded at last, but not without great opposition, in causing the decrees to be proclaimed. it cost more labor to effect this in malines and utrect, where the archbishops were at strife with their clergy, who, as they were accused, preferred to involve the whole church in ruin rather than submit to a reformation of morals. of all the provinces brabant raised its voice the loudest. the states of this province appealed to their great privilege, which protected their members from being brought before a foreign court of justice. they spoke loudly of the oath by which the king had bound himself to observe all their statutes, and of the conditions under which they alone had sworn allegiance to him. louvain, antwerp, brussels, and herzogenbusch solemnly protested against the decrees, and transmitted their protests in distinct memorials to the regent. the latter, always hesitating and wavering, too timid to obey the king, and far more afraid to disobey him, again summoned her council, again listened to the arguments for and against the question, and at last again gave her assent to the opinion which of all others was the most perilous for her to adopt. a new reference to the king in spain was proposed; the next moment it was asserted that so urgent a crisis did not admit of so dilatory a remedy; it was necessary for the regent to act on her own responsibility, and either defy the threatening aspect of despair, or to yield to it by modifying or retracting the royal ordinance. she finally caused the annals of brabant to be examined in order to discover if possible a precedent for the present case in the instructions of the first inquisitor whom charles v. had appointed to the province. these instructions indeed did not exactly correspond with those now given; but had not the king declared that he introduced no innovation? this was precedent enough, and it was declared that the new edicts must also be interpreted in accordance with the old and existing statutes of the province. this explanation gave indeed no satisfaction to the states of brabant, who had loudly demanded the entire abolition of the inquisition, but it was an encouragement to the other provinces to make similar protests and an equally bold opposition. without giving the duchess time to decide upon their remonstrances they, on their own authority, ceased to obey the inquisition, and withdrew their aid from it. the inquisitors, who had so recently been expressly urged to a more rigid execution of their duties now saw themselves suddenly deserted by the secular arm, and robbed of all authority, while in answer to their application for assistance the court could give them only empty promises. the regent by thus endeavoring to satisfy all parties had displeased all. during these negotiations between the court, the councils, and the states a universal spirit of revolt pervaded the whole nation. men began to investigate the rights of the subject, and to scrutinize the prerogative of kings. "the netherlanders were not so stupid," many were heard to say with very little attempt at secrecy, "as not to know right well what was due from the subject to the sovereign, and from the king to the subject; and that perhaps means would yet be found to repel force with force, although at present there might be no appearance of it." in antwerp a placard was set up in several places calling upon the town council to accuse the king of spain before the supreme court at spires of having broken his oath and violated the liberties of the country, for, brabant being a portion of the burgundian circle, was included in the religious peace of passau and augsburg. about this time too the calvinists published their confession of faith, and in a preamble addressed to the king, declared that they, although a hundred thousand strong, kept themselves nevertheless quiet, and like the rest of his subjects, contributed to all the taxes of the country; from which it was evident, they added, that of themselves they entertained no ideas of insurrection. bold and incendiary writings were publicly disseminated, which depicted the spanish tyranny in the most odious colors, and reminded the nation of its privileges, and occasionally also of its powers. [the regent mentioned to the king a number (three thousand) of these writings. strada . it is remarkable how important a part printing, and publicity in general, played in the rebellion of the netherlands. through this organ one restless spirit spoke to millions. besides the lampoons, which for the most part were composed with all the low scurrility and brutality which was the distinguishing character of most of the protestant polemical writings of the time, works were occasionally published which defended religious liberty in the fullest sense of the word.] the warlike preparations of philip against the porte, as well as those which, for no intelligible reason, eric, duke of brunswick, about this time made in the vicinity, contributed to strengthen the general suspicion that the inquisition was to be forcibly imposed on the netherlands. many of the most eminent merchants already spoke of quitting their houses and business to seek in some other part of the world the liberty of which they were here deprived; others looked about for a leader, and let fall hints of forcible resistance and of foreign aid. that in this distressing position of affairs the regent might be left entirely without an adviser and without support, she was now deserted by the only person who was at the present moment indispensable to her, and who had contributed to plunge her into this embarrassment. "without kindling a civil war," wrote to her william of orange, "it was absolutely impossible to comply now with the orders of the king. if, however, obedience was to be insisted upon, he must beg that his place might be supplied by another who would better answer the expectations of his majesty, and have more power than he had over the minds of the nation. the zeal which on every other occasion he had shown in the service of the crown, would, he hoped, secure his present proceeding from misconstruction; for, as the case now stood, he had no alternative between disobeying the king and injuring his country and himself." from this time forth william of orange retired from the council of state to his town of breda, where in observant but scarcely inactive repose lie watched the course of affairs. count horn followed his example. egmont, ever vacillating between the republic and the throne, ever wearying himself in the vain attempt to unite the good citizen with the obedient subject--egmont, who was less able than the rest to dispense with the favor of the monarch, and to whom, therefore, it was less an object of indifference, could not bring himself to abandon the bright prospects which were now opening for him at the court of the regent. the prince of orange had, by his supeirior intellect, gained an influence over the regent--which great minds cannot fail to command from inferior spirits. his retirement had opened a void in her confidence which count egmont was now to fill by virtue of that sympathy which so naturally subsists between timidity, weakness, and good-nature. as she was as much afraid of exasperating the people by an exclusive confidence in the adherents to the crown, as she was fearful of displeasing the king by too close an understanding with the declared leaders of the faction, a better object for her confidence could now hardly be presented than this very count egmont, of whom it could not be said that he belonged to either of the two conflicting parties. this ebook was produced by david widger, widger@cecomet.net book iii. conspiracy of the nobles . up to this point the general peace had it appears been the sincere wish of the prince of orange, the counts egmont and horn, and their friends. they had pursued the true interests of their sovereign as much as the general weal; at least their exertions and their actions had been as little at variance with the former as with the latter. nothing bad as yet occurred to make their motives suspected, or to manifest in them a rebellious spirit. what they had done they had done in discharge of their bounden duty as members of a free state, as the representatives of the nation, as advisers of the king, as men of integrity and honor. the only weapons they had used to oppose the encroachments of the court had been remonstrances, modest complaints, petitions. they had never allowed themselves to be so far carried away by a just zeal for their good cause as to transgress the limits of prudence and moderation which on many occasions are so easily overstepped by party spirit. but all the nobles of the republic did not now listen to the voice of that prudence; all did not abide within the bounds of moderation. while in the council of state the great question was discussed whether the nation was to be miserable or not, while its sworn deputies summoned to their assistance all the arguments of reason and of equity, and while the middle-classes and the people contented themselves with empty complaints, menaces, and curses, that part of the nation which of all seemed least called upon, and on whose support least reliance had been placed, began to take more active measures. we have already described a class of the nobility whose services and wants philip at his accession had not considered it necessary to remember. of these by far the greater number had asked for promotion from a much more urgent reason than a love of the mere honor. many of them were deeply sunk in debt, from which by their own resources they could not hope to emancipate themselves. when then, in filling up appointments, philip passed them over he wounded them in a point far more sensitive than their pride. in these suitors he had by his neglect raised up so many idle spies and merciless judges of his actions, so many collectors and propagators of malicious rumor. as their pride did not quit them with their prosperity, so now, driven by necessity, they trafficked with the sole capital which they could not alienate--their nobility and the political influence of their names; and brought into circulation a coin which only in such a period could have found currency--their protection. with a self-pride to which they gave the more scope as it was all they could now call their own, they looked upon themselves as a strong intermediate power between the sovereign and the citizen, and believed themselves called upon to hasten to the rescue of the oppressed state, which looked imploringly to them for succor. this idea was ludicrous only so far as their self-conceit was concerned in it; the advantages which they contrived to draw from it were substantial enough. the protestant merchants, who held in their hands the chief part of the wealth of the netherlands, and who believed they could not at any price purchase too dearly the undisturbed exercise of their religion, did not fail to make use of this class of people who stood idle in the market and ready to be hired. these very men whom at any other time the merchants, in the pride of riches, would most probably have looked down upon, now appeared likely to do them good service through their numbers, their courage, their credit with the populace, their enmity to the government, nay, through their beggarly pride itself and their despair. on these grounds they zealously endeavored to form a close union with them, and diligently fostered the disposition for rebellion, while they also used every means to keep alive their high opinions of themselves, and, what was most important, lured their poverty by well-applied pecuniary assistance and glittering promises. few of them were so utterly insignificant as not to possess some influence, if not personally, yet at least by their relationship with higher and more powerful nobles; and if united they would be able to raise a formidable voice against the crown. many of them had either already joined the new sect or were secretly inclined to it; and even those who were zealous roman catholics had political or private grounds enough to set them against the decrees of trent and the inquisition. all, in fine, felt the call of vanity sufficiently powerful not to allow the only moment to escape them in which they might possibly make some figure in the republic. but much as might be expected from the co-operation of these men in a body it would have been futile and ridiculous to build any hopes on any one of them singly; and the great difficulty was to effect a union among them. even to bring them together some unusual occurrence was necessary, and fortunately such an incident presented itself. the nuptials of baron montigny, one of the belgian nobles, as also those of the prince alexander of parma, which took place about this time in brussels, assembled in that town a great number of the belgian nobles. on this occasion relations met relations; new friendships were formed and old renewed; and while the distress of the country was the topic of conversation wine and mirth unlocked lips and hearts, hints were dropped of union among themselves, and of an alliance with foreign powers. these accidental meetings soon led to concealed ones, and public discussions gave rise to secret consultations. two german barons, moreover, a count of holle and a count of schwarzenberg, who at this time were on a visit to the netherlands, omitted nothing to awaken expectations of assistance from their neighbors. count louis of nassau, too, had also a short time before visited several german courts to ascertain their sentiments. [it was not without cause that the prince of orange suddenly disappeared from brussels in order to be present at the election of a king of rome in frankfort. an assembly of so many german princes must have greatly favored a negotiation.] it has even been asserted that secret emissaries of the admiral coligny were seen at this time in brabant, but this, however, may be reasonably doubted. if ever a political crisis was favorable to an attempt at revolution it was the present. a woman at the helm of government; the governors of provinces disaffected themselves and disposed to wink at insubordination in others; most of the state counsellors quite inefficient; no army to fall back upon; the few troops there were long since discontented on account of the outstanding arrears of pay, and already too often deceived by false promises to be enticed by new; commanded, moreover, by officers who despised the inquisition from their hearts, and would have blushed to draw a sword in its behalf; and, lastly, no money in the treasury to enlist new troops or to hire foreigners. the court at brussels, as well as the three councils, not only divided by internal dissensions, but in the highest degree--venal and corrupt; the regent without full powers to act on the spot, and the king at a distance; his adherents in the provinces few, uncertain, and dispirited; the faction numerous and powerful; two-thirds of the people irritated against popery and desirous of a change--such was the unfortunate weakness of the government, and the more unfortunate still that this weakness was so well known to its enemies! in order to unite so many minds in the prosecution of a common object a leader was still wanting, and a few influential names to give political weight to their enterprise. the two were supplied by count louis of nassau and henry count brederode, both members of the most illustrious houses of the belgian nobility, who voluntarily placed themselves at the head of the undertaking. louis of nassau, brother of the prince of orange, united many splendid qualities which made him worthy of appearing on so noble and important a stage. in geneva, where he studied, he had imbibed at once a hatred to the hierarchy and a love to the new religion, and on his return to his native country had not failed to enlist proselytes to his opinions. the republican bias which his mind had received in that school kindled in him a bitter hatred of the spanish name, which animated his whole conduct and only left him with his latest breath. popery and spanish rule were in his mind identical-- as indeed they were in reality--and the abhorrence which he entertained for the one helped to strengthen his dislike for the other. closely as the brothers agreed in their inclinations and aversions the ways by which each sought to gratify them were widely dissimilar. youth and an ardent temperament did not allow the younger brother to follow the tortuous course through which the elder wound himself to his object. a cold, calm circumspection carried the latter slowly but surely to his aim, and with a pliable subtilty he made all things subserve his purpose; with a foolhardy impetuosity which overthrew all obstacles, the other at times compelled success, but oftener accelerated disaster. for this reason william was a general and louis never more than an adventurer; a sure and powerful arm if only it were directed by a wise head. louis' pledge once given was good forever; his alliances survived every vicissitude, for they were mostly formed in the pressing moment of necessity, and misfortune binds more firmly than thoughtless joy. he loved his brother as dearly as he did his cause, and for the latter he died. henry of brederode, baron of viane and burgrave of utrecht, was descended from the old dutch counts who formerly ruled that province as sovereign princes. so ancient a title endeared him to the people, among whom the memory of their former lords still survived, and was the more treasured the less they felt they had gained by the change. this hereditary splendor increased the self-conceit of a man upon whose tongue the glory of his ancestors continually hung, and who dwelt the more on former greatness, even amidst its ruins, the more unpromising the aspect of his own condition became. excluded from the honors and employments to which, in his opinion, his own merits and his noble ancestry fully entitled him (a squadron of light cavalry being all which was entrusted to him), he hated the government, and did not scruple boldly to canvass and to rail at its measures. by these means he won the hearts of the people. he also favored in secret the evangelical belief; less, however, as a conviction of his better reason than as an opposition to the government. with more loquacity than eloquence, and more audacity than courage, he was brave rather from not believing in danger than from being superior to it. louis of nassau burned for the cause which he defended, brederode for the glory of being its defender; the former was satisfied in acting for his party, the latter discontented if he did not stand at its head. no one was more fit to lead off the dance in a rebellion, but it could hardly have a worse ballet-master. contemptible as his threatened designs really were, the illusion of the multitude might have imparted to them weight and terror if it had occurred to them to set up a pretender in his person. his claim to the possessions of his ancestors was an empty name; but even a name was now sufficient for the general disaffection to rally round. a pamphlet which was at the time disseminated amongst the people openly called him the heir of holland; and his engraved portrait, which was publicly exhibited, bore the boastful inscription:-- sum brederodus ego, batavae non infima gentis gloria, virtutem non unica pagina claudit. ( .) besides these two, there were others also from among the most illustrious of the flemish nobles the young count charles of mansfeld, a son of that nobleman whom we have found among the most zealous royalists; the count kinlemburg; two counts of bergen and of battenburg; john of marnix, baron of toulouse; philip of marnix, baron of st. aldegonde; with several others who joined the league, which, about the middle of november, in the year , was formed at the house of von hammes, king at arms of the golden fleece. here it was that six men decided the destiny of their country as formerly a few confederates consummated the liberty of switzerland, kindled the torch of a forty years' war, and laid the basis of a freedom which they themselves were never to enjoy. the objects of the league were set forth in the following declaration, to which philip of marnix was the first to subscribe his name: "whereas certain ill-disposed persons, under the mask of a pious zeal, but in reality under the impulse of avarice and ambition, have by their evil counsels persuaded our most gracious sovereign the king to introduce into these countries the abominable tribunal of the inquisition, a tribunal diametrically opposed to all laws, human and divine, and in cruelty far surpassing the barbarous institutions of heathenism; which raises the inquisitors above every other power, and debases man to a perpetual bondage, and by its snares exposes the honest citizen to a constant fear of death, inasmuch as any one (priest, it may be, or a faithless friend, a spaniard or a reprobate), has it in his power at any moment to cause whom he will to be dragged before that tribunal, to be placed in confinement, condemned, and executed without the accused ever being allowed to face his accuser, or to adduce proof of his innocence; we, therefore, the undersigned, have bound ourselves to watch over the safety of our families, our estates, and our own persons. to this we hereby pledge ourselves, and to this end bind ourselves as a sacred fraternity, and vow with a solemn oath to oppose to the best of our power the introduction of this tribunal into these countries, whether it be attempted openly or secretly, and under whatever name it may be disguised. we at the same time declare that we are far from intending anything unlawful against the king our sovereign; rather is it our unalterable purpose to support and defend the royal prerogative, and to maintain peace, and, as far as lies in our power, to put down all rebellion. in accordance with this purpose we have sworn, and now again swear, to hold sacred the government, and to respect it both in word and deed, which witness almighty god! "further, we vow and swear to protect and defend one another, in all times and places, against all attacks whatsoever touching the articles which are set forth in this covenant. we hereby bind ourselves that no accusation of any of our followers, in whatever name it may be clothed, whether rebellion, sedition, or otherwise, shall avail to annul our oath towards the accused, or absolve us from our obligation towards him. no act which is directed against the inquisition can deserve the name of a rebellion. whoever, therefore, shall be placed in arrest on any such charge, we here pledge ourselves to assist him to the utmost of our ability, and to endeavor by every allowable means to effect his liberation. in this, however, as in all matters, but especially in the conduct of all measures against the tribunal of the inquisition, we submit ourselves to the general regulations of the league, or to the decision of those whom we may unanimously appoint our counsellors and leaders. "in witness hereof, and in confirmation of this our common league and covenant, we call upon the holy name of the living god, maker of heaven and earth, and of all that are therein, who searches the hearts, the consciences, and the thoughts, and knows the purity of ours. we implore the aid of the holy spirit, that success and honor may crown our undertaking, to the glory of his name, and to the peace and blessing of our country!" this covenant was immediately translated into several languages, and quickly disseminated through the provinces. to swell the league as speedily as possible each of the confederates assembled all his friends, relations, adherents, and retainers. great banquets were held, which lasted whole days--irresistible temptations for a sensual, luxurious people, in whom the deepest wretchedness could not stifle the propensity for voluptuous living. whoever repaired to these banquets--and every one was welcome--was plied with officious assurances of friendship, and, when heated with wine, carried away by the example of numbers, and overcome by the fire of a wild eloquence. the hands of many were guided while they subscribed their signatures; the hesitating were derided, the pusillanimous threatened, the scruples of loyalty clamored down; some even were quite ignorant what they were signing, and were ashamed afterwards to inquire. to many whom mere levity brought to the entertainment the general enthusiasm left no choice, while the splendor of the confederacy allured the mean, and its numbers encouraged the timorous. the abettors of the league had not scrupled at the artifice of counterfeiting the signature and seals of the prince of orange, counts egmont, horn, mcgen, and others, a trick which won them hundreds of adherents. this was done especially with a view of influencing the officers of the army, in order to be safe in this quarter, if matters should come at last to violence. the device succeeded with many, especially with subalterns, and count brederode even drew his sword upon an ensign who wished time for consideration. men of all classes and conditions signed it. religion made no difference. roman catholic priests even were associates of the league. the motives were not the same with all, but the pretext was similar. the roman catholics desired simply the abolition of the inquisition, and a mitigation of the edicts; the protestants aimed at unlimited freedom of conscience. a few daring spirits only entertained so bold a project as the overthrow of the present government, while the needy and indigent based the vilest hopes on a general anarchy. a farewell entertainment, which about this time was given to the counts schwarzenberg and holle in breda, and another shortly afterwards in hogstraten, drew many of the principal nobility to these two places, and of these several had already signed the covenant. the prince of orange, counts egmont, horn, and megen were present at the latter banquet, but without any concert or design, and without having themselves any share in the league, although one of egmont's own secretaries and some of the servants of the other three noblemen had openly joined it. at this entertainment three hundred persons gave in their adhesion to the covenant, and the question was mooted whether the whole body should present themselves before the regent armed or unarmed, with a declaration or with a petition? horn and orange (egmont would not countenance the business in any way) were called in as arbiters upon this point, and they decided in favor of the more moderate and submissive procedure. by taking this office upon them they exposed themselves to the charge of having in no very covert manner lent their sanction to the enterprise of the confederates. in compliance, therefore, with their advice, it was determined to present their address unarmed, and in the form of a petition, and a day was appointed on which they should assemble in brussels. the first intimation the regent received of this conspiracy of the nobles was given by the count of megen soon after his return to the capital. "there was," he said, "an enterprise on foot; no less than three hundred of the nobles were implicated in it; it referred to religion; the members of it had bound themselves together by an oath; they reckoned much on foreign aid; she would soon know more about it." though urgently pressed, he would give her no further information. "a nobleman," he said, "had confided it to him under the seal of secrecy, and he had pledged his word of honor to him." what really withheld him from giving her any further explanation was, in all probability, not so much any delicacy about his honor, as his hatred of the inquisition, which he would not willingly do anything to advance. soon after him, count egmont delivered to the regent a copy of the covenant, and also gave her the names of the conspirators, with some few exceptions. nearly about the same time the prince of orange wrote to her: "there was, as he had heard, an army enlisted, four hundred officers were already named, and twenty thousand men would presently appear in arms." thus the rumor was intentionally exaggerated, and the danger was multiplied in every mouth. the regent, petrified with alarm at the first announcement of these tidings, and guided solely by her fears, hastily called together all the members of the council of state who happened to be then in brussels, and at the same time sent a pressing summons to the prince of orange and count horn, inviting them to resume their seats in the senate. before the latter could arrive she consulted with egmont, megen, and barlaimont what course was to be adopted in the present dangerous posture of affairs. the question debated was whether it would be better to have recourse to arms or to yield to the emergency and grant the demands of the confederates; or whether they should be put off with promises, and an appearance of compliance, in order to gain time for procuring instructions from spain, and obtaining money and troops? for the first plan the requisite supplies were wanting, and, what was equally requisite, confidence in the army, of which there seemed reason to doubt whether it had not been already gained by the conspirators. the second expedient would it was quite clear never be sanctioned by the king; besides it would serve rather to raise than depress the courage of the confederates; while, on the other hand, a compliance with their reasonable demands and a ready unconditional pardon of the past would in all probability stifle the rebellion in the cradle. the last opinion was supported by megen and egmont but opposed by barlaimont. "rumor," said the latter, "had exaggerated the matter; it is impossible that so formidable an armament could have been prepared so secretly and, so rapidly. it was but a band of a few outcasts and desperadoes, instigated by two or three enthusiasts, nothing more. all will be quiet after a few heads have been struck off." the regent determined to await the opinion of the council of state, which was shortly to assemble; in the meanwhile, however, she was not inactive. the fortifications in the most important places were inspected and the necessary repairs speedily executed; her ambassadors at foreign courts received orders to redouble their vigilance; expresses were sent off to spain. at the same time she caused the report to be revived of the near advent of the king, and in her external deportment put on a show of that imperturbable firmness which awaits attack without intending easily to yield to it. at the end of march (four whole months consequently from the framing of the covenant), the whole state council assembled in brussels. there were present the prince of orange, the duke of arschot, counts egmont, bergen, megen, aremberg, horn, hosstraten, barlaimont, and others; the barons montigny and hachicourt, all the knights of the golden fleece, with the president viglius, state counsellor bruxelles, and the other assessors of the privy council. several letters were produced which gave a clearer insight into the nature and objects of the conspiracy. the extremity to which the regent was reduced gave the disaffected a power which on the present occasion they did not neglect to use. venting their long suppressed indignation, they indulged in bitter complaints against the court and against the government. "but lately," said the prince of orange, "the king sent forty thousand gold florins to the queen of scotland to support her in her undertakings against england, and he allows his netherlands to be burdened with debt. not to mention the unseasonableness of this subsidy and its fruitless expenditure, why should he bring upon us the resentment of a queen, who is both so important to us as a friend and as an enemy so much to be dreaded?" the prince did not even refrain on the present occasion from glancing at the concealed hatred which the king was suspected of cherishing against the family of nassau and against him in particular. "it is well known," he said, "that he has plotted with the hereditary enemies of my house to take away my life, and that he waits with impatience only for a suitable opportunity." his example opened the lips of count horn also, and of many others besides, who with passionate vehemence descanted on their own merits and the ingratitude of the king. with difficulty did the regent succeed in silencing the tumult and in recalling attention to the proper subject of the debate. the question was whether the confederates, of whom it was now known that they intended to appear at court with a petition, should be admitted or not? the duke of arschot, counts aremberg, megen, and barlaimont gave their negative to the proposition. "what need of five hundred persons," said the latter, "to deliver a small memorial? this paradox of humility and defiance implies no good. let them send to us one respectable man from among their number without pomp, without assumption, and so submit their application to us. otherwise, shut the gates upon them, or if some insist on their admission let them be closely watched, and let the first act of insolence which any one of them shall be guilty of be punished with death." in this advice concurred count mansfeld, whose own son was among the conspirators; he had even threatened to disinherit his son if he did not quickly abandon the league. counts megen, also, and aremberg hesitated to receive the petition; the prince of orange, however, counts egmont, horn, hogstraten, and others voted emphatically for it. "the confederates," they declared, "were known to them as men of integrity and honor; a great part of them were connected with themselves by friendship and relationship, and they dared vouch for their behavior. every subject was allowed to petition; a right which was enjoyed by the meanest individual in the state could not without injustice be denied to so respectable a body of men." it was therefore resolved by a majority of votes to admit the confederates on the condition that they should appear unarmed and conduct themselves temperately. the squabbles of the members of council had occupied the greater part of the sitting, so that it was necessary to adjourn the discussion to the following day. in order that the principal matter in debate might not again be lost sight of in useless complaints the regent at once hastened to the point: "brederode, we are informed," she said, "is coming to us, with an address in the name of the league, demanding the abolition of the inquisition and a mitigation of the edicts. the advice of my senate is to guide me in my answer to him; but before you give your opinions on this point permit me to premise a few words. i am told that there are many even amongst yourselves who load the religious edicts of the emperor, my father, with open reproaches, and describe them to the people as inhuman and barbarous. now i ask you, lords and gentlemen, knights of the fleece, counsellors of his majesty and of the state, whether you did not yourselves vote for these edicts, whether the states of the realm have not recognized them as lawful? why is that now blamed, which was formerly declared right? is it because they have now become even more necessary than they then were? since when is the inquisition a new thing in the netherlands? is it not full sixteen years ago since the emperor established it? and wherein is it more cruel than the edicts? if it be allowed that the latter were the work of wisdom, if the universal consent of the states has sanctioned them-- why this opposition to the former, which is nevertheless far more humane than the edicts, if they are to be observed to the letter? speak now freely; i am not desirous of fettering your decision; but it is your business to see that it is not misled by passion and prejudice." the council of state was again, as it always had been, divided between two opinions; but the few who spoke for the inquisition and the literal execution of the edicts were outvoted by the opposite party with the prince of orange at its head. "would to heaven," he began,--"that my representations had been then thought worthy of attention, when as yet the grounds of apprehension were remote; things would in that case never have been carried so far as to make recourse to extreme measures indispensable, nor would men have been plunged deeper in error by the very means which were intended to beguile them from their delusion. we are all unanimous on the one main point. we all wish to see the catholic religion safe; if this end can be secured without the aid of the inquisition, it is well, and we offer our wealth and our blood to its service; but on this very point it is that our opinions are divided. "there are two kinds of inquisition: the see of rome lays claim to one, the other has, from time immemorial, been exercised by the bishops. the force of prejudice and of custom has made the latter light and supportable to us. it will find little opposition in the netherlands, and the augmented numbers of the bishops will make it effective. to what purpose then insist on the former, the mere name of which is revolting to all the feelings of our minds? when so many nations exist without it why should it be imposed on us? before luther appeared it was never heard of; but the troubles with luther happened at a time when there was an inadequate number of spiritual overseers, and when the few bishops were, moreover, indolent, and the licentiousness of the clergy excluded them from the office of judges. now all is changed; we now count as many bishops as there are provinces. why should not the policy of the government adjust itself to the altered circumstances of the times? we want leniency, not severity. the repugnance of the people is manifest--this we must seek to appease if we would not have it burst out into rebellion. with the death of pius iv. the full powers of the inquisitors have expired; the new pope has as yet sent no ratification of their authority, without which no one formerly ventured to exercise his office. now, therefore, is the time when it can be suspended without infringing the rights of any party. "what i have stated with regard to the inquisition holds equally good in respect to the edicts also. the exigency of the times called them forth, but are not those times passed? so long an experience of them ought at last to have taught us that against hersey no means are less successful than the fagot and sword. what incredible progress has not the new religion made during only the last few years in the provinces; and if we investigate the cause of this increase we shall find it principally in the glorious constancy of those who have fallen sacrifices to the truth of their opinions. carried away by sympathy and admiration, men begin to weigh in silence whether what is maintained with such invincible courage may not really be the truth. in france and in england the same severities may have been inflicted on the protestants, but have they been attended with any better success there than here? the very earliest christians boasted that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. the emperor julian, the most terrible enemy that christianity ever experienced, was fully persuaded of this. convinced that persecution did but kindle enthusiasm he betook himself to ridicule and derision, and found these weapons far more effective than force. in the greek empire different teachers of heresy have arisen at different times. arius under constantine, aetius under constantius, nestorius under theodosius. but even against these arch- heretics and their disciples such cruel measures were never resorted to as are thought necessary against our unfortunate country--and yet where are all those sects now which once a whole world, i had almost said, could not contain? this is the natural course of heresy. if it is treated with contempt it crumbles into insignificance. it is as iron, which, if it lies idle, corrodes, and only becomes sharp by use. let no notice be paid to it, and it loses its most powerful attraction, the magic of what is new and what is forbidden. why will we not content ourselves with the measures which have been approved of by the wisdom of such great rulers? example is ever the safest guide. "but what need to go to pagan antiquity for guidance and example when we have near at hand the glorious precedent of charles v., the greatest of kings, who taught at last by experience, abandoned the bloody path of persecution, and for many years before his abdication adopted milder measures. and philip himself, our most gracious sovereign, seemed at first strongly inclined to leniency until the counsels of granvella and of others like him changed these views; but with what right or wisdom they may settle between themselves. to me, however, it has always appeared indispensable that legislation to be wise and successful must adjust itself to the manners and maxims of the times. in conclusion, i would beg to remind you of the close understanding which subsists between the huguenots and the flemish protestants. let us beware of exasperating them any further. let us not act the part of french catholics towards them, lest they should play the huguenots against us, and, like the latter, plunge their country into the horrors of a civil war." [no one need wonder, says burgundias (a vehement stickler for the roman catholic religion and the spanish party), that the speech of this prince evinced so much acquaintance with philosophy; he had acquired it in his intercourse with balduin. . barry, - . hopper, . strada, , .] it was, perhaps, not so much the irresistible truth of his arguments, which, moreover, were supported by a decisive majority in the senate, as rather the ruinous state of the military resources, and the exhaustion of the treasury, that prevented the adoption of the opposite opinion which recommended an appeal to the force of arms that the prince of orange had chiefly to thank for the attention which now at last was paid to his representations. in order to avert at first the violence of the storm, and to gain time, which was so necessary to place the government in a better sate of preparation, it was agreed that a portion of the demands should be accorded to the confederates. it was also resolved to mitigate the penal statutes of the emperor, as he himself would certainly mitigate them, were he again to appear among them at that day --and as, indeed, he had once shown under circumstances very similar to the present that he did not think it derogatory to his high dignity to do. the inquisition was not to be introduced in any place where it did not already exist, and where it had been it should adopt a milder system, or even be entirely suspended, especially since the inquisitors had not yet been confirmed in their office by the pope. the latter reason was put prominently forward, in order to deprive the protestants of the gratification of ascribing the concessions to any fear of their own power, or to the justice of their demands. the privy council was commissioned to draw out this decree of the senate without delay. thus prepared the confederates were awaited. the gueux. the members of the senate had not yet dispersed, when all brussels resounded with the report that the confederates were approaching the town. they consisted of no more than two hundred horse, but rumor greatly exaggerated their numbers. filled with consternation, the regent consulted with her ministers whether it was best to close the gates on the approaching party or to seek safety in flight? both suggestions were rejected as dishonorable; and the peaceable entry of the nobles soon allayed all fears of violence. the first morning after their arrival they assembled at kuilemberg house, where brederode administered to them a second oath, binding them before all other duties to stand by one another, and even with arms if necessary. at this meeting a letter from spain was produced, in which it was stated that a certain protestant, whom, they all knew and valued, had been burned alive in that country by a slow fire. after these and similar preliminaries he called on them one after another by name to take the new oath and renew the old one in their own names and in those of the absent. the next day, the th of april, , was fixed for the presentation of the petition. their numbers now amounted to between three and four hundred. amongst them were many retainers of the high nobility, as also several servants of the king himself and of the duchess. with the counts of nassau and brederode at their head, and formed in ranks of four by four, they advanced in procession to the palace; all brussels attended the unwonted spectacle in silent astonishment. here were to be seen a body of men advancing with too much boldness and confidence to look like supplicants, and led by two men who were not wont to be petitioners; and, on the other hand, with so much order and stillness as do not usually accompany rebellion. the regent received the procession surrounded by all her counsellors and the knights of the fleece. "these noble netherlanders," thus brederode respectfully addressed her, "who here present themselves before your highness, wish in their own name, and of many others besides who are shortly to arrive, to present to you a petition of whose importance as well as of their own humility this solemn procession must convince you. i, as speaker of this body, entreat you to receive our petition, which contains nothing but what is in unison with the laws of our country and the honor of the king." "if this petition," replied margaret, "really contains nothing which is at variance either with the good of the country, or with the authority of the king, there is no doubt that it will be favorably considered." "they had learnt," continued the spokesman, "with indignation and regret that suspicious objects had been imputed to their association, and that interested parties had endeavored to prejudice her highness against him; they therefore craved that she would name the authors of so grave an accusation, and compel them to bring their charges publicly, and in due form, in order that he who should be found guilty might suffer the punishment of his demerits." "undoubtedly," replied the regent, "she had received unfavorable rumors of their designs and alliance. she could not be blamed, if in consequence she had thought it requisite to call the attention of the governors of the provinces to the matter; but, as to giving up the names of her informants to betray state secrets," she added, with an appearance of displeasure, "that could not in justice be required of her." she then appointed the next day for answering their petition; and in the meantime she proceeded to consult the members of her council upon it. "never" (so ran the petition which, according to some, was drawn up by the celebrated balduin), "never had they failed in their loyalty to their king, and nothing now could be farther from their hearts; but they would rather run the risk of incurring the displeasure of their sovereign than allow him to remain longer in ignorance of the evils with which their native country was menaced, by the forcible introduction of the inquisition and the continued enforcement of the edicts. they had long remained consoling themselves with the expectation that a general assembly of the states would be summoned to remedy these grievances; but now that even this hope was extinguished, they held it to be their duty to give timely warning to the regent. they, therefore, entreated her highness to send to madrid an envoy, well disposed, and fully acquainted with the state and temper of the times, who should endeavor to persuade the king to comply with the demands of the whole nation, and abolish the inquisition, to revoke the edicts, and in their stead cause new and more humane ones to be drawn up at a general assembly of the states. but, in the meanwhile, until they could learn the king's decision, they prayed that the edicts and the operations of the inquisition be suspended." "if," they concluded, "no attention should be paid to their humble request, they took god, the king, the regent, and all her counsellors to witness that they had done their part, and were not responsible for any unfortunate result that might happen." the following day the confederates, marching in the same order of procession, but in still greater numbers (counts bergen and kuilemberg having, in the interim, joined them with their adherents), appeared before the regent in order to receive her answer. it was written on the margin of the petition, and was to the effect, "that entirely to suspend the inquisition and the edicts, even temporarily, was beyond her powers; but in compliance with the wishes of the confederates she was ready to despatch one of the nobles to the king in spain, and also to support their petition with all her influence. in the meantime, she would recommend the inquisitors to administer their office with moderation; but in return she should expect on the part of the league that they should abstain from all acts of violence, and undertake nothing to the prejudice of the catholic faith." little as these vague and general promises satisfied the confederates, they were, nevertheless, as much as they could have reasonably expected to gain at first. the granting or refusing of the petition had nothing to do with the primary object of the league. enough for them at present that it was once recognized, enough that it was now, as it were, an established body, which by its power and threats might, if necessary, overawe the government. the confederates, therefore, acted quite consistently with their designs, in contenting themselves with this answer, and referring the rest to the good pleasure of the king. as, indeed, the whole pantomime of petitioning had only been invented to cover the more daring plan of the league, until it should have strength enough to show itself in its true light, they felt that much more depended on their being able to continue this mask, and on the favorable reception of their petition, than on its speedily being granted. in a new memorial, which they delivered three days after, they pressed for an express testimonial from the regent that they had done no more than their duty, and been guided simply by their zeal for the service of the king. when the duchess evaded a declaration, they even sent a person to repeat this request in a private interview. "time alone and their future behavior," she replied to this person, "would enable her to judge of their designs." the league had its origin in banquets, and a banquet gave it form and perfection. on the very day that the second petition was presented brederode entertained the confederates in kuilemberg house. about three hundred guests assembled; intoxication gave them courage, and their audacity rose with their numbers. during the conversation one of their number happened to remark that he had overheard the count of barlaimont whisper in french to the regent, who was seen to turn pale on the delivery of the petitions, that "she need not be afraid of a band of beggars (gueux);" (in fact, the majority of them had by their bad management of their incomes only too well deserved this appellation.) now, as the very name for their fraternity was the very thing which had most perplexed them, an expression was eagerly caught up, which, while it cloaked the presumption of their enterprise in humility, was at the same time appropriate to them as petitioners. immediately they drank to one another under this name, and the cry "long live the gueux!" was accompanied with a general shout of applause. after the cloth had been removed brederode appeared with a wallet over his shoulder similar to that which the vagrant pilgrims and mendicant monks of the time used to carry, and after returning thanks to all for their accession to the league, and boldly assuring them that he was ready to venture life and limb for every individual present, he drank to the health of the whole company out of a wooden beaker. the cup went round and every one uttered the same vow as be set it to his lips. then one after the other they received the beggar's purse, and each hung it on a nail which he had appropriated to himself. the shouts and uproar attending this buffoonery attracted the prince of orange and counts egmont and horn, who by chance were passing the spot at the very moment, and on entering the house were boisterously pressed by brederode, as host, to remain and drink a glass with them. ["but," egmont asserted in his written defence "we drank only one single small glass, and thereupon they cried 'long live the king and the gueux!' this was the first time that i heard that appellation, and it certainly did not please me. but the times were so bad that one was often compelled to share in much that was against one's inclination, and i knew not but i was doing an innocent thing." proces criminels des comtes d'egmont, etc.. . . egmont's defence, hopper, . strada, - . burgund., , .] the entrance of three such influential personages renewed the mirth of the guests, and their festivities soon passed the bounds of moderation. many were intoxicated; guests and attendants mingled together without distinction; the serious and the ludicrous, drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. but it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication they attempted when sober to carry into execution. it was necessary to manifest to the people in some striking shape the existence of their protectors, and likewise to fan the zeal of the faction by a visible emblem; for this end nothing could be better than to adopt publicly this name of gueux, and to borrow from it the tokens of the association. in a few days the town of brussels swarmed with ash-gray garments such as were usually worn by mendicant friars and penitents. every confederate put his whole family and domestics in this dress. some carried wooden bowls thinly overlaid with plates of silver, cups of the same kind, and wooden knives; in short the whole paraphernalia of the beggar tribe, which they either fixed around their hats or suspended from their girdles: round the neck they wore a golden or silver coin, afterwards called the geusen penny, of which one side bore the effigy of the king, with the inscription, "true to the king;" on the other side were seen two hands folded together holding a wallet, with the words "as far as the beggar's scrip." hence the origin of the name "gueux," which was subsequently borne in the netherlands by all who seceded from popery and took up arms against the king. before the confederates separated and dispersed among the provinces they presented themselves once more before the duchess, in order to remind her of the necessity of leniency towards the heretics until the arrival of the king's answer from spain, if she did not wish to drive the people to extremities. "if, however," they added, "a contrary behavior should give rise to any evils they at least must be regarded as having done their duty." to this the regent replied, "she hoped to be able to adopt such measures as would render it impossible for disorders to ensue; but if, nevertheless, they did occur, she could ascribe them to no one but the confederates. she therefore earnestly admonished them on their part to fulfil their engagements, but especially to receive no new members into the league, to hold no more private assemblies, and generally not to attempt any novel and unconstitutional measures." and in order to tranquillize their minds she commanded her private secretary, berti, to show them the letters to the inquisitors and secular judges, wherein they were enjoined to observe moderation towards all those who had not aggravated their heretical offences by any civil crime. before their departure from brussels they named four presidents from among their number who were to take care of the affairs of the league, and also particular administrators for each province. a few were left behind in brussels to keep a watchful eye on all the movements of the court. brederode, kuilemberg, and bergen at last quitted the town, attended by five hundred and fifty horsemen, saluted it once more beyond the walls with a discharge of musketry, and then the three leaders parted, brederode taking the road to antwerp, and the two others to guelders. the regent had sent off an express to antwerp to warn the magistrate of that town against him. on his arrival more than a thousand persons thronged to the hotel where he had taken up his abode. showing himself at a window, with a full wineglass in his hand, he thus addressed them: "citizens of antwerp! i am here at the hazard of my life and my property to relieve you from the oppressive burden of the inquisition. if you are ready to share this enterprise with me, and to acknowledge me as your leader, accept the health which i here drink to you, and hold up your hands in testimony of your approbation." hereupon he drank to their health, and all hands were raised amidst clamorous shouts of exultation. after this heroic deed he quitted antwerp. immediately after the delivery of the "petition of the nobles," the regent had caused a new form of the edicts to be drawn up in the privy council, which should keep the mean between the commands of the king and the demands of the confederates. but the next question that arose was to determine whether it would be advisable immediately to promulgate this mitigated form, or moderation, as it was commonly called, or to submit it first to the king for his ratification. the privy council who maintained that it would be presumptuous to take a step so important and so contrary to the declared sentiments of the monarch without having first obtained his sanction, opposed the vote of the prince of orange who supported the former proposition. besides, they urged, there was cause to fear that it would not even content the nation. a "moderation" devised with the assent of the states was what they particularly insisted on. in order, therefore, to gain the consent of the states, or rather to obtain it from them by stealth, the regent artfully propounded the question to the provinces singly, and first of all to those which possessed the least freedom, such as artois, namur, and luxemburg. thus she not only prevented one province encouraging another in opposition, but also gained this advantage by it, that the freer provinces, such as flanders and brabant, which were prudently reserved to the last, allowed themselves to be carried away by the example of the others. by a very illegal procedure the representatives of the towns were taken by surprise, and their consent exacted before they could confer with their constituents, while complete silence was imposed upon them with regard to the whole transaction. by these means the regent obtained the unconditional consent of some of the provinces to the "moderation," and, with a few slight changes, that of other provinces. luxemburg and namur subscribed it without scruple. the states of artois simply added the condition that false informers should be subjected to a retributive penalty; those of hainault demanded that instead of confiscation of the estates, which directly militated against their privileges, another discretionary punishment should be introduced. flanders called for the entire abolition of the inquisition, and desired that the accused might be secured in right of appeal to their own province. the states of brabant were outwitted by the intrigues of the court. zealand, holland, utrecht, guelders, and friesland as being provinces which enjoyed the most important privileges, and which, moreover, watched over them with the greatest jealousy, were never asked for their opinion. the provincial courts of judicature had also been required to make a report on the projected amendment of the law, but we may well suppose that it was unfavorable, as it never reached spain. from the principal cause of this "moderation," which, however, really deserved its name, we may form a judgment of the general character of the edicts themselves. "sectarian writers," it ran, "the heads and teachers of sects, as also those who conceal heretical meetings, or cause any other public scandal, shall be punished with the gallows, and their estates, where the law of the province permit it, confiscated; but if they abjure their errors, their punishment shall be commuted into decapitation with the sword, and their effects shall be preserved to their families." a cruel snare for parental affection! less grievous heretics, it was further enacted, shall, if penitent, be pardoned; and if impenitent shall be compelled to leave the country, without, however, forfeiting their estates, unless by continuing to lead others astray they deprive themselves of the benefit of this provision. the anabaptists, however, were expressly excluded from benefiting by this clause; these, if they did not clear themselves by the most thorough repentance, were to forfeit their possessions; and if, on the other hand, they relapsed after penitence, that is, were backsliding heretics, they were to be put to death without mercy. the greater regard for life and property which is observable in this ordinance as compared with the edicts, and which we might be tempted to ascribe to a change of intention in the spanish ministry, was nothing more than a compulsory step extorted by the determined opposition of the nobles. so little, too, were the people in the netherlands satisfied by this "moderation," which fundamentally did not remove a single abuse, that instead of "moderation" (mitigation), they indignantly called it "moorderation," that is, murdering. after the consent of the states had in this manner been extorted from them, the "moderation" was submitted to the council of the state, and, after receiving their signatures, forwarded to the king in spain in order to receive from his ratification the force of law. the embassy to madrid, which had been agreed upon with the confederates, was at the outset entrusted to the marquis of bergen, who, however, from a distrust of the present disposition of the king, which was only too well grounded, and from reluctance to engage alone in so delicate a business, begged for a coadjutor. [this marquis of bergen is to be distinguished from count william of bergen, who was among the first who subscribed the covenant. vigi. ad hopper, letter vii.] he obtained one in the baron of montigny, who had previously been employed in a similar duty, and had discharged it with high credit. as, however, circumstances had since altered so much that he had just anxiety as to his present reception in madrid for his greater safety, he stipulated with the duchess that she should write to the monarch previously; and that he, with his companion, should, in the meanwhile, travel slowly enough to give time for the king's answer reaching him en route. his good genius wished, as it appeared, to save him from the terrible fate which awaited him in madrid, for his departure was delayed by an unexpected obstacle, the marquis of bergen being disabled from setting out immediately through a wound which he received from the blow of a tennis-ball. at last, however, yielding to the pressing importunities of the regent, who was anxious to expedite the business, he set out alone, not, as he hoped, to carry the cause of his nation, but to die for it. in the meantime the posture of affairs had changed so greatly in the netherlands, the step which the nobles had recently taken had so nearly brought on a complete rupture with the government, that it seemed impossible for the prince of orange and his friends to maintain any longer the intermediate and delicate position which they had hitherto held between the country and the court, or to reconcile the contradictory duties to which it gave rise. great must have been the restraint which, with their mode of thinking, they had to put on themselves not to take part in this contest; much, too, must their natural love of liberty, their patriotism, and their principles of toleration have suffered from the constraint which their official station imposed upon them. on the other hand, philip's distrust, the little regard which now for a long time had been paid to their advice, and the marked slights which the duchess publicly put upon them, had greatly contributed to cool their zeal for the service, and to render irksome the longer continuance of a part which they played with so much repugnance and with so little thanks. this feeling was strengthened by several intimations they received from spain which placed beyond doubt the great displeasure of the king at the petition of the nobles, and his little satisfaction with their own behavior on that occasion, while they were also led to expect that he was about to enter upon measures, to which, as favorable to the liberties of their country, and for the most part friends or blood relations of the confederates; they could never lend their countenance or support. on the name which should be applied in spain to the confederacy of the nobles it principally depended what course they should follow for the future. if the petition should be called rebellion no alternative would be left them but either to come prematurely to a dangerous explanation with the court, or to aid it in treating as enemies those with whom they had both a fellow-feeling and a common interest. this perilous alternative could only be avoided by withdrawing entirely from public affairs; this plan they had once before practically adopted, and under present circumstances it was something more than a simple expedient. the whole nation had their eyes upon them. an unlimited confidence in their integrity, and the universal veneration for their persons, which closely bordered on idolatry, would ennoble the cause which they might make their own and ruin that which they should abandon. their share in the administration of the state, though it were nothing more than nominal, kept the opposite party in check; while they attended the senate violent measures were avoided because their continued presence still favored some expectations of succeeding by gentle means. the withholding of their approbation, even if it did not proceed from their hearts, dispirited the faction, which, on the contrary, would exert its full strength so soon as it could reckon even distantly on obtaining so weighty a sanction. the very measures of the government which, if they came through their hands, were certain of a favorable reception and issue, would without them prove suspected and futile; even the royal concessions, if they were not obtained by the mediation of these friends of the people, would fail of the chief part of their efficacy. besides, their retirement from public affairs would deprive the regent of the benefit of their advice at a time when counsel was most indispensable to her; it would, moreover, leave the preponderance with a party which, blindly dependent on the court, and ignorant of the peculiarities of republican character, would neglect nothing to aggravate the evil, and to drive to extremity the already exasperated mind of the public. all these motives (and it is open to every one, according to his good or bad opinion of the prince, to say which was the most influential) tended alike to move him to desert the regent, and to divest himself of all share in public affairs. an opportunity for putting this resolve into execution soon presented itself. the prince had voted for the immediate promulgation of the newly-revised edicts; but the regent, following the suggestion of her privy council, had determined to transmit them first to the king. "i now see clearly," he broke out with well-acted vehemence, "that all the advice which i give is distrusted. the king requires no servants whose loyalty he is determined to doubt; and far be it from me to thrust my services upon a sovereign who is unwilling to receive them. better, therefore, for him and me that i withdraw from public affairs." count horn expressed himself nearly to the same effect. egmont requested permission to visit the baths of aix-la- chapelle, the use of which had been prescribed to him by his physician, although (as it is stated in his accusation) he appeared health itself. the regent, terrified at the consequences which must inevitably follow this step, spoke sharply to the prince. "if neither my representations, nor the general welfare can prevail upon you, so far as to induce you to relinquish this intention, let me advise you to be more careful, at least, of your own reputation. louis of nassau is your brother; he and count brederode, the heads of the confederacy, have publicly been your guests. the petition is in substance identical with your own representations in the council of state. if you now suddenly desert the cause of your king will it not be universally said that you favor the conspiracy?" we do not find it anywhere stated whether the prince really withdrew at this time from the council of state; at all events, if he did, he must soon have altered his mind, for shortly after he appears again in public transactions. egmont allowed himself to be overcome by the remonstrances of the regent; horn alone actually withdrew himself to one of his estates,--[where be remained three months inactive.]--with the resolution of never more serving either emperor or king. meanwhile the gueux had dispersed themselves through the provinces, and spread everywhere the most favorable reports of their success. according to their assertions, religious freedom was finally assured; and in order to confirm their statements they helped themselves, where the truth failed, with falsehood. for example, they produced a forged letter of the knights of the fleece, in which the latter were made solemnly to declare that for the future no one need fear imprisonment, or banishment, or death on account of religion, unless he also committed a political crime; and even in that case the confederates alone were to be his judges; and this regulation was to be in force until the king, with the consent and advice of the states of the realm, should otherwise dispose. earnestly as the knights applied themselves upon the first information of the fraud to rescue the nation from their delusion, still it had already in this short interval done good service to the faction. if there are truths whose effect is limited to a single instant, then inventions which last so long can easily assume their place. besides, the report, however false, was calculated both to awaken distrust between the regent and the knights, and to support the courage of the protestants by fresh hopes, while it also furnished those who were meditating innovation an appearance of right, which, however unsubstantial they themselves knew it to be, served as a colorable pretext for their proceedings. quickly as this delusion was dispelled, still, in the short space of time that it obtained belief, it had occasioned so many extravagances, had introduced so much irregularity and license, that a return to the former state of things became impossible, and continuance in the course already commenced was rendered necessary as well by habit as by despair. on the very first news of this happy result the fugitive protestants had returned to their homes, which they had so unwillingly abandoned; those who had been in concealment came forth from their hiding-places; those who had hitherto paid homage to the new religion in their hearts alone, emboldened by these pretended acts of toleration, now gave in their adhesion to it publicly and decidedly. the name of the "gueux" was extolled in all the provinces; they were called the pillars of religion and liberty; their party increased daily, and many of the merchants began to wear their insignia. the latter made an alteration in the "gueux" penny, by introducing two travellers' staffs, laid crosswise, to intimate that they stood prepared and ready at any instant to forsake house and hearth for the sake of religion. the gueux league, in short, had now given to things an entirely different form. the murmurs of the people, hitherto impotent and despised, as being the cries of individuals, had, now that they were concentrated, become formidable; and had gained power, direction, and firmness through union. every one who was rebelliously disposed now looked on himself as the member of a venerable and powerful body, and believed that by carrying his own complaints to the general stock of discontent he secured the free expression of them. to be called an important acquisition to the league flattered the vain; to be lost, unnoticed, and irresponsible in the crowd was an inducement to the timid. the face which the confederacy showed to the nation was very unlike that which it had turned to the court. but had its objects been the purest, had it really been as well disposed towards the throne as it wished to appear, still the multitude would have regarded only what was illegal in its proceedings, and upon them its better intentions would have been entirely lost. public preaching. no moment could be more favorable to the huguenots and the german protestants than the present to seek a market for their dangerous commodity in the netherlands. accordingly, every considerable town now swarmed with suspicious arrivals, masked spies, and the apostles of every description of heresy. of the religious parties, which had sprung up by secession from the ruling church, three chiefly had made considerable progress in the provinces. friesland and the adjoining districts were overrun by the anabaptists, who, however, as the most indigent, without organization and government, destitute of military resources, and moreover at strife amongst themselves, awakened the least apprehension. of far more importance were the calvanists, who prevailed in the southern provinces, and above all in flanders, who were powerfully supported by their neighbors the huguenots, the republic of geneva, the swiss cantons, and part of germany, and whose opinions, with the exception of a slight difference, were also held by the throne in england. they were also the most numerous party, especially among the merchants and common citizens. the huguenots, expelled from france, had been the chief disseminators of the tenets of this party. the lutherans were inferior both in numbers and wealth, but derived weight from having many adherents among the nobility. they occupied, for the most part, the eastern portion of the netherlands, which borders on germany, and were also to be found in some of the northern territories. some of the most powerful princes of germany were their allies; and the religious freedom of that empire, of which by the burgundian treaty the netherlands formed an integral part, was claimed by them with some appearance of right. these three religious denominations met together in antwerp, where the crowded population concealed them, and the mingling of all nations favored liberty. they had nothing in common, except an equally inextinguishable hatred of popery, of the inquisition in particular, and of the spanish government, whose instrument it was; while, on the other hand, they watched each other with a jealousy which kept their zeal in exercise, and prevented the glowing ardor of fanaticism from waxing dull. the regent, in expectation that the projected "moderation" would be sanctioned by the king, had, in the meantime, to gratify the gueux, recommended the governors and municipal officers of the provinces to be as moderate as possible in their proceedings against heretics; instructions which were eagerly followed, and interpreted in the widest sense by the majority, who had hitherto administered the painful duty of punishment with extreme repugnance. most of the chief magistrates were in their hearts averse to the inquisition and the spanish tyranny, and many were even secretly attached to one or other of the religious parties; even the others were unwilling to inflict punishment on their countrymen to gratify their sworn enemies, the spaniards. all, therefore, purposely misunderstood the regent, and allowed the inquisition and the edicts to fall almost entirely into disuse. this forbearance of the government, combined with the brilliant representations of the gueux, lured from their obscurity the protestants, who, however, had now grown too powerful to be any longer concealed. hitherto they had contented themselves with secret assemblies by night; now they thought themselves numerous and formidable enough to venture to these meetings openly and publicly. this license commenced somewhere between oudenarde and ghent, and soon spread through the rest of flanders. a certain herrnann stricker, born at overyssel, formerly a monk, a daring enthusiast of able mind, imposing figure, and ready tongue, was the first who collected the people for a sermon in the open air. the novelty of the thing gathered together a crowd of about seven thousand persons. a magistrate of the neighborhood, more courageous than wise, rushed amongst the crowd with his drawn sword, and attempted to seize the preacher, but was so roughly handled by the multitude, who for want of other weapons took up stones and felled him to the ground, that he was glad to beg for his life. [the unheard-of foolhardiness of a single man rushing into the midst of a fanatical crowd of seven thousand people to seize before their eyes one whom they adored, proves, more than all that can be said on the subject the insolent contempt with which the roman catholics of the time looked down upon the so-called heretics as an inferior race of beings.] this success of the first attempt inspired courage for a second. in the vicinity of aalst they assembled again in still greater numbers; but on this occasion they provided themselves with rapiers, firearms, and halberds, placed sentries at all the approaches, which they also barricaded with carts and carriages. all passers-by were obliged, whether willing or otherwise, to take part in the religious service, and to enforce this object lookout parties were posted at certain distances round the place of meeting. at the entrance booksellers stationed themselves, offering for sale protestant catechisms, religious tracts, and pasquinades on the bishops. the preacher, hermann stricker, held forth from a pulpit which was hastily constructed for the occasion out of carts and trunks of trees. a canvas awning drawn over it protected him from the sun and the rain; the preacher's position was in the quarter of the wind that the people might not lose any part of his sermon, which consisted principally of revilings against popery. here the sacraments were administered after the calvinistic fashion, and water was procured from the nearest river to baptize infants without further ceremony, after the practice, it was pretended, of the earliest times of christianity. couples were also united in wedlock, and the marriage ties dissolved between others. to be present at this meeting half the population of ghent had left its gates; their example was soon followed in other parts, and ere long spread over the whole of east flanders. in like manner peter dathen, another renegade monk, from poperingen, stirred up west flanders; as many as fifteen thousand persons at a time attended his preaching from the villages and hamlets; their number made them bold, and they broke into the prisons, where some anabaptists were reserved for martyrdom. in tournay the protestants were excited to a similar pitch of daring by ambrosius ville, a french calvinist. they demanded the release of the prisoners of their sect, and repeatedly threatened if their demands were not complied with to deliver up the town to the french. it was entirely destitute of a garrison, for the commandant, from fear of treason, had withdrawn it into the castle, and the soldiers, moreover, refused to act against their fellow-citizens. the sectarians carried their audacity to such great lengths as to require one of the churches within the town to be assigned to them; and when this was refused they entered into a league with valenciennes and antwerp to obtain a legal recognition of their worship, after the example of the other towns, by open force. these three towns maintained a close connection with each other, and the protestant party was equally powerful in all. while, however, no one would venture singly to commence the disturbance, they agreed simultaneously to make a beginning with public preaching. brederode's appearance in antwerp at last gave them courage. six thousand persons, men and women, poured forth from the town on an appointed day, on which the same thing happened in tournay and valenciennes. the place of meeting was closed in with a line of vehicles, firmly fastened together, and behind them armed men were secretly posted, with a view to protect the service from any surprise. of the preachers, most of whom were men of the very lowest class--some were germans, some were huguenots--and spoke in the walloon dialect; some even of the citizens felt themselves called upon to take a part in this sacred work, now that no fears of the officers of justice alarmed them. many were drawn to the spot by mere curiosity to hear what kind of new and unheard-of doctrines these foreign teachers, whose arrival had caused so much talk, would set forth. others were attracted by the melody of the psalms, which were sung in a french version, after the custom in geneva. a great number came to hear these sermons as so many amusing comedies such was the buffoonery with which the pope, the fathers of the ecclesiastical council of trent, purgatory, and other dogmas of the ruling church were abused in them. and, in fact, the more extravagant was this abuse and ridicule the more it tickled the ears of the lower orders; and a universal clapping of hands, as in a theatre, rewarded the speaker who had surpassed others in the wildness of his jokes and denunciations. but the ridicule which was thus cast upon the ruling church was, nevertheless, not entirely lost on the minds of the hearers, as neither were the few grains of truth or reason which occasionally slipped in among it; and many a one, who had sought from these sermons anything but conviction, unconsciously carried away a little also of it. these assemblies were several times repeated, and each day augmented the boldness of the sectarians; till at last they even ventured, after concluding the service to conduct their preachers home in triumph, with an escort of armed horsemen, and ostentatiously to brave the law. the town council sent express after express to the duchess, entreating her to visit them in person, and if possible to reside for a short time in antwerp, as the only expedient to curb the arrogance of the populace; and assuring her that the most eminent merchants, afraid of being plundered, were already preparing to quit it. fear of staking the royal dignity on so hazardous a stroke of policy forbade her compliance; but she despatched in her stead count megen, in order to treat with the magistrate for the introduction of a garrison. the rebellious mob, who quickly got an inkling of the object of his visit, gathered around him with tumultuous cries, shouting, "he was known to them as a sworn enemy of the gueux; that it was notorious he was bringing upon them prisons and the inquisition, and that he should leave the town instantly." nor was the tumult quieted till megen was beyond the gates. the calvinists now handed in to the magistrate a memorial, in which they showed that their great numbers made it impossible for them henceforward to assemble in secrecy, and requested a separate place of worship to be allowed them inside the town. the town council renewed its entreaties to the duchess to assist, by her personal presence, their perplexities, or at least to send to them the prince of orange, as the only person for whom the people still had any respect, and, moreover, as specially bound to the town of antwerp by his hereditary title of its burgrave. in order to escape the greater evil she was compelled to consent to the second demand, however much against her inclination to entrust antwerp to the prince. after allowing himself to be long and fruitlessly entreated, for he had all at once resolved to take no further share in public affairs, he yielded at last to the earnest persuasions of the regent and the boisterous wishes of the people. brederode, with a numerous retinue, came half a mile out of the town to meet him, and both parties saluted each other with a discharge of pistols. antwerp appeared to have poured out all her inhabitants to welcome her deliverer. the high road swarmed with multitudes; the roofs were taken off the houses in order that they might accommodate more spectators; behind fences, from churchyard walls, even out of graves started up men. the attachment of the people to the prince showed itself in childish effusions. "long live the gueux!" was the shout with which young and old received him. "behold," cried others, "the man who shall give us liberty." "he brings us," cried the lutherans, "the confession of augsburg!" "we don't want the gueux now!" exclaimed others; "we have no more need of the troublesome journey to brussels. he alone is everything to us!" those who knew not what to say vented their extravagant joy in psalms, which they vociferously chanted as they moved along. he, however, maintained his gravity, beckoned for silence, and at last, when no one would listen to him, exclaimed with indignation, half real and half affected, "by god, they ought to consider what they did, or they would one day repent what they had now done." the shouting increased even as he rode into the town. the first conference of the prince with the heads of the different religious sects, whom he sent for and separately interrogated, presently convinced him that the chief source of the evil was the mutual distrust of the several parties, and the suspicions which the citizens entertained of the designs of the government, and that therefore it must be his first business to restore confidence among them all. first of all he attempted, both by persuasion and artifice, to induce the calvinists, as the most numerous body, to lay down their weapons, and in this he at last, with much labor, succeeded. when, however, some wagons were soon afterwards seen laden with ammunition in malines, and the high bailiff of brabant showed himself frequently in the neighborhood of antwerp with an armed force, the calvinists, fearing hostile interruption of their religious worship, besought the prince to allot them a place within the walls for their sermons, which should be secure from a surprise. he succeeded once more in pacifying them, and his presence fortunately prevented an outbreak on the assumption of the virgin, which, as usual, had drawn a crowd to the town, and from whose sentiments there was but too much reason for alarm. the image of the virgin was, with the usual pomp, carried round the town without interruption; a few words of abuse, and a suppressed murmur about idolatry, was all that the disapproving multitudes indulged in against the procession. . while the regent received from one province after another the most melancholy accounts of the excesses of the protestants, and while she trembled for antwerp, which she was compelled to leave in the dangerous hands of the prince of orange, a new terror assailed her from another quarter. upon the first authentic tidings of the public preaching she immediately called upon the league to fulfil its promises and to assist her in restoring order. count brederode used this pretext to summon a general meeting of the whole league, for which he could not have selected a more dangerous moment than the present. so ostentatious a display of the strength of the league, whose existence and protection had alone encouraged the protestant mob to go the length it had already gone, would now raise the confidence of the sectarians, while in the same degree it depressed the courage of the regent. the convention took place in the town of liege st. truyen, into which brederode and louis of nassau had thrown themselves at the head of two thousand confederates. as the long delay of the royal answer from madrid seemed to presage no good from that quarter, they considered it advisable in any case to extort from the regent a letter of indemnity for their persons. those among them who were conscious of a disloyal sympathy with the protestant mob looked on its licentiousness as a favorable circumstance for the league; the apparent success of those to whose degrading fellowship they had deigned to stoop led them to alter their tone; their former laudable zeal began to degenerate into insolence and defiance. many thought that they ought to avail themselves of the general confusion and the perplexity of the duchess to assume a bolder tone and heap demand upon demand. the roman catholic members of the league, among whom many were in their hearts still strongly inclined to the royal cause, and who had been drawn into a connection with the league by occasion and example, rather than from feeling and conviction, now heard to their astonishment propositions for establishing universal freedom of religion, and were not a little shocked to discover in how perilous an enterprise they had hastily implicated themselves. on this discovery the young count mansfeld withdrew immediately from it, and internal dissensions already began to undermine the work of precipitation and haste, and imperceptibly to loosen the joints of the league. count egmont and william of orange were empowered by the regent to treat with the confederates. twelve of the latter, among whom were louis of nassau, brederode, and kuilemberg, conferred with them in duffle, a village near malines. "wherefore this new step?" demanded the regent by the mouth of these two noblemen. "i was required to despatch ambassadors to spain; and i sent them. the edicts and the inquisition were complained of as too rigorous; i have rendered both more lenient. a general assembly of the states of the realm was proposed; i have submitted this request to the king because i could not grant it from my own authority. what, then, have i unwittingly either omitted or done that should render necessary this assembling in st. truyen? is it perhaps fear of the king's anger and of its consequences that disturbs the confederates? the provocation certainly is great, but his mercy is even greater. where now is the promise of the league to excite no disturbances amongst the people? where those high-sounding professions that they were ready to die at my feet rather, than offend against any of the prerogatives of the crown? the innovators already venture on things which border closely on rebellion, and threaten the state with destruction; and it is to the league that they appeal. if it continues silently to tolerate this it will justly bring on itself the charge of participating in the guilt of their offences; if it is honestly disposed towards the sovereign it cannot remain longer inactive in this licentiousness of the mob. but, in truth, does it not itself outstrip the insane population by its dangerous example, concluding, as it is known to do, alliances with the enemies of the country, and confirming the evil report of its designs by the present illegal meeting?" against these reproaches the league formally justified itself in a memorial which it deputed three of its members to deliver to the council of state at brussels. "all," it commenced, "that your highness has done in respect to our petition we have felt with the most lively gratitude; and we cannot complain of any new measure, subsequently adopted, inconsistent with your promise; but we cannot help coming to the conclusion that the orders of your highness are by the judicial courts, at least, very little regarded; for we are continually hearing--and our own eyes attest to the truth of the report--that in all quarters our fellow-citizens are in spite of the orders of your highness still mercilessly dragged before the courts of justice and condemned to death for religion. what the league engaged on its part to do it has honestly fulfilled; it has, too, to the utmost of its power endeavored to prevent the public preachings; but it certainly is no wonder if the long delay of an answer from madrid fills the mind of the people with distrust, and if the disappointed hopes of a general assembly of the states disposes them to put little faith in any further assurances. the league has never allied, nor ever felt any temptation to ally, itself with the enemies of the country. if the arms of france were to appear in the provinces we, the confederates, would be the first to mount and drive them back again. the league, however, desires to be candid with your highness. we thought we read marks of displeasure in your countenance; we see men in exclusive possession of your favor who are notorious for their hatred against us. we daily hear that persons are warned from associating with us, as with those infected with the plague, while we are denounced with the arrival of the king as with the opening of a day of judgment--what is more natural than that such distrust shown to us should at last rouse our own? that the attempt to blacken our league with the reproach of treason, that the warlike preparations of the duke of savoy and of other princes, which, according to common report, are directed against ourselves; the negotiations of the king with the french court to obtain a passage through that kingdom for a spanish army, which is destined, it is said, for the netherlands--what wonder if these and similar occurrences should have stimulated us to think in time of the means of self-defence, and to strengthen ourselves by an alliance with our friends beyond the frontier? on a general, uncertain, and vague rumor we are accused of a share in this licentiousness of the protestant mob; but who is safe from general rumor? true it is, certainly, that of our numbers some are protestants, to whom religious toleration would be a welcome boon; but even they have never forgotten what they owe to their sovereign. it is not fear of the king's anger which instigated us to hold this assembly. the king is good, and we still hope that he is also just. it cannot, therefore, be pardon that we seek from him, and just as little can it be oblivion that we solicit for our actions, which are far from being the least considerable of the services we have at different times rendered his majesty. again, it is true, that the delegates of the lutherans and calvinists are with us in st. truyen; nay, more, they have delivered to us a petition which, annexed to this memorial, we here present to your highness. in it they offer to go unarmed to their preachings if the league will tender its security to them, and be willing to engage for a general meeting of the states. we have thought it incumbent upon us to communicate both these matters to you, for our guarantee can have no force unless it is at the same time confirmed by your highness and some of your principal counsellors. among these no one can be so well acquainted with the circumstances of our cause, or be so upright in intention towards us, as the prince of orange and counts horn and egmont. we gladly accept these three as meditators if the necessary powers are given to them, and assurance is afforded us that no troops will be enlisted without their knowledge. this guarantee, however, we only require for a given period, before the expiration of which it will rest with the king whether he will cancel or confirm it for the future. if the first should be his will it will then be but fair that time should be allowed us to place our persons and our property in security; for this three weeks will be sufficient. finally, and in conclusion, we on our part also pledge ourselves to undertake nothing new without the concurrence of those three persons, our mediators." the league would not have ventured to hold such bold language if it had not reckoned on powerful support and protection; but the regent was as little in a condition to concede their demands as she was incapable of vigorously opposing them. deserted in brussels by most of her counsellors of state, who had either departed to their provinces, or under some pretext or other had altogether withdrawn from public affairs; destitute as well of advisers as of money (the latter want had compelled her, in the first instance, to appeal to the liberality of the clergy; when this proved insufficient, to have recourse to a lottery), dependent on orders from spain, which were ever expected and never received, she was at last reduced to the degrading expedient of entering into a negotiation with the confederates in st. truyen, that they should wait twenty-four days longer for the king's resolution before they took any further steps. it was certainly surprising that the king still continued to delay a decisive answer to the petition, although it was universally known that he had answered letters of a much later date, and that the regent earnestly importuned him on this head. she had also, on the commencement of the public preaching, immediately despatched the marquis of bergen after the baron of montigny, who, as an eye-witness of these new occurrences, could confirm her written statements, to move the king to an earlier decision. . in the meanwhile, the flemish ambassador, florence of montigny, had arrived in madrid, where he was received with a great show of consideration. his instructions were to press for the abolition of the inquisition and the mitigation of the edicts; the augmentation of the council of state, and the incorporation with it of the two other councils; the calling of a general assembly of the states, and, lastly, to urge the solicitations of the regent for a personal visit from the king. as the latter, however, was only desirous of gaining time, montigny was put off with fair words until the arrival of his coadjutor, without whom the king was not willing to come to any final determination. in the meantime, montigny had every day and at any hour that he desired, an audience with the king, who also commanded that on all occasions the despatches of the duchess and the answers to them should be communicated to himself. he was, too, frequently admitted to the council for belgian affairs, where he never omitted to call the king's attention to the necessity of a general assembly of the states, as being the only means of successfully meeting the troubles which had arisen, and as likely to supersede the necessity of any other measure. he moreover impressed upon him that a general and unreserved indemnity for the past would alone eradicate the distrust, which was the source of all existing complaints, and would always counteract the good effects of every measure, however well advised. he ventured, from a thorough acquaintance with circumstances and accurate knowledge of the character of his countrymen, to pledge himself to the king for their inviolable loyalty, as soon as they should be convinced of the honesty of his intentions by the straightforwardness of his proceedings; while, on the contrary, he assured him that there would be no hopes of it as long as they were not relieved of the fear of being made the victims of the oppression, and sacrificed to the envy of the spanish nobles. at last montigny's coadjutor made his appearance, and the objects of their embassy were made the subject of repeated deliberations. . the king was at that time at his palace at segovia, where also he assembled his state council. the members were: the duke of alva; don gomez de figueroa; the count of feria; don antonio of toledo, grand commander of st. john; don john manriquez of lara, lord steward to the queen; ruy gomez, prince of eboli and count of melito; louis of quixada, master of the horse to the prince; charles tyssenacque, president of the council for the netherlands; hopper, state counsellor and keeper of the seal; and state counsellor corteville. the sitting of the council was protracted for several days; both ambassadors were in attendance, but the king was not himself present. here, then, the conduct of the belgian nobles was examined by spanish eyes; step by step it was traced back to the most distant source; circumstances were brought into relation with others which, in reality, never had any connection; and what had been the offspring of the moment was made out to be a well- matured and far-sighted plan. all the different transactions and attempts of the nobles which had been governed solely by chance, and to which the natural order of events alone assigned their particular shape and succession, were said to be the result of a preconcerted scheme for introducing universal liberty in religion, and for placing all the power of the state in the hands of the nobles. the first step to this end was, it was said, the violent expulsion of the minister granvella, against whom nothing could be charged, except that he was in possession of an authority which they preferred to exercise themselves. the second step was sending count egmont to spain to urge the abolition of the inquisition and the mitigation of the penal statutes, and to prevail on the king to consent to an augmentation of the council of state. as, however, this could not be surreptitiously obtained in so quiet a manner, the attempt was made to extort it from the court by a third and more daring step--by a formal conspiracy, the league of the gueux. the fourth step to the same end was the present embassy, which at length boldly cast aside the mask, and by the insane proposals which they were not ashamed to make to their king, clearly brought to light the object to which all the preceding steps had tended. could the abolition of the inquisition, they exclaimed, lead to anything less than a complete freedom of belief? would not the guiding helm of conscience be lost with it? did not the proposed "moderation" introduce an absolute impunity for all heresies? what was the project of augmenting the council of state and of suppressing the two other councils but a complete remodelling of the government of the country in favor of the nobles?--a general constitution for all the provinces of the netherlands? again, what was this compact of the ecclesiastics in their public preachings but a third conspiracy, entered into with the very same objects which the league of the nobles in the council of state and that of the gueux had failed to effect? however, it was confessed that whatever might be the source of the evil it was not on that account the less important and imminent. the immediate personal presence of the king in brussels was, indubitably, the most efficacious means speedily and thoroughly to remedy it. as, however, it was already so late in the year, and the preparations alone for the journey would occupy the short tine which was to elapse before the winter set in; as the stormy season of the year, as well as the danger from french and english ships, which rendered the sea unsafe, did not allow of the king's taking the northern route, which was the shorter of the two; as the rebels themselves meanwhile might become possessed of the island of walcheren, and oppose the lauding of the king; for all these reasons, the journey was not to be thought of before the spring, and in absence of the only complete remedy it was necessary to rest satisfied with a partial expedient. the council, therefore, agreed to propose to the king, in the first place, that he should recall the papal inquisition from the provinces and rest satisfied with that of the bishops; in the second place, that a new plan for the mitigation of the edicts should be projected, by which the honor of religion and of the king would be better preserved than it had been in the transmitted "moderation;" thirdly, that in order to reassure the minds of the people, and to leave no means untried, the king should impart to the regent full powers to extend free grace and pardon to all those who had not already committed any heinous crime, or who had not as yet been condemned by any judicial process; but from the benefit of this indemnity the preachers and all who harbored them were to be excepted. on the other hand, all leagues, associations, public assemblies, and preachings were to be henceforth prohibited under heavy penalties; if, however, this prohibition should be infringed, the regent was to be at liberty to employ the regular troops and garrisons for the forcible reduction of the refractory, and also, in case of necessity, to enlist new troops, and to name the commanders over them according as should be deemed advisable. finally, it would have a good effect if his majesty would write to the most eminent towns, prelates, and leaders of the nobility, to some in his own hand, and to all in a gracious tone, in order to stimulate their zeal in his service. when this resolution of his council of state was submitted to the king his first measure was to command public processions and prayers in all the most considerable places of the kingdom and also of the netherlands, imploring the divine guidance in his decision. he appeared in his own person in the council of state in order to approve this resolution and render it effective. he declared the general assembly of the states to be useless and entirely abolished it. he, however, bound himself to retain some german regiments in his pay, and, that they might serve with the more zeal, to pay them their long-standing arrears. he commanded the regent in a private letter to prepare secretly for war; three thousand horse and ten thousand infantry were to be assembled by her in germany, to which end he furnished her with the necessary letters and transmitted to her a sum of three hundred thousand gold florins. he also accompanied this resolution with several autograph letters to some private individuals and towns, in which he thanked them in the most gracious terms for the zeal which they had already displayed in his service and called upon them to manifest the same for the future. notwithstanding that he was inexorable on the most important point, and the very one on which the nation most particularly insisted--the convocation of the states, notwithstanding that his limited and ambiguous pardon was as good as none, and depended too much on arbitrary will to calm the public mind; notwithstanding, in fine, that he rejected, as too lenient, the proposed "moderation," but which, on the part of the people, was complained of as too severe; still he had this time made an unwonted step in the favor of the nation; he had sacrificed to it the papal inquisition and left only the episcopal, to which it was accustomed. the nation had found more equitable judges in the spanish council than they could reasonably have hoped for. whether at another time and under other circumstances this wise concession would have had the desired effect we will not pretend to say. it came too late; when ( ) the royal letters reached brussels the attack on images had already commenced. this ebook was produced by david widger, widger@cecomet.net book iv. the iconoclasts. the springs of this extraordinary occurrence are plainly not to be sought for so far back as many historians affect to trace them. it is certainly possible, and very probable, that the french protestants did industriously exert themselves to raise in the netherlands a nursery for their religion, and to prevent by all means in their power an amicable adjustment of differences between their brethren in the faith in that quarter and the king of spain, in order to give that implacable foe of their party enough to do in his own country. it is natural, therefore, to suppose that their agents in the provinces left nothing undone to encourage their oppressed brethren with daring hopes, to nourish their animosity against the ruling church, and by exaggerating the oppression under which they sighed to hurry them imperceptibly into illegal courses. it is possible, too, that there were many among the confederates who thought to help out their own lost cause by increasing the number of their partners in guilt; who thought they could not otherwise maintain the legal character of their league unless the unfortunate results against which they had warned the king really came to pass, and who hoped in the general guilt of all to conceal their own individual criminality. it is, however, incredible that the outbreak of the iconoclasts was the fruit of a deliberate plan, preconcerted, as it is alleged, at the convent of st. truyen. it does not seem likely that in a solemn assembly of so many nobles and warriors, of whom the greater part were the adherents of popery, an individual should be found insane enough to propose an act of positive infamy, which did not so much injure any religious party in particular, as rather tread under foot all respect for religion in general, and even all morality too, and which could have been conceived only in the mind of the vilest reprobate. besides, this outrage was too sudden in its outbreak, too vehement in its execution altogether, too monstrous to have been anything more than the offspring of the moment in which it saw the light; it seemed to flow so naturally from the circumstances which preceded it that it does not require to be traced far back to remount to its origin. a rude mob, consisting of the very dregs of the populace, made brutal by harsh treatment, by sanguinary decrees which dogged them in every town, scared from place to place and driven almost to despair, were compelled to worship their god, and to hide like a work of darkness the universal, sacred privilege of humanity. before their eyes proudly rose the temples of the dominant church, in which their haughty brethren indulged in ease their magnificent devotion, while they themselves were driven from the walls, expelled, too, by the weaker number perhaps, and forced, here in the wild woods, under the burning heat of noon, in disgraceful secrecy to worship the same god; cast out from civil society into a state of nature, and reminded in one dread moment of the rights of that state! the greater their superiority of numbers the more unnatural did their lot appear; with wonder they perceive the truth. the free heaven, the arms lying ready, the frenzy in their brains and fury in their hearts combine to aid the suggestions of some preaching fanatic; the occasion calls; no premeditation is necessary where all eyes at once declare consent; the resolution is formed ere yet the word is scarcely uttered; ready for any unlawful act, no one yet clearly knows what, the furious band rushes onwards. the smiling prosperity of the hostile religion insults the poverty of their own; the pomp of the authorized temples casts contempt on their proscribed belief; every cross they set up upon the highway, every image of the saints that they meet, is a trophy erected over their own humiliation, and they all must be removed by their avenging hands. fanaticism suggests these detestable proceedings, but base passions carry them into execution. . the commencement of the attack on images took place in west flanders and artois, in the districts between lys and the sea. a frantic herd of artisans, boatmen, and peasants, mixed with prostitutes, beggars, vagabonds, and thieves, about three hundred in number, furnished with clubs, axes, hammers, ladders, and cords (a few only were provided with swords or fire arms), cast themselves, with fanatical fury, into the villages and hamlets near st. omer, and breaking open the gates of such churches and cloisters as they find locked, overthrow everywhere the altars, break to pieces the images of the saints, and trample them under foot. with their excitement increased by its indulgence, and reinforced by newcomers, they press on by the direct road to ypres, where they can count on the support of a strong body of calvinists. unopposed, they break into the cathedral, and mounting on ladders they hammer to pieces the pictures, hew down with axes the pulpits and pews, despoil the altars of their ornaments, and steal the holy vessels. this example was quickly followed in menin, comines, verrich, lille, and oudenard; in a few days the same fury spreads through the whole of flanders. at the very time when the first tidings of this occurrence arrived antwerp was swarming with a crowd of houseless people, which the feast of the assumption of the virgin had brought together in that city. even the presence of the prince of orange was hardly sufficient to restrain the licentious mob, who burned to imitate the doings of their brethren in st. omer; but an order from the court which summoned him to brussels, where the regent was just assembling her council of state, in order to lay before them the royal letters, obliged him to abandon antwerp to the outrages of this band. his departure was the signal for tumult. apprehensive of the lawless violence of which, on the very first day of the festival, the mob had given indications in derisory allusions, the priests, after carrying about the image of the virgin for a short time, brought it for safety to the choir, without, as formerly, setting it up in the middle of the church. this incited some mischievous boys from among the people to pay it a visit there, and jokingly inquire why she had so soon absented herself from among them? others mounting the pulpit, mimicked the preacher, and challenged the papists to a dispute. a roman catholic waterman, indignant at this jest, attempted to pull them down, and blows were exchanged in the preacher's seat. similar scenes occurred on the following evening. the numbers increased, and many came already provided with suspicious implements and secret weapons. at last it came into the head of one of them to cry, "long live the gueux!" immediately the whole band took up the cry, and the image of the virgin was called upon to do the same. the few roman catholics who were present, and who had given up the hope of effecting anything against these desperadoes, left the church after locking all the doors except one. so soon as they found themselves alone it was proposed to sing one of the psalms in the new version, which was prohibited by the government. while they were yet singing they all, as at a given signal, rushed furiously upon the image of the virgin, piercing it with swords and daggers, and striking off its head; thieves and prostitutes tore the great wax-lights from the altar, and lighted them to the work. the beautiful organ of the church, a masterpiece of the art of that period, was broken to pieces, all the paintings were effaced, the statues smashed to atoms. a crucifix, the size of life, which was set up between the two thieves, opposite the high altar, an ancient and highly valued piece of workmanship, was pulled to the ground with cords, and cut to pieces with axes, while the two malefactors at its side were respectfully spared. the holy wafers were strewed on the ground and trodden under foot; in the wine used for the lord's supper, which was accidentally found there, the health of the gueux was drunk, while with the holy oil they rubbed their shoes. the very tombs were opened, and the half-decayed corpses torn up and trampled on. all this was done with as much wonderful regularity as if each had previously had his part assigned to him; every one worked into his neighbor's hands; no one, dangerous as the work was, met with injury; in the midst of thick darkness, which the tapers only served to render more sensible, with heavy masses falling on all sides, and though on the very topmost steps of the ladders, they scuffled with each other for the honors of demolition--yet no one suffered the least injury. in spite of the many tapers which lighted them below in their villanous work not a single individual was recognized. with incredible rapidity was the dark deed accomplished; a number of men, at most a hundred, despoiled in a few hours a temple of seventy altars--after st. peter's at rome, perhaps the largest and most magnificent in christendom. the devastation of the cathedral did not content them; with torches and tapers purloined from it they set out at midnight to perform a similar work of havoc on the remaining churches, cloisters, and chapels. the destructive hordes increased with every fresh exploit of infamy, and thieves were allured by the opportunity. they carried away whatever they found of value--the consecrated vessels, altar-cloths, money, and vestments; in the cellars of the cloisters they drank to intoxication; to escape greater indignities the monks and nuns abandoned everything to them. the confused noises of these riotous acts had startled the citizens from their first sleep; but night made the danger appear more alarming than it really was, and instead of hastening to defend their churches the citizens fortified themselves in their houses, and in terror and anxiety awaited the dawn of morning. the rising sun at length revealed the devastation which had been going on during the night; but the havoc did not terminate with the darkness. some churches and cloisters still remained uninjured; the same fate soon overtook them also. the work of destruction lasted three whole days. alarmed at last lest the frantic mob, when it could no longer find anything sacred to destroy, should make a similar attack on lay property and plunder their ware houses; and encouraged, too, by discovering how small was the number of the depredators, the wealthier citizens ventured to show themselves in arms at the doors of their houses. all the gates of the town were locked but one, through which the iconoclasts broke forth to renew the same atrocities in the rural districts. on one occasion only during all this time did the municipal officers venture to exert their authority, so strongly were they held in awe by the superior power of the calvinists, by whom, as it was believed, this mob of miscreants was hired. the injury inflicted by this work of devastation was incalculable. in the church of the virgin it was estimated at not less than four hundred thousand gold florins. many precious works of art were destroyed; many valuable manuscripts; many monuments of importance to history and to diplomacy were thereby lost. the city magistrate ordered the plundered articles to be restored on pain of death; in enforcing this restitution he was effectually assisted by the preachers of the reformers, who blushed for their followers. much was in this manner recovered, and the ringleaders of the mob, less animated, perhaps, by the desire of plunder than by fanaticism and revenge, or perhaps being ruled by some unseen head, resolved for the future to guard against these excesses, and to make their attacks in regular bands and in better order. the town of ghent, meanwhile, trembled for a like destiny. immediately on the first news of the outbreak of the iconoclasts in antwerp the magistrate of the former town with the most eminent citizens had bound themselves to repel by force the church spoilers; when this oath was proposed to the commonalty also the voices were divided, and many declared openly that they were by no means disposed to hinder so devout a work. in this state of affairs the roman catholic clergy found it advisable to deposit in the citadel the most precious movables of their churches, and private families were permitted in like manner to provide for the safety of offerings which had been made by their ancestors. meanwhile all the services were discontinued, the courts of justice were closed; and, like a town in momentary danger of being stormed by the enemy, men trembled in expectation of what was to come. at last an insane band of rioters ventured to send delegates to the governor with this impudent message: "they were ordered," they said, "by their chiefs to take the images out of the churches, as had been done in the other towns. if they were not opposed it should be done quietly and with as little injury as possible, but otherwise they would storm the churches;" nay, they went so far in their audacity as to ask the aid of the officers of justice therein. at first the magistrate was astounded at this demand; upon reflection, however, and in the hope that the presence of the officers of law would perhaps restrain their excesses, he did not scruple to grant their request. in tournay the churches were despoiled of their ornaments within sight of the garrison, who could not be induced to march against the iconoclasts. as the latter had been told that the gold and silver vessels and other ornaments of the church were buried underground, they turned up the whole floor, and exposed, among others, the body of the duke adolph of gueldres, who fell in battle at the head of the rebellious burghers of ghent, and had been buried herein tournay. this adolph had waged war against his father, and had dragged the vanquished old man some miles barefoot to prison--an indignity which charles the bold afterwards retaliated on him. and now, again, after more than half a century fate avenged a crime against nature by another against religion; fanaticism was to desecrate that which was holy in order to expose once more to execration the bones of a parricide. other iconoclasts from valenciennes united themselves with those of tournay to despoil all the cloisters of the surrounding district, during which a valuable library, the accumulation of centuries, was destroyed by fire. the evil soon penetrated into brabant, also malines, herzogenbusch, breda, and bergen-op-zoom experienced the same fate. the provinces, namur and luxemburg, with a part of artois and of hainault, had alone the good fortune to escape the contagion of those outrages. in the short period of four or five days four hundred cloisters were plundered in brabant and flanders alone. the northern netherlands were soon seized with the same mania which had raged so violently through the southern. the dutch towns, amsterdam, leyden, and gravenhaag, had the alternative of either voluntarily stripping their churches of their ornaments, or of seeing them violently torn from there; the determination of their magistrates saved delft, haarlem, gouda, and rotterdam from the devastation. the same acts of violence were practised also in the islands of zealand; the town of utrecht and many places in overyssel and groningen suffered the same storms. friesland was protected by the count of aremberg, and gueldres by the count of megen from a like fate. an exaggerated report of these disturbances which came in from the provinces spread the alarm to brussels, where the regent had just made preparations for an extraordinary session of the council of state. swarms of iconoclasts already penetrated into brabant; and the metropolis, where they were certain of powerful support, was threatened by them with a renewal of the same atrocities then under the very eyes of majesty. the regent, in fear for her personal safety, which, even in the heart of the country, surrounded by provincial governors and knights of the fleece, she fancied insecure, was already meditating a flight to mons, in hainault, which town the duke of arschot held for her as a place of refuge, that she might not be driven to any undignified concession by falling into the power of the iconoclasts. in vain did the knights pledge life and blood for her safety, and urgently beseech her not to expose them to disgrace by so dishonorable a flight, as though they were wanting in courage or zeal to protect their princess; to no purpose did the town of brussels itself supplicate her not to abandon them in this extremity, and vainly did the council of state make the most impressive representations that so pusillanimous a step would not fail to encourage still more the insolence of the rebels; she remained immovable in this desperate condition. as messenger after messenger arrived to warn her that the iconoclasts were advancing against the metropolis, she issued orders to hold everything in readiness for her flight, which was to take place quietly with the first approach of morning. at break of day the aged viglius presented himself before her, whom, with the view of gratifying the nobles, she had been long accustomed to neglect. he demanded to know the meaning of the preparations he observed, upon which she at last confessed that she intended to make her escape, and assured him that he would himself do well to secure his own safety by accompanying her. "it is now two years," said the old man to her, "that you might have anticipated these results. because i have spoken more freely than your courtiers you have closed your princely ear to me, which has been open only to pernicious suggestions." the regent allowed that she had been in fault, and had been blinded by an appearance of probity; but that she was now driven by necessity. "are you resolved," answered viglius, "resolutely to insist upon obedience to the royal commands?" "i am," answered the duchess. "then have recourse to the great secret of the art of government, to dissimulation, and pretend to join the princes until, with their assistance, you have repelled this storm. show them a confidence which you are far from feeling in your heart. make them take an oath to you that they will make common cause in resisting these disorders. trust those as your friends who show themselves willing to do it; but be careful to avoid frightening away the others by contemptuous treatment." viglius kept the regent engaged in conversation until the princes arrived, who he was quite certain would in nowise consent to her flight. when they appeared he quietly withdrew in order to issue commands to the town council to close the gates of the city and prohibit egress to every one connected with the court. this last measure effected more than all the representations had done. the regent, who saw herself a prisoner in her own capital, now yielded to the persuasions of the nobles, who pledged themselves to stand by her to the last drop of blood. she made count mansfeld commandant of the town, who hastily increased the garrison and armed her whole court. the state council was now held, who finally came to a resolution that it was expedient to yield to the emergency; to permit the preachings in those places where they had already commenced; to make known the abolition of the papal inquisition; to declare the old edicts against the heretics repealed, and before all things to grant the required indemnity to the confederate nobles, without limitation or condition. at the same time the prince of orange, counts egmont and horn, with some others, were appointed to confer on this head with the deputies of the league. solemnly and in the most unequivocal terms the members of the league were declared free from all responsibility by reason of the petition which had been presented, and all royal officers and authorities were enjoined to act in conformity with this assurance, and neither now nor for the future to inflict any injury upon any of the confederates on account of the said petition. in return, the confederates bound themselves to be true and loyal servants of his majesty, to contribute to the utmost of their power to the re-establishment of order and the punishment of the iconiclasts, to prevail on the people to lay down their arms, and to afford active assistance to the king against internal and foreign enemies. securities, formally drawn up and subscribed by the plenipotentiaries of both sides, were exchanged between them; the letter of indemnity, in particular, was signed by the duchess with her own hand and attested by her seal. it was only after a severe struggle, and with tears in her eyes, that the regent, as she tremblingly confessed to the king, was at last induced to consent to this painful step. she threw the whole blame upon the nobles, who had kept her a prisoner in brussels and compelled her to it by force. above all she complained bitterly of the prince of orange. this business accomplished, all the governors hastened to their provinces; egmont to flanders, orange to antwerp. in the latter city the protestants had seized the despoiled and plundered churches, and, as if by the rights of war, had taken possession of them. the prince restored them to their lawful owners, gave orders for their repair, and re-established in them the roman catholic form of worship. three of the iconoclasts, who had been convicted, paid the penalty of their sacrilege on the gallows; some of the rioters were banished, and many others underwent punishment. afterwards he assembled four deputies of each dialect, or nations, as they were termed, and agreed with them that, as the approaching winter made preaching in the open air impossible, three places within the town should be granted then, where they might either erect new churches, or convert private houses to that purpose. that they should there perform their service every sunday and holiday, and always at the same hour, but on no other days. if, however, no holiday happened in the week, wednesday should be kept by them instead. no religious party should maintain more than two clergymen, and these must be native netherlanders, or at least have received naturalization from some considerable town of the provinces. all should take an oath to submit in civil matters to the municipal authorities and the prince of orange. they should be liable, like the other citizens, to all imposts. no one should attend sermons armed; a sword, however, should be allowed to each. no preacher should assail the ruling religion from the pulpit, nor enter upon controverted points, beyond what the doctrine itself rendered unavoidable, or what might refer to morals. no psalm should be sung by them out of their appointed district. at the election of their preachers, churchwardens, and deacons, as also at all their other consistorial meetings, a person from the government should on each occasion be present to report their proceedings to the prince and the magistrate. as to all other points they should enjoy the same protection as the ruling religion. this arrangement was to hold good until the king, with consent of the states, should determine otherwise; but then it should be free to every one to quit the country with his family and his property. from antwerp the prince hastened to holland, zealand, and utrecht, in order to make there similar arrangements for the restoration of peace; antwerp, however, was, during his absence, entrusted to the superintendence of count howstraten, who was a mild man, and although an adherent of the league, had never failed in loyalty to the king. it is evident that in this agreement the prince had far overstepped the powers entrusted to him, and though in the service of the king had acted exactly like a sovereign lord. but he alleged in excuse that it would be far easier to the magistrate to watch these numerous and powerful sects if he himself interfered in their worship, and if this took place under his eyes, than if he were to leave the sectarians to themselves in the open air. in gueldres count megen showed more severity, and entirely suppressed the protestant sects and banished all their preachers. in brussels the regent availed herself of the advantage derived from her personal presence to put a stop to the public preaching, even outside the town. when, in reference to this, count nassau reminded her in the name of the confederates of the compact which had been entered into, and demanded if the town of brussels had inferior rights to the other towns? she answered, if there were public preachings in brussels before the treaty, it was not her work if they were now discontinued. at the same time, however, she secretly gave the citizens to understand that the first who should venture to attend a public sermon should certainly be hung. thus she kept the capital at least faithful to her. it was more difficult to quiet tournay, which office was committed to count horn, in the place of montigny, to whose government the town properly belonged. horn commanded the protestants to vacate the churches immediately, and to content themselves with a house of worship outside the walls. to this their preachers objected that the churches were erected for the use of the people, by which terms, they said, not the heads but the majority were meant. if they were expelled from the roman catholic churches it was at least fair that they should be furnished with money for erecting churches of their own. to this the magistrate replied even if the catholic party was the weaker it was indisputably the better. the erection of churches should not be forbidden them; they could not, however, after the injury which the town had already suffered from their brethren, the iconoclasts, very well expect that it should be further burdened by the erection of their churches. after long quarrelling on both sides, the protestants contrived to retain possession of some churches, which, for greater security, they occupied with guards. in valenciennes, too, the protestants refused submission to the conditions which were offered to them through philip st. aldegonde, baron of noircarmes, to whom, in the absence of the marquis of bergen, the government of that place was entrusted. a reformed preacher, la grange, a frenchman by birth, who by his eloquence had gained a complete command over them, urged them to insist on having churches of their own within the town, and to threaten in case of refusal to deliver it up to the huguenots. a sense of the superior numbers of the calvinists, and of their understanding with the huguenots, prevented the governor adopting forcible measures against them. count egmont, also to manifest his zeal for the king's service, did violence to his natural kind-heartedness. introducing a garrison into the town of ghent, he caused some of the most refractory rebels to be put to death. the churches were reopened, the roman catholic worship renewed, and all foreigners, without exception, ordered to quit the province. to the calvinists, but to them alone, a site was granted outside the town for the erection of a church. in return they were compelled to pledge themselves to the most rigid obedience to the municipal authorities, and to active co-operation in the proceedings against the iconoclasts. he pursued similar measures through all flanders and artois. one of his noblemen, john cassembrot, baron of beckerzeel, and a leaguer, pursuing the iconoclasts at the head of some horsemen of the league, surprised a band of them just as they were about to break into a town of hainault, near grammont, in flanders, and took thirty of them prisoners, of whom twenty-two were hung upon the spot, and the rest whipped out of the province. services of such importance one would have thought scarcely deserved to be rewarded with the displeasure of the king; what orange, egmont, and horn performed on this occasion evinced at least as much zeal and had as beneficial a result as anything that was accomplished by noircarmes, megen, and aremberg, to whom the king vouchsafed to show his gratitude both by words and deeds. but their zeal, their services came too late. they had spoken too loudly against his edicts, had been too vehement in their opposition to his measures, had insulted him too grossly in the person of his minister granvella, to leave room for forgiveness. no time, no repentance, no atonement, however great, could efface this one offence from the memory of their sovereign. philip lay sick at segovia when the news of the outbreak of the iconoclasts and the uncatholic agreement entered into with the reformers reached him. at the same time the regent renewed her urgent entreaty for his personal visit, of which also all the letters treated, which the president viglius exchanged with his friend hopper. many also of the belgian nobles addressed special letters to the king, as, for instance, egmont, mansfeld, megen, aremberg, noircarmes, and barlaimont, in which they reported the state of their provinces, and at once explained and justified the arrangements they had made with the disaffected. just at this period a letter arrived from the german emperor, in which he recommended philip to act with clemency towards his belgian subjects, and offered his mediation in the matter. he had also written direct to the regent herself in brussels, and added letters to the several leaders of the nobility, which, however, were never delivered. having conquered the first anger which this hateful occurrence had excited, the king referred the whole matter to his council. the party of granvella, which had the preponderance in the council, was diligent in tracing a close connection between the behavior of the flemish nobles and the excesses of the church desecrators, which showed itself in similarity of the demands of both parties, and especially the time which the latter chose for their outbreak. in the same month, they observed, in which the nobles had sent in their three articles of pacification, the iconoclasts had commenced their work; on the evening of the very day that orange quitted antwerp the churches too were plundered. during the whole tumult not a finger was lifted to take up arms; all the expedients employed were invariably such as turned to the advantage of the sects, while, on the contrary, all others were neglected which tended to the maintenance of the pure faith. many of the iconoclasts, it was further said, had confessed that all that they had done was with the knowledge and consent of the princes; though surely nothing was more natural, than for such worthless wretches to seek to screen with great names a crime which they had undertaken solely on their own account. a writing also was produced in which the high nobility were made to promise their services to the "gueux," to procure the assembly of the states general, the genuineness of which, however, the former strenuously denied. four different seditious parties were, they said, to be noticed in the netherlands, which were all more or less connected with one another, and all worked towards a common end. one of these was those bands of reprobates who desecrated the churches; a second consisted of the various sects who had hired the former to perform their infamous acts; the "gueux," who had raised themselves to be the defenders of the sects were the third; and the leading nobles who were inclined to the "gueux" by feudal connections, relationship, and friendship, composed the fourth. all, consequently, were alike fatally infected, and all equally guilty. the government had not merely to guard against a few isolated members; it had to contend with the whole body. since, then, it was ascertained that the people were the seduced party, and the encouragement to rebellion came from higher quarters, it would be wise and expedient to alter the plan hitherto adopted, which now appeared defective in several respects. inasmuch as all classes had been oppressed without distinction, and as much of severity shown to the lower orders as of contempt to the nobles, both had been compelled to lend support to one another; a party had been given to the latter and leaders to the former. unequal treatment seemed an infallible expedient to separate them; the mob, always timid and indolent when not goaded by the extremity of distress, would very soon desert its adored protectors and quickly learn to see in their fate well-merited retribution if only it was not driven to share it with them. it was therefore proposed to the king to treat the great multitude for the future with more leniency, and to direct all measures of severity against the leaders of the faction. in order, however, to avoid the appearance of a disgraceful concession, it was considered advisable to accept the mediation of the emperor, and to impute to it alone and not to the justice of their demands, that the king out of pure generosity had granted to his belgian subjects as much as they asked. the question of the king's personal visit to the provinces was now again mooted, and all the difficulties which had formerly been raised on this head appeared to vanish before the present emergency. "now," said tyssenacque and hopper, "the juncture has really arrived at which the king, according to his own declaration formerly made to count egmont, will be ready to risk a thousand lives. to restore quiet to ghent charles v. had undertaken a troublesome and dangerous journey through an enemy's country. this was done for the sake of a single town; and now the peace, perhaps even the possession, of all the united provinces was at stake." this was the opinion of the majority; and the journey of the king was looked upon as a matter from which he could not possibly any longer escape. the question now was, whether he should enter upon it with a numerous body of attendants or with few; and here the prince of eboli and count figueroa were at issue with the duke of alva, as their private interests clashed. if the king journeyed at the head of an army the presence of the duke of alva would be indispensable, who, on the other hand, if matters were peaceably adjusted, would be less required, and must make room for his rivals. "an army," said figueroa, who spoke first, "would alarm the princes through whose territories it must march, and perhaps even be opposed by them; it would, moreover, unnecessarily burden the provinces for whose tranquillization it was intended, and add a new grievance to the many which had already driven the people to such lengths. it would press indiscriminately upon all of the king's subjects, whereas a court of justice, peaceably administering its office, would observe a marked distinction between the innocent and the guilty. the unwonted violence of the former course would tempt the leaders of the faction to take a more alarming view of their behavior, in which wantonness and levity had the chief share, and consequently induce them to proceed with deliberation and union; the thought of having forced the king to such lengths would plunge them into despair, in which they would be ready to undertake anything. if the king placed himself in arms against the rebels he would forfeit the most important advantage which he possessed over them, namely, his authority as sovereign of the country, which would prove the more powerful in proportion as he showed his reliance upon that alone. he would place himself thereby, as it were, on a level with the rebels, who on their side would not be at a loss to raise an army, as the universal hatred of the spanish forces would operate in their favor with the nation. by this procedure the king would exchange the certain advantage which his position as sovereign of the country conferred upon him for the uncertain result of military operations, which, result as they might, would of necessity destroy a portion of his own subjects. the rumor of his hostile approach would outrun him time enough to allow all who were conscious of a bad cause to place themselves in a posture of defence, and to combine and render availing both their foreign and domestic resources. here again the general alarm would do them important service; the uncertainty who would be the first object of this warlike approach would drive even the less guilty to the general mass of the rebels, and force those to become enemies to the king who otherwise would never have been so. if, however, he was coming among them without such a formidable accompaniment; if his appearance was less that of a sanguinary judge than of an angry parent, the courage of all good men would rise, and the bad would perish in their own security. they would persuade themselves what had happened was unimportant; that it did not appear to the king of sufficient moment to call for strong measures. they wished if they could to avoid the chance of ruining, by acts of open violence, a cause which might perhaps yet be saved; consequently, by this quiet, peaceable method everything would be gained which by the other would be irretrievably lost; the loyal subject would in no degree be involved in the same punishment with the culpable rebel; on the latter alone would the whole weight of the royal indignation descend. lastly, the enormous expenses would be avoided which the transport of a spanish army to those distant regions would occasion. "but," began the duke of alva, "ought the injury of some few citizens to be considered when danger impends over the whole? because a few of the loyally-disposed may suffer wrong are the rebels therefore not to be chastised? the offence has been universal, why then should not the punishment be the same? what the rebels have incurred by their actions the rest have incurred equally by their supineness. whose fault is it but theirs that the former have so far succeeded? why did they not promptly oppose their first attempts? it is said that circumstances were not so desperate as to justify this violent remedy; but who will insure us that they will not be so by the time the king arrives, especially when, according to every fresh despatch of the regent, all is hastening with rapid strides to a-ruinous consummation? is it a hazard we ought to run to leave the king to discover on his entrance into the provinces the necessity of his having brought with him a military force? it is a fact only too well-established that the rebels have secured foreign succors, which stand ready at their command on the first signal; will it then be time to think of preparing for war when the enemy pass the frontiers? is it a wise risk to rely for aid upon the nearest belgian troops when their loyalty is so little to be depended upon? and is not the regent perpetually reverting in her despatches to the fact that nothing but the want of a suitable military force has hitherto hindered her from enforcing the edicts, and stopping the progress of the rebels? a well-disciplined and formidable army alone will disappoint all their hopes of maintaining themselves in opposition to their lawful sovereign, and nothing but the certain prospect of destruction will make them lower their demands. besides, without an adequate force, the king cannot venture his person in hostile countries; he cannot enter into any treaties with his rebellious subjects which would not be derogatory to his honor." the authority of the speaker gave preponderance to his arguments, and the next question was, when the king should commence his journey and what road he should take. as the voyage by sea was on every account extremely hazardous, he had no other alternative but either to proceed thither through the passes near trent across. germany, or to penetrate from savoy over the apennine alps. the first route would expose him to the danger of the attack of the german protestants, who were not likely to view with indifference the objects of his journey, and a passage over the apennines was at this late season of the year not to be attempted. moreover, it would be necessary to send for the requisite galleys from italy, and repair them, which would take several months. finally, as the assembly of the cortes of castile, from which he could not well be absent, was already appointed for december, the journey could not be undertaken before the spring. meanwhile the regent pressed for explicit instructions how she was to extricate herself from her present embarrassment, without compromising the royal dignity too far; and it was necessary to do something in the interval till the king could undertake to appease the troubles by his personal presence. two separate letters were therefore despatched to the duchess; one public, which she could lay before the states and the council chambers, and one private, which was intended for herself alone. in the first, the king announced to her his restoration to health, and the fortunate birth of the infanta clara isabella eugenia, afterwards wife of the archduke albert of austria and princess of the netherlands. he declared to her his present firm intention to visit the netherlands in person, for which he was already making the necessary preparations. the assembling of the states he refused, as he had previously done. no mention was made in this letter of the agreement which she had entered into with the protestants and with the league, because he did not deem it advisable at present absolutely to reject it, and he was still less disposed to acknowledge its validity. on the other hand, he ordered her to reinforce the army, to draw together new regiments from germany, and to meet the refractory with force. for the rest, he concluded, he relied upon the loyalty of the leading nobility, among whom he knew many who were sincere in their attachment both to their religion and their king. in the secret letter she was again enjoined to do all in her power to prevent the assembling of the states; but if the general voice should become irresistible, and she was compelled to yield, she was at least to manage so cautiously that the royal dignity should not suffer, and no one learn the king's consent to their assembly. while these consultations were held in spain the protestants in the netherlands made the most extensive use of the privileges which had been compulsorily granted to them. the erection of churches wherever it was permitted was completed with incredible rapidity; young and old, gentle and simple, assisted in carrying stones; women sacrificed even their ornaments in order to accelerate the work. the two religious parties established in several towns consistories, and a church council of their own, the first move of the kind being made in antwerp, and placed their form of worship on a well-regulated footing. it was also proposed to raise a common fund by subscription to meet any sudden emergency of the protestant church in general. in antwerp a memorial was presented by the calvinists of that town to the count of hogstraten, in which they offered to pay three millions of dollars to secure the free exercise of their religion. many copies of this writing were circulated in the netherlands; and in order to stimulate others, many had ostentatiously subscribed their names to large sums. various interpretations of this extravagant offer were made by the enemies of the reformers, and all had some appearance of reason. for instance, it was urged that under the pretext of collecting the requisite sum for fulfilling this engagement they hoped, without suspicion, to raise funds for military purposes; for whether they should be called upon to contribute for or against they would, it was thought, be more ready to burden themselves with a view of preserving peace than for an oppressive and devasting war. others saw in this offer nothing more than a temporary stratagem of the protestants by which they hoped to bind the court and keep it irresolute until they should have gained sufficient strength to confront it. others again declared it to be a downright bravado in order to alarm the regent, and to raise the courage of their own party by the display of such rich resources. but whatever was the true motive of this proposition, its originators gained little by it; the contributions flowed in scantily and slowly, and the court answered the proposal with silent contempt. the excesses, too, of the iconoclasts, far from promoting the cause of the league and advancing the protestants interests, had done irreparable injury to both. the sight of their ruined churches, which, in the language of viglius, resembled stables more than houses of god, enraged the roman catholics, and above all the clergy. all of that religion, who had hitherto been members of the league, now forsook it, alleging that even if it had not intentionally excited and encouraged the excesses of the iconoclasts it had beyond question remotely led to them. the intolerance of the calvinists who, wherever they were the ruling party, cruelly oppressed the roman catholics, completely expelled the delusion in which the latter had long indulged, and they withdrew their support from a party from which, if they obtained the upper hand, their own religion had so much cause to fear. thus the league lost many of its best members; the friends and patrons, too, which it had hitherto found amongst the well-disposed citizens now deserted it, and its character began perceptibly to decline. the severity with which some of its members had acted against the iconoclasts in order to prove their good disposition towards the regent, and to remove the suspicion of any connection with the malcontents, had also injured them with the people who favored the latter, and thus the league was in danger of ruining itself with both parties at the same time. the regent had no sooner became acquainted with this change in the public mind than she devised a plan by which she hoped gradually to dissolve the whole league, or at least to enfeeble it through internal dissensions. for this end she availed herself of the private letters which the king had addressed to some of the nobles, and enclosed to her with full liberty to use them at her discretion. these letters, which overflowed with kind expressions were presented to those for whom they were intended, with an attempt at secrecy, which designedly miscarried, so that on each occasion some one or other of those who had received nothing of the sort got a hint of them. in order to spread suspicion the more widely numerous copies of the letters were circulated. this artifice attained its object. many members of the league began to doubt the honesty of those to whom such brilliant promises were made; through fear of being deserted by their principal members and supporters, they eagerly accepted the conditions which were offered them by the regent, and evinced great anxiety for a speedy reconciliation with the court. the general rumor of the impending visit of the king, which the regent took care to have widely circulated, was also of great service to her in this matter; many who could not augur much good to themselves from the royal presence did not hesitate to accept a pardon, which, perhaps, for what they could tell, was offered them for the last time. among those who thus received private letters were egmont and prince of orange. both had complained to the king of the evil reports with which designing persons in spain had labored to brand their names, and to throw suspicion on their motives and intentions; egmont, in particular, with the honest simplicity which was peculiar to his character, had asked the monarch only to point out to him what he most desired, to determine the particular action by which his favor could be best obtained and zeal in his service evinced, and it should, he assured him, be done. the king in reply caused the president, von tyssenacque, to tell him that he could do nothing better to refute his traducers than to show perfect submission to the royal orders, which were so clearly and precisely drawn up, that no further exposition of them was required, nor any particular instruction. it was the sovereign's part to deliberate, to examine, and to decide; unconditionally to obey was the duty of the subject; the honor of the latter consisted in his obedence. it did not become a member to hold itself wiser than the head. he was assuredly to be blamed for not having done his utmost to curb the unruliness of his sectarians; but it was even yet in his power to make up for past negligence by at least maintaining peace and order until the actual arrival of the king. in thus punishing count egmont with reproofs like a disobedient child, the king treated him in accordance with what he knew of his character; with his friend he found it necessary to call in the aid of artifice and deceit. orange, too, in his letter, had alluded to the suspicions which the king entertained of his loyalty and attachment, but not, like egmont, in the vain hope of removing them; for this, he had long given up; but in order to pass from these complaints to a request for permission to resign his offices. he had already frequently made this request to the regent, but had always received from her a refusal, accompanied with the strongest assurance of her regard. the king also, to whom he now at last addressed a direct application, returned him the same answer, graced with similar strong assurances of his satisfaction and gratitude. in particular he expressed the high satisfaction he entertained of his services, which he had lately rendered the crown in antwerp, and lamented deeply that the private affairs of the prince (which the latter had made his chief plea for demanding his dismissal) should have fallen into such disorder; but ended with the declaration that it was impossible for him to dispense with his valuable services at a crisis which demanded the increase, rather than diminution, of his good and honest servants. he had thought, he added, that the prince entertained a better opinion of him than to suppose him capable of giving credit to the idle talk of certain persons, who were friends neither to the prince nor to himself. but, at the same time, to give him a proof of his sincerity, he complained to him in confidence of his brother, the count of nassau, pretended to ask his advice in the matter, and finally expressed a wish to have the count removed for a period from the netherlands. but philip had here to do with a head which in cunning was superior to his own. the prince of orange had for a long time held watch over him and his privy council in madrid and segovia, through a host of spies, who reported to him everything of importance that was transacted there. the court of this most secret of all despots had become accessible to his intriguing spirit and his money; in this manner he had gained possession of several autograph letters of the regent, which she had secretly written to madrid, and had caused copies to be circulated in triumph in brussels, and in a measure under her own eyes, insomuch that she saw with astonishment in everybody's hands what she thought was preserved with so much care, and entreated the king for the future to destroy her despatches immediately they were read. william's vigilance did not confine itself simply to the court of spain; he had spies in france, and even at more distant courts. he is also charged with not being over scrupulous as to the means by which he acquired his intelligence. but the most important disclosure was made by an intercepted letter of the spanish ambassador in france, francis von alava, to the duchess, in which the former descanted on the fair opportunity which was now afforded to the king, through the guilt of the netherlandish people, of establishing an arbitrary power in that country. he therefore advised her to deceive the nobles by the very arts which they had hitherto employed against herself, and to secure them through smooth words and an obliging behavior. the king, he concluded, who knew the nobles to be the hidden springs of all the previous troubles, would take good care to lay hands upon them at the first favorable opportunity, as well as the two whom he had already in spain; and did not mean to let them go again, having sworn to make an example in them which should horrify the whole of christendom, even if it should cost him his hereditary dominions. this piece of evil news was strongly corroborated by the letters which bergen and montigny wrote from spain, and in which they bitterly complained of the contemptuous behavior of the grandees and the altered deportment of the monarch towards them; and the prince of orange was now fully sensible what he had to expect from the fair promises of the king. the letter of the minister, alava, together with some others from spain, which gave a circumstantial account of the approaching warlike visit of the king, and of his evil intentions against the nobles, was laid by the prince before his brother, count louis of nassau, counts egmont, horn, and hogstraten, at a meeting at dendermonde in flanders, whither these five knights had repaired to confer on the measures necessary for their security. count louis, who listened only to his feelings of indignation, foolhardily maintained that they ought, without loss of time, to take up arms and seize some strongholds. that they ought at all risks to prevent the king's armed entrance into the provinces. that they should endeavor to prevail on the swiss, the protestant princes of germany, and the huguenots to arm and obstruct his passage through their territories; and if, notwithstanding, he should force his way through these impediments, that the flemings should meet him with an army on the frontiers. he would take upon himself to negotiate a defensive alliance in france, in switzerland, and in germany, and to raise in the latter empire four thousand horse, together with a proportionate body of infantry. pretexts would not be wanting for collecting the requisite supplies of money, and the merchants of the reformed sect would, he felt assured, not fail them. but william, more cautious and more wise, declared himself against this proposal, which, in the execution, would be exposed to numberless difficulties, and had as yet nothing to justify it. the inquisition, he represented, was in fact abolished, the edicts were nearly sunk into oblivion, and a fair degree of religious liberty accorded. hitherto, therefore, there existed no valid or adequate excuse for adopting this hostile method; he did not doubt, however, that one would be presented to them before long, and in good time for preparation. his own opinion consequently was that they should await this opportunity with patience, and in the meanwhile still keep a watchful eye upon everything, and contrive to give the people a hint of the threatened danger, that they might be ready to act if circumstances should call for their co-operation. if all present had assented to the opinion of the prince of orange, there is no doubt but so powerful a league, formidable both by the influence and the high character of its members, would have opposed obstacles to the designs of the king which would have compelled him to abandon them entirely. but the determination of the assembled knights was much shaken by the declaration with which count egmont surprised them. "rather," said he, "may all that is evil befall me than that i should tempt fortune so rashly. the idle talk of the spaniard, alava, does not move me; how should such a person be able to read the mind of a sovereign so reserved as philip, and to decipher his secrets? the intelligence which montigny gives us goes to prove nothing more than that the king has a very doubtful opinion of our zeal for his service, and believes he has cause to distrust our loyalty; and for this i for my part must confess that we have given him only too much cause. and it is my serious purpose, by redoubling my zeal, to regain his good opinion, and by my future behavior to remove, if possible, the distrust which my actions have hitherto excited. how could i tear myself from the arms of my numerous and dependent family to wander as an exile at foreign courts, a burden to every one who received me, the slave of every one who condescended to assist me, a servant of foreigners, in order to escape a slight degree of constraint at home? never can the monarch act unkindly towards a servant who was once beloved and dear to him, and who has established a well-grounded claim to his gratitude. never shall i be persuaded that he who has expressed such favorable, such gracious sentiments towards his belgian subjects, and with his own mouth gave me such emphatic, such solemn assurances, can be now devising, as it is pretended, such tyrannical schemes against them. if we do but restore to the country its former repose, chastise the rebels, and re-establish the roman catholic form of worship wherever it has been violently suppressed, then, believe me, we shall hear no more of spanish troops. this is the course to which i now invite you all by my counsel and my example, and to which also most of our brethren already incline. i, for my part, fear nothing from the anger of the king. my conscience acquits me. i trust my fate and fortunes to his justice and clemency." in vain did nassau, horn, and orange labor to shake his resolution, and to open his eyes to the near and inevitable danger. egmont was really attached to the king; the royal favors, and the condescension with which they were conferred, were still fresh in his remembrance. the attentions with which the monarch had distinguished him above all his friends had not failed of their effect. it was more from false shame than from party spirit that he had defended the cause of his countrymen against him; more from temperament and natural kindness of heart than from tried principles that he had opposed the severe measures of the government. the love of the nation, which worshipped him as its idol, carried him away. too vain to renounce a title which sounded so agreeable, he had been compelled to do something to deserve it; but a single look at his family, a harsher designation applied to his conduct, a dangerous inference drawn from it, the mere sound of crime, terrified him from his self-delusion, and scared him back in haste and alarm to his duty. orange's whole plan was frustrated by egmont's withdrawal. the latter possessed the hearts of the people and the confidence of the army, without which it was utterly impossible to undertake anything effective. the rest had reckoned with so much certainty upon him that his unexpected defection rendered the whole meeting nugatory. they therefore separated without coming to a determination. all who had met in dendermonde were expected in the council of state in brussels; but egmont alone repaired thither. the regent wished to sift him on the subject of this conference, but she could extract nothing further from him than the production of the letter of alava, of which he had purposely taken a copy, and which, with the bitterest reproofs, he laid before her. at first she changed color at sight of it, but quickly recovering herself, she boldly declared that it was a forgery. "how can this letter," she said, "really come from alava, when i miss none? and would he who pretends to have intercepted it have spared the other letters? nay, how can it be true, when not a single packet has miscarried, nor a single despatch failed to come to hand? how, too, can it be thought likely that the king would have made alava master of a secret which he has not communicated even to me?" civil war . meanwhile the regent hastened to take advantage of the schism amongst the nobles to complete the ruin of the league, which was already tottering under the weight of internal dissensions. without loss of time she drew from germany the troops which duke eric of brunswick was holding in readiness, augmented the cavalry, and raised five regiments of walloons, the command of which she gave to counts mansfeld, megen, aremberg, and others. to the prince, likewise, she felt it necessary to confide troops, both because she did not wish, by withholding them pointedly, to insult him, and also because the provinces of which he was governor were in urgent need of them; but she took the precaution of joining with him a colonel waldenfinger, who should watch all his steps and thwart his measures if they appeared dangerous. to count egmont the clergy in flanders paid a contribution of forty thousand gold florins for the maintenance of fifteen hundred men, whom he distributed among the places where danger was most apprehended. every governor was ordered to increase his military force, and to provide himself with ammunition. these energetic preparations, which were making in all places, left no doubt as to the measures which the regent would adopt in future. conscious of her superior force, and certain of this important support, she now ventured to change her tone, and to employ quite another language with the rebels. she began to put the most arbitrary interpretation on the concessions which, through fear and necessity, she had made to the protestants, and to restrict all the liberties which she had tacitly granted them to the mere permission of their preaching. all other religious exercises and rites, which yet appeared to be involved in the former privilege, were by new edicts expressly forbidden, and all offenders in such matters were to be proceeded against as traitors. the protestants were permitted to think differently from the ruling church upon the sacrament, but to receive it differently was a crime; baptism, marriage, burial, after their fashion, were probibited under pain of death. it was a cruel mockery to allow them their religion, and forbid the exercise of it; but this mean artifice of the regent to escape from the obligation of her pledged word was worthy of the pusillanimity with which she had submitted to its being extorted from her. she took advantage of the most trifling innovations and the smallest excesses to interrupt the preachings; and some of the preachers, under the charge of having performed their office in places not appointed to them, were brought to trial, condemned, and executed. on more than one occasion the regent publicly declared that the confederates had taken unfair advantage of her fears, and that she did not feel herself bound by an engagement which had been extorted from her by threats. of all the belgian towns which had participated in the insurrection of the iconoclasts none had caused the regent so much alarm as the town of valenciennes, in hainault. in no other was the party of the calvinists so powerful, and the spirit of rebellion for which the province of hainault had always made itself conspicuous, seemed to dwell here as in its native place. the propinquity of france, to which, as well by language as by manners, this town appeared to belong, rather than to the netherlands, had from the first led to its being governed with great mildness and forbearance, which, however, only taught it to feel its own importance. at the last outbreak of the church-desecrators it had been on the point of surrendering to the huguenots, with whom it maintained the closest understanding. the slightest excitement night renew this danger. on this account valenciennes was the first town to which the regent proposed, as soon as should be in her power, to send a strong garrison. philip of noircarmes, baron of st. aldegonde, governor of hainault in the place of the absent marquis of bergen, had received this charge, and now appeared at the head of an army before its walls. deputies came to meet him on the part of the magistrate from the town, to petition against the garrison, because the protestant citizens, who were the superior number, had declared against it. noircarnes acquainted them with the will of the regent, and gave them the choice between the garrison or a siege. he assured them that not more than four squadrons of horse and six companies of foot should be imposed upon the town; and for this he would give them his son as a hostage. these terms were laid before the magistrate, who, for his part, was much inclined to accept them. but peregrine le grange, the preacher, and the idol of the populace, to whom it was of vital importance to prevent a submission of which he would inevitably become the victim, appeared at the head of his followers, and by his powerful eloquence excited the people to reject the conditions. when their answer was brought to noircarmes, contrary to all law of nations, he caused the messengers to be placed in irons, and carried them away with him as prisoners; he was, however, by express command of the regent, compelled to set them free again. the regent, instructed by secret orders from madrid to exercise as much forbearance as possible, caused the town to be repeatedly summoned to receive the garrison; when, however, it obstinately persisted in its refusal, it was declared by public edict to be in rebellion, and noircarmes was authorized to commence the siege in form. the other provinces were forbidden to assist this rebellious town with advice, money, or arms. all the property contained in it was confiscated. in order to let it see the war before it began in earnest, and to give it time for rational reflection, noircarmes drew together troops from all hainault and cambray ( ), took possession of st. amant, and placed garrisons in all adjacent places. the line of conduct adopted towards valenciennes allowed the other towns which were similarly situated to infer the fate which was intended for them also, and at once put the whole league in motion. an army of the gueux, between three thousand and four thousand strong, which was hastily collected from the rabble of fugitives, and the remaining bands of the iconoclasts, appeared in the territories of tournay and lille, in order to secure these two towns, and to annoy the enemy at valenciennes. the commandant of lille was fortunate enough to maintain that place by routing a detachment of this army, which, in concert with the protestant inhabitants, had made an attempt to get possession of it. at the same time the army of the gueux, which was uselessly wasting its time at lannoy, was surprised by noircarmes and almost entirely annihilated. the few who with desperate courage forced their way through the enemy, threw themselves into the town of tournay, which was immediately summoned by the victor to open its gates and admit a garrison. its prompt obedience obtained for it a milder fate. noircarmes contented himself with abolishing the protestant consistory, banishing the preachers, punishing the leaders of the rebels, and again re-establishing the roman catholic worship, which he found almost entirely suppressed. after giving it a steadfast roman catholic as governor, and leaving in it a sufficient garrison, he again returned with his victorious army to valenciennes to press the siege. this town, confident in its strength, actively prepared for defence, firmly resolved to allow things to come to extremes before it surrendered. the inhabitants had not neglected to furnish themselves with ammunition and provisions for a long siege; all who could carry arms (the very artisans not excepted), became soldiers; the houses before the town, and especially the cloisters, were pulled down, that the besiegers might not avail themselves of them to cover their attack. the few adherents of the crown, awed by the multitude, were silent; no roman catholic ventured to stir himself. anarchy and rebellion had taken the place of good order, and the fanaticism of a foolhardy priest gave laws instead of the legal dispensers of justice. the male population was numerous, their courage confirmed by despair, their confidence unbounded that the siege would be raised, while their hatred against the roman catholic religion was excited to the highest pitch. many had no mercy to expect; all abhorred the general thraldom of an imperious garrison. noircarmes, whose army had become formidable through the reinforcements which streamed to it from all quarters, and was abundantly furnished with all the requisites for a long blockade, once more attempted to prevail on the town by gentle means, but in vain. at last he caused the trenches to be opened and prepared to invest the place. in the meanwhile the position of the protestants had grown as much worse as that of the regent had improved. the league of the nobles had gradually melted away to a third of its original number. some of its most important defenders, count egmont, for instance, had gone over to the king; the pecuniary contributions which had been so confidently reckoned upon came in but slowly and scantily; the zeal of the party began perceptibly to cool, and the close of the fine season made it necessary to discontinue the public preachings, which, up to this time, had been continued. these and other reasons combined induced the declining party to moderate its demands, and to try every legal expedient before it proceeded to extremities. in a general synod of the protestants, which was held for this object in antwerp, and which was also attended by some of the confederates, it was resolved to send deputies to the regent to remonstrate with her upon this breach of faith, and to remind her of her compact. brederode undertook this office, but was obliged to submit to a harsh and disgraceful rebuff, and was shut out of brussels. he had now recourse to a written memorial, in which,--in the name of the whole league, he complained that the duchess had, by violating her word, falsified in sight of all the protestants the security given by the league, in reliance on which all of them had laid down their arms; that by her insincerity she had undone all the good which the confederates had labored to effect; that she had sought to degrade the league in the eyes of the people, had excited discord among its members, and had even caused many of them to be persecuted as criminals. he called upon her to recall her late ordinances, which deprived the protestants of the free exercise of their religion, but above all to raise the siege of valenciennes, to disband the troops newly enlisted, and ended by assuring her that on these conditions and these alone the league would be responsible for the general tranquillity. to this the regent replied in a tone very different from her previous moderation. "who these confederates are who address me in this memorial is, indeed, a mystery to me. the confederates with whom i had formerly to do, for ought i know to the contrary, have dispersed. all at least cannot participate in this statement of grievances, for i myself know of many, who, satisfied in all their demands, have returned to their duty. but still, whoever he may be, who without authority and right, and without name addresses me, he has at least given a very false interpretation to my word if he asserts that i guaranteed to the protestants complete religious liberty. no one can be ignorant how reluctantly i was induced to permit the preachings in the places where they had sprung up unauthorized, and this surely cannot be counted for a concession of freedom in religion. is it likely that i should have entertained the idea of protecting these illegal consistories, of tolerating this state within a state? could i forget myself so far as to grant the sanction of law to an objectionable sect; to overturn all order in the church and in the state, and abominably to blaspheme my holy religion? look to him who has given you such permission, but you must not argue with me. you accuse me of having violated the agreement which gave you impunity and security. the past i am willing to look over, but not what may be done in future. no advantage was to be taken of you on account of the petition of last april, and to the best of my knowledge nothing of the kind has as yet been done; but whoever again offends in the same way against the majesty of the king must be ready to bear the consequences of his crime. in fine, how can you presume to remind me of an agreement which you have been the first to break? at whose instigation were the churches plundered, the images of the saints thrown down, and the towns hurried into rebellion? who formed alliances with foregn powers, set on foot illegal enlistments, and collected unlawful taxes from the subjects of the king? these are the reasons which have impelled me to draw together my troops, and to increase the severity of the edicts. whoever now asks me to lay down my arms cannot mean well to his country or his king, and if ye value your own lives, look to it that your own actions acquit you, instead of judging mine." all the hopes which the confederates might have entertained of an amicable adjustment sank with this high-toned declaration. without being confident of possessing powerful support, the regent would not, they argued, employ such language. an army was in the field, the enemy was before valenciennes, the members who were the heart of the league had abandoned it, and the regent required unconditional submission. their cause was now so bad that open resistance could not make it worse. if they gave themselves up defenceless into the hands of their exasperated sovereign their fate was certain; an appeal to arms could at least make it a matter of doubt; they, therefore, chose the latter, and began seriously to take steps for their defence. in order to insure the assistance of the german protestants, louis of nassau attempted to persuade the towns of amsterdam, antwerp, tournay, and valenciennes to adopt the confession of augsburg, and in this manner to seal their alliance with a religious union. but the proposition was not successful, because the hatred of the calvinists to the lutherans exceeded, if possible, that which they bore to popery. nassau also began in earnest to negotiate for supplies from france, the palatinate, and saxony. the count of bergen fortified his castles; brederode threw himself with a small force into his strong town of vianne on the leek, over which he claimed the rights of sovereignty, and which he hastily placed in a state of defense, and there awaited a reinforcement from the league, and the issue of nassua's negotiations. the flag of war was now unfurled, everywhere the drum was heard to beat; in all parts troops were seen on the march, contributions collected, and soldiers enlisted. the agents of each party often met in the same place, and hardly had the collectors and recruiting officers of the regent quitted a town when it had to endure a similar visit from the agents of the league. from valenciennes the regent directed her attention to herzogenbusch, where the iconoclasts had lately committed fresh excesses, and the party of the protestants had gained a great accession of strength. in order to prevail on the citizens peaceably to receive a garrison, she sent thither, as ambassador, the chancellor scheiff, from brabant, with counsellor merode of petersheim, whom she appointed governor of the town; they were instructed to secure the place by judicious means, and to exact from the citizens a new oath of allegiance. at the same time the count of megen, who was in the neighborhood with a body of troops, was ordered to support the two envoys in effecting their commission, and to afford the means of throwing in a garrison immediately. but brederode, who obtained information of these movements in viane, had already sent thither one of his creatures, a certain anton von bomber,-- a hot calvinist, but also a brave soldier, in order to raise the courage of his party, and to frustrate the designs of the regent. this bomberg succeeded in getting possession of the letters which the chancellor brought with him from the duchess, and contrived to substitute in their place counterfeit ones, which, by their harsh and imperious language, were calculated to exasperate the minds of the citizens. at the same time he attempted to throw suspicion on both the ambassadors of the duchess as having evil designs upon the town. in this he succeeded so well with the mob that in their mad fury they even laid hands on the ambassadors and placed them in confinement. he himself, at the head of eight thousand men, who had adopted him as their leader, advanced against the count of megen, who was moving in order of battle, and gave him so warm a reception, with some heavy artillery, that he was compelled to retire without accomplishing his object. the regent now sent an officer of justice to demand the release of her ambassadors, and in case of refusal to threaten the place with siege; but bomberg with his party surrounded the town hall and forced the magistrate to deliver to him the key of the town. the messenger of the regent was ridiculed and dismissed, and an answer sent through him that the treatment of the prisoners would depend upon brederode's orders. the herald, who was remaining outside before the town, now appeared to declare war against her, which, however, the chancellor prevented. after his futile attempt on herzogenhusch the count of megen threw himself into utrecht in order to prevent the execution of a design which count brederode had formed against that town. as it had suffered much from the army of the confederates, which was encamped in its immediate neighborhood, near viane, it received megen with open arms as its protector, and conformed to all the alterations which he made in the religious worship. upon this he immediately caused a redoubt to be thrown up on the bank of the leek, which would command viane. brederode, not disposed to await his attack, quitted that rendezvous with the best part of his army and hastened to amsterdam. however unprofitably the prince of orange appeared to be losing his time in antwerp during these operations he was, nevertheless, busily employed. at his instigation the league had commenced recruiting, and brederode had fortified his castles, for which purpose he himself presented him with three cannons which he had had cast at utrecht. his eye watched all the movements of the court, and he kept the league warned of the towns which were next menaced with attack. but his chief object appeared to be to get possession of the principal places in the districts under his own government, to which end he with all his power secretly assisted brederode's plans against utrecht and amsterdam. the most important place was the island of walcheren, where the king was expected to land; and he now planned a scheme for the surprise of this place, the conduct of which was entrusted to one of the confederate nobles, an intimate friend of the prince of orange, john of marnix, baron of thoulouse, and brother of philip of aldegonde. . thoulouse maintained a secret understanding with the late mayor of middleburg, peter haak, by which he expected to gain an opportunity of throwing a garrison into middleburg and flushing. the recruiting, however, for this undertaking, which was set on foot in antwerp, could not be carried on so quietly as not to attract the notice of the magistrate. in order, therefore, to lull the suspicions of the latter, and at the same time to promote the success of the scheme, the prince caused the herald by public proclamation to order all foreign soldiers and strangers who were in the service of the state, or employed in other business, forthwith to quit the town. he might, say his adversaries, by closing the gates have easily made himself master of all these suspected recruits; but be expelled them from the town in order to drive them the more quickly to the place of their destination. they immediately embarked on the scheldt, and sailed down to rammekens; as, however, a marketvessel of antwerp, which ran into flushing a little before them had given warning of their design they were forbidden to enter the port. they found the same difficulty at arnemuiden, near middleburg, although the protestants in that place exerted themselves to raise an insurrection in their favor. thoulouse, therefore, without having accomplished anything, put about his ships and sailed back down the scheldt as far as osterweel, a quarter of a mile from antwerp, where he disembarked his people and encamped on the shore, with the hope of getting men from antwerp, and also in order to revive by his presence the courage of his party, which had been cast down by the proceedings of the magistrate. by the aid of the calvinistic clergy, who recruited for him, his little army increased daily, so that at last he began to be formidable to the antwerpians, whose whole territory he laid waste. the magistrate was for attacking him here with the militia, which, however, the prince of orange successfully opposed by the, pretext that it would not be prudent to strip the town of soldiers. meanwhile the regent had hastily brought together a small army under the command of philip of launoy, which moved from brussels to antwerp by forced marches. at the same time count megen managed to keep the army of the gueux shut up and employed at viane, so that it could neither hear of these movements nor hasten to the assistance of its confederates. launoy, on his arrival attacked by surprise the dispersed crowds, who, little expecting an enemy, had gone out to plunder, and destroyed them in one terrible carnage. thoulouse threw himself with the small remnant of his troops into a country house, which had served him as his headquarters, and for a long time defended himself with the courage of despair, until launoy, finding it impossible to dislodge him, set fire to the house. the few who escaped the flames fell on the swords of the enemy or were drowned in the scheldt. thoulouse himself preferred to perish in the flames rather than to fall into the hands of the enemy. this victory, which swept off more than a thousand of the enemy, was purchased by the conqueror cheaply enough, for he did not lose more than two men. three hundred of the leaguers who surrendered were cut down without mercy on the spot, as a sally from antwerp was momentarily dreaded. before the battle actually commenced no anticipation of such an event had been entertained at antwerp. the prince of orange, who had got early information of it, had taken the precaution the day before of causing the bridge which unites the town with osterweel to be destroyed, in order, as he gave out, to prevent the calvinists within the town going out to join the army of thoulouse. a more probable motive seems to have been a fear lest the catholics should attack the army of the gueux general in the rear, or lest launoy should prove victorious, and try to force his way into the town. on the same pretext the gates of the city were also shut by his orders, arnd the inhabitants, who did not comprehend the meaning of all these movements, fluctuated between curiosity and alarm, until the sound of artillery from osterweel announced to them what there was going on. in clamorous crowds they all ran to the walls and ramparts, from which, as the wind drove the smoke from the contending armies, they commanded a full view of the whole battle. both armies were so near to the town that they could discern their banners, and clearly distinguish the voices of the victors and the vanquished. more terrible even than the battle itself was the spectacle which this town now presented. each of the conflicting armies had its friends and its enemies on the wall. all that went on in the plain roused on the ramparts exultation or dismay; on the issue of the conflict the fate of each spectator seemed to depend. every movement on the field could be read in the faces of the townsmen; defeat and triumph, the terror of the conquered, and the fury of the conqueror. here a painful but idle wish to support those who are giving way, to rally those who fly; there an equally futile desire to overtake them, to slay them, to extirpate them. now the gueux fly, and ten thousand men rejoice; thoulouse's last place and refuge is in flames, and the hopes of twenty thousand citizens are consumed with him. but the first bewilderment of alarm soon gave place to a frantic desire of revenge. shrieking aloud, wringing her hands and with dishevelled hair, the widow of the slain general rushed amidst the crowds to implore their pity and help. excited by their favorite preacher, hermann, the calvinists fly to arms, determined to avenge their brethren, or to perish with them; without reflection, without plan or leader, guided by nothing but their anguish, their delirium, they rush to the red gate of the city which leads to the field of battle; but there is no egress, the gate is shut and the foremost of the crowd recoil on those that follow. thousands and thousands collect together, a dreadful rush is made to the meer bridge. we are betrayed! we are prisoners! is the general cry. destruction to the papists, death to him who has betrayed us!--a sullen murmur, portentous of a revolt, runs through the multitude. they begin to suspect that all that has taken place has been set on foot by the roman catholics to destroy the calvinists. they had slain their defenders, and they would now fall upon the defenceless. with fatal speed this suspicion spreads through the whole of antwerp. now they can, they think, understand the past, and they fear something still worse in the background; a frightful distrust gains possession of every mind. each party dreads the other; every one sees an enemy in his neighbor; the mystery deepens the alarm and horror; a fearful condition for a populous town, in which every accidental concourse instantly becomes tumult, every rumor started amongst them becomes a fact, every small spark a blazing flame, and by the force of numbers and collision all passions are furiously inflamed. all who bore the name of calvinists were roused by this report. fifteen thousand of them take possession of the meer bridge, and plant heavy artillery upon it, which they had taken by force from the arsenal; the same thing also happens at another bridge; their number makes them formidable, the town is in their hands; to escape an imaginary danger they bring all antwerp to the brink of ruin. immediately on the commencement of the tumult the prince of orange hastened to the meer bridge, where, boldly forcing his way through the raging crowd, he commanded peace and entreated to be heard. at the other bridge count hogstraten, accompanied by the burgomaster strahlen, made the same attempt; but not possessing a sufficient share either of eloquence or of popularity to command attention, he referred the tumultuous crowd to the prince, around whom all antwerp now furiously thronged. the gate, he endeavored to explain to them, was shut simply to keep off the victor, whoever he might be, from the city, which would otherwise become the prey of an infuriated soldiery. in vain! the frantic people would not listen, and one more daring than the rest presented his musket at him, calling him a traitor. with tumultuous shouts they demanded the key of the red gate, which he was ultimately forced to deliver into the hands of the preacher hermann. but, he added with happy presence of mind, they must take heed what they were doing; in the suburbs six hundred of the enemy's horse were waiting to receive them. this invention, suggested by the emergency, was not so far removed from the truth as its author perhaps imagined; for no sooner had the victorous general perceived the commotion in antwerp than he caused his whole cavalry to mount in the hope of being able, under favor of the disturbance, to break into the town. i, at least, continued the prince of orange, shall secure my own safety in time, and he who follows my example will save himself much future regret. these words opportunely spoken and immediately acted upon had their effect. those who stood nearest followed him, and were again followed by the next, so that at last the few who had already hastened out of the city when they saw no one coming after them lost the desire of coping alone with the six hundred horse. all accordingly returned to the meer bridge, where they posted watches and videttes, and the night was passed tumultuously under arms. the town of antwerp was now threatened with fearful bloodshed and pillage. in this pressing emergency orange assembled an extraordinary senate, to which were summoned all the best-disposed citizens of the four nations. if they wished, said he, to repress the violence of the calvinists they must oppose them with an army strong enough and prepared to meet them. it was therefore resolved to arm with speed the roman catholic inhabitants of the town, whether natives, italians, or spaniards, and, if possible, to induce the lutherans also to join them. the haughtiness of the calvinists, who, proud of their wealth and confident in their numbers, treated every other religious party with contempt, had long made the lutherans their enemies, and the mutual exasperation of these two protestant churches was even more inmplacable than their common hatred of the dominant church. this jealousy the magistrate had turned to advantage, by making use of one party to curb the other, and had thus contrived to keep the calvinists in check, who, from their numbers and insolence, were most to be feared. with this view, he had tacitly taken into his protection the lutherans, as the weaker and more peaceable party, having moreover invited for them, from germany, spiritual teachers, who, by controversial sermons, might keep up the mutual hatred of the two bodies. he encouraged the lutherans in the vain idea that the king thought more favorably of their religious creed than that of the calvinists, and exhorted them to be careful how they damaged their good cause by any understanding with the latter. it was not, therefore, difficult to bring about, for the moment, a union with the roman catholics and the lutherans, as its object was to keep down their detested rivals. at dawn of day an army was opposed to the calvinists which was far superior in force to their own. at the head of this army, the eloquence of orange had far greater effect, and found far more attention than on the preceding evening, unbacked by such strong persuasion. the calvinists, though in possession of arms and artillery, yet, alarmed at the superior numbers arrayed against them, were the first to send envoys, and to treat for an amicable adjustment of differences, which by the tact and good temper of the prince of orange, he concluded to the satisfaction of all parties. on the proclamation of this treaty the spaniards and italians immdiately laid down their arms. they were followed by the calvinists, and these again by the roman catholics; last of all the lutherans disarmed. two days and two nights antwerp had continued in this alarming state. during the tumult the roman catholics had succeeded in placing barrels of gunpowder under the meer bridge, and threatened to blow into the air the whole army of the calvinists, who had done the same in other places to destroy their adversaries. the destruction of the town hung on the issue of a moment, and nothing but the prince's presence of mind saved it. noircarmes, with his army of walloons, still lay before valenciennes, which, in firm reliance on being relieved by the gueux, obstinately refused to listen to all the representations of the regent, and rejected every idea of surrender. an order of the court had expressly forbidden the royalist general to press the siege until he should receive reinforcements from germany. whether from forbearance or fear, the king regarded with abhorrence the violent measure of storming the place, as necessarily involving the innocent in the fate of the guilty, and exposing the loyal subject to the same ill-treatment as the rebel. as, however, the confidence of the besieged augmented daily, and emboldened by the inactivity of the besiegers, they annoyed him by frequent sallies, and after burning the cloisters before the town, retired with the plunder--as the time uselessly lost before this town was put to good use by the rebels and their allies, noircarmes besouht the duchess to obtain immediate permission from the king to take it by storm. the answer arrived more quickly than philip was ever before wont to reply. as yet they must be content, simply to make the necessary preparations, and then to wait awhile to allow terror to have its effect; but if upon this they did not appear ready to capitulate, the storming might take place, but, at the same time, with the greatest possible regard for the lives of the inhabitants. before the regent allowed noircarmes to proceed to this extremity she empowered count egmont, with the duke arschot, to treat once more with the rebels amicably. both conferred with the deputies of the town, and omitted no argument calculated to dispel their delusion. they acquainted them with the defeat of thoulouse, their sole support, and with the fact that the count of megen had cut off the army of the gueux from the town, and assured them that if they had held out so long they owed it entirely to the king's forbearance. they offered them full pardon for the past; every one was to be free to prove his innocence before whatever tribunal he should chose; such as did not wish to avail themselves of this privilege were to be allowed fourteen days to quit the town with all their effects. nothing was required of the townspeople but the admission of the garrison. to give time to deliberate on these terms an armistice of three days was granted. when the deputies returned they found their fellow-citizens less disposed than ever to an accommodation, reports of new levies by the gueux having, in the meantime, gained currency. thoulouse, it was pretended, had conquered, and was advancing with a powerful army to relieve the place. their confidence went so far that they even ventured to break the armistice, and to fire upon the besiegers. at last the burgomaster, with difficulty, succeeded in bringing matters so far towards a peaceful settlement that twelve of the town counsellors were sent into the camp with the following conditions: the edict by which valenciennes had been charged with treason and declared an enemy to the country was required to be recalled, the confiscation of their goods revoked, and the prisoners on both sides restored to liberty; the garrison was not to enter the town before every one who thought good to do so had placed himself and his property in security; and a pledge to be given that the inhabitants should not be molested in any manner, and that their expenses should be paid by the king. noircarmes was so indignant with these conditions that he was almost on the point of ill-treating the deputies. if they had not come, he told them, to give up the place, they might return forthwith, lest he should send them home with their hands tied behind their backs. upon this the deputies threw the blame on the obstinacy of the calvinists, and entreated him, with tears in their eyes, to keep them in the camp, as they did not, they said, wish to have anything more to do with their rebellious townsmen, or to be joined in their fate. they even knelt to beseech the intercession of egmont, but noircarmes remained deaf to all their entreaties, and the sight of the chains which he ordered to be brought out drove them reluctantly enough back to valenciennes. necessity, not severity, imposed this harsh procedure upon the general. the detention of ambassadors had on a former occasion drawn upon him the reprimand of the duchess; the people in the town would not have failed to have ascribed the non-appearance of their present deputies to the same cause as in the former case had detained them. besides, he was loath to deprive the town of any out of the small residue of well- disposed citizens, or to leave it a prey to a blind, foolhardy mob. egmont was so mortified at the bad report of his embassy that he the night following rode round to reconnoitre its fortifications, and returned well satisfied to have convinced himself that it was no longer tenable. valenciennes stretches down a gentle acclivity into the level plain, being built on a site as strong as it is delightful. on one side enclosed by the scheldt and another smaller river, and on the other protected by deep ditches, thick walls, and towers, it appears capable of defying every attack. but noircarmes had discovered a few points where neglect had allowed the fosse to be filled almost up to the level of the natural surface, and of these he determined to avail himself in storming. he drew together all the scattered corps by which he had invested the town, and during a tempestuous night carried the suburb of berg without the loss of a single man. he then assigned separate points of attack to the count of bossu, the young charles of mansfeld, and the younger barlaimont, and under a terrible fire, which drove the enemy from his walls, his troops were moved up with all possible speed. close before the town, and opposite the gate under the eyes of the besiegers, and with very little loss, a battery was thrown up to an equal height with the fortifications. from this point the town was bombarded with an unceasing fire for four hours. the nicolaus tower, on which the besieged had planted some artillery, was among the first that fell, and many perished under its ruins. the guns were directed against all the most conspicuous buildings, and a terrible slaughter was made amongst the inhabitants. in a few hours their principal works were destroyed, and in the gate itself so extensive a breach was made that the besieged, despairing of any longer defending themselves, sent in haste two trumpeters to entreat a parley. this was granted, but the storm was continued without intermission. the ambassador entreated noircarmes to grant them the same terms which only two days before they had rejected. but circumstances had now changed, and the victor would hear no more of conditions. the unceasing fire left the inhabitants no time to repair the ramparts, which filled the fosse with their debris, and opened many a breach for the enemy to enter by. certain of utter destruction, they surrendered next morning at discretion after a bombardment of six-and- thirty hours without intermission, and three thousand bombs had been thrown into the city. noircarmes marched into the town with his victorious army under the strictest discipline, and was received by a crowd of women and children, who went to meet him, carrying green boughs, and beseeching his pity. all the citizens were immediately disarmed, the commandant and his son beheaded; thirty-six of the most guilty of the rebels, among whom were la grange and another calvinistic preacher, guido de bresse, atoned for their obstinacy at the gallows; all the municipal functionaries were deprived of their offices, and the town of all its privileges. the roman catholic worship was immediately restored in full dignity, and the protestant abolished. the bishop of arras was obliged to quit his residence in the town, and a strong garrison placed in it to insure its future obedience. the fate of valenciennes, towards which all eyes had been turned, was a warning to the other towns which had similarly offended. noircarmes followed up his victory, and marched immediately against maestricht, which surrendered without a blow, and received a garrison. from thence he marched to tornhut to awe by his presence the people of herzogenbusch and antwerp. the gueux in this place, who under the command of bomberg had carried all things before them, were now so terrified at his approach that they quitted the town in haste. noircarmes was received without opposition. the ambassadors of the duchess were immediately set at liberty. a strong garrison was thrown into tornhut. cambray also opened its gates, and joyfully recalled its archbishop, whom the calvinists had driven from his see, and who deserved this triumph as he did not stain his entrance with blood. ghent, ypres, and oudenarde submitted and received garrisons. gueldres was now almost entirely cleared of the rebels and reduced to obedience by the count of megen. in friesland and groningen the count of aremberg had eventually the same success; but it was not obtained here so rapidly or so easily, since the count wanted consistency and firmness, and these warlike republicans maintained more pertinaciously their privileges, and were greatly supported by the strength of their position. with the exception of holland all the provinces had yielded before the victorious arms of the duchess. the courage of the disaffected sunk entirely, and nothing was left to them but flight or submission. resignation of william of orange. ever since the establishment of the guesen league, but more perceptibly since the outbreak of the iconoclasts, the spirit of rebellion and disaffection had spread so rapidly among all classes, parties had become so blended and confused, that the regent had difficulty in distinguishing her own adherents, and at last hardly knew on whom to rely. the lines of demarcation between the loyal and the disaffected had grown gradually fainter, until at last they almost entirely vanished. the frequent alterations, too, which she had been obliged to make in the laws, and which were at most the expedients and suggestions of the moment, had taken from them their precision and binding force, and had given full scope to the arbitrary will of every individual whose office it was to interpret them. and at last, amidst the number and variety of the interpretations, the spirit was lost and the intention of the lawgiver baffled. the close connection which in many cases subsisted between protestants and roman catholics, between gueux and royalists, and which not unfrequently gave them a common interest, led the latter to avail themselves of the loophole which the vagueness of the laws left open, and in favor of their protestant friends and associates evaded by subtle distinctions all severity in the discharge of their duties. in their minds it was enough not to be a declared rebel, not one of the gueux, or at least not a heretic, to be authorized to mould their duties to their inclinations, and to set the most arbitrary limits to their obedience to the king. feeling themselves irresponsible, the governors of the provinces, the civil functionaries, both high and low, the municipal officers, and the military commanders had all become extremely remiss in their duty, and presuming upon this impunity showed a pernicious indulgence to the rebels and their adherents which rendered abortive all the regent's measures of coercion. this general indifference and corruption of so many servants of the state had further this injurious result, that it led the turbulent to reckon on far stronger support than in reality they had cause for, and to count on their own side all who were but lukewarm adherents of the court. this way of thinking, erroneous as it was, gave them greater courage and confidence; it had the same effect as if it had been well founded; and the uncertain vassals of the king became in consequence almost as injurious to him as his declared enemies, without at the same time being liable to the same measures of severity. this was especially the case with the prince of orange, counts egmont, bergen, hogstraten, horn, and several others of the higher nobility. the regent felt the necessity of bringing these doubtful subjects to an explanation, in order either to deprive the rebels of a fancied support or to unmask the enemies of the king. and the latter reason was of the more urgent moment when being obliged to send an army into the field it was of the utmost importance to entrust the command of the troops to none but those of whose fidelity she was fully assured. she caused, therefore, an oath to be drawn up which bound all who took it to advance the roman catholic faith, to pursue and punish the iconoclasts, and to help by every means in their power in extirpating all kinds of heresy. it also pledged them to treat the king's enemies as their own, and to serve without distinction against all whom the regent in the king's name should point out. by this oath she did not hope so much to test their sincerity, and still less to secure them, as rather to gain a pretext for removing the suspected parties if they declined to take it, and for wresting from their hands a power which they abused, or a legitimate ground for punishing them if they took it and broke it. this oath was exacted from all knights of the fleece, all civil functionaries and magistrates, all officers of the army--from every one in short who held any appointment in the state. count mansfeld was the first who publicly took it in the council of state at brussels; his example was followed by the duke of arschot, counts egmont, megen, and barlaimont. hogstraten and horn endeavored to evade the necessity. the former was offended at a proof of distrust which shortly before the regent had given him. under the pretext that malines could not safely be left any longer without its governor, but that the presence of the count was no less necessary in antwerp, she had taken from him that province and given it to another whose fidelity she could better reckon upon. hostraten expressed his thanks that she had been pleased to release him from one of his burdens, adding that she would complete the obligation if she would relieve him from the other also. true to his determination count horn was living on one of his estates in the strong town of weerdt, having retired altogether from public affairs. having quitted the service of the state, he owed, he thought, nothing more either to the republic or to the king, and declined the oath, which in his case appears at last to have been waived. the count of brederode was left the choice of either taking the prescribed oath or resigning the command of his squadron of cavalry. after many fruitless attempts to evade the alternative, on the plea that he did not hold office in the state, he at last resolved upon the latter course, and thereby escaped all risk of perjuring himself. vain were all the attempts to prevail on the prince of orange to take the oath, who, from the suspicion which had long attached to him, required more than any other this purification; and from whom the great power which it had been necessary to place in his hands fully justified the regent in exacting it. it was not, however, advisable to proceed against him with the laconic brevity adopted towards brederode and the like; on the other hand, the voluntary resignation of all his offices, which he tendered, did not meet the object of the regent, who foresaw clearly enough how really dangerous he would become, as soon as he should feel himself independent, and be no longer checked by any external considerations of character or duty in the prosecution of his secret designs. but ever since the consultation in dendermonde the prince of orange had made up his mind to quit the service of the king of spain on the first favorable opportunity, and till better days to leave the country itself. a very disheartening experience had taught him how uncertain are hopes built on the multitude, and how quickly their zeal is cooled by the necessity of fulfilling its lofty promises. an army was already in the field, and a far stronger one was, he knew, on its road, under the command of the duke of alva. the time for remonstrauces was past; it was only at the head of an army that an advantageous treaty could now be concluded with the regent, and by preventing the entrance of the spanish general. but now where was he to raise this army, in want as he was of money, the sinews of warfare, since the protestants had retracted their boastful promises and deserted him in this pressing emergency? [how valiant the wish, and how sorry the deed was, is proved by the following instance amongst others. some friends of the national liberty, roman catholics as well as protestants, had solemnly engaged in amsterdam to subscribe to a common fund the hundredth penny of their estates, until a sum of eleven thousand florins should be collected, which was to be devoted to the common cause and interests. an alms-box, protected by three locks, was prepared for the reception of these contributions. after the expiration of the prescribed period it was opened, and a sum was found amounting to seven hundred florins, which was given to the hostess of the count of brederode, in part payment of his unliquidated score. univ. hist. of the n., vol. .] religious jealousy and hatred, moreover, separated the two protestant churches, and stood in the way of every salutary combination against the common enemy of their faith. the rejection of the confession of augsburg by the calvinists had exasperated all the protestant princes of germany, so that no support was to be looked for from the empire. with count egmont the excellent army of walloons was also lost to the cause, for they followed with blind devotion the fortunes of their general, who had taught them at st. quentin and gravelines to be invincible. and again, the outrages which the iconoclasts had perpetrated on the churches and convents had estranged from the league the numerous, wealthy, and powerful class of the established clergy, who, before this unlucky episode, were already more than half gained over to it; while, by her intrigues, the regent daily contrived to deprive the league itself of some one or other of its most influential members. all these considerations combined induced the prince to postpone to a more favorable season a project for which the present juncture was little suited, and to leave a country where his longer stay could not effect any advantage for it, but must bring certain destruction on himself. after intelligence gleaned from so many quarters, after so many proofs of distrust, so many warnings from madrid, he could be no longer doubtful of the sentiments of philip towards him. if even he had any doubt, his uncertainty would soon have been dispelled by the formidable armament which was preparing in spain, and which was to have for its leader, not the king, as was falsely given out, but, as he was better informed, the duke of alva, his personal enemy, and the very man he had most cause to fear. the prince had seen too deeply into philip's heart to believe in the sincerity of his reconciliation after having once awakened his fears. he judged his own conduct too justly to reckon, like his friend egmont, on reaping a gratitude from the king to which he had not sown. he could therefore expect nothing but hostility from him, and prudence counselled him to screen himself by a timely flight from its actual outbreak. he had hitherto obstinately refused to take the new oath, and all the written exhortations of the regent had been fruitless. at last she sent to him at antwerp her private secretary, berti, who was to put the matter emphatically to his conscience, and forcibly remind him of all the evil consequences which so sudden a retirement from the royal service would draw upon the country, as well as the irreparable injury it would do to his own fair fame. already, she informed him by her ambassador, his declining the required oath had cast a shade upon his honor, and imparted to the general voice, which accused him of an understanding with the rebels, an appearance of truth which this unconditional resignation would convert to absolute certainty. it was for the sovereign to discharge his servants, but it did not become the servant to abandon his sovereign. the envoy of the regent found the prince in his palace at antwerp, already, as it appeared, withdrawn from the public service, and entirely devoted to his private concerns. the prince told him, in the presence of hogstraten, that he had refused to take the required oath because he could not find that such a proposition had ever before been made to a governor of a province; because he had already bound himself, once for all, to the king, and therefore, by taking this new oath, he would tacitly acknowledge that he had broken the first. he had also refused because the old oath enjoined him to protect the rights and privileges of the country, but he could not tell whether this new one might not impose upon him duties which would contravene the first; because, too, the clause which bound him to serve, if required, against all without distinction, did not except even the emperor, his feudal lord, against whom, however, he, as his vassal, could not conscientiously make war. he had refused to take this oath because it might impose upon him the necessity of surrendering his friends and relations, his children, nay, even his wife, who was a lutheran, to butchery. according to it, moreover, he must lend himself to every thing which it should occur to the king's fancy or passion to demand. but the king might thus exact from him things which he shuddered even to think of, and even the severities which were now, and had been all along, exercised upon the protestants, were the most revolting to his heart. this oath, in short, was repugnant to his feelings as a man, and he could not take it. in conclusion, the name of the duke of alva dropped from his lips in a tone of bitterness, and he became immediately silent. all these objections were answered, point by point, by berti. certainly such an oath had never been required from a governor before him, because the provinces had never been similarly circumstanced. it was not exacted because the governors had broken the first, but in order to remind them vividly of their former vows, and to freshen their activity in the present emergency. this oath would not impose upon him anything which offended against the rights and privileges of the country, for the king had sworn to observe these as well as the prince of orange. the oath did not, it was true, contain any reference to a war with the emperor, or any other sovereign to whom the prince might be related; and if he really had scruples on this point, a distinct clause could easily be inserted, expressly providing against such a contingency. care would be taken to spare him any duties which were repugnant to his feelings as a man, and no power on earth would compel him to act against his wife or against his children. berti was then passing to the last point, which related to the duke of alva, but the prince, who did not wish to have this part of his discourse canvassed, interrupted him. "the king was coming to the netherlands," he said, "and he knew the king. the king would not endure that one of his servants should have wedded a lutheran, and he had therefore resolved to go with his whole family into voluntary banishment before he was obliged to submit to the same by compulsion. but," he concluded, "wherever he might be, he would always conduct himself as a subject of the king." thus far-fetched were the motives which the prince adduced to avoid touching upon the single one which really decided him. berti had still a hope of obtaining, through egmont's eloquence, what by his own he despaired of effecting. he therefore proposed a meeting with the latter ( ), which the prince assented to the more willingly as he himself felt a desire to embrace his friend once more before his departure, and if possible to snatch the deluded man from certain destruction. this remarkable meeting, at which the private secretary, berti, and the young count mansfeld, were also present, was the last that the two friends ever held, and took place in villebroeck, a village on the rupel, between brussels and antwerp. the calvinists, whose last hope rested on the issue of this conference, found means to acquaint themselves of its import by a spy, who concealed himself in the chimney of the apartment where it was held. all three attempted to shake the determination of the prince, but their united eloquence was unable to move him from his purpose. "it will cost you your estates, orange, if you persist in this intention," said the prince of gaure, as he took him aside to a window. "and you your life, egmont, if you change not yours," replied the former. "to me it will at least be a consolation in my misfortunes that i desired, in deed as well as in word, to help my country and my friends in the hour of need; but you, my friend, you are dragging friends and country with you to destruction." and saying these words, he once again exhorted him, still more urgently than ever, to return to the cause of his country, which his arm alone was yet able to preserve; if not, at least for his own sake to avoid the tempest which was gathering against him from spain. but all the arguments, however lucid, with which a far-discerning prudence supplied him, and however urgently enforced, with all the ardor and animation which the tender anxiety of friendship could alone inspire, did not avail to destroy the fatal confidence which still fettered egmont's better reason. the warning of orange seemed to come from a sad and dispirited heart; but for egmont the world still smiled. to abandon the pomp and affluence in which he had grown up to youth and manhood; to part with all the thousand conveniences of life which alone made it valuable to him, and all this to escape an evil which his buoyant spirit regarded as remote, if not imaginary; no, that was not a sacrifice which could be asked from egmont. but had he even been less given to indulgence than he was, with what heart could he have consigned a princess, accustomed by uninterrupted prosperity to ease and comfort, a wife who loved him as dearly as she was beloved, the children on whom his soul hung in hope and fondness, to privations at the prospect of which his own courage sank, and which a sublime philosophy alone can enable sensuality to undergo. "you will never persuade me, orange," said egmont, "to see things in the gloomy light in which they appear to thy mournful prudence. when i have succeeded in abolishing the public preachings, and chastising the iconoclasts, in crushing the rebels, and restoring peace and order in the provinces, what can the king lay to my charge? the king is good and just; i have claims upon his gratitude, and i must not forget what i owe to myself." "well, then," cried orange, indignantly and with bitter anguish, "trust, if you will, to this royal gratitude; but a mournful presentiment tells me--and may heaven grant that i am deceived!--that you, egmont, will be the bridge by which the spaniards will pass into our country to destroy it." after these words, he drew him to his bosom, ardently clasping him in his arms. long, as though the sight was to serve for the remainder of his life, did he keep his eyes fixed upon him; the tears fell; they saw each other no more. the very next day the prince of orange wrote his letter of resignation to the regent, in which he assured her of his perpetual esteem, and once again entreated her to put the best interpretation on his present step. he then set off with his three brothers and his whole family for his own town of breda, where he remained only as long as was requisite to arrange some private affairs. his eldest son, prince philip william, was left behind at the university of louvain, where he thought him sufficiently secure under the protection of the privileges of brabant and the immunities of the academy; an imprudence which, if it was really not designed, can hardly be reconciled with the just estimate which, in so many other cases, he had taken of the character of his adversary. in breda the heads of the calvinists once more consulted him whether there was still hope for them, or whether all was irretrievably lost. "he had before advised them," replied the prince, "and must now do so again, to accede to the confession of augsburg; then they might rely upon aid from germany. if they would still not consent to this, they must raise six hundred thousand florins, or more, if they could." "the first," they answered, "was at variance with their conviction and their conscience; but means might perhaps be found to raise the money if he would only let them know for what purpose he would use it." "no!" cried he, with the utmost displeasure, "if i must tell you that, it is all over with the use of it." with these words he immediately broke off the conference and dismissed the deputies. the prince of orange was reproached with having squandered his fortune, and with favoring the innovations on account of his debts; but he asserted that he still enjoyed sixty thousand florins yearly rental. before his departure he borrowed twenty thousand florins from the states of holland on the mortgage of some manors. men could hardly persuade themselves that he would have succumbed to necessity so entirely, and without an effort at resistance given up all his hopes and schemes. but what he secretly meditated no one knew, no one had read in his heart. being asked how he intended to conduct himself towards the king of spain, "quietly," was his answer, "unless he touches my honor or my estates." he left the netherlands soon afterwards, and betook himself in retirement to the town of dillenburg, in nassau, at which place he was born. he was accompanied to germany by many hundreds, either as his servants or as volunteers, and was soon followed by counts hogstraten, kuilemberg, and bergen, who preferred to share a voluntary exile with him rather than recklessly involve themselves in an uncertain destiny. in his departure the nation saw the flight of its guardian angel; many had adored, all had honored him. with him the last stay of the protestants gave way; they, however, had greater hopes from this man in exile than from all the others together who remained behind. even the roman catholics could not witness his departure without regret. them also had he shielded from tyranny; he had not unfrequently protected them against the oppression of their own church, and he had rescued many of them from the sanguinary jealousy of their religious opponents. a few fanatics among the calvinists, who were offended with his proposal of an alliance with their brethren, who avowed the confession of augsburg, solemnized with secret thanksgivings the day on which the enemy left them. ( ). decay and dispersion of the geusen league. immediately after taking leave of his friend, the prince of gaure hastened back to brussels, to receive from the regent the reward of his firmness, and there, in the excitement of the court and in the sunshine of his good fortune, to dispel the light cloud which the earnest warnings of the prince of orange had cast over his natural gayety. the flight of the latter now left him in possession of the stage. he had now no longer any rival in the republic to dim his glory. with redoubled zeal he wooed the transient favor of the court, above which he ought to have felt himself far exalted. all brussels must participate in his joy. he gave splendid banquets and public entertainments, at which, the better to eradicate all suspicion from his mind, the regent herself frequently attended. not content with having taken the required oath, he outstripped the most devout in devotion; outran the most zealous in zeal to extirpate the protestant faith, and to reduce by force of arms the refractory towns of flanders. he declared to his old friend, count hogstraten, as also to the rest of the gueux, that he would withdraw from them his friendship forever if they hesitated any longer to return into the bosom of the church, and reconcile themselves with their king. all the confidential letters which had been exchanged between him and them were returned, and by this last step the breach between them was made public and irreparable. egmont's secession, and the flight of the prince of orange, destroyed the last hope of the protestants and dissolved the whole league of the gueux. its members vied with each other in readiness--nay, they could not soon enough abjure the covenant and take the new oath proposed to them by the government. in vain did the protestant merchants exclaim at this breach of faith on the part of the nobles; their weak voice was no longer listened to, and all the sums were lost with which they had supplied the league. the most important places were quickly reduced and garrisoned; the rebels had fled, or perished by the hand of the executioner; in the provinces no protector was left. all yielded to the fortune of the regent, and her victorious army was advancing against antwerp. after a long and obstinate contest this town had been cleared of the worst rebels; hermann and his adherents took to flight; the internal storms had spent their rage. the minds of the people became gradually composed, and no longer excited at will by every furious fanatic, began to listen to better counsels. the wealthier citizens earnestly longed for peace to revive commerce and trade, which had suffered severely from the long reign of anarchy. the dread of alva's approach worked wonders; in order to prevent the miseries which a spanish army would inflict upon the country, the people hastened to throw themselves on the gentler mercies of the regent. of their own accord they despatched plenipotentiaries to brussels to negotiate for a treaty and to hear her terms. agreeably as the regent was surprised by this voluntary step, she did not allow herself to be hurried away by her joy. she declared that she neither could nor would listen to any overtures or representations until the town had received a garrison. even this was no longer opposed, and count mansfeld marched in the day after with sixteen squadrons in battle array. a solemn treaty was now made between the town and duchess, by which the former bound itself to prohibit the calvinistic form of worship, to banish all preachers of that persuasion, to restore the roman catholic religion to its former dignity, to decorate the despoiled churches with their former ornaments, to administer the old edicts as before, to take the new oath which the other towns had sworn to, and, lastly, to deliver into the hands of justice all who been guilty of treason, in bearing arms, or taking part in the desecration of the churches. on the other hand, the regent pledged herself to forget all that had passed, and even to intercede for the offenders with the king. all those who, being dubious of obtaining pardon, preferred banishment, were to be allowed a month to convert their property into money, and place themselves in safety. from this grace none were to be excluded but such as had been guilty of a capital offence, and who were excepted by the previous article. immediately upon the conclusion of this treaty all calvinist and lutheran preachers in antwerp, and the adjoining territory, were warned by the herald to quit the country within twenty-four hours. all the streets and gates were now thronged with fugitives, who for the honor of their god abandoned what was dearest to them, and sought a more peaceful home for their persecuted faith. here husbands were taking an eternal farewell of their wives, fathers of their children; there whole families were preparing to depart. all antwerp resembled a house of mourning; wherever the eye turned some affecting spectacle of painful separation presented itself. a seal was set on the doors of the protestant churches; the whole worship seemed to be extinct. the th of april ( ) was the day appointed for the departure of the preachers. in the town hall, where they appeared for the last time to take leave of the magistrate, they could not command their grief; but broke forth into bitter reproaches. they had been sacrificed, they exclaimed, they had been shamefully betrayed; but a time would come when antwerp would pay dearly enough for this baseness. still more bitter were the complaints of the lutheran clergy, whom the magistrate himself had invited into the country to preach against the calvinists. under the delusive representation that the king was not unfavorable to their religion they had been seduced into a combination against the calvinists, but as soon as the latter had been by their co-operation brought under subjection, and their own services were no longer required, they were left to bewail their folly, which had involved themselves and their enemies in common ruin. a few days afterwards the regent entered antwerp in triumph, accompanied by a thousand walloon horse, the knights of the golden fleece, all the governors and counsellors, a number of municipal officers, and her whole court. her first visit was to the cathedral, which still bore lamentable traces of the violence of the iconoclasts, and drew from her many and bitter tears. immediately afterwards four of the rebels, who had been overtaken in their flight, were brought in and executed in the public market-place. all the children who had been baptized after the protestant rites were rebaptized by roman catholic priests; all the schools of heretics were closed, and their churches levelled to the ground. nearly all the towns in the netherlands followed the example of antwerp and banished the protestant preachers. by the end of april the roman catholic churches were repaired and embellished more splendidly than ever, while all the protestant places of worship were pulled down, and every vestige of the proscribed belief obliterated in the seventeen provinces. the populace, whose sympathies are generally with the successful party, was now as active in accelerating the ruin of the unfortunate as a short time before it had been furiously zealous in its cause; in ghent a large and beautiful church which the calvinists had erected was attacked, and in less than an hour had wholly disappeared. from the beams of the roofless churches gibbets were erected for those who had profaned the sanctuaries of the roman catholics. the places of execution were filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the high roads with fugitives. innumerable were the victims of this year of murder; in the smallest towns fifty at least, in several of the larger as many as three hundred, were put to death, while no account was kept of the numbers in the open country who fell into the hands of the provost-marshal and were immediately strung up as miscreants, without trial and without mercy. the regent was still in antwerp when ambassadors presented themselves from the electors of brandenburg, saxony, hesse, wurtemberg, and baden to intercede for their fugitive brethren in the faith. the expelled preachers of the augsburg confession had claimed the rights assured to them by the religious peace of the germans, in which brabant, as part of the empire, participated, and had thrown themselves on the protection of those princes. the arrival of the foreign ministers alarmed the regent, and she vainly endeavored to prevent their entrance into antwerp; under the guise, however, of showing them marks of honor, she continued to keep them closely watched lest they should encourage the malcontents in any attempts against the peace of the town. from the high tone which they most unreasonably adopted towards the regent it might almost be inferred that they were little in earnest in their demand. "it was but reasonable," they said, "that the confession of augsburg, as the only one which met the spirit of the gospel, should be the ruling faith in the netherlands; but to persecute it by such cruel edicts as were in force was positively unnatural and could not be allowed. they therefore required of the regent, in the name of religion, not to treat the people entrusted to her rule with such severity." she replied through the count of staremberg, her minister for german affairs, that such an exordium deserved no answer at all. from the sympathy which the german princes had shown for the belgian fugitives it was clear that they gave less credit to the letters of the king, in explanation of his measures, than to the reports of a few worthless wretches who, in the desecrated churches, had left behind them a worthier memorial of their acts and characters. it would far more become them to leave to the king of spain the care of his own subjects, and abandon the attempt to foster a spirit of rebellion in foreign countries, from which they would reap neither honor nor profit. the ambassadors left antwerp in a few days without having effected anything. the saxon minister, indeed, in a private interview with the regent even assured her that his master had most reluctantly taken this step. the german ambassadors had not quitted antwerp when intelligence from holland completed the triumph of the regent. from fear of count megen count brederode had deserted his town of viane, and with the aid of the protestants inhabitants had succeeded in throwing himself into amsterdam, where his arrival caused great alarm to the city magistrate, who had previously found difficulty in preventing a revolt, while it revived the courage of the protestants. here brederode's adherents increased daily, and many noblemen flocked to him from utrecht, friesland, and groningen, whence the victorious arms of megen and aremberg had driven them. under various disguises they found means to steal into the city, where they gathered round brederode, and served him as a strong body-guard. the regent, apprehensive of a new outbreak, sent one of her private secretaries, jacob de la torre, to the council of amsterdam, and ordered them to get rid of count brederode on any terms and at any risk. neither the magistrate nor de la torre himself, who visited brederode in person to acquaint him with the will of the duchess, could prevail upon him to depart. the secretary was even surprised in his own chamber by a party of brederode's followers, and deprived of all his papers, and would, perhaps, have lost his life also if he had not contrived to make his escape. brederode remained in amsterdam a full month after this occurrence, a powerless idol of the protestants, and an oppressive burden to the roman catholics; while his fine army, which he had left in viane, reinforced by many fugitives from the southern provinces, gave count megen enough to do without attempting to harass the protestants in their flight. at last brederode resolved to follow the example of orange, and, yielding to necessity, abandon a desperate cause. he informed the town council that he was willing to leave amsterdam if they would enable him to do so by furnishing him with the pecuniary means. glad to get quit of him, they hastened to borrow the money on the security of the town council. brederode quitted amsterdam the same night, and was conveyed in a gunboat as far as vlie, from whence he fortunately escaped to embden. fate treated him more mildly than the majority of those he had implicated in his foolhardy enterprise; he died the year after, , at one of his castles in germany, from the effects of drinking, by which he sought ultimately to drown his grief and disappoint ments. his widow, countess of moers in her own right, was remarried to the prince palatine, frederick iii. the protestant cause lost but little by his demise; the work which he had commenced, as it had not been kept alive by him, so it did not die with him. the little army, which in his disgraceful flight he had deserted, was bold and valiant, and had a few resolute leaders. it disbanded, indeed, as soon as he, to whom it looked for pay, had fled; but hunger and courage kept its parts together some time longer. one body, under command of dietrich of battenburgh, marched to amsterdam in the hope of carrying that town; but count megen hastened with thirteen companies of excellent troops to its relief, and compelled the rebels to give up the attempt. contenting themselves with plundering the neighboring cloisters, among which the abbey of egmont in particular was hardly dealt with, they turned off towards waaterland, where they hoped the numerous swamps would protect them from pursuit. but thither count megen followed them, and compelled them in all haste to seek safety in the zuyderzee. the brothers van battenburg, and two friesan nobles, beima and galama, with a hundred and twenty men and the booty they had taken from the monasteries, embarked near the town of hoorne, intending to cross to friesland, but through the treachery of the steersman, who ran the vessel on a sand-bank near harlingen, they fell into the hands of one of aremberg's captains, who took them all prisoners. the count of aremberg immediately pronounced sentence upon all the captives of plebeian rank, but sent his noble prisoners to the regent, who caused seven of them to be beheaded. seven others of the most noble, including the brothers van battenburg and some frieslanders, all in the bloom of youth, were reserved for the duke of alva, to enable him to signalize the commencement of his administration by a deed which was in every way worthy of him. the troops in four other vessels which set sail from medenhlick, and were pursued by count megen in small boats, were more successful. a contrary wind had forced them out of their course and driven them ashore on the coast of gueldres, where they all got safe to land; crossing the rhine, near heusen, they fortunately escaped into cleves, where they tore their flags in pieces and dispersed. in north holland count megen overtook some squadrons who had lingered too long in plundering the cloisters, and completely overpowered them. he afterwards formed a junction with noircarmes and garrisoned amsterdam. the duke erich of brunswick also surprised three companies, the last remains of the army of the gueux, near viane, where they were endeavoring to take a battery, routed them and captured their leader, rennesse, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at the castle of freudenburg, in utrecht. subsequently, when duke erich entered viane, he found nothing but deserted streets, the inhabitants having left it with the garrison on the first alarm. he immediately razed the fortifications, and reduced this arsenal of the gueux to an open town without defences. all the originators of the league were now dispersed; brederode and louis of nassau had fled to germany, and counts hogstraten, bergen, and kuilemberg had followed their example. mansfeld had seceded, the brothers van battenburg awaited in prison an ignomonious fate, while thoulouse alone had found an honorable death on the field of battle. those of the confederates who had escaped the sword of the enemy and the axe of the executioner had saved nothing but their lives, and thus the title which they had assumed for show became at last a terrible reality. such was the inglorious end of the noble league, which in its beginning awakened such fair hopes and promised to become a powerful protection against oppression. unanimity was its strength, distrust and internal dissension its ruin. it brought to light and developed many rare and beautiful virtues, but it wanted the most indispensable of all, prudence and moderation, without which any undertaking must miscarry, and all the fruits of the most laborious industry perish. if its objects had been as pure as it pretended, or even had they remained as pure as they really were at its first establishment, it might have defied the unfortunate combination of circumstances which prematurely overwhelmed it, and even if unsuccessful it would still have deserved an honorable mention in history. but it is too evident that the confederate nobles, whether directly or indirectly, took a greater share in the frantic excesses of the iconoclasts than comported with the dignity and blamelessness of their confederation, and many among them openly exchanged their own good cause for the mad enterprise of these worthless vagabonds. the restriction of the inquisition and a mitigation of the cruel inhumanity of the edicts must be laid to the credit of the league; but this transient relief was dearly purchased, at the cost of so many of the best and bravest citizens, who either lost their lives in the field, or in exile carried their wealth and industry to another quarter of the world; and of the presence of alva and the spanish arms. many, too, of its peaceable citizens, who without its dangerous temptations would never have been seduced from the ranks of peace and order, were beguiled by the hope of success into the most culpable enterprises, and by their failure plunged into ruin and misery. but it cannot be denied that the league atoned in some measure for these wrongs by positive benefits. it brought together and emboldened many whom a selfish pusillanimity kept asunder and inactive; it diffused a salutary public spirit amongst the belgian people, which the oppression of the government had almost entirely extinguished, and gave unanimity and a common voice to the scattered members of the nation, the absence of which alone makes despots bold. the attempt, indeed, failed, and the knots, too carelessly tied, were quickly unloosed; but it was through such failures that the nation was eventually to attain to a firm and lasting union, which should bid defiance to change. the total destruction of the geusen army quickly brought the dutch towns also back to their obedience, and in the provinces there remained not a single place which had not submitted to the regent; but the increasing emigration, both of the natives and the foreign residents, threatened the country with depopulation. in amsterdam the crowd of fugitives was so great that vessels were wanting to convey them across the north sea and the zuyderzee, and that flourishing emporium beheld with dismay the approaching downfall of its prosperity. alarmed at this general flight, the regent hastened to write letters to all the towns, to encourage the citizens to remain, and by fair promises to revive a hope of better and milder measures. in the king's name she promised to all who would freely swear to obey the state and the church complete indemnity, and by public proclamation invited the fugitives to trust to the royal clemency and return to their homes. she engaged also to relieve the nation from the dreaded presence of a spanish army, even if it were already on the frontiers; nay, she went so far as to drop hints that, if necessary, means might be found to prevent it by force from entering the provinces, as she was fully determined not to relinquish to another the glory of a peace which it had cost her so much labor to effect. few, however, returned in reliance upon her word, and these few had cause to repent it in the sequel; many thousands had already quitted the country, and several thousands more quickly followed them. germany and england were filled with flemish emigrants, who, wherever they settled, retained their usages and manners, and even their costume, unwilling to come to the painful conclusion that they should never again see their native land, and to give up all hopes of return. few carried with them any remains of their former affluence; the greater portion had to beg their way, and bestowed on their adopted country nothing but industrious skill and honest citizens. and now the regent hastened to report to the king tidings such as, during her whole administration, she had never before been able to gratify him with. she announced to him that she had succeeded in restoring quiet throughout the provinces, and that she thought herself strong enough to maintain it. the sects were extirpated, and the roman catholic worship re-established in all its former splendor; the rebels had either already met with, or were awaiting in prison, the punishment they deserved; the towns were secured by adequate garrisons. there was therefore no necessity for sending spanish troops into the netherlands, and nothing to justify their entrance. their arrival would tend to destroy the existing repose, which it had cost so much to establish, would check the much-desired revival of commerce and trade, and, while it would involve the country in new expenses, would at the same time deprive them of the only means of supporting them. the mere rumor of the approach of a spanish army had stripped the country of many thousands of its most valuable citizens; its actual appearance would reduce it to a desert. as there was no longer any enemy to subdue, or rebellion to suppress, the people would see no motive for the march of this army but punishment and revenge, and under this supposition its arrival would neither be welcomed nor honored. no longer excused by necessity, this violent expedient would assume the odious aspect of oppression, would exasperate the national mind afresh, drive the protestants to desperation, and arm their brethren in other countries in their defence. the regent, she said, had in the king's name promised the nation it should be relieved from this foreign army, and to this stipulation she was principally indebted for the present peace; she could not therefore guarantee its long continuance if her pledge was not faithfully fulfilled. the netherlands would receive him as their sovereign, the king, with every mark of attachment and veneration, but he must come as a father to bless, not as a despot to chastise them. let him come to enjoy the peace which she had bestowed on the country, but not to destroy it afresh. alva's armament and expedition to the netherlands. but it was otherwise determined in the council at madrid. the minister, granvella, who, even while absent himself, ruled the spanish cabinet by his adherents; the cardinal grand inquisitor, spinosa, and the duke of alva, swayed respectively by hatred, a spirit of persecution, or private interest, had outvoted the milder councils of the prince ruy gomes of eboli, the count of feria, and the king's confessor, fresneda. the insurrection, it was urged by the former, was indeed quelled for the present, but only because the rebels were awed by the rumor of the king's armed approach; it was to fear of punishment alone, and not to sorrow for their crime, that the present calm was to be ascribed, and it would soon again be broken if that feeling were allowed to subside. in fact, the offences of the people fairly afforded the king the opportunity he had so long desired of carrying out his despotic views with an appearance of justice. the peaceable settlement for which the regent took credit to herself was very far from according with his wishes, which sought rather for a legitimate pretext to deprive the provinces of their privileges, which were so obnoxious to his despotic temper. with an impenetrable dissimulation philip had hitherto fostered the general delusion that he was about to visit the provinces in person, while all along nothing could have been more remote from his real intentions. travelling at any time ill suited the methodical regularity of his life, which moved with the precision of clockwork; and his narrow and sluggish intellect was oppressed by the variety and multitude of objects with which new scenes crowded it. the difficulties and dangers which would attend a journey to the netherlands must, therefore, have been peculiarly alarming to his natural timidity and love of ease. why should he, who, in all that he did, was accustomed to consider himself alone, and to make men accommodate themselves to his principles, not his principles to men, undertake so perilous an expedition, when he could see neither the advantage nor necessity of it. moreover, as it had ever been to him an utter impossibility to separate, even for a moment, his person from his royal dignity, which no prince ever guarded so tenaciously and pedantically as himself, so the magnificence and ceremony which in his mind were inseparably connected with such a journey, and the expenses which, on this account, it would necessarily occasion, were of themselves sufficient motives to account for his indisposition to it, without its being at all requisite to call in the aid of the influence of his favorite, ruy gomes, who is said to have desired to separate his rival, the duke of alva, from the king. little, however, as be seriously intended this journey, he still deemed it advisable to keep up the expectation of it, as well with a view of sustaining the courage of the loyal as of preventing a dangerous combination of the disaffected, and stopping the further progress of the rebels. in order to carry on the deception as long as possible, philip made extensive preparations for his departure, and neglected nothing which could be required for such an event. he ordered ships to be fitted out, appointed the officers and others to attend him. to allay the suspicion such warlike preparations might excite in all foreign courts, they were informed through his ambassadors of his real design. he applied to the king of france for a passage for himself and attendants through that kingdom, and consulted the duke of savoy as to the preferable route. he caused a list to be drawn up of all the towns and fortified places that lay in his march, and directed all the intermediate distances to be accurately laid down. orders were issued for taking a map and survey of the whole extent of country between savoy and burgundy, the duke being requested to furnish the requisite surveyors and scientific officers. to such lengths was the deception carried that the regent was commanded to hold eight vessels at least in readiness off zealand, and to despatch them to meet the king the instant she heard of his having sailed from spain; and these ships she actually got ready, and caused prayers to be offered up in all the churches for the king's safety during the voyage, though in secret many persons did not scruple to remark that in his chamber at madrid his majesty would not have much cause to dread the storms at sea. philip played his part with such masterly skill that the belgian ambassadors at madrid, lords bergen and montigny, who at first had disbelieved in the sincerity of his pretended journey, began at last to be alarmed, and infected their friends in brussels with similar apprehensions. an attack of tertian ague, which about this time the king suffered, or perhaps feigned, in segovia, afforded a plausible pretence for postponing his journey, while meantime the preparations for it were carried on with the utmost activity. at last, when the urgent and repeated solicitations of his sister compelled him to make a definite explanation of his plans, he gave orders that the duke of alva should set out forthwith with an army, both to clear the way before him of rebels, and to enhance the splendor of his own royal arrival. he did not yet venture to throw off the mask and announce the duke as his substitute. he had but too much reason to fear that the submission which his flemish nobles would cheerfully yield to their sovereign would be refused to one of his servants, whose cruel character was well known, and who, moreover, was detested as a foreigner and the enemy of their constitution. and, in fact, the universal belief that the king was soon to follow, which long survived alva's entrance into the country, restrained the outbreak of disturbances which otherwise would assuredly have been caused by the cruelties which marked the very opening of the duke's government. the clergy of spain, and especially the inquisition, contributed richly towards the expenses of this expedition as to a holy war. throughout spain the enlisting was carried on with the utmost zeal. the viceroys and governors of sardinia, sicily, naples, and milan received orders to select the best of their italian and spanish troops in the garrisons and despatch them to the general rendezvous in the genoese territory, where the duke of alva would exchange them for the spanish recruits which he should bring with him. at the same time the regent was commanded to hold in readiness a few more regiments of german infanty in luxembourg, under the command of the counts eberstein, schaumburg, and lodrona, and also some squadrons of light cavalry in the duchy of burgundy to reinforce the spanish general immediately on his entrance into the provinces. the count of barlaimont was commissioned to furnish the necessary provision for the armament, and a sum of two hundred thousand gold florins was remitted to the regent to enable her to meet these expenses and to maintain her own troops. the french court, however, under pretence of the danger to be apprehended from the huguenots, had refused to allow the spanish army to pass through france. philip applied to the dukes of savoy and lorraine, who were too dependent upon him to refuse his request. the former merely stipulated that he should be allowed to maintain two thousand infantry and a squadron of horse at the king's expense in order to protect his country from the injuries to which it might otherwise be exposed from the passage of the spanish army. at the same time he undertook to provide the necessary supplies for its maintenance during the transit. the rumor of this arrangement roused the huguenots, the genevese, the swiss, and the grisons. the prince of conde and the admiral coligny entreated charles ix. not to neglect so favorable a moment of inflicting a deadly blow on the hereditary foe of france. with the aid of the swiss, the genevese, and his own protestant subjects, it would, they alleged, be an easy matter to destroy the flower of the spanish troops in the narrow passes of the alpine mountains; and they promised to support him in this undertaking with an army of fifty thousand huguenots. this advice, however, whose dangerous object was not easily to be mistaken, was plausibly declined by charles ix., who assured them that he was both able and anxious to provide for the security of his kingdom. he hastily despatched troops to cover the french frontiers; and the republics of geneva, bern, zurich, and the grisons followed his example, all ready to offer a determined opposition to the dreaded enemy of their religion and their liberty. on the th of may, , the duke of alva set sail from carthagena with thirty galleys, which had been furnished by andrew doria and the duke cosmo of florence, and within eight days landed at genoa, where the four regiments were waiting to join him. but a tertian ague, with which he was seized shortly after his arrival, compelled him to remain for some days inactive in lombardy--a delay of which the neighboring powers availed themselves to prepare for defence. as soon as the duke recovered he held at asti, in montferrat, a review of all his troops, who were more formidable by their valor than by their numbers, since cavalry and infantry together did not amount to much above ten thousand men. in his long and perilous march he did not wish to encumber himself with useless supernumeraries, which would only impede his progress and increase the difficulty of supporting his army. these ten thousand veterans were to form the nucleus of a greater army, which, according as circumstances and occasion might require, he could easily assemble in the netherlands themselves. this array, however, was as select as it was small. it consisted of the remains of those victorious legions at whose head charles v. had made europe tremble; sanguinary, indomitable bands, in whose battalions the firmness of the old macedonian phalanx lived again; rapid in their evolutions from long practice, hardy and enduring, proud of their leader's success, and confident from past victories, formidable by their licentiousness, but still more so by their discipline; let loose with all the passions of a warmer climate upon a rich and peaceful country, and inexorable towards an enemy whom the church had cursed. their fanatical and sanguinary spirit, their thirst for glory and innate courage was aided by a rude sensuality, the instrument by which the spanish general firmly and surely ruled his otherwise intractable troops. with a prudent indulgence he allowed riot and voluptuousness to reign throughout the camp. under his tacit connivance italian courtezans followed the standards; even in the march across the apennines, where the high price of the necessaries of life compelled him to reduce his force to the smallest possible number, he preferred to have a few regiments less rather than to leave behind these instruments of voluptuousness. [the bacchanalian procession of this army contrasted strangely enough with the gloomy seriousness and pretended sanctity of his aim. the number of these women was so great that to restrain the disorders and quarrelling among themselves they hit upon the expedient of establishing a discipline of their own. they ranged themselves under particular flags, marched in ranks and sections, and in admirable military order, after each battalion, and classed themselves with strict etiquette according to their rank and pay.] but industriously as alva strove to relax the morals of his soldiers, he enforced the more rigidly a strict military discipline, which was interrupted only by a victory or rendered less severe by a battle. for all this he had, he said, the authority of the athenian general iphicrates, who awarded the prize of valor to the pleasure-loving and rapacious soldier. the more irksome the restraint by which the passions of the soldiers were kept in check, the greater must have been the vehemence with which they broke forth at the sole outlet which was left open to them. the duke divided his infantry, which was about nine thousand strong, and chiefly spaniards, into four brigades, and gave the command of them to four spanish officers. alphonso of ulloa led the neapolitan brigade of nine companies, amounting to three thousand two hundred and thirty men; sancho of lodogno commanded the milan brigade, three thousand two hundred men in ten companies; the sicilian brigade, with the same number of companies, and consisting of sixteen hundred men, was under julian romero, an experienced warrior, who had already fought on belgian ground. [the same officer who commanded one of the spanish regiments about which so much complaint had formerly been made in the states- general.] gonsalo of braccamonte headed that of sardinia, which was raised by three companies of recruits to the full complement of the former. to every company, moreover, were added fifteen spanish musqueteers. the horse, in all twelve hundred strong, consisted of three italian, two albanian, and seven spanish squadrons, light and heavy cavalry, and the chief command was held by ferdinand and frederick of toledo, the two sons of alva. chiappin vitelli, marquis of cetona, was field-marshal; a celebrated general whose services had been made over to the king of spain by cosmo of florence; and gabriel serbellon was general of artillery. the duke of savoy lent alva an experienced engineer, francis pacotto, of urbino, who was to be employed in the erection of new fortifications. his standard was likewise followed by a number of volunteers, and the flower of the spanish nobility, of whom the greater part had fought under charles v. in germany, italy, and before tunis. among these were christopher mondragone, one of the ten spanish heroes who, near mithlbehg, swam across the elbe with their swords between their teeth, and, under a shower of bullets from the enemy, brought over from the opposite shore the boats which the emperor required for the construction of a bridge. sancho of avila, who had been trained to war under alva himself, camillo of monte, francis ferdugo, karl davila, nicolaus basta, and count martinego, all fired with a noble ardor, either to commence their military career under so eminent a leader, or by another glorious campaign under his command to crown the fame they had already won. after the review the army marched in three divisions across mount cenis, by the very route which sixteen centuries before hannibal is said to have taken. the duke himself led the van; ferdinand of toledo, with whom was associated lodogno as colonel, the centre; and the marquis of cetona the rear. the commissary general, francis of ibarra, was sent before with general serbellon to open the road for the main body, and get ready the supplies at the several quarters for the night. the places which the van left in the morning were entered in the evening by the centre, which in its turn made room on the following day for the rear. thus the army crossed the alps of savoy by regular stages, and with the fourteenth day completed that dangerous passage. a french army of observation accompanied it side by side along the frontiers of dauphins, and the course of the rhone, and the allied army of the genevese followed it on the right, and was passed by it at a distance of seven miles. both these armies of observation carefully abstained from any act of hostility, and were merely intended to cover their own frontiers. as the spanish legions ascended and descended the steep mountain crags, or while they crossed the rapid iser, or file by file wound through the narrow passes of the rocks, a handful of men would have been sufficient to put an entire stop to their march, and to drive them back into the mountains, where they would have been irretrievably lost, since at each place of encampment supplies were provided for no more than a single day, and for a third part only of the whole force. but a supernatural awe and dread of the spanish name appeared to have blinded the eyes of the enemy so that they did not perceive their advantage, or at least did not venture to profit by it. in order to give them as little opportunity as possible of remembering it, the spanish general hastened through this dangerous pass. convinced, too, that if his troops gave the slightest umbrage he was lost, the strictest discipline was maintained during the march; not a single peasant's hut, not a single field was injured; and never, perhaps, in the memory of man was so numerous an army led so far in such excellent order. [once only on entering lorraine three horsemen ventured to drive away a few sheep from a flock, of which circumstance the duke was no sooner informed than he sent back to the owner what had been taken from him and sentenced the offenders to be hung. this sentence was, at the intercession of the lorraine general, who had come to the frontiers to pay his respects to the duke, executed on only one of the three, upon whom the lot fell at the drum-head.] destined as this army was for vengeance and murder, a malignant and baleful star seemed to conduct it safe through all dangers; and it would be difficult to decide whether the prudence of its general or the blindness of its enemies is most to be wondered at. in franche comte, four squadrons of burgundian cavalry, newly-raised, joined the main army, which, at luxembourg, was also reinforced by three regiments of german infantry under the command of counts eberstein, schaumburg, and lodrona. from thionville, where he halted a few days, alva sent his salutations to the regent by francis of ibarra, who was, at the same time, directed to consult her on the quartering of the troops. on her part, noircarmes and barlairnont were despatched to the spanish camp to congratulate the duke on his arrival, and to show him the customary marks of honor. at the same time they were directed to ask him to produce the powers entrusted to him by the king, of which, however, he only showed a part. the envoys of the regent were followed by swarms of the flemish nobility, who thought they could not hasten soon enough to conciliate the favor of the new viceroy, or by a timely submission avert the vengeance which was preparing. among them was count egmont. as he came forward the duke pointed him out to the bystanders. "here comes an arch-heretic," he exclaimed, loud enough to be heard by egmont himself, who, surprised at these words, stopped and changed color. but when the duke, in order to repair his imprudence, went up to him with a serene countenance, and greeted him with a friendly embrace, the fleming was ashamed of his fears, and made light of this warning, by putting some frivolous interpretation upon it. egmont sealed this new friendship with a present of two valuable chargers, which alva accepted with a grave condescension. upon the assurance of the regent that the provinces were in the enjoyment of perfect peace, and that no opposition was to be apprehended from any quarter, the duke discharged some german regiments, which had hitherto drawn their pay from the netherlands. three thousand six hundred men, under the command of lodrona, were quartered in antwerp, from which town the walloon garrison, in which full reliance could not be placed, was withdrawn; garrisons proportionably stronger were thrown into ghent and other important places; alva himself marched with the milan brigade towards brussels, whither he was accompanied by a splendid cortege of the noblest in the land. here, as in all the other towns of the netherlands, fear and terror had preceded him, and all who were conscious of any offences, and even those who were sensible of none, alike awaited his approach with a dread similar to that with which criminals see the coming of their day of trial. all who could tear themselves from the ties of family, property, and country had already fled, or now at last took to flight. the advance of the spanish army had already, according to the report of the regent, diminished the population of the provinces by the loss of one hundred thousand citizens, and this general flight still continued. but the arrival of the spanish general could not be more hateful to the people of the netherlands than it was distressing and dispiriting to the regent. at last, after so many years of anxiety, she had begun to taste the sweets of repose, and that absolute-authority, which had been the long-cherished object of eight years of a troubled and difficult administration. this late fruit of so much anxious industry, of so many cares and nightly vigils, was now to be wrested from her by a stranger, who was to be placed at once in possession of all the advantages which she had been forced to extract from adverse circumstances, by a long and tedious course of intrigue and patient endurance. another was lightly to bear away the prize of promptitude, and to triumph by more rapid success over her superior but less glittering merits. since the departure of the minister, granvella, she had tasted to the full the pleasures of independence. the flattering homage of the nobility, which allowed her more fully to enjoy the shadow of power, the more they deprived her of its substance, had, by degrees, fostered her vanity to such an extent, that she at last estranged by her coldness even the most upright of all her servants, the state counsellor viglius, who always addressed her in the language of truth. all at once a censor of her actions was placed at her side, a partner of her power was associated with her, if indeed it was not rather a master who was forced upon her, whose proud, stubborn, and imperious spirit, which no courtesy could soften, threatened the deadliest wounds to her self-love and vanity. to prevent his arrival she had, in her representations to the king, vainly exhausted every political argument. to no purpose had she urged that the utter ruin of the commerce of the netherlands would be the inevitable consequence of; this introduction of the spanish troops; in vain had she assured the king that peace was universally restored, and reminded him of her own services in procuring it, which deserved, she thought, a better guerdon than to see all the fruits of her labors snatched from her and given to a foreigner, and more than all, to behold all the good which she had effected destroyed by a new and different line of conduct. even when the duke had already crossed mount cenis she made one more attempt, entreating him at least to diminish his army; but that also failed, for the duke insisted upon acting up to the powers entrusted to him. in poignant grief she now awaited his approach, and with the tears she shed for her country were mingled those of offended self-love. on the d of august, , the duke of alva appeared before the gates of brussels. his army immediately took up their quarters in the suburbs, and he himself made it his first duty to pay his respects to the sister of his king. she gave him a private audience on the plea of suffering from sickness. either the mortification she had undergone had in reality a serious effect upon her health, or, what is not improbable, she had recourse to this expedient to pain his haughty spirit, and in some degree to lessen his triumph. he delivered to her letters from the king, and laid before her a copy of his own appointment, by which the supreme command of the whole military force of the netherlands was committed to him, and from which, therefore, it would appear, that the administration of civil affairs remained, as heretofore, in the hands of the regent. but as soon as he was alone with her he produced a new commission, which was totally different from the former. according to this, the power was delegated to him of making war at his discretion, of erecting fortifications, of appointing and dismissing at pleasure the governors of provinces, the commandants of towns, and other officers of the king; of instituting inquiries into the past troubles, of punishing those who originated them, and of rewarding the loyal. powers of this extent, which placed him almost on a level with a sovereign prince, and far surpassed those of the regent herself, caused her the greatest consternation, and it was with difficulty that she could conceal her emotion. she asked the duke whether he had not even a third commission, or some special orders in reserve which went still further, and were drawn up still more precisely, to which he replied distinctly enough in the affirmative, but at the same time gave her to understand that this commission might be too full to suit the present occasion, and would be better brought into play hereafter with due regard to time and circumstances. a few days after his arrival he caused a copy of the first instructions to be laid before the several councils and the states, and had them printed to insure their rapid circulation. as the regent resided in the palace, he took up his quarters temporarily in kuilemberg house, the same in which the association of the gueux had received its name, and before which, through a wonderful vicissitude, spanish tyranny now planted its flag. a dead silence reigned in brussels, broken only at times by the unwonted clang of arms. the duke had entered the town but a few hours when his attendants, like bloodhounds that have been slipped, dispersed themselves in all directions. everywhere foreign faces were to be seen; the streets were empty, all the houses carefully closed, all amusements suspended, all public places deserted. the whole metropolis resembled a place visited by the plague. acquaintances hurried on without stopping for their usual greeting; all hastened on the moment a spaniard showed himself in the streets. every sound startled them, as if it were the knock of the officials of justice at their doors; the nobility, in trembling anxiety, kept to their houses; they shunned appearing in public lest their presence should remind the new viceroy of some past offence. the two nations now seemed to have exchanged characters. the spaniard had become the talkative man and the brabanter taciturn; distrust and fear had scared away the spirit of cheerfulness and mirth; a constrained gravity fettered even the play of the features. every moment the impending blow was looked for with dread. this general straining of expectation warned the duke to hasten the accomplishment of his plans before they should be anticipated by the timely flight of his victims. his first object was to secure the suspected nobles, in order, at once and forever, to deprive the faction of its leaders, and the nation, whose freedom was to be crushed, of all its supporters. by a pretended affability he had succeeded in lulling their first alarm, and in restoring count egmont in particular to his former perfect confidence, for which purpose he artfully employed his sons, ferdinand and frederick of toledo, whose companionableness and youth assimilated more easily with the flemish character. by this skilful advice he succeeded also in enticing count horn to brussels, who had hitherto thought it advisable to watch the first measures of the duke from a distance, but now suffered himself to be seduced by the good fortune of his friend. some of the nobility, and count egmont at the head of them, even resumed their former gay style of living. but they themselves did not do so with their whole hearts, and they had not many imitators. kuilemberg house was incessantly besieged by a numerous crowd, who thronged around the person of the new viceroy, and exhibited an affected gayety on their countenances, while their hearts were wrung with distress and fear. egmont in particular assumed the appearance of a light heart, entertaining the duke's sons, and being feted by them in return. meanwhile, the duke was fearful lest so fair an opportunity for the accomplishment of his plans might not last long, and lest some act of imprudence might destroy the feeling of security which had tempted both his victims voluntarily to put themselves into his power; he only waited for a third; hogstraten also was to be taken in the same net. under a plausible pretext of business he therefore summoned him to the metropolis. at the same time that he purposed to secure the three counts in brussels, colonel lodrona was to arrest the burgomaster, strahlen, in antwerp, an intimate friend of the prince of orange, and suspected of having favored the calvinists; another officer was to seize the private secretary of count egmont, whose name was john cassembrot von beckerzeel, as also some secretaries of count horn, and was to possess themselves of their papers. when the day arrived which had been fixed upon for the execution of this plan, the duke summoned all the counsellors and knights before him to confer with them upon matters of state. on this occasion the duke of arschot, the counts mansfeld, barlaimont, and aremberg attended on the part of the netherlands, and on the part of the spaniards besides the duke's sons, vitelli, serbellon, and ibarra. the young count mansfeld, who likewise appeared at the meeting, received a sign from his father to withdraw with all speed, and by a hasty flight avoid the fate which was impending over him as a former member of the geusen league. the duke purposely prolonged the consultation to give time before he acted for the arrival of the couriers from antwerp, who were to bring him the tidings of the arrest of the other parties. to avoid exciting any suspicion, the engineer, pacotto, was required to attend the meeting to lay before it the plans for some fortifications. at last intelligence was brought him that lodrona had successfully executed his commission. upon this the duke dexterously broke off the debate and dismissed the council. and now, as count egmont was about to repair to the apartment of don ferdinand, to finish a game that he had commenced with him, the captain of the duke's body guard, sancho d'avila, stopped him, and demanded his sword in the king's name. at the same time he was surrounded by a number of spanish soldiers, who, as had been preconcerted, suddenly advanced from their concealment. so unexpected a blow deprived egmont for some moments of all powers of utterance and recollection; after a while, however, he collected himself, and taking his sword from his side with dignified composure, said, as he delivered it into the hands of the spaniard, "this sword has before this on more than one occasion successfully defended the king's cause." another spanish officer arrested count horn as he was returning to his house without the least suspicion of danger. horn's first inquiry was after egmont. on being told that the same fate had just happened to his friend he surrendered himself without resistance. "i have suffered myself to be guided by him," he exclaimed, "it is fair that i should share his destiny." the two counts were placed in confinement in separate apartments. while this was going on in the interior of kuilemberg house the whole garrison were drawn out under arms in front of it. no one knew what had taken place inside, a mysterious terror diffused itself throughout brussels until rumor spread the news of this fatal event. each felt as if he himself were the sufferer; with many indignation at egmont's blind infatuation preponderated over sympathy for his fate; all rejoiced that orange had escaped. the first question of the cardinal granvella, too, when these tidings reached him in rome, is said to have been, whether they had taken the silent one also. on being answered in the negative he shook his head "then as they have let him escape they have got nothing." fate ordained better for the count of hogstraten. compelled by ill-health to travel slowly, he was met by the report of this event while he was yet on his way. he hastily turned back, and fortunately escaped destruction. immediately after egmont's seizure a writing was extorted from him, addressed to the commandant of the citadel of ghent, ordering that officer to deliver the fortress to the spanish colonel alphonso d'ulloa. upon this the two counts were then (after they had been for some weeks confined in brussels) conveyed under a guard of three thousand spaniards to ghent, where they remained imprisoned till late in the following year. in the meantime all their papers had been seized. many of the first nobility who, by the pretended kindness of the duke of alva, had allowed themselves to be cajoled into remaining experienced the same fate. capital punishment was also, without further delay, inflicted on all who before the duke's arrival had been taken with arms in their hands. upon the news of egmont's arrest a second body of about twenty thousand inhabitants took up the wanderer's staff, besides the one hundred thousand who, prudently declining to await the arrival of the spanish general, had already placed themselves in safety. [a great part of these fugitives helped to strengthen the army of the huguenots, who had taken occasion, from the passage of the spanish army through lorraine, to assemble their forces, and now pressed charles ix. hard. on these grounds the french court thought it had a right to demand aid from the regent of the netherlands. it asserted that the huguenots had looked upon the march of the spanish army as the result of a preconcerted plan which had been formed against them by the two courts at bayonne and that this had roused them from their slumber. that consequently it behooved the spanish court to assist in extricating the french king from difficulties into which the latter had been brought simply by the march of the spanish troops. alva actually sent the count of aremberg with a considerable force to join the army of the queen mother in france, and even offered to command these subsidiaries in person, which, however, was declined. strada, . thuan, .] after so noble a life had been assailed no one counted himself safe any longer; but many found cause to repent that they had so long deferred this salutary step; for every day flight was rendered more difficult, for the duke ordered all the ports to be closed, and punished the attempt at emigration with death. the beggars were now esteemed fortunate, who had abandoned country and property in order to preserve at least their liberty and their lives. alva's first measures, and departure of the duchess of parma. alva's first step, after securing the most suspected of the nobles, was to restore the inquisition to its former authority, to put the decrees of trent again in force, abolish the "moderation," and promulgate anew the edicts against heretics in all their original severity. the court of inquisition in spain had pronounced the whole nation of the netherlands guilty of treason in the highest degree, catholics and heterodox, loyalists and rebels, without distinction; the latter as having offended by overt acts, the former as having incurred equal guilt by their supineness. from this sweeping condemnation a very few were excepted, whose names, however, were purposely reserved, while the general sentence was publicly confirmed by the king. philip declared himself absolved from all his promises, and released from all engagements which the regent in his name had entered into with the people of the netherlands, and all the justice which they had in future to expect from him must depend on his own good-will and pleasure. all who had aided in the expulsion of the minister, granvella, who had taken part in the petition of the confederate nobles, or had but even spoken in favor of it; all who had presented a petition against the decrees of trent, against the edicts relating to religion, or against the installation of the bishops; all who had permitted the public preachings, or had only feebly resisted them; all who had worn the insignia of the gueux, had sung geusen songs, or who in any way whatsoever had manifested their joy at the establishment of the league; all who had sheltered or concealed the reforming preachers, attended calvinistic funerals, or had even merely known of their secret meetings, and not given information of them; all who had appealed to the national privileges; all, in fine, who had expressed an opinion that they ought to obey god rather than man; all these indiscriminately were declared liable to the penalties which the law imposed upon any violation of the royal prerogative, and upon high treason; and these penalties were, according to the instruction which alva had received, to be executed on the guilty persons without forbearance or favor; without regard to rank, sex, or age, as an example to posterity, and for a terror to all future times. according to this declaration there was no longer an innocent person to be found in the whole netherlands, and the new viceroy had it in his power to make a fearful choice of victims. property and life were alike at his command, and whoever should have the good fortune to preserve one or both must receive them as the gift of his generosity and humanity. by this stroke of policy, as refined as it was detestable, the nation was disarmed, and unanimity rendered impossible. as it absolutely depended on the duke's arbitrary will upon whom the sentence should be carried in force which had been passed without exception upon all, each individual kept himself quiet, in order to escape, if possible, the notice of the viceroy, and to avoid drawing the fatal choice upon himself. every one, on the other hand, in whose favor he was pleased to make an exception stood in a degree indebted to him, and was personally under an obligation which must be measured by the value he set upon his life and property. as, however, this penalty could only be executed on the smaller portion of the nation, the duke naturally secured the greater by the strongest ties of fear and gratitude, and for one whom he sought out as a victim he gained ten others whom he passed over. as long as he continued true to this policy he remained in quiet possession of his rule, even amid the streams of blood which he caused to flow, and did not forfeit this advantage till the want of money compelled him to impose a burden upon the nation which oppressed all indiscriminately. in order to be equal to this bloody occupation, the details of which were fast accumulating, and to be certain of not losing a single victim through the want of instruments; and, on the other hand, to render his proceedings independent of the states, with whose privileges they were so much at variance, and who, indeed, were far too humane for him, he instituted an extraordinary court of justice. this court consisted of twelve criminal judges, who, according to their instructions, to the very letter of which they must adhere, were to try and pronounce sentence upon those implicated in the past disturbances. the mere institution of such a board was a violation of the liberties of the country, which expressly stipulated that no citizen should be tried out of his own province; but the duke filled up the measure of his injustice when, contrary to the most sacred privileges of the nation, he proceeded to give seats and votes in that court to spaniards, the open and avowed enemies of belgian liberty. he himself was the president of this court, and after him a certain licentiate, vargas, a spaniard by birth, of whose iniquitous character the historians of both parties are unanimous; cast out like a plague-spot from his own country, where he had violated one of his wards, he was a shameless, hardened villain, in whose mind avarice, lust, and the thirst for blood struggled for ascendancy. the principal members were count aremberg, philip of noircarmes, and charles of barlaimont, who, however, never sat in it; hadrian nicolai, chancellor of gueldres; jacob mertens and peter asset, presidents of artois and flanders; jacob hesselts and john de la porte, counsellors of ghent; louis del roi, doctor of theology, and by birth a spaniard; john du bois, king's advocate; and de la'torre, secretary of the court. in compliance with the representations of viglius the privy council was spared any part in this tribunal; nor was any one introduced into it from the great council at malines. the votes of the members were only recommendatory, not conclusive, the final sentence being reserved by the duke to himself. no particular time was fixed for the sitting of the court; the members, however, assembled at noon, as often as the duke thought good. but after the expiration of the third month alva began to be less frequent in his attendance, and at last resigned his place entirely to his favorite, vargas, who filled it with such odious fitness that in a short time all the members, with the exception merely of the spanish doctor, del rio, and the secretary, de la torre, weary of the atrocities of which they were compelled to be both eyewitnesses and accomplices, remained away from the assembly. [the sentences passed upon the most eminent persons (for example, the sentence of death passed upon strahlen, the burgomaster of antwerp), were signed only by vargas, del rio, and de la torre.] it is revolting to the feelings to think how the lives of the noblest and best were thus placed at the mercy of spanish vagabonds, and how even the sanctuaries of the nation, its deeds and charters, were unscrupulously ransacked, the seals broken, and the most secret contracts between the sovereign and the state profaned and exposed. [for an example of the unfeeling levity with which the most important matters, even decisions in cases of life and death, were treated in this sanguinary council, it may serve to relate what is told of the counsellor hesselts. he was generally asleep during the meeting, and when his turn came to vote on a sentence of death he used to cry out, still half asleep: "ad patibulum! ad patibulum!" so glibly did his tongue utter this word. it is further to be remarked of this hesselts, that his wife, a daughter of the president viglius, had expressly stipulated in the marriage- contract that he should resign the dismal office of attorney for the king, which made him detested by the whole nation. vigl. ad hopp. lxvii., l.] from the council of twelve (which, from the object of its institution, was called the council for disturbances, but on account of its proceedings is more generally known under the appellation of the council of blood, a name which the nation in their exasperation bestowed upon it), no appeal was allowed. its proceedings could not be revised. its verdicts were irrevocable and independent of all other authority. no other tribunal in the country could take cognizance of cases which related to the late insurrection, so that in all the other courts justice was nearly at a standstill. the great council at malines was as good as abolished; the authority of the council of state entirely ceased, insomuch that its sittings were discontinued. on some rare occasions the duke conferred with a few members of the late assembly, but even when this did occur the conference was held in his cabinet, and was no more than a private consultation, without any of the proper forms being observed. no privilege, no charter of immunity, however carefully protected, had any weight with the council for disturbances. [vargas, in a few words of barbarous latin, demolished at once the boasted liberties of the netherlands. "non curamus vestros privilegios," he replied to one who wished to plead the immunities of the university of louvain.] it compelled all deeds and contracts to be laid before it, and often forced upon them the most strained interpetations and alterations. if the duke caused a sentence to be drawn out which there was reason to fear might be opposed by the states of brabant, it was legalized without the brabant seal. the most sacred rights of individuals were assailed, and a tyranny without example forced its arbitrary will even into the circle of domestic life. as the protestants and rebels had hitherto contrived to strengthen their party so much by marriages with the first families in the country, the duke issued an edict forbidding all netherlanders, whatever might be their rank or office, under pain of death and confiscation of property, to conclude a marriage without previously obtaining his permission. all whom the council for disturbances thought proper to summon before it were compelled to appear, clergy as well as laity; the most venerable heads of the senate, as well as the reprobate rabble of the iconoclasts. whoever did not present himself, as indeed scarcely anybody did, was declared an outlaw, and his property was confiscated; but those who were rash or foolish enough to appear, or who were so unfortunate as to be seized, were lost without redemption. twenty, forty, often fifty were summoned at the same time and from the same town, and the richest were always the first on whom the thunderbolt descended. the meaner citizens, who possessed nothing that could render their country and their homes dear to them, were taken unawares and arrested without any previous citation. many eminent merchants, who had at their disposal fortunes of from sixty thousand to one hundred thousand florins, were seen with their hands tied behind their backs, dragged like common vagabonds at the horse's tail to execution, and in valenciennes fifty- five persons were decapitated at one time. all the prisons--and the duke immediately on commencing his administration had built a great number of them--were crammed full with the accused; hanging, beheading, quartering, burning were the prevailing and ordinary occupations of the day; the punishment of the galleys and banishment were more rarely heard of, for there was scarcely any offence which was reckoned too trival to be punished with death. immense sums were thus brought into the treasury, which, however, served rather to stimulate the new viceroy's and his colleagues' thirst for gold than to quench it. it seemed to be his insane purpose to make beggars of the whole people, and to throw all their riches into the hands of the king and his servants. the yearly income derived from these confiscations was computed to equal the revenues of the first kingdoms of europe; it is said to have been estimated, in a report furnished to the king, at the incredible amount of twenty million of dollars. but these proceedings were the more inhuman, as they often bore hardest precisely upon the very persons who were the most peaceful subjects, and most orthodox roman catholics, whom they could not want to injure. whenever an estate was confiscated all the creditors who had claims upon it were defrauded. the hospitals, too, and public institutions, which such properties had contributed to support, were now ruined, and the poor, who had formerly drawn a pittance from this source, were compelled to see their only spring of comfort dried up. whoever ventured to urge their well-grounded claims on the forfeited property before the council of twelve (for no other tribunal dared to interfere with these inquiries), consumed their substance in tedious and expensive proceedings, and were reduced to beggary before they saw the end of them. the histories of civilized states furnish but one instance of a similar perversion of justice, of such violation of the rights of property, and of such waste of human life; but cinna, sylla, and marius entered vanquished rome as incensed victors, and practised without disguise what the viceroy of the netherlands performed under the venerable veil of the laws. up to the end of the year the king's arrival had been confidently expected, and the well-disposed of the people had placed all their last hopes on this event. the vessels, which philip had caused to be equipped expressly for the purpose of meeting him, still lay in the harbor of flushing, ready to sail at the first signal; and the town of brussels had consented to receive a spanish garrison, simply because the king, it was pretended, was to reside within its walls. but this hope gradually vanished, as he put off the journey from one season to the next, and the new viceroy very soon began to exhibit powers which announced him less as a precursor of royalty than as an absolute minister, whose presence made that of the monarch entirely superfluous. to compete the distress of the provinces their last good angel was now to leave them in the person of the regent. from the moment when the production of the duke's extensive powers left no doubt remaining as to the practical termination of her own rule, margaret had formed the resolution of relinquishing the name also of regent. to see a successor in the actual possession of a dignity which a nine years' enjoyment had made indispensable to her; to see the authority, the glory, the splendor, the adoration, and all the marks of respect, which are the usual concomitants of supreme power, pass over to another; and to feel that she had lost that which she could never forget she had once held, was more than a woman's mind could endure; moreover, the duke of alva was of all men the least calculated to make her feel her privation the less painful by a forbearing use of his newly-acquired dignity. the tranquillity of the country, too, which was put in jeopardy by this divided rule, seemed to impose upon the duchess the necessity of abdicating. many governors of provinces refused, without an express order from the court, to receive commands from the duke and to recognize him as co-regent. the rapid change of their point of attraction could not be met by the courtiers so composedly and imperturbably but that the duchess observed the alteration, and bitterly felt it. even the few who, like state counsellor viglius, still firmly adhered to her, did so less from attachment to her person than from vexation at being displaced by novices and foreigners, and from being too proud to serve a fresh apprenticeship under a new viceroy. but far the greater number, with all their endeavors to keep an exact mean, could not help making a difference between the homage they paid to the rising sun and that which they bestowed on the setting luminary. the royal palace in brussels became more and more deserted, while the throng at kuilemberg house daily increased. but what wounded the sensitiveness of the duchess most acutely was the arrest of horn and egmont, which was planned and executed by the duke without her knowledge or consent, just as if there had been no such person as herself in existence. alva did, indeed, after the act was done, endeavor to appease her by declaring that the design had been purposely kept secret from her in order to spare her name from being mixed up in so odious a transaction; but no such considerations of delicacy could close the wound which had been inflicted on her pride. in order at once to escape all risk of similar insults, of which the present was probably only a forerunner, she despatched her private secretary, macchiavell, to the court of her brother, there to solicit earnestly for permission to resign the regency. the request was granted without difficulty by the king, who accompanied his consent with every mark of his highest esteem. he would put aside (so the king expressed himself) his own advantage and that of the provinces in order to oblige his sister. he sent a present of thirty thousand dollars, and allotted to her a yearly pension of twenty thousand. [which, however, does not appear to have been very punctually paid, if a pamphlet maybe trusted which was printed during her lifetime. (it bears the title: discours sur la blessure de monseigneur prince d'orange, , without notice of the place where it was printed, and is to be found in the elector's library at dresden.) she languished, it is there stated, at namur in poverty, and so ill- supported by her son (the then governor of the netherlands), that her own secretary, aldrobandin, called her sojourn there an exile. but the writer goes on to ask what better treatment could she expect from a son who, when still very young, being on a visit to her at brussels, snapped his fingers at her behind her back.] at the same time a diploma was forwarded to the duke of alva, constituting him, in her stead, viceroy of all the netherlands, with unlimited powers. gladly would margaret have learned that she was permitted to resign the regency before a solemn assembly of the states, a wish which she had not very obscurely hinted to the king. but she was not gratified. she was particularly fond of solemnity, and the example of the emperor, her father, who had exhibited the extraordinary spectacle of his abdication of the crown in this very city, seemed to have great attractions for her. as she was compelled to part with supreme power, she could scarcely be blamed for wishing to do so with as much splendor as possible. moreover, she had not failed to observe how much the general hatred of the duke had effected in her own favor, and she looked, therefore, the more wistfully forward to a scene, which promised to be at once so flattering to her and so affecting. she would have been glad to mingle her own tears with those which she hoped to see shed by the netherlanders for their good regent. thus the bitterness of her descent from the throne would have been alleviated by the expression of general sympathy. little as she had done to merit the general esteem during the nine years of her administration, while fortune smiled upon her, and the approbation of her sovereign was the limit to all her wishes, yet now the sympathy of the nation had acquired a value in her eyes as the only thing which could in some degree compensate to her for the disappointment of all her other hopes. fain would she have persuaded herself that she had become a voluntary sacrifice to her goodness of heart and her too humane feelings towards the netherlanders. as, however, the king was very far from being disposed to incur any danger by calling a general assembly of the states, in order to gratify a mere caprice of his sister, she was obliged to content herself with a farewell letter to them. in this document she went over her whole administration, recounted, not without ostentation, the difficulties with which she had had to struggle, the evils which, by her dexterity, she had prevented, and wound up at last by saying that she left a finished work, and had to transfer to her successor nothing but the punishment of offenders. the king, too, was repeatly compelled to hear the same statement, and she left nothing undone to arrogate to herself the glory of any future advantages which it might be the good fortune of the duke to realize. her own merits, as something which did not admit of a doubt, but was at the same time a burden oppressive to her modesty, she laid at the feet of the king. dispassionate posterity may, nevertheless; hesitate to subscribe unreservedly to this favorable opinion. even though the united voice of her contemporaries, and the testimony of the netherlands themselves vouch for it, a third party will not be denied the right to examine her claims with stricter scrutiny. the popular mind, easily affected, is but too ready to count the absence of a vice as an additional virtue, and, under the pressure of existing evil, to give excess of praise for past benefits. the netherlander seems to have concentrated all his hatred upon the spanish name. to lay the blame of the national evils on the regent would tend to remove from the king and his minister the curses which he would rather shower upon them alone and undividedly; and the duke of alva's government of the netherlands was, perhaps, not the proper point of view from which to test the merits of his predecessor. it was undoubtedly no light task to meet the king's expectations without infringing the rights of the people and the duties of humanity; but in struggling to effect these two contradictory objects margaret had accomplished neither. she had deeply injured the nation, while comparatively she had done little service to the king. it is true that she at last crushed the protestant faction, but the accidental outbreak of the iconoclasts assisted her in this more than all her dexterity. she certainly succeeded by her intrigues in dissolving the league of the nobles, but not until the first blow had been struck at its roots by internal dissensions. the object, to secure which she had for many years vainly exhaused her whole policy, was effected at last by a single enlistment of troops, for which, however, the orders were issued from madrid. she delivered to the duke, no doubt, a tranquillized country; but it cannot be denied that the dread of his approach had the chief share in tranquillizing it. by her reports she led the council in spain astray; because she never informed it of the disease, but only of the occasional symptoms; never of the universal feeling and voice of the nation, but only of the misconduct of factions. her faulty administration, moreover, drew the people into the crime, because she exasperated without sufficiently awing them. she it was that brought the murderous alva into the country by leading the king to believe that the disturbances in the provinces were to be ascribed, not so much to the severity of the royal ordinances, as to the unworthiness of those who were charged with their execution. margaret possessed natural capacity and intellect; and an acquired political tact enabled her to meet any ordinary case; but she wanted that creative genius which, for new and extraordinary emergencies, invents new maxims, or wisely oversteps old ones. in a country where honesty was the best policy, she adopted the unfortunate plan of practising her insidious italian policy, and thereby sowed the seeds of a fatal distrust in the minds of the people. the indulgence which has been so liberally imputed to her as a merit was, in truth, extorted from her weakness and timidity by the courageous opposition of the nation; she had never departed from the strict letter of the royal commands by her own spontaneous resolution; never did the gentle feelings of innate humanity lead her to misinterpret the cruel purport of her instructions. even the few concessions to which necessity compelled her were granted with an uncertain and shrinking hand, as if fearing to give too much; and she lost the fruit of her benefactions because she mutilated them by a sordid closeness. what in all the other relations of her life she was too little, she was on the throne too much--a woman! she had it in her power, after granvella's expulsion, to become the benefactress of the belgian nation, but she did not. her supreme good was the approbation of her king, her greatest misfortune his displeasure; with all the eminent qualities of her mind she remained an ordinary character because her heart was destitute of native nobility. she used a melancholy power with much moderation, and stained her government with no deed of arbitrary cruelty; nay, if it had depended on her, she would have always acted humanely. years afterwards, when her idol, philip ii., had long forgotten her, the netherlanders still honored her memory; but she was far from deserving the glory which her successor's inhumanity reflected upon her. she left brussels about the end of december, . the duke escorted her as far as the frontiers of brabant, and there left her under the protection of count mansfeld in order to hasten back to the metropolis and show himself to the netherlanders as sole regent. trial and execution of counts egmont and horn. the two counts were a few weeks after their arrest conveyed to ghent under an escort of three thousand spaniards, where they were confined in the citadel for more than eight months. their trial commenced in due form before the council of twelve, and the solicitor-general, john du bois, conducted the proceedings. the indictment against egmont consisted of ninety counts, and that against horn of sixty. it would occupy too much space to introduce them here. every action, however innocent, every omission of duty, was interpreted on the principle which had been laid down in the opening of the indictment, "that the two counts, in conjunction with the prince of orange, had planned the overthrow of the royal authority in the netherlands, and the usurpation of the government of the country;" the expulsion of granvella; the embassy of egmont to madrid; the confederacy of the gueux; the concessions which they made to the protestants in the provinces under their government--all were made to have a connection with, and reference to, this deliberate design. thus importance was attached to the most insignificant occurrences, and one action made to darken and discolor another. by taking care to treat each of the charges as in itself a treasonable offence it was the more easy to justify a sentence of high treason by the whole. the accusations were sent to each of the prisoners, who were required to reply to them within five days. after doing so they were allowed to employ solicitors and advocates, who were permitted free access to them; but as they were accused of treason their friends were prohibited from visiting them. count egmont employed for his solicitor von landas, and made choice of a few eminent advocates from brussels. the first step was to demur against the tribunal which was to try them, since by the privilege of their order they, as knights of the golden fleece, were amenable only to the king himself, the grand master. but this demurrer was overruled, and they were required to produce their witnesses, in default of which they were to be proceeded against /in contumaciam./ egmont had satisfactorily answered to eighty-two counts, while count horn had refuted the charges against him, article by article. the accusation and the defence are still extant; on that defence every impartial tribunal would have acquitted them both. the procurator fiscal pressed for the production of their evidence, and the duke of alva issued his repeated commands to use despatch. they delayed, however, from week to week, while they renewed their protests against the illegality of the court. at last the duke assigned them nine days to produce their proofs; on the lapse of that period they were to be declared guilty, and as having forfeited all right of defence. during the progress of the trial the relations and friends of the two counts were not idle. egmont's wife, by birth a duchess of bavaria, addressed petitions to the princes of the german empire, to the emperor, and to the king of spain. the countess horn, mother of the imprisoned count, who was connected by the ties of friendship or of blood with the principal royal families of germany, did the same. all alike protested loudly against this illegal proceeding, and appealed to the liberty of the german empire, on which horn, as a count of the empire, had special claims; the liberty of the netherlands and the privileges of the order of the golden fleece were likewise insisted upon. the countess egmont succeeded in obtaining the intercession of almost every german court in behalf of her husband. the king of spain and his viceroy were besieged by applications in behalf of the accused, which were referred from one to the other, and made light of by both. countess horn collected certificates from all the knights of the golden fleece in spain, germany, and italy to prove the privileges of the order. alva rejected them with a declaration that they had no force in such a case as the present. "the crimes of which the counts are accused relate to the affairs of the belgian provinces, and he, the duke, was appointed by the king sole judge of all matters connected with those countries." four months had been allowed to the solicitor-general to draw up the indictment, and five were granted to the two counts to prepare for their defence. but instead of losing their time and trouble in adducing their evidence, which, perhaps, would have profited then but little, they preferred wasting it in protests against the judges, which availed them still less. by the former course they would probably have delayed the final sentence, and in the time thus gained the powerful intercession of their friends might perhaps have not been ineffectual. by obstinately persisting in denying the competency of the tribunal which was to try them, they furnished the duke with an excuse for cutting short the proceedings. after the last assigned period had expired, on the st of june, , the council of twelve declared them guilty, and on the th of that month sentence of death was pronounced against them. the execution of twenty-five noble netherlanders, who were beheaded in three successive days in the marketplace at brussels, was the terrible prelude to the fate of the two counts. john casembrot von beckerzeel, secretary to count egmont, was one of the unfortunates, who was thus rewarded for his fidelity to his master, which he steadfastly maintained even upon the rack, and for his zeal in the service of the king, which he had manifested against the iconoclasts. the others had either been taken prisoners, with arms in their hands, in the insurrection of the "gueux," or apprehended and condemned as traitors on account of having taken a part in the petition of the nobles. the duke had reason to hasten the execution of the sentence. count louis of nassau had given battle to the count of aremberg, near the monastery of heiligerlee, in groningen, and had the good fortune to defeat him. immediately after his victory he had advanced against groningen, and laid siege to it. the success of his arms had raised the courage of his faction; and the prince of orange, his brother, was close at hand with an army to support him. these circumstances made the duke's presence necessary in those distant provinces; but he could not venture to leave brussels before the fate of two such important prisoners was decided. the whole nation loved them, which was not a little increased by their unhappy fate. even the strict papists disapproved of the execution of these eminent nobles. the slightest advantage which the arms of the rebels might gain over the duke, or even the report of a defeat, would cause a revolution in brussels, which would immediately set the two counts at liberty. moreover, the petitions and intercessions which came to the viceroy, as well as to the king of spain, from the german princes, increased daily; nay, the emperor, maximilian ii., himself caused the countess to be assured "that she had nothing to fear for the life of her spouse." these powerful applications might at last turn the king's heart in favor of the prisoners. the king might, perhaps, in reliance on his viceroy's usual dispatch, put on the appearance of yielding to the representations of so many sovereigns, and rescind the sentence of death under the conviction that his mercy would come too late. these considerations moved the duke not to delay the execution of the sentence as soon as it was pronounced. on the day after the sentence was passed the two counts were brought, under an escort of three thousand spaniards, from ghent to brussels, and placed in confinement in the brodhause, in the great market-place. the next morning the council of twelve were assembled; the duke, contrary to his custom, attended in person, and both the sentences, in sealed envelopes, were opened and publicly read by secretary pranz. the two counts were declared guilty of treason, as having favored and promoted the abominable conspiracy of the prince of orange, protected the confederated nobles, and been convicted of various misdemeanors against their king and the church in their governments and other appointments. both were sentenced to be publicly beheaded, and their heads were to be fixed upon pikes and not taken down without the duke's express command. all their possessions, fiefs, and rights escheated to the royal treasury. the sentence was signed only by the duke and the secretary, pranz, without asking or caring for the consent of the other members of the council. during the night between the th and th of june the sentences were brought to the prisoners, after they had already gone to rest. the duke gave them to the bishop of ypres, martin rithov, whom he had expressly summoned to brussels to prepare the prisoners for death. when the bishop received this commission he threw himself at the feet of the duke, and supplicated him with tears in his eyes for mercy, at least for respite for the prisoners; but he was answered in a rough and angry voice that he had been sent for from ypres, not to oppose the sentence, but by his spiritual consolation to reconcile the unhappy noblemen to it. egmont was the first to whom the bishop communicated the sentence of death. "that is indeed a severe sentence," exclaimed the count, turning pale, and with a faltering voice. "i did not think that i had offended his majesty so deeply as to deserve such treatment. if, however, it must be so i submit to my fate with resignation. may this death atone for my offence, and save my wife and children from suffering. this at least i think i may claim for my past services. as for death, i will meet it with composure, since it so pleases god and my king." he then pressed the bishop to tell him seriously and candidly if there was no hope of pardon. being answered in the negative, he confessed and received the sacrament from the priest, repeating after him the mass with great devoutness. he asked what prayer was the best and most effective to recommend him to god in his last hour. on being told that no prayer could be more effectual than the one which christ himself had taught, he prepared immediately to repeat the lord's prayer. the thoughts of his family interrupted him; he called for pen and ink, and wrote two letters, one to his wife, the other to the king. the latter was as follows: "sire,--this morning i have heard the sentence which your majesty has been pleased to pass upon me. far as i have ever been from attempting anything against the person or service of your majesty, or against the true, old, and catholic religion, i yet submit myself with patience to the fate which it has pleased god to ordain should suffer. if, during the past disturbances, i have omitted, advised, or done anything that seems at variance with my duty, it was most assuredly performed with the best intentions, or was forced upon me by the pressure of circumstances. i therefore pray your majesty to forgive me, and, in consideration of my past services, show mercy to my unhappy wife, my poor children, and servants. in a firm hope of this, i commend myself--to the infinite mercy of god. "your majesty's most faithful vassal and servant, "lamoral count egmont. "brussels, june , , near my last moments." this letter he placed in the hands of the bishop, with the strongest injunctions for its safe delivery; and for greater security he sent a duplicate in his own handwriting to state counsellor viglius, the most upright man in the senate, by whom, there is no doubt, it was actually delivered to the king. the family of the count were subsequently reinstated in all his property, fiefs, and rights, which, by virtue of the sentence, had escheated to the royal treasury. meanwhile a scaffold had been erected in the marketplace, before the town hall, on which two poles were fixed with iron spikes, and the whole covered with black cloth. two-and-twenty companies of the spanish garrison surrounded the scaffold, a precaution which was by no means superfluous. between ten and eleven o'clock the spanish guard appeared in the apartment of the count; they were provided with cords to tie his hands according to custom. he begged that this might be spared him, and declared that he was willing and ready to die. he himself cut off the collar from his doublet to facilitate the executioner's duty. he wore a robe of red damask, and over that a black spanish cloak trimmed with gold lace. in this dress he appeared on the scaffold, and was attended by don julian romero, maitre-de-camp; salinas, a spanish captain; and the bishop of ypres. the grand provost of the court, with a red wand in his hand, sat on horseback at the foot of the scaffold; the executioner was concealed beneath. egmont had at first shown a desire to address the people from the scaffold. he desisted, however, on the bishop's representing to him that either he would not be heard, or that if he were, he might--such at present was the dangerous disposition of the people--excite them to acts of violence, which would only plunge his friends into destruction. for a few moments he paced the scaffold with noble dignity, and lamented that it had not been permitted him to die a more honorable death for his king and his country. up to the last he seemed unable to persuade himself that the king was in earnest, and that his severity would be carried any further than the mere terror of execution. when the decisive period approached, and he was to receive the extreme unction, he looked wistfully round, and when there still appeared no prospect of a reprieve, he turned to julian romero, and asked him once more if there was no hope of pardon for him. julian romero shrugged his shoulders, looked on the ground, and was silent. he then closely clenched his teeth, threw off his mantle and robe, knelt upon the cushion, and prepared himself for the last prayer. the bishop presented him the crucifix to kiss, and administered to him extreme unction, upon which the count made him a sign to leave him. he drew a silk cap over his eyes, and awaited the stroke. over the corpse and the streaming blood a black cloth was immediately thrown. all brussels thronged around the scaffold, and the fatal blow seemed to fall on every heart. loud sobs alone broke the appalling silence. the duke himself, who watched the execution from a window of the townhouse, wiped his eyes as his victim died. shortly afterwards count horn advanced on the scaffold. of a more violent temperament than his friend, and stimulated by stronger reasons for hatred against the king, he had received the sentence with less composure, although in his case, perhaps, it was less unjust. he burst forth in bitter reproaches against the king, and the bishop with difficulty prevailed upon him to make a better use of his last moments than to abuse them in imprecations on his enemies. at last, however, he became more collected, and made his confession to the bishop, which at first he was disposed to refuse. he mounted the scaffold with the same attendants as his friend. in passing he saluted many of his acquaintances; his hands were, like egmont's, free, and he was dressed in a black doublet and cloak, with a milan cap of the same color upon his head. when he had ascended, he cast his eyes upon the corpse, which lay under the cloth, and asked one of the bystanders if it was the body of his friend. on being answered in the affirmative, he said some words in spanish, threw his cloak from him, and knelt upon the cushion. all shrieked aloud as he received the fatal blow. the heads of both were fixed upon the poles which were set up on the scaffold, where they remained until past three in the afternoon, when they were taken down, and, with the two bodies, placed in leaden coffins and deposited in a vault. in spite of the number of spies and executioners who surrounded the scaffold, the citizens of brussels would not be prevented from dipping their handkerchiefs in the streaming blood, and carrying home with them these precious memorials. siege of antwerp by the prince of parma, in the years and . it is an interesting spectacle to observe the struggle of man's inventive genius in conflict with powerful opposing elements, and to see the difficulties which are insurmountable to ordinary capacities overcome by prudence, resolution, and a determined will. less attractive, but only the more instructive, perhaps, is the contrary spectacle, where the absence of those qualities renders all efforts of genius vain, throws away all the favors of fortune, and where inability to improve such advantages renders hopeless a success which otherwise seemed sure and inevitable. examples of both kinds are afforded by the celebrated siege of antwerp by the spaniards towards the close of the sixteenth century, by which that flourishing city was forever deprived of its commercial prosperity, but which, on the other hand, conferred immortal fame on the general who undertook and accomplished it. twelve years had the war continued which the northern provinces of belgium had commenced at first in vindication simply of their religious freedom, and the privileges of their states, from the encroachments of the spanish viceroy, but maintained latterly in the hope of establishing their independence of the spanish crown. never completely victors, but never entirely vanquished, they wearied out the spanish valor by tedious operations on an unfavorable soil, and exhausted the wealth of the sovereign of both the indies while they themselves were called beggars, and in a degree actually were so. the league of ghent, which had united the whole netherlands, roman catholic and protestant, in a common and (could such a confederation have lasted) invincible body, was indeed dissolved; but in place of this uncertain and unnatural combination the northern provinces had, in the year , formed among themselves the closer union of utrecht, which promised to be more lasting, inasmuch as it was linked and held together by common political and religious interests. what the new republic had lost in extent through this separation from the roman catholic provinces it was fully compensated for by the closeness of alliance, the unity of enterprise, and energy of execution; and perhaps it was fortunate in thus timely losing what no exertion probably would ever have enabled it to retain. the greater part of the walloon provinces had, in the year , partly by voluntary submission and partly by force of arms, been again reduced under the spanish yoke. the northern districts alone had been able at all successfully to oppose it. a considerable portion of brabant and flanders still obstinately held out against the arms of the duke alexander of parma, who at that time administered the civil government of the provinces, and the supreme command of the army, with equal energy and prudence, and by a series of splendid victories had revived the military reputation of spain. the peculiar formation of the country, which by its numerous rivers and canals facilitated the connection of the towns with one another and with the sea, baffled all attempts effectually to subdue it, and the possession of one place could only be maintained by the occupation of another. so long as this communication was kept up holland and zealand could with little difficulty assist their allies, and supply them abundantly by water as well as by land with all necessaries, so that valor was of no use, and the strength of the king's troops was fruitlessly wasted on tedious sieges. of all the towns in brabant antwerp was the most important, as well from, its wealth, its population, and its military force, as by its position on the mouth of the scheldt. this great and populous town, which at this date contained more than eighty thousand inhabitants, was one of the most active members of the national league, and had in the course of the war distinguished itself above all the towns of belgium by an untamable spirit of liberty. as it fostered within its bosom all the three christian churches, and owed much of its prosperity to this unrestricted religious liberty, it had the more cause to dread the spanish rule, which threatened to abolish this toleration, and by the terror of the inquisition to drive all the protestant merchants from its markets. moreover it had had but too terrible experience of the brutality of the spanish garrisons, and it was quite evident that if it once more suffered this insupportable yoke to be imposed upon it it would never again during the whole course of the war be able to throw it off. but powerful as were the motives which stimulated antwerp to resistance, equally strong were the reasons which determined the spanish general to make himself master of the place at any cost. on the possession of this town depended in a great measure that of the whole province of brabant, which by this channel chiefly derived its supplies of corn from zealand, while the capture of this place would secure to the victor the command of the scheldt. it would also deprive the league of brabant, which held its meetings in the town, of its principal support; the whole faction of its dangerous influence, of its example, its counsels, and its money, while the treasures of its inhabitants would open plentiful supplies for the military exigencies of the king. its fall would sooner or later necessarily draw after it that of all brabant, and the preponderance of power in that quarter would decide the whole dispute in favor of the king. determined by these grave considerations, the duke of parma drew his forces together in july, , and advanced from his position at dornick to the neighborhood of antwerp, with the intention of investing it. but both the natural position and fortifications of the town appeared to defy attacks. surrounded on the side of brabant with insurmountable works and moats, and towards flanders covered by the broad and rapid stream of the scheldt, it could not be carried by storm; and to blockade a town of such extent seemed to require a land force three times larger than that which the duke had, and moreover a fleet, of which he was utterly destitute. not only did the river yield the town all necessary supplies from ghent, it also opened an easy communication with the bordering province of zealand. for, as the tide of the north sea extends far up the scheldt, and ebbs and flows regularly, antwerp enjoys the peculiar advantage that the same tide flows past it at different times in two opposite directions. besides, the adjacent towns of brussels, malines, ghent, dendermonde, and others, were all at this time in the hands of the league, and could aid the place from the land side also. to blockade, therefore, the town by land, and to cut off its communication with flanders and brabant, required two different armies, one on each bank of the river. a sufficient fleet was likewise needed to guard the passage of the scheldt, and to prevent all attempts at relief, which would most certainly be made from zealand. but by the war which he had still to carry on in other quarters, and by the numerous garrisons which he was obliged to leave in the towns and fortified places, the army of the duke was reduced to ten thousand infantry and seventeen hundred horse, a force very inadequate for an undertaking of such magnitude. moreover, these troops were deficient in the most necessary supplies, and the long arrears of pay had excited them to subdued murmurs, which hourly threatened to break out into open mutiny. if, notwithstanding these difficulties, he should still attempt the seige, there would be much occasion to fear from the strongholds of the enemy, which were left in the rear, and from which it would be easy, by vigorous sallies, to annoy an army distributed over so many places, and to expose it to want by cutting off its supplies. all these considerations were brought forward by the council of war, before which the duke of parrna now laid his scheme. however great the confidence which they placed in themselves, and in the proved abilities of such a leader, nevertheless the most experienced generals did not disguise their despair of a fortunate result. two only were exceptions, capizucchi and mondragone, whose ardent courage placed them above all apprehensions; the rest concurred in dissuading the duke from attempting so hazardous an enterprise, by which they ran the risk of forfeiting the fruit of all their former victories and tarnishing the glory they had already earned. but objections, which he had already made to himself and refuted, could not shake the duke of parma in his purpose. not in ignorance of its inseparable dangers, not from thoughtless overvaluing his forces had he taken this bold resolve. but that instinctive genius which leads great men by paths which inferior minds either never enter upon or never finish, raised him above the influence of the doubts which a cold and narrow prudence would oppose to his views; and, without being able to convince his generals, he felt the correctness of his calculations in a conviction indistinct, indeed, but not on that account less indubitable. a succession of fortunate results had raised his confidence, and the sight of his army, unequalled in europe for discipline, experience, and valor, and commanded by a chosen body of the most distinguished officers, did not permit him to entertain fear for a moment. to those who objected to the small number of his troops, he answered, that however long the pike, it is only the point that kills; and that in military enterprise, the moving power was of more importance than the mass to be moved. he was aware, indeed, of the discontent of his troops, but he knew also their obedience; and he thought, moreover, that the best means to stifle their murmurs was by keeping them employed in some important undertaking, by stimulating their desire of glory by the splendor of the enterprise, and their rapacity by hopes of the rich booty which the capture of so wealthy a town would hold out. in the plan which he now formed for the conduct of the siege he endeavored to meet all these difficulties. famine was the only instrument by which he could hope to subdue the town; but effectually to use this formidable weapon, it would be expedient to cut off all its land and water communications. with this view, the first object was to stop, or at least to impede, the arrival of supplies from zealand. it was, therefore, requisite not only to carry all the outworks, which the people of antwerp had built on both shores of the scheldt for the protection of their shipping; but also, wherever feasible, to throw up new batteries which should command the whole course of the river; and to prevent the place from drawing supplies from the land side, while efforts were being made to intercept their transmission by sea, all the adjacent towns of brabant and flanders were comprehended in the plan of the siege, and the fall of antwerp was based on the destruction of all those places. a bold and, considering the duke's scanty force, an almost extravagant project, which was, however, justified by the genius of its author, and crowned by fortune with a brilliant result. as, however, time was required to accomplish a plan of this magnitude, the prince of parma was content, for the present, with the erection of numerous forts on the canals and rivers which connected antwerp with dendermonde, ghent, malines, brussels, and other places. spanish garrisons were quartered in the vicinity, and almost at the very gates of those towns, which laid waste the open country, and by their incursions kept the surrounding territory in alarm. thus, round ghent alone were encamped about three thousand men, and proportionate numbers round the other towns. in this way, and by means of the secret understanding which he maintained with the roman catholic inhabitants of those towns, the duke hoped, without weakening his own forces, gradually to exhaust their strength, and by the harassing operations of a petty but incessant warfare, even without any formni siege, to reduce them at last to capitulate. in the meantime the main force was directed against antwerp, which he now closely invested. he fixed his headquarters at bevern in flanders, a few miles from antwerp, where he found a fortified camp. the protection of the flemish bank of the scheldt was entrusted to the margrave of rysburg, general of cavalry; the brabant bank to the count peter ernest von mansfeld, who was joined by another spanish leader, mondragone. both the latter succeeded in crossing the scheldt upon pontoons, notwithstanding the flemish admiral's ship was sent to oppose them, and, passing antwerp, took up their position at stabroek in bergen. detached corps dispersed themselves along the whole brabant side, partly to secure the dykes and the roads. some miles below antwerp the scheldt was guarded by two strong forts, of which one was situated at liefkenshoek on the island doel, in flanders, the other at lillo, exactly opposite the coast of brabant. the last had been erected by mondragone himself, by order of the duke of alvaa, when the latter was still master of antwerp, and for this very reason the duke of parma now entrusted to him the attack upon it. on the possession of these two forts the success of the siege seemed wholly to depend, since all the vessels sailing from zealand to antwerp must pass under their guns. both forts had a short time before been strengthened by the besieged, and the former was scarcely finished when the margrave of rysburg attacked it. the celerity with which he went to work surprised the enemy before they were sufficiently prepared for defence, and a brisk assault quickly placed liefkenshoek in the hands of the spaniards. the confederates sustained this loss on the same fatal day that the prince of orange fell at delft by the hands of an assassin. the other batteries, erected on the island of doel, were partly abandoned by their defenders, partly taken by surprise, so that in a short time the whole flemish side was cleared of the enemy. but the fort at lillo, on the brabant shore, offered a more vigorous resistance, since the people of antwerp had had time to strengthen its fortifications and to provide it with a strong garrison. furious sallies of the besieged, led by odets von teligny, supported by the cannon of the fort, destroyed all the works of the spaniards, and an inundation, which was effected by opening the sluices, finally drove them away from the place after a three weeks' siege, and with the loss of nearly two thousand killed. they now retired into their fortified camp at stabroek, and contented themselves with taking possession of the dams which run across the lowlands of bergen, and oppose a breastwork to the encroachments of the east scheldt. the failure of his attempt upon the fort of lillo compelled the prince of parma to change his measures. as he could not succeed in stopping the passage of the scheldt by his original plan, on which the success of the siege entirely depended, he determined to effect his purpose by throwing a bridge across the whole breadth of the river. the thought was bold, and there were many who held it to be rash. both the breadth of the stream, which at this part exceeds twelve hundred paces, as well as its violence, which is still further augmented by the tides of the neighboring sea, appeared to render every attempt of this kind impracticable. moreover, he had to contend with a deficiency of timber, vessels, and workmen, as well as with the dangerous position between the fleets of antwerp and of zealand, to which it would necessarily be an easy task, in combination with a boisterous element, to interrupt so tedious a work. but the prince of parma knew his power, and his settled resolution would yield to nothing short of absolute impossibility. after he had caused the breadth as well as the depth of the river to be measured, and had consulted with two of his most skilful engineers, barocci and plato, it was settled that the bridge should be constructed between calloo in flanders and ordain in brabant. this spot was selected because the river is here narrowest, and bends a little to the right, and so detains vessels a while by compelling them to tack. to cover the bridge strong bastions were erected at both ends, of which the one on the flanders side was named fort st. maria, the other, on the brabant side, fort st. philip, in honor of the king. while active preparations were making in the spanish camp for the execution of this scheme, and the whole attention of the enemy was directed to it, the duke made an unexpected attack upon dendermonde, a strong town between ghent and antwerp, at the confluence of the dender and the scheldt. as long as this important place was in the hands of the enemy the towns of ghent and antwerp could mutually support each other, and by the facility of their communication frustrate all the efforts of the besiegers. its capture would leave the prince free to act against both towns, and might decide the fate of his undertaking. the rapidity of his attack left the besieged no time to open their sluices and lay the country under water. a hot cannonade was opened upon the chief bastion of the town before the brussels gate, but was answered by the fire of the besieged, which made great havoc amongst the spaniards. it increased, however, rather than discouraged their ardor, and the insults of the garrison, who mutilated the statue of a saint before their eyes, and after treating it with the most contumelious indignity, hurled it down from the rampart, raised their fury to the highest pitch. clamorously they demanded to be led against the bastion before their fire had made a sufficient breach in it, and the prince, to avail himself of the first ardor of their impetuosity, gave the signal for the assault. after a sanguinary contest of two hours the rampart was mounted, and those who were not sacrificed to the first fury of the spaniards threw themselves into the town. the latter was indeed now more exposed, a fire being directed upon it from the works which had been carried; but its strong walls and the broad moat which surrounded it gave reason to expect a protracted resistance. the inventive resources of the prince of parma soon overcame this obstacle also. while the bombardment was carried on night and day, the troops were incessantly employed in diverting the course of the dender, which supplied the fosse with water, and the besieged were seized with despair as they saw the water of the trenches, the last defence of the town, gradually disappear. they hastened to capitulate, and in august, , received a spanish garrison. thus, in the space of eleven days, the prince of parrna accomplished an undertaking which, in the opinion of competent judges, would require as many weeks. the town of ghent, now cut off from antwerp and the sea, and hard pressed by the troops of the king, which were encamped in its vicinity, and without hope of immediate succor, began to despair, as famine, with all its dreadful train, advanced upon them with rapid steps. the inhabitants therefore despatched deputies to the spanish camp at bevern, to tender its submission to the king upon the same terms as the prince had a short time previously offered. the deputies were informed that the time for treaties was past, and that an unconditional submission alone could appease the just anger of the monarch whom they had offended by their rebellion. nay, they were even given to understand that it would be only through his great mercy if the same humiliation were not exacted from them as their rebellious ancestors were forced to undergo under charles v., namely, to implore pardon half-naked, and with a cord round their necks. the deputies returned to ghent in despair, but three days afterwards a new deputation was sent to the spanish camp, which at last, by the intercession of one of the prince's friends, who was a prisoner in ghent, obtained peace upon moderate terms. the town was to pay a fine of two hundred thousand florins, recall the banished papists, and expel the protestant inhabitants, who, however, were to be allowed two years for the settlement of their affairs. all the inhabitants except six, who were reserved for capital punishment (but afterwards pardoned), were included in a general amnesty, and the garrison, which amounted to two thousand men, was allowed to evacuate the place with the honors of war. this treaty was concluded in september of the same year, at the headquarters at bevern, and immediately three thousand spaniards marched into the town as a garrison. it was more by the terror of his name and the dread of famine than by the force of arms that the prince of parma had succeeded in reducing this city to submission, the largest and strongest in the netherlands, which was little inferior to paris within the barriers of its inner town, consisted of thirty-seven thousand houses, and was built on twenty islands, connected by ninety-eight stone bridges. the important privileges which in the course of several centuries this city had contrived to extort from its rulers fostered in its inhabitants a spirit of independence, which not unfrequently degenerated into riot and license, and naturally brought it in collision with the austrian-spanish government. and it was exactly this bold spirit of liberty which procured for the reformation the rapid and extensive success it met with in this town, and the combined incentives of civil and religious freedom produced all those scenes of violence by which, during the rebellion, it had unfortunately distinguished itself. besides the fine levied, the prince found within the walls a large store of artillery, carriages, ships, and building materials of all kinds, with numerous workmen and sailors, who materially aided him in his plans against antwerp. before ghent surrendered to the king vilvorden and herentals had fallen into the hands of the spaniards, and the capture of the block-houses near the village of willebrock had cut off antwerp from brussels and malines. the loss of these places within so short a period deprived antwerp of all hope of succor from brabant and flanders, and limited all their expectations to the assistance which might be looked for from zealand. but to deprive them also of this the prince of parma was now making the most energetic preparations. the citizens of antwerp had beheld the first operations of the enemy against their town with the proud security with which the sight of their invincible river inspired them. this confidence was also in a degree justified by the opinion of the prince of orange, who, upon the first intelligence of the design, had said that the spanish army would inevitably perish before the walls of antwerp. that nothing, however, might be neglected, he sent, a short time before his assassination, for the burgomaster of antwerp, philip marnix of st. aldegonde, his intimate friend, to delft, where he consulted with him as to the means of maintaining defensive operations. it was agreed between then that it would be advisable to demolish forthwith the great dam between sanvliet and lillo called the blaaugarendyk, so as to allow the waters of the east scheldt to inundate, if necessary, the lowlands of bergen, and thus, in the event of the scheldt being closed, to open a passage for the zealand vessels to the town across the inundated country. aldegonde had, after his return, actually persuaded the magistrate and the majority of the citizens to agree to this proposal, when it was resisted by the guild of butchers, who claimed that they would be ruined by such a measure; for the plain which it was wished to lay under water was a vast tract of pasture land, upon which about twelve thousand oxen--were annually put to graze. the objection of the butchers was successful, and they managed to prevent the execution of this salutary scheme until the enemy had got possession of the dams as well as the pasture land. at the suggestion of the burgomaster st. aldegonde, who, himself a member of the states of brabant, was possessed of great authority in that council, the fortifications on both sides the scheldt had, a short time before the arrival of the spaniards, been placed in repair, and many new redoubts erected round the town. the dams had been cut through at saftingen, and the water of the west scheldt let out over nearly the whole country of waes. in the adjacent marquisate of bergen troops had been enlisted by the count of hohenlohe, and a scotch regiment, under the command of colonel morgan, was already in the pay of the republic, while fresh reinforcements were daily expected from england and france. above all, the states of holland and zealand were called upon to hasten their supplies. but after the enemy had taken strong positions on both sides of the river, and the fire of their batteries made the navigation dangerous, when place after place in brabant fell into their hands, and their cavalry had cut off all communication on the land side, the inhabitants of antwerp began at last to entertain serious apprehensions for the future. the town then contained eighty-five thousand souls, and according to calculation three hundred thousand quarters of corn were annually required for their support. at the beginning of the siege neither the supply nor the money was wanting for the laying in of such a store; for in spite of the enemy's fire the zealand victualing ships, taking advantage of the rising tide, contrived to make their way to the town. all that was requisite was to prevent any of the richer citizens from buying up these supplies, and, in case of scarcity, raising the price. to secure his object, one gianibelli from mantua, who had rendered important services in the course of the siege, proposed a property tax of one penny in every hundred, and the appointment of a board of respectable persons to purchase corn with this money, and distribute it weekly. and until the returns of this tax should be available the richer classes should advance the required sum, holding the corn purchased, as a deposit, in their own magazines; and were also to share in the profit. but this plan was unwelcome to the wealthier citizens, who had resolved to profit by the general distress. they recommended that every individual should be required to provide himself with a sufficient supply for two years; a proposition which, however it might suit their own circumstances, was very unreasonable in regard to the poorer inhabitants, who, even before the siege, could scarcely find means to supply themselves for so many months. they obtained indeed their object, which was to reduce the poor to the necessity of either quitting the place or becoming entirely their dependents. but when they afterwards reflected that in the time of need the rights of property would not be respected, they found it advisable not to be over-hasty in making their own purchases. the magistrate, in order to avert an evil that would have pressed upon individuals only, had recourse to an expedient which endangered the safety of all. some enterprising persons in zealand had freighted a large fleet with provisions, which succeeded in passing the guns of the enemy, and discharged its cargo at antwerp. the hope of a large profit had tempted the merchants to enter upon this hazardous speculation; in this, however, they were disappointed, as the magistrate of antwerp had, just before their arrival, issued an edict regulating the price of all the necessaries of life. at the same time to prevent individuals from buying up the whole cargo and storing it in their magazines with a view of disposing of it afterwards at a dearer rate, he ordered that the whole should be publicly sold in any quantities from the vessels. the speculators, cheated of their hopes of profit by these precautions, set sail again, and left antwerp with the greater part of their cargo, which would have sufficed for the support of the town for several months. this neglect of the most essential and natural means of preservation can only be explained by the supposition that the inhabitants considered it absolutely impossible ever to close the scheldt completely, and consequently had not the least apprehension that things would come to extremity. when the intelligence arrived in antwerp that the prince intended to throw a bridge over the scheldt the idea was universally ridiculed as chimerical. an arrogant comparison was drawn between the republic and the stream, and it was said that the one would bear the spanish yoke as little as the other. "a river which is twenty-four hundred feet broad, and, with its own waters alone, above sixty feet deep, but which with the tide rose twelve feet more--would such a stream," it was asked, "submit to be spanned by a miserable piece of paling? where were beams to be found high enough to reach to the bottom and project above the surface? and how was a work of this kind to stand in winter, when whole islands and mountains of ice, which stone walls could hardly resist, would be driven by the flood against its weak timbers, and splinter them to pieces like glass? or, perhaps, the prince purposed to construct a bridge of boats; if so, where would he procure the latter, and how bring them into his intrenchments? they must necessarily be brought past antwerp, where a fleet was ready to capture or sink them." but while they were trying to prove the absurdity of the prince of parma's undertaking he had already completed it. as soon as the forts st. maria and st. philip were erected, and protected the workmen and the work by their fire, a pier was built out into the stream from both banks, for which purpose the masts of the largest vessels were employed; by a skilful arrangement of the timbers they contrived to give the whole such solidity that, as the result proved, it was able to resist the violent pressure of the ice. these timbers, which rested firmly and securely on the bottom of the river, and projected a considerable height above it, being covered with planks, afforded a commodious roadway. it was wide enough to allow eight men to cross abreast, and a balustrade that ran along it on both sides, protected them from the fire of small- arms from the enemy's vessels. this "stacade," as it was called, ran from the two opposite shores as far as the increasing depth and force of the stream allowed. it reduced the breadth of the river to about eleven hundred feet; as, however, the middle and proper current would not admit of such a barrier, there remained, therefore, between the two stacades a space of more than six hundred paces through which a whole fleet of transports could sail with ease. this intervening space the prince designed to close by a bridge of boats, for which purpose the craft must be procured from dunkirk. but, besides that they could not be obtained in any number at that place, it would be difficult to bring them past antwerp without great loss. he was, therefore, obliged to content himself for the time with having narrowed the stream one-half, and rendered the passage of the enemy's vessels so much the more difficult. where the stacades terminated in the middle of the stream they spread out into parallelograms, which were mounted with heavy guns, and served as a kind of battery on the water. from these a heavy fire was opened on every vessel that attempted to pass through this narrow channel. whole fleets, however, and single vessels still attempted and succeeded in passing this dangerous strait. meanwhile ghent surrendered, and this unexpected success at once rescued the prince from his dilemma. he found in this town everything necessary to complete his bridge of boats; and the only difficulty now was its safe transport, which was furnished by the enemy themselves. by cutting the dams at saftingen a great part of the country of waes, as far as the village of borcht, had been laid under water, so that it was not difficult to cross it with flat-bottomed boats. the prince, therefore, ordered his vessels to run out from ghent, and after passing dendermonde and rupelmonde to pass through the left dyke of the scheldt, leaving antwerp to the right, and sail over the inundated fields in the direction of borcht. to protect this passage a fort was erected at the latter village, which would keep the enemy in check. all succeeded to his wishes, though not without a sharp action with the enemy's flotilla, which was sent out to intercept this convoy. after breaking through a few more dams on their route, they reached the spanish quarters at calloo, and successfully entered the scheldt again. the exultation of the army was greater when they discovered the extent of the danger the vessels had so narrowly escaped. scarcely had they got quit of the enemy's vessels when a strong reinforcement from antwerp got under weigh, commanded by the valiant defender of lillo, odets von teligny. when this officer saw that the affair was over, and that the enemy had escaped, he took possession of the dam through which their fleet had passed, and threw up a fort on the spot in order to stop the passage of any vessels from ghent which might attempt to follow them. by this step the prince was again thrown into embarrassment. he was far from having as yet a sufficient number of vessels, either for the construction of the bridge or for its defence, and the passage by which the former convoy had arrived was now closed by the fort erected by teligny. while he was reconnoitring the country to discover a new way for his, fleets an idea occurred to him which not only put an end to his present dilemma, but greatly accelerated the success of his whole plan. not far from the village of stecken, in waes, which is within some five thousand paces of the commencement of the inundation, flows a small stream called the moer, which falls into the scheldt near ghent. from this river he caused a canal to be dug to the spot where the inundations began, and as the water of these was not everywhere deep enough for the transit of his boats, the canal between bevern and verrebroek was continued to calloo, where it was met by the scheldt. at this work five hundred pioneers labored without intermission, and in order to cheer the toil of the soldiers the prince himself took part in it. in this way did he imitate the example of the two celebrated romans, drusus and corbulo, who by similar works had united the rhine with the zuyder zee, and the maes with the rhine? this canal, which the army in honor of its projector called the canal of parma, was fourteen thousand paces in length, and was of proportion able depth and breadth, so as to be navigable for ships of a considerable burden. it afforded to the vessels from ghent not only a more secure, but also a much shorter course to the spanish quarters, because it was no longer necessary to follow the many windings of the scheldt, but entering the moer at once near ghent, and from thence passing close to stecken, they could proceed through the canal and across the inundated country as far as calloo. as the produce of all flanders was brought to the town of ghent, this canal placed the spanish camp in communication with the whole province. abundance poured into the camp from all quarters, so that during the whole course of the siege the spaniards suffered no scarcity of any kind. but the greatest benefit which the prince derived from this work was an adequate supply of flat-bottomed vessels to complete his bridge. these preparations were overtaken by the arrival of winter, which, as the scheldt was filled with drift-ice, occasioned a considerable delay in the building of the bridge. the prince had contemplated with anxiety the approach of this season, lest it should prove highly destructive to the work he had undertaken, and afford the enemy a favorable opportunity for making a serious attack upon it. but the skill of his engineers saved him from the one danger, and the strange inaction of the enemy freed him from the other. it frequently happened, indeed, that at flood-time large pieces of ice were entangled in the timbers, and shook them violently, but they stood the assault of the furious element, which only served to prove their stability. in antwerp, meanwhile, important moments had been wasted in futile deliberations; and in a struggle of factions the general welfare was neglected. the government of the town was divided among too many heads, and much too great a share in it was held by the riotous mob to allow room for calmness of deliberation or firmness of action. besides the municipal magistracy itself, in which the burgomaster had only a single voice, there were in the city a number of guilds, to whom were consigned the charge of the internal and external defence, the provisioning of the town, its fortifications, the marine, commerce, etc.; some of whom must be consulted in every business of importance. by means of this crowd of speakers, who intruded at pleasure into the council, and managed to carry by clamor and the number of their adherents what they could not effect by their arguments, the people obtained a dangerous influence in the public debates, and the natural struggle of such discordant interests retarded the execution of every salutary measure. a government so vacillating and impotent could not command the respect of unruly sailors and a lawless soldiery. the orders of the state consequently were but imperfectly obeyed, and the decisive moment was more than once lost by the negligence, not to say the open mutiny, both of the land and sea forces. the little harmony in the selection of the means by which the enemy was to be opposed would not, however, have proved so injurious had there but existed unanimity as to the end. but on this very point the wealthy citizens and poorer classes were divided; so the former, having everything to apprehend from allowing matters to be carried to extremity, were strongly inclined to treat with the prince of parma. this disposition they did not even attempt to conceal after the fort of liefkenshoek had fallen into the enemy's hands, and serious fears were entertained for the navigation of the scheldt. some of them, indeed, withdrew entirely from the danger, and left to its fate the town, whose prosperity they had been ready enough to share, but in whose adversity they were unwilling to bear a part. from sixty to seventy of those who remained memorialized the council, advising that terms should be made with the king. no sooner, however, had the populace got intelligence of it than their indignation broke out in a violent uproar, which was with difficulty appeased by the imprisonment and fining of the petitioners. tranquillity could only be fully restored by publication of an edict, which imposed the penalty of death on all who either publicly or privately should countenance proposals for peace. the prince of parma did not fail to take advantage of these disturbances; for nothing that transpired within the city escaped his notice, being well served by the agents with whom he maintained a secret understanding with antwerp, as well as the other towns of brabant and flanders. although he had already made considerable progress in his measures for distressing the town, still he had many steps to take before he could actually make himself master of it; and one unlucky moment might destroy the work of many months. without, therefore, neglecting any of his warlike preparations, he determined to make one more serious attempt to get possession by fair means. with this object he despatched a letter in november to the great council of antwerp, in which he skilfully made use of every topic likely to induce the citizens to come to terms, or at least to increase their existing dissensions. he treated them in this letter in the light of persons who had been led astray, and threw the whole blame of their revolt and refractory conduct hitherto upon the intriguing spirit of the prince of orange, from whose artifices the retributive justice of heaven had so lately liberated them. "it was," he said, "now in their power to awake from their long infatuation and return to their allegiance to a monarch who was ready and anxious to be reconciled to his subjects. for this end he gladly offered himself as mediator, as he had never ceased to love a country in which he had been born, and where he had spent the happiest days of his youth. he therefore exhorted them to send plenipotentiaries with whom he could arrange the conditions of peace, and gave them hopes of obtaining reasonable terms if they made a timely submission, but also threatened them with the severest treatment if they pushed matters to extremity." this letter, in which we are glad to recognize a language very different from that which the duke of alva held ten years before on a similar occasion, was answered by the townspeople in a respectful and dignified tone. while they did full justice to the personal character of the prince, and acknowledged his favorable intentions towards them with gratitude, they lamented the hardness of the times, which placed it out of his power to treat them in accordance with his character and disposition. they declared that they would gladly place their fate in his hands if he were absolute master of his actions, instead of being obliged to obey the will of another, whose proceedings his own candor would not allow him to approve of. the unalterable resolution of the king of spain, as well as the vow which he had made to the pope, were only too well known for them to have any hopes in that quarter. they at the same time defended with a noble warmth the memory of the prince of orange, their benefactor and preserver, while they enumerated the true cases which had produced this unhappy war, and had caused the provinces to revolt from the spanish crown. at the same time they did not disguise from him that they had hopes of finding a new and a milder master in the king of france, and that, if only for this reason, they could not enter into any treaty with the spanish king without incurring the charge of the most culpable fickleness and ingratitude. the united provinces, in fact, dispirited by a succession of reverses, had at last come to the determination of placing themselves under the protection and sovereignty of france, and of preserving their existence and their ancient privileges by the sacrifice of their independence. with this view an embassy had some time before been despatched to paris, and it was the prospect of this powerful assistance which principally supported the courage of the people of antwerp. henry iii., king of france, was personally disposed to accept this offer; but the troubles which the intrigues of the spaniards contrived to excite within his own kingdom compelled him against his will to abandon it. the provinces now turned for assistance to queen elizabeth of england, who sent them some supplies, which, however, came too late to save antwerp. while the people of this city were awaiting the issue of these negotiations, and expecting aid from foreign powers, they neglected, unfortunately, the most natural and immediate means of defence; the whole winter was lost, and while the enemy turned it to greater advantage the more complete was their indecision and inactivity. the burgomaster of antwerp, st. aldegonde, had, indeed, repeatedly urged the fleet of zealand to attack the enemy's works, which should be supported on the other side from antwerp. the long and frequently stormy nights would favor this attempt, and if at the same time a sally were made by the garrison at lillo, it seemed scarcely possible for the enemy to resist this triple assault. but unfortunately misunderstandings had arisen between the commander of the fleet, william von blois von treslong, and the admiralty of zealand, which caused the equipment of the fleet to be most unaccountably delayed. in order to quicken their movements teligny at last resolved to go himself to middleburg, were the states of zealand were assembled; but as the enemy were in possession of all the roads the attempt cost him his freedom and the republic its most valiant defender. however, there was no want of enterprising vessels, which, under the favor of the night and the floodtide, passing through the still open bridge in spite of the enemy's fire, threw provisions into the town and returned with the ebb. but as many of these vessels fell into the hands of the enemy the council gave orders that they should never risk the passage unless they amounted to a certain number; and the result, unfortunately, was that none attempted it because the required number could not be collected at one time. several attacks were also made from antwerp on the ships of the spaniards, which were not entirely unsuccessful; some of the latter were captured, others sunk, and all that was required was to execute similar attempts on a grand scale. but however zealously st. aldegonde urged this, still not a captain was to be found who would command a vessel for that purpose. amid these delays the winter expired, and scarcely had the ice begun to disappear when the construction of the bridge of boats was actively resumed by the besiegers. between the two piers a space of more than six hundred paces still remained to be filled up, which was effected in the following manner: thirty-two flat-bottomed vessels, each sixty-six feet long and twenty broad, were fastened together with strong cables and iron chains, but at a distance from each other of about twenty feet to allow a free passage to the stream. each boat, moreover, was moored with two cables, both up and down the stream, but which, as the water rose with the tide, or sunk with the ebb, could be slackened or tightened. upon the boats great masts were laid which reached from one to another, and, being covered with planks, formed a regular road, which, like that along the piers, was protected with a balustrade. this bridge of boats, of which the two piers formed a continuation, had, including the latter, a length of twenty-four thousand paces. this formidable work was so ingeniously constructed, and so richly furnished with the instruments of destruction, that it seemed almost capable, like a living creature, of defending itself at the word of command, scattering death among all who approached. besides the two forts of st. maria and st. philip, which terminated the bridge on either shore, and the two wooden bastions on the bridge itself, which were filled with soldiers and mounted with guns on all sides, each of the two-and-thirty vessels was manned with thirty soldiers and four sailors, and showed the cannon's mouth to the enemy, whether he carne up from zealand or down from antwerp. there were in all ninety-seven cannon, which were distributed beneath and above the bridge, and more than fifteen hundred men who were posted, partly in the forts, partly in the vessels, and, in case of necessity, could maintain a terrible fire of small-arms upon the enemy. but with all this the prince did not consider his work sufficiently secure. it was to be expected that the enemy would leave nothing unattempted to burst by the force of his machines the middle and weakest part. to guard against this, he erected in a line with the bridge of boats, but at some distance from it, another distinct defence, intended to break the force of any attack that might be directed against the bridge itself. this work consisted of thirty-three vessels of considerable magnitude, which were moored in a row athwart the stream and fastened in threes by masts, so that they formed eleven different groups. each of these, like a file of pikemen, presented fourteen long wooden poles with iron heads to the approaching enemy. these vessels were loaded merely with ballast, and were anchored each by a double but slack cable, so as to be able to give to the rise and fall of the tide. as they were in constant motion they got from the soldiers the name of "swimmers." the whole bridge of boats and also a part of the piers were covered by these swimmers, which were stationed above as well as below the bridge. to all these defensive preparations was added a fleet of forty men-of-war, which were stationed on both coasts and served as a protection to the whole. this astonishing work was finished in march, , the seventh month of the siege, and the day on which it was completed was kept as a jubilee by the troops. the great event was announced to the besieged by a grand /fete de joie/, and the army, as if to enjoy ocular demonstration of its triumph, extended itself along the whole platform to gaze upon the proud stream, peacefully and obediently flowing under the yoke which had been imposed upon it. all the toil they had undergone was forgotton in the delightful spectacle, and every man who had had a hand in it, however insignificant he might be, assumed to himself a portion of the honor which the successful execution of so gigantic an enterprise conferred on its illustrious projector. on the other hand, nothing could equal the consternation which seized the citizens of antwerp when intelligence was brought them that the scheldt was now actually closed, and all access from zealand cut off. to increase their dismay they learned the fall of brussels also, which had at last been compelled by famine to capitulate. an attempt made by the count of hohenlohe about the same time on herzogenbusch, with a view to recapture the town, or at least form a diversion, was equally unsuccessful; and thus the unfortunate city lost all hope of assistance, both by sea and land. these evil tidings were brought them by some fugitives who had succeeded in passing the spanish videttes, and had made their way into the town; and a spy, whom the burgomaster had sent out to reconnoitre the enemy's works, increased the general alarm by his report. he had been seized and carried before the prince of parma, who commanded him to be conducted over all the works, and all the defences of the bridge to be pointed out to him. after this had been done he was again brought before the general, who dismissed him with these words: "go," said he, "and report what you have seen to those who sent you. and tell them, too, that it is my firm resolve to bury myself under the ruins of this bridge or by means of it to pass into your town." but the certainty of danger now at last awakened the zeal of the confederates, and it was no fault of theirs if the former half of the prince's vow was not fulfilled. the latter had long viewed with apprehension the preparations which were making in zealand for the relief of the town. he saw clearly that it was from this quarter that he had to fear the most dangerous blow, and that with all his works he could not make head against the combined fleets of zealand and antwerp if they were to fall upon him at the same time and at the proper moment. for a while the delays of the admiral of zealand, which he had labored by all the means in his power to prolong, had been his security, but now the urgent necessity accelerated the expedition, and without waiting for the admiral the states at middleburg despatched the count justin of nassau, with as many ships as they could muster, to the assistance of the besieged. this fleet took up a position before liefkenshoek, which was in possession of the spaniards, and, supported by a few vessels from the opposite fort of lillo, cannonaded it with such success that the walls were in a short time demolished, and the place carried by storm. the walloons who formed the garrison did not display the firmness which might have been expected from soldiers of the duke of parma; they shamefully surrendered the fort to the enemy, who in a short time were in possession of the whole island of doel, with all the redoubts situated upon it. the loss of these places, which were, however, soon retaken, incensed the duke of parma so much that he tried the officers by court-martial, and caused the most culpable among them to be beheaded. meanwhile this important conquest opened to the zealanders a free passage as far as the bridge, and after concerting with the people of antwerp the time was fixed for a combined attack on this work. it was arranged that, while the bridge of boats was blown up by machines already prepared in antwerp, the zealand fleet, with a sufficient supply of provisions, should be in the vicinity, ready to sail to the town through the opening. while the duke of parma was engaged in constructing his bridge an engineer within the walls was already preparing the materials for its destruction. frederick gianibelli was the name of the man whom fate had destined to be the archimedes of antwerp, and to exhaust in its defence the same ingenuity with the same want of success. he was born in mantua, and had formerly visited madrid for the purpose, it was said, of offering his services to king philip in the belgian war. but wearied with waiting the offended engineer left the court with the intention of making the king of spain sensibly feel the value of talents which he had so little known how to appreciate. he next sought the service of queen elizabeth of england, the declared enemy of spain, who, after witnessing a few specimens of his skill, sent him to antwerp. he took up his residence in that town, and in the present extremity devoted to its defence his knowledge, his energy, and his zeal. as soon as this artist perceived that the project of erecting the bridge was seriously intended, and that the work was fast approaching to completion, he applied to the magistracy for three large vessels, from a hundred and fifty to five hundred tons, in which he proposed to place mines. he also demanded sixty boats, which, fastened together with cables and chains, furnished with projecting grappling-irons, and put in motion with the ebbing of the tide, were intended to second the operation of the mine-ships by being directed in a wedgelike form against the bridge. but he had to deal with men who were quite incapable of comprehending an idea out of the common way, and even where the salvation of their country was at stake could not forget the calculating habits of trade. his scheme was rejected as too expensive, and with difficulty he at last obtained the grant of two smaller vessels, from seventy to eighty tons, with a number of flat-bottomed boats. with these two vessels, one of which he called the "fortune" and the other the "hope," he proceeded in the following manner: in the hold of each he built a hollow chamber of freestone, five feet broad, three and a half high, and forty long. this magazine he filled with sixty hundredweight of the finest priming powder of his own compounding, and covered it with as heavy a weight of large slabs and millstones as the vessels could carry. over these he further added a roof of similar stones, which ran up to a point and projected six feet above the ship's side. the deck itself was crammed with iron chains and hooks, knives, nails, and other destructive missiles; the remaining space, which was not occupied by the magazine, was likewise filled up with planks. several small apertures were left in the chamber for the matches which were to set fire to the mine. for greater certainty he had also contrived a piece of mechanism which, after the lapse of a given time, would strike out sparks, and even if the matches failed would set the ship on fire. to delude the enemy into a belief that these machines were only intended to set the bridge on fire, a composition of brimstone and pitch was placed in the top, which could burn a whole hour. and still further to divert the enemy's attention from the proper seat of danger, he also prepared thirty-two flatbottomed boats, upon which there were only fireworks burning, and whose sole object was to deceive the enemy. these fire-ships were to be sent down upon the bridge in four separate squadrons, at intervals of half an hour, and keep the enemy incessantly engaged for two whole hours, so that, tired of firing and wearied by vain expectation, they might at last relax their vigilance before the real fire-ships came. in addition to all this he also despatched a few vessels in which powder was concealed in order to blow up the floating work before the bridge, and to clear a passage for the two principal ships. at the same time he hoped by this preliminary attack to engage the enemy's attention, to draw them out, and expose them to the full deadly effect of the volcano. the night between the th and th of april was fixed for the execution of this great undertaking. an obscure rumor of it had already diffused itself through the spanish camp, and particularly from the circumstance of many divers from antwerp having been detected endeavoring to cut the cables of the vessels. they were prepared, therefore, for a serious attack; they only mistook the real nature of it, and counted on having to fight rather with man than the elements. in this expectation the duke caused the guards along the whole bank to be doubled, and drew up the chief part of his troops in the vicinity of the bridge, where he was present in person; thus meeting the danger while endeavoring to avoid it. no sooner was it dark than three burning vessels were seen to float down from the city towards the bridge, then three more, and directly after the same number. they beat to arms throughout the spanish camp, and the whole length of the bridge was crowded with soldiers. meantime the number of the fire-ships increased, and they came in regular order down the stream, sometimes two and sometimes three abreast, being at first steered by sailors on board them. the admiral of the antwerp fleet, jacob jacobson (whether designedly or through carelessness is not known), had committed the error of sending off the four squadrons of fire-ships too quickly one after another, and caused the two large mine- ships also to follow them too soon, and thus disturbed the intended order of attack. the array of vessels kept approaching, and the darkness of night still further heightened the extraordinary spectacle. as far as the eye could follow the course of the stream all was fire; the fire-ships burning as brilliantly as if they were themselves in the flames; the surface of the water glittered with light; the dykes and the batteries along the shore, the flags, arms, and accoutrements of the soldiers who lined the rivers as well as the bridges were clearly distinguishable in the glare. with a mingled sensation of awe and pleasure the soldiers watched the unusual sight, which rather resembled a fete than a hostile preparation, but from the very strangeness of the contrast filled the mind with a mysterious awe. when the burning fleet had come within two thousand paces of the bridge those who had the charge of it lighted the matches, impelled the two mine-vessels into the middle of the stream, and leaving the others to the guidance of the current of the waves, they hastily made their escape in boats which had been kept in readiness. their course, however, was irregular, and destitute of steersmen they arrived singly and separately at the floating works, where they continued hanging or were dashed off sidewise on the shore. the foremost powder-ships, which were intended to set fire to the floating works, were cast, by the force of a squall which arose at that instant, on the flemish coast. one of the two, the "fortune," grounded in its passage before it reached the bridge, and killed by its explosion some spanish soldiers who were at work in a neighboring battery. the other and larger fire-ship, called the "hope," narrowly escaped a similar fate. the current drove her against the floating defences towards the flemish bank, where it remained hanging, and had it taken fire at that moment the greatest part of its effect would have been lost. deceived by the flames which this machine, like the other vessels, emitted, the spaniards took it for a common fire-ship, intended to burn the bridge of boats. and as they had seen them extinguished one after the other without further effect all fears were dispelled, and the spaniards began to ridicule the preparations of the enemy, which had been ushered in with so much display and now had so absurd an end. some of the boldest threw themselves into the stream in order to get a close view of the fire-ship and extinguish it, when by its weight it suddenly broke through, burst the floating work which had detained it, and drove with terrible force on the bridge of boats. all was now in commotion on the bridge, and the prince called to the sailors to keep the vessel off with poles, and to extinguish the flames before they caught the timbers. at this critical moment he was standing at the farthest end of the left pier, where it formed a bastion in the water and joined the bridge of boats. by his side stood the margrave of rysburg, general of cavalry and governor of the province of artois, who had formerly-served the states, but from a protector of the republic had become its worst enemy; the baron of billy, governor of friesland and commander of the german regiments; the generals cajetan and guasto, with several of the principal officers; all forgetful of their own danger and entirely occupied with averting the general calamity. at this moment a spanish ensign approached the prince of parma and conjured him to remove from a place where his life was in manifest and imminent peril. no attention being paid to his entreaty he repeated it still more urgently, and at last fell at his feet and implored him in this one instance to take advice from his servant. while he said this he had laid hold of the duke's coat as though he wished forcibly to draw him away from the spot, and the latter, surprised rather at the man's boldness than persuaded by his arguments, retired at last to the shore, attended by cajetan and guasto. he had scarcely time to reach the fort st. maria at the end of the bridge when an explosion took place behind him, just as if the earth had burst or the vault of heaven given way. the duke and his whole army fell to the ground as dead, and several minutes elapsed before they recovered their consciousness. but then what a sight presented itself! the waters of the scheldt had been divided to its lowest depth, and driven with a surge which rose like a wall above the dam that confined it, so that all the fortifications on the banks were several feet under water. the earth shook for three miles round. nearly the whole left pier, on which the fire-ship had been driven, with a part of the bridge of boats, had been burst and shattered to atoms, with all that was upon it; spars, cannon, and men blown into the air. even the enormous blocks of stone which had covered the mine had, by the force of the explosion, been hurled into the neighboring fields, so that many of them were afterwards dug out of the ground at a distance of a thousand paces from the bridge. six vessels were buried, several had gone to pieces. but still more terrible was the carnage which the murderous machine had dealt amongst the soldiers. five hundred, according to other reports even eight hundred, were sacrificed to its fury, without reckoning those who escaped with mutilated or injured bodies. the most opposite kinds of death were combined in this frightful moment. some were consumed by the flames of the explosion, others scalded to death by the boiling water of the river, others stifled by the poisonous vapor of the brimstone; some were drowned in the stream, some buried under the hail of falling masses of rock, many cut to pieces by the knives and hooks, or shattered by the balls which were poured from the bowels of the machine. some were found lifeless without any visible injury, having in all probability been killed by the mere concussion of the air. the spectacle which presented itself directly after the firing of the mine was fearful. men were seen wedged between the palisades of the bridge, or struggling to release themselves from beneath ponderous masses of rock, or hanging in the rigging of the ships; and from all places and quarters the most heartrending cries for help arose, but as each was absorbed in his own safety these could only be answered by helpless wailings. many had escaped in the most wonderful manner. an officer named tucci was carried by the whirlwind like a feather high into the air, where he was for a moment suspended, and then dropped into the river, where he saved himself by swimming. another was taken up by the force of the blast from the flanders shore and deposited on that of brabant, incurring merely a slight contusion on the shoulder; he felt, as he afterwards said, during this rapid aerial transit, just as if he had been fired out of a cannon. the prince of parma himself had never been so near death as at that moment, when half a minute saved his life. he had scarcely set foot in the fort of st. maria when he was lifted off his feet as if by a hurricane, and a beam which struck him on the head and shoulders stretched him senseless on the earth. for a long time he was believed to be actually killed, many remembering to have seen him on the bridge only a few minutes before the fatal explosion. he was found at last between his attendants, cajetan and guasto, raising himself up with his hand on his sword; and the intelligence stirred the spirits of the whole army. but vain would be the attempt to depict his feelings when he surveyed the devastation which a single moment had caused in the work of so many months. the bridge of boats, upon which all his hopes rested, was rent asunder; a great part of his army was destroyed; another portion maimed and rendered ineffective for many days; many of his best officers were killed; and, as if the present calamity were not sufficient, he had now to learn the painful intelligence that the margrave of rysburg, whom of all his officers he prized the highest, was missing. and yet the worst was still to come, for every moment the fleets of the enemy were to be expected from antwerp and lillo, to which this fearful position of the army would disable him from offering any effectual resistance. the bridge was entirely destroyed, and nothing could prevent the fleet from zealand passing through in full sail; while the confusion of the troops in this first moment was so great and general that it would have been impossible to give or obey orders, as many corps had lost their commanding officers, and many commanders their corps; and even the places where they had been stationed were no longer to be recognized amid the general ruin. add to this that all the batteries on shore were under water, that several cannon were sunk, that the matches were wet, and the ammunition damaged. what a moment for the enemy if they had known how to avail themselves of it! it will scarcely be believed, however, that this success, which surpassed all expectation, was lost to antwerp, simply because nothing was known of it. st. aldegonde, indeed, as soon as the explosion of the mine was heard in the town, had sent out several galleys in the direction of the bridge, with orders to send up fire-balls and rockets the moment they had passed it, and then to sail with the intelligence straight on to lillo, in order to bring up, without delay, the zealand fleet, which had orders to co-operate. at the same time the admiral of antwerp was ordered, as soon as the signal was given, to sail out with his vessels and attack the enemy in their first consternation. but although a considerable reward was promised to the boatmen sent to reconnoitre they did not venture near the enemy, but returned without effecting their purpose, and reported that the bridge of boats was uninjured, and the fire-ship had had no effect. even on the following day also no better measures were taken to learn the true state of the bridge; and as the fleet at lillo, in spite of the favorable wind, was seen to remain inactive, the belief that the fire-ships had accomplished nothing was confirmed. it did not seem to occur to any one that this very inactivity of the confederates, which misled the people of antwerp, might also keep back the zealanders at lille, as in fact it did. so signal an instance of neglect could only have occurred in a government, which, without dignity of independence, was guided by the tumultuous multitude it ought to have governed. the more supine, however, they were themselves in opposing the enemy, the more violently did their rage boil against gianibelli, whom the frantic mob would have torn in pieces if they could have caught him. for two days the engineer was in the most imminent danger, until at last, on the third morning, a courier from lillo, who had swam under the bridge, brought authentic intelligence of its having been destroyed, but at the same time announced that it had been repaired. this rapid restoration of the bridge was really a miraculous effort of the prince of parma. scarcely had he recovered from the shock, which seemed to have overthrown all his plans, when he contrived, with wonderful presence of mind, to prevent all its evil consequences. the absence of the enemy's fleet at this decisive moment revived his hopes. the ruinous state of the bridge appeared to be a secret to them, and though it was impossible to repair in a few hours the work of so many months, yet a great point would be gained if it could be done even in appearance. all his men were immediately set to work to remove the ruins, to raise the timbers which had been thrown down, to replace those which were demolished, and to fill up the chasms with ships. the duke himself did not refuse to share in the toil, and his example was followed by all his officers. stimulated by this popular behavior, the common soldiers exerted themselves to the utmost; the work was carried on during the whole night under the constant sounding of drums and trumpets, which were distributed along the bridge to drown the noise of the work-people. with dawn of day few traces remained of the night's havoc; and although the bridge was restored only in appearance, it nevertheless deceived the spy, and consequently no attack was made upon it. in the meantime the prince contrived to make the repairs solid, nay, even to introduce some essential alterations in the structure. in order to guard against similar accidents for the future, a part of the bridge of boats was made movable, so that in case of necessity it could be taken away and a passage opened to the fire-ships. his loss of men was supplied from the garrisons of the adjoining places, and by a german regiment which arrived very opportunely from gueldres. he filled up the vacancies of the officers who were killed, and in doing this he did not forget the spanish ensign who had saved his life. the people of antwerp, after learning the success of their mine-ship, now did homage to the inventor with as much extravagance as they had a short time before mistrusted him, and they encouraged his genius to new attempts. gianibelli now actually obtained the number of flat-bottomed vessels which he had at first demanded in vain, and these he equipped in such a manner that they struck with irresistible force on the bridge, and a second time also burst and separated it. but this time, the wind was contrary to the zealand fleet, so that they could not put out, and thus the prince obtained once more the necessary respite to repair the damage. the archimedes of antwerp was not deterred by any of these disappointments. anew he fitted out two large vessels which were armed with iron hooks and similar instruments in order to tear asunder the bridge. but when the moment came for these vessels to get under weigh no one was found ready to embark in them. the engineer was therefore obliged to think of a plan for giving to these machines such a self- impulse that, without being guided by a steersman, they would keep the middle of the stream, and not, like the former ones, be driven on the bank by the wind. one of his workmen, a german, here hit upon a strange invention, if strada's description of it is to be credited. he affixed a sail under the vessel, which was to be acted upon by the water, just as an ordinary sail is by the wind, and could thus impel the ship with the whole force of the current. the result proved the correctness of his calculation; for this vessel, with the position of its sails reversed, not only kept the centre of the stream, but also ran against the bridge with such impetuosity that the enemy had not time to open it and was actually burst asunder. but all these results were of no service to the town, because the attempts were made at random and were supported by no adequate force. a new fire-ship, equipped like the former, which had succeeded so well, and which gianibelli had filled with four thousand pounds of the finest powder was not even used; for a new mode of attempting their deliverance had now occurred to the people of antwerp. terrified by so many futile attempts from endeavoring to clear a passage for vessels on the river by force, they at last came to the determination of doing without the stream entirely. they remembered the example of the town of leyden, which, when besieged by the spaniards ten years before, had saved itself by opportunely inundating the surrounding country, and it was resolved to imitate this example. between lillo and stabroek, in the district of bergen, a wide and somewhat sloping plain extends as far as antwerp, being protected by numerous embankments and counter-embankments against the irruptions of the east scheldt. nothing more was requisite than to break these dams, when the whole plain would become a sea, navigable by flat-bottomed vessels almost to the very walls of antwerp. if this attempt should succeed, the duke of parma might keep the scheldt guarded with his bridge of boats as long as he pleased; a new river would be formed, which, in case of necessity, would be equally serviceable for the time. this was the very plan which the prince of orange had at the commencement of the siege recommended, and in which he had been strenuously, but unsuccessfully, seconded by st. aldegonde, because some of the citizens could not be persuaded to sacrifice their own fields. in the present emergency they reverted to this last resource, but circumstances in the meantime had greatly changed. the plain in question is intersected by a broad and high dam, which takes its name from the adjacent castle of cowenstein, and extends for three miles from the village of stabroek, in bergen, as far as the scheldt, with the great dam of which it unites near ordam. beyond this dam no vessels can proceed, however high the tide, and the sea would be vainly turned into the fields as long as such an embankment remained in the way, which would prevent the zealand vessels from descending into the plain before antwerp. the fate of the town would therefore depend upon the demolition of this cowenstein dam; but, foreseeing this, the prince of parma had, immediately on commencing the blockade, taken possession of it, and spared no pains to render it tenable to the last. at the village of stabroek, count mansfeld was encamped with the greatest part of his army, and by means of this very cowenstein dam kept open the communication with the bridge, the headquarters, and the spanish magazines at calloo. thus the army formed an uninterrupted line from stabroek in brabant, as far as bevern in flanders, intersected indeed, but not broken by the scheldt, and which could not be cut off without a sanguinary conflict. on the dam itself within proper distances five different batteries had been erected, the command of which was given to the most valiant officers in the army. nay, as the prince of parma could not doubt that now the whole fury of the war would be turned to this point, he entrusted the defence of the bridge to count mansfeld, and resolved to defend this important post himself. the war, therefore, now assumed a different aspect, and the theatre of it was entirely changed. both above and below lillo, the netherlanders had in several places cut through the dam, which follows the brabant shore of the scheldt; and where a short time before had been green fields, a new element now presented itself, studded with masts and boats. a zealand fleet, commanded by count hohenlohe, navigated the inundated fields, and made repeated movements against the cowenstein dam, without, however, attempting a serious attack on it, while another fleet showed itself in the scheldt, threatening the two coasts alternately with a landing, and occasionally the bridge of boats with an attack. for several days this manoeuvre was practised on the enemy, who, uncertain of the quarter whence an attack was to be expected, would, it was hoped, be exhausted by continual watching, and by degrees lulled into security by so many false alarms. antwerp had promised count hohenlohe to support the attack on the dam by a flotilla from the town; three beacons on the principal tower were to be the signal that this was on the way. when, therefore, on a dark night the expected columns of fire really ascended above antwerp, count hohenlohe immediately caused five hundred of his troops to scale the dam between two of the enemy's redoubts, who surprised part of the spanish garrison asleep, and cut down the others who attempted to defend themselves. in a short time they had gained a firm footing upon the dam, and were just on the point of disembarking the remainder of their force, two thousand in number, when the spaniards in the adjoining redoubts marched out and, favored by the narrowness of the ground, made a desperate attack on the crowded zealanders. the guns from the neighboring batteries opened upon the approaching fleet, and thus rendered the landing of the remaining troops impossible; and as there were no signs of co-operation on the part of the city, the zealanders were overpowered after a short conflict and again driven down from the dam. the victorious spaniards pursued them through the water as far as their boats, sunk many of the latter, and compelled the rest to retreat with heavy loss. count hohenlohe threw the blame of this defeat upon the inhabitants of antwerp, who had deceived him by a false signal, and it certainly must be attributed to the bad arrangement of both parties that the attempt failed of better success. but at last the allies determined to make a systematic assault on the enemy with their combined force, and to put an end to the siege by a grand attack as well on the dam as on the bridge. the th of may, , was fixed upon for the execution of this design, and both armies used their utmost endeavors to make this day decisive. the force of the hollanders and zealanders, united to that of antwerp, exceeded two hundred ships, to man which they had stripped their towns and citadels, and with this force they purposed to attack the cowenstein dam on both sides. the bridge over the scheldt was to be assailed with new machines of gianibelli's invention, and the duke of parma thereby hindered from assisting the defence of the dam. alexander, apprised of the danger which threatened him, spared nothing on his side to meet it with energy. immediately after getting possession of the dam he had caused redoubts to be erected at five different, places, and had given the command of them to the most experienced officers of the army. the first of these, which was called the cross battery, was erected on the spot where the cowenstein darn enters the great embankment of the scheldt, and makes with the latter the form of a cross; the spaniard, mondragone, was appointed to the command of this battery. a thousand paces farther on, near the castle of cowenstein, was posted the battery of st. james, which was entrusted to the command of camillo di monte. at an equal distance from this lay the battery of st. george, and at a thousand paces from the latter, the pile battery, under the command of gamboa, so called from the pile-work on which it rested; at the farthest end of the darn, near stabroek, was the fifth redoubt, where count mansfeld, with capizuechi, an italian, commanded. all these forts the prince now strengthened with artillery and men; on both sides of the dam, and along its whole extent, he caused piles to be driven, as well to render the main embankment firmer, as to impede the labor of the pioneers, who were to dig through it. early on the morning of the th of may the enemy's forces were in motion. with the dusk of dawn there came floating down from lillo, over the inundated country, four burning vessels, which so alarmed the guards upon the dams, who recollected the former terrible explosion, that they hastily retreated to the next battery. this was exactly what the enemy desired. in these vessels, which had merely the appearance of fire- ships, soldiers were concealed, who now suddenly jumped ashore, and succeeded in mounting the dam at the undefended spot, between the st. george and pile batteries. immediately afterward the whole zealand fleet showed itself, consisting of numerous ships-of-war, transports, and a crowd of smaller craft, which were laden with great sacks of earth, wool, fascines, gabions, and the like, for throwing up breastworks wherever necessary, the ships-of-war were furnished with powerful artillery, and numerously and bravely manned, and a whole army of pioneers accompanied it in order to dig through the dam as soon as it should be in their possession. the zealanders had scarcely begun on their side to ascend the dam when the fleet of antwerp advanced from osterweel and attacked it on the other. a high breastwork was hastily thrown up between the two nearest hostile batteries, so as at once to divide the two garrisons and to cover the pioneers. the latter, several hundreds in number, now fell to work with their spades on both sides of the dam, and dug with such energy that hopes were entertained of soon seeing the two seas united. but meanwhile the spaniards also had gained time to hasten to the spot from the two nearest redoubts, and make a spirited assault, while the guns from the battery of st. george played incessantly on the enemy's fleet. a furious battle now raged in the quarter where they were cutting through the dike and throwing up the breastworks. the zealanders had drawn a strong line of troops round the pioneers to keep the enemy from interrupting their work, and in this confusion of battle, in the midst of a storm of bullets from the enemy, often up to the breast in water, among the dead and dying, the pioneers pursued their work, under the incessant exhortations of the merchants, who impatiently waited to see the dam opened and their vessels in safety. the importance of the result, which it might be said depended entirely upon their spades, appeared to animate even the common laborers with heroic courage. solely intent upon their task, they neither saw nor heard the work of death which was going on around them, and as fast as the foremost ranks fell those behind them pressed into their places. their operations were greatly impeded by the piles which had been driven in, but still more by the attacks of the spaniards, who burst with desperate courage through the thickest of the enemy, stabbed the pioneers in the pits where they were digging, and filled up again with dead bodies the cavities which the living had made. at last, however, when most of their officers were killed or wounded, and the number of the enemy constantly increasing, while fresh laborers were supplying the place of those who had been slain, the courage of these valiant troops began to give way, and they thought it advisable to retreat to their batteries. now, therefore, the confederates saw themselves masters of the whole extent of the dam, from fort st. george as far as the pile battery. as, however, it seemed too long to wait for the thorough demolition of the dam, they hastily unloaded a zealand transport, and brought the cargo over the dam to a vessel of antwerp, with which count hohenlohe sailed in triumph to that city. the sight of the provisions at once filled the inhabitants with joy, and as if the victory was already won, they gave themselves up to the wildest exultation. the bells were rung, the cannon discharged, and the inhabitants, transported by their unexpected success, hurried to the osterweel gate, to await the store-ships which were supposed to be at hand. in fact, fortune had never smiled so favorably on the besieged as at that moment. the enemy, exhausted and dispirited, had thrown themselves into their batteries, and, far from being able to struggle with the victors for the post they had conquered, they found themselves rather besieged in the places where they had taken refuge. some companies of scots, led by their brave colonel, balfour, attacked the battery of st. george, which, however, was relieved, but not without severe loss, by camillo di monte, who hastened thither from st. james' battery. the pile battery was in a much worse condition, it being hotly cannonaded by the ships, and threatened every moment to crumble to pieces. gainboa, who commanded it, lay wounded, and it was unfortunately deficient in artillery to keep the enemy at a distance. the breastwork, too, which the zealanders had thrown up between this battery and that of st. george cut off all hope of assistance from the scheldt. if, therefore, the belgians had only taken advantage of this weakness and inactivity of the enemy to proceed with zeal and perseverance in cutting through the dam, there is no doubt that a passage might have been made, and thus put an end to the whole siege. but here also the same want of consistent energy showed itself which had marked the conduct of the people of antwerp during the whole course of the siege. the zeal with which the work had been commenced cooled in proportion to the success which attended it. it was soon found too tedious to dig through the dyke; it seemed far easier to transfer the cargoes from the large store-ships into smaller ones, and carry these to the town with the flood tide. st. aldegonde and hohenlohe, instead of remaining to animate the industry of the workmen by their personal presence, left the scene of action at the decisive moment, in order, by sailing to the town with a corn vessel, to win encomiums on their wisdom and valor. while both parties were fighting on the dam with the most obstinate fury the bridge over the scheldt had been attacked from antwerp with new machines, in order to give employment to the prince in that quarter. but the sound of the firing soon apprised him of what was going on at the dyke, and as soon as he saw the bridge clear he hastened to support the defence of the dyke. followed by two hundred spanish pikemen, he flew to the place of attack, and arrived just in time to prevent the complete defeat of his troops. he hastily posted some guns which he had brought with him in the two nearest redoubts, and maintained from thence a heavy fire upon the enemy's ships. he placed himself at the head of his men, and, with his sword in one hand and shield in the other, led them against the enemy. the news of his arrival, which quickly spread from one end of the dyke to the other, revived the drooping spirits of his troops, and the conflict recommenced with renewed violence, made still more murderous by the nature of the ground where it was fought. upon the narrow ridge of the dam, which in many places was not more than nine paces broad, about five thousand combatants were fighting; so confined was the spot upon which the strength of both armies was assembled, and which was to decide the whole issue of the siege. with the antwerpers the last bulwark of their city was at stake; with the spaniards it was to determine the whole success of their undertaking. both parties fought with a courage which despair alone could inspire. from both the extremities of the dam the tide of war rolled itself towards the centre, where the zealanders and antwerpers had the advantage, and where they had collected their whole strength. the italians and spaniards, inflamed by a noble emulation, pressed on from stabroek; and from the scheldt the walloons and spaniards advanced, with their general at their head. while the former endeavored to relieve the pile battery, which was hotly pressed by the enemy, both by sea and land, the latter threw themselves on the breastwork, between the st. george and the pile batteries, with a fury which carried everything before it. here the flower of the belgian troops fought behind a well- fortified rampart, and the guns of the two fleets covered this important post. the prince was already pressing forward to attack this formidable defence with his small army when he received intelligence that the italians and spaniards, under capizucchi and aquila, had forced their way, sword in hand, into the pile battery, had got possession of it, and were now likewise advancing from the other side against the enemy's breastwork. before this intrenchment, therefore, the whole force of both armies was now collected, and both sides used their utmost efforts to carry and to defend this position. the netherlanders on board the fleet, loath to remain idle spectators of the conflict, sprang ashore from their vessels. alexander attacked the breastwork on one side, count mansfeld on the other; five assaults were made, and five times they were repulsed. the netherlanders in this decisive moment surpassed themselves; never in the whole course of the war had they fought with such determination. but it was the scotch and english in particular who baffled the attempts of the enemy by their valiant resistance. as no one would advance to the attack in the quarter where the scotch fought, the duke himself led on the troops, with a javelin in his hand, and up to his breast in water. at last, after a protracted struggle, the forces of count mansfeld succeeded with their halberds and pikes in making a breach in the breastwork, and by raising themselves on one another's shoulders scaled the parapet. barthelemy toralva, a spanish captain, was the first who showed himself on the top; and almost at the same instant the italian, capizucchi, appeared upon the edge of it; and thus the contest of valor was decided with equal glory for both nations. it is worth while to notice here the manner in which the prince of parma, who was made arbiter of this emulous strife, encouraged this delicate sense of honor among his warriors. he embraced the italian, capizucchi, in presence of the troops, and acknowledged aloud that it was principally to the courage of this officer that he owed the capture of the breastwork. he caused the spanish captain, toralva, who was dangerously wounded, to be conveyed to his own quarters at stabroek, laid on his own bed, and covered with the cloak which he himself had worn the day before the battle. after the capture of the breastwork the victory no longer remained doubtful. the dutch and zealand troops, who had disembarked to come to close action with the enemy, at once lost their courage when they looked about them and saw the vessels, which were their last refuge, putting off from the shore. for the tide had begun to ebb, and the commanders of the fleet, from fear of being stranded with their heavy transports, and, in case of an unfortunate issue to the engagement, becoming the prey of the enemy, retired from the dam, and made for deep water. no sooner did alexander perceive this than he pointed out to his troops the flying vessels, and encouraged them to finish the action with an enemy who already despaired of their safety. the dutch auxiliaries were the first that gave way, and their example was soon followed by the zealanders. hastily leaping from the dam they endeavored to reach the vessels by wading or swimming; but from their disorderly flight they impeded one another, and fell in heaps under the swords of the pursuers. many perished even in the boats, as each strove to get on board before the other, and several vessels sank under the weight of the numbers who rushed into them. the antwerpers, who fought for their liberty, their hearths, their faith, were the last who retreated, but this very circumstance augmented their disaster. many of their vessels were outstripped by the ebb-tide, and grounded within reach of the enemy's cannon, and were consequently destroyed with all on board. crowds of fugitives endeavored by swimming to gain the other transports, which had got into deep water; but such was the rage and boldness of the spaniards that they swam after them with their swords between their teeth, and dragged many even from the ships. the victory of the king's troops was complete but bloody; for of the spaniards about eight hundred, of the netherlanders some thousands (without reckoning those who were drowned), were left on the field, and on both sides many of the principal nobility perished. more than thirty vessels, with a large supply of provisions for antwerp, fell into the hands of the victors, with one hundred and fifty cannon and other military stores. the dam, the possession of which had been so dearly maintained, was pierced in thirteen different places, and the bodies of those who had cut through it were now used to stop up the openings. the following day a transport of immense size and singular construction fell into the hands of the royalists. it formed a floating castle, and had been destined for the attack on the cowenstein dam. the people of antwerp had built it at an immense expense at the very time when the engineer gianibelli's useful proposals had been rejected on account of the cost they entailed, and this ridiculous monster was called by the proud title of "end of the war," which appellation was afterwards changed for the more appropriate sobriquet of "money lost!" when this vessel was launched it turned out, as every sensible person had foretold, that on account of its unwieldly size it was utterly impossible to steer it, and it could hardly be floated by the highest tide. with great difficulty it was worked as far as ordain, where, deserted by the tide, it went aground, and fell a prey to the enemy. the attack upon the cowenstein dam was the last attempt which was made to relieve antwerp. from this time the courage of the besieged sank, and the magistracy of the town vainly labored to inspirit with distant hopes the lower orders, on whom the present distress weighed heaviest. hitherto the price of bread had been kept down to a tolerable rate, although the quality of it continued to deteriorate; by degrees, however, provisions became so scarce that a famine was evidently near at hand. still hopes were entertained of being able to hold out, at least until the corn between the town and the farthest batteries, which was already in full ear, could be reaped; but before that could be done the enemy had carried the last outwork, and had appropriated the whole harvest to their use. at last the neighboring and confederate town of malines fell into the enemy's hands, and with its fall vanished the only remaining hope of getting supplies from brabant. as there was, therefore, no longer any means of increasing the stock of provisions nothing was left but to diminish the consumers. all useless persons, all strangers, nay even the women and children were to be sent away out of the town, but this proposal was too revolting to humanity to be carried into execution. another plan, that of expelling the catholic inhabitants, exasperated them so much that it had almost ended in open mutiny. and thus st. aldegonde at last saw himself compelled to yield to the riotous clamors of the populace, and on the th of august, , to make overtures to the duke of parma for the surrender of the town. the refugees a tale of two continents a. conan doyle contents. part i. in the old world. chapter i. the man from america. ii. a monarch in deshabille iii. the holding of the door iv. the father of his people v. children of belial vi. a house of strife vii. the new world and the old viii. the rising sun ix. le roi s'amuse x. an eclipse at versailles xi. the sun reappears xii. the king receives xiii. the king has ideas xiv. the last card xv. the midnight mission xvi. "when the devil drives" xvii. the dungeon of portillac xviii. a night of surprises xix. in the king's cabinet xx. the two francoises xxi. the man in the caleche xxii. the scaffold of portillac xxiii. the fall of the catinats part ii. in the new world. chapter xxiv. the start of the "golden rod" xxv. a boat of the dead xxvi. the last port xxvii. a dwindling island xxviii. in the pool of quebec xxix. the voice at the port-hole xxx. the inland waters xxxi. the hairless man xxxii. the lord of sainte marie xxxiii. the slaying of brown moose xxxiv. the men of blood xxxv. the tapping of death xxxvi. the taking of the stockade xxxvii. the coming of the friar xxxviii. the dining-hall of sainte marie xxxix. the two swimmers xl. the end note on the huegenots and their dispersion note on the future of louis, madame de maintenon, and madame de montespan chapter i. the man from america. it was the sort of window which was common in paris about the end of the seventeenth century. it was high, mullioned, with a broad transom across the centre, and above the middle of the transom a tiny coat of arms--three caltrops gules upon a field argent--let into the diamond-paned glass. outside there projected a stout iron rod, from which hung a gilded miniature of a bale of wool which swung and squeaked with every puff of wind. beyond that again were the houses of the other side, high, narrow, and prim, slashed with diagonal wood-work in front, and topped with a bristle of sharp gables and corner turrets. between were the cobble-stones of the rue st. martin and the clatter of innumerable feet. inside, the window was furnished with a broad bancal of brown stamped spanish leather, where the family might recline and have an eye from behind the curtains on all that was going forward in the busy world beneath them. two of them sat there now, a man and a woman, but their backs were turned to the spectacle, and their faces to the large and richly furnished room. from time to time they stole a glance at each other, and their eyes told that they needed no other sight to make them happy. nor was it to be wondered at, for they were a well-favoured pair. she was very young, twenty at the most, with a face which was pale, indeed, and yet of a brilliant pallor, which was so clear and fresh, and carried with it such a suggestion of purity and innocence, that one would not wish its maiden grace to be marred by an intrusion of colour. her features were delicate and sweet, and her blue-black hair and long dark eyelashes formed a piquant contrast to her dreamy gray eyes and her ivory skin. in her whole expression there was something quiet and subdued, which was accentuated by her simple dress of black taffeta, and by the little jet brooch and bracelet which were her sole ornaments. such was adele catinat, the only daughter of the famous huguenot cloth-merchant. but if her dress was sombre, it was atoned for by the magnificence of her companion. he was a man who might have been ten years her senior, with a keen soldier face, small well-marked features, a carefully trimmed black moustache, and a dark hazel eye which might harden to command a man, or soften to supplicate a woman, and be successful at either. his coat was of sky-blue, slashed across with silver braidings, and with broad silver shoulder-straps on either side. a vest of white calamanca peeped out from beneath it, and knee-breeches of the same disappeared into high polished boots with gilt spurs upon the heels. a silver-hilted rapier and a plumed cap lying upon a settle beside him completed a costume which was a badge of honour to the wearer, for any frenchman would have recognised it as being that of an officer in the famous blue guard of louis the fourteenth. a trim, dashing soldier he looked, with his curling black hair and well-poised head. such he had proved himself before now in the field, too, until the name of amory de catinat had become conspicuous among the thousands of the valiant lesser _noblesse_ who had flocked into the service of the king. they were first cousins, these two, and there was just sufficient resemblance in the clear-cut features to recall the relationship. de catinat was sprung from a noble huguenot family, but having lost his parents early he had joined the army, and had worked his way without influence and against all odds to his present position. his father's younger brother, however, finding every path to fortune barred to him through the persecution to which men of his faith were already subjected, had dropped the "de" which implied his noble descent, and he had taken to trade in the city of paris, with such success that he was now one of the richest and most prominent citizens of the town. it was under his roof that the guardsman now sat, and it was his only daughter whose white hand he held in his own. "tell me, adele," said he, "why do you look troubled?" "i am not troubled, amory," "come, there is just one little line between those curving brows. ah, i can read you, you see, as a shepherd reads the sky." "it is nothing, amory, but--" "but what?" "you leave me this evening." "but only to return to-morrow." "and must you really, really go to-night?" "it would be as much as my commission is worth to be absent. why, i am on duty to-morrow morning outside the king's bedroom! after chapel-time major de brissac will take my place, and then i am free once more." "ah, amory, when you talk of the king and the court and the grand ladies, you fill me with wonder." "and why with wonder?" "to think that you who live amid such splendour should stoop to the humble room of a mercer." "ah, but what does the room contain?" "there is the greatest wonder of all. that you who pass your days amid such people, so beautiful, so witty, should think me worthy of your love, me, who am such a quiet little mouse, all alone in this great house, so shy and so backward! it is wonderful!" "every man has his own taste," said her cousin, stroking the tiny hand. "it is with women as with flowers. some may prefer the great brilliant sunflower, or the rose, which is so bright and large that it must ever catch the eye. but give me the little violet which hides among the mosses, and yet is so sweet to look upon, and sheds its fragrance round it. but still that line upon your brow, dearest." "i was wishing that father would return." "and why? are you so lonely, then?" her pale face lit up with a quick smile. "i shall not be lonely until to-night. but i am always uneasy when he is away. one hears so much now of the persecution of our poor brethren." "tut! my uncle can defy them." "he has gone to the provost of the mercer guild about this notice of the quartering of the dragoons." "ah, you have not told me of that." "here it is." she rose and took up a slip of blue paper with a red seal dangling from it which lay upon the table. his strong, black brows knitted together as he glanced at it. "take notice," it ran, "that you, theophile catinat, cloth-mercer of the rue st. martin, are hereby required to give shelter and rations to twenty men of the languedoc blue dragoons under captain dalbert, until such time as you receive a further notice. [signed] de beaupre (commissioner of the king)." de catinat knew well how this method of annoying huguenots had been practised all over france, but he had flattered himself that his own position at court would have insured his kinsman from such an outrage. he threw the paper down with an exclamation of anger. "when do they come?" "father said to-night." "then they shall not be here long. to-morrow i shall have an order to remove them. but the sun has sunk behind st. martin's church, and i should already be upon my way." "no, no; you must not go yet." "i would that i could give you into your father's charge first, for i fear to leave you alone when these troopers may come. and yet no excuse will avail me if i am not at versailles. but see, a horseman has stopped before the door. he is not in uniform. perhaps he is a messenger from your father." the girl ran eagerly to the window, and peered out, with her hand resting upon her cousin's silver-corded shoulder. "ah!" she cried, "i had forgotten. it is the man from america. father said that he would come to-day." "the man from america!" repeated the soldier, in a tone of surprise, and they both craned their necks from the window. the horseman, a sturdy, broad-shouldered young man, clean-shaven and crop-haired, turned his long, swarthy face and his bold features in their direction as he ran his eyes over the front of the house. he had a soft-brimmed gray hat of a shape which was strange to parisian eyes, but his sombre clothes and high boots were such as any citizen might have worn. yet his general appearance was so unusual that a group of townsfolk had already assembled round him, staring with open mouth at his horse and himself. a battered gun with an extremely long barrel was fastened by the stock to his stirrup, while the muzzle stuck up into the air behind him. at each holster was a large dangling black bag, and a gaily coloured red-slashed blanket was rolled up at the back of his saddle. his horse, a strong-limbed dapple-gray, all shiny with sweat above, and all caked with mud beneath, bent its fore knees as it stood, as though it were overspent. the rider, however, having satisfied himself as to the house, sprang lightly out of his saddle, and disengaging his gun, his blanket, and his bags, pushed his way unconcernedly through the gaping crowd and knocked loudly at the door. "who is he, then?" asked de catinat. "a canadian? i am almost one myself. i had as many friends on one side of the sea as on the other. perchance i know him. there are not so many white faces yonder, and in two years there was scarce one from the saguenay to nipissing that i had not seen." "nay, he is from the english provinces, amory. but he speaks our tongue. his mother was of our blood." "and his name?" "is amos--amos--ah, those names! yes, green, that was it--amos green. his father and mine have done much trade together, and now his son, who, as i understand, has lived ever in the woods, is sent here to see something of men and cities. ah, my god! what can have happened now?" a sudden chorus of screams and cries had broken out from the passage beneath, with the shouting of a man and the sound of rushing steps. in an instant de catinat was half-way down the stairs, and was staring in amazement at the scene in the hall beneath. two maids stood, screaming at the pitch of their lungs, at either side. in the centre the aged man-servant pierre, a stern old calvinist, whose dignity had never before been shaken, was spinning round, waving his arms, and roaring so that he might have been heard at the louvre. attached to the gray worsted stocking which covered his fleshless calf was a fluffy black hairy ball, with one little red eye glancing up, and the gleam of two white teeth where it held its grip. at the shrieks, the young stranger, who had gone out to his horse, came rushing back, and plucking the creature off, he slapped it twice across the snout, and plunged it head-foremost back into the leather bag from which it had emerged. "it is nothing," said he, speaking in excellent french; "it is only a bear." "ah, my god!" cried pierre, wiping the drops from his brow. "ah, it has aged me five years! i was at the door, bowing to monsieur, and in a moment it had me from behind." "it was my fault for leaving the bag loose. the creature was but pupped the day we left new york, six weeks come tuesday. do i speak with my father's friend, monsieur catinat?" "no, monsieur," said the guardsman, from the staircase. "my uncle is out, but i am captain de catinat, at your service, and here is mademoiselle catinat, who is your hostess." the stranger ascended the stair, and paid his greetings to them both with the air of a man who was as shy as a wild deer, and yet who had steeled himself to carry a thing through. he walked with them to the sitting-room, and then in an instant was gone again, and they heard his feet thudding upon the stairs. presently he was back, with a lovely glossy skin in his hands. "the bear is for your father, mademoiselle," said he. "this little skin i have brought from america for you. it is but a trifle, and yet it may serve to make a pair of mocassins or a pouch." adele gave a cry of delight as her hands sank into the depths of its softness. she might well admire it, for no king in the world could have had a finer skin. "ah, it is beautiful, monsieur," she cried; "and what creature is it? and where did it come from?" "it is a black fox. i shot it myself last fall up near the iroquois villages at lake oneida." she pressed it to her cheek, her white face showing up like marble against its absolute blackness. "i am sorry my father is not here to welcome you, monsieur," she said; "but i do so very heartily in his place. your room is above. pierre will show you to it, if you wish." "my room? for what?" "why, monsieur, to sleep in!" "and must i sleep in a room?" de catinat laughed at the gloomy face of the american. "you shall not sleep there if you do not wish," said he. the other brightened at once and stepped across to the further window, which looked down upon the court-yard. "ah," he cried. "there is a beech-tree there, mademoiselle, and if i might take my blanket out yonder, i should like it better than any room. in winter, indeed, one must do it, but in summer i am smothered with a ceiling pressing down upon me." "you are not from a town then?" said de catinat. "my father lives in new york--two doors from the house of peter stuyvesant, of whom you must have heard. he is a very hardy man, and he can do it, but i--even a few days of albany or of schenectady are enough for me. my life has been in the woods." "i am sure my father would wish you to sleep where you like and to do what you like, as long as it makes you happy." "i thank you, mademoiselle. then i shall take my things out there, and i shall groom my horse." "nay, there is pierre." "i am used to doing it myself." "then i will come with you," said de catinat, "for i would have a word with you. until to-morrow, then, adele, farewell!" "until to-morrow, amory." the two young men passed downstairs together, and the guardsman followed the american out into the yard. "you have had a long journey," he said. "yes; from rouen." "are you tired?" "no; i am seldom tired." "remain with the lady, then, until her father comes back." "why do you say that?" "because i have to go, and she might need a protector." the stranger said nothing, but he nodded, and throwing off his black coat, set to work vigorously rubbing down his travel-stained horse. chapter ii. a monarch in deshabille. it was the morning after the guardsman had returned to his duties. eight o'clock had struck on the great clock of versailles, and it was almost time for the monarch to rise. through all the long corridors and frescoed passages of the monster palace there was a subdued hum and rustle, with a low muffled stir of preparation, for the rising of the king was a great state function in which many had a part to play. a servant with a steaming silver saucer hurried past, bearing it to monsieur de st. quentin, the state barber. others, with clothes thrown over their arms, bustled down the passage which led to the ante-chamber. the knot of guardsmen in their gorgeous blue and silver coats straightened themselves up and brought their halberds to attention, while the young officer, who had been looking wistfully out of the window at some courtiers who were laughing and chatting on the terraces, turned sharply upon his heel, and strode over to the white and gold door of the royal bedroom. he had hardly taken his stand there before the handle was very gently turned from within, the door revolved noiselessly upon its hinges, and a man slid silently through the aperture, closing it again behind him. "hush!" said he, with his finger to his thin, precise lips, while his whole clean-shaven face and high-arched brows were an entreaty and a warning. "the king still sleeps." the words were whispered from one to another among the group who had assembled outside the door. the speaker, who was monsieur bontems, head _valet de chambre_, gave a sign to the officer of the guard, and led him into the window alcove from which he had lately come. "good-morning, captain de catinat," said he, with a mixture of familiarity and respect in his manner. "good-morning, bontems. how has the king slept?" "admirably." "but it is his time." "hardly." "you will not rouse him yet?" "in seven and a half minutes." the valet pulled out the little round watch which gave the law to the man who _was_ the law to twenty millions of people. "who commands at the main guard?" "major de brissac." "and you will be here?" "for four hours i attend the king." "very good. he gave me some instructions for the officer of the guard, when he was alone last night after the _petit coucher_. he bade me to say that monsieur de vivonne was not to be admitted to the _grand lever_. you are to tell him so." "i shall do so." "then, should a note come from _her_--you understand me, the new one--" "madame de maintenon?" "precisely. but it is more discreet not to mention names. should she send a note, you will take it and deliver it quietly when the king gives you an opportunity." "it shall be done." "but if the other should come, as is possible enough--the other, you understand me, the former--" "madame de montespan." "ah, that soldierly tongue of yours, captain! should she come, i say, you will gently bar her way, with courteous words, you understand, but on no account is she to be permitted to enter the royal room." "very good, bontems." "and now we have but three minutes." he strode through the rapidly increasing group of people in the corridor with an air of proud humility as befitted a man who, if he was a valet, was at least the king of valets, by being the valet of the king. close by the door stood a line of footmen, resplendent in their powdered wigs, red plush coats, and silver shoulder knots. "is the officer of the oven here?" asked bontems. "yes, sir," replied a functionary who bore in front of him an enamelled tray heaped with pine shavings. "the opener of the shutters?" "here, sir." "the remover of the taper?" "here, sir." "be ready for the word." he turned the handle once more, and slipped into the darkened room. it was a large square apartment, with two high windows upon the further side, curtained across with priceless velvet hangings. through the chinks the morning sun shot a few little gleams, which widened as they crossed the room to break in bright blurs of light upon the primrose-tinted wall. a large arm-chair stood by the side of the burnt-out fire, shadowed over by the huge marble mantel-piece, the back of which was carried up twining and curving into a thousand arabesque and armorial devices until it blended with the richly painted ceiling. in one corner a narrow couch with a rug thrown across it showed where the faithful bontems had spent the night. in the very centre of the chamber there stood a large four-post bed, with curtains of gobelin tapestry looped back from the pillow. a square of polished rails surrounded it, leaving a space some five feet in width all round between the enclosure and the bedside. within this enclosure, or _ruelle_, stood a small round table, covered over with a white napkin, upon which lay a silver platter and an enamelled cup, the one containing a little frontiniac wine and water, the other bearing three slices of the breast of a chicken, in case the king should hunger during the night. as bontems passed noiselessly across the room, his feet sinking into the moss-like carpet, there was the heavy close smell of sleep in the air, and he could near the long thin breathing of the sleeper. he passed through the opening in the rails, and stood, watch in hand, waiting for the exact instant when the iron routine of the court demanded that the monarch should be roused. beneath him, from under the costly green coverlet of oriental silk, half buried in the fluffy valenciennes lace which edged the pillow, there protruded a round black bristle of close-cropped hair, with the profile of a curving nose and petulant lip outlined against the white background. the valet snapped his watch, and bent over the sleeper. "i have the honour to inform your majesty that it is half-past eight," said he. "ah!" the king slowly opened his large dark-brown eyes, made the sign of the cross, and kissed a little dark reliquary which he drew from under his night-dress. then he sat up in bed, and blinked about him with the air of a man who is collecting his thoughts. "did you give my orders to the officer of the guard, bontems?" he asked. "yes, sire." "who is on duty?" "major de brissac at the main guard, and captain de catinat in the corridor." "de catinat! ah, the young man who stopped my horse at fontainebleau. i remember him. you may give the signal, bontems." the chief valet walked swiftly across to the door and threw it open. in rushed the officer of the ovens and the four red-coated, white-wigged footmen, ready-handed, silent-footed, each intent upon his own duties. the one seized upon bontem's rug and couch, and in an instant had whipped them off into an ante-chamber, another had carried away the _en cas_ meal and the silver taper-stand; while a third drew back the great curtains of stamped velvet and let a flood of light into the apartment. then, as the flames were already flickering among the pine shavings in the fireplace, the officer of the ovens placed two round logs crosswise above them, for the morning air was chilly, and withdrew with his fellow-servants. they were hardly gone before a more august group entered the bed-chamber. two walked together in front, the one a youth little over twenty years of age, middle-sized, inclining to stoutness, with a slow, pompous bearing, a well-turned leg, and a face which was comely enough in a mask-like fashion, but which was devoid of any shadow of expression, except perhaps of an occasional lurking gleam of mischievous humour. he was richly clad in plum-coloured velvet, with a broad band of blue silk; across his breast, and the glittering edge of the order of st. louis protruding from under it. his companion was a man of forty, swarthy, dignified, and solemn, in a plain but rich dress of black silk, with slashes of gold at the neck and sleeves. as the pair faced the king there was sufficient resemblance between the three faces to show that they were of one blood, and to enable a stranger to guess that the older was monsieur, the younger brother of the king, while the other was louis the dauphin, his only legitimate child, and heir to a throne to which in the strange workings of providence neither he nor his sons were destined to ascend. strong as was the likeness between the three faces, each with the curving bourbon nose, the large full eye, and the thick hapsburg under-lip, their common heritage from anne of austria, there was still a vast difference of temperament and character stamped upon their features. the king was now in his six-and-fortieth year, and the cropped black head was already thinning a little on the top, and shading away to gray over the temples. he still, however, retained much of the beauty of his youth, tempered by the dignity and sternness which increased with his years. his dark eyes were full of expression, and his clear-cut features were the delight of the sculptor and the painter. his firm and yet sensitive mouth and his thick, well-arched brows gave an air of authority and power to his face, while the more subdued expression which was habitual to his brother marked the man whose whole life had been spent in one long exercise of deference and self-effacement. the dauphin, on the other hand, with a more regular face than his father, had none of that quick play of feature when excited, or that kingly serenity when composed, which had made a shrewd observer say that louis, if he were not the greatest monarch that ever lived, was at least the best fitted to act the part. behind the king's son and the king's brother there entered a little group of notables and of officials whom duty had called to this daily ceremony. there was the grand master of the robes, the first lord of the bed-chamber, the duc du maine, a pale youth clad in black velvet, limping heavily with his left leg, and his little brother, the young comte de toulouse, both of them the illegitimate sons of madame de montespan and the king. behind them, again, was the first valet of the wardrobe, followed by fagon, the first physician, telier, the head surgeon, and three pages in scarlet and gold who bore the royal clothes. such were the partakers in the family entry, the highest honour which the court of france could aspire to. bontems had poured on the king's hands a few drops of spirits of wine, catching them again in a silver dish; and the first lord of the bedchamber had presented the bowl of holy water with which he made the sign of the cross, muttering to himself the short office of the holy ghost. then, with a nod to his brother and a short word of greeting to the dauphin and to the due du maine, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat in his long silken night-dress, his little white feet dangling from beneath it--a perilous position for any man to assume, were it not that he had so heart-felt a sense of his own dignity that he could not realise that under any circumstances it might be compromised in the eyes of others. so he sat, the master of france, yet the slave to every puff of wind, for a wandering draught had set him shivering and shaking. monsieur de st. quentin, the noble barber, flung a purple dressing-gown over the royal shoulders, and placed a long many-curled court wig upon his head, while bontems drew on his red stockings and laid before him his slippers of embroidered velvet. the monarch thrust his feet into them, tied his dressing-gown, and passed out to the fireplace, where he settled himself down in his easy-chair, holding out his thin delicate hands towards the blazing logs, while the others stood round in a semicircle, waiting for the _grand lever_ which was to follow. "how is this, messieurs?" the king asked suddenly, glancing round him with a petulant face. "i am conscious of a smell of scent. surely none of you would venture to bring perfume into the presence, knowing, as you must all do, how offensive it is to me." the little group glanced from one to the other with protestations of innocence. the faithful bontems, however, with his stealthy step, had passed along behind them, and had detected the offender. "my lord of toulouse, the smell comes from you," he said. the comte de toulouse, a little ruddy-cheeked lad, flushed up at the detection. "if you please, sire, it is possible that mademoiselle de grammont may have wet my coat with her casting-bottle when we all played together at marly yesterday," he stammered. "i had not observed it, but if it offends your majesty--" "take it away! take it away!" cried the king. "pah! it chokes and stifles me! open the lower casement, bontems. no; never heed, now that he is gone. monsieur de st. quentin, is not this our shaving morning?" "yes, sire; all is ready." "then why not proceed? it is three minutes after the accustomed time. to work, sir; and you, bontems, give word for the _grand lever_." it was obvious that the king was not in a very good humour that morning. he darted little quick questioning glances at his brother and at his sons, but whatever complaint or sarcasm may have trembled upon his lips, was effectually stifled by de st. quentin's ministrations. with the nonchalance born of long custom, the official covered the royal chin with soap, drew the razor swiftly round it, and sponged over the surface with spirits of wine. a nobleman then helped to draw on the king's black velvet _haut-de-chausses_, a second assisted in arranging them, while a third drew the night-gown over the shoulders, and handed the royal shirt, which had been warming before the fire. his diamond-buckled shoes, his gaiters, and his scarlet inner vest were successively fastened by noble courtiers, each keenly jealous of his own privilege, and over the vest was placed the blue ribbon with the cross of the holy ghost in diamonds, and that of st. louis tied with red. to one to whom the sight was new, it might have seemed strange to see the little man, listless, passive, with his eyes fixed thoughtfully on the burning logs, while this group of men, each with a historic name, bustled round him, adding a touch here and a touch there, like a knot of children with a favourite doll. the black undercoat was drawn on, the cravat of rich lace adjusted, the loose overcoat secured, two handkerchiefs of costly point carried forward upon an enamelled saucer, and thrust by separate officials into each side pocket, the silver and ebony cane laid to hand, and the monarch was ready for the labours of the day. during the half-hour or so which had been occupied in this manner there had been a constant opening and closing of the chamber door, and a muttering of names from the captain of the guard to the attendant in charge, and from the attendant in charge to the first gentleman of the chamber, ending always in the admission of some new visitor. each as he entered bowed profoundly three times, as a salute to majesty, and then attached himself to his own little clique or coterie, to gossip in a low voice over the news, the weather, and the plans of the day. gradually the numbers increased, until by the time the king's frugal first breakfast of bread and twice watered wine had been carried in, the large square chamber was quite filled with a throng of men many of whom had helped to make the epoch the most illustrious of french history. here, close by the king, was the harsh but energetic louvois, all-powerful now since the death of his rival colbert, discussing a question of military organisation with two officers, the one a tall and stately soldier, the other a strange little figure, undersized and misshapen, but bearing the insignia of a marshal of france, and owning a name which was of evil omen over the dutch frontier, for luxembourg was looked upon already as the successor of conde, even as his companion vauban was of turenne. beside them, a small white-haired clerical with a kindly face, pere la chaise, confessor to the king, was whispering his views upon jansenism to the portly bossuet, the eloquent bishop of meaux, and to the tall thin young abbe de fenelon, who listened with a clouded brow, for it was suspected that his own opinions were tainted with the heresy in question. there, too, was le brun, the painter, discussing art in a small circle which contained his fellow-workers verrio and laguerre, the architects blondel and le notre, and sculptors girardon, puget, desjardins, and coysevox, whose works had done so much to beautify the new palace of the king. close to the door, racine, with his handsome face wreathed in smiles, was chatting with the poet boileau and the architect mansard, the three laughing and jesting with the freedom which was natural to the favourite servants of the king, the only subjects who might walk unannounced and without ceremony into and out of his chamber. "what is amiss with him this morning?" asked boileau in a whisper, nodding his head in the direction of the royal group. "i fear that his sleep has not improved his temper." "he becomes harder and harder to amuse," said racine, shaking his head. "i am to be at madame de maintenon's room at three to see whether a page or two of the _phedre_ may not work a change." "my friend," said the architect, "do you not think that madame herself might be a better consoler than your _phedre_?" "madame is a wonderful woman. she has brains, she has heart, she has tact--she is admirable." "and yet she has one gift too many." "and that is?" "age." "pooh! what matter her years when she can carry them like thirty? what an eye! what an arm! and besides, my friends, he is not himself a boy any longer." "ah, but that is another thing." "a man's age is an incident, a woman's a calamity." "very true. but a young man consults his eye, and an older man his ear. over forty, it is the clever tongue which wins; under it, the pretty face." "ah, you rascal! then you have made up your mind that five-and-forty years with tact will hold the field against nine-and-thirty with beauty. well, when your lady has won, she will doubtless remember who were the first to pay court to her." "but i think that you are wrong, racine." "well, we shall see." "and if you are wrong--" "well, what then?" "then it may be a little serious for you." "and why?" "the marquise de montespan has a memory." "her influence may soon be nothing more." "do not rely too much upon it, my friend. when the fontanges came up from provence, with her blue eyes and her copper hair, it was in every man's mouth that montespan had had her day. yet fontanges is six feet under a church crypt, and the marquise spent two hours with the king last week. she has won once, and may again." "ah, but this is a very different rival. this is no slip of a country girl, but the cleverest woman in france." "pshaw, racine, you know our good master well, or you should, for you seem to have been at his elbow since the days of the fronde. is he a man, think you, to be amused forever by sermons, or to spend his days at the feet of a lady of that age, watching her at her tapestry-work, and fondling her poodle, when all the fairest faces and brightest eyes of france are as thick in his _salons_ as the tulips in a dutch flower-bed? no, no, it will be the montespan, or if not she, some younger beauty." "my dear boileau, i say again that her sun is setting. have you not heard the news?" "not a word." "her brother, monsieur de vivonne, has been refused the _entre_." "impossible!" "but it is a fact." "and when?" "this very morning." "from whom had you it?" "from de catinat, the captain of the guard. he had his orders to bar the way to him." "ha! then the king does indeed mean mischief. that is why his brow is so cloudy this morning, then. by my faith, if the marquise has the spirit with which folk credit her, he may find that it was easier to win her than to slight her." "ay; the mortemarts are no easy race to handle." "well, heaven send him a safe way out of it! but who is this gentleman? his face is somewhat grimmer than those to which the court is accustomed. ha! the king catches sight of him, and louvois beckons to him to advance. by my faith, he is one who would be more at his ease in a tent than under a painted ceiling." the stranger who had attracted racine's attention was a tall thin man, with a high aquiline nose, stern fierce gray eyes, peeping out from under tufted brows, and a countenance so lined and marked by age, care, and stress of weather that it stood out amid the prim courtier faces which surrounded it as an old hawk might in a cage of birds of gay plumage. he was clad in a sombre-coloured suit which had become usual at court since the king had put aside frivolity and fontanges, but the sword which hung from his waist was no fancy rapier, but a good brass-hilted blade in a stained leather-sheath, which showed every sign of having seen hard service. he had been standing near the door, his black-feathered beaver in his hand, glancing with a half-amused, half-disdainful expression at the groups of gossips around him, but at the sign from the minister of war he began to elbow his way forward, pushing aside in no very ceremonious fashion all who barred his passage. louis possessed in a high degree the royal faculty of recognition. "it is years since i have seen him, but i remember his face well," said he, turning to his minister. "it is the comte de frontenac, is it not?" "yes, sire," answered louvois; "it is indeed louis de buade, comte de frontenac, and formerly governor of canada." "we are glad to see you once more at our _lever_," said the monarch, as the old nobleman stooped his head, and kissed the white hand which was extended to him. "i hope that the cold of canada has not chilled the warmth of your loyalty." "only death itself, sire, would be cold enough for that." "then i trust that it may remain to us for many long years. we would thank you for the care and pains which you have spent upon our province, and if we have recalled you, it is chiefly that we would fain hear from your own lips how all things go there. and first, as the affairs of god take precedence of those of france, how does the conversion of the heathen prosper?" "we cannot complain, sire. the good fathers, both jesuits and recollets, have done their best, though indeed they are both rather ready to abandon the affairs of the next world in order to meddle with those of this." "what say you to that, father?" asked louis, glancing, with a twinkle of the eyes, at his jesuit confessor. "i say, sire, that when the affairs of this world have a bearing upon those of the next, it is indeed the duty of a good priest, as of every other good catholic, to guide them right." "that is very true, sire," said de frontenac, with an angry flush upon his swarthy cheek; "but as long as your majesty did me the honour to intrust those affairs no my own guidance, i would brook no interference in the performance of my duties, whether the meddler were clad in coat or cassock." "enough, sir, enough!" said louis sharply. "i had asked you about the missions." "they prosper, sire. there are iroquois at the sault and the mountain, hurons at lorette, and algonquins along the whole river _cotes_ from tadousac in the east to sault la marie, and even the great plains of the dakotas, who have all taken the cross as their token. marquette has passed down the river of the west to preach among the illinois, and jesuits have carried the gospel to the warriors of the long house in their wigwams at onondaga." "i may add, your majesty," said pere la chaise, "that in leaving the truth there, they have too often left their lives with it." "yes, sire, it is very true," cried de frontenac cordially. "your majesty has many brave men within your domains, but none braver than these. they have come back up the richelieu river from the iroquois villages with their nails gone, their fingers torn out, a cinder where their eye should be, and the scars of the pine splinters as thick upon their bodies as the _fleurs-de-lis_ on yonder curtain. yet, with a month of nursing from the good ursulines, they have used their remaining eye to guide them back to the indian country once more, where even the dogs have been frightened at their haggled faces and twisted limbs." "and you have suffered this?" cried louis hotly. "you allow these infamous assassins to live?" "i have asked for troops, sire." "and i have sent some." "one regiment." "the carignan-saliere. i have no better in my service. "but more is needed, sire." "there are the canadians themselves. have you not a militia? could you not raise force enough to punish these rascally murderers of god's priests? i had always understood that you were a soldier." de frontenac's eyes flashed, and a quick answer seemed for an instant to tremble upon his lips, but with an effort the fiery old man restrained himself. "your majesty will learn best whether i am a soldier or not," said he, "by asking those who have seen me at seneffe, mulhausen, salzbach, and half a score of other places where i had the honour of upholding your majesty's cause." "your services have not been forgotten." "it is just because i am a soldier and have seen something of war that i know how hard it is to penetrate into a country much larger than the lowlands, all thick with forest and bog, with a savage lurking behind every tree, who, if he has not learned to step in time or to form line, can at least bring down the running caribou at two hundred paces, and travel three leagues to your one. and then when you have at last reached their villages, and burned their empty wigwams and a few acres of maize fields, what the better are you then? you can but travel back again to your own land with a cloud of unseen men lurking behind you, and a scalp-yell for every straggler. you are a soldier yourself, sire. i ask you if such a war is an easy task for a handful of soldiers, with a few _censitaires_ straight from the plough, and a troop of _coureurs-de-bois_ whose hearts are all the time are with their traps and their beaver-skins." "no, no; i am sorry if i spoke too hastily," said louis. "we shall look into the matter at our council." "then it warms my heart to hear you say so," cried the old governor. "there will be joy down the long st. lawrence, in white hearts and in red, when it is known that their great father over the waters has turned his mind towards them." "and yet you must not look for too much, for canada has been a heavy cost to us, and we have many calls in europe." "ah, sire, i would that you could see that great land. when your majesty has won a campaign over here, what may come of it? glory, a few miles of land luxembourg, strassburg, one more city in the kingdom; but over there, with a tenth of the cost and a hundredth part of the force, there is a world ready to your hand. it is so vast, sire, so rich, so beautiful! where are there such hills, such forests, such rivers? and it is all for us if we will but take it. who is there to stand in our way? a few nations of scattered indians and a thin strip of english farmers and fishermen. turn your thoughts there, sire, and in a few years you would be able to stand upon your citadel at quebec, and to say there is one great empire here from the snows of the north to the warm southern gulf, and from the waves of the ocean to the great plains beyond marquette's river, and the name of this empire is france, and her king is louis, and her flag is the _fleurs-de-lis_." louis's cheek had flushed at this ambitious picture, and he had leaned forward in his chair, with flashing eyes, but he sank back again as the governor concluded. "on my word, count," said he, "you have caught something of this gift of indian eloquence of which we have heard. but about these english folk. they are huguenots, are they not?" "for the most part. especially in the north." "then it might be a service to holy church to send them packing. they have a city there, i am told. new--new--how do they call it?" "new york, sire. they took it from the dutch." "ah, new york. and have i not heard of another? bos--bos--" "boston, sire." "that is the name. the harbours might be of service to us. tell me, now, frontenac," lowering his voice so that his words might be audible only to the count, louvois, and the royal circle, "what force would you need to clear these people out? one regiment, two regiments, and perhaps a frigate or two?" but the ex-governor shook his grizzled head. "you do not know them, sire," said he. "they are stern folk, these. we in canada, with all your gracious help, have found it hard to hold our own. yet these men have had no help, but only hindrance, with cold and disease, and barren lands, and indian wars, but they have thriven and multiplied until the woods thin away in front of them like ice in the sun, and their church bells are heard where but yesterday the wolves were howling. they are peaceful folk, and slow to war, but when they have set their hands to it, though they may be slack to begin, they are slacker still to cease. to put new england into your majesty's hands, i would ask fifteen thousand of your best troops and twenty ships of the line." louis sprang impatiently from his chair, and caught up his cane. "i wish," said he, "that you would imitate these people who seem to you to be so formidable, in their excellent habit of doing things for themselves. the matter may stand until our council. reverend father, it has struck the hour of chapel, and all else may wait until we have paid out duties to heaven." taking a missal from the hands of an attendant, he walked as fast as his very high heels would permit him, towards the door, the court forming a lane through which he might pass, and then closing up behind to follow him in order of precedence. chapter iii. the holding of the door. whilst louis had been affording his court that which he had openly stated to be the highest of human pleasures--the sight of the royal face--the young officer of the guard outside had been very busy passing on the titles of the numerous applicants for admission, and exchanging usually a smile or a few words of greeting with them, for his frank, handsome face was a well-known one at the court. with his merry eyes and his brisk bearing, he looked like a man who was on good terms with fortune. indeed, he had good cause to be so, for she had used him well. three years ago he had been an unknown subaltern bush-fighting with algonquins and iroquois in the wilds of canada. an exchange had brought him back to france and into the regiment of picardy, but the lucky chance of having seized the bridle of the king's horse one winter's day in fontainebleau when the creature was plunging within a few yards of a deep gravel-pit had done for him what ten campaigns might have failed to accomplish. now as a trusted officer of the king's guard, young, gallant, and popular, his lot was indeed an enviable one. and yet, with the strange perversity of human nature, he was already surfeited with the dull if magnificent routine of the king's household, and looked back with regret to the rougher and freer days of his early service. even there at the royal door his mind had turned away from the frescoed passage and the groups of courtiers to the wild ravines and foaming rivers of the west, when suddenly his eyes lit upon a face which he had last seen among those very scenes. "ah, monsieur de frontenac!" he cried. "you cannot have forgotten me." "what! de catinat! ah, it is a joy indeed to see a face from over the water! but there is a long step between a subaltern in the carignan and a captain in the guards. you have risen rapidly." "yes; and yet i may be none the happier for it. there are times when i would give it all to be dancing down the lachine rapids in a birch canoe, or to see the red and the yellow on those hill-sides once more at the fall of the leaf." "ay," sighed de frontenac. "you know that my fortunes have sunk as yours have risen. i have been recalled, and de la barre is in my place. but there will be a storm there which such a man as he can never stand against. with the iroquois all dancing the scalp-dance, and dongan behind them in new york to whoop them on, they will need me, and they will find me waiting when they send. i will see the king now, and try if i cannot rouse him to play the great monarch there as well as here. had i but his power in my hands, i should change the world's history." "hush! no treason to the captain of the guard," cried de catinat, laughing, while the stern old soldier strode past him into the king's presence. a gentleman very richly dressed in black and silver had come up during this short conversation, and advanced, as the door opened, with the assured air of a man whose rights are beyond dispute. captain de catinat, however, took a quick step forward, and barred him off from the door. "i am very sorry, monsieur de vivonne," said he, "but you are forbidden the presence." "forbidden the presence! i? you are mad!" he stepped back with gray face and staring eyes, one shaking hand half raised in protest, "i assure you that it is his order." "but it is incredible. it is a mistake." "very possibly." "then you will let me past." "my orders leave me no discretion." "if i could have one word with the king." "unfortunately, monsieur, it is impossible." "only one word." "it really does not rest with me, monsieur." the angry nobleman stamped his foot, and stared at the door as though he had some thoughts of forcing a passage. then turning on his heel, he hastened away down the corridor with the air of a man who has come to a decision. "there, now," grumbled de catinat to himself, as he pulled at his thick dark moustache, "he is off to make some fresh mischief. i'll have his sister here presently, as like as not, and a pleasant little choice between breaking my orders and making an enemy of her for life. i'd rather hold fort richelieu against the iroquois than the king's door against an angry woman. by my faith, here _is_ a lady, as i feared! ah, heaven be praised! it is a friend, and not a foe. good-morning, mademoiselle nanon." "good-morning, captain de catinat." the new-comer was a tall, graceful brunette, her fresh face and sparkling black eyes the brighter in contrast with her plain dress. "i am on guard, you see. i cannot talk with you." "i cannot remember having asked monsieur to talk with me." "ah, but you must not pout in that pretty way, or else i cannot help talking to you," whispered the captain. "what is this in your hand, then?" "a note from madame de maintenon to the king. you will hand it to him, will you not?" "certainly, mademoiselle. and how is madame, your mistress?" "oh, her director has been with her all the morning, and his talk is very, very good; but it is also very, very sad. we are not very cheerful when monsieur godet has been to see us. but i forget monsieur is a huguenot, and knows nothing of directors." "oh, but i do not trouble about such differences. i let the sorbonne and geneva fight it out between them. yet a man must stand by his family, you know." "ah! if monsieur could talk to madame de maintenon a little! she would convert him." "i would rather talk to mademoiselle nanon, but if--" "oh!" there was an exclamation, a whisk of dark skirts, and the soubrette had disappeared down a side passage. along the broad, lighted corridor was gliding a very stately and beautiful lady, tall, graceful, and exceedingly haughty. she was richly clad in a bodice of gold-coloured camlet and a skirt of gray silk trimmed with gold and silver lace. a handkerchief of priceless genoa point half hid and half revealed her beautiful throat, and was fastened in front by a cluster of pearls, while a rope of the same, each one worth a bourgeois' income, was coiled in and out through her luxuriant hair. the lady was past her first youth, it is true, but the magnificent curves of her queenly figure, the purity of her complexion, the brightness of her deep-lashed blue eyes and the clear regularity of her features enabled her still to claim to be the most handsome as well as the most sharp-tongued woman in the court of france. so beautiful was her bearing, the carriage of her dainty head upon her proud white neck, and the sweep of her stately walk, that the young officer's fears were overpowered in his admiration, and he found it hard, as he raised his hand in salute, to retain the firm countenance which his duties demanded. "ah, it is captain de catinat," said madame de montespan, with a smile which was more embarrassing to him than any frown could have been. "your humble servant, marquise." "i am fortunate in finding a friend here, for there has been some ridiculous mistake this morning." "i am concerned to hear it." "it was about my brother, monsieur de vivonne. it is almost too laughable to mention, but he was actually refused admission to the _lever_." "it was my misfortune to have to refuse him, madame." "you, captain de catinat? and by what right?" she had drawn up her superb figure, and her large blue eyes were blazing with indignant astonishment. "the king's order, madame." "the king! is it likely that the king would cast a public slight upon my family? from whom had you this preposterous order?" "direct from the king through bontems." "absurd! do you think that the king would venture to exclude a mortemart through the mouth of a valet? you have been dreaming, captain." "i trust that it may prove so, madame." "but such dreams are not very fortunate to the dreamer. go, tell the king that i am here, and would have a word with him." "impossible, madame." "and why?" "i have been forbidden to carry a message." "to carry any message?" "any from you, madame." "come, captain, you improve. it only needed this insult to make the thing complete. you may carry a message to the king from any adventuress, from any decayed governess"--she laughed shrilly at her description of her rival--"but none from francoise de mortemart, marquise de montespan?" "such are my orders, madame. it pains me deeply to be compelled to carry them out." "you may spare your protestations, captain. you may yet find that you have every reason to be deeply pained. for the last time, do you refuse to carry my message to the king?" "i must, madame." "then i carry it myself." she sprang forward at the door, but he slipped in front of her with outstretched arms. "for god's sake, consider yourself, madame!" he entreated. "other eyes are upon you." "pah! canaille!" she glanced at the knot of switzers, whose sergeant had drawn them off a few paces, and who stood open-eyed, staring at the scene. "i tell you that i _will_ see the king." "no lady has ever been at the morning _lever_." "then i shall be the first." "you will ruin me if you pass." "and none the less, i shall do so." the matter looked serious. de catinat was a man of resource, but for once he was at his wits' end. madame de montespan's resolution, as it was called in her presence, or effrontery, as it was termed behind her back, was proverbial. if she attempted to force her way, would he venture to use violence upon one who only yesterday had held the fortunes of the whole court in the hollow of her hand, and who, with her beauty, her wit, and her energy, might very well be in the same position to-morrow? if she passed him, then his future was ruined with the king, who never brooked the smallest deviation from his orders. on the other hand, if he thrust her back, he did that which could never be forgiven, and which would entail some deadly vengeance should she return to power. it was an unpleasant dilemma. but a happy thought flashed into his mind at the very moment when she, with clenched hand and flashing eyes, was on the point of making a fresh attempt to pass him. "if madame would deign to wait," said he soothingly, "the king will be on his way to the chapel in an instant." "it is not yet time." "i think the hour has just gone." "and why should i wait, like a lackey?" "it is but a moment, madame." "no, i shall not wait." she took a step forward towards the door. but the guardsman's quick ear had caught the sound of moving feet from within, and he knew that he was master of the situation. "i will take madame's message," said he. "ah, you have recovered your senses! go, tell the king that i wish to speak with him." he must gain a little time yet. "shall i say it through the lord in waiting?" "no; yourself." "publicly?" "no, no; for his private ear." "shall i give a reason for your request?" "oh, you madden me! say what i have told you, and at once." but the young officer's dilemma was happily over. at that instant the double doors were swung open, and louis appeared in the opening, strutting forwards on his high-heeled shoes, his stick tapping, his broad skirts flapping, and his courtiers spreading out behind him. he stopped as he came out, and turned to the captain of the guard. "you have a note for me?" "yes, sire." the monarch slipped it into the pocket of his scarlet undervest, and was advancing once more when his eyes fell upon madame de montespan standing very stiff and erect in the middle of the passage. a dark flush of anger shot to his brow, and he walked swiftly past her without a word; but she turned and kept pace with him down the corridor. "i had not expected this honour, madame," said he. "nor had i expected this insult, sire." "an insult, madame? you forget yourself." "no; it is you who have forgotten me, sire." "you intrude upon me." "i wished to hear my fate from your own lips," she whispered. "i can bear to be struck myself, sire, even by him who has my heart. but it is hard to hear that one's brother has been wounded through the mouths of valets and huguenot soldiers for no fault of his, save that his sister has loved too fondly." "it is no time to speak of such things." "when can i see you, then, sire?" "in your chamber." "at what hour?" "at four." "then i shall trouble your majesty no further." she swept him one of the graceful courtesies for which she was famous, and turned away down a side passage with triumph shining in her eyes. her beauty and her spirit had never failed her yet, and now that she had the monarch's promise of an interview she never doubted that she could do as she had done before, and win back the heart of the man, however much against the conscience of the king. chapter iv. the father of his people. louis had walked on to his devotions in no very charitable frame of mind, as was easily to be seen from his clouded brow and compressed lips. he knew his late favourite well, her impulsiveness, her audacity, her lack of all restraint when thwarted or opposed. she was capable of making a hideous scandal, of turning against him that bitter tongue which had so often made him laugh at the expense of others, perhaps even of making some public exposure which would leave him the butt and gossip of europe. he shuddered at the thought. at all costs such a catastrophe must be averted. and yet how could he cut the tie which bound them? he had broken other such bonds as these; but the gentle la valliere had shrunk into a convent at the very first glance which had told her of waning love. that was true affection. but this woman would struggle hard, fight to the bitter end, before she would quit the position which was so dear to her. she spoke of her wrongs. what were her wrongs? in his intense selfishness, nurtured by the eternal flattery which was the very air he breathed, he could not see that the fifteen years of her life which he had absorbed, or the loss of the husband whom he had supplanted, gave her any claim upon him. in his view he had raised her to the highest position which a subject could occupy. now he was weary of her, and it was her duty to retire with resignation, nay, even with gratitude for past favours. she should have a pension, and the children should be cared for. what could a reasonable woman ask for more? and then his motives for discarding her were so excellent. he turned them over in his mind as he knelt listening to the archbishop of paris reciting the mass, and the more he thought, the more he approved. his conception of the deity was as a larger louis, and of heaven as a more gorgeous versailles. if he exacted obedience from his twenty millions, then he must show it also to this one who had a right to demand it of him. on the whole, his conscience acquitted him. but in this one matter he had been lax. from the first coming of his gentle and forgiving young wife from spain, he had never once permitted her to be without a rival. now that she was dead, the matter was no better. one favourite had succeeded another, and if de montespan had held her own so long, it was rather from her audacity than from his affection. but now father la chaise and bossuet were ever reminding him that he had topped the summit of his life, and was already upon that downward path which leads to the grave. his wild outburst over the unhappy fontanges had represented the last flicker of his passions. the time had come for gravity and for calm, neither of which was to be expected in the company of madame de montespan. but he had found out where they were to be enjoyed. from the day when de montespan had introduced the stately and silent widow as a governess for his children, he had found a never-failing and ever-increasing pleasure in her society. in the early days of her coming he had sat for hours in the rooms of his favourite, watching the tact and sweetness of temper with which her dependent controlled the mutinous spirits of the petulant young duc du maine and the mischievous little comte de toulouse. he had been there nominally for the purpose of superintending the teaching, but he had confined himself to admiring the teacher. and then in time he too had been drawn into the attraction of that strong sweet nature, and had found himself consulting her upon points of conduct, and acting upon her advice with a docility which he had never shown before to minister or mistress. for a time he had thought that her piety and her talk of principle might be a mere mask, for he was accustomed to hypocrisy all round him. it was surely unlikely that a woman who was still beautiful, with as bright an eye and as graceful a figure as any in his court, could, after a life spent in the gayest circles, preserve the spirit of a nun. but on this point he was soon undeceived, for when his own language had become warmer than that of friendship, he had been met by an iciness of manner and a brevity of speech which had shown him that there was one woman at least in his dominions who had a higher respect for herself than for him. and perhaps it was better so. the placid pleasures of friendship were very soothing after the storms of passion. to sit in her room every afternoon, to listen to talk which was not tainted with flattery, and to hear opinions which were not framed to please his ear, were the occupations now of his happiest hours. and then her influence over him was all so good! she spoke of his kingly duties, of his example to his subjects, of his preparation for the world beyond, and of the need for an effort to snap the guilty ties which he had formed. she was as good as a confessor--a confessor with a lovely face and a perfect arm. and now he knew that the time had come when he must choose between her and de montespan. their influences were antagonistic. they could not continue together. he stood between virtue and vice, and he must choose. vice was very attractive too, very comely, very witty, and holding him by that chain of custom which is so hard to shake off. there were hours when his nature swayed strongly over to that side, and when he was tempted to fall back into his old life. but bossuet and pere la chaise were ever at his elbows to whisper encouragement, and, above all, there was madame de maintenon to remind him of what was due to his position and to his six-and-forty years. now at last he had braced himself for a supreme effort. there was no safety for him while his old favourite was at court. he knew himself too well to have any faith in a lasting change so long as she was there ever waiting for his moment of weakness. she must be persuaded to leave versailles, if without a scandal it could be done. he would be firm when he met her in the afternoon, and make her understand once for all that her reign was forever over. such were the thoughts which ran through the king's head as he bent over the rich crimson cushion which topped his _prie-dieu_ of carved oak. he knelt in his own enclosure to the right of the altar, with his guards and his immediate household around him, while the court, ladies and cavaliers, filled the chapel. piety was a fashion now, like dark overcoats and lace cravats, and no courtier was so worldly-minded as not to have had a touch of grace since the king had taken to religion. yet they looked very bored, these soldiers and seigneurs, yawning and blinking over the missals, while some who seemed more intent upon their devotions were really dipping into the latest romance of scudery or calpernedi, cunningly bound up in a sombre cover. the ladies, indeed, were more devout, and were determined that all should see it, for each had lit a tiny taper, which she held in front of her on the plea of lighting up her missal, but really that her face might be visible to the king, and inform him that hers was a kindred spirit. a few there may have been, here and there, whose prayers rose from their hearts, and who were there of their own free will; but the policy of louis had changed his noblemen into courtiers and his men of the world into hypocrites, until the whole court was like one gigantic mirror which reflected his own likeness a hundredfold. it was the habit of louis, as he walked back from the chapel, to receive petitions or to listen to any tales of wrong which his subjects might bring to him. his way, as he returned to his rooms, lay partly across an open space, and here it was that the suppliants were wont to assemble. on this particular morning there were but two or three--a parisian, who conceived himself injured by the provost of his guild, a peasant whose cow had been torn by a huntsman's dog, and a farmer who had had hard usage from his feudal lord. a few questions and then a hurried order to his secretary disposed of each case, for if louis was a tyrant himself, he had at least the merit that he insisted upon being the only one within his kingdom. he was about to resume his way again, when an elderly man, clad in the garb of a respectable citizen, and with a strong deep-lined face which marked him as a man of character, darted forward, and threw himself down upon one knee in front of the monarch. "justice, sire, justice!" he cried. "what is this, then?" asked louis. "who are you, and what is it that you want?" "i am a citizen of paris, and i have been cruelly wronged." "you seem a very worthy person. if you have indeed been wronged you shall have redress. what have you to complain of?" "twenty of the blue dragoons of languedoc are quartered in my house, with captain dalbert at their head. they have devoured my food, stolen my property, and beaten my servants, yet the magistrates will give me no redress.' "on my life, justice seems to be administered in a strange fashion in our city of paris!" exclaimed the king wrathfully. "it is indeed a shameful case," said bossuet. "and yet there may be a very good reason for it," suggested pere la chaise. "i would suggest that your majesty should ask this man his name, his business, and why it was that the dragoons were quartered upon him." "you hear the reverend father's question." "my name, sire, is catinat, by trade i am a merchant in cloth, and i am treated in this fashion because i am of the reformed church." "i thought as much!" cried the confessor. "that alters matters," said bossuet. the king shook his head and his brow darkened. "you have only yourself to thank, then. the remedy is in your hands." "and how, sire?" "by embracing the only true faith." "i am already a member of it, sire." the king stamped his foot angrily. "i can see that you are a very insolent heretic," said he. "there is but one church in france, and that is my church. if you are outside that, you cannot look to me for aid." "my creed is that of my father, sire, and of my grandfather." "if they have sinned it is no reason why you should. my own grandfather erred also before his eyes were opened." "but he nobly atoned for his error," murmured the jesuit. "then you will not help me, sire?" "you must first help yourself." the old huguenot stood up with a gesture of despair, while the king continued on his way, the two ecclesiastics, on either side of him, murmuring their approval into his ears. "you have done nobly, sire." "you are truly the first son of the church." "you are the worthy successor of st. louis." but the king bore the face of a man who was not absolutely satisfied with his own action. "you do not think, then, that these people have too hard a measure?" said he. "too hard? nay, your majesty errs on the side of mercy." "i hear that they are leaving my kingdom in great numbers." "and surely it is better so, sire; for what blessing can come upon a country which has such stubborn infidels within its boundaries?" "those who are traitors to god can scarce be loyal to the king," remarked bossuet. "your majesty's power would be greater if there were no temple, as they call their dens of heresy, within your dominions." "my grandfather promised them protection. they are shielded, as you well know, by the edict which be gave at nantes." "but it lies with your majesty to undo the mischief that has been done." "and how?" "by recalling the edict." "and driving into the open arms of my enemies two millions of my best artisans and of my bravest servants. no, no, father, i have, i trust, every zeal for mother-church, but there is some truth in what de frontenac said this morning of the evil which comes from mixing the affairs of this world with those of the next. how say you, louvois?" "with all respect to the church, sire, i would say that the devil has given these men such cunning of hand and of brain that they are the best workers and traders in your majesty's kingdom. i know not how the state coffers are to be filled if such tax-payers go from among us. already many have left the country and taken their trades with them. if all were to go, it would be worse for us than a lost campaign." "but," remarked bossuet, "if it were once known that the king's will had been expressed, your majesty may rest assured that even the worst of his subjects bear him such love that they would hasten to come within the pale of holy church. as long as the edict stands, it seems to them that the king is lukewarm, and that they may abide in their error." the king shook his head. "they have always been stubborn folk," said he. "perhaps," remarked louvois, glancing maliciously at bossuet, "were the bishops of france to make an offering to the state of the treasures of their sees, we might then do without these huguenot taxes." "all that the church has is at the king's service," answered bossuet curtly. "the kingdom is mine and all that is in it," remarked louis, as they entered the _grand salon_, in which the court assembled after chapel, "yet i trust that it may be long before i have to claim the wealth of the church." "we trust so, sire," echoed the ecclesiastics. "but we may reserve such topics for our council-chamber. where is mansard? i must see his plans for the new wing at marly." he crossed to a side table, and was buried in an instant in his favourite pursuit, inspecting the gigantic plans of the great architect, and inquiring eagerly as to the progress of the work. "i think," said pere la chaise, drawing bossuet aside, "that your grace has made some impression upon the king's mind." "with your powerful assistance, father." "oh, you may rest assured that i shall lose no opportunity of pushing on the good work." "if you take it in hand, it is done." "but there is another who has more weight than i." "the favourite, de montespan?" "no, no; her day is gone. it is madame de maintenon." "i hear that she is very devout." "very. but she has no love for my order. she is a sulpitian. yet we may all work to one end. now if you were to speak to her, your grace." "with all my heart." "show her how good a service it would be could she bring about the banishment of the huguenots." "i shall do so." "and offer her in return that we will promote--" he bent forward and whispered into the prelate's ear. "what! he would not do it!" "and why? the queen is dead." "the widow of the poet scarron!" "she is of good birth. her grandfather and his were dear friends." "it is impossible." "but i know his heart, and i say it is possible." "you certainly know his heart, father, if any can. but such a thought had never entered my head." "then let it enter and remain there. if she will serve the church, the church will serve her. but the king beckons, and i must go." the thin dark figure hastened off through the throng of courtiers, and the great bishop of meaux remained standing with his chin upon his breast, sunk in reflection. by this time all the court was assembled in the _grand salon_, and the huge room was gay from end to end with the silks, the velvets, and the brocades of the ladies, the glitter of jewels, the flirt of painted fans, and the sweep of plume or aigrette. the grays, blacks, and browns of the men's coats toned down the mass of colour, for all must be dark when the king was dark, and only the blues of the officers' uniforms, and the pearl and gray of the musketeers of the guard, remained to call back those early days of the reign when the men had vied with the women in the costliness and brilliancy of their wardrobes. and if dresses had changed, manners had done so even more. the old levity and the old passions lay doubtless very near the surface, but grave faces and serious talk were the fashion of the hour. it was no longer the lucky _coup_ at the lansquenet table, the last comedy of moliere, or the new opera of lully about which they gossiped, but it was on the evils of jansenism, on the expulsion of arnauld from the sorbonne, on the insolence of pascal, or on the comparative merits of two such popular preachers as bourdaloue and massilon. so, under a radiant ceiling and over a many-coloured floor, surrounded by immortal paintings, set thickly in gold and ornament, there moved these nobles and ladies of france, all moulding themselves upon the one little dark figure in their midst, who was himself so far from being his own master that he hung balanced even now between two rival women, who were playing a game in which the future of france and his own destiny were the stakes. chapter v. children of belial. the elderly huguenot had stood silent after his repulse by the king, with his eyes cast moodily downwards, and a face in which doubt, sorrow, and anger contended for the mastery. he was a very large, gaunt man, raw-boned and haggard, with a wide forehead, a large, fleshy nose, and a powerful chin. he wore neither wig nor powder, but nature had put her own silvering upon his thick grizzled locks, and the thousand puckers which clustered round the edges of his eyes, or drew at the corners of his mouth, gave a set gravity to his face which needed no device of the barber to increase it. yet in spite of his mature years, the swift anger with which he had sprung up when the king refused his plaint, and the keen fiery glance which he had shot at the royal court as they filed past him with many a scornful smile and whispered gibe at his expense, all showed that he had still preserved something of the strength and of the spirit of his youth. he was dressed as became his rank, plainly and yet well, in a sad-coloured brown kersey coat with silver-plated buttons, knee-breeches of the same, and white woollen stockings, ending in broad-toed black leather shoes cut across with a great steel buckle. in one hand he carried his low felt hat, trimmed with gold edging, and in the other a little cylinder of paper containing a recital of his wrongs, which he had hoped to leave in the hands of the king's secretary. his doubts as to what his next step should be were soon resolved for him in a very summary fashion. these were days when, if the huguenot was not absolutely forbidden in france, he was at least looked upon as a man who existed upon sufferance, and who was unshielded by the laws which protected his catholic fellow-subjects. for twenty years the stringency of the persecution had increased until there was no weapon which bigotry could employ, short of absolute expulsion, which had not been turned against him. he was impeded in his business, elbowed out of all public employment, his house filled with troops, his children encouraged to rebel against him, and all redress refused him for the insults and assaults to which he was subjected. every rascal who wished to gratify his personal spite, or to gain favour with his bigoted superiors, might do his worst upon him without fear of the law. yet, in spite of all, these men clung to the land which disowned them, and, full of the love for their native soil which lies so deep in a frenchman's heart, preferred insult and contumely at home to the welcome which would await them beyond the seas. already, however, the shadow of those days was falling upon them when the choice should no longer be theirs. two of the king's big blue-coated guardsmen were on duty at that side of the palace, and had been witnesses to his unsuccessful appeal. now they tramped across together to where he was standing, and broke brutally into the current of his thoughts. "now, hymn-books," said one gruffly, "get off again about your business." "you're not a very pretty ornament to the king's pathway," cried the other, with a hideous oath. "who are you, to turn up your nose at the king's religion, curse you?" the old huguenot shot a glance of anger and contempt at them, and was turning to go, when one of them thrust at his ribs with the butt end of his halberd. "take that, you dog!" he cried. "would you dare to look like that at the king's guard?" "children of belial," cried the old man, with his hand pressed to his side, "were i twenty years younger you would not have dared to use me so." "ha! you would still spit your venom, would you? that is enough, andre! he has threatened the king's guard. let us seize him and drag him to the guard-room." the two soldiers dropped their halberds and rushed upon the old man, but, tall and strong as they were, they found it no easy matter to secure him. with his long sinewy arms and his wiry frame, he shook himself clear of them again and again, and it was only when his breath had failed him that the two, torn and panting, were able to twist round his wrists, and so secure him. they had hardly won their pitiful victory, however, before a stern voice and a sword flashing before their eyes, compelled them to release their prisoner once more. it was captain de catinat, who, his morning duties over, had strolled out on to the terrace, and had come upon this sudden scene of outrage. at the sight of the old man's face he gave a violent start, and drawing his sword, had rushed forward with such fury that the two guardsmen not only dropped their victim, but, staggering back from the threatening sword-point, one of them slipped and the other rolled over him, a revolving mass of blue coat and white kersey. "villains!" roared de catinat. "what is the meaning of this?" the two had stumbled on to their feet again, very shamefaced and ruffled. "if you please, captain," said one, saluting, "this is a huguenot who abused the royal guard." "his petition had been rejected by the king, captain, and yet he refused to go." de catinat was white with fury. "and so, when a french citizen has come to have a word with the great master of his country, he must be harassed by two swiss dogs like you?" he cried. "by my faith, we shall soon see about that!" he drew a little silver whistle from his pocket, and at the shrill summons an old sergeant and half a dozen soldiers came running from the guard-room. "your names?" asked the captain sternly. "andre meunier." "and yours?" "nicholas klopper." "sergeant, you will arrest these men, meunier and klopper." "certainly, captain," said the sergeant, a dark grizzled old soldier of conde and turenne. "see that they are tried to-day." "and on what charge, captain?" "for assaulting an aged and respected citizen who had come on business to the king." "he was a huguenot on his own confession," cried the culprits together. "hum!" the sergeant pulled doubtfully at his long moustache. "shall we put the charge in that form, captain? just as the captain pleases." he gave a little shrug of his epauletted shoulders to signify his doubt whether any good could arise from it. "no," said de catinat, with a sudden happy thought. "i charge them with laying their halberds down while on duty, and with having their uniforms dirty and disarranged." "that is better," answered the sergeant, with the freedom of a privileged veteran. "thunder of god, but you have disgraced the guards! an hour on the wooden horse with a musket at either foot may teach you that halberds were made for a soldier's hand, and not for the king's grass-plot. seize them! attention! right half turn! march!" and away went the little clump of guardsmen with the sergeant in the rear. the huguenot had stood in the background, grave and composed, without any sign of exultation, during this sudden reversal of fortune; but when the soldiers were gone, he and the young officer turned warmly upon each other. "amory, i had not hoped to see you!" "nor i you, uncle. what, in the name of wonder, brings you to versailles?" "my wrongs, amory. the hand of the wicked is heavy upon us, and whom can we turn to save only the king?" the young officer shook his head. "the king is at heart a good man," said he. "but he can only see the world through the glasses which are held before him. you have nothing to hope from him." "he spurned me from his presence." "did he ask your name?" "he did, and i gave it." the young guardsman whistled. "let us walk to the gate," said he. "by my faith, if my kinsmen are to come and bandy arguments with the king, it may not be long before my company finds itself without its captain." "the king would not couple us together. but indeed, nephew, it is strange to me how you can live in this house of baal and yet bow down to no false gods." "i keep my belief in my own heart." the older man shook his head gravely. "your ways lie along a very narrow path," said he, "with temptation and danger ever at your feet. it is hard for you to walk with the lord, amory, and yet go hand in hand with the persecutors of his people." "tut, uncle!" said the young man impatiently. "i am a soldier of the king's, and i am willing to let the black gown and the white surplice settle these matters between them. let me live in honour and die in my duty, and i am content to wait to know the rest." "content, too, to live in palaces, and eat from fine linen," said the huguenot bitterly, "when the hands of the wicked are heavy upon your kinsfolk, and there is a breaking of phials, and a pouring forth of tribulation, and a wailing and a weeping throughout the land." "what is amiss, then?" asked the young soldier, who was somewhat mystified by the scriptural language in use among the french calvinists of the day. "twenty men of moab have been quartered upon me, with one dalbert, their captain, who has long been a scourge to israel." "captain claude dalbert, of the languedoc dragoons? i have already some small score to settle with him." "ay, and the scattered remnant has also a score against this murderous dog and self-seeking ziphite." "what has he done, then?" "his men are over my house like moths in a cloth bale. no place is free from them. he sits in the room which should be mine, his great boots on my spanish leather chairs, his pipe in his mouth, his wine-pot at his elbow, and his talk a hissing and an abomination. he has beaten old pierre of the warehouse." "ha!" "and thrust me into the cellar." "ha!" "because i have dragged him back when in his drunken love he would have thrown his arms about your cousin adele." "oh!" the young man's colour had been rising and his brows knitted at each successive charge, but at this last his anger boiled over, and he hurried forward with fury in his face, dragging his elderly companion by the elbow. they had been passing through one of those winding paths, bordered by high hedges, which thinned away every here and there to give a glimpse of some prowling faun or weary nymph who slumbered in marble amid the foliage. the few courtiers who met them gazed with surprise at so ill-assorted a pair of companions. but the young soldier was too full of his own plans to waste a thought upon their speculations. still hurrying on, he followed a crescent path which led past a dozen stone dolphins shooting water out of their mouths over a group of tritons, and so through an avenue of great trees which looked as if they had grown there for centuries, and yet had in truth been carried over that very year by incredible labour from st. germain and fontainebleau. beyond this point a small gate led out of the grounds, and it was through it that the two passed, the elder man puffing and panting with this unusual haste. "how did you come, uncle?" "in a caleche." "where is it?" "that is it, beyond the auberge." "come, let us make for it." "and you, amory, are you coming?" "my faith, it is time that i came, from what you tell me. there is room for a man with a sword at his side in this establishment of yours." "but what would you do?" "i would have a word with this captain dalbert." "then i have wronged you, nephew, when i said even now that you were not whole-hearted towards israel." "i know not about israel," cried de catinat impatiently. "i only know that if my adele chose to worship the thunder like an abenaqui squaw, or turned her innocent prayers to the mitche manitou, i should like to set eyes upon the man who would dare to lay a hand upon her. ha, here comes our caleche! whip up, driver, and five livres to you if you pass the gate of the invalides within the hour." it was no light matter to drive fast in an age of springless carriages and deeply rutted roads, but the driver lashed at his two rough unclipped horses, and the caleche jolted and clattered upon its way. as they sped on, with the road-side trees dancing past the narrow windows, and the white dust streaming behind them, the guardsman drummed his fingers upon his knees, and fidgeted in his seat with impatience, shooting an occasional question across at his grim companion. "when was all this, then?" "it was yesterday night." "and where is adele now?" "she is at home." "and this dalbert?" "oh, he is there also!" "what! you have left her in his power while you came away to versailles?" "she is locked in her room." "pah! what is a lock?" the young man raved with his hands in the air at the thought of his own impotence. "and pierre is there?" "he is useless." "and amos green." "ah, that is better. he is a man, by the look of him." "his mother was one of our own folk from staten island, near manhattan. she was one of those scattered lambs who fled early before the wolves, when first it was seen that the king's hand waxed heavy upon israel. he speaks french, and yet he is neither french to the eye, nor are his ways like our ways." "he has chosen an evil time for his visit." "some wise purpose may lie hid in it." "and you have left him in the house?" "yes; he was sat with this dalbert, smoking with him, and telling him strange tales." "what guard could he be? he is a stranger in a strange land. you did ill to leave adele thus, uncle." "she is in god's hands, amory." "i trust so. oh, i am on fire to be there!" he thrust his head through the cloud of dust which rose from the wheels, and craned his neck to look upon the long curving river and broad-spread city, which was already visible before them, half hid by a thin blue haze, through which shot the double tower of notre dame, with the high spire of st. jacques and a forest of other steeples and minarets, the monuments of eight hundred years of devotion. soon, as the road curved down to the river-bank, the city wall grew nearer and nearer, until they had passed the southern gate, and were rattling over the stony causeway, leaving the broad luxembourg upon their right, and colbert's last work, the invalides, upon their left. a sharp turn brought them on to the river quays, and crossing over the pont neuf, they skirted the stately louvre, and plunged into the labyrinth of narrow but important streets which extended to the northward. the young officer had his head still thrust out of the window, but his view was obscured by a broad gilded carriage which lumbered heavily along in front of them. as the road broadened, however, it swerved to one side, and he was able to catch a glimpse of the house to which they were making. it was surrounded on every side by an immense crowd. chapter vi. a house of strife. the house of the huguenot merchant was a tall, narrow building standing at the corner of the rue st. martin and the rue de biron. it was four stories in height, grim and grave like its owner, with high peaked roof, long diamond-paned windows, a frame-work of black wood, with gray plaster filling the interstices, and five stone steps which led up to the narrow and sombre door. the upper story was but a warehouse in which the trader kept his stock, but the second and third were furnished with balconies edged with stout wooden balustrades. as the uncle and the nephew sprang out of the caleche, they found themselves upon the outskirts of a dense crowd of people, who were swaying and tossing with excitement, their chins all thrown forwards and their gaze directed upwards. following their eyes, the young officer saw a sight which left him standing bereft of every sensation save amazement. from the upper balcony there was hanging head downwards a man clad in the bright blue coat and white breeches of one of the king's dragoons. his hat and wig had dropped off, and his close-cropped head swung slowly backwards and forwards a good fifty feet above the pavement. his face was turned towards the street, and was of a deadly whiteness, while his eyes were screwed up as though he dared not open them upon the horror which faced them. his voice, however, resounded over the whole place until the air was filled with his screams for mercy. above him, at the corner of the balcony, there stood a young man who leaned with a bent back over the balustrades, and who held the dangling dragoon by either ankle. his face, however, was not directed towards his victim, but was half turned over his shoulder to confront a group of soldiers who were clustering at the long, open window which led out into the balcony. his head, as he glanced at them, was poised with a proud air of defiance, while they surged and oscillated in the opening, uncertain whether to rush on or to retire. suddenly the crowd gave a groan of excitement. the young man had released his grip upon one of the ankles, and the dragoon hung now by one only, his other leg flapping helplessly in the air. he grabbed aimlessly with his hands at the wall and the wood-work behind him, still yelling at the pitch of his lungs. "pull me up, son of the devil, pull me up!" he screamed. "would you murder me, then? help, good people, help!" "do you want to come up, captain?" said the strong clear voice of the young man above him, speaking excellent french, but in an accent which fell strangely upon the ears of the crowd beneath. "yes, sacred name of god, yes!" "order off your men, then." "away, you dolts, you imbeciles! do you wish to see me dashed to pieces? away, i say! off with you!" "that is better," said the youth, when the soldiers had vanished from the window. he gave a tug at the dragoon's leg as he spoke, which jerked him up so far that he could twist round and catch hold of the lower edge of the balcony. "how do you find yourself now?" he asked. "hold me, for heaven's sake, hold me!" "i have you quite secure." "then pull me up!" "not so fast, captain. you can talk very well where you are." "let me up, sir, let me up!" "all in good time. i fear that it is inconvenient to you to talk with your heels in the air." "ah, you would murder me!" "on the contrary, i am going to pull you up." "heaven bless you!" "but only on conditions." "oh, they are granted! i am slipping!" "you will leave this house--you and your men. you will not trouble this old man or this young girl any further. do you promise?" "oh yes; we shall go." "word of honour?" "certainly. only pull me up!" "not so fast. it may be easier to talk to you like this. i do not know how the laws are over here. maybe this sort of thing is not permitted. you will promise me that i shall have no trouble over the matter." "none, none. only pull me up!" "very good. come along!" he dragged at the dragoon's leg while the other gripped his way up the balustrade until, amid a buzz of congratulation from the crowd, he tumbled all in a heap over the rail on to the balcony, where he lay for a few moments as he had fallen. then staggering to his feet, without a glance at his opponent, he rushed, with a bellow of rage, through the open window. while this little drama had been enacted overhead, the young guardsman had shaken off his first stupor of amazement, and had pushed his way through the crowd with such vigour that he and his companion had nearly reached the bottom of the steps. the uniform of the king's guard was in itself a passport anywhere, and the face of old catinat was so well known in the district that everyone drew back to clear a path for him towards his house. the door was flung open for them, and an old servant stood wringing his hands in the dark passage. "oh, master! oh, master!" he cried. "such doings, such infamy! they will murder him!" "whom, then?" "this brave monsieur from america. oh, my god, hark to them now!" as he spoke, a clatter and shouting which had burst out again upstairs ended suddenly in a tremendous crash, with volleys of oaths and a prolonged bumping and smashing, which shook the old house to its foundations. the soldier and the huguenot rushed swiftly up the first flight of stairs, and were about to ascend the second one, from the head of which the uproar seemed to proceed, when a great eight-day clock came hurtling down, springing four steps at a time, and ending with a leap across the landing and a crash against the wall, which left it a shattered heap of metal wheels and wooden splinters. an instant afterwards four men, so locked together that they formed but one rolling bundle, came thudding down amid a _debris_ of splintered stair-rails, and writhed and struggled upon the landing, staggering up, falling down, and all breathing together like the wind in a chimney. so twisted and twined were they that it was hard to pick one from the other, save that the innermost was clad in black flemish cloth, while the three who clung to him were soldiers of the king. yet so strong and vigorous was the man whom they tried to hold that as often as he could find his feet he dragged them after him from end to end of the passage, as a boar might pull the curs which had fastened on to his haunches. an officer, who had rushed down at the heels of the brawlers, thrust his hands in to catch the civilian by the throat, but he whipped them back again with an oath as the man's strong white teeth met in his left thumb. clapping the wound to his mouth, he flashed out his sword and was about to drive it through the body of his unarmed opponent, when de catinat sprang forward and caught him by the wrist. "you villain, dalbert!" he cried. the sudden appearance of one of the king's own bodyguard had a magic effect upon the brawlers. dalbert sprang back, with his thumb still in his mouth, and his sword drooping, scowling darkly at the new-comer. his long sallow face was distorted with anger, and his small black eyes blazed with passion and with the hell-fire light of unsatisfied vengeance. his troopers had released their victim, and stood panting in a line, while the young man leaned against the wall, brushing the dust from his black coat, and looking from his rescuer to his antagonists. "i had a little account to settle with you before, dalbert," said de catinat, unsheathing his rapier. "i am on the king's errand," snarled the other. "no doubt. on guard, sir!" "i am here on duty, i tell you!" "very good. your sword, sir!" "i have no quarrel with you." "no?" de catinat stepped forward and struck him across the face with his open hand. "it seems to me that you have one now," said he. "hell and furies!" screamed the captain. "to your arms, men! _hola_, there, from above! cut down this fellow, and seize your prisoner! _hola_! in the king's name!" at his call a dozen more troopers came hurrying down the stairs, while the three upon the landing advanced upon their former antagonist. he slipped by them, however, and caught out of the old merchant's hand the thick oak stick which he carried. "i am with you, sir," said he, taking his place beside the guardsman. "call off your canaille, and fight me like a gentleman," cried de catinat. "a gentleman! hark to the bourgeois huguenot, whose family peddles cloth!" "you coward! i will write liar on you with my sword-point!" he sprang forward, and sent in a thrust which might have found its way to dalbert's heart had the heavy sabre of a dragoon not descended from the side and shorn his more delicate weapon short off close to the hilt. with a shout of triumph, his enemy sprang furiously upon him with his rapier shortened, but was met by a sharp blow from the cudgel of the young stranger which sent his weapon tinkling on to the ground. a trooper, however, on the stair had pulled out a pistol, and clapping it within a foot of the guardsman's head, was about to settle the combat, once and forever, when a little old gentleman, who had quietly ascended from the street, and who had been looking on with an amused and interested smile at this fiery sequence of events, took a sudden step forward, and ordered all parties to drop their weapons with a voice so decided, so stern, and so full of authority, that the sabre points all clinked down together upon the parquet flooring as though it were a part of their daily drill. "upon my word, gentlemen, upon my word!" said he, looking sternly from one to the other. he was a very small, dapper man, as thin as a herring, with projecting teeth and a huge drooping many-curled wig, which cut off the line of his skinny neck and the slope of his narrow shoulders. his dress was a long overcoat of mouse-coloured velvet slashed with gold, beneath which were high leather boots, which, with his little gold-laced, three-cornered hat, gave a military tinge to his appearance. in his gait and bearing he had a dainty strut and backward cock of the head, which, taken with his sharp black eyes, his high thin features, and his assured manner, would impress a stranger with the feeling that this was a man of power. and, indeed, in france or out of it there were few to whom this man's name was not familiar, for in all france the only figure which loomed up as large as that of the king was this very little gentleman who stood now, with gold snuff-box in one hand, and deep-laced handkerchief in the other, upon the landing of the huguenot's house. for who was there who did not know the last of the great french nobles, the bravest of french captains, the beloved conde, victor of recroy and hero of the fronde? at the sight of his pinched, sallow face the dragoons and their leader had stood staring, while de catinat raised the stump of his sword in a salute. "heh, heh!" cried the old soldier, peering at him. "you were with me on the rhine--heh? i know your face, captain. but the household was with turenne." "i was in the regiment of picardy, your highness. de catinat is my name." "yes, yes. but you, sir, who the devil are you?" "captain dalbert, your highness, of the languedoc blue dragoons." "heh! i was passing in my carriage, and i saw you standing on your head in the air. the young man let you up on conditions, as i understood." "he swore he would go from the house," cried the young stranger. "yet when i had let him up, he set his men upon me, and we all came downstairs together." "my faith, you seem to have left little behind you," said conde, smiling, as he glanced at the litter which was strewed all over the floor. "and so you broke your parole, captain dalbert?" "i could not hold treaty with a huguenot and an enemy of the king," said the dragoon sulkily. "you could hold treaty, it appears, but not keep it. and why did you let him go, sir, when you had him at such a vantage?" "i believed his promise." "you must be of a trusting nature." "i have been used to deal with indians." "heh! and you think an indian's word is better than that of an officer in the king's dragoons?" "i did not think so an hour ago." "hem!" conde took a large pinch of snuff, and brushed the wandering grains from his velvet coat with his handkerchief of point. "you are very strong, monsieur," said he, glancing keenly at the broad shoulders and arching chest of the young stranger. "you are from canada, i presume?" "i have been there, sir. but i am from new york." conde shook his head. "an island?" "no, sir; a town." "in what province?" "the province of new york." "the chief town, then?" "nay; albany is the chief town." "and how came you to speak french?" "my mother was of french blood." "and how long have you been in paris?" "a day." "heh! and you already begin to throw your mother's country-folk out of windows!" "he was annoying a young maid, sir, and i asked him to stop, whereon he whipped out his sword, and would have slain me had i not closed with him, upon which he called upon his fellows to aid him. to keep them off, i swore that i would drop him over if they moved a step. yet when i let him go, they set upon me again, and i know not what the end might have been had this gentleman not stood my friend." "hem! you did very well. you are young, but you have resource." "i was reared in the woods, sir." "if there are many of your kidney, you may give my friend de frontenac some work ere he found this empire of which he talks. but how is this, captain dalbert? what have you to say?" "the king's orders, your highness." "heh! did he order you to molest the girl? i have never yet heard that his majesty erred by being too _harsh_ with a woman." he gave a little dry chuckle in his throat, and took another pinch of snuff. "the orders are, your highness, to use every means which may drive these people into the true church." "on my word, you look a very fine apostle and a pretty champion for a holy cause," said conde, glancing sardonically out of his twinkling black eyes at the brutal face of the dragoon. "take your men out of this, sir, and never venture to set your foot again across this threshold." "but the king's command, your highness." "i will tell the king when i see him that i left soldiers and that i find brigands. not a word, sir! away! you take your shame with you, and you leave your honour behind." he had turned in an instant from the sneering, strutting old beau to the fierce soldier with set face and eye of fire. dalbert shrank back from his baleful gaze, and muttering an order to his men, they filed off down the stair with clattering feet and clank of sabres. "your highness," said the old huguenot, coming forward and throwing open one of the doors which led from the landing, "you have indeed been a saviour of israel and a stumbling-block to the froward this day. will you not deign to rest under my roof, and even to take a cup of wine ere you go onwards?" conde raised his thick eyebrows at the scriptural fashion of the merchant's speech, but he bowed courteously to the invitation, and entered the chamber, looking around him in surprise and admiration at its magnificence. with its panelling of dark shining oak, its polished floor, its stately marble chimney-piece, and its beautifully moulded ceiling, it was indeed a room which might have graced a palace. "my carriage waits below," said he, "and i must not delay longer. it is not often that i leave my castle of chantilly to come to paris, and it was a fortunate chance which made me pass in time to be of service to honest men. when a house hangs out such a sign as an officer of dragoons with his heels in the air, it is hard to drive past without a question. but i fear that as long as you are a huguenot, there will be no peace for you in france, monsieur." "the law is indeed heavy upon us." "and will be heavier if what i hear from court is correct. i wonder that you do not fly the country." "my business and my duty lie here." "well, every man knows his own affairs best. would it not be wise to bend to the storm, heh?" the huguenot gave a gesture of horror. "well, well, i meant no harm. and where is this fair maid who has been the cause of the broil?" "where is adele, pierre?" asked the merchant of the old servant, who had carried in the silver tray with a squat flask and tinted venetian glasses. "i locked her in my room, master." "and where is she now?" "i am here, father." the young girl sprang into the room, and threw her arms round the old merchant's neck. "oh, i trust these wicked men have not hurt you, love!" "no, no, dear child; none of us have been hurt, thanks to his highness the prince of conde here." adele raised her eyes, and quickly drooped them again before the keen questioning gaze of the old soldier. "may god reward your highness!" she stammered. in her confusion the blood rushed to her face, which was perfect in feature and expression. with her sweet delicate contour, her large gray eyes, and the sweep of the lustrous hair, setting off with its rich tint the little shell-like ears and the alabaster whiteness of the neck and throat, even conde, who had seen all the beauties of three courts and of sixty years defile before him, stood staring in admiration at the huguenot maiden. "heh! on my word, mademoiselle, you make me wish that i could wipe forty years from my account." he bowed, and sighed in the fashion that was in vogue when buckingham came to the wooing of anne of austria, and the dynasty of cardinals was at its height. "france could ill spare those forty years, your highness." "heh, heh! so quick of tongue too? your daughter has a courtly wit, monsieur." "god forbid, your highness! she is as pure and good--" "nay, that is but a sorry compliment to the court. surely, mademoiselle, you would love to go out into the great world, to hear sweet music, see all that is lovely, and wear all that is costly, rather than look out ever upon the rue st. martin, and bide in this great dark house until the roses wither upon your cheeks." "where my father is, i am happy at his side," said she, putting her two hands upon his sleeve. "i ask nothing more than i have got." "and i think it best that you go up to your room again," said the old merchant shortly, for the prince, in spite of his age, bore an evil name among women. he had come close to her as he spoke, and had even placed one yellow hand upon her shrinking arm, while his little dark eyes twinkled with an ominous light. "tut, tut!" said he, as she hastened to obey. "you need not fear for your little dove. this hawk, at least, is far past the stoop, however tempting the quarry. but indeed, i can see that she is as good as she is fair, and one could not say more than that if she were from heaven direct. my carriage waits, gentlemen, and i wish you all a very good day!" he inclined his be-wigged head, and strutted off in his dainty, dandified fashion. from the window de catinat could see him slip into the same gilded chariot which had stood in his way as he drove from versailles. "by my faith," said he, turning to the young american, "we all owe thanks to the prince, but it seems to me, sir, that we are your debtors even more. you have risked your life for my cousin, and but for your cudgel, dalbert would have had his blade through me when he had me at a vantage. your hand, sir! these are things which a man cannot forget." "ay, you may well thank him, amory," broke in the old huguenot, who had returned after escorting his illustrious guest to the carriage. "he has been raised up as a champion for the afflicted, and as a helper for those who are in need. an old man's blessing upon you, amos green, for my own son could not have done for me more than you, a stranger." but their young visitor appeared to be more embarrassed by their thanks than by any of his preceding adventures. the blood flushed to his weather-tanned, clear-cut face, as smooth as that of a boy, and yet marked by a firmness of lip and a shrewdness in the keen blue eyes which spoke of a strong and self-reliant nature. "i have a mother and two sisters over the water," said he diffidently. "and you honour women for their sake?" "we always honour women over there. perhaps it is that we have so few. over in these old countries you have not learned what it is to be without them. i have been away up the lakes for furs, living for months on end the life of a savage among the wigwams of the sacs and the foxes, foul livers and foul talkers, ever squatting like toads around their fires. then when i have come back to albany where my folk then dwelt, and have heard my sisters play upon the spinet and sing, and my mother talk to us of the france of her younger days and of her childhood, and of all that they had suffered for what they thought was right, then i have felt what a good woman is, and how, like the sunshine, she draws out of one's soul all that is purest and best." "indeed, the ladies should be very much obliged to monsieur, who is as eloquent as he is brave," said adele catinat, who, standing in the open door, had listened to the latter part of his remarks. he had forgotten himself for the instant, and had spoken freely and with energy. at the sight of the girl, however, he coloured up again, and cast down his eyes. "much of my life has been spent in the woods," said he, "and one speaks so little there that one comes to forget how to do it. it was for this that my father wished me to stay some time in france, for he would not have me grow up a mere trapper and trader." "and how long do you stop in paris?" asked the guardsman. "until ephraim savage comes for me." "and who is he?" "the master of the _golden rod_." "and that is your ship?" "my father's ship. she has been to bristol, is now at rouen, and then must go to bristol again. when she comes back once more, ephraim comes to paris for me, and it will be time for me to go." "and how like you paris?" the young man smiled. "they told me ere i came that it was a very lively place, and truly from the little that i have seen this morning, i think that it is the liveliest place that i have seen." "by my faith," said de catinat, "you came down those stairs in a very lively fashion, four of you together with a dutch clock as an _avant-courier_, and a whole train of wood-work at your heels. and you have not seen the city yet?" "only as i journeyed through it yester-evening on my way to this house. it is a wondrous place, but i was pent in for lack of air as i passed through it. new york is a great city. there are said to be as many as three thousand folk living there, and they say that they could send out four hundred fighting-men, though i can scarce bring myself to believe it. yet from all parts of the city one may see something of god's handiwork--the trees, the green of the grass, and the shine of the sun upon the bay and the rivers. but here it is stone and wood, and wood and stone, look where you will. in truth, you must be very hardy people to keep your health in such a place." "and to us it is you who seem so hardy, with your life in the forest and on the river," cried the young girl. "and then the wonder that you can find your path through those great wildernesses, where there is naught to guide you." "well, there again! i marvel how you can find your way among these thousands of houses. for myself, i trust that it will be a clear night to-night." "and why?" "that i may see the stars." "but you will find no change in them." "that is it. if i can but see the stars, it will be easy for me to know how to walk when i would find this house again. in the daytime i can carry a knife and notch the door-posts as i pass, for it might be hard to pick up one's trail again, with so many folk ever passing over it." de catinat burst out laughing again. "by my faith, you will find paris livelier than ever," said he, "if you blaze your way through on the door-posts as you would on the trees of a forest. but perchance it would be as well that you should have a guide at first; so, if you have two horses ready in your stables, uncle, our friend and i might shortly ride back to versailles together, for i have a spell of guard again before many hours are over. then for some days he might bide with me there, if he will share a soldier's quarters, and so see more than the rue st. martin can offer. how would that suit you, monsieur green?" "i should be right glad to come out with you, if we may leave all here in safety." "oh, fear not for that," said the huguenot. "the order of the prince of conde will be as a shield and a buckler to us for many a day. i will order pierre to saddle the horses." "and i must use the little time i have," said the guardsman, as he turned away to where adele waited for him in the window. chapter vii. the new world and the old. the young american was soon ready for the expedition, but de catinat lingered until the last possible minute. when at last he was able to tear himself away, he adjusted his cravat, brushed his brilliant coat, and looked very critically over the sombre suit of his companion. "where got you those?" he asked. "in new york, ere i left." "hem! there is naught amiss with the cloth, and indeed the sombre colour is the mode, but the cut is strange to our eyes." "i only know that i wish that i had my fringed hunting tunic and leggings on once more." "this hat, now. we do not wear our brims flat like that. see if i cannot mend it." he took the beaver, and looping up one side of the brim, he fastened it with a golden brooch taken from his own shirt front. "there is a martial cock," said he, laughing, "and would do credit to the king's own musketeers. the black broad-cloth and silk hose will pass, but why have you not a sword at your side?" "i carry a gun when i ride out." "_mon dieu_, you will be laid by the heels as a bandit!" "i have a knife, too." "worse and worse! well, we must dispense with the sword, and with the gun too, i pray! let me re-tie your cravat. so! now if you are in the mood for a ten-mile gallop, i am at your service." they were indeed a singular contrast as they walked their horses together through the narrow and crowded causeways of the parisian streets. de catinat, who was the older by five years, with his delicate small-featured face, his sharply trimmed moustache, his small but well-set and dainty figure, and his brilliant dress, looked the very type of the great nation to which he belonged. his companion, however, large-limbed and strong, turning his bold and yet thoughtful face from side to side, and eagerly taking in all the strange, new life amidst which he found himself, was also a type, unfinished, it is true, but bidding fair to be the higher of the two. his close yellow hair, blue eyes, and heavy build showed that it was the blood of his father, rather than that of his mother, which ran in his veins; and even the sombre coat and swordless belt, if less pleasing to the eye, were true badges of a race which found its fiercest battles and its most glorious victories in bending nature to its will upon the seas and in the waste places of the earth. "what is yonder great building?" he asked, as they emerged into a broader square. "it is the louvre, one of the palaces of the king." "and is he there?" "nay; he lives at versailles." "what! fancy that a man should have two such houses!" "two! he has many more--st. germain, marly, fontainebleau, clugny." "but to what end? a man can but live at one at a time." "nay; he can now come or go as the fancy takes him." "it is a wondrous building. i have seen the seminary of st. sulpice at montreal, and thought that it was the greatest of all houses, and yet what is it beside this?" "you have been to montreal, then? you remember the fort?" "yes, and the hotel dieu, and the wooden houses in a row, and eastward the great mill with the wall; but what do you know of montreal?" "i have soldiered there, and at quebec, too. why, my friend, you are not the only man of the woods in paris, for i give you my word that i have worn the caribou mocassins, the leather jacket, and the fur cap with the eagle feather for six months at a stretch, and i care not how soon i do it again," amos green's eyes shone with delight at finding that his companion and he had so much in common, and he plunged into a series of questions which lasted until they had crossed the river and reached the south-westerly gate of the city. by the moat and walls long lines of men were busy at their drill. "who are those, then?" he asked, gazing at them with curiosity. "they are some of the king's soldiers." "but why so many of them? do they await some enemy?" "nay; we are at peace with all the world. worse luck!" "at peace. why then all these men?" "that they may be ready." the young man shook his head in bewilderment. "they might be as ready in their own homes surely. in our country every man has his musket in his chimney corner, and is ready enough, yet he does not waste his time when all is at peace." "our king is very great, and he has many enemies." "and who made the enemies?" "why, the king, to be sure." "then would it not be better to be without him?" the guardsman shrugged his epaulettes in despair. "we shall both wind up in the bastille or vincennes at this rate," said he. "you must know that it is in serving the country that he has made these enemies. it is but five years since he made a peace at nimeguen, by which he tore away sixteen fortresses from the spanish lowlands. then, also, he had laid his hands upon strassburg and upon luxembourg, and has chastised the genoans, so that there are many who would fall upon him if they thought that he was weak." "and why has he done all this?" "because he is a great king, and for the glory of france." the stranger pondered over this answer for some time as they rode on between the high, thin poplars, which threw bars across the sunlit road. "there was a great man in schenectady once," said he at last. "they are simple folk up yonder, and they all had great trust in each other. but after this man came among them they began to miss--one a beaver-skin and one a bag of ginseng, and one a belt of wampum, until at last old pete hendricks lost his chestnut three-year-old. then there was a search and a fuss until they found all that had been lost in the stable of the new-comer, so we took him, i and some others, and we hung him up on a tree, without ever thinking what a great man he had been." de catinat shot an angry glance at his companion. "your parable, my friend, is scarce polite," said he. "if you and i are to travel in peace you must keep a closer guard upon your tongue." "i would not give you offence, and it may be that i am wrong," answered the american, "but i speak as the matter seems to me, and it is the right of a free man to do that." de catinat's frown relaxed as the other turned his earnest blue eyes upon him. "by my soul, where would the court be if every man did that?" said he. "but what in the name of heaven is amiss now?" his companion had hurled himself off his horse, and was stooping low over the ground, with his eyes bent upon the dust. then, with quick, noiseless steps, he zigzagged along the road, ran swiftly across a grassy bank, and stood peering at the gap of a fence, with his nostrils dilated, his eyes shining, and his whole face aglow with eagerness. "the fellow's brain is gone," muttered de catinat, as he caught at the bridle of the riderless horse. "the sight of paris has shaken his wits. what in the name of the devil ails you, that you should stand glaring there?" "a deer has passed," whispered the other, pointing down at the grass. "its trail lies along there and into the wood. it could not have been long ago, and there is no slur to the track, so that it was not going fast. had we but fetched my gun, we might have followed it, and brought the old man back a side of venison." "for god's sake get on your horse again!" cried de catinat distractedly. "i fear that some evil will come upon you ere i get you safe to the rue st. martin again!" "and what is wrong now?" asked amos green, swinging himself into the saddle. "why, man, these woods are the king's preserves and you speak as coolly of slaying his deer as though you were on the shores of michigan!" "preserves! they are tame deer!" an expression of deep disgust passed over his face, and spurring his horse, he galloped onwards at such a pace that de catinat, after vainly endeavouring to keep up, had to shriek to him to stop. "it is not usual in this country to ride so madly along the roads," he panted. "it is a very strange country," cried the stranger, in perplexity. "maybe it would be easier for me to remember what _is_ allowed. it was but this morning that i took my gun to shoot a pigeon that was flying over the roofs in yonder street, and old pierre caught my arm with a face as though it were the minister that i was aiming at. and then there is that old man--why, they will not even let him say his prayers." de catinat laughed. "you will come to know our ways soon," said he. "this is a crowded land, and if all men rode and shot as they listed, much harm would come from it. but let us talk rather of your own country. you have lived much in the woods from what you tell me." "i was but ten when first i journeyed with my uncle to sault la marie, where the three great lakes meet, to trade with the chippewas and the tribes of the west." "i know not what la salle or de frontenac would have said to that. the trade in those parts belongs to france." "we were taken prisoners, and so it was that i came to see montreal and afterwards quebec. in the end we were sent back because they did not know what they could do with us." "it was a good journey for a first." "and ever since i have been trading--first, on the kennebec with the abenaquis, in the great forests of maine, and with the micmac fish-eaters over the penobscot. then later with the iroquois, as far west as the country of the senecas. at albany and schenectady we stored our pelts, and so on to new york, where my father shipped them over the sea." "but he could ill spare you surely?" "very ill. but as he was rich, he thought it best that i should learn some things that are not to be found in the woods. and so he sent me in the _golden rod_, under the care of ephraim savage." "who is also of new york?" "nay; he is the first man that ever was born at boston." "i cannot remember the names of all these villages." "and yet there may come a day when their names shall be as well known as that of paris." de catinat laughed heartily. "the woods may have given you much, but not the gift of prophecy, my friend. well, my heart is often over the water even as yours is, and i would ask nothing better than to see the palisades of point levi again, even if all the five nations were raving upon the other side of them. but now, if you will look there in the gap of the trees, you will see the king's new palace." the two young men pulled up their horses, and looked down at the wide-spreading building in all the beauty of its dazzling whiteness, and at the lovely grounds, dotted with fountain and with statue, and barred with hedge and with walk, stretching away to the dense woods which clustered round them. it amused de catinat to watch the swift play of wonder and admiration which flashed over his companion's features. "well, what do you think of it?" he asked at last. "i think that god's best work is in america, and man's in europe." "ay, and in all europe there is no such palace as that, even as there is no such king as he who dwells within it." "can i see him, think you?" "who, the king? no, no; i fear that you are scarce made for a court." "nay, i should show him all honour." "how, then? what greeting would you give him?" "i would shake him respectfully by the hand, and ask as to his health and that of his family." "on my word, i think that such a greeting might please him more than the bent knee and the rounded back, and yet, i think, my son of the woods, that it were best not to lead you into paths where you would be lost, as would any of the courtiers if you dropped them in the gorge of the saguenay. but _hola_! what comes here? it looks like one of the carriages of the court." a white cloud of dust, which had rolled towards them down the road, was now so near that the glint of gilding and the red coat of the coachman could be seen breaking out through it. as the two cavaliers reined their horses aside to leave the roadway clear, the coach rumbled heavily past them, drawn by two dapple grays, and the horsemen caught a glimpse, as it passed, of a beautiful but haughty face which looked out at them. an instant afterwards a sharp cry had caused the driver to pull up his horses, and a white hand beckoned to them through the carriage window. "it is madame de montespan, the proudest woman in france," whispered de catinat. "she would speak with us, so do as i do." he touched his horse with the spur, gave a _gambade_ which took him across to the carriage, and then, sweeping off his hat, he bowed to his horse's neck; a salute in which he was imitated, though in a somewhat ungainly fashion, by his companion. "ha, captain!" said the lady, with no very pleasant face, "we meet again." "fortune has ever been good to me, madame." "it was not so this morning." "you say truly. it gave me a hateful duty to perform." "and you performed it in a hateful fashion." "nay, madame, what could i do more?" the lady sneered, and her beautiful face turned as bitter as it could upon occasion. "you thought that i had no more power with the king. you thought that my day was past. no doubt it seemed to you that you might reap favour with the new by being the first to cast a slight upon the old." "but, madame--" "you may spare your protestations. i am one who judges by deeds and not by words. did you, then, think that my charm had so faded, that any beauty which i ever have had is so withered?" "nay, madame, i were blind to think that." "blind as a noontide owl," said amos green with emphasis. madame de montespan arched her eyebrows and glanced at her singular admirer. "your friend at least speaks that which he really feels," said she. "at four o'clock to-day we shall see whether others are of the same mind; and if they are, then it may be ill for those who mistook what was but a passing shadow for a lasting cloud." she cast another vindictive glance at the young guardsman, and rattled on once more upon her way. "come on!" cried de catinat curtly, for his companion was staring open-mouthed after the carriage. "have you never seen a woman before?" "never such a one as that." "never one with so railing a tongue, i dare swear," said de catinat. "never one with so lovely a face. and yet there is a lovely face at the rue st. martin also." "you seem to have a nice taste in beauty, for all your woodland training." "yes, for i have been cut away from women so much that when i stand before one i feel that she is something tender and sweet and holy." "you may find dames at the court who are both tender and sweet, but you will look long, my friend, before you find the holy one. this one would ruin me if she can, and only because i have done what it was my duty to do. to keep oneself in this court is like coming down the la chine rapids where there is a rock to right, and a rock to left, and another perchance in front, and if you so much as graze one, where are you and your birch canoe? but our rocks are women, and in our canoe we bear all our worldly fortunes. now here is another who would sway me over to her side, and indeed i think it may prove to be the better side too." they had passed through the gateway of the palace, and the broad sweeping drive lay in front of them, dotted with carriages and horsemen. on the gravel walks were many gaily dressed ladies, who strolled among the flower-beds or watched the fountains with the sunlight glinting upon their high water sprays. one of these, who had kept her eyes turned upon the gate, came hastening forward the instant that de catinat appeared. it was mademoiselle nanon, the _confidante_ of madame de maintenon. "i am so pleased to see you, captain," she cried, "and i have waited so patiently. madame would speak with you. the king comes to her at three, and we have but twenty minutes. i heard that you had gone to paris, and so i stationed myself here. madame has something which she would ask you." "then i will come at once. ah, de brissac, it is well met!" a tall, burly officer was passing in the same uniform which de catinat wore. he turned at once, and came smiling towards his comrade. "ah, amory, you have covered a league or two from the dust on your coat!" "we are fresh from paris. but i am called on business. this is my friend, monsieur amos green. i leave him in your hands, for he is a stranger from america, and would fain see all that you can show. he stays with me at my quarters. and my horse, too, de brissac. you can give it to the groom." throwing the bridle to his brother officer, and pressing the hand of amos green, de catinat sprang from his horse, and followed at the top of his speed in the direction which the young lady had already taken. chapter viii. the rising sun. the rooms which were inhabited by the lady who had already taken so marked a position at the court of france were as humble as were her fortunes at the time when they were allotted to her, but with that rare tact and self-restraint which were the leading features in her remarkable character, she had made no change in her living with the increase of her prosperity, and forbore from provoking envy and jealousy by any display of wealth or of power. in a side wing of the palace, far from the central _salons_, and only to be reached by long corridors and stairs, were the two or three small chambers upon which the eyes, first of the court, then of france, and finally of the world, were destined to be turned. in such rooms had the destitute widow of the poet scarron been housed when she had first been brought to court by madame de montespan as the governess of the royal children, and in such rooms she still dwelt, now that she had added to her maiden francoise d'aubigny the title of marquise de maintenon, with the pension and estate which the king's favour had awarded her. here it was that every day the king would lounge, finding in the conversation of a clever and virtuous woman a charm and a pleasure which none of the professed wits of his sparkling court had ever been able to give to him, and here, too, the more sagacious of the courtiers were beginning to understand, was the point, formerly to be found in the magnificent _salons_ of de montespan, whence flowed those impulses and tendencies which were so eagerly studied, and so keenly followed up by all who wished to keep the favour of the king. it was a simple creed, that of the court. were the king pious, then let all turn to their missals and their rosaries. were he rakish, then who so rakish as his devoted followers? but woe to the man who was rakish when he should be praying, or who pulled a long face when the king wore a laughing one! and thus it was that keen eyes were ever fixed upon him, and upon every influence that came near him, so that the wary courtier, watching the first subtle signs of a coming change, might so order his conduct as to seem to lead rather than to follow. the young guardsman had scarce ever exchanged a word with this powerful lady, for it was her taste to isolate herself, and to appear with the court only at the hours of devotion. it was therefore with some feelings both of nervousness and of curiosity that he followed his guide down the gorgeous corridors, where art and wealth had been strewn with so lavish a hand. the lady paused in front of the chamber door, and turned to her companion. "madame wishes to speak to you of what occurred this morning," said she. "i should advise you to say nothing to madame about your creed, for it is the only thing upon which her heart can be hard." she raised her finger to emphasise the warning, and tapping at the door, she pushed it open. "i have brought captain de catinat, madame," said she. "then let the captain step in." the voice was firm, and yet sweetly musical. obeying the command, de catinat found himself in a room which was no larger and but little better furnished than that which was allotted to his own use. yet, though simple, everything in the chamber was scrupulously neat and clean, betraying the dainty taste of a refined woman. the stamped-leather furniture, the la savonniere carpet, the pictures of sacred subjects, exquisite from an artist's point of view, the plain but tasteful curtains, all left an impression half religious and half feminine but wholly soothing. indeed, the soft light, the high white statue of the virgin in a canopied niche, with a perfumed red lamp burning before it, and the wooden _prie-dieu_ with the red-edged prayer-book upon the top of it, made the apartment look more like a private chapel than a fair lady's boudoir. on each side of the empty fireplace was a little green-covered arm-chair, the one for madame and the other reserved for the use of the king. a small three-legged stool between them was heaped with her work-basket and her tapestry. on the chair which was furthest from the door, with her back turned to the light, madame was sitting as the young officer entered. it was her favourite position, and yet there were few women of her years who had so little reason to fear the sun, for a healthy life and active habits had left her with a clear skin and delicate bloom which any young beauty of the court might have envied. her figure was graceful and queenly, her gestures and pose full of a natural dignity, and her voice, as he had already remarked, most sweet and melodious. her face was handsome rather than beautiful, set in a statuesque classical mould, with broad white forehead, firm, delicately sensitive mouth, and a pair of large serene gray eyes, earnest and placid in repose, but capable of reflecting the whole play of her soul, from the merry gleam of humour to the quick flash of righteous anger. an elevating serenity was, however, the leading expression of her features, and in that she presented the strongest contrast to her rival, whose beautiful face was ever swept by the emotion of the moment, and who gleamed one hour and shadowed over the next like a corn-field in the wind. in wit and quickness of tongue it is true that de montespan had the advantage, but the strong common-sense and the deeper nature of the elder woman might prove in the end to be the better weapon. de catinat, at the moment, without having time to notice details, was simply conscious that he was in the presence of a very handsome woman, and that her large pensive eyes were fixed critically upon him, and seemed to be reading his thoughts as they had never been read before. "i think that i have already seen you, sir, have i not?" "yes, madame, i have once or twice had the honour of attending upon you though it may not have been my good fortune to address you." "my life is so quiet and retired that i fear that much of what is best and worthiest at the court is unknown to me. it is the curse of such places that evil flaunts itself before the eye and cannot be overlooked, while the good retires in its modesty, so that at times we scarce dare hope that it is there. you have served, monsieur?" "yes, madame. in the lowlands, on the rhine, and in canada." "in canada! ah! what nobler ambition could woman have than to be a member of that sweet sisterhood which was founded by the holy marie de l'incarnation and the sainted jeanne le ber at montreal? it was but the other day that i had an account of them from father godet des marais. what joy to be one of such a body, and to turn from the blessed work of converting the heathen to the even more precious task of nursing back health and strength into those of god's warriors who have been struck down in the fight with satan!" it was strange to de catinat, who knew well the sordid and dreadful existence led by these same sisters, threatened ever with misery, hunger, and the scalping-knife, to hear this lady at whose feet lay all the good things of this earth speaking enviously of their lot. "they are very good women," said he shortly, remembering mademoiselle nanon's warning, and fearing to trench upon the dangerous subject. "and doubtless you have had the privilege also of seeing the holy bishop laval?" "yes, madame, i have seen bishop laval." "and i trust that the sulpitians still hold their own against the jesuits?" "i have heard, madame, that the jesuits are the stronger at quebec, and the others at montreal." "and who is your own director, monsieur?" de catinat felt that the worst had come upon him. "i have none, madame." "ah, it is too common to dispense with a director, and yet i know not how i could guide my steps in the difficult path which i tread if it were not for mine. who is your confessor, then?" "i have none. i am of the reformed church, madame." the lady gave a gesture of horror, and a sudden hardening showed itself in mouth and eye. "what, in the court itself," she cried, "and in the neighbourhood of the king's own person!" de catinat was lax enough in matters of faith, and held his creed rather as a family tradition than from any strong conviction, but it hurt his self-esteem to see himself regarded as though he had confessed to something that was loathsome and unclean. "you will find, madame," said he sternly, "that members of my faith have not only stood around the throne of france, but have even seated themselves upon it." "god has for his own all-wise purposes permitted it, and none should know it better than i, whose grandsire, theodore d'aubigny, did so much to place a crown upon the head of the great henry. but henry's eyes were opened ere his end came, and i pray--oh, from my heart i pray--that yours may be also." she rose, and throwing herself down upon the _prie-dieu_ sunk her face in her hands for some few minutes, during which the object of her devotions stood in some perplexity in the middle of the room, hardly knowing whether such an attention should be regarded as an insult or as a favour. a tap at the door brought the lady back to this world again, and her devoted attendant answered her summons to enter. "the king is in the hall of victories, madame," said she. "he will be here in five minutes." "very well. stand outside, and let me know when he comes. now, sir," she continued, when they were alone once more, "you gave a note of mine to the king this morning?" "i did, madame." "and, as i understand, madame de montespan was refused admittance to the _grand lever_?" "she was, madame." "but she waited for the king in the passage?" "she did." "and wrung from him a promise that he would see her to-day?" "yes, madame." "i would not have you tell me that which it may seem to you a breach of your duty to tell. but i am fighting now against a terrible foe, and for a great stake. do you understand me?" de catinat bowed. "then what do i mean?" "i presume that what madame means is that she is fighting for the king's favour with the lady you mentioned." "as heaven is my judge, i have no thought of myself. i am fighting with the devil for the king's soul." "'tis the same thing, madame." the lady smiled. "if the king's body were in peril, i could call on the aid of his faithful guards, and not less so now, surely, when so much more is at stake. tell me, then, at what hour was the king to meet the marquise in her room?" "at four, madame." "i thank you. you have done me a service, and i shall not forget it." "the king comes, madame," said mademoiselle nanon, again protruding her head. "then you must go, captain. pass through the other room, and so into the outer passage. and take this. it is bossuet's statement of the catholic faith. it has softened the hearts of others, and may yours. now, adieu!" de catinat passed out through another door, and as he did so he glanced back. the lady had her back to him, and her hand was raised to the mantel-piece. at the instant that he looked she moved her neck, and he could see what she was doing. she was pushing back the long hand of the clock. chapter ix. le roi s'amuse. captain de catinat had hardly vanished through the one door before the other was thrown open by mademoiselle nanon, and the king entered the room. madame de maintenon rose with a pleasant smile and curtsied deeply, but there was no answering light upon her visitor's face, and he threw himself down upon the vacant arm-chair with a pouting lip and a frown upon his forehead. "nay, now this is a very bad compliment," she cried, with the gaiety which she could assume whenever it was necessary to draw the king from his blacker humours. "my poor little dark room has already cast a shadow over you." "nay; it is father la chaise and the bishop of meaux who have been after me all day like two hounds on a stag, with talk of my duty and my position and my sins, with judgment and hell-fire ever at the end of their exhortations." "and what would they have your majesty do?" "break the promise which i made when i came upon the throne, and which my grandfather made before me. they wish me to recall the edict of nantes, and drive the huguenots from the kingdom." "oh, but your majesty must not trouble your mind about such matters." "you would not have me do it, madame?" "not if it is to be a grief to your majesty." "you have, perchance, some soft feeling for the religion of your youth?" "nay, sire; i have nothing but hatred for heresy." "and yet you would not have them thrust out?" "bethink you, sire, that the almighty can himself incline their hearts to better things if he is so minded, even as mine was inclined. may you not leave it in his hands?" "on my word," said louis, brightening, "it is well put. i shall see if father la chaise can find an answer to that. it is hard to be threatened with eternal flames because one will not ruin one's kingdom. eternal torment! i have seen the face of a man who had been in the bastille, for fifteen years. it was like a dreadful book, with a scar or a wrinkle to mark every hour of that death in life. but eternity!" he shuddered, and his eyes were filled with the horror of his thought. the higher motives had but little power over his soul, as those about him had long discovered, but he was ever ready to wince at the image of the terrors to come. "why should you think of such things, sire?" said the lady, in her rich, soothing voice. "what have you to fear, you who have been the first son of the church?" "you think that i am safe, then?" "surely, sire." "but i have erred, and erred deeply. you have yourself said as much." "but that is all over, sire. who is there who is without stain? you have turned away from temptation. surely, then, you have earned your forgiveness." "i would that the queen were living once more. she would find me a better man." "i would that she were, sire." "and she should know that it was to you that she owed the change. oh, francoise, you are surely my guardian angel, who has taken bodily form! how can i thank you for what you have done for me?" he leaned forward and took her hand, but at the touch a sudden fire sprang into his eyes, and he would have passed his other arm round her had she not risen hurriedly to avoid the embrace. "sire!" said she, with a rigid face and one finger upraised. "you are right, you are right, francoise. sit down, and i will control myself. still at the same tapestry, then! my workers at the gobelins must look to their laurels." he raised one border of the glossy roll, while she, having reseated herself, though not without a quick questioning glance at her companion, took the other end into her lap and continued her work. "yes, sire. it is a hunting scene in your forests at fontainebleau. a stag of ten tines, you see, and the hounds in full cry, and a gallant band of cavaliers and ladies. has your majesty ridden to-day?" "no. how is it, francoise, that you have such a heart of ice?" "i would it were so, sire. perhaps you have hawked, then?" "no. but surely no man's love has ever stirred you! and yet you have been a wife." "a nurse, sire, but never a wife. see the lady in the park! it is surely mademoiselle. i did not know that she had come up from choisy." but the king was not to be distracted from his subject. "you did not love this scarron, then?" he persisted. "he was old, i have heard, and as lame as some of his verses." "do not speak lightly of him, sire. i was grateful to him; i honoured him; i liked him." "but you did not love him." "why should you seek to read the secrets of a woman's heart?" "you did not love him, francoise?" "at least i did my duty towards him." "has that nun's heart never yet been touched by love then?" "sire, do not question me." "has it never--" "spare me, sire, i beg of you!" "but i must ask, for my own peace hangs upon your answer." "your words pain me to the soul." "have you never, francoise, felt in your heart some little flicker of the love which glows in mine?" he rose with his hands outstretched, a pleading monarch, but she, with half-turned bead, still shrank away from him. "be assured of one thing, sire," said she, "that even if i loved you as no woman ever loved a man yet, i should rather spring from that window on to the stone terraces beneath than ever by word or sign confess as much to you." "and why, francoise?" "because, sire, it is my highest hope upon earth that i have been chosen to lift up your mind towards loftier things--that mind the greatness and nobility of which none know more than i." "and is my love so base, then?" "you have wasted too much of your life and of your thoughts upon woman's love. and now, sire, the years steal on and the day is coming when even you will be called upon to give an account of your actions, and of the innermost thoughts of your heart. i would see you spend the time that is left to you, sire, in building up the church, in showing a noble example to your subjects, and in repairing any evil which that example may have done in the past." the king sank back into his chair with a groan. "forever the same," said he. "why, you are worse than father la chaise and bossuet." "nay, nay," said she gaily, with the quick tact in which she never failed. "i have wearied you, when you have stooped to honour my little room with your presence. that is indeed ingratitude, and it were a just punishment if you were to leave me in solitude to-morrow, and so cut off all the light of my day. but tell me, sire, how go the works at marly? i am all on fire to know whether the great fountain will work." "yes, the fountain plays well, but mansard has thrown the right wing too far back. i have made him a good architect, but i have still much to teach him. i showed him his fault on the plan this morning, and he promised to amend it." "and what will the change cost, sire?" "some millions of livres, but then the view will be much improved from the south side. i have taken in another mile of ground in that direction, for there were a number of poor folk living there, and their hovels were far from pretty." "and why have you not ridden to-day, sire?" "pah! it brings me no pleasure. there was a time when my blood was stirred by the blare of the horn and the rush of the hoofs, but now it is all wearisome to me." "and hawking too?" "yes; i shall hawk no more." "but, sire, you must have amusement." "what is so dull as an amusement which has ceased to amuse? i know not how it is. when i was but a lad, and my mother and i were driven from place to place, with the fronde at war with us and paris in revolt, with our throne and even our lives in danger, all life seemed to be so bright, so new, and so full of interest. now that there is no shadow, and that my voice is the first in france, as france's is in europe, all is dull and lacking in flavour. what use is it to have all pleasure before me, when it turns to wormwood when it is tasted?" "true pleasure, sire, lies rather in the inward life, the serene mind, the easy conscience. and then, as we grow older, is it not natural that our minds should take a graver bent? we might well reproach ourselves if it were not so, for it would show that we had not learned the lesson of life." "it may be so, and yet it is sad and weary when nothing amuses. but who is there?" "it is my companion knocking. what is it, mademoiselle?" "monsieur corneille, to read to the king," said the young lady, opening the door. "ah, yes, sire; i know how foolish is a woman's tongue, and so i have brought a wiser one than mine here to charm you. monsieur racine was to have come, but i hear that he has had a fall from his horse, and he sends his friend in his place. shall i admit him?" "oh, as you like, madame, as you like," said the king listlessly. at a sign from mademoiselle nanon a little peaky man with a shrewd petulant face, and long gray hair falling back over his shoulders, entered the room. he bowed profoundly three times, and then seated himself nervously on the very edge of the stool, from which the lady had removed her work-basket. she smiled and nodded to encourage the poet, while the monarch leaned back in his chair with an air of resignation. "shall it be a comedy, or a tragedy, or a burlesque pastoral?" corneille asked timidly. "not the burlesque pastoral," said the king with decision. "such things may be played, but cannot be read, since they are for the eye rather than the ear." the poet bowed his acquiescence. "and not the tragedy, monsieur," said madame de maintenon, glancing up from her tapestry. "the king has enough that is serious in his graver hours, and so i trust that you will use your talent to amuse him." "ay, let it be a comedy," said louis; "i have not had a good laugh since poor moliere passed away." "ah, your majesty has indeed a fine taste," cried the courtier poet. "had you condescended to turn your own attention to poetry, where should we all have been then?" louis smiled, for no flattery was too gross to please him. "even as you have taught our generals war and our builders art, so you would have set your poor singers a loftier strain. but mars would hardly deign to share the humbler laurels of apollo." "i have sometimes thought that i had some such power," answered the king complacently; "though amid my toils and the burdens of state i have had, as you say, little time for the softer arts." "but you have encouraged others to do what you could so well have done yourself, sire. you have brought out poets as the sun brings out flowers. how many have we not seen--moliere, boileau, racine, one greater than the other? and the others, too, the smaller ones--scarron, so scurrilous and yet so witty--oh, holy virgin! what have i said?" madame had laid down her tapestry, and was staring in intense indignation at the poet, who writhed on his stool under the stern rebuke of those cold gray eyes. "i think, monsieur corneille, that you had better go on with your reading," said the king dryly. "assuredly, sire. shall i read my play about darius?" "and who was darius?" asked the king, whose education had been so neglected by the crafty policy of cardinal mazarin that he was ignorant of everything save what had come under his own personal observation. "darius was king of persia, sire." "and where is persia?" "it is a kingdom of asia." "is darius still king there?" "nay, sire; he fought against alexander the great." "ah, i have heard of alexander. he was a famous king and general, was he not?" "like your majesty, he both ruled wisely and led his armies victoriously." "and was king of persia, you say?" "no, sire; of macedonia. it was darius who was king of persia." the king frowned, for the slightest correction was offensive to him. "you do not seem very clear about the matter, and i confess that it does not interest me deeply," said he. "pray turn to something else." "there is my _pretended astrologer_." "yes, that will do." corneille commenced to read his comedy, while madame de maintenon's white and delicate fingers picked among the many-coloured silks which she was weaving into her tapestry. from time to time she glanced across, first at the clock and then at the king, who was leaning back, with his lace handkerchief thrown over his face. it was twenty minutes to four now, but she knew that she had put it back half an hour, and that the true time was ten minutes past. "tut! tut!" cried the king suddenly. "there is something amiss there. the second last line has a limp in it, surely." it was one of his foibles to pose as a critic, and the wise poet would fall in with his corrections, however unreasonable they might be. "which line, sire? it is indeed an advantage to have one's faults made clear." "read the passage again." "et si, quand je lui dis le secret de mon ame, avec moins de rigueur elle eut traite ma flamme, dans ma fayon de vivre, et suivant mon humeur, une autre eut bientot le present de mon coeur." "yes, the third line has a foot too many. do you not remark it, madame?" "no; but i fear that i should make a poor critic." "your majesty is perfectly right," said corneille unblushingly. "i shall mark the passage, and see that it is corrected." "i thought that it was wrong. if i do not write myself, you can see that i have at least got the correct ear. a false quantity jars upon me. it is the same in music. although i know little of the matter, i can tell a discord where lully himself would miss it. i have often shown him errors of the sort in his operas, and i have always convinced him that i was right." "i can readily believe it, your majesty." corneille had picked up his book again, and was about to resume his reading when there came a sharp tap at the door. "it is his highness the minister, monsieur de louvois," said mademoiselle nanon. "admit him," answered louis. "monsieur corneille, i am obliged to you for what you have read, and i regret that an affair of state will now interrupt your comedy. some other day perhaps i may have the pleasure of hearing the rest of it." he smiled in the gracious fashion which made all who came within his personal influence forget his faults and remember him only as the impersonation of dignity and of courtesy. the poet, with his book under his arm, slipped out, while the famous minister, tall, heavily wigged, eagle-nosed, and commanding, came bowing into the little room. his manner was that of exaggerated politeness, but his haughty face marked only too plainly his contempt for such a chamber and for the lady who dwelt there. she was well aware of the feeling with which he regarded her, but her perfect self-command prevented her from ever by word or look returning his dislike. "my apartments are indeed honoured to-day," said she, rising with outstretched hand. "can monsieur condescend to a stool, since i have no fitter seat to offer you in this little doll's house? but perhaps i am in the way, if you wish to talk of state affairs to the king. i can easily withdraw into my boudoir." "no, no, nothing of the kind, madame," cried louis. "it is my wish that you should remain here. what is it, louvois?" "a messenger arrived from england with despatches, your majesty," answered the minister, his ponderous figure balanced upon the three-legged stool. "there is very ill feeling there, and there is some talk of a rising. the letter from lord sunderland wished to know whether, in case the dutch took the side of the malcontents, the king might look to france for help. of course, knowing your majesty's mind, i answered unhesitatingly that he might." "you did what?" "i answered, sire, that he might." king louis flushed with anger, and he caught up the tongs from the grate with a motion as though he would have struck his minister with them. madame sprang from her chair, and laid her hand upon his arm with a soothing gesture. he threw down the tongs again, but his eyes still flashed with passion as he turned them upon louvois. "how dared you?" he cried. "but, sire--" "how dared you, i say? what! you venture to answer such a message without consulting me! how often am i to tell you that i am the state-- i alone; that all is to come from me; and that i am answerable to god only? what are you? my instrument! my tool! and you venture to act without my authority!" "i thought that i knew your wishes, sire," stammered louvois, whose haughty manner had quite deserted him, and whose face was as white as the ruffles of his shirt. "you are not there to think about my wishes, sir. you are there to consult them and to obey them. why is it that i have turned away from my old nobility, and have committed the affairs of my kingdom to men whose names have never been heard of in the history of france, such men as colbert and yourself? i have been blamed for it. there was the duc de st. simon, who said, the last time that he was at the court, that it was a bourgeois government. so it is. but i wished it to be so, because i knew that the nobles have a way of thinking for themselves, and i ask for no thought but mine in the governing of france. but if my bourgeois are to receive messages and give answers to embassies, then indeed i am to be pitied. i have marked you of late, louvois. you have grown beyond your station. you take too much upon yourself. see to it that i have not again to complain to you upon this matter." the humiliated minister sat as one crushed, with his chin sunk upon his breast. the king muttered and frowned for a few minutes, but the cloud cleared gradually from his face, for his fits of anger were usually as short as they were fierce and sudden. "you will detain that messenger, louvois," he said at last, in a calm voice. "yes, sire." "and we shall see at the council meeting to-morrow that a fitting reply be sent to lord sunderland. it would be best perhaps not to be too free with our promises in the matter. these english have ever been a thorn in our sides. if we could leave them among their own fogs with such a quarrel as would keep them busy for a few years, then indeed we might crush this dutch prince at our leisure. their last civil war lasted ten years, and their next may do as much. we could carry our frontier to the rhine long ere that. eh, louvois?" "your armies are ready, sire, on the day that you give the word." "but war is a costly business. i do not wish to have to sell the court plate, as we did the other day. how are the public funds?" "we are not very rich, sire. but there is one way in which money may very readily be gained. there was some talk this morning about the huguenots, and whether they should dwell any longer in this catholic kingdom. now, if they are driven out, and if their property were taken by the state, then indeed your majesty would at once become the richest monarch in christendom." "but you were against it this morning, louvois?" "i had not had time to think of it, sire." "you mean that father la chaise and the bishop had not had time to get at you," said louis sharply. "ah, louvois, i have not lived with a court round me all these years without learning how things are done. it is a word to him, and so on to another, and so to a third, and so to the king. when my good fathers of the church have set themselves to bring anything to pass, i see traces of them at every turn, as one traces a mole by the dirt which it has thrown up. but i will not be moved against my own reason to do wrong to those who, however mistaken they may be, are still the subjects whom god has given me." "i would not have you do so, sire," cried louvois in confusion. the king's accusation had been so true that he had been unable at the moment even to protest. "i know but one person," continued louis, glancing across at madame de maintenon, "who has no ambitions, who desires neither wealth nor preferment, and who can therefore never be bribed to sacrifice my interests. that is why i value that person's opinion so highly." he smiled at the lady as he spoke, while his minister cast a glance at her which showed the jealousy which ate into his soul. "it was my duty to point this out to you, sire, not as a suggestion, but as a possibility," said he, rising. "i fear that i have already taken up too much of your majesty's time, and i shall now withdraw." bowing slightly to the lady, and profoundly to the monarch, he walked from the room. "louvois grows intolerable," said the king. "i know not where his insolence will end. were it not that he is an excellent servant, i should have sent him from the court before this. he has his own opinions upon everything. it was but the other day that he would have it that i was wrong when i said that one of the windows in the trianon was smaller than any of the others. it was the same size, said he. i brought le metre with his measures, and of course the window was, as i had said, too small. but i see by your clock that it is four o'clock. i must go." "my clock, sire, is half an hour slow." "half an hour!" the king looked dismayed for an instant, and then began to laugh. "nay, in that case," said he, "i had best remain where i am, for it is too late to go, and i can say with a clear conscience that it was the clock's fault rather than mine." "i trust that it was nothing of very great importance, sire," said the lady, with a look of demure triumph in her eyes. "by no means." "no state affair?" "no, no; it was only that it was the hour at which i had intended to rebuke the conduct of a presumptuous person. but perhaps it is better as it is. my absence will in itself convey my message, and in such a sort that i trust i may never see that person's face more at my court. but, ah, what is this?" the door had been flung open, and madame de montespan, beautiful and furious, was standing before them. chapter x. an eclipse at versailles. madame de maintenon was a woman who was always full of self-restraint and of cool resource. she had risen in an instant, with an air as if she had at last seen the welcome guest for whom she had pined in vain. with a frank smile of greeting, she advanced with outstretched hand. "this is indeed a pleasure," said she. but madame de montespan was very angry, so angry that she was evidently making strong efforts to keep herself within control, and to avoid breaking into a furious outburst. her face was very pale, her lips compressed, and her blue eyes had the set stare and the cold glitter of a furious woman. so for an instant they faced each other, the one frowning, the other smiling, two of the most beautiful and queenly women in france. then de montespan, disregarding her rival's outstretched hand, turned towards the king, who had been looking at her with a darkening face. "i fear that i intrude, sire." "your entrance, madame, is certainly somewhat abrupt." "i must crave pardon if it is so. since this lady has been the governess of my children i have been in the habit of coming into her room unannounced." "as far as i am concerned, you are most welcome to do so," said her rival, with perfect composure. "i confess that i had not even thought it necessary to ask your permission, madame," the other answered coldly. "then you shall certainly do so in the future, madame," said the king sternly. "it is my express order to you that every possible respect is to be shown in every way to this lady." "oh, to _this_ lady!" with a wave of her hand in her direction. "your majesty's commands are of course our laws. but i must remember that it _is_ this lady, for sometimes one may get confused as to which name it is that your majesty has picked out for honour. to-day it is de maintenon; yesterday it was fontanges; to-morrow--ah, well, who can say who it may be to-morrow?" she was superb in her pride and her fearlessness as she stood, with her sparkling blue eyes and her heaving bosom, looking down upon her royal lover. angry as he was, his gaze lost something of its sternness as it rested upon her round full throat and the delicate lines of her shapely shoulders. there was something very becoming in her passion, in the defiant pose of her dainty head, and the magnificent scorn with which she glanced at her rival. "there is nothing to be gained, madame, by being insolent," said he. "nor is it my custom, sire." "and yet i find your words so." "truth is always mistaken for insolence, sire, at the court of france." "we have had enough of this." "a very little truth is enough." "you forget yourself, madame. i beg that you will leave the room." "i must first remind your majesty that i was so far honoured as to have an appointment this afternoon. at four o'clock i had your royal promise that you would come to me. i cannot doubt that your majesty will keep that promise in spite of the fascinations which you may find here." "i should have come, madame, but the clock, as you may observe, is half an hour slow, and the time had passed before i was aware of it." i beg, sire, that you will not let that distress you. i am returning to my chamber, and five o'clock will suit me as well as four." "i thank you, madame, but i have not found this interview so pleasant that i should seek another." "then your majesty will not come?" "i should prefer not." "in spite of your promise!" "madame!" "you will break your word!" "silence, madame; this is intolerable." "it is indeed intolerable!" cried the angry lady, throwing all discretion to the winds. "oh, i am not afraid of you, sire. i have loved you, but i have never feared you. i leave you here. i leave you with your conscience and your--your lady confessor. but one word of truth you shall hear before i go. you have been false to your wife, and you have been false to your mistress, but it is only now that i find that you can be false also to your word." she swept him an indignant courtesy, and glided, with head erect, out of the room. the king sprang from his chair as if he had been stung. accustomed as he was to his gentle little wife, and the even gentler la valliere, such language as this had never before intruded itself upon the royal ears. it was like a physical blow to him. he felt stunned, humiliated, bewildered, by so unwonted a sensation. what odour was this which mingled for the first time with the incense amid which he lived? and then his whole soul rose up in anger at her, at the woman who had dared to raise her voice against him. that she should be jealous of and insult another woman, that was excusable. it was, in fact, an indirect compliment to himself. but that she should turn upon him, as if they were merely man and woman, instead of monarch and subject, that was too much. he gave an inarticulate cry of rage, and rushed to the door. "sire!" madame de maintenon, who had watched keenly the swift play of his emotions over his expressive face, took two quick steps forward, and laid her hand upon his arm. "i will go after her." "and why, sire?" to forbid her the court." "but, sire--" "you heard her! it is infamous! i shall go." "but, sire, could you not write?" "no, no; i shall see her." he pulled open the door. "oh, sire, be firm, then!" it was with an anxious face that she watched him start off, walking rapidly, with angry gestures, down the corridor. then she turned back, and dropping upon her knees on the _prie-dieu_, bowed her head in prayer for the king, for herself, and for france. de catinat, the guardsman, had employed himself in showing his young friend from over the water all the wonders of the great palace, which the other had examined keenly, and had criticised or admired with an independence of judgment and a native correctness of taste natural to a man whose life had been spent in freedom amid the noblest works of nature. grand as were the mighty fountains and the artificial cascades, they had no overwhelming effect on one who had travelled up from erie to ontario, and had seen the niagara river hurl itself over its precipice, nor were the long level swards so very large to eyes which had rested upon the great plains of the dakotas. the building itself, however, its extent, its height, and the beauty of its stone, filled him with astonishment. "i must bring ephraim savage here," he kept repeating. "he would never believe else that there was one house in the world which would weigh more than all boston and new york put together." de catinat had arranged that the american should remain with his friend major de brissac, as the time had come round for his own second turn of guard. he had hardly stationed himself in the corridor when he was astonished to see the king, without escort or attendants, walking swiftly down the passage. his delicate face was disfigured with anger, and his mouth was set grimly, like that of a man who had taken a momentous resolution. "officer of the guard," said he shortly. "yes, sire." "what! you again, captain de catinat? you have not been on duty since morning?" "no, sire. it is my second guard." "very good. i wish your assistance." "i am at your command, sire." "is there a subaltern here?" "lieutenant de la tremouille is at the side guard." "very well. you will place him in command." "yes, sire." "you will yourself go to monsieur de vivonne. you know his apartments?" "yes, sire." "if he is not there, you must go and seek him. wherever he is, you must find him within the hour." "yes, sire." "you will give him an order from me. at six o'clock he is to be in his carriage at the east gate of the palace. his sister, madame de montespan, will await him there, and he is charged by me to drive her to the chateau of petit bourg. you will tell him that he is answerable to me for her arrival there." "yes, sire." de catinat raised his sword in salute, and started upon his mission. the king passed on down the corridor, and opened a door which led him into a magnificent ante-room, all one blaze of mirrors and gold, furnished to a marvel with the most delicate ebony and silver suite, on a deep red carpet of aleppo, as soft and yielding as the moss of a forest. in keeping with the furniture was the sole occupant of this stately chamber--a little negro boy in a livery of velvet picked out with silver tinsel, who stood as motionless as a small swart statuette against the door which faced that through which the king entered. "is your mistress there?" "she has just returned, sire." "i wish to see her." "pardon, sire, but she--" "is everyone to thwart me to-day?" snarled the king, and taking the little page by his velvet collar, he hurled him to the other side of the room. then, without knocking, he opened the door, and passed on into the lady's boudoir. it was a large and lofty room, very different to that from which he had just come. three long windows from ceiling to floor took up one side, and through the delicate pink-tinted blinds the evening sun cast a subdued and dainty light. great gold candelabra glittered between the mirrors upon the wall, and le brun had expended all his wealth of colouring upon the ceiling, where louis himself, in the character of jove, hurled down his thunder-bolts upon a writhing heap of dutch and palatine titans. pink was the prevailing tone in tapestry, carpet, and furniture, so that the whole room seemed to shine with the sweet tints of the inner side of a shell, and when lit up, as it was then, formed such a chamber as some fairy hero might have built up for his princess. at the further side, prone upon an ottoman, her face buried in the cushion, her beautiful white arms thrown over it, the rich coils of her brown hair hanging in disorder across the long curve of her ivory neck, lay, like a drooping flower, the woman whom he had come to discard. at the sound of the closing door she had glanced up, and then, at the sight of the king, she sprang to her feet and ran towards him, her hands out, her blue eyes bedimmed with tears, her whole beautiful figure softening into womanliness and humility. "ah, sire," she cried, with a pretty little sunburst of joy through her tears, "then i have wronged you! i have wronged you cruelly! you have kept your promise. you were but trying my faith! oh, how could i have said such words to you--how could i pain that noble heart! but you have come after me to tell me that you have forgiven me!" she put her arms forward with the trusting air of a pretty child who claims an embrace as her due, but the king stepped swiftly back from her, and warned her away from him with an angry gesture. "all is over forever between us," he cried harshly. "your brother will await you at the east gate at six o'clock, and it is my command that you wait there until you receive my further orders." she staggered back as if he had struck her. "leave you!" she cried. "you must leave the court." "the court! ay, willingly, this instant! but you! ah, sire, you ask what is impossible." "i do not ask, madame; i order. since you have learned to abuse your position, your presence has become intolerable. the united kings of europe have never dared to speak to me as you have spoken to-day. you have insulted me in my own palace--me, louis, the king. such things are not done twice, madame. your insolence has carried you too far this time. you thought that because i was forbearing, i was therefore weak. it appeared to you that if you only humoured me one moment, you might treat me as if i were your equal the next, for that this poor puppet of a king could always be bent this way or that. you see your mistake now. at six o'clock you leave versailles forever." his eyes flashed, and his small upright figure seemed to swell in the violence of his indignation, while she leaned away from him, one hand across her eyes and one thrown forward, as if to screen her from that angry gaze. "oh, i have been wicked!" she cried. "i know it, i know it!" "i am glad, madame, that you have the grace to acknowledge it." "how could i speak to you so! how could i! oh, that some blight may come upon this unhappy tongue! i, who have had nothing but good from you! i to insult you, who are the author of all my happiness! oh, sire, forgive me, forgive me! for pity's sake forgive me!" louis was by nature a kind-hearted man. his feelings were touched, and his pride also was flattered by the abasement of this beautiful and haughty woman. his other favourites had been amiable to all, but this one was so proud, so unyielding, until she felt his master-hand. his face softened somewhat in its expression as he glanced at her, but he shook his head, and his voice was as firm as ever as he answered. "it is useless, madame," said he. "i have thought this matter over for a long time, and your madness to-day has only hurried what must in any case have taken place. you must leave the palace." "i will leave the palace. say only that you forgive me. oh, sire, i cannot bear your anger. it crushes me down. i am not strong enough. it is not banishment, it is death to which you sentence me. think of our long years of love, sire, and say that you forgive me. i have given up all for your sake--husband, honour, everything. oh, will you not give your anger up for mine? my god, he weeps! oh, i am saved, i am saved!" "no, no, madame," cried the king, dashing his hand across his eyes. "you see the weakness of the man, but you shall also see the firmness of the king. as to your insults to-day, i forgive them freely, if that will make you more happy in your retirement. but i owe a duty to my subjects also, and that duty is to set them an example. we have thought too little of such things. but a time has come when it is necessary to review our past life, and to prepare for that which is to come." "ah, sire, you pain me. you are not yet in the prime of your years, and you speak as though old age were upon you. in a score of years from now it may be time for folk to say that age has made a change in your life." the king winced. "who says so?" he cried angrily. "oh, sire, it slipped from me unawares. think no more of it. nobody says so. nobody." "you are hiding something from me. who is it who says this?" "oh, do not ask me, sire." "you said that it was reported that i had changed my life not through religion, but through stress of years. who said so?" "oh, sire, it was but foolish court gossip, all unworthy of your attention. it was but the empty common talk of cavaliers who had nothing else to say to gain a smile from their ladies." "the common talk?" louis flushed crimson. "have i, then, grown so aged? you have known me for nearly twenty years. do you see such changes in me?" "to me, sire, you are as pleasing and as gracious as when you first won the heart of mademoiselle tonnay-charente." the king smiled as he looked at the beautiful woman before him. "in very truth," said he, "i can say that there has been no such great change in mademoiselle tonnay-charente either. but still it is best that we should part, francoise." "if it will add aught to your happiness, sire, i shall go through it, be it to my death." "now that is the proper spirit." "you have but to name the place, sire--petit bourg, chargny, or my own convent of st. joseph in the faubourg st. germain. what matter where the flower withers, when once the sun has forever turned from it? at least, the past is my own, and i shall live in the remembrance of the days when none had come between us, and when your sweet love was all my own. be happy, sire, be happy, and think no more of what i said about the foolish gossip of the court. your life lies in the future. mine is in the past. adieu, dear sire, adieu!" she threw forward her hands, her eyes dimmed over, and she would have fallen had louis not sprung forward and caught her in his arms. her beautiful head drooped upon his shoulder, her breath was warm upon his cheek, and the subtle scent of her hair was in his nostrils. his arm, as he held her, rose and fell with her bosom, and he felt her heart, beneath his hand, fluttering like a caged bird. her broad white throat was thrown back, her eyes almost closed, her lips just parted enough to show the line of pearly teeth, her beautiful face not three inches from his own. and then suddenly the eyelids quivered, and the great blue eyes looked up at him, lovingly, appealingly, half deprecating, half challenging, her whole soul in a glance. did he move? or was it she? who could tell? but their lips had met in a long kiss, and then in another, and plans and resolutions were streaming away from louis like autumn leaves in the west wind. "then i am not to go? you would not have the heart to send me away, would you?" "no, no; but you must not annoy me, francoise." "i had rather die than cause you an instant of grief. oh, sire, i have seen so little of you lately! and i love you so! it has maddened me. and then that dreadful woman--" "who, then?" "oh, i must not speak against her. i will be civil for your sake even to her, the widow of old scarron." "yes, yes, you must be civil. i cannot have any unpleasantness." "but you will stay with me, sire?" her supple arms coiled themselves round his neck. then she held him for an instant at arm's length to feast her eyes upon his face, and then drew him once more towards her. "you will not leave me, dear sire. it is so long since you have been here." the sweet face, the pink glow in the room, the hush of the evening, all seemed to join in their sensuous influence. louis sank down upon the settee. "i will stay," said he. "and that carriage, dear sire, at the east door?" "i have been very harsh with you, francoise. you will forgive me. have you paper and pencil, that i may countermand the order?" "they are here, sire, upon the side table. i have also a note which, if i may leave you for an instant, i will write in the anteroom." she swept out with triumph in her eyes. it had been a terrible fight, but all the greater the credit of her victory. she took a little pink slip of paper from an inlaid desk, and dashed off a few words upon it. they were: "should madame de maintenon have any message for his majesty, he will be for the next few hours in the room of madame de montespan." this she addressed to her rival, and it was sent on the spot, together with the king's order, by the hands of the little black page. chapter xi. the sun reappears. for nearly a week the king was constant to his new humour. the routine of his life remained unchanged, save that it was the room of the frail beauty, rather than of madame de maintenon, which attracted him in the afternoon. and in sympathy with this sudden relapse into his old life, his coats lost something of their sombre hue, and fawn-colour, buff-colour, and lilac began to replace the blacks and the blues. a little gold lace budded out upon his hats also and at the trimmings of his pockets, while for three days on end his _prie-dieu_ at the royal chapel had been unoccupied. his walk was brisker, and he gave a youthful flourish to his cane as a defiance to those who had seen in his reformation the first symptoms of age. madame had known her man well when she threw out that artful insinuation. and as the king brightened, so all the great court brightened too. the _salons_ began to resume their former splendour, and gay coats and glittering embroidery which had lain in drawers for years were seen once more in the halls of the palace. in the chapel, bourdaloue preached in vain to empty benches, but a ballet in the grounds was attended by the whole court, and received with a frenzy of enthusiasm. the montespan ante-room was crowded every morning with men and women who had some suit to be urged, while her rival's chambers were as deserted as they had been before the king first turned a gracious look upon her. faces which had been long banished the court began to reappear in the corridors and gardens unchecked and unrebuked, while the black cassock of the jesuit and the purple soutane of the bishop were less frequent colours in the royal circle. but the church party, who, if they were the champions of bigotry, were also those of virtue, were never seriously alarmed at this relapse. the grave eyes of priest or of prelate followed louis in his escapade as wary huntsmen might watch a young deer which gambols about in the meadow under the impression that it is masterless, when every gap and path is netted, and it is in truth as much in their hands as though it were lying bound before them. they knew how short a time it would be before some ache, some pain, some chance word, would bring his mortality home to him again, and envelop him once more in those superstitious terrors which took the place of religion in his mind. they waited, therefore, and they silently planned how the prodigal might best be dealt with on his return. to this end it was that his confessor, pere la chaise, and bossuet, the great bishop of meaux, waited one morning upon madame de maintenon in her chamber. with a globe beside her, she was endeavouring to teach geography to the lame due du maine and the mischievous little comte de toulouse, who had enough of their father's disposition to make them averse to learning, and of their mother's to cause them to hate any discipline or restraint. her wonderful tact, however, and her unwearying patience had won the love and confidence even of these little perverse princes, and it was one of madame de montespan's most bitter griefs that not only her royal lover, but even her own children, turned away from the brilliancy and riches of her salon to pass their time in the modest apartment of her rival. madame de maintenon dismissed her two pupils, and received the ecclesiastics with the mixture of affection and respect which was due to those who were not only personal friends, but great lights of the gallican church. she had suffered the minister louvois to sit upon a stool in her presence, but the two chairs were allotted to the priests now, and she insisted upon reserving the humbler seat for herself. the last few days had cast a pallor over her face which spiritualised and refined the features, but she wore unimpaired the expression of sweet serenity which was habitual to her. "i see, my dear daughter, that you have sorrowed," said bossuet, glancing at her with a kindly and yet searching eye. "i have indeed, your grace. all last night i spent in prayer that this trial may pass away from us." "and yet you have no need for fear, madame--none, i assure you. others may think that your influence has ceased; but we, who know the king's heart, we think otherwise. a few days may pass, a few weeks at the most, and once more it will be upon your rising fortunes that every eye in france will turn." the lady's brow clouded, and she glanced at the prelate as though his speech were not altogether to her taste. "i trust that pride does not lead me astray," she said. "but if i can read my own soul aright, there is no thought of myself in the grief which now tears my heart. what is power to me? what do i desire? a little room, leisure for my devotions, a pittance to save me from want--what more can i ask for? why, then, should i covet power? if i am sore at heart, it is not for any poor loss which i have sustained. i think no more of it than of the snapping of one of the threads on yonder tapestry frame. it is for the king i grieve--for the noble heart, the kindly soul, which might rise so high, and which is dragged so low, like a royal eagle with some foul weight which ever hampers its flight. it is for him and for france that my days are spent in sorrow and my nights upon my knees." "for all that, my daughter, you are ambitious." it was the jesuit who had spoken. his voice was clear and cold, and his piercing gray eyes seemed to read into the depths of her soul. "you may be right, father. god guard me from self-esteem. and yet i do not think that i am. the king, in his goodness, has offered me titles-- i have refused them; money--i have returned it. he has deigned to ask my advice in matters of state, and i have withheld it. where, then, is my ambition?" "in your heart, my daughter. but it is not a sinful ambition. it is not an ambition of this world. would you not love to turn the king towards good?" "i would give my life for it." "and there is your ambition. ah, can i not read your noble soul? would you not love to see the church reign pure and serene over all this realm--to see the poor housed, the needy helped, the wicked turned from their ways, and the king ever the leader in all that is noble and good? would you not love that, my daughter?" her cheeks had flushed, and her eyes shone as she looked at the gray face of the jesuit, and saw the picture which his words had conjured up before her. "ah, that would be joy indeed!" she cried. "and greater joy still to know, not from the mouths of the people, but from the voice of your own heart in the privacy of your chamber, that you had been the cause of it, that your influence had brought this blessing upon the king and upon the country." "i would die to do it." "we wish you to do what may be harder. we wish you to live to do it." "ah!" she glanced from one to the other with questioning eyes. "my daughter," said bossuet solemnly, leaning forward, with his broad white hand outstretched and his purple pastoral ring sparkling in the sunlight, "it is time for plain speaking. it is in the interests of the church that we do it. none hear, and none shall ever hear, what passes between us now. regard us, if you will, as two confessors, with whom your secret is inviolable. i call it a secret, and yet it is none to us, for it is our mission to read the human heart. you love the king." "your grace!" she started, and a warm blush, mantling up in her pale cheeks, deepened and spread until it tinted her white forehead and her queenly neck. "you love the king." "your grace--father!" she turned in confusion from one to the other. "there is no shame in loving, my daughter. the shame lies only in yielding to love. i say again that you love the king." "at least i have never told him so," she faltered. "and will you never?" "may heaven wither my tongue first!" "but consider, my daughter. such love in a soul like yours is heaven's gift, and sent for some wise purpose. this human love is too often but a noxious weed which blights the soil it grows in, but here it is a gracious flower, all fragrant with humility and virtue." "alas! i have tried to tear it from my heart." "nay; rather hold it firmly rooted there. did the king but meet with some tenderness from you, some sign that his own affection met with an answer from your heart, it might be that this ambition which you profess would be secured, and that louis, strengthened by the intimate companionship of your noble nature, might live in the spirit as well as in the forms of the church. all this might spring from the love which you hide away as though it bore the brand of shame." the lady half rose, glancing from the prelate to the priest with eyes which had a lurking horror in their depths. "can i have understood you!" she gasped. "what meaning lies behind these words? you cannot counsel me to--" the jesuit had risen, and his spare figure towered above her. "my daughter, we give no counsel which is unworthy of our office. we speak for the interests of holy church, and those interests demand that you should marry the king." "marry the king!" the little room swam round her. "marry the king!" "there lies the best hope for the future. we see in you a second jeanne d'arc, who will save both france and france's king." madame sat silent for a few moments. her face had regained its composure, and her eyes were bent vacantly upon her tapestry frame as she turned over in her mind all that was involved in the suggestion. "but surely--surely this could never be," she said at last, "why should we plan that which can never come to pass?" "and why?" "what king of france has married a subject? see how every princess of europe stretches out her hand to him. the queen of france must be of queenly blood, even as the last was." "all this may be overcome." "and then there are the reasons of state. if the king marry, it should be to form a powerful alliance, to cement a friendship with a neighbour nation, or to gain some province which may be the bride's dowry. what is my dowry? a widow's pension and a work-box." she laughed bitterly, and yet glanced eagerly at her companions, as one who wished to be confuted. "your dowry, my daughter, would be those gifts of body and of mind with which heaven has endowed you. the king has money enough, and the king has provinces enough. as to the state, how can the state be better served than by the assurance that the king will be saved in future from such sights as are to be seen in this palace to-day?" "oh, if it could be so! but think, father, think of those about him-- the dauphin, monsieur his brother, his ministers. you know how little this would please them, and how easy it is for them to sway his mind. no, no; it is a dream, father, and it can never be." the faces of the two ecclesiastics, who had dismissed her other objections with a smile and a wave, clouded over at this, as though she had at last touched upon the real obstacle. "my daughter," said the jesuit gravely, "that is a matter which you may leave to the church. it may be that we, too, have some power over the king's mind, and that we may lead him in the right path, even though those of his own blood would fain have it otherwise. the future only can show with whom the power lies. but you? love and duty both draw you one way now, and the church may count upon you." "to my last breath, father." "and you upon the church. it will serve you, if you in turn will but serve it." "what higher wish could i have?" "you will be our daughter, our queen, our champion, and you will heal the wounds of the suffering church." "ah! if i could!" "but you can. while there is heresy within the land there can be no peace or rest for the faithful. it is the speck of mould which will in time, if it be not pared off, corrupt the whole fruit." "what would you have, then, father?" "the huguenots must go. they must be driven forth. the goats must be divided from the sheep. the king is already in two minds. louvois is our friend now. if you are with us, then all will be well." "but, father, think how many there are!" "the more reason that they should be dealt with." "and think, too, of their sufferings should they be driven forth." "their cure lies in their own hands." "that is true. and yet my heart softens for them." pere la chaise and the bishop shook their heads. nature had made them both kind and charitable men, but the heart turns to flint when the blessing of religion is changed to the curse of sect. "you would befriend god's enemies then?" "no, no; not if they are indeed so." "can you doubt it? is it possible that your heart still turns towards the heresy of your youth?" "no, father; but it is not in nature to forget that my father and my grandfather--" "nay, they have answered for their own sins. is it possible that the church has been mistaken in you? do you then refuse the first favour which she asks of you? you would accept her aid, and yet you would give none in return." madame de maintenon rose with the air of one who has made her resolution. "you are wiser than i," said she, "and to you have been committed the interests of the church. i will do what you advise." "you promise it?" "i do." her two visitors threw up their hands together. "it is a blessed day," they cried, "and generations yet unborn will learn to deem it so." she sat half stunned by the prospect which was opening out in front of her. ambitious she had, as the jesuit had surmised, always been-- ambitious for the power which would enable her to leave the world better than she found it. and this ambition she had already to some extent been able to satisfy, for more than once she had swayed both king and kingdom. but to marry the king--to marry the man for whom she would gladly lay down her life, whom in the depths of her heart she loved in as pure and as noble a fashion as woman ever yet loved man--that was indeed a thing above her utmost hopes. she knew her own mind, and she knew his. once his wife, she could hold him to good, and keep every evil influence away from him. she was sure of it. she should be no weak maria theresa, but rather, as the priest had said, a new jeanne d'arc, come to lead france and france's king into better ways. and if, to gain this aim, she had to harden her heart against the huguenots, at least the fault, if there were one, lay with those who made this condition rather than with herself. the king's wife! the heart of the woman and the soul of the enthusiast both leaped at the thought. but close at the heels of her joy there came a sudden revulsion to doubt and despondency. was not all this fine prospect a mere day-dream? and how could these men be so sure that they held the king in the hollow of their hand? the jesuit read the fears which dulled the sparkle of her eyes, and answered her thoughts before she had time to put them into words. "the church redeems its pledges swiftly," said he. "and you, my daughter, you must be as prompt when your own turn comes." "i have promised, father." "then it is for us to perform. you will remain in your room all evening." "yes, father." "the king already hesitates. i spoke with him this morning, and his mind was full of blackness and despair. his better self turns in disgust from his sins, and it is now when the first hot fit of repentance is just coming upon him that he may best be moulded to our ends. i have to see and speak with him once more, and i go from your room to his. and when i have spoken, he will come from his room to yours, or i have studied his heart for twenty years in vain. we leave you now, and you will not see us, but you will see the effects of what we do, and you will remember your pledge to us." they bowed low to her both together, and left her to her thoughts. an hour passed, and then a second one, as she sat in her _fauteuil_, her tapestry before her, but her hands listless upon her lap, waiting for her fate. her life's future was now being settled for her, and she was powerless to turn it in one way or the other. daylight turned to the pearly light of evening, and that again to dusk, but she still sat waiting in the shadow. sometimes as a step passed in the corridor she would glance expectantly towards the door, and the light of welcome would spring up in her gray eyes, only to die away again into disappointment. at last, however, there came a quick sharp tread, crisp and authoritative, which brought her to her feet with flushed cheeks and her heart beating wildly. the door opened, and she saw outlined against the gray light of the outer passage the erect and graceful figure of the king. "sire! one instant, and mademoiselle will light the lamp." "do not call her." he entered and closed the door behind him. "francoise, the dusk is welcome to me, because it screens me from the reproaches which must lie in your glance, even if your tongue be too kindly to speak them." "reproaches, sire! god forbid that i should utter them!" "when i last left you, francoise, it was with a good resolution in my mind. i tried to carry it out, and i failed--i failed. i remember that you warned me. fool that i was not to follow your advice!" "we are all weak and mortal, sire. who has not fallen? nay, sire, it goes to my heart to see you thus." he was standing by the fireplace, his face buried in his hands, and she could tell by the catch of his breath that he was weeping. all the pity of her woman's nature went out to that silent and repenting figure dimly seen in the failing light. she put out her hand with a gesture of sympathy, and it rested for an instant upon his velvet sleeve. the next he had clasped it between his own, and she made no effort to release it. "i cannot do without you, francoise," he cried. "i am the loneliest man in all this world, like one who lives on a great mountain-peak, with none to bear him company. who have i for a friend? whom can i rely upon? some are for the church; some are for their families; most are for themselves. but who of them all is single-minded? you are my better self, francoise; you are my guardian angel. what the good father says is true, and the nearer i am to you the further am i from all that is evil. tell me, francoise, do you love me?" "i have loved you for years, sire." her voice was low but clear--the voice of a woman to whom coquetry was abhorrent. "i had hoped it, francoise, and yet it thrills me to hear you say it. i know that wealth and title have no attraction for you, and that your heart turns rather towards the convent than the palace. yet i ask you to remain in the palace, and to reign there. will you be my wife, francoise?" and so the moment had in very truth come. she paused for an instant, only an instant, before taking this last great step; but even that was too long for the patience of the king. "will you not, francoise?" he cried, with a ring of fear in his voice. "may god make me worthy of such an honour, sire!" said she. "and here i swear that if heaven double my life, every hour shall be spent in the one endeavour to make you a happier man!" she had knelt down, and the king, still holding her hand, knelt down beside her. "and i swear too," he cried, "that if my days also are doubled, you will now and forever be the one and only woman for me." and so their double oath was taken, an oath which was to be tested in the future, for each did live almost double their years, and yet neither broke the promise made hand in hand on that evening in the shadow-girt chamber. chapter xii. the king receives. it may have been that mademoiselle nanon, the faithful _confidante_ of madame de maintenon, had learned something of this interview, or it may be that pere la chaise, with the shrewdness for which his order is famous, had come to the conclusion that publicity was the best means of holding the king to his present intention; but whatever the source, it was known all over the court next day that the old favourite was again in disgrace, and that there was talk of a marriage between the king and the governess of his children. it was whispered at the _petit lever_, confirmed at the _grand entree_, and was common gossip by the time that the king had returned from chapel. back into wardrobe and drawer went the flaring silks and the feathered hats, and out once more came the sombre coat and the matronly dress. scudery and calpernedi gave place to the missal and st. thomas a kempis, while bourdaloue, after preaching for a week to empty benches, found his chapel packed to the last seat with weary gentlemen and taper-bearing ladies. by midday there was none in the court who had not heard the tidings, save only madame de montespan, who, alarmed by her lover's absence, had remained in haughty seclusion in her room, and knew nothing of what had passed. many there were who would have loved to carry her the tidings; but the king's changes had been frequent of late, and who would dare to make a mortal enemy of one who might, ere many weeks were past, have the lives and fortunes of the whole court in the hollow of her hand? louis, in his innate selfishness, had been so accustomed to regard every event entirely from the side of how it would affect himself, that it had never struck him that his long-suffering family, who had always yielded to him the absolute obedience which he claimed as his right, would venture to offer any opposition to his new resolution. he was surprised, therefore, when his brother demanded a private interview that afternoon, and entered his presence without the complaisant smile and humble air with which he was wont to appear before him. monsieur was a curious travesty of his elder brother. he was shorter, but he wore enormously high boot-heels, which brought him to a fair stature. in figure he had none of that grace which marked the king, nor had he the elegant hand and foot which had been the delight of sculptors. he was fat, waddled somewhat in his walk, and wore an enormous black wig, which rolled down in rows and rows of curls over his shoulders. his face was longer and darker than the king's, and his nose more prominent, though he shared with his brother the large brown eyes which each had inherited from anne of austria. he had none of the simple and yet stately taste which marked the dress of the monarch, but his clothes were all tagged over with fluttering ribbons, which rustled behind him as he walked, and clustered so thickly over his feet as to conceal them from view. crosses, stars, jewels, and insignia were scattered broadcast over his person, and the broad blue ribbon of the order of the holy ghost was slashed across his coat, and was gathered at the end into a great bow, which formed the incongruous support of a diamond-hilted sword. such was the figure which rolled towards the king, bearing in his right hand his many-feathered beaver, and appearing in his person, as he was in his mind, an absurd burlesque of the monarch. "why, monsieur, you seem less gay than usual to-day," said the king, with a smile. "your dress, indeed, is bright, but your brow is clouded. i trust that all is well with madame and with the duc de chartres?" "yes, sire, they are well; but they are sad like myself, and from the same cause." "indeed! and why?" "have i ever failed in my duty as your younger brother, sire?" "never, philippe, never!" said the king, laying his hand affectionately upon the other's shoulder. "you have set an excellent example to my subjects." "then why set a slight upon me?" "philippe!" "yes, sire, i say it is a slight. we are of royal blood, and our wives are of royal blood also. you married the princess of spain; i married the princess of bavaria. it was a condescension, but still i did it. my first wife was the princess of england. how can we admit into a house which has formed such alliances as these a woman who is the widow of a hunchback singer, a mere lampooner, a man whose name is a byword through europe?" the king had stared in amazement at his brother, but his anger now overcame his astonishment. "upon my word!" he cried; "upon my word! i have said just now that you have been an excellent brother, but i fear that i spoke a little prematurely. and so you take upon yourself to object to the lady whom i select as my wife!" "i do, sire." "and by what right?" "by the right of the family honour, sire, which is as much mine as yours." "man," cried the king furiously, "have you not yet learned that within this kingdom i am the fountain of honour, and that whomsoever i may honour becomes by that very fact honourable? were i to take a cinder-wench out of the rue poissonniere, i could at my will raise her up until the highest in france would be proud to bow down before her. do you not know this?" "no, i do not," cried his brother, with all the obstinacy of a weak man who has at last been driven to bay. "i look upon it as a slight upon me and a slight upon my wife." "your wife! i have every respect for charlotte elizabeth of bavaria, but how is she superior to one whose grandfather was the dear friend and comrade in arms of henry the great? enough! i will not condescend to argue such a matter with you! begone, and do not return to my presence until you have learned not to interfere in my affairs." "for all that, my wife shall not know her!" snarled monsieur; and then, as his brother took a fiery step or two towards him, he turned and scuttled out of the room as fast as his awkward gait and high heels would allow him. but the king was to have no quiet that day. if madame de maintenon's friends had rallied to her yesterday, her enemies were active to-day. monsieur had hardly disappeared before there rushed into the room a youth who bore upon his rich attire every sign of having just arrived from a dusty journey. he was pale-faced and auburn-haired, with features which would have been strikingly like the king's if it were not that his nose had been disfigured in his youth. the king's face had lighted up at the sight of him, but it darkened again as he hurried forward and threw himself down at his feet. "oh, sire," he cried, "spare us this grief--spare us this humiliation! i implore you to pause before you do what will bring dishonour upon yourself and upon us!" the king started back from him, and paced angrily up and down the room. "this is intolerable!" he cried. "it was bad from my brother, but worse from my son. you are in a conspiracy with him, louis. monsieur has told you to act this part." the dauphin rose to his feet and looked steadfastly at his angry father. "i have not seen my uncle," he said. "i was at meudon when i heard this news--this dreadful news--and i sprang upon my horse, sire, and galloped over to implore you to think again before you drag our royal house so low." "you are insolent, louis." "i do not mean to be so, sire. but consider, sire, that my mother was a queen, and that it would be strange indeed if for a step-mother i had a--" the king raised his hand with a gesture of authority which checked the word upon his lips. "silence!" he cried, "or you may say that which would for ever set a gulf between us. am i to be treated worse than my humblest subject, who is allowed to follow his own bent in his private affairs?" "this is not your own private affair, sire; all that you do reflects upon your family. the great deeds of your reign have given a new glory to the name of bourbon. oh, do not mar it now, sire! i implore it of you upon my bended knees!" "you talk like a fool!" cried his father roughly. "i propose to marry a virtuous and charming lady of one of the oldest noble families of france, and you talk as if i were doing something degrading and unheard of. what is your objection to this lady?" "that she is the daughter of a man whose vices were well known, that her brother is of the worst repute, that she has led the life of an adventuress, is the widow of a deformed scribbler, and that she occupies a menial position in the palace." the king had stamped with his foot upon the carpet more than once during this frank address, but his anger blazed into a fury at its conclusion. "do you dare," he cried, with flashing eyes, "to call the charge of my children a menial position? i say that there is no higher in the kingdom. go back to meudon, sir, this instant, and never dare to open your mouth again on the subject. away, i say! when, in god's good time, you are king of this country, you may claim your own way, but until then do not venture to cross the plans of one who is both your parent and your monarch." the young man bowed low, and walked with dignity from the chamber; but he turned with his hand upon the door. "the abbe fenelon came with me, sire. is it your pleasure to see him?" "away! away!" cried the king furiously, still striding up and down the room with angry face and flashing eyes. the dauphin left the cabinet, and was instantly succeeded by a tall thin priest, some forty years of age, strikingly handsome, with a pale refined face, large well-marked features, and the easy deferential bearing of one who has had a long training in courts. the king turned sharply upon him, and looked hard at him with a distrustful eye. "good-day, abbe fenelon," said he. "may i ask what the object of this interview is?" "you have had the condescension, sire, on more than one occasion, to ask my humble advice, and even to express yourself afterwards as being pleased that you had acted upon it." "well? well? well?" growled the monarch. "if rumour says truly, sire, you are now at a crisis when a word of impartial counsel might be of value to you. need i say that it would--" "tut! tut! why all these words?" cried the king. "you have been sent here by others to try and influence me against madame de maintenon." "sire, i have had nothing but kindness from that lady. i esteem and honour her more than any lady in france." "in that case, abbe, you will, i am sure, be glad to hear that i am about to marry her. good-day, abbe. i regret that i have not longer time to devote to this very interesting conversation." "but, sire--" "when my mind is in doubt, abbe, i value your advice very highly. on this occasion my mind is happily _not_ in doubt. i have the honour to wish you a very good-day." the king's first hot anger had died away by now, and had left behind it a cold, bitter spirit which was even more formidable to his antagonists. the abbe, glib of tongue and fertile of resource as he was, felt himself to be silenced and overmatched. he walked backwards, with three long bows, as was the custom of the court, and departed. but the king had little breathing space. his assailants knew that with persistence they had bent his will before, and they trusted that they might do so again. it was louvois, the minister, now who entered the room, with his majestic port, his lofty bearing, his huge wig, and his aristocratic face, which, however, showed some signs of trepidation as it met the baleful eye of the king. "well, louvois, what now?" he asked impatiently. "has some new state matter arisen?" "there is but one new state matter which has arisen, sire, but it is of such importance as to banish all others from our mind." "what then?" "your marriage, sire." "you disapprove of it?" "oh, sire, can i help it?" "out of my room, sir! am i to be tormented to death by your importunities? what! you dare to linger when i order you to go!" the king advanced angrily upon the minister, but louvois suddenly flashed out his rapier. louis sprang back with alarm and amazement upon his face, but it was the hilt and not the point which was presented to him. "pass it through my heart, sire!" the minister cried, falling upon his knees, his whole great frame in a quiver with emotion. "i will not live to see your glory fade!" "great heaven!" shrieked louis, throwing the sword down upon the ground, and raising his hands to his temples, "i believe that this is a conspiracy to drive me mad. was ever a man so tormented in his life? this will be a private marriage, man, and it will not affect the state in the least degree. do you hear me? have you understood me? what more do you want?" louvois gathered himself up, and shot his rapier back into its sheath. "your majesty is determined?" he asked. "absolutely." "then i say no more. i have done my duty." he bowed his head as one in deep dejection when he departed, but in truth his heart was lightened within him, for he had the king's assurance that the woman whom he hated would, even though his wife, not sit on the throne of the queens of france. these repeated attacks, if they had not shaken the king's resolution, had at least irritated and exasperated him to the utmost. such a blast of opposition was a new thing to a man whose will had been the one law of the land. it left him ruffled and disturbed, and without regretting his resolution, he still, with unreasoning petulance, felt inclined to visit the inconvenience to which he had been put upon those whose advice he had followed. he wore accordingly no very cordial face when the usher in attendance admitted the venerable figure of father la chaise, his confessor. "i wish you all happiness, sire," said the jesuit, "and i congratulate you from my heart that you have taken the great step which must lead to content both in this world and the next." "i have had neither happiness nor contentment yet, father," answered the king peevishly. "i have never been so pestered in my life. the whole court has been on its knees to me to entreat me to change my intention." the jesuit looked at him anxiously out of his keen gray eyes. "fortunately, your majesty is a man of strong will," said he, "and not to be so easily swayed as they think." "no, no, i did not give an inch. but still, it must be confessed that it is very unpleasant to have so many against one. i think that most men would have been shaken." "now is the time to stand firm, sire; satan rages to see you passing out of his power, and he stirs up all his friends and sends all his emissaries to endeavour to detain you." but the king was not in a humour to be easily consoled. "upon my word, father," said he, "you do not seem to have much respect for my family. my brother and my son, with the abbe fenelon and the minister of war, are the emissaries to whom you allude." "then there is the more credit to your majesty for having resisted them. you have done nobly, sire. you have earned the praise and blessing of holy church." "i trust that what i have done is right, father," said the king gravely. "i should be glad to see you again later in the evening, but at present i desire a little leisure for solitary thought." father la chaise left the cabinet with a deep distrust of the king's intentions. it was obvious that the powerful appeals which had been made to him had shaken if they had failed to alter his resolution. what would be the result if more were made? and more would be made; that was as certain as that darkness follows light. some master-card must be played now which would bring the matter to a crisis at once, for every day of delay was in favour of their opponents. to hesitate was to lose. all must be staked upon one final throw. the bishop of meaux was waiting in the ante-room, and father la chaise in a few brief words let him see the danger of the situation and the means by which they should meet it. together they sought madame de maintenon in her room. she had discarded the sombre widow's dress which she had chosen since her first coming to court, and wore now, as more in keeping with her lofty prospects, a rich yet simple costume of white satin with bows of silver serge. a single diamond sparkled in the thick coils of her dark tresses. the change had taken years from a face and figure which had always looked much younger than her age, and as the two plotters looked upon her perfect complexion, her regular features, so calm and yet so full of refinement, and the exquisite grace of her figure and bearing, they could not but feel that if they failed in their ends, it was not for want of having a perfect tool at their command. she had risen at their entrance, and her expression showed that she had read upon their faces something of the anxiety which filled their minds. "you have evil news!" she cried. "no, no, my daughter." it was the bishop who spoke. "but we must be on our guard against our enemies, who would turn the king away from you if they could." her face shone at the mention of her lover. "ah, you do not know!" she cried. "he has made a vow. i would trust him as i would trust myself. i know that he will be true." but the jesuit's intellect was arrayed against the intuition of the woman. "our opponents are many and strong," said he shaking his head. "even if the king remain firm, he will be annoyed at every turn, so that he will feel his life is darker instead of lighter, save, of course, madame, for that brightness which you cannot fail to bring with you. we must bring the matter to an end." "and how, father?" "the marriage must be at once!" "at once!" "yes. this very night, if possible." "oh, father, you ask too much. the king would never consent to such a proposal." "it is he that will propose it." "and why?" "because we shall force him to. it is only thus that all the opposition can be stopped. when it is done, the court will accept it. until it is done, they will resist it." "what would you have me do, then, father?" "resign the king." "resign him!" she turned as pale as a lily, and looked at him in bewilderment. "it is the best course, madame." "ah, father, i might have done it last month, last week, even yesterday morning. but now--oh, it would break my heart!" "fear not, madame. we advise you for the best. go to the king now, at once. say to him that you have heard that he has been subjected to much annoyance upon your account, that you cannot bear to think that you should be a cause of dissension in his own family, and therefore you will release him from his promise, and will withdraw yourself from the court forever." "go now? at once?" "yes, without loss of an instant." she cast a light mantle about her shoulders. "i follow your advice," she said. "i believe that you are wiser than i. but, oh, if he should take me at my word!" "he will not take you at your word." "it is a terrible risk." "but such an end as this cannot be gained without risks. go, my child, and may heaven's blessing go with you!" chapter xiii. the king has ideas. the king had remained alone in his cabinet, wrapped in somewhat gloomy thoughts, and pondering over the means by which he might carry out his purpose and yet smooth away the opposition which seemed to be so strenuous and so universal. suddenly there came a gentle tap at the door, and there was the woman who was in his thoughts, standing in the twilight before him. he sprang to his feet and held out his hands with a smile which would have reassured her had she doubted his constancy. "francoise! you here! then i have at last a welcome visitor, and it is the first one to-day." "sire, i fear that you have been troubled." "i have indeed, francoise." "but i have a remedy for it." "and what is that?" "i shall leave the court, sire, and you shall think no more of what has passed between us. i have brought discord where i meant to bring peace. let me retire to st. cyr, or to the abbey of fontevrault, and you will no longer be called upon to make such sacrifices for my sake." the king turned deathly pale, and clutched at her shawl with a trembling hand, as though he feared that she was about to put her resolution into effect that very instant. for years his mind had accustomed itself to lean upon hers. he had turned to her whenever he needed support, and even when, as in the last week, he had broken away from her for a time, it was still all-important to him to know that she was there, the faithful friend, ever forgiving, ever soothing, waiting for him with her ready counsel and sympathy. but that she should leave him now, leave him altogether, such a thought had never occurred to him, and it struck him with a chill of surprised alarm. "you cannot mean it, francoise," he cried, in a trembling voice. "no, no, it is impossible that you are in earnest." "it would break my heart to leave you, sire, but it breaks it also to think that for my sake you are estranged from your own family and ministers." "tut! am i not the king? shall i not take my own course without heed to them? no, no, francoise, you must not leave me! you must stay with me and be my wife." he could hardly speak for agitation, and he still grasped at her dress to detain her. she had been precious to him before, but was far more so now that there seemed to be a possibility of his losing her. she felt the strength of her position, and used it to the utmost. "some time must elapse before our wedding, sire. yet during all that interval you will be exposed to these annoyances. how can i be happy when i feel that i have brought upon you so long a period of discomfort?" "and why should it be so long, francoise?" "a day would be too long, sire, for you to be unhappy through my fault. it is a misery to me to think of it. believe me, it would be better that i should leave you." "never! you shall not! why should we even wait a day, francoise? i am ready. you are ready. why should we not be married now?" "at once! oh, sire!" "we shall. it is my wish. it is my order. that is my answer to those who would drive me. they shall know nothing of it until it is done, and then let us see which of them will dare to treat my wife with anything but respect. let it be done secretly, francoise. i will send in a trusty messenger this very night for the archbishop of paris, and i swear that, if all france stand in the way, he shall make us man and wife before he departs." "is it your will, sire?" "it is; and ah, i can see by your eyes that it is yours also! we shall not lose a moment, francoise. what a blessed thought of mine, which will silence their tongues forever! when it is ready they may know, but not before. to your room, then, dearest of friends and truest of women! when we meet again, it will be to form a bond which all this court and all this kingdom shall not be able to loose." the king was all on fire with the excitement of this new resolution. he had lost his air of doubt and discontent, and he paced swiftly about the room with a smiling face and shining eyes. then he touched a small gold bell, which summoned bontems, his private body-servant. "what o'clock is it, bontems?" "it is nearly six, sire." "hum!" the king considered for some moments. "do you know where captain de catinat is, bontems?" "he was in the grounds, sire, but i heard that he would ride back to paris to-night." "does he ride alone?" "he has one friend with him." "who is this friend? an officer of the guards?" "no, sire; it is a stranger from over the seas, from america, as i understand, who has stayed with him of late, and to whom monsieur de catinat has been showing the wonders of your majesty's palace." "a stranger! so much the better. go, bontems, and bring them both to me." "i trust that they have not started, sire. i will see." he hurried off, and was back in ten minutes in the cabinet once more. "well?" "i have been fortunate, sire. their horses had been led out and their feet were in the stirrups when i reached them." "where are they, then?" "they await your majesty's orders in the ante-room." "show them in, bontems, and give admission to none, not even to the minister, until they have left me." to de catinat an audience with the monarch was a common incident of his duties, but it was with profound astonishment that he learned from bontems that his friend and companion was included in the order. he was eagerly endeavouring to whisper into the young american's ear some precepts and warnings as to what to do and what to avoid, when bontems reappeared and ushered them into the presence. it was with a feeling of curiosity, not unmixed with awe, that amos green, to whom governor dongan, of new york, had been the highest embodiment of human power, entered the private chamber of the greatest monarch in christendom. the magnificence of the ante-chamber in which he had waited, the velvets, the paintings, the gildings, with the throng of gaily dressed officials and of magnificent guardsmen, had all impressed his imagination, and had prepared him for some wondrous figure robed and crowned, a fit centre for such a scene. as his eyes fell upon a quietly dressed, bright-eyed man, half a head shorter than himself, with a trim dapper figure, and an erect carriage, he could not help glancing round the room to see if this were indeed the monarch, or if it were some other of those endless officials who interposed themselves between him and the other world. the reverent salute of his companion, however, showed him that this must indeed be the king, so he bowed and then drew himself erect with the simple dignity of a man who has been trained in nature's school. "good-evening, captain de catinat," said the king, with a pleasant smile. "your friend, as i understand, is a stranger to this country. i trust, sir, that you have found something here to interest and to amuse you?" "yes, your majesty. i have seen your great city, and it is a wonderful one. and my friend has shown me this palace, with its woods and its grounds. when i go back to my own country i will have much to say of what i have seen in your beautiful land." "you speak french, and yet you are not a canadian." "no, sire; i am from the english provinces." the king looked with interest at the powerful figure, the bold features, and the free bearing of the young foreigner, and his mind flashed back to the dangers which the comte de frontenac had foretold from these same colonies. if this were indeed a type of his race, they must in truth be a people whom it would be better to have as friends than as enemies. his mind, however, ran at present on other things than statecraft, and he hastened to give de catinat his orders for the night. "you will ride into paris on my service. your friend can go with you. two are safer than one when they bear a message of state. i wish you, however, to wait until nightfall before you start." "yes, sire." "let none know your errand, and see that none follow you. you know the house of archbishop harlay, prelate of paris?" "yes, sire." "you will bid him drive out hither and be at the north-west side postern by midnight. let nothing hold him back. storm or fine, he must he here to-night. it is of the first importance." "he shall have your order, sire." "very good. adieu, captain. adieu, monsieur. i trust that your stay in france may be a pleasant one." he waved his hand, smiling with the fascinating grace which had won so many hearts, and so dismissed the two friends to their new mission. chapter xiv. the last card. madame de montespan still kept to her rooms, uneasy in mind at the king's disappearance, but unwilling to show her anxiety to the court by appearing among them or by making any inquiry as to what had occurred. while she thus remained in ignorance of the sudden and complete collapse of her fortunes, she had one active and energetic agent who had lost no incident of what had occurred, and who watched her interests with as much zeal as if they were his own. and indeed they were his own; for her brother, monsieur de vivonne, had gained everything for which he yearned, money, lands, and preferment, through his sister's notoriety, and he well knew that the fall of her fortunes must be very rapidly followed by that of his own. by nature bold, unscrupulous, and resourceful, he was not a man to lose the game without playing it out to the very end with all the energy and cunning of which he was capable. keenly alert to all that passed, he had, from the time that he first heard the rumour of the king's intention, haunted the antechamber and drawn his own conclusions from what he had seen. nothing had escaped him--the disconsolate faces of monsieur and of the dauphin, the visit of pere la chaise and bossuet to the lady's room, her return, the triumph which shone in her eyes as she came away from the interview. he had seen bontems hurry off and summon the guardsman and his friend. he had heard them order their horses to be brought out in a couple of hours' time, and finally, from a spy whom he employed among the servants, he learned that an unwonted bustle was going forward in madame de maintenon's room, that mademoiselle nanon was half wild with excitement, and that two court milliners had been hastily summoned to madame's apartment. it was only, however, when he heard from the same servant that a chamber was to be prepared for the reception that night of the archbishop of paris that he understood how urgent was the danger. madame de montespan had spent the evening stretched upon a sofa, in the worst possible humour with everyone around her. she had read, but had tossed aside the book. she had written, but had torn up the paper. a thousand fears and suspicions chased each other through her head. what had become of the king, then? he had seemed cold yesterday, and his eyes had been for ever sliding round to the clock. and to-day he had not come at all. was it his gout, perhaps? or was it possible that she was again losing her hold upon him? surely it could not be that! she turned upon her couch and faced the mirror which flanked the door. the candles had just been lit in her chamber, two score of them, each with silver backs which reflected their light until the room was as bright as day. there in the mirror was the brilliant chamber, the deep red ottoman, and the single figure in its gauzy dress of white and silver. she leaned upon her elbow, admiring the deep tint of her own eyes with their long dark lashes, the white curve of her throat, and the perfect oval of her face. she examined it all carefully, keenly, as though it were her rival that lay before her, but nowhere could she see a scratch of time's malicious nails. she still had her beauty, then. and if it had once won the king, why should it not suffice to hold him? of course it would do so. she reproached herself for her fears. doubtless he was indisposed, or perhaps he would come still. ha! there was the sound of an opening door and of a quick step in her ante-room. was it he, or at least his messenger with a note from him? but no, it was her brother, with the haggard eyes and drawn face of a man who is weighed down with his own evil tidings. he turned as he entered, fastened the door, and then striding across the room, locked the other one which led to her boudoir. "we are safe from interruption," he panted. "i have hastened here, for every second may be invaluable. have you heard anything from the king?" "nothing." she had sprung to her feet, and was gazing at him with a face which was as pale as his own. "the hour has come for action, francoise. it is the hour at which the mortemarts have always shown at their best. do not yield to the blow, then, but gather yourself to meet it." "what is it?" she tried to speak in her natural tone, but only a whisper came to her dry lips. "the king is about to marry madame de maintenon." "the _gouvernante_! the widow scarron! it is impossible!" "it is certain." "to marry? did you say to marry?" "yes, he will marry her." the woman flung out her hands in a gesture of contempt, and laughed loud and bitterly. "you are easily frightened, brother," said she. "ah, you do not know your little sister. perchance if you were not my brother you might rate my powers more highly. give me a day, only one little day, and you will see louis, the proud louis, down at the hem of my dress to ask my pardon for this slight. i tell you that he cannot break the bonds that hold him. one day is all i ask to bring him back." "but you cannot have it." "what?" "the marriage is to-night." "you are mad, charles." "i am certain of it." in a few broken sentences he shot out all that he had seen and heard. she listened with a grim face, and hands which closed ever tighter and tighter as he proceeded. but he had said the truth about the mortemarts. they came of a contentious blood, and were ever at their best at a moment of action. hate rather than dismay filled her heart as she listened, and the whole energy of her nature gathered and quickened to meet the crisis. "i shall go and see him," she cried, sweeping towards the door. "no, no, francoise. believe me, you will ruin everything if you do. strict orders have been given to the guard to admit no one to the king." "but i shall insist upon passing them." "believe me, sister, it is worse than useless. i have spoken with the officer of the guard, and the command is a stringent one." "ah, i shall manage." "no, you shall not." he put his back against the door. "i know that it is useless, and i will not have my sister make herself the laughing-stock of the court, trying to force her way into the room of a man who repulses her." his sister's cheeks flushed at the words, and she paused irresolute. "had i only a day, charles, i am sure that i could bring him back to me. there has been some other influence here, that meddlesome jesuit or the pompous bossuet, perhaps. only one day to counteract their wiles! can i not see them waving hell-fire before his foolish eyes, as one swings a torch before a bull to turn it? oh, if i could but baulk them to-night! that woman! that cursed woman! the foul viper which i nursed in my bosom! oh, i had rather see louis in his grave than married to her! charles, charles, it must be stopped; i say it must be stopped! i will give anything, everything, to prevent it!" "what will you give, my sister?" she looked at him aghast. "what! you do not wish me to buy you?" she said. "no; but i wish to buy others." "ha! you see a chance, then?" "one, and one only. but time presses. i want money." "how much?" "i cannot have too much. all that you can spare." with hands which trembled with eagerness she unlocked a secret cupboard in the wall in which she concealed her valuables. a blaze of jewellery met her brother's eyes as he peered over her shoulder. great rubies, costly emeralds, deep ruddy beryls, glimmering diamonds, were scattered there in one brilliant shimmering many-coloured heap, the harvest which she had reaped from the king's generosity during more than fifteen years. at one side were three drawers, the one over the other. she drew out the lowest one. it was full to the brim of glittering _louis d'ors_. "take what you will!" she said. "and now your plan! quick!" he stuffed the money in handfuls into the side pockets of his coat. coins slipped between his fingers and tinkled and wheeled over the floor, but neither cast a glance at them. "your plan?" she repeated. "we must prevent the archbishop from arriving here. then the marriage would be postponed until to-morrow night, and you would have time to act." "but how prevent it?" "there are a dozen good rapiers about the court which are to be bought for less than i carry in one pocket. there is de la touche, young turberville, old major despard, raymond de carnac, and the four latours. i will gather them together, and wait on the road." "and waylay the archbishop?" "no; the messengers." "oh, excellent! you are a prince of brothers! if no message reaches paris, we are saved. go; go; do not lose a moment, my dear charles." "it is very well, francoise; but what are we to do with them when we get them? we may lose our heads over the matter, it seems to me. after all, they are the king's messengers, and we can scarce pass our swords through them." "no?" "there would be no forgiveness for that." "but consider that before the matter is looked into i shall have regained my influence with the king." "all very fine, my little sister, but how long is your influence to last? a pleasant life for us if at every change of favour we have to fly the country! no, no, francoise; the most that we can do is to detain the messengers." "where can you detain them?" "i have an idea. there is the castle of the marquis de montespan at portillac." "of my husband!" "precisely." "of my most bitter enemy! oh, charles, you are not serious." "on the contrary, i was never more so. the marquis was away in paris yesterday, and has not yet returned. where is the ring with his arms?" she hunted among her jewels and picked out a gold ring with a broad engraved face. "this will be our key. when good marceau, the steward, sees it, every dungeon in the castle will be at our disposal. it is that or nothing. there is no other place where we can hold them safe." "but when my husband returns?" "ah, he may be a little puzzled as to his captives. and the complaisant marceau may have an evil quarter of an hour. but that may not be for a week, and by that time, my little sister, i have confidence enough in you to think that you really may have finished the campaign. not another word, for every moment is of value. adieu, francoise! we shall not be conquered without a struggle. i will send a message to you to-night to let you know how fortune uses us." he took her fondly in his arms, kissed her, and then hurried from the room. for hours after his departure she paced up and down with noiseless steps upon the deep soft carpet, her hand still clenched, her eyes flaming, her whole soul wrapped and consumed with jealousy and hatred of her rival. ten struck, and eleven, and midnight, but still she waited, fierce and eager, straining her ears for every foot-fall which might be the herald of news. at last it came. she heard the quick step in the passage, the tap at the ante-room door, and the whispering of her black page. quivering with impatience, she rushed in and took the note herself from the dusty cavalier who had brought it. it was but six words scrawled roughly upon a wisp of dirty paper, but it brought the colour back to her cheeks and the smile to her lips. it was her brother's writing, and it ran: "the archbishop will not come to-night." chapter xv. the midnight mission. de catinat in the meanwhile was perfectly aware of the importance of the mission which had been assigned to him. the secrecy which had been enjoined by the king, his evident excitement, and the nature of his orders, all confirmed the rumours which were already beginning to buzz round the court. he knew enough of the intrigues and antagonisms with which the court was full to understand that every precaution was necessary in carrying out his instructions. he waited, therefore, until night had fallen before ordering his soldier-servant to bring round the two horses to one of the less public gates of the grounds. as he and his friend walked together to the spot, he gave the young american a rapid sketch of the situation at the court, and of the chance that this nocturnal ride might be an event which would affect the future history of france. "i like your king," said amos green, "and i am glad to ride in his service. he is a slip of a man to be the head of a great nation, but he has the eye of a chief. if one met him alone in a maine forest, one would know him as a man who was different to his fellows. well, i am glad that he is going to marry again, though it's a great house for any woman to have to look after." de catinat smiled at his comrade's idea of a queen's duties. "are you armed?" he asked. "you have no sword or pistols?" "no; if i may not carry my gun, i had rather not be troubled by tools that i have never learned to use. i have my knife. but why do you ask?" "because there may be danger." "and how?" "many have an interest in stopping this marriage. all the first men of the kingdom are bitterly against it. if they could stop _us_, they would stop _it_, for to-night at least." "but i thought it was a secret?" "there is no such thing at a court. there is the dauphin, or the king's brother, either of them, or any of their friends, would be right glad that we should be in the seine before we reach the archbishop's house this night. but who is this?" a burly figure had loomed up through the gloom on the path upon which they were going. as it approached, a coloured lamp dangling from one of the trees shone upon the blue and silver of an officer of the guards. it was major de brissac, of de catinat's own regiment. "hullo! whither away?" he asked. "to paris, major." "i go there myself within an hour. will you not wait, that we may go together?" "i am sorry, but i ride on a matter of urgency. i must not lose a minute." "very good. good-night, and a pleasant ride." "is he a trusty man, our friend the major?" asked amos green, glancing back. "true as steel." "then i would have a word with him." the american hurried back along the way they had come, while de catinat stood chafing at this unnecessary delay. it was a full five minutes before his companion joined him, and the fiery blood of the french soldier was hot with impatience and anger. "i think that perhaps you had best ride into paris at your leisure, my friend," said he. "if i go upon the king's service i cannot be delayed whenever the whim takes you." "i am sorry," answered the other quietly. "i had something to say to your major, and i thought that maybe i might not see him again." "well, here are the horses," said the guardsman as he pushed open the postern-gate. "have you fed an watered them, jacques?" "yes, my captain," answered the man who stood at their head. "boot and saddle, then, friend green, and we shall not draw rein again until we see the lights of paris in front of us." the soldier-groom peered through the darkness after them with a sardonic smile upon his face. "you won't draw rein, won't you?" he muttered as he turned away. "well, we shall see about that, my captain; we shall see about that." for a mile or more the comrades galloped along, neck to neck and knee to knee. a wind had sprung up from the westward, and the heavens were covered with heavy gray clouds, which drifted swiftly across, a crescent moon peeping fitfully from time to time between the rifts. even during these moments of brightness the road, shadowed as it was by heavy trees, was very dark, but when the light was shut off it was hard, but for the loom upon either side, to tell where it lay. de catinat at least found it so, and he peered anxiously over his horse's ears, and stooped his face to the mane in his efforts to see his way. "what do you make of the road?" he asked at last. "it looks as if a good many carriage wheels had passed over it to-day." "what! _mon dieu!_ do you mean to say that you can see carriage wheels there?" "certainly. why not?" "why, man, i cannot see the road at all." amos green laughed heartily. "when you have travelled in the woods by night as often as i have," said he, "when to show a light may mean to lose your hair, one comes to learn to use one's eyes." "then you had best ride on, and i shall keep just behind you. so! _hola!_ what is the matter now?" there had been the sudden sharp snap of something breaking, and the american had reeled for an instant in the saddle. "it's one of my stirrup leathers. it has fallen." "can you find it?" "yes; but i can ride as well without it. let us push on." "very good. i can just see you now." they had galloped for about five minutes in this fashion, de catinat's horse's head within a few feet of the other's tail, when there was a second snap, and the guardsman rolled out of the saddle on to the ground. he kept his grip of the reins, however, and was up in an instant at his horse's head, sputtering out oaths as only an angry frenchman can. "a thousand thunders of heaven!" he cried. "what was it that happened then?" "your leather has gone too." "two stirrup leathers in five minutes? it is not possible." "it is not possible that it should be chance," said the american gravely, swinging himself off his horse. "why, what is this? my other leather is cut, and hangs only by a thread." "and so does mine. i can feel it when i pass my hand along. have you a tinder-box? let us strike a light." "no, no; the man who is in the dark is in safety. i let the other folk strike lights. we can see all that is needful to us." "my rein is cut also." "and so is mine." "and the girth of my saddle." "it is a wonder that we came so far with whole bones. now, who has played us this little trick?" "who could it be but that rogue jacques! he has had the horses in his charge. by my faith, he shall know what the strappado means when i see versailles again." "but why should he do it?" "ah, he has been set on to it. he has been a tool in the hands of those who wished to hinder our journey." "very like. but they must have had some reason behind. they knew well that to cut our straps would not prevent us from reaching paris, since we could ride bareback, or, for that matter, could run it if need be." "they hoped to break our necks." "one neck they might break, but scarce those of two, since the fate of the one would warn the other." "well, then, what do you think that they meant?" cried de catinat impatiently. "for heaven's sake, let us come to some conclusion, for every minute is of importance." but the other was not to be hurried out of his cool, methodical fashion of speech and of thought. "they could not have thought to stop us," said he. "what did they mean, then? they could only have meant to delay us. and why should they wish to delay us? what could it matter to them if we gave our message an hour or two sooner or an hour or two later? it could not matter." "for heaven's sake--" broke in de catinat impetuously. but amos green went on hammering the matter slowly out. "why should they wish to delay us, then? there's only one reason that i can see. in order to give other folk time to get in front of us and stop us. that is it, captain. i'd lay you a beaver-skin to a rabbit-pelt that i'm on the track. there's been a party of a dozen horsemen along this ground since the dew began to fall. if they were delayed, they would have time to form their plans before we came." "by my faith, you may be right," said de catinat thoughtfully. "what would you propose?" "that we ride back, and go by some less direct way." "it is impossible. we should have to ride back to meudon cross-roads, and then it would add ten miles to our journey." "it is better to get there an hour later than not to get there at all." "pshaw! we are surely not to be turned from our path by a mere guess. there is the st. germain cross-road about a mile below. when we reach it we can strike to the right along the south side of the river, and so change our course." "but we may not reach it." "if anyone bars our way we shall know how to treat with them." "you would fight, then?" "yes." "what! with a dozen of them?" "a hundred, if we are on the king's errand." amos green shrugged his shoulders. "you are surely not afraid?" "yes, i am, mighty afraid. fighting's good enough when there's no help for it. but i call it a fool's plan to ride straight into a trap when you might go round it." "you may do what you like," said de catinat angrily. "my father was a gentleman, the owner of a thousand arpents of land, and his son is not going to flinch in the king's service." "my father," answered amos green, "was a merchant, the owner of a thousand skunk-skins, and his son knows a fool when he sees one." "you are insolent, sir," cried the guardsman. "we can settle this matter at some more fitting opportunity. at present i continue my mission, and you are very welcome to turn back to versailles if you are so inclined." he raised his hat with punctilious politeness, sprang on to his horse, and rode on down the road. amos green hesitated a little, and then mounting, he soon overtook his companion. the latter, however, was still in no very sweet temper, and rode with a rigid neck, without a glance or a word for his comrade. suddenly his eyes caught something in the gloom which brought a smile back to his face. away in front of them, between two dark tree clumps, lay a vast number of shimmering, glittering yellow points, as thick as flowers in a garden. they were the lights of paris. "see!" he cried, pointing. "there is the city, and close here must be the st. germain road. we shall take it, so as to avoid any danger." "very good! but you should not ride too fast, when your girth may break at any moment." "nay, come on; we are close to our journey's end. the st. germain road opens just round this corner, and then we shall see our way, for the lights will guide us." he cut his horse with his whip, and they galloped together round the curve. next instant they were both down in one wild heap of tossing heads and struggling hoofs, de catinat partly covered by his horse, and his comrade hurled twenty paces, where he lay silent and motionless in the centre of the road. chapter xvi. "when the devil drives." monsieur de vivonne had laid his ambuscade with discretion. with a closed carriage and a band of chosen ruffians he had left the palace a good half-hour before the king's messengers, and by the aid of his sister's gold he had managed that their journey should not be a very rapid one. on reaching the branch road he had ordered the coachman to drive some little distance along it, and had tethered all the horses to a fence under his charge. he had then stationed one of the band as a sentinel some distance up the main highway to flash a light when the two courtiers were approaching. a stout cord had been fastened eighteen inches from the ground to the trunk of a wayside sapling, and on receiving the signal the other end was tied to a gate-post upon the further side. the two cavaliers could not possibly see it, coming as it did at the very curve of the road, and as a consequence their horses fell heavily to the ground, and brought them down with them. in an instant the dozen ruffians who had lurked in the shadow of the trees sprang out upon them, sword in hand; but there was no movement from either of their victims. de catinat lay breathing heavily, one leg under his horse's neck, and the blood trickling in a thin stream down his pale face, and falling, drop by drop, on to his silver shoulder-straps. amos green was unwounded, but his injured girth had given way in the fall, and he had been hurled from his horse on to the hard road with a violence which had driven every particle of breath from his body. monsieur de vivonne lit a lantern, and flashed it upon the faces of the two unconscious men. "this is a bad business, major despard," said he to the man next him. "i believe that they are both gone." "tut! tut! by my soul, men did not die like that when i was young!" answered the other, leaning forward his fierce grizzled face into the light of the lantern. "i've been cast from my horse as often as there are tags to my doublet, but, save for the snap of a bone or two, i never had any harm from it. pass your rapier under the third rib of the horses, de la touche; they will never be fit to set hoof to ground again." two sobbing gasps and the thud of their straining necks falling back to earth told that the two steeds had come to the end of their troubles. "where is latour?" asked monsieur de vivonne. "achille latour has studied medicine at montpellier. where is he?" "here i am, your excellency. it is not for me to boast, but i am as handy a man with a lancet as with a rapier, and it was an evil day for some sick folk when i first took to buff and bandolier. which would you have me look to?" "this one in the road." the trooper bent over amos green. "he is not long for this world," said he. "i can tell it by the catch of his breath." "and what is his injury?" "a subluxation of the epigastrium. ah, the words of learning will still come to my tongue, but it is hard to put into common terms. methinks that it were well for me to pass my dagger through his throat, for his end is very near." "not for your life!" cried the leader. "if he die without wound, they cannot lay it to our charge. turn now to the other." the man bent over de catinat, and placed his hand upon his heart. as he did so the soldier heaved a long sigh, opened his eyes, and gazed about him with the face of one who knows neither where he is nor how he came there. de vivonne, who had drawn his hat down over his eyes, and muffled the lower part of his face in his mantle, took out his flask, and poured a little of the contents down the injured man's throat. in an instant a dash of colour had come back into the guardsman's bloodless cheeks, and the light of memory into his eyes. he struggled up on to his feet, and strove furiously to push away those who held him. but his head still swam, and he could scarce hold himself erect. "i must to paris!" he gasped; "i must to paris! it is the king's mission. you stop me at your peril!" "he has no hurt save a scratch," said the ex-doctor. "then hold him fast. and first carry the dying man to the carriage." the lantern threw but a small ring of yellow light, so that when it had been carried over to de catinat, amos green was left lying in the shadow. now they brought the light back to where the young man lay. but there was no sign of him. he was gone. for a moment the little group of ruffians stood staring, the light of their lantern streaming up upon their plumed hats, their fierce eyes, and savage faces. then a burst of oaths broke from them, and de vivonne caught the false doctor by the throat, and hurling him down, would have choked him upon the spot, had the others not dragged them apart. "you lying dog!" he cried. "is this your skill? the man has fled, and we are ruined!" "he has done it in his death-struggle," gasped the other hoarsely, sitting up and rubbing his throat. "i tell you that he was _in extremis_. he cannot be far off." "that is true. he cannot be far off," cried de vivonne. "he has neither horse nor arms. you, despard and raymond de carnac, guard the other, that he play us no trick. do you, latour, and you, turberville, ride down the road, and wait by the south gate. if he enter paris at all, he must come in that way. if you get him, tie him before you on your horse, and bring him to the rendezvous. in any case, it matters little, for he is a stranger, this fellow, and only here by chance. now lead the other to the carriage, and we shall get away before an alarm is given." the two horsemen rode off in pursuit of the fugitive, and de catinat, still struggling desperately to escape, was dragged down the st. germain road and thrust into the carriage, which had waited at some distance while these incidents were being enacted. three of the horsemen rode ahead, the coachman was curtly ordered to follow them, and de vivonne, having despatched one of the band with a note to his sister, followed after the coach with the remainder of his desperadoes. the unfortunate guardsman had now entirely recovered his senses, and found himself with a strap round his ankles, and another round his wrists, a captive inside a moving prison which lumbered heavily along the country road. he had been stunned by the shock of his fall, and his leg was badly bruised by the weight of his horse; but the cut on his forehead was a mere trifle, and the bleeding had already ceased. his mind, however, pained him more than his body. he sank his head into his pinioned hands, and stamped madly with his feet, rocking himself to and fro in his despair. what a fool, a treble fool, he had been! he, an old soldier, who had seen something of war, to walk with open eyes into such a trap! the king had chosen him of all men, as a trusty messenger, and yet he had failed him--and failed him so ignominiously, without shot fired or sword drawn. he was warned, too, warned by a young man who knew nothing of court intrigue, and who was guided only by the wits which nature had given him. de catinat dashed himself down upon the leather cushion in the agony of his thoughts. but then came a return of that common-sense which lies so very closely beneath the impetuosity of the celt. the matter was done now, and he must see if it could not be mended. amos green had escaped. that was one grand point in his favour. and amos green had heard the king's message, and realised its importance. it was true that he knew nothing of paris, but surely a man who could pick his way at night through the forests of maine would not be baulked in finding so well-known a house as that of the archbishop of paris. but then there came a sudden thought which turned de catinat's heart to lead. the city gates were locked at eight o'clock in the evening. it was now nearly nine. it would have been easy for him, whose uniform was a voucher for his message, to gain his way through. but how could amos green, a foreigner and a civilian, hope to pass? it was impossible, clearly impossible. and yet, somehow, in spite of the impossibility, he still clung to a vague hope that a man so full of energy and resource might find some way out of the difficulty. and then the thought of escape occurred to his mind. might he not even now be in time, perhaps, to carry his own message? who were these men who had seized him? they had said nothing to give him a hint as to whose tools they were. monsieur and the dauphin occurred to his mind. probably one or the other. he had only recognised one of them, old major despard, a man who frequented the low wine-shops of versailles, and whose sword was ever at the disposal of the longest purse. and where were these people taking him to? it might be to his death. but if they wished to do away with him, why should they have brought him back to consciousness? and why this carriage and drive? full of curiosity, he peered out of the windows. a horseman was riding close up on either side; but there was glass in front of the carriage, and through this he could gain some idea as to his whereabouts. the clouds had cleared now, and the moon was shining brightly, bathing the whole wide landscape in its shimmering light. to the right lay the open country, broad plains with clumps of woodland, and the towers of castles pricking out from above the groves. a heavy bell was ringing in some monastery, and its dull booming came and went with the breeze. on the left, but far away, lay the glimmer of paris. they were leaving it rapidly behind. whatever his destination, it was neither the capital nor versailles. then he began to count the chances of escape. his sword had been removed, and his pistols were still in the holsters beside his unfortunate horse. he was unarmed, then, even if he could free himself, and his captors were at least a dozen in number. there were three on ahead, riding abreast along the white, moonlit road. then there was one on each side, and he should judge by the clatter of hoofs that there could not be fewer than half a dozen behind. that would make exactly twelve, including the coachman, too many, surely, for an unarmed man to hope to baffle. at the thought of the coachman he had glanced through the glass front at the broad back of the man, and he had suddenly, in the glimmer of the carriage lamp, observed something which struck him with horror. the man was evidently desperately wounded. it was strange indeed that he could still sit there and flick his whip with so terrible an injury. in the back of his great red coat, just under the left shoulder-blade, was a gash in the cloth, where some weapon had passed, and all round was a wide patch of dark scarlet which told its own tale. nor was this all. as he raised his whip, the moonlight shone upon his hand, and de catinat saw with a shudder that it also was splashed and clogged with blood. the guardsman craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the man's face; but his broad-brimmed hat was drawn low, and the high collar of his driving-coat was raised, so that his features were in the shadow. this silent man in front of him, with the horrible marks upon his person, sent a chill to de catinat's valiant heart, and he muttered over one of marot's huguenot psalms; for who but the foul fiend himself would drive a coach with those crimsoned hands and with a sword driven through his body? and now they had come to a spot where the main road ran onwards, but a smaller side track wound away down the steep slope of a hill, and so in the direction of the seine. the advance-guard had kept to the main road, and the two horsemen on either side were trotting in the same direction, when, to de catinat's amazement, the carriage suddenly swerved to one side, and in an instant plunged down the steep incline, the two stout horses galloping at their topmost speed, the coachman standing up and lashing furiously at them, and the clumsy old vehicle bounding along in a way which threw him backwards and forwards from one seat to the other. behind him he could hear a shout of consternation from the escort, and then the rush of galloping hoofs. away they flew, the roadside poplars dancing past at either window, the horses thundering along with their stomachs to the earth, and that demon driver still waving those horrible red hands in the moonlight and screaming out to the maddened steeds. sometimes the carriage jolted one way, sometimes another, swaying furiously, and running on two side wheels as though it must every instant go over. and yet, fast as they went, their pursuers went faster still. the rattle of their hoofs was at their very backs, and suddenly at one of the windows there came into view the red, distended nostrils of a horse. slowly it drew forward, the muzzle, the eye, the ears, the mane, coming into sight as the rider still gained upon them, and then above them the fierce face of despard and the gleam of a brass pistol barrel. "at the horse, despard, at the horse!" cried an authoritative voice from behind. the pistol flashed, and the coach lurched over as one of the horses gave a convulsive spring. but the driver still shrieked and lashed with his whip, while the carriage bounded onwards. but now the road turned a sudden curve, and there, right in front of them, not a hundred paces away, was the seine, running cold and still in the moonshine. the bank on either side of the highway ran straight down without any break to the water's edge. there was no sign of a bridge, and a black shadow in the centre of the stream showed where the ferry-boat was returning after conveying some belated travellers across. the driver never hesitated, but gathering up the reins, he urged the frightened creatures into the river. they hesitated, however, when they first felt the cold water about their hocks, and even as they did so one of them, with a low moan, fell over upon her side. despard's bullet had found its mark. like a flash the coachman hurled himself from the box and plunged into the stream; but the pursuing horsemen were all round him before this, and half-a-dozen hands had seized him ere he could reach deep water, and had dragged him to the bank. his broad hat had been struck off in the struggle, and de catinat saw his face in the moonshine. great heavens! it was amos green. chapter xvii. the dungeon of portillac. the desperadoes were as much astonished as was de catinat when they found that they had recaptured in this extraordinary manner the messenger whom they had given up for lost. a volley of oaths and exclamations broke from them, as, on tearing off the huge red coat of the coachman, they disclosed the sombre dress of the young american. "a thousand thunders!" cried one. "and this is the man whom that devil's brat latour would make out to be dead!" "and how came he here?" "and where is etienne arnaud?" "he has stabbed etienne. see the great cut in the coat!" "ay; and see the colour of his hand! he has stabbed him, and taken his coat and hat." "what! while we were all within stone's cast!" "ay; there is no other way out of it." "by my soul!" cried old despard, "i had never much love for old etienne, but i have emptied a cup of wine with him before now, and i shall see that he has justice. let us cast these reins round the fellow's neck and hang him upon this tree." several pairs of hands were already unbuckling the harness of the dead horse, when de vivonne pushed his way into the little group, and with a few curt words checked their intended violence. "it is as much as your lives are worth to touch him," said he. "but he has slain etienne arnaud." "that score may be settled afterwards. to-night he is the king's messenger. is the other all safe?" "yes, he is here." "tie this man, and put him in beside him. unbuckle the traces of the dead horse. so! now, de carnac, put your own into the harness. you can mount the box and drive, for we have not very far to go." the changes were rapidly made; amos green was thrust in beside de catinat, and the carriage was soon toiling up the steep incline which it had come down so precipitately. the american had said not a word since his capture, and had remained absolutely stolid, with his hands crossed over his chest whilst his fate was under discussion. now that he was alone once more with his comrade, however, he frowned and muttered like a man who feels that fortune has used him badly. "those infernal horses!" he grumbled. "why, an american horse would have taken to the water like a duck. many a time have i swum my old stallion sagamore across the hudson. once over the river, we should have had a clear lead to paris." "my dear friend," cried de catinat, laying his manacled hands upon those of his comrade, "can you forgive me for speaking as i did upon the way from versailles?" "tut, man! i never gave it a thought." "you were right a thousand times, and i was, as you said, a fool--a blind, obstinate fool. how nobly you have stood by me! but how came you there? never in my life have i been so astonished as when i saw your face." amos green chuckled to himself. "i thought that maybe it would be a surprise to you if you knew who was driving you," said he. "when i was thrown from my horse i lay quiet, partly because i wanted to get a grip of my breath, and partly because it seemed to me to be more healthy to lie than to stand with all those swords clinking in my ears. then they all got round you, and i rolled into the ditch, crept along it, got on the cross-road in the shadow of the trees, and was beside the carriage before ever they knew that i was gone. i saw in a flash that there was only one way by which i could be of use to you. the coachman was leaning round with his head turned to see what was going on behind him. i out with my knife, sprang up on the front wheel, and stopped his tongue forever." "what! without a sound!" "i have not lived among the indians for nothing." "and then?" "i pulled him down into the ditch, and i got into his coat and his hat. i did not scalp him." "scalp him? great heavens! such things are only done among savages." "ah! i thought that maybe it was not the custom of the country. i am glad now that i did not do it. i had hardly got the reins before they were all back and bundled you into the coach. i was not afraid of their seeing me, but i was scared lest i should not know which road to take, and so set them on the trail. but they made it easy to me by sending some of their riders in front, so i did well until i saw that by-track and made a run for it. we'd have got away, too, if that rogue hadn't shot the horse, and if the beasts had faced the water." the guardsman again pressed his comrade's hands. "you have been as true to me as hilt to blade," said he. "it was a bold thought and a bold deed." "and what now?" asked the american. "i do not know who these men are, and i do not know whither they are taking us." "to their villages, likely, to burn us." de catinat laughed in spite of his anxiety. "you will have it that we are back in america again," said he. "they don't do things in that way in france." "they seem free enough with hanging in france. i tell you, i felt like a smoked-out 'coon when that trace was round my neck." "i fancy that they are taking us to some place where they can shut us up until this business blows over." "well, they'll need to be smart about it." "why?" "else maybe they won't find us when they want us." "what do you mean?" for answer, the american, with a twist and a wriggle, drew his two hands apart, and held them in front of his comrade's face. "bless you, it is the first thing they teach the papooses in an indian wigwam. i've got out of a huron's thongs of raw hide before now, and it ain't very likely that a stiff stirrup leather will hold me. put your hands out." with a few dexterous twists he loosened de catinat's bonds, until he also was able to slip his hands free. "now for your feet, if you'll put them up. they'll find that we are easier to catch than to hold." but at that moment the carriage began to slow down, and the clank of the hoofs of the riders in front of them died suddenly away. peeping through the windows, the prisoners saw a huge dark building stretching in front of them, so high and so broad that the night shrouded it in upon every side. a great archway hung above them, and the lamps shone on the rude wooden gate, studded with ponderous clamps and nails. in the upper part of the door was a small square iron grating, and through this they could catch a glimpse of the gleam of a lantern and of a bearded face which looked out at them. de vivonne, standing in his stirrups, craned his neck up towards the grating, so that the two men most interested could hear little of the conversation which followed. they saw only that the horseman held a gold ring up in the air, and that the face above, which had begun by shaking and frowning, was now nodding and smiling. an instant later the head disappeared, the door swung open upon screaming hinges, and the carriage drove on into the courtyard beyond, leaving the escort, with the exception of de vivonne, outside. as the horses pulled up, a knot of rough fellows clustered round, and the two prisoners were dragged roughly out. in the light of the torches which flared around them they could see that they were hemmed in by high turreted walls upon every side. a bulky man with a bearded face, the same whom they had seen at the grating, was standing in the centre of the group of armed men issuing his orders. "to the upper dungeon, simon!" he cried. "and see that they have two bundles of straw and a loaf of bread until we learn our master's will." "i know not who your master may be," said de catinat, "but i would ask you by what warrant he dares to stop two messengers of the king while travelling in his service?" "by st. denis, if my master play the king a trick, it will be but tie and tie," the stout man answered, with a grin. "but no more talk! away with them, simon, and you answer to me for their safe-keeping." it was in vain that de catinat raved and threatened, invoking the most terrible menaces upon all who were concerned in detaining him. two stout knaves thrusting him from behind and one dragging in front forced him through a narrow gate and along a stone-flagged passage, a small man in black buckram with a bunch of keys in one hand and a swinging lantern in the other leading the way. their ankles had been so tied that they could but take steps of a foot in length. shuffling along, they made their way down three successive corridors and through three doors, each of which was locked and barred behind them. then they ascended a winding stone stair, hollowed out in the centre by the feet of generations of prisoners and of jailers, and finally they were thrust into a small square dungeon, and two trusses of straw were thrown in after them. an instant later a heavy key turned in the lock, and they were left to their own meditations. very grim and dark those meditations were in the case of de catinat. a stroke of good luck had made him at court, and now this other of ill fortune had destroyed him. it would be in vain that he should plead his own powerlessness. he knew his royal master well. he was a man who was munificent when his orders were obeyed, and inexorable when they miscarried. no excuse availed with him. an unlucky man was as abhorrent to him as a negligent one. in this great crisis the king had trusted him with an all-important message, and that message had not been delivered. what could save him now from disgrace and from ruin? he cared nothing for the dim dungeon in which he found himself, nor for the uncertain fate which hung over his head, but his heart turned to lead when he thought of his blasted career, and of the triumph of those whose jealousy had been aroused by his rapid promotion. there were his people in paris, too--his sweet adele, his old uncle, who had been as good as a father to him. what protector would they have in their troubles now that he had lost the power that might have shielded them? how long would it be before they were exposed once more to the brutalities of dalbert and his dragoons? he clenched his teeth at the thought, and threw himself down with a groan upon the litter of straw dimly visible in the faint light which streamed through the single window. but his energetic comrade had yielded to no feeling of despondency. the instant that the clang of the prison door had assured him that he was safe from interruption he had slipped off the bonds which held him and had felt all round the walls and flooring to see what manner of place this might be. his search had ended in the discovery of a small fireplace at one corner, and of two great clumsy billets of wood, which seemed to have been left there to serve as pillows for the prisoners. having satisfied himself that the chimney was so small that it was utterly impossible to pass even his head up it, he drew the two blocks of wood over to the window, and was able, by placing one above the other and standing on tiptoe on the highest, to reach the bars which guarded it. drawing himself up, and fixing one toe in an inequality of the wall, he managed to look out on to the courtyard which they had just quitted. the carriage and de vivonne were passing out through the gate as he looked, and he heard a moment later the slam of the heavy door and the clatter of hoofs from the troop of horsemen outside. the seneschal and his retainers had disappeared; the torches, too, were gone, and, save for the measured tread of a pair of sentinels in the yard twenty feet beneath him, all was silent throughout the great castle. and a very great castle it was. even as he hung there with straining hands his eyes were running in admiration and amazement over the huge wall in front of him, with its fringe of turrets and pinnacles and battlements all lying so still and cold in the moonlight. strange thoughts will slip into a man's head at the most unlikely moments. he remembered suddenly a bright summer day over the water when first he had come down from albany, and how his father had met him on the wharf by the hudson, and had taken him through the water-gate to see peter stuyvesant's house, as a sign of how great this city was which had passed from the dutch to the english. why, peter stuyvesant's house and peter stuyvesant's bowery villa put together would not make one wing of this huge pile, which was itself a mere dog-kennel beside the mighty palace at versailles. he would that his father were here now; and then, on second thoughts, he would not, for it came back to him that he was a prisoner in a far land, and that his sight-seeing was being done through the bars of a dungeon window. the window was large enough to pass his body through if it were not for those bars. he shook them and hung his weight upon them, but they were as thick as his thumb and firmly welded. then, getting some strong hold for his other foot, he supported himself by one hand while he picked with his knife at the setting of the iron. it was cement, as smooth as glass and as hard as marble. his knife turned when he tried to loosen it. but there was still the stone. it was sandstone, not so very hard. if he could cut grooves in it, he might be able to draw out bars, cement, and all. he sprang down to the floor again, and was thinking how he should best set to work, when a groan drew his attention to his companion. "you seem sick, friend," said he. "sick in mind," moaned the other. "oh, the cursed fool that i have been! it maddens me!" "something on your mind?" said amos green, sitting down upon his billets of wood. "what was it, then?" the guardsman made a movement of impatience. "what was it? how can you ask me, when you know as well as i do the wretched failure of my mission. it was the king's wish that the archbishop should marry them. the king's wish is the law. it must be the archbishop or none. he should have been at the palace by now. ah, my god! i can see the king's cabinet, i can see him waiting, i can see madame waiting, i can hear them speak of the unhappy de catinat--" he buried his face in his hands once more. "i see all that," said the american stolidly, "and i see something more." "what then?" "i see the archbishop tying them up together." "the archbishop! you are raving." "maybe. but i see him." "he could not be at the palace." "on the contrary, he reached the palace about half an hour ago." de catinat sprang to his feet. "at the palace!" he screamed. "then who gave him the message?" "i did," said amos green. chapter xviii. a night of surprises. if the american had expected to surprise or delight his companion by this curt announcement he was woefully disappointed, for de catinat approached him with a face which was full of sympathy and trouble, and laid his hand caressingly upon his shoulder. "my dear friend," said he, "i have been selfish and thoughtless. i have made too much of my own little troubles and too little of what you have gone through for me. that fall from your horse has shaken you more than you think. lie down upon this straw, and see if a little sleep may not--" "i tell you that the bishop is there!" cried amos green impatiently. "quite so. there is water in this jug, and if i dip my scarf into it and tie it round your brow--" "man alive! don't you hear me! the bishop is there." "he is, he is," said de catinat soothingly. "he is most certainly there. i trust that you have no pain?" the american waved in the air with his knotted fists. "you think that i am crazed," he cried, "and, by the eternal, you are enough to make me so! when i say that i sent the bishop, i mean that i saw to the job. you remember when i stepped back to your friend the major?" it was the soldier's turn to grow excited now. "well?" he cried, gripping the other's arm. "well, when we send a scout into the woods, if the matter is worth it, we send a second one at another hour, and so one or other comes back with his hair on. that's the iroquois fashion, and a good fashion too." "my god! i believe that you have saved me!" "you needn't grip on to my arm like a fish-eagle on a trout! i went back to the major, then, and i asked him when he was in paris to pass by the archbishop's door." "well? well?" "i showed him this lump of chalk. 'if we've been there,' said i, 'you'll see a great cross on the left side of the door-post. if there's no cross, then pull the latch and ask the bishop if he'll come up to the palace as quick as his horses can bring him.' the major started an hour after us; he would be in paris by half-past ten; the bishop would be in his carriage by eleven, and he would reach versailles half an hour ago, that is to say, about half-past twelve. by the lord, i think i've driven him off his head!" it was no wonder that the young woodsman was alarmed at the effect of his own announcement. his slow and steady nature was incapable of the quick, violent variations of the fiery frenchman. de catinat, who had thrown off his bonds before he had lain down, spun round the cell now, waving his arms and his legs, with his shadow capering up the wall behind him, all distorted in the moonlight. finally he threw himself into his comrade's arms with a torrent of thanks and ejaculations and praises and promises, patting him with his hands and hugging him to his breast. "oh, if i could but do something for you!" he exclaimed. "if i could do something for you!" "you can, then. lie down on that straw and go to sleep." "and to think that i sneered at you! i! oh, you have had your revenge!" "for the lord's sake, lie down and go to sleep!" by persuasions and a little pushing he got his delighted companion on to his couch again, and heaped the straw over him to serve as a blanket. de catinat was wearied out by the excitements of the day, and this last great reaction seemed to have absorbed all his remaining strength. his lids drooped heavily over his eyes, his head sank deeper into the soft straw, and his last remembrance was that the tireless american was seated cross-legged in the moonlight, working furiously with his long knife upon one of the billets of wood. so weary was the young guardsman that it was long past noon, and the sun was shining out of a cloudless blue sky, before he awoke. for a moment, enveloped as he was in straw, and with the rude arch of the dungeon meeting in four rough-hewn groinings above his head, he stared about him in bewilderment. then in an instant the doings of the day before, his mission, the ambuscade, his imprisonment, all flashed back to him, and he sprang to his feet. his comrade, who had been dozing in the corner, jumped up also at the first movement, with his hand on his knife, and a sinister glance directed towards the door. "oh, it's you, is it?" said he, "i thought it was the man." "has some one been in, then?" "yes; they brought those two loaves and a jug of water, just about dawn, when i was settling down for a rest." "and did he say anything?" "no; it was the little black one." "simon, they called him." "the same. he laid the things down and was gone. i thought that maybe if he came again we might get him to stop." "how, then?" "maybe if we got these stirrup leathers round his ankles he would not get them off quite as easy as we have done." "and what then?" "well, he would tell us where we are, and what is to be done with us." "pshaw! what does it matter since our mission is done?" "it may not matter to you--there's no accounting for tastes--but it matters a good deal to me. i'm not used to sitting in a hole, like a bear in a trap, waiting for what other folks choose to do with me. it's new to me. i found paris a pretty close sort of place, but it's a prairie compared to this. it don't suit a man of my habits, and i am going to come out of it." "there's no help but patience, my friend." "i don't know that. i'd get more help out of a bar and a few pegs." he opened his coat, and took out a short piece of rusted iron, and three small thick pieces of wood, sharpened at one end. "where did you get those, then?" "these are my night's work. the bar is the top one of the grate. i had a job to loosen it, but there it is. the pegs i whittled out of that log." "and what are they for?" "well, you see, peg number one goes in here, where i have picked a hole between the stones. then i've made this other log into a mallet, and with two cracks there it is firm fixed, so that you can put your weight on it. now these two go in the same way into the holes above here. so! now, you see, you can stand up there and look out of that window without asking too much of your toe joint. try it." de catinat sprang up and looked eagerly out between the bars. "i do not know the place," said he, shaking his head. "it may be any one of thirty castles which lie upon the south side of paris, and within six or seven leagues of it. which can it be? and who has any interest in treating us so? i would that i could see a coat of arms, which might help us. ah! there is one yonder in the centre of the mullion of the window. but i can scarce read it at the distance. i warrant that your eyes are better than mine, amos, and that you can read what is on yonder escutcheon." "on what?" "on the stone slab in the centre window." "yes, i see it plain enough. it looks to me like three turkey-buzzards sitting on a barrel of molasses." "three allurions in chief over a tower proper, maybe. those are the arms of the provence de hautevilles. but it cannot be that. they have no chateau within a hundred leagues. no, i cannot tell where we are." he was dropping back to the floor, and put his weight upon the bar. to his amazement, it came away in his hand. "look, amos, look!" he cried. "ah, you've found it out! well, i did that during the night." "and how? with your knife?" "no; i could make no way with my knife; but when i got the bar out of the grate, i managed faster. i'll put this one back now, or some of those folks down below may notice that we have got it loose." "are they all loose?" "only the one at present, but we'll get the other two out during the night. you can take that bar out and work with it, while i use my own picker at the other. you see, the stone is soft, and by grinding it you soon make a groove along which you can slip the bar. it will be mighty queer if we can't clear a road for ourselves before morning." "well, but even if we could get out into the courtyard, where could we turn to then?" "one thing at a time, friend. you might as well stick at the kennebec because you could not see how you would cross the penobscot. anyway, there is more air in the yard than in here, and when the window is clear we shall soon plan out the rest." the two comrades did not dare to do any work during the day, for fear they should be surprised by the jailer, or observed from without. no one came near them, but they ate their loaves and drank their water with the appetite of men who had often known what it was to be without even such simple food as that. the instant that night fell they were both up upon the pegs, grinding away at the hard stone and tugging at the bars. it was a rainy night, and there was a sharp thunder-storm, but they could see very well, while the shadow of the arched window prevented their being seen. before midnight they had loosened one bar, and the other was just beginning to give, when some slight noise made them turn their heads, and there was their jailer standing, open-mouthed in the middle of the cell, staring up at them. it was de catinat who observed him first, and he sprang down at him in an instant with his bar; but at his movement the man rushed for the door, and drew it after him just as the american's tool whizzed past his ear and down the passage. as the door slammed, the two comrades looked at each other. the guardsman shrugged his shoulders and the other whistled. "it is scarce worth while to go on," said de catinat. "we may as well be doing that as anything else. if my picker had been an inch lower i'd have had him. well, maybe he'll get a stroke, or break his neck down those stairs. i've nothing to work with now, but a few rubs with your bar will finish the job. ah, dear! you are right, and we are fairly treed!" a great bell had begun to ring in the chateau, and there was a loud buzz of voices and a clatter of feet upon the stones. hoarse orders were shouted, and there was the sound of turning keys. all this coming suddenly in the midst of the stillness of the night showed only too certainly that the alarm had been given. amos green threw himself down in the straw, with his hands in his pockets, and de catinat leaned sulkily against the wall, waiting for whatever might come to him. five minutes passed, however, and yet another five minutes, without anyone appearing. the hubbub in the courtyard continued, but there was no sound in the corridor which led to their cell. "well, i'll have that bar out, after all," said the american at last, rising and stepping over to the window. "anyhow, we'll see what all this caterwauling is about." he climbed up on his pegs as he spoke, and peeped out. "come up!" he cried excitedly to his comrade. "they've got some other game going on here, and they are all a deal too busy to bother their heads about us." de catinat clambered up beside him, and the two stood staring down into the courtyard. a brazier had been lit at each corner, and the place was thronged with men, many of whom carried torches. the yellow glare played fitfully over the grim gray walls, flickering up sometimes until the highest turrets shone golden against the black sky, and then, as the wind caught them, dying away until they scarce threw a glow upon the cheek of their bearer. the main gate was open, and a carriage, which had apparently just driven in, was standing at a small door immediately in front of their window. the wheels and sides were brown with mud, and the two horses were reeking and heavy-headed, as though their journey had been both swift and long. a man wearing a plumed hat and enveloped in a riding-coat had stepped from the carriage, and then, turning round, had dragged a second person out after him. there was a scuffle, a cry, a push, and the two figures had vanished through the door. as it closed, the carriage drove away, the torches and braziers were extinguished, the main gate was closed once more, and all was as quiet as before this sudden interruption. "well!" gasped de catinat. "is this another king's messenger they've got?" "there will be lodgings for two more here in a short time," said amos green. "if they only leave us alone, this cell won't hold us long." "i wonder where that jailer has gone?" "he may go where he likes, as long as he keeps away from here. give me your bar again. this thing is giving. it won't take us long to have it out." he set to work furiously, trying to deepen the groove in the stone, through which he hoped to drag the staple. suddenly he ceased, and strained his ears. "by thunder!" said he, "there's some one working on the other side." they both stood listening. there were the thud of hammers, the rasping of a saw, and the clatter of wood from the other side of the wall. "what can they be doing?" "i can't think." "can you see them?" "they are too near the wall." "i think i can manage," said de catinat. "i am slighter than you." he pushed his head and neck and half of one shoulder through the gap between the bars, and there he remained until his friend thought that perhaps he had stuck, and pulled at his legs to extricate him. he writhed back, however, without any difficulty. "they are building something," he whispered. "building!" "yes; there are four of them, with a lantern." "what can they be building, then?" "it's a shed, i think. i can see four sockets in the ground, and they are fixing four uprights into them." "well, we can't get away as long as there are four men just under our window." "impossible." "but we may as well finish our work, for all that." the gentle scrapings of his iron were drowned amid the noise which swelled ever louder from without. the bar loosened at the end, and he drew it slowly towards him. at that instant, however, just as he was disengaging it, a round head appeared between him and the moonlight, a head with a great shock of tangled hair and a woollen cap upon the top of it. so astonished was amos green at the sudden apparition that he let go his grip upon the bar, which, falling outwards, toppled over the edge of the window-sill. "you great fool!" shrieked a voice from below, "are your fingers ever to be thumbs, then, that you should fumble your tools so? a thousand thunders of heaven! you have broken my shoulder." "what is it, then?" cried the other. "my faith, pierre, if your fingers went as fast as your tongue, you would be the first joiner in france." "what is it, you ape! you have dropped your tool upon me." "i! i have dropped nothing." "idiot! would you have me believe that iron falls from the sky? i say that you have struck me, you foolish, clumsy-fingered lout." "i have not struck you yet," cried the other, "but, by the virgin, if i have more of this i will come down the ladder to you!" "silence, you good-for-naughts!" said a third voice sternly. "if the work be not done by daybreak, there will be a heavy reckoning for somebody." and again the steady hammering and sawing went forward. the head still passed and repassed, its owner walking apparently upon some platform which they had constructed beneath their window, but never giving a glance or a thought to the black square opening beside him. it was early morning, and the first cold light was beginning to steal over the courtyard, before the work was at last finished and the workmen had left. then at last the prisoners dared to climb up and to see what it was which had been constructed during the night. it gave them a catch of the breath as they looked at it. it was a scaffold. there it lay, the ill-omened platform of dark greasy boards newly fastened together, but evidently used often before for the same purpose. it was buttressed up against their wall, and extended a clear twenty feet out, with a broad wooden stair leading down from the further side. in the centre stood a headsman's block, all haggled at the top, and smeared with rust-coloured stains. "i think it is time that we left," said amos green. "our work is all in vain, amos," said de catinat sadly. "whatever our fate may be--and this looks ill enough--we can but submit to it like brave men." "tut, man; the window is clear! let us make a rush for it." "it is useless. i can see a line of armed men along the further side of the yard." "a line! at this hour!" "yes; and here come more. see, at the centre gate! now what in the name of heaven is this?" as he spoke the door which faced them opened and a singular procession filed out. first came two dozen footmen, walking in pairs, all carrying halberds, and clad in the same maroon-coloured liveries. after them a huge bearded man, with his tunic off, and the sleeves of his coarse shirt rolled up over his elbows, strode along with a great axe over his left shoulder. behind him, a priest with an open missal pattered forth prayers, and in his shadow was a woman, clad in black, her neck bared, and a black shawl cast over her head and drooping in front of her bowed face. within grip of her walked a tall, thin, fierce-faced man, with harsh red features, and a great jutting nose. he wore a flat velvet cap with a single eagle feather fastened into it by a diamond clasp, which gleamed in the morning light. but bright as was his gem, his dark eyes were brighter still, and sparkled from under his bushy brows with a mad brilliancy which bore with it something of menace and of terror. his limbs jerked as he walked, his features twisted, and he carried himself like a man who strives hard to hold himself in when his whole soul is aflame with exultation. behind him again twelve more maroon-clad retainers brought up the rear of this singular procession. the woman had faltered at the foot of the scaffold, but the man behind her had thrust her forward with such force that she stumbled over the lower step, and would have fallen had she not clutched at the arm of the priest. at the top of the ladder her eyes met the dreadful block, and she burst into a scream, and shrunk backwards. but again the man thrust her on, and two of the followers caught her by either wrist and dragged her forwards. "oh, maurice! maurice!" she screamed. "i am not fit to die! oh, forgive me, maurice, as you hope for forgiveness yourself! maurice! maurice!" she strove to get towards him, to clutch at his wrist, at his sleeve, but he stood with his hand on his sword, gazing at her with a face which was all wreathed and contorted with merriment. at the sight of that dreadful mocking face the prayers froze upon her lips. as well pray for mercy to the dropping stone or to the rushing stream. she turned away, and threw back the mantle which had shrouded her features. "ah, sire!" she cried. "sire! if you could see me now!" and at the cry and at the sight of that fair pale face, de catinat, looking down from the window, was stricken as though by a dagger; for there, standing beside the headsman's block, was she who had been the most powerful, as well as the wittiest and the fairest, of the women of france--none other than francoise de montespan, so lately the favourite of the king. chapter xix. in the king's cabinet. on the night upon which such strange chances had befallen his messengers, the king sat alone in his cabinet. over his head a perfumed lamp, held up by four little flying cupids of crystal, who dangled by golden chains from the painted ceiling, cast a brilliant light upon the chamber, which was flashed back twenty-fold by the mirrors upon the wall. the ebony and silver furniture, the dainty carpet of la savonniere, the silks of tours, the tapestries of the gobelins, the gold-work and the delicate chinaware of sevres--the best of all that france could produce was centred between these four walls. nothing had ever passed through that door which was not a masterpiece of its kind. and amid all this brilliance the master of it sat, his chin resting upon his hands, his elbows upon the table, with eyes which stared vacantly at the wall, a moody and a solemn man. but though his dark eyes were fixed upon the wall, they saw nothing of it. they looked rather down the long vista of his own life, away to those early years when what we dream and what we do shade so mistily into one another. was it a dream or was it a fact, those two men who used to stoop over his baby crib, the one with the dark coat and the star upon his breast, whom he had been taught to call father, and the other one with the long red gown and the little twinkling eyes? even now, after more than forty years, that wicked, astute, powerful face flashed up, and he saw once more old richelieu, the great unanointed king of france. and then the other cardinal, the long lean one who had taken his pocket-money, and had grudged him his food, and had dressed him in old clothes. how well he could recall the day when mazarin had rouged himself for the last time, and how the court had danced with joy at the news that he was no more! and his mother, too, how beautiful she was, and how masterful! could he not remember how bravely she had borne herself during that war in which the power of the great nobles had been broken, and how she had at last lain down to die, imploring the priests not to stain her cap-strings with their holy oils! and then he thought of what he had done himself, how he had shorn down his great subjects until, instead of being like a tree among saplings, he had been alone, far above all others, with his shadow covering the whole land. then there were his wars and his laws and his treaties. under his care france had overflowed her frontiers both on the north and on the east, and yet had been so welded together internally that she had but one voice, with which she spoke through him. and then there was that line of beautiful faces which wavered up in front of him. there was olympe de mancini, whose italian eyes had first taught him that there is a power which can rule over a king; her sister, too, marie de mancini; his wife, with her dark little sun-browned face; henrietta of england, whose death had first shown him the horrors which lie in life; la valliere, montespan, fontanges. some were dead; some were in convents. some who had been wicked and beautiful were now only wicked. and what had been the outcome of all this troubled, striving life of his? he was already at the outer verge of his middle years; he had lost his taste for the pleasures of his youth; gout and vertigo were ever at his foot and at his head to remind him that between them lay a kingdom which he could not hope to govern. and after all these years he had not won a single true friend, not one, in his family, in his court, in his country, save only this woman whom he was to wed that night. and she, how patient she was, how good, how lofty! with her he might hope to wipe off by the true glory of his remaining years all the sin and the folly of the past. would that the archbishop might come, that he might feel that she was indeed his, that he held her with hooks of steel which would bind them as long as life should last! there came a tap at the door. he sprang up eagerly, thinking that the ecclesiastic might have arrived. it was, however, only his personal attendant, to say that louvois would crave an interview. close at his heels came the minister himself, high-nosed and heavy-chinned. two leather bags were dangling from his hand. "sire," said he, when bontems had retired, "i trust that i do not intrude upon you." "no, no, louvois. my thoughts were in truth beginning to be very indifferent company, and i am glad to be rid of them." "your majesty's thoughts can never, i am sure, be anything but pleasant," said the courtier. "but i have brought you here something which i trust may make them even more so." "ah! what is that?" "when so many of our young nobles went into germany and hungary, you were pleased in your wisdom to say that you would like well to see what reports they sent home to their friends; also what news was sent out from the court to them." "yes." "i have them here--all that the courier has brought in, and all that are gathered to go out, each in its own bag. the wax has been softened in spirit, the fastenings have been steamed, and they are now open." the king took out a handful of the letters and glanced at the addresses. "i should indeed like to read the hearts of these people," said he. "thus only can i tell the true thoughts of those who bow and simper before my face. i suppose," with a sudden flash of suspicion from his eyes, "that you have not yourself looked into these?" "oh, sire, i had rather die!" "you swear it?" "as i hope for salvation!" "hum! there is one among these which i see is from your own son." louvois changed colour, and stammered as he looked at the envelope. "your majesty will find that he is as loyal out of your presence as in it, else he is no son of mine," said he. "then we shall begin with his. ha! it is but ten lines long. 'dearest achille, how i long for you to come back! the court is as dull as a cloister now that you are gone. my ridiculous father still struts about like a turkey-cock, as if all his medals and crosses could cover the fact that he is but a head lackey, with no more real power than i have. he wheedles a good deal out of the king, but what he does with it i cannot imagine, for little comes my way. i still owe those ten thousand livres to the man in the rue orfevre. unless i have some luck at lansquenet, i shall have to come out soon and join you.' hem! i did you an injustice, louvois. i see that you have _not_ looked over these letters." the minister had sat with a face which was the colour of beetroot, and eyes which projected from his head, while this epistle was being read. it was with relief that he came to the end of it, for at least there was nothing which compromised him seriously with the king; but every nerve in his great body tingled with rage as he thought of the way in which his young scape-grace had alluded to him. "the viper!" he cried. "oh, the foul snake in the grass! i will make him curse the day that he was born." "tut, tut, louvois!" said the king. "you are a man who has seen much of life, and you should be a philosopher. hot-headed youth says ever more than it means. think no more of the matter. but what have we here? a letter from my dearest girl to her husband, the prince de conti. i would pick her writing out of a thousand. ah, dear soul, she little thought that my eyes would see her artless prattle! why should i read it, since i already know every thought of her innocent heart?" he unfolded the sheet of pink scented paper with a fond smile upon his face, but it faded away as his eyes glanced down the page, and he sprang to his feet with a snarl of anger, his hand over his heart and his eyes still glued to the paper. "minx!" he cried, in a choking voice. "impertinent, heartless minx! louvois, you know what i have done for the princess. you know she has been the apple of my eye. what have i ever grudged her? what have i ever denied her?" "you have been goodness itself, sire," said louvois, whose own wounds smarted less now that he saw his master writhing. "hear what she says of me: 'old father grumpy is much as usual, save that he gives a little at the knees. you remember how we used to laugh at his airs and graces! well, he has given up all that, and though he still struts about on great high heels, like a landes peasant on his stilts, he has no brightness at all in his clothes. of course, all the court follow his example, so you can imagine what a nightmare place this is. then this woman still keeps in favour, and her frocks are as dismal as grumpy's coats; so when you come back we shall go into the country together, and you shall dress in red velvet, and i shall wear blue silk, and we shall have a little coloured court of our own in spite of my majestic papa.'" louis sank his face in his hands. "you hear how she speaks of me, louvois." "it is infamous, sire; infamous!" "she calls me names--_me_, louvois!" "atrocious, sire." "and my knees! one would think that i was an old man!" "scandalous. but, sire, i would beg to say that it is a case in which your majesty's philosophy may well soften your anger. youth is ever hot-headed, and says more than it means. think no more of the matter." "you speak like a fool, louvois. the child that i have loved turns upon me, and you ask me to think no more of it. ah, it is one more lesson that a king can trust least of all those who have his own blood in their veins. what writing is this? it is the good cardinal de bouillon. one may not have faith in one's own kin, but this sainted man loves me, not only because i have placed him where he is, but because it is his nature to look up to and love those whom god has placed above him. i will read you his letter, louvois, to show you that there is still such a thing as loyalty and gratitude in france. 'my dear prince de la roche-sur-yon.' ah, it is to him he writes. 'i promised when you left that i would let you know from time to time how things were going at court, as you consulted me about bringing your daughter up from anjou, in the hope that she might catch the king's fancy.' what! what! louvois! what villainy is this? 'the sultan goes from bad to worse. the fontanges was at least the prettiest woman in france, though between ourselves there was just a shade too much of the red in her hair--an excellent colour in a cardinal's gown, my dear duke, but nothing brighter than chestnut is permissible in a lady. the montespan, too, was a fine woman in her day, but fancy his picking up now with a widow who is older than himself, a woman, too, who does not even try to make herself attractive, but kneels at her _prie-dieu_ or works at her tapestry from morning to night. they say that december and may make a bad match, but my own opinion is that two novembers make an even worse one.' louvois! louvois! i can read no more! have you a _lettre de cachet_?" "there is one here, sire." "for the bastille?" "no; for vincennes." "that will do very well. fill it up, louvois! put this villain's name in it! let him be arrested to-night, and taken there in his own caleche. the shameless, ungrateful, foul-mouthed villain! why did you bring me these letters, louvois? oh, why did you yield to my foolish whim? my god, is there no truth, or honour, or loyalty in the world?" he stamped his feet, and shook his clenched hands in the air in the frenzy of his anger and disappointment. "shall i, then, put back the others?" asked louvois eagerly. he had been on thorns since the king had begun to read them, not knowing what disclosures might come next. "put them back, but keep the bag." "both bags?" "ah! i had forgot the other one. perhaps if i have hypocrites around me, i have at least some honest subjects at a distance. let us take one haphazard. who is this from? ah! it is from the duc de la rochefoucauld. he has ever seemed to be a modest and dutiful young man. what has he to say? the danube--belgrade--the grand vizier--ah!" he gave a cry as if he had been stabbed. "what, then, sire?" the minister had taken a step forward, for he was frightened by the expression upon the king's face. "take them away, louvois! take them away!" he cried, pushing the pile of papers away from him. "i would that i had never seen them! i will look at them no more! he gibes even at my courage, i who was in the trenches when he was in his cradle! 'this war would not suit the king,' he says. 'for there are battles, and none of the nice little safe sieges which are so dear to him.' by god, he shall pay to me with his head for that jest! ay, louvois, it will be a dear gibe to him. but take them away. i have seen as much as i can bear." the minister was thrusting them back into the bag when suddenly his eye caught the bold, clear writing of madame de maintenon upon one of the letters. some demon whispered to him that here was a weapon which had been placed in his hands, with which he might strike one whose very name filled him with jealousy and hatred. had she been guilty of some indiscretion in this note, then he might even now, at this last hour, turn the king's heart against her. he was an astute man, and in an instant he had seen his chance and grasped it. "ha!" said he, "it was hardly necessary to open this one." "which, louvois? whose is it?" the minister pushed forward the letter, and louis started as his eyes fell upon it. "madame's writing!" he gasped. "yes; it is to her nephew in germany." louis took it in his hand. then, with a sudden motion, he threw it down among the others, and then yet again his hand stole towards it. his face was gray and haggard, and beads of moisture had broken out upon his brow. if this too were to prove to be as the others! he was shaken to the soul at the very thought. twice he tried to pluck it out, and twice his trembling fingers fumbled with the paper. then he tossed it over to louvois. "read it to me," said he. the minister opened the letter out and flattened it upon the table, with a malicious light dancing in his eyes, which might have cost him his position had the king but read it aright. "'my dear nephew,'" he read, "'what you ask me in your last is absolutely impossible. i have never abused the king's favour so far as to ask for any profit for myself, and i should be equally sorry to solicit any advance for my relatives. no one would rejoice more than i to see you rise to be major in your regiment, but your valour and your loyalty must be the cause, and you must not hope to do it through any word of mine. to serve such a man as the king is its own reward, and i am sure that whether you remain a cornet or rise to some higher rank, you will be equally zealous in his cause. he is surrounded, unhappily, by many base parasites. some of these are mere fools, like lauzun; others are knaves, like the late fouquet; and some seem to be both fools and knaves, like louvois, the minister of war.'" here the reader choked with rage, and sat gurgling and drumming his fingers upon the table. "go on, louvois, go on," said louis, smiling up at the ceiling. "'these are the clouds which surround the sun, my dear nephew; but the sun is, believe me, shining brightly behind them. for years i have known that noble nature as few others can know it, and i can tell you that his virtues are his own, but that if ever his glory is for an instant dimmed over, it is because his kindness of heart has allowed him to be swayed by those who are about him. we hope soon to see you back at versailles, staggering under the weight of your laurels. meanwhile accept my love and every wish for your speedy promotion, although it cannot be obtained in the way which you suggest.'" "ah," cried the king, his love shining in his eyes, "how could i for an instant doubt her! and yet i had been so shaken by the others! francoise is as true as steel. was it not a beautiful letter, louvois?" "madame is a very clever woman," said the minister evasively. "and such a reader of hearts! has she not seen my character aright?" "at least she has not read mine, sire." there was a tap at the door, and bontems peeped in. "the archbishop has arrived, sire." "very well, bontems. ask madame to be so good as to step this way. and order the witnesses to assemble in the ante-room." as the valet hastened away, louis turned to his minister: "i wish you to be one of the witnesses, louvois." "to what, sire?" "to my marriage." the minister started. "what, sire! already?" "now, louvois; within five minutes." "very good, sire." the unhappy courtier strove hard to assume a more festive manner; but the night had been full of vexation to him, and to be condemned to assist in making this woman the king's wife was the most bitter drop of all. "put these letters away, louvois. the last one has made up for all the rest. but these rascals shall smart for it, all the same. by-the-way, there is that young nephew to whom madame wrote. gerard d'aubigny is his name, is it not?" "yes, sire." "make him out a colonel's commission, and give him the next vacancy, louvois." "a colonel, sire! why, he is not yet twenty." "ay, louvois. pray, am i the chief of the army, or are you? take care, louvois! i have warned you once before. i tell you, man, that if i choose to promote one of my jack-boots to be the head of a brigade, you shall not hesitate to make out the papers. now go into the ante-room, and wait with the other witnesses until you are wanted." there had meanwhile been busy goings-on in the small room where the red lamp burned in front of the virgin. francoise de maintenon stood in the centre, a little flush of excitement on her cheeks, and an unwonted light in her placid gray eyes. she was clad in a dress of shining white brocade, trimmed and slashed with silver serge, and fringed at the throat and arms with costly point lace. three women, grouped around her, rose and stooped and swayed, putting a touch here and a touch there, gathering in, looping up, and altering until all was to their taste. "there!" said the head dressmaker, giving a final pat to a rosette of gray silk; "i think that will do, your majes--that is to say, madame." the lady smiled at the adroit slip of the courtier dressmaker. "my tastes lean little towards dress," said she, "yet i would fain look as he would wish me to look." "ah, it is easy to dress madame. madame has a figure. madame has a carriage. what costume would not look well with such a neck and waist and arm to set it off? but, ah, madame, what are we to do when we have to make the figure as well as the dress? there was the princess charlotte elizabeth. it was but yesterday that we cut her gown. she was short, madame, but thick. oh, it is incredible how thick she was! she uses more cloth than madame, though she is two hand-breadths shorter. ah, i am sure that the good god never meant people to be as thick as that. but then, of course, she is bavarian and not french." but madame was paying little heed to the gossip of the dressmaker. her eyes were fixed upon the statue in the corner, and her lips were moving in prayer--prayer that she might be worthy of this great destiny which had come so suddenly upon her, a poor governess; that she might walk straight among the pitfalls which surrounded her upon every side; that this night's work might bring a blessing upon france and upon the man whom she loved. there came a discreet tap at the door to break in upon her prayer. "it is bontems, madame," said mademoiselle nanon. "he says that the king is ready." "then we shall not keep him waiting. come, mademoiselle, and may god shed his blessing upon what we are about to do!" the little party assembled in the king's ante-room, and started from there to the private chapel. in front walked the portly bishop, clad in a green vestment, puffed out with the importance of the function, his missal in his hand, and his fingers between the pages at the service _de matrimoniis_. beside him strode his almoner, and two little servitors of the court in crimson cassocks bearing lighted torches. the king and madame de maintenon walked side by side, she quiet and composed, with gentle bearing and downcast eyes, he with a flush on his dark cheeks, and a nervous, furtive look in his eyes, like a man who knows that he is in the midst of one of the great crises of his life. behind them, in solemn silence, followed a little group of chosen witnesses, the lean, silent pere la chaise, louvois, scowling heavily at the bride, the marquis de charmarante, bontems, and mademoiselle nanon. the torches shed a strong yellow light upon this small band as they advanced slowly through the corridors and _salons_ which led to the chapel, and they threw a garish glare upon the painted walls and ceilings, flashing back from gold-work and from mirror, but leaving long trailing shadows in the corners. the king glanced nervously at these black recesses, and at the portraits of his ancestors and relations which lined the walls. as he passed that of his late queen, maria theresa, he started and gasped with horror. "my god!" he whispered; "she frowned and spat at me!" madame laid her cool hand upon his wrist. "it is nothing, sire," she murmured, in her soothing voice. "it was but the light flickering over the picture." her words had their usual effect upon him. the startled look died away from his eyes, and taking her hand in his he walked resolutely forwards. a minute later they were before the altar, and the words were being read which should bind them forever together. as they turned away again, her new ring blazing upon her finger, there was a buzz of congratulation around her. the king only said nothing, but he looked at her, and she had no wish that he should say more. she was still calm and pale, but the blood throbbed in her temples. "you are queen of france now," it seemed to be humming--"queen, queen, queen!" but a sudden shadow had fallen across her, and a low voice was in her ear. "remember your promise to the church," it whispered. she started, and turned to see the pale, eager face of the jesuit beside her. "your hand has turned cold, francoise," said louis. "let us go, dearest. we have been too long in this dismal church." chapter xx. the two francoises. madame de montespan had retired to rest, easy in her mind, after receiving the message from her brother. she knew louis as few others knew him, and she was well aware of that obstinacy in trifles which was one of his characteristics. if he had said that he would be married by the archbishop, then the archbishop it must be; to-night, at least, there should be no marriage. to-morrow was a new day, and if it did not shake the king's plans, then indeed she must have lost her wit as well as her beauty. she dressed herself with care in the morning, putting on her powder, her little touch of rouge, her one patch near the dimple of her cheek, her loose robe of violet velvet, and her casconet of pearls with all the solicitude of a warrior, who is bracing on his arms for a life and death contest. no news had come to her of the great event of the previous night, although the court already rang with it, for her haughtiness and her bitter tongue had left her without a friend or intimate. she rose, therefore, in the best of spirits, with her mind set on the one question as to how best she could gain an audience with the king. she was still in her boudoir putting the last touches to her toilet when her page announced to her that the king was waiting in her _salon_. madame de montespan could hardly believe in such good fortune. she had racked her brain all morning as to how she should win her way to him, and here he was waiting for her. with a last glance at the mirror, she hastened to meet him. he was standing with his back turned, looking up at one of snyders's paintings, when she entered; but as she closed the door, he turned and took two steps towards her. she had run forward with a pretty little cry of joy, her white arms outstretched, and love shining on her face; but he put out his hand, gently and yet with decision, with a gesture which checked her approach. her hands dropped to her side, her lip trembled, and she stood looking at him with her grief and her fears all speaking loudly from her eyes. there was a look upon his features which she had never seen before, and already something was whispering at the back of her soul that to-day at least his spirit was stronger than her own. "you are angry with me again," she cried. he had come with every intention of beginning the interview by telling her bluntly of his marriage; but now, as he looked upon her beauty and her love, he felt that it would have been less brutal to strike her down at his feet. let some one else tell her, then. she would know soon enough. besides, there would be less chance then of a scene, which was a thing abhorrent to his soul. his task was, in any case, quite difficult enough. all this ran swiftly through his mind, and she as swiftly read it off in the brown eyes which gazed at her. "you have something you came to say, and now you have not the heart to say it. god bless the kindly heart which checks the cruel tongue." "no, no, madame," said louis; "i would not be cruel. i cannot forget that my life has been brightened and my court made brilliant during all these years by your wit and your beauty. but times change, madame, and i owe a duty to the world which overrides my own personal inclinations. for every reason i think that it is best that we should arrange in the way which we discussed the other day, and that you should withdraw yourself from the court." "withdraw, sire! for how long?" "it must be a permanent withdrawal, madame." she stood with clenched hands and a pale face staring at him. "i need not say that i shall make your retirement a happy one as far as in me lies. your allowance shall be fixed by yourself; a palace shall be erected for you in whatever part of france you may prefer, provided that it is twenty miles from paris. an estate also--" "oh, sire, how can you think that such things as these would compensate me for the loss of your love?" her heart had turned to lead within her breast. had he spoken hotly and angrily she might have hoped to turn him as she had done before; but this gentle and yet firm bearing was new to him, and she felt that all her arts were vain against it. his coolness enraged her, and yet she strove to choke down her passion and to preserve the humble attitude which was least natural to her haughty and vehement spirit; but soon the effort became too much for her. "madame," said he, "i have thought well over this matter, and it must be as i say. there is no other way at all. since we must part, the parting had best be short and sharp. believe me, it is no pleasant matter for me either. i have ordered your brother to have his carriage at the postern at nine o'clock, for i thought that perhaps you would wish to retire after nightfall." "to hide my shame from a laughing court! it was thoughtful of you, sire. and yet, perhaps, this too was a duty, since we hear so much of duties nowadays, for who was it but you--" "i know, madame, i know. i confess it. i have wronged you deeply. believe me that every atonement which is in my power shall be made. nay, do not look so angrily at me, i beg. let our last sight of each other be one which may leave a pleasant memory behind it." "a pleasant memory!" all the gentleness and humility had fallen from her now, and her voice had the hard ring of contempt and of anger. "a pleasant memory! it may well be pleasant to you, who are released from the woman whom you ruined, who can turn now to another without any pale face to be seen within the _salons_ of your court to remind you of your perfidy. but to me, pining in some lonely country house, spurned by my husband, despised by my family, the scorn and jest of france, far from all which gave a charm to life, far from the man for whose love i have sacrificed everything--this will be a very pleasant memory to me, you may be sure!" the king's eyes had caught the angry gleam which shot from hers, and yet he strove hard to set a curb upon his temper. when such a matter had to be discussed between the proudest man and the haughtiest woman in all france, one or the other must yield a point. he felt that it was for him to do so, and yet it did not come kindly to his imperious nature. "there is nothing to be gained, madame," said he, "by using words which are neither seemly for your tongue nor for my ears. you will do me the justice to confess that where i might command i am now entreating, and that instead of ordering you as my subject, i am persuading you as my friend." "oh, you show too much consideration, sire! our relations of twenty years or so can scarce suffice to explain such forbearance from you. i should indeed be grateful that you have not set your archers of the guard upon me, or marched me from the palace between a file of your musketeers. sire, how can i thank you for this forbearance?" she curtsied low, with her face set in a mocking smile. "your words are bitter, madame." "my heart is bitter, sire." "nay, francoise, be reasonable, i implore you. we have both left our youth behind." "the allusion to my years comes gratefully from your lips." "ah, you distort my words. then i shall say no more. you may not see me again, madame. is there no question which you would wish to ask me before i go?" "good god!" she cried; "is this a man? has it a heart? are these the lips which have told me so often that he loved me? are these the eyes which have looked so fondly into mine? can you then thrust away a woman whose life has been yours as you put away the st. germain palace when a more showy one was ready for you? and this is the end of all those vows, those sweet whispers, those persuasions, those promises--this!" "nay, madame, this is painful to both of us." "pain! where is the pain in your face? i see anger in it because i have dared to speak truth; i see joy in it because you feel that your vile task is done. but where is the pain? ah, when i am gone all will be so easy to you--will it not? you can go back then to your governess--" "madame!" "yes, yes, you cannot frighten me! what do i care for all that you can do! but i know all. do not think that i am blind. and so you would even have married her! you, the descendant of st. louis, and she the scarron widow, the poor drudge whom in charity i took into my household! ah, how your courtiers will smile! how the little poets will scribble! how the wits will whisper! you do not hear of these things, of course, but they are a little painful for your friends." "my patience can bear no more," cried the king furiously. "i leave you, madame, and forever." but her fury had swept all fear and discretion from her mind. she stepped between the door and him, her face flushed, her eyes blazing, her face thrust a little forward, one small white satin slipper tapping upon the carpet. "you are in haste, sire! she is waiting for you, doubtless." "let me pass, madame." "but it was a disappointment last night, was it not, my poor sire? ah, and for the governess, what a blow! great heaven, what a blow! no archbishop! no marriage! all the pretty plan gone wrong! was it not cruel?" louis gazed at the beautiful furious face in bewilderment, and it flashed across his mind that perhaps her grief had turned her brain. what else could be the meaning of this wild talk of the archbishop and the disappointment? it would be unworthy of him to speak harshly to one who was so afflicted. he must soothe her, and, above all, he must get away from her. "you have had the keeping of a good many of my family jewels," said he. "i beg that you will still retain them as a small sign of my regard." he had hoped to please her and to calm her, but in an instant she was over at her treasure-cupboard hurling double handfuls of precious stones down at his feet. they clinked and rattled, the little pellets of red and yellow and green, rolling, glinting over the floor and rapping up against the oak panels at the base of the walls. "they will do for the governess if the archbishop comes at last," she cried. he was more convinced than ever that she had lost her wits. a thought struck him by which he might appeal to all that was softer and more gentle in her nature. he stepped swiftly to the door, pushed it half open, and gave a whispered order. a youth with long golden hair waving down over his black velvet doublet entered the room. it was her youngest son, the count of toulouse. "i thought that you would wish to bid him farewell," said louis. she stood staring as though unable to realise the significance of his words. then it was borne suddenly in upon her that her children as well as her lover were to be taken from her, that this other woman should see them and speak with them and win their love while she was far away. all that was evil and bitter in the woman flashed suddenly up in her, until for the instant she was what the king had thought her. if her son was not for her, then he should be for none. a jewelled knife lay among her treasures, ready to her hand. she caught it up and rushed at the cowering lad. louis screamed and ran forward to stop her; but another had been swifter than he. a woman had darted through the open door, and had caught the upraised wrist. there was a moment's struggle, two queenly figures swayed and strained, and the knife dropped between their feet. the frightened louis caught it up, and seizing his little son by the wrist, he rushed from the apartment. francoise de montespan staggered back against the ottoman to find herself confronted by the steady eyes and set face of that other francoise, the woman whose presence fell like a shadow at every turn of her life. "i have saved you, madame, from doing that which you would have been the first to bewail." "saved me! it is you who have driven me to this!" the fallen favourite leaned against the high back of the ottoman, her hands resting behind her upon the curve of the velvet. her lids were half closed on her flashing eyes, and her lips just parted to show a gleam of her white teeth. here was the true francoise de montespan, a feline creature crouching for a spring, very far from that humble and soft-spoken francoise who had won the king back by her gentle words. madame de maintenon's hand had been cut in the struggle, and the blood was dripping down from the end of her fingers, but neither woman had time to spare a thought upon that. her firm gray eyes were fixed upon her former rival as one fixes them upon some weak and treacherous creature who may be dominated by a stronger will. "yes, it is you who have driven me to this--you, whom i picked up when you were hard pressed for a crust of bread or a cup of sour wine. what had you? you had nothing--nothing except a name which was a laughing-stock. and what did i give you? i gave you everything. you know that i gave you everything. money, position, the entrance to the court. you had them all from me. and now you mock me!" "madame, i do not mock you. i pity you from the bottom of my heart." "pity? ha! ha! a mortemart is pitied by the widow scarron! your pity may go where your gratitude is, and where your character is. we shall be troubled with it no longer then." "your words do not pain me." "i can believe that you are not sensitive." "not when my conscience is at ease." "ah! it has not troubled you, then?" "not upon this point, madame." "my god! how terrible must those other points have been!" "i have never had an evil thought towards you." "none towards me? oh, woman, woman!" "what have i done, then? the king came to my room to see the children taught. he stayed. he talked. he asked my opinion on this and that. could i be silent? or could i say other than what i thought?" "you turned him against me!" "i should be proud indeed if i thought that i had turned him to virtue." "the word comes well from your lips." "i would that i heard it upon yours." "and so, by your own confession, you stole the king's love from me, most virtuous of widows!" "i had all gratitude and kindly thought for you. you have, as you have so often reminded me, been my benefactress. it was not necessary for you to say it, for i had never for an instant forgotten it. yet if the king has asked me what i thought, i will not deny to you that i have said that sin is sin, and that he would be a worthier man if he shook off the guilty bonds which held him." "or exchanged them for others." "for those of duty." "pah! your hypocrisy sickens me! if you pretend to be a nun, why are you not where the nuns are? you would have the best of two worlds-- would you not?--have all that the court can give, and yet ape the manners of the cloister. but you need not do it with me! i know you as your inmost heart knows you. i was honest, and what i did, i did before the world. you, behind your priests and your directors and your _prie-dieus_ and your missals--do you think that you deceive me, as you deceive others?" her antagonist's gray eyes sparkled for the first time, and she took a quick step forward, with one white hand half lifted in rebuke. "you may speak as you will of me," said she. "to me it is no more than the foolish paroquet that chatters in your ante-room. but do not touch upon things which are sacred. ah, if you would but raise your own thoughts to such things--if you would but turn them inwards, and see, before it is too late, how vile and foul is this life which you have led! what might you not have done? his soul was in your hands like clay for the potter. if you had raised him up, if you had led him on the higher path, if you had brought out all that was noble and good within him, how your name would have been loved and blessed, from the chateau to the cottage! but no; you dragged him down; you wasted his youth; you drew him from his wife; you marred his manhood. a crime in one so high begets a thousand others in those who look to him for an example; and all, all are upon your soul. take heed, madame, for god's sake take heed ere it be too late! for all your beauty, there can be for you, as for me, a few short years of life. then, when that brown hair is white, when that white cheek is sunken, when that bright eye is dimmed--ah, then god pity the sin-stained soul of francoise de montespan!" her rival had sunk her head for the moment before the solemn words and the beautiful eyes. for an instant she stood silent, cowed for the first time in all her life; but then the mocking, defiant spirit came back to her, and she glanced up with a curling lip. "i am already provided with a spiritual director, thank you," said she. "oh, madame, you must not think to throw dust in my eyes! i know you, and know you well!" "on the contrary, you seem to know less than i had expected. if you know me so well, pray what am i?" all her rival's bitterness and hatred rang in the tones of her answer. "you are," said she, "the governess of my children, and the secret mistress of the king." "you are mistaken," answered madame de maintenon serenely. "i am the governess of your children, and i am the king's wife." chapter xxi. the man in the caleche. often had de montespan feigned a faint in the days when she wished to disarm the anger of the king. so she had drawn his arms round her, and won the pity which is the twin sister of love. but now she knew what it was to have the senses struck out of her by a word. she could not doubt the truth of what she heard. there was that in her rival's face, in her steady eye, in her quiet voice, which carried absolute conviction with it. she stood stunned for an instant, panting, her outstretched hands feeling at the air, her defiant eyes dulling and glazing. then, with a short sharp cry, the wail of one who has fought hard and yet knows that she can fight no more, her proud head drooped, and she fell forward senseless at the feet of her rival. madame de maintenon stooped and raised her up in her strong white arms. there was true grief and pity in her eyes as she looked down at the snow-pale face which lay against her bosom, all the bitterness and pride gone out of it, and nothing left save the tear which sparkled under the dark lashes, and the petulant droop of the lip, like that of a child which had wept itself to sleep. she laid her on the ottoman and placed a silken cushion under her head. then she gathered together and put back into the open cupboard all the jewels which were scattered about the carpet. having locked it, and placed the key on the table where its owner's eye would readily fall upon it, she struck a gong, which summoned the little black page. "your mistress is indisposed," said she. "go and bring her maids to her." and so, having done all that lay with her to do, she turned away from the great silent room, where, amid the velvet and the gilding, her beautiful rival lay like a crushed flower, helpless and hopeless. helpless enough, for what could she do? and hopeless too, for how could fortune aid her? the instant that her senses had come back to her she had sent away her waiting women, and lay with clasped hands and a drawn face planning out her own weary future. she must go; that was certain. not merely because it was the king's order, but because only misery and mockery remained for her now in the palace where she had reigned supreme. it was true that she had held her position against the queen before, but all her hatred could not blind her to the fact that her rival was a very different woman to poor meek little maria theresa. no; her spirit was broken at last. she must accept defeat, and she must go. she rose from the couch, feeling that she had aged ten years in an hour. there was much to be done, and little time in which to do it. she had cast down her jewels when the king had spoken as though they would atone for the loss of his love; but now that the love was gone there was no reason why the jewels should be lost too. if she had ceased to be the most powerful, she might still be the richest woman in france. there was her pension, of course. that would be a munificent one, for louis was always generous. and then there was all the spoil which she had collected during these long years--the jewels the pearls, the gold, the vases, the pictures, the crucifixes, the watches, the trinkets--together they represented many millions of livres. with her own hands she packed away the more precious and portable of them, while she arranged with her brother for the safe-keeping of the others. all day she was at work in a mood of feverish energy, doing anything and everything which might distract her thoughts from her own defeat and her rival's victory. by evening all was ready, and she had arranged that her property should be sent after her to petit bourg, to which castle she intended to retire. it wanted half an hour of the time fixed for her departure, when a young cavalier, whose face was strange to her, was ushered into the room. he came with a message from her brother. "monsieur de vivonne regrets, madame, that the rumour of your departure has got abroad among the court." "what do i care for that, monsieur?" she retorted, with all her old spirit. "he says, madame, that the courtiers may assemble at the west gate to see you go; that madame de neuilly will be there, and the duchesse de chambord, and mademoiselle de rohan, and--" the lady shrank with horror at the thought of such an ordeal. to drive away from the palace, where she had been more than queen, under the scornful eyes and bitter gibes of so many personal enemies! after all the humiliations of the day, that would be the crowning cup of sorrow. her nerve was broken. she could not face it. "tell my brother, monsieur, that i should be much obliged if he would make fresh arrangements, by which my departure might be private." "he bade me say that he had done so, madame." "ah! at what hour then?" "now. as soon as possible." "i am ready. at the west gate then?" "no; at the east. the carriage waits." "and where is my brother?" "we are to pick him up at the park gate." "and why that?" "because he is watched; and were he seen beside the carriage, all would be known." "very good. then, monsieur, if you will take my cloak and this casket we may start at once." they made their way by a circuitous route through the less-used corridors, she hurrying on like a guilty creature, a hood drawn over her face, and her heart in a flutter at every stray footfall. but fortune stood her friend. she met no one, and soon found herself at the eastern postern gate. a couple of phlegmatic swiss guardsmen leaned upon their muskets upon either side, and the lamp above shone upon the carriage which awaited her. the door was open, and a tall cavalier swathed in a black cloak handed her into it. he then took the seat opposite to her, slammed the door, and the caleche rattled away down the main drive. it had not surprised her that this man should join her inside the coach, for it was usual to have a guard there, and he was doubtless taking the place which her brother would afterwards occupy. that was all natural enough. but when ten minutes passed by, and he had neither moved nor spoken, she peered at him through the gloom with some curiosity. in the glance which she had of him, as he handed her in, she had seen that he was dressed like a gentleman, and there was that in his bow and wave as he did it which told her experienced senses that he was a man of courtly manners. but courtiers, as she had known them, were gallant and garrulous, and this man was so very quiet and still. again she strained her eyes through the gloom. his hat was pulled down and his cloak was still drawn across his mouth, but from out of the shadow she seemed to get a glimpse of two eyes which peered at her even as she did at him. at last the silence impressed her with a vague uneasiness. it was time to bring it to an end. "surely, monsieur, we have passed the park gate where we were to pick up my brother." her companion neither answered nor moved. she thought that perhaps the rumble of the heavy caleche had drowned her voice. "i say, monsieur," she repeated, leaning forwards, "that we have passed the place where we were to meet monsieur de vivonne." he took no notice. "monsieur," she cried, "i again remark that we have passed the gates." there was no answer. a thrill ran through her nerves. who or what could he be, this silent man? then suddenly it struck her that he might be dumb. "perhaps monsieur is afflicted," she said. "perhaps monsieur cannot speak. if that be the cause of your silence, will you raise your hand, and i shall understand." he sat rigid and silent. then a sudden mad fear came upon her, shut up in the dark with this dreadful voiceless thing. she screamed in her terror, and strove to pull down the window and open the door. but a grip of steel closed suddenly round her wrist and forced her back into her seat. and yet the man's body had not moved, and there was no sound save the lurching and rasping of the carriage and the clatter of the flying horses. they were already out on the country roads far beyond versailles. it was darker than before, heavy clouds had banked over the heavens, and the rumbling of thunder was heard low down on the horizon. the lady lay back panting upon the leather cushions of the carriage. she was a brave woman, and yet this sudden strange horror coming upon her at the moment when she was weakest had shaken her to the soul. she crouched in the corner, staring across with eyes which were dilated with terror at the figure on the other side. if he would but say something! any revelation, any menace, was better than this silence. it was so dark now that she could hardly see his vague outline, and every instant, as the storm gathered, it became still darker. the wind was blowing in little short angry puffs, and still there was that far-off rattle and rumble. again the strain of the silence was unbearable. she must break it at any cost. "sir," said she, "there is some mistake here. i do not know by what right you prevent me from pulling down the window and giving my directions to the coachman." he said nothing. "i repeat, sir, that there is some mistake. this is the carriage of my brother, monsieur de vivonne, and he is not a man who will allow his sister to be treated uncourteously." a few heavy drops of rain splashed against one window. the clouds were lower and denser. she had quite lost sight of that motionless figure, but it was all the more terrible to her now that it was unseen. she screamed with sheer terror, but her scream availed no more than her words. "sir," she cried, clutching forward with her hands and grasping his sleeve, "you frighten me. you terrify me. i have never harmed you. why should you wish to hurt an unfortunate woman? oh, speak to me; for god's sake, speak!" still the patter of rain upon the window, and no other sound save her own sharp breathing. "perhaps you do not know who i am!" she continued, endeavouring to assume her usual tone of command, and talking now to an absolute and impenetrable darkness. "you may learn when it is too late that you have chosen the wrong person for this pleasantry. i am the marquise de montespan, and i am not one who forgets a slight. if you know anything of the court, you must know that my word has some weight with the king. you may carry me away in this carriage, but i am not a person who can disappear without speedy inquiry, and speedy vengeance if i have been wronged. if you would--oh, jesus! have mercy!" a livid flash of lightning had burst from the heart of the cloud, and, for an instant, the whole country-side and the interior of the caleche were as light as day. the man's face was within a hand's breadth of her own, his mouth wide open, his eyes mere shining slits, convulsed with silent merriment. every detail flashed out clear in that vivid light-- his red quivering tongue, the lighter pink beneath it, the broad white teeth, the short brown beard cut into a peak and bristling forward. but it was not the sudden flash, it was not the laughing, cruel face, which shot an ice-cold shudder through francoise de montespan. it was that, of all men upon earth, this was he whom she most dreaded, and whom she had least thought to see. "maurice!" she screamed. "maurice! it is you!" "yes, little wifie, it is i. we are restored to each other's arms, you see, after this interval." "oh, maurice, how you have frightened me! how could you be so cruel? why would you not speak to me?" "because it was so sweet to sit in silence and to think that i really had you to myself after all these years, with none to come between. ah, little wifie, i have often longed for this hour." "i have wronged you, maurice; i have wronged you! forgive me!" "we do not forgive in our family, my darling francoise. is it not like old days to find ourselves driving together? and in this carriage, too. it is the very one which bore us back from the cathedral where you made your vows so prettily. i sat as i sit now, and you sat there, and i took your hand like this, and i pressed it, and--" "oh, villain, you have twisted my wrist! you have broken my arm!" "oh, surely not, my little wifie! and then you remember that, as you told me how truly you would love me, i leaned forward to your lips, and--" "oh, help! brute, you have cut my mouth! you have struck me with your ring." "struck you! now who would have thought that spring day when we planned out our future, that this also was in the future waiting for me and you? and this! and this!" he struck savagely at her face in the darkness. she threw herself down, her head pressed against the cushions. with the strength and fury of a maniac he showered his blows above her, thudding upon the leather or crashing upon the woodwork, heedless of his own splintered hands. "so i have silenced you," said he at last. "i have stopped your words with my kisses before now. but the world goes on, francoise, and times change, and women grow false, and men grow stern." "you may kill me if you will," she moaned. "i will," he said simply. still the carriage flew along, jolting and staggering in the deeply-rutted country roads. the storm had passed, but the growl of the thunder and the far-off glint of a lightning-flash were to be heard and seen on the other side of the heavens. the moon shone out with its clear cold light, silvering the broad, hedgeless, poplar-fringed plains, and shining through the window of the carriage upon the crouching figure and her terrible companion. he leaned back now, his arms folded upon his chest, his eyes gloating upon the abject misery of the woman who had wronged him. "where are you taking me?" she asked at last. "to portillac, my little wifie." "and why there? what would you do to me?" "i would silence that little lying tongue forever. it shall deceive no more men." "you would murder me?" "if you call it that." "you have a stone for a heart." "my other was given to a woman." "oh, my sins are indeed punished." "rest assured that they will be." "can i do nothing to atone?" "i will see that you atone." "you have a sword by your side, maurice. why do you not kill me, then, if you are so bitter against me? why do you not pass it through my heart?" "rest assured that i would have done so had i not an excellent reason." "why, then?" "i will tell you. at portillac i have the right of the high justice, the middle, and the low. i am seigneur there, and can try, condemn, and execute. it is my lawful privilege. this pitiful king will not even know how to avenge you, for the right is mine, and he cannot gainsay it without making an enemy of every seigneur in france." he opened his mouth again and laughed at his own device, while she, shivering in every limb, turned away from his cruel face and glowing eyes, and buried her face in her hands. once more she prayed god to forgive her for her poor sinful life. so they whirled through the night behind the clattering horses, the husband and the wife, saying nothing, but with hatred and fear raging in their hearts, until a brazier fire shone down upon them from the angle of a keep, and the shadow of the huge pile loomed vaguely up in front of them in the darkness. it was the castle of portillac. chapter xxii. the scaffold of portillac. and thus it was that amory de catinat and amos green saw from their dungeon window the midnight carriage which discharged its prisoner before their eyes. hence, too, came that ominous planking and that strange procession in the early morning. and thus it also happened that they found themselves looking down upon francoise de montespan as she was led to her death, and that they heard that last piteous cry for aid at the instant when the heavy hand of the ruffian with the axe fell upon her shoulder, and she was forced down upon her knees beside the block. she shrank screaming from the dreadful, red-stained, greasy billet of wood, but the butcher heaved up his weapon, and the seigneur had taken a step forward with hand outstretched to seize the long auburn hair and to drag the dainty head down with it when suddenly he was struck motionless with astonishment, and stood with his foot advanced and his hand still out, his mouth half open, and his eyes fixed in front of him. and, indeed, what he had seen was enough to fill any man with amazement. out of the small square window which faced him a man had suddenly shot head-foremost, pitching on to his outstretched hands and then bounding to his feet. within a foot of his heels came the head of a second one, who fell more heavily than the first, and yet recovered himself as quickly. the one wore the blue coat with silver facings of the king's guard; the second had the dark coat and clean-shaven face of a man of peace; but each carried a short rusty iron bar in his hand. not a word did either of them say, but the soldier took two quick steps forward and struck at the headsman while he was still poising himself for a blow at the victim. there was a thud, with a crackle like a breaking egg, and the bar flew into pieces. the heads-man gave a dreadful cry, and dropped his axe, clapped his two hands to his head, and running zigzag across the scaffold, fell over, a dead man, into the courtyard beneath. quick as a flash de catinat had caught up the axe, and faced de montespan with the heavy weapon slung over his shoulder and a challenge in his eyes. "now!" said he. the seigneur had for the instant been too astounded to speak. now he understood at least that these strangers had come between him and his prey. "seize these men!" he shrieked, turning to his followers. "one moment!" cried de catinat, with a voice and manner which commanded attention. "you see by my coat what i am. i am the body-servant of the king. who touches me touches him. have a care for yourselves. it is a dangerous game!" "on, you cowards!" roared de montespan. but the men-at-arms hesitated, for the fear of the king was as a great shadow which hung over all france. de catinat saw their indecision, and he followed up his advantage. "this woman," he cried, "is the king's own favourite, and if any harm come to a lock of her hair, i tell you that there is not a living soul within this portcullis who will not die a death of torture. fools, will you gasp out your lives upon the rack, or writhe in boiling oil, at the bidding of this madman?" "who are these men, marceau?" cried the seigneur furiously. "they are prisoners, your excellency." "prisoners! whose prisoners?" "yours, your excellency." "who ordered you to detain them?" "you did. the escort brought your signet-ring." "i never saw the men. there is devilry in this. but they shall not beard me in my own castle, nor stand between me and my own wife. no, _par dieu!_ they shall not and live! you men, marceau, etienne, gilbert, jean, pierre, all you who have eaten my bread, on to them, i say!" he glanced round with furious eyes, but they fell only upon hung heads and averted faces. with a hideous curse he flashed out his sword and rushed at his wife, who knelt half insensible beside the block. de catinat sprang between them to protect her; but marceau, the bearded seneschal, had already seized his master round the waist. with the strength of a maniac, his teeth clenched and the foam churning from the corners of his lips, de montespan writhed round in the man's grasp, and shortening his sword, he thrust it through the brown beard and deep into the throat behind it. marceau fell back with a choking cry, the blood bubbling from his mouth and his wound; but before his murderer could disengage his weapon, de catinat and the american, aided by a dozen of the retainers, had dragged him down on to the scaffold, and amos green had pinioned him so securely that he could but move his eyes and his lips, with which he lay glaring and spitting at them. so savage were his own followers against him--for marceau was well loved amongst them-- that, with axe and block so ready, justice might very swiftly have had her way, had not a long clear bugle-call, rising and falling in a thousand little twirls and flourishes, clanged out suddenly in the still morning air. de catinat pricked up his ears at the sound of it like a hound at the huntsman's call. "did you hear, amos?" "it was a trumpet." "it was the guards' bugle-call. you, there, hasten to the gate! throw up the portcullis and drop the drawbridge! stir yourselves, or even now you may suffer for your master's sins! it has been a narrow escape, amos!" "you may say so, friend. i saw him put out his hand to her hair, even as you sprang from the window. another instant and he would have had her scalped. but she is a fair woman, the fairest that ever my eyes rested upon, and it is not fit that she should kneel here upon these boards." he dragged her husband's long black cloak from him, and made a pillow for the senseless woman with a tenderness and delicacy which came strangely from a man of his build and bearing. he was still stooping over her when there came the clang of the falling bridge, and an instant later the clatter of the hoofs of a troop of cavalry, who swept with wave of plumes, toss of manes, and jingle of steel into the courtyard. at the head was a tall horseman in the full dress of the guards, with a curling feather in his hat, high buff gloves, and his sword gleaming in the sunlight. he cantered forward towards the scaffold, his keen dark eyes taking in every detail of the group which awaited him there. de catinat's face brightened at the sight of him, and he was down in an instant beside his stirrup. "de brissac!" "de catinat! now where in the name of wonder did you come from?" "i have been a prisoner. tell me, de brissac, did you leave the message in paris?" "certainly i did." "and the archbishop came?" "he did." "and the marriage?" "took place as arranged. that is why this poor woman whom i see yonder has had to leave the palace." "i thought as much." "i trust that no harm has come to her?" "my friend and i were just in time to save her. her husband lies there. he is a fiend, de brissac." "very likely; but an angel might have grown bitter had he had the same treatment." "we have him pinioned here. he has slain a man, and i have slain another." "on my word, you have been busy." "how did you know that we were here?" "nay, that is an unexpected pleasure." "you did not come for us, then?" "no; we came for the lady." "and how did this fellow get hold of her?" "her brother was to have taken her in his carriage. her husband learned it, and by a lying message he coaxed her into his own, which was at another door. when de vivonne found that she did not come, and that her rooms were empty, he made inquiries, and soon learned how she had gone. de montespan's arms had been seen on the panel, and so the king sent me here with my troop as fast as we could gallop." "ah, and you would have come too late had a strange chance not brought us here. i know not who it was who waylaid us, for this man seemed to know nothing of the matter. however, all that will be clearer afterwards. what is to be done now?" "i have my own orders. madame is to be sent to petit bourg, and any who are concerned in offering her violence are to be kept until the king's pleasure is known. the castle, too, must be held for the king. but you, de catinat, you have nothing to do now?" "nothing, save that i would like well to ride into paris to see that all is right with my uncle and his daughter." "ah, that sweet little cousin of thine! by my soul, i do not wonder that the folk know you well in the rue st. martin. well, i have carried a message for you once, and you shall do as much for me now." "with all my heart. and whither?" "to versailles. the king will be on fire to know how we have fared. you have the best right to tell him, since without you and your friend yonder it would have been but a sorry tale." "i will be there in two hours." "have you horses?" "ours were slain." "you will find some in the stables here. pick the best, since you have lost your own in the king's service." the advice was too good to be overlooked. de catinat, beckoning to amos green, hurried away with him to the stables, while de brissac, with a few short sharp orders, disarmed the retainers, stationed his guardsmen all over the castle, and arranged for the removal of the lady, and for the custody of her husband. an hour later the two friends were riding swiftly down the country road, inhaling the sweet air, which seemed the fresher for their late experience of the dank, foul vapours of their dungeon. far behind them a little dark pinnacle jutting over a grove of trees marked the chateau which they had left, while on the extreme horizon to the west there came a quick shimmer and sparkle where the level rays of the early sun gleamed upon the magnificent palace which was their goal. chapter xxiii. the fall of the catinats. two days after madame de maintenon's marriage to the king there was held within the humble walls of her little room a meeting which was destined to cause untold misery to many hundreds of thousands of people, and yet, in the wisdom of providence, to be an instrument in carrying french arts and french ingenuity and french sprightliness among those heavier teutonic peoples who have been the stronger and the better ever since for the leaven which they then received. for in history great evils have sometimes arisen from a virtue, and most beneficent results have often followed hard upon a crime. the time had come when the church was to claim her promise from madame, and her pale cheek and sad eyes showed how vain it had been for her to try and drown the pleadings of her tender heart by the arguments of the bigots around her. she knew the huguenots of france. who could know them better, seeing that she was herself from their stock, and had been brought up in their faith? she knew their patience, their nobility, their independence, their tenacity. what chance was there that they would conform to the king's wish? a few great nobles might, but the others would laugh at the galleys, the jail, or even the gallows when the faith of their fathers was at stake. if their creed were no longer tolerated, then, and if they remained true to it, they must either fly from the country or spend a living death tugging at an oar or working in a chain-gang upon the roads. it was a dreadful alternative to present to a people who were so numerous that they made a small nation in themselves. and most dreadful of all, that she who was of their own blood should cast her voice against them. and yet her promise had been given, and now the time had come when it must be redeemed. the eloquent bishop bossuet was there, with louvois, the minister of war, and the famous jesuit, father la chaise, each piling argument upon argument to overcome the reluctance of the king. beside them stood another priest, so thin and so pale that he might have risen from his bed of death, but with a fierce light burning in his large dark eyes, and with a terrible resolution in his drawn brows and in the set of his grim, lanky jaw. madame bent over her tapestry and weaved her coloured silks in silence, while the king leaned upon his hand and listened with the face of a man who knows that he is driven, and yet can hardly turn against the goads. on the low table lay a paper, with pen and ink beside it. it was the order for the revocation, and it only needed the king's signature to make it the law of the land. "and so, father, you are of opinion that if i stamp out heresy in this fashion i shall assure my own salvation in the next world?" he asked. "you will have merited a reward." "and you think so too, monsieur bishop?" "assuredly, sire." "and you. abbe du chayla?" the emaciated priest spoke for the first time, a tinge of colour creeping into his corpse-like cheeks, and a more lurid light in his deep-set eyes. "i know not about assuring your salvation, sire. i think it would take very much more to do that. but there cannot be a doubt as to your damnation if you do not do it." the king started angrily, and frowned at the speaker. "your words are somewhat more curt than i am accustomed to," he remarked. "in such a matter it were cruel indeed to leave you in doubt. i say again that your soul's fate hangs upon the balance. heresy is a mortal sin. thousands of heretics would turn to the church if you did but give the word. therefore these thousands of mortal sins are all upon your soul. what hope for it then, if you do not amend?" "my father and my grandfather tolerated them." "then, without some special extension of the grace of god, your father and your grandfather are burning in hell." "insolent!" the king sprang from his seat. "sire, i will say what i hold to be the truth were you fifty times a king. what care i for any man when i know that i speak for the king of kings? see; are these the limbs of one who would shrink from testifying to truth?" with a sudden movement he threw back the long sleeves of his gown and shot out his white fleshless arms. the bones were all knotted and bent and screwed into the most fantastic shapes. even louvois, the hardened man of the court, and his two brother priests, shuddered at the sight of those dreadful limbs. he raised them above his head and turned his burning eyes upwards. "heaven has chosen me to testify for the faith before now," said he. "i heard that blood was wanted to nourish the young church of siam, and so to siam i journeyed. they tore me open; they crucified me; they wrenched and split my bones. i was left as a dead man, yet god has breathed the breath of life back into me that i may help in this great work of the regeneration of france." "your sufferings, father," said louis, resuming his seat, "give you every claim, both upon the church and upon me, who am its special champion and protector. what would you counsel, then, father, in the case of those huguenots who refuse to change?" "they would change," cried du chayla, with a drawn smile upon his ghastly face. "they must bend or they must break. what matter if they be ground to powder, if we can but build up a complete church in the land?" his deep-set eyes glowed with ferocity, and be shook one bony hand in savage wrath above his head. "the cruelty with which you have been used, then, has not taught you to be more tender to others." "tender! to heretics! no, sire, my own pains have taught me that the world and the flesh are as nothing, and that the truest charity to another is to capture his soul at all risks to his vile body. i should have these huguenot souls, sire, though i turned france into a shambles to gain them." louis was evidently deeply impressed by the fearless words and the wild earnestness of the speaker. he leaned his head upon his hand for a little time, and remained sunk in the deepest thought. "besides, sire," said pere la chaise softly, "there would be little need for these stronger measures of which the good abbe speaks. as i have already remarked to you, you are so beloved in your kingdom that the mere assurance that you had expressed your will upon the subject would be enough to turn them all to the true faith." "i wish that i could think so, father; i wish that i could think so. but what is this?" it was his valet who had half opened the door. "captain de catinat is here, who desires to see you at once, sire." "ask the captain to enter. ah!" a happy thought seemed to have struck him. "we shall see what love for me will do in such a matter, for if it is anywhere to be found it must be among my own body-servants." the guardsman had arrived that instant from his long ride, and leaving amos green with the horses, he had come on at once, all dusty and travel-stained, to carry his message to the king. he entered now, and stood with the quiet ease of a man who is used to such scenes, his hand raised in a salute. "what news, captain?" "major de brissac bade me tell you, sire, that he held the castle of portillac, that the lady is safe, and that her husband is a prisoner." louis and his wife exchanged a quick glance of relief. "that is well," said he. "by the way, captain, you have served me in many ways of late, and always with success. i hear, louvois, that de la salle is dead of the small-pox." "he died yesterday, sire." "then i desire that you make out the vacant commission of major to monsieur de catinat. let me be the first to congratulate you, major, upon your promotion, though you will need to exchange the blue coat for the pearl and gray of the mousquetaires. we cannot spare you from the household, you see." de catinat kissed the hand which the monarch held out to him. "may i be worthy of your kindness, sire!" "you would do what you could to serve me, would you not?" "my life is yours, sire." "very good. then i shall put your fidelity to the proof." "i am ready for any proof." "it is not a very severe one. you see this paper upon the table. it is an order that all the huguenots in my dominions shall give up their errors, under pain of banishment or captivity. now i have hopes that there are many of my faithful subjects who are at fault in this matter, but who will abjure it when they learn that it is my clearly expressed wish that they should do so. it would be a great joy to me to find that it was so, for it would be a pain to me to use force against any man who bears the name of frenchman. do you follow me?" "yes, sire." the young man had turned deadly pale, and he shifted his feet, and opened and clasped his hands. he had faced death a dozen times and under many different forms, but never had he felt such a sinking of the heart as came over him now. "you are yourself a huguenot, i understand. i would gladly have you, then, as the first-fruit of this great measure. let us hear from your own lips that you, for one, are ready to follow the lead of your king in this as in other things." the young guardsman still hesitated, though his doubts were rather as to how he should frame his reply than as to what its substance should be. he felt that in an instant fortune had wiped out all the good turns which she had done him during his past life, and that now, far from being in her debt, he held a heavy score against her. the king arched his eyebrows and drummed his fingers impatiently as he glanced at the downcast face and dejected bearing. "why all this thought?" he cried. "you are a man whom i have raised and whom i will raise. he who has a major's epaulettes at thirty may carry a marshal's baton at fifty. your past is mine, and your future shall be no less so. what other hopes have you?" "i have none, sire, outside your service." "why this silence, then? why do you not give the assurance which i demand?" "i cannot do it, sire." "you cannot do it!" "it is impossible. i should have no more peace in my mind, or respect for myself, if i knew that for the sake of position or wealth i had given up the faith of my fathers." "man, you are surely mad! there is all that a man could covet upon one side, and what is there upon the other?" "there is my honour." "and is it, then, a dishonour to embrace my religion?" "it would be a dishonour to me to embrace it for the sake of gain without believing in it." "then believe it." "alas, sire, a man cannot force himself to believe. belief is a thing which must come to him, not he to it." "on my word, father," said louis, glancing with a bitter smile at his jesuit confessor, "i shall have to pick the cadets of the household from your seminary, since my officers have turned casuists and theologians. so, for the last time, you refuse to obey my request?" "oh, sire--" de catinat took a step forward with outstretched hands and tears in his eyes. but the king checked him with a gesture. "i desire no protestations," said he. "i judge a man by his acts. do you abjure or not?" "i cannot, sire." "you see," said louis, turning again to the jesuit, "it will not be as easy as you think." "this man is obstinate, it is true, but many others will be more yielding." the king shook his head. "i would that i knew what to do," said he. "madame, i know that you, at least, will ever give me the best advice. you have heard all that has been said. what do you recommend?" she kept her eyes still fixed upon her tapestry, but her voice was firm and clear as she answered:-- "you have yourself said that you are the eldest son of the church. if the eldest son desert her, then who will do her bidding? and there is truth, too, in what the holy abbe has said. you may imperil your own soul by condoning this sin of heresy. it grows and flourishes, and if it be not rooted out now, it may choke the truth as weeds and briers choke the wheat." "there are districts in france now," said bossuet, "where a church is not to be seen in a day's journey, and where all the folk, from the nobles to the peasants, are of the same accursed faith. so it is in the cevennes, where the people are as fierce and rugged as their own mountains. heaven guard the priests who have to bring them back from their errors." "whom should i send on so perilous a task?" asked louis. the abbe du chayla was down in a instant upon his knees with his gaunt hands outstretched. "send me, sire! me!" he cried. "i have never asked a favour of you, and never will again. but i am the man who could break this people. send me with your message to the people of the cevennes." "god help the people of the cevennes!" muttered louis, as he looked with mingled respect and loathing at the emaciated face and fiery eyes of the fanatic. "very well, abbe," he added aloud; "you shall go to the cevennes." perhaps for an instant there came upon the stern priest some premonition of that dreadful morning when, as he crouched in a corner of 'his burning home, fifty daggers were to rasp against each other in his body. he sunk his face in his hands, and a shudder passed over his gaunt frame. then he rose, and folding his arms, he resumed his impassive attitude. louis took up the pen from the table, and drew the paper towards him. "i have the same counsel, then, from all of you," said he,--"from you, bishop; from you, father; from you, madame; from you, abbe; and from you, louvois. well, if ill come from it, may it not be visited upon me! but what is this?" de catinat had taken a step forward with his hand outstretched. his ardent, impetuous nature had suddenly broken down all the barriers of caution, and he seemed for the instant to see that countless throng of men, women, and children of his own faith, all unable to say a word for themselves, and all looking to him as their champion and spokesman. he had thought little of such matters when all was well, but now, when danger threatened, the deeper side of his nature was moved, and he felt how light a thing is life and fortune when weighed against a great abiding cause and principle. "do not sign it, sire," he cried. "you will live to wish that your hand had withered ere it grasped that pen. i know it, sire. i am sure of it. consider all these helpless folk--the little children, the young girls, the old and the feeble. their creed is themselves. as well ask the leaves to change the twigs on which they grow. they could not change. at most you could but hope to turn them from honest folk into hypocrites. and why should you do it? they honour you. they love you. they harm none. they are proud to serve in your armies, to fight for you, to work for you, to build up the greatness of your kingdom. i implore you, sire, to think again before you sign an order which will bring misery and desolation to so many." for a moment the king had hesitated as he listened to the short abrupt sentences in which the soldier pleaded for his fellows, but his face hardened again as he remembered how even his own personal entreaty had been unable to prevail with this young dandy of the court. "france's religion should be that of france's king," said he, "and if my own guardsmen thwart me in such a matter, i must find others who will be more faithful. that major's commission in the mousquetaires must go to captain de belmont, louvois." "very good, sire." "and de catinat's commission may be transferred to lieutenant labadoyere." "very good, sire." "and i am to serve you no longer?" "you are too dainty for my service." de catinat's arms fell listlessly to his side, and his head sunk forward upon his breast. then, as he realised the ruin of all the hopes of his life, and the cruel injustice with which he had been treated, he broke into a cry of despair, and rushed from the room with the hot tears of impotent anger running down his face. so, sobbing, gesticulating, with coat unbuttoned and hat awry, he burst into the stable where placid amos green was smoking his pipe and watching with critical eyes the grooming of the horses. "what in thunder is the matter now?" he asked, holding his pipe by the bowl, while the blue wreaths curled up from his lips. "this sword," cried the frenchman--"i have no right to wear it! i shall break it!" "well, and i'll break my knife too if it will hearten you up." "and these," cried de catinat, tugging at his silver shoulder-straps, "they must go." "ah, you draw ahead of me there, for i never had any. but come, friend, let me know the trouble, that i may see if it may not be mended." "to paris! to paris!" shouted the guardsman frantically. "if i am ruined, i may yet be in time to save them. the horses, quick!" it was clear to the american that some sudden calamity had befallen, so he aided his comrade and the grooms to saddle and bridle. five minutes later they were flying on their way, and in little more than an hour their steeds, all reeking and foam-flecked, were pulled up outside the high house in the rue st. martin. de catinat sprang from his saddle and rushed upstairs, while amos followed in his own leisurely fashion. the old huguenot and his beautiful daughter were seated at one side of the great fireplace, her hand in his, and they sprang up together, she to throw herself with a glad cry into the arms of her lover, and he to grasp the hand which his nephew held out to him. at the other side of the fireplace, with a very long pipe in his mouth and a cup of wine upon a settle beside him, sat a strange-looking man, with grizzled hair and beard, a fleshy red projecting nose, and two little gray eyes, which twinkled out from under huge brindled brows. his long thin face was laced and seamed with wrinkles, crossing and recrossing everywhere, but fanning out in hundreds from the corners of his eyes. it was set in an unchanging expression, and as it was of the same colour all over, as dark as the darkest walnut, it might have been some quaint figure-head cut out of a coarse-grained wood. he was clad in a blue serge jacket, a pair of red breeches smeared at the knees with tar, clean gray worsted stockings, large steel buckles over his coarse square-toed shoes, and beside him, balanced upon the top of a thick oaken cudgel, was a weather-stained silver-laced hat. his gray-shot hair was gathered up behind into a short stiff tail, and a seaman's hanger, with a brass handle, was girded to his waist by a tarnished leather belt. de catinat had been too occupied to take notice of this singular individual, but amos green gave a shout of delight at the sight of him, and ran forward to greet him. the other's wooden face relaxed so far as to show two tobacco-stained fangs, and, without rising, he held out a great red hand, of the size and shape of a moderate spade. "why, captain ephraim," cried amos in english, "who ever would have thought of finding you here? de catinat, this is my old friend ephraim savage, under whose charge i came here." "anchor's apeak, lad, and the hatches down," said the stranger, in the peculiar drawling voice which the new englanders had retained from their ancestors, the english puritans. "and when do you sail?" "as soon as your foot is on her deck, if providence serve us with wind and tide. and how has all gone with thee, amos?" "right well. i have much to tell you of." "i trust that you have held yourself apart from all their popish devilry." "yes, yes, ephraim." "and have had no truck with the scarlet woman." "no, no; but what is it now?" the grizzled hair was bristling with rage, and the little gray eyes were gleaming from under the heavy tufts. amos, following their gaze, saw that de catinat was seated with his arm round adele, while her head rested upon his shoulder. "ah, if i but knew their snip-snap, lippetty-chippetty lingo! saw one ever such a sight! amos, lad, what is the french for 'a shameless hussy'?" "nay, nay, ephraim. surely one may see such a sight, and think no harm of it, on our side of the water. "never, amos. in no godly country." "tut! i have seen folks courting in new york." "ah, new york! i said in no godly country. i cannot answer for new york or virginia. south of cape cod, or of new haven at the furthest, there is no saying what folk will do. very sure i am that in boston or salem or plymouth she would see the bridewell and he the stocks for half as much. ah!" he shook his head and bent his brows at the guilty couple. but they and their old relative were far too engrossed with their own affairs to give a thought to the puritan seaman. de catinat had told his tale in a few short, bitter sentences, the injustice that had been done to him, his dismissal from the king's service, and the ruin which had come upon the huguenots of france. adele, as is the angel instinct of woman, thought only of her lover and his misfortunes as she listened to his story, but the old merchant tottered to his feet when he heard of the revocation of the edict, and stood with shaking limbs, staring about him in bewilderment. "what am i to do?" he cried. "what am i to do? i am too old to begin my life again." "never fear, uncle," said de catinat heartily. "there are other lands beyond france." "but not for me. no, no; i am too old. lord, but thy hand is heavy upon thy servants. now is the vial opened, and the carved work of the sanctuary thrown down. ah, what shall i do, and whither shall i turn?" he wrung his hands in his perplexity. "what is amiss with him, then, amos?" asked the seaman. "though i know nothing of what he says, yet i can see that he flies a distress signal." "he and his must leave the country, ephraim." "and why?" "because they are protestants, and the king will not abide their creed." ephraim savage was across the room in an instant, and had enclosed the old merchant's thin hand in his own great knotted fist. there was a brotherly sympathy in his strong grip and rugged weather-stained face which held up the other's courage as no words could have done. "what is the french for 'the scarlet woman,' amos?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder. "tell this man that we shall see him through. tell him that we've got a country where he'll just fit in like a bung in a barrel. tell him that religion is free to all there, and not a papist nearer than baltimore or the capuchins of the penobscot. tell him that if he wants to come, the _golden rod_ is waiting with her anchor apeak and her cargo aboard. tell him what you like, so long as you make him come." "then we must come at once," said de catinat, as he listened to the cordial message which was conveyed to his uncle. "to-night the orders will be out, and to-morrow it may be too late." "but my business!" cried the merchant. "take what valuables you can, and leave the rest. better that than lose all, and liberty into the bargain." and so at last it was arranged. that very night, within five minutes of the closing of the gates, there passed out of paris a small party of five, three upon horseback, and two in a closed carriage which bore several weighty boxes upon the top. they were the first leaves flying before the hurricane, the earliest of that great multitude who were within the next few months to stream along every road which led from france, finding their journey's end too often in galley, dungeon and torture chamber, and yet flooding over the frontiers in numbers sufficient to change the industries and modify the characters of all the neighbouring peoples. like the israelites of old, they had been driven from their homes at the bidding of an angry king, who, even while he exiled them, threw every difficulty in the way of their departure. like them, too, there were none of them who could hope to reach their promised land without grievous wanderings, penniless, friendless, and destitute. what passages befell these pilgrims in their travels, what dangers they met, and overcame in the land of the swiss, on the rhine, among the walloons, in england, in ireland, in berlin, and even in far-off russia, has still to be written. this one little group, however, whom we know, we may follow in their venturesome journey, and see the chances which befell them upon that great continent which had lain fallow for so long, sown only with the weeds of humanity, but which was now at last about to quicken into such glorious life. part ii. in the new world. chapter xxiv. the start of the "golden rod." thanks to the early tidings which the guardsman had brought with him, his little party was now ahead of the news. as they passed through the village of louvier in the early morning they caught a glimpse of a naked corpse upon a dunghill, and were told by a grinning watchman that it was that of a huguenot who had died impenitent, but that was a common enough occurrence already, and did not mean that there had been any change in the law. at rouen all was quiet, and captain ephraim savage before evening had brought both them and such property as they had saved aboard of his brigantine, the golden rod. it was but a little craft, some seventy tons burden, but at a time when so many were putting out to sea in open boats, preferring the wrath of nature to that of the king, it was a refuge indeed. the same night the seaman drew up his anchor and began to slowly make his way down the winding river. and very slow work it was. there was half a moon shining and a breeze from the east, but the stream writhed and twisted and turned until sometimes they seemed to be sailing up rather than down. in the long reaches they set the yard square and ran, but often they had to lower their two boats and warp her painfully along, tomlinson of salem, the mate, and six grave, tobacco-chewing, new england seamen with their broad palmetto hats, tugging and straining at the oars. amos green, de catinat, and even the old merchant had to take their spell ere morning, when the sailors were needed aboard for the handling of the canvas. at last, however, with the early dawn the river broadened out and each bank trended away, leaving a long funnel-shaped estuary between. ephraim savage snuffed the air and paced the deck briskly with a twinkle in his keen gray eyes. the wind had fallen away, but there was still enough to drive them slowly upon their course. "where's the gal?" he asked. "she is in my cabin," said amos green. "i thought that maybe she could manage there until we got across." "where will you sleep yourself, then?" "tut, a litter of spruce boughs and a sheet of birch bark over me have been enough all these years. what would i ask better than this deck of soft white pine and my blanket?" "very good. the old man and his nephew, him with the blue coat, can have the two empty bunks. but you must speak to that man, amos. i'll have no philandering aboard my ship, lad--no whispering or cuddling or any such foolishness. tell him that this ship is just a bit broke off from boston, and he'll have to put up with boston ways until he gets off her. they've been good enough for better men than him. you give me the french for 'no philandering,' and i'll bring him up with a round turn when he drifts." "it's a pity we left so quick or they might have been married before we started. she's a good girl, ephraim, and he is a fine man, for all that their ways are not the same as ours. they don't seem to take life so hard as we, and maybe they get more pleasure out of it." "i never heard tell that we were put here to get pleasure out of it," said the old puritan, shaking his head. "the valley of the shadow of death don't seem to me to be the kind o' name one would give to a play-ground. it is a trial and a chastening, that's what it is, the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. we're bad from the beginning, like a stream that runs from a tamarack swamp, and we've enough to do to get ourselves to rights without any fool's talk about pleasure." "it seems to me to be all mixed up," said amos. "like the fat and the lean in a bag of pemmican. look at that sun just pushing its edge over the trees, and see the pink flush on the clouds and the river like a rosy ribbon behind us. it's mighty pretty to our eyes, and very pleasing to us, and it wouldn't be so to my mind if the creator hadn't wanted it to be. many a time when i have lain in the woods in the fall and smoked my pipe, and felt how good the tobacco was, and how bright the yellow maples were, and the purple ash, and the red tupelo blazing among the bushwood, i've felt that the real fool's talk was with the man who could doubt that all this was meant to make the world happier for us." "you've been thinking too much in them woods," said ephraim savage, gazing at him uneasily. "don't let your sail be too great for your boat, lad, nor trust to your own wisdom. your father was from the bay, and you were raised from a stock that cast the dust of england from their feet rather than bow down to baal. keep a grip on the word and don't think beyond it. but what is the matter with the old man? he don't seem easy in his mind." the old merchant had been leaning over the bulwarks, looking back with a drawn face and weary eyes at the red curving track behind them which marked the path to paris. adele had come up now, with not a thought to spare upon the dangers and troubles which lay in front of her as she chafed the old man's thin cold hands, and whispered words of love and comfort into his ears. but they had come to the point where the gentle still-flowing river began for the first time to throb to the beat of the sea. the old man gazed forward with horror at the bowsprit as he saw it rise slowly upwards into the air, and clung frantically at the rail as it seemed to slip away from beneath him. "we are always in the hollow of god's hand," he whispered, "but oh, adele, it is a dreadful thing to feel his fingers moving under us." "come with me, uncle," said de catinat, passing his arm under that of the old man. "it is long since you have rested. and you, adele, i pray that you will go and sleep, my poor darling, for it has been a weary journey. go now, to please me, and when you wake, both france and your troubles will lie behind you." when father and daughter had left the deck, de catinat made his way aft again to where amos green and the captain were standing. "i am glad to get them below, amos," said he, "for i fear that we may have trouble yet." "and how?" "you see the white road which runs by the southern bank of the river. twice within the last half-hour i have seen horsemen spurring for dear life along it. where the spires and smoke are yonder is honfleur, and thither it was that these men went. i know not who could ride so madly at such an hour unless they were the messengers of the king. oh, see, there is a third one!" on the white band which wound among the green meadows a black dot could be seen which moved along with great rapidity, vanished behind a clump of trees, and then reappeared again, making for the distant city. captain savage drew out his glass and gazed at the rider. "ay, ay," said he, as he snapped it up again. "it is a soldier, sure enough. i can see the glint of the scabbard which he carries on his larboard side. i think we shall have more wind soon. with a breeze we can show our heels to anything in french waters, but a galley or an armed boat would overhaul us now." de catinat, who, though he could speak little english, had learned in america to understand it pretty well, looked anxiously at amos green. "i fear that we shall bring trouble on this good captain," said he, "and that the loss of his cargo and ship may be his reward for having befriended us. ask him whether he would not prefer to land us on the north bank. with our money we might make our way into the lowlands." ephraim savage looked at his passenger with eyes which had lost something of their sternness. "young man," said he, "i see that you can understand something of my talk." de catinat nodded. "i tell you then that i am a bad man to beat. any man that was ever shipmates with me would tell you as much. i just jam my helm and keep my course as long as god will let me. d'ye see?" de catinat again nodded, though in truth the seaman's metaphors left him with but a very general sense of his meaning. "we're comin' abreast of that there town, and in ten minutes we shall know if there is any trouble waiting for us. but i'll tell you a story as we go that'll show you what kind o' man you've shipped with. it was ten years ago that i speak of, when i was in the _speedwell_, sixty-ton brig, tradin' betwixt boston and jamestown, goin' south with lumber and skins and fixin's, d'ye see, and north again with tobacco and molasses. one night, blowin' half a gale from the south'ard, we ran on a reef two miles to the east of cape may, and down we went with a hole in our bottom like as if she'd been spitted on the steeple o' one o' them honfleur churches. well, in the morning there i was washin' about, nigh out of sight of land, clingin' on to half the foreyard, without a sign either of my mates or of wreckage. i wasn't so cold, for it was early fall, and i could get three parts of my body on to the spar, but i was hungry and thirsty and bruised, so i just took in two holes of my waist-belt, and put up a hymn, and had a look round for what i could see. well, i saw more than i cared for. within five paces of me there was a great fish, as long pretty nigh as the spar that i was grippin'. it's a mighty pleasant thing to have your legs in the water and a beast like that all ready for a nibble at your toes." "_mon dieu!_" cried the french soldier. "and he have not eat you?" ephraim savage's little eyes twinkled at the reminiscence. "i ate him," said he. "what!" cried amos. "it's a mortal fact. i'd a jack-knife in my pocket, same as this one, and i kicked my legs to keep the brute off, and i whittled away at the spar until i'd got a good jagged bit off, sharp at each end, same as a nigger told me once down delaware way. then i waited for him, and stopped kicking, so he came at me like a hawk on a chick-a-dee. when he turned up his belly i jammed my left hand with the wood right into his great grinnin' mouth, and i let him have it with my knife between the gills. he tried to break away then, but i held on, d'ye see, though he took me so deep i thought i'd never come up again. i was nigh gone when we got to the surface, but he was floatin' with the white up, and twenty holes in his shirt front. then i got back to my spar, for we'd gone a long fifty fathoms under water, and when i reached it i fainted dead away." "and then?" "well, when i came to, it was calm, and there was the dead shark floatin' beside me. i paddled my spar over to him and i got loose a few yards of halliard that were hangin' from one end of it. i made a clove-hitch round his tail, d'ye see, and got the end of it slung over the spar and fastened, so as i couldn't lose him. then i set to work and i ate him in a week right up to his back fin, and i drank the rain that fell on my coat, and when i was picked up by the _gracie_ of gloucester, i was that fat that i could scarce climb aboard. that's what ephraim savage means, my lad, when he says that he is a baddish man to beat." whilst the puritan seaman had been detailing his reminiscence, his eyes had kept wandering from the clouds to the flapping sails and back. such wind as there was came in little short puffs, and the canvas either drew full or was absolutely slack. the fleecy shreds of cloud above, however, travelled swiftly across the blue sky. it was on these that the captain fixed his gaze, and he watched them like a man who is working out a problem in his mind. they were abreast of honfleur now, and about half a mile out from it. several sloops and brigs were lying there in a cluster, and a whole fleet of brown-sailed fishing-boats were tacking slowly in. yet all was quiet on the curving quay and on the half-moon fort over which floated the white flag with the golden _fleur-de-lis_. the port lay on their quarter now and they were drawing away more quickly as the breeze freshened. de catinat glancing back had almost made up his mind that their fears were quite groundless when they were brought back in an instant and more urgently than ever. round the corner of the mole a great dark boat had dashed into view, ringed round with foam from her flying prow, and from the ten pairs of oars which swung from either side of her. a dainty white ensign drooped over her stern, and in her bows the sun's light was caught by a heavy brass carronade. she was packed with men, and the gleam which twinkled every now and again from amongst them told that they were armed to the teeth. the captain brought his glass to bear upon them and whistled. then he glanced up at the clouds once more. "thirty men," said he, "and they go three paces to our two. you, sir, take your blue coat off this deck or you'll bring trouble upon us. the lord will look after his own if they'll only keep from foolishness. get these hatches off, tomlinson. so! where's jim sturt and hiram jefferson? let them stand by to clap them on again when i whistle. starboard! starboard! keep her as full as she'll draw. now, amos, and you, tomlinson, come here until i have a word with you." the three stood in consultation upon the poop, glancing back at their pursuers. there could be no doubt that the wind was freshening; it blew briskly in their faces as they looked back, but it was not steady yet, and the boat was rapidly overhauling them. already they could see the faces of the marines who sat in the stern, and the gleam of the lighted linstock which the gunner held in his hand. "_hola!_" cried an officer in excellent english. "lay her to or we fire" "who are you, and what do you want?" shouted ephraim savage, in a voice that might have been heard from the bank. "we come in the king's name, and we want a party of huguenots from paris who came on board of your vessel at rouen." "brace back the foreyard and lay her to," shouted the captain. "drop a ladder over the side there and look smart! so! now we are ready for them." the yard was swung round and the vessel lay quietly rising and falling on the waves. the boat dashed alongside, her brass cannon trained upon the brigantine, and her squad of marines with their fingers upon their triggers ready to open fire. they grinned and shrugged their shoulders when they saw that their sole opponents were three unarmed men upon the poop. the officer, a young active fellow with a bristling moustache, like the whiskers of a cat, was on deck in an instant with his drawn sword in his hand. "come up, two of you!" he cried. "you stand here at the head of the ladder, sergeant. throw up a rope and you can fix it to this stanchion. keep awake down there and be all ready to fire! you come with me, corporal lemoine. who is captain of this ship?" "i am, sir," said ephraim savage submissively. "you have three huguenots aboard?" "tut! tut! huguenots, are they? i thought they were very anxious to get away, but as long as they paid their passage it was no business of mine. an old man, his daughter, and a young fellow about your age in some sort of livery." "in uniform, sir! the uniform of the king's guard. those are the folk i have come for." "and you wish to take them back?" "most certainly." "poor folk! i am sorry for them." "and so am i, but orders are orders and must be done." "quite so. well, the old man is in his bunk asleep. the maid is in a cabin below. and the other is sleeping down the hold there where we had to put him, for there is no room elsewhere." "sleeping, you say? we had best surprise him." "but think you that you dare do it alone! he has no arms, it is true, but he is a well-grown young fellow. will you not have twenty men up from the boat?" some such thought had passed through the officer's head, but the captain's remark put him upon his mettle. "come with me, corporal," said he. "down this ladder, you say?" "yes, down the ladder and straight on. he lies between those two cloth bales." ephraim savage looked up with a smile playing about the corners of his grim mouth. the wind was whistling now in the rigging, and the stays of the mast were humming like two harp strings. amos green lounged beside the french sergeant who guarded the end of the rope ladder, while tomlinson, the mate, stood with a bucket of water in his hand exchanging remarks in very bad french with the crew of the boat beneath him. the officer made his way slowly down the ladder which led into the hold, and the corporal followed him, and had his chest level with the deck when the other had reached the bottom. it may have been something in ephraim savage's face, or it may have been the gloom around him which startled the young frenchman, but a sudden suspicion flashed into his mind. "up again, corporal!" he shouted, "i think that you are best at the top." "and i think that you are best down below, my friend," said the puritan, who gathered the officer's meaning from his gesture. putting the sole of his boot against the man's chest he gave a shove which sent both him and the ladder crashing down on to the officer beneath him. as he did so he blew his whistle, and in a moment the hatch was back in its place and clamped down on each side with iron bars. the sergeant had swung round at the sound of the crash, but amos green, who had waited for the movement, threw his arms about him and hurled him overboard into the sea. at the same instant the connecting rope was severed, the foreyard creaked back into position again, and the bucketful of salt water soused down over the gunner and his gun, putting out his linstock and wetting his priming. a shower of balls from the marines piped through the air or rapped up against the planks, but the boat was tossing and jerking in the short choppy waves and to aim was impossible. in vain the men tugged and strained at their oars while the gunner worked like a maniac to relight his linstock and to replace his priming. the boat had lost its weigh, while the brigantine was flying along now with every sail bulging and swelling to bursting-point. crack! went the carronade at last, and five little slits in the mainsail showed that her charge of grape had flown high. her second shot left no trace behind it, and at the third she was at the limit of her range. half an hour afterwards a little dark dot upon the horizon with a golden speck at one end of it was all that could be seen of the honfleur guard-boat. wider and wider grew the low-lying shores, broader and broader was the vast spread of blue waters ahead, the smoke of havre lay like a little cloud upon the northern horizon, and captain ephraim savage paced his deck with his face as grim as ever, but with a dancing light in his gray eyes. "i knew that the lord would look after his own," said he complacently. "we've got her beak straight now, and there's not as much as a dab of mud betwixt this and the three hills of boston. you've had too much of these french wines of late, amos, lad. come down and try a real boston brewing with a double stroke of malt in the mash tub." chapter xxv. a boat of the dead. for two days the _golden rod_ lay becalmed close to the cape la hague, with the breton coast extending along the whole of the southern horizon. on the third morning, however, came a sharp breeze, and they drew rapidly away from land, until it was but a vague dim line which blended with the cloud banks. out there on the wide free ocean, with the wind on their cheeks and the salt spray pringling upon their lips, these hunted folk might well throw off their sorrows and believe that they had left for ever behind them all tokens of those strenuous men whose earnest piety had done more harm than frivolity and wickedness could have accomplished. and yet even now they could not shake off their traces, for the sin of the cottage is bounded by the cottage door, but that of the palace spreads its evil over land and sea. "i am frightened about my father, amory," said adele, as they stood together by the shrouds and looked back at the dim cloud upon the horizon which marked the position of that france which they were never to see again. "but he is out of danger now." "out of danger from cruel laws, but i fear that he will never see the promised land." "what do you mean, adele? my uncle is hale and hearty." "ah, amory, his very heart-roots were fastened in the rue st. martin, and when they were torn his life was torn also. paris and his business, they were the world to him." "but he will accustom himself to this new life." "if it only could be so! but i fear, i fear, that he is over old for such a change. he says not a word of complaint. but i read upon his face that he is stricken to the heart. for hours together he will gaze back at france, with the tears running silently down his cheeks. and his hair has turned from gray to white within the week." de catinat also had noticed that the gaunt old huguenot had grown gaunter, that the lines upon his stern face were deeper, and that his head fell forward upon his breast as he walked. he was about, however, to suggest that the voyage might restore the merchant's health, when adele gave a cry of surprise and pointed out over the port quarter. so beautiful was she at the instant with her raven hair blown back by the wind, a glow of colour struck into her pale cheeks by the driving spray, her lips parted in her excitement, and one white hand shading her eyes, that he stood beside her with all his thoughts bent upon her grace and her sweetness. "look!" she cried. "there is something floating upon the sea. i saw it upon the crest of a wave." he looked in the direction in which she pointed, but at first he saw nothing. the wind was still behind them, and a brisk sea was running of a deep rich green colour, with long creamy curling caps to the larger waves. the breeze would catch these foam-crests from time to time, and then there would be a sharp spatter upon the decks, with a salt smack upon the lips, and a pringling in the eyes. suddenly as he gazed, however, something black was tilted up upon the sharp summit of one of the seas, and swooped out of view again upon the further side. it was so far from him that he could make nothing of it, but sharper eyes than his had caught a glance of it. amos green had seen the girl point and observed what it was which had attracted her attention. "captain ephraim," cried he, "there's a boat on the starboard quarter." the new england seaman whipped up his glass and steadied it upon the bulwark. "ay, it's a boat," said he, "but an empty one. maybe it's been washed off from some ship, or gone adrift from shore. put her hard down, mr. tomlinson, for it just so happens that i am in need of a boat at present." half a minute later the _golden rod_ had swung round and was running swiftly down towards the black spot which still bobbed and danced upon the waves. as they neared her they could see that something was projecting over her side. "it's a man's head!" cried amos green. but ephraim savage's grim face grew grimmer. "it's a man's foot," said he. "i think that you had best take the gal below to the cabin." amid a solemn hush they ran alongside this lonely craft which hung out so sinister a signal. within ten yards of her the foreyard was hauled aback and they gazed down upon her terrible crew. she was a little thirteen-foot cockle-shell, very broad for her length and so flat in the bottom that she had been meant evidently for river or lake work. huddled together beneath the seats were three folk, a man in the dress of a respectable artisan, a woman of the same class, and a little child about a year old. the boat was half full of water and the woman and child were stretched with their faces downwards, the fair curls of the infant and the dark locks of the mother washing to and fro like water-weeds upon the surface. the man lay with a slate-coloured face, his chin cocking up towards the sky, his eyes turned upwards to the whites, and his mouth wide open showing a leathern crinkled tongue like a rotting leaf. in the bows, all huddled in a heap, and with a single paddle still grasped in his hand, there crouched a very small man clad in black, an open book lying across his face, and one stiff leg jutting upwards with the heel of the foot resting between the rowlocks. so this strange company swooped and tossed upon the long green atlantic rollers. a boat had been lowered by the _golden rod_, and the unfortunates were soon conveyed upon deck. no particle of either food or drink was to be found, nor anything save the single paddle and the open bible which lay across the small man's face. man, woman, and child had all been dead a day at the least, and so with the short prayers used upon the seas they were buried from the vessel's side. the small man had at first seemed also to be lifeless, but amos had detected some slight flutter of his heart, and the faintest haze was left upon the watch glass which was held before his mouth. wrapped in a dry blanket he was laid beside the mast, and the mate forced a few drops of rum every few minutes between his lips until the little spark of life which still lingered in him might be fanned to a flame. meanwhile ephraim savage had ordered up the two prisoners whom he had entrapped at honfleur. very foolish they looked as they stood blinking and winking in the daylight from which they had been so long cut off. "very sorry, captain," said the seaman, "but either you had to come with us, d'ye see, or we had to stay with you. they're waiting for me over at boston, and in truth i really couldn't tarry." the french soldier shrugged his shoulders and looked around him with a lengthening face. he and his corporal were limp with sea-sickness, and as miserable as a frenchman is when first he finds that france has vanished from his view. "which would you prefer, to go on with us to america, or go back to france?" "back to france, if i can find my way. oh, i must get to france again if only to have a word with that fool of a gunner." "well, we emptied a bucket of water over his linstock and priming, d'ye see, so maybe he did all he could. but there's france, where that thickening is over yonder." "i see it! i see it! ah, if my feet were only upon it once more." "there is a boat beside us, and you may take it." "my god, what happiness! corporal lemoine, the boat! let us push off at once." "but you need a few things first. good lord, who ever heard of a man pushing off like that! mr. tomlinson, just sling a keg of water and a barrel of meat and of biscuit into this boat. hiram jefferson, bring two oars aft. it's a long pull with the wind in your teeth, but you'll be there by to-morrow night, and the weather is set fair." the two frenchmen were soon provided with all that they were likely to require, and pushed off with a waving of hats and a shouting of _bon voyage_. the foreyard was swung round again and the _golden rod_ turned her bowsprit for the west. for hours a glimpse could be caught of the boat, dwindling away on the wave-tops, until at last it vanished into the haze, and with it vanished the very last link which connected them with the great world which they were leaving behind them. but whilst these things had been done, the senseless man beneath the mast had twitched his eyelids, had drawn a little gasping breath, and then finally had opened his eyes. his skin was like gray parchment drawn tightly over his bones, and the limbs which thrust out from his clothes were those of a sickly child. yet, weak as he was, the large black eyes with which he looked about him were full of dignity and power. old catinat had come upon deck, and at the sight of the man and of his dress he had run forward, and had raised his head reverently and rested it in his own arms. "he is one of the faithful," he cried, "he is one of our pastors. ah, now indeed a blessing will be upon our journey!" but the man smiled gently and shook his head. "i fear that i may not come this journey with you," said he, "for the lord has called me upon a further journey of my own. i have had my summons and i am ready. i am indeed the pastor of the temple at isigny, and when we heard the orders of the wicked king, i and two of the faithful with their little one put forth in the hope that we might come to england. but on the first day there came a wave which swept away one of our oars and all that was in the boat, our bread, our keg, and we were left with no hope save in him. and then he began to call us to him one at a time, first the child, and then the woman, and then the man, until i only am left, though i feel that my own time is not long. but since ye are also of the faithful, may i not serve you in any way before i go?" the merchant shook his head, and then suddenly a thought flashed upon him, and he ran with joy upon his face and whispered eagerly to amos green. amos laughed, and strode across to the captain. "it's time," said ephraim savage grimly. then the whisperers went to de catinat. he sprang in the air and his eyes shone with delight. and then they went down to adele in her cabin, and she started and blushed, and turned her sweet face away, and patted her hair with her hands as woman will when a sudden call is made upon her. and so, since haste was needful, and since even there upon the lonely sea there was one coming who might at any moment snap their purpose, they found themselves in a few minutes, this gallant man and this pure woman, kneeling hand in hand before the dying pastor, who raised his thin arm feebly in benediction as he muttered the words which should make them forever one. adele had often pictured her wedding to herself, as what young girl has not? often in her dreams she had knelt before the altar with amory in the temple of the rue st. martin. or sometimes her fancy had taken her to some of those smaller churches in the provinces, those little refuges where a handful of believers gathered together, and it was there that her thoughts had placed the crowning act of a woman's life. but when had she thought of such a marriage as this, with the white deck swaying beneath them, the ropes humming above, their only choristers the gulls which screamed around them, and their wedding hymn the world-old anthem which is struck from the waves by the wind? and when could she forget the scene? the yellow masts and the bellying sails, the gray drawn face and the cracked lips of the castaway, her father's gaunt earnest features as he knelt to support the dying minister, de catinat in his blue coat, already faded and weather-stained. captain savage with his wooden face turned towards the clouds, and amos green with his hands in his pockets and a quiet twinkle in his blue eyes! then behind all the lanky mate and the little group of new england seamen with their palmetto hats and their serious faces! and so it was done amid kindly words in a harsh foreign tongue, and the shaking of rude hands hardened by the rope and the oar. de catinat and his wife leaned together by the shrouds when all was over and watched the black side as it rose and fell, and the green water which raced past them. "it is all so strange and so new," she said. "our future seems as vague and dark as yonder cloud-banks which gather in front of us." "if it rest with me," he answered, "your future will be as merry and bright as the sunlight that glints on the crest of these waves. the country that drove us forth lies far behind us, but out there is another and a fairer country, and every breath of wind wafts us nearer to it. freedom awaits us there, and we bear with us youth and love, and what could man or woman ask for more?" so they stood and talked while the shadows deepened into twilight and the first faint gleam of the stars broke out in the darkening heavens above them. but ere those stars had waned again one more toiler had found rest aboard the _golden rod_, and the scattered flock from isigny had found their little pastor once more. chapter xxvi. the last port. for three weeks the wind kept at east or north-east, always at a brisk breeze and freshening sometimes into half a gale. the _golden rod_ sped merrily upon her way with every sail drawing, alow and aloft, so that by the end of the third week amos and ephraim savage were reckoning out the hours before they would look upon their native land once more. to the old seaman who was used to meeting and to parting it was a small matter, but amos, who had never been away before, was on fire with impatience, and would sit smoking for hours with his legs astride the shank of the bowsprit, staring ahead at the skyline, in the hope that his friend's reckoning had been wrong, and that at any moment he might see the beloved coast line looming up in front of him. "it's no use, lad," said captain ephraim, laying his great red hand upon his shoulder. "they that go down to the sea in ships need a power of patience, and there's no good eatin' your heart out for what you can't get." "there's a feel of home about the air, though," amos answered. "it seems to whistle through your teeth with a bite to it that i never felt over yonder. ah, it will take three months of the mohawk valley before i feel myself to rights." "well," said his friend, thrusting a plug of trinidado tobacco into the corner of his cheek, "i've been on the sea since i had hair to my face, mostly in the coast trade, d'ye see, but over the water as well, as far as those navigation laws would let me. except the two years that i came ashore for the king philip business, when every man that could carry a gun was needed on the border, i've never been three casts of a biscuit from salt water, and i tell you that i never knew a better crossing than the one we have just made." "ay, we have come along like a buck before a forest fire. but it is strange to me how you find your way so clearly out here with never track nor trail to guide you. it would puzzle me, ephraim, to find america, to say nought of the narrows of new york." "i am somewhat too far to the north, amos. we have been on or about the fiftieth since we sighted cape la hague. to-morrow we should make land, by my reckonin'." "ah, to-morrow! and what will it be? mount desert? cape cod? long island?" "nay, lad, we are in the latitude of the st. lawrence, and are more like to see the arcadia coast. then with this wind a day should carry us south, or two at the most. a few more such voyages and i shall buy myself a fair brick house in green lane of north boston, where i can look down on the bay, or on the charles or the mystic, and see the ships comin' and goin'. so i would end my life in peace and quiet." all day amos green, in spite of his friend's assurance, strained his eyes in the fruitless search for land, and when at last the darkness fell he went below and laid out his fringed hunting tunic, his leather gaiters, and his raccoon-skin cap, which were very much more to his taste than the broadcloth coat in which the dutch mercer of new york had clad him. de catinat had also put on the dark coat of civil life, and he and adele were busy preparing all things for the old man, who had fallen so weak that there was little which he could do for himself. a fiddle was screaming in the forecastle, and half the night through hoarse bursts of homely song mingled with the dash of the waves and the whistle of the wind, as the new england men in their own grave and stolid fashion made merry over their home-coming. the mate's watch that night was from twelve to four, and the moon was shining brightly for the first hour of it. in the early morning, however, it clouded over, and the _golden rod_ plunged into one of those dim clammy mists which lie on all that tract of ocean. so thick was it that from the poop one could just make out the loom of the foresail, but could see nothing of the fore-topmast-stay sail or the jib. the wind was north-east with a very keen edge to it, and the dainty brigantine lay over, scudding along with her lee rails within hand's touch of the water. it had suddenly turned very cold--so cold that the mate stamped up and down the poop, and his four seamen shivered together under the shelter of the bulwarks. and then in a moment one of them was up, thrusting with his forefinger into the air and screaming, while a huge white wall sprang out of the darkness at the very end of the bowsprit, and the ship struck with a force which snapped her two masts like dried reeds in a wind, and changed her in an instant to a crushed and shapeless heap of spars and wreckage. the mate had shot the length of the poop at the shock, and had narrowly escaped from the falling mast, while of his four men two had been hurled through the huge gap which yawned in the bows, while a third had dashed his head to pieces against the stock of the anchor. tomlinson staggered forwards to find the whole front part of the vessel driven inwards, and a single seaman sitting dazed amid splintered spars, flapping sails, and writhing, lashing cordage. it was still as dark as pitch, and save the white crest of a leaping wave nothing was to be seen beyond the side of the vessel. the mate was peering round him in despair at the ruin which had come so suddenly upon them when he found captain ephraim at his elbow, half clad, but as wooden and as serene as ever. "an iceberg," said he, sniffing at the chill air. "did you not smell it, friend tomlinson?" "truly i found it cold, captain savage, but i set it down to the mist." "there is a mist ever set around them, though the lord in his wisdom knows best why, for it is a sore trial to poor sailor men. she makes water fast, mr. tomlinson. she is down by the bows already." the other watch had swarmed upon deck and one of them was measuring the well. "there is three feet of water," he cried, "and the pumps sucked dry yesterday at sundown." "hiram jefferson and john moreton to the pumps!" cried the captain. "mr. tomlinson, clear away the long-boat and let us see if we may set her right, though i fear that she is past mending." "the long-boat has stove two planks," cried a seaman. "the jolly-boat, then?" "she is in three pieces." the mate tore his hair, but ephraim savage smiled like a man who is gently tickled by some coincidence. "where is amos green?" "here, captain ephraim. what can i do?" "and i?" asked de catinat eagerly. adele and her father had been wrapped in mantles and placed for shelter in the lee of the round house. "tell him he can take his spell at the pumps," said the captain to amos. "and you, amos, you are a handy man with a tool. get into yonder long-boat with a lantern and see if you cannot patch her up." for half an hour amos green hammered and trimmed and caulked, while the sharp measured clanking of the pumps sounded above the dash of the seas. slowly, very slowly, the bows of the brigantine were settling down, and her stern cocking up. "you've not much time, amos, lad," said the captain quietly. "she'll float now, though she's not quite water-tight." "very good. lower away! keep up the pump in there! mr. tomlinson, see that provisions and water are ready, as much as she will hold. come with me, hiram jefferson." the seaman and the captain swung themselves down into the tossing boat, the latter with a lantern strapped to his waist. together they made their way until they were under her mangled bows. the captain shook his head when he saw the extent of the damage. "cut away the foresail and pass it over," said he. tomlinson and amos green cut away the lashings with their knives and lowered the corner of the sail. captain ephraim and the seaman seized it, and dragged it across the mouth of the huge gaping leak. as he stooped to do it, however, the ship heaved up upon a swell, and the captain saw in the yellow light of his lantern sinuous black cracks which radiated away backwards from the central hole. "how much in the well?" he asked. "five and a half feet." "then the ship is lost. i could put my finger between her planks as far as i can see back. keep the pumps going there! have you the food and water, mr. tomlinson?" "here, sir." "lower them over the bows. this boat cannot live more than an hour or two. can you see anything of the berg?" "the fog is lifting on the starboard quarter," cried one of the men. "yes, there is the berg, quarter of a mile to leeward!" the mist had thinned away suddenly, and the moon glimmered through once more upon the great lonely sea and the stricken ship. there, like a huge sail, was the monster piece of ice upon which they had shattered themselves, rocking slowly to and fro with the wash of the waves. "you must make for her," said captain ephraim. "there is no other chance. lower the gal over the bows! well, then, her father first, if she likes it better. tell them to sit still, amos, and that the lord will bear us up if we keep clear of foolishness. so! you're a brave lass for all your niminy-piminy lingo. now the keg and the barrel, and all the wraps and cloaks you can find. now the other man, the frenchman. ay, ay, passengers first, and you have got to come. now, amos! now the seamen, and you last, friend tomlinson." it was well that they had not very far to go, for the boat was weighed down almost to the edge, and it took the baling of two men to keep in check the water which leaked in between the shattered planks. when all were safely in their places. captain ephraim savage swung himself aboard again, which was but too easy now that every minute brought the bows nearer to the water. he came back with a bundle of clothing which he threw into the boat. "push off!" he cried. "jump in, then." "ephraim savage goes down with his ship," said he quietly. "friend tomlinson, it is not my way to give my orders more than once. push off, i say!" the mate thrust her out with a boat-hook. amos and de catinat gave a cry of dismay, but the stolid new englanders settled down to their oars and pulled off for the iceberg. "amos! amos! will you suffer it?" cried the guardsman in french. "my honour will not permit me to leave him thus. i should feel it a stain for ever." "tomlinson, you would not leave him! go on board and force him to come." "the man is not living who could force him to do what he had no mind for." "he may change his purpose." "he never changes his purpose." "but you cannot leave him, man! you must at least lie by and pick him up." "the boat leaks like a sieve," said the mate. "i will take her to the berg, leave you all there, if we can find footing, and go back for the captain. put your heart into it, my lads, for the sooner we are there the sooner we shall get back." but they had not taken fifty strokes before adele gave a sudden scream. "my god!" she cried, "the ship is going down!" she had settled lower and lower in the water, and suddenly with a sound of rending planks she thrust down her bows like a diving water-fowl, her stern flew up into the air, and with a long sucking noise she shot down swifter and swifter until the leaping waves closed over her high poop lantern. with one impulse the boat swept round again and made backwards as fast as willing arms could pull it. but all was quiet at the scene of the disaster. not even a fragment of wreckage was left upon the surface to show where the _golden rod_ had found her last harbour. for a long quarter of an hour they pulled round and round in the moonlight, but not a glimpse could they see of the puritan seaman, and at last, when in spite of the balers the water was washing round their ankles, they put her head about once more, and made their way in silence and with heavy hearts to their dreary island of refuge. desolate as it was, it was their only hope now, for the leak was increasing and it was evident that the boat could not be kept afloat long. as they drew nearer they saw with dismay that the side which faced them was a solid wall of ice sixty feet high without a flaw or crevice in its whole extent. the berg was a large one, fifty paces at least each way, and there was a hope that the other side might be more favourable. baling hard, they paddled round the corner, but only to find themselves faced by another gloomy ice-crag. again they went round, and again they found that the berg increased rather than diminished in height. there remained only one other side, and they knew as they rowed round to it that their lives hung upon the result, for the boat was almost settling down beneath them. they shot out from the shadow into the full moonlight and looked upon a sight which none of them would forget until their dying day. the cliff which faced them was as precipitous as any of the others, and it glimmered and sparkled all over where the silver light fell upon the thousand facets of ice. right in the centre, however, on a level with the water's edge, there was what appeared to be a huge hollowed-out cave which marked the spot where the golden rod had, in shattering herself, dislodged a huge boulder, and so amid her own ruin prepared a refuge for those who had trusted themselves to her. this cavern was of the richest emerald green, light and clear at the edges, but toning away into the deepest purples and blues at the back. but it was not the beauty of this grotto, nor was it the assurance of rescue which brought a cry of joy and of wonder from every lip, but it was that, seated upon an ice boulder and placidly smoking a long corn-cob pipe, there was perched in front of them no less a person than captain ephraim savage of boston. for a moment the castaways could almost have believed that it was his wraith, were wraiths ever seen in so homely an attitude, but the tones of his voice very soon showed that it was indeed he, and in no very christian temper either. "friend tomlinson," said he, "when i tell you to row for an iceberg i mean you to row right away there, d'ye see, and not to go philandering about over the ocean. it's not your fault that i'm not froze, and so i would have been if i hadn't some dry tobacco and my tinder-box to keep myself warm." without stopping to answer his commander's reproaches, the mate headed for the ledge, which had been cut into a slope by the bows of the brigantine, so that the boat was run up easily on to the ice. captain savage seized his dry clothes and vanished into the back of the cave, to return presently warmer in body, and more contented in mind. the long-boat had been turned upside down for a seat, the gratings and thwarts taken out and covered with wraps to make a couch for the lady, and the head knocked out of the keg of biscuits. "we were frightened for you, ephraim," said amos green. "i had a heavy heart this night when i thought that i should never see you more." "tut, amos, you should have known me better." "but how came you here, captain?" asked tomlinson. "i thought that maybe you had been taken down by the suck of the ship." "and so i was. it is the third ship in which i have gone down, but they have never kept me down yet. i went deeper to-night than when the _speedwell_ sank, but not so deep as in the _governor winthrop_. when i came up i swam to the berg, found this nook, and crawled in. glad i was to see you, for i feared that you had foundered." "we put back to pick you up and we passed you in the darkness. and what should we do now?" "rig up that boat-sail and make quarters for the gal. then get our supper and such rest as we can, for there is nothing to be done to-night, and there may be much in the morning." chapter xxvii. a dwindling island. amos green was aroused in the morning by a hand upon his shoulder, and springing to his feet, found de catinat standing beside him. the survivors of the crew were grouped about the upturned boat, slumbering heavily after their labours of the night. the red rim of the sun had just pushed itself above the water-line, and sky and sea were one blaze of scarlet and orange from the dazzling gold of the horizon to the lightest pink at the zenith. the first rays flashed directly into their cave, sparkling and glimmering upon the ice crystals and tingeing the whole grotto with a rich warm light. never was a fairy's palace more lovely than this floating refuge which nature had provided for them. but neither the american nor the frenchman had time now to give a thought to the novelty and beauty of their situation. the latter's face was grave, and his friend read danger in his eyes. "what is it, then?" "the berg. it is coming to pieces." "tut, man, it is as solid as an island." "i have been watching it. you see that crack which extends backwards from the end of our grotto. two hours ago i could scarce put my hand into it. now i can slip through it with ease. i tell you that she is splitting across." amos green walked to the end of the funnel-shaped recess and found, as his friend had said, that a green sinuous crack extended away backwards into the iceberg, caused either by the tossing of the waves, or by the terrific impact of their vessel. he roused captain ephraim and pointed out the danger to him. "well, if she springs a leak we are gone," said he. "she's been thawing pretty fast as it is." they could see now that what had seemed in the moonlight to be smooth walls of ice were really furrowed and wrinkled like an old man's face by the streams of melted water which were continually running down them. the whole huge mass was brittle and honeycombed and rotten. already they could hear all round them the ominous drip, drip, and the splash and tinkle of the little rivulets as they fell into the ocean. "hullo!" cried amos green, "what's that?" "what then?" "did you hear nothing?" "no." "i could have sworn that i heard a voice." "impossible. we are all here." "it must have been my fancy then." captain ephraim walked to the seaward face of the cave and swept the ocean with his eyes. the wind had quite fallen away now, and the sea stretched away to the eastward, smooth and unbroken save for a single great black spar which floated near the spot where the _golden rod_ had foundered. "we should lie in the track of some ships," said the captain thoughtfully. "there's the codders and the herring-busses. we're over far south for them, i reckon. but we can't be more'n two hundred mile from port royal in arcadia, and we're in the line of the st. lawrence trade. if i had three white mountain pines, amos, and a hundred yards of stout canvas i'd get up on the top of this thing, d'ye see, and i'd rig such a jury-mast as would send her humming into boston bay. then i'd break her up and sell her for what she was worth, and turn a few pieces over the business. but she's a heavy old craft, and that's a fact, though even now she might do a knot or two an hour if she had a hurricane behind her. but what is it, amos?" the young hunter was standing with his ear slanting, his head bent forwards, and his eyes glancing sideways like a man who listens intently. he was about to answer when de catinat gave a cry and pointed to the back of the cave. "look at the crack now." it had widened by a foot since they had noticed it last, until it was now no longer a crack. it was a pass. "let us go through," said the captain. "it can but come out on the other side." "then let us see the other side." he led the way and the other two followed him. it was very dark as they advanced, with high dripping ice walls on either side and one little zigzagging slit of blue sky above their heads. tripping and groping their way, they stumbled along until suddenly the passage grew wider and opened out into a large square of flat ice. the berg was level in the centre and sloped upwards from that point to the high cliffs which bounded it on each side. in three directions this slope was very steep, but in one it slanted up quite gradually, and the constant thawing had grooved the surface with a thousand irregularities by which an active man could ascend. with one impulse they began all three to clamber up until a minute later they were standing not far from the edge of the summit, seventy feet above the sea, with a view which took in a good fifty miles of water. in all that fifty miles there was no sign of life, nothing but the endless glint of the sun upon the waves. captain ephraim whistled. "we are out of luck," said he. amos green looked about him with startled eyes. "i cannot understand it," said he. "i could have sworn--by the eternal, listen to that!" the clear call of a military bugle rang out in the morning air. with a cry of amazement they all three craned forward and peered over the edge. a large ship was lying under the very shadow of the iceberg. they looked straight down upon her snow-white decks, fringed with shining brass cannon, and dotted with seamen. a little clump of soldiers stood upon the poop going through the manual exercise, and it was from them that the call had come which had sounded so unexpectedly in the ears of the castaways. standing back from the edge, they had not only looked over the top-masts of this welcome neighbour, but they had themselves been invisible from her decks. now the discovery was mutual, as was shown by a chorus of shouts and cries from beneath them. but the three did not wait an instant. sliding and scrambling down the wet, slippery incline, they rushed shouting through the crack and into the cave where their comrades had just been startled by the bugle-call while in the middle of their cheerless breakfast. a few hurried words and the leaky long-boat had been launched, their possessions had been bundled in, and they were afloat once more. pulling round a promontory of the berg, they found themselves under the stern of a fine corvette, the sides of which were lined with friendly faces, while from the peak there drooped a huge white banner mottled over with the golden lilies of france. in a very few minutes their boat had been hauled up and they found themselves on board the _st. christophe_ man-of-war, conveying marquis de denonville, the new governor-general of canada, to take over his duties. chapter xxviii. in the pool of quebec. a singular colony it was of which the shipwrecked party found themselves now to be members. the _st. christophe_ had left rochelle three weeks before with four small consorts conveying five hundred soldiers to help the struggling colony on the st. lawrence. the squadron had become separated, however, and the governor was pursuing his way alone in the hope of picking up the others in the river. aboard he had a company of the regiment of quercy, the staff of his own household, saint vallier, the new bishop of canada, with several of his attendants, three recollet friars, and five jesuits bound for the fatal iroquois mission, half-a-dozen ladies on their way out to join their husbands, two ursuline nuns, ten or twelve gallants whom love of adventure and the hope of bettering their fortunes had drawn across the seas, and lastly some twenty peasant maidens of anjou who were secure of finding husbands waiting for them upon the beach, if only for the sake of the sheets, the pot, the tin plates and the kettle which the king would provide for each of his humble wards. to add a handful of new england independents, a puritan of boston, and three huguenots to such a gathering, was indeed to bring fire-brand and powder-barrel together. and yet all aboard were so busy with their own concerns that the castaways were left very much to themselves. thirty of the soldiers were down with fever and scurvy, and both priests and nuns were fully taken up in nursing them. denonville, the governor, a pious-minded dragoon, walked the deck all day reading the psalms of david, and sat up half the night with maps and charts laid out before him, planning out the destruction of the iroquois who were ravaging his dominions. the gallants and the ladies flirted, the maidens of anjou made eyes at the soldiers of quercy, and the bishop saint vallier read his offices and lectured his clergy. ephraim savage used to stand all day glaring at the good man as he paced the deck with his red-edged missal in his hand, and muttering about the "abomination of desolation," but his little ways were put down to his exposure upon the iceberg, and to the fixed idea in the french mind that men of the anglo-saxon stock are not to be held accountable for their actions. there was peace between england and france at present, though feeling ran high between canada and new york, the french believing, and with some justice, that the english colonists were whooping on the demons who attacked them. ephraim and his men were therefore received hospitably on board, though the ship was so crowded that they had to sleep wherever they could find cover and space for their bodies. the catinats, too, had been treated in an even more kindly fashion, the weak old man and the beauty of his daughter arousing the interest of the governor himself. de catinat had, during the voyage, exchanged his uniform for a plain sombre suit, so that, except for his military bearing, there was nothing to show that he was a fugitive from the army. old catinat was now so weak that he was past the answering of questions, his daughter was forever at his side, and the soldier was diplomatist enough, after a training at versailles, to say much without saying anything, and so their secret was still preserved. de catinat had known what it was to be a huguenot in canada before the law was altered. he had no wish to try it after. on the day after the rescue they sighted cape breton in the south, and soon running swiftly before an easterly wind, saw the loom of the east end of anticosti. then they sailed up the mighty river, though from mid-channel the banks upon either side were hardly to be seen. as the shores narrowed in, they saw the wild gorge of the saguenay river upon the right, with the smoke from the little fishing and trading station of tadousac streaming up above the pine trees. naked indians with their faces daubed with red clay, algonquins and abenakis, clustered round the ship in their birchen canoes with fruit and vegetables from the land, which brought fresh life to the scurvy-stricken soldiers. thence the ship tacked on up the river past mal bay, the ravine of the eboulements and the bay of st. paul with its broad valley and wooded mountains all in a blaze with their beautiful autumn dress, their scarlets, their purples, and their golds, from the maple, the ash, the young oak, and the saplings of the birch. amos green, leaning on the bulwarks, stared with longing eyes at these vast expanses of virgin woodland, hardly traversed save by an occasional wandering savage or hardy _coureur-de-bois_. then the bold outline of cape tourmente loomed up in front of them; they passed the rich placid meadows of laval's seigneury of beaupre, and, skirting the settlements of the island of orleans, they saw the broad pool stretch out in front of them, the falls of montmorenci, the high palisades of cape levi, the cluster of vessels, and upon the right that wonderful rock with its diadem of towers and its township huddled round its base, the centre and stronghold of french power in america. cannon thundered from the bastions above, and were echoed back by the warship, while ensigns dipped, hats waved, and a swarm of boats and canoes shot out to welcome the new governor, and to convey the soldiers and passengers to shore. the old merchant had pined away since he had left french soil, like a plant which has been plucked from its roots. the shock of the shipwreck and the night spent in their bleak refuge upon the iceberg had been too much for his years and strength. since they had been picked up he had lain amid the scurvy-stricken soldiers with hardly a sign of life save for his thin breathing and the twitching of his scraggy throat. now, however, at the sound of the cannon and the shouting he opened his eyes, and raised himself slowly and painfully upon his pillow. "what is it, father? what can we do for you?" cried adele. "we are in america, and here is amory and here am i, your children." but the old man shook his head. "the lord has brought me to the promised land, but he has not willed that i should enter into it," said he. "may his will be done, and blessed be his name forever! but at least i should wish, like moses, to gaze upon it, if i cannot set foot upon it. think you, amory, that you could lend me your arm and lead me on to the deck?" "if i have another to help me," said de catinat, and ascending to the deck, he brought amos green back with him. "now, father, if you will lay a hand upon the shoulder of each, you need scarce put your feet to the boards." a minute later the old merchant was on the deck, and the two young men had seated him upon a coil of rope with his back against the mast, where he should be away from the crush. the soldiers were already crowding down into the boats, and all were so busy over their own affairs that they paid no heed to the little group of refugees who gathered round the stricken man. he turned his head painfully from side to side, but his eyes brightened as they fell upon the broad blue stretch of water, the flash of the distant falls, the high castle, and the long line of purple mountains away to the north-west. "it is not like france," said he. "it is not green and peaceful and smiling, but it is grand and strong and stern like him who made it. as i have weakened, adele, my soul has been less clogged by my body, and i have seen clearly much that has been dim to me. and it has seemed to me, my children, that all this country of america, not canada alone, but the land where you were born also, amos green, and all that stretches away towards yonder setting sun, will be the best gift of god to man. for this has he held it concealed through all the ages, that now his own high purpose may be wrought upon it. for here is a land which is innocent, which has no past guilt to atone for, no feud, nor ill custom, nor evil of any kind. and as the years roll on all the weary and homeless ones, all who are stricken and landless and wronged, will turn their faces to it, even as we have done. and hence will come a nation which will surely take all that is good and leave all that is bad, moulding and fashioning itself into the highest. do i not see such a mighty people, a people who will care more to raise their lowest than to exalt their richest--who will understand that there is more bravery in peace than in war, who will see that all men are brothers, and whose hearts will not narrow themselves down to their own frontiers, but will warm in sympathy with every noble cause the whole world through? that is what i see, adele, as i lie here beside a shore upon which i shall never set my feet, and i say to you that if you and amory go to the building of such a nation then indeed your lives are not misspent. it will come, and when it comes, may god guard it, may god watch over it and direct it!" his head had sunk gradually lower upon his breast and his lids had fallen slowly over his eyes which had been looking away out past point levi at the rolling woods and the far-off mountains. adele gave a quick cry of despair and threw her arms round the old man's neck. "he is dying, amory, he is dying!" she cried. a stern franciscan friar, who had been telling his beads within a few paces of them, heard the cry and was beside them in an instant. "he is indeed dying," he said, as he gazed down at the ashen face. "has the old man had the sacraments of the church?" "i do not think that he needs them," answered de catinat evasively. "which of us do not need them, young man!" said the friar sternly. "and how can a man hope for salvation without them? i shall myself administer them without delay." but the old huguenot had opened his eyes, and with a last flicker of strength he pushed away the gray-hooded figure which bent over him. "i left all that i love rather than yield to you," he cried, "and think you that you can overcome me now?" the franciscan started back at the words, and his hard suspicious eyes shot from de catinat to the weeping girl. "so!" said he. "you are huguenots, then!" "hush! do not wrangle before a man who is dying!" cried de catinat in a voice as fierce as his own. "before a man who is dead," said amos green solemnly. as he spoke the old man's face had relaxed, his thousand wrinkles had been smoothed suddenly out, as though an invisible hand had passed over them, and his head fell back against the mast. adele remained motionless with her arms still clasped round his neck and her cheek pressed against his shoulder. she had fainted. de catinat raised his wife and bore her down to the cabin of one of the ladies who had already shown them some kindness. deaths were no new thing aboard the ship, for they had lost ten soldiers upon the outward passage, so that amid the joy and bustle of the disembarking there were few who had a thought to spare upon the dead pilgrim, and the less so when it was whispered abroad that he had been a huguenot. a brief order was given that he should be buried in the river that very night, and then, save for a sailmaker who fastened the canvas round him, mankind had done its last for theophile catinat. with the survivors, however, it was different, and when the troops were all disembarked, they were mustered in a little group upon the deck, and an officer of the governor's suite decided upon what should be done with them. he was a portly, good-humoured, ruddy-cheeked man, but de catinat saw with apprehension that the friar walked by his side as he advanced along the deck, and exchanged a few whispered remarks with him. there was a bitter smile upon the monk's dark face which boded little good for the heretics. "it shall be seen to, good father, it shall be seen to," said the officer impatiently, in answer to one of these whispered injunctions. "i am as zealous a servant of holy church as you are." "i trust that you are, monsieur de bonneville. with so devout a governor as monsieur de denonville, it might be an ill thing even in this world for the officers of his household to be lax." the soldier glanced angrily at his companion, for he saw the threat which lurked under the words. "i would have you remember, father," said he, "that if faith is a virtue, charity is no less so." then, speaking in english: "which is captain savage?" "ephraim savage of boston." "and master amos green?" "amos green of new york." "and master tomlinson?" "john tomlinson of salem." "and master mariners hiram jefferson, joseph cooper, seek-grace spalding, and paul cushing, all of massachusetts bay?" "we are all here." "it is the governor's order that all whom i have named shall be conveyed at once to the trading brig _hope_, which is yonder ship with the white paint line. she sails within the hour for the english provinces." a buzz of joy broke from the castaway mariners at the prospect of being so speedily restored to their homes, and they hurried away to gather together the few possessions which they had saved from the wreck. the officer put his list in his pocket and stepped across to where de catinat leaned moodily against the bulwarks. "surely you remember me," he said. "i could not forget your face, even though you have exchanged a blue coat for a black one." de catinat grasped the hand which was held out to him. "i remember you well, de bonneville, and the journey that we made together to fort frontenac, but it was not for me to claim your friendship, now that things have gone amiss with me." "tut, man; once my friend always my friend." "i feared, too, that my acquaintance would do you little good with yonder dark-cowled friar who is glowering behind you." "well, well, you know how it is with us here. frontenac could keep them in their place, but de la barre was as clay in their hands, and this new one promises to follow in his steps. what with the sulpitians at montreal and the jesuits here, we poor devils are between the upper and the nether stones. but i am grieved from my heart to give such a welcome as this to an old comrade, and still more to his wife." "what is to be done, then?" "you are to be confined to the ship until she sails, which will be in a week at the furthest." "and then?" "you are to be carried home in her and handed over to the governor of rochelle to be sent back to paris. those are monsieur de denonville's orders, and if they be not carried out to the letter, then we shall have the whole hornet's nest about our ears." de catinat groaned as he listened. after all their strivings and trials and efforts, to return to paris, the scorn of his enemies, and an object of pity to his friends, was too deep a humiliation. he flushed with shame at the very thought. to be led back like the home-sick peasant who has deserted from his regiment! better one spring into the broad blue river beneath him, were it not for little pale-faced adele who had none but him to look to. it was so tame! so ignominious! and yet in this floating prison, with a woman whose fate was linked with his own, what hope was there of escape? de bonneville had left him, with a few blunt words of sympathy, but the friar still paced the deck with a furtive glance at him from time to time, and two soldiers who were stationed upon the poop passed and repassed within a few yards of him. they had orders evidently to mark his movements. heart-sick he leaned over the side watching the indians in their paint and feathers shooting backwards and forwards in their canoes, and staring across at the town where the gaunt gable ends of houses and charred walls marked the effect of the terrible fire which a few years before had completely destroyed the lower part. as he stood gazing, his attention was drawn away by the swish of oars, and a large boat full of men passed immediately underneath where he stood. it held the new englanders, who were being conveyed to the ship which was to take them home. there were the four seamen huddled together, and there in the sheets were captain ephraim savage and amos green, conversing together and pointing to the shipping. the grizzled face of the old puritan and the bold features of the woodsman were turned more than once in his direction, but no word of farewell and no kindly wave of the hand came back to the lonely exile. they were so full of their own future and their own happiness, that they had not a thought to spare upon his misery. he could have borne anything from his enemies, but this sudden neglect from his friends came too heavily after his other troubles. he stooped his face to his arms and burst in an instant into a passion of sobs. before he raised his eyes again the brig had hoisted her anchor, and was tacking under full canvas out of the quebec basin. chapter xxix. the voice at the port-hole. that night old theophile catinat was buried from the ship's side, his sole mourners the two who bore his own blood in their veins. the next day de catinat spent upon deck, amid the bustle and confusion of the unlading, endeavouring to cheer adele by light chatter which came from a heavy heart. he pointed out to her the places which he had known so well, the citadel where he had been quartered, the college of the jesuits, the cathedral of bishop laval, the magazine of the old company, dismantled by the great fire, and the house of aubert de la chesnaye, the only private one which had remained standing in the lower part. from where they lay they could see not only the places of interest, but something also of that motley population which made the town so different to all others save only its younger sister, montreal. passing and repassing along the steep path with the picket fence which connected the two quarters, they saw the whole panorama of canadian life moving before their eyes, the soldiers with their slouched hats, their plumes, and their bandoleers, habitants from the river _cotes_ in their rude peasant dresses, little changed from their forefathers of brittany or normandy, and young rufflers from france or from the seigneuries, who cocked their hats and swaggered in what they thought to be the true versailles fashion. there, too, might be seen little knots of the men of the woods, _coureurs-de-bois_ or _voyageurs_, with leathern hunting tunics, fringed leggings, and fur cap with eagle feather, who came back once a year to the cities, leaving their indian wives and children in some up-country wigwam. redskins, too, were there, leather-faced algonquin fishers and hunters, wild micmacs from the east, and savage abenakis from the south, while everywhere were the dark habits of the franciscans, and the black cassocks and broad hats of the recollets, and jesuits, the moving spirits of the whole. such were the folk who crowded the streets of the capital of this strange offshoot of france which had been planted along the line of the great river, a thousand leagues from the parent country. and it was a singular settlement, the most singular perhaps that has ever been made. for a long twelve hundred miles it extended, from tadousac in the east, away to the trading stations upon the borders of the great lakes, limiting itself for the most part to narrow cultivated strips upon the margins of the river, banked in behind by wild forests and unexplored mountains, which forever tempted the peasant from his hoe and his plough to the freer life of the paddle and the musket. thin scattered clearings, alternating with little palisaded clumps of log-hewn houses, marked the line where civilisation was forcing itself in upon the huge continent, and barely holding its own against the rigour of a northern climate and the ferocity of merciless enemies. the whole white population of this mighty district, including soldiers, priests, and woodmen, with all women and children, was very far short of twenty thousand souls, and yet so great was their energy, and such the advantage of the central government under which they lived, that they had left their trace upon the whole continent. when the prosperous english settlers were content to live upon their acres, and when no axe had rung upon the further side of the alleghanies, the french had pushed their daring pioneers, some in the black robe of the missionary, and some in the fringed tunic of the hunter, to the uttermost ends of the continent. they had mapped out the lakes and had bartered with the fierce sioux on the great plains where the wooden wigwam gave place to the hide tee-pee. marquette had followed the illinois down to the mississippi, and had traced the course of the great river until, first of all white men, he looked upon the turbid flood of the rushing missouri. la salle had ventured even further, and had passed the ohio, and had made his way to the mexican gulf, raising the french arms where the city of new orleans was afterwards to stand. others had pushed on to the rocky mountains, and to the huge wilderness of the north-west, preaching, bartering, cheating, baptising, swayed by many motives and holding only in common a courage which never faltered and a fertility of resource which took them in safety past every danger. frenchmen were to the north of the british settlements, frenchmen were to the west of them, and frenchmen were to the south of them, and if all the continent is not now french, the fault assuredly did not rest with that iron race of early canadians. all this de catinat explained to adele during the autumn day, trying to draw her thoughts away from the troubles of the past, and from the long dreary voyage which lay before her. she, fresh from the staid life of the parisian street and from the tame scenery of the seine, gazed with amazement at the river, the woods and the mountains, and clutched her husband's arm in horror when a canoeful of wild skin-clad algonquins, their faces striped with white and red paint, came flying past with the foam dashing from their paddles. again the river turned from blue to pink, again the old citadel was bathed in the evening glow, and again the two exiles descended to their cabins with cheering words for each other and heavy thoughts in their own hearts. de catinat's bunk was next to a port-hole, and it was his custom to keep this open, as the caboose was close to him in which the cooking was done for the crew, and the air was hot and heavy. that night he found it impossible to sleep, and he lay tossing under his blanket, thinking over every possible means by which they might be able to get away from this cursed ship. but even if they got away, where could they go to then? all canada was sealed to them. the woods to the south were full of ferocious indians. the english settlements would, it was true, grant them freedom to use their own religion, but what would his wife and he do, without a friend, strangers among folk who spoke another tongue? had amos green remained true to them, then, indeed, all would have been well. but he had deserted them. of course there was no reason why he should not. he was no blood relation of theirs. he had already benefited them many times. his own people and the life that he loved were waiting for him at home. why should he linger here for the sake of folk whom he had known but a few months? it was not to be expected, and yet de catinat could not realise it, could not understand it. but what was that? above the gentle lapping of the river he had suddenly heard a sharp clear "hist!" perhaps it was some passing boatman or indian. then it came again, that eager, urgent summons. he sat up and stared about him. it certainly must have come from the open port-hole. he looked out, but only to see the broad basin, with the loom of the shipping, and the distant twinkle from the lights on point levi. as his head dropped back upon the pillow something fell upon his chest with a little tap, and rolling off, rattled along the boards. he sprang up, caught a lantern from a hook, and flashed it upon the floor. there was the missile which had struck him--a little golden brooch. as he lifted it up and looked closer at it, a thrill passed through him. it had been his own, and he had given it to amos green upon the second day that he had met him, when they were starting together for versailles. this was a signal then, and amos green had not deserted them after all. he dressed himself, all in a tremble with excitement, and went upon deck. it was pitch dark, and he could see no one, but the sound of regular footfalls somewhere in the fore part of the ship showed that the sentinels were still there. the guardsman walked over to the side and peered down into the darkness. he could see the loom of a boat. "who is there?" he whispered. "is that you, de catinat? "yes." "we have come for you." "god bless you, amos." "is your wife there?" "no, but i can rouse her." "good! but first catch this cord. now pull up the ladder!" de catinat gripped the line which was thrown to him, and on drawing it up found that it was attached to a rope ladder furnished at the top with two steel hooks to catch on to the bulwarks. he placed them in position, and then made his way very softly to the cabin amidships in the ladies' quarters which had been allotted to his wife. she was the only woman aboard the ship now, so that he was able to tap at her door in safety, and to explain in a few words the need for haste and for secrecy. in ten minutes adele had dressed, and with her valuables in a little bundle, had slipped out from her cabin. together they made their way upon deck once more, and crept aft under the shadow of the bulwarks. they were almost there when de catinat stopped suddenly and ground out an oath through his clenched teeth. between them and the rope ladder there was standing in a dim patch of murky light the grim figure of a franciscan friar. he was peering through the darkness, his heavy cowl shadowing his face, and he advanced slowly as if he had caught a glimpse of them. a lantern hung from the mizzen shrouds above him. he unfastened it and held it up to cast its light upon them. but de catinat was not a man with whom it was safe to trifle. his life had been one of quick resolve and prompt action. was this vindictive friar at the last moment to stand between him and freedom? it was a dangerous position to take. the guardsman pulled adele into the shadow of the mast, and then, as the monk advanced, he sprang out upon him and seized him by the gown. as he did so the other's cowl was pushed back, and instead of the harsh features of the ecclesiastic, de catinat saw with amazement in the glimmer of the lantern the shrewd gray eyes and strong tern face of ephraim savage. at the same instant another figure appeared over the side, and the warm-hearted frenchman threw himself into the arms of amos green. "it's all right," said the young hunter, disengaging himself with some embarrassment from the other's embrace. "we've got him in the boat with a buckskin glove jammed into his gullet!" "who then?" "the man whose cloak captain ephraim there has put round him. he came on us when you were away rousing your lady, but we got him to be quiet between us. is the lady there?" "here she is." "as quick as you can, then, for some one may come along." adele was helped over the side, and seated in the stern of a birch-bark canoe. the three men unhooked the ladder, and swung themselves down by a rope, while two indians, who held the paddles, pushed silently off from the ship's side, and shot swiftly up the stream. a minute later a dim loom behind them, and the glimmer of two yellow lights, was all that they could see of the _st. christophe_. "take a paddle, amos, and i'll take one," said captain savage, stripping off his monk's gown. "i felt safer in this on the deck of yon ship, but it don't help in a boat. i believe we might have fastened the hatches and taken her, brass guns and all, had we been so minded." "and been hanged as pirates at the yard-arm next morning," said amos. "i think we have done better to take the honey and leave the tree. i hope, madame, that all is well with you." "nay, i can hardly understand what has happened, or where we are." "nor can i, amos." "did you not expect us to come back for you, then?" "i did not know what to expect." "well, now, but surely you could not think that we would leave you without a word." "i confess that i was cut to the heart by it." "i feared that you were when i looked at you with the tail of my eye, and saw you staring so blackly over the bulwarks at us. but if we had been seen talking or planning they would have been upon our trail at once. as it was they had not a thought of suspicion, save only this fellow whom we have in the bottom of the boat here." "and what did you do?" "we left the brig last night, got ashore on the beaupre side, arranged for this canoe, and lay dark all day. then to-night we got alongside and i roused you easily, for i knew where you slept. the friar nearly spoiled all when you were below, but we gagged him and passed him over the side. ephraim popped on his gown so that he might go forward to help you without danger, for we were scared at the delay." "ah! it is glorious to be free once more. what do i not owe you, amos?" "well, you looked after me when i was in your country, and i am going to look after you now." "and where are we going?" "ah! there you have me. it is this way or none, for we can't get down to the sea. we must make our way over land as best we can, and we must leave a good stretch between quebec citadel and us before the day breaks, for from what i hear they would rather have a huguenot prisoner than an iroquois sagamore. by the eternal, i cannot see why they should make such a fuss over how a man chooses to save his own soul, though here is old ephraim just as fierce upon the other side, so all the folly is not one way." "what are you saying about me?" asked the seaman, pricking up his ears at the mention of his own name. "only that you are a good stiff old protestant." "yes, thank god. my motto is freedom to conscience, d'ye see, except just for quakers, and papists, and--and i wouldn't stand anne hutchinsons and women testifying, and suchlike foolishness." amos green laughed. "the almighty seems to pass it over, so why should you take it to heart?" said he. "ah, you're young and callow yet. you'll live to know better. why, i shall hear you saying a good word soon even for such unclean spawn as this," prodding the prostrate friar with the handle of his paddle. "i daresay he's a good man, accordin' to his lights." "and i daresay a shark is a good fish accordin' to its lights. no, lad, you won't mix up light and dark for me in that sort of fashion. you may talk until you unship your jaw, d'ye see, but you will never talk a foul wind into a fair one. pass over the pouch and the tinder-box, and maybe our friend here will take a turn at my paddle." all night they toiled up the great river, straining every nerve to place themselves beyond the reach of pursuit. by keeping well into the southern bank, and so avoiding the force of the current, they sped swiftly along, for both amos and de catinat were practised hands with the paddle, and the two indians worked as though they were wire and whipcord instead of flesh and blood. an utter silence reigned over all the broad stream, broken only by the lap-lap of the water against their curving bow, the whirring of the night hawk above them, and the sharp high barking of foxes away in the woods. when at last morning broke, and the black shaded imperceptibly into gray, they were far out of sight of the citadel and of all trace of man's handiwork. virgin woods in their wonderful many-coloured autumn dress flowed right down to the river edge on either side, and in the centre was a little island with a rim of yellow sand and an out-flame of scarlet tupelo and sumach in one bright tangle of colour in the centre. "i've passed here before," said de catinat. "i remember marking that great maple with the blaze on its trunk, when last i went with the governor to montreal. that was in frontenac's day, when the king was first and the bishop second." the redskins, who had sat like terra-cotta figures, without a trace of expression upon their set hard faces, pricked up their ears at the sound of that name. "my brother has spoken of the great onontio," said one of them, glancing round. "we have listened to the whistling of evil birds who tell us that he will never come back to his children across the seas." "he is with the great white father," answered de catinat. "i have myself seen him in his council, and he will assuredly come across the great water if his people have need of him." the indian shook his shaven head. "the rutting month is past, my brother," said he, speaking in broken french, "but ere the month of the bird-laying has come there will be no white man upon this river save only behind stone walls." "what, then? we have heard little! have the iroquois broken out so fiercely?" "my brother, they said they would eat up the hurons, and where are the hurons now? they turned their faces upon the eries, and where are the eries now? they went westward against the illinois, and who can find an illinois village? they raised the hatchet against the andastes, and their name is blotted from the earth. and now they have danced a dance and sung a song which will bring little good to my white brothers." "where are they, then?" the indian waved his hand along the whole southern and western horizon. "where are they not? the woods are rustling with them. they are like a fire among dry grass, so swift and so terrible!" "on my life," said de catinat, "if these devils are indeed unchained, they will need old frontenac back if they are not to be swept into the river." "ay," said amos, "i saw him once, when i was brought before him with the others for trading on what he called french ground. his mouth set like a skunk trap and he looked at us as if he would have liked our scalps for his leggings. but i could see that he was a chief and a brave man." "he was an enemy of the church, and the right hand of the foul fiend in this country," said a voice from the bottom of the canoe. it was the friar who had succeeded in getting rid of the buckskin glove and belt with which the two americans had gagged him. he was lying huddled up now glaring savagely at the party with his fiery dark eyes. "his jaw-tackle has come adrift," said the seaman. "let me brace it up again." "nay, why should we take him farther?" asked amos. "he is but weight for us to carry, and i cannot see that we profit by his company. let us put him out." "ay, sink or swim," cried old ephraim with enthusiasm. "nay, upon the bank." "and have him maybe in front of us warning the black jackets." "on that island, then." "very good. he can hail the first of his folk who pass." they shot over to the island and landed the friar, who said nothing, but cursed them with his eye. they left with him a small supply of biscuit and of flour to last him until he should be picked up. then, having passed a bend in the river, they ran their canoe ashore in a little cove where the whortleberry and cranberry bushes grew right down to the water's edge, and the sward was bright with the white euphorbia, the blue gentian, and the purple balm. there they laid out their small stock of provisions, and ate a hearty breakfast while discussing what their plans should be for the future. chapter xxx. the inland waters. they were not badly provided for their journey. the captain of the gloucester brig in which the americans had started from quebec knew ephraim savage well, as who did not upon the new england coast? he had accepted his bill therefore at three months' date, at as high a rate of interest as he could screw out of him, and he had let him have in return three excellent guns, a good supply of ammunition, and enough money to provide for all his wants. in this way he had hired the canoe and the indians, and had fitted her with meat and biscuit to last them for ten days at the least. "it's like the breath of life to me to feel the heft of a gun and to smell the trees round me," said amos. "why, it cannot be more than a hundred leagues from here to albany or schenectady, right through the forest." "ay, lad, but how is the gal to walk a hundred leagues through a forest? no, no, let us keep water under our keel, and lean on the lord." "then there is only one way for it. we must make the richelieu river, and keep right along to lake champlain and lake st. sacrament. there we should be close by the headwaters of the hudson." "it is a dangerous road," said de catinat, who understood the conversation of his companions, even when he was unable to join in it. "we should need to skirt the country of the mohawks." "it's the only way, i guess. it's that or nothing." "and i have a friend upon the richelieu river who, i am sure, would help us on our way," said de catinat with a smile. "adele, you have heard me talk of charles de la noue, seigneur de sainte marie?" "he whom you used to call the canadian duke, amory?" "precisely. his seigneury lies on the richelieu, a little south of fort st. louis, and i am sure that he would speed us upon our way." "good!" cried amos. "if we have a friend there we shall do well. that clenches it then, and we shall hold fast by the river. let's get to our paddles then, for that friar will make mischief for us if he can." and so for a long week the little party toiled up the great waterway, keeping ever to the southern bank, where there were fewer clearings. on both sides of the stream the woods were thick, but every here and there they would curve away, and a narrow strip of cultivated land would skirt the bank, with the yellow stubble to mark where the wheat had grown. adele looked with interest at the wooden houses with their jutting stories and quaint gable-ends, at the solid, stone-built manor-houses of the seigneurs, and at the mills in every hamlet, which served the double purpose of grinding flour and of a loop-holed place of retreat in case of attack. horrible experience had taught the canadians what the english settlers had yet to learn, that in a land of savages it is a folly to place isolated farmhouses in the centre of their own fields. the clearings then radiated out from the villages, and every cottage was built with an eye to the military necessities of the whole, so that the defence might make a stand at all points, and might finally centre upon the stone manor-house and the mill. now at every bluff and hill near the villages might be seen the gleam of the muskets of the watchers, for it was known that the scalping parties of the five nations were out, and none could tell where the blow would fall, save that it must come where they were least prepared to meet it. indeed, at every step in this country, whether the traveller were on the st. lawrence, or west upon the lakes, or down upon the banks of the mississippi, or south in the country of the cherokees and of the creeks, he would still find the inhabitants in the same state of dreadful expectancy, and from the same cause. the iroquois, as they were named by the french, or the five nations as they called themselves, hung like a cloud over the whole great continent. their confederation was a natural one, for they were of the same stock and spoke the same language, and all attempts to separate them had been in vain. mohawks, cayugas, onondagas, oneidas, and senecas were each proud of their own totems and their own chiefs, but in war they were iroquois, and the enemy of one was the enemy of all. their numbers were small, for they were never able to put two thousand warriors in the field, and their country was limited, for their villages were scattered over the tract which lies between lake champlain and lake ontario. but they were united, they were cunning, they were desperately brave, and they were fiercely aggressive and energetic. holding a central position, they struck out upon each side in turn, never content with simply defeating an adversary, but absolutely annihilating and destroying him, while holding all the others in check by their diplomacy. war was their business, and cruelty their amusement. one by one they had turned their arms against the various nations, until, for a space of over a thousand square miles, none existed save by sufferance. they had swept away hurons and huron missions in one fearful massacre. they had destroyed the tribes of the north-west, until even the distant sacs and foxes trembled at their name. they had scoured the whole country to westward until their scalping parties had come into touch with their kinsmen the sioux, who were lords of the great plains, even as they were of the great forests. the new england indians in the east, and the shawnees and delawares farther south, paid tribute to them, and the terror of their arms had extended over the borders of maryland and virginia. never, perhaps, in the world's history has so small a body of men dominated so large a district and for so long a time. for half a century these tribes had nursed a grudge wards the french since champlain and some of his followers had taken part with their enemies against them. during all these years they had brooded in their forest villages, flashing out now and again in some border outrage, but waiting for the most part until their chance should come. and now it seemed to them that it had come. they had destroyed all the tribes who might have allied themselves with the white men. they had isolated them. they had supplied themselves with good guns and plenty of ammunition from the dutch and english of new york. the long thin line of french settlements lay naked before them. they were gathered in the woods, like hounds in leash, waiting for the orders of their chiefs, which should precipitate them with torch and with tomahawk upon the belt of villages. such was the situation as the little party of refugees paddled along the bank of the river, seeking the only path which could lead them to peace and to freedom. yet it was, as they well knew, a dangerous road to follow. all down the richelieu river were the outposts and blockhouses of the french, for when the feudal system was grafted upon canada the various seigneurs or native _noblesse_ were assigned their estates in the positions which would be of most benefit to the settlement. each seigneur with his tenants under him, trained as they were in the use of arms, formed a military force exactly as they had done in the middle ages, the farmer holding his fief upon condition that he mustered when called upon to do so. hence the old officers of the regiment of carignan, and the more hardy of the settlers, had been placed along the line of the richelieu, which runs at right angles to the st. lawrence towards the mohawk country. the blockhouses themselves might hold their own, but to the little party who had to travel down from one to the other the situation was full of deadly peril. it was true that the iroquois were not at war with the english, but they would discriminate little when on the warpath, and the americans, even had they wished to do so, could not separate their fate from that of their two french companions. as they ascended the st. lawrence they met many canoes coming down. sometimes it was an officer or an official on his way to the capital from three rivers or montreal, sometimes it was a load of skins, with indians or _coureurs-de-bois_ conveying them down to be shipped to europe, and sometimes it was a small canoe which bore a sunburned grizzly-haired man, with rusty weather-stained black cassock, who zigzagged from bank to bank, stopping at every indian hut upon his way. if aught were amiss with the church in canada the fault lay not with men like these village priests, who toiled and worked and spent their very lives in bearing comfort and hope, and a little touch of refinement too, through all those wilds. more than once these wayfarers wished to have speech with the fugitives, but they pushed onwards, disregarding their signs and hails. from below nothing overtook them, for they paddled from early morning until late at night, drawing up the canoe when they halted, and building a fire of dry wood, for already the nip of the coming winter was in the air. it was not only the people and their dwellings which were stretched out before the wondering eyes of the french girl as she sat day after day in the stern of the canoe. her husband and amos green taught her also to take notice of the sights of the woodlands, and as they skirted the bank, they pointed out a thousand things which her own senses would never have discerned. sometimes it was the furry face of a raccoon peeping out from some tree-cleft, or an otter swimming under the overhanging brushwood with the gleam of a white fish in its mouth. or, perhaps, it was the wild cat crouching along a branch with its wicked yellow eyes fixed upon the squirrels which played at the farther end, or else with a scuttle and rush the canadian porcupine would thrust its way among the yellow blossoms of the resin weed and the tangle of the whortleberry bushes. she learned, too, to recognise the pert sharp cry of the tiny chick-a-dee, the call of the blue-bird, and the flash of its wings amid the foliage, the sweet chirpy note of the black and white bobolink, and the long-drawn mewing of the cat-bird. on the breast of the broad blue river, with nature's sweet concert ever sounding from the bank, and with every colour that artist could devise spread out before her eyes on the foliage of the dying woods, the smile came back to her lips, and her cheeks took a glow of health which france had never been able to give. de catinat saw the change in her, but her presence weighed him down with fear, for he knew that while nature had made these woods a heaven, man had changed it into a hell, and that a nameless horror lurked behind all the beauty of the fading leaves and of the woodland flowers. often as he lay at night beside the smouldering fire upon his couch of spruce, and looked at the little figure muffled in the blanket and slumbering peacefully by his side, he felt that he had no right to expose her to such peril, and that in the morning they should turn the canoe eastward again and take what fate might bring them at quebec. but ever with the daybreak there came the thought of the humiliation, the dreary homeward voyage, the separation which would await them in galley and dungeon, to turn him from his purpose. on the seventh day they rested at a point but a few miles from the mouth of the richelieu river, where a large blockhouse, fort richelieu, had been built by m. de saurel. once past this they had no great distance to go to reach the seigneury of de catinat's friend of the _noblesse_ who would help them upon their way. they had spent the night upon a little island in midstream, and at early dawn they were about to thrust the canoe out again from the sand-lined cove in which she lay, when ephraim savage growled in his throat and pointed out across the water. a large canoe was coming up the river, flying along as quick as a dozen arms could drive it. in the stern sat a dark figure which bent forward with every swing of the paddles, as though consumed by eagerness to push onwards. even at that distance there was no mistaking it. it was the fanatical monk whom they had left behind them. concealed among the brushwood, they watched their pursuers fly past and vanish round a curve in the stream. then they looked at one another in perplexity. "we'd have done better either to put him overboard or to take him as ballast," said ephraim. "he's hull down in front of us now, and drawing full." "well, we can't take the back track anyhow," remarked amos. "and yet how can we go on?" said de catinat despondently. "this vindictive devil will give word at the fort and at every other point along the river. he has been back to quebec. it is one of the governor's own canoes, and goes three paces to our two." "let me cipher it out." amos green sat on a fallen maple with his head sunk upon his hands. "well," said he presently, "if it's no good going on, and no good going back, there's only one way, and that is to go to one side. that's so, ephraim, is it not?" "ay, ay, lad, if you can't run you must tack, but it seems shoal water on either bow." "we can't go to the north, so it follows that we must go to the south." "leave the canoe?" "it's our only chance. we can cut through the woods and come out near this friendly house on the richelieu. the friar will lose our trail then, and we'll have no more trouble with him, if he stays on the st. lawrence." "there's nothing else for it," said captain ephraim ruefully. "it's not my way to go by land if i can get by water, and i have not been a fathom deep in a wood since king philip came down on the province, so you must lay the course and keep her straight, amos." "it is not far, and it will not take us long. let us get over to the southern bank and we shall make a start. if madame tires, de catinat, we shall take turns to carry her." "ah, monsieur, you cannot think what a good walker i am. in this splendid air one might go on forever." "we will cross then." in a very few minutes they were at the other side and had landed at the edge of the forest. there the guns and ammunition were allotted to each man, and his share of the provisions and of the scanty baggage. then having paid the indians, and having instructed them to say nothing of their movements, they turned their backs upon the river and plunged into the silent woods. chapter xxxi. the hairless man. all day they pushed on through the woodlands, walking in single file, amos green first, then the seaman, then the lady, and de catinat bringing up the rear. the young woodsman advanced cautiously, seeing and hearing much that was lost to his companions, stopping continually and examining the signs of leaf and moss and twig. their route lay for the most part through open glades amid a huge pine forest, with a green sward beneath their feet, made beautiful by the white euphorbia, the golden rod, and the purple aster. sometimes, however, the great trunks closed in upon them, and they had to grope their way in a dim twilight, or push a path through the tangled brushwood of green sassafras or scarlet sumach. and then again the woods would shred suddenly away in front of them, and they would skirt marshes, overgrown with wild rice and dotted with little dark clumps of alder bushes, or make their way past silent woodland lakes, all streaked and barred with the tree shadows which threw their crimsons and clarets and bronzes upon the fringe of the deep blue sheet of water. there were streams, too, some clear and rippling where the trout flashed and the king-fisher gleamed, others dark and poisonous from the tamarack swamps, where the wanderers had to wade over their knees and carry adele in their arms. so all day they journeyed 'mid the great forests, with never a hint or token of their fellow-man. but if man were absent, there was at least no want of life. it buzzed and chirped and chattered all round them from marsh and stream and brushwood. sometimes it was the dun coat of a deer which glanced between the distant trunks, sometimes the badger which scuttled for its hole at their approach. once the long in-toed track of a bear lay marked in the soft earth before them, and once amos picked a great horn from amid the bushes which some moose had shed the month before. little red squirrels danced and clattered above their heads, and every oak was a choir with a hundred tiny voices piping from the shadow of its foliage. as they passed the lakes the heavy gray stork flapped up in front of them, and they saw the wild duck whirring off in a long v against the blue sky, or heard the quavering cry of the loon from amid the reeds. that night they slept in the woods, amos green lighting a dry wood fire in a thick copse where at a dozen paces it was invisible. a few drops of rain had fallen, so with the quick skill of the practised woodsman he made two little sheds of elm and basswood bark, one to shelter the two refugees, and the other for ephraim and himself. he had shot a wild goose, and this, with the remains of their biscuit, served them both for supper and for breakfast. next day at noon they passed a little clearing, in the centre of which were the charred embers of a fire. amos spent half an hour in reading all that sticks and ground could tell him. then, as they resumed their way, he explained to his companions that the fire had been lit three weeks before, that a white man and two indians had camped there, that they had been journeying from west to east, and that one of the indians had been a squaw. no other traces of their fellow-mortals did they come across, until late in the afternoon amos halted suddenly in the heart of a thick grove, and raised his hand to his ear. "listen!" he cried. "i hear nothing," said ephraim. "nor i," added de catinat. "ah, but i do!" cried adele gleefully. "it is a bell--and at the very time of day when the bells all sound in paris!" "you are right, madame. it is what they call the angelus bell." "ah, yes, i hear it now!" cried de catinat. "it was drowned by the chirping of the birds. but whence comes a bell in the heart of a canadian forest?" "we are near the settlements on the richelieu. it must be the bell of the chapel at the fort." "fort st. louis! ah, then, we are no great way from my friend's seigneury." "then we may sleep there to-night, if you think that he is indeed to be trusted." "yes. he is a strange man, with ways of his own, but i would trust him with my life." "very good. we shall keep to the south of the fort and make for his house. but something is putting up the birds over yonder. ah, i hear the sound of steps! crouch down here among the sumach, until we see who it is who walks so boldly through the woods." they stooped all four among the brushwood, peeping out between the tree trunks at a little glade towards which amos was looking. for a long time the sound which the quick ears of the woodsman had detected was inaudible to the others, but at last they too heard the sharp snapping of twigs as some one forced his passage through the undergrowth. a moment later a man pushed his way into the open, whose appearance was so strange and so ill-suited to the spot, that even amos gazed upon him with amazement. he was a very small man, so dark and weather-stained that he might have passed for an indian were it not that he walked and was clad as no indian had ever been. he wore a broad-brimmed hat, frayed at the edges, and so discoloured that it was hard to say what its original tint had been. his dress was of skins, rudely cut and dangling loosely from his body, and he wore the high boots of a dragoon, as tattered and stained as the rest of his raiment. on his back he bore a huge bundle of canvas with two long sticks projecting from it, and under each arm he carried what appeared to be a large square painting. "he's no injun," whispered amos, "and he's no woodsman either. blessed if i ever saw the match of him!" "he's neither _voyageur_, nor soldier, nor _coureur-de-bois_," said de catinat. "'pears to me to have a jurymast rigged upon his back, and fore and main staysails set under each of his arms," said captain ephraim. "well, he seems to have no consorts, so we may hail him without fear." they rose from their ambush, and as they did so the stranger caught sight of them. instead of showing the uneasiness which any man might be expected to feel at suddenly finding himself in the presence of strangers in such a country, he promptly altered his course and came towards them. as he crossed the glade, however, the sounds of the distant bell fell upon his ears, and he instantly whipped off his hat and sunk his head in prayer. a cry of horror rose, not only from adele but from everyone of the party, at the sight which met their eyes. the top of the man's head was gone. not a vestige of hair or of white skin remained, but in place of it was a dreadful crinkled discoloured surface with a sharp red line running across his brow and round over his ears. "by the eternal!" cried amos, "the man has lost his scalp!" "my god!" said de catinat. "look at his hands!" he had raised them in prayer. two or three little stumps projecting upwards showed where the fingers had been. "i've seen some queer figure-heads in my life, but never one like that," said captain ephraim. it was indeed a most extraordinary face which confronted them as they advanced. it was that of a man who might have been of any age and of any nation, for the features were so distorted that nothing could be learned from them. one eyelid was drooping with a puckering and flatness which showed that the ball was gone. the other, however, shot as bright and merry and kindly a glance as ever came from a chosen favourite of fortune. his face was flecked over with peculiar brown spots which had a most hideous appearance, and his nose had been burst and shattered by some terrific blow. and yet, in spite of this dreadful appearance, there was something so noble in the carriage of the man, in the pose of his head and in the expression which still hung, like the scent from a crushed flower, round his distorted features, that even the blunt puritan seaman was awed by it. "good-evening, my children," said the stranger, picking up his pictures again and advancing towards them. "i presume that you are from the fort, though i may be permitted to observe that the woods are not very safe for ladies at present." "we are going to the manor-house of charles de la noue at sainte marie," said de catinat, "and we hope soon to be in a place of safety. but i grieve, sir, to see how terribly you have been mishandled." "ah, you have observed my little injuries, then! they know no better, poor souls. they are but mischievous children--merry-hearted but mischievous. tut, tut, it is laughable indeed that a man's vile body should ever clog his spirit, and yet here am i full of the will to push forward, and yet i must even seat myself on this log and rest myself, for the rogues have blown the calves of my legs off." "my god! blown them off! the devils!" "ah, but they are not to be blamed. no, no, it would be uncharitable to blame them. they are ignorant poor folk, and the prince of darkness is behind them to urge them on. they sank little charges of powder into my legs and then they exploded them, which makes me a slower walker than ever, though i was never very brisk. 'the snail' was what i was called at school in tours, yes, and afterwards at the seminary i was always 'the snail.'" "who are you then, sir, and who is it who has used you so shamefully?" asked de catinat. "oh, i am a very humble person. i am ignatius morat, of the society of jesus, and as to the people who have used me a little roughly, why, if you are sent upon the iroquois mission, of course you know what to expect. i have nothing at all to complain of. why, they have used me very much better than they did father jogues, father breboeuf, and a good many others whom i could mention. there were times, it is true, when i was quite hopeful of martyrdom, especially when they thought my tonsure was too small, which was their merry way of putting it. but i suppose i was not worthy of it; indeed i know that i was not, so it only ended in just a little roughness." "where are you going then?" asked amos, who had listened in amazement to the man's words. "i am going to quebec. you see i am such a useless person that, until i have seen the bishop, i can really do no good at all." "you mean that you will resign your mission into the bishop's hands?" said de catinat. "oh, no. that would be quite the sort of thing which i should do if i were left to myself, for it is incredible how cowardly i am. you would not think it possible that a priest of god could be so frightened as i am sometimes. the mere sight of a fire makes me shrink all into myself ever since i went through the ordeal of the lighted pine splinters, which have left all these ugly stains upon my face. but then, of course, there is the order to be thought of, and members of the order do not leave their posts for trifling causes. but it is against the rules of holy church that a maimed man should perform the rites, and so, until i have seen the bishop and had his dispensation, i shall be even more useless than ever." "and what will you do then?" "oh, then, of course, i will go back to my flock." "to the iroquois!" "that is where i am stationed." "amos," said de catinat, "i have spent my life among brave men, but i think that this is the bravest man that i have ever met!" "on my word," said amos, "i have seen some good men, too, but never one that i thought was better than this. you are weary, father. have some of our cold goose, and there is still a drop of cognac in my flask." "tut, tut, my son, if i take anything but the very simplest living it makes me so lazy that i become a snail indeed." "but you have no gun and no food. how do you live?" "oh, the good god has placed plenty of food in these forests for a traveller who dare not eat very much. i have had wild plums, and wild grapes, and nuts and cranberries, and a nice little dish of _tripe-de-mere_ from the rocks." the woodsman made a wry face at the mention of this delicacy. "i had as soon eat a pot of glue," said he. "but what is this which you carry on your back?" "it is my church. ah, i have everything here, tent, altar, surplice, everything. i cannot venture to celebrate service myself without the dispensation, but surely this venerable man is himself in orders and will solemnise the most blessed function." amos, with a sly twinkle of the eyes, translated the proposal to ephraim, who stood with his huge red hands clenched, mumbling about the saltless pottage of papacy. de catinat replied briefly, however, that they were all of the laity, and that if they were to reach their destination before nightfall, it was necessary that they should push on. "you are right, my son," said the little jesuit. "these poor people have already left their villages, and in a few days the woods will be full of them, though i do not think that any have crossed the richelieu yet. there is one thing, however, which i would have you do for me." "and what is that?" "it is but to remember that i have left with father lamberville at onondaga the dictionary which i have made of the iroquois and french languages. there also is my account of the copper mines of the great lakes which i visited two years ago, and also an orrery which i have made to show the northern heavens with the stars of each month as they are seen from this meridian. if aught were to go amiss with father lamberville or with me, and we do not live very long on the iroquois mission, it would be well that some one else should profit from my work." "i will tell my friend to-night. but what are these great pictures, father, and why do you bear them through the wood?" he turned them over as he spoke, and the whole party gathered round them, staring in amazement. they were very rough daubs, crudely coloured and gaudy. in the first, a red man was reposing serenely upon what appeared to be a range of mountains, with a musical instrument in his hand, a crown upon his head, and a smile upon his face. in the second, a similar man was screaming at the pitch of his lungs, while half-a-dozen black creatures were battering him with poles and prodding him with lances. "it is a damned soul and a saved soul," said father ignatius morat, looking at his pictures with some satisfaction. "these are clouds upon which the blessed spirit reclines, basking in all the joys of paradise. it is well done this picture, but it has had no good effect, because there are no beaver in it, and they have not painted in a tobacco-pipe. you see they have little reason, these poor folk, and so we have to teach them as best we can through their eyes and their foolish senses. this other is better. it has converted several squaws and more than one indian. i shall not bring back the saved soul when i come in the spring, but i shall bring five damned souls, which will be one for each nation. we must fight satan with such weapons as we can get, you see. and now, my children, if you must go, let me first call down a blessing upon you!" and then occurred a strange thing, for the beauty of this man's soul shone through all the wretched clouds of sect, and, as he raised his hand to bless them, down went those protestant knees to earth, and even old ephraim found himself with a softened heart and a bent head listening to the half-understood words of this crippled, half-blinded, little stranger. "farewell, then," said he, when they had risen. "may the sunshine of saint eulalie be upon you, and may saint anne of beaupre shield you at the moment of your danger." and so they left him, a grotesque and yet heroic figure, staggering along through the woods with his tent, his pictures, and his mutilation. if the church of rome should ever be wrecked it may come from her weakness in high places, where all churches are at their weakest, or it may be because with what is very narrow she tries to explain that which is very broad, but assuredly it will never be through the fault of her rank and file, for never upon earth have men and women spent themselves more lavishly and more splendidly than in her service. chapter xxxii. the lord of sainte marie. leaving fort st. louis, whence the bells had sounded, upon their right, they pushed onwards as swiftly as they could, for the sun was so low in the heavens that the bushes in the clearings threw shadows like trees. then suddenly, as they peered in front of them between the trunks, the green of the sward turned to the blue of the water, and they saw a broad river running swiftly before them. in france it would have seemed a mighty stream, but, coming fresh from the vastness of the st. lawrence, their eyes were used to great sheets of water. but amos and de catinat had both been upon the bosom of the richelieu before, and their hearts bounded as they looked upon it, for they knew that this was the straight path which led them, the one to home, and the other to peace and freedom. a few days' journeying down there, a few more along the lovely island-studded lakes of champlain and saint sacrament, under the shadow of the tree-clad adirondacks, and they would be at the headquarters of the hudson, and their toils and their dangers be but a thing of gossip for the winter evenings. across the river was the terrible iroquois country, and at two points they could see the smoke of fires curling up into the evening air. they had the jesuit's word for it that none of the war-parties had crossed yet, so they followed the track which led down the eastern bank. as they pushed onwards, however, a stern military challenge suddenly brought them to a stand, and they saw the gleam of two musket barrels which covered them from a thicket overlooking the path. "we are friends," cried de catinat. "whence come you, then?" asked an invisible sentinel. "from quebec." "and whither are you going?" "to visit monsieur charles de la noue, seigneur of sainte marie." "very good. it is quite safe, du lhut. they have a lady with them, too. i greet you, madame, in the name of my father." two men had emerged from the bushes, one of whom might have passed as a full-blooded indian, had it not been for these courteous words which he uttered in excellent french. he was a tall slight young man, very dark, with piercing black eyes, and a grim square relentless mouth which could only have come with indian descent. his coarse flowing hair was gathered up into a scalp-lock, and the eagle feather which he wore in it was his only headgear. a rude suit of fringed hide with caribou-skin mocassins might have been the fellow to the one which amos green was wearing, but the gleam of a gold chain from his belt, the sparkle of a costly ring upon his finger, and the delicate richly-inlaid musket which he carried, all gave a touch of grace to his equipment. a broad band of yellow ochre across his forehead and a tomahawk at his belt added to the strange inconsistency of his appearance. the other was undoubtedly a pure frenchman, elderly, dark and wiry, with a bristling black beard and a fierce eager face. he, too, was clad in hunter's dress, but he wore a gaudy striped sash round his waist, into which a brace of long pistols had been thrust. his buckskin tunic had been ornamented over the front with dyed porcupine quills and indian bead-work, while his leggings were scarlet with a fringe of raccoon tails hanging down from them. leaning upon his long brown gun he stood watching the party, while his companion advanced towards them. "you will excuse our precautions," said he. "we never know what device these rascals may adopt to entrap us. i fear, madame, that you have had a long and very tiring journey." poor adele, who had been famed for neatness even among housekeepers of the rue st. martin, hardly dared to look down at her own stained and tattered dress. fatigue and danger she had endured with a smiling face, but her patience almost gave way at the thought of facing strangers in this attire. "my mother will be very glad to welcome you, and to see to every want," said he quickly, as though he had read her thoughts. "but you, sir, i have surely seen you before." "and i you," cried the guardsman. "my name is amory de catinat, once of the regiment of picardy. surely you are achille de la noue de sainte marie, whom i remember when you came with your father to the government _levees_ at quebec." "yes, it is i," the young man answered, holding out his hand and smiling in a somewhat constrained fashion. "i do not wonder that you should hesitate, for when you saw me last i was in a very different dress to this." de catinat did indeed remember him as one of the band of the young _noblesse_ who used to come up to the capital once a year, where they inquired about the latest modes, chatted over the year-old gossip of versailles, and for a few weeks at least lived a life which was in keeping with the traditions of their order. very different was he now, with scalp-lock and war-paint, under the shadow of the great oaks, his musket in his hand and his tomahawk at his belt. "we have one life for the forest and one for the cities," said he, "though indeed my good father will not have it so, and carries versailles with him wherever he goes. you know him of old, monsieur, and i need not explain my words. but it is time for our relief, and so we may guide you home." two men in the rude dress of canadian _censitaires_ or farmers, but carrying their muskets in a fashion which told de catinat's trained senses that they were disciplined soldiers, had suddenly appeared upon the scene. young de la noue gave them a few curt injunctions, and then accompanied the refugees along the path. "you may not know my friend here," said he, pointing to the other sentinel, "but i am quite sure that his name is not unfamiliar to you. this is greysolon du lhut." both amos and de catinat looked with the deepest curiosity and interest at the famous leader of _coureurs-de-bois_, a man whose whole life had been spent in pushing westward, ever westward, saying little, writing nothing, but always the first wherever there was danger to meet or difficulty to overcome. it was not religion and it was not hope of gain which led him away into those western wildernesses, but pure love of nature and of adventure, with so little ambition that he had never cared to describe his own travels, and none knew where he had been or where he had stopped. for years he would vanish from the settlements away into the vast plains of the dacotah, or into the huge wilderness of the north-west, and then at last some day would walk back into sault la marie, or any other outpost of civilisation, a little leaner, a little browner, and as taciturn as ever. indians from the furthest corners of the continent knew him as they knew their own sachem. he could raise tribes and bring a thousand painted cannibals to the help of the french who spoke a tongue which none knew, and came from the shores of rivers which no one else had visited. the most daring french explorers, when, after a thousand dangers, they had reached some country which they believed to be new, were as likely as not to find du lhut sitting by his camp fire there, some new squaw by his side, and his pipe between his teeth. or again, when in doubt and danger, with no friends within a thousand miles, the traveller might suddenly meet this silent man, with one or two tattered wanderers of his own kidney, who would help him from his peril, and then vanish as unexpectedly as he came. such was the man who now walked by their sides along the bank of the richelieu, and both amos and de catinat knew that his presence there had a sinister meaning, and that the place which greysolon du lhut had chosen was the place where the danger threatened. "what do you think of those fires over yonder, du lhut?" asked young de la noue. the adventurer was stuffing his pipe with rank indian tobacco, which he pared from a plug with a scalping knife. he glanced over at the two little plumes of smoke which stood straight up against the red evening sky. "i don't like them," said he. "they are iroquois then?" "yes." "well, at least it proves that they are on the other side of the river." "it proves that they are on this side." "what!" du lhut lit his pipe from a tinder paper. "the iroquois are on this side," said he. "they crossed to the south of us." "and you never told us. how do you know that they crossed, and why did you not tell us?" "i did not know until i saw the fires over yonder." "and how did they tell you?" "tut, an indian papoose could have told," said du lhut impatiently. "iroquois on the trail do nothing without an object. they have an object then in showing that smoke. if their war-parties were over yonder there would be no object. therefore their braves must have crossed the river. and they could not get over to the north without being seen from the fort. they have got over on the south then." amos nodded with intense appreciation. "that's it!" said he, "that's injun ways. i'll lay that he is right." "then they may be in the woods round us. we may be in danger," cried de la noue. du lhut nodded and sucked at his pipe. de catinat cast a glance round him at the grand tree trunks, the fading foliage, the smooth sward underneath with the long evening shadows barred across it. how difficult it was to realise that behind all this beauty there lurked a danger so deadly and horrible that a man alone might well shrink from it, far less one who had the woman whom he loved walking within hand's touch of him. it was with a long heart-felt sigh of relief that he saw a wall of stockade in the midst of a large clearing in front of him, with the stone manor house rising above it. in a line from the stockade were a dozen cottages with cedar-shingled roofs turned up in the norman fashion, in which dwelt the habitants under the protection of the seigneur's chateau--a strange little graft of the feudal system in the heart of an american forest. above the main gate as they approached was a huge shield of wood with a coat of arms painted upon it, a silver ground with a chevron ermine between three coronets gules. at either corner a small brass cannon peeped through an embrasure. as they passed the gate the guard inside closed it and placed the huge wooden bars into position. a little crowd of men, women, and children were gathered round the door of the chateau, and a man appeared to be seated on a high-backed chair upon the threshold. "you know my father," said the young man with a shrug of his shoulders. "he will have it that he has never left his norman castle, and that he is still the seigneur de la noue, the greatest man within a day's ride of rouen, and of the richest blood of normandy. he is now taking his dues and his yearly oaths from his tenants, and he would not think it becoming, if the governor himself were to visit him, to pause in the middle of so august a ceremony. but if it would interest you, you may step this way and wait until he has finished. you, madame, i will take at once to my mother, if you will be so kind as to follow me." the sight was, to the americans at least, a novel one. a triple row of men, women, and children were standing round in a semicircle, the men rough and sunburned, the women homely and clean, with white caps upon their heads, the children open-mouthed and round-eyed, awed into an unusual quiet by the reverent bearing of their elders. in the centre, on his high-backed carved chair, there sat an elderly man very stiff and erect, with an exceedingly solemn face. he was a fine figure of a man, tall and broad, with large strong features, clean-shaven and deeply-lined, a huge beak of a nose, and strong shaggy eyebrows which arched right up to the great wig, which he wore full and long as it had been worn in france in his youth. on his wig was placed a white hat cocked jauntily at one side with a red feather streaming round it, and he wore a coat of cinnamon-coloured cloth with silver at the neck and pockets, which was still very handsome, though it bore signs of having been frayed and mended more than once. this, with black velvet knee-breeches and high well-polished boots, made a costume such as de catinat had never before seen in the wilds of canada. as they watched, a rude husbandman walked forwards from the crowd, and kneeling down upon a square of carpet placed his hands between those of the seigneur. "monsieur de sainte marie, monsieur de sainte marie, monsieur de sainte marie," said he three times, "i bring you the faith and homage which i am bound to bring you on account of my fief herbert, which i hold as a man of faith of your seigneury." "be true, my son. be valiant and true!" said the old nobleman solemnly, and then with a sudden change of tone: "what in the name of the devil has your daughter got there?" a girl had advanced from the crowd with a large strip of bark in front of her on which was heaped a pile of dead fish. "it is your eleventh fish which i am bound by my oath to render to you," said the _censitaire_. "there are seventy-three in the heap, and i have caught eight hundred in the month." "_peste!_" cried the nobleman. "do you think, andre dubois, that i will disorder my health by eating three-and-seventy fish in this fashion? do you think that i and my body-servants and my personal retainers and the other members of my household have nothing to do but to eat your fish? in future, you will pay your tribute not more than five at a time. where is the major-domo? theuriet, remove the fish to our central store-house, and be careful that the smell does not penetrate to the blue tapestry chamber or to my lady's suite." a man in very shabby black livery, all stained and faded, advanced with a large tin platter and carried off the pile of white fish. then, as each of the tenants stepped forward to pay their old-world homage, they all left some share of their industry for their lord's maintenance. with some it was a bundle of wheat, with some a barrel of potatoes, while others had brought skins of deer or of beaver. all these were carried off by the major-domo, until each had paid his tribute, and the singular ceremony was brought to a conclusion. as the seigneur rose, his son, who had returned, took de catinat by the sleeve and led him through the throng. "father," said he, "this is monsieur de catinat, whom you may remember some years ago at quebec." the seigneur bowed with much condescension, and shook the guardsman by the hand. "you are extremely welcome to my estates, both you and your body-servants--" "they are my friends, monsieur. this is monsieur amos green and captain ephraim savage. my wife is travelling with me, but your courteous son has kindly taken her to your lady." "i am honoured--honoured indeed!" cried the old man, with a bow and a flourish. "i remember you very well, sir, for it is not so common to meet men of quality in this country. i remember your father also, for he served with me at rocroy, though he was in the foot, and i in the red dragoons of grissot. your arms are a martlet in fess upon a field azure, and now that i think of it, the second daughter of your great-grand-father married the son of one of the la noues of andelys, which is one of our cadet branches. kinsman, you are welcome!" he threw his arms suddenly round de catinat and slapped him three times on the back. the young guardsman was only too delighted to find himself admitted to such an intimacy. "i will not intrude long upon your hospitality," said he. "we are journeying down to lake champlain, and we hope in a day or two to be ready to go on." "a suite of rooms shall be laid at your disposal as long as you do me the honour to remain here. _peste!_ it is not every day that i can open my gates to a man with good blood in his veins! ah, sir, that is what i feel most in my exile, for who is there with whom i can talk as equal to equal? there is the governor, the intendant, perhaps, one or two priests, three or four officers, but how many of the _noblesse_? scarcely one. they buy their titles over here as they buy their pelts, and it is better to have a canoe-load of beaver skins than a pedigree from roland. but i forget my duties. you are weary and hungry, you and your friends. come up with me to the tapestried _salon_, and we shall see if my stewards can find anything for your refreshment. you play piquet, if i remember right? ah, my skill is leaving me, and i should be glad to try a hand with you." the manor-house was high and strong, built of gray stone in a framework of wood. the large iron-clamped door through which they entered was pierced for musketry fire, and led into a succession of cellars and store-houses in which the beets, carrots, potatoes, cabbages, cured meat, dried eels, and other winter supplies were placed. a winding stone staircase led them through a huge kitchen, flagged and lofty, from which branched the rooms of the servants or retainers as the old nobleman preferred to call them. above this again was the principal suite, centering in the dining-hall with its huge fireplace and rude home-made furniture. rich rugs formed of bear or deer-skin were littered thickly over the brown-stained floor, and antlered heads bristled out from among the rows of muskets which were arranged along the wall. a broad rough-hewn maple table ran down the centre of this apartment, and on this there was soon set a venison pie, a side of calvered salmon, and a huge cranberry tart, to which the hungry travellers did full justice. the seigneur explained that he had already supped, but having allowed himself to be persuaded into joining them, he ended by eating more than ephraim savage, drinking more than du lhut, and finally by singing a very amorous little french _chanson_ with a tra-le-ra chorus, the words of which, fortunately for the peace of the company, were entirely unintelligible to the bostonian. "madame is taking her refection in my lady's boudoir," he remarked, when the dishes had been removed. "you may bring up a bottle of frontiniac from bin thirteen, theuriet. oh, you will see, gentlemen, that even in the wilds we have a little, a very little, which is perhaps not altogether bad. and so you come from versailles, de catinat? it was built since my day, but how i remember the old life of the court at st. germain, before louis turned serious! ah, what innocent happy days they were when madame de nevailles had to bar the windows of the maids of honour to keep out the king, and we all turned out eight deep on to the grass plot for our morning duel! by saint denis, i have not quite forgotten the trick of the wrist yet, and, old as i am, i should be none the worse for a little breather." he strutted in his stately fashion over to where a rapier and dagger hung upon the wall, and began to make passes at the door, darting in and out, warding off imaginary blows with his poniard, and stamping his feet with little cries of "punto! reverso! stoccata! dritta! mandritta!" and all the jargon of the fencing schools. finally he rejoined them, breathing heavily and with his wig awry. "that was our old exercise," said he. "doubtless you young bloods have improved upon it, and yet it was good enough for the spaniards at rocroy and at one or two other places which i could mention. but they still see life at the court, i understand. there are still love passages and blood lettings. how has lauzun prospered in his wooing of mademoiselle de montpensier? was it proved that madame de clermont had bought a phial from le vie, the poison woman, two days before the soup disagreed so violently with monsieur? what did the due de biron do when his nephew ran away with the duchess? is it true that he raised his allowance to fifty thousand livres for having done it?" such were the two-year-old questions which had not been answered yet upon the banks of the richelieu river. long into the hours of the night, when his comrades were already snoring under their blankets, de catinat, blinking and yawning, was still engaged in trying to satisfy the curiosity of the old courtier, and to bring him up to date in all the most minute gossip of versailles. chapter xxxiii. the slaying of brown moose. two days were spent by the travellers at the seigneury of sainte marie, and they would very willingly have spent longer, for the quarters were comfortable and the welcome warm, but already the reds of autumn were turning to brown, and they knew how suddenly the ice and snow come in those northern lands, and how impossible it would be to finish their journey if winter were once fairly upon them. the old nobleman had sent his scouts by land and by water, but there were no signs of the iroquois upon the eastern banks, so that it was clear that de lhut had been mistaken. over on the other side, however, the high gray plumes of smoke still streamed up above the trees as a sign that their enemies were not very far off. all day from the manor-house windows and from the stockade they could see those danger signals which reminded them that a horrible death lurked ever at their elbow. the refugees were rested now and refreshed, and of one mind about pushing on. "if the snow comes, it will be a thousand times more dangerous," said amos, "for we shall leave a track then that a papoose could follow." "and why should we fear?" urged old ephraim. "truly this is a desert of salt, even though it lead to the vale of hinnom, but we shall be borne up against these sons of jeroboam. steer a straight course, lad, and jam your helm, for the pilot will see you safe." "and i am not frightened, amory, and i am quite rested now," said adele. "we shall be so much more happy when we are in the english provinces, for even now, how do we know that that dreadful monk may not come with orders to drag us back to quebec and paris?" it was indeed very possible that the vindictive franciscan, when satisfied that they had not ascended to montreal, or remained at three rivers, might seek them on the banks of the richelieu. when de catinat thought of how he passed them in his great canoe that morning, his eager face protruded, and his dark body swinging in time to the paddles, he felt that the danger which his wife suggested was not only possible but imminent. the seigneur was his friend, but the seigneur could not disobey the governor's orders. a great hand, stretching all the way from versailles, seemed to hang over them, even here in the heart of the virgin forest, ready to snatch them up and carry them back into degradation and misery. better all the perils of the woods than that! but the seigneur and his son, who knew nothing of their pressing reasons for haste, were strenuous in urging de catinat the other way, and in this they were supported by the silent du lhut, whose few muttered words were always more weighty than the longest speech, for he never spoke save about that of which he was a master. "you have seen my little place," said the old nobleman, with a wave of his beruffled ring-covered hand. "it is not what i should wish it, but such as it is, it is most heartily yours for the winter, if you and your comrades would honour me by remaining. as to madame, i doubt not that my own dame and she will find plenty to amuse and occupy them, which reminds me, de catinat, that you have not yet been presented. theuriet, go to your mistress and inform her that i request her to be so good as to come to us in the hall of the dais." de catinat was too seasoned to be easily startled, but he was somewhat taken aback when the lady, to whom the old nobleman always referred in terms of exaggerated respect, proved to be as like a full-blooded indian squaw as the hall of the dais was to a french barn. she was dressed, it was true, in a bodice of scarlet taffeta with a black skirt, silver-buckled shoes, and a scented pomander ball dangling by a silver chain from her girdle, but her face was of the colour of the bark of the scotch fir, while her strong nose and harsh mouth, with the two plaits of coarse black hair which dangled down her back, left no possible doubt as to her origin. "allow me to present you, monsieur de catinat," said the seigneur de sainte marie solemnly, "to my wife, onega de la noue de sainte marie, chatelaine by right of marriage to this seigneury, and also to the chateau d'andelys in normandy, and to the estate of varennes in provence, while retaining in her own right the hereditary chieftainship on the distaff side of the nation of the onondagas. my angel, i have been endeavouring to persuade our friends to remain with us at sainte marie instead of journeying on to lake champlain." "at least leave your white lily at sainte marie," said the dusky princess, speaking in excellent french, and clasping with her ruddy fingers the ivory hand of adele. "we will hold her safe for you until the ice softens, and the leaves and the partridge berries come once more. i know my people, monsieur, and i tell you that the woods are full of murder, and that it is not for nothing that the leaves are the colour of blood, for death lurks behind every tree." de catinat was more moved by the impressive manner of his hostess than by any of the other warnings which he had received. surely she, if anyone, must be able to read the signs of the times. "i know not what to do!" he cried in despair. "i must go on, and yet how can i expose her to these perils? i would fain stay the winter, but you must take my word for it, sir, that it is not possible." "du lhut, you know how things should be ordered," said the seigneur. "what should you advise my friend to do, since he is so set upon getting to the english provinces before the winter comes?" the dark silent pioneer stroked his beard with his hand as he pondered over the question. "there is but one way," said he at last, "though even in it there is danger. the woods are safer than the river, for the reeds are full of _cached_ canoes. five leagues from here is the blockhouse of poitou, and fifteen miles beyond, that of auvergne. we will go to-morrow to poitou through the woods and see if all be safe. i will go with you, and i give you my word that if the iroquois are there, greysolon du lhut will know it. the lady we shall leave here, and if we find that all is safe we shall come back for her. then in the same fashion we shall advance to auvergne, and there you must wait until you hear where their war-parties are. it is in my mind that it will not be very long before we know." "what! you would part us!" cried adele aghast. "it is best, my sister," said onega, passing her arm caressingly round her. "you cannot know the danger, but we know it, and we will not let our white lily run into it. you will stay here to gladden us, while the great chief du lhut, and the french soldier, your husband, and the old warrior who seems so wary, and the other chief with limbs like the wild deer, go forward through the woods and see that all is well before you venture." and so it was at last agreed, and adele, still protesting, was consigned to the care of the lady of sainte marie, while de catinat swore that without a pause he would return from poitou to fetch her. the old nobleman and his son would fain have joined them in their adventure, but they had their own charge to watch and the lives of many in their keeping, while a small party were safer in the woods than a larger one would be. the seigneur provided them with a letter for de lannes, the governor of the poitou blockhouse, and so in the early dawn the four of them crept like shadows from the stockade-gate, amid the muttered good wishes of the guard within, and were lost in an instant in the blackness of the vast forest. from la noue to poitou was but twelve miles down the river, but by the woodland route where creeks were to be crossed, reed-girt lakes to be avoided, and paths to be picked among swamps where the wild rice grew higher than their heads, and the alder bushes lay in dense clumps before them, the distance was more than doubled. they walked in single file, du lhut leading, with the swift silent tread of some wild creature, his body bent forward, his gun ready in the bend of his arm, and his keen dark eyes shooting little glances to right and left, observing everything from the tiniest mark upon the ground or tree trunk to the motion of every beast and bird of the brushwood. de catinat walked behind, then ephraim savage, and then amos, all with their weapons ready and with every sense upon the alert. by midday they were more than half-way, and halted in a thicket for a scanty meal of bread and cheese, for de lhut would not permit them to light a fire. "they have not come as far as this," he whispered, "and yet i am sure that they have crossed the river. ah, governor de la barre did not know what he did when he stirred these men up, and this good dragoon whom the king has sent us now knows even less." "i have seen them in peace," remarked amos. "i have traded to onondaga and to the country of the senecas. i know them as fine hunters and brave men." "they are fine hunters, but the game that they hunt best are their fellow-men. i have myself led their scalping parties, and i have fought against them, and i tell you that when a general comes out from france who hardly knows enough to get the sun behind him in a fight, he will find that there is little credit to be gained from them. they talk of burning their villages! it would be as wise to kick over the wasps' nest, and think that you have done with the wasps. you are from new england, monsieur?" "my comrade is from new england; i am from new york." "ah, yes. i could see from your step and your eye that the woods were as a home to you. the new england man goes on the waters and he slays the cod with more pleasure than the caribou. perhaps that is why his face is so sad. i have been on the great water, and i remember that my face was sad also. there is little wind, and so i think that we may light our pipes without danger. with a good breeze i have known a burning pipe fetch up a scalping party from two miles' distance, but the trees stop scent, and the iroquois noses are less keen than the sioux and the dacotah. god help you, monsieur, if you should ever have an indian war. it is bad for us, but it would be a thousand times worse for you." "and why?" "because we have fought the indians from the first, and we have them always in our mind when we build. you see how along this river every house and every hamlet supports its neighbour? but you, by saint anne of beaupre, it made my scalp tingle when i came on your frontiers and saw the lonely farm-houses and little clearings out in the woods with no help for twenty leagues around. an indian war is a purgatory for canada, but it would be a hell for the english provinces!" "we are good friends with the indians," said amos. "we do not wish to conquer." "your people have a way of conquering although they say that they do not wish to do it," remarked du lhut. "now, with us, we bang our drums, and wave our flags, and make a stir, but no very big thing has come of it yet. we have never had but two great men in canada. one was monsieur de la salle, who was shot last year by his own men down the great river, and the other, old frontenac, will have to come back again if new france is not to be turned into a desert by the five nations. it would surprise me little if by this time two years the white and gold flag flew only over the rock of quebec. but i see that you look at me impatiently, monsieur de catinat, and i know that you count the hours until we are back at sainte marie again. forward, then, and may the second part of our journey be as peaceful as the first." for an hour or more they picked their way through the woods, following in the steps of the old french pioneer. it was a lovely day with hardly a cloud in the heavens, and the sun streaming down through the thick foliage covered the shaded sward with a delicate network of gold. sometimes where the woods opened they came out into the pure sunlight, but only to pass into thick glades beyond, where a single ray, here and there, was all that could break its way through the vast leafy covering. it would have been beautiful, these sudden transitions from light to shade, but with the feeling of impending danger, and of a horror ever lurking in these shadows, the mind was tinged with awe rather than admiration. silently, lightly, the four men picked their steps among the great tree trunks. suddenly du lhut dropped upon his knees and stooped his ear to the ground. he rose, shook his head, and walked on with a grave face, casting quick little glances into the shadows in every direction. "did you hear something?" whispered amos. du lhut put his finger to his lips, and then in an instant was down again upon his face with his ear fixed to the ground. he sprang up with the look of a man who has heard what he expected to hear. "walk on," said he quietly, "and behave exactly as you have done all day." "what is it, then?" "indians." "in front of us?" "no, behind us." "what are they doing?" "they are following us." "how many of them?" "two, i think." the friends glanced back involuntarily over their shoulders into the dense blackness of the forest. at one point a single broad shaft of light slid down between two pines and cast a golden blotch upon their track. save for this one vivid spot all was sombre and silent. "do not look round," whispered du lhut sharply. "walk on as before." "are they enemies?" "they are iroquois." "and pursuing us?" "no, we are now pursuing them." "shall we turn, then?" "no, they would vanish like shadows," "how far off are they?" "about two hundred paces, i think." "they cannot see us, then?" "i think not, but i cannot be sure. they are following our trail, i think." "what shall we do, then?" "let us make a circle and get behind them." turning sharp to the left he led them in a long curve through the woods, hurrying swiftly and yet silently under the darkest shadows of the trees. then he turned again, and presently halted. "this is our own track," said he. "ay, and two redskins have passed over it," cried amos, bending down, and pointing to marks which were entirely invisible to ephraim savage or de catinat. "a full-grown warrior and a lad on his first warpath," said du lhut. "they were moving fast, you see, for you can hardly see the heel marks of their moccasins. they walked one behind the other. now let us follow them as they followed us, and see if we have better luck." he sped swiftly along the trail with his musket cocked in his hand, the others following hard upon his heels, but there was no sound, and no sign of life from the shadowy woods in front of them. suddenly du lhut stopped and grounded his weapon. "they are still behind us," he said. "still behind us?" "yes. this is the point where we branched off. they have hesitated a moment, as you can see by their footmarks, and then they have followed on." "if we go round again and quicken our pace we may overtake them." "no, they are on their guard now. they must know that it could only be on their account that we went back on our tracks. lie here behind the fallen log and we shall see if we can catch a glimpse of them." a great rotten trunk, all green with mould and blotched with pink and purple fungi, lay to one side of where they stood. behind this the frenchman crouched, and his three companions followed his example, peering through the brushwood screen in front of them. still the one broad sheet of sunshine poured down between the two pines, but all else was as dim and as silent as a vast cathedral with pillars of wood and roof of leaf. not a branch that creaked, nor a twig that snapped, nor any sound at all save the sharp barking of a fox somewhere in the heart of the forest. a thrill of excitement ran through the nerves of de catinat. it was like one of those games of hide-and-seek which the court used to play, when louis was in a sportive mood, among the oaks and yew hedges of versailles. but the forfeit there was a carved fan, or a box of bonbons, and here it was death. ten minutes passed and there was no sign of any living thing behind them. "they are over in yonder thicket," whispered du lhut, nodding his head towards a dense clump of brushwood, two hundred paces away. "have you seen them?" "no." "how do you know, then?" "i saw a squirrel come from his hole in the great white beech-tree yonder. he scuttled back again as if something had scared him. from his hole he can see down into that brushwood." "do you think that they know that we are here?" "they cannot see us. but they are suspicious. they fear a trap." "shall we rush for the brushwood?" "they would pick two of us off, and be gone like shadows through the woods. no, we had best go on our way." "but they will follow us." "i hardly think that they will. we are four and they are only two, and they know now that we are on our guard and that we can pick up a trail as quickly as they can themselves. get behind these trunks where they cannot see us. so! now stoop until you are past the belt of alder bushes. we must push on fast now, for where there are two iroquois there are likely to be two hundred not very far off." "thank god that i did not bring adele!" cried de catinat. "yes, monsieur, it is well for a man to make a comrade of his wife, but not on the borders of the iroquois country, nor of any other indian country either." "you do not take your own wife with you when you travel, then?" asked the soldier. "yes, but i do not let her travel from village to village. she remains in the wigwam." "then you leave her behind?" "on the contrary, she is always there to welcome me. by saint anne, i should be heavy-hearted if i came to any village between this and the bluffs of the illinois, and did not find my wife waiting to greet me." "then she must travel before you." du lhut laughed heartily, without, however, emitting a sound. "a fresh village, a fresh wife," said he. "but i never have more than one in each, for it is a shame for a frenchman to set an evil example when the good fathers are spending their lives so freely in preaching virtue to them. ah, here is the ajidaumo creek, where the indians set the sturgeon nets. it is still seven miles to poitou." "we shall be there before nightfall, then?" "i think that we had best wait for nightfall before we make our way in. since the iroquois scouts are out as far as this, it is likely that they lie thick round poitou, and we may find the last step the worst unless we have a care, the more so if these two get in front of us to warn the others." he paused a moment with slanting head and sidelong ear. "by saint anne," he muttered, "we have not shaken them off. they are still upon our trail!" "you hear them?" "yes, they are no great way from us. they will find that they have followed us once too often this time. now, i will show you a little bit of woodcraft which may be new to you. slip off your moccasins, monsieur." de catinat pulled off his shoes as directed, and du lhut did the same. "put them on as if they were gloves," said the pioneer, and an instant later ephraim savage and amos had their comrades' shoes upon their hands. "you can sling your muskets over your back. so! now down on all fours, bending yourselves double, with your hands pressing hard upon the earth. that is excellent. two men can leave the trail of four! now come with me, monsieur." he flitted from tree to tree on a line which was parallel to, but a few yards distant from, that of their comrades. then suddenly he crouched behind a bush and pulled de catinat down beside him. "they must pass us in a few minutes," he whispered. "do not fire if you can help it." something gleamed in du lhut's hand, and his comrade, glancing down, saw that he had drawn a keen little tomahawk from his belt. again the mad wild thrill ran through the soldier's blood, as he peered through the tangled branches and waited for whatever might come out of the dim silent aisles of tree-boles. and suddenly he saw something move. it flitted like a shadow from one trunk to the other so swiftly that de catinat could not have told whether it were beast or human. and then again he saw it, and yet again, sometimes one shadow, sometimes two shadows, silent, furtive, like the _loup-garou_ with which his nurse had scared him in his childhood. then for a few moments all was still once more, and then in an instant there crept out from among the bushes the most terrible-looking creature that ever walked the earth, an iroquois chief upon the war-trail. he was a tall powerful man, and his bristle of scalp-locks and eagle feathers made him look a giant in the dim light, for a good eight feet lay between his beaded moccasin and the topmost plume of his headgear. one side of his face was painted in soot, ochre, and vermilion to resemble a dog, and the other half as a fowl, so that the front view was indescribably grotesque and strange. a belt of wampum was braced round his loin-cloth, and a dozen scalp-locks fluttered out as he moved from the fringe of his leggings. his head was sunk forward, his eyes gleamed with a sinister light, and his nostrils dilated and contracted like those of an excited animal. his gun was thrown forward, and he crept along with bended knees, peering, listening, pausing, hurrying on, a breathing image of caution. two paces behind him walked a lad of fourteen, clad and armed in the same fashion, but without the painted face and without the horrid dried trophies upon the leggings. it was his first campaign, and already his eyes shone and his nostrils twitched with the same lust for murder which burned within his elder. so they advanced, silent, terrible, creeping out of the shadows of the wood, as their race had come out of the shadows of history, with bodies of iron and tiger souls. they were just abreast of the bush when something caught the eye of the younger warrior, some displaced twig or fluttering leaf, and he paused with suspicion in every feature. another instant and he had warned his companion, but du lhut sprang out and buried his little hatchet in the skull of the older warrior. de catinat heard a dull crash, as when an axe splinters its way into a rotten tree, and the man fell like a log, laughing horribly, and kicking and striking with his powerful limbs. the younger warrior sprang like a deer over his fallen comrade and dashed on into the wood, but an instant later there was a gunshot among the trees in front, followed by a faint wailing cry. "that is his death-whoop," said du lhut composedly. "it was a pity to fire, and yet it was better than letting him go." as he spoke the two others came back, ephraim ramming a fresh charge into his musket. "who was laughing?" asked amos. "it was he," said du lhut, nodding towards the dying warrior, who lay with his head in a horrible puddle, and his grotesque features contorted into a fixed smile. "it's a custom they have when they get their death-blow. i've known a seneca chief laugh for six hours on end at the torture-stake. ah, he's gone!" as he spoke the indian gave a last spasm with his hands and feet, and lay rigid, grinning up at the slit of blue sky above him. "he's a great chief," said du lhut. "he is brown moose of the mohawks, and the other is his second son. we have drawn first blood, but i do not think that it will be the last, for the iroquois do not allow their war-chiefs to die unavenged. he was a mighty fighter, as you may see by looking at his neck." he wore a peculiar necklace which seemed to de catinat to consist of blackened bean pods set upon a string. as he stooped over it he saw to his horror that they were not bean pods, but withered human fingers. "they are all right fore-fingers," said du lhut, "so everyone represents a life. there are forty-two in all. eighteen are of men whom he has slain in battle, and the other twenty-four have been taken and tortured." "how do you know that?" "because only eighteen have their nails on. if the prisoner of an iroquois be alive, he begins always by biting his nails off. you see that they are missing from four-and-twenty." de catinat shuddered. what demons were these amongst whom an evil fate had drifted him? and was it possible that his adele should fall into the hands of such fiends? no, no, surely the good god, for whose sake they had suffered so much, would not permit such an infamy! and yet as evil a fate had come upon other women as tender as adele--upon other men as loving as he. what hamlet was there in canada which had not such stories in their record? a vague horror seized him as he stood there. we know more of the future than we are willing to admit, away down in those dim recesses of the soul where there is no reason, but only instincts and impressions. now some impending terror cast its cloud over him. the trees around, with their great protruding limbs, were like shadowy demons thrusting out their gaunt arms to seize him. the sweat burst from his forehead, and he leaned heavily upon his musket. "by saint eulalie," said du lhut, "for an old soldier you turn very pale, monsieur, at a little bloodshed." "i am not well. i should be glad of a sup from your cognac bottle." "here it is, comrade, and welcome! well, i may as well have this fine scalp that we may have something to show for our walk." he held the indian's head between his knees, and in an instant, with a sweep of his knife, had torn off the hideous dripping trophy. "let us go!" cried de catinat, turning away in disgust. "yes, we shall go! but i shall also have this wampum belt marked with the totem of the bear. so! and the gun too. look at the 'london' printed upon the lock. ah, monsieur green, monsieur green, it is not hard to see where the enemies of france get their arms." so at last they turned away, du lhut bearing his spoils, leaving the red grinning figure stretched under the silent trees. as they passed on they caught a glimpse of the lad lying doubled up among the bushes where he had fallen. the pioneer walked very swiftly until he came to a little stream which prattled down to the big river. here he slipped off his boots and leggings, and waded down it with his companions for half a mile or so. "they will follow our tracks when they find him," said he, "but this will throw them off, for it is only on running water that an iroquois can find no trace. and now we shall lie in this clump until nightfall, for we are little over a mile from port poitou, and it is dangerous to go forward, for the ground becomes more open." and so they remained concealed among the alders whilst the shadows turned from short to long, and the white drifting clouds above them were tinged with the pink of the setting sun. du lhut coiled himself into a ball with his pipe between his teeth and dropped into a light sleep, pricking up his ears and starting at the slightest sound from the woods around them. the two americans whispered together for a long time, ephraim telling some long story about the cruise of the brig _industry_, bound to jamestown for sugar and molasses, but at last the soothing hum of a gentle breeze through the branches lulled them off also, and they slept. de catinat alone remained awake, his nerves still in a tingle from that strange sudden shadow which had fallen upon his soul. what could it mean? not surely that adele was in danger? he had heard of such warnings, but had he not left her in safety behind cannons and stockades? by the next evening at latest he would see her again. as he lay looking up through the tangle of copper leaves at the sky beyond, his mind drifted like the clouds above him, and he was back once more in the jutting window in the rue st. martin, sitting on the broad _bancal_, with its spanish leather covering, with the gilt wool-bale creaking outside, and his arm round shrinking, timid adele, she who had compared herself to a little mouse in an old house, and who yet had courage to stay by his side through all this wild journey. and then again he was back at versailles. once more he saw the brown eyes of the king, the fair bold face of de montespan, the serene features of de maintenon-- once more he rode on his midnight mission, was driven by the demon coachman, and sprang with amos upon the scaffold to rescue the most beautiful woman in france. so clear it was and so vivid that it was with a start that he came suddenly to himself, and found that the night was creeping on in an american forest, and that du lhut had roused himself and was ready for a start. "have you been awake?" asked the pioneer. "yes." "have you heard anything?" "nothing but the hooting of the owl." "it seemed to me that in my sleep i heard a gunshot in the distance." "in your sleep?" "yes, i hear as well asleep as awake and remember what i hear. but now you must follow me close, and we shall be in the fort soon." "you have wonderful ears, indeed," said de catinat, as they picked their way through the tangled wood. "how could you hear that these men were following us to-day? i could make out no sound when they were within hand-touch of us." "i did not hear them at first." "you saw them?" "no, nor that either." "then how could you know that they were there?" "i heard a frightened jay flutter among the trees after we were past it. then ten minutes later i heard the same thing. i knew then that there was some one on our trail, and i listened." "_peste!_ you are a woodsman indeed!" "i believe that these woods are swarming with iroquois, although we have had the good fortune to miss them. so great a chief as brown moose would not start on the path with a small following nor for a small object. they must mean mischief upon the richelieu. you are not sorry now that you did not bring madame?" "i thank god for it!" "the woods will not be safe, i fear, until the partridge berries are out once more. you must stay at sainte marie until then, unless the seigneur can spare men to guard you." "i had rather stay there forever than expose my wife to such devils." "ay, devils they are, if ever devils walked upon earth. you winced, monsieur, when i took brown moose's scalp, but when you have seen as much of the indians as i have done your heart will be as hardened as mine. and now we are on the very borders of the clearing, and the blockhouse lies yonder among the clump of maples. they do not keep very good watch, for i have been expecting during these last ten minutes to hear the _qui vive_. you did not come as near to sainte marie unchallenged, and yet de lannes is as old a soldier as la noue. we can scarce see now, but yonder, near the river, is where he exercises his men." "he does so now," said amos. "i see a dozen of them drawn up in a line at their drill." "no sentinels, and all the men at drill!" cried du lhut in contempt. "it is as you say, however, for i can see them myself with their ranks open, and each as stiff and straight as a pine stump. one would think to see them stand so still that there was not an indian nearer than orange. we shall go across to them, and by saint anne, i shall tell their commander what i think of his arrangements." du lhut advanced from the bushes as he spoke, and the four men crossed the open ground in the direction of the line of men who waited silently for them in the dim twilight. they were within fifty paces, and yet none of them had raised hand or voice to challenge their approach. there was something uncanny in the silence, and a change came over du lhut's face as he peered in front of him. he craned his head round and looked up the river. "my god!" he screamed. "look at the fort!" they had cleared the clump of trees, and the outline of the blockhouse should have shown up in front of them. there was no sign of it. it was gone! chapter xxxiv. the men of blood. so unexpected was the blow that even de lhut, hardened from his childhood to every shock and danger, stood shaken and dismayed. then, with an oath, he ran at the top of his speed towards the line of figures, his companions following at his heels. as they drew nearer they could see through the dusk that it was not indeed a line. a silent and motionless officer stood out some twenty paces in front of his silent and motionless men. further, they could see that he wore a very high and singular head-dress. they were still rushing forward, breathless with apprehension, when to their horror this head-dress began to lengthen and broaden, and a great bird flapped heavily up and dropped down again on the nearest tree-trunk. then they knew that their worst fears were true, and that it was the garrison of poitou which stood before them. they were lashed to low posts with willow withies, some twenty of them, naked all, and twisted and screwed into every strange shape which an agonised body could assume. in front where the buzzard had perched was the gray-headed commandant, with two cinders thrust into his sockets and his flesh hanging from him like a beggar's rags. behind was the line of men, each with his legs charred off to the knees, and his body so haggled and scorched and burst that the willow bands alone seemed to hold it together. for a moment the four comrades stared in silent horror at the dreadful group. then each acted as his nature bade him. de catinat staggered up against a tree-trunk and leaned his head upon his arm, deadly sick. du lhut fell down upon his knees and said something to heaven, with his two clenched hands shaking up at the darkening sky. ephraim savage examined the priming of his gun with a tightened lip and a gleaming eye, while amos green, without a word, began to cast round in circles in search of a trail. but du lhut was on his feet again in a moment, and running up and down like a sleuth-hound, noting a hundred things which even amos would have overlooked. he circled round the bodies again and again. then he ran a little way towards the edge of the woods, and then came back to the charred ruins of the blockhouse, from some of which a thin reek of smoke was still rising. "there is no sign of the women and children," said he. "my god! there were women and children?" "they are keeping the children to burn at their leisure in their villages. the women they may torture or may adopt as the humour takes them. but what does the old man want?" "i want you to ask him, amos," said the seaman, "why we are yawing and tacking here when we should be cracking on all sail to stand after them?" du lhut smiled and shook his head. "your friend is a brave man," said he, "if he thinks that with four men we can follow a hundred and fifty." "tell him, amos, that the lord will bear us up," said the other excitedly. "say that he will be with us against the children of jeroboam, and we will cut them off utterly, and they shall be destroyed. what is the french for 'slay and spare not'? i had as soon go about with my jaw braced up, as with folk who cannot understand a plain language." but du lhut waved aside the seaman's suggestions. "we must have a care now," said he, "or we shall lose our own scalps, and be the cause of those at sainte marie losing theirs as well." "sainte marie!" cried de catinat. "is there then danger at sainte marie?" "ay, they are in the wolf's mouth now. this business was done last night. the place was stormed by a war-party of a hundred and fifty men. this morning they left and went north upon foot. they have been _cached_ among the woods all day between poitou and sainte marie." "then we have come through them?" "yes, we have come through them. they would keep their camp to-day and send out scouts. brown moose and his son were among them and struck our trail. to-night--" "to-night they will attack sainte marie?" "it is possible. and yet with so small a party i should scarce have thought that they would have dared. well, we can but hasten back as quickly as we can, and give them warning of what is hanging over them." and so they turned for their weary backward journey, though their minds were too full to spare a thought upon the leagues which lay behind them or those which were before. old ephraim, less accustomed to walking than his younger comrades, was already limping and footsore, but, for all his age, he was as tough as hickory, and full of endurance. du lhut took the lead again and they turned their faces once more towards the north. the moon was shining brightly in the sky, but it was little aid to the travellers in the depths of the forest. where it had been shadowy in the daytime it was now so absolutely dark that de catinat could not see the tree-trunks against which he brushed. here and there they came upon an open glade bathed in the moonshine, or perhaps a thin shaft of silver light broke through between the branches, and cast a great white patch upon the ground, but du lhut preferred to avoid these more open spaces, and to skirt the glades rather than to cross them. the breeze had freshened a little, and the whole air was filled with the rustle and sough of the leaves. save for this dull never-ceasing sound all would have been silent had not the owl hooted sometimes from among the tree-tops, and the night-jar whirred above their heads. dark as it was, du lhut walked as swiftly as during the sunlight, and never hesitated about the track. his comrades could see, however, that he was taking them a different way to that which they had gone in the morning, for twice they caught a sight of the glimmer of the broad river upon their left, while before they had only seen the streams which flowed into it. on the second occasion he pointed to where, on the farther side, they could see dark shadows flitting over the water. "iroquois canoes," he whispered. "there are ten of them with eight men in each. they are another party, and they are also going north." "how do you know that they are another party?" "because we have crossed the trail of the first within the hour." de catinat was filled with amazement at this marvellous man who could hear in his sleep and could detect a trail when the very tree-trunks were invisible to ordinary eyes. du lhut halted a little to watch the canoes, and then turned his back to the river, and plunged into the woods once more. they had gone a mile or two when suddenly he came to a dead stop, snuffing at the air like a hound on a scent. "i smell burning wood," said he. "there is a fire within a mile of us in that direction." "i smell it too," said amos. "let us creep up that way and see their camp." "be careful, then," whispered du lhut, "for your lives may hang from a cracking twig." they advanced very slowly and cautiously until suddenly the red flare of a leaping fire twinkled between the distant trunks. still slipping through the brushwood, they worked round until they had found a point from which they could see without a risk of being seen. a great blaze of dry logs crackled and spurtled in the centre of a small clearing. the ruddy flames roared upwards, and the smoke spread out above it until it looked like a strange tree with gray foliage and trunk of fire. but no living being was in sight and the huge fire roared and swayed in absolute solitude in the midst of the silent woodlands. nearer they crept and nearer, but there was no movement save the rush of the flames, and no sound but the snapping of the sticks. "shall we go up to it?" whispered de catinat. the wary old pioneer shook his head. "it may be a trap," said he. "or an abandoned camp?" "no, it has not been lit more than an hour." "besides, it is far too great for a camp fire," said amos. "what do you make of it?" asked du lhut. "a signal." "yes, i daresay that you are right. this light is not a safe neighbour, so we shall edge away from it and then make a straight line for sainte marie." the flames were soon but a twinkling point behind them, and at last vanished behind the trees. du lhut pushed on rapidly until they came to the edge of a moonlit clearing. he was about to skirt this, as he had done others, when suddenly he caught de catinat by the shoulder and pushed him down behind a clump of sumach, while amos did the same with ephraim savage. a man was walking down the other side of the open space. he had just emerged, and was crossing it diagonally, making in the direction of the river. his body was bent double, but as he came out from the shadow of the trees they could see that he was an indian brave in full war-paint, with leggings, loin-cloth, and musket. close at his heels came a second, and then a third and a fourth, on and on until it seemed as if the wood were full of men, and that the line would never come to an end. they flitted past like shadows in the moonlight, in absolute silence, all crouching and running in the same swift stealthy fashion. last of all came a man in the fringed tunic of a hunter, with a cap and feather upon his head. he passed across like the others, and they vanished into the shadows as silently as they had appeared. it was five minutes before du lhut thought it safe to rise from their shelter. "by saint anne," he whispered, "did you count them?" "three hundred and ninety-six," said amos. "i made it four hundred and two." "and you thought that there were only a hundred and fifty of them!" cried de catinat. "ah, you do not understand. this is a fresh band. the others who took the blockhouse must be over there, for their trail lies between us and the river." "they could not be the same," said amos, "for there was not a fresh scalp among them." du lhut gave the young hunter a glance of approval. "on my word," said he, "i did not know that your woodsmen are as good as they seem to be. you have eyes, monsieur, and it may please you some day to remember that greysolon du lhut told you so." amos felt a flush of pride at these words from a man whose name was honoured wherever trader or trapper smoked round a camp fire. he was about to make some answer when a dreadful cry broke suddenly out of the woods, a horrible screech, as from some one who was goaded to the very last pitch of human misery. again and again, as they stood with blanched cheeks in the darkness, they heard that awful cry swelling up from the night and ringing drearily through the forest. "they are torturing the women," said du lhut. "their camp lies over there." "can we do nothing to aid them?" cried amos. "ay, ay, lad," said the captain in english. "we can't pass distress signals without going out of our course. let us put about and run down yonder." "in that camp," said du lhut slowly, "there are now nearly six hundred warriors. we are four. what you say has no sense. unless we warn them at sainte marie, these devils will lay some trap for them. their parties are assembling by land and by water, and there may be a thousand before daybreak. our duty is to push on and give our warning." "he speaks the truth," said amos to ephraim. "nay, but you must not go alone!" he seized the stout old seaman by the arm and held him by main force to prevent him from breaking off through the woods. "there is one thing which we can do to spoil their night's amusement," said du lhut. "the woods are as dry as powder, and there has been no drop of rain for a long three months." "yes?" "and the wind blows straight for their camp, with the river on the other side of it." "we should fire the woods!" "we cannot do better." in an instant du lhut had scraped together a little bundle of dry twigs, and had heaped them up against a withered beech tree which was as dry as tinder. a stroke of flint and steel was enough to start a little smoulder of flame, which lengthened and spread until it was leaping along the white strips of hanging bark. a quarter of a mile farther on du lhut did the same again, and once more beyond that, until at three different points the forest was in a blaze. as they hurried onwards they could hear the dull roaring of the flames behind them, and at last, as they neared sainte marie, they could see, looking back, the long rolling wave of fire travelling ever westward towards the richelieu, and flashing up into great spouts of flame as it licked up a clump of pines as if it were a bundle of faggots. du lhut chuckled in his silent way as he looked back at the long orange glare in the sky. "they will need to swim for it, some of them," said he. "they have not canoes to take them all off. ah, if i had but two hundred of my _coureurs-de-bois_ on the river at the farther side of them not one would have got away." "they had one who was dressed like a white man," remarked amos. "ay, and the most deadly of the lot. his father was a dutch trader, his mother an iroquois, and he goes by the name of the flemish bastard. ah, i know him well, and i tell you that if they want a king in hell, they will find one all ready in his wigwam. by saint anne, i have a score to settle with him, and i may pay it before this business is over. well, there are the lights of sainte marie shining down below there. i can understand that sigh of relief, monsieur, for, on my word, after what we found at poitou, i was uneasy myself until i should see them." chapter xxxv. the tapping of death. day was just breaking as the four comrades entered the gate of the stockade, but early as it was the _censitaires_ and their families were all afoot staring at the prodigious fire which raged to the south of them. de catinat burst through the throng and rushed upstairs to adele, who had herself flown down to meet him, so that they met in each other's arms half-way up the great stone staircase with a burst of those little inarticulate cries which are the true unwritten language of love. together, with his arm round her, they ascended to the great hall where old de la noue with his son were peering out of the window at the wonderful spectacle. "ah, monsieur," said the old nobleman, with his courtly bow, "i am indeed rejoiced to see you safe under my roof again, not only for your own sake, but for that of madame's eyes, which, if she will permit an old man to say so, are much too pretty to spoil by straining them all day in the hopes of seeing some one coming out of the forest. you have done forty miles, monsieur de catinat, and are doubtless hungry and weary. when you are yourself again i must claim my revenge in piquet, for the cards lay against me the other night." but du lhut had entered at de catinat's heels with his tidings of disaster. "you will have another game to play, monsieur de sainte-marie," said he. "there are six hundred iroquois in the woods and they are preparing to attack." "tut, tut, we cannot allow our arrangements to be altered by a handful of savages," said the seigneur. "i must apologise to you, my dear de catinat, that you should be annoyed by such people while you are upon my estate. as regards the piquet, i cannot but think that your play from king and knave is more brilliant than safe. now when i played piquet last with de lannes of poitou--" "de lannes of poitou is dead, and all his people," said du lhut. "the blockhouse is a heap of smoking ashes." the seigneur raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff, tapping the lid of his little round gold box. "i always told him that his fort would be taken unless he cleared away those maple trees which grew up to the very walls. they are all dead, you say?" "every man." "and the fort burned?" "not a stick was left standing." "have you seen these rascals?" "we saw the trail of a hundred and fifty. then there were a hundred in canoes, and a war-party of four hundred passed us under the flemish bastard. their camp is five miles down the river, and there cannot be less than six hundred." "you were fortunate in escaping them." "but they were not so fortunate in escaping us. we killed brown moose and his son, and we fired the woods so as to drive them out of their camp." "excellent! excellent!" said the seigneur, clapping gently with his dainty hands. "you have done very well indeed, du lhut! you are, i presume, very tired?" "i am not often tired. i am quite ready to do the journey again." "then perhaps you would pick a few men and go back into the woods to see what these villains are doing?" "i shall be ready in five minutes." "perhaps you would like to go also, achille?" his son's dark eyes and indian face lit up with a fierce joy. "yes, i shall go also," he answered. "very good, and we shall make all ready in your absence. madame, you will excuse these little annoyances which mar the pleasure of your visit. next time that you do me the honour to come here i trust that we shall have cleared all these vermin from my estate. we have our advantages. the richelieu is a better fish pond, and these forests are a finer deer preserve than any of which the king can boast. but on the other hand we have, as you see, our little troubles. you will excuse me now, as there are one or two things which demand my attention. de catinat, you are a tried soldier and i should be glad of your advice. onega, give me my lace handkerchief and my cane of clouded amber, and take care of madame until her husband and i return." it was bright daylight now, and the square enclosure within the stockade was filled with an anxious crowd who had just learned the evil tidings. most of the _censitaires_ were old soldiers and trappers who had served in many indian wars, and whose swarthy faces and bold bearing told their own story. they were sons of a race which with better fortune or with worse has burned more powder than any other nation upon earth, and as they stood in little groups discussing the situation and examining their arms, a leader could have asked for no more hardy or more war-like following. the women, however, pale and breathless, were hurrying in from the outlying cottages, dragging their children with them, and bearing over their shoulders the more precious of their household goods. the confusion, the hurry, the cries of the children, the throwing down of bundles and the rushing back for more, contrasted sharply with the quiet and the beauty of the woods which encircled them, all bathed in the bright morning sunlight. it was strange to look upon the fairy loveliness of their many-tinted foliage, and to know that the spirit of murder and cruelty was roaming unchained behind that lovely screen. the scouting party under du lhut and achille de la noue had already left, and at the order of the seigneur the two gates were now secured with huge bars of oak fitted into iron staples on either side. the children were placed in the lower store-room with a few women to watch them, while the others were told off to attend to the fire buckets, and to reload the muskets. the men had been paraded, fifty-two of them in all, and they were divided into parties now for the defence of each part of the stockade. on one side it had been built up to within a few yards of the river, which not only relieved them from the defence of that face, but enabled them to get fresh water by throwing a bucket at the end of a rope from the stockade. the boats and canoes of sainte marie were drawn up on the bank just under the wall, and were precious now as offering a last means of escape should all else fail. the next fort, st. louis, was but a few leagues up the river, and de la noue had already sent a swift messenger to them with news of the danger. at least it would be a point on which they might retreat should the worst come to the worst. and that the worst might come to the worst was very evident to so experienced a woodsman as amos green. he had left ephraim savage snoring in a deep sleep upon the floor, and was now walking round the defences with his pipe in his mouth, examining with a critical eye every detail in connection with them. the stockade was very strong, nine feet high and closely built of oak stakes which were thick enough to turn a bullet. half-way up it was loop-holed in long narrow slits for the fire of the defenders. but on the other hand the trees grew up to within a hundred yards of it, and formed a screen for the attack, while the garrison was so scanty that it could not spare more than twenty men at the utmost for each face. amos knew how daring and dashing were the iroquois warriors, how cunning and fertile of resource, and his face darkened as he thought of the young wife who had come so far in their safe-keeping, and of the women and children whom he had seen crowding into the fort. "would it not be better if you could send them up the river?" he suggested to the seigneur. "i should very gladly do so, monsieur, and perhaps if we are all alive we may manage it to-night if the weather should be cloudy. but i cannot spare the men to guard them, and i cannot send them without a guard when we know that iroquois canoes are on the river and their scouts are swarming on the banks." "you are right. it would be madness." "i have stationed you on this eastern face with your friends and with fifteen men. monsieur de catinat, will you command the party?" "willingly." "i will take the south face as it seems to be the point of danger. du lhut can take the north, and five men should be enough to watch the river side." "have we food and powder?" "i have flour and smoked eels enough to see this matter through. poor fare, my dear sir, but i daresay you learned in holland that a cup of ditch water after a brush may have a better smack than the blue-sealed frontiniac which you helped me to finish the other night. as to powder, we have all our trading stores to draw upon." "we have not time to clear any of these trees?" asked the soldier. "impossible. they would make better shelter down than up." "but at least i might clear that patch of brushwood round the birch sapling which lies between the east face and the edge of the forest. it is good cover for their skirmishers." "yes, that should be fired without delay." "nay, i think that i might do better," said amos. "we might bait a trap for them there. where is this powder of which you spoke?" "theuriet, the major-domo, is giving out powder in the main store-house." "very good." amos vanished upstairs, and returned with a large linen bag in his hand. this he filled with powder, and then, slinging it over his shoulder, he carried it out to the clump of bushes and placed it at the base of the sapling, cutting a strip out of the bark immediately above the spot. then with a few leafy branches and fallen leaves he covered the powder bag very carefully over so that it looked like a little hillock of earth. having arranged all to his satisfaction he returned, clambering over the stockade, and dropping down upon the other side. "i think that we are all ready for them now," said the seigneur. "i would that the women and children were in a safe place, but we may send them down the river to-night if all goes well. has anyone heard anything of du lhut?" "jean has the best ears of any of us, your excellency," said one man from beside the brass corner cannon. "he thought that he heard shots a few minutes ago." "then he has come into touch with them. etienne, take ten men and go to the withered oak to cover them if they are retreating, but do not go another yard on any pretext. i am too short-handed already. perhaps, de catinat, you wish to sleep?" "no, i could not sleep." "we can do no more down here. what do you say to a round or two of piquet? a little turn of the cards will help us to pass the time." they ascended to the upper hall, where adele came and sat by her husband, while the swarthy onega crouched by the window looking keenly out into the forest. de catinat had little thought to spare upon the cards, as his mind wandered to the danger which threatened them and to the woman whose hand rested upon his own. the old nobleman, on the other hand, was engrossed by the play, and cursed under his breath, or chuckled and grinned as the luck swayed one way or the other. suddenly as they played there came two sharp raps from without. "some one is tapping," cried adele. "it is death that is tapping," said the indian woman at the window. "ay, ay, it was the patter of two spent balls against the woodwork. the wind is against our hearing the report. the cards are shuffled. it is my cut and your deal. the capot, i think, was mine." "men are rushing from the woods," cried onega. "tut! it grows serious!" said the nobleman. "we can finish the game later. remember that the deal lies with you. let us see what it all means." de catinat had already rushed to the window. du lhut, young achille de la noue, and eight of the covering party were running with their heads bent towards the stockade, the door of which had been opened to admit them. here and there from behind the trees came little blue puffs of smoke, and one of the fugitives who wore white calico breeches began suddenly to hop instead of running and a red splotch showed upon the white cloth. two others threw their arms round him and the three rushed in abreast while the gate swung into its place behind them. an instant later the brass cannon at the corner gave a flash and a roar while the whole outline of the wood was traced in a rolling cloud, and the shower of bullets rapped up against the wooden wall like sleet on a window. chapter xxxvi. the taking of the stockade. having left adele to the care of her indian hostess, and warned her for her life to keep from the windows, de catinat seized his musket and rushed downstairs. as he passed a bullet came piping through one of the narrow embrasures and starred itself in a little blotch of lead upon the opposite wall. the seigneur had already descended and was conversing with du lhut beside the door. "a thousand of them, you say?" "yes, we came on a fresh trail of a large war-party, three hundred at the least. they are all mohawks and cayugas with a sprinkling of oneidas. we had a running fight for a few miles, and we have lost five men." "all dead, i trust." "i hope so, but we were hard pressed to keep from being cut off. jean mance is shot through the leg." "i saw that he was hit." "we had best have all ready to retire to the house if they carry the stockade. we can scarce hope to hold it when they are twenty to one." "all is ready." "and with our cannon we can keep their canoes from passing, so we might send our women away to-night." "i had intended to do so. will you take charge of the north side? you might come across to me with ten of your men now, and i shall go back to you if they change their attack." the firing came in one continuous rattle now from the edges of the wood, and the air was full of bullets. the assailants were all trained shots, men who lived by their guns, and to whom a shaking hand or a dim eye meant poverty and hunger. every slit and crack and loop-hole was marked, and a cap held above the stockade was blown in an instant from the gun barrel which supported it. on the other hand, the defenders were also skilled in indian fighting, and wise in every trick and lure which could protect themselves or tempt their enemies to show. they kept well to the sides of the loop-holes, watching through little crevices of the wood, and firing swiftly when a chance offered. a red leg sticking straight up into the air from behind a log showed where one bullet at least had gone home, but there was little to aim at save a puff and flash from among the leaves, or the shadowy figure of a warrior seen for an instant as he darted from one tree-trunk to the other. seven of the canadians had already been hit, but only three were mortally wounded, and the other four still kept manfully to their loop-holes, though one who had been struck through the jaw was spitting his teeth with his bullets down into his gun-barrel. the women sat in a line upon the ground, beneath the level of the loop-holes, each with a saucerful of bullets and a canister of powder, passing up the loaded guns to the fighting men at the points where a quick fire was most needful. at first the attack had been all upon the south face, but as fresh bodies of the iroquois came up their line spread and lengthened until the whole east face was girt with fire, which gradually enveloped the north also. the fort was ringed in by a great loop of smoke, save only where the broad river flowed past them. over near the further bank the canoes were lurking, and one, manned by ten warriors, attempted to pass up the stream, but a good shot from the brass gun dashed in her side and sank her, while a second of grape left only four of the swimmers whose high scalp-locks stood out above the water like the back-fins of some strange fish. on the inland side, however, the seigneur had ordered the cannon to be served no more, for the broad embrasures drew the enemy's fire, and of the men who had been struck half were among those who worked the guns. the old nobleman strutted about with his white ruffles and his clouded cane behind the line of parched smoke-grimed men, tapping his snuff-box, shooting out his little jests, and looking very much less concerned than he had done over his piquet. "what do you think of it, du lhut?" he asked. "i think very badly of it. we are losing men much too fast." "well, my friend, what can you expect? when a thousand muskets are all turned upon a little place like this, some one must suffer for it. ah, my poor fellow, so you are done for too!" the man nearest him had suddenly fallen with a crash, lying quite still with his face in a platter of the sagamite which had been brought out by the women. du lhut glanced at him and then looked round. "he is in a line with no loop-hole, and it took him in the shoulder," said he. "where did it come from then? ah, by saint anne, look there!" he pointed upwards to a little mist of smoke which hung round the summit of a high oak. "the rascal overlooks the stockade. but the trunk is hardly thick enough to shield him at that height. this poor fellow will not need his musket again, and i see that it is ready primed." de la noue laid down his cane, turned back his ruffles, picked up the dead man's gun, and fired at the lurking warrior. two leaves fluttered out from the tree and a grinning vermilion face appeared for an instant with a yell of derision. quick as a flash du lhut brought his musket to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. the man gave a tremendous spring and crashed down through the thick foliage. some seventy or eighty feet below him a single stout branch shot out, and on to this he fell with the sound of a great stone dropping into a bog, and hung there doubled over it, swinging slowly from side to side like a red rag, his scalp-lock streaming down between his feet. a shout of exultation rose from the canadians at the sight, which was drowned in the murderous yell of the savages. "his limbs twitch. he is not dead," cried de la noue. "let him die there," said the old pioneer callously, ramming a fresh charge into his gun. "ah, there is the gray hat again. it comes ever when i am unloaded." "i saw a plumed hat among the brushwood." "it is the flemish bastard. i had rather have his scalp than those of his hundred best warriors." "is he so brave then?" "yes, he is brave enough. there is no denying it, for how else could he be an iroquois war-chief? but he is clever and cunning, and cruel-- ah, my god, if all the stories told are true, his cruelty is past believing. i should fear that my tongue would wither if i did but name the things which this man has done. ah, he is there again." the gray hat with the plume had shown itself once more in a rift of the smoke. de la noue and du lhut both fired together, and the cap fluttered up into the air. at the same instant the bushes parted, and a tall warrior sprang out into full view of the defenders. his face was that of an indian, but a shade or two lighter, and a pointed black beard hung down over his hunting tunic. he threw out his hands with a gesture of disdain, stood for an instant looking steadfastly at the fort, and then sprang back into cover amid a shower of bullets which chipped away the twigs all round him. "yes, he is brave enough," du lhut repeated with an oath. "your _censitaires_ have had their hoes in their hands more often than their muskets, i should judge from their shooting. but they seem to be drawing closer upon the east face, and i think that they will make a rush there before long." the fire had indeed grown very much fiercer upon the side which was defended by de catinat, and it was plain that the main force of the iroquois were gathered at that point. from every log, and trunk, and cleft, and bush came the red flash with the gray halo, and the bullets sang in a continuous stream through the loop-holes. amos had whittled a little hole for himself about a foot above the ground, and lay upon his face loading and firing in his own quiet methodical fashion. beside him stood ephraim savage, his mouth set grimly, his eyes flashing from under his down-drawn brows, and his whole soul absorbed in the smiting of the amalekites. his hat was gone, his grizzled hair flying in the breeze, great splotches of powder mottled his mahogany face, and a weal across his right cheek showed where an indian bullet had grazed him. de catinat was bearing himself like an experienced soldier, walking up and down among his men with short words of praise or of precept, those fire-words rough and blunt which bring a glow to the heart and a flush to the cheek. seven of his men were down, but as the attack grew fiercer upon his side it slackened upon the others, and the seigneur with his son and du lhut brought ten men to reinforce them. de la noue was holding out his snuff-box to de catinat when a shrill scream from behind them made them both look round. onega, the indian wife, was wringing her hands over the body of her son. a glance showed that the bullet had pierced his heart and that he was dead. for an instant the old nobleman's thin face grew a shade paler, and the hand which held out the little gold box shook like a branch in the wind. then he thrust it into his pocket again and mastered the spasm which had convulsed his features. "the de la noues always die upon the field of honour," he remarked. "i think that we should have some more men in the angle by the gun." and now it became clear why it was that the iroquois had chosen the eastern face for their main attack. it was there that the clump of cover lay midway between the edge of the forest and the stockade. a storming party could creep as far as that and gather there for the final rush. first one crouching warrior, and then a second, and then a third darted across the little belt of open space, and threw themselves down among the bushes. the fourth was hit, and lay with his back broken a few paces out from the edge of the wood, but a stream of warriors continued to venture the passage, until thirty-six had got across, and the little patch of underwood was full of lurking savages. amos green's time had come. from where he lay he could see the white patch where he had cut the bark from the birch sapling, and he knew that immediately underneath it lay the powder bag. he sighted the mark, and then slowly lowered his barrel until he had got to the base of the little trees as nearly as he could guess it among the tangle of bushes. the first shot produced no result, however, and the second was aimed a foot lower. the bullet penetrated the bag, and there was an explosion which shook the manor-house and swayed the whole line of stout stockades as though they were corn-stalks in a breeze. up to the highest summits of the trees went the huge column of blue smoke, and after the first roar there was a deathly silence which was broken by the patter and thud of falling bodies. then came a wild cheer from the defenders, and a furious answering whoop from the indians, while the fire from the woods burst out with greater fury than ever. but the blow had been a heavy one. of the thirty-six warriors, all picked for their valour, only four regained the shelter of the woods, and those so torn and shattered that they were spent men. already the indians had lost heavily, and this fresh disaster made them reconsider their plan of attack, for the iroquois were as wary as they were brave, and he was esteemed the best war-chief who was most chary of the lives of his followers. their fire gradually slackened, and at last, save for a dropping shot here and there, it died away altogether. "is it possible that they are going to abandon the attack?" cried de catinat joyously. "amos, i believe that you have saved us." but the wily du lhut shook his head. "a wolf would as soon leave a half-gnawed bone as an iroquois such a prize as this." "but they have lost heavily." "ay, but not so heavily as ourselves in proportion to our numbers. they have fifty out of a thousand, and we twenty out of threescore. no, no, they are holding a council, and we shall soon hear from them again. but it may be some hours first, and if you will take my advice you will have an hour's sleep, for you are not, as i can see by your eyes, as used to doing without it as i am, and there may be little rest for any of us this night." de catinat was indeed weary to the last pitch of human endurance. amos green and the seaman had already wrapped themselves in their blankets and sunk to sleep under the shelter of the stockade. the soldier rushed upstairs to say a few words of comfort to the trembling adele, and then throwing himself down upon a couch he slept the dreamless sleep of an exhausted man. when at last he was roused by a fresh sputter of musketry fire from the woods the sun was already low in the heavens, and the mellow light of evening tinged the bare walls of the room. he sprang from his couch, seized his musket, and rushed downstairs. the defenders were gathered at their loop-holes once more, while du lhut, the seigneur, and amos green were whispering eagerly together. he noticed as he passed that onega still sat crooning by the body of her son, without having changed her position since morning. "what is it, then? are they coming on?" he asked. "they are up to some devilry," said du lhut, peering out at the corner of the embrasure. "they are gathering thickly at the east fringe, and yet the firing comes from the south. it is not the indian way to attack across the open, and yet if they think help is coming from the fort they might venture it." "the wood in front of us is alive with them," said amos. "they are as busy as beavers among the underwood." "perhaps they are going to attack from this side, and cover the attack by a fire from the flank." "that is what i think," cried the seigneur. "bring the spare guns up here and all the men except five for each side." the words were hardly out of his mouth when a shrill yell burst from the wood, and in an instant a cloud of warriors dashed out and charged across the open, howling, springing, and waving their guns or tomahawks in the air. with their painted faces, smeared and striped with every vivid colour, their streaming scalp-locks, their waving arms, their open mouths, and their writhings and contortions, no more fiendish crew ever burst into a sleeper's nightmare. some of those in front bore canoes between them, and as they reached the stockade they planted them against it and swarmed up them as if they had been scaling-ladders. others fired through the embrasures and loop-holes, the muzzles of their muskets touching those of the defenders, while others again sprang unaided on to the tops of the palisades and jumped fearlessly down upon the inner side. the canadians, however, made such a resistance as might be expected from men who knew that no mercy awaited them. they fired whilst they had time to load, and then, clubbing their muskets, they smashed furiously at every red head which showed above the rails. the din within the stockade was infernal, the shouts and cries of the french, the whooping of the savages, and the terrified screaming of the frightened women blending into one dreadful uproar, above which could be heard the high shrill voice of the old seigneur imploring his _censitaires_ to stand fast. with his rapier in his hand, his hat lost, his wig awry, and his dignity all thrown to the winds, the old nobleman showed them that day how a soldier of rocroy could carry himself, and with du lhut, amos, de catinat and ephraim savage, was ever in the forefront of the defence. so desperately did they fight, the sword and musket-butt outreaching the tomahawk, that though at one time fifty iroquois were over the palisades, they had slain or driven back nearly all of them when a fresh wave burst suddenly over the south face which had been stripped of its defenders. du lhut saw in an instant that the enclosure was lost and that only one thing could save the house. "hold them for an instant," he screamed, and rushing at the brass gun he struck his flint and steel and fired it straight into the thick of the savages. then as they recoiled for an instant he stuck a nail into the touch-hole and drove it home with a blow from the butt of his gun. darting across the yard he spiked the gun at the other corner, and was back at the door as the remnants of the garrison were hurled towards it by the rush of the assailants. the canadians darted in, and swung the ponderous mass of wood into position, breaking the leg of the foremost warrior who had striven to follow them. then for an instant they had time for breathing and for council. chapter xxxvii. the coming of the friar. but their case was a very evil one. had the guns been lost so that they might be turned upon the door, all further resistance would have been vain, but du lhut's presence of mind had saved them from that danger. the two guns upon the river face and the canoes were safe, for they were commanded by the windows of the house. but their numbers were terribly reduced, and those who were left were weary and wounded and spent. nineteen had gained the house, but one had been shot through the body and lay groaning in the hall, while a second had his shoulder cleft by a tomahawk and could no longer raise his musket. du lhut, de la noue, and de catinat were uninjured, but ephraim savage had a bullet-hole in his forearm, and amos was bleeding from a cut upon the face. of the others hardly one was without injury, and yet they had no time to think of their hurts for the danger still pressed and they were lost unless they acted. a few shots from the barricaded windows sufficed to clear the enclosure, for it was all exposed to their aim; but on the other hand they had the shelter of the stockade now, and from the further side of it they kept up a fierce fire upon the windows. half-a-dozen of the _censitaires_ returned the fusillade, while the leaders consulted as to what had best be done. "we have twenty-five women and fourteen children," said the seigneur. "i am sure that you will agree with me, gentlemen, that our first duty is towards them. some of you, like myself, have lost sons or brothers this day. let us at least save our wives and sisters." "no iroquois canoes have passed up the river," said one of the canadians. "if the women start in the darkness they can get away to the fort." "by saint anne of beaupre," exclaimed du lhut, "i think it would be well if you could get your men out of this also, for i cannot see how it is to be held until morning." a murmur of assent broke from the other canadians, but the old nobleman shook his bewigged head with decision. "tut! tut! what nonsense is this!" he cried. "are we to abandon the manor-house of sainte marie to the first gang of savages who choose to make an attack upon it? no, no, gentlemen, there are still nearly a score of us, and when the garrison learn that we are so pressed, which will be by to-morrow morning at the latest, they will certainly send us relief." du lhut shook his head moodily. "if you stand by the fort i will not desert you," said he, "and yet it is a pity to sacrifice brave men for nothing." "the canoes will hardly hold the women and children as it is," cried theuriet. "there are but two large and four small. there is not space for a single man." "then that decides it," said de catinat. "but who are to row the women?" "it is but a few leagues with the current in their favour, and there are none of our women who do not know how to handle a paddle." the iroquois were very quiet now, and an occasional dropping shot from the trees or the stockade was the only sign of their presence. their losses had been heavy, and they were either engaged in collecting their dead, or in holding a council as to their next move. the twilight was gathering in, and the sun had already sunk beneath the tree-tops. leaving a watchman at each window, the leaders went round to the back of the house where the canoes were lying upon the bank. there were no signs of the enemy upon the river to the north of them. "we are in luck," said amos. "the clouds are gathering and there will be little light." "it is luck indeed, since the moon is only three days past the full," answered du lhut. "i wonder that the iroquois have not cut us off upon the water, but it is likely that their canoes have gone south to bring up another war-party. they may be back soon, and we had best not lose a moment." "in an hour it might be dark enough to start." "i think that there is rain in those clouds, and that will make it darker still." the women and children were assembled and their places in each boat were assigned to them. the wives of the censitaires, rough hardy women whose lives had been spent under the shadow of a constant danger, were for the most part quiet and collected, though a few of the younger ones whimpered a little. a woman is always braver when she has a child to draw her thoughts from herself, and each married woman had one now allotted to her as her own special charge until they should reach the fort. to onega, the indian wife of the seigneur, who was as wary and as experienced as a war sachem of her people, the command of the women was entrusted. "it is not very far, adele," said de catinat, as his wife clung to his arm. "you remember how we heard the angelus bells as we journeyed through the woods. that was fort st. louis, and it is but a league or two." "but i do not wish to leave you, amory. we have been together in all our troubles. oh, amory, why should we be divided now?" "my dear love, you will tell them at the fort how things are with us, and they will bring us help." "let the others do that, and i will stay. i will not be useless, amory. onega has taught me to load a gun. i will not be afraid, indeed i will not, if you will only let me stay." "you must not ask it, adele. it is impossible, child i could not let you stay." "but i feel so sure that it would be best." the coarser reason of man has not yet learned to value those subtle instincts which guide a woman. de catinat argued and exhorted until he had silenced if he had not convinced her. "it is for my sake, dear. you do not know what a load it will be from my heart when i know that you are safe. and you need not be afraid for me. we can easily hold the place until morning. then the people from the fort will come, for i hear that they have plenty of canoes, and we shall all meet again." adele was silent, but her hands tightened upon his arm. her husband was still endeavouring to reassure her when a groan burst from the watcher at the window which overlooked the stream. "there is a canoe on the river to the north of us," he cried. the besieged looked at each other in dismay. the iroquois had then cut off their retreat after all. "how many warriors are in it?" asked the seigneur. "i cannot see. the light is not very good, and it is in the shadow of the bank." "which way is it coming?" "it is coming this way. ah, it shoots out into the open now, and i can see it. may the good lord be praised! a dozen candles shall burn in quebec cathedral if i live till next summer!" "what is it then?" cried de la noue impatiently. "it is not an iroquois canoe. there is but one man in it. he is a canadian." "a canadian!" cried du lhut, springing up to the window. "who but a madman would venture into such a hornet's nest alone! ah, yes, i can see him now. he keeps well out from the bank to avoid their fire. now he is in mid-stream and he turns towards us. by my faith, it is not the first time that the good father has handled a paddle." "it is a jesuit!" said one, craning his neck. "they are ever where there is most danger." "no, i can see his capote," cried another. "it is a franciscan friar!" an instant later there was the sound of a canoe grounding upon the pebbles, the door was unbarred, and a man strode in, attired in the long brown gown of the franciscans. he cast a rapid glance around, and then, stepping up to de catinat, laid his hand upon his shoulder. "so, you have not escaped me!" said he. "we have caught the evil seed before it has had time to root." "what do you mean, father?" asked the seigneur. "you have made some mistake. this is my good friend amory de catinat, of a noble french family." "this is amory de catinat, the heretic and huguenot," cried the monk. "i have followed him up the st. lawrence, and i have followed him up the richelieu, and i would have followed him to the world's end if i could but bring him back with me." "tut, father, your zeal carries you too far," said the seigneur. "whither would you take my friend, then?" "he shall go back to france with his wife. there is no place in canada for heretics." du lhut burst out laughing. "by saint anne, father," said he, "if you could take us all back to france at present we should be very much your debtors." "and you will remember," said de la noue sternly, "that you are under my roof and that you are speaking of my guest." but the friar was not to be abashed by the frown of the old nobleman. "look at this," said he, whipping a paper out of his bosom. "it is signed by the governor, and calls upon you, under pain of the king's displeasure, to return this man to quebec. ah, monsieur, when you left me upon the island that morning you little thought that i would return to quebec for this, and then hunt you down so many hundreds of miles of river. but i have you now, and i shall never leave you until i see you on board the ship which will carry you and your wife back to france." for all the bitter vindictiveness which gleamed in the monk's eyes, de catinat could not but admire the energy and tenacity of the man. "it seems to me, father, that you would have shone more as a soldier than as a follower of christ," said he; "but, since you have followed us here, and since there is no getting away, we may settle this question at some later time." but the two americans were less inclined to take so peaceful a view. ephraim savage's beard bristled with anger, and he whispered something into amos green's ear. "the captain and i could easily get rid of him," said the young woodsman, drawing de catinat aside. "if he _will_ cross our path he must pay for it." "no, no, not for the world, amos! let him alone. he does what he thinks to be his duty, though his faith is stronger than his charity, i think. but here comes the rain, and surely it is dark enough now for the boats." a great brown cloud had overspread the heavens, and the night had fallen so rapidly that they could hardly see the gleam of the river in front of them. the savages in the woods and behind the captured stockade were quiet, save for an occasional shot, but the yells and whoops from the cottages of the _censitaires_ showed that they were being plundered by their captors. suddenly a dull red glow began to show above one of the roofs. "they have set it on fire," cried du lhut. "the canoes must go at once, for the river will soon be as light as day. in! in! there is not an instant to lose!" there was no time for leave-taking. one impassioned kiss and adele was torn away and thrust into the smallest canoe, which she shared with onega, two children, and an unmarried girl. the others rushed into their places, and in a few moments they had pushed off, and had vanished into the drift and the darkness. the great cloud had broken and the rain pattered heavily upon the roof, and splashed upon their faces as they strained their eyes after the vanishing boats. "thank god for this storm!" murmured du lhut. "it will prevent the cottages from blazing up too quickly." but he had forgotten that though the roofs might be wet the interior was as dry as tinder. he had hardly spoken before a great yellow tongue of flame licked out of one of the windows, and again and again, until suddenly half of the roof fell in, and the cottage was blazing like a pitch-bucket. the flames hissed and sputtered in the pouring rain, but, fed from below, they grew still higher and fiercer, flashing redly upon the great trees, and turning their trunks to burnished brass. their light made the enclosure and the manor-house as clear as day, and exposed the whole long stretch of the river. a fearful yell from the woods announced that the savages had seen the canoes, which were plainly visible from the windows not more than a quarter of a mile away. "they are rushing through the woods. they are making for the water's edge," cried de catinat. "they have some canoes down there," said du lhut. "but they must pass us!" cried the seigneur of sainte marie. "get down to the cannon and see if you cannot stop them." they had hardly reached the guns when two large canoes filled with warriors shot out from among the reeds below the fort, and steering out into mid-stream began to paddle furiously after the fugitives. "jean, you are our best shot," cried de la noue. "lay for her as she passes the great pine tree. lambert, do you take the other gun. the lives of all whom you love may hang upon the shot!" the two wrinkled old artillerymen glanced along their guns and waited for the canoes to come abreast of them. the fire still blazed higher and higher, and the broad river lay like a sheet of dull metal with two dark lines, which marked the canoes, sweeping swiftly down the centre. one was fifty yards in front of the other, but in each the indians were bending to their paddles and pulling frantically, while their comrades from the wooded shores whooped them on to fresh exertions. the fugitives had already disappeared round the bend of the river. as the first canoe came abreast of the lower of the two guns, the canadian made the sign of the cross over the touch-hole and fired. a cheer and then a groan went up from the eager watchers. the discharge had struck the surface close to the mark, and dashed such a shower of water over it that for an instant it looked as if it had been sunk. the next moment, however, the splash subsided, and the canoe shot away uninjured, save that one of the rowers had dropped his paddle while his head fell forward upon the back of the man in front of him. the second gunner sighted the same canoe as it came abreast of him, but at the very instant when he stretched out his match to fire a bullet came humming from the stockade and he fell forward dead without a groan. "this is work that i know something of, lad," said old ephraim, springing suddenly forward. "but when i fire a gun i like to train it myself. give me a help with the handspike and get her straight for the island. so! a little lower for an even keel! now we have them!" he clapped down his match and fired. it was a beautiful shot. the whole charge took the canoe about six feet behind the bow, and doubled her up like an eggshell. before the smoke had cleared she had foundered, and the second canoe had paused to pick up some of the wounded men. the others, as much at home in the water as in the woods, were already striking out for the shore. "quick! quick!" cried the seigneur. "load the gun! we may get the second one yet!" but it was not to be. long before they could get it ready the iroquois had picked up their wounded warriors and were pulling madly up-stream once more. as they shot away the fire died suddenly down in the burning cottages and the rain and the darkness closed in upon them. "my god!" cried de catinat furiously, "they will be taken. let us abandon this place, take a boat, and follow them. come! come! not an instant is to be lost!" "monsieur, you go too far in your very natural anxiety," said the seigneur coldly. "i am not inclined to leave my post so easily!" "ah, what is it? only wood and stone, which can be built again. but to think of the women in the hands of these devils! oh, i am going mad! come! come! for christ's sake come!" his face was deadly pale, and he raved with his clenched hands in the air. "i do not think that they will be caught," said du lhut, laying his hand soothingly upon his shoulder. "do not fear. they had a long start and the women here can paddle as well as the men. again, the iroquois canoe was overloaded at the start, and has the wounded men aboard as well now. besides, these oak canoes of the mohawks are not as swift as the algonquin birch barks which we use. in any case it is impossible to follow, for we have no boat." "there is one lying there." "ah, it will but hold a single man. it is that in which the friar came." "then i am going in that! my place is with adele!" he flung open the door, rushed out, and was about to push off the frail skiff, when some one sprang past him, and with a blow from a hatchet stove in the side of the boat. "it is my boat," said the friar, throwing down the axe and folding his arms. "i can do what i like with it." "you fiend! you have ruined us!" "i have found you and you shall not escape me again." the hot blood flushed to the soldier's head, and picking up the axe, he took a quick step forward. the light from the open door shone upon the grave, harsh face of the friar, but not a muscle twitched nor a feature changed as he saw the axe whirl up in the hands of a furious man. he only signed himself with the cross, and muttered a latin prayer under his breath. it was that composure which saved his life. de catinat hurled down the axe again with a bitter curse, and was turning away from the shattered boat, when in an instant, without a warning, the great door of the manor-house crashed inwards, and a flood of whooping savages burst into the house. chapter xxxviii. the dining hall of sainte marie. what had occurred is easily explained. the watchers in the windows at the front found that it was more than flesh and blood could endure to remain waiting at their posts while the fates of their wives and children were being decided at the back. all was quiet at the stockade, and the indians appeared to be as absorbed as the canadians in what was passing upon the river. one by one, therefore, the men on guard had crept away and had assembled at the back to cheer the seaman's shot and to groan as the remaining canoe sped like a bloodhound down the river in the wake of the fugitives. but the savages had one at their head who was as full of wiles and resource as du lhut himself. the flemish bastard had watched the house from behind the stockade as a dog watches a rat-hole, and he had instantly discovered that the defenders had left their post. with a score of other warriors he raised a great log from the edge of the forest, and crossing the open space unchallenged, he and his men rushed it against the door with such violence as to crack the bar across and tear the wood from the hinges. the first intimation which the survivors had of the attack was the crash of the door, and the screams of two of the negligent watchmen who had been seized and scalped in the hall. the whole basement floor was in the hands of the indians, and de catinat and his enemy the friar were cut off from the foot of the stairs. fortunately, however, the manor-houses of canada were built with the one idea of defence against indians, and even now there were hopes for the defenders. a wooden ladder which could be drawn up in case of need hung down from the upper windows to the ground upon the river-side. de catinat rushed round to this, followed by the friar. he felt about for the ladder in the darkness. it was gone. then indeed his heart sank in despair. where could he fly to? the boat was destroyed. the stockades lay between him and the forest, and they were in the hands of the iroquois. their yells were ringing in his ears. they had not seen him yet, but in a few minutes they must come upon him. suddenly he heard a voice from somewhere in the darkness above him. "give me your gun, lad," it said. "i see the loom of some of the heathen down by the wall." "it is i. it is i, amos," cried de catinat. "down with the ladder or i am a dead man." "have a care. it may be a ruse," said the voice of du lhut. "no, no, i'll answer for it," cried amos, and an instant later down came the ladder. de catinat and the friar rushed up it, and they hardly had their feet upon the rungs when a swarm of warriors burst out from the door and poured along the river bank. two muskets flashed from above, something plopped like a salmon in the water, and next instant the two were among their comrades and the ladder had been drawn up once more. but it was a very small band who now held the last point to which they could retreat. only nine of them remained, the seigneur, du lhut, the two americans, the friar, de catinat, theuriet the major-domo, and two of the _censitaires_. wounded, parched, and powder-blackened, they were still filled with the mad courage of desperate men who knew that death could come in no more terrible form than through surrender. the stone staircase ran straight up from the kitchen to the main hall, and the door, which had been barricaded across the lower part by two mattresses, commanded the whole flight. hoarse whisperings and the click of the cocking of guns from below told that the iroquois were mustering for a rush. "put the lantern by the door," said du lhut, "so that it may throw the light upon the stair. there is only room for three to fire, but you can all load and pass the guns. monsieur green, will you kneel with me, and you, jean duval? if one of us is hit let another take his place at once. now be ready, for they are coming!" as he spoke there was a shrill whistle from below, and in an instant the stair was filled with rushing red figures and waving weapons. bang! bang! bang! went the three guns, and then again and again bang! bang! bang! the smoke was so thick in the low-roofed room that they could hardly see to pass the muskets to the eager hands which grasped for them. but no iroquois had reached the barricade, and there was no patter of their feet now upon the stair. nothing but an angry snarling and an occasional groan from below. the marksmen were uninjured, but they ceased to fire and waited for the smoke to clear. and when it cleared they saw how deadly their aim had been at those close quarters. only nine shots had been fired, and seven indians were littered up and down on the straight stone stair. five of them lay motionless, but two tried to crawl slowly back to their friends. du lhut and the _censitaire_ raised their muskets, and the two crippled men lay still. "by saint anne!" said the old pioneer, as he rammed home another bullet. "if they have our scalps we have sold them at a great price. a hundred squaws will be howling in their villages when they hear of this day's work." "ay, they will not forget their welcome at sainte marie," said the old nobleman. "i must again express my deep regret, my dear de catinat, that you and your wife should have been put to such inconvenience when you have been good enough to visit me. i trust that she and the others are safe at the fort by this time." "may god grant that they are! oh, i shall never have an easy moment until i see her once more." "if they are safe we may expect help in the morning, if we can hold out so long. chambly, the commandant, is not a man to leave a comrade at a pinch." the cards were still laid out at one end of the table, with the tricks overlapping each other, as they had left them on the previous morning. but there was something else there of more interest to them, for the breakfast had not been cleared away, and they had been fighting all day with hardly bite or sup. even when face to face with death, nature still cries out for her dues, and the hungry men turned savagely upon the loaf, the ham, and the cold wild duck. a little cluster of wine bottles stood upon the buffet, and these had their necks knocked off, and were emptied down parched throats. three men still took their turn, however, to hold the barricade, for they were not to be caught napping again. the yells and screeches of the savages came up to them as though all the wolves of the forest were cooped up in the basement, but the stair was deserted save for the seven motionless figures. "they will not try to rush us again," said du lhut with confidence. "we have taught them too severe a lesson." "they will set fire to the house." "it will puzzle them to do that," said the major-domo. "it is solid stone, walls and stair, save only for a few beams of wood, very different from those other cottages." "hush!" cried amos green, and raised his hand. the yells had died away, and they heard the heavy thud of a mallet beating upon wood. "what can it be?" "some fresh devilry, no doubt." "i regret to say, messieurs," observed the seigneur, with no abatement of his courtly manner, "that it is my belief that they have learned a lesson from our young friend here, and that they are knocking out the heads of the powder-barrels in the store-room." but du lhut shook his head at the suggestion. "it is not in a redskin to waste powder," said he. "it is a deal too precious for them to do that. ah, listen to that!" the yellings and screechings had begun again, but there was a wilder, madder ring in their shrillness, and they were mingled with snatches of song and bursts of laughter. "ha! it is the brandy casks which they have opened," cried du lhut. "they were bad before, but they will be fiends out of hell now." as he spoke there came another burst of whoops, and high above them a voice calling for mercy. with horror in their eyes the survivors glanced from one to the other. a heavy smell of burning flesh rose from below, and still that dreadful voice shrieking and pleading. then slowly it quavered away and was silent forever. "who was it?" whispered de catinat, his blood running cold in his veins. "it was jean corbeil, i think." "may god rest his soul! his troubles are over. would that we were as peaceful as he! ah, shoot him! shoot!" a man had suddenly sprung out at the foot of the stair and had swung his arm as though throwing something. it was the flemish bastard. amos green's musket flashed, but the savage had sprung back again as rapidly as he appeared. something splashed down amongst them and rolled across the floor in the lamp-light. "down! down! it is a bomb!" cried de catinat but it lay at du lhut's feet, and he had seen it clearly. he took a cloth from the table and dropped it over it. "it is not a bomb," said he quietly, "and it _was_ jean corbeil who died." for four hours sounds of riot, of dancing and of revelling rose up from the store-house, and the smell of the open brandy casks filled the whole air. more than once the savages quarrelled and fought among themselves, and it seemed as if they had forgotten their enemies above, but the besieged soon found that if they attempted to presume upon this they were as closely watched as ever. the major-domo, theuriet, passing between a loop-hole and a light, was killed instantly by a bullet from the stockade, and both amos and the old seigneur had narrow escapes until they blocked all the windows save that which overlooked the river. there was no danger from this one, and, as day was already breaking once more, one or other of the party was forever straining their eyes down the stream in search of the expected succour. slowly the light crept up the eastern sky, a little line of pearl, then a band of pink, broadening, stretching, spreading, until it shot its warm colour across the heavens, tinging the edges of the drifting clouds. over the woodlands lay a thin gray vapour, the tops of the high oaks jutting out like dim islands from the sea of haze. gradually as the light increased the mist shredded off into little ragged wisps, which thinned and drifted away, until at last, as the sun pushed its glowing edge over the eastern forests, it gleamed upon the reds and oranges and purples of the fading leaves, and upon the broad blue river which curled away to the northward. de catinat, as he stood at the window looking out, was breathing in the healthy resinous scent of the trees, mingled with the damp heavy odour of the wet earth, when suddenly his eyes fell upon a dark spot upon the river to the north of them. "there is a canoe coming down!" he cried. in an instant they had all rushed to the opening, but du lhut sprang after them, and pulled them angrily towards the door. "do you wish to die before your time?" he cried. "ay, ay!" said captain ephraim, who understood the gesture if not the words. "we must leave a watch on deck. amos, lad, lie here with me and be ready if they show." the two americans and the old pioneer held the barricade, while the eyes of all the others were turned upon the approaching boat. a groan broke suddenly from the only surviving _censitaire_. "it is an iroquois canoe!" he cried. "impossible!" "alas, your excellency, it is so, and it is the same one which passed us last night." "ah, then the women have escaped them." "i trust so. but alas, seigneur, i fear that there are more in the canoe now than when they passed us." the little group of survivors waited in breathless anxiety while the canoe sped swiftly up the river, with a line of foam on either side of her, and a long forked swirl in the waters behind. they could see that she appeared to be very crowded, but they remembered that the wounded of the other boat were aboard her. on she shot and on, until as she came abreast of the fort she swung round, and the rowers raised their paddles and burst into a shrill yell of derision. the stern of the canoe was turned towards them now, and they saw that two women were seated in it. even at that distance there was no mistaking the sweet pale face or the dark queenly one beside it. the one was onega and the other was adele. chapter xxxix. the two swimmers. charles de la noue, seigneur de sainte marie, was a hard and self-contained man, but a groan and a bitter curse burst from him when he saw his indian wife in the hands of her kinsmen, from whom she could hope for little mercy. yet even now his old-fashioned courtesy to his guest had made him turn to de catinat with some words of sympathy, when there was a clatter of wood, something darkened the light of the window, and the young soldier was gone. without a word he had lowered the ladder and was clambering down it with frantic haste. then as his feet touched the ground he signalled to his comrades to draw it up again, and dashing into the river he swam towards the canoe. without arms and without a plan he had but the one thought that his place was by the side of his wife in this, the hour of her danger. fate should bring him what it brought her, and he swore to himself, as he clove a way with his strong arms, that whether it were life or death they should still share it together. but there was another whose view of duty led him from safety into the face of danger. all night the franciscan had watched de catinat as a miser watches his treasure, filled with the thought that this heretic was the one little seed which might spread and spread until it choked the chosen vineyard of the church. now when he saw him rush so suddenly down the ladder, every fear was banished from his mind save the overpowering one that he was about to lose his precious charge. he, too, clambered down at the very heels of his prisoner, and rushed into the stream not ten paces behind him. and so the watchers at the window saw the strangest of sights. there, in mid-stream, lay the canoe, with a ring of dark warriors clustering in the stern, and the two women crouching in the midst of them. swimming madly towards them was de catinat, rising to the shoulders with the strength of every stroke, and behind him again was the tonsured head of the friar, with his brown capote and long trailing gown floating upon the surface of the water behind him. but in his zeal he had thought too little of his own powers. he was a good swimmer, but he was weighted and hampered by his unwieldy clothes. slower and slower grew his stroke, lower and lower his head, until at last with a great shriek of _in manus tuas, domine!_ he threw up his hands, and vanished in the swirl of the river. a minute later the watchers, hoarse with screaming to him to return, saw de catinat pulled aboard the iroquois canoe, which was instantly turned and continued its course up the river. "my god!" cried amos hoarsely. "they have taken him. he is lost." "i have seen some strange things in these forty years, but never the like of that!" said du lhut. the seigneur took a little pinch of snuff from his gold box, and flicked the wandering grains from his shirt-front with his dainty lace handkerchief. "monsieur de catinat has acted like a gentleman of france," said he. "if i could swim now as i did thirty years ago, i should be by his side." du lhut glanced round him and shook his head. "we are only six now," said he. "i fear they are up to some devilry because they are so very still." "they are leaving the house!" cried the _censitaire_, who was peeping through one of the side windows. "what can it mean? holy virgin, is it possible that we are saved? see how they throng through the trees. they are making for the canoe. now they are waving their arms and pointing." "there is the gray hat of that mongrel devil amongst them," said the captain. "i would try a shot upon him were it not a waste of powder and lead." "i have hit the mark at as long a range," said amos, pushing his long brown gun through a chink in the barricade which they had thrown across the lower half of the window. "i would give my next year's trade to bring him down." "it is forty paces further than my musket would carry," remarked du lhut, "but i have seen the english shoot a great way with those long guns." amos took a steady aim, resting his gun upon the window sill, and fired. a shout of delight burst from the little knot of survivors. the flemish bastard had fallen. but he was on his feet again in an instant and shook his hand defiantly at the window. "curse it!" cried amos bitterly, in english. "i have hit him with a spent ball. as well strike him with a pebble." "nay, curse not, amos, lad, but try him again with another pinch of powder if your gun will stand it." the woodsman thrust in a full charge, and chose a well-rounded bullet from his bag, but when he looked again both the bastard and his warriors had disappeared. on the river the single iroquois canoe which held the captives was speeding south as swiftly as twenty paddles could drive it, but save this one dark streak upon the blue stream, not a sign was to be seen of their enemies. they had vanished as if they had been an evil dream. there was the bullet-spotted stockade, the litter of dead bodies inside it, the burned and roofless cottages, but the silent woods lay gleaming in the morning sunshine as quiet and peaceful as if no hell-burst of fiends had ever broken out from them. "by my faith, i believe that they have gone!" cried the seigneur. "take care that it is not a ruse," said du lhut. "why should they fly before six men when they have conquered sixty?" but the _censitaire_ had looked out of the other window, and in an instant he was down upon his knees with his hands in the air, and his powder blackened face turned upwards, pattering out prayers and thanksgivings. his five comrades rushed across the room and burst into a shriek of joy. the upper reach of the river was covered with a flotilla of canoes from which the sun struck quick flashes as it shone upon the musket-barrels and trappings of the crews. already they could see the white coats of the regulars, the brown tunics of the coureurs-de-bois_, and the gaudy colours of the hurons and algonquins. on they swept, dotting the whole breadth of the river, and growing larger every instant, while far away on the southern bend, the iroquois canoe was a mere moving dot which had shot away to the farther side and lost itself presently under the shadow of the trees. another minute and the survivors were out upon the bank, waving their caps in the air, while the prows of the first of their rescuers were already grating upon the pebbles. in the stern of the very foremost canoe sat a wizened little man with a large brown wig, and a gilt-headed rapier laid across his knees. he sprang out as the keel touched bottom, splashing through the shallow water with his high leather boots, and rushing up to the seigneur, he flung himself into his arms. "my dear charles," he cried, "you have held your house like a hero. what, only six of you! tut, tut, this has been a bloody business!" "i knew that you would not desert a comrade, chambly. we have saved the house, but our losses have been terrible. my son is dead. my wife is in that iroquois canoe in front of you." the commandant of fort st. louis pressed his friend's hand in silent sympathy. "the others arrived all safe," he said at last. "only that one was taken, on account of the breaking of a paddle. three were drowned and two captured. there was a french lady in it, i understand, as well as madame." "yes, and they have taken her husband as well." "ah, poor souls! well, if you are strong enough to join us, you and your friends, we shall follow after them without the loss of an instant. ten of my men will remain to guard the house, and you can have their canoe. jump in then, and forward, for life and death may hang upon our speed!" chapter xl. the end. the iroquois had not treated de catinat harshly when they dragged him from the water into their canoe. so incomprehensible was it to them why any man should voluntarily leave a place of safety in order to put himself in their power that they could only set it down to madness, a malady which inspires awe and respect among the indians. they did not even tie his wrists, for why should he attempt to escape when he had come of his own free will? two warriors passed their hands over him, to be sure that he was unarmed, and he was then thrust down between the two women, while the canoe darted in towards the bank to tell the others that the st. louis garrison was coming up the stream. then it steered out again, and made its way swiftly up the centre of the river. adele was deadly pale and her hand, as her husband laid his upon it, was as cold as marble. "my darling," he whispered, "tell me that all is well with you--that you are unhurt!" "oh, amory, why did you come? why did you come, amory? oh, i think i could have borne anything, but if they hurt you i could not bear that." "how could i stay behind when i knew that you were in their hands? i should have gone mad!" "ah, it was my one consolation to think that you were safe." "no, no, we have gone through so much together that we cannot part now. what is death, adele? why should we be afraid of it?" "i am not afraid of it." "and i am not afraid of it. things will come about as god wills it, and what he wills must in the end be the best. if we live, then we have this memory in common. if we die, then we go hand-in-hand into another life. courage, my own, all will be well with us." "tell me, monsieur," said onega, "is my lord still living?" "yes, he is alive and well." "it is good. he is a great chief, and i have never been sorry, not even now, that i have wedded with one who was not of my own people. but ah, my son! who shall give my son back to me? he was like the young sapling, so straight and so strong! who could run with him, or leap with him, or swim with him? ere that sun shines again we shall all be dead, and my heart is glad, for i shall see my boy once more." the iroquois paddles had bent to their work until a good ten miles lay between them and sainte marie. then they ran the canoe into a little creek upon their own side of the river, and sprang out of her, dragging the prisoners after them. the canoe was carried on the shoulders of eight men some distance into the wood, where they concealed it between two fallen trees, heaping a litter of branches over it to screen it from view. then, after a short council, they started through the forest, walking in single file, with their three prisoners in the middle. there were fifteen warriors in all, eight in front and seven behind, all armed with muskets and as swift-footed as deer, so that escape was out of the question. they could but follow on, and wait in patience for whatever might befall them. all day they pursued their dreary march, picking their way through vast morasses, skirting the borders of blue woodland lakes where the gray stork flapped heavily up from the reeds at their approach, or plunging into dark belts of woodland where it is always twilight, and where the falling of the wild chestnuts and the chatter of the squirrels a hundred feet above their heads were the only sounds which broke the silence. onega had the endurance of the indians themselves, but adele, in spite of her former journeys, was footsore and weary before evening. it was a relief to de catinat, therefore, when the red glow of a great fire beat suddenly through the tree-trunks, and they came upon an indian camp in which was assembled the greater part of the war-party which had been driven from sainte marie. here, too, were a number of the squaws who had come from the mohawk and cayuga villages in order to be nearer to the warriors. wigwams had been erected all round in a circle, and before each of them were the fires with kettles slung upon a tripod of sticks in which the evening meal was being cooked. in the centre of all was a very fierce fire which had been made of brushwood placed in a circle, so as to leave a clear space of twelve feet in the middle. a pole stood up in the centre of this clearing, and something all mottled with red and black was tied up against it. de catinat stepped swiftly in front of adele that she might not see the dreadful thing, but he was too late. she shuddered, and drew a quick breath between her pale lips, but no sound escaped her. "they have begun already, then," said onega composedly. "well, it will be our turn next, and we shall show them that we know how to die." "they have not ill-used us yet," said de catinat. "perhaps they will keep us for ransom or exchange." the indian woman shook her head. "do not deceive yourself by any such hope," said she. "when they are as gentle as they have been with you it is ever a sign that you are reserved for the torture. your wife will be married to one of their chiefs, but you and i must die, for you are a warrior, and i am too old for a squaw." married to an iroquois! those dreadful words shot a pang through both their hearts which no thought of death could have done. de catinat's head dropped forward upon his chest, and he staggered and would have fallen had adele not caught him by the arm. "do not fear, dear amory," she whispered. "other things may happen but not that, for i swear to you that i shall not survive you. no, it may be sin or it may not, but if death will not come to me, i will go to it." de catinat looked down at the gentle face which had set now into the hard lines of an immutable resolve. he knew that it would be as she had said, and that, come what might, that last outrage would not befall them. could he ever have believed that the time would come when it would send a thrill of joy through his heart to know that his wife would die? as they entered the iroquois village the squaws and warriors had rushed towards them, and they passed through a double line of hideous faces which jeered and jibed and howled at them as they passed. their escort led them through this rabble and conducted them to a hut which stood apart. it was empty, save for some willow fishing-nets hanging at the side, and a heap of pumpkins stored in the corner. "the chiefs will come and will decide upon what is to be done with us," said onega. "here they are coming now, and you will soon see that i am right, for i know the ways of my own people." an instant later an old war-chief, accompanied by two younger braves and by the bearded half-dutch iroquois who had led the attack upon the manor-house, strolled over and stood in the doorway, looking in at the prisoners, and shooting little guttural sentences at each other. the totems of the hawk, the wolf, the bear, and the snake showed that they each represented one of the great families of the nation. the bastard was smoking a stone pipe, and yet it was he who talked the most, arguing apparently with one of the younger savages, who seemed to come round at last to his opinion. finally the old chief said a few short stern words, and the matter appeared to be settled. "and you, you beldame," said the bastard in french to the iroquois woman, "you will have a lesson this night which will teach you to side against your own people." "you half-bred mongrel," replied the fearless old woman, "you should take that hat from your head when you speak to one in whose veins runs the best blood of the onondagas. you a warrior? you who, with a thousand at your back, could not make your way into a little house with a few poor husbandmen within it! it is no wonder that your father's people have cast you out! go back and work at the beads, or play at the game of plum-stones, for some day in the woods you might meet with a man, and so bring disgrace upon the nation which has taken you in!" the evil face of the bastard grew livid as he listened to the scornful words which were hissed at him by the captive. he strode across to her, and taking her hand he thrust her forefinger into the burning bowl of his pipe. she made no effort to remove it, but sat with a perfectly set face for a minute or more, looking out through the open door at the evening sunlight and the little groups of chattering indians. he had watched her keenly in the hope of hearing a cry, or seeing some spasm of agony upon her face, but at last, with a curse, he dashed down her hand and strode from the hut. she thrust her charred finger into her bosom and laughed. "he is a good-for-nought!" she cried. "he does not even know how to torture. now, i could have got a cry out of him. i am sure of it. but you--monsieur, you are very white!" "it was the sight of such a hellish deed. ah, if we were but set face to face, i with my sword, he with what weapon he chose, by god, he should pay for it with his heart's blood." the indian woman seemed surprised. "it is strange to me," she said, "that you should think of what befalls me when you are yourselves under the same shadow. but our fate will be as i said." "ah!" "you and i are to die at the stake. she is to be given to the dog who has left us." "ah!" "adele! adele! what shall i do!" he tore his hair in his helplessness and distraction. "no, no, fear not, amory, for my heart will not fail me. what is the pang of death if it binds us together?" "the younger chief pleaded for you, saying that the _mitche manitou_ had stricken you with madness, as could be seen by your swimming to their canoe, and that a blight would fall upon the nation if you were led to the stake. but this bastard said that love came often like madness among the pale-faces, and that it was that alone which had driven you. then it was agreed that you should die and that she should go to his wigwam, since he had led the war-party. as for me, their hearts were bitter against me, and i also am to die by the pine splinters." de catinat breathed a prayer that he might meet his fate like a soldier and a gentleman. "when is it to be?" he asked. "now! at once! they have gone to make all ready! but you have time yet, for i am to go first." "amory, amory, could we not die together now?" cried adele, throwing her arms round her husband. "if it be sin, it is surely a sin which will be forgiven us. let us go, dear. let us leave these dreadful people and this cruel world and turn where we shall find peace." the indian woman's eyes flashed with satisfaction. "you have spoken well, white lily," said she. "why should you wait until it is their pleasure to pluck you. see, already the glare of their fire beats upon the tree-trunks, and you can hear the howlings of those who thirst for your blood. if you die by your own hands, they will be robbed of their spectacle, and their chief will have lost his bride. so you will be the victors in the end, and they the vanquished. you have said rightly, white lily. there lies the only path for you!" "but how to take it?" onega glanced keenly at the two warriors who stood as sentinels at the door of the hut. they had turned away, absorbed in the horrible preparations which were going on. then she rummaged deeply within the folds of her loose gown and pulled out a small pistol with two brass barrels and double triggers in the form of winged dragons. it was only a toy to look at, all carved and scrolled and graven with the choicest work of the paris gunsmith. for its beauty the seigneur had bought it at his last visit to quebec, and yet it might be useful, too, and it was loaded in both barrels. "i meant to use it on myself," said she, as she slipped it into the hand of de catinat. "but now i am minded to show them that i can die as an onondaga should die, and that i am worthy to have the blood of their chiefs in my veins. take it, for i swear that i will not use it myself, unless it be to fire both bullets into that bastard's heart." a flush of joy shot over de catinat as his fingers closed round the pistol. here was indeed a key to unlock the gates of peace. adele laid her cheek against his shoulder and laughed with pleasure. "you will forgive me, dear," he whispered. "forgive you! i bless you, and love you with my whole heart and soul. clasp me close, darling, and say one prayer before you do it." they had sunk on their knees together when three warriors entered the hut and said a few abrupt words to their country-woman. she rose with a smile. "they are waiting for me," said she. "you shall see, white lily, and you also, monsieur, how well i know what is due to my position. farewell, and remember onega!" she smiled again, and walked from the hut amidst the warriors with the quick firm step of a queen who sweeps to a throne. "now, amory!" whispered adele, closing her eyes, and nestling still closer to him. he raised the pistol, and then, with a quick sudden intaking of the breath, he dropped it, and knelt with glaring eyes looking up at a tree which faced the open door of the hut. it was a beech-tree, exceedingly old and gnarled, with its bark hanging down in strips and its whole trunk spotted with moss and mould. some ten feet above the ground the main trunk divided into two, and in the fork thus formed a hand had suddenly appeared, a large reddish hand, which shook frantically from side to side in passionate dissuasion. the next instant, as the two captives still stared in amazement, the hand disappeared behind the trunk again and a face appeared in its place, which still shook from side to side as resolutely as its forerunner. it was impossible to mistake that mahogany, wrinkled skin, the huge bristling eyebrows, or the little glistening eyes. it was captain ephraim savage of boston! and even as they stared and wondered a sudden shrill whistle burst out from the depths of the forest, and in a moment every bush and thicket and patch of brushwood were spouting fire and smoke, while the snarl of the musketry ran round the whole glade, and the storm of bullets whizzed and pelted among the yelling savages. the iroquois' sentinels had been drawn in by their bloodthirsty craving to see the prisoners die, and now the canadians were upon them, and they were hemmed in by a ring of fire. first one way and then another they rushed, to be met always by the same blast of death, until finding at last some gap in the attack they streamed through, like sheep through a broken fence, and rushed madly away through the forest, with the bullets of their pursuers still singing about their ears, until the whistle sounded again to recall the woodsmen from the chase. but there was one savage who had found work to do before he fled. the flemish bastard had preferred his vengeance to his safety! rushing at onega, he buried his tomahawk in her brain, and then, yelling his war-cry, he waved the blood-stained weapon above his head, and flew into the hut where the prisoners still knelt. de catinat saw him coming, and a mad joy glistened in his eyes. he rose to meet him, and as he rushed in he fired both barrels of his pistol into the bastard's face. an instant later a swarm of canadians had rushed over the writhing bodies, the captives felt warm friendly hands which grasped their own, and looking upon the smiling, well-known faces of amos green, savage, and du lhut, they knew that peace had come to them at last. and so the refugees came to the end of the toils of their journey, for that winter was spent by them in peace at fort st. louis, and in the spring, the iroquois having carried the war to the upper st. lawrence, the travellers were able to descend into the english provinces, and so to make their way down the hudson to new york, where a warm welcome awaited them from the family of amos green. the friendship between the two men was now so cemented together by common memories and common danger that they soon became partners in fur-trading, and the name of the frenchman came at last to be as familiar in the mountains of maine and on the slopes of the alleghanies as it had once been in the _salons_ and corridors of versailles. in time de catinat built a house on staten island, where many of his fellow-refugees had settled, and much of what he won from his fur-trading was spent in the endeavour to help his struggling huguenot brothers. amos green had married a dutch maiden of schenectady, and as adele and she became inseparable friends, the marriage served to draw closer the ties of love which held the two families together. as to captain ephraim savage, he returned safely to his beloved boston, where he fulfilled his ambition by building himself a fair brick house upon the rising ground in the northern part of the city, whence he could look down both upon the shipping in the river and the bay. there he lived, much respected by his townsfolk, who made him selectman and alderman, and gave him the command of a goodly ship when sir william phips made his attack upon quebec, and found that the old lion frontenac was not to be driven from his lair. so, honoured by all, the old seaman lived to an age which carried him deep into the next century, when he could already see with his dim eyes something of the growing greatness of his country. the manor-house of sainte marie was soon restored to its former prosperity, but its seigneur was from the day that he lost his wife and son a changed man. he grew leaner, fiercer, less human, forever heading parties which made their way into the iroquois woods and which outrivalled the savages themselves in the terrible nature of their deeds. a day came at last when he sallied out upon one of these expeditions, from which neither he nor any of his men ever returned. many a terrible secret is hid by those silent woods, and the fate of charles de la noue, seigneur de sainte marie, is among them. note on the huguenots and their dispersion. towards the latter quarter of the seventeenth century there was hardly an important industry in france which was not controlled by the huguenots, so that, numerous as they were, their importance was out of all proportion to their numbers. the cloth trade of the north and the south-east, the manufacture of serges and light stuffs in languedoc, the linen trade of normandy and brittany, the silk and velvet industry of tours and lyons, the glass of normandy, the paper of auvergne and angoumois, the jewellery of the isle of france, the tan yards of touraine, the iron and tin work of the sedanais--all these were largely owned and managed by huguenots. the numerous saint days of the catholic calendar handicapped their rivals, and it was computed that the protestant worked days in the year to his fellow-countryman's . a very large number of the huguenot refugees were brought back, and the jails and galleys of france were crowded with them. one hundred thousand settled in friesland and holland, , in switzerland, , in germany, and , in england. some made their way even to the distant cape of good hope, where they remained in the paarl district. in war, as in industry, the exiles were a source of strength to the countries which received them. frenchmen drilled the russian armies of peter the great, a huguenot count became commander-in-chief in denmark, and schomberg led the army of brandenburg, and afterwards that of england. in england three huguenot regiments were formed for the service of william. the exiles established themselves as silk workers in spitalfields, cotton spinners at bideford, tapestry weavers at exeter, wool carders at taunton, kersey makers at norwich, weavers at canterbury, bat makers at wandsworth, sailcloth makers at ipswich, workers in calico in bromley, glass in sussex, paper at laverstock, cambric at edinburgh. early protestant refugees had taken refuge in america twenty years before the revocation, where they formed a colony at staten island. a body came to boston in , and were given , acres at oxford, by order of the general court at massachusetts. in new york and long island colonies sprang up, and later in virginia (the monacan settlement), in maryland, and in south carolina (french santee and orange quarter). note on the future of louis, madams de maintenon, and madame de montespan. it has been left to our own century to clear the fair fame of madame de maintenon of all reproach, and to show her as what she was, a pure woman and a devoted wife. she has received little justice from the memoir writers of the seventeenth century, most of whom, the duc de st. simon, for example, and the princess elizabeth of bavaria, had their own private reasons for disliking her. an admirable epitome of her character and influence will be found in dr. dollinger's _historical studies_. she made louis an excellent wife, waited upon him assiduously for thirty years of married life, influenced him constantly towards good--save only in the one instance of the huguenots, and finally died very shortly after her husband. madame de montespan lived in great magnificence after the triumph of her rival, and spent freely the vast sums which the king's generosity had furnished her with. eventually, having exhausted all that this world could offer, she took to hair-shirts and nail-studded girdles, in the hope of securing a good position in the next. her horror of death was excessive. in thunderstorms she sat with a little child in her lap, in the hope that its innocence might shield her from the lightning. she slept always with her room ablaze with tapers, and with several women watching by the side of her couch. when at last the inevitable arrived she left her body for the family tomb, her heart to the convent of la fleche, and her entrails to the priory of menoux near bourbon. these latter were thrust into a box and given to a peasant to convey to the priory. curiosity induced him to look into the box upon the way, and, seeing the contents, he supposed himself to be the victim of a practical joke, and emptied them out into a ditch. a swineherd was passing at the moment with his pigs, and so it happened that, in the words of mrs. julia pardoe, "in a few minutes the most filthy animals in creation had devoured portions of the remains of one of the haughtiest women who ever trod the earth." louis, after a reign of more than fifty years, which comprised the most brilliant epoch of french history, died at last in amidst the saddest surroundings. one by one those whom he loved had preceded him to the grave, his brother, his son, the two sons of his son, their wives, and finally his favourite great-grandson, until he, the old dying monarch, with his rouge and his stays, was left with only a little infant in arms, the duc d'anjou, three generations away from him, to perpetuate his line. on th august, , he was attacked by senile gangrene, which gradually spread up the leg until on the th it became fatal. his dying words were worthy of his better self. "gentlemen, i desire your pardon for the bad example which i have set you. i have greatly to thank you fur the manner in which you have served me, as well as for the attachment and fidelity which i have always experienced at your hands. i request from you the same zeal and fidelity for my grandson. farewell, gentlemen. i feel that this parting has affected not only myself but you also. forgive me! i trust that you will sometimes think of me when i am gone." this ebook was produced by david widger michel and angele [a ladder of swords] by gilbert parker volume . chapter xv it seemed an unspeakable smallness in a man of such high place in the state, whose hand had tied and untied myriad knots of political and court intrigue, that he should stoop to a game which any pettifogging hanger-on might play-and reap scorn in the playing. by insidious arts, leicester had in his day turned the queen's mind to his own will; had foiled the diplomacy of the spaniard, the german and the gaul; had by subterranean means checkmated the designs of the medici; had traced his way through plot and counter-plot, hated by most, loved by none save, maybe, his royal mistress to whom he was now more a custom than a cherished friend. year upon year he had built up his influence. none had championed him save himself, and even from the consequences of rashness and folly he had risen to a still higher place in the kingdom. but such as leicester are ever at last a sacrifice to the laborious means by which they achieve their greatest ends-means contemptible and small. to the great intriguers every little detail, every commonplace insignificance is used--and must be used by them alone--to further their dark causes. they cannot trust their projects to brave lieutenants, to faithful subordinates. they cannot say, "here is the end; this is the work to be done; upon your shoulders be the burden!" they must "stoop to conquer." every miserable detail becomes of moment, until by-and-by the art of intrigue and conspiracy begins to lose proportion in their minds. the detail has ever been so important, conspiracy so much second nature, that they must needs be intriguing and conspiring when the occasion is trifling and the end negligible. to all intriguers life has lost romance; there is no poem left in nature; no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its wholesome influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no causes for which to die--save themselves. they are so honeycombed with insincerity and the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as one, all pathways the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon their world they see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and whether the path be good or bad they would still walk in it crookedly. how many men and women leicester had tracked or lured to their doom; over how many men and women he had stepped to his place of power, history speaks not carefully; but the traces of his deeds run through a thousand archives, and they suggest plentiful sacrifices to a subverted character. favourite of a queen, he must now stoop to set a trap for the ruin of as simple a soul as ever stepped upon the soil of england; and his dark purposes had not even the excuse of necessity on the one hand, of love or passion on the other. an insane jealousy of the place the girl had won in the consideration of the queen, of her lover who, he thought, had won a still higher place in the same influence, was his only motive for action at first. his cruelty was not redeemed even by the sensuous interest the girl might arouse in a reckless nature by her beauty and her charm. so the great leicester--the gipsy, as the dead sussex had called him--lay in wait in greenwich park for angele to pass, like some orchard thief in the blossoming trees. knowing the path by which she would come to her father's cottage from the palace, he had placed himself accordingly. he had thought he might have to wait long or come often for the perfect opportunity; but it seemed as if fate played his game for him, and that once again the fruit he would pluck should fall into his palm. bright- eyed, and elated from a long talk with the duke's daughter, who had given her a message from the queen, angele had abstractedly taken the wrong path in the wood. leicester saw that it would lead her into the maze some distance off. making a detour, he met her at the moment she discovered her mistake. the light from the royal word her friend had brought was still in her face; but it was crossed by perplexity now. he stood still as though astonished at seeing her, a smile upon his face. so perfectly did he play his part that she thought the meeting accidental; and though in her heart she had a fear of the man and knew how bitter an enemy he was of michel's, his urbane power, his skilful diplomacy of courtesy had its way. these complicated lives, instinct with contradiction, have the interest of forbidden knowledge. the dark experiences of life leave their mark and give such natures that touch of mystery which allures even those who have high instincts and true feelings, as one peeps over a hidden depth and wonders what lies beyond the dark. so angele, suddenly arrested, was caught by the sense of mystery in the man, by the fascination of finesse, of dark power; and it was womanlike that all on an instant she should dream of the soul of goodness in things evil. thus in life we are often surprised out of long years of prejudice, and even of dislike and suspicion, by some fortuitous incident, which might have chanced to two who had every impulse towards each other, not such antagonisms as lay between robert dudley, earl of leicester, and this huguenot refugee. she had every cue to hate hum. each moment of her life in england had been beset with peril because of him-peril to the man she loved, therefore peril to herself. and yet, so various is the nature of woman, that, while steering straitly by one star, she levies upon the light of other stars. faithful and sincere, yet loving power, curious and adventurous, she must needs, without intention, without purpose, stray into perilous paths. as leicester stepped suddenly into angele's gaze, she was only, as it were, conscious of a presence in itself alluring by virtue of the history surrounding it. she was surprised out of an instinctive dislike, and the cue she had to loathe him was for the moment lost. unconsciously, unintentionally, she smiled at him now, then, realising, retreated, shrinking from him, her face averted. man or woman had found in leicester the delicate and intrepid gamester, exquisite in the choice of detail, masterful in the breadth of method. and now, as though his whole future depended on this interview, he brought to bear a life-long skill to influence her. he had determined to set the queen against her. he did not know--not even he--that she had saved the queen's life on that auspicious may day when harry lee had fought the white knight michel de la foret and halved the honours of the lists with him. if he had but known that the queen had hid from him this fact--this vital thing touching herself and england, he would have viewed his future with a vaster distrust. but there could be no surer sign of elizabeth's growing coldness and intended breach than that she had hid from him the dreadful incident of the poisoned glove, and the swift execution of the would-be murderer, and had made cecil her only confidant. but he did know that elizabeth herself had commanded michel de la foret to the lists; and his mad jealousy impelled him to resort to a satanic cunning towards these two fugitives, who seemed to have mounted within a few short days as far as had he in thrice as many years to a high place in the regard of the majesty of england. to disgrace them both; to sow distrust of the girl in the queen's mind; to make her seem the opposite of what she was; to drop in her own mind suspicion of her lover; to drive her to some rash act, some challenge of the queen herself--that was his plan. he knew how little elizabeth's imperious spirit would brook any challenge from this fearless girl concerning de la foret. but to convince her that the queen favoured michel in some shadowed sense, that de la foret was privy to a dark compact--so deep a plot was all worthy of a larger end. he had well inspired the court of france through its ambassador to urge the medici to press actively and bitterly for de la foret's return to france and to the beheading sword that waited for him; and his task had been made light by international difficulties, which made the heart of elizabeth's foreign policy friendship with france and an alliance against philip of spain. she had, therefore, opened up, even in the past few days, negotiations once again for the long-talked-of marriage with the duke of anjou, the brother of the king, son of the medici. state policy was involved, and, if de la foret might be a counter, the pledge of exchange in the game, as it were, the path would once more be clear. he well believed that elizabeth's notice of de la foret was but a fancy that would pass, as a hundred times before such fancies had come and gone; but against that brighter prospect there lay the fact that never before had she shown himself such indifference. in the past she had raged against him, she had imprisoned him; she had driven him from her presence in her anger, but always her paroxysms of rage had been succeeded by paroxysms of tenderness. now he saw a colder light in the sky, a greyer horizon met his eye. so at every corner of the compass he played for the breaking of the spell. yet as he now bowed low before angele there seemed to show in his face a very candour of surprise, of pleasure, joined to a something friendly and protective in his glance and manner. his voice insinuated that bygones should be bygones; it suggested that she had misunderstood him. it pleaded against the injustice of her prejudice. "so far from home!" he said with a smile. "more miles from home," she replied, thinking of never-returning days in france, "than i shall ever count again." "but no, methinks the palace is within a whisper," he responded. "lord leicester knows well i am a prisoner; that i no longer abide in the palace," she answered. he laughed lightly. "an imprisonment in a queen's friendship. i bethink me, it is three hours since i saw you go to the palace. it is a few worthless seconds since you have got your freedom." she nettled at his tone. "lord leicester takes great interest in my unimportant goings and comings. i cannot think it is because i go and come." he chose to misunderstand her meaning. drawing closer he bent over her shoulder. "since your arrival here, my only diary is the tally of your coming and going." suddenly, as though by an impulse of great frankness, he added in a low tone: "and is it strange that i should follow you--that i should worship grace and virtue? men call me this and that. you have no doubt been filled with dark tales of my misdeeds. has there been one in the court, even one, who, living by my bounty or my patronage, has said one good word of me? and why? for long years the queen, who, maybe, might have been better counselled, chose me for her friend, adviser--because i was true to her. i have lived for the queen, and living for her have lived for england. could i keep--i ask you, could i keep myself blameless in the midst of flattery, intrigue, and conspiracy? i admit that i have played with fiery weapons in my day; and must needs still do so. the incorruptible cannot exist in the corrupted air of this court. you have come here with the light of innocence and truth about you. at first i could scarce believe that such goodness lived, hardly understood it. the light half-blinded and embarrassed; but, at last, i saw! you of all this court have made me see what sort of life i might have lived. you have made me dream the dreams of youth and high unsullied purpose once again. was it strange that in the dark pathways of the court i watched your footsteps come and go, carrying radiance with you? no--leicester has learned how sombre, sinister, has been his past, by a presence which is the soul of beauty, of virtue, and of happy truth. lady, my heart is yours. i worship you." overborne for the moment by the eager, searching eloquence of his words, she had listened bewildered to him. now she turned upon him with panting breath and said: "my lord, my lord, i will hear no more. you know i love monsieur de la foret, for whose sake i am here in england--for whose sake i still remain." "'tis a labour of love but ill requited," he answered with suggestion in his tone. "what mean you, my lord?" she asked sharply, a kind of blind agony in her voice; for she felt his meaning, and though she did not believe him, and knew in her soul he slandered, there was a sting, for slander ever scorches where it touches. "can you not see?" he said. "may day--why did the queen command him to the lists? why does she keep him here-in the palace? why, against the will of france, her ally, does she refuse to send him forth? why, unheeding the laughter of the court, does she favour this unimportant stranger, brave though he be? why should she smile upon him? . . . can you not see, sweet lady?" "you know well why the queen detains him here," she answered calmly now. "in the queen's understanding with france, exiles who preach the faith are free from extradition. you heard what the queen required of him-- that on trinity day he should preach before her, and upon this preaching should depend his safety." "indeed, so her majesty said with great humour," replied leicester. "so indeed she said; but when we hide our faces a thin veil suffices. the man is a soldier--a soldier born. why should he turn priest now? i pray you, think again. he was quick of wit; the queen's meaning was clear to him; he rose with seeming innocence to the fly, and she landed him at the first toss. but what is forward bodes no good to you, dear star of heaven. i have known the queen for half a lifetime. she has wild whims and dangerous fancies, fills her hours of leisure with experiences--an artist is the queen. she means no good to you." she had made as if to leave him, though her eyes searched in vain for the path which she should take; but she now broke in impatiently: "poor, unnoted though i am, the queen of england is my friend," she answered. "what evil could she wish me? from me she has naught to fear. i am not an atom in her world. did she but lift her finger i am done. but she knows that, humble though i be, i would serve her to my last breath; because i know, my lord leicester, how many there are who serve her foully, faithlessly; and there should be those by her who would serve her singly." his eyes half closed, he beat his toe upon the ground. he frowned, as though he had no wish to hurt her by words which he yet must speak. with calculated thought he faltered. "yet do you not think it strange," he said at last, "that monsieur de la foret should be within the palace ever, and that you should be banished from the palace? have you never seen the fly and the spider in the web? do you not know that they who have the power to bless or ban, to give joy or withhold it, appear to give when they mean to withhold? god bless us all--how has your innocence involved your judgment!" she suddenly flushed to the eyes. "i have wit enough," she said acidly, "to feel that truth which life's experience may not have taught me. it is neither age nor evil that teaches one to judge 'twixt black and white. god gives the true divination to human hearts that need." it was a contest in which leicester revelled--simplicity and single- mindedness against the multifarious and double-tongued. he had made many efforts in his time to conquer argument and prejudice. when he chose, none could be more insinuating or turn the flank of a proper argument by more adroit suggestion. he used his power now. "you think she means well by you? you think that she, who has a thousand ladies of a kingdom at her call, of the best and most beautiful--and even," his voice softened, "though you are more beautiful than all, that beauty would soften her towards you? when was it elizabeth loved beauty? when was it that her heart warmed towards those who would love or wed? did she not imprison me, even in these palace grounds, for one whole year because i sought to marry? has she not a hundred times sent from her presence women with faces like flowers because they were in contrast to her own? do you see love blossoming at this court? god's son! but she would keep us all like babes in eden an' she could, unmated and unloved." he drew quickly to her and leant over her, whispering down her shoulder. "do you think there is any reason why all at once she should change her mind and cherish lovers?" she looked up at him fearlessly and firmly. "in truth, i do. my lord leicester, you have lived in the circle of her good pleasure, near to her noble majesty, as you say, for half a lifetime. have you not found a reason why now or any time she should cherish love and lovers? ah, no, you have seen her face, you have heard her voice, but you have not known her heart!" "ah, opportunity lacked," he said in irony and with a reminiscent smile. "i have been busy with state affairs, i have not sat on cushions, listening to royal fingers on the virginals. still, i ask you, do you think there is a reason why from her height she should stoop down to rescue you or give you any joy? wherefore should the queen do aught to serve you? wherefore should she save your lover?" it was on angele's lips to answer, "because i saved her life on may day." it was on her lips to tell of the poisoned glove, but she only smiled, and said: "but, yes, i think, my lord, there is a reason, and in that reason i have faith." leicester saw how firmly she was fixed in her idea, how rooted was her trust in the queen's intentions towards her; and he guessed there was something hidden which gave her such supreme confidence. "if she means to save him, why does she not save him now? why not end the business in a day--not stretch it over these long mid-summer weeks?" "i do not think it strange," she answered. "he is a political prisoner. messages must come and go between england and france. besides, who calleth for haste? is it i who have most at stake? it is not the first time i have been at court, my lord. in these high places things are orderly,"--a touch of sarcasm came into her tone,--"life is not a mighty rushing wind, save to those whom vexing passion drives to hasty deeds." she made to move on once more, but paused, still not certain of her way. "permit me to show you," he said with a laugh and a gesture towards a path. "not that--this is the shorter. i will take you to a turning which leads straight to your durance--and another which leads elsewhere." she could not say no, because she had, in very truth, lost her way, and she might wander far and be in danger. also, she had no fear of him. steeled to danger in the past, she was not timid; but, more than all, the game of words between them had had its fascination. the man himself, by virtue of what he was, had his fascination also. the thing inherent in all her sex, to peep over the hedge, to skirt dangerous fires lightly, to feel the warmth distantly and not be scorched--that was in her, too; and she lived according to her race and the long predisposition of the ages. most women like her--as good as she--have peeped and stretched out hands to the alluring fire and come safely through, wiser and no better. but many, too, bewildered and confused by what they see--as light from a mirror flashed into the eye half blinds--have peeped over the hedge and, miscalculating their power of self-control, have entered in, and returned no more into the quiet garden of unstraying love. leicester quickly put on an air of gravity. "i warn you that danger lies before you. if you cross the queen--and you will cross the queen when you know the truth, as i know it--you will pay a heavy price for refusing leicester as your friend." she made a protesting motion and seemed about to speak, but suddenly, with a passionate gesture, leicester added: "let them go their way. monsieur de la foret will be tossed aside before another winter comes. do you think he can abide here in the midst of plot and intrigue, and hated by the people of the court? he is doomed. but more, he is unworthy of you; while i can serve you well, and i can love you well." she shrank away from him. "no, do not turn from me, for in very truth, leicester's heart has been pierced by the inevitable arrow. you think i mean you evil?" he paused with a sudden impulse continued: "no! no! and if there be a saving grace in marriage, marriage it shall be, if you will but hear me. you shall be my wife--leicester's wife. as i have mounted to power so i will hold power with you--with you, the brightest spirit that ever england saw. worthy of a kingdom with you beside me, i shall win to greater, happier days; and at kenilworth, where kings and queens have lodged, you shall be ruler. we will leave this court until elizabeth, betrayed by those who know not how to serve her, shall send for me again. here--the power behind the throne--you and i will sway this realm through the aging, sentimental queen. listen, and look at me in the eyes-- i speak the truth, you read my heart. you think i hated you and hated de la foret. by all the gods, it's true i hated him, because i saw that he would come between me and the queen. a man must have one great passion. life itself must be a passion. power was my passion--power, not the queen. you have broken all that down. i yield it all to you--for your sake and my own. i would steal from life yet before my sun goes to its setting a few years of truth and honesty and clear design. at heart i am a patriot--a loyal englishman. your cause--the cause of protestantism-- did i not fight for it at rochelle? have i not ever urged the queen to spend her revenue for your cause, to send her captains and her men to fight for it?" she raised her head in interest, and her lips murmured: "yes, yes, i know you did that." he saw his advantage and pursued it. "see, i will be honest with you-- honest, at last, as i have wished in vain to be, for honesty was misunderstood. it is not so with you--you understand. dear, light of womanhood, i speak the truth now. i have been evil in my day i admit it --evil because i was in the midst of evil. i betrayed because i was betrayed; i slew, else i should have been slain. we have had dark days in england, privy conspiracy and rebellion; and i have had to thread my way through dreadful courses by a thousand blind paths. would it be no joy to you if i, through your influence, recast my life--remade my policy, renewed my youth--pursuing principle where i have pursued opportunity? angele, come to kenilworth with me. leave de la foret to his fate. the way to happiness is with me. will you come?" he had made his great effort. as he spoke he almost himself believed that he told the truth. under the spell of his own emotional power it seemed as though he meant to marry her, as though he could find happiness in the union. he had almost persuaded himself to be what he would have her to believe he might be. under the warmth and convincing force of his words her pulses had beat faster, her heart had throbbed in her throat, her eyes had glistened; but not with that light which they had shed for michel de la foret. how different was this man's wooing--its impetuous, audacious, tender violence, with that quiet, powerful, almost sacred gravity of her camisard lover! it is this difference--the weighty, emotional difference--between a desperate passion and a pure love which has ever been so powerful in twisting the destinies of a moiety of the world to misery, who otherwise would have stayed contented, inconspicuous and good. angele would have been more than human if she had not felt the spell of the ablest intriguer, of the most fascinating diplomatist of his day. before he spoke of marriage the thrill--the unconvincing thrill though it was--of a perilous temptation was upon her; but the very thing most meant to move her only made her shudder; for in her heart of hearts she knew that he was ineradicably false. to be married to one constitutionally untrue would be more terrible a fate for her than to be linked to him in a lighter, more dissoluble a bond. so do the greatest tricksters of this world overdo their part, so play the wrong card when every past experience suggests it is the card to play. he knew by the silence that followed his words, and the slow, steady look she gave him, that she was not won nor on the way to the winning. "my lord," she said at last, and with a courage which steadied her affrighted and perturbed innocence, "you are eloquent, you are fruitful of flattery, of those things which have, i doubt not, served you well in your day. but, if you see your way to a better life, it were well you should choose one of nobler mould than i. i am not made for sacrifice, to play the missioner and snatch brands from the burning. i have enough to do to keep my own feet in the ribbon-path of right. you must look elsewhere for that guardian influence which is to make of you a paragon." "no, no," he answered sharply, "you think the game not worth the candle --you doubt me and what i can do for you; my sincerity, my power you doubt." "indeed, yes, i doubt both," she answered gravely, "for you would have me believe that i have power to lead you. with how small a mind you credit me! you think, too, that you sway this kingdom; but i know that you stand upon a cliff's edge, and that the earth is fraying 'neath your tread. you dare to think that you have power to drag down with you the man who honours me with--" "with his love, you'd say. yet he will leave you fretting out your soul until the sharp-edged truth cuts your heart in twain. have you no pride? i care not what you say of me--say your worst, and i will not resent it, for i will still prove that your way lies with me." she gave a bitter sigh, and touched her forehead with trembling fingers. "if words could prove it, i had been convinced but now, for they are well devised, and they have music too; but such a music, my lord, as would drown the truth in the soul of a woman. your words allure, but you have learned the art of words. you yourself--oh, my lord, you who have tasted all the pleasures of this world, could you then have the heart to steal from one who has so little that little which gives her happiness?" "you know not what can make you happy--i can teach you that. by god's son! but you have wit and intellect and are a match for a prince, not for a cast off camisard. i shall ere long be lord--lieutenant of these isles-of england and ireland. come to my nest. we will fly far --ah, your eye brightens, your heart leaps to mine--i feel it now, i--" "oh, have done, have done," she passionately broke in; "i would rather die, be torn upon the rack, burnt at the stake, than put my hand in yours! and you do not wish it--you speak but to destroy, not to cherish. while you speak to me i see all those"--she made a gesture as though to put something from her "all those to whom you have spoken as you have done to me. i hear the myriad falsehoods you have told--one whelming confusion. i feel the blindness which has crept upon them--those poor women--as you have sown the air with the dust of the passion which you call love. oh, you never knew what love meant, my lord! i doubt if, when you lay in your mother's arms, you turned to her with love. you never did one kindly act for love, no generous thought was ever born in you by love. sir, i know it as though it were written in a book; your life has been one long calculation--your sympathy or kindness a calculated thing. good-nature, emotion you may have had, but never the divine thing by which the world is saved. were there but one little place where that eden flower might bloom within your heart, you could not seek to ruin that love which lives in mine and fills it, conquering all the lesser part of me. i never knew of how much love i was capable until i heard you speak today. out of your life's experience, out of all that you have learned of women good and evil, you--for a selfish, miserable purpose--would put the gyves upon my wrists, make me a pawn in your dark game; a pawn which you would lose without a thought as the game went on. "if you must fight, my lord, if you must ruin monsieur de la foret and a poor huguenot girl, do it by greater means than this. you have power, you say. use it then; destroy us, if you will. send us to the medici: bring us to the block, murder us--that were no new thing to lord leicester. but do not stoop to treachery and falsehood to thrust us down. oh, you have made me see the depths of shame to-day! but yet," her voice suddenly changed, a note of plaintive force filled it--"i have learned much this hour--more than i ever knew. perhaps it is that we come to knowledge only through fire and tears." she smiled sadly. "i suppose that sometime some day, this page of life would have scorched my sight. oh, my lord, what was there in me that you dared speak so to me? was there naught to have stayed your tongue and stemmed the tide in which you would engulf me?" he had listened as in a dream at first. she had read him as he might read himself, had revealed him with the certain truth, as none other had done in all his days. he was silent for a long moment, then raised his hand in protest. "you have a strange idea of what makes offence and shame. i offered you marriage," he said complacently. "and when i come to think upon it, after all that you have said, fair huguenot, i see no cause for railing. you call me this and that; to you i am a liar, a rogue, a cut-throat, what you will; and yet, and yet, i will have my way--i will have my way in the end." "you offered me marriage--and meant it not. do i not know? did you rely so little on your compelling powers, my lord, that you must needs resort to that bait? do you think that you will have your way to-morrow if you have failed to-day?" with a quick change of tone and a cold, scornful laugh he rejoined: "do you intend to measure swords with me?" "no, no, my lord," she answered quietly; "what should one poor unfriended girl do in contest with the earl of leicester? but yet, in very truth, i have friends, and in my hour of greatest need i shall go seeking." she was thinking of the queen. he guessed her thought. "you will not be so mad," he said urbanely again. "of what can you complain to the queen? tut, tut, you must seek other friends than the majesty of england!" "then, my lord, i will," she answered bravely. "i will seek the help of such a friend as fails not when all fails, even he who putteth down the mighty from their seats and exalteth the humble." "well, well, if i have not touched your heart," he answered gallantly, "i at least have touched your wit and intellect. once more i offer you alliance. think well before you decline." he had no thought that he would succeed, but it was ever his way to return to the charge. it had been the secret of his life's success so far. he had never taken a refusal. he had never believed that when man or woman said no that no was meant; and, if it were meant, he still believed that constant dropping would wear away the stone. he still held that persistence was the greatest lever in the world, that unswerving persistence was the master of opportunity. they had now come to two paths in the park leading different ways. "this road leads to kenilworth, this to your prison," he said with a slow gesture, his eyes fixed upon hers. "i will go to my prison, then," she said, stepping forward, "and alone, by your leave." leicester was a good sportsman. though he had been beaten all along the line, he hid his deep chagrin, choked down the rage that was in him. smiling, he bowed low. "i will do myself the honour to visit your prison to-morrow," he said. "my father will welcome you, my lord," she answered, and, gathering up her skirt, ran down the pathway. he stood unmoving, and watched her disappear. "but i shall have my way with them both," he said aloud. the voice of a singer sounded in the green wood. half consciously leicester listened. the words came shrilling through the trees: "oh, love, it is a lily flower, (sing, my captain, sing, my lady!) the sword shall cleave it, life shall leave it who shall know the hour? (sing, my lady, still!)" presently the jingling of bells mingled with the song, then a figure in motley burst upon him. it was the queen's fool. "brother, well met--most happily met!" he cried. "and why well met, fool?" asked leicester. "prithee, my work grows heavy, brother. i seek another fool for the yoke. here are my bells for you. i will keep my cap. and so we will work together, fool: you for the morning, i for the afternoon, and the devil take the night-time! so god be with you, obligato!" with a laugh he leaped into the undergrowth, and left leicester standing with the bells in his hand. chapter xvi angele had come to know, as others in like case have ever done, how wretched indeed is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours. she had saved the queen's life upon may day, and on the evening of that day the queen had sent for her, had made such high and tender acknowledgment of her debt as would seem to justify for her perpetual honour. and what elizabeth said she meant; but in a life set in forests of complications and opposing interests the political overlapped the personal in her nature. thus it was that she had kept the princes of the world dangling, advancing towards marriage with them, retreating suddenly, setting off one house against the other, allying herself to one european power to-day, with another to-morrow, her own person and her crown the pawn with which she played. it was not a beautiful thing in a woman, but it was what a woman could do; and, denied other powers given to men--as to her father--she resorted to astute but doubtful devices to advance her diplomacy. over all was self-infatuation, the bane of princes, the curse of greatness, the source of wide injustice. it was not to be expected, as leicester had said, that elizabeth, save for the whim of the moment, would turn aside to confer benefit upon angele or to keep her in mind, unless constrained to do so for some political reason. the girl had charmed the queen, had, by saving her life, made england her long debtor; but leicester had judged rightly in believing that the queen might find the debt irksome; that her gratitude would be corroded by other destructive emotions. it was true that angele had saved her life, but michel had charmed her eye. he had proved himself a more gallant fighter than any in her kingdom; and had done it, as he had said, in her honour. so, as her admiration for michel grew, her debt to angele became burdensome; and, despite her will, there stole into her mind the old petulance and smothered anger against beauty and love and marriage. she could ill bear that one near her person should not be content to flourish in the light and warmth of her own favour, setting aside all other small affections. so it was that she had sent angele to her father and kept de la foret in the palace. perplexed, troubled by new developments, the birth of a son to mary queen of scots, the demand of her parliament that she should marry, the pressure of foreign policy which compelled her to open up again negotiations for marriage with the duke of anjou--all these combined to detach her from the interest she had suddenly felt in angele. but, by instinct, she knew also that leicester, through jealousy, had increased the complication; and, fretful under the long influence he had had upon her, she steadily lessened intercourse with him. the duel he fought with lempriere on may day came to her ears through the duke's daughter, and she seized upon it with sharp petulance. first she ostentatiously gave housing and care to lempriere, and went to visit him; then, having refused leicester audience, wrote to him. "what is this i hear," she scrawled upon the paper, "that you have forced a quarrel with the lord of rozel, and have well-ny ta'en his life! is swording then your dearest vice that you must urge it on a harmless gentle man, and my visitor? do you think you hold a charter of freedom for your self-will? have a care, leicester, or, by god! you shall know another sword surer than your own." the rage of leicester on receiving this knew no bounds; for though he had received from elizabeth stormy letters before, none had had in it the cold irony of this missive. the cause of it? desperation seized him. with a mad disloyalty he read in every word of elizabeth's letter, michel de la foret, refugee. with madder fury he determined to strike for the immediate ruin of de la foret, and angele with him--for had she not thrice repulsed him as though he had been some village captain? after the meeting in the maze he had kept his promise of visiting her "prison." by every art, and without avail, he had through patient days sought to gain an influence over her; for he saw that if he could but show the queen that the girl was open to his advances, accepted his protection, her ruin would be certain--in anger elizabeth would take revenge upon both refugees. but however much he succeeded with monsieur aubert, he failed wholly with angele. she repulsed him still with the most certain courtesy, with the greatest outward composure; but she had to make her fight alone, for the queen forbade intercourse with michel, and she must have despaired but for the messages sent now and then by the duke's daughter. through m. aubert, to whom leicester was diligently courteous, and whom he sought daily, discussing piously the question of religion so dear to the old man's heart, he strove to foster in angele's mind the suspicion he had ventured at their meeting in the maze, that the queen, through personal interest in michel, was saving his life to keep him in her household. so well did he work on the old man's feelings that when he offered his own protection to m. aubert and angele, whatever the issue with de la foret might be, he was met with an almost tearful response of gratitude. it was the moment to convey a deep distrust of de la foret to the mind of the old refugee, and it was subtly done. were it not better to leave the court where only danger surrounded them, and find safety on leicester's own estate, where no man living could molest them? were it not well to leave michel de la foret to his fate, what ever it would be? thrice within a week the queen had sent for de la foret--what reason was there for that, unless the queen had a secret personal interest in him? did m. aubert think it was only a rare touch of humour which had turned de la foret into a preacher, and set his fate upon a sermon to be preached before the court? he himself had long held high office, had been near to her majesty, and he could speak with more knowledge than he might use--it grieved him that mademoiselle aubert should be placed in so painful a position. sometimes as the two talked angele would join them; and then there was a sudden silence, which made her flush with embarrassment, anxiety or anger. in vain did she assume a cold composure, in vain school herself to treat leicester with a precise courtesy; in vain her heart protested the goodness of de la foret and high uprightness of the queen; the persistent suggestions of the dark earl worked upon her mind in spite of all. why had the queen forbidden her to meet michel, or write to him, or to receive letters from him? why had the queen, who had spoken such gratitude, deserted her? and now even the duke's daughter wrote to her no more, sent her no further messages. she felt herself a prisoner, and that the queen had forgotten her debt. she took to wandering to that part of the palace-grounds where she could see the windows of the tower her lover inhabited. her old habit of cheerful talk deserted her, and she brooded. it was long before she heard of the duel between the seigneur and lord leicester--the duke's daughter had kept this from her, lest she should be unduly troubled--and when, in anxiety, she went to the house where lempriere had been quartered, he had gone, none could tell her whither. buonespoir was now in close confinement, by secret orders of leicester, and not allowed to walk abroad; and thus with no friend save her father, now so much under the influence of the earl, she was bitterly solitary. bravely she fought the growing care and suspicion in her heart; but she was being tried beyond her strength. her father had urged her to make personal appeal to the queen; and at times, despite her better judgment, she was on the verge of doing so. yet what could she say? she could not go to the queen of england and cry out, like a silly milk-maid: "you have taken my lover--give him back to me!" what proof had she that the queen wanted her lover? and if she spoke, the impertinence of the suggestion might send back to the fierce medici that same lover, to lose his head. leicester, who now was playing the game as though it were a hazard for states and kingdoms, read the increasing trouble in her face; and waited confidently for the moment when in desperation she would lose her self- control and go to the queen. but he did not reckon with the depth of the girl's nature and her true sense of life. her brain told her that what she was tempted to do she should not; that her only way was to wait; to trust that the queen of england was as much true woman as queen, and as much queen as true woman; and that the one was held in high equipoise by the other. besides, trinity day would bring the end of it all, and that was not far off. she steeled her will to wait till then, no matter how dark the sky might be. as time went on, leicester became impatient. he had not been able to induce m. aubert to compel angele to accept a quiet refuge at kenilworth; he saw that this plan would not work, and he deployed his mind upon another. if he could but get angele to seek de la foret in his apartment in the palace, and then bring the matter to elizabeth's knowledge with sure proof, de la foret's doom would be sealed. at great expense, however; for, in order to make the scheme effective, angele should visit de la foret at night. this would mean the ruin of the girl as well. still that could be set right; because, once de la foret was sent to the medici the girl's character could be cleared; and, if not, so much the surer would she come at last to his protection. what he had professed in cold deliberation had become in some sense a fact. she had roused in him an eager passion. he might even dare, when de la foret was gone, to confess his own action in the matter to the queen, once she was again within his influence. she had forgiven him more than that in the past, when he had made his own mad devotion to herself excuse for his rashness or misconduct. he waited opportunity, he arranged all details carefully, he secured the passive agents of his purpose; and when the right day came he acted. about ten o'clock one night, a half-hour before the closing of the palace gates, when no one could go in or go out save by permit of the lord chamberlain, a footman from a surgeon of the palace came to angele, bearing a note which read: "your friend is very ill, and asks for you. come hither alone; and now, if you would come at all." her father was confined to bed with some ailment of the hour, and asleep --it were no good to awaken him. her mind was at once made up. there was no time to ask permission of the queen. she knew the surgeon's messengers by sight, this one was in the usual livery, and his master's name was duly signed. in haste she made herself ready, and went forth into the night with the messenger, her heart beating hard, a pitiful anxiety shaking her. her steps were fleet between the lodge and the palace. they were challenged nowhere, and the surgeon's servant, entering a side door of the palace, led her hastily through gloomy halls and passages where they met no one, though once in a dark corridor some one brushed against her. she wondered why there were no servants to show the way, why the footman carried no torch or candle; but haste and urgency seemed due excuse, and she thought only of michel, and that she would soon see him-dying, dead perhaps before she could touch his hand! at last they emerged into a lighter and larger hallway, where her guide suddenly paused, and said to angel, motioning towards a door: "enter. he is there." for a moment she stood still, scarce able to breathe, her heart hurt her so. it seemed to her as though life itself was arrested. as the servant, without further words, turned and left her, she knocked, opened the door without awaiting a reply, and stepping into semidarkness, said softly: "michel! michel!" chapter xvii at angle's entrance a form slowly raised itself on a couch, and a voice, not michel's, said: "mademoiselle--by our lady, 'tis she!" it was the voice of the seigneur of rozel, and angle started back amazed. "you, monsieur--you!" she gasped. "it was you that sent for me?" "send? not i--i have not lost my manners yet. rozel at court is no greater fool than lempriere in jersey." angle wrung her hands. "i thought it de la foret who was ill. the surgeon said to come quickly." lempriere braced himself against the wall, for he was weak, and his fever still high. "ill?--not he. as sound in body and soul as any man in england. that is a friend, that de la foret lover of yours, or i'm no butler to the queen. he gets leave and brings me here and coaxes me back to life again--with not a wink of sleep for him these five days past till now." angel had drawn nearer, and now stood beside the couch, trembling and fearful, for it came to her mind that she had been made the victim of some foul device. the letter had read: "your friend is ill." true, the seigneur was her friend, but he had not sent for her. "where is de la foret?" she asked quickly. "yonder, asleep," said the seigneur, pointing to a curtain which divided the room from one adjoining. angel ran quickly towards the door, then stopped short. no, she would not waken him. she would go back at once. she would leave the palace by the way she came. without a word she turned and went towards the door opening into the hallway. with her hand upon the latch she stopped short again; for she realised that she did not know her way through the passages and corridors, and that she must make herself known to the servants of the palace to obtain guidance and exit. as she stood helpless and confused, the seigneur called hoarsely: "de la foret--de la foret!" before angele could decide upon her course, the curtain of the other room was thrust aside, and de la foret entered. he was scarce awake, and he yawned contentedly. he did not see angele, but turned towards lempriere. for once the seigneur had a burst of inspiration. he saw that angele was in the shadow, and that de la foret had not observed her. he determined that the lovers should meet alone. "your arm, de la foret," he grunted. "i'll get me to the bed in yonder room--'tis easier than this couch." "two hours ago you could not bear the bed, and must get you to the couch--and now! seigneur, do you know the weight you are?" he added, laughing, as he stooped, and helping lempriere gently to his feet, raised him slowly in his arms and went heavily with him to the bedroom. angele watched him with a strange thrill of timid admiration and delight. surely it could not be that michel--her michel--could be bought from his allegiance by any influence on earth. there was the same old simple laugh on his lips, as, with chaffing words, he carried the huge seigneur to the other room. her heart acquitted him then and there of all blame, past or to come. "michel!" she said aloud involuntarily--the call of her spirit which spoke on her lips against her will. de la foret had helped lempriere to the bed again as he heard his name called, and he stood suddenly still, looking straight before him into space. angele's voice seemed ghostly and unreal. "michel!" he heard again, and he came forward into the room where she was. yet once again she said the word scarcely above a whisper, for the look of rapt wonder and apprehension in his manner overcame her. now he turned towards her, where she stood in the shadow by the door. he saw her, but even yet he did not stir, for she seemed to him still an apparition. with a little cry she came forward to him. "michel--help me!" she murmured, and stretched out her hands. with a cry of joy he took her in his arms and pressed her to his heart. then a realisation of danger came to him. "why did you come?" he asked. she told him hastily. he heard with astonishment, and then said: "there is some foul trick here. have you the message?" she handed it to him. "it is the surgeon's writing, verily," he said; "but it is still a trick, for the sick man here is rozel. i see it all. you and i forbidden to meet--it was a trick to bring you here." "oh, let me go!" she cried. "michel, michel, take me hence." she turned towards the door. "the gates are closed," he said, as a cannon boomed on the evening air. angele trembled violently. "oh, what will come of this?" she cried, in tearful despair. "be patient, sweet, and let me think," he answered. at that moment there came a knocking at the door, then it was thrown open, and there stepped inside the earl of leicester, preceded by a page bearing a torch. "is michel de la foret within?" he called; then stopped short, as though astonished, seeing angele. "so! so!" he said, with a contemptuous laugh. michel de la foret's fingers twitched. he quickly stepped in front of angele, and answered: "what is your business here, my lord?" leicester languorously took off a glove, and seemed to stifle a yawn in it; then said: "i came to take you into my service, to urge upon you for your own sake to join my troops, going upon duty in the north; for i fear that if you stay here the queen mother of france will have her way. but i fear i am too late. a man who has sworn himself into service d'amour has no time for service de la guerre." "i will gladly give an hour from any service i may follow to teach the earl of leicester that he is less a swordsman than a trickster." leicester flushed, but answered coolly: "i can understand your chagrin. you should have locked your door. it is the safer custom." he bowed lightly towards angele. "you have not learned our english habits of discretion, monsieur de la foret. i would only do you service. i appreciate your choler. i should be no less indignant. so, in the circumstances, i will see that the gates are opened, of course you did not realise the flight of time,--and i will take mademoiselle to her lodgings. you may rely on my discretion. i am wholly at your service --tout a vous, as who should say in your charming language." the insolence was so veiled in perfect outward courtesy that it must have seemed impossible for de la foret to reply in terms equal to the moment. he had, however, no need to reply, for the door of the room suddenly opened, and two pages stepped inside with torches. they were followed by a gentleman in scarlet and gold, who said, "the queen!" and stepped aside. an instant afterwards elizabeth, with the duke's daughter, entered. the three dropped upon their knees, and elizabeth waved without the pages and the gentleman-in-waiting. when the doors closed, the queen eyed the three kneeling figures, and as her glance fell on leicester a strange glitter came into her eyes. she motioned all to rise, and with a hand upon the arm of the duke's daughter, said to leicester: "what brings the earl of leicester here?" "i came to urge upon monsieur the wisdom of holding to the sword and leaving the book to the butter-fingered religious. your majesty needs good soldiers." he bowed, but not low, and it was clear he was bent upon a struggle. he was confounded by the queen's presence, he could not guess why she should have come; and that she was prepared for what she saw was clear. "and brought an eloquent pleader with you?" she made a scornful gesture towards angele. "nay, your majesty; the lady's zeal outran my own, and crossed the threshold first." the queen's face wore a look that leicester had never seen on it before, and he had observed it in many moods. "you found the lady here, then?" "with monsieur alone. seeing she was placed unfortunately, i offered to escort her hence to her father. but your majesty came upon the moment." there was a ring of triumph in leicester's voice. no doubt, by some chance, the queen had become aware of angele's presence, he thought. fate had forestalled the letter he had already written on this matter and meant to send her within the hour. chance had played into his hands with perfect suavity. the queen, less woman now than queen, enraged by the information got he knew not how, had come at once to punish the gross breach of her orders and a dark misconduct-so he thought. the queen's look, as she turned it on angele, apparently had in it what must have struck terror to even a braver soul than that of the helpless huguenot girl. "so it is thus you spend the hours of night? god's faith, but you are young to be so wanton!" she cried in a sharp voice. "get you from my sight and out of my kingdom as fast as horse and ship may carry you--as feet may bear you." leicester's face lighted to hear. "your high majesty," pleaded the girl, dropping on her knees, "i am innocent. as god lives, i am innocent." "the man, then, only is guilty?" the queen rejoined with scorn. "is it innocent to be here at night, my palace gates shut, with your lover- alone?" leicester laughed at the words. "your majesty, oh, your gracious majesty, hear me. we were not alone-- not alone--" there was a rustle of curtains, a heavy footstep, and lempriere of rozel staggered into the room. de la foret ran to help him, and throwing an arm around him, almost carried him towards the couch. lempriere, however, slipped from de la foret's grasp to his knees on the floor before the queen. "not alone, your high and sacred majesty, i am here--i have been here through all. i was here when mademoiselle came, brought hither by trick of some knave not fit to be your immortal majesty's subject. i speak the truth, for i am butler to your majesty and no liar. i am lempriere of rozel." no man's self-control could meet such a surprise without wavering. leicester was confounded, for he had not known that lempriere was housed with de la foret. for a moment he could do naught but gaze at lempriere. then, as the seigneur suddenly swayed and would have fallen, the instinct of effective courtesy, strong in him, sent him with arms outstretched to lift him up. together, without a word, he and de la foret carried him to the couch and laid him down. that single act saved leicester's life. there was something so naturally (though, in truth, it was so hypocritically) kind in the way he sprang to his enemy's assistance that an old spirit of fondness stirred in the queen's breast, and she looked strangely at him. when, however, they had disposed of lempriere and leicester had turned again towards her, she said: "did you think i had no loyal and true gentlemen at my court, my lord? did you think my leech would not serve me as fair as he would serve the earl of leicester? you have not bought us all, robert dudley, who have bought and sold so long. the good leech did your bidding and sent your note to the lady; but there your bad play ended and fate's began. a rabbit's brains, leicester--and a rabbit's end. fate has the brains you need." leicester's anger burst forth now under the lash of ridicule. "i cannot hope to win when your majesty plays fate in caricature." with a little gasp of rage elizabeth leaned over and slapped his face with her long glove. "death of my life, but i who made you do unmake you!" she cried. he dropped his hand on his sword. "if you were but a man, and not--" he said, then stopped short, for there was that in the queen's face which changed his purpose. anger was shaking her, but there were tears in her eyes. the woman in her was stronger than the queen. it was nothing to her at this moment that she might have his life as easily as she had struck his face with her glove; this man had once shown the better part of himself to her, and the memory of it shamed her for his own sake now. she made a step towards the door, then turned and spoke: "my lord, i have no palace and no ground wherein your footstep will not be trespass. pray you, remember." she turned towards lempriere, who lay on his couch faint and panting. "for you, my lord of rozel, i wish you better health, though you have lost it somewhat in a good cause." her glance fell on de la foret. her look softened. "i will hear you preach next sunday, sir." there was an instant's pause, and then she said to angele, with gracious look and in a low voice: "you have heard from me that calumny which the innocent never escape. to try you i neglected you these many days; to see your nature even more truly than i knew it, i accused you but now. you might have been challenged first by one who could do you more harm than elizabeth of england, whose office is to do good, not evil. nets are spread for those whose hearts are simple, and your feet have been caught. be thankful that we understand; and know that elizabeth is your loving friend. you have had trials--i have kept you in suspense--there has been trouble for us all; but we are better now; our minds are more content; so all may be well, please god! you will rest this night with our lady-dove here, and to-morrow early you shall return in peace to your father. you have a good friend in our cousin." she made a gentle motion towards the duke's daughter. "she has proved it so. in my leech she has a slave. to her you owe this help in time of need. she hath wisdom, too, and we must listen to her, even as i have done this day." she inclined her head towards the door. leicester opened it, and as she passed out she gave him one look which told him that his game was lost, if not for ever, yet for time uncertain and remote. "you must not blame the leech, my lord," she said, suddenly turning back. "the queen of england has first claim on the duty of her subjects. they serve me for love; you they help at need as time-servers." she stepped on, then paused again and looked back. "also i forbid fighting betwixt you," she said, in a loud voice, looking at de la foret and leicester. without further sign or look, she moved on. close behind came angele and the duke's daughter, and leicester followed at some distance. chapter xviii not far from the palace, in a secluded place hidden by laburnum, roses, box and rhododendrons, there was a quaint and beautiful retreat. high up on all sides of a circle of green the flowering trees and shrubs interlaced their branches, and the grass, as smooth as velvet, was of such a note as soothed the eye and quieted the senses. in one segment of the verdant circle was a sort of open bower made of poles, up which roses climbed and hung across in gay festoons; and in two other segments mossy banks made resting-places. here, in days gone by, when robert dudley, earl of leicester, first drew the eyes of his queen upon him, elizabeth came to listen to his vows of allegiance, which swam in floods of passionate devotion to her person. christopher hatton, sir henry lee, the duke of norfolk, the earl of sussex, a race of gallants, had knelt upon this pleasant sward. here they had declared a devotion that, historically platonic, had a personal passion which, if rewarded by no personal requital, must have been an expensive outlay of patience and emotion. but those days had gone. robert dudley had advanced far past his fellows, had locked himself into the chamber of the queen's confidence, had for long proved himself necessary to her, had mingled deference and admiration with an air of monopoly, and had then advanced to an air of possession, of suggested control. then had begun his decline. england and england's queen could have but one ruler, and upon an occasion in the past elizabeth made it clear by the words she used: "god's death, my lord, i have wished you well; but my favour is not so locked up for you that others shall not partake thereof; and, if you think to rule here, i will take a course to see you forthcoming. i will have here but one mistress and no master." in these words she but declared what was the practice of her life, the persistent passion of her rule. the world could have but one sun, and every man or woman who sought its warmth must be a sun-worshipper. there could be no divided faith, no luminaries in the sky save those which lived by borrowed radiance. here in this bright theatre of green and roses poets had sung the praises of this queen to her unblushing and approving face; here ladies thrice as beautiful as she had begged her to tell them the secret of her beauty, so much greater than that of any living woman; and she was pleased even when she knew they flattered but to gain her smile--it was the tribute that power exacts. the place was a cenotaph of past romance and pleasure. every leaf of every tree and flower had impressions of glories, of love, ambition and intrigue, of tears and laughter, of joyousness and ruin. never a spot in england where so much had been said and done, so far reaching in effect and influence. but its glory was departed, its day was done, it was a place of dreams and memories: the queen came here no more. many years had withered since she had entered this charmed spot; and that it remained so fine was but evidence of the care of those to whom she had given strict orders seven years past, that in and out of season it must be ever kept as it had erstwhile been. she had never entered the place since the day the young marquis of wessex, whom she had imprisoned for marrying secretly and without her consent, on his release came here, and, with a concentrated bitterness and hate, had told her such truths as she never had heard from man or woman since she was born. he had impeached her in such cold and murderous terms as must have made wince even a woman with no pride. to elizabeth it was gall and wormwood. when he at last demanded the life of the young wife who had died in enforced seclusion, because she had married the man she loved, elizabeth was so confounded that she hastily left the place, saying no word in response. this attack had been so violent, so deadly, that she had seemed unnerved, and forbore to command him to the tower or to death. "you, in whose breast love never stirred, deny the right to others whom god blessed with it," he cried. "envious of mortal happiness that dare exist outside your will or gift, you sunder and destroy. you, in whose hands was power to give joy, gave death. what you have sown you shall reap. here on this spot i charge you with high treason, with treachery to the people over whom you have power as a trust, which trust you have made a scourge." with such words as these he had assailed her, and for the first time in her life she had been confounded. in safety he had left the place, and taken his way to italy, from which he had never returned, though she had sent for him in kindness. since that day elizabeth had never come hither; and by-and-by none of her court came save the duke's daughter, and her fool, who both made it their resort. here the fool came upon the friday before trinity day, bringing with him lempriere and buonespoir, to whom he had much attached himself. it was a day of light and warmth, and the place was like a basket of roses. having seen the two serving-men dispose, in a convenient place, the refreshment which lempriere's appetite compelled, the fool took command of the occasion and made the two sit upon a bank, while he prepared the repast. strangest of the notable trio was the dwarfish fool with his shaggy black head, twisted mouth, and watchful, wandering eye, whose foolishness was but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision. going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the queen's inner chamber, then in the midst of the council, unconsidered, and the butt of all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery which as often made his listeners shrink as caused their laughter. the queen he called delicio, and leicester, obligato--as one who piped to another's dance. he had taken to buonespoir at the first glance, and had frequented him, and lempriere had presently been added to his favour. he had again and again been messenger between them, as also of late between angele and michel, whose case he viewed from a stand-point of great cheerfulness, and treated them as children playing on the sands-- as, indeed, he did the queen and all near to her. but buonespoir, the pirate, was to him reality and the actual, and he called him bono publico. at first lempriere, ever jealous of his importance, was inclined to treat him with elephantine condescension; but he could not long hold out against the boon archness of the jester, and he collapsed suddenly into as close a friendship as that between himself and buonespoir. a rollicking spirt was his own fullest stock-in-trade, and it won him like a brother. so it was that here, in the very bosom of the forest, lured by the pipe the fool played, lempriere burst forth into song, in one hand a bottle of canary, in the other a handful of comfits: "duke william was a norman (spread the sail to the breeze!) that did to england ride; at hastings by the channel (drink the wine to the lees!) our harold the saxon died. if there be no cakes from normandy, there'll be more ale in england!" "well sung, nobility, and well said," cried buonespoir, with a rose by the stem in his mouth, one hand beating time to the music, the other clutching a flagon of muscadella; "for the normans are kings in england, and there's drink in plenty at the court of our lady duchess." "delicio shall never want while i have a penny of hers to spend," quoth the fool, feeling for another tune. "should conspirators prevail, and the damnedest be, she hath yet the manor of rozel and my larder," urged lempriere, with a splutter through the canary. "that shall be only when the fifth wind comes--it is so ordained, nuncio!" said the fool blinking. buonespoir set down his flagon. "and what wind is the fifth wind?" he asked, scratching his bullethead, his child-like, widespread eyes smiling the question. "there be now four winds--the north wind and his sisters, the east, the west, and south. when god sends a fifth wind, then conspirators shall wear crowns. till then delicio shall sow and i shall reap, as is heaven's will." lempriere lay back and roared with laughter. "before belial, there never was such another as thou, fool. conspirators shall die and not prevail, for a man may not marry his sister, and the north wind shall have no progeny. so there shall be no fifth wind." "proved, proved," cried the fool. "the north wind shall go whistle for a mate--there shall be no fifth wind. so, delicio shall still sail by the compass, and shall still compass all, and yet be compassed by none; for it is written, who compasseth delicio existeth not." buonespoir watched a lark soaring, as though its flight might lead him through the fool's argument clearly. lempriere closed his eye, and struggled with it, his lips outpursed, his head sunk on his breast. suddenly his eyes opened, he brought the bottle of canary down with a thud on the turf. "'fore michael and all angels, i have it, fool; i travel, i conceive. de carteret of st. ouen's must have gone to the block ere conceiving so. i must conceive thus of the argument. he who compasseth the queen existeth not, for compassing, he dieth." "so it is by the hour-glass and the fortune told in the porringer. you have conceived like a man, nuncio." "and conspirators, i conceive, must die, so long as there be honest men to slay them," rejoined the seigneur. "must only honest men slay conspirators? oh, shadrach, meshach, and abednego!" wheezed buonespoir with a grin. he placed his hand upon his head in self-pity. "buonespoir, art thou damned by muscadella?" he murmured. "but thou art purged of the past, bono publico," answered the fool. "since delicio hath looked upon thee she hath shredded the tyburn lien upon thee--thou art flushed like a mountain spring; and conspirators shall fall down by thee if thou, passant, dost fall by conspirators in the way. bono publico, thou shalt live by good company. henceforth contraband shall be spurned and the book of grace opened." buonespoir's eyes laughed like a summer sky, but he scratched his head and turned over the rose-stem in his mouth reflectively. "so be it, then, if it must be; but yesterday the devon sea-sweeper, francis drake, overhauled me in my cottage, coming from the queen, who had infused him of me. 'i have heard of you from a high masthead,' said he. 'if the spanish main allure you, come with me. there be galleons yonder still; they shall cough up doubloons.' 'it hath a sound of piracy,' said i. 'i am expurgated. my name is written on clean paper now, blessed be the name of the queen!' 'tut, tut, buonesperado,' laughed he, 'you shall forget that tyburn is not a fable if you care to have doubloons reminted at the queen's mint. it is meet spanish philip's head be molted to oblivion, and elizabeth's raised, so that good silver be purged of popish alloy.' but that i had sworn by the little finger of st. peter when the moon was full, never to leave the english seas, i also would have gone with drake of devon this day. it is a man and a master of men that drake of devon." "'tis said that when a man hath naught left but life, and hath treated his honour like a poor relation, he goes to the spanish main with drake and grenville," said lempriere. "then must obligato go, for he hath such credentials," said the fool, blowing thistle-down in the air. "yesterday was no palm sunday to leicester. delicio's head was high. 'imperial majesty,' quoth obligato, his knees upon the rushes, 'take my life but send me not forth into darkness where i shall see my queen no more. by the light of my queen's eyes have i walked, and pains of hell are my queen's displeasure.' 'methinks thy humbleness is tardy,' quoth delicio. 'no cock shall crow by my nest,' said she. 'and, by the mantle of elijah, i am out with sour faces and men of phlegm and rheum. i will be gay once more. so get thee gone to kenilworth, and stray not from it on thy peril. take thy malaise with thee, and i shall laugh again.' behold he goeth. so that was the end of obligato, and now cometh another tune." "she hath good cheer?" asked lempriere eagerly. "i have never seen delicio smile these seven years as she smiled to-day; and when she kissed amicitia i sent for my confessor and made my will. delicio hath come to spring-time, and the voice of the turtle is in her ear." "amicitia--and who is amicitia?" asked lempriere, well flushed with wine. "she who hath brought obligato to the diminuendo and finale," answered the fool; "even she who hath befriended the huguenottine of the black eyes." "ah, she, the duke's daughter--v'la, that is a flower of a lady! did she not say that my jerkin fitted neatly when i did act as butler to her adorable majesty three months syne? she hath no mate in the world save mademoiselle aubert, whom i brought hither to honour and to fame." "to honour and fame, was it--but by the hill of desperandum, nuncio," said the fool, prodding him with his stick of bells. "'desperandum'! i know not latin; it amazes me," said lempriere, waving a lofty hand. "she--the huguenottine--was a-mazed also, and from the maze was played by obligato." "how so! how so!" cried the seigneur, catching at his meaning. "did leicester waylay and siege? 'sblood, had i known this, i'd have broached him and swallowed him even on crutches." "she made him raise the siege, she turned his own guns upon him, and in the end hath driven him hence." by rough questioning lempriere got from the fool by snatches the story of the meeting in the maze, which had left leicester standing with the jester's ribboned bells in his hand. then the seigneur got to his feet, and hugged the fool, bubbling with laughter. "by all the blood of all the saints, i will give thee burial in my own grave when all's done," he spluttered; "for there never was such fooling, never such a wise fool come since confucius and the khan. good be with you, fool, and thanks be for such a lady. thanks be also for the duke's daughter. ah, how she laid leicester out! she washed him up the shore like behemoth, and left him gaping." buonespoir intervened. "and what shall come of it? what shall be the end? the honeyflower lies at anchor--there be three good men in waiting, shadrach, meshach, and abednego, and--" the seigneur interrupted. "there's little longer waiting. all's well! her high hereditary majesty smiled on me when she gave leicester conge and fiery quittance. she hath me in favour, and all shall be well with michel and angele. o fool, fool, fantastic and flavoured fool, sing me a song of good content, for if this business ends not with crescendo and bell-ringing, i am no butler to the queen nor keep good company!" seating themselves upon the mossy bank, their backs to the westward sun, the fool peered into the green shadows and sang with a soft melancholy an ancient song that another fool had sung to the first tudor: "when blows the wind and drives the sleet, and all the trees droop down; when all the world is sad, 'tis meet good company be known: and in my heart good company sits by the fire and sings to me. "when warriors return, and one that went returns no more; when dusty is the road we run, and garners have no store; one ingle-nook right warm shall be where my heart hath good company. "when man shall flee and woman fail, and folly mock and hope deceive, let cowards beat the breast and wail, i'll homeward hie; i will not grieve: i'll draw the blind, i'll there set free my heart's beloved boon company. "when kings shall favour, ladies call my service to their side; when roses grow upon the wall of life, with love inside; i'll get me home with joy to be in my heart's own good company!" "oh, fool, oh, beneficent fool, well done! 'tis a song for a man-- 'twould shame de carteret of st. ouen's to his knees," cried lempriere. "oh, benignant fool, well done! 'twould draw me from my meals," said a voice behind the three; and, turning hastily about, they saw, smiling and applausive, the duke's daughter. beside her was angele. the three got to their feet, and each made obeisance after his kind- buonespoir ducking awkwardly, his blue eyes bulging with pleasure, lempriere swelling with vanity and spreading wide acknowledgment of their presence, the fool condescending a wave of welcome. "oh! abundant amicitia!" cried the fool to the duke's daughter, "thou art saved by so doing. so get thee to thanksgiving and god's mercy." "wherefore am i saved by being drawn from my meals by thy music, fool?" she asked, linking her arm in angele's. "because thou art more enamoured of lampreys than of man; and it is written that thou shalt love thy fellow man, and he that loveth not is lost: therefore thou art lost if thou lingerest at meals." "is it so, then? and this lady--what thinkest thou? must she also abstain and seek good company?" "no, verily, amicitia, for she is good company itself, and so she may sleep in the larder and have no fear." "and what think you--shall she be happy? shall she have gifts of fate?" "discriminately so, amicitia. she shall have souvenirs and no suspicions of fate. but she shall not linger here, for all lingerers in delicio's court are spied upon--not for their soul's good. she shall go hence, and--" "ay, princely lady, she shall go hence," interposed lempriere, who had panted to speak, and could bear silence no longer. "her high majesty will kiss her on the brow, and in jersey isle she shall blossom and bloom and know bounty--or never more shall i have privilege and perquage." he lumbered forward and kissed angele's hand as though conferring distinction, but with great generosity. "i said that all should go well, and so it shall. rozel shall prevail. the queen knows on what rock to build, as i made warrant for her, and will still do so." his vanity was incorrigible, but through it ran so child-like a spirit that it bred friendship and repulsed not. the duke's daughter pressed the arm of angele, who replied: "indeed it has been so according to your word, and we are--i am--shall ever be beholden. in storm you have been with us, so true a pilot and so brave a sailor; and if we come to port and the quiet shore, there shall be spread a feast of remembrance which shall never grow cold, seigneur." "one ingle-nook right warm shall be where my heart hath good company," sang the fool, and catching by the arm buonespoir, who ducked his head in farewell, ran him into the greenwood. angele came forward as if to stay buonespoir, but stopped short reflectively. as she did so, the duke's daughter whispered quickly into lempriere's ear. swelling with pride he nodded, and said: "i will reach him and discover myself to him, and bring him, if he stray, most undoubted and infallible lady," and with an air of mystery he made a heavily respectful exit. left alone, the two ladies seated themselves in the bower of roses, and for a moment were silent. presently the duke's daughter laughed aloud. "in what seas of dear conceit swims your leviathan seigneur, heart's- ease?" angele stole a hand into the cool palm of the other. "he was builded for some lonely sea all his own. creation cheated him. but god give me ever such friends as he, and i shall indeed 'have good company' and fear no issue." she sighed. "remains there still a fear? did you not have good promise in the queen's words that night?" "ay, so it seemed, and so it seemed before--on may day, and yet--" "and yet she banished you, and tried you, and kept you heart-sick? sweet, know you not how bitter a thing it is to owe a debt of love to one whom we have injured? so it was with her. the queen is not a saint, but very woman. marriage she hath ever contemned and hated; men she hath desired to keep her faithful and impassioned servitors. so does power blind us. and the braver the man, the more she would have him in her service, at her feet, the centre of the world." "i had served her in a crisis, an hour of peril. was naught due me?" the duke's daughter drew her close. "she never meant but that all should be well. and because you had fastened on her feelings as never i have seen another of your sex, so for the moment she resented it; and because de la foret was yours--ah, if you had each been naught to the other, how easy it would have run! do you not understand?" "nay, then, and yea, then--and i put it from me. see, am i not happy now? upon your friendship i build." "sweet, i did what i could. leicester filled her ears with poison every day, mixed up your business and great affairs with france, sought to convey that you both were not what you are; until at last i countermarched him." she laughed merrily. "ay, i can laugh now, but it was all hanging by a thread, when my leech sent his letter that brought you to the palace. it had grieved me that i might not seek you, or write to you in all those sad days; but the only way to save you was by keeping the queen's command; for she had known of leicester's visits to you, of your meeting in the maze, and she was set upon it that alone, all alone, you should be tried to the last vestige of your strength. if you had failed--" "if i had failed--" angele closed her eyes and shuddered. "i had not cared for myself, but michel--" "if you had failed, there had been no need to grieve for michel. he then had not grieved for thee. but see, the wind blows fair, and in my heart i have no fear of the end. you shall go hence in peace. this morning the queen was happier than i have seen her these many years: a light was in her eye brighter than showeth to the court. she talked of this place, recalled the hours spent here, spoke even softly of leicester. and that gives me warrant for the future. she has relief in his banishment, and only recalls older and happier days when, if her cares were no greater, they were borne by the buoyancy of girlhood and youth. of days spent here she talked until mine own eyes went blind. she said it was a place for lovers, and if she knew any two lovers who were true lovers, and had been long parted, she would send them here." "there be two true lovers, and they have been long parted," murmured angele. "but she commanded these lovers not to meet till trinity day, and she brooks not disobedience even in herself. how could she disobey her own commands? but"--her eyes were on the greenwood and the path that led into the circle--"but she would shut her eyes to-day, and let the world move on without her, let lovers thrive, and birds be nesting without heed or hap. disobedience shall thrive when the queen connives at it--and so i leave you to your disobedience, sweet." with a laugh she sprang to her feet, and ran. amazed and bewildered angele gazed after her. as she stood looking she heard her name called softly. turning, she saw michel. they were alone. chapter xix when de la foret and angele saw the queen again it was in the royal chapel. perhaps the longest five minutes of m. de la foret's life were those in which he waited the coming of the queen on that trinity sunday which was to decide his fate. when he saw elizabeth enter the chapel his eyes swam, till the sight of them was lost in the blur of colour made by the motions of gorgeously apparelled courtiers and the people of the household. when the queen had taken her seat and all was quiet, he struggled with himself to put on such a front of simple boldness as he would wear upon day of battle. the sword the queen had given him was at his side, and his garb was still that of a gentleman, not of a huguenot minister such as elizabeth in her grim humour, and to satisfy her bond with france, would make of him this day. the brown of his face had paled in the weeks spent in the palace and in waiting for this hour; anxiety had toned the ruddy vigour of his bearing; but his figure was the figure of a soldier, and his hand that of a strong man. he shook a little as he bowed to her majesty, but that passed, and when at last his eye met that of the duke's daughter he grew steady; for she gave him as plainly as though her tongue spoke, a message from angele. angele herself he did not see--she was kneeling in an obscure corner, her father's hand in hers, all the passion of her life pouring out in prayer. de la foret drew himself up with an iron will. no nobler figure of a man ever essayed to preach the word, and so elizabeth thought; and she repented of the bitter humour which had set this trial as his chance of life in england and his freedom from the hand of catherine. the man bulked larger in her eyes than he had ever done, and she struggled with herself to keep the vow she had made to the duke's daughter the night that angele had been found in de la foret's rooms. he had been the immediate cause, fated or accidental, of the destined breach between leicester and herself; he had played a significant part in her own life. glancing at her courtiers, she saw that none might compare with him, the form and being of calm boldness and courage. she sighed she knew scarce why. when de la foret first opened his mouth and essayed to call the worshippers to prayer, no words came forth--only a dry whisper. some ladies simpered, and more than one courtier laughed silently. michel saw, and his face flamed up. but he laid a hand on himself, and a moment afterwards his voice came forth, clear, musical, and resonant, speaking simple words, direct and unlacquered sentences, passionately earnest withal. he stilled the people to a unison of sentiment, none the less interested and absorbed because it was known that he had been the cause of the great breach between the queen and the favourite. ere he had spoken far, flippant gallants had ceased to flutter handkerchiefs, to move their swords idly upon the floor. he took for his text: "stand and search for the old paths." the beginning of all systems of religion, the coming of the nazarene, the rise and growth of christianity, the martyrdoms of the early church, the invasion of the truth by false doctrine, the abuses of the church, the reformation, the martyrdom of the huguenots for the return to the early principles of christianity, the "search for the old paths," he set forth in a tone generous but not fiery, presently powerful and searching, yet not declamatory. at the last he raised the sword that hung by his side, and the book that lay before him, and said: "and what matter which it is we wield--this steel that strikes for god, or this book which speaks of him? for the book is the sword of the spirit, and the sword is the life of humanity; for all faith must be fought for, and all that is has been won by strife. but the paths wherein ye go to battle must be the old paths; your sword shall be your staff by day, and the book your lantern by night. that which ye love ye shall teach, and that which ye teach ye shall defend; and if your love be a true love your teaching shall be a great teaching, and your sword a strong sword which none may withstand. it shall be the pride of sovereign and of people; and so neither 'height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of god.'" ere he had ended, some of the ladies were overcome, the eyes of the duke's daughter were full of tears, and elizabeth said audibly, when he ceased speaking: "on my soul, i have no bishop with a tongue like his. would that my lord of ely were here to learn how truth should be spoke. henceforth my bishops shall first be camisards." of that hour's joyful business the queen wrote thus to the medici before the day was done: cancelling all other letters on the matter, this m. de la foret shall stay in my kingdom. i may not be the headsman of one of my faith--as eloquent a preacher as he was a brave soldier. abiding by the strict terms of our treaty with my brother of france, he shall stay with us in peace, and in our own care. he hath not the eloquence of a knox, but he hath the true thing in him, and that speaks. to the duke's daughter the queen said: "on my soul, he shall be married instantly, or my ladies will carry him off and murder him for love." and so it was that the heart of elizabeth the queen warmed again and dearly towards two huguenot exiles, and showed that in doing justice she also had not so sour a heart towards her sex as was set down to her credit. yet she made one further effort to keep de la foret in her service. when michel, once again, declined, dwelt earnestly on his duty towards the widow of his dead chief, and begged leave to share her exile in jersey, elizabeth said: "on my soul, but i did not think there was any man on earth so careless of princes' honours!" to this de la foret replied that he had given his heart and life to one cause, and since montgomery had lost all, even life, the least michel de la foret could do was to see that the woman who loved him be not unprotected in the world. also, since he might not at this present fight for the cause, he could speak for it; and he thanked the queen of england for having shown him his duty. all that he desired was to be quiet for a space somewhere in "her high majesty's good realm," till his way was clear to him. "you would return to jersey, then, with our friend of rozel?" elizabeth said, with a gesture towards lempriere, who, now recovered from his wound, was present at the audience. de la foret inclined his head. "if it be your high majesty's pleasure." and lempriere of rozel said: "he would return with myself your noble majesty's friend before all the world, and buonespoir his ship the honeyflower." elizabeth's lips parted in a smile, for she was warmed with the luxury of doing good, and she answered: "i know not what the end of this will be, whether our loyal lempriere will become a pirate or buonespoir a butler to my court; but it is too pretty a hazard to forego in a world of chance. by the rood, but i have never, since i sat on my father's throne, seen black so white as i have done this past three months. you shall have your buonespoir, good rozel; but if he plays pirate any more--tell him this from his queen--upon an english ship, i will have his head, if i must needs send drake of devon to overhaul him." that same hour the queen sent for angele, and by no leave, save her own, arranged the wedding-day, and ordained that it should take place at southampton, whither the comtesse de montgomery had come on her way to greenwich to plead for the life of michel de la foret, and to beg elizabeth to relieve her poverty. both of which things elizabeth did, as the annals of her life record. after elizabeth--ever self-willed--had declared her way about the marriage ceremony, looking for no reply save that of silent obedience, she made angele sit at her feet and tell her whole story again from first to last. they were alone, and elizabeth showed to this young refugee more of her own heart than any other woman had ever seen. not by words alone, for she made no long story; but once she stooped and kissed angele upon the cheek, and once her eyes filled up with tears, and they dropped upon her lap unheeded. all the devotion shown herself as a woman had come to naught; and it may be that this thought stirred in her now. she remembered how leicester and herself had parted, and how she was denied all those soft resources of regret which were the right of the meanest women in her realm. for, whatever she might say to her parliament and people, she knew that all was too late--that she would never marry and that she must go childless and uncomforted to her grave. years upon years of delusion of her people, of sacrifice to policy, had at last become a self-delusion, to which her eyes were not full opened yet--she sought to shut them tight. but these refugees, coming at the moment of her own struggle, had changed her heart from an ever-growing bitterness to human sympathy. when angele had ended her tale once more, the queen said: "god knows, ye shall not linger in my court. such lives have no place here. get you back to my isle of jersey, where ye may live in peace. here all is noise, self-seeking and time-service. if ye twain are not happy i will say the world should never have been made." before they left greenwich palace--m. aubert and angele, de la foret, lempriere, and buonespoir--the queen made michel de la foret the gift of a chaplaincy to the crown. to monsieur aubert she gave a small pension, and in angele's hands she placed a deed of dower worthy of a generosity greater than her own. at southampton, michel and angele were married by royal license, and with the comtesse de montgomery set sail in buonespoir's boat, the honeyflower, which brought them safe to st. helier's, in the isle of jersey. chapter xx followed several happy years for michel and angele. the protection of the queen herself, the chaplaincy she had given de la foret, the friendship with the governor of the island; and the boisterous tales lempriere had told of those days at greenwich palace quickened the sympathy and held the interest of the people at large; while the simple lives of the two won their way into the hearts of all, even, at last, to that of de carteret of st. ouen's. it was angele herself who brought the two seigneurs together at her own good table; and it needed all her tact on that occasion to prevent the ancient foes from drinking all the wine in her cellar. there was no parish in jersey that did not know their goodness, but mostly in the parishes of st. martin's and rozel were their faithful labours done. from all parts of the island people came to hear michel speak, though that was but seldom; and when he spoke he always wore the sword the queen had given him, and used the book he had studied in her palace. it was to their home that buonespoir the pirate--faithful to his promise to the queen that he would harry english ships no more came wounded, after an engagement with a french boat sent to capture him, carried thither by shadrach, meshach, and abednego. it was there he died, after having drunk a bottle of st. ouen's muscadella, brought secretly to him by his unchanging friend, lempriere, so hastening the end. the comtesse de montgomery, who lived in a cottage near by, came constantly to the little house on the hillside by rozel bay. she had never loved her own children more than she did the brown-haired child with the deep-blue eyes, which was the one pledge of the great happiness of michel and angele. soon after this child was born, m. aubert had been put to rest in st. martin's churchyard, and there his tombstone might be seen so late as a hundred years ago. so things went softly by for seven years, and then madame de montgomery journeyed to england, on invitation of the queen and to better fortune, and angele and de la foret were left to their quiet life in jersey. sometimes this quiet was broken by bitter news from france, of fresh persecution, and fresh struggle on the part of the huguenots. thereafter for hours, sometimes for days, de la foret would be lost in sorrowful and restless meditation; and then he fretted against his peaceful calling and his uneventful life. but the gracious hand of his wife and the eyes of his child led him back to cheerful ways again. suddenly one day came the fearful news from england that the plague had broken out, and that thousands were dying. the flight from london was like the flight of the children of israel into the desert. the dead- carts filled with decaying bodies rattled through the foul streets, to drop their horrid burdens into the great pit at aldgate; the bells of london tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. if a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled away with the real victims to die the awful death. from every church, where clergy were left to pray, went up the cry for salvation from "plague, pestilence, and famine." scores of ships from holland and from france lay in the channel, not allowed to touch the shores of england, nor permitted to return whence they came. on the very day that news of this reached jersey, came a messenger from the queen of england for michel de la foret to hasten to her court for that she had need of him, and it was a need which would bring him honour. even as the young officer who brought the letter handed it to de la foret in the little house on the hill-side above rozel bay, he was taken suddenly ill, and fell at the camisard's feet. de la foret straightway raised him in his arms. he called to his wife, but, bidding her not come near, he bore the doomed man away to the lonely ecrehos rocks lying within sight of their own doorway. suffering no one to accompany him, he carried the sick man to the boat which had brought the queen's messenger to rozel bay. the sailors of the vessel fled, and alone de la foret set sail for the ecrehos. there upon the black rocks the young man died, and michel buried him in the shore-bed of the maitre ile. then, after two days--for he could bear suspense no longer--he set sail for jersey. upon that journey there is no need to dwell. any that hath ever loved a woman and a child must understand. a deep fear held him all the way, and when he stepped on shore at rozel bay he was as one who had come from the grave, haggard and old. hurrying up the hillside to his doorway, he called aloud to his wife, to his child. throwing open the door, he burst in. his dead child lay upon a couch, and near by, sitting in a chair, with the sweat of the dying on her brow, was angele. as he dropped on his knee beside her, she smiled and raised her hand as if to touch him, but the hand dropped and the head fell forward on his breast. she was gone into a greater peace. once more michel made a journey-alone--to the ecrehos, and there, under the ruins of the old abbey of val richer, he buried the twain he had loved. not once in all the terrible hours had he shed a tear; not once had his hand trembled; his face was like stone, and his eyes burned with an unearthly light. he did not pray beside the graves; but he knelt and kissed the earth again and again. he had doffed his robes of peace, and now wore the garb of a soldier, armed at all points fully. rising from his knees, he turned his face towards jersey. "only mine! only mine!" he said aloud in a dry, bitter voice. in the whole island, only his loved ones had died of the plague. the holiness and charity and love of michel and angele had ended so! when once more he set forth upon the channel, he turned his back on jersey and shaped his course towards france, having sent elizabeth his last excuses for declining a service which would have given him honour, fame and regard. he was bent upon a higher duty. not long did he wait for the death he craved. next year, in a huguenot sortie from anvers, he was slain. he died with these words on his lips: "maintenant, angele!" in due time the island people forgot them both, but the seigneur of rozel caused a stone to be set up on the highest point of land that faces france, and on the stone were carved the names of michel and angele. having done much hard service for his country and for england's queen, lempriere at length hung up his sword and gave his years to peace. from the manor of rozel he was wont to repair constantly to the little white house, which remained as the two had left it,--his own by order of the queen,--and there, as time went on, he spent most of his days. to the last he roared with laughter if ever the name of buonespoir was mentioned in his presence; he swaggered ever before the royal court and de carteret of st. ouen's; and he spoke proudly of his friendship with the duke's daughter, who had admired the cut of his jerkin at the court of elizabeth. but in the house where angele had lived he moved about as though in the presence of a beloved sleeper he would not awake. michel and angele had had their few years of exquisite life and love, and had gone; lempriere had longer measure of life and little love, and who shall say which had more profit of breath and being? the generations have passed away, and the angel of equity hath a smiling pity as she scans the scales and the weighing of the past. etext editor's bookmarks: never believed that when man or woman said no that no was meant slander ever scorches where it touches this ebook was produced by david widger michel and angele [a ladder of swords] by gilbert parker volume . chapter viii five minutes later, lempriere of rozel, as butler to the queen, saw a sight of which he told to his dying day. when, after varied troubles hereafter set down, he went back to jersey, he made a speech before the royal court, in which he told what chanced while elizabeth was at chapel. "there stood i, butler to the queen," he said, with a large gesture, "but what knew i of butler's duties at greenwich palace! her majesty had given me an office where all the work was done for me. odds life, but when i saw the gentleman of the rod and his fellow get down on their knees to lay the cloth upon the table, as though it was an altar at jerusalem, i thought it time to say my prayers. there was naught but kneeling and retiring. now it was the salt-cellar, the plate, and the bread; then it was a duke's daughter--a noble soul as ever lived--with a tasting-knife, as beautiful as a rose; then another lady enters who glares at me, and gets to her knees as does the other. three times up and down, and then one rubs the plate with bread and salt, as solemn as st. ouen's when he says prayers in the royal court. gentles, that was a day for jersey. for there stood i as master of all, the queen's butler, and the greatest ladies of the land doing my will--though it was all persian mystery to me, save when the kettle-drums began to beat and the trumpet to blow, and in walk bareheaded the yeomen of the guard, all scarlet, with a golden rose on their backs, bringing in a course of twenty-four gold dishes; and i, as queen's butler, receiving them. "then it was i opened my mouth amazed at the endless dishes filled with niceties of earth, and the duke's daughter pops onto my tongue a mouthful of the first dish brought, and then does the same to every yeoman of the guard that carried a dish--that her notorious majesty be safe against the hand of poisoners. there was i, fed by a duke's daughter; and thus was jersey honoured; and the duke's daughter whispers to me, as a dozen other unmarried ladies enter, 'the queen liked not the cut of your frieze jerkin better than do i, seigneur.' with that she joins the others, and they all kneel down and rise up again, and lifting the meat from the table, bear it into the queen's private chamber. "when they return, and the yeomen of the guard go forth, i am left alone with these ladies, and there stand with twelve pair of eyes upon me, little knowing what to do. there was laughter in the faces of some, and looks less taking in the eyes of others; for my lord leicester was to have done the duty i was set to do that day, and he the greatest gallant of the kingdom, as all the world knows. what they said among themselves i know not, but i heard leicester's name, and i guessed that they were mostly in the pay of his soft words. but the duke's daughter was on my side, as was proved betimes when leicester made trouble for us who went from jersey to plead the cause of injured folk. of the earl's enmity to me--a foolish spite of a great nobleman against a norman-jersey gentleman--and of how it injured others for the moment, you all know; but we had him by the heels before the end of it, great earl and favourite as he was." in the same speech lempriere told of his audience with the queen, even as she sat at dinner, and of what she said to him; but since his words give but a partial picture of events, the relation must not be his. when the queen returned from chapel to her apartments, lempriere was called by an attendant, and he stood behind the queen's chair until she summoned him to face her. then, having finished her meal, and dipped her fingers in a bowl of rose-water, she took up the papers leicester had given her--the duke's daughter had read them aloud as she ate--and said: "now, my good seigneur of rozel, answer me these few questions: first, what concern is it of yours whether this michel de la foret be sent back to france, or die here in england?" "i helped to save his life at sea--one good turn deserves another, your high-born majesty." the queen looked sharply at him, then burst out laughing. "god's life, but here's a bull making epigrams!" she said. then her humour changed. "see you, my butler of rozel, you shall speak the truth, or i'll have you where that jerkin will fit you not so well a month hence. plain answers i will have to plain questions, or de carteret of st. ouen's shall have his will of you and your precious pirate. so bear yourself as you would save your head and your honours." lempriere of rozel never had a better moment than when he met the queen of england's threats with faultless intrepidity. "i am concerned about my head, but more about my honours, and most about my honour," he replied. "my head is my own, my honours are my family's, for which i would give my head when needed; and my honour defends both until both are naught--and all are in the service of my queen." smiling, elizabeth suddenly leaned forward, and, with a glance of satisfaction towards the duke's daughter, who was present, said: "i had not thought to find so much logic behind your rampant skull," she said. "you've spoken well, rozel, and you shall speak by the book to the end, if you will save your friends. what concern is it of yours whether michel de la foret live or die?" "it is a concern of one whom i've sworn to befriend, and that is my concern, your ineffable majesty." "who is the friend?" "mademoiselle aubert." "the betrothed of this michel de la foret?" "even so, your exalted majesty. but i made sure de la foret was dead when i asked her to be my wife." "lord, lord, lord, hear this vast infant, this hulking baby of a seigneur, this primeval innocence! listen to him, cousin," said the queen, turning again to the duke's daughter. "was ever the like of it in any kingdom of this earth? he chooses a penniless exile--he, a butler to the queen, with three dove-cotes and the perquage--and a huguenot withal. he is refused; then comes the absent lover over sea, to shipwreck; and our seigneur rescues him, 'fends him; and when yon master exile is in peril, defies his queen's commands"--she tapped the papers lying beside her on the table--"then comes to england with the lady to plead the case before his outraged sovereign, with an outlawed buccaneer for comrade and lieutenant. there is the case, is't not?" "i swore to be her friend," answered lempriere stubbornly, "and i have done according to my word." "there's not another nobleman in my kingdom who would not have thought twice about the matter, with the lady aboard his ship on the high seas- 'tis a miraculous chivalry, cousin," she added to the duke's daughter, who bowed, settled herself again on her velvet cushion, and looked out of the corner of her eyes at lempriere. "you opposed sir hugh pawlett's officers who went to arrest this de la foret," continued elizabeth. "call you that serving your queen? pawlett had our commands." "i opposed them but in form, that the matter might the more surely be brought to your majesty's knowledge." "it might easily have brought you to the tower, man." "i had faith that your majesty would do right in this, as in all else. so i came hither to tell the whole story to your judicial majesty." "our thanks for your certificate of character," said the queen, with amused irony. "what is your wish? make your words few and plain." "i desire before all that michel de la foret shall not be returned to the medici, most radiant majesty." "that's plain. but there are weighty matters 'twixt france and england, and de la foret may turn the scale one way or another. what follows, beggar of rozel?" "that mademoiselle aubert and her father may live without let or hindrance in jersey." "that you may eat sour grapes ad eternam? next?" "that buonespoir be pardoned all offences and let live in jersey on pledge that he sin no more, not even to raid st. ouen's cellars of the muscadella reserved for your generous majesty." there was such humour in lempriere's look as he spoke of the muscadella that the queen questioned him closely upon buonespoir's raid; and so infectious was his mirth, as he told the tale, that elizabeth, though she stamped her foot in assumed impatience, smiled also. "you shall have your buonespoir, seigneur," she said; "but for his future you shall answer as well as he." "for what he does in jersey isle, your commiserate majesty?" "for crime elsewhere, if he be caught, he shall march to tyburn, friend," she answered. then she hurriedly added: "straightway go and bring mademoiselle and her father hither. orders are given for their disposal. and to-morrow at this hour you shall wait upon me in their company. i thank you for your services as butler this day, monsieur of rozel. you do your office rarely." as the seigneur left elizabeth's apartments, he met the earl of leicester hurrying thither, preceded by the queen's messenger. leicester stopped and said, with a slow malicious smile: "farming is good, then--you have fine crops this year on your holding?" the point escaped lempriere at first, for the favourite's look was all innocence, and he replied: "you are mistook, my lord. you will remember i was in the presence-chamber an hour ago, my lord. i am lempriere, seigneur of rozel, butler to her majesty." "but are you, then? i thought you were a farmer and raised cabbages." smiling, leicester passed on. for a moment the seigneur stood pondering the earl's words and angrily wondering at his obtuseness. then suddenly he knew he had been mocked, and he turned and ran after his enemy; but leicester had vanished into the queen's apartments. the queen's fool was standing near, seemingly engaged in the light occupation of catching imaginary flies, buzzing with his motions. as leicester disappeared he looked from under his arm at lempriere. "if a bird will not stop for the salt to its tail, then the salt is damned, nuncio; and you must cry david! and get thee to the quarry." lempriere stared at him swelling with rage; but the quaint smiling of the fool conquered him, and instead of turning on his heel, he spread himself like a colossus and looked down in grandeur. "and wherefore cry david! and get quarrying?" he asked. "come, what sense is there in thy words, when i am wroth with yonder nobleman?" "oh, nuncio, nuncio, thou art a child of innocence and without history. the salt held not the bird for the net of thy anger, nuncio; so it is meet that other ways be found. david the ancient put a stone in a sling and goliath laid him down like an egg in a nest--therefore, nuncio, get thee to the quarry. obligato, which is to say leicester yonder, hath no tail--the devil cut it off and wears it himself. so let salt be damned, and go sling thy stone!" lempriere was good-humoured again. he fumbled in his purse and brought forth a gold-piece. "fool, thou hast spoken like a man born sensible and infinite. i understand thee like a book. thou hast not folly and thou shalt not be answered as if thou wast a fool. but in terms of gold shalt thou have reply." he put the gold-piece in the fool's hand and slapped him on the shoulder. "why now, nuncio," answered the other, "it is clear that there is a fool at court, for is it not written that a fool and his money are soon parted? and this gold-piece is still hot with running 'tween thee and me." lempriere roared. "why, then, for thy hit thou shalt have another gold- piece, gossip. but see"--his voice lowered--"know you where is my friend, buonespoir, the pirate? know you where he is in durance?" "as i know marrow in a bone i know where he hides, nuncio, so come with me," answered the fool. "if de carteret had but thy sense, we could live at peace in jersey," rejoined lempriere, and strode ponderously after the light-footed fool who capered forth singing: "come hither, o come hither, there's a bride upon her bed; they have strewn her o'er with roses, there are roses 'neath her head: life is love and tears and laughter, but the laughter it is dead sing the way to the valley, to the valley! hey, but the roses they are red!" chapter ix the next day at noon, as her majesty had advised the seigneur, de la foret was ushered into the presence. the queen's eye quickened as she saw him, and she remarked with secret pleasure the figure and bearing of this young captain of the huguenots. she loved physical grace and prowess with a full heart. the day had almost passed when she would measure all men against leicester in his favour; and he, knowing this clearly now, saw with haughty anxiety the gradual passing of his power, and clutched futilely at the vanishing substance. thus it was that he now spent his strength in getting his way with the queen in little things. she had been so long used to take his counsel--in some part wise and skilful--that when she at length did without it, or followed her own mind, it became a fever with him to let no chance pass for serving his own will by persuading her out of hers. this was why he had spent an hour the day before in sadly yet vaguely reproaching her for the slight she put upon him in the presence-chamber by her frown; and another in urging her to come to terms with catherine de medici in this small affair--since the frenchwoman had set her revengeful heart upon it--that larger matters might be settled to the gain of england. it was not so much that he had reason to destroy de la foret, as that he saw that the queen was disposed to deal friendly by him and protect him. he did not see the danger of rousing in the queen the same unreasoning tenaciousness of will upon just such lesser things as might well be left to her advisers. in spite of which he almost succeeded, this very day, in regaining, for a time at least, the ground he had lost with her. he had never been so adroit, so brilliant, so witty, so insinuating; and he left her with the feeling that if he had his way concerning de la foret--a mere stubborn whim, with no fair reason behind it--his influence would be again securely set. the sense of crisis was on him. on michel de la foret entering the presence the queen's attention had become riveted. she felt in him a spirit of mastery, yet of unselfish purpose. here was one, she thought, who might well be in her household, or leading a regiment of her troops. the clear fresh face, curling hair, direct look, quiet energy, and air of nobility--this sort of man could only be begotten of a great cause; he were not possible in idle or prosperous times. elizabeth looked him up and down, then affected surprise. "monsieur de la foret," she said, "i do not recognise you in this attire"--glancing towards his dress. de la foret bowed, and elizabeth continued, looking at a paper in her hand: "you landed on our shores of jersey in the robes of a priest of france. the passport for a priest of france was found upon your person when our officers in jersey made search of you. which is yourself-- michel de la foret, soldier, or a priest of france?" de la foret replied gravely that he was a soldier, and that the priestly dress had been but a disguise. "in which papist attire, methinks, michel de la foret, soldier and huguenot, must have been ill at ease--the eagle with the vulture's wing. what say you, monsieur?" "that vulture's wing hath carried me to a safe dove-cote, your gracious majesty," he answered, with a low obeisance. "i'm none so sure of that, monsieur," was elizabeth's answer, and she glanced quizzically at leicester, who made a gesture of annoyance. "our cousin france makes you to us a dark intriguer and conspirator, a dangerous weed in our good garden of england, a 'troublous, treacherous violence'--such are you called, monsieur." "i am in your high majesty's power," he answered, "to do with me as it seemeth best. if your majesty wills it that i be returned to france, i pray you set me upon its coast as i came from it, a fugitive. thence will i try to find my way to the army and the poor stricken people of whom i was. i pray for that only, and not to be given to the red hand of the medici." "red hand--by my faith, but you are bold, monsieur!" leicester tapped his foot upon the floor impatiently, then caught the queen's eye, and gave her a meaning look. de la foret saw the look and knew his enemy, but he did not quail. "bold only by your high majesty's faith, indeed," he answered the queen, with harmless guile. elizabeth smiled. she loved such flattering speech from a strong man. it touched a chord in her deeper than that under leicester's finger. leicester's impatience only made her more self-willed on the instant. "you speak with the trumpet note, monsieur," she said to de la foret. "we will prove you. you shall have a company in my lord leicester's army here, and we will send you upon some service worthy of your fame." "i crave your majesty's pardon, but i cannot do it," was de la foret's instant reply. "i have sworn that i will lift my sword in one cause only, and to that i must stand. and more--the widow of my dead chief, gabriel de montgomery, is set down in this land unsheltered and alone. i have sworn to one who loves her, and for my dead chief's sake, that i will serve her and be near her until better days be come and she may return in quietness to france. in exile we few stricken folk must stand together, your august majesty." elizabeth's eye flashed up. she was impatient of refusal of her favour. she was also a woman, and that de la foret should flaunt his devotion to another woman was little to her liking. the woman in her, which had never been blessed with a noble love, was roused. the sourness of a childless, uncompanionable life was stronger for the moment than her strong mind and sense. "monsieur has sworn this, and monsieur has sworn that," she said petulantly--" and to one who loveth a lady, and for a cause--tut, tut, tut!--" suddenly a kind of intriguing laugh leaped into her eye, and she turned to leicester and whispered in his ear. leicester frowned, then smiled, and glanced up and down de la foret's figure impertinently. "see, monsieur de la foret," she added; "since you will not fight, you shall preach. a priest you came into my kingdom, and a priest you shall remain; but you shall preach good english doctrine and no popish folly." de la foret started, then composed himself, and before he had time to reply, elizabeth continued: "partly for your own sake am i thus gracious; for as a preacher of the word i have not need to give you up, according to agreement with our brother of france. as a rebel and conspirator i were bound to do so, unless you were an officer of my army. the seigneur of rozel has spoken for you, and the comtesse de montgomery has written a pleading letter. also i have from another source a tearful prayer--the ink is scarce dry upon it--which has been of service to you. but i myself have chosen this way of escape for you. prove yourself worthy, and all may be well--but prove yourself you shall. you have prepared your own brine, monsieur; in it you shall pickle." she smiled a sour smile, for she was piqued, and added: "do you think i will have you here squiring of distressed dames, save as a priest? you shall hence to madame of montgomery as her faithful chaplain, once i have heard you preach and know your doctrine." leicester almost laughed outright in the young man's face now, for he had no thought that de la foret would accept, and refusal meant the exile's doom. it seemed fantastic that this noble gentleman, this very type of the perfect soldier, with the brown face of a picaroon and an athletic valour of body, should become a preacher even in necessity. elizabeth, seeing de la foret's dumb amazement and anxiety, spoke up sharply: "do this, or get you hence to the medici, and madame of montgomery shall mourn her protector, and mademoiselle your mistress of the vermilion cheek, shall have one lover the less; which, methinks, our seigneur of rozel would thank me for." de la foret started, his lips pressed firmly together in effort of restraint. there seemed little the queen did not know concerning him; and reference to angele roused him to sharp solicitude. "well, well?" asked elizabeth impatiently, then made a motion to leicester, and he, going to the door, bade some one to enter. there stepped inside the seigneur of rozel, who made a lumbering obeisance, then got to his knees before the queen. "you have brought the lady safely--with her father?" she asked. lempriere, puzzled, looked inquiringly at the queen, then replied: "both are safe without, your infinite majesty." de la foret's face grew pale. he knew now for the first time that angele and her father were in england, and he looked lempriere suspiciously in the eyes; but the swaggering seigneur met his look frankly, and bowed with ponderous and genial gravity. now de la foret spoke. "your high majesty," said he, "if i may ask mademoiselle aubert one question in your presence--" "your answer now; the lady in due season," interposed the queen. "she was betrothed to a soldier, she may resent a priest," said de la foret, with a touch of humour, for he saw the better way was to take the matter with some outward ease. elizabeth smiled. "it is the custom of her sex to have a fondness for both," she answered, with an acid smile. "but your answer?" de la foret's face became exceeding grave. bowing his head, he said: "my sword has spoken freely for the cause; god forbid that my tongue should not speak also. i will do your majesty's behest." the jesting word that was upon the royal lips came not forth, for de la foret's face was that of a man who had determined a great thing, and elizabeth was one who had a heart for high deeds. "the man is brave indeed," she said under her breath, and, turning to the dumfounded seigneur, bade him bring in mademoiselle aubert. a moment later angele entered, came a few steps forward, made obeisance, and stood still. she showed no trepidation, but looked before her steadily. she knew not what was to be required of her, she was a stranger in a strange land; but persecution and exile had gone far to strengthen her spirit and greaten her composure. elizabeth gazed at the girl coldly and critically. to women she was not over-amiable; but as she looked at the young huguenot maid, of this calm bearing, warm of colour, clear of eye, and purposeful of face, some thing kindled in her. most like it was that love for a cause, which was more to be encouraged by her than any woman's love for a man, which as she grew older inspired her with aversion, as talk of marriage brought cynical allusions to her lips. "i have your letter and its protests and its pleadings. there were fine words and adjurations--are you so religious, then?" she asked brusquely. "i am a huguenot, your noble majesty," answered the girl, as though that answered all. "how is it, then, you are betrothed to a roistering soldier?" asked the queen. "some must pray for christ's sake, and some must fight, your most christian majesty," answered the girl. "some must do both," rejoined the queen, in a kinder voice, for the pure spirit of the girl worked upon her. "i am told that monsieur de la foret fights fairly. if he can pray as well, methinks he shall have safety in our kingdom, and ye shall all have peace. on trinity sunday you shall preach in my chapel, monsieur de la foret, and thereafter you shall know your fate." she rose. "my lord," she said to leicester, on whose face gloom had settled, "you will tell the lord chamberlain that monsieur de la foret's durance must be made comfortable in the west tower of my palace till chapel-going of trinity day. i will send him for his comfort and instruction some sermons of latimer." she stepped down from the dais. "you will come with me, mistress," she said to angele, and reached out her hand. angele fell on her knees and kissed it, tears falling down her cheek, then rose and followed the queen from the chamber. she greatly desired to look backward towards de la foret, but some good angel bade her not. she realised that to offend the queen at this moment might ruin all; and elizabeth herself was little like to offer chance for farewell and love- tokens. so it was that, with bowed head, angele left the room with the queen of england, leaving lempriere and de la foret gazing at each other, the one bewildered, the other lost in painful reverie, and leicester smiling maliciously at them both. chapter x every man, if you bring him to the right point, if you touch him in the corner where he is most sensitive, where he most lives, as it were; if you prick his nerves with a needle of suggestion where all his passions, ambitions and sentiments are at white heat, will readily throw away the whole game of life in some mad act out of harmony with all he ever did. it matters little whether the needle prick him by accident or blunder or design, he will burst all bounds, and establish again the old truth that each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity. nor need the occasion of this revolution be a great one; the most trivial event may produce the great fire which burns up wisdom, prudence and habit. the earl of leicester, so long counted astute, clearheaded, and well- governed, had been suddenly foisted out of balance, shaken from his imperious composure, tortured out of an assumed and persistent urbanity, by the presence in greenwich palace of a huguenot exile of no seeming importance, save what the medici grimly gave him by desiring his head. it appeared absurd that the great leicester, whose nearness to the throne had made him the most feared, most notable, and, by virtue of his opportunities, the most dramatic figure in england, should have sleepless nights by reason of a fugitive like michel de la foret. on the surface it was preposterous that he should see in the queen's offer of service to the refugee evidence that she was set to grant him special favours; it was equally absurd that her offer of safety to him on pledge of his turning preacher should seem proof that she meant to have him near her. elizabeth had left the presence-chamber without so much as a glance at him, though she had turned and looked graciously at the stranger. he had hastily followed her, and thereafter impatiently awaited a summons which never came, though he had sent a message that his hours were at her majesty's disposal. waiting, he saw angele's father escorted from the palace by a gentleman pensioner to a lodge in the park; he saw michel de la foret taken to his apartments; he saw the seigneur of rozel walking in the palace grounds with such possession as though they were his own, self-content in every motion of his body. upon the instant the great earl was incensed out of all proportion to the affront of the seigneur's existence. he suddenly hated lempriere only less than he hated michel de la foret. as he still waited irritably for a summons from elizabeth, he brooded on every word and every look she had given him of late; he recalled her manner to him in the ante-chapel the day before, and the admiring look she cast on de la foret but now. he had seen more in it than mere approval of courage and the self-reliant bearing of a refugee of her own religion. these were days when the soldier of fortune mounted to high places. he needed but to carry the banner of bravery, and a busy sword, and his way to power was not hindered by poor estate. to be gently born was the one thing needful, and michel de la foret was gently born; and he had still his sword, though he chose not to use it in elizabeth's service. my lord knew it might be easier for a stranger like de la foret, who came with no encumbrance, to mount to place in the struggles of the court, than for an englishman, whose increasing and ever-bolder enemies were undermining on every hand, to hold his own. he began to think upon ways and means to meet this sudden preference of the queen, made sharply manifest as he waited in the ante-chamber, by a summons to the refugee to enter the queen's apartments. when the refugee came forth again he wore a sword the queen had sent him, and a packet of latimer's sermons were under his arm. leicester was unaware that elizabeth herself did not see de la foret when he was thus hastily called; but that her lady-in-waiting, the duke's daughter, who figured so largely in the pictures lempriere drew of his experiences at greenwich palace, brought forth the sermons and the sword, with this message from the queen: "the queen says that it is but fair to the sword to be by michel de la foret's side when the sermons are in his hand, that his choice have every seeming of fairness. for her majesty says it is still his choice between the sword and the book till trinity day." leicester, however, only saw the sword at the side of the refugee and the gold-bound book under his arm as he came forth, and in a rage he left the palace and gloomily walked under the trees, denying himself to every one. to seize de la foret, and send him to the medici, and then rely on elizabeth's favour for his pardon, as he had done in the past? that might do, but the risk to england was too great. it would be like the queen, if her temper was up, to demand from the medici the return of de la foret, and war might ensue. two women, with two nations behind them, were not to be played lightly against each other, trusting to their common sense and humour. as he walked among the trees, brooding with averted eyes, he was suddenly faced by the seigneur of rozel, who also was shaken from his discretion and the best interests of the two fugitives he was bound to protect, by a late offence against his own dignity. a seed of rancour had been sown in his mind which had grown to a great size and must presently burst into a dark flower of vengeance. he, lempriere of rozel, with three dovecotes, the perquage, and the office of butler to the queen, to be called a "farmer," to be sneered at--it was not in the blood of man, not in the towering vanity of a lempriere, to endure it at any price computable to mortal mind. thus there were in england on that day two fools (there are as many now), and one said: "my lord leicester, i crave a word with you." "crave on, good fellow," responded leicester with a look of boredom, making to pass by. "i am lempriere, lord of rozel, my lord--" "ah yes, i took you for a farmer," answered leicester. "instead of that, i believe you keep doves, and wear a jerkin that fits like a king's. dear lord, so does greatness come with girth!" "the king that gave me dove-cotes gave me honour, and 'tis not for the earl of leicester to belittle it." "what is your coat of arms?" said leicester with a faint smile, but in an assumed tone of natural interest. "a swan upon a sea of azure, two stars above, and over all a sword with a wreath around its point," answered lempriere simply, unsuspecting irony, and touched by leicester's flint where he was most like to flare up with vanity. "ah!" said leicester. "and the motto?" "mea spes supra stella--my hope is beyond the stars." "and the wreath--of parsley, i suppose?" now lempriere understood, and he shook with fury as he roared: "yes, by god, and to be got at the point of the sword, to put on the heads of insolents like lord leicester!" his face was flaming, he was like a cock strutting upon a stable mound. there fell a slight pause, and then leicester said: "to-morrow at daylight, eh?" "now, my lord, now!" "we have no seconds." "'sblood! 'tis not your way, my lord, to be stickling in detail of courtesy." "'tis not the custom to draw swords in secret, lempriere of rozel. also my teeth are not on edge to fight you." lempriere had already drawn his sword, and the look of his eyes was as that of a mad bull in a ring. "you won't fight with me--you don't think rozel your equal?" his voice was high. leicester's face took on a hard, cruel look. "we cannot fight among the ladies," he said quietly. lempriere followed his glance, and saw the duke's daughter and another in the trees near by. he hastily put up his sword. "when, my lord?" he asked. "you will hear from me to-night," was the answer, and leicester went forward hastily to meet the ladies--they had news no doubt. lempriere turned on his heel and walked quickly away among the trees towards the quarters where buonespoir was in durance, which was little more severe than to keep him within the palace yard. there he found the fool and the pirate in whimsical converse. the fool had brought a letter of inquiry and warm greeting from angele to buonespoir, who was laboriously inditing one in return. when lempriere entered the pirate greeted him jovially. "in the very pinch of time you come," he said. "you have grammar and syntax and etiquette." "'tis even so, nuncio," said the fool. "here is needed prosody potential. exhale!" the three put their heads together above the paper. chapter xi "i would know your story. how came you and yours to this pass? where were you born? of what degree are you? and this michel de la foret, when came he to your feet--or you to his arms? i would know all. begin where life began; end where you sit here at the feet of elizabeth. this other cushion to your knees. there--now speak. we are alone." elizabeth pushed a velvet cushion towards angele, where she half-knelt, half-sat on the rush-strewn floor of the great chamber. the warm light of the afternoon sun glowed through the thick-tinted glass high up, and, in the gleam, the heavy tapestries sent by an archduke, once suitor for elizabeth's hand, emerged with dramatic distinctness, and peopled the room with silent watchers of the great queen and the nobly-born but poor and fugitive huguenot. a splendid piece of sculpture--eleanor, wife of edward--given elizabeth by another royal suitor, who had sought to be her consort through many years, caught the warm bath of gold and crimson from the clerestory and seemed alive and breathing. against the pedestal the queen had placed her visitor, the red cushions making vivid contrast to her white gown and black hair. in the half-kneeling, half-sitting posture, with her hands clasped before her, so to steady herself to composure, angele looked a suppliant--and a saint. her pure, straightforward gaze, her smooth, urbane forehead, the guilelessness that spoke in every feature, were not made worldly by the intelligence and humour reposing in the brown depths of her eyes. not a line vexed her face or forehead. her countenance was of a singular and almost polished smoothness, and though her gown was severely simple by comparison with silks and velvets, furs and ruffles of a gorgeous court at its most gorgeous period, yet in it here and there were touches of exquisite fineness. the black velvet ribbon slashing her sleeves, the slight cloud-like gathering of lace at the back of her head, gave a distinguished softness to her appearance. she was in curious contrast to the queen, who sat upon heaped-up cushions, her rich buff and black gown a blaze of jewels, her yellow hair, now streaked with grey, roped with pearls, her hands heavy with rings, her face past its youth, past its hopefulness, however noble and impressive, past its vivid beauty. her eyes wore ever a determined look, were persistent and vigilant, with a lurking trouble, yet flooded, too, by a quiet melancholy, like a low, insistent note that floats through an opera of passion, romance, and tragedy; like a tone of pathos giving deep character to some splendid pageant, which praises whilst it commemorates, proclaiming conquest while the grass has not yet grown on quiet houses of the children of the sword who no more wield the sword. evasive, cautious, secretive, creator of her own policy, she had sacrificed her womanhood to the power she held and the state she served. vain, passionate, and faithful, her heart all england and elizabeth, the hunger for glimpses of what she had never known, and was never to know, thrust itself into her famished life; and she was wont to indulge, as now, in fancies and follow some emotional whim with a determination very like to eccentricity. that, at this time, when great national events were forward, when conspiracies abounded, when parliament was grimly gathering strength to compel her to marry; and her council were as sternly pursuing their policy for the destruction of leicester; while that very day had come news of a rising in the north and of fresh popish plots hatched in france--that in such case, this day she should set aside all business, refuse ambassadors and envoys admission, and occupy herself with two huguenot refugees seemed incredible to the younger courtiers. to such as cecil, however, there was clear understanding. he knew that when she seemed most inert, most impassive to turbulent occurrences, most careless of consequences, she was but waiting till, in her own mind, her plans were grown; so that she should see her end clearly ere she spoke or moved. now, as the great minister showed himself at the door of the chamber and saw elizabeth seated with angele, he drew back instinctively, expectant of the upraised hand which told him he must wait. and, in truth, he was nothing loth to do so, for his news he cared little to deliver, important though it was that she should have it promptly and act upon it soon. he turned away with a feeling of relief, however, for this gossip with the huguenot maid would no doubt interest her, give new direction to her warm sympathies, which if roused in one thing were ever more easily roused in others. he knew that a crisis was nearing in the royal relations with leicester. in a life of devotion to her service he had seen her before in this strange mood, and he could feel that she was ready for an outburst. as he thought of de la foret and the favour with which she had looked at him he smiled grimly, for if it meant aught it meant that it would drive leicester to some act which would hasten his own doom; though, indeed, it might also make another path more difficult for himself, for the parliament, for the people. little as elizabeth could endure tales of love and news of marriage; little as she believed in any vows, save those made to herself; little as she was inclined to adjust the rough courses of true love, she was the surgeon to this particular business, and she had the surgeon's love of laying bare even to her own cynicism the hurt of the poor patient under her knife. indeed, so had angele impressed her that for once she thought she might hear the truth. because she saw the awe in the other's face and a worshipping admiration of the great protectress of protestantism, who had by large gifts of men and money in times past helped the cause, she looked upon her here with kindness. "speak now, mistress fugitive, and i will listen," she added, as cecil withdrew; and she made a motion to musicians in a distant gallery. angele's heart fluttered to her mouth, but the soft, simple music helped her, and she began with eyes bent upon the ground, her linked fingers clasping and unclasping slowly. "i was born at rouen, your high majesty," she said. "my mother was a cousin of the prince of passy, the great protestant--" "of passy--ah!" said elizabeth amazed. "then you are protestants indeed; and your face is no invention, but cometh honestly. no, no, 'tis no accident--god rest his soul, great passy!" "she died--my mother--when i was a little child. i can but just remember her--so brightly quiet, so quick, so beautiful. in rouen life had little motion; but now and then came stir and turmoil, for war sent its message into the old streets, and our captains and our peasants poured forth to fight for the king. once came the king and queen--francis and mary--" elizabeth drew herself upright with an exclamation. "ah, you have seen her--mary of scots," she said sharply. "you have seen her?" "as near as i might touch her with my hand, as near as is your high majesty. she spoke to me--my mother's father was in her train;--as yet we had not become huguenots, nor did we know her majesty as now the world knows. they came, the king and queen--and that was the beginning." she paused, and looked shyly at elizabeth, as though she found it hard to tell her story. "and the beginning, it was--?" said elizabeth, impatient and intent. "we went to court. the queen called my mother into her train. but it was in no wise for our good. at court my mother pined away--and so she died in durance." "wherefore in durance?" "to what she saw she would not shut her eyes; to what she heard she would not close her soul; what was required of her she would not do." "she would not obey the queen?" "she could not obey those whom the queen favoured. then the tyranny that broke her heart--" the queen interrupted her. "in very truth, but 'tis not in france alone that queen's favourites grasp the sceptre and speak the word. hath a queen a thousand eyes--can she know truth where most dissemble?" "there was a man--he could not know there was one true woman there, who for her daughter's sake, for her desired advancement, and because she was cousin of passy, who urged it, lived that starved life; this man, this prince, drew round her feet snares, set pit-falls for her while my father was sent upon a mission. steadfast she kept her soul unspotted; but it wore away her life. the queen would not permit return to rouen--who can tell what tale was told her by one whom she foiled? and so she stayed. in this slow, savage persecution, when she was like a bird that, thinking it is free, flieth against the window-pane and falleth back beaten, so did she stay, and none could save her. to cry out, to throw herself upon the spears, would have been ruin of herself, her husband and her child; and for these she lived." elizabeth's eyes had kindled. perhaps never in her life had the life at court been so exposed to her. the simple words, meant but to convey the story, and with no thought behind, had thrown a light on her own court, on her own position. adept in weaving a sinuous course in her policy, in making mazes for others to tread, the mazes which they in turn prepared had never before been traced beneath her eyes to the same vivid and ultimate effect. "help me, ye saints, but things are not at such a pass in this place!" she said abruptly, but with weariness in her voice. "yet sometimes i know not. the court is a city by itself, walled and moated, and hath a life all its own. 'if there be found ten honest men within the city yet will i save it,' saith the lord. by my father's head, i would not risk a finger on the hazard if this city, this court of elizabeth were set 'twixt the fire from heaven and eternal peace. in truth, child, i would lay me down and die in black disgust were it not that one might come hereafter would make a very sodom or gomorrah of this land: and out yonder--out in all my counties, where the truth of england is among my poor burgesses, who die for the great causes which my nobles profess but risk not their lives--out yonder all that they have won, and for which i have striven, would be lost. . . . speak on. i have not heard so plain a tongue and so little guile these twenty years." angele continued, more courage in her voice. "in the midst of it all came the wave of the new faith upon my mother. and before ill could fall upon her from her foes, she died and was at rest. then we returned to rouen, my father and i, and there we lived in peril, but in great happiness of soul until the day of massacre. that night in paris we were given greatly of the mercy of god." "you were there--you were in the massacre at paris?" in the house of the duke of langon, with whom was resting after a hazardous enterprise, michel de la foret." "and here beginneth the second lesson," said the queen with a smile on her lips; but there was a look of scrutiny in her eyes, and something like irony in her tone. "and i will swear by all the stars of heaven that this michel saved ye both. is it not so?" "it is even so. by his skill and bravery we found our way to safety, and in a hiding-place near to our loved rouen watched him return from the gates of death." "he was wounded then?" "seven times wounded, and with as little blood left in him as would fill a cup. but it was summer, and we were in the hills, and they brought us, our friends of rouen, all that we had need of; and so god was with us. "but did he save thy life, except by skill, by indirect and fortunate wisdom? was there deadly danger upon thee? did he beat down the sword of death?" "he saved my life thrice directly. the wounds he carried were got by interposing his own sword 'twixt death and me." "and that hath need of recompense?" "my life was little worth the wounds he suffered; but i waited not until he saved it to owe it unto him. all that it is was his before he drew the sword." "and 'tis this ye would call love betwixt ye--sweet givings and takings of looks, and soft sayings, and unchangeable and devouring faith. is't this--and is this all?" the girl had spoken out of an innocent heart, but the challenge in the queen's voice worked upon her, and though she shrank a little, the fulness of her soul welled up and strengthened her. she spoke again, and now in her need and in her will to save the man she loved, by making this majesty of england his protector, her words had eloquence. "it is not all, noble queen. love is more than that. it is the waking in the poorest minds, in the most barren souls, of something greater than themselves--as a chemist should find a substance that would give all other things by touching of them a new and higher value; as light and sun draw from the earth the tendrils of the seed that else had lain unproducing. 'tis not alone soft words and touch of hand or lip. this caring wholly for one outside one's self kills that self which else would make the world blind and deaf and dumb. none hath loved greatly but hath helped to love in others. ah, most sweet majesty, for great souls like thine, souls born great, this medicine is not needful, for already hath the love of a nation inspired and enlarged it; but for souls like mine and of so many, none better and none worse than me, to love one other soul deeply and abidingly lifts us higher than ourselves. your majesty hath been loved by a whole people, by princes and great men in a different sort--is it not the world's talk that none that ever reigned hath drawn such slavery of princes, and of great nobles who have courted death for hopeless love of one beyond their star? and is it not written in the world's book also that the queen of england hath loved no man, but hath poured out her heart to a people; and hath served great causes in all the earth because of that love which hath still enlarged her soul, dowered at birth beyond reckoning?" tears filled her eyes. "ah, your supreme majesty, to you whose heart is universal, the love of one poor mortal seemeth a small thing, but to those of little consequence it is the cable by which they unsteadily hold over the chasm 'twixt life and immortality. to thee, oh greatest monarch of the world, it is a staff on which thou need'st not lean, which thou hast never grasped; to me it is my all; without it i fail and fall and die." she had spoken as she felt, yet, because she was a woman and guessed the mind of another woman, she had touched elizabeth where her armour was weakest. she had suggested that the queen had been the object of adoration, but had never given her heart to any man; that hers was the virgin heart and life; and that she had never stooped to conquer. without realising it, and only dimly moving with that end in view, she had whetted elizabeth's vanity. she had indeed soothed a pride wounded of late beyond endurance, suspecting, as she did, that leicester had played his long part for his own sordid purposes, that his devotion was more alloy than precious metal. no note of praise could be pitched too high for elizabeth, and if only policy did not intervene, if but no political advantage was lost by saving de la foret, that safety seemed now secure. "you tell a tale and adorn it with good grace," she said, and held out her hand. angele kissed it. "and you have said to elizabeth what none else dared to say since i was queen here. he who hath never seen the lightning hath no dread of it. i had not thought there was in the world so much artlessness, with all the power of perfect art. but we live to be wiser. thou shalt continue in thy tale. thou hast seen mary, once queen of france, now queen of scots--answer me fairly; without if, or though, or any sort of doubt, the questions i shall put. which of us twain, this ruin-starred queen or i, is of higher stature?" "she hath advantage in little of your majesty," bravely answered angele. "then," answered elizabeth sourly, "she is too high, for i myself am neither too high nor too low. . . . and of complexion, which is the fairer?" "her complexion is the fairer, but your majesty's countenance hath truer beauty, and sweeter majesty." elizabeth frowned slightly, then said: "what exercises did she take when you were at the court?" "sometimes she hunted, your majesty, and sometimes she played upon the virginals." "did she play to effect?" "reasonably, your noble majesty." "you shall hear me play, and then speak truth upon us, for i have known none with so true a tongue since my father died." thereon she called to a lady who waited near in a little room to bring an instrument; but at that moment cecil appeared again at the door, and his face seeming to show anxiety, elizabeth, with a sigh, beckoned him to enter. "your face, cecil, is as long as a lenten collect. what raven croaks in england on may day eve?" cecil knelt before her, and gave into her hand a paper. "what record runs here?" she asked querulously. "a prayer of your faithful lords and commons that your majesty will grant speech with their chosen deputies to lay before your majesty a cause they have at heart." "touching of--?" darkly asked the queen. "the deputies wait even now--will not your majesty receive them? they have come humbly, and will go hence as humbly on the instant, if the hour is ill chosen." immediately elizabeth's humour changed. a look of passion swept across her face, but her eyes lighted, and her lips smiled proudly. she avoided troubles by every means, fought off by subtleties the issues which she must meet; but when the inevitable hour came none knew so well to meet it as though it were a dearest friend, no matter what the danger, how great the stake. "they are here at my door, these good servants of the state--shall they be kept dangling?" she said loudly. "though it were time for prayers and god's mercy yet should they speak with me, have my counsel, or my hand upon the sacred parchment of the state. bring them hither, cecil. now we shall see--now you shall see, angele of rouen, now you shall see how queens shall have no hearts to call their own, but be head and heart and soul and body at the will of every churl who thinks he serves the state and knows the will of heaven. stand here at my left hand. mark the players and the play." kneeling, the deputies presented a resolution from the lords and commons that the queen should, without more delay, in keeping with her oft- expressed resolve and the promise of her council, appoint one who should succeed to the throne in case of her death "without posterity." her faithful people pleaded with her gracious majesty to forego unwillingness to marry and seek a consort worthy of her supreme consideration, to be raised to a place beside her near that throne which she had made the greatest in the world. gravely, solemnly, the chief members of the lords and commons spoke, and with as weighty pauses and devoted protestations as though this were the first time their plea had been urged, this obvious duty had been set out before her. long ago in the flush and pride of her extreme youth and the full assurance of the fruits of marriage, they had spoken with the same sober responsibility; and though her youth had gone and the old certainty had for ever disappeared, they spoke of her marriage and its consequences as though it were still that far-off yesterday. well for them that they did so, for though time had flown and royal suitors without number had become figures dim in the people's mind, elizabeth, fed upon adulation, invoked, admired, besieged by young courtiers, flattered by maids who praised her beauty, had never seen the hands of the clock pass high noon, and still remained under the dearest and saddest illusion which can rest in a woman's mind. long after the hands of life's clock had moved into afternoon, the ancient prayer was still gravely presented that she should marry and give an heir to england's crown; and she as solemnly listened and dropped her eyes, and strove to hide her virgin modesty behind a high demeanour which must needs sink self in royal duty. "these be the dear desires of your supreme majesty's faithful lords and commons and the people of the shires whose wills they represent. your majesty's life, god grant it last beyond that of the youngest of your people so greatly blessed in your rule! but accidents of time be many; and while the world is full of guile, none can tell what peril may beset the crown, if your majesty's wisdom sets not apart, gives not to her country, one whom the nation can surround with its care, encompass lovingly by its duty." the talk with angele had had a curious influence upon the queen. it was plain that now she was moved by real feeling, and that, though she deceived herself, or pretended so to do, shutting her eyes to sober facts, and dreaming old dreams--as it were, in a world where never was a mirror nor a timepiece--yet there was working in her a fresher spirit, urging her to a fairer course than she had shaped for many a day. "my lords and gentlemen and my beloved subjects," she answered presently, and for an instant set her eyes upon angele, then turned to them again, "i pray you stand and hear me. . . . ye have spoken fair words to my face, and of my face, and of the person of this daughter of great henry, from whom i got whatever grace or manner or favour is to me; and by all your reasoning you do flatter the heart of the queen of england, whose mind indeed sleeps not in deed or desire for this realm. ye have drawn a fair picture of this mortal me, and though from the grace of the picture the colours may fade by time, may give by weather, may be spoiled by chance, yet my loyal mind, nor time with her swift wings shall overtake, nor the misty clouds may darken, nor chance with her slippery foot may overthrow. it sets its course by the heart of england, and when it passeth there shall be found that one shall be left behind who shall be surety of all that hath been lying in the dim warehouse of fate for england's high future. be sure that in this thing i have entered into the weigh-house, and i hold the balance, and ye shall be well satisfied. ye have been fruitful in counsel, ye have been long knitting a knot never tied, ye shall have comfort soon. but know ye beyond peradventure that i have bided my time with good reason. if our loom be framed with rotten hurdles, when our web is well-ny done, our work is yet to begin. against mischance and dark discoveries my mind, with knowledge hidden from you, hath been firmly arrayed. if it be in your thought that i am set against a marriage which shall serve the nation, purge yourselves, friends, of that sort of heresy, for the belief is awry. though i think that to be one and always one, neither mated nor mothering, be good for a private woman, for a prince it is not meet. therefore, say to my lords and commons that i am more concerned for what shall chance to england when i am gone than to linger out my living thread. i hope, my lords and gentlemen, to die with a good nunc dimittis, which could not be if i did not give surety for the nation after my graved bones. ye shall hear soon--ye shall hear and be satisfied, and so i give you to the care of almighty god." once more they knelt, and then slowly withdrew, with faces downcast and troubled. they had secret knowledge which she did not yet possess, but which at any moment she must know, and her ambiguous speech carried no conviction to their minds. yet their conference with her was most opportune, for the news she must presently receive, brought by a messenger from scotland who had outstripped all others, would no doubt move her to action which should set the minds of the people at rest, and go far to stem the tide of conspiracy flowing through the kingdom. elizabeth stood watching them, and remained gazing after they had disappeared; then rousing herself, she turned to leave the room, and beckoned to angele to follow. chapter xii as twilight was giving place to night angele was roused from the reverie into which she had fallen, by the duke's daughter, who whispered to her that if she would have a pleasure given to but few, she would come quickly. taking her hand the duke's daughter--as true and whimsical a spirit as ever lived in troubled days and under the aegis of the sword- led her swiftly to the queen's chamber. they did not enter, but waited in a quiet gallery. "the queen is playing upon the virginals, and she playeth best when alone; so stand you here by this tapestry, and you shall have pleasure beyond payment," said the duke's daughter. angele had no thought that the queen of her vanity had commanded that she be placed there as though secretly, and she listened dutifully at first; but presently her ears were ravished; and even the duke's daughter showed some surprise, for never had she heard the queen play with such grace and feeling. the countenance of the musician was towards them, and at last, as though by accident, elizabeth looked up and saw the face of her lady. "spy, spy," she cried. "come hither--come hither, all of you!" when they had descended and knelt to her, she made as if she would punish the duke's daughter by striking her with a scarf that lay at her hand, but to angele she said: "how think you then, hath that other greater skill--darnley's wife i mean?" "not she or any other hath so delighted me," said angele, with worship in her eyes--so doth talent given to majesty become lifted beyond its measure. the queen's eyes lighted. "we shall have dancing, then," she said. "the dance hath charms for me. we shall not deny our youth. the heart shall keep as young as the body." an instant later the room was full of dancers, and elizabeth gave her hand to leicester, who bent every faculty to pleasing her. his face had darkened as he had seen angele beside her, but the queen's graciousness, whether assumed or real, had returned, and her face carried a look of triumph and spirit and delight. again and again she glanced towards angele, and what she saw evidently gave her pleasure, for she laughed and disported herself with grace and an agreeable temper, and leicester lent himself to her spirit with adroit wit and humility. he had seen his mistake of the morning, and was now intent to restore himself to favour. he succeeded well, for the emotions roused in elizabeth during the day, now heightened by vanity and emulation, found in him a centre upon which they could converge; and, in her mind, angele, for the nonce, was disassociated from any thought of de la foret. leicester's undoubted gifts were well and cautiously directed, and his talent of assumed passion--his heart was facile, and his gallantry knew no bounds--was put to dexterous use, convincing for the moment. the queen seemed all complaisance again. presently she had angele brought to her. "how doth her dance compare-she who hath wedded darnley?" "she danceth not so high nor disposedly, with no such joyous lightness as your high majesty, but yet she moveth with circumspection." "circumspection--circumspection, that is no gift in dancing, which should be wilful yet airily composed, thoughtless yet inducing. circumspection! --in nothing else hath mary shown it where she should. 'tis like this queen perversely to make a psalm of dancing, and then pirouette with sacred duty. but you have spoken the truth, and i am well content. so get you to your rest." she tapped ange'le's cheek. "you shall remain here to-night. 'tis too late for you to be sent abroad." she was about to dismiss her, when there was a sudden stir. cecil had entered and was making his way to the queen, followed by two strangers. elizabeth waited their approach. "your gracious majesty," said cecil, in a voice none heard save elizabeth, for all had fallen back at a wave of her hand, "the queen of scots is the mother of a fair son." elizabeth's face flushed, then became pale, and she struck her knee with her clinched hand. "who bringeth the news?" she inquired in a sharp voice. "sir andrew melvill here." "who is with him yonder?" "one who hath been attached to the queen of scots." "he hath the ill look of such an one," she answered, and then said below her breath bitterly: "she hath a son--and i am but a barren stock." rising, she added hurriedly: "we will speak to the people at the may day sports to-morrow. let there be great feasting." she motioned to sir andrew melvill to come forward, and with a gesture of welcome and a promise of speech with him on the morrow she dismissed them. since the two strangers had entered, angele's eyes had been fastened on the gentleman who accompanied sir andrew melvill. her first glance at him had sent a chill through her, and she remained confused and disturbed. in vain her memory strove to find where the man was set in her past. the time, the place, the event eluded her, but a sense of foreboding possessed her; and her eyes followed him with strained anxiety as he retired from the presence. chapter xiii as had been arranged when lempriere challenged leicester, they met soon after dawn among the trees beside the thames. a gentleman of the court, to whom the duke's daughter had previously presented lempriere, gaily agreed to act as second, and gallantly attended the lord of rozel in his adventurous enterprise. there were few at court who had not some grudge against leicester, few who would not willingly have done duty at such a time; for leicester's friends were of fair-weather sort, ready to defend him, to support him, not for friendship but for the crumbs that dropped from the table of his power. the favourite himself was attended by the earl of ealing, a youngster who had his spurs to win, who thought it policy to serve the great time-server. two others also came. it was a morning little made for deeds of rancour or of blood. as they passed, the early morning mists above the green fields of kent and essex were being melted by the summer sun. the smell of ripening fruit came on them with pungent sweetness, their feet crashed odorously through clumps of tiger-lilies, and the dew on the ribbon-grass shook glistening drops upon their velvets. overhead the carolling of the thrush came swimming recklessly through the trees, and far over in the fields the ploughmen started upon the heavy courses of their labour; while here and there poachers with bows and arrows slid through the green undergrowth, like spies hovering on an army's flank. to lempriere the morning carried no impression save that life was well worth living. no agitation passed across his nerves, no apprehension reached his mind. he had no imagination; he loved the things that his eyes saw because they filled him with enjoyment; but why they were, or whence they came, or what they meant or boded, never gave him meditation. a vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling and rich with energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the heavens would not fall. the stinging sweetness of the morning was a tonic to all his energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through the lush grasses and boskage as though marching to a marriage. leicester, on his part, no more caught at the meaning of the morning, at the long whisper of enlivened nature, than did his foe. the day gave to him no more than was his right. if the day was not fine, then leicester was injured; but if the day was fine, then leicester had his due. moral blindness made him blind for the million deep teachings trembling round him. he felt only the garish and the splendid. so it was that at kenilworth, where his queen had visited him, the fetes that he had held would far outshine the fete which would take place in greenwich park on this may day. the fete of this may day would take place, but would he see it? the thought flashed through his mind that he might not; but he trod it under foot; not through an inborn, primitive egotism like that of lempriere, but through an innate arrogance, an unalterable belief that fate was ever on his side. he had played so many tricks with fate, had mocked while taking its gifts so often, that, like the son who has flouted his indulgent father through innumerable times, he conceived that he should never be disinherited. it irked him that he should be fighting with a farmer, as he termed the seigneur of the jersey isle; but there was in the event, too, a sense of relief, for he had a will for murder. yesterday's events were still fresh in his mind; and he had a feeling that the letting of lempriere's blood would cool his own and be some cure for the choler which the presence of these strangers at the court had wrought in him. there were better swordsmen in england than he, but his skill was various, and he knew tricks of the trade which this primitive norman could never have learnt. he had some touch of wit, some biting observation, and, as he neared the place of the encounter, he played upon the coming event with a mordant frivolity. not by nature a brave man, he was so much a fatalist, such a worshipper of his star, that he had acquired an artificial courage which had served him well. the unschooled gentlemen with him roared with laughter at his sallies, and they came to the place of meeting as though to a summer feast. "good-morrow, nobility," said leicester with courtesy overdone, and bowing much too low. "good-morrow, valentine," answered lempriere, flushing slightly at the disguised insult, and rising to the moment. "i hear the crop of fools is short this year in jersey, and through no fault of yours--you've done your best most loyally," jeered leicester, as he doffed his doublet, his gentlemen laughing in derision. "'tis true enough, my lord, and i have come to find new seed in england, where are fools to spare; as i trust in heaven one shall be spared on this very day for planting yonder." he was eaten with rage, but he was cool and steady. he was now in his linen and small clothes and looked like some untrained hercules. "well said, nobility," laughed leicester with an ugly look. "'tis seed time--let us measure out the seed. on guard!" never were two men such opposites, never two so seemingly ill-matched. leicester's dark face and its sardonic look, his lithe figure, the nervous strength of his bearing, were in strong contrast to the bulking breadth, the perspiring robustness of lempriere of rozel. it was not easy of belief that lempriere should be set to fight this toreador of a fighting court. but there they stood, lempriere's face with a great-eyed gravity looming above his rotund figure like a moon above a purple cloud. but huge and loose though the seigneur's motions seemed, he was as intent as though there were but two beings in the universe, leicester and himself. a strange alertness seemed to be upon him, and, as leicester found when the swords crossed, he was quicker than his bulk gave warrant. his perfect health made his vision sure; and, though not a fine swordsman, he had done much fighting in his time, had been ever ready for the touch of steel; and had served some warlike days in fighting france, where fate had well befriended him. that which leicester meant should be by-play of a moment became a full half-hour's desperate game. leicester found that the thrust--the fatal thrust learned from an italian master-- he meant to give, was met by a swift precision, responding to quick vision. again and again he would have brought the end, but lempriere heavily foiled him. the wound which the seigneur got at last, meant to be mortal, was saved from that by the facility of a quick apprehension. indeed, for a time the issue had seemed doubtful, for the endurance and persistence of the seigneur made for exasperation and recklessness in his antagonist, and once blood was drawn from the wrist of the great man; but at length lempriere went upon the aggressive. here he erred, for leicester found the chance for which he had manoeuvred--to use the feint and thrust got out of italy. he brought his enemy low, but only after a duel the like of which had never been seen at the court of england. the toreador had slain his bull at last, but had done no justice to his reputation. never did man more gallantly sustain his honour with heaviest odds against him than did the seigneur of rozel that day. as he was carried away by the merry gentlemen of the court, he called back to the favourite: "leicester is not so great a swordsman after all. hang fast to your honours by the skin of your teeth, my lord." chapter xiv it was monday, and the eyes of london and the court were turned towards greenwich park, where the queen was to give entertainment to the french envoy who had come once more to urge upon the queen marriage with a son of the medici, and to obtain an assurance that she would return to france the widow of the great montgomery and his valiant lieutenant, michel de la foret. the river was covered with boats and barges, festooned, canopied, and hung with banners and devices; and from sunrise music and singing conducted down the stream the gaily dressed populace--for those were the days when a man spent on his ruff and his hose and his russet coat as much as would feed and house a family for a year; when the fine- figured ruflier with sables about his neck, corked slipper, trimmed buskin, and cloak of silk or damask furred, carried his all upon his back. loud-voiced gallants came floating by; men of a hundred guilds bearing devices pompously held on their way to the great pageant; country bumpkins up from surrey roystered and swore that there was but one land that god had blessed, and challenged the grinning watermen from gravesend and hampton court to deny it; and the sun with ardour drove from the sky every invading cloud, leaving essex and kent as far as eye could see perfect green gardens of opulence. before elizabeth had left her bed, london had emptied itself into greenwich park. thither the london companies had come in their varied dazzling accoutrements--hundreds armed in fine corselets bearing the long moorish pike; tall halberdiers in the unique armour called almainrivets, and gunners or muleteers equipped in shirts of mail with morions or steel caps. here too were to come the gentlemen pensioners, resplendent in scarlet, to "run with the spear;" and hundreds of men-at-arms were set at every point to give garish bravery to all. thousands of citizens, openmouthed, gazed down the long arenas of green festooned with every sort of decoration and picturesque invention. cages of large birds from the indies, fruits, corn, fishes, grapes, hung in the trees, players perched in the branches discoursed sweet music, and poets recited their verses from rustic bridges or on platforms with weapons and armour hung trophy-wise on ragged staves. upon a small lake a dolphin four-and- twenty feet in length came swimming, within its belly a lively orchestra; italian tumblers swung from rope to bar; and crowds gathered at the places where bear and bull-baiting were to excite the none too fastidious tastes of the time. all morning the gay delights went on, and at high noon the cry was carried from mouth to mouth: "the queen! the queen!" she appeared on a balcony surrounded by her lords and ladies, and there received the diplomatists, speaking at length to the french envoy in a tone of lightness and elusive cheerfulness which he was at a loss to understand and tried in vain to pierce by cogent remarks bearing on matters of moment involved in his embassage. not far away stood leicester, but the queen had done no more than note his presence by a glance, and now and again with ostentatious emphasis she spoke to angele, whom she had had brought to her in the morning before chapel-going. thus early, after a few questions and some scrutiny, she had sent her in charge of a gentleman-at-arms and a maid of the duke's daughter to her father's lodging, with orders to change her robe, to return to the palace in good time before noon, and to bring her father to a safe place where he could watch the pleasures of the people. when angele came to the presence again she saw that the queen was wearing a gown of pure white with the sleeves shot with black, such as she herself had worn when admitted to audience yesterday. vexed, agitated, embittered as elizabeth had been by the news brought to her the night before, she had kept her wardrobers and seamstresses at work the whole night to alter a white satin habit to the simplicity and style of that which angele had worn. "what think you of my gown, my lady refugee?" she said to angele at last, as the gentlemen pensioners paraded in the space below, followed by the knights tilters--at their head the queen's champion, sir henry lee: twenty-five of the most gallant and favoured of the courtiers of elizabeth, including the gravest of her counsellors and the youngest gallant who had won her smile, master christopher hatton. some of these brave suitors, taken from the noblest families, had appeared in the tilt- yard every anniversary of the year of her accession, and had lifted their romantic office, which seemed but the service of enamoured knights, into an almost solemn dignity. the vast crowd disposed itself around the great improvised yard where the knights tilters were to engage, and the queen, followed by her retinue, descended to the dais which had been set up near the palace. her white satin gown, roped with pearls only at the neck and breast, glistened in the bright sun, and her fair hair took on a burnished radiance. as angele passed with her in the gorgeous procession, she could not but view the scene with admiring eye, albeit her own sweet sober attire, a pearly grey, seemed little in keeping; for the ladies and lords were most richly attired, and the damask and satin cloaks, crimson velvet gowns, silk hoods, and jewelled swords and daggers made a brave show. she was like some moth in a whorl of butterflies. her face was pale, and her eye had a curious disturbed look, as though they had seen frightening things. the events of last evening had tried her simple spirit, and she shrank from this glittering show; but the knowledge that her lover's life was in danger, and that her happiness was here and now at stake, held her bravely to her place, beset as it was with peril; for the queen, with that eccentricity which had lifted her up yesterday, might cast her down to-day, and she had good reason to fear the power and influence of leicester, whom she knew with a sure instinct was intent on michel's ruin. behind all her nervous shrinking and her heart's doubt, the memory of the face of the stranger she had seen last night with sir andrew melvill tortured her. she could not find the time and place where she had seen the eyes that, in the palace, had filled her with mislike and abhorrence as they looked upon the queen. again and again in her fitful sleep had she dreamt of him, and a sense of foreboding was heavy upon her--she seemed to hear the footfall of coming disaster. the anxiety of her soul lent an unnatural brightness to her eyes; so that more than one enamoured courtier made essay to engage her in conversation, and paid her deferential compliment when the queen's eyes were not turned her way. come to the dais, she was placed not far from her majesty, beside the duke's daughter, whose whimsical nature found frequent expression in what the queen was wont to call "a merry volt." she seemed a privileged person, with whom none ventured to take liberties, and against whom none was entitled to bear offence, for her quips were free from malice, and her ingenuity in humour of mark. she it was who had put into the queen's head that morning an idea which was presently to startle angele and all others. leicester was riding with the knights tilters, and as they cantered lightly past the dais, trailing their spears in obeisance, elizabeth engaged herself in talk with cecil, who was standing near, and appeared not to see the favourite. this was the first time since he had mounted to good fortune that she had not thrown him a favour to pick up with his spear and wear in her honour, and he could scarce believe that she had meant to neglect him. he half halted, but she only deigned an inclination of the head, and he spurred his horse angrily on with a muttered imprecation, yet, to all seeming, gallantly paying homage. "there shall be doings ere this day is done. 'beware the gipsy'!" said the duke's daughter in a low tone to angele, and she laughed. lightly. "who is the gipsy?" asked angele, with good suspicion, however. "who but leicester," answered the other. "is he not black enough?" "why was he so called? who put the name upon who but the earl of sussex as he died--as noble a chief, as true a counsellor as ever spoke truth to a queen. but truth is not all at court, and sussex was no flatterer. leicester bowed under the storm for a moment when sussex showed him in his true colours; but sussex had no gift of intrigue, the tide turned, and so he broke his heart, and died. but he left a message which i sometimes remember with my collects. 'i am now passing to another world,' said he, 'and must leave you to your fortunes and to the queen's grace and goodness; but beware the gipsy, for he will be too hard for all of you; you know not the beast so well as i do.' but my lord sussex was wrong. one there is who knows him through and through, and hath little joy in the knowing." the look in the eyes of the duke's daughter became like steel and her voice hardened, and angele realised that leicester had in this beautiful and delicate maid-of-honour as bitter an enemy as ever brought down the mighty from their seats; that a pride had been sometime wounded, suffered an unwarrantable affront, which only innocence could feel so acutely. her heart went out to the duke's daughter as it had never gone out to any of her sex since her mother's death, and she showed her admiration in her glance. the other saw it and smiled, slipping a hand in hers for a moment; and then a look, half-debating, half-triumphant, came into her face as her eyes followed leicester down the green stretches of the tilting-yard. the trumpet sounded, the people broke out in shouts of delight, the tilting began. for an hour the handsome joust went on, the earl of oxford, charles howard, sir henry lee, sir christopher hatton, and leicester challenging, and so even was the combat that victory seemed to settle in the plumes of neither, though leicester of them all showed not the greatest skill, while in some regards greatest grace and deportment. suddenly there rode into the lists, whence, no one seemed to know, so intent had the public gaze been fixed, so quickly had he come, a mounted figure all in white, and at the moment when sir henry lee had cried aloud his challenge for the last time. silence fell as the bright figure cantered down the list, lifted the gauge, and sat still upon his black steed. consternation fell. none among the people or the knights tilters knew who the invader was, and leicester called upon the masters of the ceremonies to demand his name and quality. the white horseman made no reply, but sat unmoved, while noise and turmoil suddenly sprang up around him. presently the voice of the queen was heard clearly ringing through the lists. "his quality hath evidence. set on." the duke's daughter laughed, and whispered mischievously in angele's ear. the gentlemen of england fared ill that day in the sight of all the people, for the challenger of the knights tilters was more than a match for each that came upon him. he rode like a wild horseman of yucatan. wary, resourceful, sudden in device and powerful in onset, he bore all down, until the queen cried: "there hath not been such skill in england since my father rode these lists. three of my best gentlemen down, and it hath been but breathing to him. now, sir harry lee, it is thy turn," she laughed as she saw the champion ride forward; "and next 'tis thine, leicester. ah, leicester would have at him now!" she added sharply, as she saw the favourite spur forward before the gallant lee. "he is full of choler--it becomes him, but it shall not be; bravery is not all. and if he failed "she smiled acidly--"he would get him home to kenilworth and show himself no more--if he failed, and the white knight failed not! what think you, dove?" she cried to the duke's daughter. "would he not fall in the megrims for that england's honour had been over thrown? leicester could not live if england's honour should be toppled down like our dear chris hatton and his gallants yonder." the duke's daughter curtsied. "methinks england's honour is in little peril--your majesty knows well how to 'fend it. no subject keeps it." "if i must 'fend it, dove, then leicester there must not fight to-day. it shall surely be sir harry lee. my lord leicester must have the place of honour at the last," she called aloud. leicester swung his horse round and galloped to the queen. "your majesty," he cried in suppressed anger, "must i give place?" "when all have failed and leicester has won, then all yield place to leicester," said the queen drily. the look on his face was not good to see, but he saluted gravely and rode away to watch the encounter between the most gallant knight tilter in england and the stranger. rage was in his heart, and it blinded him to the certainty of his defeat, for he was not expert in the lists. but by a sure instinct he had guessed the identity of the white horseman, and every nerve quivered with desire to meet him in combat. last night's good work seemed to have gone for naught. elizabeth's humour had changed; and to-day she seemed set on humiliating him before the nobles who hated him, before the people who had found in him the cause why the queen had not married, so giving no heir to the throne. perturbed and charged with anger as he was, however, the combat now forward soon chained his attention. not in many a year had there been seen in england such a display of skill and determination. the veteran knight tilter, who knew that the result of this business meant more than life to him, and that more than the honour of his comrades was at stake--even the valour of england which had been challenged--fought as he had never fought before, as no man had fought in england for many a year. at first the people cried aloud their encouragement; but as onset and attack after onset and attack showed that two masters of their craft, two desperate men, had met, and that the great sport had become a vital combat between their own champion and the champion of another land--spain, france, denmark, russia, italy?--a hush spread over the great space, and every eye was strained; men gazed with bated breath. the green turf was torn and mangled, the horses reeked with sweat and foam, but overhead the soaring skylark sang, as it were, to express the joyance of the day. during many minutes the only sound that broke the stillness was the clash of armed men, the thud of hoofs, and the snorting and the wild breathing of the chargers. the lark's notes, however, ringing out over the lists freed the tongue of the queen's fool, who suddenly ran out into the lists, in his motley and cap and bells, and in his high trilling voice sang a fool's song to the fighting twain: "who would lie down and close his eyes while yet the lark sings o'er the dale? who would to love make no replies, nor drink the nut-brown ale, while throbs the pulse, and full 's the purse and all the world 's for sale?" suddenly a cry of relief, of roaring excitement, burst from the people. both horsemen and their chargers were on the ground. the fight was over, the fierce game at an end. that which all had feared, even the queen herself, as the fight fared on, had not come to pass--england's champion had not been beaten by the armed mystery, though the odds had seemed against him. "though wintry blasts may prove unkind, when winter's past we do forget; love's breast in summer time is kind, and all 's well while life 's with us yet hey, ho, now the lark is mating, life's sweet wages are in waiting!" thus sang the fool as the two warriors were helped to their feet. cumbered with their armour, and all dust-covered and blood-stained, though not seriously hurt, they were helped to their horses, and rode to the dais where the queen sat. "ye have fought like men of old," she said, "and neither had advantage at the last. england's champion still may cry his challenge and not be forsworn, and he who challenged goeth in honour again from the lists. you, sir, who have challenged, shall we not see your face or hear your voice? for what country, for what prince lifted you the gauge and challenged england's honour?" "i crave your high majesty's pardon"--angele's heart stood still. her love had not pierced his disguise, though leicester's hate had done so on the instant--"i crave your noble majesty's grace," answered the stranger, "that i may still keep my face covered in humility. my voice speaks for no country and for no prince. i have fought for mine own honour, and to prove to england's queen that she hath a champion who smiteth with strong arm, as on me and my steed this hath been seen to-day." "gallantly thought and well said," answered elizabeth; "but england's champion and his strong arm have no victory. if gifts were given they must needs be cut in twain. but answer me, what is your country? i will not have it that any man pick up the gauge of england for his own honour. what is your country? "i am an exile, your high majesty; and the only land for which i raise my sword this day is that land where i have found safety from my enemies." the queen turned and smiled at the duke's daughter. "i knew not where my own question might lead, but he hath turned it to full account," she said, under her breath. "his tongue is as ready as his spear. then ye have both laboured in england's honour, and i drink to you both," she added, and raised to her lips a glass of wine which a page presented. "i love ye both--in your high qualities," she hastened to add with dry irony, and her eye rested mockingly on leicester. "my lords and gentlemen and all of my kingdom," she added in a clear voice, insistent in its force, "ye have come upon may day to take delight of england in my gardens, and ye are welcome. ye have seen such a sight as doeth good to the eyes of brave men. it hath pleased me well, and i am constrained to say to you what, for divers great reasons, i have kept to my own counsels, labouring for your good. the day hath come, however, the day and the hour when ye shall know that wherein i propose to serve you as ye well deserve. it is my will--and now i see my way to its good fulfilment--that i remain no longer in that virgin state wherein i have ever lived." great cheering here broke in, and for a time she could get no further. ever alive to the bent of the popular mind, she had chosen a perfect occasion to take them into her confidence--however little or much she would abide by her words, or intended the union of which she spoke. in the past she had counselled with her great advisers, with cecil and the rest, and through them messages were borne to the people; but now she spoke direct to them all, and it had its immediate reward--the acclamations were as those with which she was greeted when she first passed through the streets of london on inheriting the crown. well pleased, she continued: "this i will do with expedition and weightiest judgment, for of little account though i am, he that sits with the queen of england in this realm must needs be a prince indeed.... so be ye sure of this that ye shall have your heart-most wishes, and there shall be one to come after me who will wear this crown even as i have worn, in direct descent, my father's crown. our dearest sister, the queen of the scots, hath been delivered of a fair son; and in high affection the news thereof she hath sent me, with a palfry which i shall ride among you in token of the love i bear her majesty. she hath in her time got an heir to the throne with which we are ever in kinship and alliance, and i in my time shall give ye your heart's desire." angele, who had, with palpitating heart and swimming head, seen michel de la foret leave the lists and disappear among the trees, as mysteriously as he came, was scarce conscious of the cheers and riotous delight that followed elizabeth's tactful if delusive speech to the people. a few whispered words from the duke's daughter had told her that michel had obeyed the queen's command in entering the lists and taking up the challenge; and that she herself, carrying the royal message to him and making arrangements for his accoutrement and mounting, had urged him to obedience. she observed drily that he had needed little pressure, and that his eyes had lighted at the prospect of the combat. apart from his innate love of fighting, he had realised that in the moment of declining to enter the queen's service he had been at a disadvantage, and that his courage was open to attack by the incredulous or malicious. this would have mattered little were it not that he had been given unusual importance as a prisoner by the queen's personal notice of himself. he had, therefore, sprung to the acceptance, and sent his humble duty to the queen by her winsome messenger, who, with conspicuous dramatic skill, had arranged secretly, with the help of a gentleman pensioner and the master of the horse, his appearance and his exit. that all succeeded as she had planned quickened her pulses, and made her heart still warmer to angele, who, now that all was over, and her huguenot lover had gone his mysterious ways, seemed lost in a troubled reverie. it was a troubled reverie indeed, for angele's eyes were on the stranger who was present with sir andrew melvill the night before. her gaze upon him now became fixed and insistent, for the sense of foreboding so heavy on her deepened to a torturing suspense. where had she seen this man before? to what day or hour in her past did he belong? what was there in his smooth, smiling, malicious face that made her blood run cold? as she watched him, he turned his head. she followed his eyes. the horse which mary queen of scots had sent with the message of the birth of her son was being led to the queen by the dark browed, pale-faced churl who had brought it from scotland. she saw a sharp dark look pass between the two. suddenly her sight swam, she swayed and would have fainted, but resolution steadied her, and a low exclamation broke from her lips. now she knew! the face that had eluded her was at last in the grasp of horrified memory. it was the face of one who many years ago was known to have poisoned the due de chambly by anointing the pommel of his saddle with a delicate poison which the rider would touch, and touching would, perhaps, carry to his nostrils or mouth as he rode, and die upon the instant. she herself had seen the due de chambly fall; had seen this man fly from paris for his life; and had thereafter known of his return to favour at the court of mary and francis, for nothing could be proved against him. the memory flashed like lightning through her brain. she moved swiftly forward despite the detaining hand of the duke's daughter. the queen was already mounted, her hand already upon the pommel of the saddle. elizabeth noted the look of anguished anxiety in angele's eyes, her face like that of one who had seen souls in purgatory; and some swift instinct, born of years upon years of peril in old days when her life was no boon to her enemies, made her lean towards the girl, whose quick whispered words were to her as loud as thunder. she was, however, composed and still. not a tremor passed through her. "your wish is granted, mistress," she said aloud, then addressed a word to cecil at her side, who passed on her command. presently she turned slowly to the spot where sir andrew melvill and the other sat upon their horses. she scanned complacently the faces of both, then her eyes settled steadily on the face of the murderer. still gazing intently she drew the back of her gloved fingers along the pommel. the man saw the motion, unnoted and unsignificant to any other save angele, meaningless even to melvill, the innocent and honest gentleman at his side; and he realised that the queen had had a warning. noting the slight stir among the gentlemen round him, he knew that his game was foiled, that there was no escape. he was not prepared for what followed. in a voice to be heard only at small distance, the queen said calmly: "this palfry sent me by my dear sister of scotland shall bear me among you, friends; and in days to come i will remember how she hath given new life to me by her loving message. sir andrew melvill, i shall have further speech with you; and you, sir,"--speaking to the sinister figure by his side--"come hither." the man dismounted, and with unsteady step came forward. elizabeth held out her gloved hand for him to kiss. his face turned white. it was come soon, his punishment. none knew save angele and the queen the doom that was upon him, if angele's warning was well-founded. he knelt, and bent his head over her hand. "salute, sir," she said in a low voice. he touched his lips to her fingers. she pressed them swiftly against his mouth. an instant, then he rose and stepped backwards to his horse. tremblingly, blindly, he mounted. a moment passed, then elizabeth rode on with her ladies behind her, her gentlemen beside her. as she passed slowly, the would-be regicide swayed and fell from his horse, and stirred no more. elizabeth rode on, her hand upon the pommel of the saddle. so she rode for a full half-hour, and came back to her palace. but she raised not her gloved right hand above the pommel, and she dismounted with exceeding care. that night the man who cared for the horse died secretly as had done his master, with the queen's glove pressed to his nostrils by one whom cecil could trust. and the matter was hidden from the court and the people; for it was given out that melvill's friend had died of some heart trouble. etext editor's bookmarks: each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity no note of praise could be pitched too high for elizabeth she had never stooped to conquer this ebook was produced by david widger <widger@cecomet.net> michel and angele [a ladder of swords] by gilbert parker volume . introduction if it does not seem too childish a candour to say so, 'michel and angele' always seems to me like some old letter lifted out of an ancient cabinet with the faint perfume of bygone days upon it. perhaps that is because the story itself had its origin in a true but brief record of some good huguenots who fled from france and took refuge in england, to be found, as the book declares, at the walloon church, in southampton. the record in the first paragraphs of the first chapter of the book fascinated my imagination, and i wove round michel de la foret and angele aubert a soft, bright cloud of romance which would not leave my vision until i sat down and wrote out what, in the writing, seemed to me a true history. it was as though some telepathy between the days of elizabeth and our own controlled me--self-hypnotism, i suppose; but still, there it was. the story, in its original form, was first published in 'harper's weekly' under the name of michel and angele, but the fear, i think, that many people would mispronounce the first word of the title, induced me to change it when, double in length, it became a volume called 'a ladder of swords'. as it originally appeared, i wrote it in the island of jersey, out at the little bay of rozel in a house called la chaire, a few yards away from the bay itself, and having a pretty garden with a seat at its highest point, from which, beyond the little bay, the english channel ran away to the atlantic. it was written in complete seclusion. i had no visitors; there was no one near, indeed, except the landlord of the little hotel in the bay, and his wife. all through the island, however, were people whom i knew, like the malet de carterets, the lemprieres, and old general pipon, for whom the jersey of three hundred years ago was as near as the jersey of to-day, so do the jersiais prize, cultivate, and conserve every hour of its recorded history. as the sea opens out to a vessel making between the promontories to the main, so, while writing this tale which originally was short, the larger scheme of 'the battle of the strong' spread out before me, luring me, as though in the distance were the fortunate isles. eight years after 'michel and angele' was written and first published in 'harper's weekly', i decided to give it the dignity of a full-grown romance. for years i had felt that it had the essentials for a larger canvas, and at the earnest solicitation of messrs. harper & brothers i settled to do what had long been in my mind. the narrative grew as naturally from what it was to larger stature as anything that had been devised upon a greater scale at the beginning; and in london town i had the same joy in the company of michel and angele--and a vastly increased joy in the company of lempriere, the hulking, joyous giant--as i had years before in jersey itself when the story first stirred in my mind and reached my pen. while adverse reviews of the book were few if any, it cannot be said that this romance is a companion in popularity with, for instance, 'the right of way'. it had its friends, but it has apparently appealed to smaller audiences--to those who watch the world go by; who are not searching for the exposure of life's grim realities; who do not seek the clinic of the soul's tragedies. there was tragedy here, but there was comedy too; there was also joy and faith, patience and courage. the book, taken by itself, could not make a permanent reputation for any man, but it has its place in the scheme of my work, and i would not have it otherwise than it is. a note there will be found a few anachronisms in this tale, but none so important as to give a wrong impression of the events of queen elizabeth's reign. michel and angele chapter i if you go to southampton and search the register of the walloon church there, you will find that in the summer of _, "madame vefue de montgomery with all her family and servants were admitted to the communion"--"tous ceux cj furent recus la a cene du _, comme passans, sans avoir rendu raison de la foj, mes sur la tesmognage de mons. forest, ministre de madame, quj certifia quj ne cognoisoit rien en tout ceux la po' quoy il ne leur deust administre la cene s'il estoit en lieu po' a ferre." there is another striking record, which says that in august of the same year demoiselle angele claude aubert, daughter of monsieur de la haie aubert, councillor of the parliament of rouen, was married to michel de la foret, of the most noble flemish family of that name. when i first saw these records, now grown dim with time, i fell to wondering what was the real life-history of these two people. forthwith, in imagination, i began to make their story piece by piece; and i had reached a romantic 'denoument' satisfactory to myself and in sympathy with fact, when the angel of accident stepped forward with some "human documents." then i found that my tale, woven back from the two obscure records i have given, was the true story of two most unhappy yet most happy people. from the note struck in my mind, when my finger touched that sorrowful page in the register of the church of the refugees at southampton, had spread out the whole melody and the very book of the song. one of the later-discovered records was a letter, tear-stained, faded, beautifully written in old french, from demoiselle angele claude aubert to michel de la foret at anvers in march of the year _. the letter lies beside me as i write, and i can scarcely believe that three and a quarter centuries have passed since it was written, and that she who wrote it was but eighteen years old at the time. i translate it into english, though it is impossible adequately to carry over either the flavour or the idiom of the language: written on this may day of the year _, at the place hight rozel in the manor called of the same of jersey isle, to michel de la foret, at anvers in flanders. michel, thy good letter by safe carriage cometh to my hand, bringing to my heart a lightness it hath not known since that day when i was hastily carried to the port of st. malo, and thou towards the king his prison. in what great fear have i lived, having no news of thee and fearing all manner of mischance! but our god hath benignly saved thee from death, and me he hath set safely here in this isle of the sea. thou hast ever been a brave soldier, enduring and not fearing; thou shalt find enow to keep thy blood stirring in these days of trial and peril to us who are so opprobriously called les huguenots. if thou wouldst know more of my mind thereupon, come hither. safety is here, and work for thee--smugglers and pirates do abound on these coasts, and popish wolves do harry the flock even in this island province of england. michel, i plead for the cause which thou hast nobly espoused, but--alas! my selfish heart, where thou art lie work and fighting, and the same high cause, and sadly, i confess, it is for mine own happiness that i ask thee to come. i wot well that escape from france hath peril, that the way hither from that point upon yonder coast called carteret is hazardous, but yet-but yet all ways to happiness are set with hazard. if thou dost come to carteret thou wilt see two lights turning this- wards: one upon a headland called tour de rozel, and one upon the great rock called of the ecrehos. these will be in line with thy sight by the sands of hatainville. near by the tour de rozel shall i be watching and awaiting thee. by day and night doth my prayer ascend for thee. the messenger who bears this to thee (a piratical knave with a most kind heart, having, i am told, a wife in every port of france and of england the south, a most heinous sin!) will wait for thy answer, or will bring thee hither, which is still better. he is worthy of trust if thou makest him swear by the little finger of st. peter. by all other swearings he doth deceive freely. the lord make thee true, michel. if thou art faithful to me, i shall know how faithful thou art in all; for thy vows to me were most frequent and pronounced, with a full savour that might warrant short seasoning. yet, because thou mayst still be given to such dear fantasies of truth as were on thy lips in those dark days wherein thy sword saved my life 'twixt paris and rouen, i tell thee now that i do love thee, and shall so love when, as my heart inspires me, the cloud shall fall that will hide us from each other forever. angele. an afterword: i doubt not we shall come to the heights where there is peace, though we climb thereto by a ladder of swords. a. some years before angele's letter was written, michel de la foret had become an officer in the army of comte gabriel de montgomery, and fought with him until what time the great chief was besieged in the castle of domfront in normandy. when the siege grew desperate, montgomery besought the intrepid young huguenot soldier to escort madame de montgomery to england, to be safe from the oppression and misery sure to follow any mishap to this noble leader of the camisards. at the very moment of departure of the refugees from domfront with the comtesse, angele's messenger--the "piratical knave with the most kind heart "presented himself, delivered her letter to de la foret, and proceeded with the party to the coast of normandy by st. brieuc. embarking there in a lugger which buonespoir the pirate secured for them, they made for england. having come but half-way of the channel, the lugger was stopped by an english frigate. after much persuasion the captain of the frigate agreed to land madame de montgomery upon the island of jersey, but forced de la foret to return to the coast of france; and buonespoir elected to return with him. chapter ii meanwhile angele had gone through many phases of alternate hope and despair. she knew that montgomery the camisard was dead, and a rumour, carried by refugees, reached her that de la foret had been with him to the end. to this was presently added the word that de la foret had been beheaded. but one day she learned that the comtesse de montgomery was sheltered by the governor, sir hugh pawlett, her kinsman, at mont orgueil castle. thither she went in fear from her refuge at rozel, and was admitted to the comtesse. there she learned the joyful truth that de la foret had not been slain, and was in hiding on the coast of normandy. the long waiting was a sore trial, yet laughter was often upon her lips henceforth. the peasants, the farmers and fishermen of jersey, at first --as they have ever been--little inclined towards strangers, learned at last to look for her in the fields and upon the shore, and laughed in response, they knew not why, to the quick smiling of her eyes. she even learned to speak their unmusical but friendly norman-jersey french. there were at least a half-dozen fishermen who, for her, would have gone at night straight to the witches' rock in st. clement's bay--and this was bravery unmatched. it came to be known along the coast that "ma'm'selle" was waiting for a lover fleeing from the french coast. this gave her fresh interest in the eyes of the serfs and sailors and their women folk, who at first were not inclined towards the huguenot maiden, partly because she was french, and partly because she was not a catholic. but even these, when they saw that she never talked religiously, that she was fast learning to speak their own homely patois, and that in the sickness of their children she was untiring in her kindness, forgave the austerity of the gloomy-browed old man her father, who spoke to them distantly, or never spoke at all; and her position was secure. then, upon the other hand, the gentry of the manors, seeing the friendship grow between her and the comtesse de montgomery at mont orgueil castle, made courteous advances towards her father, and towards herself through him. she could scarce have counted the number of times she climbed the great hill like a fortress at the lift of the little bay of rozel, and from the nez du guet scanned the sea for a sail and the sky for fair weather. when her eyes were not thus busy, they were searching the lee of the hillside round for yellow lilies, and the valley below for the campion, the daffodil, and the thousand pretty ferns growing in profusion there. every night she looked out to see that her signal fire was lit upon the nez du guet, and she never went to bed without taking one last look over the sea, in the restless inveterate hope which at once sustained her and devoured her. but the longest waiting must end. it came on the evening of the very day that the seigneur of rozel went to angele's father and bluntly told him he was ready to forego all norman-jersey prejudice against the french and the huguenot religion, and take angele to wife without penny or estate. in reply to the seigneur, monsieur aubert said that he was conscious of an honour, and referred monsieur to his daughter, who must answer for herself; but he must tell monsieur of rozel that monsieur's religion would, in his own sight, be a high bar to the union. to that the seigneur said that no religion that he had could be a bar to anything at all; and so long as the young lady could manage her household, drive a good bargain with the craftsmen and hucksters, and have the handsomest face and manners in the channel islands, he'd ask no more; and she might pray for him and his salvation without let or hindrance. the seigneur found the young lady in a little retreat among the rocks, called by the natives la chaire. here she sat sewing upon some coarse linen for a poor fisherwoman's babe when the seigneur came near. she heard the scrunch of his heels upon the gravel, the clank of his sword upon the rocks, and looked up with a flush, her needle poised; for none should know of her presence in this place save her father. when she saw who was her visitor, she rose. after greeting and compliment, none too finely put, but more generous than fitted with jersey parsimony, the gentleman of rozel came at once to the point. "my name is none too bad," said he--"raoul lempriere, of the lemprieres that have been here since rollo ruled in normandy. my estate is none worse than any in the whole islands; i have more horses and dogs than any gentleman of my acres; and i am more in favour at court than de carteret of st. ouen's. i am the queen's butler, and i am the first that royal favour granted to set up three dove-cotes, one by st. aubin's, one by st. helier's, and one at rozel: and--and," he added, with a lumbering attempt at humour--"and, on my oath, i'll set up another dove-cote with out my sovereign's favour, with your leave alone. by our lady, i do love that colour in yon cheek! just such a colour had my mother when she snatched from the head of my cousin of carteret's milk-maid wife the bonnet of a lady of quality and bade her get to her heifers. god's beauty! but 'tis a colour of red primroses in thy cheeks and blue campions in thine eyes. come, i warrant i can deepen that colour"--he bowed low--"madame of rozel, if it be not too soon!" the girl listened to this cheerful and loquacious proposal and courtship all in one, ending with the premature bestowal of a title, in mingled anger, amusement, disdain, and apprehension. her heart fluttered, then stood still, then flew up in her throat, then grew terribly hot and hurt her, so that she pressed her hand to her bosom as though that might ease it. by the time he had finished, drawn himself up, and struck his foot upon the ground in burly emphasis of his devoted statements, the girl had sufficiently recovered to answer him composedly, and with a little glint of demure humour in her eyes. she loved another man; she did not care so much as a spark for this happy, swearing, swashbuckling gentleman; yet she saw he had meant to do her honour. he had treated her as courteously as was in him to do; he chose her out from all the ladies of his acquaintance to make her an honest offer of his hand--he had said nothing about his heart; he would, should she marry him, throw her scraps of good-humour, bearish tenderness, drink to her health among his fellows, and respect and admire her--even exalt her almost to the rank of a man in his own eyes; and he had the tolerance of the open-hearted and open- handed man. all these things were as much a compliment to her as though she were not a despised huguenot, an exiled lady of no fortune. she looked at him a moment with an almost solemn intensity, so that he shifted his ground uneasily, but at once smiled encouragingly, to relieve her embarrassment at the unexpected honour done her. she had remained standing; now, as he made a step towards her, she sank down upon the seat, and waved him back courteously. "a moment, monsieur of rozel," she ventured. "did my father send you to me?" he inclined his head and smiled again. "did you say to him what you have said to me?" she asked, not quite without a touch of malice. "i left out about the colour in the cheek," he answered, with a smirk at what he took to be the quickness of his wit. "you kept your paint-pot for me," she replied softly. "and the dove-cote, too," he rejoined, bowing finely, and almost carried off his feet by his own brilliance. she became serious at once--so quickly that he was ill prepared for it, and could do little but stare and pluck at the tassel of his sword; for he was embarrassed before this maiden, who changed as quickly as the currents change under the brow of the couperon cliff, behind which lay his manor-house of rozel. "i have visited at your manor, monsieur of rozel. i have seen the state in which you live, your retainers, your men-at-arms, your farming-folk, and your sailormen. i know how your queen receives you; how your honour is as stable as your fief." he drew himself up again proudly. he could understand this speech. "your horses and your hounds i have seen," she added, "your men-servants and your maid-servants, your fields of corn, your orchards, and your larder. i have sometimes broken the commandment and coveted them and envied you." "break the commandment again, for the last time," he cried, delighted and boisterous. "let us not waste words, lady. let's kiss and have it over." her eyes flashed. "i coveted them and envied you; but then, i am but a vain girl at times, and vanity is easier to me than humbleness." "blood of man, but i cannot understand so various a creature!" he broke in, again puzzled. "there is a little chapel in the dell beside your manor, monsieur. if you will go there, and get upon your knees, and pray till the candles no more burn, and the popish images crumble in their places, you will yet never understand myself or any woman." "there's no question of popish images between us," he answered, vainly trying for foothold. "pray as you please, and i'll see no harm comes to the mistress of rozel." he was out of his bearings and impatient. religion to him was a dull recreation invented chiefly for women. she became plain enough now. "'tis no images nor religion that stands between us," she answered, "though they might well do so. it is that i do not love you, monsieur of rozel." his face, which had slowly clouded, suddenly cleared. "love! love!" he laughed good-humouredly. "love comes, i'm told, with marriage. but we can do well enough without fugling on that pipe. come, come, dost think i'm not a proper man and a gentleman? dost think i'll not use thee well and 'fend thee, huguenot though thou art, 'gainst trouble or fret or any man's persecutions--be he my lord bishop, my lord chancellor, or king of france, or any other?" she came a step closer to him, even as though she would lay a hand upon his arm. "i believe that you would do all that in you lay," she answered steadily. "yours is a rough wooing, but it is honest--" "rough! rough!" he protested, for he thought he had behaved like some adonis. was it not ten years only since he had been at court! "be assured, monsieur, that i know how to prize the man who speaks after the light given him. i know that you are a brave and valorous gentleman. i must thank you most truly and heartily, but, monsieur, you and yours are not for me. seek elsewhere, among your own people, in your own religion and language and position, the mistress of rozel." he was dumfounded. now he comprehended the plain fact that he had been declined. "you send me packing!" he blurted out, getting red in the face. "ah, no! say it is my misfortune that i cannot give myself the great honour," she said; in her tone a little disdainful dryness, a little pity, a little feeling that here was a good friend lost. "it's not because of the french soldier that was with montgomery at domfront?--i've heard that story. but he's gone to heaven, and 'tis vain crying for last year's breath," he added, with proud philosophy. "he is not dead. and if he were," she added, "do you think, monsieur, that we should find it easier to cross the gulf between us?" "tut, tut, that bugbear love!" he said shortly. "and so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? i' faith, i'd befriend thee well if thou wert my wife, ma'm'selle." "it is hard for those who need friends to lose them," she answered sadly. the sorrow of her position crept in upon her and filled her eyes with tears. she turned them to the sea-instinctively towards that point on the shore where she thought it likely michel might be; as though by looking she might find comfort and support in this hard hour. even as she gazed into the soft afternoon light she could see, far over, a little sail standing out towards the ecrehos. not once in six months might the coast of france be seen so clearly. one might almost have noted people walking on the beach. this was no good token, for when that coast may be seen with great distinctness a storm follows hard after. the girl knew this; and though she could not know that this was michel de la foret's boat, the possibility fixed itself in her mind. she quickly scanned the horizon. yes, there in the north-west was gathering a dark- blue haze, hanging like small filmy curtains in the sky. the seigneur of rozel presently broke the silence so awkward for him. he had seen the tears in her eyes, and though he could not guess the cause, he vaguely thought it might be due to his announcement that she had lost a friend. he was magnanimous at once, and he meant what he said and would stand by it through thick and thin. "well, well, i'll be thy everlasting friend if not thy husband," he said with ornate generosity. "cheer thy heart, lady." with a sudden impulse she seized his hand and kissed it, and, turning, ran swiftly down the rocks towards her home. he stood and looked after her, then, dumfounded, at the hand she had kissed. "blood of my heart!" he said, and shook his head in utter amazement. then he turned and looked out upon the channel. he saw the little boat angele had descried making from france. glancing at the sky, "what fools come there!" he said anxiously. they were michel de la foret and buonespoir the pirate, in a black- bellied cutter with red sails. chapter iii for weeks de la foret and buonespoir had lain in hiding at st. brieuc. at last buonespoir declared all was ready once again. he had secured for the camisard the passport and clothes of a priest who had but just died at granville. once again they made the attempt to reach english soil. standing out from carteret on the belle suzanne, they steered for the light upon the marmotier rocks of the ecrehos, which angele had paid a fisherman to keep going every night. this light had caused the french and english frigates some uneasiness, and they had patrolled the channel from cap de la hague to the bay of st. brieuc with a vigilance worthy of a larger cause. one fine day an english frigate anchored off the ecrehos, and the fisherman was seized. he, poor man, swore that he kept the light burning to guide his brother fishermen to and fro between boulay bay and the ecrehos. the captain of the frigate tried severities; but the fisherman stuck to his tale, and the light burned on as before-- a lantern stuck upon a pole. one day, with a telescope, buonespoir had seen the exact position of the staff supporting the light, and had mapped out his course accordingly. he would head straight for the beacon and pass between the marmotier and the maitre ile, where is a narrow channel for a boat drawing only a few feet of water. unless he made this, he must run south and skirt the ecriviere rock and bank, where the streams setting over the sandy ridges make a confusing perilous sea to mariners in bad weather. else, he must sail north between the ecrehos and the dirouilles, in the channel called etoc, a tortuous and dangerous passage save in good weather, and then safe only to the mariner who knows the floor of that strait like his own hand. de la foret was wholly in the hands of buonespoir, for he knew nothing of these waters and coasts; also he was a soldier and no sailor. they cleared cape carteret with a fair wind from the north-east, which should carry them safely as the bird flies to the haven of rozel. the high, pinkish sands of hatainville were behind them; the treacherous taillepied rocks lay to the north, and a sweet sea before. nothing could have seemed fairer and more hopeful. but a few old fishermen on shore at carteret shook their heads dubiously, and at port bail, some miles below, a disabled naval officer, watching through a glass, rasped out, "criminals or fools!" but he shrugged his shoulders, for if they were criminals he was sure they would expiate their crimes this night, and if they were fools--he had no pity for fools. but buonespoir knew his danger. truth is, he had chosen this night because they would be safest from pursuit, because no sensible seafaring man, were he king's officer or another, would venture forth upon the impish channel, save to court disaster. pirate, and soldier in priest's garb, had frankly taken the chances. with a fair wind they might, with all canvas set--mainsail, foresail, jib, and fore-topsail--make rozel bay within two hours and a quarter. all seemed well for a brief half-hour. then, even as the passage between the marmotier and the ecrehos opened out, the wind suddenly shifted from the north-east to the southwest and a squall came hurrying on them--a few moments too soon; for, had they been clear of the ecrehos, clear of the taillepieds, felee bank, and the ecriviere, they could have stood out towards the north in a more open sea. yet there was one thing in their favour: the tide was now running hard from the north-west, so fighting for them while the wind was against them. their only safety lay in getting beyond the ecrehos. if they attempted to run in to the marmotier for safety, they would presently be at the mercy of the french. to trust their doubtful fortunes and bear on was the only way. the tide was running fast. they gave the mainsail to the wind still more, and bore on towards the passage. at last, as they were opening on it, the wind suddenly veered full north-east. the sails flapped, the boat seemed to hover for a moment, and then a wave swept her towards the rocks. buonespoir put the helm hard over, she went about, and they close-hauled her as she trembled towards the rocky opening. this was the critical instant. a heavy sea was running, the gale was blowing hard from the north-east, and under the close-hauled sail the belle suzanne was lying over dangerously. but the tide, too, was running hard from the south, fighting the wind; and, at the moment when all seemed terribly uncertain, swept them past the opening and into the swift-running channel, where the indraught sucked them through to the more open water beyond. although the belle suzanne was in more open water now, the danger was not over. ahead lay a treacherous sea, around them roaring winds, and the perilous coast of jersey beyond all. "do you think we shall land?" quietly asked de la foret, nodding towards the jersey coast. "as many chances 'gainst it as for it, m'sieu'," said buonespoir, turning his face to the north, for the wind had veered again to north-east, and he feared its passing to the north-west, giving them a head-wind and a swooping sea. night came down, but with a clear sky and a bright moon; the wind, however, not abating. the next three hours were spent in tacking, in beating towards the jersey coast under seas which almost swamped them. they were standing off about a mile from the island, and could see lighted fires and groups of people upon the shore, when suddenly a gale came out from the southwest, the wind having again shifted. with an oath, buonespoir put the helm hard over, the belle suzanne came about quickly, but as the gale struck her, the mast snapped like a pencil, she heeled over, and the two adventurers were engulfed in the waves. a cry of dismay went up from the watchers on the shore. they turned with a half-conscious sympathy towards angele, for her story was known by all, and in her face they read her mortal fear, though she made no cry, but only clasped her hands in agony. her heart told her that yonder michel de la foret was fighting for his life. for an instant only she stood, the terror of death in her eyes, then she turned to the excited fishermen near. "men, oh men," she cried, "will you not save them? will no one come with me?" some shook their heads sullenly, others appeared uncertain, but their wives and children clung to them, and none stirred. looking round helplessly, angele saw the tall figure of the seigneur of rozel. he had been watching the scene for some time. now he came quickly to her. "is it the very man?" he asked her, jerking a finger towards the struggling figures in the sea. "yes, oh yes," she replied, nodding her head piteously. "god tells my heart it is." her father drew near and interposed. "let us kneel and pray for two dying men," said he, and straightway knelt upon the sand. "by st. martin, we've better medicine than that, apothecary!" said lempriere of rozel loudly, and, turning round, summoned two serving-men. "launch my strong boat," he added. "we will pick these gentlemen from the brine, or know the end of it all." the men hurried gloomily to the long-boat, ran her down to the shore and into the surf. "you are going--you are going to save him, dear seigneur?" asked the girl tremulously. "to save him--that's to be seen, mistress," answered lempriere, and advanced to the fishermen. by dint of hard words, and as hearty encouragement and promises, he got a half-dozen strong sailors to man the boat. a moment after, they were all in. at a motion from the seigneur, the boat was shot out into the surf, and a cheer from the shore gave heart to de la foret and buonespoir, who were being driven upon the rocks. the jerseymen rowed gallantly; and the seigneur, to give them heart, promised a shilling, a capon, and a gallon of beer to each, if the rescue was made. again and again the two men seemed to sink beneath the sea, and again and again they came to the surface and battled further, torn, battered, and bloody, but not beaten. cries of "we're coming, gentles, we're coming!" from the seigneur of rozel, came ringing through the surf to the dulled ears of the drowning men, and they struggled on. there never was a more gallant rescue. almost at their last gasp the two were rescued. "mistress aubert sends you welcome, sir, if you be michel de la foret," said lempriere of rozel, and offered the fugitive his horn of liquor as he lay blown and beaten in the boat. "i am he," de la foret answered. "i owe you my life, monsieur," he added. lempriere laughed. "you owe it to the lady; and i doubt you can properly pay the debt," he answered, with a toss of the head; for had not the lady refused him, the seigneur of rozel, six feet six in height, and all else in proportion, while this gentleman was scarce six feet. "we can have no quarrel upon the point," answered de la foret, reaching out his hand; "you have at least done tough work for her, and if i cannot pay in gold, i can in kind. it was a generous deed, and it has made a friend for ever of michel de la foret." "raoul lempriere of rozel they call me, michel de la foret, and by rollo the duke, but i'll take your word in the way of friendship, as the lady yonder takes it for riper fruit! though, faith, 'tis fruit of a short summer, to my thinking." all this while buonespoir the pirate, his face covered with blood, had been swearing by the little finger of st. peter that each jerseyman there should have the half of a keg of rum. he went so far in gratitude as to offer the price of ten sheep which he had once secretly raided from the seigneur of rozel and sold in france; for which he had been seized on his later return to the island, and had escaped without punishment. hearing, lempriere of rozel roared at him in anger: "durst speak to me! for every fleece you thieved i'll have you flayed with bow-strings if ever i sight your face within my boundaries." "then i'll fetch and carry no more for m'sieu' of rozel," said buonespoir, in an offended tone, but grinning under his reddish beard. "when didst fetch and carry for me, varlet?" lempriere roared again. "when the seigneur of rozel fell from his horse, overslung with sack, the night of the royal duke's visit, and the footpads were on him, i carried him on my back to the lodge of rozel manor. the footpads had scores to settle with the great rozel." for a moment the seigneur stared, then roared again, but this time with laughter. "by the devil and rollo, i have sworn to this hour that there was no man in the isle could have carried me on his shoulders. and i was right, for jersiais you're none, neither by adoption nor grace, but a citizen of the sea." he laughed again as a wave swept over them, drenching them, and a sudden squall of wind came out of the north. "there's no better head in the isle than mine for measurement and thinking, and i swore no man under eighteen stone could carry me, and i am twenty-five--i take you to be nineteen stone, eh?" "nineteen, less two ounces," grinned buonespoir. "i'll laugh de carteret of st. ouen's out of his stockings over this," answered lempriere. "trust me for knowing weights and measures! look you, varlet, thy sins be forgiven thee. i care not about the fleeces, if there be no more stealing. st. ouen's has no head--i said no one man in jersey could have done it--i'm heavier by three stone than any man in the island." thereafter there was little speaking among them, for the danger was greater as they neared the shore. the wind and the sea were against them; the tide, however, was in their favour. others besides m. aubert offered up prayers for the safe-landing of the rescued and rescuers. presently an ancient fisherman broke out into a rude sailor's chanty, and every voice, even those of the two huguenots, took it up: "when the four winds, the wrestlers, strive with the sun, when the sun is slain in the dark; when the stars burn out, and the night cries to the blind sea-reapers, and they rise, and the water-ways are stark-- god save us when the reapers reap! when the ships sweep in with the tide to the shore, and the little white boats return no more; when the reapers reap, lord give thy sailors sleep, if thou cast us not upon the shore, to bless thee evermore: to walk in thy sight as heretofore though the way of the lord be steep! by thy grace, show thy face, lord of the land and the deep!" the song stilled at last. it died away in the roar of the surf, in the happy cries of foolish women, and the laughter of men back from a dangerous adventure. as the seigneur's boat was drawn up the shore, angele threw herself into the arms of michel de la foret, the soldier dressed as a priest. lempriere of rozel stood abashed before this rich display of feeling. in his hottest youth he could not have made such passionate motions of affection. his feelings ran neither high nor broad, but neither did they run low and muddy. his nature was a straight level of sensibility--a rough stream between high banks of prejudice, topped with the foam of vanity, now brawling in season, and now going steady and strong to the sea. angele had come to feel what he was beneath the surface. she felt how unimaginative he was, and how his humour, which was but the horse- play of vanity, helped him little to understand the world or himself. his vanity was ridiculous, his self-importance was against knowledge or wisdom; and heaven had given him a small brain, a big and noble heart, a pedigree back to rollo, and the absurd pride of a little lord in a little land. angele knew all this; but realised also that he had offered her all he was able to offer to any woman. she went now and put out both hands to him. "i shall ever pray god's blessing on the lord of rozel," she said, in a low voice. "'twould fit me no better than st. ouen's sword fits his fingers. i'll take thine own benison, lady--but on my cheek, not on my hand as this day before at four of the clock." his big voice lowered. "come, come, the hand thou kissed, it hath been the hand of a friend to thee, as raoul lempriere of rozel said he'd be. thy lips upon his cheek, though it be but a rough fellow's fancy, and i warrant, come good, come ill, rozel's face will never be turned from thee. pooh, pooh! let yon soldier-priest shut his eyes a minute; this is 'tween me and thee; and what's done before the world's without shame." he stopped short, his black eyes blazing with honest mirth and kindness, his breath short, having spoken in such haste. her eyes could scarce see him, so full of tears were they; and, standing on tiptoe, she kissed him upon each cheek. "'tis much to get for so little given," she said, with a quiver in her voice; "yet this price for friendship would be too high to pay to any save the seigneur of rozel." she hastily turned to the men who had rescued michel and buonespoir. "if i had riches, riches ye should have, brave men of jersey," she said; "but i have naught save love and thanks, and my prayers too, if ye will have them." "'tis a man's duty to save his fellow an' he can," cried a gaunt fisherman, whose daughter was holding to his lips a bowl of conger-eel soup. "'twas a good deed to send us forth to save a priest of holy church," cried a weazened boat-builder with a giant's arm, as he buried his face in a cup of sack, and plunged his hand into a fishwife's basket of limpets. "aye, but what means she by kissing and arm-getting with a priest?" cried a snarling vraic-gatherer. "'tis some jest upon holy church, or yon priest is no better than common men but an idle shame." by this time michel was among them. "priest i am none, but a soldier," he said in a loud voice, and told them bluntly the reasons for his disguise; then, taking a purse from his pocket, thrust into the hands of his rescuers and their families pieces of silver and gave them brave words of thanks. but the seigneur was not to be outdone in generosity. his vanity ran high; he was fain to show angele what a gorgeous gentleman she had failed to make her own; and he was in ripe good-humour all round. "come, ye shall come, all of ye, to the manor of rozel, every man and woman here. ye shall be fed, and fuddled too ye shall be an' ye will; for honest drink which sends to honest sleep hurts no man. to my kitchen with ye all; and you, messieurs"--turning to m. aubert and de la fore- "and you, mademoiselle, come, know how open is the door and full the table at my manor of rozel--st. ouen's keeps a beggarly board." chapter iv thus began the friendship of the bragging seigneur of rozel for the three huguenots, all because he had seen tears in a girl's eyes and misunderstood them, and because the same girl had kissed him. his pride was flattered that they should receive protection from him, and the flattery became almost a canonising when de carteret of st. ouen's brought him to task for harbouring and comforting the despised huguenots; for when de carteret railed he was envious. so henceforth lempriere played lord protector with still more boisterous unction. his pride knew no bounds when, three days after the rescue, sir hugh pawlett, the governor, answering de la foret's letter requesting permission to visit the comtesse de montgomery, sent him word to fetch de la foret to mont orgueil castle. clanking and blowing, he was shown into the great hall with de la foret, where waited sir hugh and the widow of the renowned camisard. clanking and purring like an enormous cat, he turned his head away to the window when de la foret dropped on his knees and kissed the hand of the comtesse, whose eyes were full of tears. clanking and gurgling, he sat to a mighty meal of turbot, eels, lobsters, ormers, capons, boar's head, brawn, and mustard, swan, curlew, and spiced meats. this he washed down with bastard, malmsey, and good ale, topped with almonds, comfits, perfumed cherries with "ipocras," then sprinkled himself with rose-water and dabbled his face and hands in it. filled to the turret, he lurched to his feet, and drinking to sir hugh's toast, "her sacred majesty!" he clanked and roared. "elizabeth!" as though upon the field of battle. he felt the star of de carteret declining and rozel's glory ascending like a comet. once set in a course, nothing could change him. other men might err, but once right, the seigneur of rozel was everlasting. of late he had made the cause of michel de la foret and angele aubert his own. for this he had been raked upon the coals by de carteret of st. ouen's and his following, who taunted him with the saying: "save a thief from hanging and he'll cut your throat." not that there was ill feeling against de la foret in person. he had won most hearts by a frank yet still manner, and his story and love for angele had touched the women folk where their hearts were softest. but the island was not true to itself or its history if it did not divide itself into factions, headed by the seigneurs, and there had been no ground for good division for five years till de la foret came. short of actual battle, this new strife was the keenest ever known, for sir hugh pawlett was ranged on the side of the seigneur of rozel. kinsman of the comtesse de montgomery, of queen elizabeth's own protestant religion, and admiring de la foret, he had given every countenance to the camisard refugee. he had even besought the royal court of jersey to grant a pardon to buonespoir the pirate, on condition that he should never commit a depredation upon an inhabitant of the island--this he was to swear to by the little finger of st. peter. should he break his word, he was to be banished the island for ten years, under penalty of death if he returned. when the hour had come for buonespoir to take the oath, he failed to appear; and the next morning the seigneur of st. ouen's discovered that during the night his cellar had been raided of two kegs of canary, many flagons of muscadella, pots of anchovies and boxes of candied "eringo," kept solely for the visit which the queen had promised the island. there was no doubt of the misdemeanant, for buonespoir returned to de carteret from st. brieuc the gabardine of one of his retainers, in which he had carried off the stolen delicacies. this aggravated the feud between the partisans of st. ouen's and rozel, for lempriere of rozel had laughed loudly when he heard of the robbery, and said "'tis like st. ouen's to hoard for a queen and glut a pirate. we feed as we get at rozel, and will feed the court well too when it comes, or i'm no butler to elizabeth." but trouble was at hand for michel and for his protector. the spies of catherine de medici, mother of the king of france, were everywhere. these had sent word that de la foret was now attached to the meagre suite of the widow of the great camisard montgomery, near the castle of mont orgueil. the medici, having treacherously slain the chief, became mad with desire to slay the lieutenant. she was set to have the man, either through diplomacy with england, or to end him by assassination through her spies. having determined upon his death, with relentless soul she pursued the cause as closely as though this exiled soldier were a powerful enemy at the head of an army in france. thus it was that she wrote to queen elizabeth, asking that "this arrant foe of france, this churl, conspirator, and reviler of the sacraments, be rendered unto our hands for well-deserved punishment as warning to all such evil-doers." she told elizabeth of de la foret's arrival in jersey, disguised as a priest of the church of france, and set forth his doings since landing with the seigneur of rozel. further she went on to say to "our sister of england" that "these dark figures of murder and revolt be a peril to the soft peace of this good realm." to this, elizabeth, who had no knowledge of michel, who desired peace with france at this time, who had favours to ask of catherine, and who in her own realm had fresh reason to fear conspiracy through the queen of the scots and others, replied forthwith that "if this de la foret falleth into our hands, and if it were found he had in truth conspired against france its throne, had he a million lives, not one should remain." having despatched this letter, she straightway sent a messenger to sir hugh pawlett in jersey, making quest of de la foret, and commanding that he should be sent to her in england at once. when the queen's messenger arrived at orgueil castle, lempriere chanced to be with sir hugh pawlett, and the contents of elizabeth's letter were made known to him. at the moment monsieur of rozel was munching macaroons and washing them down with canary. the governor's announcement was such a shock that he choked and coughed, the crumbs flying in all directions; and another pint of canary must be taken to flush his throat. thus cleared for action, he struck out. "'tis st. ouen's work," he growled. "'tis the work of the medici," said sir hugh. "read," he added, holding out the paper. now lempriere of rozel had a poor eye for reading. he had wit enough to wind about the difficulty. "if i see not the queen's commands, i've no warrant but sir hugh pawlett's words, and i'll to london and ask 'fore her majesty's face if she wrote them, and why. i'll tell my tale and speak my mind, i pledge you, sir." "you'll offend her majesty. her commands are here." pawlett tapped the letter with his finger. "i'm butler to the queen, and she will list to me. i'll not smirk and caper like st. ouen's; i'll bear me like a man not speaking for himself. i'll speak as harry her father spoke--straight to the purpose. . . . no, no, no, i'm not to be wheedled, even by a pawlett, and you shall not ask me. if you want michel de la foret, come and take him. he is in my house. but ye must take him, for come he shall not!" "you will not oppose the queen's officers?" "de la foret is under my roof. he must be taken. i will give him up to no one; and i'll tell my sovereign these things when i see her in her palace." "i misdoubt you'll play the bear," said pawlett, with a dry smile. "the queen's tongue is none so tame. i'll travel by my star, get sweet or sour." "well, well, 'give a man luck, and throw him into the sea,' is the old proverb. i'm coming for your friend to-night." "i'll be waiting with my fingers on the door, sir," said rozel, with a grim vanity and an outrageous pride in himself. chapter v the seigneur of rozel found de la foret at the house of m. aubert. his face was flushed with hard riding, and perhaps the loving attitude of michel and angele deepened it, for at the garden gate the lovers were saying adieu. "you have come for monsieur de la foret?" asked angele anxiously. her quick look at the seigneur's face had told her there were things amiss. "there's commands from the queen. they're for the ears of de la foret," said the seigneur. "i will hear them too," said angele, her colour going, her bearing determined. the seigneur looked down at her with boyish appreciation, then said to de la foret: "two queens make claim for you. the wolfish catherine writes to england for her lost camisard, with much fool's talk about 'dark figures,' and 'conspirators,' 'churls,' and foes of 'soft peace'; and england takes the bait and sends to sir hugh pawlett yonder. and, in brief, monsieur, the governor is to have you under arrest and send you to england. god knows why two queens make such a pother over a fellow with naught but a sword and a lass to love him--though, come to think, 'a man's a man if he have but a hose on his head,' as the proverb runs." de la foret smiled, then looked grave, as he caught sight of angele's face. "'tis arrest, then?" he asked. "'tis come willy nilly," answered the seigneur. "and once they've forced you from my doors, i'm for england to speak my mind to the queen. i can make interest for her presence--i hold court office," he added with puffing confidence. angele looked up at him with quick tears, yet with a smile on her lips. "you are going to england for michel's sake?" she said in a low voice. "for michel, or for you, or for mine honour, what matter, so that i go!" he answered, then added: "there must be haste to rozel, friend, lest the governor take lempriere's guest like a potato-digger in the fields." putting spurs to his horse, he cantered heavily away, not forgetting to wave a pompous farewell to angele. de la foret was smiling as he turned to angele. she looked wonderingly at him, for she had felt that she must comfort him, and she looked not for this sudden change in his manner. "is prison-going so blithe, then?" she asked, with a little uneasy laugh which was half a sob. "it will bring things to a head," he answered. "after danger and busy days, to be merely safe, it is scarce the life for michel de la foret. i have my duty to the comtesse; i have my love for you; but i seem of little use by contrast with my past. and yet, and yet," he added, half sadly, "how futile has been all our fighting, so far as human eye can see." "nothing is futile that is right, michel," the girl replied. "thou hast done as thy soul answered to god's messages: thou hast fought when thou couldst, and thou hast sheathed thy blade when there was naught else to do. are not both right?" he clasped her to his breast; then, holding her from him a little, looked into her eyes steadily a moment. "god hath given thee a true heart, and the true heart hath wisdom," he answered. "you will not seek escape? nor resist the governor?" she asked eagerly. "whither should i go? my place is here by you, by the comtesse de montgomery. one day it may be i shall return to france, and to our cause--" "if it be god's will." "if it be god's will." "whatever comes, you will love me, michel?" "i will love you, whatever comes." "listen." she drew his head down. "i am no dragweight to thy life? thou wouldst not do otherwise if there were no foolish angele?" he did not hesitate. "what is best is. i might do otherwise if there were no angele in my life to pilot my heart, but that were worse for me." "thou art the best lover in all the world." "i hope to make a better husband. to-morrow is carmine-lettered in my calendar, if thou sayst thou wilt still have me under the sword of the medici." her hand pressed her heart suddenly. "under the sword, if it be god's will," she answered. then, with a faint smile: "but no, i will not believe the queen of england will send thee, one of her own protestant faith, to the medici." "and thou wilt marry me?" "when the queen of england approves thee," she answered, and buried her face in the hollow of his arm. an hour later sir hugh pawlett came to the manor-house of rozel with two-score men-at-arms. the seigneur himself answered the governor's knocking, and showed himself in the doorway, with a dozen halberdiers behind him. "i have come seeking michel de la foret," said the governor. "he is my guest." "i have the queen's command to take him." "he is my cherished guest." "must i force my way?" "is it the queen's will that blood be shed?" "the queen's commands must be obeyed." "the queen is a miracle of the world, god save her! what is the charge against him?" "summon michel de la foret, 'gainst whom it lies." "he is my guest; ye shall have him only by force." the governor turned to his men. "force the passage and search the house," he commanded. the company advanced with levelled pikes, but at a motion from the seigneur his men fell back before them, and, making a lane, disclosed michel de la foret at the end of it. michel had not approved of lempriere's mummery of defence, but he understood from what good spirit it sprung, and how it flattered the seigneur's vanity to make show of resistance. the governor greeted de la foret with a sour smile, read to him the queen's writ, and politely begged his company towards mont orgueil castle. "i'll fetch other commands from her majesty, or write me down a pedlar of st. ouen's follies," the seigneur said from his doorway, as the governor and de la foret bade him good-bye and took the road to the castle. chapter vi michel de la foret was gone, a prisoner. from the dusk of the trees by the little chapel of rozel, angele had watched his exit in charge of the governor's men. she had not sought to show her presence: she had seen him--that was comfort to her heart; and she would not mar the memory of that last night's farewell by another before these strangers. she saw with what quiet michel bore his arrest, and she said to herself, as the last halberdier vanished: "if the queen do but speak with him, if she but look upon his face and hear his voice, she must needs deal kindly by him. my michel--ah, it is a face for all men to trust and all women--" but she sighed and averted her head as though before prying eyes. the bell of rozel chapel broke gently on the evening air; the sound, softened by the leaves and mellowed by the wood of the great elm-trees, billowed away till it was lost in faint reverberation in the sea beneath the cliffs of the couperon, where a little craft was coming to anchor in the dead water. at first the sound of the bell soothed her, softening the thought of the danger to michel. she moved with it towards the sea, the tones of her grief chiming with it. presently, as she went, a priest in cassock and robes and stole crossed the path in front of her, an acolyte before him swinging a censer, his voice chanting latin verses from the service for the sick, in his hands the sacred elements of the sacrament for the dying. the priest was fat and heavy, his voice was lazy, his eyes expressionless, and his robes were dirty. the plaintive, peaceful sense which the sound of the vesper bell had thrown over angele's sad reflections passed away, and the thought smote her that, were it not for such as this black-toothed priest, michel would not now be on his way to england, a prisoner. to her this vesper bell was the symbol of tyranny and hate. it was fighting, it was martyrdom, it was exile, it was the medici. all that she had borne, all that her father had borne, the thought of the home lost, the mother dead before her time, the name ruined, the heritage dispossessed, the red war of the camisards, the rivulets of blood in the streets of paris and of her loved rouen, smote upon her mind, and drove her to her knees in the forest glade, her hands upon her ears to shut out the sound of the bell. it came upon her that the bell had said "peace! peace!" to her mind when there should be no peace; that it had said "be patient!" when she should be up and doing; that it had whispered "stay!" when she should tread the path her lover trod, her feet following in his footsteps as his feet had trod in hers. she pressed her hands tight upon her ears and prayed with a passion and a fervour she had never known before. a revelation seemed to come upon her, and, for the first time, she was a huguenot to the core. hitherto she had suffered for her religion because it was her mother's broken life, her father's faith, and because they had suffered, and her lover had suffered. her mind had been convinced, her loyalty had been unwavering, her words for the great cause had measured well with her deeds. but new senses were suddenly born in her, new eyes were given to her mind, new powers for endurance to her soul. she saw now as the martyrs of meaux had seen; a passionate faith descended on her as it had descended on them; no longer only patient, she was fain for action. tears rained from her eyes. her heart burst itself in entreaty and confession. "thy light shall be my light, and thy will my will, o lord," she cried at the last. "teach me thy way, create a right spirit within me. give me boldness without rashness, and hope without vain thinking. bear up my arms, o lord, and save me when falling. a poor samaritan am i. give me the water that shall be a well of water springing up to everlasting life, that i thirst not in the fever of doing. give me the manna of life to eat that i faint not nor cry out in plague, pestilence, or famine. give me thy grace, o god, as thou hast given it to michel de la foret, and guide my feet as i follow him in life and in death, for christ's sake. amen." as she rose from her knees she heard the evening gun from the castle of mont orgueil, whither michel was being borne by the queen's men. the vesper bell had stopped. through the wood came the salt savour of the sea on the cool sunset air. she threw back her head and walked swiftly towards it, her heart beating hard, her eyes shining with the light of purpose, her step elastic with the vigour of youth and health. a quarter-hour's walking brought her to the cliff of the couperon. as she gazed out over the sea, however, a voice in the bay below caught her ear. she looked down. on the deck of the little craft which had entered the harbour when the vesper bell was ringing stood a man who waved a hand up towards her, then gave a peculiar call. she stared with amazement: it was buonespoir the pirate. what did this mean? had god sent this man to her, by his presence to suggest what she should do in this crisis in her life? for even as she ran down the shore towards him, it came to her mind that buonespoir should take her in his craft to england. what to do in england? who could tell? she only knew that a voice called her to england, to follow the footsteps of michel de la foret, who even this night would be setting forth in the governor's brigantine for london. buonespoir met her upon the shore, grinning like a boy. "god save you, lady!" he said. "what brings you hither, friend?" she asked. if he had said that a voice had called him hither as one called her to england, it had not sounded strange; for she was not thinking that this was one who superstitiously swore by the little finger of st. peter, but only that he was the man who had brought her michel from france, who had been a faithful friend to her and to her father. "what brings me hither?" buonespoir laughed low in his chest. "even to fetch to the seigneur of rozel, a friend of mine by every token of remembrance, a dozen flagons of golden muscadella." to angele no suggestion flashed that these flagons of muscadella had come from the cellar of the seigneur of st. ouen's, where they had been reserved for a certain royal visit. nothing was in her mind save the one thought-that she must follow michel. "will you take me to england?" she asked, putting a hand quickly on his arm. he had been laughing hard, picturing to himself what lempriere of rozel would say when he sniffed the flagon of st. ouen's best wine, and for an instant he did not take in the question; but he stared at her now as the laugh slowly subsided through notes of abstraction and her words worked their way into his brain. "will you take me, buonespoir?" she urged. "take you--?" he questioned. "to england." "and myself to tyburn?" "nay, to the queen." "'tis the same thing. head of abel! elizabeth hath heard of me. the seigneur of st. ouen's and others have writ me down a pirate to her. she would not pardon the muscadella," he added, with another laugh, looking down where the flagons lay. "she must pardon more than that," exclaimed angele, and hastily she told him of what had happened to michel de la foret, and why she would go. "thy father, then?" he asked, scowling hard in his attempt to think it out. "he must go with me--i will seek him now." "it must be at once, i' faith, for how long, think you, can i stay here unharmed? i was sighted off st. ouen's shore a few hours agone." "to-night?" she asked. "by twelve, when we shall have the moon and the tide," he answered. "but hold!" he hastily added. "what, think you, could you and your father do alone in england? and with me it were worse than alone. these be dark times, when strangers have spies at their heels, and all travellers are suspect." "we will trust in god," she answered. "have you money?" he questioned--"for london, not for me," he added hastily. "enough," she replied. "the trust with the money is a weighty matter," he added; "but they suffice not. you must have 'fending." "there is no one," she answered sadly, "no one save--" "save the seigneur of rozel!" buonespoir finished the sentence. "good. you to your father, and i to the seigneur. if you can fetch your father by your pot-of-honey tongue, i'll fetch the great lempriere with muscadella. is't a bargain?" "in which i gain all," she answered, and again touched his arm with her finger-tips. "you shall be aboard here at ten, and i will join you on the stroke of twelve," he said, and gave a low whistle. at the signal three men sprang up like magic out of the bowels of the boat beneath them, and scurried over the side; three as ripe knaves as ever cheated stocks and gallows, but simple knaves, unlike their master. two of them had served with francis drake in that good ship of his lying even now not far from elizabeth's palace at greenwich. the third was a rogue who had been banished from jersey for a habitual drunkenness which only attacked him on land--at sea he was sacredly sober. his name was jean nicolle. the names of the other two were herve robin and rouge le riche, but their master called them by other names. "shadrach, meshach, and abednego," said buonespoir in ceremony, and waved a hand of homage between them and angele. "kiss dirt, and know where duty lies. the lady's word on my ship is law till we anchor at the queen's stairs at greenwich. so, heaven help you, shadrach, meshach, and abednego!" said buonespoir. a wave of humour passed over angele's grave face, for a stranger quartet never sailed high seas together: one blind of an eye, one game of a leg, one bald as a bottle and bereft of two front teeth; but buonespoir was sound of wind and limb, his small face with the big eyes lost in the masses of his red hair, and a body like hercules. it flashed through angele's mind even as she answered the gurgling salutations of the triumvirate that they had been got together for no gentle summer sailing in the channel. her conscience smote her that she should use such churls; but she gave it comfort by the thought that while serving her they could do naught worse; and her cause was good. yet they presented so bizarre an aspect, their ugliness was so varied and particular, that she almost laughed. buonespoir understood her thoughts, for with a look of mocking innocence in his great blue eyes he waved a hand again towards the graceless trio, and said, "for deep-sea fishing." then he solemnly winked at the three. a moment later angele was speeding along the shore towards her home on the farther hillside up the little glen; and within an hour buonespoir rolled from the dusk of the trees by the manor-house of rozel and knocked at the door. he carried on his head, as a fishwife carries a tray of ormers, a basket full of flagons of muscadella; and he did not lower the basket when he was shown into the room where the seigneur of rozel was sitting before a trencher of spiced veal and a great pot of ale. lempriere roared a hearty greeting to the pirate, for he was in a sour humour because of the taking off of michel de la foret; and of all men this pirate-fellow, who had quips and cranks, and had played tricks on his cousin of st. ouen's, was most welcome. "what's that on your teacup of a head?" he roared again as buonespoir grinned pleasure at the greeting. "muscadella," said buonespoir, and lowered the basket to the table. lempriere seized a flagon, drew it forth, looked closely at it, then burst into laughter, and spluttered: "st. ouen's muscadella, by the hand of rufus!" seizing buonespoir by the shoulders, he forced him down upon a bench at the table, and pushed the trencher of spiced meat against his chest. "eat, my noble lord of the sea and master of the cellar," he gurgled out, and, tipping the flagon of muscadella, took a long draught. "god-a- mercy--but it has saved my life," he gasped in satisfaction as he lay back in his great chair, and put his feet on the bench whereon buonespoir sat. they raised their flagons and toasted each other, and lempriere burst forth into song, in the refrain of which buonespoir joined boisterously: "king rufus he did hunt the deer, with a hey ho, come and kiss me, dolly! it was the spring-time of the year, hey ho, dolly shut her eyes! king rufus was a bully boy, he hunted all the day for joy, sweet dolly she was ever coy: and who would e'er be wise that looked in dolly's eyes? "king rufus he did have his day, with a hey ho, come and kiss me, dolly! so get ye forth where dun deer play-- hey ho, dolly comes again! the greenwood is the place for me, for that is where the dun deer be, 'tis where my dolly comes to me: and who would stay at home, that might with dolly roam? sing hey ho, come and kiss me, dolly!" lempriere, perspiring with the exertion, mopped his forehead, then lapsed into a plaintive mood. "i've had naught but trouble of late," he wheezed. "trouble, trouble, trouble, like gnats on a filly's flank!" and in spluttering words, twice bracketed in muscadella, he told of michel de la foret's arrest, and of his purpose to go to england if he could get a boat to take him. "'tis that same business brings me here," said buonespoir, and forthwith told of his meeting with angele and what was then agreed upon. "you to go to england!" cried lempriere amazed. "they want you for tyburn there." "they want me for the gallows here," said buonespoir. rolling a piece of spiced meat in his hand, he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed till the grease came out of his eyes, and took eagerly from a servant a flagon of malmsey and a dish of ormers. "hush, chew thy tongue a minute!" said the seigneur, suddenly starting and laying a finger beside his nose. "hush!" he said again, and looked into the flicker of the candle by him with half-shut eyes. "may i have no rushes for a bed, and die like a rat in a moat, if i don't get thy pardon too of the queen, and bring thee back to jersey, a thorn in the side of de carteret for ever! he'll look upon thee assoilzied by the queen, spitting fire in his rage, and no canary or muscadella in his cellar." it came not to the mind of either that this expedition would be made at cost to themselves. they had not heard of don quixote, and their gifts were not imitative. they were of a day when men held their lives as lightly as many men hold their honour now; when championship was as the breath of life to men's nostrils, and to adventure for what was worth having or doing in life the only road of reputation. buonespoir was as much a champion in his way as lempriere of rozel. they were of like kidney, though so far apart in rank. had lempriere been born as low and as poor as buonespoir, he would have been a pirate too, no doubt; and had buonespoir been born as high as the seigneur, he would have carried himself with the same rough sense of honour, with as ripe a vanity; have been as naive, as sincere, as true to the real heart of man untaught in the dissimulation of modesty or reserve. when they shook hands across the trencher of spiced veal, it was as man shakes hand with man, not man with master. they were about to start upon their journey when there came a knocking at the door. on its being opened the bald and toothless abednego stumbled in with the word that immediately after angele and her father came aboard the honeyflower some fifty halberdiers suddenly appeared upon the couperon. they had at once set sail, and got away even before the sailors had reached the shore. as they had rounded the point, where they were hid from view, abednego dropped overboard and swam ashore on the rising tide, making his way to the manor to warn buonespoir. on his way hither, stealing through the trees, he had passed a half-score of halberdiers making for the manor, and he had seen others going towards the shore. buonespoir looked to the priming of his pistols, and buckling his belt tightly about him, turned to the seigneur and said: "i will take my chances with abednego. where does she lie--the honeyflower, abednego?" "off the point called verclut," answered the little man, who had travelled with francis drake. "good; we will make a run for it, flying dot-and-carry-one as we go." while they had been speaking the seigneur had been thinking; and now, even as several figures appeared at a little distance in the trees, making towards the manor, he said, with a loud laugh: "no. 'tis the way of a fool to put his head between the door and the jamb. 'tis but a hundred yards to safety. follow me--to the sea-- abednego last. this way, bullies!" without a word all three left the house and walked on in the order indicated, as de carteret's halberdiers ran forward threatening. "stand!" shouted the sergeant of the halberdiers. "stand, or we fire!" but the three walked straight on unheeding. when the sergeant of the men-at-arms recognised the seigneur, he ordered down the blunderbusses. "we come for buonespoir the pirate," said the sergeant. "whose warrant?" said the seigneur, fronting the halberdiers, buonespoir and abednego behind him. "the seigneur of st. ouen's," was the reply. "my compliments to the seigneur of st. ouen's, and tell him that buonespoir is my guest," he bellowed, and strode on, the halberdiers following. suddenly the seigneur swerved towards the chapel and quickened his footsteps, the others but a step behind. the sergeant of the halberdiers was in a quandary. he longed to shoot, but dared not, and while he was making up his mind what to do, the seigneur had reached the chapel door. opening it, he quickly pushed buonespoir and abednego inside, whispering to them, then slammed the door and put his back against it. there was another moment's hesitation on the sergeant's part, then a door at the other end of the chapel was heard to open and shut, and the seigneur laughed loudly. the halberdiers ran round the chapel. there stood buonespoir and abednego in a narrow roadway, motionless and unconcerned. the halberdiers rushed forward. "perquage! perquage! perquage!" shouted buonespoir, and the bright moonlight showed him grinning. for an instant there was deadly stillness, in which the approaching footsteps of the seigneur sounded loud. "perquage!" buonespoir repeated. "perquage! fall back!" said the seigneur, and waved off the pikes of the halberdiers. "he has sanctuary to the sea." this narrow road in which the pirates stood was the last of three in the isle of jersey running from churches to the sea, in which a criminal was safe from arrest by virtue of an old statute. the other perquages had been taken away; but this one of rozel remained, a concession made by henry viii to the father of this raoul lempriere. the privilege had been used but once in the present seigneur's day, because the criminal must be put upon the road from the chapel by the seigneur himself, and he had used his privilege modestly. no man in jersey but knew the sacredness of this perquage, though it was ten years since it had been used; and no man, not even the governor himself, dare lift his hand to one upon that road. so it was that buonespoir and abednego, two fugitives from justice, walked quietly to the sea down the perquage, halberdiers, balked of their prey, prowling on their steps and cursing the seigneur of rozel for his gift of sanctuary: for the seigneur of st. ouen's and the royal court had promised each halberdier three shillings and all the ale he could drink at a sitting, if buonespoir was brought in alive or dead. in peace and safety the three boarded the honeyflower off the point called verclut, and set sail for england, just seven hours after michel de la foret had gone his way upon the channel, a prisoner. chapter vii a fortnight later, of a sunday morning, the lord chamberlain of england was disturbed out of his usual equanimity. as he was treading the rushes in the presence-chamber of the royal palace at greenwich, his eye busy in inspection--for the queen would soon pass on her way to chapel--his head nodding right and left to archbishop, bishop, councillors of state, courtiers, and officers of the crown, he heard a rude noise at the door leading into the ante-chapel, where the queen received petitions from the people. hurrying thither in shocked anxiety, he found a curled gentleman of the guard, resplendent in red velvet and gold chains, in peevish argument with a boisterous seigneur of a bronzed good-humoured face, who urged his entrance to the presence-chamber. the lord chamberlain swept down upon the pair like a flamingo with wings outspread. "god's death, what means this turmoil? her majesty comes hither!" he cried, and scowled upon the intruder, who now stepped back a little, treading on the toes of a huge sailor with a small head and bushy red hair and beard. "because her majesty comes i come also," the seigneur interposed grandly. "what is your name and quality?" "yours first, and i shall know how to answer." "i am the lord chamberlain of england." "and i, my lord, am lempriere, seigneur of rozel--and butler to the queen." "where is rozel?" asked my lord chamberlain. the face of the seigneur suddenly flushed, his mouth swelled, and then burst. "where is rozel!" he cried in a voice of rage. "where is rozel! have you heard of hugh pawlett," he asked, with a huge contempt--" of governor hugh pawlett?" the lord chamberlain nodded. "then ask his excellency when next you see him, where is rozel? but take good counsel and keep your ignorance from the queen," he added. "she has no love for stupids." "you say you are butler to the queen? whence came your commission?" said the lord chamberlain, smiling now; for lempriere's words and ways were of some simple world where odd folk lived, and his boyish vanity disarmed anger. "by royal warrant and heritage. and of all of the jersey isle, i only may have dove-totes, which is the everlasting thorn in the side of de carteret of st. ouen's. now will you let me in, my lord?" he said, all in a breath. at a stir behind him the lord chamberlain turned, and with a horrified exclamation hurried away, for the procession from the queen's apartments had already entered the presence-chamber: gentlemen, barons, earls, knights of the garter, in brave attire, with bare heads and sumptuous calves. the lord chamberlain had scarce got to his place when the chancellor, bearing the seals in a red silk purse, entered, flanked by two gorgeous folk with the royal sceptre and the sword of state in a red scabbard, all flourished with fleur-de-lis. moving in and out among them all was the queen's fool, who jested and shook his bells under the noses of the highest. it was an event of which the seigneur of rozel told to his dying day: that he entered the presence-chamber of the royal palace of greenwich at the same instant as the queen--"rozel at one end, elizabeth at the other, and all the world at gaze," he was wont to say with loud guffaws. but what he spoke of afterwards with preposterous ease and pride was neither pride nor ease at the moment; for the queen's eyes fell on him as he shoved past the gentlemen who kept the door. for an instant she stood still, regarding him intently, then turned quickly to the lord chamberlain in inquiry, and with sharp reproof too in her look. the lord chamberlain fell on his knee and with low uncertain voice explained the incident. elizabeth again cast her eyes towards lempriere, and the court, following her example, scrutinised the seigneur in varied styles of insolence or curiosity. lempriere drew himself up with a slashing attempt at composure, but ended by flaming from head to foot, his face shining like a cock's comb, the perspiration standing out like beads upon his forehead, his eyes gone blind with confusion. that was but for a moment, however, and then, elizabeth's look being slowly withdrawn from him, a curious smile came to her lips, and she said to the lord chamberlain: "let the gentleman remain." the queen's fool tripped forward and tapped the lord chamberlain on the shoulder. "let the gentleman remain, gossip, and see you that remaining he goeth not like a fly with his feet in the porridge." with a flippant step before the seigneur, he shook his bells at him. "thou shalt stay, nuncio, and staying speak the truth. so doing you shall be as noted as a comet with three tails. you shall prove that man was made in god's image. so lift thy head and sneeze--sneezing is the fashion here; but see that thou sneeze not thy head off as they do in tartary. 'tis worth remembrance." rozel's self-importance and pride had returned. the blood came back to his heart, and he threw out his chest grandly; he even turned to buonespoir, whose great figure might be seen beyond the door, and winked at him. for a moment he had time to note the doings of the queen and her courtiers with wide-eyed curiosity. he saw the earl of leicester, exquisite, haughty, gallant, fall upon his knee, and elizabeth slowly pull off her glove and with a none too gracious look give him her hand to kiss, the only favour of the kind granted that day. he saw cecil, her minister, introduce a foreign noble, who presented his letters. he heard the queen speak in a half-dozen different languages, to people of various lands, and he was smitten with amazement. but as elizabeth came slowly down the hall, her white silk gown fronted with great pearls flashing back the light, a marchioness bearing the train, the crown on her head glittering as she turned from right to left, her wonderful collar of jewels sparkling on her uncovered bosom, suddenly the mantle of black, silver-shotted silk upon her shoulders became to lempriere's heated senses a judge's robe, and elizabeth the august judge of the world. his eyes blinded again, for it was as if she was bearing down upon him. certainly she was looking at him now, scarce heeding the courtiers who fell to their knees on either side as she came on. the red doublets of the fifty gentlemen pensioners--all men of noble families proud to do this humble yet distinguished service--with battle-axes, on either side of her, seemed to lempriere on the instant like an army with banners threatening him. from the ante-chapel behind him came the cry of the faithful subjects who, as the gentleman-at-arms fell back from the doorway, had but just caught a glimpse of her majesty--"long live elizabeth!" it seemed to lempriere that the gentlemen pensioners must beat him down as they passed, yet he stood riveted to the spot; and indeed it was true that he was almost in the path of her majesty. he was aware that two gentlemen touched him on the shoulder and bade him retire; but the queen motioned to them to desist. so, with the eyes of the whole court on him again, and elizabeth's calm curious gaze fixed, as it were, on his forehead, he stood still till the flaming gentlemen pensioners were within a few feet of him, and the battle-axes were almost over his head. the great braggart was no better now than a wisp of grass in the wind, and it was more than homage that bent him to his knees as the queen looked him full in the eyes. there was a moment's absolute silence, and then she said, with cold condescension: "by what privilege do you seek our presence?" "i am raoul lempriere, seigneur of rozel, your high majesty," said the choking voice of the jerseyman. the queen raised her eyebrows. "the man seems french. you come from france?" lempriere flushed to his hair--the queen did not know him, then! "from jersey isle, your sacred majesty." "jersey isle is dear to us. and what is your warrant here?" "i am butler to your majesty, by your gracious majesty's patent, and i alone may have dove-cotes in the isle; and i only may have the perquage- on your majesty's patent. it is not even held by de carteret of st. ouen's." the queen smiled as she had not smiled since she entered the presence- chamber. "god preserve us," she said--"that i should not have recognised you! it is, of course, our faithful lempriere of rozel." the blood came back to the seigneur's heart, but he did not dare look up yet, and he did not see that elizabeth was in rare mirth at his words; and though she had no ken or memory of him, she read his nature and was mindful to humour him. beckoning leicester to her side, she said a few words in an undertone, to which he replied with a smile more sour than sweet. "rise, monsieur of rozel," she said. the seigneur stood up, and met her gaze faintly. "and so, proud seigneur, you must needs flout e'en our lord chamberlain, in the name of our butler with three dove-cotes and the perquage. in sooth thy office must not be set at naught lightly--not when it is flanked by the perquage. by my father's doublet, but that frieze jerkin is well cut; it suits thy figure well--i would that my lord leicester here had such a tailor. but this perquage--i doubt not there are those here at court who are most ignorant of its force and moment. my lord chamberlain, my lord leicester, cecil here--confusion sits in their faces. the perquage, which my father's patent approved, has served us well, i doubt not, is a comfort to our realm and a dignity befitting the wearer of that frieze jerkin. speak to their better understanding, monsieur of rozel." "speak, nuncio, and you shall have comforts, and be given in marriage, multiple or singular, even as i," said the fool, and touched him on the breast with his bells. lempriere had recovered his heart, and now was set full sail in the course he had charted for himself in jersey. in large words and larger manner he explained most innocently the sacred privilege of perquage. "and how often have you used the right, friend?" asked elizabeth. "but once in ten years, your noble majesty." "when last?" "but yesterday a week, your universal majesty." elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "who was the criminal, what the occasion?" "the criminal was one buonespoir, the occasion our coming hither to wait upon the queen of england and our lady of normandy, for such is your well-born majesty to your loyal jersiais." and thereupon he plunged into an impeachment of de carteret of st. ouen's, and stumbled through a blunt broken story of the wrongs and the sorrows of michel and angele and the doings of buonespoir in their behalf. elizabeth frowned and interrupted him. "i have heard of this buonespoir, monsieur, through others than the seigneur of st. ouen's. he is an unlikely squire of dames. there's a hill in my kingdom has long bided his coming. where waits the rascal now?" "in the ante-chapel, your majesty." "by the rood!" said elizabeth in sudden amazement. "in my ante-chapel, forsooth!" she looked beyond the doorway and saw the great red-topped figure of buonespoir, his good-natured, fearless fare, his shock of hair, his clear blue eye--he was not thirty feet away. "he comes to crave pardon for his rank offences, your benignant majesty," said lempriere. the humour of the thing rushed upon the queen. never before were two such naive folk at court. there was not a hair of duplicity in the heads of the two, and she judged them well in her mind. "i will see you stand together--you and your henchman," she said to rozel, and moved on to the antechapel, the court following. standing still just inside the doorway, she motioned buonespoir to come near. the pirate, unconfused, undismayed, with his wide blue asking eyes, came forward and dropped upon his knees. elizabeth motioned lempriere to stand a little apart. thereupon she set a few questions to buonespoir, whose replies, truthfully given, showed that he had no real estimate of his crimes, and was indifferent to what might be their penalties. he had no moral sense on the one hand, on the other, no fear. suddenly she turned to lempriere again. "you came, then, to speak for this michel de la foret, the exile--?" "and for the demoiselle angele aubert, who loves him, your majesty." "i sent for this gentleman exile a fortnight ago--" she turned towards leicester inquiringly. "i have the papers here, your majesty," said leicester, and gave a packet over. "and where have you de la foret?" said elizabeth. "in durance, your majesty." "when came he hither?" "three days gone," answered leicester, a little gloomily, for there was acerbity in elizabeth's voice. elizabeth seemed about to speak, then dropped her eyes upon the papers, and glanced hastily at their contents. "you will have this michel de la foret brought to my presence as fast as horse can bring him, my lord," she said to leicester. "this rascal of the sea--buonespoir--you will have safe bestowed till i recall his existence again," she said to a captain of men-at-arms; "and you, monsieur of rozel, since you are my butler, will get you to my dining- room, and do your duty--the office is not all perquisites," she added smoothly. she was about to move on, when a thought seemed to strike her, and she added, "this mademoiselle and her father whom you brought hither- where are they?" "they are even within the palace grounds, your imperial majesty," answered lempriere. "you will summon them when i bid you," she said to the seigneur; "and you shall see that they have comforts and housing as befits their station," she added to the lord chamberlain. so did elizabeth, out of a whimsical humour, set the highest in the land to attend upon unknown, unconsidered exiles. etext editor's bookmarks: boldness without rashness, and hope without vain thinking nothing is futile that is right religion to him was a dull recreation invented chiefly for women google books (oxford university) transcriber's notes: . page scan source: http://books.google.com/books?id=nxoeaaaaqaaj& (oxford university) . the diphthong oe is represented by [oe]. the huguenot. vol. i. london: printed by a. spottiswoode, new-street-square. the huguenot a tale of the french protestants. by the author of "the gipsy," "the robber," &c. &c. * * * in three volumes. vol. i. * * * london: printed for longman, orme, brown, green, & longmans, paternoster-row. . dedication. * * * to charles rudolphe lord clinton, &c. &c. &c. my lord, although i, of course, look upon the book, which i now venture to dedicate to one whom i so much esteem and respect, with those parental prejudices which make us often overlook all defects, and magnify any good qualities in our offspring, yet, believe me, i feel that it is very far inferior to that which i could wish to present to you. do not, then, measure my regard by the value of the work, but accept it only as a very slight testimony of great esteem; and, at the same time, allow me, even in my dedication, to say a few words concerning the book itself. i will not trouble you or the public with any reasoning upon the general conduct of the story--why i suddenly changed the scene here, or flew off to another character there,--why i gave but a glimpse of such a personage, or dwelt long and minutely upon another. i believe and trust that those who read the work attentively will discover strong reasons for all such proceedings, and i am quite sure that much thought and care was bestowed on each step of the kind before it was taken. your own good taste will decide whether i was right or wrong, and blame or approve, i know, whatever i might plead. the public will do so also; and, as a general rule, i think it best to conceal, as far as possible, in all cases, the machinery of a composition of this kind, suffering the wheels to produce their effect without being publicly exhibited. i have heard many authors blamed, however, and, doubtless, have been so myself, for frequently changing the scene or character before the reader's eyes. there are people who read a romance only for the story, and these are always displeased with anything that interrupts their straightforward progress. but nature does not tell _her_ stories in such a way as these readers desire; and, in the course of human life, there are always little incidents occurring, which seem of no earthly importance at the time, but which, in years long after, affect persons and produce events where no one could imagine that such a connexion is likely to be brought about. i have always in this respect, as in all others, endeavoured to the best of my abilities to copy nature; and those readers who pass over little incidents, because they seem at the time irrelevant, or run on to follow the history of one character whenever a less interesting personage is brought upon the scene, will derive little either of profit or pleasure from any well constructed work of fiction. i have, as far as possible, avoided in all my works bringing prominently forward any character or any scene which has not a direct influence upon the progress and end of the tales; but i have equally avoided pointing out to the superficial reader, by any flourish of trumpets, that the personage he thinks of no importance is "to turn out a great man in the end," or that the scene which seems unconnected and irrelevant will be found not without results. besides these considerations, however, i trust every romance-writer in the present day proposes to himself greater objects than the mere telling of a good story. he who, in the course of a well-conceived and interesting tale, excites our good passions to high and noble aspirations; depicts our bad passions so as to teach us to abhor and govern them; arrays our sympathies on the side of virtue, benevolence, and right; expands our hearts, and makes the circle of our feelings and affections more comprehensive; stores our imaginations with images bright, and sweet, and beautiful; makes us more intimately and philosophically acquainted with the characters of our fellow-men; and, in short, causes the reader to rise wiser and with a higher appreciation of all that is good and great,--attains the grand object at which every man should aim, and deserves the thanks and admiration of mankind. even he who makes the attempt, though without such success, does something, and never can write altogether in vain. that you, to whom i inscribe this work, can appreciate such purposes, and will encourage the attempt, even where, as in these pages, it goes little beyond endeavour, is no slight pleasure to me: nor is it an unmeaning or insincere compliment when i say, that though i yield my own opinions to no man, yet i have often thought of you and yours while i have been writing these volumes. i know not whether you remember saying one day, after we had visited together the school instituted by our noble acquaintance guicciardini, "that whether it succeeded or failed, the endeavour to do good ought to immortalize him." perhaps you have forgotten the words, but i have not. allow me, ere i end this long epistle, to add something in regard to the truth of the representations made in the work, and the foundation on which the story rests. if you will look into the curious "mémoires historiques sur la bastille," published in (vol. i., page ), you will find some of the bare facts, as they are stated in the great register of the bastille, on which the plot of the tale that follows entirely hinges. of course i cannot forestall my story by alluding more particularly to those facts; and i have only further to say on that subject, that for many reasons i have altered the names inserted in the great register. i have also taken the same liberty with regard to the scenes of many events which really occurred, placing in poitou what sometimes took place in dauphiny, sometimes in provence. nor have i felt myself bound in all instances to respect the exact dates, having judged it expedient to bring many events within a short compass which were spread over a greater space of time. i have endeavoured, however, to represent most accurately, without prejudice or favour, the conduct of the french catholics to french protestants, and of protestants to catholics, during the persecutions of the seventeenth century. my love and esteem for many excellent catholics--priests as well as laity--would prevent me, i believe, from viewing the question of the revocation of the edict of nantes, and the consequences thereof, with a prejudiced eye; and when i read the following passages in the writings, not of a protestant, but of a sincere catholic, i am only inclined to doubt whether i have not softened the picture of persecution. "il restait peu à faire pour exciter le zèle du roi contre une religion solemnellement frappée des plus éclatans anathèmes par l'église universelle, et qui s'en était elle-même frappée la première en se séparant de tout l'antiquité sur des points de foi fondamentaux. "le roi était devenu dévot, et dévot dans la dernière ignorance. a la dévotion se joignit la politique. on voulut lui plaire par les endroits qui le touchaient le plus sensiblement, la dévotion et l'autorité. on lui peignit les huguenots avec les plus noires couleurs; un état dans un état, parvenu à ce point de licence à force de désordres, de révoltes, de guerres civiles, d'alliances étrangères, de résistance à force ouverte contre les rois ses prédécesseurs, et jusqu'à lui-même réduit à vivre en traité avec eux. mais on se garda bien de lui apprendre la source de tant de maux, les origines de leurs divers dégrès et de leurs progrès, pourquoi et par qui les huguenots furent premièrement armés, puis soutenus, et surtout de lui dire un seul mot des projets de si longue main pourpensés, des horreurs et des attentats de la ligue contre sa couronne, contre sa maison, contre son père, son aïeul, et tous les siens. "on lui voila avec autant de soin ce que l'évangile, et d'après cette divine loi les apôtres, et tous les pères et leur suite, enseignent la manière de prêcher jésus christ, de convertir les infidèles et les hérétiques, et de se conduire en ce qui regarde la religion. on toucha un dévot de la douceur de faire, aux dépens d'autrui, une pénitence facile qu'on lui persuada sure pour l'autre monde. * * * * * "les grands ministres n'étaient plus alors. le tellier au lit de la mort, son funeste fils était le seul qui restât, car seignelay ne faisait guère que poindre. louvois, avide de guerre, atterré sous le poids d'une trève de vingt ans, qui ne faisait presque que d'être signée, espéra qu'un si grand coup porté aux huguenots réunirait tout le protestantisme de l'europe, et s'applaudit en attendant de ce que le roi ne pouvant frapper sur les huguenots que par ses troupes, il en serait le principal exécuteur, et par là de plus en plus en crédit. l'esprit et le génie de madame de maintenon, tel qu'il vient d'être représenté avec exactitude, n'était rien moins que propre, ni capable d'aucune affaire au-delà de l'intrigue. elle n'était pas née ni nourrie à voir sur celle-ci au-delà de ce qui lui en était presenté, moins encore pour ne pas saisir avec ardeur une occasion si naturelle de plaire, d'admirer, de s'affermir de plus en plus par la dévotion. qui d'ailleurs eût su un mot de ce qui ne se délibérait qu'entre le confesseur, le ministre alors comme unique, et l'épouse nouvelle et chérie; et qui de plus eût osé contredire? c'est ainsi que sont menés à tout, par une voie ou par une autre, les rois qui, par grandeur, par défiance, par abandon à ceux qui les tiennent, par paresse ou par orgueil, ne se communiquent qu'à deux ou trois personnes, et bien souvent à moins, et qui mettent entre eux et tout le reste de leurs sujets une barrière insurmontable. "la revocation de l'édit de nantes, sans le moindre prétexte et sans aucun besoin, et les diverses proscriptions plutôt que déclarations qui la suivirent, furent les fruits de ce complot affreux qui dépeupla un quart du royaume; qui ruina son commerce; qui l'affaiblit dans toutes ses parties; qui le mit si longtemps au pillage public et avoué des dragons; qui autorisa les tourmens et les supplices dans lesquels ils firent réellement mourir tant d'innocens de tout sexe par milliers; qui ruina un peuple si nombreux; qui déchira un monde de familles; qui arma les parens contre les parens pour avoir leur bien et les laisser mourir de faim; qui fit passer nos manufactures aux étrangers, fit fleurir et regorger leurs états aux dépens du nôtre, et leur fit bâtir de nouvelles villes; qui leur donna le spectacle d'un si prodigieux peuple proscrit, nu, fugitif, errant sans crime, cherchant asile loin de sa patrie; qui mit nobles, riches, vieillards, gens souvent très-estimés pour leur piété, leur savoir, leur vertu, des gens aisés, faibles, délicats, à la ruine, et sous le nerf très-effectif du comité, pour cause unique de religion; enfin qui, pour comble de toutes horreurs, remplit toutes les provinces du royaume de parjures et de sacrilèges, où tout retentissait de hurlemens de ces infortunées victimes de l'erreur, pendant que tant d'autres sacrifiaient leur conscience à leurs biens et à leur repos, et achetaient l'un et l'autre par des abjurations simulées, d'où sans intervalle on les traînait à adorer ce qu'ils ne croyaient point, et à recevoir réellement le divin corps du saint des saints, tandis qu'ils demeuraient persuadés qu'ils ne mangeaient que du pain qu'ils devaient encore abhorrer. telle fut l'abomination générale enfantée par la flatterie et par la cruauté. de la torture à l'abjuration, et de celle-ci à la communion, il n'y avait pas souvent vingt-quatre heures de distance, et leurs bourreaux étaient leurs conducteurs et leurs témoins. ceux qui, par la suite, eurent l'air d'être changés avec plus de loisir, ne tardèrent pas par leur fuite ou par leur conduite à démentir leur pretendu retour."--_st. simon_, vol. xiii. p. . ed. . i have now nothing further to say, my dear lord clinton, but to beg your pardon for having already said so much, and to express a hope that you and the public will deal leniently by that which is now offered to you, with the highest respect and esteem, by yours most faithfully, g. p. r. james. _fair oak lodge, petersfield_. _th nov_. . the huguenot. * * * chapter i. the hero, his friend, and his dwelling in the seventeenth century. there is a small town in one of the remote provinces of france, about ten miles from the sea shore, and two or three hundred from the capital, on the appearance of which it may be as well to dwell for a short time; noticing not alone its houses and its streets as they appeared in the seventeenth century, but its inhabitants, their feelings, and their customs, at that period. were we not to make this formal sort of presentation, the reader would feel as if set down suddenly amidst a crowd of strangers with no one to introduce him, with no one to unpadlock the barrier which the cautious laws of society set up between man and man, to guard against the wild-beast propensities of the race of intellectual tigers to which we belong. now, however, if we manage skilfully, the reader may become as familiar with the people of another day, and scenes of another land, as if they had been the playfellows of his childhood, and the haunts of his youth; and may go on calmly with those to whom he is thus introduced through the dark and painful events which are recorded in the pages that follow. that part of france in which our scene is laid, presents features which differ very much from the dull and uninteresting aspect of the land from calais to paris, and from paris to the mountains of switzerland--the route generally pursued by our travelling countrymen, whether they go forth to make what is usually called the grand tour, or content themselves with idling away a long space of mispent time amongst the helvetian mountains. in the district that i speak of, the face of the country, though it cannot perhaps be called mountainous, is richly varied, running up into occasional high and pointed hills, presenting frequent masses of rock and wood, diversified by a mile or two, here and there, of soft pasture and meadow; with innumerable streams--some calm and peaceful, some fierce and torrent-like, some sparkling and playful, giving an air of life and glad activity to the land through which they flow. these manifold streams shed also a hue of indescribable verdure, a fresh leafyness of aspect, that is most grateful to the eye; and though there is not there, as in our own land, the frequent hedge-row, with its sweet village associations, yet there is no want of high umbrageous trees scattered here and there, besides the thick woods that, in many places, occupy several leagues in extent, and the lesser copses that nest themselves in many a dell. the district that we speak of is bright in its skies and warm in its sunshine, though it is not precisely in the region of the richest vine; and there are scarcely five days, during six months of the year, in which, on every stony bank or on the short soft turf above the large lizards may not be seen basking in their coats of green and gold. there are not, indeed, the cloudless skies of italy, which, notwithstanding their splendid colouring, are insipid from their very cloudlessness: no, but wreathed in grand masses by the free air, sometimes drifting from the british channel, sometimes sweeping from the wide western ocean, the clouds and the sunshine sport together in the heaven, while the shadow and the light chase each other over the earth below, and ever and anon comes down a passing shower, refreshing the lands it lights upon, and leaving them brighter than before. on the top of one of the tall rocky hills we have mentioned, in very remote feudal times,--for we find it mentioned in all the wars undertaken by the edwards and the henries in their vain endeavours to grasp a crown that did not belong to them,--a town had been built and fortified, circumscribed by large stone walls flanked by round towers, and crowned by the square keep of a castle, only one wall of which has been left, for now near a century and a half. this town was of small size, occupying nothing but the summit of the hill, and was strictly confined within the walls; and, indeed, below, on three sides, were such steep ascents--in some places showing precipitous spaces of rude rock, and in others covered with short, green, slippery turf--that it was scarcely possible for the inhabitants to have built beyond the walls, except on one side, even if they had been so inclined. in such times of danger, however, it had been the object of those who possessed the town to keep that fourth side, by which the ascent was more easy, clear from all houses and buildings of any kind, so that the quarrels from the cross-bow, the arrows from the bow, or the balls from the cannon--as different ages brought different inventions--might sweep down unimpeded upon any approaching enemy, and that the eye might also have a free range to discover the approach of a foe. thus that gentler slope was not even broken by a road till the end of the sixteenth century, the way up to the town from the valley below being constructed with great skill and care upon one of the steepest sides of the hill, by means of wide short platforms, each of which was defended by some particular fortification of its own, while the whole line of the valley and the lower part of the road were commanded by the cannon of the castle of st. anne, a rude old fortress on an inferior hill, of little or no use to any persons but those who possessed the higher and more important works above. through the valley and winding round the foot of the hill of st. anne was a wide, clear, beautiful stream, navigable up to that spot, and falling into the sea at the distance of ten or twelve miles in a direct line, but which contrived to extend its course, by the tortuous path that it pursued amongst the hills, to a length of nearly twenty leagues. such as we have described was the situation, in feudal times, of the small town that we shall call morseiul; but ere the commencement of our tale those feudal times had passed away. even during the wars of the league the town had remained in tranquillity and repose. it was remote from the general scene of strife; and although it had sent out many who aided, and not insignificantly, in upholding the throne of henry iv., there was but one occasion on which the tide of war flowed near its walls, and then speedily retreated, and left it unassailed. under these circumstances fortifications were soon neglected--precautions were no longer taken--the cannon for half a century remained upon the walls unused--rust and honeycomb began to gnaw into the heart of the iron--sheds were erected in the embrasures--houses succeeded--gardens were laid out in the round towers--the castle of st. anne fell utterly into ruins--and some of the patriotic and compassionate inhabitants thought it a hard tax upon the sinews of the horses, who in those days carried from place to place the merchandise of the country, to be forced to climb the zizgag path of one of the more precipitous sides of the hill. thus in the early part of the reign of louis xiii. a petition was addressed by the inhabitants to their count, who still retained all his feudal rights and privileges, beseeching him to construct or permit the construction of a gate upon the southern side of the town, and a road down the easier descent. the count, who was a good-humoured man, a nobleman of the school of henry iv., and as fond of the people of the good town as they were of him, was quite willing to gratify them in any reasonable desire; but he was the more moved to do what they wished in the present instance, inasmuch as some ten or fifteen years before he had himself broken through the old rules and regulations established in the commune, and not only built himself a château beyond the walls of that very side, but laid out a space of two or three acres of ground in such a manner as to give him shade when he wanted it, and sunshine when the shade was not agreeable. of the château we shall speak hereafter: but it is only here necessary to say, that in building this dwelling beyond the walls, the count de morseiul of that day had forgotten altogether the possibility of carrying a road down that side of the hill. he had constructed a way for himself into the town by enlarging an old postern in the walls, which he caused to open into his garden, and by this postern, whenever he sought to issue forth into the country beyond, he took his way into the town, traversed the square, and followed the old zigzag road down the steep side of the hill. the peasantry, indeed, had not failed to think of that which their lord had overlooked, and when they had a dozen or two of pigeons, or a pair of fowls, or a fat calf to present to the seigneur, they almost invariably brought it by the slope up the hill. a path had thus been worn from the valley below in the precise direction which was best fitted for the road, and whenever the good townsmen presented their petition to the count, it instantly struck him how very convenient such a road would be to himself as well as to them. now the count was neither a cunning nor an ungenerous man; and the moment he saw that the advantage to be derived would be to himself, he determined to open the gate, and make the road at his own expense without subjecting the commune or the peasantry to corvée or fine. he told the inhabitants so at once, and they, as they well might be, were grateful to him in consequence. he made the road, and a handsome one it was; and he threw down a part of the wall, and erected a splendid gate in its place. he gave no name, indeed, to either; but the people immediately and universally bestowed a name on both, and called them the count's gate, and the count's road, so that the act was perpetuated by the grateful memory of those whom it benefited. as, following the example of the earth on which we live, every thing upon its surface moves forward, or perhaps we may say appears to move forward, while very likely it is going but in a circle, the opening of the gate and the making of the road was speedily followed by another step, which was the building of houses by the road-side; so that, at the period when our tale commences, the whole aspect, appearance, and construction of the town was altered. a long street, with gardens at the back of the houses, extended all the way down the gentle slope of the hill; the gate had been widened, the summit had been cleared of a great number of small houses, and a view was opened straight up into a fine gay-looking market square at the top, with the ruined wall of the old keep, raising its high head covered with ivy on the western side, and to the north the little church, with its tall thin-slated spire rising high, not only above the buildings of the town itself, but the whole of the country round, and forming a remarkable object, which was seen for many leagues at sea. we are in this account supposing the reader to be looking up the street, which was turned towards the south, and was consequently full of sunshine towards the middle of the day. it would, indeed, have been intolerably hot in the summer, had it not been that the blessed irregularity of the houses contrived to give some shade at every hour of the four and twenty. but from the bottom of that street almost up to the top was to be seen, upon the left hand, rising above the buildings of the street itself, the weathercocks, and round turrets, and pointed roofs and loop-holes, and windows innumerable, which marked the château built by the count who had constructed the road; while here and there, too, were also seen the tops of the tall limes and elms with which he had shaded his gardens, and which had now grown up into tall splendid trees, flourishing in the years which had brought him to decay and death. into the little town of morseiul had been early introduced the doctrines of calvin, and the inhabitants clung to those doctrines with peculiar pertinacity. they had constantly sent volunteers to the protestant army; they had bestirred themselves in aid of la rochelle, and had even despatched succour to the protestants of the far south. the weak, bigotted, and treacherous louis xiii. had declared that they were the most obstinate heretics in his dominions, and had threatened against them many things, which the wisdom of his great minister had prevented him from performing. but the counts of morseiul themselves had at all times rendered great services to the state: they had proved themselves on all occasions gallant and determined soldiers and skilful politicians; and, though they too held firm by the religion of their ancestors, and set equally at defiance both threats and seductions--which conduct formed the strongest link between them and their people--richelieu had judged that it would be hazardous to drive them into open resistance to the crown. we may indeed surmise that he judged it unnecessary also, inasmuch as there can be no doubt that in his dealings with the huguenots he treated them solely as a political party, and not as a religious sect. such being the case, though somewhat courting the persecutions of the times, the town of morseiul had been left unmolested in the exercise of its religious tenets, and had enjoyed not only all the liberty which was granted to the protestants of france by the edict of nantes, but various other privileges, obtained perhaps by a little encroachment, and retained by right of prescription. the inhabitants were a hardy and determined race, frank and good-humoured, and possessing from various points in their position a great degree of simplicity in manners and character, mingled with much religious fervour. they had, indeed, of late years, been somewhat polished, or perhaps one might call it, corrupted. they had acquired more wants and more wishes from the increasing luxuriousness of the day; had heard with wonder, and not perhaps without some longing, of the splendours and the marvels and the gaieties of the court of louis xiv., then in the bright and butterfly days of its youthful ostentation; and they felt strongly and beneficially the general impulse given to every sort of commerce by the genius of colbert, and applied themselves to derive the utmost advantage therefrom, by pursuing with skill, activity, and perseverance, various manufactures, in which they displayed no small ingenuity. a good number of them had become wealthy, and all of them indeed were well off in the station of life in which they were placed. the artisan was rich for an artisan, as well as the burgess for a burgess; but they were all simple in their habits, not without their little pride, or without their luxuries on a holyday; but frugal and thoughtful as they were industrious. such was the town of morseiul and its inhabitants in the year --. we must now turn to the château of the count, and to its denizens at the time of the opening of our tale. the château was built, as we have said, on the outside of the walls of the town, and was one of those odd buildings of which many a specimen has come down to us. it seemed to have been built by detached impulses, and upon no general plan, though, to admit nothing but the truth, the construction was attributable all to one person. the great hall was along, wide-spreading piece of architecture, with a high roof, and a row of windows turned to the south side, which was the front of the château. then came two or three square masses of stone-work on either side of the hall, with the gables projecting to the front, no two of them of the same height and size; and many of them separated either by a tall round tower, with loopholes all the way up, like button-holes in the front of a waistcoat, or broken towards the roof by a turret stuck on and projecting from the rest of the building. on the western side of the château was a large square tower, with numerous windows, placed with some degree of regularity; and on the eastern, was an octangular tower containing a separate entrance of a somewhat gothic character. two large wings projected behind towards the town on which the château unceremoniously turned its back, and the large open space of ground thus enclosed, was again divided into two by a heavy transverse mass of building, as irregular as the external parts of the whole. the mansion was completed by the stables and offices for the servants and retainers, and the whole was pitched in the centre of a platform, which had formerly been one of the bastions of the town. behind the château, and between the building and the walls, were numerous trees, giving that space the name of the bocage, and through this lay the little walk that led to the postern, which was originally the only exit from the château. in front was a tolerably wide esplanade, extending to the edge of the bastion, and from the edge of the terrace descended a flight of steps to the slope below, on which had been laid out a flower-garden, separated from the rest of the ground by a stone wall, surmounted by flower-pots in the shape of vases. the remaining portion of the space enclosed was planted, according to the taste of that day, with straight rows of trees, on the beauties of which it is unnecessary to dwell. the interior of the castle was fitted up in the taste of the reign of henry iv. and louis xiii., few changes having taken place since the time it was first furnished, immediately after it was built. some of the rooms, indeed, contained the furniture of the older castle formerly inhabited by the counts, which furniture was of a much more remote age, and had been condemned, by scornful posterity, to the dusty oblivion which we so fondly pile upon our ancestors. it may be as well, however, to conduct the reader into one of the rooms of that château, and, telling him that we have ourselves sat therein, furnished exactly as it was then furnished, and looking exactly as it then looked, endeavour to make him see it as the glass of memory now gives it back to us. it was a large oblong room, with a vaulted roof: not dome-shaped, indeed, for it was flat at the top; but from the walls towards the centre, it sloped for a considerable way before it received the flattened form which we mention. it was indeed a four-sided vault, with the top of the arches cut off. on two sides were windows, or perhaps we should call them casements, with the glass set in leaden frames, and opening only in part. the hearth and chimney were of enormous dimensions, with a seat on either side of the fire-place, which was a sort of raised platform of brick-work, ornamented with two large andirons grinning with lions' heads, for the reception of the fuel. over the chimney again was a wide slab of marble, supported by two marble scrolls; and a tablet, on which was recorded, with very tolerable latinity, that that château had been built by francis count of morseiul, in the year of grace one thousand five hundred and ninety. above this marble, far blacker than the dark oak panelling which supported it, hung an immense ebony frame, carved with a thousand curious figures, and containing a large round mirror of polished metal, reflecting, though in a different size, all the objects that the room contained. on the two sides of the chamber were one or two fine portraits by rubens and vandyke, also in ebony frames, but cursed with an internal border of gold. a multitude of high-backed chairs, only fitted for men in armour, and ladies with whalebone bodices; four cabinets of ebony, chequered with small lines of inlaid ivory, with immense locks, marked out by heavy, but not inelegant, silver shields; and two or three round tables, much too small for the size of the room, made up the rest of the furniture of the apartment, if we except some curious specimens of porcelain, and one or two curiosities brought by different members of the family from foreign lands. there was also a lute upon one of the tables, and ten long glasses, with a vein of gold in their taper stalks, ranged in battle array upon the mantelpiece. the moment at which we shall begin our tale was about the hour of dinner in the province, at that period a very different hour from that at which we dine in the present day. the windows were all open, the bright sunshine was pouring in and throwing the small square panes into lozenges upon the flooring; and from that room, which was high up in the castle, might be seen as wide spread and beautiful a landscape as ever the eye rested upon, a world of verdure, streams, and woods, and hills, with the bright sky above. such was the chamber and its aspect at the period that we speak of; and we must now turn to those who inhabited it, and, in the first place, must depict them to the reader's eye, before we enter into any remarks or detailed account of their several characters, which, perhaps, we may be inclined to give in this instance, even while we admit that in general it is far better to suffer our personages to develope themselves and tell their own tale to the reader. in all, there were some seven persons in that room; but there were only two upon whom we shall at present pause. they were seated at a table in the midst, on which were spread forth various viands in abundance, upon plates of silver of a rich and handsome form; while a profusion of the same metal in the shape of cups, forks, spoons, and lavers appeared upon another table near, which had been converted into a temporary sort of buffet. ranged on the same buffet was also a multitude of green glass bottles, containing apparently, by their dusty aspect and well-worn corks, several kinds of old and choice wine; and five servants in plain but rich liveries, according to the fashion of that day, bustled about to serve the two superior persons at the table. those two persons were apparently very nearly of the same age, about the same height; and in corporeal powers they seemed also evenly matched; but in every other respect they were as different as can well be conceived. the one who sat at the side of the table farthest from the door was a man of about six or seven and twenty years of age, with a dark brown complexion, clear and healthy though not florid, and with large, full, deep-coloured gray eyes, fringed with long black lashes. his hair and mustaches were jet black; and the character of his countenance, for the moment at least, was serious and thoughtful. he was evidently a very powerful and vigorous man, deep-chested, long in the arm; and though, at first look, his form seemed somewhat spare, yet every motion displayed the swelling of strong muscles called into action; and few there were in that day who could have stood unmoved a buffet from his hand. such was albert count of morseiul, an officer so distinguished during the first wars of louis xiv., that it is only necessary to name him to bring to the reader's recollection a long train of splendid actions. opposite to him sat a friend and comrade, who had gone through many a campaign with him, who had shared watchings, and dangers, and toils, had stood side by side with him in the "imminent deadly breach," and who was very much beloved by the count, although the other often contrived to tease and annoy him, and sometimes to give him pain, by a certain idle and careless levity which had arisen amongst the young nobles of france some twenty years before, and had not yet been put out by that great extinguisher, the courtly form and ceremony which louis xiv. placed upon every movement of the imagination. the friend was, as we have said, very different from his host. although not more than a year younger than the count, he had a less manly look, which might perhaps be owing to the difference of colouring; for he was of that fair complexion which the pictures of vandyk have shown us can be combined with great vigour and character of expression. his features were marked and fine, his hazel eye piercing and quick, and his well-cut lip, varying indeed with every changing feeling or momentary emotion, still gave, by the peculiar bend in which it was fashioned when in repose, a peculiar tone of scornful playfulness to every expression his countenance assumed. in form, he appeared at first sight more powerful, perhaps, than the count; but a second glance was sufficient to show that such was not the case; and, though there was indeed little difference, if any thing, it was not in his favour. we must pause for an instant to notice the dress of the two friends; not indeed to describe pourpoints or paint rich lace, but speak of their garments, as the taste thereof might be supposed to betoken some points in the character of each. the dress of the count de morseiul was in taste of the day; which was certainly as bad a taste, as far as it affected the habiliments of the male part of the human race, as could be devised; but he had contrived, by the exercise of his own judgment in the colouring, to deprive it of a part of its frightfulness. the hues were all deep-toned, but rich and harmonious; and though there was no want of fine lace, the ribands, which were then the reigning mode of the day, were reduced to as few in number as any parisian tailor would consent to withhold from the garb of a high nobleman. his friend, however, the chevalier d'evran, having opinions of his own to which he adhered with a wilful pertinacity, did not fully give in to the fashion of the times; and retained, as far as possible, without making himself a spectacle, the costume of an earlier period. if we may coin a word for the occasion, there was a good deal of vandykism still about it. all the colours, too, were light and sunshiny; philomot and blue, and pink and gold; and jewels were not wanting, nor rich lace where they could be worn with taste; for though the liking was for splendour, and for a shining and glittering appearance, yet in all the arrangements there was a fine taste visibly predominant. such, then, was the general appearance of the two friends; and after partaking of the good things which both the table and the buffet displayed,--for during the meal itself the conversation was brief and limited to a few questions and answers,--the chevalier turned his chair somewhat more towards the window, and gazing out over the prospect which was spread forth before his eyes, he said,-- "and so, albert, this is morseiul; and here thou art again after an absence of six years!" "even so, louis," replied the count, "even so. this is morseiul; and i know not whether it be from that inherent love of the place in which some of our happiest days have been spent, or whether the country round us be in reality more lovely than any other that i have seen since i left it, yet just when you spoke i was thinking of asking you whether you were or were not satisfied with my boasted morseiul." "it may well be lovelier than any you have seen since you left it," replied the chevalier; "for, as far as i know aught of your history, and i think i could account for every day of your life since last you were here, you have seen nothing since but the flat prettiness of the beauvoisis, the green spinage plate of the cambresis, or the interminable flats of flanders, where plains are varied by canals, and the only eminence to be seen for forty miles round one is the top of a windmill. well may morseiul be prettier than that, and no great compliment to morseiul either; but i will tell you something more, albert. i have seen morseiul long ago. ay, and sat in these halls, and drank of that wine, and looked out of that window, and thought then as i think now, that it is, indeed, as fair a land as ever i should wish to cast my eyes on." "indeed, louis!" exclaimed his companion; "how happens it, then, if you know the place so well, that you have listened to all my praises thereof, and come hither with me purposely to see it, without giving me one hint that you knew of the existence of such a place upon the surface of the globe?" "why it has happened from two causes," replied the chevalier, "and perhaps from three. in the first place, did you never discover that i have the gift of secrecy in a very high degree?" "why i have certainly discovered," replied the count with a smile, "that you are fond of a mystery; and sometimes, louis, when there's no great need of one." "most cuttingly and ungenerously answered," replied the chevalier, with a laugh; "but granting the fact, as a man does when he denies it strenuously in his mind all the time---but granting the fact, was not that one good and sufficient cause for my not saying a word about it? and in the next place, albert, if i had told you i had been here, and knew it very nearly as well as you do yourself, it would have deprived you of the whole pleasure of relating the wonders and the marvels of morseiul, which would have been most ungenerous of me, seeing and knowing the delight you took therein; and perhaps there might be another cause," he added in a graver tone. "perhaps i might hesitate to talk to you, albert,--to you, with whom filial affection is not the evanescent thing that weeps like an april shower for half an hour over the loss of those we love, and then is wafted away in sparkling and in light--i might have hesitated, i say, to speak with you of times when one whom you have loved and lost sat in these halls and commanded in these lands." "i thank you, louis," replied the count; "i thank you from my heart; but you might have spoken of him. my memory of my dead father is something different from such things in general. it is the memory of him, louis, and not of my own loss; and, therefore, as every thought of him is pleasing, satisfying, ennobling to my heart: as i can call up every circumstance in which i have seen him placed, every word which i have heard him speak, every action which i have seen him perform, with pride, and pleasure, and advantage, i love to let my thoughts rest upon the memories of his life; and though i can behold him no more living, yet i may thus enable myself to dwell with him in the past. we may be sure, louis, that those who try to banish the loved and the departed from their thoughts, and from their conversation, have more selfishness in their love, have more selfishness in their sorrow, than real affection or than real esteem. the pangs which draw tears from us over the tomb may be permitted to us as a weakness, not unenviable: a lapse of sorrow for the broken tie and the loss of immediate communion, is also but a just tribute to ourselves and to the gone. but those who really loved the dead, and justly loved them, will cherish memory for their sakes; while those whose love was weak, or not founded on esteem, or selfish, may well give up a time to hopeless sorrow, and then banish the painful memory from their mind for ever: but it shows either that there must have been something wrong in the affection of the past, or a want of hope in the eternal meeting of the future. no, no, louis, i live with my dead father every hour; i call to mind his looks, his words, his gestures; and as i never think to meet a man who could speak one evil word of him, i never fear to hear him mentioned, and to dwell upon his name." the chevalier was silent for a moment, for the feelings of his companion were too hallowed for a jest; but he replied immediately after, "i believe you are quite right, albert; but to banish all serious themes, which you know do not suit me, my love of mystery, which, as you well know, is a part of my nature, was quite sufficient to prevent my mentioning the subject. i wonder i was fool enough to let the whole secret out now. i should only have told you, by rights, just enough to excite your curiosity, in order that i might then disappoint you." "as you have gone so far, however," replied the count with a smile, "you may as well tell the whole story at once, as it must be told, sooner or later, i suppose." "on my word, i do not know whether i can make up my mind to such unusual frankness," answered the chevalier: "i have already done quite enough to lose my reputation. however, as you seem anxious----" "not in the least," answered the count, "i am quite satisfied. i was so before, and am so still, and shall be so if you resolutely maintain your mystery, concluding that you have some good reason for doing so." "oh no," answered the chevalier, "i never had a good reason for any thing i did in my life: i make a point of never having one; and the very insinuation of such a thing will make me unravel the whole matter at once, and show you that there is no mystery at all in the matter. you may have heard, perchance, that the duc de rouvré, who, by the way, is just appointed governor of the province, has a certain property with a certain château, called ruffigny, which----" "which marches with my own," exclaimed the count. "exactly what i was going to say," rejoined the chevalier; "a certain property, called ruffigny, which marches with your own, and a château thereupon some five leagues hence. now, the excellent duke, being an old friend, and distant relation indeed, of my family, it is scarcely possible, with common decency, for me to be more than ten years at a time without visiting him; and accordingly, about ten years ago, i being then a sprightly youth, shortly about to fit on my first arms, came down and spent the space of about a month in that very château of ruffigny, and the duke brought me over here to dine with your father, and hunt the wild boar in the woods behind st. anne." "it is very odd," said the count, "i have no recollection of it." "how should you?" demanded his friend, "as you were then gone upon your first campaign, under duras, upon the rhine. it was not, in all probability, worth your father's while to write you word that a young scapegrace had been brought to dine with him, and had run his _couteau de chasse_ up to the hilt in the boar's gullet." "oh, i now remember," exclaimed the count; "i heard of that, but i forgot the name. have you not been here since then?" "not i," replied the chevalier. "the duke asked me, indeed, to return the following year; but something prevented him from returning himself, and i believe he has never come back to ruffigny since. a man who has so many castles as he has cannot favour any one of them above once in six or seven years or so." "he is coming down now, however," replied the count; "for, of course, the affairs of his government must bring him here, if it be but to hold the states." "ay, but he does not come to ruffigny," replied the chevalier. "he goes to poitiers. i know all about his movements; and i'll tell you what, morseiul: take care how you go to visit him at poitiers, for you might chance not to come back unscathed." "how so?" demanded the count, turning sharply as if with some surprise. "is there any thing new against us poor huguenots?" "poo, i spoke not of that," replied the chevalier. "you sectarians seem to have a sort of hereditary feeling of martyrdom in you, as if your chief ancestor had been st. bartholomew himself, and the saint, being skinned alive, had given the world a skinless posterity, which makes them all feel alarmed lest any one should touch them." "it is an ominous name, st. bartholomew, you must acknowledge to the ears of a huguenot," replied the count. "but what is it i have to fear, if not that, louis?" "what is it you have to fear!" rejoined the chevalier. "why, a pair of the brightest eyes in all france--i believe i might say in all europe." the count shook his head with a smile. "well then," continued the chevalier, "a pair of lips that look like twin roses; eyebrows that give a meaning to every lustrous look of the eyes; a hand small, white, and delicate, with fingers tapering and rounded like those with which the venus of the greeks gathers around her timid form the unwilling drapery; a foot such as no sandle-shod goddess of the golden age could match: and a form which would have left the sculptor nothing to seek in other beauties but herself." the count laughed aloud. "i am quite safe," he said, "quite safe, louis, quite safe. i have nothing on earth to fear." "indeed!" exclaimed his companion, in the same gay tone. "pray, what panoply of proof do you possess sufficient to resist such arms as these when brought against you?" "mine is twofold," answered the count. "in the first place, your own enthusiasm cannot be misunderstood, and, of course, i do not become the rival of my friend. our great hero, condé, has set all soldiers a better example." "what then, do you intend to follow his example in regard to the chatillon?" demanded the chevalier; "to yield me the lady, and as soon as i am comfortably killed off, make love to my widow? but no, no, albert, i stand not in your way; there are other attractions for me, i tell you fairly! even if it were not so, let every man in love, as in war, do the best for himself. but, at all events, i tell you take care of yourself if you go to poitiers, unless, indeed, you have some better armour than the thought of rivalry with me." "i must go to poitiers of course," replied the count, "when the governor comes down; but yet i shall go without fear, as i think you might by this time know. have you not seen me amongst the fairest, and the gayest, and the sweetest of this world's daughters, and yet i do not think in all the catalogue you could find one cabalistic name sufficiently powerful to conjure up a sigh from my lips." "why, to say the truth," replied the chevalier, "i have often thought you as cold as a cannon ball before it is fired; but then, my dear count, all that time you have had something else to do, something to excite, to interest, and to engross you. but now the stir and bustle of the camp is over,--the march, the countermarch, the advance, the retreat is done,--the fierce excitement of the battle-field does not bring forth all the energies of a fiery heart,--the trumpet no longer calls you from the ear of the fair one, before the whispered tale of love be well begun. in this piping time of peace, why, man, you have nothing for it but to make love, or die of melancholy. if you have a charm, let us hear what it is!" "oh, i am no man of mysteries," replied the count, "and my tale is very soon told. it is just five years ago--i was at that time in the heyday of all sorts of passions, in love, i believe, with every thing in woman's form that came in my way,--when, after spending the winter in paris, i came down here to take leave of my father before joining the army in flanders. it seemed as if he felt that we were parting for the last time, for he gave me many a caution, and many a warning regarding the woman that i might choose for my wife. he exacted no promise indeed, nor gave his counsels the shape of a command; but, amongst other injunctions, which i would most unwillingly violate, he strongly advised me never to wed any one of a different religious creed from myself. about the same time, however, a little incident occurred, which fancy worked up so strongly as to have had an effect upon my whole after feelings. you know the deep and bowery lanes and roads about the place, how beautifully the sunshine streams amongst them, how richly the song of the birds sound in the trees above, how full of a sparkling and fanciful light is the whole scenery round us when we dive into its depths. i was always fond of wandering through these scenes, and one day about that time i was out alone, at some distance beyond the castle of st. anne's, when suddenly, as i was musing, and gazing, and drinking in, as it were, the sights and sounds around me, i heard the cry of dogs, and the sound of horns. but they were distant, and they passed away, and i went on wandering slowly, with my horse's bridle hanging loosely over my arm, till suddenly i heard the sound of galloping hoofs; and, immediately after, down the little road in which i was, came a gay wild horse of the limousin, with a fair girl upon its back, who should hardly have been trusted to ride a fiery creature like that. she was not, indeed, a mere child, being apparently some sixteen or seventeen years of age, but extreme youth was in every feature and in every line, and, i might add, beauty also, for never in my life did i behold such visionlike loveliness as hers. the horse, with some sudden fright, must have darted away while she had laid down the rein, for at the time i met her, though not broken, it was floating at his feet, hazarding at every instant to throw him down. she sat firmly in the seat, and rode with grace and ease; but she was evidently much frightened, and as soon as she saw some one before her in the lane, she pointed with an eager gesture to the rein, and uttered some words which i did not hear. i easily divined her meaning however, and turning my own horse loose, knowing i could catch him again in a moment, i snatched at the rein of her horse as he passed, ran for a moment by its side, not to check it too sharply, then brought it to a halt, and asked her if she would alight. she bowed her head gracefully, and smiled most sweetly, replying, as soon as he could find breath, with many thanks for the service i had rendered her, that she was not hurt, and but a little frightened, the horse having darted away while she had laid down the rein to put on her gloves. she would not alight she said, but must return quickly to her friends, who would be frightened, and, without saying more, she again gracefully bent her head, turned her horse, and cantered rapidly away. i saw her once afterwards, passing along with a gay cortege, composed of persons that i did not know. as we passed each other she recognised me instantly, and, with a heightened colour, noticed me by another marked inclination of the head. when i had passed on, i could judge by her own gestures and those of the persons around her, that she was telling them what had occurred, and explaining to them the sign of recognition which she had made. on this second occasion she seemed to my eyes even more lovely than before. her voice, too, though i had heard it so little, was the most musical that ever spoke to the heart of man, and i pondered and thought over the vision of loveliness that i had just seen, till it took so strong a hold of my heart and my imagination, that i could not rest satisfied without seeking to behold it again. i rode through all the country round; i was every day, and almost all day, on horseback; i called at every neighbouring house; i inquired at every place where i was likely to meet with information, but i could never see, or speak with, or hear of that fair creature again, and the time came rapidly on when i was compelled to rejoin the army. i thought of her often, however, i have thought of her ever since; that lovely face, that sweet voice will never go from my mind, and reason and fancy combine to make me resolve never to wed any one that i do not think as lovely as herself." "pray what share had reason," demanded the chevalier, "in a business altogether so unreasonable? poo! my dear albert, you have worked yourself into a boyish fancy of love, and then have clung to it, i suppose, as the last bit of boyhood left about you. what had reason to do with your seeing a pretty girl in a dark lane, and fancying there was nothing like her upon earth?" "with that, nothing certainly," replied the count, "but with my after-determination much. before that time long i had began to school myself a good deal on account of a propensity not so much to fall in love, but, as you term it, louis, to make love to every fair creature i met with. i had found it needful to put some check upon myself: and if an artificial one was to be chosen, i did not see why this should not be selected as well as any other. i determined that, as the knights of old, and our own troubadours too, if you will, and even--as by your laughing i suppose you would have it--excellent don quixote himself, that pattern of all true gentlemen, vowed and dedicated themselves to some fair lady, whom they had seen even less frequently than i had her--i determined, i say, that i would encourage this fancy of loving my fair horsewoman, and would employ the image of beauty, which imagination, perhaps, had its share in framing, and the fine qualities of the mind and heart, which were shadowed out beneath that lovely exterior, as a test, a touchstone, whereby to try and to correct my feelings towards others, and to approach none with words of love who did not appear to me as beautiful in form as she was, and who did not seem at least equal to the standard which fancy had raised up under her image. the matter perhaps was carried farther than i intended, the feeling became more intense than i had expected. for some time i sincerely and truly fancied myself in love; but even since reason has come to my aid in such a matter, and i know how much imagination has to do with the whole, yet from that one circumstance, from that fanciful accident, my standard of perfection in woman has been raised so high, that i find none who have attained it; and yet so habitual has it become with me to apply it to every one i see, that whenever i am introduced to any beautiful creature, to whom i might otherwise become attached, the fanciful image rises up, and the new acquaintance is tried and ever is found wanting." "thou art a strange composition, my good friend the count," said the chevalier, "but we shall see, now that peace and tranquillity have fallen over the world, whether you can go on still resisting with the courage of a martyr. i don't believe a word of it, although, to say sooth, your quality of heretic is something in your favour. but, in the name of fortune, tell me what are all those loud and tumultuous sounds which are borne by the wind through the open window. your good people of morseiul are not in rebellion, i hope." "not that i know of," replied the count, with a smile at the very idea of such a thing as rebellion under louis xiv.; "but i will call my fellow riquet, who ought, i think, to have been called scapin, for i am sure molière must have had a presentiment of the approaching birth of such a scoundrel. he will tell us all about it; for if a thing takes place on the other side of the earth, riquet knows it all within five minutes after it happens." before he had well finished speaking, the person he alluded to entered. but riquet deserves a pause for separate notice. chapter ii. the valet--the townspeople--the proclamation. the personage who entered the room, which on that the first actual day after his arrival at his own dwelling the count de morseiul had used as a dining-room, was the representative of an extinct race, combining in his own person all the faults and absurdities with all the talents and even virtues which were sometimes mingled together in that strange composition, the old french valet. it is a creature that we find recorded in the pages of many an antique play, now either banished altogether from the stage, or very seldom acted; but, alas! the being itself is extinct; and even were we to find a fossil specimen in some unexplored bed of blue clay, we should gain but a very inadequate idea of all its various properties and movements. we have still the roguish valet in sad abundance--a sort of common house-rat; and we have, moreover, the sly and the silent, the loquacious and the lying, the pilfering and the impudent valet, with a thousand other varieties; but the old french valet, that mithridatic compound of many curious essences, is no longer upon the earth, having gone absolutely out of date and being at the same period with his famous contemporary "_le marquis_." at the time we speak of, however, the french valet was in full perfection; and, as we have said, an epitome of the whole race and class was to be found in maître jerome riquet, who now entered the room, and advanced with an operatic step towards his lord. he was a man perhaps of forty years of age, which, as experience and constant practice were absolute requisites in his profession, was a great advantage to him, for he had lost not one particle of the activity of youth, seeming to possess either a power of ubiquity, or a rapidity of locomotion which rendered applicable to him the famous description of the bird which flew so fast "as to be in two places at once." quicksilver, or a lover's hours of happiness, a swallow, or the wind, were as nothing when compared to his rapidity; and it is also to be remarked, that the rapidity of the mind went hand in hand with the rapidity of the body, enabling him to comprehend his master's orders before they were spoken, to answer a question before it was asked, and to determine with unerring sagacity by a single glance whether it would be most for his interests or his purposes to understand or misunderstand the coming words before they were pronounced. riquet was slightly made, though by no means fulfilling the immortal caricature of the gates of calais; but when dressed in his own appropriate costume, he contrived to make himself look more meagre than he really was, perhaps with a view of rendering his person less recognisable when, dressed in a suit of his master's clothes with sundry additions and ornaments of his own device, he appeared enlarged with false calves to his legs, and manifold paddings on his breast and shoulders, enacting with great success the part of the marquis of kerousac, or of any other place which he chose to raise into the dignity of a marquisate for his own especial use. his features, it is true, were so peculiar in their cast and expression, that it would have seemed at first sight utterly impossible for the face of jerome riquet to be taken for any other thing upon the earth than the face of jerome riquet. the figure thereof was long, and the jaws of the form called lantern, with high cheek bones, and a forehead so covered with protuberances, that it seemed made on purpose for the demonstration of phrenology. along this forehead, in almost a straight line drawn from a point immediately between the eyes, at a very acute angle towards the zenith, were a pair of eyebrows, strongly marked throughout their whole course, but decorated by an obtrusive tuft near the nose, from which tuft now stuck out several long grey bristles. the eyes themselves were sharp, small, and brilliant; but being under the especial protection of the superincumbent eyebrows, they followed the same line, leaving a long lean cheek on either side, only relieved by a congregation of radiating wrinkles at the corners of the eyelids. the mouth was as wide as any man could well desire for the ordinary purposes of life, and it was low down too in the face, leaving plenty of room for the nose above, which was as peculiar in its construction as any that ever was brought from "the promontory of noses." it was neither the judaical hook nose, nor the pure aquiline, nor the semi-judaical italian, nor the vulture, nor the sheep, nor the horse nose. it had no affinity whatever to the "nez retroussé," nor was it the bottle, nor the ace of clubs. it was a nose _sui generis_, and starting from between the two bushy eyebrows, it made its way out, with a slight parabolic curve downwards, till it had reached about the distance of an inch and a half from the fundamental base line of the face. having attained that elevation, it came to a sharp abrupt point, through the thin skin of which the white gristle seemed inclined to force its way, and then suddenly dropping a perpendicular, it joined itself on to the lower part of the face, at a right angle with the upper lip, with the extensive territories of which it did not interfere in the slightest degree, being as it were a thing apart, while the nostrils started up again, running in the same line as the eyes and eyebrows. such in personal appearance was jerome riquet, and his mental conformation was not at all less singular. of this mental conformation we shall have to give some illustrations hereafter; but yet, to deal fairly by him, we must afford some sketch of his inner man in juxtaposition with his corporeal qualities. in the first place, without the reality of being a coward, he affected cowardice as a very convenient reputation, which might be serviceable on many occasions, and could be shaken off whenever he thought fit. "a brave man," he said, "has something to keep up, he must never be cowardly; but a poltroon can be a brave man, without derogating from a well-earned reputation, whenever he pleases. no, no, i like variety; i'll be a coward, and a brave man only when it suits me." he sometimes, indeed, nearly betrayed himself, by burlesquing fear, especially when any raw soldier was near, for he had an invincible inclination to amuse himself with the weaknesses of others, and knew how contagious a disease fear is. the next remarkable trait in his character was a mixture of honesty and roguery, which left him many doubts in his own mind as to whether he was by nature a knave or a simpleton. he would pilfer from his master any thing he could lay his hands upon, if he thought his master did not really want it; but had that master fallen into difficulties or dangers he would have given him his last louis, or laid down his life to save him. he would pick the locks of a cabinet to see what it contained, and ingeniously turn the best folded letter inside out to read the contents; but no power on earth would ever have made him divulge to others that which he practised such unjustifiable means to learn. he was also a most determined liar, both by habit and inclination. he preferred it, he said, to truth. it evinced greater powers of the human mind. telling truth, he said, only required the use of one's tongue and one's memory; but to lie, and to lie well, demanded imagination, judgment, courage, and, in short, all the higher qualities of the human intellect. he could sometimes, however, tell the truth, when he saw that it was absolutely necessary. all that he had was a disposition to falsehood, controllable under particular circumstances, but always returning when those circumstances were removed. as to the religion of maître jerome riquet, the less that is said upon the matter the better for the honour of that individual. he had but one sense of religion, indeed, and his definition of religion will give that sense its clearest exposition. in explaining his views one day on the subject to a fellow valet, he was known to declare that religion consisted in expressing those opinions concerning what was within a man's body, and what was to become of it after death, which were most likely to be beneficial to that body in the circumstances in which it was placed. now, to say the truth, in order to act in accordance with this definition, maître jerome had a difficult part to perform. his parents and relations were all catholics and having been introduced at an early age into the house of a huguenot nobleman, and attached for many years to the person of his son, with only one other catholic in the household, it would seem to have been the natural course of policy for the valet, under his liberal view of things, to abandon catholicism, and betake himself to the pleasant heresy of his masters. but riquet had a more extensive conception of things than that. he saw and knew that catholicism was the great predominant religion of the country; he knew that it was the predominant religion of the court also; and he had a sort of instinctive foresight from the beginning of the persecutions and severities--the dark clouds of which were now gathering fast around the huguenots, and were likely sooner or later to overwhelm them. now, like the famous erasmus, jerome riquet had no will to be made a martyr of; and though he could live very comfortable in a huguenot family, and attach himself to its lords, he did not think it at all necessary to attach himself to its religion also, but, on the contrary, went to mass when he had nothing else to do, confessed what sins he thought fit to acknowledge or to invent once every four or five years, swore that he performed all the penances assigned to him, and tormented the protestant maid-servants of the château, by vowing that they were all destined to eternal condemnation, that there was not a nook in purgatory hot enough to bake away their sins, and that a place was reserved for them in the bottomless pit itself, with arians and socinians, and all the heretics and heresiarchs from the beginning of the world. after having given way to one of these tirades, he would generally burst into a loud fit of laughter at the absurdity of all religious contentions, and run away leaving his fellow-servants with a full conviction that he had no religion at all. he dared not, it is true, indulge in such licences towards his master; but he very well knew that the young count was not a bigot himself, and would not by any means think that he served him better if he changed his religion. in times of persecution and danger, indeed, the count might have imagined that there was a risk of a very zealous catholic being induced to injure or betray his protestant lord; but the count well knew jerome to be any thing but a zealous catholic, and he had not the slightest fear that any hatred of protestantism or love for the church of rome would ever induce the worthy valet to do any thing against the lord to whom he had attached himself. such, then, was jerome riquet; and we shall pause no longer upon his other characteristic qualities than to say, that he was the exemplification of the word clever; that there was scarcely any thing to which he could not turn his hand, and that though light, and lying and pilfering, and impudent beyond all impudence, he was capable of strong attachments and warm affections; and if we may use a very colloquial expression to characterise his proceedings, there was fully as much fun as malice in his roguery. a love of adventure and of jest was his predominant passion; and although all the good things and consolations of this life by no means came amiss to him, yet in the illegitimate means which he took to acquire them he found a greater pleasure even than in their enjoyment when obtained. when the door opened, as we have said, and riquet presented himself, the eyes of the count de morseiul fixed upon him at once; and he immediately gathered from the ludicrous expression of fear which the valet had contrived to throw into his face, that something of a serious nature had really happened in the town, though he doubted not that it was by no means sufficient to cause the astonishment and terror which jerome affected. before he could ask any questions, however, jerome, advancing with the step of a ballet master, cast himself on one knee at the count's feet, exclaiming,-- "my lord, i come to you for protection and for safety." "why, what is the matter, jerome?" exclaimed the count. "what rogue's trick have you been playing now? is it a cudgel or the gallows that you fear?" "neither, my good lord," replied jerome, "but it is the fagot and the stake. i fear the rage of your excited and insubordinate people in the town of morseiul, who are now in a state of heretical insurrection, tearing down the king's proclamations, trampling his edicts under foot, and insulting his officers; and as i happen, i believe, to be the only catholic in the place, i run the risk of being one of the first to be sacrificed, if their insane vehemence leads them into further acts of phrenzy." "get up, fool, get up," cried the count, shaking him off as he clung to his knee; "tell me, if you can speak truth and common sense, what is it you mean, and what has occasioned all these shouts that we heard just now?" "i mean, my lord," said riquet, starting up and putting himself in an attitude, "i mean all that i say. there is some proclamation," he continued in a more natural tone, "concerning the performance of the true catholic and apostolic religion, which some of the king's officers posted up on the gate at the bottom of the count's street, and which the people instantly tore down. the huissier and the rest were proceeding up the street to read the edict in the great square, amidst the shouts and imprecations of the vulgar; but i saw them gathering together stones, and bringing out cudgels, which showed me that harder arguments were about to be used than words; and as there is no knowing where such matters may end, i made haste to take care of my own poor innocent skin, and lay myself at your feet, humbly craving your protection." "then, get out of my way," said the count, putting him on one side, and moving towards the door. "louis, we must go and see after this. this is some new attack upon us poor huguenots--some other jesuitical infraction of the privileges assured to us by our good king henry iv. we must quiet the people, however, and see what the offence is;--though, god help us," he added with a sigh, "since the parliaments have succumbed there is no legal means left us of obtaining redress. some day or another these bad advisers of our noble and magnificent monarch will drive the protestant part of his people into madness, or compel them to raise the standard of revolt against him, or to fly to other lands, and seek the exercise of their religion unoppressed." "hush, hush, hush, morseiul," said his companion, laying his hand kindly on his arm, "your words are hasty. you do not know how small a matter constitutes treason now-a-days, or how easy is the passage to the bastille." "oh! i know--i know quite well," replied the count; "and that many a faithful and loyal subject, who has served his king and country well, has found his way there before me. i love and admire my king. i will serve him with my whole soul and the last drop of my blood, and all i claim in return is that liberty of my own free thoughts which no man can take from me. chains cannot bind that down; bastilles cannot shut it in; and every attempt to crush it is but an effort of tyranny both impotent and cruel. however, we must calm the people. where is my hat, knave?" "i have often wished, my dear morseiul," said the chevalier, as they followed the valet, who ran on to get the count's hat: "i have often wished that you would give yourself a little time to think and to examine. i am very sure that if you did you would follow the example of the greatest man of modern times, abjure your religious errors, and gain the high station and renown which you so well deserve." "what, do you mean turenne?" exclaimed the count. "never, louis, never! i grant him, louis, to have been one of the greatest men of this, or perhaps of any other age, mighty as a warrior, just, clearsighted, kind-hearted, and comprehensive as a politician, and perhaps as great in the noble and honest simplicity of his nature as in any other point of view. i grant him all and every thing that you could say in his favour. i grant every thing that his most enthusiastic admirers can assert; but _god forbid that we should ever imitate the weakness of a great man's life_. no, no, chevalier, it is one of the most perverted uses of example to justify wrong because the good have been tempted to commit it. no man's example, no man's opinion to me is worth any thing, however good or however wise he may be, if there be stamped upon its face the broad and unequivocal marks of wrong." by this time they had reached the vestibule from which a little flight of steps conducted into the garden, and maître jerome stood there with his lord's hat and polished cane in his hand. the count took them with a quick gesture and passed on, followed by his friend, who raised his eyebrows a little with a look of regret, as his only answer to the last words. these words had been heard by the valet also, and the raising of the eyebrows was not unmarked; and maître jerome, understanding the whole train of the argument, as well as if he had heard every syllable, commented upon what he considered his lord's imbecility by a shrug of the shoulders, in which his head almost utterly disappeared. in the mean time the young count and his friend passed up the little avenue to the postern gate, opened it, and entered the town of morseiul; and then, by a short and narrow street, which was at that moment all in shadow, entered the market square, at which they arrived, by the shorter path they pursued, long before the officers who were about to read the proclamation. a great number of persons were collected in the square, and it was evident that by this time the whole place was in a state of great excitement. the chevalier was in some fear for the effect of the coming scene upon his friend; and, as they entered the market place, he stopped him, laying his hand upon his arm, and saying,-- "morseiul, you are a good deal heated, pause for one moment and think of what you are about. for the sake of yourself and of your country, if not for mine; neither say nor do any thing rashly." the count turned towards him with a calm and gentle smile, and grasped his hand. "thank you, louis," he said, "thank you, though your caution, believe me, is unnecessary. you will see that i act as calmly and as reasonably, that i speak as quietly and as peacefully as the most earnest catholic could desire. heaven forbid," he added, "that i should say one word, or make one allusion to any thing that could farther excite the passions of the people than they are likely to be excited already. civil strife, louis, is the most awful of all things so long as it lasts, and seldom, very seldom if ever obtains the end for which it first commenced. but even if i did not think so," he added in a lower voice, "i know that the protestants of france have no power to struggle with the force of the crown, unless--" and his voice fell almost to a whisper, "unless the crown force upon them the energetic vigour of despair." the two had paused while they thus spoke, and while they heard the murmuring sounds of the people coming up the hill from the right hand, the noise of several persons running could be distinguished on the other side, and turning round towards the postern, the count saw that, thanks to the care and foresight of maître jerome, a great number of his domestics and attendants were coming up at full speed to join him, so that when he again advanced, he was accompanied by ten or twelve persons ready to obey without hesitation or difficulty the slightest command that he should give. as there was no telling the turn which events might take, he was not sorry that it should be so; and as he now advanced towards the centre of the square the sight of his liveries instantly attracted the attention of the people, and he was recognised with joyful exclamations of "the count! the count!" gladness was in every face at his approach, for the minds of the populace were in that state of anxious hesitation, in which the presence and direction of any one to whom they are accustomed to look up is an absolute blessing. taking off his hat and bowing repeatedly to every one around him, speaking to many, and recognising every one with whom he was personally acquainted with a frank and good-humoured smile, the count advanced through the people, who gathered upon his path as he proceeded, till he reached the top of the hill, and obtained a clear view of what was passing below. had not one known the painful and angry feelings which were then excited, it would have been a pleasant and a cheerful scene. the sun had by this time got sufficiently round to the westward to throw long shadows from the irregular gable-ended houses more than half way across the wide open road that conducted from the valley to the top of the hill. the perspective, too, was strongly marked by the lines of the buildings; the other side of the road was in bright light; there was a beautiful prospect of hill and dale seen out beyond the town; numerous booths and stalls, kept by peasant women with bright dresses and snowy caps, chequered the whole extent; and up the centre of the street, approaching slowly, were the officers of the district, with a small party of military, followed on either side by a much more considerable number of the lower order of town's people and peasantry. such was the scene upon which the eyes of the count de morseiul fell; and it must be admitted, that when he saw the military his heart beat with considerable feelings of indignation, for we must remember that in towns like that which was under his rule the feudal customs still existed to a very great extent. it was still called his town of morseiul. the king, indeed, ruled; the laws of the land were administered in the king's name; but the custody, defence, and government of the town of morseiul was absolutely in the hands of the count, or of the persons to whom he delegated his power during his absence. it was regularly, in fact, garrisoned in his name; and there were many instances, scarcely twenty years before, in which the garrisons of such towns had resisted in arms the royal authority; and if not held to be fully justified, at all events had passed without punishment, because they were acting under the orders of him in whose name they were levied. the attempt, therefore, of any body of the king's troops to penetrate into the count's town of morseiul, without his having been formally deprived of the command thereof, seemed to him one of the most outrageous violations of his privileges which it was possible to imagine; and his heart consequently beat, as we have said, with feelings of high indignation. he suppressed them, however, with the calm determination of doing what was right; and turned to gaze upon the people who surrounded him, in order to ascertain as far as possible by what feelings they were affected. his own attendants had congregated immediately behind him; on his right hand stood his friend the chevalier; on his left, about half a step behind, so as to be near the count, but not to appear obtrusive, was a personage of considerable importance in the little town of morseiul, though he exercised a handicraft employment, and worked daily with his own hands, even while he directed others. this was paul virlay, the principal blacksmith of the place. he was at this time a man of about fifty years of age, tall, and herculean in all his proportions. the small head, the broad muscular chest and shoulders, the brawny arms, the immense thick hands, the thin flanks, and the stout legs and thighs, all bespoke extraordinary strength. he was very dark in complexion, with short-cut curly black hair, grizzled with grey; and the features of his face, though short, and by no means handsome, had a good and a frank expression, but at all times somewhat stern. at the present moment his brow was more contracted than usual; not that there was any other particular mark of very strongly excited passions upon his countenance; and the attitude he had assumed was one of calm and reposing strength, resting with his right hand supported by one of the common quarter-staffs of the country, a full inch and a half thick, much in the same position which he frequently assumed when, pausing in his toil, he talked with his workmen, leaving the sledge hammer, that usually descended with such awful strength, to support the hand which wielded it at other times like a feather. behind him again, was a great multitude of the town's people of different classes, though the mayor and the municipal officers had thought fit to absent themselves carefully from the scene of probable strife. but the eyes of the count fell, as we have said, upon paul virlay; and knowing him to be a man both highly respected in his own class, and of considerable wealth and importance in the city, he addressed him in the first instance, saying,-- "good morrow, virlay, it is long since i have seen you all. what is all this about?" "you don't forget us, count albert, even when you are away," replied the blacksmith, with his brow unbending. "we know that very well, and have proofs of it too, when any thing good is to be done; but this seems to me to be a bad business. we hear that the king has suppressed the chamber of the edict, which was our greatest safeguard; and now my boy tells me, for i sent him down to see when they first came to the bottom of the hill, that this is a proclamation forbidding us from holding synods; and be you sure, sir, that the time is not far distant when they will try to stop us altogether from worshipping god in our own way. what think you, my lord?" he said, in a lower tone, "were it not better to show them at once that they cannot go on?" and his looks spoke much more than even his words. "no, virlay," replied the count; "no, by no means. you see the people are in tumult below evidently. any unadvised and illegal resistance to the royal authority will immediately call upon us harsh measures, and be made the pretext by any bad advisers who may surround the king for irritating his royal mind against us. let us hear what the proclamation really is; even should it be harsh and unjust, which from the king's merciful nature we will hope is not the case: let us listen to it calmly and peaceably, and after having considered well, and taken the advice and opinion of wise and experienced men, let us then make what representations to the king we may think fit, and petition him in his clemency to do us right." "clemency!" said the blacksmith. "however, my lord, you know better than i, but i hope they will not say any thing to make our blood boil, that's all." "even if they should," replied the count, "we must prevent it from boiling over. virlay, i rely upon you, as one of the most sensible men in the place, not only to restrain yourself, but to aid me in restraining others. the king has every right to send his own officers to make his will known to his people." "but the dragoons," said virlay, fixing his eyes upon the soldiers; "what business have they here? why they might, count albert----" the count stopped him. "they are yet without the real bounds of the town, virlay," he said; "and they do not enter into it! send some one you can trust for the mayor with all speed; unhook the gates from the bars that keep them back; place a couple of men behind each; i will prevent the military from entering into the town: but i trust to you, and the other men of good sense who surround me, to guard the king's officers and the king's authority from any insult, and to suffer the proclamation of his will to take place in the market-place without any opposition or tumult whatsoever." "i will do my best, count," replied the blacksmith, "for i am sure you are a true friend to us--and we may well trust in you." the crowd from below had in the meantime advanced steadily up the hill, surrounding the officers of the crown and the soldiery; and by this time the whole mass was within a hundred and fifty yards of the spot where the count and his companions stood. their progress had been without violence, indeed, but not without hootings and outcry, which seemed greatly to annoy the officer in command of the soldiers, he having been accustomed alone to the court of the grand monarch, and to the scenes in the neighbourhood of the capital, where the people might well be said to lick the dust beneath the feet of their pageant-loving king. it seemed, then, something so strange and monstrous to his ears, that any expression of the royal will should be received otherwise than with the most deep and devoted submission, that he was more than once tempted to turn and charge the multitude. a prudent consideration, however, of the numbers by which he was surrounded, and the scantiness of his own band, overcame all such purposes; and, though foaming with indignation, he continued to advance, without noticing the shouts that assailed him, and playing with the manifold ribands and pieces of silk that decorated his buff coat and his sword knot, to conceal his vexation and annoyance. "who have we here at the head of them?" demanded the count, turning to the chevalier. "his face is not unknown to me." "as far as i can see," replied his companion, "it is young hericourt, a nephew of le tellier's--do you not remember? as brave as a lion, but moreover a young coxcomb, who thinks that he can do every thing, and that nothing can be done without him; as stupid as an owl too. i wonder you do not recollect his getting great credit for taking the little fort of the _bec de l'oie_ by a sheer act of stupidity,--getting himself and his party entangled between the two forts, and while lamets was advancing to extricate him, forcing his way in, from not knowing what else to do." "i remember, i remember," said the count, with a smile; "he was well rewarded for his fortunate mistake. but what does he here, i wonder? i thought he never quitted the precincts of versailles, but to follow the king to the camp." "he is the worst person who could have been sent upon this errand," replied the chevalier; "for he is certain to make mischief wherever he goes. he has attached himself much to the rouvrés, however, of late, and i suppose le tellier has given him some post about the new governor, in order that his rule may not be the most tranquil in the world." while they were speaking, the eyes of the people who were coming up the hill fell upon the group that had assembled just in front of the gates, with the count, his friend, and his servants, in the foreground; and immediately a loud shout made itself heard, of "the count! the count! long live the count!" followed by various other exclamations, such as "he will protect us! he will see justice done us! long live our own good count!" i the moment that the count's name was thus loudly pronounced, the young officer, turning to those who followed, gave some orders in a low voice, and then, spurring on his horse through the crowd, rode directly up to the count de morseiul; who, as he saw him approaching, turned to the chevalier, saying, "you bear witness, louis, that i deal with this matter as moderately and loyally as may be." "i trust, for the sake of all," said the chevalier, "that you will. you know, albert, that i do not care two straws for one religion more than the other; and think that a man can serve god singing the psalms of clement marot as well, or perhaps better, than if he sung them in latin, without, perhaps, understanding them. but for heaven's sake keep peace in the inside of the country at all events. but here comes our young dragoon." as he spoke, the young officer rode up with a good deal of irritation evident in his countenance. he seemed to be three or four and twenty years of age, of a complexion extremely fair, and with a countenance sufficiently unmeaning, though all the features were good. he bowed familiarly to the chevalier, and more distantly to the count de morseuil; but addressed himself at once to the latter:-- "i have the honour," he said, "i presume, of speaking to the count de morseuil, and i must say that i hope he will give me his aid in causing proclamation of the king's will amongst these mutinous and rebellious people of his town of morseuil." "my friend the chevalier here tells me," replied the count, "that i have the honour of seeing monsieur de hericourt----" "the marquis auguste de hericourt," interrupted the young officer. "well, sir, well," said the count, somewhat impatiently, "i stand corrected: the marquis auguste de hericourt, and i am very happy to have the honour of seeing him, and also to inform him that i will myself ensure that the king's will is, as he says, proclaimed in my town of morseiul by the proper officers, taking care to accompany them into the town myself for that purpose, although i cannot but defend my poor townsmen from the accusation of being mutinous and rebellious subjects, nothing being further from the thoughts of any one here present than mutiny or rebellion." "do you not hear the cries and shouts?" cried the young officer. "do you not see the threatening aspect of the people?" "i hear some shouts, certainly," answered the count, "as if something had given offence or displeasure; but what it is i do not know. i trust and hope that it is nothing in any proclamation of the king's; and if i should find it to be so, when i hear the proclamation read, i shall take every means to put an end to such demonstrations of disappointment or grief, at once. we have always the means of approaching the royal ear, and i feel sure that there will be no occasion for clamour or outcry in order to obtain justice at the hands of our most gracious and wise monarch.--but allow me to observe, monsieur le marquis," he continued somewhat more quickly, "your dragoons are approaching rather too near the gates of morseiul." "you do not intend, i presume, sir," said the young officer sharply, "to refuse an entrance to the officers of the king, charged with a proclamation from his majesty!" "not to the king's proper civil officers," replied the count, keeping his eye, while he spoke, warily fixed upon the dragoons. "but, most assuredly, i do intend to refuse admittance to any body of military whatsoever, great or small, while i retain the post with which his majesty has entrusted me of governor to this place." there was a pause for a single instant, and the young officer turned his head, without replying, towards the soldiers, on whom the count's eye also was still fixed. there was something, however, suspicious in their movements. they had now reached the brow of the hill, and were within twenty yards of the gate. they formed into a double file as they came up in front of the civil officers, and the head man of each file was seen passing a word to those behind him. at the moment their officer turned his head towards them, they began to move forward in quicker time, and in a moment more would have passed the gates; but at that instant the clear full voice of the count de morseiul was heard exclaiming, in a tone that rose above all the rest of the sounds-- "close the gates!" and the two ponderous masses of wood, which had not been shut for many years, swung forward grating on their hinges, and at once barred all entrance into the town. "what is the meaning of this, monsieur de hericourt?" continued the count. "your men deserve a severe reprimand, sir, for attempting to enter the town without my permission or your orders." the young man turned very red, but he was not ready with a reply, and the chevalier, willing as far as possible to prevent any unpleasant consequences, and yet not to lose a jest, exclaimed-- "i suppose the marquis took it for the bec de l'oie, but he is mistaken, you see." "he might have found it a trap for a goose, if not a goose's bill," said a loud voice from behind; but the marquis either did not or would not hear any thing but the pleasant part of the allusion, and, bowing to the chevalier with a smile, he said, "oh, you are too good, monsieur le chevalier, the affair you mention was but a trifle, far more owing to the courage of my men than to any skill on my part. but, in the present instance, i must say, count," he added, turning towards the other, "that the king's officers must be admitted to make proclamations in the town of morseiul." "the king's civil officers shall, sir," replied the count, "as i informed you before: but no soldiers, on any pretence whatsoever. however, sir," he continued, seeing the young officer mustering up a superabundant degree of energy, "i think it will be much the best plan for you to do me the honour of reposing yourself, with any two or three of your attendants you may think fit, at my poor château here, without the walls, while your troopers can refresh themselves at the little auberge at the foot of the hill. my friend, the chevalier here, will do the honours of my house till i return, and i will accompany the officers charged with the proclamation, and see that they meet with no obstruction in the fulfilment of their duty." "i do not know that i am justified," said the young officer, hesitating, "in not insisting upon seeing the proclamation made myself." "i am afraid there will be no use of insisting," replied the count; "and depend upon it, sir, you will serve the king better by suffering the proclamation to be made quietly, than even by risking a disturbance by protracting, unnecessarily, an irritating discussion. i wish to treat you with all respect, and with the distinction due to your high merit. farther, i have nothing to say, but that i am governor of morseiul, and as such undertake to see the king's proclamation duly made within the walls." the hesitation of the young dragoon was only increased by the cool and determined tone of the count. murmurs were rising amongst the people round, and the voice of paul virlay was heard muttering, "he had better decide quickly, or we shall not be able to keep the good men quiet." the marquis heard the words, and instantly began to bristle up, to fix himself more firmly in the saddle, and put his hand towards the hilt of his sword; but the chevalier advanced close to his side, and spoke to him for a moment or two in a low voice. nothing was heard of their conversation, even by the count de morseiul , but the words "good wine--pleasant evening--laugh over the whole affair." but at length the young courtier bowed his head to the count, saying, "well then, sir, i repose the trust in you, knowing you to be a man of such high honour, that you would not undertake what you could not perform, nor fail to execute punctually that which you had undertaken. i will do myself the honour of waiting your return with the chevalier, at your château." after some further words of civility on both parts, the young officer dismounted and threw his rein to a page, and then formally placing the civil officers under the care and protection of the count de morseiul, he gave orders to his dragoons to bend their steps down the hill, and refresh themselves at the auberge below; while he, bowing again to the count, took his way with the chevalier and a single attendant along the esplanade which led to the gates of the château without the walls. the civil officers, who had certainly been somewhat maltreated as they came up the hill, seemed not a little unwilling to see the dragoons depart, and a loud shout, mingled of triumph and scorn, with which the people treated the soldiers as they turned to march down the hill, certainly did not at all tend to comfort or re-assure the poor huissiers, greffiers, and other officers. the shout caused the young marquis, who had proceeded twenty or thirty steps upon his way, to stop short, and turn round, imagining that some new collision had taken place between the town's people and the rest; but seeing that all was quiet he walked on again the moment after, and the count, causing the civil officers to be surrounded by his own attendants, ordered the wicket to be opened, and led the way in, calling to virlay to accompany him, and urging upon him the necessity of preserving peace and order, let the nature of the proclamation be what it might. "i have given you my promise, count," replied the blacksmith, "to do my best, and i won't fail; but i won't answer for myself or others on any other occasion." "we are only speaking of the present," replied the count; "for other occasions other measures, as the case may be: but at present every thing requires us to submit without any opposition.--where can this cowardly mayor be," he said, "that he does not choose to show himself in a matter like this? but the proclamation must be made without him, if he do not appear." they had by this time advanced into the midst of the great square, and the count signified to the officer charged with the proclamation, that it had better be made at once: but for some moments what he suggested could not be accomplished from the pressure of the people, the crowd amounting by this time to many hundred persons. the count, his attendants, and virlay, however, contrived, with some difficulty, to clear a little space around, the first by entreaties and expostulations, and the blacksmith by sundry thrusts of his strong quarterstaff and menaces, with an arm which few of those there present seemed inclined to encounter. the count then took off his hat, and the officer began to read the proclamation, which was long and wordy; but which, like many another act of the crown then taking place from day to day, had a direct tendency to deprive the protestants of france of the privileges which had been secured to them by henry iv. amongst other galling and unjust decrees here announced to the people was one which--after stating that many persons of the religion affecting the title of _reformed_, being ill-disposed towards the king's government, were selling their landed property with the view of emigrating to other lands--went on to declare and to give warning to all purchasers, that if heretical persons effecting such sales did quit the country within one year after having sold their property, the whole would be considered as confiscated to the state, and that purchasers would receive no indemnity. when this part of the proclamation was read, the eyes of the sturdy blacksmith turned upon the count, who, by a gesture of the hand, endeavoured to suppress all signs of disapprobation amongst the multitude. it was in vain, however; for a loud shout of indignation burst forth from them, which was followed by another, when the proclamation went on to declare, that the mayors of towns, professing the protestant faith, should be deprived of the rank of nobles, which had been formerly granted to them. the proclamation then proceeded with various other notices of the same kind, and the indignation of the people was loud and unrestrained. the presence of the count, however, and the exertions of virlay, and several influential people, who were opposed to a rash collision with the authority of the king, prevented any act of violence from being committed, and when the whole ceremony was complete, the officers were led back to the gates by the count, who gave orders that they should be conducted in safety beyond the precincts of the place by his own attendants. after returning into the great square, and holding a momentary conversation with some of the principal persons present, he returned by the postern to his own abode, where he found his friend and the young officer, apparently forgetting altogether the unpleasant events of the morning, and laughing and talking gaily over indifferent subjects. "i have the pleasure of informing you, monsieur de hericourt," said the count when he appeared, "that the proclamation has been made without interruption, and that the king's officers have been conducted out of the town in safety. we have therefore nothing more of an unpleasant kind to discuss, and i trust that you will take some refreshment." wine, and various sorts of meats, which were considered as delicacies in those days, were brought and set before the young courtier, who did justice to all, declaring that he had never in his life tasted any thing more exquisite than the produce of the count's cellars. he even ventured to praise the dishes, though he insinuated, much to the indignation of the cook, to whom it was repeated by an attendant, that there was a shade too much of taragon in one of the ragouts, and that if a matelotte had been five minutes more cooked, the fish would have been tenderer, and the flavour more decided. the count smiled, and apologised for the error, reminding him, that the poor rustics in the country could not boast the skill and delicacy, or even perhaps the nicety of natural taste of the artists of the capital. he then turned the conversation to matters of some greater importance, and inquired when they were to expect the presence of the duc de rouvré in the province. the young marquis opened his eyes at the question, as if he looked upon it as a sign of the most utter and perfect ignorance and rusticity that could be conceived. "is it possible, monsieur le comte," he said, "that you, so high in the service of the king, and so highly esteemed, as i may add, at court, are not aware that the duke arrived at poitiers nearly five days ago? i had the honour of accompanying him thither, and he has himself been within the last three days as near as seven leagues to the very place where we are now sitting." "you must remember, my good sir," replied the count, "as some excuse for my ignorance, that i received his majesty's gracious permission to return hither upon some important affairs direct from the army, without visiting the court, and that i only arrived late last night. pray, when you return to monsieur de rouvré, present my compliments to him, and tell him that i shall do myself the honour of waiting upon him, to congratulate him and the duchess upon their safe arrival in the province, without any delay." "wait till they are fully established at poitiers," replied the young officer. "they are now upon a little tour through the province, not choosing to stay at poitiers yet," he added, sinking his voice into a low and confidential tone, "because their household is not in complete order. none of the new liveries are made; the guard of the governor is not yet organised; two cooks and three servers have not arrived from paris. nothing is in order, in short. in a week, i trust, we shall be more complete, and then indeed i do not think that the household of any governor in the kingdom will exceed in taste, if not in splendour, that of the duc de rouvré." "which is, i presume," said the chevalier, "under the direction and superintendence of the refined and celebrated good taste of the marquis auguste de hericourt." "why, to say the truth," replied the young nobleman, "my excellent friend de rouvré has some confidence in my judgment of such things: i may say, indeed, has implicit faith therein, as he has given all that department over to me for the time, beseeching me to undertake it, and of course i cannot disappoint him." "of course not! of course not!" replied the chevalier, and in such conversation passed on some time, the worthy marquis de hericourt, swallowed up in himself, not at all perceiving a certain degree of impatience in the count de morseiul, which might have afforded any other man a hint to take his departure. he lingered over his wine; he lingered over his dessert; he perambulated the gardens; he criticised the various arrangements of the château with that minute attention to nothings, which is the most insufferable of all things when obtruded upon a mind bent upon matters of deep importance. it was thus fully five o'clock in the afternoon before he took his departure, and the count forced himself to perform every act of civility by him to the last moment. as soon as he was gone, however, the young nobleman turned quickly to his friend, saying,-- "i thought that contemptible piece of emptiness would never depart, and of course, louis, after what has taken place this morning, it is absolutely necessary for me to consult with some of my friends of the same creed as myself. i will not in any degree involve you in these matters, as the very fact of your knowing any of our proceedings might hereafter be detrimental to you; and i only make this excuse because i owe it to the long friendship between us not to withhold any part of my confidence from you, except out of consideration for yourself." "act as you think fit, my dear albert," replied his friend; "but only act with moderation. if you want my advice on any occasion, ask it, without minding whether you compromise me or not; i'm quite sure that i am much too bad a catholic to sacrifice my friend's secrets either to pellisson, la chaise, or le tellier. if i am not mistaken, the devil himself will make the fourth at their card-table some day, and perhaps louvois will stand by and bet." "oh! i entertain no fear of your betraying me," answered the count with a smile; "but i should entertain great fear of embroiling you with the court." "only take care not to embroil yourself," replied the chevalier. "i am sure i wish there were no such thing as sects in the world. if you could but take a glance at the state of england, which is split into more sects than it contains cities, i am sure you would be of turenne's opinion, and come into the bosom of the mother church, if it were but for the sake of getting rid of such confusion. nay, shake not your wise head. if the truth be told, you are a protestant because you were bred so in your youth; and one half of the world has no other motive either for its religion or its politics. but get thee gone, albert, get thee gone. consult with your wise friends, and come back more huguenotised than ever." the count would have made some further apologies for leaving him, but his friend would not hear them, and sending for his horse, albert of morseiul took his departure from his château, forbidding any of his attendants to follow him. chapter iii. the pastor. the count's orders were given so distinctly for no one to accompany him on his way, that none of his domestics presumed even to gaze after him from the gate, or to mark the path he took. as he wished to call no attention, he kept under the walls of the town, riding slowly along over the green till he came to the zigzag path which we have before mentioned as being now almost entirely disused. he had cast a large cloak around him, of that kind which at an after period degenerated into what was called a roquelaure, and his person was thus sufficiently concealed to prevent him from being recognised by any body at a distance. at the foot of the zigzag which he now descended he chose a path which led along the bank of the river for some way to the right, and then entered into a beautiful wooded lane between high banks. the sun was shining full over the world, but with a tempered and gentle light from the point of its declination at which it had arrived. the rays, however, did not in general reach the road, except where the bank sloped away; and then pouring through the green leaves and branches of the wild briar the honeysuckle and the hazel, it streamed upon the miniature cliffs of yellow sand on the opposite side, and chequered the uneven path which the young count was pursuing. the birds had as yet lost little of their full song, and the deep round tones of the blackbird bidding the golden day adieu as he saw the great light-bearer descending in the heaven, poured forth from beneath the holly bushes, with a melancholy and a moralising sound, speaking to the heart of man with the grand philosophic voice of nature, and counselling peace and affection, and meditation on the bounties of god. it is impossible to ride through such scenes at such an hour on the evening of bright summer days without feeling the calm and elevating influence of all things, whether mute or tuneful, taught by almighty beneficence to celebrate either by aspect or by song the close of another day's being and enjoyment. the effect upon the heart of the count de morseiul was full and deep. he had been riding slowly before, but after passing through the lane for about a minute, he gently drew in the bridle upon his horse till the beast went slower still, then laid the rein quietly upon his neck, and gave himself up to meditation. the chief theme in his mind at that moment was certainly the state and prospects of himself and his fellow protestants: and perhaps--even in experiencing all the beauty and the peacefulness of the scene through which he wandered, the calm tone of enjoyment in every thing around, the voice of tranquillity that spoke in every sound--his feelings towards those who unnecessarily disturbed the contented existence of an industrious and happy race, might become bitterer, and his indignation grow more deep and stern, though more melancholy and tranquil. what had the huguenots done, he asked himself, for persecution to seek them out there in the midst of their calm and pleasant dwellings--to fill them with fiery passions that they knew not of before--to drive them to acts which they as well as their enemies might bitterly repent at an after period--and to mar scenes which seemed destined for the purest and happiest enjoyment that the nature of man and its harmony with the other works of god can produce, by anxiety, care, strife, and perhaps with bloodshed? what had the huguenots done? he asked himself. had they not served their king as loyally, as valiantly, as readily in the battle field, and upon the wide ocean, as the most zealous catholic amongst them all? had not the most splendid victories which his arms had obtained by land been won for him by huguenot generals? was not even then a huguenot seaman carrying the thunders of his navy into the ports of spain? were the huguenots less loyal subjects, less industrious mechanics, less estimable as citizens, than any other of the natives of the land? far from it. the contrary was known to be the fact--the decided contrary. they were more peaceable, they were more tranquil, they were more industrious, they were more ready to contribute either their blood or their treasure to the service of the state than the great mass of the catholic population; and yet tormenting exactions, insults, cavillings, inquiries, and investigations, all tending to irritate and to enrage, were going on day by day, and were clearly to be followed soon by the persecuting sword itself. on such themes he paused and thought as he went on, and the first effect produced upon his mind was of course painful and gloomy. as the sweetest music sounding at the same time with inharmonious notes can but produce harsh dissonance, so the brightest scenes to a mind filled with painful thoughts seems but to deepen their sadness. still, however, after a time, the objects around him, and their bright tranquillity, had their effect upon the heart of the count; his feelings grew calmer, and the magic power of association came to lay out a road whereby fancy might lead his thoughts to gentler themes. the path that he was pursuing led him at length to the spot where the little adventure had occurred which he had related in the course of the morning to his friend. he never passed by that spot without giving a thought to the fair girl he had there met; but now he dwelt upon the recollection longer than he otherwise might have done, in consequence of having spoken of her and of their meeting that very day. he smiled as he thought of the whole, for there was nothing like pain of any kind mingled with the remembrance. it was merely a fanciful dream he had cherished, half amused at himself for the little romance he had got up in his own mind, half employing the romance itself as a check upon the very imagination that had framed it. "she was certainly very lovely," he thought as he rode on, "and her voice was certainly very sweet; and unless nature, as is but too often the case, had in her instance become accomplice to a falsehood, that form, that face, that voice, must have betokened a bright spirit and a noble heart. alas! why is it," he went on to ask himself, "why is it that the countenance, if we read it aright, should not be the correct interpreter of the heart? doubtless such was at first god's will, and the serpent taught us, though we could not conceal our hearts from the almighty, to falsify the stamp he had fixed upon them for our fellow men. and yet it is strange--however much we may have gained from experience, however painfully we may learn that man's heart is written in his actions, not in his face--it is strange we ever judge more or less by the same deceitful countenance, and guess by its expressions, if not by its features, though we might as well judge of what is at the bottom of a deep stream by the waves that agitate its surface." in such fanciful dreams he went on, often turning again to the fair vision that he had there seen, sometimes wondering who she could have been, and sometimes deciding and deciding the question wrongly in his own mind, but never suffering the wild expectation which he had once nourished of meeting her again to cross his mind--for he had found that to indulge it rendered him uneasy, and unfit for more real pursuits. at length, the lane winding out upon some hills where the short dry turf betokened a rocky soil below, took its way through a country of a less pleasing aspect. here the count de morseiul put his horse into a quicker pace, and after descending into another low valley full of streams and long luxuriant grass, he climbed slowly a high hill, surmounted by a towering spire. the village to which the spire belonged was very small, and consisted entirely of the low houses of an agricultural population. they were neat, clean, and cheerful however in aspect, and there was an attention to niceness of exterior visible every where, not very frequently found amongst the lower classes of any country. there was scarcely any one in the street, as the count passed, except, indeed, a few children enjoying their evening sport, and taking the day's last hour of happy life, before the setting sun brought the temporary extinction of their bright activity. there was also at the end of the town a good old dame sitting at a cottage door and spinning in the tempered sunshine of the evening, while her grey cat rolled happy in the dust beside her; but the whole of the rest of the villagers were still in the fields. the count rode on, giving the dame "good even" as he passed; and, leaving what seemed the last house of the village behind him, he took his way along a road shadowed by tall walnut trees growing upon the edge of a hill, which towered up in high and broken banks on the left, and sloped away upon the right, displaying the whole track of country through which the young nobleman had just passed, bright in the evening light below, with his own town and castle rising up a fellow hill to that on which he now stood, at the distance of some seven or eight miles. as he turned one sharp angle of the hill, however, he suddenly drew in his rein on seeing a carriage before him. it was stationary, however, and the two boorish looking servants, dressed in grey, who accompanied it, were standing at the edge of the hill, gazing over the country, as if the scene were new to them; while the horses, which the coachman had left to their own discretion, were stamping in a state of listless dozing, to keep off the flies which the season rendered troublesome. it was evident that the carriage was held in waiting for some one, and the count, after pausing for a single instant, rode on, looking in as he passed it. there was no one, however, within the wide and clumsy vehicle, and the servants, though they stared at the young stranger, took no notice, and made no sign of reverence as he went by them; with which, indeed, he was well satisfied, not desiring to be recognised by any one who might noise his proceedings abroad. he rode on then with somewhat of a quicker pace, to a spot where, at the side of the road, a little wicket gale led into a small grove of old trees, through which a path conducted to a neat stone-built house, of small size, with its garden around it: flowers on the one hand, and pot-herbs on the other. nothing could present an aspect cleaner, neater, more tasteful than the house and the garden. not a straw was out of its place in the thatch, and every flower-bed of the little parterre was trimmed exactly with the same scrupulous care. the door was of wood, painted grey, with a rope and handle by the side, to which was attached a large bell, but, though at almost all times that door stood open, it was closed on the present occasion. the young count took his way through the grove and the garden straight to the door, as if familiar with the path of old, leaving his horse, however, under the trees, not far from the outer gate. on finding the door closed, he pulled the handle of the bell, though somewhat gently; but, for a moment or two, no one replied, and he rang again, on which second summons a maid servant, of some forty or fifty years, appeared, bearing on her head a towering structure of white linen, in the shape of a cap, not unlike in shape and snowy whiteness the uncovered peak of some mountain ridge in the alps. on her appearance she uttered an exclamation of pleasure at the sight of the young count, whom she instantly recognised; and, on his asking for her master, she replied, that he was busy in conference with two ladies, but that she was sure that the count de morseiul might go in at any time. she pointed onward with her hand, as she spoke, down the clean nicely-sanded passage to the door of a small room at the back of the house, looking over the prospect which we have mentioned. it was evidently the good woman's intention that the count should go in and announce himself; but he did not choose to do so, and sent her forward to ask if he might be admitted. a full clear round voice instantly answered from within, on her application, "certainly, certainly," and, taking that as his warrant, the count advanced into the room at once. he found it tenanted by three people, on only one of whom, however, we shall pause, as the other two, consisting of a lady, dressed in a sort of half mourning, with a thick veil which she had drawn over her face before the count entered, and another who was apparently a female servant of a superior class, instantly quitted the room, merely saying to their companion, "i will not forget." the third was a man of sixty-two or sixty-three years of age, dressed in black, without sword or any ornament to his plain straight cut clothes. his head was bare, though a small black velvet cap lay on the table beside him, and his white hair, which was suffered to grow very long at the back and on the temples, fell down his neck, and met the plain white collar of his shirt, which was turned back upon his shoulders. the top of his head was bald, rising up from a fine wide forehead, with all those characteristic marks of expansion and elevation which we are generally inclined to associate in our own minds with the idea of powerful intellect and noble feelings. the countenance, too, was fine, the features straight, clear, and well-defined, though the eyes, which had been originally fine and large, were somewhat hollowed by age, and the cheeks, sunken also, left the bones beneath the eyes rather too prominent. the chin was rounded and fine, and the teeth white and undecayed; but, in other respects, the marks of age were very visible. there were lines and furrows about the brow; and, on the cheeks; and, between the eyebrows, there was a deep dent, which might give, in some degree, an air of sternness, but seemed still more the effect of intense thought, and perhaps of anxious care. the form of the old man bore evident traces of the powerful and vigorous mould in which it had been originally cast; the shoulders were broad, the chest deep, the arms long and sinewy, the hands large and muscular. the complexion had been originally brown, and perhaps at one time florid; but now it was pale, without a trace of colour any where but in the lips, which for a man of that age were remarkably full and red. the eye, the light of the soul, was still bright and sparkling. it gave no evidence of decay, varying frequently in expression from keen and eager rapidity of thought, and from the rapid changes of feeling in a heart still full of strong emotions. such--though the picture is but a faint one--such was the appearance of claude de l'estang, huguenot minister of the small village of auron, at equal distances from ruffigny and morseiul. he had played, in his youth, a conspicuous part in defence of the huguenot cause; he had been a soldier as well as a preacher, and the sword and musket had been familiar to his hands, so long as the religion of his fathers was assailed by open persecution. no sooner, however, did those times seem to have passed away, than, casting from him the weapons of carnal warfare, he resumed the exercise of the profession to which he had been originally destined, and became, for the time, one of the most popular preachers in the south of france. though his life was irreproachable, his manners pure, and his talents high, claude de l'estang had not been without his portion of the faults and failings of humanity. he had been ambitious in his particular manner; he had been vain; he had loved the admiration and applause of the multitude; he had coveted the fame of eloquence, and the reputation of superior sanctity; youth, and youth's eagerness, joined with the energy inseparable from high genius, had carried his natural errors to an extreme: but long before the period of which we now speak, years, and still more sorrows, had worked a great and beneficial, but painful alteration. his first disappointment was the disappointment of the brightest hopes of youth, complicated with all that could aggravate the crossing of early love; for there was joined unto it the blasting of all bright confidence in woman's sincerity, and the destruction of that trust in the eternal happiness of one whom he could never cease to love which was more painful to the mind of a sincere and enthusiastic follower of his own particular creed than the loss of all his other hopes together. he had loved early, and loved above his station; and encouraged by hope, and by the smiles of one who fancied that she loved in return, his ambition had been stimulated by passion, till all the great energies of his mind were called forth to raise himself to the highest celebrity. when he had attained all, however, when he saw multitudes flock to hear his voice, and thousands hanging upon the words of his lips as upon oracles, even then, at the moment when he thought every thing must yield to him, he had seen an unexpected degree of coldness come upon her he loved, and apparent reluctance to fulfil the promises which had been given when his estate was lowlier. some slight opposition on the part of noble and wealthy parents--opposition that would have yielded to entreaties less than urgent, was assigned as the cause of the hesitation which wrung his heart. the very duties which he himself had inculcated, and which, had there been real love at heart, would have found a very different interpretation, were now urged in opposition to his wishes; and, mortified and pained, claude de l'estang watched anxiously for the ultimate result. we need not pause upon all the steps; the end was, that he saw her, to whom he had devoted every affection of a warm and energetic heart, break her engagements to him, wed an enemy of her father's creed, renounce the religion in which she had been brought up, and after some years of ephemeral glitter in a corrupt court, become faithless to the husband for whom she had become faithless to her religion, and end her days, in bitterness, in a convent, where her faith was suspected, and her real sins daily reproved. in the meanwhile, claude de l'estang had wrestled with his own nature. he had refrained from showing mortification, or grief, or despair; he had kept the serpent within his own bosom, and fed him upon his own heart: he had abandoned not his pulpit; he had neglected, in no degree, his flock; he had publicly held up as a warning to others the dereliction of her whom he most loved, as one who had gone out from amongst them because she was not of them; he had become sterner, indeed more severe, in his doctrines as well as in his manners, and this first sorrow had a tendency rather to harden than to soften his heart. the next thing, however, which he had to undergo, was the punishment of that harshness. a youth of a gentle but eager disposition, who had been his own loved companion and friend, whom he still esteemed highly for a thousand good and engaging qualities, was betrayed into an error, on the circumstances of which we will not pause. suffice it to say that it proceeded from strong passion and circumstances of temptation, and that for it he was eager and willing to make atonement. he was one of the congregation of claude de l'estang, however, and the minister showed himself the more determined, on account of the friendship that existed between them, not to suffer the fault to pass without the humiliation of public penitence; and he exacted all, to the utmost tittle, that a harsh church, in its extremest laws, could demand, ere it received a sinner back into its bosom again. the young man submitted, feeling deep repentance, and believing his own powers of endurance to be greater than they were. but the effect was awful. from the church door, when he had performed the act demanded of him, fancying that the finger of scorn would be pointed at him for ever, he fled to his own home with reason cast headlong from her throne. ere two hours were over he had died by his own hand; scrawling with his blood, as it flowed from him, a brief epistle to his former friend to tell him that the act was his. that awful day, and those few lines, not only filled the bosom of the minister with remorse and grief, but it opened his eyes to every thing that had been dark in his own bosom. it showed him that he had made a vanity of dealing with his friend more severely than he would have done with others; that it was for his own reputation's sake that he had thus acted; that there was pride in the severe austerity of his life; that there was something like hypocrisy in the calm exterior with which he had covered over a broken heart. he felt that he had mighty enemies to combat in himself; and, as his heart was originally pure and upright, his energies great, and his power over himself immense, he determined that he would at once commence the war, and never end it till--to use his own words--"he had subdued every strong hold of the evil spirit in his breast, and expelled the enemy of his eternal master for ever." he succeeded in his undertaking: his very first act was to resign to others the cure of his congregation in rochelle; the next to apply for and obtain the cure of the little protestant congregation, in the remote village of auron. every argument was brought forward to induce him to stay in la rochelle, but every argument proved inefficacious. the vanity of popularity he fancied might be a snare to him, and he refused all entreaties. when he came amongst the good villagers, he altered the whole tone and character of his preaching. it became simple, calm, unadorned, suited in every respect to the capacity of the lowest person that heard him. all the fire of his eloquence was confined to urging upon his hearers their duties, in the tone of one whose whole soul and expectations were staked upon their salvation. he became mild and gentle, too, though firm when it was needful; and the reputation which he had formerly coveted still followed him when he sought to cast it off. no synod of the protestant clergy took place without the opinion of claude de l'estang being cited almost without appeal; and whenever advice, or consolation, or support was wanting, men would travel for miles to seek it at the humble dwelling of the village pastor. his celebrity, joined with his mildness, gained great immunities for himself and his flock, during the early part of the reign of louis xiv. at first, indeed, when he took upon himself the charge of auron, the catholic authorities of the neighbouring towns, holding in remembrance his former character, imagined that he had come there to make proselytes, and prepared to wage the strife with vehemence against him. the intendant of the province was urged to visit the little village of auron, to cause the spire of the church--which had been suffered to remain, as all the inhabitants of the neighbouring district were protestants--to be pulled down, and the building reduced to the shape and dimensions to which the temples of the protestants were generally restricted: but ere the pastor had been many months there, his conduct was so different from what had been expected; he kept himself so completely aloof from every thing like cabal or intrigue; he showed so little disposition to encroach upon the rights, or to assail the religion, of others; that, knowing his talents and his energies when roused into action, the neighbouring catholics embraced the opinion, that it would be better to leave him undisturbed. the intendant of the province was a wise and a moderate man, and although, when urged, he could not neglect to visit the little town of auron, yet he did so after as much delay as possible, and with the determination of dealing as mildly with its pastor, and its population, as was possible. when he came, he found the minister so mild, so humble, so unlike what he had been represented, that his good intentions were strengthened. he was obliged to say, that he must have the spire of the church taken down, although it was shown that there was not one catholic family to be offended by the sight within seven or eight miles around. but claude de l'estang only smiled at the proposal, saying, that he could preach quite as well if it were away; and the intendant, though he declared that it was absolutely necessary to be done, by some accident always forgot to give orders to that effect; and even at a later period discovered that the spire, both from its own height and from the height of the hill on which it stood, sometimes acted as a landmark to ships at sea. thus the spire remained; and here, in calm tranquillity, claude de l'estang had, at the time we speak of, passed more than thirty years of his life. a small private fortune of his own enabled him to exercise any benevolent feelings to which his situation might give rise: simple in habits, he required little for himself; active and energetic in mind, he never wanted time to attend to the spiritual and temporal wants of his flock with the most minute attention. though ever grave and sad himself, he was ever well pleased to see the peasantry happy and amused; and he felt practically every day, in comparing auron with rochelle, how much better is love than popularity. no magistrate, no judge, had any occupation in the town of auron, for the veneration in which he was held was a law to the place. any disputes that occurred amongst the inhabitants in consequence of the inseparable selfishnesses of our nature, were instantly referred to him; and he was sure to decide in such a way as instantly to satisfy the great bulk of the villagers that he was right. there were no recusants; for though there might be individuals who, from folly or obstinacy, or the blindness of selfishness, would have opposed his decision if it had stood unsupported, yet when the great mass of their fellow villagers were against them also, they dared not utter a word. if there was any evil committed; if youth, and either youth's passions or its follies produced wrong, the pastor had learned ever to censure mildly, to endeavour to amend rather than to punish, and to repair the evil that had been done, rather than to castigate him to whom it was attributable. in such occupations passed the greater part of his time; and he felt to the very heart the truth of the words--even in this world--that "blessed are the peace-makers." the rest of his time he devoted either to study or to relaxation. what he called study was the deep intense application of his mind to the knowledge and interpretation of the holy scriptures, whether in translation or in the original languages. what he called relaxation divided itself into two parts: the reading of that high classical literature, which had formed the great enjoyment of his youth, and by attention to which his eloquence had been chiefly formed; and the cultivation of his flower-garden, of which he was extremely fond, together with the superintendence of the little farm which surrounded his mansion. his life, in short, was a life of primeval simplicity: his pleasures few, but sweet and innocent; his course of existence, for many years at least, smooth and unvaried, remote from strife, and dedicated to do good. from time to time, indeed, persons of a higher rank, and of thoughts and manners much more refined than those of the villagers by whom he was surrounded, would visit his retirement, to seek his advice or enjoy his conversation; and on these occasions he certainly did feel a refreshment of mind from the living communion with persons of equal intellect, which could not be gained even from his converse with the mighty dead. still it never made him wish to return to situations in which such opportunities were more frequent, if not constant. "it is enough as it is," he said; "it now comes like a refreshing shower upon the soil of the heart, teaching it to bring forth flowers; but, perhaps, if that rain were more plentiful and continued always, there would be nothing but flowers and no fruit. i love my solitude, though perhaps i love it not unbroken." it rarely happened that these visits had any thing that was at all painful or annoying in them, for the means of communication between one part of the country and another were in that day scanty; and those who came to see him could in no degree be moved by curiosity, but must either be instigated by some motive of much importance, or brought thither by the desire of a mind capable of comprehending and appreciating his. he seldom, we may almost say he never, went out to visit any one but the members of his own flock in his spiritual capacity. he had twice, indeed, in thirty years, been at the château of morseiul, but that was first on the occasion of a dangerous illness of the countess, the mother of count albert, and then, on the commencement of those encroachments upon the rights of the huguenots, which had now been some time in progress. the counts of morseiul, however, both father and son, visited him often. the first he had regarded well nigh as a brother; the latter he looked upon almost in the light of a son. he loved their conversation from its sincerity, its candour, and its vigour. the experience of the old count, which came united with none of the hardness of heart and feeling which experience too often brings; the freshness of mind, the fanciful enthusiasms of the younger nobleman, alike interested, pleased, and attached him. with both there were points of immediate communication, by which his mind entered instantly into the thoughts and feelings of theirs; and he felt throughout every fresh conversation with them, that he was dealing with persons worthy of communication with him, both by brightness and elevation of intellect, by earnest energy of character, by virtue, honour, and uprightness, and by the rare gem of unchangeable truth. it may well be supposed, then, that he rose to meet the young count de morseiul, of whose return to his own domains he had not been made aware, with a smile of unmixed satisfaction. "welcome, my dear albert," he said, addressing him by the name which he had used towards him from childhood; "welcome back to your own dwelling and your own people. how have you fared in the wars? how have you fared in perilous camps and in the field, and in the still more perilous court? and how long is it since you returned to morseiul?" "i have fared well, dear friend," replied the count, "in all; have had some opportunity of serving the king, and have received more thanks than those services deserved. in regard to the court, where i could neither serve him nor myself, nor any one else, i have escaped its perils this year, by obtaining permission to come straight from the army to morseiul, without visiting either paris or versailles; and now, as to your last question, when i arrived, i would say but yesterday afternoon, were it not that you would, i know, thank me for coming to see you so speedily, when in truth i only intended to come to-morrow, had not some circumstances, not so pleasant as i could wish, though not so bad as i fear may follow, brought me hither, to consult with you to-day." a slight cloud came over the old man's countenance as his younger companion spoke. "is the difficulty in which you seek counsel, albert," he demanded, "in your own household, or in the household of our suffering church?" "alas," replied the count, "it is in the latter, my excellent friend; had it been in my own household, unless some urgent cause impelled me, i should not have thus troubled you." "i feared so, i feared so," replied the old man; "i have heard something of these matters of late:--so they will not leave us in repose!" and as he spoke he rose from the chair he had resumed after welcoming the count, and paced the room backwards and forwards more than once. "it is in vain," he said at length, casting himself back into his seat, "to let such things agitate me. the disposal of all is in a better and a firmer hand than mine. 'on this rock will i found my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!' so said our divine master; and i need not tell you, albert of morseiul, that when he said, 'on this rock,' he meant on the rock of faith, and did not mean the trumpery juggle, the buffoon-like playing on the name of peter, which 'the disciples of a corrupt sect would attribute to him. he has founded his church upon the rock of faith, and thereon do i build my hope; for i cannot but see that the enemy are preparing the spear and making ready the bow against us. whether it be god's will that we shall resist, as we have done in former times, and be enabled, though but a handful amongst a multitude, to smite the enemies and the perverters of our pure religion, or whether we shall be called upon to die as martyrs, and seal our faith by the pouring out of our blood, leaving another ensample to the elect that come after us, will be pointed out by the circumstances in which we are placed. but i see clearly that the sword is out to smite us, and we must either resist or endure." "it is precisely on that point," replied the count, "that i came to consult with you. measures of a strong, a harassing, and of an unjust nature, are taking place against us, because we will not say we believe that which we are sure is false, and follow doctrines which our soul repudiates. did i hope, my excellent friend, that the matter would stop here; did i expect that such measures of petty annoyance as i have heard proclaimed in the town of morseiul to-day, or any thing, indeed, similar to those measures, would be the final end and limit of the attack upon our liberties and our faith, i should be most anxious to calm the minds of the people, to persuade them to endure rather than to resist, and to remember that patience will cure many things: i should ask you, i should beseech even you, plighted as you are to support the cause of truth and righteousness, to aid me in my efforts, and to remember at what an awful price indemnity must be bought; to remember how fearful, how terrible, must be the scenes through which we wade to the attainment of those equal rights which should be granted even without our seeking them." "and i would aid you! and i would remember!" exclaimed the pastor, grasping his hand, "so help me the god of my trust, albert of morseiul," he continued more vehemently, "as i have ever avoided for long years every cause of strife and dissension, every matter of offence thrown in my way by those who would persecute us. nay more, far more; when my counsels have been sought, when my advice has been required, the words that i have spoken have always been pacific, not alone peaceful in sound, but peaceful in spirit and in intent, and peaceful in every tendency; i have counselled submission where i might have stirred up war; i have advised mild means and supplications, when the time for successful resistance was pointed out both by just cause for bitter indignation, and by the embarrassment of our enemies in consequence of their over ambition: and now i tell thee, albert, i tell thee with pain and apprehension, that i doubt, that i much doubt, whether in so doing i have acted right or wrong; whether, by such timid counsels, the happy moment has not been suffered to slip; whether our enemies, more wise in their generation than we are, have not taken advantage of our forbearance, have not waited till they themselves were in every way prepared, and are now ready to execute the iniquitous designs which have only been suspended in consequence of ambitious efforts in other quarters." "i fear, indeed, that it is so," replied the young count; "but, nevertheless, neither you nor any other person has cause to reproach himself for such conduct. forbearance, even if taken advantage of by insidious enemies, must always be satisfactory to one's own heart." "i know not, i know not," replied the old man. "in my early days, albert, these hands have grasped the sword in defence of my religion; and we were then taught that resistance to the will of those bigots and tyrants who would crush out the last spark of the pure worship of god, and substitute in its place the gross idolatry which disfigures this land, was a duty to the author of our faith. we were taught that resistance was not optional, but compulsory; and that to our children, and to our brethren, and to our ancestors, we owed the same determined, persevering, uncompromising efforts that were required from us by the service of the lord likewise. we were taught that we should never surrender, that we should never hesitate, that we should never compromise, till the liberty of the true reformed church of france was established upon a sure and permanent basis, or the last drop of blood in the veins of her saints was poured out into the cup of martyrdom. such were the doctrines, albert, that were taught in my youth, such were the doctrines under which i myself became a humble soldier of the cross. but, alas, lulled with the rest of my brethren into a fatal security, thinking that no farther infraction of our liberties would take place, believing that we should always be permitted to worship the god of our salvation according to the dictates of our own conscience--perhaps even believing, albert, that some degree of contumely and persecution, some stigma attached to the poor name of huguenot, might be beneficial, if not necessary, in our frail condition as mortal men, to be a bond of union amongst us to maintain our religion in its purity, and to keep alive the flame of zeal;--believing all this, i have not bestirred myself to resist small encroachments, i have even counselled others to pass them over without notice. now, however, i am convinced that it is the intention, perhaps not of the king, for men say that he is kind and clement, but of the base men that surround him, gradually to sap the foundations of our church, and cast it down altogether. i have seen it in every act that has been taking place of late, have marked it in every proceeding of the court; and, though slow and insidious, covered with base pretexts and pitiful quibbles, the progress of our enemies has been sure, and i fear that it may be too late to close the door against them: i could recall all their acts one by one, and the summing up would clearly show, that the idolatrous priesthood of this popish land are determined not to suffer a purer faith to remain any longer as an offence and reproach unto them." "i much wish," replied the count earnestly, "that you would put down, in order, these encroachments. i have been long absent, serving in the field, where my faith has, of course, been no obstacle, and where we have little discussion of such matters: but if i had them clearly stated before me, i and the other protestant noblemen of france might draw up a petition to the king, whose natural sense of right is very strong, which would induce him to do us justice----" the old man shook his head with a look of melancholy doubt, but the count immediately added, repeating the words he had just used, "to do us justice, or to make such a declaration of his intentions, as to enable us to take measures to meet the exigency of the moment." "willingly, most willingly," said claude de l'estang, "will i tell you all that is done, and has been doing, by our enemies. i will tell you also, albert, all the false and absurd charges that they urge against us to justify their own iniquitous dealings towards us. we will consider the whole together calmly and dispassionately, and take counsel as to what may best be done. god forbid that i should see the blood of my fellow christians shed; but god forbid, also, that i should see his holy church overthrown." "you speak of charges against us, sir," said the count, with some surprise in his countenance: "i knew not that even malice itself could find or forge a charge against the huguenots of france. at the court and in the camp there is no charge; tell me what we have done in the provinces to give even a foundation for a charge." "nothing, my young friend," replied the clergyman; "we have done nothing but defend the immunities secured unto us by the hand of the very king who now seeks to snatch them from us. we have not even defended, as perhaps we should, the unalienable privileges given us by a greater king. no; the insidious plan of our deceitful enemies has been to attack us first, and then to lay resistance to our charge as a crime. take but a few instances. in the towns of tonnay and of privas, the reformed religion was not only the dominant religion, but the sole religion, and had been so for near a century; the inhabitants were all protestants, tranquil, quiet, industrious. there were no religious contentions, there were no jealous feuds, when some one, prompted by the fiend, whispered to the crown that means should be taken to establish, in those places, the authority of the idolatrous church; that opportunity should be given for making converts from the pure to the corrupted faith; that in the end the pillage of the protestant congregations should be permitted to the romish priesthood. an order was instantly given for opening a romish church in a place where there were no papists, and for preaching against our creed in the midst of its sincere followers. the church was accordingly opened; the singing of latin masses, and the exhibition of idolatrous processions commenced where such things had not been known in the memory of man: a few boys hooted, and instantly there was raised a cry, that the romish priests were interrupted in their functions, that the ceremonies of the church were opposed by the whole mass of huguenots. what was the result? the parliament of paris gave authenticity to the calumny, by granting letters of protection to the intruding clergy; and then, taking its own act as proof of the guilt of the huguenots, commanded our temples to be pulled down, and the free exercise of our religion in that place to be abolished. this was the case at tonnay; and if at the same time the decree, which announced its fate to that city, had boldly forbidden our worship throughout the land, we might have displayed some union, and made some successful resistance. but our enemies were too wise to give us such a general motive: they struck an isolated blow here, and an isolated blow there; they knew man's selfishness; they foresaw how apathetic we should be to the injuries of our fellows; and they were right. the huguenots of france made no effort in favour of those who suffered; some never inquired into the question at all, and believed that the people of tonnay had brought the evil on their own heads; some shrugged the indifferent shoulder, and thought it not worth while to trouble the peace of the whole community for the sake of a single small town. had it been your town of morseiul it would have been the same, for such has been the case with privas, with dexodun, with melle, with chevreux, with vitré, and full fifty more; and not one protestant has moved to support the rights of his brother. whenever, indeed, any thing has occurred affecting the whole body, then men have flocked to us, demanding advice and assistance; they have talked of open resistance, of immediate war, of defending their rights, of opposing further aggressions; but i have ever seen, albert, that, mingled with a few determined and noble spirits, there have been many selfish, many indifferent; and i know that, unless some strong and universal bond of union be given them, some great common motive be afforded, thousands will fall off in the hour of need, and leave their defenders in the hands of the enemy. for this reason, as well as for many others, i have always urged peace where peace can be obtained; but i see now such rapid progress made against us, that i tremble between two terrible results." the young count gazed thoughtfully in the pastor's face for a few moments ere he replied. "i fear," he said at length, "that we have not yet a sufficient motive to bind all men, as is most needful in the strong assertion of a common cause.--heaven forbid that we should do or even think of aught disloyal or rebellious; but i doubt much, though the new injury we have received is gross, that it will furnish a sufficient motive to unite all our brethren in one general representation to the king of our general grievances. yet there are many points in the edict i heard read to-day wounding to the vanity of influential men amongst us, and that motive will often move them when others fail. but listen, and tell me what you think. these were the chief heads of the proclamation:"--and he went on to recapitulate all that he had heard, the old man listening with attention while he spoke. "i fear there is no bond of union here," replied the pastor, commenting upon some of the heads which the young count had given him; "rather, my good young friend, matter for dissension. they have cunningly thrown in more than one apple of discord to divide the mayors of the protestant towns from their people, ay, and even to make the pastors odious to the flock." "let us, however," said the count, "endeavour to act as unitedly as possible--let us keep a wary eye upon the proceedings of our enemies--let us be prepared to seize the fit moment for opposition, that we may seize it before it be necessary to resist in a manner that may be imputed to us as disloyal. doubtless, at the assembling of the states of the province, which will take place shortly, there will be a great number of the protestant nobles present, and i will endeavour to bring them to a general conference, in the course of which we may perhaps----" "hark!" said the old man, "there is the noise of a horse's feet;" and the next instant a loud ringing of the bell was heard, followed by the sound of a voice in the passage speaking to the maid servant in jocular and facetious tones, with which the young count was well acquainted. "it is my rascally valet, riquet," he said. "he's always thrusting himself where he has no business." "i wonder you retain him in your service," said the pastor; "i have marked him in your father's time, and have heard you both say that he is a knave." "and yet he loves me," said the young count; "and i do in truth believe would sooner injure himself than me." the old man shook his head with an expression of doubt; but the count went on: "however, i did not wish him to know that i came here to-night, and still less should wish him to be acquainted with the nature of my errand. he is a papist, you know, and may suspect, perhaps, that we are holding a secret council with others. we had better, therefore, give him admittance at once." there was a small silver bell stood on the table beside the pastor; and, as the maid did not come in, he rang it, inquired who it was that had arrived when she did make her appearance, and then ordered the valet to be admitted. "what brought you here, maître jerome?" demanded the young count, somewhat sternly, as the valet entered on his tiptoes, with a look of supreme self-satisfaction. "why, my lord," replied the man, "scarcely had you set out when there arrived a courier from the duc de rouvré, bringing you a packet. he was asked to leave it, as you were absent; but he said it was of vast importance, and that he was to get your answer from your own mouth: so he would give it to nobody. i took him into what used to be called the page's room, and made him drink deep of château thierry, picked his pocket of the packet while he was looking out of the window, and seeing that he was tired to death, commended him to his bed, with a night cap of good liquor, promising to wake him as soon as you returned, and then set off with the packet to seek you, monsieur le comte." "and pray what was the object of all this trickery?" demanded the count. "if you be not careful, maître jerome, you will place your neck in a cord some day." "so my mother used to say," replied the man, with cool effrontery; "but i only wished to serve your lordship, and knowing that there were difficult matters in hand, thought you might like to read the packet first, in order to be prepared to give a ready answer. we could easily seal up the letter again, and slip it into the courier's jerkin--which the poor fool put under his head when he went to sleep, thinking to secure the packet that was already gone. he would then present it to you in due form, and you give your answer without any apparent forethought." the count could not refrain from turning a smiling look upon the pastor, who, however, bent down his eyes and shook his head with a disapproving sigh. the count at the same time tore open the packet which the servant had handed to him, with a ruthless roughness, that made good jerome riquet start, and cry "oh!" with an expression of pain upon his countenance, to see not the slightest possibility left of ever patching up the letter again, so as to make it appear as if it had never been opened. "and i suppose, master jerome," continued the count, while making his way into the packet, "that you took the trouble of watching me when i set out this afternoon." "heaven forbid, sir," replied the man; "that would have been both very impertinent, and an unnecessary waste of time and attention, as i knew quite well where you were going. as soon as you had been out to hear the proclamation and keep the people quiet, and came home and sat with the shuttlecock marquis de hericourt, and then ordered your horse, i said to myself, and i told henriot, 'his lordship is gone to consult with monsieur claude de l'estang; and where, indeed, could he go so well as to one who is respected by the catholics almost as much as by the huguenots? whom could he apply to so wisely as to one whose counsels are always judicious, always peaceful, and always benevolent?'" and having finished this piece of oratory, riquet--perceiving that his master, busy in the letter, gave him no attention--made a low but somewhat grotesque reverence to the good pastor, bending his head, rounding his back, and elevating his shoulders, while his long thin legs stuck out below, so that he assumed very much the appearance of a sleeping crane. the pastor, however, shook his head, replying gravely, "my good friend, i have lived more than sixty-five years in the world, and yet i trust age has not diminished the intellect which experience may have tended to improve." by the time he had said this the young count had read to the end of the short letter which he had received, and put it before the pastor. "this is kind," he said, "and courteous of my good friend the duke, who, though i have not seen him for many years, still retains his regard for our family. jerome, you may retire," he added, "and wait for me without. this letter which you have brought is of no importance whatever, a mere letter of civility, so that either you or the duke's courier have lied." "oh, it was the courier, sir," replied the valet, with his usual quiet impudence, "it was the courier of course, otherwise there is no truth in the old proverb, _cheat like a valet, lie like a courier_. i always keep to my own department, sir;" and so saying he marched out of the room. in the mean time claude de l'estang had read the letter, which invited the young count to visit the duc de rouvré at poitiers, and take up his abode in the governor's house some days before the meeting of the states. it went on to express great regard for the young nobleman himself, and high veneration for his father's memory; and then, glancing at the religious differences existing in the province, and the measures which had been lately taken against the huguenots, it went on to state that the writer was anxious to receive the private advice and opinion of the young count as to the best means of extinguishing all irritation on such subjects. "were this from any other man than the duc de rouvré," said the pastor, "i should say that it was specious and intended to mislead; but the duc has always shown himself favourable to the protestants as a politician, and i have some reason to believe is not unfavourable to their doctrines in his heart: but go, my son, go as speedily as possible, and god grant that your efforts may conclude with peace." after a few more words of the same tenor, the pastor and his young friend separated, and the count and his valet, mounting their horses, took their way back towards the château, with the shades of night beginning to gather quickly about them. chapter iv. unexpected companions. the two horsemen rode to the village at a quick rate, but then slackened their pace, and passed through the single little street at a walk. the scene, however, was now changed; the children were no longer playing before the doors; from out of the windows of some of the cottages streamed forth the reddish light of a resin candle; from others was heard issuing the sound of a psalm, sung before the inhabitants retired to rest; and at the doors of others again appeared a peasant returned late from the toil of the day, and--as is so natural to the heart of man--pausing in the thickening twilight to take one more look of the world, before the darkness of night shut it out altogether. a star or two was beginning to appear in the sky; the bats were flitting hither and thither through the dusk; and, though it was still warm and mild, every thing betokened the rapid approach of night. from the village the count rode on, relapsing, after having spoken a few words to his servant, into the same meditative mood which had possessed him on his way to auron. he hastened not his pace, and after he had gone about three miles complete darkness surrounded him. there was no moon in the sky; the road by which he had come, steep, stony, and irregular, required full light to render it safe for his horse's knees; and, after the animal had tripped more than once, the count struck into a path to the right, which led by a little _détour_ into the high road from paris to poitiers. high roads, however, in those days were very different things from those which they have now become; and there is scarcely a parish road in england, or a commercial road in france, which is not wider, more open, and better in every respect than the high road we speak of was at that time. when he had gained it, however, the count went on more easily till he arrived at the spot where it entered one of the large woods which supplied the inhabitants with fuel in a country unproductive of coal. there, however, he met with an obstruction which he had not at all anticipated. as he approached the outskirts of the wood, there was a sudden flash to the right, and a ball whistled across the count's path, but without hitting either himself or his servant. he was too much accustomed to scenes in which such winged messengers of death were common, to be startled by the shot, but merely muttering to himself, "this is unpleasant; we must put a stop to this so near morseiul," he considered whether it would be better for him to push his horse forward or to go back upon the open road. but the matter was settled for him by others; for he was surrounded in a moment by five or six men, who speedily pulled him off his horse, though he made no effort to resist where resistance he saw would be vain, and then demanded his name in an imperative and threatening manner. he heard, however, at the same time, the galloping of the horse of jerome riquet, who had remained some twenty or thirty yards behind him; and perfectly certain, therefore, that very efficient aid would soon be brought to deliver him, he determined to procrastinate as far as possible, in the hopes of taking some of the plunderers who had established themselves so near his dwelling. "i cannot see," he said, "what your business can be with my name; if it is my money that you want, any that i have upon my person you can take.--my good friend, you will oblige me by not holding my collar so tight; it gives me a feeling of strangulation, which, as you may perhaps some day know, is not very pleasant." the man who held him, and who seemed the principal of the group, did not appear to be at all offended at being reminded of what might be the end of his exploits, but let go his collar, laughing and saying, "you are merry! however, your money we shall take as our own right. it is fair toll you know; and your name we must have too, as being officers of the king's highway, if not of the king, we have certainly a right to ask for passports." "heaven forbid that i should deny any of your rights," replied the count; "my money i will give you with all my heart: but my name is my own, and i do not choose to give that to any one." "well, then, we must take you where we can see your face," replied the other. "then if we know you, well and good, you shall go on; if we do not know you, we shall find means to make you speak more clearly, i will warrant." "he is one of them! he is one of them, be you sure," replied a second voice. "i would tie him to a tree and shoot him at once out of the way." "no, no," rejoined the first; "i think i know his tongue. it is maître nicolas, the notary--not a bad man in his way. bring him along, and his horse too; we shall soon see." though the count, perhaps, might not consider himself flattered by being taken for maître nicolas the notary, he began to perceive that there was something more in the conduct of these men than the common desire of plunder, some personal motive either of revenge or enmity; and, as he well knew that he was generally loved throughout the neighbourhood, he had no apprehensions as to the result regarding himself. he was anxious, however, to see more of his captors' proceedings, and therefore accompanied them without any effort to undeceive them as to who he was. they led him along for about a quarter of a mile down the high road through the wood, then struck into a narrower path to the right, only in use for wood-carts, and then again took a foot path, which brought them to a spot where a bright light was seen glimmering through the trees before them. it was evident that some wider road than that which they were following at the moment led also to the point to which it tended, for the sound of horses' feet was heard in that direction, and a creaking, as if of some heavy carriage wheels. "there is brown keroual," said one of the men, "come back from the other end of the wood, and i'll bet you two louis to two deniers that he's got hold of them. don't you hear the wheels? i think we might let you go," he added, turning towards the count, and trying to get a full glance of his face by the light that flashed through the leaves. at that moment, however, one of his companions replied, "take him on, take him on! you can't tell what wheels they are. they may be sending away those women." this seemed to decide the matter somewhat to the satisfaction of albert de morseiul, who was not a little anxious to witness what was going on; and the men accordingly led him forward through the bushes, which partially obstructed the path, till coming suddenly to an open space under a high sandy bank, he found himself in the midst of a scene, upon which we must pause for a moment. there was a large wood fire in the midst of the open space; and both to the right and left led away a small road, deeply channelled by the wheels of sand carts. the high bank above was crowned with the fine trees of the wood, amongst the branches and stems of which the light of the fire and of one or, two torches lost itself; while the fuller light below shone upon three or four curious groups of human beings. one of these groups was gathered together near the fire, and consisted of seven men, some lying down, some standing, all of them well armed, and some of them with carbines in their hands; their dress in a great degree resembled that of the english soldiery at the time of cromwell, though the usurper had been dead, and the fashion of such clothing gone out, about twenty years. a few of them had their faces bare, but the greater part had something drawn over their countenance so as completely to disguise it. in general, this covering was a mere piece of silk or cloth with slits made for the eyes, but in two instances a regular mask appeared. at a little distance from the fire, farther under the bank, sat two ladies, one richly habited in the taste of that day, and with the upper part of the face covered by the common black velvet riding mask, the other dressed more simply, but still handsomely, with a large watch hanging by her side, and two or three rings still upon her hands, notwithstanding the company in which she was found. there were some large grey cloaks spread upon the ground beneath them, to protect them apparently from the damp of the ground; and standing near, leaning on a musket, apparently as a guard over them, was one of the same fraternity that appeared by the side of the fire. at some distance up the road to the right, a carriage was seen stationary, with the horses taken out and cropping the grass by the side; but the eyes of the whole party under the bank were turned to the other side, where, at the entrance of the road into the open space, appeared a second carriage drawn by four mules, which had just been led up by a party of the banditti, who were the first that had appeared mounted. from the door of the vehicle, which was now brought to a halt, its tenants were in the very act of descending, with fear and unwillingness written upon their countenances. the two first that came forth were ecclesiastics of the catholic church: the first, a man who might well be considered as remarkably ugly, had his countenance not been expressive, and its expression indicative of considerable talent. the second was a much handsomer man in every respect, but with a keen, sly, fox-like aspect, and a constant habit of biting his nether lip, of which he could not divest himself, even at a moment when, to judge by his countenance, he was possessed by extraordinary fear. after them came another man, dressed as a layman, one or two domestics, and a fat inferior priest, with a dirty and a greasy countenance, full of nothing but large black eyes and dull stupidity. while they were thus making their unwilling exit from the carriage, several of those who had brought them thither were mounted upon different parts of the vehicle, busily cutting off, opening, and emptying various valises, trunk-mails, and other contrivances for conveying luggage. the attention of the other actors in the scene was so much taken up by this group, that no one seemed to notice the arrival of the party which brought the count thither; and though the man who had led it had resumed a grasp of his collar, as if to demonstrate that the count was the captive of his bow and spear, he was himself so intensely occupied in looking at the proceedings round the carriage, that he paused close to the wood for several minutes. at length, however, he recollected himself, and, by advancing two or three steps with those that followed, called the attention of the rest from the carriage and its ejected tenants to the new captive that had been brought in. the light flashed full upon the count as the man held him; but the moment the eyes of the group around the fire were turned upon him, several voices exclaimed in a tone of surprise and consternation, "the count! the count! the count de morseiul!" no sooner did the first of the ecclesiastics, who had descended from the carriage, hear the exclamation, than he turned his eyes in that way also, ran forward, and, catching the count by the hand, exclaimed, "monsieur de morseiul, my dear friend, i claim your protection. these men threaten to murder me!" "monsieur pelisson," replied the count, "i greatly grieve that i can give you no protection. i am a prisoner to these men, as you see, myself, and, were i not of another creed, might, for aught i know, have to apply to you to shrive me! for they have threatened to tie me to a tree, and shoot me likewise." "good god! this is very horrible," cried pelisson, in utter terror and consternation. "pray, monsieur de st. helie," he exclaimed, turning to the other ecclesiastic who followed, "pray, exhort these men--you are so eloquent!" "i--i--i--i can exhort nobody," stammered forth the other, trembling in every limb. a change, however, was working itself in their favour; for the moment that the count's name had been publicly announced, a great degree of agitation and movement had taken place amongst the robbers. those who had been lying down started up, those who had been plundering the carriage abandoned their pillage, and joined their companions by the fire; the man who had grasped the count let go his hold, as if he had burnt his hand, and a rapid consultation evidently took place amongst the rest, which the count himself was not a little surprised to see, as, amongst those whose faces were uncovered, there was not a single individual whom he could recognise as having ever beheld before. the movement of pelisson, however, and the words which passed between him and the count again called their attention in that direction from the consultation which was going on. two men, both masked, separated themselves from the rest, one a very tall and powerful man, somewhat richly though not tastefully dressed; the other a short, broad-made, sturdy looking person, who only wanted the accompaniment of a bandoleer over his buff coat to be a perfect representation of the parliamentary soldier of great britain. the lesser man took upon himself to be spokesman, though they both advanced direct towards the count. "we are sorry for what has happened, monsieur de morseiul," he said; "we had not the slightest intention of disturbing you upon your road, and it was this fellow's stupidness and the darkness of the night that has caused the mistake. i have only to say, as i said before, that we are sorry for it, and that you are quite at liberty to go when you like." the count's determination was taken in a moment. "i am happy to hear," he said, "that you are sorry for one offence at least against the laws of the country; but, in regard to my going, if i go, i have not the slightest intention of going alone. i am not a person to abandon my companions in distress, and i must insist upon some of the parties here present being liberated as well as myself." pelisson looked at him with an imploring glance; the abbé de st. helie elapsed his hands together, and gazed anxiously in his face; while the man to whom he had spoken replied in a surly tone,-- "we would fain treat you well, sir count, and do you no harm; so go your way in god's name, and do not meddle with what does not concern you, for fear worse come of it. you are not leading the forlorn hope at maestricht now, remember." "oh!" said the count, with a meaning nod of the head, as if the man's allusion had let him into some secret; but ere he could reply further, the taller and more athletic of the two whispered a few words to his companion in a low voice, and the other, after a moment's pause of hesitation, turned once more to the count and said, "well, sir, what is it you would have? we respect and love you, and would do much to please you. what do you demand?" "in the first place," replied the count de morseiul, speaking very slowly and distinctly, and using as many words as he possibly could, knowing that every moment was something gained by bringing succour nearer; "in the first place, as i am sure that you are too much men of honour, and too courteous in your nature a great deal----" "come, come, sir count," replied the man, interrupting him, "cut your story short. we have honour of our own particular kind; but as to our nature being courteous, it is not. we are neither fools, babies, nor frequenters of the painted chambers of paris, but freemen of the forest. what i ask is, what do you demand?" "in the first place," replied the count, taking a step forward towards the spot where the two ladies were sitting, and pointing in that direction with his hand, "in the first place, i demand that you should set those two ladies at liberty!" "they might have been at liberty long ago," replied the man, "if they had chosen to say whence they came and whither they were going. however, go they shall, as you ask it; but i should like to have those rings and that watch first." "fie," said the count, "you surely would not touch the trinkets. their purses, i dare say, have been taken already." "those were given up at first," replied the man, "and we should have had the watch and rings too if we had not been interrupted by this other affair. come, pretty one," he added, turning to the younger of the two ladies, who had both risen when they heard the intercession that was made for them, and were gazing on the young count with eager anxiety, "come, let us see if there be any diamonds amongst those rings, for we must not let diamonds get out of the forest. they are better than gold a great deal." thus saying, he advanced towards her, and took the small delicate beautiful fingers, on which the rings appeared, in his rough grasp. "i fear, lady," said the count, who had followed him, "that i cannot protect you farther. we must feel grateful for your being permitted to go at all." "we owe you a deep debt of gratitude as it is, sir," replied the elder lady; and the younger added immediately, "indeed we do: but let them take the rings," she continued, drawing them from her fingers.--"all but one," she added suddenly, "all but one." "what, a wedding-ring," cried the man, with a loud laugh, "or a lover's token, i suppose, for i see no wedding-ring here." "no, sir," she said, drawing up her head somewhat proudly, "but the gift of a mother that loved me, and who is most dear to me still in memory. pray, let me keep it. this is the ring." "why, that is worth all the rest," said the man, looking at it. "no, no, my pretty mistress, we must have this." the count de morseiul had stood by, somewhat pale, and with a manner which, for the first time, betrayed some degree of agitation. but he now interposed, seeing, by the trembling of her hand, how much emotion the man's words produced upon the young lady, though he could not behold her countenance. "what is the value of the ring?" he demanded of the man. "why, some twenty louis, i dare say," he replied. "well, i will give you double the amount for it," said the count. "i have not the money upon me, for your men have taken all i had; but you can trust me, and i will pay it to any one whom you will send to the château of morseiul, and pledge my honour they shall come and go in safety, and without inquiry." "your honour, my lord count, is worth the city of poitiers," replied the man. "there is the ring," and he gave it into the count's hand. albert de morseiul took it, and gazed at it by the fire-light for a moment with some attention, and with some emotion. it was formed of diamonds, and, according to a fashion common in that day, formed the initials, probably of some proper name, c. s., surmounted by a count's coronet. "lady," he said, after he had looked at it, "this ring is almost as strong a temptation to me as to our friend here. i long to keep it till its fair owner, once more at liberty, may come to claim it at my hands. that would be ungenerous, however, and so i suppose i must give it back." so saying, he replaced it on her finger, and, with an air of courteous gallantry, raised the small fair hand to his lips. she bent down her head over her hand and his, as if to gaze at the recovered ring, and he felt a warm drop fall from the bright eyes that sparkled through the mask upon it. "and now," he said, turning to the man who had acted as chief of the band, "and now you will let the ladies depart." "yes," replied the man, "but one of our people must drive them to the place where we tied the lackeys to the trees." "they are safe, upon your honour, though?" said the count. "upon my honour they are," answered the man bluffly. "i should like to see the man that would wag a finger at them when i say they are free." "come then, quick," said the count, turning to the ladies; "let us not lose the fortunate moment;" and he took her hand to lead her to the carriage, which he had remarked standing farther down the road. but both pelisson and st. helie threw themselves in his way, exclaiming aloud, "for god's sake do not leave us! for heaven's sake do not abandon us!" "no, no," replied the count. "my good friends," he added, turning to the band, "pray offer these good gentlemen no wrong, at least till my return. perhaps i can hit upon some terms between you and them, and also tell you a piece of news which will make you change your determination." "not easily," said the leader; "but we will not harm them till you come back, if you are only going to take the ladies to the carriage. you, stephen, drive it to the place where the lackeys were left." "i will return instantly," said the count, and he led the younger lady on, the elder following. till they reached the carriage, and during a part of the time occupied in tying the horses again to it, all were silent; but at length the younger lady ventured to say, in a low voice,-- "how can i ever thank you, monsieur de morseiul?" the count did not reply to the question, but he said, as he was handing her in,-- "am i not right? have we not met before?" "it is years ago," she said, in the same low tone; "but," she added the moment after, just as the man was about to drive away, "we shall meet again, and if we do, say nothing of this meeting, i beseech you; but remember only that i am deeply grateful." the carriage drove away, and the count remained for a moment listening. he then returned to the mixed group by the fire, where the agitation of terror in the case of the abbé de st. helie had worked itself up to such a pitch during his absence, that the tears were streaming copiously from the unhappy man's eyes, while the band that had made him a captive stood round gazing upon him with some contempt, but certainly no appearance of pity. pelisson, on his part, displayed a greater degree of firmness, remaining with his hands clasped together, and his eyes fixed upon the ground, but without any other sign of fear than some paleness of his countenance, and an occasional movement of the lips, as if he were in prayer. the count advanced into the midst of the group, and perceiving that the leader of the band into whose hands they had fallen looked to him to speak first, and maintained a sort of dogged silence which augured but ill for the two ecclesiastics, he said, "now, my good friend, what do you intend to do with these gentlemen?" "i intend," replied the man in a stern tone, "to shoot the two that are standing there without fail, to scourge that black-faced priest by the carriage till he has not a bit of skin on his back, and send the lackeys trooping." "you are of course jesting," said the count. "you are not a man, i am sure, to commit deliberate murder. but you have frightened them enough.--let me hear what you intend to do, without a jest." "there has been no jest spoken," replied the man fiercely. "i have told you my intentions, and i shall not change. these two villains have come down into a peaceful province, and amongst a happy people, to bring dissension, and persecution, and hatred amongst us, and they shall taste the first bitter fruits of their own works. i shall certainly not let them escape; and i can tell the old jesuit le tellier, and his tyrant son, louvois, that they may send as many of such firebrands down as they will; i will do my best to meet them, and extinguish them in their own blood." "i really do not know what you mean," replied the count. "monsieur pelisson, i cannot conceive, from what i know of you, that you are a man to undertake such evil tasks as this good gentleman accuses you of. we of the reformed religion certainly regretted that you had thought fit to fall back into what we consider to be a great error, but we never supposed that you would deal hardly with your reformed brethren." "neither do i, count," replied pelisson, firmly. "it is natural that, having abandoned errors, i should seek to lead others to follow the same course; but no harsh means have i ever practised, no harsh means have i ever counselled. on the contrary, i have advocated gentleness, peace, persuasion, exhortation, kindness, equity, on all occasions. but it is in vain, my good young gentleman," he added, looking at his captors, "it is all in vain. these men are determined to take our blood, and it is in vain to try to stay them; though the retribution which will fall upon them, and i fear, too, upon your own sect, will be awful, when our fate reaches the ears of the king. but it is in vain, as i have said. you have done your best for us, and i thank you from my heart. bear witness, every one!" he continued, raising his voice, "bear witness, every one, that this noble gentleman, the count de morseiul, has no share in the terrible act these men are going to commit, and that he has done his best to save us." "no one will suspect me, monsieur pelisson," replied the count. "but i must yet do something more," he added, believing, not wrongly, that the words and demeanour of pelisson must have had some effect upon the body of men by whom they were surrounded, and also having some hope now that aid might be at hand. "i must yet do something more, and the time i believe is come for doing it. listen to me, sir," he added, addressing the man who had led the band throughout. "i beg of you instantly to set these two gentlemen at liberty. i beg of you, both for your own sake and for the sake of the reformed church, to which i belong, and to whose instigations this act will be attributed; and if you will not attend to my entreaties you must attend to my command--i command you to set them at liberty!" "command!" said the man, with a scornful laugh. "your commands are likely to be mighty potent here, in the green wood, sir count! now, listen to my commands to you. make the best of your time and get away from this spot without delay, for if you stay you shall either see those two men shot before your face, or you shall be shot with them. so be quick." "be it as you say, my good friend," replied the count coolly. "we shall have bloody work of it; but before you go on, remember, i tell you, you shall take my life with theirs; and let me warn you of another thing which you do not know, the first shot that is fired, the first loud word that is spoken," he added, dropping his voice, "will bring destruction on the heads of all." the man to whom he spoke gazed in his face with some surprise, as if not clearly understanding his meaning, while the rest of the band appeared eagerly whispering together, in a manner which might be interpreted to bespeak some difference of opinion between themselves and their leader. the ear of the count was quick; while conducting the two ladies to their carriage, he had heard uncertain sounds at a distance, which he had little doubted were occasioned by the arrival of some party from the castle in search of him: while he had spoken to the chief of the band in favour of pelisson and his companions, he had again caught the same sounds, but more distinctly. he had heard voices, and the trampling of horse, and taking advantage of the momentary hesitation which seemed to affect his opponent, he exclaimed, "hark!" and lifted up his hand to enjoin silence. the sounds, though distant, were now very distinct, and he added, "you hear! they are in search of me with all the force from the castle. you did not know that my servant was behind when i was taken, and fled to seek succour." his opponent stamped his foot upon the ground, and laid his hand upon a pistol in his belt, fingering the hammer of the lock in a very ominous manner; but the count once more interposed, anxious on many accounts to prevent a collision. "come," he said, "i wish to do you no injury. let us compromise the matter. set the party you have taken free, and doubtless they will abandon to your care and guidance all the baggage and money that they may possess. what say you, monsieur pelisson?" "willingly, willingly," cried pelisson, to whom all the last words spoken had been a relief. "willingly, willingly," cried the abbé de st. helie; the tears which had been streaming from fear changing suddenly into the tears of joy, and flowing on as rapidly as ever. their enemy, however, seemed still to hesitate; but the taller man, whom we have before seen exercising some influence over him, pulled him by the sleeve once more, and whispered to him eagerly for a brief space. he listened to him for an instant, partly turning away his head, then shook himself pettishly free from his grasp, saying, "well, i suppose it must be so. i will set them free now; but a day of reckoning will come, if they take not a warning from what has passed. gather all those things together, my men. each one take something, and let us be off as fast as we can. stand to your arms, though; stand to your arms, some of you. those fellows are coming devilish near, and may find their way up here." "they shall not injure you," said the count. "i break no engagements, even when only implied." at that moment, however, the abbé de st. helie, having sufficiently recovered from the terror into which he had been cast to give some thought to what he was about, exclaimed aloud, "but the king's commission--the king's commission! they must not take that;" and rushing towards the baggage he seized a white leather bag, which seemed to contain some especial treasure; but scarcely had he got it in his hand when the chief of their captors snatched it violently from him, and dashed it into the midst of the fire, where he set his foot upon it, as if to insure that it should be burnt, even at the risk of injuring himself. albert de morseiul was an officer in the king's service, and had been brought up in his youth with high notions of devoted loyalty and reverence for the royal authority, which even the free spirit of the reformed religion which he professed had not been able to diminish. the insult offered to the monarch's commission then struck him with indignation; and, starting forward, he grasped the man who would have destroyed it by the chest, exclaiming, "sir, would you insult the king himself?" the man replied not, but strove to keep down his foot upon the packet. the young count, however, was as powerful in frame as himself, and considerably taller; and, after a momentary struggle, he cast him back, while the abbé de st. helie snatched the packet from the flames. what would have been the result of this strife, in which both the robber's blood and that of the young count were heated, would be difficult to say, for the man had drawn the pistol from his belt, and the click of the lock was plainly heard as he cocked it; but just at that minute the men who had been engaged in stripping the trunk mails of their contents, caught a sight of a party of horsemen coming up the road; and gathering every thing that was most valuable together, they retreated quickly around their leader. abandoning his contention with the count, he now promptly formed them into line, collected all the various articles belonging to themselves which were scattered about, and retreated in the direction of the opposite road, offering a firm face of five men abreast, with their carbines cocked, and levelled to the horsemen, who were now coming up thick into the open space where all these events had passed. at the head of the horsemen appeared the chevalier d'evran, armed in haste to deliver or avenge his friend; but, as the count saw that he was now master of the field, and that the robbers were retreating in a very threatening attitude, which might produce bloodshed if they were not immediately shown that no molestation would be offered to them, he took a rapid step or two forward, exclaiming to his own party,-- "halt, halt! we have come to a compromise before you arrived, and are all at liberty. thanks, louis, a thousand thanks, however, for your succour!" the count's men paused promptly at his command, and the robbers retreated slowly up the other road, facing round every ten or twelve steps, fully prepared for defence, like an old lion pursued by the hunters. in the mean while the chevalier sprung from his horse, and grasped his friend's hand eagerly. "why, albert," he exclaimed, "albert, this would never do! you who, though one of the rashest officers in the service, had escaped balls and pikes, and bayonets and sabres, to run the risk of being killed by a ditch-fighting freebooter, within a mile or two of your own hearth! why, when that rascal jerome there came and told me, i thought i should have gone mad; but i was determined to ride the rascals down like wolves, if i found they had injured you." "oh, no," replied the count, "they showed no inclination to injure me; and, indeed, it would appear, as far as i am concerned, that the whole matter was a mistake, for to me they were very respectful. in truth, i seemed to be in wonderful favour with them, and my only difficulty was in saving m. pelisson and this reverend gentleman here. but, notwithstanding these worthy men's reverence for myself, i must set to work to put this down as soon as ever i come back from poitiers." "i am sure, monsieur le comte," said the abbé de st. helie, "we owe you every thing this night, and your conduct shall never be blotted out from our grateful remembrance." the count bowed low, but somewhat stiffly; then, shaking pelisson by the hand, he said, "i am happy to have been of any service to you both, gentlemen. my good friend, monsieur pelisson, i trust that you will not be any the worse for this short, though unpleasant, sojourn in the forest. i will not ask you and your friend to return and stop awhile at the château of morseiul, as in all probability monsieur de st. helie might not relish abiding under the roof of a heretic. but besides that," he added with a smile, "besides that, in regard to which of course i speak in jest, i doubt not you are anxious to proceed. morseiul is out of your way, and in an hour and a half you will reach the auberge of quatremoulins." "but, sir, shall we be safe, shall we be safe?" exclaimed the abbé de st. helie, who was now examining the vehicle in which they had been travelling with anxious eyes. "gracious god!" he exclaimed, ere the count could answer, "look! there is a ball which has gone through the carriage within an inch of my head!" the count de morseiul looked at the chevalier, and they both laughed. "there is a proverb in england, my good abbé," said the chevalier, "that a miss is as good as a mile; but if you will take my advice you will plant yourself just in the same spot again, or put your valise to raise you just opposite the shot-hole, for there are a thousand chances to one that, if you are shot at a thousand times, no bullet ever comes there again." the abbé did not seem much to like the pleasantry, for in his mind the subject was far too serious a one to admit of a joke; and the count de morseiul replied to his former question,--"depend upon it you are in perfect safety. but to make that more sure, the chevalier and i will return to morseiul with only one or two attendants, and send the rest of my men to escort you to the inn. however, gentlemen, if you will take my advice, you will not travel by night any more when you are in this part of the country; for, from what that fellow said, i should suppose the peasantry have got some evil notion of your intended proceedings here, and it might be dangerous to trust yourselves with them too much. there are such things, you must remember, as shooting from behind hedges, and from the tops of banks; and you must not forget that, in this part of the world, where our lanes are cut deep down between the fields, our orchards thick, and our woods many, it is no easy matter to ascertain where there is an enemy. as i take it for granted you are going towards poitiers, monsieur pelisson, i shall most likely see you soon again. we will all accompany you out of the wood, and then you shall have a sufficient escort to ensure your safety." pelisson thanked him again and again. the trunk mails, and what portion of their contents the robbers had left, were gathered together, the carriage re-loaded, and its human burden placed safely in it. pelisson and the abbé de st. helie, after having ascertained that the injuries inflicted by the fire upon the precious packet in the sheep-skin bag extended no farther than that outer cover, gave the word that they were ready; and moving on in slow procession, the carriage, its denizens, and their escort of cavaliers made their exit from the road, after which the count and the chevalier took leave of the others to return to the castle of morseiul; and thus ended the adventures of the night. chapter v. the journey, and some of its events. we will pass over all comments which took place amongst the parties to the scene which we described in our last chapter, and will take up our story again with the interval of a single day. how happy would it often be for us in life if we could thus blot out a single day! if, out of our existence as out of our history, we could extirpate one four and twenty hours, its never-to-be-recalled deeds, its thoughts affecting the mind for ever, its events affecting the whole course of after-existence! how happy would it be if we could blot it out from being! and often, too often, how happy would it be if we could blot it out from memory--from memory, the treasurer of our joys and pains--memory, whose important charge differs from the bright office of hope, in the sad particular of having to deal with nothing but realities! however, with the count de morseiul and his friend the chevalier d'evran, that day had passed in nothing which left regret. the count had explained to his friend that he judged it necessary to go to poitiers at once: the chevalier had very willingly agreed to accompany him, saying, that he would take the good old duke by surprise: they had then enjoyed every thing that morseiul afforded of enjoyable; they had wandered by the glassy stream, they had ridden through the beautiful scenes around, they had hunted the boar in the count's green woods, they had tasted with moderation his good wine, and the rich fruits of a sunny land; and thus that day had passed over without a cloud. although the king of france had given over, by this time, the habit with which he set out, in the light and active days of his first manhood, and no longer made all his journeys on horseback, yet the custom was kept up by a great part of his nobility and officers, and it was very usual to ride post upon a journey, that is to say, to mount whatever horse the postmaster chose to give, and ride on to the next relay, accompanied by a postilion on another horse, carrying the baggage. the count de morseiul, however, did not follow this plan, as he had no inclination to appear in the city of poitiers, which at that time boasted of being the largest city in france, except paris, in the character of a courier. as he loved not carriages, however, and had plenty of fiery horses in his stable panting for exercise, he sent forward a relay himself to a distant inn upon the road, and, on the morning we speak of, accompanied by his friend and a large body of their servants, rode calmly on upon the way, proposing to make a journey of about five and thirty miles that day. "it is politic of me, d'evran," he said, conversing with the chevalier, "it is politic of me to carry you away from morseiul so soon; as you have promised to give me one whole month, for fear you should become tired of your abode, and exhaust all its little stock of amusements and pleasures too rapidly. satiety is a great evil, and surely one of the minor policies of life is to guard against it." "no fear of my getting tired of morseiul so soon," replied the chevalier; "but i cannot agree entirely to your view of satiety. i have often had many doubts as to whether it be really an evil or not." "i have none," replied the count; "it seems to me the greatest of intellectual evils; it seems to me to be to the mind what despair is to the heart, and in the mind of a young man is surely what premature decrepitude is to the body. good god, louis, how can you entertain a doubt? the idea of losing one sense, one fine perception, is surely horrible enough; but tenfold horrible must be the idea of losing them altogether; or, what comes to the same thing, of losing the enjoyment that they confer upon us?" "nay, but, albert," said the chevalier, who was fond of playing with his own wit as a bright weapon, without considering its dangerous nature, and took no little pleasure in calling forth, even against himself, the enthusiastic eagerness of his friend; "nay, but, albert, what i contend for is, that satiety is true wisdom; that it is a perfect, thorough knowledge of all enjoyments, and a proper estimation of their emptiness." "hold, hold," exclaimed the count, "that is a very different thing; to my mind satiety is the exhaustion of our own powers of enjoying, not the discovery of the want of a power of conferring enjoyment in other things. because a man loses the sense of smelling, that will not deprive the rose of its sweet odour. does a tyrant cut out my tongue? the delicious flavour of the peach will remain, though i taste it not; though he blind my eyes, the face of nature will flourish and look fair as much as ever. no, no, satiety is the deprivation, by over enjoyment, of our own powers of receiving; and not a just estimate of the powers of other things in giving pleasure." "but you will own," said the chevalier, "that a deep and minute acquaintance with any source of enjoyment naturally tends to diminish the gratification that we at first received from it. you will not deny that moralist and philosopher, from solomon down to our own days, have all been right in pointing out the vanity of all things. _vanitas vanitatis_, my dear count, has been the stamp fixed by every great mind that the world has yet produced upon the objects of human enjoyment. this has been the acme, this the conclusion at which wisdom has arrived; and surely the sooner we ourselves arrive at it in life the better." "heaven forbid," exclaimed the count; "heaven forbid, either that it should be so, or that such should be your real and mature opinion. you say that a minute acquaintance with the sources of enjoyment diminishes the gratification they afford. there is undoubtedly something lost in every case of such minute acquaintance; but it is by the loss of a peculiar and distinct source of pleasure accompanying every other enjoyment the first time it is tasted, and never going beyond. i mean novelty--the bloom upon the ripe plum, which renders it beautiful to the eye as well as refreshing to the taste--brush away the bloom, the plum is no longer so beautiful, but the taste no less refreshing. setting aside the diminution made for the loss of that novelty, i deny your position." the chevalier laughed at his friend's eagerness. "you will not surely deny, morseiul," he said, "that there is no pleasure, no enjoyment, really satisfactory to the human heart; and, consequently, the more intimately we become acquainted with it, the more clearly do we see its emptiness." "had you said at the first," replied the count, "that our acquaintance with pleasures show their insufficiency, i should have admitted the truth of your assertion; but to discover the insufficiency of one pleasure seems to me only a step towards the enjoyment of pleasures of a higher quality." "but we may exhaust them all," said the chevalier, "and then comes--what but satiety?" "no," replied the count, "not satiety, aspirations for and hopes of higher pleasures still; the last, the grandest, the noblest seeking for enjoyment that the universe can afford; the pursuit that leads us through the gates of the tomb to those abodes where the imperfections of enjoyment end, where the seeds of decay grow not up with the flowers that we plant, where the fruit is without the husk, and the music without the dissonance. this still is left us when all other enjoyments of life are exhausted, or have been tasted, or have been cast away, or have been destroyed. depend upon it, louis, that even the knowledge we acquire of the insufficiency of earth's enjoyment gives us greater power to advance in the scale of enjoyment; and that, if we choose to learn our lesson from the picture given us of the earthly paradise, we shall find a grand moral in the tree of eternal life having been planted by the tree of knowledge." "but still, my dear count," replied the chevalier, "you seem still to approach to my argument, while you deny its force. if such be the result of satiety, as you say it is, namely, to lead us to the aspiration after higher enjoyments, till those aspirations point to another world, surely it is better to arrive at that result as soon as possible." "no," replied the count; "in the first place, i did not say that such was the result of satiety; i said that it was the result of discovering by experience the insufficiency of all earthly enjoyments to give perfect satisfaction to a high and immortal spirit and well-regulated mind. satiety i hold to be quite the reverse of this; i hold it to be the degradation of our faculties of enjoyment, either by excessive indulgence, or by evil direction. the man who follows such a course of life as to produce any chance of reaching satiety, tends downward instead of upward, to lower rather than to higher pleasures, and exhausts his own capabilities, not the blessings of god. the opposite course produces the opposite result; we know and learn that all god's creations afford us some enjoyment, although we know and learn, at the same time, that it has been his will that none of those enjoyments upon earth should give complete and final satisfaction. our capabilities of enjoying by enjoying properly are not blunted but acuminated; we fly from satiety instead of approaching it; and even while we learn to aspire to higher things, we lose not a particle of the power--except by the natural decay of our faculties--of enjoying even the slight foretaste that heaven has given us here." "solomon, solomon, solomon!" said his companion, "solomon was evidently a misanthrope either by nature or by satiety. he had seen every thing under the sun, and he pronounced every thing vanity--ay, lighter than vanity itself." "and he was right," replied the count; "every thing is lighter than vanity itself, when comparing the things of this world with the things of eternity. but you know," he added with a smile, "that we huguenots, as you call us, acknowledge no authority against the clear operation of reason, looking upon no man as perfect but one. if you were to tell me that it was right to put a friend in a dangerous place where he was sure to be killed for the purpose of marrying his widow, i should not a bit more believe that it was right, because david had done it; and even if you were to prove to me that through the whole writings of solomon there was not, as i believe there is, a continual comparison between earthly things and heavenly things, i should still say that you were in the wrong; the satiety that he felt being a just punishment upon him for the excesses he committed and the follies to which he gave way, and by no means a proof of his wisdom, any more than those follies and excesses themselves. long before we have exhausted the manifold pleasures which heaven has given us here by moderate and virtuous enjoyment--long before we have even discovered by experience the insufficiency of one half that we may properly enjoy, the span of man's life is finished; and at the gates of death he may think himself happy, if, while he has learnt to desire the more perfect enjoyment of heavenly things, he has not rendered himself unfit for that enjoyment, by having depraved his faculties to satiety by excess." "well, well," said the chevalier, seeing that his friend spoke earnestly, "i am afraid i must give up solomon, albert. if i remember right, the man had some hundreds of wives or so; and i am sure he might well cry out that all is vanity after that. i wonder they did not all fall upon him at once, and smother him under looking-glasses and bonbonnières." the count saw that his friend turned the matter into a joke, and, from his long acquaintance with him, he doubted not that he had been carrying on the discussion from first to last for sport. he was not angry or cross about it; but, of an eager and of an earnest disposition, he could not play with subjects of value, like an unconscious child tossing jewels to and fro, and he remained thoughtful for some time. while the chevalier continued to jest upon a thousand things, sometimes connecting one joke with another in rapid and long succession, sometimes pausing for a moment or two, and taking his next subject from any accidental circumstance in their ride or feature in the scene around, the count gradually resumed the conversation upon indifferent matters. having only in view, however, in any extracts that we may give from their conversation, either to forward the progress of their history or to display the peculiar character of each, we shall dwell no longer upon their words during the rest of the ride to a little village, some seventeen miles from the château, where they stayed a moment to water their horses. the count was looking down, watching the animals drink; but the chevalier, who was gazing at every thing in the place, suddenly exclaimed, "surely there cannot be two such ugly heads as that in france! the abbé pelisson, as i live! why, monsieur pelisson," he exclaimed, advancing till he was directly under the window from which the head of the abbé was protruded, "how have you stuck here by the way?" "alas! my good sir," replied the abbé, "the fright of the day before yesterday had such an effect upon my poor companion de st. helie, that he was quite unable to proceed. he is better this afternoon, and we shall set out in an hour, after he has taken something to refresh him and give him strength." "you will overtake us at our next lodging," said the chevalier. "oh no, we shall pass you far," replied the abbé. "we shall still have five hours' light, and as we travel by post, we may calculate upon going between five and six miles an hour." the count on his part made no comment, but merely nodded his head to pelisson; and when the chevalier's brief conversation was at an end, they rode on. the village which they had fixed upon for their resting-place that night was a large straggling open collection of houses, which had grown up on either side of the wide road, simply because it happened to be at a convenient distance from many other places. the buildings were scattered, and separated by large gardens or courts, and the inn itself was in fact the only respectable dwelling in the place, having been an old brick-built country seat in former days, with the walls that defended it from attack still standing round the court, the windows rattling and quivering with the wind and their antiquity, the rooms wide and lofty, and perhaps a little cheerless, and the kitchen, which formed the entrance, as black as the smoke of many generations could render it. the whole house was prepared to meet the count de morseiul, his coming having been announced by the servants sent on with the horses; and did ducks and fowls in various countries write the histories of their several races, that morning would have been memorable for the massacre that took place, and only be comparable to the day of st. bartholomew. but the culinary art was great in france then as it is now, and the cook, knowing that she had a difficult task to perform, exerted her utmost ingenuity to render tough poultry tender, and insipid viands savoury, for the distinguished guest that was to dine and sleep within those walls. though the preparations had been begun at an early hour, yet they were by no means concluded when the party arrived; and while jerome riquet plunged into the kitchen, and communicated to the cook a thousand secrets from the vast stores of his own mind, the count and his friend gazed forth from the window of a high, wide, square-shaped room over the wide prospect, which lay in gentle undulations beneath their eyes, with the road that they themselves had just passed taking, as it were, a standing leap over each of the little hills that it met with in its way. the day had been remarkably fine during the earlier portion thereof, but towards three o'clock clouds had come over, not indeed veiling the sky under a sheet of sombre grey, but fleeting lightly across the blue expanse, like the momentary cares of infancy, and passing away, after dropping a few large tears, which the joyful sun dried up again the moment after. as the count and his friend gazed forth, however, a heavier shower was seen sweeping over the prospect, the sky became quite covered, a grey mist--through which, however, a yellow gleam was seen, saying that the summer night was not far off,--advanced over wood and field, and hill and dale, and dashing down with all the impetuous and short-lived fury of an angry boy, the cloud poured forth its burden on the earth. while yet it was raging in its utmost wrath, the plain carriage of pelisson and his companions was seen rolling slowly onward towards the village, with coachman and lackey holding down the drenched head towards the storm, and shading the defenceless neck. all the windows of the vehicle were closed, in order, if possible, to keep out the wind and rain; but constructed as carriages were in those days, there was no great protection to be found in them from the breath or the drops of heaven; and, as the rumbling vehicle approached the village, the head of pelisson was seen suddenly thrust forth on the safest side, shouting something to the coachman, who seemed inclined to go through all the signs in the subjunctive mood of the verb, _not to hear_. after repeating three times his words, the abbé drew his head in again, and the carriage entered the village. "for a hundred louis," said the chevalier, "we have the company of messieurs pelisson and st. helie to-night. i beseech thee, albert, tell them they cannot lodge here, if it be but to see their rueful faces. look, look! there comes the vehicle, like the ark of noah, discovered by some fortunate chance on ararat, and set upon the wheels of pharaoh's chariot, fished out of the red sea. where could they pick up such an antediluvian conveyance? look, the ark stops! now, open the window, noah. out comes the door!" and, as he spoke, he had matter for more merriment, for the first person that issued forth was the fat black-faced priest in his greasy cassock. "the raven! the raven!" shouted the chevalier, laughing aloud, "what beast next, count? what beast next?" "hush, hush! louis," said his friend, in a lower tone; "they will hear you, and it is a pity to give pain." "true, oh most sapient albert," answered the chevalier, "and you shall see how courteous i can be. i will even take the raven by the claw--if you give me but time to order a basin and napkin in the adjoining room for the necessary ablution afterwards. oh, monsieur pelisson, enchanted to see you!" he continued, as the abbé entered the room; "monsieur de st. helie, this is indeed delightful; monsieur de beaumanoir, allow me to take you by the hand," he added, advancing towards the greasy priest. "you mistake me for some one else," said the priest, drawing slightly back, turning his shoulder, and speaking through his teeth like a muzzled bear: "i am the curé de guadrieul." "true, true, i forgot," went on the chevalier in the same wild way. "enchanted to see you, monsieur le curé de guadrieul! how much we are bound to laud and love this shower for having given us the felicity of your society." "i am sure i have no cause to laud it," said the priest, "for all the rain has come in at that crazy window, and run into my neck, besides drenching my soutane." the chevalier might have gone on for an hour, but the count came to the relief of the poor priest. he notified to pelisson and his companions, that the house and all that it contained had been engaged by him, but he pressed them to remain as his guests so cordially, that monsieur de st. helie, who--though he loved not huguenots, loved damp weather worse and savoury viands more--consented readily, warned by the rising odours from the kitchen, that he might certainly go farther and fare worse. chambers were found for the new guests, and, before an hour had passed, the whole party was seated at a groaning board, the plentiful supply on which made monsieur de st. helie open his eyes with well satisfied astonishment. we are not quite sure, indeed, that he did not feel a greater respect for protestantism than he had ever felt before; and so placable and mild had he evidently become, that the chevalier whispered, to his friend, while apparently speaking of something else, "for heaven's sake, morseiul, never suffer your people to give that man such a feast again! three such dinners would make him condemn his own soul, and turn heretic." pelisson was cheerful as usual, mild and gentle, a little plausible perhaps, and somewhat too courtier like, but still rendering himself most agreeable, both by his manner and by a sort of indescribable ease and grace in his conversation and language. behind the chair of the count, as a sort of nomenclator of the different dishes, had placed himself worthy maître jerome riquet. now, heaven knows that no person was naturally more simple in his tastes than albert of morseiul; but he had left, as usual, all the minor arrangements of his comfort to others, and certainly jerome riquet, as soon as he heard that two catholic abbés and a priest were about to dine at the table of his master, had not relaxed in any of his efforts to excel all excellence, determined to astound the ecclesiastics by the luxury and splendour of a country inn. had it produced nothing but parchment and jack-boots, jerome riquet would have discovered means of sending in entrée upon entrée in various different forms, and under various different names. but as it was, notice of the count's coming having been given the day before, and vast preparations made by the worthy aubergiste, the suppers of versailles were little more refined than that to which pelisson and his companions now sat down; while, according to jerome's directions, two servants stood behind every chair, and the count was graced by his own additional presence at the right elbow. riquet himself had not only taken up that position as the _pièce de résistance_, but as the _pièce de parade_, and, as was not uncustomary then, he mingled with what was going forward at table whenever it suited him. often by a happy exhortation upon some dish, or observation upon some wine, he contrived to turn the conversation in a different direction when it was proceeding in a way that did not please him. about half way through the meal, however, his attention seemed to be caught by something awkward in the position of the curé de guadrieul, and from time to time he turned a sort of anxious and inquiring glance towards him, wondering whether he sat so high in his chair from the natural conformation of short legs and a long body, or from some adventitious substance placed beneath his nether man. he made various movements to discover it; but, in the meantime, the conversation went on, and the count having been naturally drawn by the observation of some other person to pay pelisson a compliment upon his graceful style, the abbé replied, "oh, my style is nothing, monsieur le comte, though you are good enough to praise it; and besides, after all, it is but style. i had a brother once, poor fellow!" he added, "who might indeed have claimed your praise; for, in addition to good style, which he possessed in an infinitely higher degree than myself, he had a peculiar art of speaking briefly, which, heaven knows, i have not, and of leaving nothing unsaid that could be said upon the subject he treated. when he was only nineteen years of age he was admitted to the academy of castres; but, upon his admission, they made this singular and flattering condition with him, namely, that he should never speak upon any subject till every body else had spoken, 'for,' said the academicians, 'when he speaks first, he never leaves any body else any thing to say upon the subject, and when he speaks last he finds a thousand things to say that nobody else has said.' besides all this," he continued, "my brother had another great and inestimable advantage over me." "pray what was that?" demanded the count. "he was not hideous," replied pelisson. "oh, i do not think that such an advantage," said the chevalier. "it is the duty of a woman to be handsome; but i think men have a right to be ugly if they like." "so say i," replied pelisson; "but mademoiselle de scudery says that i abuse the privilege, and upon my word i think so, for just before i came from paris something happened which is worth telling. i was walking along," he continued, "quite soberly and thoughtfully down the rue de beauvoisis--you know that little street that leads up by the convent of st. mary--when coming opposite to a large house nearly at the corner, i was suddenly met by as beautiful a creature as ever i saw, with her soubrette by her side, and her loup in her hand, so that i could quite see her face. she was extremely well dressed, and, in fact, altogether fit to be the goddess of an idyl. however, as i did not know her, i was passing quietly on, when suddenly she stopped, took me by the hand, and said, in an earnest voice, 'do me the pleasure, sir, of accompanying me for one moment.' on my word, gentlemen, i did not know what was going to happen, but i was a great deal too gallant, of course, to refuse her; when, without another word, she led me to the door of the house, up the stairs, rang the bell on the first floor, and conducted me into an anteroom. a servant threw open another door for her; and then bringing me into a second room, where i found a gentleman of good mien with two sticks in his hand, she presented me to him with these singular words: '_line for line, sir, like that! remember, line for line, sir, like that!_' and then turning on her heel she walked away, leaving me petrified with astonishment. the gentleman in whose presence i stood seemed no less surprised for a moment than myself; but the instant after he burst into a violent fit of laughter, which made me a little angry. "'pray, sir, what is the meaning of all this?' i asked. 'do you not know that lady?' he rejoined. 'no, sir,' i replied, 'i neither know her nor you.' 'oh, as for me,' replied the gentleman, 'you have seen me more than once before, monsieur pelisson, though you do not know me. i am mignard, the painter; but as to the lady, i must either not give you the clue to her bringing you here, or not give you her name, which you like.' 'give me the clue; give me the clue,' replied i: 'the lady's name i will find out hereafter.' "'do not be offended then,' he said, 'but the truth is, i am painting for that lady a picture of the temptation in the wilderness. she came to see it this morning, and a violent dispute arose between us as to how i was to represent the devil; she contending that he was to be excessively ugly, and i, that though disfigured by bad passions, there was to be the beauty of an angel fallen. she left me a minute ago in a fit of playful pettishness, when lo and behold she returns almost instantly, bringing you in her hand, and saying, 'line for line, like that.' i leave you to draw your own conclusion." "i did draw my own conclusion," continued pelisson, "and got out of the way of monsieur mignard's brush as fast as possible, only saying, that i thought the lady very much in the wrong, for there could lie no great temptation under such an exterior as mine." his auditors laughed both at the story and at the simplicity with which it was told, and no one laughed more heartily than the black-faced priest. but while he was chuckling on his seat, maître jerome, who had glided round behind him, suddenly seized hold of two leathern strings that hung down over the edge of the chair, and exclaiming, "that must be very inconvenient to your reverence," he pulled out from underneath him, by a sudden jerk which nearly laid him at his length on the floor, the identical sheep-skin bag which had nearly been burnt to pieces in the wood. the priest started up with terror and dismay, exclaiming, "give it to me: give it to me, sirrah. how dare you take it from under me? it is the king's commission to messieurs pelisson and st. helie for putting down heresy in poitou." a sudden grave look and a dead silence succeeded this unexpected announcement; but while the priest snatched the packet from jerome riquet's profane hands, declaring that he had promised not to part with it for a moment, pelisson made his voice heard, saying, "you mistake, my good brother; such is not the object of the commission, as the king explained it to me. on the contrary, his majesty said that, when it was opened at poitiers, we would find that the whole object and scope of it was to heal the religious differences of the province in the mildest and most gentle manner possible." "i trust it may be found so, monsieur pelisson," replied the count gravely, turning his eyes from the abbé de st. helie, who said nothing. "i trust it may be found so;" and though it was evident that some damp was thrown upon his good spirits, he turned the conversation courteously and easily to other subjects: while jerome riquet, satisfied in regard to the nature of the packet, made a thousand apologies to the curé of guadrieul, loaded his plate with delicacies, and then returned to his master's elbow. after supper, for so the meal was then called, the party separated. the chevalier d'evran, for motives of his own, attached himself closely, for the time being, to the abbé de st. helie, and engaged him in a party at trick track; the young count strolled out in the evening light with pelisson, both carefully avoiding any religious subjects from the delicacy of their mutual position; the fat priest went to gossip with maître jerome, and smoke a pipe in the kitchen of the inn; and the serving men made love to the village girls, or caroled in the court-yard. thus ended the first day's journey of the count de morseiul towards poitiers. on the following morning he had taken his departure before the ecclesiastics had risen, leaving the servants, who were to follow with the horses, to make them fully aware that they had been his guests during their stay at the inn; and on the third day, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, he came under the high rocky banks which guard the entrance to the ancient city which was to be the end of his journey. chapter vi. the lady and her lovers. the city of poitiers is a beautiful old town, at least it is a town in which there is much to interest; the memories of many remote periods cross and intersect each other, like the arches of a gothic church, forming a fretwork over head of varied and solemn, though dim, associations. the roman, and the goth, and the frank, and the englishman, have all there left indelible traces of their footsteps; and each spot through the streets of that city, and through the neighbouring country, is shadowed or brightened by the recollection of great and extraordinary deeds in the past. there is something in it, also, unlike any other town in the world; the number and extent of its gardens, the distance between its various houses, would make it look more like an orchard than a town, did not, every here and there, rise up some striking edifice, some fine church, bearing in its windows the leopards, or the fleurs de lis, as the case may be; a townhouse, a broken citadel, or a roman amphitheatre in ruins, and all amidst rich green gardens, and grapes, and flowering shrubs. the count de morseiul and his train, after passing the gates of the city, which were then duly watched and warded, rode on to the house of the governor, which was, at that time, in the great square. it had probably been a roman building, of which part of the portico had been preserved, forming the end of one of the wings; for, during three or four centuries, a tall porch had remained there supported by three columns. though the principal gate was in the centre of the house, it was usual for the people of the town to enter by this porch; and such was the only purpose that it served. the whole aspect of the place has been altered long since; the governor's house has been changed into an inn, where i have slept on more than one occasion; and of the three columns nothing more remains but the name, which has descended to the hotel. it was in that time, however, a large brick building, with an immense arched gateway in the centre, under which goliath of gath himself might have passed on horseback with a feather in his cap. beyond this was the inner court, with the usual buildings around it; but upon a large and magnificent scale, and on the left, under the arch-way, rose a wide flight of stone steps, leading to the principal apartments above. throughout the whole town, and especially in the neighbourhood of the governor's house, there appeared, on the day of the count's arrival, a greater degree of bustle and activity than poitiers generally displays; and as he drew up his horse under the archway, to ascend the stairs, several peasant girls, after pausing to look at the cavaliers, passed on into the courts beyond, loaded with baskets full of flowers, and fruit, and green branches. as he had sent on a messenger the day before to announce his approach, the count de morseiul knew that he was expected; and it was evident, from the sudden rushing forth of all the servants, the rapid and long ringing of the great bell, which went up stairs, and a thousand other such signs, that orders had been given to treat him with especial distinction. while some of the masters of the stable took possession of his grooms and horse-boys, to show them to the place appointed for them, two other servants, in costumes which certainly did honour to the taste of m. le marquis auguste de hericourt, marshalled the count and the chevalier--followed by their respective valets and pages, without which men of their rank and fortune travelled not in that day--to the vestibule at the top of the staircase. a step beyond the door of the vestibule, which was also a step beyond what etiquette required, the governor of the province was already waiting to receive the count de morseiul. he was a frank, amiable, and kind-hearted old gentleman, as tall, and as thin, and as brown as a cypress tree; and grasping the count's hand, he welcomed him to poitiers as an old friend, and the son of an old friend, and likewise, perhaps we might say, as one whose high character and fame, as a soldier, he greatly and sincerely admired. while speaking to the count so eagerly that he saw nothing else, the governor felt a hand laid upon his arm, and, turning, beheld the chevalier, whom he welcomed also warmly, though in a peculiar tone of intimacy which he had not used towards the count de morseiul. "ah, d'evran," he said, "what brought you here, mad boy? i wanted not to see you; but i can tell you i shall put you in a garret, as you deserve, for the house is filled to the doors. this is our first grand reception, our little provincial _appartement_. all the nobility in the neighbourhood are flocking in, and, as we cannot lodge them all, we are obliged to begin our entertainment as early as possible, in order to suffer some of them to get home betimes. this must plead my apology, my dear count, for not giving you more spacious apartments yourself, and for not taking you at once to the duchess, who is all anxiety to see our hero. some refreshments shall be taken to you in your own apartment, to your little salon, where, perhaps, you will give a corner to this wild chevalier; for there is that young puppy hericourt, who only arrived last night, up to the elbows in the dining-room in all sort of finery and foolery." "but where is la belle clémence?" demanded the chevalier. "where is the beauty of beauties? will she not give me a quarter of an hour in her boudoir, think you, duke?" "get along with you," replied the duke: "clémence does not want to see you. go and refresh yourself with the count: by that time we shall have found a place to put you in; and when you have cast off your dusty apparel, ransacked the perfumers, sought out your best lace, and made yourself look as insupportably conceited as you used to do two years ago at versailles, it will be time for you to present yourself in our reception-room, and there you can see clémence, who, i dare say, will laugh at you to your heart's content." "so be it--so be it," replied the chevalier, with a well-satisfied air. "come, count, we must obey the governor: see if he do not make himself as despotic here as his majesty in paris. which is our way, monsieur de rouvré?" and with that appearance of indifference which has always been a current sort of affectation with men of the world, from the days of horace downwards, he followed the servants to the handsome apartments prepared for the count de morseiul, which certainly needed no apology. on the table the count found a packet of letters, which m. de rouvré had brought for him from paris. they contained nothing of any great importance, being principally from old military companions; but after the chevalier had taken some refreshments with him, and retired to the apartments which had been prepared in haste for him, the count took up the letters, and, carried forward by the memory of old times, went on reading, forgetful of the necessity of dressing himself for the approaching fête. he promised himself little or no pleasure indeed therein, for he expected to see few, if any, with whom he was acquainted; and his mind was too deeply occupied with important and even painful subjects, for him to think of mingling in lighter scenes with any very agreeable sensations. he did not remember then the necessity of preparation, till he had to call for lights, and heard the roll of carriage-wheels, and the clattering of horses. he then, however, hastened to repair his forgetfulness; but jerome was not as prompt and ready as usual, or else he was far more careful of his master's appearance. we will not, indeed, pause upon all the minute points of his toilet; but certainly, by the time that the valet would acknowledge that his master was fit to go down, he had given to the count's fine person every advantage that dress can bestow; and perhaps albert of morseiul did not look at all the worse for that air of high and thoughtful intelligence, which the deep interests whereon his mind was fixed, called up in a countenance, with the fine and noble features of which, that expression was so peculiarly suited. when, at length, he entered the little saloon that had been allotted to him, he found one of the officers of the governor waiting, with his own page, to conduct him to the reception-rooms; and, on asking if the chevalier was ready, he found that he had been there seeking him, and had gone down. it was a slight reproach for his tardiness, and the count hastened to follow. the way was not long, but the stairs had been left somewhat dark, as but little time had been given for preparation; and when the doors were opened for the young count, a blaze of light and a scene of magnificence burst upon his eyes, which he had not been prepared to see in that remote part of france. the rooms were brilliantly, though softly, lighted, and the principal blaze came from the great saloon at the farther end. rich hangings and decorations were not wanting, but as they were, of course, to be procured with greater difficulty than in paris, the places where many draperies would have hung, or where gilded scrolls, trophies, and other fanciful embellishments would have appeared, were filled up with much better taste from the storehouses of nature; and garlands, and green boughs, and the multitude of flowers which that part of the country produces, occupied every vacant space. a very excellent band of musicians, which the duke had brought with him from the capital, was posted in an elevated gallery of the great saloon; and the sweet notes of many popular melodies of the day came pouring down the long suite of apartments, softened, but not rendered indistinct by the distance. in the first chamber which the count entered were a great number of the inferior officers of the governor, in their dresses of ceremony, giving that ante-chamber an air of almost regal state; and through the midst of them was passing, at the moment, a party of the high nobles of the province, who had just arrived before the count came in. though not above one half of the invited had yet appeared, there were numerous groups in every part of the rooms; and at more than one of the tables, which, as customary in that age, were set out for play, the young count found persons whom he knew, and stopped to speak with them as he advanced. the duke and duchess de rouvré had taken their station in the great saloon; but in the smaller saloon immediately preceding it, albert de morseiul paused by one of the tables, to speak to the prince de marsillac, who was leaning against it; not playing, but turning his back with an air of indifference upon the scene beyond. "ah, monsieur de morseiul," he said, "it is an unexpected pleasure to see you here; i thought you were in flanders." "i was so fourteen days ago," replied the count; "but as little did i expect to see you." "oh, this is in some sort my native country," replied the prince; "and being here upon family affairs, i could not, of course, hesitate to come and grace the first entertainment of the good duke. there seems a promise of a goodly assembly; and, indeed, there are attractions enough, what between a new governor, a new governess, and clémence de marly." "and pray who is clémence de marly?" demanded the count. "i am a rustic, you see, and have never yet heard of her." "rustic, indeed!" said the prince; "why all the parisian world is mad about her. she is the most admired, the most adored, i may say, of all the stars or comets, or what not, that have appeared in my day; as beautiful as hebe, as graceful as the brightest of the graces, as proud as juno, about ten times colder than diana, and as witty as madame de cornuel. people began to fancy that the king himself was in love with her; only you know that now, under the domination l'amie de l'amie, those days of folly and scandal have gone by, and, on my word, the saucy beauty treated majesty no better than she does nobility. i myself heard her----" "but who is clémence de marly?" demanded the count again; "you have not satisfied me, marsillac. of what race or family is she? i know of no such name or family connected with the rouvrés." the prince replied in a lower tone, "she is an orphan, a foundling, an any thing you like. some say," he added in a whisper, "a natural child of the king's own; but others again, and this is the true story, say that she is a natural child of de rouvré's. there was a tale some time ago, you know, before he married, about him and the countess de ----, a person of very large fortune; and as this girl has wealth at command, and lives always with the rouvrés, there can be no doubt of the matter. madame de rouvré, having no family, wisely treats her as her child, and spoils her as if she were her grandchild. they used to say she was to be married to your friend the chevalier d'evran, whom i saw hanging at her elbow just now. hericourt vows that he will cut the throat of any man who marries her without his consent; but louvois is supposed to have laid out a match for her even nearer to his race than that; segnelai is not without hopes of carrying off the prize for some of his people; and they seem in these days to care no more for the bend sinister than if the adam and eve laws still prevailed, and we were all the children of nature together." "this is the fair lady that d'evran has been talking to me about," replied the count; "but he talked of her and her beauty so coolly, that i can scarcely suppose he is much in love." "just come round hither and look at him then," said marsillac, moving a little farther down, so as to give a fuller view into the other room. "you know d'evran's way of being in love; lying down upon a sofa and playing with a feather fan, while the lady stands at the distance of two yards from him, and he says more clever things to her in five minutes than any body else can say in an hour. there he is doing it even now." the count moved slowly into the place which marsillac had left for him, so as not to attract attention by flagrant examination of what was going on, and then raised his eyes towards the part of the great saloon at which the prince had been looking. the group that they lighted on was certainly in every respect a singular one. in the centre of it stood or rather leaned beside a high-backed chair, in an attitude of the most perfect grace that it is possible to conceive, which could not have been studied, for there was ease and nature in every line, a young lady, apparently of one or two and twenty years of age, whose beauty was both of a very exquisite and a very singular cast. it fully justified the description which had been given of it by the chevalier d'evran; the eyes were deep deep blue, but fringed with long and dark lashes, thickset but smooth, and sweeping in one even graceful fringe. the lips were, indeed, twin roses; the complexion delicately fair, and yet the face bearing in the cheek the warm hue of undiminished health. those lips, even when not speaking, were always a little, a very little, parted, showing the bright pearl-like teeth beneath; the brow was smooth and fair, and yet the eyebrow which marked the exact line of the forehead above the eyes, changed, by the slightest elevation or depression, the whole aspect of the countenance with every passing emotion. with every change, too, the other features harmonised, and there was a bright sparklingness about the face, even at that distance, which made it, to the eyes of the count, resemble a lovely landscape in an early summer morning, where every thing seems fresh life and brightness. the ear, too, which was slightly turned towards them, was most beautiful; and the form, though the dress of that day did not serve to expose it much, was seen swelling through the drapery in every line of exquisite beauty. the hand, the arm, the foot, the neck and throat, were all perfect as any sculptor could have desired to model; and the whole, with the grace of the attitude and the beauty of the expression, formed an object that one might have well wished to look at for long hours. on the right of the lady, precisely as the prince had described him, lay the chevalier d'evran, richly dressed, and, perhaps, affecting a little more indifference than he really felt. half kneeling, half sitting, at her feet, was the marquis de hericourt, saying nothing, but looking up in her face with an expression which plainly implied that he was marveling whether she or himself were the loveliest creature upon earth. on her left hand stood a gentleman whom the count instantly recognised as one of the highest and most distinguished nobles of the court of louis xiv., several years older than either the marquis or the chevalier, but still apparently as much if not more smitten than either. behind her, and round about her, in various attitudes, were half a dozen others, each striving to catch her attention for a single moment; but it was to the elder gentleman whom we have mentioned that she principally listened, except, indeed, when some witticism of the chevalier caused her to turn and smile upon him for a moment. amongst the rest of the little train behind her were two personages, for neither of whom the count de morseiul entertained any very great esteem: the chevalier de rohan, a ruined and dissipated scion of one of the first families in france, and a gentleman of the name of hatréoumont, whom the count had known while serving with the army in flanders, and who, though brave as a lion, bore such a character for restless and unprincipled scheming, that the count had soon reduced their communication to a mere passing bow. all the rest of those who surrounded her were distinguished as far as high station and wealth went, and many were marked for higher and better qualities; but, in general, she seemed to treat them all as mere slaves, sending one hither with a message, and another thither for something that she wanted, with an air of proud command, as if they were born but to obey her will. the group was, as we have said, an interesting and a curious one; but what was there in it that made the count de morseiul turn deadly pale? what was there in it that made his heart beat with feelings which he had never known before in gazing at any proud beauty of this world? what was it made him experience different sensations towards that lady, the first time that he beheld her, from those which he had ever felt towards others? was it the first time that he had ever beheld her? oh, no. there, though the features were somewhat changed by the passing of a few years, though the beauty of the girl had expanded into the beauty of the woman, though the form had acquired roundness and _contour_ without losing one line of grace, there, in that countenance and in that form, he beheld again the dream of his young imagination; there he saw her of whom he had thought so often, and with whose image he had sported in fancy, till the playfellow of his imagination had become the master of his feelings: and now that he did see her, he saw her in a situation and under circumstances that gave him pain. all the beauty of person indeed which he had so much admired was there; but all those charms of the heart and of the mind, which his fancy had read in the book of that beauty seemed now reversed, and he saw but a spoilt, proud, lovely girl, apparently as vain and frivolous as the rest of a vain and frivolous court. "you are silent long, de morseiul," said the prince de marsillac; "you are silent very long. you seem amongst the smitten, my good friend. what! shall we see the fair lands and châteaux of the first protestant gentleman in france laid at the feet of yon pretty dame? take my advice, morseiul; take the advice of an elder man than yourself. order your horses to be saddled early to-morrow morning, and get you back to your castle or to the army. even if she were to have you, morseiul, she would never suit you: her heart, man, is as cold as a russian winter, and as hard as the nether millstone, and never in this world will she love any other thing but her own pretty self." "i am not at all afraid of her," replied the count; "i have seen her before, and was only admiring the group around her." "seen her and forgotten her!" exclaimed marsillac, "so as not to remember her when i spoke of her! in the name of heaven let her not hear that. nay, tell it not at the court, if you would maintain your reputation for wit, wisdom, and good taste. but i suppose, in fact, you are as cold as she is. go and speak to her, morseiul; go and speak to her, for i see indeed you are quite safe." "not i, indeed," said the count; "i shall go and speak to the duke and his excellent lady: and i suppose in time shall have to go through all sorts of necessary formalities with la belle clémence; but till it is needful i have no inclination to increase any lady's vanity who seems to have so much of it already." thus saying, he turned away, only hearing the prince exclaim, "o mighty sybarite!" and moving with easy grace through the room, he advanced into the great saloon, cast his eyes round the whole extent, looking for the duke and duchess, and passing over la belle clémence and her party with a mere casual glance, as if he scarcely saw or noticed her. there was an immediate whisper in the little group itself; several of those around took upon them to tell her who he was, and all eyes followed him as with the same calm and graceful, but somewhat stately, steps he advanced to the spot where the duke and duchess were placed, and was warmly greeted by the latter as an old and valued friend. she made a place for him by her side, and leaning down from time to time by the good old lady's chair, he took the opportunity of each interval between the appearance of the new guests to address to her some little kindly and graceful observation, calling back her memory to old times, when she had fondled his boyhood, and, by mingling perhaps a little of the melancholy that adheres to the past with more cheerful subjects, rendered them thereby not the less pleasant. the duchess was well pleased with his attention, and for some time seemed inclined to enjoy it alone; but at length she said, "i must not keep you here, count, all night, or i shall have the duke jealous at sixty, which would never do. you must go and say sweet things, as in duty bound, to younger dames than i am. see, there is mademoiselle de fronsac, as pretty a creature as ever was seen, and our clémence. you know clémence, do you not?--but look, mademoiselle de fronsac, as if to give you a fair opportunity, has dropped her bracelet." the count advanced to pick up the bracelet for the young lady to whom his attention had been called; but his purpose was anticipated by a gentleman who stood near, and at the same moment the chevalier seeing his friend detached from the side of the duchess, crossed the saloon towards him, and took him by the arm. "come, albert," he said, "come! this is affectation. you must come and undergo the ordeal of those bright eyes. she has been speaking of you, and with deep interest, i assure you." the count smiled. "to mortify some culprit lover!" he said, "or give a pang to some young foolish heart. was it you, louis?" he asked in the same tone; "was it you she sought to teaze, by speaking with interest of another?" "you are wrong, albert," said the chevalier in a low voice, leading him gradually towards the spot, "you are wrong--i do not seek clémence de marly. my resolution has long been taken. i shall never marry--nor would any consideration upon earth lead her to marry me. i know that full well; but while i say so, i tell you too that you do her injustice. you must not judge of her at once." they were now within a few steps of the spot where clémence stood, and the count, who had been looking down while he advanced, listening to the low words of the chevalier, now raised his eyes as the other took a step forward to introduce him. to his surprise he saw the colour varying in the cheek of the lovely being before whom he stood, and a slight degree of flutter in her manner and appearance, which albert de morseiul could only account for by supposing that the scene in which they had last met, the robbers, and the wood, and the plunder of the carriage, had risen up before her eyes, and produced the agitation he saw in one, who was apparently so self-possessed in her usual demeanour. there upon her finger too, he saw the identical ring that he had saved for her from the robbers; and as he was in no way vain, he attributed the heightened colour to all those remembrances. but while he recalled that evening, his feelings towards clémence grew less severe--he felt there was a tie between them of some interest, he felt too that her demeanour then had been very different from that which it appeared to be now. though scarcely ten words had been spoken in the wood, those words had been all indicative of deep feelings and strong affections; there had been the signs of the heart, the clinging memories of love, the pure sensations of an unworldly spirit; and when he now gazed upon her, surrounded by flatterers and lovers, heartless herself, and seeming to take no delight but in sporting with the hearts of others, the ancient story of the two separate spirits in the same form seemed realised before him, and he knew not how to reconcile the opposite traits that he observed. all this passed through his mind in a moment. rapid thought, that, winging its way along the high road of time, can cover years in a single instant, had glanced over all that we have said, even while the words of introduction were hanging upon the tongue of the chevalier d'evran. the count bowed low but gravely, met the full glance of those lustrous eyes without the slightest change of countenance, and was about to have added some common place and formal compliment; but clémence de marly spoke first. "i sent the chevalier to you, monsieur de morseiul," she said with the same musical voice which he remembered so well, "because you seemed not to recognise me; and i wished to thank you for a service that you rendered long ago to a wild girl who might probably have been killed by a fiery horse that she was riding, had you not stopped it, and given her back the rein which she had lost. perhaps you have forgotten it, for i hear that great acts are so common to the count de morseiul that he is likely not to recollect what was to him a trifling event. to me, however, the service was important, and i have not forgotten either it or the person who rendered it." the eye of the chevalier d'evran was upon the count de morseiul while the lady spoke, and there was a sparkling brightness in it which his friend scarcely understood. at the same time, however, it was scarcely possible for human nature to hear such words from such lips totally unmoved. "your pardon, madam," replied the count, "i have never forgotten the adventure either; but i did not expect that you would have remembered so trifling a service. i recollected you the moment that i saw you; but did not of course venture to claim to be recognised on the merit of so insignificant an act." "i can answer for his not having forgotten it," said the chevalier d'evran, "for it is not more than five or six days ago, mademoiselle de marly, that he told me the whole circumstances, and if i would i could mention----" the colour rose slightly in the count de morseiul's cheek, as the chevalier d'evran gazed upon him with a malicious smile; but the latter, however, paused in his career, only adding, "if i would, i could mention all this grave count's comments upon that event;--but i suppose i must not." "nay, nay," exclaimed clémence, "i insist upon your telling us. you are our bondsman and slave. as you have vowed worship and true service, i command you, monsieur le chevalier, to tell the whole without reserve--to give us the secrets of the enemy's camp." "i hope, madam," said the count, willing to turn the conversation, and yet knowing very well that he might obviate his own purpose if he showed any anxiety to do so, "i hope, madam, that you do not class me amongst the enemy; if you do, i can assure you, you are very much mistaken." "that is what i wish to know, count," replied the lady, smiling; "it is for that very purpose of knowing whether you are of the friends or the enemies, that i put the chevalier here upon his honour as to your comments." "i suppose, madam," said the elder gentleman to whom she had been speaking during the former part of the evening, and who did not seem at all well pleased with the interruption occasioned by the count's presence, "i suppose, madam, if you put the chevalier upon his honour, he will be obliged to keep secret that which was intrusted to him in confidence." clémence turned and gazed at him for a moment in silence, and then said, "you are right, monsieur le duc de melcourt, though i did not think to hear you take part against me. i will find means to punish you, and to show you my power and authority in a way that perhaps you do not know. monsieur le chevalier, we shall excuse you for your contumacy, having the means of arriving at information by a higher power. monsieur de morseiul," she continued, raising her head with a look of queenly authority, "we command you to give us the information yourself; but that the ears of these worthy cavaliers and gentlemen who stand around may not be gratified by the intelligence, we will permit you to lead us to the dance which we see they are preparing for in the other room." she extended her hand towards him. he could not of course refuse to take it; and after giving one glance of gay and haughty irony at the group she left behind, clémence de marly moved forward towards the other room with albert of morseiul. with the same air of proud consciousness she passed through the whole of the first saloon; but the moment that she entered the second, which was comparatively vacant, as the dancers were gathering in the third, her manner entirely altered. the count felt her hand rest somewhat languidly in his; her carriage lost a great degree of its stately dignity; the look of coquettish pride passed away; and she said, "monsieur de morseiul, i need not tell you that my object in exercising, in this instance, that right of doing any thing that i like unquestioned which i have found it convenient to assume, is not to ask you any foolish question of what you may have said or thought concerning a person but little worthy of your thoughts at all. perhaps, indeed, you may have already guessed my object in thus forcing you, as it were, to dance with me against your will; but that does not render it the less necessary for me to take the first, perhaps the only opportunity i may have of thanking you deeply, sincerely, and truly, for the great service, and the kind, the manly, the chivalrous manner in which it was performed, that you rendered me on the night of monday last. i have my own particular reasons--and perhaps may have reasons also for many other things that appear strange--for not wishing that adventure to be mentioned any where. although i had with me two servants attached to the carriage, and also my old and faithful attendant whom you saw, there was no chance of my secret being betrayed by any one but by you. i was not sure that i had made my wishes plain when i left you, and was anxious about to-night; but i saw in a moment from your whole demeanour in entering the room that i was quite safe, and i may add my thanks for that, to my thanks for the service itself." "the service, lady, required no thanks," replied the count. "i do believe there is not a gentleman in france that would not have done the same for any woman upon earth." clémence shook her head with a grave--even a melancholy look, replying, "you estimate them too highly, count. we women have better opportunities of judging them; and i know that there are not three gentlemen in france, and perhaps six in europe, who would do any thing for any woman without some selfish, if not some base motive--unless his own gratification were consulted rather than her comfort." "nay, nay, nay; you are bitter, indeed," said the count. "on my word i believe that there is not one french gentleman who would not, as i have said, have done the same for any woman; and certainly when it was done for you, any little merit that it might have had otherwise, was quite lost." "hush, hush," said clémence, with a blush and a somewhat reproachful smile, "hush, hush, monsieur de morseiul; you forget that i am accustomed to hear such sweet speeches from morning till night, and know their right value. if you would prove to me that you really esteem me, do not take your tone from those empty coxcombs that flutter through such scenes as these. be to me, as far as we are brought into communication together, the same count de morseiul that i have heard you are to others, frank, straightforward, sincere." "indeed i will," replied the count, feeling the full influence of all his fanciful dreams in the past, reviving in the present; "but will you never be offended?" "there is little chance," she replied as they moved on, "that we should ever see enough of each other for me to be offended. you, i hear, avoid the court as far as possible. i am doomed to spend the greater part of my life there; and i fear there is very little chance of the duke, my guardian, going to the quiet shades of ruffigny, where first i had the pleasure of seeing you." "were you then at ruffigny when i first saw you?" demanded the count with some surprise. "yes," she answered; "but i was staying there with some of my own relations, who were on a visit to the duke. do you remember--i dare say you do not--do you remember meeting me some days after with a party on horseback?" "yes," he replied, "i have it all before my eyes even now." "and the lady who was upon my left hand?" she said. "quite well," replied the count; "was that your mother?" "alas, no," replied clémence, "that was my step-mother; my mother died three years before. but to return to what we were saying, i do not pretend to be less vain than other women, and therefore can scarcely answer for it, that, if you were to tell me harsh truths, i might not be offended; but i will tell you what, monsieur de morseiul, i would try--i would try as steadily as possible, not to be offended; and even if i were, i know my own mind sufficiently to say i would conquer it before the sun went down twice." "that is all that i could desire," replied the count; "and if you promise me to do so, i will always be sincere and straightforward with you." "what an opportunity that promise gives," replied the lady, "of asking you to be sincere at once, and tell me what were the comments of which the chevalier spoke. would that be ungenerous, monsieur de morseiul?" "i think it would," replied the count; "but i will pledge myself to one thing, that if you keep your promise towards me for one month, and take no offence at any thing i may say, i will tell you myself what those comments were without the slightest concealment whatsoever." the eyes of clémence de marly sparkled, as she answered, "you shall see;" but they had lingered so long that the dance was on the eve of commencing, and they were forced to hurry on into the other room. there the count found the eyes of the prince de marsillac wherever he turned; and there was a peculiar expression on his countenance--not precisely a smile, but yet approaching to it--with a slight touch of sarcastic bitterness on the lip, which was annoying. could the count have heard, however, the conversation that was going on amongst two or three of the group which he and clémence had quitted shortly before, he might have felt still more annoyed. there were three persons who took but a small part in that conversation, the chevalier, the young marquis de hericourt, and the duc de melcourt. it was one of those that stood behind who first spoke. "how long will she be?" he demanded. "in doing what?" said another. "in fixing the fetters," replied the first; "in making him one of the train." "not two whole days," said the second. "not two whole hours i say," added a third; "look at them now, how they stand in the middle chamber: depend upon it when the count comes back we shall all have to make him our bow, and welcome him as one of us." there was a little shrivelled old man who sat behind, and had, as yet, said nothing. "he will never be one of you, gentlemen," he now said, joining in, "he will never be one of you, for he sets out with a great advantage over you." "what is that?" demanded two or three voices at once. "why," replied the old man, "he is the first man under sixty i ever heard her even civil to in my life. there is monsieur le duc there; you know he's out of the question, because he's past the age." the duc de melcourt looked a little mortified, and said, "sir, you are mistaken; and at all events she never said any thing civil to you, though you are so much past the age." "i never asked her," replied the other. "but there is the chevalier d'evran," replied one of the younger men, "she has said three or four civil things to him this very night:--i heard her." "as much bitter as sweet in them," replied the old man; "but, at all events, she does not love him." "she loves me more than you know," said the chevalier quietly; and turning on his heel he went to join a gay party on the opposite side of the room, and perversely paid devoted attention to a fair lady whom he cared nothing about, and to whom the morals of any other court would have required him to pay no attentions but those of ordinary civility. chapter vii. the growth of love. the entertainment was kept up late; many of the guests scarcely departed before daylight; those who were invited to remain the night at the governor's house, retired when they thought fit; and every one acknowledged that this was the most splendid and the most agreeable fête that had been given in poitiers for many years. what were the feelings, however, of the count de morseiul as, at an hour certainly not later than one in the morning, he sought his own apartments? we must not afford those feelings much space; and we will only record what he saw before he left the hall, leaving the mind of the reader to supply the rest. on leading back clémence de marly to her seat, he had entered into conversation for a moment with some persons whom he knew; and when he turned towards her again, he saw not only that she was surrounded by almost all those who had been about her before, but that a number of young cavaliers freshly arrived had swelled her train, and that her demeanour was precisely the same as that which had, at his first entrance, removed her from the high place in which his imagination had enthroned her. every flattery seemed to be received as merely her due--every attention but as a tribute that she had a right to command. on some of her slaves she smiled more graciously than on others, but certainly was not without giving that encouragement to many which may be afforded by saucy harshness as much as by attention and condescension. she did not, indeed, dance frequently[ ]; that was a favour reserved for few; but the whole of the rest of her conduct displeased albert of morseiul; and he was grieved--very much grieved--to feel that it had power to give him pain. --------------------- [footnote : on many occasions each lady remained with her first partner during the whole of a ball night; but this was not invariable.] --------------------- under these circumstances, then, he resolved to witness it no more, and retired to his own apartments, determined, as far as possible, to conquer his own feelings while they were yet to be conquered, and to rule his heart so long as it was his own to rule. it was late on the following morning before any of the guests assembled at the breakfast-table; but when the whole had met, the party was so large, that but little pleasant conversation could take place with any one. the duke de rouvré paid the greatest attention to the count, and displayed a marked anxiety to distinguish and to please him. clémence de marly was entirely surrounded by her little train; and her pleasure in the homage she received seemed evident to albert of morseiul. the chevalier d'evran was somewhat thoughtful and grave, and more than once turned his eyes quickly from the face of clémence to that of his friend. in the hours that had lately passed, however, albert of morseiul had practised the lesson of commanding himself, which he had learnt long before, and he was now perfect at the task. he took no notice whatsoever of the fair girl's demeanour towards others; and though, as usual, calm and grave, he bore his part in the conversation with earnestness and attention; and it so happened that on more than one occasion something was said which called up the deep poetical fire of his nature, and led him briefly to pour forth in eloquent words the fine and high-toned feelings of his heart. all who were present knew his high character, and all were struck with his words and with his manner; so that once or twice, even when speaking casually on things of no very great importance, he was annoyed at finding a sudden deep silence spread round the table, and every one listening to what he said. if any thing could have repaid him for the annoyance, it might have been to see the lustrous eyes of clémence de marly fixed intent upon his countenance till they met his, and then dropped with a slight heightening of the colour, or turned sparkling to those round her, while her lips gave utterance to some gay jest, intended to cover the fit of eager attention in which she had been detected. alas, however, it must be owned, that to find those eyes so gazing upon him was no compensation, but rather was painful to albert of morseiul; for it only served to encourage feelings which he was determined to conquer. he would fain have had it otherwise; he would have felt nothing but calm indifference towards clémence de marly; and yet he knew, from what he had experienced on the preceding night, that he did not feel towards her entirely as he did towards other women. he thought, however, that by dedicating himself altogether to the great and important subject which had filled his thoughts when he came to poitiers, by giving up all his thoughts to that, and by making his stay as brief as possible, he should be enabled to avoid those things, both in the society of clémence herself, and in his own inmost thoughts, which might become dangerous to his peace. during the course of breakfast he revolved these things in his mind, and before it was over his thoughts were more strongly directed than ever to the affairs of the protestants, by the appearance of the abbés de st. helie and pelisson. he determined then to endeavour, as far as possible, in the very first instance, to discover from them what was the nature of the measures about to be pursued by the court of france towards the huguenots. in the next place, he purposed to inquire explicitly of the duc de rouvré what course of conduct he intended to follow towards the protestants of the province; and, having ascertained these facts, to consult with all the wisest and the best of the huguenot leaders, who might happen to be at poitiers, to determine with them the line of action to be followed, according to circumstances, and then to return at once to morseiul. he took an opportunity then, as soon as breakfast was over, of conversing with pelisson and st. helie, while the duke and duchess of rouvré were busy in receiving the adieus of some of their departing guests. with the frank sincerity of his native character he demanded, straightforwardly, of the two ecclesiastics, what was the course of conduct that their commission directed them to pursue; and pelisson had half replied, saying, that they had better open their commission at once before the duke de rouvré, and see the contents, when his more cunning and politic friend interrupted him, saying, that he had express orders not to open the packet till the meeting of the states, which was to take place in about eight days. this announcement differing, in some degree, from the account which he had given before, excited not unjustly the count's suspicion; and, knowing that he should have a more candid reply from the duke himself, he determined, in the next instance, to apply to him. he did so not long after, and the duke retired with him into his library. "my dear morseiul," he said, grasping the young count's hand, "you know that i myself am an advocate for the utmost toleration, that i am so far from entertaining any ill will towards my brethren who differ with me in some respects, that more than one of my relations have married huguenots. this is very well known at the court also. the king is fully aware of it, and i cannot but hope that my late appointment, as governor of this province, is a sign that, notwithstanding all the rumours lately afloat, his majesty intends to deal kindly and well with all denominations of his subjects. i must not conceal from you, however, that there are rumours in paris of a different kind; that there are not people wanting who declare that the king and his council are determined no longer to have any more than one religion in france, and that the most vigorous means are to be employed to carry this resolution into effect. nor shall i attempt to deny to you, that the coming of pelisson and st. helie here seems to me a very ominous and unpleasant occurrence. the presence of the first i should care little about, as he is frank, and i believe sincere, wishes well, and would always act kindly; but the other is a shrewd knave, a bigot, i believe, more by policy than by any great devotion for our holy church, malevolent, selfish, and cunning. they bear a commission which, it seems, is not to be owned till the meeting of the states. this looks like a purpose of controlling me in my own government, of putting a power over me whereof i am to stand in awe. now, should i find that such is the case, i shall undoubtedly beseech his majesty to permit me to retire from public life." "for heaven's sake do not do so just at present," said the count de morseiul. "we have need, my dear friend, of every moderate and enlightened man like yourself to keep the country quiet at a moment when affairs seem verging towards a terrible convulsion. you must remember, and i hope the king will remember, that the protestants are a great and important body in france; that there are two or three millions of us in this country; that we demand nothing but the calm and quiet exercise of our own religious opinions; but that, at the same time, there are many resolute and determined men amongst us, and many eager and fiery spirits, who may be urged into acts of resistance if they be opprest. all wise and sensible huguenots will endeavour, as far as may be, to seek peace and tranquillity; but suppose that resistance be once begun, in consequence of an attempt to debar us of the free exercise of the rights secured to us by the edict of nantes, can the king, or any body else, expect even his most loyal and best-intentioned protestant subjects to aid in keeping down and oppressing their brethren?" "not in oppressing, not in oppressing, my dear count," said the duke; "we must not attribute to our beloved sovereign even the thought of oppressing his subjects." "nothing but oppression could drive any of us to resistance," replied the count; "and it is not from the king at all that we anticipate oppression, but from those that surround him. need i point to louvois, to whom the king, by his own acknowledgment, yields his own better judgment?" the duke was silent, and his young friend proceeded: "if we have not to fear oppression, my lord, there is nothing to be feared throughout the land but if we have, i would fain know what shape that oppression is likely to take, both as a sincere member of what we call the reformed church, and as a loyal and devoted subject of the king. i would fain know, in order that, in my own neighbourhood, and amongst my own people, i may do all in my power to maintain peace and tranquillity; which i cannot at all answer for, if such proclamations be suddenly made amongst the people when they are unprepared, as were made five days ago in my town of morseiul, nearly creating a serious disturbance therein. the appearance of the military, also, did infinite harm, and the renewal of such scenes might quickly irritate a small body of the people into revolt; that small body would be joined by greater numbers, and the flame of civil war would spread throughout the country." "the proclamation," replied the duke, "was the king's, and of course it was necessary to make it instantly. with regard to the military, the intendant of the province demanded that a force should be sent to insure that the proclamation was made peacefully; so having no one else in whom i could at all trust, i sent young hericourt, with as small a force as possible, as i could not, of course, refuse the application." "of the intendant of the province, my dear duke," replied the count, "i shall say nothing, except that he is as opposite as possible in mind, in character, and manners to the duc de rouvré. a man of low origin, chosen from the _maîtres des requêtes_, as all these intendants are, cannot be supposed to view such questions in a grand and fine point of view. individual instances certainly may sometimes occur, but unfortunately they have not occurred in poitiers. our only safety is in the duc de rouvré; but i am most anxious, if possible, to act in concert with him in keeping tranquillity throughout the province." "i know you are, my dear young friend, i know you are," replied the duke; "wait, however, for a few days. i expect several other gentlemen in poitiers of your persuasion in religious matters. i will see and confer with you all as to what may be done, in the best spirit towards you, believe me. i have sent, or am sending, letters to every eminent man of the so-called reformed religion throughout this district, begging him to give me the aid of his advice. when we have others here, we can take counsel together, and act accordingly." the young count of course submitted, whatever were the private reasons which induced him to wish to quit poitiers as soon as possible. he felt that a long sojourn there might be dangerous to him; he saw that the feelings of his heart might trample under foot the resolutions of his judgment. but, obliged as he was to remain, he now took the wisest course that circumstances permitted him to pursue. he saw clémence de marly as little as possible; and that portion of time which courtesy compelled him to give up to her, was only yielded to her society upon those public occasions when he fancied that her demeanour to others was likely to counteract the effect of her fascinations upon himself. on these occasions he always appeared attentive, courteous, and desirous to please her. perhaps at times even, there shone through his demeanour those indications of deeper feelings and of a passion which might have become strong and overpowering, which were not likely to escape a woman's eye. but his general conduct was by no means that of a lover. he was never one of the train. he came and went, and spoke for a few moments in his usual calm and equable manner, but nothing more; and clémence de marly, it must be confessed, was somewhat piqued. it was not that she sought to display the count de morseiul to the world as one of the idle train of adorers that followed her, for she despised them, and esteemed him too much to wish him amongst them; but it was that she thought her beauty, and her graces, and her mind; ay! and the feeling and noble heart which she knew to exist in her own bosom--forgetting that she took pains to conceal it--might all have had a greater effect upon the count than they had apparently produced. she thought that she merited more than he seemed to be inclined to give; and there was something also in the little mysterious link of connexion between them, which had, in some degree, excited her imagination, and taught her to believe that the count would take a deeper interest in her than he appeared to do. there was a little disappointment, a little surprise, a good deal of mortification.--was there any thing more? we shall see! at present we have to deal with her conduct more than with her feelings, and that conduct, perhaps, was not such as was best calculated to win the count's regard. it is true, she paid less attention to the train that followed her; she treated the generality of them with almost undisguised contempt. it seemed as if her haughtiness towards them in general, increased; but then she was far more with the chevalier d'evran. she was seen walking in the gardens with him, with a single servant a step behind, and twice the count de morseiul entered the saloon, and found her sitting alone with him in eager conversation. he felt more and more each day that it was time for him to quit the city of poitiers, but still he was detained there by circumstances that he could not alter; and on the fifth day after his arrival, having passed a somewhat sleepless night, and feeling his brow hot and aching, he went down into the wide gardens of the house to enjoy the fresh morning air in comfort. it was an hour when those gardens seldom possessed a tenant, but at the turn of the first walk he met clémence de marly alone. she seemed to be returning from the farther part of the grounds, and had her eyes bent upon the earth, with a thoughtful--nay, with even a melancholy look. if they had not been so near when he saw her, he might, perhaps, have turned to avoid a meeting which he feared; but she was within a few steps, and raised her eyes instantly as she heard the sound of approaching feet. the colour came into her cheek as she saw him, but only slightly, and she acknowledged his salutation by a graceful inclination of the head. "you are an early riser, mademoiselle de marly," said the count, as she paused to speak with him. "i have always been so," she answered. "i love the soft breath of the morning air." "it is one of the great secrets of health and beauty," rejoined the count; but she shook her head with a smile, saying,-- "such are not my objects in early rising, monsieur de morseiul. health i scarcely value as it deserves, as i never knew the want of it; and beauty i value not at all.--it is true! whatever you may think." "still, beauty has its value," replied the count. "it is a grand and noble gift of god; but i acknowledge it ought to be the mint mark of the gold." "it is one of the most dangerous gifts of heaven," replied clémence, vehemently. "it is often one of the most burdensome! it is dangerous to ourselves, to our own hearts, to our own eternal happiness. it is burdensome in all its consequences. too much beauty to a woman is like overgrown wealth to a man:--with this sad difference, that he can always do good with his possession, and she can do none with hers. and now monsieur de morseiul thinks me a hypocrite; and, though he promised ever to be straightforward with me, he will not say so." "nay, indeed," replied the count, "i am far from thinking that there is aught of hypocrisy in what you say, lady. i may think such feelings and thoughts evanescent with you, but i believe you feel them at the time." clémence shook her head with a melancholy--almost a reproachful look. "they are not evanescent," she said earnestly. "they are constant, steadfast; have been for years." even while she spoke she turned to leave him; and he thought, as she quickly averted her head, that there was something like a tear in her bright eye. he could not resist; and he followed her rapidly, saying, "i hope i have not offended." "oh no!" she answered, turning to him, and letting him see without disguise that the tear was really there; "oh no! monsieur de morseiul! there was nothing said that could offend me. do you not know that, like a child putting its hand upon an instrument of music without knowing he will produce any sound, a mere casual word will often be spoken unconsciously, which, by some unseen mechanism in the breast of another, will awaken emotions which we never intended to call up? our little conversation roused the thoughts of many years in a moment, but there was nothing said that could in the least offend. you know we vain women, count," she added in a lighter mood, "are only offended with our lovers. it is on them that we pour forth our caprices. so, for heaven's sake, take care how you become my lover, for then i should certainly be offended with you every five minutes." "would it be so terrible to you, then, to see me your lover?" demanded the count in the same tone. "to be sure," she answered, half playfully, half seriously; "it would be a sad exchange, would it not? to give a friend for a slave. besides, i doubt not that you have loved a thousand times before. but tell me, count, do you think any one can love more than once?" "from my own experience i cannot speak," replied the count, "for i am a very stony-hearted person, but i should think that a man might." "and woman not!" she interrupted eagerly. "poor women! you hem us in on all sides!--but after all, perhaps, you are right," she added, after a moment's pause. "there is, there must be a difference between the love of man and the love of woman. hers is the first fresh brightness of the heart, which never can be known again; hers is the flower which, once broken off, is succeeded by no other; hers is the intense--the deep--the all engrossing, which, when once come and gone, leaves the exhausted heart without the power of feeling such things again. with man it is different: love has not that sway over him that it has over a woman. it is not with him the only thing, the end, the object of his being. it takes possession of him but as a part, and, therefore, may be known more than once, perhaps. but, with woman, that fire once kindled must be the funeral pile of her own heart. as the ancients fabled, flowers may spring up from the ashes, but as far as real love is concerned, after the first true affection, the heart is with the dead." she paused, and both were silent; for there was something in the words which she spoke which had a deeper effect upon albert of morseiul than he had imagined any thing could have produced. he struggled against himself, however, and then replied, "you took me up too quickly, lady. i was not going to say that it is impossible for woman to love twice. i do not know, i cannot judge; but i think it very possible that the ancients, to whom you have just alluded, may have intended to figure love under the image of the ph[oe]nix; and i do fully believe that many a woman may have fancied herself in love a dozen times before she was so really." "fancy herself in love!" exclaimed clémence, in a tone almost indignant. "fancy herself in love, monsieur de morseiul! i should think it less difficult to love twice than to fancy one's self in love at all, if one were not really so. we may perhaps fancy qualities in a person who does not truly possess them, and thus, adorned by our own imagination, may love him; but still it is not that we fancy we are in love, but are really in love with the creature of our fancy. however, i will talk about it no more. it is a thing that does not do to think of. i wonder if ever there was a man that was really worth loving." the count replied, but he could not get her to pursue the subject any farther; she studiously rambled away to other things; and, after speaking of some matters of minor import, darted back at once to the point at which the conversation had begun, as if the rest had been but a temporary dream, interpolated as it were between matters of more serious moment. the count had been endeavouring to bring her back to the subject of the heart's feelings; for though he felt that it was a dangerous one--a most dangerous one--one that might well lead to words that could never be recalled, yet he longed to gain some insight into that heart which he could not but think was filled with finer things than she suffered to appear. she would not listen, however, nor be led, and replied as if she had not in the slightest degree attended to what he had been saying,-- "no, monsieur de morseiul, no, it is neither for health's sake nor for beauty's that i rise early and seek the morning air. i will tell you why it is. in those early and solitary hours, and those hours alone, i can have some communion with my own heart--i can converse with the being within myself--i can hold conference, too, with what i never meet alone at other hours,--nature, and nature's god. the soft air of the morning has a voice only to be heard when crowds are far away. the leaves of the green trees have tongues, drowned in the idle gabble of a foolish multitude, but heard in the calm quiet of the early morning. the fields, the brooks, the birds, the insects, all have their language, if we will listen to it; but what are fields, and brooks, and birds, and trees, and the soft air, when i am surrounded by a tribe of things as empty as the sounding brass or tinkling cymbal? can i think of any thing more dignified than a padusoie when one baby man is whispering softly in my ear, 'the violet, mademoiselle, suits better with your complexion than with any other that the earth ever produced, which shows that complexion's exceeding brightness;' and another tells me that the blackness of my hair would make a raven blush, or that my eyes are fit to people the heaven with stars! but it is time that i should go to my task," she continued; "so adieu, monsieur de morseiul. if you walk on straight to the ramparts you will find the view beautiful, and the air fresh." thus saying, she turned and left him, and the hint not to follow was too plain to be misunderstood. he walked on then towards the ramparts with his arms crossed upon his chest, and his eyes bent upon the ground. he did not soliloquise, for his nature was not one of those which frequently give way to such weaknesses. it was his thoughts that spoke, and spoke plainly, though silently. "she is, indeed, lovely," he thought, "and she is, indeed, enchanting. if she would but give her heart way she is all that i pictured to myself, all that i dreamed of, though with a sad mixture of faults from which her original nature was free. but, alas! it is evident that she either does love or has loved another, and she herself confesses that she cannot love twice. perhaps she has spoken thus plainly as a warning, and if so, how much ought i to thank her for her frankness? besides, she is of another creed. i must dream upon this subject no more.--yet who can be the man that has won that young heart, and then perhaps thought it not worth the wearing? surely, surely it cannot be d'evran, and yet she evidently likes his society better than that of any one. she seeks him rather than otherwise. how can i tell what may have passed, what may be passing between them even now? yet she is evidently not at ease at heart, and he too told me but the other day that it was his determination never to marry. he--made for loving and being beloved!--he never marry!--it must be so; some quarrel has taken place between them, some breach which they think irremediable. how often is it when such things are the case that lovers will fancy that they are cool, and calm, and determined, and can live like friends and acquaintances, forgetting the warmer feelings that have once existed between them! yes, it must be so," he continued, as he pondered over all the different circumstances; "it must be so, and they will soon be reconciled. i will crush these foolish feelings in my heart; i will banish all weak remembrances; and to do so effectually, i will quit this place as soon as possible, leaving louis here, if he chooses to stay." thus musing, with a sad heart and bitterer feelings than he would even admit to himself, albert de morseiul walked on in the direction which clémence had pointed out, and passing through various long allies, planted in the taste of that day, arrived at a spot where some steps led up to the ramparts of the town, which commanded a beautiful view over the gently undulating country round poitiers, with more than one little river meandering through the fields around. leaning his arms on the low breastwork, he paused and gazed over a scene on which, at any other time, he might have looked with feelings of deep interest, and noted every little mound and tree, marking, as he was wont, each light and shadow, and following each turn of the clain or boivre. now, however, there was nothing but a vague vision of green and sunny things before his eyes, while the sight of the spirit was fixed intensely upon the deeper and darker things of his own heart. alas, alas, it must be said, he felt that he loved clémence de marly. notwithstanding all he had seen, notwithstanding all he had condemned, notwithstanding the fear that she could not make him happy even if he could obtain her, the belief that it would be impossible to win her, and the conviction that she loved another--alas, he felt, and felt bitterly, that at length, indeed, he loved, and loved with the whole energy of his nature. he reproached himself with weakness; he accused himself of the follies that he had so often condemned in others. was it her mere beauty that he loved? he asked himself. was it the mere perfection of form and colour that, in a few short years, would fleet with fleeting seasons, and give place to irremediable decay? was he, who had believed that loveliness could have no effect on him, was he caught by the painted glittering of a mere beautiful statue? no; he felt there was something more. he felt that she had given him sufficient insight into her original nature to show him that, though spoiled by after circumstances, she had been made by the hand of god that which he had always believed he could love, that bright being where the beautiful form, and the beautiful heart, and the beautiful mind were all attuned together in one grand and comprehensive harmony of nature. he felt that such was the case, and his sensations were only the bitterer that it should be so. he had thus paused and meditated some little time full of his own thoughts and nothing else, when a hand was suddenly laid upon his shoulder, and, turning round, he saw his friend the chevalier. "why, albert," he said, "in what melancholy guise are you here meditating? i met clémence upon the stairs just now, and she told me that i should find you here, tasting the morning air upon the ramparts. i expected to see you with your eye roving enchanted over this fine scene, looking as usual halfway between a mad poet and a mad painter; and lo! instead of that, here you are planted upon the rampart like a dragoon officer in garrison in a dull dutch town, with your heel beating melancholy time on the pavement, and your eyes profoundly cast into the town ditch. in the name of heaven, why did you not make clémence come on to enliven you?" the count smiled with a somewhat bitter smile. "it would have hardly been necessary, and hardly right to try," he replied; "but you miscalculate my power, d'evran. the lady left me with an intelligible hint, not only that she was not about to follow me, but that i was not to follow her." "what, saucy with you, too!" cried the chevalier laughing. "i did not think that she would have had determination enough for that." "nay, nay, you are mistaken, louis," replied the count; "not in the least saucy, as you term it, but quite mistress of herself, of course, to do as she pleased." "and yet, albert," said the chevalier, "and yet i do believe that there is not a man in france with whom she would so willingly have walked through these gardens as with yourself. nay, do not be foolish or blind, albert. i heard her saying to marsillac but yesterday, when he called to take his leave, that she had seen at poitiers more than she had ever seen in her life before, a courtier who was not a fool, a soldier who was not a libertine, and a man of nearly thirty who had some good feelings left." the count gazed steadfastly into the chevalier's face for a moment, as if he would have read into his very soul, and then replied, "come, louis, let us go back. if she meant me, she was pleased to be complimentary, and had probably quarrelled with her real lover, and knew that he was in hearing." the chevalier gave himself a turn round upon his heel, without reply, sang a bar or two of a gay air, at that time fashionable in paris, and then walked back to the governor's house with the count, who, from every thing he had seen and heard, but the more firmly determined to hasten his steps from poitiers as fast as possible. the hour of breakfast had not yet arrived when they entered the house, and the count turned to his own apartments, seeking to remain in solitude for a few minutes, not in order to indulge in thoughts and reflections which he felt to be unnerving, but to make a vigorous effort to recover all his composure, and pass the rest of the two or three days which he had to remain as if nothing had given any disturbance to the usual tranquil course of his feelings. in the ante-room, however, he found maître jerome, sitting watching the door, like a cat before the hole of a mouse; and the moment he entered jerome sprang up, saying,-- "oh, monseigneur, i have something to say to you, which may not be amiss to hear quickly. i have discovered the exact nature of the commission of monsieur de st. helie, which you wanted to know." the count beckoned him into the inner chamber, and demanded, looking at him sternly, "truth or falsehood, riquet? this is no joking matter!" "truth, upon my honour, sir," replied the man; "i would deceive you on no account whatsoever; and now, pray, sir, ask no questions, but let me tell my tale. it is truth, for once in my life, depend upon it. i can tell truth upon an occasion, sir, when it suits me." "but how am i to be sure of the accuracy of the information, if i ask you no questions, riquet?" said the count. "you may be quite sure of it, sir," replied the man, "though i must not tell you how i came at my tale. suppose, i say, only suppose that i had heard monsieur de st. helie repeating it word for word to monsieur pelisson, and the curé de guadrieul had confirmed it. i say, suppose it were so, and be sure that my authority is quite as good." "well, well," said his master, "go on." "well, then, sir," continued the servant, "of course, as a good catholic, i hope that you and all the other huguenots of france may be thoroughly roasted in good time; but, nevertheless, as you happen to be my master in this world, i am in duty bound to tell you what i heard. monsieur de st. helie, then, and monsieur pelisson are commanded to demand of the states of the province, effectual measures to be taken for the purpose of bringing into the bosom of the church, without delay, all the huguenots within their jurisdiction. in expressing this demand there are a great many soft words used, and much talk of gentleness and persuasion; but huguenots' children are to be brought over by all means; they are to be received to renounce their errors at seven years old. no more huguenots are to be permitted to keep schools. they are to be excluded from all public offices of any kind or character whatsoever. they are no longer to be allowed to call their religion _the reformed religion_----" "enough, enough," said the count, stopping him, "and more than enough. is this information sure?" "most sure, sir," replied the man, with a solemnity that admitted no doubt of his sincerity, "and the commission ended with the words, that these means were to be taken in preparation for those ulterior steps which the king was determined to employ." the count made no reply, but paced the room for two or three minutes in considerable agitation. "i wanted something to rouse me," he said, at length, "and i have it now, indeed! quick, riquet, call claude, and beyhours, and martin; tell them to saddle their horses, for i want them to carry some notes. when you have done that, come hither yourself, and say not a word of this affair to any one." when the man returned, he found three notes written and addressed to different protestant noblemen in the neighbourhood of poitiers, which his lord directed him to give to the servants named, to carry them to their several destinations; and then added, "now, riquet, i have a commission for you yourself; i will not give you a note, as that is useless. you would know the contents of it before you got to the end of your journey: of that i am well aware." "certainly, sir," replied the man, with his usual effrontery; "i always make a point of that, for then i can tell the purport on my arrival if i lose the note by the way." "i know it," replied the count, "but i believe you, notwithstanding, to be faithful and attached to me, and that you can be silent when it is necessary." "as the grave, sir," replied the man. "well, then," continued his master, "you know the château of the maille, at about two leagues' distance. go thither--ask to speak to monsieur de corvoie--tell him that i will be with him to-morrow about mid-day--that i have matters of the deepest importance to communicate to him--and that i have asked three other gentlemen of our own persuasion to meet me at his house to-morrow. say nothing more and nothing less." "sir, i will cut it on all sides exactly as you have commanded," replied the man, "and will bear you his message back immediately, if there should be any." these arrangements being made, the count descended to the breakfast table, where he found the chevalier seated by the side of clémence de marly. the count had resolved that during his stay he would notice the conduct of clémence as little as possible; that he would endeavour to look upon her as a being that could never be his; but, nevertheless, he could not now help noticing that though she and the chevalier might not converse much together, there was from time to time a few words passed between them in a low voice, evidently referring to things apart from the general conversation that was going on. he steeled his heart, though with agony to himself, and pleading the necessity of visiting some friends in the neighbourhood, mounted his horse immediately after breakfast, and was absent from poitiers the greater part of the day. chapter viii. the meeting and the chase. on the following morning, at breakfast, some sports and diversions were proposed; and the governor, who wished to afford amusement to all parties and to keep them in especial good humour till after the meeting of the states, proposed to set out almost immediately to force a stag in the neighbouring woods. there were several young noblemen present, swelling the train of la belle clémence, but she had shown herself somewhat grave, and less lively than usual; and after the proposal had been made and agreed to by almost all, she remarked the silence of the count de morseiul, saying, that she feared, from the profound silence that he kept, they were again to be deprived of the pleasure of monsieur de morseiul's society, as they had been on their ride of the day before. she spoke in rather a low voice, and, perhaps one might say, timidly, for her manner was very different from that which she usually assumed. "i fear, fair lady," replied the count, who felt that under any other circumstances her speech would have been a sore temptation, "i fear that i have engaged myself to visit a friend in the neighbourhood at noon to-day." "oh, we will take no excuse," cried the duc de rouvré; "indeed, count, you must send a messenger to tell your friend you cannot come. you who are famed for your skill in forest sports must positively be with us." the count, however, remained firm, saying, that he had appointed to meet his friend on business of importance to them both; and the duc de rouvré was of course silent. the young de hericourt, who had been absent for a day or two, and had only lately returned, gazed at clémence with a sort of ironical smile, as he saw upon her countenance a look of mortification which she could not or would not restrain; but the count saw it too, and was struck with it; for, though skilful by habit in reading the hearts of those with whom he was brought into contact, he could not perfectly satisfy himself with regard to the nature of that look and the feelings from which it sprung. he felt, too, that something more than a dry refusal was, perhaps, owing in mere courtesy to clémence for the wish she had expressed for his society, and he added,-- "i do assure you, mademoiselle de marly, that nothing could have been so great a temptation to me as the thought of accompanying you, and our gay friends here, to wake the woods with the sounds of horns and dogs, and i grieve very much that this appointment should have been made so unfortunately." "indeed," she exclaimed, brightening up, "if such be your feelings i will coax _ma reine_, as i always call our good duchess, to coax the governor, who never refuses any thing to her, though he refuses plenty of things to me, to delay the party for an hour. then we shall be some time getting to the woodside, you know; some time making all our preparations; and you shall come and join us whenever you have done. we will make noise enough to let you know where we are." of course there was now no refusing; the count promised to come if the important business in which he was about to be engaged was over in time, and clémence repaid him with a smile, such as she but rarely gave to any. it was now well nigh time for him to depart; and after shutting himself up for a few minutes alone, in order to think over the circumstances about to be discussed, he set out, with some servants, and rode rapidly to the château of the maille. he found several horses in the court yard, and judged rightly, from that sight, that the others had arrived before him. he found them all assembled in the large hall, and each greeted him gladly and kindly, looking with some eagerness for what he had to communicate. but the master of the château asked him to pause for a moment, adding,-- "i have a friend here who arrived last night, and whom you will all be glad to see. he will join us in a moment, as he is but writing a short despatch in another room." "who is he?" demanded the count; "is it monsieur de l'estang?" "oh no," replied the other. "he is a man of arms instead of a man of peace." but almost as he spoke the door opened, and the famous maréchal de schomberg entered the room. "i am happy to see you all, gentlemen," he said; "monsieur de morseiul, my good friend," he continued, shaking him warmly by the hand, "i am delighted to meet you. i have not seen you since we were fellow-soldiers together in very troublous times." "i hope, marshal," replied the count, "that at the present we may be fellow-pacificators instead of fellow-soldiers. we are all protestants, gentlemen, and as what i have lately learned affects us all, i thought it much the best plan, before i took any steps in consequence, in my own neighbourhood, to consult with you, and see whether we could not draw up such a remonstrance and plain statement of our case to the king, as to induce him to oppose the evil intentions of his ministers, and once more guarantee to us the full and entire enjoyment of those rights in which he promised us security on his accession to the throne, but which have been sadly encroached upon and curtailed within the last ten years." "they have, indeed," said the count de champclair; "but i trust, monsieur de morseiul, you have nothing to tell us which may lead us to believe that greater encroachments still are intended." marshal schomberg shook his head with a melancholy smile; but he did not interrupt the count de morseiul, who proceeded to relate what he knew of the mission of pelisson and st. helie, and the further information which he had gained in regard to their commission on the preceding day. the first burst of anger and indignation was greater than he expected, and nothing was talked of for a few minutes but active resistance to the powers of the crown, of reviving the days of the league or those of louis xiii., and defending their rights and privileges to the last. marshal schomberg, however eminently distinguished for his attachment to his religion, maintained a profound silence during the whole of the first ebullitions; and at length monsieur de champclair remarked, "the marshal does not seem to think well of our purposes. what would he have us do, thus brought to bay?" "my good friends," replied schomberg, with his slight foreign accent, "i think only that you do not altogether consider how times have changed since the days of louis xiii. even then the reformed church of france was not successful in resisting the king, and now resistance, unless men were driven to it by despair, would be madness. forced as i am to be much about the court, i have seen and known these matters in their progress more intimately than any of you, and can but believe that our sole hope will rest in showing the king the utmost submission, while at the same time we represent to him the grievances that we suffer." "but does he not know those grievances already?" exclaimed one of the other gentlemen; "are they not his own act and deed?" "they are, it is true," replied schomberg, mildly, "but he does not know one half of the consequences which his own acts produce. let me remind you that it is the people who surround the king that urge him to these acts, and it is consequently their greatest interest to prevent him from knowing the evil consequences thereof. not one half of the severities that are exercised in the provinces--indeed i may say, no severities at all--are exercised towards the protestants in the immediate neighbourhood of paris, versailles, or fontainbleau. they take especial care that the eyes of majesty, and the ear of authority, shall not be opened to the cries, groans, or sufferings of an injured people. louis the great is utterly ignorant that the protestants have suffered, or are likely to suffer, under any of his acts. the king has been always, more or less, a bigot, and his mother was the same: colbert is dead, who stood between us and our enemies. his son is a mere boy, unable if not unwilling to defend us. the fury, louvois, and his old jesuitical father, are, in fact, the only ministers that remain, and they have been our enemies from the beginning. but they have now stronger motives to persecute us. the king must be ruled by some passion; he is tired of the domination of louvois, and that minister seeks now for some new hold upon his master. he supported his tottering power for many years by the influence of madame de montespan. madame de montespan has fallen; and a new reign has commenced under a woman, who is the enemy of that great bad man; but she also is a bigot, and the minister clearly sees that if he would remain a day in power he must link madame scarron to himself in some general plan which will identify their interests together. she sees, and he sees, that whatever be that plan it must comprise something which affords occupation to the bigoted zeal of the king. the jesuits see that too, and are very willing to furnish such occupation; but the king, who thinks himself a new st. george, is tired of persecuting jansenism. that dragon is too small and too tenacious of life to afford a subject of interest to the king any longer; when he thinks it is quite dead, it revives again, and crawls feebly here and there, so that the saint is weary of killing a creature that seems immortal. under these circumstances they have turned his eyes and thoughts towards the protestants; and what have they proposed to him which might not seduce a glory-loving monarch like himself? they have promised him that he shall effect what none of his ancestors could ever accomplish, by completely triumphing over subjects who have shown that they can resist powerfully when oppressed. they have promised him this glory as an absolute monarch. they have promised him almost apostolic glory in converting people whom he believes to be heretics. they have promised him the establishment of one, and one only religion in france; and they have promised him that, by so doing, he will inflict a bitter wound on those protestant princes with whom he has been so long contending. such are the motives by which they lead on the mind of louis to severe acts against us; but there is yet one other motive; and to that i will particularly call your attention, as it ought, i think, greatly to affect our conduct. they have misrepresented the followers of the reformed religion in france as a turbulent, rebellious, obstinate race of men, who adhere to their own creed more out of opposition to the sovereign than from any real attachment to the religion of their forefathers. by long and artful reasonings they have persuaded the king that such is the case. he himself told me long ago, that individually there are a great many good men, and brave men, and loyal men amongst us; but that as a body we are the most stiff-necked and rebellious race he ever read of in history." "have we not been driven to rebellion?" demanded monsieur de champclair, "have we not been driven to resistance? have we ever taken arms but in our own defence?" "true," replied schomberg, "quite true. but kings unfortunately see through the eyes of others. the causes of our resistance are hidden from him scrupulously. the resistance itself is urged upon him vehemently." "then it is absolutely necessary," said the count de morseiul, "that he should be made clearly and distinctly to know how much we have been aggrieved, how peaceably and loyally we are really disposed, and how little but the bitterest fruits can ever be reaped from the seeds that are now sowing." "precisely," replied schomberg. "that is precisely what i should propose to do. let us present a humble remonstrance to the king, making a true statement of our case. let us make him aware of the evils that have accrued, of the evils that still must accrue from persecution; but in the language of the deepest loyalty and most submissive obedience. let us open his eyes, in fact, to the real state of the case. this is our only hope, for in resistance i fear there is none. the protestant people are apathetic, they are not united--and they are not sufficiently numerous, even if they were united, to contend successfully with the forces of a great empire in a time of external peace." "i do not know that," exclaimed monsieur de champclair. but he had the great majority of the persons who were then present against him, and, in a desultory conversation that followed, those who had most vehemently advocated resistance but a few minutes before, who had been all fire and fury, and talked loudly of sacrificing their lives a thousand times rather than sacrificing their religion, viewed the matter in a very different light now when the first eagerness was over. one declared that not an able-bodied man in forty would take the field in defence of his religion; another said, that they had surely had warning enough at la rochelle; another spoke, with a shudder, of alaix. in short, albert de morseiul had an epitome in that small meeting of the doubts, fears, and hesitations; the apathy, the weakness, the renitency which would affect the great body of protestants, if called upon suddenly to act together. he was forced, then, to content himself with pressing strongly upon the attention of all present the necessity of adopting instantly the suggestion of marshal schomberg, and of drawing up a representation to the king, to be signed as rapidly as possible by the chief protestants throughout the kingdom, and transmitted to schomberg, who was even then on his way towards paris. vain discussions next ensued in regard to the tone of the remonstrance, and the terms that were to be employed; and those who were inclined to be more bold in words than in deeds, proposed such expressions as would have entirely obviated the result sought to be obtained, giving the petition the character of a threatening and mutinous manifesto. though this effect was self-evident, yet the terms had nearly been adopted by the majority of those present, and most likely would have been so, had not a fortunate suggestion struck the mind of albert of morseiul. "my good friends," he said, "there is one thing which we have forgotten to consider. we are all of us soldiers and country gentlemen, and many of us have, perhaps, a certain tincture of belles lettres; but a petition from the whole body of protestants should be drawn up by some person eminent alike for learning, wisdom, and piety, whose very name may be a recommendation to that which he produces. what say you, then, to request monsieur claude de l'estang to draw up the petition for our whole body. i intend to leave poitiers to-morrow, and will communicate your desire to him. the paper shall be sent to you all as soon as it is drawn up, and nothing will remain but to place our hands to it, and lay it before the king." the proposal was received with joy by all; for even those who were pressing their own plans obstinately were at heart glad to be delivered from the responsibility; and this having been decided, the meeting broke up. the count de morseiul lingered for a few minutes after the rest were gone to speak with marshal schomberg, who asked, "so you are not going to wait for the opening of the states?" "i see no use of so doing," replied the count; "now that i know the measures which the king's commission dictates, i have nothing farther to detain me. but tell me, marshal, do you really believe that louvois and his abettors will urge the king seriously to such steps?" "to a thousand others," replied schomberg; "to a thousand harsher, and a thousand more dangerous measures. i can tell you that it is already determined to prohibit for the future the marriages of catholics and protestants. that, indeed, were no great evil, and i think rather favourable to us, than not; but it is only one out of many encroachments on the liberty of conscience, and, depend upon it, our sole hope is in opening the king's eyes to our real character as a body, and to the awful evils likely to ensue from oppressing us." "but should we be unable so to do," demanded the count, "what remains for us then, my noble friend? must we calmly submit to increasing persecution? must we renounce our faith? must we resist and die?" "if by our death," replied schomberg firmly, but sadly, "we could seal for those who come after us, even with our hearts' blood, a covenant of safety--if by our fall in defence of our religion we could cement, as with the blood of martyrs, the edifice of the reformed church--if there were even a hope that our destruction could purchase immunity to our brethren or our children, i should say that there is but one course before us. but, alas! my good young friend, do you not know, as well as i do, that resistance is hopeless in itself, and must be ruinous in its consequences; that it must bring torture, persecution, misery, upon the women, the children, the helpless; that it must crush out the last spark of toleration that is likely to be left; and that the ultimate ruin of our church in france will but be hastened thereby? no one deserving the title of man, gentleman, or christian, will abandon his religion under persecution; but there is another course to be taken, and it i shall take, if these acts against us be not stayed. i will quit the land--i will make myself a home elsewhere. my faith shall be my country, as my sword has been my inheritance! would you take my advice, my dear count, you would follow my example, and forming your determination before hand, be prepared to act when necessary." the count shook his head. "i thank you," he said, "i thank you, and will give what you propose the fullest consideration; but it is a resolution that cannot be taken at once--at least by such as feel as i do. oh! my good friend, remember how many ties i have to break asunder before i can act as you propose. there are all the sweet memories of youth, the clinging household dreams of infancy, the sunny home of my first days, when life's pilgrimage took its commencement in a garden of flowers. i must quit all these,--every dear thing to which the remembrance of my brightest days is attached--and spend the autumn and the winter of my latter life in scenes where there is not even a memory of its spring. i must quit all these, schomberg. i must quit more. i must quit the faithful people that have surrounded me from my boyhood--who have grown up with me like brothers--who have watched over me like fathers--who have loved me with that hereditary love that none but lord and vassal can feel towards each other--who would lay down their lives to serve me, and who look to me for direction, protection, and support. i must quit them, i must leave them a prey to those who would tear and destroy them. i must leave, too, the grave of my father, the tombs of my ancestors, round which the associations of the past have wreathed a chain of glorious memories that should bind me not to abandon them. i, too, should have my grave there, schomberg; i, too, should take my place amongst the many who have served their country, and left a name without a stain. when i have sought the battle field, have i not thought of them, and burned to accomplish deeds like theirs? when i have been tempted to do any thing that is wrong, have i not thought upon their pure renown, and cast the temptation from me like a slimy worm? and should i leave those tombs now? were it not better to do as they would have done, to hang out my banner from the walls against oppression, and when the sword which they have transmitted to me can defend my right no longer, perish on the spot which is hallowed by the possession of their ashes?" "no, my friend, no," replied schomberg, "it were not better, for neither could you so best do honour to their name, neither would your death and sacrifice avail aught to the great cause of religious liberty. but there is more to be considered, albert of morseiul; you might not gain the fate you sought for. the perverse bullet and the unwilling steel often, too often, will not do their fatal mission upon him that courts them. how often do we see that the timid, the cowardly, or the man who has a thousand sweet inducements to seek long life, meets death in the first field he enters, while he who in despair or rage walks up to the flashing cannon's mouth escapes as by a miracle? think; morseiul, if such were to be your case, what would be the result: first to linger in imprisonment, next to see the exterminating sword of persecution busy amongst those that you had led on into revolt, to know that their hearths were made desolate, their children orphans, their patrimony given to others, their wives and daughters delivered to the brutal insolence of victorious soldiers; and then, knowing all this, to end your own days as a common criminal, stretched on a scaffold on the torturing wheel, amidst the shouts and derisions of superstitious bigots, with the fraudulent voice of monkish hypocrisy pouring into your dying ear insults to your religion and to your god. think of all this! and think also, that, at that last moment, you would know that you yourself had brought it all to pass, without the chance of effecting one single benefit to yourself or others." the count put his hand before his eyes, but made no reply; and then, wringing marshal schomberg's hand, he mounted his horse and rode slowly away. for a considerable distance he went on towards poitiers at the same slow pace, filled with dark and gloomy thoughts, and with nothing but despair on every side. he felt that the words of marshal schomberg were true to their fullest extent, and a sort of presage of the coming events seemed to gather slowly upon his heart, like dark clouds upon the verge of the sky. his only hope reduced itself to the same narrow bounds which had long contained those of schomberg; the result, namely, of the proposed petition to the king. but there were one or two words which schomberg had dropped accidentally, and which it would seem, from what we have told before, ought not to have produced such painful and bitter feelings in the breast of albert of morseiul as they did produce. they were those words which referred to the prohibition about to be decreed against the marriages of protestants and catholics. what was it to him, he asked himself, whether catholics and protestants might or might not marry? was not his determination taken with regard to the only person whom he could have ever loved? and did it matter that another barrier was placed between them, when there were barriers impassable before. but still he felt the announcement deeply and painfully; reason had no power to check and overcome those sensations; and oppressed and overloaded as his mind then was, it wandered vaguely from misery to misery, and seemed to take a pleasure in calling up every thing that could increase its own pain and anguish. when he had thus ridden along for somewhat more than two miles, he suddenly heard a horn winded lowly in the distance, and, as he fancied, the cry of dogs. it called to his mind his promise to clémence de marly. he felt that his frame of mind was in strange contrast with a gay hunting scene. yet he had promised to go as soon as ever he was free, and he was not a man to break his promise, even when it was a light one. he turned his horse's head, then, in the direction of the spot from which the sound seemed to proceed, still going on slowly and gloomily. a moment after he heard the sounds again. the memory of happy days, and of his old forest sports, came upon him, and he made a strong effort against the darker spirit in his bosom. "i will drive these gloomy thoughts from me," he said, "if it be but for an hour; i will yet know one bright moment more. for this day i will be a boy again, and to-morrow i will cast all behind me, and plunge into the stream of care and strife!" as he thus thought he touched his horse with the spur; the gallant beast bounded off like lightning; the cry of the hounds, the sound of the horns came nearer and nearer; and in a few moments more the count came suddenly upon a relay of horses and dogs, established upon the side of a hill, as was then customary, for the purpose of giving fresh vigour to the chase when it had been abated by weariness. "is the deer expected to pass here?" demanded the count, speaking to one of the _veneurs_, and judging instantly, by his own practised eye, that it would take another direction. "the young marquis hericourt thought so," replied the man, "but he knows nothing about it." at that moment the gallant stag itself was seen, at the distance of about half a mile, bounding along in the upland towards a point directly opposite; and the count knowing that he must come upon the hunt at the turn of the valley, spurred on at all speed, followed by his attendants. in a few minutes more a few of the huntsmen were seen; and, in another, clémence de marly was before his eyes. she was glowing with exercise and eagerness, her eyes bright as stars, her clustering hair floating back from her face, her whole aspect like that which she bore, when first he saw her in all the brightness of her youth and beauty. the chevalier was seen at a distance amusing himself by teasing, almost into madness, a fiery horse, that was eager to bound forward before all the rest; the train of suitors, and of flatterers, that generally followed her, was scattered about the field; and, in a moment--with his hat off, his dark hair curling round his brow, his features lighted up with a smile which was strangely mingled with the strong lines of deep emotions just passed, like the sun scattering the remnants of a thunder cloud; with his chest thrown forward, his head bending to a graceful salute, and his person erect as a column--albert of morseiul was by the side of clémence de marly and galloping on with her, seeming but of one piece with the noble animal that bore him. the eyes of almost all those that followed, or were around, were turned to those two; and certainly almost every thing else in the gay and splendid scene through which they moved seemed to go out extinguished by the comparison. in the whole air, and aspect, and figure of each, there was that clear, concentrated expression of grace, dignity, and power, that seems almost immortal; so that the duke de rouvré and his train, the gay nobles, the dogs, the huntsmen, and the whole array, were for an instant forgotten. men forgot even themselves for a time to wonder and admire. unconscious that such was the case, albert de morseiul and clémence de marly rode on; and he--with his fate, as he conceived, sealed, and his determination taken--cast off all cold and chilling restraint, and appeared what he really was--nay, more, appeared what he was when eager, animated, and with all the fine qualities of his heart and mind welling over in a moment of excitement. all the tales that she had heard of him as he appeared in the battle field, or in the moment of difficulty and danger, were now realised to the mind of clémence de marly, and while she wondered and enjoyed, she felt that for the first time in her life, she had met with one to whom her own high heart and spirit must yield. her eyes sunk beneath the eagle gaze of his; her hand held the rein more timidly; new feelings came upon her, doubts of her own sufficiency, of her own courage, of her own strength, of her own beauty, of her own worthiness: she felt that she had admired and esteemed albert of morseiul before, but she felt that there was something more strange, more potent in her bosom now. we must pause on no other scene of that hunting. throughout the whole of that afternoon the count gave way to the same spirit. whether alone with clémence, or surrounded by others, the high and powerful mind broke forth with fearless energy. a bright and poetical imagination; a clear and cultivated understanding; a decision of character and of tone, founded on the consciousness of rectitude and of great powers; a wit as graceful as it was keen, aided by the advantages of striking beauty, and a deep-toned voice of striking melody, left every one so far behind, so out of all comparison, that even the vainest there felt it themselves, and felt it with mortification and anger. the hunting was over, and by chance or by design albert of morseiul was placed next to clémence de marly at supper. the duke de rouvré had noticed the brightening change which had come over his young friend, and attributing it to a wrong cause, he said good-humouredly,-- "monsieur de morseiul, happy am i to see you shake off your sadness. you are so much more cheerful, that i doubt not you have heard good news to-day." this was spoken at some distance across the table, and every one heard it; but the young count replied calmly, "alas! no, my lord; i was determined to have one more day of happiness, and therefore cast away every other thought but the pleasure of the society by which i was surrounded. i gave way to that pleasure altogether this day, because i am sorry to say, i must quit your hospitable roof tomorrow, in order to return to morseiul, fearing that i shall not be able to come to poitiers again, while i remain in this part of france." clémence de marly turned very pale, but then again the blood rushed powerfully over her face. but the duke de rouvré, by replying immediately, called attention away from her. "nay, nay, monsieur le comte," he said, "you promised me to stay for several days, longer, and i cannot part with an old friend, and the son of an old friend, so soon." "i said, my lord, that i would stay if it were possible," replied the count. "but i can assure you that it is not possible; various important causes of the greatest consequence not only to me, but to the state, call me imperatively away, when, indeed, there are but too many inducements to stay here." "i know one of the causes," said the duke; "i hear you have taken measures for suppressing that daring band of plunderers--_night hawks_, as they call themselves, who have for some time hung about that part of the country, and who got possession of poor monsieur pelisson and monsieur st. helie, as they were telling me the other day; but you might trust that to your seneschals, count." "indeed i cannot, my lord duke," replied the count; "that affair has more branches than you know of--or, perhaps i should say, more roots to be eradicated. besides there are many other things." "well, well," said the duke, "if it must be so, it must. however, as soon as the states have ceased to hold their meetings, i shall come for a little repose to ruffigny, and then, if you have not been fully successful, i will do my best to help you; but we are not going to lose our friend louis here too. chevalier, do you go back with your friend?" "not to hunt robbers," replied the chevalier with a smile; "i would almost as soon hunt rats with the dauphin. besides, he has never asked me; this is the first intelligence i had of his intention." "i only formed it this morning," replied the count. "but you have promised me a whole month, louis, and you shall give it me when you find it most pleasant to yourself." "well, i shall linger on here for a few days," replied the chevalier, "if the governor will feed and lodge me; and then, when i have seen all the bright things that are done by the states, i will come and join you at morseiul." thus ended the discussion which followed the young count's announcement. no further conversation took place between him and clémence, who devoted her whole attention, during the rest of the evening, either to the chevalier, the duc de melcourt, or the young marquis de hericourt. the hour for albert de morseiul's departure was announced as immediately after breakfast on the following day; but clémence de marly did not appear that morning at the table, for the first time since his arrival at poitiers. when the hour was come, and his horses were prepared, he took leave of the rest of the party, and with many painful emotions at his heart quitted the saloon, the duke and the chevalier, with one or two others, accompanying him to the top of the stairs. at that moment, however, as he was about to descend, clémence appeared as if going into the saloon. she was somewhat paler than usual; but her manner was the same as ever. "so, monsieur de morseiul," she said, "you are going! i wish you a happy journey;" and thus treating him like a mere common acquaintance, she bowed her head and entered the saloon. chapter ix. the discovery. two days after the departure of the count de morseiul, the states of the province were opened in form; but neither with the states nor with their proceedings shall we have any thing to do, and will merely notice an event which occurred on the eve of their meeting. on the day preceding, a vast number of gentlemen from all parts of the province had flocked into the city. the house of the governor was again filled to the very doors, and though the formal opening of the states was deferred till the succeeding day, they nominally commenced their assembly on the day after the count's departure. the colleagues, pelisson and st. helie, had separated after their arrival in poitiers, the former having gone to the bishop's palace, where he busied himself in his usual occupation at this time, namely, in diffusing large sums of money through the province by different channels, for the purpose of bribing all persons who might be found weak or wavering in the protestant faith to abandon their religion, and profess themselves catholics. st. helie had remained at the house of the governor, following occupations more suited to his genius, that of watching every thing that was done, of gaining information concerning the views and feelings of all persons likely to be present at the assembly of the states, and of endeavouring to form a party for his own purposes amidst the more fierce, intolerant, and bigoted of the influential catholics of the province. the duke de rouvré could not avoid showing this personage every sort of civility, for, indeed, such was the king's command; but at the same time he could not conceal from himself that the abbé was a spy upon his actions, and was intended to be a check upon his conduct, and, as may well be supposed under such circumstances, he was not particularly pleased with his guest. on the day preceding the regular opening of the states, then, after some of the preliminary formalities had been gone through, the duc de rouvré, while conversing in his saloon with twelve or fourteen of the principal roman catholic gentry, who had come to visit him as if by accident, but in reality by a previous arrangement with others, was not agreeably surprised to see the abbé de st. helie, followed by pelisson and the curé of guadrieul, enter the room in somewhat a formal manner, and advance towards him with a face of business. he bowed low, however, as it was the first time he had seen the abbé that morning, greeted pelisson somewhat more warmly, and suffered the third personage of the party to walk up in bull-like sullenness with nothing but a formal inclination of the head. "it is time, my lord," said the abbé de st. helie, "to fulfil the order of the king, and to open in your presence the commission with which he has entrusted us, of the nature of which we are ourselves in some sort ignorant up to this moment." "i thought, gentlemen," said the duke, "that you informed me the commission was not to be opened till after the opening of the states." "no, my lord," replied the abbé, "i said, till after the meeting of the states, which were convened to meet to-day." "well then, gentlemen," said the duke, "i will give you my attention in a few minutes. you see i am at present occupied with friends, but in half an hour i shall be prepared to receive you in my cabinet upon any business that may remain to be transacted between us." "i see no reason, my lord," replied the abbé, "why the commission should not be opened before the gentlemen here present, all of whom are sincere christians, and zealous supporters of the true faith." "no earthly reason whatever," replied the duke sharply, "except that i choose to do my own business in my own way, in my own house, and in my own government." "i am sorry to suggest any alterations in your lordship's plans," replied the abbé with a cool sneer, "but i have authority for what i am doing. the king's express directions are to open the commission in presence of your lordship, _and other competent witnesses_." "oh, if such be the case," said the duke, much mortified, "there could be no witnesses more competent, and none perhaps better prepared than the present. pray open your commission, gentlemen. my good sirs, take your seats round this table. let us give the matter, if possible, some air of regularity. without there! send for my secretary. we will wait till he comes, if you please, monsieur de st. helie. what splendid weather this is, gentlemen. we have not had one wet day for nearly two months, and yet a gentle rain every morning." the persons present ranged themselves round the table, the curé de guadrieul produced the leathern bag which contained the commission, and laid it down heavily before him, and as soon as the duke's secretary appeared, a large knot upon the leathern strings of the bag was cut with a penknife, and the whole packet handed to the abbé de st. helie, who had placed himself at the governor's right hand. opening the mouth of the bag, then, the abbé took forth a large parchment packet, sealed up at both ends with the royal arms of france. the governor asked to look at the superscription, and finding it addressed in the usual terms to the abbé st. helie and pelisson, he gave it back to the former, who with an important countenance and slow formality began to break the seals. two or three paper covers were within in order to keep the precious document secure, and one by one the abbé unfolded them, till he came to the last, which was also sealed, but which was much smaller than the size of the outer parcel had given reason to expect. he broke the seal himself, however, and produced the contents, when, to the astonishment of every body, and the merriment of the younger persons present, there appeared nothing but a pack of cards. the duc de rouvré looked on dryly, not a smile curled his countenance, and he said, gazing at the abbé de st. helie, who sat in stupified silence,-- "i admire the sagacity and propriety with which it has been judged necessary to appoint witnesses for the opening of this commission,--or of this game, perhaps i ought to say, monsieur de st. helie. gentlemen, i trust that you are perfectly satisfied; but i must ask you whether it be necessary to direct my secretary to take a procès verbal of the contents, import, and extent of the abbé's commission?" in the mean time pelisson had reached across, and taken up the papers which had surrounded the cards. he examined them minutely and long; but at length replied to the duke's sneer by saying,-- "perhaps it may be more necessary, my lord, than you imagine. it seems to me from the appearance of these papers that the packet has been opened before. there is a slight tear in the parchment, which tear is evidently not new." "you must look to that yourselves, gentlemen," said the duc de rouvré, seriously angry; "the commission has been in your charge and custody, and in that of no one else. you best know whether you have opened it before the time or not. secretary, as these gentlemen demand it, make a note that we have this day seen opened by the abbé de st. helie in our presence a packet addressed to him and monsieur de pelisson, purporting to be a commission for certain purposes addressed to them by his most christian majesty; and that on the said packet being so opened, there has been found in it nothing but a pack of cards, not in the most cleanly condition." "pray let him add," said pelisson, "that i have declared my opinion, from the appearance of the papers, that the said packet had been previously opened." "let that also be noted," said the duke; "but it must be noted also that monsieur de pelisson did not make that observation till after the packet had been opened, and the cards discovered, that the seals were unbroken, and the leathern bag entire; and now, gentlemen," he continued, "after having interrupted my conversation with these noble gentlemen here present to witness the opening of a pack of cards--which may indeed be the commencement of a game that i don't understand--perhaps you will excuse me for rising and resuming our more agreeable occupation." pelisson bowed his head, calm and undisturbed; the abbé de st. helie looked stupified, mortified, and angry beyond all measure; and the dull priest of guadrieul, upon whom the eyes of both of his superiors were turned from time to time with an expression of no very doubtful import, looked swallowed up in stolid fear and astonishment. the governor and his guests in general had risen and scattered themselves about the room, and after speaking to the abbé de st. helie for a few moments, pelisson advanced, and took his leave in a few words, saying, that of course it was their duty to inform the king of what had occurred, and that therefore they must proceed to write quickly before the ordinary set out. the governor bowed stiffly, and merely replied that he himself could not think of troubling the king upon a trifle of such minor importance, and therefore left them to make their communication in their own terms. the three then retired, and the rest of the party soon after separated; but the worthy governor had not been left half an hour alone before he received a billet from the bishop, requesting an audience, which was immediately granted. he came, accompanied by pelisson and the curé de guadrieul, who remained without while the archbishop and his companion held a previous conference with the governor. the curé was then called in, and remained some time with them. he was then sent out again to the ante-chamber, then recalled, and nearly two hours passed in what was apparently an unpleasant discussion, for at the end of that time when the governor returned to the saloon from his own cabinet, clémence de marly, the duchess, and the chevalier d'evran, all remarked that he was very much agitated and heated. in a minute or two afterwards his secretary followed him into the room with a note, apparently just written, in his hand, and asked if that would do. the governor read the note, and replied, "yes! send it off directly," he said. "bid the messenger give my very best regards to the count de morseiul! lay the strictest injunctions upon him also not to stop this night till he has overtaken the count. if the count be in bed when he reaches the place where he is, he need not of course disturb him till the morning.--but bid him say every thing that is kind from me." clémence de marly rose, and with a winning grace that was more natural to her than the capricious pride she sometimes assumed, walked up to the duke, glided her arm through his, and drew the old nobleman into one of the deep windows. she spoke with him for several minutes earnestly, and he replied as if endeavouring to parry by a jest some question he did not choose to answer. "nay, nay," she was heard to say at length, "my dear guardian, you _shall_ tell me, and you know that clémence is more absolute than the king." "we will talk about it to-morrow, clémence," replied the duke, "and perhaps i may tell you; but you shall make your confession in return, fair lady." she blushed a little and turned away, and thus the conversation ended. chapter x. the recall. albert of morseiul rode on his way with a heart ill at case. the excitement of the preceding night was gone, and the lassitude that succeeded it was like the weakness after a fever. it seemed to him that the last cheerful hours of life were over, and the rest was all to be strife and anguish; that the last of all the sweet dreams, with which hope and youth deck the future, were done and passed away, and nothing but the stern grey reality was left. it is hard and sorrowful to make up the mind to any parting, and tenfold hard and sorrowful to make up the mind to our parting with the sweet promising fancies of our early days, to put ourselves under a harsher guide for ever, and follow with him a rugged and a cheerless path, when before we had been treading on sweet sunshiny flowers. in general, it is true, the wise beneficence of heaven has provided that we should not part with all at once, but that the visions and the dreams, like the many gay companions of our boyhood, should either be abandoned for others, or drop away from our side, one by one, till all are gone, and we hardly mark which is the last. but there are times when all are snatched away together, or, as in the case of albert of morseiul, when the last that is taken is the brightest and the best, and the parting is clear, defined, and terrible. bitter, bitter, then, were his feelings as he rode away from poitiers, and made up his mind that the last dream of youth was over, that the nourished vision of long years was dissipated, that the bubble was burst, and that all was gone; that she who, half ideal, half real, had been that object round which both memory and imagination had clung as the something splendid for the future, was not what he had dreamt of, and even if she were, could never, never be his; and that at length that theme of thought was gone from him for ever. that moment and that spot seemed to form the parting place, where youth, imagination, and happiness were left behind, and care, reality, and anxiety started forward with latter life. though, as we have endeavoured on more than one occasion to show, the count de morseiul was a man of strong imagination and of deep and intense feelings, yet he possessed qualities of other kinds, which served to counterbalance and to rule those dangerous gifts, not, indeed, preventing them from having their effect upon himself, paining, grieving, and wearing him, but sufficient to prevent imagination from clouding his judgment, or strong feeling from warping his conduct from the stern path which judgment dictated. he applied himself then to examine distinctly what were the probabilities of the future, and what was the line of conduct that it became him to pursue. he doubted not, indeed he felt strongly convinced, that clémence de marly would ultimately give her hand to the chevalier d'evran, to his friend and companion. he believed that, for the time, some accidental circumstance might have alienated them from each other, and that, perhaps on both sides, any warmer and more eager passion that they once had felt, might have been a little cooled; but still he doubted not, from all he saw, that clémence would yet be his friend's bride, and the first part of his own task was to prepare his mind to bear that event with calmness, and firmness, and dignity, whenever it should happen. as his thoughts reverted, however, to the situation of his fellow huguenots, and the probable fate that awaited them, he saw a prospect of relief from the agony of his own personal feelings in the strife that was likely to ensue from their persecution; and perhaps he drew a hope even from the prospect of an early grave. with such thoughts struggling in his breast, and with all the varied emotions which the imagination of the reader may well supply, albert of morseiul rode on till he reached the house appointed for his second resting place. every thing had been prepared for his reception, and all the external appliances were ready to insure comfort, so that there was not even any little bodily want or irritation to withdraw his attention from the gloomy pictures presented by his own thoughts. with a tact in such matters which was peculiarly his own, jerome riquet took especial care that the dinner set before his master should be of the very simplest kind, and instead of crowding the room with servants, as he had done on a former occasion, he, who on the journey acted the part of major domo, waited upon the count at table alone, only suffering another servant to carry in and remove the dishes. he had taken the precaution of bringing with him some wine from poitiers, which he had induced the sommelier of the archbishop to pilfer from the best bin in his master's cellar, and he now endeavoured to seduce his master, whose deep depression he had seen and deplored during their journey, into taking more of the fragrant juice than usual, not, indeed, by saying one word upon the subject, but by filling his glass whenever he saw it empty. now jerome riquet would have given the tip of one of his ears to have been made quite sure of what was the chief cause of the count's anxiety. that he was anxious about the state of the protestant cause the valet well knew; that he was in some degree moved by feelings of love towards clémence de marly, riquet very easily divined. but jerome riquet was, as we have before said on more than one occasion, shrewd and intelligent, and in nothing more so than in matters where the heart was concerned. it is true he had never been in the room five times when clémence and his master were together, but there are such things in the world wherein we live as half open doors, chinks, key-holes, and garret windows; and in the arts and mysteries of all these, jerome riquet was a most decided proficient. he had thus seen quite enough to make him feel very sure, that whatever might be clémence de marly's feelings towards others, her feelings towards his master were not by any means unfavourable; and after much speculation he had arranged in his own mind--from a knowledge of the somewhat chivalrous generosity in his master's character--that he and the chevalier d'evran were in love with the same person, and that the count, even with the greater probability of success, had abandoned the pursuit of his passion, rather than become the rival of his friend. riquet wished much to be assured of this fact, however; and to know whether it was really and truly the proximate cause of the melancholy he beheld, or whether there was some deeper and more powerful motive still, concealed from those eyes which he thought were privileged to pry into every secret of his master. thus, after dinner was over, and the dessert was put upon the table--though he had wisely forborne up to that moment to do, to say, or to allow any thing that could disturb the train of the count's thoughts--he could resist no longer, and again quickly filled up his young lord's glass as he saw it empty. his master put it aside with the back of his hand, saying, "no more!" "oh, my lord," said riquet, "you will not surely refuse to drink that glass to the health of mademoiselle clémence!" the count, who knew him thoroughly, and in general perceived very clearly all the turnings and windings through which he pursued his purposes, turned round, gazing in his face for a moment as he bent over his shoulder, and then replied with a melancholy smile, "certainly not, riquet. health and happiness to her!" and he drank the wine. the look and the words were quite sufficient for jerome riquet, though the count was not aware that it would be so; but the cunning valet saw clearly, that, whatever other causes might mingle with the melancholy of his master, love for clémence de marly had a principal share therein; and, confirmed in his own opinion of his lord's motive in quitting poitiers, his first thought, when he cleared away and left him, was, by what artful scheme or cunning device he could carry him back to poitiers against his own will, and plunge him inextricably into the pursuit of her he loved. several plans suggested themselves to his mind, which was fertile in all such sort of intrigues, and it is very probable that, though he had to do with a keen and a clear-sighted man, he might have succeeded unaided in his object; but he suddenly received assistance which he little expected, by the arrival, at their first resting-place, of a courier from the duc de rouvré, towards the hour of ten at night. riquet was instantly called to the messenger; and, telling him that the count was so busy that he could see nobody at that moment, the valet charged himself with the delivery of the note and the message, while the governor's servant sat down to refresh himself after a long and fatiguing ride. riquet took a lamp with him to light himself up the stairs, though he had gone up and down all night without any, and before he reached the door of the count's room, he had of course made himself acquainted with the whole contents of the note, so that when he returned to the kitchen to converse with the messenger, he was perfectly prepared to cross-examine him upon the various transactions at poitiers with sagacity and acuteness. the whole story of the cards found in the king's packet had of course made a great sensation in the household of the governor, and riquet now laughed immoderately at the tale, declaring most irreverently that he had never known louis le grand was such a wag. there is nothing like laughter for opening the doors of the heart, and letting its secrets troop out by dozens. the courier joined in the merriment of the valet, and riquet had no difficulty in extracting from him every thing else that he knew. the after conferences between the governor, pelisson, and the archbishop, were displayed as far as the messenger had power to withdraw the veil, and the general opinion entertained in the governor's household that some suspicion attached to the young count in regard to that packet, and that the courier himself had been sent to recall him to poitiers, was also communicated in full to the valet. to the surprise of the courier, however, riquet laughed more inordinately than ever, declaring that the governor, and the archbishop, and st. helie, and pelisson, must all have been mad or drunk when they were so engaged. in the mean time the count de morseiul had opened the letter from the governor, and read the contents, which informed him that a pack of cards had been found, in place of a commission, in the packet given by the king to messieurs st helie and pelisson; that those gentlemen declared that the packet had been opened; and that they had come with the bishop for the purpose of making formal application to the governor to recall him, the count de morseiul, to poitiers, alleging that the only period at which the real commission could have been abstracted was while they were in his company at an inn on the road. they had also pointed out, the duke said, that the count, as one of the principal protestant leaders, was a person more interested than any other, both to ascertain the contents of that packet, and to abstract the commission, in case its contents were such as they imagined them to have been; and at the same lime they said there was good reason to believe that, in consequence of the knowledge thus obtained, he, the count de morseiul, had called together a meeting of protestant gentlemen in the neighbourhood of poitiers, had communicated to them the plans and purposes of the government, and had concerted schemes for frustrating the king's designs. the duc de rouvré then went on to say, that as he knew and fully confided in the honour and integrity of the count de morseiul, and as the bishop and monsieur pelisson had produced no corroborative proof of their allegation whatsoever, he by no means required or demanded the count to return to poitiers, but thought fit to communicate to him the facts, and to leave him to act according to his own judgment. the count paced the room in no slight agitation for several minutes after he had read the letter; but it was not the abstraction of the king's commission, if such an act had really taken place, nor the accusation insinuated, rather than made, against himself, which agitated him on the present occasion. the accusation he regarded as absurd, the abstraction of the commission merely laughable; a suspicion indeed might cross his mind that riquet had had a hand in it, but he knew well that he himself had none, and therefore he cast the matter from his mind at once. but his agitation proceeded from the thought of being obliged to go back to poitiers--from the fear of seeing all his good resolutions overthrown--from the idea of meeting once more, surrounded with greater difficulties and danger than ever, her whom he now but too clearly felt to be the only being that he had ever loved. to the emotions which such considerations produced, he gave up a considerable time, and then, taking up the bell, he rang it sharply, ordering the page that appeared to send riquet to him. he simply told the valet what had occurred, and ordered his horses to be saddled to return to poitiers the next morning at day break. he insinuated no suspicion, though he fixed his eyes strongly upon the man's countenance, when he spoke of the abstraction of the commission, but the face of riquet changed not in the least, except in consequence of a slight irrepressible chuckle which took place at the mention of the appearance of the cards. the count did not wish to inquire into the matter, but, from what he saw of riquet's manner, he judged that his servant had nothing to do with the transaction; and, setting out early the next morning, he went back to poitiers at full speed, hiring horses when his own were too tired to proceed, so that he reached the house of the governor towards nine o'clock on the same night. he was immediately ushered into the saloon, where the family of monsieur de rouvré and a very small party besides were assembled, and, apologising for the dustiness and disarray of his appearance to the duke, who met him near the door, he said that he had only presented himself to show that he had lost not a moment in returning to repel the false insinuations made against him. he was then about to leave the room, hastily glancing his eye over the party beyond, and seeing that his friend the chevalier was not present; but the voice of the duchess de rouvré called him to her side, saying,-- "we will all, i am sure, excuse dust and disarray for the pleasure of monsieur de morseiul's society. is it not so, madame de beaune? is it not so, clémence?" clémence had scarcely looked up since the count's arrival, but she now did so with a slight inclination of the head, and replied, "the count de morseiul, my queen, values the pleasure of his society so highly that he is disposed to give us but little of it, it would appear." the words were scarcely spoken when the count, with his own peculiar, graceful, but energetic manner, walked straight up to clémence de marly, and stopped opposite to her, saying gravely, but not angrily, "i assure you, dear lady, i do not deserve your sarcasm. if you knew, on the contrary, how great was the pleasure that i myself have derived from this society, you would estimate the sacrifice i made in quitting it, and approve, rather than condemn, the self-command and resolution i have shown." clémence looked suddenly up in his face with one of her bright beaming smiles, and then frankly extended her hand to him. "i was wrong," she said; "forgive me, monsieur de morseiul! you know a spoilt woman always thinks that she has done penance enough when she has forced herself to say i was wrong." if the whole world had been present, albert of morseiul could not have refrained from bending down his lips to that fair hand; but he did so calmly and respectfully, and then turning to the duchess, he said that if she would permit him, he would but do away the dust and disarray of his apparel, and return in a moment. the petition was not of course refused: his toilet was hasty, and occupied but a few minutes; and he returned as quickly as possible to the hall, where he passed the rest of the evening without giving any farther thoughts or words to painful themes, except in asking the governor to beg the presence of the bishop, monsieur pelisson, and the abbé de st. helie, as early as possible on the following morning, in order that the whole business might be over before the hour appointed for the meeting of the states. the bishop, who was an eager and somewhat bigoted man, was quite willing to pursue the matter at once; and before breakfast on the following day, he, with the two abbés and the curé de guadrieul, met the count de morseiul in the cabinet of the governor. there was something in the frank, upright, and gallant bearing of the young nobleman that impressed even the superstitious bigots to whom he was opposed with feelings of doubt as to the truth of their own suspicions, and even with some sensations of shame for having urged those suspicions almost in the form of direct charges. they hesitated, therefore, as to the mode of their attack, and the count, impatient of delay, commenced the business at once by addressing the bishop. "my noble friend, the duke here present," he said, "has communicated to me, my lord, both by letter and by word of mouth, a strange scene that has been enacted here regarding a commission, real or supposed, given by the king to the abbés of st. helie and pelisson. it seems, that when the packet supposed to contain the commission was produced, a pack of cards was found therein, instead of what was expected; that monsieur pelisson found reason to suppose that the packet had been previously opened; and that he then did--what monsieur pelisson should not have done, considering the acquaintance that he has with me and with my character--namely, charged me with having opened, by some private means, the packet containing his commission, abstracted and destroyed the commission itself, and substituted a pack of cards in its place." "stop, stop, my dear count," said pelisson, "you are mistaken as to the facts. i never made such an accusation, whatever others did. all i said was, that you were the only person interested in the abstraction of that commission who had possessed any opportunity of destroying it." "and in so saying, sir, you spoke falsely," replied the count de morseiul; "for, in the first place, you insinuated what was not the case, that i have had an opportunity of destroying it; and, in the next place, you forgot that for three quarters of an hour, or perhaps more, for aught i know, your whole baggage was in the hands of a body of plunderers, while neither you, buried in your devotions, under the expectation of immediate death, nor monsieur de st. helie, weeping, trembling, and insane in the agony of unmanly fear, had the slightest knowledge of what was done with any thing in your possession; so that the plunderers, if they had chosen it, might have re-written you a new commission, ordering you both to be scourged back from poitiers to paris. i only say this to show the absurdity of the insinuations you have put forth. here, in a journey which has probably taken you seven or eight days to perform, in the course of which you must have slept at seven or eight different inns upon the road, and during which you were for a length of time in the hands of a body of notorious plunderers, you only choose to fix upon me, who entertained you with civility and kindness, who delivered you from death itself, and who saved from the flames and restored to your own hands, at the risk of my life, the very commission which you now insinuate i had some share in abstracting from the paper that contained it. besides, sir, if i remember rightly, that packet was entrusted to the care of a personage attendant upon yourselves, and who watched it like the fabled guardian of the golden fleece." "but the guardian of the fleece slumbered, sir," replied pelisson, who, to say the truth, was really ashamed of the charge which had been brought against the count de morseiul, and was very glad of an opportunity to escape from the firm grasp of the count's arguments by a figure of speech. "besides, monsieur de morseiul," he said, "had you but listened a little longer you would have heard, that though i said yours was the only party which had an opportunity of taking it, and were interested in its destruction, i never charged you with doing so, or commanding it to be done; but i said that some of your servants, thinking to do you a pleasure, might have performed the exchange, which certainly must have been accomplished with great slight of hand." "you do not escape me so, sir," replied the young count; "if i know any thing of the laws of the land, or, indeed, of the laws of common sense and right reason, you are first bound to prove that a crime has been committed, before you dare to accuse any one of committing it. you must show that there ever has been, in reality, a commission in that packet. if i understood monsieur de rouvré's letter right, the seals of the king were found unbroken on the packet, and not the slightest appearance of its having been opened was remarked, till you, monsieur pelisson, discovered that there was such an appearance after the fact. the king may have been jesting with you; monsieur de louvois may have been making sport of you; a drunken clerk of the cabinet may have committed some blunder in a state of inebriety; no crime may have been committed at all, for aught we know." "my good sir," said the bishop haughtily, "you show how little you know of the king and of the court of the king by supposing that any such transactions could take place." "my lord," replied the count, gazing upon him with a smile of ineffable contempt, "when you were a little curé in the small town of castelnaudry, my father supported the late king of france with his right hand, and with the voice of his counsel: when you were trooping after a band of rebels in the train of the house of vendôme, i was page of honour to our present gracious monarch, in dangers and difficulties, in scantiness, and in want: when you have been fattening in a rich diocese, obtained by no services to the crown, i have fought beside my monarch, and led his troops up to the cannon of his enemies' ramparts: i have sat beside him in his council of war, and ever have been graciously received by him in the midst of his court; and let me tell you, my lord bishop, that it is not more improbable, nay, not more impossible, that louis xiv. should play a scurvy jest upon two respectable ecclesiastics, than that the count of morseiul should open a paper not addressed to himself." "both good and true," my young friend, said the duc de rouvré; "no one who knows you could suspect you of such a thing for a moment." "but we may his servants," said the abbé de st. helie sharply, though he had hitherto remained silent, knowing that he himself had been the chief instigator of the charge, and fearing to call upon himself the indignation of the young count. "well, gentlemen," said the count de morseiul, "although i should have every right to demand that you should first of all establish the absolute fact of the abstraction of this packet upon proper testimony, i will not only permit, but even demand, that all my servants who accompanied me from morseiul shall be brought in and examined one by one; and if you find any of them to whom you can fairly attach a suspicion, i will give him up to you at once, to do what you think fit with. i have communicated to them the contents of monsieur de rouvré's letter, but have said nothing further to them on the subject. they must all be arrived by this time: i beg that you would call them in yourselves in what order you please." "by your leave, by your leave," said the abbé de st. helie, seeing that the bishop was about to speak; "we will have your valet; jerome--i think i heard him so called. let us have him, if you please." jerome was accordingly brought in, and appeared with a face of worthy astonishment. having in this instance not to deal with the count, of whom he stood in some degree of awe, though that awe did not in the least diminish his malevolence, the abbé de st. helie proceeded to conduct the examination of riquet himself. "you, master jerome riquet," he commenced, "you are, i presume, of the church pretending to be reformed?" "heaven forbid!" exclaimed riquet, in a tone of well assumed horror. "no, reverend sir, i am of the holy roman and apostolical church, and have never yet gone astray from it." this announcement did not well suit the purposes of the abbé, who, judging from the intolerant feelings of his own heart, had never doubted that the confidential servant of the young count would be found to be a zealous huguenot. he exclaimed, however, "i am glad to hear it--i am glad to hear it! but let us speak a little further, monsieur jerome. it was you, i think, who snatched from under our good brother here, monsieur le curé de guadrieul, a certain sheep leather bag, containing our commission from his majesty. was it not so?" "i certainly did gently withdraw from under the reverend gentleman," replied riquet, "a bag on which he was sitting, and which he took back again, as you saw, declaring it to be the king's commission for exterminating the huguenots, which did my soul good to hear. i gave it back with all reverence, as you saw, and had it not in my hands a minute, though i did think--though i did indeed know----" "did think? did know, what?" demanded the abbé. "that it could not have been in safer hands than mine," added riquet; and though st helie urged him vehemently, he could get him to give him no farther explanation. angry at being foiled--and such probably was the result that riquet intended to produce--the abbé lost all caution and reserve. "come, come, master jerome riquet," he exclaimed in a sharp voice, "come, come; remember that there is such a place as the bastille. tell us the truth, sir! tell us the truth! this paper was stolen! you evidently know something about it! tell us the truth, or means shall be found to make you. now, answer me! if your baggage were searched at this moment, would not the packet be found therein--or have you dared to destroy it?" jerome riquet now affected to bristle up in turn. his eyes flashed, his large nostrils expanded like a pair of extinguishers, and he replied, "no, abbé, no; neither the one nor the other. but since i, one of the king's most loyal catholic subjects, am accused in this way, i will speak out i will say that you two gentlemen should have taken better care of the commission yourselves, and that though not one scrap will be found in my valise, or in the baggage of any other person belonging to my lord, i would not be answerable that more than a scrap was not found amongst the baggage of some that are accusing others." "how now, sirrah," cried the abbé de st helie, "do you dare to say that either monsieur pelisson or i----" "nothing about either of you two reverend sirs," replied the valet, "nothing about either of you two! but first let my valise be brought in and examined. monsieur has been pleased to say that there is something there; and i swear by every thing i hold dear, or by any other oath your reverences please, that i have not touched a thing in it since i heard of this business about the cards. let it be brought in, i say, and examined. may i tell the people without, my lord duke, to bring in every thing i have in the world, and lay it down here before you?" the duke immediately assented, and while jerome riquet, without entirely leaving the room, bade the attendants in the ante-chamber bring in every thing, every thing they could find in his room, st. helie and pelisson looked in each others faces with glances of some embarrassment and wonder, while the count de morseiul gazed sternly down on the table, firmly believing that master jerome riquet was engaged in playing off some specious trick which he himself could not detect, and was bound not to expose. the goods and chattels of the valet were brought in, and a various and motley display they made; for whether he had arranged the whole on purpose out of sheer impudence, or had left matters to take their course accidentally, his valise presented a number of objects certainly not his own property, and to most of which his master, if he had remarked them, might have laid claim. the count was silent, however, and though the manifold collection of silk stockings, ribands, lace, doublets, &c. &c. &c., were drawn forth to the very bottom, yet nothing the least bearing upon the question of the abstraction of the commission was found throughout the whole. as he shook the last vest, to show that there was nothing in it, a smile of triumph shone upon the countenance of jerome riquet, and he demanded, "now, gentlemen, are you satisfied that i have no share in this business?" the abbé de st helie was hastening to acknowledge that he was satisfied, for he was timid as well as malevolent; and having lost the hold, which he thought he might have had on jerome riquet, the menacing words which the valet had made use of filled his mind with apprehensions, lest some suspicion should be raised up in the mind of the king, or of louvois, that he himself had had a share in the disappearance of the paper. not so, however, pelisson, who, though he had learnt the lesson of sycophancy and flattery with wonderful aptitude, was naturally a man of courage and resolution, and before monsieur de st. helie could well finish what he had to say, he exclaimed aloud,-- "stop, stop, master jerome riquet, we are undoubtedly satisfied that the papers are not in your valise, and i think it probable that you have had nothing to do with the matter; but you threw out an insinuation just now of which we must hear more. what was the meaning of the words you made use of when you said that, you would not be answerable that more than a scrap was not found amongst the baggage of some that are accusing others?" jerome riquet hesitated, and either felt or affected a disinclination to explain himself; but pelisson persisted, notwithstanding sundry twitches of the sleeve given to him both by the abbé de st. helie and the bishop himself. "i must have this matter cleared up," said pelisson, "and i do not rise till it is. explain yourself, sir, or i shall apply both to your lord and to the governor, to insist upon your so doing." jerome riquet looked towards the count, who immediately said, "what your meaning was, riquet, you best know; but you must have had some meaning, and it is fit that you should explain it." "well, then," said riquet, shaking his head upon his shoulders with an important look, "what i mean is this; that if ever i saw a man who had an inclination to see the contents of a packet that did not belong to him, it was monsieur le curé de guadrieul there. he knows very well that he talked to me for half an hour of how easy it would be to get the packet out of the bag, and he seemed to have a very great inclination to do it." while he made this insinuation, the dull, fat, leaden-looking mass of the curé de guadrieul was seen heaving with some internal convulsion: his breath came thick, his cheeks and his breast expanded, his eyes grew red and fierce, his hands trembled with rage; and starting up from his seat he exclaimed,-- "me? me? by the lord i will strangle thee with my own hands," and he sprang towards jerome riquet, as if to execute his threat; while the governor exclaimed in a voice of thunder, "sit down, sir; and, as you have joined in accusing others, learn to bear the retaliation, as indeed you must." "can he deny what i say?" demanded riquet, stretching out his three fore-fingers, and shaking them in the curé's face; "can he deny that he talked to me for half an hour about the easiness of purloining the commission, and told me of a thousand instances of the same kind, that have taken place before now? no, he cannot deny it!" "i did talk to thee, base miscreant," said the curé, still swelling with rage, "but it was to show why i always sat upon the bag, and slept with it under my head, ever after that affair with the robbers." "mark that, gentlemen," said the count de morseiul. "well, sir, we do mark it," said the bishop; "that proves nothing against the curé but extreme care and precaution." "nor can i prove any thing directly, monseigneur," cried riquet; "but still i have a strange suspicion that the very night i speak of did not go over without the fingers of monsieur le curé being in the bag. let me ask him another question, and let him mind how he answers it. was he, or was he not, seen by more than one person dabbling at the mouth of the bag?" "that was only to see that the knot was fast," replied the curé, glaring round him with a look of growing bewilderment and horror. "ay, ay," continued riquet, with a glance of calm contempt that almost drove the man mad; "ay, ay, all i wish is that i had an opportunity of looking into your baggage as you have had of looking into mine." "and so you shall, by heaven," cried the duc de rouvré. "i will have it brought from his chamber this instant." "i don't care," cried the priest; "let it be brought; you will find nothing there." but the abbé de st. helie and the bishop both interposed. though pelisson said nothing, and looked mortified and pained, the others urged every thing that they could think of for the protection of the baggage of the ecclesiastic, without the slightest consideration of equity or justice whatsoever; but the governor was firm, replying,-- "gentlemen, i will be responsible for my conduct both to the king and to the king of kings; and, in one word, i tell you that this baggage shall be examined. you have brought back the count de morseiul, and his whole train, on charges and insinuations which you have not been able to establish; and you would now fain shrink from a little trouble and inconvenience, which ought to be taken, in order to clear one of yourselves of an imputation accompanied by a few singular facts. maître riquet, call one of my servants from the door, but do not leave the room yourself." as soon as the servant appeared, the governor, notwithstanding the renewed opposition of the two ecclesiastics, ordered the whole baggage and effects of the curé de guadrieul to be brought down from the chamber that he inhabited. this was accordingly done, and besides a number of stray articles of apparel almost as miscellaneous in character and appearance as those which the opening of riquet's valise had displayed, there was a large sort of trunk-mail which appeared to be carefully locked. the curé had looked on with a grim and scowling smile while his various goods and chattels were displayed upon the floor of the governor's cabinet, and then turning to st. helie with a growl, which might have been supposed to proceed from a calumniated bear, he said,-- "don't be afraid. they can't find any thing;" and advancing to his effects he shook them one after the other, and turned out the pockets, when there were any, to show that there was nothing concealed. he then produced a large key, and opening the trunk-mail took out, one by one, the various things that it contained. he had nearly got to the bottom, and was displaying a store of tobacco pipes, some of which were wrapped up in pieces of paper, some in their original naked whiteness, when in the midst of them appeared what seemed a tobacco box, also wrapped up in paper. the moment the eyes of riquet fell upon it he exclaimed, "stop, stop, what is that? there is writing on that paper. monsieur le duc, i pray you to examine what is on that paper." the eyes of the curé, who had it in his hand, fixed for an instant upon the tobacco box and its envelope, and his fingers instantly relaxed their grasp and suffered it to drop upon the ground. well, indeed, they might do so, for the very first words that were seen were, "i pray god to have you, messieurs pelisson and st. helie, in his holy, care," with the signature of "louis." the governor unrolled the paper which, though it was but a fragment, left not the slightest doubt that it was part either of a commission or of a letter of instructions from the king to the two ecclesiastics. with his mouth wide open, his eyes ready to start from their sockets, his face become as pale as death, and his limbs scarcely able to support him, the unfortunate curé de guadrieul stood gasping in the middle of the room, unable to utter a word. all eyes were fixed upon him, all brows were frowning upon him, and the only thing which could have roused him, if it had been possible for any thing to rouse him at that moment, was the extraordinary face which jerome riquet was making, in a vain endeavour to mingle in his countenance a certain portion of compassion with contempt and reprobation. nobody spoke for a moment or two after the governor had read the contents; but at length the duc de rouvré said, in a dry, severe tone,-- "secretary, you have made a note of all this; you will keep also the fragment of paper. my lord the bishop, messieurs pelisson and st. helie, after the painful and distressing event of this examination, i shall make no comment whatsoever upon what has taken place. i beg that you would remove this personage the curé de guadrieul from my house, to do with him as you think fit. you will not, of course, be surprised when you remember the threatening language which you three were pleased to use towards myself, two days ago, in order to induce me to cause the arrest of the count de morseiul, upon a charge of crimes of which he was not guilty--monsieur pelisson, do not interrupt me: i know you were more moderate than the rest; but as you were acting together, i must look upon the words of one, your spokesman, to be the words of all--you will not be surprised i say, recollecting these facts, that i send off a special messenger to his majesty this night, in order to give him my own statement of all these occurrences, and to beseech him to take those steps which to me seem necessary for maintaining the peace and tranquillity of the province. i, gentlemen, do not encroach upon the rights and privileges of others; and, so long as his majesty is pleased to hold me in an official situation, i will not suffer any one to trench upon my privileges and legitimate authority. as the hour for the daily meeting of the states is now fast approaching, however, i will bid you farewell, begging you to take this personage with you, and, as i have said, deal with him as you think fit, for i wish to exercise no severity upon any ecclesiastic." the persons he addressed had nothing to say in reply, though the bishop thought fit to harangue the little party for a moment upon his own authority and high dignity, and pelisson endeavoured to involve a bad business in a cloud of words. they were all, however, desperately mortified, and not a little alarmed; for there was no doubt that they had proceeded far beyond the point where their legitimate authority ended, in pressing the governor to severe measures against the count de morseiul. the loss of the packet, too, might now be attributed to themselves, instead of to him; the delay in executing the king's will, as it had been expressed, would be laid to their charge; the duc de rouvré was evidently highly irritated against them, and his representations to the throne on the subject were likely to be listened to with peculiar attention, as they were coupled with the announcement to the king that the states, by his skilful management, had voted at once a much larger sum as a gift than any one at the court had anticipated. all these considerations alarmed the whole party, though indeed pelisson, who had more knowledge of human nature than the other two, trusted, with some degree of hope, that the cloak of religious zeal would cover all other sins. his greatest apprehension proceeded from the supposition that the king would cast the blame of the loss of the packet on themselves, and would attribute the negligence which had caused it to want of respect to his person. he therefore set himself straightway to consider how such a result might be obviated. the bishop and the abbé de st. helie took an unceremonious leave of the governor and his friend, and pushing the culprit curé of guadrieul out before them, quitted the cabinet in haste. pelisson paused for a moment to say a word or two more in order to mitigate, as far as possible, the severity of the governor's report; but monsieur de rouvré was in no very placable mood, and the conference soon terminated, leaving the governor and the count to discuss the affair, half laughingly, half seriously. the invitation of the duc de rouvré was now pressing and strong, that the young count de morseiul should remain at least two days longer at poitiers, and he coupled that invitation with the direct intimation that it was most necessary he should do so, as he the duke had yet to learn in some degree the temper of the states in regard to the important questions between the catholics and protestants. the young count consequently agreed to remain; taking the precaution, however, of writing at full to claude de l'estang, and sending off the letter by one of his own trustworthy servants, beseeching him to draw up the petition which the protestant gentry had agreed upon, and to have it ready by the time at which he proposed to arrive at morseiul. during the greater part of those two days which followed he saw little of clémence de marly. without any cause assigned, she had been absent from all the spots where he was most likely to see her, except on those occasions when she was necessarily surrounded by a crowd. after breakfast, she remained but a moment in the salle: on the first day she did not appear at dinner; and on the second, she was absent from the breakfast table. the chevalier d'evran was also absent, and every thing tended to confirm, in the mind of the young count de morseiul, the impression which he had received, that his friend was the lover of her whom he himself loved, and that some cause of disagreement, either temporary or permanent, had arisen between them. nothing, however, tended to confirm this idea more than the appearance of clémence herself when she was present. there was an anxiety in the expression of her eyes; a thoughtfulness about her brow; an impatience of society; an occasional absence of mind, which was hardly to be mistaken. her whole appearance was that of a person struggling with strong feelings, which were in reality getting the mastery. she showed no particular inclination after his return--except as we have seen on the first evening--to speak with the count de morseiul, either in public or in private. words of civility passed between them, of course, and every little courtesy was, perhaps, more scrupulously observed than usual with her; but on that evening which closed the last day of the young count's proposed stay, a change took place. a large party had assembled at the governor's house; and though he himself looked both grave and anxious, he was doing the honours of his dwelling to every one with as much courtesy as possible, when suddenly, seeing the count de morseiul standing alone, near the doorway of the second room, he crossed over to speak with him, saying, "albert, clémence was seeking for you a moment ago. where is she? have you seen her?" ere the young count could reply, clémence de marly herself came up, as if about to speak with the duke, whose hand she took in hers, in the sort of daughter-like manner in which she always behaved to him. "monsieur de morseiul," she said, with a thoughtful lustre shining in her eyes, and giving a deeper and brighter expression to her whole countenance, "i have come to take refuge with you from that young de hericourt, who evidently intends to persecute me during the whole evening.--but stay, stay, monseigneur," she added, turning to the duke, who seemed about to leave them, to speak with some one else: "before you go, hear what i am going to say to monsieur de morseiul. you are going, count, i hear, to take your departure to-morrow morning early: if you would walk with me for half an hour in the gardens ere you leave us, you would much oblige me, as i wish to speak with you.--now, dear king of poitou," she continued, turning to the duke, "you may go. i have no more secrets to make you a witness of." the duke replied not exactly to her words, but seemed fully to comprehend them; and saying, "not to-night, clémence! remember, not tonight!" he left her under the charge of the count de morseiul, and proceeded to attend to his other guests. placed in a situation somewhat strange, and, as it were, forced to appear as one of the attendant train of the bright and beautiful girl, from whose dangerous fascinations he was eager to fly, for a single instant albert of morseiul felt slightly embarrassed; but unexpected situations seldom so much affected him as to produce any thing like ungraceful hesitation of manner. clémence de marly might not, perhaps, even perceive that the count was at all embarrassed, for she was deeply occupied with her own fancies; and though she conversed with him not gaily, but intelligently, there was evidently another train of thought going on in her breast all the time, which sometimes made her answer wide from the mark, and then smile at her own absence of mind. the eyes of the young marquis de hericourt followed her wherever she turned, and certainly bore not the most placable expression towards the count de morseiul; but his anger or his watching disturbed neither clémence nor her companion, who both had busy thoughts enough to occupy them. after some time the excitement of the dance seemed to rouse clémence from her musing fit; and, though confined to subjects of ordinary interest, the conversation between her and the count became of a deeper tone and character, and her heart seemed to take part in it as well as her mind. albert of morseiul felt it far more dangerous than before; for though they might but speak of a picture, or a statue, or a song, with which he could have conversed with a connoisseur of any kind, perhaps with more profit, as far as mere knowledge of the subject went, yet there was a refinement of taste evident in the manner in which clémence viewed every thing, a sparkling grace given by her imagination to every subject that she touched upon, when her feelings were really interested therein, which was very, very winning to a mind like that of albert de morseiul. is it possible, under such circumstances, always to be upon one's guard? is it possible, when the heart loves deeply, always to conquer it with so powerful an effort, as not to let it have the rule even for an hour? if it be, such was not the case with the young count de morseiul. he forgot not his resolutions, it is true; but he gave himself up to happiness for the moment, and spoke with warmth, enthusiasm, and eagerness, which can seldom, if ever, be displayed to a person we do not love. there was a light, too, in his eye when he gazed on clémence de marly--a look in which regret was mingled with tenderness, and in which the cloud of despair only shadowed, but did not darken the fire of passion--which might well show her, unless her eyes were dazzled by their own light, that she was loved, and loved by a being of a higher and more energetic character than those which usually surrounded her. perhaps she did see it--perhaps she did not grieve to see it--for her eyes became subdued by his; her mellow and beautiful voice took a softer tone; the colour came and went in her cheek; and before the end of the dance in which they were engaged, her whole appearance, her whole manner, made the count ask himself, "what am i doing?" clémence de marly seemed to have addressed the same question to her own heart; for as soon as the dance was over, the cloud of thoughtful sadness came back upon her brow, and she said, "i am fatigued. i shall dance no more to-night. all the people are doubtless come now, and dear madame de rouvré will move no more; so i shall go and set myself down in state beside her, and get her to shield me from annoyance to-night." the count led her towards the duchess, intending himself to seek his chamber soon after; but as they went, clémence said to him in a low tone, "do you see that pretty girl sitting there by her mother, old madame de marville, so modest, and so gentle and retiring. she is as good a little creature as ever breathed, and as pretty, yet nobody leads her out to dance. if i had a brother, i should like him to marry that girl. she would not bring him fortune, but she would bring him happiness. i wish, monsieur de morseiul, you would go and ask her to dance." though he was anxious to retire, and full of other thoughts, albert of morseiul would not have refused for the world; and clémence, leading him up to her friend, said, "annette, here is monsieur le comte de morseiul wishes to dance with you: i am sure you will, for your friend's sake." the young lady bowed her head with a slight timid blush, and rising, allowed the count to lead her to the dance. no great opportunity of conversing existed; but albert of morseiul took especial pains to show himself as courteous and as kind as possible. annette de marville led the conversation herself to clémence de marly, and nothing could exceed the enthusiastic admiration with which she spoke of her friend. perhaps a little to the surprise of the count, she never mentioned clémence's beauty, or her grace, or her wit; matters which, in those days, and at the court of louis xiv., were the only topics for praise, the only attractions coveted. she spoke of her high and noble feelings, her enthusiastic and affectionate heart; and, in answer to something which the count said not quite so laudatory as she would have had it, she exclaimed,-- "oh! but clémence does not do herself justice in the world. it is only to those who know her most intimately that her shy heart will show itself." the words sunk into the mind of the count de morseiul; and when the dance was concluded, and he had led back his fair companion to her seat, he retired speedily to his own apartments, to meditate over what he had heard, and what had taken place. end of the first volume. london: printed by a. spottiswoode, new-street-square. the huguenot. vol. ii. london: printed by a. spottiswoode, new-street-square. the huguenot a tale of the french protestants. by the author of "the gipsy," "the robber," &c. &c. * * * in three volumes. vol. ii. * * * london: printed for longman, orme, brown, green, & longmans, paternoster-row. . the huguenot. * * * chapter i. the explanations. silent and lonely thought is a sad dispeller of enchantments. under its power, the visions, and hopes, and indistinct dreams, which had fluttered before the eyes of the count de morseiul during the magic moments he had passed with clémence de marly, fled like fairies at the approach of the sun, within a very short period after he had retired to his chamber; and all that remained was a sort of reproachful mournful ness, when he thought over his own conduct and the indulgence of those feelings which he feared he had displayed but too plainly. with such thoughts he lay down to rest; but they were not soothing companions of the pillow, and it was long ere he slept. from time to time he heard the sound of music from the halls below; and in the intervals, when some open door gave a freer passage to the sound, gay laughing voices came merry on the ear, speaking cheerfulness, and happiness, and contentment, and ignorance, of the cares and sorrows and anxieties of life. "alas!" thought the count, as he lay and listened, "alas! that such bright illusions should ever pass away, and that those should ever learn the touch of grief and anguish and despair, who are now laughing in the heedless merriment of youth, unconscious of danger or of sorrow. and yet, perhaps," he continued, "could we lay bare the hearts of those now seemingly so gay--could we examine what is their ordinary state, and what their feelings were, even a few short moments before they entered those saloons--we might find there also as much care and pain as in any other scene of life, and bless the glad merriment that lulls human pangs and anxieties for a time, though it cannot quench them altogether." though he went to sleep late, he rose early on the following morning, not forgetful of his appointment with clémence de marly. fearful, however, that she might be in the gardens before him, he dressed himself and hastened out without the loss of a single minute, not a little anxious to know what was the nature of the communication which she had to make to him, and with which the duc de rouvré was evidently acquainted. he was in truth, anxious in regard to every part of their conversation, he was anxious in regard to its result; but still he did not lay out at all the conduct he was to pursue towards her, feeling that he had wakened from the dream of the evening before, and was not likely to indulge in such visions again. there was nobody in the part of the garden near the house; and he walked on in the direction which she had pointed out to him, till he had nearly reached the rampart, and thus satisfied himself that she had not yet arrived. he then turned back by the same path, and before he had gone half way down, he beheld clémence coming towards him, but at some distance. she was certainly looking more lovely than ever; and he could not but feel that, even in her very gayest and most sparkling moods, there was a charm wanting in comparison with her more serious and thoughtful aspect. clémence was now evidently a good deal agitated. it often happens, when we have an act of importance to perform, especially when that act is unusual to us, that even in revolving it in our own minds, and preparing for the moment, we overpower ourselves, as it were, by the force of our own thoughts, and, by guarding against agitation, give agitation the better opportunity to assail us. albert of morseiul saw that clémence was much moved, and he prepared to soothe her by every means in his power. the only efficacious means being to draw her attention to ordinary things. "let me offer you my arm," he said in a kindly tone; and leading her on, he spoke of the beauty of the morning, and then of anette de marville, and then of other indifferent things. clémence seemed to understand his object; and though she at first smiled, as if to intimate that she did so, she gave her mind up to his guidance, and for five or ten minutes touched upon no subject but the most ordinary topics of conversation. as they approached the rampart, however, and she had an opportunity of looking along it, and ascertaining that there was no one there, she said,-- "now i am better, now i can speak of other things.--monsieur de morseiul," she continued, "although i am accustomed to do extraordinary things, and to behave, in many respects, unlike other people, i dare say you do not suppose that i would have taken the very bold step of asking any gentleman to meet me here, as i have done you this day, without a motive sufficient to justify me, even in your sight." "i am quite sure of it," replied the count; "and though you may think me, perhaps, a harsh censor, i am not at all inclined to be so in your case." "indeed?" she said, with a somewhat mournful shake of the head; "indeed?--but, however, monsieur de morseiul, what i have to tell you is substantial, real, and more important than any feelings or inclinations. i shall have to pain you--to grieve you--to call up apprehensions--to prepare you, perhaps, for suffering! oh god!" she cried, bursting suddenly into tears, "that i should have to do this!" the count took her hand and pressed it to his lips, and besought her to be calm and soothed. "do not be apprehensive, do not be grieved," he said: "calm yourself, dear lady, calm yourself, clémence! i am prepared for much sorrow; i am prepared for danger and anxiety. i have for some time seen nothing but clouds and storms in the future!" "but not such as these," replied clémence, "not such as these. but i will not keep you in suspense, for that is worse than all now. the task, though a painful one, has been of my own seeking. first, monsieur de morseiul, to speak of that which i know is dearest to your heart--your religious liberty is in danger--it is more than in danger--it is at an end. the whole resolutions of the court are now made known--at least, amongst the principal catholics of france. the reformed church is to be swept away--there is no longer to be any but one religion tolerated throughout the kingdom--your temples are to be overthrown--your ministers to be forbidden, on pain of death, to worship god as their forefathers have done--the edict of nantes is to be revoked entirely;" and, clasping her hands together, she gazed in his face, while she added, in a low, tremulous, but distinct, voice, "you are to be driven to the mass at the point of the pike--your children are to be taken from you to be educated in another faith!" till she uttered the last words albert de morseiul had remained with his eyes bent upon the ground, though deep feelings of agitation were evident in every line of his fine countenance. but when she spoke of the protestants being driven to mass at the point of the pike, and their children being taken from them to be educated in the catholic religion, he threw back his head, gazing up to heaven with a look of firm determination, while his left hand, by a natural movement, fell upon the hilt of his sword. clémence de marly, as he did so, gazed upon him earnestly through the tears that were still in her eyes, and then exclaimed, as she saw how terribly moved he was, "these are dreadful tidings for me to tell monsieur de morseiul; you must hate me, i am sure you must hate me!" "hate you?" exclaimed the count, clasping both her hands in his, while in that agitating moment--carried away by the strength of his own feelings, and by the tokens she displayed of deep interest in him and his--every barrier gave way before the passion of his heart. "hate you? oh god! i love you but too well, too deeply--better, more deeply, than you can ever know, or divine, or dream of!" clémence turned away her head, with a face glowing like the rose; but she left her hands in his, without an effort to withdraw them, though she exclaimed, "say not so! say not so!--or at least," she added, turning round once more towards him--"say not so till you have heard all; for i have much, much more to tell, more painful, more terrible still. let me have one moment to recover," and, withdrawing her hands, she placed them over her eyes for an instant. after a very brief pause she added, "now, monsieur de morseiul, i can go on. you are here in great danger. you have been in great danger ever since you have been here; and it has only been the power and authority of the duke that has protected you. after your first intercourse with the governor, the bishop and the two ecclesiastics, a party has been made in the town, in the states, and in the province, against you, and, alas! against the good duc de rouvré too. finding that they were likely to incur the anger of the king for something that had happened, if they did not make good their own case against you, they have laboured, i may say, night and day, to counteract the measures of the duke with the states, so as to make him obnoxious to the king. they have pretended that you,--while you were here before--held illegal meetings with huguenots in the neighbourhood, in order to oppose and frustrate the measures of the king. they have got the intendant of the province upon their side, and they insisted, to monsieur de rouvré, on your being instantly arrested, they having proffered distinct information of your having held a meeting with other protestant noblemen, about three miles from this place, on the day of the hunting. do you remember that day?" "i shall never forget it!" replied the count, gazing upon her with a look that made her eyes sink again. "well," she continued, "monsieur de rouvré would not consent; and when the intendant threatened to arrest you on his own responsibility, the governor was obliged to say that he would defend you, and protect you, if necessary, by the interposition of the military force at his command. this created a complete breach, which is now only apparently healed. both parties have applied to the king, and monsieur de rouvré entertained the strongest hopes till yesterday that the decision would have been in his favour, both inasmuch as justice was on his side, and as he had obtained from the states a large supply, which he knew would be most gratifying and acceptable to the court; but suddenly, yesterday morning, news arrived of the general measures which the council intended to pursue. these i have already told you, and they showed the duke that every thing would give way to bigotry and superstition. various letters communicated the same intelligence to others as well as to the duke, but i having----" she paused and hesitated, while the colour came and went rapidly in her cheek. "speak, dear lady, speak," said the count eagerly. "i believe i may speak," she said, "after something that you said but now. i was going to say that, i having before taken upon me, perhaps sillily, when first these men brought their false charge against you, to meddle with this business, from feelings that i must not and cannot explain, and having then made the duke tell me the whole business, by earnest prayers and entreaties--that he seeing that i was--that i was interested in the matter, told me all the rest, and gave me permission to tell you the whole this morning, in order that you may guard against the measures that he fears are coming; 'i mustn't tell him myself,' he said, 'and, as the business has been communicated alone to catholics, he is not likely to hear it, till too late. nevertheless, it is no secret, the matter having been told openly to at least twenty people in this town. you can therefore do it yourself, clémence, that he may not say i have lured him back here into the jaws of his enemies.' thus then monsieur de morseiul," she continued more collectedly, "thus it is that i have acted as i have acted; and oh, if you would take my advice, painful as i acknowledge it is to give it, you would proceed instantly to morseiul, and then either fly to england, or to some other country where you will be in safety." "how shall i thank you!" replied albert of morseiul, taking her hand, and casting behind him all consideration of his own fate and that of his fellow protestants, to be thought of at an after moment, while, for the time, he gave his whole attention to the words which he had himself just spoken with regard to his love for clémence de marly "how shall i ever thank you for the interest you have taken in me, for your kindness, for your generous kindness, and for all the pain that this i see has caused you! pray, clémence, pray add one more boon to those you have conferred, forgive the rash and presumptuous words i spoke just now--and forget them also." "forget them!" exclaimed clémence, clasping her hands and raising her bright eyes to his. "forget them! never, as long as i have being! forgive them, monsieur de morseiul; that were easily done if i could believe them true." "they are as true as heaven!" replied the count; "but oh, clémence, clémence, lead me not away into false dreams! lead me not away to think that possible which is impossible.--can it, ought it to be?" "i know not what you mean," replied clémence, with a look somewhat bewildered, somewhat hurt. "all i know is, monsieur de morseiul, that you have spoken words which justify me to myself for feelings--ay, and perhaps for actions,--in regard to which i was doubtful--fearful--which sometimes made me blush when i thought of them. the words that you have spoken take away that blush. i feel that i had not mistaken you; but yet," she added, "tell me before you go, for i feel that it must be soon. what is it that you mean? what is the import of your question?" "oh, it means much and many things, clémence," replied the count: "it takes in a wide range of painful feelings; and when i acknowledge, and again and again say, that the words i have spoken are true as heaven; when, again and again, i say that i love you deeply, devotedly, entirely, better than aught else on earth, i grieve that i have said them, i feel that i have done wrong." clémence de marly withdrew her hand, not sharply, not coldly, but mournfully, and she raised her fair countenance towards the sky as if asking, with apprehension at her heart, "what is thy will, oh heaven?"--"albert of morseiul," she said, "if you have any cause to regret that those words have been spoken, let them be for ever between us as if unspoken. they shall never by me be repeated to any one. you may perhaps one day, years hence," and as she spoke her eyes filled with tears,--"you may perhaps regret what you are now doing; but it will be a consolation to you then to know, that even though you spoke words of love and then recalled them, they were ever, as they ever shall be, a consolation and a comfort to me. the only thing on earth that i could fear was the blame of my own heart for having thought you loved me,--and perhaps loved," she added, while a deep blush again spread over all her countenance, "and perhaps loved, when you did not. you have shielded me from that blame: you have taken away all self-reproach; and now god speed you, albert! choose your own path, follow the dictates of your own heart, and your own conscience, and farewell!" "stay, stay, clémence," said the count de morseiul, detaining her by the hand. "yet listen to me; yet hear me a few words farther!" she turned round upon him with one of her former smiles. "you know how easily such requests are granted," she said; "you know how willingly i would fain believe you all that is noble, and just, and honourable, and perfectly incapable of trifling with a woman's heart." "first, then," said the count, "let me assure you that the words i have spoken were not, as you seemed to have imagined, for your ear alone, to be disavowed before the world. ever shall i be ready, willing, eager to avow those words, and the love i feel, and have spoken of, will never, can never die away in my heart. but oh, clémence, do you remember the words that passed between us in this very garden, as to whether a woman could love twice? do you remember what you acknowledged yourself on that occasion?" "and do you believe, then," said clémence, "after all that you have seen, that i have ever loved? do you believe," she said, with the bright but scornful smile that sometimes crossed her lip, "that because clémence de marly has suffered herself to be surrounded by fools and coxcombs, the one to neutralise and oppose the other--whereas if she had not done so, she must have chosen one from the herd to be her lord and master, and have become his slave--do you imagine, i say, that she has fallen in love with pretty monsieur de hericourt, with his hair frizzled like a piece of pastry, his wit as keen as a baby's wooden sword, and his courage of that high discriminating quality which might be well led on by a child's trumpet? or with the german prince, who, though a brave man and not without sense, is as courteous as an italian mountebank's dancing bear, who thinks himself the pink of politeness when he hands round a hat to gather the sous, growling between his teeth all the time that he does so? or with the duc de melcourt, who though polished and keen, and brave as his sword, is as cold-hearted as the iron that lies within that scabbard, and in seeking clémence de marly seeks three requisite things to accomplish a french nobleman's household, a large fortune which may pay cooks and serving men, and give at least two gilded coaches more: a handsome wife that cares nothing for her husband, and is not likely to disturb him by her love; and some influence at court which may obtain for him the next blue riband vacant?--out upon them all!" she added vehemently; "and fie, fie, fie, upon you, albert of morseiul! if i thought that you could love a person of whom you judged so meanly, i should believe you unworthy of another thought from me." it is useless to deny, that every word she spoke was pleasant to the ear of the count de morseiul; but yet she had not exactly touched the point towards which his own apprehensions regarding her had turned, and though he did not choose to name the chevalier, he still went on. "i have thought nothing of the kind you speak of clémence," he replied, "but i may have thought it possible for you to have met with another more worthy of your thoughts and of your affection than any of these; that you may have loved him; and that on some quarrel, either temporary or permanent, your indignation towards him, and your determination not to let him see the pain he has occasioned, may have made you fancy yourself in love with another. may not this be the case? but still, even were it not so, there is much--but i ask," he added, seeing the colour of clémence fluttering like the changing colours on the plumage of a bird, "but i ask again, may it not have been so?" clémence gazed at him intently and steadfastly for a moment, and there was evidently a struggle going on in her breast of some kind. perhaps albert of morseiul might misunderstand the nature of that struggle; indeed, it is clear he did so in some degree, for it certainly confirmed him in the apprehensions which he had entertained. the air and the expression of clémence varied considerably while she gazed upon him. for a moment there was the air of proud beauty and careless caprice with which she treated the lovers of whom she had just spoken so lightly; and the next, as some memory seemed to cross her mind, the haughty look died away into one of subdued tenderness and affection. an instant after, sadness and sorrow came over her face like a cloud, and her eyes appeared to be filling with irrepressible tears. she conquered that, too; and when she replied, it was with a smile so strangely mingled with various expressions, that it was difficult to discern which predominated. there was a certain degree of pride in her tone; there was sorrow upon her brow; and yet there was a playfulness round her eyes and lips, as if something made her happy amidst it all. "such might be the case," she replied, "such is very likely to be the case with all women. but pray, sir--having settled it all so well and so wisely--who was the favoured person who had thus won clémence de marly's love, while some few others were seeking for it in vain? your falcon, fancy, was certainly not without a lure. i see it clearly, monsieur de morseiul." "it might be one," replied the count, "whose rival i would never become, even were other things done away; it might be one long and deeply regarded by myself." "the chevalier, the chevalier!" exclaimed clémence, with her whole face brightening into a merry smile. "no, no, no! you have been deceiving yourself. no, no, count; the chevalier d'evran never has been, never will be, any thing to me but that which he is now; we have had no quarrel, we have had no coldness. it is quite possible, monsieur de morseiul, believe me, even for a weak woman like myself to feel friendship and place confidence without love." she strove in some degree to withdraw the hand that the count had taken, as if she were about to leave him; but the count detained it, gently saying, "stay yet one moment, clémence; let us yet have but one word more of explanation before we part." "no," she replied, disengaging her hand, "no; we have had explanations enough. never wed a woman of whom you have a single doubt, sir. no, no," she added, with a look slightly triumphant perhaps, somewhat sorrowful, but somewhat playful withal; "no, no! clémence de marly has already, perhaps, said somewhat too much already! but one thing i will tell you, albert of morseiul--you love her! she sees it, she knows it, and from henceforth she will not doubt it--for a woman does not trust by halves like a man. you love her! you will love her! and, though you have perhaps somewhat humiliated her; though you have made the proud humble and the gay melancholy, it is perhaps no bad lesson for her, and she will now make you sue, before you gain as a previous lover that which you now seem to require some pressing to accept adieu, monsieur de morseiul; there is, i see, somebody coming; adieu." "stay yet a moment, clémence; hear me yet urge something in my defence," exclaimed her lover. but clémence proceeded down the steps from the rampart, only pausing and turning to say in a tone of greater tenderness and interest,-- "farewell, albert, farewell; and for god's sake forget not the warning that i gave you this morning, nor any of the matters so much more worthy of attention than the worthless love of a gay capricious girl." thus saying, she hastened on, and passing by the person who was coming forward from the house--and who was merely a servant attached to the count de morseiul, as usual hunting out his master to interrupt him at the most inappropriate time--she hurried to a small door to the left of the building, entered, and mounting a back staircase which led towards her own apartments, she sought shelter therein from all the many eyes that were at that time beginning to move about the place; for her face was a tablet on which strong and recent emotion was deeply and legibly written. nor had that emotion passed, indeed; but, on the contrary, new and agitating thoughts had been swelling upon her all the way through the gardens, as she returned alone--the memories of one of those short but important lapses of time which change with the power of an enchanter the whole course of our being, which alter feeling and thoughts and hope and expectation, give a different direction to aspiration and effort and ambition, which add wings and a fiery sword to enthusiasm, and, in fact, turn the thread of destiny upon a new track through the labyrinth of life. there was in the midst of those memories one bright and beautiful spot; but it was mingled with so many contending feelings--there was so much alloy to that pure gold--that, when at length she reached her dressing-room and cast herself into a chair, she became completely overpowered, and, bursting into tears, wept bitterly and long. the old and faithful attendant whom albert of morseiul had seen with her in the forest, and who was indeed far superior to the station which she filled, both by talents, education, and heart, now witnessing the emotion of her young mistress, glided up and took her hand in hers, trying by every quiet attention to tranquillise and soothe her. it was in vain, for a long time, however, that she did so; and when at length clémence had recovered in some degree her composure, and began to dry her eyes, the attendant asked, eagerly, "dear, dear child, what is it has grieved you so?" "i will tell you, maria; i will tell you in a minute," replied clémence. "you who have been a sharer of all my thoughts from my infancy--you who were given me as a friend by the dear mother i have lost--you who have preserved for me so much, and have preserved me myself so often--i will tell you all and every thing. i will have no concealment in this from you; for i feel, as if i were a prophet, that terrible and troublous times are coming; that it is my fate to take a deep and painful part therein; and that i shall need one like you to counsel, and advise, and assist, and support me in many a danger, and, for aught i know, in many a calamity." "dear clémence, dear child," said the attendant, "i will ever do my best to soothe and comfort you; and what little assistance i can give shall be given; but i have trusted and i have hoped for many days--now both from what i have seen and what i have heard--that there was a stronger hand than that of a weak old woman soon about to be plighted to support and defend you for life." "who do you mean?" exclaimed clémence eagerly; "who are you speaking of, maria?" "can you not divine?" demanded the old lady; "can you not divine that i mean him that we saw in the forest--him, who seemed to my old eyes to wed you then, with the ring that your mother gave you, when she told you never to part with it to any one but to the man who was to place it again on your finger as your husband." "good heaven!" exclaimed clémence, "i never thought of that! i am his wife then, maria--at least i shall ever consider myself such." "but will he consider you so too?" demanded the attendant; "and do you love him enough to consider him so, dear child? i have never seen you love any one yet, and i only began to hope that you would love him when i saw your colour change as often as his name was mentioned." "i have said i would tell you all, maria," replied clémence, "and i will tell you all. i never have loved any one before; and how could i, surrounded as i have been by the empty, and the vain, and the vicious,--by a crowd so full of vices, and so barren of virtues, that a man thought himself superior to the whole world, if he had but one good quality to recommend him: and what were the qualities on which they piqued themselves? if a man had wit, he thought himself a match for an empress; if he had courage, though that, to say the truth, was the most general quality, he felt himself privileged to be a libertine, and a gamester, and an atheist; and, instead of feeling shame, he gloried in his faults. how could i love any of such men? how could i esteem them--the first step to love? i have but heard one instance of true affection in the court of france--that of poor conti to the king's daughter; and i never fancied myself such a paragon as to be the second woman that could raise such attachment. nothing less, however, would satisfy me, and therefore i determined to shape my course accordingly. i resolved to let the crowd that chose it follow, and flatter, and affect to worship, as much as ever they so pleased. it was their doing, not mine. i mean not to say that it did not please and amuse me: i mean not to say that i did not feel some sort of satisfaction--which i now see was wrong to feel--in using as slaves, in ordering here and there, in trampling upon and mortifying a set of beings that i contemned and despised, and that valued me alone for gifts which i valued not myself. had there been one man amongst them that at all deserved me--that gave one thought to my mind or to my heart, rather than to my beauty or my fortune--he would have hated me for the manner in which i treated him and others; and i might have learned to love him, even while he learned to contemn me. such was not the case, however, for there was not one that did so. had i declared my determination of never marrying, to be the slave of a being i despised, they would soon have put me in a convent, or at least have tried to do so; and i feared they might. therefore it was i went on upon the same plan, sitting like a waxen virgin in a shrine, letting adorers come and worship as much as they pleased, and taking notice of none. there is not one of them that can say that i ever gave him aught but a cutting speech, or an expression of my contempt it is now several years ago, but you must remember it well, when we were first with the duke at ruffigny." "oh, i remember it well," replied the attendant, "and the hunting, and your laying down the bridle like a wild careless girl, as you then were, and the horse running away with you, and this very count de morseiul saving you by stopping it ay, i remember it all well, and you told me how gallant and handsome he looked, and all he had said; and i laughed, and told you you were in love with him." "i was not in love," replied clémence, with the colour slightly deepening in her cheek, "i was not in love; but i might soon have been so even then. i thought a great deal about him; i was very young, had mixed not at all with the world, and he was certainly at that time, in personal appearance, what might well realise the dream of a young and enthusiastic imagination.--he is older and graver now," she added, musing, "and time has made a change on him; but yet i scarcely think he is less handsome. however, i thought of him a good deal then, especially after i had met him the second time, and discovered who he was: and i thought of him often afterwards. wherever there was any gallant action done, i was sure to listen eagerly, expecting to hear his name.--and how often did i hear it, maria! not a campaign passed but some new praises fell upon the count de morseiul. he had defended this post like some ancient hero, against whole legions of the enemy. he had thrown himself into that small fort, which was considered untenable, and held an army at bay for weeks. he had been the first to plant his foot on the breach; he had been the last in the rear upon a retreat. the peasant's cottage, the citizen's fire-side, owed their safety to him; and the ministers of another religion than his own had found shelter and protection beneath his sword. i know not how it was, but when all these tales were told me, his image always rose up before me as i had seen him, and i pictured him in every action. i could see him leading the charging squadrons. i could see him standing in the deadly breach. i could see the women and the children, and the conquered and the wounded, clinging to his knees, and could see him saving them. i did not love him, maria, but i thought of him a great deal more than of any one else in all the world. well, then, after some years, came the last great service that he rendered us, not many weeks ago, and was not his demeanour then, maria--was not his whole air and conduct in the midst of danger to himself and others--the peremptory demand of our liberation--the restoration of the ring i valued--the easy unshaken courtesy in a moment of agitation and risk,--was it not all noble, all chivalrous, all such as a woman's imagination might well dwell upon?" "it was, indeed," replied maria, "and ever since then i have thought that you loved him." "in the mean time," continued clémence, "in the mean time i had also become sadly spoilt. i had grown capricious, and vain, and haughty, by indulging such feelings for several years, in pursuit of my own system; and when the count appeared at poitiers, i do not know that i was inclined to treat him well. not that i would ever have behaved to him as i did to others; but i scarcely knew how to behave better. i believed myself privileged to say and do any thing i thought right, to exact any thing, nay, to command any thing. i was surprised when i found he took no notice of me; i was mortified perhaps; i determined, if ever i made him happy at last, to punish him for his first indifference,--to punish him, how think you? to make him love me, to make him doubtful of whether i loved him, and to make him figure in the train of those whom i myself despised. but, oh, maria, i soon found that i could not accomplish what i sought. there was a power, a command in his nature that overawed, that commanded me. instead of teaching him to love me, and making him learn to doubt that i loved him, i soon found that it was i that loved, and learned to doubt that he loved me. then came restlessness and disquietude. from time to time i saw--i felt that he loved me, and then again i doubted, and strove to make him show it more clearly, by the very means best calculated to make him crush it altogether. i affected to listen to the frivolous and the vain, to smile upon the beings i despised, to assume indifference towards the only one i loved. thus it went on till the last day of his stay, when he refused to accompany us on our hunting party, but left me with a promise to join us if he could. i was disappointed, mortified. i doubted if he would keep his promise. i doubted whether he had any inclination to do so, and i strove to forget, in the excitement of the chase, the bitterness of that which i suffered. suddenly, however, i caught a glance of him riding down towards us. he came up to my side, he rode on by me, he attended to me, he spoke to me alone; there was a grace, and a dignity, and a glory about his person that was new and strange; he seemed as if some new inspiration had come upon him. on every subject that we spoke of he poured forth his soul in words of fire. his eyes and his countenance beamed with living light, such as i had never before beheld; every thing vanished from my eyes and thoughts but him; every thing seemed small and insignificant and to bow before him; the very fiery charger that he rode seemed to obey, with scarcely a sign or indication of his will. the cavaliers around looked but like his attendants, and i--i maria--proud, and haughty, and vain as i had encouraged myself to be--i felt that i was in the presence of my master, and that, there, beside me, was the only man on earth that i could willingly and implicitly obey--i felt subdued, but not depressed--i felt, perhaps, as a woman ought to feel towards a man she loves, that i was competent to be his companion and his friend, to share his thoughts, to respond to all his feelings, to enter into his views and opinions, to meet him, in short, with a mind yielding, but scarcely to be called inferior, different in quality, but harmonious in love and thought. i felt that he was one who would never wish me to be a slave; but one that i should be prompt and ready to bend to and obey. can i tell you, maria, all the agony that took possession of my heart when i found that the whole bright scene was to pass away like a dream? since then many a painful thing has happened. i have wrung my heart, i have embittered my repose by fancying that i have loved, where i was not loved in return, that i have been the person to seek, and he to despise me. but this day, this day, maria, has come an explanation. he has told me that he loves me, he has told me that he has loved me long; he has taken away that shame, he has given me that comfort. we both foresee many difficulties, pangs, and anxieties; but, alas! maria, i see plainly, not only that he discovers in the future far more difficulties, and dangers, and obstacles between us than i myself perceive, but also that he disapproves of much of my conduct--that doubts and apprehensions mingle with his love--that it is a thing which he has striven against, not from his apprehension of difficulties, but from his doubts of me and of my nature; that love has mastered him for a time; but still has not subdued him altogether. it is a bitter and a sad thing," she added, placing her hands over her eyes. "but, dear child," said the attendant, "it will be easy for you to remove all such doubts and apprehensions." "hush, hush," replied clémence, "let me finish, maria, and then say no more upon this score to-day. i will hear all you can say tomorrow. he is gone by this time; god knows whether we shall ever meet again. but, at all events, my conduct is determined; i will act in every respect, whether he be with me or whether he be absent from me, whether he misunderstands me or whether he conceives my motives exactly--i will act as i know he would approve if he could see every action and every movement of my heart. i will cast behind me all those things which i now feel were wrong; though, heaven knows, i did not see that there was the slightest evil in any of them, till love for him has, with the quickness of a flash of lightning, opened my eyes in regard to my conduct towards others. i will do all, in short, that he ought to love me for; and, in doing that, i will in no degree seek him, but leave fate and god's will to work out my destiny, trusting that with such purposes i shall be less miserable than i have been for the last week. and now, maria," she added, "i have given you the picture of a woman's heart. let us dwell no more upon this theme, for i must wash away these tears, these new invaders of eyes that have seldom known them before, and go as soon as possible to monsieur de rouvré, to inform him of a part, at least, of my conversation with the count." chapter ii. the return. sometimes, amidst the storms and tempests of life, when the rain of sorrow has been pouring down amain, and the lightning of wrath been flashing on our path, the clouds overhead, heavy and loaded with mischief to come, and the thunder rolling round and round after the flash, there will come a brief calm moment of sweet tranquillity, as if wrath and enmity, and strife and care, and misfortune, had cast themselves down to rest, exhausted with their fury. happy is the man who in such moments can throw from him remembrance of the past, and apprehension of the future, and taste the refreshing power without alloy. but seldom can we do so: the passed-by storm is fresh on memory, the threatening aspect of the sky is full before our eyes, and such was the case with albert of morseiul, as on the third day after leaving poitiers he rode on towards his own abode. the degree of impatient anxiety under which he had laboured had caused him to make the two first days' journeys as long as possible, so that not above ten or twelve miles, or at most fifteen, lay between him and his own château, when he set out on that third morning from the inn. nothing occurred to disturb his journey; every thing passed in peace and tranquillity; known, loved, and respected in that part of the country, the people vied with each other as to which should show him the most affectionate civility, and no news either from the capital or poitiers had reached him to dissipate the apparent calm around. every thing wore the aspect of peace throughout the country. the peasant's wife sunned herself at the door of her cottage, with distaff and spindle in hand, plying lightly her daily toil, while her children ran or crawled about before her, full of enjoyment themselves, and giving enjoyment to her who beheld them. the peasant pursued his labour in the fields, and cheered it by a song; and although the count knew many of those whom he saw to be protestants, there was no appearance of anxiety or apprehension amongst them. every thing was cheerful, and contented, and tranquil, and the peace of the scene sank into his heart. angels may be supposed to look upon this earth's pleasures with a feeling of melancholy though not sadness, from a knowledge of their fragility; and so albert of morseiul, though he felt in some degree calmed and tranquillised by what he saw, yet could not prevent a sensation of deep melancholy from mingling with his other feelings, as he thought, "this can but last for a very, very little time." at length he turned into the very wood where he had encountered the robbers, which now bore, of course, a very different aspect in the full daylight from that which it had borne in the depth of the night. the summer sunshine was now streaming through the green leaves, and far away between the wide bolls of the trees, the mossy ground might be seen carpeted with velvet softness, and chequered with bright catches and streams of light. the road, too, though not in the full sunshine, was crossed here and there by long lines of radiance, and the sky over head was seen clear and blue, while every projecting branch of the tall trees above caught the light, and sparkled with a brighter green. the aspect of this scene was more tranquillising still than the last; but it did not chase the count's deep melancholy; and, finding that he was riding very slow, which only afforded time for thought when thought was useless, he turned round to see if his attendants were near, intending to ride on faster, if they were within sight. the road was very nearly straight; and, at the distance of four or five hundred yards, passing one of the soft green refreshing shadows cast by the wood, he saw the body of servants riding gaily on after him, conversing together. between him and them, however, just issuing from one of the green wood paths, which joined the high road, was another figure, which immediately called the count's attention. it was that of an old man, plain and simple in his own appearance, but mounted on a mule, gaily tricked and caparisoned, as was the universal custom in those days, with fringes and knobs of red worsted, and bells of many a size and shape about its collar and head-stall. the rider was not one of those whom men forget easily; and, though he was at a considerable distance as well as the attendants, the count instantly recognised good claude de l'estang. seeing the count pause, the old man put his mule into a quicker pace, and rode on towards him. when he came near he wished his young friend joy of his return, but his own face was any thing but joyful. "we shall all be indeed glad to see you, my dear albert," he said, "for we have very great need of your return on every account. besides all these grievous and iniquitous proceedings against the protestants, we have in our own bosom men who i hear had the impudence even to attack you; but who have since committed various other outrages of a marked and peculiar character. one man, i learn, has been shot dead upon the spot, another has been wounded severely, a third has been robbed and maltreated. but i cannot discover that any one has met with harshness, except such as are distinguished for a somewhat inordinate zeal in favour of the catholic faith. not a protestant has been attacked, which marks the matter more particularly, and the peasantry themselves are beginning to notice the fact, so that it will not be long before their priests take notice of it, and the eyes of the state will be turned angrily upon us." "i fear indeed that it will be so," replied the count; "but whether the result will or will not be evil, god in his wisdom only knows." "how is this, my dear albert?" exclaimed the clergyman. "you sent to me to ask that i should draw up a humble petition to the king, representing the protestants as peaceful, humble, obedient subjects, and surely we must take every measure that we may not by our own actions give the lie to our own words." "i will certainly, my dear friend," replied the count, "take every measure that it is possible for man to take, to put down this evil system of plunder and violence, whether it be carried on by protestants or catholics. there is a notorious violation of the law, and i am determined to put it down if it be possible, without any regard whatsoever to distinction between the two religions. the petition to the king was necessary when i wrote about it, and is so still, for it was then our only hope, and it may now be taken as a proof that even to the last moment we were willing to show ourselves humble, devoted, and loyal. i expect nothing from it but that result; but that result itself is something." "i fear, my son," said the old man, "that you have heard bad news since you wrote to me." "the worst," replied the count, with a melancholy shake of the head, "the very worst that can be given. they intend, i understand from authority that cannot be doubted, to suppress entirely the free exercise of our religion in france, and to revoke the edict of our good king henry which secured it to us." the old man dropped the reins upon his mule's neck, and raised his eyes appealingly to heaven. "terrible, indeed!" he said; "but i can scarcely credit it." "it is but too true--but too certain!" replied the count; "and yet terrible as this is--horrible, infamous, detestable as is the cruelty and tyranny of the act itself, the means by which it is to be carried into execution are still more cruel, tyrannical, and detestable." the old man gazed in his face as if he had hardly voice to demand what those means were; but after a brief pause the count went on: "to sum up all in one word, they intend to take the protestant children from the protestant mother, from the father, from the brother, and forbidding all intercourse, to place them in the hands of the enemies of our faith, to be educated in the superstitions that we abhor." "god will avert it!" said the old man; "it cannot be that even the sins and the follies of him who now sits upon the throne of france should deserve the signal punishment of being thus utterly given up and abandoned by the spirit of god to the tyrannical and brutal foolishness of his own heart. i cannot believe that it will ever be executed. i cannot believe that it will ever be attempted. i doubt not they will go on as they have begun; that they will send smooth-faced priests with cunning devices, as they have done indeed since you went hence, to bribe and buy to the domination of satan the weak and wavering of our flocks, and send lists of them to the king, to swell his heart with the pride of having made converts. i can easily conceive that they will be permitted to take from us places and dignities, to drive us by every sort of annoyance, so that the gold may be purified from the dross, the corn may be winnowed from the chaff. all this they will do, for all this undoubtedly we sinners have deserved. but i do not believe that they will be permitted to do more, and my trust is not in man but in god. for the sins that we have committed, for the weakness we have displayed, for murmurs and rebellion against his will, for sinful doubts and apprehensions of his mercy, from the earthliness of our thoughts, and the want of purity in all our dealings, god may permit us to be smitten severely, terribly; but the fiery sword of his vengeance will not go out against his people beyond a certain point. he has built his church upon a rock, and there shall it stand; nor will i ever believe that the reformed church of france shall be extinguished in the land, nor that the people who have sought god with sincerity shall be left desolate. we will trust in him, my son! we will trust in him!" "ay," said the count; "but my excellent old friend, it now becomes our duty to think seriously what, means, under god's will, we may use in defence of his church. i myself have thought upon it long and eagerly, but i have thought of it in vain, for the subject is so difficult and so embarrassed, that without some one to counsel me, some one to aid me, i can fix upon no plan that offers even a probability of success. i must speak with you before to-morrow be over, long and earnestly. i know not why i should not turn to your dwelling with you even now," he added; "i know not when i may be taken away from the midst of you, for much personal danger threatens myself. but, however, what i have to say must be said alone, and in private. the man riquet is behind, and though i believe he is faithful to me, and holds but loosely by his popish creed, i must not trust too far. let us turn towards your dwelling." "be it so, be it so," replied the old man; and wending on their way through the forest for some distance farther, they took the first road that turned to the right, and pursued the forest path that ran along through the bottom of the deep valleys, in which some part of the wood was scattered. it had been a bright and a beautiful day, but the air was warm and sultry; and the horses of the count looked more fatigued than might have been expected from so short a journey. the old clergyman and his young friend spoke but little more as they went along; and it was only to comment upon the tired condition of the horses, and the oppressive state of the atmosphere that they did so. "it is as well, my son," said claude de l'estang at length, "it is as well that you have turned with me, for depend upon it we shall have a storm. do you not see those large harsh masses of cloud rising above the trees?" "i have remarked them some time," replied the count, "and twice i thought i saw a flash." "hark!" exclaimed the clergyman, and there was evidently a sound of thunder not very distant. "let us ride a little quicker," the old man continued; "we are just coming to the slope of the hill where the wood ends, and then we are not far from auron." the count did as the pastor asked him, and the moment after they issued out from the wood, upon the shoulder of a gentle eminence, with green slopes declining, from either side of the road, into the valleys. a tall hill rose gradually to the left, along the side of which the highway was cut; and full in their view to the right,--but two or three miles on, across the valley, left by the eminence along which they rode--appeared the high conical hill of auron, crowned, as we have before described it, with the little village spire. though there were some detached masses of cloud sweeping over the sky above them, and twisting themselves into harsh curious forms, the sun was still shining warm and strong upon the spot where they were, while the storm, the voice of which they had heard in the wood, was seen treading the valleys and hills beyond towards auron, wrapped in a mantle of dark vapours and shadows. the contrast between the bright sunshine and sparkling light around them, with the sweeping thunder clouds that were pouring forth their mingled wrath upon the beautiful country beyond, was very fine, and the count drew in his horse for a moment to gaze upon it more at ease. "you see, though they have been busy in seducing my flock, over there," said the pastor, fixing his eyes with a look of affection upon auron, "you see they have still left me my spire to the church. i fear, not from any good will to me or mine," he added, "but because they say it acts as a sort of landmark at sea." the count made no reply, for he thought that the time was not far distant when that peaceful village would be the scene of persecution, if not of desolation, and the building where a quiet and industrious population had worshipped god for ages, according to the dictates of their own consciences, would be taken from them. his only answer then was a melancholy smile, as he rode slowly on again, still gazing on the village and the storm, the flashes of the lightning blazing across the path from time to time, as if the cloud from which they issued had been close above the travellers. scarcely, however, had the count and his companion gone a hundred yards along the side of the hill, when a bright fitful line of intense light darted across the curtain of the dark cloud before their eyes, aimed like a fiery javelin cast by the unerring hand of the destroying angel at the pointed spire of the village church. the shape of the spire was instantly changed; a part evidently fell in ruins; and, the next moment, the whole of that which stood, blazed forth in flames, like a fiery beacon raised on the highest hill of an invaded land to tell that strife and bloodshed have begun. "it is accomplished!" cried the pastor, as he gazed upon the destruction of the spire. "it is accomplished! oh, albert, how natural is weakness and superstition to the human heart! can we see the fall of that building in which for many a long year our pure faith has offered up its prayers, unmingled with the vanities of a false creed, and not feel as if the will of god were against us--as if that were a sign unto us that his favour had past from us, at least in this land--as if it were a warning for us to gird ourselves, and, shaking off the dust of our feet, to seek another place of abiding?" he paused not while he spoke, however, but rode on quickly, in order to aid and direct in saving any part of the building that yet remained; but as they went he still continued to pour forth many a sorrowful ejaculation, mingling, with personal grief for the destruction of an object which had for long years been familiar with his eye, and associated with every feeling of home, and peace, and of happy dwelling amongst his own people, and of high duties well performed, vague feelings of awe, and perhaps of superstition, as he read in that sight a warning, and a sign, and a shadowing forth of the almighty will, that the church whereof he was a member was destined to destruction also. before the party reached the village, the spire had been completely consumed; but the peasantry had fortunately succeeded in preventing the fire from reaching the body of the building, and the rain was now pouring down in torrents, as the tears of an angel of wrath over the accomplishment of his painful mission; so that all that remained was to ascertain what damage had been done. both the clergyman and the count remarked several strangers standing round the church offering no assistance to any one, and only communing together occasionally in a low voice on the proceedings of the protestant population. albert of morseiul gazed upon them with some surprise, and at length said, "i think, gentlemen, you might have given some little aid and assistance in this matter." "what!" cried one of the men, "aid in upholding a temple of heretics! what, keep from the destruction with which god has marked it, a building which man should long ago have pulled down!" "i did not know you, gentlemen," replied the count. "there are some circumstances in which people may be expected to remember that they are fellow-men and fellow-christians, before they think of sects or denominations." thus saying, he turned and left them, accompanying claude de l'estang to his dwelling. "never mind them, albert, never mind them," said the pastor as they walked along. "these are the men who are engaged daily in seducing my flock. i have seen them more than once as i have been going hither and thither amongst the people; but i have heeded them not, nor ever spoken to them. those who can sell themselves for gold--and gold is the means of persuasion that they are now adopting--are not steadfast or faithful in any religion, and are more likely to corrupt others, and to lead to great defection by falling away in a moment of need, than to serve or prop the cause to which they pretend to be attached. i trust that god's grace will reach them in time; but in a moment of increasing danger like this, i would rather that they showed themselves at once. i would rather, if they are to sell themselves either for safety or for gold, that they should sell themselves at once, and let us know them before the fiery ordeal comes. i would rather have to say, they went forth from us, because they were not of us, than think them children of light, and find them children of darkness." "i fear," said the count in a low voice, "i fear that they are waging the war against us, my good friend, in a manner which will deprive us of all unanimity. it is no longer what it was in former times, when the persecuting sword was all we had to fear and to resist. we have now the artful tongues of oily and deceitful disputants. we have all the hellish cunning of a sect which allows every means to be admissible, every falsehood, every misstatement, every perversion, every deceit, to be just, and right, and righteous, so that the object to be obtained is the promotion of their own creed. thus the great mass of the weak or the ill-informed may be affected by their teachers; while at the same time gold is held out to allure the covetous--the deprivation of rank, station, office, and emolument, is employed to drive the ambitious, the slothful, and the indifferent--and threats of greater severity of persecution, mental torture, insult, indignity, and even death itself, are held over the heads of the coward and the fearful." they thus conversed as they went along, and the opinion of each but served to depress the hopes of the other more and more. both were well acquainted with the spirit of doubt and disunion that reigned amongst the protestants of france, a spirit of disunion which had been planted, fostered, and encouraged by every art that a body of cunning and unscrupulous men could employ to weaken the power of their adversaries. on arriving at the house of claude de l'estang, the pastor put into the hands of his young friend the petition to the king which he had drawn up, and which perfectly meeting his views, was immediately sent off for general signature, in order to be transmitted to paris, and presented to the monarch. long before it reached him, however, the final and decisive blow had been struck, and, therefore, we shall notice that paper no more. a long conversation ensued between the pastor and his young friend; and it was evident to the count de morseiul, that the opinions of claude de l'estang himself, stern and fervent as they had been in youth, now rendered milder by age, and perhaps by sorrow, tended directly to general and unquestioning submission, rather than to resistance: not indeed to the abandonment of any religious principle, not to the slightest sacrifice of faith, not to the slightest conformity of what he deemed a false religion. no; he proposed and he advised to suffer in patience for the creed that he held; to see even the temples of the reformed church destroyed, if such an extreme should be adopted; to see persons of the purer faith excluded from offices and dignity, and rank and emoluments; even to suffer, should it be necessary, plunder, oppression, and imprisonment itself, without yielding one religious doctrine; but at the same time without offering any resistance to the royal authority. "but should they go still farther," said the count, "should they attempt to interdict altogether the exercise of our religion; should they take the child from the mother, the sister from the care of the brother; should they force upon us roman rites, and demand from us confessions of papistical belief, what are we to do then, my good old friend?" "our religious duties," replied the pastor, "we must not forbear to exercise, even if the sword hung over us that was to slay us at the first word. as for the rest, i trust and believe that it will not come to pass; but if it should, there will be no choice left us but resistance or flight. ask me not, albert, to decide now upon which of the two we should choose. it must ever be a dark, a painful, and a terrible decision when the time comes that it is necessary to make it; and perhaps the decision itself may be affected far more by the acts of others than by our own. we must determine according to circumstances; but, in the mean time, let us as far as possible be prepared for either of the two painful alternatives. we must make great sacrifices, albert, and i know that you are one of those who would ever be ready to make such for your fellow christians. if we are driven to flee from the land of our birth, and to seek a home in other countries; if by the waters of babylon we must sit down and weep, thinking of the jerusalem that we shall never behold again, there will be many, very many of our brethren compelled to fly with but little means of support, and perhaps it may be long before in other lands they obtain such employment as will enable them to maintain themselves by the work of their own hands. those who are richer must minister unto them, albert. luckily i myself can do something in that sort, for long ago, when there was no thought of this persecution, i sold what little land i had, intending to spend the amount in relieving any distress that i might see amongst my people, and to trust to the altar that i served for support in my old age. but little of this sum has been as yet expended, and if i did but know any hands in which i could trust it in a foreign land, either in england or in holland, i would transmit it thither instantly. you too, albert, if i have heard right, derived considerable wealth in money from some distant relation lately. for your own sake as well as others, it were better to place that in safety in foreign lands, for i find that it would be dangerous now to attempt to sell any landed possessions, and if you were forced to leave this country you might find yourself suddenly reduced to want in the midst of strangers." "i have not only thought of this before," replied the count, "but i have already taken measures for transmitting that sum to holland. as soon as i heard of the unjust prohibitions regarding the sale of lands by protestants, i wrote to holland to a banker whom i knew there in days of old, an honest man and a sincere friend, though somewhat too fond of gain. the sum i can thus transmit is far more than enough to give me competence for life, and if you please i can transmit thither the little store you speak of also." "willingly, willingly," replied the pastor; "it may be a benefit to others if not to me.--albert," he added, "i shall never quit this land! i feel it, i know it! my ministry must be accomplished here till the last: and whether i shall be taken from you by some of the ordinary events of nature, or whether god wills it that i should seal with my blood the defence of my faith and my testimony against the church of rome, i know not; but i am sure, i feel sure, that i shall never quit the land in which i was born." albert of morseiul did not attempt to argue with claude de l'estang upon this prejudice, for he knew it was one of those which, like some trees and shrubs, root themselves but the more firmly from being shaken, and from an ineffectual endeavour being made to pluck them out. for nearly two hours the young count remained at the house of the clergyman discussing all the various topics connected with their situation, while his servants were scattered about in different dwellings of the village. at the end of that time, however, master jerome riquet made his appearance at the pastor's house, to inform his lord (from a participation in whose actions he judged he had been too long excluded) that the storm had passed away; and, ordering his horses to be brought up, after a few more words with claude de l'estang, the count mounted and pursued his way homeward to the château of morseiul. throwing his rein to the groom, the young nobleman walked on through the vestibule, and entered the great hall. it was calm and solitary, with the bright evening sunshine streaming through the tall windows and chequering the stone floor. nothing was moving but a multitude of bright motes dancing in the sunbeam, and one of the banners of the house of morseiul shaken by the wind as the door opened and closed on the count's entrance. the whole aspect of the place told that it had not been tenanted for some time. every thing was beautifully clean indeed, but the tall-backed chairs ranged straight along the walls, the table standing exactly in the midst, the unsullied whiteness of the stone floor, not even marked with the print of a dog's foot, all spoke plainly that it had been long untenanted. the count gazed round it in silent melancholy, marked the waving banner and the dancing motes, and, if we may use the term, the solemn cheerfulness of that wide hall; and then said to himself, ere he turned again to leave it, "such will it be, and so the sun will shine, when i am gone afar--or in the grave." chapter iii. new acquaintances. we will now lead the reader into another and very different scene from any of those into which we have as yet conducted him. it is a small but cheerful sitting-room, or parlour, in the house of a comfortable citizen of the town of morseiul. there was every thing that could be required for comfort, and a little for show. the corner cupboard which protruded its round stomach into the room, like that of some fat alderman of the olden time, was ornamented with a variety of little gewgaws, and nick-nacks of silver, displayed in quaint array upon the shelves; and, besides several brass lamps and sconces wonderfully well polished, which were never lighted, were a number of articles of porcelain, of a kind which was then somewhat rare, and is now nearly invaluable. the two windows of this little parlour looked out upon the great square or market place, towards the southern corner of which it was situated, and commanded a view of a large blacksmith's forge on the opposite side, close by the gate leading down to what was called the count's road. there was a door out of this parlour, a black oaken door, with panels richly carved and ornamented, which appeared to lead into a room at the back, and another similar door at the side, opening into the passage which went straight through the house from the square into the garden behind. at the table in the midst of this room--which table, at the moment we speak of, that is, half past eight o'clock in the morning, was decorated with a large pewter dish, containing a savoury ragout of veal, flanked by two bottles of cider and four drinking cups--sat the burly person of good paul virlay, the rich blacksmith, who, being well to do in the world, and enabled by competence to take his ease, had not yet gone out to superintend the work which his men were carrying on at the forge opposite. another effect of his easy situation in life was, that he had time to perform those necessary ablutions too much required by the faces and hands of all blacksmiths, but which, alas! all blacksmiths are but too apt to neglect. it is true that, had he washed his face and hands for ever, or, after the prescribed rule of the arabian nights, had scoured them "forty times with alkali, and forty times with the ashes of the same plant," his face and hands would still have retained a certain glowing coppery brown hue, which they had acquired by the action of sun, and air, and fire, and hard work, and which they likewise possessed, it must be confessed, in some degree from nature. at the table with paul virlay were three other personages. the first was his daughter, a sweet little girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age, and the second his wife, a goodly dame, perhaps two years or three years older than himself, and who, being terribly marked with the smallpox, had never possessed any beauty. thus, at his marriage, virlay, who had been in much request amongst the young ladies of morseiul, declared that he had taken the good working horse instead of the jennet. she had always been extremely careful, laborious, active, and economical; somewhat given to smartness of apparel, indeed, but by no means to extravagance, and though decorating herself with black velvet riband, and large ornaments of gold, yet careful that the riband was not worn out too soon, and the gold ornaments neither bruised nor broken. on her right hand, between herself and her husband, sat the fourth person of the party, who was no other than the lady's brother, a stout, broad-made, determined-looking man, who had served long in the army under the count; and had risen as high, by his daring courage and somewhat rash gallantry, as any person not of noble blood could rise, except under very extraordinary circumstances. he had accumulated, it was said, a considerable sum of money--perhaps not by the most justifiable of all dealings with the inhabitants of conquered districts--so that armand herval was an object of not a little attention, and what we may call cupidity, to the unmarried young ladies of morseiul. that town was not, indeed, his regular dwelling place, for his abode was at a small town nearer to the sea coast, some five or six miles off; but he frequently came to visit his sister and brother-in-law, over both of whom he exercised very considerable influence, although, as frequently is the case, the latter was naturally a man of much stronger natural sense than himself. it is in almost all instances, indeed, energy that gives power; and with persons not well educated, or not very highly endowed by nature, that energy loses none of its effect from approaching somewhat towards rashness. such then was the case with paul virlay and his brother-in-law. when unmoved by any strong passions, however, armand herval was quite the man to lead and to seduce. he was gay, blithe, cheerful, full of frolic, fearless of consequences, specious in reasoning, possessing much jest and repartee, overflowing with tales, or anecdotes, of what he had seen, or heard, or done in the wars; and it was only when crossed, or opposed, or excited by wine or anger, that the darker and more fiery spirit of the somewhat ruthless trooper would break forth and overawe those that surrounded him. on the present morning there was a strange mixture in his demeanour of a sad and serious thoughtfulness, with gaiety and even merriment. he laughed and jested with his niece, he took a pleasure in teasing his sister, but he spoke, once or twice, in a low and bitter tone to paul virlay upon various matters which were taking place in the neighbourhood, and did not even altogether spare the count de morseiul himself. at that, however, virlay bristled up; and his brother-in-law, who had done it more from a spirit of teasing than aught else, only laughed at his anger, and turned the discourse to something else. he eat and drank abundantly of the breakfast set before him; laughed at the cleanness of virlay's face and hands, and the smartness of his brown jerkin, and insisted that his little niece should run to the window to see whether the men were working properly, saying that her father was no longer fit for his trade. the girl did as she was bid, and replied immediately, "i do not see the men at all, but i see the young count just turning the corner." "that is early," cried virlay, laying down his fork. "is he on horseback?" "no, he is on foot," replied the girl, "and nobody with him."--"he is coming over here, i declare he is coming over here," cried the girl, clapping her hands. "nonsense," cried virlay, starting up, as well as his wife and brother-in-law. "not nonsense at all, paul," cried herval. "he is making straight for the house, so i shall be off as fast as i can by the back door. i am not fond of making low bows, and standing with my hat in my hand, when i can help it." "stay, stay," cried virlay; "do not go yet, armand, i have much to talk with you about." but his brother-in-law shook his head, and darted through the oak door we have mentioned, into the room beyond. madame virlay bestirred herself to give order and dignity to the breakfast table; but before she could accomplish that purpose the count was in the open passage, and knocking at the door of the room for admission. virlay opened it immediately, and the young nobleman entered with that frank and graceful bearing which was part, indeed, of his inheritance, but which secured to him that hereditary love for his race which the virtues and kindness of his forefathers had established amongst the people. "good morrow, virlay," he said. "good morrow, madame virlay! oh, my pretty margette, why you have grown so great a girl that i must call you so no longer, lest the people say that i am making love to you.--virlay," he added, in a graver tone, "i would fain speak a word or two with you on business. i would not send for you to the château for various reasons, but cannot we go into the next room for a moment or two?" virlay made a sign to his wife and daughter to retire, and placed a seat for the count. "no, my lord," he said, "you shall not give yourself that trouble. shot the door, wife, and remember, no eves-dropping!" "bless thee, paul," exclaimed his wife, bridling with a little indignation; "do you think i would listen to what my lord count says to you? i know better, i trust," and she shut the door. perhaps neither the count, however, nor virlay were quite certain of the lady's discretion under such circumstances, and they, therefore, both remained near the window, and conversed in low tones. "i come to speak to you, virlay," said the count, in somewhat of a grave tone, "both as an influential man and as a sensible man--though he may have his little faults," he added, fixing his eyes somewhat meaningly upon the blacksmith's face, "and who may suffer himself to be a little too much led by others; but who, nevertheless, has the best intentions, i know, and who will always, sooner or later, remember that one must not do wrong that right may come of it." the blacksmith replied nothing, but kept his eyes fixed upon the ground, though the red became somewhat deeper in his brown cheek, and an expression of consciousness was to be seen in every feature of his countenance. "what i want to speak with you about is this," continued the count: "since i have been away, during this last campaign, there has sprung up, it seems, a dangerous band in this part of the province; consisting of men who are carrying on a system of violence, depredation, and intimidation, which must be put a stop to. what i want to consult with you in regard to, is the best means of putting down this band, for put down i am determined it shall be, and that right speedily." "you will not be able to put them down, my lord!" replied the blacksmith. "if mere simple plunder were the object of these persons, the thing would be easily done. you would have the whole people to aid you, and nothing would be more easy. but, my lord, such is not the case. the men may plunder--i do not say that it is not so--but they only plunder their enemies. it has always been so in this part of the country, as the good count, your father, well knew, and always will be so to the end of the world. people have given these bands different names, at different times, and from different circumstances. once they were called _les faucons_, because, at that time, the minister was sending down men into the country, taxing the salt and the fish, and when any of them came, one of these bands stooped upon him, like a falcon, carried him off, and he was never heard of more. at another time they were called _les eperviers_, the hawks, because they hovered over all the country and caught what they could. that was the time when the king sent down so many soldiers, that they could not carry off the collectors without hovering round them for a long time. now they call them _les chauve-souris_, or the bats, because they fly about just at the setting-in of night, and woe be to the persecuting papist that falls in their way. to-morrow, if obliged to do the work later at night, they may be called _les hiboux_, or the owls; and the time may come, perhaps, when they will be called _les loups_ or _les chouettes_, the wolves or the screech-owls: but they will do no harm to any one but their enemies. an honest man, who seeks to harm nobody, may go from one end of the province to another,--ay, and through all brittany, too, as well as poitou, without meeting with the least annoyance. but if it be different, if he be an oppressor of the people, a seller of men's souls, let him see that he travels by daylight only, and even then he wo'n't be very safe." "i do not know," said the count, "that i am either an oppressor of the people, or a buyer and seller of men's souls; and yet, my good friend virlay, these chauve-souris, as you call them, fastened their claws upon me, and put me to no slight inconvenience and discomfort. they might have shot me, too, for they fired right at my horse. you may have heard of all this before, i dare say," he added, with a smile. the blacksmith did not reply for a moment; but then he said, "i dare say, my lord, it was some mistake. i doubt not that they did not know you; or that some foolish fellow, as will happen sometimes, went beyond his orders." "but then again," said the count, "they both attacked and plundered two ladies, defenceless women, who could have given them no offence." "some hangers-on of a governor that was sent down to oppress the province," replied the blacksmith. "these bands, my lord, know all that's passing through the country better than you do yourself." "but in this instance," said the count, "they certainly knew not what they were about, for instead of a governor sent down to oppress the province, monsieur de rouvré is the very man to stand between the province and oppression, and, from all i hear, is likely to give up the post and the court, and retire to ruffigny, if the measures of the council are what he judges unfair towards us." "if he do that," said the blacksmith, "he will have a better body guard at ruffigny than ever he had at poitiers. but what is it you want me to do, monsieur le comte? i have no power to put down these bands. i have no sway with them or against them." "what i want you to do," replied the count, "is to use your whole power and influence in every way, to put a stop to a system which cannot be suffered to go on. sorry should i be to draw the sword against these mistaken people, but i must have them no more on the lands and lordships of morseiul, where they have quartered themselves i find during my absence. i must have my forests free of such deer, and you know, virlay, when i say a thing i will keep my word. i have been in their hands, and they were civil to me, respected my person, did something towards obeying my directions; and, although i know two of them, however well concealed they might be," he added, laying strong emphasis on the words, "i will in no degree betray the knowledge i acquired. i only wish to make it fully understood, that i wish this band to be dispersed. i am well aware of the evil custom that you allude to, and how deeply it has rooted itself in the habits of the people; but i tell you, virlay, that this is likely to produce more evil to the cause of the reformed church than any thing that could be devised. at all events, it is contrary altogether to the laws of the land, and to civil order, and whatever be the pretext, i will not tolerate it on my lands. i wish the bands to be dispersed, the night meetings to be abandoned, the men to pursue their lawful employments, and in other hours to take their necessary rest. but, at all events, as i have said before, within my jurisdiction they shall not remain. if they go to the lands of other lords, i cannot of course help it; but i trust that those other lords will have spirit and decision enough to drive them off their territories. let us say no more about it, virlay. you understand me distinctly, and know my whole meaning; and now, let me know when, and how, i may best obtain a meeting with a person called brown keroual, for i must make him hear reason also." the blacksmith paused for two or three minutes before he answered. "why, my lord," he said at length, "i ought not to tell you any thing about him, perhaps, by that name. on all accounts, perhaps i ought not; but yet i know i can trust you; and i am sure you will take no advantage. so i'll only ask you one thing, not to go down to where he is, with too many people about you, for fear of bad consequences if there should be any of his folks about." "i shall go down," said the count, "towards the place where i hear he is generally to be met with, with only two servants; and when i come near enough, i shall give the horse to the servants, and walk forward on foot." "you will be as safe as in your own château, then," said the blacksmith; "but you must not go for a couple of days, as where he will be tomorrow, and next day, i cannot tell. but if, on the day after, you will be just at the hour when the but begins to flit, at a little turn of the river about six miles down.--you know the high rock just between the river and the forest, with the tall tree upon it, which they call the _chêne vert_." "i know it well. i know it well," said the count. "but on which side of the rock do you mean? the tall face flanks the river, the back slopes away towards the wood." "at the back, at the back," replied the blacksmith. "amongst the old hawthorns that lie scattered down the slope. you will find him there at the hour i mention." "i will be there," said the count in reply, "and i will allow the intervening time for the band to quit the woods of morseiul. but if it have not done so by the morning after, there will be a difference between us, which i should be sorry for." thus saying, the count left the worthy townsman, and took his way back to the château. in the two days that intervened, nothing occurred to vary the course of his existence. he entertained some expectation of receiving letters from poitiers, but none arrived. he heard nothing from the governor, from the chevalier d'evran, or from clémence de marly; and from paris, also, the ordinary courier brought no tidings for the young count. a lull had come over the tempestuous season of his days, and we shall now follow him on his expedition to the _chênt vert_, under which, be it said, we have ourselves sat many an hour thinking over and commenting upon the deeds we now record. the count, as he had said, took but two servants with him, and rode slowly on through, the evening air, with his mind somewhat relieved by the absence of any fresh excitement, and by the calm refreshing commune of his spirit with itself. on the preceding day there had been another thunder storm; but the two which had occurred had served to clear and somewhat cool the atmosphere, though the breath of the air was still full of summer. when at the distance of about a mile and a half from the spot which the blacksmith had indicated, the count gave his horse to his servants, and bade them wait there for his return. he wandered on slowly, slackening his pace as much to enjoy the beauty and brightness of the scene around, as to let the appointed time arrive for his meeting with the leader of the band we have mentioned. when he had gone on about a hundred yards, however, he heard in the distance the wild but characteristic notes of a little instrument, at that time, and even in the present day, delighted in throughout poitou, and known there by the pleasant and harmonious name of the musette. sooth to say, it differs but little, though it does in a degree, from the ordinary bagpipe; and yet there is not a peasant in poitou, and scarcely a noble of the province either, who will not tell you that it is the sweetest and most harmonious instrument in the world. it requires, however, to be heard in a peculiar manner, and at peculiar seasons: either, as very often happens in the small towns of that district, in the dead of the night, when it breaks upon the ear as the player walks along the street beneath your window, with a solemn and plaintive melody, that seems scarcely of the earth; or else in the morning and evening tide, heard at some little distance amongst the hills and valleys of that sunny land, when it sounds like the spirit of the winds, singing a wild ditty to the loveliness of the scene. the count de morseiul had quite sufficient national, or perhaps we should say provincial, feeling to love the sound of the musette; and he paused to listen, as, with a peculiar beauty and delicacy of touch, the player poured on the sounds from the very direction in which he was proceeding. he did not hasten his pace, however, enjoying it as he went; and still the nearer and nearer he came to the _chênt vert_, the closer he seemed to approach to the spot whence the sounds issued. it is true the player could not see him, as he came in an oblique line from the side of the water, to which at various places the wood approached very near. but the moment that the count turned the angle of the rock which we have mentioned, and on the top of which stood the large evergreen oak, from which it took its name, he beheld a group which might well have furnished a picture for a phyllis and a corydon to any pastoral poet that ever penned an idyl or an eclogue. seated on a little grassy knoll, under one of the green hawthorns, was a girl apparently above the common class, with a veil, which she seemed to have lately worn over her head, cast down beside her, and with her dark hair falling partly upon her face as it bent over that of a man, seated, or rather stretched, at her feet, who, supporting himself on one elbow, was producing from the favourite instrument of the country the sounds which the count had heard. lying before them, and turning its sagacious eyes from the face of the one to the face of the other, was a large rough dog, and the girl's hand, which was fair and small, was engaged in gently caressing the animal's head as the count came up. so occupied were they with each other, and so full were the tones of the music, that it was the dog who first perceived the approach of a stranger, and bounded barking forward towards the count, as if the young nobleman were undoubtedly an intruder. the girl and her lover--for who could doubt that he was such?--both rose at the same time, and she, casting her veil over her head, darted away with all speed towards the wood, while her companion called after her, "not far, not far." the count then perceived, somewhat to his surprise, that the veil she wore was that of a novice in a convent. notwithstanding the barking of the dog, and the somewhat fierce and uncertain aspect of his master, the count advanced with the same slow, steady pace, and in a minute or two after was standing within five steps of armand herval. that good personage had remained fixed to his place, and for sometime had not recognised the young count; but the moment he did so, a change came over his countenance, and he saluted him with an air of military respect. "good day, armand," said the count, "i am afraid i have disturbed your young friend; but pray go after her, and tell her that i am neither spy nor enemy, so she need not be alarmed. come back and speak to me, however, for i want a few minutes' conversation with you.--have you seen your brother-in-law virlay, lately?" "not for several days," replied armand; "but i will go after her, my lord, and see her safe, and come back to you in a minute." "do so," replied the count, "and i will wait for you here. will you not stay with me, good dog?" he added, patting the dog's head and casting himself down upon the ground; but the dog followed his master, and the count remained alone, thinking over the little picture which had been so unexpectedly presented to his eyes. "this lets me into much of the history," he thought. "here is a motive and an object both for accumulating wealth and intimidating the papists! but how can he contrive to get the girl out of a convent to sit with him here, listening to him playing the musette, while it is yet the open day? it is true, we are at a great distance from any town or village. the only religious house near, either, is that upon the hill two miles farther down. though i cannot prevent this business, i must give him some caution;" and then he set himself to think over the whole affair again, and to endeavour to account for an event which was less likely perhaps to take place in that province, in the midst of a protestant population, than in any other part of france. some time passed ere armand herval returned, and by this time the twilight was growing thick and grey. "it is later than i thought, herval," said the young count, rising from the ground, on which he had been stretched, as the other came up; "i shall hardly have time to say all i had to say, even if the person were here that i came to converse with." "then you did not come to see me, my lord?" demanded herval, in a tone perhaps expressive of a little mortification. "no, herval," replied the count with a slight smile, "i came to see a person called brown keroual: but," he added, after a moment's pause, "if you are likely to stay here, i will leave the message with you." the count stopped as if for a reply, and his companion answered, "speak, speak, my lord count! your message shall not fail to reach him." "well then, armand," replied the nobleman, "tell keroual this for me: first, that i know him--that i recognised him the moment he spoke when last we met; but that having some regard for him, i do not intend to take any advantage whatever of that knowledge to his prejudice, although he be engaged in wrong and unlawful deeds. however, i came here to meet him, in order to reason with him on his conduct, for he is a good and a gallant soldier, and would now have been an officer--for i recommended him for advancement--had it not been for that plundering of the priory of st. amand, which was thrown in my teeth by monsieur de louvois whenever i mentioned his name." "if louvois had been in it," replied his companion, "it would not have escaped half as well as it did; for i think, according to the very doctrines of their popish church, the good act of burning one louvois would be quite enough to obtain pardon for the sin of burning a whole score of monks along with him. but what were you going to say farther, sir?" "why, to brown keroual," continued the count, "i was going to say, that he is engaged in a matter contrary to all law and order, heading a band of robbers which must be----" "i beg your pardon, sir," interrupted herval somewhat impatiently, "not robbers! if you please, a band of _chauve-souris_. they rob no man: they only plunder the enemy; and let me tell you, my lord count, that there is many a man more or less joined with that band, who would just as soon think of robbing another as you would.--has any thing been asked for the ring, though it was the ring of a papist? was not the money that was taken from you restored?" "it was," replied the count; "but we must not be too nice about our terms, herval. i do not know any law, human or divine, that allows a man to pick and choose at his own will and pleasure whom he will rob, and whom he will murder." "ay, my noble lord," answered the man, getting warm; "but there is a law of nature, which, after all, is a law of god, and which not only justifies but requires us to destroy him who would destroy us; and, whether it be straightforwardly that he is seeking our destruction, or by cunning and crooked paths, it matters not, we have a right to prevent him by every means in our power, and if we catch hold of him, to knock him on the head like a viper or any other noxious vermin." "in all cases but direct attack," answered the count, "civil society gives our defence into the hands of the law." "but when the law and its ministers are leagued with the destroyers, with the real plunderers, with the real disturbers of the public peace," exclaimed the man vehemently, "we must make a new law for ourselves, and be its officers also." the count did not interrupt him, as he was very well pleased to be made acquainted clearly with all the views and opinions of that body of men whom armand herval might be supposed to represent; and the soldier went on with great volubility, and some eloquence, to defend the right of resistance with all the well-known arguments upon the subject, which have been repeated and combated a thousand times; but he came not a bit nearer than any who had gone before him to the real question at issue, namely, where the duty of submission ceased and the right of resistance began. we must remember that not only the higher orders, but also the lower classes of french protestants were at that time much more generally enlightened and accustomed to the use of their own reason, than the catholics, and the natural consequence of any attempt to oppress them, was to render such arguments as those used by herval, very common amongst them. neither was the count de morseiul prepared to oppose the general scope of the man's reasoning, though he was determined to resist the practical misapplication of it, which was then actively going on in the province. "i will not argue with you, herval," he said, "nor will i attempt to persuade you that what the council is doing now, and may do against us poor protestants, is right, feeling it as i do to be wrong. but, nevertheless, i think--nay, i am sure--that such proceedings, as those of the band we speak of, are perfectly incompatible with our duty to the king and our fellow-subjects, and likely to produce infinitely greater evil to the reformed religion than good. the existence of such bands will give an excuse for sending a large military force into the province, for persecuting the protestants still farther, and for taking such precautions that even, if a crisis were to come, in which the resistance to oppression which you speak of were necessary, it would be rendered hopeless by the prepared state of the enemy. in the mean time it is wrong, because, at the best, it is carrying on what you call hostilities without a declaration of war; it is dangerous to the peaceful even of our own friends, as has been shown in my case, and in that of two ladies of the governor's family, who is most warmly interested in our behalf; and it is degrading a powerful and just cause in the eyes of all men, by giving its supporters the air of night plunderers." "as for a declaration of war," replied herval, "they have made that themselves by their own acts, and as to the rest of what you say, sir, there are objections certainly. did i but see our noblemen like yourself, and our ministers preparing a good resistance to tyranny and injustice, i would be as quiet as a lamb. but i see nothing of the kind; you are all sitting still in your houses, and waiting till they come to cut your throats. so as there must and shall be resistance of some kind, and it must begin by the lower instead of the higher, we must even take the lesser of two evils, and go on as we have done." armand herval spoke, as was common with him when at all heated, with very little reverence or respect in his tone; but albert of morseiul was not of a character to suffer himself to be irritated in the slightest degree by any want of formal respect. no man knew better how to preserve his own dignity without making any exaction, and he accordingly replied, with perfect calmness,-- "i should be sorry, armand, that our good friend brown keroual should persist in conduct which may make a division amongst different classes of the protestants, at the very moment that we require union for our common safety. you will therefore let him know at once, that i am determined, upon my own lands, to put an end to this system; that my forest and my moors shall no longer hold these _chauve-souris_. the day after to-morrow i shall begin my operations, and as i know the country as well as any man in it, shall have no difficulty in putting my plans in execution. keroual knows me for a man of my word, and i must not have one single man disguised and in arms any where within my jurisdiction at the end of three days from this time." the man smiled with a grim but less dissatisfied look than the count had expected. "they none of them wish to give you offence, sir," he replied, "and can easily move off your lands to others." "that they must do," replied the count, "but there is something more still to be said. when once off my lands, they may doubtless consider that the matter is at an end; but such is not the case." "my lord, if you follow us off your lands," said armand, dropping farther disguise, and making use of the pronoun of the first person, "if you follow us off your own lands, you must take the consequences." "i am always prepared to do so," replied the count. "my purpose is not of course to follow any of you off my own lands, unless i am summoned to do so; but if i am summoned, which will immediately be the case if there be any renewal of outrages whatsoever, i shall most assuredly use my whole power, and employ my whole means, to put down that which i know to be wrong." the man to whom he spoke gazed sternly upon the ground for a moment or two, and seemed to be struggling with various contending feelings. "come, my lord count," he said at length, "i will tell you what. every one who has served under you knows that you are as brave a man, as kind an officer, and as skilful a commander as any that ever lived, and we are all willing to do what we can to please you in your own way. if you would put yourself at our head, there is not a man amongst us that would not follow you to death itself.--no, but hear me out, my lord; don't answer till you have heard.--we get quicker information than even you can get, for with us it flies from mouth to mouth like lightning. we have no long written letters, but as soon as a thing is known, one man tells it to another, and so it comes down here. now we know what most likely you don't know, that every thing is settled in paris for putting down the reformed religion altogether. we know, too, which i see you don't know, that the duc de rouvré has received orders from the court to resign the government of the province, and retire to ruffigny, without presenting himself at the court. now depend upon it, my lord, before a fortnight be over, you will have to rouse yourself against this oppression, to make the voice of remonstrance heard in firmer tones, and with arms in your hand. you know it as well as i do, and i know you are no more afraid of doing it than i am; but only, like all the rest of the people about the court, you have gone mad concerning a thing called loyalty, and have got your head filled with ideas of respect and veneration for the king--simply because he is the king and wears a crown--when if the truth were known, he is not so much worthy of respect and veneration as any of our peasants who drive a team of oxen, with a whip of sheep leather, from one end of the field to the other. a selfish, voluptuous, adulterous tyrant----" "hush, hush," exclaimed the count, "i can neither stay nor hear, if you proceed in such terms as those." "well, well," said the man, "though what i say is true, and you know it, my lord count, i wo'n't go on if it offends you. but what i was going to say besides is this. you have got your head filled with these ideas; you wish to do every thing respectfully and loyally; you wish to show the most profound respect for the law, and be compelled to resist before you do resist. but are our enemies doing the same towards us? are they showing any respect for the law, or for justice, or good faith, honour, honesty, or treaties? no, no, they are taking step by step, and ruining us piecemeal! my lord, you are like a man in a fortress, with a truce between him and a perfidious enemy, who takes advantage of his good nature to get possession of one outpost after another, then marches over the glacis, lodges himself on the counterscarp, erects his batteries, points his cannon, and says, 'now, surrender, or i'll blow you to pieces!' this is what you are suffering to be done, my lord; and, at one word, if you, count, will come and put yourself at our head to resist oppression, you shall have two hundred men at one whistle; and ere five days be over you shall have two thousand; before ten days ten thousand. will you do it?" "undoubtedly not," replied the count. "were the time to come that all other means having failed, i should be forced to stand upon my own defence, and the defence of my fellow protestants, i would openly plant my banner on the hill of morseiul, stand upon the straightforward justice of my cause, point to the unvarying loyalty of my life, and demand simple justice for myself and my brethren." "and you would find all confusion and consternation in your own party," replied the man, "not a skeleton even of a regiment ready to support you, the timid abandoning you, and the brave unprepared. you would find, on the other side, the enemy upon you before you knew where you were; instead of justice you would get persecution, and, before a fortnight was over, your head would be rolling about the place de grève. well, well, be it so!--i will help you yet, my lord, whether you like it or not, and when the day of danger comes, you may find brown keroual and his band nearer to your hand than you imagine. in the mean time, we will keep as quiet as may be. but if you hear of a few jesuits and lazarites being hung, you must not be surprised, that's all.--have you any thing farther to say to me, my lord? for it is now quite dark; and, like a sober peaceable man," he added with a laugh, "i must be going home to supper. one or two of my companions may come to fetch me, too." "i have nothing farther to say, armand," replied the count, "except, perhaps, it were a word of caution about that young person i saw with you just now; and who, i must say, i was sorry to see with you." "why, my lord, why?" demanded the man quickly; "you don't suppose i would do her hurt. i would not injure her, so help me god! for the whole world. if you had not come up, i should have taken her back in five minutes." "i do not suppose you would wrong her, herval," said the count, "by no means do i suppose such a thing; but she out here with you, with a novice's veil on! she is evidently some roman catholic girl in a monastery, and i would have you cautious on that account." "oh, my lord," replied the man, "the time for caution is all over now. we are soon coming to a setting to rights of all those things. quiet cannot be kept up above a fortnight longer, and then the doors of more than one convent will be as wide open as the sea. one of three things must then happen. we shall either have established our rights, and my little novice will be out of her fetters; or we shall be defeated and i killed, and that matter over; or defeated, yet living and flying away with her, pretty soul, to some country where we may be united in peace." "yes, yes," replied the count; "but you do not reflect what you may bring upon her head in the mean time. she may be removed from that convent to another, where you can never reach her. if these wanderings with you are detected, she may be subjected too to punishments and penances, such as you have no idea of." the man laughed aloud. "no fear, my lord, no fear," he said; "the good mothers dare no more send her away than they dare lose their right hand. they would fancy the convent in flames the very first night she slept out of it. why, she is their guardian angel, at least so they think; and she is specially appointed to bring their tribute, consisting of a silver crown and a flask of wine, twice in the week to brown keroual, in virtue of which they obtain his protection against all bands and companies whatsoever. the only stipulation they made when the tribute was demanded, was, that he was on no account to tell the director; and when the director, who is a greater old woman than any one amongst them, heard it in confession, he added, a fifteen sous piece once a week for himself, with no other stipulation than that brown keroual was not to tell the bishop; so that twice in the week the dear child brings me the tribute--ay, and the real tribute, for which i sought, of her own sweet company. nobody dares watch her, nobody dares follow her; and as she is always absent the same time, and always back again before the bat's wing is to be seen flitting in the air, they ask no questions, but judging the distance long, exempt her from vespers, that she may accomplish it more easily. and now, my lord count," he continued, "i must leave you, for my people will be waiting for me. i think where we now stand is off your lordship's ground, for i could not well give up this meeting place. but farther than this, i shall not come, till the time when you shall be very willing to thank brown keroual for his help." the count made no reply to his words, but wishing him good night, he left him, and rejoined his servants. he then rode quickly homeward, but was somewhat surprised, as he climbed the steep towards the castle, to see a full blaze of light pouring through the windows of the lesser hall. on entering the gates, however, he saw several horses and servants in the liveries of the chevalier d'evran, and found his friend seated at supper in the hall above. "you see, albert," said the chevalier, rising and grasping his hand as he came in, "you see what liberties i take, and what account i make of your friendship. here i come, and order all sorts of viands without ceremony, simply because i have ridden hard and am desperately an hungred." his countenance was frank and open, though not perhaps so cheerful in its expression as usual; his manner was free and unembarrassed, and seemed not as if any thing that had occurred at poitiers would have the slightest tendency to diminish the friendship and intimacy that existed between him and the count. albert of morseiul, however, could not feel exactly the same. he could not divest his mind of a vague feeling of jealous disquietude in regard to the confident intimacy which seemed to exist between the chevalier d'evran and clémence de marly. however hopeless might be his own love towards her--however much he might have taught himself that despair was in his case wisdom--however strong might be his resolutions to resist every temptation to seek her society any more, there was something painful to him that he could not overcome, in the idea of the chevalier being constantly at her side; and although his regard and affection for his friend were not diminished, yet there was an unpleasant feeling at his heart when he saw him, which perhaps might make some difference in his manner. "many thanks for doing so, louis," he answered, struggling hard against his own feelings, "many thanks for doing so. what news bring you from poitiers?" the chevalier did not appear to feel any difference in the manner of his friend, and replied, "but little news, albert, and that not good. i was but one day in poitiers before i set off in haste. i found every thing in confusion and derangement. the states split into factions; the governor, the intendant, and the bishop, at open war with each other; cabals of the basest and blackest character going on in every quarter of the town; good madame de rouvré wishing her husband any thing but a governor; and clémence de marly looking pale, ill, and sorrowful. i stayed but a sufficient time," he continued, not giving the count an opportunity to make any observations, "i stayed but a sufficient time to make myself thoroughly acquainted with all that was proceeding, and then set off at once for the purpose of proceeding to paris with all speed. i came to spend two or three hours with you, albert, at the most, for i must hurry on without delay. the king, you know, is my godfather, and i trust that my representation of what is taking place at poitiers may do some good. if it do not, de rouvré is ruined, and a most pitiful intrigue triumphant." "i trust in heaven that you may be successful," replied the count; "but proceed with your supper, d'evran." "i will, i will," replied the chevalier, "but will you let me give you one more proof of how much at home i can make myself in your house, by giving an order to your servants?" "most assuredly," replied the count; "you have nothing to do but to speak." "it is this, then," said the chevalier; "you will be good enough, master jerome riquet, to make all these worthy gentlemen who are assisting you to serve my supper march out of the room in single file. now come, master riquet, do it in an officer-like way. you have seen service, i know." riquet seemed well pleased at the honourable task conferred upon him, and according to the chevalier's direction made the servants troop out of the room one by one, he himself preparing to remain as a confidential person to serve the count and his friend during the conversation which he doubted not was to ensue. the chevalier, however, as soon as he saw himself obeyed so far, again raised his voice, saying,-- "now, master riquet, you have executed the man[oe]uvre so well, that it is a pity your men should be without their officer. you will be good enough to follow them." riquet made a sort of semi-pirouette on the tips of his toes, and disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, marched out of the room, and shut the door. "albert," said the chevalier, as soon as he was gone, "i am afraid, very much afraid, that all is lost for the cause of you huguenots. there are people about the king, who must be mad to counsel him as they do. all the news i have, which perhaps you know already, is as sad as it can be. there wants but one more step to be taken for the utter abolition of what you call the reformed religion in france--i mean the abolition of the privileges granted by the edict of nantes--and perhaps that step will be taken before i can reach paris." "so quickly?" exclaimed the count. "even so!" rejoined his friend. "all the mad-like steps which have been taken by the council have been applauded by one general roar of the whole clergy of france. petition after petition has come in from every catholic body through the land, beseeching the king to do you every sort of injustice, and i feel convinced that they are persuading him, while he is risking a civil war, ruining his provinces, and exasperating some of his most faithful subjects, that he is acting justly, politicly and religiously, and is, in short, a saint upon earth, notwithstanding all his mistresses. i pretend to no power over the king or influence with him, except inasmuch as i can often say to him, in my wild rambling way, things that nobody else could say, and dare to tell him under the same cloak many an unpleasant fact that others will not tell him. however, my object now is to open his eyes about de rouvré, to whom i am too deeply bound by ties of gratitude to see him injured and calumniated, if i can help it. i would fain ask you, albert, what you intend to do, how you intend to act, when these rash measures are pushed to the extreme against you; but yet it is unfair to give you the pain of refusing me, and perhaps unwise to seek a share in secrets which i ought not to know, or, knowing, to reveal." "as far as any thing has yet passed," replied the count, "there is nothing either to conceal or to reveal, louis. it will be difficult for the king to tire out my loyalty. i am determined to bear to the very utmost. what i shall do when the very utmost bound of endurance is passed i do not know, having as yet settled nothing in my own mind." "i cannot think," continued the chevalier, "that the king will individually treat you ill, who have served him so well; but with regard to your religion, depend upon it the utmost extremes are determined upon already." "i grieve to hear it," replied the count, "but it is not more than i expected. the rapidity of these measures gives no time for calm and loyal remonstrance or petition to make the king aware of the real truth." "such is indeed the case," said the chevalier. "couriers are arriving at poitiers and taking their departure again five or six times in the day, killing the horses on the road, setting off fat men themselves and returning thin.--i know this is no joking matter, albert, and i am anxious to do what little good i can. i am therefore going to follow the example of these couriers, and as soon as i have seen the king, and obtained some satisfaction on these matters, i shall return hither with all speed to watch the progress of events, and if possible to shield and protect my friends. in this quarter of the world," he added, holding out his hand to the count with a frank smile, "in this quarter of the world are all those for whom i entertain any very sincere affection; de rouvré, who has befriended me from my youth, and never lost an opportunity of serving me; you, albert, who have been my companion for many years in perils and dangers, to whom i owe the immense benefit of a good example, and the no less inestimable blessing of a noble mind to communicate with under all circumstances." "and clémence de marly," said the count, with a melancholy smile, "of course you will add clémence de marly, chevalier." "assuredly," replied the chevalier, "assuredly, albert, i will add clémence de marly. i will not ask you, albert, why you look at me reproachfully. clémence, i believe from my heart, loves you, and i scruple not to tell you so. if it were not for the cursed obstacle of your religion, you might both be happy. that is a terrible obstacle, it is true; but were it not for that--i say--you might both be happy, and your example and her love for you might do away the only faults she has, and make her to you a perfect angel, though there is not one other man in france, perhaps, whom she could endure or render happy. she also, and her fate, are amongst the objects of my journey to paris; but of that i shall tell you nothing till i can tell you all." "i know you are a man of mysteries," said the count with a faint smile, "and therefore i suppose i must neither attempt to investigate this, nor to enquire how it is, that the gay and gallant chevalier d'evran is in one way insensible to charms which he is so sensible of in other respects." "you are right, albert, not to make any such attempt," replied the chevalier. "with respect to love for clémence, a thousand causes may have produced the peculiar feelings i entertain towards her. i may _have loved_ and been cured." the count made no reply, but fell into a reverie; and after gazing on him for a minute or two the chevalier added, "you, albert, love her, and are not cured." his friend, however, was still silent, and, changing the conversation, the chevalier talked of indifferent things, and did not return to subjects of such painful interest, till midnight came, and he once more took his departure from the château of morseiul. chapter iv. the preaching in the desert. again we must pass over a brief space of time, and also somewhat change the scene, but not very far. in the interval, the acts of a bigoted and despotic monarch had been guided by the advice of cruel and injudicious ministers, till the formal prohibition of the opening of any protestant place of worship throughout france for the service of god, according to the consciences of the members of the reformed church, had been proclaimed throughout the land. such had been the change, or rather the progress, made in that time; and the falling off of many leading protestants, the disunion which existed amongst others, the overstrained loyalty of some, and the irresolution of many, had shown to even the calmer and the firmer spirits, who might still have conducted resistance against tyranny to a successful result, that though, perhaps, they might shed oceans of blood, the protestant cause in france was lost, at least for the time. the scene, too, we have said, was changed. it was no longer the city of poitiers, with its multitudes and its gay parties; it was no longer the château, with its lord and his attendants; it was no longer the country town, with its citizens and its artizans; but it was upon one of those dark brown moors of which so many are to be found on the borders of brittany and poitou, under the canopy of heaven alone, and with nothing but the bleakest objects in nature round about. the moor had a gentle slope towards the westward. it was covered with gorse and heath, interspersed with old ragged hawthorns, stunted and partly withered, as we often see, some being brought up in poverty and neglect, never knowing care or shelter, stinted and sickly, and shrivelling with premature decay. cast here and there amongst the thorns, too, were large masses of rock and cold grey stone, the appearance of which in that place was difficult to account for, as there was no higher ground around from which such masses could have fallen. a small wood of pines had been planted near the summit of the ground, but they, too, had decayed prematurely in that ungrateful soil; and though each tree presented here and there some scrubby tufts of dark green foliage, the principal branches stood out, white and blasted, skeleton fingers pointing in despairing mockery at the wind that withered them. the hour was about six o'clock in the evening, and as if to accord with the earth below it, there was a cold and wintry look about the sky which the season did not justify; and the long blue lines of dark cloud, mingled with streaks of yellow and orange towards the verge of heaven, seemed to bespeak an early autumn. there was one little pond in the foreground of the picture sunk deep amongst some banks and hawthorn bushes, and looking dark and stern as every thing around it. flapping up from it, however, scared by the noise of a horse's feet, rose a large white stork, contrasting strangely with the dim shadowy waters. the person that startled the bird by passing nearer to him than any body else had done, rode forward close by the head of the pond to a spot about three hundred yards farther on, where a great multitude of people were assembled, perhaps to the number of two thousand. he was followed by several servants; but it is to be remarked that both servants and lord were unarmed. he himself did not even wear the customary sword, without which not a gentleman in france was seen at any distance from his own house, and no apparent arms of any kind, not even the small knife or dagger, often worn by a page, was visible amongst the attendants. there was a buzz of many voices as he approached, but it was instantly silenced, when, dismounting from his horse, he gave the rein to a servant, and then advanced to meet one or two persons who drew out from the crowd as if privileged by intimacy to speak with him. the first of these was claude de l'estang, whose hand he took and shook affectionately, though mournfully. the second was a tall thin ravenous-looking personage, with sharp-cut lengthened features, a keen, but somewhat unsettled, we might almost use the word phrenzied, eye, and an expression of countenance altogether neither very benevolent nor very prepossessing. he also took the count's hand, saying, "i am glad to see thee, my son; i am glad to see thee. thou art somewhat behind the time, and in this great day of backsliding and falling off i feared that even thou, one of our chief props and greatest lights, might have departed from us into the camp of the philistines." "fear not, monsieur chopel," replied the count; "i trust there is no danger of such weakness on my part. i was detained to write a letter in answer to one from good monsieur de rouvré, who has suffered so much in our cause, and who, it seems, arrived at ruffigny last night." "i know he did," said claude de l'estang; "but pray, my dear albert, before either myself or our good brother, monsieur chopel, attempt to lead the devotions of the people, do you speak a few words of comfort and consolation to them, and above all things counsel them to peace and tranquil doings." the count paused and seemed to hesitate for a moment. in truth, the task that was put upon him was not pleasant to him, and he would fain have avoided it; but accustomed to overcome all repugnance to that which was right, he conquered himself with scarcely a struggle, and advanced with claude de l'estang into the midst of the people, who made way with respectful reverence, as he sought for some slightly elevated point from which to address them more easily. chopel and l'estang, however, had chosen a sort of rude rock for their pulpit before he came, and having been led thither, the count mounted upon it, and took off his hat, as a sign that he was about to speak. all voices were immediately hushed, and he then went on. "my brethren," he said, "we are here assembled to worship god according to our own consciences, and to the rules and doctrines of the reformed church. in so doing we are not failing in our duty to the king, who, as sovereign of these realms, is the person whom, under god, we are most bound to obey and reverence. it has seemed fit to his majesty, from motives, upon which i will not touch, to withdraw from us much that was granted by his predecessors. he has ordered the temples in which we are accustomed to worship to be closed, so that on this, the sabbath day, we have no longer any place of permitted worship but in the open air. that, however, has not been denied us; there is no prohibition to our meeting and praising god here, and this resource at least is allowed us, which, though it may put us to some slight inconvenience and discomfort, will not the less afford the sincere and devout an opportunity of raising their prayers to the almighty, in company with brethren of the same faith and doctrines as themselves. we know that god does not dwell in temples made with hands; and i have only to remind you, my brethren, before giving place to our excellent ministers, who will lead our devotions this day, that the god we have assembled to worship is also a god of peace, who has told us, by the voice of his son, not to revile those who revile us, nor smite those that smite us, but to bear patiently all things, promising that those who endure to the last shall be saved. i appointed this place," he continued, "for our meeting, because it was far from any town, and consequently we shall have few here from idle curiosity, and afford no occasion of offence to any man. i begged you earnestly to come unarmed also, as i myself have done, that there might be no doubt of our views and purposes being pacific. i am happy to see that all have followed this advice, i believe without exception, and also that there are several women amongst us, which, i trust, is a sign that, in the strait and emergency in which we now are, they will not abandon their husbands, their fathers, and their brothers, for any inducement, but continue to serve god in the faith in which they have been brought up." having thus spoken, the count gave place and descended amongst the people, retiring several steps from the little sort of temporary pulpit, and preparing to go through the service of the reformed church, as if he had been within the walls of the temple his father had built in morseiul, and which was now ordered to be levelled with the ground. after a few words between claude de l'estang and chopel, the latter mounted the pulpit and gave out a psalm, the ----, which he led himself, in a voice like thunder. the whole congregation joined; and though the verses that they repeated were in the simple unadorned words of the olden times, and the voices that sung them not always in perfect harmony, yet the sound of that melody in the midst of the desert had something strangely impressive, nay, even affecting. the hearts of a people that would not bow down before man, bowed down before god; and they who in persecution and despair had lost all trust on earth, in faith and hope raised their voices unto heaven with praise and adoration. when the psalm was over, and the minds of all men prepared for prayer, the clergyman who had given out the psalm, closing his eyes and spreading his hands, turned his face towards the sky and began his address to the almighty. we shall not pause upon the words that he made use of here, as it would be irreverent to use them lightly; but it is sufficient to say, that he mingled many themes with his address that both claude de l'estang and the count de morseiul wished had been omitted. he thanked god for the trial and purification to which he had subjected his people: but in doing so, he dwelt so long upon, and entered so deeply into, the nature of all those trials and grievances and the source from which they sprang, pointed out with such virulent acrimony the tyranny and the persecution which the reformed church had suffered, and clothed so aptly, nay, so eloquently, his petitions against the persecutors and enemies of the church, in the sublime language of scripture, that the count could not but feel that he was very likely to stir up the people to seek their deliverance with their own hand and think themselves fully justified by holy writ; or, at all events, to exasperate their already excited passions, and render the least spark likely to cast them into a flame. albert of morseiul was uneasy while this was proceeding, especially as the prayer lasted an extraordinary length of time, and he could not refrain from turning to examine the countenances of some of the persons present, in order to discover what was the effect produced upon them, especially as he saw a man, standing between him and the rock on which the preacher stood, grasp something under his cloak, as if the appearance of being unarmed was, in that case, not quite real. near to him were one or two women wrapped up in the large grey cloaks of the country, and they obstructed his view to the right; but at some distance straight before him he saw the burly form of virlay, the blacksmith, and close by him again the stern, but expressive, countenance of armand herval. scattered round about, too, he remarked a considerable number of men with a single cock's feather stuck in the front of the hat, which, though bands of feathers and similar ornaments were very much affected, even by the lower classes of that period, was by no means a common decoration in the part of the country where he then was. every thing, indeed, was peaceable and orderly in the demeanour of the crowd: no one pressed upon the other, no one moved, no one spoke, but each and all stood in deep silence, listening to the words of the minister; but they listened with frowning brows and stern dark looks, and the young count felt thankful that the lateness of the hour, and the distance from any town, rendered it unlikely that the proceedings would be interrupted by the interference, or even appearance, of any of the catholic authorities of the province. the prayer of the clergyman chopel at length came to an end; and, as had been previously arranged between them, claude de l'estang, in turn, advanced. another hymn was sung; and the ejected minister of auron commenced, what was then called amongst the huguenots of france, "the preaching in the desert." on mounting the rock that served them for a pulpit, the old man seemed a good deal affected; and twice he wiped away tears from his eyes, while he gazed round upon the people with a look of strong interest and affection, which every one present saw and felt deeply. he then paused for a moment in silent prayer, and, when it was concluded, took a step forward with the bible open in his hand, his demeanour changed, the spirit of the orator upon him, and high and noble energy lighting up his eyes and shining on his lofty brow. "the nineteenth verse of the twenty-first chapter of st. luke," he said, "_in your patience possess ye your souls!_" "my brethren, let us be patient, for to such as are so, is promised the kingdom of heaven. my brethren, let us be patient, for so we are taught by the living word of god. my brethren, let us be patient, for christ was patient, even unto death, before us. what! shall we know that the saints and prophets of god have been scorned, and mocked, and persecuted, in all ages? what! shall we know that the apostles of christ, the first teachers of the gospel of grace, have been scourged, and driven forth, and stoned and slain? what! shall we know that, for ages, the destroying sword was out, from land to land, against our brethren in the lord? what! shall we know that he himself closed a life of poverty and endurance, by submitting willingly to insult, buffeting, and a torturing death?--and shall we not bear our cross meekly? what! i ask again, shall we know that the church of christ was founded in persecution, built up by the death of saints, cemented by the blood of martyrs, and yet rose triumphant over the storms of heathen wrath; and shall we doubt that yet, even yet, we shall stand and not be cast down? shall we refuse to seal the covenant with our blood, or to endure the reproach of our lord even unto the last? "yes, my brethren, yes! god will give you, and me also, grace to do so; and though 'ye shall be betrayed both by parents, and brethren, and kinsfolk, and friends, and some of you shall they cause to be put to death,' yet the faithful and the true shall endure unto the last, and '_in your patience possess ye your souls_.' "but there is more required at your hands than patience, my brethren. there is constancy! perseverance in the way of the lord! there must be no falling off in the time of difficulty or danger; there must be no hesitation in the service of our god. we have put our hands to the plough, and we must not look back. we have engaged in the great work, and we must not slacken our diligence. remember, my brethren, remember, that the most fiery persecution is but the trial of our faith, and all who strive for a great reward, all who struggle for the glory of the kingdom of heaven, must be as gold ten times purified in the fire. were it not so even,--were we not christians,--had we not the word of god for our direction,--had we not the command of christ to obey, where is the man amongst us that would falsify the truth, declare that thing wrong which he believed to be right, swear that he believed that which he knew to be false, put on the garb of hypocrisy and clothe himself with falsehood as with a garment, to shield himself from the scourge of the scorner or the sword of the persecutor? "if there be such a coward or such a hypocrite here, let him go forth from amongst us, and satan, the father of lies, shall conduct him to the camp of the enemy. where is the man amongst us, i say, that, were there nothing to restrain him but the inward voice of conscience, would show himself so base as to abandon the faith of his fathers, in the hour of persecution? "but when we know that we are right, when the word of god is our warrant, when our faith in christ is our stay, when the object before us is the glory of god and our own salvation, who would be fool enough to barter eternal condemnation for the tranquillity of a day? who would not rather sell all that he has, and take up his cross and follow christ, than linger by the flesh-pots of egypt, and dwell in the tents of sin? "christ foretold, my brethren, that those who followed him faithfully should endure persecution to the end of the earth. he won us not by the promises of earthly glory, he seduced us not by the allurements of worldly wealth, he held out no inducement to our ambition by the promises of power and authority, he bribed not our pride by the hope of man's respect and reverence. oh, no; himself, _the word of god_, which is but to say all in one word, _truth_; he told us all things truly; he laid before us, as our lot below, poverty, contempt, and scorn, the world's reproach, the calumny of the evil, chains, tortures, and imprisonment, contumely, persecution, and death. these he set before us as our fate, these he suffered as our example, these he endured with patience for our atonement! those who became followers of christ knew well the burden that they took up; saw the load that they had here to bear; and, strengthened by faith and by the holy spirit, shrunk not from the task, groaned not under the weight of the cross. they saw before their eyes the exceeding great reward,--the reward that was promised to them, the reward that is promised to us, the reward that is promised to all who shall endure unto the last,--to enter into the joy of our master, to become a partaker of the kingdom reserved for him from before all worlds. "we must therefore, my brethren, endure; we must endure unto the last; but we must endure with patience, and with forbearance, and with meekness, and with gentleness; and 'it shall turn to us for a testimony,' it shall produce for us a reward. they may smite us here, and they may slay us, and they may bring us down to the dust of death; but he has promised that not a hair of our heads shall perish, and that _in our patience shall we possess our souls_. "the woe that he denounced against jerusalem, did it not fall upon it? when the day of vengeance came, that all things written were to be fulfilled, did not armies compass it about, and desolation draw nigh unto it, and was not distress great in the land and wrath upon the people, and did not millions fall by the sword, and were not millions led away captives into all nations, and was not jerusalem trodden down of the gentiles, and was there one stone left upon another? "if, then, god, the god of mercy, so fulfilled each word, when kindled to exercise wrath; how much more shall he fulfil every tittle of his gracious promises to those that serve him? if, then, the prophecies of destruction have been fulfilled, so, also, shall be the prophecies of grace and glory, by him whose words pass not away, though heaven and earth may pass away. for sorrows and endurance in time, he has promised us glory and peace in eternity; and for the persecutions which we now suffer, he gives to those, who endure unto the last, the recompence of his eternal joy. "with endurance we shall live, and _with patience we shall possess our souls_; and we--if we so do, serving god in this life under all adversities--shall have peace, the peace of god which passeth all understanding; joy, the joy of the lord, who has trodden down his enemies; glory, the glory of the knowledge of god, when he cometh with clouds and great glory, and every eye shall see him, and they, also, which pierced him, and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. even so, amen." the words of the preacher were poured forth rather than spoken. it seemed less like eloquence than like inspiration. his full, round, clear voice was heard through every part of his large auditory; not a word was lost, not a tone was indistinct, and the people listened with that deep stern silence which causes a general rustle, like the sighing of the wind, to take place through the multitude when he paused for a moment in his discourse, and every one drew deep the long-suppressed breath. in the same strain, and with the same powers of voice and gesture, claude de l'estang was going on with his sermon, when some sounds were heard at the farther part of the crowd, towards the spot where the scene was sheltered by the stunted wood we have mentioned: as those sounds were scarcely sufficient to give any interruption to the minister, being merely those apparently of some other persons arriving, the count de morseiul, and almost every one on that side of the preacher, remained gazing upon him as he went on with the same energy, and did not turn their heads to see what occasioned the noise. those, however, who were on the opposite side, and who, when looking towards the minister, had at the same time in view the spot from which the sounds proceeded, were seen to gaze sternly from time to time in that direction; and once or twice, notwithstanding the solemn words they heard, stooped down their heads together, and spoke in whispering consultation. these appearances at length induced the count de morseiul to turn his eyes that way; when he beheld a sight, which at once made his blood boil, but made him thankful also that he had come in such guise as even to act as a restraint upon himself, having no arms of any kind upon him. at the skirt of the crowd were collected a party of eighteen or twenty dragoons, who were forcing their horses slowly in amongst the people, who drew back, and gazed upon them with looks of stern determined hatred. the purpose of the soldiers, indeed, seemed to be simply to insult and to annoy, for they did not proceed to any overt act of violence, and were so far separated from each other, in a disorderly manner, that it could only be supposed they came thither to find themselves sport, rather than to disperse the congregation by any lawful authority. the foremost of the whole party was the young marquis de hericourt, and albert of morseiul conceived, perhaps not unreasonably, that there might be some intention of giving him personal annoyance at the bottom of that young officer's conduct. distinguished from the rest of the people by his dress, the count was very plainly to be seen from the spot where de hericourt was, and the young dragoon slowly made his way towards him through the press, looking at the people on either side with but ill-concealed signs of contempt upon his countenance. the count determined, as far as possible, to set an example of patience; and when the rash youth came close up to him, saying aloud, "ha, monsieur de morseiul, a lucky opportunity! i have long wished to hear a _prêche_," the count merely raised his hand as a sign for the young man to keep silence, and pointed with his right hand to the pastor, who with an undisturbed demeanour and steady voice pursued his sermon as if not the slightest interruption had occurred, although the young dragoon on horseback in the midst of his people, was at that moment before him. de hericourt was bent upon mischief, however. rash to the pitch of folly, he had neither inquired nor considered whether the people were armed or not, but having heard that one of the preachings in the desert was to take place, he had come, unauthorised, for the purpose of disturbing and dispersing the congregation, not by the force of law, but by insult and annoyance, which he thought the protestants would not dare to resist. he listened, then, for a moment or two to the words of claude de l'estang, seeming, for an instant, somewhat struck with the impressive manner of the old man; but he soon got tired, and, turning the bridle of his horse, as if to pass round the count de morseiul, he said again, aloud, "you've got a number of women here, monsieur de morseiul; pretty little heretics, i've no doubt! i should like to have a look at their faces." so saying, he spurred on unceremoniously, driving back five or six people before him, and caught hold of one of the women--whom we have noticed as standing not very far from the count de morseiul--trying, at the same time, to pull back the thick veil which was over her face. the count could endure no longer, more especially as, in the grey cloak and the veil with which the person assailed by the dragoon was covered, he thought he recognised the dress of the lady he had formerly seen at the house of claude de l'estang. starting forward then instantly to her side, he seized the bridle of de hericourt's horse, and forced the animal back almost upon his haunches. the young officer stooped forward over his saddle bow, seeking for a pistol in his holster, and at the same moment addressing an insulting and contemptuous term to the count. no sooner was it uttered, however, than he received one single buffet from the hand of albert of morseiul, which cast him headlong from his horse into the midst of the people. every one was rushing upon him; his dragoons were striving to force their way forward to the spot; the voice of claude de l'estang, though exerted to its utmost power, was unheard; and in another instant the rash young man would have been literally torn to pieces by the people he had insulted. but with stern and cool self-possession the count de morseiul strode over him, and held back those that were rushing forward, with his powerful arms, exclaiming, in a voice of thunder,-- "stand back, my friends, stand back! this is a private quarrel. i must have no odds against an adversary and a fellow-soldier. stand back, i say! we are here man to man, and whoever dares to take him out of my hands is my enemy, not my friend. rise, monsieur de hericourt," he said in a lower voice, "rise, mount your horse, and be gone. i cannot protect you a minute longer." some of the count's servants, who had been standing near, had by this time made their way up to him, and with their help he cleared the space around, shouting to the dragoons who were striving to come up, and had not clearly seen the transaction which had taken place, "keep back, keep back!--i will answer for his life! if you come up there will be bloodshed!" in the mean time the young man had sprung upon his feet, his dress soiled by the fall, his face glowing like fire, and fury flashing from his eyes. "you have struck me," he cried, glaring upon the count; "you have struck me, and i will have your blood." "hush, sir," said the count, calmly. "do not show yourself quite a madman. mount your horse, and begone while you may! i shall be at the château of morseiul till twelve o'clock tomorrow," he added in a lower voice. "mount, mount!" he proceeded in a quicker manner, seeing some movements on the other side of the crowd of a very menacing kind; "mount, if you would live and keep your soldiers' lives another minute!" de hericourt sprang into the saddle, and, while the count, in that tone of command which was seldom disobeyed, exclaimed, "make way for him there; let no one impede him;" he spurred on quickly through the crowd, gathering his men together as he went. all eyes were turned to look after him, but the moment he and his troop were free from the people at the extreme edge of the crowd, he was seen to speak a word to the man at the head of the file. the soldiers immediately halted, faced round, and, carrying fire-arms as they did, coolly unslung their carbines. the first impulse of that part of the crowd nearest to the dragoons, was to press back, while those on the opposite side strove to get forward, headed by virlay and armand herval. the crush in the centre was consequently tremendous, but the count de morseiul succeeded in casting himself between the female he had saved and the troopers. at the very moment that he did so, the dragoons raised their fusees to their shoulders, and fired at once into the midst of the compact mass of people. every shot told; and one unfortunate young man, about two paces from the count de morseiul, received no less than four shots in his head and throat. a mingled yell of rage and agony rose up from the people, while a loud exulting laugh broke from the soldiery. but their triumph was only for a moment, for they were instantly assailed by a shower of immense stones which knocked one of the troopers off his horse, and killed him on the spot. herval and virlay, too, made their way round behind the rock on which the clergyman had been standing, and it now became apparent that, in that part of the crowd at least, arms were not wanting, for flash after flash broke from the dense mass of the advancing multitude, and swords and pikes were seen gleaming in the air. the troopers at length turned their horses and fled, but not before they had suffered tremendously. the huguenots pursued, and with peculiar skill and knowledge of the country, drove them hither and thither over the moor. some having mounted the horses which brought them thither, pursued them into spots that they could not pass, while some on foot defended the passes and ravines. the count de morseiul and his servants mounted instantly, and rode far and wide over the place, attempting to stop the effusion of blood, and being, in many instances, successful in rescuing some of the soldiery from the hands of the people and from the death they well deserved. thus passed more than an hour, till seeing that the light was beginning to fail, and that the last spot of the sun was just above the horizon, the count turned back to the scene of that day's unfortunate meeting, in the hope of rendering some aid and assistance to the wounded who had been left behind. he had by this time but one servant with him, and when he came to the spot where the meeting had been held, he found it quite deserted. the wounded and the dead had been carried away by those who remained; and, of the rest of the people who had been there, the greater part had been scattered abroad in pursuit of the fugitive soldiers, while part had fled in fear to their own homes. there was nothing but the cold grey rock, and the brown moor stained here and there with blood, and the dark purple streaks of the evening sky, and the east wind whistling mournfully through the thin trees. "i think, sir," said the servant, after his master had paused for some moments in melancholy mood, gazing on the scene around, "i think, sir, that i hear voices down by the water, where we put up the stork as we came." the count listened, and heard voices too, and he instantly turned his horse thither. by the side of that dark water he found a melancholy group, consisting of none other but claude de l'estang and two female figures, all kneeling round or supporting the form of a third person, also a female, who seemed severely hurt. this was the sight which presented itself to the eyes of the count from the top of the bank above; and, dismounting, he sprang down to render what assistance he could. his first attention was turned, of course, almost entirely to the wounded girl, whose head and shoulders were supported on the knee of one of the other women, while the pastor was pouring into her ear, in solemn tones, the words of hope and consolation--but they were words of hope and consolation referring to another world. the hand that lay upon her knee was fair and soft, the form seemed young and graceful; and, though the count as he descended could not see her face, the novice's veil that hung from her head told him a sad tale in regard to the story of her life. he doubted not, from all he saw, that she was dying; and his heart sickened when he thought of the unhappy man who had brought her thither, and of what would be the feelings of his fierce and vehement heart when he heard the fate that had befallen her. he had scarcely time to think of it, for, ere he had well reached the bottom of the descent, the sound of a horse coming furiously along was heard, and armand herval paused on the opposite side of the dell, and gazed down upon the group below. it seemed as if instinct told him that there was what he sought; for, without going on to the moor, he turned his horse's rein down the descent, though it was steep and dangerous, and in a moment had sprung from the beast's back and was kneeling by her he had loved. it is scarcely to be told whether she was conscious of his presence or not, for the hand of death was strong upon her; but it is certain that, as he printed upon her hands the burning kisses of love in agony, and quenched them with his tears, it is certain that a smile came over her countenance before that last awful shudder with which the soul parted from the body for ever. after it was all over he gazed at her for a single instant without speaking. every one present saw that he acted as if of right, and let him do what he would; and unpinning the veil from her long beautiful hair, he took and steeped it in the blood that was still, notwithstanding all that had been done to stanch it, welling from a deep wound in her breast, till every part of the fabric was wet with gore. he then took the veil, placed it in his brown, scarred bosom--upon his heart;--and raising his eyes and one hand to heaven, murmured some words that were not distinctly heard. he had not uttered one audible sentence since he came up, but he now turned, and with a tone of intreaty addressed claude de l'estang. "the spirit will bless you, sir," he said, "for giving her comfort in the hour of death! may i bear her to your house till eleven o'clock to-night, when i may remove her to her own abode?" "i must not refuse you, my poor young man," replied the clergyman. "but i fear that my house will be no safe resting-place, even for the dead, just now." herval grasped his arm, and said, in a low but emphatic tone, "it is safe, sir, against all the troops in poitou. how long it may be so, i cannot tell; but as long as this arm can wield a sword, it shall not want defence. my lord count," he added, pointing to the dead body, "did i not hear that you meet her murderer to-morrow at noon?" "i know not the hour or place he may appoint," replied the count in a low deep voice; "but we do meet! and there are things that call aloud for vengeance, herval, which even i cannot forgive." the man laughed aloud, but that laugh was no voice of merriment. it was dreary, boding, horrible, and in good accordance with the circumstances and the scene. he replied nothing to the words of the count, however, turning to the pastor and saying, "now, sir, now! if you will give shelter to the dead for but an hour or two, you shall win deep gratitude of the living." "willingly," replied the pastor. "but then," he added, turning to one of the other two women who were present, "who shall protect you home, dear lady?" "that will i do, at the risk of my life," said the count; and the other woman, whom the pastor had not addressed, replied, "it will be better so. we have been too long absent already." armand herval had not noticed the brief words that were spoken, for he was gazing with an intense and eager look upon the fair countenance of the dead, with bitter anguish written in every line of his face. the pastor touched his arm gently, saying, "now, my son, let me and you carry the body. we can pass through the wood unseen." but the other put him by, with his hand, saying, in a sad tone, "i need no help;" and then kneeled down by her side, he put his arms around her, saying, "let me bear thee in my bosom, sweet child, once only, once before the grave parteth us, and ere it shall unite us again. oh, claire, claire," he added, kissing her cold lips passionately, "oh, claire, claire, was it for this i taught thee a purer faith, and brought thee hither to see the worship of the persecuted followers of the cross? was it for this i bent down my nature, and became soft as a woman to suit my heart to yours? oh, claire, claire, if i have brought thee to death, i will avenge thy death; and for every drop that falls from my eyes, i will have a drop of blood." "vengeance is mine, saith the lord!" the old man said in a low tone; "but let us haste, my son, for night is coming on fast. farewell, lady. albert, i trust them to thee. we shall meet again--if not here, in heaven!" armand herval took the corpse of the fair girl who had fallen, in his powerful arms, and bore her after the pastor towards the wood we have mentioned, while his horse, trained so to do, followed him with a regular pace, and entered the road through the copse immediately after him. albert of morseiul remained alone with the two ladies, his interposition in favour of one of whom had brought on the sad events which we have detailed. as soon as the pastor was gone, he advanced towards her, and held out both his hands with deep emotion. "i cannot be mistaken," he said. "the disguise might deceive any other eyes, but it cannot mine. clémence! it must be clémence! am i not right?" she put her hands in his in return, saying, "oh, yes, you are right! but what, what shall i do, monsieur de morseuil? i am faint and weary with agitation, and all this terrible scene. i have left the carriage that brought me hither at two or three miles' distance, and, perhaps, it too has gone away on the report of the fliers from this awful place." "i will send up my servant immediately," said the count, "to see, and in the mean time rest here, clémence. in this deep hollow we shall escape all passing eyes till his return, and you will have more shelter than any where else.--where can the servant find the carriage?" clémence, who had raised her veil, looked towards her companion to explain more fully than she could do. but her attendant, maria--for such was the person who accompanied her--judging, perhaps, that a word spoken at such a moment between two people, situated as were clémence de marly and the count de morseiul, might have more effect than whole hours of conversation at another time, took upon herself the task of telling the servant, saying, "i can direct him, my lord, better than any one. it were as well to bring your horse down here before he goes." the count assented, and with a slow step she proceeded to fulfil her errand. "clémence de marly trembled not a little. she felt that the moment for the decision of her fate for life was come. she felt that her heart and her faith must be plighted to albert of morseiul at that moment, or, perhaps, never. she felt that if she did so plight it, she plighted herself to care, to grief, to anxiety, to danger,--perhaps to destruction,--perhaps to desolation. but that very feeling took away all hesitation, all scruple, and made her, in a moment, make up her mind to let him see her heart as it really was, to cast away from her every vain and every proud feeling, and to stand, before him she loved, without disguise. the count, too, felt, and felt strongly, that this was a moment which must not be let pass; and the instant the attendant had quitted them, he raised the lady's hand to his lips, pressing on it a warm and passionate kiss. "tell me, clémence, tell me, dear clémence," he said, "what is the meaning of this. what is the meaning of your presence here? is it, is it that the only barrier which existed between us is removed? is it that you are of the same faith as i am?" "is that the only barrier, albert?" she said, shaking her head somewhat reproachfully. "is that the only barrier? you spoke of many." "i spoke of only one insurmountable," replied the count, "and i believed that to be insurmountable, clémence, for i was even then aware of the decree, which did not appear till afterwards, but which forbade the marriage of catholics and protestants." "and was that the only insurmountable one?" she demanded. "was that the only insurmountable barrier to our union?--what, if i had previously loved another?" "and is it so, then?" demanded the count, with somewhat of sadness in his tone. "and have you before loved another?" "no, no!" exclaimed clémence eagerly, and placing the hand which she had withdrawn in his again; "no, no! the woman was coming over me once more, but i will conquer the woman. no, i never did love another. even if i had fancied it, i should now know, albert, by what i feel at this moment, how idle such a fancy had been. but i never did fancy it. i never did believe it, even in the least degree; and now that i have said all that i can say, whatever may happen, never doubt me, albert. whatever you see, never entertain a suspicion. i have never loved another, and i can say nothing more." "yes, yes! oh, yes!" he exclaimed, "you can say more, clémence. say that you love me." she bent down her head, and albert of morseiul drew her gently to his bosom. "say it! say it, dear clémence!" he said. clémence hesitated, but at length she murmured something that no other ear but his could have heard, had it been ever so close. but he heard, and heard aright, that her reply was, "but too well!" the count sealed the words upon her lips with his, and clémence de marly hid her eyes upon his shoulder, for they were full of tears. "and now," she added, raising them after a moment with one of her own sparkling smiles, "and now, having said those awful words, of course i am henceforth a slave. but this is no scene for jest, albert. desolation and destruction is round us on every side, i fear." "it matters not," replied the count, "if thy faith is the same as mine is----" "it is, it is!" cried clémence. "it may have wavered, albert; but, thanks to yon good creature who has just left us, the light has never been wholly extinguished in my mind. my mother was a protestant, and in that faith she brought me up. she then, knowing that i must fall into other hands, left maria with me, with charges to me never to let her quit me. i was but a child then," she continued, "and they forced me to abjure. but their triumph lasted not an hour, for though i dared not show my feelings, i always felt that the path on which they would lead me was wrong, and strove, whenever i could, to return to a better way. to-day i came here at all risks, but i fear very much, albert, i fear that destruction, and oppression, and grief, surround us on every side." "if thy faith be the same as mine, clémence," said the count, "if thy heart be united with mine, i will fear nothing, i will dare all. if they will not suffer us to live in peace in this our native land, fortunately i have just transmitted to another country enough to support us in peace, and tranquillity, and ease.--and yet, oh yet, clémence," he continued, his tone becoming sadder and his countenance losing its look of hope, "and yet, oh yet, clémence, when i think of that unhappy man who has just left us, and of the fair girl whose corpse he has now borne away in his arms;--when i remember that scarcely more than eight days have passed since he was animated with the same hopes that i am, founding those hopes upon the same schemes of flight, and trusting more than i have ever trusted to the bright hereafter,--when i think of that, and of his present fate, the agony that must now be wringing his heart, the dark obscurity of his bitter despair, i tremble to dream of the future, not for myself, but for thee, sweet girl. but we must fall upon some plan both of communicating when we will, and of acting constantly on one scheme and for one object. here comes your faithful attendant. she must know our situation and our plans--only one word more. you have promised me this," he continued, once more raising her hand to his lips. "when and where you will," replied clémence. "and you will fly with me, whenever i find the opportunity of doing so?" "i will," she answered. the attendant had now approached, and the count took a step towards her, still holding clémence by the hand, as if he feared to lose the precious boon she had bestowed upon him. "she is mine, madame," he said, addressing the attendant. "she is mine, by every promise that can bind one human being to another." "and you are hers?" demanded the attendant solemnly. "and you are hers, my lord count, by the same promises?" "i am, by every thing i hold sacred," said the count, raising his hand towards heaven, "now and for ever, till death take me from her. but ere we can be united, i fear, i fear that many things must be undergone. alas, that i should recommend it! but she must even conceal her faith: for, from the cruel measures of the court, even now death or perpetual imprisonment in some unknown dungeon is the only fate reserved for the relapsed convert, as they call those who have been driven to embrace a false religion, and quitted it in renewed disgust. but i must trust to you to afford me the means of communicating with her at all times. the only chance for us, i fear, is flight." "it is the only one! it is the only one!" replied the maid. "fly with her to england, my lord. fly with her as speedily as possible. be warned, my lord, and neither delay nor hesitate. the edge of the net is just falling on you. if you take your resolution at once, and quit the land before a week be over, you may be safe; but if you stay longer, every port in france will be closed against you." "i will make no delay," replied the count. "her happiness and her safety are now committed to my charge; inestimable trusts, which i must on no account risk. but i have some followers and dependants to provide for, even here. i have some friends to defend; and i must not show myself remiss in that; or she herself would hardly love me. it were easy, methinks, however, for you and your mistress to make your escape at once to england, and for me to join you there hereafter." "oh no, my lord, i fear not!" replied the maid. "i do not think monsieur de rouvré himself would object to her marrying you and flying. he shrewdly suspects, i think, that she is protestant at heart; but he would never yield to her flying herself. but, hark! i hear horses coming. let us draw back and be quiet." "there is no sound of carriage-wheels, i fear," said clémence, listening. "oh, albert, all this day's sad events have quite overpowered me; and i dread the slightest sound." the count pressed her hand in his, and, as was usual with him in moments of danger, turned his eyes towards his sword-belt, forgetting that the blade was gone. the sound of horses' feet approaching rapidly, however, still continued; and, at length, a party of four persons, whose faces could not be well distinguished in the increasing darkness, stopped exactly opposite the spot where a little rough road led down into the hollow where the lovers were. one of the riders sprang to the ground in a moment, and, leaving his horse with the others, advanced, exclaiming aloud,-- "hollo! ho! albert de morseiul! hollo! where are you?" "it is the voice of the chevalier d'evran," cried clémence, clinging closer to her lover, as if with some degree of fear. "i think it is," said the count; "but fear not! he is friendly to us all. draw down your veil, however, my beloved; it is not necessary that he should see and know you." with the same shout the chevalier continued to advance towards them, and the count took a step or two forward to meet him. but, shaking his friend warmly by the hand, the chevalier passed on at once to the lady, and, to the surprise of the count, addressed her immediately by her name: "very pretty, indeed, mademoiselle clémence!" he said; "this is as dangerous a jest, i think, as ever was practised." clémence hesitated not a moment, but replied at once, "it is no jest, sir! it is a dangerous reality, if you will." "poo, poo, silly girl," cried the chevalier. "by the lord that lives, you will get yourself into the castle of pignerol, or the bastille, or some such pleasant abode! i have come at full speed to bring you back." "stay yet a minute, louis," said the count somewhat gravely. "there is another person to be consulted in this business, whom you do not seem to recollect. mademoiselle de marly is, for the time, under my protection; and you know we delegate such a duty to no one." "my dear count," replied the chevalier, "the good duc de rouvré will doubtless be infinitely obliged to you for the protection you have given to this fair lady; but having sent me to find her and bring her back, i must do so at once; and will only beg her to be wise enough to make no rash confessions as she goes. the affair, as far as she is concerned, is a jest at present: it is likely, i hear, to prove a serious jest to others. i left your man, who directed me hither, to bring up the carriage as far as possible: and now, mademoiselle clémence, we will go, with your good pleasure." the tone of authority in which the chevalier spoke by no means pleased albert of morseiul, who felt strong in his heart the newly acquired right of mutual love to protect clémence de marly himself. he was not of a character, however, to quarrel with his friend lightly, and he replied, "louis, we are too old friends for you to make me angry. as your proposal of conveying mademoiselle de marly back in her own carriage, coincides with what we had previously arranged, of course i shall not oppose it; but equally, of course, i accompany her to ruffigny." "i am afraid that cannot be, albert," answered the chevalier; and the resolute words, "it must be!" had just been uttered in reply, when clémence interfered. "it is very amusing, gentlemen," she said in her ordinary tone of scornful playfulness, "it is very amusing, indeed, to hear you calmly and quietly settling a matter that does not in the least depend upon yourselves. you forget that i am here, and that the decision must be mine. monsieur le chevalier, be so good as not to look authoritative, for, depend upon it, you have no more power here than that old hawthorn stump. monsieur de rouvré cannot delegate what he does not possess; and as i have never yet suffered any one to rule me, i shall not commence that bad practice to-night. you may now tell me, in secret, what are your motives in this business; but, depend upon it, that my own high judgment will decide in the end." "let it!" replied the chevalier; and bending down his head, he whispered a few words to clémence in a quick and eager manner. she listened attentively, and when he had done, turned at once to the count de morseiul, struggling to keep up the same light manner, but in vain. "i fear," she said, "monsieur de morseiul, that i must decide for the plan of the chevalier, and that i must lay my potent commands upon you not to accompany or follow me. nay more, i will forbid your coming to ruffigny tomorrow; but the day after, unless you hear from me to the contrary, you may be permitted to inquire after my health." albert of morseiul was deeply mortified; too much so, indeed, to reply in any other manner than by a stately bow. clémence saw that he was hurt; and, though some unexplained motive prevented her from changing her resolution, she cast off reserve at once, and holding out her hand to him, said aloud, notwithstanding the presence of the chevalier, "do you forgive me, albert?" though unable to account for her conduct, the count felt that he loved her deeply still, and he pressed his lips upon her hand warmly and eagerly, while clémence added in a lower tone, but by no means one inaudible to those around who chose to listen, "have confidence in me, albert! have confidence in me, and remember you have promised never to doubt me whatever may happen. oh, albert, having once given my affection, believe me utterly incapable of trifling with yours even by a single thought." "i will try, clémence," he replied; "but you must own there is something here to be explained." "there is!" she said, "there is; and it shall be explained as soon as possible; but, in the mean time, trust me! here comes the servant, i think: the carriage must be near." it was as she supposed; and the count gave her his arm to assist her in climbing back to the level ground above, saying, at the same time in a tone of some coldness which he could not conquer, "as the lady has herself decided, chevalier, i shall not of course press my attendance farther than to the carriage door; but have you men enough with you to insure her safety? it is now completely dark." "quite enough!" replied the chevalier, "quite enough, albert;" and he fell into silence till they reached the side of the vehicle, dropping, however, a few yards behind clémence and her lover. every moment of existence is certainly precious, as a part of the irrevocable sum of time written against us in the book of life; but there is no occasion on which the full value of each instant is so entirely felt, in which every minute is so dear, so treasured, so inestimable in our eyes, as when we are about to part with her we love. albert of morseuil felt that it was so; and in the few short moments that passed ere they reached the carriage, words were spoken in a low murmuring tone, which, in the intensity of the feelings they expressed and excited, wrought more deeply on his heart and hers, than could the passage of long indifferent years. they were of those few words spoken in life that remain in the ear of memory for ever. the fiery hand that, at the impious feast, wrote the fate of the assyrian in characters of flame, left them to go out extinguished when the announcement was complete; but the words that the hand of deep and intense passion writes upon firm, high, and energetic hearts, remain for ever, even unto the grave itself. those moments were brief, however, and clémence and her attendant were soon upon their way; the chevalier sprang upon his horse, and then held out his hand frankly to the count. "albert," he said, laughing, "i have never yet beheld so great a change of love's making as that which the truant boy has wrought in thee. thou wouldst even quarrel with thy oldest and dearest companion--thou who art no way quarrelsome. you have known me now long, albert; love me well still. if you have ever seen me do a dishonest act, cast me off; if not, as i heard clémence say just now--trust me!" and thus saying, he galloped off, without waiting for any reply. chapter v. the revenge. while clémence de marly cast herself back in the carriage; and, with the great excitement under which she had been acting for some time, now over, hid her eyes with her hands, and gave herself up to deep, and even to painful thought--while over that bright and beautiful countenance came a thousand varied expressions as she recollected all that had passed--while the look of horror rose there as she remembered all the fearful scenes she had beheld, the murderous treachery of the dragoons, the retribution taken by the people, and the death of the unhappy girl who had received one of the random shots--while that again was succeeded by the expression of admiration and enthusiasm, as she recalled the words and conduct of the protestant pastor, and while a blush, half of shame and half of joy, succeeded, as she remembered all that had passed between her and albert of morseiul; the count himself was wending his way slowly homeward, with feelings different from hers, and by no means so happy. she knew that difficulty and danger surrounded her, she knew that much was necessarily to be endured, much to be apprehended; but she had woman's greatest, strongest consolation. she had the great, the mighty support, that she was loved by him whom alone she loved. with her that was enough to carry her triumphant through all danger, to give her a spirit to resist all oppression, to support her under all trials, to overcome all fears. it may be asked, when we say that albert of morseiul's feelings were different, whether he then loved her less than she loved him, whether love in his bosom was less powerful, less all-sufficing than in hers. it would seem strange to answer, no; yet such was not the case. he loved her as much, as deeply, as she did him; he loved her as tenderly, as truly. his love--though there must always be a difference between the love of man and the love of woman--was as full, as perfect, as all-sufficing as her own, and yet his bosom was not so much at ease as hers, his heart did not feel the same confidence in its own happiness that hers did. but there were many different causes combined to produce that effect. in the first place, he knew the dangers, the obstacles, the difficulties, far better than she did. he knew them more intimately, more fully, more completely; they were all present to his mind at once; no bright hopes of changing circumstances came to relieve the prospect; but all, except the love of clémence de marly, was dark, obscure, and threatening around him. that love might have seemed, however, but as a brighter spot amidst the obscurity, had it not been that apprehensions for her were now added to all his apprehensions for his religion and his country. it might have seemed all the brighter for the obscurity, had it been itself quite unclouded, had there not been some shadows, though slight, some mystery to be struggled with, something to be forgotten or argued down. during the few last minutes that he was with her, the magic fascination of her presence had conquered every thing, and seated love triumphant above all; but as he rode on, albert de morseiul pondered over what had occurred, thought of the influence which the chevalier d'evran had exerted over her, combined it with what he had seen before at poitiers, and pronounced it in his own heart, "very strange." he resolved not to think upon it, and yet he thought. he accused himself--the man of all others the least suspicious on the earth, by nature--he accused himself of being basely suspicious. he argued with himself that it was impossible that either on the part of clémence or the chevalier there should be any thing which could give him pain, when each, in the presence of the other, behaved to him as they had behaved that night; and yet there was something to be explained, which hung--like one of those thin veils of cloud that sometimes cover even the summer sun, prognosticating a weeping evening to a blithe noon--which hung over the only star that fate had left to shine upon his track, and he thought of it sadly and anxiously, and longed for something to bear it far away. he struggled with such feelings and such reflections for some time; and then, forcing his thoughts to other things, he found that there was plenty, indeed, for him to consider and to provide against, plenty to inquire into and to ponder over, ere he resolved or acted. first came the recollection of the quarrel between himself and the young de hericourt. he knew that the rash and cruel young man had made his escape from the field, for he himself, with two of his servants, had followed him close, and, by detaining a party of the pursuers, had afforded the commander of the dragoons an opportunity to fly. that he would immediately require that which is absurdly called satisfaction, for the blow which had been struck, there could be no earthly doubt, although the laws against duelling were at that time enforced with the utmost strictness, and there was not the slightest chance whatsoever of the king showing mercy to any protestant engaged in a duel with a roman catholic. no man more contemned or reprobated the idiotical custom of duelling than the count himself; no man looked upon it in a truer light than he did; but yet must we not forgive him, if, even with such feelings and with such opinions, he prepared, without a thought or hesitation, to give his adversary the meeting he demanded? can we severely blame him if he determined, with his own single arm, to avenge the wanton slaughter that had been committed, and to put the barrier of a just punishment between the murderer of so many innocent people and a repetition of the crime? can we blame him, if, seeing no chance whatsoever of the law doing justice upon the offender, he resolved--risking at the same time his own life--to take the law into his hand, and seek justice for himself and others? the next subject that started up for consideration was the general events of that day, and the question of what colouring would be given to those events at the court of france. a peaceful body of people, meeting together for the worship of the almighty, in defiance of no law, (for the edict concerning the expulsion of the protestant pastors, and prohibiting the preaching of the reformed religion at all, had not yet appeared,) had been brutally insulted by a body of unauthorised armed men, had been fired upon by them without provocation, and had lost several of their number, murdered in cold blood and in a most cowardly manner, by the hands of the military. they had then, in their own defence, attacked and pursued their brutal assailants, and had slain several of them as a direct consequence of their own crimes. such were the simple facts of the case; but what was the tale, the count asked himself, which would be told at the court of france, and vouched for by the words of those, who, having committed the great crime of unprovoked murder, would certainly entertain no scruple in regard to justifying it by the lesser crime of a false oath? "it will be represented," thought the count, "that a body of armed fanatics met for some illegal purpose, and intending no less than revolt against the king's government, attacked and slaughtered a small body of the royal troops sent to watch their movements. it will be represented that the dragoons fought gallantly against the rebels, and slew a great number of their body; and this, doubtless, will be vouched for by the words of respectable people, all delicately adjusted by romish fraud; and while the sword and the axe are wetted with the blood of the innocent and the unoffending, the murderer, and his accomplices, may be loaded with honours and rewards!--but it shall not be so if i can stay it," he added. "i will take the bold, perhaps the rash, resolution,--i will cast myself in the gap. i will make the truth known, and the voice thereof shall be heard throughout europe, even if i fall myself. i, at least, was there unarmed: that can be proved. no weapon has touched my hand during this day, and therefore my testimony may be less suspected." while he thus pondered, riding slowly on through the thick darkness which had now fallen completely around his path, he passed a little wood, which is called the wood of jersel to this day; but, just as he had arrived at the opposite end, two men started out upon him as if to seize the bridle of his horse. instantly, however, another voice exclaimed from behind, "back, back! i told you any one coming the other way. he cannot come that way, fools. we have driven him into the net, and he has but one path to follow. let the man go on, whoever he is, and disturb him not." the men were, by this time, drawing back, and they instantly disappeared behind the trees; while the count rode on with his servant at somewhat a quicker pace. on his arrival at his own dwelling, albert of morseiul proceeded, at once, to the library of the château, and though jerome riquet strongly pressed him to take some refreshment, he applied himself at once to draw up a distinct statement of all that had occurred, nor quitted it till the night had two thirds waned. he then retired to rest, ordering himself to be called, without fail, if any body came to the château, demanding to see him. for the first hour, however, after he had lain down, as may well be supposed, he could not close his eyes. the obscurity seemed to encourage thought, and to call up all the fearful memories of the day. it was a fit canvass, the darkness of the night, for imagination to paint such awful pictures on. there is something soothing, however, in the grey twilight of the morning, which came at length, and then, but not till then, the count slept. though his slumber was disturbed and restless, it was unbroken for several hours; and it was nearly eleven o'clock in the day when, starting up suddenly from some troublous dream, he awoke and gazed wildly round the room, not knowing well where he was. the sight of the sun streaming into the apartment, however, showed him how long he had slept, and ringing the bell that lay by his bedside, he demanded eagerly of jerome riquet, who appeared in an instant, whether no one had been to seek him. the man replied, "no one," and informed his lord that the gates of the castle had not been opened during the morning. "it is strange!" said the count. "if i hear not by twelve," he continued, "i must set off without waiting. send forward a courier, riquet, as fast as possible towards paris, giving notice at the post-houses that i come with four attendants, yourself one, and ordering horses to be prepared, for i must ride post to the capital. have every thing ready in a couple of hours at the latest, for i must distance this morning's ordinary courier, and get to the court before him." "if you ride as you usually do, my lord," replied the man, "you will easily do that, for you seldom fail to kill all the horses and all the postilions; and if your humble servant were composed of any thing but bones and a good wit, you would have worn the flesh off him long ago." "i am in no mood for jesting, riquet," replied the count; "see that every thing is ready as i have said, and be prepared to accompany me." riquet, who was never yet known to have found too little time to do any thing on earth, took the rapid orders of his lord extremely coolly, aided him to dress, and then left him. he had scarcely been gone five minutes, however, before he returned with a face somewhat whiter than usual. "what is the matter, sirrah?" cried the count somewhat sharply. "why, my lord," he said, "here is the mayor, and the adjoint, and the counsellors, arrived in great terror and trepidation, to tell you that maillard, the carrier, coming down from the way of nantes with his packhorses, has seen the body of a young officer tied to a tree, in the little wood of jersel. he was afraid to meddle with it himself, and they were afraid to go down till they had come to tell you." "send the men up," said the count, "and have horses saddled for me instantly." "now, sir mayor," he said, as the local magistrate entered, "what is the meaning of this? what are these news you bring?" to say sooth, the mayor was somewhat embarrassed in presenting himself before the count, as he had lately shown no slight symptoms of cowardly wavering in regard to the protestant cause: nor would he have come now had he not been forced to do so by other members of the town council. he answered, then, with evident hesitation and timidity,-- "terrible news, indeed, my lord!--terrible news, indeed! this young man has been murdered, evidently; for he is tied to a tree, and a paper nailed above his head. so says maillard, who was afraid to go near to read what was written; and then, my lord, i was afraid to go down without your lordship's sanction, as you are _haut justicier_ for a great way round." the count's lip curled with a scornful sneer. "it seems to me," he said, "that maillard and yourself are two egregious cowards. we will dispense with your presence, mr. mayor; and these other gentlemen will go down with me at once to see what this business is. though the man might be tied to a tree, and very likely much hurt, that did not prove that he was dead; and very likely he might have been recovered, or, at least, have received the sacraments of the church, if maillard and yourself had thought fit to be speedy in your measures. come, gentlemen, let us set out at once." the rebuked mayor slunk away with a hanging head, and the rest of the municipal council, elated exactly in proportion to the depression of their chief, followed the young count, who led the way with a party of his servants to the wood of jersel. on first entering that part of the road which traversed the wood the party perceived nothing; and the good citizens of morseiul drew themselves a little more closely together, affected by certain personal apprehensions in regard to meddling with the night's work of one who seemed both powerful and unscrupulous. a moment after, however, the object which maillard had seen was presented to their eyes, and, though crowding close together, curiosity got the better of fear, and they followed the count up to the spot. the moment the count de morseiul had heard the tale, he had formed his own conclusion, and in that conclusion he now found himself not wrong. the body that was tied to the tree was that of the young marquis de hericourt; but there were circumstances connected with the act of vengeance which had been thus perpetrated, that rendered it even more awful than he had expected, to the eyes of the count de morseiul. there was no wound whatsoever upon the body, and the unhappy young man had evidently been tied to the tree before his death, for his hands, clenched in agony, were full of the large rugged bark of the elm, which he seemed to have torn off in dying. a strong rope round his middle pressed him tight against the tree. his arms and legs were also bound down to it, so that he could not escape; his hat and upper garments were off, and lying at a few yards' distance; and his shoulders and neck were bare, except where his throat was still pressed by the instrument used for his destruction. that instrument was the usual veil of a novice in a catholic convent, entirely soaked and dabbled in blood, and twisted tightly up into the form of a rope. it had been wound twice round his neck, and evidently tightened till he had died of strangulation. a piece of paper was nailed upon the tree above his head, so high up, indeed, as to be out of the reach of any one present; but on it was written in a large bold hand which could easily be read, these words:-- "the punishment inflicted on a murderer of the innocent, by brown keroual." the count de morseiul gazed upon the horrible object thus presented to him in deep silence, communing with his own heart; while the magistrates of the town, and the attendants, as is common with inferior minds, felt the awe less deeply, and talked it over with each other in an under voice. "this is very horrible, indeed," said the count at length. "i think, before we do any thing in the business, as this gentleman was of the roman catholic faith, and an officer in the king's service, we had better send down immediately to the curé of maubourg, and ask him to come up to receive the body." the word of the young count was of course law to those who surrounded him, and one of his own attendants having been despatched for the curé, the good man came up with four or five of the villagers in less than half an hour. his countenance, which was mild and benevolent, was very sad, for he had received from the messenger an account of what had taken place. the young count, who had some slight personal knowledge of him, and knew him still better by reputation, advanced some way to meet him, saying-- "this is a dreadful event, monsieur le curé, and i have thought it better to send for you rather than move the body of this young gentleman myself, knowing him to have been a catholic, while all of us here present were of a different faith. had not life been evidently long extinguished," he continued, "we should not, of course, have scrupled in such a manner; but as it is, we have acted as we have done, in the hopes of meeting your own views upon the subject." "you have done quite well, and wisely, my son," replied the curé. "would to god that all dissensions in the church would cease, as i feel sure they would do, if all men would act as prudently as you have done." "and as wisely and moderately as _you always do_, monsieur le curé," added the count. the curé bowed his head, and advanced towards the tree, where he read the inscription over the head of the murdered man, and then gazed upon the veil that was round his throat. he shook his head sadly as he did so, and then turning to the count, he said, "perhaps you do not know the key of all this sad story. i heard it before i came hither. this morning, an hour before matins, the bell of the religious house of st. hermand--you know it well, count, i dare say, a mile or so beyond the _chêne vert_--was rung loudly, and on the portress opening the gate, four men, with their faces covered, carried in the body of one of the novices, called claire duval, who had been absent the whole night, causing great alarm. there was a shot wound in her breast; she was laid out for the grave; and, though none of the men spoke a word, but merely placed the body in the lodge, and then retired, a paper was found with it afterwards, saying, 'an innocent girl murdered by the base de hericourt, and revenged by brown keroual.'--this, of course, i imagine, is the body of him called de hericourt." "it is, indeed, sir," replied the count, "the young marquis de hericourt, a relation not very distant of the marquis de louvois; and a brave, but rash, unprincipled, and weak young man he was. in your hands i leave the charge of the body, but any assistance that my servants can give you, or that my influence can procure, are quite at your service." the curé' thanked him for his offer, but only requested that he would send him down some sort of a litter or conveyance, to carry the body to the church. the count immediately promised to do so; and returning home he fulfilled his word. he then took some refreshment before his journey, wrote a brief note to the duc de rouvré, stating that he would have come over to see him immediately, but was obliged to go to paris without loss of time; and then mounting his horse, and followed by his attendants, he rode to the first post-house, where taking post-horses, he proceeded at as rapid a pace as possible towards the capital. chapter vi. the court. we must once more--following the course of human nature as it is at all times, but more especially as it then was, before all the great asperities of the world were smoothed and softened down, and one universal railroad made life an easy and rapid course from one end to another--we must once more then, following the common course of being, shift the scene, and bring before our readers a new part of the great panorama of that day. it was then at the lordly palace of versailles, in the time of its greatest and most extraordinary splendour, when the treasures of a world had been ransacked to adorn its halls, and art and genius had been called in to do what riches had been unable to accomplish; while yet every chamber throughout the building flamed with those far-famed groups, cast in solid gold, the designs of which had proceeded from the pencil of le brun, and the execution of which had employed a thousand of the most skilful hands in france; while yet marble, and porphyry, and jasper, shone in every apartment; and the rarest works, from every quarter of the world, were added to the richness of the other decorations: before, in short, the consequences of his own ambition, or his successor's faults and weaknesses, had stripped one splendid ornament from that extraordinary building, which louis xiv. had erected in the noon of his splendour--it was then that took place the scene which we are about now to describe. the count de morseiul had scarcely paused even to take needful rest on his way from poitou to paris, and he had arrived late at night at the untenanted dwelling of his fathers in the capital. the counts de morseiul had ever preferred the country to the town, and though they possessed a large house in the place royale, which then was, though it is now no longer a fashionable part of the city; that house had become, at it were, merely the dwelling-place of some old officers and attendants, who happened to have a lingering fondness for the busy haunts of men which their lord shared not in. the old white-headed porter, as he opened the gate for his young master, stared with wonder and surprise to see him there, and nothing of course was found prepared for his reception. but the count was easily satisfied and easily pleased. food could always be procured without any difficulty, in the great capital of all eating, but repose was what the young count principally required; and, after having despatched a messenger to versailles, to ask in due form an audience of the king as early as possible on the following morning, to cast himself on the first bed that could be got ready, and forgot in a few minutes all the cares, and sorrows, and anxieties, which had accompanied him on his way to the capital. the request for an audience was conveyed through the marquis of seignelai, with whom the count himself was well acquainted; and he doubted not that it would be granted immediately, if he had preceded, as he had every reason to believe he had, the ordinary courier from poitou, bringing the news of the events which had taken place in that province. the letter of the young secretary, in return to his application, arrived the next morning; but it was cold and formal, and evidently written under the immediate dictation of the king. it merely notified to the count that, for the next three days, the time appointed by his majesty for business would be fully occupied; that, in the mean time, if the business which brought the count to paris were important, he would communicate it to the minister under whose department it came. the note went on to add, that if the business were not one requiring immediate despatch, the young count would do well to come to versailles, to signify the place of his abode at the palace, and to wait the monarch's leisure. this was by no means the tone which louis usually assumed towards one of the most gallant officers in his service; and, while the count at once perceived that the king was offended with him on some account, he felt great difficulty in so shaping his conduct as to meet the exigency of the moment. as the only resource, he determined to see and interest seignelai to obtain for him a more speedy audience; and he had the greater hopes of so doing, inasmuch as that minister was known to be jealous of and inimical to louvois, one of the great persecutors of the protestants. while he was pondering over these things, and preparing to set out immediately for versailles, another courier from the court arrived, bearing with him a communication of a very different character, which, upon the whole, surprised the count, even more than the former one had done. it contained a general invitation to all the evening entertainments of the court; specifying not only those to which the great mass of the french nobility were admitted as a matter of course, but the more private and select parties of the king, to which none in general but his own especial friends and favourites were ever invited. this gave albert of morseiul fresh matter for meditation, but also some hope that the king, whom he believed to be generous and kindhearted, had remembered the services he and his ancestors had rendered to the state, and had consequently made an effort to overcome any feeling of displeasure which he might have entertained in consequence of reports from poitiers. he determined, however, to pursue his plan with regard to seignelai, believing that it would be facilitated rather than otherwise by any change of feeling which had come over the monarch, and he accordingly proceeded to versailles at once. the secretary of state was not to be found in his apartments, but one of his attendants informed the count that, at that hour, he would find him alone in the gardens, and he accordingly proceeded to seek him with all speed. as he passed by the orangery, however, he heard the sound of steps and gay voices speaking, and, in a moment after, stood in the presence of the king himself, who had passed through the orangery, and was now issuing forth into the gardens. louis was at this time a man of the middle age, above the ordinary height, and finely proportioned in all his limbs. though he still looked decidedly younger than he really was, and the age of forty was perhaps as much as any one would have assigned him, judging from appearance, yet he had lost all the slightness of the youthful figure. he was robust, and even stout, though by no means corpulent, and the ease and grace with which he moved showed that no power was impaired. his countenance was fine and impressive, though, perhaps, it might not have afforded to a very scrutinising physiognomist any indication of the highest qualities of the human mind. all the features were good, some remarkably handsome, but in most there was some peculiar defect, some slight want which took away from the effect of the whole. the expression was placable, but commanding, and grave rather than thoughtful; and the impression produced by its aspect was, that it was serious, less from natural disposition or intense occupation of mind, than from the consciousness that it was a condescension for that countenance to smile. the monarch's carriage, as he walked, also produced an effect somewhat similar on those who saw him for the first time. every step was dignified, stately, and graceful; but there was something a little theatrical in the whole, joined with, or perhaps expressing, a knowledge that every step was marked and of importance. the king's dress was exceedingly rich and costly; and certainly though bad taste in costume was then at its height, the monarch and the group that came close upon his steps, formed as glittering and gay an object as could be seen. amongst those who followed the king, however, were several ecclesiastics, and to the surprise of the young count de morseiul, one of those on whom his eye first fell was no other than the abbé pelisson, in eager but low conversation with the bishop of meaux. louis himself was speaking with a familiar tone, alternately to the prince de marsillac, and to the well known financier bechameil, whose exquisite taste in pictures, statues, and other works of art, recommended him greatly to the monarch. no sooner did the king's look rest upon the young count de morseiul, than his brow became as dark as a thunder cloud, and he stopped suddenly in his walk. scarcely had the count time to remark that angry expression, however, before it had entirely passed away, and a grave and dignified smile succeeded. it was a common remark, at that time, that the king was to be judged by those who sought him, from his first aspect, and certainly, if that were the test in the present instance, his affection for the count of morseiul was but small. louis was conscious that he had displayed bad feelings more openly than he usually permitted himself to do; and he now hastened to repair that fault, not by affecting the direct contrary sentiments, as some might have done, but by softening down his tone and demeanour to the degree of dignified disapprobation, which they might naturally be supposed to have reached. "monsieur de morseiul," he said, as the young nobleman approached, "i am glad, yet sorry, to see you. there are various reports have reached me from poitou tending to create a belief that you have been, in some degree, wanting in due respect to my will; and i should have been glad that the falsehood of those reports had been proved before you again presented yourself. your services, sir, however, are not forgotten, and you have, on so many occasions, shown devotion, obedience, and gallantry, which might well set an example to the whole world, that i cannot believe there is any truth in what i have heard, and am willing, unless a painful conviction to the contrary is forced upon me, to look upon you, till the whole of this matter be fully investigated, in the same light as ever." the king paused a moment, as if for reply; and the count de morseiul gladly seized the opportunity of saying, "i came up post, sire, last night, from morseiul, for the purpose of casting myself at your majesty's feet, and entreating you to believe that i would never willingly give you the slightest just cause for offence, in word, thought, or deed. i apprehended that some false or distorted statements, either made for the purpose of deceiving your majesty, or originating in erroneous impressions, might have reached you concerning my conduct, as i know misapprehensions of my conduct had occurred in poitiers itself. such being the case, and various very painful events having taken place, i felt it my duty to beseech your majesty to grant me an audience, in order that i might lay before you the pure and simple facts, which i am ready to vouch for on the honour of a french gentleman. i am most desirous, especially with regard to the latter events which have taken place, that your majesty should be at once made aware of the facts as they really occurred, lest any misrepresentations should reach your ears, and prepare your mind to take an unfavourable view of acts which were performed in all loyalty, and with the most devoted affection to your majesty's person." the young count spoke with calm and dignified boldness. there was no hesitation, there was no wavering, there was no apprehension either in tone, manner, or words; and there was something in his whole demeanour which set at defiance the very thought of there being the slightest approach to falsehood or artifice in his nature. the king felt that it was so himself, notwithstanding many prejudices on all the questions which could arise between the count and himself. but his line of conduct, by this time, had been fully determined, and he replied, "as i caused you to be informed this morning, monsieur de morseiul, my arrangements do not permit me to give you so much time as will be necessary for the hearing of all you have to say for several days. in the mean while, however, fear not that your cause will be, in any degree, prejudged. we have already, by a courier arrived this morning, received full intelligence of all that has lately taken place in poitou, and of the movements of some of our misguided subjects of the pretended reformed religion. we have ordered accurate information to be obtained upon the spot, by persons who cannot be considered as prejudiced, and we will give you audience as soon as such information has been fully collected. in the mean time you will remain at the court, and be treated here, in every respect, as a favoured and faithful servant, which will show you that no unjust prejudice has been created; though it is not to be denied that the first effect of the tidings we received from poitou was to excite considerable anger against you. however, you owe a good deal, in those respects, to monsieur pelisson, who bore witness to your having gallantly defended his life from a bad party of robbers, and to your having saved from the flames a commission under our hand, although that commission was afterwards unaccountably abstracted. i hope to hear," the king continued, "of your frequenting much the society of monsieur pelisson, and our respected and revered friend the bishop of meaux, by which you may doubtless derive great advantage, and perhaps arrive at those happy results which would make it our duty, as well as our pleasure, to favour you in the very highest degree." the meaning of louis was too evident to be mistaken; and, as the count de morseiul had not the slightest intention of encouraging even a hope that he would abandon the creed of his ancestors, he merely bowed in reply, and the king passed on. the count was then about to retire immediately from the gardens, but pelisson caught him by the sleeve as he passed, saying in a low voice,-- "come on, monsieur de morseiul, come on after the king. believe me, i really wish you well; and it is of much consequence that you should show not only your attachment to his majesty, by presenting yourself constantly at the court, but also that you are entering into none of the intrigues of those who are irritating him by opposition and cabals. you know monsieur bossuet, of course. let us come on." "i only know monsieur bossuet by reputation," replied the count, bowing to the bishop who had paused also, and at the same time turning to follow the royal train. "i only know him by reputation, as who, throughout france, nay, throughout europe, does not?" "the compliment will pass for catholic, though it comes from a protestant mouth," said one of two gentlemen who had been obliged to pause also by the halt of the party before them. but neither bossuet nor the count took any notice, but walked on, entering easily into conversation with each other; the eloquent prelate, who was not less keen and dexterous than he was zealous and learned, accommodating himself easily to the tone of the young count. pelisson, ere they had gone far, was inclined to have drawn the conversation to religious subjects, and was a little anxious to prove to the count de morseiul that, at the bottom, there was very little real difference between the catholic and the protestant faith, from which starting-point he intended to argue, as was his common custom, that as there was so little difference, and as in all the points of difference that did exist the catholics were in the right, it was a bounden duty for every protestant to renounce his heretical doctrines, and embrace the true religion. bossuet, however, was much more politic, and resisted all pelisson's efforts to introduce such topics, by cutting across them immediately, and turning the conversation to something less evidently applicable to the count de morseiul. something was said upon the subject of jansenism, indeed, as they walked along; and bossuet replied, smiling,-- "heaven forbid that those discussions should be renewed! i abhor controversy, and always avoid it, except when driven to it. i am anxious indeed, most anxious, that all men should see and renounce errors, and especially anxious, as i am in duty bound, when those errors are of such a nature as to affect their eternal salvation. but very little good, i doubt, has ever been done by controversy, though certainly still less by persecution; and if we were to choose between those two means, controversy would of course be the best. unfortunately, however, it seldom ends but as a step to the other." there was something so moderate and so mild in the language of the prelate, that the young count soon learned to take great pleasure in his discourse; and after these few brief words concerning religion, the bishop of meaux drew the conversation to arts and sciences, and the great improvements of every kind which had taken place in france under the government of louis xiv. they were still speaking on this subject when the king turned at the end of the terrace, and with surprise saw the count de morseiul in his train, between pelisson and bossuet. a smile of what appeared to be dignified satisfaction came over the monarch's countenance, and as he passed he asked,-- "what are you discussing so eagerly, monsieur de meaux?" "we are not discussing, sire," replied the bishop, "for we are all of one opinion. monsieur de morseiul was saying that in all his knowledge of history--which we know is very great--he cannot find one monarch whose reign has produced so great a change in society as that of louis the great." the king smiled graciously, and passed on. but the same sarcastic personage, who followed close behind the party to which the count had attached himself, added to bossuet's speech, almost loud enough for the king to hear, "except mahomet! except mahomet, monsieur de meaux!" it was impossible either for the bishop, or the count, or pelisson, to repress a smile; but the only one of the party who turned to look was the count, the others very well knowing the voice to be that of villiers, whose strange method of paying court to louis xiv. was by abusing every thing on which the monarch prided himself. he was slightly acquainted with the count de morseiul, having met him more than once on service, and seeing him turn his head, he came up and joined them. "you spoil that man, all of you," he said, speaking of the king. "all the world flatters him, till he does not know what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly.--now, as we stand here upon this terrace," he continued, "and look down over those gardens, is there any thing to be seen on the face of the earth more thoroughly and completely disgusting than they are? is it possible for human ingenuity to devise any thing so mathematically detestable? one would suppose that la hire, or cassini, or some of the other clockmakers, had been engaged with their villanous compasses in marking out all those rounds, and triangles, and squares, so that the whole park and gardens, when seen, from my little room (which the king in his immense generosity gave me in the garret story of the palace), look exactly like a dusty leaf torn out of euclid's elements, with all the problems demonstrated upon it. then, monsieur de morseiul, do pray look at those basins and statues. here you have a set of black tadpoles croaking at an unfortunate woman in the midst, as black as themselves. there you have a striking representation of neptune gone mad--perhaps it was meant for a storm at sea; and certainly, from the number of people death-sick all round, and pouring forth from their mouths into the basins, one might very easily conceive it to be so. there is not one better than another, and yet the king walks about amongst them all, and thinks it the finest thing that ever was seen upon the face of the earth, and has at this moment five-and-twenty thousand men working hard, to render it, if possible, uglier than before." the count de morseiul smiled; and, although he acknowledged that he loved the fair face of the country, unshaven and unornamented better than all that art could do, yet he said, that for the gardens of such a palace as that of versailles, where solemn and reposing grandeur was required, and regular magnificence more than picturesque beauty, he did not see that better could have been done. thus passed the conversation, till the king, after having taken another turn, re-entered the building, and his courtiers quitted him at the foot of the staircase. the count then inquired of pelisson where he could best lodge in versailles, and the abbé pointed out to him a handsome house, very near that in which the bishop of meaux had taken up his abode for the time. "do you intend to come speedily to versailles?" demanded the bishop. "as i understood the king," replied the count, "it is his pleasure that i should do so; and consequently i shall merely go back to paris to make my arrangements, and then return hither with all speed. i propose to be back by seven or eight o'clock this evening, if this house is still to be had." "for that i can answer," replied the bishop. "the only disagreeable thing you will find here is a want of food," he added, laughing, "for the palace swallows up all; but if you will honour me by supping with me to-night, monsieur le comte, perhaps monsieur pelisson will join us, with one or two others, and we may spend a calm and pleasant evening, in talking over such things as chance or choice may select. we do so often in my poor abode. but indeed i forgot; perhaps you may prefer going to the theatre at the palace, for this is one of the nights when a play is performed there." "no, indeed," replied the count. "i hold myself not only flattered, but obliged, by your invitation, monsieur de meaux, and i will not fail to be with you at any hour you appoint." the hour was accordingly named; and, taking his leave, the young count de morseiul sought his horses, and returned to paris. his visit to versailles, indeed, had not been so satisfactory as he could have wished; and while jerome riquet was making all the preparations for his master's change of abode, the count himself leaned his head upon his hand, and revolved in deep thought all the bearings of his present situation. no one knew better than he did, that appearances are but little to be trusted at any court, and as little as in any other at the court of louis xiv. he knew that the next word from the king's mouth might be an order to conduct him to the bastille, and that very slight proofs of guilt would be required to change his adherence to his religion, if not into a capital crime, at least into a pretext for dooming him to perpetual imprisonment. he saw, also, though perhaps not to the full extent of the king's design, that louis entertained some hopes of his abandoning his religion; and he doubted not that various efforts would be employed to induce him to do so--efforts difficult to be parried, painful to him to be the object of, and which might, perhaps, afford matter for deep offence if they, proved ineffectual. he saw, and he knew too, that it was decidedly the resolution of the king and of his advisers to put down altogether the protestant religion in france; that there was no hope, that there was no chance of mitigating, in any degree, the unchangeable spirit of intolerance. all these considerations urged the young count to pursue a plan which had suggested itself at first to his mind, rather as the effect of despair than of calculation. it was to go back no more to versailles; to return post-haste to poitou; to collect with all speed the principal protestants who might be affected by any harsh measures of the court; to demand of clémence de marly the fulfilment of her promise to fly with him; and, embarking with the rest at the nearest port, to seek safety and peace in another land. the more he thought over this design the more he was inclined to adopt it; for although he evidently saw that tidings of what had taken place at the preaching in the desert had already reached the king's ears, and that the first effect was passed, yet he could not rely by any means upon the sincerity of the demeanour assumed towards him, and believed that even though he--if his military services were required--might be spared from political considerations, yet the great majority of the protestants might be visited with severe inflictions, on account of the part they had taken in the transactions of that day. one consideration alone tended to make him pause ere he executed this purpose, which was, that having undertaken a task he was bound to execute it, and not to shrink from it while it was half completed; and, though anxious to do what he considered right in all things, he feared that by flying he might but be able to protect a few, while by remaining he might stand between many and destruction. in this world we ponder and consider, and give time, and care, and anxiety, and thought to meditation over different lines of conduct, while calm, imperturbable fate stands by till the appointed moment, and then, without inquiring the result, decides the matter for us. the count had sent a servant immediately after his return from versailles to the house of marshal schomberg, to inquire whether that officer were in paris, and if so, at what hour he would be visible. the servant returned bringing word that marshal schomberg had quitted the country, that his house and effects had been sold, and that it was generally supposed he never intended to return. this was an example of the prompt execution of a resolution, which might well have induced the count de morseiul to follow it, especially as it showed schomberg's opinion to be, that the affairs of the protestants in france were utterly irretrievable, and that the danger to those who remained was imminent. thus was another weight cast into the scale; but even while he was rising from the table at which he sat, in order to give directions for preparing for a still longer journey than that which he had notified to his servants before, jerome riquet entered the room and placed before him a note, written in a hand with which he was not at all acquainted. "you have thought much of my conduct strange, albert--" it began; and turning at once to the other page he saw the name of clémence. "you have thought much of my conduct strange, and now will you not think it still stranger, when i tell you that i have but two moments to write to you, and not even a moment to see you? i looked forward to tomorrow with hope and expectation; and now i suddenly learn that we are to set off within an hour for paris. the order has been received from the king: the duke will not make a moment's delay: for me to stay here alone is, of course, impossible; and i am obliged to leave poitou without seeing you, without the possibility even of receiving an answer. pray write to me immediately in paris. tell me that you forgive me for an involuntary fault; tell me that you forgive me for any thing i may have done to pain you. i say so, because your last look seemed to be reproachful; and yet, believe me, when i tell you upon my honour, that i could not but act as i have acted. "oh, albert! if i could but see you in paris! i, who used to be so bold--i, who used to be so fearless, now feel as if i were going into a strange world, where there is need of protection, and guidance, and direction. i feel as if i had given up all control over myself; and if you were near me, if you were in paris, i should have greater confidence, i should have greater courage, i should have more power to act, to speak, even to think rightly, than i have at present. come, then, if it be possible, come then, if it be right; and if not, at all events write to me soon, write to me immediately. "may i,--yes i may, for i feel it is true--call myself "your clémence." the letter was dated on the very day that the count himself had set off, and had evidently been sent over to the château of morseiul shortly after his departure. maître riquet had contrived to linger in the room on one pretext or another while his master read the note, and the count, turning towards him, demanded eagerly how it had come, and who had brought it. "why, monseigneur," replied the man, "the truth is, i always love to have a little information. in going through life i have found it like a snuff-box, which one should always carry; even if one does not take snuff one's self: it is so useful for one's friends!" "come, come, sir, to the point," said his master. "how did this letter arrive? that is the question." "just what i was going to tell you, my lord," replied the man. "i left behind me pierre martin to gather together a few stray things which i could not carry with me, and a few stray pieces of information which i could not learn myself, and to bring them after us to paris with all speed; old doublets, black silk stockings, bottles of essence, cases of razors, true information regarding all the reports in the county of poitou, and whatever letters might have arrived between our going and his coming." "in the latter instance," replied the count, "you have done wisely, and more thoughtfully than myself. i do believe, riquet, as you once said of yourself, you never forget any thing that is necessary." "you do me barely justice, sir," replied the man, "for i remember always a great deal more than is necessary; so, seeing that the letter was in a lady's hand, i brought it you, my lord, at once, without even waiting to look in at the end; which, perhaps, was imprudent, as very likely now i shall never be able to ascertain the contents." "you are certainly not without your share of impudence, maître jerome," replied his master; "which i suppose you would say is amongst your other good qualities. but now leave me; for i must think over this letter." riquet prepared to obey, but as he opened the door for his own exit, he drew two or three steps back, throwing it much wider, and giving admission to the prince de marsillac. his appearance did not by any means surprise the count, for although he had seen him that very morning at versailles, he had obtained not a moment to speak with him; and, as old friends, it was natural that, if any thing brought the prince to paris, he should call at the hôtel de morseiul, to talk over all that had taken place since their last meeting at poitiers. "my dear count," he said, "understanding from monsieur de meaux that you return to versailles to-night, i have come to offer you a place down in my carriage, or to take a place in yours, that we may have a long chat over the scenes at poitiers, and over the prospects of this good land of ours." "willingly," said the count. "i have no carriage with me, but i will willingly accompany you in yours. what time do you go?" "as soon as you will," replied the prince. "i am ready to set out directly. i have finished all that i had to do in paris, and return at once." the count paused for a moment to calculate in his own mind whether it were possible that the duc de rouvré could reach paris that night. considering, however, the slow rate at which he must necessarily travel, accompanied by all his family, albert of morseiul saw that one, if not two days more, must elapse before his arrival. "well," he said, having by this time determined at all events to pause in the neighbourhood of the capital till after he had seen clémence--"well, as i have not dined, old friend, i will go through that necessary ceremony, against which my man riquet has doubtless prepared, and then i will be ready to accompany you." "nor have i dined either," replied the prince; "so if you will give a knife and fork to one you justly call an old friend i will dine with you, and we will send for the carriage in the meanwhile." there was something in the prince's tone and manner, difficult to describe or to explain, which struck the count as extraordinary. the calmest, the coolest, the most self-possessed man in france was a little embarrassed. but the count made no remark, merely looking for a moment in his face--somewhat steadfastly indeed, and in such a manner that the other turned to the window, saying, in a careless tone, "it was under those trees, i think, that the duke of guise killed coligny." the count made no reply, but called some of his attendants, and bade them see what had been provided for dinner. in a few minutes it was announced as ready, and he sat down with his friend to table, doing the honours with perfect politeness and cheerfulness. before the meal was concluded, it was announced that the prince's carriage and servants had arrived, and, when all was ready, the count de morseiul proposed that they should depart, leaving his attendants to follow. just as he had his foot upon the step of the carriage, however, the count turned to his friend, and said, "you have forgot, my good friend, to tell the coachman whether he is to drive to the bastille, or vincennes, or to versailles." "you mistake," said the prince, following him into the carriage: "to versailles, of course. i will explain to you the whole matter as we go. within ten minutes after you left versailles this morning," he continued, as soon as they were once fully on the way, "i was sent for to the king about something referring to my post of grand veneur. i found louvois with him in one of his furious and insolent moods, and the king bearing all with the utmost patience. it soon became apparent that the conversation referred to you, louvois contending that you should never have been suffered to quit versailles till some affairs that have taken place in poitou were fully examined, declaring that you had only gone to paris in order to make your escape from the country more conveniently. the king asked me my opinion; and i laughed at the idea to louvois's face. he replied that i did not know all, or half, indeed, for that if i did i should not feel nearly so certain. i said i knew you better; and, to settle the matter at once, i added that, as i was going to paris, i would undertake you came back with me in my carriage or i in yours. the king trusted me, as you see; and i thought it a great deal better to come in this manner as a friend, than to let louvois send you a _lettre de cachet_, which you might even find a more tiresome companion than the prince de marsillac." "undoubtedly i should," replied the count, "and i thank you much for the interest you have taken in the affair as well as for the candour of the confession. but now, my friend, since you have gone so far, go a little farther, and give me some insight, if you can, into what is taking place at the court just at present--i mean in reference to myself--for my situation is, as you may suppose, not the most pleasant; and is one in which a map of the country may be serviceable to me. i see none of my old friends about the court at present except yourself. seignelai i have not been able to find----" "and he would give you no information even if you did find him," replied the prince. "i can give you but very little, for i know but little. in the first place, however, let me tell you a great secret; that you are strongly suspected of being a protestant." "indeed," replied the count; "i fear they have more than suspicion against me there." "confess it not," said his friend, "confess it not! for just at present, it would be much more safe to confess high treason: but, in the next place, my dear count, a report has gone abroad--quite false i know--that you are desperately in love with this fair clémence de marly." "and pray," demanded the count, smiling, "in what manner would that affect me at the court, even were it true?" "why, now, to answer seriously," replied his friend, "though, remember i speak only from the authority of my own imagination, i should say, that you are very likely to obtain her, with every sort of honour and distinction to boot, in spite of hericourt and the chevalier d'evran, and all the rest, upon one small condition; which is, that you take a morning's walk into the church of st. laurent, or any other that may be more pleasant to you; stay about half an hour, read a set form, which means little or nothing, and go through some other ceremonies of the same kind." "in fact," said the count, "make my renunciation in form, you mean to say." the prince nodded his head, and albert of morseiul fell into thought, well knowing that his friend was himself ignorant of one of the most important considerations of the whole; namely, the faith of clémence de marly herself. on that subject, of course, he did not choose to say any thing; but after remaining in thought for a few moments, he demanded,-- "and pray, my good friend, what is to be the result, if i do not choose to make this renunciation?" "heaven only knows," replied the prince. "there are, at least, six or seven different sorts of fate that may befall you. probably the choice will be left to yourself; whether you will have your head struck off in a gentlemanly way in the court of the bastille, or be broken on the wheel; though i believe that process they are keeping for the huguenot priests now,--ministers as you call them. if the king should be exceeding merciful, the castle of pignerol, or the prison in the isle st. marguerite, may afford you a comfortable little solitary dwelling for the rest of your life. i don't think it likely that he should send you to the galleys, though i am told they are pretty full of military men now. but if i were you, i would choose the axe: it is soonest over." "i think i should prefer a bullet," said the count; "but we shall see, my good friend, though i can't help thinking your anticipations are somewhat more sanguinary than necessary. i hear that schomberg has taken his departure, and it must have been with the king's permission. why should it not be the same in my case? i have served the king as well, though, perhaps, not quite so long." "but you are a born subject of france," replied the other; "schomberg is not; and, besides, schomberg has given no offence, except remaining faithful to his religion. you have been heading preaching in the open fields they say, if not preaching yourself." "certainly not the last," replied the count. "indeed!" said his friend; "they have manufactured a story, then, of your having addressed the people before any one else." "good god!" exclaimed the count; "is it possible that people can pervert one's actions in such a manner? i merely besought the people to be orderly and tranquil, and added a hope that they had come unarmed as i had come." "it would seem that a number of you were armed, however," said the prince, "for some of the dragoons were killed it would appear; and, on my word, you owe a good deal to pelisson; for if louvois had obtained his way this morning, as usual, your head would have been in no slight danger. the abbé stepped in, however, and said, that he had seen much of you in poitou, and that from all he had heard and seen, his majesty had not a more faithful or obedient subject in those parts." "i am certainly very much obliged to him," replied the count. "but he has strangely altered his tone; for at poitiers he would fain have proved me guilty all sorts of acts that i never committed." "perhaps he may have had cause to change," replied the prince de marsillac. "it is known that he and st. helie quarrelled violently before pelisson's return. but at all events, your great security is in the fact, that there are two factions in the party who are engaged in putting down your sect. the one would do it by gentle means--bribery, corruption, persuasion, and the soft stringents of exclusion from place, rank, and emolument. the other breathes nothing but fire and blood, the destruction of rebels to the royal will, and the most signal punishment for all who differ in opinion from themselves. this last party would fain persuade the king that the huguenots are in arms, or ready to take arms, throughout france, and that nothing is to be done but to send down armies to subdue them. but then the others come in and say, 'it is no such thing; the people are all quiet; they are submitting with a good grace, and if you do not drive them to despair, they will gradually return, one by one, to the bosom of the mother church, rather than endure all sorts of discomfort and disgrace!' of this party are pelisson, the good bishop, and many other influential people; but, above all, madame de maintenon, whose power, in every thing but this, is supreme." "had i not better see her," demanded the count, "and endeavour to interest her in our favour?" "she dare not for her life receive you," replied the prince. "what is religion, or humanity, or generosity, or any thing else to her if it stand in the way of ambition? no, no, morseiul! the good lady may perhaps speak a kind word for you in secret, and when it can be put in the form of an insinuation; but she is no madame de montespan who would have defended the innocent, and thrust herself in the way to prevent injustice, even if the blow had fallen upon herself. she dared to say to the king things that no other mortal dared, and would say them too, when her heart, or her understanding was convinced; but madame de maintenon creeps towards the crown, and dares not do a good action if it be a dangerous one. do not attempt to see her, for she would certainly refuse; and if she thought that the very application had reached the king's ears, she would urge him to do something violent, merely to show him that she had nothing to do with you." "she has had much to do with me and mine," replied the count, somewhat bitterly; "for to my father, she and her mother owed support when none else would give it." "she owed her bread to madame de montespan," replied the prince, "and yet ceased not her efforts till she had supplanted her. but," he added, after a pause, "she is not altogether bad, either, and it is not improbable, that if there be any scheme going on for converting you by milder means than the wheel, as i believe there is, she may be the deviser of it. she was in the room this morning when the business was taking place between the king, louvois, and pelisson. she said nothing, but sat working at a distance, the very counterpart of a pie-bald cat that sat dozing in the corner; but she heard all, and i remarked that when the affair was settled, and other things began, she beckoned pelisson to look at her embroidery, and spoke to him for some minutes in a low voice." "morseiul, may i advise you?" the prince continued, after a brief interval had taken place in the conversation; "listen to me but one word! i know well that there is no chance of your changing your religion except upon conviction. do not, however, enact the old roman, or court too much the fate of martyrdom; but without taking any active step in the matter, let the whole plans of these good folks, as far as they affect yourself, go on unopposed: let them, in short, still believe that it is not impossible to convert you. listen to pelisson--pay attention to bossuet--watch the progress of events--be converted if you can; and if not, you, at all events, will gain opportunities of retiring from the country with far greater ease and safety than at present, if you should be driven to such a step at last. in the mean time, this affair of the preaching will have blown over, and they will not dare to revive it against you if they let it slumber for some time. think of it, morseiul!--think of it!" "i will," replied the count, "and thank you sincerely; and indeed will do all that may be done with honour, not to offend the king or endanger myself;" and thus the conversation ended on that subject; the prince having said already far more than might have been expected from a courtier of louis xiv. chapter vii. the clouds and the sunshine. the count de morseiul had just time to take possession of his new abode, and make himself tolerably at his ease therein, before the hour arrived for proceeding to the house of the bishop of meaux, where he was received by the prelate with every sort of kindness. he arrived before any body else, and bossuet took him by the hand, saying, with a smile, "some of our good clergy, monsieur de morseiul, would perhaps be scandalized at receiving in their house so distinguished a protestant as yourself; but i trust you know, what i have always endeavoured to prove, that i look upon all denominations of christians as my brethren, and am only perhaps sometimes a little eager with them, out of what very likely you consider an _over-anxiety_, to induce them to embrace those doctrines which i think necessary to their salvation. should it ever be so between you and me, monsieur le comte, will you forgive me. "willingly," replied the count, thinking that the work of conversion was about to begin; but, to his surprise, bossuet immediately changed the conversation, and turned it to the subject of the little party he had invited to meet the count. "i have not," he said, "made it, as indeed i usually do, almost entirely of churchmen; for i feared you might think that i intended to overwhelm you under ecclesiastical authority: however, we have some belonging to the church, whom you will be glad to meet, if you do not know them already. the abbé renaudot will be here, who has a peculiar faculty for acquiring languages, such as i never knew in any one but himself. he understands no less than seventeen foreign languages, and twelve of those he speaks with the greatest facility. that, however, is one of his least qualities, as you may yourself judge when i tell you, that in this age, where interest and ambition swallow up every thing, he is the most disinterested man that perhaps ever lived. possessed of one very small, poor benefice which gives him a scanty subsistence, he has constantly refused every other preferment; and no persuasion will induce him to do what he terms, 'encumber himself with wealth.' we shall also have la broue, with whose virtues and good qualities you are already acquainted. d'herbelot also wrote yesterday to invite himself. he has just returned from italy, where that reverence was shown to him, which generous and expansive minds are always ready to display towards men of genius and of learning. he was received by the grand duke at florence, and treated like a sovereign prince, though merely a poor french scholar. a house was prepared for him, the secretary of state met him, and, as a parting present, a valuable library of oriental manuscripts was bestowed upon him by the duke himself. to these grave people we have joined our lively friend pelisson, and one whom doubtless you know, boileau despréaux. one cannot help loving him, and being amused with him, although we are forced to acknowledge that his sarcasm and his bitterness go a good deal too far. when he was a youth, they tell me, he was the best tempered boy in the world, and his father used to say of him, that all his other children had some sharpness and some talent, but that as for nicholas, he was a good-natured lad, who would never speak ill of any one. one thing, however, i must tell you to his honour. he obtained some time ago, as i lament to say has frequently been done, a benefice in the church without being an ecclesiastic. the revenues of the benefice he spent, in those his young days, in lightness, if not in vice. he has since changed his conduct and his views, and not long ago, not only resigned the benefice, but paid back from his own purse all that he had received, to be spent in acts of charity amongst the deserving of the neighbourhood. this merits particular notice and record." bossuet was going on to mention several others who were likely to join their party, when two of those whom he had named arrived, and the others shortly after made their appearance. the evening passed, as such an evening may well be supposed to have passed, at the dwelling of the famous bishop of meaux. it was cheerful, though not gay; and subjects of deep and important interest were mingled with, and enlivened by many a light and lively sally, confined within the bounds of strict propriety, but none the less brilliant or amusing, for it is only weak and narrow intellects that are forced to fly to themes painful, injurious, or offensive, in order to seek materials with which to found a reputation for wit or talent. the only matter, however, which was mentioned affecting at all the course of our present tale, and therefore the only one on which we shall pause, was discussed between pelisson and the abbé renaudot, while the count de morseiul was standing close by them, speaking for a moment with d'herbelot. "is there any news stirring at the court, monsieur pelisson?" said renaudot. "you hear every thing, and i hear nothing of what is going on there." "why there is nothing of any consequence, i believe," said pelisson, in a loud voice. "the only thing now i hear of is, that mademoiselle marly is going to be married at length." "what, la belle clémence!" cried renaudot "who is the man that has touched her hard heart at length?" "oh, an old lover," said pelisson. "perseverance has carried the day. the chevalier d'evran is the man. the king gave his consent some few days ago, the chevalier having come up express from poitou to ask it." every word reached the ear of the count de morseiul, and his mind reverted instantly to the conduct of the chevalier and clémence, and to the letter which he had received from her. as any man in love would do, under such circumstances, he resolved not to believe a word; but as most men in love would feel, he certainly felt himself not a little uneasy, not a little agitated, not a little pained even by the report. unwilling, however, to hear any more, he walked to the other end of the room to take his leave, as it was now late. pelisson looked after him as he went, and seeing him bid bossuet adieu, he followed his example, and accompanied the young count down the stairs and throughout the few steps he had to take ere he reached his own dwelling. no word, however, was spoken by either regarding clémence de marly, and albert of morseiul retired at once, though certainly not to sleep. he revolved in his mind again and again the probability of pelisson's story having any truth in it. he knew clémence, and he knew the chevalier, and he felt sure that he could trust them both; but that trust was all that he had to oppose to the very great likelihood which there existed, that the king, as he so frequently did, would take the arrangement of a marriage for clémence de marly into his own hands, without in the slightest degree consulting her inclination, or the inclination of any one concerned. the prospect now presented to the mind of albert of morseiul was in the highest degree painful. fresh difficulties, fresh dangers, were added to the many which were already likely to overwhelm him, if even, as he trusted she would, clémence held firm by her plighted troth to him, and resisted what was then so hard to resist in france, the absolute will of the king. still this new incident would only serve to show that instant flight was more absolutely necessary than before, would render any return to france utterly impossible, and would increase the danger and difficulty of executing that flight itself. but a question suggested itself to the count's mind, which, though he answered it in the affirmative, left anxiety and doubt behind it. would clémence de marly resist the will of the king? could she do so? so many were the means to be employed to lead or drive her to obedience, so much might be done by leading her on from step to step, that bitter, very bitter anxiety took possession of her lover's heart. he persuaded himself that it was pain and anxiety on her account alone; but still he loved her too well, too truly, not to feel pained and anxious for himself. on the following morning, as soon as he had breakfasted, he wrote a brief note to clémence, telling her that he was at versailles, was most anxious to see her and converse with her, if it were but for a few minutes, and beseeching her to let him know immediately where he could do so speedily, as he had matters of very great importance to communicate to her at once. the letter was tender and affectionate; but still there was that in it, which might show the keen eyes of love that there was some great doubt and uneasiness pressing on the mind of the writer. as soon as the letter was written, he gave it into the hands of jerome riquet, directing him to carry it to paris, to wait there for the arrival of the family of de rouvré, if they had not yet come, and to find means to give it to maria, the attendant of mademoiselle de marly. he was too well aware of riquet's talents not to be quite sure that this commission would be executed in the best manner; and after his departure he strove to keep his mind as quiet as possible, and occupied himself in writing to his intendant at morseiul, conveying orders for his principal attendants to come up to join him at versailles directly, bringing with them a great variety of different things which were needful to him, but which had been left behind in the hurry of his departure. while he was writing, he was again visited by the prince de marsillac, who came in kindly to tell him that the report of pelisson, who had passed the preceding evening with him, seemed to be operating highly in his favour at court. "i am delighted," he said, "that the good abbé has had the first word, for st. helie is expected to-night, and, depend upon it, his story would be very different. it will not be listened to now, however," he continued; "and every day gained, depend upon it, is something. take care, however, count," he said, pointing to the papers on the table, "take care of your correspondence; for though the king himself is above espionage, louvois is not, i can tell you, and unless you send your letters by private couriers of your own, which might excite great suspicion, every word is sure to be known." "i was going to send this letter by a private courier," said the count; "but as it is only intended to order up the rest of my train from poitou, and some matters of that kind, i care not if it be known to-morrow." "if it be to order up your train," replied the prince, "send it through louvois himself. write him a note instantly, saying, that as you understand he has a courier going, you will be glad if he will despatch that letter. it will be opened, read, and the most convincing proof afforded to the whole of them, that you have no intention of immediate flight, which is the principal thing they seem to apprehend. with this, clenching the report of pelisson, you may set st. helie at defiance, i should think." the count smiled. "heaven deliver me from the intrigues of a court," he said. he did, however, as he was advised; and the prince de marsillac carried off the letter and the note, promising to have them delivered to louvois immediately. several hours then passed anxiously, and although he knew that he could not receive an answer till two or three o'clock, and might perhaps not receive one at all that day, he could not help thinking the time long, and, marking the striking of the palace clock, as if it must have gone wrong for his express torment. the shortest possible space of time, however, in which it was possible to go and come between versailles and paris had scarcely expired after the departure of riquet, when the valet again appeared. he brought with him a scrap of paper, which proved to be the back of the count's own note to clémence, unsealed, and with no address upon it; but written in a hasty hand within was found-- "i cannot--i dare not, see you at present, nor can i now write as i should desire to do. if what you wish to say is of immediate importance, write as before, and it is sure to reach me." there was no signature, but the hand was that of clémence de marly; and the heart of albert of morseiul felt as if it would have broken. it seemed as if the last tie between him and happiness was severed. it seemed as if that hope, which would have afforded him strength, and support, and energy, to combat every difficulty and overleap every obstacle, was taken away from him; and for five or ten minutes he paced up and down the saloon in agony of mind unutterable. "she is yielding already," he said at length, "she is yielding already. the king's commands are hardly announced to her, ere she feels that she must give way. it is strange--it is most strange! i could have staked my life that with her it would have been otherwise!--and yet the influence which this chevalier d'evran seems always to have possessed over her is equally strange. if, as she has so solemnly told me, she is not really bound to him by any tie of affection, may she not be bound by some promise rashly given in former years? we have heard of such things. however, no promises to me shall stand in the way; she shall act freely, and at her own will, as far as i am concerned;" and, sitting down, he wrote a few brief lines to clémence, in which, though he did not pour out the bitterness of his heart, he showed how bitterly he was grieved. "the tidings i had to tell you," he said, "were simply these, which i heard last night. the king destines your hand for another, and has already announced that such is the case. the few words that you have written show me that you are already aware of this fact, and that perhaps struggling between promises to me and an inclination to obey the royal authority, you are pained, and uncertain how to act. such, at least, is the belief to which i am led by the few cold painful words which i have received. if that belief is right, it may make you more easy to know that, in such a case, albert of morseiul will never exact the fulfilment of a promise that clémence de marly is inclined to break." he folded the note up, sealed it, and once more called for riquet. before the man appeared, however, some degree of hesitation had come over the heart of the count, and he asked him,-- "who did you see at the hôtel de rouvré?" "i saw," replied the man, "some of the servants; and i saw two or three ecclesiastics looking after their valises in the court; and i saw madame de rouvré looking out of one of the windows with mademoiselle clémence, and the chevalier d'evran." "it is enough," said the count. "i should wish this note taken back to paris before nightfall, and given into the hands of the same person to whom you gave the other. take some rest, riquet. but i should like that to be delivered before nightfall." "i will deliver it, sir, and be back in time to dress you for the _appartement_." "the _appartement_," said the count, "i had forgotten that, and most likely shall not go. well," he added after a moment's thought, "better go there than to the bastille. but it matters not, riquet, jean can dress me." the man bowed and retired. but by the time that it was necessary for the count to commence dressing for the _appartement_, riquet had returned, bringing with him, however, no answer to the note, for which, indeed, he had not waited. the count suffered him to arrange his dress as he thought fit, and then proceeded to the palace, which was by this time beginning to be thronged with company. during one half of the life of louis xiv. he was accustomed to throw open all the splendid public rooms of his palace three times in the week to all the chief nobility of his court and capital, and every thing that liberal, and even ostentatious, splendour could do to please the eye, delight the ear, or amuse the mind of those who were thus collected, was done by the monarch on the nights which were marked for what was called _appartement_. at an after period of his life, when the death of almost all his great ministers had cast the burden of all the affairs of state upon the king himself, he seldom, if ever, appeared at these assemblies, passing the hours, during which he furnished his court with amusement, in labouring diligently with one or other of his different ministers. at the time we speak of, however, he almost every night showed himself in the _appartement_ for some time, noticing every body with affability and kindness, and remarking, it was said, accurately who was present and who was not. it was considered a compliment to the monarch never to neglect any reasonable opportunity of paying court at these assemblies; and it is very certain that had the count de morseiul failed in presenting himself on the present occasion, his absence would have been regarded as a decided proof of disaffection. he found the halls below, then, filled with guards and attendants; the staircase covered with officers, and guests arriving in immense crowds; while from the first room above poured forth the sound of a full orchestra, which was always the first attraction met with during the evening, as if to put the guests in harmony, and prepare their minds for pleasure and enjoyment. the music was of the finest kind that could be found in france, and no person ever rendered himself celebrated, even in any remote province, for peculiar skill or taste in playing on any instrument, without being sought out and brought to play at the concerts of the king. the concert room, which was the only one where the light was kept subdued, opened into a long suite of apartments, hall beyond hall, saloon beyond saloon, where the eye was dazzled by the blaze, and fatigued by the immense variety of beautiful and precious ornaments which were seen stretching away in brilliant perspective. here tables were laid out for every sort of game that was then in fashion, from billiards to lansquenet; and the king took especial pains to make it particularly known to every person at his court, that it was not only his wish, but his especial command, if any man found any thing wanting, or required any thing whatever for his amusement or pleasure in the apartments, that he was to order some of the attendants to bring it. perfect liberty reigned throughout the whole saloons, as far as was consistent with propriety of conduct. the courtiers made up their parties amongst themselves, chose their own amusements, followed their own pursuits. every sort of refreshment was provided in abundance, and hundreds on hundreds of servants, in splendid dresses, were seen moving here and there throughout the rooms, supplying the wants, and fulfilling the wishes of all the guests, with the utmost promptitude, or waiting for their orders, and remarking, with anxious attention, that nothing was wanting to the convenience of any one. the whole of the principal suite of rooms in the palace was thus thrown open, as we have said, three times in the week, with the exception of the great ball room, which was only opened on particular occasions. sometimes, at the balls of the court, the _appartement_ was not held, and the meeting took place in the ball-room itself. but at other times the ball followed the supper of the king, which took place invariably at ten o'clock, and the company invited proceeded from the _appartement_ to the ball-room, leaving those whose age, health, or habits, gave them the privilege of not dancing, to amuse themselves with the games which were provided on the ordinary nights. such was to be the case on the present evening, and such as we have described was the scene of splendour which opened upon the eyes of the count de morseiul as he entered the concert-room, and taking a seat at the end, gazed up the gallery, listening with pleasure to a calm and somewhat melancholy, but soothing strain of music. his mind, indeed, was too much occupied with painful feelings of many kinds for him to take any pleasure or great interest in the magnificence spread out before his eyes, which he had indeed often seen before, but which he might have seen again with some admiration, had his bosom been free and his heart at rest. at present, however, it was but dull pageantry to him, and the music was the thing that pleased him most; but when a gay and lively piece succeeded to that which he had first heard, he rose and walked on into the rooms beyond, striving to find amusement for his thoughts, though pleasure might not be there to be found. although he was by no means a general frequenter of the court, and always escaped from it to the calmer pleasures of the country as soon as possible, he was, of course, known to almost all the principal nobility of the realm, and to all the officers who had in any degree distinguished themselves in the service. thus, in the very first room, he was stopped by a number of acquaintances; and, passing on amidst the buzz of many voices, and all the gay nothings of such a scene, he met from time to time with some one, whose talents, or whose virtues, or whose greater degree of intimacy with himself, enabled him to pause and enter into longer and more interesting conversation, either in reference to the present--its hopes and fears,--or to the period when last they met, and the events that then surrounded them. although such things could not, of course, cure his mind of its melancholy, it afforded him some degree of occupation for his thoughts, till a sudden whisper ran through the rooms of "the king! the king!" and every body drew back from the centre of the apartments to allow the monarch to pass. louis advanced from the inner rooms with that air of stately dignity, which we know, from the accounts both of his friends and enemies, to have been unrivalled in grace and majesty. his commanding person, his handsome features, his kingly carriage, and his slow and measured step, all bespoke at once the monarch, and afforded no bad indication of his character, with its many grand and extensive, if not noble qualities, its capaciousness, its ambition, and even its occasional littleness, for the somewhat theatrical demeanour was never lost, and the stage effect was not less in louis's mind than in his person. he paused to speak for a moment with several persons as he passed, stood at the lansquenet table where his brother and his son were seated, dropped an occasional word, always graceful and agreeable, at two or three of the other tables, and then paused for a moment and looked up and down the rooms, evidently feeling himself, what his whole people believed him to be, the greatest monarch that ever trod the earth. there was something, indeed, it must be acknowledged, in the mighty splendour of the scene around--in the inestimable amount of the earth's treasures there collected--in the blaze of light, the distant sound of the music, the dazzling loveliness of many there present--the courage, the learning, the talent, the genius collected in those halls; and in the knowledge that there was scarcely a man present who would not shed the last drop of his heart's blood in the defence of his king, there was something that might well turn giddy the brain of any man who felt himself placed on that awful pinnacle of power and greatness. louis, however, was well accustomed to it, and, like the child and the lion, he had become familiar from youth with things which might make other men tremble. thus he paused but for a moment to remark and to enjoy, and then advanced again through the apartments. the next person that his eye fell upon was the count de morseiul; and his countenance showed in a moment how true had been the prophecy of the prince de marsillac, that a great change would take place in his feelings. he now smiled graciously upon the young count, and paused to speak with him. "i trust to see you often here, monsieur de morseiul," he said. "i shall not fail, sire," the count replied, "to pay my duty to your majesty as often as i am permitted to do so." "then you do not return soon to poitou, monsieur le comte?" said the king. "i have thought it so improbable that i should do so, sire," replied the count, who evidently saw that louvois had not failed to report his letter, "that i have taken a hotel here, and have sent for my attendants this day. if i hoped that my presence in poitou could be of any service to your majesty----" "it may be, it may be, count, in time to come," replied the king. "in the mean time we will try to amuse you well here. i have heard that you are one of the best billiard-players in france. follow me now to the billiard room, and, though i am out of practice, i will try a stroke or two with you." it was a game in which louis excelled, as, indeed, he did in all games; and this was one which afterwards, we are told, made the fortune of the famous minister, chamillart. the count de morseiul, therefore, received this invitation as a proof that he was very nearly re-established in the king's good graces. he feared not at all to compete with the monarch, as he himself was also out of practice, and, indeed, far more than the king; so that, though an excellent player, there was no chance of his being driven either to win the game against the monarch, or to make use of some man[oe]uvre to avoid doing so. he followed the king then willingly; but louis, passing through the billiard-room, went on in the first place to the end of the suite of apartments, noticing every body to whom he wished to pay particular attention, and then returned to the game. a number of persons crowded round--so closely indeed, that the monarch exclaimed,-- "let us have room--let us have room! we will have none but the ladies so close to us: ha, monsieur de morseiul?" the game then commenced, and went on with infinite skill and very nearly equal success on both parts. louis became somewhat eager, but yet a suspicion crossed his mind that the young count was purposely giving him the advantage, and at the end of some very good strokes he purposely placed his balls in an unfavourable position. the count did not fail to take instant advantage of the opportunity, and had well nigh won the game. by an unfortunate stroke, however, he lost his advantage, and the king never let him have the table again till he was himself secure. "you see, monsieur de morseiul," he said, as he paused for a moment afterwards, "you see you cannot beat me." "i never even hoped it, sire," replied the count. "in my own short day i have seen so many kings, generals, and statesmen try to do so with signal want of success, that i never entertained so presumptuous an expectation." the monarch smiled graciously, well pleased at a compliment from the young huguenot nobleman which he had not expected; and as the game was one in which he took great pleasure, and which also displayed the graces of his person to the greatest advantage, he played a second game with the count, which he won by only one stroke. he then left the table, and after speaking once more with several persons in the apartments, retired, not to re-appear till after his supper. as soon as he was gone, the prince de marsillac once more approached the young count, saying in a whisper,--"you have not beaten the king, morseiul, but you have conquered him: yet, take my advice, on no account leave the apartments till after the ball has begun. let louis see you there, for you know what a marking eye he has for every one who is in the rooms." thus saying, he passed on, and the count determined to follow his advice, though the hour and a half that was yet to elapse seemed tedious if not interminable to him. about a quarter of an hour before the supper of the king, however, as he sat listlessly leaning against one of the columns, he saw a party coming up from the concert room at a rapid pace, and long before the eye could distinctly see of what persons it was composed, his heart told him that clémence de marly was there. she came forward, leaning on the arm of the duc de rouvré, dressed with the utmost splendour, and followed by a party of several others who had just arrived. she was certainly not less lovely than ever. to the eyes of albert de morseiul, indeed, it seemed that she was more so: but there was an expression of deep sadness on that formerly gay and smiling countenance, which would have made the whole feelings of the count de morseiul change into grief for her grief, and anxiety for her anxiety, had there not been a certain degree of haughtiness, throned upon her brow and curling her lips, which bespoke more bitterness than depression of feeling. the duc de rouvré was, as i have said, proceeding rapidly through the rooms, and paused not to speak with any one. the eyes of clémence, however, fell full upon the count de morseiul, and rested on him with their full melancholy light, while she noticed him with a calm and graceful inclination of the head, but passed on without a word. the feelings of the count de morseiul were bitter indeed, as may well be imagined. "so soon," he said to himself, "so soon! by heaven i can understand now all that i have heard and wondered at: how, for a woman--an empty, vain, coquettish woman--a man may forget the regard of years, and cut his friend's throat as he would that of a stag or boar. where is the chevalier d'evran i wonder? he does not appear in the train to-night; but perhaps he comes not till the ball. i will wait, however, the same time as if she had not been here." he moved not from his place, but remained leaning against the column; and, as is generally the case, not seeking, he was sought for. a number of people who knew him gathered round him; and, although he was in any thing but a mood for entertaining or being entertained, the very shortness of his replies, and the degree of melancholy bitterness that mingled with them, caused words that he never intended to be witty, to pass for wit, and protracted the torture of conversing with indifferent people upon indifferent subjects, when the heart is full of bitterness, and the mind occupied with its own sad business. at length the doors of the ball room were thrown open, and the company poured in to arrange themselves before the monarch came. several parties, indeed, remained playing at different games at the tables in the gallery, and the count remained where he was, still leaning against the column, which was at the distance of ten or twelve yards from the doors of the ball room. not above five minutes had elapsed before the king and his immediate attendants appeared, coming from his private supper room to be present at the ball. his eye, as he passed, ran over the various tables, making a graceful motion with his hand for the players not to rise; and as he approached the folding doors, he remarked the count, and beckoned to him to come up. the count immediately started forward, and the king demanded, "a gallant young man like you, do you not dance, monsieur de morseiul?" taken completely by surprise at this piece of condescension, the count replied, "alas, sire, i am not in spirits to dance; i should but cloud the gaiety of my fair partner, and she would wish herself any where else before the evening were over." louis smiled; and, so much accustomed as he was to attribute the sunshine and clouds upon his courtiers' brows to the effects of his favour or displeasure, he instantly put his own interpretation upon the words of the count, and that interpretation raised the young nobleman much in the good graces of a monarch, who, though vain and despotic, was not naturally harsh and severe. "if, monsieur de morseiul," he said, "some slight displeasure which the king expressed yesterday morning, have rendered our gay fellow-soldier of maestricht and valenciennes so sad, let his sadness pass away, for his conduct here has effaced unfavourable reports, and if he persevere to the end in the same course, he may count upon the very highest favour." almost every circumstance combines on earth to prevent monarchs hearing the truth, even from the most sincere. time, place, and circumstance is almost always against them; and in the present instance, the count de morseiul knew well, that neither the spot nor the moment were at all suited to any thing like an explanation. he could but reply, therefore, that the lightest displeasure of the king was of course enough to make him sad, and end his answer by one of those compliments which derive at least half their value, like paper money, from the good will of the receiver. "come, come," said the king gaily; "shake off this melancholy, fellow-soldier. come with me; and if i have rightly heard the secrets of certain hearts, i will find you a partner this night, who shall not wish herself any where else while dancing with the count de morseiul." the count gazed upon the king with utter astonishment; and louis, enjoying his surprise, led the way quickly on into the ball room, the count following, as he bade him, close by his side, and amongst his principal officers. as soon as they had entered the ball room, louis paused for an instant, and every one rose. the king's eyes, as well as those of the count de morseiul, ran round the vast saloon seeking for some particular object to albert of morseiul that object was soon discovered, placed between the duchess de rouvré, and anette de marville, at the very farthest part of the room. louis, however, who was in good spirits, and in a mood peculiarly condescending, walked round the whole circle, pausing to speak to almost every married lady there, and twice turning suddenly towards the count, perhaps with the purpose of teazing him a little, but seemingly as if about to point out the lady to whom he had alluded. at length, however, he reached the spot where the duchess de rouvré and her party were placed; and after speaking for a moment to the duchess, while the cheek of clémence de marly became deadly pale and then glowed again fiery red, he turned suddenly towards her, and said-- "mademoiselle de marly, or perhaps as i in gallantry ought to say, _belle clémence_, i have promised the count de morseiul here to find him a partner for this ball, who will dance with him throughout to-night, without wishing herself anywhere else. now, as i have certain information that he is very hateful to you, there is but one thing which can make you execute the task to the full. doubtless you, as well as all the rest of our court, feel nothing so great a pleasure as obeying the king's commands--at least, so they tell me--and therefore i command you to dance with him, and to be as happy as possible, and not to wish yourself any where else from this moment till the ball closes." he waited for no reply, but making a sign to the count to remain by the side of his fair partner, proceeded round the rest of the circle. nothing in the demeanour of clémence de marly but her varying colour had told how much she was agitated while the king spoke; but the words which the monarch had used were so pointed, and touched so directly upon the feelings between herself and albert of morseiul, that those who stood around pressed slightly forward as soon as louis had gone on, to see how she was affected by what had passed. to her ear those words were most strange and extraordinary. it was evident that by some one the secret of her heart had been betrayed to the king, and equally evident that louis had determined to countenance that love which she had fancied would make her happy in poverty, danger, or distress, announcing his approbation at the very moment that a temporary coldness had arisen between her and her lover, and that her heart was oppressed with those feelings of hopelessness, which will sometimes cross even our brightest and happiest days. on the count de morseiul the king's words had produced a different, but not a less powerful effect. the surprise and joy which he might have felt at finding himself suddenly pointed out by the monarch as the favoured suitor for the hand of her he loved, was well nigh done away by the conviction that the price the king put upon his ultimate approbation of their union was such as he could not pay. but nevertheless those words were most joyful, though they raised up some feeling of self-reproach in his heart. it was evident that the tale told by pelisson regarding the chevalier was false, or perhaps, indeed, originated in some pious fraud devised for the purpose of driving him more speedily to acknowledge himself a convert to the church of rome. whatever were the circumstances, however, it was clear that clémence was herself unconscious of any such report, and that all the probabilities which imagination had built up to torment him were but idle dreams. he had pained himself enough indeed; but he had pained clémence also, and his first wish was to offer her any atonement in his power. such were the feelings and thoughts called up in the bosom of the young count by the events which had just occurred. but the surprise of clémence and her lover was far outdone by that of the duke and duchess de rouvré, who, astonished at the favour into which their young friend seemed so suddenly to have risen, and equally astonished at the intimation given by the king of an attachment existing between the count and clémence, overflowed with joy and satisfaction as soon as the monarch left the spot, and expressed many a vain hope that, after all, the affairs which had commenced in darkness and shadow, would end in sunshine and light. ere the count could reply, or say one word to clémence de marly, the _bransle_ began, and he led her forth to dance. there was but a moment for him to speak to her; but he did not lose that moment. "clémence," he said, as he led her forward, "i fear i have both pained you and wronged you." a bright and beautiful smile spread at once over her countenance. "you have," she said; "but those words are enough, albeit! say no more! the pain is done away; the wrong is forgotten." "it is not forgotten by me, sweet girl," he replied, in the same low tone; "but i must speak to you long, and explain all." "come to-morrow," she answered; "all difficulties must now be done away. i, too, have something to explain, albert," she added, "but yet not every thing that i could wish to explain, and about that i will make you my only reproach. you promised not to doubt me--oh, keep that promise!" as she spoke the dance began, and of course their conversation for the time concluded. all eyes were upon the young count--so rare a visiter at the palace, and upon her--so admired, so courted, so disdainful, as she was believed to be by every one present, but whose destiny seemed now decided, and whose heart everyone naturally believed to be won. graceful by nature as well as by education, no two persons of the whole court could have been better fitted than albert of morseiul and clémence de marly to pass through the ordeal of such a scene as a court ball in those days; and though every eye was, as we have said, upon them, yet they had a great advantage on that night, which would have prevented any thing like embarrassment, even had not such scenes been quite familiar to them. they scarcely knew that any eyes were watching them, they were scarcely conscious of the presence of the glittering crowd around. engrossed by their own individual feelings--deep, absorbing, overpowering, as those feelings were,--their spirits were wrapt up in themselves and in each other; they thought not of the dance, they thought not of the spectators, but left habit, and natural grace, and a fine ear, to do all that was requisite as far as the minuet was concerned. if either thought of the dance at all, it was only when the eyes of albert of morseiul rested on clémence, and he thought her certainly more lovely and graceful than ever she had before appeared, or when his hand touched hers, and the thrill of that touch passed to his heart, speaking of love and hope and happiness to come. the effect was what might naturally be supposed--each danced more gracefully than perhaps they had ever done before; and one of those slight murmurs of admiration passed through the courtly crowd, and was confirmed by a gracious smile and gentle inclination of the head from the king himself. "we must not let him escape us," said the monarch in a low voice to the prince de marsillac. "certainly he is worthy of some trouble in recalling from his errors." "if he escape from the fair net your majesty has spread for him," replied the prince, "he will be the most cunning bird that ever i saw. indeed, i should suppose he has no choice, when, if caught, he will have to thank his king for every thing, for honour, favour, distinction, his soul's salvation, and a fair wife that loves him. if he be not pressed till he takes fright, he will entangle himself so that no power can extricate him." "he shall have every opportunity," said the king. "i must not appear too much in the matter. you, prince, see that they be left alone together, if possible, for a few minutes. use what man[oe]uvre you will, and i will take care to countenance it." at the court balls of that day it was the custom to dance throughout the night with one person, and the opportunity of conversing between those who were dancing was very small. a few brief words at the commencement, or at the end of each dance, was all that could be hoped for, and clémence and her lover were fain to fix all their hopes of explanation and of longer intercourse upon the morrow. suddenly, however, it was announced, before the hour at which the balls usually terminated, that the king had a lottery, to which all the married ladies of the court were invited. the crowd poured into the apartment where the drawing of this lottery was to take place; every lady anxious for a ticket where all were prizes, and the tickets themselves given by the king; while those who were not to share in this splendid piece of generosity, were little less eager, desirous of seeing the prizes, and learning who it was that won them. all then, as we have said, poured out of the ball room, through the great gallery and other state-rooms in which the _appartement_ was usually held. there were only two who lingered--clémence de marly and albert of morseiul. they, however, remained to the last, and then followed slowly, employing the few minutes thus obtained in low spoken words of affection, perhaps all the warmer and all the tenderer for the coldness and the pain just passed. ere three sentences, however, had been uttered, the good duc de rouvré approached, saying, "come, clémence, come quick, or you will not find a place where you will see." the eye of the prince de marsillac, however, was upon them; and, threading the mazes of the crowd, he took the duke by the arm; and, drawing him aside with an important face, told him that the king wanted to speak with him immediately. the duc de rouvré darted quickly away to seek the monarch: and the prince paused for a single instant ere he followed, to say in a low voice to the count,-- "you will neither of you be required at the lottery, if you think that the lot you have drawn already is sufficiently good." the count was not slow to understand the hint, and he gently led clémence de marly back into one of the vacant saloons. "surely they will think it strange," she said; but ere the count could reply, she added quickly; "but, after all, what matters it if they do?--i would have it so, that every one may see and know the whole so clearly, that all persecution may be at an end. now, albert, now," she said, "tell me what could make you write me so cruel a letter." "i will in one word," he replied; "but remember, clémence, that i own i have been wrong, and in telling you the causes, in explaining the various circumstances which led me to believe that you were wavering in your engagements to me, i seek not to justify myself, but merely to explain." "oh never, never think it!" she exclaimed, ere she would let him go on; "whatever may happen, whatever appearances may be, never, albert, never for one moment think that i am wavering! once more, most solemnly, most truly, i assure you, that though perhaps fate may separate me from you, and circumstances over which we have no control render our union impossible, nothing--no, not the prospect of immediate death itself, shall ever induce me to give my hand to another. no circumstances can effect that, for that must be my voluntary act; and i can endure death, i can endure imprisonment, i can endure any thing they choose to inflict, except the wedding a man i do not love. now, tell me," she continued, "now let me hear, what could make you think i did so waver." the count related all that had taken place, the words which he had heard pelisson make use of in conversation with an indifferent person, the mortification and pain he had felt at the words she had written in answer to his note, the confirmation of all his anxious fears by what jerome riquet had told him, and all the other probabilities that had arisen to make him believe that those fears were just. clémence heard him sometimes with a look of pain, sometimes with a reproachful smile. "after all, albert," she said, "perhaps you have had some cause--more cause indeed than jealous men often have, and yet you shall hear how simply all this may be accounted for. the day after we parted in poitou, the abbé de st. helie arrived at ruffigny, with several other persons of the same kind, and monsieur de rouvré found his house filled with spies upon his actions. he received, however, in the evening of the same day, an order to come to the court immediately, to give an account of the events which had taken place in his government. the same spies of louvois accompanied us on the road, as well as the chevalier d'evran,--who was the person that had obtained from the king the order for the duke to appear at court, rather than to remain in exile at ruffigny, while his enemies said what they chose of him in his absence. we had not arrived in paris ten minutes at the time your servant came. we were surrounded by spies of every kind; the good duke was in a state of agitation impossible to describe, and so fearful that any thing like a protestant should be seen in his house, or that any thing, in short, should occur to give probability to the charges against him, that i knew your coming would be dangerous both to yourself and to him, the house being filled with persons who were ready not only to report, but to pervert every thing that took place. on receiving your note, maria called me out of the saloon; but my apartments were not prepared; servants were coming and going; no writing paper was to be procured; a pen and ink was obtained with difficulty. i knew if i were absent five minutes in the state of agitation, that pervaded the whole household, madame de rouvré would come to seek me, and i was consequently obliged to write the few words i did write in the greatest haste, and under the greatest anxiety. maria was not even out of the room conveying those few words to your servant, when the duchess came in, and i was glad hypocritically to affect great activity and neatness about the arrangement of my apartments, to conceal the real matter which had employed me. such is the simple state of the case; and i never even heard of this other marriage, about which pelisson must have made some mistake. had i heard of it," she added, "it would only have made me laugh." "i see not why it should do so," replied the count. "surely, louis d'evran is--as i well know he is considered by many of the fair and the bright about this court--a person not to be despised by any woman. he evidently, too, exercises great influence over you, clémence; and therefore the report itself was not such as i, at least, could treat as absurd, especially when, in addition to these facts, it was stated that the king had expressed his will that you should give him your hand." "to me, however, albert," she replied, "it must appear absurd, knowing and feeling as i do know and feel, that were the chevalier d'evran the only man i had ever seen, or ever were likely to see, that i should never even dream of marrying him. he may be much loved and liked by other women; doubtless he is, and sure i am he well deserves it. i like him, too, albert. i scruple not to own it--i like him much; but that is very different from loving him as i love--as a woman should love her husband i mean to say. and now, albert," she continued, "with regard to the influence he has over me, i will tell you nothing more. that shall remain as a trial of your confidence in me. this influence will never be exerted but when it is right. should it be exerted wrongly, it is at an end from that moment. when you wished to accompany me to ruffigny, from that terrible scene in which we last parted, he represented to me in few words how monsieur de rouvré was situated. he showed me, that by bringing you there at such a time from such a scene, i should but bring destruction on that kind friend who had sheltered and protected my infancy and my youth, when i had none else to protect me. he showed me, too, that i should put an impassable barrier between you and me, for the time at least. he told me that no one but himself was aware of where i was, but that your accompanying me would instantly make it known to the whole world, and most likely produce the ruin of both. now, tell me, albert, was he not right to say all this? was not his view a just one?" "it was," replied the count; "but yet he might have urged it in another manner. he might have explained the whole to me as well as to you: and still you leave unexplained, clémence, how he should know where you were when you had concealed it so well, so unaccountably well, from the family at ruffigny." "oh! jealousy, jealousy," said clémence, playfully; "what a terrible and extraordinary thing jealousy is! and yet, albert, perhaps a woman likes to see a little of it when she really loves. however, you are somewhat too hard upon the chevalier, and you shall not wring from me any other secret just yet. you have wrung from me, albert, too many of the secrets of my heart already, and i will not make you the spoilt child of love, by letting you have altogether your own way. as to my concealing from the family of ruffigny, however, where i was going on that occasion, or on most others, it is very easily explained. do you not know that till i was foolish enough at poitiers to barter all the freedom of my heart, for love with but little confidence it would seem, i have always been a tyrant instead of a slave? are you not aware that i have always done just as i liked with every one? and one of my reasons for exercising my power to the most extreme degree was, that my religious faith might never be controlled? till this fierce persecution of the protestants began, and till the king made it his great object, and announced his determination of putting down all but the roman catholic faith in the realm, monsieur de rouvré himself cared but little for the distinction of protestant and catholic, and even had he known what i was doing, though he might have objected, would not have strongly opposed me. i established my right, however, of doing what i liked, and going where i liked, and acting as i liked, on such firm grounds, that it was not easily shaken. even now, had i chosen to see you to-day in paris, i might have done it; but would you have thought the better of clémence if she had risked the fortunes of him who has been more than a father to her? nobody would, and nobody should have said me nay, if i had believed that it was just and right to bid you come. but i thought it was wrong, albert. now, however, i may bid you come in safety to all; and now that i have time and opportunity to make any arrangements i like, i may safely promise, that should any change come over the present aspect of our affairs, which change i fear must and will come, i will find means to see you at any time, and under any circumstances. but hark! from what i hear, the lottery is over, and the people departing. let us go forward and join them, if it be but for a moment." thus saying, she rose, and the count led her on to the room where the distribution of the prizes had just taken place. every one was now interested with another subject. a full hour had been given at the beginning of the evening to the affair of the count de morseiul and mademoiselle de marly, which was a far greater space of time, and far more attention than such a court might be expected to give, even to matters of the deepest and most vital importance. but no former impression could of course outlive the effect of a lottery. there was not one man or woman present whose thoughts were filled with any thing else than the prizes and their distributions; and the head of even the good duchess of rouvré herself, who was certainly of somewhat higher character than most of those present, was so filled with the grand engrossing theme, that nothing was talked of, as the party returned to paris, but the prize which had fallen to the share of madame de this, or the disappointment which had been met with by madame de that; so that clémence de marly could lean back in the dark corner of the carriage, and enjoy her silence undisturbed. chapter viii. the hour of happiness. at the levée of the king, on the succeeding morning, the young count de morseiul was permitted to appear for a few minutes. the monarch was evidently in haste, having somewhat broken in on his matutinal habits in consequence of the late hour at which he had retired on the night before. "they tell me you have a favour to ask, monsieur de morseiul," said the king. "i hope it is not a very great one, for i have slept so well and am in such haste, that, perhaps, i might grant it, whether it were right or wrong." "it is merely, sire," replied the count, "to ask your gracious permission to proceed to paris this morning, in order to visit mademoiselle de marly. not knowing when it may be your royal pleasure to grant me the longer audience which you promised for some future time, i did not choose to absent myself from versailles without your majesty's consent." louis smiled graciously, for no such tokens of deference were lost upon him. "most assuredly," he said, "you have my full permission: and now i think of it--bontems," he continued, turning to one of his _valets de chamber_, "bring me that casket that is in the little cabinet below--now i think of it, the number of our ladies last night fell short at the lottery, and there was a prize of a pair of diamond earrings left. i had intended to have given them to la belle clémence; but, somehow," he added, with a smile, "she did not appear in the room. perhaps, however, you know more of that than i do, monsieur de morseiul!--oh, here is bontems--give me the casket." taking out of the small ebony box which was now presented to him, a little case, containing a very handsome pair of diamond ear-rings, the king placed it in the hands of the young count, saying, "there, monsieur de morseiul, be my messenger to the fair lady. give her those jewels from the king; and tell her, that i hope ere long she will be qualified to draw prizes in some not very distant lottery by appearing as one of the married ladies of our court. she has tortured all our gallant gentlemen's hearts too long, and we will not suffer our subjects to be thus ill treated. do you stay in paris all day, monsieur de morseiul, or do you come here to witness the new opera?" "i did not propose to do either, sire," replied the count: "i had, in fact, engaged myself to pass another pleasant evening at the house of monsieur de meaux." "indeed!" said the king, evidently well pleased. "that is all as it should be. i cannot but think, monsieur de morseiul, that if you pass many more evenings so well, either you will convert monsieur de meaux--which god forbid, or monsieur de meaux will convert you--which god grant." the count bowed gravely; and, as the king turned to speak with some one else who was giving him a part of his dress, the young nobleman took it as a permission to retire; and, mounting his horse, which had been kept ready saddled, he made the best of his way towards the capital. that gay world, with its continual motion, was as animated then as now. though the abode of the court was at versailles, yet the distance was too small to make the portion of the population absolutely withdrawn from the metropolis at all important while all the other great bodies of the kingdom assembled, or were represented there. thousands on thousands were hurrying through the streets; the same trades and occupations were going on then as now, with only this difference, that, at that period, luxury, and industry, and every productive art had reached, if not its highest, at least its most flourishing point; and all things presented, even down to the aspect of the city itself, that hollow splendour, that tinselled magnificence, that artificial excitement, that insecure prosperity, the falseness of all and each of which had afterwards to be proved, and which entailed a long period of fresh errors, bitter repentance, and terrible atonement. but through the gay crowd the count de morseiul passed on, noticing it little, if at all. he was urged on his way by the strongest of all human impulses, by love--first, ardent, pure, sincere, love--all the more deep, all the more intense, all the more over-powering, because he had not felt it at that earlier period, while the animal triumphs over the mental in almost all the affections of man. his heart and his spirit had lost nothing of their freshness to counterbalance the vigour and the power they had obtained, and at the age of seven or eight and twenty he loved with all the vehemence and ardour of a boy, while he felt with all the permanence and energy of manhood. though contrary, perhaps, to the rules and etiquettes of french life at that period, he took advantage both of the message with which he was charged from the king, and the sort of independence which clémence de marly had established for herself, to ask for her instead of either the duke or the duchess. he was not, indeed, without a hope that he should find her alone, and that hope was realised. she had expected him, and expected him early; and, perhaps, the good duchess de rouvré herself had fancied that such might be the case, and, remembering the warm affections of her own days, had abstained from presenting herself in the little saloon where clémence de marly had usually established her abode during their residence in paris. had albert of morseiul entertained one doubt of the affection of clémence de marly, that doubt must have vanished in a moment--must have vanished at the look with which she rose to meet him. it was all brightness--it was all happiness. the blood mounted, it is true, into her cheeks, and into her temples; her beautiful lips trembled slightly, and her breath came fast; but the bright and radiant smile was not to be mistaken. the sparkling of the eyes spoke what words could not speak; and, though her tongue for a moment refused its office, the smile that played around the lips was eloquent of all that the heart felt. not contented with the hand she gave, albert of morseiul took the other also; and not contented with the thrilling touch of those small hands, he threw his arms around her, and pressed her to his heart; and not contented--for love is the greatest of encroachers--with that dear embrace, he made his lips tell the tale of their own joy to hers, and once and again he tasted the happiness that none had ever tasted before: and then, as if asking pardon for the rashness of his love, he pressed another kiss upon her fair hand, and leading her back to her seat, took his place beside her. fearful that he should forget, he almost immediately gave her the jewels that the king had sent. but what were jewels to clémence de marly at that moment? he told her, also, the message the king had given, especially that part which noted her absence from the room where the lottery had been drawn. "i would not have given those ten minutes," she replied eagerly, "for all the jewels in his crown." they then forgot the king, the court, and every thing but each other, and spent the moments of the next half hour in the joy, in the surpassing joy, of telling and feeling the happiness that each conferred upon the other. oh! those bright sunny hours of early love, of love in its purity and its truth, and its sincerity--of love, stripped of all that is evil, or low, or corrupt, and retaining but of earth sufficient to make it harmonise with earthly creatures like ourselves--full of affection--full of eager fire, but affection as unselfish as human nature will admit, and fire derived from heaven itself! how shall ye ever be replaced in after life? what tone shall ever supply the sound of that master chord after its vibrations have once ceased? as the time wore on, however, and albert of morseiul remembered that there were many things on which it was necessary to speak at once to clémence de marly, the slight cloud of care came back upon his brow, and reading the sign of thought in a moment, she herself led the way, by saying,-- "but we must not forget, dear albert, there is much to be thought of. we are spending our time in dreaming over our love, when we have to think of many more painful points in our situation. we have spoken of all that concerns our intercourse with each other; but of your situation at the court i am ignorant; and am not only ignorant of the cause, but astonished to find, that when i expected the most disastrous results, you are in high favour with the king, and apparently have all at your command." "not so, dear clémence--alas! it is not so," replied the count; "the prosperity of my situation is as hollow as a courtier's heart--as fickle as any of the other smiles of fortune." before he could go on, however, to explain to her the real position in which he stood, madame de rouvré entered the room, and was delighted at seeing one whom she had always esteemed and loved. she might have remained long, but clémence, with the manner which she was so much accustomed to assume, half playful, half peremptory, took up the little case of ear-rings from the table, saying, "see what the king has sent me! and now, dear duchess, you shall go away, and leave me to talk with my lover. it is so new a thing for me to have an acknowledged lover, and one, too, that i don't despise, that i have not half tired myself with my new plaything. am not i a very saucy demoiselle?" she added, kissing the duchess, who was retiring with laughing obedience. "but take the diamonds, and examine them at your leisure. they will serve to amuse you in the absence of your clémence." "if i were a lover now," said the duchess smiling, "i should say something about their not being half as bright as your eyes, clémence. but words vary in their value so much, that what would be very smart and pleasant from a young man, is altogether worthless on the lips of an old woman. let me see you before you go, count. it is not fair that saucy girl should carry you off altogether." "now, now, albert," said clémence, as soon as the duchess was gone, "tell me before we are interrupted again." the count took up the tale then with his last day's sojourn in brittany, and went on to detail minutely every thing that had occurred since his arrival in the capital; and, as he told her, her cheek grew somewhat paler till, in the end, she exclaimed, "it is all as bad as it can be. you will never change your faith, albert." "could you love me, clémence," he asked, "if i did?" she put her hand before her eyes for a moment, then placed one of them in his, and replied, "i should love you ever, albert, with a woman's love, unchangeable and fixed. but i could not esteem you, as i would fain esteem him that i must love." "so thought i," replied the count, "so judged i of my clémence; and all that now remains to be thought of is, how is this to end, and what is to be our conduct to make the end as happy to ourselves as may be?" "alas!" replied clémence, "i can answer neither question. the probability is that all must end badly, that your determination not to yield your religion to any inducements must soon be known; for depend upon it, albert, they will press you on the subject more closely every day; and you are not made to conceal what you feel. the greater the expectations of your conversion have been, the more terrible will be the anger that your adherence to your own faith will produce; and depend upon it, the prince de marsillac takes a wrong view of the question; for it matters not whether this affair have passed away, or be revived against you,--power never yet wanted a pretext to draw the sword of persecution. neither, albert, can my change of faith be long concealed. i cannot insult god by the mockery of faith in things, regarding which my mind was long doubtful, but which i am now well assured, and thoroughly convinced, are false. in this you are in a better situation than myself, for you can but be accused of holding fast to the faith that you have ever professed: me they will accuse of falling into heresy with my eyes open. perhaps they will add that i have done so for your love." "then, dear clémence," he replied, "the only path for us is the path of flight, speedy and rapid flight. i have already secured for us competence in another land; wealth i cannot secure, but competence is surely all that either you or i require." "all, all," replied clémence; "poverty with you, albert, would be enough. but the time, and the manner of our flight, must be left to you. the distance between paris and the frontier is so small, that we bad better effect it now, and not wait for any contingency. if you can find means to withdraw yourself from the court, i will find means to join you any where within two or three miles' journey of the capital. but write to me the place, the hour, and the time; and, as we love each other, albert, and by the faith that we both hold, and for which we are both prepared to sacrifice so much, i will not fail you." "what if it should be to-morrow?" demanded the count. clémence gazed at him for a moment with some agitation. "even if it should be tomorrow," she said at length, "even if it should be to-morrow, i will come. but oh, albert," she added, leaning her head upon his shoulder, "i am weaker, more cowardly, more womanly than i thought. i would fain have it a day later: i would fain procrastinate even by a day. but never mind, never mind, albert; should it be necessary, should you judge it right, should you think it requisite for your safety, let it be to-morrow." "i cannot yet judge," replied the count; "i think, i trust that it will not be so soon. i only put the question to make you aware that such a thing is possible, barely possible. in all probability the king will give me longer time. he cannot suppose that the work of conversion will take place by a miracle. i do not wish to play a double game with them, even in the least, clémence, nor suffer them to believe that there is a chance even of my changing, when there is none; but still i would fain, for your sake as well as mine, delay a day or two." "delays are dangerous, even to an old proverb," said clémence; but ere she could conclude her sentence the duc de rouvré entered the room; and not choosing, or perhaps not having spirits at the moment to act towards him as she had done towards the duchess, clémence suffered the conversation to drop, and proceeded with him and her lover to the saloon of madame. in that saloon there appeared a number of persons, amongst whom were several that the count de morseiul knew slightly; but the beams of royal favour having fallen upon him with their full light during the night before, all those who had any knowledge of him were of course eager to improve such an acquaintance, and vied with each other in smiles and looks of pleasure on his appearance. amongst others was the chevalier de rohan, whom we have noticed as forming one of the train of suitors who had followed clémence de marly to poitiers; but he was now satisfied, apparently, that not even any fortunate accident could give the bright prize to him, and he merely bowed to her on her entrance, with the air of a worshipper at the shrine of an idol, while he grasped the hand of his successful rival, and declared himself delighted to see him. after remaining there for some time longer lingering in the sunshine of the looks of her he loved, the count prepared to take his departure, especially as several other persons had been added to the circle, and their society fell as a weight and an incumbrance upon him when his whole thoughts were of clémence de marly. he had taken his leave and reached the door of the apartment, when, starting up with the ear-rings in her hand, she exclaimed-- "stay, stay, monsieur de morseiul, i forgot to send my thanks to the king. pray tell him," she added, advancing across the room to speak with the count in a lower tone, "pray tell him how grateful i am to his majesty for his kind remembrance; and remember," she said, in a voice that could be heard by no one but himself, "to-morrow, should it be needful:--i am firmer now." albert of morseiul dared not speak all that he felt, with the language of the lips; but the eyes of her lover thanked clémence de marly sufficiently: and he, on his part, left her with feelings which the bustle and the crowd of the thronged capital struggled with and oppressed. he rode quick, then, in order to make his way out of the city as fast as possible; but ere he had passed the gate, he was overtaken by the chevalier de rohan, who came up to his side, saying, "i am delighted to have overtaken you, my dear count. such a companion on this long dry tiresome journey to versailles is, indeed, a delight; and i wished also particularly to speak to you regarding a scheme of mine, which, i trust, may bring me better days." now, the society of the chevalier de rohan, though his family was one of the highest in france, and though he held an important place at the court, was neither very agreeable nor very reputable; and the count, therefore, replied briefly, "i fear that, as i shall stop at several places, it will not be in my power to accompany you, monsieur le chevalier; but any thing i can do to serve you will give me pleasure." "why, the fact is," replied the chevalier, "that i was very unfortunate last night at play, and wished to ask if you would lend me a small sum till i receive my appointments from the king. if you are kind enough to do so, i doubt not before two days are over to recover all that i have lost, and ten times more, for i discovered the fortunate number last night when it was too late." a faint and melancholy smile came over the count's face, at the picture of human weakness that his companion's words displayed; and as the chevalier was somewhat celebrated for borrowing without repaying, he asked what was the sum he required. "oh, a hundred louis will be quite enough," replied the chevalier, not encouraged to ask more by his companion's tone. "well, monsieur de rohan," said the count, "i have not the sum with me, but i will send it to you on my arrival at versailles, if that will be time enough." "quite! quite!" replied de rohan; "any time before the tables are open." "indeed, indeed! my good friend," said the count, "i wish you would abandon such fatal habits; and, satisfied with having lost so much, live upon the income you have, without ruining yourself by trying to make it greater. however, i will send the money, and do with it what you will." "you are a prude! you are a prude!" cried de rohan, putting spurs to his horse; "but i will tell you something more in your own way when we meet again." chapter ix. the unknown peril. dark and ominous as was the prospect of every thing around the count de morseuil, when the blessings of his bright days were passing away, one by one, and his best hope was exile, yet the interview which had just taken place between him and clémence de marly was like a bright summer hour in the midst of storms, and even when it was over, like the june sun, it left a long twilight of remembered joy behind it. but there are times in human life when dangers are manifold, when we are pressed upon by a thousand difficulties, and when, nevertheless, though the course we have determined on is full of risks and perils, sorrows and sufferings, we eagerly, perhaps even imprudently, hurry forward upon it, to avoid those very doubts and uncertainties, which are worse than actual pains. such was the case with the count de morseuil, and he felt within him so strong an inclination to take the irrevocable step of quitting france for ever, and seeking peace and toleration in another land, that, much accustomed to examine and govern his own feelings, he paused, and pondered over the line of conduct he was about to pursue, during his visit to the bishop of meaux, perceiving in himself a half concealed purpose of forcing on the conversation to the subject of religion, and of showing bossuet clearly, that there was no chance whatever of inducing him to abandon the religion of his fathers. against this inclination, on reflection, he determined to be upon his guard, although he adhered rigidly to his resolution of countenancing, in no degree, a hope of his becoming a convert to the roman catholic faith; and his only doubt now was whether his passing two evenings so close together with the bishop of meaux, with whom he had so slight an acquaintance, might not afford some encouragement to expectations which he felt himself bound to check. having promised, however, he went, but at the same time made up his mind not to return to the prelate's abode speedily. on the present occasion, he not only found bossuet alone, but was left with him for more than an hour, without any other visiter appearing. the good bishop himself was well aware of the danger of scaring away those whom he sought to win; and, sincerely desirous, for the count's own sake, of bringing him into that which he believed to be the only path to salvation, he was inclined to proceed calmly and gently in the work of his conversion. there were others, however, more eager than himself; the king was as impetuous in the apostolic zeal which he believed himself to feel, as he had formerly been in pursuits which though, certainly more gross and sensual, would perhaps, if accurately weighed, have been found to be as little selfish, vain, and personal, as the efforts that he made to convert his protestant subjects. the hesitation even in regard to embracing the _king's creed_ was an offence, and he urged on bossuet eagerly to press the young count, so far, at least, as to ascertain if there were or were not a prospect of his speedily following the example of turenne, and so many others. the bishop was thus driven to the subject, though against his will; and shortly after the young count's appearance, he took him kindly and mildly by the hand, and led him into a small cabinet, where were ranged, in goodly order, a considerable number of works on the controversial divinity of the time. amongst others, appeared some of the good prelate's own productions, such as "l'exposition de la doctrine catholique," the "traité de la communion sous les deux espèces," and the "histoire des variations." bossuet ran his finger over the titles as he pointed them out to the young count. "i wish, my young friend," he said, "that i could prevail upon you to read some of these works: some perhaps even of my own, not from the vanity of an author alone, though i believe that the greatest compliment that has ever been paid to me was that which was paid by some of the pastors of your own sect, who asserted when i wrote that book," and he pointed to the exposition, "that i had altered the catholic doctrines in order to suit them to the purposes of my defence. nor indeed would they admit the contrary, till the full approbation of the head of our church stamped the work as containing the true doctrines of our holy faith. but, as i was saying, i wish i could persuade you to read some of these, not so much to gratify the vanity of an author, nor even simply to make a convert, but because i look upon you as one well worthy of saving, as a brand from the burning--and because i should look upon your recall to the bosom of the mother church as worth a hundred of any ordinary conversions. in short, my dear young friend, because i would save you from much unhappiness, in life, in death, and in eternity." "i owe you deep thanks, monsieur de meaux," said the count, "for the interest that you take in me; and i will promise you most sincerely to read, with as unprejudiced an eye as possible, not only any but all of the works you have written on such subjects. i have already read some, and it is by no means too much to admit, that if any one could induce me to quit the faith in which i have been brought up, it would be monsieur de meaux. he will not think me wrong, however, when i say that i am, as yet, unconvinced. nor will he be offended if i make one observation, or, rather, ask one question, in regard to something he has just said." "far, far from it, my son," replied the bishop. "i am ever willing to explain any thing, to enter into the most open and candid exposition of every thing that i think or feel. i have no design to embarrass, or to perplex, or to obscure; my whole view is to make my own doctrine clear and explicit, so that the mind of the merest child may choose between the right and the wrong." "i merely wish to ask," said the count, "whether by the words 'unhappiness in life, and in death,' you meant to allude to temporal or spiritual unhappiness? whether you meant delicately to point out to me that the hand of persecution is likely to be stretched out to oppress me? or----" "no! no!" cried bossuet, eagerly. "heaven forbid that i should hold out as an inducement the apprehension of things that i disapprove of! no, monsieur de morseiul, i meant merely spiritual happiness and unhappiness, for i do not believe that any man can be perfectly happy in life while persisting in a wrong belief; certainly i believe that he must be unhappy in his death; and, alas! my son, reason and religion both teach me that he must be unhappy in eternity." "the great question of eternity," replied the count, solemnly, "is in the hands of god. but the man, and the only man, who, in this sense, must be unhappy in life, in death, and in eternity, seems to me to be the man who is uncertain in his faith. in life and in death i can conceive the deist, or (if there be such a thing) the atheist--if perfectly convinced of the truth of his system--perfectly happy and perfectly contented. but the sceptic can never be happy. he who, in regard to religious belief, is doubtful, uncertain, wavering, must assuredly be unhappy in life and in death, though to god's great mercy we must refer the eternity. if i remain unshaken, monsieur de meaux, in my firm belief that what we call the reformed church is right in its views and doctrines, the only thing that can disturb or make me unhappy therein is temporal persecution. were my faith in that church, however, shaken, i would abandon it immediately. i could not, i would not, remain in a state of doubt." "the more anxious am i, my son," replied the bishop, "to withdraw you from that erroneous creed, for so firm and so decided a mind as yours is the very one which could the best appreciate the doctrines of the church of rome, which are always clear, definite, and precise, the same to-day as they were yesterday, based upon decisions that never change, and not, as your faith does, admitting doubts and fostering variations. you must listen to me, my young friend. indeed, i must have you listen to me. i hear some of our other friends in the next room; but we must converse more, and the sooner the better. you have visited me twice, but i will next visit you, for i think nothing should be left undone that may court a noble spirit back to the church of god." thus saying, he slowly led the way into the larger room, the young count merely replying as he did so,-- "would to god, monsieur de meaux, that by your example and by your exhortations you could prevent others from giving us protestants the strongest of all temporal motives to remain attached to our own creed." "what motive is that?" demanded bossuet, apparently in some surprise. "persecution!" replied the count; "for depend upon it, to all those who are worthy of being gained, persecution is the strongest motive of resistance." "alas! my son," replied bossuet, "that you should acknowledge such a thing as pride to have any thing on earth to do with the eternal salvation of your souls. an old friend of mine used to say, 'it is more often from pride than from want of judgment that people set themselves up against established opinions. men find the first places occupied in the right party, and they do not choose to take up with back seats.' i have always known this to be true in the things of the world; but i think that pride should have nothing to do with the things of eternity." thus ended the conversation between the count and bossuet on the subject of religion for that night. two guests had arrived, more soon followed, and the conversation became more general. still, however, as there were many ecclesiastics, the subject of religion was more than once introduced, the restraint which the presence of a protestant nobleman had occasioned on the first visit of the count having now been removed. the evening passed over calmly and tranquilly, however, till about ten o'clock at night, when the count took his leave, and departed. the rest of the guests stayed later; and on issuing out into the street the young nobleman found himself alone in a clear, calm, moonlight night, with the irregular shadows of the long line of houses chequering the pavement with the yellow lustre of the moon. looking up into the wide open square beyond, the shadows were lost, and there the bright planet of the night seemed to pour forth a flood of radiance without let or obstruction. there was a fountain in the middle of the square, casting up its sparkling waters towards the sky, as if spirits were tossing about the moonbeams in their sport, and casting the bright rays from hand to hand. as the count gazed, however, and thought that he would stroll on, giving himself up to calm reflection at that tranquil hour, and arranging his plans for the momentous future without disturbance from the hum of idle multitudes, a figure suddenly came between the fountain and his eyes, and crept slowly down on the dark side of the street towards him. he was standing at the moment in the shadow of bossuet's porch, so as not to be seen: but the figure came down the street to the door of the count's own dwelling, paused for a minute, as if in doubt, then walked over into the moonlight, and gazed up into the windows of the prelate's hotel. the count instantly recognised the peculiar form and structure of his valet, jerome riquet, and, walking out from the porch towards his own house, he called the man to him, and asked it any thing were the matter. "why yes, sir," said riquet in a low voice, "so much so that i thought of doing what i never did in my life before--sending in for you, to know what to do. there has been a person seeking you twice or three times since you went, and saying he must speak with you immediately." "do you know him?" demanded the count. "oh yes, i know him," answered riquet; "a determined devil he is too; a man in whom you used to place much confidence in the army, and who was born, i believe, upon your own lands--armand herval, you know him well. i could give him another name if i liked." "well," said the count, as tranquilly as possible; "what of him, riquet? what does he want here?" "ay, sir, that i can't tell," replied the man: "but i greatly suspect he wants no good. he is dressed in black from his head to his feet; and his face is black enough too, that is to say, the look of it. it was always like a thunder cloud, and now it is like a thunder cloud gone mad. i don't think the man is sane, sir; and the third time he came down here, about ten minutes ago, he said he could not stop a minute, that he had business directly; and so he went away, pulling his great dark hat and feather over his head, as if to prevent people from seeing how his eyes were flashing; and then i saw that the breast of his great heavy coat was full of something else than rosemary or honeycomb." "what do you mean? what do you mean?" demanded the count. "what had he in his breast?" "why, i mean pistols, sir," said the man; "if i must speak good french, i say he had pistols, then. so thinking he was about some mischief, i crept after him from door to door, dodged him across the square, and saw him go in by a gate, that i thought was shut, into the garden behind the château. i went in after him, though i was in a desperate fright for fear any one should catch me; and i trembled so, that i shook three crowns in my pocket till they rang like sheep bells. i thought he would have heard me; but i watched him plant himself under one of the statues on the terrace, and there he stood like a statue himself. i defy you to have told the one from the other, or to have known monsieur herval from monsieur neptune. whenever i saw that, i came back to look for you, and tell you what had happened; for you know, sir, i am awfully afraid of firearms; and i had not even a pair of curling irons to fight him with." "that must be near the apartments of louvois," said the young count thoughtfully. "this man may very likely seek to do him some injury." "more likely the king, sir," said the valet in a low voice. "i have heard that his majesty walks there on that terrace every fine night after the play for half an hour. he is quite alone, and it would be as much as one's liberty is worth to approach him at that time." "come with me directly, riquet," said the count, "and show me where this is. station yourself at the gate you mention after i have gone in, and if you hear me call to you aloud, instantly give the alarm to the sentries. come, quick, for the play must soon be over." thus saying, the young count strode on, crossed the place, and, under the guidance of riquet, approached the gate through which herval had entered. the key was in the lock on the outside, and the door ajar; and, leaving the man in the shadow, the count entered alone. the gardens appeared perfectly solitary, sleeping in the moonlight. the principal water-works were still; and no sound or motion was to be seen or heard, but such as proceeded from the smaller fountains that were sparkling on the terrace making the night musical with the plaintive murmur of their waters, or from the tops of the high trees as they were waved by the gentle wind. the palace was full of lights, and nothing was seen moving across any of the windows, so that it was evident that the play was not yet concluded; and the young count looked about for the person he sought for a moment or two in vain. at length, however, he saw the shadow cast by one of the groups of statues, alter itself somewhat in form; and instantly crossing the terrace to the spot, he saw herval sitting on the first step which led from the terrace down to the gardens, his back leaning against the pedestal, and his arms crossed upon his chest. he did not hear the step of the young count till he was close upon him; but the moment he did so, he started up, and drew a pistol from his breast. he soon perceived who it was, however; and the count, saying in a low voice, "my servants tell me you have been seeking me," drew him, though somewhat unwilling apparently, down the steps. "what is it you wanted with me?" continued the count, gazing in his face, to see whether the marks of insanity which riquet had spoken of were visible to him. but there was nothing more in the man's countenance than its ordinary fierce and fiery expression when stimulated by high excitement. "i came to you, count," he said, "to make you, if you will, the sharer of a glorious deed; and now you are here, you shall at least be the spectator thereof--the death of your great enemy--the death of him who tramples upon his fellow-creatures as upon grapes in the winepress--the death of the slayer of souls and bodies." "do you mean louvois?" said the count in a calm tone. "louvois!" scoffed the man. "no i no! no! i mean him who gives fangs to the viper, and poison to the snake! i mean him without whom louvois is but a bundle of dry reeds to be consumed to light the first fire that wants kindling, or to rot in its own emptiness! i mean the giver of the power, the lord of the persecutions: the harlot-monger, and the murderer, that calls himself king of france; and who, from that holy title, which he claims from god, thinks himself entitled to pile vice upon folly, and sin upon vice, and crime upon sin, till the destruction which he has so often courted to his own head shall this night fall upon him. the first of the brutal murderers that he sent down to rob our happy hearths of the jewel of their peace, this hand has slain; and the same that crushed the worm shall crush the serpent also." the count now saw that there was, indeed, in the state of herval's mind, something different from its usual tone and character. it could hardly be said that the chief stay thereof was broken, so as to justify the absolute supposition of insanity; but it seemed as if one of the fine filaments of the mental texture had given way, leaving all the rest nearly as it was before, though with a confused and morbid line running through the whole web. it need not be said that albert of morseiul was determined to prevent at all or any risk the act that the man proposed to commit; but yet he wished to do so, without calling down death and torture on the head of one who was kindled almost into absolute madness, by wrongs which touched the finest affections of his heart, through religion and through love. "herval," he said, calmly, "i am deeply grieved for you. you have suffered, i know how dreadfully; and you have suffered amongst the first of our persecuted sect: but still you must let me argue with you, for you act regarding all this matter in a wrong light, and you propose to commit a great and terrible crime." "argue with me not, count of morseiul!" cried the man; "argue with me not, for i will hear no arguments. doubtless you would have argued with me, too, about killing that small pitiful insect, that blind worm, who murdered her i loved, and three or four noble and brave men along with her." "i will tell you in a word, herval," replied the count, "had you not slain him, i would have done so. my hand against his, alone, and my life against his. he had committed a base, foul, ungenerous murder, for which i knew that the corrupted law would give us no redress, and i was prepared to shelter under a custom which i abhor and detest in general, the execution of an act of justice which could be obtained by no other means. had it been but for that poor girl's sake, i would have slain him like a dog." "thank you, count, thank you," cried the man, grasping his hand in his with the vehemence of actual phrensy. "thank you for those words from my very soul. but he was not worthy of your noble sword. he died the death that he deserved; strangled like a common felon, writhing and screaming for the mercy he had never shown." to what he said on that head the count did not reply; but he turned once more to the matter immediately before them. "now, herval," he said, "you see that i judge not unkindly or hardly by you. you must listen to my advice however----" "not about this, not about this," cried the man, vehemently; "i am desperate, and i am determined. i will not see whole herds of my fellow christians slaughtered like swine to please the bloody butcher on the throne. i will not see the weak and the faint-hearted driven, by terror, to condemn their own souls and barter eternity for an hour of doubtful peace. i will not see the ignorant and the ill-instructed bought by scores, like cattle at a market. i will not see the infants torn from their mothers' arms to be offered a living sacrifice to the moloch of rome. this night he shall die, who has condemned so many others; this night he shall fall, who would work the fall of the pure church that condemns him. i will hear no advice: i will work the work for which i came, and then perish when i may. was it not for this that every chance has favoured me? was it not for this that the key was accidentally left in the door till such time as i laid my hand upon it and took it away? was it not for this that no eye saw me seize upon that key, this morning, though thousands were passing by? was it not for this that such a thing should happen on the very night in which he comes forth to walk upon that terrace' and shall i now pause,--shall i now listen to any man's advice, who tells me that i must hold my hand?" "if you will not listen to my advice," said the count, "you must listen to my authority, herval. the act you propose to commit you shall not commit." "no!" cried he. "who shall stop me?--yours is but one life against mine, remember; and i care not how many fall, or how soon i fall myself either, so that this be accomplished." "my life, as you say," replied the count, "is but one. but even, herval, if you were to take mine, which would neither be just nor grateful, if even you were to lose your own, which may yet be of great service to the cause of our faith, you could not, and you should not, take that of the king. if you are determined, i am determined too. my servant stands at yonder gate, and on the slightest noise he gives the alarm. thus, then, i tell you," he continued, glancing his eyes towards the windows of the palace, across which various figures were now beginning to move; "thus, then, i tell you, you must either instantly quit this place with me, or that struggle begins between us, which, end how it may as far as i am concerned, must instantly insure the safety of the king, and lead you to trial and execution. the way is still open for you to abandon this rash project at once, or to call down ruin upon your own head without the slightest possible chance of accomplishing your object." "you have frustrated me," cried the man, "you have foiled me! you have overthrown, by preventing a great and noble deed, the execution of a mighty scheme for the deliverance of this land, and the security of our suffering church! the consequences be upon your own head, count of morseiul! the consequences be upon your own head! i see that you have taken your measures too well, and that, even if you paid the just penalty for such interference, the result could not be accomplished." "come then," said the count; "come, herval, i must forgive anger as i have thwarted a rash purpose; but make what speed you may to quit the gardens, for, ere another minute be over, many a one will be crossing that terrace to their own apartments." thus saying, he laid his hand upon the man's arm, to lead him gently away from the dangerous spot on which he stood. but herval shook off his grasp sullenly, and walked on before with a slow and hesitating step, as if, every moment, he would have turned in order to effect his purpose. the count doubted and feared that he would do so, and glad was he, indeed, when he saw him pass the gate which led out of the gardens. as soon as herval had gone forth, the young count closed the door, locked it, and threw the key over the wall, saying, "there! thank god, it is now impossible!" "ay," replied the man. "but there are other things possible, count; and things that may cause more bloodshed and more confusion than one little pistol shot.--it would have saved all france," he continued, muttering to himself, "it would have saved all france.--what a change!--but if we must fight it out in the field, we must." while he spoke he walked onward towards the count's house, in a sort of gloomy but not altogether silent reverie; in the intervals of which, he spoke or murmured to himself in a manner which almost seemed to justify the opinion expressed by riquet, that he was insane. suddenly turning round towards the valet who followed, however, he demanded sharply, "has there not been a tall man, with a green feather in his hat, asking for your lord two or three times to-day?" "so i have heard," replied riquet, "from the swiss, but i did not see him myself." "the swiss never informed me thereof," said the count. "pray, who might he be, and what was his business?" "his name, sir," replied herval, "is hatréaumont, and his business was for your private ear." "hatréaumont!" said the count in return. "what, he who was an officer in the guards?" herval nodded his head, and the count went on: "a brave man, a determined man he was; but in other respects a wild rash profligate. he can have no business for my private ear, that i should be glad or even willing to hear." "you know not that, count," said herval; "he has glorious schemes in view, schemes which perhaps may save his country." the count shook his head; "schemes," he said, "which will bring ruin on himself, and on all connected with him. i have rarely known or heard of a man unprincipled and profligate in private life, who could be faithful and just in public affairs. such men there may be perhaps; but the first face of the case is against them; for surely they who are not to be trusted between man and man, are still less to be trusted when greater temptations lie in their way, and greater interests are at stake." "well, well," said herval, "he will not trouble you again. this was the last day of his stay in paris, and ere to-morrow be two hours old, he will be far away." "and pray," demanded the count, "was it by his advice--he who owes nothing but gratitude to the king--was it by his advice that you were stationed where i found you?" "he knew nothing of it," said the man sharply, "he knew nothing of it; nor did i intend that he should know, till it was all over--and now," he continued, "what is to become of me?" "why, in the first place," replied the count "you had better come in with me and take some refreshment. while we are doing so, we will think of the future for you." the man made no reply, but followed the count, who led the way into his house, and then ordered some refreshments of various kinds to be set before his guest from poitou, examining the man's countenance as he did so, and becoming more and more convinced that something certainly had given way in the brain to produce the wandering and unsettled eye which glared in his face, as well as the rash words and actions that he spoke and performed. "and now, herval," he said, as soon as they were alone, "there is but one question which you should ask yourself,--whether it is better for you to return at once to poitou, or, since you are so far on your way to holland, to take advantage of that circumstance, and speed to the frontier without delay. i know not what is the situation of your finances; but if money be wanting for either step, i am ready to supply you as an old comrade." "i want no money," exclaimed the man; "i am wealthy in my station beyond yourself. what have i to do with money whose life is not worth an hour? i have a great mind to divide all i have into a hundred portions, spend one each day, and die at the end of it.--holland! no, no; this is no time for me to quit france. i will be at my post at the coming moment; i will set off again to-night for poitou. but let me tell you, count--for i had forgotten--if you should yourself wish to secure aught in holland--and i have heard that there is a lady dearer to you than all your broad lands--remember there is a schoolmaster living three doors on this side of the barrier of passy, called vandenenden, passing for a fleming by birth, but in reality a native of dort. he has regular communication with his native land, and will pass any thing you please with the utmost security." "i thank you for that information sincerely," replied the count; "it may be most useful to me. but give me one piece of information more," he added, as the man rose after having drank a glass of water, with a few drops of wine in it. "what was the state of the province when you left it?" "if you mean, count, what was the state of the reformed party," said herval, gazing round with a look of wild carelessness, "it was a girl in a consumption, where something is lost every day, no one knows how, and yet the whole looks as pretty as ever, till there is nothing but a skeleton remains. but there will be this difference, count, there will be this difference. there will be strength found in the skeleton! have you not heard? there were three thousand men, together with women and children, all converted at once, within ten miles of niort; and it cost the priest so much bread and wine giving them the sacrament, that he swore he would make no more converts unless the king would double the value of the cure--ha! ha! ha!" and laughing loud and wildly, he turned upon his heel and left the room without bidding the count good night. chapter x. the decision. about seven o'clock on the following morning, jerome riquet entered his master's room on tip toe, drew the curtains of his bed, and found him leaning on his arm, reading attentively. the subject of the count's studies matters not. they were interrupted immediately; for a note, which the valet placed in his hands, caused him instantly to spring up to order his horses to be prepared with speed, and to set off for paris at once, without waiting for the morning meal. the note which caused this sudden expedition contained but a few words. they were-- "come to me immediately, if you can, for i have matter of deep moment on which i wish to speak with you. you must not come, however, to the hôtel de rouvré, for though it may seem strange in me to name another place to meet you, yet you will find with me one whom you will be surprised to see. i must not then hesitate to ask you to seek me towards ten o'clock, at number five in the street of the jacobins; the house is that of a bookbinder, and in the shop you will find maria." it had no signature; but the handwriting was that of clémence. all that had occurred within the last few days had shown the count de morseiul that the crisis of his fate was approaching, that a very few days, nay, a very few hours, might decide the fortunes of his future life for ever. the multitude of matters which had pressed for his consideration during the two or three preceding days, the various anxieties that he had suffered, the mingling of joy and hope with pain and apprehension, had all created a state of mind in which it was difficult to think calmly of the future. now, however, he had regained complete mastery of his own mind: the short interval of repose which had taken place had removed all confusion, all agitation, from his thoughts; and as he rode on towards paris somewhat slowly, finding that there was more than the necessary time to accomplish his journey, he revolved coolly and deliberately in his own mind the peculiar points in his situation, and questioned himself as to his conduct and his duty in regard to each. first, then, of course, came the image of clémence; and in regard to his love for her, and her's for him, there was many a question to be asked, which was answered by his own heart, whether altogether fairly and candidly or not, those who know love and love's nature can best declare. in asking her to fly with him from france, then, he was going to take her from wealth, and splendour, and luxury, and soft nurture, and all the comforts and conveniences which, surrounding her from her earliest years, had made to her eyes poverty, and difficulty, and distress, seem but a recorded dream of which she knew nothing but that some men had felt such things. he had to offer her in a foreign land, indeed, competence, mere competence; but would competence to her, educated as she had been educated, be any thing else than another name for poverty? even that competence itself might perhaps be insecure. it depended upon the doubtful faith of foreign merchants, from whom he had no security, and if that were gone, he had nought to depend upon but his sword, and a high name in arms. could clémence bear all this? he asked himself. could the gay, the admired, the adored, endure seclusion and retirement, and almost solitude? could the spoilt child of fortune undergo privation? could she, who had been accustomed but to command to be obeyed, be contented with scanty service from foreign servants? would she never repine? would she never look back to the bright land of france, and think with regret of the high station from which she had voluntarily descended? would she never even, by one repining thought in the depth of her heart, reproach him for having won her away, to share his exile and misery? would he never see upon her countenance one shade of sorrow and dissatisfaction when petty cares weighed down the mind made for greater things, when small anxieties and daily discomforts interrupted the current of finer and higher thoughts, or when disrespect and coldness made the sad change felt to her, upon whose words the brightest and the best had hung? his heart answered, no; that none of these things would ever arise to make him feel that he should not have taken her from her high fortunes to share his reverses. what could not love do, he asked himself, to brighten the lowliest lot? the grand face of nature would be still before them inexhaustible as a store of enjoyment; the communion of two high minds, he felt, could never be wanting while they were united: if they retained competence, they had all that was needful; and if for a time worse fell upon them, love would surely be strong enough to excite them to every effort and every exertion, each for the other, to cheer, to encourage, to alleviate; and would bring, too, its own reward. besides, he remembered that he should never have to reproach himself with having led clémence to difficulty and to danger--a reproach which, could it have been brought against him by conscience, would have imbittered all his joys--for her own situation, her own faith, required flight as well as his; and by making her his own, he only secured to her protection, support, affection, and guidance. such were some of the thoughts which crossed his mind regarding clémence; but there was another consideration of more difficulty, a question on which he was less satisfied. his fellow protestants throughout the land, and more especially those who looked up to him for aid and for direction, should he now leave them to their fate, even though he could not avert from them one blow, even though he could not save them from one single pang? should he not stay to share their lot, to comfort or to fall with them? the question would have been answered to once, laid they been firm and united amongst themselves. it needed not, indeed, that they should have armed to resist the royal authority against which they had no power to contend; it needed not that they should have attempted to build up the churches which had been thrown down, to replace the ministers who had been ejected, to petition for the restoration of rights which injustice had snatched from them: it needed none of these things to have induced him, without hesitation, to stay and partake of all that might befal them, if they had displayed a resolution of remaining calmly, firmly, though peaceably, attached to their faith, addressing their prayers to god in private, if public worship was forbidden them, and opposing to the iniquitous proceedings of their enemies that tranquil steady resistance of endurance, which seldom fails in ultimately repelling attack. had they so acted, the count de morseiul would have had no hesitation; but such was not the case. even before the last severe measures, which have been recorded in this book, the inconveniences attending their situation, the apprehension of worse, and the prospect of immediate gain, had caused annually the conversion of hundreds of the protestant population of france to the roman catholic faith. nothing like a spirit of union had reigned amongst them for years; and now that danger and persecution fell upon them, each day brought to the court tidings of thousands upon thousands having at once professed conversion. each bishop, each intendant, sent daily lists of the numbers who had quitted the religion of their fathers to embrace that of the state; and in almost all quarters, those who had courage to sacrifice something for conscience sake, were flying from the land, or preparing for flight. he, too, had to remember that he was himself placed in a situation more difficult and dangerous than the rest. the question was not whether he should remain adhering calmly to his own faith, and living in tranquillity, though under oppression, or should fly to a foreign land; but there was a choice of three acts before him: whether he should remain to trial and perpetual imprisonment, if not death; or retiring to poitou at once, raise the standard of hopeless revolt; or seek security in another country, leaving those to whom he could render no possible service. the voice of reason certainly said, fly! but yet it was painful to him to do so. independent of all thoughts of what he left behind--the dwelling of his infancy, the tombs of his fathers, the bright land of his birth--independent of all this, there was the clinging to his own people, which few can feel deeply but those circumstanced as he was; which none indeed can feel now, when the last vestiges have been swept away of a system which, though in no slight degree dangerous and evil, had nevertheless many an amiable and many an admirable point. he loved not to leave them, he loved not to leave any fellow sufferer behind while he provided for his own safety; and though reason told him that on every motive he ought to fly, yet he felt that lingering inclination to remain, which required the voice of others to conquer entirely. such were the principal questions which his mind had found to discuss during the last two days; but since the preceding night, a new subject for thought had arisen, a new question presented itself. it however was not so difficult of solution as the others. a dark attempt upon the king's life, which could hardly have failed of success, had been nearly executed; but that was not all. from herval he had learned, that schemes, which there was much reason to believe were dangerous to the whole state, were at that moment in agitation, if not upon the point of being accomplished. he loved not to be the denouncer of any man; and for herval himself, he felt pity mingled with blame, which made him glad that the length of time that had elapsed, had given him an opportunity of retiring once more to poitou. with regard to the proceedings of hatréaumont, however, he had no scruple and no hesitation. it was right and necessary that the king should be made acquainted with the fact of dangerous designs being in agitation; and although he was well aware, that the task of informing the monarch of the truth would be a difficult and delicate one, so as not to bring the strong and unscrupulous hand of power upon persons who might be innocent, and were only accused by the word of a man whom he sincerely believed to be partially insane, yet he resolved to undertake that task, trusting to the firmness and uprightness of his own character, to insure that the execution of it should be such as to avoid doing injury to any one who was not guilty. men under such circumstances in general err from an inaccuracy or deficiency of statement, proceeding from the confusion and uncertainty of a mind oppressed and agitated by the burthen of important affairs, or difficult and intricate circumstances. the count de morseiul, however, saw his way clearly, and prepared to tell the king exactly the words which herval had made use of, but at the same time to inform him, that he had much reason to believe that the man was insane, and that, therefore, but little reliance was to be placed upon his statement, except so far as the employing of precaution might be required. the meditation over all these circumstances fully occupied the time till his arrival in paris; and dismounting at his own house, he took his way alone and on foot towards the rue des jacobins. the capital at that period had but little of the light and graceful architectural beauty which the citizens have since endeavoured to give it; but there was, instead, a grey, mysterious looking grandeur about the vast piles of building of which it was composed, peculiar and entirely characteristic of the french metropolis. the great height of the houses, the smallness, in general, of the windows, their multitudes, their irregularities, the innumerable carriage entrances leading into court yards where cities and new worlds seemed to be opening on every side, the intricate alleys and passages that were seen branching here and there in unknown directions as the stranger took his way through the streets; every thing, in short, impressed upon the mind, as a keen and sensible perception, that fact, which, though common to all great capitals, is generally unfelt, that we are walking in the midst of a world of human beings with whom we have scarcely one feeling in sympathy; of whose habits, character, pursuits, pleasures, and pains we are utterly ignorant; who are living, moving, acting, feeling, undergoing life's great ordeal, smiling with rapture, writhing with anguish, melting with the bitter tears of sorrow and regret, inspired by hope, or palpitating with expectation around us on every side, without our having the slightest participation in any of their feelings, with scarcely a knowledge of their existence, and certainly none of their situation. it was impossible to walk through the streets of paris at that time--it was impossible even to walk through the older parts of the city when i myself remember it, without having that sensation strongly excited--without asking one's self as one gazed up at the small windows of some of the many tenanted houses, and saw the half-drawn curtain shading out even the scanty portion of sun that found its way thither: is there sickness or death within? are there tears over the departing couch of the beloved? is there anguish over the bier of the gone? without asking one's self, as one gazed at some wide-open casement, courting the summer air, and perhaps with some light piece of drapery floating out into the street, is that the abode of love and joy? is happy heart there meeting happy heart? are they smiling over the birth of the first-born, or watching the glad progress of a young spirit kindred with their own? without asking one's self, as the eye rested upon some squalid doorway, foul with uncleaned ages, or some window, thick and obscure with the dust of years, some dim alley, or some dark and loathsome passage, is vice, and plunder, and iniquity there? is there the feverish joy of sin mingled with remorse, and anguish, and apprehension? is there the wasting and the gnawing effects of vice, sickness, and sorrow, worn limbs, corroded heart, nights of restless watchfulness, and days of ceaseless anguish? it was impossible to walk through that tall city, with its myriads living above myriads, house within house, and court within court, without asking one's self such questions, and without feeling that the whole intense and thrilling reality of the scene was rendered but more striking by the gay and careless multitude that tripped along, each seeming scarcely conscious that there was another being in the world but himself. the count de morseiul was half an hour before his time; he walked somewhat slowly, and in picturing the feelings which a contemplative mind might experience in passing through paris, we have pictured those which pressed for his attention, and crossed from time to time the current of his other thoughts. at length, however, he entered the rue des jacobins, and easily found the house to which he had been directed. it was a tall building of six stories, with a bookseller's shop upon the ground floor. very different indeed, however, was it from a gay dwelling such as paris now exhibits, with every new publication in blue and yellow flaming in the windows: but, through a small door, entrance was obtained into a long dark shop, where, on shelves, and in cases, and on benches, and on counters, were piled up manifold dusty volumes, whose state of tranquil slumber seemed to have been long undisturbed. a single pale apprentice, with an apron on and a brush in his hand, walked from one end of the shop to the other, or examined with slow inactivity the sheets of some unbound work, moving about his task with the same indifference to its speedy execution, as if the years of mathuselah were bound up in his indentures. the count looked at the shop well, to ascertain that he was right, and then entered; but in the long dim vista of the counters and packages, the person he sought for was not to be seen; and not having contemplated such an occurrence, he was somewhat embarrassed as to the person he should ask for. to have inquired whether a lady were waiting for him there or not, might perhaps have been received as an insult by the master of the house, and yet he thought it would be imprudent to risk the name of clémence de marly, when she herself might not have given it. he felt sure that had she arrived, her attendant maria would have been at the post where she had promised to place her; and, in order to occupy the time till she came, he determined to ask for some book, and then enter into desultory conversation with the lad in the shop, after having bought it. he had scarcely spoken, however, when from behind a pile of solid literature which obscured still farther the end of the shop, the servant maria came forth and advanced towards him. the matter was then easily explained, and the youth seemed in no degree surprised at the appointment, but proceeded to tie up the book which the count had demanded, while maria told him that her young lady had only just arrived, and was waiting for him up stairs. he followed her with a rapid step as she led the way, and at the third turning of a long dim narrow staircase, he found clémence waiting at a door and listening as if for his arrival. there was something in the meeting under such circumstances which did away all feelings of reserve, such as perhaps might otherwise have still affected them towards each other; and clémence, feeling that she was all his--that their fate was united for ever, felt scarcely a blush rise into her cheek when he, at once, pressed her to his heart upon their meeting. she spoke not, however, but held up her finger, as if to enjoin silence, and then led him through a little anteroom into a room beyond. there, seated at a table with some books scattered upon it, appeared the good pastor of auron, claude de l'estang. he was thinner, paler, more worn, than when first we endeavoured to depict him; but the light was not gone out in the clear bright eye, the same mild but intelligent smile hung upon the lip, the same high spirit was thrown upon the brow. he rose and grasped the young count's hands eagerly. "oh, my dear albert," he said, "i am glad to see you! this sweet child," he added, after the first exclamation, "wrote to me all that was between you and her. she is dear to my heart as if she were my own; and is she not my own. did i not bring her back to the faith of her dear mother? did i not rescue her from the evils of a corrupt perverted church? but of that we will speak not now, albert. the moment i heard of it--the moment i heard that you were here, and had cast yourself, as it were, into the jaws of the lion, after the fatal night when that murderous youth, like pilate, mingled our blood with our sacrifices--i resolved at once to make my way hither, at all and any risks, to speak to you, to exhort you, to tell you what i have decided in my own mind is the only plan for you to follow. i thought, indeed, when i set out--notwithstanding all that has occurred since you left poitou, notwithstanding the scattering of the sheep and the driving forth of the shepherd, and the falling off of many, and the wavering of all the rest--i thought that here i might learn tidings which might make a change in my opinion, but that, at all events, it was right for me to come, in order that i might consult with you and others, and take our last final determination together. but, since i have heard from this dear child the situation in which you are placed, since i have heard from a weak brother, who has outwardly abjured the faith which he fondly clings to in his heart, things that you yourselves do not know, my opinion has been confirmed to the fullest extent, and i have only to say to you, albert, fly! fly with her immediately; save her from persecution, and anguish, and care; confirm her in the only true faith, and in the renunciation of every superstitious vanity of the church of rome! strengthen her, support her, protect her! lose no time--no, not a day; for, if you do, danger to both, and, perhaps, everlasting separation in this world may be the consequence." "i am most ready and most willing," replied the count. "it is absolutely necessary, indeed, that i should return to versailles, but only for a few hours. after that, i can return hither, and, without further delay, execute what i am fully convinced is the only plan for us to pursue." "it is the only plan," said the clergyman. "are you aware, albert, that, in the short space of five days, one half of the protestants of poitou have bent the knee to baal? are you aware that the very men who, a week ago, clung to you for aid and protection, would now fly from you, either in shame at their own degeneracy, or because you are marked out for indignation by the powers that be? yes, albert, they would fly from you! there is a remnant, indeed, faithful and true unto the last; but to them i shall say, as i say to you, they must go forth to other lands, and shake off the dust from their feet as a testimony against this place. there is nothing left you, albert, but flight, and that speedy and unhesitating. i have told you that i have heard much from a weak brother, whose renunciation of his faith weighs heavy upon him. he is in the confidence, it would seem, of those who rule; and he has informed me that it is the determination of the monarch and his council never to let you quit the court of france except as a follower of the popish church of rome. every temptation is to be held out to you to make you yield, every menace used to drive you on the way they want; and should your resistance become strong and decided, the order for your arrest is already made out, and needs but one word to cause its execution. fly, then, fly, albert, and even if not for your own sake for hers." "i am most willing, my good friend," replied the count. "i need no exhortation so to do. but is clémence still willing to go with me?" "can you doubt it, albert," she said, "with _his_ approbation and advice?" "yet, dear clémence," said the count, "i should be wrong were i not to tell you what may happen. the danger, the risk of our escape, the fatigues, and labours, and anxieties of the journey, the perils that await us at every step you have made up your mind to. but, clémence, have you thought of the change from affluence to mere competence, from splendour and luxury to bare necessaries, even perhaps to poverty itself, for all i have on earth depends upon the good faith of those to whom i have transmitted it, and i might arrive and find nothing. have you thought of all this? have you thought that it may last for years, that we may have to live, and die, and bring up our children in poverty----?" "out upon it, albert!" exclaimed the old man, angrily; "wouldst thou take the part of the prince of this world against her better angel? but she will not doubt, she will not waver: i know she will not. sooner than be a hypocrite, sooner than abandon troth and embrace error, she would cast herself upon the world, were it ten thousand times as bad--out upon it! she fears not: she will have her husband, and her faith, and her god to support her." "i have not thought of all you suggest, albert," replied clémence more mildly, but still somewhat reproachfully, "i have not thought of them, because it was unnecessary to think of them at all. do you not love me, albert? do i not love you? is not that love riches, and splendour, and luxury enough for us? but when, beside that all-sufficient love, we have the knowledge that we are doing our duty, that we are suffering for our conscience sake, that we have left all to follow what we believe the dictates of the great author of our faith, there will be a satisfaction, a pride, a glory, that even a woman's heart can feel. fear not for me, albert; i understand your scruples, and though they require forgiveness i forgive them. let us be guided by his advice,--i am sure that it is good,--and i am willing, most willing, to risk all and every thing under such circumstances, and for such a cause." "well then, so be it," said the count; "let us consider our decision as made. this very night, clémence, i will return to paris. this very night i will meet you here; but oh, my good friend," he continued, turning to the pastor, "you whom i love and venerate as a father, you will easily understand what i feel when i say, that i could wish most anxiously that this dear girl, who is to accompany me through scenes of some peril, were united to me before we depart, not alone by the bonds of deep and true affection, not alone by the bonds of all the mutual promises and engagements which man and woman can plight towards each other, but by the sanction of that holy religion which first instituted such an union, and by the blessing of one of the ministers of christ. i fear, however, it cannot be done." "nay, my son, it can," replied the clergyman. "expelled from our temples, debarred from the performance of all those ceremonial rites, which are but the shadows and types of higher things, the abandonment of such ceremonies as we cannot exercise, can, in no degree, either in the sight of man or of god, as long as the side of law or justice is considered, affect the validity of such a contract, or do away, in the slightest degree, the solemn legality of an union complete in all the forms which we are enabled to give it. even were it not so, i have power delegated to me by the synod of our church, without application to higher authorities, whose approbation, for many years, would have been difficult and embarrassing to obtain, to perform all the ceremonies of the church, upon due knowledge certified by me that they are not contrary, in the particular cases, to the law of god, or to those just ordinances of man to which we have ourselves subscribed. if you desire it, and if clémence is willing, i will this very night, before you depart, give my blessing to your union, and doubt not that, with my certificate thereof, witnessed by proper witnesses, that union will be held good by the protestant church throughout the world." "then i fear not," exclaimed the count. "what say you, dear clémence? can you resolve upon this also,--speak, dear girl," he added as she paused in silence, covering her eyes with her hand. "speak! oh speak!" "what should i say, albert?" she said. "do you dream that i would refuse? do you suppose that i would reject the only thing which was wanting to give me confidence, and strength, and hope through all the perils that we may have to undergo?" albert gazed on her with a look that thanked her to the full; and, after a brief moment given to happiness, he asked, "but who shall be the witnesses?" "maria must be one," said clémence, "for she of course goes with us." "one of my servants may be another," said the count. "but it is better to have several." "the master of this house and his son," said claude de l'estang, "will make up a number more than sufficient; and all that remains, albert, is for you to go and settle your affairs at versailles, and return hither as soon as you may; though i wish, indeed, that it were possible for you not to go back to that place at all." "indeed it is quite necessary," replied the count; "not contemplating this meeting, i have left all the little store of wealth which i brought with me from poitou in my house at versailles. it is impossible to send for it without causing instant suspicion, and it is absolutely necessary, not only for the expences of the journey, but in order to secure some little sum for our subsistence, for a year or two, in case we shall find that, either by misfortune or by fraud, the money which i transmitted to holland is not forthcoming." "it is, indeed, most necessary," said claude de l'estang. "i have heard that one of our poor ministers, who was banished some years ago from languedoc, suffered most terribly in foreign lands before he could gain employment." "but i can bring in my share," exclaimed clémence, her eyes sparkling with gladness. "i have a number of jewels, of different kinds: many purchased in other days with my own money; many given me by friends of my youth long years ago. they have cost, i know, in all many thousand livres. these are my own, and i will take them with me. those that i have received from the duke and duchess, and other roman catholic friends, i shall leave to be given back to them again." "do so, do so!" said the pastor. "there are some people, my dear child, who would wring a text from scripture to bid you do the contrary, telling you to spoil the egyptians; but i think that such injunctions as that must ever be applicable to particular cases alone, and the application must be made by god himself. i say, leave all that is not justly and absolutely your own: leave all that those who gave it would not give now, if they could see the use to which you are going to apply it. we shall rarely regret, my child, if ever, having been too just; we shall never cease to regret if we are once unjust." the count de morseiul had remarked that, through the whole of this conversation, the pastor had never once mentioned himself or his own plans. it might however seem, that he left it to be understood that he, too, was about to fly from the land; but the count de morseiul knew him well, and was aware that he was one of those who would resolutely and firmly place himself in the way of perils which he would teach others to avoid. he did not choose even to suppose that the pastor was about to remain in the land which he advised them to quit; and he, therefore, demanded, "at what hour, my good friend, will you be ready to give us your blessing and to go with us?" "my son," replied the pastor, "i will give my blessing on your union at any hour you like, for i dare not go out during the day. but, alas, i must not think of going with you. i say not, that i will not come hereafter, if heaven enable me to do so; but it must be after i have seen every one of my flock, who is willing to sacrifice temporal to eternal things, in safety in another land before me. nay, nay, albert," he said, seeing the count about to reply, "urge me not in this matter, for i am sure i am right, and when such is the case i must be immoveable. as soon as all who are willing to go are gone, i will obey the injunction of the king, which orders the pastors and ministers of our church to quit the realm immediately----" "indeed!" exclaimed the count. "has such an order been issued? i never heard of it." "you hear, my son, very little here," replied the old man. "care is taken to keep unpleasant sights from the eyes of kings and courtiers. pomp, and pageantry, and display, luxury and feasting, and music, and games, and revelry, they are the things for palaces and capitals; not the groans and tears of the wronged and injured, not the cries and murmurs of the oppressed. some days have passed since the order appeared throughout all the provinces, and many of my brethren have already obeyed. i will obey it, too, but not till the last." "oh," cried clémence, "dear and excellent friend, do not, do not expose yourself too far. remember how much we may need your council and assistance hereafter. remember what a stay and support your presence may be to the whole of your flock in other lands." "those who do not fulfil their duties now, clémence," said the pastor, "upon the pretext of fulfilling them better hereafter, will fulfil none at all, my child. but say no more either of you; my determination is strong and fixed: and now, albert," he added, with a faint smile, "find some way of measuring her finger for the ring that is to make her yours, and if you could get some friendly notary to draw up a regular contract of marriage between you against this evening, all would be complete." albert of morseiul took the fair hand of his promised bride, which she gave him with a blushing cheek, to measure it for the ring that was to be the symbol of their union. upon the very finger was that ring which he had rescued for her when it had been taken away by the band of herval, the coronet and the cypher in diamonds; and as he gazed upon it and tried it on his own finger, to judge of the size, a brief feeling of curiosity passed through his heart, and he thought, "this, indeed, is strange: i am about to wed one, of whose history, and fate, and circumstances, both i myself, and almost every one around me, are ignorant." he lifted his look to her face, however, while he thus thought. those large, pure, beautiful eyes were gazing upon him with tenderness and trust, and, replacing the ring upon her finger, he sealed his faith and confidence upon that fair hand with a kiss. chapter xi. the king's closet. during the time that the young count was absent from versailles and busied, as we have represented, with those schemes on which his future woe or welfare seemed beyond all doubt to depend, a scene was taking place in the palace of the king, in which the count was more interested than he could have supposed possible, and which, as will be seen at the close of this history, was destined to affect him as much as any of his own proceedings. the scene, then, was in the king's cabinet at versailles. a clock of a rich and singular construction stood exactly before the monarch, marking out to him the portions of time which he could bestow upon each separate affair as it was brought before him. a large inkstand, containing innumerable pens, and a portfolio, half filled with writing, in the king's own hand, lay upon the table; wax of four different colours, blue, red, white, and yellow, were also placed before him, in a small case of marquetry, which contained likewise several seals, and an instrument of a peculiar form for spreading the wax: the walls were ornamented with a few very choice small pictures; a number of maps were there also, and a few, but very few, books. the monarch was seated in a large arm chair, his right foot supported by a footstool, and his hand holding a pen as it rested on the table. the expression of his countenance was mild but intelligent, and before him stood--a little pale indeed, and affecting, certainly, greater awe and terror than he really did feel--a man, whom, as we described him before, may be passed over in silence as far as his personal appearance is concerned. this was no other than jerome riquet, the valet of the count of morseiul; and behind him appeared the figure of bontems, louis's confidential attendant, who instantly retreated in silence from the chamber, on a slow nod of the head from the king. "your name," said the monarch, fixing his eyes full upon riquet, "is, i understand, jerome riquet, and you are valet to the young count of morseiul." "i have been his faithful valet in the field, and the camp, and the court, and the castle, for these many years, sire," replied the man. "and i hear," continued the king, "that you are a member of the holy catholic church, while your lord is of the religion which its professors call reformed. now, answer me truly, how have you contrived--during the long period of service, surrounded, as you were, by huguenot fellow servants and under a huguenot lord--how have you contrived to fulfil the duties of your religion, i say, under such circumstances?" "oh, sire, nothing so easy," replied the man. "may it please your majesty, i was much better off, in most respects, than my brother catholics; for on a fast day, sire, by my lord's order, on my account, there was either fish, or some other meagre dish prepared, so that i had my choice. i could fast and grow thin, or sin and grow fat, as i thought fit." the king's countenance fell a little at an uncalled-for joke in his presence, especially on a subject which, in his eyes, was of serious importance. louis, however, was very rarely disposed to say a harsh word, unless it was impossible to help it; and he therefore passed over the valet's levity with merely the reproof of that displeased look, and then again demanded,-- "so, then, your lord gave you every facility of fulfilling the duties of your religion?" "the greatest, sire," replied the man. "except when we were in holland, where there was no catholic church to be found, he has always driven me to mass as if with a scourge. even at morseiul, scarcely a sunday passed without his telling me to go to mass, and asking me if i had been." "this looks well for the young gentleman," said the king, seemingly well pleased with the account the man afforded. "we have had different stories at court--that he was rank and bigoted, and furious against the catholic religion." "lord bless your majesty!" exclaimed the man, "he is more than three quarters of a catholic himself, and if the devil gets the other quarter it will only be because the count is driven to him." "speak not profanely, sir, of things that are serious," said the king, "nor presume, in my presence, to venture upon such jests." as he spoke, the whole aspect of his countenance changed, his brow grew dark, his lip curled, his voice became deeper, his head more erect, and that indescribable majesty, for which he was famous, took possession of his person, making the unfortunate jerome riquet ready to sink into the earth. "now, sir," continued the king, "be not frightened; but give me clear and straight-forward answers in a serious tone. what you have told me of your young lord is satisfactory to me. i am most anxious to do him good and to show him favour. i have marked his gallant conduct as a soldier, and his upright and noble demeanour as a french gentleman, and i would fain save him from the destruction to which obstinacy may lead him. you say that he is three parts a catholic already, and would be one altogether if it were not--at least so i understand you--that some one drove him to the contrary conduct. now, who is it drives him, sir? speak to me plainly and explicitly, and no harm shall come to you.--have you lost your tongue, sir, or are you struck dumb?" the king continued, seeing that riquet remained silent, while his whole frame seemed to work with terror and agitation. perhaps, had his lord been there, he might have discovered, at once, that riquet was working himself up to assume an immense deal more of terror than he really felt; but the king, conscious of having assumed an overawing look which he had often seen produce effects somewhat similar, believed the fear of the valet to be entirely real, and was not at all surprised to see riquet suddenly cast himself at his feet and burst into an amazing flood of tears. "if i have offended your majesty," cried the man, with a species of orientalism which was not at all displeasing to the ears of the despotic monarch of the french, "if i have offended your majesty, take my head! but you are now proceeding to question me upon matters in which what i have to tell and to speak of, may produce the most terrible results. i know not every word i utter that i may not be doing wrong--i know not that every word may not cost my life--and unless your majesty will deign to grant me in writing your full and free pardon for all that i have done, i dare not, indeed i dare not go on; or if i do, terror will make me prevaricate, and attempt to conceal facts that the wisdom of your majesty will soon discover." "nay, nay," exclaimed the king; "before i give you such pardon, my good friend, i must know to what it extends. you may have committed twenty crimes, for aught i know; you may be a relapsed heretic, for aught i know." "so help me god, sire, no," exclaimed the man vehemently: "i am a sincere, devout, and zealous catholic, and have been so all my life. here is the certificate of the parish priest in poitou, sire, in order that i might have the benefit of the indulgence," and he drew forth from his pocket a small piece of written paper which louis read attentively, and which bestowed upon him so high a character for devotion to the catholic faith, and for various other extraordinary virtues, that louis thought he could not be far wrong in assuring him of the pardon he wanted, especially as riquet, while he read, had relapsed into a passion of tears, and the moments allotted to the task of examining him were fleeting rapidly away. "well," he said, "to make you at ease, i will grant you the pardon, under some conditions." "and pray put in, sire," cried riquet, with real joy sparkling in his eyes, "pray put in that you take me under your royal protection, for fear the count should be angry, or any of the heretics should attempt to take vengeance upon me. "that i will do also," replied louis, and taking the pen he wrote rapidly a paper which, according to the old english form, would have been somewhat to the following effect, though the beginning of it, "_a tous ceux_," &c. may be somewhat freely translated. "know all men by these presents, that we, for especial reasons thereunto us moving, have granted our full and free pardon unto the person called jerome hardouin riquet, for all crimes or offences that he may have committed up to the date of these presents, always excepted any crime which he may have committed against the holy church or our sovereign state of which he is not at this time charged, and which may be hereafter proved against him, and that we do also take the said jerome hardouin riquet under our especial protection, warning all men to have regard unto the same, for such is our will. "louis." the king read the paper over, paused for a moment, as if he yet hesitated whether he should give it or not, and then with a sort of half smile, and a look expressive of something between carelessness and magnanimity, he held it out to the valet, who seized it and kissed it repeatedly. then standing up before the monarch, he said,-- "now, sire, safe in your majesty's protection, i am ready and capable of answering distinctly and clearly any thing that you may ask me." the king took the paper up again, into which he had looked to ascertain the various denominations of maître riquet, and then recommenced his questions as follows, returning in the first place to the one which riquet had left unanswered, "who and what are the people who are driving, or are likely to drive, your master to remain obstinate in heresy." "please your majesty," replied riquet, "the principal persons are, a very reverend and respectable gentleman, called the abbé de st. helie; also, the intendant of the province of poitou, our reverend father the bishop of poitiers, monsieur de louvois, and i am not very sure that good monsieur de rouvré himself has not a part." the king gazed at the bold speaker for a moment or two, as if doubtful of his real intention; asking of himself whether the man spoke sincerely and simply, or whether a daring jest, or a still more impudent sarcasm, lay concealed in the words he used. the man's previous terror, however, and the air of perfect unconsciousness of offence with which he spoke, did much to convince louis that he had no double meaning. his tone, however, was sharp and angry, as he asked, "how now, sir? how can some of the best and wisest, the most prudent and the most zealous men in the realm, drive any heretic to refuse obstinately the cup of salvation offered to him? i trust, you mean no offence, sirrah!" jerome riquet's countenance instantly fell, and with a thousand lamentations and professions of profound respect for louvois and st. helie, and every one whom the king might trust and favour, he declared, that his only meaning was, that he believed his master and a great many other protestants would have been converted long ago, if they had been led rather than driven. he added, that he had heard the young count and the old one too say a thousand times, that some of the gentlemen he mentioned had done as much to prevent the protestants from returning to the mother church, as monsieur bossuet had done to bring them back to it. louis paused and thought, and had not his prepossessions been so complete as they were, the plain truth which the valet told him might not have been unproductive of fruit. as it was it went in some degree to effect the real object which riquet had in view; namely, to impress the king with a notion, that there was a great probability of the young count being recalled to the bosom of the catholic church, provided the means employed were gentleness and persuasion. it is very seldom, indeed, in this life, that we meet with any thing like pure and unmixed motives, and such were certainly not to be expected in the bosom of jerome riquet. his first object and design was certainly to serve his master; but, in so serving him, he had an eye to gratifications of his own also; for to his feelings and disposition versailles was a much pleasanter place than morseiul, paris a more agreeable land than poitou. he used to declare, that he was fond of the country, but liked it paved; that his avenues should always be houses, and his flocks and herds wear coats and petticoats. he naturally calculated, then, that if the king undertook the task of converting the young count by gentle and quiet means, he would not fail to keep him in the delightful sojourning place of versailles, while he, jerome riquet, amongst all the gods and goddesses of brass and marble, which were gathered together in the gardens, might play the part of proteus, and take a thousand shapes, as might suit his versatile genius. the king thought over the reply of riquet for some moments, somewhat struck by hearing that the arguments which the protestants held amongst themselves were exactly similar to those which they had often put forth in addressing him. so much skill, however, had been employed by his council and advisers to open wide before him the path of error, and to close up the narrow footway of truth, that even when any one pulled away the brambles and briars with which the latter had been blocked up, and showed him that there was really another path, he refused to follow it, and chose the wider and more travelled road. thus his conclusion was, after those few minutes' thought,-- "this is all very well, and very specious; but as we do not trust to a sick man to point out the remedies that will cure him, so must we not trust to these huguenots to point out what would be the best means of converting them. however, master jerome riquet, it is not in regard to opinions that i sent for you, i want to hear facts, if you please. now tell me: do you remember, upon a certain occasion, a proclamation having been sent down to be read in the town of morseiul, the king's officers having been insulted, and, i believe, pelted with stones, and the proclamation torn down?" "no, sire," replied riquet boldly, for he was telling a lie, and therefore spoke confidently. "i remember my master going out in haste one day to prevent, he said, any bad conduct on the part of the people, and i remember hearing that he had caused the proclamation to be made himself in the market-place, in spite of some riotous folk, who would willingly have opposed it." "high time that such folk should be put down," said the king. "these are the peaceable and obedient subjects, which the advocates of the huguenots would fain persuade me that they are. but one question more on this head: did you see the young count of morseuil cause the gates of the town to be shut in the face of my officers, or did you hear that he had done so, upon good authority?" "no, sire, i neither heard nor saw it," replied riquet; "and, for myself, i was safely in the castle during the whole day." "do you remember," continued the king, looking at the paper, "having carried notes or letters from your master to different protestant gentlemen in the neighbourhood of poitiers, calling upon them to assemble and meet him at the house of another huguenot, named m. de corvoie?" "no, sire, oh no!" replied the man. "while we were at poitiers, i only carried one note, and that was to the saddle-maker, who in repadding one of my lord's saddles, had done it so as to gall the horse's back." "sir, you are lying," said the king sternly. riquet once more cast himself upon his knees before the monarch, clasping his hands and exclaiming, "may i lose your majesty's favour for ever, if i am not telling you the exact truth. let any one who dares to say that i carried any other note than that which i have mentioned be confronted with me this moment, and i will prove, that he is shamefully deceiving your majesty, for no other note did i carry, no, not even a love letter. otherwise, i could and would, not only tell your majesty the fact, but every word that the notes contained." "this is very extraordinary," said the king, "and i shall take care to inquire into it." "i trust your majesty will," replied the man boldly, for it may be recollected that he had not carried any note, but had been merely charged with a message to m. de corvoie: "i trust that your majesty will; for i assure you, on the faith of a valet de chambre, that no such transaction ever occurred. did not they want to charge me--the very men who i dare say have brought this accusation--did they not want to charge me with having abstracted your majesty's commission to messieurs st. helie and pelisson, and with having placed a pack of cards in its stead; and were they not brought to shame by its being found out, that they themselves had done it, by fragments of the commission being found in one of their valises, wrapped like a dirty rag about an old tobacco box?" "how is this? how is this?" exclaimed the king. "i heard that the commission had been abstracted, but i heard not this result--fragments of the commission wrapping a tobacco box found in their own valises!" "ay, sire," replied the man, "'tis all too true, for the examination was conducted in presence of monsieur de rouvré;" and with earnest volubility maître jerome set to work, and, in his own particular manner, gave the monarch a long and detailed, but rapid account of what had taken place on the return of the count de morseiul to poitiers, adding cunning commentaries in words, gesticulations, and grimaces, which scarcely left the king the power of retaining his due gravity, especially when riquet personated to the life, the worthy curé of guadrieul, on the discovery of the paper in his valise. while he was in the very act of making this detail, however, the door of the royal cabinet was opened, and a man of a harsh and disagreeable countenance, with a face somewhat red and blotched, but with great fire and intelligence in his eyes, entered the room, pausing for a single moment at the door, as if for permission. "come in, monsieur de louvois, come in," said the king. "this is jerome riquet, the valet of the count de morseiul, whom i told you i intended to examine. he puts a very different face upon several matters, however, from that which we expected to find," and the king briefly recapitulated to his famous minister the information he had received from riquet, leaving out however the first part of the conversation between them, which contained matter that could not be very agreeable to the minister. a somewhat sneering smile came upon louvois' countenance as he listened; and he replied, "i am very happy to hear, sire, that the count de morseiul is so good and faithful a servant to your majesty. may i be permitted to ask this worthy person a question or two in your presence?" the king bowed his head, and the minister, turning to riquet, went on: "although we have much more reason to think favourably of your master," he said, "than we had at first, yet there is one point in regard to which, though he did not actually commit a fault, he greatly neglected his duty, at least, so we are led to believe. we are assured, that shortly before he came up to versailles, a great meeting of huguenots in the open air took place upon a wild moor, within the limits of the young count's lands, which meeting, though held for the peaceful purpose, we are told, of merely preaching in the open air, terminated in bloodshed, and an attack upon a small body of the king's dragoons who were watching the proceedings." louvois' eye was fixed upon the valet all the time he spoke, and jerome riquet was making up his mind to deny steadily any knowledge of the transaction; but suddenly his whole views upon the subject were changed by the minister coming to the head and front of the count's offence. "now," continued louvois, "although there was certainly no law to compel the count to be present on such an occasion, yet, when he knew that a meeting of this kind was about to take place on his own estates, and that dangerous consequences might ensue, he would but have shown his zeal and duty in the service of the king by going to the spot, and doing all that he could to make the proceedings tranquil and inoffensive." "but the count did go, sir," exclaimed riquet, "the count did go, and i remember the fact of his going particularly." "are you ready to swear that he was there?" demanded louvois. "all i can say," replied the valet, "is, that he left home for the purpose of going there. i was not present myself, but i heard from every one else that he was." "and pray at what hour did he return that night?" demanded louvois, "for the events that i speak of did not take place till near nightfall, and if the count had been there till the whole assemblage had dispersed, a thousand to one no harm would have ensued." "i cannot exactly tell at what hour he returned," said the valet, who was beginning to fancy that he was not exactly in the right road. "it was after nightfall, however." "recollect yourself," said louvois, "was it nine, ten o'clock." "it might be nearly ten," said the man. "and, i think," said louvois, his lip curling with a smile, bitter and fiend-like, "i think you were one of those, were you not, who went down on the following morning to the spot where the young marquis de hericourt had been murdered? your name is amongst those who were seen there, so say no more. but now tell me, where is your master at this moment?" jerome riquet smarted under a strong perception of having been outwitted; and the consequence was, that knowing, or at least believing, that when a man falls into one such piece of ill luck, it generally goes on, with a sort of run against him; he made up his mind to know as little as possible about any thing, for fear of falling into a new error, and replied to louvois' question, that he could not tell. "is he in his hotel at versailles, or not, sir?" said the minister sternly; "endeavour to forget for once that you are professionally a liar, and give a straight-forward answer, for on your telling truth depends your immediate transmission to the bastille or not. was your master at home when you left the house, or out?" "he was out then, sir, certainly," replied riquet. "on horseback, or on foot?" demanded louvois. "on horseback," replied the man. "now, answer me one other question," continued the minister. "have you not been heard, this very morning, to tell the head groom to have horses ready to go to paris?" "sir," said jerome, with a look of impudent raillery that he dared not assume towards the king, but which nothing upon earth could have repressed in addressing louvois at that moment, "sir, i feel convinced that i must possess a valet de chambre without knowing it, for nobody on earth could repeat my words so accurately, unless i had some scoundrel of a valet to betray them as soon as they were spoken." "sir, your impudence shall have its just punishment," said louvois, taking up a pen and dipping it in the ink, but the king waved his hand, saying, "put down the pen, monsieur de louvois! you forget that you are in the king's cabinet and in his presence!--riquet, you may retire." riquet did not need a second bidding, but, with a look of profound awe and reverence towards louis, laid his hand upon his heart, lifted up his shoulders, like the jaws of a crocodile ready to swallow up his head, and bowing almost to the ground, walked backward out of the room. louvois stood before the king, for an instant, with a look of angry mortification, which he suppressed with difficulty. louis suffered him to remain thus, and, perhaps, did not enjoy a little the humiliation he had inflicted upon a man whom he, more than once in his life, declared to be perfectly insupportable, though he could not do without him. at length, however, he spoke in a grave but not an angry tone, saying, "from the questions that you asked that man just now, monsieur de louvois, i am led to believe that you have received some fresh information regarding this young gentleman--this count de morseiul. my determination up to this moment, strengthened by the advice of monsieur de meaux, monsieur pelisson, and others, is simply this: to pursue to the utmost the means of persuasion and conciliation in order to induce him, by fair means, to return to the bosom of the catholic church." "better, sire," replied louvois, "far better cut him off like a withered and corrupted branch, unfit to be grafted on that goodly tree." "you know, marquis," said the king, "that i am always amenable to reason. i have expressed the determination which i had taken under particular circumstances. if you have other circumstances to communicate to me which may make me alter that opinion, do so straight-forwardly. kings are as liable to error as other men,--perhaps, indeed, more so; for they see truth at a distance, and require perspective glasses to examine it well, which are not always at hand. if i am wrong i am ready to change my resolution, though it is always a part of a king's duty to decide speedily when he can do it wisely." "the simple fact, sire," replied louvois, with the mortification under which he still smarted affecting his tone of voice; "the simple fact is, as your majesty must have divined from the answers that man gave me, i have now clear and distinct proof that this count de morseiul has, throughout the insignificant but annoying troubles occasioned by the huguenots in poitou, been the great fomenter of all their discontent, and their leader in actual insurrection. he was not only present at this preaching in the desert, as these fanatics call it, and led all the proceedings, by a speech upon the occasion highly insulting to your majesty's authority and dignity; with all which your majesty has already been made acquainted----" "but upon not very clear and conclusive evidence," said the king. "upon evidence, monsieur de louvois, which should condemn none of my subjects before a court of law, and, therefore, not before his sovereign. that he made a speech is clear; but some of the witnesses deposed, that it was only to recommend moderation and tranquillity, and to beseech them, on no account, to appear on such occasions with arms." "all hypocrisy, sire," replied louvois. "i have had two of the dragoons with me this morning who were present with my unfortunate cousin, young de hericourt, and they are quite ready and willing to swear that he, this count de morseiul, began the affray by striking that young officer from his horse." "without provocation?" demanded the king, his brow growing somewhat cloudy. "they saw none given," replied louvois, "and they were close to him. not only this, but, as it is shown that he did not himself return to his own house till late at night; that de hericourt never returned at all; and that the two were angry rivals for the hand of this very mademoiselle de marly, there is strong reason to believe that they met after the affair on the moor, and that the unhappy young man was slain by the hand of the count of morseiul." "this is something new, indeed," said the king. "have you any further information, monsieur de louvois?" "merely the following, sire," replied the minister, "that, in the course of yesterday evening, the famous fanatic minister, claude de l'estang, the great stay of the self-styled reformed church, who, on more than one occasion, in his youth opposed your royal father in arms, and has, through life, been the great friend and adviser of these counts of morseiul, arrived in paris last night, sent a billet down to the count this morning, and further, that the count immediately went up to visit him. unfortunately the news was communicated to me too late to take measures for tracking the count from versailles to the hiding-place of the minister, whom it is desirable to lay hands upon if possible. the count was tracked, indeed, to his own hotel in paris; but, just before i came hither, the messenger returned to tell me, that as soon as monsieur de morseiul had arrived at his own house he had gone out again on foot, and all further trace of him was lost. what i would urge upon your majesty's attention, then, is this, that if you suffer him to trifle away many days, persuading you and good monsieur bossuet, that he intends to yield and return to the church, you will suffer this affair of the preaching, the tumult, the murder of some of your loyal subjects, and the previous factious conduct of this young man, to drop and be forgotten; and you cannot well revive it after any length of time, as it is known, already, that full information has been laid before you on the subject. it does seem to me, sire," continued the minister, seeing that louis was much moved by his reasonings, "it does seem to me that you have but one choice. you must either, believing, as i do, that the count de morseiul has not the slightest intention of ever becoming a convert from the heresy which he now professes, determine upon arresting him and punishing him for the crimes with which he is charged, should they be proved; or else you must grant him your royal favour and pardon, put it out of your own power to investigate further the matter, bestow upon him the hand of mademoiselle de marly, and leave fate, and his own inclinations, to convert him to the catholic faith, or not, as may happen." "i certainly shall not take the latter alternative," replied the king. "the circumstances you have brought forward are extremely strong, especially this renewed visit to claude de l'estang. i am not one to show indecision where firmness is necessary, louvois. in an hour or two, whenever i think it probable that he is returned to versailles, i will send to require his presence. i will question him myself upon his belief, ascertain the probability of his conversion, and determine at once. if i find your statement correct----" "sire," cried louvois, interrupting the king, as was too often his custom to do, "there is little use of your asking him any questions but one simple one; the answer to which must, at once, satisfy so great and magnanimous a mind as yours, and you will see that i entertain no feeling of personal enmity to the young man by the question that i am about to suggest. if he answer that question candidly, straightforwardly, and, at once, in the manner and sense which your majesty can approve, give him your favour, raise him high, distinguish him in every manner: but if he prevaricates, hesitates, or answers in a sense and manner which your majesty cannot approve, send him to the bastille." "but what is the question?" demanded the king eagerly. "what is the question, monsieur de louvois?" "this, sire," replied louvois: "monsieur de morseiul, i beg and command of you, as your king and your benefactor, to tell me whether there is, or is not, really any chance of your ever becoming a convert to the true catholic faith of this realm?" louvois, by putting such a question into the king's mouth, showed not only how intimately he was acquainted with louis's weaknesses, but also how well he knew the firmness and candour of the young count de morseiul. he knew, in short, that the latter would tell the truth, and that the former would condemn it. "nothing can be fairer," replied the king, "nothing can be fairer, monsieur de louvois. i will put that question to him exactly, and upon his answer to it he shall stand or fall." "so thoroughly am i convinced, sire, of what the result will be," continued louvois, "that i will beseech your majesty to give me authority to have him arrested immediately after he leaves you, in case you send me no order to the contrary." "certainly," replied the king, "certainly. i will sign the order immediately." "allow me to remind you, sire," replied louvois, "that you signed one the other day, which is already in the hands of cantal, only you ordered me to suspend the execution. that will do quite well, and cantal will be at hand to put it in force." "be it so," said the monarch, "be it so: but let cantal be in the way at the time i send for the young count, that i may signify to him that he is not to arrest the count if the answer i receive satisfies me. and now, monsieur de louvois, what news regarding this business of dunkirk?" the king and his minister then turned to other matters, and having concluded the principal part of the affairs they had in hand, were talking somewhat lightly of other matters, when one of the attendants, who knew that the hour of louvois was over, opened the door and interrupted their further conversation, by announcing, to the surprise of both, that the count de morseiul was in waiting, beseeching, earnestly, a moment's audience of the monarch. the king turned his eyes upon louvois, as if to inquire, "what is the meaning of this?" but a moment or two after he bade the attendant give the count admission. "then i had better take my leave, sire," said the minister, "and give cantal a hint to be in readiness;" and taking up the papers from which he had been reading some extracts to the monarch, louvois bowed low and quitted the room. end of the second volume. london: printed by a. spottiswoode, new-street-square. the huguenot. vol. iii. london: printed by a. spottiswoode, new-street-square. the huguenot a tale of the french protestants. by the author of "the gipsy," "the robber," &c. &c. * * * in three volumes. vol. iii. * * * london: printed for longman, orme, brown, green, & longmans, paternoster-row. . the huguenot. * * * chapter i. the unforeseen blow. to have judged by the affable and agreeable smile which louvois bore upon his countenance as he passed the young count de morseuil in one of the anterooms, a stranger to that minister would have imagined that he was extremely well disposed towards the gentleman whom he was in fact labouring to ruin. no such error, however, could have taken place with regard to the aspect with which the king received the young count, which, though not frowning and severe, was grave and somewhat stern. the countenance and conduct of albert of morseiul was calm, tranquil, and serene; and louis, who, intending to cut the interview as short as possible, had risen, could not help saying within himself, "that looks not like the face of a man conscious of crime." as the king paused while he made this remark to himself, the count imagined that he waited for him to begin and open the cause of his coming; and, consequently, he said at once, "sire, i have ventured to intrude upon your majesty, notwithstanding your intimation that you would send for me when your convenience served, inasmuch as i have matters of some importance to lay before you, which would bear no delay." "pray," demanded louis, "pray, monsieur de morseiul, before you proceed further, be so good as to inform me, whether the matters to which you allude refer to yourself or to the state?" "by no means to myself," replied the count, who was not altogether satisfied with the king's tone and manner. "they refer entirely to the safety of the state and your majesty. on my own affairs i would not have presumed to intrude upon you again." "very well, then," said the king dryly, "since such is the case, you will be good enough to communicate whatever you may have to say upon such subjects to monsieur de louvois, monsieur de seignelai, or monsieur colbert de croissy, as the case may be; such being the usual course by which matters of importance are brought to my ears. and now, monsieur de morseiul, though i have but a single moment to attend to any thing at this particular time, let me ask you one question,--is there or is there not any hope of my receiving the great gratification of being enabled to show you as much favour and distinction as i could wish, by your abjuring the heresy in which you have been unfortunately brought up, and seeking repose in the bosom of the catholic church?" the count de morseiul felt that a crisis in his fate had arrived; but, with the question put to him so simply and straight-forwardly, he felt that he could not evade the decision, and he would not prevaricate even for safety. "if, sire," he said, "what your majesty demands is to know my own opinion upon the subject at this moment--" "i mean, sir," said the king, "plainly, do you believe that there exists a likelihood of your becoming converted to the catholic faith?" "i do not believe so, sire," replied the count. "with deep and profound respect for your majesty, with much veneration and regard for monsieur bossuet, and with all the advantage of being even now reading some of his works upon religion, i should be deceiving your majesty, i should be wronging myself, i should be showing myself unworthy of the high opinion which monsieur de meaux has expressed of me, if i did not clearly and distinctly state that i see no likelihood whatsoever of my changing opinions instilled into me in infancy." "nay, nay," cried the king, considerably moved and struck by the calm, yet respectful dignity of the young count's demeanour. "think better of it! in god's name think better of it! let me hope that the eloquence of bossuet will prevail--let me hope that i may yet have the opportunity of conferring upon you all those favours that i am most eager to bestow." there was an eagerness and sincerity in the king's manner, which affected the count in turn. "alas, sire," he said, "what would i not do to merit the favour of such a king? but still i must not deceive you. whatever hopes your majesty is pleased to entertain of my conversion to the established religion of the realm, may be derived from the knowledge--from the powerful gratitude--which your majesty's generosity and high qualities of every kind must call up in your subjects and your servants; or they may arise from your knowledge of the deep and persuasive eloquence of the bishop of meaux: but they must not arise from any thing that i have said, or can say, regarding the state of my mind at this moment." "i grieve, monsieur de morseiul, i grieve bitterly to hear it," replied the king; and he then paused, looking down thoughtfully for some moments; after which he added, "let me remonstrate with you, that nothing may be left undone, which i can do, to justify me in treating you as i could wish. surely, monsieur de morseiul, there can be nothing very difficult to believe in that which so many--nay, i may say all the holiest, the wisest, and the best have believed, since the first preaching of our religion. surely, the great body of authority which has accumulated throughout ages, in favour of the catholic church, is not to be shaken by such men as luther and calvin. you yourselves acknowledge that there are--as there must ever be when heavenly things are revealed to earthly understanding--mysteries which we cannot subject to the ordinary test of human knowledge, in the whole scheme of our redemption--you acknowledge it; and yet with faith you believe in those mysteries, rejecting only those which do not suit you, and pretending that the scripture does not warrant them. but let me ask you, upon what authority we are to rely for the right interpretation of those very passages? is it to be upon the word of two such men as luther and calvin, learned though they might be, or on the authority of the church, throughout all ages, supported by the unbiassed opinions of a whole host of the learned and the wise in every century? are we to rely upon the opinion of two men, originally stirred up by avarice and bad passions, in preference to the whole body of saints and martyrs, who have lived long lives of piety and holiness, meditating upon those very mysteries which you reject. i am but a weak and feeble advocate, monsieur de morseiul, and should not, perhaps, have raised my voice at all after the eloquence of a bossuet has failed to produce its effect; but my zealous and anxious wish both to see you reunited to the church, and to show you that favour which such a conversion would justify, have made me say thus much." the young count was too prudent by far to enter into any theological discussions with the king, and he, therefore, contented himself with replying, "i fear, sire, that our belief is not in our own power. most sincerely do i hope and trust, that, if i be now in the wrong, god may open my eyes to the truth. at present however----" "say no more, sir! say no more!" said the king, bending his head as a signal that the young nobleman might retire. "i am heartily sorry for your state of mind! i had hoped better things. as to any other information you may have to communicate, you will be pleased to give it to one of the secretaries of state, according to the department to which it naturally refers itself." the king once more bowed his head, and the count with a low inclination retired. "i had better go at once to the apartments of louvois," he thought; "for this affair of hatréaumont may be already on the eve of bursting forth, and i would fain have the last act of my stay in my native land one of loyalty to the king who drives me forth." when he reached the open air, then, he turned to the right, to seek the apartments of louvois; but, ere he reached them, he was met by the chevalier de rohan, whom we have already mentioned, who stopped him with a gay and nonchalant air, saying, "oh, my dear count, you have made my fortune! the hundred louis that you lent me have brought good luck, and i am now a richer man than i have been for the last twelve months. i won ten thousand franks yesterday." "and, doubtless, will lose them again today," answered the count. "i wish to heaven you would change this life--but, my dear chevalier, i must hasten on, for i am on business." "when shall i have an hour to talk with you, count?" exclaimed the chevalier de rohan, still detaining him. "i want very much to explain to you my plan for raising myself--i am down low enough, certainly, just now." "when next we meet, chevalier--when next we meet!" said the count, smiling as he thought of his approaching departure. "i am in great haste now." but ere he could disengage himself from the hold of the persevering chevalier de rohan, he felt a hand laid gently upon his arm, and turning round, saw a gentleman whose face was not familiar to him. "monsieur le comte de morseiul, i believe," said the stranger; and, on the count bowing his head, he went on. "i have to apologise for interrupting your conversation; but i have a word for your private ear of some importance." the chevalier de rohan had by this time turned away, with a nod of the head; and the count replied to the other, "i am in some haste, sir. pray, what may be your pleasure?" "i have an unpleasant task to perform towards you, monsieur de morseiul," said the stranger; "but it is my wish to execute it as gently and delicately as possible. my orders are to arrest and convey you to the bastille." the count de morseiul felt that painful tightening of the heart which every man, thus suddenly stopped in the full career of liberty, and destined to be conveyed to long and uncertain imprisonment, to be shut out from all the happy sounds and sights of earth, to be debarred all the sweet intercourses of friendship and affection, has felt and must feel. at the same time all the various points of anxiety and difficulty in his situation rushed through his mind with such rapidity as to turn him dizzy with the whirling numbers of such painful thoughts. clémence de marly, whose hand was to have been his that very night, the good old pastor, his friends, his servants, all might, for aught he knew, be kept in utter ignorance of his fate for many days. the hands, too, of the unscrupulous and feelingless instruments of despotic power, would be in every cabinet of his house and his château, invading all the little storehouses of past affections, perhaps scattering to the winds all the fond memorials of the loved and dead. the dark lock of his mother's hair, which he had preserved from boyhood--the few fragments of her handwriting, and some verses that she had composed shortly before her death--all his father's letters to him, from the time that he first sent him forth, a gallant boy girt with the sword of a high race, to win renown, through all that period when the son, growing up in glory, shone back upon his father's name the light that he had thence received, and paid amply all the cares which had been bestowed upon him, by the joy of his great deeds, up to that sad moment, when, with a trembling hand, the dying parent announced to his son the commencement and progress of the fatal malady that carried him to the grave.--all these were to be opened, examined, perhaps dispersed by the cold, if not by the scornful; and all the sanctities of private affection violated. such and a thousand other such feelings, rapid, innumerable, and, in some instances, contradictory to and opposing each other, rushed through his bosom in a moment at the announcement of the officer's errand. the whole facts of his situation, in short, with every minute particular, were conjured up before his eyes, as in a picture, by those few words; and the first effort of deliberate thought was made while de cantal went on to say, "as i have said, monsieur de morseiul, it is my wish to save you any unnecessary pain, and therefore i have ordered the carriage, which is to convey you to the bastille, to wait at the further end of the first street. a couple of musketeers and myself will accompany you inside; so that there will be no unnecessary parade about the matter: and i doubt not that you will be liberated shortly." "i trust it may be so, sir," replied the count; "and am obliged to you for your kindness. i have violated no law, divine or human; and though, of course, i have many sins to atone towards my god, yet i have none towards my king. i am quite ready to accompany you, but i suppose that i shall not be permitted to return to my own house, even to seek those things which may be necessary for my comfort in the bastille." "quite impossible, sir," replied the officer. "it would be as much as my head is worth to permit you to set foot in your own dwelling." the thoughts of the young count, as may well be supposed, were turned, at that moment, particularly to clémence de marly; and he was most anxious, on every account, to make his servants acquainted with the fact of his having been arrested, in the hope that riquet would have the good sense to convey the tidings to the hôtel de rouvré. to have explained this, in any degree, to the officer who had him in charge, would have been to frustrate the whole design; and therefore he replied, "far be it from me, sir, to wish you to do any thing but your duty: but you see, as i have been accustomed, throughout my life, to somewhat perhaps too much luxury, i should be very desirous of procuring some changes of apparel. that, i am aware, may be permitted to me unless i am to be in the strictest and most severe kind of imprisonment which the bastille admits of. you know by the orders you have received whether such is to be the case or not, and of course i do not wish you to deviate from your orders. am i to be kept _au secret?_" "oh dear no, not at all," replied the officer. "the order merely implies your safe custody; and, probably, unless some private commands are given farther, you will have what is called the great liberties of the bastille: but still that would not, by any means, justify me in permitting you to go to your own house." "no," replied the count; "but it renders it perfectly possible--if you are, as i believe, disposed to treat a person in my unfortunate situation with kindness and liberality--for you to send down one of your own attendants to my valet, jerome riquet, with my orders to send me up, in the course of the day, such clothes as may be necessary for a week. let the message be verbal, so as to guard against any dangerous communication; and let the clothes be addressed to the care of the governor of the prison, in order that they may be inspected before they are given to me." "oh, to that, of course, there can be no objection," replied the young officer. "we will do it immediately. but we must lose no time, monsieur de morseiul, for the order is countersigned by monsieur de louvois, and you know he likes prompt obedience." the count accompanied him at a rapid pace, deriving no slight consolation under the unhappy circumstances in which he was placed, at the idea of clémence being fully informed of the cause of his not appearing at the time he had promised. at the spot which monsieur de cantal had mentioned, was found a plain carriage, with a coachman and lackey in grey, and two musketeers of the guard seated quietly in the inside. while the count was entering the vehicle, the officer called the lackey to his side and said, "run down as fast as possible to the house of the count de morseiul, and inquire for his valet. what did you say his name is, monsieur de morseiul?" "jerome riquet," said the count. "ay, jerome riquet," said the officer. "inquire for his valet, jerome riquet: tell him that the king has judged it right that his master should pass a short time in the bastille, and that, therefore, he must send up thither to-night, addressed to the care of the governor, what clothes he judges the count may require. the house is next door but one to that of monsieur de meaux. run quick, and take the little alley at the end of the street, so that you may join us at the corner of the road." the young officer then entered the carriage, and the coachman drove on; but before they proceeded along the high road they were obliged to pause for a moment or two, in order to give time for the arrival of the lackey, who, when he came, spoke a few words through the window to monsieur de cantal, in the course of which the word "exempt" was frequently audible. "that is unpleasant," said the young officer, turning to the count: "i find that an exempt has been sent to your house already,--to seal up your papers, i suppose; and, on hearing the man give the message to one of your servants, he was very angry, it seems, sending word to wait for him here; but, as i am not under his orders or authority, i think i shall even tell the coachman to go on." he said this in a hesitating tone, however, evidently afraid that he had done wrong; and before he could execute his purpose of bidding the carriage proceed, the lackey said, "here comes the exempt, sir. here he is!" in a moment after, a tall, meager, gaunt-looking man, dressed in the peculiar robes of an exempt of the court, with a nose extraordinarily red, scarcely any eyebrows, and a mouth which seemed capable of swallowing the vehicle that he approached and all that it contained, came up to the side of the carriage, and spoke to the young officer through the window. the words that passed between them seemed to be sharp; and, at length, the exempt exclaimed, in a louder tone, so as to be completely audible to the count--although his articulation was of that round spluttering kind which rendered it very difficult to make out what he said--"i shall do so, however, sir; i shall do so, however. i have authority for what i do. i will suffer no such communications as these, and i will not quit the carriage till i have seen the prisoner safely lodged in the hands of the governor of the bastille." "well, sir," replied the officer, a little heated; "if you choose to overstep your duty i cannot help it, and certainly shall not attempt to prevent your going with the coachman if you think fit. in the inside of the carriage you shall not come, for there i will guard my prisoner myself." "that you may do, sir, if you like," cried the exempt, shaking the awful mass of wig in which his head was plunged: "but i will take care that there shall be no more communications.--linen! what the devil does a prisoner in the bastille want with linen? why, in the very first packet sent to him there might be all sorts of treasonable things written upon the linen. have we not heard of ink of sympathy and all manner of things?" "well, well, sir," exclaimed the young officer: "i saw no harm in what i was doing, or else i should not have done it. but get up, if you are going to get up, for i shall order the coachman to go on." the exempt sprang up the high and difficult ascent which led to a coachbox of those days, with a degree of activity which could hardly have been expected from a person of his pompous dignity, and the coach then drove on upon its weary way to paris. "a very violent and self-conceited person, indeed, that seems to be," said the count. "do you know him?" "not i," replied the young officer, "though he threatens to make me know him pretty sufficiently, by complaining to louvois about sending for these cursed clothes of yours." the officer was evidently out of temper; and the count, therefore, left him to himself, and fell into a fit of musing over his own situation. that fit of musing, dark and painful as it was, lasted, without cessation, till the vehicle entered one of the suburbs of the great city of paris. there, however, it met with an interruption of a very unexpected kind; for, in trying to pass between two heavy carts, which were going along in opposite directions, the coachman contrived to get the wheels of the carriage locked with those of both the other vehicles; and with such force was this done that the lackey behind was thrown down and hurt, the exempt himself nearly pitched off the coachbox, and obliged to cling with both his hands, while the coachman lost his hat and the reins. the idea of making his escape crossed the mind of the count de morseiul; but he evidently saw that even if he were out of the carriage, surrounded as he was by a great number of people, without any large sum of money upon his person, and with the eyes of the officer, the musketeers, and the exempt upon him, it would be vain to make the attempt. to render the situation of the vehicle as bad as possible, one of the horses, either irritated by the uncouth and not very gentle terms with which the coachman attempted to back out of the difficulty, or galled by part of the cart pressing upon it, began to kick most vehemently; and monsieur de cantal, the officer, having previously sent the two musketeers to aid the coachman and the exempt in disentangling the carriage, now showed a strong inclination to go himself. after looking anxiously at the count de morseiul for a moment, he at length said, "i must either go and set those men right, or suffer the carriage to be kicked to pieces. if i go, monsieur de morseiul, will you give me your word not to try to escape?" the count paused for an instant; but then the same consideration returned upon him, and he replied, "go, sir, go: i do give you my word." the officer then sprang out; but scarcely had he been away a moment, when the head of the exempt appeared looking in at the window. "hist, hist, monsieur de morseiul!" he said, in a voice totally different from that which he had used before, and which was wonderfully familiar to the ears of the count; "hist, hist! on the very first linen you receive, there will be information written for you. it will be invisible to all eyes till it is held to the fire. but the flame of a strong lamp will do, if you cannot sham an ague and get some wood to warm you." "i can scarcely believe my eyes," said the count, in the same low voice. "do not doubt them, do not doubt them," said the exempt. "i knew of your arrest before you knew of it yourself, but could not warn you, and was making all ready when the man came to the hotel. i have sacrificed much for you, count; as goodly a pair of eyebrows as ever valet had in this world; and i dare not blow my nose for fear of wiping off the paint: louvois outwitted me this morning, and now i'll outwit him if i have but time. heavens, how that beast is plunging and kicking! the pin i ran into its stomach is sticking there yet i suppose; ay, she's quieter now; here they come, and i must splutter.--monsieur," he said, as the officer now returned to the side of the carriage, "monsieur, this is guarding your prisoner securely, is it not? here i come to the window and find not a single soul to prevent his escaping, when he might have got out in a moment, and run up the rue de bièvre, and passed through the rue de l'ecole, and across the place de l'université, and then down to the river----" "psha!" said the officer impatiently; "let me have no more of this impertinence, sir. the count gave me his word that he would not escape. if i deliver my prisoner safely at the bastille, that is sufficient, and i will not have my conduct questioned. if you have any complaint to make, make it to monsieur de louvois. come, get up, sir, don't answer; the carriage is now clear, and enough of it left together to carry us to the bastille. go on, coachman." the coachman, however, pertinaciously remained in a state of tranquillity, till the exempt was once more comfortably seated by his side; and then the carriage rolling on through the back streets of the capital, made a little turn by the rue de jean beausire, into the rue st. antoine, and approached the gates of that redoubted prison, in which so many of the best and noblest in france have lingered out, at different times, a part of their existence. to few, to very few, have the tall gloomy towers of that awful fortress appeared without creating feelings of pain and apprehension; and however confident he might be of his own innocence, however great might be his trust in the good providence and protection of god, however strong he might be in a good cause and a firm spirit, it cannot be denied that albert of morseiul felt deeply and painfully, and with an anxious and a sickening heart, his entrance into that dark solitary abode of crime, and sorrow, and suffering. the carriage drew up just opposite the drawbridge, and the officer getting out, left his prisoner in charge of the two musketeers, and went forward to speak to the officer on guard at the gates. to him he notified, in due form, that he had brought a prisoner, with orders from the king for his incarceration; and the carriage, was kept for some time standing there, while the officer on guard proceeded to the dwelling of the governor, to demand the keys of the great gates. when he had obtained them and returned, the doors were opened; the guard was turned out under arms; the great drawbridge let down; the bell which communicated with the interior of the building rung; and the vehicle containing the count, slowly rolled on into the outer court, called the cour du gouvernement. there the carriage paused, the governor of the prison having expressed his intention of coming down to receive the prisoner from the hands of the officer who brought him: otherwise, the carriage would have gone on into the inner court. a short pause ensued, and at length the well-known besmaux was seen approaching, presenting exactly that appearance which might be expected from his character; for the traits of debauchery, levity, and ferocity, which distinguished his actual life, had stamped themselves upon his countenance in ineffacable characters. "ah, good day, monsieur de morseiul," he said, as the door of the carriage opened, and the count descended. "monsieur de cantal, your very humble servant. gentlemen, both, you had better step into the corps de garde, where i will receive your prisoner, monsieur de cantal, and read the letters for his detention." thus saying, with a slow and important step he walked into the building, seated himself, called for pen and ink, and a light, and then read the king's letter for the arrest and imprisonment of the count de morseiul. "monsieur de louvois is varying these letters every day," he said; "one never knows what one is doing. however, there stands the king's name, and that is quite enough; so, monsieur de morseiul, you are welcome to the bastille. you are to have our great liberties, i suppose. i must beg you to give me your sword, however, and also every thing you have about your person, if you please; letters, papers, money, jewels, and every thing else, in short, except your seal, or your signet ring, which you keep for the purposes about to be explained to you." with very painful feelings the count unbuckled his sword, and laid it down upon the table. he then gave up all the money that he possessed, one or two ordinary papers of no import, and the other usual articles of the same kind, which are borne about the person. the note which he had received from clémence in the morning, he had luckily destroyed. while this was doing, the governor continued to write, examining the different things that he put down before him, and he then said, "is this all, sir?" "it is," replied the count, "upon my word." "one of the men must put his hands in your pocket, count," said the governor; "that is a ceremony everyone has to undergo here." the prisoner shut his teeth hard, but made no remark, and offered no resistance, though, if he had given way to his feelings, he would certainly have dashed the man to the ground at once, who, with unceremonious hands, now searched his person. when that also was over, besmaux wrote down a few more words at the end of the list of things he had made out, and handed it to the count to read. the only observation that the young nobleman made, was, that the governor had put down his sword as having a silver hilt, when the hilt was of gold. "ah, it is of gold, is it?" said de besmaux, taking it up and looking at it, while several of the attendants who stood round grinned from ear to ear. "well, we will alter it, and put it down gold. now, monsieur de morseiul, will you have the goodness to sign that paper, which, with these letters, we fold up thus? and now with the seal which you retain, you will have the goodness to seal them, and write your name round the seal." with all these forms the count complied, and the governor then intimated to him, that he was ready to conduct him into the interior of the bastille, the spot where they then were, though within the walls and drawbridge, being actually considered as without the château. "here, then, i take leave of you, monsieur de morseiul," said the officer who had brought him thither, "and i will do my best, on my return to versailles, to insure that the clothes you want shall be sent, notwithstanding the interference of that impertinent exempt, who took himself off on the outside of the drawbridge, and has doubtless gone back to lay his complaint against me before louvois. i know the king, however; and knowing that he wishes no one to be treated with harshness or severity, have therefore no fear of the consequences." the count held out his hand to him frankly. "i am very much obliged to you, monsieur de cantal," he said, "for the kindness and politeness you have shown me. it is at such moments as these, that kindness and politeness become real benefits." the officer took his hand respectfully, and then, without more words, retired; the carriage passed out; the gates creaked upon their hinges; and the heavy drawbridge swung slowly up, with a jarring sound of chains, and heavy iron work, sadly harmonious with the uses of the building, which they shut out from the world. the governor then led the way towards the large and heavy mass of gloomy masonry, with its eight tall gaunt towers, which formed the real prison of the bastille, and approached the gate in the centre, that looked towards the gardens and buildings of the arsenal. the drawbridge there was by this time down, and the gates were open for the admission of the prisoner; while what was called the staff of the bastille stood ready to receive him, and the guard of the grand court was drawn up in line on either side. "you see we have an extensive court here," said the governor, leading the way. "it is somewhat dark to be sure, on account of the buildings being so high; but, however, some of our people, when they have been accustomed to it for a year or two, find it cheerful enough. we will put you, i think, monsieur de morseiul, into what is called the tower of liberty, both because the name is a pleasant name--though it is but a name after all, either here or elsewhere--and also because it is close to the library, and as long as you have the great liberties, as they are called, you may go in there, and amuse yourself. most of you huguenots, i believe, are somewhat of bookworms, and when a man cannot find many of the living to talk to, he likes just as well to talk to the dead. i do not suppose, that, like some of our inmates here on their first arrival, you are going to mope and pine like a half-starved cat, or a sick hen. it is hard to bear at first i acknowledge; but there's nothing like bearing a thing gaily after all. this way, monsieur de morseiul, this way, and i will show you your apartment." he accordingly led him to the extreme angle of the grand court on the left hand, where a large transverse mass of architecture, containing the library, the hall of the council, and various other apartments, separated that part from the lesser court, called the court of the well. a small stone doorway opened the way to a narrow spiral staircase, which made the head dizzy with its manifold turning; and about halfway up the steps the governor paused, and opened a door which communicated by a narrow but crooked passage, with a single tolerable sized chamber, handsomely furnished. "you see we treat you well, monsieur de morseiul," said besmaux; "and if any thing can be done to make your residence here pleasant, we shall not fail to do it. there is but little use, if any, of causing doors to be locked or sentries to be placed. some of the guards, or some of the officers of the staff, will be very willing to show you as much as is right of the rest of the building: and, in the mean time, can i serve you?" "in nothing, i am afraid," replied the count. "i have neither clothes, nor baggage, nor any thing else with me, which will put me to some inconvenience till they send it to me; but i understand that orders have been given to that effect already; and i should only be glad to have any clothes and linen that may arrive as soon as possible." "i will see to it, i will see to it," replied besmaux. "you have dined of course, count; but to-night you will sup with me." "if my stay here is to be long," said the count, after thanking the governor for his invitation, "i should, of course, be very glad to have the attendance of a domestic. i care not much, indeed, whether it be one of my own, or whether it be one with which you can supply me for the time, but i am not used to be without some sort of attendance." the governor smiled. "you must not be nice in the bastille, monsieur de morseiul," he said; "we all do with few attendants here, but we will see what can be done for you. at present we know nothing, but that here you are. the order for your reception is of that kind which leaves every thing doubtful but the fact that, for the time, you are not to be confined very strictly; and, indeed, as the letter is somewhat informal, as every thing is that comes from the hands of monsieur de louvois, i must write to him again for farther information. as soon as i receive it, the whole shall be arranged as far as i can to your satisfaction. in the mean time we will give you every indulgence, as far as our own general rules will allow, though, perhaps, you will think that share of indulgence very small." the count expressed his thanks in commonplace terms, well knowing the character of besmaux, and that his fair speeches only promised a degree of courtesy which his actions generally failed to fulfil. after lingering for a moment or two, the governor left his prisoner in the abode assigned to him, and returned to his own dwelling, without locking the door of the apartment. there are states of mind in which the necessity of calm contemplation is so strong and overpowering, that none of the ordinary motives which affect our nature have any influence upon us for the time,--states in which even vanity the most irritable, and curiosity the most active of our moral prompters in this world, slumber inactive, and leave thought and judgment paramount. such was the case with the count de morseiul. although he had certainly been interested with every thing concerning the prison, which was to be his abode for an undefined length of time; although all that took place indicative of his future destiny was, of course, not without attraction and excitement, he had grown weary of the formalities of his entrance into the bastille, less because they were wearisome in themselves than because he longed to be alone, and to have a few minutes for calm and silent reflection. when he did come to reflect, however, the prospect presented was dark, gloomy, and sad. he was cut off from the escape he had meditated. the only thing that could have saved him from the most imminent dangers and difficulties, the only scheme which he had been able to fall upon to secure even the probability of peace and safety upon earth, had been now frustrated. the charges likely to be brought against him, if once averred by the decision of a court of justice, were such as, he well knew, could not and would not be followed by pardon; and when he looked at the chances that existed of those charges being sanctioned, confirmed, and declared just, by any commission that might sit to try him, he found that the probabilities were altogether against him; and that if party feeling biassed the opinion of one single magistrate, his cause was utterly lost. in cases where circumstantial evidence is every thing--and therein lies the horror and danger of judging by circumstantial evidence--so light a word, so small a turn will give a completely different view to the whole circumstances of any case, will so completely prejudice the question, and bias the minds of hearers, that he was quite aware if any zealous catholics should be engaged in the task of persecuting him to the last, he could scarcely hope to escape from such serious imputations, as would justify perhaps his permanent detention, if not his death. he had been at the meeting of the protestants on the moor, which though not illegal at the time, had been declared to be so since. he had then addressed the people, and had exhorted them to tranquillity and to peace; but where were the witnesses to come from in order to prove that such was the case. he had gone unarmed to that meeting; but others had been there in arms and with arms concealed. he, himself, with his own hand, had struck the first blow, from which such awful consequences had sprung; but how was he to prove the provocation which he had, in the first instance, received; or the protection which he had afterwards given to the base and unworthy young man, who had escaped from death by his means, only to become a murderer the moment after. the only witnesses that he could call were persons of the party inimical to the court, who might now be found with difficulty--when emigration was taking place from every part of france,--who would only be partially believed if they could be heard, and who would place themselves in danger by bearing testimony on his behalf. the witnesses against him would be the hired miscreants who had fired into a body of unoffending people, but who were of the religion of the judges, the unscrupulous adherents of the cause to which those judges were bound by every tie of interest and of prejudice, and who were serving under a monarch that, on one terrible occasion, had stepped in to overrule the decision of a court of justice, and to inflict severer punishment than even his own creatures had dared to assign. death, therefore, seemed to be the only probable end of his imprisonment, death, or eternal loss of liberty! and the count knew the court, and the character of those with whom he had to deal, too well, to derive any degree of consolation from the lenity with which he was treated at first. had he been now in heart and mind, as he was not very long before, when quitting the army on the signature of the truce he had returned to the home of his ancestors, the prospect would have been far less terrible to him, far less painful. his heart was then in some degree solitary, his mind was comparatively alone in the world. he had spent the whole of his active life in scenes of danger and of strife. he had confronted death so often, that the lean and horrid monster had lost his terrors and become familiar with one, who had seemed to seek his acquaintance as if in sport. his ties to the world had been few; for the existence of bright days, and happy careless moments, and splendid fortune, and the means of luxury and enjoyment at command, are not the things that bind and attach us to life. the tie, the strong, the mighty tie of deep and powerful affection to some being, or beings, like himself, had been wanting. there were many that he liked; there were many that he esteemed; there were many he protected and supported even at that time; but he knew and felt that if he were gone the next moment, they would be liked, and esteemed, and supported, and protected by others, and would feel the same, or nearly the same, towards those who succeeded as towards him, when he had passed away from the green and sunny earth and left them to the care of newer friends. but now other ties had arisen around him--ties, the strength, the durability, the firm pressure of which he had never known before. there was now a being on the earth to whom he was attached by feelings that can only once be felt, for whom he, himself, would have been ready to sacrifice every thing else; who for him, and for his love, had shewn herself willing to cast from her all of those bright and pageant-like days of splendour, in which she had once seemed to take so much delight. the tie, the strong tie of human affection--the rending of which is the great and agonising pang of death--had twined itself round his heart, and bound every feeling and every thought. the great, the surpassing quality of sentient being, the capability of loving, and being loved, had risen up to crush and to leave void all the lesser things of life, but also to give death terrors that it knew not before; to make the grave the bitter parting place where joy ends for ever, and to poison the shaft that lays us low with venom that is felt in agony ere the dark, dreamless sleep succeeds and extinguishes all. but was this all that rendered his situation now more terrible than it had been before? alas, no! the sense of religion was strong, and he might confidently trust that though earthly passion ended with the grave, and the mortal fire of his love for clémence de marly would there become extinct--he might confidently trust that, in another world, with his love for her exalted as well as purified, rendered more intense and sublime, though less passionate and human, they should meet again, known to each other, bound together by the immortal memory of vast affection, and only distinct from other spirits, bright and happy as themselves, by the glorious consciousness of love, and the intense happiness of having loved well, loved nobly, and to the last. such might have been his consolation in the prospect of parting with her who had become so dear to him, if he had left her in calm and peaceful security, in a happy land, and without danger or difficulty surrounding her. but when he thought of the religion she had embraced, of the perils which surrounded her at every step, of the anguish which would fall upon her at his fate, of the utterly unprotected, uncomforted, unconsoled state in which she must remain, the heart of the strong warrior failed, and the trust of the christian was drowned in human tears. chapter ii. the conspirators. in such dark anticipations and gloomy reflections, as we have mentioned in the end of the last chapter, the count de morseiul passed the solitary hours, till a servant appeared to conduct him to the supper table of the governor. had he not wished to think, indeed, he might have easily found amusement, either in the court below, where a number of the other prisoners were walking, or in the small library of the château; but he did wish to think, and however sad and sombre the stream of thought might be at that moment, its course only seemed too soon interrupted. the governor was civil, and even intended to be very affable; but albert of morseiul was not of a character to be amused with the anecdotes of a debauched soldier's life; and the only variety which the conversation of besmaux afforded were tales of the regency of anne of austria, which, though they might at any other moment have served to entertain an idle hour, were too light and insignificant to take hold of a mind agitated and writhing like that of the count. the governor thought his guest very dull, and, after having made various essays to enliven him, he proposed that they should sit down to play for sums, written upon pieces of paper, which were to be accounted for after the count's liberation. the young nobleman would have certainly lost the good opinion of besmaux for ever by declining this proposal, had it not so occurred that two incidents intervened which prevented him from pressing it. the first was the arrival of a large packet of linen and other clothes for the use of the count; and the governor, who found a real pleasure in the execution of the task of a gaoler, proceeded to examine with his own eyes and hands every separate article which had been sent. it may be supposed that, after the intimation which he had received on the road, the young count's heart felt no slight agitation and interest during the scrutiny; but if any thing was written in the manner which riquet had stated, no discovery thereof was made; and, having completely satisfied himself, besmaux ordered the packet to be carried to the chamber of the count. the little excitement thus produced had scarcely worn away, when the great bell was heard to ring, and the officer upon guard appeared to demand the keys. according to the usual form the governor demanded--"for whose admission?" "for the admission," said the officer, reading from a scrap of paper, "for the admission of louis de rohan, called the chevalier de rohan." the governor started up in some surprise--"on what charge?" he demanded. "for high treason," replied the officer; and besmaux immediately gave orders for the chevalier to be brought to his apartments. "monsieur de morseiul," he said, "you will be good enough to follow that porte-clef, who will conduct you back to your chamber. do you feel it cold?--for the king allows firing." "i have felt it slightly cold," the count replied, "and of course the state of a prisoner does not tend to warm the heart." "give wood to the count in his chamber," said besmaux, to one of the turnkeys, who had entered at the same time with the officer on guard; "and now, good night, count. no word to the prisoner, if you pass him on the stairs!" the count rose and departed; and, as the governor had anticipated, met the chevalier de rohan at the foot of the stairs. that unfortunate gentleman was guarded by a musketeer on either side, and a man holding a torch preceding him. the moment that his eye fell upon the count de morseuil, he stopped, and appeared as if he were about to speak: but an officer who was behind, and, in whom the count de morseiul instantly recognised the marquis of brissac, major of the king's guard, exclaimed aloud, "pass on, monsieur de rohan!" the count, who certainly had no desire to hold any communications with him, merely bowed his head, and followed by the turnkey, passed out into the court. though brissac knew him well, he took not the slightest notice of him as he passed, and the count was conducted to his chamber in the tower of liberty, as it was called, where firing and lights were almost immediately afterwards brought him. on leaving him, however, the turnkey showed, by locking the heavy door without, that the name of the tower had but little real meaning, and the harsh sound of the grating iron fell heavy and painfully upon the count's ear. there was, however, the hope before him of receiving some intelligence from his friends without, and as soon as he had made sure that the turnkey was gone for the night, he eagerly opened the packet of clothes that had been sent, and endeavoured, by the means which had been pointed out, to discover any thing which might be written on them. at first he was disappointed, and was beginning to fear that riquet had been prevented from executing the purpose which he had entertained. at length, however, as he held one of the handkerchiefs before the fire, some slight yellow lines began to appear, grew gradually darker and darker, and assumed the form of letters, words, lines, and sentences. the first thing that was written at the top was in the hand of the valet himself, and contained words of hope and encouragement. it was to the following effect:-- "fear not; you shall soon be free. the lady has been told of all. the priest has gone safely back to poitou. no suspicion attaches to any one, and means are taking to do away the evil." the next sentences were in a different handwriting; and perhaps the young count might not have been able to recognise whose it was--so different did it seem upon the linen, and in that ink, from the usual writing of clémence,--had not the words been sufficient to show him from whom it proceeded. "fear not, dear albert," the writing went; "i have heard all and grieve, but do not despond. i have been sent for to see one to-morrow morning early, who is all-powerful. she loved me in my childhood; she promised me many things in my youth, which i was too proud to accept; but i will now cast all pride away for the sake of him i love." a few lines more were written still further down, but as the count was turning eagerly to read them, numerous sounds were heard from the court below, the clang of soldiers grounding their arms, and voices speaking, and the moment after, various footsteps might be distinguished ascending the staircase which came towards the room. fearful that he should be discovered, the count concealed the handkerchief in his bosom; but the steps passed by the door of his apartment, and, immediately after, heavy footfalls were heard in the room above, with voices speaking in sharp and angry tones. those sounds soon ceased above, however; four or five persons were heard to descend the stairs, and then all became quiet, except that a quick footstep was still heard pacing backwards and forwards in the apartment over head. "that is the chevalier de rohan," thought the count. "what crime i wonder can that weak libertine have committed, to deserve the rigorous imprisonment to which it seems he is to be subjected?" with such brief thought, however, he dismissed the subject from his mind, and turned once more to the writing. by this time it had nearly vanished; but being again exposed to the fire it re-appeared, though more faintly than before. fearful of interruption, the count turned to the last lines which he had not read. they seemed to him, as far as he could judge, to be written in the hand of the chevalier d'evran, whom, to say sooth, in the joys and fears and agitations of the few preceding days, he had nearly forgotten. "i have just returned to paris, dear albert," it said, "having gone down to poitou to secure evidence, which they would never have suffered to transpire, if some friend of yours had not been upon the spot. i have secured it. fear not, therefore, for i and your belle clémence are labouring together to set you free." oh, human nature, strange and extraordinary state of existence, how many contradictions dost thou contain! although filled with such good hopes, although containing such proofs of friendship, although conveying such important intelligence, the lines written by the chevalier d'evran were not altogether pleasing to the count de morseiul, and he felt sensations that he was angry with himself for feeling, but which all his schooling of his own heart could scarcely banish. "i shall hate myself," he continued, "if i feel thus. must there ever be some counterbalancing thing in life and in feeling, to poize the bad against the good, and to make us less happy, less wise, less generous than we otherwise might be? here new sensations have sprung up in my bosom, of a deeper and a finer kind than i ever knew before; and must there come some petty jealousy, some small, low, mean want of confidence, even in those i esteem and love to debase me as much as those other feelings might elevate me? i will think of such things no more; and will only think of louis with gratitude and affection." thus saying, or rather thus thinking, he re-read the lines that had been written by clémence, and found therein a balm and a consolation which healed all the evil of the other. having done so, his next care was to efface the writing; but that he found by no means difficult, damping the handkerchief in the cruise of water which had been left for him, and which, in a few minutes, left not a vestige of the lines which had been traced for his eye alone. he sat up for some time after this examination, soothed and calmed by the tidings he had received, and certainly far more tranquil in every respect than during the first few hours of his confinement. the waning of the lights, however, which had been given to him, warned him, at length, that it was time to retire to rest, and after some brief prayers to the almighty for guidance, protection, and deliverance, he undressed himself, extinguished the lights, and lay down to seek repose; but it was in vain that he did so, for as he lay on the small prison bed which was allotted to him, and gazed round upon the massy walls of the chamber in which he was confined, with the flickering light of the half-extinguished fire flashing from time to time on all the various objects round about, the sensation of imprisonment, of the utter loss of liberty, of being cut off from all correspondence or communication with his fellow-men, of being in the power and at the mercy of others, without any appeal against their will, or any means of deliverance from their hands, came upon him more strongly, more forcibly than ever, and made a heart, not easily bent or affected by any apprehensions, sink with a cold feeling of deep and utter despondency. thus passed several hours till, at length, weariness overcame thought, and he obtained sleep towards the morning. he was awakened by the entrance of one of the turnkeys, accompanied by the major of the bastille; but the tidings which the latter officer brought to the count de morseiul were by no means pleasant, or calculated to confirm the hopes that the words of clémence and the chevalier d'evran had held out to him. "i am sorry to tell you, monsieur de morseiul," he said, "that the governor last night received orders from monsieur de louvois to place you in stricter confinement, and he is, therefore, obliged to say that you can no longer be permitted to quit your chamber. any thing that can be done, consistent with his duty, to render your confinement less painful to you, shall be done, depend upon it." the officer was then bowing, as if to retire; but the count stopped him by asking, "is there any objection to my inquiring, sir, whether there is a cause assigned for this new order?" "in regard to that i am as ignorant as yourself," replied the major. "all i can tell is, that the order was brought by monsieur de brissac at the same time that he conveyed hither the chevalier de rohan," and, without waiting for any further questions, he quitted the room in haste; and the turnkey, having brought the count his breakfast, and, as far as possible, arranged the room with some degree of neatness, followed the major and locked the door. the full horrors of imprisonment now fell upon the count de morseiul, and the day wore away without his holding any further intercourse with any human being, except when his dinner and his supper were brought to him by one of the turnkeys. we need not pause upon his sensations, nor describe minutely all the dark and horrible anticipations which rose, like phantoms, to people his solitary chamber. night came at length, and this night, at least, he slept; for the exhaustion of his corporeal frame, by the intense emotions of his mind, was far greater than that which could have been produced by a day of the most unusual exercise. day had scarcely dawned on the following morning, however, when he was roused by two of the officers of the prison entering his chamber, and desiring him to rise, as an officer from the king was waiting to convey him to the royal chamber, at the arsenal, where a commission was sitting for the purpose of interrogating him and his accomplices. the count made no observation, but hastened to do as he was directed; and, as soon as he was dressed, he descended the narrow and tortuous staircase into the great court of the bastille, where he found the soldiers of the garrison drawn up in arms on either side, together with a number of officers belonging to the staff of the garrison, various turnkeys and other gaolers, and in their hands, evidently as prisoners, the unfortunate chevalier de rohan, and an old white-headed man, apparently of seventy years of age, with a shrewd and cunning countenance, more strongly expressive of acuteness than vigour of mind. without suffering him to speak with any one, the officers of the prison placed him in file immediately after the chevalier de rohan--a gaoler, however, interposing between each of the prisoners and the one that followed;--and thus, between a double row of soldiery, they marched on into the _cour du gouvernement_, as if they were about to be conducted to the house of the governor. when they reached that court, however, they turned at once to the left, mounted a flight of steps leading to a raised terrace which overlooked the water, and then passing onward, approached the grating which separated that court from the gardens of the arsenal. at the grating appeared a large body of musketeers, commanded by an officer of the name of jouvelle, who had served under the count de morseiul himself, and into his hands the officers of the bastille delivered their prisoners, who were then marched, under a strong escort, to the arsenal, where the commission was sitting. all the gates of the gardens and of the building itself, the count remarked, were in the hands of the musketeers of the king, and not another individual was to be seen besides the soldiery, in the gardens usually so thronged with the good citizens of paris. passing through several of the narrow and intricate passages of the building, the three prisoners were placed in a room which seemed to have been destined for a military mess-room; and, while they were kept separate by their guards, an inferior officer was sent out to see whether the commission was ready to proceed. in a few minutes he returned with two officers of the court, who demanded the presence of louis chevalier de rohan. the interrogation of this prisoner lasted for a great length of time; but, at the end of about an hour and a half, the same officers re-appeared, demanding the presence of affinius vandenenden, upon which the old man, whom we have mentioned, rose and followed them out of the room. the chevalier, however, had not returned with the officers, and during the space of half an hour longer the count de morseiul remained in suspense, in regard to what was proceeding. at length the officers once more appeared, and with them the captain of the musketeers, de jouvelle, who, while the ushers pronounced the name of "albert count of morseiul," passed by the prisoner, as if to speak to one of the soldiers, saying, in a low voice, as he did so, "be of good cheer, count; they have said nothing to criminate you." the count passed on without reply, and followed the ushers into another chamber at the farther end of the passage, where he found a number of lawyers and counsellors of state assembled as a royal commission, and presided by the well-known la reynie. the aspect of the room was not that of a court of justice, and it was evident that the commissioners met simply for the purpose of carrying on the preliminary interrogatories. the count was furnished with a seat, and after a whispering consultation, for a moment, between la reynie and one of his brethren, the former commenced the interrogation of the count by assuring him of the clemency and mercy of the king's disposition, and adjuring him to tell, frankly and straight-forwardly, the whole truth, as the only means of clearing his reputation, and re-establishing himself in the royal favour. to this exordium the count de morseiul merely replied by an inclination of the head, very well knowing that with some of the gentlemen whom he saw before him it was advisable to be as niggardly of speech as possible. la reynie then proceeded to ask how long he had been acquainted with the chevalier de rohan, and the count replied that he had known him for many years. "when did you see him last?" demanded the judge, "and where?" "in the gardens of versailles," answered the count, calmly, "not five minutes before i was myself arrested." "and upon what occasion," demanded the judge, "did you see him previously?" "i saw him," replied the count, "when i visited the duc de rouvré, at poitiers, and once also upon the road between paris and versailles, about three or four days ago." "are you sure that these are the only days that you have seen him?" demanded the judge. "recollect yourself, monsieur le comte. i think you must have forgotten." "no, i have not," replied the count. "i have only seen him on these two occasions since i arrived in paris, and two or three times during my stay at poitiers." "ay, there is the fact," said la reynie. "you saw him frequently at poitiers." "i also saw various blacksmiths, and lackeys, and horse-boys," said the count, unable to conceive what connection there could exist between any charges against himself and those against the chevalier de rohan, who was known to be a zealous catholic, "and with them, the blacksmiths, lackeys, and horse-boys, i had as much to do as i had with the chevalier de rohan, and no more." "and pray," continued la reynie, in the same tone, "what private conversations took place between you and the chevalier at poitiers? to the best of your recollection repeat the substance thereof." the count smiled. "to the best of my recollection, then," he said, "the substance was as follows: 'good day, count de morseiul. good morning, monsieur de rohan. what a beautiful day it is, monsieur de morseiul. it is the most charming weather i remember. there is a sad want of rain, monsieur le chevalier, and i fear the poor peasantry will suffer. do you go out with the duke to hunt to-day? i think not, for my horses are tired.' such, sir, is the substance of the only private conversations that took place between myself and the chevalier at poitiers." "was that all, monsieur de morseiul?" demanded la reynie, with tolerable good humour. "are you sure you have forgot nothing of equal importance?" "i believe i have not forgot one word," replied the count, "except that, on one occasion, monsieur de rohan said to me, 'your hat is unlooped, count:' when, i am afraid, i looped it without thanking him." "well, then, now to somewhat longer and more important conversations, my good young gentleman," said la reynie. "what has passed between you and the chevalier de rohan when you have met him since your arrival at the court?" "why, sir," replied the count, with a grave and somewhat grieved air, "i give you my word that nothing passed between the chevalier de rohan and myself which at all affected his majesty's service, and i would fain, if it were possible, avoid entering into particulars which, if told to every body, might be painful to a gentleman of my acquaintance, who, i trust, may yet clear himself of any serious charge." "monsieur le comte de morseiul," said the counsellor ormesson, "we respect your motives, and have regard to the manner in which you have expressed them; but the chevalier de rohan, i am sorry to inform you, stands charged with high treason upon very strong presumptive evidence. there are particular circumstances which induce a belief that you may have had something to do with his schemes. we trust that such is not the case: but it is absolutely necessary that you should clearly and explicitly state the nature of any transactions which may have taken place between you and him, both for your own safety, for his, and out of respect and duty to the king." "then, sir, i have no other choice," replied the count, "but to yield to your reasons, and to beg that you would put your questions in such a shape that i may answer them distinctly and easily." "very well, monsieur de morseiul," said la reynie; "we have always heard that you are a gentleman of honour, who would not prevaricate even to save his own life. pray inform us what was the nature of the conversation between you and the chevalier de rohan, on the morning of the d of this month." "it was a very short one," replied the count, somewhat surprised to see what accurate information of his proceedings had been obtained. "the chevalier overtook me as i was going to versailles, and on that occasion monsieur de rohan informed me that he had lost a large sum at the gaming table on the night before, and begged me to lend him a hundred louis, in the hopes of recovering it by the same means. i advised him strongly to abstain from such proceedings, but of course did not refuse to lend him what he asked." "then did you lend him the hundred louis on the spot?" demanded la reynie. "no," replied the count; "i told him that i had not such a sum with me, but promised to send it to him at his lodgings in the course of the afternoon, which i did as soon as ever i arrived at versailles." "pray how happened it, monsieur de morseiul," demanded ormesson, "that as you were going to versailles, and the chevalier overtook you going thither also; you did not ride on together, as would seem natural for two gentlemen like yourselves?" "nay," replied the count, smiling, "that i think is pressing the matter rather too far, monsieur. my society might not be pleasant to the chevalier, or the reverse might be the case; or we might have other business by the way. a thousand circumstances of the same kind might occur." "well, then, i will put the question straightforwardly and at once," said ormesson. "had you, or had you not, any reason to believe that the chevalier de rohan was at that time engaged in schemes dangerous to the state?" "none in the world," replied the count, "and no such feelings or ideas whatsoever had any share in preventing my riding on with the chevalier de rohan." the commissioners looked at each other for a moment with an inquiring glance, and then la reynie placed before the count a note which was to the following effect:-- "my dear count, "i have received what you sent me, for which i return you many thanks, and i have not the slightest doubt, by your assistance, to be able to accomplish the purpose i have in view. "your devoted, "the chevalier de rohan." "pray, monsieur de morseiul," said the counsellor, "do you recognise that note?" "most assuredly," replied the count. "i received that note from the chevalier de rohan, on the very evening of the day we have just mentioned." "and pray, what is the interpretation you put upon it?" demanded la reynie. "simply," replied the count, "that he had received the hundred louis which i sent him, and hoped by employing them at the gaming-table to be enabled to win back the sum that he had lost." "it seems to me," said the judge, "that the note will very well bear two interpretations, count, and that supposing a gentleman unfortunate enough to have laid schemes for introducing a foreign enemy into the country, or for causing any of the provinces of the kingdom to revolt, and supposing him, at the same time, to be greatly straightened for money and assistance--it seems to me, i say, that the note before us is just such a one as he would write to a friend who had come to his aid at the moment of need, either by giving him aid of a pecuniary or of any other kind." "all i can say, sir," replied the count, "is that the note before you i received from the chevalier de rohan, and that no other interpretation than the one i have given was, or could be, put upon it by me. i knew of no schemes whatsoever against the state, and the chevalier himself had certainly no other meaning than the one i have assigned. it will be very easy for you, however, gentlemen, to place the note before the chevalier, and make him explain it himself. though an unfortunate gentleman, he is still a gentleman of honour, and will tell you the truth. we have had no conversation together upon the subject. we have not even interchanged a word as we came hither, and you can compare his statement with mine." "perhaps that may have been done already, monsieur de morseiul," said ormesson, "but at all events we think we may close your examination for to-day. the interrogation may be resumed at a future period, when other things have become manifest; and we have only, at present, to exhort you, on all occasions, to deal frankly and openly with the court." "such is always my custom to do, sir," replied the count. "i stand before you conscious of my innocence of any crime whatsoever, and, having nothing to conceal, am always ready to state frankly and truly what i know, except when by so doing i may wound or injure others." thus saying, he bowed to the commissioners and retired. at the door of the chamber he found two musketeers waiting for his coming out, and, being placed between them, he was once more conducted back to the bastille by the same way he had come. he was then led by the turnkeys, who were in waiting to receive him, to the same apartment which he had previously occupied; but before nightfall, it was notified to him that the liberties of the bastille were restored to him, and he received some slight solace by knowing that he should not, for some time at least, be confined to the solitary discomfort of his own apartment, with no occupation but to stride from one side to the other, or gazing out of the narrow window, endeavour to gain a sight of what was passing in the rue st. antoine. chapter iii. the execution. within the walls of the bastille, some weeks passed over almost without incident, but not without pain to the count de morseiul; but it would be tedious to detail all the feelings and the thoughts that crossed each other in his bosom during that period. he was still allowed a great degree of liberty, was permitted to take exercise in the great court, to converse with many of the other prisoners, and to hear whispers of what was taking place in the world without. but none of those whispers gave him any tidings of those he loved, any indication of his own probable fate, or any news of the church to which he belonged; and he remarked with pain, that while many of the other prisoners received visits from their friends and acquaintances, either no one sought to see him, or else those who did so were excluded by some express order. he grieved over this, and perhaps felt, with some degree of bitterness of spirit, that the iron of captivity might not only enter into the soul, but might wear and corrode the mind on which it pressed. such feelings made him at once apply himself eagerly to every thing that could occupy his thoughts, and turn them from contemplations which he knew to be not only painful, but hurtful also; and he soon created for himself a number of those occupations which many an unhappy man besides himself has devised at different times for the solace of captivity. the library, however, was his greatest enjoyment. though so fond of all manly exercises, and famous for his skill therein, he had from his youth loved the communing with other minds, in the pages which the hand of genius has traced, and which have been given forth as the deliberate effort of the writer's spirit. he loved, i say, that communing with other men's hearts and minds which is undisturbed by discussion, or wordy dispute, or any of the petty vanities that creep into the living conversation even of the great, the learned, and the good; and now, though the library was small, and perhaps not very well selected, yet there was many a book therein which afforded him sweet occupation during some, at least, of the melancholy hours of imprisonment. at other times he walked the length of the court yard, gaining where he could a gleam of sunshine; and rather than suffer his thoughts, as he did so walk, to dwell upon the painful theme of his own fate, he would count the very stones of the pavement, and moralise upon their shapes and colours. almost every day, during the period we have mentioned, the guard was turned out, the prisoners having their liberties were ordered to keep back, and a train of others in the stricter state of imprisonment were marched out to the arsenal. amongst these was usually the unhappy chevalier de rohan; and the wistful, longing gaze with which one day he looked round the court as he passed through, seeming to envy the other prisoners the sort of liberty they enjoyed, caused the count de morseiul to task severely his own heart for the repinings which he felt at his own situation. various little occurrences of the same kind took place from time to time, affording a momentary matter of interest in the midst of the dark sameness of the prison life. at one period, during the whole of several nights, the count de morseiul heard at intervals voices which seemed to be shouting through speaking trumpets. the place from which the sound proceeded varied constantly; and the young prisoner could only conclude that some friends of one of the sad inhabitants of the bastille were prowling round it, endeavouring to communicate intelligence. he listened eagerly, in the supposition that those sounds might be addressed to him; but though from time to time he could catch a single word, such as "dead," "told," &c., he could make no continuous sense of what was said. the first time this occurred was shortly after his examination before the commission, and it continued, for three or four nights, to be repeated at different hours; but still the sounds were too distant for him to ascertain the meaning of the speakers, and he was obliged to content himself with believing that this intelligence was not intended for himself, and hoping that it had been more distinct to the unfortunate person for whose ears it was designed.[ ] after having listened during the whole of one night, and the words not being repeated, he determined to ask one of his fellow-prisoners, who had the liberty like himself of walking in the court, whether he had heard it, and had been able to make out what was said. --------------------- [footnote : the words were intended for the unfortunate chevalier de rohan, and were "hatréaumont est mort, et n'a rien dit." the unhappy prisoner, like the count de morseiul, was not able to distinguish the meaning of his friends; otherwise those words, if he had shaped his course accordingly, would have insured his safety.] --------------------- the personage whom he fixed upon in his own mind for that purpose was a tall, upright, elderly man, with a soldier-like air, and a good deal of frankness of manner, approaching, perhaps, to what is called bluffness, without being in the slightest degree rude or uncivil. he seemed to seek nobody, but to converse willingly with any one when he was sought--gave his opinion in few words, but distinctly, accurately, and positively--bore his imprisonment with perfect lightness and indifference--never referred in the slightest degree to the cause thereof or to his own history, though without appearing to avoid the subject at all--and, in short, impressed strongly on the minds of those who saw him, and were accustomed to judge of the world, that he was a frank, upright, straight-forward soldier, accustomed to various kinds of endurance, and bearing all with manly firmness and resolution. he spoke french with great fluency and accuracy; but at times, in conversing with him, the count de morseiul had fancied he could remark a foreign accent, though very slight, and he was inclined to believe that the old officer was one of the weimerians who had served so long in the pay of france. his countenance, indeed, was not like that of a german; there was more quickness and brightness of the eye, and the features were more elongated, and somewhat sharper than is common amongst the teutonic races. but still a great part of the weimerian troops had been levied on the borders of the rhine, where the mixture of french and other blood often makes itself strongly to be remarked amongst the german population. his ordinary walk was from one corner of the court-yard to the opposite angle, which gave the utmost extent of space that could be had; and there the young count, on descending the staircase, found him walking up and down with his usual quick pace and erect carriage. though the old man neither paused nor noticed him further than by a passing "good morning, sir," the count joined him, and at once spoke of the matter in question. "have you heard," he said, "during this last night or two, some people shouting, apparently through speaking trumpets, as if they wished to convey intelligence to one of us prisoners?" "once or twice very faintly," replied the other. "but i am on the opposite side of the prison to you, you know, and the sounds i heard seemed to come from your side, or, at all events, not further round than the well tower. do you think they were addressed to you?" "i think not," replied the count; "and if they were, i certainly could make nothing of them. i looked out of my window to get a sight as far as possible of the speakers by the moonlight the other night, but i was not successful; for i can see, as i am placed, into the little place st. antoine, but no further. however, i tried to distinguish the voices, and certainly they were not those of any one i know." "a speaking trumpet makes a great difference," replied his companion. "i should have liked to have heard them more distinctly." "do you think they were intended for you?" said the count. "oh dear no," replied the other; "nobody can have any thing to tell me. if ever my liberty comes, it will come at once; and as to either trying me or punishing me in any other way than by imprisonment, that they dare not do." "that is in some degree a happy situation," said the count. "but i scarcely know how that can be, for judging by my own case, and that of many others, i have no slight reason to believe that they dare try or punish any man in france, whether guilty or not." "any frenchman you mean, count," replied the stranger; "but that does not happen to be my case; and though my own king may be rascal and fool enough to let me stay here wearing out the last days of a life, the greater part of which has been devoted to the service of himself and his ungrateful ancestors, yet i do not believe that he dare for his life suffer me to be publicly injured. a trial would, as a matter of course, be known sooner or later. they may poison me, perhaps," he continued, "to keep me quiet, though i do not think it either. your king is not so bad as that, though he is a great tyrant; but he is not bloody by his nature. however, monsieur de morseiul, as i am not in here for any crime, as i never had any thing to do with a conspiracy of any kind, as i am not a native of this country, or a subject of your king, as i have not a secret in the world, and little more money than will serve to feed and clothe me, i do not see that any one can have either object or interest in hallooing at me through a speaking trumpet." "you have excited my curiosity," said the count, "and a frenchman's curiosity, you know, is always somewhat intrusive; but as you have just said that you have not a secret in the world, it will seem less impertinent than it otherwise would be if i ask what, in the name of fortune, you can be here for?" "not in the least impertinent," replied the other. "i am in here for something of the same kind that they tell me you are in here for: namely, for differing from the king of france in regard to transubstantiation; for thinking that he'll go to the devil at once when he dies, without stopping half-way at a posthouse, called purgatory, which a set of scoundrels have established for their own particular convenience; and for judging it a great deal better that people should sing psalms, and say their prayers, in a language that they understand, than in a tongue they know not a word of. i mean, in short, for being a protestant; for if it had not been for that, i should not have been in here. the fact was, i served long in this country in former times, and having taken it into my head to see it again, and to visit some old friends, i undertook a commission to bring back a couple of brats of a poor cousin of mine, who had been left here for their education. louis found out what i was about, declared that i came to make protestant converts, and shut me up in the bastille, where i have been now nearly nine months. i sent a message over to the king of england by a fellow-prisoner who was set at liberty some time ago. but every one knows that charles would have sold his own soul by the pound, and thrown his father and mother, and all his family, into the scale, for the sake of a few crowns, at any time. this popish rascal, too, who is now on the throne, doubtless thinks that i am just as well where i am, so i calculate upon whistling away my days within the four walls of this court.--i don't care, it can't last very long. i was sixty-five on the third of last month, and though there feels some life in these old limbs, the days of mathuselah, thank god, are gone by, and we've no more kicking about now for a thousand years. i shouldn't wonder," he continued, "if the people you heard were hallooing to that unfortunate chevalier de rohan, whom they dragged through this morning to be interrogated again. they say he'll have his head chopped off to a certainty. if we could have found out what the people said we might have told him, for prisoners will get at each other let them do what they like." "i listened for one whole night," said the count, "but found it quite in vain. the judges i suppose are satisfied that i had nothing to do with this business of the chevalier de rohan's, otherwise they would have had me up again for examination." "god knows," replied his companion. "tyranny is like an actor at a country fair, and one never knows which way he will kick next." thus passed the conversation between the count and the old english officer, whose name, somewhat disfigured indeed, may be found written in the registers of the bastille as arrested on suspicion; for which crime he, like many others, was subjected to imprisonment for a lengthened period. he and the count de morseiul now usually took their walk together, and in his society the young nobleman found no small delight, for there was a sort of quaint indifference which gave salt and flavour to considerable good sense and originality of thought. the old man himself seemed to take a pleasure in conversing with the young count; which was evidently not the case with the generality of his fellow-prisoners. one morning, however, towards the end of the period we have mentioned, the sound of the falling drawbridge was heard, the soldiers drew up in double line, the order for all the other prisoners to fall back was given, and the chevalier de rohan, followed by two or three other prisoners, amongst whom were vandenenden and a lady, were brought in as if from examination. the countenances of almost all were very pale, with the exception of that of the chevalier de rohan, which was inflamed, with a fiery spot on either cheek, while his eyes flashed fire, and his lips were absolutely covered with foam. four times between the great gate of the court and the tower in which he was confined, he halted abruptly, and turning round with furious gestures to the guards and gaolers who surrounded him, poured forth a torrent of fierce and angry words, exclaiming that he had been deceived, cheated, that the king's name had been used to assure him of safety, and that now the king had retracted the promises and was going to murder him. it was in vain that the guards tried to stop him, and endeavoured to force him onward. still he turned round as soon as ever he had an opportunity, and shouted forth the same accusation with horrible imprecations and even blasphemies. the second prisoner, who seemed to be a military man, paused and regarded the chevalier with a stern and somewhat scornful air, but the lady and the old man, vandenenden, were drowned in tears, and from all the count saw he concluded that the trial of the chevalier and his accomplices had either terminated in their condemnation, or else had taken such a turn as showed that result to be inevitable. from that time none of the prisoners who had the liberties of the bastille were allowed to remain in the court when the chevalier and his accomplices passed through it, an order being given before the gates were opened, for every one to retire to his own apartments. three days after this new regulation, such an order having been given, the count obeyed it willingly, for the weather had become cold and damp, and the court of the bastille felt like a well. he had obtained permission to take some books out of the library, in which there was no fire allowed, and sitting by the embers in his own apartment, he was endeavouring to amuse himself by reading, when the sounds of what seemed to him carts, in greater numbers than usual, mingled with the tongues of many persons speaking, called him to the little window of his chamber. he saw that the small place st. antoine was filled with a crowd of people surrounding two or three large carts as they seemed, but he could not make out what the persons present were about, and, after looking on for a few minutes, he returned to his book. every thing within the walls of the bastille seemed to be unusually still and quiet, and for rather more than an hour and a half he read on, till some sound of a peculiar character, or some sudden impression on his own mind which he could not account for, made him again rise and hasten to the window. when he did so, a sight was presented to his eyes which would have required long years to efface its recollection. the carts which he had seen, and the materials they contained, had been by this time erected into a scaffold; and in the front thereof, turned towards the rue st. antoine, which, as well as the square itself, was filled with an immense multitude of people, was a block with the axe leaning against the side. at one corner of the scaffold was erected a gibbet, and in the front, within a foot or two of the block, stood the unfortunate chevalier de rohan, with a priest, on one side of him, pouring consolation or instruction into his ear, while the executioner, on the other side, was busily cutting off his hair to prepare his neck for the stroke. two or three other prisoners were behind with several priests and the assistants of the executioner, and amongst them again was seen the form of the old man, vandenenden, and of the lady whom the count had beheld pass through the court of the castle. the old man seemed scarcely able to support himself, and was upheld near the foot of the gallows by two of the guards; but the lady, with her head uncovered and her fine hair gathered together in a knot near the top of her head, stood alone, calm, and, to all appearance, perfectly self-possessed; and as she turned, for a moment, to look at the weak old man, whose writhing agitation at parting with a life that he could not expect to prolong for many years even if pardoned was truly lamentable, she showed the count de morseiul a fine though somewhat faded countenance, with every line expressive of perfect resolution and tranquillity. the count de morseiul was a brave man, who had confronted death a thousand times, who had seen it in many an awful shape and accompanied by many a terrible accessory; but when he looked at the upturned faces of the multitude, the block, the axe, the gibbet, the executioners, the cold grey sky above that spoke of hopelessness, the thronged windows all around teeming with gaping faces, and all the horrible parade of public execution, he could not but wonder at the self-possession and the calmness of that lady's look and demeanour, as one about to suffer in that awful scene. his, however, was no heart that could delight in such spectacles, and withdrawing almost immediately from the window, he waited in deep thought. in about a minute after there was a sort of low murmur, followed by a heavy stroke; and then the murmur sounded like the rushing of a distant wind. in a few moments after that, again came another blow, and the count thought that there was a suppressed scream, mingled with the wave-like sound of the multitude. again came that harsh blow, accompanied by a similar noise, and, lastly, a loud shout, in which there were mingled tones of ferocity and derision, very different from any which had been heard before. not aware of what could have produced the change, the count was once more irresistibly led to the window, where he beheld swinging and writhing on the gibbet, the form of the old man vandenenden, whose pusillanimity seemed to have excited the contempt and indignation of the populace. on the other parts of the scaffold the executioner and his assistants were seen gathering up the bloody ruins of the human temples they had overthrown. sickened and pained, the count turned away, and covered his eyes with his hands, asking himself in the low voice of thought, "when will this be my fate also?" chapter iv. the woman's judgment. we must now, for a little, change the scene entirely; and, as we find often done most naturally, both in reality and poetry, bring the prison and the palace side by side. it was in one of the smaller chambers, then, of the palace at versailles--exquisitely fitted up with furniture of the most costly, if not of the most splendid materials, with very great taste shown in every thing, grace in all the ornaments, harmony in all the colours, and a certain degree of justness and appropriateness in every object around--that there sat a lady, late on the evening of an autumnal day, busily reading from a book, illustrated with some of the richest and most beautiful miniatures that the artists of the french capital could then produce. she was, at the time we speak, of somewhat past the middle age,--that is to say, she was nearly approaching to the age of fifty, but she looked considerably younger than she really was, and forty was the very extreme at which any one by the mere look would have ventured to place the number of her years. the rich worked candelabra of gold under which she was reading cast its light upon not a single grey hair. the form was full and rounded; the arms white and delicate; the hand, which in general loses its symmetry sooner than aught else, except, perhaps, the lips, was as tapering, as soft, and as beautiful in contour as ever. the eyes were large and expressive, and there was a thoughtfulness about the whole countenance which had nothing of melancholy in its character, perhaps a little of worldliness, but more of mind and intellect than either. after she had been reading for some time, the door was quietly opened, and the king himself entered with a soft and almost noiseless step. the lady immediately laid down her book and rose, but the king took her by the hand, led her back to her chair, and seated himself beside her. "still busy, reading," he said. "i am anxious to do so, your majesty," she answered, "at every moment that i can possibly command. in the sort of life which i am destined to lead, and in your majesty's splendid court, temptations to forget what is right, and to think of nothing but pleasures and enjoyments, are so manifold, that one has need to have recourse to such calmer counsellors as these," and she laid her hand upon the book, "counsellors who are not disturbed by such seductions, and whose words have with them a portion of the tranquillity of the dead." the words were of a soberer character than louis had been accustomed to hear from the lips of woman during the greater part of his life, but still they did not displease him, and he replied only by saying,-- "but we must have a few more living counsels at present, madame, for the fate of louis----" "which is the fate of france," she said in so low a voice that it could scarcely be termed an interruption. "for the fate of louis and of his domestic happiness--a word, alas, which is so little known to kings--is even now in the balance. madame," he continued, taking that fair hand in his, "madame, it is scarcely necessary at this hour to tell you that i love you; it is scarcely necessary to speak what are the wishes and the hopes of the king; scarcely necessary to say what would be his conduct were not motives, strong and almost overpowering, opposed to all that he most desires." madame de maintenon, for she it was, had risen from her seat; had withdrawn her hand from that of the king, and for a moment pressed both her hands tightly upon her heart, while her countenance, which had become as pale as death, spoke that the emotion which she felt was real. "cease, sire; oh, cease," she exclaimed, "if you would not have me drop at your feet! indeed," she continued more vehemently, "that is my proper place," and she cast herself at once upon her knees before the king, taking the hand from which she had just disengaged her own, to bend her lips over it with a look of reverence and affection. "hear me, sire, hear me," she said, as the king endeavoured to raise her, "hear me even as i am; for notwithstanding the deep and sincere love and veneration which are in my heart, i must yet offend in one person the monarch whom every voice in europe proclaims the greatest in the earth; the man whom my own heart tells me is the most worthy to be loved. there is one, however, sire, who must be loved and venerated first, and beyond all--i mean the almighty; and from his law, and from his commands, nothing on earth shall ever induce me to swerve. now, for more than a year, such has been my constant reply to your majesty on these occasions. i have besought you, i have entreated you never to speak on such subjects again, unless that were possible which i know to be impossible." "nay," replied the monarch, interrupting her, and raising her with a little gentle force, "nay, nothing is impossible, but for me to see you kneeling there." "oh yes, indeed, indeed, it is, your majesty!" she said; "i have long known it, i have long been sure of it. you once condescended to dream of it yourself; you mentioned it to me, and i for a single instant was deceived by hope; but as soon as i came to examine it, i became convinced, fully convinced, that such a thing was utterly and entirely impossible, that your majesty should descend from your high station, and that you should oppose and over-rule the advice and opinion of courtiers and ministers, who, though perhaps a little touched with jealousy, can easily find sound and rational reasons enough to oppose your will in this instance. oh, no, no, sire, i know it is impossible; for heaven's sake do not agitate me by a dream of happiness that can never be realised!" "so little is it impossible, dear friend," replied the king, "that it is scarcely half an hour ago since i spoke with louvois upon the subject." "and what did he say?" exclaimed madame de maintenon, with an eagerness that she could not master. "he opposed it, of course--and doubtless wisely. but oh, sire, you must grant me a favour: the last of many, but still a very great one. you must let me retire from your court, from this place of cruel and terrible temptation, where they look upon me, from the favour which your majesty has been pleased to show me, in a light which i dare not name. no, sire, no, i will never have it said, that i lived on at your court knowing that i bore the name of your concubine. however false, the imputation is too terrible to be undergone--i, who have ever raised my voice against such acts, i, who have risked offending your majesty by remonstrances and exhortations. no, sire, no! i cannot, indeed i cannot, undergo it any longer. it is terrible to me, it is injurious to your majesty, who has so nobly triumphed over yourself in another instance. it matters not what monsieur de louvois has said, though i trust he said nothing on earth to lead you to believe that i am capable of yielding to unlawful love." "oh no," replied the king, "his opposition was but to the marriage, and that as usual was rude, gross, and insulting to his king. i wonder that i have patience with him. but it will some day soon give way." "i hope and trust, sire," cried madame de maintenon, clasping her hands earnestly, "i hope and trust that your majesty has not suffered insult on my account. then, indeed, it were high time that i should go." "no," replied louis, "not absolute insult. louvois means but to act well. he said every thing in opposition, i acknowledge, coarsely and rudely, and in the end he cast himself upon his knees before me, unsheathed his sword, and, offering the hilt, besought me to take his life, rather than to do what i contemplated." "he did!" cried madame de maintenon, with a bright red spot in either cheek. "he did! the famous minister of louis xiv. has been studying at the theatre lately i know! but still, sire, though doubtless he was right in some part of his view, françoise d'aubigné is not quite so lowly as to be an object of scorn to the son of michael le tellier, whose ancestors i believe sold drugs at rheims, while my grandfather supported the throne of yours with his sword, his blood, and his wisdom. he might have spared his scorn, methinks, and saved his wit for argument. but i must not speak so freely in my own cause, for that it is my own, i acknowledge," and she wiped away some tears from her fine eyes. "it is my own, for when i beseech your majesty to let me leave you, i tear my own heart, i trample upon all my own feelings. but oh, believe me, sire," she continued ardently, "believe me when i say, that i would rather that heart were broken, as it soon will be, than that your majesty should do any thing derogatory to your crown and dignity, or i must add, than i would do myself any thing in violation of the precepts of virtue and religion." she wept a good deal; but she wept gracefully, and hers was one of those faces which looked none the worse for tears. the king gently drew her to her seat, for she had still been standing; saying, "nay, nay, be comforted. you have yet the king. you think not really then," he said, "really and sincerely you think not, that there is any true degradation in a monarch wedding a subject? i ask you yourself, i ask you to speak candidly!" "nay, sire," cried madame de maintenon, "how can you ask me, deeply interested as i am--how can you ask any woman? for we all feel alike in such things, and differently from you men. there is not one woman, proud or humble in your majesty's court, that would not give you the same answer, if she spoke sincerely." "indeed!" exclaimed the king; "then we men must be certainly in the wrong. but what think you," he continued, "what think you, as a proof--what would yon fair girl clémence de marly say, were we to ask her? i saw her but now, as i passed, reading with the dauphine in somewhat melancholy guise." "well may she be melancholy, sire!" replied the lady, somewhat sadly, "when the king hears not her prayers. but methinks it would be hardly fair to make her a judge." "why, why?" demanded louis quickly; "because she is so proud and haughty?--remember, you said the proudest in our court." "so i say still, sire," replied madame de maintenon in a gentle tone; "but i do not think her proud. she would be too favourable a judge; that was my sole objection. her own station in the court is doubtful; and besides, sire, you could not think of submitting that, on which none--no, not the wisest minister you have--can judge so well as yourself, to the decision of a girl." "fear not," replied the king; "i will but take her voice on the matter, without her knowing aught of that on which her opinion is called for. i would fain hear what a young and unpractised tongue would say. let her be called in." madame de maintenon hesitated for a moment. the risk seemed great; the object of long years was at stake; and her own fate, and that of france, might depend upon the words of a wild, proud girl. but she saw no means of avoiding the trial; and she rang the bell: even in the very act of doing so, remembering many a trait of clémence, both in childhood and youth, which gave her some assurance. a page appeared instantly, and was despatched to the apartments of the dauphine to call mademoiselle de marly to the presence of the king. the feet of clémence bore her thither like light, though her heart beat wildly with fear and agitation; and the hue of her cheek, once so bright and glowing, was now as pale as death. she was glad, however, to find the king and madame de maintenon alone, for she had succeeded in interesting the latter in the fate of the count de morseiul, and she doubted not that she would exert herself, as much as she dared to do for any one, to persuade the king to deal with him gently. so many long and weary days had passed, however, with but little progress, that she had well nigh sunk into despair, when the summons of this night made her suppose that her fate, and that of her lover, was upon the eve of being decided. the page who conducted her closed the door as soon as she had entered, and clémence stood before the king with feelings of awe and agitation, such as in former days she knew not that she could feel towards the greatest potentate on earth: but clémence de marly loved, and her whole feelings had been changed. not a little was her surprise, however, when the king addressed her in a tone half playful, half serious,-- "come hither, spoiled beauty," he said, "come hither: and sit down upon that stool--or, in truth, i should give you up this chair, for you are going to act a part that you never performed before--that of judge, and in a matter of taste, too." clémence put her hand to her brow, as if to clear away the thoughts with which she had come thither. but, after gazing in the king's face for a moment with a bewildered look, she recovered herself, and replied,-- "indeed, sire, i am, of all people, the most unfit; but i will do my best to please your majesty. what may be the question?" "why," answered the king, smiling at her evident surprise and embarrassment, the real cause of which he had quite forgotten in his own thoughts and feelings, "why the matter is this; a new play has been submitted to us for approval by one of our best poets. it turns upon an ancient king becoming in love with one of his own subjects, and marrying her while his ministers wish him to marry a neighbouring queen. the question of the policy, however, is not the thing. we have settled all that, but the point in dispute between me and this fair lady is, whether the poet would have done better to have made the heroine turn out, after all, to be some princess unknown. i say not; but our sweet friend, whose opinion, perhaps, is better than my own, contends that it would have been better, in order to preserve the king's dignity." madame de maintenon panted for breath, and grasped the book that lay on the table to prevent herself from betraying her agitation; but she dared not say a word, nor even look up. she was almost instantly relieved, however, for clémence exclaimed, almost before the king had done speaking,--"oh, no! oh, no! dear lady, you are wrong, believe me. kings lose their dignity only by evil acts; they rise in transcendent majesty when they tread upon base prejudices. i know nothing of the policy; you tell me that is apart; and the only question is whether she was worthy that he chose. was she, sire--was she noble and good?" "most noble, and most excellent!" said the king. "was she religious, wise, well educated?" continued clémence, eagerly. "she was all!" answered louis, "all in a most eminent degree." "was she in knowledge, demeanour, character, worthy of his love and of himself?" asked the enthusiastic girl, with her whole face glowing. "in demeanour not inferior, in character equal, in knowledge superior--in all respects worthy!" replied the monarch, catching her enthusiasm. but he was stopped by the agitated sobs of madame de maintenon, who, sinking from her chair at his feet, clasped his knees, exclaiming, "spare me, sire! spare me, or i shall die!" the king gazed at her tenderly for a moment, then bent down his head, kissed her check, and, whispering a few brief words, placed her in the chair where he himself had been sitting. he then turned to clémence de marly, who stood by, astonished at the agitation that her words had produced, and fearful that the consequences might be the destruction of all her own hopes. the countenance of louis, as he turned towards her, somewhat re-assured her; but still she could not help exclaiming with no slight anxiety, "i hope, sire, i have not offended. i fear i have done so unintentionally." "if you have," said the king, smiling upon her graciously, "we will find a punishment for you; and as we have made you act as a judge where you little perhaps expected it, we will now make you a witness of things that you expected still less, but which your lips must never divulge till you are authorised to do so. go as fast as possible to my oratory close by the little cabinet of audience, there you will find good monsieur la chaise: direct him to ring the bell, and--after having told bontems to summon monsieur de montchevreuil and the archbishop, who is still here, i think--to come hither himself as speedily as possible. you will accompany him." what were the king's intentions clémence de marly scarcely could divine; but seeing that her words had evidently given happiness both to the king and to madame de maintenon, and judging from that fact that her own best hopes for the deliverance of him she loved might be on the eve of accomplishment, she flew rather than ran to obey the king's directions. she found the king's confessor, la chaise, waiting, evidently for the return of the king, with some impatience. the message which she brought him seemed to excite his astonishment greatly; but after pausing for a moment to consider what kind of event that message might indicate, the old man clasped his hands, exclaiming, "this is god's work, the king's salvation is now secure." he then did as he had been directed, rang the bell for bontems, gave the order as he had received it, and hurried after clémence along the corridor of the palace. at the door of madame de maintenon's apartment the young lady paused, for there were voices speaking eagerly within, and she feared to intrude upon the monarch. his commands to return, however, had been distinct, and she consequently opened the door and entered. madame de maintenon was standing by the table with her eyes bent down, and her colour much heightened. the king was also standing, and with a slight frown upon his countenance was regarding a person who had been added to the party since clémence had left it. this was no other than the minister louvois, whose coarse harsh features seemed filled with sullen mortification, which even the presence of the king could scarcely restrain from breaking forth in angry words. his eyes were bent down, not in humility but in stubborness, his shoulders a little raised, and he was muttering rather than speaking when clémence entered. the only words, however, that were audible were, "your majesty's will must be a law to yourself as well as to your people. i have ventured in all sincerity to express my opinion, and have nothing more to say." the opening of the door caused madame de maintenon to raise her eyes, and when she saw clémence and the confessor a glad and relieved smile played over her countenance, which was greatly increased by the words which the confessor addressed to the king immediately on his entrance. "sire," he said, without waiting for louis to speak, "from what i have heard, and from what i see, i believe--nay, i am sure, that your majesty is about to take a step which will, more than any that i know of, tend to insure your eternal salvation. am i not right?" and he extended his hand towards madame de maintenon, as if that gesture were quite sufficient to indicate his full meaning. "you are, my good father," replied the king; "and i am happy to find that so wise and so good a man as yourself approves of what i am doing. monsieur louvois here still seems discontented, though i have conceded so much to his views of policy as to promise that this marriage shall remain for ever private." "what are views of policy," cried père la chaise, "to your majesty's eternal salvation? there are greater, there are higher considerations than worldly policy, sire; but even were worldly policy all, i should differ with monsieur louvois, and say that you were acting as wisely in the things of this world as in reference to another." "god knows, and this lady knows," said louvois, "that my only opposition proceeds from views of policy. for herself, personally," he added, feeling that he might have offended one who was more powerful than even himself, "for herself, personally, she well knows that i have the most deep and profound respect; and, since it is to be, i trust that his majesty will allow me to be one of the witnesses." "assuredly," replied the king. "i had so determined in my own mind, monsieur de louvois; and as we need not have more than three, we will dispense with this young lady's presence. oh, here comes the archbishop and montchevreuil; my good father la chaise, let me beg you to prepare an altar, even here. i have determined that all doubt and discussion upon this subject shall be over to-night. explain, i beg you, to monsieur de harlay what are my views and intentions. one word, belle clémence," he added, advancing to clémence, and speaking to her with a gracious smile, "we shall not need your presence, fair lady, but you shall not want the bridemaid's presents. come hither to-morrow half an hour before i go to the council; and as you have judged well and wisely in this cause to-night, we will endeavour to judge leniently on any cause that you may bring before us to-morrow." although the king spoke low, his words did not escape the keen ear of louvois; and when clémence raised her eyes to reply, they met those of the minister gazing upon her with a look of fiend-like anger, which seemed to imply, "you have triumphed over me for the time, and have thwarted me in a matter of deep moment. you think at the same time you have gained your own private end, but i will disappoint you." such at least was the interpretation that clémence put upon that angry glance. for an instant it made her heart sink, but, recollecting her former courage the next instant, she replied boldly to the king, "my trust is always in your majesty alone. i have ever had that trust; and what i have seen to-night would show me clearly, that let us expect what we may of your majesty's magnanimity and generosity no disappointment will await us." thus saying she retired; and what farther passed in the chamber that she quitted--though it affected the destinies of louis, and of france, and of europe, more than any event which had taken place for years--remains in the records of history amongst those things which are known though not proved, and are never doubted even though no evidence of their reality exists. chapter v. the escape. the hope delayed, which maketh the heart sick, had its wearing effect upon the count de morseiul. his countenance showed it in every line; the florid hue of strong health was beginning to pass away; and one morning, in taking his usual walk up and down the court of the bastille in company with the bluff old english officer we have mentioned, his companion, after gazing in his face for a moment, as if something therein had suddenly struck him, said, "you look ill, young gentleman; what is the matter?" "how is it possible that i can be otherwise," said the count, "confined as i am here, and lingering on from day to day, without any knowledge of what is passing regarding myself, or of the fate of friends that i love, or of the condition of all those in whose happiness i am interested?" "poo! you must bear things more lightly," answered the old soldier. "why here, you, a youth, a mere boy, have plenty of time before you to spare a year or two for imprisonment. think of what a difference there is between you and me: here am i without a day too much to spare in life; while to you neither months nor years are any thing. as to your friends without, too, trouble not your brain about them. the world would go on just as well without you and i, if we were put out of it to-morrow; friends would find new friends, sweethearts gain new lovers, servants betake them to new masters, and the roses would grow, and the birds would sing, and love, and war, and policy, and the wind of heaven, would have their course as if nothing had happened. there might be a few drops in some eyes which would fall like a spring shower, and be dried up again as soon. however," he added, seeing that his philosophy was not very much to the taste of the young count, "you must live in the world as long as i have done ere you can take such hard lessons home; and if it be but communication with your friends without that you want, i should think that might be obtained easily." "i see not how that is to be done," replied the count. "if they had allowed me to have my valet here there would have been no difficulty, for i do not think that even stone walls would keep in his wit." "oh, we can do without him, i dare say," replied the old man. "if you write me down a note, containing few words, and no treason, doubtless i can find means, perhaps this very day, of sending it forth to any one that you will. in my apartment we shall find paper, which i got not long ago; some sort of ink we will easily manufacture for ourselves. so, come: that will revive hope a little for you; and though i cannot promise you an answer, yet perhaps one may be obtained too. there are old friends of mine that sometimes will drop in to see me; and what i propose to do, is to give your note to one of the prisoners i have spoken with, who expects to be liberated to-day or to-morrow, and direct the answer to be sent by some one who is likely to come to see me." the young count gladly availed himself of this proposal; and the means of writing having, by one prison resource or another, been obtained, he wrote a few brief words, detailing the anxiety and pain he suffered, and begging some immediate information as to the probability of his obtaining his freedom, and regarding the situation of those that he loved best. he couched his meaning in language as vague as possible, and addressed the note to his valet, jerome riquet, fearing to write to clémence, lest he should by any means draw suspicion and consequent evil upon her. the old english officer undertook to give all the necessary directions for its delivery, and when they met again in the evening, he assured him that the note was gone. at an early hour on the following morning the englishman was called away from him to speak with some one admitted by an order from the minister; and in about ten minutes after he joined the count, and slipped a small piece of folded paper into his hand, saying, in a low voice, "do not look at it now, or leave me immediately, for there are several of these turnkeys about, and we must not create suspicion." after a few more turns, however, the old man said, "now, monsieur de morseiul," and the count hastening to his chamber, opened the note which was in the handwriting of riquet. "i have been obliged," it said, "to keep out of the way, and to change my shape a dozen times, on account of the business of the exempt; but--from what the count says, and from hearing that monsieur de louvois swore last night by all the gods that he worships, that, on account of some offence just given, he will bring the count's head to the block within a week, as he did that of monsieur de rohan--a bold stroke will be struck to-day. the count will be set at liberty about two o'clock, and the moment he is at liberty he must neither go to king nor ministers, nor to his own house, either in paris or at versailles, but to the little inn called the golden cock, in the rue du faubourg st. antoine, call himself monsieur du sac, and ask for the horse his servant brought. having got it, let him ride on for poitou as fast as he can go. he will meet friends by the way." this was all that the note contained, and what was the bold stroke that riquet alluded to the count could not divine. he judged, indeed, that perhaps it was quite as well he should be ignorant of the facts; and after having impressed all the directions contained in the note upon his mind, he destroyed the paper, and was preparing to go down again into the court. it so happened, however, that he paused for a moment, and took up one of the books which he was still reading, when an officer, who was called the major of the bastille, entered the room, and summoned him to the presence of the governor. the count immediately followed, and passing through the gate into the court of government, he found besmaux waiting in the corps de garde, with a blithe and smiling countenance. "good morning, monsieur de morseiul," he said; "i have got some good news for you, which perhaps you do not expect." he fixed his eyes scrutinisingly upon the count's face, but all was calm. "here is an order for your liberation," he continued, "which, doubtless, you will be glad to hear." "most glad," exclaimed the count; "for, to say the truth, i am growing both sick and weary of this imprisonment, especially as i know that i have done nothing to deserve it." "that is better than being imprisoned knowing you have done something to deserve it," said besmaux. "however, here is the order; and though it is not exactly in accurate form, i must obey, i suppose, and set you at liberty, for here is the king's handwriting in every line." "that you must judge of yourself, monsieur de besmaux," replied the count. "but i hope, of course, that you will not detain me any longer than is necessary." "no, no," said besmaux; "i must obey the order, for it is in the king's hand distinctly. here are all the things that were upon your person, monsieur de morseiul. be so good as to break the seal yourself, examine them, and give me an acknowledgment--as is usual here--that they have been returned to you. there is the ordinary form; you have nothing to do but to sign it." the count did as he was required to do, and the governor then restored to him his sword, saying, "there is your sword, monsieur le comte. it is customary to give some little acknowledgment to the turnkeys if you think fit; and now, monsieur le comte, you are free. will you do me the honour of supping with me again to-night?" "i fear not to-night, monsieur de besmaux; some other time i will have that pleasure. but, of course, after this unexpected and sudden enlargement, there is much to be done." "of course," replied the governor; "you will have to thank the king, and monsieur de louvois, and all that. some other time then be it. it is strange they have sent no carriage or horse for you. perhaps you would like to wait till they arrive?" "oh, no," replied the count. "freedom before every thing, monsieur de besmaux. by your permission i will send for the apparel i have left in my chamber. but now, to set my foot beyond the drawbridge is my great ambition." "we will conduct you so far," replied besmaux, and led the way towards the gate. the drawbridge was lowered, the gates opened, and the count, distributing the greater part of the money which had been restored to him amongst the turnkeys, turned and took leave of the governor, and issued forth from the bastille. he remarked, however, that besmaux, with the major of the prison, and two or three others, remained upon the bridge, as if they felt some suspicion, and were watching his farther proceedings. he, accordingly, rendered his pace somewhat slow, and turned towards his own hotel in paris, while two or three boys, who hung about the gates of the bastille, followed, importunately looking up in his face. he passed along two streets before he could get rid of them, but then, suddenly turning up one of the narrow lanes of the city, he made the best of his way to the little inn, or rather public house, which jerome riquet had pointed out to him in his letter, where a bright golden cock, somewhat larger than life, stood out into the street from a pole thrust into the front of the house. before he turned in he looked down the street towards the bastille, but saw no cause for suspicion, and entered the narrow entrance. as was not uncommon in such houses at that time, no door on either hand gave admission to the rooms of the inn till the visiter had threaded half way through the small ill-lighted passage. at length, however, doors appeared, and the sound of a footstep instantly called out a stout, jovial-looking personage, with a considerable nose and abundance of cheek and stomach, who, without saying any thing, merely planted himself directly in the count's way. "are you the landlord?" demanded the count. "yes, sir," replied the cabaretier, much more laconically than might have been expected from his appearance. "who are you?" "i am monsieur du sac," replied the count. "oh, oh!" cried the host, laying his forefinger on the side of his face. "if you are monsieur du sac, your horse will be ready in a crack. but you had better come into the stable; there are people drinking in the hall." the count followed him without saying any more, and found three horses standing ready saddled, and wanting only the girths tightened, and the bridles in their mouths. the centre one he instantly recognised as one of his own finest horses, famous for its great strength and courage. the other two were powerful animals, but of a different breed; and the count was somewhat surprised when the landlord ordered a stable boy, who was found waiting, to make haste and girth them all up. the boy began with the farther horse; but the landlord then exclaimed, "no, no, the gentleman's first, the others will do after;" and in a moment the count's horse was ready to set out. "better go by the back gate, sir," said the host; "then if you follow round by the gardens of the convent of st. mary, up the little lane to the left, you will come into the road again, where all is clear. where's the bottle, boy, i told you to have ready? monsieur du sac will want a draught before he goes." a large bottle was instantly produced from a nook in the stable, and a tumbler full of excellent wine poured out. the count took it, and drank, for excitement had made him thirsty, and he might well want that support, which the juice of the grape or any other thing could afford, when he reflected that the die was now cast; that he had been liberated from prison, as he could not doubt by some counterfeit order; and that he was flying from the court of france, certainly never to return, unless it were as a captive brought back probably to death. the blow being struck, however, he was not a man to feel regret or hesitation, and there was something in the sensation of being at liberty, of having cast off the dark load of imprisonment, which was in itself inspiring. he sprang upon his horse then with joyful speed, cast the landlord one of the few gold pieces that remained in his purse, and while the boy held open the back gates of the inn court, he rode out once more free to turn his steps whithersoever he would. that part of the city was not unknown to him, and passing round the gardens, and through the narrow lanes which at that time were intermingled with the faubourg st. antoine, he entered the high road again just where the town ended, and the country began; and putting his horse into a quick pace, made the best of his way onward toward poitou. as he now went forth he looked not back, and he had gone on for five or six miles, when the belief that he heard the feet of horses following fast made him pause and turn. he was not mistaken in the supposition. there were two horsemen on the road, about five or six hundred yards behind him; but they slackened their pace as soon as he paused; and remembering the words written by jerome riquet, that he would find friends upon the road, he thought it better not to inquire into the matter any further, but make the most of his time, and go on. he thus proceeded without drawing a rein for about five and thirty miles, the men who were behind him still keeping him in sight, but never approaching nearer than a certain distance. the road which he had chosen was that of orleans, though not the most direct; but by taking it, he avoided all that part of the country through which he was most likely to be pursued if his flight were speedily discovered. at length, in the neighbourhood of the little town of angerville, a man appeared on horseback at the turning of one of the roads. he was evidently waiting for some one, and rode up to the count as soon as ever he appeared, saying merely, "monsieur du sac." "the same," replied the count; and the man immediately said, "this way, then, sir." the count followed without any reply, and the man rode on at a quick pace for the distance of fully three miles further. the horsemen turned as the count had turned, but the road had become tortuous, and they were soon lost to his sight. at length, however, the high stone walls, overtopped with trees, and partly covered with ivy, which usually surrounded the park of an old french château, appeared, and making a circuit round three sides of this enclosure, the count and his guide came suddenly to the large iron gates, which gave admission to a paved court leading to another set of gates, with a green esplanade and a terrace above; while the whole was crowned by a heavy mass of stonework, referable to no sort of architecture but itself. round these courts were various small buildings, scarcely fitted indeed for human habitation, but appropriated to gardeners and gatekeepers, and other personages of the kind; and from one of these, as soon as the count appeared, instantly rushed forth jerome riquet himself, kissing his master's hand with sincere joy and affection, which was not at all decreased by a consciousness that his liberation had been effected by the skill, genius, and intrigue of the said jerome riquet himself. "dismount, my lord, in all safety," he said; "we have taken measures to insure that you should not be traced. refreshments of every kind are ready for you; and if you so please, you can take a comfortable night's repose before you go on." "that were scarcely prudent, riquet," replied the count; "but i will at all events pause for a time, and you can tell me all that has happened. first, whose dwelling is this?" "the house of good monsieur perault at angerville," replied the valet. "he has been dead for about two months, and his old maître d'hôtel, being a friend of mine, and still in the family, gave me the keys of the château to be your first resting place." on entering the château, albert of morseiul found it completely thronged with his own servants; and the joyful faces that crowded round, some in smiles and some in tears, to see their young lord liberated, was not a little sweet to his heart. some balm, indeed, was necessary to heal old wounds, before new ones were inflicted; and, though riquet moved through the assembled attendants with the conscious dignity of one who had conferred the benefit in which they rejoiced, yet he hastened to lead his young lord on, and to have the room cleared, having much indeed to tell. his tale was painful to the count in many respects; but, being given by snatches, as the various questions of his master elicited one fact after another, we will attempt to put it in more continuous form, and somewhat shorter language, taking it up at events which, though long past, were now first explained. from an accidental reference to the count's journey from morseiul to poitiers, riquet was led to declare the whole facts in regard to the commission which had been given by the king to pelisson and st. helie. the insatiable spirit of curiosity by which maître jerome was possessed, never let him rest till he had made the unhappy curé of guadrieul declare, by a man[oe]uvre before related, what was in the sheepskin bag he carried; and, as soon as the valet heard that it was a commission from the king, his curiosity was still more strongly excited to ascertain the precise contents. for the purpose of so doing, he attached himself firmly to the curé during the rest of the evening, made him smoke manifold pipes, induced him to eat every promotive of drinking that he could lay his hands upon, plied him with wine, and then when half besotted, ventured to insinuate a wish to peep into the bag. the curé, however, was firm to his trust even in the midst of drunkenness; he would peep into the bag with curious longings himself, but he would allow no one else to do so, and riquet had no resource but to finish what he had so well commenced by a bottle of heady burgundy in addition, which left the poor priest but strength enough to roll away to his chamber, and, conscious that he was burthened with matters which he was incompetent to defend, to lock the door tight behind him before he sunk insensible on his bed. he forgot, however, one thing, which it is as well for every one to remember; namely, that chambers have windows as well as doors; and jerome riquet, whose genius for running along house gutters was not less than his other high qualities, found not the slightest difficulty of effecting an entrance, and spending three or four hours in the examination of the sheepskin bag and its contents. with as much skill as if he had been brought up in the french post-office of that day, he opened the royal packet without even breaking the seals, and only inflicting a very slight and accidental tear on one part of the envelope, which the keen eyes of pelisson had afterwards discovered. as soon as he saw the nature of the king's commission, riquet,--who was no friend to persecution of any kind, and who well knew that all his master's plans would be frustrated, and the whole province of poitou thrown into confusion if such a commission were opened on the first assembling of the states,--determined to do away with it altogether, and substitute an old pack of cards which he happened to have in his valise in place of that important document. he then proceeded to examine minutely and accurately the contents of the curé's trunk mail, and more from a species of jocose malice than any thing else, he tore off a piece of the king's commission which could do no harm to any one, and folded it round the old tobacco box, which he had found wrapped up in a piece of paper very similar amongst the goods and chattels of the priest. besides this adventure, he had various others to detail to the count, with the most important of which: namely, his interview with the king and louvois at versailles, the reader is already acquainted. but he went on from that point to relate, that, lingering about in the neighbourhood of the king's apartments, he had heard the order for his master's arrest given to monsieur de cantal. he flew home with all speed, but on arriving at the count's hotel found that he had already gone to the palace, and that his arrest was certain. his next question to himself was how he might best serve him under such circumstances; and, habituated from the very infancy of his valethood to travesty himself in all sorts of disguises, he determined instantly on assuming the character of an exempt of one of the courts of law, as affording the greatest probability of answering his purpose. he felt a degree of enjoyment and excitement in every species of trick of the kind which carried him through, when the least timidity or hesitation would have frustrated his whole plans. the fact is, that although it may seem a contradiction in terms, yet maître jerome was never so much in his own character as when he was personating somebody else. the result of his acting on this occasion we already know, as far as the count was concerned; but the moment that he had seen him lodged in the bastille, the valet, calculating that his frolic might render versailles a dangerous neighbourhood, retired to the count's hotel in paris, where a part of his apparel was still to be found, compounded rapidly the sympathetic ink from one of the many receipts stored up in his brain, and then flew with a handkerchief, properly prepared, to clémence de marly, whom he found alone with the chevalier d'evran. as his master had not made him acquainted with the occasional feelings of jealousy which he had experienced towards that gentleman, jerome believed he had fallen upon the two persons from whom, out of all the world, his master would be most delighted to hear. the whole facts of the count's arrest then were detailed and discussed, and the words written, which, as we have seen, were received by albert of morseuil in prison. afraid to go back to versailles, riquet hastened away into poitou leaving to clémence de marly and the chevalier d'evran the task of liberating his lord, of which they seemed to entertain considerable hopes. on his return, however, he found, first, that all his fellow-servants having been faithful to him, the investigations regarding the appearance of the exempt had ended in nothing being discovered, except that somebody had profanely personated one of those awful personages; and, secondly, that the count was not only still in durance, but that little, if any, progress had been made towards effecting his liberation. the duc de rouvré, who seemed to be restored to the king's favour, was now a guest at the palace of versailles: with clémence de marly the valet could not obtain an interview, though he daily saw her in company with the chevalier d'evran, and the report began to be revived that the king intended to bestow her hand upon that gentleman, who was now in exceedingly high favour with the monarch. a scheme now took possession of the mind of riquet, which only suggested itself in utter despair of any other plan succeeding; and as, to use his own expression, the very attempt, if frustrated, would bring his head under the axe, he acknowledged to his lord that he had hesitated and trembled even while he prepared every thing for its execution. he went down once more into poitou; he communicated with all the friends and most favoured vassals of his master; he obtained money and means for carrying every part of his scheme into effect, as soon as his lord should be liberated from the bastille, and for securing his escape into poitou, where a choice of plans remained before him, of which we shall have to speak hereafter. the great point, however, was to enable the count to make his exit from the prison, and it was at this that the heart of jerome riquet failed. his was one of those far-seeing geniuses that never forget, in any situation, to obtain, from the circumstances of the present, any thing which may be, however remotely, advantageous in the future. upon this principle he had acted in his conference with the king, and without any definite and immediate object but that of obtaining pardon for himself for past offences, he had induced the monarch, we must remember, to give him a document, of which he now proposed to take advantage. by a chemical process, very easily effected, he completely took out the ink in those parts of the document where his own name was written, and then, with slow and minute labour, substituted the name of his master in the place, imitating, even to the slightest stroke, the writing of the king. the date underwent the same change to suit his purpose, so that a complete pardon, in what appeared the undoubted hand of the king himself, was prepared for the count de morseiul. this step having been taken, riquet contemplated his work with pride, but fear, and the matter remained there for the whole day: but by the next morning he had become habituated to daring; and, resolved to make the document complete, he spent eight hours in forging, underneath, an order, in due form, for the count's liberation; and the most practised eye could have scarcely found any difference between the lines there written and those of the king himself. in all probability, if riquet could have obtained a scrap of louvois' writing he would have added the countersign of the minister, but, as that was not to be had, he again laid the paper by, and was seized with some degree of panic at what he had done. he had brought up, however, from poitou, his lord's intendant, and several others of his confidential servants and attendants, promising them, with the utmost conceit and self-confidence, to set the count at liberty. they now pressed him to fulfil his design, and while he hesitated, with some degree of tremour, the note which the old english officer had conveyed to him was put into his hands, and decided him at once. he entrusted the forged order to a person whom he could fully rely upon to deliver it at the gates of the bastille, stationed his relays upon the road, and prepared every thing for his master's escape. such was the account which he gave to his young lord, as he sat in the château of angerville, and though he did not exactly express all that he had heard in regard to clémence de marly and the chevalier d'evran, he told quite enough to renew feelings in the bosom of the count which he had struggled against long and eagerly. "who were the men," demanded the count, "that followed me on horseback?" "both of them, sir," replied the man, "were persons who would have delayed any pursuit of you at the peril of their own lives. one of them was your own man, martin, whom you saved from being hung for a spy, by the night attack you made upon the prince of orange's quarters. the other, sir, was poor paul virlay, who came up with the intendant of his own accord, with his heart well nigh broken, and with all the courage of despair about him." "poor paul virlay!" exclaimed the count--"his heart well nigh broken! why, what has happened to him, jerome? i left him in health and in happiness." "ay, sir," replied the man, "but things have changed since then. two hellish priests--i've a great mind to become a huguenot myself--got hold of his little girl, and got her to say, or at least swore that she said, she would renounce her father's religion. he was furious; and her mother, who had been ill for some days, grew worse, and took to her bed. the girl said she never had said so; the priests said she had, and brought a witness; and they seized her in her father's own house, and carried her away to a convent. he was out when it happened, and when he came back he found his wife dying and his child gone. the mother died two days after; and paul, poor fellow, whose brain was quite turned, was away for three days with his large sledgehammer with him, which nobody but himself could wield. every body said that he was gone to seek after the priests, to dash their brains out with the hammer, but they heard of it, and escaped out of the province; and at the end of three days he came back quite calm and cool, but every body saw that his heart was broken. i saw him at morseiul, poor fellow, and i have seldom seen so terrible a sight. the mayor, who has turned catholic, you know, sir, asked him if he had gone after the priests, to which he said 'no;' but every one thinks that he did." while riquet was telling this tale the count had placed his hands before his eyes, and it was evident that he trembled violently, moved by terrible and strongly conflicting feelings, the fiery struggle of which might well have such an influence on his corporeal frame. he rose from his seat slowly, however, when the man had done, and walked up and down the room more than once with a stern heavy step. at length, turning to riquet again, he demanded, "and in what state is the province?" "why, almost in a state of revolt, sir," replied riquet. "as far as i can hear, there are as many as a couple of thousand men in arms in different places. it is true they are doing no great things; that the intendant of the province, sometimes with the bishop, sometimes with the abbé st. helie, marches hither and thither with a large body of troops, and puts down the revolt here, or puts down the revolt there. till he hears that it has broken out in another place, he remains where it last appeared, quartering his soldiers upon the inhabitants, and, in the order of the day, allowing them _to do every thing but kill_. then he drives the people by thousands at a time to the churches of our religion, makes them take the mass, and breaks a few of them on the wheel when they spit the host out of their mouths. he then writes up to the king that he has made wonderful conversions; but before his letter can well reach paris he is obliged to march to another part of the province, to put down the insurrection there, and to make converts, and break on the wheel as before." "say no more, say no more," cried the count. "oh, god! wilt thou suffer this to go on?" again he paced the room for several minutes, and then turning suddenly to riquet, he said--"riquet, you have shown yourself at once devoted, courageous, and resolute in the highest degree." "oh, sir," interrupted the man, "you mistake: i am the most desperate coward that ever breathed." "no jesting now, riquet," said the count, in a sorrowful tone; "no jesting now. my spirits are too much crushed, my heart too much torn to suffer me to hear one light word. after all that you have done for me, will you do one act more? have you the courage to return to paris this night, and carry a letter for me to mademoiselle de marly, and to bring me back her reply?" "well, sir, well," said riquet, rubbing his hands, and then putting his fore-finger under his collar, and running it round his neck with a significant gesture, "a man can be hanged but once in his life, at least as far as i know of; and, as cæsar said, 'a brave man is but hanged once, a coward is hanged every day;' therefore, as i see no other object that my father and mother could have in bringing me into the world, but that i should be hanged in your service, i will go to paris, at the risk of accomplishing my destiny, with all my heart." "hark you, riquet," replied the count, "i will give you a means of security. if by any means you should be taken, and likely to be put to death for what you have done, tell those who take you, that, upon a distinct promise of pardon to you under the king's own hand, the count of morseiul will surrender himself in your place. i will give you that promise under my hand, if you like." "that is not necessary, sir," replied riquet. "every body in all france knows that you keep your word. but pray write the letter quickly; for, ride as hard as i will, i shall have scarce time to reach paris before bed-time; and i suppose you would not have the young lady wakened." there was a degree of cold bitterness in riquet's manner when he spoke thus of clémence, which made the count of morseiul feel that the man thought he was deceived. but still, after what had passed before, he felt that he was bound to be more upon his guard against himself than against others; and he resolved that he would not be suspicious, that he would drive from his bosom every such feeling, that he would remember the indubitable proofs of affection that she had given him, and that he would act toward her as if her whole conduct had been under his eye, and had been such as he could most approve. the materials for writing were instantly procured, and while riquet caused a fresh horse to be saddled, and prepared for his journey, the count sat down and wrote as follows:-- "my beloved clémence, "thank god, i am once more at liberty; but the brightness of that blessing, great as it is under any circumstances, would be nearly all tarnished and lost if i had not the hope that you would share it with me. i am now some way on the road to poitou, where i hear that the most horrible and aggravated barbarities are daily being committed upon my fellow protestants. my conduct there must be determined by circumstances; but i will own that my blood boils at the butchery and persecution i hear of. i remember the dear and cheering promises you have made--i remember the willingness and the joyfulness with which those promises were made, and that recollection renders it not madness,--renders it not selfishness to say to you, come to me, my clémence, come to me as speedily as possible; come and decide for me, when perhaps i may not have calmness to decide for myself! come, and let us unite our fate for ever, and so far acquire the power of setting the will of the world at defiance. were it possible, i would trust entirely to your love and your promises, in the hope that you would suffer the bearer of this, most faithful and devoted as he has shown himself to be, to guide you to me; but i fear that the little time he dare stay in paris would render it impossible for you to make your escape with him. should this, as i fear, be the case, write to me, if it be but a few lines, to tell me how i can assist or aid you in your escape, and when it can be made. adieu! heaven bless and guard you." before he had concluded riquet had again appeared, telling him that he was ready to set out, and taking the somewhat useless precaution to seal his letter, the count gave it into his hands, and saw him depart. it was now about five o'clock in the evening; and as he knew that many a weary and expectant hour must pass before the man could return, the count conferred with all the various attendants who had been collected at angerville, and found that the account which riquet had given him of the state of poitou was confirmed in every respect. each had some tale of horror or of cruelty. paul virlay, however, whom he had asked for more than once, did not appear; and it was discovered on inquiry that he had not even remained at angerville, but with the cold and sullen sort of despair that had fallen upon him had ridden on, now that he judged the count was in safety. after a time the young nobleman, anxious for some repose both of mind and of body, cast himself upon a bed, in the hope of obtaining sleep; but it visited not his eyelids; dark and horrible and agitating visions peopled the hours of darkness, though slumber had no share in calling them up. at length, full two hours before he had expected that riquet could return, the sound of a horse's feet, coming at a rapid pace, struck the count's ear, as he lay and listened to the howling of the november wind; and, starting up, he went to the window of the room and gazed out. it was a clear night, with the moon up, though there were some occasional clouds floating quickly over the sky, and he clearly saw that the horseman was riquet, and alone. proceeding into the other room where he had left a light, he hastened down to meet him, asking whether he had obtained an answer. "i have, sir," replied the man; "though i saw not the fair lady herself: yet maria, the waiting woman, brought it in no long time. there it is;" and drawing it from his pocket, he gave it into the count's hand. albert of morseiul hastened back with the letter, and tore it eagerly open; but what were the words that his eyes saw? "cruel and unkind," it began, "and must i not add--alas, must i not add even to the man that i love--ungenerous and ungrateful? what would i not have sacrificed, what would i not have done, rather than that this should have occurred, and that the first use you make of your liberty should be to fly to wage actual war against the crown! how shall i dare look up? i, who for weeks have been pleading that no such thought would ever enter into your noble and loyal nature. no, albert, i cannot follow the messenger you send; or, to use the more true and straight-forward word, i _will_ not; and never by my presence with you, however much i may still love you, will i countenance the acts to which you are now hurrying." it was signed "clémence;" but it fell from the count's hand ere his eye had reached that word, and he gazed at it fixedly as it lay upon the ground for several moments, without attempting to raise it; then, turning with a sudden start to riquet and another servant who stood by, as if for orders, he exclaimed--"to horse!" chapter vi. the pastor's prison. the pillow of clémence de marly was wet with her tears, and sleep had not visited her eyes, when a quick knocking was heard at her door, and she demanded timidly who was there. "it is i, madam," replied the voice of the duchess de rouvré's maid. "then wait a moment, mariette," replied clémence, "and i will open the door. she rose, put on a dressing gown, and by the light of the lamp which still stood unextinguished on the table, she raised and concealed, in a small casket, two letters which she had left open, and which bore evident signs of having been wept over before she retired to rest. the one was in the clear free handwriting of youth and strength; the other was in characters, every line of which spoke the feeble hand of age, infirmity, or sickness. when that was done, she opened the door which was locked, and admitted the duchess's maid, who was followed into the room by her own attendant maria, who usually slept in a little chamber hard by. "what is the matter, mariette?" demanded the young lady. "i can scarcely say that i have closed my eyes ere i am again disturbed." "i am sorry, mademoiselle, to alarm you," replied the woman; "but maria would positively not wake you, so i was obliged to do it, for the duke was sent for just as he was going to bed, and after remaining for two hours with the king has returned, and given immediate orders to prepare for a long journey. the duchess sent me to let you know that such was the case, and that the carriages would be at the door in less than two hours." "do you know whither they are going," demanded clémence, "and if i am to accompany them?" "i know nothing from the duke or the duchess, mademoiselle," replied the woman, "but the duke's valet said that we were going either to brittany or poitou, for my lord had brought away a packet from the king addressed to somebody in those quarters; and you are going certainly, mademoiselle, for the duchess told me to tell you so, and the valet says that it is on account of you we are going; for that the chevalier came back with my lord the duke, and when he parted with him, said, 'tell clémence, she shall hear from me soon.'" clémence mused, but made no answer; and when in about an hour after, she descended to the saloon of the hotel, she found every thing in the confusion of departure, and the duc de rouvré standing by the table, at which his wife was seated, waiting for the moment of setting out, with a face wan, indeed, and somewhat anxious, but not so sorrowful or dejected as perhaps clémence expected to see. "i fear, my dear duke," she said, approaching him and leaning her two hands affectionately upon his arm, "i fear that you, who have been to your poor clémence a father indeed, are destined to have even more than a father's share of pains and anxieties with her. i am sure that all this to-night is owing to me, or to those that are dear to me, and that you have fallen under the king's displeasure on account of the rash steps of him whom i cannot yet cease to love." "not at all, my sweet clémence; not at all, my sweet child," said the old nobleman, kissing her hand with that mingled air of gallant respect and affection which he always showed towards her. "i do not mean to say, that your fair self has nothing to do with this business in any way, but certainly not in that way. it is about another business altogether, clémence, that we are ordered to retire from the court; but not in disgrace, my dear young friend, we are by no means in disgrace. the king is perfectly satisfied that you have had no share in all the business of poor albert of morseiul; and when i told him how bitterly and deeply grieved you were, and how struck to the heart you seemed to have been, when you heard that the count had fled to join the rebels in poitou, he told me to bid you console yourself, saying, that he would find you another and a better husband soon." clémence's eyes were bent down upon the ground with an expression of grief and pain; but she looked up in a moment, and said, "is it permitted me to ask you, my lord, how i am connected with this sudden removal?" "nay," he said, "nay, sweet clémence, that i must not tell you. i scruple not to say, that i think his majesty is acting without due consideration; but, of course, my first duty, like that of all his other subjects, is to obey; and he particularly wishes that nothing should be said to you on the subject, as it might render one duty difficult by opposing to it another. at present the whole matter is quite simple; we have nothing to do but to set out as soon as these villanous lackeys have got the carriages ready." thus saying, the duke turned away, evidently wishing to avoid further inquiries, and in about half an hour after clémence was rolling away from versailles with the duke and duchess de rouvré, followed by a long train of carriages and attendants. it is needless to trace a melancholy journey in the darkest and gloomiest weather of the month of november; but it was evident that the duc de rouvré was in haste, travelling early and late, and it also appeared, from his conversation as they went, that, though he was charged with no special mission from the king, he proposed only pausing for a short time in poitou, and then bending his steps to some of his other estates. indeed, he suffered it to be understood that, in all probability, for many months he should take but little repose, frequently changing his place of abode, and travelling from one city to another. although the health of madame de rouvré was by no means vigorous, and though far and rapid travelling never, at any time, had agreed with her, she made no objection, but seemed contented and happy with the arrangement, and even suggested that a journey to italy might be beneficial to them all. clémence wondered but was silent; and at length, late on the afternoon of the sixth day after their departure, they arrived at the small town of thouars, over which was brooding the dark grey fogs of a november evening. not many miles remained to travel from thouars to ruffigny; and the duke, who was of course well known in that part of the country, received visits of congratulation on his arrival from the principal officers and inhabitants of the town. at these visits, however, clémence was not present. she sent down an excuse for not appearing during the evening; and when the duke sent up to say he wished to see her for a moment, she was not to be found, nor had she, indeed, returned at the end of an hour. where was clémence de marly? it may be asked. she was in the dark and gloomy abode, often of crime and often of innocence, but ever of anguish and of sorrow. she was in the prison of the old château of thouars. not, indeed, as one of those unfortunate beings, the involuntary inmates of the place, but as one coming upon the sad and solemn errand of visiting a dear and well-beloved friend for the last time. the office of governor of the prison, as it was seldom if ever used for the confinement of state offenders, had been suffered to fall into the hands of the mayor of the place, who delegated his charge to an old lieutenant, who again entrusted it to two subordinate gaolers, antique and rusty in their office as the keys they carried. it was with one of these that clémence was speaking eagerly in the small dark passage that led into the interior of the building. she was habited in the ordinary grey cloak in which we have seen her twice before, and had with her still, on this occasion also, the faithful servant who had then attended her. "come, come, pretty mistress," said the man, thrusting himself steadfastly in the way, "i tell you it is as much as my head is worth. he is condemned to be broken on the wheel to-morrow, and i dare admit nobody to him." "look at these," said clémence, pouring some gold pieces from her purse into her open hand. "i offer you these if you will allow me to speak with him for an hour, and if you refuse i shall certainly insist upon seeing the lieutenant of the governor himself. you know what manner of man he is, and whether he will reject what i shall offer him; so he will get the money, and you will not, and i shall see the prisoner notwithstanding." the man's resolution was evidently shaken to the foundation. he was an old man and fond of gold. the sight was pleasant to him, and, putting forth his hand, he lifted one piece between his finger and thumb, turned it over, and dropped it back again upon the others. the sound completed what the touch had begun. "well," he said at length, "i do not see why he should get it and i not. he is asleep, too, now in the arm-chair; so it were a pity to wake him. you want to be with the old man an hour, do you, young woman? well, you must both go in then; and i must go away and be absent with the keys, for fear the lieutenant should wake and go to see the prisoner." "do you mean to lock us in with him, then?" exclaimed the maid, in some terror. "fear not, maria!" said her mistress. "you, who have ever given me encouragement and support, must not fear now. there is god even here." "be quick, then, and come along," said the gaoler, "but first give me the money." clémence poured it into his hand; and when he had got it, he paused, hesitating as if he were tempted by the spirit of evil to keep the gold and refuse her admission. but if such were the case, a moment's reflection showed him that to attempt it would be ruinous; and he, therefore, led the way along the passage in which they were, putting his finger upon his lips to enjoin silence, as they passed by a part of the prison which seemed to be inhabited by those who had some means of obtaining luxuries. at length, however, he lowered a lantern which he carried, and pointed to two or three steps which led into another passage, narrower, damper, and colder than the former. at the distance of about fifty feet from the steps this corridor was crossed by another; and turning to the right over a rough uneven flooring of earth, with the faint light of the lantern gleaming here and there on the damp green glistening mould of the walls, he walked on till he reached the end, and then opened a low heavy door. all within was dark, and, as the man drew back to let his female companions pass, the attendant, maria, laid her hand upon the lantern, saying, "give us a light, at least!" "ah! well, you may have it," grumbled forth the gaoler; and clémence, who though resolute to her purpose, still felt the natural fears of her sex and her situation, turned to him, saying, "i give you three more of those pieces when you open the door again for me." "oh, i'll do that--i'll do that!" replied the man, quickened by the gold; and while maria took the lantern and passed the door, clémence gazed down the step or two that led into the dungeon, and then with a pale cheek and wrung heart followed. the door closed behind them; the harsh bolt of the lock grated as the man turned the key; and, the power of retreat being at an end, the beautiful girl threw back the hood of the cloak, and gazed on before her into the obscure vault, which the feeble light of the lantern had scarcely deprived of any part of its darkness. the only thing that she could perceive, at first, was a large heavy pillar in the midst, supporting the pointed vault of the dungeon, with the faint outline of a low wooden bed, with the head thereof resting against the column. no one spoke; and nothing but a faint moan broke the awful silence. it required the pause of a moment or two ere clémence could overcome the feelings of her own heart sufficiently to take the lantern and advance; opening a part of the dim horn as she did so, in order to give greater light. a step or two farther forward brought her to the side of the bed; and the light of the lantern now showed her distinctly the venerable form of claude de l'estang stretched out upon the straw with which the pallet was filled. a heavy chain was round his middle, and the farther end thereof was fastened to a stanchion in the column. the minister was dressed in a loose grey prison gown, and, although he saw the approach of some one in the abode of misery in which he was placed, he moved not at all, but remained with his arm bent under his head, his eyes turned slightly towards the door, his lower lip dropping as if with debility or pain, and his whole attitude displaying the utter lassitude and apathy of exhaustion and despair. when clémence was within a foot or two of his side, however, he slowly raised his eyes towards her; and in a moment, when he beheld her face, a bright gleam came over his faded countenance, awakening in it all those peculiar signs and marks of strong intellect and intense feeling which the moment before had seemed extinct and gone. it was like the lightning flashing over some noble ruin in the midst of the deep darkness of the night. "is it you, my sweet child?" he cried, in a faint voice that was scarcely audible even in the midst of the still silence. "is it you that have come to visit me in this abode of wretchedness and agony? this is indeed a blessing and a comfort; a blessing to see that there are some faithful even to the last, a comfort and a joy to find that she on whose truth and steadfastness i had fixed such hopes, has not deceived me;--and yet," he exclaimed, while clémence gazed upon him with the tears rolling rapidly over her cheeks, and the sobs struggling hard for utterance, "and yet, why, oh why have you come here? why have you risked so much, my child, to soothe the few short hours that to-morrow's noon shall see at an end?" "oh, dear friend," said clémence, kneeling down beside the pallet, "could i do otherwise, when i was in this very town, than strive to see you, my guide, my instructor, my teacher in right, my warner of the path that i ought to shun? could i do otherwise, when i thought that there was none to soothe, that there was none to console you, that in the darkness and the agony of these awful hours there was not one voice to speak comfort, or to say one word of sympathy?" "my child, you are mistaken," replied the old man, striving to raise himself upon his arm, and sinking back again with a low groan. "there has been one to comfort, there has been one to support me. he, to whom i go, has never abandoned me: neither in the midst of insult and degradation; no, nor in the moment of agony and torture, nor in those long and weary hours that have passed since they bore these ancient limbs from the rack on which they had bound them, and cast them down here to endure the time in darkness, in pain, and in utter helplessness, till at noon to-morrow the work will be accomplished on the bloody wheel, and the prisoner in this ruined clay will receive a joyful summons to fly far to his redeemer's throne." the tears rained down from the eyes of clémence de marly like the drops of a summer shower; but she dared not trust herself to speak: and after pausing to take breath, which came evidently with difficulty, the old man went on, "but still i say, clémence, still i say, why have you come hither? you know not the danger, you know not the peril in which you are." "what!" cried clémence, "should i fear danger, should i fear peril in such a case as this? let them do to me what they will, let them do to me what god permits them to do. to have knelt here beside you, to have spoken one word of comfort to you, to have wiped the drops from that venerable brow in this awful moment, would be a sufficient recompense to clémence de marly for all that she could suffer." "god forbid," cried the pastor, "that they should make you suffer as they can. you know not what it is, my child--you know not what it is! if it were possible that an immortal spirit, armed with god's truth, should consent unto a lie, that torture might well produce so awful a falling off! but you recall me, my child, to what i was saying. i have not been alone, i have not been uncomforted even here. the word of god has been with me in my heart, the spirit of god has sustained my spirit, the sufferings of my saviour have drowned my sufferings, the hope of immortality has made me bear the utmost pains of earth. when they had taken away the printed words from before mine eyes, when they had shut out the light of heaven, so that i could not have seen, even if the holy book had been left, they thought they had deprived me of my solace. but they forgot that every word thereof was in my heart; that it was written there, with the bright memories of my early days; that it was traced there with the calm recollections of my manhood; that it was printed there with sufferings and with tears; that it was graven there with smiles and joys; that with every act of my life, and thought of my past being, those words of the revealed will of god were mingled, and never could be separated; and it came back to me even here, and blessed me in the dungeon; it came back to me before the tribunal of my enemies, and gave me a mouth and wisdom; it came back to me on the torturing rack, and gave me strength to endure without a groan; it came back to me even as i was lying mangled here, and made the wheel of to-morrow seem a blessed resting-place." "alas, alas!" cried clémence, "when i see you here; when i see you thus suffering; when i see you thus the sport of cruelty and persecution, i feel that i have judged too harshly of poor albert, in regard to his taking arms against the oppressors; i feel that perhaps, like him, i should have thus acted, even though i called the charge of ingratitude upon my head." "and is he free, then? is he free?" demanded the pastor, eagerly. "he is free," replied clémence, "and, as we hear, in arms against the king." "oh, entreat him to lay them down," exclaimed the pastor; "beseech him not to attempt it tell him that ruin and death can be the only consequences: tell him that the protestant church is at an end in france: tell him that flight to lands where the pure faith is known and loved is the only hope: tell him that resistance is destruction to him, and to all others. tell him so, my child, tell him so from me: tell him so--but, hark!" he continued, "what awful sound is that?" for even while he was speaking, and apparently close to the spot where the dungeon was situated, a sharp explosion took place, followed by a multitude of heavy blows given with the most extraordinary rapidity. no voices were distinguished for some minutes; and the blows continued without a moment's cessation, thundering one upon the other with a vehemence and force which seemed to shake the whole building. "it is surely," said clémence, "somebody attacking the prison door. perhaps, oh heaven! perhaps it is some one trying to deliver you." "heaven forbid!" exclaimed the old man; "heaven forbid that they should madly rush to such an attempt for the purpose of saving, for a few short hours, this wretched frame from that death which will be a relief. hark, do you not hear cries and shouts?" clémence listened, and she distinctly heard many voices apparently elevated, but at a distance, while the sound of the blows continued thundering upon what was evidently the door of the prison, and a low murmur, as if of persons speaking round, joined with the space to make the farther cries indistinct. a pause succeeded for a moment or two; but then came the sound of galloping horse, and then a sharp discharge of musketry, instantly followed by the loud report of fire-arms from a spot immediately adjacent to the building. clémence clasped her hands in terror, while her attendant maria, filled with the dangerous situation in which they were placed, ran and pushed the door of the dungeon, idly endeavouring to force it open. in the mean while, for two or three minutes nothing was heard but shouts and cries, with two or three musket shots; then came a volley, then another, then two or three more shots, then the charging of horse mingled with cries, and shouts, and screams, while still the thundering blows continued, and at length a loud and tremendous crash was heard shaking the whole building. a momentary pause succeeded, the blows were no longer heard, and the next sound was the rush of many feet. a moment of doubt and apprehension, of anxiety, nay of terror, followed. clémence was joyful at the thought of the pastor's deliverance; but what, she asked herself, was to be her own fate, even if the purpose of those who approached was the good man's liberation. another volley from without broke in upon the other sounds; but in an instant after the rushing of the feet approached the door where they were, and manifold voices were heard speaking. "it is locked," cried one; "where can the villain be with the keys?" "get back," cried another loud voice; "give me but a fair stroke at it." a blow like thunder followed; and, seeming to fall upon the locks and bolts of the door, dashed them at once to pieces, driving a part of the wood-work into the dungeon itself. two more blows cast the whole mass wrenched from its hinges to the ground. a multitude of people rushed in, some of them bearing lights, all armed to the teeth, some bloody, some begrimed with smoke and gunpowder; fierce excitement flashing from every eye, and eager energy upon every face. "he is here, he is here," they shouted to the others without. "make way, make way, let us bring him out." "but who are these women?" cried another voice. "friends, friends, dear friends, come to comfort me," cried the pastor. "blessings on the tongue that so often has taught us," cried other voices, while several ran forward and kissed his hands with tears; "blessings on the heart that has guided and directed us." "stand back, my friends, stand back," cried a gigantic man, with an immense sledge-hammer in his hand, "let me break the chain;" and at a single blow he dashed the strong links to atoms. "now bring them all along!" he cried, "now bring them all along! take up the good man on the bed, and carry him out." "bring them all along! bring them all along!" cried a thousand voices, and without being listened to in any thing that she had to say, clémence, clinging as closely as she could to her attendant, was hurried out along the narrow passages of the prison, which were now flashing with manifold lights, into the dark little square which was found filled with people. multitudes of lights were in all the windows round, and, covering the prison, a strong band of men were drawn up facing the opposite street. a number of persons on horseback were in front of the band, and, by the lights which were flashing from the torches in the street, one commanding figure appeared to the eyes of clémence at the very moment she was brought forth from the doors of the prison, stretching out his hand towards the men behind him, and shouting, in a voice that she could never forget, though now that voice was raised into tones of loud command, such as she had never heard it use. "hold! hold! the man that fires a shot dies! not one unnecessary shot, not one unnecessary blow!" clémence strove to turn that way, and to fly towards the hotel where monsieur de rouvré lodged; but she was borne away by the stream, which seemed to be now retreating from the town. at the same moment an armed man laid gently hold of her cloak, seeing her efforts to free herself, and said,-- "this way, lady, this way. it is madness for you to think to go back now. you are with friends. you are with one who will protect you with his life, for your kindness to the murdered and the lost." she turned round to gaze upon him, not recollecting his voice; and his face, in the indistinct light, seemed to her like a face remembered in a dream, connected with the awful scene of the preaching on the moor, and the dark piece of water, and the dying girl killed by the shot of the dragoons. ere she could ask any questions, however, the stream of people hurried her on, and in a few minutes she was out of thouars, and in the midst of the open country round. chapter vii. the death of the persecuted. when the flight had been conducted for about two miles in the midst of the perfect darkness which surrounded the whole scene--for the lights and torches which had appeared in the town had been extinguished with the exception of one or two, on leaving it--the voice which had before addressed clémence de marly again spoke nearer, apparently giving command, as some one in authority over the others. "where is the litter?" he exclaimed.--"where is the litter that was brought for the good minister? bring it hither: he will be more easy in that." clémence had kept as near as she could to the spot where claude de l'estang was carried, and she now heard him answer in a faint and feeble voice,-- "do not move me: in pity do not move me. my limbs are so strained and dislocated by the rack, that the slightest movement pains me. carry me as i am, if you will; but move me not from this bed." "well, then, place these two ladies in the litter," said the same voice. "we shall go faster then." without asking her consent, clémence de marly was placed in the small hand-litter which had been brought for the pastor; her maid took the place by her side, and, lifted on the shoulders of four men, she was carried on more quickly, gaining a faint and indistinct view of what was passing around, from the more elevated situation in which she now was. they were mounting slowly the side of the hill, about two miles from the town of thouars, and she could catch a distant view of the dark towers and masses of the town as it then existed, rising above the objects around. from thence, as far as her eye was able to distinguish, a stream of people was flowing on all along the road to the very spot where she was, and several detached parties were seen here and there, crossing the different eminences on either side, so that the force assembled must have been very considerable. she listened eagerly for any sound from the direction of thouars, apprehensive at every moment that she would hear the firing renewed; for she knew, or at least she believed she knew, that albert of morseiul, with the better disciplined band which he seemed to command, would be the last to leave the city he had so boldly entered. nothing, however, confirmed her expectation. there was a reddish light over the town, as if there were either fires in the streets, or that the houses were generally lighted up; but all was silent, except a dull distant murmur, heard when the sound of the marching feet ceased from any cause for a moment. few words passed between clémence and her attendant; for though maria was a woman of a calm determined spirit in moments of immediate danger, and possessed with a degree of religious zeal, which was a strong support in times of peril and difficulty, yet the scenes in the prison and the dungeon, the horrors which she had only dreamt of before brought actually before her eyes, had not precisely unnerved, but had rendered her thoughtful and silent. the only sentence which she ventured to address to her mistress, without being spoken to, was,-- "oh, madam, is the young count so much to blame, after all?" "alas, maria," replied clémence, in the same low tone, "i think that all are to blame, more or less. deep provocation has certainly been given; but i do think that albert ought to have acted differently. he had not these scenes before his eyes when he fled to put himself at the head of the insurgents; and ere he did so, he certainly owed something to me and something to the king. nevertheless, since i have seen what i have seen, and heard what i have heard, i can make excuses which i could not make before." the attendant made no reply, and the conversation dropped. the march continued rapidly for three or four hours, till at length there was a short halt; and a brief consultation seemed to take place between two or three of the leaders on horseback. the principal part of the men on foot, exhausted as it appeared by great exertion, sat or lay down by the road side; but ere the conference had gone on for above five minutes, a cavalier, followed by several other men on horseback, came up at the full gallop; and again the deep mellow tones of that remarkable voice struck the ear of clémence de marly, and made her whole frame thrill. his words, or as they appeared commands, were but few; and, without either approaching the side of claude de l'estang or herself, he rode back again in haste, and the march was renewed. ere long a fine cold rain began to fall, chilling those it lighted on to the very heart; and clémence thought she perceived that as they advanced the number of people gradually fell away. at length, after a long and fatiguing march through the night, as the faint grey of the dawn began to appear, she found that, at the very utmost, there were not above a hundred of the armed protestants around her. the party was evidently under the command of a short but powerfully made man, on horseback, whom she recognised as the person who had carried the unfortunate novice claire in his arms to the house of claude de l'estang. he rode on constantly by the side of the bed in which the good pastor was carried on men's shoulders, and bowing down his head from time to time, he spoke to him with what seemed words of comfort and hope. they were now on a part of the road from thouars towards nantes, that passed through the midst of one of those wide sandy tracts called in france _landes_, across which a sort of causeway had been made by felled trees, rough and painful of passage even to the common carts of the country. this causeway, however, was soon quitted by command of armand herval. one party took its way through the sands to the right; and the rest, following the litters, bent their course across the country, towards a spot where a dark heavy line bounded the portion of the _landes_ within sight, and seemed to denote a large wood of the deep black pine, which grows better than any other tree in that sandy soil. it was near an hour before they reached the wood; and even underneath its shadow the shifting sand continued, only diversified a little by a few thin blades of green grass, sufficient to feed the scanty flocks of sheep, which form the only riches of that tract. in the midst of the wood--where they had found or formed a little oasis around them--were two shepherds' cottages; and to these the party commanded by armand herval at once directed its course. an old man and two boys came out as they approached, but with no signs of surprise; and claude de l'estang was carried to one of the cottages, into which clémence followed. she had caught a sight of the good man's face as they bore him past her, and she saw that there was another sad and painful task before her, for which she nerved her mind. "now, good antoine," said armand herval, speaking to one of the shepherds, "lead out the sheep with all speed, and take them over all the tracks of men and horses that you may meet with. you will do it carefully, i know. we have delivered the good man, as you see; but i fear--i fear much that we have after all come too late, for the butchers have put him to the question, and almost torn him limb from limb. god knows i made what speed i could, and so did the count." the old shepherd to whom he spoke made no reply, but listened, gazing in his face with a look of deep melancholy. one of the younger men who stood by, however, said, "we heard the firing. i suppose they strove hard to keep him." "that they assuredly did!" replied herval, his brows knitting as he spoke; "and if we had not been commanded by such a man, they would not only have kept him, but us too. one half of our people failed us. boursault was not there. kerac and his band never came. we were full seven hundred short, and then the petard went off too soon, and did no good, but brought the whole town upon us. they had dragoons, too, from niort; and tried first to drive us back, then to take us in flank by the tower-street, then to barricade the way behind us; but they found they had to do with a count de morseiul, and they were met every where, and every where defeated. yet, after all," continued the man, "he will ruin us from his fear of shedding any blood but his own. but i must go in and see after the good man; and then speed to the woods. we shall be close round about, and one sound of a conch[ ] will bring a couple of hundred to help you, good antoine." --------------------- [footnote : this large shell is used in many of the sea-coast districts of france still, for the purpose of giving signals. the sound, when properly blown, is very powerful and peculiar. they assert that across a level country it can be heard six miles. i have myself heard it more than two, and so distinctly, that it must have been audible at a much greater distance.] --------------------- thus saying, he went into the cottage, where clémence had already taken her place by the side of the unhappy pastor's bed; and, on the approach of herval, she raised her finger gently to indicate that he slept. he had, indeed, fallen into momentary slumber, utterly exhausted by suffering and fatigue; but the fallen temples--the sharpened features--the pale ashy hue of the countenance, showed to the eyes of clémence, at least, that the sleep was not that from which he would wake refreshed and better. herval, less acute in his perceptions, judged differently; and, after assuring clémence in a whisper that she was quite in safety there, as the woods round were filled with the band, he left her, promising to return ere night. clémence would fain have asked after albert of morseiul, and might, perhaps, have expressed a wish to see him; but there were strange feelings of timidity in her heart which kept her silent till the man was gone, and then she regretted that she had not spoken, and accused herself of weakness. during the time that she now sat watching by the pastor's side, she had matter enough for thought in her own situation. what was now to become of her, was a question that frequently addressed itself to her heart; and, more than once, as she thus sat and pondered, the warm ingenuous blood rushed up into her cheek at thoughts which naturally arose in her bosom from the consideration of the strange position in which she was placed. albert of morseiul had not seen her, she knew. he could not even divine or imagine that she was at thouars at all, much less in the prison itself; but yet she felt somewhat reproachfully towards him, as if he should have divined that it was she whom he saw borne along, not far from the unhappy pastor. though she acknowledged, too, in her own heart, that there were great excuses to be made for the decided part which her lover had taken in the insurrection of that part of the country, still she was not satisfied, altogether, with his having done so; still she called him, in her own heart, both rash and ungrateful. on the other hand, she remembered, that she had written to him in haste, and in some degree of anger, or, at least, of bitter disappointment; that she had refused, without explaining all the circumstances which prevented her, to share his flight as she had previously promised; that, hurried and confused, she had neither told him that, at the very time she was writing, the duchess de rouvré waited to accompany her to the court, and that to fly at such a moment was impossible; nor that, during the whole of the following day, she was to remain at versailles, where the eyes of every one would be upon her, more especially attracted towards her by the news of her lover's flight, which must, by that time, be generally known. she feared, too, that in that letter she had expressed herself harshly, even unkindly; she feared that those very words might have driven the count into the desperate course which he had adopted, and she asked herself, with feelings such as she had never experienced before, when contemplating a meeting with albert of morseiul, how would he receive her? in short, in thinking of the count, she felt that she had been somewhat in the wrong in regard to her conduct towards him. but she felt, also, at the same time, that he had been likewise in the wrong, and, therefore, what she had first to anticipate were the words of mutual reproach, rather than the words of mutual affection. such was one painful theme of thought, and how she was to shape her own immediate conduct was another. to return to the house of the duc de rouvré seemed utterly out of the question. she had been found in the prison of claude de l'estang. her religious feelings could no longer be concealed; her renunciation of the catholic faith was sure, at that time, to be looked upon as nothing short of treason; and death or eternal imprisonment was the only fate that would befall her, if she were once cast into the hands of the roman catholic party. what then was she to do? was she to throw herself at once upon the protection of albert of morseiul? was she to bind her fate to his for ever, at the very moment when painful points of difference had arisen between them? was she to cast herself upon his bounty as a suppliant, instead of holding the same proud situation she had formerly held,--instead of being enabled to confer upon him that which he would consider an inestimable benefit, while she herself enhanced its value beyond all price, by the sacrifice of all and every thing for him? was she now, on the contrary,--when it seemed as if she had refused to make that sacrifice for his sake,--to come to him, as a fugitive, claiming his protection, to demand his bounty and his support, and to supplicate permission to share the fate in which he might think she had shown a disinclination to participate, till she was compelled to do so? the heart of clémence de marly was wrung at the thought. she knew that albert of morseiul was generous, noble, kind-hearted. she felt that, very likely, he might view the case in much brighter hues than she herself depicted it to her own mind; she felt that, if she were a suppliant to him, no reproach would ever spring to his lips; no cold averted look would ever tell her that he thought she had treated him ill. but she asked herself whether those reproaches would not be in his heart; and the pride, which might have taken arms and supported her under any distinct and open charge, gave way at the thought of being condemned, and yet cherished. how should she act, then? how should she act? she asked herself; and as clémence de marly was far from one of those perfect creatures who always act right from the first impulse, the struggle between contending feelings was long and terrible, and mingled with some tears. her determination, however, was right at length. "i will tell him all i have felt, and all i think," she said. "i will utter no reproach: i will say not one word to wound him: i will let him see once more, how deeply and truly i love him. i will hear, without either pride or anger, any thing that albert of morseiul will say to me, and then, having done so, i will trust to his generosity to do the rest. i need not fear! surely, i need not fear!" and, with this resolution, she became more composed, the surest and the strongest proof that it was right. but, to say the truth, since the perils of the night just passed, since she had beheld him she loved in a new character; since, with her own eyes, she had seen him commanding in the strife of men, and every thing seeming to yield to the will of his powerful and intrepid mind, new feelings had mingled with her love for him, of which, what she had experienced when he rode beside her at the hunting party at poitiers, had been but, as it were, a type. it was not fear, but it was some degree of awe. she felt that, with all her own strength of mind, with all her own brightness of intellect and self-possession, there were mightier qualities in his character to which she must bow down: that she, in fact, was woman, altogether woman, in his presence. as she thus thought, a slight motion on the bed where claude de l'estang was laid made her turn her eyes thither. the old man had awoke from his short slumber, and his eyes, still bright and intelligent, notwithstanding the approach of death and the exhaustion of his shattered frame, were turned towards her with an earnest and a melancholy expression. "i hope you feel refreshed," said clémence, bending over him. "you have had some sleep; and i trust it has done you good." "do not deceive yourself, my dear child," replied the old man. "no sleep can do me good, but that deep powerful one which is soon coming. i wait but god's will, clémence, and i trust that he will soon give the spirit liberty. it will be in mercy, clémence, that he sends death; for were life to be prolonged, think what it would be to this torn and mangled frame. neither hand nor foot can i move, nor were it possible to give back strength to my limbs or ease to my body. every hour that i remain, i look upon but as a trial of patience and of faith, and i will not murmur: no, clémence, not even in thought, against his almighty will, who bids me drag on the weary minutes longer. but yet, when the last of those minutes has come, oh! how gladly shall i feel the summons that others dread and fly from! i would fain, my child," he said, "i would fain hear: and from your lips: some of that blessed word which the misguided persecutors of our church deny unmutilated to the blind followers of their faith, though every word therein speaks hope, and consolation, and counsel, and direction to the heart of man." "alas! good father," replied clémence, "the bible which i always carry with me, was left behind when i came to see you in prison, and i know not where to find one here." "the people in this, or the neighbouring cottage, have one," said the pastor. "they are good honest souls, whom i have often visited in former days." as the good woman of the cottage had gone out, almost immediately after the arrival of the party, to procure some herbs, which she declared would soothe the pastor greatly, clémence proceeded to the other cottage, where she found an old man with a bible in his hand, busily reading a portion thereof to a little boy who stood near. he looked up, and gave her the book as soon as she told him the purpose for which she came, and then, following into the cottage where the pastor lay, he and the boy stood by, and listened attentively while she read such chapters as claude de l'estang expressed a wish to hear. those chapters were not, in general, such as might have been supposed. they were not those which hold out the glorious promises of everlasting life to men who suffer for their faith in this state of being. they were not such as pourtray to us, in its real and spiritual character, that other world, to which the footsteps of all are tending. it seemed as if, of such things, the mind of the pastor was so fully convinced, so intimately and perfectly sure, that they were as parts of his own being. but the passages that he selected were those in which our redeemer lays down all the bright, perfect, and unchangeable precepts for the rule and governance of man's own conduct, which form the only code of law and philosophy that can indeed be called divine. and in that last hour it seemed the greatest hope and consolation which the dying man could receive, to ponder upon those proofs of divine love and wisdom which nothing but the spirit of god himself could have dictated. thus passed the whole of the day. from time to time clémence paused, and the pastor spoke a few words to those who surrounded him: words of humble comment on what was read, or pious exhortation. at other times, when his fair companion was tired, the attendant maria would take the book and read. no noises, no visit from without, disturbed the calm. it seemed as if their persecutors were at fault; and though from time to time one of the different members of those shepherd families passed in or out, no other persons were seen moving upon the face of the _landes_; no sounds were heard but their own low voices throughout the short light of a november day. to one fresh from the buzz of cities, and the busy activity of man, the contrast of the stillness and the solitude was strange; but doubly strange and exceeding solemn were they to the mind of her who came, fresh from the perturbed and fevered visions of the preceding night, and saw that day lapse away like a long and quiet sleep. towards the dusk of the evening, however, her attendant laid her hand upon her arm as she was still reading, saying, "there is a change coming;" and clémence paused and gazed down upon the old man's countenance. it looked very grey; but whether from the shadows of the evening, or from the loss of whatever hue of living health remained, she could hardly tell. but the difference was not so great in the colour as in the expression. the look of pain and suffering which, notwithstanding all his efforts to bear his fate with tranquillity, had still marked that fine expressive countenance, was gone, and a calm and tranquil aspect had succeeded, although the features were extremely sharpened, the eye sunk, and the temples hollow. it was the look of a body and a spirit at peace; and, for a moment, as the eyes were turned up towards the sky, clémence imagined that the spirit was gone: but the next moment he looked round towards her, as if inquiring why she stopped. "how are you, sir?" she said. "you seem more at ease." "i am quite at ease, clémence," replied the old man. "all pain has left me. i am somewhat cold, but that is natural; and for the last half hour the remains of yesterday's agony have been wearing away, as i have seen snow upon a hill's side melt in the april sunshine. it is strange, and scarcely to be believed, that death should be so pleasant; for this is death, my child, and i go away from this world of care and pain with a foretaste of the mercies of the next. it is very slow, but still it is coming, clémence, and bringing healing on its wings. death, the messenger of god's will, to one that trusts in his mercy, is indeed the harbinger of that peace of god which passes all understanding." he paused a little, and his voice had grown considerably weaker, even while he spoke. "god forgive my enemies," he said at length, "and the mistaken men who persecute others for their soul's sake. god forgive them, and yield them a better light; for, oh how i wish that all men could feel death only as i feel it!" such were the last words of claude de l'estang. they were perfectly audible and distinct to every one present, and they were spoken with the usual calm sweet simplicity of manner which had characterised all the latter part of his life. but after he had again paused for two or three minutes, he opened his lips as if to say something more, but no sound was heard. he instantly felt that such was the case, and ceased; but he feebly stretched forth his hand toward clémence, who bent her head over it, and dewed it with her tears. when she raised her eyes, they fell upon the face of the dead. chapter viii. the discovery of error. we must now change the scene and time, though the spot to which we will conduct the reader is not situated more than ten miles from that in which the events took place recorded in the last chapter, and only one day's interval had elapsed. considerably more inland, it presented none of that sandy appearance which characterises the _landes_. the vegetation also was totally different, the rich, even rank, grass spreading under the tall trees of the forest, and the ivy covering those which had lost their leaves thus early in the year. there was a little château belonging to an inferior noble of the province, situated in the midst of one of those wide woods which the french of that day took the greatest pains to maintain in a flourishing condition, both for the sake of the fuel which they afforded, and the cover that they gave to the objects of the chase. the château itself was built, as usual, upon an eminence of considerable elevation, overlooking the forest world around, and in its immediate neighbourhood the wood was cleared away so as to give an open esplanade, along which, upon the present occasion, some fifteen hundred or two thousand men had passed the preceding day and night: having liberated the poor pastor of auron on the night before. some few tents of rude construction, some huts hastily raised, had been their only shelter; but they murmured not; and indeed it was not from such causes that any of those who deserted from the body of protestant insurgents quitted the standard of their leader. it was, that the agents of the governing priesthood had long been busy amongst them, and had sapped the principles and shaken the resolution of many of those who even showed themselves willing to take arms, but who soon fell away in the hour of need, acting more detrimentally on their own cause than if they had absolutely opposed it, or abandoned it from the first. doubts of each other, and hesitation in their purposes, had thus been spread through the protestants; and though, of the number assembled there, few existed who had now either inclination or opportunity to turn back, yet they thought with gloomy apprehension upon the defection that was daily taking place in the great body of huguenots throughout france; and their energies were chilled even if their resolution was not shaken. the day of which we now speak rose with a brighter aspect than the preceding one, and it was scarcely more than daylight when the gates of the castle were opened, the horses of the count de morseiul and his immediate officers and attendants were brought out; and in a minute after, he himself, booted and spurred, and bearing energetic activity in his eye, came forth upon the esplanade, surrounded by a number of persons, who were giving him information, or receiving his orders. the men who were gathered in arms on the slope of the hill gazed up towards him with that sort of expectation which is near akin to hope; and the prompt rapidity of his gestures, the quickness with which he was speaking, the ease with which he seemed to comprehend every body, and the readiness and capability, if we may so call it, of his own demeanour, was marked by all those that looked upon him, and gave trust and confidence even to the faintest heart there. "where is riquet?" the count said, after speaking to some of the gentlemen who had taken arms; "where is riquet? he told me that two persons had arrived from paris last night, and were safe in his chamber. where is riquet?" "riquet! riquet!" shouted several voices, sending the sound back into the castle; but in the mean time the count went on speaking to those around them in a sorrowful tone. "so poor monsieur de l'estang is dead!" he said. "that is a shining light, indeed, put out. he died yesterday evening you say--god forgive me that i should regret him at such a moment as this, and wish that he had been left to us. there was not a nobler or a wiser, or, what is the same thing, a better man in france. i have known him from my childhood, gentlemen, and you must not think me weak that i cannot bear this loss as manly as might be," and he dashed a tear away from his eye. "that they should torture such a venerable form as that!" he added; "that they should stretch upon the rack him, who never pained or tortured any one! these things are too fearful, gentlemen, almost to be believed. the time will come when they shall be looked upon but as a doubtful tale. is it not six of our pastors, in poitou alone, that they have broken on the wheel? out upon them, inhuman savages! out upon them! i say. but what was this you told me of some ladies having been freed from the prison?--oh, here is riquet. now, sirrah, what are your tidings? who are these personages from paris?" "one of them, sir," replied riquet, whose tone was changed in no degree by the new situation in which he was placed, "one of them is your lordship's own man, or rather your lordship's man's man, peter. he is the personage that i left in paris to give the order for your liberation that you wot of." "ay!" said the count; "what made him so long in following us? he was not detained, by any chance, was he?" "oh no, my lord," replied the valet, "he was not detained, only he thought--he thought--i do not know very well what he thought. but, however, he stayed for two or three days, and is only just come on hither." "does he bring any news?" demanded the count. "none, but that the prince de conti is dead, very suddenly indeed, of the smallpox, caught of his fair wife; that all protestants are ordered to quit paris immediately; and that the duke of berwick has made formal abjuration." "i grieve for the prince de conti," said the count, "he was promising and soldier-like; though the other, the young prince de la roche-sur-yon, is full of still higher qualities. so, the boy duke of berwick has abjured. that might be expected. no other news?" "none, my lord, from him," replied the man, who evidently was a little embarrassed in speaking on the subject of his fellow-servant; and he added immediately, "the other gentleman seems to have news; but he will communicate it to none but yourself." "i will speak with them both," replied the count. "bring them hither immediately, riquet." "why, my lord," said the valet, "as to peter, i do not well know where----" "you must know where, within three minutes," replied the count, who, in general interpreted pretty accurately the external signs and symbols of what was going on in riquet's heart. "you must know where, within three minutes, and that where must be here, by my side. maître riquet, remember, though somewhat indulgent in the saloon or the cabinet, i am not to be trifled with in the field. now, gentlemen, what were we speaking of just now? oh, these ladies. have you any idea of what they were in prison for? doubtless, for worshipping god according to their consciences. that is the great crime now. but i did not know that they had begun to persecute poor women;" and a shade of deep melancholy came over his fine features, as he thought of what might be the situation of clémence de marly. "why, it would seem, sir," replied one of the gentlemen, "from what i can hear, that the ladies were not there as prisoners; but were two charitable persons of the town of thouars, who had come to give comfort and consolation to our poor friend, monsieur de l'estang." "god's blessing will be upon them," replied the count, "for it was a noble and a generous deed in such times as these. but here comes master riquet, with our two newly arrived friends. good heavens, my old acquaintance of the bastille! sir, i am very glad to see you free, and should be glad to see you in this poor province of poitou, could we but give you any other entertainment than bullets and hard blows, and scenes of sorrow or of strife." "no matter, no matter, my young friend," replied the old englishman; "to such entertainment i am well accustomed. it has been meat and drink to me from my youth; and though i cannot exactly say that i will take any other part in these transactions, being bound in honour, in some sense, not to do so, yet i will take my part in any dangers that are going, willingly. but do not let me stop you, if you are going to ask any questions of that fellow, who came the last five or six miles with me; for if you don't get him out of the hands of that rascal of yours, there will be no such thing as truth in him in five minutes." "come hither, peter," cried the count. "maître riquet you have face enough for any thing; so stand here. now, peter, the truth at one word! what was it that riquet was telling you not to tell me?" "why, my lord," replied the man, glancing his eye from his master to the valet, and the awe of the former in a moment overpowering the awe of the latter; "why, my lord, he was saying, that there was no need to tell your lordship that i never delivered the order that he gave me to deliver at the gates of the bastille." the count stood for a moment gazing on him thunderstruck. "you never delivered the order!" he exclaimed. "do you mean to say you never delivered the order he gave you for my liberation?" "no, my lord," replied the man, beginning to quake in every limb for fear that he had done something wrong. "i never did deliver the order. but i'll tell your lordship why. i thought there was no use of delivering it, for just as i was walking up to do so, and had made myself look as like a courier of the court as i could, i saw you yourself going along the rue st. antoine, with two boys staring up in your face, and i thought i might only make mischief for myself or you if i went and said any thing more about the matter. when i knew you were free, i thought that was quite enough." "certainly, certainly," replied the count; "but in the name of heaven, then, by whom have i been delivered?" "why, my lord, that is difficult to say," replied riquet, "but not by that fellow who has brought me back the order as i gave it to him; and now--as very likely your lordship would wish to know--i told him not to tell you, simply because it would tease you to no purpose, and take away from me the honour of having set your lordship free, without doing you any good." "you are certainly impudent enough for your profession," replied the count, "and in this instance as foolish as knavish. the endeavour and the risk were still the same, and it is for that i owe you thanks, not for the success or want of success." "ah, sir," replied riquet, "if all masters were so noble and generous, we poor valets should not get spoilt so early. but how you have been liberated, heaven only knows." "that's a mistake," replied the old english officer; "every body at the court of france knows. the king was in a liberating mood one week; and he himself gave an order for the count's liberation one day, and for mine two days afterwards. i heard of it when i went to present myself before the king, and the whole court was ringing with what they called your ingratitude, count; for by that time it was known on what errand you had set off hither." the count clasped his hands together, and looked down upon the ground. "i fear," he said in a low voice, "that i have been sadly misled." "not by me, my lord, upon my honour!" cried riquet, with an earnest look. "i did my best to serve you, and to deliver you; and i fully thought that by my means it had been done. the man can tell you that he had the order from me: he can produce it now--" "i blame you not, riquet," said his master, "i blame you not! you acted for the best; but most unhappily has this chanced, to bring discredit on a name which never yet was stained. it is now too late to think of it, however. my part is chosen, and there is no retracting." "when on my visit to the court," said the old english officer, "in order to return thanks for my liberation, and to demand certain acts of justice, i heard you blamed, i replied, my good sir, that we in england held that private affections must never interfere with public duties; and that doubtless you felt the part you had chosen to be a public duty. they seemed not to relish the doctrine there--nor you fully to feel its force, i think." "my dear sir," said the count, "i have not time to discuss nicely all the collateral points which affect that question. all i will say is, that in following such a broad rule, there is much need to be upon our guard against one of man's greatest enemies--his own deceitful heart; and to make sure that, in choosing the seeming part of public duty, to be not as much influenced by private affections--amongst which i class vanity, pride, anger, revenge--as in adopting the opposite course." "that is true, too; that is true, too," replied the other. "man puts me in mind of an ape i once saw, whose greatest delight was to tickle himself; but if any one else tried to do it, he would bite to the bone. but i see you are about to march--and some of your people have got their troops already in motion. if you will allow me half an hour's conversation as we ride along, i shall be glad. i will get my horse, and mount in a minute." "the horse that brought you here must be tired," replied the count; "my people have several fresh ones. riquet, see that a horse be saddled quickly for--this gentleman. a strange piece of ignorance, sir," he continued, "but i am still unacquainted with your name." "oh, thomas cecil, my good count," replied the old officer, "sir thomas cecil; but i will go get the horse, and be with you in a moment." the count bowed his head, and while the englishman was away, proceeded to conclude all his arrangements for the march. in something like regular order, but still with evident symptoms of no long training in the severe rules of military discipline, the count's little force began to march, and a great part thereof was winding down the hill when the old englishman returned. "that is a fine troop," he said, "just now getting into motion. if you had many such as that, you might do something." "they are a hundred of my own protestant tenantry and citizens," replied the count. "they have all served under me long in the late war, and were disbanded after the truce of twenty years was signed. there is not a braver or steadier handful in europe; and since i have been placed as i am, i make it a point to lead them at the head in any offensive operations on our part, and to follow with them in the rear in the event of retreat, which you see is the case now. you will let them precede us a little, and then we can converse at leisure." thus saying, he mounted his horse, and after seeing the little body, which he called his legion, take its way down the hill, he followed accompanied by sir thomas, with a small party of attendants fifty yards behind them. "and now, my good sir," said the young nobleman, "you will not think me of scanty courtesy if i say that it may be necessary to tell me in what i can serve you; or, in fact, to speak more plainly, if i ask the object of your coming to my quarters, at once, as i am informed that the intendant of the province, with what troops he can bring together from berry and rouergue, forming altogether a very superior force to our own, is marching to attack us. if he can do so in our retreat, of course he will be glad to avail himself of the opportunity, especially as i have been led away from the part of the country which it is most easy to defend with such troops as ours, in order to prevent an act of brutal persecution which they were going to perpetrate on one of the best of men. thus our time for conversation may be short." "why, you have not let him surprise you, i hope?" exclaimed the old officer. "not exactly that," replied the count; "but we are come into a part of the country where the people are principally catholic, and we find a difficulty in getting information. i am also obliged to make a considerable movement to the left of my real line of retreat, in order to prevent one of our most gallant fellows, and his band of nearly three hundred men, from being cut off. he is, it is true, both brave and skilful, and quite capable of taking care of himself; but i am sorry to say grief and excitement have had an effect upon his brain, and he is occasionally quite insane, so that, without seeming to interfere with him too much, i am obliged, for the sake of those who are with him, to give more attention to his proceedings than might otherwise have been necessary." the count paused, and the old officer replied, in a thoughtful tone, "i am in great hopes, from what i hear, that you will find more mild measures adopted towards you than you anticipate. are you aware of who it is that has been sent down to command the troops in this district, in place of the former rash and cruel man?" "no," replied the count, "but, from what i have heard during these last four days, i have been led to believe that a man of far greater skill and science is at the head of the king's troops. all their combinations have been so much more masterly, that i have found it necessary to be extremely cautious, whereas a fortnight ago i could march from one side of the country to the other without any risk." "the officer," replied sir thomas cecil, "was raised to the rank of major-general for the purpose, and is, i understand, an old friend of yours, the chevalier d'evran." the count suddenly pulled up his horse, and gazed, for a moment, in the old man's face. "then," said he, "the protestant cause is ruined.--it is not solely on account of louis d'evran's skill," he added, "that i say so: though if ever any one was made for a great commander he is that man; but he is mild and moderate, conciliating and good-humoured; and i have remarked that a little sort of fondness for mystery which he affects,--concealing all things that he intends in a sort of dark cloud, till it flashes forth like lightning,--has a very powerful effect upon all minds that are not of the first order. the only bond that has kept the protestants together has been sharp and bitter persecution lately endured. if any one equally gentle and firm, powerful and yet conciliating, appears against us, i shall not have five hundred men left in two days." "and perhaps, count," said the old man, "not very sorry for it?" the count turned his eyes upon him, and looked steadily in his face for a moment. "that, i think," he said, "is hardly a fair question, my good friend. i believe you, sir, from all i have seen of you, to be an upright and honourable man, and i have looked upon you as a sincere protestant, and one suffering, in some degree, from your attachment to that faith. i take it for granted, then, that nothing which i have said to you this day is to be repeated." "nothing, upon my honour," replied sir thomas cecil, frankly. "you are quite right in your estimation of me, i assure you. if i ask any question, it is for my own satisfaction, and because, sir, i take an interest in you. nothing that passes your lips shall be repeated by me without your permission; though i tell you fairly, and at once, that i am going very soon to the head quarters of the chevalier d'evran, to fulfil a mission to him, which will be unsuccessful i know, but which must still be fulfilled. will you trust me so far as this, count? will you let me know whether you really wish this state of insurrection to go on; or would not rather, if mild--i will not call them equitable--terms could be obtained for the protestants of this district, that peace should be restored and a hopeless struggle ended? i do not say hopeless," he continued, "at all to disparage you efforts; but----" "my dear sir," replied the count, "act as bluntly by me as you did in the bastille, call the struggle hopeless if you will. there are not ten men in my little force who do not know it to be hopeless, and those ten are fools. the only choice left, sir, to the protestants of this district when i arrived here was between timid despair and courageous despair; to die by the slow fire of persecution without resistance, or to die with swords in our hands in a good cause. we chose the latter, which afforded, indeed, the only hope of wringing toleration from our enemies by a vigorous effort. but i am as well aware as you are that we have no power sufficient to resist the power of the crown; that in the mountains, woods, and fastnesses of this district and of brittany, upon which i am now retreating, i might, perhaps, frustrate the pursuit of the royal forces, for months, nay, for years; living, for weeks, as a chief of banditti, and only appearing for a single day, from time to time, as the general of an army. day by day my followers would decrease; for the scissars of inconvenience often shear down the forces of an insurgent leader more fatally than the sharp sword of war. then, a thousand to one, no means that i could take would prevent all my people from committing evil acts. i, and a just and holy cause, would acquire a bad name, and the whole would end by the worst of my people betraying me to death upon the scaffold. all this, sir, was considered before i drew the sword; but you must remember that i had not the slightest idea whatsoever that the king had shown any disposition to treat me personally with any thing but bitter severity.--to return to your former question, then, and to answer it candidly and straight-forwardly, but merely remember between you and i, i should not grieve on such reasonable terms being granted to the generality of protestants as would enable them to live peacefully, adhering to their own religion, though it be in private; to see my men reduced, as i have said, to five hundred, ay, or to one hundred: provided those gallant men, who, with firm determination, adhere to the faith of their fathers, and are resolved neither to conceal that faith nor submit to its oppression, have the means of seeking liberty of conscience in another land. as for myself," he continued, with a deep sigh, "my mind is at present in such a state that i should little care, if once i saw this settled, to go to-morrow and lay my head at the foot of the king's throne. abjure my religion i never will; live in a land where it is persecuted i never will; but life has lately become a load to me, and it were as well for all, under such circumstances, that it were terminated. this latter part of what i have said, sir, you may tell the chevalier d'evran: namely that, on the government granting such terms to the protestants of this district as will insure the two objects i have mentioned, the count of morseiul is willing to surrender himself to the pleasure of the king; though, till such terms are granted, and my people so secured, nothing shall induce me to sheath the sword:--and yet i acknowledge that i am bitterly grieved and mortified that this error has taken place in regard to the order for my liberation, and that thus an imputation of ingratitude has been brought upon me which i do not deserve." the old officer held out his hand to him, and shook that of the count heartily, adding with a somewhat profane oath, which characterises the english nation, "sir, you deserve your reputation!" he went on a minute or two afterwards to say, "i have been accustomed, in some degree, to such transactions; and i will report your words and nothing more: but, by your leave, i think you had better alter the latter part, and stipulate that you shall be allowed yourself to emigrate with a certain number of your followers. louvois is extremely anxious to keep from the king's ears the extent of this insurrection, having always persuaded him that there would be none. he will, therefore, be extremely glad to have it put down without more noise on easy terms, and doubtless he has given the chevalier d'evran instructions to that effect." "no, no," replied the count; "i must endeavour, sir, to wipe away the stain that has been cast upon me. do you propose to go to the chevalier's head quarters at once?" "not exactly," replied the old englishman. "i am first going to thouars, having some business with the duc de rouvré." "good god!" exclaimed the count; "is the duc du rouvré at thouars?" and a confused image of the truth, that clémence de marly had been one of the two persons found in the prison with claude de l'estang, now flashed on his mind. ere the old man could reply, however, two of the persons who were following, and who seemed to have ridden some way to the left of the direct road, rode up as fast as they could come, and informed the count de morseiul, that what seemed a large body of men, was marching up towards their flank by a path which ran up the hollow-way between them and the opposite hills. the little force of the count had by this time emerged from the woods, and was marching along the side of the hill, that gradually sank away into those _landes_, across which armand herval had, as we have seen, led clémence de marly. up the valley, on the left, lay a deep ravine, bringing the cross road from thouars into the road in which the huguenots were, so that the flank of the count's force was exposed to the approach of the enemy on that side, though it had somewhat the advantage of the ground. no other line, however, had been open for him, the country on the other side leading into tracts much more exposed to attack; and, in fact, on that morning no choice had been left but either to run the risk of what now appeared to have happened, or to leave herval and his men to their fate, they not having joined the main force on the preceding day as they had been directed to do. the count instantly turned his horse's head galloped to the spot from whence the men had seen the head of the enemy's column, paused for a single instant, in order, if possible, to ascertain their force, and then riding back, commanded the small troop, which he called his legion, to face about. while, by his orders, they traversed a piece of broken ground to the left, so as to approach a spot where the hollow-way debouched upon the open country, he sent five or six of his attendants with rapid orders to the different noblemen who were under his command, in regard to assuming a position upon the hill. "tell monsieur du bar," he said to one of the men, "to march on as quickly as possible till he reaches the windmill, to garnish that little wood on the slope with musketeers, to plant the two pieces of cannon by the mill so as to bear upon the road, to strengthen himself by the mill and the walls round it, and to hold that spot firm to the very last. jean, bid the marquis send off a man instantly to herval, that he may join us with his chauve-souris, and in the mean time ask him to keep the line of the hill from the left of monsieur du bar to the cottage on the slope, so that the enemy may not turn our flank. if i remember right, there are two farm roads there, so that all movements will be easy from right to left, or from front to rear. as soon as herval comes up, let the marquis throw him forward, with his marksmen, to cover my movements, and then commence the general retreat by detachments from each flank, holding firm by the mill and the wood to the last; for they dare not advance while those are in our hands. i can detain them here for a quarter of an hour, but not longer.--sir thomas cecil," he added, "take my advice, and ride off for thouars with all speed. this will be a place for plenty of bullets, but no glory." thus saying, he galloped down to his troop; and in a moment after the old english officer, who stood with the utmost sang-froid to witness the fight, saw him charge into the hollow-way at the head of his men. chapter ix. the battle and the retreat. we must now return to the small shepherds cottage in the _landes_; and, passing over the intervening day which had been occupied in the burial of the good pastor, we must take up the story of clémence de marly on the morning of which we have just been speaking. at an early hour on that day armand herval came into the cottage, where the people were setting before her the simple meal of ewe milk and black bread, which was all that they could afford to give; and, standing by her side with somewhat of a wild air, he asked her if she were ready to go. she had seen him several times on the preceding day, and his behaviour had always been so respectful, his grief for the death of claude de l'estang so sincere, and the emotions which he displayed at the burial of the body in the sand so deep and unaffected, that clémence had conceived no slight confidence in a man, whom she might have shrunk from with terror, had she known that in him she beheld the same plunderer, who, under the name of brown keroual, had held her for some time a prisoner in the forest near auron. "to go where, sir?" she demanded, with some degree of agitation. "i knew not that i was about to go any where." "oh, yes!" replied the man, in the same wild way. "we should have gone yesterday, and i shall be broke for insubordination. you do not know how stern he is when he thinks fit, and how no prayers or intreaties can move him." "whom do you speak of, sir?" demanded clémence. "i do not know whom you mean." "why, the general to be sure," replied the man, "the commander-in-chief,--your husband--the count de morseiul." the blood rushed up into the cheek of clémence de marly. "you are mistaken," she said; "he is not my husband." "then he soon will be," replied the man with a laugh; "though the grave is a cold bridal bed.--i know that, lady!--i know that full well; for when i held her to my heart on the day of our nuptials, the cheek that used to feel so warm when i kissed it, was as cold as stone; and when you come to kiss his cheek, or brow, too, after they have shot him, you will find it like ice--cold--cold--with a coldness that creeps to your very soul, and all the heat that used to be in your heart goes into your brain, and there you feel it burning like a coal." clémence shuddered, both at the evident insanity of the person who was talking to her, and at the images which his words called up before her eyes. he was about to go on, but a tall, dark, powerful man came in from the cottage door where he had been previously standing, and laid hold of herval's arm, saying, "come, keroual, come. you are only frightening the lady; and, indeed, you ought to be upon the march. what will my lord say? the fit is upon him now, madam," he continued, addressing clémence, "but it will soon go away again. they drove him mad, by shooting a poor girl he was in love with at the preaching on the moor, which you may remember. i am not sure, but i think you were there too. if i could get him to play a little upon the musette at the door, the fit would soon leave him. he used to be so fond of it, and play it so well.--poor fellow, he is terribly mad! see how he is looking at us without speaking.--come keroual, come; here is the musette at the door;" and he led him away by the arm. "ay," said the old shepherd as they went out, "one is not much less mad than the other. there, they ought both to have gone to have joined the count last night. but the burying of poor monsieur de l'estang seemed to set them both off; and now there are all the men drawn out and ready to march, and they will sit and play the musette there, lord knows how long!" "but what did they mean by asking if i were ready?" said clémence. "do they intend to take me with them?" "why yes, madam," replied the old man; "i suppose so. the litter was ready for you last night, and as the army is going to retreat i hear, it would not be safe for you to stay here, as the catholics are coming up in great force under the chevalier d'evran." clémence started and turned round, while the colour again rushed violently into her cheeks; and then she covered her eyes with her hands, as if to think more rapidly by shutting out all external objects. she was roused, however, almost immediately, by the sound of the musette, and saying, "i will go! i am quite ready to go!" she advanced to the door of the cottage. it was a strange and extraordinary sight that presented itself. herval and paul virlay, dressed in a sort of anomalous military costume, and armed with manifold weapons, were sitting together on the stone bench at the cottage door, the one playing beautifully upon the instrument of his native province, and the other listening, apparently well satisfied; while several groups of men of every complexion and expression, were standing round, gazing upon the two, and attending to the music. the air that herval or keroual was playing was one of the ordinary psalm tunes in use amongst the protestants, and he gave it vast expression; so that pleasure in the music and religious enthusiasm seemed entirely to withdraw the attention of the men from the madness of the act at that moment. paul virlay, however, was mad in that kind, if mad at all, which is anxious and cunning in concealing itself; and the moment he saw clémence, he started up with somewhat of shame in his look, saying,-- "he is better now, madam; he is better now. come, herval," he continued, touching his arm, "let us go." herval, however, continued till he had played the tune once over again, and then laying down the musette, he looked in virlay's face for a moment without speaking; but at length replied,-- "very well, paul, let us go. i am better now. madam, i beg your pardon; i am afraid we have hurried you." even as he spoke a messenger came up at full speed, his horse in a lather of foam, and eagerness and excitement in his countenance. "in the name of heaven, keroual, what are you about?" he cried. "here is the count and monsieur du bar engaged with the whole force of the enemy within two miles of you. in heaven's name put your men in array, and march as fast as possible, or you will be cut off, and they defeated." the look of intelligence and clear sense came back into herval's countenance in a moment. "good god! i have been very foolish," he said, putting his hand to his head. "quick, my men: each to his post: sound the conch there. but the lady," he continued, turning to the man who had ridden up; "what can we do with the lady?" "oh, she must be taken with you, by all means," replied the man. "we can send her on from the cross road into the front. they will sweep all this country, depend upon it; and they are not men to spare a lady." clémence turned somewhat pale as the man spoke; and though, in fact, her fate was utterly in the hands of those who surrounded her, she turned an inquiring look upon maria, who stood near, as if asking what she should do. "oh, go, lady! go!" cried the attendant, in a language which the men did not understand, but which clémence seemed to speak fluently; and after a few more words she retired into the cottage, to wait for the litter, while the band of brown keroual, some on horseback and some on foot, began to file off towards the scene of action. in a few minutes after the litter appeared; but by this time two mules had been procured for it, and, with a man who knew the country well for their driver, clémence and maria set off with the last troop of the huguenots, which was brought up by herval himself. he was now all intelligence and activity; and no one to see him could have conceived that it was the same man, whose mind but a few minutes before seemed totally lost. he urged on their march as fast as possible, pressing the party of foot which was attached to his mounted band; and in a few minutes after a sharp fire of musketry met the ear of clémence as she was borne forward. this continued for a little time, as they passed round the edge of a low wood which flanked the hills on one side, and seemed the connecting link between the _landes_ and the cultivated country. about five minutes after, however, louder and more rending sounds were heard; and it was evident that cannon were now employed on both sides. the voices of several people shouting, too, were heard, and a horse without a rider came rushing by, and startled the mules that bore the litter. clémence de marly could but raise her prayers to god for his blessing on the right cause. it was not fear that she felt, for fear is personal. it was awe. it was the impressive consciousness of being in the midst of mighty scenes, which sometimes in her moments of wild enthusiasm she had wished to see, but which she now felt to be no matter for sport or curiosity. another instant she was out upon the side of the hill beyond the wood; and the whole scene laid open before her. that scene was very awful, notwithstanding the confusion which prevented her from comprehending clearly what was going on. a large body of troops was evidently marching up the valley to the attack of the heights. a windmill surrounded by some low stone walls, not a hundred yards to the left of the spot where she was placed, appeared at the moment she first saw it one blaze of fire, from the discharge of musketry and cannon, which seemed to be directed, as far as she could judge, against the flank of a body of cavalry coming up a road in the valley. on the slope of the hill, however, to the right, a considerable body of infantry was making its way up to the attack of the farther angle of the wood, round which she herself had just passed; and, from amongst the trees and brushwood, nearly stripped of their leaves as they were, she could see poured forth almost an incessant torrent of smoke and flame upon the assailing party, seeming almost at every other step to make them waver, as if ready to turn back. the object, however, which engaged her principal attention was a small body of horsemen, apparently rallying, and reposing for a moment, under shelter of the fire from the hill. why she knew not,--for the features of none of those composing that party were at all discernible,--but her heart beat anxiously, as if she felt that there was some beloved being there. the next instant that small body of men was again put in motion, and galloping down like lightning, might be seen, though half hidden by the clouds of dust, to hurl itself violently against the head of the advancing column, like an avalanche against some mighty rock. almost at the same moment, however, an officer rode furiously up to herval, and gave him some directions in a quick and eager voice. herval merely nodded his head; then turned to the driver of the mules, and told him to make as much haste as he could towards mortagne, along the high road. "remain with the head of the column," he said; "and, above all things, keep your beasts to the work, for you must neither embarrass the march, nor let the lady be left behind." the man obeyed at once; but before he had left the brow of the hill, clémence saw the band of keroual begin to descend towards the small body of cavaliers we have mentioned, while a company of musketeers, at a very few yards distance from her, began to file off as if for retreat. all the confusion of such a scene succeeded, the jostling, the rushing, the quarrels, the reproaches, the invectives, which take place upon the retreat of an irregular force. but several bodies of better disciplined men taking their way along the road close to clémence, preserved some order and gave her some protection; and as they passed rapidly onward, the sounds of strife and contention, the shouts and vociferations of the various commanders, the rattle of the small arms and the roar of the artillery, gradually diminished; and while clémence hoped in her heart that the battle was over, she looked round for some one coming up from the rear to inquire for the fate of him for whom her heart had beat principally during that morning. for about half an hour, however, nobody came, the retreat assumed the appearance of an orderly march, and all was going on tranquilly, when a horseman came up at a quick pace, and pulled in his charger beside the litter. clémence looked towards him. it was not the face that she expected to see, but, on the contrary, that of a tall, thin, hale old man, perfectly a stranger to her. he pulled off his hat with military courtesy, and bowed low. "i beg your pardon, madam," he said, "but i have just been informed of your name, quality, and situation, and also with the circumstances of your being brought from thouare hither. i come to say," he added, lowering his voice and bending down, "that i am just going to visit an old friend, the duke de rouvré, who, i understand, is your guardian. now, i do not know whether you are here of your own good will, or whether there be any degree of force in the matter. should you, however, be disposed to send any message to the duke, i am ready to take it." "i give you many thanks, sir," replied clémence, "but, of course, i can send no long message now, nor detailed explanation of my situation. assure him only, and the duchess, who has been a mother to me, of my deep love, and gratitude, and respect." "but shall i tell them," said the old man, "that you are here with your consent, or without your consent?" "you may tell them," replied clémence, "that i was brought here indeed without my consent, though being here i must now remain voluntarily. my fate is decided." "do you mean to say, madam?" demanded the old gentleman, bluffly, "that i am to tell them you are married? that is the only way in general that a woman's fate can be decided which i know of." "no, sir," replied clémence, colouring, "there is in this country a different decision of one's fate. i am a protestant! it must no longer, and it can no longer be concealed." a bright and noble smile came upon the old man's countenance. "i beg your pardon, madam," he said. "i have spoken somewhat rudely, perhaps; but i will deliver your message, and at some future time may ask your pardon, if you will permit me, for having called the colour into a lady's cheek, a thing that i am not fond of doing, though it be beautiful to see." thus saying, and bowing low, he was about to turn his horse and canter back again, when an eager look that lighted up clémence's features, made him pause even before she spoke, and ride on a little further beside her. "you came from the rear, sir, i think," she said, in a low and faltering voice. "may i ask how has gone the day?--is the count de morseiul safe?" the old man smiled again sweetly upon her. "madam," he said, "did not sad experience often show us that it were not so, i should think, from the fate of the count of morseiul this day, that a gallant and all daring heart is a buckler which neither steel nor lead can penetrate. i myself have sat and watched him, while in six successive charges he attacked and drove back an immensely superior force of the enemy's cavalry, charging and retreating every time under the most tremendous and well sustained fire of the light infantry on their flanks that ever i saw. scarcely a man of his whole troop has escaped without wounds, and but too many are killed. the count himself, however, is perfectly unhurt. i saw him five minutes ago bringing up the rear, and as by that time the enemy were showing no disposition to pursue vigorously, he may be considered as safe, having effected his retreat from a very difficult situation in the most masterly manner. is there any one else, madam, of whom i can give you information?" "i fear not," replied the lady. "there is, indeed, one that i would fain ask for; but as you have been with the count de morseiul, probably you do not know him. i mean the chevalier d'evran." "what, both the commanders!" exclaimed the old gentleman, with a smile which again called the colour into clémence's cheek. "but i beg your pardon, madam," he added; "i have a better right to tell tales than to make comments. in this instance i cannot give you such accurate information as i did in the other, for i do not know the person of the chevalier d'evran. but as far as this little perspective glass could show me, the gentleman who has been commanding the royal forces, and whom i was informed was the chevalier d'evran, is still commanding them, and apparently unhurt. i discovered him by his philomot scarf, and sword knot, after losing sight of him for a time. but he was still upon horseback, commanding in the midst of his staff, and has the credit of having won the day, though the immense superiority of his forces rendered any other result out of the question, even if he had not acted as well and skilfully as he has done. i will now once more beg pardon for intruding upon you, and trust that fair fortune and prosperity may attend you." thus saying, he turned and cantered away; and on looking round to her maid, clémence perceived that maria had drawn the hood of her grey cloak over her head. chapter x. the lover's reunion. the march was over, the pursuers left behind, and the count of morseiul had pitched his tents in a strong position, with some shepherds' huts and one or two cottages and farm-houses in the midst of his camp. a nunnery of no great extent, situated upon a little eminence, was within the limits of his position, and a small chapel belonging thereunto, nearly at the bottom of the hill, and commanding the passage of a stream and morass, was occupied by a strong body of his followers, under herval and virlay, while the marquis du bar, who had been slightly wounded in the course of that day's strife, insisted upon fixing his quarters on the most exposed side of the camp, where any attack was likely to take place. no attempt had been made to take possession of the nunnery, as it was only occupied by women, and as the count was aware that in case of need, he could obtain entrance in a moment. at the same time he could fully depend not only upon the courage and firmness, but upon the vigilance of du bar, and he therefore looked upon his small force as completely in security. provisions, too, had been found in abundance, and the people of the neighbouring country were somewhat better disposed towards the huguenot cause, than those of the district which they had just left. his men, however, had suffered tremendously, even in the brief struggle which had taken place with the overpowering force of the catholics. of his own troop, not more than thirty men were found capable of action at the end of that day, and, at least, one third of the whole huguenot force was unfit for service. this was a lamentable prospect, as the insurgents had no points of strength to fall back upon, and had not the leaders been animated by the consciousness of having performed great actions in that day's contest and having held at bay the royal army with a force six times inferior in number, the proposal of dispersing and carrying on the warfare by desultory efforts in the woods, which was suggested in one of their little councils, would certainly have been adopted. in the mean time, however, the spirit of the men was kept up, and their resolution fortified, by the prayers and exhortations of the various ministers who accompanied the camp; and on going round to the different quarters just after nightfall, the count found some bodies of the protestants still engaged in their religious exercises, some just concluded, but all less depressed at heart than he was himself. when he had done his round, he paused before the door of one of the farm-houses--the best and most comfortable--and dismissing the men who had followed, he turned to enter. there was a slight degree of hesitation, however, seemed to come over him as he did so, and he remained for some moments with his hand upon the latch. he at length raised it, and entered the kitchen of the farm-house, where the family of the proprietor were assembled round the ample hearth, on which was a full supply of blazing wood. at that very moment, speaking to the mistress of the house, was clémence's attendant, maria; but clémence herself was not present, and on inquiring for her, the count was told that she was in an upper chamber, to which the woman immediately led him. albert of morseiul followed her step by step, and when the door opened, he saw clémence sitting at the table, with her head resting on her hand, and her eyes turned towards the fire; but with such a look of deep sadness and painful thought, as made his heart ache to see and to know that he could not change it. "here is the count de morseiul," said the maid; and instantly clémence started up, and turned towards the door, while the count entered, and the maid retired. the face of clémence de marly assumed two or three different expressions in a moment. there was joy to see him, there was doubt, there was apprehension; but she advanced towards him at once, and the look of love was not to be doubted. he took the hands that she held out to him, he kissed them tenderly and often: but still there was deep sadness on his brow, as there was in his heart, and his first words were, "oh, clémence, at what a moment have you come to me at last!" "albert," she said in reply, "i have much to say to you. since i have been here, and seen what i have seen, i have found many excuses for your conduct; and i have learned to think that what i wrote briefly i may have written harshly and unkindly, and to blame myself as much, nay more than you: believing, though i had no time to explain why i could not come at the moment as i could have wished, yet, that i should still have added, such words as might show you that i was yours unchanged, however much i might judge that you had acted rashly, unadvisedly, and unlike yourself. i have determined to tell you all this at once, albert, and, acknowledging that i blame myself, to shelter myself from all reproaches on your part in your kindness and generosity." "thanks, thanks, dearest clémence," replied the count, pressing her to his heart; "this is, indeed, balm after such a day as this: but i think, my clémence, when you hear all, you will yourself exculpate me from blame,--though i fear that the charge of ingratitude which others may bring against me, will never be done away in the less generous minds of the world in general, without a terrible sacrifice. you i know, clémence, will believe every word i tell you." "oh, every word!" she exclaimed; "to doubt you, albert, were to doubt truth itself." "well, then, believe, clémence," he said, "when i tell you, that till this morning,--till this very morning,--i had not the slightest idea whatsoever that my liberation was attributable to the king. not only i, but all my domestics, every attendant that i have, my man riquet himself, all believed that it was through an artifice of his that i had been set at liberty. had i thought otherwise, upon my word, my first act would have been to fly to versailles, to express my thanks, whatever my after conduct might have been." he then explained to her every thing that had taken place, and the mistake under which he had himself laboured throughout. "what confirmed me in the belief that the whole of riquet's story was perfectly correct," he said, "was the fact that besmaux, when he set me at liberty, observed that the order under which he did it, was not quite in the usual form, together with some remarks that he made upon there being no carriage sent for me with the order." "alas! alas!" cried clémence, wringing her hands, "it was my weakness; it was my foolish fears and anxiety, that produced all this mischief. listen to my tale now, albert, and forgive me, forgive me for what i have done." she then related to her lover almost all that had taken place between the king, herself, and madame de maintenon. we say almost, because she did not relate the whole; but though albert of morseiul saw it, he divined from what she did tell, that there were matters which she was bound not to divulge. perhaps he divined the important truth itself, and at all events he did not love her a bit the less for a concealment which had no want of confidence in it. "on the following morning," she said, "at the hour that the king had appointed, i did not fail to be in attendance. i found him writing; but it was soon over, and he handed me the paper, saying, 'there, lady, we have judged the cause that you have at heart as favourably as you judged ours last night. tell him,' he added, 'when you see him, that--though we cannot alter the strict laws, which we have found it necessary to make, for his sake--we will grant him all that may reasonably make him happy, either in our own land, or in another!'" "and i have borne arms against him," cried the count, clasping his arms together. "yet hear me out, albert," continued clémence, "for the fault is mine. the order was for your immediate liberation. i took it eagerly, thanked the king, and retired, well knowing that it ought to be countersigned by louvois, and sent through his office. but during the evening before, on the occasion of something that was said, he gave me such a fiend-like look of revenge, that i knew he would seek your destruction, if not mine. i was well aware, too, that in many an instance he has interrupted the king's clemency, or his bounty; and weakly, most weakly, i sent the order without his signature--ay, and without a moment's delay, by a servant belonging to the duc de rouvré. thus, thus it was, that i, in my eagerness for your safety, have plunged you into new dangers,--dangers from which, alas! i fear that there is scarcely a possible means of escape." the count looked down upon the ground for a moment, and he then replied, "i will write to the king myself, clémence. it is very possible that he will not even read the letter of a rebel with arms in his hand. but still it will be a satisfaction to me to do so. i must first get to the sea side, however, in order that i may place poor riquet in security, for were the tale told and he afterwards discovered, i fear that no tortures would be considered too horrible to punish the daring act that he committed." "i, too, will write," replied clémence. "i will write and tell the whole to one, who, though she will refuse at first, i know, to do any thing in our behalf, yet will not fail, calmly and quietly, to labour in our favour, thinking that she owes something to me. i will tell her the whole; i will tell her distinctly, albert; and if you will procure it for me i will send her even the forged order that you mention, with the attestation of the man who brought it back from paris." albert of morseiul pressed her to his heart, and she added, "at all events, albert, we shall be able to fly. we are now not far from the sea; ships can easily be procured, and we may be happy in another land." albert of morseiul kissed her cheek for his only reply: but his heart was sad, and he could scarcely command even a smile to countenance the false hope she had expressed. his own determinations were taken, his own resolutions formed; but he thought it better and more kind not to make them known to clémence de marly till the moment arrived for putting them in execution. while they were yet speaking, the attendant again came into the room to inform the count that three persons waited below to see him, and on going down he found riquet, with one of the protestants attached to the marquis du bar, and a gentleman, who appeared to be an inferior officer in the royal service. the two latter instantly stepped forward when he appeared. "monsieur du bar," said the protestant soldier, "has sent you this gentleman, bearing a flag of truce, from the chevalier d'evran. he carries a letter to yourself, and a letter to the lady from thouars." the count bowed to the stranger, and begged to see the letter to himself. it was simply addressed to the count de morseiul, and he opened it with some emotion, for it was strange to see the hand of louis d'evran, writing to him as from one adversary to another. the style and tone of the letter, however, though it was very short, were precisely as if nothing had occurred to interrupt their intimacy, or array them hostilely against each other. it ran-- "dear albert, "i write to you simply to know whether i am to regard the communication made to me, on your part, by an english gentleman, called sir thomas cecil, as formal and definitive, as i must be made aware of that fact before i can transmit it to the court. i trust and hope that good results may proceed from it: but you must not forget that it is an awful risk. for my part i will do my best to quiet the province with as little harshness as possible, and with that object i accepted, or rather may say, solicited this command. in every respect, however, my duty must be done to the king, and shall be so done to the utmost. you never in your life fought better than you did this morning. your defence of the heights was quite a turenne affair; but you made a mistake in your morning movement to the left, which showed me your flank. perhaps, however, you had some reason for it, for i think there was a fresh corps came up towards the close of the affair. look to yourself, dear albert, for be you sure that i shall give you no breathing time; and so god speed you! "louis d'evran. "post scriptum. i find myself called upon by my duty, to require you formally to send back la belle clémence to her good friend de rouvré, and to address a letter to her upon the subject of her return." the count had read this epistle with a thoughtful and a somewhat frowning brow. it was quite characteristic of the chevalier d'evran, but yet there was something in it that did not please him. he turned, however, to the officer courteously, saying,-- "the chevalier d'evran notifies to me, that he has sent a letter to mademoiselle de marly, and seems to leave it to me to deliver it. i would rather, however, that you did so yourself, if that lady will permit me to introduce you to her, when you can bear her answer from her own mouth. riquet," he said, "go up and inquire, whether mademoiselle de marly will grant this gentleman a few minutes' audience." a short pause ensued: for clémence hesitated for some time. at length, however, riquet returned with an answer in the affirmative, and the count led the officer to her presence. "i am commanded, madame," said the stranger, "by monsieur le chevalier d'evran, lieutenant-general of the province, to deliver you this letter, and to say, that, at any time to-morrow which you will name, he will send a proper carriage and attendants, to convey you back to the town of thouars, from which he understands that you were forcibly carried away, some night ago." clémence merely bowed her head, and held out her hand for the letter, which she opened and read. a faint smile came over her countenance as she proceeded, and when she had done, she handed the epistle to her lover, asking, "what shall i do or say?" "nay, i can give you no advice," replied the count. "in this matter, clémence, you must act by your own judgment: advice from me, situated as you are now, would bear somewhat the character of dictation. do you wish me to read the letter?" "certainly," she replied. "my mind will be easily made up as to the answer." the count then proceeded to read the letter, which was merely one of form; and began-- "mademoiselle, "i am urged by monsieur le duc de rouvré, and feel it a part of my duty, to apply to you immediately to return to the care and protection of that gentleman and the duchess, under whose charge and guardianship you have been placed by the king. although we are fully informed that you were carried away from the town of thouars without your own consent and approbation, we feel sure, from the high character and reputation of the count de morseiul, though now unfortunately in open rebellion, that he will be most anxious you should return, and will do all that he can to facilitate the arrangements for that purpose. such being the case, let me exhort you, mademoiselle, to make all haste to quit the camp of a body of men in open insurrection, and to place yourself under the protection of legitimate authority. "i have the honour to be, "mademoiselle, "your devoted servant, "louis d'evran." the count returned the letter with no other comment than, "it is strange;" and clémence paused for a moment, gazing upon the back of the letter, but evidently occupied by deep thoughts. she then turned to the officer, who had remained standing, and said, "i will not detain you, sir, to write, as my answer must be merely what the chevalier d'evran expects. you will inform him--notwithstanding that it may seem bold of me to say so--that although i was certainly not brought here with my consent, i, nevertheless, am here by my consent; and as i have long been disposed to return to that faith in which i was originally instructed, and have for some time embraced it upon sincere conviction, i cannot consent to place myself in a situation where the exercise of the reformed religion will be denied to me; but must, on the contrary, remain with those who will protect and support me in my adherence to what i consider the only pure and true faith." "in short, madam," replied the officer, "i am to tell the chevalier that you are a huguenot?" "exactly, sir," replied clémence; "and that i have been so for some time." the officer showed an inclination to pause, and to add something to what had been said; but the count stopped him. "you are, sir," he said, "i think but the bearer of a letter; nothing in that has been shown us giving you at all the title of an envoy. you have, therefore, but to bear back the reply which this lady has given." "and your own, sir," said the officer, "which i have not received." "it is as simple as her own, sir," replied the count. "assure the chevalier d'evran of my best regard; tell him he may trust entirely and fully to the proposal made to him on my part, to which he alludes, as far at least as i myself am concerned. in respect, however, to what will satisfy the other leaders, who are in arms for the maintenance of their just liberties, and for the attainment of immunity in worshipping god according to their own consciences, he must deal with themselves. in that i cannot, and do not interfere, and have only to support them with my sword and counsels till such time as they have obtained their rights, or are satisfied with any arrangement proposed." "i shall not fail," replied the officer, "to convey these messages distinctly;" and thus saying, he bowed, and left the room, followed by the count of morseiul, who, giving directions that his eyes should be properly bandaged, placed him in the hands of the protestant soldier who had accompanied him, and of the guard which was waiting without. he then made a sign to riquet to follow him up stairs, and bade his valet repeat to clémence de marly all that had occurred respecting his liberation from the bastille. "and now, riquet," he said, when the man had given a much more straight-forward and decided statement than he usually made, "it is my intention, as soon as possible, to lay the whole of these facts before the king, feeling it due to my own honour to show him that i have not been so ungrateful as he thinks. as the act, however, which you have committed might prove very dangerous to you, if you should fall into the hands of the catholic party, i shall take care, before i give this account, that you have an opportunity of seeking refuge in another land. i know that all countries are to you alike: and i will ensure that you shall be provided with full means of obtaining for yourself comfort and repose." "sir," said the man, with some feeling, "all countries, as you say, are to me alike. but such is not the case with regard to all masters. please god, i will never serve another but yourself. if you quit the country, i will quit it with you: if you remain, i will remain. i am already--am i not?--in arms against the crown. i am just as much a rebel riding after you from place to place, and every now and then firing a musket when i think nobody sees me, as if i were at the head of the whole business, and people called it the rebellion of riquet. you may therefore lay the whole statement before the king if you please, and i will myself write down the plain facts, in fewer words than a paper drawn up by a notary's clerk without a fee. i have no fear, sir, of gathering together upon my shoulders a few more stray crimes and misdemeanours. that does not lie in the way of my cowardice. my neck is thin and long, and whether it be the axe or the cord that has to do with it, it will neither give the cord nor the edge much trouble; while i have always one consolation, which is, that if the experiment of hanging should prove disagreeable, it cannot be tried upon me twice. i will go and get the paper directly, sir, which the man, peter, brought back again. i will put down all his sayings and doings, and all my own; and the king, who is said to have a high taste in all branches of skill, ought to declare when he sees the order for your liberation which i manufactured, that there is not a piece of mosaic like it in all versailles, and grant me a high reward for such a specimen of dexterity in my art." "i fear, you deceive yourself, riquet," replied the count; but the man shook his head. "no, sir, i do not," he said, "i assure you. all things considered and well weighed, i do not think that i run a bit more risk by this matter being told to the king, than if it never reached his ears." thus saying he left the room, and albert of morseiul turned to other and sweeter thoughts. "dear, dear clémence," he said, gazing tenderly upon her, "you have now, indeed, chosen your part as i could expect clémence to do, and by the words that you have this day spoken, you have swept away every feeling in my bosom that could give me a moment's pain." "hush, albert, hush," said clémence. "i know the kind of pain to which you allude. but you should never have entertained it. love, albert,--the love of a heart such as yours, ought never to doubt." "but, dear clémence," replied the count, "is it possible for love to be satisfied while there is any thing touching its affection concealed?" clémence smiled, but shook her head; and as she was about to reply, a single musket shot was heard disturbing the tranquillity which had fallen over the camp. the count listened, and his ear caught the distant sounds of "alerte! alerte!" followed almost immediately afterwards by a more general discharge of musketry. clémence had turned very pale. "fear not, dear clémence," he said, "this is merely a night attack upon some of our quarters which will soon be repelled, for i have taken sufficient precautions. i will see what it is, and return immediately." thus saying he left her, and clémence, with a heart full of strong and mingled emotions, leaned her head upon the little table and wept. chapter xi. the night attack. particular orders had been issued by the count de morseiul that no offence should be given to the religious feelings of the catholics: and, in issuing his commands for the occupation of the little chapel at the bottom of the hill, he had directed that the building appropriated to the ceremonies of the church should not be entered, except in case of necessity; the porch and the sacristy being taken possession of, and the piece of consecrated ground around it, which was strongly walled, affording a sort of fort, in which the men constructed huts, or set up their tents. they were accustomed, indeed, to abide in the forest, and found no difficulty or discomfort in taking their night's rest where they were. three fine spreading yew trees, of unknown age and immense thickness, afforded a pleasant shelter to many; and wine, which had been found plentifully in the hamlet above, as well as in a little town at no great distance, flowed liberally amongst a body of men who had fought hard and marched long since the morning. there was a great difference, however, to be remarked between them and the religious insurgents of more northern countries; for though both the sterner fanaticism which characterised scotland and england not long before, and the wilder imaginations and fanciful enthusiasms of the far south were occasionally to be found in individuals, the great mass were entirely and decidedly french, possessing the character of light, and somewhat thoughtless gaiety, so peculiar to that indifferent and laughter-loving nation. thus, though they had prayed earnestly, after having fought with determination in the cause which to them was the cause of conscience, they were now quite ready to forget both prayer and strife, till some other cause should re-produce the enthusiasm which gave vigour to either. they sat in groups, then, round fires of an old apple tree or two which they had pulled down, and drank the wine--procured, it must be acknowledged, by various different means; but though they sang not, as perhaps they might have done under other circumstances, nothing else distinguished them from any other party of gay french soldiers carousing after a laborious day. herval and virlay, as the commanders of that peculiar body, had taken possession of the little sacristy, and made themselves as comfortable therein as circumstances admitted. they were both somewhat inclined to scoff at, and do dishonour to every thing connected with the ceremonies of the church of rome; but the commands of the count were still sufficiently potent with them to prevent them from indulging such feelings; and they remained conversing both over the events of the day, and also over past times, without any farther insult to the roman catholic faith than merely a scornful glance towards the vestments of the priests, the rich purple and lace of which excited their indignation even more than many articles of faith. several hours of the evening had thus worn away, and their conversation, far from being like that of their men without, was sad, dark, and solemn. the proximity of the convent had recalled to the mind of herval the situation of her he had loved; and though they talked much of her fate, yet by some peculiar accident, which we shall not attempt to explain, that subject, dark and painful as it was, did not disturb his mental faculties as might have been expected. it produced, however, both on him and on virlay, that dark and profound gloom, from which actions of a fierce and cruel nature more frequently have birth, than even from the keen and active excitement of strife and anger. "ay, and your child, too, virlay," said herval: "it is strange, is it not, that we have not yet found her? i should not wonder if she were in this very convent, up here upon the hill. the count will not surely want you to leave it unsearched, when we march to-morrow." "it matters little whether he do or not," replied virlay. "search it i will; and that as soon as it be grey day-light. my child i will have, if she be in france: and, oh, herval, how often, when we are near a monastery or a convent, do i long to put a torch to the gate of it, and burn it all to the ground!" "no, no," replied herval, "that would not do; you would be burning the innocent with the guilty." "ay, true," answered virlay, "and thus i might burn my own poor child." "ay, or my claire," replied herval,--"that is to say, if she had been living, poor thing! you know they shot her, paul. they shot her to the heart. but as i was saying, you might burn your own poor child, or the child of many a man that loves his as well as you do yours." "i wonder if she be in there," said paul virlay. "why should i not take ten or twelve men up, and make them open the gates and see?" "better wait till day," replied herval; "better wait till day, virlay. they have thousands of places that you might miss in the night. hark! some one knocked at the door--who is it? come in!" "only a poor old woman," replied a voice from without, half opening the door, "only a poor old woman soliciting charity and peace;" and a minute after, with timid and shaking steps, a woman, dressed in a grey gown like the portress of some convent, gradually drew herself within the doorway, and crossed herself twenty times in a minute, as she gazed upon the two protestants sitting with the gloom of their late conversation still upon their faces. "what do you want, old woman?" said herval sharply. "don't you know that you risk a great deal by coming out at this hour? my men are not lambs, nor wood pigeons, nor turtle doves." "oh, heaven bless you, sir, i know that," replied the old lady, "and in a great fright i am too: but after all i'm the least in a fright in the convent; and sister bridget--when she came to me with her teeth chattering in her head just after the men had come round and knocked at the door, and swore they would burn the place to the ground before morning--she talked so much about my courage, that i thought i had some, and agreed to come down; and then when she had got me out, she locked the wicket, and vowed i should not come in till i had been down to do the errand. so i came quietly on, and through the little gate, and got out of the way of the great gate, because i saw there were a number of fires there; and when i saw a light under the sacristy door, i said to myself, the officers will be in there, and they will be gentler and kinder----" "well, and what was your errand when you did come?" demanded herval sharply. "why, sir," replied the old woman, "we have a young lady amongst us--" paul virlay started suddenly on his feet--"and a sweet young lady she is too," continued the poor old nun, "as sweet a young lady and as pretty as ever i set my eyes on, and she told our good lady mother, the superior----" "what is her name, woman?" cried paul virlay, advancing upon the poor sister who retreated before him, but who still, with woman's intuitive tact in such things, saw that she had got the advantage. "what is her name, woman? it is my child! oh, herval, it is my child!" "so she said to my lady mother," continued the good nun, as soon as she could make her voice heard; "so she said to my lady mother, that she was sure that if her father was in the count of morseiul's camp, he would come up in a minute with a guard of men to protect the convent--especially if he knew that we had been kind and good to her." "where is she?--take me to her," cried paul virlay. "woman, take me to my child.--i will bring a guard,--i will protect you. where is my poor margette?" "are you her father, then, sir?" demanded the old woman. "is your name monsieur virlay?" "yes, yes, yes," cried he impetuously: "i am paul virlay, woman." "then, sir," she replied, "if you will bring up a guard and undertake to protect the convent, you can have the young lady, only pray----" "i will take a guard," cried he; "do not be afraid, woman! nobody shall hurt you. i will take a guard," he continued speaking to herval, as if in excuse for taking away part of the men from an important post, "i will take a guard for fear there should be men up there, and they should want to keep margette. the count said, too, that the only reason he did not occupy the convent was, that he did not like to disturb the nuns. now, when they ask it themselves, i may well go. you can send for me in a moment if i be wanted." "there is no fear of that," replied herval; "go, in god's name, and see your child." paul virlay hastened away, drawing the old woman by the arm after him, while herval remained behind shaking his head, with a melancholy motion, and saying, "he will see his child again, and she will cling round his neck and kiss his cheek, and they will be happy: but i shall never see my poor claire, as long as i linger on upon this dull world." he paused, and leaning his head upon his hand, plunged into melancholy thought. there was a little bustle without, while virlay chose out such men as he thought he could best depend upon, and then, that part of the camp did not exactly sink into tranquillity, but the general noise of the party was less. there was still loud talking amongst the men, and wine seemed to have done its work too, as in one or two instances, especially near the little sacristy, where the wilder and less tractable of herval's band had been placed to be under his own eye, the psalms with which the evening had begun had deviated into gayer songs; and he sat and listened gravely, while one of the men near the door carolled to his comrades a light ditty. song. in the deep woods when i was young, sly the happy, happy sunshine stole. under the green leaves, where the birds sung, and merry, merry music filled the whole; for mary sat there, and all her care was to outsing the linnet,--dear little soul! through the long grass, then would i steal, in music and sunshine to have my part. that no one was coming, seemed she to feel, till the warm kiss, made the sweet maid start. then would she smile, through her blushes the while, and vow she did not love me,--dear little heart! the sunshine is stealing still through the trees. still in the green woods the gay birds sing, but those leaves have fall'n by the wintry breeze, and many birds have dropped, that were then on the wing, all, all alone, beneath the cold stone, lies my sweet mary!--poor little thing! herval wept bitterly. it was one of the songs of his own youth, which he had himself sung in many a joyous hour: a song which was the master-key to visions of early happiness, and touching in its light emptiness upon all the most painful themes of thought. the song, the dear song of remembered happiness, sung at that moment of painful bereavement, was like a soldier's child springing to meet its father returning from the wars, and unconsciously plunging the arrow head deeper into the wound from which he suffered. as he thus sat and wept, he was suddenly roused by the sound of a single musket shot at no great distance, and starting up, he listened, when loud cries from the other side of the chapel caught his ear, and he rushed out. all was dark; not a star was in the sky; but the air was free from vapour, and looking towards the spot from which the sounds proceeded, he could see a dark body moving rapidly along the side of the hill, beyond the enclosure round the chapel. the shot that had been fired was not returned, and hurrying up to the spot as fast as possible, he clearly distinguished a column of infantry marching along at a quick pace in that direction, and evidently seeking to force its way between the convent and the chapel. there was none but a single sentry in that direction--the man who had discharged his musket--and herval exclaimed in agony, "good god, how is this? they have been suffered to pass the morass and the stream!" "i fired as soon as i saw them," replied the man; "but virlay carried off all the men from down below there, and marched them up to the convent." herval struck his clenched hand against his brow, exclaiming, "fool that i was to suffer him!" then rushing back as fast as possible, he called all the rest of his troop to arms, and with the mere handful that assembled in a moment, rushed out by the gate through which the portress of the convent had entered, and attempted to cast himself in the way of the head of the enemy's column. it was in vain, however, that he did so. a company of light infantry faced about, and met his first furious attack with a tremendous fire, while the rest of the force moved on. the sound, however, of the combat thus commenced, roused the rest of the camp, and the count of morseiul, himself on foot, and at the head of a considerable body of the most determined huguenots, was advancing, ere five minutes were over, not to repel the attack of the enemy--for by what he saw, albert of morseiul instantly became aware, that, his camp being forced at the strongest point, it was in vain to hope that the king's army could be repulsed--but at least to cover the retreat of his troops with as little loss as possible. all the confusion of a night combat now took place, the hurrying up by the dull and doubtful light; the cowardice that shows itself in many men when the eye of day is not upon them; the rashness and emotion of others, who indeed are not afraid, but only agitated; the mistakes of friends for foes, and foes for friends; the want of all knowledge of which party is successful in those points where the strife is going on at a distance. as far as it was possible in such circumstances, albert of morseiul restored some degree of order and regularity to the defence. relying almost altogether upon his infantry, he held the royalists in check, while he sent orders to some of the inferior commanders to evacuate the camp in as orderly a manner as possible, gathering the horse together upon the brow of the hill, so as to be ready when the occasion served to charge and support the infantry. his particular directions were despatched to monsieur du bar to maintain his post to the last, as the count well knew that the forces of the chevalier d'evran were sufficient to attack the huguenot camp on both sides at once. such, indeed, had been the plan of the chevalier; but it was not followed correctly. he had placed himself at the head of the attack upon the side of the convent, as by far the most hazardous and difficult. the officer who commanded the other attack was a man of considerable skill, but he had with him the intendant of the province; a personage as weak and presumptuous as he was cruel and bigoted: and insisting upon it, that the officer at the head of the troops had made a mistake in regard to the way, he entangled him in the morass, and delayed him for more than an hour. had the attack on that side succeeded, as well as that on the side of the chapel, the little force of the huguenots must have been absolutely annihilated, and had the attack there even commenced at the same time that it began on the other side, the disasters of that night must have been tenfold greater than they proved. as it was, the count de morseiul had time to offer at least some resistance, and to organise his retreat. a horse was soon brought to him, and perceiving by the firing on the flank of the enemy's column, that herval and his men were striving desperately to retrieve the error which had been committed, he called up a small body of horse, and making a gallant charge at their head, drove back some of the infantry companies that interposed between himself and the chapel, and opened a communication with herval and the men. giving orders to the officer in command of the horse to make another rapid charge, but not to entangle his men too far, the count himself rode down to herval, to ascertain what was proceeding in that quarter. he found the man covered with blood and gunpowder, raging like a wolf in the midst of a flock. "herval," he exclaimed, "a great mistake has been committed. a handful of men could have defended that bridge against an army." "i know it, count, i know it," replied herval. "i have been a fool, virlay has been a madman. i should never have trusted him by himself. it is time i should die." "it is rather time, herval," replied the count, "that you should live and exert your good sense to remedy what is amiss. do you not see that by spending your strength here you are doing no good, and losing your men every minute? gather them together: quick, and follow me. we want support, there, upon the hill. the chapel is untenable now. quick: lose not a moment. good god!" he said, "they are not charging as i ordered, and in another moment we shall be cut off!" it was indeed as he said. the young officer, to whom he had given the command, was shot through the head at the very moment that he was about to execute it. the charge was not made; the body which had been driven back by the count were rallied by the chevalier d'evran; the infantry of the huguenots, which had been guarding the heights, wavered before the superior force brought against them; and by the time that herval's men were collected, a large body of foot interposed between the count de morseiul and the spot where he had left his troops. nothing remained but to lead round herval's little force by the hollow-way on the edge of the morass, and climbing the steeper part of the hill, by the road that led to the little hamlet and farm houses, to rejoin the principal body of the protestants there, and to make one more effort to hold the hamlet against the advancing force of the royalists, till monsieur du bar had time to draw off his troops. ere the count, however, could reach the ground where he had fixed his own head quarters, both the infantry and cavalry, which he had left, had been driven back, and, by a terrible oversight, instead of retiring upon the hamlet, had taken the way to the right, along which the other bodies of troops had been ordered to retreat. the royalists thus, at the time that the count arrived, were pouring in amongst the cottages and farm houses, and when he reached the little knoll immediately behind the house, where he had left clémence de marly, he was instantly assailed by a tremendous fire from behind the walls of the court yard, and the lower windows of the house itself. he had no troops with him but herval's band, and a small body of foot which arrived at that moment to his assistance from the marquis du bar, and he paused for an instant in agony of heart, knowing and feeling that it was utterly hopeless to attempt to retake the farmhouse, and enable clémence to effect her escape. the grief and pain of a whole life seemed summed up in that one moment. "i will not," he cried, in the rashness of despair, "i will not leave her without an effort." herval was by his side. "sir," he said, "i must not live over this night. let us advance at all risks." the count gave the order, and the men advanced gallantly, though the enemy's fire was terrible. they were actually scaling the wall of the court-yard, when suddenly a fire was opened upon them from the houses and walls on either side. herval fell over amidst the enemy, the count's horse dropped at once under him, and he felt himself drawn forcibly out from beneath the dying animal, and carried along by the men in full retreat from that scene of slaughter. "here is a horse, count,--here is a horse," cried a voice near him. "mount, quick, and oh take care of my poor girl. she is on with the troops before. i have lost you the battle, and know what must come of it." the count turned and saw paul virlay by his side; but before he could reply the man left the bridle in his hand, and rushed into the midst of the enemy. springing on the charger's back the count gazed round him. herval's band was all in confusion; but beginning to rally upon the body of infantry sent by du bar. the hamlet was in full possession of the enemy: the only means of communication between du bar and the troops that were retreating was along the hill side. albert of morseiul saw that if he did not maintain that line, his gallant friend would be cut off, and, for the moment, casting from his mind all the other bitter anxieties that preyed upon it, he hastened to occupy a little rising ground, terribly exposed, indeed, to the enemy's fire, but which would protect the flank of his friend's little corps, while they joined the rest who were in retreat. that he was just in time was proved to albert of morseiul, by the sound of a load cannonade, which commenced from the very direction of du bar's quarters; and, sending that officer orders to retreat directly, he remained, for twenty minutes, repelling every charge of the enemy; and, by the example of his own desperate courage and perfect self-command, seeming to inspire his men with resolution unconquerable. in the mean time the marquis du bar retreated before the other body of royalists which had now come up, and having seen his men in comparative safety, rode back, with a small body of horse, to aid the count in covering the retreat. the royalists now, however, had gained their object; the camp of the huguenots was in their hands; the slaughter on both sides had been dreadful, considering the short space of time which the strife had lasted; the country beyond was difficult and defensible, and the order for stopping further pursuit was given as soon as no more resistance was made in the huguenot camp. chapter xii. the royalist camp. "i am astonished, sir, that you should presume to interfere," said the chevalier d'evran, speaking to the intendant of the province, whom he had found on riding down to the post of the second in command, in order to ascertain what was the cause of the attack having been so long delayed in that quarter. "i am astonished that you should presume to interfere at all. the weak gentlemen who have hitherto been commanding in this country have been indulgent to such insolence: but you will find very different consequences if you attempt to practise it upon me." "insolence, sir!--insolence!" exclaimed the intendant, foaming with rage and mortified pride at being thus addressed in the presence of many hundreds of witnesses. "insolence in me!--why, who am i, sir? am i not the intendant of justice, police, and finance in this province?" "yes, sir, insolence!" replied the chevalier d'evran. "you are the intendant of justice, police, and finance; but before i assumed the command of the king's forces in this province, you yourself had required martial law to be proclaimed, so that you not only put every one else under the authority of the military power, but yourself also; and, by heavens, if you stare in my face in that manner one moment longer, i will have you hanged up to yonder tree. bring a drum here," he continued, "and summon four officers from the regiments of lorraine and berry. we will soon see who is to command here." the unfortunate intendant turned as pale as ashes; for the gallantry and decision which the chevalier d'evran had shown since he assumed the command, were of a very impressive character, and gave weight to his threats. the officer who had laid the complaint against him, however, now interfered. "for god's sake, general," he said, "have mercy upon this poor man, and consider what will be the result of calling a drum-head court-martial." "i should always be very willing, sir," replied the chevalier, drawing up his fine person to its full height, "i should always be very willing to attend to your recommendations; but, sir, in the course of this night and the preceding day, i have obtained two great and signal successes over this body of insurgents; and i think that those successes will fully justify me in the eyes of the king, for punishing with such authority as is vested in my hands the person to whom we may attribute that our success was not complete, by the annihilation of the huguenot party in the province. if the intendant chooses immediately to make a humble apology for what has passed, and to promise in the most solemn manner never to interfere in any one thing in my camp, or under my command, i will so far overlook the matter for the time, as not to carry this extreme measure into execution against him at once. but, in the mean time, i will hold it suspended over his head, and if required, execute it on the moment." the apologies and promises were as full and ample as the chevalier could demand; and, leaving strict orders that the worthy intendant should be kept in a sort of honourable surveillance in the camp, the chevalier turned his horse's head, and rode back with his staff towards the village, smiling slightly over what had just passed, for, to say the truth, he had been acting a part much more harsh and severe than he was inclined to pursue in reality. the truth is, that after the engagement of the preceding morning, the intendant had shown some disposition to take possession of one or two prisoners that had fallen into the royalists' hands, for the purpose of employing the rack and the wheel in their conversion; but the chevalier, having determined from the first to put a stop to such measures, had evaded all discussion for the time, very sure that ere long the intendant would give him an opportunity of depriving him, at least for the time, of all authority in the province. the smile, however, was soon succeeded by a somewhat more anxious expression; for knowing as he did that clémence de marly was in the camp of the huguenots, he was not a little apprehensive of what might have been her fate in the course of the struggle of that night. he had given particular instructions regarding her, however; had made it so fully understood, that he would have no unnecessary bloodshed, and had exhorted his troops and inferior officers so eloquently to regard the protestants merely as erring brothers, as soon as the arms were out of their hands, that he felt little or no apprehension of any excesses being committed after the engagement. as soon, then, as he had ascertained that mademoiselle de marly was in the farmhouse on the top of the hill, and was perfectly safe, he contented himself with sending a message to her, telling her that he would visit her in the morning, and begging her in the mean time to put her mind completely at ease. he then proceeded to investigate the amount of his own loss, and that of the huguenots. nearly an equal number had fallen on each side; but the army of the chevalier d'evran could afford to lose a thousand men without any serious diminution of its strength, while the same loss on the part of the protestant force reduced it in a lamentable degree. "now," thought the chevalier, when he heard the result of the inquiries that he caused to be made, "if i can but drive albert of morseiul to the sea, and force him to embark with the most determined of his sect, while the others lay down their arms and conform, we shall do very well. these battles were necessary to dishearten the desperate fellows, and to give me power to do them good, and treat them mercifully. but we may change our system now, and press them hard without losing the lives of gallant men. what this old cecil tells me of the mistake about the liberation, may, if properly shown, mitigate a part of the king's anger towards albert; but it will never do the whole, and i fear flight is his only resource. this offer that he has made, however, stands desperately in the way, and yet it must be communicated to the king. i dare not conceal it." while he thus thought, sitting in the room of one of the cottages, information was brought him that one of the wounded huguenots, who was kept with other prisoners in a barn hard by, was very anxious to see him. "i will come immediately," he replied to the officer, and then sitting down, he wrote a brief despatch to louvois, in which he detailed all the events that had occurred; but at the same time, knowing the views of the minister, he intimated that the only means of keeping the extent of the insurrection from the king's knowledge, and from general publicity throughout the whole of europe, would be to give him the full power of pardoning all men on laying down their arms. he begged the minister to believe that he had not the slightest desire whatsoever that the little services he had performed should be reported to louis; but at the same time he pointed out that those services could not be ultimately beneficial, unless the power that he demanded was granted to him, and all other authority in the province superseded for at least one month. he felt very sure that this would be granted by louvois, as that minister had become greatly alarmed, and had openly expressed to the young commander his anxiety lest the extent of the revolt which had taken place in consequence of measures he had advised, should ruin him for ever with the king. the chevalier trusted, also--although he was obliged, in the end of his epistle, to state the proposal made by the count de morseiul--that the powers granted by the minister would be such as to enable him to serve that nobleman. when this despatch was concluded, and sent off, he demanded where the person was who had wished to see him, and was led to a small out-house close by the farm in which clémence abode. the door, which was padlocked, and at which a sentry appeared, was opened to give him admission, and he found stretched upon piles of straw on the floor of the building two or three men, apparently in a dying state, and another seated in a somewhat extraordinary attitude in one corner of the shed. the sight was very horrible; the straw in many parts was stained with blood, and anguish was legibly written on the pale countenances of the dying. "who was the prisoner that wished to speak with me?" said the chevalier, going in; but they each answered by claiming to be heard: one demanding a little water, one asking to be taken into the open air, and one who, before the words had fully passed his lips, lay a corpse upon the straw, asking pardon and life, and promising obedience and conversion. the chevalier ordered every thing that could make them comfortable to be supplied as far as possible, adding some sharp reproaches to his own people for the state in which he found the wounded: and he then said, "but there was some one who, as i understood, wished to speak with me more particularly." "it was i," said the man who was sitting down in the corner, at once starting up into the likeness of jerome riquet; while at the same moment another faint voice from the farther part of the building said, "it was i, general. i told the officer who came here, that i would fain see you about the count de morseiul." "riquet," said the chevalier, "i will attend to you presently. you seem well, and unhurt; answer me three questions, and i may say something that will satisfy you in return. have you been engaged in this unfortunate business simply as the servant of the count de morseiul?" "as nothing else, upon my word, sir," replied riquet. "are you a catholic or a protestant?" "as catholic as salt fish on a friday," replied riquet. "surrounded on all sides by heretics, i was at one time in great fear for myself, like a man in a city where there is a plague. but bless you, sir, i found it was not catching, and here i am more catholic than ever." "have you, then, in any instance, borne arms in this war?" demanded the chevalier. "no, on my honour, chevalier," replied the valet. "no arms have i borne except a shaving-brush, a razor, a pair of tweezers, and a toothpick." "well, then," replied the chevalier, "i can promise you pardon; but remember you are a prisoner on parole. do you give me your word that you will not try to escape?" "lord bless you, sir," replied the man, "i would not escape for the world. i am with the winning side. you don't suppose riquet's a fool, to go over to the poor devils that you're driving into the sea!" "scoundrel!" said a deep but faint voice from the other side of the building; and telling riquet to bring the light with him, the chevalier advanced to the spot, where, stretched upon the straw, in the most remote corner of the shed, lay the unfortunate armand herval, dying from the effects of at least twenty wounds. as soon as the eyes of the wounded man fell upon riquet, he exclaimed, angrily,--"get thee hence, traitor! let me not see your face, scoundrel! to abandon thus your noble lord at the first moment of misfortune!" "you mistake, monsieur," replied riquet quietly--"i am not a bit more of a scoundrel than you are, monsieur herval, nor, indeed, of a traitor either: every one serves his lord in his own way, master herval, that's all. you in your way, and i in mine. if you had waited a little, to hear what i had to say to the chevalier, you would have seen that i was quite as ready to make sacrifices for my lord as yourself." "herval!" said the chevalier, as he listened to their conversation; "that name is surely familiar to me." "well it might be," answered riquet; "for i dare say my lord must have told you, monsieur le chevalier. this man, or i am much mistaken, would have killed the king himself, if my lord had not prevented him." "indeed!" demanded the chevalier. "can we get any proof of this?" "proof, sir?" replied the dying man; "it was on that account i sent for you. the count de morseiul is ruined; and the cause of the reformed church is over; and all this evil has happened through my fault. i have heard, too, that he has offered to surrender himself to the axe, in order to buy safety for the rest of us. but surely the king--let him be as great a tyrant as he may--will not murder the man that saved his life." "the king, sir, is no tyrant," replied the chevalier, "but a generous and noble master to those who are obedient and loyal: even to the disobedient he is most merciful; and if this fact could be made known to him, and proved beyond all doubt, i feel perfectly convinced that he would not only pardon the count de morseiul for his past errors, but show him some mark of favour, in gratitude for what he has done." "the king does know it," replied herval, sharply; "the king must know it; for i have heard that the whole papers of hatréaumont fell into the hands of louvois; and i have myself seen that foul tiger's name written to an order for my arrest as one of hatréaumont's accomplices." "but that does not prove," replied the chevalier, "that either the king or louvois knew of this act of the count's." "it does prove it," replied the dying man; "for the only letter i ever wrote to hatréaumont in my life was to tell him that i had failed in my purpose of killing the tyrant; that every thing had gone fair till the count de morseiul came in between me and him, and declared, that i should take his life first. i told him all, every thing--how i got into the gardens of versailles at night, and hid under the terrace where the king walked alone--how yon babbling fool betrayed my purpose to the count, and he came and prevented me doing the deed i ought to have done, even if i had taken his life first. i told him all this, and i cursed the count of morseiul in my madness, over again and again--and now the man whose life he saved is seeking to bring him to the block." "this is extraordinary and important," said the chevalier: "i cannot believe that the king knows it. louvois must have kept it from his ears. will you make a deposition of this, my good fellow, as early to-morrow as we can get proper witnesses and a notary?" "early to-morrow?" said the man faintly, "early to-morrow, chevalier?--i shall never see a to-morrow. now is your only moment, and as for witnesses, quick, get paper and pen and ink. there is not half an hour's life in me. if you had come when first i sent, there would have been plenty of time. but now every moment is a loss." "quick, riquet," cried the chevalier, "bid the officer at the door run to my quarters, and bring down pen and ink and paper, without a moment's delay." riquet lost no time, and the chevalier endeavoured as far as possible to keep herval quiet till the means of writing were brought. the dying man would go on speaking, however, but with his voice becoming lower and lower, and his ideas evidently in some degree confused. once or twice he spoke as if he were at versailles, and in the presence of the king: then seemed as if he fancied himself conversing with hatréaumont; and then again pronounced the name of claire more than once, and talked of happiness. when riquet and the officer returned, however, with the materials for writing, he had still strength and recollection enough to commence his declaration in a formal manner. "i, armand herval," he said, "do hereby declare, and on the bed of death affirm most solemnly, that had it not been that the count de morseiul prevented me, i would have shot the king of france, upon the terrace at versailles, after the play, on the night before the arrest of the chevalier de rohan, and that all i said was perfectly true, in a letter which was written by me to monsieur de hatréaumont, dated on the--i cannot recollect the day:" he added, in a lower tone, "it seems as if a mist had come over that part of my memory." "never mind," said the chevalier, "go on, my good friend, go on, the date is unimportant." "was it the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth?" continued the man. "i cannot recollect for the life of me, your majesty. it's a short life, too. mine will soon be spent, and claire's is all gone----" he spoke very faintly, indeed; and the chevalier said, "you forget, my friend, you forget. we were talking of the count de morseiul." "ah!" cried the man, with a greater effort, and starting up on the straw--"ah, so we were.--what a fool i am!--write it down, quick!--write it down, quick!--but take your fingers off my throat!--take your fingers off my throat!--i cannot speak if you stop my breath!--what's the use of putting out the light?--why do you put out the light?--oh, heaven, it is death, it is death," and, falling back upon the straw, the strong frame shook for a moment, as if an ague had seized him, and then all was still. the chevalier d'evran shut his teeth close, saying, "this is unfortunate. however, you are a witness, riquet, to all that he said." "lord bless you, noble sir," replied the valet, "nobody will believe a word that i say. i should consider my character ruined for ever if there was any body, in all europe, that would believe me upon my oath." "i had forgot," said the chevalier, dryly; "your character is in no danger, i believe, on that score. but my word will be believed, and my voice, at least, shall be heard." "well, sir," replied riquet, perhaps a little piqued at the chevalier's reply, "let me add my voice too; for though they may believe me in nothing else, they may, perhaps, believe me in a confession which will go to twist my own neck. i wish to be sent to the king, sir; though if you can find out when he is in a good humour i should prefer it. but my object is to inform him that it was altogether my fault, and my foolishness, and my crime, that prevented the count de morseiul from going to versailles as soon as he was liberated from the bastille to throw himself at the king's feet. if it had not been for that aforesaid foolishness of mine he would never have come hither, would never have led the rebels at all, and most likely, by this time, would have been as high in the king's good graces as ever." "i have heard all this before," said the chevalier. "but are you positively resolved, my good friend, to go voluntarily and make confession of all these things?--do you remember the consequences?--do you think of the risks?" "no, sir," replied riquet, "i do quite the contrary. i try to forget them all as fast as possible, being resolved to go at any rate, and, therefore, judging that the less i think about risks and consequences the better." "by heaven, thou art right," replied the chevalier, "and thou shalt have a bottle of burgundy, if there be one in the camp, to keep warm thy good philosophy. see, there is the grey of the morning coming in, and i may well go away satisfied with having found one man in the world who is not so great a scoundrel as i thought him." the chevalier returned to the hut in which he had established his quarters, and cast himself down for an hour's repose; but before the daylight had been long in the sky he was on foot again, and at the door of the farm-house which contained clémence de marly. he was immediately admitted; and, strange as it may seem, if the count de morseiul had witnessed that meeting, it would certainly have wrung his heart more than the loss of a great battle. the royalist commander advanced at once to his fair prisoner, and, putting his arms slightly round her, kissed her cheek without any apparent reluctance on her part; and her first exclamation was, "oh, louis, i am glad to see you safe! you know not how my heart is torn!" "i dare say it is, my pretty clémence," replied the chevalier, in his usual light tone; "but you, who have been doing nothing else but tearing other people's hearts for the last five years, must take your turn now. you have placed me in a terrible predicament, however, thoughtless girl," he added. "you are obstinate as an arragonese mule about this matter of religion, and will not be contented till you have got yourself roasted in this world as preparatory to----" "but tell me, louis--tell me about him!" demanded clémence. "is he safe? has he escaped from this awful night?" "i suppose you mean morseiul, by _he_ and _him_," said the chevalier, "and if so, he is safe, as far as i know. he has escaped. that is to say, he has not been taken, thank god--though one time he was very near it; for, by the flash of the guns, i saw his face in the middle of our men:--but i dare say now, clémence, that you would a thousand-fold rather have me killed than this heretic of yours?" "do not be unkind, louis," replied clémence--"i would of course rather have neither of you killed; but now that you have got me, tell me what is to be my fate?" "why, that question is difficult to answer," said the chevalier; "heaven knows, i did not want you, madam. i was obliged to write you a formal summons to return, for mere decency's sake; but i certainly never expected you would obey it. you might have said, no, silly girl, without telling all the world that you had turned huguenot--all for the love of a gallant knight." "nonsense, louis! do speak seriously," replied clémence: "you very well know i was what you call a huguenot long before." "not quite, clémence! not quite!" cried the chevalier: "you were what may be called huguenoting. but this rash and imprudent determination of declaring your feelings, doubts, or whatever they may be, at the very moment when the sword of persecution is drawn, was, indeed, very silly, clémence. what is to be done now is rendered doubly difficult, and i suppose i must of course connive at your escape. we must take means to have an intimation conveyed for some trading vessels to hover about the coast, to give you an opportunity of getting away till this fierce bigotry has gone by. it will not last long; and in a year or two, i doubt not, exiles will be permitted to return. the only difficulty will be to have the ships opportunely; but i think i can manage that." "oh, do, do, louis!" exclaimed clémence, eagerly. "that is all that can be desired; and pray try to persuade albert to fly at once." "nay, nay," replied the chevalier, laughing, "that must not be my task, clémence. on that subject i dare not say a word. but you may well do what you will. i will take care that the means of flight to another country shall be provided for you, and you may take with you any one that is willing to go." "but then," exclaimed clémence, "i must have the opportunity of persuading him." "certainly," exclaimed the chevalier: "the first thing you have to do is to get out of my camp as fast as you can. i would not have you three days here for the world; for as affairs go at present, i cannot answer that the power of protecting you will be left to me for three days. however," he added, after a moment's thought, "to-day you must stay and march on with us, and before to-morrow, i trust i shall be able to put you under such protection as will insure you safety and support in your flight; and now, pretty maid, i must leave you. we shall begin to march about noon. in the mean time there is a courier going to montaigu, so send off thither for whatever you may need to make you comfortable. an easy horse shall be ready for you; and if at any time you may feel yourself inclined to gallop away, you may take him with you as a present from me. by the way, little heretic," he added, when he got to the door, "you will want money for your peregrinations." "oh, no," replied clémence, "i have plenty. i have plenty, i assure you. i have near two hundred double louis which i took to the prison in hopes----." "little do you know of what you may want, silly girl," replied the chevalier. "why one of these very merchant ships may demand the half of that for carrying you over. here," he added, drawing forth a leathern purse embroidered in gold--"i don't know how much there is here, but you must take it too; and if by any unforeseen circumstance you should need more when in england, draw on me what they call a bill of exchange." clémence took the money without ceremony, as if it were a mere matter of course, and only added, "come and see me again before we march, louis." the chevalier nodded his head and left her. chapter xiii the last efforts. to describe the military man[oe]uvres which took place during the three or four following days would be neither amusing nor instructive to the reader. suffice it to say, that the small force of the count de morseiul diminished as he retreated, while the army of the chevalier d'evran was increased by the arrival of two new regiments. the latter had thus an opportunity of extending his line, and frustrating a vigorous effort made by the count to cut his way into brittany. every effort that the protestant leader made to bring to his aid those who had promised very soon to join him, only showed him that the estimation which he had formed of the degree of vigour and unanimity to be expected from the huguenots was but too accurate. almost all those determined and daring leaders of the lower orders who had given energy and activity to all the movements of the insurgents had fallen in the preceding skirmishes. herval was heard of no more; paul virlay had been seen by one of the soldiers to fall by a shot through the head towards the close of the last affair; and at length, with not more than five hundred men under his command, albert of morseiul found himself shut in between a force of eight thousand men and the sea. the only consolation that he had was to hear that clémence de marly was safe, and the only hope was that some vessels from rochelle, for which he had despatched a shallop in haste, might be tempted by the large sum he offered to hasten round and carry off a certain portion of his troops, comprising the principal leaders, while the rest laid down their arms, and he himself surrendered to the fate that awaited him. such were his plans and purposes when the last day of the insurrection dawned upon the world; and we must pause for an instant to describe the situation of his little force on that eventful morning. there is upon that coast a small rocky island, not so high as the celebrated mont st. michel, which is on the opposite side of the peninsula of brittany, but in almost every other respect similar to that famous rock. at the time we speak of this island was fortified, and the guns of the castle commanded almost entirely the small bay in which it was situated. at low water the island becomes a peninsula, being joined to the land like the mont st. michel by a narrow neck of land, along the top of which there ran a paved causeway, covered entirely by the sea to the depth of five or six feet at the time of high water. the commandant of the fort was a protestant gentleman who had distinguished himself in some degree in the service. he had been raised, and greatly favoured by the influence of the counts of morseiul, and owed his post to them. he had not only promised to co-operate with the young count in the commencement of the unfortunate revolt, but he had sent him some assistance, and a large quantity of ammunition; and when the count found that he was cut off from forcing his way into brittany on the one hand, or reaching sainctonge on the other, he had shaped his course past montaigu towards the little bay in which this island was situated, and had succeeded in reaching it, notwithstanding the efforts of the royalist corps to prevent him. opposite to the island was a small village, on a high bank above the sea-shore. it possessed a large church, and two or three walled farm houses; and during one half of the night after his arrival, the count toiled with the country people, who were principally protestants, to throw up breastworks and plant pallisades, so as to fortify the village in as strong a manner as possible. four cannon, which were all that he possessed, were planted to command the principal road leading to the village, and ere morning the whole was brought to such a condition as to enable the little band of protestants to offer a determined and lengthened resistance, should they be driven to do so. was it then, it may be asked, the purpose of the count to offer that resistance? it certainly was not; but feeling perfectly sure that the chevalier d'evran was disposed to grant the protestants the most lenient terms consistent with his duty, he took these measures in order to give him the best excuse for treating with the insurgents, and granting them a favourable capitulation. "if," he thought, "the chevalier can show to the king that it would have cost him two or three thousand of his best troops to overcome or slaughter a poor body of five hundred men, louis is too wise and too good a soldier himself not to hold him perfectly justified for granting the mildest terms." when all was completed, the count cast himself down to rest, and slept for some time from utter exhaustion. by the first ray of morning, however, he was upon the shore, looking towards the sea, and beheld, to his no small joy and satisfaction, three vessels, at the distance of about four or five miles, standing off and on, as if waiting for the tide to enter the bay. the tide, however, though not quite at the ebb, had sank so low that there was no chance of their being able to come in till it had quite gone down and risen again; and albert of morseiul looked with anxiety for the passing of six or seven hours, which must thus elapse. his anxiety now led him to the other side of the village, and going to one of the farm houses, situated at the corner of a small cart-road which he had barricaded, he went up to a window on the first floor, and looked over the wide view that sloped away below. there appeared, what he had expected to find, the camp of the chevalier d'evran, hemming him in on all sides. the distance between the village and the first tents was about two miles, so that at any time, without more than half an hour's notice, the attack upon his little fortress might commence. he was quite prepared, it is true, and doubted not to be able to maintain his post for many hours, knowing that his men would fight with the energy of despair. but no movement whatsoever in the royalist camp indicated any great haste to attack him. there were no groups of officers busily reconnoitring; there were no regiments drawn up as if to march to the assault; and the only objects that were seen were two files of soldiers marching along to relieve the guard at different points of the camp. all this was satisfactory to an experienced eye like that of the count de morseiul, and well knowing his opponent, he judged that the chevalier was waiting for some reply from paris, ere he gave any answer to the terms which he, the count, had suggested. he paused, therefore, for nearly twenty minutes, gazing over the scene, when suddenly, from a point of the camp where nothing seemed stirring before, a little group of persons on horseback drew out, and rode swiftly towards the village. the moment after the count perceived that two of those persons were clad in women's garments; and the rapidity with which they came, showed him that they were fearful of being stopped. going down from the window in haste, he sprang upon horseback, and with the attendants who were waiting for him below, rode out upon the side of the hill, in order to assist the fugitives in case of need; but no sign of pursuit took place till one half of the distance or more had been passed by the little party; and the count dismounting about a quarter of a mile from the village, watched their coming with eager eyes and a beating heart, as he recognised the form of clémence de marly. when she was beyond all risk of being overtaken, a small party of cavaliers issued forth from another part of the camp, and rode on towards the village, but slowly, and they were still at more than a miles distance when clémence was in the arms of her lover, and weeping upon his bosom. he led her in as fast as possible, followed by the maid maria, and no less a person than jerome riquet, who seemed to have found of breaking his word so strong a temptation, that he could not resist it. a rumour had spread amongst the protestants in the town that something of interest was proceeding without, and when the count and clémence turned towards the village, they found that their meeting had been witnessed by many eyes. but in the faces of those they passed, albert of morseiul read courage brightened, and resolution strengthened, by that which they had just seen; and there was not a man within that little encampment whose heart did not feel elevated and confirmed by witnessing the bursting forth of those tender and ennobling feelings, which ever, when pure and true, dignify man's spirit, and brighten his mind. when they were within the barriers, the count turned for a moment to look at the other group which had drawn out from the camp; but it did not seem that they were in pursuit of clémence, for they shaped their course along the road towards the principal entrance of the village, and when the count turned, he clearly saw them displaying a flag of truce. he led clémence into the house where he had taken up his head quarters, however, and saying a few soothing words, left her to see what was the intelligence which the chevalier's envoys conveyed. as he walked down he met a messenger coming to demand his presence at the barrier; and on approaching it, he found waiting, in the guard-house, the old english officer, sir thomas cecil, with one or two french, gentlemen with whom he was slightly acquainted. "monsieur de morseiul," said the old englishman, "i have been charged by major-general the chevalier d'evran to communicate to you the only terms which he is permitted by the king to grant under the circumstances in which you respectively stand. he was long in hopes that those terms would have been more favourable than they are, and they are very painful to me to announce. but as you conveyed to him a message through me, he thought that i ought to undertake to bear the reply." "i thank you, my dear sir," replied the count, "most sincerely for undertaking the task. but, as a preliminary, let me tell you before these gentlemen who have come with you, as well as before monsieur du bar here, and my own friends around me, that the only terms which i will accept are those which i notified to the chevalier d'evran through you, namely, permission for any one hundred of my friends of the reformed religion to retire from france unmolested; a free pardon to all the rest, except myself, on laying down their arms, and a promise that they shall be permitted to exercise their religion in private without annoyance. on these conditions we will immediately lay down our arms, and i will surrender myself at discretion to his majesty's pleasure." "no, no!--no, no!" cried several voices amongst the protestants; "we cannot submit to that. we will die at our post with arms in our hands, rather than that the count shall be sacrificed." "my good friends," replied the count, "that is a personal matter altogether. i have made the best terms that i can for you, and i have done what i judge right for myself; knowing that the only way of dealing with his majesty is to throw myself upon his magnanimity." the old englishman wiped away a tear from his eye. "i am sorry to say, sir," he rejoined, "that i cannot even mention such favourable terms as those. on condition of your immediately laying down your arms, the chevalier d'evran, in the name of the king, offers the following:--permission for every one not absolutely a subject of france to leave the country unmolested. free pardon to all but the actual leaders of the revolt, specified in the following list. they must unconditionally surrender to the king's pleasure, and trust to his mercy." the list apparently contained about fifty names; at the head of which stood that of the count of morseiul. the count looked round upon the protestant gentlemen by whom he was surrounded. on all their countenances but one or two there was awe, but not fear. as the only reply needful, the marquis du bar laid his finger upon the hilt of his sword, and the count turning to sir thomas cecil, said, "you perceive, sir, that it is utterly impossible we can accede to this demand. i know not whether it has been made under any mistaken impression; but when i offered what i did offer through you to the chevalier d'evran, i was just as certain that we should be reduced to the situation in which we are at present as i am now--nay, expected it to be worse than it is. we can but die, sir; and i have not the slightest objection to lead you round the preparations which i have made for resisting to the last; so that if our blood must be shed, and the chevalier is determined to sacrifice the lives of a large body of our royal master's troops, he may be satisfied that he cannot carry this position without the loss of two or three thousand men." "it is not necessary, count. it is not necessary," replied the old officer. "the chevalier has no choice; the terms are dictated by higher authority; and all that he can do farther than signify those terms to you is to grant you five hours to consider of them. if you like to accept a truce for that time you may take it." the count was not a little surprised at this indulgence, but he took care to express none; and accepting the truce willingly, suffered the old officer to depart. one or two of the young french officers, whom he had known in the army, wrung his hand as they went away, and besought him, with kindly feelings, to think well of what he was about. one of them, however, ere he went, whispered a more important word in his ear. "there are ships out at sea," he said. "you and the other leaders may get off before the five hours are out." the count took no notice, but wished him good-by; and returning with monsieur du bar and the rest of the officers, he held a brief consultation with them in the saloon of the little inn. "had we more boats," he said, "the matter would be easily managed. but there are but two on the shore, which will not carry out above twenty of us. however, my good friends, it becomes necessary to take some prompt resolution. i have begun to be somewhat doubtful to-day of le luc, who commands in the fort. he has sent me no answer to my note of last night, and though i do not believe that he would be so great a scoundrel, after all his promises, as to turn against us, yet i must ascertain decidedly what are his intentions; for he might sink the boats as they passed under his guns. if he be still friendly to us, and willing really to aid us, we are safe, for while the soldiery lay down their arms and surrender upon promise of free pardon, you, gentlemen, who all of you, i find, are upon this long list of proscription, can march along the causeway into the fort, and embark in the ships that lie out there. if, on the contrary, we find him a traitor, we must make the boats hold as many as they will, and take the chance of the scoundrel firing upon them. i shall only claim to have one place reserved in one of the boats." "two," said du bar; "surely two, morseiul. did i not see a lady?" "it is for her i speak," replied the count. "du bar, in pity do not urge me in matters where my resolution is taken. i have pangs and agony at my heart sufficient at this moment, believe me, to be spared that of refusing a friend.--now then, gentlemen," he added, after a moment's pause, "let five of you accompany me along the causeway which must be passable by this time, to speak to governor le luc. if you will mount your horses, i will be down with you in an instant," and he went up to take one hurried embrace of her he loved, and to explain to her what had happened, and what was proposed, concealing from her, as far as he could, the dangers and difficulties of their situation; but concealing from her still more carefully his own purpose of surrendering at discretion. when this was done he went down, and finding the other gentlemen ready, sprang upon his horse, without noticing that a multitude of the inferior protestants had gathered round, and seemed to be watching them with somewhat suspicious eyes. the sea had not quite left the causeway dry, except in one or two places, and the sands were still quite covered. but the only result of this was to force the count and his train to proceed slowly, and one by one, while he himself led the way, the white stone pavement being clearly discernible through the thin water. in the mean time, however, the protestants who had been gazing at him as he mounted, gathered into knots together, and seemed to be speaking hastily and discontentedly. some of the inferior officers joined them, and a great deal of tumult and talking ensued, which called out several of the gentlemen of the party to remonstrate. but remonstrance seemed in vain, and the crowd soon after trooped away out of the little open space where they had assembled, in the direction of the corps de garde, where the small battery of cannon was placed. various broken sentences, however, were heard from time to time, such as, "i would hardly have believed it. to take care of themselves, and leave us to perish. i always said, we should be made the sacrifice. better be a catholic and at peace, than that." "ride after the count and tell him what is going on," said one of the gentlemen to another, "while i go to our good minister, monsieur vigni, and get him to reason with them. you see they are mistaking the matter altogether, and think that we are going to abandon them. make haste, or it will be too late." the suggestion was instantly followed; but ere the officer could get his horse and ride down to the sea shore, the count and his party were nearly at the fort, and to them we must now turn. the progress of the young general of the huguenots had been slower than it might have been, not only on account of the causeway being partially covered with water, but also because the stone, with which it was composed, had in some places been broken up or carried away. he at length reached, however, the fortified head of the causeway at the foot of the rock, and then demanded admission to speak with the governor. this was refused him; but as such might naturally be the case, his suspicions were but little increased by that event. he, however, directed the officer in command immediately to send up and inform the governor le luc of his being there, and of his desire to speak with him. after keeping him some time, the officer returned, saying, "that monsieur le luc would come down himself to speak with the count," and during the period that the protestant leaders were thus occupied in waiting for the appearance of the governor, the protestant officer arrived from the village, bringing news that the soldiery which had been left behind were in a state of actual mutiny, having entirely mistaken the object of the count and his companions, and imagined that they were engaged in seeking their own safety, leaving the soldiers to meet whatever fate might befall them. "in the name of heaven, ride back, du bar," said the count, "and quiet them till i return. it is better for me to stay and speak to this worthy gentleman, who seems to be showing us a cold face, as you know he owes every thing to my house. i will return instantly, as soon as he condescends to favour us with his presence." du bar did not reply, but turned his horse, for they were still kept on the outside even of the causeway head, and rode back as fast as he could go, accompanied by one of the other officers. the count remained, growing more and more impatient every moment; and the governor, perhaps thinking that he would get tired of waiting, and retire without an answer, kept him nearly half an hour before he made his appearance. he then came down with that dull and dogged look, which generally accompanies the purpose of disgraceful actions; and the count, restraining his indignation, called to him to cause the drawbridge to be lowered, in order that he might speak to him more privately. "no, indeed," replied the governor, with a scoff; "with the little force i have in here, i shall not think of causing the drawbridge to be lowered, when i know that the village is occupied by a large party of armed traitors." "traitors!" exclaimed the count; but again overcoming his anger, he added, in a cooler tone, "monsieur le luc, up to this moment i have believed you to be of the reformed church." "i am so no longer," muttered the governor. "well, sir," continued the count, "there are other things which may have influence upon men of honour and good feeling besides their religion. there is at the village, as you say, a large party of protestant gentlemen, assembled in defence of their liberty and freedom of conscience: they find themselves unable to resist the power of those that would oppress them; terms are proposed for extending a free pardon to all but some thirty or forty; those thirty or forty are desirous of obtaining shelter in this fortress for one or two hours at the utmost, till they can embark in those ships, which are waiting for the rising of the tide. now, monsieur le luc, my father gave you the first commission that you held under the crown. he obtained for you your first promotion, and i bestowed upon you the post in this fortress which you now hold. will you, sir, grant us the shelter that we demand at your hand. "very pretty," replied le luc, "to talk of honour, and ask me to betray the trust that the king reposes in me." still the count kept his temper. "you refuse, then?" he demanded. "yes, that i do," answered the governor in a rude tone; "and the sooner you take yourself back to the land the better, for i am in no humour to be trifled with." it was with difficulty that the count restrained himself; but there was one chance more, and he tried it. "yet another word, my good friend," he said. "there is a matter in which you can favour us without endangering your own safety, or getting into discredit with the government. if we attempt to pass to the ships in what boats we can find, will you pledge me your word that you do not fire into them?" "if you do not make haste away from the gates of this fortress," replied the governor, who saw, by the quivering of the count's lip the contempt that he could not help feeling, "i will fire upon you where you are, and will sink the boat of every traitor that comes within shot." "sir," said the count, "you are a dastardly, pitiful, contemptible scoundrel. it is only happy for you that the drawbridge is between us, or i would treat you like an ill-conditioned hound, and lash you within an inch of your life under my horse's feet." "you shall hear more, traitor; you shall hear more in a minute," replied the governor. "and mind i tell you, the faster you go the better for you." thus saying, he turned away, and mounted the zigzag staircase in the rock with a rapid step. the count paused, and turned his horse; but at that very moment he saw a party of horsemen at the other end of the causeway apparently coming towards him with great speed, part of them upon the sands, which by this time had been left dry, part of them following the road in the midst. "it is du bar and the rest," said he, in a low voice, to one of the gentlemen near him. "i have a very great mind to stay here, and try to punish that fellow for his insolence. i could swim that little bit of sea in a moment, and the drawbridge once in our possession, the castle would be ours." "count, count," shouted the officer of the guard from the fortress-side of the drawbridge "for god's sake make haste and ride back. i hear that governor of ours giving orders for charging the cannon with grape. he will fire upon you as sure as i am alive, for he sent word to the chevalier d'evran last night that he would do so." "i thank you, sir, for your courtesy," replied the count calmly. "under these circumstances, my friends, it is better for us to so back." the other officers put their horses into a quick pace, and they rode on; but they had scarcely gone a hundred yards when the cannon of the castle opened a fire of grape upon them. the shot, however, flew over their heads, as they were too near the walls to be easily hit, except from the drawbridge, where the count could see preparations being made for following up the same course. at the same moment, however, he pulled up his horse, exclaiming, "good god, that is not the marquis du bar: it is the chevalier d'evran!" the officers who were with him paused also, and to their surprise, and somewhat to their consternation, perceived that, shut in as they were by the sea on two sides, and by the fortress on another, the only open ground before them was occupied by the commander-in-chief of the royalist forces, with a numerous staff, and a small escort of cavalry. "we have nothing for it, my friends," said the count de morseiul in a low, calm tone, "but to surrender; it is evident our men have capitulated in the village. let us ride on and meet them." thus saying he spurred on his horse, while the chevalier d'evran galloped forward on his side, waving his hat, and shaking his clenched fist towards the people on the walls of the fort. they either did not recognise him, however, or did not choose to obey his commands; and before he and the count de morseiul met, a second discharge of grape-shot took place from the cannon of the castle. at the same moment the count de morseiul beheld the chevalier d'evran suddenly check up his horse, press his hand upon his side, and fall headlong to the ground, while one of the horses of the count's party was killed upon the spot, and an officer of the chevalier's staff fell wounded, but rose up again immediately. the count galloped eagerly on to the spot where he had seen the chevalier d'evran fall, and the memory of long friendship came painfully back upon his heart. before he had reached the group of soldiers and officers, however, five or six men had raised the unfortunate commander from the ground, and were bearing him rapidly back towards the village. so eagerly were those who remained conversing together, and so fully occupied with their own thoughts, that the count de morseiul might, to all appearance, have passed by them without opposition or inquiry; but he himself drew in his rein, demanding, "is he much hurt?" "alas! monsieur de morseiul," replied the officer, who seemed to be next in command, "he is dead! killed on the spot by that infernal shot! and a nobler gentleman, or better soldier, never lived. but some of your own people are killed also; are they not?" "one of the horses only, i believe," replied the count. "pray, may i ask how all this has happened?--poor louis!" "ride on, ride on, charliot," said the officer, speaking to one of his own men before he answered the count, "that scoundrel will fire upon us again. tell him i will hang him over the drawbridge if he fires another shot monsieur de morseiul, i will explain all this as we ride back, for you will have but little time to make your arrangements. scarcely half an hour ago as monsieur d'evran and the rest of us were reconnoitring pretty close to your camp, a party of your men came out and offered to capitulate on certain terms, which the chevalier instantly agreed to, and they gave us possession of the gate and the corps de garde. just at that moment, however, came up monsieur du bar, who remonstrated somewhat angrily with the chevalier on signing a capitulation with the men, when he had given the officers a truce of five hours to consider of his terms. he represented that in those five hours all the gentlemen named in the proscribed list might have made their escape. on that the chevalier replied, that he intended to take no advantage; that the truce should be held to exist notwithstanding the capitulation; and that every gentleman on that list might act exactly as he pleased, without any one trying to impede him. he could not suffer them, of course, to pass through our camp; but if they could escape by sea they might. he said, however, that he wished to speak with this le luc, and that he would take the liberty of riding down through the village. du bar then asked if he intended to bid le luc fire on the boats or ships. he answered quite the contrary; that his only intention was to supersede him in his command, and put an officer in his place who would keep the truce to the letter. you have, therefore, yet four hours nearly, to do what you will in, monsieur de morseiul; for i, of course, taking the chevalier's command, shall maintain all his arrangements, and act in their full spirit." the count had listened sadly and attentively, and when the royalist officer had done speaking, he replied that by his leave he would ride on as fast as possible to the village, and consult with his companions. "do so! do so!" answered the other; "and now i think of it, i had better go on to the fort, and put the chevelier's intentions in execution. for this firing upon you may be considered already a breach of the truce. i shall find you on my return; and at the little auberge you will meet with an english gentleman most anxious to speak with you." thus saying, he turned again towards the fort, and the count, with a sad heart, rode back to the village. chapter xiv. the bitter parting. just at the entrance of the village, the count met with his companion du bar. "have you heard all?" demanded that officer. "what is to be done?" "get the boats ready with all speed," replied the count. "the tide will turn within half an hour, the ships will be able to come farther in. twenty or thirty persons may get off in the first boats, which must come back again for a second freight. i see clearly, my friend, that there is no intention of dealing harshly with us. all the officers wish us to escape, and there will be no more firing from the castle. i must leave the embarkation, and all that, to you, du bar, for i have things to go through that will try my heart to the utmost. i must have a few minutes to make up my mind to parting with my friends and companions, and all that i love on earth, forever.--du bar," he continued, while the other wrung his hand affectionately, "there will be a young lady who will accompany you, and that girl, the daughter of poor virlay. you have a wife and children yourself, whom you love, i know, fondly and devotedly. they are in safety, you told me, on those opposite shores which i shall never see. but let me beseech you,--by the memory of these dark and terrible days, when the hand that now presses yours is laid in the dust, as i know too well must soon be the case,--let me beseech you, i say, to give every aid and assistance to those two that i now commit to your charge. be to the one as a brother, du bar, and to the other as a father. i know you to be honest and true as you are brave and wise; and i shall lay my head upon the block with more peace at my heart, if you promise me that which i now ask." "i do, i do," replied the marquis, with the tears standing in his eyes. "i do promise you, from my heart, and i would fain persuade you even now to consider----" but the count waved his hand and rode on. there was a considerable crowd round the entrance of the little inn, and he had some difficulty in making his way in. at the door of the room where he had fixed his own quarters, he found two or three of the royalist soldiers; but, passing by them, he entered the room, when a sight met his eye which might well chill and wring his heart. the room was nearly empty, but stretched upon the long table, which occupied the midst, was the fine noble form of the chevalier d'evran, now still in death. standing near the head of the body, was the old english officer, sir thomas cecil, with an air of deep stern grief upon his fine and striking countenance. his hat was off, showing his white hair, his arms were crossed upon his chest, his head was erect as ever, and nothing like a tear was in his eye: but there was no mistaking the expression of his countenance. it was that of intense sorrow. but on the other side of the table grief was displaying itself in a different manner, and in a different form. for there knelt clémence de marly, with her beautiful head bent down over the dead body; her hair, fallen from its bindings, scattered wildly, partly over her own shoulders, partly over the breast of the chevalier; her left hand clasping that of the dead man, her eyes and face buried on his bosom, while the convulsing sobs that shook her whole frame, told how bitterly she was weeping. the count paused with a look of deep sadness: but there was no anger or jealousy in his countenance. the old english officer, however, as soon as he perceived him, hurried forward, and took both his hands, saying, in a low and solemn voice, "you must let her weep, count, you must let her weep! it is her brother!" "i have been sure of it for several days," replied the count. "she told me not, but i knew it from what she did tell me. this day of agony, however, sir, is not yet over. i must disturb her grief but to waken her to more. you know the short time that is allowed for flight. you know the fate that would await her here if she were to remain in this country as what is called a relapsed heretic, by the cruel persecutors of this land. within two hours from this time, my good sir, she must take her departure for ever. the boats will be ready, and not a moment must be lost; and in those two short hours she must part with one who loves her as well as ever woman yet was loved, with one who truly believes she loves him as well as woman's heart can love--and who shall say where is the boundary of that boundless affection? she must part with him, sir, for ever, and with her native land." "this is not her native land," replied the old officer. "the lady clémence cecil, sir, is an english woman. but in one respect you say true. my poor niece must go, for i have experienced in my own person, as you know, now daring is the injustice of arbitrary power in this land, in the prisons of which, i, an english subject, have been detained for more than a year and a half, till our own papistical and despotic king chose to apply to your despot for my liberation, and for the restoration of my brother's children. she must leave this land indeed. but your words imply that you must stay behind. tell me, tell me, my noble friend, is this absolutely necessary, in honour and in conscience?" the count grasped his hand, and pointed to the dead body. "i promised him," he said, "who lies there, that i would surrender myself to the king's pleasure. i have every reason to believe, that, in consideration of that promise, he dealt as favourably with us as he was permitted; that he even went beyond the strict line of his duty to give us some facilities of escape; and i must hold my promise to the dead as well as if he were here to claim it." "god forbid," said sir thomas cecil, "that i should say one word against it, terrible as is your determination--for you must well know the fate that awaits you. it seems to me that there was only that one act wanting, to make you all that our poor clémence ought to love on earth, at the very moment she is to lose you for ever. see, she is raising her head. speak to her, my friend, speak to her!" the count advanced and threw his arms round her. he knew that the grief which she felt was one that words could do nothing to mitigate, and the only consolation that he offered was thus by pressing her fondly to his heart, as if to express that there was love and tenderness yet left for her on earth. clémence rose and wiped; way her tears, for she felt he might think that some doubt of his affection mingled with her grief for her brother, if she suffered it to fall into excess. "oh, albert," she said, "this is very terrible. i have but you now----" a hesitation came over the count de morseiul as she spoke those words, gazing tenderly and confidingly upon him: a hesitation, as to whether he should at once tell her his determination, or not let her know that he was about to remain behind, till she was absolutely in the boat destined to bear her away. it was a terrible question that he thus put to his own heart. but he thought it would be cruel not to tell her, however dreadful might be the struggle to witness and to share. "alas, clémence," he replied, "i must soon trust you, for a time at least, to other guidance, to other protection than my own. the boats are preparing to carry off a certain number of our friends to england. you must go in one of them, clémence, and that immediately. your noble uncle here, for such i understand he is, sir thomas cecil, will protect you i know, and be a father to you. the marquis du bar, too, one of the noblest of men, will be to you, as a brother." clémence replied not, but gazed with a look of deep, earnest, imploring inquiry in the countenance of her lover, and after a moment he answered that look by adding, "i have given my promise, clémence, to remain behind!" "to death, to death!" cried clémence, casting herself upon his bosom, and weeping bitterly, "you are remaining to die. i know it, i know it, and i will never quit you!" the count kissed her tenderly, and pressed her to his heart; but he suffered not his resolution to be shaken. "listen to me, my clémence," he said. "what may be my fate i know not: but i trust in god's mercy, and in my own uprightness of intentions. but think, clémence, only think, dear clémence, how terrible would be my feelings, how tenfold deep and agonising would be all that i may have to suffer, if i knew that, not only i myself was in danger, but that you also were in still greater peril. if i knew that you were in imprisonment, that the having followed the dictates of your conscience was imputed to you as a crime; that you were to be tormented by the agony of trial, before a tyrannical tribunal, and doomed to torture, to cruel death, or to eternal imprisonment. conceive, clémence, conceive how my heart would be wrung under such circumstances. conceive how to every pang that i may otherwise suffer would be added the infinite weight of grief, and indignation, and suspense on your account. conceive all this, and then, oh clémence, be merciful, be kind, and give me the blessing of seeing you depart in safety, as a consolation and a support under all that i may have myself to suffer." clémence wept bitterly upon his bosom, and the count soothed her by every endearing and tender word. at length, she suddenly raised her head, as if some new idea had struck her, and she exclaimed, "i will go, albert. i will go upon one condition, without torturing you more by opposition." "what is that condition, dear clémence?" demanded the count, gazing on her face, which was glowing warmly even through her tears. "what is that condition, dearest clémence?" clémence hid her face again upon his breast, and answered, "it is, that i may become your wife before i quit this shore. we have protestant ministers here; the ceremony can be easily performed. my uncle, i know, will offer no opposition; and i would fain bear the name of one so noble and so beloved, to another land, and to the grave, which may, perhaps, soon reunite us." the count's heart was wrung, but he replied, "oh, beloved clémence, why, why propose that which must not--which cannot be; why propose that which, though so tempting to every feeling of my heart, would cover me with well-deserved shame if i yielded to it?--think, think clémence, what would deservedly be said of me if i were to consent--if i were to allow you to become my wife; to part with you at the altar, and perhaps by my death as a condemned criminal, to leave you an unprotected widow within a few days." clémence clasped her hands, vehemently exclaiming, "so help me heaven as i would rather be the widow of albert of morseiul, than the wife of any other man that ever lived on earth!" sir thomas cecil, however, interposed. "clémence," he said, "your lover is right: but he will not use arguments to persuade you that i may use. this is a severe and bitter trial. the almighty only knows how it will terminate: but, my dear child, remember that this is no ordinary man you love. let his character be complete to the last! do not--do not, by any solicitation of your's, clémence, take the least brightness from his bright example. let him go on, my child, to do what he believes his duty at all risks, and through all sacrifices. let there not be one selfish spot from the beginning to the end for man to point at; and the almighty will protect and reward him to whom he has given power to act uprightly to the last;--if not in this world, in another he will be blest, clémence, and to that other we must turn our hopes of happiness, for here it is god's will that we should have tribulation." clémence clasped her hands, and bent down her eyes to the ground. for several minutes she remained as if in deep thought, and then said, in a low but a firmer voice, "albert, i yield; and knowing from what is in my own heart, how dreadful this moment must be to you, i will not render it more dreadful by asking you any thing more that you must refuse. i will endeavour to be as calm as i can, albert;--but weep i must. perhaps," she added, with a faint, faint smile upon her lips, "i might weep less if there were no hope; if it were all despair: but i see a glimmering for exertion on my part, if not exactly for hope; and that exertion may certainly be better made in another land than if i were to remain here:--and now for the pain of departure. that must be undergone, and i am ready to undergo it rather at once than when i have forgotten my faint resolution. do you go with me?" she continued, turning to her uncle; "if it be needful that you stay, i fear not to go alone." sir thomas cecil, however, replied that he was ready to accompany her. her maid, maria, was warned to prepare with all speed; and ere a few more sentences were spoken on either part, the marquis du bar came to inform the count, that the boats were afloat, and the vessels standing in, as far as they could into the bay. the huguenot gentlemen mentioned in the list of proscription were already on the shore, and not a little eager to be in the first boats to put off. the soldiery were drawn up under arms to await the expiration of the truce; and as the count and sir thomas cecil led down clémence, weeping bitterly, to the sands, a murmur of sympathy and compassion ran through the crowd, and through the ranks of the soldiery, and the gentlemen drew back to give her the first place in the boats. before they reached the edge, however, the count, whose eye had been raised for a moment to the vessels, pointed towards them with a smile of satisfaction. "gentlemen," he said, looking round, "i am happy to see that you will all be able to get off without risk. do you not perceive they are sending off their boats for you? clémence," he said, in a lower voice, "will you go at once, or will you wait till the other boats arrive, and all go together?" "let me wait--let me wait," said clémence, in the same low tone. "every moment that my hand touches yours is a treasure." the other boats came in rapidly with the returning tide; and as soon as their keels touched the sand, and a few words had been spoken to ascertain that all was right and understood, the count turned and said,-- "now, gentlemen." there were some twenty or thirty yards of shallow water between the sands and the boats, and albert of morseiul raised clémence in his arms, and carried her to the edge of the first. neither of them spoke a word; but as leaning over, he placed her in the boat, she felt his arms clasp more tightly round her, and his lips were pressed upon hers. "the almighty bless thee!" and "god protect and deliver you!" was all that was said on either side; and the count turned back to the shore. one by one the different officers advanced to him in silence, and grasped his hand before they proceeded to the boats. when they were all in, and the boats began to push off, the count pulled off his hat, and stood bareheaded, looking up to heaven. but at that moment a loud shout burst from the soldiery, of "the count, the count, they have forgotten the count!" but the count of morseiul turned round towards them, and said aloud, in his usual calm, firm tone: "they have not forgotten me, my friends. it was you that were mistaken when you thought that i had forgotten you. i remain to meet my fate, whatever it may be." a number of men in the ranks instantly threw down their muskets, and rushing forward, clasped his knees, beseeching him to go. but he waved his hand, saying gently, "it is in vain, my friends! my determination has been taken for many days. go back to your ranks, my good fellows, go back to your ranks! i will but see the boats safe, and then join you, to surrender the village and lay down our arms." the count then turned again to the sea, and watched the four boats row onward from the shore. they reached the vessels in safety in a few minutes; in a few minutes more the boats belonging to the village began to row back empty. after a little pause some more canvass was seen displayed upon the yards of the vessels. they began to move; they sailed out of the harbour; and, after gazing down upon the sand fixedly and intently while one might count a hundred, the count of morseiul, feeling himself solitary, turned, gave the word of command, and marched the men back into the village. he entered immediately into the room where the chevalier d'evran lay, and although by this time all the principal officers of the royalist force were there, with several other persons, amongst whom was his own servant riquet, he walked silently up to the head of the corpse, and gazed for several minutes on the dead man's face. then lifting the cold hand, he pressed it affectionately in his. "god receive thee, louis! god receive thee!" he said, and his eyes filled with the first tears that they had shed that day. "i see no use now, sir," he continued, turning to the officer who had taken the command of the royal forces, "i see no use of delaying any longer the surrender of the village. i am ready in person to give it up to you this moment, and also to surrender my sword. the only favour i have to ask is, that you will make it known to his majesty that i had no share in the event by which my unhappy friend here fell. the shot which slew him was intended for me, as you are doubtless aware." "perfectly," replied the commander; "and i have already sent off a despatch to the king, giving him an account of the events of this morning; and i myself, joined with all the officers here present, have not failed to testify our sense of the noble, upright, and disinterested conduct of the count of morseiul. i would fain speak with him a word alone, however," and he drew him aside to the window. "count," he said, "i shall not demand your sword, nor in any way affect your liberty, if you will promise to go to paris immediately, and surrender yourself there. if you would take my advice, you would go at once to the king, and cast yourself at his feet. ask for no audience, but seek admission to him at some public moment if fortune favours you, which i trust it will, you may have an opportunity of explaining to his majesty many things that have probably been misrepresented." "i shall certainly follow your advice," said the count, "since you put it in my power to do so." "ah, gentlemen," cried riquet, who had been listening unperceived to all they said. "if the poor chevalier had lived, the count would have been quite safe, for he had the means of proving that the count saved the king's life not long ago, of which his majesty knows nothing. i heard the man herval make his confession to the chevalier with my own ears; but he could not take it down, for the man died before pen and ink could do their work." "that is unfortunate, indeed," said the commander; "but still you can give your testimony of the facts, my good friend." "bless you, sir," replied riquet, "they will never believe any thing i can say." "i fear not, indeed," replied the count. "besides, sir, my good friend riquet, if he went to paris, would have so much to confess on his own account, that they would not mind what he said in regard to the confessions of others." "unfortunately, too," said the commander, "all the papers of hatréaumont, if i remember right, were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. such was the sentence of the court, i know, and it must have been executed long ago. however, count, the plan that i have proposed is still the best. speed to paris with what haste you may; cast yourself upon the king's mercy; tell him all and every thing, if he will permit you to do so, and engage all your friends to support your cause at the same moment. take your way at once into brittany," he added, dropping his voice, "and from thence to paris; for i very much fear that the result would be fatal if you were to fall into the hands of the intendant of poitou. he is exasperated to the highest degree. you have surrendered at discretion, taken with arms in your hand. he has already broken on the wheel two or three under the same circumstances; and i dare not deal with him in the same way that the chevalier d'evran did, for i have not sufficient power." the count thanked him for his advice, and followed it; and, as we must not pause upon such circumstances as the surrender of the village, we shall let that event be supposed to have taken place; and in our next chapter shall, if possible, pursue this sad history to its conclusion. chapter xv. the end. it was in the great reception room at versailles, an hour after the king had held the council, which failed not to meet every day. his mood was neither more nor less severe than ordinary; for if, on the one hand, events had taken place which had given him pleasure, other events had reached his ears from the south of france, which showed him, notwithstanding all louvois's efforts to conceal the extent of the evil, that serious disturbances in the cevennes, and other parts of france, near the mouth of the rhone, were likely to follow the measures which had been adopted against the protestants. louvois himself was present, and in no very placable mood, the king having replied to him more than once during the morning haughtily and angrily, and repressed the insolence by which his demeanour was sometimes characterised, with that severe dignity which the minister was very willing to see exercised towards any one but himself. louis, who was dressed in the most sumptuous manner, held in his hand a roll of papers, which had been given him just before his entrance into the chamber; but he did not read them, and merely turned them round and round from time to time, as if he were handling a truncheon. many eyes were fixed upon him, and various were the hopes and fears which the aspect of that one man created in the breasts of those who surrounded him. all, however, were silent at that moment, for an event was about to take place highly flattering to the pride of the ostentatious king of france, and the eyes of all were fixed upon the doors at the end of the hall. at length they opened, and a fine looking middle-aged man, dressed in a robe of red velvet, followed by four others in black velvet, was led into the apartment and approached the king. he bowed low and reverently, and then addressed the french sovereign without embarrassment, and with apparent ease, assuring the monarch in vague, but still flattering terms, that the republic of genoa, of which he was doge, had entertained nothing, throughout the course of events lately passed, but profound respect for the crown of france. somewhat to the left of the king, amongst the multitude of french princes and officers, appeared one or two groups, consisting of the ambassadors from different barbaric nations; and, while the doge of genoa spoke, offering excuses for the conduct of the state he ruled, the eye of louis glanced from time to time to the indian envoys in their gorgeous apparel, as they eagerly asked questions of their interpreter, and were told that it was the prince of an independent state come to humble himself before the mighty monarch that he had offended. when the audience of the doge of genoa was over, and he withdrew, a multitude of the courtiers followed, so that the audience hall was nearly clear, and the king paused for a moment, talking over the doge's demeanour to those who surrounded him, and apparently about to retire immediately. he had taken a step forward, indeed, to do so, when the prince de marsillac, who certainly dared to press the king upon disagreeable subjects, when no one else would run the risk, advanced, and, bowing low, pointed to the papers in the king's hand. "i ventured, sire," he said, "before your majesty came here, to present to you those papers which you promised to look at." the king's brow instantly darkened. "i see at once, prince," he said, "that they refer to the count of morseiul, a rebel, as i am informed, taken with arms in his hand, in regard to whom the laws of the land must have their course." the prince was somewhat abashed, and hesitated; but another gentleman stepped forward with stern and somewhat harsh features, but with a noble air and look that bespoke fearless sincerity. "what is it, montausier?" said the king, sharply addressing that celebrated nobleman, who is supposed to have been represented by molière under the character of the misanthrope. "merely to say, sire," replied the duke in a firm, strong tone of voice, "that some one has falsified the truth to your majesty. my nephew, in command of the troops to whom the count surrendered, informs me that he was not taken with arms in his hand, as you have said; but, on the contrary, (and here lies a great difference,) surrendered voluntarily, when, according to the truce of five hours granted to the huguenots by the chevalier d'evran, he had every opportunity of escaping to england had he so pleased, as all the rest of the leaders on that occasion did." "how is this, sir?" demanded the king, turning to louvois. "i speak from your statements, and i hope you have not made me speak falsely." "sire," replied louvois, with a look of effrontery, "i have just heard that what the duke says is the case; but i judged that all such points could naturally be investigated at the count's trial." the king seemed struck with this observation; but montausier instantly replied--"monsieur de louvois, if his majesty will permit me to tell you so, you have been, for the first time in your life, sadly tardy in receiving information; for my nephew informs me that he gave you intelligence of this fact no less than three days ago; and, in the next place, you are very well aware of what you have not thought fit to say, that by investigating such things at a trial, you would directly frustrate the express object for which the count de morseiul surrendered himself when he might have escaped, which was to cast himself at the king's feet, and explain to him the strange and extraordinary misconception by which he was cast into rebellion, and to prove that as soon as ever he discovered the mistake which had been committed, he had expressed himself ready to surrender, and trust to the king's clemency, which is as great a quality as his justice." louvois's face had grown fiery red. "expressed his readiness to surrender!" cried he with a scoff. "did he not fight two battles after that?" "how, sir?" exclaimed the king. "i had understood from you that no battles had been fought at all. mere skirmishes you said--affairs of posts--that the insurrection was nothing but the revolt of a few peasants." louvois stammered forth some excuse about the numbers being insignificant, and the whole business crushed within nine days after the chevalier d'evran took the command; but the king turned away angrily, saying, "monsieur de louvois, no more interruption. i find in my middle age, as i found in my youth, that a king must see with his own eyes. now, marsillac, what is it you wish? what is it you desire of me, montausier?" "for my part, sire," replied the prince de marsillac, "i only desire that your majesty should run your eyes over those papers. they are very brief, and to the point; and every fact that is therein stated i can assure you can be proved on indisputable authority." "and i," said the duke of montausier, "have only to beg that your majesty would see and hear the count of morseiul. from him, as every man here present knows, you will hear the pure and simple truth, which is a thing that happens to your majesty perhaps once in five or six years, and will do you good." the king smiled, and turned his eyes upon the papers; and when he had read them nearly through, he smiled again, even more gaily than before. "it turns out, gentlemen," he said, "that an affair has happened to me which i fancy happens to us all more than once in our lives. i have been completely cheated by a valet. i remember giving the villain the paper well, out of which it seems he manufactured a free pardon for his master. at all events, this frees the count from the charge of base ingratitude which has been heavily urged against him. your statement of his willing surrender, montausier, greatly diminishes his actual and undoubted crime; and as i have complied with the request of the prince de marsillac, and looked at the papers, i must not refuse you yours. either to-day, if the count have arrived, or to-morrow, i will hear his story from his own lips." "sire," replied the duke of montausier, "i have been daring enough to receive him in my apartments." the cloud came slightly again over louis's countenance; but though he replied with dignified gravity, yet it was not with anger. "you have done wrong," he said; "but since it is so, call him to my presence. all you ladies and gentlemen around shall judge if i deal harshly with him." there was a pretty girl standing not far from the king, and close between her own mother and the interpreter of the ambassadors from siam. we have spoken of her before, under the name of annette de marville; and while she had remained in that spot, her eyes had more than once involuntarily filled with tears. she was timid and retiring in her nature; and as the duke of montausier turned away to obey the king, every one was surprised to hear her voice raised sufficiently loud to reach even the ear of louis himself, saying to the interpreter, "tell them that they are now going to see how magnanimously the king will pardon one who has offended him." the king looked another way; but it was evident to those who were accustomed to watch his countenance, that he connected the words he had just heard with the humiliation he had inflicted on the doge of genoa, and that the contrast struck and pleased him not a little. in a very short time, before this impression had at all faded away, the door again opened, and the duke of montausier re-entered with the count of morseiul. the latter was pale, but perfectly firm and composed. he did not wear his sword, but he carried it sheathed in his hand, and advancing directly towards louis, he bent one knee before the king, at the same time laying down the weapon at the monarch's feet. "sire," he said, without rising, "i have brought you a sword, which for more than ten years was drawn in every campaign in your majesty's service. it has, unfortunately, been drawn against you; and that it has been so, and at the very moment when your majesty had a right to expect gratitude at my hands, is the bitterest recollection of my life; so bitter indeed, so horrible, so painful, that the moment i discovered the terrible error into which i had been hurried, the moment that i discovered that i owed my liberation to your majesty, i instantly determined, whatever might be the result of the events that were then taking place, to surrender myself, unconditionally, to your majesty's pleasure, to embrace no means of escape, to reject every opportunity of flight; and if your indignation so far overcame your mercy as to doom me to death, to submit to it, not alone with courage, which every man in your majesty's service possesses, but with perfect resignation to your royal will." the words, the manner, the action, all pleased the king, and the countenance with which he looked upon the young nobleman was by no means severe. "you have, i fear, greatly erred, monsieur de morseiul," he replied. "but still i believe you have been much misled. is there any favour that you have to ask me?" the count gazed up in the king's face, still kneeling; and every head was bent forward, every ear listened eagerly. a momentary pause followed, as if there was a great struggle within him; and then he answered. "sire, i will not ask my life of your majesty;--not from any false pride, for i feel and acknowledge that it is yours to give or to take,--but because my conduct, however much it might originate in mistake, must appear so ungrateful to you that you cannot, at this moment, feel i deserve your mercy. the only favour i will ask, then, is this: that should i be brought to a trial, which must end, as i know, inevitably in my fall, you will read every word of my deposition, and i therein promise to give your majesty a full and true account, without the falsification of a single word, of all that has taken place in this last lamentable business." louvois took a half step forward as if to speak, and not a little anxiety was upon his countenance. but, contrary to the general impression of those present, all that the count had said had pleased the king; though his latter words had not a little alarmed the minister, who knew that truths might be displayed which he was most anxious to conceal. "monsieur de morseiul," replied the king, "i will promise what you ask, at all events. but what you have said has pleased me, for it shows that you understand my spirit towards my subjects, and that i can grant without being asked. your life, sir, is given to you. what punishment we shall inflict may, perhaps, depend upon the sentence of a judicial court or of our council." "may it please your majesty," said louvois, stepping forward, "to hear me one moment. you have, perhaps, thought me inimical to monsieur de morseiul, but such, indeed, is not the case; and i would propose, that instead of subjecting him to any trial at all, you, at once, pronounce sentence of banishment upon him, which is all the mercy that he can expect. his estates, as ought to be the case, must be forfeited to the crown." "and he driven forth," said the king, "to employ his military talents in the service of our enemies." "never, never, never, sire!" exclaimed the count, clasping his hands eagerly. "never should my sword be drawn against my native land. i would rather beg my bread in misery, from door to door: i would rather live in want, and die in sorrow, than do so base an act!" there was truth and zeal upon his countenance, and louvois urged what he had proposed; but while he was addressing the monarch, in a lower tone, one of the side doors of the hall opened, and a lady came partly in, speaking to some one behind her, as if she knew not that any one was in the hall. the moment that she perceived her mistake, madame de maintenon drew back; but the king advanced a step and besought her to come in. "we want your presence much, madam," he said with a smile, "for we cannot decide upon what is to be done with this young culprit. but you seem in haste, and who is this with you? i have somewhere seen his face before." the king might well fail to recognise the countenance of jerome riquet, for it was at that moment actually cadaverous in appearance, from the various emotions that were going on in his heart. "i was at that moment seeking your majesty," said madame de maintenon, advancing with her usual calm grace, "and was passing this way to your cabinet, to crave an audience ere you went out. but i thought the ceremony of the day was over." "what are your commands, madam?" said the king. "your wishes are to be attended to at all times." "you know, sir," she said, "that i am not fond of ever asking one, who is only over generous to his servants, for any thing. but i was eager at that moment to beseech your majesty to grant at once your pardon to this unfortunate man who some time ago committed a great crime in misapplying your majesty's handwriting, and who has now just committed another, for which i understand the officers of justice are in pursuit of him, though the swiftness of the horse which brought him here has enabled him to escape for the moment. he found out my apartments, i know not how, and i brought him instantly to your majesty as soon as i had heard his story, and read this paper." "what is this paper?" demanded the king, taking it; "ticketed i see in the hand of monsieur de la reynie, 'letter from the said herval to the sieur de hatréaumont!' how come you possessed of this, sirrah?" riquet advanced and knelt before the king, while louvois suddenly seemed to recollect some business, and retired from the circle. "sire," said the valet, in the briefest possible terms, "in serving my master i was taken by your majesty's forces, shut up in a barn with some wounded prisoners, heard the well known leader, herval, confess to the chevalier d'evran, that he had written a letter to the traitor hatréaumont, regarding his having been prevented from murdering your majesty by the count de morseiul, (in which prevention i had some little share). the man died before his words could be taken down. the chevalier d'evran said it did not signify, for you would believe his evidence. but the chevalier d'evran was killed. my word i knew would not be believed; but i heard that the papers of hatréaumont were to be burnt this day by the common hangman, opposite the bastille.[ ] i had a swift horse saddled. i got close to the fire. i fixed my eyes upon the papers one by one as they were thrown in, till seeing the writing of herval, i seized the letter, and galloped hither as hard as i could. this is my tale, sire, and on my word it is true." --------------------- footnote : the papers of hatréaumont were preserved for some time after his death, in order to give light in regard to the guilt of his accomplices. --------------------- the king hastily opened the paper, and read the contents, the expression of his countenance changing several times as he proceeded. but when he had done, he turned towards the count, saying, "monsieur de morseiul, i require no one now to advise me how to act towards you. you are freely and entirely pardoned. i have given up the hope again of ever seeing you cast away the errors of your faith. but even that must not make me harsh towards the man who has saved my life. i would only fain know how it was that you did not inform me of this at the time?" "sire," replied the count, "i came to your majesty for the purpose. your majesty most remember, that i told you that i had matters of deep importance to communicate. you referred me to monsieur de louvois, and as i was proceeding to his house, i was arrested. in the bastille i was allowed to communicate with no one, and the rest you know." "we have been all very unfortunate, count," replied the king. "however, i trust, that these embarrassments are at an end. you have your free pardon for the past, and now for the future. i cannot violate in your favour the laws that i have laid down for the regulation of the land, and for the establishment of one general religion throughout the country. if you stay in france, you, with others, lose the means of exercising the ceremonies of your sect. but, as i said to the count de schomberg, i say to you: in consideration of the great services that you have rendered, i will allow you to sell all your possessions if you choose to retire to another land, and this is, i fear, all i can do." "your majesty overwhelms me with bounty," said the count, "but there are yet two favours that i would ask." "what more?" said the king. "one request is, sire," said the count, "to be allowed once in every year to present myself before your majesty; and the other, that i may retain the château and the immediate grounds around it belonging to my ancestors. thus every fond recollection that i have attached to france will still be gratified; and though in exile, i shall live a frenchman to the last." "your request is granted," replied the king, with a smile. "and now, gentlemen and ladies, as by your faces round i judge you are all well satisfied, we will not detain you longer." thus saying, louis turned and withdrew. ere the count of morseiul retired from the room, and before any of his friends therein could speak with him, madame de maintenon said a word in his ear in a low voice. "go to the hotel of the british ambassador," she said. "you will there find those that you do not expect." the heart of the count of morseiul beat high. he had words of gratitude to speak to many there present; but as soon as that was done, he hurried to paris without a moment's pause; and in a few minutes clasped clémence de marly to a joyful heart. we need not tell here the brief story she related of her flight from the coast of france to london; and of her having found an affectionate parent in one who, by the wiles of an artful second wife, and an intriguing priest, had been persuaded to leave his children, by a first marriage with a protestant lady, to the charge of her catholic relations in france; and to the care of the king of that country. louis had become the godfather of the eldest (known to us as the chevalier d'evran), while the earl himself was in exile during the troubles of the great rebellion. a catholic himself, the earl had been easily induced to believe that his children's salvation depended upon their being educated in a catholic country; even though concealed there from protestant relations by assumed names. but on the death of his second wife, all his feelings of natural affection returned, and during an illness, which made him believe that he was on his death-bed, he sent his brother to seek and bring back his children. we need not enter into the detail any farther. the reader can and will imagine it all. all that remains to be said is, that clémence, in her eagerness, had easily persuaded that parent, whose only child she now was--for the three which had sprung from the second marriage had not survived--to hasten over to paris, invested with every authority from the king, with whom his religion rendered him a favourite, to solicit the pardon of the count of morseiul. in consequence of the considerable round the count was obliged to take in his journey to the capital, and the difficulty of obtaining an audience of the king, she had arrived the day before his fate was finally decided. the only part of that fate which could yet be doubtful, was now in her hands; and, if the king of france had shown himself merciful to the count de morseiul, she showed herself devoted to him through life, making him as happy, as the combination of the rarest qualities of mind and person with the noblest, and the deepest, and the dearest qualities of the heart, could make such a man as we have endeavoured to depict the huguenot. the end. transcriber's notes: . page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/historicalromanc weymiala . the diphthong oe is represented by [oe]. historical romances _under the red robe_ _count hannibal_ _a gentleman of france_ _by the same author_ the house of the wolf a gentleman of france under the red robe shrewsbury sophia count hannibal in kings' byways starvecrow farm laid up in lavender ovington's bank the traveller in the fur cloak queen's folly the _lively peggy_ historical romances _under the red robe_ _count hannibal_ _a gentleman of france_ by stanley j. weyman longmans, green and co. fifth avenue new york historical romances under the red robe * count hannibal a gentleman of france copyright * * * * * by stanley j. weyman printed in the united states of america under the red robe contents i. at zaton's. ii. at the green pillar. iii. the house in the wood. iv. madam and mademoiselle. v. revenge. vi. under the pic du midi. vii. a master stroke. viii. the question. ix. clon. x. the arrest. xi. the road to paris. xii. at the finger-post xiii. st. martin's eve. xiv. st. martin's summer. under the red robe chapter i. at zaton's "marked cards!" there were a score round us when the fool, little knowing the man with whom he had to deal, and as little how to lose like a gentleman, flung the words in my teeth. he thought, i'll be sworn, that i should storm and swear and ruffle it like any common cock of the hackle. but that was never gil de berault's way. for a few seconds after he had spoken i did not even look at him. i passed my eye instead--smiling, _bien entendu_--round the ring of waiting faces, saw that there was no one except de pombal i had cause to fear; and then at last i rose and looked at the fool with the grim face i have known impose on older and wiser men. "marked cards, m. l'anglais?" i said, with a chilling sneer. "they are used, i am told, to trap players--not unbirched schoolboys." "yet i say that they are marked!" he replied hotly, in his queer foreign jargon. "in my last hand i had nothing. you doubled the stakes. bah, sir, you knew! you have swindled me!" "monsieur is easy to swindle--when he plays with a mirror behind him," i answered tartly. and at that there was a great roar of laughter, which might have been heard in the street, and which brought to the table every one in the eating-house whom his violence had not already attracted. but i did not relax my face. i waited until all was quiet again, and then waving aside two or three who stood between us and the entrance, i pointed gravely to the door. "there is a little space behind the church of st. jacques, m. l'etranger," i said, putting on my hat and taking my cloak on my arm. "doubtless you will accompany me thither?" he snatched up his hat, his face burning with shame and rage. "with pleasure!" he blurted out. "to the devil, if you like!" i thought the matter arranged, when the marquis laid his hand on the young fellow's arm and checked him. "this must not be," he said, turning from him to me with his grand fine-gentleman's air. "you know me, m. de berault. this matter has gone far enough." "too far, m. de pombal!" i answered bitterly. "still, if you wish to take the gentleman's place, i shall raise no objection." "chut, man!" he retorted, shrugging his shoulders negligently. "i know you, and i do not fight with men of your stamp. nor need this gentleman." "undoubtedly," i replied, bowing low, "if he prefers to be caned in the streets." that stung the marquis. "have a care! have a care!" he cried hotly. "you go too far, m. berault." "de berault, if you please," i objected, eyeing him sternly. "my family has borne the _de_ as long as yours, m. de pombal." he could not deny that, and he answered, "as you please"; at the same time restraining his friend by a gesture. "but none the less, take my advice," he continued. "the cardinal has forbidden duelling, and this time he means it! you have been in trouble once and gone free. a second time it may fare worse with you. let this gentleman go, therefore, m. de berault. besides--why, shame upon you, man!" he exclaimed hotly; "he is but a lad!" two or three who stood behind me applauded that. but i turned and they met my eye; and they were as mum as mice. "his age is his own concern," i said grimly. "he was old enough a while ago to insult me." "and i will prove my words!" the lad cried, exploding at last. he had spirit enough, and the marquis had had hard work to restrain him so long. "you do me no service, m. de pombal," he continued, pettishly shaking off his friend's hand. "by your leave, this gentleman and i will settle this matter." "that is better," i said, nodding drily, while the marquis stood aside, frowning and baffled. "permit me to lead the way." zaton's eating-house stands scarcely a hundred paces from st. jacques la boucherie, and half the company went thither with us. the evening was wet, the light in the streets was waning, the streets themselves were dirty and slippery. there were few passers in the rue st. antoine; and our party, which earlier in the day must have attracted notice and a crowd, crossed unmarked, and entered without interruption the paved triangle which lies immediately behind the church. i saw in the distance one of the cardinal's guard loitering in front of the scaffolding round the new hôtel richelieu; and the sight of the uniform gave me pause for a moment. but it was too late to repent. the englishman began at once to strip off his clothes. i closed mine to the throat, for the air was chilly. at that moment, while we stood preparing and most of the company seemed a little inclined to stand off from me, i felt a hand on my arm, and, turning, saw the dwarfish tailor at whose house in the rue savonnerie i lodged at the time. the fellow's presence was unwelcome, to say the least of it; and though for want of better company i had sometimes encouraged him to be free with me at home, i took that to be no reason why i should be plagued with him before gentlemen. i shook him off, therefore, hoping by a frown to silence him. he was not to be so easily put down, however. and perforce i had to speak to him. "afterwards, afterwards," i said. "i am engaged now." "for god's sake, don't, sir!" was the poor fool's answer. "don't do it! you will bring a curse on the house. he is but a lad, and--" "you, too!" i exclaimed, losing patience. "be silent, you scum! what do you know about gentlemen's quarrels? leave me; do you hear?" "but the cardinal!" he cried in a quavering voice. "the cardinal, m. de berault? the last man you killed is not forgotten yet. this time he will be sure to--" "do you hear?" i hissed. the fellow's impudence passed all bounds. it was as bad as his croaking. "begone!" i said. "i suppose you are afraid he will kill me, and you will lose your money?" frison fell back at that almost as if i had struck him, and i turned to my adversary, who had been awaiting my motions with impatience. god knows he did look young; as he stood with his head bare and his fair hair drooping over his smooth woman's forehead--a mere lad fresh from the college of burgundy, if they have such a thing in england. i felt a sudden chill as i looked at him: a qualm, a tremor, a presentiment. what was it the little tailor had said? that i should--but there, he did not know. what did he know of such things? if i let this pass i must kill a man a day, or leave paris and the eating-house, and starve. "a thousand pardons," i said gravely, as i drew and took my place. "a dun. i am sorry that the poor devil caught me so inopportunely. now, however, i am at your service." he saluted, and we crossed swords and began. but from the first i had no doubt what the result would be. the slippery stones and fading light gave him, it is true, some chance, some advantage, more than he deserved; but i had no sooner felt his blade than i knew that he was no swordsman. possibly he had taken half-a-dozen lessons in rapier art, and practised what he learned with an englishman as heavy and awkward as himself. but that was all. he made a few wild, clumsy rushes, parrying widely. when i had foiled these, the danger was over, and i held him at my mercy. i played with him a little while, watching the sweat gather on his brow, and the shadow of the church-tower fall deeper and darker, like the shadow of doom, on his face. not out of cruelty--god knows i have never erred in that direction!--but because, for the first time in my life, i felt a strange reluctance to strike the blow. the curls clung to his forehead; his breath came and went in gasps; i heard the men behind me murmur, and one or two of them drop an oath; and then i slipped--slipped, and was down in a moment on my right side, my elbow striking the pavement so sharply that the arm grew numb to the wrist. he held off! i heard a dozen voices cry, "now! now you have him!" but he held off. he stood back and waited with his breast heaving and his point lowered, until i had risen and stood again on my guard. "enough! enough!" a rough voice behind me cried. "don't hurt the man after that." "on guard, sir!" i answered coldly--for he seemed to waver. "it was an accident. it shall not avail you again." several voices cried "shame!" and one, "you coward!" but the englishman stepped forward, a fixed look in his blue eyes. he took his place without a word. i read in his drawn white face that he had made up his mind to the worst, and his courage won my admiration. i would gladly and thankfully have set one of the lookers-on--any of the lookers-on--in his place; but that could not be. so i thought of zaton's closed to me, of pombal's insult, of the sneers and slights i had long kept at the sword's point; and, pressing him suddenly in a heat of affected anger, i thrust strongly over his guard, which had grown feeble, and ran him through the chest. when i saw him lying, laid out on the stones with his eyes half shut, and his face glimmering white in the dusk--not that i saw him thus long, for there were a dozen kneeling round him in a twinkling--i felt an unwonted pang. it passed, however, in a moment. for i found myself confronted by a ring of angry faces--of men who, keeping at a distance, hissed and threatened me. they were mostly canaille, who had gathered during the fight, and had viewed all that passed from the farther side of the railings. while some snarled and raged at me like wolves, calling me "butcher!" and "cut-throat!" and the like, or cried out that berault was at his trade again, others threatened me with the vengeance of the cardinal, flung the edict in my teeth, and said with glee that the guard were coming--they would see me hanged yet. "his blood is on your head!" one cried furiously. "he will be dead in an hour. and you will swing for him! hurrah!" "begone to your kennel!" i answered, with a look which sent him a yard backwards, though the railings were between us. and i wiped my blade carefully, standing a little apart. for--well, i could understand it--it was one of those moments when a man is not popular. those who had come with me from the eating-house eyed me askance, and turned their backs when i drew nearer; and those who had joined us and obtained admission were scarcely more polite. but i was not to be outdone in _sangfroid_. i cocked my hat, and drawing my cloak over my shoulders, went out with a swagger which drove the curs from the gate before i came within a dozen paces of it. the rascals outside fell back as quickly, and in a moment i was in the street. another moment and i should have been clear of the place and free to lie by for a while, when a sudden scurry took place round me. the crowd fled every way into the gloom, and in a hand-turn a dozen of the cardinal's guard closed round me. i had some acquaintance with the officer in command, and he saluted me civilly. "this is a bad business, m. de berault," he said. "the man is dead they tell me." "neither dying nor dead," i answered lightly. "if that be all, you may go home again." "with you," he replied, with a grin, "certainly. and as it rains, the sooner the better. i must ask you for your sword, i am afraid." "take it," i said, with the philosophy which never deserts me. "but the man will not die." "i hope that may avail you," he answered in a tone i did not like. "left wheel, my friends! to the châtelet! march!" "there are worse places," i said, and resigned myself to fate. after all, i had been in prison before, and learned that only one jail lets no prisoner escape. but when i found that my friend's orders were to hand me over to the watch, and that i was to be confined like any common jail-bird caught cutting a purse or slitting a throat, i confess my heart sank. if i could get speech with the cardinal, all would probably be well; but if i failed in this, or if the case came before him in strange guise, or he were in a hard mood himself, then it might go ill with me. the edict said, death! and the lieutenant at the châtelet did not put himself to much trouble to hearten me. "what! again, m. de berault?" he said, raising his eyebrows as he received me at the gate, and recognized me by the light of the brazier which his men were just kindling outside. "you are a very bold man, sir, or a very foolhardy one, to come here again. the old business, i suppose?" "yes, but he is not dead," i answered coolly. "he has a trifle--a mere scratch. it was behind the church of st. jacques." "he looked dead enough," my friend the guardsman interposed. he had not yet gone. "bah!" i answered scornfully. "have you ever known me make a mistake? when i kill a man, i kill him. i put myself to pains, i tell you, not to kill this englishman. therefore he will live." "i hope so," the lieutenant said, with a dry smile. "and you had better hope so, too, m. de berault. for if not--" "well?" i said, somewhat troubled. "if not, what, my friend?" "i fear he will be the last man you will fight," he answered. "and even if he lives, i would not be too sure, my friend. this time the cardinal is determined to put it down." "he and i are old friends," i said confidently. "so i have heard," he answered, with a short laugh. "i think the same was said of chalais. i do not remember that it saved his head." this was not reassuring. but worse was to come. early in the morning orders were received that i should be treated with especial strictness, and i was given the choice between irons and one of the cells below the level. choosing the latter, i was left to reflect upon many things; among others, on the queer and uncertain nature of the cardinal, who loved, i knew, to play with a man as a cat with a mouse; and on the ill effects which sometimes attend a high chest-thrust, however carefully delivered. i only rescued myself at last from these and other unpleasant reflections by obtaining the loan of a pair of dice; and the light being just enough to enable me to reckon the throws, i amused myself for hours by casting them on certain principles of my own. but a long run again and again upset my calculations; and at last brought me to the conclusion that a run of bad luck may be so persistent as to see out the most sagacious player. this was not a reflection very welcome to me at the moment. nevertheless, for three days it was all the company i had. at the end of that time the knave of a jailer who attended me, and who had never grown tired of telling me, after the fashion of his kind, that i should be hanged, came to me with a less assured air. "perhaps you would like a little water?" he said civilly. "why, rascal?" i asked. "to wash with," he answered. "i asked for some yesterday, and you would not bring it," i grumbled. "however, better late than never. bring it now. if i must hang, i will hang like a gentleman. but, depend upon it, the cardinal will not serve an old friend so scurvy a trick." "you are to go to him," he answered, when he came back with the water. "what? to the cardinal?" i cried. "yes," he answered. "good!" i exclaimed; and in my joy i sprang up at once, and began to refresh my dress. "so all this time i have been doing him an injustice. _vive monseigneur!_ i might have known it." "don't make too sure!" the man answered spitefully. then he went on: "i have something else for you. a friend of yours left it at the gate," he added. and he handed me a packet. "quite so!" i said, reading his rascally face aright. "and you kept it as long as you dared--as long as you thought i should hang, you knave! was not that so? but there, do not lie to me. tell me instead which of my friends left it." for, to confess the truth, i had not so many friends at this time; and ten good crowns--the packet contained no less a sum--argued a pretty staunch friend, and one of whom a man might be proud. the knave sniggered maliciously. "a crooked, dwarfish man left it," he said. "i doubt i might call him a tailor and not be far out." "chut!" i answered; but i was a little out of countenance. "i understand. an honest fellow enough, and in debt to me! i am glad he remembered. but when am i to go, friend?" "in an hour," he answered sullenly. doubtless he had looked to get one of the crowns; but i was too old a hand for that. if i came back i could buy his services; and if i did not i should have wasted my money. nevertheless, a little later, when i found myself on my way to the hôtel richelieu under so close a guard that i could see nothing except the figures that immediately surrounded me, i wished i had given him the money. at such times, when all hangs in the balance and the sky is overcast, the mind runs on luck and old superstitions, and is prone to think a crown given here may avail there--though there be a hundred leagues away. the palais richelieu was at this time in building, and we were required to wait in a long, bare gallery, where the masons were at work. i was kept a full hour here, pondering uncomfortably on the strange whims and fancies of the great man who then ruled france as the king's lieutenant-general, with all the king's powers; and whose life i had once been the means of saving by a little timely information. on occasion he had done something to wipe out the debt; and at other times he had permitted me to be free with him. we were not unknown to one another, therefore. nevertheless, when the doors were at last thrown open, and i was led into his presence, my confidence underwent a shock. his cold glance, that, roving over me, regarded me not as a man but an item, the steely glitter of his southern eyes, chilled me to the bone. the room was bare, the floor without carpet or covering. some of the woodwork lay about, unfinished and in pieces. but the man--this man, needed no surroundings. his keen, pale face, his brilliant eyes, even his presence--though he was of no great height and began already to stoop at the shoulders--were enough to awe the boldest. i recalled as i looked at him a hundred tales of his iron will, his cold heart, his unerring craft. he had humbled the king's brother, the splendid duke of orleans, in the dust. he had curbed the queen-mother. a dozen heads, the noblest in france, had come to the block through him. only two years before he had quelled rochelle; only a few months before he had crushed the great insurrection in languedoc: and though the south, stripped of its old privileges, still seethed with discontent, no one in this year dared lift a hand against him--openly, at any rate. under the surface a hundred plots, a thousand intrigues, sought his life or his power; but these, i suppose, are the hap of every great man. no wonder, then, that the courage on which i plumed myself sank low at sight of him; or that it was as much as i could do to mingle with the humility of my salute some touch of the _sangfroid_ of old acquaintanceship. and perhaps that had been better left out. for this man was without bowels. for a moment, while he stood looking at me and before he spoke to me, i gave myself up for lost. there was a glint of cruel satisfaction in his eyes that warned me, before he spoke, what he was going to say to me. "i could not have made a better catch, m. de berault," he said, smiling villainously, while he gently smoothed the fur of a cat that had sprung on the table beside him. "an old offender and an excellent example. i doubt it will not stop with you. but later, we will make you the warrant for flying at higher game." "monseigneur has handled a sword himself," i blurted out. the very room seemed to be growing darker, the air colder. i was never nearer fear in my life. "yes?" he said, smiling delicately. "and so?" "will not be too hard on the failings of a poor gentleman." "he shall suffer no more than a rich one," he replied suavely, as he stroked the cat. "enjoy that satisfaction, m. de berault. is that all?" "once i was of service to your eminence," i said desperately. "payment has been made," he answered, "more than once. but for that i should not have seen you, m. de berault." "the king's face!" i cried, snatching at the straw he seemed to hold out. he laughed cynically, smoothly. his thin face, his dark moustache, and whitening hair, gave him an air of indescribable keenness. "i am not the king," he said. "besides, i am told you have killed as many as six men in duels. you owe the king, therefore, one life at least. you must pay it. there is no more to be said, m. de berault," he continued coldly, turning away and beginning to collect some papers. "the law must take its course." i thought he was about to nod to the lieutenant to withdraw me, and a chilling sweat broke out down my back. i saw the scaffold, i felt the cords. a moment, and it would be too late! "i have a favour to ask," i stammered desperately, "if your eminence would give me a moment alone." "to what end?" he answered, turning and eyeing me with cold disfavour. "i know you--your past--all. it can do no good, my friend." "nor harm!" i cried. "and i am a dying man, monseigneur!" "that is true," he said thoughtfully. still he seemed to hesitate; and my heart beat fast. at last he looked at the lieutenant. "you may leave us," he said shortly. "now," when the officer had withdrawn and left us alone, "what is it? say what you have to say quickly. and above all, do not try to fool me, m. de berault." but his piercing eyes so disconcerted me that now i had my chance i could not find a word to say, and stood before him mute. i think this pleased him, for his face relaxed. "well?" he said at last. "is that all?" "the man is not dead," i muttered. he shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "what of that?" he said. "that was not what you wanted to say to me." "once i saved your eminence's life," i faltered miserably. "admitted," he answered, in his thin, incisive voice. "you mentioned the fact before. on the other hand, you have taken six to my knowledge, m. de berault. you have lived the life of a bully, a common bravo, a gamester. you, a man of family! for shame! and it has brought you to this. yet on that one point i am willing to hear more," he added abruptly. "i might save your eminence's life again," i cried. it was a sudden inspiration. "you know something," he said quickly, fixing me with his eyes. "but no," he continued, shaking his head gently. "pshaw! the trick is old. i have better spies than you, m. de berault." "but no better sword," i cried hoarsely. "no, not in all your guard!" "that is true," he said. "that is true." to my surprise, he spoke in a tone of consideration; and he looked down at the floor. "let me think, my friend," he continued. he walked two or three times up and down the room, while i stood trembling. i confess it trembling. the man whose pulses danger has no power to quicken, is seldom proof against suspense; and the sudden hope his words awakened in me so shook me that his figure, as he trod lightly to and fro, with the cat rubbing against his robe and turning time for time with him, wavered before my eyes. i grasped the table to steady myself. i had not admitted even in my own mind how darkly the shadow of montfaucon and the gallows had fallen across me. i had leisure to recover myself, for it was some time before he spoke. when he did, it was in a voice harsh, changed, imperative. "you have the reputation of a man faithful, at least, to his employer," he said. "do not answer me. i say it is so. well, i will trust you. i will give you one more chance--though it is a desperate one. woe to you if you fail me! do you know cocheforêt in béarn? it is not far from auch." "no, your eminence." "nor m. de cocheforêt?" "no, your eminence." "so much the better," he retorted. "but you have heard of him. he has been engaged in every gascon plot since the late king's death, and gave me more trouble last year in the vivarais than any man twice his years. at present he is at bosost in spain, with other refugees, but i have learned that at frequent intervals he visits his wife at cocheforêt, which is six leagues within the border. on one of these visits he must be arrested." "that should be easy," i said. the cardinal looked at me. "tush, man! what do you know about it?" he answered bluntly. "it is whispered at cocheforêt if a soldier crosses the street at auch. in the house are only two or three servants, but they have the country-side with them to a man, and they are a dangerous breed. a spark might kindle a fresh rising. the arrest, therefore, must be made secretly." i bowed. "one resolute man inside the house, with the help of two or three servants whom he could summon to his aid at will, might effect it," the cardinal continued, glancing at a paper which lay on the table. "the question is, will you be the man, my friend?" i hesitated; then i bowed. what choice had i? "nay, nay, speak out!" he said sharply. "yes or no, m. de berault?" "yes, your eminence," i said reluctantly. again, i say, what choice had i? "you will bring him to paris, and alive. he knows things, and that is why i want him. you understand?" "i understand, monseigneur," i answered. "you will get into the house as you can," he continued. "for that you will need strategy, and good strategy. they suspect everybody. you must deceive them. if you fail to deceive them, or, deceiving them, are found out later, m. de berault--i do not think you will trouble me again, or break the edict a second time. on the other hand, should you deceive _me_"--he smiled still more subtly, but his voice sank to a purring note--"i will break you on the wheel like the ruined gamester you are!" i met his look without quailing. "so be it!" i said recklessly. "if i do not bring m. de cocheforêt to paris, you may do that to me, and more also!" "it is a bargain!" he answered slowly. "i think you will be faithful. for money, here are a hundred crowns. that sum should suffice; but if you succeed you shall have twice as much more. well, that is all, i think. you understand?" "yes, monseigneur." "then why do you wait?" "the lieutenant?" i said modestly. monseigneur laughed to himself, and sitting down wrote a word or two on a slip of paper. "give him that," he said, in high good-humour. "i fear, m. de berault, you will never get your deserts--in this world!" chapter ii. at the green pillar. cocheforêt lies in a billowy land of oak and beech and chestnut--a land of deep, leafy bottoms, and hills clothed with forest. ridge and valley, glen and knoll, the woodland, sparsely peopled and more sparsely tilled, stretches away to the great snow mountains that here limit france. it swarms with game--with wolves and bears, deer and boars. to the end of his life i have heard that the great king loved this district, and would sigh, when years and state fell heavily on him, for the beech-groves and box-covered hills of south béarn. from the terraced steps of auch you can see the forest roll away in light and shadow, vale and upland, to the base of the snow-peaks; and, though i come from brittany and love the smell of the salt wind, i have seen few sights that outdo this. it was the second week in october when i came to cocheforêt, and, dropping down from the last wooded brow, rode quietly into the place at evening. i was alone, and had ridden all day in a glory of ruddy beech-leaves, through the silence of forest roads, across clear brooks and glades still green. i had seen more of the quiet and peace of the country than had been my share since boyhood, and i felt a little melancholy; it might be for that reason, or because i had no great taste for the task before me--the task now so imminent. in good faith, it was not a gentleman's work, look at it how you might. but beggars must not be choosers, and i knew that this feeling would pass away. at the inn, in the presence of others, under the spur of necessity, or in the excitement of the chase, were that once begun, i should lose the feeling. when a man is young, he seeks solitude: when he is middle-aged he flies it and his thoughts. i made without ado for the green pillar, a little inn in the village street, to which i had been directed at auch, and, thundering on the door with the knob of my riding-switch, railed at the man for keeping me waiting. here and there at hovel doors in the street--which was a mean, poor place, not worthy of the name--men and women looked out at me suspiciously. but i affected to ignore them; and at last the host came. he was a fair-haired man, half basque, half frenchman, and had scanned me well, i was sure, through some window or peephole; for, when he came out, he betrayed no surprise at the sight of a well-dressed stranger--a portent in that out-of-the-way village--but eyed me with a kind of sullen reserve. "i can lie here to-night, i suppose?" i said, dropping the reins on the sorrel's neck. the horse hung its head. "i don't know," he answered stupidly. i pointed to the green bough which topped a post that stood opposite the door. "this is an inn, is it not?" i said. "yes," he answered slowly; "it is an inn. but--" "but you are full, or you are out of food, or your wife is ill, or something else is amiss," i answered peevishly. "all the same, i am going to lie here. so you must make the best of it, and your wife, too--if you have one." he scratched his head, looking at me with an ugly glitter in his eyes. but he said nothing, and i dismounted. "where can i stable my horse?" i asked. "i'll put it up," he answered sullenly, stepping forward and taking the reins in his hands. "very well," i said; "but i go with you. a merciful man is merciful to his beast, and where-ever i go i see my horse fed." "it will be fed," he said shortly. and then he waited for me to go into the house. "the wife is in there," he continued, looking at me stubbornly. "_imprimis_--if you understand latin, my friend," i answered, "the horse in the stall." as if he saw it was no good, he turned the sorrel slowly round, and began to lead it across the village street. there was a shed behind the inn, which i had already marked and taken for the stable, and i was surprised when i found he was not going there. but i made no remark, and in a few minutes saw the horse well stabled in a hovel which seemed to belong to a neighbour. this done, the man led the way back to the inn, carrying my valise. "you have no other guests?" i said, with a casual air. i knew he was watching me closely. "no," he answered. "this is not much in the way to anywhere, i suppose?" "no." that was evident; a more retired place i never saw. the hanging woods, rising steeply to a great height, so shut the valley in that i was puzzled to think how a man could leave it save by the road i had come. the cottages, which were no more than mean, small huts, ran in a straggling double line, with many gaps--through fallen trees and ill-cleared meadows. among them a noisy brook ran in and out. and the inhabitants--charcoal-burners, or swineherds, or poor people of the like class, were no better than their dwellings. i looked in vain for the château. it was not to be seen, and i dared not ask for it. the man led me into the common room of the tavern--a low-roofed, poor place, lacking a chimney or glazed windows, and grimy with smoke and use. the fire--a great half-burned tree--smouldered on a stone hearth, raised a foot from the floor. a huge black pot simmered over it, and beside one window lounged a country fellow talking with the goodwife. in the dusk i could not see his face, but i gave the woman a word, and sat down to wait for my supper. she seemed more silent than the common run of women; but this might be because her husband was present. while she moved about, getting my meal, he took his place against the doorpost and fell to staring at me so persistently that i felt by no means at my ease. he was a tall, strong fellow, with a rough moustache and brown beard, cut in the mode henri quatre; and on the subject of that king--a safe one, i knew, with a béarnais--and on that alone, i found it possible to make him talk. even then there was a suspicious gleam in his eyes that bade me abstain from questions; and as the darkness deepened behind him, and the firelight played more and more strongly on his features, and i thought of the leagues of woodland that lay between this remote valley and auch. i recalled the cardinal's warning that if i failed in my attempt i should be little likely to trouble paris again. the lout by the window paid no attention to me; nor i to him, when i had once satisfied myself that he was really what he seemed to be. but by and by two or three men--rough, uncouth fellows--dropped in to reinforce the landlord, and they, too, seemed to have no other business than to sit in silence looking at me, or now and again to exchange a word in a _patois_ of their own. by the time my supper was ready, the knaves numbered six in all; and, as they were armed to a man with huge spanish knives, and evidently resented my presence in their dull rustic fashion--every rustic is suspicious--i began to think that, unwittingly, i had put my head into a wasp's nest. nevertheless, i ate and drank with apparent appetite; but little that passed within the circle of light cast by the smoky lamp escaped me. i watched the men's looks and gestures at least as sharply as they watched mine; and all the time i was racking my wits for some mode of disarming their suspicions--or failing that, of learning something more of the position, which, it was clear, far exceeded in difficulty and danger anything i had expected. the whole valley, it would seem, was on the lookout to protect my man! i had purposely brought with me from auch a couple of bottles of choice armagnac; and these had been carried into the house with my saddlebags. i took one out now and opened it, and carelessly offered a dram of the spirit to the landlord. he took it. as he drank it, i saw his face flush; he handed back the cup reluctantly, and on that hint i offered him another. the strong spirit was already beginning to work. he accepted, and in a few minutes began to talk more freely and with less of the constraint which had marked us. still, his tongue ran chiefly on questions--he would know this, he would learn that; but even this was a welcome change. i told him openly whence i had come, by what road, how long i had stayed in auch, and where; and so far i satisfied his curiosity. only when i came to the subject of my visit to cocheforêt i kept a mysterious silence, hinting darkly at business in spain and friends across the border, and this and that, and giving the peasants to understand, if they pleased, that i was in the same interest as their exiled master. they took the bait, winked at one another, and began to look at me in a more friendly way--the landlord foremost. but when i had led them so far, i dared go no farther, lest i should commit myself and be found out. i stopped, therefore, and, harking back to general subjects, chanced to compare my province with theirs. the landlord, now become almost talkative, was not slow to take up this challenge; and it presently led to my acquiring a curious piece of knowledge. he was boasting of his great snow mountains, the forests that propped them, the bears that roamed in them, the izards that loved the ice, and the boars that fed on the oak mast. "well," i said, quite by chance, "we have not these things, it is true. but we have things in the north you have not. we have tens of thousands of good horses--not such ponies as you breed here. at the horse fair at fécamp my sorrel would be lost in the crowd. here in the south you will not meet his match in a long day's journey." "do not make too sure of that!" the man replied, his eyes bright with triumph and the dram. "what would you say if i showed you a better--in my own stable?" i saw that his words sent a kind of thrill through his other hearers, and that such of them as understood--for two or three of them talked their _patois_ only--looked at him angrily; and in a twinkling i began to comprehend. but i affected dulness, and laughed scornfully. "seeing is believing," i said. "i doubt if you know a good horse here when you see one, my friend." "oh, don't i?" he said, winking. "indeed!" "i doubt it," i answered stubbornly. "then come with me, and i will show you one," he retorted, discretion giving way to vainglory. his wife and the others, i saw, looked at him dumbfounded; but, without paying any heed to them, he took up a lanthorn, and, assuming an air of peculiar wisdom, opened the door. "come with me," he continued. "i don't know a good horse when i see one, don't i? i know a better than yours, at any rate!" i should not have been surprised if the other men had interfered; but--i suppose he was a leader among them, and they did not, and in a moment we were outside. three paces through the darkness took us to the stable, an offset at the back of the inn. my man twirled the pin, and, leading the way in, raised his lanthorn. a horse whinnied softly, and turned its bright, soft eyes on us--a baldfaced chestnut, with white hairs in its tail and one white stocking. "there!" my guide exclaimed, waving the lanthorn to and fro boastfully, that i might see its points. "what do you say to that? is that an undersized pony?" "no," i answered, purposely stinting my praise. "it is pretty fair--for this country." "or any country," he answered wrathfully. "any country, i say--i don't care where it is! and i have reason to know! why, man, that horse is-- but there, that is a good horse, if ever you saw one!" and with that he ended abruptly and lamely, lowering the lanthorn with a sudden gesture, and turning to the door. he was on the instant in such hurry, that he almost shouldered me out. but i understood. i knew that he had nearly betrayed all--that he had been on the point of blurting out that that was m. de cocheforêt's horse! m. de cocheforêt's, _comprenez bien!_ and while i turned away my face in the darkness, that he might not see me smile, i was not surprised to find the man in a moment changed, and become, in the closing of the door, as sober and suspicious as before, ashamed of himself and enraged with me, and in a mood to cut my throat for a trifle. it was not my cue to quarrel, however--anything but that. i made, therefore, as if i had seen nothing, and when we were back in the inn praised the horse grudgingly, and like a man but half convinced. the ugly looks and ugly weapons i saw around me were fine incentives to caution; and no italian, i flatter myself, could have played his part more nicely than i did. but i was heartily glad when it was over, and i found myself, at last, left alone for the night in a little garret--a mere fowl-house--upstairs, formed by the roof and gable walls, and hung with strings of apples and chestnuts. it was a poor sleeping-place--rough, chilly, and unclean. i ascended to it by a ladder; my cloak and a little fern formed my only bed. but i was glad to accept it. it enabled me to be alone and to think out the position unwatched. of course m. de cocheforêt was at the château. he had left his horse here, and gone up on foot: probably that was his usual plan. he was therefore within my reach, in one sense--i could not have come at a better time--but in another he was as much beyond it as if i were still in paris. so far was i from being able to seize him that i dared not ask a question or let fall a rash word, or even look about me freely. i saw i dared not. the slightest hint of my mission, the faintest breath of distrust, would lead to throat-cutting--and the throat would be mine; while the longer i lay in the village, the greater suspicion i should incur, and the closer would be the watch kept over me. in such a position some men might have given up the attempt and saved themselves across the border. but i have always valued myself on my fidelity, and i did not shrink. if not to-day, to-morrow; if not this time, next time. the dice do not always turn up aces. bracing myself, therefore, to the occasion, i crept, as soon as the house was quiet, to the window, a small, square, open lattice, much cobwebbed, and partly stuffed with hay. i looked out. the village seemed to be asleep. the dark branches of trees hung a few feet away, and almost obscured a grey, cloudy sky, through which a wet moon sailed drearily. looking downwards, i could at first see nothing; but as my eyes grew used to the darkness--i had only just put out my rushlight--i made out the stable-door and the shadowy outlines of the lean-to roof. i had hoped for this. i could now keep watch, and learn at least whether cocheforêt left before morning. if he did not i should know he was still here. if he did, i should be the better for seeing his features, and learning, perhaps, other things that might be of use. making up my mind to be uncomfortable, i sat down on the floor by the lattice, and began a vigil that might last, i knew, until morning. it did last about an hour. at the end of that time i heard whispering below, then footsteps; then, as some persons turned a corner, a voice speaking aloud and carelessly. i could not catch the words spoken; but the voice was a gentleman's, and its bold accents and masterful tone left me in no doubt that the speaker was m. de cocheforêt himself. hoping to learn more, i pressed my face nearer to the opening, and i had just made out through the gloom two figures--one that of a tall, slight man, wearing a cloak, the other, i thought, a woman's, in a sheeny white dress--when a thundering rap on the door of my garret made me spring back a yard from the lattice, and lie down hurriedly on my couch. the noise was repeated. "well?" i cried, cursing the untimely interruption. i was burning with anxiety to see more. "what is it? what is the matter?" the trapdoor was lifted a foot or more. the landlord thrust up his head. "you called, did you not?" he asked. he held up a rushlight, which illumined half the room and lit up his grinning face. "called--at this hour of the night, you fool?" i answered angrily. "no! i did not call. go to bed, man!" but he remained on the ladder, gaping stupidly. "i heard you," he said. "go to bed! you are drunk!" i answered, sitting up. "i tell you i did not call." "oh, very well," he answered slowly. "and you do not want anything?" "nothing--except to be left alone!" i replied sourly. "umph!" he said. "good-night!" "good-night! good-night!" i answered, with what patience i might. the tramp of the horse's hoofs as it was led out of the stable was in my ear at the moment. "good-night!" i continued feverishly, hoping he would still retire in time, and i have a chance to look out. "i want to sleep." "good," he said, with a broad grin. "but it is early yet, and you have plenty of time." and then, at last, he slowly let down the trapdoor, and i heard him chuckle as he went down the ladder. before he reached the bottom i was at the window. the woman whom i had seen still stood below, in the same place; and beside her a man in a peasant's dress, holding a lanthorn, but the man, the man i wanted to see was no longer there. and it was evident that he was gone; it was evident that the others no longer feared me, for while i gazed the landlord came out to them with another lanthorn, and said something to the lady, and she looked up at my window and laughed. it was a warm night, and she wore nothing over her white dress. i could see her tall, shapely figure and shining eyes, and the firm contour of her beautiful face; which, if any fault might be found with it, erred in being too regular. she looked like a woman formed by nature to meet dangers and difficulties; and even here, at midnight, in the midst of these desperate men, she seemed in place. it was possible that under her queenly exterior, and behind the contemptuous laugh with which she heard the land lord's story, there lurked a woman's soul capable of folly and tenderness. but no outward sign betrayed its presence. i scanned her very carefully; and secretly, if the truth be told, i was glad to find madame de cocheforêt such a woman. i was glad that she had laughed as she had--that she was not a little, tender, child-like woman, to be crushed by the first pinch of trouble. for if i succeeded in my task, if i--but, pish! women, i said, were all alike. she would find consolation quickly enough. i watched until the group broke up, and madame, with one of the men, went her way round the corner of the inn, and out of my sight. then i retired to bed again, feeling more than ever perplexed what course i should adopt. it was clear that, to succeed, i must obtain admission to the house. this was garrisoned, unless my instructions erred, by two or three old men-servants only, and as many women; since madame, to disguise her husband's visits the more easily, lived, and gave out that she lived, in great retirement. to seize her husband at home, therefore, might be no impossible task; though here, in the heart of the village, a troop of horse might make the attempt, and fail. but how was i to gain admission to the house--a house guarded by quick-witted women, and hedged in with all the precautions love could devise? that was the question; and dawn found me still debating it, still as far as ever from an answer. with the first light i was glad to get up. i thought that the fresh air might inspire me, and i was tired, besides, of my stuffy closet. i crept stealthily down the ladder, and managed to pass unseen through the lower room, in which several persons were snoring heavily. the outer door was not fastened, and in a hand-turn i stood in the street. it was still so early that the trees stood up black against the reddening sky, but the bough upon the post before the door was growing green, and in a few minutes the grey light would be everywhere. already even in the road way there was a glimmering of it; and as i stood at the corner of the house--where i could command both the front and the side on which the stable opened--looking greedily for any trace of the midnight departure, my eyes detected something light-coloured lying on the ground. it was not more than two or three paces from me, and i stepped to it and picked it up curiously, hoping it might be a note. it was not a note, however, but a tiny orange-coloured sachet, such as women carry in the bosom. it was full of some faintly scented powder, and bore on one side the initial "e," worked in white silk; and was altogether a dainty little toy, such as women love. doubtless madame de cocheforêt had dropped it in the night. i turned it over and over; and then i put it away with a smile, thinking it might be useful some time, and in some way. i had scarcely done this, and turned with the intention of exploring the street, when the door behind me creaked on its leather hinges, and in a moment my host stood at my elbow. evidently his suspicions were again aroused, for from that time he managed to be with me, on one pretence or another, until noon. moreover, his manner grew each moment more churlish, his hints plainer; until i could scarcely avoid noticing the one or the other. about midday, having followed me for the twentieth time into the street, he came at last to the point, by asking me rudely if i did not need my horse. "no," i said. "why do you ask?" "because," he answered, with an ugly smile, "this is not a very healthy place for strangers." "ah!" i retorted. "but the border air suits me, you see." it was a lucky answer; for, taken with my talk of the night before, it puzzled him, by again suggesting that i was on the losing side, and had my reasons for lying near spain. before he had done scratching his head over it, the clatter of hoofs broke the sleepy quiet of the village street, and the lady i had seen the night before rode quickly round the corner, and drew her horse on to its haunches. without looking at me, she called to the innkeeper to come to her stirrup. he went. the moment his back was turned, i slipped away, and in a twinkling was hidden by a house. two or three glum-looking fellows stared at me as i passed, but no one moved; and in two minutes i was clear of the village, and in a half-worn track which ran through the wood, and led--if my ideas were right--to the château. to discover the house and learn all that was to be learned about its situation was my most pressing need: even at the risk of a knife-thrust, i was determined to satisfy it. i had not gone two hundred paces along the path before i heard the tread of a horse behind me, and i had just time to hide myself before madame came up and rode by me, sitting her horse gracefully, and with all the courage of a northern woman. i watched her pass, and then, assured by her presence that i was in the right road, i hurried after her. two minutes' walking at speed brought me to a light wooden bridge spanning a stream. i crossed this, and, the wood opening, saw before me first a wide, pleasant meadow, and beyond this a terrace. on the terrace, pressed upon on three sides by thick woods, stood a grey mansion, with the corner tourelles, steep, high roofs, and round balconies that men loved and built in the days of the first francis. it was of good size, but wore, i fancied, a gloomy aspect. a great yew hedge, which seemed to enclose a walk or bowling-green, hid the ground floor of the east wing from view, while a formal rose garden, stiff even in neglect, lay in front of the main building. the west wing, whose lower roofs fell gradually away to the woods, probably contained the stables and granaries. i stood a moment only, but i marked all, and noted how the road reached the house, and which windows were open to attack; then i turned and hastened back. fortunately, i met no one between the house and the village, and was able to enter the inn with an air of the most complete innocence. short as had been my absence, i found things altered there. round the door loitered and chattered three strangers--stout, well-armed fellows, whose bearing suggested a curious mixture of smugness and independence. half-a-dozen pack-horses stood tethered to the post in front of the house; and the landlord's manner, from being rude and churlish only, had grown perplexed and almost timid. one of the strangers, i soon found, supplied him with wine; the others were travelling merchants, who rode in the first one's company for the sake of safety. all were substantial men from tarbes--solid burgesses; and i was not long in guessing that my host, fearing what might leak out before them, and particularly that i might refer to the previous night's disturbance, was on tenterhooks while they remained. for a time this did not suggest anything to me. but when we had all taken our seats for supper there came an addition to the party. the door opened, and the fellow whom i had seen the night before with madame de cocheforêt entered, and took a stool by the fire. i felt sure that he was one of the servants at the château; and in a flash his presence inspired me with the most feasible plan for obtaining admission which i had yet hit upon. i felt myself growing hot at the thought--it seemed so full of promise and of danger--and on the instant, without giving myself time to think too much, i began to carry it into effect. i called for two or three bottles of better wine, and, assuming a jovial air, passed it round the table. when we had drunk a few glasses, i fell to talking, and, choosing politics, took the side of the languedoc party and the malcontents, in so reckless a fashion that the innkeeper was beside himself at my imprudence. the merchants, who belonged to the class with whom the cardinal was always most popular, looked first astonished and then enraged. but i was not to be checked. hints and sour looks were lost upon me. i grew more outspoken with every glass, i drank to the rochellois, i swore it would not be long before they raised their heads again; and at last, while the innkeeper and his wife were engaged lighting the lamp, i passed round the bottle and called on all for a toast. "i'll give you one to begin," i bragged noisily. "a gentleman's toast! a southern toast! here is confusion to the cardinal, and a health to all who hate him!" "mon dieu!" one of the strangers cried, springing from his seat in a rage. "i am not going to stomach that! is your house a common treason-hole," he continued, turning furiously on the landlord, "that you suffer this?" "hoity-toity!" i answered, coolly keeping my seat. "what is all this? don't you relish my toast, little man?" "no--nor you!" he retorted hotly, "whoever you may be!" "then i will give you another," i answered, with a hiccough. "perhaps it will be more to your taste. here is the duke of orleans, and may he soon be king!" chapter iii. the house in the wood. my words fairly startled the three men out of their anger. for a moment they glared at me as if they had seen a ghost. then the wine-merchant clapped his hand on the table. "that is enough!" he said, with a look at his companions. "i think there can be no mistake about that. as damnable treason as ever i heard whispered! i congratulate you, sir, on your boldness. as for you," he continued, turning with an ugly sneer to the landlord, "i shall know now the company you keep! i was not aware that my wine wet whistles to such a tune!" but if he was startled, the innkeeper was furious, seeing his character thus taken away; and, being at no time a man of many words, he vented his rage exactly in the way i wished. in a twinkling he raised such an uproar as can scarcely be conceived. with a roar like a bull's he ran headlong at the table, and overturned it on the top of me. the woman saved the lamp and fled with it into a corner, whence she and the man from the château watched the skirmish in silence; but the pewter cups and platters flew spinning across the floor, while the table pinned me to the ground among the ruins of my stool. having me at this disadvantage--for at first i made no resistance--the landlord began to belabour me with the first thing he snatched up, and when i tried to defend myself cursed me with each blow for a treacherous rogue and a vagrant. meanwhile, the three merchants, delighted with the turn things had taken, skipped round us laughing; and now hounded him on, now bantered me with "how is that for the duke of orleans?" and "how now, traitor?" when i thought this had lasted long enough--or, to speak more plainly, when i could stand the innkeeper's drubbing no longer--i threw him off by a great effort, and struggled to my feet. but still, though the blood was trickling down my face, i refrained from drawing my sword. i caught up instead a leg of the stool which lay handy, and, watching my opportunity, dealt the landlord a shrewd blow under the ear, which laid him out in a moment on the wreck of his own table. "now!" i cried, brandishing my new weapon, which fitted the hand to a nicety, "come on! come on, if you dare to strike a blow, you peddling, truckling, huckstering knaves! a fig for you and your shaveling cardinal!" the red-faced wine-merchant drew his sword in a one-two. "why, you drunken fool," he said wrathfully, "put that stick down, or i will spit you like a lark!" "lark in your teeth!" i cried, staggering as if the wine were in my head. "another word, and i--" he made a couple of savage passes at me, but in a twinkling his sword flew across the room. "_voilà!_" i shouted, lurching forward, as if i had luck and not skill to thank for it. "now the next! come on, come on--you white-livered knaves!" and, pretending a drunken frenzy, i flung my weapon bodily amongst them, and seizing the nearest, began to wrestle with him. in a moment they all threw themselves upon me, and, swearing copiously, bore me back to the door. the wine-merchant cried breathlessly to the woman to open it, and in a twinkling they had me through it and half way across the road. the one thing i feared was a knife-thrust in the mêlée; but i had to run that risk, and the men were honest enough and, thinking me drunk, indulgent. in a trice i found myself on my back in the dirt, with my head humming; and heard the bars of the door fall noisily into their places. i got up and went to the door, and, to play out my part, hammered on it frantically, crying out to them to let me in. but the three travellers only jeered at me, and the landlord, coming to the window, with his head bleeding, shook his fist at me and cursed me for a mischief-maker. baffled in this i retired to a log which lay in the road a few paces from the house, and sat down on it to await events. with torn clothes and bleeding face, hatless and covered with dirt, i was in scarcely better case than my opponent. it was raining, too, and the dripping branches swayed over my head. the wind was in the south--the coldest quarter. i began to feel chilled and dispirited. if my scheme failed, i had forfeited roof and bed to no purpose, and placed future progress out of the question. it was a critical moment. but at last that happened for which i had been looking. the door swung open a few inches, and a man came noiselessly out; the door was quickly barred behind him. he stood a moment, waiting on the threshold and peering into the gloom; and seemed to expect to be attacked. finding himself unmolested, however, and all quiet, he went off steadily down the street--towards the château. i let a couple of minutes go by and then i followed. i had no difficulty in hitting on the track at the end of the street, but when i had once plunged into the wood, i found myself in darkness so intense that i soon strayed from the path, and fell over roots, and tore my clothes with thorns, and lost my temper twenty times before i found the path again. however, i gained the bridge at last, and caught sight of a light twinkling before me. to make for it across the meadow and terrace was an easy task; yet when i had reached the door and had hammered upon it, i was in so sorry a plight that i sank down, and had no need to play a part or pretend to be worse than i was. for a long time no one answered. the dark house towering above me remained silent. i could hear, mingled with the throbbings of my heart, the steady croaking of the frogs in a pond near the stables; but no other sound. in a frenzy of impatience and disgust i stood up again and hammered, kicking with my heels on the nail-studded door, and crying out desperately, "_a moi_! _a moi!_" then, or a moment later, i heard a remote door opened; footsteps as of more than one person drew near. i raised my voice and cried again, "_a moi!_" "who is there?" a voice asked. "a gentleman in distress," i answered piteously, moving my hands across the door. "for god's sake open and let me in. i am hurt, and dying of cold." "what brings you here?" the voice asked sharply. despite its tartness, i fancied it was a woman's. "heaven knows!" i answered desperately. "i cannot tell. they maltreated me at the inn, and threw me into the street. i crawled away, and have been wandering in the wood for hours. then i saw a light here." thereon, some muttering took place on the other side of the door, to which i had my ear. it ended in the bars being lowered. the door swung partly open and a light shone out, dazzling me. i tried to shade my eyes with my fingers, and as i did so fancied i heard a murmur of pity. but when i looked in under screen of my hand i saw only one person--the man who held the light, and his aspect was so strange, so terrifying, that, shaken as i was by fatigue, i recoiled a step. he was a tall and very thin man, meanly dressed in a short scanty jacket and well-darned hose. unable, for some reason, to bend his neck, he carried his head with a strange stiffness. and that head! never did living man show a face so like death. his forehead was bald and white, his cheek-bones stood out under the strained skin, all the lower part of his face fell in, his jaws receded, his cheeks were hollow, his lips and chin were thin and fleshless. he seemed to have only one expression--a fixed grin. while i stood looking at this formidable creature he made a quick motion to shut the door again, smiling more widely. i had the presence of mind to thrust in my foot, and, before he could resent the act, a voice in the background cried: "for shame, clon! stand back. stand back, do you hear? i am afraid, monsieur, that you are hurt." the last words were my welcome to that house; and, spoken at an hour and in circumstances so gloomy, they made a lasting impression. round the hall ran a gallery, and this, the height of the apartment, and the dark panelling seemed to swallow up the light. i stood within the entrance (as it seemed to me) of a huge cave; the skull-headed porter had the air of an ogre. only the voice which greeted me dispelled the illusion. i turned trembling towards the quarter whence it came, and, shading my eyes, made out a woman's form standing in a doorway under the gallery. a second figure, which i took to be that of the servant i had seen at the inn, loomed uncertainly beside her. i bowed in silence. my teeth were chattering i was faint without feigning, and felt a kind of terror, hard to explain, at the sound of this woman's voice. "one of our people has told me about you," she continued, speaking out of the darkness. "i am sorry that this has happened to you here, but i am afraid that you were indiscreet." "i take all the blame, madame," i answered humbly. "i ask only shelter for the night." "the time has not yet come when we cannot give our friends that!" she answered, with noble courtesy. "when it does, monsieur, we shall be homeless ourselves." i shivered, looking anywhere but at her; for i had not sufficiently pictured this scene of my arrival--i had not foreseen its details; and now i took part in it i felt a miserable meanness weigh me down. i had never from the first liked the work! but, i had had no choice. and i had no choice now. luckily, the guise in which i came, my fatigue, and wound were a sufficient mark, or i should have incurred suspicion at once. for i am sure that if ever in this world a brave man wore a hang-dog air, or gil de berault fell below himself, it was then and there--on madame de cocheforêt's threshold, with her welcome sounding in my ears. one, i think, did suspect me. clon, the porter, continued to hold the door obstinately ajar and to eye me with grinning spite, until his mistress, with some sharpness, bade him drop the bars, and conduct me to a room. "do you go also, louis," she continued, speaking to the man beside her, "and see this gentleman comfortably disposed. i am sorry," she added, addressing me in the graceful tone she had before used, and i thought i could see her head bend in the darkness, "that our present circumstances do not permit us to welcome you more fitly, monsieur. but the troubles of the times--however, you will excuse what is lacking. until to-morrow, i have the honour to bid you goodnight." "good-night, madame," i stammered, trembling. i had not been able to distinguish her face in the gloom of the doorway, but her voice, her greeting, her presence, unmanned me. i was troubled and perplexed; i had not spirit to kick a dog. i followed the two servants from the hall without heeding how we went; nor was it until we came to a full stop at a door in a whitewashed corridor, and it was forced upon me that something was in question between my two conductors, that i began to take notice. then i saw that one of them, louis, wished to lodge me here where we stood. the porter, on the other hand, who held the keys, would not. he did not speak a word, nor did the other--and this gave a queer ominous character to the debate; but he continued to jerk his head towards the farther end of the corridor, and, at last, he carried his point. louis shrugged his shoulders, and moved on, glancing askance at me; and i, not understanding the matter in debate, followed the pair in silence. we reached the end of the corridor, and there, for an instant, the monster with the keys paused and grinned at me. then he turned into a narrow passage on the left, and after following it for some paces, halted before a small, strong door. his key jarred in the lock, but he forced it shrieking round, and with a savage flourish threw the door open. i walked in and saw a mean, bare chamber with barred windows. the floor was indifferently clean, there was no furniture. the yellow light of the lanthorn falling on the stained walls gave the place the look of a dungeon. i turned to the two men. "this is not a very good room," i said. "and it feels damp. have you no other?" louis looked doubtfully at his companion. but the porter shook his head stubbornly. "why does he not speak?" i asked with impatience. "he is dumb," louis answered. "dumb!" i exclaimed. "but he hears." "he has ears," the servant answered drily. "but he has no tongue, monsieur." i shuddered. "how did he lose it?" i asked. "at rochelle. he was a spy, and the king's people took him the day the town surrendered. they spared his life, but cut out his tongue." "ah!" i said. i wished to say more, to be natural, to show myself at my ease. but the porter's eyes seemed to burn into me, and my own tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. he opened his lips and pointed to his throat with a horrid gesture, and i shook my head and turned from him-- "you can let me have some bedding?" i murmured hastily, for the sake of saying something, and to escape. "of course, monsieur," louis answered. "i will fetch some." he went away, thinking doubtless that clon would stay with me. but after waiting a minute the porter strode off also with the lanthorn, leaving me to stand in the middle of the damp, dark room, and reflect on the position. it was plain that clon suspected me. this prison-like room, with its barred window at the back of the house, and in the wing farthest from the stables, proved so much. clearly, he was a dangerous fellow, of whom i must beware. i had just begun to wonder how madame could keep such a monster in her house, when i heard his step returning. he came in, lighting louis, who carried a small pallet and a bundle of coverings. the dumb man had, besides the lanthorn, a bowl of water and a piece of rag in his hand. he set them down, and going out again, fetched in a stool. then he hung up the lanthorn on a nail, took the bowl and rag, and invited me to sit down. i was loth to let him touch me; but he continued to stand over me, pointing and grinning with dark persistence, and, rather than stand on a trifle, i sat down at last, and gave him his way. he bathed my head carefully enough, and i dare say did it good; but i understood. i knew that his only desire was to learn whether the cut was real or a pretence. i began to fear him more and more, and, until he was gone from the room, dared scarcely lift my face, lest he should read too much in it. alone, even, i felt uncomfortable. this seemed so sinister a business, and so ill begun. i was in the house. but madame's frank voice haunted me, and the dumb man's eyes, full of suspicion and menace. when i presently got up and tried my door, i found it locked. the room smelled dank and close--like a vault. i could not see through the barred window; but i could hear the boughs sweep it in ghostly fashion; and i guessed that it looked out where the wood grew close to the walls of the house; and that even in the day the sun never peeped through it. nevertheless, tired and worn out, i slept at last. when i awoke the room was full of grey light, the door stood open, and louis, looking ashamed of himself, waited by my pallet with a cup of wine in his hand, and some bread and fruit on a platter. "will monsieur be good enough to rise?" he said. "it is eight o'clock." "willingly," i answered tartly. "now that the door is unlocked." he turned red. "it was an oversight," he stammered. "clon is accustomed to lock the door, and he did it inadvertently, forgetting that there was any one--" "inside!" i said drily. "precisely, monsieur." "ah!" i replied. "well, i do not think the oversight would please madame de cocheforêt, if she heard of it?" "if monsieur would have the kindness not to--" "mention it, my good fellow?" i answered, looking at him with meaning, as i rose. "no; but it must not occur again." i saw that this man was not like clon. he had the instincts of the family servant, and freed from the influences of darkness, felt ashamed of his conduct. while he arranged my clothes, he looked round the room with an air of distaste, and muttered once or twice that the furniture of the principal chambers was packed away. "m. de cocheforêt is abroad, i think?" i said, as i dressed. "and likely to remain there," the man answered carelessly, shrugging his shoulders. "monsieur will doubtless have heard that he is in trouble. in the meantime, the house is triste, and monsieur must overlook much, if he stays. madame lives retired, and the roads are ill-made and visitors few." "when the lion was ill the jackals left him," i said. louis nodded. "it is true," he answered simply. he made no boast or brag on his own account, i noticed; and it came home to me that he was a faithful fellow, such as i love. i questioned him discreetly, and learned that he and clon and an older man who lived over the stables were the only male servants left of a great household. madame, her sister-in-law, and three women completed the family. it took me some time to repair my wardrobe, so that i dare say it was nearly ten when i left my dismal little room. i found louis waiting in the corridor, and he told me that madame de cocheforêt and mademoiselle were in the rose-garden, and would be pleased to receive me. i nodded, and he guided me through several dim passages to a parlour with an open door, through which the sun shone in gaily. cheered by the morning air and this sudden change to pleasantness and life, i stepped lightly out. the two ladies were walking up and down a wide path which bisected the garden. the weeds grew rankly in the gravel underfoot, the rose-bushes which bordered the walk thrust their branches here and there in untrained freedom, a dark yew hedge which formed the background bristled with rough shoots and sadly needed trimming. but i did not see any of these things then. the grace, the noble air, the distinction of the two women who paced slowly to meet me--and who shared all these qualities greatly as they differed in others--left me no power to notice trifles. mademoiselle was a head shorter than her _belle s[oe]ur_--a slender woman and petite, with a beautiful face and a fair complexion. she walked with dignity, but beside madame's stately figure she seemed almost childish. and it was characteristic of the two that mademoiselle as they drew near to me regarded me with sorrowful attention, madame with a grave smile. i bowed low. they returned the salute. "this is my sister," madame de cocheforêt said, with a slight, a very slight air of condescension. "will you please to tell me your name, monsieur?" "i am m. de barthe, a gentleman of normandy," i said, taking the name of my mother. my own, by a possibility, might be known. madame's face wore a puzzled look. "i do not know your name, i think," she said thoughtfully. doubtless she was going over in her mind all the names with which conspiracy had made her familiar. "that is my misfortune, madame," i said humbly. "nevertheless i am going to scold you," she rejoined, still eyeing me with some keenness. "i am glad to see that you are none the worse for your adventure--but others may be. and you should have borne that in mind." "i do not think that i hurt the man seriously," i stammered. "i do not refer to that," she answered coldly. "you know, or should know, that we are in disgrace here; that the government regards us already with an evil eye, and that a very small thing would lead them to garrison the village and perhaps oust us from the little the wars have left us. you should have known this and considered it," she continued. "whereas--i do not say that you are a braggart, m. de barthe. but on this one occasion you seem to have played the part of one." "madame, i did not think," i stammered. "want of thought causes much evil," she answered, smiling. "however, i have spoken, and we trust that while you stay with us you will be more careful. for the rest, monsieur," she continued graciously, raising her hand to prevent me speaking, "we do not know why you are here, or what plans you are pursuing. and we do not wish to know. it is enough that you are of our side. this house is at your service as long as you please to use it. and if we can aid you in any other way we will do so." "madame!" i exclaimed; and there i stopped. i could not say any more. the rose-garden, with its air of neglect, the shadow of the quiet house that fell across it, the great yew hedge which backed it, and was the pattern of one under which i had played in childhood--all had points that pricked me. but the women's kindness, their unquestioning confidence, the noble air of hospitality which moved them! against these and their placid beauty in its peaceful frame i had no shield. i turned away, and feigned to be overcome by gratitude. "i have no words--to thank you!" i muttered presently. "i am a little shaken this morning. i--pardon me." "we will leave you for a while," mademoiselle de cocheforêt said, in gentle, pitying tones. "the air will revive you. louis shall call you when we go to dinner, m. de barthe. come, elise." i bowed low to hide my face, and they nodded pleasantly--not looking closely at me--as they walked by me to the house. i watched the two gracious, pale-robed figures until the doorway swallowed them, and then i walked away to a quiet corner where the shrubs grew highest and the yew hedge threw its deepest shadow, and i stood to think. they were strange thoughts, i remember. if the oak can think at the moment the wind uproots it, or the gnarled thorn-bush when the landslip tears it from the slope, they may have such thoughts. i stared at the leaves, at the rotting blossoms, into the dark cavities of the hedge; i stared mechanically, dazed and wondering. what was the purpose for which i was here? what was the work i had come to do? above all, how--my god! how was i to do it in the face of these helpless women, who trusted me--who opened their house to me? clon had not frightened me, nor the loneliness of the leagued village, nor the remoteness of this corner where the dread cardinal seemed a name, and the king's writ ran slowly, and the rebellion, long quenched elsewhere, still smouldered. but madame's pure faith, the younger woman's tenderness--how was i to face these? i cursed the cardinal, i cursed the english fool who had brought me to this, i cursed the years of plenty and scarceness and the quartier marais, and zaton's, where i had lived like a pig, and-- a touch fell on my arm. i turned. it was clon. how he had stolen up so quietly, how long he had been at my elbow, i could not tell. but his eyes gleamed spitefully in their deep sockets, and he laughed with his fleshless lips; and i hated him. in the daylight the man looked more like a death's-head than ever. i fancied i read in his face that he knew my secret, and i flashed into rage at sight of him. "what is it?" i cried, with another oath. "don't lay your corpse-claws on me!" he mowed at me, and, bowing with ironical politeness, pointed to the house. "is madame served?" i said impatiently, crushing down my anger. "is that what you mean, fool?" he nodded. "very well," i retorted. "i can find my way, then. you may go!" he fell behind, and i strode back through the sunshine and flowers, and along the grass-grown paths, to the door by which i had come. i walked fast, but his shadow kept pace with me, driving out the strange thoughts in which i had been indulging. slowly but surely it darkened my mood. after all, this was a little, little place; the people who lived here--i shrugged my shoulders. france, power, pleasure, life lay yonder in the great city. a boy might wreck himself here for a fancy; a man of the world, never. when i entered the room, where the two ladies stood waiting for me by the table, i was myself again. "clon made you understand, then?" the younger woman said kindly. "yes, mademoiselle," i answered. on which i saw the two smile at one another, and i added: "he is a strange creature. i wonder you can bear to have him near you." "poor man! you do not know his story?" madame said. "i have heard something of it," i answered. "louis told me." "well, i do shudder at him, sometimes," she replied, in a low voice. "he has suffered--and horribly, and for us. but i wish it had been on any other service. spies are necessary things, but one does not wish to have to do with them! anything in the nature of treachery is so horrible." "quick, louis! the cognac, if you have any there!" mademoiselle exclaimed. "i am sure you are--still feeling ill, monsieur." "no, i thank you," i muttered hoarsely, making an effort to recover myself. "i am quite well. it was an old wound that sometimes touches me." chapter iv. madame and mademoiselle. to be frank, however, it was not the old wound that touched me so nearly, but madame's words; which, finishing what clon's sudden appearance in the garden had begun, went a long way towards hardening me and throwing me back into myself. i saw with bitterness--what i had perhaps forgotten for a moment--how great was the chasm which separated me from these women; how impossible it was we could long think alike; how far apart in views, in experience, in aims we were. and while i made a mock in my heart of their high-flown sentiments--or thought i did--i laughed no less at the folly which had led me to dream, even for a moment, that i could, at my age, go back--go back and risk all for a whim, a scruple, the fancy of a lonely hour. i dare say something of this showed in my face: for madame's eyes mirrored a dim reflection of trouble as she looked at me, and mademoiselle ate nervously and at random. at any rate, i fancied so, and i hastened to compose myself; and the two, in pressing upon me the simple dainties of the table, soon forgot, or appeared to forget, the incident. yet in spite of this _contretemps_, that first meal had a strange charm for me. the round table whereat we dined was spread inside the open door which led to the garden, so that the october sunshine fell full on the spotless linen and quaint old plate, and the fresh balmy air filled the room with the scent of sweet herbs. louis served us with the mien of major-domo, and set on each dish as though it had been a peacock or a mess of ortolans. the woods provided the larger portion of our meal; the garden did its part; the confections mademoiselle had cooked with her own hand. by-and-bye, as the meal went on, as louis trod to and fro across the polished floor, and the last insects of summer hummed sleepily outside, and the two gracious faces continued to smile at me out of the gloom--for the ladies sat with their backs to the door--i began to dream again. i began to sink again into folly--that was half pleasure, half pain. the fury of the gaming-house and the riot of zaton's seemed far away. the triumphs of the fencing-room--even they grew cheap and tawdry. i thought of existence as one outside it. i balanced this against that, and wondered whether, after all, the red soutane were so much better than the homely jerkin, or the fame of a day than ease and safety. and life at cocheforêt was all after the pattern of this dinner. each day, i might almost say each meal, gave rise to the same sequence of thoughts. in clon's presence, or when some word of madame's, unconsciously harsh, reminded me of the distance between us, i was myself. at other times, in face of this peaceful and intimate life, which was only rendered possible by the remoteness of the place and the peculiar circumstances in which the ladies stood, i felt a strange weakness. the loneliness of the woods that encircled the house, and here and there afforded a distant glimpse of snow-clad peaks; the absence of any link to bind me to the old life, so that at intervals it seemed unreal; the remoteness of the great world, all tended to sap my will and weaken the purpose which had brought me to this place. on the fourth day after my coming, however, something happened to break the spell. it chanced that i came late to dinner, and entered the room hastily and without ceremony, expecting to find madame and her sister already seated. instead, i found them talking in a low tone by the open door, with every mark of disorder in their appearance; while clon and louis stood at a little distance with downcast faces and perplexed looks. i had tune to see all this, and then my entrance wrought a sudden change. clon and louis sprang to attention; madame and her sister came to the table and sat down, and made a shallow pretence of being at their ease. but mademoiselle's face was pale, her hand trembled; and though madame's greater self-command enabled her to carry off the matter better, i saw that she was not herself. once or twice she spoke harshly to louis; she fell at other times into a brown study; and when she thought i was not watching her, her face wore a look of deep anxiety. i wondered what all this meant; and i wondered more when, after the meal, the two walked in the garden for an hour with clon. mademoiselle came from this interview alone, and i was sure that she had been weeping. madame and the dark porter stayed outside some time longer; then she, too, came in, and disappeared. clon did not return with her, and when i went into the garden five minutes later louis also had vanished. save for two women who sat sewing at an upper window, the house seemed to be deserted. not a sound broke the afternoon stillness of room or garden, and yet i felt that more was happening in this silence than appeared on the surface. i began to grow curious--suspicious; and presently slipped out myself by way of the stables, and, skirting the wood at the back of the house, gained with a little trouble the bridge which crossed the stream and led to the village. turning round at this point, i could see the house, and i moved a little aside into the underwood, and stood gazing at the windows, trying to unriddle the matter. it was not likely that m. de cocheforêt would repeat his visit so soon; and, besides, the women's emotions had been those of pure dismay and grief, unmixed with any of the satisfaction to which such a meeting, though snatched by stealth, would give rise. i discarded my first thought, therefore--that he had returned unexpectedly--and i sought for another solution. but none was on the instant forthcoming. the windows remained obstinately blind, no figures appeared on the terrace, the garden lay deserted, and without life. my departure had not, as i half expected it would, drawn the secret into light. i watched a while, at times cursing my own meanness; but the excitement of the moment and the quest tided me over that. then i determined to go down into the village and see whether anything was moving there. i had been down to the inn once, and had been received half sulkily, half courteously, as a person privileged at the great house, and therefore to be accepted. it would not be thought odd if i went again; and after a moment's thought, i started down the track. this, where it ran through the wood, was so densely shaded that the sun penetrated to it little, and in patches only. a squirrel stirred at times, sliding round a trunk, or scampering across the dry leaves. occasionally a pig grunted and moved farther into the wood. but the place was very quiet, and i do not know how it was that i surprised clon instead of being surprised by him. he was walking along the path before me with his eyes on the ground--walking so slowly, and with his lean frame so bent that i might have supposed him ill if i had not remarked the steady movement of his head from right to left, and the alert touch with which he now and again displaced a clod of earth or a cluster of leaves. by-and-bye he rose stiffly, and looked round him suspiciously; but by that time i had slipped behind a trunk, and was not to be seen; and after a brief interval he went back to his task, stooping over it more closely, if possible, than before, and applying himself with even greater care. by that time i had made up my mind that he was tracking some one. but whom? i could not make a guess at that. i only knew that the plot was thickening, and began to feel the eagerness of the chase. of course, if the matter had not to do with cocheforêt, it was no affair of mine; but though it seemed unlikely that anything could bring him back so soon, he might still be at the bottom of this. and, besides, i felt a natural curiosity. when clon at last improved his pace, and went on to the village, i took up his task. i called to mind all the wood-lore i had ever known, and scanned trodden mould and crushed leaves with eager eyes. but in vain. i could make nothing of it at all, and rose at last with an aching back and no advantage. i did not go on to the village after that, but returned to the house, where i found madame pacing the garden. she looked up eagerly on hearing my step; and i was mistaken if she was not disappointed--if she had not been expecting some one else. she hid the feeling bravely, however, and met me with a careless word; but she turned to the house more than once while we talked, and she seemed to be all the while on the watch, and uneasy. i was not surprised when clon's figure presently appeared in the doorway, and she left me abruptly, and went to him. i only felt more certain than before that there was something strange on foot. what it was, and whether it had to do with m. de cocheforêt, i could not tell. but there it was, and i grew more curious the longer i remained alone. she came back to me presently, looking thoughtful and a trifle downcast. "that was clon, was it not?" i said, studying her face. "yes," she answered. she spoke absently, and did not look at me. "how does he talk to you?" i asked, speaking a trifle curtly. as i intended, my tone roused her. "by signs," she said. "is he--is he not a little mad?" i ventured. i wanted to make her talk and forget herself. she looked at me with sudden keenness, then dropped her eyes. "you do not like him?" she said, a note of challenge in her voice. "i have noticed that, monsieur." "i think he does not like me," i replied. "he is less trustful than we are," she answered naïvely. "it is natural that he should be. he has seen more of the world." that silenced me for a moment, but she did not seem to notice it. "i was looking for him a little while ago, and i could not find him," i said, after a pause. "he has been into the village," she answered. i longed to pursue the matter farther; but though she seemed to entertain no suspicion of me, i dared not run the risk. i tried her, instead, on another tack. "mademoiselle de cocheforêt does not seem very well to-day?" i said. "no?" she answered carelessly. "well, now you speak of it, i do not think she is. she is often anxious about--my husband." she uttered the last two words with a little hesitation, and looked at me quickly when she had spoken them. we were sitting at the moment on a stone seat which had the wall of the house for a back; and, fortunately, i was toying with the branch of a creeping plant that hung over it, so that she could not see more than the side of my face. for i knew that it altered. over my voice, however, i had more control, and i hastened to answer, "yes, i suppose so," as innocently as possible. "he is at bosost--in spain. you knew that, i conclude?" she said, with a certain sharpness. and she looked me in the face again very directly. "yes," i answered, beginning to tremble. "i suppose you have heard, too, that he--that he sometimes crosses the border?" she continued, in a low voice, but with a certain ring of insistence in her tone. "or, if you have not heard it, you guess it?" i was in a quandary, and grew, in one second, hot all over. uncertain what amount of knowledge i ought to admit, i took refuge in gallantry. "i should be surprised if he did not," i answered, with a bow, "being, as he is, so close, and having such an inducement to return, madame." she drew a long, shivering sigh--at the thought of his peril, i fancied, and sat back against the wall. nor did she say any more, though i heard her sigh again. in a moment she rose. "the afternoons are growing chilly," she said; "i will go in and see how mademoiselle is. sometimes she does not come to supper. if she cannot descend this evening, i am afraid you must excuse me too, monsieur." i said what was right, and watched her go in; and, as i did so, i loathed my errand, and the mean contemptible curiosity which it had planted in my mind, more than at any former time. these women--i could find it in my heart to hate them for their frankness, for their foolish confidence, and the silly trustfulness that made them so easy a prey! _nom de dieu!_ what did the woman mean by telling me all this? to meet me in such a way, to disarm one by such methods, was to take an unfair advantage. it put a vile--ay, the vilest--aspect, on the work i had to do. yet it was very odd! what could m. de cocheforêt mean by returning so soon, if m. de cocheforêt was here? and, on the other hand, if it was not his unexpected presence that had so upset the house, what was the secret? whom had clon been tracking? and what was the cause of madame's anxiety? in a few minutes i began to grow curious again; and, as the ladies did not appear at supper, i had leisure to give my brain full license, and in the course of an hour thought of a hundred keys to the mystery. but none exactly fitted the lock, or laid open the secret. a false alarm that evening helped to puzzle me still more. i was sitting, about an hour after supper, on the same seat in the garden--i had my cloak and was smoking--when madame came out like a ghost, and, without seeing me, flitted away through the darkness toward the stables. for a moment i hesitated, then i followed her. she went down the path and round the stables, and so far i understood; but when she had in this way gained the rear of the west wing, she took a track through the thicket to the east of the house again, and so came back to the garden. this gained, she came up the path and went in through the parlour door, and disappeared--after making a clear circuit of the house, and not once pausing or looking to right or left! i confess i was fairly baffled. i sank back on the seat i had left, and said to myself that this was the lamest of all conclusions. i was sure that she had exchanged no word with any one. i was equally sure that she had not detected my presence behind her. why, then, had she made this strange promenade, alone, unprotected, an hour after nightfall? no dog had bayed, no one had moved, she had not once paused, or listened, like a person expecting a rencontre. i could not make it out. and i came no nearer to solving it, though i lay awake an hour beyond my usual time. in the morning neither of the ladies descended to dinner, and i heard that mademoiselle was not so well. after a lonely meal, therefore--i missed them more than i should have supposed--i retired to my favourite seat, and fell to meditating. the day was fine, and the garden pleasant. sitting there with my eyes on the old-fashioned herb-beds, with the old-fashioned scents in the air, and the dark belt of trees bounding the view on either side, i could believe that i had been out of paris not three weeks, but three months. the quiet lapped me round. i could fancy that i had never loved anything else. the wood-doves cooed in the stillness; occasionally the harsh cry of a jay jarred the silence. it was an hour after noon, and hot. i think i nodded. on a sudden, as if in a dream, i saw clon's face peering at me round the angle of the parlour door. he looked, and in a moment withdrew, and i heard whispering. the door was gently closed. then all was still again. but i was wide awake now, and thinking hard. clearly the people of the house wished to assure themselves that i was asleep and safely out of the way. as clearly, it was to my interest to know what was passing. giving way to the temptation, i rose quietly, and, stooping below the level of the windows, slipped round the east end of the house, passing between it and the great yew hedge. here i found all still, and no one stirring. so, keeping a wary eye about me, i went on round the house--reversing the route which madame had taken the night before--until i gained the rear of the stables. here i had scarcely paused a second to scan the ground before two persons came out of the stable-court they were madame and the porter. they stood a brief while outside, and looked up and down. then madame said something to the man, and he nodded. leaving him standing where he was, she crossed the grass with a quick, light step, and vanished among the trees. in a moment my mind was made up to follow; and, as clon turned at once and went in, i was able to do so before it was too late. bending low among the shrubs, i ran hot-foot to the point where madame had entered the wood. here i found a narrow path, and ran nimbly along it, and presently saw her grey robe fluttering among the trees before me. it only remained to keep out of her sight and give her no chance of discovering that she was followed; and this i set myself to do. once or twice she glanced round, but the wood was of beech, the light which passed between the leaves was mere twilight, and my clothes were dark-coloured. i had every advantage, therefore, and little to fear as long as i could keep her in view and still remain myself at such a distance that the rustle of my tread would not disturb her. assured that she was on her way to meet her husband, whom my presence kept from the house, i felt that the crisis had come at last; and i grew more excited with each step i took. true, i detested the task of watching her: it filled me with peevish disgust. but in proportion as i hated it i was eager to have it done and be done with it, and succeed, and stuff my ears and begone from the scene. when she presently came to the verge of the beech wood, and, entering a little open clearing, seemed to loiter, i went cautiously. this, i thought, must be the rendezvous; and i held back warily, looking to see him step out of the thicket. but he did not, and by-and-bye she quickened her pace. she crossed the open and entered a wide ride cut through a low, dense wood of alder and dwarf oak--a wood so closely planted, and so intertwined with hazel and elder and box that the branches rose like a solid wall, twelve feet high, on either side of the track. down this she passed, and i stood and watched her go; for i dared not follow. the ride stretched away as straight as a line for four or five hundred yards, a green path between green walls. to enter it was to be immediately detected, if she turned; while the thicket itself permitted no passage. i stood baffled and raging, and watched her pass along. it seemed an age before she at last reached the end, and, turning sharply to the right, was in an instant gone from sight. i waited then no longer. i started off, and, running as lightly and quietly as i could, i sped down the green alley. the sun shone into it, the trees kept off the wind, and between heat and haste, i sweated finely. but the turf was soft, and the ground fell slightly, and in little more than a minute i gained the end. fifty yards short of the turning i stayed myself, and, stealing on, looked cautiously the way she had gone. i saw before me a second ride, the twin of the other, and a hundred and fifty paces down it her grey figure tripping on between the green hedges. i stood and took breath, and cursed the wood and the heat and madame's wariness. we must have come a league or two-thirds of a league, at least. how far did the man expect her to plod to meet him? i began to grow angry. there is moderation even in the cooking of eggs, and this wood might stretch into spain, for all i knew! presently she turned the corner and was gone again, and i had to repeat my man[oe]uvre. this time, surely, i should find a change. but no! another green ride stretched away into the depths of the forest, with hedges of varying shades--here light and there dark, as hazel and elder, or thorn, and yew and box prevailed--but always high and stiff and impervious. half-way down the ride madame's figure tripped steadily on, the only moving thing in sight. i wondered, stood, and, when she vanished, followed--only to find that she had entered another track, a little narrower, but in every other respect alike. and so it went on for quite half an hour. sometimes madame turned to the right, sometimes to the left. the maze seemed to be endless. once or twice i wondered whether she had lost her way, and was merely seeking to return. but her steady, purposeful gait, her measured pace, forbade the idea. i noticed, too, that she seldom looked behind her--rarely to right or left. once the ride down which she passed was carpeted not with green, but with the silvery, sheeny leaves of some creeping plant that in the distance had a shimmer like that of water at evening. as she trod this, with her face to the low sun, her tall grey figure had a pure air that for the moment startled me--she looked unearthly. then i swore in scorn of myself, and at the next corner i had my reward. she was no longer walking on. she had stopped, i found, and seated herself on a fallen tree that lay in the ride. for some time i stood in ambush watching her, and with each minute i grew more impatient. at last i began to doubt--to have strange thoughts. the green walls were growing dark. the sun was sinking; a sharp, white peak, miles and miles away, which closed the vista of the ride began to flush and colour rosily. finally, but not before i had had leisure to grow uneasy, she stood up and walked on more slowly. i waited, as usual, until the next turning hid her. then i hastened after her, and, warily passing round the corner--came face to face with her! i knew all in a moment--that she had fooled me, tricked me, lured me away. her face was white with scorn, her eyes blazed; her figure, as she confronted me, trembled with anger and infinite contempt. "you spy!" she cried. "you hound! you--gentleman! oh, _mon dieu!_ if you are one of us--if you are really not _canaille_--we shall pay for this some day! we shall pay a heavy reckoning in the time to come! i did not think," she continued--her every syllable like the lash of a whip--"that there was anything so vile as you in this world!" i stammered something--i do not know what. her words burned into me--into my heart! had she been a man, i would have struck her dead! "you thought you deceived me yesterday," she continued, lowering her tone, but with no lessening of the passion and contempt which curled her lip and gave fulness to her voice. "you plotter! you surface trickster! you thought it an easy task to delude a woman--you find yourself deluded. god give you shame that you may suffer!" she continued mercilessly. "you talked of clon, but clon beside you is the most honourable of men!" "madame," i said hoarsely--and i know my face was grey as ashes--"let us understand one another." "god forbid!" she cried, on the instant. "i would not soil myself!" "fie! madame," i said, trembling. "but then, you are a woman. that should cost a man his life!" she laughed bitterly. "you say well," she retorted. "i am not a man. neither am i madame. madame de cocheforêt has spent this afternoon--thanks to your absence and your imbecility--with her husband. yes, i hope that hurts you!" she went on, savagely snapping her little white teeth together. "to spy and do vile work, and do it ill, monsieur mouchard--monsieur de mouchard, i should say--i congratulate you!" "you are not madame de cocheforêt!" i cried, stunned--even in the midst of my shame and rage--by this blow. "no, monsieur!" she answered grimly. "i am not! and permit me to point out--for we do not all lie easily--that i never said i was. you deceived yourself so skilfully that we had no need to trick you." "mademoiselle, then?" i muttered. "is madame!" she cried. "yes, and i am mademoiselle de cocheforêt. and in that character, and in all others, i beg from this moment to close our acquaintance, sir. when we meet again--if we ever do meet--which god forbid!" she cried, her eyes sparkling, "do not presume to speak to me, or i will have you flogged by the grooms. and do not stain our roof by sleeping under it again. you may lie to-night in the inn. it shall not be said that cocheforêt," she continued proudly, "returned even treachery with inhospitality; and i will give orders to that end. to-morrow begone back to your master, like the whipped cur you are! spy and coward!" with the last fierce words she moved away. i would have said something, i could almost have found it in my heart to stop her and make her hear. nay, i had dreadful thoughts; for i was the stronger, and i might have done with her as i pleased. but she swept by me so fearlessly--as i might pass some loathsome cripple in the road--that i stood turned to stone. without looking at me--without turning her head to see whether i followed or remained, or what i did--she went steadily down the track until the trees and the shadow and the growing darkness hid her grey figure from me; and i found myself alone. chapter v. revenge. and full of black rage! had she only reproached me, or, turning on me in the hour of _my_ victory, said all she had now said in the moment of her own, i could have borne it. she might have shamed me then, and i might have taken the shame to myself, and forgiven her. but, as it was, i stood there in the gathering dusk, between the darkening hedges, baffled, tricked, defeated! and by a woman! she had pitted her wits against mine, her woman's will against my experience, and she had come off the victor. and then she had reviled me. as i took it all in, and began to comprehend, also, the more remote results, and how completely her move had made further progress on my part impossible, i hated her. she had tricked me with her gracious ways and her slow-coming smile. and, after all--for what she had said--it was this man's life or mine. what had i done that another man would not do? _mon dieu!_ in the future there was nothing i would not do. i would make her smart for those words of hers! i would bring her to her knees! still, hot as i was, an hour might have restored me to coolness. but when i started to return, i fell into a fresh rage, for i remembered that i did not know my way out of the maze of rides and paths into which she had drawn me; and this and the mishaps which followed kept my rage hot. for a full hour i wandered in the wood, unable, though i knew where the village lay, to find any track which led continuously in one direction. whenever, at the end of each attempt, the thicket brought me up short, i fancied i heard her laughing on the farther side of the brake; and the ignominy of this chance punishment, the check which the confinement placed on my rage, almost maddened me. in the darkness, i fell, and rose cursing; i tore my hands with thorns; i stained my suit, which had suffered sadly once before. at length, when i had almost resigned myself to lie in the wood, i caught sight of the lights of the village, and trembling between haste and anger, pressed towards them. in a few minutes i stood in the little street. the lights of the inn shone only fifty yards away; but before i could show myself even there pride suggested that i should do something to repair my clothes. i stopped, and scraped and brushed them; and, at the same time, did what i could to compose my features. then i advanced to the door and knocked. almost on the instant the landlord's voice cried from the inside, "enter, monsieur!" i raised the latch and went in. the man was alone, squatting over the fire, warming his hands a black pot simmered on the ashes: as i entered, he raised the lid and peeped inside. then he glanced over his shoulder. "you expected me?" i said defiantly, walking to the hearth, and setting one of my damp boots on the logs. "yes," he answered, nodding curtly. "your supper is just ready. i thought you would be in about this time." he grinned as he spoke, and it was with difficulty i suppressed my wrath "mademoiselle de cocheforêt told you," i said, affecting indifference, "where i was?" "ay, mademoiselle--or madame," he replied, grinning afresh. so she had told him where she had left me, and how she had tricked me! she had made me the village laughing-stock! my rage flashed out afresh at the thought, and, at the sight of his mocking face, i raised my fist. but he read the threat in my eyes, and was up in a moment, snarling, with his hand on his knife. "not again, monsieur!" he cried, in his vile _patois_, "my head is sore still. raise your hand, and i will rip you up as i would a pig!" "sit down, fool," i said. "i am not going to harm you. where is your wife?" "about her business." "which should be getting my supper," i retorted sharply. he rose sullenly, and, fetching a platter, poured the mess of broth and vegetables into it. then he went to a cupboard and brought out a loaf of black bread and a measure of wine, and set them also on the table. "you see it," he said laconically. "and a poor welcome!" i exclaimed. he flamed into sudden passion at that. leaning with both his hands on the table, he thrust his rugged face and blood-shot eyes close to mine. his mustachios bristled; his beard trembled. "hark ye, sirrah!" he muttered, with sullen emphasis--"be content! i have my suspicions. and if it were not for my lady's orders i would put a knife into you, fair or foul, this very night. you would lie snug outside, instead of inside, and i do not think any one would be the worse. but, as it is, be content. keep a still tongue; and when you turn your back on cocheforêt to-morrow keep it turned." "tut! tut!" i said--but i confess i was a little out of countenance. "threatened men live long, you rascal!" "in paris!" he answered significantly. "not here, monsieur." he straightened himself with that, nodded once, and went back to the fire, and i shrugged my shoulders and began to eat, affecting to forget his presence. the logs on the hearth burned sullenly, and gave no light. the poor oil-lump, casting weird shadows from wall to wall, served only to discover the darkness. the room, with its low roof and earthen floor, and foul clothes flung here and there, reeked of stale meals and garlic and vile cooking. i thought of the parlour at cocheforêt, and the dainty table, and the stillness, and the scented pot-herbs; and, though i was too old a soldier to eat the worse because my spoon lacked washing, i felt the change, and laid it savagely at mademoiselle's door. the landlord, watching me stealthily from his place by the hearth, read my thoughts, and chuckled aloud. "palace fare, palace manners!" he muttered scornfully. "set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride--back to the inn!" "keep a civil tongue, will you!" i answered, scowling at him. "have you finished?" he retorted. i rose, without deigning to reply, and, going to the fire, drew off my boots, which were wet through. he, on the instant, swept off the wine and loaf to the cupboard, and then, coming back for the platter i had used, took it, opened the back door, and went out, leaving the door ajar. the draught which came in beat the flame of the lamp this way and that, and gave the dingy, gloomy room an air still more miserable. i rose angrily from the fire, and went to the door, intending to close it with a bang. but when i reached it, i saw something, between door and jamb, which stayed my hand. the door led to a shed in which the housewife washed pots and the like. i felt some surprise, therefore, when i found a light there at this time of night; still more surprise when i saw what she was doing. she was seated on the mud floor, with a rushlight before her, and on either side of her a high-piled heap of refuse and rubbish. from one of these, at the moment i caught sight of her, she was sorting things--horrible, filthy sweepings of road or floor--to the other; shaking and sifting each article as she passed it across, and then taking up another and repeating the action with it, and so on: all minutely, warily, with an air of so much patience and persistence that i stood wondering. some things--rags--she held up between her eyes and the light, some she passed through her fingers, some she fairly tore in pieces. and all the time her husband stood watching her greedily, my platter still in his hand, as if her strange occupation fascinated him. i stood looking, also, for half a minute, perhaps; then the man's eye, raised for a single second to the doorway, met mine. he started, muttered something to his wife, and, quick as thought, kicked the light out, leaving the shed in darkness. cursing him for an ill-conditioned fellow, i walked back to the fire, laughing. in a twinkling he followed me, his face dark with rage. "_ventre saint gris!_" he exclaimed, thrusting it close to mine. "is not a man's house his own?" "it is, for me," i answered coolly, shrugging my shoulders. "and his wife: if she likes to pick dirty rags at this hour, that is your affair." "pig of a spy!" he cried, foaming with rage. i was angry enough at bottom, but i had nothing to gain by quarrelling with the fellow; and i curtly bade him remember himself. "your mistress gave you your orders," i said contemptuously. "obey them!" he spat on the floor, but at the same time he grew calmer. "you are right there," he answered spitefully. "what matter, after all, since you leave to-morrow at six? your horse has been sent down, and your baggage is above." "i will go to it," i retorted. "i want none of your company. give me a light, fellow!" he obeyed reluctantly, and, glad to turn my back on him, i went up the ladder, still wondering faintly, in the midst of my annoyance, what his wife was about that my chance detection of her had so enraged him. even now he was not quite himself. he followed me with abuse, and, deprived by my departure of any other means of showing his spite, fell to shouting through the floor, bidding me remember six o'clock, and be stirring; with other taunts, which did not cease until he had tired himself out. the sight of my belongings--which i had left a few hours before at the château--strewn about the floor of this garret, went some way towards firing me again. but i was worn out. the indignities and mishaps of the evening had, for once, crushed my spirit, and after swearing an oath or two i began to pack my bags. vengeance i would have; but the time and manner i left for daylight thought. beyond six o'clock in the morning i did not look forward; and if i longed for anything it was for a little of the good armagnac i had wasted on those louts of merchants in the kitchen below. it might have done me good now. i had wearily strapped up one bag, and nearly filled the other, when i came upon something which did, for the moment, rouse the devil in me. this was the tiny orange-coloured sachet which mademoiselle had dropped the night i first saw her at the inn, and which, it will be remembered, i picked up. since that night i had not seen it, and had as good as forgotten it. now, as i folded up my other doublet, the one i had then been wearing, it dropped from the pocket. the sight of it recalled all--that night, and mademoiselle's face in the lanthorn light, and my fine plans, and the end of them; and, in a fit of childish fury, the outcome of long suppressed passion, i snatched up the sachet from the floor and tore it across and across, and flung the pieces down. as they fell, a cloud of fine pungent dust burst from them, and with the dust something heavier, which tinkled sharply on the boards. i looked down to see what this was--perhaps i already repented of my act--but for the moment i could see nothing. the floor was grimy and uninviting, and the light bad. in certain moods, however, a man is obstinate about small things, and i moved the taper nearer. as i did so, a point of light, a flashing sparkle that shone for a second among the dirt and refuse on the floor, caught my eye. it was gone in a moment, but i had seen it. i stared, and moved the light again, and the spark flashed out afresh, this time in a different place. much puzzled, i knelt, and, in a twinkling, found a tiny crystal. hard by lay another--and another; each as large as a fair-sized pea. i took up the three, and rose to my feet again, the light in one hand, the crystals in the palm of the other. they were diamonds!--diamonds of price! i knew it in a moment. as i moved the taper to and fro above them, and watched the fire glow and tremble in their depths, i knew that i held that which would buy the crazy inn and all its contents a dozen times over. they were diamonds! gems so fine, and of so rare a water--or i had never seen gems--that my hand trembled as i held them, and my head grew hot, and my heart beat furiously. for a moment i thought i dreamed, that my fancy played me some trick; and i closed my eyes and did not open them again for a minute. but when i did, there they were, hard, real, and angular. convinced at last, in a maze of joy and fear, i closed my hand upon them, and, stealing on tip-toe to the trapdoor, laid first my saddle on it, and then my bags, and over all my cloak, breathing fast the while. then i stole back; and, taking up the light again, began to search the floor, patiently, inch by inch, with naked feet, every sound making me tremble as i crept hither and thither over the creaking boards. and never was search more successful or better paid. in the fragments of the sachet i found six smaller diamonds and a pair of rubies. eight large diamonds i found on the floor. one, the largest and last-found, had bounded away, and lay against the wall in the farthest corner. it took me an hour to run that one to earth; but afterwards i spent another hour on my hands and knees before i gave up the search, and, satisfied at last that i had collected all, sat down on my saddle on the trap-door, and, by the last flickering light of a candle which i had taken from my bag, gloated over my treasure--a treasure worthy of fabled golconda. hardly could i believe in its reality, even now. recalling the jewels which the english duke of buckingham wore on the occasion of his visit to paris in , and of which there was so much talk, i took these to be as fine, though less in number. they should be worth fifteen thousand crowns, more or less. fifteen thousand crowns! and i held them in the hollow of my hand--i who was scarcely worth ten thousand sous. the candle going out cut short my admiration. left in the dark with these precious atoms, my first thought was how i might dispose of them safely; which i did, for the time, by secreting them in the lining of my boot. my second thought turned on the question how they had come where i had found them, among the powdered spice and perfumes in mademoiselle de cocheforêt's sachet. a minute's reflection enabled me to come very near the secret, and at the same time shed a flood of light on several dark places. what clon had been seeking on the path between the house and the village, what the goodwife of the inn had sought among the sweepings of yard and floor, i knew now,--the sachet. i knew, too, what had caused the marked and sudden anxiety i had noticed at the château--the loss of this sachet. and there for a while i came to a check. but one step more up the ladder of thought brought all in view. in a flash i guessed how the jewels had come to be in the sachet; and that it was not mademoiselle but m. de cocheforêt who had mislaid them. and i thought the discovery so important that i began to pace the room softly, unable, in my excitement, to remain still. doubtless he had dropped the jewels in the hurry of his start from the inn that night! doubtless, too, he had carried them in that bizarre hiding-place for the sake of safety, considering it unlikely that robbers, if he fell into their hands, would take the sachet from him; as still less likely that they would suspect it to contain anything of value. everywhere it would pass for a love-gift, the work of his mistress. nor did my penetration stop there. ten to one the gems were family property, the last treasure of the house; and m. de cocheforêt, when i saw him at the inn, was on his way to convey them out of the country; either to secure them from seizure by the government, or to raise money by selling them--money to be spent in some last desperate enterprise. for a day or two, perhaps, after leaving cocheforêt, while the mountain road and its chances occupied his thoughts, he had not discovered his loss. then he had searched for the precious sachet, missed it, and returned hot-foot on his tracks. i was certain that i had hit on the true solution; and all that night i sat wakeful in the darkness, pondering what i should do. the stones, unset as they were, could never be identified, never be claimed. the channel by which they had come to my hands could never be traced. to all intents they were mine--mine, to do with as i pleased! fifteen thousand crowns!--perhaps twenty thousand crowns!--and i to leave at six in the morning, whether i would or no! i might leave for spain with the jewels in my pocket. i confess i was tempted. the gems were so fine that i doubt not some indifferently honest men would have sold salvation for them. but a berault his honour? no! i was tempted, but not for long. thank god, a man may be reduced to living by the fortunes of the dice, and may even be called by a woman spy and coward without becoming a thief. the temptation soon left me--i take credit for it--and i fell to thinking of this and that plan for making use of them. once it occurred to me to take the jewels to the cardinal and buy my pardon with them; again, to use them as a trap to capture cocheforêt; again to--and then about five in the morning, as i sat up on my wretched pallet, while the first light stole slowly in through the cobwebbed, hay-stuffed lattice, there came to me the real plan, the plan of plans, on which i acted. it charmed me. i smacked my lips over it, and hugged myself, and felt my eyes dilate in the darkness, as i conned it. it seemed cruel, it seemed mean; i cared nothing. mademoiselle had boasted of her victory over me, of her woman's wits and her acuteness; and of my dulness. she had said her grooms should flog me, she had rated me as if i had been a dog. very well; we would see now whose brains were the better, whose was the master mind, whose should be the whipping. the one thing required by my plan was that i should get speech with her; that done, i could trust myself, and my new-found weapon, for the rest. but that was absolutely necessary; and seeing that there might be some difficulty about it, i determined to descend as if my mind were made up to go; then, on pretence of saddling my horse, i would slip away on foot, and lie in wait near the château until i saw her come out. or if i could not effect my purpose in that way--either by reason of the landlord's vigilance, or for any other cause--my course was still easy. i would ride away, and when i had proceeded a mile or so, tie up my horse in the forest and return to the wooden bridge. thence i could watch the garden and front of the château until time and chance gave me the opportunity i sought. so i saw my way quite clearly; and when the fellow below called me, reminding me rudely that i must be going, and that it was six o'clock, i was ready with my answer. i shouted sulkily that i was coming, and, after a decent delay, i took up my saddle and bags and went down. viewed by the cold morning light, the inn room looked more smoky, more grimy, more wretched than when i had last seen it. the goodwife was not visible. the fire was not lighted. no provision, not so much as a stirrup-cup or bowl of porridge cheered the heart. i looked round, sniffing the stale smell of last night's lamp, and grunted. "are you going to send me out fasting?" i said, affecting a worse humour than i felt. the landlord was standing by the window, stooping over a great pair of frayed and furrowed thigh-boots, which he was labouring to soften with copious grease. "mademoiselle ordered no breakfast," he answered, with a malicious grin. "well, it does not much matter," i replied grandly. "i shall be at auch by noon." "that is as may be," he answered, with another grin. i did not understand him, but i had something else to think about, and i opened the door and stepped out, intending to go to the stable. then in a second i comprehended. the cold air laden with woodland moisture met me and went to my bones; but it was not that which made me shiver. outside the door, in the road, sitting on horseback in silence, were two men. one was clon. the other, who held a spare horse by the rein--my horse--was a man i had seen at the inn, a rough, shock-headed, hard-bitten fellow. both were armed, and clon was booted. his mate rode barefoot, with a rusty spur strapped to one heel. the moment i saw them a sure and certain fear crept into my mind: it was that made me shiver. but i did not speak to them. i went in again, and closed the door behind me. the landlord was putting on the boots. "what does this mean?" i said hoarsely. i had a clear prescience of what was coming. "why are these men here?" "orders," he answered laconically. "whose orders?" i retorted. "whose?" he answered bluntly. "well, monsieur, that is my business. enough that we mean to see you out of the country, and out of harm's way." "but if i will not go?" i cried. "monsieur will go," he answered coolly. "there are no strangers in the village to-day," he added, with a significant smile. "do you mean to kidnap me?" i replied, in a rage. behind the rage was something--i will not call it terror, for the brave feel no terror--but it was near akin to it. i had had to do with rough men all my life, but there was a grimness and truculence in the aspect of these three that shook me. when i thought of the dark paths and narrow lanes and cliff-sides we must traverse, whichever road we took, i trembled. "kidnap you, monsieur?" he answered, with an everyday air. "that is as you please to call it. one thing is certain, however," he continued, maliciously touching an arquebuss which he had produced and set upright against a chair while i was at the door; "if you attempt the slightest resistance, we shall know how to put an end to it, either here or on the road." i drew a deep breath. the very imminence of the danger restored me to the use of my faculties i changed my tone and laughed aloud. "so that is your plan, is it?" i said. "the sooner we start the better, then. and the sooner i see auch and your back turned, the more i shall be pleased." he rose. "after you, monsieur," he said. i could not restrain a slight shiver. his newborn politeness alarmed me more than his threats. i knew the man and his ways, and i was sure that it boded ill for me. but i had no pistols, and only my sword and knife, and i knew that resistance at this point must be worse than vain. i went out jauntily, therefore, the landlord coming after me with my saddle and bags. the street was empty, save for the two waiting horsemen who sat in their saddles looking doggedly before them. the sun had not yet risen, the air was raw. the sky was grey, cloudy, and cold. my thoughts flew back to the morning on which i had found the sachet--at that very spot, almost at that very hour; and for a moment i grew warm again at the thought of the little packet i carried in my boot. but the landlord's dry manner, the sullen silence of his two companions, whose eyes steadily refused to meet mine, chilled me again. for an instant the impulse to refuse to mount, to refuse to go, was almost irresistible; then, knowing the madness of such a course, which might, and probably would, give the men the chance they desired, i crushed it down and went slowly to my stirrup. "i wonder you do not want my sword," i said by way of sarcasm, as i swung myself up. "we are not afraid of it," the innkeeper answered gravely. "you may keep it--for the present." i made no answer--what answer had i to make?--and we rode at a foot-pace down the street; he and i leading, clon and the shock-headed man bringing up the rear. the leisurely mode of our departure, the absence of hurry or even haste, the men's indifference whether they were seen, or what was thought, all served to sink my spirits, and deepen my sense of peril. i felt that they suspected me, that they more than half guessed the nature of my errand at cocheforêt, and that they were not minded to be bound by mademoiselle's orders. in particular i augured the worst from clon's appearance. his lean malevolent face and sunken eyes, his very dumbness chilled me. mercy had no place there. we rode soberly, so that nearly half an hour elapsed before we gained the brow from which i had taken my first look at cocheforêt. among the dwarf oaks whence i had viewed the valley we paused to breathe our horses, and the strange feelings with which i looked back on the scene may be imagined. but i had short time for indulging in sentiment or recollections. a curt word, and we were moving again. a quarter of a mile farther on the road to auch dipped into the valley. when we were already half-way down this descent the innkeeper suddenly stretched out his hand and caught my rein. "this way!" he said. i saw he would have me turn into a by-path leading south-westwards--a mere track, faint and little trodden and encroached on by trees, which led i knew not whither. i checked my horse. "why?" i said rebelliously. "do you think i do not know the road? this is the way to auch." "to auch--yes," he answered bluntly. "but we are not going to auch." "whither then?" i said angrily. "you will see presently," he replied, with an ugly smile. "yes, but i will know now!" i retorted, passion getting the better of me. "i have come so far with you. you will find it more easy to take me farther, if you tell me your plans." "you are a fool!" he cried, with a snarl. "not so," i answered. "i ask only to know whither i am going." "into spain," he said. "will that satisfy you?" "and what will you do with me there?" i asked, my heart giving a great bound. "hand you over to some friends of ours," he answered curtly, "if you behave yourself. if not, there is a shorter way, and one that will save us some travelling. make up your mind. monsieur. which shall it be?" chapter vi. under the pic du midi. so that was their plan. two or three hours to the southward, the long white glittering wall stretched east and west above the brown woods. beyond that lay spain. once across the border, i might be detained, if no worse happened to me, as a prisoner of war; for we were then at war with spain on the italian side. or i might be handed over to one of the savage bands, half smugglers, half brigands, that held the passes; or be delivered--worst fate of all--into the power of the french exiles, of whom some would be likely to recognize me and cut my throat. "it is a long way into spain," i muttered, watching in a kind of fascination clon handling his pistols. "i think you will find the other road longer still!" the landlord answered grimly. "but choose, and be quick about it." they were three to one, and they had firearms. in effect i had no choice. "well, if i must i must!" i cried, making up my mind with seeming recklessness. "_vogue la galère!_ spain be it. it will not be the first time i have heard the dons talk." the men nodded, as much as to say that they had known what the end would be; the landlord released my rein; and in a trice we were riding down the narrow track, with our faces set towards the mountains. on one point my mind was now more easy. the men meant fairly by me; and i had no longer to fear, as i had feared, a pistol shot in the back at the first convenient ravine. as far as that went, i might ride in peace. on the other hand, if i let them carry me across the border my fate was sealed. a man set down without credentials or guards among the wild desperadoes who swarmed in war time in the asturian passes might consider himself fortunate if an easy death fell to his lot. in my case i could make a shrewd guess what would happen. a single nod of meaning, one muttered word, dropped among the savage men with whom i should be left, and the diamonds hidden in my boot would go neither to the cardinal nor back to mademoiselle--nor would it matter to me whither they went. so while the others talked in their taciturn fashion, or sometimes grinned at my gloomy face, i looked out over the brown woods with eyes that saw, yet did not see. the red squirrel swarming up the trunk, the startled pigs that rushed away grunting from their feast of mast, the solitary rider who met us, armed to the teeth, and passed northwards after whispering with the landlord--all these i saw. but my mind was not with them. it was groping and feeling about like a hunted mole for some way of escape. for time pressed. the slope we were on was growing steeper. by-and-bye we fell into a southward valley, and began to follow it steadily upwards, crossing and recrossing a swiftly rushing stream. the snow-peaks began to be hidden behind the rising bulk of hills that overhung us; and sometimes we could see nothing before or behind but the wooded walls of our valley rising sheer and green a thousand paces on either hand, with grey rocks half masked by fern and ivy getting here and there through the firs and alders. it was a wild and sombre scene even at that hour, with the midday sun shining on the rushing water and drawing the scent out of the pines; but i knew that there was worse to come, and sought desperately for some ruse by which i might at least separate the men. three were too many; with one i might deal. at last, when i had cudgelled my brain for an hour, and almost resigned myself to a sudden charge on the men single-handed--a last desperate resort--i thought of a plan, dangerous, too, and almost desperate, but which still seemed to promise something. it came of my fingers resting in my pocket on the fragments of the orange sachet, which, without having any particular design in my mind, i had taken care to bring with me. i had torn the sachet into four pieces--four corners. as i played mechanically with them, one of my fingers fitted into one, as into a glove; a second finger into another. and the plan came. still, before i could move in it, i had to wait until we stopped to bait the flagging horses, which we did about noon at the head of the valley. then, pretending to drink from the stream, i managed to secure unseen a handful of pebbles, slipping them into the same pocket with the morsels of stuff. on getting to horse again, i carefully fitted a pebble, not too tightly, into the largest scrap, and made ready for the attempt. the landlord rode on my left, abreast of me; the other two knaves behind. the road at this stage favoured me, for the valley, which drained the bare uplands that lay between the lower spurs and the base of the real mountains, had become wide and shallow. here were no trees, and the path was a mere sheep-track covered with short crisp grass, and running sometimes on this bank of the stream and sometimes on that. i waited until the ruffian beside me turned to speak to the men behind. the moment he did so and his eyes were averted, i slipped out the scrap of satin in which i had placed the pebble, and balancing it carefully on my right thigh as i rode, i flipped it forward with all the strength of my thumb and finger. i meant it to fall a few paces before us in the path, where it could be seen. but alas for my hopes! at the critical moment my horse started, my finger struck the scrap aslant, the pebble flew out, and the bit of stuff fluttered into a whin-bush close to my stirrup--and was lost! i was bitterly disappointed, for the same thing might happen again, and i had now only three scraps left. but fortune favoured me, by putting it into my neighbour's head to plunge into a hot debate with the shock-headed man on the nature of some animals seen on a distant brow; which he said were izards, while the other maintained that they were common goats. he continued, on this account, to ride with his face turned the other way. i had time to fit another pebble into the second piece of stuff, and sliding it on to my thigh, poised it, and flipped it. this time my finger struck the tiny missile fairly in the middle, and shot it so far and so truly that it dropped exactly in the path ten paces in front of us. the moment i saw it fall i kicked my neighbour's nag in the ribs; it started, and he, turning in a rage, hit it. the next instant he pulled it almost on to its haunches. "saint gris!" he cried; and sat glaring at the bit of yellow satin, with his face turned purple and his jaw fallen. "what is it?" i said, staring at him in turn. "what is the matter, fool?" "matter?" he blurted out. "_mon dieu!_" but clon's excitement surpassed even his. the dumb man no sooner saw what had attracted his comrade's attention, than he uttered an inarticulate and horrible noise, and tumbling off his horse, more like a beast than a man, threw himself bodily on the precious morsel. the innkeeper was not far behind him. an instant and he was down, too, peering at the thing; and for an instant i thought that they would fight over it. however, though their jealousy was evident, their excitement cooled a little when they discovered that the scrap of stuff was empty; for, fortunately, the pebble had fallen out of it. still, it threw them into such a fever of eagerness as it was wonderful to witness. they nosed the ground where it had lain, they plucked up the grass and turf, and passed it through their fingers, they ran to and fro like dogs on a trail; and, glancing askance at one another, came back always together to the point of departure. neither in his jealousy would suffer the other to be there alone. the shock-headed man and i sat our horses and looked on; he marvelling, and i pretending to marvel. as the two searched up and down the path, we moved a little out of it to give them space; and presently, when all their heads were turned from me, i let a second morsel drop under a gorse-bush. the shock-headed man, by-and-bye, found this, and gave it to clon; and, as from the circumstances of the first discovery no suspicion attached to me, i ventured to find the third and last scrap myself. i did not pick it up, but i called the innkeeper, and he pounced on it as i have seen a hawk pounce on a chicken. they hunted for the fourth morsel, but, of course, in vain, and in the end they desisted, and fitted the three they had together; but neither would let his own portion out of his hands, and each looked at the other across the spoil with eyes of suspicion. it was strange to see them in that wide-stretching valley, whence grey boar-backs of hills swelled up into the silence of the snow--it was strange, i say, in that vast solitude to see these two, mere dots on its bosom, circling round one another in fierce forgetfulness of the outside world, glaring and shifting their ground like cocks about to engage, and wholly engrossed--by three scraps of orange-colour, invisible at fifty paces! at last the innkeeper cried with an oath: "i am going back. this must be known down yonder. give me your pieces, man, and do you go with antoine. it will be all right." but clon, waving a scrap in either hand and thrusting his ghastly mask into the other's face, shook his head in passionate denial. he could not speak, but he made it clear that if any one went back with the news he was the man to go. "nonsense!" the landlord retorted fiercely. "we cannot leave antoine to go on alone with him. give me the stuff." but clon would not. he had no thought of resigning the credit of the discovery, and i began to think that the two would really come to blows. but there was an alternative, and first one and then the other looked at me. it was a moment of peril, and i knew it. my stratagem might react on myself, and the two, to put an end to this difficulty, agree to put an end to me. but i faced them so coolly and showed so bold a front, and the ground was so open, that the idea took no root. they fell to wrangling again more viciously than before. one tapped his gun and the other his pistols. the landlord scolded, the dumb man gurgled. at last their difference ended as i had hoped it would. "very well then, we will both go back!" the innkeeper cried in a rage. "and antoine must see him on. but the blame be on your head. do you give the lad your pistols." clon took one pistol and gave it to the shock-headed man. "the other!" the innkeeper said impatiently. but clon shook his head with a grim smile, and pointed to the arquebuss. by a sudden movement the landlord snatched the pistol, and averted clon's vengeance by placing both it and the gun in the shock-headed man's hands. "there!" he said, addressing the latter, "now can you do? if monsieur tries to escape or turn back, shoot him! but four hours' riding should bring you to the roca blanca. you will find the men there, and will have no more to do with it." antoine did not see things quite in that light, however. he looked at me, and then at the wild track in front of us; and he muttered an oath and said he would die if he would. but the landlord, who was in a frenzy of impatience, drew him aside and talked to him, and in the end seemed to persuade him; for in a few minutes the matter was settled. antoine came back and said sullenly, "forward, monsieur," the two others stood on one side, i shrugged my shoulders and kicked up my horse, and in a twinkling we two were riding on together--man to man. i turned once or twice to see what those we had left behind were doing, and always found them standing in apparent debate; but my guard showed so much jealousy of these movements that i presently shrugged my shoulders again and desisted. i had racked my brains to bring about this state of things. but, strange to say, now i had succeeded, i found it less satisfactory than i had hoped. i had reduced the odds and got rid of my most dangerous antagonists; but antoine, left to himself, proved to be as full of suspicion as an egg of meat. he rode a little behind me with his gun across his saddle-bow, and a pistol near his hand, and at the slightest pause on my part, or if i turned to look at him, he muttered his constant "forward, monsieur!" in a tone that warned me that his finger was on the trigger. at such a distance he could not miss; and i saw nothing for it but to go on meekly before him--to the roca blanca and my fate. what was to be done? the road presently reached the end of the valley and entered a narrow pine-clad defile, strewn with rocks and boulders, over which the torrent plunged and eddied with a deafening roar. in front the white gleam of waterfalls broke the sombre ranks of climbing trunks. the snow-line lay less than half a mile away on either hand; and crowning all--at the end of the pass, as it seemed to the eye--rose the pure white pillar of the pic du midi shooting up six thousand feet into the blue of heaven. such a scene, so suddenly disclosed, was enough to drive the sense of danger from my mind; and for a moment i reined in my horse. but "forward, monsieur!" came the grating order. i fell to earth again, and went on. what was to be done? i was at my wit's end to know. the man refused to talk, refused to ride abreast of me, would have no dismounting, no halting, no communication; at all. he would have nothing but this silent, lonely procession of two, with the muzzle of his gun at my back. and meanwhile we were fast climbing the pass. we had left the others an hour--nearly two. the sun was declining; the time, i supposed, about half-past three. if he would only let me come within reach of him! or if anything would fall out to take his attention! when the pass presently widened into a bare and dreary valley, strewn with huge boulders, and with snow lying here and there in the hollows, i looked desperately before me, and scanned even the vast snow-fields that overhung us and stretched away to the base of the ice-peak. but i saw nothing. no bear swung across the path, no izard showed itself on the cliffs. the keen sharp air cut our cheeks and warned me that we were approaching the summit of the ridge. on all sides were silence and desolation. _mon dieu!_ and the ruffians on whose tender mercies i was to be thrown might come to meet us! they might appear at any moment. in my despair i loosened my hat on my head, and let the first gust carry it to the ground, and then with an oath of annoyance tossed my feet loose to go after it. but the rascal roared to me to keep my seat. "forward, monsieur!" he shouted brutally. "go on!" "but my hat!" i cried. "_mille tonnerres_, man! i must--" "forward, monsieur, or i shoot!" he replied inexorably, raising his gun. "one--two--" and i went on. but, oh, i was wrathful! that i, gil de berault, should be outwitted and led by the nose, like a ringed bull, by this gascon lout! that i, whom all paris knew and feared--if it did not love--the terror of zaton's, should come to my end in this dismal waste of snow and rock, done to death by some pitiful smuggler or thief! it must not be! surely in the last resort i could give an account of one man, though his belt were stuffed with pistols! but how? only, it seemed, by open force. my heart began to flutter as i planned it; and then grew steady again. a hundred paces before us a gully or ravine on the left ran up into the snow-field. opposite its mouth a jumble of stones and broken rocks covered the path. i marked this for the place. the knave would need both his hands to hold up his nag over the stones, and, if i turned on him suddenly enough, he might either drop his gun, or fire it harmlessly. but, in the meantime, something happened; as, at the last moment, things do happen. while we were still fifty yards short of the place, i found his horse's nose creeping forward on a level with my crupper; and, still advancing, until i could see it out of the tail of my eye, and my heart gave a great bound. he was coming abreast of me: he was going to deliver himself into my hands! to cover my excitement, i began to whistle. "hush!" he muttered fiercely: his voice sounding strange and unnatural. my first thought was that he was ill, and i turned to him. but he only said again, "hush! pass by here quietly, monsieur." "why?" i asked mutinously, curiosity getting the better of me. for had i been wise i had taken no notice; every second his horse was coming up with mine. its nose was level with my stirrup already. "hush, man!" he said again. this time there was no mistake about the panic in his voice. "they call this the devil's chapel. god send us safe by it! it is late to be here. look at those!" he continued, pointing with a finger which visibly shook. i looked. at the mouth of the gully, in a small space partly cleared of stones stood three broken shafts, raised on rude pedestals. "well?" i said in a low voice. the sun which was near setting flushed the great peak above to the colour of blood; but the valley was growing grey and each moment more dreary. "well, what of those?" i said. in spite of my peril and the excitement of the coming struggle i felt the chill of his fear. never had i seen so grim, so desolate, so godforsaken a place! involuntarily i shivered. "they were crosses," he muttered, in a voice little above a whisper, while his eyes roved this way and that in terror. "the curé of gabas blessed the place, and set them up. but next morning they were as you see them now. come on, monsieur, come on!" he continued, plucking at my arm. "it is not safe here after sunset. pray god, satan be not at home!" he had completely forgotten in his panic that he had anything to fear from me. his gun dropped loosely across his saddle, his leg rubbed mine. i saw this, and i changed my plan of action. as our horses reached the stones i stooped, as if to encourage mine, and by a sudden clutch snatched the gun bodily from his hand; at the same time i backed my horse with all my strength. it was done in a moment! a second and i had him at the end of the gun, and my finger was on the trigger. never was victory more easily gained. he looked at me between rage and terror, his jaw fallen. "are you mad?" he cried, his teeth chattering as he spoke. even in this strait his eyes left me and wandered round in alarm. "no, sane!" i retorted fiercely. "but i do not like this place any better than you do!" which was true enough, if not quite true. "so, by your right, quick march!" i continued imperatively. "turn your horse, my friend, or take the consequences." he turned like a lamb, and headed down the valley again, without giving a thought to his pistols. i kept close to him, and in less than a minute we had left the devil's chapel well behind us, and were moving down again as we had come up. only now i held the gun. when we had gone half a mile or so--until then i did not feel comfortable myself, and though i thanked heaven the place existed, thanked heaven also that i was out of it--i bade him halt. "take off your belt!" i said curtly, "and throw it down. but, mark me, if you turn, i fire!" the spirit was quite gone out of him. he obeyed mechanically. i jumped down, still covering him with the gun, and picked up the belt, pistols and all. then i remounted, and we went on. by-and-bye he asked me sullenly what i was going to do. "go back," i said, "and take the road to auch when i come to it." "it will be dark in an hour," he answered sulkily. "i know that," i retorted. "we must camp and do the best we can." and as i said, we did. the daylight held until we gained the skirts of the pine-wood at the head of the pass. here i chose a corner a little off the track, and well-sheltered from the wind, and bade him light a fire. i tethered the horses near this and within sight. it remained only to sup. i had a piece of bread; he had another and an onion. we ate in silence, sitting on opposite sides of the fire. but after supper i found myself in a dilemma; i did not see how i was to sleep. the ruddy light which gleamed on the knave's swart face and sinewy hands showed also his eyes, black, sullen, and watchful. i knew that the man was plotting revenge; that he would not hesitate to plant his knife between my ribs should i give him a chance. i could find only one alternative to remaining awake. had i been bloody-minded, i should have chosen it and solved the question at once and in my favour by shooting him as he sat. but i have never been a cruel man, and i could not find it in my heart to do this. the silence of the mountain and the sky--which seemed a thing apart from the roar of the torrent and not to be broken by it--awed me. the vastness of the solitude in which we sat, the dark void above through which the stars kept shooting, the black gulf below in which the unseen waters boiled and surged, the absence of other human company or other signs of human existence put such a face upon the deed that i gave up the thought of it with a shudder, and resigned myself, instead, to watch through the night--the long, cold, pyrenean night. presently he curled himself up like a dog and slept in the blaze, and then for a couple of hours i sat opposite him, thinking. it seemed years since i had seen zaton's or thrown the dice. the old life, the old employments--should i ever go back to them?--seemed dim and distant. would cocheforêt, the forest and the mountain, the grey château and its mistresses, seem one day as dim! and if one bit of life could fade so quickly at the unrolling of another, and seem in a moment pale and colourless, would all life some day and somewhere, and all the things we--but faugh! i was growing foolish. i sprang up and kicked the wood together, and, taking up the gun, began to pace to and fro under the cliff. strange that a little moonlight, a few stars, a breath of solitude should carry a man back to childhood and childish things! * * * * * it was three in the afternoon of the next day, and the sun lay hot on the oak groves, and the air was full of warmth as we began to climb the slope, on which the road to auch shoots out of the track. the yellow bracken and the fallen leaves underfoot seemed to throw up light of themselves, and here and there a patch of ruddy beech lay like a bloodstain on the hillside. in front a herd of pigs routed among the mast, and grunted lazily; and high above us a boy lay watching them. "we part here," i said to my companion. it was my plan to ride a little way on the road to auch so as to blind his eyes; then, leaving my horse in the forest, i would go on foot to the château. "the sooner the better!" he answered, with a snarl. "and i hope i may never see your face again, monsieur!" but when we came to the wooden cross at the fork of the roads, and were about to part, the boy we had seen leapt out of the fern and came to meet us. "hollo!" he cried, in a sing-song tone. "well!" my companion answered, drawing rein impatiently. "what is it?" "there are soldiers in the village." "soldiers?" antoine cried incredulously. "ay, devils on horseback!" the lad answered, spitting on the ground. "three score of them! from auch!" antoine turned to me, his face transformed with fury. "curse you!" he cried. "this is some of your work! now we are all undone! and my mistresses! _sacré!_ if i had that gun i would shoot you like a rat!" "steady, fool!" i answered roughly. "i know no more of this than you do!" this was so true that my surprise was as great as his. the cardinal, who rarely made a change of front, had sent me hither that he might not be forced to send soldiers, and run the risk of all that might arise from such a movement. what of this invasion, then, than which nothing could be less consistent with his plans? i wondered. it was possible, of course, that the travelling merchants, before whom i had played at treason, had reported the facts; and that on this the commandant at auch had acted. but it seemed unlikely. he had had his orders, too; and, under the cardinal's rule, there was small place for individual enterprise. i could not understand it. one thing was clear, however. i might now enter the village as i pleased. "i am going on to look into this," i said to antoine. "come, my man." he shrugged his shoulders, and stood still. "not i!" he answered, with an oath. "no soldiers for me! i have lain out one night, and i can lie out another!" i nodded indifferently, for i no longer wanted him; and we parted. after this, twenty minutes' riding brought me to the entrance of the village; and here the change was great indeed. not one of the ordinary dwellers in the place was to be seen: either they had shut themselves up in their hovels, or, like antoine, they had fled to the woods. their doors were closed, their windows shuttered. but lounging about the street were a score of dragoons, in boots and breastplates, whose short-barrelled muskets, with pouches and bandoliers attached, were piled near the inn door. in an open space where there was a gap in the street, a long row of horses, linked head to head, stood bending their muzzles over bundles of rough forage, and on all sides the cheerful jingle of chains and bridles and the sound of coarse jokes and laughter filled the air. as i rode up to the inn door an old sergeant, with squinting eyes and his tongue in his cheeks, eyed me inquisitively, and started to cross the street to challenge me. fortunately, at that moment the two knaves whom i had brought from paris with me, and whom i had left at auch to await my orders, came up. i made them a sign not to speak to me, and they passed on; but i suppose that they told the sergeant that i was not the man he wanted, for i saw no more of him. after picketing my horse behind the inn--i could find no better stable, every place being full--i pushed my way through the group at the door, and entered. the old room, with the low grimy roof and the reeking floor, was half full of strange figures, and for a few minutes i stood unseen in the smoke and confusion. then the landlord came my way, and as he passed me i caught his eye. he uttered a low curse, dropped the pitcher he was carrying, and stood glaring at me, like a man possessed. the soldier whose wine he was carrying flung a crust in his face, with, "now, greasy fingers! what are you staring at?" "the devil!" the landlord muttered, beginning to tremble. "then let me look at him!" the man retorted and he turned on his stool. he started, finding me standing over him. "at your service!" i said grimly. "a little time and it will be the other way, my friend." chapter vii. a master stroke. i have a way with me which commonly commands respect; and when the landlord's first terror was over and he would serve me, i managed to get my supper--the first good meal i had had in two days--pretty comfortably in spite of the soldiers' presence. the crowd, too, which filled the room, soon began to melt. the men strayed off in groups to water their horses, or went to hunt up their quarters, until only two or three were left. dusk had fallen outside; the noise in the street grew less. the firelight began to glow and flicker on the walls, and the wretched room to look as homely as it was in its nature to look. i was pondering for the twentieth time what step i should take next--under these new circumstances--and why the soldiers were here, and whether i should let the night pass before i moved, when the door, which had been turning on its hinges almost without pause for an hour, opened again, and a woman came in. she paused a moment on the threshold looking round, and i saw that she had a shawl on her head and a milk-pitcher in her hand, and that her feet and ankles were bare. there was a great rent in her coarse stuff petticoat, and the hand which held the shawl together was brown and dirty. more i did not see; supposing her to be a neighbour stolen in now that the house was quiet to get some milk for her child or the like, i took no further heed of her. i turned to the fire again and plunged into my thoughts. but to get to the hearth where the goodwife was fidgeting, the woman had to pass in front of me; and as she passed i suppose she stole a look at me from under her shawl. for just when she came between me and the blaze she uttered a low cry and shrank aside--so quickly that she almost stepped on the hearth. the next moment she turned her back to me and was stooping, whispering in the housewife's ear. a stranger might have thought that she had merely trodden on a hot ember. but another idea, and a very sharp one, came into my mind; and i stood up silently. the woman's back was towards me, but something in her height, her shape, the pose of her head, hidden as it was by her shawl, seemed familiar. i waited while she hung over the fire whispering, and while the goodwife slowly filled her pitcher out of the great black pot. but when she turned to go, i took a step forward so as to bar her way. and our eyes met. i could not see her features; they were lost in the shadow of the hood. but i saw a shiver run through her from head to foot. and i knew then that i had made no mistake. "that is too heavy for you, my girl," i said familiarly, as i might have spoken to a village wench. "i will carry it for you." one of the men, who remained lolling at the table, laughed, and the other began to sing a low song. the woman trembled in rage or fear, but she kept silence and let me take the jug from her hands. and when i went to the door and opened it, she followed mechanically. an instant, and the door fell to behind us, shutting off the light and glow, and we two stood together in the growing dusk. "it is late for you to be out, mademoiselle," i said politely. "you might meet with some rudeness, dressed as you are. permit me to see you home." she shuddered, and i thought i heard her sob, but she did not answer. instead, she turned and walked quickly through the village in the direction of the château, keeping in the shadow of the houses. i carried the pitcher and walked beside her; and in the dark i smiled. i knew how shame and impotent rage were working in her. this was something like revenge! presently i spoke. "well, mademoiselle," i said. "where are your grooms?" she gave me one look, her eyes blazing with anger, her face like hate itself; and after that i said no more, but left her in peace, and contented myself with walking at her shoulder until we came to the end of the village, where the track to the great house plunged into the wood. there she stopped, and turned on me like a wild creature at bay. "what do you want?" she cried hoarsely, breathing as if she had been running. "to see you safe to the house," i answered coolly. "and if i will not?" she retorted. "the choice does not lie with you, mademoiselle," i answered sternly. "you will go to the house with me, and on the way you will give me an interview; but not here. here we are not private enough. we may be interrupted at any moment, and i wish to speak to you at length." i saw her shiver. "what if i will not?" she said again. "i might call to the nearest soldiers and tell them who you are," i answered coolly. "i might, but i should not. that were a clumsy way of punishing you, and i know a better way. i should go to the captain, mademoiselle, and tell him whose horse is locked up in the inn stable. a trooper told me--as some one had told him--that it belonged to one of his officers; but i looked through the crack, and i knew the horse again." she could not repress a groan. i waited. still she did not speak. "shall i go to the captain?" i said ruthlessly. she shook the hood back from her face, and looked at me. "oh, you coward! you coward!" she hissed through her teeth. "if i had a knife!" "but you have not, mademoiselle," i answered, unmoved. "be good enough, therefore, to make up your mind which it is to be. am i to go with my news to the captain, or am i to come with you?" "give me the pitcher!" she said harshly. i did so, wondering. in a moment she flung it with a savage gesture far into the bushes. "come!" she said, "if you will. but some day god will punish you!" without another word she turned and entered the path through the trees, and i followed her. i suppose every turn in its course, every hollow and broken place in it had been known to her from childhood, for she followed it swiftly and unerringly, barefoot as she was. i had to walk fast through the darkness to keep up with her. the wood was quiet, but the frogs were beginning to croak in the pool, and their persistent chorus reminded me of the night when i had come to the house-door hurt and worn out, and clon had admitted me, and she had stood under the gallery in the hall. things had looked dark then. i had seen but a very little way ahead. now all was plain. the commandant might be here with all his soldiers, but it was i who held the strings. we came to the little wooden bridge and saw beyond the dark meadows the lights of the house. all the windows were bright. doubtless the troopers were making merry. "now, mademoiselle," i said quietly. "i must trouble you to stop here, and give me your attention for a few minutes. afterwards you may go your way." "speak!" she said defiantly. "and be quick! i cannot breathe the air where you are! it poisons me!" "ah!" i said slowly. "do you think you make things better by such speeches as those?" "oh!" she cried--and i heard her teeth click together. "would you have me fawn on you?" "perhaps not," i answered. "still you make one mistake." "what is it?" she panted. "you forget that i am to be feared as well as--loathed!" i answered grimly. "ay, mademoiselle, to be feared!" i continued. "do you think that i do not know why you are here in this guise? do you think that i do not know for whom that pitcher of broth was intended? or who will now have to fast to-night? i tell you i know all these things. your house is full of soldiers; your servants were watched and could not leave. you had to come yourself and get food for him!" she clutched at the hand-rail of the bridge, and for an instant clung to it for support. her face, from which the shawl had fallen, glimmered white in the shadow of the trees. at last i had shaken her pride. at last! "what is your price?" she murmured faintly. "i am going to tell you," i replied, speaking so that every word might fall distinctly on her ears, and sating my eyes on her proud face. i had never dreamed of such revenge as this! "about a fortnight ago, m. de cocheforêt left here at night with a little orange-coloured sachet in his possession." she uttered a stifled cry, and drew herself stiffly erect. "it contained--but there, mademoiselle, you know its contents," i went on. "whatever they were, m. de cocheforêt lost it and them at starting. a week ago he came back--unfortunately for himself--to seek them." she was looking full in my face now. she seemed scarcely to breathe in the intensity of her surprise and expectation. "you had a search made, mademoiselle," i continued quietly. "your servants left no place unexplored. the paths, the roads, the very woods were ransacked. but in vain, because all the while the orange sachet lay whole and unopened in my pocket." "no!" she cried impetuously. "you lie, sir! the sachet was found, torn open, many leagues from this place!" "where i threw it, mademoiselle," i replied, "that i might mislead your rascals and be free to return. oh! believe me," i continued, letting something of myself, something of my triumph, appear at last in my voice. "you have made a mistake! you would have done better had you trusted me. i am no bundle of sawdust, mademoiselle, but a man: a man with an arm to shield and a brain to serve, and--as i am going to teach you--a heart also!" she shivered. "in the orange-coloured sachet that you lost i believe there were eighteen stones of great value?" she made no answer, but she looked at me as if i fascinated her. her very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. she was so little conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score of men might have come up behind her unseen and unnoticed. i took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and held it towards her. "will you open this?" i said. "i believe it contains what you lost. that it contains all i will not answer, mademoiselle, because i spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and i may have failed to find some. but the others can be recovered--i know where they are." she took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking. a few turns and the mild lustre of the stones made a kind of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour. _morbleu!_ as i looked at them--and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--i wondered how i had come to resist the temptation. while i gazed her hands began to waver. "i cannot count," she muttered helplessly. "how many are there?" "in all, eighteen.' "they should be eighteen," she said. she closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming. then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and i saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before. "well?" she muttered between her teeth. "your price, man? your price?" "i am coming to it now, mademoiselle," i said gravely. "it is a simple matter. you remember the afternoon when i followed you--clumsily and thoughtlessly perhaps--through the wood to restore these things? it seems about a month ago. i believe it happened the day before yesterday. you called me then some very harsh names, which i will not hurt you by repeating. the only price i ask for restoring your jewels is that you recall those names. "how?" she muttered. "i do not understand." i repeated my words very slowly. "the only price or reward i ask, mademoiselle, is that you take back those names, and say that they were not deserved." "and the jewels?" she exclaimed hoarsely. "they are yours. they are nothing to me. take them, and say that you do not think of me-- nay, i cannot say the words, mademoiselle." "but there is something--else! what else?" she cried, her head thrown back, her eyes, bright as any wild animal's, searching mine. "ha! my brother? what of him? what of him, sir?" "for him, mademoiselle--i would prefer that you should tell me no more than i know already," i answered in a low voice. "i do not wish to be in that affair. but yes, there is one thing i have not mentioned. you are right." she sighed so deeply that i caught the sound. "it is," i continued slowly, "that you will permit me to remain at cocheforêt for a few days, while the soldiers are here. i am told that there are twenty men and two officers quartered in your house. your brother is away. i ask to be permitted, mademoiselle, to take his place for the time, and to be privileged to protect your sister and yourself from insult. that is all." she raised her hand to her head. after a long pause: "the frogs!" she muttered, "they croak! i cannot hear." and then, to my surprise, she turned suddenly on her heel, and walked over the bridge, leaving me there. for a moment i stood aghast, peering after her shadowy figure, and wondering what had taken her. then, in a minute or less, she came quickly back to me, and i understood. she was crying. "m. de barthe," she said, in a trembling voice, which told me that the victory was won. "is there nothing else? have you no other penance for me?" "none, mademoiselle." she had drawn the shawl over her head, and i no longer saw her face. "that is all you ask?" she murmured. "that is all i ask--now," i answered. "it is granted," she said slowly and firmly. "forgive me if i seem to speak lightly--if i seem to make little of your generosity or my shame; but i can say no more now. i am so deep in trouble and so gnawed by terror that--i cannot feel anything much to-night, either shame or gratitude. i am in a dream; god grant it may pass as a dream! we are sunk in trouble. but for you and what you have done, m. de barthe--i--" she paused and i heard her fighting with the sobs which choked her--"forgive me.... i am overwrought. and my--my feet are cold," she added suddenly and irrelevantly. "will you take me home?" "ah, mademoiselle," i cried remorsefully, "i have been a beast! you are barefoot, and i have kept you here." "it is nothing," she said in a voice which thrilled me. "my heart is warm, monsieur--thanks to you. it is many hours since it has been as warm." she stepped out of the shadow as she spoke--and there, the thing was done. as i had planned, so it had come about. once more i was crossing the meadow in the dark to be received at cocheforêt a welcome guest. the frogs croaked in the pool and a bat swooped round us in circles; and surely never--never, i thought, with a kind of exultation in my breast--had man been placed in a stranger position. somewhere in the black wood behind us--probably in the outskirts of the village--lurked m. de cocheforêt. in the great house before us, outlined by a score of lighted windows, were the soldiers come from auch to take him. between the two, moving side by side in the darkness, in a silence which each found to be eloquent, were mademoiselle and i: she who knew so much, i who knew all--all but one little thing! we reached the house, and i suggested that she should steal in first by the way she had come out, and that i should wait a little and knock at the door when she had had time to explain matters to clon. "they do not let me see clon," she answered slowly. "then your woman must tell him," i rejoined. "or he may say something and betray me." "they will not let our woman come to us." "what?" i cried, astonished. "but this is infamous. you are not prisoners!" mademoiselle laughed harshly. "are we not? well, i suppose not; for if we wanted company, captain larolle said he would be delighted to see us--in the parlour." "he has taken your parlour?" i said. "he and his lieutenant sit there. but i suppose we should be thankful," she added bitterly. "we have still our bed-rooms left to us." "very well," i said. "then i must deal with clon as i can. but i have still a favour to ask, mademoiselle. it is only that you and your sister will descend to-morrow at your usual time. i shall be in the parlour." "i would rather not," she said, pausing and speaking in a troubled voice. "are you afraid?" "no, monsieur; i am not afraid," she answered proudly. "but--" "you will come?" i said. she sighed before she spoke. at length, "yes, i will come--if you wish it," she answered; and the next moment she was gone round the corner of the house, while i laughed to think of the excellent watch these gallant gentlemen were keeping. m. de cocheforêt might have been with her in the garden, might have talked with her as i had talked, might have entered the house even, and passed under their noses scot-free. but that is the way of soldiers. they are always ready for the enemy, with drums beating and flags flying--at ten o'clock in the morning. but he does not always come at that hour. i waited a little, and then i groped my way to the door, and knocked on it with the hilt of my sword. the dogs began to bark at the back, and the chorus of a drinking-song, which came fitfully from the east wing, ceased altogether. an inner door opened, and an angry voice, apparently an officer's, began to rate some one for not coming. another moment, and a clamour of voices and footsteps seemed to pour into the hall, and fill it. i heard the bar jerked away, the door was flung open, and in a twinkling a lanthorn, behind which a dozen flushed visages were dimly seen, was thrust into my face. "why, who the fiend is this?" cried one, glaring at me in astonishment. "_morbleu!_ it is the man!" another shrieked. "seize him!" in a moment half a dozen hands were laid on my shoulders, but i only bowed politely. "the officer, my friends," i said, "m. le capitaine larolle. where is he?" "_diable!_ but who are you, first?" the lanthorn-bearer retorted bluntly. he was a tall, lanky sergeant, with a sinister face. "well, i am not m. de cocheforêt," i replied; "and that must satisfy you, my man. for the rest, if you do not fetch captain larolle at once and admit me, you will find the consequences inconvenient." "ho! ho!" he said, with a sneer. "you can crow, it seems. well, come in." they made way, and i walked into the hall, keeping my hat on. on the great hearth a fire had been kindled, but it had gone out. three or four carbines stood against one wall, and beside them lay a heap of haversacks and some straw. a shattered stool, broken in a frolic, and half a dozen empty wine-skins strewed the floor, and helped to give the place an air of untidiness and disorder. i looked round with eyes of disgust, and my gorge rose. they had spilled oil, and the place reeked foully. "_ventre bleu!_" i said. "is this conduct in a gentleman's house, you rascals? _ma vie!_ if i had you, i would send half of you to the wooden horse!" they gazed at me open-mouthed. my arrogance startled them. the sergeant alone scowled. when he could find his voice for rage-- "this way!" he said. "we did not know a general officer was coming, or we would have been better prepared!" and muttering oaths under his breath, he led me down the well-known passage. at the door of the parlour he stopped. "introduce yourself!" he said rudely. "and if you find the air warm, don't blame me!" i raised the latch and went in. at a table in front of the hearth, half covered with glasses and bottles, sat two men playing hazard. the dice rang sharply as i entered, and he who had just thrown kept the box over them while he turned, scowling, to see who came in. he was a fair-haired, blonde man, large-framed and florid. he had put off his cuirass and boots, and his doublet showed frayed and stained where the armour had pressed on it. but otherwise he was in the extreme of last year's fashion. his deep cravat, folded over so that the laced ends drooped a little in front, was of the finest; his great sash of blue and silver was a foot wide. he had a little jewel in one ear, and his tiny beard was peaked _à l'espagnole_. probably when he turned he expected to see the sergeant, for at sight of me he rose slowly, leaving the dice still covered. "what folly is this?" he cried wrathfully. "here, sergeant! sergeant!--without there! what the--! who are you, sir?" "captain larolle," i said, uncovering politely, "i believe?" "yes, i am captain larolle," he retorted. "but who, in the fiend's name, are you? you are not the man we are after!" "i am not m. cocheforêt," i said coolly. "i am merely a guest in the house, m. le capitaine. i have been enjoying madame de cocheforêt's hospitality for some time, but by an evil chance i was away when you arrived." and with that i walked to the hearth, and, gently pushing aside his great boots which stood there drying, kicked the logs into a blaze. "_mille diables!_" he whispered. and never did i see a man more confounded. but i affected to be taken up with his companion, a sturdy, white-mustachioed old veteran, who sat back in his chair, eyeing me, with swollen cheeks and eyes surcharged with surprise. "good evening, m. le lieutenant," i said, bowing gravely. "it is a fine night." then the storm burst. "fine night!" the captain shrieked, finding his voice again. "_mille diables!_ are you aware, sir, that i am in possession of this house, and that no one harbours here without my permission? guest! hospitality! lieutenant--call the guard! call the guard!" he continued passionately. "where is that ape of a sergeant?" the lieutenant rose to obey, but i lifted my hand. "gently, gently, captain," i said. "not so fast! you seem surprised to see me here. believe me, i am much more surprised to see you." "_sacré!_" he cried, recoiling at this fresh impertinence, while the lieutenant's eyes almost jumped out of his head. but nothing moved me. "is the door closed?" i said sweetly. "thank you; it is, i see. then permit me to say again, gentlemen, that i am much more surprised to see you than you can be to see me. when monseigneur the cardinal honoured me by sending me from paris to conduct this matter, he gave me the fullest--the fullest powers, m. le capitaine--to see the affair to an end. i was not led to expect that my plans would be spoiled on the eve of success by the intrusion of half the garrison from auch!" "o ho!" the captain said softly--in a very different tone and with a very different face. "so you are the gentleman i heard of at auch?" "very likely," i said drily. "but i am from paris, not auch." "to be sure," he answered thoughtfully. "eh, lieutenant?" "yes, m. le capitaine, no doubt," the inferior replied. and they both looked at one another, and then at me, in a way i did not understand. "i think," said i, to clinch the matter, "that you have made a mistake, captain; or the commandant has. and it occurs to me that the cardinal will not be best pleased." "i hold the king's commission," he answered rather stiffly. "to be sure," i replied. "but you see the cardinal--" "ah, but the cardinal--" he rejoined quickly; and then he stopped and shrugged his shoulders. and they both looked at me. "well?" i said. "the king," he answered slowly. "tut-tut!" i exclaimed, spreading out my hands. "the cardinal. let us stick to him. you were saying?" "well, the cardinal, you see--" and then again, after the same words, he stopped--stopped abruptly and shrugged his shoulders. i began to suspect something. "if you have anything to say against monseigneur," i answered, watching him narrowly, "say it. but take a word of advice. don't let it go beyond the door of this room, my friend, and it will do you no harm." "neither here nor outside," he retorted, looking for a moment at his comrade. "only i hold the king's commission. that is all. and i think enough. for the rest, will you throw a main? good! lieutenant, find a glass, and the gentleman a seat. and here, for my part, i will give you a toast. the cardinal--whatever betide!" i drank it, and sat down to play with him; i had not heard the music of the dice for a month, and the temptation was irresistible. but i was not satisfied. i called the mains and won his crowns,--he was a mere baby at the game,--but half my mind was elsewhere. there was something here i did not understand; some influence at work on which i had not counted; something moving under the surface as unintelligible to me as the soldiers' presence. had the captain repudiated my commission altogether, and put me to the door or sent me to the guard-house, i could have followed that. but these dubious hints, this passive resistance, puzzled me. had they news from paris, i wondered. was the king dead? or the cardinal ill? i asked them. but they said no, no, no to all, and gave me guarded answers. and midnight found us still playing; and still fencing. chapter viii. the question. "sweep the room, monsieur? and remove this medley? but, m. le capitaine--" "the captain is at the village," i replied sternly. "and do you move! move, man, and the thing will be done while you are talking about it. set the door into the garden open--so!" "certainly, it is a fine morning. and the tobacco of m. le lieutenant--but m. le capitaine did not--" "give orders? well, i give them!" i answered. "first of all, remove these beds. and bustle, man, bustle, or i will find something to quicken you." in a moment-- "and m. le capitaine's riding-boots?" "place them in the passage," i replied. "_ohé!_ in the passage?" he paused, looking at them in doubt. "yes, booby; in the passage." "and the cloaks, monsieur?" "there is a bush handy outside the window. let them air." "_ohé_, the bush? well, to be sure they are damp. but--yes, yes, monsieur, it is done. and the holsters?" "there also!" i said harshly. "throw them out. faugh! the place reeks of leather. now, a clean hearth. and set the table before the open door, so that we may see the garden. so. and tell the cook that we shall dine at eleven, and that madame and mademoiselle will descend." "_ohé!_ but m. le capitaine ordered the dinner for half past eleven?" "it must be advanced, then; and, mark you, my friend, if it is not ready when madame comes down, you will suffer, and the cook too." when he was gone on his errand, i looked round. what else was lacking? the sun shone cheerily on the polished floor; the air, freshened by the rain which had fallen in the night, entered freely through the open doorway. a few bees lingering with the summer hummed outside. the fire crackled bravely; an old hound, blind and past work, lay warming its hide on the hearth. i could think of nothing more, and i stood and watched the man set out the table and spread the cloth. "for how many, monsieur?" he asked, in a scared tone. "for five," i answered; and i could not help smiling at myself. what would zaton's say could it see berault turned housewife? there was a white glazed cup--an old-fashioned piece of the second henry's time--standing on a shelf. i took it down and put some late flowers in it, and set it in the middle of the table, and stood off myself to look at it. but a moment later, thinking i heard them coming, i hurried it away in a kind of panic, feeling on a sudden ashamed of the thing. the alarm proved to be false, however; and then again, taking another turn, i set the piece back. i had done nothing so foolish for--for more years than i liked to count. but when madame and mademoiselle came, they had eyes neither for the flowers nor the room. they had heard that the captain was out beating the village and the woods for the fugitive, and where i had looked for a comedy i found a tragedy. madame's face was so red with weeping that all her beauty was gone. she started and shook at the slightest sound, and, unable to find any words to answer my greeting, could only sink into a chair and sit crying silently. mademoiselle was in a mood scarcely more cheerful. she did not weep, but her manner was hard and fierce. she spoke absently and answered fretfully. her eyes glittered, and she had the air of straining her ears continually to catch some dreaded sound. "there is no news, monsieur?" she said, as she took her seat. and she shot a swift look at me. "none, mademoiselle." "they are searching the village?" "i believe so." "where is clon?" this in a lower voice, and with a kind of shrinking in her face. i shook my head. "i believe they have him confined somewhere. and louis, too," i said, "but i have not seen either of them." "and where are--? i thought these people would be here," she muttered. and she glanced askance at the two vacant places. the servant had brought in the meal. "they will be here presently," i said coolly. "let us make the most of the time. a little wine and food will do madame good." she smiled rather sadly. "i think we have changed places," she said; "and that you have turned host, and we guests." "let it be so," i said cheerfully. "i recommend some of this ragoût. come, mademoiselle; fasting can aid no one. a full meal has saved many a man's life." it was clumsily said perhaps, for she shuddered and looked at me with a ghastly smile. but she persuaded her sister to taste something; and she took something on her own plate and raised her fork to her lips. but in a moment she laid it down again. "i cannot," she murmured. "i cannot swallow. oh, my god, at this moment they may be taking him!" i thought that she was about to burst into a passion of tears, and i repented that i had induced her to descend. but her self-control was not yet exhausted. by an effort painful to see, she recovered her composure. she took up her fork, and ate a few mouthfuls. then she looked at me with a fierce under-look. "i want to see clon," she whispered feverishly. the man who waited on us had left the room. "he knows?" i said. she nodded, her beautiful face strangely disfigured. her closed teeth showed between her lips. two red spots burned in her white cheeks, and she breathed quickly. i felt, as i looked at her, a sudden pain at my heart; and a shuddering fear, such as a man awaking to find himself falling over a precipice, might feel. how these women loved the man! for a moment i could not speak. when i found my voice it sounded dry and husky. "he is a safe confidant," i muttered. "he can neither speak nor write, mademoiselle." "no, but--" and then her face became fixed. "they are coming," she whispered. "hush!" she rose stiffly, and stood supporting herself by the table. "have they--have they--found him?" she muttered. the woman by her side wept on, unconscious what was impending. i heard the captain stumble far down the passage, and swear loudly; and i touched mademoiselle's hand. "they have not!" i whispered. "all is well, mademoiselle. pray, pray calm yourself. sit down, and meet them as if nothing were the matter. and your sister! madame, madame," i cried, almost harshly, "compose yourself. remember that you have a part to play." my appeal did something. madame stifled her sobs. mademoiselle drew a deep breath and sat down; and though she was still pale and still trembled, the worst was past. and just in time. the door flew open with a crash. the captain stumbled into the room, swearing afresh. "_sacré nom du diable!_" he cried, his face crimson with rage. "what fool placed these things here? my boots? my--" his jaw fell. he stopped on the word, stricken silent by the new aspect of the room, by the sight of the little party at the table, by all the changes i had worked. "_saint siêge!_" i he muttered. "what is this?" the lieutenant's grizzled face peering over his shoulder completed the picture. "you are rather late, m. le capitaine," i said cheerfully. "madame's hour is eleven. but come, here are your seats waiting for you." "_mille tonnerres!_" he muttered, advancing into the room, and glaring at us. "i am afraid the ragoût is cold," i continued, peering into the dish and affecting to see nothing. "the soup, however, has been kept hot by the fire. but i think you do not see madame." he opened his mouth to swear, but for the moment thought better of it. "who--who put my boots in the passage?" he asked, his voice thick with rage. he did not bow to the ladies, or take any notice of their presence. "one of the men, i suppose," i said indifferently. "is anything missing?" he glared at me. then his cloak, spread outside, caught his eye. he strode through the door, saw his holsters lying on the grass, and other things strewn about. he came back. "whose monkey game is this?" he snarled, and his face was very ugly. "who is at the bottom of this? speak, sir, or i--" "tut-tut! the ladies!" i said. "you forget yourself, monsieur." "forget myself?" he hissed, and this time he did not check his oath. "don't talk to me of the ladies! madame? bah! do you think, fool, that we are put into rebels' houses to bow and smile and take dancing lessons?" "in this case a lesson in politeness were more to the point, monsieur," i said sternly. and i rose. "was it by your orders that this was done?" he retorted, his brow black with passion. "answer, will you?" "it was!" i replied outright. "then take that!" he cried, dashing his hat violently in my face. "and come outside." "with pleasure, monsieur," i answered, bowing. "in one moment. permit me to find my sword. i think it is in the passage." i went thither to get it. when i returned i found that the two men were waiting for me in the garden, while the ladies had risen from the table and were standing near it with blanched faces. "you had better take your sister upstairs, mademoiselle," i said gently, pausing a moment beside them. "have no fear. all will be well." "but what is it?" she answered, looking troubled. "it was so sudden. i am--i did not understand. you quarrelled so quickly." "it is very simple," i answered, smiling. "m. le capitaine insulted you yesterday; he will pay for it to-day. that is all. or, not quite all," i continued, dropping my voice and speaking in a different tone. "his removal may help you, mademoiselle. do you understand? i think that there will be no more searching to-day." she uttered an exclamation, grasping my arm and peering into my face. "you will kill him?" she muttered. i nodded. "why not?" i said. she caught her breath and stood with one hand clasped to her bosom, gazing at me with parted lips, the blood mounting to her cheeks. gradually the flush melted into a fierce smile. "yes, yes, why not?" she repeated, between her teeth. "why not?" she had her hand on my arm, and i felt her fingers tighten until i could have winced. "why not? so you planned this--for us, monsieur?" i nodded. "but can you?" "safely," i said; then, muttering to her to take her sister upstairs, i turned towards the garden. my foot was already on the threshold, and i was composing my face to meet the enemy, when i heard a movement behind me. the next moment her hand was on my arm. "wait! wait a moment! come back!" she panted. i turned. the smile and flush had vanished; her face was pale. "no!" she said abruptly. "i was wrong! i will not have it. i will have no part in it! you planned it last night, m. de barthe. it is murder." "mademoiselle!" i exclaimed, wondering. "murder? why? it is a duel." "it is murder," she answered persistently. "you planned it last night. you said so." "but i risk my own life," i replied sharply. "nevertheless--i will have no part in it," she answered more faintly. "it will bring no good." she was trembling with agitation. her eyes avoided mine. "on my shoulders be it then!" i replied stoutly. "it is too late, mademoiselle, to go back. they are waiting for me. only, before i go, let me beg of you to retire." and i turned from her, and went out, wondering and thinking. first, that women were strange things. secondly--_murder?_ merely because i had planned the duel and provoked the quarrel! never had i heard anything so preposterous. grant it, and dub every man who kept his honour with his hands a cain--and a good many branded faces would be seen in some streets. i laughed at the fancy, as i strode down the garden walk. and yet, perhaps, i was going to do a foolish thing. the lieutenant would still be here: a hard, bitter man, of stiffer stuff than his captain. and the troopers. what if, when i had killed their leader, they made the place too hot for me, monseigneur's commission notwithstanding? i should look silly, indeed, if on the eve of success i were driven from the place by a parcel of jack-boots. i liked the thought so little that i hesitated yet it seemed too late to retreat. the captain and the lieutenant were waiting in a little open space fifty yards from the house, where a narrower path crossed the broad walk, down which i had first seen mademoiselle and her sister pacing. the captain had removed his doublet, and stood in his shirt leaning against the sundial, his head bare and his sinewy throat uncovered. he had drawn his rapier and stood pricking the ground impatiently. i marked his strong and nervous frame and his sanguine air: and twenty years earlier the sight might have damped me. but no thought of the kind entered my head now, and though i felt with each moment greater reluctance to engage, doubt of the issue had no place in my calculations. i made ready slowly, and would gladly, to gain time, have found some fault with the place. but the sun was sufficiently high to give no advantage to either. the ground was good, the spot well chosen. i could find no excuse to put off the man, and i was about to salute him and fall to work, when a thought crossed my mind. "one moment!" i said. "supposing i kill you, m. le capitaine, what becomes of your errand here?" "don't trouble yourself," he answered, with a sneer--he had misread my slowness and hesitation. "it will not happen, monsieur. and in any case the thought need not harass you. i have a lieutenant." "yes, but what of my mission?" i replied bluntly. "i have no lieutenant." "you should have thought of that before you interfered with my boots," he retorted, with contempt. "true," i said, overlooking his manner. "but better late than never. i am not sure, now i think of it, that my duty to monseigneur will let me fight." "you will swallow the blow?" he cried, spitting on the ground offensively. "_diable!_" and the lieutenant, standing on one side with his hands behind him and his shoulders squared, laughed grimly. "i have not made up my mind," i answered irresolutely. "well, _nom de dieu!_ make it up," the captain replied, with an ugly sneer. he took a swaggering step this way and that, playing his weapon. "i am afraid, lieutenant, there will be no sport to-day," he continued, in a loud aside. "our cock has but a chicken heart." "well!" i said coolly, "i do not know what to do. certainly it is a fine day, and a fair piece of ground. and the sun stands well. but i have not much to gain by killing you, m. le capitaine, and it might get me into an awkward fix. on the other hand, it would not hurt me to let you go." "indeed?" he said contemptuously, looking at me as i should look at a lacquey. "no!" i replied. "for if you were to say that you had struck gil de berault, and left the ground with a whole skin, no one would believe you." "gil de berault!" he exclaimed, frowning. "yes, monsieur," i replied suavely. "at your service. you did not know my name?" "i thought your name was de barthe," he said. his voice sounded queerly; and he waited for the answer with parted lips, and a shadow in his eyes which i had seen in men's eyes before. "no," i said. "that was my mother's name, i took it for this occasion only." his florid cheek lost a shade of its colour, and he bit his lips as he glanced at the lieutenant, trouble in his eyes. i had seen these signs before, and knew them, and i might have cried "chicken-heart!" in my turn; but i had not made a way of escape for him--before i declared myself--for nothing, and i held to my purpose. "i think you will allow now," i said grimly, "that it will not harm me even if i put up with a blow!" "m. de berault's courage is known," he muttered. "and with reason," i said. "that being so, suppose we say this day three months, m. le capitaine? the postponement to be for my convenience." he caught the lieutenant's eye, and looked down sullenly, the conflict in his mind as plain as daylight. he had only to insist, and i must fight; and if by luck or skill he could master me, his fame as a duellist would run, like a ripple over water, through every garrison town in france and make him a name even in paris. on the other side were the imminent peril of death, the gleam of cold steel already in fancy at his breast, the loss of life and sunshine, and the possibility of a retreat with honour, if without glory. i read his face, and knew before he spoke what he would do. "it appears to me that the burden is with you," he said huskily; "but for my part, i am satisfied." "very well," i said, "i take the burden. permit me to apologize for having caused you to strip unnecessarily. fortunately the sun is shining." "yes," he said gloomily. and he took his clothes from the sundial, and began to put them on. he had expressed himself satisfied; but i knew that he was feeling very ill-satisfied with himself, and i was not surprised when he presently said abruptly and almost rudely, "there is one thing i think we must settle here." "what is that?" i asked. "our positions," he blurted out. "or we shall cross one another again within the hour." "umph! i am not quite sure that i understand," i said. "that is precisely what i don't do--understand!" he retorted, in a tone of surly triumph. "before i came on this duty, i was told that there was a gentleman here, bearing sealed orders from the cardinal to arrest m. de cocheforêt; and i was instructed to avoid collision with him so far as might be possible. at first i took you for the gentleman. but the plague take me if i understand the matter now." "why not?" i said coldly. "because--well, the matter is in a nutshell!" he answered impetuously. "are you here on behalf of madame de cocheforêt to shield her husband? or are you here to arrest him? that is what i don't understand, m. de berault." "if you mean, am i the cardinal's agent--i am!" i answered sternly. "to arrest m. de cocheforêt?" "to arrest m. de cocheforêt." "well--you surprise me," he said. only that; but he spoke so drily that i felt the blood rush to my face. "take care, monsieur," i said severely. "do not presume too far on the inconvenience to which your death might put me." he shrugged his shoulders. "no offence!" he said. "but you do not seem, m. de berault, to comprehend the difficulty. if we do not settle things now, we shall be bickering twenty times a day!" "well, what do you want?" i asked impatiently. "simply to know how you are going to proceed. so that our plans may not clash." "but surely, m. le capitaine, that is my affair!" i replied. "the clashing?" he answered bitterly. then he waved aside my wrath. "pardon," he said, "the point is simply this: how do you propose to find him if he is here?" "that again is my affair," i answered. he threw up his hands in despair; but in a moment his place was taken by an unexpected disputant. the lieutenant, who had stood by all the time, listening and tugging at his grey moustache, suddenly spoke. "look here, m. de berault," he said, confronting me roughly, "i do not fight duels. i am from the ranks. i proved my courage at montauban in ' , and my honour is good enough to take care of itself. so i say what i like, and i ask you plainly what m. le capitaine doubtless has in his mind but does not ask: are you running with the hare and hunting with the hounds in this matter? in other words, have you thrown up monseigneur's commission in all but name and become madame's ally; or--it is the only other alternative--are you getting at the man through the women?" "you villain!" i cried, glaring at him in such a rage and fury i could scarcely get the words out. this was plain speaking with a vengeance! "how dare you! how dare you say that i am false to the hand that pays me?" i thought he would blench, but he did not. he stood up stiff as a poker. "i do not say; i ask!" he replied, facing me squarely, and slapping his fist into his open hand to drive home his words the better. "i ask you whether you are playing the traitor to the cardinal? or to these two women? it is a simple question." i fairly choked. "you impudent scoundrel," i said. "steady, steady!" he replied. "pitch sticks where it belongs. but that is enough. i see which it is, m. le capitaine; this way a moment, by your leave." and in a very cavalier way he took his officer by the arm, and drew him into a side-walk, leaving me to stand in the sun, bursting with anger and spleen. the gutter-bred rascal! that such a man should insult me, and with impunity! in paris i might have made him fight, but here it was impossible. i was still foaming with rage when they returned. "we have come to a determination," the lieutenant said, tugging his grey mustachios and standing like a ramrod. "we shall leave you the house and madame, and you can take your line to find the man. for ourselves, we shall draw off our men to the village, and we shall take our line. that is all, m. le capitaine, is it not?" "i think so," the captain muttered, looking anywhere but at me. "then we bid you good-day, monsieur," the lieutenant added. and in a moment he turned his companion round, and the two retired up the walk to the house, leaving me to look after them in a black fit of rage and incredulity. at the first flush there was something so offensive in the manner of their going that anger had the upper hand. i thought of the lieutenant's words, and i cursed him to hell with a sickening consciousness that i should not forget them in a hurry: "was i playing the traitor to the cardinal or to these women--which?" _mon dieu!_ if ever question--but there! some day i would punish him. and the captain? i could put an end to his amusement, at any rate; and i would. doubtless among the country bucks of auch he lorded it as a chief provincial bully, but i would cut his comb for him some fine morning behind the barracks. and then, as i grew cooler i began to wonder why they were going, and what they were going to do. they might be already on the track, or have the information they required under hand; in that case i could understand the movement. but if they were still searching vaguely, uncertain whether their quarry were in the neighbourhood or not, and uncertain how long they might have to stay, it seemed incredible that soldiers should move from good quarters to bad without motive. i wandered down the garden thinking sullenly of this, and pettishly cutting off the heads of the flowers with my sheathed sword. after all, if they found and arrested the man, what then? i should have to make my peace with the cardinal as i best might. he would have gained his point, but not through me, and i should have to look to myself. on the other hand, if i anticipated them--and, as a fact, i felt that i could lay my hand on the fugitive within a few hours--there would come a time when i must face mademoiselle. a little while back that had not seemed so difficult a thing. from the day of our first meeting--and in a higher degree since that afternoon when she had lashed me with her scorn--my views of her, and my feelings towards her, had been strangely made up of antagonism and sympathy; of repulsion, because in her past and present she was so different from me; of yearning, because she was a woman and friendless. then i had duped her and bought her confidence by returning the jewels, and in a measure i had sated my vengeance; and then, as a consequence, sympathy had again begun to get the better, until now i hardly knew my own mind or what i intended. _i did not know_, in fact, what i intended. i stood there in the garden with that conviction suddenly new-born in my mind; and then, in a moment, i heard her step and turned to find her behind me. her face was like april, smiles breaking through her tears. as she stood with a tall hedge of sunflowers behind her, i started to see how beautiful she was. "i am here in search of you, m. de barthe," she said, colouring slightly, perhaps because my eyes betrayed my thought, "to thank you. you have not fought, and yet you have conquered. my woman has just been with me, and she tells me that they are going!" "going?" i said. "yes, mademoiselle, they are leaving the house." she did not understand my reservation. "what magic have you used?" she said, almost gaily--it was wonderful how hope had changed her. "moreover, i am curious to learn how you managed to avoid fighting." "after taking a blow?" i said bitterly. "monsieur, i did not mean that," she said reproachfully. but her face clouded. i saw that, viewed in this light--in which i suppose she had not seen it--the matter perplexed her still more. i took a sudden resolution. "have you ever heard, mademoiselle," i said gravely, plucking off while i spoke the dead leaves from a plant beside me, "of a gentleman by name de berault? known in paris, so i have heard, by the sobriquet of the black death?" "the duellist?" she answered, in wonder. "yes, i have heard of him. he killed a young gentleman of this province at nancy two years back. it was a sad story," she continued, shuddering, "of a dreadful man. god keep our friends from such!" "amen!" i said quietly. but, in spite of myself, i could not meet her eyes. "why?" she answered, quickly taking alarm at my silence. "what of him, m. de barthe? why have you mentioned him?" "because he is here, mademoiselle." "here?" she exclaimed. "yes, mademoiselle," i answered soberly. "i am he." chapter ix. clon. "you!" she cried, in a voice which pierced me, "you--m. de berault? impossible!" but, glancing askance at her.--i could not face her,--i saw that the blood had left her cheeks. "yes, mademoiselle," i answered, in a low voice. "de barthe was my mother's name. when i came here, a stranger, i took it that i might not be known; that i might again speak to a good woman and not see her shrink. that--but why trouble you with all this?" i continued proudly, rebelling against her silence, her turned shoulder, her averted face. "you asked me, mademoiselle, how i could take a blow and let the striker go. i have answered. it is the one privilege m. de berault possesses." "then," she replied quickly, but almost in a whisper, "if i were m. de berault, i would use it, and never fight again." "in that event, mademoiselle," i answered cynically, "i should lose my men friends as well as my women friends. like monseigneur, the cardinal, i rule by fear." she shuddered, either at the name or at the idea my words called up, and, for a moment, we stood awkwardly silent. the shadow of the sundial fell between us; the garden was still; here and there a leaf fluttered slowly down, or a seed fell. with each instant of silence i felt the gulf between us growing wider, i felt myself growing harder; i mocked at her past, which was so unlike mine; i mocked at mine, and called it fate. i was on the point of turning from her with a bow--and a furnace in my breast--when she spoke. "there is a late rose lingering there," she said, a slight tremor in her voice. "i cannot reach it. will you pluck it for me, m. de berault?" i obeyed her, my hand trembling, my face on fire. she took the rose from me, and placed it in the bosom of her dress. and i saw that her hand trembled too, and that her cheek was dark with blushes. she turned at once, and began to walk towards the house. presently she spoke. "heaven forbid that i should misjudge you a second time!" she said, in a low voice. "and, after all, who am i that i should judge you at all? an hour ago, i would have killed that man had i possessed the power." "you repented, mademoiselle," i said huskily. i could scarcely speak. "do you never repent?" "yes. but too late, mademoiselle." "perhaps it is never too late," she answered softly. "alas, when a man is dead--" "you may rob a man of more than life!" she replied with energy, stopping me by a gesture. "if you have never robbed a man--or a woman--of honour! if you have never ruined boy or girl, m. de berault! if you have never pushed another into the pit and gone by it yourself! if--but for murder? listen. you may be a romanist, but i am a huguenot, and have read. 'thou shalt not kill!' it is written; and the penalty, 'by man shall thy blood be shed!' but, 'if you cause one of these little ones to offend, it were _better_ for you that a mill-stone were hanged about your neck, and that you were cast into the depths of the sea." "mademoiselle, you are too merciful," i muttered. "i need mercy myself," she answered, sighing. "and i have had few temptations. how do i know what you have suffered?" "or done!" i said, almost rudely. "where a man has not lied, nor betrayed, nor sold himself or others," she answered firmly, but in a low tone, "i think i can forgive all else. i can better put up with force," she added, smiling sadly, "than with fraud." ah, dieu! i turned away my face that she might not see how it paled, how i winced; that she might not guess how her words, meant in mercy, stabbed me to the heart. and yet, then, for the first time, while viewing in all its depth and width the gulf which separated us, i was not hardened; i was not cast back on myself. her gentleness, her pity, her humility, softened me, while they convicted me. my god! how could i do that which i had come to do? how could i stab her in the tenderest part, how could i inflict on her that rending pang, how could i meet her eyes, and stand before her, a caliban, a judas, the vilest, lowest, basest thing she could conceive? i stood, a moment, speechless and disordered; stunned by her words, by my thoughts--as i have seen a man stand when he has lost his all, his last, at the tables. then i turned to her; and for an instant i thought that my tale was told already. i thought that she had pierced my disguise, for her face was aghast, stricken with sudden fear. then i saw that she was not looking at me, but beyond me, and i turned quickly and saw a servant hurrying from the house to us. it was louis. his face, it was, had frightened her. his eyes were staring, his hair waved, his cheeks were flabby with dismay. he breathed as if he had been running. "what is it?" mademoiselle cried, while he was still some way off. "speak, man. my sister? is she--" "clon," he gasped. the name changed her to stone. "clon?" she muttered. "what of him?" "in the village!" louis panted, his tongue stuttering with terror. "they are flogging him! they are killing him, mademoiselle! to make him tell!" mademoiselle grasped the sundial and leant against it, her face colourless, and, for an instant, i thought that she was fainting. "tell?" i said mechanically. "but he cannot tell. he is dumb, man." "they will make him guide them," louis groaned, covering his ears with his shaking hands, his face like paper. "and his cries! oh, monsieur, go!" he continued, suddenly appealing to me, in a thrilling tone. "save him. all through the wood i heard them. it was horrible! horrible!" mademoiselle uttered a low moan, and i turned to support her, thinking each second to see her fall. but with a sudden movement she straightened herself, and, slipping by me, with eyes which seemed to see nothing, she started swiftly down the walk towards the meadow gate. i ran after her, but, taken by surprise as i was, it was only by a great effort i reached the gate before her, and, thrusting myself in the road, barred the way. "let me pass!" she panted fiercely, striving to thrust me on one side. "out of my way, sir! i am going to the village." "you are not going to the village," i said sternly. "go back to the house, mademoiselle, and at once." "my servant!" she wailed. "let me go! oh, let me go! do you think i can rest here while they torture him? he cannot speak, and they--they--" "go back, mademoiselle," i said, cutting her short, with decision. "you would only make matters worse! i will go myself, and what one man can do against many, i will! louis, give your mistress your arm and take her to the house. take her to madame." "but you will go?" she cried. before i could stay her--i swear i would have done so if i could--she raised my hand and carried it to her trembling lips. "you will go! go and stop them! stop them," she continued, in a tone which stirred my heart, "and heaven reward you, monsieur!" i did not answer; nor did i once look back, as i crossed the meadow; but i did not look forward either. doubtless it was grass i trod; doubtless the wood was before me with the sun shining aslant on it, and behind me the house with a flame here and there on the windows. but i went in a dream, among shadows; with a racing pulse, in a glow from head to heel; conscious of nothing but the touch of mademoiselle's warm lips, seeing neither meadows nor house, nor even the dark fringe of wood before me, but only mademoiselle's passionate face. for the moment i was drunk: drunk with that to which i had been so long a stranger, with that which a man may scorn for years, to find it at last beyond his reach--drunk with the touch of a good woman's lips. i passed the bridge in this state; and my feet were among the brushwood before the heat and fervour in which i moved found on a sudden their direction. something began to penetrate to my veiled senses--a hoarse inarticulate cry, now deep, now shrilling horribly, which seemed to fill the wood. it came at intervals of half a minute or so, and made the flesh creep, it was so full of dumb pain, of impotent wrestling, of unspeakable agony. i am a man and have seen things. i saw the concini beheaded, and chalais ten years later--they gave him thirty-four blows; and when i was a boy i escaped from the college and viewed from a great distance ravaillac torn by horses--that was in the year ten. but the horrible cries i now heard filled me, perhaps because i was alone and fresh from the sight of mademoiselle, with loathing that was intense. the very wood, though the sun wanted an hour of setting, seemed to grow dark. i ran on through it, cursing, until the hovels of the village at length came in sight. again the shriek rose, a pulsing horror, and this time i could hear the lash fall on the sodden flesh, i could see in fancy the strong man, trembling, quivering, straining against his bonds. and then, in a moment, i was in the street, and, as the scream once more tore the air, i dashed round the corner by the inn, and came upon them. i did not look at _him_. i saw captain larolle and the lieutenant, and a ring of troopers, and one man, bare-armed, teasing out with his fingers the thongs of a whip. the thongs dripped blood, and the sight fired the mine. the rage i had suppressed when the lieutenant bearded me earlier in the afternoon, the passion with which mademoiselle's distress had filled my breast, at last found vent. i sprang through the line of soldiers, and striking the man with the whip a buffet between the shoulders, which hurled him breathless to the ground, i turned on the leaders. "you devils!" i cried. "shame on you! the man is dumb! i tell you, if i had ten men with me, i would sweep you and your scum out of the village with broomsticks. lay on another lash," i continued recklessly, "and i will see if you or the cardinal be the stronger." the lieutenant glared at me, his grey moustache bristling, his eyes almost starting from his head. some of the troopers laid their hands on their swords, but no one moved, and only the captain spoke. "_mille diables!_" he swore. "what is all this about? are you mad, sir?" "mad or sane!" i cried, still in a fury. "lay on another lash, and you shall repent it." "i?" "yes, you!" for an instant there was a pause of astonishment. then to my surprise the captain laughed--laughed loudly. "very heroic!" he said. "quite magnificent, m. le chevalier-errant. but you see, unfortunately, you come too late!" "too late!" i said incredulously. "yes, too late," he replied, with a mocking smile. and the lieutenant grinned too. "you see the man has just confessed. we have only been giving him an extra touch or two, to impress his memory, and save us the trouble of tying him up again." "i don't believe it," i said bluntly--but i felt the check, and fell to earth. "the man cannot speak." "no, but he has managed to tell us that he will guide us to the place we want," the captain answered drily. "the whip, if it cannot find a man a tongue, can find him wits. what is more, i think, he will keep his word," he continued, with a hideous smile. "for i warn him that if he does not, all your heroics shall not save him! he is a rebel dog, and known to us of old, and i will flay his back to the bones--ay, until we can see his heart beating through his ribs--but i will have what i want--in your teeth, too, you d--d meddler." "steady, steady!" i said, somewhat sobered. i saw that he was telling me the truth. "he is going to take you to m. de cocheforêt's hiding-place, is he?" "yes, he is!" the captain retorted offensively. "have you any objection to make to that, master spy?" "none," i replied. "but i shall go with you. and if you live three months, i shall kill you for that name--behind the barracks at auch, m. le capitaine." he changed colour, but he answered me boldly enough. "i don't know that you will go with us. that is as we please," he continued, with a snarl. "i have the cardinal's orders," i said sternly. "the cardinal?" he exclaimed, stung to fury by this repetition of the name. "the cardinal be--" but the lieutenant laid his hands on his lips, and stopped him. "hush!" he said. then more quietly, "your pardon, m. le capitaine. shall i give orders to the men to fall in?" the captain nodded sullenly. "take him down!" the lieutenant ordered, in his harsh, monotonous voice. "throw his blouse over him, and tie his hands. and do you two, paul and lebrun, guard him. michel, bring the whip, or he may forget how it tastes. sergeant, choose four good men and dismiss the rest to their quarters." "shall we need the horses?" the sergeant asked. "i don't know," the captain answered peevishly. "what does the rogue say?" the lieutenant stepped up to him. "listen!" he said grimly. "nod if you mean yes, and shake your head if you mean no. and have a care you answer truly. is it more than a mile to this place? the place you know of?" they had loosened the poor wretch's fastenings, and covered his back. he stood leaning against the wall, his mouth still panting, the sweat running down his hollow cheeks; his sunken eyes were closed; a quiver now and again ran through his frame. the lieutenant repeated his question, and, getting no answer, looked round for orders. the captain met the look, and crying savagely, "answer, will you, you mute!" struck the half-swooning miserable across the back with his switch. the effect was magical. covered, as his shoulders were, the man sprang erect with a shriek of pain, raising his chin, and hollowing his back; and in that attitude stood an instant with starting eyes, gasping for breath. then he sank back against the wall, moving his mouth spasmodically. his face was the colour of lead. "_diable!_ i think we have gone too far with him!" the captain muttered. "bring some wine!" the lieutenant replied. "quick with it!" i looked on, burning with indignation, and wondering besides what would come of this. if the man took them to the place, and they succeeded in seizing, cocheforêt, there was an end of the matter as far as i was concerned. it was off my shoulders, and i might leave the village when i pleased; nor was it likely--since he would have his man, though not through me--that the cardinal would refuse me an amnesty. on the whole, i thought that i would prefer that things should take that course; and assuming the issue, i began to wonder whether in that event it would be necessary that madame should know the truth. i had a kind of a vision of a reformed berault, dead to play and purging himself at a distance from zaton's, winning, perhaps, a name in the italian war, and finally--but, pshaw! i was a fool. however, be that as it might, it was essential that i should see the arrest made; and i waited patiently while they revived the tortured man, and made their dispositions. these took some time; so that the sun was down, and it was growing dusk, when we marched out, clon going first, supported by his two guards, the captain and i following,--abreast, and eyeing one another suspiciously,--the lieutenant, with the sergeant and five troopers, bringing up the rear. clon moved slowly, moaning from time to time, and but for the aid given him by the two men with him, must have sunk down again and again. he went out between two houses close to the inn, and struck a narrow track, scarcely discernible, which ran behind other houses, and then plunged into the thickest part of the wood. a single person, traversing the covert, might have made such a track; or pigs, or children. but it was the first idea that occurred to us, and it put us all on the alert. the captain carried a cocked pistol, i held my sword drawn, and kept a watchful eye on him; and the deeper the dusk fell in the wood, the more cautiously we went, until at last we came out with a sort of jump into a wider and lighter path. i looked up and down it, and saw before me a wooden bridge, and an open meadow, lying cold and grey in the twilight; and i stood in astonishment. it was the old path to the château! i shivered at the thought that he was going to take us there, to the house--to mademoiselle! the captain also recognised the place, and swore aloud. but the dumb man went on unheeding, until he reached the wooden bridge. there he paused as if in doubt, and looked towards the dark outline of the building, which was just visible, one faint light twinkling sadly in the west wing. as the captain and i pressed up behind him, he raised his hands and seemed to wring them towards the house. "have a care!" the captain growled. "play me no tricks, or--" but he did not finish the sentence; for clon turned back from the bridge, and, entering the wood on the left hand, began to ascend the bank of the stream. we had not gone a hundred yards before the ground grew rough, and the undergrowth thick; and yet through all ran a kind of path which enabled us to advance, dark as it was growing. very soon the bank on which we moved began to rise above the water, and grew steep and rugged. we turned a shoulder, where the stream swept round a curve, and saw we were in the mouth of a small ravine, dark and steep-walled. the water brawled along the bottom, over boulders and through chasms. in front, the slope on which we stood shaped itself into a low cliff; but half-way between its summit and the water, a ledge, or narrow terrace, running along the face, was dimly visible. "ten to one, a cave!" the captain muttered. "it is a likely place." "and an ugly one!" i sneered. "which one to ten might safely hold for hours!" "if the ten had no pistols--yes!" he answered viciously. "but you see we have. is he going that way?" he was. "lieutenant," larolle said, turning and speaking in a low voice, though the chafing of the stream below us covered ordinary sounds, "shall we light the lanthorns, or press on while there is still a glimmering of day?" "on, i should say, m. le capitaine," the lieutenant answered. "prick him in the back if he falters. i will warrant he has a tender place or two!" the brute added, with a chuckle. the captain gave the word, and we moved forward; it being very evident now that the cliff-path was our destination. it was possible for the eye to follow the track all the way to it through rough stones and brushwood; and though clon climbed feebly and with many groans, two minutes saw us step on to it. it did not turn out to be the perilous place it looked at a distance. the ledge, grassy and terrace-like, sloped slightly downwards and outwards, and in parts was slippery; but it was as wide as a highway, and the fall to the water did not exceed thirty feet. even in such a dim light as now displayed it to us, and by increasing the depth and unseen dangers of the gorge, gave a kind of impressiveness to our movements, a nervous woman need not have feared to breast it. i wondered how often mademoiselle had passed along it with her milk-pitcher. "i think we have him now!" captain larolle muttered, twisting his mustachios, and looking round to make his last dispositions. "paul and lebrun, see that your man makes no noise. sergeant, come forward with your carbine, but do not fire without orders. now, silence, all, and close up, lieutenant. forward!" we advanced about a hundred paces, keeping the cliff on our left, then turned a shoulder, and saw, a few paces in front of us, a black blotch standing out from the grey duskiness of the cliff-side. the prisoner stopped, and raising his bound hands pointed to it. "there?" the captain whispered, pressing forward. "is that the place?" clon nodded. the captain's voice shook with excitement. "you two remain here with him!" he muttered, in a low tone. "sergeant, come forward with me. now, are you ready? forward!" he and the sergeant passed quickly, one on either side of clon and his guards. the path was narrow here, and the captain passed outside. the eyes of all but one were on the black blotch, the hollow in the cliff-side, and no one saw exactly what happened. but somehow, as the captain passed abreast of him, the prisoner thrust back his guards, and springing sideways, flung his unbound arms round larolle's body, and in an instant swept him, shouting, to the verge of the precipice. it was done in a moment. by the time the lieutenant's startled wits and eyes were back, the two were already tottering on the edge, looking in the gloom like one dark form. the sergeant, who was the first to find his head, levelled his carbine; but as the wrestlers twirled and twisted, the captain shrieking out oaths and threats, the mute silent as death, it was impossible to see which was which; and the sergeant lowered his gun again, while the men held back nervously. the ledge sloped steeply there; the edge was vague; already the two seemed to be wrestling in mid-air,--and the mute was a man beyond hope or fear. that moment of hesitation was fatal. clon's long arms were round the other's arms, crushing them into his ribs; clon's skull-like face grinned hate into the other's eyes; his long limbs curled round him like the folds of a snake. suddenly larolle's strength gave way. "damn you all! why don't you--mercy! mercy!" came in a last scream from his lips; and then, as the lieutenant, taken aback before, sprang forward to his aid, the two toppled over the edge, and in a second hurtled out of sight. "_mon dieu!_" the lieutenant cried, in horror. the answer was a dull splash in the depths below. he flung up his arms. "water!" he said. "quick, men, get down! we may save him yet! they have fallen into water!" but there was no path, and night was come, and the men's nerves were shaken. the lanthorns had to be lit, and the way to be retraced; and by the time we reached the dark pool which lay below, the last bubbles were gone from the surface, the last ripples had beaten themselves out against the banks. true, the pool still rocked sullenly, and the yellow light showed a man's hat floating, and near it a glove three parts submerged. but that was all. the mute's dying grip had known no loosening, nor his hate any fear. later, i heard that when they dragged the two out next day, his fingers were in the other's eye-sockets, his teeth in his throat. if ever man found death sweet, it was he. as we turned slowly from the black water, some shuddering, some crossing themselves, the lieutenant looked vengefully at me. "curse you!" he said, in sudden fury. "i believe you are glad!" "he deserved his fate," i answered coldly. "why should i pretend to be sorry? it was now or in three months. and for the other poor devil's sake i am glad." he glared at me a moment, in speechless anger. at last, "i should like to have you tied up!" he said, between his teeth. "i should have thought that you had had enough of tying up for one day!" i retorted. "but there; it comes of making officers out of the canaille. dogs love blood. the teamster must still lash something, if he can no longer lash his horses." we were back, a sombre little procession, at the wooden bridge, when i said this. he stopped suddenly. "very well," he replied, nodding viciously, "that decides me. sergeant, light me this way with a lanthorn. the rest of you to the village. now, master spy," he continued, glancing at me with gloomy spite, "your road is my road. i think i know how to cook your goose." i shrugged my shoulders in disdain, and together, the sergeant leading the way with the light, we crossed the meadow, and passed through the gate where mademoiselle had kissed my hand, and up the ghostly walk between the rosebushes. i wondered uneasily what the lieutenant would be at, and what he intended; but the lanthorn light which now fell on the ground at our feet, and now showed one of us to the other, high-lit in a frame of blackness, discovered nothing in his grizzled face but settled hostility. he wheeled at the end of the walk to go to the main door; but as he did so, i saw the flutter of a white skirt by the stone seat against the house, and i stepped that way. "mademoiselle," i said softly, "is it you?" "clon?" she muttered, her voice quivering. "what of him?" "he is past pain," i answered gently. "he is dead, but in his own way. take comfort, mademoiselle." and then before i could say more, the lieutenant with his sergeant and light were at my elbow. he saluted mademoiselle roughly. she looked at him with shuddering abhorrence. "are you come to flog me, sir?" she said icily. "is it not enough that you have murdered my servant?" "on the contrary, it was he killed my captain," the lieutenant answered, in another tone than i had expected. "if your servant is dead, so is my comrade." she looked with startled eyes, not at him, but at me. "what! captain larolle?" she muttered. i nodded. "how?" she asked. "clon flung the captain and himself into the river-pool," i explained, in a low voice. "the pool above the bridge." she uttered an exclamation of awe, and stood silent. but her lips moved; i think she was praying for clon, though she was a huguenot. meanwhile i had a fright. the lanthorn, swinging in the sergeant's hand, and now throwing its smoky light on the stone seat, now on the rough wall above it, showed me something else. on the seat, doubtless where mademoiselle's hand had lain, as she sat in the dark, listening and watching, stood a pitcher of food. beside her, in that place, it was damning evidence. i trembled lest the lieutenant's eye should fall upon it, lest the sergeant should see it; i thought what i could do to hide it; and then in a moment i forgot all about it. the lieutenant was speaking, and his voice was like doom. my throat grew dry as i listened. my tongue stuck to my mouth; i tried to look at mademoiselle, but i could not. "it is true, the captain is gone," he said stiffly. "but others are alive, and about one of them, a word with you,--by your leave, mademoiselle. i have listened to a good deal of talk from this fine gentleman friend of yours. he has spent the last twenty-four hours saying, 'you shall!' and 'you shall not!' he came from you, and took a very high tone because we laid a little whip-lash about that dumb devil of yours. he called us brutes and beasts, and but for him i am not sure that my friend would not be alive. but when he said a few minutes ago that he was glad,--glad of it, damn him!--then i fixed it in my mind that i would be even with him. and i am going to be!" "what do you mean?" mademoiselle asked, wearily interrupting him. "if you think you can prejudice me against that gentleman--" "that is precisely what i do think! and i am going to do it. and a little more than that!" "you will be only wasting your breath!" she answered proudly. "wait! wait, mademoiselle, until you have heard!" he said. "if ever a black-hearted scoundrel, a dastardly, sneaking spy, trod the earth, it is this fellow! this friend of yours! and i am going to expose him. your own eyes and your own ears shall persuade you. why, i would not eat, i would not drink, i would not sit down with him! i would not! i would rather be beholden to the meanest trooper in my squadron than to him! ay, i would, so help me heaven!" and the lieutenant, turning squarely on his heels, spat on the ground. chapter x. the arrest. so it had come! and come in such a fashion that i saw no way of escape. the sergeant was between us, and i could not strike him. and i found no words. a score of times i had thought with shrinking how i should reveal my secret to mademoiselle, what i should say, and how she would take it. but in my mind it had always been a voluntary act, this disclosure. it had been always i who had unmasked myself, and she who listened--alone; and in this voluntariness and this privacy there had been something which seemed to take from the shame of anticipation. but here--here was no voluntary act on my part, no privacy, nothing but shame. i stood mute, convicted, speechless--like the thing i was. yet if anything could have braced me, it was mademoiselle's voice, when she answered him. "go on, monsieur," she said, with the perfect calmness of scorn. "you will have done the sooner." "you do not believe me?" he replied hotly. "then, i say, look at him! look at him! if ever shame--" "monsieur!" she said abruptly--she did not look at me. "i am ashamed myself!" "why, his very name is not his own!" the lieutenant rejoined jerkily. "he is no barthe at all. he is berault the gambler, the duellist, the bully--" again she interrupted him. "i know it," she said coldly. "i know it all. and if you have nothing more to tell me, go, monsieur. go!" she continued, in a tone of infinite scorn. "enough that you have earned my contempt as well as my abhorrence!" he looked for a moment taken aback. then, "ay, but i _have_ more!" he cried, his voice stubbornly triumphant. "i forgot that you would think little of that! i forgot that a swordsman has always the ladies' hearts. but i have more. do you know, too, that he is in the cardinal's pay? do you know that he is here on the same errand which brings us here,--to arrest m. de cocheforêt? do you know that while we go about the business openly and in soldier fashion, it is his part to worm himself into your confidence, to sneak into madame's intimacy, to listen at your door, to follow your footsteps, to hang on your lips, to track you--track you until you betray yourselves and the man? do you know this, and that all his sympathy is a lie, mademoiselle? his help, so much bait to catch the secret? his aim, blood-money--blood-money? why, _morbleu!_" the lieutenant continued, pointing his finger at me, and so carried away by passion, so lifted out of himself by wrath and indignation, that in spite of myself i shrank before him,--"you talk, lady, of contempt and abhorrence in the same breath with me! but what have you for him? what have you for him, the spy, the informer, the hired traitor? and if you doubt, if you want evidence, look at him. only look at him, i say!" and he might well say it! for i stood silent still; cowering and despairing, white with rage and hate. but mademoiselle did not look. she gazed straight at the lieutenant. "have you done?" she said. "done?" he stammered. her words, her air, brought him to earth again. "done? yes, if you believe me." "i do not," she answered proudly. "if that be all, be satisfied, monsieur. i do not believe you." "then tell me," he retorted, after a moment of stunned surprise, "why, if he was not on our side, do you think we let him remain here? why did we suffer him to stay in a suspected house bullying us, and taking your part from hour to hour?" "he has a sword, monsieur," she answered, with fine contempt. "_mille diables!_" he cried, snapping his fingers in a rage. "that for his sword! no. it was because he held the cardinal's commission; because he had equal authority with us; because we had no choice." "and that being so, monsieur, why are you now betraying him?" she asked keenly. he swore at that, feeling the stroke go home. "you must be mad," he said, glaring at her. "mad, if you cannot see that the man is what i tell you he is. look at him! listen to him! has he a word to say for himself?" still she did not look. "it is late," she replied, coldly and irrelevantly. "and i am not very well. if you have quite done, perhaps you will leave me, monsieur." "_mon dieu!_" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders; "you are mad! i have told you the truth, and you will not believe it. well, on your head be it then, mademoiselle. i have no more to say. but you will see." he looked at her for a moment as if he thought that she might still give way; then he saluted her roughly, gave the word to the sergeant, turned, and went down the path. the sergeant went after him, the lanthorn swaying in his hand. we two were left alone in the gloom. the frogs were croaking in the pool; the house, the garden, the wood,--all lay quiet under the darkness, as on the night when i first came to the château. and would to heaven i had never come! that was the cry in my heart. would to heaven i had never seen this woman, whose nobility and faith and singleness were a continual shame to me; a reproach, branding me every hour i stood in her presence, with all vile and hateful names. the man just gone, coarse, low-bred, brutal soldier as he was, man-flogger, and drilling-block, had yet found heart to feel my baseness, and words in which to denounce it. what, then, would she say when the truth some day came home to her? what shape should i take in her eyes then? how should i be remembered through all the years--then? then? but now? what was she thinking, now, as she stood, silent and absorbed, by the stone seat, a shadowy figure with face turned from me? was she recalling the man's words, fitting them to the facts and the past, adding this and that circumstance? was she, though she had rebuffed him in the body, collating, now he was gone, all he had said, and out of these scraps piecing together the damning truth? the thought tortured me. i could brook uncertainty no longer. i went nearer to her and touched her sleeve. "mademoiselle," i said, in a voice which sounded hoarse and forced even in my own ears, "do you believe this of me?" she started violently and turned. "pardon, monsieur," she answered. "i had forgotten that you were here. do i believe--what?" "what that man said of me," i muttered. "that!" she exclaimed; and she stood a moment gazing at me in a strange fashion. "do i believe what he said, monsieur! but come, come," she continued, "and i will show you if i believe it. but not here." she led the way on the instant into the house, going in through the parlour door, which stood half open. the room inside was pitch dark, but she took me fearlessly by the hand, and led me quickly through it, and along the passage, until we came to the cheerful lighted hall, where a great fire burned on the hearth. all traces of the soldiers' occupation had been swept away. but the room was empty. she led me to the fire, and there, in the full light, no longer a shadowy creature, but red-lipped, brilliant, throbbing with life, she stood opposite me, her eyes shining, her colour high, her breast heaving. "do i believe it?" she said. "i will tell you. m. de cocheforêt's hiding-place is in the hut behind the fern-stack, two furlongs beyond the village, on the road to auch. you know now what no one else knows, he and i and madame excepted. you hold in your hands his life and my honour; and you know also, m. de berault, whether i believed that tale." "my god!" i cried. and i stood looking at her, until something of the horror in my eyes crept into hers, and she shuddered and stepped back. "what is it? what is it?" she whispered, clasping her hands. and with all the colour gone from her cheeks she peered trembling into the corners and towards the door. "there is no one here. is there any one--listening?" i forced myself to speak, though i shook all over, like a man in an ague. "no, mademoiselle, there is no one here," i muttered. and then i let my head fall on my breast, and i stood before her, the statue of despair. had she felt a grain of suspicion, a grain of doubt, my bearing must have opened her eyes. but her mind was cast in so noble a mould, that having once thought ill of me and been converted, she could feel no doubt again. it was her nature to trust all in all. so, a little recovered from her fright, she stood looking at me in great wonder; and at last she had a thought. "you are not well?" she said suddenly. "it is your old wound, monsieur." "yes, mademoiselle," i muttered faintly. "it is my old wound." "i will call clon!" she cried impetuously. and then, with a sob, "ah! poor clon! he is gone. but there is louis. i will call him, and he will get you something." she was gone from the room before i could stop her; and i was left leaning against the table, possessor at last of the great secret which i had come so far to win. possessor of that secret, and able in a moment to open the door, and go out into the night, and make use of it--and yet the most unhappy of men. the sweat stood on my brow, my eyes wandered round the room; i even turned towards the door, with some mad thought of flight--flight from her, from the house, from everything. and god knows if i might not have chosen that course; for i still stood doubting, when on the door, that door, there came a sudden hurried knocking which jarred every nerve in my body. i started. i stood in the middle of the floor, gazing at the door, as at a ghost. then glad of action, glad of anything that might relieve the tension of my feelings, i strode to it, and pulled it sharply open. on the threshold, his flushed face lit up by the light behind me, stood one of the knaves i had brought with me to auch. he had been running, and panted heavily, but he had kept his wits. he grasped my sleeve instantly. "ah! monsieur, the very man!" he cried, tugging at me. "quick! come this instant, and you may yet be first. they have the secret. they have found monsieur." "found whom?" i echoed. "m. de cocheforêt?" "no; but the place where he lies. it was found by accident. the lieutenant was gathering his men to go to it when i came away. if we are quick, we may be there first." "but the place?" i said. "i could not hear where it was," he answered bluntly. "we can hang on their skirts, and at the last moment strike in." the pair of pistols i had taken from the shock-headed man lay on a chest by the door. i snatched them up, and my hat, and joined him without another word; and in a moment we were running down the garden. i looked back once before we passed the gate, and i saw the light streaming out through the door which i had left open; and i fancied that for an instant a figure darkened the gap. but the fancy only strengthened the one single iron purpose which had taken possession of me and all my thoughts. i must be first. i must anticipate the lieutenant, and make the arrest myself. i ran on only the faster. we seemed to be across the meadow and in the wood in a moment. there, instead of keeping along the common path, i boldly singled out--my senses seemed preternaturally keen--the smaller track by which clon had brought us, and ran unfaltering along it, avoiding logs and pitfalls as by instinct, and following all its turns and twists, until it brought us to the back of the inn, and we could hear the murmur of subdued voices in the village street, the sharp low words of command, and even the clink of weapons; and could see, above and between the houses, the dull glare of lanthorns and torches. i grasped my man's arm and crouched down, listening. "where is your mate?" i said, in his ear. "with them," he muttered. "then come," i whispered, rising. "i have seen enough. let us go." but he caught me by the arm and detained me. "you don't know the way!" he hissed. "steady, steady, monsieur. you go too fast. they are just moving. let us join them, and strike in when the time comes. we must let them guide us." "fool!" i said, shaking off his hand. "i tell you, i know where he is! i know where they are going. come; lose not a moment, and we will pluck the fruit while they are on the road to it." his only answer was an exclamation of surprise; at that moment the lights began to move. the lieutenant was starting. the moon was not yet up; the sky was grey and cloudy; to advance where we were was to step into a wall of blackness. but we had lost too much time already, and i did not hesitate. bidding my companion follow me, and use his legs, i sprang through a low fence which rose before us, and stumbling blindly over some broken ground in the rear of the houses, came, with a fall or two, to a little watercourse with steep sides. through this i plunged recklessly, and up the farther side, and, breathless and panting, gained the road just beyond the village, and fifty yards in advance of the lieutenant's troop. they had only two lanthorns burning now, and we were beyond the circle of light these cast; while the steady tramp of so many footsteps covered the noise we made. we were unnoticed. in a twinkling we turned our backs, and as fast as we could ran down the road. fortunately, they were thinking more of secrecy than speed, and in a minute we had doubled the distance between us; in two minutes their lights were mere sparks shining in the gloom behind us. we lost, at last, even the tramp of their feet. then i began to look out and go more slowly; peering into the shadows on either side for the fern-stack. on one hand the hill rose steeply; on the other it fell away to the stream. on neither side was close wood,--or my difficulties had been immensely increased,--but scattered oak-trees stood here and there among gorse and bracken. this helped me, and in a moment, on the upper side, i came upon the dense substance of the stack looming black against the lighter hill. my heart beat fast, but it was no time for thought. bidding the man in a whisper to follow me and be ready to back me up, i climbed the bank softly, and with a pistol in my hand, felt my way to the rear of the stack; thinking to find a hut there, set against the fern, and m. de cocheforêt in it. but i found no hut. there was none; and all was so dark that it came upon me suddenly as i stood between the hill and the stack that i had undertaken a very difficult thing. the hut behind the fern-stack? but how far behind? how far from it? the dark slope stretched above us, infinite, immeasurable, shrouded in night. to begin to climb it in search of a tiny hut, probably well-hidden and hard to find in daylight, seemed a task as impossible as to meet with the needle in the hay! and now, while i stood, chilled and doubting, the steps of the troop in the road began to grow audible, began to come nearer. "well, m. le capitaine?" the man beside me muttered--in wonder why i stood. "which way? or they will be before us yet." i tried to think, to reason it out; to consider where the hut would be; while the wind sighed through the oaks, and here and there i could hear an acorn fall. but the thing pressed too close on me: my thoughts would not be hurried, and at last i said at a venture, "up the hill! straight from the stack." he did not demur, and we plunged at the ascent, knee deep in bracken and furze, sweating at every pore with our exertions, and hearing the troop come every moment nearer on the road below. doubtless _they_ knew exactly whither to go! forced to stop and take breath when we had scrambled up fifty yards or so, i saw their lanthorns shining like moving glow-worms; and could even hear the clink of steel. for all i could tell, the hut might be down there, and we two be moving from it! but it was too late to go back now; they were close to the fern-stack: and in despair i turned to the hill again. a dozen steps, and i stumbled. i rose and plunged on again; again i stumbled. then i found that i was no longer ascending. i was treading level earth. and--was it water i saw before me, below me, a little in front of my feet, or some mirage of the sky? neither; and i gripped my fellow's arm, as he came abreast of me, and stopped him sharply. below us, in the centre of a steep hollow, a pit in the hill-side, a light shone out through some aperture and quivered on the mist, like the pale lamp of a moorland hobgoblin. it made itself visible, displaying nothing else; a wisp of light in the bottom of a black bowl. yet my spirits rose with a great bound at sight of it, for i knew that i had stumbled on the place i sought. in the common run of things i should have weighed my next step carefully, and gone about it slowly. but here was no place for thought, nor room for delay, and i slid down the side of the hollow, and the moment my feet touched the bottom, sprang to the door of the little hut whence the light issued. a stone turned under my foot in my rush, and i fell on my knees on the threshold; but the fall only brought my face to a level with the startled eyes of the man who lay inside on a bed of fern. he had been reading. at the sound i made he dropped his book, and stretched out his hand for a weapon. but the muzzle of my pistol covered him before he could reach his; he was not in a posture from which he could spring, and at a sharp word from me he dropped his hand. the tigerish glare which had flickered for an instant in his eyes, gave place to a languid smile; and he shrugged his shoulders. "_eh, bien?_" he said, with marvellous composure. "taken at last! well, i was tired of it." "you are my prisoner, m. de cocheforêt," i answered. "it seems so," he said. "move a hand, and i kill you," i answered. "but you have still a choice." "truly?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "yes. my orders are to take you to paris alive or dead. give me your parole that you will make no attempt to escape, and you shall go thither at your ease and as a gentleman. refuse, and i shall disarm and bind you, and you will go as a prisoner." "what force have you?" he asked curtly. he had not moved. he still lay on his elbow, his cloak covering him, the little marot in which he had been reading close to his hand. but his quick, black eyes, which looked the keener for the pallor and thinness of his face, roved ceaselessly over me, probed the darkness behind me, took note of everything. "enough to compel you, monsieur," i replied sternly. "but that is not all. there are thirty dragoons coming up the hill to secure you, and they will make you no such offer. surrender to me before they come and give me your parole, and i will do all for your comfort. delay, and you will fall into their hands. there can be no escape." "you will take my word," he said slowly. "give it, and you may keep your pistols, m. de cocheforêt," i replied. "tell me at least that you are not alone." "i am not alone." "then i give it," he said, with a sigh. "and for heaven's sake get me something to eat and a bed. i am tired of this pig-sty--and this life _arnidieu!_ it is a fortnight since i slept between sheets." "you shall sleep to-night in your own house if you please," i answered hurriedly. "but here they come. be good enough to stay where you are a moment, and i will meet them." i stepped out into the darkness, in the nick of time. the lieutenant, after posting his men round the hollow, had just slid down with a couple of sergeants to make the arrest. the place round the open door was pitch dark. he had not espied my knave, who had lodged himself in the deepest shadow of the hut; and when he saw me come out across the light, he took me for cocheforêt. in a twinkling he thrust a pistol into my face, and cried triumphantly, "you are my prisoner!" at the same instant one of the sergeants raised a lanthorn and threw its light into my eyes. "what folly is this?" i said savagely. the lieutenant's jaw fell, and he stood for half a minute, paralyzed with astonishment. less than an hour before he had left me at the château. thence he had come hither with the briefest delay; and yet he found me here before him! he swore fearfully, his face dark, his mustachios stiff with rage. "what is this? what is it?" he cried at last. "where is the man?" "what man?" i said. "this cocheforêt!" he roared, carried away by his passion. "don't lie to me! he is here, and i will have him!" "you will not. you are too late!" i said, watching him heedfully. "m. de cocheforêt is here, but he has already surrendered to me, and he is my prisoner." "your prisoner?" "yes, my prisoner!" i answered facing the man with all the harshness i could muster. "i have arrested him by virtue of the cardinal's special commission granted to me. and by virtue of the same i shall keep him!" he glared at me for a moment in utter rage and perplexity. then on a sudden i saw his face lighten. "it is a d--d ruse!" he shouted, brandishing his pistol like a madman. "it is a cheat and a fraud! and by g--d you have no commission! i see through it! i see through it all! you have come here, and you have hocussed us! you are of their side, and this is your last shift to save him!" "what folly is this?" i exclaimed. "no folly at all!" he answered, conviction in his tone. "you have played upon us! you have fooled us! but i see through it now! an hour ago i exposed you to that fine madame at the house there, and i thought it a marvel that she did not believe me. i thought it a marvel that she did not see through you, when you stood there before her, confounded, tongue-tied, a rogue convicted! but i understand it now. she knew you! by----, she knew you! she was in the plot, and you were in the plot; and i, who thought i was opening her eyes, was the only one fooled! but it is my turn now. you have played a bold part, and a clever one, and i congratulate you! but," he continued, a sinister light in his little eyes, "it is at an end now, monsieur! you took us in finely with your tale of monseigneur, and his commission, and your commission, and the rest. but i am not to be blinded any longer, or bullied! you have arrested him, have you? _you_ have arrested him! well, by g--d, i shall arrest him, and i shall arrest you too!" "you are mad!" i said, staggered as much by this new view of the matter as by his perfect conviction of its truth. "mad, lieutenant!" "i was!" he snarled drily. "but i am sane now. i was mad when you imposed upon us; when you persuaded me that you were fooling the women to get the secret out of them, while all the time you were sheltering them, protecting them, aiding them, and hiding him--then i was mad! but not now. however, i ask your pardon, m. de barthe, or m. de berault, or whatever your name really is. i ask your pardon. i thought you the cleverest sneak and the dirtiest hound heaven ever made, or hell refused! i find that you were cleverer than i thought, and an honest traitor. your pardon." one of the men who stood about the rim of the bowl above us laughed. i looked at the lieutenant, and could willingly have killed him. "_mon dieu!_" i said, so furious in my turn that i could scarcely speak. "do you say that i am an impostor--that i do not hold the cardinal's commission?" "i do say that!" he answered coolly. "and shall abide by it." "and that i belong to the rebel party?" "i do," he replied, in the same tone. "in fact," with a grin, "i say that you are an honest man on the wrong side, m. de berault. and you say that you are a scoundrel on the right. the advantage, however, is with me, and i shall back my opinion by arresting you." a ripple of coarse laughter ran round the hollow. the sergeant who held the lanthorn grinned, and a trooper at a distance called out of the darkness, "_a bon chat bon rat!_" this brought a fresh burst of laughter, while i stood speechless, confounded by the stubbornness, the crassness, the insolence, of the man. "you fool!" i cried at last, "you fool!" and then m. de cocheforêt, who had come out of the hut, and taken his stand at my elbow, interrupted me. "pardon me one moment," he said airily, looking at the lieutenant, with raised eyebrows, and pointing to me with his thumb. "but i am puzzled between you. this gentleman's name? is it de berault or de barthe?" "i am m. de berault," i said brusquely, answering for myself. "of paris?" "yes, monsieur, of paris." "you are not then the gentleman who has been honouring my poor house with his presence?" "oh, yes!" the lieutenant struck in, grinning. "he is that gentleman, too!" "but i thought--i understood that that was m. de barthe." "i am m. de barthe, also," i retorted impatiently. "what of that, monsieur? it was my mother's name. i took it when i came down here." "to--er, to arrest me, may i ask?" "yes," i answered doggedly. "to arrest you. what of that?" "nothing," he replied slowly and with a steady look at me, a look i could not meet. "except that, had i known this before, m. de berault, i should have thought long before i surrendered to you." the lieutenant laughed, and i felt my cheek burn. but i affected to see nothing, and turned to him again. "now, monsieur," i said sternly, "are you satisfied?" "no!" he answered point blank. "i am not. you two gentlemen may have rehearsed this pretty scene a dozen times. the only word it seems to me, is, quick march, back to quarters." i found myself driven to play my last card--much against my will. "not so," i said; "i have my commission." "produce it!" he replied brusquely. "do you think that i carry it with me?" i said, in scorn. "do you think that when i came here, alone, and not with fifty dragoons at my back, i carried the cardinal's seal in my pocket for the first lackey to find? but you shall have it. where is that knave of mine?" the words were scarcely out of my mouth before his ready hand thrust a paper into my fingers. i opened it slowly, glanced at it, and amid a pause of surprise gave it to the lieutenant. he looked for a moment confounded. he stared at it, with his jaw fallen. then with a last instinct of suspicion he bade the sergeant hold up the lanthorn, and by its light proceeded to spell out the document. "umph!" he ejaculated, after a moment's silence; and he cast an ugly look at me. "i see." and he read it aloud. "_by these presents i command and empower gilles de berault, sieur de berault, to seek for, hold, arrest, and deliver to the governor of the bastile the body of henri de cocheforêt, and to do all such acts and things as shall be necessary to effect such arrest and delivery, for which these shall be his warrant_. "(_signed_) _richelieu, lieut.-gen_." when he had done,--and he read the signature with a peculiar intonation,--some one said softly, "_vive le roi!_" and there was a moment's silence. the sergeant lowered his lanthorn. "is it enough?" i said hoarsely, glaring from face to face. the lieutenant bowed stiffly. "for me?" he said. "quite, monsieur. i beg your pardon again. i find that my first impressions were the-correct ones. sergeant, give the gentleman his paper." and turning his shoulder rudely, he tossed the commission towards the sergeant, who picked it up, and gave it to me, grinning. i knew that the clown would not fight, and he had his men round him; and i had no choice but to swallow the insult. as i put the paper in my breast, with as much indifference as i could assume, he gave a sharp order. the troopers began to form on the edge above, the men who had descended, to climb the bank. as the group behind him began to open and melt away, i caught sight of a white robe in the middle of it. the next moment, appearing with a suddenness which was like a blow on the cheek to me, mademoiselle de cocheforêt glided forward, and came towards me. she had a hood on her head, drawn low; and for a moment i could not see her face. i forgot her brother's presence at my elbow; from habit and impulse rather than calculation, i took a step forward to meet her---though my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth, and i was dumb and trembling. but she recoiled with such a look of white hate, of staring, frozen-eyed loathing, that i stepped back as if she had indeed struck me. it did not need the words which accompanied the look, the "_do not touch me!_" which she hissed at me as she drew her skirts together, to drive me to the farther edge of the hollow; there to stand with clenched teeth and nails driven into the flesh while she hung, sobbing tearless sobs, on her brother's neck. chapter xi. the road to paris. i remember hearing marshal bassompierre, who, of all men within my knowledge, had the widest experience, say that not dangers, but discomforts, prove a man, and show what he is; and that the worst sores in life are caused by crumpled rose-leaves and not by thorns. i am inclined to agree with this. for i remember that when i came from my room on the morning after the arrest, and found hall and parlour and passage empty, and all the common rooms of the house deserted, and no meal laid, and when i divined anew from this discovery the feeling of the house towards me,--however natural and to be expected,--i felt as sharp a pang as when, the night before, i had had to face discovery and open rage and scorn. i stood in the silent, empty parlour, and looked round me with a sense of desolation; of something lost and gone, which i could not replace. the morning was grey and cloudy, the air sharp; a shower was falling. the rose-bushes at the window swayed in the wind, and where i could remember the hot sunshine lying on floor and table, the rain beat in and stained the boards. the main door flapped and creaked to and fro. i thought of other days and meals i had taken there, and of the scent of flowers, and i fled to the hall in despair. but here, too, was no sign of life or company, no comfort, no attendance. the ashes of the logs, by whose blaze mademoiselle had told me the secret, lay on the hearth white and cold; and now and then a drop of moisture, sliding down the great chimney, pattered among them. the great door stood open as if the house had no longer anything to guard. the only living thing to be seen was a hound which roamed about restlessly, now gazing at the empty hearth, now lying down with pricked ears and watchful eyes. some leaves which had been blown in rustled in a corner. i went out moodily into the garden, and wandered down one path, and up another, looking at the dripping woods and remembering things, until i came to the stone seat. on it, against the wall, trickling with rain-drops, and with a dead leaf half filling its narrow neck, stood the pitcher of food. i thought how much had happened since mademoiselle took her hand off it and the sergeant's lanthorn disclosed it to me. and sighing grimly, i went in again through the parlour door. a woman was on her knees, kindling the belated fire. i stood a moment, looking at her doubtfully, wondering how she would bear herself, and what she would say to me: and then she turned, and i cried out her name in horror; for it was madame! she was very plainly dressed; her childish face was wan, and piteous with weeping. but either the night had worn out her passion and drained her tears, or this great exigency gave her temporary calmness; for she was perfectly composed. she shivered as her eyes met mine, and she blinked as if a light had been suddenly thrust before her. but she turned again to her task, without speaking. "madame! madame!" i cried, in a frenzy of distress. "what is this?" "the servants would not do it," she answered, in a low but steady voice. "you are still our guest, monsieur, and it must be done." "but--i cannot suffer it!" i cried, in misery. "madame de cocheforêt, i will--i would rather do it myself!" she raised her hand, with a strange, patient expression on her face. "hush, please," she said. "hush! you trouble me." the fire took light and blazed up as she spoke, and she rose slowly from it, and, with a lingering look at it, went out; leaving me to stand and stare and listen in the middle of the floor. presently i heard her coming back along the passage, and she entered, bearing a tray with wine and meat and bread. she set it down on the table, and with the same wan face, trembling always on the verge of tears, she began to lay out the things. the glasses clinked pitifully against the plates as she handled them; the knives jarred with one another; and i stood by, trembling myself, and endured this strange, this awful penance. she signed to me at last to sit down and eat; and she went herself, and stood in the garden doorway, with her back to me. i obeyed. i sat down; but though i had eaten nothing since the afternoon of the day before, and a little earlier had had appetite enough, i could not swallow. i fumbled with my knife, and munched and drank; and grew hot and angry at this farce; and then looked through the window at the dripping bushes, and the rain, and the distant sundial, and grew cold again. suddenly she turned round and came to my side. "you do not eat," she said. i threw down my knife, and sprang up in a frenzy of passion. "_mon dieu!_ madame!" i cried. "do you think i have _no_ heart?" and then in a moment i knew what i had done. in a moment she was on her knees on the floor, clasping my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes, crying to me for mercy--for life! life! life! his life! oh, it was horrible! it was horrible to see her fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to see her slender little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that this was a woman, a gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet. "oh, madame! madame!" i cried, in my agony. "i beg you to rise. rise, or i must go! you will drive me out!" "grant me his life!" she moaned passionately. "only his life! what had he done to you, that you should hunt him down? what had we done to you, that you should slay us? ah, sir, have mercy! let him go, and we will pray for you; i and my sister will pray for you every morning and night of our lives." i was in terror lest some one should come and see her lying there, and i stooped and tried to raise her. but she would not rise; she only sank the lower until her tender hands clasped my spurs, and i dared not move. then i took a sudden resolution. "listen then, madame," i said, almost sternly, "if you will not rise. when you ask what you do, you forget how i stand, and how small my power is! you forget that were i to release your husband to-day, he would be seized within the hour by those who are still in the village, and who are watching every road--who have not ceased to suspect my movements and my intentions. you forget, i say, my circumstances--" she cut me short on that word. she sprang abruptly to her feet and faced me. one moment, and i should have said something to the purpose. but at that word she was before me, white, breathless, dishevelled, struggling for speech. "oh yes, yes," she panted eagerly, "i know! i understand!" and she thrust her hand into her bosom and plucked something out and gave it to me--forced it upon me into my hands. "i know! i know!" she said again. "take it, and god reward you, monsieur! we give it freely--freely and thankfully! and may god bless you!" i stood and looked at her, and looked at it, and slowly froze. she had given me the packet--the packet i had restored to mademoiselle, the parcel of jewels. i weighed it in my hands, and my heart grew hard again, for i knew that this was mademoiselle's doing; that it was she who, mistrusting the effect of madame's tears and prayers, had armed her with this last weapon--this dirty bribe, i flung it down on the table among the plates, all my pity changed to anger. "madame," i cried ruthlessly, "you mistake me altogether. i have heard hard words enough in the last twenty-four hours, and i know what you think of me! but you have yet to learn that i have never turned traitor to the hand that employed me, nor sold my own side! when i do so for a treasure ten times the worth of that, may my hand rot off!" she sank into a seat, with a moan of despair, and at that moment the door opened, and m. de cocheforêt came in. over his shoulder i had a glimpse of mademoiselle's proud face, a little whiter to-day, with dark marks under the eyes, but still firm and cold. "what is this?" he said, frowning and stopping short as his eyes lighted on madame. "it is--that we start at eleven o'clock, monsieur," i answered, bowing curtly. "those, i fancy, are your property." and pointing to the jewels, i went out by the other door. * * * * * that i might not be present at their parting, i remained in the garden until the hour i had appointed was well passed; then without entering the house i went to the stable entrance. here i found all ready, the two troopers (whose company i had requisitioned as far as auch) already in the saddle, my own two knaves waiting with my sorrel and m. de cocheforêt's chestnut. another horse was being led up and down by louis, and, alas, my heart winced at the sight. for it bore a lady's saddle, and i saw that we were to have company. was it madame who meant to come with us? or mademoiselle? and how far? to auch? or farther? i suppose that they had set some kind of a watch on me; for, as i walked up, m. de cocheforêt and his sister came out of the house,--he looking white, with bright eyes and a twitching in his cheek, though through all he affected a jaunty bearing; she wearing a black mask. "mademoiselle accompanies us?" i said formally. "with your permission, monsieur," he answered, with grim politeness. but i saw that he was choking with emotion. i guessed that he had just parted from his wife, and i turned away. when we were all mounted, he looked at me. "perhaps, as you have my parole, you will permit me to ride alone," he said, with a little hesitation, "and--" "without me!" i rejoined keenly. "assuredly, so far as is possible." i directed the troopers to ride in front and keep out of ear-shot; my two men followed the prisoner at a like distance, with their carbines on their knees. last of all i rode myself, with my eyes open and a pistol loose in my holster. m. de cocheforêt, i saw, was inclined to sneer at so many precautions, and the mountain made of his request; but i had not done so much and come so far, i had not faced scorn and insults, to be cheated of my prize at last. aware that until we were beyond auch there must be hourly and pressing danger of a rescue, i was determined that he who would wrest my prisoner from me should pay dearly for it. only pride, and, perhaps, in a degree also, appetite for a fight, had prevented me borrowing ten troopers instead of two. we started, and i looked with a lingering eye and many memories at the little bridge, the narrow woodland path, the first roofs of the village; all now familiar, all seen for the last time. up the brook a party of soldiers were dragging for the captain's body. a furlong farther on, a cottage, burned by some carelessness in the night, lay a heap of black ashes. louis ran beside us, weeping; the last brown leaves fluttered down in showers. and between my eyes and all, the slow, steady rain fell and fell and fell. and so i left cocheforêt. louis went with us to a point a mile beyond the village, and there stood and saw us go, cursing me furiously as i passed. looking back when we had ridden on, i still saw him standing; and after a moment's hesitation i rode back to him. "listen, fool," i said, cutting him short in the midst of his mowing and snarling, "and give this message to your mistress. tell her from me that it will be with her husband as it was with m. de regnier, when he fell into the hands of his enemy--no better and no worse." "you want to kill her, too, i suppose?" he answered, glowering at me. "no, fool! i want to save her!" i retorted wrathfully. "tell her that, just that and no more, and you will see the result." "i shall not," he said sullenly. "i shall not tell her. a message from you, indeed!" and he spat on the ground. "then on your head be it!" i answered solemnly. and i turned my horse's head and galloped fast after the others. for, in spite of his refusal, i felt sure that he would report what i had said--if it were only out of curiosity; and it would be strange if madame did not understand the reference. and so we began our journey; sadly, under dripping trees and a leaden sky. the country we had to traverse was the same i had trodden on the last day of my march southwards, but the passage of a month had changed the face of everything. green dells, where springs welling out of the chalk had made of the leafy bottom a fairies' home, strewn with delicate ferns and hung with mosses--these were now swamps into which our horses sank to the fetlock. sunny brows, whence i had viewed the champaign and traced my forward path, had become bare, windswept ridges. the beech woods, which had glowed with ruddy light, were naked now; mere black trunks and rigid arms pointing to heaven. an earthy smell filled the air; a hundred paces away a wall of mist closed the view. we plodded on sadly, up hill and down hill; now fording brooks already stained with flood-water, now crossing barren heaths. but up hill or down hill, whatever the outlook, i was never permitted to forget that i was the jailer, the ogre, the villain; that i, riding behind in my loneliness, was the blight on all, the death-spot. true, i was behind the others; i escaped their eyes. but there was not a line of mademoiselle's drooping figure that did not speak scorn to me, not a turn of her head that did not seem to say, "oh god, that such a thing should breathe!" i had only speech with her once during the day, and that was on the last ridge before we went down into the valley to climb up again to auch. the rain had ceased; the sun, near its setting, shone faintly; and for a few moments we stood on the brow and looked southwards while we breathed the horses. the mist lay like a pall on all the country we had traversed; but beyond it and above it, gleaming pearl-like in the level rays, the line of the mountains stood up like a land of enchantment, soft, radiant, wonderful, or like one of those castles on the hill of glass of which the old romances tell us. i forgot, for an instant, how we were placed, and i cried to my neighbour that it was the fairest pageant i had ever seen. she--it was mademoiselle, and she had taken off her mask--cast one look at me; only one, but it conveyed disgust and loathing so unspeakable that scorn beside them would have been a gift. i reined in my horse as if she had struck me, and felt myself go first hot and then cold under her eyes. then she looked another way. i did not forget the lesson; after that i avoided her more sedulously than before. we lay that night at auch, and i gave m. de cocheforêt the utmost liberty; even permitting him to go out and return at his will. in the morning, believing that on the farther side of auch we ran less risk of attack, i dismissed the two dragoons, and an hour after sunrise we set out again. the day was dry and cold, the weather more promising. i planned to go by way of lectoure, crossing the garonne at agen; and i thought with roads continually improving as we moved northwards, we should be able to make good progress before night. my two men rode first; i came last by myself. our way lay for some hours down the valley of the gers, under poplars and by long rows of willows; and presently the sun came out and warmed us. unfortunately, the rain of the day before had swollen the brooks which crossed our path, and we more than once had a difficulty in fording them. noon, therefore, found us little more than half-way to lectoure, and i was growing each minute more impatient, when our road, which had for a little while left the river bank, dropped down to it again, and i saw before us another crossing, half ford, half slough. my men tried it gingerly, and gave back, and tried it again in another place and finally, just as mademoiselle and monsieur came up to them, floundered through and sprang slantwise up the farther bank. the delay had been long enough to bring me, with no good will of my own, close up to the cocheforêts. mademoiselle's horse made a little business of the place; this delayed them still longer, and in the result, we entered the water almost together, and i crossed close on her heels. the bank on either side was steep; while crossing we could see neither before nor behind. at the moment, however, i thought nothing of this, nor of her delay, and i was following her quite at my leisure, when the sudden report of a carbine, a second report, and a yell of alarm in front, thrilled me through. on the instant, while the sound was still in my ears, i saw it all. like a hot iron piercing my brain, the truth flashed into my mind. we were attacked! we were attacked, and i was here helpless in this pit, this trap! the loss of a second while i fumbled here, mademoiselle's horse barring the way, might be fatal. there was but one way. i turned my horse straight at the steep bank, and he breasted it. one moment he hung as if he must fall back. then, with a snort of terror and a desperate bound, he topped it, and gained the level, trembling and snorting. it was as i had guessed. seventy paces away on the road lay one of my men. he had fallen, horse and man, and lay still. near him, with his back against a bank, stood his fellow, on foot, pressed by four horsemen, and shouting. as my eye lighted on the scene, he let fly with a carbine and dropped one. i snatched a pistol from my holster, cocked it, and seized my horse by the head--i might save the man yet. i shouted to encourage him, and in another second should have charged into the fight, when a sudden vicious blow, swift and unexpected, struck the pistol from my hand. i made a snatch at it as it fell, but missed it; and before i could recover myself, mademoiselle thrust her horse furiously against mine, and with her riding-whip, lashed the sorrel across the ears. as my horse reared madly up, i had a glimpse of her eyes flashing hate through her mask; of her hand again uplifted; the next moment, i was down in the road, ingloriously unhorsed, the sorrel was galloping away, and her horse, scared in its turn, was plunging unmanageably a score of paces from me. i don't doubt that but for that she would have trampled on me. as it was, i was free to draw; and in a twinkling i was running towards the fighters. all i have described had happened in a few seconds. my man was still defending himself; the smoke of the carbine had scarcely risen. i sprang with a shout across a fallen tree that intervened; at the same moment, two of the men detached themselves, and rode to meet me. one, whom i took to be the leader, was masked. he came furiously at me, trying to ride me down; but i leaped aside nimbly, and evading him, rushed at the other, and scaring his horse, so that he dropped his point, cut him across the shoulder before he could guard himself. he plunged away, cursing, and trying to hold in his horse, and i turned to meet the masked man. "you double-dyed villain!" he cried, riding al. me again. and this time he man[oe]uvred his horse so skilfully that i was hard put to it to prevent him knocking me down; and could not with all my efforts reach him to hurt him. "surrender, will you!" he continued, "you bloodhound!" i wounded him slightly in the knee for answer; but before i could do more his companion came back, and the two set upon me with a will, slashing at my head so furiously and towering above me with so great an advantage that it was all i could do to guard myself. i was soon glad to fall back against the bank--as my man had done before me. in such a conflict my rapier would have been of little use, but fortunately i had armed myself before i left paris with a cut-and-thrust sword for the road; and though my mastery of the weapon was not on a par with my rapier-play, i was able to fend off their cuts, and by an occasional prick keep the horses at a distance. still they swore and cut at me, trying to wear me out; and it was trying work. a little delay, the least accident, might enable the other man to come to their help, or mademoiselle, for all i knew, might shoot me with my own pistol; and i confess, i was unfeignedly glad when a lucky parade sent the masked man's sword flying across the road. he was no coward; for unarmed as he was, he pushed his horse at me, spurring it recklessly; but the animal, which i had several times touched, reared up instead and threw him at the very moment that i wounded his companion a second time in the arm, and made him give back. this quite changed the scene. the man in the mask staggered to his feet, and felt stupidly for a pistol. but he could not find one, and was, i saw, in no state to use it if he had. he reeled helplessly to the bank, and leaned against it. he would give no further trouble. the man i had wounded was in scarcely better condition. he retreated before me for some paces, but then losing courage, he dropped his sword, and, wheeling round, cantered off down the road, clinging to his pommel. there remained only the fellow engaged with my man, and i turned to see how they were getting on. they were standing to take breath, so i ran towards them; but, seeing me coming, this rascal, too, whipped round his horse, and disappeared in the wood, and left us masters of the field. the first thing i did--and i remember it to this day with pleasure--was to plunge my hand into my pocket, take out half the money i had in the world, and press it on the man who had fought for me so stoutly, and who had certainly saved me from disaster. in my joy i could have kissed him! it was not only that i had escaped defeat by the skin of my teeth,--and his good sword,--but i knew, and thrilled with the knowledge, that the fight had altered the whole position. he was wounded in two places, and i had a scratch or two, and had lost my horse; and my other poor fellow was dead as a herring. but speaking for myself, i would have spent half the blood in my body to purchase the feeling with which i turned back to speak to m. de cocheforêt and his sister. _i had fought before them_. mademoiselle had dismounted, and with her face averted and her mask pushed on one side, was openly weeping. her brother, who had scrupulously kept his place by the ford from the beginning of the fight to the end, met me with raised eyebrows and a peculiar smile. "acknowledge my virtue," he said airily. "i am here, m. de berault--which is more than can be said of the two gentlemen who have just ridden off." "yes," i answered, with a touch of bitterness. "i wish they had not shot my poor man before they went." he shrugged his shoulders. "they were my friends," he said. "you must not expect me to blame them. but that is not all." "no," i said, wiping my sword. "there is this gentleman in the mask." and i turned to go towards him. "m. de berault!" there was something abrupt in the way in which cocheforêt called my name after me. i stood. "pardon?" i said, turning. "that gentleman?" he answered, hesitating, and looking at me doubtfully. "have you considered--what will happen to him, if you give him up to the authorities?" "who is he?" i said sharply. "that is rather a delicate question," he answered, frowning, and still looking at me fixedly. "not from me," i replied brutally, "since he is in my power. if he will take off his mask, i shall know better what i intend to do with him." the stranger had lost his hat in his fall, and his fair hair, stained with dust, hung in curls on his shoulders. he was a tall man, of a slender, handsome presence, and though his dress was plain and almost rough, i espied a splendid jewel on his hand, and fancied i detected other signs of high quality. he still lay against the bank in a half-swooning condition, and seemed unconscious of my scrutiny. "should i know him if he unmasked?" i said suddenly, a new idea in my head. "you would," m. de cocheforêt answered simply. "and?" "it would be bad for every one." "ho, ho!" i said softly, looking hard, first at my old prisoner, and then at my new one. "then, what do you wish me to do?" "leave him here," m. de cocheforêt answered glibly, his face flushed, the pulse in his cheek beating. i had known him for a man of perfect honour before, and trusted him. but this evident earnest anxiety on behalf of his friend touched me. besides, i knew that i was treading on slippery ground; that it behoved me to be careful. "i will do it," i said, after a moment's reflection. "he will play me no tricks, i suppose? a letter of--" "_mon dieu_, no! he will understand," cocheforêt answered eagerly. "you will not repent it, i swear. let us be going." "well,--but my horse?" i said, somewhat taken aback by this extreme haste. "we shall overtake it," he replied urgently. "it will have kept to the road. lectoure is no more than a league from here, and we can give orders there to have these two fetched in and buried." i had nothing to gain by demurring, and so it was arranged. after that we did not linger. we picked up what we had dropped, m. de cocheforêt mounted his sister, and within five minutes we were gone. casting a glance back from the skirts of the wood, as we entered it, i fancied that i saw the masked man straighten himself and turn to look after us; but the leaves were beginning to intervene, the distance was great and perhaps cheated me. and yet i was not disinclined to think the unknown a little less severely injured and a trifle more observant than he seemed. chapter xii. at the finger-post. through all, it will have been noticed, mademoiselle had not spoken to me, nor said one word, good or bad. she had played her part grimly; had taken her defeat in silence, if with tears; had tried neither prayer, nor defence, nor apology. and the fact that the fight was now over, the scene left behind, made no difference in her conduct--to my surprise and discomfiture. she kept her face averted from me; she rode as before; she affected to ignore my presence. i caught my horse feeding by the road-side, a furlong forward, and mounted, and fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. and just as we had plodded on then in silence, we plodded on now, while i wondered at the unfathomable ways of women, and knowing that i had borne myself well, marvelled that she could take part in such an incident and remain unchanged. yet it had made a change in her. though her mask screened her well, it could not entirely hide her emotions, and by-and-bye i marked that her head drooped, that she rode sadly and listlessly, that the lines of her figure were altered. i noticed that she had flung away, or furtively dropped, her riding-whip, and i understood that to the old hatred of me were now added shame and vexation; shame that she had so lowered herself, even to save her brother, vexation that defeat had been her only reward. of this i saw a sign at lectoure, where the inn had but one common room, and we must all dine in company. i secured for them a table by the fire, and leaving them standing by it, retired myself to a smaller one, near the door. there were no other guests, and this made the separation between us more marked. m. de cocheforêt seemed to feel this. he shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a smile half sad, half comical. but mademoiselle was implacable. she had taken off her mask, and her face was like stone. once, only once, during the meal i saw a change come over her. she coloured, i suppose at her thoughts, until her face flamed from brow to chin. i watched the blush spread and spread, and then she slowly and proudly turned her shoulder to me, and looked through the window at the shabby street. i suppose that she and her brother had both built on this attempt, which must have been arranged at auch. for when we went on in the afternoon, i saw a more marked change. they rode now like people resigned to the worst. the grey realities of the brother's position, the dreary, hopeless future, began to hang like a mist before their eyes; began to tinge the landscape with sadness; robbed even the sunset of its colours. with each hour their spirits flagged and their speech became less frequent, until presently, when the light was nearly gone and the dusk was round us, the brother and sister rode hand in hand, silent, gloomy, one at least of them weeping. the cold shadow of the cardinal, of paris, of the scaffold, was beginning to make itself felt; was beginning to chill them. as the mountains which they had known all their lives sank and faded behind us, and we entered on the wide, low valley of the garonne, their hopes sank and faded also--sank to the dead-level of despair. surrounded by guards, a mark for curious glances, with pride for a companion, m. de cocheforêt could doubtless have borne himself bravely; doubtless he would bear himself bravely still when the end came. but almost alone, moving forward through the grey evening to a prison, with so many measured days before him, and nothing to exhilarate or anger,--in this condition it was little wonder if he felt, and betrayed that he felt, the blood run slow in his veins; if he thought more of the weeping wife and ruined home, which he left behind him, than of the cause in which he had spent himself. but god knows, they had no monopoly of gloom. i felt almost as sad myself. long before sunset the flush of triumph, the heat of the battle, which had warmed my heart at noon, were gone; giving place to a chill dissatisfaction, a nausea, a despondency, such as i have known follow a long night at the tables. hitherto there had been difficulties to be overcome, risks to be run, doubts about the end. now the end was certain, and very near; so near that it filled all the prospect. one hour of triumph i might still have; i hugged the thought of it as a gambler hugs his last stake. i planned the place and time and mode, and tried to occupy myself wholly with it. but the price? alas, that would intrude too, and more as the evening waned; so that as i passed this or that thing by the road, which i could recall passing on my journey south,--with thoughts so different, with plans that now seemed so very, very old,--i asked myself grimly if this were really i, if this were gil de berault, known as zaton's _premier joueur_; or some don quichotte from castile, tilting at windmills, and taking barbers' bowls for gold. we reached agen very late in the evening, after groping through a by-way near the river, set with holes and willow-stools and frog-spawns--a place no better than a slough. after it the great fire and the lights at the blue maid seemed like a glimpse of a new world, and in a twinkling put something of life and spirits into two at least of us. there was queer talk round the hearth here of doings in paris,--of a stir against the cardinal, with the queen-mother at bottom, and of grounded expectations that something might this time come of it. but the landlord pooh-poohed the idea, and i more than agreed with him. even m. de cocheforêt, who was for a moment inclined to build on it, gave up hope when he heard that it came only by way of montauban; whence, since its reduction the year before, all sorts of _canards_ against the cardinal were always on the wing. "they kill him about once a month," our host said, with a grin. "sometimes it is _monsieur_ who is to prove a match for him, sometimes _césar monsieur_--the duke of vendôme, you understand,--and sometimes the queen-mother. but since m. de chalais and the marshal made a mess of it, and paid forfeit, i pin my faith to his eminence--that is his new title, they tell me." "things are quiet round here?" i asked. "perfectly. since the languedoc business came to an end, all goes well," he answered. mademoiselle had retired on our arrival, so that her brother and i were for an hour or two thrown together. i left him at liberty to separate himself if he pleased, but he did not use the opportunity. a kind of comradeship, rendered piquant by our peculiar relations, had begun to spring up between us. he seemed to take pleasure in my company, more than once rallied me on my post of jailer, would ask humorously if he might do this or that, and once even inquired what i should do if he broke his parole. "or take it this way," he continued flippantly "suppose i had stuck you in the back this evening, in that cursed swamp by the river, m. de berault? what then? _pardieu!_ i am astonished at myself that i did not do it. i could have been in montauban within twenty-four hours, and found fifty hiding-places, and no one the wiser." "except your sister," i said quietly. he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "yes," he said, "i am afraid i must have put her out of the way too, to preserve my self-respect. you are right." and on that he fell into a reverie which held him for a few minutes. then i found him looking at me with a kind of frank perplexity that invited question. "what is it?" i said. "you have fought a great many duels?" "yes," i said. "did you never strike a foul blow in one of them?" "never. why do you ask?" "well,--i wanted to confirm an impression," he said. "to be frank, m. de berault, i seem to see in you two men." "two men?" "yes, two men," he answered. "one, the man who captured me; the other, the man who let my friend go free to-day." "it surprised you that i let him go? that was prudence, m. de cocheforêt," i replied, "nothing more. i am an old gambler--i know when the stakes are too high for me. the man who caught a lion in his wolf-pit had no great catch." "no, that is true," he answered, smiling. "and yet--i find two men in your skin." "i dare say that there are two in most men's skins," i answered, with a sigh, "but not always together. sometimes one is there, and sometimes the other." "how does the one like taking up the other's work?" he asked keenly. i shrugged my shoulders. "that is as may be," i said. "you do not take an estate without the debts." he did not answer for a moment, and i fancied that his thoughts had reverted to his own case. but on a sudden he looked at me again. "will you answer me a question, m. de berault?" he said, with a winning smile. "perhaps," i said. "then tell me--it is a tale that is, i am sure, worth the telling. what was it that, in a very evil hour for me, sent you in search of me?" "the cardinal," i answered. "i did not ask who," he replied drily. "i asked, what. you had no grudge against me?" "no." "no knowledge of me?" "no." "then what on earth induced you to do it? heavens, man," he continued bluntly, rising and speaking with greater freedom than he had before used, "nature never intended you for a tip staff! what was it, then?" i rose too. it was very late, and the room was empty, the fire low. "i will tell you--tomorrow!" i said. "i shall have something to say to you then, of which that will be part." he looked at me in great astonishment; with a little suspicion, too. but i put him off, and called for a light, and by going at once to bed, cut short his questions. those who know the great south road to agen, and how the vineyards rise in terraces north of the town, one level of red earth above another, green in summer, but in late autumn bare and stony, will remember a particular place where the road two leagues from the town runs up a long hill. at the top of the hill four ways meet; and there, plain to be seen against the sky is a finger-post, indicating which way leads to bordeaux, and which to montauban, and which to perigueux. this hill had impressed me on my journey down; perhaps, because i had from it my first view of the garonne valley, and there felt myself on the verge of the south country where my mission lay. it had taken root in my memory; i had come to look upon its bare, bleak brow, with the finger-post and the four roads, as the first outpost of paris, as the first sign of return to the old life. now for two days i had been looking forward to seeing it again. that long stretch of road would do admirably for something i had in my mind. that sign-post, with the roads pointing north, south, east, and west, could there be a better place for meetings and partings? we came to the bottom of the ascent about an hour before noon--m. de cocheforêt, mademoiselle, and i. we had reversed the order of yesterday, and i rode ahead. they came after me at their leisure. at the foot of the hill, however, i stopped and, letting mademoiselle pass on, detained m. de cocheforêt by a gesture. "pardon me, one moment," i said. "i want to ask a favour." he looked at me somewhat fretfully, with a gleam of wildness in his eyes that betrayed how the iron was eating into his heart. he had started after breakfast as gaily as a bridegroom, but gradually he had sunk below himself; and now he had much ado to curb his impatience. the _bonhomie_ of last night was quite gone. "of me?" he said. "what is it?" "i wish to have a few words with mademoiselle--alone," i explained. "alone?" he answered, frowning. "yes," i replied, without blenching, though his face grew dark. "for the matter of that, you can be within call all the time, if you please. but i have a reason for wishing to ride a little way with her." "to tell her something?" "yes." "then you can tell it to me," he retorted suspiciously. "mademoiselle, i will answer for it, has no desire to--" "see me, or speak to me!" i said, taking him up. "i can understand that. yet i want to speak to her." "very well, you can speak to her before me," he answered rudely. "let us ride on and join her." and he made a movement as if to do so. "that will not do, m. de cocheforêt," i said firmly, stopping him with my hand. "let me beg you to be more complaisant. it is a small thing i ask; but i swear to you, if mademoiselle does not grant it, she will repent it all her life." he looked at me, his face growing darker and darker. "fine words!" he said presently, with a sneer. "yet i fancy i understand them." then with a passionate oath he broke out in a fresh tone. "but i will not have it. i have not been blind, m. de berault, and i understand. but i will not have it! i will have no such judas bargain made. _pardieu!_ do you think i could suffer it and show my face again?" "i don't know what you mean!" i said, restraining myself with difficulty. i could have struck the fool. "but i know what you mean," he replied, in a tone of repressed rage. "you would have her sell herself: sell herself body and soul to you to save me! and you would have me stand by and see the thing done! well, my answer is--never! though i go to the wheel! i will die a gentleman, if i have lived a fool!" "i think you will do the one as certainly as you have done the other," i retorted, in my exasperation. and yet i admired him. "oh, i am not such a fool," he cried, scowling at me, "as you have perhaps thought. i have used my eyes." "then be good enough now to favour me with your ears," i answered drily. "and listen when i say that no such bargain has ever crossed my mind. you were kind enough to think well of me last night, m. de cocheforêt. why should the mention of mademoiselle in a moment change your opinion? i wish simply to speak to her. i have nothing to ask from her; neither favour nor anything else. and what i say she will doubtless tell you afterwards. _ciel_, man!" i continued angrily, "what harm can i do to her, in the road, in your sight?" he looked at me sullenly, his face still flushed, his eyes suspicious. "what do you want to say to her?" he asked jealously. he was quite unlike himself. his airy nonchalance, his careless gaiety, were gone. "you know what i do _not_ want to say to her, m. de cocheforêt," i answered. "that should be enough." he glowered at me for a moment, still ill content. then, without a word, he made me a gesture to go to her. she had halted a score of paces away, wondering doubtless what was on foot. i rode towards her. she wore her mask, so that i lost the expression of her face as i approached, but the manner in which she turned her horse's head uncompromisingly towards her brother, and looked past me--as if i were merely a log in the road--was full of meaning. i felt the ground suddenly cut from under me. i saluted her, trembling. "mademoiselle," i said, "will you grant me the privilege of your company for a few minutes, as we ride." "to what purpose, sir?" she answered, in the coldest voice in which i think a woman ever spoke to a man. "that i may explain to you a great many things you do not understand," i murmured. "i prefer to be in the dark," she replied. and her manner said more than her words. "but, mademoiselle," i pleaded,--i would not be discouraged,--"you told me one day that you would never judge me hastily again." "facts judge you, not i, sir," she answered icily. "i am not sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you--i thank god." i shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we stood was warm. "still--once before you thought the same!" i exclaimed. "afterwards you found that you had been wrong. it may be so again, mademoiselle." "impossible," she said. that stung me. "no!" i said fiercely. "it is not impossible. it is you who are impossible! it is you who are heartless, mademoiselle. i have done much, very much, in the last three days to make things lighter for you. i ask you now to do something for me which can cost you nothing." "nothing?" she answered slowly; and her scornful voice cut me as if it had been a knife. "do you think, monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-respect, as i do with every word i speak to you? do you think it costs me nothing to be here, where i feel every look you cast on me an insult, every breath i take in your presence a contamination. nothing, monsieur?" she laughed in bitter irony. "oh, be sure, something! but something which i despair of making clear to you." i sat for a moment in my saddle, shaken and quivering with pain. it had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were changed to loathing. it was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. for a moment i could not find voice to answer her. then i pointed to m. de cocheforêt. "do you love him?" i said, hoarsely, roughly. the gibing tone had passed from her voice to mine. she did not answer. "because, if you do," i continued, "you will let me tell my tale. say no but once more, mademoiselle,--i am only human,--and i go. and you will repent it all your life." i had done better had i taken that tone from the beginning. she winced, her head drooped, she seemed to grow smaller. all in a moment, as it were, her pride collapsed. "i will hear you," she answered feebly. "then we will ride on, if you please," i said, keeping the advantage i had gained. "you need not fear. your brother will follow." i caught hold of her rein and turned her horse, and she suffered it without demur. in a moment we were pacing side by side, the long, straight road before us. at the end where it topped the hill, i could see the finger-post,--two faint black lines against the sky. when we reached that, involuntarily i checked my horse and made it move more slowly. "well, sir," she said impatiently. and her figure shook as if with cold. "it is a tale i desire to tell you, mademoiselle," i answered, speaking with effort. "perhaps i may seem to begin a long way off, but before i end, i promise to interest you. two months ago there was living in paris a man, perhaps a bad man, at any rate, by common report, a hard man." she turned to me suddenly, her eyes gleaming through her mask. "oh, monsieur, spare me this!" she said, quietly scornful. "i will take it for granted." "very well," i replied steadfastly. "good or bad, this man, one day, in defiance of the cardinal's edict against duelling, fought with a young englishman behind st. jacques church. the englishman had influence, the person of whom i speak had none, and an indifferent name; he was arrested, thrown into the châtelet, cast for death, left for days to face death. at the last an offer was made to him. if he would seek out and deliver up another man, an outlaw with a price upon his head, he should himself go free." i paused and drew a deep breath. then i continued, looking not at her, but into the distance: "mademoiselle, it seems easy now to say what course he should have chosen. it seems hard now to find excuses for him. but there was one thing which i plead for him. the task he was asked to undertake was a dangerous one. he risked, he knew he must risk, and the event proved him right, his life against the life of this unknown man. and--one thing more--there was time before him. the outlaw might be taken by another, might be killed, might die, might--. but there, mademoiselle, we know what answer this person made. he took the baser course, and on his honour, on his parole, with money supplied to him, went free,--free on the condition that he delivered up this other man." i paused again, but i did not dare to look at her, and after a moment of silence i resumed. "some portion of the second half of this story you know, mademoiselle; but not all. suffice it that this man came down to a remote village, and there at a risk, but heaven knows, basely enough, found his way into his victim's home. once there, his heart began to fail him. had he found the house garrisoned by men, he might have pressed on to his end with little remorse. but he found there only two helpless, loyal women; and i say again that from the first hour of his entrance he sickened of the work he had in hand. still he pursued it. he had given his word, and if there was one tradition of his race which this man had never broken, it was that of fidelity to his side; to the man that paid him. but he pursued it with only half his mind, in great misery sometimes, if you will believe me, in agonies of shame. gradually, however, almost against his will, the drama worked itself out before him, until he needed only one thing." i looked at mademoiselle. but her head was averted; i could gather nothing from the outlines of her form. and i went on. "do not misunderstand me," i said, in a lower voice. "do not misunderstand what i am going to say next. this is no love story, and can have no ending such as romancers love to set to their tales. but i am bound to mention, mademoiselle, that this man, who had lived about inns and eating-houses, and at the gaming-tables almost all his days, met here for the first time for years a good woman; and learned by the light of her loyalty and devotion to see what his life had been, and what was the real nature of the work he was doing. i think,--nay, i know--that it added a hundredfold to his misery, that when he learned at last the secret he had come to surprise, he learned it from her lips, and in such a way that had he felt no shame, hell could have been no place for him. but in one thing she misjudged him. she thought, and had reason to think, that the moment he knew her secret he went out, not even closing the door, and used it. but the truth was that, while her words were still in his ears, news came to him that others had the secret; and had he not gone out on the instant, and done what he did, and forestalled them, m. de cocheforêt would have been taken, but by others." mademoiselle broke her long silence so suddenly that her horse sprang forward. "would to heaven he had!" she wailed. "been taken by others?" i exclaimed, startled out of my false composure. "oh, yes, yes!" she answered passionately. "why did you not tell me? why did you not confess to me even then? i--oh, no more! no more!" she continued, in a piteous voice. "i have heard enough. you are racking my heart, m. de berault. some day i will ask god to give me strength to forgive you." "but you have not heard me out," i replied. "i want to hear no more," she answered, in a voice she vainly strove to render steady. "to what end? can i say more than i have said? did you think i could forgive you now--with him behind us going to his death? oh, no, no!" she continued. "leave me! i implore you to leave me. i am not well." she drooped over her horse's neck as she spoke and began to weep so passionately that the tears ran down her cheeks under her mask, and fell and sparkled like dew on the mane before her; while her sobs shook her so painfully that i thought she must fall. i stretched out my hand instinctively to give her help; but she shrank from me. "no!" she gasped, between her sobs. "do not touch me. there is too much between us." "yet there must be one thing more between us," i answered firmly. "you must listen to me a little longer, whether you will or no, mademoiselle, for the love you bear to your brother. there is one course still open to me by which i may redeem my honour; it has been in my mind for some time back to take that course. to-day, i am thankful to say, i can take it cheerfully, if not without regret; with a steadfast heart, if with no light one. mademoiselle," i continued earnestly, feeling none of the triumph, none of the vanity, i had foreseen, but only joy in the joy i could give her, "i thank god that it is still in my power to undo what i have done; that it is still in my power to go back to him who sent me, and telling him that i have changed my mind and will bear my own burdens, to pay the penalty." we were within a hundred paces of the brow of the hill and the finger-post now. she cried out wildly that she did not understand. "what is it you have just said?" she murmured. "i cannot hear." and she began to fumble with the ribbon of her mask. "only this, mademoiselle," i answered gently. "i give back to your brother his word and his parole. from this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. you shall tell him so from me. here, where we stand, four roads meet. that to the right goes to montauban, where you have doubtless friends, and can lie hid for a time; or that to the left leads to bordeaux, where you can take ship if you please. and in a word mademoiselle," i continued, ending a little feebly, "i hope that your troubles are now over." she turned her face to me--we had both come to a standstill--and plucked at the fastenings of her mask. but her trembling fingers had knotted the string, and in a moment she dropped her hands with a cry of despair. "and you? you?" she said, in a voice so changed i should not have known it for hers. "what will you do? i do not understand. this mask! i cannot hear." "there is a third road," i answered. "it leads to paris. that is my road, mademoiselle. we part here." "but why? why?" she cried wildly. "because from to-day i would fain begin to be honourable," i answered, in a low voice. "because i dare not be generous at another's cost i must go back to the châtelet." she tried feverishly to raise her mask with her hand. "i am--not well," she stammered. "i cannot breathe." she swayed so violently in her saddle as she spoke, that i sprang down, and running round her horse's head, was just in time to catch her as she fell. she was not quite unconscious then, for, as i supported her, she murmured, "leave me! leave me! i am not worthy that you should touch me." those words made me happy. i carried her to the bank, my heart on fire, and laid her against it just as m. de cocheforêt rode up. he sprang from his horse, his eyes blazing with anger. "what is this?" he cried harshly. "what have you been saying to her, man?" "she will tell you," i answered drily, my composure returning under his eye,--"amongst other things, that you are free. from this moment, m. de cocheforêt, i give you back your parole, and i take my own honour. farewell." he cried out something as i mounted, but i did not stay to hear or answer. i dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the crossroads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless--and behind me all i loved. once, when i had gone a hundred yards, i looked back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. and again i looked back. this time i saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred mass. chapter xiii. st. martin's eve. it was late evening on the last day but one of november, when i rode into paris through the orleans gate. the wind was in the northeast, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. the air seemed to be full of wood smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart i envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south, and the prospect of riding day after day across heath and moor and pasture. at least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom, and the open air, and hope and uncertainty, while i came back under doom; and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs, saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate. for make no mistake. a man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the cynical saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings and struggles of heart. at least a dozen times between the loire and paris, i asked myself what honour was; and what good it would do me when i lay rotting and forgotten; if i was not a fool following a jack-o'-lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom i was returning, would not be the first to gibe at my folly. however, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of mademoiselle's looks and words. i dared not be false to her again; i could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low. and therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking--i came, on this last evening but one of november, to the orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the luxembourg, on my way to the pont au change. the struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted _gamins_ under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries, the first breath, in a word, of paris, there came a new temptation--to go for one last night to zaton's to see the tables again and the faces of surprise; to be, for an hour or two, the old berault. that could be no breach of honour; for in any case i could not reach the cardinal before tomorrow. and it could do no harm. it could make no change in anything. it would not have been a thing worth struggling about--only i had in my inmost heart suspicions that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; that even such a talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue there. still i think i should have succumbed in the end, if i had not received at the corner of the luxembourg a shock which sobered me effectually. as i passed the gates, a coach followed by two outriders swept out of the palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and i reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. as it whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and i saw for a second, by the waning light,--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot,--a face inside. a face, and no more, and that only for a second! but it froze me. it was richelieu's, the cardinal's; but not as i had been wont to see it, keen, cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in every feature. this face was distorted with rage and impatience; with the fever of haste and the fear of death. the eyes burned under the pale brow, the mustachios bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; i could fancy the man crying "faster! faster!" and gnawing his nails in the impatience of passion; and i shrank back as if i had been struck. the next moment the galloping outriders splashed me, the coach was a hundred paces ahead, and i was left chilled and wondering, foreseeing the worst, and no longer in any mood for the gaming-table. such a revelation of such a man was enough to appall me. conscience cried out that he must have heard that cocheforêt had escaped, and through me! but i dismissed the idea as soon as formed. in the vast meshes of the cardinal's schemes, cocheforêt could be only a small fish; and to account for the face in the coach i needed a cataclysm, a catastrophe, a misfortune, as far above ordinary mishaps, as this man's intellect rose above the common run of minds. it was almost dark when i crossed the bridges, and crept despondently to the rue savonnerie. after stabling my horse, i took my bag and holsters, and climbing the stairs to my old landlord's,--the place seemed to have grown strangely mean and small and ill-smelling in my absence,--i knocked at the door. it was opened by the little tailor himself, who threw up his arms at the sight of me. "by st. genevieve!" he said. "if it is not m. de berault!" "no other," i said. it touched me a little, after my lonely journey, to find him so glad to see me--though i had never done him a greater benefit than sometimes to unbend with him and borrow his money. "you look surprised, little man!" i continued, as he made way for me to enter. "i'll be sworn you have been pawning my goods and letting my room, you knave!" "never, your excellency!" he answered, beaming on me. "on the contrary, i have been expecting you." "how?" i said. "to-day?" "to-day or to-morrow," he answered, following me in and closing the door. "the first thing i said, when i heard the news this morning, was, now we shall have m. de berault back again. your excellency will pardon the children," he continued, as i took the old seat on the three-legged stool before the hearth. "the night is cold, and there is no fire in your room." while he ran to and fro with my cloak and bags, little gil, to whom i had stood at st. sulpice's--borrowing ten crowns the same day, i remember--came shyly to play with my sword-hilt "so you expected me back when you heard the news, frison, did you?" i said, taking the lad on my knee. "to be sure, your excellency," he answered, peeping into the black pot before he lifted it to the hook. "very good. then, now, let us hear what the news was," i said drily. "of the cardinal, m. de berault." "ah? and what?" he looked at me, holding the heavy pot suspended in his hands. "you have not heard?" he exclaimed, his jaw falling. "not a tittle. tell it me, my good fellow." "you have not heard that his eminence is disgraced?" i stared at him. "not a word," i said. he set down the pot. "your excellency must have made a very long journey indeed, then," he said, with conviction. "for it has been in the air a week or more, and i thought it had brought you back. a week? a month, i dare say. they whisper that it is the old queen's doing. at any rate, it is certain that they have cancelled his commissions and displaced his officers. there are rumours of immediate peace with spain. his enemies are lifting up their heads, and i hear that he has relays of horses set all the way to the coast, that he may fly at any moment for what i know he may be gone already." "but, man," i said--"the king! you forget the king. let the cardinal once pipe to him, and he will dance. and they will dance, too!" i added grimly. "yes," frison answered eagerly. "true, your excellency, but the king will not see him. three times to-day, as i am told, the cardinal has driven to the luxembourg, and stood like any common man in the ante-chamber, so that i hear it was pitiful to see him. but his majesty would not admit him. and when he went away the last time, i am told that his face was like death! well, he was a great man, and we may be worse ruled, m. de berault, saving your presence. if the nobles did not like him, he was good to the traders, and the _bourgeoisie_, and equal to all." "silence, man! silence, and let me think," i said, much excited. and while he bustled to and fro, getting my supper, and the firelight played about the snug, sorry little room, and the child toyed with his plaything, i fell to digesting this great news, and pondering how i stood now and what i ought to do. at first sight, i know, it seemed that i had nothing to do but sit still. in a few hours the man who held my bond would be powerless, and i should be free. in a few hours i might smile at him. to all appearance, the dice had fallen well for me. i had done a great thing, run a great risk, won a woman's love, and after all was not to pay the penalty! but a word which fell from frison as he fluttered round me, pouring out the broth, and cutting the bread, dropped into my mind and spoiled my satisfaction. "yes, your excellency," he exclaimed, confirming something he had said before, and which i had missed, "and i am told that the last time he came into the gallery, there was not a man of all the scores who attended his _levée_ last monday would speak to him. they fell off like rats,--just like rats,--until he was left standing all alone. and i have seen him!" frison lifted up his eyes and his hands and drew in his breath. "ah, i have seen the king look shabby beside him! and his eye! i would not like to meet it now." "pish!" i growled. "some one has fooled you. men are wiser than that." "so? well, your excellency understands. but--there are no cats on a cold hearth." i told him again that he was a fool. but withal i felt uncomfortable. this was a great man if ever a great man lived, and they were all leaving him; and i--well, i had no cause to love him. but i had taken his money, i had accepted his commission, and i had betrayed him. those three things being so, if he fell before i could--with the best will in the world--set myself right with him, so much the better for me. that was my gain, the fortune of war. but if i lay hid, and took time for my ally, and being here while he stood still,--though tottering,--waited until he fell, what of my honour then? what of the grand words i had said to mademoiselle at agen? i should be like the recreant in the old romance, who, lying in the ditch while the battle raged, came out afterwards and boasted of his courage. and yet the flesh was weak. a day, twenty-four hours, two days, might make the difference between life and death. at last i settled what i would do. at noon the next day, the time at which i should have presented myself, if i had not heard this news, at that time i would still present myself. not earlier; i owed myself the chance. not later; that was due to him. having so settled it, i thought to rest in peace. but with the first light i was awake; and it was all i could do to keep myself quiet until i heard frison stirring. i called to him then to know if there was any news, and lay waiting and listening while he went down to the street to learn. it seemed an endless time before he came back; an age, after he came back, before he spoke. "well, he has not set off?" i cried at last, unable to control my eagerness. of course he had not. at nine o'clock i sent frison out again; and at ten, and at eleven--always with the same result. i was like a man waiting, and looking, and, above all, listening for a reprieve, and as sick as any craven. but when he came back at eleven, i gave up hope, and dressed myself carefully. i suppose i still had an odd look, however; for frison stopped me at the door and asked me, with evident alarm, whither i was going. i put the little man aside gently. "to the tables," i said. "to make a big throw, my friend." it was a fine morning; sunny, keen, pleasant. even the streets smelled fresh. but i scarcely noticed it. all my thoughts were where i was going. it seemed but a step from my threshold to the hotel richelieu. i was no sooner gone from the one than i found myself at the other. as on the memorable evening, when i had crossed the street in a drizzling rain, and looked that way with foreboding, there were two or three guards in the cardinal's livery, loitering before the gates. but this was not all. coming nearer, i found the opposite pavement under the louvre thronged with people; not moving about their business, but standing all silent, all looking across furtively, all with the air of persons who wished to be thought passing by. their silence and their keen looks had in some way an air of menace. looking back after i had turned in towards the gates, i found them devouring me with their eyes. certainly they had little else to look at. in the courtyard, where some mornings when the court was in paris i had seen a score of coaches waiting and thrice as many servants, were now emptiness and sunshine and stillness. the officer, who stood twisting his mustachios, on guard, looked at me in wonder as i passed. the lackeys lounging in the portico, and all too much taken up with whispering to make a pretence of being of service, grinned at my appearance. but that which happened when i had mounted the stairs, and come to the door of the ante-chamber, outdid all. the man on guard there would have opened the door; but when i went to take advantage of the offer, and enter, a major-domo, who was standing near, muttering with two or three of his kind, hastened forward and stopped me. "your business, monsieur, if you please?" he said inquisitively. and i wondered why the others looked at me so strangely. "i am m. de berault," i answered sharply. "i have the _entrée_." he bowed politely enough. "yes, m. de berault, i have the honour to know your face," he said. "but pardon me. have you business with his eminence?" "i have the common business," i answered bluntly, "by which many of us live, sirrah!--to wait on him." "but--by appointment, monsieur?" he persisted. "no," i said, astonished. "it is the usual hour. for the matter of that, however, i have business with him." the man looked at me for a moment, in apparent embarrassment. then he stood reluctantly aside, and signed to the door-keeper to open the door. i passed in, uncovering, with an assured face, ready to meet all eyes. then in a moment, on the threshold, the mystery was explained. the room was empty. chapter xiv. st. martin's summer. yes, at the great cardinal's _levée_ i was the only client. i stared round the room, a long narrow gallery, through which it was his custom to walk every morning, after receiving his more important visitors. i stared, i say, round this room, in a state of stupefaction. the seats against either wall were empty, the recesses of the windows empty too. the hat, sculptured and painted here and there, the staring r, the blazoned arms, looked down on a vacant floor. only, on a little stool by the main door, sat a quiet-faced man in black, who read, or pretended to read, in a little book, and never looked up. one of those men, blind, deaf, secretive, who fatten in the shadow of the great. at length, while i stood confounded and full of shamed thought,--for i had seen the ante-chamber of richelieu's old hotel so crowded that he could not walk through it,--this man closed his book, rose, and came noiselessly towards me. "m. de berault?" he said. "yes," i answered. "his eminence awaits you. be good enough to follow me." i did so, in a deeper stupor than before. for how could the cardinal know that i was here? how could he have known when he gave the order? but i had short time to think of these things. we passed through two rooms, in one of which some secretaries were writing; we stopped at a third door. over all brooded a silence which could be felt. the usher knocked, opened, and with his finger on his lip, pushed aside a curtain, and signed to me to enter. i did so, and found myself standing behind a screen. "is that m. de berault?" asked a thin, high-pitched voice. "yes, monseigneur," i answered, trembling. "then come, my friend, and talk to me." i went round the screen; and i know not how it was, the watching crowd outside, the vacant antechamber in which i had stood, the stillness,--all seemed concentrated here, and gave to the man i saw before me, a dignity which he had never possessed for me when the world passed through his doors, and the proudest fawned on him for a smile. he sat in a great chair on the farther side of the hearth, a little red skull-cap on his head, his fine hands lying motionless in his lap. the collar of lawn which fell over his red cape was quite plain, but the skirts of his red robe were covered with rich lace, and the order of the holy ghost shone on his breast. among the multitudinous papers on the great table near him i saw a sword and pistols lying; and some tapestry that covered a little table behind him failed to hide a pair of spurred riding-boots. but he--in spite of these signs of trouble--looked towards me as i advanced, with a face mild and almost benign; a face in which i strove in vain to find traces of last night's passion. so that it flashed across me that if this man really stood--and afterwards i knew he did--on the thin razor-edge between life and death, between the supreme of earthly power, lord of france, and arbiter of europe, and the nothingness of the clod, he justified his fame. he gave weaker natures no room for triumph. the thought was no sooner entertained than it was gone. "and so you are back at last, m. de berault?" he said, gently. "i have been expecting to see you since nine this morning." "your eminence knew then--" i muttered. "that you returned to paris by the orleans gate last evening, alone?" he fitted together the ends of his fingers, and looked at me over them with inscrutable eyes. "yes, i knew all that last night. and now of your mission? you have been faithful, and diligent, i am sure. where is he?" i stared at him, and was dumb. somehow the strange things i had seen since i left my lodging, the surprises i had found awaiting me here, had driven my own fortunes, my own peril, out of my head, until this moment. now, at his question, all returned with a rush. my heart heaved suddenly in my breast. i strove for a savour of the old hardihood; but for the moment i could not find a word. "well?" he said lightly, a faint smile lifting his mustache. "you do not speak. you left auch with him on the twenty-fourth, m. de berault. so much i know. and you reached paris without him last night. he has not given you the slip?" with sudden animation. "no, monseigneur," i muttered. "ha! that is good," he answered, sinking back again in his chair. "for the moment--but i knew i could depend on you. and now where is he?" he continued. "what have you done with him? he knows much, and the sooner i know it, the better. are your people bringing him, m. de berault?" "no, monseigneur," i stammered, with dry lips. his very good humour, his benignity, appalled me. i knew how terrible would be the change, how fearful his rage, when i should tell him the truth. and yet that i, gil de berault, should tremble before any man! i spurred myself, as it were, to the task. "no, your eminence," i said, with the courage of despair. "i have not brought him, because i have set him free." "because you have--_what?_" he exclaimed. he leaned forward, his hands on the arm of his chair; and his glittering eyes, growing each instant smaller, seemed to read my soul. "because i have let him go," i repeated. "and why?" he said, in a voice like the rasping of a file. "because i took him unfairly," i answered desperately. "because, monseigneur, i am a gentleman, and this task should have been given to one who was not. i took him, if you must know," i continued impatiently,--the fence once crossed, i was growing bolder,--"by dogging a woman's steps, and winning her confidence, and betraying it. and, whatever i have done ill in my life,--of which you were good enough to throw something in my teeth when i was last here,--i have never done that, and i will not!" "and so you set him free?" "yes." "after you had brought him to auch?" "yes." "and in point of fact saved him from falling into the hands of the commandant at auch?" "yes," i answered desperately. "then what of the trust i placed in you, sirrah?" he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward, he probed me with his eyes. "you who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that! what of the trust i placed in you?" "the answer is simple," i said, shrugging my shoulders with a touch of my old self. "i am here to pay the penalty." "and do you think that i do not know why?" he retorted, striking his one hand on the arm of the chair with a force which startled me. "because you have heard, sir, that my power is gone! that i, who was yesterday the king's right hand, am to-day dried up, withered, and paralyzed! because--but have a care! have a care!" he continued not loudly, but in a voice like a dog's snarl. "you, and those others! have a care i say, or you may find yourselves mistaken yet!" "as heaven shall judge me," i answered solemnly, "that is not true. until i reached paris last night i knew nothing of this report. i came here with a single mind, to redeem my honour by placing again in your eminence's hands that which you gave me on trust." for a moment he remained in the same attitude, staring at me fixedly. then his face somewhat relaxed. "be good enough to ring that bell," he said. it stood on a table near me. i rang it, and a velvet-footed man in black came in, and gliding up to the cardinal placed a paper in his hand. the cardinal looked at it while the man stood with his head obsequiously bent; my heart beat furiously. "very good," the cardinal said, after a pause, which seemed to me to be endless. "let the doors be thrown open." the man bowed low, and retired behind the screen. i heard a little bell ring, somewhere in the silence, and in a moment the cardinal stood up. "follow me!" he said, with a strange flash of his keen eyes. astonished, i stood aside while he passed to the screen; then i followed him. outside the first door, which stood open, we found eight or nine persons,--pages, a monk, the major-domo, and several guards waiting like mutes. these signed to me to precede them, and fell in behind us, and in that order we passed through the first room and the second, where the clerks stood with bent heads to receive us. the last door, the door of the ante-chamber, flew open as we approached; a score of voices cried, "place! place for his eminence!" we passed without pause through two lines of bowing lackeys, and entered--an empty room! the ushers did not know how to look at one another. the lackeys trembled in their shoes. but the cardinal walked on, apparently unmoved, until he had passed slowly half the length of the chamber. then he turned himself about, looking first to one side; and then to another, with a low laugh of derision. "father," he said, in his thin voice, "what does the psalmist say? 'i am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert!'" the monk mumbled assent. "and later, in the same psalm is it not written, 'they shall perish, but thou shalt endure!'" "it is so," the father answered. "amen." "doubtless that refers to another life," the cardinal continued, with his slow, wintry smile. "in the meantime we will go back to our book? and our prayers, and serve god and the king in small things, if not in great. come, father, this is no longer a place for us. _vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas!_ we will retire." so, as solemnly as we had come, we marched back through the first and second and third doors, until we stood again in the silence of the cardinal's chamber; he and i and the velvet-footed man in black. for a while richelieu seemed to forget me. he stood brooding on the hearth, with his eye's on the embers. once i heard him laugh; and twice he uttered in a tone of bitter mockery, the words, "fools! fools! fools!" at last he looked up, saw me, and started. "ah!" he said. "i had forgotten you. well, you are fortunate, m. de berault. yesterday i had a hundred clients. to-day i have only one, and i cannot afford to hang him. but for your liberty--that is another matter." i would have said something, but he turned abruptly to the table, and sitting down wrote a few lines on a piece of paper. then he rang his bell, while i stood waiting and confounded. the man in black came from behind the screen. "take that letter and this gentleman to the upper guard-room," his eminence said sharply. "i can hear no more," he continued wearily, raising his hand to forbid interruption. "the matter is ended, m. de berault. be thankful." and in a moment i was outside the door, my head in a whirl, my heart divided between gratitude and resentment. along several passages i followed my guide; everywhere finding the same silence, the same monastic stillness. at length, when i had begun to consider whether the bastile or the châtelet would be my fate, he stopped at a door, gave me the letter, and, lifting the latch, signed to me to enter. i went in in amazement, and stopped in confusion. before me, alone, just risen from a chair, with her face one moment pale, the next red with blushes, stood mademoiselle de cocheforêt. i cried out her name. "m. de berault!" she said, visibly trembling. "you did not expect to see me?" "i expected to see no one so little, mademoiselle," i answered, striving to recover my composure. "yet you might have thought that we should not utterly desert you," she replied, with a reproachful humility which went to my heart. "we should have been base indeed, if we had not made some attempt to save you. i thank heaven that it has so far succeeded that that strange man has promised me your life. you have seen him?" she continued eagerly, and in another tone, while her eyes grew suddenly large with fear. "yes, mademoiselle, i have seen him," i said. "and he has given me my life." "and?" "and sent me to imprisonment." "for how long?" she whispered. "i do not know," i answered. "i expect, during the king's pleasure." she shuddered. "i may have done more harm than good," she murmured, looking at me piteously. "but i did it for the best. i told him all, and--yes, perhaps i did harm." but to hear her accuse herself thus, when she had made this long and lonely journey to save me; when she had forced herself into her enemy's presence, and had, as i was sure she had, abased herself for me, was more than i could bear. "hush, mademoiselle, hush!" i said, almost roughly. "you hurt me. you have made me happy: and yet i wish that you were not here, where i fear you have few friends, but back at cocheforêt. you have done more than i expected, and a hundred times more than i deserved. but i was a ruined man before this happened. i am no more now, but i am still that; and i would not have your name pinned to mine on paris lips. therefore, good-bye. god forbid i should say more to you, or let you stay where foul tongues would soon malign you." she looked at me in a kind of wonder; then with a growing smile, "it is too late," she said gently. "too late?" i exclaimed. "how, mademoiselle?" "because--do you remember, m. de berault, what you told me of your love story, by agen? that it could have no happy ending? for the same reason i was not ashamed to tell mine to the cardinal. by this time it is common property." i looked at her as she stood facing me. her eyes shone, but they were downcast. her figure drooped, and yet a smile trembled on her lips. "what did you tell him, mademoiselle?" i whispered, my breath coming quickly. "that i loved," she answered boldly, raising her clear eyes to mine. "and therefore that i was not ashamed to beg, even on my knees. nor ashamed to be with my lover, even in prison." i fell on my knees, and caught her hand before the last word passed her lips. for the moment i forgot king and cardinal, prison and the future, all--all except that this woman, so pure and so beautiful, so far above me in all things, loved me. for the moment, i say. then i remembered myself. i stood up and thrust her from me, in a sudden revulsion of feeling. "you do not know me," i said. "you do not know me. you do not know what i have done." "that is what i do know," she answered, looking at me with a wondrous smile. "ah, but you do not," i cried. "and besides, there is this--this between us." and i picked up the cardinal's letter. it had fallen on the floor. she turned a shade paler. then she said, "open it! open it! it is not sealed, nor closed." i obeyed mechanically, dreading what i might see. even when i had it open i looked at the finely scrawled characters with eyes askance. but at last i made it out. it ran thus:-- "the king's pleasure is, that m. de berault, having mixed himself up with affairs of state, retire forthwith to the manor of cocheforêt, and confine himself within its limits, until the king's pleasure be further known. "richelieu." on the next day we were married. the same evening we left paris, and i retraced, in her company, the road which i had twice traversed alone and in heaviness. a fortnight later we were at cocheforêt, in the brown woods under the southern mountains; and the great cardinal, once more triumphant over his enemies, saw, with cold, smiling eyes, the world pass through his chamber. the flood-tide, which then set in, lasted thirteen years; in brief, until his death. for the world had learned its lesson, and was not to be deceived a second time. to this hour they call that day, which saw me stand for all his friends, "the day of dupes." the end count hannibal sorori su causs carae pio erga matrem amore etiam cariori hoc frater contents chapter i. crimson favours. ii. hannibal de saulx, comte de tavannes. iii. the house next the golden maid. iv. the eve of the feast. v. a rough wooing. vi. "who touches tavannes?" vii. in the amphitheatre. viii. two hens and an egg. ix. unstable. x. madame st. lo. xi. a bargain. xii. in the hall of the louvre. xiii. diplomacy. xiv. too short a spoon. xv. the brother of st. magloire. xvi. at close quarters. xvii. the duel. xviii. andromeda, perseus being absent. xix. in the orlÉannais. xx. on the castle hill. xxi. she would, and would not. xxii. playing with fire. xxiii. a mind, and not a mind. xxiv. at the king's inn. xxv. the company of the bleeding heart. xxvi. temper. xxvii. the black town. xxviii. in the little chapter house. xxix. the escape. xxx. sacrilege! xxxi. the flight from angers. xxxii. the ordeal by steel. xxxiii. the ambush. xxxiv. "which will you, madame?" xxxv. against the wall. xxxvi. his kingdom. count hannibal. chapter i. crimson favours. m. de tavannes smiled. mademoiselle averted her eyes, and shivered; as if the air, even of that close summer night, entering by the door at her elbow, chilled her. and then came a welcome interruption. "tavannes!" "sire!" count hannibal rose slowly. the king had called, and he had no choice but to obey and go. yet he hung a last moment over his companion, his hateful breath stirring her hair. "our pleasure is cut short too soon, mademoiselle," he said, in the tone and with the look she loathed. "but for a few hours only. we shall meet to-morrow. or, it may be--earlier." she did not answer, and "tavannes!" the king repeated with violence. "tavannes! mordieu!" his majesty continued, looking round furiously. "will no one fetch him? sacré nom, am i king, or a dog of a----" "i come, sire!" count hannibal cried in haste. for charles, king of france, ninth of the name, was none of the most patient; and scarce another in the court would have ventured to keep him waiting so long. "i come, sire; i come!" tavannes repeated, as he moved from her side. he shouldered his way through the circle of courtiers, who barred the road to the presence, and in part hid mademoiselle from observation. he pushed past the table at which charles and the comte de rochefoucauld had been playing primero, and at which the latter still sat, trifling idly with the cards. three more paces, and he reached the king, who stood in the _ruelle_ with rambouillet and the italian marshal. it was the latter who, a moment before, had summoned his majesty from his game. mademoiselle, watching him go, saw so much; so much, and the king's roving eyes and haggard face, and the four figures, posed apart in the fuller light of the upper half of the chamber. then the circle of courtiers came together before her, and she sat back on her stool. a fluttering, long-drawn sigh escaped her. now, if she could slip out and make her escape! now--she looked round. she was not far from the door; to withdraw seemed easy. but a staring, whispering knot of gentlemen and pages blocked the way; and the girl, ignorant of the etiquette of the court and with no more than a week's experience of paris, had not the courage to rise and pass alone through the group. she had come to the louvre this saturday evening under the wing of madame d'yverne, her _fiancé's_ cousin. by ill hap madame had been summoned to the princess dowager's closet, and perforce had left her. still, mademoiselle had her betrothed, and in his charge had sat herself down to wait, nothing loth, in the great gallery, where all was bustle and gaiety and entertainment. for this, the seventh day of the fêtes, held to celebrate the marriage of the king of navarre and charles's sister--a marriage which was to reconcile the two factions of the huguenots and the catholics, so long at war--saw the louvre as gay, as full, and as lively as the first of the fête days had found it; and in the humours of the throng, in the ceaseless passage of masks and maids of honour, guards and bishops, swiss in the black, white and green of anjou, and huguenot nobles in more sombre habits, the country-bred girl had found recreation and to spare. until gradually the evening had worn away and she had begun to feel nervous; and m. de tignonville, her betrothed, placing her in the embrasure of a window, had gone to seek madame. she had waited for a time without much misgiving; expecting each moment to see him return. he would be back before she could count a hundred; he would be back before she could number the leagues that separated her from her beloved province, and the home by the biscay sea, to which even in that brilliant scene her thoughts turned fondly. but the minutes had passed, and passed, and he had not returned. worse, in his place tavannes--not the marshal, but his brother count hannibal--had found her; he, whose odious court, at once a menace and an insult, had subtly enveloped her for a week past. he had sat down beside her, he had taken possession of her, and, profiting by her inexperience, had played on her fears and smiled at her dislike. finally, whether she would or no, he had swept her with him into the chamber. the rest had been an obsession, a nightmare, from which only the king's voice summoning tavannes to his side had relieved her. her aim now was to escape before he returned, and before another, seeing her alone, adopted his _rôle_ and was rude to her. already the courtiers about her were beginning to stare, the pages to turn and titter and whisper. direct her gaze as she might, she met some eye watching her, some couple enjoying her confusion. to make matters worse, she presently discovered that she was the only woman in the chamber; and she conceived the notion that she had no right to be there at that hour. at the thought her cheeks burned, her eyes dropped; the room seemed to buzz with her name, with gross words and jests, and gibes at her expense. at last, when the situation had grown nearly unbearable, the group before the door parted, and tignonville appeared. the girl rose with a cry of relief, and he came to her. the courtiers glanced at the two and smiled. he did not conceal his astonishment at finding her there. "but, mademoiselle, how is this?" he asked in a low voice. he was as conscious of the attention they attracted as she was, and as uncertain on the point of her right to be there. "i left you in the gallery. i came back, missed you, and----" she stopped him by a gesture. "not here!" she muttered, with suppressed impatience. "i will tell you outside. take me--take me out, if you please, monsieur, at once!" he was as glad to be gone as she was to go. the group by the doorway parted; she passed through it, he followed. in a moment the two stood in the great gallery, above the salle des caryatides. the crowd which had paraded here an hour before was gone, and the vast echoing apartment, used at that date as a guard-room, was well-nigh empty. only at rare intervals, in the embrasure of a window or the recess of a door, a couple talked softly. at the farther end, near the head of the staircase which led to the hall below, and the courtyard, a group of armed swiss lounged on guard. mademoiselle shot a keen glance up and down, then she turned to her lover, her face hot with indignation. "why did you leave me?" she asked. "why did you leave me, if you could not come back at once? do you understand, sir," she continued, "that it was at your instance i came to paris, that i came to this court, and that i look to you for protection?" "surely," he said. "and----" "and do you think carlat and his wife fit guardians for me? should i have come or thought of coming to this wedding, but for your promise, and madame your cousin's? if i had not deemed myself almost your wife," she continued warmly, "and secure of your protection, should i have come within a hundred miles of this dreadful city? to which, had i my will, none of our people should have come." "dreadful? pardieu, not so dreadful," he answered, smiling, and striving to give the dispute a playful turn. "you have seen more in a week than you would have seen at vrillac in a lifetime, mademoiselle." "and i choke!" she retorted; "i choke! do you not see how they look at us, at us huguenots, in the street? how they, who live here, point at us and curse us? how the very dogs scent us out and snarl at our heels, and the babes cross themselves when we go by? can you see the place des gastines and not think what stood there? can you pass the grève at night and not fill the air above the river with screams and wailings and horrible cries--the cries of our people murdered on that spot?" she paused for breath, recovered herself a little, and in a lower tone, "for me," she said, "i think of philippine de luns by day and by night! the eaves are a threat to me; the tiles would fall on us had they their will; the houses nod to--to----" "to what, mademoiselle?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders and assuming a tone of cynicism. "to crush us! yes, monsieur, to crush us!" "and all this because i left you for a moment?" "for an hour--or well-nigh an hour," she answered more soberly. "but if i could not help it?" "you should have thought of that--before you brought me to paris, monsieur. in these troublous times." he coloured warmly. "you are unjust, mademoiselle," he said. "there are things you forget; in a court one is not always master of oneself." "i know it," she answered drily, thinking of that through which she had gone. "but you do not know what happened!" he returned with impatience. "you do not understand that i am not to blame. madame d'yverne, when i reached the princess dowager's closet, had left to go to the queen of navarre. i hurried after her, and found a score of gentlemen in the king of navarre's chamber. they were holding a council, and they begged, nay, they compelled me to remain." "and it was that which detained you so long?" "to be sure, mademoiselle." "and not--madame st. lo?" m. de tignonville's face turned scarlet. the thrust in tierce was unexpected. this then was the key to mademoiselle's spirt of temper. "i do not understand you," he stammered. "how long were you in the king of navarre's chamber, and how long with madame st. lo?" she asked with fine irony. "or no, i will not tempt you," she went on quickly, seeing him hesitate. "i heard you talking to madame st. lo in the gallery while i sat within. and i know how long you were with her." "i met madame as i returned," he stammered, his face still hot, "and i asked her where you were. i did not know, mademoiselle, that i was, not to speak to ladies of my acquaintance." "i was alone, and i was waiting." "i could not know that--for certain," he answered, making the best of it. "you were not where i left you. i thought, i confess--that you had gone. that you had gone home." "with whom? with whom?" she repeated pitilessly. "was it likely? with whom was i to go? and yet it is true, i might have gone home had i pleased--with m. de tavannes! yes," she continued, in a tone of keen reproach and with the blood mounting to her forehead, "it is to that, monsieur, you expose me! to be pursued, molested, harassed by a man whose look terrifies me, and whose touch i--i detest! to be addressed wherever i go by a man whose every word proves that he thinks me game for the hunter, and you a thing he may neglect. you are a man and you do not know, you cannot know what i suffer! what i have suffered this week past whenever you have left my side!" tignonville looked gloomy. "what has he said to you?" he asked, between his teeth. "nothing i can tell you," she answered with a shudder. "it was he who took me into the chamber." "why did you go?" "wait until he bids you do something," she answered. "his manner, his smile, his tone, all frighten me. and to-night, in all these there was a something worse, a hundred times worse than when i saw him last--on thursday! he seemed to--to gloat on me," the girl stammered, with a flush of shame, "as if i were his! oh, monsieur, i wish we had not left our poitou! shall we ever see vrillac again, and the fishers' huts about the port, and the sea beating blue against the long brown causeway?" he had listened darkly, almost sullenly; but at this, seeing the tears gather in her eyes, he forced a laugh. "why, you are as bad as m. de rosny and the vidame!" he said. "and they are as full of fears as an egg is of meat! since the admiral was wounded by that scoundrel on friday, they think all paris is in a league against us." "and why not!" she asked, her cheek grown pale, her eyes reading his eyes. "why not? why, because it is a monstrous thing even to think of!" tignonville answered, with the confidence of one who did not use the argument for the first time. "could they insult the king more deeply than by such a suspicion? a borgia may kill his guests, but it was never a practice of the kings of france! pardieu, i have no patience with them! they may lodge where they please, across the river, or without the walls if they choose, the rue de l'arbre sec is good enough for me, and the king's name sufficient surety!" "i know you are not apt to be fearful," she answered, smiling; and she looked at him with a woman's pride in her lover. "all the same, you will not desert me again, sir, will you?" he vowed he would not, kissed her hand, looked into her eyes; then melting to her, stammering, blundering, he named madame st. lo. she stopped him. "there is no need," she said, answering his look with kind eyes, and refusing to hear his protestations. "in a fortnight will you not be my husband? how should i distrust you? it was only that while she talked, i waited--i waited; and--and that madame st. lo is count hannibal's cousin. for a moment i was mad enough to dream that she held you on purpose. you do not think it was so?" "she!" he cried sharply; and he winced, as if the thought hurt him. "absurd! the truth is, mademoiselle," he continued with a little heat, "you are like so many of our people! you think a catholic capable of the worst." "we have long thought so at vrillac," she answered gravely. "that's over now, if people would only understand. this wedding has put an end to all that. but i'm harking back," he continued awkwardly; and he stopped. "instead, let me take you home." "if you please. carlat and the servants should be below." he took her left hand in his right after the wont of the day, and with his other hand touching his sword-hilt, he led her down the staircase, that by a single turn reached the courtyard of the palace. here a mob of armed servants, of lacqueys, and foot-boys, some bearing torches, and some carrying their masters' cloaks and _galoshes_, loitered to and fro. had m. de tignonville been a little more observant, or a trifle less occupied with his own importance, he might have noted more than one face which looked darkly on him; he might have caught more than one overt sneer at his expense. but in the business of summoning carlat--mademoiselle de vrillac's steward and major-domo--he lost the contemptuous "christaudins!" that hissed from a footboy's lips, and the "southern dogs!" that died in the moustachios of a bully in the livery of the king's brother. he was engaged in finding the steward, and in aiding him to cloak his mistress; then with a ruffling air, a new acquirement, which he had picked up since he came to paris, he made a way for her through the crowd. a moment, and the three, followed by half a dozen armed servants, bearing pikes and torches, detached themselves from the throng, and crossing the courtyard, with its rows of lighted windows, passed out by the gate between the tennis courts, and so into the rue des fosses de st. germain. before them, against a sky in which the last faint glow of evening still contended with the stars, the spire and pointed arches of the church of st. germain rose darkly graceful. it was something after nine; the heat of the august day brooded over the crowded city, and dulled the faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. as mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the cloister of st. germain where only the day before admiral coligny, the leader of the huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort's hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. but he laughed at her. "it was a private blow," he said, answering her unspoken thought. "it is like enough the guises sped it. but they know now what is the king's will, and they have taken the hint and withdrawn themselves. it will not happen again, mademoiselle. for proof, see the guards"--they were passing the end of the rue bethizy, in the corner house of which, abutting on the rue de l'arbre sec, coligny had his lodgings--"whom the king has placed for his security. fifty pikes under cosseins." "cosseins?" she repeated. "but i thought cosseins----" "was not wont to love us!" tignonville answered with a confident chuckle. "he was not. but the dogs lick where the master wills, mademoiselle. he was not, but he does. this marriage has altered all." "i hope it may not prove an unlucky one!" she murmured. she felt impelled to say it. "not it!" he answered confidently. "why should it?" they stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the rue st. honoré opposite the croix du tiroir; which rose shadowy in the middle of the four ways. he hammered on the door. "but," she said softly, looking in his face, "the change is sudden, is it not? the king was not wont to be so good to us!" "the king was not king until now," he answered "that is what i am trying to persuade our people. believe me, mademoiselle, you may sleep without fear; and early in the morning i will be with you. carlat, have a care of your mistress until morning, and let madame lie in her chamber. she is nervous to-night. there, sweet, until morning! god keep you, and pleasant dreams!" he uncovered, and bowing over her hand, kissed it; and the door being open he would have turned away. but she lingered as if unwilling to enter. "there is--do you hear it--a stir in _that_ quarter?" she said, pointing across the rue st. honoré. "what lies there?" "northward? the markets," he answered. "'tis nothing. they say, you know, that paris never sleeps. good-night, sweet, and a fair awakening!" she shivered as she had shivered under tavannes' eye. and still she lingered, keeping him. "are you going to your lodging at once?" she asked--for the sake, it seemed, of saying something. "i?" he answered a little hurriedly. "no, i was thinking of paying rochefoucauld the compliment of seeing him home. he has taken a new lodging to be near the admiral; a horrid bare place in the rue bethizy, without furniture, but he would go into it to-day. and he has a sort of claim on my family, you know." "yes," she said simply. "of course. then i must not detain you. god keep you safe," she continued, with a faint quiver in her tone; and her lip trembled. "good-night, and fair dreams, monsieur." he echoed the words gallantly. "of you, sweet!" he cried; and turning away with a gesture of farewell, he set off on his return. he walked briskly, nor did he look back, though she stood awhile gazing after him. she was not aware that she gave thought to this; nor that it hurt her. yet when bolt and bar had shot behind her, and she had mounted the cold, bare staircase of that day--when she had heard the dull echoing footsteps of her attendants as they withdrew to their lairs and sleeping-places, and still more when she had crossed the threshold of her chamber, and signed to madame carlat and her woman to listen--it is certain she felt a lack of something. perhaps the chill that possessed her came of that lack, which she neither defined nor acknowledged. or possibly it came of the night air, august though it was; or of sheer nervousness, or of the remembrance of count hannibal's smile. whatever its origin, she took it to bed with her; and long after the house slept round her, long after the crowded quarter of the halles had begun to heave and the sorbonne to vomit a black-frocked band, long after the tall houses in the gabled streets, from st. antoine to montmartre and from st. denis on the north to st. jacques on the south, had burst into rows of twinkling lights--nay, long after the quarter of the louvre alone remained dark, girdled by this strange midnight brightness--she lay awake. at length she too slept, and dreamed of home and the wide skies of poitou, and her castle of vrillac washed day and night by the biscay tides. chapter ii. hannibal de saulx, comte de tavannes. "tavannes!" "sire." tavannes, we know, had been slow to obey the summons. emerging from the crowd he found that the king, with retz and rambouillet, his marshal des logis, had retired to the farther end of the chamber; apparently charles had forgotten that he had called. his head a little bent--he was tall and had a natural stoop--the king seemed to be listening to a low but continuous murmur of voices which proceeded from the door of his closet. one voice frequently raised was beyond doubt a woman's; a foreign accent, smooth and silky, marked another; a third, that from time to time broke in, wilful and impetuous, was the voice of monsieur, the king's brother, catherine de médicis' favourite son. tavannes, waiting respectfully two paces behind the king, could catch little that was said; but charles, something more, it seemed, for on a sudden he laughed, a violent, mirthless laugh. and he clapped rambouillet on the shoulder. "there!" he said, with one of his horrible oaths, "'tis settled! 'tis settled! go, man, and take your orders! and you, m. de retz," he continued, in a tone of savage mockery, "go, my lord, and give them!" "i, sire?" the italian marshal answered in accents of deprecation. there were times when the young king would show his impatience of the italian ring, the retzs and biragues, the strozzis and gondys, with whom his mother surrounded him. "yes, you!" charles answered. "you and my lady mother! and in god's name answer for it at the day!" he continued vehemently. "you will have it! you will not let me rest till you have it! then have it, only see to it, it be done thoroughly! there shall not be one left to cast it in the king's teeth and cry, 'et tu, carole!' swim, swim in blood if you will," he continued with growing wildness. "oh, 'twill be a merry night! and it's true so far, you may kill fleas all day, but burn the coat, and there's an end. so burn it, burn it, and----" he broke off with a start as he discovered tavannes at his elbow. "god's death, man!" he cried roughly, "who sent for you?" "your majesty called me," tavannes answered; while, partly urged by the king's hand, and partly anxious to escape, the others slipped into the closet and left them together. "i sent for you? i called your brother, the marshal!" "he is within, sire," tavannes answered, indicating the closet. "a moment ago i heard his voice." charles passed his shaking hand across his eyes. "is he?" he muttered. "so he is! i heard it too. and--and a man cannot be in two places at once!" then while his haggard gaze, passing by tavannes, roved round the chamber, he laid his hand on count hannibal's breast. "they give me no peace, madame and the guises," he whispered, his face hectic with excitement. "they will have it. they say that coligny--they say that he beards me in my own palace. and--and, _mordieu_," with sudden violence, "it's true! it's true enough! it was but to-day he was for making terms with me! with me, the king! making terms! so it shall be, by god and devil, it shall! but not six or seven! no, no. all! all! there shall not be one left to say to me, 'you did it!'" "softly, sire," tavannes answered; for charles had gradually raised his voice. "you will be observed." for the first time the young king--he was but twenty-two years old, god pity him!--looked at his companion. "to be sure," he whispered; and his eyes grew cunning. "besides, and after all, there's another way, if i choose. oh, i've thought and thought, i'd have you know." and shrugging his shoulders, almost to his ears, he raised and lowered his open hands alternately, while his back hid the movement from the chamber. "see-saw! see-saw!" he muttered. "and the king between the two, you see. that's madame's king-craft. she's shown me that a hundred times. but look you, it is as easy to lower the one as the other," with a cunning glance at tavannes' face, "or to cut off the right as the left. and--and the admiral's an old man and will pass; and for the matter of that i like to hear him talk. he talks well. while the others, guise and his kind, are young, and i've thought, oh, yes, i've thought--but there," with a sudden harsh laugh, "my lady mother will have it her own way. and for this time she shall, but, all! all! even foucauld, there! do you mark him? he's sorting the cards. do you see him--as he will be to-morrow, with the slit in his throat and his teeth showing? why, god!" his voice rising almost to a scream, "the candles by him are burning blue!" and with a shaking hand, his face convulsed, the young king clutched his companion's arm, and pinched it. count hannibal shrugged his shoulders, but answered nothing. "d'you think we shall see them afterwards?" charles resumed, in a sharp, eager whisper. "in our dreams, man? or when the watchman cries, and we awake, and the monks are singing lauds at st. germain, and--and the taper is low?" tavannes' lip curled. "i don't dream, sire," he answered coldly, "and i seldom wake. for the rest, i fear my enemies neither alive nor dead." "don't you? by g--d, i wish i didn't," the young man exclaimed. his brow was wet with sweat. "i wish i didn't. but there, it's settled. they've settled it, and i would it were done! what do you think of--of it, man? what do you think of it, yourself?" count hannibal's face was inscrutable. "i think nothing, sire," he said drily. "it is for your majesty and your council to think. it is enough for me that it is the king's will." "but you'll not flinch?" charles muttered, with a quick look of suspicion. "but there," with a monstrous oath, "i know you'll not! i believe you'd as soon kill a monk--though, thank god," and he crossed himself devoutly, "there is no question of that--as a man. and sooner than a maiden." "much sooner, sire," tavannes answered grimly. "if you have any orders in the monkish direction--no? then your majesty must not talk to me longer. m. de rochefoucauld is beginning to wonder what is keeping your majesty from your game. and others are marking you, sire." "by the lord!" charles exclaimed, a ring of wonder mingled with horror in his tone, "if they knew what was in our minds they'd mark us more! yet, see nançay there beside the door? he is unmoved. he looks to-day as he looked yesterday. yet he has charge of the work in the palace----" for the first time tavannes allowed a movement of surprise to escape him. "in the palace?" he muttered. "is it to be done here, too, sire?" "would you let some escape, to return by-and-by and cut our throats?" the king retorted with a strange spirt of fury; an incapacity to maintain the same attitude of mind for two minutes together was the most fatal weakness of his ill-balanced nature. "no. all! all!" he repeated with vehemence. "didn't noah people the earth with eight? but i'll not leave eight! my cousins, for they are blood-royal, shall live if they will recant. and my old nurse whether or no. and paré, for no one else understands my complexion. and----" "and rochefoucauld, doubtless, sire?" the king, whose eye had sought his favourite companion, withdrew it. he darted a glance at tavannes. "foucauld? who said so?" he muttered jealously. "not i! but we shall see. we shall see! and do you see that you spare no one, m. le comte, without an order. that is your business." "i understand, sire," tavannes answered coolly. and after a moment's silence, seeing that the king had done with him, he bowed low and withdrew; watched by the circle, as all about a king were watched in the days when a king's breath meant life or death, and his smile made the fortunes of men. as he passed rochefoucauld, the latter looked up and nodded. "what keeps brother charles?" he muttered. "he's madder than ever to-night. is it a masque or a murder he is planning?" "the vapours," tavannes answered with a sneer. "old tales his old nurse has stuffed him withal. he'll come by-and-by, and 'twill be well if you can divert him." "i will if he come," rochefoucauld answered, shuffling the cards. "if not 'tis chicot's business and he should attend to it. i'm tired and shall to bed." "he will come," tavannes answered, and moved, as if to go on. then he paused for a last word. "he will come," he muttered, stooping and speaking under his breath, his eyes on the other's face. "but play him lightly. he is in an ugly mood. please him, if you can, and it may serve." the eyes of the two met an instant, and those of foucauld--so the king called his huguenot favourite--betrayed some surprise; for count hannibal and he were not intimate. but seeing that the other was in earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. he was lifting the curtain to go out, when nauçay, the captain of the guard, plucked his sleeve. "what have you been saying to foucauld, m. de tavannes?" he muttered. "i?" "yes," with a jealous glance, "you, m. le comte." count hannibal looked at him with the sudden ferocity that made the man a proverb at court. "what i chose, m. le capitaine des suisses!" he hissed. and his hand closed like a vice on the other's wrist. "what i chose, look you! and remember, another time, that i am not a huguenot, and say what i please." "but there is great need of care," nançay protested, stammering and flinching. "and--and i have orders, m. le comte." "your orders are not for me," tavannes answered, releasing his arm with a contemptuous gesture. "and look you, man, do not cross my path to-night. you know our motto? who touches my brother, touches tavannes! be warned by it." nançay scowled. "but the priests say, 'if your hand offend you, cut it off!'" he muttered. tavannes laughed, a sinister laugh. "if you offend me i'll cut your throat," he said; and with no ceremony he went out, and dropped the curtain behind him. nançay looked after him, his face pale with rage. "curse him!" he whispered, rubbing his wrist. "if he were anyone else i would teach him! but he would as soon run you through in the presence as in the pré aux clercs! and his brother, the marshal, has the king's ear! and madame catherine's too, which is worse!" he was still fuming when an officer in the colours of monsieur, the king's brother, entered hurriedly, and keeping his hand on the curtain, looked anxiously round the chamber. as soon as his eye found nançay, his face cleared. "have you the reckoning?" he muttered. "there are seventeen huguenots in the palace besides their highnesses," nançay replied, in the same cautious tone. "not counting two or three who are neither the one thing nor the other. in addition, there are the two montmorencies; but they are to go safe for fear of their brother, who is not in the trap. he is too like his father, the old bench-burner, to be lightly wronged! and besides, there is paré, who is to go to his majesty's closet as soon as the gates are shut. if the king decides to save anyone else, he will send him to his closet. so 'tis all clear and arranged here. if you are as forward outside, it will be well! who deals with the gentleman with the toothpick?" "the admiral? monsieur, guise, and the grand prior; cosseins and besme have charge. 'tis to be done first. then the provost will raise the town. he will have a body of stout fellows ready at three or four rendezvous, so that the fire may blaze up everywhere at once. marcel, the ex-provost, has the same commission south of the river. orders to light the town as for a frolic have been given, and the halles will be ready." nançay nodded, reflected a moment, and then with an involuntary shudder, "god!" he exclaimed, "it will shake the world!" "you think so?" "ay, will it not!" his next words showed that he bore tavannes' warning in mind. "for me, my friend, i go in mail to-night," he said. "there will be many a score paid before morning, besides his majesty's. and many a left-handed blow will be struck in the _mêlée!_" the other crossed himself. "grant none light here!" he said devoutly. and with a last look he nodded and went out. in the doorway he jostled a person who was in the act of entering. it was m. de tignonville, who, seeing nançay at his elbow, saluted him, and stood looking round. the young man's face was flushed, his eyes were bright with unwonted excitement. "m. de rochefoucauld?" he asked eagerly. "he has not left yet?" nançay caught the thrill in his voice, and marked the young man's flushed face, and altered bearing. he noted, too, the crumpled paper he carried half-hidden in his hand; and the captain's countenance grew dark. he drew a step nearer and his hand reached softly for his dagger. but his voice when he spoke was smooth as the surface of the pleasure-loving court, smooth as the externals of all things in paris that summer evening. "he is here still," he said. "have you news, m. de tignonville?" "news?" "for m. de rochefoucauld?" tignonville laughed. "no," he said. "i am here to see him to his lodging, that is all. news, captain? what made you think so?" "that which you have in your hand," nançay answered, his fears relieved. the young man blushed to the roots of his hail "it is not for him," he said. "i can see that, monsieur," nançay answered politely. "he has his successes, but all the billets-doux do not go one way." the young man laughed, a conscious, flattered laugh. he was handsome, with such a face as women love, but there was a lack of ease in the way he wore his court suit. it was a trifle finer, too, than accorded with huguenot taste; or it looked the finer for the way he wore it, even as teliguy's and foucauld's velvet capes and stiff brocades lost their richness and became but the adjuncts, fitting and graceful, of the men. odder still, as tignonville laughed, half hiding and half revealing the dainty, scented paper in his hand, his clothes seemed smarter and he more awkward than usual. "it is from a lady," he admitted. "but a bit of badinage, i assure you, nothing more." "understood!" m. de nançay murmured politely. "i congratulate you." "but----" "i say i congratulate you!" "but it is nothing." "oh, i understand. and see, the king is about to rise. go forward, monsieur," he continued benevolently. "a young man should show himself. besides his majesty likes you well," he added with a leer. he had an unpleasant sense of humour, had his majesty's captain of the guard; and this evening somewhat more than ordinary on which to exercise it. tignonville held too good an opinion of himself to suspect the other of badinage; and thus encouraged he pushed his way to the front of the circle. during his absence with his betrothed, the crowd in the chamber had grown thin, the candles had burned an inch shorter in the sconces. but though many who had been there, had left, the more select remained, and the king's return to his seat had given the company a fillip. an air of feverish gaiety, common in the unhealthy life of the court, prevailed. at a table abreast of the king, montpensier and marshal cossé were dicing and disputing, with now a yell of glee, and now an oath, that betrayed which way fortune inclined. at the back of the king's chair, chicot, his gentleman-jester, hung over charles's shoulder, now scanning his cards, and now making hideous faces that threw the onlookers into fits of laughter. farther up the chamber, at the end of the alcove, marshal tavannes--our hannibal's brother--occupied a low stool, which was set opposite the open door of the closet. through this doorway a slender foot, silk-clad, shot now and again into sight; it came, it vanished, it came again, the gallant marshal striving at each appearance to rob it of its slipper, a dainty jewelled thing of crimson velvet. he failed thrice, a peal of laughter greeting each failure. at the fourth essay, he upset his stool and fell to the floor, but held the slipper. and not the slipper only, but the foot. amid a flutter of silken skirts and dainty laces--while the hidden beauty shrilly protested--he dragged first the ankle, and then a shapely leg into sight. the circle applauded; the lady, feeling herself still drawn on, screamed loudly and more loudly. all save the king and his opponent turned to look. and then the sport came to a sudden end. a sinewy hand appeared, interposed, released; for an instant the dark, handsome face of guise looked through the doorway. it was gone as soon as seen; it was there a second only. but more than one recognised it, and wondered. for was not the young duke in evil odour with the king by reason of the attack on the admiral? and had he not been chased from paris only that morning and forbidden to return? they were still wondering, still gazing, when abruptly--as he did all things--charles thrust back his chair. "foucauld, you owe me ten pieces!" he cried with glee, and he slapped the table. "pay, my friend; pay!" "to-morrow, little master; to-morrow!" rochefoucauld answered in the same tone. and he rose to his feet. "to-morrow!" charles repeated. "to-morrow?" and on the word his jaw fell. he looked wildly round. his face was ghastly. "well, sire, and why not?" rochefoucauld answered in astonishment. and in his turn he looked round, wondering; and a chill fell on him. "why not?" he repeated. for a moment no one answered him: the silence in the chamber was intense. where he looked, wherever he looked, he met solemn, wondering eyes, such eyes as gaze on men in their coffins. "what has come to you all?" he cried with an effort. "what is the jest, for faith, sire, i don't see it?" the king seemed incapable of speech, and it was chicot who filled the gap. "it is pretty apparent," he said with a rude laugh. "the cock will lay and foucauld will pay--to-morrow!" the young nobleman's colour rose; between him and the gascon gentleman was no love lost. "there are some debts i pay to-day," he cried haughtily. "for the rest, farewell my little master! when one does not understand the jest it is time to be gone." he was half-way to the door, watched by all, when the king spoke. "foucauld!" he cried in an odd, strangled voice. "foucauld!" and the huguenot favourite turned back, wondering. "one minute!" the king continued in the same forced voice. "stay till morning--in my closet. it is late now. we'll play away the rest of the night!" "your majesty must excuse me," rochefoucauld answered frankly. "i am dead asleep." "you can sleep in the garde-robe," the king persisted. "thank you for nothing, sire!" was the gay answer. "i know that bed! i shall sleep longer and better in my own." the king shuddered, but strove to hide the movement under a shrug of his shoulders. he turned away. "it is god's will!" he muttered. he was white to the lips. rochefoucauld did not catch the words. "good night, sire," he cried. "farewell, little master." and with a nod here and there, he passed to the door, followed by mergey and chamont, two gentlemen of his suite. nançay raised the curtain with an obsequious gesture. "pardon me, m. le comte," he said, "do you go to his highness's?" "for a few minutes, nançay." "permit me to go with you. the guards may be set." "do so, my friend," rochefoucauld answered. "ah, tignonville, is it you!" "i am come to attend you to your lodging," the young man said. and he ranged up beside the other, as, the curtain fallen behind them, they walked along the gallery. rochefoucauld stopped and laid his hand on tignonville's sleeve. "thanks, dear lad," he said, "but i am going to the princess dowager's. afterwards to his highness's. i may be detained an hour or more. you will not like to wait so long." m. de tignonville's face fell ludicrously. "well, no," he said. "i--i don't think i could wait so long--to-night." "then come to-morrow night," rochefoucauld answered with good nature. "with pleasure," the other cried heartily, his relief evident. "certainly. with pleasure." and, nodding good-night, they parted. while rochefoucauld, with nançay at his side and his gentlemen attending him, passed along the echoing and now empty gallery, the younger man bounded down the stairs to the great hall of the caryatides, his face radiant. he for one was not sleepy. chapter iii. the house next the "golden maid." we have it on record that before the comte de la rochefoucauld left the louvre that night he received the strongest hints of the peril which threatened him; and at least one written warning was handed to him by a stranger in black, and by him in turn was communicated to the king of navarre. we are told further that when he took his final leave, about the hour of eleven, he found the courtyard brilliantly lighted, and the three companies of guards--swiss, scotch, and french--drawn up in ranked array from the door of the great hall to the gate which opened on the street. but, the chronicler adds, neither this precaution, sinister as it appeared to some of his suite, nor the grave farewell which rambouillet, from his post at the gate, took of one of his gentlemen, shook that chivalrous soul or sapped its generous confidence. m. de tignonville was young and less versed in danger than the governor of rochelle; with him, had he seen so much, it might have been different. but he left the louvre an hour earlier--at a time when the precincts of the palace, gloomy-seeming to us in the light cast by coming events, wore their wonted aspect. his thoughts, moreover, as he crossed the courtyard, were otherwise employed. so much so, indeed, that though he signed to his two servants to follow him, he seemed barely conscious what he was doing; nor did he shake off his reverie until he reached the corner of the rue baillet. here the voices of the swiss who stood on guard opposite coligny's lodgings, at the end of the rue bethizy, could be plainly heard. they had kindled a fire in an iron basket set in the middle of the road, and knots of them were visible in the distance, moving to and fro about their piled arms. tignonville paused before he came within the radius of the firelight, and turning, bade his servants take their way home. "i shall follow, but i have business first," he added curtly. the elder of the two demurred. "the streets are not too safe," he said. "in two hours or less, my lord, it will be midnight. and then----" "go, booby; do you think i am a child?" his master retorted angrily. "i've my sword and can use it. i shall not be long. and do you hear, men, keep a still tongue, will you?" the men, country fellows, obeyed reluctantly, and with a full intention of sneaking after him the moment he had turned his back. but he suspected them of this, and stood where he was until they had passed the fire, and could no longer detect his movements. then he plunged quickly into the rue baillet, gained through it the rue du roule, and traversing that also turned to the right into the rue ferronerie, the main thoroughfare, east and west, of paris. here he halted in front of the long, dark outer wall of the cemetery of the innocents, in which, across the tombstones and among the sepulchres of dead paris, the living paris of that day, bought and sold, walked, gossiped, and made love. about him things were to be seen that would have seemed stranger to him had he been less strange to the city. from the quarter of the markets north of him, a quarter which fenced in the cemetery on two sides, the same dull murmur proceeded, which mademoiselle de vrillac had remarked an hour earlier. the sky above the cemetery glowed with reflected light, the cause of which was not far to seek, for every window of the tall houses that overlooked it, and the huddle of booths about it, contributed a share of the illumination. at an hour late even for paris, an hour when honest men should have been sunk in slumber, this strange brilliance did for a moment perplex him; but the past week had been so full of fêtes, of masques and frolics, often devised on the moment and dependent on the king's whim, that he set this also down to such a cause, and wondered and no more. the lights in the houses flung their radiance high, and did not serve his purpose; but beside the closed gate of the cemetery, between two stalls, was a votive lamp burning before an image of the mother and child. he crossed to this, and assuring himself by a glance to right and left that he stood in no danger from prowlers, he drew a note from his breast. it had been slipped into his hand in the gallery before he saw mademoiselle to her lodging; it had been in his possession barely an hour. but brief as its contents were, and easily committed to memory, he had perused it thrice already. "at the house next the 'golden maid,' rue cinq diamants, an hour before midnight, you may find the door open should you desire to talk farther with c. st. l." as he read it for the fourth time the light of the lamp fell athwart his face; and even as his fine clothes had never seemed to fit him worse than when he faintly denied the imputations of gallantry launched at him by nançay, so his features had never looked less handsome than they did now. the glow of vanity which warmed his cheek as he read the message, the smile of conceit which wreathed his lips, bespoke a nature not of the most noble; or the lamp did him less than justice. presently he kissed the note, and hid it. he waited until the clock of st. jacques struck the hour before midnight; and then moving forward he turned to the right by way of the narrow neck leading to the rue lombard. he walked in the kennel here, his sword in his hand and his eyes looking to right and left; for the place was notorious for robberies. but though he saw more than one figure lurking in a doorway or under the arch that led to a passage, it vanished on his nearer approach. in less than a minute he reached the southern end of the street that bore the odd title of the five diamonds. situate in the crowded quarter of the butchers, and almost in the shadow of their famous church, this street--which farther north was continued in the rue quimcampoix--presented in those days a not uncommon mingling of poverty and wealth. on one side of the street a row of lofty gabled houses built under francis the first, sheltered persons of good condition; on the other, divided from these by the width of the road and a reeking kennel, a row of pent-houses, the hovels of cobblers and sausage-makers, leaned against shapeless timber houses which tottered upwards in a medley of sagging roofs and bulging gutters. tignonville was strange to the place, and nine nights out of ten he would have been at a disadvantage. but, thanks to the tapers that to-night shone in many windows, he made out enough to see that he need search only the one side; and with a beating heart he passed along the row of newer houses, looking eagerly for the sign of the "golden maid." he found it at last; and then for a moment he stood puzzled. the note said, next door to the "golden maid," but it did not say on which side. he scrutinised the nearer house, but he saw nothing to determine him; and he was proceeding to the farther, when he caught sight of two men, who, ambushed behind a horse-block on the opposite side of the roadway, seemed to be watching his movements. their presence flurried him; but much to his relief his next glance at the houses showed him that the door of the farther one was unlatched. it stood slightly ajar, permitting a beam of light to escape into the street. he stepped quickly to it--the sooner he was within the house the better--pushed the door open and entered. as soon as he was inside he tried to close the entrance behind him, but he found he could not; the door would not shut. after a brief trial he abandoned the attempt and passed quickly on, through a bare lighted passage which led to the foot of a staircase, equally bare. he stood at this point an instant and listened, in the hope that madame's maid would come to him. at first he heard nothing save his own breathing; then a gruff voice from above startled him, "this way, monsieur," it said. "you are early, but not too soon!" so madame trusted her footman! m. de tignonville shrugged his shoulders; but after all, it was no affair of his, and he went up. half-way to the top, however, he stood, an oath on his lips. two men had entered by the open door below--even as he had entered! and as quietly! the imprudence of it! the imprudence of leaving the door so that it could not be closed! he turned and descended to meet them, his teeth set, his hand on his sword, one conjecture after another whirling in his brain. was he beset? was it a trap? was it a rival? was it chance? two steps he descended; and then the voice he had heard before cried again, but more imperatively, "no, monsieur, this way! did you not hear me? this way and be quick, if you please. by-and-by there will be a crowd, and then the more we have dealt with the better!" he knew now that he had made a mistake, that he had entered the wrong house; and naturally his impulse was to continue his descent and secure his retreat. but the pause had brought the two men who had entered face to face with him, and they showed no signs of giving way. on the contrary. "the room is above, monsieur," the foremost said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and with a slight salutation. "after you, if you please," and he signed to him to return. he was a burly man, grim and truculent in appearance, and his follower was like him. tignonville hesitated, then turned and ascended. but as soon as he had reached the landing where they could pass him, he turned again. "i have made a mistake, i think," he said. "i have entered the wrong house." "are you for the house next the 'golden maid,' monsieur?" "yes." "rue cinq diamants, quarter of the boucherie?" "yes." "no mistake then," the stout man replied firmly. "you are early, that is all. you have arms, i see. maillard!"--to the person whose voice tignonville had heard at the head of the stairs--"a white sleeve, and a cross for monsieur's hat, and his name on the register. come, make a beginning! make a beginning, man." "to be sure, monsieur. all is ready." "then lose no time, i say. here are others, also early in the good cause. gentlemen, welcome! welcome all who are for the true faith! death to the heretics! 'kill, and no quarter!' is the word to-night!" "death to the heretics!" the last comers cried in chorus. "kill and no quarter! at what hour, m. le prévot?" "at day-break," the provost answered importantly. "but have no fear, the tocsin will sound. the king and our good man m. de guise have all in hand. a white sleeve, a white cross, and a sharp knife shall rid paris of the vermin! gentlemen of the quarter, the word of the night is 'kill, and no quarter! death to the huguenots!'" "death! death to the huguenots! kill, and no quarter!" a dozen--the room was beginning to fill--waved their weapons and echoed the cry. tignonville had been fortunate enough to apprehend the position--and the peril in which he stood--before maillard advanced to him bearing a white linen sleeve. in the instant of discovery his heart had stood a moment, the blood had left his cheeks; but with some faults, he was no coward, and he managed to hide his emotion. he held out his left arm, and suffered the beadle to pass the sleeve over it and to secure the white linen above the elbow. then at a gesture he gave up his velvet cap, and saw it decorated with a white cross of the same material. "now the register, monsieur," maillard continued briskly; and waving him in the direction of a clerk, who sat at the end of the long table, having a book and an ink-horn before him, he turned to the next comer. tignonville would fain have avoided the ordeal of the register, but the clerk's eye was on him. he had been fortunate so far, but he knew that the least breath of suspicion would destroy him, and summoning his wits together he gave his name in a steady voice. "anne desmartins." it was his mother's maiden name, and the first that came into his mind. "of paris?" "recently; by birth, of the limousin." "good, monsieur," the clerk answered, writing in the name. and he turned to the next. "and you, my friend?" chapter iv. the eve of the feast. it was tignonville's salvation that the men who crowded the long white-walled room, and exchanged vile boasts under the naked flaring lights, were of all classes. there were butchers, natives of the surrounding quarter whom the scent of blood had drawn from their lairs; and there were priests with hatchet faces, who whispered in the butchers' ears. there were gentlemen of the robe, and plain mechanics, rich merchants in their gowns, and bare-armed ragpickers, sleek choristers, and shabby led-captains; but differ as they might in other points, in one thing all were alike. from all, gentle or simple, rose the same cry for blood, the same aspiration to be first equipped for the fray. in one corner a man of rank stood silent and apart, his hand on his sword, the working of his face alone betraying the storm that reigned within. in another, a norman horse-dealer talked in low whispers with two thieves. in a third, a gold-wire drawer addressed an admiring group from the sorbonne; and meantime the middle of the floor grew into a seething mass of muttering, scowling men, through whom the last comers, thrust as they might, had much ado to force their way. and from all under the low ceiling rose a ceaseless hum, though none spoke loud. "kill! kill! kill!" was the burden; the accompaniment such profanities and blasphemies as had long disgraced the paris pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry--already at a white heat--of the parisian populace. tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. but for his life he dared not. and presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him a whetstone. "are you sharp, noble sir?" he asked with a leer. "are you sharp? it's surprising how the edge goes on the bone. a cut and thrust? well, every man to his taste. but give me a broad butcher's knife and i'll ask no help, be it man, woman, or child!" a bystander, a lean man in rusty black, chuckled as he listened. "but the woman or the child for choice, eh, jehan?" he said. and he looked to tignonville to join in the jest. "ay, give me a white throat for choice!" the cripple answered, with horrible zest. "and there'll be delicate necks to prick to-night! lord, i think i hear them squeal! you don't need it, sir?" he continued, again proffering the whetstone. "no? then i'll give my blade another whet, in the name of our lady, the saints, and good father pezelay!" "ay, and give me a turn!" the lean man cried, proffering his weapon. "may i die if i do not kill one of the accursed for every finger of my hands!" "and toe of my feet!" the cripple answered, not to be outdone. "and toe of my feet! a full score!" "'tis according to your sins!" the other, who had something of the air of a churchman, answered. "the more heretics killed, the more sins forgiven. remember that, brother, and spare not if your soul be burdened! they blaspheme god and call him paste! in the paste of their own blood," he continued ferociously, "i will knead them and roll them out, saith the good father pezelay, my master!" the cripple crossed himself. "whom god keep," he said. "he is a good man. but you are looking ill, noble sir?" he continued, peering curiously at the young huguenot. "'tis the heat," tignonville muttered. "the night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. i will go nearer the door." he hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room and giving the alarm. but when he had forced his way to the threshold, he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left, the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe, over the shoulders of the crowd. with that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim before his eyes. the catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium. he strove to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm. but he could not bring his mind to a point. instead, in lightning flashes he foresaw what must happen: his betrothed in the hands of the murderers, the fair face that had smiled on him frozen with terror; brave men, the fighters of montauban, the defenders of angely, strewn dead through the dark lanes of the city. and now a gust of passion, and now a shudder of fear, seized him; and in any other assembly his agitation must have led to detection. but in that room were many twitching faces and trembling hands. murder, cruel, midnight, and most foul, wrung even from the murderers her toll of horror. while some, to hide the nervousness they felt, babbled of what they would do, others betrayed by the intentness with which they awaited the signal, the dreadful anticipations that possessed their souls. before he had formed any plan, a movement took place near the door. the stairs shook beneath the sudden trampling of feet, a voice cried "de par le roi! de par le roi!" and the babel of the room died down. the throng swayed and fell back on either hand, and marshal tavannes entered, wearing half armour, with a white sash; he was followed by six or eight gentlemen in like guise. amid cries of "jarnac! jarnac!"--for to him the credit of that famous fight, nominally won by the king's brother, was popularly given--he advanced up the room, met the provost of the merchants, and began to confer with him. apparently he asked the latter to select some men who could be trusted on a special mission, for the provost looked round and beckoned to his side one or two of higher rank than the herd, and then one or two of the most truculent aspect. tignonville trembled lest he should be singled out. he had hidden himself as well as he could at the rear of the crowd by the door; but his dress, so much above the common, rendered him conspicuous. he fancied that the provost's eye ranged the crowd for him; and to avoid it and efface himself he moved a pace to his left. the step was fatal. it saved him from the provost, but it brought him face to face and eye to eye with count hannibal, who stood in the first rank at his brother's elbow. tavannes stared an instant as if he doubted his eyesight. then, as doubt gave slow place to certainty, and surprise to amazement, he smiled. and after a moment he looked another way. tignonville's heart gave a great bump and seemed to stand still. the lights whirled before his eyes, there was a roaring in his ears. he waited for the word that should denounce him. it did not come. and still it did not come; and marshal tavannes was turning. yes, turning, and going; the provost, bowing low, was attending him to the door; his suite were opening on either side to let him pass. and count hannibal? count hannibal was following also, as if nothing had occurred. as if he had seen nothing! the young man caught his breath. was it possible that he had imagined the start of recognition, the steady scrutiny, the sinister smile? no; for as tavannes followed the others, he hung an instant on his heel, their eyes met again, and once more he smiled. in the next breath he was gone through the doorway, his spurs rang on the stairs; and the babel of the crowd, unchecked by the great man's presence, broke out anew, and louder. tignonville shuddered. he was saved as by a miracle, saved he did not know how. but the respite, though its strangeness diverted his thoughts for a while, brought short relief. the horrors which impended over others surged afresh into his mind, and filled him with a maddening sense of impotence. to be one hour, only one short half-hour without! to run through the sleeping streets, and scream in the dull ears which a king's flatteries had stopped as with wool! to go up and down and shake into life the guests whose royal lodgings daybreak would turn to a shambles reeking with their blood! they slept, the gentle teligny, the brave pardaillan, the gallant rochefoucauld, piles the hero of st. jean, while the cruel city stirred rustling about them, and doom crept whispering to the door. they slept, they and a thousand others, gentle and simple, young and old; while the half-mad valois shifted between two opinions, and the italian woman, accursed daughter of an accursed race, cried "hark!" at her window, and looked eastwards for the dawn. and the women? the woman he was to marry? and the others? in an access of passion he thrust aside those who stood between, he pushed his way, disregarding complaints, disregarding opposition, to the door. but the pikes lay across it, and he could not utter a syllable to save his life. he would have flung himself on the door-keepers, for he was losing control of himself; but as he drew back for the spring, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a voice he loathed hummed in his ear. "no, fair play, noble sir; fair play!" the cripple jehan muttered, forcibly drawing him aside. "all start together, and it's no man's loss. but if there is any little business," he continued, lowering his tone and peering with a cunning look into the other's face, "of your own, noble sir, or your friends', anything or anybody you want despatched, count on me. it were better, perhaps, you didn't appear in it yourself, and a man you can trust----" "what do you mean?" the young man cried, recoiling from him. "no need to look surprised, noble sir," the lean man, who had joined them, answered in a soothing tone. "who kills to-night does god service, and who serves god much may serve himself a little. 'thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn,' says good father pezelay." "hear, hear!" the cripple chimed in eagerly, his impatience such that he danced on his toes. "he preaches as well as the good father his master! so frankly, noble sir, what is it? what is it? a woman grown ugly? a rich man grown old, with perchance a will in his chest? or a young heir that stands in my lord's way? whichever it be, or whatever it be, trust me and our friend here, and my butcher's gully shall cut the knot." tignonville shook his head. "but something there is," the lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at tignonville's clothes. it was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? if so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and we'll enlist." "ay, we know shops on the bridge where you can plunge your arm elbow-deep in gold," the cripple muttered, his eyes sparkling greedily. "there's baillet's, noble sir! there's a shop for you! and there's the man's shop who works for the king. he's lame like me. and i know the way to all. oh, it will be a merry night if they ring before the dawn. it must be near daybreak now. and what's that?" ay, what was it? a score of voices called for silence; a breathless hush fell on the crowd. a moment the fiercest listened, with parted lips and starting eyes. then, "it was the bell!" cried one, "let us out!" "it was not!" cried, another. "it was a pistol shot!" "anyhow let us out!" the crowd roared in chorus; "let us out!" and they pressed in a furious mass towards the door, as if they would force it, signal or no signal. but the pikemen stood fast, and the throng, checked in their first rush, turned on one another, and broke into wrangling and disputing; boasting, and calling heaven and the saints to witness how thoroughly, how pitilessly, how remorselessly they would purge paris of this leprosy when the signal did sound. until again above the babel a man cried "silence!" and again they listened. and this time, dulled by walls and distance, but unmistakable by the ears of fear or hate, the heavy note of a bell came to them on the hot night-air. it was the boom, sullen and menacing, of the death signal. the door-keepers lowered their pikes, and with a wild rush as of wolves swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "a bas les huguenots! mort aux huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. for as it was here, so it was in a dozen other quarters. quickly as they streamed out--and to have issued more quickly would have been impossible--fiercely as they pushed and fought and clove their way, tignonville was of the foremost. and for a moment, seeing the street clear before him and almost empty, the huguenot thought that he might do something. he might outstrip the stream of rapine, he might carry the alarm; at worst he might reach his betrothed before harm befel her. but when he had sped fifty yards, his heart sank. true, none passed him; but under the spell of the alarm-bell the stones themselves seemed to turn to men. houses, courts, alleys, the very churches vomited men. in a twinkling the street was alive with men, roared with them as with a rushing tide, gleamed with their lights and weapons, thundered with the volume of their thousand voices. he was no longer ahead, men were running before him, behind him, on his right hand and on his left. in every side-street, every passage, men were running; and not men only, but women, children, furious creatures without age or sex. and all the time the bell tolled overhead, tolled faster and faster, and louder and louder; and shots and screams, and the clash of arms, and the fall of strong doors began to swell the maelstrom of sound. he was in the rue st. honoré now, and speeding westward. but the flood still rose with him, and roared abreast of him. nay, it outstripped him. when he came, panting, within sight of his goal, and lacked but a hundred paces of it, he found his passage barred by a dense mass of people moving slowly to meet him. in the heart of the press the light of a dozen torches shone on half as many riders mailed and armed; whose eyes, as they moved on, and the furious gleaming eyes of the rabble about them, never left the gabled roofs on their right. on these from time to time a white-clad figure showed itself, and passed from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, or, stooping low, ran along the parapet. every time that this happened, the men on horseback pointed upwards and the mob foamed with rage. tignonville groaned, but he could not help. unable to go forward, he turned, and with others hurrying, shouting, and brandishing weapons, he pressed into the rue du roule, passed through it, and gained the bethizy. but here, as he might have foreseen, all passage was barred at the hôtel pouthieu by a horde of savages, who danced and yelled and sang songs round the admiral's body, which lay in the middle of the way; while to right and left men were bursting into houses and forcing new victims into the street. the worst had happened there, and he turned panting, regained the rue st. honoré and, crossing it and turning left-handed, darted through side streets until he came again into the main thoroughfare a little beyond the croix du tiroir, that marked the corner of mademoiselle's house. here his last hope left him. the street swarmed with bands of men hurrying to and fro as in a sacked city. the scum of the halles, the rabble of the quarter poured this way and that, here at random, there swayed and directed by a few knots of men-at-arms, whose corselets reflected the glare of a hundred torches. at one time and within sight, three or four houses were being stormed. on every side rose heartrending cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of "to the river!" the most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles and boat-hooks. all this tignonville saw, though his eyes, leaping the turmoil, looked only to the door at which he had left mademoiselle a few hours earlier. there a crowd of men pressed and struggled; but from the spot where he stood he could see no more. that was enough, however. rage nerved him, and despair; his world was dying round him. if he could not save her he would avenge her. recklessly he plunged into the tumult; blade in hand, with vigorous blows he thrust his way through, his white sleeve and the white cross in his hat gaining him passage until he reached the fringe of the band who beset the door. here his first attempt to pass failed; and he might have remained hampered by the crowd if a squad of archers had not ridden up. as they spurred to the spot, heedless over whom they rode, he clutched a stirrup, and was borne with them into the heart of the crowd. in a twinkling he stood on the threshold of the house, face to face and foot to foot with count hannibal, who stood also on the threshold, but with his back to the door, which, unbarred and unbolted, gaped open behind him. chapter v. a rough wooing. the young man had caught the delirium that was abroad that night. the rage of the trapped beast was in his heart, his hand held a sword. to strike blindly, to strike without question the first who withstood him was the wild-beast instinct; and if count hannibal had not spoken on the instant, the marshal's brother had said his last word in the world. yet as he stood there, a head above the crowd, he seemed unconscious alike of tignonville and the point that all but pricked his breast. swart and grim-visaged, his harsh features distorted by the glare which shone upon him, he looked beyond the huguenot to the sea of tossing arms and raging faces that surged about the saddles of the horsemen. it was to these he spoke. "begone, dogs!" he cried, in a voice that startled the nearest, "or i will whip you away with my stirrup-leathers! do you hear? begone! this house is not for you! burn, kill, plunder where you will, but go hence!" "but 'tis on the list!" one of the wretches yelled. "'tis on the list!" and he pushed forward until he stood at tignonville's elbow. "and has no cross!" shrieked another, thrusting himself forward in his turn. "see you, let us by, whoever you are! in the king's name, kill! it has no cross!" "then," tavannes thundered, "will i nail you for a cross to the front of it! no cross, say you? i will make one of you, foul crow!" and as he spoke, his arm shot out; the man recoiled, his fellow likewise. but one of the mounted archers took up the matter. "nay, but, my lord," he said--he knew tavannes--"it is the king's will there be no favour shown to-night to any, small or great. and this house is registered, and is full of heretics." "and has no cross!" the rabble urged in chorus. and they leapt up and down in their impatience, and to see the better. "and has no cross!" they persisted. they could understand that. of what use crosses, if they were not to kill where there was no cross? daylight was not plainer. tavannes' face grew dark, and he shook his finger at the archer who had spoken. "rogue," he cried, "does the king's will run here only? are there no other houses to sack or men to kill, that you must beard me? and favour? you will have little of mine, if you do not budge and take your vile tail with you! off! or must i cry 'tavannes!' and bid my people sweep you from the streets?" the foremost rank hesitated, awed by his manner and his name; while the rearmost, attracted by the prospect of easier pillage, had gone off already. the rest wavered; and another and another broke away. the archer who had put himself forward saw which way the wind was blowing, and he shrugged his shoulders. "well, my lord, as you will," he said sullenly. "all the same i would advise you to close the door and bolt and bar. we shall not be the last to call to-day." and he turned his horse in ill-humour, and forced it, snorting and plunging, through the crowd. "bolt and bar?" tavannes cried after him in fury. "see you my answer to that!" and turning on the threshold, "within there!" he cried. "open the shutters and set lights, and the table! light, i say; light! and lay on quickly, if you value your lives! and throw open, for i sup with your mistress tonight, if it rain blood without! do you hear me, rogues? set on!" he flung the last word at the quaking servants; then he turned again to the street. he saw that the crowd was melting, and, looking in tignonville's face, he laughed aloud. "does monsieur sup with us?" he said. "to complete the party? or will he choose to sup with our friends yonder? it is for him to say. i confess, for my part," with an awful smile, "their hospitality seems a trifle crude, and boisterous." tignonville looked behind him and shuddered. the same horde which had so lately pressed about the door had found a victim lower down the street, and, as tavannes spoke, came driving back along the roadway, a mass of tossing lights and leaping, running figures, from the heart of which rose the screams of a creature in torture. so terrible were the sounds that tignonville leant half swooning against the door-post; and even the iron heart of tavannes seemed moved for a moment. for a moment only: then he looked at his companion, and his lip curled. "you'll join us, i think?" he said with an undisguised sneer. "then, after you, monsieur. they are opening the shutters. doubtless the table is laid, and mademoiselle is expecting us. after you, monsieur, if you please. a few hours ago i should have gone first, for you, in this house"--with a sinister smile--"were at home! now, we have changed places." whatever he meant by the gibe--and some smack of an evil jest lurked in his tone--he played the host so far as to urge his bewildered companion along the passage and into the living-chamber on the left, where he had seen from without that his orders to light and lay were being executed. a dozen candles shone on the board, and lit up the apartment. what the house contained of food and wine had been got together and set on the table; from the low, wide window, beetle-browed and diamond-paned, which extended the whole length of the room and looked on the street at the height of a man's head above the roadway, the shutters had been removed--doubtless by trembling and reluctant fingers. to such eyes of passers-by as looked in, from the inferno of driving crowds and gleaming weapons which prevailed outside--and not outside only, but throughout paris--the brilliant room and the laid table must have seemed strange indeed! to tignonville, all that had happened, all that was happening, seemed a dream: a dream his entrance under the gentle impulsion of this man who dominated him; a dream mademoiselle standing behind the table with blanched face and stony eyes; a dream the cowering servants huddled in a corner beyond her; a dream his silence, her silence, the moment of waiting before count hannibal spoke. when he did speak it was to count the servants. "one, two, three, four, five," he said. "and two of them women. mademoiselle is but poorly attended. are there not"--and he turned to her--"some lacking?" the girl opened her lips twice, but no sound issued. the third time, "two went out," she muttered in a hoarse, strangled voice, "and have not returned." "and have not returned?" he answered, raising his eyebrows. "then i fear we must not wait for them. we might wait long!" and turning sharply to the panic-stricken servants, "go you to your places! do you not see that mademoiselle waits to be served?" the girl shuddered and spoke. "do you wish me," she muttered, in the same strangled tone, "to play this farce--to the end?" "the end may be better, mademoiselle, than you think," he answered, bowing. and then to the miserable servants, who hung back afraid to leave the shelter of their mistress's skirts, "to your places!" he cried. "set mademoiselle's chair. are you so remiss on other days? if so," with a look of terrible meaning, "you will be the less loss! now, mademoiselle, may i have the honour? and when we are at table we can talk." he extended his hand, and, obedient to his gesture, she moved to the place at the head of the table, but without letting her fingers come into contact with his. he gave no sign that he noticed this, but he strode to the place on her right, and signed to tignonville to take that on her left. "will you not be seated?" he continued. for she kept her feet. she turned her head stiffly, until for the first time her eyes looked into his. a shudder more violent than the last shook her. "had you not better--kill us at once?" she whispered. the blood had forsaken even her lips. her face was the face of a statue--white, beautiful, lifeless. "i think not," he said gravely. "be seated, and let us hope for the best. and you, sir," he continued, turning to carlat, "serve your mistress with wine. she needs it." the steward filled for her, and then for each of the men, his shaking hand spilling as much as it poured. nor was this strange. above the din and uproar of the street, above the crash of distant doors, above the tocsin that still rang from the reeling steeple of st. germain's, the great bell of the palais on the island had just begun to hurl its note of doom upon the town. a woman crouching at the end of the chamber burst into hysterical weeping, but, at a glance from tavannes' terrible eye, was mute again. tignonville found voice at last. "have they--killed the admiral?" he muttered, his eyes on the table. "m. coligny! an hour ago." "and teligny?" "him also." "m. de rochefoucauld?" "they are dealing with m. le comte now, i believe," tavannes answered. "he had his chance, and cast it away." and he began to eat. the man at the table shuddered. the woman continued to look before her, but her lips moved as if she prayed. suddenly a rush of feet, a roar of voices surged past the window; for a moment the glare of the torches which danced ruddily on the walls of the room, showed a severed head borne above the multitude on a pike. mademoiselle, with a low cry, made an effort to rise, but count hannibal grasped her wrist and she sank back half fainting. then the nearer clamour sank a little, and the bells, unchallenged, flung their iron tongues above the maddened city. in the east the dawn was growing; soon its grey light would fall on cold hearths, on battered doors and shattered weapons, on hordes of wretches drunk with greed and hate. when he could be heard, "what are you going to do with us?" the man asked hoarsely. "that depends," count hannibal replied after a moment's thought. "on what?" "on mademoiselle de vrillac." the other's eyes gleamed with passion. he leaned forward. "what has she to do with it?" he cried. and he stood up and sat down again in a breath. tavannes raised his eyebrows with a blandness that seemed at odds with his harsh visage. "i will answer that question by another question," he replied. "how many are there in the house, my friend?" "you can count." tavannes counted again. "seven?" he said. tignonville nodded impatiently. "seven lives?" "well?" "well, monsieur, you know the king's will?" "i can guess it," the other replied furiously. and he cursed the king, and the king's mother, calling her jezebel. "you can guess it?" tavannes answered; and then with sudden heat, as if that which he had to say could not be said even by him in cold blood, "nay, you know it! you heard it from the archer at the door. you heard him say, 'no favour, no quarter for man, for woman, or for child. so says the king.' you heard it, but you fence with me. foucauld, with whom his majesty played to-night, hand to hand and face to face--foucauld is dead! and you think to live? you?" he continued, lashing himself into passion. "i know not by what chance you came where i saw you an hour gone, nor by what chance you came by that and that"--pointing with accusing finger to the badges the huguenot wore. "but this i know! i have but to cry your name from yonder casement, nay, monsieur, i have but to stand aside when the mob go their rounds from house to house, as they will go presently, and you will perish as certainly as you have hitherto escaped!" for the second time mademoiselle turned and looked at him. "then," she whispered, with white lips, "to what end this--mockery?" "to the end that seven lives may be saved, mademoiselle," he answered, bowing. "at a price?" she muttered. "at a price," he answered. "a price which women do not find it hard to pay--at court. 'tis paid every day for pleasure or a whim, for rank or the _entrée_, for robes and gewgaws. few, mademoiselle, are privileged to buy a life; still fewer, seven!" she began to tremble. "i would rather die--seven times!" she cried, her voice quivering. and she tried to rise, but sat down again. "and these?" he said, indicating the servants. "far, far rather!" she repeated passionately. "and monsieur? and monsieur!" he urged with stern persistence, while his eyes passed lightly from her to tignonville and back to her again, their depths inscrutable. "if you love monsieur, mademoiselle, and i believe you do----" "i can die with him!" she cried. "and he with you!" she writhed in her chair. "and he with you?" count hannibal repeated, with emphasis; and he thrust forward his head. "for that is the question. think, think, mademoiselle. it is in my power to save from death him whom you love; to save you; to save this _canaille_, if it so please you. it is in my power to save him, to save you, to save all; and i will save all--at a price! if, on the other hand, you deny me that price, i will as certainly leave all to perish, as perish they will, before the sun that is now rising sets to-night!" mademoiselle looked straight before her, the flicker of a dreadful prescience in her eyes. "and the price?" she muttered. "the price?" "you, mademoiselle." "yes, you! nay, why fence with me?" he continued gently. "you knew it, you have said it. you have read it in my eyes these seven days." she did not speak, move, or seem to breathe. as he said, she had foreseen, she had known the answer. but tignonville, it seemed, had not. he sprang to his feet. "m. de tavannes," he cried, "you are a villain!" "monsieur?" "you are a villain! but you shall pay for this!" the young man continued vehemently. "you shall not leave this room alive! you shall pay for this insult!" "insult?" tavannes answered in apparent surprise; and then, as if comprehension broke upon him, "ah! monsieur mistakes me," he said, with a generous sweep of his hand. "and mademoiselle also, perhaps? oh! be content, she shall have bell, book, and candle; she shall be tied as tight as holy church can tie her! or, if she please, and one survive, she shall have a priest of her own church--you call it a church? she shall have whichever of the two will serve her better. 'tis one to me! but for paying me, monsieur," he continued with irony in voice and manner; "when, i pray you? in eternity! for if you refuse my offer, you have done with time. now? i have but to sound this whistle"--he touched a silver whistle which hung at his breast--"and there are those within hearing will do your business before you make two passes. dismiss the notion, sir, and understand. you are in my power. paris runs with blood, as noble as yours, as innocent as hers. if you would not perish with the rest, decide! and quickly! for what you have seen are but the forerunners, what you have heard are but the gentle whispers that predict the gale. do not parley too long; so long that even i may no longer save you." "i would rather die!" mademoiselle moaned, her face covered. "i would rather die!" "and see him die?" he answered quietly. "and see these die? think, think, child!" "you will not do it!" she gasped. she shook from head to foot. "i shall do nothing," he answered firmly. "i shall but leave you to your fate, and these to theirs. in the king's teeth i dare save my wife and her people; but no others. you must choose--and quickly." one of the frightened women--it was mademoiselle's tiring-maid, a girl called javette--made a movement, as if to throw herself at her mistress's feet. tignonville drove her to her place with a word. he turned to count hannibal. "but, m. le comte," he said, "you must be mad! mad, to wish to marry her in this way! you do not love her. you do not want her. what is she to you more than other women?" "what is she to you more than other women?" tavannes retorted in a tone so sharp and incisive that tignonville started, and a faint touch of colour crept into the wan cheek of the girl, who sat between them, the prize of the contest. "what is she more to you than other women? is she more? and yet--you want her!" "she is more to me," tignonville answered. "is she?" the other retorted, with a ring of keen meaning. "is she? but we bandy words and the storm is rising, as i warned you it would rise. enough for you that i _do_ want her. enough for you that i will have her. she shall be the wife, the willing wife, of hannibal de tavannes--or i leave her to her fate, and you to yours!" "ah, god!" she moaned. "the willing wife!" "ay, mademoiselle, the willing wife," he answered sternly. "or no man's wife!" chapter vi. who touches tavannes? in saying that the storm was rising count hannibal had said no more than the truth. a new mob had a minute before burst from the eastward into the rue st. honoré; and the roar of its thousand voices swelled louder than the importunate clangour of the bells. behind its moving masses the dawn of a new day--sunday, the th of august, the feast of st. bartholomew--was breaking over the bastille, as if to aid the crowd in its cruel work. the gabled streets, the lanes, and gothic courts, the stifling wynds, where the work awaited the workers, still lay in twilight; still the gleam of the torches, falling on the house-fronts, heralded the coming of the crowd. but the dawn was growing, the sun was about to rise. soon the day would be here, giving up the lurking fugitive whom darkness, more pitiful, had spared, and stamping with legality the horrors that night had striven to hide. and with day, with the full light, killing would grow more easy, escape more hard. already they were killing on the bridge where the rich goldsmiths lived, on the wharves, on the river. they were killing at the louvre, in the courtyard under the king's eyes, and below the windows of the médicis. they were killing in st. martin and st. denis and st. antoine; wherever hate, or bigotry, or private malice impelled the hand. from the whole city went up a din of lamentation, and wrath, and foreboding. from the cour des miracles, from the markets, from the boucherie, from every haunt of crime and misery, hordes of wretched creatures poured forth; some to rob on their own account, and where they listed, none gainsaying; more to join themselves to one of the armed bands whose business it was to go from street to street, and house to house, quelling resistance, and executing through paris the high justice of the king. it was one of these swollen bands which had entered the street while tavannes spoke; nor could he have called to his aid a more powerful advocate. as the deep "a bas! a bas!" rolled like thunder along the fronts of the houses, as the more strident "tuez! tuez!" drew nearer and nearer, and the lights of the oncoming multitude began to flicker on the shuttered gables, the fortitude of the servants gave way. madame carlat, shivering in every limb, burst into moaning; the tiring-maid, javette, flung herself in terror at mademoiselle's knees, and, writhing herself about them, shrieked to her to save her, only to save her! one of the men moved forward on impulse, as if he would close the shutters; and only old carlat remained silent, praying mutely with moving lips and a stern, set face. and count hannibal? as the glare of the links in the street grew brighter, and ousted the sickly daylight, his form seemed to dilate. he stilled the shrieking woman by a glance. "choose! mademoiselle, and quickly!" he said. "for i can only save my wife and her people! quick, for the pinch is coming, and 'twill be no boy's play." a shot, a scream from the street, a rush of racing feet before the window seconded his words. "quick, mademoiselle!" he cried. and his breath came a little faster. "quick, before it be too late! will you save life, or will you kill!" she looked at her lover with eyes of agony, dumbly questioning him. but he made no sign, and only tavannes marked the look. "monsieur has done what he can to save himself," he said with a sneer. "he has donned the livery of the king's servants; he has said, 'whoever perishes, i will live!' but--" "curse you!" the young man cried, and, stung to madness, he tore the cross from his cap and flung it on the ground. he seized his white sleeve and ripped it from shoulder to elbow. then, when it hung by the string only, he held his hand. "curse you!" he cried furiously. "i will not at your bidding! i may save her yet! i will save her!" "fool!" tavannes answered--but his words were barely audible above the deafening uproar. "can you fight a thousand? look! look!" and seizing the other's wrist he pointed to the window. the street glowed like a furnace in the red light of torches, raised on poles above a sea of heads; an endless sea of heads, and gaping faces, and tossing arms which swept on and on, and on and by. for a while it seemed that the torrent would flow past them and would leave them safe. then came a check, a confused outcry, a surging this way and that; the torches reeled to and fro, and finally with a dull roar of "open! open!" the mob faced about to the house and the lighted window. for a second it seemed that even count hannibal's iron nerves shook a little. he stood between the sullen group that surrounded the disordered table and the maddened rabble, that gloated on the victims before they tore them to pieces. "open! open!" the mob howled: and a man dashed in the window with his pike. in that crisis mademoiselle's eyes met tavannes' for the fraction of a second. she did not speak; nor, had she retained the power to frame the words, would they have been audible. but something she must have looked, and something of import, though no other than he marked or understood it. for in a flash he was at the window and his hand was raised for silence. "back!" he thundered. "back, knaves!" and he whistled shrilly. "do what you will," he continued in the same tone, "but not here! pass on! pass on!--do you hear?" but the crowd were not to be lightly diverted. with a persistence brutal and unquestioning they continued to howl "open! open!" while the man who had broken the window the moment before, jehan, the cripple with the hideous face, seized the lead-work, and tore away a great piece of it. then laying hold of a bar, he tried to drag it out, setting one foot against the wall below. tavannes saw what he did, and his frame seemed to dilate with the fury and violence of his character. "dogs!" he shouted, "must i call out my riders and scatter you? must i flog you through the streets with stirrup-leathers? i am tavannes, beware of me! i have claws and teeth and i bite!" he continued, the scorn in his words exceeding even the rage of the crowd, at which he flung them. "kill where you please, rob where you please, but not where i am! or i will hang you by the heels on montfaucon, man by man! i will flay your backs. go! go! i am tavannes!" but the mob, cowed for a moment by the thunder of his voice, by his arrogance and recklessness, showed at this that their patience was exhausted. with a yell which drowned his tones they swayed forward; a dozen thundered on the door, crying, "in the king's name!" as many more tore out the remainder of the casement, seized the bars of the window, and strove to pull them out or to climb between them. jehan, the cripple, with whom tignonville had rubbed elbows at the rendezvous, led the way. count hannibal watched them a moment, his harsh face bent down to them, his features plain in the glare of the torches. but when the cripple, raised on the others' shoulders, and emboldened by his adversary's inactivity, began to squeeze himself through the bars, tavannes raised a pistol, which he had held unseen behind him, cocked it at leisure, and levelled it at the foul face which leered close to his. the dwarf saw the weapon and tried to retreat; but it was too late. a flash, a scream, and the wretch, shot through the throat, flung up his hands, and fell back into the arms of a lean man in black who had lent him his shoulder to ascend. for a few seconds the smoke of the pistol filled the window and the room. there was a cry that the huguenots were escaping, that the huguenots were resisting, that it was a plot; and some shouted to guard the back and some to watch the roof, and some to be gone. but when the fumes cleared away, the mob saw, with stupor, that all was as it had been. count hannibal stood where he had stood before, a grim smile on his lips. "who comes next!" he cried in a tone of mockery. "i have more pistols!" and then with a sudden change to ferocity, "you dogs!" he went on. "you scum of a filthy city, sweepings of the halles! do you think to beard me? do you think to frighten me or murder me? i am tavannes, and this is my house, and were there a score of huguenots in it, you should not touch one, nor harm a hair of his head! begone, i say again, while you may! seek women and children, and kill them. but not here!" for an instant the mingled scorn and brutality of his words silenced them. then from the rear of the crowd came an answer--the roar of an arquebuse. the ball whizzed past count hannibal's head, and, splashing the plaster from the wall within a pace of tignonville, dropped to the ground. tavannes laughed. "bungler!" he cried. "were you in my troop i would dip your trigger-finger in boiling oil to teach you to shoot! but you weary me, dogs. i must teach you a lesson, must i?" and he lifted a pistol and levelled it. the crowd did not know whether it was the one he had discharged or another, but they gave back with a sharp gasp. "i must teach you, must i?" he continued with scorn. "here bigot, badelon, drive me these blusterers! rid the street of them! a tavannes! a tavannes!" not by word or look had he before this betrayed that he had supports. but as he cried the name, a dozen men armed to the teeth, who had stood motionless under the croix du tiroir, fell in a line on the right flank of the crowd. the surprise for those nearest them was complete. with the flash of the pikes before their eyes, with the cold steel in fancy between their ribs, they fled every way, uncertain how many pursued, or if any pursuit there was. for a moment the mob, which a few minutes before had seemed so formidable that a regiment might have quailed before it, bade fair to be routed by a dozen pikes. and so, had all in the crowd been what he termed them, the rabble and sweepings of the streets, it would have been. but in the heart of it, and felt rather than seen, were a handful of another kidney; sorbonne students and fierce-eyed priests, with three or four mounted archers, the nucleus that, moving through the streets, had drawn together this concourse. and these with threats and curses and gleaming eyes stood fast, even tavannes' dare-devils recoiling before the tonsure. the check thus caused allowed those who had budged a breathing space. they rallied behind the black robes, and began to stone the pikes; who in their turn withdrew until they formed two groups, standing on their defence, the one before the window the other before the door. count hannibal had watched the attack and the check, as a man watches a play; with smiling interest. in the panic, the torches had been dropped or extinguished, and now between the house and the sullen crowd which hung back, yet grew moment by moment more dangerous, the daylight fell cold on the littered street and the cripple's huddled form prone in the gutter. a priest raised on the shoulders of the lean man in black began to harangue the mob, and the dull roar of assent, the brandished arms which greeted his appeal, had their effect on tavannes' men. they looked to the window, and muttered among themselves. it was plain that they had no stomach for a fight with the church, and were anxious for the order to withdraw. but count hannibal gave no order, and, much as his people feared the cowls, they feared him more. meanwhile the speaker's eloquence rose higher; he pointed with frenzied gestures to the house. the mob groaned, and suddenly a volley of stones fell among the pikemen, whose corselets rattled under the shower. the priest seized that moment. he sprang to the ground, and to the front. he caught up his robe and waved his hand, and the rabble, as if impelled by a single will, rolled forward in a huge one-fronted thundering wave, before which the two handfuls of pikemen--afraid to strike, yet afraid to fly--were swept away like straws upon the tide. but against the solid walls and oak-barred door of the house the wave beat, only to fall back again, a broken, seething mass of brandished arms and ravening faces. one point alone was vulnerable, the window, and there in the gap stood tavannes. quick as thought he fired two pistols into the crowd; then, while the smoke for a moment hid all, he whistled. whether the signal was a summons to his men to fight their way back--as they were doing to the best of their power--or he had resources still unseen, was not to be known. for as the smoke began to rise, and while the rabble before the window, cowed by the fall of two of their number, were still pushing backward instead of forward, there rose behind them strange sounds--yells, and the clatter of hoofs, mingled with screams of alarm. a second, and into the loose skirts of the crowd came charging helter-skelter, pell-mell, a score of galloping, shrieking, cursing horsemen, attended by twice as many footmen, who clung to their stirrups or to the tails of the horses, and yelled and whooped, and struck in unison with the maddened riders. "on! on!" the foremost shrieked, rolling in his saddle, and foaming at the mouth. "bleed in august, bleed in may! kill!" and he fired a pistol among the rabble, who fled every way to escape his rearing, plunging charger. "kill! kill!" cried his followers, cutting the air with their swords, and rolling to and fro on their horses in drunken emulation. "bleed in august, bleed in may!" "on! on!" cried the leader, as the crowd which beset the house fled every way before his reckless onset. "bleed in august, bleed in may!" the rabble fled, but not so quickly but that one or two were ridden down, and this for an instant checked the riders. before they could pass on, "ohé!" cried count hannibal from his window. "ohé!" with a shout of laughter, "ride over them, dear brother! make me a clean street for my wedding!" marshal tavannes--for he, the hero of jarnac, was the leader of this wild orgy--turned that way, and strove to rein in his horse. "what ails them?" he cried, as the maddened animal reared upright, its iron hoofs striking fire from the slippery pavement. "they are rearing like thy bayard!" count hannibal answered. "whip them, whip them for me! tavannes! tavannes!" "what? this canaille!" "ay, that canaille!" "who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" the marshal replied, and spurred his horse among the rabble, who had fled to the sides of the street and now strove hard to efface themselves against the walls. "begone, dogs; begone!" he cried, still hunting them. and then, "you would bite, would you?" and snatching another pistol from his boot, he fired it among them, careless whom he hit. "ha! ha! that stirs you, does it!" he continued as the wretches fled headlong. "who touches my brother, touches tavannes! on! on!" suddenly, from a doorway near at hand, a sombre figure darted into the roadway, caught the marshal's rein, and for a second checked his course. the priest--for a priest it was, father pezelay, the same who had addressed the mob--held up a warning hand. "halt!" he cried, with burning eyes. "halt, my lord! it is written, thou shalt not spare the canaanitish woman. 'tis not to spare the king has given command and a sword, but to kill! 'tis not to harbour, but to smite! to smite!" "then smite i will!" the marshal retorted, and with the butt of his pistol struck the zealot down. then, with as much indifference as he would have treated a huguenot, he spurred his horse over him, with a mad laugh at his jest. "who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" he yelled. "touches tavannes! on! on! bleed in august, bleed in may!" "on!" shouted his followers, striking about them in the same desperate fashion. they were young nobles who had spent the night feasting at the palace, and, drunk with wine and mad with excitement, had left the louvre at daybreak to rouse the city. "a jarnac! a jarnac!" they cried, and some saluted count hannibal as they passed. and so, shouting and spurring and following their leader, they swept away down the now empty street, carrying terror and a flame wherever their horses bore them that morning. tavannes, his hands on the ledge of the shattered window, leaned out laughing, and followed them with his eyes. a moment, and the mob was gone, the street was empty; and one by one, with sheepish faces, his pikemen emerged from the doorways and alleys in which they had taken refuge. they gathered about the three huddled forms which lay prone and still in the gutter: or, not three--two. for even as they approached them, one, the priest, rose slowly and giddily to his feet. he turned a face bleeding, lean, and relentless towards the window at which tavannes stood. solemnly, with the sign of the cross, and with uplifted hands, he cursed him in bed and at board, by day and by night, in walking, in riding, in standing, in the day of battle, and at the hour of death. the pikemen fell back appalled, and hid their eyes; and those who were of the north crossed themselves, and those who came from the south bent two fingers horse-shoe fashion. but hannibal de tavannes laughed; laughed in his moustache, his teeth showing, and bade them move that carrion to a distance, for it would smell when the sun was high. then he turned his back on the street, and looked into the room. chapter vii. in the amphitheatre. the movements of the women had overturned two of the candles; a third had guttered out. the three which still burned, contending pallidly with the daylight that each moment grew stronger, imparted to the scene the air of a debauch too long sustained. the disordered board, the wan faces of the servants cowering in their corner, mademoiselle's frozen look of misery, all increased the likeness; which a common exhaustion so far strengthened that when tavannes turned from the window, and, flushed with his triumph, met the others' eyes, his seemed the only vigour, and he the only man in the company. true, beneath the exhaustion, beneath the collapse of his victims, there burned passions, hatreds, repulsions, as fierce as the hidden fires of the volcano; but for the time they smouldered ash-choked and inert. he flung the discharged pistols on the table. "if yonder raven speak truth," he said, "i am like to pay dearly for my wife, and have short time to call her wife. the more need, mademoiselle, for speed, therefore. you know the old saying, 'short signing, long seisin? shall it be my priest, or your minister?" m. de tignonville started forward. "she promised nothing!" he cried. and he struck his hand on the table. count hannibal smiled, his lip curling. "that," he replied, "is for mademoiselle to say." "but if she says it? if she says it, monsieur? what then?" tavannes drew forth a comfit-box, such as it was the fashion of the day to carry, as men of a later time carried a snuff-box. he slowly chose a prune. "if she says it?" he answered. "then m. de tignonville has regained his sweetheart. and m. de tavannes has lost his bride." "you say so!" "yes. but----" "but what?" "but she will not say it," tavannes replied coolly. "why not?" "why not?" "yes, monsieur, why not?" the younger man repeated trembling. "because, m. de tignonville, it is not true." "but she did not speak!" tignonville retorted, with passion--the futile passion of the bird which beats its wings against a cage. "she did not speak. she could not promise, therefore." tavannes ate the prune slowly, seemed to give a little thought to its flavour, approved it a true agen plum, and at last spoke. "it is not for you to say whether she promised," he returned drily, "nor for me. it is for mademoiselle." "you leave it to her?" "i leave it to her to say whether she promised." "then she must say no!" tignonville cried in a tone of triumph and relief. "for she did not speak. mademoiselle, listen!" he continued, turning with outstretched hands and appealing to her with passion. "do you hear? do you understand? you have but to speak to be free! you have but to say the word, and monsieur lets you go! in god's name, speak! speak then, clotilde! oh!" with a gesture of despair, as she did not answer, but continued to sit stony and hopeless, looking straight before her, her hands picking convulsively at the fringe of her girdle. "she does not understand! fright has stunned her! be merciful, monsieur. give her time to recover, to know what she does. fright has turned her brain." count hannibal smiled. "i knew her father and her uncle," he said, "and in their time the vrillacs were not wont to be cowards. monsieur forgets, too," he continued with fine irony, "that he speaks of my betrothed." "it is a lie!" tavannes raised his eyebrows. "you are in my power," he said. "for the rest, if it be a lie, mademoiselle has but to say so." "you hear him?" tignonville cried. "then speak, mademoiselle! clotilde, speak! say you never spoke, you never promised him!" the young man's voice quivered with indignation, with rage, with pain; but most, if the truth be told, with shame--the shame of a position strange and unparalleled. for in proportion as the fear of death instant and violent was lifted from him, reflection awoke, and the situation in which he stood took uglier shape. it was not so much love that cried to her, love that suffered, anguished by the prospect of love lost; as in the highest natures it might have been. rather it was the man's pride which suffered; the pride of a high spirit which found itself helpless between the hammer and the anvil, in a position so false that hereafter men might say of the unfortunate that he had bartered his mistress for his life. he had not! but he had perforce to stand by; he had to be passive under stress of circumstances, and by the sacrifice, if she consummated it, he would in fact be saved. there was the pinch. no wonder that he cried to her in a voice which roused even the servants from their lethargy of fear. "say it!" he cried. "say it, before it be too late. say you did not promise!" slowly she turned her face to him. "i cannot," she whispered; "i cannot. go," she continued, a spasm distorting her features. "go, monsieur. leave me. it is over." "what?" he exclaimed. "you promised him?" she bowed her head. "then," the young man cried, in a transport of resentment, "i will be no part of the price. see! there! and there!" he tore the white sleeve wholly from his arm, and, rending it in twain, flung it on the floor and trampled on it. "it shall never be said that i stood by and let you buy my life! i go into the street and i take my chance." and he turned to the door. but tavannes was before him. "no!" he said; "you will stay here, m. de tignonville!" and he set his back against the door. the young man looked at him, his face convulsed with passion. "i shall stay here?" he cried. "and why, monsieur? what is it to you if i choose to perish?" "only this," tavannes retorted. "i am answerable to mademoiselle now, in an hour i shall be answerable to my wife--for your life. live, then, monsieur; you have no choice. in a month you will thank me--and her." "i am your prisoner?" "precisely." "and i must stay here--to be tortured?" tignonville cried. count hannibal's eyes sparkled. sudden stormy changes, from indifference to ferocity, from irony to invective, were characteristic of the man. "tortured!" he repeated grimly. "you talk of torture while piles and pardaillan, teligny and rochefoucauld lie dead in the street! while your cause sinks withered in a night, like a gourd! while your servants fall butchered, and france rises round you in a tide of blood! bah!"--with a gesture of disdain--"you make me also talk, and i have no love for talk, and small time. mademoiselle, you at least act and do not talk. by your leave i return in an hour, and i bring with me--shall it be my priest, or your minister?" she looked at him with the face of one who awakes slowly to the full horror, the full dread, of her position. for a moment she did not answer. then, "a minister," she murmured, her voice scarcely audible. he nodded. "a minister?" he said lightly. "very well, if i can find one." and walking to the shattered, gaping casement--through which the cool morning air blew into the room and gently stirred the hair of the unhappy girl--he said some words to the man on guard outside. then he turned to the door, but on the threshold he paused, looked with a strange expression at the pair, and signed to carlat and the servants to go out before him. "up, and lie close above!" he growled. "open a window or look out, and you will pay dearly for it! do you hear? up! up! you, too, old crop-ears. what! would you?"--with a sudden glare as carlat hesitated--"that is better! mademoiselle, until my return." he saw them all out, followed them, and closed the door on the two; who, left together, alone with the gaping window and the disordered feast, maintained a strange silence. the girl, gripping one hand in the other as if to quell her rising horror, sat looking before her, and seemed barely to breathe. the man, leaning against the wall at a little distance, bent his eyes not on her, but on the floor, his face gloomy and distorted. his first thought should have been of her and for her; his first impulse to console, if he could not save her. his it should have been to soften, were that possible, the fate before her; to prove to her by words of farewell, the purest and most sacred, that the sacrifice she was making, not to save her own life but the lives of others, was appreciated by him who paid with her the price. and all these things, and more, may have been in m. de tignonville's mind; they may even have been uppermost in it, but they found no expression. the man remained sunk in a sombre reverie. he had the appearance of thinking of himself, not of her; of his own position, not of hers. otherwise he must have looked at her, he must have turned to her; he must have owned the subtle attraction of her unspoken appeal when she drew a deep breath and slowly turned her eyes on him, mute, asking, waiting what he should offer. surely he should have! yet it was long before he responded. he sat buried in thought of himself, and his position, the vile, the unworthy position in which her act had placed him. at length the constraint of her gaze wrought on him, or his thoughts became unbearable, and he looked up and met her eyes, and with an oath he sprang to his feet. "it shall not be!" he cried, in a tone low, but full of fury. "you shall not do it! i will kill him first! i will kill him with this hand! or----" a step took him to the window, a step brought him back--ay, brought him back exultant, and with a changed face. "or better, we will thwart him yet. see, mademoiselle, do you see? heaven is merciful! for a moment the cage is open!" his eyes shone with excitement, the sweat of sudden hope stood on his brow as he pointed to the unguarded casement. "come! it is our one chance!" and he caught her by her arm, and strove to draw her to the window. but she hung back, staring at him. "oh, no, no!" she cried. "yes, yes! i say!" he responded. "you do not understand. the way is open! we can escape, clotilde, we can escape!" "i cannot! i cannot!" she wailed, still resisting him. "you are afraid?" "afraid?" she repeated the word in a tone of wonder. "no, but i cannot. i promised him. i cannot. and, o god!" she continued, in a sudden outburst of grief, as the sense of general loss, of the great common tragedy broke on her and whelmed for the moment her private misery. "why should we think of ourselves? they are dead, they are dying, who were ours, whom we loved! why should we think to live? what does it matter how it fares with us? we cannot be happy. happy?" she continued wildly. "are any happy now? or is the world all changed in a night? no, we could not be happy. and at least you will live, tignonville. i have that to console me." "live!" he responded vehemently. "i live? i would rather die a thousand times. a thousand times rather than live shamed! than see you sacrificed to that devil! than go out with a brand on my brow, for every man to point at me! i would rather die a thousand times!" "and do you think that i would not?" she answered, shivering. "better, far better die than--than live with him!" "then why not die?" she stared at him, wide-eyed, and a sudden stillness possessed her. "how?" she whispered. "what do you mean?" "that!" he said. as he spoke, he raised his hand and signed to her to listen. a sullen murmur, distant as yet, but borne to the ear on the fresh morning air, foretold the rising of another storm. the sound grew in intensity, even while she listened; and yet for a moment she misunderstood him. "o god!" she cried, out of the agony of nerves overwrought, "will that bell never stop? will it never stop? will no one stop it?" "'tis not the bell!" he cried, seizing her hand as if to focus her attention. "it is the mob you hear. they are returning. we have but to stand a moment at this open window, we have but to show ourselves to them, and we need live no longer! mademoiselle! clotilde!--if you mean what you say, if you are in earnest, the way is open!" "and we shall die--together!" "yes, together. but have you the courage?" "the courage!" she cried, a brave smile lighting the whiteness of her face. "the courage were needed to live. the courage were needed to do that. i am ready, quite ready. it can be no sin! to live with that in front of me were the sin! come!" for the moment she had forgotten her people, her promise, all! it seemed to her that death would absolve her from all. "come!" he moved with her under the impulse of her hand until they stood at the gaping window. the murmur, which he had heard indistinctly a moment before, had grown to a roar of voices. the mob, on its return eastward along the rue st. honoré, was nearing the house. he stood, his arm supporting her, and they waited, a little within the window. suddenly he stooped, his face hardly less white than hers; their eyes met, and he would have kissed her. she did not withdraw from his arm, but she drew back her face, her eyes half shut. "no!" she murmured. "no! while i live i am his. but we die together, tignonville! we die together. it will not last long, will it? and afterwards----" she did not finish the sentence, but her lips moved in prayer, and over her features came a far-away look; such a look as that which on the face of another huguenot lady, philippine de luns--vilely done to death in the place maubert fourteen years before--silenced the ribald jests of the lowest rabble in the world. an hour or two earlier, awed by the abruptness of the outburst, mademoiselle had shrunk from her fate; she had known fear. now that she stood out voluntarily to meet it, she, like many a woman before and since, feared no longer. she was lifted out of and above herself. but death was long in coming. some cause beyond their knowledge stayed the onrush of the mob along the street. the din, indeed, persisted, deafened, shook them; but the crowd seemed to be at a stand a few doors down the rue st. honoré. for a half-minute, a long half-minute, which appeared an age, it drew no nearer. would it draw nearer? would it come on? or would it turn again? the doubt, so much worse than despair, began to sap that courage of the man which is always better fitted to do than to suffer. the sweat rose on tignonville's brow as he stood listening, his arm round the girl--as he stood listening and waiting. it is possible that when he had said a minute or two earlier that he would rather die a thousand times than live thus shamed, he had spoken beyond the mark. or it is possible that he had meant his words to the full. but in this case he had not pictured what was to come, he had not gauged correctly his power of passive endurance. he was as brave as the ordinary man, as the ordinary soldier; but martyrdom, the apotheosis of resignation, comes more naturally to women than to men, more hardly to men than to women. yet had the crisis come quickly he might have met it. but he had to wait, and to wait with that howling of wild beasts in his ears; and for this he was not prepared. a woman might be content to die after this fashion; but a man? his colour went and came, his eyes began to rove hither and thither. was it even now too late to escape? too late to avoid the consequences of the girl's silly persistence? too late to----? her eyes were closed, she hung half lifeless on his arm. she would not know, she need not know until afterwards. and afterwards she would thank him! afterwards--meantime the window was open, the street was empty, and still the crowd hung back and did not come. he remembered that two doors away was a narrow passage, which leaving the rue st. honoré turned at right angles under a beetling archway, to emerge in the rue du roule. if he could gain that passage unseen by the mob! he would gain it. with a swift movement, his mind made up, he took a step forward. he tightened his grasp of the girl's waist, and, seizing with his left hand the end of the bar which the assailants had torn from its setting in the window jamb, he turned to lower himself. one long step would land him in the street. at that moment she awoke from the stupor of exaltation. she opened her eyes with a startled movement; and her eyes met his. he was in the act of stepping backwards and downwards, dragging her after him. but it was not this betrayed him. it was his face, which in an instant told her all, and that he sought not death, but life! she struggled upright and strove to free herself. but he had the purchase of the bar, and by this time he was furious as well as determined. whether she would or no, he would save her, he would drag her out. then, as consciousness fully returned, she, too, took fire. "no!" she cried, "i will not!" and she struggled more violently. "you shall!" he retorted between his teeth. "you shall not perish here." but she had her hands free, and as he spoke she thrust him from her passionately, desperately, with all her strength. he had his one foot in the air at the moment, and in a flash it was done. with a cry of rage he lost his balance, and, still holding the bar, reeled backwards through the window; while mademoiselle, panting and half fainting, recoiled--recoiled into the arms of hannibal de tavannes, who, unseen by either, had entered the room a long minute before. from the threshold, and with a smile, all his own, he had watched the contest and the result. chapter viii. two hens and an egg. m. de tignonville was shaken by the fall, and in the usual course of things he would have lain where he was, and groaned. but when a man has once turned his back on death he is apt to fancy it at his shoulder. he has small stomach for surprises, and is in haste to set as great a distance as possible between the ugly thing and himself. so it was with the huguenot. shot suddenly into the full publicity of the street, he knew that at any instant danger might take him by the nape; and he was on his legs and glancing up and down before the clatter of his fall had travelled the length of three houses. the rabble were still a hundred paces away, piled up and pressed about a house where men were being hunted as men hunt rats. he saw that he was unnoted, and apprehension gave place to rage. his thoughts turned back hissing hot to the thing that had happened, and in a paroxysm of shame he shook his fist at the gaping casement and the sneering face of his rival, dimly seen in the background. if a look would have killed tavannes--and her--it had not been wanting. for it was not only the man m. de tignonville hated at this moment; he hated mademoiselle also, the unwitting agent of the other's triumph. she had thrust him from her; she had refused to be guided by him; she had resisted, thwarted, shamed him. then let her take the consequences. she willed to perish: let her perish! he did not acknowledge even to himself the real cause of offence, the proof to which she had put his courage, and the failure of that courage to stand the test. yet it was this, though he had himself provoked the trial, which burned up his chivalry, as the smuggler's fire burns up the dwarf heath upon the landes. it was the discovery that in an heroic hour he was no hero that gave force to his passionate gesture, and next moment sent him storming down the beetling passage to the rue du roule, his heart a maelstrom of fierce vows and fiercer menaces. he had reached the further end of the alley and was on the point of entering the street before he remembered that he had nowhere to go. his lodgings were no longer his, since his landlord knew him to be a huguenot, and would doubtless betray him. to approach those of his faith whom he had frequented was to expose them to danger; and, beyond the religion, he had few acquaintances and those of the newest. yet the streets were impossible. he walked them on the utmost edge of peril; he lurked in them under the blade of an impending axe. and, whether he walked or lurked, he went at the mercy of the first comers bold enough to take his life. the sweat stood on his brow as he paused under the low arch of the alley-end, tasting the bitter forlornness of the dog banned and set for death in that sunlit city. in every window of the gable end which faced his hiding-place he fancied an eye watching his movements; in every distant step he heard the footfall of doom coming that way to his discovery. and while he trembled, he had to reflect, to think, to form some plan. in the town was no place for him, and short of the open country no safety. and how could he gain the open country? if he succeeded in reaching one of the gates--st. antoine, or st. denis, in itself a task of difficulty--it would only be to find the gate closed, and the guard on the alert. at last it flashed on him that he might cross the river; and at the notion hope awoke. it was possible that the massacre had not extended to the southern suburb; possible, that if it had, the huguenots who lay there--frontenay, and montgomery, and chartres, with the men of the north--might be strong enough to check it, and even to turn the tables on the parisians. his colour returned. he was no coward, as soldiers go; if it came to fighting he had courage enough. he could not hope to cross the river by the bridge, for there, where the goldsmiths lived, the mob were like to be most busy. but if he could reach the bank he might procure a boat at some deserted point, or, at the worst, he might swim across. from the louvre at his back came the sound of gun-shots; from every quarter the murmur of distant crowds, or the faint lamentable cries of victims. but the empty street before him promised an easy passage, and he ventured into it and passed quickly through it. he met no one, and no one molested him; but as he went he had glimpses of pale faces that from behind the casements watched him come and turned to watch him go; and so heavy on his nerves was the pressure of this silent ominous attention, that he blundered at the end of the street. he should have taken the southerly turning; instead he held on, found himself in the rue ferronerie, and a moment later was all but in the arms of a band of city guards, who were making a house-to-house visitation. he owed his safety rather to the condition of the street than to his presence of mind. the rue ferronerie, narrow in itself, was so choked at this date by stalls and bulkheads, that an edict directing the removal of those which abutted on the cemetery had been issued a little before. nothing had been done on it, however, and this neck of paris, this main thoroughfare between the east and the west, between the fashionable quarter of the marais and the fashionable quarter of the louvre, was still a devious huddle of sheds and pent-houses. tignonville slid behind one of these, found that it masked the mouth of an alley, and, heedless whither the passage led, ran hurriedly along it. every instant he expected to hear the hue and cry behind him, and he did not halt or draw breath until he had left the soldiers far in the rear, and found himself astray at the junction of four noisome lanes, over two of which the projecting gables fairly met. above the two others a scrap of sky appeared, but this was too small to indicate in which direction the river lay. tignonville hesitated, but not for long; a burst of voices heralded a new danger, and he shrank into a doorway. along one of the lanes a troop of children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping round something which they dragged by a string. now one of the hindmost would hurl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go, or whose turn it was to pull and whose to follow. at last they started afresh with a whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of the air. their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward, and lingered like a thing of life. but it was no thing of life, as tignonville saw with a shudder when they passed him. the object of their sport was the naked body of a child, an infant! his gorge rose at the sight. fear such as he had not before experienced chilled his marrow. this was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong man quailed; the hate of which mademoiselle had spoken when she said that the babes crossed themselves, at her passing, and the houses tottered to fall upon her! he paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him; and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed on him. instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the back of a house, which looked another way. the outer gates of an arched doorway were open, and a loaded hay-cart, touching either side and brushing the arch above, blocked the passage. his gaze, leaving the windows, dropped to this, he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he stiffened. between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant, then vanished. tignonville stared. at first he thought his eyes had tricked him. then the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable invitation. it is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive has aught to fear, and tignonville, after casting a glance down the lane--which revealed a single man standing with his face the other way--slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall. he coughed. a voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the act, and aided him. in a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed between the hay and the roof of the arch. beside him lay a man whose features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern. but the man knew him and whispered his name. "you know me?" tignonville muttered in astonishment. "i marked you, m. de tignonville, at the preaching last sunday," the stranger answered placidly. "you were there?" "i preached." "then you are m. la tribe!" "i am," the clergyman answered quietly. "they seized me on my threshold, but i left my cloak in their hands and fled. one tore my stocking with his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured. they hunted me to the end of the next street, but i lived and still live, and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city." the sympathy between the huguenot by faith and the huguenot by politics was imperfect. tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger generation, was a huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. he felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer. "i wish i felt as sure!" he muttered bluntly. "you know that all our people are dead?" "he can save by few or by many," the preacher answered devoutly. "we are of the few, blessed be god, and shall see israel victorious, and our people as a flock of sheep!" "i see small chance of it," tignonville answered contemptuously. "i know it as certainly as i knew before you came, m. de tignonville, that you would come!" "that i should come?" "that some one would come," la tribe answered, correcting himself. "i knew not who it would be until you appeared and placed yourself in the doorway over against me, even as obadiah in the holy book passed before the hiding-place of elijah." the two lay on their faces side by side, the rafters of the archway low on their heads. tignonville lifted himself a little, and peered anew at the other. he fancied that la tribe's mind, shaken by the horrors of the morning and his narrow escape, had given way. "you rave, man," he said. "this is no time for visions." "i said naught of visions," the other answered. "then why so sure that we shall escape?" "i am certified of it," la tribe replied. "and more than that, i know that we shall lie here some days. the time has not been revealed to me, but it will be days and a day. then we shall leave this place unharmed, as we entered it, and, whatever betide others, we shall live." tignonville shrugged his shoulders. "i tell you, you rave, m. la tribe," he said petulantly. "at any moment we may be discovered. even now i hear footsteps." "they tracked me well-nigh to this place," the minister answered placidly. "the deuce they did!" tignonville muttered, with irritation. he dared not raise his voice. "i would you had told me that before i joined you, monsieur, and i had found some safer hiding-place! when we are discovered----" "then," the other continued calmly, "you will see." "in any case we shall be better farther back," tignonville retorted. "here, we are within an ace of being seen from the lane." and he began to wriggle himself backwards. the minister laid his hand on him. "have a care!" he muttered. "and do not move, but listen. and you will understand. when i reached this place--it would be about five o'clock this morning--breathless, and expecting each minute to be dragged forth to make my confession before men, i despaired as you despair now. like elijah under the juniper tree, i said 'it is enough, o lord! take my soul also, for i am no better than my fellows!' all the sky was black before my eyes, and my ears were filled with the wailings of the little ones and the lamentations of women. 'o lord, it is enough,' i prayed. 'take my soul, or, if it be thy will, then, as the angel was sent to take the cakes to elijah, give me also a sign that i shall live.'" for a moment he paused, struggling with overpowering emotion. even his impatient listener, hitherto incredulous, caught the infection, and in a tone of awe murmured, "yes? and then, m. la tribe!" "the sign was given me. the words were scarcely out of my mouth when a hen flew up, and, scratching a nest in the hay at my feet, presently laid an egg." tignonville stared. "it was timely, i admit," he said. "but it is no uncommon thing. probably it has its nest here and lays daily." "young man, this is new-mown hay," the minister answered solemnly. "this cart was brought here no further back than yesterday. it smells of the meadow, and the flowers hold their colour. no, the fowl was sent. to-morrow it will return, and the next, and the next, until the plague be stayed and i go hence. but that is not all. a while later a second hen appeared, and i thought it would lay in the same nest. but it made a new one, on the side on which you lie and not far from your foot. then i knew that i was to have a companion, and that god had laid also for him a table in the wilderness." "it did lay, then?" "it is still on the nest, beside your foot." tignonville was about to reply when the preacher grasped his arm and by a sign enjoined silence. he did so not a moment too soon. preoccupied by the story, narrator and listener had paid no heed to what was passing in the lane, and the voices of men speaking close at hand took them by surprise. from the first words which reached them, it was clear that the speakers were the same who had chased la tribe as far as the meeting of the four ways, and, losing him there, had spent the morning in other business. now they had returned to hunt him down, and but for a wrangle which arose among them and detained them, they had stolen on their quarry before their coming was suspected. "'twas this way he ran!" "no, 'twas the other!" they contended; and their words, winged with vile threats and oaths, grew noisy and hot. the two listeners dared scarcely to breathe. the danger was so near, it was so certain that if the men came three paces farther, they would observe and search the hay-cart, that tignonville fancied the steel already at his throat. he felt the hay rustle under his slightest movement, and gripped one hand with the other to restrain the tremor of overpowering excitement. yet when he glanced at the minister he found him unmoved, a smile on his face. and m. de tignonville could have cursed him for his folly. for the men were coming on! an instant, and they perceived the cart, and the ruffian who had advised this route pounced on it in triumph. "there! did i not say so?" he cried. "he is curled up in that hay, for the satan's grub he is! that is where he is, see you!" "maybe," another answered grudgingly, as they gathered before it. "and maybe not, simon!" "to hell with your maybe not!" the first replied. and he drove his pike deep into the hay and turned it viciously. the two on the top controlled themselves. tignonville's face was livid; of himself he would have slid down amongst them and taken his chance, preferring to die fighting, to die in the open, rather than to perish like a rat in a stack. but la tribe had gripped his arm and held him fast. the man whom the others called simon thrust again, but too low and without result. he was for trying a third time, when one of his comrades who had gone to the other side of the lane announced that the men were on the top of the hay. "can you see them!" "no, but there's room and to spare." "oh, a curse on your room!" simon retorted. "well, you can look." "if that's all, i'll soon look!" was the answer. and the rogue, forcing himself between the hay and the side of the gateway, found the wheel of the cart, and began to raise himself on it. tignonville, who lay on that hand, heard, though he could not see his movements. he knew what they meant, he knew that in a twinkling he must be discovered; and with a last prayer he gathered himself for a spring. it seemed an age before the intruder's head appeared on a level with the hay; and then the alarm came from another quarter. the hen which had made its nest at tignonville's feet, disturbed by the movement or by the newcomer's hand, flew out with a rush and flutter as of a great firework. upsetting the startled simon, who slipped swearing to the ground, it swooped scolding and clucking over the heads of the other men, and reaching the street in safety scuttled off at speed, its outspread wings sweeping the earth in its rage. they laughed uproariously as simon emerged, rubbing his elbow. "there's for you! there's your preacher!" his opponent jeered. "d----n her! she gives tongue as fast as any of them!" gibed a second. "will you try again, simon? you may find another love-letter there!" "have done!" a third cried impatiently. "he'll not be where the hen is! let's back! let's back! i said before that it wasn't this way he turned! he's made for the river." "the plague in his vitals!" simon replied furiously. "wherever he is, i'll find him!" and reluctant to confess himself wrong, he lingered, casting vengeful glances at the hay. but one of the other men cursed him for a fool; and presently, forced to accept his defeat or be left alone, he rejoined his fellows. slowly the footsteps and voices receded along the lane; slowly, until silence swallowed them, and on the quivering strained senses of the two who remained behind, descended the gentle influence of twilight and the sweet scent of the new-mown hay on which they lay. la tribe turned to his companion, his eyes shining. "our soul is escaped," he murmured, "even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. the snare is broken and we are delivered!" his voice shook as he whispered the ancient words of triumph. but when they came to look in the nest at tignonville's feet there was no egg! chapter ix. unstable. and that troubled m. la tribe no little, although he did not impart his thoughts to his companion. instead they talked in whispers of the things which had happened; of the admiral, of teligny, whom all loved, of rochefoucauld the accomplished, the king's friend; of the princes in the louvre whom they gave up for lost, and of the huguenot nobles on the farther side of the river, of whose safety there seemed some hope. tignonville--he best knew why--said nothing of the fate of his betrothed, or of his own adventures in that connection. but each told the other how the alarm had reached him, and painted in broken words his reluctance to believe in treachery so black. thence they passed to the future of the cause, and of that took views as opposite as light and darkness, as papegot and huguenot. the one was confident, the other in despair. and some time in the afternoon, worn out by the awful experiences of the last twelve hours, they fell asleep, their heads on their arms, the hay tickling their faces; and, with death stalking the lane beside them, slept soundly until after sundown. when they awoke hunger awoke with them, and urged on la tribe's mind the question of the missing egg. it was not altogether the prick of appetite which troubled him, but regarding the hiding-place in which they lay as an ark of refuge providentially supplied, protected and victualled, he could not refrain from asking reverently what the deficiency meant. it was not as if one hen only had appeared; as if no farther prospect had been extended. but up to a certain point the message was clear. then when the hand of providence had shown itself most plainly, and in a manner to melt the heart with awe and thankfulness, the message had been blurred. seriously the huguenot asked himself what it portended. to tignonville, if he thought of it at all, the matter was the matter of an egg, and stopped there. an egg might alleviate the growing pangs of hunger; its non-appearance was a disappointment, but he traced the matter no farther. it must be confessed that the hay-cart was to him only a hay-cart--and not an ark; and the sooner he was safely away from it the better he would be pleased. while la tribe, lying snug and warm beside him, thanked god for a lot so different from that of such of his fellows as had escaped--whom he pictured crouching in dank cellars, or on roof-trees exposed to the heat by day and the dews by night--the young man grew more and more restive. hunger pricked him, and the meanness of the part he had played moved him to action. about midnight, resisting the dissuasions of his companion, he would have sallied out in search of food if the passage of a turbulent crowd had not warned him that the work of murder was still proceeding. he curbed himself after that and lay until daylight. but, ill content with his own conduct, on fire when he thought of his betrothed, he was in no temper to bear hardship cheerfully or long; and gradually there rose before his mind the picture of madame st. lo's smiling face, and the fair hair which curled low on the white of her neck. he would, and he would not. death that had stalked so near him preached its solemn sermon. but death and pleasure are never far apart; and at no time and nowhere have they jostled one another more familiarly than in that age, wherever the influence of italy and italian art and italian hopelessness extended. again, on the one side, la tribe's example went for something with his comrade in misfortune; but in the other scale hung relief from discomfort, with the prospect of a woman's smiles and a woman's flatteries, of dainty dishes, luxury, and passion. if he went now, he went to her from the jaws of death, with the glamour of adventure and peril about him; and the very going into her presence was a lure. moreover, if he had been willing while his betrothed was still his, why not now when he had lost her? it was this last reflection--and one other thing which came on a sudden into his mind--which turned the scale. about noon he sat up in the hay, and, abruptly and sullenly, "i'll lie here no longer," he said; and he dropped his legs over the side. "i shall go." the movement was so unexpected that la tribe stared at him in silence. then, "you will run a great risk, m. de tignonville," he said gravely, "if you do. you may go as far under cover of night as the river, or you may reach one of the gates. but as to crossing the one or passing the other, i reckon it a thing impossible." "i shall not wait until night," tignonville answered curtly, a ring of defiance in his tone. "i shall go now! i'll lie here no longer!" "now?" "yes, now." "you will be mad if you do," the other replied. he thought it the petulant outcry of youth tired of inaction; a protest, and nothing more. he was speedily undeceived. "mad or not, i am going!" tignonville retorted. and he slid to the ground, and from the covert of the hanging fringe of hay looked warily up and down the lane. "it is clear, i think," he said. "good-bye." and with no more, without one upward glance or a gesture of the hand, with no further adieu or word of gratitude, he walked out into the lane, turned briskly to the left, and vanished. the minister uttered a cry of astonishment, and made as if he would descend also. "come back, sir!" he called, as loudly as he dared. "m. de tignonville, come back! this is folly or worse!" but m. de tignonville was gone. la tribe listened a while, unable to believe it, and still expecting his return. at last, hearing nothing, he slid, greatly excited, to the ground and looked out. it was not until he had peered up and down the lane and made sure that it was empty that he could persuade himself that the other had gone for good. then he climbed slowly and seriously to his place again, and sighed as he settled himself. "unstable as water thou shalt not excel!" he muttered. "now i know why there was only one egg." meanwhile tignonville, after putting a hundred yards between himself and his bedfellow, plunged into the first dark entry which presented itself. hurriedly, and with a frowning face, he cut off his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist; and this act, by disclosing his linen, put him in possession of the white sleeve which he had once involuntarily donned, and once discarded. the white cross on the cap he could not assume, for he was bareheaded. but he had little doubt that the sleeve would suffice, and with a bold demeanour he made his way northward until he reached again the rue ferronerie. excited groups were wandering up and down the street, and, fearing to traverse its crowded narrows, he went by lanes parallel with it as far as the rue st. denis, which he crossed. everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible. near the rue des lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. a little further on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair. to obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards--but god knows how long afterwards--a passer-by, more pitiful than his fellows, had put her out of her misery with a spit, which still remained plunged in her body. m. de tignonville shuddered at the sight, and at others like it. he loathed the symbol he wore, and himself for wearing it; and more than once his better nature bade him return and play the nobler part. once he did turn with that intention. but he had set his mind on comfort and pleasure, and the value of these things is raised, not lowered, by danger and uncertainty. quickly his stoicism oozed away; he turned again. barely avoiding the rush of a crowd of wretches who were bearing a swooning victim to the river, he hurried through the rue des lombards and reached in safety the house beside the "golden maid." he had no doubt now on which side of the "maid" madame st. lo lived; the house was plain before him. he had only to knock. but in proportion as he approached his haven, his anxiety grew. to lose all, with all in his grasp, to fail upon the threshold, was a thing which bore no looking at; and it was with a nervous hand and eyes cast fearfully behind him that he plied the heavy iron knocker which adorned the door. he could not turn his gaze from a knot of ruffians, who were gathered under one of the tottering gables on the farther side of the street. they seemed to be watching him, and he fancied--though the distance rendered this impossible--that he could see suspicion growing in their eyes. at any moment they might cross the roadway, they might approach, they might challenge him. and at the thought he knocked and knocked again. why did not the porter come? ay, why? for now a score of contingencies came into the young man's mind and tortured him. had madame st. lo withdrawn to safer quarters and closed the house? or, good catholic as she was, had she given way to panic, and determined to open to no one? or was she ill? or had she perished in the general disorder? or---- and then, even as the men began to slink towards him, his heart leapt. he heard a footstep heavy and slow move through the house. it came nearer and nearer. a moment, and an iron-grated judas-hole in the door slid open, and a servant, an elderly man, sleek and respectable, looked out at him. tignonville could scarcely speak for excitement. "madame st. lo?" he muttered tremulously. "i come to her from her cousin the comte de tavannes. quick! quick! if you please. open to me!" "monsieur is alone?" "yes! yes!" the man nodded gravely and slid back the bolts. he allowed m. de tignonville to enter, then with care he secured the door, and led the way across a small square court, paved with red tiles and enclosed by the house, but open above to the sunshine and the blue sky. a gallery which ran round the upper floor looked on this court, in which a great quiet reigned, broken only by the music of a fountain. a vine climbed on the wooden pillars which supported the gallery, and, aspiring higher, embraced the wide carved eaves, and even tapestried with green the three gables that on each side of the court broke the sky-line. the grapes hung nearly ripe, and amid their clusters and the green lattice of their foliage tignonville's gaze sought eagerly but in vain the laughing eyes and piquant face of his new mistress. for with the closing of the door, and the passing from him of the horrors of the streets, he had entered, as by magic, a new and smiling world; a world of tennis and roses, of tinkling voices and women's wiles, a world which smacked of florence and the south, and love and life; a world which his late experiences had set so far away from him, his memory of it seemed a dream. now, as he drank in its stillness and its fragrance, as he felt its safety and its luxury lap him round once more, he sighed. and with that breath he rid himself of much. the servant led him to a parlour, a cool shady room on the farther side of the tiny quadrangle, and, muttering something inaudible, withdrew. a moment later a frolicsome laugh, and the light flutter of a woman's skirt as she tripped across the court, brought the blood to his cheeks. he went a step nearer to the door, and his eyes grew bright. chapter x. madame st. lo. so far excitement had supported tignonville in his escape. it was only when he knew himself safe, when he heard madame st. lo's footstep in the courtyard and knew that in a moment he would see her, that he knew also that he was failing for want of food. the room seemed to go round with him; the window to shift, the light to flicker. and then again, with equal abruptness, he grew strong and steady and perfectly master of himself. nay, never had he felt a confidence in himself so overwhelming or a capacity so complete. the triumph of that which he had done, the knowledge that of so many he, almost alone, had escaped, filled his brain with a delicious and intoxicating vanity. when the door opened, and madame st. lo appeared on the threshold, he advanced holding out his arms. he expected that she would fall into them. but madame only backed and curtseyed, a mischievous light in her eyes. "a thousand thanks, monsieur!" she said, "but you are more ready than i!" and she remained by the door. "i have come to you through all!" he cried, speaking loudly because of a humming in his ears. "they are lying in the streets! they are dying, are dead, are hunted, are pursued, are perishing! but i have come through all to you!" she curtseyed anew. "so i see, monsieur!" she answered. "i am nattered!" but she did not advance, and gradually, light-headed as he was, he began to see that she looked at him with an odd closeness. and he took offence. "i say, madame, i have come to you!" he repeated. "and you do not seem pleased!" she came forward a step and looked at him still more oddly. "oh, yes," she said. "i am pleased, m. de tignonville. it is what i intended. but tell me how you have fared. you are not hurt?" "not a hair!" he cried boastfully. and he told her in a dozen windy sentences of the adventure of the hay-cart and his narrow escape. he wound up with a foolish meaningless laugh. "then you have not eaten for thirty-six hours?" she said. and when he did not answer, "i understand," she continued, nodding and speaking as to a child. and she rang a silver handbell and gave an order. she addressed the servant in her usual tone, but to tignonville's ear her voice seemed to fall to a whisper. her figure--she was small and fairy-like--began to sway before him; and then in a moment, as it seemed to him, she was gone, and he was seated at a table, his trembling fingers grasping a cup of wine which the elderly servant who had admitted him was holding to his lips. on the table before him were a spit of partridges and a cake of white bread. when he had swallowed a second mouthful of wine--which cleared his eyes as by magic--the man urged him to eat. and he fell to with an appetite that grew as he ate. by and by, feeling himself again, he became aware that two of madame's women were peering at him through the open doorway. he looked that way and they fled giggling into the court; but in a moment they were back again, and the sound of their tittering drew his eyes anew to the door. it was the custom of the day for ladies of rank to wait on their favourites at table; and he wondered if madame were with them, and why she did not come and serve him herself. but for a while longer the savour of the roasted game took up the major part of his thoughts; and when prudence warned him to desist, and he sat back, satisfied after his long fast, he was in no mood to be critical. perhaps--for somewhere in the house he heard a lute--madame was entertaining those whom she could not leave? or deluding some who might betray him if they discovered him? from that his mind turned back to the streets and the horrors through which he had passed; but for a moment and no more. a shudder, an emotion of prayerful pity, and he recalled his thoughts. in the quiet of the cool room, looking on the sunny, vine-clad court, with the tinkle of the lute and the murmurous sound of women's voices in his ears, it was hard to believe that the things from which he had emerged were real. it was still more unpleasant, and as futile, to dwell on them. a day of reckoning would come, and, if la tribe were right, the cause would rally, bristling with pikes and snorting with war-horses, and the blood spilled in this wicked city would cry aloud for vengeance. but the hour was not yet. he had lost his mistress, and for that atonement must be exacted. but in the present another mistress awaited him, and as a man could only die once, and might die at any minute, so he could only live once and in the present. then _vogue la galère!_ as he roused himself from this brief reverie and fell to wondering how long he was to be left to himself, a rosebud tossed by an unseen hand struck him on the breast and dropped to his knees. to seize it and kiss it gallantly, to spring to his feet and look about him were instinctive movements. but he could see no one; and, in the hope of surprising the giver, he stole to the window. the sound of the lute and the distant tinkle of laughter persisted. the court, save for a page, who lay asleep on a bench in the gallery, was empty. tignonville scanned the boy suspiciously; a male disguise was often adopted by the court ladies, and if madame would play a prank on him, this was a thing to be reckoned with. but a boy it seemed to be, and after a while the young man went back to his seat. even as he sat down, a second flower struck him more sharply in the face, and this time he darted not to the window but to the door. he opened it quickly and looked out, but again he was too late. "i shall catch you presently, _ma reine!_" he murmured tenderly, with intent to be heard. and he closed the door. but, wiser this time, he waited with his hand on the latch until he heard the rustling of a skirt, and saw the line of light at the foot of the door darkened by a shadow. that moment he flung the door wide, and, clasping the wearer of the skirt in his arms, kissed her lips before she had time to resist. then he fell back as if he had been shot! for the wearer of the skirt, she whom he had kissed, was madame st. lo's woman, and behind her stood madame herself, laughing, laughing, laughing with all the gay abandonment of her light little heart. "oh, the gallant gentleman!" she cried, and clapped her hands effusively. "was ever recovery so rapid? or triumph so speedy? suzanne, my child, you surpass venus. your charms conquer before they are seen!" m. de tignonville had put poor suzanne from him as if she burned; and hot and embarrassed, cursing his haste, he stood looking awkwardly at them. "madame," he stammered at last, "you know quite well that i----" "seeing is believing!" "that i thought it was you!" "oh, what i have lost!" she replied. and she looked archly at suzanne, who giggled and tossed her head. he was growing angry. "but, madame," he protested, "you know----" "i know what i know, and i have seen what i have seen!" madame answered merrily. and she hummed, "ce fut le plus grand jour d'este que m'embrassa la belle suzanne! "oh, yes, i know what i know!" she repeated. and she fell again to laughing immoderately; while the pretty piece of mischief beside her hung her head, and, putting a finger in her mouth, mocked him with an affectation of modesty. the young man glowered at them between rage and embarrassment. this was not the reception, nor this the hero's return to which he had looked forward. and a doubt began to take form in his mind. the mistress he had pictured would not laugh at kisses given to another; nor forget in a twinkling the straits through which he had come to her, the hell from which he had plucked himself! possibly the court ladies held love as cheap as this, and lovers but as playthings, butts for their wit, and pegs on which to hang their laughter. but--but he began to doubt, and, perplexed and irritated, he showed his feelings. "madame," he said stiffly, "a jest is an excellent thing. but pardon me if i say that it is ill played on a fasting man." madame desisted from laughter that she might speak. "a fasting man?" she cried. "and he has eaten two partridges!" "fasting from love, madame." madame st. lo held up her hands. "and it's not two minutes since he took a kiss!" he winced, was silent a moment, and then seeing that he got nothing by the tone he had adopted he cried for quarter. "a little mercy, madame, as you are beautiful," he said, wooing her with his eyes. "do not plague me beyond what a man can bear. dismiss, i pray you, this good creature--whose charms do but set off yours as the star leads the eye to the moon--and make me the happiest man in the world by so much of your company as you will vouchsafe to give me." "that may be but a very little," she answered, letting her eyes fall coyly, and affecting to handle the tucker of her low ruff. but he saw that her lip twitched; and he could have sworn that she mocked him to suzanne, for the girl giggled. still by an effort he controlled his feelings. "why so cruel?" he murmured, in a tone meant for her alone, and with a look to match. "you were not so hard when i spoke with you in the gallery, two evenings ago, madame." "was i not?" she asked. "did i look like this? and this?" and, languishing, she looked at him very sweetly after two fashions. "something." "oh, then i meant nothing!" she retorted with sudden vivacity. and she made a face at him, laughing under his nose. "i do that when i mean nothing, monsieur! do you see? but you are gascon, and given, i fear, to flatter yourself." then he saw clearly that she played with him: and resentment, chagrin, pique got the better of his courtesy. "i flatter myself?" he cried, his voice choked with rage. "it may be i do now, madame, but did i flatter myself when you wrote me this note?" and he drew it out and flourished it in her face. "did i imagine when i read this? or is it not in your hand? it is a forgery, perhaps," he continued bitterly. "or it means nothing? nothing, this note bidding me be at madame st. lo's at an hour before midnight--it means nothing? at an hour before midnight, madame!" "on saturday night? the night before last night?" "on saturday night, the night before last night! but madame knows nothing of it? nothing, i suppose?" she shrugged her shoulders and smiled cheerfully on him. "oh, yes, i wrote it," she said. "but what of that, m. de tignonville?" "what of that?" "yes, monsieur, what of that? did you think it was written out of love for you?" he was staggered for the moment by her coolness. "out of what, then?" he cried hoarsely. "out of what, then, if not out of love?" "why, out of pity, my little gentleman!" she answered sharply. "and trouble thrown away it seems. love!" and she laughed so merrily and spontaneously it cut him to the heart. "no; but you said a dainty thing or two, and smiled a smile; and like a fool, and like a woman, i was sorry for the innocent calf that bleated so prettily on its way to the butcher's! and i would lock you up and save your life, i thought, until the blood-letting was over. now you have it, m. de tignonville, and i hope you like it." like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of ill-fortune? like it, when the prospect of her charms had bribed him from the path of fortitude, when for her sake he had been false to his mistress, to his friends, to his faith, to his cause? like it, when he knew as he listened that all was lost, and nothing gained--not even this poor, unworthy, shameful compensation? like it? no wonder that words failed him, and he glared at her in rage, in misery, in shame. "oh, if you don't like it," she continued, tossing her head after a momentary pause, "then you should not have come! it is of no profit to glower at me, monsieur. you do not frighten me." "i would--i would to god i had not come!" he groaned. "and, i dare say, that you had never seen me--since you cannot win me!" "that too," he exclaimed. she was of an extraordinary levity, and at that after staring at him a moment she broke into shrill laughter. "a little more, and i'll send you to my cousin hannibal!" she said. "you do not know how anxious he is to see you. have you a mind," with a waggish look, "to play bride's man, m. de tignonville? or will you give away the bride? it is not too late, though soon it will be!" he winced, and from red grew pale. "what do you mean?" he stammered. and, averting his eyes in shame, seeing now all the littleness, all the baseness of his position, "has he--married her?" he continued. "ho, ho!" she cried in triumph. "i've hit you now, have i, monsieur? i've hit you!" and mocking him, "has he--married her?" she lisped. "no; but he will marry her, have no fear of that! he will marry her. he waits but to get a priest. would you like to see what he says?" she continued, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. "i had a note from him yesterday. would you like to see how welcome you'll be at the wedding?" and she flaunted a piece of paper before his eyes. "give it me," he said. she let him seize it the while she shrugged her shoulders. "it's your affair, not mine," she said. "see it if you like, and keep it if you like. cousin hannibal wastes few words." that was true, for the paper contained but a dozen or fifteen words, and an initial by way of signature. "i may need your shoveling to-morrow afternoon. send him, and tignonville in safeguard if he come.--h." "i can guess what use he has for a priest," she said. "it is not to confess him, i warrant. it's long, i fear, since hannibal told his beads." m. de tignonville swore. "i would i had the confessing of him!" he said between his teeth. she clapped her hands in glee. "why should you not?" she cried. "why should you not? 'tis time yet, since i am to send to-day and have not sent. will you be the shaveling to go confess or marry him?" and she laughed recklessly. "will you, m. de tignonville? the cowl will mask you as well as another, and pass you through the streets better than a cut sleeve. he will have both his wishes, lover and clerk in one then. and it will be pull monk, pull hannibal with a vengeance." tignonville gazed at her, and as he gazed courage and hope awoke in his eyes. what if, after all, he could undo the past? what if, after all, he could retrace the false step he had taken, and place himself again where he had been--by her side? "if you meant it!" he exclaimed, his breath coming fast. "if you only meant what you say, madame." "if?" she answered, opening her eyes. "and why should i not mean it?" "because," he replied slowly, "cowl or no cowl, when i meet your cousin----" "'twill go hard with him?" she cried, with a mocking laugh. "and you think i fear for him. that is it, is it?" he nodded. "i fear just _so much_ for him!" she retorted with contempt. "just so much!" and coming a step nearer to tignonville she snapped her small white fingers under his nose. "do you see? no, m. de tignonville," she continued, "you do not know count hannibal if you think that he fears, or that any fear for him. if you will beard the lion in his den, the risk will be yours, not his!" the young man's face glowed. "i take the risk!" he cried. "and i thank you for the chance; that, madame, whatever betide. but----" "but what?" she asked, seeing that he hesitated and that his face fell. "if he afterwards learn that you have played him a trick," he said, "will he not punish you?" "punish me?" he nodded. madame laughed her high disdain. "you do not yet know hannibal de tavannes," she said. "he does not war with women." chapter xi. a bargain. it is the wont of the sex to snatch at an ell where an inch is offered, and to press an advantage in circumstances in which a man, acknowledging the claims of generosity, scruples to ask for more. the habit, now ingrained, may have sprung from long dependence on the male, and is one which a hundred instances, from the time of judith downward, prove to be at its strongest where the need is greatest. when mademoiselle de vrillac came out of the hour-long swoon into which her lover's defection had cast her, the expectation of the worst was so strong upon her that she could not at once credit the respite which madame carlat hastened to announce. she could not believe that she still lay safe, in her own room above stairs; that she was in the care of her own servants, and that the chamber held no presence more hateful than that of the good woman who sat weeping beside her. as was to be expected, she came to herself sighing and shuddering, trembling with nervous exhaustion. she looked for _him_, as soon as she looked for any; and even when she had seen the door locked and double-locked, she doubted--doubted, and shook and hid herself in the hangings of the bed. the noise of the riot and rapine which prevailed in the city, and which reached the ear even in that locked room--and although the window, of paper, with an upper pane of glass, looked into a courtyard--was enough to drive the blood from a woman's cheeks. but it was fear of the house, not of the street, fear from within, not from without, which impelled the girl into the darkest corner and shook her wits. she could not believe that even this short respite was hers, until she had repeatedly heard the fact confirmed at madame carlat's mouth. "you are deceiving me!" she cried more than once. and each time she started up in fresh terror. "he never said that he would not return until to-morrow!" "he did, my lamb, he did!" the old woman answered with tears. "would i deceive you?" "he said he would not return?" "he said he would not return until to-morrow. you had until to-morrow, he said." "and then?" "he would come and bring the priest with him," madame carlat replied sorrowfully. "the priest? to-morrow!" mademoiselle cried. "the priest!" and she crouched anew with hot eyes behind the hangings of the bed, and, shivering, hid her face. but this for a time only. as soon as she had made certain of the respite, and that she had until the morrow, her courage rose, and with it the instinct of which mention has been made. count hannibal had granted a respite; short as it was, and no more than the barest humanity required, to grant one at all was not the act of the mere butcher who holds the trembling lamb, unresisting, in his hands. it was an act--no more, again be it said, than humanity required--and yet an act which bespoke an expectation of some return, of some correlative advantage. it was not in the part of the mere brigand. something had been granted. something short of the utmost in the captor's power had been exacted. he had shown that there were things he would not do. then might not something more be won from him? a further delay, another point; something, no matter what, which could be turned to advantage. with the brigand it is not possible to bargain. but who gives a little may give more; who gives a day may give a week; who gives a week may give a month. and a month? her heart leapt up. a month seemed a lifetime, an eternity, to her who had but until to-morrow! yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less brave. to obtain aught from tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him _before_ that to-morrow which meant so much to her. it was necessary, in a word, to run some risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not hesitate. it might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. in that case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case. the position of the window, while it increased the women's safety, debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that which their ears afforded them. they had no means of judging whether tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in the work of murder. madame carlat, indeed, had no desire to know anything. in that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. to her, therefore, the notion of sending for tavannes, or communicating with him, came as a thunderbolt. was her mistress mad? did she wish to court her fate? to reach tavannes they must apply to his riders, for carlat and the men-servants were confined above. those riders were grim, brutal men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. and madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold. and yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. as we now know. for it was noon--or a little more--of sunday, august the twenty-fourth, "a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder." from the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of notre dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and tignonville crouched in his haymow--huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the seine. on the river bank spire niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books. in their houses, ramus the scholar and goujon the sculptor--than whom paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered like sheep; and in the valley of misery, now the quai de la megisserie, seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons. nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a little later, what matters it?--m. tignonville's own cousin, madame d'yverne, the darling of the louvre the day before, perished in the hands of the mob; and the sister of m. de taverny, equally ill-fated, died in the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets. madame carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. but mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded. "if i am to be monsieur's wife," she said with quivering nostrils, "shall i fear his servants?" and opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called. the man who answered was a norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low-browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the embodiment of the women's apprehensions. moreover, his _patois_ of the cider-land was little better than german to them; their southern, softer tongue was sheer italian to him. but he seemed not ill-disposed, or mademoiselle's air overawed him; and presently she made him understand, and with a nod he descended to carry her message. then mademoiselle's heart began to beat; and beat more quickly when she heard _his_ step--alas! she knew it already, knew it from all others--on the stairs. the table was set, the card must be played, to win or lose. it might be that with the low, opinion he held of women he would think her reconciled to her lot; he would think this an overture, a step towards kinder treatment, one more proof of the inconstancy of the lower and the weaker sex, made to be men's playthings. and at that thought her eyes grew hot with rage. but if it were so, she must still put up with it. she must still put up with it! she had sent for him, and he was coming--he was at the door! he entered, and she breathed more freely. for once his face lacked the sneer, the look of smiling possession, which she had come to know and hate. it was grave, expectant, even suspicious; still harsh and dark, akin, as she now observed, to the low-browed, furrowed face of the rider who had summoned him. but the offensive look was gone, and she could breathe. he closed the door behind him, but he did not advance into the room. "at your pleasure, mademoiselle?" he said simply. "you sent for me, i think." she was on her feet, standing before him with something of the submissiveness of roxana before her conqueror. "i did," she said; and stopped at that, her hand to her side as if she could not continue. but presently in a low voice, "i have heard," she went on, "what you said, monsieur, after i lost consciousness." "yes?" he said; and was silent. nor did he lose his watchful look. "i am obliged to you for your thought of me," she continued in a faint voice, "and i shall be still further obliged--i speak to you thus quickly and thus early--if you will grant me a somewhat longer time." "do you mean--if i will postpone our marriage?" "yes, monsieur." "it is impossible!" "do not say that," she cried, raising her voice impulsively. "i appeal to your generosity. and for a short, a very short, time only." "it is impossible," he answered quietly. "and for reasons, mademoiselle. in the first place i can more easily protect my wife. in the second, i am even now summoned to the louvre, and should be on my way thither. by to-morrow evening, unless i am mistaken in the business on which i am required, i shall be on my way to a distant province with royal letters. it is essential that our marriage take place before i go." "why?" she asked stubbornly. he shrugged his shoulders. "why?" he repeated. "can you ask, mademoiselle, after the events of last night? because, if you please, i do not wish to share the fate of m. de tignonville. because in these days life is uncertain, and death too certain. because it was our turn last night, and it may be the turn of your friends--to-morrow night!" "then some have escaped?" she cried. he smiled. "i am glad to find you so shrewd," he replied. "in an honest wife it is an excellent quality. yes, mademoiselle; one or two." "who? who? i pray you tell me." "m. de montgomery, who slept beyond the river, for one; and the vidame, and some with him. m. de biron, whom i count a huguenot, and who holds the arsenal in the king's teeth, for another. and a few more. enough, in a word, mademoiselle, to keep us wakeful. it is impossible, therefore, for me to postpone the fulfilment of your promise." "a promise on conditions!" she retorted, in rage that she could win no more. and every line of her splendid figure, every tone of her voice flamed sudden, hot rebellion. "i do not go for nothing! you gave me the lives of all in the house, monsieur! of all!" she repeated with passion. "and all are not here! before i marry you, you must show me m. de tignonville alive and safe!" he shrugged his shoulders. "he has taken himself off," he said. "it is naught to me what happens to him now." "it is all to me!" she retorted. at that he glared at her, the veins of his forehead swelling suddenly. but after a seeming struggle with himself he put the insult by, perhaps for future reckoning and account. "i did what i could," he said sullenly. "had i willed it he had died there and then in the room below. i gave him his life. if he has risked it anew and lost it, it is naught to me." "it was his life you gave me," she repeated stubbornly. "his life--and the others. but that is not all," she continued; "you promised me a minister." he nodded, smiling sourly to himself, as if this confirmed a suspicion he had entertained. "or a priest," he said. "no, a minister." "if one could be obtained. if not, a priest." "no, it was to be at my will; and i will a minister! i will a minister!" she cried passionately. "show me m. tignonville alive, and bring me a minister of my faith, and i will keep my promise, m. de tavannes. have no fear of that. but otherwise, i will not." "you will not?" he cried. "you will not?" "no!" "you will not marry me?" "no!" the moment she had said it fear seized her, and she could have fled from him, screaming. the flash of his eyes, the sudden passion of his face, burned themselves into her memory. she thought for a second that he would spring on her and strike her down. yet though the women behind her held their breath, she faced him, and did not quail; and to that, she fancied, she owed it that he controlled himself. "you will not?" he repeated, as if he could not understand such resistance to his will--as if he could not credit his ears. "you will not?" but after that, when he had said it three times, he laughed; a laugh, however, with a snarl in it that chilled her blood. "you bargain, do you?" he said. "you will have the last tittle of the price, will you? and have thought of this and that to put me off, and to gain time until your lover, who is all to you, come to save you? oh, clever girl! clever! but have you thought where you stand--woman? do you know that if i gave the word to my people they would treat you as the commonest baggage that tramps the froidmantel? do you know that it rests with me to save you, or to throw you to the wolves whose ravening you hear?" and he pointed to the window. "minister? priest?" he continued. "_mon dieu_, mademoiselle, i stand astonished at my moderation. you chatter to me of ministers and priests, and the one or the other, when it might be neither! when you are as much and as hopelessly in my power to-day as the wench in my kitchen! you! you flout me, and make terms with me! you!" and he came so near her with his dark harsh face, his tone rose so menacing on the last word, that her nerves, shattered before, gave way, and, unable to control herself, she flinched with a low cry, thinking he would strike her. he did not follow, nor move to follow; but he laughed a low laugh of content. and his eyes devoured her. "ho! ho!" he said. "we are not so brave as we pretend to be, it seems. and yet you dared to chaffer with me? you thought to thwart me--tavannes! _mon dieu_, mademoiselle, to what did you trust? to what did you trust? ay, and to what do you trust?" she knew that by the movement, which fear had forced from her, she had jeopardised everything. that she stood to lose all and more than all which she had thought to win by a bold front. a woman less brave, of a spirit less firm, would have given up the contest, and have been glad to escape so. but this woman, though her bloodless face showed that she knew what cause she had for fear, and though her heart was, indeed, sick with sheer terror, held her ground at the point to which she had retreated. she played her last card. "to what do i trust?" she muttered with trembling lips. "yes, mademoiselle," he answered, between his teeth. "to what do you trust--that you play with tavannes?" "to his honour, monsieur," she answered faintly. "and to your promise." he looked at her with his mocking smile. "and yet," he sneered, "you thought a moment ago that i was going to strike you. you thought that i should beat you! and now it is my honour and my promise! oh, clever, clever, mademoiselle! 'tis so that women make fools of men. i knew that something of this kind was on foot when you sent for me, for i know women and their ways. but, let me tell you, it is an ill time to speak of honour when the streets are red! and of promises when the king's word is 'no faith with a heretic!'" "yet you will keep yours," she said bravely. he did not answer at once, and hope which was almost dead in her breast began to recover; nay, presently sprang up erect. for the man hesitated, it was evident; he brooded with a puckered brow and gloomy eyes; an observer might have fancied that he traced pain as well as doubt in his face. at last: "there is a thing," he said slowly and with a sort of glare at her, "which, it may be, you have not reckoned. you press me now, and will stand on your terms and your conditions, your _ifs_ and your _unlesses!_ you will have the most from me, and the bargain and a little beside the bargain! but i would have you think if you are wise. bethink you how it will be between us when you are my wife--if you press me so now, mademoiselle. how will it sweeten things then? how will it soften them? and to what, i pray you, will you trust for fair treatment then, if you will be so against me now?" she shuddered. "to the mercy of my husband," she said in a low voice. and her chin sank on her breast. "you will be content to trust to that?" he answered grimly. and his tone and the lifting of his brow promised little clemency. "bethink you! 'tis your rights now, and your terms, mademoiselle! and then it will be only my mercy--madame." "i am content," she muttered faintly. "and the lord have mercy on my soul, is what you would add," he retorted, "so much trust have you in my mercy! and you are right! you are right, since you have played this trick on me. but as you will. if you will have it so, have it so! you shall stand on your conditions now; you shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the pact. but afterwards--afterwards, madame de tavannes----" he did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her petition, mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden on her arms, had burst into violent weeping. her hair, hastily knotted up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white. the man stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure. but he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about. first one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he seemed about to add something. but he did not speak. the sentence he had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of orations. "_afterwards, madame de tavannes!_" chapter xii. in the hall of the louvre. it is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for mademoiselle which had seized count hannibal be deemed unworthy of the higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one. as tavannes, after leaving mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes, beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the gothic spires of his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder. he saw paris as a city sacked; a slaughterhouse, where for a week a masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments, broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. but he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only tignonville; tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office. probably it was to this that one man hunted through paris owed his escape that day. he sprang from a narrow passage full in tavannes' view, and, hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly--as a hare will run when chased--along the street to meet count hannibal's company. the man's face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his breath hissed from him as he ran. his pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by count hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead. and dead he would have been within thirty seconds had tavannes played his part. but his thoughts were elsewhere. either he took the poor wretch for tignonville, or for the minister on whom his mind was running; at any rate he suffered him to slip under the belly of his horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped the pursuers in their tracks. the quarry slipped into an alley and vanished. the hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed inclined to resent the mistake. but tavannes smiled; a broader smile lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside. there are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of others excite pity. tavannes' lip curled as he rode on through the streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a king twenty-two years old had made of his capital. his lip curled most of all when he came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication between city and palace cut off. such a proof of unkingly panic, in a crisis wrought by the king himself, astonished him less a few minutes later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered the courtyard of the fortress. within and about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing. the westering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated and restless movements. to a calm eye they seemed like men acting in a nightmare. their fitful talk and disjointed gestures, their sweating brows and damp hair, no less than the sullen, brooding silence of one here and there, bespoke the abnormal and the terrible. there were livid faces among them, and twitching cheeks, and some who swallowed much; and some again who bared their crimson arms and bragged insanely of the part they had played. but perhaps the most striking thing was the thirst, the desire, the demand for news, and for fresh excitement. in the space of time it took him to pass through them, count hannibal heard a dozen rumours of what was passing in the city; that montgomery and the gentlemen who had slept beyond the river had escaped on horseback in their shirts; that guise had been shot in the pursuit; that he had captured the vidame de chartres and all the fugitives; that he had never left the city; that he was even then entering by the porte de bucy. again that biron had surrendered the arsenal, that he had threatened to fire on the city, that he was dead, that with the huguenots who had escaped he was marching on the louvre, that---- and then tavannes passed out of the blinding sunshine, and out of earshot of their babble, and had plain in his sight across the quadrangle, the new façade, italian, graceful, of the renaissance; which rose in smiling contrast with the three dark gothic sides that now, the central tower removed, frowned unimpeded at one another. but what was this which lay along the foot of the new italian wall? this, round which some stood, gazing curiously, while others strewed fresh sand about it, or after long downward-looking glanced up to answer the question of a person at a window? death; and over death--death in its most cruel aspect--a cloud of buzzing, whirling flies, and the smell, never to be forgotten, of much spilled blood. from a doorway hard by came shrill bursts of hysterical laughter; and with the laughter plumped out, even as tavannes crossed the court, a young girl, thrust forth it seemed by her fellows, for she turned about and struggled as she came. once outside she hung back, giggling and protesting, half willing, half unwilling; and meeting tavannes' eye thrust her way in again with a whirl of her petticoats, and a shriek. but before he had taken four paces she was out again. he paused to see who she was, and his thoughts involuntarily went back to the woman he had left weeping in the upper room. then he turned about again and stood to count the dead. he identified piles, identified pardaillan, identified soubise--whose corpse the murderers had robbed of the last rag--and touchet and st. galais. he made his reckoning with an unmoved face, and with the same face stopped and stared, and moved from one to another; had he not seen the slaughter about "_le petit home_" at jarnac, and the dead of three pitched fields? but when a bystander, smirking obsequiously, passed him a jest on soubise, and with his finger pointed the jest, he had the same hard unmoved face for the gibe as for the dead. and the jester shrank away, abashed and perplexed by his stare and his reticence. half way up the staircase to the great gallery or guardroom above, count hannibal found his brother, the marshal, huddled together in drunken slumber on a seat in a recess. in the gallery to which he passed on without awakening him, a crowd of courtiers and ladies, with arquebusiers and captains of the quarters, walked to and fro, talking in whispers; or peeped over shoulders towards the inner end of the hall, where the querulous voice of the king rose now and again above the hum. as tavannes moved that way, nançay, in the act of passing out, booted and armed for the road, met him and almost jostled him. "ah, well met, m. le comte," he sneered, with as much hostility as he dared betray. "the king has asked for you twice." "i am going to him. and you? whither in such a hurry, m. nançay?" "to chatillon." "on pleasant business?" "enough that it is on the king's!" nançay replied with unexpected temper. "i hope that you may find yours as pleasant!" he added with a grin. and he went on. the gleam of malice in the man's eye warned tavannes to pause. he looked round for someone who might be in the secret, saw the provost of the merchants and approached him. "what's amiss, m. le charron?" he asked. "is not the affair going as it should?" "'tis about the arsenal, m. le comte," the provost answered busily. "m. de biron is harbouring the vermin there. he has lowered the portcullis and pointed his culverins over the gate and will not yield it or listen to reason. the king would bring him to terms, but no one will venture himself inside with the message. rats in a trap, you know, bite hard, and care little whom they bite." "i begin to understand." "precisely, m. le comte. his majesty would have sent m. de nançay. but he elected to go to chatillon, to seize the young brood there. the admiral's children, you comprehend." "whose teeth are not yet grown! he was wise." "to be sure, m. de tavannes, to be sure. but the king was annoyed, and on top of that came a priest with complaints, and if i may make so bold as to advise you, you will not----" but tavannes fancied that he had caught the gist of the difficulty, and with a nod he moved on; and so he missed the point of the warning which the other had it in his mind to give. a moment and he reached the inner circle, and there halted, disconcerted, nay, taken aback. for as soon as he showed his face, the king, who was pacing to and fro like a caged beast, before a table at which three clerks knelt on cushions, espied him and stood still. with a glare of something like madness in his eyes, charles raised his hand with a shaking finger and singled him out. "so, by g--d, you are there!" he cried, with a volley of blasphemy. and he signed to those about count hannibal to stand away from him. "you are there, are you? and you are not afraid to show your face? i tell you, it's you and such as you bring us into contempt! so that it is said everywhere guise does all and serves god, and we follow because we must! it's you, and such as you, are stumbling-blocks to our good folk of paris! are you traitor, sirrah?" he continued with passion, "or are you of our brother alençon's opinions, that you traverse our orders to the damnation of your soul and our discredit? are you traitor? or are you heretic? or what are you? god in heaven, will you answer me, man, or shall i send you where you will find your tongue?" "i know not of what your majesty accuses me," count hannibal answered, with a scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulders. "i? 'tis not i," the king retorted. his hair hung damp on his brow, and he dried his hands continually; while his gestures had the ill-measured and eccentric violence of an epileptic. "here, you! speak, father, and confound him!" then tavannes discovered on the farther side of the circle the priest whom his brother had ridden down that morning. father pezelay's pale hatchet-face gleamed paler than ordinary; and a great bandage hid one temple and part of his face. but, below the bandage, the flame of his eyes was not lessened, nor the venom of his tongue. to the king he had come--for no other would deal with his violent opponent; to the king's presence! and, as he prepared to blast his adversary, now his chance was come, his long lean frame, in its narrow black cassock, seemed to grow longer, leaner, more baleful, more snake-like. he stood there a fitting representative of the dark fanaticism of paris, which charles and his successor--the last of a doomed line--alternately used as tool or feared as master; and to which the most debased and the most immoral of courts paid, in its sober hours, a vile and slavish homage. even in the midst of the drunken, shameless courtiers--who stood, if they stood for anything, for that other influence of the day, the renaissance--he was to be reckoned with; and count hannibal knew it. he knew that in the eyes not of charles only, but of nine out of ten who listened to him, a priest was more sacred than a virgin, and a tonsure than all the virtues of spotless innocence. "shall the king give with one hand and withdraw with the other?" the priest began, in a voice hoarse yet strident, a voice borne high above the crowd on the wings of passion. "shall he spare of the best of the men and the maidens whom god hath doomed, whom the church hath devoted, whom the king hath given? is the king's hand shortened or his word annulled that a man does as he forbiddeth and leaves undone what he commandeth? is god mocked? woe, woe unto you," he continued, turning swiftly, arms uplifted, towards tavannes, "who please yourself with the red and white of their maidens and take of the best of the spoil, sparing where the king's word is 'spare not!' who strike at holy church with the sword! who----" "answer, sirrah!" charles cried, spurning the floor in his fury. he could not listen long to any man. "is it so? is it so? do you do these things?" count hannibal shrugged his shoulders and was about to answer, when a thick, drunken voice rose from the crowd behind him. "is it what? eh! is it what?" it droned. and a figure with bloodshot eyes, disordered beard, and rich clothes awry, forced its way through the obsequious circle. it was marshal tavannes. "eh, what? you'd beard the king, would you?" he hiccoughed truculently, his eyes on father pezelay, his hand on his sword. "were you a priest ten times-- "silence!" charles cried, almost foaming with rage at this fresh interruption. "it's not he, fool! 'tis your pestilent brother." "who touches my brother touches tavannes!" the marshal answered with a menacing gesture. he was sober enough, it appeared, to hear what was said, but not to comprehend its drift; and this caused a titter, which immediately excited his rage. he turned and seized the nearest laugher by the ear. "insolent!" he cried. "i will teach you to laugh when the king speaks! puppy! who laughs at his majesty or touches my brother has to do with tavannes!" the king, in a rage that almost deprived him of speech, stamped the floor twice. "idiot!" he cried. "imbecile! let the man go! 'tis not he! 'tis your heretic brother, i tell you! by all the saints! by the body of----" and he poured forth a flood of oaths. "will you listen to me and be silent! will you--your brother----" "if he be not your majesty's servant, i will kill him with this sword!" the irrepressible marshal struck in. "as i have killed ten to-day! ten!" and, staggering back, he only saved himself from falling by clutching chicot about the neck. "steady, my pretty maréchale!" the jester cried, chucking him under the chin with one hand, while with some difficulty he supported him with the other--for he, too, was far from sober-- "pretty margot, toy with me, maiden bashful----" "silence!" charles cried, darting forth his long arms in a fury of impatience. "god, have i killed every man of sense? are you all gone mad? silence! do you hear? silence! and let me hear what he has to say," with a movement towards count hannibal. "and look you, sirrah," he continued with a curse, "see that it be to the purpose!" "if it be a question of your majesty's service," tavannes answered. "and obedience to your majesty's orders, i am deeper in it than he who stands there!" with a sign towards the priest. "i give my word for that. and i will prove it." "how, sir?" charles cried. "how, how, how? how will you prove it?" "by doing for you, sire, what he will not do!" tavannes answered scornfully. "let him stand out, and if he will serve his church as i will serve my king---- "blaspheme not!" cried the priest. "chatter not!" tavannes retorted hardily, "but do! better is he," he continued, "who takes a city than he who slays women! nay, sire," he went on hurriedly, seeing the king start, "be not angry, but hear me! you would send to biron, to the arsenal? you seek a messenger, sire? then let the good father be the man. let him take your majesty's will to biron, and let him see the grand master face to face, and bring him to reason. or, if he will not, i will! let that be the test!" "ay, ay!" cried marshal de tavannes, "you say well, brother! let him!" "and if he will not, i will!" tavannes repeated. "let that be the test, sire." the king wheeled suddenly to father pezelay. "you hear, father?" he said. "what say you!" the priest's face grew sallow, and more sallow. he knew that the walls of the arsenal sheltered men whose hands no convention and no order of biron's would keep from his throat, were the grim gate and frowning culverins once passed; men who had seen their women and children, their wives and sisters immolated at his word, and now asked naught but to stand face to face and eye to eye with him and tear him limb from limb before they died! the challenge, therefore, was one-sided and unfair; but for that very reason it shook him. the astuteness of the man who, taken by surprise, had conceived this snare filled him with dread. he dared not accept, and he scarcely dared to refuse the offer. and meantime the eyes of the courtiers, who grinned in their beards, were on him. at length he spoke, but it was in a voice which had lost its boldness and assurance. "it is not for me to clear myself," he cried, shrill and violent, "but for those who are accused, for those who have belied the king's word, and set at naught his christian orders. for you, count hannibal, heretic, or no better than heretic, it is easy to say 'i go.' for you go but to your own, and your own will receive you!" "then you will not go?" with a jeer. "at your command? no!" the priest shrieked with passion. "his majesty knows whether i serve him." "i know," charles cried, stamping his foot in a fury, "that you all serve me when it pleases you! that you are all sticks of the same faggot, wood of the same bundle, hell-babes in your own business, and sluggards in mine! you kill to-day and you'll lay it to me to-morrow! ay, you will! you will!" he repeated frantically, and drove home the asseveration with a fearful oath. "the dead are as good servants as you! foucauld was better! foucauld? foucauld? ah, my god!" and abruptly in presence of them all, with the sacred name, which he so often defiled, on his lips, charles turned, and covering his face burst into childish weeping; while a great silence fell on all--on bussy with the blood of his cousin resnel on his point, on fervacques, the betrayer of his friend, on chicot, the slayer of his rival, on cocconnas the cruel--on men with hands unwashed from the slaughter, and on the shameless women who lined the walls; on all who used this sobbing man for their stepping-stone, and, to attain their ends and gain their purposes, trampled his dull soul in blood and mire. one looked at another in consternation. fear grew in eyes that a moment before were bold; cheeks turned pale that a moment before were hectic. if he changed as rapidly as this, if so little dependence could be placed on his moods or his resolutions, who was safe? whose turn might it not be to-morrow? or who might not be held accountable for the deeds done this day? many, from whom remorse had seemed far distant a while before, shuddered and glanced behind them. it was as if the dead who lay stark without the doors, ay, and the countless dead of paris, with whose shrieks the air was laden, had flocked in shadowy shape into the hall; and there, standing beside their murderers, had whispered with their cold breath in the living ears, "a reckoning! a reckoning! as i am, thou shalt be!" it was count hannibal who broke the spell and the silence, and with his hand on his brother's shoulder stood forward. "nay, sire," he cried, in a voice which rang defiant in the roof, and seemed to challenge alike the living and the dead, "if all deny the deed, yet will not i! what we have done we have done! so be it! the dead are dead! so be it! for the rest, your majesty has still one servant who will do your will, one soldier whose life is at your disposition! i have said i will go, and i go, sire. and you, churchman," he continued, turning in bitter scorn to the priest, "do you go too--to church! to church, shaveling! go, watch and pray for us! fast and flog for us! whip those shoulders, whip them till the blood runs down! for it is all, it seems, you will do for your king!" charles turned. "silence, railer!" he said in a broken voice. "sow no more troubles! already," a shudder shook his tall ungainly form, "i see blood, blood, blood everywhere! blood! ah, god, shall i from this time see anything else? but there is no turning back. there is no undoing. so, do you go to biron. and do you," he went on, sullenly addressing marshal tavannes, "take him and tell him what it is needful he should know." "'tis done, sire!" the marshal cried with a hiccough. "come, brother!" but when the two, the courtiers making quick way for them, had passed down the hall to the door, the marshal tapped hannibal's sleeve. "it was touch and go," he muttered; it was plain he had been more sober than he seemed. "mind you, it does not do to thwart our little master in his fits! remember that another time, or worse will come of it, brother. as it is, you came out of it finely and tripped that black devil's heels to a marvel! but you won't be so mad as to go to biron?" "yes," count hannibal answered coldly. "i shall go." "better not! better not!" the marshal answered. "'twill be easier to go in than to come out--with a whole throat! have you taken wild cats in the hollow of a tree? the young first, and then the she-cat? well, it will be that! take my advice, brother. have after montgomery, if you please, ride with nançay to chatillon--he is mounting now--go where you please out of paris, but don't go there! biron hates us, hates me. and for the king, if he do not see you for a few days, 'twill blow over in a week." count hannibal shrugged his shoulders. "no," he said, "i shall go." the marshal stared a moment. "morbleu!" he said, "why? 'tis not to please the king, i know. what do you think to find there, brother?" "a minister," hannibal answered gently. "i want one with life in him, and they are scarce in the open. so i must to covert after him." and, twitching his sword-belt a little nearer to his hand, he passed across the court to the gate, and to his horses. the marshal went back laughing, and, slapping his thigh as he entered the hall, jostled by accident a gentleman who was passing out. "what is it?" the gascon cried hotly; for it was chicot he had jostled. "who touches my brother touches tavannes!" the marshal hiccoughed. and, smiting his thigh anew, he went off into another fit of laughter. chapter xiii. diplomacy. where the old wall of paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the seine and the ramparts beyond the rue st. pol wore at this date an aspect typical of the troubles of the time. along the waterside the gloomy old palace of st. pol, once the residence of the mad king charles the sixth--and his wife, the abandoned isabeau de bavière--sprawled its maze of mouldering courts and ruined galleries, a dreary monument of the gothic days which were passing from france. its spacious curtilage and dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the rue st. antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of the bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where st. pol ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall. this second palace was the hôtel des tournelles, a fantastic medley of turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the days of the english domination; it had been the abode of the regent bedford. from his time it had remained for a hundred years the town residence of the kings of france; but the death of henry ii., slain in its lists by the lance of the same montgomery who was this day fleeing for his life before guise, had given his widow a distaste for it. catherine de médicis, her sons, and the court had abandoned it; already its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats played where kings had slept; and in "our palace of the tournelles" reigned only silence and decay. unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad, the grim shade of the eleventh louis sometimes walked in its desolate precincts. in the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from the rest of paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken palaces, stood the arsenal. destroyed in great part by the explosion of a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of billy, and its proximity to the bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of paris. it was the appanage of the master of the ordnance, and within its walls m. de biron, a huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm. during the day he had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led them to his gate; and as night fell--on such a carnage as the hapless city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the armagnacs, one hundred and fifty-four years earlier--the glow of his matches through the dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls, indicated that there was still one place in paris where the king's will did not run. in comparison of the disorder which prevailed in the city, a deadly quiet reigned here; a stillness so chill that a timid man must have stood and hesitated to approach. but a stranger who about nightfall rode down the street towards the entrance, a single footman running at his stirrup, only nodded a stern approval of the preparations. as he drew nearer he cast an attentive eye this way and that; nor stayed until a hoarse challenge brought him up when he had come within six horses' lengths of the arsenal gate. he reined up then, and raising his voice, asked in clear tones for m. de biron. "go," he continued boldly, "tell the grand master that one from the king is here, and would speak with him." "from the king of france?" the officer on the gate asked. "surely! is there more than one king in france?" a curse and a bitter cry of "king? king herod!" were followed by a muttered discussion that, in the ears of one of the two who waited in the gloom below, boded little good. the two could descry figures moving to and fro before the faint red light of the smouldering matches; and presently a man on the gate kindled a torch, and held it so as to fling its light downward. the stranger's attendant cowered behind the horse. "have a care, my lord!" he whispered. "they are aiming at us!" if so the rider's bold front and unmoved demeanour gave them pause. presently, "i will send for the grand master" the man who had spoken before announced. "in whose name, monsieur?" "no matter," the stranger answered. "say, one from the king." "you are alone?" "i shall enter alone." the assurance seemed to be satisfactory, for the man answered "good!" and after a brief delay a wicket in the gate was opened, the portcullis creaked upward, and a plank was thrust across the ditch. the horseman waited until the preparations were complete; then he slid to the ground, threw his rein to the servant, and boldly walked across. in an instant he left behind him the dark street, the river, and the sounds of outrage, which the night breeze bore from the farther bank, and found himself within the vaulted gateway, in a bright glare of light, the centre of a ring of gleaming eyes and angry faces. the light blinded him for a few seconds; but the guards, on their side, were in no better case. for the stranger was masked; and in their ignorance who it was looked at them through the slits in the black velvet they stared, disconcerted, and at a loss. there were some there with naked weapons in their hands who would have struck him through had they known who he was; and more who would have stood aside while the deed was done. but the uncertainty--that and the masked man's tone paralysed them. for they reflected that he might be any one. condé, indeed, stood too small, but navarre, if he lived, might fill that cloak; or guise, or anjou, or the king himself. and while some would not have scrupled to strike the blood royal, more would have been quick to protect and avenge it. and so before the dark uncertainty of the mask, before the riddle of the smiling eyes which glittered through the slits, they stared irresolute; until a hand, the hand of one bolder than his fellows, was raised to pluck away the screen. the unknown dealt the fellow a buffet with his fist. "down, rascal!" he said hoarsely. "and you"--to the officer--"show me instantly to m. de biron!" but the lieutenant, who stood in fear of his men, looked at him doubtfully. "nay," he said, "not so fast!" and one of the others, taking the lead, cried, "no! we may have no need of m. de biron. your name, monsieur, first." with a quick movement the stranger gripped the officer's wrist. "tell your master," he said, "that he who clasped his wrist _thus_ on the night of pentecost is here, and would speak with him! and say, mark you, that i will come to him, not he to me!" the sign and the tone imposed upon the boldest. two-thirds of the watch were huguenots, who burned to avenge the blood of their fellows; and these, overriding their officer, had agreed to deal with the intruder, if a papegot, without recourse to the grand master, whose moderation they dreaded. a knife-thrust in the ribs, and another body in the ditch--why not, when such things were done outside? but even these doubted now; and m. peridol, the lieutenant, reading in the eyes of his men the suspicions which he had himself conceived, was only anxious to obey, if they would let him. so gravely was he impressed, indeed, by the bearing of the unknown that he turned when he had withdrawn, and came back to assure himself that the men meditated no harm in his absence; nor until he had exchanged a whisper with one of them would he leave them and go. while he was gone on his errand the envoy leaned against the wall of the gateway, and, with his chin sunk on his breast and his mind fallen into reverie, seemed unconscious of the dark glances of which he was the target. he remained in this position until the officer came back, followed by a man with a lantern. their coming roused the unknown, who, invited to follow peridol, traversed two courts without remark, and in the same silence entered a building in the extreme eastern corner of the enceinte abutting on the ruined tour de billy. here, in an upper floor, the governor of the arsenal had established his temporary lodging. the chamber into which the stranger was introduced betrayed the haste in which it had been prepared for its occupant. two silver lamps which hung from the beams of the unceiled roof shed light on a medley of arms and inlaid armour, of parchments, books, and steel caskets, which encumbered not the tables only, but the stools and chests that, after the fashion of that day, stood formally along the arras. in the midst of the disorder, on the bare floor, walked the man who, more than any other, had been instrumental in drawing the huguenots to paris--and to their doom. it was not wonderful that the events of the day, the surprise and horror still rode his mind; nor that even he who passed for a model of stiffness and reticence betrayed for once the indignation which filled his breast. until the officer had withdrawn and closed the door he did, indeed, keep silence; standing beside the table and eyeing his visitor with a lofty port and a stern glance. but the moment he was assured that they were alone he spoke. "your highness may unmask now," he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. "yet were you well advised to take the precaution, since you had hardly come at me in safety without it. had those who keep the gate seen you, i would not have answered for your highness's life! the more shame," he continued vehemently, "on the deeds of this day which have compelled the brother of a king of france to hide his face in his own capital and in his own fortress. for i dare to say, monsieur, what no other will say, now the admiral is dead. you have brought back the days of the armagnacs. you have brought bloody days and an evil name on france, and i pray god that you may not pay in your turn what you have exacted. but if you continue to be advised by m. de guise, this i will say, monsieur"--and his voice fell low and stern. "burgundy slew orleans, indeed; but he came in his turn to the bridge of montereau." "you take me for monsieur?" the unknown asked. and it was plain that he smiled under his mask. biron's face altered. "i take you," he answered sharply, "for him whose sign you sent me." "the wisest are sometimes astray," the other answered with a low laugh. and he took off his mask. the grand master started back, his eyes sparkling with anger. "m. de tavannes?" he cried, and for a moment he was silent in sheer astonishment. then, striking his hand on the table, "what means this trickery!" he asked. "it is of the simplest," tavannes answered coolly. "and yet, as you just now said, i had hardly come at you without it. and i had to come at you. no, m. de biron," he added quickly, as biron in a rage laid his hand on a bell which stood beside him on the table, "you cannot that way undo what is done." "i can at least deliver you," the grand master answered, in heat, "to those who will deal with you as you have dealt with us and ours." "it will avail you nothing," count hannibal replied soberly. "for see here, grand master, i come from the king. if you are at war with him, and hold his fortress in his teeth, i am his ambassador and sacrosanct. if you are at peace with him and hold it at his will, i am his servant, and safe also." "at peace and safe?" biron cried, his voice trembling with indignation. "and are those safe or at peace who came here trusting to _his_ word, who lay in his palace and slept in his beds? where are they, and how have they fared, that you dare appeal to the law of nations, or he to the loyalty of biron? and for you to beard me, whose brother to-day hounded the dogs of this vile city on the noblest in france, who have leagued yourself with a crew of foreigners to do a deed which will make our country stink in the nostrils of the world when we are dust! you, to come here and talk of peace and safety! m. de tavannes"--and he struck his hand on the table--"you are a bold man. i know why the king had a will to send you, but i know not why you had the will to come." "that i will tell you later," count hannibal answered coolly. "for the king, first. my message is brief, m. de biron. have you a mind to hold the scales in france?" "between?" biron asked contemptuously. "between the lorrainers and the huguenots." the grand master scowled fiercely. "i have played the go-between once too often," he growled. "it is no question of going between, it is a question of holding between," tavannes answered coolly. "it is a question--but, in a word, have you a mind, m. de biron, to be governor of rochelle? the king, having dealt the blow that has been struck to-day, looks to follow up severity, as a wise ruler should, with indulgence. and to quiet the minds of the rochellois he would set over them a ruler at once acceptable to them--or war must come of it--and faithful to his majesty. such a man, m. de biron, will in such a post be master of the kingdom; for he will hold the doors of janus, and as he bridles his sea-dogs, or unchains them, there will be peace or war in france." "is all that from the king's mouth?" biron asked with sarcasm. but his passion had died down. he was grown thoughtful, suspicious; he eyed the other intently as if he would read his heart. "the offer is his, and the reflections are mine," tavannes answered drily. "let me add one more. the admiral is dead. the king of navarre and the prince of condé are prisoners. who is now to balance the italians and the guises? the grand master--if he be wise and content to give the law to france from the citadel of rochelle." biron stared at the speaker in astonishment at his frankness. "you are a bold man," he cried at last. "but _timeo danaos et dona ferentes_," he continued bitterly. "you offer, sir, too much." "the offer is the king's." "and the conditions? the price?" "that you remain quiet, m. de biron." "in the arsenal?" "in the arsenal. and do not too openly counteract the king's will. that is all." the grand master looked puzzled. "i will give up no one," he said. "no one! let that be understood." "the king requires no one." a pause. then, "does m. de guise know of the offer?" biron inquired; and his eye grew bright. he hated the guises and was hated by them. it was _there_ he was a huguenot. "he has gone far to-day," count hannibal answered drily. "and if no worse come of it should be content. madame catherine knows of it." the grand master was aware that marshal tavannes depended on the queen-mother; and he shrugged his shoulders. "ay, 'tis like her policy," he muttered. "'tis like her!" and pointing his guest to a cushioned chest which stood against the wall, he sat down in a chair beside the table and thought awhile, his brow wrinkled, his eyes dreaming. by-and-by he laughed sourly. "you have lighted the fire," he said, "and would fain i put it out." "we would have you hinder it spreading." "you have done the deed and are loth to pay the blood-money. that is it, is it?" "we prefer to pay it to m. de biron," count hannibal answered civilly. again the grand master was silent awhile. at length he looked up and fixed tavannes with eyes keen as steel. "what is behind?" he growled. "say, man, what is it? what is behind?" "if there be aught behind, i do not know it," tavannes answered steadfastly. m. de biron relaxed the fixity of his gaze. "but you said that you had an object?" he returned. "i had--in being the bearer of the message." "what was it?" "my object? to learn two things." "the first, if it please you?" the grand master's chin stuck out a little, as he spoke. "have you in the arsenal a m. de tignonville, a gentleman of poitou?" "i have not," biron answered curtly. "the second?" "have you here a huguenot minister?" "i have not. and if i had i should not give him up," he added firmly. tavannes shrugged his shoulders. "i have a use for one," he said carelessly. "but it need not harm him." "for what, then, do you need him?" "to marry me." the other stared. "but you are a catholic," he said. "but she is a huguenot," tavannes answered. the grand master did not attempt to hide his astonishment. "and she sticks on that?" he exclaimed. "to-day?" "she sticks on that. to-day." "to-day? _nom de dieu!_ to-day! well," brushing the matter aside after a pause of bewilderment, "any way, i cannot help her. i have no minister here. if there be aught else i can do for her----" "nothing, i thank you," tavannes answered. "then it only remains for me to take your answer to the king?" and he rose politely, and taking his mask from the table prepared to assume it. m. de biron gazed at him a moment without speaking, as if he pondered on the answer he should give. at length he nodded, and rang the bell which stood beside him. "the mask!" he muttered in a low voice as footsteps sounded without. and, obedient to the hint, tavannes disguised himself. a second later the officer who had introduced him opened the door and entered. "peridol," m. de biron said--he had risen to his feet--"i have received a message which needs confirmation; and to obtain this i must leave the arsenal. i am going to the house--you will remember this--of marshal tavannes, who will be responsible for my person; in the meantime this gentleman will remain under strict guard in the south chamber upstairs. you will treat him as a hostage, with all respect, and will allow him to preserve his _incognito_. but if i do not return by noon to-morrow, you will deliver him to the men below, who will know how to deal with him." count hannibal made no attempt to interrupt him, nor did he betray the discomfiture which he undoubtedly felt. but as the grand master paused, "m. de biron," he said, in a voice harsh and low, "you will answer to me for this!" and his eyes glittered through the slits in the mask. "possibly, but not to-day or to-morrow!" biron replied, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. "peridol! see the gentleman bestowed as i have ordered, and then return to me. monsieur," with a bow, half courteous, half ironical, "let me commend to you the advantages of silence and your mask." and he waved his hand in the direction of the door. a moment count hannibal hesitated. he was in the heart of a hostile fortress where the resistance of a single man armed to the teeth must have been futile; and he was unarmed, save for a poniard. nevertheless, for a moment the impulse to spring on biron, and with the dagger at his throat to make his life the price of a safe passage, was strong. then--for with the warp of a harsh and passionate character were interwrought an odd shrewdness and some things little suspected--he resigned himself. bowing gravely, he turned with dignity, and in silence followed the officer from the room. peridol had two men with lanterns in waiting at the door. from one of these the lieutenant took the light, and, with an air at once sullen and deferential, led the way up the stone staircase to the floor over that in which m. de biron had his lodging. tavannes followed; the two guards came last, carrying the second lantern. at the head of the staircase, whence a bare passage ran north and south, the procession turned right-handed, and, passing two doors, halted before the third and last, which faced them at the end of the passage. the lieutenant unlocked it with a key which he took from a hook beside the doorpost. then, holding up his light, he invited his charge to enter. the room was not small, but it was low in the roof, and prison-like, it had bare walls and smoke-marks on the ceiling. the window, set in a deep recess, the floor of which rose a foot above that of the room, was unglazed; and through the gloomy orifice the night wind blew in, laden even on that august evening with the dank mist of the river flats. a table, two stools, and a truckle bed without straw or covering made up the furniture; but peridol, after glancing round, ordered one of the men to fetch a truss of straw and the other to bring up a pitcher of wine. while they were gone tavannes and he stood silently waiting, until, observing that the captive's eyes sought the window, the lieutenant laughed. "no bars?" he said. "no, monsieur, and no need of them. you will not go by that road, bars or no bars." "what is below?" count hannibal asked carelessly. "the river?" "yes, monsieur," with a grin, "but not water. mud, and six feet of it, soft as christmas porridge, but not so sweet. i've known two puppies thrown in under this window that did not weigh more than a fat pullet apiece. one was gone before you could count fifty, and the other did not live thrice as long--nor would have lasted that time, but that it fell on the first and clung to it." tavannes dismissed the matter with a shrug, and, drawing his cloak about him, set a stool against the wall and sat down. the men who brought in the wine and the bundle of straw were inquisitive, and would have loitered, scanning him stealthily; but peridol hurried them away. the lieutenant himself stayed only to cast a glance round the room and to mutter that he would return when his lord returned; then, with a "good night" which said more for his manners than his good will, he followed them out. a moment later the grating of the key in the lock and the sound of the bolts as they sped home told tavannes that he was a prisoner. chapter xiv. too short a spoon. count hannibal remained seated, his chin sunk on his breast, until his ear assured him that the three men had descended the stairs to the floor below. then he rose, and, taking the lantern from the table, on which peridol had placed it, he went softly to the door, which, like the window, stood in a recess--in this case the prolongation of the passage. a brief scrutiny satisfied him that escape that way was impossible, and he turned, after a cursory glance at the floor and ceiling, to the dark, windy aperture which yawned at the end of the apartment. placing the lantern on the table, and covering it with his cloak, he mounted the window recess, and, stepping to the unguarded edge, looked out. he knew, rather than saw, that peridol had told the truth. the smell of the aguish flats which fringed that part of paris rose strong in his nostrils. he guessed that the sluggish arm of the seine which divided the arsenal from the Île des louviers crawled below; but the night was dark, and it was impossible to discern land from water. he fancied that he could trace the outline of the island--an uninhabited place, given up to wood piles; but the lights of the college quarter beyond it, which rose feebly twinkling, to the crown of st. geneviève, confused his sight and rendered the nearer gloom more opaque. from that direction and from the cité to his right came sounds which told of a city still heaving in its blood-stained sleep, and even in its dreams planning further excesses. now a distant shot, and now a faint murmur on one of the bridges, or a far-off cry, raucous, sudden, curdled the blood. but even of what was passing under cover of the darkness, he could learn little; and after standing awhile with a hand on either side of the window he found the night air chill. he stepped back, and, descending to the floor, uncovered the lantern and set it on the table. his thoughts travelled back to the preparations he had made the night before with a view to securing mademoiselle's person, and he considered, with a grim smile, how little he had foreseen that within twenty-four hours he would himself be a prisoner. presently, finding his mask oppressive, he removed it, and, laying it on the table before him, sat scowling at the light. biron had jockeyed him cleverly. well, the worse for armand de gontaut de biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! but in the meantime? in the meantime his fate was sealed if harm befell biron. and what the king's real mind in biron's case was, and what the queen-mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far, when they had the grand master at their mercy, they would resist the temptation to add him to the victims. if biron placed himself at once in marshal tavannes' hands, all might be well. but if he ventured within the long arm of the guises, or went directly to the louvre, the fact that with the grand master's fate count hannibal's was bound up, would not weigh a straw. in such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the less great the small, without a scruple. and the guises did not love count hannibal; he was not loved by many. even the strength of his brother the marshal stood rather in the favour of the king's heir, for whom he had won the battle of jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the desperate madness of this day had let loose on paris. it was not the peril in which he stood, however--though, with the cold clear eye of the man who had often faced peril, he appreciated it to a nicety--that count hannibal found least bearable, but his enforced inactivity. he had thought to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm, and out of the danger of others to compact his own success. instead he lay here, not only powerless to guide his destiny, which hung on the discretion of another, but unable to stretch forth a finger to further his plans. as he sat looking darkly at the lantern, his mind followed biron and his riders through the midnight streets: along st. antoine and la verrerie, through the gloomy narrows of the rue la ferronerie, and so past the house in the rue st. honoré where mademoiselle sat awaiting the morrow--sat awaiting tignonville, the minister, the marriage! doubtless there were still bands of plunderers roaming to and fro; at the barriers troops of archers stopping the suspected; at the windows pale faces gazing down; at the gates of the temple, and of the walled enclosures which largely made up the city, strong guards set to prevent invasion. biron would go with sufficient to secure himself; and unless he encountered with the bodyguard of guise his passage would quiet the town. but was it so certain that _she_ was safe? he knew his men, and while he had been free he had not hesitated to leave her in their care. but now that he could not go, now that he could not raise a hand to help, the confidence which had not failed him in straits more dangerous grew weak. he pictured the things which might happen, at which, in his normal frame of mind, he would have laughed. now they troubled him so that he started at a shadow, so that he quailed at a thought. he, who last night, when free to act, had timed his coming and her rescue to a minute! who had rejoiced in the peril, since with the glamour of such things foolish women were taken! who had not flinched when the crowd roared most fiercely for her blood! why had he suffered himself to be trapped! why indeed? and thrice in passion he paced the room. long ago the famous nostradamus had told him that he would live to be a king, but of the smallest kingdom in the world. "every man is a king in his coffin," he had answered. "the grave is cold and your kingdom shall be warm," the wizard had rejoined. on which the courtiers had laughed, promising him a moorish island and a black queen. and he had gibed with the rest, but secretly had taken note of the sovereign counties of france, their rulers and their heirs. now he held the thought in horror, foreseeing no county, but the cage under the stifling tiles at loches, in which cardinal balue and many another had worn out their hearts. he came to that thought not by way of his own peril, but of mademoiselle's; which affected him in so novel a fashion that he wondered at his folly. at last, tired of watching the shadows which the draught set dancing on the wall, he drew his cloak about him and lay down on the straw. he had kept vigil the previous night, and in a few minutes, with a campaigner's ease, he was asleep. midnight had struck. about two the light in the lantern burned low in the socket, and with a soft sputtering went out. for an hour after that the room lay still, silent, dark; then slowly the grey dawn, the greyer for the river mist which wrapped the neighbourhood in a clammy shroud, began to creep into the room and discover the vague shapes of things. again an hour passed, and the sun was rising above montreuil, and here and there the river began to shimmer through the fog. but in the room it was barely daylight when the sleeper awoke, and sat up, his face expectant. something had roused him. he listened. his ear, and the habit of vigilance which a life of danger instils, had not deceived him. there were men moving in the passage; men who shuffled their feet impatiently. had biron returned! or had aught happened to him, and were these men come to avenge him? count hannibal rose and stole across the boards to the door, and, setting his ear to it, listened. he listened while a man might count a hundred and fifty, counting slowly. then, for the third part of a second, he turned his head, and his eyes travelled the room. he stooped again and listened more closely, scarcely breathing. there were voices as well as feet to be heard now; one voice--he thought it was peridol's--which held on long, now low, now rising into violence. others were audible at intervals, but only in a growl or a bitter exclamation, that told of minds made up and hands which would not be restrained. he caught his own name, tavannes--the mask was useless then! and once a noisy movement which came to nothing, foiled, he fancied, by peridol. he knew enough. he rose to his full height, and his eyes seemed a little closer together; an ugly smile curved his lips. his gaze travelled over the objects in the room, the bare stools and table, the lantern, the wine pitcher; beyond these, in a corner, the cloak and straw on the low bed. the light, cold and grey, fell cheerlessly on the dull chamber, and showed it in harmony with the ominous whisper which grew in the gallery; with the stern-faced listener who stood, his one hand on the door. he looked, but he found nothing to his purpose, nothing to serve his end, whatever his end was; and with a quick light step he left the door, mounted the window recess, and, poised on the very edge, looked down. if he thought to escape that way his hope was desperate. the depth to the water-level was not, he judged, twelve feet. but peridol had told the truth. below lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. this quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. but, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to the right of his position. he sprang to the floor again, and listened an instant; then, with guarded movements--for there was fear in the air, fear in the silent room, and at any moment the rush might be made, the door burst in--he set the lantern and wine pitcher on the floor, and took up the table in his arms. he began to carry it to the window, but, halfway thither, his eye told him that it would not pass through the opening, and he set it down again and glided to the bed. again he was thwarted; the bed was screwed to the floor. another might have despaired at that, but he rose with no sign of dismay, and listening, always listening, he spread his cloak on the floor, and deftly, with as little noise and rustling as might be, he piled the straw in it, compressed the bundle, and, cutting the bed-cords with his dagger, bound all together with them. in three steps he was in the embrasure of the window, and, even as the men in the passage thrust the lieutenant aside and with a sudden uproar came down to the door, he flung the bundle lightly and carefully to the right--so lightly and carefully, and with so nice and deliberate a calculation, that it seemed odd it fell beyond the reach of an ordinary leap. an instant and he was on the floor again. the men had to unlock, to draw back the bolts, to draw back the door which opened outwards; their numbers, as well as their savage haste, impeded them. when they burst in at last, with a roar of "to the river! to the river!"--burst in a rush of struggling shoulders and lowered pikes, they found him standing, a solitary figure, on the further side of the table, his arms folded. and the sight of the passive figure for a moment stayed them. "say your prayers, child of satan!" cried the leader, waving his weapon. "we give you one minute!" "ay, one minute!" his followers chimed in. "be ready!" "you would murder me?" he said with dignity. and when they shouted assent, "good!" he answered. "it is between you and m. de biron, whose guest i am. but"--with a glance which passed round the ring of glaring eyes and working features--"i would leave a last word for some one. is there any one here who values a safe-conduct from the king? 'tis for two men coming and going for a fortnight." and he held up a slip of paper. the leader cried "to hell with his safe-conduct! say your prayers!" but all were not of his mind; on one or two of the crimson savage faces--the faces, for the most part, of honest men maddened by their wrongs--flashed an avaricious gleam. a safe-conduct? to avenge, to slay, to kill--and to go safe! for some minds such a thing has an invincible fascination. a man thrust himself forward. "ay, i'll have it!" he cried. "give it here!" "it is yours," count hannibal answered, "if you will carry ten words to marshal tavannes--when i am gone." the man's neighbour laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. "and marshal tavannes will pay you finely," he said. but maudron, the man who had offered, shook off the hand. "if i take the message!" he muttered in a grim aside. "do you think me mad?" and then aloud he cried, "ay, i'll take your message! give me the paper." "you swear you will take it?" the man had no intention of taking it, but he perjured himself and went forward. the others would have pressed round too, half in envy, half in scorn; but tavannes by a gesture stayed them. "gentlemen, i ask a minute only," he said. "a minute for a dying man is not much. your friends had as much." and the fellows, acknowledging the claim and assured that their victim could not escape, let maudron go round the table to him. the man was in haste and ill at ease, conscious of his evil intentions and the fraud he was practising; and at once greedy to have, yet ashamed of the bargain he was making. his attention was divided between the slip of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his comrades; he paid little heed to count hannibal, whom he knew to be unarmed. only when tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be fain to delay, "go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is up!" tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. maudron saw a chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have leapt back with it! but quick as he, and quicker, tavannes too stooped, gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first through the window. the movement carried tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. an instant he hung on the verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards. he alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he himself bounded off right-handed. the peril was appalling, the possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have taken. but he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. he could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. but from its support he leapt on convulsively, and as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. they sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard, and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time. the men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. shout as they might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. they could only look on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from their view, behind the angle of the building. here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and wall. he struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless maudron--a tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he turned and painfully climbed the river-bank. the pike-wound in his shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn. nevertheless, when he had put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the arsenal he paused, and turned. he saw that the men had run to other windows which looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with triumph. he shook his fist at them. "ho, fools!" he cried, "you kill not tavannes so! till our next meeting at montfaucon, fare you well!" chapter xv. the brother of st. magloire. as the exertion of power is for the most part pleasing, so the exercise of that which a woman possesses over a man is especially pleasant. when in addition a risk of no ordinary kind has been run, and the happy issue has been barely expected--above all when the momentary gain seems an augury of final victory--it is impossible that a feeling akin to exultation should not arise in the mind, however black the horizon, and however distant the fair haven. the situation in which count hannibal left mademoiselle de vrillac will be remembered. she had prevailed on him; but in return he had bowed her to the earth, partly by subtle threats, and partly by sheer savagery. he had left her weeping, with the words "madame de tavannes" ringing doom in her ears, and the dark phantom of his will pointing onward to an inevitable future. had she abandoned hope, it would have been natural. but the girl was of a spirit not long nor easily cowed; and tavannes had not left her half an hour before the reflection, that so far the honours of the day were hers, rose up to console her. in spite of his power and her impotence, she had imposed her will upon his; she had established an influence over him, she had discovered a scruple which stayed him, and a limit beyond which he would not pass. in the result she might escape; for the conditions which he had accepted with an ill grace, might prove beyond his fulfilling. she might escape! true, many in her place would have feared a worse fate and harsher handling. but there lay half the merit of her victory. it had left her not only in a better position, but with a new confidence in her power over her adversary. he would insist on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could look for no indulgence. but if the conditions proved to be beyond his power, she believed that he would spare her: with an ill grace, indeed, with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman's pride might scarcely support. but he would spare her. and if the worst befell her? she would still have the consolation of knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had ransomed those most dear to her. owing to the position of her chamber, she saw nothing of the excesses to which paris gave itself up during the remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the following morning. but the carlats and her women learned from the guards below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. how could she prove false to them? how doom them to perish, had there been no question of her lover? of him she sat thinking by the hour together. she recalled with solemn tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself. she found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for himself, and which she quickly forgave him. the revulsion of feeling which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from him, no longer moved her much; while all in his action that might have seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she still clung to him. clung to him, not so much with the passion of the mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life but sacrifice. she had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that day, and until late on the following day. her own servants waited on her, and it was known that below stairs count hannibal's riders kept sullen ward behind barred doors and shuttered windows, refusing admission to all who came. now and again echoes of the riot which filled the streets with bloodshed reached her ears: or word of the more striking occurrences was brought to her by madame carlat. and early on this second day, monday, it was whispered that m. de tavannes had not returned, and that the men below were growing uneasy. at last, when the suspense below and above was growing tense, it was broken. footsteps and voices were heard ascending the stairs, the trampling and hubbub were followed by a heavy knock; perforce the door was opened. while mademoiselle, who had risen, awaited with a beating heart she knew not what, a cowled father, in the dress of the monks of st. magloire, stood on the threshold, and, crossing himself, muttered the words of benediction. he entered slowly. no sight could have been more dreadful to mademoiselle; for it set at naught the conditions which she had so hardly exacted. what if count hannibal were behind, were even now mounting the stairs, prepared to force her to a marriage before this shaveling? or ready to proceed, if she refused, to the last extremity? sudden terror taking her by the throat choked her; her colour fled, her hand flew to her breast. yet, before the door had closed on bigot, she had recovered herself. "this intrusion is not by m. de tavannes' orders!" she cried, stepping forward haughtily. "this person has no business here. how dare you admit him?" the norman showed his bearded visage a moment at the door. "my lord's orders," he muttered sullenly. and he closed the door on them. she had a huguenot's hatred of a cowl; and, in this crisis, her reasons for fearing it. her eyes blazed with indignation. "enough!" she cried, pointing with a gesture of dismissal to the door. "go back to him who sent you! if he will insult me, let him do it to my face! if he will perjure himself, let him forswear himself in person. or, if you come on your own account," she continued, flinging prudence to the winds, "as your brethren came to philippa de luns, to offer me the choice you offered her, i give you her answer! if i had thought of myself only, i had not lived so long! and rather than bear your presence or hear your arguments----" she came to a sudden, odd, quavering pause on the word; her lips remained parted, she swayed an instant on her feet. the next moment madame carlat, to whom the visitor had turned his shoulder, doubted her eyes, for mademoiselle was in the monk's arms! "clotilde! clotilde!" he cried, and held her to him. for the monk was m. de tignonville! under the cowl was the lover with whom mademoiselle's thoughts had been engaged. in this disguise, and armed with tavannes' note to madame st. lo--which the guards below knew for count hannibal's hand, though they were unable to decipher the contents--he had found no difficulty in making his way to her. he had learned before he entered that tavannes was abroad, and was aware therefore that he ran little risk. his betrothed, on the other hand, who knew nothing of his adventures in the interval, saw in him one who came to her at the greatest risk, across unnumbered perils, through streets swimming with blood. and though she had never embraced him save in the crisis of the massacre, though she had never called him by his christian name, in the joy of this meeting she abandoned herself to him, she clung to him weeping, she forgot for the time his defection, and thought only of him who had returned to her so gallantly, who brought into the room a breath of poitou, and the sea, and the old days, and the old life; and at the sight of whom the horrors of the last two days fell from her--for the moment. and madame carlat wept also, and in the room was a sound of weeping. the least moved was, for a certainty, m. de tignonville himself, who, as we know, had gone through much that day. but even his heart swelled, partly with pride, partly with thankfulness that he had returned to one who loved him so well. fate had been kinder to him than he deserved; but he need not confess that now. when he had brought off the _coup_ which he had in his mind, he would hasten to forget that he had entertained other ideas. mademoiselle had been the first to be carried away; she was also the first to recover herself. "i had forgotten," she cried suddenly. "i had forgotten," and she wrested herself from his embrace with violence, and stood panting, her face white, her eyes affrighted. "i must not! and you--i had forgotten that too! to be here, monsieur, is the worst office you can do me. you must go! go, monsieur, in mercy i beg of you, while it is possible. every moment you are here, every moment you spend in this house, i shudder." "you need not fear for me," he said, in a tone of bravado. he did not understand. "i fear for myself!" she answered. and then, wringing her hands, divided between her love for him and her fear for herself, "oh, forgive me!" she said. "you do not know that he has promised to spare me, if he cannot produce you, and--and--a minister! he has granted me that; but i thought when you entered that he had gone back on his word, and sent a priest, and it maddened me! i could not bear to think that i had gained nothing. now you understand, and you will pardon me, monsieur? if he cannot produce you i am saved. go then, leave me, i beg, without a moment's delay." he laughed derisively as he turned back his cowl and squared his shoulders. "all that is over!" he said, "over and done with, sweet! m. de tavannes is at this moment a prisoner in the arsenal. on my way hither i fell in with m. de biron, and he told me. the grand master, who would have had me join his company, had been all night at marshal tavannes' hotel, where he had been detained longer than he expected. he stood pledged to release count hannibal on his return, but at my request he consented to hold him one hour, and to do also a little thing for me." the glow of hope which had transfigured her face faded slowly. "it will not help," she said, "if he find you here." "he will not! nor you!" "how, monsieur?" "in a few minutes," he explained--he could not hide his exultation, "a message will come from the arsenal in the name of tavannes, bidding the monk he sent to you bring you to him. a spoken message, corroborated by my presence, should suffice: '_bid the monk who is now with mademoiselle_,' it will run, '_bring her to me at the arsenal, and let four pikes guard them hither_.' when i begged m. de biron to do this, he laughed. 'i can do better,' he said. 'they shall bring one of count hannibal's gloves, which he left on my table. always supposing my rascals have done him no harm, which god forbid, for i am answerable.'" tignonville, delighted with the stratagem which the meeting with biron had suggested, could see no flaw in it. she could, and though she heard him to the end, no second glow of hope softened the lines of her features. with a gesture full of dignity, which took in not only madame carlat and the waiting-woman who stood at the door but the absent servants, "and what of these?" she said. "what of these? you forgot them, monsieur. you do not think, you cannot have thought, that i would abandon them? that i would leave them to such mercy as he, defeated, might extend to them? no, you forgot them." he did not know what to answer, for the jealous eyes of the frightened waiting-woman, fierce with the fierceness of a hunted animal, were on him. the carlat and she had heard, could hear. at last, "better one than none!" he muttered, in a voice so low that if the servants caught his meaning it was but indistinctly. "i have to think of you." "and i of them," she answered firmly. "nor is that all. were they not here, it could not be. my word is passed--though a moment ago, monsieur, in the joy of seeing you i forgot it. and how," she continued, "if i keep not my word, can i expect him to keep his? or how, if i am ready to break the bond, on this happening which i never expected, can i hold him to conditions which he loves as little--as little as i love him?" her voice dropped piteously on the last words; her eyes, craving her lover's pardon, sought his. but rage, not pity or admiration, was the feeling roused in tignonville's breast. he stood staring at her, struck dumb by folly so immense. at last, "you cannot mean this," he blurted out. "you cannot mean, mademoiselle, that you intend to stand on that! to keep a promise wrung from you by force, by treachery, in the midst of such horrors as he and his have brought upon us! it is inconceivable!" she shook her head. "i promised," she said. "you were forced to it." "but the promise saved our lives." "from murderers! from assassins!" he protested. she shook her head. "i cannot go back," she said firmly; "i cannot." "then you are willing to marry him," he cried in ignoble anger. "that is it! nay, you must wish to marry him! for, as for his conditions, mademoiselle," the young man continued, with an insulting laugh, "you cannot think seriously of them. _he_ keep conditions and you in his power! he, count hannibal! but for the matter of that, and were he in the mind to keep them, what are they? there are plenty of ministers. i left one only this morning. i could lay my hand on one in five minutes. he has only to find one therefore--and to find me!" "yes, monsieur," she cried, trembling with wounded pride, "it is for that reason i implore you to go. the sooner you leave me, the sooner you place yourself in a position of security, the happier for me! every moment that you spend here, you endanger both yourself and me!" "if you will not be persuaded----" "i shall not be persuaded," she answered firmly, "and you do but"--alas! her pride began to break down, her voice to quiver, she looked piteously at him--"by staying here make it harder for me to--to----" "hush!" cried madame carlat, "hush!" and as they started and turned towards her--she was at the end of the chamber by the door, almost out of earshot--she raised a warning hand. "listen!" she muttered, "some one has entered the house." "'tis my messenger from biron," tignonville answered sullenly. and he drew his cowl over his face, and, hiding his hands in his sleeves, moved towards the door. but on the threshold he turned and held out his arms. he could not go thus. "mademoiselle! clotilde!" he cried with passion, "for the last time, listen to me, come with me. be persuaded!" "hush!" madame carlat interposed again, and turned a scared face on them. "it is no messenger! it is tavannes himself: i know his voice." and she wrung her hands. "_oh, mon dieu, mon dieu_, what are we to do?" she continued, panic-stricken. and she looked all ways about the room. chapter xvi. at close quarters. fear leapt into mademoiselle's eyes, but she commanded herself. she signed to madame carlat to be silent, and they listened, gazing at one another, hoping against hope that the woman was mistaken. a long moment they waited, and some were beginning to breathe again, when the strident tones of count hannibal's voice rolled up the staircase, and put an end to doubt. mademoiselle grasped the table and stood supporting herself by it. "what are we to do?" she muttered. "what are we to do?" and she turned distractedly towards the women. the courage which had supported her in her lover's absence had abandoned her now. "if he finds him here i am lost! i am lost!" "he will not know me," tignonville muttered. but he spoke uncertainly; and his gaze, shifting hither and thither, belied the boldness of his words. madame carlat's eyes flew round the room; on her for once the burden seemed to rest. alas! the room had no second door, and the windows looked on a courtyard guarded by tavannes' people. and even now count hannibal's step rang on the stair! his hand was almost on the latch. the woman wrung her hands; then, a thought striking her, she darted to a corner where mademoiselle's robes hung on pegs against the wall. "here!" she cried, raising them. "behind these! he may not be seen here! quick, monsieur, quick! hide yourself!" it was a forlorn hope--the suggestion of one who had not thought out the position; and, whatever its promise, mademoiselle's pride revolted against it. "no," she cried. "not there!" while tignonville, who knew that the step was useless, since count hannibal must have learned that a monk had entered, held his ground. "you could not deny yourself!" he muttered hurriedly. "and a priest with me?" she answered; and she shook her head. there was no time for more, and even as mademoiselle spoke count hannibal's knuckles tapped the door. she cast a last look at her lover. he had turned his back on the window; the light no longer fell on his face. it was possible that he might pass unrecognised, if tavannes' stay was brief; at any rate the risk must be run. in a half-stifled voice she bade her woman, javette, open the door. count hannibal bowed low as he entered; and he deceived the others. but he did not deceive her. he had not crossed the threshold before she repented that she had not acted on tignonville's suggestion, and denied herself. for what could escape those hard keen eyes, which swept the room, saw all, and seemed to see nothing--those eyes in which there dwelt even now a glint of cruel humour? he might deceive others, but she who panted within his grasp, as the wild bird palpitates in the hand of the fowler, was not deceived! he saw, he knew! although, as he bowed, and smiling, stood upright, he looked only at her. "i expected to be with you before this," he said courteously, "but i have been detained. first, mademoiselle, by some of your friends, who were reluctant to part with me; then by some of your enemies, who, finding me in no handsome case, took me for a huguenot escaped from the river, and drove me to shifts to get clear of them. however, now i am come, i have news." "news?" she muttered with dry lips. it could hardly be good news. "yes, mademoiselle, of m. de tignonville," he answered. "i have little doubt that i shall be able to produce him this evening, and so to satisfy one of your scruples. and as i trust that this good father," he went on, turning to the ecclesiastic, and speaking with the sneer from which he seldom refrained, catholic as he was, when he mentioned a priest, "has by this time succeeded in removing the other, and persuading you to accept his ministrations----" "no!" she cried impulsively. "no?" with a dubious smile, and a glance from one to the other. "oh, i had hoped better things. but he still may? he still may. i am sure he may. in which case, mademoiselle, your modesty must pardon me if i plead urgency, and fix the hour after supper this evening for the fulfilment of your promise." she turned white to the lips. "after supper?" she gasped. "yes, mademoiselle, this evening. shall i say--at eight o'clock?" in horror of the thing which menaced her, of the thing from which only two hours separated her, she could find no words but those which she had already used. the worst was upon her; worse than the worst could not befall her. "but he has not persuaded me!" she cried, clenching her hands in passion. "he has not persuaded me!" "still he may, mademoiselle." "he will not!" she cried wildly. "he will not!" the room was going round with her. the precipice yawned at her feet; its naked terrors turned her brain. she had been pushed nearer, and nearer, and nearer; struggle as she might she was on the verge. a mist rose before her eyes, and though they thought she listened she understood nothing of what was passing. when she came to herself after the lapse of a minute, count hannibal was speaking. "permit him another trial," he was saying in a tone of bland irony. "a short time longer, mademoiselle! one more assault, father! the weapons of the church could not be better directed or to a more worthy object; and, successful, shall not fail of due recognition and an earthly reward." and while she listened, half fainting, with a humming in her ears, he was gone. the door closed on him, and the three--mademoiselle's woman had withdrawn when she opened to him--looked at one another. the girl parted her lips to speak, but she only smiled piteously; and it was m. de tignonville who broke the silence, in a tone which betrayed rather relief than any other feeling. "come, all is not lost yet," he said briskly. "if i can escape from the house----" "he knows you," she answered. "what?" "he knows you," mademoiselle repeated in a tone almost apathetic. "i read it in his eyes. he knew you at once: and knew, too," she added bitterly, "that he had here under his hand one of the two things he required." "then why did he hide his knowledge?" the young man retorted sharply. "why?" she answered. "to induce me to waive the other condition in the hope of saving you. oh!" she continued in a tone of bitter raillery, "he has the cunning of hell, of the priests! you are no match for him, monsieur. nor i; nor any of us. and"--with a gesture of despair--"he will be my master! he will break me to his will and to his hand! i shall be his! his, body and soul, body and soul!" she continued drearily, as she sank into a chair and, rocking herself to and fro, covered her face. "i shall be his! his till i die!" the man's eyes burned, and the pulse in his temples beat wildly. "but you shall not," he exclaimed. "i may be no match for him in cunning, you say well. but i can kill him. and i will!" he paced up and down. "i will!" "you should have done it when he was here," she answered, half in scorn, half in earnest. "it is not too late," he cried; and then he stopped, silenced by the opening door. it was javette who entered. they looked at her, and before she spoke were on their feet. her face, white and eager, marking something besides fear, announced that she brought news. she closed the door behind her, and in a moment it was told. "monsieur can escape, if he is quick," she cried in a low tone; and they saw that she trembled with excitement. "they are at supper. but he must be quick! he must be quick!" "is not the door guarded!" "it is, but----" "and he knows! your mistress says that he knows that i am here." for a moment javette looked startled. "it is possible," she muttered. "but he has gone out." madame carlat clapped her hands. "i heard the door close," she said, "three minutes ago." "and if monsieur can reach the room in which he supped last night, the window that was broken is only blocked"--she swallowed once or twice in her excitement--"with something he can move. and then monsieur is in the street, where his cowl will protect him." "but count hannibal's men?" he asked eagerly. "they are eating in the lodge by the door." "ha! and they cannot see the other room from there?" javette nodded. her tale told, she seemed to be unable to add a word. mademoiselle, who knew her for a craven, wondered that she had found courage either to note what she had or to bring the news. but as providence had been so good to them as to put it into this woman's head to act as she had, it behoved them to use the opportunity--the last, the very last opportunity they might have. she turned to tignonville. "oh, go!" she cried feverishly. "go, i beg! go now, monsieur! the greatest kindness you can do me is to place yourself as quickly as possible beyond his reach." a faint colour, the flush of hope, had returned to her cheeks. her eyes glittered. "right, mademoiselle!" he cried, obedient for once. "i go! and do you be of good courage." he held her hand an instant, then, moving to the door, he opened it and listened. they all pressed behind him to hear. a murmur of voices, low and distant, mounted the staircase and bore out the girl's tale; apart from this the house was silent. tignonville cast a last look at mademoiselle, and, with a gesture of farewell, glided a-tiptoe to the stairs and began to descend, his face hidden in his cowl. they watched him reach the angle of the staircase, they watched him vanish beyond it; and still they listened, looking at one another when a board creaked or the voices below were hushed for a moment. chapter xvii. the duel. at the foot of the staircase tignonville paused. the droning norman voices of the men on guard issued from an open door a few paces before him on the left. he caught a jest, the coarse chuckling laughter which attended it, and the gurgle of applause which followed; and he knew that at any moment one of the men might step out and discover him. fortunately the door of the room with the shattered window was almost within reach of his hand on the right side of the passage, and he stepped softly to it. he stood an instant hesitating, his hand on the latch; then, alarmed by a movement in the guard-room, as if some were rising, he pushed the door in a panic, slid into the room, and shut the door behind him. he was safe, and he had made no noise; but at the table, at supper, with his back to him and his face to the partly closed window, sat count hannibal! the young man's heart stood still. for a long minute he gazed at the count's back, spellbound and unable to stir. then, as tavannes ate on without looking round, he began to take courage. possibly he had entered so quietly that he had not been heard, or possibly his entrance was taken for that of a servant. in either case, there was a chance that he might retire after the same fashion; and he had actually raised the latch, and was drawing the door to him with infinite precaution, when tavannes' voice struck him, as it were, in the face. "pray do not admit the draught, m. de tignonville," he said, without looking round. "in your cowl you do not feel it, but it is otherwise with me." the unfortunate tignonville stood transfixed, glaring at the back of the other's head. for an instant he could not find his voice. at last "curse you!" he hissed in a transport of rage. "curse you! you did know, then? and she was right." "if you mean that i expected you, to be sure, monsieur," count hannibal answered. "see, your place is laid. you will not feel the air from without there. the very becoming dress which you have adopted secures you from cold. but--do you not find it somewhat oppressive this summer weather?" "curse you!" the young man cried, trembling. tavannes turned and looked at him with a dark smile. "the curse may fall," he said, "but i fancy it will not be in consequence of your petitions, monsieur. and now, were it not better you played the man?" "if i were armed," the other cried passionately, "you would not insult me!" "sit down, sir, sit down," count hannibal answered sternly. "we will talk of that presently. in the meantime i have something to say to you. will you not eat?" but tignonville would not. "very well," count hannibal answered; and he went on with his supper, "i am indifferent whether you eat or not. it is enough for me that you are one of the two things i lacked an hour ago; and that i have you, m. de tignonville. and through you i look to obtain the other." "what other?" tignonville cried. "a minister," tavannes answered, smiling. "a minister. there are not many left in paris--of your faith. but you met one this morning, i know!" "i? i met one?" "yes, monsieur, you! and can lay your hand on him in five minutes, you know." m. de tignonville gasped. his face turned a shade paler. "you have a spy," he cried. "you have a spy upstairs!" tavannes raised his cup to his lips, and drank. when he had set it down, "it may be," he said, and he shrugged his shoulders. "i know, it boots not how i know. it is my business to make the most of my knowledge--and of yours!" m. de tignonville laughed rudely. "make the most of your own," he said; "you will have none of mine." "that remains to be seen," count hannibal answered. "carry your mind back two days, m. de tignonville. had i gone to mademoiselle de vrillac last saturday and said to her 'marry me, or promise to marry me,' what answer would she have given?" "she would have called you an insolent!" the young man replied hotly. "and i----" "no matter what you would have done!" tavannes said. "suffice it that she would have answered as you suggest. yet to-day she has given me her promise." "yes," the young man retorted, "in circumstances in which no man of honour----" "let us say in peculiar circumstances." "well?" "which still exist! mark me, m. de tignonville," count hannibal continued, leaning forward and eyeing the young man with meaning, "_which still exist!_ and may have the same effect on another's will as on hers! listen! do you hear?" and rising from his seat with a darkening face, he pointed to the partly shuttered window, through which the measured tramp of a body of men came heavily to the ear. "do you hear, monsieur? do you understand? as it was yesterday it is to-day! they killed the president la place this morning! and they are searching! they are still searching! the river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! i have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase through the streets!" the younger man had risen also. he stood confronting tavannes, the cowl fallen back from his face, his eyes dilated. "you think to frighten me!" he cried. "you think that i am craven enough to sacrifice her to save myself. you----" "you were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this window and waited for death!" count hannibal answered brutally. "you flinched then, and may flinch again!" "try me!" tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. "try me!" and then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, "but you dare not!" he cried. "you dare not!" "no?" "no! for if i die you lose her!" tignonville replied in a voice of triumph. "ha, ha! i touch you there!" he continued. "you dare not, for my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself! you may threaten, m. de tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to the window"--and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other's gesture--"but my safety is more to you than to me! and 'twill end there!" "you believe that?" "i know it!" in two strides count hannibal was at the window. he seized a great piece of the boarding which closed one half of the opening; he wrenched it away. a flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again to his opponent. "then if you know it," he cried vehemently, "in god's name act upon it!" and he pointed to the window. "act upon it?" "ay, act upon it!" tavannes repeated, with a glance of flame. "the road is open! if you would save your mistress, behold the way! if you would save her from the embrace she abhors, from the eyes under which she trembles, from the hand of a master, there lies the way! and it is not her glove only you will save, but herself, her soul, her body! so," he continued with a certain wildness and in a tone wherein contempt and bitterness were mingled, "to the lions, brave lover! will you your life for her honour? will you death that she may live a maid? will you your head to save her finger? then, leap down! leap down! the lists are open, the sand is strewed! out of your own mouth i have it that if you perish she is saved! then out, monsieur! cry 'i am a huguenot!' and god's will be done!" tignonville was livid. "rather, your will!" he panted. "your will, you devil! nevertheless----" "you will go! ha! ha! you will go!" for an instant it seemed that he would go. stung by the challenge, wrought on by the contempt in which tavannes held him, he shot a look of hate at the tempter; he caught his breath, and laid his hand on the edge of the shuttering as if he would leap out. but it goes hard with him who has once turned back from the foe. the evening light, glancing cold on the burnished pike-points of a group of archers who stood near, caught his eye and went chill to his heart. death, not in the arena, not in the sight of shouting thousands, but in this darkening street, with an enemy laughing from the window, death with no revenge to follow, with no certainty that after all she would be safe, such a death could be compassed only by pure love--the love of a child for a parent, of a parent for a child, of a man for the one woman in the world! he recoiled. "you would not spare her!" he cried, his face damp with sweat--for he knew now that he would not go. "you want to be rid of me! you would fool me, and then----" "out of your own mouth you are convict!" count hannibal retorted gravely. "it was you who said it! but still i swear it! shall i swear it to you?" but tignonville recoiled another step and was silent. "no? o _preux chevalier_, o gallant knight! i knew it! do you think that i did not know with whom i had to deal?" and count hannibal burst into harsh laughter, turning his back on the other, as if he no longer counted. "you will neither die with her nor for her! you were better in her petticoats and she in your breeches! or no, you are best as you are, good father! take my advice, m. de tignonville, have done with arms; and with a string of beads, and soft words, and talk of holy mother church, you will fool the women as surely as the best of them! they are not all like my cousin, a flouting, gibing, jeering woman--you had poor fortune there, i fear?" "if i had a sword!" tignonville hissed, his face livid with rage. "you call me coward, because i will not die to please you. but give me a sword, and i will show you if i am a coward!" tavannes stood still. "you are there, are you?" he said in an altered tone. "i----" "give me a sword," tignonville repeated, holding out his open trembling hands. "a sword! a sword! 'tis easy taunting an unarmed man, but----" "you wish to fight?" "i ask no more! no more! give me a sword," he urged, his voice quivering with eagerness. "it is you who are the coward!" count hannibal stared at him. "and what am i to get by fighting you?" he reasoned slowly. "you are in my power. i can do with you as i please. i can call from this window and denounce you, or i can summon my men----" "coward! coward!" "ay? well, i will tell you what i will do," with a subtle smile. "i will give you a sword, m. de tignonville, and i will meet you foot to foot here, in this room, on a condition." "what is it? what is it?" the young man cried with incredible eagerness. "name your condition!" "that if i get the better of you, you find me a minister." "i find you a----" "a minister. yes, that is it. or tell me where i can find one." the young man recoiled. "never!" he said. "you know where to find one." "never! never!" "you can lay your hand on one in five minutes, you know." "i will not." "then i shall not fight you!" count hannibal answered coolly; and he turned from him, and back again. "you will pardon me if i say, m. de tignonville, that you are in as many minds about fighting as about dying! i do not think that you would have made your fortune at court. moreover, there is a thing which i fancy you have not considered. if we fight you may kill me, in which case the condition will not help me much. or i--which is more likely--" he added with a harsh smile, "may kill you, and again i am no better placed." the young man's, pallid features betrayed the conflict in his breast. to do him justice, his hand itched for the sword-hilt--he was brave enough for that; he hated, and only so could he avenge himself. but the penalty if he had the worse! and yet what of it? he was in hell now, in a hell of humiliation, shame, defeat, tormented by this fiend! 'twas only to risk a lower hell. at last, "i will do it!" he cried hoarsely. "give me a sword and look to yourself." "you promise?" "yes, yes, i promise!" "good," count hannibal answered suavely; "but we cannot fight so, we must have more light," and striding to the door he opened it, and calling the norman bade him move the table and bring caudles--a dozen candles; for in the narrow streets the light was waning, and in the half-shuttered room it was growing dusk. tignonville, listening with a throbbing brain, wondered that the attendant expressed no surprise and said no word--until tavannes added to his orders one for a pair of swords. then, "monsieur's sword is here," bigot answered in his half-intelligible patois. "he left it here yester morning." "you are a good fellow, bigot," tavannes answered, with a gaiety and good-humour which astonished tignonville. "and one of these days you shall marry suzanne." the norman smiled sourly and went in search of the weapon. "you have a poniard?" count hannibal continued in the same tone of unusual good temper, which had already struck tignonville. "excellent! will you strip, then, or--as we are? very good, monsieur; in the unlikely event of fortune declaring for you, you will be in a better condition to take care of yourself. a man running through the streets in his shirt is exposed to inconveniences!" and he laughed gaily. while he laughed the other listened; and his rage began to give place to wonder. a man who regarded as a pastime a sword and dagger conflict between four walls, who, having his adversary in his power, was ready to discard the advantage, to descend into the lists, and to risk life for a whim, a fancy--such a man was outside his experience, though in poitou in those days of war were men reckoned brave. for what, he asked himself as he waited, had tavannes to gain by fighting? the possession of mademoiselle? but mademoiselle, if his passion for her overwhelmed him, was in his power; and if his promise were a barrier--which seemed inconceivable in the light of his reputation--he had only to wait, and to-morrow, or the next day, or the next, a minister would be found, and without risk he could gain that for which he was now risking all. tignonville did not know that it was in the other's nature to find pleasure in such utmost ventures. nevertheless the recklessness to which tavannes' action bore witness had its effect upon him. by the time the young man's sword arrived something of his passion for the conflict had evaporated; and though the touch of the hilt restored his determination, the locked door, the confined space, and the unaccustomed light went a certain distance towards substituting despair for courage. the use of the dagger in the duels of that day, however, rendered despair itself formidable. and tignonville, when he took his place, appeared anything but a mean antagonist. he had removed his robe and cowl, and lithe and active as a cat he stood as it were on springs, throwing his weight now on this foot and now on that, and was continually in motion. the table bearing the candles had been pushed against the window, the boarding of which had been replaced by bigot before he left the room. tignonville had this, and consequently the lights, on his dagger hand; and he plumed himself on the advantage, considering his point the more difficult to follow. count hannibal did not seem to notice this, however. "are you ready?" he asked. and then, "on guard!" he cried, and he stamped the echo to the word. but, that done, instead of bearing the other down with a headlong rush characteristic of the man--as tignonville feared--he held off warily, stooping low; and when his slow opening was met by one as cautious, he began to taunt his antagonist. "come!" he cried, and feinted half-heartedly. "come, monsieur, are we going to fight, or play at fighting?" "fight yourself, then!" tignonville answered, his breath quickened by excitement and growing hope. "'tis not i hold back!" and he lunged, but was put aside. "Ça! ça!" tavannes retorted; and he lunged and parried in his turn, but loosely and at a distance. after which the two moved nearer the door, their eyes glittering as they watched one another, their knees bent, the sinews of their backs straining for the leap. suddenly tavannes thrust, and leapt away, and as his antagonist thrust in return the count swept the blade aside with a strong parry, and for a moment seemed to be on the point of falling on tignonville with the poniard. but tignonville retired his right foot nimbly, which brought them front to front again. and the younger man laughed. "try again, m. le comte!" he said. and, with the word, he dashed in himself quick as light; for a second the blades ground on one another, the daggers hovered, the two suffused faces glared into one another; then the pair disengaged again. the blood trickled from a scratch on count hannibal's neck; half an inch to the right and the point had found his throat. and tignonville, elated, laughed anew, and swaying from side to side on his hips, watched with growing confidence for a second chance. lithe as one of the leopards charles kept at the louvre, he stooped lower and lower, and more and more with each moment took the attitude of the assailant, watching for an opening; while count hannibal, his face dark and his eyes vigilant, stood increasingly on the defence. the light was waning a little, the wicks of the caudles were burning long; but neither noticed it or dared to remove his eyes from the other's. their laboured breathing found an echo on the farther side of the door, but this again neither observed. "well?" count hannibal said at last. "are you coming?" "when i please," tignonville answered; and he feinted but drew back. the other did the same, and again they watched one another, their eyes seeming to grow smaller and smaller. gradually a smile had birth on tignonville's lips. he thrust! it was parried! he thrust again--parried! tavannes, grown still more cautious, gave a yard. tignonville pushed on, but did not allow confidence to master caution. he began, indeed, to taunt his adversary; to flout and jeer him. but it was with a motive. for suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he repeated the peculiar thrust which had been successful before. this time, however, tavannes was ready. he put aside the blade with a quick parade, and instead of making a riposte sprang within the other's guard. the two came face to face and breast to shoulder, and struck furiously with their daggers. count hannibal was outside his opponent's sword and had the advantage. tignonville's dagger fell, but glanced off the metalwork of the other's hilt; tavannes' fell swift and hard between the young man's eyes. the huguenot flung up his hands and staggered back, falling his length on the floor. in an instant count hannibal was on his breast, and had knocked away his dagger. then, "you own yourself vanquished?" he cried. the young man, blinded by the blood which trickled down his face, made a sign with his hands. count hannibal rose to his feet again, and stood a moment looking at his foe without speaking. presently he seemed to be satisfied. he nodded, and going to the table dipped a napkin in water. he brought it, and carefully supporting tignonville's head, laved his brow. "it is as i thought," he said, when he had stanched the blood. "you are not hurt, man. you are stunned. it is no more than a bruise." the young man was coming to himself. "but i thought----" he muttered, and broke off to pass his hand over his face. then he got up slowly, reeling a little, "i thought it was the point," he muttered. "no, it was the pommel," tavannes answered drily. "it would not have served me to kill you. i could have done that ten times." tignonville groaned, and, sitting down at the table, held the napkin to his aching head. one of the candles had been overturned in the struggle and lay on the floor, flaring in a little pool of grease. tavannes set his heel upon it; then, striding to the farther end of the room, he picked up tignonville's dagger and placed it beside his sword on the table. he looked about to see if aught else remained to do, and, finding nothing, he returned to tignonville's side. "now, monsieur," he said in a voice hard and constrained, "i must ask you to perform your part of the bargain." a groan of anguish broke from the unhappy man. and yet he had set his life on the cast; what more could he have done? "you will not harm him?" he muttered. "he shall go safe," count hannibal replied gravely. "and----" he fought a moment with his pride, then blurted out the words, "you will not tell her--that it was through me--you found him?" "i will not," tavannes answered in the same tone. he stooped and picked up the other's robe and cowl, which had fallen from a chair--so that as he spoke his eyes were averted. "she shall never know through me," he said. and tignonville, his face hidden in his hands, told him. chapter xviii. andromeda, perseus being absent. little by little--while they fought below--the gloom had thickened, and night had fallen in the room above. but mademoiselle would not have candles brought. seated in the darkness, on the uppermost step of the stairs, her hands clasped about her knees, she listened and listened, as if by that action she could avert misfortune; or as if, by going so far forward to meet it, she could turn aside the worst. the women shivering in the darkness about her would fain have struck a light and drawn her back into the room, for they felt safer there. but she was not to be moved. the laughter and chatter of the men in the guard-room, the coming and going of bigot as he passed, below but out of sight, had no terrors for her; nay, she breathed more freely on the bare open landing of the staircase than in the close confines of a room which her fears made hateful to her. here at least she could listen, her face unseen; and listening she bore the suspense more easily. a turn in the staircase, with the noise which proceeded from the guard-room, rendered it difficult to hear what happened in the closed room below. but she thought that if an alarm were raised there she must hear it; and as the moments passed and nothing happened, she began to feel confident that her lover had made good his escape by the window. presently she got a fright. three or four men came from the guard-room and went, as it seemed to her, to the door of the room with the shattered casement. she told herself that she had rejoiced too soon, and her heart stood still. she waited for a rush of feet, a cry, a struggle. but except an uncertain muffled sound which lasted for some minutes, and was followed by a dull shock, she heard nothing more. and presently the men went back whispering, the noise in the guard-room which had been partially hushed broke forth anew, and perplexed but relieved she breathed again. surely he had escaped by this time. surely by this time he was far away, in the arsenal, or in some place of refuge! and she might take courage, and feel that for this day the peril was overpast. "mademoiselle will have the lights now?" one of the women ventured. "no! no!" she answered feverishly, and she continued to crouch where she was on the stairs, bathing herself and her burning face in the darkness and coolness of the stairway. the air entered freely through a window at her elbow and the place was fresher, were that all, than the room she had left. javette began to whimper, but she paid no heed to her; a man came and went along the passage below, and she heard the outer door unbarred, and the jarring tread of three or four men who passed through it. but all without disturbance; and afterwards the house was quiet again. and as on this monday evening the prime virulence of the massacre had begun to abate--though it held after a fashion to the end of the week--paris without was quiet also. the sounds which had chilled her heart at intervals during two days were no longer heard. a feeling almost of peace, almost of comfort--a drowsy feeling, that was three parts a reaction from excitement--took possession of her. in the darkness her head sank lower and lower on her knees. and half an hour passed, while javette whimpered, and madame carlat slumbered, her broad back propped against the wall. suddenly mademoiselle opened her eyes, and saw, three steps below her, a strange man whose upward way she barred. behind him came carlat, and behind him bigot, lighting both; and in the confusion of her thoughts as she rose to her feet the three, all staring at her in a common amazement, seemed a company. the air entering through the open window beside her blew the flame of the candle this way and that, and added to the nightmare character of the scene; for by the shifting light the men seemed to laugh one moment and scowl the next, and their shadows were now high and now low on the wall. in truth they were as much amazed at coming on her in that place as she at their appearance; but they were awake, and she newly roused from sleep; and the advantage was with them. "what is it?" she cried in a panic. "what is it?" "if mademoiselle will return to her room?" one of the men said courteously. "but--what is it?" she was frightened. "if mademoiselle----" then she turned without more and went back into the room, and the three followed, and her woman and madame carlat. she stood resting one hand on the table while javette with shaking fingers lighted the candles. then, "now, monsieur," she said in a hard voice, "if you will tell me your business?" "you do not know me?" the stranger's eyes dwelt kindly and pitifully on her. she looked at him steadily, crushing down the fears which knocked at her heart. "no," she said. "and yet i think i have seen you." "you saw me a week last sunday," the stranger answered sorrowfully. "my name is la tribe. i preached that day, mademoiselle, before the king of navarre. i believe that you were there." for a moment she stared at him in silence, her lips parted. then she laughed, a laugh which set the teeth on edge. "oh, he is clever!" she cried. "he has the wit of the priests! or the devil! but you come too late, monsieur! you come too late! the bird has flown." "mademoiselle----" "i tell you the bird has flown!" she repeated vehemently. and her laugh of joyless triumph rang through the room. "he is clever, but i have outwitted him! i have----" she paused and stared about her wildly, struck by the silence; struck, too, by something solemn, something pitiful in the faces that were turned on her. and her lip began to quiver. "what?" she muttered. "why do you look at me so? he has not"--she turned from one to another--"he has not been taken?" "m. tignonville?" she nodded. "he is below." "ah!" she said. they expected to see her break down, perhaps to see her fall. but she only groped blindly for a chair and sat. and for a moment there was silence in the room. it was the huguenot minister who broke it in a tone formal and solemn. "listen, all present!" he said slowly. "the ways of god are past finding out. for two days in the midst of great perils i have been preserved by his hand and fed by his bounty, and i am told that i shall live if, in this matter, i do the will of those who hold me in their power. but be assured--and hearken all," he continued, lowering his voice to a sterner note. "rather than marry this woman to this man against her will--if indeed in his sight such marriage can be--rather than save my life by such base compliance, i will die not once but ten times! see. i am ready! i will make no defence!" and he opened his arms as if to welcome the stroke. "if there be trickery here, if there has been practising below, where they told me this and that, it shall not avail! until i hear from mademoiselle's own lips that she is willing, i will not say over her so much as yea, yea, or nay, nay!" "she is willing!" la tribe turned sharply, and beheld the speaker. it was count hannibal, who had entered a few seconds earlier, and had taken his stand within the door. "she is willing!" tavannes repeated quietly. and if, in this moment of the fruition of his schemes, he felt his triumph, he masked it under a face of sombre purpose. "do you doubt me, man?" "from her own lips!" the other replied, undaunted--and few could say as much--by that harsh presence. "from no other's!" "sirrah, you----" "i can die. and you can no more, my lord!" the minister answered bravely. "you have no threat can move me." "i am not sure of that," tavannes answered, more blandly. "but had you listened to me and been less anxious to be brave, m. la tribe, where no danger is, you had learned that here is no call for heroics! mademoiselle is willing, and will tell you so." "with her own lips?" count hannibal raised his eyebrows. "with her own lips, if you will," he said. and then, advancing a step and addressing her, with unusual gravity, "mademoiselle de vrillac," he said, "you hear what this gentleman requires. will you be pleased to confirm what i have said?" she did not answer, and in the intense silence which held the room in its freezing grasp a woman choked, another broke into weeping. the colour ebbed from the cheeks of more than one; the men fidgeted on their feet. count hannibal looked round, his head high. "there is no call for tears," he said; and whether he spoke in irony or in a strange obtuseness was known only to himself. "mademoiselle is in no hurry--and rightly--to answer a question so momentous. under the pressure of utmost peril, she passed her word; the more reason that, now the time has come to redeem it, she should do so at leisure and after thought. since she gave her promise, monsieur, she has had more than one opportunity of evading its fulfilment. but she is a vrillac, and i know that nothing is farther from her thoughts." he was silent a moment; and then "mademoiselle," he said, "i would not hurry you." her eyes were closed, but at that her lips moved. "i am--willing," she whispered. and a fluttering sigh, of relief, of pity, of god knows what, filled the room. "you are satisfied, m. la tribe?" "i do not----" "man!" with a growl as of a tiger, count hannibal dropped the mask. in two strides he was at the minister's side, his hand gripped his shoulder; his face, flushed with passion, glared into his. "will you play with lives!" he hissed. "if you do not value your own, have you no thought of others? of these? look and count! have you no bowels? if she will save them, will not you?" "my own i do not value." "curse your own!" tavannes cried in furious scorn. and he shook the other to and fro. "who thought of your life? will you doom these? will you give them to the butcher?" "my lord," la tribe answered, shaken in spite of himself, "if she be willing----" "she is willing." "i have nought to say. but i caught her words indistinctly. and without her consent---- "she shall speak more plainly. mademoiselle----" she anticipated him. she had risen, and stood looking straight before her, seeing nothing. "i am willing," she muttered with a strange gesture, "if it must be." he did not answer. "if it must be," she repeated slowly, and with a heavy sigh. and her chin dropped on her breast. then, abruptly, suddenly--it was a strange thing to see--she looked up. a change as complete as the change which had come over count hannibal a minute before came over her. she sprang to his side; she clutched his arm and devoured his face with her eyes. "you are not deceiving me?" she cried. "you have tignonville below? you--oh, no, no!" and she fell back from him, her eyes distended, her voice grown suddenly shrill and defiant, "you have not! you are deceiving me! he has escaped, and you have lied to me!" "i?" "yes, you have lied to me!" it was the last fierce flicker of hope when hope seemed dead: the last clutch of the drowning at the straw that floated before the eyes. he laughed harshly. "you will be my wife in five minutes," he said, "and you give me the lie? a week, and you will know me better! a month, and--but we will talk of that another time. for the present," he continued, turning to la tribe, "do you, sir, tell her that the gentleman is below. perhaps she will believe you. for you know him." la tribe looked at her sorrowfully; his heart bled for her. "i have seen m. de tignonville," he said. "and m. le comte says truly. he is in the same case with ourselves, a prisoner." "you have seen him?" she wailed. "i left him in the room below, when i mounted the stairs." count hannibal laughed, the grim mocking laugh which seemed to revel in the pain it inflicted. "will you have him for a witness?" he cried. "there could not be a better, for he will not forget. shall i fetch him?" she bowed her head, shivering. "spare me that," she said. and she pressed her hands to her eyes while an uncontrollable shudder passed over her frame. then she stepped forward: "i am ready," she whispered. "do with me as you will!" * * * * * when they had all gone out and closed the door behind them, and the two whom the minister had joined were left together, count hannibal continued for a time to pace the room, his hands clasped at his back, and his head sunk somewhat on his chest. his thoughts appeared to run in a new channel, and one, strange to say, widely diverted from his bride and from that which he had just done. for he did not look her way, or, for a time, speak to her. he stood once to snuff a candle, doing it with an absent face; and once to look, but still absently, as if he read no word of it, at the marriage writing which lay, the ink still wet, upon the table. after each of these interruptions he resumed his steady pacing to and fro, to and fro, nor did his eye wander once in the direction of her chair. and she waited. the conflict of emotions, the strife between hope and fear, the final defeat had stunned her; had left her exhausted, almost apathetic. yet not quite, nor wholly. for when in his walk he came a little nearer to her, a chill perspiration broke out on her brow, and shudderings crept over her; and when he passed farther from her--and then only, it seemed--she breathed again. but the change lay beneath the surface, and cheated the eye. into her attitude, as she sat, her hands clasped on her lap, her eyes fixed, came no apparent change or shadow of movement. suddenly, with a dull shock, she became aware that he was speaking. "there was need of haste," he said, his tone strangely low and free from emotion, "for i am under bond to leave paris to-morrow for angers, whither i bear letters from the king. and as matters stood, there was no one with whom i could leave you. i trust bigot; he is faithful, and you may trust him, madame, fair or foul! but he is not quick-witted. badelon also you may trust. bear it in mind. your woman javette is not faithful; but as her life is guaranteed she must stay with us until she can be securely placed. indeed, i must take all with me--with one exception--for the priests and monks rule paris, and they do not love me, nor would spare aught at my word." he was silent a few moments. then he resumed in the same tone, "you ought to know how we, tavannes, stand. it is by monsieur and the queen-mother; and _contra_ the guises. we have all been in this matter; but the latter push and we are pushed, and the old crack will reopen. as it is, i cannot answer for much beyond the reach of my arm. therefore, we take all with us except m. tignonville, who desires to be conducted to the arsenal." she had begun to listen with averted eyes. but as he continued to speak surprise awoke in her, and something stronger than surprise--amazement, stupefaction. slowly her eyes came to him, and when he ceased to speak, "why do you tell me these things!" she muttered, her dry lips framing the words with difficulty. "because it behoves you to know them," he answered, thoughtfully tapping the table. "i have no one, save my brother, whom i can trust." she would not ask him why he trusted her, nor why he thought he could trust her. for a moment or two she watched him, while he, with his eyes lowered, stood in deep thought. at last he looked up and his eyes met hers. "come!" he said abruptly and in a different tone, "we must end this! is it to be a kiss or a blow between us?" she rose, though her knees shook under her; and they stood face to face, her face white as paper. "what--do you mean?" she whispered. "is it to be a kiss or a blow?" he repeated. "a husband must be a lover, madame, or a master, or both! i am content to be the one or the other, or both, as it shall please you. but the one i will be." "then, a thousand times, a blow," she cried, her eyes flaming, "from you!" he wondered at her courage, but he hid his wonder. "so be it!" he answered. and before she knew what he would be at, he struck her sharply across the cheek with the glove which he held in his hand. she recoiled with a low cry, and her cheek blazed scarlet where he had struck it. "so be it!" he continued sombrely. "the choice shall be yours, but you will come to me daily for the one or the other. if i cannot be lover, madame, i will be master. and by this sign i will have you know it, daily, and daily remember it." she stared at him, her bosom rising and falling, in an astonishment too deep for words. but he did not heed her. he did not look at her again. he had already turned to the door, and while she looked he passed through it, he closed it behind him. and she was alone. chapter xix. in the orlÉannais. "but you fear him?" "fear him?" madame st. lo answered; and, to the surprise of the countess, she made a little face of contempt. "no; why should i fear him? i fear him no more than the puppy leaping at old sancho's bridle fears his tall playfellow! or than the cloud you see above us fears the wind before which it flies!" she pointed to a white patch, the size of a man's hand, which hung above the hill on their left hand and formed the only speck in the blue summer sky. "fear him! not i!" and, laughing gaily, she put her horse at a narrow rivulet which crossed the grassy track on which they rode. "but he is hard!" the countess murmured in a low voice, as she regained her companion's side. "hard!" madame st. lo rejoined with a gesture of pride. "ay, hard as the stones in my jewelled ring! hard as flint, or the nether millstone--to his enemies! but to women! bah! who ever heard that he hurt a woman!" "why then is he so feared!" the countess asked, her eyes on the subject of their discussion; a solitary figure, riding some fifty paces in front of them. "because he counts no cost!" her companion answered. "because he killed savillon in the court of the louvre, though he knew his life the forfeit. he would have paid the forfeit too, or lost his right hand, if monsieur, for his brother the marshal's sake, had not intervened. but savillon had whipped his dog, you see. then he killed the chevalier de millaud, but 'twas in fair fight, in the snow, in their shirts. for that, millaud's son lay in wait for him with two, in the passage under the châtelet; but hannibal wounded one, and the others saved themselves. undoubtedly he is feared!" she added with the same note of pride in her voice. the two, who talked, rode at the rear of the little company which had left paris at daybreak two days before, by the porte st. jacques. moving steadily south-westward by the lesser roads and bridle-tracks--for count hannibal seemed averse from the great road--they had lain the second night in a village three leagues from bonneval. a journey of two days on fresh horses is apt to change scenery and eye alike; but seldom has an alteration--in themselves and all about them--as great as that which blessed this little company, been wrought in so short a time. from the stifling wynds and evil-smelling lanes of paris, they had passed to the green uplands, the breezy woods and babbling streams of the upper orléannais; from sights and sounds the most appalling, to the solitude of the sandy heath, haunt of the great bustard, or the sunshine of the hillside, vibrating with the songs of larks; from an atmosphere of terror and gloom to the freedom of god's earth and sky. numerous enough--they numbered a score of armed men--to defy the lawless bands which had their lairs in the huge forest of orleans, they halted where they pleased: at mid-day under a grove of chestnut-trees, or among the willows beside a brook; at night, if they willed it, under god's heaven. far, not only from paris, but from the great road, with its gibbets and pillories--the great road which at that date ran through a waste, no peasant living willingly within sight of it--they rode in the morning and in the evening, resting in the heat of the day. and though they had left paris with much talk of haste, they rode more at leisure with every league. for whatever tavannes' motive, it was plain that he was in no hurry to reach his destination. nor for that matter were any of his company. madame st. lo, who had seized the opportunity of escaping from the capital under her cousin's escort, was in an ill-humour with cities, and declaimed much on the joys of a cell in the woods. for the time the coarsest nature and the dullest rider had had enough of alarums and conflicts. the whole company, indeed, though it moved in some fashion of array with an avant and a rearguard, the ladies riding together, and count hannibal proceeding solitary in the midst, formed as peaceful a band, and one as innocently diverted, as if no man of them had ever grasped pike or blown a match. there was an old rider among them who had seen the sack of rome, and the dead face of the great constable, the idol of the free companies. but he had a taste for simples and much skill in them; and when madame had once seen badelon on his knees in the grass searching for plants, she lost her fear of him. bigot, with his low brow and matted hair, was the abject slave of suzanne, madame st. lo's woman, who twitted him mercilessly on his norman _patois_, and poured the vials of her scorn on him a dozen times a day. in all, with la tribe and the carlats, madame st. lo's servants, and the countess's following, they numbered not far short of two score; and when they halted at noon, and under the shadow of some leafy tree, ate their mid-day meal, or drowsed to the tinkle of madame st. lo's lute, it was difficult to believe that paris existed, or that these same people had so lately left its blood-stained pavements. they halted this morning a little earlier than usual. madame st. lo had barely answered her companion's question before the subject of their discussion swung himself from old sancho's back, and stood waiting to assist them to dismount. behind him, where the green valley through which the road passed narrowed to a rocky gate, an old mill stood among willows at the foot of a mound. on the mound behind it a ruined castle which had stood siege in the hundred years' war raised its grey walls; and beyond this the stream which turned the mill poured over rocks with a cool rushing sound that proved irresistible. the men, their horses watered and hobbled, went off, shouting like boys, to bathe below the falls; and after a moment's hesitation count hannibal rose from the grass on which he had flung himself. "guard that for me, madame," he said. and he dropped a packet, bravely sealed and tied with a silk thread, into the countess's lap. "'twill be safer than leaving it in my clothes. ohe!" and he turned to madame st. lo. "would you fancy a life that was all gipsying, cousin?" and if there was irony in his voice, there was desire in his eyes. "there is only one happy man in the world," she answered, with conviction. "by name?" "the hermit of compiégne." "and in a week you would be wild for a masque!" he said cynically. and turning on his heel he followed the men. madame st. lo sighed complacently. "heigho!" she said. "he's right! we are never content, _ma mie!_ when i am trifling in the gallery my heart is in the greenwood. and when i have eaten black bread and drunk spring water for a fortnight i do nothing but dream of zamet's, and white mulberry tarts! and you are in the same case. you have saved your round white neck, or it has been saved for you, by not so much as the thickness of zamet's pie-crust--i declare my mouth is beginning to water for it!--and instead of being thankful and making the best of things, you are thinking of poor madame d'yverne, or dreaming of your calf-love!" the girl's face--for a girl she was, though they called her madame--began to work. she struggled a moment with her emotion, and then broke down, and fell to weeping silently. for two days she had sat in public and not given way. but the reference to her lover was too much for her strength. madame st. lo looked at her with eyes which were not unkindly. "sits the wind in that quarter!" she murmured. "i thought so! but there, my dear, if you don't put that packet in your gown you'll wash out the address! moreover, if you ask me, i don't think the young man is worth it. it is only that which we have not got--we want!" but the young countess had borne to the limit of her powers. with an incoherent word she rose to her feet, and walked hurriedly away. the thought of what was and of what might have been, the thought of the lover who still--though he no longer seemed, even to her, the perfect hero--held a place in her heart, filled her breast to overflowing. she longed for some spot where she could weep unseen, where the sunshine and the blue sky would not mock her grief; and seeing in front of her a little clump of alders, which grew beside the stream, in a bend that in winter was marshy, she hastened towards it. madame st. lo saw her figure blend with the shadow of the trees--"quite _à la_ ronsard, i give my word!" she murmured. "and now she is out of sight! _la, la!_ i could play at the game myself, and carve sweet sorrow on the barks of trees, if it were not so lonesome! and if i had a man!" and gazing pensively at the stream and the willows, my lady tried to work herself into a proper frame of mind; now murmuring the name of one gallant, and now, finding it unsuited, the name of another. but the soft inflection would break into a giggle, and finally into a yawn; and, tired of the attempt, she began to pluck grass and throw it from her. by-and-by she discovered that madame carlat and the women, who had their place a little apart, had disappeared; and affrighted by the solitude and silence--for neither of which she was made--she sprang up and stared about her, hoping to discern them. right and left, however, the sweep of hillside curved upward to the skyline, lonely and untenanted; behind her the castled rock frowned down on the rugged gorge and filled it with dispiriting shadow. madame st. lo stamped her foot on the turf. "the little fool!" she murmured, pettishly. "does she think that i am to be murdered that she may fatten on sighs? oh, come up, madame, you must be dragged out of this!" and she started briskly towards the alders, intent on gaining company as quickly as possible. she had gone about fifty yards, and had as many more to traverse when she halted. a man, bent double, was moving stealthily along the farther side of the brook a little in front of him. now she saw him, now she lost him; now she caught a glimpse of him again, through a screen of willow branches. he moved with the utmost caution, as a man moves who is pursued or in danger; and for a moment she deemed him a peasant whom the bathers had disturbed and who was bent on escaping. but when he came opposite to the alder-bed she saw that that was his point, for he crouched down, sheltered by a willow, and gazed eagerly among the trees, always with his back to her; and then he waved his hand to someone in the wood. madame st. lo drew in her breath. as if he had heard the sound--which was impossible--the man dropped down where he stood, crawled a yard or two on his face, and disappeared. madame stared a moment, expecting to see him or hear him. then, as nothing happened, she screamed. she was a woman of quick impulses, essentially feminine; and she screamed three or four times, standing where she was, her eyes on the edge of the wood. "if that does not bring her out, nothing will!" she thought. it brought her. an instant, and the countess appeared, and hurried in dismay to her side. "what is it?" the younger woman asked, glancing over her shoulder; for all the valley, all the hills were peaceful, and behind madame st. lo--but the lady had not discovered it--the servants who had returned were laying the meal. "what is it?" she repeated anxiously. "who was it?" madame st. lo asked curtly. she was quite calm now. "who was--who?" "the man in the wood?" the countess stared a moment, then laughed. "only the old soldier they call badelon, gathering simples. did you think that he would harm me?" "it was not old badelon whom i saw!" madame st. lo retorted. "it was a younger man, who crept along the other side of the brook, keeping under cover. when i first saw him he was there," she continued, pointing to the place. "and he crept on and on until he came opposite to you. then he waved his hand." "to me!" madame nodded. "but if you saw him, who was he?" the countess asked. "i did not see his face," madame st. lo answered. "but he waved to you. that i saw." the countess had a thought which slowly flooded her face with crimson. madame st. lo saw the change, saw the tender light which on a sudden softened the other's eyes; and the same thought occurred to her. and having a mind to punish her companion for her reticence--for she did not doubt that the girl knew more than she acknowledged--she proposed that they should return and find badelon, and learn if he had seen the man. "why?" madame tavannes asked. and she stood stubbornly, her head high. "why should we?" "to clear it up," the elder woman answered mischievously. "but perhaps, it were better to tell your husband and let his men search the coppice." the colour left the countess's face as quickly as it had come. for a moment she was tongue-tied. then, "have we not had enough of seeking and being sought?" she cried; more bitterly than befitted the occasion. "why should we hunt him? i am not timid, and he did me no harm. i beg, madame, that you will do me the favour of being silent on the matter." "oh, if you insist? but what a pother--" "i did not see him, and he did not see me," madame de tavannes answered vehemently. "i fail, therefore, to understand why we should harass him, whoever he be. besides, m. de tavannes is waiting for us." "and m. de tignonville--is following us!" madame st. lo muttered--under her breath. and she made a face at the other's back. she was silent, however; they returned to the others; and nothing of import, it would seem, had happened. the soft summer air played on the meal laid under the willows as it had played on the meal of yesterday laid under the chestnut-trees. the horses grazed within sight, moving now and again, with a jingle of trappings or a jealous neigh; the women's chatter vied with the unceasing sound of the mill-stream. after dinner, madame st. lo touched the lute, and badelon--badelon who had seen the sack of the colonna's palace, and been served by cardinals on the knee--fed a water-rat, which had its home in one of the willow-stumps, with carrot-parings. one by one the men laid themselves to sleep with their faces on their arms; and to the eyes all was as all had been yesterday in this camp of armed men living peacefully. but not to the countess! she had accepted her life, she had resigned herself, she had marvelled that it was no worse. after the horrors of paris the calm of the last two days had fallen on her as balm on a wound. worn out in body and mind, she had rested, and only rested; without thought, almost without emotion, save for the feeling, half fear, half curiosity, which stirred her in regard to the strange man, her husband. who on his side left her alone. but the last hour had wrought a change. her eyes were grown restless, her colour came and went. the past stirred in its shallow--ah, so shallow--grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might, thrust out hands to plague and torment her. if the man who sought to speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the skirts of her party, were tignonville--her lover, who at his own request had been escorted to the arsenal before their departure from paris--then her plight was a sorry one. for what woman, wedded as she had been wedded, could think otherwise than indulgently of his persistence? and yet, lover and husband! what peril, what shame the words had often spelled! at the thought only she trembled and her colour ebbed. she saw, as one who stands on the brink of a precipice, the depth which yawned before her. she asked herself, shivering, if she would ever sink to that. all the loyalty of a strong nature, all the virtue of a good woman revolted against the thought. true, her husband--husband she must call him--had not deserved her love; but his bizarre magnanimity, the gloomy, disdainful kindness with which he had crowned possession, even the unity of their interests, which he had impressed upon her in so strange a fashion, claimed a return in honour. to be paid--how? how? that was the crux which perplexed, which frightened, which harassed her. for, if she told her suspicions, she exposed her lover to capture by one who had no longer a reason to be merciful. and if she sought occasion to see tignonville and so to dissuade him, she did it at deadly risk to herself. yet what other course lay open to her if she would not stand by? if she would not play the traitor? if she---- "madame,"--it was her husband, and he spoke to her suddenly,--"are you not well?" and, looking up guiltily, she found his eyes fixed curiously on hers. her face turned red and white and red again, and she faltered something and looked from him, but only to meet madame st. lo's eyes. my lady laughed softly in sheer mischief. "what is it?" count hannibal asked sharply. but madame st. lo's answer was a line of ronsard. chapter xx. on the castle hill. thrice she hummed it, bland and smiling. then from the neighbouring group came an interruption. the wine he had drunk had put it into bigot's head to snatch a kiss from suzanne; and suzanne's modesty, which was very nice in company, obliged her to squeal. the uproar which ensued, the men backing the man and the women the woman, brought tavannes to his feet. he did not speak, but a glance from his eyes was enough. there was not one who failed to see that something was amiss with him, and a sudden silence fell on the party. he turned to the countess. "you wished to see the castle?" he said. "you had better go now, but not alone." he cast his eyes over the company, and summoned la tribe, who was seated with the carlats. "go with madame," he said curtly. "she has a mind to climb the hill. bear in mind, we start at three, and do not venture out of hearing." "i understand, m. le comte," the minister answered. he spoke quietly, but there was a strange light in his face as he turned to go with her. none the less he was silent until madame's lagging feet--for all her interest in the expedition was gone--had borne her a hundred paces from the company. then, "who knoweth our thoughts and forerunneth all our desires," he murmured. and when she turned to him, astonished, "madame," he continued, "i have prayed, ah, how i have prayed, for this opportunity of speaking to you! and it has come. i would it had come this morning, but it has come. do not start or look round; many eyes are on us, and alas! i have that to say to you which it will move you to hear, and that to ask of you which it must task your courage to perform." she began to tremble, and stood, looking up the green slope to the broken grey wall which crowned its summit. "what is it?" she whispered, commanding herself with an effort. "what is it? if it have aught to do with m. tignonville----" "it has not!" in her surprise--for although she had put the question she had felt no doubt of the answer--she started and turned to him. "it has not?" she exclaimed almost incredulously. "no." "then what is it, monsieur?" she replied, a little haughtily. "what can there be that should move me so?" "life or death, madame," he answered solemnly. "nay, more; for since providence has given me this chance of speaking to you, a thing of which, i despaired, i know that the burden is laid on us, and that it is guilt or it is innocence, according as we refuse the burden or bear it." "what is it then?" she cried impatiently. "what is it?" "i tried to speak to you this morning." "was it you then, whom madame st. lo saw stalking me before dinner?" "it was." she clasped her hands and heaved a sigh of relief. "thank god, monsieur!" she replied. "you have lifted a weight from me. i fear nothing in comparison of that. nothing!" "alas," he answered sombrely, "there is much to fear, for others if not for ourselves! do you know what that is which m. de tavannes bears always in his belt? what it is he carries with such care? what it was he handed to you to keep while he bathed to-day?" "letters from the king." "yes, but the import of those letters?" "no." "and yet should they be written in letters of blood!" the minister exclaimed, his face kindling. "they should scorch the hands that hold them and blister the eyes that read them. they are the fire and the sword! they are the king's order to do at angers as they have done in paris. to slay all of the religion who are found there--and they are many! to spare none, to have mercy neither on the old man nor the unborn child! see yonder hawk!" he continued, pointing with a shaking hand to a falcon which hung light and graceful above the valley, the movement of its wings invisible. "how it disports itself in the face of the sun! how easy its way, how smooth its flight! but see, it drops upon its prey in the rushes beside the brook, and the end of its beauty is slaughter! so is it with yonder company!" his finger sank until it indicated the little camp seated toy-like in the green meadow four hundred feet below them, with every man and horse, and the very camp-kettle, clear-cut and visible, though diminished by distance to fairy-like proportions. "so it is with yonder company!" he repeated sternly. "they play and are merry, and one fishes and another sleeps! but at the end of the journey is death. death for their victims, and for them the judgment!" she stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind her and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the little camp. the sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness of an august afternoon. but his words went home so truly that the sunlit landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called up before the mind. the countess turned white and sick. "are you sure?" she whispered at last. "quite sure." "ah, god!" she cried, "are we never to have peace?" and turning from the valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood. after a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace. "what do you want me to do?" she cried, despair in her voice. "what can i do?" "were the letters he bears destroyed----" "the letters?" "yes, were the letters destroyed," la tribe answered relentlessly, "he could do nothing! nothing! without that authority the magistrates of angers would not move. he could do nothing. and men and women and children--men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them--will live! will live!" he repeated with a softening eye. and with an all-embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round. "will live!" she drew a deep breath. "and you have brought me here," she said, "to ask me to do this?" "i was sent here to ask you to do this." "why me? why me!" she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him, her face wan and colourless. "you come to me, a woman! why to me?" "you are his wife!" "and he is my husband!" "therefore he trusts you," was the unyielding, the pitiless answer. "you, and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this." she gazed at him in astonishment. "and it is you who say that?" she faltered, after a pause. "you who made us one, who now bid me betray him, whom i have sworn to love? to ruin him whom i have sworn to honour?" "i do!" he answered solemnly. "on my head be the guilt, and on yours the merit." "nay, but--" she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion--"do you take both guilt and merit! you are a man," she continued, her words coming quickly in her excitement, "he is but a man! why do you not call him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him? staking your life against his, with all those lives for prize? and save them or perish? why i, even i, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not my husband! surely you, you who are a man, and young----" "am no match for him in strength or arms," the minister answered sadly. "else would i do it." "else would i stake my life, heaven knows, as gladly to save their lives as i sit down to meat! but i should fail, and if i failed all were lost. moreover," he continued solemnly, "i am certified that this task has been set for you. it was not for nothing, madame, nor to save one poor household that you were joined to this man; but to ransom all these lives and this great city. to be the judith of our faith, the saviour of angers, the----" "fool! fool!" she cried. "will you be silent?" and she stamped the turf passionately, while her eyes blazed in her white face. "i am no judith, and no madwoman as you are fain to make me. mad?" she continued, overwhelmed with agitation. "my god, i would i were, and i should be free from this!" and, turning, she walked a little way from him with the gesture of one under a crushing burden. he waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and still she did not return. at length she came back, her bearing more composed; she looked at him and her eyes seized his and seemed as if they would read his soul. "are you sure," she said, "of what you have told me? will you swear that the contents of these letters are as you say?" "as i live," he answered gravely. "as god lives." "and you know--of no other way, monsieur? of no other way?" she repeated slowly and piteously. "of none, madame, of none, i swear." she sighed deeply, and stood sunk in thought. then, "when do we reach angers?" she asked heavily. "the day after to-morrow." "i have--until the day after to-morrow?" "yes. to-night we lie near vendôme." "and to-morrow night?" "near a place called la flèche. it is possible," he went on with hesitation--for he did not understand her--"that he may bathe to-morrow, and may hand the packet to you, as he did to-day when i vainly sought speech with you. if he does that----" "yes?" she said, her eyes on his face. "the taking will be easy. but when he finds you have it not--" he faltered anew--"it may go hard with you." she did not speak. "and there, i think, i can help you. if you will stray from the party, i will meet you and destroy the letter. that done--and would god it were done already--i will take to flight as best i can, and you will raise the alarm and say that i robbed you of it! and if you tear your dress----" "no," she said. he looked a question. "no!" she repeated in a low voice. "if i betray him i will not lie to him! and no other shall pay the price! if i ruin him it shall be between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!" he shook his head. "i do not know," he murmured, "what he may do to you!" "nor i," she said proudly. "that will be for him." * * * * * curious eyes had watched the two as they climbed the hill. for the path ran up the slope to the gap which served for gate, much as the path leads up to the castle beautiful in old prints of the pilgrim's journey; and madame st. lo had marked the first halt and the second, and, noting every gesture, had lost nothing of the interview save the words. but until the two, after pausing a moment, passed out of sight she made no sign. then she laughed. and as count hannibal, at whom the laugh was aimed, did not heed her, she laughed again. and she hummed the line of ronsard. still he would not be roused, and, piqued, she had recourse to words. "i wonder what you would do," she said, "if the old lover followed us, and she went off with him!" "she would not go," he answered coldly, and without looking up. "but if he rode off with her?" "she would come back on her feet!" madame st. lo's prudence was not proof against that. she had the woman's inclination to hide a woman's secret; and she had not intended, when she laughed, to do more than play with the formidable man with whom so few dared to play. now, stung by his tone and his assurance, she must needs show him that his trustfulness had no base. and, as so often happens in the circumstances, she went a little farther than the facts bore her. "any way, he has followed us so far!" she cried viciously. "m. de tignonville?" "yes. i saw him this morning while you were bathing. she left me and went into the little coppice. he came down the other side of the brook, stooping and running, and went to join her." "how did he cross the brook?" madame st. lo blushed. "old badelon was there, gathering simples," she said. "he scared him. and he crawled away." "then he did not cross?" "no. i did not say he did!" "nor speak to her?" "no. but if you think it will pass so next time--you do not know much of women!" "of women generally, not much," he answered, grimly polite. "of this woman a great deal!" "you looked in her big eyes, i suppose!" madame st. lo cried with heat. "and straightway fell down and worshipped her!" she liked rather than disliked the countess; but she was of the lightest, and the least opposition drove her out of her course. "and you think you know her! and she, if she could save you from death by opening an eye, would go with a patch on it till her dying day! take my word for it, monsieur, between her and her lover you will come to harm." count hannibal's swarthy face darkened a tone, and his eyes grew a very little smaller. "i fancy that he runs the greater risk," he muttered. "you may deal with him, but, for her----" "i can deal with her. you deal with some women with a whip" "you would whip me, i suppose?" "yes," he said quietly. "it would do you good, madame. and with other women otherwise. there are women who, if they are well frightened, will not deceive you. and there are others who will not deceive you though they are frightened. madame de tavannes is of the latter kind." "wait! wait and see!" madame cried in scorn. "i am waiting." "yes! and whereas if you had come to me i could have told her that about m. tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting and waiting and waiting until one fine day you'll wake up and find madame gone, and----" "then i'll take a wife i can whip!" he answered, with a look which apprised her how far she had carried it. "but it will not be you, sweet cousin. for i have no whip heavy enough for your case." chapter xxi. she would, and would not. we noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe. but there are concessions which touch even a good woman's conscience; and madame de tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her. to ignore what la tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from massacre--this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. but to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment. and the countess was no fanatic. no haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own. even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her. true, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pass for punishment. but he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. in return for which she was to ruin him! it was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him. she pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the westering sun in their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the bracken which fringed the track. across breezy heaths and over downs, through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world--from which they came and to which they must return--that she could have wept in anguish, cursing god for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on creation. the gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and swaying stirrups--and singing now a refrain from ronsard, and now one of those verses of marot's psalms which all the world had sung three decades before--wore their most lamblike aspect. behind them madame st. lo chattered to suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at angers. and the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. in time of war death's shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is out of mind. of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of vendôme, three only wore faces attuned to the cruel august week just ending; three only, like dark beads strung far apart on a gay nun's rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in their places. the countess was one; the others were the two men whose thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, la tribe's with sombre fire in their depths, count hannibal's fraught with a gloomy speculation, which belied his brave words to madame st. lo. he, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not touch her. and she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. so that of the three only la tribe was single-minded. this day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. night was hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which marked where vendôme stood. "another league," count hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'tis pure and dry here," he said. "set a watch, bigot, and let two men go down for water. i hear frogs below. you do not fear to be moonstruck, madame!" "i prefer this," she answered in a low voice. "houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "give me god's heaven." "the earth is his, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke. he looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. he stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and madame st. lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order. by-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which, they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of nature's cathedral. through the shadowy gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a brescian organ. the darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night. the countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions. "yet, i believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself. "though i have seen what i have seen, yet i believe!" and though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which her soul shrank! the woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for choosing evil or good, ease for herself or life for others. but the moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no shame and no suffering seemed--for the moment at least--too great a price to pay for the lives of little children. love had been taken from her life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity--that must go, too! she felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night. but things fell out in a manner she had not pictured. they halted before noon on the north bank of the loir, in a level meadow with lines of poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the soft shimmer of leaves. blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky, flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, italian fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair. a road ran across the meadow to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself. presently madame st. lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have it. the poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a hermit--in a meadow--was no longer to her taste. "let us go on the water!" she cried. "presently you will go to bathe, monsieur, and leave us to grill!" "two livres to the man who will fetch the boat!" count hannibal cried. in less than half a minute three men had thrown off their boots, and were swimming across, amid the laughter and shouts of their fellows. in five minutes the boat was brought. it was not large and would hold no more than four. tavannes' eye fell on carlat. "you understand a boat," he said. "go with madame st. lo. and you, m. la tribe." "but you are coming?" madame st. lo cried, turning to the countess. "oh, madame," with a curtsey, "you are not? you----" "yes, i will come," the countess answered. "i shall bathe a short distance up the stream," count hannibal said. he took from his belt the packet of letters, and as carlat held the boat for madame st. lo to enter, he gave it to the countess, as he had given it to her yesterday. "have a care of it, madame," he said in a low voice, "and do not let it pass out of your hands. to lose it may be to lose my head." the colour ebbed from her cheeks. in spite of herself her shaking hand put back the packet. "had you not better then--give it to bigot?" she faltered. "he is bathing." "let him bathe afterwards." "no," he answered almost harshly; he found a species of pleasure in showing her that, strange as their relations were, he trusted her. "no; take it, madame. only have a care of it." she took it then, hid it in her dress, and he turned away; and she turned towards the boat. la tribe stood beside the stern, holding it for her to enter, and as her fingers rested an instant on his arm their eyes met. his were alight, his arm even quivered; and she shuddered. she avoided looking at him a second time, and this was easy, since he took his seat in the bows beyond carlat, who handled the oars. silently the boat glided out on the surface of the stream, and floated downwards, carlat now and again touching an oar, and madame st. lo chattering gaily in a voice which carried far on the water. now it was a flowering rush she must have, now a green bough to shield her face from the sun's reflection; and now they must lie in some cool, shadowy pool under fern-clad banks, where the fish rose heavily, and the trickle of a rivulet fell down over stones. it was idyllic. but not to the countess. her face burned, her temples throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to steady her pulses. the packet within her dress scorched her. the great city and its danger, tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action, the irrevocableness of action hurried through her brain. the knowledge that she must act now--or never--pressed upon her with distracting force. her hand felt the packet, and fell again nerveless. "the sun has caught you, _ma mie_," madame st. lo said. "you should ride in a mask as i do." "i have not one with me," she muttered, her eyes on the water. "and i but an old one. but at angers----" the countess heard no more; on that word she caught la tribe's eye. he was beckoning to her behind carlat's back, pointing imperiously to the water, making signs to her to drop the packet over the side. when she did not obey--she felt sick and faint--she saw through a mist his brow grow dark. he menaced her secretly. and still the packet scorched her; and twice her hand went to it, and dropped again empty. on a sudden madame st. lo cried out. the bank on one side of the stream was beginning to rise more boldly above the water, and at the head of the steep thus formed she had espied a late rose-bush in bloom; nothing would now serve but she must land at once and plunder it. the boat was put in therefore, she jumped ashore, and began to scale the bank. "go with madame!" la tribe cried, roughly nudging carlat in the back. "do you not see that she cannot climb the bank! up, man, up!" the countess opened her mouth to cry "no!" but the word died half-born on her lips; and when the steward looked at her, uncertain what she had said, she nodded. "yes, go!" she muttered. she was pale. "yes, man, go!" cried the minister, his eyes burning. and he almost pushed the other out of the boat. the next second the craft floated from the bank, and began to drift downwards. la tribe waited until a tree interposed and hid them from the two whom they had left; then he leaned forward. "now, madame!" he cried imperiously. "in god's name, now!" "oh!" she cried. "wait! wait! i want to think." "to think?" "he trusted me!" she wailed. "he trusted me! how can i do it?" nevertheless, and even while she spoke, she drew forth the packet. "heaven has given you the opportunity!" "if i could have stolen it!" she answered. "fool!" he returned rocking himself to and fro and fairly beside himself with impatience. "why steal it? it is in your hands! you have it! it is heaven's own opportunity, it is god's opportunity given to you!" for he could not read her mind nor comprehend the scruple which held her hand. he was single-minded. he had but one aim, one object. he saw the haggard faces of brave men hopeless; he heard the dying cries of women and children. such an opportunity of saving god's elect, of redeeming the innocent, was in his eyes a gift from heaven. and having these thoughts and seeing her hesitate--hesitate when every movement caused him agony, so imperative was haste, so precious the opportunity--he could bear the suspense no longer. when she did not answer he stooped forward, until his knees touched the thwart on which carlat had sat; then without a word he flung himself forward, and, with one hand far extended, grasped the packet. had he not moved, she would have done his will; almost certainly she would have done it. but, thus attacked, she resisted instinctively; she clung to the letters. "no!" she cried. "no! let go, monsieur!" and she tried to drag the packet from him. "give it me!" "let go, monsieur! do you hear!" she repeated. and with a vigorous jerk she forced it from him--he had caught it by the edge only--and held it behind her. "go back, and----" "give it me!" he panted. "i will not!" "then throw it overboard!" "i will not!" she cried again, though his face, dark with passion, glared into hers, and it was clear that the man, possessed by one idea only, was no longer master of himself. "go back to your place!" "give it me," he gasped, "or i will upset the boat!" and seizing her by the shoulder he reached over her, striving to take hold of the packet which she held behind her. the boat rocked; and as much in rage as fear she screamed. a cry uttered wholly in rage answered hers; it came from carlat. la tribe, however, whose whole mind was fixed on the packet, did not heed, nor would have heeded, the steward. but the next moment a second cry, fierce as that of a wild beast, clove the air from the lower and farther bank; and the huguenot, recognising count hannibal's voice, involuntarily desisted and stood erect. a moment the boat rocked perilously under him; then--for unheeded it had been drifting that way--it softly touched the bank on which carlat stood staring and aghast. la tribe's chance was gone; he saw that the steward must reach him before he could succeed in a second attempt. on the other hand, the undergrowth on the bank was thick, he could touch it with his hand, and if he fled at once he might escape. he hung an instant irresolute; then, with a look which went to the countess's heart, he sprang ashore, plunged among the alders, and in a moment was gone. "after him! after him!" thundered count hannibal. "after him, man!" and carlat, stumbling down the steep slope and through the rough briars, did his best to obey. but in vain. before he reached the water's edge, the noise of the fugitive's retreat had grown faint. a few seconds and it died away. chapter xxii. playing with fire. the impulse of la tribe's foot as he landed had driven the boat into the stream. it drifted slowly downward, and if naught intervened would take the ground on count hannibal's side, a hundred and fifty yards below him. he saw this, and walked along the bank, keeping pace with it, while the countess sat motionless, crouching in the stern of the craft, her fingers strained about the fatal packet. the slow glide of the boat, as almost imperceptibly it approached the low bank; the stillness of the mirror-like surface on which it moved, leaving only the faintest ripple behind it; the silence--for under the influence of emotion count hannibal too was mute--all were in tremendous contrast with the storm which raged in her breast. should she--should she even now, with his eyes on her, drop the letters over the side? it needed but a movement. she had only to extend her hand, to relax the tension of her fingers, and the deed was done. it needed only that; but the golden sands of opportunity were running out--were running out fast. slowly and more slowly, silently and more silently, the boat slid in towards the bank on which he stood, and still she hesitated. the stillness, and the waiting figure, and the watching eyes now but a few feet distant, weighed on her and seemed to paralyse her will. a foot, another foot! a moment and it would be too late, the last of the sands would have run out. the bow of the boat rustled softly through the rushes; it kissed the bank. and her hand still held the letters. "you are not hurt?" he asked curtly. "no." "the scoundrel might have drowned you. was he mad?" she was silent. he held out his hand, and she gave him the packet. "i owe you much," he said, a ring of gaiety, almost of triumph, in his tone. "more than you guess, madame. god made you for a soldier's wife, and a mother of soldiers. what? you are not well, i am afraid?" "if i could sit down a minute," she faltered. she was swaying on her feet. he supported her across the belt of meadow which fringed the bank, and made her recline against a tree. then as his men began to come up--for the alarm had reached them--he would have sent two of them in the boat to fetch madame st. lo to her. but she would not let him. "your maid, then?" he said. "no, monsieur, i need only to be alone a little! only to be alone," she repeated, her face averted; and believing this he sent the men away, and, taking the boat himself, he crossed over, took in madame st. lo and carlat, and rowed them to the ferry. here the wildest rumours were current. one held that the huguenot had gone out of his senses; another, that he had watched for this opportunity of avenging his brethren; a third, that his intention had been to carry off the countess and hold her to ransom. only tavannes himself, from his position on the farther bank, had seen the packet of letters, and the hand which withheld them; and he said nothing. nay, when some of the men would have crossed to search for the fugitive, he forbade them, he scarcely knew why, save that it might please her; and when the women would have hurried to join her and hear the tale from her lips he forbade them also. "she wishes to be alone," he said curtly. "alone?" madame st. lo cried, in a fever of curiosity. "you'll find her dead, or worse! what? leave a woman alone after such a fright as that!" "she wishes it." madame laughed cynically; and the laugh brought a tinge of colour to his brow. "oh, does she?" she sneered. "then i understand! have a care, have a care, or one of these days, monsieur, when you leave her alone, you'll find them together!" "be silent!" "with pleasure," she returned. "only when it happens don't say that you were not warned. you think that she does not hear from him----" "how can she hear?" the words were wrung from him. madame st. lo's contempt passed all limits. "how can she!" she retorted. "you trail a woman across france, and let her sit by herself, and lie by herself, and all but drown by herself, and you ask how she hears from her lover? you leave her old servants about her, and you ask how she communicates with him?" "you know nothing!" he snarled. "i know this," she retorted. "i saw her sitting this morning, and smiling and weeping at the same time! was she thinking of you, monsieur? or of him? she was looking at the hills through tears; a blue mist hung over them, and i'll wager she saw some one's eyes gazing and some one's hand beckoning out of the blue!" "curse you!" he cried, tormented in spite of himself. "you love to make mischief!" "no!" she answered swiftly. "for 'twas not i made the match. but go your way, go your way, monsieur, and see what kind of a welcome you'll get!" "i will," count hannibal growled. and he started along the bank to rejoin his wife. the light in his eyes had died down. yet would they have been more sombre, and his face more harsh, had he known the mind of the woman to whom he was hastening. the countess had begged to be left alone; alone, she found the solitude she had craved a cruel gift. she had saved the packet. she had fulfilled her trust. but only to experience, the moment it was too late, the full poignancy of remorse. before the act, while the choice had lain with her, the betrayal of her husband had loomed large; now she saw that to treat him as she had treated him was the true betrayal, and that even for his own sake, and to save him from a fearful sin, it had become her to destroy the letters. now, it was no longer her duty to him which loomed large, but her duty to the innocent, to the victims of the massacre which she might have stayed, to the people of her faith whom she had abandoned, to the women and children whose death-warrant she had preserved. now, she perceived that a part more divine had never fallen to woman, nor a responsibility so heavy been laid upon woman. nor guilt more dread! she writhed in misery, thinking of it. what had she done? she could hear afar off the sounds of the camp; an occasional outcry, a snatch of laughter. and the cry and the laughter rang in her ears, a bitter mockery. this summer camp, to what was it the prelude? this forbearance on her husband's part, in what would it end? were not the one and the other cruel make-believes? two days, and the men who laughed beside the water would slay and torture with equal zest. a little, and the husband who now chose to be generous would show himself in his true colours. and it was for the sake of such as these that she had played the coward. that she had laid up for herself endless remorse. that henceforth the cries of the innocent would haunt her dreams. racked by such thoughts she did not hear his step, and it was his shadow falling across her feet which first warned her of his presence. she looked up, saw him, and involuntarily recoiled. then, seeing the change in his face, "oh! monsieur," she stammered affrighted, her hand pressed to her side, "i ask your pardon! you startled me!" "so it seems," he answered. and he stood over her regarding her drily. "i am not quite--myself yet," she murmured. his look told her that her start had betrayed her feelings. alas, the plan of taking a woman by force has drawbacks, and among others this one: that he must be a sanguine husband who deems her heart his, and a husband without jealousy, whose suspicions are not aroused by the faintest flush or the lightest word. he knows that she is his unwillingly, a victim, not a mistress; and behind every bush beside the road and behind every mask in the crowd be espies a rival. moreover, where women are in question, who is always strong? or who can say how long he will pursue this plan or that? a man of sternest temper, count hannibal had set out on a path of conduct carefully and deliberately chosen; knowing--and he still knew--that if he abandoned it he had little to hope, if the less to fear. but the proof of fidelity which the countess had just given him had blown to a white heat the smouldering flame in his heart, and madame st. lo's gibes, which should have fallen as cold water alike on his hopes and his passion, had but fed the desire to know the best. for all that, he might not have spoken now, if he had not caught her look of affright; strange as it sounds, that look, which of all things should have silenced him and warned him that the time was not yet, stung him out of patience. suddenly the man in him carried him away. "you still fear me, then!" he said, in a voice hoarse and unnatural. "is it for what i do or for what i leave undone that you hate me, madame? tell me, i beg, for----" "for neither!" she said, trembling. his eyes, hot and passionate, were on her, and the blood had mounted to his brow. "for neither! i do not hate you, monsieur!" "you fear me then! i am right in that." "i fear--that which you carry with you," she stammered, speaking on impulse and scarcely knowing what she said. he started, and his expression changed. "so?" he exclaimed. "so? you know what i carry, do you? and from whom? from whom?" he continued in a tone of menace, "if you please, did you get that knowledge?" "from m. la tribe," she muttered. she had not meant to tell him. why had she told him? he nodded. "i might have known it," he said. "i more than suspected it. therefore i should be the more beholden to you for saving the letters. but"--he paused and laughed harshly--"it was out of no love for me you saved them. that, too, i know." she did not answer or protest; and when he had waited a moment in vain expectation of her protest, a cruel look crept into his eyes. "madame," he said slowly, "do you never reflect that you may push the part you play too far? that the patience, even of the worst of men, does not endure for ever?" "i have your word!" she answered. "and you do not fear?" "i have your word," she repeated. and now she looked him bravely in the face, her eyes full of the courage of her race. the lines of his mouth hardened as he met her look. "and what have i of yours?" he said in a low voice. "what have i of yours?" her face began to burn at that, her eyes fell and she faltered. "my gratitude," she murmured, with an upward look that craved for pity. "god knows, monsieur, you have that!" "god knows i do not want it!" he answered. and he laughed derisively. "your gratitude!" and he mocked her tone rudely and coarsely. "your gratitude?" then for a minute--for so long a time that she began to wonder and to quake--he was silent. at last, "a fig for your gratitude," he said. "i want your love! i suppose--cold as you are, and a huguenot--you can love like other women!" it was the first, the very first time he had used the word to her; and though it fell from his lips like a threat, though he used it as a man presents a pistol, she flushed anew from throat to brow. but she did not quail. "it is not mine to give," she said. "it is his!" "yes, monsieur," she answered, wondering at her courage, at her audacity, her madness. "it is his." "and it cannot be mine--at any time?" she shook her head, trembling. "never?" and, suddenly reaching forward, he gripped her wrist in an iron grasp. there was passion in his tone. his eyes burned her. whether it was that set her on another track, or pure despair, or the cry in her ears of little children and of helpless women, something in a moment inspired her, flashed in her eyes and altered her voice. she raised her head and looked him firmly in the face. "what," she said, "do you mean by love?" "you!" he answered brutally. "then--it may be, monsieur," she returned. "there is a way if you will." "away!" "if you will!" as she spoke she rose slowly to her feet; for in his surprise he had released her wrist. he rose with her, and they stood confronting one another on the strip of grass between the river and the poplars. "if i will?" his form seemed to dilate, his eyes devoured her. "if i will?" "yes," she replied. "if you will give me the letters that are in your belt, the packet which i saved to-day--that i may destroy them--i will be yours freely and willingly." he drew a deep breath, still devouring her with his eyes. "you mean it?" he said at last. "i do." she looked him in the face as she spoke, and her cheeks were white, not red. "only--the letters! give me the letters." "and for them you will give me your love?" her eyes flickered, and involuntarily she shivered. a faint blush rose and dyed her cheeks. "only god can give love," she said, her tone lower. "and yours is given?" "yes." "to another?" "i have said it." "it is his. and yet for these letters----" "for these lives!" she cried proudly. "you will give yourself?" "i swear it," she answered, "if you will give them to me! if you will give them to me," she repeated. and she held out her hands; her face, full of passion, was bright with a strange light. a close observer might have thought her distraught; still excited by the struggle in the boat, and barely mistress of herself. but the man whom she tempted, the man who held her price at his belt, after one searching look at her turned from her; perhaps because he could not trust himself to gaze on her. count hannibal walked a dozen paces from her and returned, and again a dozen paces and returned; and again a third time, with something fierce and passionate in his gait. at last he stopped before her. "you have nothing to offer for them," he said, in a cold, hard tone. "nothing that is not mine already, nothing that is not my right, nothing that i cannot take at my will. my word?" he continued, seeing her about to interrupt him. "true, madame, you have it, you had it. but why need i keep my word to you, who tempt me to break my word to the king?" she made a weak gesture with her hands. her head had sunk on her breast--she seemed dazed by the shock of his contempt, dazed by his reception of her offer. "you saved the letters?" he continued, interpreting her action. "true, but the letters are mine, and that which you offer for them is mine also. you have nothing to offer. for the rest, madame," he went on, eyeing her cynically, "you surprise me! you, whose modesty and virtue are so great, would corrupt your husband, would sell yourself, would dishonour the love of which you boast so loudly, the love that only god gives!" he laughed derisively as he quoted her words. "ay, and, after showing at how low a price you hold yourself, you still look, i doubt not, to me to respect you, and to keep my word. madame!" in a terrible voice, "do not play with fire! you saved my letters, it is true! and for that, for this time, you shall go free, if god will help me to let you go! but tempt me not! tempt me not!" he repeated, turning from her and turning back again with a gesture of despair, as if he mistrusted the strength of the restraint which he put upon himself. "i am no more than other men! perhaps i am less. and you--you who prate of love, and know not what love is--could love! could love!" he stopped on that word as if the word choked him--stopped, struggling with his passion. at last, with a half-stifled oath, he flung away from her, halted and hung a moment, then, with a swing of rage, went off again violently. his feet as he strode along the river-bank trampled the flowers, and slew the pale water forget-me-not, which grew among the grasses. chapter xxiii. a mind, and not a mind. la tribe tore through the thicket, imagining carlat and count hannibal hot on his heels. he dared not pause even to listen. the underwood tripped him, the lissom branches of the alders whipped his face and blinded him; once he fell headlong over a moss-grown stone, and picked himself up groaning. but the hare hard-pushed takes no account of the briars, nor does the fox heed the mud through which it draws itself into covert. and for the time he was naught but a hunted beast. with elbows pinned to his sides, or with hands extended to ward off the boughs, with bursting lungs and crimson face, he plunged through the tangle, now slipping downwards, now leaping upwards, now all but prostrate, now breasting a mass of thorns. on and on he ran, until he came to the verge of the wood, saw before him an open meadow devoid of shelter or hiding-place, and with a groan of despair cast himself flat. he listened. how far were they behind him? he heard nothing. nothing, save the common noises of the wood, the angry chatter of a disturbed blackbird as it flew low into hiding, or the harsh notes of a flock of starlings as they rose from the meadow. the hum of bees filled the air, and the august flies buzzed about his sweating brow, for he had lost his cap. but behind him--nothing. already the stillness of the wood had closed upon his track. he was not the less panic-stricken. he supposed that tavannes' people were getting to horse, and calculated that if they surrounded and beat the wood, he must be taken. at the thought, though he had barely got his breath, he rose, and keeping within the coppice crawled down the slope towards the river. gently, when he reached it, he slipped into the water, and stooping below the level of the bank, his head and shoulders hidden by the bushes, he waded down stream until he had put another hundred and fifty yards between himself and pursuit. then he paused and listened. still he heard nothing, and he waded on again, until the water grew deep. at this point he marked a little below him a clump of trees on the farther side; and reflecting that that side--if he could reach it unseen--would be less suspect, he swam across, aiming for a thorn bush which grew low to the water. under its shelter he crawled out, and, worming himself like a snake across the few yards of grass which intervened, he stood at length within the shadow of the trees. a moment he paused to shake himself, and then, remembering that he was still within a mile of the camp, he set off, now walking, and now running in the direction of the hills which his party had crossed that morning. for a time he hurried on, thinking only of escape. but when he had covered a mile or two, and escape seemed probable, there began to mingle with his thankfulness a bitter--a something which grew more bitter with each moment. why had he fled and left the work undone? why had he given way to unworthy fear, when the letters were within his grasp? true, if he had lingered a few seconds longer, he would have failed to make good his escape; but what of that if in those seconds he had destroyed the letters, he had saved angers, he had saved his brethren? alas! he had played the coward. the terror of tavannes' voice had unmanned him. he had saved himself and left the flock to perish; he, whom god had set apart by many and great signs for this work! he had commonly courage enough. he could have died at the stake for his convictions. but he had not the presence of mind which is proof against a shock, nor the cool judgment which, in the face of death, sees to the end of two roads. he was no coward, but now he deemed himself one, and in an agony of remorse he flung himself on his face in the long grass. he had known trials and temptations, but hitherto he had held himself erect; now, like peter, he had betrayed his lord. he lay an hour groaning in the misery of his heart, and then he fell on the text "thou art peter, and on this rock----" and he sat up. peter had betrayed his trust through cowardice--as he had. but peter had not been held unworthy. might it not be so with him? he rose to his feet, a new light in his eyes. he would return! he would return, and at all costs, even at the cost of surrendering himself, he would obtain access to the letters. and then--not the fear of count hannibal, not the fear of instant death, should turn him from his duty. he had cast himself down in a woodland glade which lay near the path along which he had ridden that morning. but the mental conflict from which he rose had shaken him so violently that he could not recall the side on which he had entered the clearing, and he turned himself about, endeavouring to remember. at that moment the light jingle of a bridle struck his ear; he caught through the green bushes the flash and sparkle of harness. they had tracked him then, they were here! so had he clear proof that this second chance was to be his. in a happy fervour he stood forward where the pursuers could not fail to see him. or so he thought. yet the first horseman, riding carelessly with his face averted and his feet dangling, would have gone by and seen nothing if his horse, more watchful, had not shied. the man turned then; and for a moment the two stared at one another between the pricked ears of the horse. at last, "m. de tignonville!" the minister ejaculated. "la tribe!" "it is truly you?" "well--i think so," the young man answered. the minister lifted up his eyes and seemed to call the trees and the clouds and the birds to witness. "now," he cried, "i know that i am chosen! and that we were instruments to do this thing from the day when the hen saved us in the hay-cart in paris! now i know that all is forgiven and all is ordained, and that the faithful of angers shall to-morrow live and not die!" and with a face radiant, yet solemn, he walked to the young man's stirrup. an instant tignonville looked sharply before him. "how far ahead are they?" he asked. his tone, hard and matter-of-fact, was little in harmony with the other's enthusiasm. "they are resting a league before you, at the ferry. you are in pursuit of them?" "yes." "not alone?" "no." the young man's look as he spoke was grim. "i have five behind me--of your kidney, m. la tribe. they are from the arsenal. they have lost one his wife, and one his son. the three others----" "yes?" "sweethearts," tignonville answered drily. and he cast a singular look at the minister. but la tribe's mind was so full of one matter, he could think only of that. "how did you hear of the letters?" he asked. "the letters?" "yes." "i do not know what you mean." la tribe stared. "then why are you following him?" he asked. "why?" tignonville echoed, a look of hate darkening his face. "do you ask why we follow----" but on the name he seemed to choke and was silent. by this time his men had come up, and one answered for him. "why are we following hannibal de tavannes?" he said sternly. "to do to him as he has done to us! to rob him as he has robbed us--of more than gold! to kill him as he has killed ours, foully and by surprise! in his bed if we can! in the arms of his wife if god wills it!" the speaker's face was haggard from brooding and lack of sleep, but his eyes glowed and burned, as his fellows growled assent. "'tis simple why we follow," a second put in. "is there a man of our faith who will not, when he hears the tale, rise up and stab the nearest of this black brood--though it be his brother? if so, god's curse on him!" "amen! amen!" "so, and so only," cried the first, "shall there be faith in our land! and our children, our little maids, shall lie safe in their beds!" "amen! amen!" the speaker's chin sank on his breast, and with his last word the light died out of his eyes. la tribe looked at him curiously, then at the others. last of all at tignonville, on whose face he fancied that he surprised a faint smile. yet tignonville's tone when he spoke was grave enough. "you have heard," he said. "do you blame us?" "i cannot," the minister answered, shivering. "i can not." he had been for a while beyond the range of these feelings; and in the greenwood, under god's heaven, with the sunshine about him, they jarred on him. yet he could not blame men who had suffered as these had suffered; who were maddened, as these were maddened, by the gravest wrongs which it is possible for one man to inflict on another. "i dare not," he continued sorrowfully. "but in god's name i offer you a higher and a nobler errand." "we need none," tignonville muttered impatiently. "yet may others need you," la tribe answered in a tone of rebuke. "you are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the king for the hands of the magistrates of angers?" "ha! does he?" "bidding them do at angers as his majesty has done in paris?" the men broke into cries of execration. "but he shall not see angers!" they swore. "the blood that he has shed shall choke him by the way! and as he would do to others it shall be done to him." la tribe shuddered as he listened, as he looked. try as he would, the thirst of these men for vengeance appalled him. "how?" he said. "he has a score and more with him: and you are only six." "seven now," tignonville answered with a smile. "true, but----" "and he lies to-night at la flèche? that is so!" "it was his intention this morning." "at the old king's inn at the meeting of the great roads?" "it was mentioned," la tribe admitted, with a reluctance he did not comprehend. "but if the night be fair he is as like as not to lie in the fields." one of the men pointed to the sky. a dark bank of cloud fresh risen from the ocean, and big with tempest, hung low in the west. "see! god will deliver him into our hands!" he cried. tignonville nodded. "if he lie there," he said, "he will." and then to one of his followers, as he dismounted, "do you ride on," he said, "and stand guard that we be not surprised. and do you, perrot, tell monsieur. perrot here, as god wills it," he added with a faint smile which did not escape the minister's eye, "married his wife from the great inn at la flèche, and he knows the place." "none better," the man growled. he was a sullen, brooding knave, whose eyes when he looked up surprised by their savage fire. la tribe shook his head. "i know it, too," he said. "'tis strong as a fortress, with a walled court, and all the windows look inwards. the gates are closed an hour after sunset, no matter who is without. if you think, m. de tignonville, to take him there----" "patience, monsieur, you have not heard me," perrot interposed. "i know it after another fashion. do you remember a rill of water which runs through the great yard and the stables?" la tribe nodded. "grated with iron at either end, and no passage for so much as a dog? you do? well, monsieur, i have hunted rats there, and where the water passes under the wall is a culvert, a man's height in length. in it is a stone, one of those which frame the grating at the entrance, which a strong man can remove--and the man is in!" "ay, in! but where!" la tribe asked, his eyebrows drawn together. "well said, monsieur, where?" perrot rejoined in a tone of triumph. "there lies the point. in the stables, where will be sleeping men, and a snorer on every truss? no, but in a fairway between two stables where the water at its entrance runs clear in a stone channel; a channel deepened in one place that they may draw for the chambers above with a rope and a bucket. the rooms above are the best in the house, four in one row, opening all on the gallery; which was uncovered, in the common fashion, until queen-mother jezebel, passing that way to nantes, two years back, found the chambers draughty; and that end of the gallery was closed in against her return. now, monsieur, he and his madame will lie there; and he will feel safe, for there is but one way to those four rooms---through the door which shuts off the covered gallery from the open part. but----" he glanced up an instant and la tribe caught the smouldering fire in his eyes--"we shall not go in by the door." "the bucket rises through a trap?" "in the gallery? to be sure, monsieur. in the corner beyond the fourth door. there shall he fall into the pit which he dug for others, and the evil that he planned rebound on his own head!" la tribe was silent. "what think you of it?" tignonville asked. "that it is cleverly planned," the minister answered. "no more than that!" "no more until i have eaten." "get him something!" tignonville replied in a surly tone. "and we may as well eat, ourselves. lead the horses into the wood. and do you, perrot, call tuez-les-moines, who is forward. two hours' riding should bring us to la flèche. we need not leave here, therefore, until the sun is low. to dinner! to dinner!" probably he did not feel the indifference he affected, for his face as he ate grew darker, and from time to time he shot a glance, barbed with suspicion, at the minister. la tribe on his side remained silent, although the men ate apart. he was in doubt, indeed, as to his own feelings. his instinct and his reason were at odds. through all, however, a single purpose, the rescue of angers, held good, and gradually other things fell into their places. when the meal was at an end, and tignonville challenged him, he was ready. "your enthusiasm seems to have waned," the younger man said with a sneer, "since we met, monsieur! may i ask now if you find any fault with the plan?" "with the plan, none." "if it was providence brought us together, was it not providence furnished me with perrot who knows la flèche? if it was providence brought the danger of the faithful in angers to your knowledge, was it not providence set us on the road--without whom you had been powerless?" "i believe it!" "then, in his name, what is the matter?" tignonville rejoined with a passion of which the other's manner seemed an inadequate cause. "what will you? what is it?" "i would take your place," la tribe answered quietly. "my place?" "yes." "what, are we too many?" "we are enough without you, m. tignonville," the minister answered. "these men, who have wrongs to avenge, god will justify them." tignonville's eyes sparkled with anger. "and have i no wrongs to avenge?" he cried. "is it nothing to lose my mistress, to be robbed of my wife, to see the woman i love dragged off to be a slave and a toy? are these no wrongs?" "he spared your life, if he did not save it," the minister said solemnly. "and hers. and her servants." "to suit himself." la tribe spread out his hands. "to suit himself! and for that you wish him to go free?" tignonville cried in a voice half-choked with rage. "do you know that this man, and this man alone, stood forth in the great hall of the louvre, and when even the king flinched, justified the murder of our people? after that is he to go free?" "at your hands," la tribe answered quietly. "you alone of our people must not pursue him." he would have added more, but tignonville would not listen. brooding on his wrongs behind the wall of the arsenal, he had let hatred eat away his more generous instincts. vain and conceited, he fancied that the world laughed at the poor figure he had cut; and the wound in his vanity festered until nothing would serve but to see the downfall of his enemy. instant pursuit, instant vengeance--only these, he fancied, could restore him in his fellows' eyes. in his heart he knew what would become him better. but vanity is a potent motive: and his conscience, even when supported by la tribe, struggled but weakly. from neither would he hear more. "you have travelled with him, until you side with him!" he cried violently. "have a care, monsieur, have a care lest we think you papist!" and walking over to the men he bade them saddle; adding a sour word which turned their eyes, in no friendly gaze, on the minister. after that la tribe said no more. of what use would it have been? but as darkness came on and cloaked the little troop, and the storm which the men had foreseen began to rumble in the west, his distaste for the business waxed. the summer lightning which presently began to play across the sky revealed not only the broad gleaming stream, between which and a wooded hill their road ran, but the faces of his companions; and these in their turn shed a grisly light on the bloody enterprise towards which they were set. nervous and ill at ease, the minister's mind dwelt on the stages of that enterprise; the stealthy entrance through the waterway, the ascent through the trap, the surprise, the slaughter in the sleeping-chamber. and either because he had lived for days in the victim's company, or was swayed by the arguments he had addressed to another, the prospect shook his soul. in vain he told himself that this was the oppressor; he saw only the man, fresh roused from sleep, with the horror of impending dissolution in his eyes. and when the rider, behind whom he sat, pointed to a faint spark of light, at no great distance before them, and whispered that it was st. agnes 's chapel, hard by the inn, he could have cried with the best catholic of them all, "inter pontem et fontem, domine!" nay, some such words did pass his lips. for the man before him turned half-way in his saddle. "what?" he asked. but the huguenot did not explain. chapter xxiv. at the king's inn. the countess sat up in the darkness of the chamber. she had writhed since noon under the stings of remorse; she could bear them no longer. the slow declension of the day, the evening light, the signs of coming tempest which had driven her company to the shelter of the inn at the cross-roads, all had racked her, by reminding her that the hours were flying, and that soon the fault she had committed would be irreparable. one impulsive attempt to redeem it she had made, we know; but it had failed, and, by rendering her suspect, had made reparation more difficult. still, by daylight it had seemed possible to rest content with the trial made; not so now, when night had fallen, and the cries of little children and the haggard eyes of mothers peopled the darkness of her chamber. she sat up, and listened with throbbing temples. to shut out the lightning which played at intervals across the heavens, madame st. lo, who shared the room, had covered the window with a cloak; and the place was dark. to exclude the dull roll of the thunder was less easy, for the night was oppressively hot, and behind the cloak the casement was open. gradually, too, another sound, the hissing fall of heavy rain, began to make itself heard, and to mingle with the regular breathing which proved that madame st. lo slept. assured of this fact, the countess presently heaved a sigh, and slipped from the bed. she groped in the darkness for her cloak, found it, and donned it over her night-gear. then, taking her bearings by her bed, which stood with its head to the window and its foot to the entrance, she felt her way across the floor to the door, and after passing her hands a dozen times over every part of it, she found the latch, and raised it. the door creaked, as she pulled it open, and she stood arrested; but the sound went no farther, for the roofed gallery outside, which looked by two windows on the courtyard, was full of outdoor noises, the rushing of rain and the running of spouts and eaves. one of the windows stood wide, admitting the rain and wind, and as she paused, holding the door open, the draught blew the cloak from her. she stepped out quickly and shut the door behind her. on her left was the blind end of the passage; she turned to the right. she took one step into the darkness and stood motionless. beside her, within a few feet of her, some one had moved, with a dull sound as of a boot on wood; a sound so near her that she held her breath, and pressed herself against the wall. she listened. perhaps some of the servants--it was a common usage--had made their beds on the floor. perhaps one of the women had stirred in the room against the wall of which she crouched. perhaps--but, even while she reassured herself, the sound rose anew at her feet. fortunately at the same instant the glare of the lightning flooded all, and showed the passage, and showed it empty. it lit up the row of doors on her right and the small windows on her left; and discovered facing her, the door which shut off the rest of the house. she could have thanked--nay, she did thank god for that light. if the sound she had heard recurred she did not hear it; for, as the thunder which followed hard on the flash, crashed overhead and rolled heavily eastwards, she felt her way boldly along the passage, touching first one door, and then a second, and then a third. she groped for the latch of the last, and found it, but, with her hand on it, paused. in order to summon up her courage, she strove to hear again the cries of misery and to see again the haggard eyes which had driven her hither. and if she did not wholly succeed, other reflections came to her aid. this storm, which covered all smaller noises, and opened, now and again, god's lantern for her use, did it not prove that he was on her side, and that she might count on his protection? the thought at least was timely, and with a better heart she gathered her wits. waiting until the thunder burst over her head, she opened the door, slid within it, and closed it. she would fain have left it ajar, that in case of need she might escape the more easily. but the wind, which beat into the passage through the open window, rendered the precaution too perilous. she went forward two paces into the room, and as the roll of the thunder died away she stooped forward and listened with painful intensity for the sound of count hannibal's breathing. but the window was open, and the hiss of the rain persisted; she could hear nothing through it, and fearfully she took another step forward. the window should be before her; the bed in the corner to the left. but nothing of either could she make out. she must wait for the lightning. it came, and for a second or more the room shone. the window, the low truckle-bed, the sleeper, she saw all with dazzling clearness, and before the flash had well passed she was crouching low, with the hood of her cloak dragged about her face. for the glare had revealed count hannibal; but not asleep! he lay on his side, his face towards her; lay with open eyes, staring at her. or had the light tricked her? the light must have tricked her, for in the interval between the flash and the thunder, while she crouched quaking, he did not move or call. the light must have deceived her. she felt so certain of it that she found courage to remain where she was until another flash came and showed him sleeping with closed eyes. she drew a breath of relief at that, and rose slowly to her feet. but she dared not go forward until a third flash had confirmed the second. then, while the thunder burst overhead and rolled away, she crept on until she stood beside the pillow, and stooping, could hear the sleeper's breathing. alas! the worst remained to be done. the packet, she was sure of it, lay under his pillow. how was she to find it, how remove it without rousing him? a touch might awaken him. and yet, if she would not return empty-handed, if she would not go back to the harrowing thoughts which had tortured her through the long hours of the day, it must be done, and done now. she knew this, yet she hung irresolute a while, blenching before the manual act, listening to the persistent rush and downpour of the rain. then a second time she drew courage from the storm. how timely had it broken! how signally had it aided her! how slight had been her chance without it! and so at last, resolutely but with a deft touch, she slid her fingers between the pillow and the bed, slightly pressing down the latter with her other hand. for an instant she fancied that the sleeper's breathing stopped, and her heart gave a great bound. but the breathing went on the next instant--if it had stopped--and dreading the return of the lightning, shrinking from being revealed so near him, and in that act--for which the darkness seemed more fitting--she groped farther, and touched something. and then, as her fingers closed upon it and grasped it, and his breath rose hot to her burning cheek, she knew that the real danger lay in the withdrawal. at the first attempt he uttered a kind of grunt and moved, throwing out his hand. she thought that he was going to awake, and had hard work to keep herself where she was; but he did not move, and she began again with so infinite a precaution that the perspiration ran down her face and her hair within the hood hung dank on her neck. slowly, oh so slowly, she drew back the hand, and with it the packet; so slowly, and yet so resolutely, being put to it, that when the dreaded flash surprised her, and she saw his harsh swarthy face, steeped in the mysterious aloofness of sleep, within a hand's breadth of hers, not a muscle of her arm moved, nor did her hand quiver. it was done--at last! with a burst of gratitude, of triumph, of exultation, she stood erect. she realised that it was done, and that here in her hand she held the packet. a deep gasp of relief, of joy, of thankfulness, and she glided towards the door. she groped for the latch, and in the act fancied his breathing was changed. she paused and bent her head to listen. but the patter of the rain, drowning all sounds save those of the nearest origin, persuaded her that she was mistaken, and, finding the latch, she raised it, slipped like a shadow into the passage, and closed the door behind her. that done she stood arrested, all the blood in her body running to her heart. she must be dreaming! the passage in which she stood--the passage which she had left in black darkness--was alight; was so far lighted, at least, that to eyes fresh from the night, the figures of three men, grouped at the farther end, stood out against the glow of the lantern which they appeared to be trimming--for the two nearest were stooping over it. these two had their backs to her, the third his face; and it was the sight of this third man which had driven the blood to her heart. he ended at the waist! it was only after a few seconds, it was only when she had gazed at him awhile in speechless horror, that he rose another foot from the floor, and she saw that he had paused in the act of ascending through a trapdoor. what the scene meant, who these men were, or what their entrance portended, with these questions her brain refused at the moment to grapple. it was much that--still remembering who might hear her, and what she held--she did not shriek aloud. instead, she stood in the gloom at her end of the passage, gazing with all her eyes until she had seen the third man step clear of the trap. she could see him; but the light intervened and blurred his view of her. he stooped, almost as soon as he had cleared himself, to help up a fourth man, who rose with a naked knife between his teeth. she saw then that all were armed, and something stealthy in their bearing, something cruel in their eyes as the light of the lantern fell now on one dark face and now on another, went to her heart and chilled it. who were they, and why were they here? what was their purpose? as her reason awoke, as she asked herself these questions, the fourth man stooped in his turn, and gave his hand to a fifth. and on that she lost her self-control and cried out. for the last man to ascend was la tribe! la tribe, from whom she had parted that morning! the sound she uttered was low, but it reached the men's ears, and the two whose backs were towards her turned as if they had been pricked. he who held the lantern raised it, and the five glared at her and she at them. then a second cry, louder and more full of surprise, burst from her lips. the nearest man, he who held the lantern high that he might view her, was tignonville, was her lover! "_mon dieu!_" she whispered. "what is it? what is it?" then, not till then, did he know her. until then the light of the lantern had revealed only a cloaked and cowled figure, a gloomy phantom which shook the heart of more than one with superstitious terror. but they knew her now--two of them; and slowly, as in a dream, tignonville came forward. the mind has its moments of crisis, in which it acts upon instinct rather than upon reason. the girl never knew why she acted as she did; why she asked no questions, why she uttered no exclamations, no remonstrances. why, with a finger on her lips and her eyes on his, she put the packet into his hands. he took it from her, too, as mechanically as she gave it--with the hand which held his bare blade. that done, silent as she, with his eyes set hard, he would have gone by her. the sight of her there, guarding the door of him who had stolen her from him, exasperated his worst passions. but she moved to hinder him, and barred the way. with her hand raised she pointed to the trapdoor. "go now!" she whispered, her tone stern and low, "you have what you want! go!" "no!" and he tried to pass her. "go!" she repeated in the same tone. "you have what you need." and still she held her hand extended; still without faltering she faced the five men, while the thunder, growing more distant, rolled sullenly eastward, and the midnight rain, pouring from every spout and dripping eave about the house, wrapped the passage in its sibilant hush. gradually her eyes dominated his, gradually her nobler nature and nobler aim subdued his weaker parts. for she understood now; and he saw that she did, and had he been alone he would have slunk away, and said no word in his defence. but one of the men, savage and out of patience, thrust himself between them. "where is he?" he muttered. "what is the use of this? where is he?" and his bloodshot eyes--it was tuez-les-moines--questioned the doors, while his hand, trembling and shaking on the haft of his knife, bespoke his eagerness. "where is he? where is he, woman? quick, or----" "i shall not tell you," she answered. "you lie," he cried, grinning like a dog. "you will tell us! or we will kill you, too! where is he? where is he?" "i shall not tell you," she repeated, standing before him in the fearlessness of scorn. "another step and i rouse the house! m. de tignonville, to you who know me, i swear that if this man does not retire----" "he is in one of these rooms?" was tignonville's answer. "in which? in which?" "search them!" she answered, her voice low, but biting in its contempt. "try them. rouse my women, alarm the house! and when you have his people at your throats--five as they will be to one of you--thank your own mad folly!" tuez-les-moines' eyes glittered. "you will not tell us?" he cried. "no!" "then----" but as the fanatic sprang on her, la tribe flung his arms round him and dragged him back. "it would be madness," he cried. "are you mad, fool? have done!" he panted, struggling with him. "if madame gives the alarm--and he may be in any one of these four rooms, you cannot be sure which--we are undone." he looked for support to tignonville, whose movement to protect the girl he had anticipated, and who had since listened sullenly. "we have obtained what we need. will you requite madame, who has gained it for us at her own risk----" "it is monsieur i would requite," tignonville muttered grimly. "by using violence to her?" the minister retorted passionately. he and tuez were still gripping one another. "i tell you, to go on is to risk what we have got! and i for one----" "am chicken-hearted!" the young man sneered. "madame--" he seemed to choke on the word. "will you swear that he is not here?" "i swear that if you do not go i will raise the alarm!" she hissed--all their words were sunk to that stealthy note. "go! if you have not stayed too long already. go! or see!" and she pointed to the trapdoor, from which the face and arms of a sixth man had that moment risen--the face dark with perturbation, so that her woman's wit told her at once that something was amiss. "see what has come of your delay already!" "the water is rising," the man muttered earnestly. "in god's name come, whether you have done it or not, or we cannot pass out again. it is within a foot of the crown of the culvert now, and it is rising." "curse on the water!" tuez-les-moines answered in a frenzied whisper. "and on this jezebel. let us kill her and him! what matter afterwards?" and he tried to shake off la tribe's grasp. but the minister held him desperately. "are you mad? are you mad?" he answered. "what can we do against thirty? let us be gone while we can. let us be gone! come." "ay, come," perrot cried, assenting reluctantly. he had taken no side hitherto. "the luck is against us! 'tis no use to-night, man!" and he turned with an air of sullen resignation. letting his legs drop through the trap he followed the bearer of the tidings out of sight. another made up his mind to go, and went. then only tignonville holding the lantern, and la tribe, who feared to release tuez-les-moines, remained with the fanatic. the countess's eyes met her old lover's, and whether old memories overcame her, or, now that the danger was nearly past, she began to give way, she swayed a little on her feet. but he did not notice it. he was sunk in black rage: rage against her, rage against himself. "take the light," she muttered unsteadily. "and--and he must follow!" "and you?" but she could bear it no longer. "oh, go," she wailed. "go! will you never go? if you love me, if you ever loved me, i implore you to go." he had betrayed little of a lover's feeling. but he could not resist that appeal, and he turned silently. seizing tuez-les-moines by the other arm, he drew him by force to the trap. "quiet, fool," he muttered savagely when the man would have resisted, "and go down! if we stay to kill him, we shall have no way of escape, and his life will be dearly bought. down, man, down!" and between them, in a struggling silence, with now and then an audible rap, or a ring of metal, the two forced the desperado to descend. la tribe followed hastily. tignonville was the last to go. in the act of disappearing he raised his lantern for a last glimpse of the countess. to his astonishment the passage was empty; she was gone. hard by him a door stood an inch or two ajar, and he guessed that it was hers, and swore under his breath, hating her at that moment. but he did not guess how nicely she had calculated her strength; how nearly exhaustion had overcome her; or that even while he paused--a fatal pause had he known it--eyeing the dark opening of the door, she lay as one dead, on the bed within. she had fallen in a swoon, from which she did not recover until the sun had risen, and marched across one quarter of the heavens. nor did he see another thing, or he might have hastened his steps. before the yellow light of his lantern faded from the ceiling of the passage, the door of the room farthest from the trap slid open. a man, whose eyes, until darkness swallowed him, shone strangely in a face extraordinarily softened, came out on tip-toe. this man stood awhile, listening. at length, hearing those below utter a cry of dismay, he awoke to sudden activity. he opened with a turn of the key the door which stood at his elbow, the door which led to the other part of the house. he vanished through it. a second later a sharp whistle pierced the darkness of the courtyard and brought a dozen sleepers to their senses and their feet. a moment, and the courtyard hummed with voices, above which one voice rang clear and insistent. with a startled cry the inn awoke. chapter xxv. the company of the bleeding heart. "but why," madame. st. lo asked, sticking her arms akimbo, "why stay in this forsaken place a day and a night, when six hours in the saddle would set us in angers?" "because," tavannes replied coldly--he and his cousin were walking before the gateway of the inn--"the countess is not well, and will be the better, i think, for staying a day." "she slept soundly enough! i'll answer for that!" he shrugged his shoulders. "she never raised her head this morning, though my women were shrieking 'murder!' next door, and----name of heaven!" madame resumed, after breaking off abruptly, and shading her eyes with her hand, "what comes here? is it a funeral? or a pilgrimage? if all the priests about here are as black, no wonder m. rabelais fell out with them!" the inn stood without the walls for the convenience of those who wished to take the road early: a little also, perhaps, because food and forage were cheaper, and the wine paid no town-dues. four great roads met before the house, along the most easterly of which the sombre company which had caught madame st. lo's attention could be seen approaching. at first count hannibal supposed with his companion that the travellers were conveying to the grave the corpse of some person of distinction; for the _cortége_ consisted mainly of priests and the like mounted on mules, and clothed for the most part in black. black also was the small banner which waved above them, and bore in place of arms the emblem of the bleeding heart. but a second glance failed to discover either litter or bier; and a nearer approach showed that the travellers, whether they wore the tonsure or not, bore weapons of one kind or another about them. suddenly madame st. lo clapped her hands, and proclaimed in great astonishment that she knew them. "why, there is father boucher, the curé of st.-benoist!" she said, "and father pezelay of st. magloire. and there is another i know, though i cannot remember his name! they are preachers from paris! that is who they are! but what can they be doing here? is it a pilgrimage, think you?" "ay, a pilgrimage of blood!" count hannibal answered between his teeth. and, turning to him to learn what moved him, she saw the look in his eyes which portended a storm. before she could ask a question, however, the gloomy company, which had first appeared in the distance, moving, an inky blot, through the hot sunshine of the summer morning, had drawn near and was almost abreast of them. stepping from her side, he raised his hand and arrested the march. "who is master here?" he asked haughtily. "i am the leader," answered a stout pompous churchman, whose small malevolent eyes belied the sallow fatuity of his face. "i, m. de tavannes, by your leave." "and you, by your leave," tavannes sneered, "are----" "archdeacon and vicar of the bishop of angers and prior of the lesser brethren of st. germain, m. le comte. visitor also of the diocese of angers," the dignitary continued, puffing out his cheeks, "and chaplain to the lieutenant-governor of saumur, whose unworthy brother i am." "a handsome glove, and well embroidered!" tavannes retorted in a tone of disdain. "the hand i see yonder!" he pointed to the lean parchment mask of father pezelay, who coloured ever so faintly, but held his peace under the sneer. "you are bound for angers!" count hannibal continued. "for what purpose, sir prior!" "his grace the bishop is absent, and in his absence----" "you go to fill his city with strife! i know you! not you!" he continued, contemptuously turning from the prior, and regarding the third of the principal figures of the party. "but you! you were the curé who got the mob together last all souls'." "i speak the words of him who sent me!" answered the third churchman, whose brooding face and dull curtained eyes gave no promise of the fits of frenzied eloquence which had made his pulpit famous in paris. "then kill and burn are his alphabet!" tavannes retorted, and heedless of the start of horror which a saying so near blasphemy excited among the churchmen, he turned to father pezelay. "and you! you, too, i know!" he continued. "and you know me! and take this from me. turn, father! turn! or worse than a broken head--you bear the scar i see--will befall you. these good persons, whom you have moved, unless i am in error, to take this journey, may not know me; but you do, and can tell them. if they will to angers, they must to angers. but if i find trouble in angers when i come, i will hang some one high. don't scowl at me, man!"--in truth, the look of hate in father pezelay's eyes was enough to provoke the exclamation. "some one, and it shall not be a bare patch on the crown will save his windpipe from squeezing!" a murmur of indignation broke from the preachers' attendants; one or two made a show of drawing their weapons. but count hannibal paid no heed to them, and had already turned on his heel when father pezelay spurred his mule a pace or two forward. snatching a heavy brass cross from one of the acolytes, he raised it aloft, and in the voice which had often thrilled the heated congregation of st. magloire, he called on tavannes to pause. "stand, my lord!" he cried. "and take warning! stand, reckless and profane, whose face is set hard as a stone, and his heart as a flint, against high heaven and holy church! stand and hear! behold the word of the lord is gone out against this city, even against angers, for the unbelief thereof! her place shall be left unto her desolate, and her children shall be dashed against the stones! woe unto you, therefore, if you gainsay it, or fall short of that which is commanded! you shall perish as achan, the son of charmi, and as saul! the curse that has gone out against you shall not tarry, nor your days continue! for the canaanitish woman that is in your house, and for the thought that is in your heart, the place that was yours is given to another! yea, the sword is even now drawn that shall pierce your side!" "you are more like to split my ears!" count hannibal answered sternly. "and now mark me! preach as you please here. but a word in angers, and though you be shaven twice over, i will have you silenced after a fashion which will not please you! if you value your tongue therefore, father----oh, you shake off the dust, do you? well, pass on! 'tis wise, perhaps." and undismayed by the scowling brows, and the cross ostentatiously lifted to heaven, he gazed after the procession as it moved on under its swaying banner, now one and now another of the acolytes looking back and raising his hands to invoke the bolt of heaven on the blasphemer. as the _cortége_ passed the huge watering-troughs, and the open gateway of the inn, the knot of persons congregated there fell on their knees. in answer the churchmen raised their banner higher, and began to sing the _eripe me, domine!_ and to its strains, now vengeful, now despairing, now rising on a wave of menace, they passed slowly into the distance, slowly towards angers and the loire. suddenly madame st. lo twitched his sleeve. "enough for me!" she cried passionately. "i go no farther with you!" "ah?" "no farther!" she repeated. she was pale, she shivered. "many thanks, my cousin, but we part company here. i do not go to angers. i have seen horrors enough. i will take my people, and go to my aunt by tours and the east road. for you, i foresee what will happen. you will perish between the hammer and the anvil." "ah?" "you play too fine a game," she continued, her face quivering. "give over the girl to her lover, and send away her people with her. and wash your hands of her and hers. or you will see her fall, and fall beside her! give her to him, i say--give her to him!" "my wife?" "wife?" she echoed, for, fickle, and at all times swept away by the emotions of the moment, she was in earnest now. "is there a tie," and she pointed after the vanishing procession, "that they cannot unloose? that they will not unloose? is there a life which escapes if they doom it? did the admiral escape? or rochefoucauld? or madame de luns in old days? i tell you they go to rouse angers against you, and i see beforehand what will happen. she will perish, and you with her. wife? a pretty wife, at whose door you took her lover last night." "and at your door!" he answered quietly, unmoved by the gibe. but she did not heed. "i warned you of that!" she cried. "and you would not believe me. i told you he was following. and i warn you of this. you are between the hammer and the anvil, m. le comte! if tignonville does not murder you in your bed----" "'tis not likely while i hold him in my power." "then holy church will fall on you and crush you. for me, i have seen enough and more than enough. i go to tours by the east road." he shrugged his shoulders. "as you please," he said. she flung away in disgust with him. she could not understand a man who played fast and loose at such a time. the game was too fine for her, its danger too apparent, the gain too small. she had, too, a woman's dread of the church, a woman's belief in the power of the dead hand to punish. and in half an hour her orders were given. in two hours her people were gathered, and she departed by the eastward road, three of tavannes' riders reinforcing her servants for a part of the way. count hannibal stood to watch them start, and noticed bigot riding by the side of suzanne's mule. he smiled; and presently, as he turned away, he did a thing rare with him--he laughed outright. a laugh which reflected a mood rare as itself. few had seen count hannibal's eye sparkle as it sparkled now; few had seen him laugh as he laughed, walking to and fro in the sunshine before the inn. his men watched him, and wondered, and liked it little, for one or two who had overheard his altercation with the churchmen had reported it, and there was shaking of heads over it. the man who had singed the pope's beard and chucked cardinals under the chin was growing old, and the most daring of the others had no mind to fight with foes whose weapons were not of this world. count hannibal's gaiety, however, was well grounded, had they known it. he was gay, not because he foresaw peril, and it was his nature to love peril; nor--in the main, though a little, perhaps--because he knew that the woman whose heart he desired to win had that night stood between him and death; nor, though again a little, perhaps, because she had confirmed his choice by conduct which a small man might have deprecated, but which a great man loved; but chiefly, because the events of the night had placed in his grasp two weapons by the aid of which he looked to recover all the ground he had lost--lost by his impulsive departure from the path of conduct on which he had started. those weapons were tignonville, taken like a rat in a trap by the rising of the water; and the knowledge that the countess had stolen the precious packet from his pillow. the knowledge--for he had lain and felt her breath upon his cheek, he had lain and felt her hand beneath his pillow, he had lain while the impulse to fling his arms about her had been almost more than he could tame! he had lain and suffered her to go, to pass out safely as she had passed in. and then he had received his reward in the knowledge that, if she robbed him, she robbed him not for herself; and that where it was a question of his life she did not fear to risk her own. when he came, indeed, to that point, he trembled. how narrowly had he been saved from misjudging her! had he not lain and waited, had he not possessed himself in patience, he might have been led to think her in collusion with the old lover whom he found at her door, and with those who came to slay him. either he might have perished unwarned; or escaping that danger, he might have detected her with tignonville and lost for all time the ideal of a noble woman. he had escaped that peril. more, he had gained the weapons we have indicated; and the sense of power, in regard to her, almost intoxicated him. surely if he wielded those weapons to the best advantage, if he strained generosity to the uttermost, the citadel of her heart must yield at last. he had the defect of his courage and his nature, a tendency to do things after a flamboyant fashion. he knew that her act would plunge him in perils which he had not foreseen. if the preachers roused the papists of angers, if he arrived to find men's swords whetted for the massacre and the men themselves awaiting the signal, then if he did not give that signal there would be trouble. there would be trouble of the kind in which the soul of hannibal de tavannes revelled, trouble about the ancient cathedral and under the black walls of the angevin castle, trouble amid which the hearts of common men would be as water. then, when things seemed at their worst, he would reveal his knowledge. then, when forgiveness must seem impossible, he would forgive. with the flood of peril which she had unloosed rising round them, he would say, "go!" to the man who had aimed at his life; he would say to her, "i know, and i forgive!" that, that only, would fitly crown the policy on which he had decided from the first, though he had not hoped to conduct it on lines so splendid as those which now dazzled him. chapter xxvi. temper. it was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the countess. she could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so much hung and of which he had indicated the importance. but if he had missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? why did he not cry the alarm, search and question and pursue? why did he not give her the opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her resolution died within her? above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? of the snatches of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of astonishment? of the parades which his horse, catching the infection, made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught it? ay, what? why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his melancholy and ride like the youngest? she wondered what the men thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. what were they thinking of it? she could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began to grip her heart. twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had shaken under her. but the cool freshness of the early summer morning, and the sight of the green landscape and the winding loir, beside which their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth. but this strange mood veiled she knew not what. it seemed, if she comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. before it her heart became as water. even her colour little by little left her cheeks. she knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now guiltily sought and now avoided his. and feeling sure that he did read it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her perplexity. this, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful thoughts. on one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in steps from the river to the white buildings of a convent. on the other the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. again the travellers lost sight of the loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last year's leaves. and out again and down again they passed, and turning aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through the glare and heat. down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of nones. and still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also. he hoped to arrive at angers before nightfall. what, she wondered, shivering, would happen there? what was he planning to do to her? how would he punish her? brave as she was, she was a woman, with a woman's nerves; and fear and anticipation got upon them; and his silence--his silence which must mean a thing worse than words! and then on a sudden, piercing all, a new thought. was it possible that he had other letters? if his bearing were consistent with anything, it was consistent with that. had he other genuine letters, or had he duplicate letters, so that he had lost nothing, but instead had gained the right to rack and torture her, to taunt and despise her? that thought stung her into sudden self-betrayal. they were riding along a broad dusty track which bordered a stone causey raised above the level of winter floods; impulsively she turned to him. "you have other letters!" she cried. "you have other letters!" and freed for the moment from her terror, she fixed her eyes on his and strove to read his face. he looked at her, his mouth grown hard. "what do you mean, madame?" he asked. "you have other letters?" "for whom?" "from the king, for angers!" he saw that she was going to confess, that she was going to derange his cherished plan; and unreasonable anger awoke in the man who had been more than willing to forgive a real injury. "will you explain?" he said between his teeth. and his eyes glittered unpleasantly. "what do you mean?" "you have other letters," she persisted, "besides those which i stole." "which you stole?" he repeated the words without passion. enraged by this unexpected turn, he hardly knew how to take it. "yes, i!" she cried. "i! i took them from under your pillow!" he was silent a minute. then he laughed and shook his head. "it will not do, madame," he said, his lip curling. "you are clever, but you do not deceive me." "deceive you?" "yes." "you do not believe that i took the letters?" she cried in great amazement. "no," he answered; "and for a good reason." he had hardened his heart now. he had chosen his line, and he would not spare her. "why, then?" she cried. "why?" "for the best of all reasons," he answered. "because the person who stole the letters was seized in the act of making his escape, and is now in my power." "the person--who stole the letters?" she faltered. "yes, madame." "do you mean m. de tignonville?" "you have said it." she turned white to the lips, and trembling could with difficulty sit her horse. with an effort she pulled it up, and he stopped also. their attendants were some way ahead. "and you have the letters?" she whispered, her eyes meeting his. "you have the letters?" "no, but i have the thief!" count hannibal answered with sinister meaning. "as i think you knew, madame," he continued ironically, "a while back before you spoke." "i? oh, no, no!" and she swayed in her saddle. "what--what are you--going to do?" she muttered after a moment's stricken silence. "to him?" "yes." "the magistrates will decide, at angers." "but he did not do it! i swear he did not." count hannibal shook his head coldly. "i swear, monsieur, i took the letters!" she repeated piteously. "punish me!" her figure, bowed like an old woman's over the neck of her horse, seemed to crave his mercy. count hannibal smiled. "you do not believe me?" "no," he said. and then, in a tone which chilled her, "if i did believe you," he continued, "i should still punish him!" she was broken; but he would see if he could not break her further. he would try if there were no weak spot in her armour. he would rack her now, since in the end she must go free. "understand, madame," he continued in his harshest tone, "i have had enough of your lover. he has crossed my path too often. you are my wife, i am your husband. in a day or two there shall be an end of this farce and of him." "he did not take them!" she wailed, her face sinking lower on her breast. "he did not take them! have mercy!" "any way, madame, they are gone!" tavannes answered. "you have taken them between you; and as i do not choose that you should pay, he will pay the price." if the discovery that tignonville had fallen into her husband's hands had not sufficed to crush her, count hannibal's tone must have done so. the shoot of new life which had raised its head after those dreadful days in paris, and--for she was young--had supported her under the weight which the peril of angers had cast on her shoulders, died, bruised under the heel of his brutality. the pride which had supported her, which had won tavannes' admiration and exacted his respect, sank, as she sank herself, bowed to her horse's neck, weeping bitter tears before him. she abandoned herself to her misery, as she had once abandoned herself in the upper room in paris. and he looked at her. he had willed to crush her; he had his will, and he was not satisfied. he had bowed her so low that his magnanimity would now have its full effect, would shine as the sun into a dark world; and yet he was not happy. he could look forward to the morrow, and say, "she will understand me, she will know me!" and lo, the thought that she wept for her lover stabbed him, and stabbed him anew; and he thought, "rather would she death from him, than life from me! though i give her creation, it will not alter her! though i strike the stars with my head, it is he who fills her world." the thought spurred him to farther cruelty, impelled him to try if, prostrate as she was, he could not draw a prayer from her? "you don't ask after him?" he scoffed. "he may be before or behind? or wounded or well? would you not know, madame? and what message he sent you? and what he fears, and what hope he has? and his last wishes? and--for while there is life there is hope--would you not learn where the key of his prison lies to-night? how much for the key to-night, madame?" each question fell on her like the lash of a whip; but as one who has been flogged into insensibility, she did not wince. that drove him on: he felt a mad desire to hear her prayers, to force her lower, to bring her to her knees. and he sought about for a keener taunt. their attendants were almost out of sight before them; the sun, declining apace, was in their eyes. "in two hours we shall be in angers," he said. "mon dieu, madame, it was a pity, when you two were taking letters, you did not go a step farther. you were surprised, or i doubt if i should be alive to-day!" then she did look up. she raised her head and met his gaze with such wonder in her eyes, such reproach in her tear-stained face, that his voice sank on the last word. "you mean--that i would have murdered you?" she said. "i would have cut off my hand first. what i did"--and now her voice was as firm as it was low--"what i did, i did to save my people. and if it were to be done again, i would do it again!" "you dare to tell me that to my face?" he cried, hiding feelings which almost choked him. "you would do it again, would you? mon dieu, madame, you need to be taught a lesson!" and by chance, meaning only to make the horses move on again, he raised his whip. she thought that he was going to strike her, and she flinched at last. the whip fell smartly on her horse's quarters, and it sprang forward. count hannibal swore between his teeth. he had turned pale, she red as fire. "get on! get on!" he cried harshly. "we are falling behind!" and riding at her heels, flipping her horse now and then, he forced her to trot on until they overtook the servants. chapter xxvii. the black town. it was late evening when, riding wearily on jaded horses, they came to the outskirts of angers, and saw before them the term of their journey. the glow of sunset had faded, but the sky was still warm with the last hues of day; and against its opal light the huge mass of the angevin castle, which even in sunshine rises dark and forbidding above the mayenne, stood up black and sharply defined. below it, on both banks of the river, the towers and spires of the city soared up from a sombre huddle of ridge-roofs, broken here by a round-headed gateway, crumbling and pigeon-haunted, that dated from st. louis, and there by the gaunt arms of a windmill. the city lay dark under a light sky, keeping well its secrets. thousands were out of doors enjoying the evening coolness in alley and court, yet it betrayed the life which pulsed in its arteries only by the low murmur which rose from it. nevertheless, the countess at sight of its roofs tasted the first moment of happiness which had been hers that day. she might suffer, but she had saved. those roofs would thank her! in that murmur were the voices of women and children she had redeemed! at the sight and at the thought a wave of love and tenderness swept all bitterness from her breast. a profound humility, a boundless thankfulness took possession of her. her head sank lower above her horse's mane; but it sank in reverence, not in shame. could she have known what was passing beneath those roofs which night was blending in a common gloom--could she have read the thoughts which at that moment paled the cheeks of many a stout burgher, whose gabled house looked on the great square, she had been still more thankful. for in attics and back rooms women were on their knees at that hour, praying with feverish eyes; and in the streets men--on whom their fellows, seeing the winding-sheet already at the chin, gazed askance--smiled, and showed brave looks abroad, while their hearts were sick with fear. for darkly, no man knew how, the news had come to angers. it had been known, more or less, for three days. men had read it in other men's eyes. the tongue of a scold, the sneer of an injured woman had spread it, the birds of the air had carried it. from garret window to garret window across the narrow lanes of the old town it had been whispered at dead of night; at convent grilles, and in the timber-yards beside the river. ten thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, it was rumoured, had perished in paris. in orleans, all. in tours this man's sister; at saumur that man's son. through france the word had gone forth that the huguenots must die; and in the busy town the same roof-tree sheltered fear and hate, rage and cupidity. on one side of the party-wall murder lurked fierce-eyed; on the other, the victim lay watching the latch, and shaking at a step. strong men tasted the bitterness of death, and women clasping their babes to their breasts smiled sickly into children's eyes. the signal only was lacking. it would come, said some, from saumur, where montsoreau, the duke of anjou's lieutenant-governor and a papist, had his quarters. from paris, said others, directly from the king. it might come at any hour now, in the day or in the night; the magistrates, it was whispered, were in continuous session, awaiting its coming. no wonder that from, lofty gable windows, and from dormers set high above the tiles, haggard faces looked northward and eastward, and ears sharpened by fear imagined above the noises of the city the ring of the iron shoes that carried doom. doubtless the majority desired--as the majority in france have always desired--peace. but in the purlieus about the cathedral and in the lanes where the sacristans lived, in convent parlours and college courts, among all whose livelihood the new faith threatened, was a stir as of a hive deranged. here was grumbling against the magistrates--why wait? there, stealthy plannings and arrangements; everywhere a grinding of weapons and casting of slugs. old grudges, new rivalries, a scholar's venom, a priest's dislike, here was final vent for all. none need leave this feast unsated! it was a man of this class, sent out for the purpose, who first espied count hannibal's company approaching. he bore the news into the town, and by the time the travellers reached the city gate, the dusky street within, on which lights were beginning to twinkle from booths and casements, was alive with figures running to meet them and crying the news as they ran. the travellers, weary and road-stained, had no sooner passed under the arch than they found themselves the core of a great crowd which moved with them and pressed about them; now unbonneting, and now calling out questions, and now shouting "vive le roi! vive le roi!" above the press, windows burst into light; and over all, the quaint leaning gables of the old timbered houses looked down on the hurry and tumult. they passed along a narrow street in which the rabble, hurrying at count hannibal's bridle, and often looking back to read his face, had much ado to escape harm; along this street and before the yawning doors of a great church, whence a hot breath heavy with incense and burning wax issued to meet them. a portion of the congregation had heard the tumult and struggled out, and now stood close-packed on the steps under the double vault of the portal. among them the countess's eyes, as she rode by, a sturdy man-at-arms on either hand, caught and held one face. it was the face of a tall, lean man in dusty black; and though she did not know him she seemed to have an equal attraction for him; for as their eyes met he seized the shoulder of the man next him and pointed her out. and something in the energy of the gesture, or in the thin lips and malevolent eyes of the man who pointed, chilled the countess's blood and shook her, she knew not why. until then, she had known no fear save of her husband. but at that a sense of the force and pressure of the crowd--as well as of the fierce passions, straining about her, which a word might unloose--broke upon her; and looking to the stern men on either side she fancied that she read anxiety in their faces. she glanced behind. bridle to bridle the count's men came on, pressing round her women and shielding them from the exuberance of the throng. in their faces too she thought that she traced uneasiness. what wonder if the scenes through which she had passed in paris began to recur to her mind, and shook nerves already overwrought? she began to tremble. "is there--danger?" she muttered, speaking in a low voice to bigot, who rode on her right hand. "will they do anything?" the norman snorted. "not while he is in the saddle," he said, nodding towards his master, who rode a pace in front of them, his reins loose. "there be some here know him!" bigot continued, in his drawling tone. "and more will know him if they break line. have no fear, madame, he will bring you safe to the inn. down with the huguenots?" he continued, turning from her and addressing a rogue who, holding his stirrup, was shouting the cry till he was crimson. "then why not away, and----" "the king! the king's word and leave!" the man answered. "ay, tell us!" shrieked another, looking upward, while he waved his cap; "have we the king's leave?" "you'll bide _his_ leave!" the norman retorted, indicating the count with his thumb. "or 'twill be up with you--on the three-legged horse!" "but he comes from the king!" the man panted. "to be sure. to be sure!" "then----" "you'll bide his time! that's all!" bigot answered, rather it seemed for his own satisfaction than the other's enlightenment. "you'll all bide it, you dogs!" he continued in his beard, as he cast his eye over the weltering crowd. "ha! so we are here, are we? and not too soon, either." he fell silent as they entered an open space, overlooked on one side by the dark façade of the cathedral, on the other three sides by houses more or less illumined. the rabble swept into this open space with them and before them, filled much of it in an instant, and for a while eddied and swirled this way and that, thrust onward by the worshippers who had issued from the church and backwards by those who had been first in the square, and had no mind to be hustled out of hearing. a stranger, confused by the sea of excited faces, and deafened by the clamour of "vive le roi!" "vive anjou!" mingled with cries against the huguenots, might have fancied that the whole city was arrayed before him. but he would have been wide of the mark. the scum, indeed--and a dangerous scum--frothed and foamed and spat under tavannes' bridle-hand; and here and there among them, but not of them, the dark-robed figure of a priest moved to and fro; or a benedictine, or some smooth-faced acolyte egged on to the work he dared not do. but the decent burghers were not there. they lay bolted in their houses; while the magistrates, with little heart to do aught except bow to the mob--or other their masters for the time being--shook in their council chamber. there is not a city of france which has not seen it; which has not known the moment when the mass impended, and it lay with one man to start it or stay its course. angers within its houses heard the clamour, and from the child, clinging to its mother's skirt, and wondering why she wept, to the provost, trembled, believing that the hour had come. the countess heard it too, and understood it. she caught the savage note in the voice of the mob--that note which means danger--and her heart beating wildly she looked to her husband. then, fortunately for her, fortunately for angers, it was given to all to see that in count hannibal's saddle sat a man. he raised his hand for silence, and in a minute or two--not at once, for the square was dusky--it was obtained. he rose in his stirrups, and bared his head. "i am from the king!" he cried, throwing his voice to all parts of the crowd. "and this is his majesty's pleasure and good will! that every man hold his hand until to-morrow on pain of death, or worse! and at noon his further pleasure will be known! vive le roi!" and he covered his head again. "vive le roi!" cried a number of the foremost. but their shouts were feeble and half-hearted, and were quickly drowned in a rising murmur of discontent and ill-humour, which, mingled with cries of "is that all? is there no more? down with the huguenots!" rose from all parts. presently these cries became merged in a persistent call, which had its origin, as far as could be discovered, in the darkest corner of the square. a call for "montsoreau! montsoreau! give us montsoreau!" with another man, or had tavannes turned or withdrawn, or betrayed the least anxiety, words had become actions, disorder a riot; and that in the twinkling of an eye. but count hannibal, sitting his horse, with his handful of riders behind him, watched the crowd, as little moved by it as the armed knight of notre dame. only once did he say a word. then, raising his hand as before to gain a hearing, "you ask for montsoreau?" he thundered. "you will have montfaucon if you do not quickly go to your homes!" at which, and at the glare of his eye, the more timid took fright. feeling his gaze upon them, seeing that he had no intention of withdrawing, they began to sneak away by ones and twos. soon others missed them and took the alarm, and followed. a moment and scores were streaming away through lanes and alleys and along the main street. at last the bolder and more turbulent found themselves a remnant. they glanced uneasily at one another and at tavannes, took fright in their turn, and plunging into the current hastened away, raising now and then as they passed through the streets a cry of "vive montsoreau! montsoreau!"--which was not without its menace for the morrow. count hannibal waited motionless until no more than half a dozen groups remained in the open. then he gave the word to dismount; so far, even the countess and her women had kept their saddles, lest the movement which their retreat into the inn must have caused should be misread by the mob. last of all he dismounted himself, and with lights going before him and behind, and preceded by bigot, bearing his cloak and pistols, he escorted the countess into the house. not many minutes had elapsed since he called for silence; but long before he reached the chamber looking over the square from the first floor, in which supper was being set for them, the news had flown through the length and breadth of angers that for this night the danger was past. the hawk had come to angers, and lo! it was a dove. count hannibal strode to one of the open windows and looked out. in the room, which was well lighted, were people of the house, going to and fro, setting out the table; to madame, standing beside the hearth--which held its summer dressing of green boughs--while her woman held water for her to wash, the scene recalled with painful vividness the meal at which she had been present on the morning of the st. bartholomew--the meal which had ushered in her troubles. naturally her eyes went to her husband, her mind to the horror in which she had held him then; and with a kind of shock, perhaps because the last few minutes had shown him in a new light, she compared her old opinion of him with that which, much as she feared him, she now entertained. this afternoon, if ever, within the last few hours, if at all, he had acted in a way to justify that horror and that opinion. he had treated her--brutally; he had insulted and threatened her, had almost struck her. and yet--and yet madame felt that she had moved so far from the point which she had once occupied that the old attitude was hard to understand. hardly could she believe that it was on this man, much as she still dreaded him, that she had looked with those feelings of repulsion. she was still gazing at him with eyes which strove to see two men in one, when he turned from the window. absorbed in thought she had forgotten her occupation, and stood, the towel suspended in her half-dried hands. before she knew what he was doing he was at her side; he bade the woman hold the bowl, and he rinsed his hands. then he turned, and without looking at the countess, he dried his hands on the farther end of the towel which she was still using. she blushed faintly. a something in the act, more intimate and more familiar than had ever marked their intercourse, set her blood running strangely. when he turned away and bade bigot unbuckle his spur-leathers, she stepped forward. "i will do it!" she murmured, acting on a sudden and unaccountable impulse. and as she knelt, she shook her hair about her face to hide its colour. "nay, madame, but you will soil your fingers!" he said coldly. "permit me," she muttered half coherently. and though her fingers shook, she pursued and performed her task. when she rose he thanked her; and then the devil in the man, or the nemesis he had provoked when he took her by force from another--the nemesis of jealousy, drove him to spoil all. "and for whose sake, madame?" he added with a jeer--"mine or m. de tignonville's?" and with a glance between jest and earnest, he tried to read her thoughts. she winced as if he had indeed struck her, and the hot colour fled her cheeks. "for his sake!" she said, with a shiver of pain. "that his life may be spared!" and she stood back humbly, like a beaten dog. though, indeed, it was for the sake of angers, in thankfulness for the past rather than in any desperate hope of propitiating her husband, that she had done it! perhaps he would have withdrawn his words. but before he could answer, the host, bowing to the floor, came to announce that all was ready, and that the provost of the city, for whom m. le comte had sent, was in waiting below. "let him come up!" tavannes answered, grave and frowning. "and see you, close the room, sirrah! my people will wait on us. ah!" as the provost, a burly man with a face framed for jollity, but now pale and long, entered and approached him with many salutations. "how comes it, m. le prévôt--you are the prévôt, are you not?" "yes, m. le comte." "how comes it that so great a crowd is permitted to meet in the streets? and that at my entrance, though i come unannounced, i find half of the city gathered together?" the provost stared. "respect, m. le comte," he said, "for his majesty's letters, of which you are the bearer, no doubt induced some to come together----" "who said i brought letters?" "who----" "who said i brought letters?" count hannibal repeated in a strenuous voice. and he ground his chair half about and faced the astonished magistrate. "who said i brought letters?" "why, my lord," the provost stammered, "it was everywhere yesterday----" "yesterday?" "last night, at latest--that letters were coming from the king." "by my hand?" "by your lordship's hand--whose name is so well known here," the magistrate added, in the hope of clearing the great man's brow. count hannibal laughed darkly. "my hand will be better known by-and-by," he said. "see you, sirrah, there is some practice here. what is this cry of montsoreau that i hear?" "your lordship knows that he is his grace's lieutenant-governor in saumur." "i know that, man. but is he here?" "he was at saumur yesterday, and 'twas rumoured three days back that he was coming here to extirpate the huguenots. then word came of your lordship and of his majesty's letters, and 'twas thought that m. de montsoreau would not come, his authority being superseded." "i see. and now your rabble think that they would prefer m. montsoreau. that is it, is it?" the magistrate shrugged his shoulders and opened his hands. "pigs!" he said. and having spat on the floor he looked apologetically at the lady. "true pigs!" "what connections has he here?" tavannes asked. "he is a brother of my lord the bishop's vicar, who arrived yesterday." "with a rout of shaven heads who have been preaching and stirring up the town!" count hannibal cried, his face growing red. "speak, man, is it so? but i'll be sworn it is!" "there has been preaching," the provost answered reluctantly. "montsoreau may count his brother, then, for one. he is a fool, but with a knave behind him, and a knave who has no cause to love us! and the castle? 'tis held by one of m. de montsoreau's creatures, i take it?" "yes, my lord." "with what force?" the magistrate shrugged his shoulders, and looked doubtfully at badelon, who was keeping the door. tavannes followed the glance with his usual impatience. "mon dieu, you need not look at him!" he cried. "he has sacked st. peter's and singed the pope's beard with a holy candle! he has been served on the knee by cardinals; and is turk or jew, or monk or huguenot as i please. and madame"--for the provost's astonished eyes, after resting awhile on the old soldier's iron visage, had passed to her--"is huguenot, so you need have no fear of her! there, speak, man," with impatience, "and cease to think of your own skin!" the provost drew a deep breath, and fixed his small eyes on count hannibal. "if i knew, my lord, what you--why, my own sister's son"--he paused, his face began to work, his voice shook--"is a huguenot! ay, my lord, a huguenot! and they know it!" he continued, a flush of rage augmenting the emotion which his countenance betrayed. "ay, they know it! and they push me on at the council, and grin behind my back; lescot, who was provost two years back and would match his son with my daughter; and thuriot who prints for the university! they nudge one another, and egg me on, till half the city thinks it is i who would kill the huguenots! i!" again his voice broke. "and my own sister's son a huguenot! and my girl at home white-faced for--for his sake." tavannes scanned the man shrewdly. "perhaps she is of the same way of thinking?" he said. the provost started, and lost one-half of his colour. "god forbid!" he cried, "saving madame's presence! who says so, my lord, lies!" "ay, lies not far from the truth." "my lord!" "pish, man, lescot has said it and will act on it. and thuriot, who prints for the university! would you 'scape them? you would? then listen to me. i want but two things. first, how many men has montsoreau's fellow in the castle? few, i know, for he is a niggard, and if he spends, he spends the duke's pay." "twelve. but five can hold it." "ay, but twelve dare not leave it! let them stew in their own broth! and now for the other matter. see, man, that before daybreak three gibbets, with a ladder and two ropes apiece, are set up in the square. and let one be before this door. you understand? then let it be done! the rest," he added with a ferocious smile, "you may leave to me." the magistrate nodded rather feebly. "doubtless," he said, his eye wandering here and there, "there are rogues in angers. and for rogues the gibbet! but saving your presence, my lord, it is a question whether----" but m. de tavannes' patience was exhausted. "will you do it?" he roared. "that is the question. and the only question." the provost jumped, he was so startled. "certainly, my lord, certainly!" he muttered humbly. "certainly, i will!" and bowing frequently, but saying no more, he backed himself out of the room. count hannibal laughed grimly after his fashion, and doubtless thought that he had seen the last of the magistrate for that night. great was his wrath therefore, when, less than a minute later--and before bigot had carved for him--the door opened and the provost appeared again. he slid in, and without giving the courage he had gained on the stairs time to cool, plunged into his trouble. "it stands this way, m. le comte," he bleated. "if i put up the gibbets and a man is hanged, and you have letters from the king, 'tis a rogue the less and no harm done. but if you have no letters from his majesty, then it is on my shoulders they will put it, and 'twill be odd if they do not find a way to hang me to right him." count hannibal smiled grimly. "and your sister's son?" he sneered. "and your girl who is white-faced for his sake, and may burn on the same bonfire with him? and----" "mercy! mercy!" the wretched provost cried. and he wrung his hands. "lescot and thuriot----" "perhaps we may hang lescot and thuriot----" "but i see no way out," the provost babbled. "no way! no way!" "i am going to show you one," tavannes retorted. "if the gibbets are not in place by sunrise, i shall hang you from this window. that is one way out; and you'll be wise to take the other! for the rest and for your comfort, if i have no letters, it is not always to paper that the king commits his inmost heart." the magistrate bowed. he quaked, he doubted, but he had no choice. "my lord," he said, "i put myself in your hands. it shall be done, certainly it shall be done. but, but----" and shaking his head in foreboding he turned to the door. at the last moment, when he was within a pace of it, the countess rose impulsively to her feet. she called to him. "m. le prévôt, a minute, if you please," she said. "there may be trouble to morrow; your daughter may be in some peril. you will do well to send her to me. my lord"--and on the word her voice, timid before, grew full and steady--"will see that i am safe. and she will be safe with me." the provost saw before him only a gracious lady, moved by a thoughtfulness unusual in persons of her rank. he was at no pains to explain the flame in her cheek, or the soft light which glowed in her eyes, as she looked at him, across her formidable husband. he was only profoundly grateful--moved even to tears. humbly thanking her he accepted her offer for his child, and withdrew wiping his eyes. when he was gone, and the door had closed behind him, tavannes turned to the countess, who still kept her feet. "you are very confident this evening," he sneered. "gibbets do not frighten you, it seems, madame. perhaps if you knew for whom the one before the door is intended?" she met his look with a searching gaze, and spoke with a ring of defiance in her tone. "i do not believe it!" she said. "i do not believe it! you who save angers will not destroy him!" and then her woman's mood changing, with courage and colour ebbing together, "oh, no, you will not! you will not!" she wailed. and she dropped on her knees before him, and holding up her clasped hands, "god will put it in your heart to spare him--and me!" he rose with a stifled oath, took two steps from her, and in a tone hoarse and constrained, "go!" he said. "go, or sit! do you hear, madame? you try my patience too far!" but when she had gone his face was radiant. he had brought her, he had brought all, to the point at which he aimed. to-morrow his triumph awaited him. to-morrow he who had cast her down would raise her up. he did not foresee what a day would bring forth. chapter xxviii. in the little chapter-house. the sun was an hour high, and in angers the shops and booths, after the early fashion of the day, were open or opening. through all the gates country folk were pressing into the gloomy streets of the black town with milk and fruit; and at doors and windows housewives cheapened fish, or chaffered over the fowl for the pot. for men must eat, though there be gibbets in the place ste.-croix: gaunt gibbets, high and black and twofold, each, with its dangling ropes, like a double note of interrogation. but gibbets must eat also; and between ground and noose was so small a space in those days that a man dangled almost before he knew it. the sooner, then, the paniers were empty, and the clown, who pays for all, was beyond the gates, the better he, for one, would be pleased. in the market, therefore, was hurrying. men cried their wares in lowered voices, and tarried but a little for the oldest customer. the bargain struck, the more timid among the buyers hastened to shut themselves into their houses again; the bolder, who ventured to the place to confirm the rumour with their eyes, talked in corners and in lanes, avoided the open, and eyed the sinister preparations from afar. the shadow of the things which stood before the cathedral affronting the sunlight with their gaunt black shapes lay across the length and breadth of angers. even in the corners where men whispered, even in the cloisters where men bit their nails in impotent auger, the stillness of fear ruled all. whatever count hannibal had it in his mind to tell the city, it seemed unlikely--and hour by hour it seemed less likely--that any would contradict him. he knew this as he walked in the sunlight before the inn, his spurs ringing on the stones as he made each turn, his movements watched by a hundred peering eyes. after all, it was not hard to rule, nor to have one's way in this world. but then, he went on to remember, not everyone had his self-control, or that contempt for the weak and unsuccessful which lightly took the form of mercy. he held angers safe, curbed by his gibbets. with m. de montsoreau he might have trouble; but the trouble would be slight, for he knew montsoreau, and what it was the lieutenant-governor valued above profitless bloodshed. he might have felt less confident had he known what was passing at that moment in a room off the small cloister of the abbey of st. aubin, a room known at angers as the little chapter-house. it was a long chamber with a groined roof and stone walls, panelled as high as a tall man might reach with dark chestnut wood. gloomily lighted by three grated windows, which looked on a small inner green, the last resting-place of the benedictines, the room itself seemed at first sight no more than the last resting-place of worn-out odds and ends. piles of thin sheepskin folios, dog's-eared and dirty, the rejected of the choir, stood against the walls; here and there among them lay a large brass-bound tome on which the chains that had fettered it to desk or lectern still rusted. a broken altar cumbered one corner: a stand bearing a curious--and rotting--map filled another. in the other two corners a medley of faded scutcheons and banners, which had seen their last toussaint procession, mouldered slowly into dust--into much dust. the air of the room was full of it. in spite of which the long oak table that filled the middle of the chamber shone with use: so did the great metal standish which it bore. and though the seven men who sat about the table seemed, at a first glance and in that gloomy light, as rusty and faded as the rubbish behind them, it needed but a second look at their lean jaws and hungry eyes to be sure of their vitality. he who sat in the great chair at the end of the table was indeed rather plump than thin. his white hands, gay with rings, were well cared for; his peevish chin rested on a falling-collar of lace worthy of a cardinal. but though the bishop's vicar was heard with deference, it was noticeable that when he had ceased to speak his hearers looked to the priest on his left, to father pezelay, and waited to hear his opinion before they gave their own. the father's energy, indeed, had dominated the angevins, clerks and townsfolk alike, as it had dominated the parisian _dévotes_ who knew him well. the vigour which hate inspires passes often for solid strength; and he who had seen with his own eyes the things done in paris spoke with an authority to which the more timid quickly and easily succumbed. yet gibbets are ugly things; and thuriot, the printer, whose pride had been tickled by a summons to the conclave, began to wonder if he had done wisely in coming. lescot, too, who presently ventured a word. "but if m. de tavannes' order be to do nothing," he began doubtfully, "you would not, reverend father, have us resist his majesty's will?" "god forbid, my friend!" father pezelay answered with unction. "but his majesty's will is to do--to do for the glory of god and the saints and his holy church! how? is that which was lawful at saumur unlawful here? is that which was lawful at tours unlawful here? is that which the king did in paris--to the utter extermination of the unbelieving and the purging of that sacred city--against his will here? nay, his will is to do--to do as they have done in paris and in tours and in saumur! but his minister is unfaithful! the woman whom he has taken to his bosom has bewildered him with her charms and her sorceries, and put it in his mind to deny the mission he bears." "you are sure, beyond chance of error, that he bears letters to that effect, good father?" the printer ventured. "ask my lord's vicar! he knows the letters and the import of them!" "they are to that effect," the archdeacon answered, drumming on the table with his fingers and speaking somewhat sullenly. "i was in the chancellery and i saw them. they are duplicates of those sent to bordeaux." "then the preparations he has made must be against the huguenots," lescot, the ex-provost, said with a sigh of relief. and thuriot's face lightened also. "he must intend to hang one or two of the ringleaders, before he deals with the herd." "think it not!" father pezelay cried in his high shrill voice. "i tell you the woman has bewitched him, and he will deny his letters!" for a moment there was silence. then, "but dare he do that, reverend father?" lescot asked slowly and incredulously. "what? suppress the king's letters?" "there is nothing he will not dare! there is nothing he has not dared!" the priest answered vehemently; the recollection of the scene in the great guard-room of the louvre, when tavannes had so skilfully turned the tables on him, instilling venom into his tone. "she who lives with him is the devil's. she has bewitched him with her spells and her sabbaths! she bears the mark of the beast on her bosom, and for her the fire is even now kindling!" the laymen who were present shuddered. the two canons who faced them crossed themselves, muttering "avaunt, satan!" "it is for you to decide," the priest continued, gazing on them passionately, "whether you will side with him or with the angel of god! for i tell you it was none other executed the divine judgments at paris! it was none other but the angel of god held the sword at tours! it is none other holds the sword here! are you for him or against him? are you for him, or for the woman with the mark of the beast? are you for god or against god? for the hour draws near! the time is at hand! you must choose! you must choose!" and, striking the table with his hand, he leaned forward, and with glittering eyes fixed each of them in turn, as he cried, "you must choose! you must choose!" he came to the archdeacon last. the bishop's vicar fidgeted in his chair, his face a shade more sallow, his cheeks hanging a trifle more loosely, than ordinary. "if my brother were here!" he muttered. "if m. de montsoreau had arrived!" but father pezelay knew whose will would prevail if montsoreau met tavannes at his leisure. to force montsoreau's hand, to surround him on his first entrance with a howling mob already committed to violence, to set him at their head and pledge him before he knew with whom he had to do--this had been, this still was, the priest's design. but how was he to pursue it while those gibbets stood? while their shadows lay even on the chapter table, and darkened the faces of his most forward associates? that for a moment staggered the priest; and had not private hatred, ever renewed by the touch of the scar on his brow, fed the fire of bigotry he had yielded, as the rabble of angers were yielding, reluctant and scowling, to the hand which held the city in its grip. but to have come so far on the wings of hate, and to do nothing! to have come avowedly to preach a crusade, and to sneak away cowed! to have dragged the bishop's vicar hither, and fawned and cajoled and threatened by turns--and for nothing! these things were passing bitter--passing bitter, when the morsel of vengeance he had foreseen smacked so sweet on the tongue. for it was no common vengeance, no layman's vengeance, coarse and clumsy, which the priest had imagined in the dark hours of the night, when his feverish brain kept him wakeful. to see count hannibal roll in the dust had gone but a little way towards satisfying him. no! but to drag from his arms the woman for whom he had sinned, to subject her to shame and torture in the depths of some convent, and finally to burn her as a witch--it was that which had seemed to the priest in the night hours a vengeance sweet in the mouth. but the thing seemed unattainable in the circumstances. the city was cowed; the priest knew that no dependence was to be placed on montsoreau, whose vice was avarice and whose object was plunder. to the archdeacon's feeble words, therefore, "we must look," the priest retorted sternly, "not to m. de montsoreau, reverend father, but to the pious of angers! we must cry in the streets, 'they do violence to god! they wound god and his mother!' and so, and so only, shall the unholy thing be rooted out!" "amen!" the cure of st.-benoist muttered, lifting his head; and his dull eyes glowed awhile. "amen! amen!" then his chin sank again upon his breast. but the canons of angers looked doubtfully at one another, and timidly at the speakers; the meat was too strong for them. and lescot and thuriot shuffled in their seats. at length, "i do not know," lescot muttered timidly. "you do not know?" "what can be done!" "the people will know!" father pezelay retorted. "trust them!" "but the people will not rise without a leader." "then will i lead them!" "even so, reverend father--i doubt," lescot faltered. and thuriot nodded assent. gibbets were erected in those days rather for laymen than for the church. "you doubt!" the priest cried. "you doubt!" his baleful eyes passed from one to the other; from them to the rest of the company. he saw that with the exception of the curé of st.-benoist all were of a mind. "you doubt! nay, but i see what it is! it is this," he continued slowly and in a different tone, "the king's will goes for nothing in angers! his writ runs not here. and holy church cries in vain for help against the oppressor. i tell you, the sorceress who has bewitched him has bewitched you also. beware! beware, therefore, lest it be with you as with him! and the fire that shall consume her, spare not your houses!" the two citizens crossed themselves, grew pale and shuddered. the fear of witchcraft was great in angers, the peril, if accused of it, enormous. even the canons looked startled. "if--if my brother were here," the archdeacon repeated feebly, "something might be done!" "vain is the help of man!" the priest retorted sternly, and with a gesture of sublime dismissal. "i turn from you to a mightier than you!" and, leaning his head on his hands, he covered his face. the archdeacon and the churchmen looked at him, and from him their scared eyes passed to one another. their one desire now was to be quit of the matter, to have done with it, to escape; and one by one with the air of whipped curs they rose to their feet, and in a hurry to be gone muttered a word of excuse shamefacedly and got themselves out of the room. lescot and the printer were not slow to follow, and in less than a minute the two strange preachers, the men from paris, remained the only occupants of the chamber; save, to be precise, a lean official in rusty black, who throughout the conference had sat by the door. until the last shuffling footstep had ceased to sound in the still cloister no one spoke. then father pezelay looked up, and the eyes of the two priests met in a long gaze. "what think you?" pezelay muttered at last. "wet hay," the other answered dreamily, "is slow to kindle, yet burns if the fire be big enough. at what hour does he state his will?" "at noon." "in the council chamber!" "it is so given out." "it is three hundred yards from the place ste.-croix and he must go guarded," the curé of st.-benoist continued in the same dull fashion. "he cannot leave many in the house with the woman. if it were attacked in his absence----" "he would return, and----" father pezelay shook his head, his cheek turned a shade paler. clearly, he saw with his mind's eye more than he expressed. "_hoc est corpus_," the other muttered, his dreamy gaze on the table. "if he met us then, on his way to the house, and we had bell, book, and candle, would he stop?" "he would not stop!" father pezelay rejoined. "he would not?" "i know the man!" "then----" but the rest st.-beuoist whispered, his head drooping forward; whispered so low that even the lean man behind him, listening with greedy ears, failed to follow the meaning of his superior's words. but that he spoke plainly enough for his hearer father pezelay's face was witness. astonishment, fear, hope, triumph, the lean pale face reflected all in turn; and, underlying all, a subtle malignant mischief, as if a devil's eyes peeped through the holes in an opera mask. when the other was at last silent pezelay drew a deep breath. "'tis bold! bold! bold!" he muttered. "but have you thought? he who bears the----" "brunt?" the other whispered with a chuckle. "he may suffer? yes, but it will not be you or i! no, he who was last here shall be first there! the archdeacon-vicar--if we can persuade him--who knows but that even for him the crown of martyrdom is reserved?" the dull eyes flickered with unholy amusement. "and the alarm that brings him from the council chamber?" "need not of necessity be real. the pinch will be to make use of it. make use of it--and the hay will burn!" "you think it will?" "what can one man do against a thousand? his own people dare not support him." father pezelay turned to the lean man who kept the door, and, beckoning to him, conferred a while with him in a low voice. "a score or so i might get," the man answered presently after some debate. "and well posted, something might be done. but we are not in paris, good father, where the quarter of the butchers is to be counted on, and men know that to kill huguenots is to do god service! here"--he shrugged his shoulders contemptuously--"they are sheep." "it is the king's will," the priest answered, frowning on him darkly. "ay, but it is not tavannes," the man in black answered with a grimace. "and he rules here today." "fool!" pezelay retorted. "he has not twenty with him. do you do as i say, and leave the rest to heaven!" "and to you, good master?" the other answered. "for it is not all you are going to do," he continued with a grin, "that you have told me. well, so be it! i'll do my part, but i wish we were in paris. ste. genevieve is ever kind to her servants." chapter xxix. the escape. in a small back room on the second floor of the inn at angers, a mean, dingy room which looked into a narrow lane, and commanded no prospect more informing than a blind wall, two men sat, fretting; or, rather, one man sat, his chin resting on his hand, while his companion, less patient or more sanguine, strode ceaselessly to and fro. in the first despair of capture--for they were prisoners--they had made up their minds to the worst, and the slow hours of two days had passed over their heads without kindling more than a faint spark of hope in their breasts. but when they had been taken out and forced to mount and ride--at first with feet tied to the horses' girths--they had let the change, the movement, and the open air fan the flame. they had muttered a word to one another, they had wondered, they had reasoned. and though the silence of their guards--from whose sour vigilance the keenest question drew no response--seemed of ill-omen, and, taken with their knowledge of the man into whose hands they had fallen, should have quenched the spark, these two, having special reasons, the one the buoyancy of youth, the other the faith of an enthusiast, cherished the flame. in the breast of one indeed it had blazed into a confidence so arrogant that he now took all for granted, and was not content. "it is easy for you to say, 'patience!'" he cried, as he walked the floor in a fever. "you stand to lose no more than your life, and if you escape go free at all points! but he has robbed me of more than life! of my love, and my self-respect, curse him! he has worsted me not once, but twice and thrice! and if he lets me go now, dismissing me with my life, i shall--i shall kill him!" he concluded, through his teeth. "you are hard to please!" "i shall kill him!" "that were to fall still lower!" the minister answered, gravely regarding him. "i would, m. de tignonville, you remembered that you are not yet out of jeopardy. such a frame of mind as yours is no good preparation for death, let me tell you!" "he will not kill us!" tignonville cried. "he knows better than most men how to avenge himself!" "then he is above most!" la tribe retorted. "for my part i wish i were sure of the fact, and i should sit here more at ease." "if we could escape, now, of ourselves!" tignonville cried. "then we should save not only life, but honour! man, think of it! if we could escape, not by his leave but against it! are you sure that this is angers!" "as sure as a man can be who has only seen the black town once or twice!" la tribe answered, moving to the casement--which was not glazed--and peering through the rough wooden lattice. "but if we could escape we are strangers here. we know not which way to go, nor where to find shelter. and for the matter of that," he continued, turning from the window with a shrug of resignation, "'tis no use to talk of it while yonder foot goes up and down the passage, and its owner bears the key in his pocket." "if we could get out of his power as we came into it!" tignonville cried. "ay, if! but it is not every floor has a trap!" "we could take up a board." the minister raised his eyebrows. "we could take up a board!" the younger man repeated; and he stepped the mean chamber from end to end, his eyes on the floor. "or--yes, _mon dieu!_" with a change of attitude, "we might break through the roof!" and, throwing back his head, he scanned the cobwebbed surface of laths which rested on the unceiled joists. "umph!" "well, why not, monsieur? why not break through the ceiling?" tignonville repeated, and in a fit of energy he seized his companion's shoulder and shook him. "stand on the bed, and you can reach it." "and the floor which rests on it!" "_par dieu_, there is no floor! 'tis a cockloft above us! see there! and there!" and the young man sprang on the bed, and thrust the rowel of a spur through the laths. la tribe's expression changed. he rose slowly to his feet. "try again!" he said. tignonville, his face red, drove the spur again between the laths, and worked it to and fro until he could pass his fingers into the hole he had made. then he gripped and bent down a length of one of the laths, and, passing his arm as far as the elbow through the hole, moved it this way and that. his eyes, as he looked down at his companion through the lolling rubbish, gleamed with triumph. "where is your floor now?" he asked. "you can touch nothing?" "nothing. it's open. a little more and i might touch the tiles." and he strove to reach higher. for answer la tribe gripped him. "down! down, monsieur," he muttered. "they are bringing our dinner." tignonville thrust back the lath as well as he could, and slipped to the floor; and hastily the two swept the rubbish from the bed. when badelon, attended by two men, came in with the meal he found la tribe at the window blocking much of the light, and tignonville laid sullenly on the bed. even a suspicious eye must have failed to detect what had been done; the three who looked in suspected nothing and saw nothing. they went out, the key was turned again on the prisoners, and the footsteps of two of the men were heard descending the stairs. "we have an hour, now!" tignonville cried; and leaping, with flaming eyes, on the bed, he fell to hacking and jabbing and tearing at the laths amid a rain of dust and rubbish. fortunately the stuff, falling on the bed, made little noise; and in five minutes, working half-choked and in a frenzy of impatience, he had made a hole through which he could thrust his arms, a hole which extended almost from one joist to its neighbour. by this time the air was thick with floating lime; the two could scarcely breathe, yet they dared not pause. mounting on la tribe's shoulders--who took his stand on the bed--the young man thrust his head and arms through the hole, and, resting his elbows on the joists, dragged himself up, and with a final effort of strength landed nose and knees on the timbers, which formed his supports. a moment to take breath, and press his torn and bleeding fingers to his lips; then, reaching down, he gave a hand to his companion and dragged him to the same place of vantage. they found themselves in a long narrow cockloft, not more than six feet high at the highest, and insufferably hot. between the tiles, which sloped steeply on either hand, a faint light filtered in, disclosing the giant rooftree running the length of the house, and at the farther end of the loft the main tie-beam, from which a network of knees and struts rose to the rooftree. tignonville, who seemed possessed by unnatural energy, stayed only to put off his boots. then "courage!" he panted, "all goes well!" and, carrying his boots in his hands, he led the way, stepping gingerly from joist to joist until he reached the tie-beam. he climbed on it, and, squeezing himself between the struts, entered a second loft similar to the first. at the farther end of this a rough wall of bricks in a timber-frame lowered his hopes; but as he approached it, joy! low down in the corner where the roof descended, a small door, square, and not more than two feet high, disclosed itself. the two crept to it on hands and knees and listened. "it will lead to the leads, i doubt?" la tribe whispered. they dared not raise their voices. "as well that way as another!" tignonville answered recklessly. he was the more eager, for there is a fear which transcends the fear of death. his eyes shone through the mask of dust, the sweat ran down to his chin, his breath came and went noisily. "naught matters if we can escape him!" he panted. and he pushed the door recklessly. it flew open, the two drew back their faces with a cry of alarm. they were looking, not into the sunlight, but into a grey dingy garret open to the roof, and occupying the upper part of a gable-end somewhat higher than the wing in which they had been confined. filthy truckle-beds and ragged pallets covered the floor, and, eked out by old saddles and threadbare horse-rugs, marked the sleeping quarters either of the servants or of travellers of the meaner sort. but the dinginess was naught to the two who knelt looking into it, afraid to move. was the place empty? that was the point; the question which had first stayed, and then set their pulses at the gallop. painfully their eyes searched each huddle of clothing, scanned each dubious shape. and slowly, as the silence persisted, their heads came forward until the whole floor lay within the field of sight. and still no sound! at last tignonville stirred, crept through the doorway, and rose up, peering round him. he nodded, and, satisfied that all was safe, the minister followed him. they found themselves a pace or so from the head of a narrow staircase, leading downwards. without moving they could see the door which closed it below. tignonville signed to la tribe to wait, and himself crept down the stairs. he reached the door, and, stooping, set his eye to the hole through which the string of the latch passed. a moment he looked, and then, turning on tiptoe, he stole up again, his face fallen. "you may throw the handle after the hatchet!" he muttered. "the man on guard is within four yards of the door." and in the rage of disappointment he struck the air with his hand. "is he looking this way?" "no. he is looking down the passage towards our room. but it is impossible to pass him." la tribe nodded, and moved softly to one of the lattices which lighted the room. it might be possible to escape that way, by the parapet and the tiles. but he found that the casement was set high in the roof, which sloped steeply from its sill to the eaves. he passed to the other window, in which a little wicket in the lattice stood open. he looked through it. in the giddy void white pigeons were wheeling in the dazzling sunshine, and gazing down he saw far below him, in the hot square, a row of booths, and troops of people moving to and fro like pigmies; and--and a strange thing, in the middle of all! involuntarily, as if the persons below could have seen his face at the tiny dormer, he drew back. he beckoned to m. tignonville to come to him; and when the young man complied, he bade him in a whisper look down. "see!" he muttered. "there!" the younger man saw and drew in his breath. even under the coating of dust his face turned a shade greyer. "you had no need to fear that he would let us go!" the minister muttered, with half-conscious irony. "no." "nor i! there are two ropes." and la tribe breathed a few words of prayer. the object which had fixed his gaze was a gibbet: the only one of the three which could be seen from their eyrie. tignonville, on the other hand, turned sharply away, and with haggard eyes stared about the room. "we might defend the staircase," he muttered. "two men might hold it for a time." "we have no food." "no." and then he gripped la tribe's arm. "i have it!" he cried. "and it may do! it must do!" he continued, his face working. "see!" and lifting from the floor one of the ragged pallets, from which the straw protruded in a dozen places, he set it flat on his head. it drooped at each corner--it had seen much wear--and while it almost hid his face, it revealed his grimy chin and mortar-stained shoulders. he turned to his companion. la tribe's face glowed as he looked. "it may do!" he cried. "it's a chance! but you are right! it may do!" tignonville dropped the ragged mattress, and tore off his coat; then he rent his breeches at the knee, so that they hung loose about his calves. "do you the same!" he cried. "and quick, man, quick! leave your boots! once outside we must pass through the streets under these"--he took up his burden again and set it on his head--"until we reach a quiet part, and there we----" "can hide! or swim the river!" the minister said. he had followed his companion's example, and now stood under a similar burden. with breeches rent and whitened, and his upper garments in no better case, he looked a sorry figure. tignonville eyed him with satisfaction, and turned to the staircase. "come," he cried, "there is not a moment to be lost. at any minute they may enter our room and find it empty! you are ready? then, not too softly, or it may rouse suspicion! and mumble something at the door." he began himself to scold, and, muttering incoherently, stumbled down the staircase, the pallet on his head rustling against the wall on each side. arrived at the door he fumbled clumsily with the latch, and, when the door gave way, plumped out with an oath--as if the awkward burden he bore were the only thing on his mind. badelon--he was on duty--stared at the apparition; but the next moment he sniffed the pallet, which was none of the freshest, and, turning up his nose, he retreated a pace. he had no suspicion; the men did not come from the part of the house where the prisoners lay, and he stood aside to let them pass. in a moment, staggering, and going a little unsteadily, as if they scarcely saw their way, they had passed by him, and were descending the staircase. so far well! unfortunately, when they reached the foot of that flight they came on the main passage of the first-floor. it ran right and left, and tignonville did not know which way he must turn to reach the lower staircase. yet he dared not hesitate; in the passage, waiting about the doors, were four or five servants, and in the distance he caught sight of three men belonging to tavannes' company. at any moment, too, an upper servant might meet them, ask what they were doing, and detect the fraud. he turned at random, therefore--to the left as it chanced--and marched along bravely, until the very thing happened which he had feared. a man came from a room plump upon them, saw them, and held up his hands in horror. "what are you doing!" he cried in a rage and with an oath. "who set you on this?" tignonville's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. la tribe from behind muttered something about the stable. "and time too!" the man said. "faugh! but how come you this way! are you drunk? here!" he opened the door of a musty closet beside him, "pitch them in here, do you hear! and take them down when it is dark! faugh! i wonder you did not carry the things through her ladyship's room at once! if my lord had been in and met you! now then, do as i tell you! are you drunk!" with a sullen air tignonville threw in his mattress. la tribe did the same. fortunately the passage was ill-lighted, and there were many helpers and strange servants in the inn. the butler only thought them ill-looking fellows who knew no better. "now be off!" he continued irascibly, "this is no place for your sort. be off!" and, as they moved, "coming! coming!" he cried in answer to a distant summons; and he hurried away on the errand which their appearance had interrupted. tignonville would have gone to work to recover the pallets, for the man had left the key in the door. but as he went to do so the butler looked back, and the two were obliged to make a pretence of following him. a moment, however, and he was gone; and tignonville turned anew to regain them. a second time fortune was adverse; a door within a pace of him opened, a woman came out. she recoiled from the strange figure; her eyes met his. unluckily the light from the room behind her fell on his face, and with a shrill cry she named him. one second and all had been lost, for the crowd of idlers at the other end of the passage had caught her cry, and were looking that way. with presence of mind tignonville clapped his hand on her mouth, and, huddling her by force into the room, followed her, with la tribe at his heels. it was a large room, in which seven or eight people, who had been at prayers when the cry startled them, were rising from their knees. the first thing they saw was javette on the threshold, struggling in the grasp of a wild man, ragged and begrimed; they deemed the city risen and the massacre upon them. carlat threw himself before his mistress, the countess in her turn sheltered a young girl, who stood beside her and from whose face the last trace of colour had fled. madame carlat and a waiting-woman ran shrieking to the window; another instant and the alarm would have gone abroad. tignonville's voice stopped it. "don't you know me?" he cried. "madame! you at least! carlat! are you all mad?" the words stayed them where they stood in an astonishment scarce less than their alarm. the countess tried twice to speak; the third time, "have you escaped?" she muttered. tignonville nodded, his eyes bright with triumph. "so far," he said. "but they may be on our heels at any moment! where can we hide?" the countess, her hand pressed to her side, looked at javette. "the door, girl!" she whispered. "lock it!" "ay, lock it! and they can go by the backstairs," madame carlat answered, awaking suddenly to the situation. "through my closet! once in the yard they may pass out through the stables." "which way?" tignonville asked impatiently. "don't stand looking at me, but----" "through this door!" madame carlat answered, hurrying to it. he was following when the countess stepped forward and interposed between him and the door. "stay!" she cried; and there was not one who did not notice a new decision in her voice, a new dignity in her bearing. "stay, monsieur, we may be going too fast. to go out now and in that guise--may it not be to incur greater peril than you incur here? i feel sure that you are in no danger of your life at present. therefore, why run the risk----" "in no danger, madame!" he cried, interrupting her in astonishment. "have you seen the gibbet in the square? do you call that no danger?" "it is not erected for you." "no?" "no, monsieur," she answered firmly, "i swear it is not. and i know of reasons, urgent reasons, why you should not go. m. de tavannes"--she named her husband nervously, as conscious of the weak spot--"before he rode abroad laid strict orders on all to keep within, since the smallest matter might kindle the city. therefore, m. de tignonville, i request, nay i entreat," she continued with greater urgency, as she saw his gesture of denial, "you to stay here until he returns." "and you, madame, will answer for my life!" she faltered. for a moment, a moment only, her colour ebbed. what if she deceived herself! what if she surrendered her old lover to death? what if--but the doubt was of a moment only. her duty was plain. "i will answer for it," she said, with pale lips, "if you remain here. and i beg, i implore you--by the love you once had for me, m. tignonville," she added desperately, seeing that he was about to refuse, "to remain here." "once!" he retorted, lashing himself into ignoble rage. "by the love i once had! say, rather, the love i have, madame--for i am no woman-weathercock to wed the winner, and hold or not hold, stay or go, as he commands! you, it seems," he continued with a sneer, "have learned the wife's lesson well! you would practise on me now, as you practised on me the other night when you stood between him and me! i yielded then, i spared him. and what did i get by it? bonds and a prison! and what shall i get now! the same! no, madame," he continued bitterly, addressing himself as much to the carlats and the others as to his old mistress. "i do not change! i loved! i love! i was going and i go! if death lay beyond that door"--and he pointed to it--"and life at his will were certain here, i would pass the threshold rather than take my life of him!" and, dragging la tribe with him, with a passionate gesture he rushed by her, opened the door, and disappeared in the next room. the countess took one pace forward, as if she would have followed him, as if she would have tried farther persuasion. but as she moved a cry rooted her to the spot. a rush of feet and the babel of many voices filled the passage with a tide of sound, which drew rapidly nearer. the escape was known! would the fugitives have time to slip out below? someone knocked at the door, tried it, pushed and beat on it. but the countess and all in the room had run to the windows and were looking out. if the two had not yet made their escape they must be taken. yet no; as the countess leaned from the window, first one dusty figure and then a second darted from a door below, and made for the nearest turning out of the place ste.-croix. before they gained it, four men, of whom badelon, his grey locks flying, was first, dashed out in pursuit, and the street rang with cries of "stop him! seize him! seize him!" someone--one of the pursuers or another--to add to the alarm let off a musket, and in a moment, as if the report had been a signal, the place was in a hubbub, people flocked into it with mysterious quickness, and from a neighbouring roof--whence, precisely, it was impossible to say--the crackling fire of a dozen arquebuses alarmed the city far and wide. unfortunately, the fugitives had been baulked at the first turning. making for a second, they found it choked, and, swerving, darted across the place towards st.-maurice, seeking to lose themselves in the gathering crowd. but the pursuers clung desperately to their skirts, overturning here a man and there a child; and then in a twinkling, tignonville, as he ran round a booth, tripped over a peg and fell, and la tribe stumbled over him and fell also. the four riders flung themselves fiercely on their prey, secured them, and began to drag them with oaths and curses towards the door of the inn. the countess had seen all from her window; had held her breath while they ran, had drawn it sharply when they fell. now "they have them!" she muttered, a sob choking her, "they have them!" and she clasped her hands. if he had followed her advice! if he had only followed her advice! but the issue proved less certain than she deemed it. the crowd, which grew each moment, knew nothing of pursuers or pursued. on the contrary, a cry went up that the riders were huguenots, and that the huguenots were rising and slaying the catholics; and as no story was too improbable for those days, and this was one constantly set about, first one stone flew, and then another, and another. a man with a staff darted forward and struck badelon on the shoulder, two or three others pressed in and jostled the riders; and if three of tavannes' following had not run out on the instant and faced the mob with their pikes, and for a moment forced them to give back, the prisoners would have been rescued at the very door of the inn. as it was they were dragged in, and the gates were flung to and barred in the nick of time. another moment, almost another second, and the mob had seized them. as it was, a hail of stones poured on the front of the inn, and amid the rising yells of the rabble there presently floated heavy and slow over the city the tolling of the great bell of st. maurice. chapter xxx. sacrilege! m. de montsoreau, lieutenant-governor of saumur, almost rose from his seat in his astonishment. "what! no letters?" he cried, a hand on either arm of his chair. the magistrates stared, one and all. "no letters?" they muttered. and "no letters?" the provost chimed in more faintly. count hannibal looked smiling round the council table. he alone was unmoved. "no," he said. "i bear none." m. de montsoreau, who, travel-stained and in his corselet, had the second place of honour at the foot of the table, frowned. "but--but, m. le comte," he said, "my instructions from monsieur were to proceed to carry out his majesty's will in co-operation with you, who, i understood, would bring letters _de par le roi_." "i had letters," count hannibal answered, negligently. "but on the way i mislaid them." "mislaid them?" montsoreau cried, unable to believe his ears; while the smaller dignitaries of the city, the magistrates and churchmen, who sat on either side of the table, gaped open-mouthed. it was incredible! it was unbelievable! mislay the king's letters! who had ever heard of such a thing? "yes, i mislaid them. lost them, if you like it better." "but you jest!" the lieutenant-governor retorted, moving uneasily in his chair. he was a man more highly named for address than courage; and, like most men skilled in finesse, he was prone to suspect a trap. "you jest, surely, monsieur! men do not lose his majesty's letters, by the way." "when they contain his majesty's will, no," tavannes answered, with a peculiar smile. "you imply, then?" count hannibal shrugged his shoulders but had not answered when bigot entered and handed him his sweetmeat box; he paused to open it and select a prune. he was long in selecting; but no change of countenance led any of those at the table to suspect that inside the lid of the box was a message--a scrap of paper informing him that montsoreau had left fifty spears in the suburb without the saumur gate, besides those whom he had brought openly into the town. tavannes read the note slowly while he seemed to be choosing his fruit. and then, "imply?" he answered. "i imply nothing, m. de montsoreau." "but----" "but that sometimes his majesty finds it prudent to give orders which he does not mean to be carried out. there are things which start up before the eye," tavannes continued, negligently tapping the box on the table, "and there are things which do not; sometimes the latter are the more important. you, better than i, m. de montsoreau, know that the king in the gallery at the louvre is one, and in his closet is another." "yes." "and that being so----" "you do not mean to carry the letters into effect?" "had i the letters, certainly, my friend. i should be bound by them. but i took good care to lose them," tavannes added naïvely. "i am no fool." "umph!" "however," count hannibal continued, with an airy gesture, "that is my affair. if you, m. de montsoreau, feel inclined, in spite of the absence of my letters, to carry yours into effect, by all means do so--after midnight of to-day." m. de montsoreau breathed hard. "and why," he asked, half sulkily and half ponderously, "after midnight only, m. le comte?" "merely that i may be clear of all suspicion of having lot or part in the matter," count hannibal answered pleasantly. "after midnight of to-night by all means, do as you please. until midnight, by your leave, we will be quiet." the lieutenant-governor moved doubtfully in his chair, the fear--which tavannes had shrewdly instilled into his mind--that he might be disowned if he carried out his instructions, struggling with his avarice and his self-importance. he was rather crafty than bold; and such things had been, he knew. little by little, and while he sat gloomily debating, the notion of dealing with one or two and holding the body of the huguenots to ransom--a notion which, in spite of everything, was to bear good fruit for angers--began to form in his mind. the plan suited him: it left him free to face either way, and it would fill his pockets more genteelly than would open robbery. on the other hand, he would offend his brother and the fanatical party, with whom he commonly acted. they were looking to see him assert himself. they were looking to hear him declare himself. and---- harshly count hannibal's voice broke in on his thoughts; harshly, a something sinister in its tone. "where is your brother?" he said. and it was evident that he had not noted his absence until then. "my lord's vicar of all people should be here!" he continued, leaning forward and looking round the table. his brow was stormy. lescot squirmed under his eye, thuriot turned pale and trembled. it was one of the canons of st.-maurice who at length took on himself to answer. "his lordship requested, m. le comte," he ventured, "that you would excuse him. his duties----" "is he ill?" "he----" "is he ill, sirrah?" tavannes roared. and while all bowed before the lightning of his eye, no man at the table knew what had roused the sudden tempest. but bigot knew, who stood by the door, and whose ear, keen as his master's, had caught the distant report of a musket shot. "if he be not ill," tavannes continued, rising and looking round the table in search of signs of guilt, "and there be foul play here, and he the player, the bishop's own hand shall not save him! by heaven it shall not! nor yours!" he continued, looking fiercely at montsoreau. "nor your master's!" the lieutenant-governor sprang to his feet. "m. le comte," he stammered, "i do not understand this language! nor this heat, which may be real or not! all i say is, if there be foul play here----" "if!" tavannes retorted. "at least, if there be, there be gibbets too! and i see necks!" he added, leaning forward. "necks!" and then, with a look of flame, "let no man leave this table until i return," he cried, "or he will have to deal with me. nay," he continued, changing his tone abruptly, as the prudence which never entirely left him--and perhaps the remembrance of the other's fifty spearmen--sobered him in the midst of his rage, "i am hasty. i mean not you, m. de montsoreau! ride where you will, ride with me if you will--and i will thank you. only remember, until midnight angers is mine!" he was still speaking when he moved from the table, and, leaving all staring after him, strode down the room. an instant he paused on the threshold and looked back; then he passed out, and clattered down the stone stairs. his horse and riders were waiting, but, his foot in the stirrup, he stayed for a word with bigot. "is it so?" he growled. the norman did not speak, but pointed towards the place ste.-croix, whence an occasional shot made answer for him. in those days the streets of the black city were narrow and crooked, overhung by timber houses and hampered by booths; nor could tavannes from the old town hall--now abandoned--see the place ste.-croix. but that he could cure. he struck spurs to his horse, and, followed by his ten horsemen, he clattered noisily down the paved street. a dozen groups hurrying the same way sprang panic-stricken to the walls, or saved themselves in doorways. he was up with them, he was beyond them! another hundred yards, and he would see the place. and then, with a cry of rage, he drew rein a little, discovering what was before him. in the narrow gut of the way a great black banner, borne on two poles, was lurching towards him. it was moving in the van of a dark procession of priests, who, with their attendants and a crowd of devout, filled the street from wall to wall. they were chanting one of the penitential psalms, but not so loudly as to drown the uproar in the place beyond them. they made no way, and count hannibal swore furiously, suspecting treachery. but he was no madman, and at the moment the least reflection would have sent him about to seek another road. unfortunately, as he hesitated a man sprang with a gesture of warning to his horse's head and seized it; and tavannes, mistaking the motive of the act, lost his self-control. he struck the fellow down, and with a reckless word rode headlong into the procession, shouting to the black robes to make way, make way! a cry, nay, a very shriek of horror, answered him and rent the air. and in a minute the thing was done. too late, as the bishop's vicar, struck by his horse, fell screaming under its hoofs--too late, as the consecrated vessels which he had been bearing rolled in the mud, tavannes saw that they bore the canopy and the host! he knew what he had done, then. before his horse's iron shoes struck the ground again, his face--even his face--had lost its colour. but he knew also that to hesitate now, to pause now, was to be torn in pieces; for his riders, seeing that which the banner had veiled from him, had not followed him, and he was alone, in the middle of brandished fists and weapons. he hesitated not a moment. drawing a pistol he spurred onwards, his horse plunging wildly among the shrieking priests; and though a hundred hands, hands of acolytes, hands of shaven monks, clutched at his bridle or gripped his boot, he got clear of them. clear, carrying with him the memory of one face seen an instant amid the crowd, one face seen, to be ever remembered--the face of father pezelay, white, evil, scarred, distorted by wicked triumph. behind him, the thunder of "sacrilege! sacrilege!" rose to heaven, and men were gathering. in front the crowd which skirmished about the inn was less dense, and, ignorant of the thing that had happened in the narrow street, made ready way for him, the boldest recoiling before the look on his face. some who stood nearest to the inn, and had begun to hurl stones at the window and to beat on the doors--which had only the minute before closed on badelon and his prisoners--supposed that he had his riders behind him; and these fled apace. but he knew better even than they the value of time; he pushed his horse up to the gates, and hammered them with his boot while he kept his pistol-hand towards the place and the cathedral, watching for the transformation which he knew would come! and come it did; on a sudden, in a twinkling! a white-faced monk, frenzy in his eyes, appeared in the midst of the crowd. he stood and tore his garments before the people, and, stooping, threw dust on his head. a second and a third followed his example; then from a thousand throats the cry of "sacrilege! sacrilege!" rolled up, while clerks flew wildly hither and thither shrieking the tale, and priests denied the sacraments to angers until it should purge itself of the evil thing. by that time count hannibal had saved himself behind the great gates, by the skin of his teeth. the gates had opened to him in time. but none knew better than he that angers had no gates thick enough, nor walls of a height, to save him for many hours from the storm he had let loose! chapter xxxi. the flight from angers. but that only the more roused the devil in the man; that, and the knowledge that he had his own headstrong act to thank for the position. he looked on the panic-stricken people who, scared by the turmoil without, had come together in the courtyard, wringing their hands and chattering; and his face was so dark and forbidding that fear of him took the place of all other fear, and the nearest shrank from contact with him. on any other entering as he had entered, they would have hailed questions; they would have asked what was amiss and if the city were rising, and where were bigot and his men. but count hannibal's eye struck curiosity dumb. when he cried from his saddle, "bring me the landlord!" the trembling man was found, and brought, and thrust forward almost without a word. "you have a back gate?" tavannes said, while the crowd leaned forward to catch his words. "yes, my lord," the man faltered. "into the street which leads to the ramparts?" "ye--yes, my lord." "then"--to badelon--"saddle! you have five minutes. saddle as you never saddled before," he continued in a low tone, "or----" his tongue did not finish the threat, but his hand waved the man away. "for you," he held tignonville an instant with his lowering eye, "and the preaching fool with you, get arms and mount! you have never played aught but the woman yet; but play me false now, or look aside but a foot from the path i bid you take, and you thwart me no more, monsieur! and you, madame," he continued, turning to the countess, who stood bewildered at one of the doors, the provost's daughter clinging and weeping about her, "you have three minutes to get your women to horse! see you, if you please, that they take no longer!" she found her voice with difficulty. "and this child?" she said. "she is in my care." "bring her," he muttered with a scowl of impatience. and then, raising his voice as he turned on the terrified gang of hostlers and inn servants who stood gaping round him, "go help!" he thundered. "go help! and quickly!" he added, his face growing a shade darker as a second bell began to toll from a neighbouring tower, and the confused babel in the place ste.-croix settled into a dull roar of "_sacrilege_! _sacrilege!_"--"hasten!" fortunately it had been his first intention to go to the council attended by the whole of his troop; and eight horses stood saddled in the stalls. others were hastily pulled out and bridled, and the women were mounted. la tribe, at a look from tavannes, took behind him the provost's daughter, who was helpless with terror. between the suddenness of the alarm, the uproar without, and the panic within, none but a man whose people served him at a nod and dreaded his very gesture could have got his party mounted in time. javette would fain have swooned, but she dared not. tignonville would fain have questioned, but he shrank from the venture. the countess would fain have said something, but she forced herself to obey and no more. even so the confusion in the courtyard, the mingling of horses and men and trappings and saddle-bags, would have made another despair; but wherever count hannibal, seated in his saddle in the middle, turned his face, chaos settled into a kind of order, servants, ceasing to listen to the yells and cries outside, ran to fetch, women dropped cloaks from the gallery, and men loaded muskets and strapped on bandoliers. until at last--but none knew what those minutes of suspense cost him--he saw all mounted, and, pistol in hand, shepherded them to the back gates. as he did so he stooped for a few scowling words with badelon, whom he sent to the van of the party: then he gave the word to open. it was done; and even as montsoreau's horsemen, borne on the bosom of a second and more formidable throng, swept raging into the already crowded square, and the cry went up for "a ram! a ram!" to batter in the gates, tavannes, hurling his little party before him, dashed out at the back, and putting to flight a handful of rascals who had wandered to that side, cantered unmolested down the lane to the ramparts. turning eastward at the foot of the frowning castle, he followed the inner side of the wall in the direction of the gate by which he had entered the preceding evening. to gain this his party had to pass the end of the rue toussaint, which issues from the place ste.-croix and runs so straight that the mob seething in front of the inn had only to turn their heads to see them. the danger incurred at this point was great; for a party as small as tavannes' and encumbered with women would have had no chance if attacked within the walls. count hannibal knew it. but he knew also that the act which he had committed rendered the north bank of the loire impossible for him. neither king nor marshal, neither charles of valois nor gaspard of tavannes, would dare to shield him from an infuriated church, a church too wise to forgive certain offences. his one chance lay in reaching the southern bank of the loire--roughly speaking, the huguenot bank--and taking refuge in some town, rochelle or st. jean d'angely, where the huguenots were strong, and whence he might take steps to set himself right with his own side. but to cross the great river which divides france into two lands widely differing he must leave the city by the east gate; for the only bridge over the loire within forty miles of angers lay eastward from the town, at ponts de cé, four miles away. to this gate, therefore, past the rue toussaint, he whirled his party daringly; and though the women grew pale as the sounds of riot broke louder on the ear, and they discovered that they were approaching instead of leaving the danger--and though tignonville for an instant thought him mad, and snatched at the countess's rein--his men-at-arms, who knew him, galloped stolidly on, passed like clockwork the end of the street, and, reckless of the stream of persons hurrying in the direction of the alarm, heedless of the fright and anger their passage excited, pressed steadily on. a moment and the gate through which they had entered the previous evening appeared before them. and--a sight welcome to one of them--it was open. they were fortunate indeed, for a few seconds later they had been too late. the alarm had preceded them; as they dashed up, a man ran to the chains of the portcullis and tried to lower it. he failed to do so at the first touch, and quailing, fled from badelon's levelled pistol. a watchman on one of the bastions of the wall shouted to them to halt or he would fire: but the riders yelled in derision, and thundering through the echoing archway, emerged into the open, and saw, extended before them, in place of the gloomy vistas of the black town, the glory of the open country and the vine-clad hills, and the fields about the loire yellow with late harvest. the women gasped their relief, and one or two who were most out of breath would have pulled up their horses and let them trot, thinking the danger at an end. but a curt savage word from the rear set them flying again, and down and up and on again they galloped, driven forward by the iron hand which never relaxed its grip of them. silent and pitiless he whirled them before him until they were within a mile of the long ponts de cé--a series of bridges rather than one bridge--and the broad shallow loire lay plain before them, its sandbanks grilling in the sun, and grey lines of willows marking its eyots. by this time some of the women, white with fatigue, could only cling to their saddles with their hands; while others were red-hot, their hair unrolled, and the perspiration mingled with the dust on their faces. but he who drove them had no pity for weakness in an emergency. he looked back and saw, a half-mile behind them, the glitter of steel following hard on their heels: and "faster! faster!" he cried, regardless of their prayers: and he beat the rearmost of the horses with his scabbard. a waiting-woman shrieked that she should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, "fall then, fool!" and the instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town about the bridges, and badelon raised his hand as a signal that they might slacken speed. the bewilderment of the start had been so great that it was then only, when they found their feet on the first link of the bridge, that two of the party, the countess and tignonville, awoke to the fact that their faces were set southwards. to cross the loire in those days meant much to all: to a huguenot very much. it chanced that these two rode on to the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing--the remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into the mind of each of them. it deepened the flush which exertion had brought to the woman's cheek, then left it paler than before. a minute earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her anger died as she looked and she remembered. in the man, shallower of feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation. he could not at first believe in their good fortune. "_mon dieu!_" he cried, "we are crossing!" and then again in a lower tone, "we are crossing! we are crossing!" and he looked at her. it was impossible that she should not look back; that she who had ceased to be angry should not feel and remember; impossible that her answering glance should not speak to his heart. below them, as on that day a month earlier, when they had crossed the bridges going northward, the broad shallow river ran its course in the sunshine, its turbid currents gleaming and flashing about the sandbanks and osier-beds. to the eye, the landscape, save that the vintage was farther advanced and the harvest in part gathered in, was the same. but how changed were their relations, their prospects, their hopes, who had then crossed the river hand-in-hand, planning a life to be passed together. the young man's rage boiled up at the thought. too vividly, too sharply it showed him the wrongs which he had suffered at the hands of the man who rode behind him, the man who even now drove him on and ordered him and insulted him. he forgot that he might have perished in the general massacre if count hannibal had not intervened. he forgot that count hannibal had spared him once and twice. he laid on his enemy's shoulders the guilt of all, the blood of all: and as, quick on the thought of his wrongs and his fellows' wrongs followed the reflection that with every league they rode southwards the chance of requital grew, he cried again, and this time joyously, "we are crossing! a little, and we shall be in our own land!" the tears filled the countess's eyes as she looked westwards and southwards. "vrillac is there!" she cried; and she pointed. "i smell the sea!" "ay!" he answered, almost under his breath. "it lies there! and no more than thirty leagues from us! with fresh horses we might see it in two days!" badelon's voice broke in on them. "forward!" he cried as they reached the southern bank. "_en avant!_" and, obedient to the word, the little party, refreshed by the short respite, took the road out of ponts de cé at a steady trot. nor was the countess the only one whose face glowed, being set southwards, or whose heart pulsed to the rhythm of the horses' hoofs that beat out "home!" carlat's and madame carlat's also. javette even, hearing from her neighbour that they were over the loire, plucked up courage; while la tribe, gazing before him with moistened eyes, cried "comfort" to the scared and weeping girl who clung to his belt. it was singular to see how all sniffed the air as if already it smacked of the sea and of the south; and how they of poitou sat their horses as if they asked nothing better than to ride on and on and on until the scenes of home arose about them. for them the sky had already a deeper blue, the air a softer fragrance, the sunshine a purity long unknown! was it wonderful, when they had suffered so much on that northern bank? when their experience during the month had been comparable only with the direst nightmare? yet one among them, after the first impulse of relief and satisfaction, felt differently. tignonville's gorge rose against the sense of compulsion, of inferiority. to be driven forward after this fashion, whether he would or no, to be placed at the beck of every base-born man-at-arms, to have no clearer knowledge of what had happened or of what was passing, or of the peril from which they fled, than the women among whom he rode--these things kindled anew the sullen fire of hate. north of the loire there had been some excuse for his inaction under insult; he had been in the man's country and power. but south of the loire, within forty leagues of huguenot niort, must he still suffer, still be supine? his rage was inflamed by a disappointment he presently underwent. looking back as they rode clear of the wooden houses of ponts de cé, he missed tavannes and several of his men; and he wondered if count hannibal had remained on his own side of the river. it seemed possible; and in that event la tribe and he and carlat might deal with badelon and the four who still escorted them. but when he looked back a minute later, tavannes was within sight, following the party with a stern face; and not tavannes only. bigot, with two of the ten men who hitherto had been missing, was with him. it was clear, however, that they brought no good news, for they had scarcely ridden up before count hannibal cried "faster! faster!" in his harshest voice, and bigot urged the horses to a quicker trot. their course lay almost parallel with the loire in the direction of beaupréau; and tignonville began to fear that count hannibal intended to recross the river at nantes, where the only bridge below angers spanned the stream. with this in view it was easy to comprehend his wish to distance his pursuers before he recrossed. the countess had no such thought. "they must be close upon us!" she murmured, as she urged her horse in obedience to the order. "whoever they are!" tignonville muttered bitterly. "if we knew what had happened, or who followed, we should know more about it, madame. for that matter, i know what i wish he would do. and our heads are set for it." "what?" "make for vrillac!" he answered, a savage gleam in his eyes. "for vrillac?" "yes." "ah, if he would!" she cried, her face turning pale. "if he would. he would be safe there!" "ay, quite safe!" he answered with a peculiar intonation. and he looked at her askance. he fancied that his thought, the thought which had just flashed into his brain, was her thought; that she had the same notion in reserve, and that they were in sympathy. and tavannes, seeing them talking together, and noting her look and the fervour of her gesture, formed the same opinion, and retired more darkly into himself. the downfall of his plan for dazzling her by a magnanimity unparalleled and beyond compare, a plan dependent on the submission of angers--his disappointment in this might have roused the worst passions of a better man. but there was in this man a pride on a level at least with his other passions: and to bear himself in this hour of defeat and flight so that if she could not love him she must admire him, checked in a strange degree the current of his rage. when tignonville presently looked back he found that count hannibal and six of his riders had pulled up and were walking their horses far in the rear. on which he would have done the same himself; but badelon called over his shoulder the eternal "forward, monsieur, _en avant!_" and sullenly, hating the man and his master more deeply every hour, tignonville was forced to push on, with thoughts of vengeance in his heart. trot, trot! trot, trot! through a country which had lost its smiling wooded character and grew more sombre and less fertile the farther they left the loire behind them. trot, trot! trot, trot!--for ever, it seemed to some. javette wept with fatigue, and the other women were little better. the countess herself spoke seldom except to cheer the provost's daughter; who, poor girl, flung suddenly out of the round of her life and cast among strangers, showed a better spirit than might have been expected. at length, on the slopes of some low hills, which they had long seen before them, a cluster of houses and a church appeared; and badelon, drawing rein, cried, "beaupréau, madame! we stay an hour!" it was six o'clock. they had ridden some hours without a break. with sighs and cries of pain the women dropped from their clumsy saddles, while the men laid out such food--it was little--as had been brought, and hobbled the horses that they might feed. the hour passed rapidly, and when it had passed badelon was inexorable. there was wailing when he gave the word to mount again; and tignonville, fiercely resenting this dumb, reasonless flight, was at heart one of the mutineers. but badelon said grimly that they might go on and live, or stay and die, as it pleased them; and once more they climbed painfully to their saddles, and jogged steadily on through the sunset, through the gloaming, through the darkness, across a weird, mysterious country of low hills and narrow plains which grew more wild and less cultivated as they advanced. fortunately the horses had been well saved during the long leisurely journey to angers, and now went well and strongly. when they at last unsaddled for the night in a little dismal wood within a mile of clisson, they had placed some forty miles between themselves and angers. chapter xxxii. the ordeal by steel. the women for the most part fell like sacks and slept where they alighted, dead weary. the men, when they had cared for the horses, followed the example; for badelon would suffer no fire. in less than half an hour, a sentry who stood on guard at the edge of the wood, and tignonville and la tribe, who talked in low voices with their backs against a tree, were the only persons who remained awake, with the exception of the countess. carlat had made a couch for her, and screened it with cloaks from the wind and the eye; for the moon had risen, and where the trees stood sparsest its light flooded the soil with pools of white. but madame had not yet retired to her bed. the two men, whose voices reached her, saw her from time to time moving restlessly to and fro between the road and the little encampment. presently she came and stood over them. "he led his people out of the wilderness," la tribe was saying; "out of the trouble of paris, out of the trouble of angers, and always, always southward. if you do not in this, monsieur, see his finger----" "and angers?" tignonville struck in, with a faint sneer. "has he led that out of trouble? a day or two ago you would risk all to save it, my friend. now, with your back safely turned on it, you think all for the best." "we did our best," the minister answered humbly. "from the day we met in paris we have been but instruments." "to save angers?" "to save a remnant." on a sudden the countess raised her hand. "do you not hear horses, monsieur?" she cried. she had been listening to the noises of the night, and had paid little heed to what the two were saying. "one of ours moved," tignonville answered listlessly. "why do you not lie down, madame?" instead of answering, "whither is he going?" she asked. "do you know?" "i wish i did know," the young man answered peevishly. "to niort, it may be. or presently he will double back and recross the loire." "he would have gone by cholet to niort," la tribe said. "the direction is rather that of rochelle. god grant we be bound thither!" "or to vrillac," the countess cried, clasping her hands in the darkness. "can it be to vrillac he is going?" the minister shook his head. "ah, let it be to vrillac!" she cried, a thrill in her voice. "we should be safe there. and he would be safe." "safe?" echoed a fourth and deeper voice. and out of the darkness beside them loomed a tall figure. the minister looked and leapt to his feet. tignonville rose more slowly. the voice was tavannes' "and where am i to be safe?" he repeated slowly, a faint ring of saturnine amusement in his tone. "at vrillac," she cried. "in my house, monsieur." he was silent a moment. then, "your house, madame? in which direction is it, from here?" "westwards," she answered impulsively, her voice quivering with eagerness and emotion and hope. "westwards, monsieur--on the sea. the causeway from the land is long, and ten can hold it against ten hundred." "westwards? and how far westwards?" tignonville answered for her; in his tone throbbed the same eagerness, the same anxiety, which spoke in hers. nor was count hannibal's ear deaf to it. "through challans," he said, "thirteen leagues." "from clisson?" "yes, monsieur le comte." "and by commequiers less," the countess cried. "no, it is a worse road," tignonville answered quickly; "and longer in time." "but we came----" "at our leisure, madame. the road is by challans, if we wish to be there quickly." "ah!" count hannibal said. in the darkness it was impossible to see his face or mark how he took it. "but being there, i have few men." "i have forty will come at call," she cried with pride. "a word to them, and in four hours or a little more----" "they would outnumber mine by four to one," count hannibal answered coldly, drily, in a voice like ice-water flung in their faces. "thank you, madame; i understand. to vrillac is no long ride; but we will not ride it at present." and he turned sharply on his heel and strode from them. he had not covered thirty paces before she overtook him in the middle of a broad patch of moonlight and touched his arm. he wheeled swiftly, his hand half-way to his hilt. then he saw who it was. "ah," he said, "i had forgotten, madame. you have come----" "no!" she cried passionately; and standing before him she shook back the hood of her cloak that he might look into her eyes. "you owe me no blow to-day. you have paid me, monsieur. you have struck me already, and foully, like a coward. do you remember," she continued rapidly, "the hour after our marriage, and what you said to me? do you remember what you told me? and whom to trust and whom to suspect, where lay our interest and where our foes? you trusted me then! what have i done that you now dare--ay, dare, monsieur," she repeated fearlessly, her face pale and her eyes glittering with excitement, "to insult me? that you treat me as--javette? that you deem me capable of _that?_ of luring you into a trap, and in my own house, or the house that was mine, of----" "treating me as i have treated others." "you have said it!" she cried. she could not herself understand why his distrust had wounded her so sharply, so home, that all fear of him was gone. "you have said it, and put that between us which will not be removed. i could have forgiven blows," she continued, breathless in her excitement, "so you had thought me what i am. but now you will do well to watch me! you will do well to leave vrillac on one side. for were you there, and raised your hand against me--not that that touches me, but it will do--and there are those, i tell you, would fling you from the tower at my word." "indeed?" "ay, indeed! and indeed, monsieur!" her face was in moonlight, his was in shadow. "and this is your new tone, madame, is it?" he said, slowly and after a pregnant pause. "the crossing of a river has wrought so great a change in you?" "no!" she cried. "yes," he said. and despite herself she flinched before the grimness of his tone. "you have yet to learn one thing, however: that i do not change. that, north or south, i am the same to those who are the same to me. that what i have won on the one bank i will hold on the other, in the teeth of all, and though god's church be thundering on my heels! i go to vrillac----" "you--go?" she cried. "you go?" "i go," he repeated, "to-morrow. and among your own people i will see what language you will hold. while you were in my power i spared you. now that you are in your own land, now that you lift your hand against me, i will show you of what make i am. if blows will not tame you, i will try that will suit you less. ay, you wince, madame! you had done well had you thought twice before you threatened, and thrice before you took in hand to scare tavannes with a parcel of clowns and fisherfolk. tomorrow, to vrillac and your duty! and one word more, madame," he continued, turning back to her truculently when he had gone some paces from her. "if i find you plotting with your lover by the way i will hang not you, but him. i have spared him a score of times; but i know him, and i do not trust him." "nor me," she said, and with a white, set face she looked at him in the moonlight. "had you not better hang me now?" "why?" "lest i do you an injury!" she cried with passion; and she raised her hand and pointed northward. "lest i kill you some night, monsieur! i tell you, a thousand men on your heels are less dangerous than the woman at your side--if she hate you." "is it so?" he cried. his hand flew to his hilt; his dagger flashed out. but she did not move, did not flinch, only she set her teeth; and her eyes, fascinated by the steel, grew wider. his hand sank slowly. he held the weapon to her, hilt foremost; she took it mechanically. "you think yourself brave enough to kill me, do you?" he sneered. "then take this, and strike, if you dare. take it--strike, madame! it is sharp, and my arms are open." and he flung them wide, standing within a pace of her. "here, above the collar-bone, is the surest for a weak hand. what, afraid?" he continued, as, stiffly clutching the weapon which he had put into her hand, she glared at him, trembling and astonished. "afraid, and a vrillac! afraid, and 'tis but one blow! see, my arms are open. one blow home, and you will never lie in them. think of that. one blow home, and you may lie in his. think of that! strike, then, madame," he went on, piling taunt on taunt, "if you dare, and if you hate me. what, still afraid! how shall i give you heart? shall i strike you? it will not be the first time by ten. i keep count, you see," he continued mockingly. "or shall i kiss you? ay, that may do. and it will not be against your will, either, for you have that in your hand will save you in an instant. even"--he drew a foot nearer--"now! even----" and he stooped until his lips almost touched hers. she sprang back. "oh, do not!" she cried. "oh, do not!" and, dropping the dagger, she covered her face with her hands, and burst into weeping. he stooped coolly, and, after groping some time for the poniard, drew it from the leaves among which it had fallen. he put it into the sheath, and not until he had done that did he speak. then it was with a sneer. "i have no need to fear overmuch," he said. "you are a poor hater, madame. and poor haters make poor lovers. 'tis his loss! if you will not strike a blow for him, there is but one thing left. go, dream of him!" and shrugging his shoulders contemptuously he turned on his heel. chapter xxxiii. the ambush. the start they made at daybreak was gloomy and ill-omened, through one of those white mists which are blown from the atlantic over the flat lands of western poitou. the horses, looming gigantic through the fog, winced as the cold harness was girded on them. the men hurried to and fro with saddles on their heads, and stumbled over other saddles, and swore savagely. the women turned mutinous and would not rise; or, being dragged up by force, shrieked wild unfitting words, as they were driven to the horses. the countess looked on and listened, and shuddered, waiting for carlat to set her on her horse. she had gone during the last three weeks through much that was dreary, much that was hopeless; but the chill discomfort of this forced start, with tired horses and wailing women, would have darkened the prospect of home had there been no fear or threat to cloud it. he whose will compelled all stood a little apart and watched all, silent and gloomy. when badelon, after taking his orders and distributing some slices of black bread to be eaten in the saddle, moved off at the head of his troop, count hannibal remained behind, attended by bigot and the eight riders who had formed the rearguard so far. he had not approached the countess since rising, and she had been thankful for it. but now, as she moved away, she looked back and saw him still standing; she marked that he wore his corselet, and in one of those revulsions of feeling--which outrun man's reason--she who had tossed on her couch through half the night, in passionate revolt against the fate before her, took fire at his neglect and his silence; she resented on a sudden the distance he kept, and his scorn of her. her breast heaved, her colour came, involuntarily she checked her horse, as if she would return to him, and speak to him. then the carlats and the others closed up behind her, badelon's monotonous "forward, madame, _en avant!_" proclaimed the day's journey begun, and she saw him no more. nevertheless, the motionless figure, looming homeric through the fog, with gleams of wet light reflected from the steel about it, dwelt long in her mind. the road which badelon followed, slowly at first, and with greater speed as the horses warmed to their work, and the women, sore and battered, resigned themselves to suffering, wound across a flat expanse broken by a few hills. these were little more than mounds, and for the most part were veiled from sight by the low-lying sea-mist, through which gnarled and stunted oaks rose mysterious, to fade as strangely. weird trees they were, with branches unlike those of this world's trees, rising in a grey land without horizon or limit, through which our travellers moved, jaded phantoms in a clinging nightmare. at a walk, at a trot, more often at a weary jog, they pushed on behind badelon's humped shoulders. sometimes the fog hung so thick about them that they saw only those who rose and fell in the saddles immediately before them; sometimes the air cleared a little, the curtain rolled up a space, and for a minute or two they discerned stretches of unfertile fields, half-tilled and stony, or long tracts of gorse and broom, with here and there a thicket of dwarf shrubs or a wood of wind-swept pines. some looked and saw these things; more rode on sulky and unseeing, supporting impatiently the toils of a flight from they knew not what. to do tignonville justice, he was not of these. on the contrary, he seemed to be in a better temper on this day; and, where so many took things unheroically, he showed to advantage. avoiding the countess and riding with carlat, he talked and laughed with marked cheerfulness; nor did he ever fail, when the mist rose, to note this or that landmark, and confirm badelon in the way he was going. "we shall be at lége by noon!" he cried more than once, "and if m. le comte persists in his plan, may reach vrillac by late sunset. by way of challans!" and always carlat answered, "ay, by challans, monsieur, so be it!" he proved, too, so far right in his prediction that noon saw them drag, a weary train, into the hamlet of lége, where the road from nantes to olonne runs southward over the level of poitou. an hour later count hannibal rode in with six of his eight men, and, after a few minutes' parley with badelon, who was scanning the horses, he called carlat to him. the old man came. "can we reach vrillac to-night?" count hannibal asked curtly. "by challans, my lord," the steward answered, "i think we can. we call it seven hours' riding from here." "and that route is the shortest?" "in time, m. le comte, the road being better." count hannibal bent his brows. "and the other way?" he said. "is by commequiers, my lord. it is shorter in distance." "by how much!" "two leagues. but there are fordings and a salt marsh; and with madame and the women----" "it would be longer?" the steward hesitated. "i think so," he said slowly, his eyes wandering to the grey misty landscape, against which the poor hovels of the village stood out naked and comfortless. a low thicket of oaks sheltered the place from southwesterly gales. on the other three sides it lay open. "very good," tavannes said curtly. "be ready to start in ten minutes. you will guide us." but when the ten minutes had elapsed and the party were ready to start, to the astonishment of all the steward was not to be found. to peremptory calls for him no answer came; and a hurried search through the hamlet proved equally fruitless. the only person who had seen him since his interview with tavannes turned out to be m. de tignonville; and he had seen him mount his horse five minutes before, and move off--as he believed--by the challans road. "ahead of us!" "yes, m. le comte," tignonville answered, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the fringe of trees. "i did not see him take the road, but he was beside the north end of the wood when i saw him last. thereabouts!" and he pointed to a place where the challans road wound round the flank of the wood. "when we are beyond that point, i think we shall see him." count hannibal growled a word in his beard, and, turning in his saddle, looked back the way he had come. half a mile away, two or three dots could be seen approaching across the plain. he turned again. "you know the road?" he said, curtly addressing the young man. "perfectly. as well as carlat." "then lead the way, monsieur, with badelon. and spare neither whip nor spur. there will be need of both, if we would lie warm to-night." tignonville nodded assent and, wheeling his horse, rode to the head of the party, a faint smile playing about his mouth. a moment, and the main body moved off behind him, leaving count hannibal and six men to cover the rear. the mist, which at noon had risen for an hour or two, was closing down again, and they had no sooner passed clear of the wood than the trees faded out of sight behind them. it was not wonderful that they could not see carlat. objects a hundred paces from them were completely hidden. trot, trot! trot, trot! through a. grey world so featureless, so unreal that the riders, now dozing in the saddle, and now awaking, seemed to themselves to stand still, as in a nightmare. a trot and then a walk, and then a trot again; and all a dozen times repeated, while the women bumped along in their wretched saddles, and the horses stumbled, and the men swore at them. ha! la garnache at last, and a sharp turn southward to challans. the countess raised her head, and began to look about her. there, should be a church, she knew; and there, the old ruined tower built by wizards, or the carthaginians, so old tradition ran; and there, to the westward, the great salt marshes towards noirmoutier. the mist hid all, but the knowledge that they were there set her heart beating, brought tears to her eyes, and lightened the long road to challans. at challans they halted half-an-hour, and washed out the horses' mouths with water and a little _guignolet_--the spirit of the country. a dose of the cordial was administered to the women; and a little after seven they began the last stage of the journey, through a landscape which even the mist could not veil from the eyes of love. there rose the windmill of soullans! there the old dolmen, beneath which the grey wolf that ate the two children of tornic had its lair. for a mile back they had been treading my lady's land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall. the salt flavour, which is new life to the shore-born, was in the fleecy reek which floated by them, now thinner, now more opaque; and almost they could hear the dull thunder of the biscay waves falling on the rocks. tignonville looked back at her and smiled. she caught the look; she fancied that she understood it and his thoughts. but her own eyes were moist at the moment with tears, and what his said, and what there was of strangeness in his glance, half-warning, half-exultant, escaped her. for there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level--hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island--she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads. where it stood, the road from commequiers and the road she travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the hillocks, it ran down to the beach and the causeway--and to her home. at the sight she bethought herself of carlat, and calling to m. de tignonville she asked him what he thought of the steward's continued absence. "he must have outpaced us!" he answered with an odd laugh. "but he must have ridden hard to do that." he reined back to her. "say nothing!" he muttered under his breath. "but look ahead, madame, and see if we are expected!" "expected? how can we be expected?" she cried. the colour rushed into her face. he put his finger to his lip, and looked warningly at badelon's humped shoulders, jogging up and down in front of them. then, stooping towards her, in a lower tone, "if carlat has arrived before us, he will have told them," he said. "have told them!" she exclaimed. "he came by the other road, and it is quicker." she gazed at him in astonishment, her lips parted; and slowly she comprehended, and her eyes grew hard. "then why," she said, "did you say it was longer? had we been overtaken, monsieur, we had had you to thank for it, it seems!" he bit his lip. "but we have not been overtaken," he rejoined. "on the contrary, you have me to thank for something quite different." "as unwelcome, perhaps!" she retorted. "for what?" "softly, madame." "for what?" she repeated, refusing to lower her voice. "speak, monsieur, if you please." he had never seen her look at him in that way. "for the fact," he answered, stung by her look and tone, "that when you arrive you will find yourself mistress in your own house! is that nothing?" "you have called in my people?" "carlat has done so, or should have," he answered. "henceforth," he continued, a ring of exultation in his voice, "it will go hard with m. le comte, if he does not treat you better than he has treated you hitherto. that is all!" "you mean that it will go hard with him in any case?" she cried, her bosom rising and falling. "i mean, madame---- but there they are! good carlat! brave carlat! he has done well." "carlat?" "ay, there they are! and you are mistress in your own land! at last you are mistress, and you have me to thank for it! see!" and heedless in his exultation whether badelon understood or not, he pointed to a place before them where the road wound between two low hills. over the green shoulder of one of these, a dozen bright points caught and reflected the last evening light; while as he spoke a man rose to his feet on the hill-side above, and began to make signs to persons below. a pennon, too, showed an instant over the shoulder, fluttered, and was gone. badelon looked as they looked. the next instant he uttered a low oath, and dragged his horse across the front of the party. "pierre!" he cried to the man on his left, "ride for your life! to my lord, and tell him we are ambushed!" and as the trained soldier wheeled about and spurred away, the sacker of rome turned a dark scowling face on tignonville. "if this be your work," he hissed, "we shall thank you for it in hell! for it is where most of us will lie to-night! they are montsoreau's spears, and they have those with them are worse to deal with than themselves!" then in a different tone, and throwing off all disguise, "men to the front!" he shouted. "and you, madame, to the rear quickly, and the women with you! now, men, forward, and draw! steady! steady! they are coming!" there was an instant of confusion, disorder, panic; horses jostling one another, women screaming and clutching at men, men shaking them off and forcing their way to the van. fortunately the enemy did not fall on at once, as badelon expected, but after showing themselves in the mouth of the valley, at a distance of three hundred paces, hung for some reason irresolute. this gave badelon time to array his seven swords in front; but real resistance was out of the question, as he knew. and to none seemed less in question than to tignonville. when the truth, and what he had done, broke on the young man, he sat a moment motionless with horror. it was only when badelon had twice summoned him with opprobrious words that he awoke to the relief of action. even after that he hung an instant trying to meet the countess's eyes, despair in his own; but it was not to be. she had turned her head, and was looking back, as if thence only and not from him could help come. it was not to him she turned; and he saw it, and the justice of it. and silent, grim, more formidable even than old badelon, the veteran fighter, who knew all the tricks and shifts of the _mêlée_, he spurred to the flank of the line. "now, steady!" badelon cried again, seeing that the enemy were beginning to move. "steady! ha! thank god, my lord! my lord is coming! stand! stand!" the distant sound of galloping hoofs had reached his ear in the nick of time. he stood in his stirrups and looked back. yes, count hannibal was coming, riding a dozen paces in front of his men. the odds were still desperate--for he brought but six--the enemy were still three to one. but the thunder of his hoofs as he came up checked for a moment the enemy's onset; and before montsoreau's people got started again count hannibal had ridden up abreast of the women, and the countess, looking at him, knew that, desperate as was their strait, she had not looked behind in vain. the glow of battle, the stress of the moment, had displaced the cloud from his face; the joy of the born fighter lightened in his eye. his voice rang clear and loud above the press. "badelon! wait you and two with madame!" he cried. "follow at fifty paces' distance, and, when we have broken them, ride through! the others with me! now forward, men, and show your teeth! a tavannes! a tavannes! a tavannes! we carry it yet!" and he dashed forward, leading them on, leaving the women behind; and down the sward to meet him, thundering in double line, came montsoreau's men-at-arms, and with the men-at-arms, a dozen pale, fierce eyed men in the church's black, yelling the church's curses. madame's heart grew sick as she heard, as she waited, as she judged him by the fast-failing light a horse's length before his men--with only tignonville beside him. she held her breath--would the shock never come? if badelon had not seized her rein and forced her forward, she would not have moved. and then, even as she moved, they met! with yells and wild cries and a mare's savage scream, the two bands crashed together in a huddle of fallen or rearing horses, of flickering weapons, of thrusting men, of grapples hand-to-hand. what happened, what was happening to anyone, who it was fell, stabbed through and through by four, or who were those who still fought single combats, twisting round one another's horses, those on her right and on her left, she could not tell. for badelon dragged her on with whip and spur, and two horsemen--who obscured her view--galloped in front of her, and rode down bodily the only man who undertook to bar her passage. she had a glimpse of that man's face, as his horse, struck in the act of turning, fell sideways on him; and she knew it, in its agony of terror, though she had seen it but once. it was the face of the man whose eyes had sought hers from the steps of the church in angers; the lean man in black, who had turned soldier of the church--to his misfortune. through? yes, through, the way was clear before them! the fight with its screams and curses died away behind them. the horses swayed and all but sank under them. but badelon knew it no time for mercy; iron-shod hoofs rang on the road behind, and at any moment the pursuers might be on their heels. he flogged on until the cots of the hamlet appeared on either side of the way; on, until the road forked and the countess with strange readiness cried "the left!" on, until the beach appeared below them at the foot of a sharp pitch, and beyond the beach the slow heaving grey of the ocean. the tide was high. the causeway ran through it, a mere thread lipped by the darkling waves, and at the sight a grunt of relief broke from badelon. for at the end of the causeway, black against the western sky, rose the gateway and towers of vrillac; and he saw that, as the countess had said, it was a place ten men could hold against ten hundred! they stumbled down the beach, reached the causeway and trotted along it; more slowly now, and looking back. the other women had followed by hook or by crook, some crying hysterically, yet clinging to their horses and even urging them; and in a medley, the causeway clear behind them and no one following, they reached the drawbridge, and passed under the arch of the gate beyond. there friendly hands, carlat's foremost, welcomed them and aided them to alight, and the countess saw, as in a dream, the familiar scene, all unfamiliar: the gate, where she had played, a child, aglow with lantern-light and arms. men, whose rugged faces she had known in infancy, stood at the drawbridge chains and at the winches. others blew matches and handled primers, while old servants crowded round her, and women looked at her, scared and weeping. she saw it all at a glance--the lights, the black shadows, the sudden glow of a match on the groining of the arch above. she saw it, and turning swiftly, looked back the way she had come; along the dusky causeway to the low, dark shore, which night was stealing quickly from their eyes. she clasped her hands. "where is badelon?" she cried. "where is he? where is he?" one of the men who had ridden before her answered that he had turned back. "turned back!" she repeated. and then, shading her eyes, "who is coming?" she asked, her voice insistent. "there is someone coming. who is it? who is it?" two were coming out of the gloom, travelling slowly and painfully along the causeway. one was la tribe, limping; the other a rider, slashed across the forehead, and sobbing curses. "no more!" she muttered. "are there no more?" the minister shook his head. the rider wiped the blood from his eyes, and turned up his face that he might see the better. but he seemed to be dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange _patois_. she stamped her foot in passion. "more lights!" she cried. "lights! how can they find their way? and let six men go down the _digue_, and meet them. will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?" but carlat, who had not been able to collect more than a dozen men, shook his head; and before she could repeat the order, sounds of battle, shrill, faint, like cries of hungry seagulls, pierced the darkness which shrouded the farther end of the causeway. the women shrank inward over the threshold, while carlat cried to the men at the chains to be ready, and to some who stood at loopholes above, to blow up their matches and let fly at his word. and then they all waited, the countess foremost, peering eagerly into the growing darkness. they could see nothing. a distant scuffle, an oath, a cry, silence! the same, a little nearer, a little louder, followed this time, not by silence, but by the slow tread of a limping horse. again a rush of feet, the clash of steel, a scream, a laugh, all weird and unreal, issuing from the night; then out of the darkness into the light, stepping slowly with hanging head, moved a horse, bearing on its back a man--or was it a man!--bending low in the saddle, his feet swinging loose. for an instant the horse and the man seemed to be alone, a ghostly pair; then at their heels came into view two figures, skirmishing this way and that; and now coming nearer, and now darting back into the gloom. one, a squat figure, stooping low, wielded a sword with two hands; the other covered him with a half-pike. and then beyond these--abruptly as it seemed--the night gave up to sight a swarm of dark figures pressing on them and after them, driving them before them. carlat had an inspiration. "fire!" he cried; and four arquebuses poured a score of slugs into the knot of pursuers. a man fell, another shrieked and stumbled, the rest gave back. only the horse came on spectrally, with hanging head and shining eyeballs, until a man ran out and seized its head, and dragged it, more by his strength than its own, over the drawbridge. after it badelon, with a gaping wound in his knee, and bigot, bleeding from a dozen hurts, walked over the bridge, and stood on either side of the saddle, smiling foolishly at the man on the horse. "leave me!" he muttered. "leave me!" he made a feeble movement with his hand, as if it held a weapon; then his head sank lower. it was count hannibal. his thigh was broken, and there was a lance-head in his arm. the countess looked at him, then beyond him, past him into the darkness. "are there no more?" she whispered tremulously. "no more? tignonville--my----" badelon shook his head. the countess covered her face and wept. chapter xxxiv. which will you, madame? it was in the grey dawning of the next day, at the hour before the sun rose, that word of m. de tignonville's fate came to them in the castle. the fog which had masked the van and coming of night hung thick on its retreating skirts, and only reluctantly and little by little gave up to sight and daylight a certain thing which night had left at the end of the causeway. the first man to see it was carlat, from the roof of the gateway; and he rubbed eyes weary with watching, and peered anew at it through the mist, fancying himself back in the place ste.-croix at angers, supposing for a wild moment the journey a dream, and the return a nightmare. but rub as he might, and stare as he might, the ugly outlines of the thing he had seen persisted--nay, grew sharper as the haze began to lift from the grey, slow-heaving floor of sea. he called another man and bade him look. "what is it?" he said. "d'you see, there? below the village?" "'tis a gibbet," the man answered, with a foolish laugh; they had watched all night. "god keep us from it." "a gibbet?" "ay!" "it is there to hang those they have taken, very like," the man answered, stupidly practical. and then other men came up, and stared at it and growled in their beards. presently there were eight or ten on the roof of the gateway looking towards the land and discussing the thing; and by-and-by a man was descried approaching along the causeway with a white flag in his hand. at that carlat bade one fetch the minister. "he understands things," he muttered, "and i misdoubt this. and see," he cried after the messenger, "that no word of it come to mademoiselle!" instinctively in the maiden home he reverted to the maiden title. the messenger went, and came again bringing la tribe, whose head rose above the staircase at the moment the envoy below came to a halt before the gate. carlat signed to the minister to come forward; and la tribe, after sniffing the salt air, and glancing at the long, low, misty shore and the stiff ugly shape which stood at the end of the causeway, looked down and met the envoy's eyes. for a moment no one spoke. only the men who had remained on the gateway, and had watched the stranger's coming, breathed hard. at last, "i bear a message," the man announced loudly and clearly, "for the lady of vrillac. is she present?" "give your message!" la tribe replied. "it is for her ears only." "do you want to enter?" "no!" the man answered so hurriedly that more than one smiled. he had the bearing of a lay clerk of some precinct, a verger or sacristan; and after a fashion the dress of one also, for he was in dusty black and wore no sword, though he was girded with a belt. "no!" he repeated, "but if madame will come to the gate, and speak to me----" "madame has other fish to fry," carlat blurted out. "do you think that she has naught to do but listen to messages from a gang of bandits?" "if she does not listen she will repent it all her life!" the fellow answered hardily. "that is part of my message." there was a pause while la tribe considered the matter. in the end, "from whom do you come?" he asked. "from his excellency the lieutenant-governor of saumur," the envoy answered glibly, "and from my lord bishop of angers, him assisting by his vicar; and from others gathered lawfully, who will as lawfully depart if their terms are accepted. also from m. de tignonville, a gentleman, i am told, of these parts, now in their hands and adjudged to die at sunset this day if the terms i bring be not accepted." there was a long silence on the gate. the men looked down fixedly; not a feature of one of them moved, for no one was surprised. "wherefore is he to die!" la tribe asked at last. "for good cause shown." "wherefore?" "he is a huguenot." the minister nodded. "and the terms!" carlat muttered. "ay, the terms!" la tribe repeated, nodding afresh. "what are they?" "they are for madame's ear only," the messenger made answer. "then they will not reach it!" carlat broke forth in wrath. "so much for that! and for yourself, see you go quickly before we make a target of you!" "very well, i go," the envoy answered sullenly. "but----" "but what?" la tribe cried, gripping carlat's shoulder to quiet him. "but what! say what you have to say, man! speak out, and have done with it!" "i will say it to her and to no other." "then you will not say it!" carlat cried again. "for you will not see her. so you may go. and the black fever in your vitals." "ay, go!" la tribe added more quietly. the man turned away with a shrug of the shoulders, and moved off a dozen paces, watched by all on the gate with the same fixed attention. but presently he paused; he returned. "very well," he said, looking up with an ill grace. "i will do my office here, if i cannot come to her. but i hold also a letter from m. de tignonville, and that i can deliver to no other hands than hers!" he held it up as he spoke, a thin scrap of greyish paper, the fly-leaf of a missal perhaps. "see!" he continued, "and take notice! if she does not get this, and learns when it is too late that it was offered----" "the terms," carlat growled impatiently. "the terms! come to them!" "you will have them?" the man answered, nervously passing his tongue over his lips. "you will not let me see her, or speak to her privately?" "no." "then hear them. his excellency is informed that one hannibal de tavannes, guilty of the detestable crime of sacrilege and of other gross crimes, has taken refuge here. he requires that the said hannibal de tavannes be handed to him for punishment, and, this being done before sunset this evening, he will yield to you free and uninjured the said m. de tignonville, and will retire from the lands of vrillac. but if you refuse"--the man passed his eye along the line of attentive faces which fringed the battlement--"he will at sunset hang the said tignonville on the gallows raised for tavannes, and will harry the demesne of vrillac to its farthest border!" there was a long silence on the gate. some, their gaze still fixed on him, moved their lips as if they chewed. others looked aside, met their fellows' eyes in a pregnant glance, and slowly returned to him. but no one spoke. at his back the flush of dawn was flooding the east, and spreading and waxing brighter. the air was growing warm; the shore below, from grey, was turning green. in a minute or two the sun, whose glowing marge already peeped above the low hills of france, would top the horizon. the man, getting no answer, shifted his feet uneasily. "well," he cried, "what answer am i to take?" still no one moved. "i've done my part. will no one give her the letter?" he cried. and he held it up. "give me my answer, for i am going." "take the letter!" the words came from the rear of the group in a voice that startled all. they turned as though some one had struck them, and saw the countess standing beside the wooden hood which covered the stairs. they guessed that she had heard all or nearly all; but the glory of the sunrise, shining full on her at that moment, lent a false warmth to her face, and life to eyes wofully and tragically set. it was not easy to say whether she had heard or not. "take the letter," she repeated. carlat looked helplessly over the parapet. "go down!" he cast a glance at la tribe, but he got none in return, and he was preparing to do her bidding when a cry of dismay broke from those who still had their eyes bent downwards. the messenger, waving the letter in a last appeal, had held it too loosely; a light air, as treacherous as unexpected, had snatched it from his hand, and bore it--even as the countess, drawn by the cry, sprang to the parapet--fifty paces from him. a moment it floated in the air, eddying, rising, falling; then, light as thistle-down, it touched the water and began to sink. the messenger uttered frantic lamentations, and stamped the causeway in his rage. the countess only looked, and looked, until the rippling crest of a baby wave broke over the tiny venture, and with its freight of tidings it sank from sight. the man, silent now, stared a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. "well, 'tis fortunate it was his," he cried brutally, "and not his excellency's, or my back had suffered! and now," he added impatiently, "by your leave, what answer?" what answer? ah, god, what answer? the men who leant on the parapet, rude and coarse as they were, felt the tragedy of the question and the dilemma, guessed what they meant to her, and looked everywhere save at her. what answer? which of the two was to live? which die--shamefully! which? which? "tell him--to come back--an hour before sunset," she muttered. they told him and he went; and one by one the men began to go too, and stole from the roof, leaving her standing alone, her face to the shore, her hands resting on the parapet. the light breeze which blew off the land stirred loose ringlets of her hair, and flattened the thin robe against her sunlit figure. so had she stood a thousand times in old days, in her youth, in her maidenhood. so in her father's time had she stood to see her lover come riding along the sands to woo her! so had she stood to welcome him on the eve of that fatal journey to paris! thence had others watched her go with him. the men remembered--remembered all; and one by one they stole shamefacedly away, fearing lest she should speak or turn tragic eyes on them. true, in their pity for her was no doubt of the end, or thought of the victim who must suffer--of tavannes. they, of poitou, who had not been with him, knew nothing of him; they cared as little. he was a northern man, a stranger, a man of the sword, who had seized her--so they heard--by the sword. but they saw that the burden of choice was laid on her; there, in her sight and in theirs, rose the gibbet; and, clowns as they were, they discerned the tragedy of her _rôle_, play it as she might, and though her act gave life to her lover. when all had retired save three or four, she turned and saw these gathered at the head of the stairs in a ring about carlat, who was addressing them in a low eager voice. she could not catch a syllable, but a look hard, and almost cruel, flashed into her eyes as she gazed; and raising her voice she called the steward to her. "the bridge is up," she said, her tone hard, "but the gates? are they locked?" "yes, madame." "the wicket?" "no, not the wicket." and carlat looked another way. "then go, lock it, and bring the keys to me!" she replied. "or stay!" her voice grew harder, her eyes spiteful as a cat's. "stay, and be warned that you play me no tricks! do you hear? do you understand? or old as you are, and long as you have served us, i will have you thrown from this tower, with as little pity as isabeau flung her gallants to the fishes. i am still mistress here, never more mistress than this day. woe to you if you forget it." he blenched and cringed before her, muttering incoherently. "i know," she said, "i read you! and now the keys. go, bring them to me! and if by chance i find the wicket unlocked when i come down, pray, carlat, pray! for you will have need of prayers." he slunk away, the men with him; and she fell to pacing the roof feverishly. now and then she extended her arms, and low cries broke from her, as from a dumb creature in pain. wherever she looked, old memories rose up to torment her and redouble her misery. a thing she could have borne in the outer world, a thing which might have seemed tolerable in the reeking air of paris or in the gloomy streets of angers, wore here its most appalling aspect. henceforth, whatever choice she made, this home, where even in those troublous times she had known naught but peace, must bear a damning stain! henceforth this day and this hour must come between her and happiness, must brand her brow, and fix her with a deed of which men and women would tell while she lived! oh, god--pray? who said, pray? "i!" and la tribe with tears in his eyes held out the keys to her. "i, madame," he continued solemnly, his voice broken with emotion. "for in man is no help. the strongest man, he who rode yesterday a master of men, a very man of war in his pride and his valour--see him now, and----" "don't!" she cried, sharp pain in her voice. "don't!" and she stopped him with her hand, her face averted. after an interval, "you come from him?" she muttered faintly. "yes." "is he--hurt to death, think you?" she spoke low, and kept her face hidden from him. "alas, no!" he answered, speaking the thought in his heart. "the men who are with him seem confident of his recovery." "do they know?" "badelon has had experience." "no, no. do they know of this?" she cried. "of this!" and she pointed with a gesture of loathing to the black gibbet on the farther strand. he shook his head. "i think not," he muttered. and after a moment, "god help you!" he added fervently. "god help and guide you, madame!" she turned on him suddenly, fiercely. "is that all you can do?" she cried. "is that all the help you can give! you are a man. go down, lead them out; drive off these cowards who drain our life's blood, who trade on a woman's heart! on them! do something, anything, rather than lie in safety here--here!" the minister shook his head sadly. "alas, madame!" he said, "to sally were to waste life. they outnumber us three to one. if count hannibal could do no more than break through last night, with scarce a man unwounded----" "he had the women!" "and we have not him!" "he would not have left us!" she cried hysterically. "i believe it." "had they taken me, do you think he would have lain behind walls? or skulked in safety here, while--while----" her voice failed her. he shook his head despondently. "and that is all you can do?" she cried, and turned from him, and to him again, extending her arms, in bitter scorn. "all you will do? do you forget that twice he spared your life? that in paris once, and once in angers, he held his hand? that always, whether he stood or whether he fled, he held himself between us and harm? ay, always? and who will now raise a hand for him? who?" "madame!" "who? who? had he died in the field," she continued, her voice shaking with grief, her hands beating the parapet--for she had turned from him--"had he fallen where he rode last night, in the front, with his face to the foe, i had viewed him tearless, i had deemed him happy! i had prayed dry-eyed for him who--who spared me all these days and weeks! whom i robbed and he forgave me! whom i tempted, and he forbore me! ay, and who spared not once or twice him for whom he must now--he must now----" and unable to finish the sentence she beat her hands again and passionately on the stones. "heaven knows, madame," the minister cried vehemently, "heaven knows, i would advise you if i could." "why did he wear his corselet?" she wailed, as if she had not heard him. "was there no spear could reach his breast, that he must come to this? no foe so gentle he would spare him this? or why did he not die with me in paris when we waited? in another minute death might have come and saved us this." with the tears running down his face he tried to comfort her. "man that is a shadow," he said, "passeth away--what matter how? a little while, a very little while, and we shall pass!" "with his curse upon us!" she cried. and, shuddering, she pressed her hands to her eyes to shut out the sight her fancy pictured. he left her for a while, hoping that in solitude she might regain control of herself. when he returned he found her seated, and outwardly more composed, her arms resting on the parapet-wall, her eyes bent steadily on the long stretch of hard sand which ran northward from the village. by that route her lover had many a time come to her; there she had ridden with him in the early days; and that way they had started for paris on such a morning and at such an hour as this, with sunshine about them, and larks singing hope above the sand-dunes, and warm wavelets creaming to the horses' hoofs! of all which, la tribe, a stranger, knew nothing. the rapt gaze, the unchanging attitude only confirmed his opinion of the course she would adopt. he was thankful to find her more composed; and in fear of such a scene as had already passed between them he stole away again. he returned by-and-by, but with the greatest reluctance, and only because carlat's urgency would take no refusal. he came this time to crave the key of the wicket, explaining that--rather to satisfy his own conscience and the men than with any hope of success--he proposed to go half-way along the causeway, and thence by signs invite a conference. "it is just possible," he added, hesitating--he feared nothing so much as to raise hopes in her--"that by the offer of a money ransom, madame----" "go," she said, without turning her head. "offer what you please. but"--bitterly--"have a care of them! montsoreau is very like montereau! beware of the bridge!" he went and came again in half-an-hour. then, indeed, though she had spoken as if hope was dead in her, she was on her feet at the first sound of his tread on the stairs; her parted lips and her white face questioned him. he shook his head. "there is a priest," he said in broken tones, "with them, whom god will judge. it is his plan, and he is without mercy or pity." "you bring nothing from--him?" "they will not suffer him to write again." "you did not see him?" "no." chapter xxxv. against the wall. in a room beside the gateway, into which, as the nearest and most convenient place, count hannibal had been carried from his saddle, a man sat sideways in the narrow embrasure of a loophole, to which his eyes seemed glued. the room, which formed part of the oldest block of the château, and was ordinarily the quarters of the carlats, possessed two other windows, deep-set indeed, yet superior to that through which bigot--for he it was--peered so persistently. but the larger windows looked southwards, across the bay--at this moment the noon-high sun was pouring his radiance through them; while the object which held bigot's gaze and fixed him to his irksome seat, lay elsewhere. the loophole commanded the causeway leading shorewards; through it the norman could see who came and went, and even the crossbeam of the ugly object which rose where the causeway touched the land. on a flat truckle-bed behind the door lay count hannibal, his injured leg protected from the coverlid by a kind of cage. his eyes were bright with fever, and his untended beard and straggling hair heightened the wildness of his aspect. but he was in possession of his senses; and as his gaze passed from bigot at the window to the old free companion, who sat on a stool beside him, engaged in shaping a piece of wood into a splint, an expression almost soft crept into his harsh face. "old fool!" he said. and his voice, though changed, had not lost all its strength and harshness. "did the constable need a splint when you laid him under the tower at gaeta?" the old man lifted his eyes from his task, and glanced through the nearest window. "it is long from noon to night," he said quietly, "and far from cup to lip, my lord!" "it would be if i had two legs," tavannes answered, with a grimace, half-snarl, half-smile. "as it is--where is that dagger? it leaves me every minute." it had slipped from the coverlid to the ground. badelon took it up, and set it on the bed within reach of his master's hand. bigot swore fiercely. "it would be farther still," he growled, "if you would be guided by me, my lord. give me leave to bar the door, and 'twill be long before these fisher clowns force it. badelon and i----" "being in your full strength," count hannibal murmured cynically. "could hold it. we have strength enough for that," the norman boasted, though his livid face and his bandages gave the lie to his words. he could not move without pain; and for badelon, his knee was as big as two with plaisters of his own placing. count hannibal stared at the ceiling. "you could not strike two blows!" he said. "don't lie to me! and badelon cannot walk two yards! fine fighters!" he continued with bitterness, not all bitter. "fine bars 'twixt a man and death! no, it is time to turn the face to the wall. and, since go i must, it shall not be said count hannibal dared not go alone! besides----" bigot stopped him with an oath that was in part a cry of pain. "d--n her!" he exclaimed in fury, "'tis she is that _besides!_ i know it. 'tis she has been our ruin from the day we saw her first, ay, to this day! 'tis she has bewitched you until your blood, my lord, has turned to water. or you would never, to save the hand that betrayed us, never to save a man----" "silence!" count hannibal cried, in a terrible voice. and rising on his elbow, he poised the dagger as if he would hurl it. "silence, or i will spit you like the vermin you are! silence, and listen! and you, old ban-dog, listen too, for i know you obstinate! it is not to save him. it is because i will die as i have lived, fearing nothing and asking nothing! it were easy to bar the door as you would have me, and die in the corner here like a wolf at bay, biting to the last. that were easy, old wolf-hound! pleasant and good sport!" "ay! that were a death!" the veteran cried, his eyes brightening. "so i would fain die!" "and i!" count hannibal returned, showing his teeth in a grim smile. "i too! yet i will not! i will not! because so to die were to die unwillingly, and give them triumph. be dragged to death? no, old dog, if die we must, we will go to death! we will die grandly, highly, as becomes tavannes! that when we are gone they may say, 'there died a man!'" "_she_ may say!" bigot muttered scowling. count hannibal heard and glared at him, but presently thought better of it, and after a pause, "ay, she too!" he said. "why not? as we have played the game--for her--so, though we lose, we will play it to the end; nor because we lose throw down the cards! besides, man, die in the corner, die biting, and he dies too!" "and why not?" bigot asked, rising in a fury. "why not? whose work is it we lie here, snared by these clowns of fisherfolk? who led us wrong and betrayed us? he die? would the devil had taken him a year ago! would he were within my reach now! i would kill him with my bare fingers! he die? and why not?" "why, because, fool, his death would not save me!" count hannibal answered coolly. "if it would, he would die! but it will not; and we must even do again as we have done. i have spared him--he's a white-livered hound!--both once and twice, and we must go to the end with it since no better can be! i have thought it out, and it must be. only see you, old dog, that i have the dagger hid in the splint where i can reach it. and then, when the exchange has been made, and my lady has her silk glove again--to put in her bosom!"--with a grimace and a sudden reddening of his harsh features--"if master priest come within reach of my arm, i'll send him before me, where i go." "ay, ay!" said badelon. "and if you fail of your stroke i will not fail of mine! i shall be there, and i will see to it he goes! i shall be there!" "you?" "ay, why not?" the old man answered quietly. "i may halt on this leg for aught i know, and come to starve on crutches like old claude boiteux who was at the taking of milan and now begs in the passage under the châtelet." "bah, man, you will get a new lord!" badelon nodded. "ay, a new lord with new ways!" he answered slowly and thoughtfully. "and i am tired. they are of another sort, lords now, than they were when i was young. it was a word and a blow then. now i am old, with most it is--'old hog, your distance! you scent my lady!' then they rode, and hunted, and tilted year in and year out, and summer or winter heard the lark sing. 'now they are curled, and paint themselves, and lie in silk and toy with ladies--who shamed to be seen at court or board when i was a boy--and love better to hear the mouse squeak than the lark sing." "still, if i give you my gold chain," count hannibal answered quietly, "'twill keep you from that." "give it to bigot," the old man answered. the splint he was fashioning had fallen on his knees, and his eyes were fixed on the distance of his youth. "for me, my lord, i am tired, and i go with you. i go with you. it is a good death to die biting before the strength be quite gone. have the dagger too, if you please, and i'll fit it within the splint right neatly. but i shall be there----" "and you'll strike home?" tavannes cried eagerly. he raised himself on his elbow, a gleam of joy in his gloomy eyes. "have no fear, my lord. see, does it tremble?" he held out his hand. "and when you are sped, i will try the spanish stroke--upwards with a turn ere you withdraw, that i learned from ruiz--on the shaven-pate. i see them about me now!" the old man continued, his face flushing, his form dilating. "it will be odd if i cannot snatch a sword and hew down three to go with tavannes! and bigot, he will see my lord the marshal by-and-by; and as i do to the priest, the marshal will do to montsoreau. ho! ho! he will teach him the _coup de jarnac_, never fear!" and the old man's moustaches curled up ferociously. count hannibal's eyes sparkled with joy. "old dog!" he cried--and he held his hand to the veteran, who brushed it reverently with his lips--"we will go together then! who touches my brother, touches tavannes!" "touches tavannes!" badelon cried, the glow of battle lighting his bloodshot eyes. he rose to his feet. "touches tavannes! you mind at jarnac----" "ah! at jarnac!" "when we charged their horse, was my boot a foot from yours, my lord?" "not a foot!" "and at dreux," the old man continued with a proud, elated gesture, "when we rode down the german pikemen--they were grass before us, leaves on the wind, thistle-down--was it not i who covered your bridle hand, and swerved not in the _mêlée?_" "it was! it was!" "and at st. quentin, when we fled before the spaniard--it was his day, you remember, and cost us dear----" "ay, i was young then," tavannes cried in turn, his eyes glistening. "st. quentin! it was the tenth of august. and you were new with me, and seized my rein----" "and we rode off together, my lord--of the last, of the last, as god sees me! and striking as we went, so that they left us for easier game." "it was so, good sword! i remember it as if it had been yesterday!" "and at cerisoles, the battle of the plain, in the old spanish wars, that was most like a joust of all the pitched fields i ever saw--at cerisoles, where i caught your horse? you mind me? it was in the shock when we broke guasto's line----" "at cerisoles?" count hannibal muttered slowly. "why, man, i----" "i caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? you remember, my lord? and at landriano, where leyva turned the tables on us again." count hannibal stared. "landriano?" he muttered bluntly. "'twas in ' , forty years ago and more! my father, indeed----" "and at rome--at rome, my lord? _mon dieu!_ in the old days at rome! when the spanish company scaled the wall--ruiz was first, i next--was it not my foot you held? and was it not i who dragged you up, while the devils of swiss pressed us hard? ah, those were days, my lord! i was young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning----" "you rave!" tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. "rome? you rave, old man! why, i was not born in those days. my father even was a boy! it was in ' you sacked it--five-and-forty years ago!" the old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. the light died out of his eyes--as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink, even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down. "no, i remember," he muttered slowly. "it was prince philibert of chalons, my lord of orange." "dead these forty years!" "ay, dead these forty years! all dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "and i grow childish! 'tis time, high time, i followed them! it trembles now; but have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. all dead! ay, all dead!" he sank into a mournful silence; and tavannes, after gazing at him awhile in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. the day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to fall across his thoughts. they no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance as in the forenoon. in its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past before his eyes. the hopes of a life, the ambitious of a life, moved in sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the sovereignty which nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman. she would not now be his. he had played highly, and he would lose highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of him highly. had she begun to think of him at all? in the chamber of the inn at angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and warmth, a shadow of turning to him. it had pleased him to think so, at any rate. it pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more confident--that in the time to come, when she was tignonville's, she would think of him secretly and kindly. she would remember him, and in her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him. it pleased him, that. it was almost all that was left to please him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. but as the day wore on, and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more grievous, the frame of his mind altered. a sombre rage was born and grew in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. to end thus, with nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! to die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen, he who had seen dreux and jarnac, had defied the king, and dared to turn the st. bartholomew to his ends! to die thus, and leave her to that puppet! strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. once, indeed, he raised himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he seemed about to speak. so that bigot came hurriedly to him. "my lord?" "water!" he said. "water, fool!" and, having drank, he turned his face to the wall, lest he should name her or ask for her. for the desire to see her before he died, to look into her eyes, to touch her hand once, only once, assailed his mind and all but whelmed his will. she had been with him, he knew it, in the night; she had left him only at daybreak. but then, in his state of collapse, he had been hardly conscious of her presence. now to ask for her or to see her would stamp him coward, say what he might to her. the proverb, that the king's face gives grace, applied to her; and an overture on his side could mean but one thing, that he sought her grace. and that he would not do though the cold waters of death covered him more and more, and the coming of the end--in that quiet chamber, while the september sun sank to the appointed place--awoke wild longings and a wild rebellion in his breast. his thoughts were very bitter, as he lay, his loneliness of the uttermost. he turned his face to the wall. in that posture he slept after a time, watched over by bigot with looks of rage and pity. and on the room fell a long silence. the sun had lacked three hours of setting when he fell asleep. when he reopened his eyes, and, after lying for a few minutes between sleep and waking, became conscious of his position, of the day, of the things which had happened, and his helplessness--an awakening which wrung from him an involuntary groan--the light in the room was still strong, and even bright. he fancied for a moment that he had merely dozed off and awaked again; and he continued to lie with his face to the wall, courting a return of slumber. but sleep did not come, and little by little, as he lay listening and thinking and growing more restless, he got the fancy that he was alone. the light fell brightly on the wall to which his face was turned; how could that be if bigot's broad shoulders still blocked the loophole? presently, to assure himself, he called the man by name. he got no answer. "badelon!" he muttered. "badelon!" had he gone, too, the old and faithful? it seemed so, for again no answer came. he had been accustomed all his life to instant service; to see the act follow the word ere the word ceased to sound. and nothing which had gone before, nothing which he had suffered since his defeat at angers, had brought him to feel his impotence and his position--and that the end of his power was indeed come--as sharply as this. the blood rushed to his head; almost the tears to eyes which had not shed them since boyhood, and would not shed them now, weak as he was! he rose on his elbow and looked with a full heart; it was as he had fancied. badelon's stool was empty; the embrasure--that was empty too. through its narrow outlet he had a tiny view of the shore and the low rocky hill, of which the summit shone warm in the last rays of the setting sun. the setting sun! ay, for the lower part of the hill was growing cold; the shore at its foot was grey. then he had slept long, and the time was come. he drew a deep breath and listened. but on all within and without lay silence, a silence marked, rather than broken, by the dull fall of a wave on the causeway. the day had been calm, but with the sunset a light breeze was rising. he set his teeth hard, and continued to listen. an hour before sunset was the time they had named for the exchange. what did it mean? in five minutes the sun would be below the horizon; already the zone of warmth on the hillside was moving and retreating upwards. and bigot and old badelon? why had they left him while he slept? an hour before sunset! why, the room was growing grey, grey and dark in the corners, and--what was that? he started, so violently that he jarred his leg, and the pain wrung a groan from him. at the foot of the bed, overlooked until then, a woman lay prone on the floor, her face resting on her outstretched arms. she lay without motion, her head and her clasped hands towards the loophole, her thick, clubbed hair hiding her neck. a woman! count hannibal stared, and, fancying he dreamed, closed his eyes, then looked again. it was no phantasm. it was the countess; it was his wife! he drew a deep breath, but he did not speak, though the colour rose slowly to his cheek. and slowly his eyes devoured her from head to foot, from the hands lying white in the light below the window to the shod feet; unchecked he took his fill, of that which he had so much desired--the seeing her! a woman prone, with all of her hidden but her hands: a hundred acquainted with her would not have known her. but he knew her, and would have known her from a hundred, nay from a thousand, by her hands alone. what was she doing here, and in this guise? he pondered; then he looked from her for an instant and saw that while he had gazed at her the sun had set, the light had passed from the top of the hill; the world without and the room within were growing cold. was that the cause she no longer lay quiet? he saw a shudder run through her, and a second; then it seemed to him--or was he going mad?--that she moaned, and prayed in half-heard words, and, wrestling with herself, beat her forehead on her arms, and then was still again, as still as death. by the time the paroxysm had passed, the last flush of sunset had faded from the sky, and the hills were growing dark. chapter xxxvi. his kingdom. count hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once. warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. a moment later she met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. instead she stood quiet and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second shook her frame. at length, "it is over!" she whispered. "patience, monsieur; have no fear, i will be brave. but i must give a little to him." "to him!" count hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily pale. she smiled with an odd passionateness. "who was my lover!" she cried, her voice a-thrill. "who will ever be my lover, though i have denied him, though i have left him to die! it was just. he who has so tried me knows it was just! he whom i have sacrificed--he knows it too, now! but it is hard to be--just," with a quavering smile. "you who take all may give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have--patience!" count hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. a moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. then he sank back on the bed. "water!" he muttered. "water!" she fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips. he drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. he lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke. "you have done that?" he whispered, "you have done that?" "yes," she answered, shuddering. "god forgive me! i have done that! i had to do that, or----" "and is it too late--to undo it?" "it is too late." a sob choked her voice. tears--tears incredible, unnatural--welled from under count hannibal's closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of his beard. "i would have gone," he muttered. "if you had spoken, i would have spared you this." "i know," she answered unsteadily; "the men told me." "and yet----" "it was just. and you are my husband," she replied. "more, i am the captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, i spared you in your weakness." "mon dieu! mon dieu, madame!" he cried, "at what a cost!" and that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself into her eyeballs, hung before her. for she knew that it was the cost to her he was counting. she knew that for himself he had ever held life cheap, that he could have seen tignonville suffer without a qualm. and the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing--even on a rival's life--because it was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as few things could have moved her at that moment. she saw it of a piece with all that had gone before, with all that had passed between them, since that fatal sunday in paris. but she made no sign. more than she had said she would not say; words of love, even of reconciliation, had no place on her lips while he whom she had sacrificed awaited his burial. and meantime the man beside her lay and found it incredible. "it was just," she had said. and he knew it; tignonville's folly--that and that only had led them into the snare and caused his own capture. but what had justice to do with the things of this world? in his experience, the strong hand--that was justice, in france; and possession--that was law. by the strong hand he had taken her, and by the strong hand she might have freed herself. and she had not. there was the incredible thing. she had chosen instead to do justice! it passed belief. opening his eyes on a silence which had lasted some minutes, a silence rendered more solemn by the lapping water without, tavannes saw her kneeling in the dusk of the chamber, her head bowed over his couch, her face hidden in her hands. he knew that she prayed, and feebly he deemed the whole a dream. no scene akin to it had had place in his life; and, weakened and in pain, he prayed that the vision might last for ever, that he might never awake. but by-and-by, wrestling with the dread thought of what she had done, and the horror which would return upon her by fits and spasms, she flung out a hand, and it fell on him. he started, and the movement, jarring the broken limb, wrung from him a cry of pain. she looked up and was going to speak, when a scuffling of feet under the gateway arch, and a confused sound of several voices raised at once, arrested the words on her lips. she rose to her feet and listened. dimly he could see her face through the dusk. her eyes were on the door, and she breathed quickly. a moment or two passed in this way, and then from the hurly-burly in the gateway the footsteps of two men--one limped--detached themselves and came nearer and nearer. they stopped without. a gleam of light shone under the door, and someone knocked. she went to the door, and, withdrawing the bar, stepped quickly back to the bedside, where for an instant the light borne by those who entered blinded her. then, above the lantern, the faces of la tribe and bigot broke upon her, and their shining eyes told her that they bore good news. it was well, for the men seemed tongue-tied. the minister's fluency was gone; he was very pale, and it was bigot who in the end spoke for both. he stepped forward, and, kneeling, kissed her cold hand. "my lady," he said, "you have gained all, and lost nothing. blessed be god!" "blessed be god!" the minister wept. and from the passage without came the sound of laughter and weeping and many voices, with a flutter of lights and flying skirts, and women's feet. she stared at him wildly, doubtfully, her hand at her throat. "what?" she said, "he is not dead--m. de tignonville?" "no, he is alive," la tribe answered, "he is alive." and he lifted up his hands as if he gave thanks. "alive?" she cried. "alive! oh, heaven is merciful! you are sure! you are sure?" "sure, madame, sure. he was not in their hands. he was dismounted in the first shock, it seems, and, coming to himself after a time, crept away and reached st. gilles, and came hither in a boat. but the enemy learned that he had not entered with us, and of this the priest wove his snare. blessed be god, who put it into your heart to escape it!" the countess stood motionless and, with closed eyes, pressed her hands to her temples. once she swayed as if she would fall her length, and bigot sprang forward to support and save her. but she opened her eyes at that, sighed very deeply, and seemed to recover herself. "you are sure?" she said faintly. "it is no trick?" "no, madame, it is no trick," la tribe answered. "m. de tignonville is alive, and here." "here!" she started at the word. the colour fluttered in her cheek. "but the keys," she murmured. and she passed her hand across her brow. "i thought--that i had them." "he has not entered," the minister answered, "for that reason. he is waiting at the postern, where he landed. he came, hoping to be of use to you." she paused a moment, and when she spoke again her aspect had undergone a subtle change. her head was high, a flush had risen to her cheeks, her eyes were bright. "then," she said, addressing la tribe, "do you, monsieur, go to him, and pray him in my name to retire to st. gilles, if he can do so without peril. he has no place here--now; and if he can go safely to his home it will be well that he do so. add, if you please, that madame de tavannes thanks him for his offer of aid, but in her husband's house she needs no other protection." bigot's eyes sparkled with joy. the minister hesitated. "no more, madame?" he faltered. he was tender-hearted, and tignonville was of his people. "no more," she said gravely, bowing her head. "it is not m. de tignonville i have to thank, but heaven's mercy, that i do not stand here at this moment unhappy as i entered--a woman accursed, to be pointed at while i live. and the dead"--she pointed solemnly through the dark casement to the shore--"the dead lie there." la tribe went. she stood a moment in thought, and then took the keys from the rough stone window-ledge on which she had laid them when she entered. as the cold iron touched her fingers she shuddered. the contact awoke again the horror and misery in which she had groped, a lost thing, when she last felt that chill. "take them," she said; and she gave them to bigot. "until my lord can leave his couch they will remain in your charge, and you will answer for all to him. go, now, take the light; and in half-an-hour send madame carlat to me." a wave broke heavily on the causeway and ran down seething to the sea; and another and another, filling the room with rhythmical thunders. but the voice of the sea was no longer the same in the darkness, where the countess knelt in silence beside the bed--knelt, her head bowed on her clasped hands, as she had knelt before, but with a mind how different, with what different thoughts! count hannibal could see her head but dimly, for the light shed upwards by the spume of the sea fell only on the rafters. but he knew she was there, and he would fain, for his heart was full, have laid his hand on her hair. and yet he would not. he would not, out of pride. instead he bit on his harsh beard, and lay looking upward to the rafters, waiting what would come. he who had held her at his will now lay at hers, and waited. he who had spared her life at a price now took his own a gift at her hands, and bore it. "_afterwards, madame de tavannes_----" his mind went back by some chance to those words--the words he had neither meant nor fulfilled. it passed from them to the marriage and the blow; to the scene in the meadow beside the river; to the last ride between la flèche and angers--the ride during which he had played with her fears and hugged himself on the figure he would make on the morrow. the figure! alas! of all his plans for dazzling her had come--_this!_ angers had defeated him, a priest had worsted him. in place of releasing tignonville after the fashion of bayard and the paladins, and in the teeth of snarling thousands, he had come near to releasing him after another fashion and at his own expense. instead of dazzling her by his mastery and winning her by his magnanimity, he lay here, owing her his life, and so weak, so broken, that the tears of childhood welled up in his eyes. out of the darkness a hand, cool and firm, slid into his, clasped it tightly, drew it to warm lips, carried it to a woman's bosom. "my lord," she murmured, "i was the captive of your sword, and you spared me. him i loved you took and spared him too--not once or twice. angers, also, and my people you would have saved for my sake. and you thought i could do this! oh! shame, shame!" but her hand held his always. "you loved him," he muttered. "yes, i loved him," she answered slowly and thoughtfully. "i loved him." and she fell silent a minute. then, "and i feared you," she added, her voice low. "oh, how i feared you--and hated you!" "and now?" "i do not fear him," she answered, smiling in the darkness. "nor hate him. and for you, my lord, i am your wife and must do your bidding, whether i will or no. i have no choice." he was silent. "is that not so?" she asked. he tried weakly to withdraw his hand. but she clung to it. "i must bear your blows or your kisses. i must be as you will and do as you will, and go happy or sad, lonely or with you, as you will! as you will, my lord! for i am your chattel, your property, your own. have you not told me so?" "but your heart," he cried fiercely, "is his! your heart, which you told me in the meadow could never be mine!" "i lied," she murmured, laughing tearfully, and her hands hovered over him. "it has come back! and it is on my lips." and she leant over and kissed him. and count hannibal knew that he had entered into his kingdom, the sovereignty of a woman's heart. * * * * * an hour later there was a stir in the village on the mainland. lanterns began to flit to and fro. sulkily men were saddling and preparing for the road. it was far to challans, farther to lège--more than one day, and many a weary league to ponts de cé and the loire. the men who had ridden gaily southwards on the scent of spoil and revenge turned their backs on the castle with many a sullen oath and word. they burned a hovel or two, and stripped such as they spared, after the fashion of the day; and it had gone ill with the peasant woman who fell into their hands. fortunately, under cover of the previous night every soul had escaped from the village, some to sea, and the rest to take shelter among the sand dunes; and as the troopers rode up the path from the beach, and through the green valley, where their horses shied from the bodies of the men they had slain, there was not an eye to see them go. or to mark the man who rode last, the man of the white face--scarred on the temple--and the burning eyes, who paused on the brow of the hill, and, before he passed beyond, cursed with quivering lips the foe who had escaped him. the words were lost, as soon as spoken, in the murmur of the sea on the causeway; the sea, fit emblem of the eternal, which rolled its tide regardless of blessing or cursing, good or ill will, nor spared one jot of ebb or flow because a puny creature had spoken to the night. the end. a gentleman of france contents. chapter i. the sport of fools. ii. the king of navarre. iii. boot and saddle. iv. mademoiselle de la vire. v. the road to blois. vi. my mother's lodging. vii. simon fleix. viii. an empty room. ix. the house in the ruelle d'arcy. x. the fight on the stairs. xi. the man at the door. xii. maximilian de bethune, baron de rosny. xiii. at rosny. xiv. m. de rambouillet. xv. vilain herodes. xvi. in the king's chamber. xvii. the jacobin monk. xviii. the offer of the league. xix. men call it chance. xx. the king's face. xxi. two women. xxii. 'la femme dispose.' xxiii. the last valois. xxiv. a royal peril. xxv. terms of surrender. xxvi. meditations. xxvii. to me, my friends! xxviii. the castle on the hill. xxix. pestilence and famine. xxx. stricken. xxxi. under the greenwood. xxxii. a tavern brawl. xxxiii. at meudon. xxxiv. ''tis an ill wind.' xxxv. 'le roi est mort.' xxxvi. 'vive le roi!' a gentleman of france. chapter i. the sport of fools. the death of the prince of condé, which occurred in the spring of , by depriving me of my only patron, reduced me to such straits that the winter of that year, which saw the king of navarre come to spend his christmas at st. jean d'angely, saw also the nadir of my fortunes. i did not know at this time--i may confess it to-day without shame--whither to turn for a gold crown or a new scabbard, and neither had nor discerned any hope of employment. the peace lately patched up at blois between the king of france and the league persuaded many of the huguenots that their final ruin was at hand; but it could not fill their exhausted treasury or enable them to put fresh troops into the field. the death of the prince had left the king of navarre without a rival in the affections of the huguenots; the vicomte de turenne, whose turbulent ambition already began to make itself felt, and m. de chatillon, ranking next to him. it was my ill-fortune, however, to be equally unknown to all three leaders, and as the month of december which saw me thus miserably straitened saw me reach the age of forty, which i regard, differing in that from many, as the grand climacteric of a man's life, it will be believed that i had need of all the courage which religion and a campaigner's life could supply. i had been compelled some time before to sell all my horses except the black sardinian with the white spot on its forehead; and i now found myself obliged to part also with my valet de chambre and groom, whom i dismissed on the same day, paying them their wages with the last links of gold chain left to me. it was not without grief and dismay that i saw myself thus stripped of the appurtenances of a man of birth, and driven to groom my own horse under cover of night. but this was not the worst. my dress, which suffered inevitably from this menial employment, began in no long time to bear witness to the change in my circumstances; so that on the day of the king of navarre's entrance into st. jean i dared not face the crowd, always quick to remark the poverty of those above them, but was fain to keep within doors and wear out my patience in the garret of the cutler's house in the rue de la coutellerie, which was all the lodging i could now afford. pardieu, 'tis a strange world! strange that time seems to me; more strange compared with this. my reflections on that day, i remember, were of the most melancholy. look at it how i would, i could not but see that my life's spring was over. the crows'-feet were gathering about my eyes, and my moustachios, which seemed with each day of ill-fortune to stand out more fiercely in proportion as my face grew leaner, were already grey. i was out at elbows, with empty pockets, and a sword which peered through the sheath. the meanest ruffler who, with broken feather and tarnished lace, swaggered at the heels of turenne, was scarcely to be distinguished from me. i had still, it is true, a rock and a few barren acres in brittany, the last remains of the family property; but the small sums which the peasants could afford to pay were sent annually to paris, to my mother, who had no other dower. and this i would not touch, being minded to die a gentleman, even if i could not live in that estate. small as were my expectations of success, since i had no one at the king's side to push my business, nor any friend at court, i nevertheless did all i could, in the only way that occurred to me. i drew up a petition, and lying in wait one day for m. forget, the king of navarre's secretary, placed it in his hand, begging him to lay it before that prince. he took it, and promised to do so, smoothly, and with as much lip-civility as i had a right to expect. but the careless manner in which he doubled up and thrust away the paper on which i had spent so much labour, no less than the covert sneer of his valet, who ran after me to get the customary present--and ran, as i still blush to remember, in vain--warned me to refrain from hope. in this, however, having little save hope left, i failed so signally as to spend the next day and the day after in a fever of alternate confidence and despair, the cold fit following the hot with perfect regularity. at length, on the morning of the third day--i remember it lacked but three of christmas--i heard a step on the stairs. my landlord living in his shop, and the two intervening floors being empty, i had no doubt the message was for me, and went outside the door to receive it, my first glance at the messenger confirming me in my highest hopes, as well as in all i had ever heard of the generosity of the king of navarre. for by chance i knew the youth to be one of the royal pages; a saucy fellow who had a day or two before cried 'old clothes' after me in the street. i was very far from resenting this now, however, nor did he appear to recall it; so that i drew the happiest augury as to the contents of the note he bore from the politeness with which he presented it to me. i would not, however, run the risk of a mistake, and before holding out my hand, i asked him directly and with formality if it was for me. he answered, with the utmost respect, that it was for the sieur de marsac, and for me if i were he. 'there is an answer, perhaps?' i said, seeing that he lingered. 'the king of navarre, sir,' he replied, with a low bow, 'will receive your answer in person, i believe.' and with that, replacing the hat which he had doffed out of respect to me, he turned and went down the stairs. returning to my room, and locking the door, i hastily opened the missive, which was sealed with a large seal, and wore every appearance of importance. i found its contents to exceed all my expectations. the king of navarre desired me to wait on him at noon on the following day, and the letter concluded with such expressions of kindness and goodwill as left me in no doubt of the prince's intentions. i read it, i confess, with emotions of joy and gratitude which would better have become a younger man, and then cheerfully sat down to spend the rest of the day in making such improvements in my dress as seemed possible. with a thankful heart i concluded that i had now escaped from poverty, at any rate from such poverty as is disgraceful to a gentleman; and consoled myself for the meanness of the appearance i must make at court with the reflection that a day or two would mend both habit and fortune. accordingly, it was with a stout heart that i left my lodgings a few minutes before noon next morning, and walked towards the castle. it was some time since i had made so public an appearance in the streets, which the visit of the king of navarre's court had filled with an unusual crowd, and i could not help fancying as i passed that some of the loiterers eyed me with a covert smile; and, indeed, i was shabby enough. but finding that a frown more than sufficed to restore the gravity of these gentry, i set down the appearance to my own self-consciousness, and, stroking my moustachios, strode along boldly until i saw before me, and coming to meet me, the same page who had delivered the note. he stopped in front of me with an air of consequence, and making me a low bow--whereat i saw the bystanders stare, for he was as gay a young spark as maid-of-honour could desire--he begged me to hasten, as the king awaited me in his closet. 'he has asked for you twice, sir,' he continued importantly, the feather of his cap almost sweeping the ground. 'i think,' i answered, quickening my steps, 'that the king's letter says noon, young sir. if i am late on such an occasion, he has indeed cause to complain of me.' 'tut, tut!' he rejoined, waving his hand with a dandified air. 'it is no matter. one man may steal a horse when another may not look over the wall, you know.' a man may be gray-haired, he may be sad-complexioned, and yet he may retain some of the freshness of youth. on receiving this indication of a favour exceeding all expectation, i remember i felt the blood rise to my face, and experienced the most lively gratitude. i wondered who had spoken in my behalf, who had befriended me; and concluding at last that my part in the affair at brouage had come to the king's ears, though i could not conceive through whom, i passed through the castle gates with an air of confidence and elation which was not unnatural, i think, under the circumstances. thence, following my guide, i mounted the ramp and entered the courtyard. a number of grooms and valets were lounging here, some leading horses to and fro, others exchanging jokes with the wenches who leaned from the windows, while their fellows again stamped up and down to keep their feet warm, or played ball against the wall in imitation of their masters. such knaves are ever more insolent than their betters; but i remarked that they made way for me with respect, and with rising spirits, yet a little irony, i reminded myself as i mounted the stairs of the words, 'whom the king delighteth to honour!' reaching the head of the flight, where was a soldier on guard, the page opened the door of the ante-chamber, and standing aside bade me enter. i did so, and heard the door close behind me. for a moment i stood still, bashful and confused. it seemed to me that there were a hundred people in the room, and that half the eyes which met mine were women's. though i was not altogether a stranger to such state as the prince of condé had maintained, this crowded anteroom filled me with surprise, and even with a degree of awe, of which i was the next moment ashamed. true, the flutter of silk and gleam of jewels surpassed anything i had then seen, for my fortunes had never led me to the king's court; but an instant's reflection reminded me that my fathers had held their own in such scenes, and with a bow regulated rather by this thought than by the shabbiness of my dress, i advanced amid a sudden silence. 'm. de marsac!' the page announced, in a tone which sounded a little odd in my ears; so much so, that i turned quickly to look at him. he was gone, however, and when i turned again the eyes which met mine were full of smiles. a young girl who stood near me tittered. put out of countenance by this, i looked round in embarrassment to find someone to whom i might apply. the room was long and narrow, panelled in chestnut, with a row of windows on the one hand, and two fireplaces, now heaped with glowing logs, on the other. between the fireplaces stood a rack of arms. round the nearer hearth lounged a group of pages, the exact counterparts of the young blade who had brought me hither; and talking with these were as many young gentlewomen. two great hounds lay basking in the heat, and coiled between them, with her head on the back of the larger, was a figure so strange that at another time i should have doubted my eyes. it wore the fool's motley and cap and bells, but a second glance showed me the features were a woman's. a torrent of black hair flowed loose about her neck, her eyes shone with wild merriment, and her face, keen, thin, and hectic, glared at me from the dog's back. beyond her, round the farther fireplace, clustered more than a score of gallants and ladies, of whom one presently advanced to me. 'sir,' he said politely--and i wished i could match his bow--'you wished to see?' 'the king of navarre,' i answered, doing my best. he turned to the group behind him, and said, in a peculiarly even, placid tone, 'he wishes to see the king of navarre.' then in solemn silence he bowed to me again and went back to his fellows. upon the instant, and before i could make up my mind how to take this, a second tripped forward, and saluting me, said, 'm. de marsac, i think?' 'at your service, sir,' i rejoined. in my eagerness to escape the gaze of all those eyes, and the tittering which was audible behind me, i took a step forward to be in readiness to follow him. but he gave no sign. 'm. de marsac to see the king of navarre' was all he said, speaking as the other had done to those behind. and with that he too wheeled round and went back to the fire. i stared, a first faint suspicion of the truth aroused in my mind. before i could act upon it, however--in such a situation it was no easy task to decide how to act--a third advanced with the same measured steps. 'by appointment i think, sir?' he said, bowing lower than the others. 'yes,' i replied sharply, beginning to grow warm, 'by appointment at noon.' 'm. de marsac,' he announced in a sing-song tone to those behind him, 'to see the king of navarre by appointment at noon.' and with a second bow--while i grew scarlet with mortification--he too wheeled gravely round and returned to the fireplace. i saw another preparing to advance, but he came too late. whether my face of anger and bewilderment was too much for them, or some among them lacked patience to see the end, a sudden uncontrollable shout of laughter, in which all the room joined, cut short the farce. god knows it hurt me: i winced, i looked this way and that, hoping here or there to find sympathy and help. but it seemed to me that the place rang with gibes, that every panel framed, however i turned myself, a cruel, sneering face. one behind me cried 'old clothes,' and when i turned the other hearth whispered the taunt. it added a thousandfold to my embarrassment that there was in all a certain orderliness, so that while no one moved, and none, while i looked at them, raised their voices, i seemed the more singled out, and placed as a butt in the midst. one face amid the pyramid of countenances which hid the farther fireplace so burned itself into my recollection in that miserable moment, that i never thereafter forgot it; a small, delicate woman's face, belonging to a young girl who stood boldly in front of her companions. it was a face full of pride, and, as i saw it then, of scorn--scorn that scarcely deigned to laugh; while the girl's graceful figure, slight and maidenly, yet perfectly proportioned, seemed instinct with the same feeling of contemptuous amusement. the play, which seemed long enough to me, might have lasted longer, seeing that no one there had pity on me, had i not, in my desperation, espied a door at the farther end of the room, and concluded, seeing no other, that it was the door of the king's bedchamber. the mortification i was suffering was so great that i did not hesitate, but advanced with boldness towards it. on the instant there was a lull in the laughter round me, and half a dozen voices called on me to stop. 'i have come to see the king,' i answered, turning on them fiercely, for i was by this time in no mood for browbeating, 'and i will see him!' 'he is out hunting,' cried all with one accord; and they signed imperiously to me to go back the way i had come. but having the king's appointment safe in my pouch, i thought i had good reason to disbelieve them; and taking advantage of their surprise--for they had not expected so bold a step on my part--i was at the door before they could prevent me. i heard mathurine, the fool, who had sprung to her feet, cry 'pardieu! he will take the kingdom of heaven by force!' and those were the last words i heard; for, as i lifted the latch--there was no one on guard there--a sudden swift silence fell upon the room behind me. i pushed the door gently open and went in. there were two men sitting in one of the windows, who turned and looked angrily towards me. for the rest the room was empty. the king's walking-shoes lay by his chair, and beside them the boot-hooks and jack. a dog before the fire got up slowly and growled, and one of the men, rising from the trunk on which he had been sitting, came towards me and asked me, with every sign of irritation, what i wanted there, and who had given me leave to enter. i was beginning to explain, with some diffidence--the stillness of the room sobering me--that i wished to see the king, when he who had advanced took me up sharply with, 'the king? the king? he is not here, man. he is hunting at st. valery. did they not tell you so outside?' i thought i recognised the speaker, than whom i have seldom seen a man more grave and thoughtful for his years, which were something less than mine, more striking in presence, or more soberly dressed. and being desirous to evade his question, i asked him if i had not the honour to address m. du plessis mornay; for that wise and courtly statesman, now a pillar of henry's counsels, it was. 'the same, sir,' he replied abruptly, and without taking his eyes from me. 'i am mornay. what of that?' 'i am m. de marsac,' i explained. and there i stopped, supposing that, as he was in the king's confidence, this would make my errand clear to him. but i was disappointed. 'well, sir?' he said, and waited impatiently. so cold a reception, following such treatment as i had suffered outside, would have sufficed to have dashed my spirits utterly had i not felt the king's letter in my pocket. being pretty confident, however, that a single glance at this would alter m. du mornay's bearing for the better, i hastened, looking on it as a kind of talisman, to draw it out and present it to him. he took it, and looked at it, and opened it, but with so cold and immovable an aspect as made my heart sink more than all that had gone before. 'what is amiss?' i cried, unable to keep silence. ''tis from the king, sir.' 'a king in motley!' he answered, his lip curling. the sense of his words did not at once strike home to me, and i murmured, in great disorder, that the king had sent for me. 'the king knows nothing of it,' was his blunt answer, bluntly given. and he thrust the paper back into my hands. 'it is a trick,' he continued, speaking with the same abruptness, 'for which you have doubtless to thank some of those idle young rascals without. you had sent an application to the king, i suppose? just so. no doubt they got hold of it, and this is the result. they ought to be whipped.' it was not possible for me to doubt any longer that what he said was true. i saw in a moment all my hopes vanish, all my plans flung to the winds; and in the first shock of the discovery i could neither find voice to answer him nor strength to withdraw. in a kind of vision i seemed to see my own lean, haggard face looking at me as in a glass, and, reading despair in my eyes, could have pitied myself. my disorder was so great that m. du mornay observed it. looking more closely at me, he two or three times muttered my name, and at last said, 'm. de marsac? ha! i remember. you were in the affair of brouage, were you not?' i nodded my head in token of assent, being unable at the moment to speak, and so shaken that perforce i leaned against the wall, my head sunk on my breast. the memory of my age, my forty years, and my poverty, pressed hard upon me, filling me with despair and bitterness. i could have wept, but no tears came. m. du mornay, averting his eyes from me, took two or three short, impatient turns up and down the chamber. when he addressed me again his tone was full of respect, mingled with such petulance as one brave man might feel, seeing another so hard pressed. 'm. de marsac,' he said, 'you have my sympathy. it is a shame that men who have served the cause should be reduced to such straits. were it possible for me to increase my own train at present, i should consider it an honour to have you with me. but i am hard put to it myself, and so are we all, and the king of navarre not least among us. he has lived for a month upon a wood which m. de rosny has cut down. i will mention your name to him, but i should be cruel rather than kind were i not to warn you that nothing can come of it.' with that he offered me his hand, and, cheered as much by this mark of consideration as by the kindness of his expressions, i rallied my spirits. true, i wanted comfort more substantial, but it was not to be had. i thanked him therefore as becomingly as i could, and seeing there was no help for it, took my leave of him, and slowly and sorrowfully withdrew from the room. alas! to escape i had to face the outside world, for which his kind words were an ill preparation. i had to run the gauntlet of the ante-chamber. the moment i appeared, or rather the moment the door closed behind me, i was hailed with a shout of derision. while one cried, 'way! way for the gentleman who has seen the king!' another hailed me uproariously as governor of guyenne, and a third requested a commission in my regiment. i heard these taunts with a heart full almost to bursting. it seemed to me an unworthy thing that, merely by reason of my poverty, i should be derided by youths who had still all their battles before them; but to stop or reproach them would only, as i well knew, make matters worse, and, moreover, i was so sore stricken that i had little spirit left even to speak. accordingly, i made my way through them with what speed i might, my head bent, and my countenance heavy with shame and depression. in this way--i wonder there were not among them some generous enough to pity me--i had nearly gained the door, and was beginning to breathe, when i found my path stopped by that particular young lady of the court whom i have described above. something had for the moment diverted her attention from me, and it required a word from her companions to apprise her of my near neighbourhood. she turned then, as one taken by surprise, and finding me so close to her that my feet all but touched her gown, she stepped quickly aside, and with a glance as cruel as her act, drew her skirts away from contact with me. the insult stung me, i know not why, more than all the gibes which were being flung at me from every side, and moved by a sudden impulse i stopped, and in the bitterness of my heart spoke to her. 'mademoiselle,' i said, bowing low--for, as i have stated, she was small, and more like a fairy than a woman, though her face expressed both pride and self-will--'mademoiselle,' i said sternly, 'such as i am, i have fought for france! some day you may learn that there are viler things in the world--and have to bear them--than a poor gentleman!' the words were scarcely out of my mouth before i repented of them, for mathurine, the fool, who was at my elbow, was quick to turn them into ridicule. raising her hands above our heads, as in act to bless us, she cried out that monsieur, having gained so rich an office, desired a bride to grace it; and this, bringing down upon us a coarse shout of laughter and some coarser gibes, i saw the young girl's face flush hotly. the next moment a voice in the crowd cried roughly, 'out upon his wedding suit!' and with that a sweetmeat struck me in the face. another and another followed, covering me with flour and comfits. this was the last straw. for a moment, forgetting where i was, i turned upon them, red and furious, every hair in my moustachios bristling. the next, the full sense of my impotence and of the folly of resentment prevailed with me, and, dropping my head upon my breast, i rushed from the room. i believe that the younger among them followed me, and that the cry of 'old clothes!' pursued me even to the door of my lodgings in the rue de la coutellerie. but in the misery of the moment, and my strong desire to be within doors and alone, i barely noticed this, and am not certain whether it was so or not. chapter ii. the king of navarre. i have already referred to the danger with which the alliance between henry the third and the league menaced us, an alliance whereof the news, it was said, had blanched the king of navarre's moustache in a single night. notwithstanding this, the court had never shown itself more frolicsome or more free from care than at the time of which i am speaking; even the lack of money seemed for the moment forgotten. one amusement followed another, and though, without doubt, something was doing under the surface--for the wiser of his foes held our prince in particular dread when he seemed most deeply sunk in pleasure--to the outward eye st. jean d'angely appeared to be given over to enjoyment from one end to the other. the stir and bustle of the court reached me even in my garret, and contributed to make that christmas, which fell on a sunday, a trial almost beyond sufferance. all day long the rattle of hoofs on the pavement, and the laughter of riders bent on diversion, came up to me, making the hard stool seem harder, the bare walls more bare, and increasing a hundredfold the solitary gloom in which i sat. for as sunshine deepens the shadows which fall athwart it, and no silence is like that which follows the explosion of a mine, so sadness and poverty are never more intolerable than when hope and wealth rub elbows with them. true, the great sermon which m. d'amours preached in the market-house on the morning of christmas-day cheered me, as it cheered all the more sober spirits. i was present myself, sitting in an obscure corner of the building, and heard the famous prediction, which was so soon to be fulfilled. 'sire,' said the preacher, turning to the king, of navarre, and referring, with the boldness that ever characterised that great man and noble christian, to the attempt then being made to exclude the prince from the succession--'sire, what god at your birth gave you man cannot take away. a little while, a little patience, and you shall cause us to preach beyond the loire! with you for our joshua we shall cross the jordan, and in the promised land the church shall be set up.' words so brave, and so well adapted to encourage the huguenots in the crisis through which their affairs were then passing, charmed all hearers; save indeed, those--and they were few--who, being devoted to the vicomte de turenne, disliked, though they could not controvert, this public acknowledgment of the king of navarre as the huguenot leader. the pleasure of those present was evinced in a hundred ways, and to such an extent that even i returned to my chamber soothed and exalted, and found, in dreaming of the speedy triumph of the cause, some compensation for my own ill-fortune. as the day wore on, however, and the evening brought no change, but presented to me the same dreary prospect with which morning had made me familiar, i confess without shame that my heart sank once more, particularly as i saw that i should be forced in a day or two to sell either my remaining horse or some part of my equipment as essential; a step which i could not contemplate without feelings of the utmost despair. in this state of mind i was adding up by the light of a solitary candle the few coins i had left, when i heard footsteps ascending the stairs. i made them out to be the steps of two persons, and was still lost in conjectures who they might be, when a hand knocked gently at my door. fearing another trick, i did not at once open, the more as there was something stealthy and insinuating in the knock. thereupon my visitors held a whispered consultation; then they, knocked again. i asked loudly who was there, but to this they did not choose to give any answer, while i, on my part, determined not to open until they did. the door was strong, and i smiled grimly at the thought that this time they would have their trouble for their pains. to my surprise, however, they did not desist, and go away, as i expected, but continued to knock at intervals and whisper much between times. more than once they called me softly by name and bade me open, but as they steadily refrained from saying who they were, i sat still. occasionally i heard them laugh, but under their breath as it were; and persuaded by this that they were bent on a frolic, i might have persisted in my silence until midnight, which was not more than two hours off, had not a slight sound, as of a rat gnawing behind the wainscot, drawn my attention to the door. raising my candle and shading my eyes i espied something small and bright protruding beneath it, and sprang up, thinking they were about to prise it in. to my surprise, however, i could discover, on taking the candle to the threshold, nothing more threatening than a couple of gold livres, which had been thrust through the crevice between the door and the floor. my astonishment may be conceived. i stood for full a minute staring at the coins, the candle in my hand. then, reflecting that the young sparks at the court would be very unlikely to spend such a sum on a jest, i hesitated no longer, but putting down the candle, drew the bolt of the door, purposing to confer with my visitors outside. in this, however, i was disappointed, for the moment the door was open they pushed forcibly past me and, entering the room pell-mell, bade me by signs to close the door again. i did so suspiciously, and without averting my eyes from my visitors. great were my embarrassment and confusion, therefore, when, the door being shut, they dropped their cloaks one after the other, and i saw before me m. du mornay and the well-known figure of the king of navarre. they seemed so much diverted, looking at one another and laughing, that for a moment i thought some chance resemblance deceived me, and that here were my jokers again. hence while a man might count ten i stood staring; and the king was the first to speak. 'we have made no mistake, du mornay, have we?' he said, casting a laughing glance at me. 'no, sire,' du mornay answered. 'this is the sieur de marsac, the gentleman whom i mentioned to you.' i hastened, confused, wondering, and with a hundred apologies, to pay my respects to the king. he speedily cut me short, however, saying, with an air of much kindness, 'of marsac, in brittany, i think, sir?' 'the same, sire.' 'then you are of the family of bonne?' 'i am the last survivor of that family, sire,' i answered respectfully. 'it has played its part,' he rejoined. and therewith he took his seat on my stool with an easy grace which charmed me. 'your motto is "_bonne foi_," is it not? and marsac, if i remember rightly, is not far from rennes, on the vilaine?' i answered that it was, adding, with a full heart, that it grieved me to be compelled to receive so great a prince in so poor a lodging. 'well, i confess,' du mornay struck in, looking carelessly round him, 'you have a queer taste, m. de marsac, in the arrangement of your furniture. you--' 'mornay!' the king cried sharply. 'sire?' 'chut! your elbow is in the candle. beware of it!' but i well understood him. if my heart had been full before, it overflowed now. poverty is not so shameful as the shifts to which it drives men. i had been compelled some days before, in order to make as good a show as possible--since it is the undoubted duty of a gentleman to hide his nakedness from impertinent eyes, and especially from the eyes of the _canaille_, who are wont to judge from externals--to remove such of my furniture and equipage as remained to that side of the room, which was visible from without when the door was open. this left the farther side of the room vacant and bare. to anyone within doors the artifice was, of course, apparent, and i am bound to say that m. du mornay's words brought the blood to my brow. i rejoiced, however, a moment later that he had uttered them; for without them i might never have known, or known so early, the kindness of heart and singular quickness of apprehension which ever distinguished the king, my master. so, in my heart, i began to call him from that hour. the king of navarre was at this time thirty-five years old, his hair brown, his complexion ruddy, his moustache, on one side at least, beginning to turn grey. his features, which nature had cast in a harsh and imperious mould, were relieved by a constant sparkle and animation such as i have never seen in any other man, but in him became ever more conspicuous in gloomy and perilous times. inured to danger from his earliest youth, he had come to enjoy it as others a festival, hailing its advent with a reckless gaiety which astonished even brave men, and led others to think him the least prudent of mankind. yet such he was not: nay, he was the opposite of this. never did marshal of france make more careful dispositions for a battle--albeit once in it he bore himself like any captain of horse--nor ever did du mornay himself sit down to a conference with a more accurate knowledge of affairs. his prodigious wit and the affability of his manners, while they endeared him to his servants, again and again blinded his adversaries; who, thinking that so much brilliance could arise only from a shallow nature, found when it was too late that they had been outwitted by him whom they contemptuously styled the prince of béarn, a man a hundredfold more astute than themselves, and master alike of pen and sword. much of this, which all the world now knows, i learned afterwards. at the moment i could think of little save the king's kindness; to which he added by insisting that i should sit on the bed while we talked. 'you wonder, m. de marsac,' he said, 'what brings me here, and why i have come to you instead of sending for you? still more, perhaps, why i have come to you at night and with such precautions? i will tell you. but first, that my coming may not fill you with false hopes, let me say frankly, that though i may relieve your present necessities, whether you fall into the plan i am going to mention, or not, i cannot take you into my service; wherein, indeed, every post is doubly filled. du mornay mentioned your name to me, but in fairness to others i had to answer that i could do nothing.' i am bound to confess that this strange exordium dashed hopes which had already risen to a high pitch. recovering myself as quickly as possible, however, i murmured that the honour of a visit from the king of navarre was sufficient happiness for me. 'nay, but that honour i must take from you' he replied, smiling; 'though i see that you would make an excellent courtier--far better than du mornay here, who never in his life made so pretty a speech. for i must lay my commands on you to keep this visit a secret, m. de marsac. should but the slightest whisper of it get abroad, your usefulness, as far as i am concerned, would be gone, and gone for good!' so remarkable a statement filled me with wonder i could scarcely disguise. it was with difficulty i found words to assure the king that his commands should be faithfully obeyed. 'of that i am sure,' he answered with the utmost kindness. 'were i not, and sure, too, from what i am told of your gallantry when my cousin took brouage, that you are a man of deeds rather than words, i should not be here with the proposition i am going to lay before you. it is this. i can give you no hope of public employment, m. de marsac, but i can offer you an adventure--if adventures be to your taste--as dangerous and as thankless as any amadis ever undertook.' 'as thankless, sire?' i stammered, doubting if i had heard aright, the expression was so strange. 'as thankless,' he answered, his keen eyes seeming to read my soul. 'i am frank with you, you see, sir,' he continued, carelessly. 'i can suggest this adventure--it is for the good of the state--i can do no more. the king of navarre cannot appear in it, nor can he protect you. succeed or fail in it, you stand alone. the only promise i make is, that if it ever be safe for me to acknowledge the act, i will reward the doer.' he paused, and for a few moments i stared at him in sheer amazement. what did he mean? were he and the other real figures, or was i dreaming? 'do you understand?' he asked at length, with a touch of impatience. 'yes, sire, i think i do,' i murmured, very certain in truth and reality that i did not. 'what do you say, then--yes or no?' he rejoined. 'will you undertake the adventure, or would you hear more before you make up your mind?' i hesitated. had i been a younger man by ten years i should doubtless have cried assent there and then, having been all my life ready enough to embark on such enterprises as offered a chance of distinction. but something in the strangeness of the king's preface, although i had it in my heart to die for him, gave me check, and i answered, with an air of great humility, 'you will think me but a poor courtier now, sire, yet he is a fool who jumps into a ditch without measuring the depth. i would fain, if i may say it without disrespect, hear all that you can tell me.' 'then i fear,' he answered quickly, 'if you would have more light on the matter, my friend, you must get another candle.' i started, he spoke so abruptly; but perceiving that the candle had indeed burned down to the socket, i rose, with many apologies, and fetched another from the cupboard. it did not occur to me at the moment, though it did later, that the king had purposely sought this opportunity of consulting with his companion. i merely remarked, when i returned to my place on the bed, that they were sitting a little nearer one another, and that the king eyed me before he spoke--though he still swung one foot carelessly in the air--with close attention. 'i speak to you, of course, sir,' he presently went on, 'in confidence, believing you to be an honourable as well as a brave man. that which i wish you to do is briefly, and in a word, to carry off a lady. nay,' he added quickly, with a laughing grimace, 'have no fear! she is no sweetheart of mine, nor should i go to my grave friend here did i need assistance of that kind. henry of bourbon, i pray god, will always be able to free his own lady-love. this is a state affair, and a matter of quite another character, though we cannot at present entrust you with the meaning of it.' i bowed in silence, feeling somewhat chilled and perplexed, as who would not, having such an invitation before him? i had anticipated an affair with men only--a secret assault or a petard expedition. but seeing the bareness of my room, and the honour the king was doing me, i felt i had no choice, and i answered, 'that being the case, sire, i am wholly at your service.' 'that is well,' he answered briskly, though methought he looked at du mornay reproachfully, as doubting his commendation of me. 'but will you say the same,' he continued, removing his eyes to me, and speaking slowly, as though he would try me, 'when i tell you that the lady to be carried off is the ward of the vicomte de turenne, whose arm is well-nigh as long as my own, and who would fain make it longer; who never travels, as he told me yesterday, with less than fifty gentlemen, and has a thousand arquebusiers in his pay? is the adventure still to your liking, m. de marsac, now that you know that?' 'it is more to my liking, sire,' i answered stoutly. 'understand this too,' he rejoined. 'it is essential that this lady, who is at present confined in the vicomte's house at chizé, should be released; but it is equally essential that there should be no breach between the vicomte and myself. therefore the affair must be the work of an independent man, who has never been in my service, nor in any way connected with me. if captured, you pay the penalty without recourse to me.' 'i fully understand, sire,' i answered. 'ventre saint gris!' he cried, breaking into a low laugh. 'i swear the man is more afraid of the lady than he is of the vicomte! that is not the way of most of our court.' du mornay, who had been sitting nursing his knee in silence, pursed up his lips, though it was easy to see that he was well content with the king's approbation. he now intervened. 'with your permission, sire,' he said, 'i will let this gentleman know the details.' 'do, my friend,' the king answered. 'and be short, for if we are here much longer i shall be missed, and in a twinkling the court will have found me a new mistress.' he spoke in jest and with a laugh, but i saw du mornay start at the words, as though they were little to his liking; and i learned afterwards that the court was really much exercised at this time with the question who would be the next favourite, the king's passion for the countess de la guiche being evidently on the wane, and that which he presently evinced for madame de guercheville being as yet a matter of conjecture. du mornay took no overt notice of the king's words, however, but proceeded to give me my directions. 'chizé, which you know by name,' he said, 'is six leagues from here. mademoiselle de la vire is confined in the northwest room, on the first-floor, overlooking the park. more i cannot tell you, except that her woman's name is fanchette, and that she is to be trusted. the house is well guarded, and you will need four or five men. there are plenty of cut-throats to be hired, only see, m. de marsac, that they are such as you can manage, and that mademoiselle takes no hurt among them. have horses in waiting, and the moment you have released the lady ride north with her as fast as her strength will permit. indeed, you must not spare her, if turenne be on your heels. you should be across the loire in sixty hours after leaving chizé.' 'across the loire?' i exclaimed in astonishment. 'yes, sir, across the loire,' he replied, with some sternness. 'your task, be good enough to understand, is to convoy mademoiselle de la vire with all speed to blois. there, attracting as little notice as may be, you will inquire for the baron de rosny at the bleeding heart, in the rue de st. denys. he will take charge of the lady, or direct you how to dispose of her, and your task will then be accomplished. you follow me?' 'perfectly,' i answered, speaking in my turn with some dryness. 'but mademoiselle i understand is young. what if she will not accompany me, a stranger, entering her room at night, and by the window?' 'that has been thought of was the answer. he turned to the king of navarre, who, after a moment's search, produced a small object from his pouch. this he gave to his companion, and the latter transferred it to me. i took it with curiosity. it was the half of a gold carolus, the broken edge of the coin being rough and jagged. 'show that to mademoiselle, my friend,' du mornay continued, 'and she will accompany you. she has the other half.' 'but be careful,' henry added eagerly, 'to make no mention, even to her, of the king of navarre. you mark me, m. de marsac! if you have at any time occasion to speak of me, you may have the honour of calling me _your friend_, and referring to me always in the same manner.' this he said with so gracious an air that i was charmed, and thought myself happy indeed to be addressed in this wise by a prince whose name was already so glorious. nor was my satisfaction diminished when his companion drew out a bag containing, as he told me, three hundred crowns in gold, and placed it in my hands, bidding me defray therefrom the cost of the journey. 'be careful, however,' he added earnestly, 'to avoid, in hiring your men, any appearance of wealth, lest the adventure seem to be suggested by some outside person; instead of being dictated by the desperate state of your own fortunes. promise rather than give, so far as that will avail. and for what you must give, let each livre seem to be the last in your pouch.' henry nodded assent. 'excellent advice!' he muttered, rising and drawing on his cloak, 'such as you ever give me, mornay, and i as seldom take--more's the pity! but, after all, of little avail without this.' he lifted my sword from the table as he spoke, and weighed it in his hand. 'a pretty tool,' he continued, turning suddenly and looking me very closely in the face. 'a very pretty tool. were i in your place, m. de marsac, i would see that it hung loose in the scabbard. ay, and more, man, use it!' he added, sinking his voice and sticking out his chin, while his grey eyes, looking ever closer into mine, seemed to grow cold and hard as steel. 'use it to the last, for if you fall into turenne's hands, god help you! i cannot!' 'if i am taken, sire,' i answered, trembling, but not with fear, 'my fate be on my own head.' i saw the king's eyes soften at that, and his face change so swiftly that i scarce knew him for the same man. he let the weapon drop with a clash on the table. 'ventre saint gris!' he exclaimed with a strange thrill of yearning in his tone. 'i swear by god, i would i were in your shoes, sir. to strike a blow or two with no care what came of it. to take the road with a good horse and a good sword, and see what fortune would send. to be rid of all this statecraft and protocolling, and never to issue another declaration in this world, but just to be for once a gentleman of france, with all to win and nothing to lose save the love of my lady! ah! mornay, would it not be sweet to leave all this fret and fume, and ride away to the green woods by coarraze?' 'certainly, if you prefer them to the louvre, sire,' du mornay answered drily; while i stood, silent and amazed, before this strange man, who could so suddenly change from grave to gay, and one moment spoke so sagely, and the next like any wild lad in his teens. 'certainly,' he answered, 'if that be your choice, sire; and if you think that even there the duke of guise will leave you in peace. turenne, i am sure, will be glad to hear of your decision. doubtless he will be elected protector of the churches. nay, sire, for shame!' du mornay continued, almost with sternness. 'would you leave france, which at odd times i have heard you say you loved, to shift for herself? would you deprive her of the only man who does love her for her own sake?' 'well, well, but she is such a fickle sweetheart, my friend,' the king answered, laughing, the side glance of his eye on me. 'never was one so coy or so hard to clip! and, besides, has not the pope divorced us?' 'the pope! a fig for the pope!' du mornay rejoined with impatient heat. 'what has he to do with france? an impertinent meddler, and an italian to boot! i would he and all the brood of them were sunk a hundred fathoms deep in the sea. but, meantime, i would send him a text to digest.' '_exemplum?_' said the king. 'whom god has joined together let no man put asunder.' 'amen!' quoth henry softly. 'and france is a fair and comely bride.' after that he kept such a silence, falling as it seemed to me into a brown study, that he went away without so much as bidding me farewell, or being conscious, as far as i could tell, of my presence. du mornay exchanged a few words with me, to assure himself that i understood what i had to do, and then, with many kind expressions, which i did not fail to treasure up and con over in the times that were coming, hastened downstairs after his master. my joy when i found myself alone may be conceived. yet was it no ecstasy, but a sober exhilaration; such as stirred my pulses indeed, and bade me once more face the world with a firm eye and an assured brow, but was far from holding out before me a troubadour's palace or any dazzling prospect. the longer i dwelt on the interview, the more clearly i saw the truth. as the glamour which henry's presence and singular kindness had cast over me began to lose some of its power, i recognised more and more surely why he had come to me. it was not out of any special favour for one whom he knew by report only, if at all by name; but because he had need of a man poor, and therefore reckless, middle-aged (of which comes discretion), obscure--therefore a safe instrument; to crown all, a gentleman, seeing that both a secret and a woman were in question. withal i wondered too. looking from the bag of money on the table to the broken coin in my hand, i scarcely knew which to admire more: the confidence which entrusted the one to a man broken and beggared, or the courage of the gentlewoman who should accompany me on the faith of the other. chapter iii. boot and saddle. as was natural, i meditated deeply and far into the night on the difficulties of the task entrusted to me. i saw that it fell into two parts: the release of the lady, and her safe conduct to blois, a distance of sixty leagues. the release i thought it probable i could effect single-handed, or with one companion only; but in the troubled condition of the country at this time, more particularly on both sides of the loire, i scarcely saw how i could ensure a lady's safety on the road northwards unless i had with me at least five swords. to get these together at a few hours' notice promised to be no easy task; although the presence of the court of navarre had filled st. jean with a crowd of adventurers. yet the king's command was urgent, and at some sacrifice, even at some risk, must be obeyed. pressed by these considerations, i could think of no better man to begin with than fresnoy. his character was bad, and he had long forfeited such claim as he had ever possessed--i believe it was a misty one? on the distaff side--to gentility. but the same cause which had rendered me destitute--i mean the death of the prince of condé--had stripped him to the last rag; and this, perhaps, inclining me to serve him, i was the more quick to see his merits. i knew him already for a hardy, reckless man, very capable of striking a shrewd blow. i gave him credit for being trusty, as long as his duty jumped with his interest. accordingly, as soon as it was light, having fed and groomed the cid, which was always the first employment of my day, i set out in search of fresnoy, and was presently lucky enough to find him taking his morning draught outside the 'three pigeons,' a little inn not far from the north gate. it was more than a fortnight since i had set eyes on him, and the lapse of time had worked so great a change for the worse in him that, forgetting my own shabbiness, i looked at him askance, as doubting the wisdom of enlisting one who bore so plainly the marks of poverty and dissipation. his great face--he was a large man--had suffered recent ill-usage, and was swollen and discoloured, one eye being as good as closed. he was unshaven, his hair was ill-kempt, his doublet unfastened at the throat, and torn and stained besides. despite the cold--for the morning was sharp and frosty, though free from wind--there were half a dozen packmen drinking and squabbling before the inn, while the beasts they drove quenched their thirst at the trough. but these men seemed with one accord to leave him in possession of the bench at which he sat; nor did i wonder much at this when i saw the morose and savage glance which he shot at me as i approached. whether he read my first impressions in my face, or for some other reason felt distaste for my company, i could not determine. but, undeterred by his behaviour, i sat down beside him and called for wine. he nodded sulkily in answer to my greeting, and cast a half-shamed, half-angry look at me out of the corners of his eyes. 'you need not look at me as though i were a dog,' he muttered presently. 'you are not so very spruce yourself, my friend. but i suppose you have grown proud since you got that fat appointment at court!' and he laughed out loud, so that i confess i was in two minds whether i should not force the jest down his ugly throat. however i restrained myself, though my cheeks burned. 'you have heard about it, then,' i said, striving to speak indifferently. 'who has not?' he said, laughing with his lips, though his eyes were far from merry. 'the sieur de marsac's appointment! ha! ha! why, man----' 'enough of it now!' i exclaimed. and i dare say i writhed on my seat. 'as far as i am concerned the jest is a stale one, sir, and does not amuse me.' 'but it amuses me,' he rejoined with a grin. 'let it be, nevertheless,' i said; and i think he read a warning in my eyes. 'i have come to speak to you upon another matter.' he did not refuse to listen, but threw one leg over the other, and looking up at the inn-sign began to whistle in a rude, offensive manner. still, having an object in view, i controlled myself and continued. 'it is this, my friend: money is not very plentiful at present with either of us.' before i could say any more he turned on me savagely, and with a loud oath thrust his bloated face, flushed with passion, close to mine. 'now look here, m. de marsac! he cried violently, 'once for all, it is no good! i have not got the money, and i cannot pay it. i said a fortnight ago, when you lent it, that you should have it this week. well,' slapping his hand on the bench, 'i have not got it, and it is no good beginning upon me. you cannot have it, and that is flat!' 'damn the money!' i cried. 'what?' he exclaimed, scarcely believing his ears. 'let the money be!' i repeated fiercely. 'do you hear? i have not come about it. i am here to offer you work--good, well-paid work--if you will enlist with me and play me fair, fresnoy.' 'play fair!' he cried with an oath. 'there, there,' i said, 'i am willing to let bygones be bygones if you are. the point is, that i have an adventure on hand, and, wanting help, can pay you for it.' he looked at me cunningly, his eye travelling over each rent and darn in my doublet. 'i will help you fast enough,' he said at last. 'but i should like to see the money first.' 'you shall,' i answered. 'then i am with you, my friend. count on me till death!' he cried, rising and laying his hand in mine with a boisterous frankness which did not deceive me into trusting him far. 'and now, whose is the affair, and what is it?' 'the affair is mine,' i said coldly. 'it is to carry off a lady.' he whistled and looked me over again, an impudent leer in his eyes. 'a lady?' he exclaimed. 'umph! i could understand a young spark going in for such--but that's your affair. who is it?' 'that is my affair, too,' i answered coolly, disgusted by the man's venality and meanness, and fully persuaded that i must trust him no farther than the length of my sword. 'all i want you to do, m. fresnoy,' i continued stiffly, 'is to place yourself at my disposal and under my orders for ten days. i will find you a horse and pay you--the enterprise is a hazardous one, and i take that into account--two gold crowns a day, and ten more if we succeed in reaching a place of safety.' 'such a place as----' 'never mind that,' i replied. 'the question is, do you accept?' he looked down sullenly, and i could see he was greatly angered by my determination to keep the matter to myself. 'am i to know no more than that?' he asked, digging the point of his scabbard again and again into the ground. 'no more,' i answered firmly. 'i am bent on a desperate attempt to mend my fortunes before they fall as low as yours; and that is as much as i mean to tell living man. if you are loth to risk your life with your eyes shut, say so, and i will go to someone else.' but he was not in a position, as i well knew, to refuse such an offer, and presently he accepted it with a fresh semblance of heartiness. i told him i should want four troopers to escort us, and these he offered to procure, saying that he knew just the knaves to suit me. i bade him hire two only, however, being too wise to put myself altogether in his hands; and then, having given him money to buy himself a horse--i made it a term that the men should bring their own--and named a rendezvous for the first hour after noon, i parted from him and went rather sadly away. for i began to see that the king had not underrated the dangers of an enterprise on which none but desperate men and such as were down in the world could be expected to embark. seeing this, and also a thing which followed clearly from it--that i should have as much to fear from my own company as from the enemy--i looked forward with little hope to a journey during every day and every hour of which i must bear a growing weight of fear and responsibility. it was too late to turn back, however, and i went about my preparations, if with little cheerfulness, at least with steadfast purpose. i had my sword ground and my pistols put in order by the cutler over whom i lodged, and who performed this last office for me with the same goodwill which had characterised all his dealings with me. i sought out and hired a couple of stout fellows whom i believed to be indifferently honest, but who possessed the advantage of having horses; and besides bought two led horses myself for mademoiselle and her woman. such other equipments as were absolutely necessary i purchased, reducing my stock of money in this way to two hundred and ten crowns. how to dispose of this sum so that it might be safe and yet at my command was a question which greatly exercised me. in the end i had recourse to my friend the cutler, who suggested hiding a hundred crowns of it in my cap, and deftly contrived a place for the purpose. this, the cap being lined with steel, was a matter of no great difficulty. a second hundred i sewed up in the stuffing of my saddle, placing the remainder in my pouch for present necessities. a small rain was falling in the streets when, a little after noon, i started with my two knaves behind me and made for the north gate. so many were moving this way and the other that we passed unnoticed, and might have done so had we numbered six swords instead of three. when we reached the rendezvous, a mile beyond the gate, we found fresnoy already there, taking shelter in the lee of a big holly-tree. he had four horsemen with him, and on our appearance rode forward to meet us, crying heartily, 'welcome, m. le capitaine!' 'welcome, certainly,' i answered, pulling the cid up sharply, and holding off from him. 'but who are these, m. fresnoy?' and i pointed with my riding-cane to his four companions. he tried to pass the matter off with a laugh. 'oh! these?' he said. 'that is soon explained. the evangelists would not be divided, so i brought them all--matthew, mark, luke, and john--thinking it likely you might fail to secure your men. and i will warrant them for four as gallant boys as you will ever find behind you!' they were certainly four as arrant ruffians as i had ever seen before me, and i saw i must not hesitate. 'two or none, m. fresnoy,' i said firmly. 'i gave you a commission for two, and two i will take--matthew and mark, or luke and john, as you please.' ''tis a pity to break the party,' said he, scowling. 'if that be all,' i retorted, 'one of my men is called john. and we will dub the other luke, if that will mend the matter.' 'the prince of condé,' he muttered sullenly, 'employed these men.' 'the prince of condé employed some queer people sometimes, m. fresnoy,' i answered, looking him straight between the eyes, 'as we all must. a truce to this, if you please. we will take matthew and mark. the other two be good enough to dismiss.' he seemed to waver for a moment, as if he had a mind to disobey, but in the end, thinking better of it, he bade the men return; and as i complimented each of them with a piece of silver, they went off, after some swearing, in tolerably good humour. thereon fresnoy was for taking the road at once, but having no mind to be followed, i gave the word to wait until the two were out of sight. i think, as we sat our horses in the rain, the holly-bush not being large enough to shelter us all, we were as sorry a band as ever set out to rescue a lady; nor was it without pain that i looked round and saw myself reduced to command such people. there was scarcely one whole un-patched garment among us, and three of my squires had but a spur apiece. to make up for this deficiency we mustered two black eyes, fresnoy's included, and a broken nose. matthew's nag lacked a tail, and, more remarkable still, its rider, as i presently discovered, was stone-deaf; while mark's sword was innocent of a scabbard, and his bridle was plain rope. one thing, indeed, i observed with pleasure. the two men who had come with me looked askance at the two who had come with fresnoy, and these returned the stare with interest. on this division and on the length of my sword i based all my hopes of safety and of something more. on it i was about to stake, not my own life only--which was no great thing, seeing what my prospects were--but the life and honour of a woman, young, helpless, and as yet unknown to me. weighed down as i was by these considerations, i had to bear the additional burden of hiding my fears and suspicions under a cheerful demeanour. i made a short speech to my following, who one and all responded by swearing to stand by me to the death. i then gave the word, and we started, fresnoy and i leading the way, luke and john with the led horses following, and the other two bringing up the rear. the rain continuing to fall and the country in this part being dreary and monotonous, even in fair weather, i felt my spirits sink still lower as the day advanced. the responsibility i was going to incur assumed more serious proportions each time i scanned my following; while fresnoy, plying me with perpetual questions respecting my plans, was as uneasy a companion as my worst enemy could have wished me. 'come!' he grumbled presently, when we had covered four leagues or so, 'you have not told me yet, sieur, where we stay to-night. you are travelling so slowly that----' 'i am saving the horses,' i answered shortly. 'we shall do a long day to-morrow.' 'yours looks fit for a week of days,' he sneered, with an evil look at my sardinian, which was, indeed, in better case than its master. 'it is sleek enough, any way!' 'it is as good as it looks,' i answered, a little nettled by his tone. 'there is a better here,' he responded. 'i don't see it,' i said. i had already eyed the nags all round, and assured myself that, ugly and blemished as they were, they were up to their work. but i had discerned no special merit among them. i looked them over again now, and came to the same conclusion--that, except the led horses, which i had chosen with some care, there was nothing among them to vie with the cid, either in speed or looks. i told fresnoy so. 'would you like to try?' he said tauntingly. i laughed, adding, 'if you think i am going to tire our horses by racing them, with such work as we have before us, you are mistaken, fresnoy. i am not a boy, you know.' 'there need be no question of racing,' he answered more quietly. 'you have only to get on that rat-tailed bay of matthew's to feel its paces and say i am right.' i looked at the bay, a bald-faced, fiddle-headed horse, and saw that, with no signs of breeding, it was still a big-boned animal with good shoulders and powerful hips. i thought it possible fresnoy might be right, and if so, and the bay's manners were tolerable, it might do for mademoiselle better than the horse i had chosen. at any rate, if we had a fast horse among us, it was well to know the fact, so bidding matthew change with me, and be careful of the cid, i mounted the bay, and soon discovered that its paces were easy and promised speed, while its manners seemed as good as even a timid rider could desire. our road at the time lay across a flat desolate heath, dotted here and there with thorn-bushes; the track being broken and stony, extended more than a score of yards in width, through travellers straying to this side and that to escape the worst places. fresnoy and i, in making the change, had fallen slightly behind the other three, and were riding abreast of matthew on the cid. 'well,' he said, 'was i not right?' 'in part,' i answered. 'the horse is better than its looks.' 'like many others,' he rejoined, a spark of resentment in his tone--'men as well as horses, m. de marsac. but what do you say? shall we canter on a little and overtake the others?' thinking it well to do so, i assented readily, and we started together. we had ridden, however, no more than a hundred yards, and i was only beginning to extend the bay, when fresnoy, slightly drawing rein, turned in his saddle and looked back. the next moment he cried, 'hallo! what is this? those fellows are not following us, are they?' i turned sharply to look. at that moment, without falter or warning, the bay horse went down under me as if shot dead, throwing me half a dozen yards over its head; and that so suddenly that i had no time to raise my arms, but, falling heavily on my head and shoulder, lost consciousness. i have had many falls, but no other to vie with that in utter unexpectedness. when i recovered my senses i found myself leaning, giddy and sick, against the bole of an old thorn-tree. fresnoy and matthew supported me on either side, and asked me how i found myself; while the other three men, their forms black against the stormy evening sky, sat their horses a few paces in front of me. i was too much dazed at first to see more, and this only in a mechanical fashion; but gradually, my brain grew clearer, and i advanced from wondering who the strangers round me were to recognising them, and finally to remembering what had happened to me. 'is the horse hurt?' i muttered as soon as i could speak. 'not a whit,' fresnoy answered, chuckling, or i was much mistaken. 'i am afraid you came off the worse of the two, captain.' he exchanged a look with the men on horseback as he spoke, and in a dull fashion i fancied i saw them smile. one even laughed, and another turned in his saddle as if to hide his face. i had a vague general sense that there was some joke on foot in which i had no part. but i was too much shaken at the moment to be curious, and gratefully accepted the offer of one of the men to fetch me a little water. while he was away the rest stood round me, the same look of ill-concealed drollery on their faces. fresnoy alone talked, speaking volubly of the accident, pouring out expressions of sympathy and cursing the road, the horse, and the wintry light until the water came; when, much refreshed by the draught, i managed to climb to the cid's saddle and plod slowly onwards with them. 'a bad beginning,' fresnoy said presently, stealing a sly glance at me as we jogged along side by side, chizé half a league before us, and darkness not far off. by this time, however, i was myself again, save for a little humming in the head, and, shrugging my shoulders, i told him so. 'all's well that ends well,' i added. 'not that it was a pleasant fall, or that i wish to have such another.' 'no, i should think not,' he answered. his face was turned from me, but i fancied i heard him snigger. something, which may have been a vague suspicion, led me a moment later to put my hand into my pouch. then i understood. i understood too well. the sharp surprise of the discovery was such that involuntarily i drove my spurs into the cid, and the horse sprang forward. 'what is the matter?' fresnoy asked. 'the matter?' i echoed, my hand still at my belt, feeling--feeling hopelessly. 'yes, what is it?' he asked, a brazen smile on his rascally face. i looked at him, my brow as red as fire. 'oh! nothing--nothing,' i said. 'let us trot on.' in truth i had discovered that, taking advantage of my helplessness, the scoundrels had robbed me, while i lay insensible, of every gold crown in my purse! nor was this all, or the worst, for i saw at once that in doing so they had effected something which was a thousandfold more ominous and formidable--established against me that secret understanding which it was my especial aim to prevent, and on the absence of which i had been counting. nay, i saw that for my very life i had only my friend the cutler and my own prudence to thank, seeing that these rogues would certainly have murdered me without scruple had they succeeded in finding the bulk of my money. baffled in this, while still persuaded that i had other resources, they had stopped short of that villany--or this memoir had never been written. they had kindly permitted me to live until a more favourable opportunity of enriching themselves at my expense should put them in possession of my last crown! though i was sufficiently master of myself to refrain from complaints which i felt must be useless, and from menaces which it has never been my habit to utter unless i had also the power to put them into execution, it must not be imagined that i did not, as i rode on by fresnoy's side, feel my position acutely or see how absurd a figure i cut in my dual character of leader and dupe. indeed, the reflection that, being in this perilous position, i was about to stake another's safety as well as my own, made me feel the need of a few minutes' thought so urgent that i determined to gain them, even at the risk of leaving my men at liberty to plot further mischief. coming almost immediately afterwards within sight of the turrets of the château of chizé, i told fresnoy that we should lie the night at the village; and bade him take the men on and secure quarters at the inn. attacked instantly by suspicion and curiosity, he demurred stoutly to leaving me, and might have persisted in his refusal had i not pulled up, and clearly shown him that i would have my own way in this case or come to an open breach. he shrank, as i expected, from the latter alternative, and, bidding me a sullen adieu, trotted on with his troop. i waited until they were out of sight, and then, turning the cid's head, crossed a small brook which divided the road from the chase, and choosing a ride which seemed to pierce the wood in the direction of the château, proceeded down it, keeping a sharp look-out on either hand. it was then, my thoughts turning to the lady who was now so near, and who, noble, rich, and a stranger, seemed, as i approached her, not the least formidable of the embarrassments before me--it was then that i made a discovery which sent a cold shiver through my frame, and in a moment swept all memory of my paltry ten crowns from my head. ten crowns! alas! i had lost that which was worth all my crowns put together--the broken coin which the king of navarre had entrusted to me, and which formed my sole credential, my only means of persuading mademoiselle de la vire that i came from him. i had put it in my pouch, and of course, though the loss of it only came home to my mind now, it had disappeared with the rest. i drew rein and sat for some time motionless, the image of despair. the wind which stirred the naked boughs overhead, and whirled the dead leaves in volleys past my feet, and died away at last among the whispering bracken, met nowhere with wretchedness greater, i believe, than was mine at that moment. chapter iv. mademoiselle de la vire. my first desperate impulse on discovering the magnitude of my loss was to ride after the knaves and demand the token at the sword's point. the certainty, however, of finding them united, and the difficulty of saying which of the five possessed what i wanted, led me to reject this plan as i grew cooler; and since i did not dream, even in this dilemma, of abandoning the expedition, the only alternative seemed to be to act as if i still had the broken coin, and essay what a frank explanation might effect when the time came. after some wretched, very wretched, moments of debate, i resolved to adopt this course; and, for the present, thinking i might gain some knowledge of the surroundings while the light lasted, i pushed cautiously forward through the trees and came in less than five minutes within sight of a corner of the chateau, which i found to be a modern building of the time of henry ii., raised, like the houses of that time, for pleasure rather than defence, and decorated with many handsome casements and tourelles. despite this, it wore, as i saw it, a grey and desolate air, due in part to the loneliness of the situation and the lateness of the hour; and in part, i think, to the smallness of the household maintained, for no one was visible on the terrace or at the windows. the rain dripped from the trees, which on two sides pressed so closely on the house as almost to darken the rooms, and everything i saw encouraged me to hope that mademoiselle's wishes would second my entreaties, and incline her to lend a ready ear to my story. the appearance of the house, indeed, was a strong inducement to me to proceed, for it was impossible to believe that a young lady, a kinswoman of the gay and vivacious turenne, and already introduced to the pleasures of the court, would elect of her own free will to spend the winter in so dreary a solitude. taking advantage of the last moments of daylight, i rode cautiously round the house, and, keeping in the shadow of the trees, had no difficulty in discovering at the north-east corner the balcony of which i had been told. it was semicircular in shape, with a stone balustrade, and hung some fifteen feet above a terraced walk which ran below it, and was separated from the chase by a low sunk fence. i was surprised to observe that, notwithstanding the rain and the coldness of the evening, the window which gave upon this balcony was open. nor was this all. luck was in store for me at last. i had not gazed at the window more than a minute, calculating its height and other particulars, when, to my great joy, a female figure, closely hooded, stepped out and stood looking up at the sky. i was too far off to be able to discern by that uncertain light whether this was mademoiselle de la vire or her woman; but the attitude was so clearly one of dejection and despondency, that i felt sure it was either one or the other. determined not to let the opportunity slip, i dismounted hastily and, leaving the cid loose, advanced on foot until i stood within half-a-dozen paces of the window. at that point the watcher became aware of me. she started back, but did not withdraw. still peering down at me, she called softly to some one inside the chamber, and immediately a second figure, taller and stouter, appeared. i had already doffed my cap, and i now, in a low voice, begged to know if i had the honour of speaking to mademoiselle de la vire. in the growing darkness it was impossible to distinguish faces. 'hush!' the stouter figure muttered in a tone of warning. 'speak lower. who are you, and what do you here?' 'i am here,' i answered respectfully, 'commissioned by a friend of the lady i have named, to convey her to a place of safety.' 'mondieu!' was the sharp answer. 'now? it is impossible.' 'no,' i murmured, 'not now, but to-night. the moon rises at half-past two. my horses need rest and food. at three i will be below this window with the means of escape, if mademoiselle choose to use them.' i felt that they were staring at me through the dusk, as though they would read my breast. 'your name, sir?' the shorter figure murmured at last, after a pause which was full of suspense and excitement. 'i do not think my name of much import at present, mademoiselle,' i answered, reluctant to proclaim myself a stranger. 'when----' 'your name, your name, sir!' she repeated imperiously, and i heard her little heel rap upon the stone floor of the balcony. 'gaston de marsac,' i answered unwillingly. they both started, and cried out together. 'impossible!' the last speaker exclaimed, amazement and anger in her tone. 'this is a jest, sir. this----' what more she would have said i was left to guess, for at that moment her attendant--i had no doubt now which was mademoiselle and which fanchette--suddenly laid her hand on her mistress's mouth and pointed to the room behind them. a second's suspense, and with a warning gesture the two turned and disappeared through the window. i lost no time in regaining the shelter of the trees; and concluding, though i was far from satisfied with the interview, that i could do nothing more now, but might rather, by loitering in the neighbourhood, awaken suspicion, i remounted and made for the highway and the village, where i found my men in noisy occupation of the inn, a poor place, with unglazed windows, and a fire in the middle of the earthen floor. my first care was to stable the cid in a shed at the back, where i provided for its wants as far as i could with the aid of a half-naked boy, who seemed to be in hiding there. this done, i returned to the front of the house, having pretty well made up my mind how i would set about the task before me. as i passed one of the windows, which was partially closed by a rude curtain made of old sacks, i stopped to look in. fresnoy and his four rascals were seated on blocks of wood round the hearth, talking loudly and fiercely, and ruffling it as if the fire and the room were their own. a pedlar, seated on his goods in one corner, was eyeing them with evident fear and suspicion; in another corner two children had taken refuge under a donkey, which some fowls had chosen as a roosting-pole. the innkeeper, a sturdy fellow, with a great club in his fist, sat moodily at the foot of a ladder which led to the loft above, while a slatternly woman, who was going to and fro getting supper, seemed in equal terror of her guests and her good man. confirmed by what i saw, and assured that the villains were ripe for any mischief, and, if not checked, would speedily be beyond my control, i noisily flung the door open and entered. fresnoy looked up with a sneer as i did so, and one of the men laughed. the others became silent; but no one moved or greeted me. without a moment's hesitation i stepped to the nearest fellow and, with a sturdy kick, sent his log from under him. 'rise, you rascal, when i enter!' i cried, giving vent to the anger i had long felt. 'and you, too!' and with a second kick i sent his neighbour's stool flying also, and administered a couple of cuts with my riding-cane across the man's shoulders. 'have you no manners, sirrah? across with you, and leave this side to your betters.' the two rose, snarling and feeling for their weapons, and for a moment stood facing me, looking now at me and now askance at fresnoy. but as he gave no sign, and their comrades only laughed, the men's courage failed them at the pinch, and with a very poor grace they sneaked over to the other side of the fire and sat there scowling. i seated myself beside their leader. 'this gentleman and i will eat here,' i cried to the man at the foot of the ladder. 'bid your wife lay for us, and of the best you have; and do you give those knaves their provender where the smell of their greasy jackets will not come between us and our victuals.' the man came forward, glad enough, as i saw, to discover any one in authority, and very civilly began to draw wine and place a board for us, while his wife filled our platters from the black pot which hung over the fire. fresnoy's face meanwhile wore the amused smile of one who comprehended my motives, but felt sufficiently sure of his position and influence with his followers to be indifferent to my proceedings. i presently showed him, however, that i had not yet done with him. our table was laid in obedience to my orders at such a distance from the men that they could not overhear our talk, and by-and-by i leant over to him. 'm. fresnoy,' i said, 'you are in danger of forgetting one thing, i fancy, which it behoves you to remember.' 'what?' he muttered, scarcely deigning to look up at me. 'that you have to do with gaston de marsac,' i answered quietly. 'i am making, as i told you this morning, a last attempt to recruit my fortunes, and i will let no man--no man, do you understand, m. fresnoy?--thwart me and go harmless.' 'who wishes to thwart you?' he asked impudently. 'you,' i answered unmoved, helping myself, as i spoke, from the roll of black bread which lay beside me. 'you robbed me this afternoon; i passed it over. you encouraged those men to be insolent; i passed it over. but let me tell you this. if you fail me to-night, on the honour of a gentleman, m. fresnoy, i will run you through as i would spit a lark.' 'will you? but two can play at that game,' he cried, rising nimbly from his stool. 'still better six! don't you think, m. de marsac, you had better have waited?' 'i think you had better hear one word more,' i answered coolly, keeping my seat, 'before you appeal to your fellows there.' 'well,' he said, still standing, 'what is it?' 'nay,' i replied, after once more pointing to his stool in vain, 'if you prefer to take my orders standing, well and good.' 'your orders?' he shrieked, growing suddenly excited. 'yes, my orders!' i retorted, rising as suddenly to my feet and hitching forward my sword. 'my orders, sir,' i repeated fiercely, 'or, if you dispute my right to command as well as to pay this party, let us decide the question here and now--you and i, foot to foot, m. fresnoy.' the quarrel flashed up so suddenly, though i had been preparing it all along, that no one moved. the woman, indeed, fell back to her children, but the rest looked on open-mouthed. had they stirred, or had a moment's hurly-burly heated his blood, i doubt not fresnoy would have taken up my challenge, for he did not lack hardihood. but as it was, face to face with me in the silence, his courage failed him. he paused, glowering at me uncertainly, and did not speak. 'well,' i said, 'don't you think that if i pay i ought to give orders, sir?' 'who wishes to oppose your orders?' he muttered, drinking off a bumper, and sitting down with an air of impudent bravado, assumed to hide his discomfiture. 'if you don't, no one else does,' i answered. 'so that is settled. landlord, some more wine.' he was very sulky with me for a while, fingering his glass in silence and scowling at the table. he had enough gentility to feel the humiliation to which he had exposed himself, and a sufficiency of wit to understand that that moment's hesitation had cost him the allegiance of his fellow-ruffians. i hastened, therefore, to set him at his ease by explaining my plans for the night, and presently succeeded beyond my hopes; for when he heard who the lady was whom i proposed to carry off, and that she was lying that evening at the château de chizé, his surprise swept away the last trace of resentment. he stared at me as at a maniac. 'mon dieu!' he exclaimed. 'do you know what you are doing, sieur?' 'i think so,' i answered. 'do you know to whom the chateau belongs?' 'to the vicomte de turenne.' 'and that mademoiselle de la vire is his relation?' 'yes,' i said. 'mon dieu!' he exclaimed again. and he looked at me open-mouthed. 'what is the matter?' i asked, though i had an uneasy consciousness that i knew--that i knew very well. 'man, he will crush you as i crush this hat!' he answered in great excitement. 'as easily. who do you think will protect you from him in a private quarrel of this kind? navarre? france? our good man? not one of them. you had better steal the king's crown jewels--he is weak; or guise's last plot--he is generous at times; or navarre's last sweetheart--he is as easy as an old shoe. you had better have to do with all these together, i tell you, than touch turenne's ewe-lambs, unless your aim be to be broken on the wheel! mon dieu, yes!' 'i am much obliged to you for your advice,' i said stiffly, 'but the die is cast. my mind is made up. on the other hand, if you are afraid, m. fresnoy----' 'i am afraid; very much afraid,' he answered frankly. 'still your name need not be brought into the matter,' i replied, 'i will take the responsibility. i will let them know my name here at the inn, where, doubtless, inquiries will be made.' 'to be sure, that is something,' he answered thoughtfully. 'well, it is an ugly business, but i am in for it. you want me to go with you a little after two, do you? and the others to be in the saddle at three? is that it?' i assented, pleased to find him so far acquiescent; and in this way, talking the details over more than once, we settled our course, arranging to fly by way of poitiers and tours. of course i did not tell him why i selected blois as our refuge, nor what was my purpose there; though he pressed me more than once on the point, and grew thoughtful and somewhat gloomy when i continually evaded it. a little after eight we retired to the loft to sleep; our men remaining below round the fire and snoring so merrily as almost to shake the crazy old building. the host was charged to sit up and call us as soon as the moon rose, but, as it turned out, i might as well have taken this office on myself, for between excitement and distrust i slept little, and was wide awake when i heard his step on the ladder and knew it was time to rise. i was up in a moment, and fresnoy was little behind me; so that, losing no time in talk, we were mounted and on the road, each with a spare horse at his knee, before the moon was well above the trees. once in the chase we found it necessary to proceed on foot, but, the distance being short, we presently emerged without misadventure and stood opposite to the chateau, the upper part of which shone cold and white in the moon's rays. there was something so solemn in the aspect of the place, the night being fine and the sky without a cloud, that i stood for a minute awed and impressed, the sense of the responsibility i was here to accept strong upon me. in that short space of time all the dangers before me, as well the common risks of the road as the vengeance of turenne and the turbulence of my own men, presented themselves to my mind, and made a last appeal to me to turn back from an enterprise so foolhardy. the blood in a man's veins runs low and slow at that hour, and mine was chilled by lack of sleep and the wintry air. it needed the remembrance of my solitary condition, of my past spent in straits and failure, of the grey hairs which swept my cheek, of the sword which i had long used honourably, if with little profit to myself; it needed the thought of all these things to restore me to courage and myself. i judged at a later period that my companion was affected in somewhat the same way; for, as i stooped to press home the pegs which i had brought to tether the horses, he laid his hand on my arm. glancing up to see what he wanted, i was struck by the wild look in his face (which the moonlight invested with a peculiar mottled pallor), and particularly in his eyes, which glittered like a madman's. he tried to speak, but seemed to find a difficulty in doing so; and i had to question him roughly before he found his tongue. when he did speak, it was only to implore me in an odd, excited manner to give up the expedition and return. 'what, now?' i said, surprised. 'now we are here, fresnoy?' 'ay, give it up!' he cried, shaking me almost fiercely by the arm. 'give it up, man! it will end badly, i tell you! in god's name, give it up, and go home before worse comes of it.' 'whatever comes of it,' i answered coldly, shaking his grasp from my arm, and wondering much at this sudden fit of cowardice, 'i go on. you, m. fresnoy, may do as you please!' he started and drew back from me; but he did not reply, nor did he speak again. when i presently went off to fetch a ladder, of the position of which i had made a note during the afternoon, he accompanied me, and followed me back in the same dull silence to the walk below the balcony. i had looked more than once and eagerly at mademoiselle's window without any light or movement in that quarter rewarding my vigilance; but, undeterred by this, which might mean either that my plot was known, or that mademoiselle de la vire distrusted me, i set the ladder softly against the balcony, which was in deep shadow, and paused only to give fresnoy his last instructions. these were simply to stand on guard at the foot of the ladder and defend it in case of surprise; so that, whatever happened inside the chateau, my retreat by the window might not be cut off. then i went cautiously up the ladder, and, with my sheathed sword in my left hand, stepped over the balustrade. taking one pace forward, with fingers outstretched, i felt the leaded panes of the window and tapped softly. as softly the casement gave way, and i followed it. a hand which i could see but not feel was laid on mine. all was darkness in the room, and before me, but the hand guided me two paces forward, then by a sudden pressure bade me stand. i heard the sound of a curtain being drawn behind me, and the next moment the cover of a rushlight was removed, and a feeble but sufficient light filled the chamber. i comprehended that the drawing of that curtain over the window had cut off my retreat as effectually as if a door had been closed behind me. but distrust and suspicion gave way the next moment to the natural embarrassment of the man who finds himself in a false position and knows he can escape from it only by an awkward explanation. the room in which i found myself was long, narrow, and low in the ceiling; and being hung with some dark stuff which swallowed up the light, terminated funereally at the farther end in the still deeper gloom of an alcove. two or three huge chests, one bearing the remnants of a meal, stood against the walls. the middle of the floor was covered with a strip of coarse matting, on which a small table, a chair and foot-rest, and a couple of stools had place, with some smaller articles which lay scattered round a pair of half-filled saddle-bags. the slighter and smaller of the two figures i had seen stood beside the table, wearing a mask and riding cloak; and by her silent manner of gazing at me, as well as by a cold, disdainful bearing, which neither her mask nor cloak could hide, did more to chill and discomfit me than even my own knowledge that i had lost the pass-key which should have admitted me to her confidence. the stouter figure of the afternoon turned out to be a red-cheeked, sturdy woman of thirty, with bright black eyes and a manner which lost nothing of its fierce impatience when she came a little later to address me. all my ideas of fanchette were upset by the appearance of this woman, who, rustic in her speech and ways, seemed more like a duenna than the waiting-maid of a court beauty, and better fitted to guard a wayward damsel than to aid her in such an escapade as we had in hand. she stood slightly behind her mistress, her coarse red hand resting on the back of the chair from which mademoiselle had apparently risen on my entrance. for a few seconds, which seemed minutes to me, we stood gazing at one another in silence, mademoiselle acknowledging my bow by a slight movement of the head. then, seeing that they waited for me to speak, i did so. 'mademoiselle de la vire?' i murmured doubtfully. she bent her head again; that was all. i strove to speak with confidence. 'you will pardon me, mademoiselle,' i said, 'if i seem to be abrupt, but time is everything. the horses are standing within a hundred yards of the house, and all the preparations for your night are made. if we leave now, we can do so without opposition. the delay even of an hour may lead to discovery.' for answer she laughed behind her mask--laughed coldly and ironically. 'you go too fast, sir,' she said, her low clear voice matching the laugh and rousing a feeling almost of anger in my heart. 'i do not know you; or, rather, i know nothing of you which should entitle you to interfere in my affairs. you are too quick to presume, sir. you say you come from a friend. from whom?' 'from one whom i am proud to call by that title,' i answered with what patience i might. 'his name!' i answered firmly that i could not give it. and i eyed her steadily as i did so. this for the moment seemed to baffle and confuse her, but after a pause she continued: 'where do you propose to take me, sir?' 'to blois; to the lodging of a friend of my friend.' 'you speak bravely,' she replied with a faint sneer. 'you have made some great friends lately it seems! but you bring me some letter, no doubt; at least some sign, some token, some warranty, that you are the person you pretend to be, m. de marsac?' 'the truth is, mademoiselle,' i stammered, 'i must explain. i should tell you----' 'nay, sir,' she cried impetuously, 'there is no need of telling. if you have what i say, show it me! it is you who lose time. let us have no more words!' i had used very few words, and, god knows, was not in the mind to use many; but, being in the wrong, i had no answer to make except the truth, and that humbly. 'i had such a token as you mention, mademoiselle,' i said, 'no farther back than this afternoon, in the shape of half a gold coin, entrusted to me by my friend. but, to my shame i say it, it was stolen from me a few hours back.' 'stolen from you!' she exclaimed. 'yes, mademoiselle; and for that reason i cannot show it,' i answered. 'you cannot show it? and you dare to come to me without it!' she cried, speaking with a vehemence which fairly startled me, prepared as i was for reproaches. 'you come to me! you!' she continued. and with that, scarcely stopping to take breath, she loaded me with abuse; calling me impertinent, a meddler, and a hundred other things, which i now blush to recall, and displaying in all a passion which even in her attendant would have surprised me, but in one so slight and seemingly delicate, overwhelmed and confounded me. in fault as i was, i could not understand the peculiar bitterness she displayed, or the contemptuous force of her language, and i stared at her in silent wonder until, of her own accord, she supplied the key to her feelings. in a fresh outburst of rage she snatched off her mask, and to my astonishment i saw before me the young maid of honour whom i had encountered in the king of navarre's ante-chamber, and whom i had been so unfortunate as to expose to the raillery of mathurine. 'who has paid you, sir,' she continued, clenching her small hands and speaking with tears of anger in her eyes, 'to make me the laughing-stock of the court? it was bad enough when i thought you the proper agent of those to whom i have a right to look for aid! it was bad enough when i thought myself forced, through their inconsiderate choice, to decide between an odious imprisonment and the ridicule to which your intervention must expose me! but that you should have dared, of your own notion, to follow me, you, the butt of the court----' 'mademoiselle!' i cried. 'a needy, out-at-elbows adventurer!' she persisted, triumphing in her cruelty. 'it exceeds all bearing! it is not to be suffered! it----' 'nay, mademoiselle; you shall hear me!' i cried, with a sternness which at last stopped her. 'granted i am poor, i am still a gentleman; yes, mademoiselle,' i continued, firmly, 'a gentleman, and the last of a family which has spoken with yours on equal terms. and i claim to be heard. i swear that when i came here to-night i believed you to be a perfect stranger! i was unaware that i had ever seen you, unaware that i had ever met you before.' 'then why did you come?' she said viciously. 'i was engaged to come by those whom you have mentioned, and there, and there only am i in fault. they entrusted to me a token which i have lost. for that i crave your pardon.' 'you have need to,' she answered bitterly, yet with a changed countenance, or i was mistaken, 'if your story be true, sir.' 'ay, that you have!' the woman beside her echoed. 'hoity toity, indeed! here is a fuss about nothing. you call yourself a gentleman, and wear such a doublet as----' 'peace, fanchette!' mademoiselle said imperiously. and then for a moment she stood silent, eyeing me intently, her lips trembling with excitement and two red spots burning in her cheeks. it was clear from her dress and other things that she had made up her mind to fly had the token been forthcoming; and seeing this, and knowing how unwilling a young girl is to forego her own way, i still had some hopes that she might not persevere in her distrust and refusal. and so it turned out. her manner had changed to one of quiet scorn when she next spoke. 'you defend yourself skilfully, sir,' she said, drumming with her fingers on the table and eyeing me steadfastly. 'but can you give me any reason for the person you name making choice of such a messenger?' 'yes,' i answered, boldly. 'that he may not be suspected of conniving at your escape.' 'oh!' she cried, with a spark of her former passion. 'then it is to be put about that mademoiselle de la vire had fled from chizé with m. de marsac, is it? i thought that!' 'through the assistance of m. de marsac,' i retorted, correcting her coldly. 'it is for you, mademoiselle,' i continued, 'to weigh that disadvantage against the unpleasantness of remaining here. it only remains for me to ask you to decide quickly. time presses, and i have stayed here too long already.' the words had barely passed my lips when they received unwelcome confirmation in the shape of a distant sound--the noisy closing of a door, which, clanging through the house at such an hour--i judged it to be after three o'clock--could scarcely mean anything but mischief. this noise was followed immediately, even while we stood listening with raised fingers, by other sounds--a muffled cry, and the tramp of heavy footsteps in a distant passage. mademoiselle looked at me, and i at her woman. 'the door!' i muttered. 'is it locked?' 'and bolted!' fanchette answered; 'and a great chest set against it. let them ramp; they will do no harm for a bit.' 'then you have still time, mademoiselle,' i whispered, retreating a step and laying my hand on the curtain before the window. perhaps i affected greater coolness than i felt. 'it is not too late. if you choose to remain, well and good. i cannot help it. if, on the other hand, you decide to trust yourself to me, i swear, on the honour of a gentleman, to be worthy of the trust--to serve you truly and protect you to the last! i can say no more.' she trembled, looking from me to the door, on which some one had just begun to knock loudly. that seemed to decide her. her lips apart, her eyes full of excitement, she turned hastily to fanchette. 'ay, go if you like,' the woman answered doggedly, reading the meaning of her look. 'there cannot be a greater villain than the one we know of. but once started, heaven help us, for if he overtakes us we'll pay dearly for it!' the girl did not speak herself, but it was enough. the noise at the door increased each second, and began to be mingled with angry appeals to fanchette to open, and with threats in case she delayed. i cut the matter short by snatching up one of the saddle-bags--the other we left behind--and flung back the curtain which covered the window. at the same time the woman dashed out the light--a timely precaution--and throwing open the casement i stepped on to the balcony, the others following me closely. the moon had risen high, and flooding with light the small open space about the house enabled me to see clearly all round the foot of the ladder. to my surprise fresnoy was not at his post, nor was he to be seen anywhere; but as, at the moment i observed this, an outcry away to my left, at the rear of the chateau, came to my ears, and announced that the danger was no longer confined to the interior of the house, i concluded that he had gone that way to intercept the attack. without more, therefore, i began to descend as quickly as i could, my sword under one arm and the bag under the other. i was half-way down, and mademoiselle was already stepping on to the ladder to follow, when i heard footsteps below, and saw him run up, his sword in his hand. 'quick, fresnoy!' i cried. 'to the horses and unfasten them! quick!' i slid down the rest of the way, thinking he had gone to do my bidding. but my feet were scarcely on the ground when a tremendous blow in the side sent me staggering three paces from the ladder. the attack was so sudden, so unexpected, that but for the sight of fresnoy's scowling face, wild with rage, at my shoulder, and the sound of his fierce breathing as he strove to release his sword, which had passed through my saddle-bag, i might never have known who struck the blow, or how narrow had been my escape. fortunately the knowledge did come to me in time, and before he freed his blade; and it nerved my hand. to draw my blade at such close quarters was impossible, but, dropping the bag which had saved my life, i dashed my hilt twice in his face with such violence that he fell backwards and lay on the turf, a dark stain growing and spreading on his upturned face. it was scarcely done before the women reached the foot of the ladder and stood beside me. 'quick!' i cried to them, 'or they will be upon us.' seizing mademoiselle's hand, just as half-a-dozen men came running round the corner of the house, i jumped with her down the haha, and, urging her to her utmost speed, dashed across the open ground which lay between us and the belt of trees. once in the shelter of the latter, where our movements were hidden from view, i had still to free the horses and mount mademoiselle and her woman, and this in haste. but my companions' admirable coolness and presence of mind, and the objection which our pursuers, who did not know our numbers, felt to leaving the open ground, enabled us to do all with comparative ease. i sprang on the cid (it has always been my habit to teach my horse to stand for me, nor do i know any accomplishment more serviceable at a pinch), and giving fresnoy's grey a cut over the flanks which despatched it ahead, led the way down the ride by which i had gained the chateau in the afternoon. i knew it to be level and clear of trees, and the fact that we chose it might throw our pursuers off the track for a time, by leading them to think we had taken the south road instead of that through the village. chapter v. the road to blois. we gained the road without let or hindrance, whence a sharp burst in the moonlight soon brought us to the village. through this we swept on to the inn, almost running over the four evangelists, whom we found standing at the door ready for the saddle. i bade them, in a quick peremptory tone, to get to horse, and was overjoyed to see them obey without demur or word of fresnoy. in another minute, with a great clatter of hoofs, we sprang clear of the hamlet, and were well on the road to melle, with poitiers some thirteen leagues before us. i looked back, and thought i discerned lights moving in the direction of the chateau; but the dawn was still two hours off, and the moonlight left me in doubt whether these were real or the creatures of my own fearful fancy. i remember, three years before this time, on the occasion of the famous retreat from angers--when the prince of condé had involved his army beyond the loire, and saw himself, in the impossibility of recrossing the river, compelled to take ship for england, leaving every one to shift for himself--i well remember on that occasion riding, alone and pistol in hand, through more than thirty miles of the enemy's country without drawing rein. but my anxieties were then confined to the four shoes of my horse. the dangers to which i was exposed at every ford and cross road were such as are inseparable from a campaign, and breed in generous hearts only a fierce pleasure, rarely to be otherwise enjoyed. and though i then rode warily, and where i could not carry terror, had all to fear myself, there was nothing secret or underhand in my business. it was very different now. during the first few hours of our flight from chizé i experienced a painful excitement, an alarm, a feverish anxiety to get forward, which was new to me; which oppressed my spirits to the very ground; which led me to take every sound borne to us on the wind for the sound of pursuit, transforming the clang of a hammer on the anvil into the ring of swords, and the voices of my own men into those of the pursuers. it was in vain mademoiselle rode with a free hand, and leaping such obstacles as lay in our way, gave promise of courage and endurance beyond my expectations. i could think of nothing but the three long days before us, with twenty-four hours to every day, and each hour fraught with a hundred chances of disaster and ruin. in fact, the longer i considered our position--and as we pounded along, now splashing through a founderous hollow, now stumbling as we wound over a stony shoulder, i had ample time to reflect upon it--the greater seemed the difficulties before us. the loss of fresnoy, while it freed me from some embarrassment, meant also the loss of a good sword, and we had mustered only too few before. the country which lay between us and the loire, being the borderland between our party and the league, had been laid desolate so often as to be abandoned to pillage and disorder of every kind. the peasants had flocked into the towns. their places had been taken by bands of robbers and deserters from both parties, who haunted the ruined villages about poitiers, and preyed upon all who dared to pass. to add to our perils, the royal army under the duke of nevers was reported to be moving slowly southward, not very far to the left of our road; while a huguenot expedition against niort was also in progress within a few leagues of us. with four staunch and trustworthy comrades at my back, i might have faced even this situation with a smile and a light heart; but the knowledge that my four knaves might mutiny at any moment, or, worse still, rid themselves of me and all restraint by a single treacherous blow such as fresnoy had aimed at me, filled me with an ever-present dread; which it taxed my utmost energies to hide from them, and which i strove in vain to conceal from mademoiselle's keener vision. whether it was this had an effect upon her, giving her a meaner opinion of me than that which i had for a while hoped she entertained, or that she began, now it was too late, to regret her flight and resent my part in it, i scarcely know; but from daybreak onwards she assumed an attitude of cold suspicion towards me, which was only less unpleasant than the scornful distance of her manner when she deigned, which was seldom, to address me. not once did she allow me to forget that i was in her eyes a needy adventurer, paid by her friends to escort her to a place of safety, but without any claim to the smallest privilege of intimacy or equality. when i would have adjusted her saddle, she bade her woman come and hold up her skirt, that my hands might not touch its hem even by accident. and when i would have brought wine to her at melle, where we stayed for twenty minutes, she called fanchette to hand it to her. she rode for the most part in her mask; and with her woman. one good effect only her pride and reserve had; they impressed our men with a strong sense of her importance, and the danger to which any interference with her might expose them. the two men whom fresnoy had enlisted i directed to ride a score of paces in advance. luke and john i placed in the rear. in this manner i thought to keep them somewhat apart. for myself, i proposed to ride abreast of mademoiselle, but she made it so clear that my neighbourhood displeased her that i fell back, leaving her to ride with fanchette; and contented myself with plodding at their heels, and striving to attach the later evangelists to my interests. we were so fortunate, despite my fears, as to find the road nearly deserted--as, alas, was much of the country on either side--and to meet none but small parties travelling along it; who were glad enough, seeing the villainous looks of our outriders, to give us a wide berth, and be quit of us for the fright. we skirted lusignan, shunning the streets, but passing near enough for me to point out to mademoiselle the site of the famous tower built, according to tradition, by the fairy melusina, and rased thirteen years back by the leaguers. she received my information so frigidly, however, that i offered no more, but fell back shrugging my shoulders, and rode in silence, until, some two hours after noon, the city of poitiers came into sight, lying within its circle of walls and towers on a low hill in the middle of a country clothed in summer with rich vineyards, but now brown and bare and cheerless to the eye. fanchette turned and asked me abruptly if that were poitiers. i answered that it was, but added that for certain reasons i proposed not to halt, but to lie at a village a league beyond the city, where there was a tolerable inn. 'we shall do very well here,' the woman answered rudely. 'any way, my lady will go no farther. she is tired and cold, and wet besides, and has gone far enough.' 'still,' i answered, nettled by the woman's familiarity, 'i think mademoiselle will change her mind when she hears my reasons for going farther.' 'mademoiselle does not wish to hear them, sir,' the lady replied herself, and very sharply. 'nevertheless, i think you had better hear them,' i persisted, turning to her respectfully. 'you see, mademoiselle----' 'i see only one thing, sir,' she exclaimed, snatching off her mask and displaying a countenance beautiful indeed, but flushed for the moment with anger and impatience, 'that, whatever betides, i stay at poitiers to-night.' 'if it would content you to rest an hour?' i suggested gently. 'it will not content me!' she rejoined with spirit. 'and let me tell you, sir,' she went on impetuously, 'once for all, that you take too much upon yourself. you are here to escort me, and to give orders to these ragamuffins, for they are nothing better, with whom you have thought fit to disgrace our company; but not to give orders to me or to control my movements. confine yourself for the future, sir, to your duties, if you please.' 'i desire only to obey you,' i answered, suppressing the angry feelings which rose in my breast, and speaking as coolly as lay in my power. 'but, as the first of my duties is to provide for your safety, i am determined to omit nothing which can conduce to that end. you have not considered that, if a party in pursuit of us reaches poitiers to-night, search will be made for us in the city, and we shall be taken. if, on the other hand, we are known to have passed through, the hunt may go no farther; certainly will go no farther to-night. therefore we must not, mademoiselle,' i added firmly, 'lie in poitiers to-night.' 'sir,' she exclaimed, looking at me, her face crimson with wonder and indignation, 'do you dare to?' 'i dare do my duty, mademoiselle,' i answered, plucking up a spirit, though my heart was sore. 'i am a man old enough to be your father, and with little to lose, or i had not been here. i care nothing what you think or what you say of me, provided i can do what i have undertaken to do and place you safely in the hands of your friends. but enough, mademoiselle, we are at the gate. if you will permit me, i will ride through the streets beside you. we shall so attract less attention.' without waiting for a permission which she was very unlikely to give, i pushed my horse forward, and took my place beside her, signing to fanchette to fall back. the maid obeyed, speechless with indignation; while mademoiselle flashed a scathing glance at me and looked round in helpless anger, as though it was in her mind to appeal against me even to the passers-by. but she thought better of it, and contenting herself with muttering the word 'impertinent' put on her mask with fingers which trembled, i fancy, not a little. a small rain was falling and the afternoon was well advanced when we entered the town, but i noticed that, notwithstanding this, the streets presented a busy and animated appearance, being full of knots of people engaged in earnest talk. a bell was tolling somewhere, and near the cathedral a crowd of no little size was standing, listening to a man who seemed to be reading a placard or manifesto attached to the wall. in another place a soldier, wearing the crimson colours of the league, but splashed and stained as with recent travel, was holding forth to a breathless circle who seemed to hang upon his lips. a neighbouring corner sheltered a handful of priests who whispered together with gloomy faces. many stared at us as we passed, and some would have spoken; but i rode steadily on, inviting no converse. nevertheless at the north gate i got a rare fright; for, though it wanted a full half-hour of sunset, the porter was in the act of closing it. seeing us, he waited grumbling until we came up, and then muttered, in answer to my remonstrance, something about queer times and wilful people having their way. i took little notice of what he said, however, being anxious only to get through the gate and leave as few traces of our passage as might be. as soon as we were outside the town i fell back, permitting fanchette to take my place. for another league, a long and dreary one, we plodded on in silence, horses and men alike jaded and sullen, and the women scarcely able to keep their saddles for fatigue. at last, much to my relief, seeing that i began to fear i had taxed mademoiselle's strength too far, the long low buildings of the inn at which i proposed to stay came in sight, at the crossing of the road and river. the place looked blank and cheerless, for the dusk was thickening; but as we trailed one by one into the courtyard a stream of firelight burst on us from doors and windows, and a dozen sounds of life and comfort greeted our ears. noticing that mademoiselle was benumbed and cramped with long sitting, i would have helped her to dismount; but she fiercely rejected my aid, and i had to content myself with requesting the landlord to assign the best accommodation he had to the lady and her attendant, and secure as much privacy for them as possible. the man assented very civilly and said all should be done; but i noticed that his eyes wandered while i talked, and that he seemed to have something on his mind. when he returned, after disposing of them, it came out. 'did you ever happen to see him, sir?' he asked with a sigh; yet was there a smug air of pleasure mingled with his melancholy. 'see whom?' i answered, staring at him, for neither of us had mentioned any one. 'the duke, sir.' i stared again between wonder and suspicion. 'the duke of nevers is not in this part, is he?' i said slowly. 'i heard he was on the brittany border, away to the westward.' 'mon dieu!' my host exclaimed, raising his hands in astonishment. 'you have not heard, sir?' 'i have heard nothing,' i answered impatiently. 'you have not heard, sir, that the most puissant and illustrious lord the duke of guise is dead?' 'm. de guise dead? it is not true!' i cried astonished. he nodded, however, several times with an air of great importance, and seemed as if he would have gone on to give me some particulars. but, remembering, as i fancied, that he spoke in the hearing of half-a-dozen guests who sat about the great fire behind me, and had both eyes and ears open, he contented himself with shifting his towel to his other arm and adding only, 'yes, sir, dead as any nail. the news came through here yesterday, and made a pretty stir. it happened at blois the day but one before christmas, if all be true.' i was thunderstruck. this was news which might change the face of france. 'how did it happen?' i asked. my host covered his mouth with his hand and coughed, and, privily twitching my sleeve, gave me to understand with some shamefacedness that he could not say more in public. i was about to make some excuse to retire with him, when a harsh voice, addressed apparently to me, caused me to turn sharply. i found at my elbow a tall thin-faced monk in the habit of the jacobin order. he had risen from his seat beside the fire, and seemed to be labouring under great excitement. 'who asked how it happened?' he cried, rolling his eyes in a kind of frenzy, while still observant, or i was much mistaken, of his listeners. is there a man in france to whom the tale has not been told? is there?' 'i will answer for one,' i replied, regarding him with little favour. 'i have heard nothing.' 'then you shall! listen!' he exclaimed, raising his right hand and brandishing it as though he denounced a person then present. 'hear my accusation, made in the name of mother church and the saints against the arch hypocrite, the perjurer and assassin sitting in high places! he shall be anathema maranatha, for he has shed the blood of the holy and the pure, the chosen of heaven! he shall go down to the pit, and that soon. the blood that he has shed shall be required of him, and that before he is one year older.' 'tut-tut. all that sounds very fine, good father,' i said, waxing impatient, and a little scornful; for i saw that he was one of those wandering and often crazy monks in whom the league found their most useful emissaries. 'but i should profit more by your gentle words, if i knew whom you were cursing.' 'the man of blood!' he cried; 'through whom the last but not the least of god's saints and martyrs entered into glory on the friday before christmas.' moved by such profanity, and judging him, notwithstanding the extravagance of his words and gestures, to be less mad than he seemed, and at least as much knave as fool, i bade him sternly have done with his cursing, and proceed to his story if he had one. he glowered at me for a moment, as though he were minded to launch his spiritual weapons at my head; but as i returned his glare with an unmoved eye--and my four rascals, who were as impatient as myself to learn the news, and had scarce more reverence for a shaven crown, began to murmur--he thought better of it, and cooling as suddenly as he had flamed up, lost no more time in satisfying our curiosity. it would ill become me, however, to set down the extravagant and often blasphemous harangue in which, styling m. de guise the martyr of god, he told the story now so familiar--the story of that dark wintry morning at blois, when the king's messenger, knocking early at the duke's door, bade him hurry, for the king wanted him. the story is trite enough now. when i heard it first in the inn on the clain, it was all new and all marvellous. the monk, too, telling the story as if he had seen the events with his own eyes, omitted nothing which might impress his hearers. he told us how the duke received warning after warning, and answered in the very antechamber, 'he dare not!' how his blood, mysteriously advised of coming dissolution, grew chill, and his eye, wounded at château thierry, began to run, so that he had to send for the handkerchief he had forgotten to bring. he told us, even, how the duke drew his assassins up and down the chamber, how he cried for mercy, and how he died at last at the foot of the king's bed, and how the king, who had never dared to face him living, came and spurned him dead! there were pale faces round the fire when he ceased, and bent brows and lips hard pressed together. when he stood and cursed the king of france--cursing him openly by the name of henry of valois, a thing i had never looked to hear in france--though no one said 'amen,' and all glanced over their shoulders, and our host pattered from the room as if he had seen a ghost, it seemed to be no man's duty to gainsay him. for myself, i was full of thoughts which it would have been unsafe to utter in that company or so near the loire. i looked back sixteen years. who but henry of guise had spurned the corpse of coligny? and who but henry of valois had backed him in the act? who but henry of guise had drenched paris with blood, and who but henry of valois had ridden by his side? one rd of the month--a day never to be erased from france's annals--had purchased for him a term of greatness. a second rd saw him pay the price--saw his ashes cast secretly and by night no man knows where! moved by such thoughts, and observing that the priest was going the round of the company collecting money for masses for the duke's soul, to which object i could neither give with a good conscience nor refuse without exciting suspicion, i slipped out; and finding a man of decent appearance talking with the landlord in a small room beside the kitchen, i called for a flask of the best wine, and by means of that introduction obtained my supper in their company. the stranger was a norman horsedealer, returning home after disposing of his string. he seemed to be in a large way of business, and being of a bluff, independent spirit, as many of those norman townsmen are, was inclined at first to treat me with more familiarity than respect; the fact of my nag, for which he would have chaffered, excelling my coat in quality, leading him to set me down as a steward or intendant. the pursuit of his trade, however, had brought him into connection with all classes of men, and he quickly perceived his mistake; and as he knew the provinces between the seine and loire to perfection, and made it part of his business to foresee the chances of peace and war, i obtained a great amount of information from him, and indeed conceived no little liking for him. he believed that the assassination of m. de guise would alienate so much of france from the king that his majesty would have little left save the towns on the loire, and some other places lying within easy reach of his court at blois. 'but,' i said, 'things seem quiet now. here, for instance.' 'it is the calm before the storm,' he answered. 'there is a monk in there. have you heard him?' i nodded. 'he is only one among a hundred--a thousand,' the horsedealer continued, looking at me and nodding with meaning. he was a brown-haired man with shrewd grey eyes, such as many normans have. 'they will get their way too, you will see,' he went on. 'well, horses will go up, so i have no cause to grumble; but, if i were on my way to blois with women or gear of that kind, i should not choose this time for picking posies on the road. i should see the inside of the gates as soon as possible.' i thought there was much in what he said; and when he went on to maintain that the king would find himself between the hammer and the anvil--between the league holding all the north and the huguenots holding all the south--and must needs in time come to terms with the latter, seeing that the former would rest content with nothing short of his deposition, i began to agree with him that we should shortly see great changes and very stirring times. 'still if they depose the king,' i said, 'the king of navarre must succeed him. he is the heir of france.' 'bah!' my companion replied somewhat contemptuously. 'the league will see to that. he goes with the other.' 'then the kings are in one cry, and you are right,' i said with conviction. 'they must unite.' 'so they will. it is only a question of time,' he said. in the morning, having only one man with him, and, as i guessed, a considerable sum of money, he volunteered to join our party as far as blois. i assented gladly, and he did so, this addition to our numbers ridding me at once of the greater part of my fears. i did not expect any opposition on the part of mademoiselle, who would gain in consequence as well as in safety. nor did she offer any. she was content, i think, to welcome any addition to our party which would save her from the necessity of riding in the company of my old cloak. chapter vi. my mother's lodging. travelling by way of chatelhérault and tours, we reached the neighbourhood of blois a little after noon on the third day without misadventure or any intimation of pursuit. the norman proved himself a cheerful companion on the road, as i already knew him to be a man of sense and shrewdness; while his presence rendered the task of keeping my men in order an easy one. i began to consider the adventure as practically achieved; and regarding mademoiselle de la vire as already in effect transferred to the care of m. de rosny, i ventured to turn my thoughts to the development of my own plans and the choice of a haven in which i might rest secure from the vengeance of m. de turenne. for the moment i had evaded his pursuit, and, assisted by the confusion caused everywhere by the death of guise, had succeeded in thwarting his plans and affronting his authority with seeming ease. but i knew too much of his power and had heard too many instances of his fierce temper and resolute will to presume on short impunity or to expect the future with anything but diffidence and dismay. the exclamations of my companions on coming within sight of blois aroused me from these reflections. i joined them, and fully shared their emotion as i gazed on the stately towers which had witnessed so many royal festivities, and, alas! one royal tragedy; which had sheltered louis the well-beloved and francis the great, and rung with the laughter of diana of poitiers and the second henry. the play of fancy wreathed the sombre building with a hundred memories grave and gay. but, though the rich plain of the loire still swelled upward as of old in gentle homage at the feet of the gallant town, the shadow of crime seemed to darken all, and dim even the glories of the royal standard which hung idly in the air. we had heard so many reports of the fear and suspicion which reigned in the city and of the strict supervision which was exercised over all who entered--the king dreading a repetition of the day of the barricades--that we halted at a little inn a mile short of the gate and broke up our company. i parted from my norman friend with mutual expressions of esteem, and from my own men, whom i had paid off in the morning, complimenting each of them with a handsome present, with a feeling of relief equally sincere. i hoped--but the hope was not fated to be gratified--that i might never see the knaves again. it wanted less than an hour of sunset when i rode up to the gate, a few paces in front of mademoiselle and her woman; as if i had really been the intendant for whom the horse-dealer had mistaken me. we found the guardhouse lined with soldiers, who scanned us very narrowly as we approached, and whose stern features and ordered weapons showed that they were not there for mere effect. the fact, however, that we came from tours, a city still in the king's hands, served to allay suspicion, and we passed without accident. once in the streets, and riding in single file between the houses, to the windows of which the townsfolk seemed to be attracted by the slightest commotion, so full of terror was the air, i experienced a moment of huge relief. this was blois--blois at last. we were within a few score yards of the bleeding heart. in a few minutes i should receive a quittance, and be free to think only of myself. nor was my pleasure much lessened by the fact that i was so soon to part from mademoiselle de la vire. frankly, i was far from liking her. exposure to the air of a court had spoiled, it seemed to me, whatever graces of disposition the young lady had ever possessed. she still maintained, and had maintained throughout the journey, the cold and suspicious attitude assumed at starting; nor had she ever expressed the least solicitude on my behalf, or the slightest sense that we were incurring danger in her service. she had not scrupled constantly to prefer her whims to the common advantage, and even safety; while her sense of self-importance had come to be so great, that she seemed to hold herself exempt from the duty of thanking any human creature. i could not deny that she was beautiful--indeed, i often thought, when watching her, of the day when i had seen her in the king of navarre's ante-chamber in all the glory of her charms. but i felt none the less that i could turn my back on her--leaving her in safety--without regret; and be thankful that her path would never again cross mine. with such thoughts in my breast i turned the corner of the rue de st. denys and came at once upon the bleeding heart, a small but decent-looking hostelry situate near the end of the street and opposite a church. a bluff, grey-haired man, who was standing in the doorway, came forward as we halted, and looking curiously at mademoiselle asked what i lacked; adding civilly that the house was full and they had no sleeping room, the late events having drawn a great assemblage to blois. 'i want only an address,' i answered, leaning from the saddle and speaking in a low voice that i might not be overheard by the passers-by. 'the baron de rosny is in blois, is he not?' the man started at the name of the huguenot leader, and looked round him nervously. but, seeing that no one was very near us, he answered: 'he was, sir; but he left town a week ago and more. there have been strange doings here, and m. de rosny thought that the climate suited him ill.' he said this with so much meaning, as well as concern that he should not be overheard, that, though i was taken aback and bitterly disappointed, i succeeded in restraining all exclamations and even show of feeling. after a pause of dismay, i asked whither m. de rosny had gone. 'to rosny,' was the answer. 'and rosny?' 'is beyond chartres, pretty well all the way to mantes,' the man answered, stroking my horse's neck. 'say thirty leagues.' i turned my horse, and hurriedly communicated what he said to mademoiselle, who was waiting a few paces away. unwelcome to me, the news was still less welcome to her. her chagrin and indignation knew no bounds. for a moment words failed her, but her flashing eyes said more than her tongue as she cried to me: 'well, sir, and what now? is this the end of your fine promises? where is your rosny, if all be not a lying invention of your own?' feeling that she had some excuse i suppressed my choler, and humbly repeating that rosny was at his house, two days farther on, and that i could see nothing for it but to go to him, i asked the landlord where we could find a lodging for the night. 'indeed, sir, that is more than i can say,' he answered, looking curiously at us, and thinking, i doubt not, that with my shabby cloak and fine horse, and mademoiselle's mask and spattered riding-coat, we were an odd couple. 'there is not an inn which is not full to the garrets--nay, and the stables; and, what is more, people are chary of taking strangers in. these are strange times. they say,' he continued in a lower tone, 'that the old queen is dying up there, and will not last the night.' i nodded. 'we must go somewhere,' i said. 'i would help you if i could,' he answered, shrugging his shoulders. 'but there it is! blois is full from the tiles to the cellars.' my horse shivered under me, and mademoiselle, whose patience was gone, cried harshly to me to do something. 'we cannot spend the night in the streets,' she said fiercely. i saw that she was worn out and scarcely mistress of her-self. the light was falling, and with it some rain. the reek of the kennels and the close air from the houses seemed to stifle us. the bell at the church behind us was jangling out vespers. a few people, attracted by the sight of our horses standing before the inn, had gathered round and were watching us. something i saw must be done, and done quickly. in despair, and seeing no other resort, i broached a proposal of which i had not hitherto even dreamed. 'mademoiselle,' i said bluntly, 'i must take you to my mother's.' 'to your mother's, sir?' she cried, rousing herself. her voice rang with haughty surprise. 'yes,' i replied brusquely; 'since, as you say, we cannot spend the night in the streets, and i do not know where else i can dispose of you. from the last advices i had i believe her to have followed the court hither. my friend,' i continued, turning to the landlord, 'do you know by name a madame de bonne, who should be in blois?' 'a madame de bonne?' he muttered, reflecting. 'i have heard the name lately. wait a moment.' disappearing into the house, he returned almost immediately, followed by a lanky pale-faced youth wearing a tattered black soutane. 'yes,' he said nodding, 'there is a worthy lady of that name lodging in the next street, i am told. as it happens, this young man lives in the same house, and will guide you, if you like.' i assented, and, thanking him for his information, turned my horse and requested the youth to lead the way. we had scarcely passed the corner of the street, however, and entered one somewhat more narrow and less frequented, when mademoiselle, who was riding behind me, stopped and called to me. i drew rein, and, turning, asked what it was. 'i am not coming,' she said, her voice trembling slightly, but whether with alarm or anger i could not determine. 'i know nothing of you, and i--i demand to be taken to m. de rosny.' 'if you cry that name aloud in the streets of blois, mademoiselle,' i retorted, 'you are like enough to be taken whither you will not care to go! as for m. de rosny, i have told you that he is not here. he has gone to his seat at mantes.' 'then take me to him!' 'at this hour of the night?' i said drily. 'it is two days' journey from here.' 'then i will go to an inn,' she replied sullenly. 'you have heard that there is no room in the inns,' i rejoined with what patience i could. 'and to go from inn to inn at this hour might lead us into trouble. i can assure you that i am as much taken aback by m. de rosny's absence as you are. for the present, we are close to my mother's lodging, and----' 'i know nothing of your mother!' she exclaimed passionately, her voice raised. 'you have enticed me hither by false pretences, sir, and i will endure it no longer. i will----' 'what you will do, i do not know then, mademoiselle,' i replied, quite at my wits' end; for what with the rain and the darkness, the unknown streets--in which our tarrying might at any moment collect a crowd--and this stubborn girl's opposition, i knew not whither to turn. 'for my part i can suggest nothing else. it does not become me to speak of my mother,' i continued, 'or i might say that even mademoiselle de la vire need not be ashamed to accept the hospitality of madame de bonne. nor are my mother's circumstances,' i added proudly, 'though narrow, so mean as to deprive her of the privileges of her birth.' my last words appeared to make some impression upon my companion. she turned and spoke to her woman, who replied in a low voice, tossing her head the while and glaring at me in speechless indignation. had there been anything else for it, they would doubtless have flouted my offer still; but apparently fanchette could suggest nothing, and presently mademoiselle, with a sullen air, bade me lead on. taking this for permission, the lanky youth in the black soutane, who had remained at my bridle throughout the discussion, now listening and now staring, nodded and resumed his way; and i followed. after proceeding a little more than fifty yards he stopped before a mean-looking doorway, flanked by grated windows, and fronted by a lofty wall which i took to be the back of some nobleman's garden. the street at this point was unlighted, and little better than an alley; nor was the appearance of the house, which was narrow and ill-looking, though lofty, calculated, as far as i could make it out in the darkness, to allay mademoiselle's suspicions. knowing, however, that people of position are often obliged in towns to lodge in poor houses, i thought nothing of this, and only strove to get mademoiselle dismounted as quickly as possible. the lad groped about and found two rings beside the door, and to these i tied up the horses. then, bidding him lead the way, and begging mademoiselle to follow, i plunged into the darkness of the passage and felt my way to the foot of the staircase, which was entirely unlighted, and smelled close and unpleasant. 'which floor?' i asked my guide. 'the fourth,' he answered quietly. 'morbleu!' i muttered, as i began to ascend, my hand on the wall. 'what is the meaning of this?' for i was perplexed. the revenues of marsac, though small, should have kept my mother, whom i had last seen in paris before the nemours edict, in tolerable comfort--such modest comfort, at any rate, as could scarcely be looked for in such a house as this--obscure, ill-tended, unlighted. to my perplexity was added, before i reached the top of the stairs, disquietude--disquietude on her account as well as on mademoiselle's. i felt that something was wrong, and would have given much to recall the invitation i had pressed on the latter. what the young lady thought herself i could pretty well guess, as i listened to her hurried breathing at my shoulder. with every step i expected her to refuse to go farther. but, having once made up her mind, she followed me stubbornly, though the darkness was such that involuntarily i loosened my dagger, and prepared to defend myself should this turn out to be a trap. we reached the top, however, without accident. our guide knocked softly at a door and immediately opened it without waiting for an answer. a feeble light shone out on the stair-head, and bending my head, for the lintel was low, i stepped into the room. i advanced two paces and stood looking about me in angry bewilderment. the bareness of extreme poverty marked everything on which my eyes rested. a cracked earthenware lamp smoked and sputtered on a stool in the middle of the rotting floor. an old black cloak nailed to the wall, and flapping to and fro in the draught like some dead gallowsbird, hung in front of the unglazed window. a jar in a corner caught the drippings from a hole in the roof. an iron pot and a second stool--the latter casting a long shadow across the floor--stood beside the handful of wood ashes, which smouldered on the hearth. and that was all the furniture i saw, except a bed which filled the farther end of the long narrow room, and was curtained off so as to form a kind of miserable alcove. a glance sufficed to show me all this, and that the room was empty, or apparently empty. yet i looked again and again, stupefied. at last finding my voice, i turned to the young man who had brought us hither, and with a fierce oath demanded of him what he meant. he shrank back behind the open door, and yet answered with a kind of sullen surprise that i had asked for madame de bonne's, and this was it. 'madame de bonne's!' i muttered. 'this madame de bonne's!' he nodded. 'of course it is! and you know it!' mademoiselle hissed in my ear, her voice, as she interposed, hoarse with passion. 'don't think that you can deceive us any longer. we know all! this,' she continued, looking round, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes ablaze with scorn, 'is your mother's, is it! your mother who has followed the court hither--whose means are narrow, but not so small as to deprive her of the privileges of her rank! this is your mother's hospitality, is it? you are a cheat, sir! and a detected cheat! let us begone! let me go, sir, i say!' twice i had tried to stop the current of her words; but in vain. now with anger which surpassed hers a hundredfold--for who, being a man, would hear himself misnamed before his mother?--i succeeded. 'silence, mademoiselle!' i cried, my grasp on her wrist. 'silence, i say! this _is_ my mother!' and running forward to the bed, i fell on my knees beside it. a feeble hand had half withdrawn the curtain, and through the gap my mother's stricken face looked out, a great fear stamped upon it. chapter vii. simon fleix. for some minutes i forgot mademoiselle in paying those assiduous attentions to my mother which her state and my duty demanded; and which i offered the more anxiously that i recognised, with a sinking heart, the changes which age and illness had made in her since my last visit. the shock of mademoiselle's words had thrown her into a syncope, from which she did not recover for some time; and then rather through the assistance of our strange guide, who seemed well aware what to do, than through my efforts. anxious as i was to learn what had reduced her to such straits and such a place, this was not the time to satisfy my curiosity, and i prepared myself instead for the task of effacing the painful impression which mademoiselle's words had made on her mind. on first coming to herself she did not remember them, but, content to find me by her side--for there is something so alchemic in a mother's love that i doubt not my presence changed her garret to a palace--she spent herself in feeble caresses and broken words. presently, however, her eye falling on mademoiselle and her maid, who remained standing by the hearth, looking darkly at us from time to time, she recalled, first the shock which had prostrated her, and then its cause, and raising herself on her elbow, looked about her wildly. 'gaston!' she cried, clutching my hand with her thin fingers, 'what was it i heard? it was of you someone spoke--a woman! she called you--or did i dream it?--a cheat! you!' 'madame, madame,' i said, striving to speak carelessly, though the sight of her grey hair, straggling and dishevelled, moved me strangely, 'was it likely? would anyone dare to use such expressions of me in your presence? you must indeed have dreamed it!' the words, however, returning more and more vividly to her mind, she looked at me very pitifully, and in great agitation laid her arm on my neck, as though she would shelter me with the puny strength which just enabled her to rise in bed. 'but someone,' she muttered, her eyes on the strangers, 'said it, gaston? i heard it. what did it mean?' 'what you heard, madame,' i answered, with an attempt at gaiety, though the tears stood in my eyes, 'was, doubtless, mademoiselle here scolding our guide from tours, who demanded three times the proper _pourboire_. the impudent rascal deserved all that was said to him, i assure you.' 'was that it?' she murmured doubtfully. 'that must have been what you heard, madame,' i answered, as if i felt no doubt. she fell back with a sigh of relief, and a little colour came into her wan face. but her eyes still dwelt curiously, and with apprehension, on mademoiselle, who stood looking sullenly into the fire; and seeing this my heart misgave me sorely that i had done a foolish thing in bringing the girl there. i foresaw a hundred questions which would be asked, and a hundred complications which must ensue, and felt already the blush of shame mounting to my cheek. 'who is that?' my mother asked softly. 'i am ill. she must excuse me.' she pointed with her fragile finger to my companions. i rose, and still keeping her hand in mine, turned so as to face the hearth. 'this, madame,' i answered formally, 'is mademoiselle----, but her name i will commit to you later, and in private. suffice it to say that she is a lady of rank, who has been committed to my charge by a high personage.' 'a high personage?' my mother repeated gently, glancing at me with a smile of gratification. 'one of the highest,' i said. 'such a charge being a great honour to me, i felt that i could not better execute it, madame, since we must lie in blois one night, than by requesting your hospitality on her behalf.' i dared mademoiselle as i spoke--i dared her with my eye to contradict or interrupt me. for answer, she looked at me once, inclining her head a little, and gazing at us from under her long eyelashes. then she turned back to the fire, and her foot resumed its angry tapping on the floor. 'i regret that i cannot receive her better,' my mother answered feebly. 'i have had losses of late. i--but i will speak of that at another time. mademoiselle doubtless knows,' she continued with dignity, 'you and your position in the south too well to think ill of the momentary straits to which she finds me reduced.' i saw mademoiselle start, and i writhed under the glance of covert scorn, of amazed indignation, which she shot at me. but my mother gently patting my hand, i answered patiently, 'mademoiselle will think only what is kind, madame--of that i am assured. and lodgings are scarce to-night in blois.' 'but tell me of yourself, gaston,' my mother cried eagerly; and i had not the heart, with her touch on my hand, her eyes on my face, to tear myself away, much as i dreaded what was coming, and longed to end the scene. 'tell me of yourself. you are still in favour with the king of---- i will not name him here?' 'still, madame,' i answered, looking steadily at mademoiselle, though my face burned. 'you are still--he consults you, gaston?' 'still, madame.' my mother heaved a happy sigh, and sank lower in the bed. 'and your employments?' she murmured, her voice trembling with gratification. 'they have not been reduced? you still retain them, gaston?' 'still, madame,' i answered, the perspiration standing on my brow, my shame almost more than i could bear. 'twelve thousand livres a year, i think?' 'the same, madame.' 'and your establishment? how many do you keep now? your valet, of course? and lackeys--how many at present?' she glanced, with an eye of pride, while she waited for my answer, first at the two silent figures by the fire, then at the poverty-stricken room; as if the sight of its bareness heightened for her the joy of my prosperity. she had no suspicion of my trouble, my misery, or that the last question almost filled the cup too full. hitherto all had been easy, but this seemed to choke me. i stammered and lost my voice. mademoiselle, her head bowed, was gazing into the fire. fanchette was staring at me, her black eyes round as saucers, her mouth half-open. 'well, madame,' i muttered at length, 'to tell you the truth, at present, you must understand, i have been forced to----' 'what, gaston?' madame de bonne half rose in bed. her voice was sharp with disappointment and apprehension; the grasp of her fingers on my hand grew closer. i could not resist that appeal. i flung away the last rag of shame. 'to reduce my establishment somewhat,' i answered, looking a miserable defiance at mademoiselle's averted figure. she had called me a liar and a cheat--here in the room! i must stand before her a liar and a cheat confessed. 'i keep but three lackeys now, madame.' 'still it is creditable,' my mother muttered thoughtfully, her eyes shining. 'your dress, however, gaston--only my eyes are weak--seems to me----' 'tut, tut! it is but a disguise,' i answered quickly. 'i might have known that,' she rejoined, sinking back with a smile and a sigh of content. 'but when i first saw you i was almost afraid that something had happened to you. and i have been uneasy lately,' she went on, releasing my hand, and beginning to play with the coverlet, as though the remembrance troubled her. 'there was a man here a while ago--a friend of simon fleix there--who had been south to pau and nerac, and he said there was no m. de marsac about the court.' 'he probably knew less of the court than the wine-tavern,' i answered with a ghastly smile. 'that was just what i told him,' my mother responded quickly and eagerly. 'i warrant you i sent him away ill-satisfied.' 'of course,' i said; 'there will always be people of that kind. but now, if you will permit me, madame, i will make such arrangements for mademoiselle as are necessary.' begging her accordingly to lie down and compose herself--for even so short a conversation, following on the excitement of our arrival, had exhausted her to a painful degree--i took the youth, who had just returned from stabling our horses, a little aside, and learning that he lodged in a smaller chamber on the farther side of the landing, secured it for the use of mademoiselle and her woman. in spite of a certain excitability which marked him at times, he seemed to be a quick, ready fellow, and he willingly undertook to go out, late as it was, and procure some provisions and a few other things which were sadly needed, as well for my mother's comfort as for our own. i directed fanchette to aid him in the preparation of the other chamber, and thus for a while i was left alone with mademoiselle. she had taken one of the stools, and sat cowering over the fire, the hood of her cloak drawn about her head; in such a manner that even when she looked at me, which she did from time to time, i saw little more than her eyes, bright with contemptuous anger. 'so, sir,' she presently began, speaking in a low voice, and turning slightly towards me, 'you practise lying even here?' i felt so strongly the futility of denial or explanation that i shrugged my shoulders and remained silent under the sneer. two more days--two more days would take us to rosny, and my task would be done, and mademoiselle and i would part for good and all. what would it matter then what she thought of me? what did it matter now? for the first time in our intercourse my silence seemed to disconcert and displease her. 'have you nothing to say for yourself?' she muttered sharply, crushing a fragment of charcoal under her foot, and stooping to peer at the ashes. 'have you not another lie in your quiver, m. de marsac? de marsac!' and she repeated the title, with a scornful laugh, as if she put no faith in my claim to it. but i would answer nothing--nothing; and we remained silent until fanchette, coming in to say that the chamber was ready, held the light for her mistress to pass out. i told the woman to come back and fetch mademoiselle's supper, and then, being left alone with my mother, who had fallen asleep, with a smile on her thin, worn face, i began to wonder what had happened to reduce her to such dire poverty. i feared to agitate her by referring to it; but later in the evening, when her curtains were drawn and simon fleix and i were left together, eyeing one another across the embers like dogs of different breeds--with a certain strangeness and suspicion--my thoughts recurred to the question; and determining first to learn something about my companion, whose pale, eager face and tattered, black dress gave him a certain individuality, i asked him whether he had come from paris with madame de bonne. he nodded without speaking. i asked him if he had known her long. 'twelve months,' he answered. 'i lodged on the fifth, madame on the second, floor of the same house in paris.' i leaned forward and plucked the hem of his black robe. 'what is this?' i said, with a little contempt. 'you are not a priest, man.' 'no,' he answered, fingering the stuff himself, and gazing at me in a curious, vacant fashion. 'i am a student of the sorbonne.' i drew off from him with a muttered oath, wondering--while i looked at him with suspicious eyes--how he came to be here, and particularly how he came to be in attendance on my mother, who had been educated from childhood in the religion, and had professed it in private all her life. i could think of no one who, in old days, would have been less welcome in her house than a sorbonnist, and began to fancy that here should lie the secret of her miserable condition. 'you don't like the sorbonne?' he said, reading my thoughts; which were, indeed, plain enough. 'no more than i love the devil!' i said bluntly. he leaned forward and, stretching out a thin, nervous hand, laid it on my knee. 'what if they are right, though?' he muttered, his voice hoarse. 'what if they are right, m. de marsac?' 'who right?' i asked roughly, drawing back afresh. 'the sorbonne,' he repeated, his face red with excitement, his eyes peering uncannily into mine. 'don't you see,' he continued, pinching my knee in his earnestness, and thrusting his face nearer and nearer to mine, 'it all turns on that? it all turns on that--salvation or damnation! are they right? are you right? you say yes to this, no to that, you white-coats; and you say it lightly, but are you right? are you right? mon dieu!' he continued, drawing back abruptly and clawing the air with impatience, 'i have read, read, read! i have listened to sermons, theses, disputations, and i know nothing. i know no more than when i began.' he sprang up and began to pace the floor, while i gazed at him with a feeling of pity. a very learned person once told me that the troubles of these times bred four kinds of men, who were much to be compassionated: fanatics on the one side or the other, who lost sight of all else in the intensity of their faith; men who, like simon fleix, sought desperately after something to believe, and found it not; and lastly, scoffers, who, believing in nothing, looked on all religion as a mockery. he presently stopped walking--in his utmost excitement i remarked that he never forgot my mother, but trod more lightly when he drew near the alcove--and spoke again. 'you are a huguenot?' he said. 'yes,' i replied. 'so is she,' he rejoined, pointing towards the bed. 'but do you feel no doubts?' 'none,' i said quietly. 'nor does she,' he answered again, stopping opposite me. you made up your mind--how?' 'i was born in the religion,' i said. 'and you have never questioned it?' 'never.' 'nor thought much about it?' 'not a great deal,' i answered. 'saint gris!' he exclaimed in a low tone. 'and do you never think of hell-fire--of the worm which dieth not, and the fire which shall not be quenched? do you never think of that, m. de marsac?' 'no, my friend, never!' i answered, rising impatiently; for at that hour, and in that silent, gloomy room i found his conversation dispiriting. 'i believe what i was taught to believe, and i strive to hurt no one but the enemy. i think little; and if i were you i would think less. i would do something, man--fight, play, work, anything but think! leave that to clerks.' 'i am a clerk,' he answered. 'a poor one, it seems,' i retorted, with a little scorn in my tone. 'leave it, man. work! fight! do something!' 'fight?' he said, as if the idea were a novel one. 'fight? but there, i might be killed; and then hell-fire you see!' 'zounds, man!' i cried, out of patience with a folly which, to tell the truth, the lamp burning low, and the rain pattering on the roof, made the skin of my back feel cold and creepy. 'enough of this! keep your doubts and your fire to yourself! and answer me,' i continued, sternly. 'how came madame de bonne so poor? how did she come down to this place?' he sat down on his stool, the excitement dying quickly out of his fare. 'she gave away all her money,' he said slowly and reluctantly. it may be imagined that this answer surprised me. 'gave it away?' i exclaimed. 'to whom? and when?' he moved uneasily on his seat and avoided my eye, his altered manner filling me with suspicions which the insight i had just obtained into his character did not altogether preclude. at last he said, 'i had nothing to do with it, if you mean that; nothing. on the contrary, i have done all i could to make it up to her. i followed her here. i swear that is so, m. de marsac.' 'you have not told me yet to whom she gave it,' i said sternly. 'she gave it,' he muttered, 'to a priest.' 'to what priest?' 'i do not know his name. he is a jacobin.' 'and why?' i asked, gazing incredulously at the student. 'why did she give it to him? come, come! have a care. let me have none of your sorbonne inventions!' he hesitated a moment, looking at me timidly, and then seemed to make up his mind to tell me. 'he found out--it was when we lived in paris, you understand, last june--that she was a huguenot. it was about the time they burned the foucards, and he frightened her with that, and made her pay him money, a little at first, and then more and more, to keep her secret. when the king came to blois she followed his majesty, thinking to be safer here; but the priest came too, and got more money, and more, until he left her--this.' 'this!' i said. and i set my teeth together. simon fleix nodded. i looked round the wretched garret to which my mother had been reduced, and pictured the days and hours of fear and suspense through which she had lived; through which she must have lived with that caitiff's threat hanging over her grey head! i thought of her birth and her humiliation, of her frail form and patient, undying love for me; and solemnly, and before heaven, i swore that night to punish the man. my anger was too great for words, and for tears i was too old. i asked simon fleix no more questions, save when the priest might be looked for again--which he could not tell me--and whether he would know him again--to which he answered, 'yes.' but, wrapping myself in my cloak, i lay down by the fire and pondered long and sadly. so, while i had been pinching there, my mother had been starving here. she had deceived me, and i her. the lamp flickered, throwing uncertain shadows as the draught tossed the strange window-curtain to and fro. the leakage from the roof fell drop by drop, and now and again the wind shook the crazy building, as though it would lift it up bodily and carry it away. chapter viii. an empty room. desiring to start as early as possible, that we might reach rosny on the second evening, i roused simon fleix before it was light, and learning from him where the horses were stabled, went out to attend to them; preferring to do this myself, that i might have an opportunity of seeking out a tailor, and providing myself with clothes better suited to my rank than those to which i had been reduced of late. i found that i still had ninety crowns left of the sum which the king of navarre had given me, and twelve of these i laid out on a doublet of black cloth with russet points and ribands, a dark cloak lined with the same sober colour, and a new cap and feather. the tradesman would fain have provided me with a new scabbard also, seeing my old one was worn-out at the heel; but this i declined, having a fancy to go with my point bare until i should have punished the scoundrel who had made my mother's failing days a misery to her; a business which, the king of navarre's once done, i promised myself to pursue with energy and at all costs. the choice of my clothes, and a few alterations which it was necessary to make in them, detained me some time, so that it was later than i could have wished when i turned my face towards the house again, bent on getting my party to horse as speedily as possible. the morning, i remember, was bright, frosty, and cold; the kennels were dry, the streets comparatively clean. here and there a ray of early sunshine, darting between the overhanging eaves, gave promise of glorious travelling-weather. but the faces, i remarked in my walk, did not reflect the surrounding cheerfulness. moody looks met me everywhere and on every side; and while courier after courier galloped by me bound for the castle, the townsfolk stood aloof in doorways listless and inactive, or, gathering in groups in corners, talked what i took to be treason under the breath. the queen-mother still lived, but orleans had revolted, and sens and mans, chartres and melun. rouen was said to be wavering, lyons in arms, while paris had deposed her king, and cursed him daily from a hundred altars. in fine, the great rebellion which followed the death of guise, and lasted so many years, was already in progress; so that on this first day of the new year the king's writ scarce ran farther than he could see, peering anxiously out from the towers above my head. reaching the house, i climbed the long staircase hastily, abusing its darkness and foulness, and planning as i went how my mother might most easily and quickly be moved to a better lodging. gaining the top of the last flight, i saw that mademoiselle's door on the left of the landing was open, and concluding from this that she was up, and ready to start, i entered my mother's room with a brisk step and spirits reinforced by the crisp morning air. but on the threshold. i stopped, and stood silent and amazed. at first i thought the room was empty. then, at a second glance, i saw the student. he was on his knees beside the bed in the alcove, from which the curtain had been partially dragged away. the curtain before the window had been torn down also, and the cold light of day, pouring in on the unsightly bareness of the room, struck a chill to my heart. a stool lay overturned by the fire, and above it a grey cat, which i had not hitherto noticed, crouched on a beam and eyed me with stealthy fierceness. mademoiselle was not to be seen, nor was fanchette, and simon fleix did not hear me. he was doing something at the bed--for my mother it seemed. 'what is it, man?' i cried softly, advancing on tiptoe to the bedside. 'where are the others?' the student looked round and saw me. his face was pale and gloomy. his eyes burned, and yet there were tears in them, and on his cheeks. he did not speak, but the chilliness, the bareness, the emptiness of the room spoke for him, and my heart sank. i took him by the shoulders. 'find your tongue, man!' i said angrily. 'where are they?' he rose from his knees and stood staring at me. 'they are gone!' he said stupidly. 'gone?' i exclaimed. 'impossible! when? whither?' 'half an hour ago. whither--i do not know.' confounded and amazed, i glared at him between fear and rage. 'you do not know?' i cried. 'they are gone, and you do not know?' he turned suddenly on me and gripped my arm. 'no, i do not know! i do not know!' he cried, with a complete change of manner and in a tone of fierce excitement. 'only, may the fiend go with them! but i do know this. i know this, m. de marsac, with whom they went, these friends of yours! a fop came, a dolt, a fine spark, and gave them fine words and fine speeches and a gold token, and, hey presto! they went, and forgot you!' 'what!' i cried, beginning to understand, and snatching fiercely at the one clue in his speech. 'a gold token? they have been decoyed away then! there is no time to be lost. i must follow.' 'no, for that is not all!' he replied, interrupting me sternly, while his grasp on my arm grew tighter and his eyes flashed as they looked into mine. 'you have not heard all. they have gone with one who called you an impostor, and a thief, and a beggar, and that to your mother's face--and killed her! killed her as surely as if he had taken a sword to her, m. de marsac! will you, after that, leave her for them?' he spoke plainly. and yet, god forgive me, it was some time before i understood him: before i took in the meaning of his words, or could transfer my thoughts from the absent to my mother lying on the bed before me. when i did do so, and turned to her, and saw her still face and thin hair straggling over the coarse pillow, then, indeed, the sight overcame me. i thought no more of others--for i thought her dead; and with a great and bitter cry i fell on my knees beside her and hid my face. what, after all, was this headstrong girl to me? what were even kings and king's commissions to me beside her--beside the one human being who loved me still, the one being of my blood and name left, the one ever-patient, ever-constant heart which for years had beaten only for me? for a while, for a few moments, i was worthy of her for i forgot all others. simon fleix roused me at last from my stupor, making me understand that she was not dead, but in a deep swoon, the result of the shock she had undergone. a leech, for whom he had despatched a neighbour, came in as i rose, and taking my place, presently restored her to consciousness. but her extreme feebleness warned me not to hope for more than a temporary recovery; nor had i sat by her long before i discerned that this last blow, following on so many fears and privations, had reached a vital part, and that she was even now dying. she lay for a while with her hand in mine and her eyes closed, but about noon, the student, contriving to give her some broth, she revived, and, recognising me, lay for more than an hour gazing at me with unspeakable content and satisfaction. at the end of that time, and when i thought she was past speaking, she signed to me to bend over her, and whispered something, which at first i could not catch. presently i made it out to be, 'she is gone--the girl you brought?' much troubled, i answered yes, begging her not to think about the matter. i need not have feared, however, for when she spoke again she did so without emotion, and rather as one seeing clearly something before her. 'when you find her, gaston,' she murmured, 'do not be angry with her. it was not her fault. she--he deceived her. see!' i followed the direction rather of her eyes than her hand, and found beneath the pillow a length of gold chain. 'she left that?' i murmured, a strange tumult of emotions in my breast. 'she laid it there,' my mother whispered. 'and she would have stopped him saying what he did'--a shudder ran through my mother's frame at the remembrance of the man's words, though her eyes still gazed into mine with faith and confidence--'she would have stopped him, but she could not, gaston. and then he hurried her away.' 'he showed her a token, madame, did he not?' i could not for my life repress the question, so much seemed to turn on the point. 'a bit of gold,' my mother whispered, smiling faintly. 'now let me sleep.' and, clinging always to my hand, she closed her eyes. the student came back soon afterwards with some comforts for which i had despatched him, and we sat by her until the evening fell, and far into the night. it was a relief to me to learn from the leech that she had been ailing for some time, and that in any case the end must have come soon. she suffered no pain and felt no fears, but meeting my eyes whenever she opened her own, or came out of the drowsiness which possessed her, thanked god, i think, and was content. as for me, i remember that room became, for the time, the world. its stillness swallowed up all the tumults which filled the cities of france, and its one interest--the coming and going of a feeble breath--eclipsed the ambitions and hopes of a lifetime. before it grew light simon fleix stole out to attend to the horses. when he returned he came to me and whispered in my ear that he had something to tell me; and my mother lying in a quiet sleep at the time, i disengaged my hand, and, rising softly, went with him to the hearth. instead of speaking, he held his fist before me and suddenly unclosed the fingers. 'do you know it?' he said, glancing at me abruptly. i took what he held, and looking at it, nodded. it was a knot of velvet of a peculiar dark red colour, and had formed, as i knew the moment i set eyes on it, part of the fastening of mademoiselle's mask. 'where did you find it?' i muttered, supposing that he had picked it up on the stairs. 'look at it!' he answered impatiently. 'you have not looked.' i turned it over, and then saw something which had escaped me at first--that the wider part of the velvet was disfigured by a fantastic stitching, done very roughly and rudely with a thread of white silk. the stitches formed letters, the letters words. with a start i read, '_a moi!_' and saw in a corner, in smaller stitches, the initials 'c. d. l. v.' i looked eagerly at the student. 'where did you find this?' i said. 'i picked it up in the street,' he answered quietly, 'not three hundred paces from here.' i thought a moment. 'in the gutter, or near the wall?' i asked. 'near the wall, to be sure.' 'under a window?' 'precisely,' he said. 'you may be easy; i am not a fool. i marked the place, m. de marsac, and shall not forget it.' even the sorrow and solicitude i felt on my mother's behalf--feelings which had seemed a minute before to secure me against all other cares or anxieties whatever--were not proof against this discovery. for i found myself placed in a strait so cruel i must suffer either way. on the one hand, i could not leave my mother; i were a heartless ingrate to do that. on the other, i could not, without grievous pain, stand still and inactive while mademoiselle de la vire, whom i had sworn to protect, and who was now suffering through my laches and mischance, appealed to me for help. for i could not doubt that this was what the bow of velvet meant; still less that it was intended for me, since few save myself would be likely to recognise it, and she would naturally expect me to make some attempt at pursuit. and i could not think little of the sign. remembering mademoiselle's proud and fearless spirit, and the light in which she had always regarded me, i augured the worst from it. i felt assured that no imaginary danger and no emergency save the last would have induced her to stoop so low; and this consideration, taken with the fear i felt that she had fallen into the hands of fresnoy, whom i believed to be the person who had robbed me of the gold coin, filled me with a horrible doubt which way my duty lay. i was pulled, as it were, both ways. i felt my honour engaged both to go and to stay, and while my hand went to my hilt, and my feet trembled to be gone, my eyes sought my mother, and my ears listened for her gentle breathing. perplexed and distracted, i looked at the student, and he at me. 'you saw the man who took her away,' i muttered. hitherto, in my absorption on my mother's account, i had put few questions, and let the matter pass as though it moved me little and concerned me less. 'what was he like? was he a big, bloated man, simon, with his head bandaged, or perhaps a wound on his face?' 'the gentleman who went away with mademoiselle, do you mean?' he asked. 'yes, yes, gentleman if you like!' 'not at all,' the student answered. 'he was a tall young gallant, very gaily dressed, dark-haired, and with a rich complexion. i heard him tell her that he came from a friend of hers too high to be named in public or in blois. he added that he brought a token from him; and when mademoiselle mentioned you--she had just entered madame's room with her woman when he appeared----' 'he had watched me out, of course.' 'just so. well, when she mentioned you, he swore you were an adventurer, and a beggarly impostor, and what not, and bade her say whether she thought it likely that her friend would have entrusted such a mission, to such a man.' 'and then she went with him?' the student nodded. 'readily? of her own free-will?' 'certainly,' he answered. 'it seemed so to me. she tried to prevent him speaking before your mother, but that was all.' on the impulse of the moment i took a step towards the door; recollecting my position, i turned back with a groan. almost beside myself, and longing for any vent for my feelings, i caught the lad by the shoulder, where he stood on the hearth, and shook him to and fro. 'tell me, man, what am i to do?' i said between my teeth. 'speak! think! invent something!' but he shook his head. i let him go with a muttered oath, and sat down on a stool by the bed and took my head between my hands. at that very moment, however, relief came--came from an unexpected quarter. the door opened and the leech entered. he was a skilful man, and, though much employed about the court, a huguenot--a fact which had emboldened simon fleix to apply to him through the landlord of the 'bleeding heart,' the secret rendezvous of the religion in blois. when he had made his examination he was for leaving, being a grave and silent man, and full of business, but at the door i stopped him. 'well, sir?' i said in a low tone, my hand on his cloak. 'she has rallied, and may live three days,' he answered quietly. 'four, it may be, and as many more as god wills.' pressing two crowns into his hand, i begged him to call daily, which he promised to do; and then he went. my mother was still dozing peacefully, and i turned to simon fleix, my doubts resolved and my mind made up. 'listen,' i said, 'and answer me shortly. we cannot both leave; that is certain. yet i must go, and at once, to the place where you found the velvet knot. do you describe the spot exactly, so that i may find it, and make no mistake.' he nodded, and after a moment's reflection answered, 'you know the rue st. denys, m. de marsac? well, go down it, keeping the "bleeding heart" on your left. take the second turning on the same side after passing the inn. the third house from the corner, on the left again, consists of a gateway leading to the hospital of the holy cross. above the gateway are two windows in the lower story, and above them two more. the knot lay below the first window you come to. do you understand?' 'perfectly,' i said. 'it is something to be a clerk, simon.' he looked at me thoughtfully, but added nothing; and i was busy tightening my sword-hilt, and disposing my cloak about the lower part of my face. when i had arranged this to my satisfaction, i took out and counted over the sum of thirty-five crowns, which i gave to him, impressing on him the necessity of staying beside my mother should i not return; for though i proposed to reconnoitre only, and learn if possible whether mademoiselle was still in blois, the future was uncertain, and whereas i was known to my enemies, they were strangers to me. having enjoined this duty upon him, i bade my mother a silent farewell, and, leaving the room, went slowly down the stairs, the picture of her worn and patient face going with me, and seeming, i remember, to hallow the purpose i had in my mind. the clocks were striking the hour before noon as i stepped from the doorway, and, standing a moment in the lane, looked this way and that for any sign of espionage. i could detect none, however. the lane was deserted; and feeling assured that any attempt to mislead my opponents, who probably knew blois better than i did, must fail, i made none, but deliberately took my way towards the 'bleeding heart,' in the rue st. denys. the streets presented the same appearance of gloomy suspense which i had noticed on the previous day. the same groups stood about in the same corners, the same suspicious glances met me in common with all other strangers who showed themselves; the same listless inaction characterised the townsfolk, the same anxious hurry those who came and went with news. i saw that even here, under the walls of the palace, the bonds of law and order were strained almost to bursting, and judged that if there ever was a time in france when right counted for little, and the strong hand for much, it was this. such a state of things was not unfavourable to my present design, and caring little for suspicious looks, i went resolutely on my way. i had no difficulty in finding the gateway of which simon had spoken, or in identifying the window beneath which he had picked up the velvet knot. an alley opening almost opposite, i took advantage of this to examine the house at my leisure, and remarked at once, that whereas the lower window was guarded only by strong shutters, now open, that in the story above was heavily barred. naturally i concentrated my attention on the latter. the house, an old building of stone, seemed sufficiently reputable, nor could i discern anything about it which would have aroused my distrust had the knot been found elsewhere. it bore the arms of a religious brotherhood, and had probably at one time formed the principal entrance to the hospital, which still stood behind it, but it had now come, as i judged, to be used as a dwelling of the better class. whether the two floors were separately inhabited or not i failed to decide. after watching it for some time without seeing anyone pass in or out, or anything occurring to enlighten me one way or the other, i resolved to venture in, the street being quiet and the house giving no sign of being strongly garrisoned. the entrance lay under the archway, through a door on the right side. i judged from what i saw that the porter was probably absent, busying himself with his gossips in matters of state. and this proved to be the case, for when i had made the passage of the street with success, and slipped quietly in through the half-open door, i found only his staff and charcoal-pan there to represent him. a single look satisfied me on that point; forthwith, without hesitation, i turned to the stairs and began to mount, assured that if i would effect anything single-handed i must trust to audacity and surprise rather than to caution or forethought. the staircase was poorly lighted by loopholes looking towards the rear, but it was clean and well-kept. silence, broken only by the sound of my footsteps, prevailed throughout the house, and all seemed so regular and decent and orderly that the higher i rose the lower fell my hopes of success. still, i held resolutely on until i reached the second floor and stood before a closed door. the moment had come to put all to the touch. i listened for a few seconds, but hearing nothing, cautiously lifted the latch. somewhat to my surprise the door yielded to my hand, and i entered. a high settle stood inside, interrupting my view of the room, which seemed to be spacious and full of rich stuffs and furniture, but low in the roof, and somewhat dimly lighted by two windows rather wide than high. the warm glow of a fire shone on the woodwork of the ceiling, and as i softly closed the door a log on the hearth gave way, with a crackling of sparks, which pleasantly broke the luxurious silence. the next moment a low, sweet voice asked, 'alphonse, is that you?' i walked round the settle and came face to face with a beautiful woman reclining on a couch. on hearing the door open she had raised herself on her elbow. now, seeing a stranger before her, she sprang up with a low cry, and stood gazing at me, her face expressing both astonishment and anger. she was of middling height, her features regular though somewhat childlike, her complexion singularly fair. a profusion of golden hair hung in disorder about her neck, and matched the deep blue of her eyes, wherein it seemed to me, there lurked more spirit and fire than the general cast of her features led one to expect. after a moment's silence, during which she scanned me from head to foot with great haughtiness--and i her with curiosity and wonder--she spoke, 'sir!' she said slowly, 'to what am i to attribute this--visit?' for the moment i was so taken aback by her appearance and extraordinary beauty, as well as by the absence of any sign of those i sought, that i could not gather my thoughts to reply, but stood looking vaguely at her. i had expected, when i entered the room, something so different from this! 'well, sir?' she said again, speaking sharply, and tapping her foot on the floor. 'this visit, madame?' i stammered. 'call it intrusion, sir, if you please!' she cried imperiously. 'only explain it, or begone.' 'i crave leave to do both, madame,' i answered, collecting myself by an effort. 'i ascended these stairs and opened your door in error--that is the simple fact--hoping to find a friend of mine here. i was mistaken, it seems, and it only remains for me to withdraw, offering at the same time the humblest apologies.' and as i spoke i bowed low and prepared to retire. 'one moment, sir!' she said quickly, and in an altered tone. 'you are, perhaps, a friend of m. de bruhl--of my husband. in that case, if you desire to leave any message i will--i shall be glad to deliver it.' she looked so charming that, despite the tumult of my feelings, i could not but regard her with admiration. 'alas! madame, i cannot plead that excuse,' i answered. 'i regret that i have not the honour of his acquaintance.' she eyed me with some surprise. 'yet still, sir,' she answered, smiling a little, and toying with a gold brooch which clasped her habit, 'you must have had some ground, some reason, for supposing you would find a friend here?' 'true, madame,' i answered, 'but i was mistaken.' i saw her colour suddenly. with a smile and a faint twinkle of the eye she said, 'it is not possible, sir, i suppose--you have not come here, i mean, out of any reason connected with a--a knot of velvet, for instance?' i started, and involuntarily advanced a step towards her. 'a knot of velvet!' i exclaimed, with emotion. 'mon dieu! then i was not mistaken! i have come to the right house, and you--you know something of this! madame,' i continued impulsively, 'that knot of velvet? tell me what it means, i implore you!' she seemed alarmed by my violence, retreating a step or two, and looking at me haughtily, yet with a kind of shamefacedness. 'believe me, it means nothing,' she said hurriedly. 'i beg you to understand that, sir. it was a foolish jest.' 'a jest?' i said. 'it fell from this window.' 'it was a jest, sir,' she answered stubbornly. but i could see that, with all her pride, she was alarmed; her face was troubled, and there were tears in her eyes. and this rendered me under the circumstances only the more persistent. 'i have the velvet here, madame,' i said. 'you must tell me more about it.' she looked at me with a weightier impulse of anger than she had yet exhibited. 'i do not think you know to whom you are speaking,' she said, breathing fast. 'leave the room, sir, and at once! i have told you it was a jest. if you are a gentleman you will believe me, and go.' and she pointed to the door. but i held my ground, with an obstinate determination to pierce the mystery. 'i am a gentleman, madame,' i said, 'and yet i must know more. until i know more i cannot go.' 'oh, this is insufferable!' she cried, looking round as if for a way of escape; but; i was between her and the only door. 'this is unbearable! the knot was never intended for you, sir. and what is more, if m. de bruhl come and find you here, you will repent it bitterly.' i saw that she was at least as much concerned on her own account as on mine, and thought myself justified under the circumstances in taking advantage of her fears. i deliberately laid my cap on the table which stood beside me. 'i will go, madame,' i said, looking at her fixedly, 'when i know all that you know about this knot i hold, and not before. if you are unwilling to tell me, i must wait for m. de bruhl, and ask him.' she cried out 'insolent!' and looked at me as if in her rage and dismay she would gladly have killed me; being, i could see, a passionate woman. but i held my ground, and after a moment she spoke. 'what do you want to know?' she said, frowning darkly. 'this knot--how did it come to lie in the street below your window? i want to know that first.' 'i dropped it,' she answered sullenly. 'why?' i said. 'because----' and then she stopped and looked at me, and then again looked down, her face crimson. 'because, if you must know,' she continued hurriedly, tracing a pattern on the table with her finger, 'i saw it bore the words "_a moi_." i have been married only two months, and i thought my husband might find it--and bring it to me. it was a silly fancy.' 'but where did you get it? 'i asked, and i stared at her in growing wonder and perplexity. for the more questions i put, the further, it seemed to me, i strayed from my object. 'i picked it up in the ruelle d'arcy,' she answered, tapping her foot on the floor resentfully. 'it was the silly thing put it into my head to--to do what i did. and now, have you any more questions, sir?' 'one only,' i said, seeing it all clearly enough. 'will you tell me, please, exactly where you found it?' 'i have told you. in the ruelle d'arcy, ten paces from the rue de valois. now, sir, will you go?' 'one word, madame. did----' but she cried, 'go, sir, go! go!' so violently, that after making one more attempt to express my thanks, i thought it better to obey her. i had learned all she knew; i had solved the puzzle. but, solving it, i found myself no nearer to the end i had in view, no nearer to mademoiselle. i closed the door with a silent bow, and began to descend the stairs, my mind full of anxious doubts and calculations. the velvet knot was the only clue i possessed, but was i right in placing any dependence on it? i knew now that, wherever it had originally lain, it had been removed once. if once, why not twice? why not three times? chapter ix. the house in the ruelle d'arcy. i had not gone down half a dozen steps before i heard a man enter the staircase from the street, and begin to ascend. it struck me at once that this might be m. de bruhl; and i realised that i had not left madame's apartment a moment too soon. the last thing i desired, having so much on my hands, was to embroil myself with a stranger, and accordingly i quickened my pace, hoping to meet him so near the foot of the stairs as to leave him in doubt whether i had been visiting the upper or lower part of the house. the staircase was dark, however, and being familiar with it, he had the advantage over me. he came leaping up two steps at a time, and turning the angle abruptly, surprised me before i was clear of the upper flight. on seeing me, he stopped short and stared; thinking at first, i fancy, that he ought to recognise me. when he did not, he stood back a pace. 'umph!' he said. 'have you been--have you any message for me, sir?' 'no,' i said, 'i have not.' he frowned. 'i am m. de bruhl,' he said. 'indeed?' i muttered, not knowing what else to say. 'you have been----' 'up your stairs, sir? yes. in error,' i answered bluntly. he gave a kind of grunt at that, and stood aside, incredulous and dissatisfied, yet uncertain how to proceed. i met his black looks with a steady countenance, and passed by him, becoming aware, however, as i went on down the stairs that he had turned and was looking after me. he was a tall, handsome man, dark, and somewhat ruddy of complexion, and was dressed in the extreme of court fashion, in a suit of myrtle-green trimmed with sable. he carried also a cloak lined with the same on his arm. beyond looking back when i reached the street, to see that he did not follow me, i thought no more of him. but we were to meet again, and often. nay, had i then known all that was to be known i would have gone back and---- but of that in another place. the rue de valois, to which a tradesman, who was peering cautiously out of his shop, directed me, proved to be one of the main streets of the city, narrow and dirty, and darkened by overhanging eaves and signboards, but full of noise and bustle. one end of it opened on the _parvis_ of the cathedral; the other and quieter end appeared to abut on the west gate of the town. feeling the importance of avoiding notice in the neighbourhood of the house i sought, i strolled into the open space in front of the cathedral, and accosting two men who stood talking there, learned that the ruelle d'arcy was the third lane on the right of the rue de valois, and some little distance along it. armed with this information i left them, and with my head bent down, and my cloak drawn about the lower part of my face, as if i felt the east wind, i proceeded down the street until i reached the opening of the lane. without looking up i turned briskly into it. when i had gone ten paces past the turning, however, i stopped and, gazing about me, began to take in my surroundings as fast as i could. the lane, which seemed little frequented, was eight or nine feet wide, unpaved, and full of ruts. the high blank wall of a garden rose on one side of it, on the other the still higher wall of a house; and both were completely devoid of windows, a feature which i recognised with the utmost dismay. for it completely upset all my calculations. in vain i measured with my eye the ten paces i had come; in vain i looked up, looked this way and that. i was nonplussed. no window opened on the lane at that point, nor, indeed, throughout its length. for it was bounded to the end, as far as i could see, by dead-walls as of gardens. recognising, with a sinking heart, what this meant, i saw in a moment that all the hopes i had raised on simon fleix's discovery were baseless. mademoiselle had dropped the velvet bow, no doubt, but not from a window. it was still a clue, but one so slight and vague as to be virtually useless, proving only that she was in trouble and in need of help; perhaps that she had passed through this lane on her way from one place of confinement to another. thoroughly baffled and dispirited, i leant for awhile against the wall, brooding over the ill-luck which seemed to attend me in this, as in so many previous adventures. nor was the low voice of conscience, suggesting that such failures arose from mismanagement rather than from ill-luck, slow to make itself heard. i reflected that if i had not allowed myself to be robbed of the gold token, mademoiselle would have trusted me; that if i had not brought her to so poor an abode as my mother's, she would not have been cajoled into following a stranger; finally, that if i had remained with her, and sent simon to attend to the horses in my place, no stranger would have gained access to her. but it has never been my way to accept defeat at the first offer, and though i felt these self-reproaches to be well deserved, a moment's reflection persuaded me that in the singular and especial providence which had brought the velvet knot safe to my hands i ought to find encouragement. had madame de bruhl not picked it up it would have continued to lie in this by-path, through which neither i nor simon fleix would have been likely to pass. again, had madame not dropped it in her turn, we should have sought in vain for any, even the slightest, clue to mademoiselle de la vire's fate or position. cheered afresh by this thought, i determined to walk to the end of the lane; and forthwith did so, looking sharply about me as i went, but meeting no one. the bare upper branches of a tree rose here and there above the walls, which were pierced at intervals by low, strong doors. these doors i carefully examined, but without making any discovery; all were securely fastened, and many seemed to have been rarely opened. emerging at last and without result on the inner side of the city ramparts, i turned, and moodily retraced my steps through the lane, proceeding more slowly as i drew near to the rue de valois. this time, being a little farther from the street, i made a discovery. the corner house, which had its front on the rue valois, presented, as i have said, a dead, windowless wall to the lane; but from my present standpoint i could see the upper part of the back of this house--that part of the back, i mean, which rose above the lower garden-wall that abutted on it--and in this there were several windows. the whole of two and a part of a third were within the range of my eyes; and suddenly in one of these i discovered something which made my heart beat high with hope and expectation. the window in question was heavily grated; that which i saw was tied to one of the bars. it was a small knot of some white stuff--linen apparently--and it seemed a trifle to the eye; but it was looped, as far as i could see from a distance, after the same fashion as the scrap of velvet i had in my pouch. the conclusion was obvious, at the same time that it inspired me with the liveliest admiration of mademoiselle's wit and resources. she was confined in that room; the odds were that she was behind those bars. a bow dropped thence would fall, the wind being favourable, into the lane, not ten, but twenty paces from the street. i ought to have been prepared for a slight inaccuracy in a woman's estimate of distance. it may be imagined with what eagerness i now scanned the house, with what minuteness i sought for a weak place. the longer i looked, however, the less comfort i derived from my inspection. i saw before me a gloomy stronghold of brick, four-square, and built in the old italian manner, with battlements at the top, and a small machicolation, little more than a string-course, above each story; this serving at once to lessen the monotony of the dead-walls, and to add to the frowning weight of the upper part. the windows were few and small, and the house looked damp and mouldy; lichens clotted the bricks, and moss filled the string-courses. a low door opening from the lane into the garden naturally attracted my attention; but it proved to be of abnormal strength, and bolted both at the top and bottom. assured that nothing could be done on that side, and being unwilling to remain longer in the neighbourhood, lest i should attract attention, i returned to the street, and twice walked past the front of the house, seeing all i could with as little appearance of seeing anything as i could compass. the front retreated, somewhat from the line of the street, and was flanked on the farther side by stables. only one chimney smoked, and that sparely. three steps led up to imposing double doors, which stood half open, and afforded a glimpse of a spacious hall and a state staircase. two men, apparently servants, lounged on the steps, eating chestnuts, and jesting with one another; and above the door were three shields blazoned in colours. i saw with satisfaction, as i passed the second time, that the middle coat was that of turenne impaling one which i could not read--which thoroughly satisfied me that the bow of velvet had not lied; so that, without more ado, i turned homewards, formulating my plans as i went. i found all as i had left it; and my mother still lying in a half-conscious state, i was spared the pain of making excuses for past absence, or explaining that which i designed. i communicated the plan i had formed to simon fleix, who saw no difficulty in procuring a respectable person to stay with madame de bonne. but for some time he would come no farther into the business. he listened, his mouth open and his eyes glittering, to my plan until i came to his share in it; and then he fell into a violent fit of trembling. 'you want me to fight, monsieur,' he cried reproachfully, shaking all over like one in the palsy. 'you said so the other night. you want to get me killed! that's it.' 'nonsense!' i answered sharply. 'i want you to hold the horses!' he looked at me wildly, with a kind of resentment in his face, and yet as if he were fascinated. 'you will drag me into it!' he persisted. 'you will!' 'i won't,' i said. 'you will! you will! and the end i know. i shall have no chance. i am a clerk, and not bred to fighting. you want to be the death of me!' he cried excitedly. 'i don't want you to fight,' i answered with some contempt. 'i would rather that you kept out of it for my mother's sake. i only want you to stay in the lane and hold the horses. you will run little more risk than you do sitting by the hearth here.' and in the end i persuaded him to do what i wished; though still, whenever he thought of what was in front of him, he fell a-trembling again, and many times during the afternoon got up and walked to and fro between the window and the hearth, his face working and his hands clenched like those of a man in a fever. i put this down at first to sheer chicken-heartedness, and thought it augured ill for my enterprise; but presently remarking that he made no attempt to draw back, and that though the sweat stood on his brow he set about such preparations as were necessary--remembering also how long and kindly, and without pay or guerdon, he had served my mother, i began to see that here was something phenomenal; a man strange and beyond the ordinary, of whom it was impossible to predicate what he would do when he came to be tried. for myself, i passed the afternoon in a state almost of apathy. i thought it my duty to make this attempt to free mademoiselle, and to make it at once, since it was impossible to say what harm might come of delay, were she in such hands as fresnoy's; but i had so little hope of success that i regarded the enterprise as desperate. the certain loss of my mother, however, and the low ebb of my fortunes, with the ever-present sense of failure, contributed to render me indifferent to risks; and even when we were on our way, through by-streets known to simon, to the farther end of the ruelle d'arcy, and the red and frosty sunset shone in our faces, and gilded for a moment the dull eaves and grey towers above us, i felt no softening. whatever the end, there was but one in the world whom i should regret, or who would regret me; and she hung, herself, on the verge of eternity. so that i was able to give simon fleix his last directions with as much coolness as i ever felt in my life. i stationed him with the three horses in the lane--which seemed as quiet and little frequented as in the morning--near the end of it, and about a hundred paces or more from the house. 'turn their heads towards the ramparts,' i said, wheeling them round myself, 'and then they will be ready to start. they are all quiet enough. you can let the cid loose. and now listen to me, simon,' i continued. 'wait here until you see me return, or until you see you are going to be attacked. in the first case, stay for me, of course; in the second, save yourself as you please. lastly, if neither event occurs before half-past five--you will hear the convent-bell yonder ring at the half-hour--begone, and take the horses; they are yours. and one word more,' i added hurriedly. 'if you can only get away with one horse, simon, take the cid. it is worth more than most men, and will not fail you at a pinch.' as i turned away, i gave him one look to see if he understood. it was not without hesitation that after that look i left him. the lad's face was flushed, he was breathing hard, his eyes seemed to be almost starting from his head. he sat his horse shaking in every limb, and had all the air of a man in a fit. i expected him to call me back; but he did not, and reflecting that i must trust him, or give up the attempt, i went up the lane with my sword under my arm, and my cloak loose on my shoulders. i met a man driving a donkey laden with faggots. i saw no one else. it was already dusk between the walls, though light enough in the open country; but that was in my favour, my only regret being that as the town gates closed shortly after half-past five, i could not defer my attempt until a still later hour. pausing in the shadow of the house while a man might count ten, i impressed on my memory the position of the particular window which bore the knot; then i passed quickly into the street, which was still full of movement, and for a second, feeling myself safe from observation in the crowd, i stood looking at the front of the house. the door was shut. my heart sank when i saw this, for i had looked to find it still open. the feeling, however, that i could not wait, though time might present more than one opportunity, spurred me on. what i could do i must do now, at once. the sense that this was so being heavy upon me, i saw nothing for it but to use the knocker and gain admission, by fraud if i could, and if not, by force. accordingly i stepped briskly across the kennel, and made for the entrance. when i was within two paces of the steps, however, someone abruptly threw the door open and stepped out. the man did not notice me, and i stood quickly aside, hoping that at the last minute my chance had come. two men, who had apparently attended this first person downstairs, stood respectfully behind him, holding lights. he paused a moment on the steps to adjust his cloak, and with more than a little surprise i recognised my acquaintance of the morning, m. de bruhl. i had scarcely time to identify him before he walked down the steps swinging his cane, brushed carelessly past me, and was gone. the two men looked after him awhile, shading their lights from the wind, and one saying something, the other laughed coarsely. the next moment they threw the door to and went, as i saw by the passage of their light, into the room on the left of the hall. now was my time. i could have hoped for, prayed for, expected no better fortune than this. the door had rebounded slightly from the jamb, and stood open an inch or more. in a second i pushed it from me gently, slid into the hall, and closed it behind me. the door of the room on the left was wide open, and the light which shone through the doorway--otherwise the hall was dark--as well as the voices of the two men i had seen, warned me to be careful. i stood, scarcely daring to breathe, and looked about me. there was no matting on the floor, no fire on the hearth. the hall felt cold, damp, and uninhabited. the state staircase rose in front of me, and presently bifurcating, formed a gallery round the place. i looked up, and up, and far above me, in the dim heights of the second floor, i espied a faint light--perhaps, the reflection of a light. a movement in the room on my left warned me that i had no time to lose, if i meant to act. at any minute one of the men might come out and discover me. with the utmost care i started on my journey. i stole across the stone floor of the hall easily and quietly enough, but i found the real difficulty begin when i came to the stairs. they were of wood, and creaked and groaned under me to such an extent that, with each step i trod, i expected the men to take the alarm. fortunately all went well until i passed the first corner--i chose, of course, the left-hand flight--then a board jumped under my foot with a crack which sounded in the empty hall, and to my excited ears, as loud as a pistol-shot. i was in two minds whether i should not on the instant make a rush for it, but happily i stood still. one of the men came out and listened, and i heard the other ask, with an oath, what it was. i leant against the wall, holding my breath. 'only that wench in one of her tantrums!' the man who had come out answered, applying an epithet to her which i will not set down, but which i carried to his account in the event of our coming face to face presently. 'she is quiet now. she may hammer and hammer, but----' the rest i lost, as he passed through the doorway and went back to his place by the fire. but in one way his words were of advantage to me. i concluded that i need not be so very cautious now, seeing that they would set down anything they heard to the same cause; and i sped on more quickly. i had just gained the second floor landing when a loud noise below--the opening of the street door and the heavy tread of feet in the hall--brought me to a temporary standstill. i looked cautiously over the balustrade, and saw two men go across to the room on the left. one of them spoke as he entered, chiding the other knaves, i fancied, for leaving the door unbarred; and the tone, though not the words, echoing sullenly up the staircase, struck a familiar chord in my memory. the voice was fresnoy's! chapter x. the fight on the stairs. the certainty, which this sound gave me, that i was in the right house, and that it held also the villain to whom i owed all my misfortunes--for who but fresnoy could have furnished the broken coin which had deceived mademoiselle?--had a singularly inspiriting effect upon me. i felt every muscle in my body grow on the instant hard as steel, my eyes more keen, my ears sharper--all my senses more apt and vigorous. i stole off like a cat from the balustrade, over which i had been looking, and without a second's delay began the search for mademoiselle's room; reflecting that though the garrison now amounted to four, i had no need to despair. if i could release the prisoners without noise--which would be easy were the key in the lock--we might hope to pass through the hall by a _tour de force_ of one kind or another. and a church-clock at this moment striking five, and reminding me that we had only half an hour in which to do all and reach the horses, i was the more inclined to risk something. the light which i had seen from below hung in a flat-bottomed lantern just beyond the head of the stairs, and outside the entrance to one of two passages which appeared to lead to the back part of the house. suspecting that m. de bruhl's business had lain with mademoiselle, i guessed that the light had been placed for his convenience. with this clue and the position of the window to guide me, i fixed on a door on the right of this passage, and scarcely four paces from the head of the stairs. before i made any sign, however, i knelt down and ascertained that there was a light in the room, and also that the key was not in the lock. so far satisfied, i scratched on the door with my fingernails, at first softly, then with greater force, and presently i heard someone in the room rise. i felt sure that the person, whoever it was, had taken the alarm and was listening, and putting my lips to the keyhole i whispered mademoiselle's name. a footstep crossed the room sharply, and i heard muttering just within the door. i thought i detected two voices. but i was impatient, and, getting no answer, whispered in the same manner as before, 'mademoiselle de la vire, are you there?' still no answer. the muttering, too, had stopped, and all was still--in the room, and in the silent house. i tried again. 'it is i, gaston de marsac,' i said. 'do you hear? i am come to release you.' i spoke as loudly as i dared, but most of the sound seemed to come back on me and wander in suspicious murmurings down the staircase. this time, however, an exclamation of surprise rewarded me, and a voice, which i recognised at once as mademoiselle's, answered softly: 'what is it? who is there?' 'gaston de marsac,' i answered. 'do you need my help?' the very brevity of her reply; the joyful sob which accompanied it, and which i detected even through the door: the wild cry of thankfulness--almost an oath--of her companion--all these assured me at once that i was welcome--welcome as i had never been before--and, so assuring me, braced me to the height of any occasion which might befall. 'can you open the door?' i muttered. all the time i was on my knees, my attention divided between the inside of the room and the stray sounds which now and then came up to me from the hall below. 'have you the key?' 'no; we are locked in,' mademoiselle answered. i expected this. 'if the door is bolted inside,' i whispered, 'unfasten it, if you please.' they answered that it was not, so bidding them stand back a little from it, i rose and set my shoulder against it. i hoped to be able to burst it in with only one crash, which by itself, a single sound, might not alarm the men downstairs. but my weight made no impression upon the lock, and the opposite wall being too far distant to allow me to get any purchase for my feet, i presently desisted. the closeness of the door to the jambs warned me that an attempt to prise it open would be equally futile; and for a moment i stood gazing in perplexity at the solid planks, which bid fair to baffle me to the end. the position was, indeed, one of great difficulty, nor can i now think of any way out of it better or other than that which i adopted. against the wall near the head of the stairs i had noticed, as i came up, a stout wooden stool. i stole out and fetched this, and setting it against the opposite wall, endeavoured in this way to get sufficient purchase for my feet. the lock still held; but, as i threw my whole weight on the door, the panel against which i leaned gave way and broke inwards with a loud, crashing sound, which echoed through the empty house, and might almost have been heard in the street outside. it reached the ears, at any rate, of the men sitting below, and i heard them troop noisily out and stand in the hall, now talking loudly, and now listening. a minute of breathless suspense followed--it seemed a long minute; and then, to my relief, they tramped back again, and i was free to return to my task. another thrust, directed a little lower, would, i hoped, do the business; but to make this the more certain i knelt down and secured the stool firmly against the wall. as i rose after settling it, something else, without sound or warning, rose also, taking me completely by surprise--a man's head above the top stair, which, as it happened, faced me. his eyes met mine, and i knew i was discovered. he turned and bundled downstairs again with a scared face, going so quickly that i could not have caught him if i would, or had had the wit to try. of silence there was no longer need. in a few seconds the alarm would be raised. i had small time for thought. laying myself bodily against the door, i heaved and pressed with all my strength; but whether i was careless in my haste, or the cause was other, the lock did not give. instead the stool slipped, and i fell with a crash on the floor at the very moment the alarm reached the men below. i remember that the crash of my unlucky fall seemed to release all the prisoned noises of the house. a faint scream within the room was but a prelude, lost the next moment in the roar of dismay, the clatter of weapons, and volley of oaths and cries and curses which, rolling up from below, echoed hollowly about me, as the startled knaves rushed to their weapons, and charged across the flags and up the staircase. i had space for one desperate effort. picking myself up, i seized the stool by two of its legs and dashed it twice against the door, driving in the panel i had before splintered. but that was all. the lock held, and i had no time for a third blow. the men were already halfway up the stairs. in a breath almost they would be upon me. i flung down the useless stool and snatched up my sword, which lay unsheathed beside me. so far the matter had gone against us, but it was time for a change of weapons now, and the end was not yet. i sprang to the head of the stairs and stood there, my arm by my side and my point resting on the floor, in such an attitude of preparedness as i could compass at the moment. for i had not been in the house all this time, as may well be supposed, without deciding what i would do in case of surprise, and exactly where i could best stand on the defensive. the flat bottom of the lamp which hung outside the passage threw a deep shadow on the spot immediately below it, while the light fell brightly on the steps beyond. standing in the shadow i could reach the edge of the stairs with my point, and swing the blade freely, without fear of the balustrade; and here i posted myself with a certain grim satisfaction as fresnoy, with his three comrades behind him, came bounding up the last flight. they were four to one, but i laughed to see how, not abruptly, but shamefacedly and by degrees, they came to a stand halfway up the flight, and looked at me, measuring the steps and the advantage which the light shining in their eyes gave me. fresnoy's ugly face was rendered uglier by a great strip of plaister which marked the place where the hilt of my sword had struck him in our last encounter at chizé; and this and the hatred he bore to me gave a peculiar malevolence to his look. the deaf man, matthew, whose savage stolidity had more than once excited my anger on our journey, came next to him. the two strangers whom i had seen in the hall bringing up the rear. of the four, these last seemed the most anxious to come to blows, and had fresnoy not barred the way with his hand we should have crossed swords without parley. 'halt, will you!' he cried, with an oath, thrusting one of them back. and then to me he said, 'so, so, my friend! it is you, is it?' i looked at him in silence, with a scorn which knew no bounds, and did not so much as honour him by raising my sword, though i watched him heedfully. 'what are you doing here?' he continued, with an attempt at bluster. still i would not answer him, or move, but stood looking down at him. after a moment of this, he grew restive, his temper being churlish and impatient at the best. besides, i think he retained just so much of a gentleman's feelings as enabled him to understand my contempt and smart under it. he moved a step upward, his brow dark with passion. 'you beggarly son of a scarecrow!' he broke out on a sudden, adding a string of foul imprecations, 'will you speak, or are you going to wait to be spitted where you stand? if we once begin, my bantam, we shall not stop until we have done your business! if you have anything to say, say it, and----' but i omit the rest of his speech, which was foul beyond the ordinary. still i did not move or speak, but looked at him unwavering, though it pained me to think the women heard. he made a last attempt. 'come, old friend,' he said, swallowing his anger again, or pretending to do so, and speaking with a vile _bonhomie_ which i knew to be treacherous, 'if we come to blows we shall give you no quarter. but one chance you shall have, for the sake of old days when we followed condé. go! take the chance, and go. we will let you pass, and that broken door shall be the worst of it. that is more,' he added with a curse, 'than i would do for any other man in your place, m. de marsac.' a sudden movement and a low exclamation in the room behind me showed that his words were heard there; and these sounds being followed immediately by a noise as of riving wood, mingled with the quick breathing of someone hard at work, i judged that the women were striving with the door--enlarging the opening it might be. i dared not look round, however, to see what progress they made, nor did i answer fresnoy, save by the same silent contempt, but stood watching the men before me with the eye of a fencer about to engage. and i know nothing more keen, more vigilant, more steadfast than that. it was well i did, for without signal or warning the group wavered a moment, as though retreating, and the next instant precipitated itself upon me. fortunately, only two could engage me at once, and fresnoy, i noticed, was not of the two who dashed forward up the steps. one of the strangers forced himself to the front, and, taking the lead, pressed me briskly, matthew seconding him in appearance, while really watching for an opportunity of running in and stabbing me at close quarters, a man[oe]uvre i was not slow to detect. that first bout lasted half a minute only. a fierce exultant joy ran through me as the steel rang and grated, and i found that i had not mistaken the strength of wrist or position. the men were mine. they hampered one another on the stairs, and fought in fetters, being unable to advance or retreat, to lunge with freedom, or give back without fear. i apprehended greater danger from matthew than from my actual opponent, and presently, watching my opportunity, disarmed the latter by a strong parade, and sweeping matthew's sword aside by the same movement, slashed him across the forehead; then, drawing back a step, gave my first opponent the point. he fell in a heap on the floor, as good as dead, and matthew, dropping his sword, staggered backwards and downwards into fresnoy's arms. 'bonne foi! france et bonne foi!' it seemed to me that i had not spoken, that i had plied steel in grimmest silence; and yet the cry still rang and echoed in the roof as i lowered my point, and stood looking grimly down at them. fresnoy's face was disfigured with rage and chagrin. they were now but two to one, for matthew, though his wound was slight, was disabled by the blood which ran down into his eyes and blinded him. 'france et bonne foi!' 'bonne foi and good sword!' cried a voice behind me. and looking swiftly round, i saw mademoiselle's face thrust through the hole in the door. her eyes sparkled with a fierce light, her lips were red beyond the ordinary, and her hair, loosened and thrown into disorder by her exertions, fell in thick masses about her white cheeks, and gave her the aspect of a war-witch, such as they tell of in my country of brittany. 'good sword!' she cried again, and clapped her hands. 'but better board, mademoiselle!' i answered gaily. like most of the men of my province, i am commonly melancholic, but i have the habit of growing witty at such times as these. 'now, m. fresnoy,' i continued,' i am waiting your convenience. must i put on my cloak to keep myself warm?' he answered by a curse, and stood looking at me irresolutely. 'if you will come down,' he said. 'send your man away and i will come,' i answered briskly. 'there is space on the landing, and a moderate light. but i must be quick. mademoiselle and i are due elsewhere, and we are late already.' still he hesitated. still he looked at the man lying at his feet--who had stretched himself out and passed, quietly enough, a minute before--and stood dubious, the most pitiable picture of cowardice and malice--he being ordinarily a stout man--i ever saw. i called him poltroon and white-feather, and was considering whether i had not better go down to him, seeing that our time must be up, and simon would be quitting his post, when a cry behind me caused me to turn, and i saw that mademoiselle was no longer looking through the opening in the door. alarmed on her behalf, as i reflected that there might be other doors to the room, and the men have other accomplices in the house, i sprang to the door to see, but had barely time to send a single glance round the interior--which showed me only that the room was still occupied--before fresnoy, taking advantage of my movement and of my back being turned, dashed up the stairs, with his comrade at his heels, and succeeded in penning me into the narrow passage where i stood. i had scarcely time, indeed, to turn and put myself on guard before he thrust at me. nor was that all. the superiority in position no longer lay with me. i found myself fighting between walls close to the opening in the door, through which the light fell athwart my eyes, baffling and perplexing me. fresnoy was not slow to see the aid this gave him, and pressed me hard and desperately; so that we played for a full minute at close quarters, thrusting and parrying, neither of us having room to use the edge, or time to utter word or prayer. at this game we were so evenly matched that for a time the end was hard to tell. presently, however, there came a change. my opponent's habit of wild living suited ill with a prolonged bout, and as his strength and breath failed and he began to give ground i discerned i had only to wear him out to have him at my mercy. he felt this himself, and even by that light i saw the sweat spring in great drops to his forehead, saw the terror grow in his eyes. already i was counting him a dead man and the victory mine, when something flashed behind his blade, and his comrade's poniard, whizzing past his shoulder, struck me fairly on the chin, staggering me and hurling me back dizzy and half-stunned, uncertain what had happened to me. sped an inch lower it would have done its work and finished mine. even as it was, my hand going up as i reeled back gave fresnoy an opening, of which he was not slow to avail himself. he sprang forward, lunging at me furiously, and would have run me through there and then, and ended the matter, had not his foot, as he advanced, caught in the stool, which still lay against the wall. he stumbled, his point missed my hip by a hair's breadth, and he himself fell all his length on the floor, his rapier breaking off short at the hilt. his one remaining backer stayed to cast a look at him, and that was all. the man fled, and i chased him as far as the head of the stairs; where i left him, assured by the speed and agility he displayed in clearing flight after flight that i had nothing to fear from him. fresnoy lay, apparently stunned, and completely at my mercy. i stood an instant looking down at him, in two minds whether i should not run him through. but the memory of old days, when he had played his part in more honourable fashion and shown a coarse good-fellowship in the field, held my hand; and flinging a curse at him, i turned in anxious haste to the door, the centre of all this bloodshed and commotion. the light still shone through the breach in the panel, but for some minutes--since fresnoy's rush up the stairs, indeed--i had heard no sound from this quarter. now, looking in with apprehensions which grew with the continuing silence, i learned the reason. the room was empty! such a disappointment in the moment of triumph was hard to bear. i saw myself, after all done and won, on the point of being again outwitted, distanced, it might be fooled. in frantic haste and excitement i snatched up the stool beside me, and, dashing it twice against the lock, forced it at last to yield. the door swung open, and i rushed into the room, which, abandoned by those who had so lately occupied it, presented nothing to detain me. i cast a single glance round, saw that it was squalid, low-roofed, unfurnished, a mere prison; then swiftly crossing the floor, i made for a door at the farther end, which my eye had marked from the first. a candle stood flaring and guttering on a stool, and as i passed i took it up. somewhat to my surprise the door yielded to my touch. in trembling haste--for what might not befall the women while i fumbled with doors or wandered in passages?--i flung it wide, and passing through it, found myself at the head of a narrow, mean staircase, leading, doubtless, to the servants' offices. at this, and seeing no hindrance before me, i took heart of grace, reflecting that mademoiselle might have escaped from the house this way. though it would now be too late to quit the city, i might still overtake her, and all end well. accordingly i hurried down the stairs, shading my candle as i went from a cold draught of air which met me, and grew stronger as i descended; until reaching the bottom at last, i came abruptly upon an open door, and an old, wrinkled, shrivelled woman. the hag screamed at sight of me, and crouched down on the floor; and doubtless, with my drawn sword, and the blood dripping from my chin and staining all the front of my doublet, i looked tierce and uncanny enough. but i felt it was no time for sensibility--i was panting to be away--and i demanded of her sternly where they were. she seemed to have lost her voice--through fear, perhaps--and for answer only stared at me stupidly; but on my handling my weapon with some readiness she so far recovered her senses as to utter two loud screams, one after the other, and point to the door beside her. i doubted her; and yet i thought in her terror she must be telling the truth, the more as i saw no other door. in any case i must risk it, so, setting the candle down on the step beside her, i passed out. for a moment the darkness was so intense that i felt my way with my sword before me, in absolute ignorance where i was or on what my foot might next rest. i was at the mercy of anyone who chanced to be lying in wait for me; and i shivered as the cold damp wind struck my cheek and stirred my hair. but by-and-by, when i had taken two or three steps, my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and i made out the naked boughs of trees between myself and the sky, and guessed that i was in a garden. my left hand, touching a shrub, confirmed me in this belief, and in another moment i distinguished something like the outline of a path stretching away before me. following it rapidly--as rapidly as i dared--i came to a corner, as it seemed to me, turned it blindly, and stopped short, peering into a curtain of solid blackness which barred my path, and overhead mingled confusedly with the dark shapes of trees. but this, too, after a brief hesitation, i made out to be a wall. advancing to it with outstretched hands, i felt the woodwork of a door, and, groping about, lit presently on a loop of cord. i pulled at this, the door yielded, and i went out. i found myself in a narrow, dark lane, and looking up and down discovered, what i might have guessed before, that it was the ruelle d'arcy. but mademoiselle? fanchette? simon? where were they? no one was to be seen. tormented by doubts, i lifted up my voice and called on them in turn; first on mademoiselle, then on simon fleix. in vain; i got no answer. high up above me i saw, as i stood back a little, lights moving in the house i had left; and the suspicion that, after all, the enemy had foiled me grew upon me. somehow they had decoyed mademoiselle to another part of the house, and then the old woman had misled me! i turned fiercely to the door, which i had left ajar, resolved to re-enter by the way i had come, and have an explanation whether or no. to my surprise--for i had not moved six paces from the door nor heard the slightest sound--i found it not only closed but bolted--bolted both at top and bottom, as i discovered on trying it. i fell on that to kicking it furiously, desperately; partly in a tempest of rage and chagrin, partly in the hope that i might frighten the old woman, if it was she who had closed it, into opening it again. in vain, of course; and presently i saw this and desisted, and, still in a whirl of haste and excitement, set off running towards the place where i had left simon fleix and the horses. it was fully six o'clock as i judged; but some faint hope that i might find him there with mademoiselle and her woman still lingered in my mind. i reached the end of the lane, i ran to the very foot of the ramparts, i looked right and left. in vain. the place was dark, silent, deserted. i called 'simon! simon! simon fleix!' but my only answer was the soughing of the wind in the eaves, and the slow tones of the convent-bell striking six. chapter xi. the man at the door. there are some things, not shameful in themselves, which it shames one to remember, and among these i count the succeeding hurry and perturbation of that night: the vain search, without hope or clue, to which passion impelled me, and the stubborn persistence with which i rushed frantically from place to place long after the soberness of reason would have had me desist. there was not, it seems to me, looking back now, one street or alley, lane or court, in blois which i did not visit again and again in my frantic wanderings; not a beggar skulking on foot that night whom i did not hunt down and question; not a wretched woman sleeping in arch or doorway whom i did not see and scrutinise. i returned to my mother's lodging again and again, always fruitlessly. i rushed to the stables and rushed away again, or stood and listened in the dark, empty stalls, wondering what had happened, and torturing myself with suggestions of this or that. and everywhere, not only at the north-gate, where i interrogated the porters and found that no party resembling that which i sought had passed out, but on the _parvis_ of the cathedral, where a guard was drawn up, and in the common streets, where i burst in on one group and another with my queries, i ran the risk of suspicion and arrest, and all that might follow thereon. it was strange indeed that i escaped arrest. the wound in my chin still bled at intervals, staining my doublet; and as i was without my cloak, which i had left in the house in the rue valois, i had nothing to cover my disordered dress. i was keenly, fiercely anxious. stray passers meeting me in the glare of a torch, or seeing me hurry by the great braziers which burned where four streets met, looked askance at me and gave me the wall; while men in authority cried to me to stay and answer their questions. i ran from the one and the other with the same savage impatience, disregarding everything in the feverish anxiety which spurred me on and impelled me to a hundred imprudences, such as at my age i should have blushed to commit. much of this feeling was due, no doubt, to the glimpse i had had of mademoiselle, and the fiery words she had spoken; more, i fancy, to chagrin and anger at the manner in which the cup of success had been dashed at the last moment from my lips. for four hours i wandered through the streets, now hot with purpose, now seeking aimlessly. it was ten o'clock when at length i gave up the search, and, worn out both in body and mind, climbed the stairs at my mother's lodgings and entered her room. an old woman sat by the fire, crooning softly to herself, while she stirred something in a black pot. my mother lay in the same heavy, deep sleep in which i had left her. i sat down opposite the nurse (who cried out at my appearance) and asked her dully for some food. when i had eaten it, sitting in a kind of stupor the while, the result partly of my late exertions, and partly of the silence which prevailed round me, i bade the woman call me if any change took place; and then going heavily across to the garret simon had occupied, i lay down on his pallet, and fell into a sound, dreamless sleep. the next day and the next night i spent beside my mother, watching the life ebb fast away, and thinking with grave sorrow of her past and my future. it pained me beyond measure to see her die thus, in a garret, without proper attendance or any but bare comforts; the existence which had once been bright and prosperous ending in penury and gloom, such as my mother's love and hope and self-sacrifice little deserved. her state grieved me sharply on my own account too, seeing that i had formed none of those familiar relations which men of my age have commonly formed, and which console them for the loss of parents and forbears; nature so ordering it, as i have taken note, that men look forward rather than backward, and find in the ties they form with the future full compensation for the parting strands behind them. i was alone, poverty-stricken, and in middle life, seeing nothing before me except danger and hardship, and these unrelieved by hope or affection. this last adventure, too, despite all my efforts, had sunk me deeper in the mire; by increasing my enemies and alienating from me some to whom i might have turned at the worst. in one other respect also it had added to my troubles not a little; for the image of mademoiselle wandering alone and unguarded through the streets, or vainly calling on me for help, persisted in thrusting itself on my imagination when i least wanted it, and came even between my mother's patient face and me. i was sitting beside madame de bonne a little after sunset on the second day, the woman who attended her being absent on an errand, when i remarked that the lamp, which had been recently lit, and stood on a stool in the middle of the room, was burning low and needed snuffing. i went to it softly, and while stooping over it, trying to improve the light, heard a slow, heavy step ascending the stairs. the house was quiet, and the sound attracted my full attention. i raised myself and stood listening, hoping that this might be the doctor, who had not been that day. the footsteps passed the landing below, but at the first stair of the next flight the person, whoever it was, stumbled, and made a considerable noise. at that, or it might be a moment later, the step still ascending, i heard a sudden rustling behind me, and, turning quickly with a start, saw my mother sitting up in bed. her eyes were open, and she seemed fully conscious; which she had not been for days, nor indeed since the last conversation i have recorded. but her face, though it was now sensible, was pinched and white, and so drawn with mortal fear that i believed her dying, and sprang to her, unable to construe otherwise the pitiful look in her straining eyes. 'madame,' i said, hastily passing my arm round her, and speaking with as much encouragement as i could infuse into my voice, 'take comfort. i am here. your son.' 'hush!' she muttered in answer, laying her feeble hand on my wrist and continuing to look, not at me, but at the door. 'listen, gaston! don't you hear? there it is again. again!' for a moment i thought her mind still wandered, and i shivered, having no fondness for hearing such things. then i saw she was listening intently to the sound which had attracted my notice. the step had reached the landing by this time. the visitor, whoever it was, paused there a moment, being in darkness, and uncertain, perhaps, of the position of the door; but in a little while i heard him move forward again, my mother's fragile form, clasped as it was in my embrace, quivering with each step he took, as though his weight stirred the house. he tapped at the door. i had thought, while i listened and wondered, of more than one whom this might be: the leech, simon fleix, madame bruhl, fresnoy even. but as the tap came, and i felt my mother tremble in my arms, enlightenment came with it, and i pondered no more. i knew as well as if she had spoken and told me. there could be only one man whose presence had such power to terrify her, only one whose mere step, sounding through the veil, could drag her back to consciousness and fear! and that was the man who had beggared her, who had traded so long on her terrors. i moved a little, intending to cross the floor softly, that when he opened the door he might find me face to face with him; but she detected the movement, and, love giving her strength, she clung to my wrist so fiercely that i had not the heart, knowing how slender was her hold on life and how near the brink she stood, to break from her. i constrained myself to stand still, though every muscle grew tense as a drawn bowstring, and i felt the strong rage rising in my throat and choking me as i waited for him to enter. a log on the hearth gave way with a dull sound startling in the silence. the man tapped again, and getting no answer, for neither of us spoke, pushed the door slowly open, uttering before he showed himself the words, 'dieu vous bénisse!' in a voice so low and smooth i shuddered at the sound. the next moment he came in and saw me, and, starting, stood at gaze, his head thrust slightly forward, his shoulders bent, his hand still on the latch, amazement and frowning spite in turn distorting his lean face. he had looked to find a weak, defenceless woman, whom he could torture and rob at his will; he saw instead a strong man armed, whose righteous anger he must have been blind indeed had he failed to read. strangest thing of all, we had met before! i knew him at once--he me. he was the same jacobin monk whom i had seen at the inn on the claine, and who had told me the news of guise's death! i uttered an exclamation of surprise on making this discovery, and my mother, freed suddenly, as it seemed, from the spell of fear, which had given her unnatural strength, sank back on the bed. her grasp relaxed, and her breath came and went with so loud a rattle that i removed my gaze from him, and bent over her, full of concern and solicitude. our eyes met. she tried to speak, and at last gasped, 'not now, gaston! let him--let him----' her lips framed the word 'go,' but she could not give it sound. i understood, however, and in impotent wrath i waved my hand to him to begone. when i looked up he had already obeyed me. he had seized the first opportunity to escape. the door was closed, the lamp burned steadily, and we were alone. i gave her a little armagnac, which stood beside the bed for such an occasion, and she revived, and presently opened her eyes. but i saw at once a great change in her. the look of fear had passed altogether from her face, and one of sorrow, yet content, had taken its place. she laid her hand in mine, and looked up at me, being too weak, as i thought, to speak. but by-and-by, when the strong spirit had done its work, she signed to me to lower my head to her mouth. 'the king of navarre,' she murmured--'you are sure, gaston--he will retain you in your--employments?' her pleading eyes were so close to mine, i felt no scruples such as some might have felt, seeing her so near death; but i answered firmly and cheerfully, 'madame, i am assured of it. there is no prince in europe so trustworthy or so good to his servants.' she sighed with infinite content, and blessed him in a feeble whisper. 'and if you live,' she went on, 'you will rebuild the old house, gaston. the walls are sound yet. and the oak in the hall was not burned. there is a chest of linen at gil's, and a chest with your father's gold lace--but that is pledged,' she added dreamily. 'i forgot.' 'madame,' i answered solemnly, 'it shall be done--it shall be done as you wish, if the power lie with me.' she lay for some time after that murmuring prayers, her head supported on my shoulder. i longed impatiently for the nurse to return, that i might despatch her for the leech; not that i thought anything could be done, but for my own comfort and greater satisfaction afterwards, and that my mother might not die without some fitting attendance. the house remained quiet, however, with that impressive quietness which sobers the heart at such times, and i could not do this. and about six o'clock my mother opened her eyes again. 'this is not marsac,' she murmured abruptly, her eyes roving from the ceiling to the wall at the foot of the bed. 'no, madame,' i answered, leaning over her, 'you are in blois. but i am here--gaston, your son.' she looked at me, a faint smile of pleasure stealing over her pinched face. 'twelve thousand livres a year,' she whispered, rather to herself than to me, 'and an establishment, reduced a little, yet creditable, very creditable.' for a moment she seemed to be dying in my arms, but again opened her eyes quickly and looked me in the face. 'gaston?' she said, suddenly and strangely. 'who said gaston? he is with the king--i have blessed him; and his days shall be long in the land!' then, raising herself in my arms with a last effort of strength, she cried loudly, 'way there! way for my son, the sieur de marsac!' they were her last words. when i laid her down on the bed a moment later, she was dead, and i was alone. madame de bonne, my mother, was seventy at the time of her death, having survived my father eighteen years. she was marie de roche de loheac, third daughter of raoul, sieur de loheac, on the vilaine, and by her great-grandmother, a daughter of jean de laval, was descended from the ducal family of rohan, a relationship which in after-times, and under greatly altered circumstances, henry duke of rohan condescended to acknowledge, honouring me with his friendship on more occasions than one. her death, which i have here recorded, took place on the fourth of january, the queen-mother of france, catherine de medicis, dying a little after noon on the following day. in blois, as in every other town, even paris itself, the huguenots possessed at this time a powerful organisation; and with the aid of the surgeon, who showed me much respect in my bereavement, and exercised in my behalf all the influence which skilful and honest men of his craft invariably possess, i was able to arrange for my mother's burial in a private ground about a league beyond the walls and near the village of chaverny. at the time of her death i had only thirty crowns in gold remaining, simon fleix, to whose fate i could obtain no clue, having carried off thirty-five with the horses. the whole of this residue, however, with the exception of a handsome gratuity to the nurse and a trifle spent on my clothes, i expended on the funeral, desiring that no stain should rest on my mother's birth or my affection. accordingly, though the ceremony was of necessity private, and indeed secret, and the mourners were few, it lacked nothing, i think, of the decency and propriety which my mother loved; and which she preferred, i have often heard her say, to the vulgar show that is equally at the command of the noble and the farmer of taxes. until she was laid in her quiet resting-place i stood in constant fear of some interruption on the part either of bruhl, whose connection with fresnoy and the abduction i did not doubt, or of the jacobin monk. but none came; and nothing happening to enlighten me as to the fate of mademoiselle de la vire, i saw my duty clear before me. i disposed of the furniture of my mother's room, and indeed of everything which was saleable, and raised in this way enough money to buy myself a new cloak--without which i could not travel in the wintry weather--and to hire a horse. sorry as the animal was, the dealer required security, and i had none to offer. it was only at the last moment i bethought me of the fragment of gold chain which mademoiselle had left behind her, and which, as well as my mother's rings and vinaigrette, i had kept back from the sale. this i was forced to lodge with him. having thus, with some pain and more humiliation, provided means for the journey, i lost not an hour in beginning it. on the eighth of january i set out for rosny, to carry the news of my ill-success and of mademoiselle's position whither i had looked a week before to carry herself. chapter xii. maximilian de bethune, baron de rosny. i looked to make the journey to rosny in two days. but the heaviness of the roads and the sorry condition of my hackney hindered me so greatly that i lay the second night at dreux, and, hearing the way was still worse between that place and my destination, began to think that i should be fortunate if i reached rosny by the following noon. the country in this part seemed devoted to the league, the feeling increasing in violence as i approached the seine. i heard nothing save abuse of the king of france and praise of the guise princes, and had much ado, keeping a still tongue and riding modestly, to pass without molestation or inquiry. drawing near to rosny, on the third morning, through a low marshy country covered with woods and alive with game of all kinds, i began to occupy myself with thoughts of the reception i was likely to encounter; which, i conjectured, would be none of the most pleasant. the daring and vigour of the baron de rosny, who had at this time the reputation of being in all parts of france at once, and the familiar terms on which he was known to live with the king of navarre, gave me small reason to hope that he would listen with indulgence to such a tale as i had to tell. the nearer i came to the hour of telling it, indeed, the more improbable seemed some of its parts, and the more glaring my own carelessness in losing the token, and in letting mademoiselle out of my sight in such a place as blois. i saw this so clearly now, and more clearly as the morning advanced, that i do not know that i ever anticipated anything with more fear than this explanation; which it yet seemed my duty to offer with all reasonable speed. the morning was warm, i remember; cloudy, yet not dark; the air near at hand full of moisture and very clear, with a circle of mist rising some way off, and filling the woods with blue distances. the road was deep and foundrous, and as i was obliged to leave it from time to time in order to pass the worst places, i presently began to fear that i had strayed into a by-road. after advancing some distance, in doubt whether i should persevere or turn back, i was glad to see before me a small house placed at the junction of several woodland paths. from the bush which hung over the door, and a water-trough which stood beside it, i judged the place to be an inn; and determining to get my horse fed before i went farther, i rode up to the door and rapped on it with my riding-switch. the position of the house was so remote that i was surprised to see three or four heads thrust immediately out of a window. for a moment i thought i should have done better to have passed by; but the landlord coming out very civilly, and leading the way to a shed beside the house, i reflected that i had little to lose, and followed him. i found, as i expected, four horses tied up in the shed, the bits hanging round their necks and their girths loosed; while my surprise was not lessened by the arrival, before i had fastened up my own horse, of a sixth rider, who, seeing us by the shed, rode up to us, and saluted me as he dismounted. he was a tall, strong man in the prime of youth, wearing a plain, almost mean suit of dust-coloured leather, and carrying no weapons except a hunting-knife, which hung in a sheath at his girdle. he rode a powerful silver-roan horse, and was splashed to the top of his high untanned boots, as if he had come by the worst of paths, if by any. he cast a shrewd glance at the landlord as he led his horse into the shed; and i judged from his brown complexion and quick eyes that he had seen much weather and lived an out-of-door life. he watched me somewhat curiously while i mixed the fodder for my horse; and when i went into the house and sat down in the first room i came to, to eat a little bread-and-cheese which i had in my pouch, he joined me almost immediately. apparently he could not stomach my poor fare, however, for after watching me for a time in silence, switching his boot with his whip the while, he called the landlord, and asked him, in a masterful way, what fresh meat he had, and particularly if he had any lean collops, or a fowl. the fellow answered that there was nothing. his honour could have some lisieux cheese, he added, or some stewed lentils. 'his honour does not want cheese,' the stranger answered peevishly, 'nor lentil porridge. and what is this i smell, my friend?' he continued, beginning suddenly to sniff with vigour. 'i swear i smell cooking.' 'it is the hind-quarter of a buck, which is cooking for the four gentlemen of the robe; with a collop or two to follow,' the landlord explained; and humbly excused himself on the ground that the gentlemen had strictly engaged it for their own eating. 'what? a whole quarter! _and_ a collop or two to follow!' the stranger retorted, smacking his lips. 'who are they?' 'two advocates and their clerks from the parliament of paris. they have been viewing a boundary near here, and are returning this afternoon,' the landlord answered. 'no reason why they should cause a famine!' ejaculated the stranger with energy. 'go to them and say a gentleman, who has ridden far, and fasted since seven this morning, requests permission to sit at their table. a quarter of venison and a collop or two among four!' he continued, in atone of extreme disgust. 'it is intolerable! and advocates! why, at that rate, the king of france should eat a whole buck, and rise hungry! don't you agree with me, sir?' he continued, turning on me and putting the question abruptly. he was so comically and yet so seriously angry, and looked so closely at me as he spoke, that i hastened to say i agreed with him perfectly. 'yet you eat cheese, sir!' he retorted irritably. i saw that, not withstanding the simplicity of his dress, he was a gentleman, and so, forbearing to take offence, i told him plainly that my purse being light i travelled rather as i could than as i would. 'is it so?' he answered hastily. 'had i known that, i would have joined you in the cheese! after all, i would rather fast with a gentleman, than feast with a churl. but it is too late now. seeing you mix the fodder, i thought your pockets were full.' 'the nag is tired, and has done its best,' i answered. he looked at me curiously, and as though he would say more. but the landlord returning at that moment, he turned to him instead. 'well!' he said briskly. 'is it all right?' 'i am sorry, your honour,' the man answered, reluctantly, and with a very downcast air, 'but the gentlemen beg to be excused.' 'zounds!' cried my companion roundly. 'they do, do they?' 'they say they have no more, sir,' the landlord continued, faltering, 'than enough for themselves and a little dog they have with them.' a shout of laughter which issued at that moment from the other room seemed to show that the quartette were making merry over my companion's request. i saw his cheek redden, and looked for an explosion of anger on his part; but instead he stood a moment in thought in the middle of the floor, and then, much to the innkeeper's relief, pushed a stool towards me, and called for a bottle of the best wine. he pleasantly begged leave to eat a little of my cheese, which he said looked better than the lisieux, and, filling my glass with wine, fell to as merrily as if he had never heard of the party in the other room. i was more than a little surprised, i remember; for i had taken him to be a passionate man, and not one to sit down under an affront. still i said nothing, and we conversed very well together. i noticed, however, that he stopped speaking more than once, as though to listen; but conceiving that he was merely reverting to the party in the other room, who grew each moment more uproarious, i said nothing, and was completely taken by surprise when he rose on a sudden, and, going to the open window, leaned out, shading his eyes with his hand. 'what is it?' i said, preparing to follow him. he answered by a quiet chuckle. 'you shall see,' he added the next instant. i rose, and going to the window looked out over his shoulder. three men were approaching the inn on horseback. the first, a great burly, dark-complexioned man with fierce black eyes and a feathered cap, had pistols in his holsters and a short sword by his side. the other two, with the air of servants, were stout fellows, wearing green doublets and leather breeches. all three rode good horses, while a footman led two hounds after them in a leash. on seeing us they cantered forward, the leader waving his bonnet. 'halt, there!' cried my companion, lifting up his voice when they were within a stone's throw of us. 'maignan!' 'my lord?' answered he of the feather, pulling up on the instant. 'you will find six horses in the shed there,' the stranger cried in a voice of command. 'turn out the four to the left as you go in. give each a cut, and send it about its business!' the man wheeled his horse before the words were well uttered, and crying obsequiously 'that it was done,' flung his reins to one of the other riders and disappeared in the shed, as if the order given him were the most commonplace one in the world. the party in the other room, however, by whom, all could be heard, were not slow to take the alarm. they broke into a shout of remonstrance, and one of their number, leaping from the window, asked with a very fierce air what the devil we meant. the others thrust out their faces, swollen and flushed with the wine they had drunk, and with many oaths backed up his question. not feeling myself called upon to interfere, i prepared to see something diverting. my companion, whose coolness surprised me, had all the air of being as little concerned as myself. he even persisted for a time in ignoring the angry lawyer, and, turning a deaf ear to all the threats and abuse with which the others assailed him, continued to look calmly at the prospect. seeing this, and that nothing could move him, the man who had jumped through the window, and who seemed the most enterprising of the party, left us at last and ran towards the stalls. the aspect of the two serving-men, however, who rode up grinning, and made as if they would ride him down, determined him to return; which he did, pale with fury, as the last of the four horses clattered out, and after a puzzled look round trotted off at its leisure into the forest. on this, the man grew more violent, as i have remarked frightened men do; so that at last the stranger condescended to notice him. 'my good sir,' he said coolly, looking at him through the window as if he had not seen him before, 'you annoy me. what is the matter?' the fellow retorted with a vast amount of bluster, asking what the devil we meant by turning out his horses. 'only to give you and the gentlemen with you a little exercise,' my companion answered, with grim humour, and in a severe tone strange in one so young--'than which, nothing is more wholesome after a full meal. that, and a lesson in good manners. maignan,' he continued, raising his voice, 'if this person has anything more to say, answer him. he is nearer your degree than mine.' and leaving the man to slink away like a whipped dog--for the mean are ever the first to cringe--my friend turned from the window. meeting my eyes as he went back to his seat, he laughed. 'well,' he said, 'what do you think?' 'that the ass in the lion's skin is very well till it meets the lion,' i answered. he laughed again, and seemed pleased, as i doubt not he was. 'pooh, pooh!' he said. 'it passed the time, and i think i am quits with my gentlemen now. but i must be riding. possibly our roads may lie for a while in the same direction, sir?' and he looked at me irresolutely. i answered cautiously that i was going to the town of rosny. 'you are not from paris?' he continued, still looking at me. 'no,' i answered. 'i am from the south.' 'from blois, perhaps?' i nodded. 'ah!' he said, making no comment, which somewhat surprised me, all men at this time desiring news, and looking to blois for it. 'i am riding towards rosny also. let us be going.' but i noticed that as we got to horse, the man he called maignan holding his stirrup with much formality, he turned and looked at me more than once with an expression in his eye which i could not interpret; so that, being in an enemy's country, where curiosity was a thing to be deprecated, i began to feel somewhat uneasy. however, as he presently gave way to a fit of laughter, and seemed to be digesting his late diversion at the inn, i thought no more of it, finding him excellent company and a man of surprising information. notwithstanding this my spirits began to flag as i approached rosny; and as on such occasions nothing is more trying than the well-meant rallying of a companion ignorant of our trouble, i felt rather relief than regret when he drew rein at four cross-roads a mile or so short of the town, and, announcing that here our paths separated, took a civil leave of me, and went his way with his servants. i dismounted at an inn at the extremity of the town, and, stopping only to arrange my dress and drink a cup of wine, asked the way to the château, which was situate, i learned, no more than a third of a mile away. i went thither on foot by way of an avenue of trees leading up to a drawbridge and gateway. the former was down, but the gates were closed, and all the formalities of a fortress in time of war were observed on my admission, though the garrison appeared to consist only of two or three serving-men and as many foresters. i had leisure after sending in my name to observe that the house was old and partly ruinous, but of great strength, covered in places with ivy, and closely surrounded by woods. a staid-looking page came presently to me, and led me up a narrow staircase to a parlour lighted by two windows, looking, one into the courtyard, the other towards the town. here a tall man was waiting to receive me, who rose on my entrance and came forward. judge of my surprise when i recognised my acquaintance of the afternoon! 'm. de rosny?' i exclaimed, standing still and looking at him in confusion. 'the same, sir,' he answered, with a quiet smile. 'you come from the king of navarre, i believe, and on an errand to me. you may speak openly. the king has no secrets from me.' there was something in the gravity of his demeanour as he waited for me to speak which strongly impressed me; notwithstanding that he was ten years younger than myself, and i had seen him so lately in a lighter mood. i felt that his reputation had not belied him--that here was a great man; and reflecting with despair on the inadequacy of the tale i had to tell him, i paused to consider in what terms i should begin. he soon put an end to this, however. 'come, sir,' he said with impatience. 'i have told you that you may speak out. you should have been here four days ago, as i take it. now you are here, where is the lady?' 'mademoiselle de la vire?' i stammered, rather to gain time than with any other object. 'tut, tut!' he rejoined, frowning. 'is there any other lady in the question? come, sir, speak out. where have you left her? this is no affair of gallantry,' he continued, the harshness of his demeanour disagreeably surprising me, i that you need beat about the bush. the king entrusted to you a lady, who, i have no hesitation in telling you now, was in possession of certain state secrets. it is known that she escaped safely from chizé and arrived safely at blois. where is she?' 'i would to heaven i knew, sir!' i exclaimed in despair, feeling the painfulness of my position increased a hundredfold by his manner. 'i wish to god i did.' 'what is this?' he cried in a raised voice. 'you do not know where she is? you jest, m. de marsac.' 'it were a sorry jest,' i answered, summoning up a rueful smile. and on that, plunging desperately into the story which i have here set down, i narrated the difficulties under which i had raised my escort, the manner in which i came to be robbed of the gold token, how mademoiselle was trepanned, the lucky chance by which i found her again, and the final disappointment. he listened, but listened throughout with no word of sympathy--rather with impatience, which grew at last into derisive incredulity. when i had done he asked me bluntly what i called myself. scarcely understanding what he meant, i repeated my name. he answered, rudely and flatly, that it was impossible. 'i do not believe it, sir!' he repeated, his brow dark. 'you are not the man. you bring neither the lady nor the token, nor anything else by which i can test your story. nay, sir, do not scowl at me,' he continued sharply. 'i am the mouthpiece of the king of navarre, to whom this matter is of the highest importance. i cannot believe that the man whom he would choose would act so. this house you prate of in blois, for instance, and the room with the two doors? what were you doing while mademoiselle was being removed?' 'i was engaged with the men of the house,' i answered, striving to swallow the anger which all but choked me. 'i did what i could. had the door given way, all would have been well.' he looked at me darkly. 'that is fine talking!' he said with a sneer. then he dropped his eyes and seemed for a time to fall into a brown study, while i stood before him, confounded by this new view of the case, furious, yet not knowing how to vent my fury, cut to the heart by his insults, yet without hope or prospect of redress. 'come!' he said harshly, after two or three minutes of gloomy reflection on his part and burning humiliation on mine, 'is there anyone here who can identify you, or in any other way confirm your story, sir? until i know how the matter stands i can do nothing.' i shook my head in sullen shame. i might protest against his brutality and this judgment of me, but to what purpose while he sheltered himself behind his master? 'stay!' he said presently, with an abrupt gesture of remembrance. 'i had nearly forgotten. i have some here who have been lately at the king of navarre's court at st. jean d'angely. if you still maintain that you are the m. de marsac to whom this commission was entrusted, you will doubtless have no objection to seeing them?' on this i felt myself placed in a most cruel dilemma. if i refused to submit my case to the proposed ordeal, i stood an impostor confessed. if i consented to see these strangers, it was probable they would not recognise me, and possible that they might deny me in terms calculated to make my position even worse, if that might be. i hesitated; but, rosny standing inexorable before me awaiting an answer, i finally consented. 'good!' he said curtly. 'this way, if you please. they are here. the latch is tricky. nay, sir, it is my house.' obeying the stern motion of his hand, i passed before him into the next room, feeling myself more humiliated than i can tell by this reference to strangers. for a moment i could see no one. the day was waning, the room i entered was long and narrow, and illuminated only by a glowing fire. besides i was myself, perhaps, in some embarrassment. i believed that my conductor had made a mistake, or that his guests had departed, and i turned towards him to ask for an explanation. he merely pointed onwards, however, and i advanced; whereupon a young and handsome lady, who had been seated in the shadow of the great fireplace, rose suddenly, as if startled, and stood looking at me, the glow of the burning wood falling on one side of her face and turning her hair to gold. 'well!' m. de rosny said, in a voice which sounded a little odd in my ears. 'you do not know madame, i think?' i saw that she was a complete stranger to me, and bowed to her without speaking. the lady saluted me in turn ceremoniously and in silence. 'is there no one else here who should know you?' m. de rosny continued, in a tone almost of persiflage, and with the same change in his voice which had struck me before; but now it was more marked. 'if not, m. de marsac, i am afraid---- but first look round, look round, sir; i would not judge any man hastily.' he laid his hand on my shoulder as he finished in a manner so familiar and so utterly at variance with his former bearing that i doubted if i heard or felt aright. yet i looked mechanically at the lady, and seeing that her eyes glistened in the firelight, and that she gazed at me very kindly, i wondered still more; falling, indeed, into a very confusion of amazement. this was not lessened but augmented a hundredfold when, turning in obedience to the pressure of de rosny's hand, i saw beside me, as if she had risen from the floor, another lady--no other than mademoiselle de la vire herself! she had that moment stepped out of the shadow of the great fireplace, which had hitherto hidden her, and stood before me curtseying prettily, with the same look on her face and in her eyes which madame's wore. 'mademoiselle!' i muttered, unable to take my eyes from her. 'mais oui, monsieur, mademoiselle,' she answered, curtseying lower, with the air of a child rather than a woman. 'here?' i stammered, my mouth open, my eyes staring. 'here, sir--thanks to the valour of a brave man,' she answered, speaking in a voice so low i scarcely heard her. and then, dropping her eyes, she stepped back into the shadow, as if either she had said too much already, or doubted her composure were she to say more. she was so radiantly dressed, she looked in the firelight more like a fairy than a woman, being of small and delicate proportions; and she seemed in my eyes so different a person, particularly in respect of the softened expression of her features, from the mademoiselle de la vire whom i had known and seen plunged in sloughs and bent to the saddle with fatigue, that i doubted still if i had seen aright, and was as far from enlightenment as before. it was m. de rosny himself who relieved me from the embarrassment i was suffering. he embraced me in the most kind and obliging manner, and this more than once; begging me to pardon the deception he had practised upon me, and to which he had been impelled partly by the odd nature of our introduction at the inn, and partly by his desire to enhance the joyful surprise he had in store for me. 'come,' he said presently, drawing me to the window, 'let me show you some more of your old friends.' i looked out, and saw below me in the courtyard my three horses drawn up in a row, the cid being bestridden by simon fleix, who, seeing me, waved a triumphant greeting. a groom stood at the head of each horse, and on either side was a man with a torch. my companion laughed gleefully. 'it was maignan's arrangement,' he said. 'he has a quaint taste in such things.' after greeting simon fleix a hundred times, i turned back into the room, and, my heart overflowing with gratitude and wonder, i begged m. de rosny to acquaint me with the details of mademoiselle's escape. 'it was the most simple thing in the world,' he said, taking me by the hand and leading me back to the hearth. 'while you were engaged with the rascals, the old woman who daily brought mademoiselle's food grew alarmed at the uproar, and came into the room to learn what it was. mademoiselle, unable to help you, and uncertain of your success, thought the opportunity too good to be lost. she forced the old woman to show her and her maid the way out through the garden. this done, they ran down a lane, as i understand, and came immediately upon the lad with the horses, who recognised them and helped them to mount. they waited some minutes for you, and then rode off.' 'but i inquired at the gate,' i said. 'at which gate?' inquired m. de rosny, smiling. 'the north-gate, of course,' i answered. 'just so,' he rejoined with a nod. 'but they went out through the west-gate and made a circuit. he is a strange lad, that of yours below there. he has a head on his shoulder, m. de marsac. well, two leagues outside the town they halted, scarcely knowing how to proceed. by good fortune, however, a horse-dealer of my acquaintance was at the inn. he knew mademoiselle de la vire, and, hearing whither she was bound, brought her hither without let or hindrance.' 'was he a norman?' i asked. m. de rosny nodded, smiling at me shrewdly. 'yes,' he said, 'he told me much about you. and now let me introduce you to my wife, madame de rosny.' he led me up to the lady who had risen at my entrance, and who now welcomed me as kindly as she had before looked on me, paying me many pleasant compliments. i gazed at her with interest, having heard much of her beauty and of the strange manner in which m. de rosny, being enamoured of two young ladies, and chancing upon both while lodging in different apartments at an inn, had decided which he should visit and make his wife. he appeared to read what was in my mind, for as i bowed before her, thanking her for the obliging things which she had uttered, and which for ever bound me to her service, he gaily pinched her ear, and said, 'when you want a good wife, m. de marsac, be sure you turn to the right.' he spoke in jest, and having his own case only in his mind. but i, looking mechanically in the direction he indicated, saw mademoiselle standing a pace or two to my right in the shadow of the great chimney-piece. i know not whether she frowned more or blushed more; but this for certain, that she answered my look with one of sharp displeasure, and, turning her back on me, swept quickly from the room, with no trace in her bearing of that late tenderness and gratitude which i had remarked. chapter xiii. at rosny. the morning brought only fresh proofs of the kindness which m. de rosny had conceived for me. awaking early i found on a stool beside my clothes, a purse of gold containing a hundred crowns; and a youth presently entering to ask me if i lacked anything, i had at first some difficulty in recognising simon fleix, so sprucely was the lad dressed, in a mode resembling maignan's. i looked at the student more than once before i addressed him by his name; and was as much surprised by the strange change i observed in him--for it was not confined to his clothes--as by anything which had happened since i entered the house. i rubbed my eyes, and asked him what he had done with his soutane. 'burned it, m. de marsac,' he answered briefly. i saw that he had burned much, metaphorically speaking, besides his soutane. he was less pale, less lank, less wo-begone than formerly, and went more briskly. he had lost the air of crack-brained disorder which had distinguished him, and was smart, sedate, and stooped less. only the odd sparkle remained in his eyes, and bore witness to the same nervous, eager spirit within. 'what are you going to do, then, simon?' i asked, noting these changes curiously. 'i am a soldier,' he answered, 'and follow m. de marsac.' i laughed. 'you have chosen a poor service, i am afraid,' i said, beginning to rise; 'and one, too, simon, in which it is possible you may be killed. i thought that would not suit you,' i continued, to see what he would say. but he answered nothing, and i looked at him in great surprise. 'you have made up your mind, then, at last?' i said. 'perfectly,' he answered. 'and solved all your doubts?' 'i have no doubts.' 'you are a huguenot?' 'that is the only true and pure religion,' he replied gravely. and with apparent sincerity and devotion he repeated beza's confession of faith. this filled me with profound astonishment, but i said no more at the time, though i had my doubts. i waited until i was alone with m. de rosny, and then i unbosomed myself on the matter; expressing my surprise at the suddenness of the conversion, and at such a man, as i had found the student to be, stating his views so firmly and steadfastly, and with so little excitement. observing that m. de rosny smiled but answered nothing, i explained myself farther. 'i am surprised,' i said, 'because i have always heard it maintained that clerkly men, becoming lost in the mazes of theology, seldom find any sure footing; that not one in a hundred returns to his old faith, or finds grace to accept a new one. i am speaking only of such, of course, as i believe this lad to be--eager, excitable brains, learning much, and without judgment to digest what they learn.' 'of such i also believe it to be true,' m. de rosny answered, still smiling. 'but even on them a little influence, applied at the right moment, has much effect, m. de marsac.' 'i allow that,' i said. 'but my mother, of whom i have spoken to you, saw much of this youth. his fidelity to her was beyond praise. yet her faith, though grounded on a rock, had no weight with him.' m. de rosny shook his head, still smiling. 'it is not our mothers who convert us,' he said. 'what!' i cried, my eyes opened. 'do you mean--do you mean that mademoiselle has done this?' 'i fancy so,' he answered, nodding. 'i think my lady cast her spell over him by the way. the lad left blois with her, if what you say be true, without faith in the world. he came to my hands two days later the stoutest of huguenots. it is not hard to read this riddle.' 'such conversions are seldom lasting,' i said. he looked at me queerly; and, the smile still hovering about his lips, answered 'tush, man! why so serious? theodore beza himself could not look dryer. the lad is in earnest, and there is no harm done.' and, heaven knows, i was in no mood to suspect harm; nor inclined just then to look at the dark side of things. it may be conceived how delightful it was to me to be received as an equal and honoured guest by a man, even then famous, and now so grown in reputation as to overshadow all frenchmen save his master; how pleasant to enjoy the comforts and amiabilities of home, from which i had been long estranged; to pour my mother's story into madame's ears and find comfort in her sympathy; to feel myself, in fine, once more a gentleman with an acknowledged place in the world. our days we spent in hunting, or excursions of some kind, our evenings in long conversations, which impressed me with an ever-growing respect for my lord's powers. for there seemed to be no end either to his knowledge of france, or to the plans for its development, which even then filled his brain, and have since turned wildernesses into fruitful lands, and squalid towns into great cities. grave and formal, he could yet unbend; the most sagacious of counsellors, he was a soldier also, and loved the seclusion in which we lived the more that it was not devoid of danger; the neighbouring towns being devoted to the league, and the general disorder alone making it possible for him to lie unsuspected in his own house. one thing only rendered my ease and comfort imperfect, and that was the attitude which mademoiselle de la vire assumed towards me. of her gratitude in the first blush of the thing i felt no doubt, for not only had she thanked me very prettily, though with reserve, on the evening of my arrival, but the warmth of m. de rosny's kindness left me no choice, save to believe that she had given him an exaggerated idea of my merits and services. i asked no more than this. such good offices left me nothing to expect or desire; my age and ill-fortune placing me at so great a disadvantage that, far from dreaming of friendship or intimacy with her, i did not even assume the equality in our daily intercourse to which my birth, taken by itself, entitled me. knowing that i must appear in her eyes old, poor, and ill-dressed, and satisfied with having asserted my conduct and honour, i was careful not to trespass on her gratitude; and while forward in such courtesies as could not weary her, i avoided with equal care every appearance of pursuing her, or inflicting my company upon her. i addressed her formally and upon formal topics only, such, i mean, as we shared with the rest of our company; and reminded myself often that though we now met in the same house and at the same table, she was still the mademoiselle de la vire who had borne herself so loftily in the king of navarre's ante-chamber. this i did, not out of pique or wounded pride, which i no more, god knows, harboured against her than against a bird; but that i might not in my new prosperity forget the light in which such a woman, young, spoiled, and beautiful, must still regard me. keeping to this inoffensive posture, i was the more hurt when i found her gratitude fade with the hour. after the first two days, during which i remarked that she was very silent, seldom speaking to me or looking at me, she resumed much of her old air of disdain. for that i cared little; but she presently went farther, and began to rake up the incidents which had happened at st. jean d'angely, and in which i had taken part. she continually adverted to my poverty while there, to the odd figure i had cut, and the many jests her friends had made at my expense. she seemed to take a pleasure positively savage in these, gibing at me sometimes so bitterly as to shame and pain me, and bring the colour to madame de rosny's cheeks. to the time we had spent together, on the other hand, she never or rarely referred. one afternoon, however, a week after my arrival at rosny, i found her sitting alone in the parlour. i had not known she was there, and i was for withdrawing at once with a bow and a muttered apology. but she stopped me with an angry gesture. 'i do not bite,' she said, rising from her stool and meeting my eyes, a red spot in each cheek. 'why do you look at me like that? do you know, m. de marsac, that i have no patience with you.' and she stamped her foot on the floor. 'but, mademoiselle,' i stammered humbly, wondering what in the world she meant, 'what have i done?' 'done?' she repeated angrily. 'done? it is not what you have done, it is what you are. i have no patience with you. why are you so dull, sir? why are you so dowdy? why do you go about with your doublet awry, and your hair lank? why do you speak to maignan as if he were a gentleman? why do you look always solemn and polite, and as if all the world were a prêche? why? why? why, i say?' she stopped from sheer lack of breath, leaving me as much astonished as ever in my life. she looked so beautiful in her fury and fierceness too, that i could only stare at her and wonder dumbly what it all meant. 'well!' she cried impatiently, after bearing this as long as she could, 'have you not a word to say for yourself? have you no tongue? have you no will of your own at all, m. de marsac?' 'but, mademoiselle,' i began, trying to explain. 'chut!' she exclaimed, cutting me short before i could get farther, as the way of women is. and then she added, in a changed tone, and very abruptly, 'you have a velvet knot of mine, sir. give it me.' 'it is in my room,' i answered, astonished beyond measure at this sudden change of subject, and equally sudden demand. 'then fetch it, sir, if you please,' she replied, her eyes flashing afresh. 'fetch it. fetch it, i say! it has served its turn, and i prefer to have it. who knows but that some day you may be showing it for a love-knot?' 'mademoiselle!' i cried, hotly. and i think that for the moment i was as angry as she was. 'still, i prefer to have it,' she answered sullenly, casting down her eyes. i was so much enraged, i went without a word and fetched it, and, bringing it to her where she stood, in the same place, put it into her hands. when she saw it some recollection, i fancy, of the day when she had traced the cry for help on it, came to her in her anger; for she took it from me with all her bearing altered. she trembled, and held it for a moment in her hands, as if she did not know what to do with it. she was thinking, doubtless, of the house in blois and the peril she had run there; and, being for my part quite willing that she should think and feel how badly she had acted, i stood looking at her, sparing her no whit of my glance. 'the gold chain you left on my mother's pillow,' i said coldly, seeing she continued silent, 'i cannot return to you at once, for i have pledged it. but i will do so as soon as i can.' 'you have pledged it?' she muttered, with her eyes averted. 'yes, mademoiselle, to procure a horse to bring me here,' i replied drily. 'however, it shall be redeemed. in return, there is something i too would ask.' 'what?' she murmured, recovering herself with an effort, and looking at me with something of her old pride and defiance. 'the broken coin you have,' i said. 'the token, i mean. it is of no use to you, for your enemies hold the other half. it might be of service to me.' 'how?' she asked curtly. 'because some day i may find its fellow, mademoiselle.' 'and then?' she cried. she looked at me, her lips parted, her eyes flashing. 'what then, when you have found its fellow, m. de marsac?' i shrugged my shoulders. 'bah!' she exclaimed, clenching her little hand, and stamping her foot on the floor in a passion i could not understand. 'that is you! that is m. de marsac all over. you say nothing, and men think nothing of you. you go with your hat in your hand, and they tread on you. they speak, and you are silent! why, if i could use a sword as you can, i would keep silence before no man, nor let any man save the king of france cock his hat in my presence! but you! there! go, leave me. here is your coin. take it and go. send me that lad of yours to keep me awake. at any rate he has brains, he is young, he is a man, he has a soul, he can feel--if he were anything but a clerk.' she waved me off in such a wind of passion as might have amused me in another, but in her smacked so strongly of ingratitude as to pain me not a little. i went, however, and sent simon to her; though i liked the errand very ill, and no better when i saw the lad's face light up at the mention of her name. but apparently she had not recovered her temper when he reached her, for he fared no better than i had done; coming away presently with the air of a whipped dog, as i saw from the yew-tree walk where i was strolling. still, after that she made it a habit to talk to him more and more; and, monsieur and madame de rosny being much taken up with one another, there was no one to check her fancy or speak a word of advice. knowing her pride, i had no fears for her; but it grieved me to think that the lad's head should be turned. a dozen times i made up my mind to speak to her on his behalf; but for one thing it was not my business, and for another i soon discovered that she was aware of my displeasure, and valued it not a jot. for venturing one morning, when she was in a pleasant humour, to hint that she treated those beneath her too inhumanly, and with an unkindness as little becoming noble blood as familiarity, she asked me scornfully if i did not think she treated simon fleix well enough. to which i had nothing to answer. i might here remark on the system of secret intelligence by means of which m. de rosny, even in this remote place, received news of all that was passing in france. but it is common fame. there was no coming or going of messengers, which would quickly have aroused suspicion in the neighbouring town, nor was it possible even for me to say exactly by what channels news came. but come it did, and at all hours of the day. in this way we heard of the danger of la ganache and of the effort contemplated by the king of navarre for its relief. m. de rosny not only communicated these matters to me without reserve, but engaged my affections by farther proofs of confidence such as might well have flattered a man of greater importance. i have said that, as a rule, there was no coming or going of messengers. but one evening, returning from the chase with one of the keepers, who had prayed my assistance in hunting down a crippled doe, i was surprised to find a strange horse, which had evidently been ridden hard and far, standing smoking in the yard. inquiring whose it was, i learned that a man believed by the grooms to be from blois had just arrived and was closeted with the baron. an event so far out of the ordinary course of things naturally aroused my wonder; but desiring to avoid any appearance of curiosity, which, if indulged, is apt to become the most vulgar of vices, i refrained from entering the house, and repaired instead to the yew-walk. i had scarcely, however, heated my blood, a little chilled with riding, before the page came to me to fetch me to his master. i found m. de rosny striding up and down his room, his manner so disordered and his face disfigured by so much grief and horror that i started on seeing him. my heart sinking in a moment, i did not need to look at madame, who sat weeping silently in a chair, to assure myself that something dreadful had happened. the light was failing, and a lamp had been brought into the room. m. de rosny pointed abruptly to a small piece of paper which lay on the table beside it, and, obeying his gesture, i took this up and read its contents, which consisted of less than a score of words. 'he is ill and like to die,' the message ran, 'twenty leagues south of la ganache. come at all costs. p. m.' 'who?' i said stupidly--stupidly, for already i began to understand. 'who is ill and like to die?' m. de rosny turned to me, and i saw that the tears were trickling unbidden down his cheeks. 'there is but one he for me,' he cried. 'may god spare that one! may he spare him to france, which needs him, to the church, which hangs on him, and to me, who love him! let him not fall in the hour of fruition. o lord, let him not fall!' and he sank on to a stool, and remained in that posture with his face in his hands, his broad shoulders shaken with grief. 'come, sir,' i said, after a pause sacred to sorrow and dismay; 'let me remind you that while there is life there is hope.' 'hope?' 'yes, m. de rosny, hope,' i replied more cheerfully. he has work to do. he is elected, called, and chosen; the joshua of his people, as m. d'amours rightly called him. god will not take him yet. you shall see him and be embraced by him, as has happened a hundred times. remember, sir, the king of navarre is strong, hardy, and young, and no doubt in good hands.' 'mornay's,' m. de rosny cried, looking up with contempt in his eye. yet from that moment he rallied, spurred, i think, by the thought that the king of navarre's recovery depended under god on m. de mornay; whom he was ever inclined to regard as his rival. he began to make instant preparations for departure from rosny, and bade me do so also, telling me, somewhat curtly and without explanation, that he had need of me. the danger of so speedy a return to the south, where the full weight of the vicomte de turenne's vengeance awaited me, occurred to me strongly; and i ventured, though with a little shame, to mention it. but m. de rosny, after gazing at me a moment in apparent doubt, put the objection aside with a degree of peevishness unusual in him, and continued to press on his arrangements as earnestly as though they did not include separation from a wife equally loving and beloved. having few things to look to myself, i was at leisure, when the hour of departure came, to observe both the courage with which madame de rosny supported her sorrow, 'for the sake of france,' and the unwonted tenderness which mademoiselle de la vire, lifted for once above herself, lavished on her. i seemed to stand--happily in one light, and yet the feeling was fraught with pain--outside their familiar relations; yet, having made my adieux as short and formal as possible, that i might not encroach on other and more sacred ones, i found at the last moment something in waiting for me. i was surprised as i rode under the gateway a little ahead of the others, by something small and light falling on the saddle-bow before me. catching it before it could slide to the ground, i saw, with infinite astonishment, that i held in my hand a tiny velvet bow. to look up at the window of the parlour, which i have said was over the archway, was my first impulse. i did so, and met mademoiselle's eyes for a second, and a second only. the next moment she was gone. m. de rosny clattered through the gate at my heels, the servants behind him. and we were on the road. chapter xiv. m. de rambouillet. for a while we were but a melancholy party. the incident i have last related--which seemed to admit of more explanations than one--left me in a state of the greatest perplexity; and this prevailed with me for a time, and was only dissipated at length by my seeing my own face, as it were, in a glass. for, chancing presently to look behind me, i observed that simon fleix was riding, notwithstanding his fine hat and feather and his new sword, in a posture and with an air of dejection difficult to exaggerate; whereon the reflection that master and man had the same object in their minds--nay, the thought that possibly he bore in his bosom a like token to that which lay warm in mine--occurring to me, i roused myself as from some degrading dream, and, shaking up the cid, cantered forward to join rosny, who, in no cheerful mood himself, was riding steadily forward, wrapped to his eyes in his cloak. the news of the king of navarre's illness had fallen on him, indeed, in the midst of his sanguine scheming with the force of a thunderbolt. he saw himself in danger of losing at once the master he loved and the brilliant future to which he looked forward; and amid the imminent crash of his hopes and the destruction of the system in which he lived, he had scarcely time to regret the wife he was leaving at rosny or the quiet from which he was so suddenly called. his heart was in the south, at la ganache, by henry's couch. his main idea was to get there quickly at all risks. the name of the king of navarre's physician was constantly on his lips. 'dortoman is a good man. if anyone can save him, dortoman will,' was his perpetual cry. and whenever he met anyone who had the least appearance of bearing news, he would have me stop and interrogate him, and by no means let the traveller go until he had given us the last rumour from blois--the channel through which all the news from the south reached us. an incident which occurred at the inn that evening cheered him somewhat; the most powerful minds being prone, i have observed, to snatch at omens in times of uncertainty. an elderly man, of strange appearance, and dressed in an affected and bizarre fashion, was seated at table when we arrived. though i entered first in my assumed capacity of leader of the party, he let me pass before him without comment, but rose and solemnly saluted m. de rosny, albeit the latter walked behind me and was much more plainly dressed. rosny returned his greeting and would have passed on; but the stranger, interposing with a still lower bow, invited him to take his seat, which was near the fire and sheltered from the draught, at the same time making as if he would himself remove to another place. 'nay,' said my companion, surprised by such an excess of courtesy, 'i do not see why i should take your place, sir.' 'not mine only,' the old man rejoined, looking at him with a particularity and speaking with an emphasis which attracted our attention, 'but those of many others, who i can assure you will very shortly yield them up to you, whether they will or not.' m. de rosny shrugged his shoulders and passed on, affecting to suppose the old man wandered. but privately he thought much of his words, and more when he learned that he was an astrologer from paris, who had the name, at any rate in this country, of having studied under nostradamus. and whether he drew fresh hopes from this, or turned his attention more particularly as we approached blois to present matters, certainly he grew more cheerful, and began again to discuss the future, as though assured of his master's recovery. 'you have never been to the king's court?' he said presently, following up, as i judged, a train of thought in his own mind. 'at blois, i mean.' 'no; nor do i feel anxious to visit it,' i answered. 'to tell you the truth, m. le baron,' i continued with some warmth, 'the sooner we are beyond blois, the better i shall be pleased. i think we run some risk there, and, besides, i do not fancy a shambles. i do not think i could see the king without thinking of the bartholomew, nor his chamber without thinking of guise.' 'tut, tut!' he said, 'you have killed a man before now.' 'many,' i answered. 'do they trouble you?' 'no, but they were killed in fair fight,' i replied. 'that makes a difference.' 'to you,' he said drily. 'but you are not the king of france, you see. should you ever come across him, he continued, flicking his horse's ears, a faint smile on his lips, 'i will give you a hint. talk to him of the battles at jarnac and moncontour, and praise your condé's father! as condé lost the fight and he won it, the compliment comes home to him. the more hopelessly a man has lost his powers, my friend, the more fondly he regards them, and the more highly he prizes the victories he can no longer gain.' 'ugh!' i muttered. 'of the two parties at court,' rosny continued, calmly overlooking my ill-humour, 'trust d'aumont and biron and the french clique. they are true to france at any rate. but whomsoever you see consort with the two retzs--the king of spain's jackals as men name them--avoid him for a spaniard and a traitor.' 'but the retzs are italians,' i objected peevishly. 'the same thing,' he answered curtly. 'they cry, "vive le roi!" but privately they are for the league, or for spain, or for whatever may most hurt us; who are better frenchmen than themselves, and whose leader will some day, if god spare his life, be king of france.' 'well, the less i have to do with the one or the other of them, save at the sword's point, the better i shall be pleased,' i rejoined. on that he looked at me with a queer smile; as was his way when he had more in his mind than appeared. and this, and something special in the tone of his conversation, as well, perhaps, as my own doubts about my future and his intentions regarding me, gave me an uneasy feeling; which lasted through the day, and left me only when more immediate peril presently rose to threaten us. it happened in this way. we had reached the outskirts of blois, and were just approaching the gate, hoping to pass through it without attracting attention, when two travellers rode slowly out of a lane, the mouth of which we were passing. they eyed us closely as they reined in to let us go by; and m. de rosny, who was riding with his horse's head at my stirrup, whispered me to press on. before i could comply, however, the strangers cantered by us, and turning in the saddle when abreast of us looked us in the face. a moment later one of them cried loudly, 'it is he! and both pulled their horses across the road, and waited for us to come up. aware that if m. de rosny were discovered he would be happy if he escaped with imprisonment, the king being too jealous of his catholic reputation to venture to protect a huguenot, however illustrious, i saw that the situation was desperate; for, though we were five to two, the neighbourhood of the city--the gate being scarcely a bow-shot off--rendered flight or resistance equally hopeless. i could think of nothing for it save to put a bold face on the matter, and, m. de rosny doing the same, we advanced in the most innocent way possible. 'halt, there!' cried one of the strangers sharply. 'and let me tell you, sir, you are known.' 'what if i am?' i answered impatiently, still pressing on. 'are you highwaymen, that you stop the way?' the speaker on the other side looked at me keenly, but in a moment retorted, 'enough trifling, sir! who you are i do not know. but the person riding at your rein is m. de rosny. him i do know, and i warn him to stop.' i thought the game was lost, but to my surprise my companion answered at once and almost in the same words i had used. 'well, sir, and what of that?' he said. 'what of that?' the stranger exclaimed, spurring his horse so as still to bar the way. 'why, only this, that you must be a madman to show yourself on this side of the loire.' 'it is long since i have seen the other,' was my companion's unmoved answer. 'you are m. de rosny? you do not deny it?' the man cried in astonishment. 'certainly i do not deny it,' m. de rosny answered bluntly. 'and more, the day has been, sir,' he continued with sudden fire, 'when few at his majesty's court would have dared to chop words with solomon de bethune, much less to stop him on the highway within a mile of the palace. but times are changed with me, sir, and it would seem with others also, if true men rallying to his majesty in his need are to be challenged by every passer on the road.' 'what! are you solomon de bethune?' the man cried incredulously. incredulously, but his countenance fell, and his voice was full of chagrin and disappointment. 'who else, sir?' m. de rosny replied haughtily. 'i am, and, as far as i know, i have as much right on this side of the loire as any other man.' 'a thousand pardons.' 'if you are not satisfied----' 'nay, m. de rosny, i am perfectly satisfied.' the stranger repeated this with a very crestfallen air, adding, 'a thousand pardons'; and fell to making other apologies, doffing his hat with great respect. 'i took you, if you will pardon me saying so, for your huguenot brother, m. maximilian,' he explained. 'the saying goes that he is at rosny.' 'i can answer for that being false,' m. de rosny answered peremptorily, 'for i have just come from there, and i will answer for it he is not within ten leagues of the place. and now, sir, as we desire to enter before the gates shut, perhaps you will excuse us.' with which he bowed, and i bowed, and they bowed, and we separated. they gave us the road, which m. de rosny took with a great air, and we trotted to the gate, and passed through it without misadventure. the first street we entered was a wide one, and my companion took advantage of this to ride up abreast of me. 'that is the kind of adventure our little prince is fond of,' he muttered. 'but for my part, m. de marsac, the sweat is running down my forehead. i have played the trick more than once before, for my brother and i are as like as two peas. and yet it would have gone ill with us if the fool had been one of his friends.' 'all's well that ends well,' i answered in a low voice, thinking it an ill time for compliments. as it was, the remark was unfortunate, for m. de rosny was still in the act of reining back when maignan called out to us to say we were being followed. i looked behind, but could see nothing except gloom and rain and overhanging eaves and a few figures cowering in doorways. the servants, however, continued to maintain that it was so, and we held, without actually stopping, a council of war. if detected, we were caught in a trap, without hope of escape; and for the moment i am sure m. de rosny regretted that he had chosen this route by blois--that he had thrust himself, in his haste and his desire to take with him the latest news, into a snare so patent. the castle--huge, dark, and grim--loomed before us at the end of the street in which we were, and, chilled as i was myself by the sight, i could imagine how much more appalling it must appear to him, the chosen counsellor of his master, and the steadfast opponent of all which it represented. our consultation came to nothing, for no better course suggested itself than to go as we had intended to the lodging commonly used by my companion. we did so, looking behind us often, and saying more than once that maignan must be mistaken. as soon as we had dismounted, however, and gone in, he showed us from the window a man loitering near; and this confirmation of our alarm sending as to our expedients again, while maignan remained watching in a room without a light, i suggested that i might pass myself off, though ten years older, for, my companion. 'alas!' he said, drumming with his fingers on the table, 'there are too many here who know me to make that possible. i thank you all the same.' 'could you escape on foot? or pass the wall anywhere, or slip through the gates early?' i suggested. 'they might tell us at the bleeding heart,' he answered. 'but i doubt it. i was a fool, sir, to put my neck into mendoza's halter, and that is a fact. but here is maignan. what is it, man?' he continued eagerly. 'the watcher is gone, my lord,' the equerry answered. 'and has left no one?' 'no one that i can see.' we both went into the next room and looked from the windows. the man was certainly not where we had seen him before. but the rain was falling heavily, the eaves were dripping, the street was a dark cavern with only here and there a spark of light, and the fellow might be lurking elsewhere. maignan, being questioned, however, believed he had gone off of set purpose. 'which may be read half a dozen ways,' i remarked. 'at any rate, we are fasting,' m. de rosny answered. 'give me a full man in a fight. let us sit down and eat. it is no good jumping in the dark, or meeting troubles half way.' we were not through our meal, however, simon fleix waiting on us with a pale face, when maignan came in again from the dark room. 'my lord,' he said quietly, 'three men have appeared. two of them remain twenty paces away. the third has come to the door.' as he spoke we heard a cautious summons below. maignan was for going down, but his master bade him stand. 'let the woman of the house go,' he said. i remarked and long remembered m. de rosny's _sangfroid_ on this occasion. his pistols he had already laid on a chair beside him, throwing his cloak over them; and now, while we waited, listening in breathless silence, i saw him hand a large slice of bread-and-meat to his equerry, who, standing behind his chair, began eating it with the same coolness. simon fleix, on the other hand, stood gazing at the door, trembling in every limb, and with so much of excitement and surprise in his attitude that i took the precaution of bidding him, in a low voice, do nothing without orders. at the same moment it occurred to me to extinguish two of the four candles which had been lighted; and i did so, m. de rosny nodding assent, just as the muttered conversation which was being carried on below ceased, and a man's tread sounded on the stairs. it was followed immediately by a knock on the outside of our door. obeying my companion's look, i cried, 'enter!' a slender man of middle height, booted and wrapped up, with his face almost entirely hidden by a fold of his cloak, came in quickly, and, closing the door behind him, advanced towards the table. 'which is m. de rosny?' he said. rosny had carefully turned his face from the light, but at the sound of the other's voice he sprang up with a cry of relief. he was about to speak, when the new-comer, raising his hand peremptorily, continued, 'no names, i beg. yours, i suppose, is known here. mine is not, nor do i desire it should be. i want speech of you, that is all.' 'i am greatly honoured,' m. de rosny replied, gazing at him eagerly. 'yet, who told you i was here?' 'i saw you pass under a lamp in the street,' the stranger answered. 'i knew your horse first, and you afterwards, and bade a groom follow you. believe me,' he added, with a gesture of the hand, 'you have nothing to fear from me.' 'i accept the assurance in the spirit in which it is offered,' my companion answered with a graceful bow, 'and think myself fortunate in being recognised'--he paused a moment and then continued--'by a frenchman and a man of honour.' the stranger shrugged his shoulders. 'your pardon, then,' he said, 'if i seem abrupt. my time is short. i want to do the best with it i can. will you favour me?' i was for withdrawing, but m. de rosny ordered maignan to place lights in the next room, and, apologising to me very graciously, retired thither with the stranger; leaving me relieved indeed by these peaceful appearances, but full of wonder and conjectures who this might be, and what the visit portended. at one moment i was inclined to identify the stranger with m. de rosny's brother; at another with the english ambassador; and then, again, a wild idea that he might be m. de bruhl occurred to me. the two remained together about a quarter of an hour and then came out, the stranger leading the way, and saluting me politely as he passed through the room. at the door he turned to say, 'at nine o'clock, then?' 'at nine o'clock,' m. de rosny replied, holding the door open. 'you will excuse me if i do not descend, marquis?' 'yes, go back, my friend,' the stranger answered. and, lighted by maignan, whose face on such occasions could assume the most stolid air in the world, he disappeared down the stairs, and i heard him go out. m. de rosny turned to me, his eyes sparkling with joy, his face and mien full of animation. 'the king of navarre is better,' he said. 'he is said to be out of danger. what do you think of that, my friend?' 'that is the best news i have heard for many a day,' i answered. and i hastened to add, that france and the religion had reason to thank god for his mercy. 'amen to that,' my patron replied reverently. 'but that is not all--that is not all.' and he began to walk up and down the room humming the th psalm a little above his breath-- la voici l'heureuse journée que dieu a faite à plein désir; par nous soit joie démenée, et prenons en elle plaisir. he continued, indeed, to walk up and down the floor so long, and with so joyful a countenance and demeanour, that i ventured at last to remind him of my presence, which he had clearly forgotten. 'ha! to be sure,' he said, stopping short and looking at me with the utmost good-humour. 'what time is it? seven. then until nine o'clock, my friend, i crave your indulgence. in fine, until that time i must keep counsel. come, i am hungry still. let us sit down, and this time i hope we may not be interrupted. simon, set us on a fresh bottle. ha! ha! _vivent le roi et le roi de navarre!_' and again he fell to humming the same psalm-- o dieu éternel, je te prie, je te prie, ton roi maintiens: o dieu, je te prie et reprie, sauve ton roi et l'entretiens! doing so with a light in his eyes and a joyous emphasis, which impressed me the more in a man ordinarily so calm and self-contained. i saw that something had occurred to gratify him beyond measure, and, believing his statement that this was not the good news from la ganache only, i waited with the utmost interest and anxiety for the hour of nine, which had no sooner struck than our former visitor appeared with the same air of mystery and disguise which had attended him before. m. de rosny, who had risen on hearing his step and had taken up his cloak, paused with it half on and half off, to cry anxiously, 'all is well, is it not?' 'perfectly,' the stranger replied, with a nod. 'and my friend?' 'yes, on condition that you answer for his discretion and fidelity.' and the stranger glanced involuntarily at me, who stood uncertain, whether to hold my ground or retire. 'good,' m. de rosny cried. then he turned to me with a mingled air of dignity and kindness, and continued: 'this is the gentleman. m. de marsac, i am honoured with permission to present you to the marquis de rambouillet, whose interest and protection i beg you to deserve, for he is a true frenchman and a patriot whom i respect.' m. de rambouillet saluted me politely. 'of a brittany family, i think?' he said. i assented; and he replied with something complimentary. but afterwards he continued to look at me in silence with a keenness and curiosity i did not understand. at last, when m. de rosny's impatience had reached a high pitch, the marquis seemed impelled to add something. 'you quite understand, m. de rosny?' he said. 'without saying anything disparaging of m. de marsac, who is, no doubt, a man of honour'--and he bowed to me very low--'this is a delicate matter, and you will introduce no one into it, i am sure, whom you cannot trust as yourself.' 'precisely,' m. de rosny replied, speaking drily, yet with a grand air which fully matched his companion's. 'i am prepared to trust this gentleman not only with my life but with my honour.' 'nothing more remains to be said then,' the marquis rejoined, bowing to me again. 'i am glad to have been the occasion of a declaration so flattering to you, sir.' i returned his salute in silence, and obeying m. de rosny's muttered direction put on my cloak and sword. m. de rosny took up his pistols. 'you will have no need of those,' the marquis said with a high glance. 'where we are going, no,' my companion answered, calmly continuing to dispose them about him. 'but the streets are dark and not too safe.' m. de rambouillet laughed. 'that is the worst of you huguenots,' he said. 'you never know when to lay suspicion aside.' a hundred retorts sprang to my lips. i thought of the bartholomew, of the french fury of antwerp, of half a dozen things which make my blood boil to this day. but m. de rosny's answer was the finest of all. 'that is true, i am afraid,' he said quietly. 'on the other hand, you catholics--take the late m. de guise for instance--have the habit of erring on the other side, i think, and sometimes trust too far.' the marquis, without making any answer to this home-thrust, led the way out, and we followed, being joined at the door of the house by a couple of armed lackeys, who fell in behind us. we went on foot. the night was dark, and the prospect out of doors was not cheering. the streets were wet and dirty, and notwithstanding all our care we fell continually into pitfalls or over unseen obstacles. crossing the _parvis_ of the cathedral, which i remembered, we plunged in silence into an obscure street near the river, and so narrow that the decrepit houses shut out almost all view of the sky. the gloom of our surroundings, no less than my ignorance of the errand on which we were bound, filled me with anxiety and foreboding. my companions keeping strict silence, however, and taking every precaution to avoid being recognised, i had no choice but to do likewise. i could think, and no more. i felt myself borne along by an irresistible current, whither and for what purpose i could not tell; an experience to an extent strange at my age the influence of the night and the weather. twice we stood aside to let a party of roisterers go by, and the excessive care m. de rambouillet evinced on these occasions to avoid recognition did not tend to reassure me or make me think more lightly of the unknown business on which i was bound. reaching at last an open space, our leader bade us in a low voice be careful and follow him closely. we did so, and crossed in this way and in single file a narrow plank or wooden bridge; but whether water ran below or a dry ditch only, i could not determine. my mind was taken up at the moment with the discovery which i had just made, that the dark building, looming huge and black before us with a single light twinkling here and there at great heights, was the castle of blois. chapter xv. vilain herodes. all the distaste and misliking i had expressed earlier in the day for the court of blois recurred with fresh force in the darkness and gloom; and though, booted and travel-stained as we were, i did not conceive it likely that we should be obtruded on the circle about the king, i felt none the less an oppressive desire to be through with our adventure, and away from the ill-omened precincts in which i found myself. the darkness prevented me seeing the faces of my companions; but on m. de rosny, who was not quite free himself, i think, from the influences of the time and place, twitching my sleeve to enforce vigilance, i noted that the lackeys had ceased to follow us, and that we three were beginning to ascend a rough staircase cut in the rock. i gathered, though the darkness limited my view behind as well as in front to a few twinkling lights, that we were mounting the scarp from the moat to the side wall of the castle; and i was not surprised when the marquis muttered to us to stop, and knocked softly on the wood of a door. m. de rosny might have spared the touch he had laid on my sleeve, for by this time i was fully and painfully sensible of the critical position in which we stood, and was very little likely to commit an indiscretion. i trusted he had not done so already! no doubt--it flashed across me while we waited--he had taken care to safeguard himself. but how often, i reflected, had all safeguards been set aside and all precautions eluded by those to whom he was committing himself! guise had thought himself secure in this very building, which we were about to enter. coligny had received the most absolute of safe-conducts from those to whom we were apparently bound. the end in either case had been the same--the confidence of the one proving of no more avail than the wisdom of the other. what if the king of france thought to make his peace with his catholic subjects--offended by the murder of guise--by a second murder of one as obnoxious to them as he was precious to their arch-enemy in the south? rosny was sagacious indeed; but then i reflected with sudden misgiving that he was young, ambitious, and bold. the opening of the door interrupted without putting an end to this train of apprehension. a faint light shone out; so feebly as to illumine little more than the stairs at our feet. the marquis entered at once, m. de rosny followed, i brought up the rear; and the door was closed by a man who stood behind it. we found ourselves crowded together at the foot of a very narrow staircase, which the doorkeeper--a stolid pikeman in a grey uniform, with a small lanthorn swinging from the crosspiece of his halberd--signed to us to ascend. i said a word to him, but he only stared in answer, and m. de rambouillet, looking back and seeing what i was about, called to me that it was useless, as the man was a swiss and spoke no french. 'this did not tend to reassure me; any more than did the chill roughness of the wall which my hand touched as i groped upwards, or the smell of bats which invaded my nostrils and suggested that the staircase was little used and belonged to a part of the castle fitted for dark and secret doings. we stumbled in the blackness up the steps, passing one door and then a second before m. de rambouillet whispered to us to stand, and knocked gently at a third. the secrecy, the darkness, and above all the strange arrangements made to receive us, filled me with the wildest conjectures. but when the door opened and we passed one by one into a bare, unfurnished, draughty gallery, immediately, as i judged, under the tiles, the reality agreed with no one of my anticipations. the place was a mere garret, without a hearth, without a single stool. three windows, of which one was roughly glazed, while the others were filled with oiled paper, were set in one wall; the others displaying the stones and mortar without disguise or ornament. beside the door through which we had entered stood a silent figure in the grey uniform i had seen below, his lanthorn on the floor at his feet. a second door at the farther end of the gallery, which was full twenty paces long, was guarded in like manner. a couple of lanthorns stood in the middle of the floor, and that was all. inside the door, m. de rambouillet with his finger on his lip stopped us, and we stood a little group of three a pace in front of the sentry, and with the empty room before us. i looked at m. de rosny, but he was looking at rambouillet. the marquis had his back towards me, the sentry was gazing into vacancy; so that baffled in my attempt to learn anything from the looks of the other actors in the scene, i fell back on my ears. the rain dripped outside and the moaning wind rattled the casements; but mingled with these melancholy sounds--which gained force, as such things always do, from the circumstances in which we were placed and our own silence--i fancied i caught the distant hum of voices and music and laughter. and that, i know not why, brought m. de guise again to my mind. the story of his death, as i had heard it from that accursed monk in the inn on the claine, rose up in all its freshness, with all its details. i started when m. de rambouillet coughed. i shivered when rosny shifted his feet. the silence grew oppressive. only the stolid men in grey seemed unmoved, unexpectant; so that i remember wondering whether it was their nightly duty to keep guard over an empty garret, the floor strewn with scraps of mortar and ends of tiles. the interruption, when it came at last, came suddenly. the sentry at the farther end of the gallery started and fell back a pace. instantly the door beside him opened and a man came in, and closing it quickly behind him, advanced up the room with an air of dignity, which even his strange appearance and attire could not wholly destroy. he was of good stature and bearing, about forty years old as i judged, his wear a dress of violet velvet with black points cut in the extreme of the fashion. he carried a sword but no ruff, and had a cup and ball of ivory--a strange toy much in vogue among the idle--suspended from his wrist by a ribbon. he was lean and somewhat narrow, but so far i found little fault with him. it was only when my eye reached his face, and saw it rouged like a woman's and surmounted by a little turban, that a feeling of scarcely understood disgust seized me, and i said to myself, 'this is the stuff of which kings' minions are made!' to my surprise, however, m. de rambouillet went to meet him with the utmost respect, sweeping the dirty floor with his bonnet, and bowing to the very ground. the newcomer acknowledged his salute with negligent kindness. remarking pleasantly 'you have brought a friend, i think?' he looked towards us with a smile. 'yes, sire, he is here,' the marquis answered, stepping aside a little. and with the word i understood that this was no minion, but the king himself: henry, the third of the name, and the last of the great house of valois, which had ruled france by the grace of god for two centuries and a half! i stared at him, and stared at him, scarcely believing what i saw. for the first time in my life i was in the presence of the king! meanwhile m. de rosny, to whom he was, of course, no marvel, had gone forward and knelt on one knee. the king raised him graciously, and with an action which, viewed apart from his woman's face and silly turban, seemed royal and fitting. 'this is good of you, rosny,' he said. 'but it is only what i expected of you.' 'sire,' my companion answered, 'your majesty has no more devoted servant than myself, unless it be the king my master.' 'by my faith,' henry answered with energy--'and if i am not a good churchman, whatever those rascally parisians say, i am nothing--by my faith, i think i believe you!' 'if your majesty would believe me in that and in some other things also,' m. de rosny answered, 'it would be very well for france.' though he spoke courteously, he threw so much weight and independence into his words that i thought of the old proverb, 'a good master, a bold servant.' 'well, that is what we are here to see,' the king replied. 'but one tells me one thing,' he went on fretfully, 'and one another, and which am i to believe?' 'i know nothing of others, sire,' rosny answered with the same spirit. 'but my master has every claim to be believed. his interest in the royalty of france is second only to your majesty's. he is also a king and a kinsman, and it irks him to see rebels beard you, as has happened of late.' 'ay, but the chief of them?' henry exclaimed, giving way to sudden excitement and stamping furiously on the floor. 'he will trouble me no more. has my brother heard of _that?_ tell me, sir, has that news reached him?' 'he has heard it, sire.' 'and he approved? he approved, of course?' 'beyond doubt the man was a traitor,' m. de rosny answered delicately. 'his life was forfeit, sire. who can question it?' 'and he has paid the forfeit,' the king rejoined, looking down at the floor and immediately falling into a moodiness as sudden as his excitement. his lips moved. he muttered something inaudible, and began to play absently with his cup and ball, his mind occupied apparently with a gloomy retrospect. 'm. de guise, m. de guise,' he murmured at last, with a sneer and an accent of hate which told of old humiliations long remembered. 'well, damn him, he is dead now. he is dead. but being dead he yet troubles us. is not that the verse, father? ha!' with a start, 'i was forgetting. but that is the worst wrong he has done me,' he continued, looking up and growing excited again. 'he has cut me off from mother church. there is hardly a priest comes near me now, and presently they will excommunicate me. and, as i hope for salvation, the church has no more faithful son than me.' i believe he was on the point, forgetting m. de rosny's presence there and his errand, of giving way to unmanly tears, when m. de rambouillet, as if by accident, let the heel of his scabbard fall heavily on the floor. the king started, and passing his hand once or twice across his brow, seemed to recover himself. 'well,' he said, 'no doubt we shall find a way out of our difficulties.' 'if your majesty,' rosny answered respectfully, 'would accept the aid my master proffers, i venture to think that they would vanish the quicker.' 'you think so,' henry rejoined. 'well, give me your shoulder. let us walk a little.' and, signing to rambouillet to leave him, he began to walk up and down with m. de rosny, talking familiarly with him in an undertone. only such scraps of the conversation as fell from them when they turned at my end of the gallery now reached me. patching these together, however, i managed to understand somewhat. at one turn i heard the king say, 'but then turenne offers----' at the next, 'trust him? well, i do not know why i should not. he promises----' then 'a republic, rosny? that his plan? pooh! he dare not. he could not. france is a kingdom by the ordinance of god in my family.' i gathered from these and other chance words, which i have since forgotten, that m. de rosny was pressing the king to accept the help of the king of navarre, and warning him against the insidious offers of the vicomte de turenne. the mention of a republic, however, seemed to excite his majesty's wrath rather against rosny for presuming to refer to such a thing than against turenne, to whom he refused to credit it. he paused near my end of the promenade. 'prove it!' he said angrily. 'but can you prove it? can you prove it? mind you, i will take no hearsay evidence, sir. now, there is turenne's agent here--you did not know, i dare say, that he had an agent here?' 'you refer, sire, to m. de bruhl,' rosny answered, without hesitation. 'i know him, sire.' 'i think you are the devil,' henry answered, looking curiously at him. 'you seem to know most things. but mind you, my friend, he speaks me fairly, and i will not take this on hearsay even from your master. though,' he added after pausing a moment, 'i love him.' 'and he, your majesty. he desires only to prove it.' 'yes, i know, i know,' the king answered fretfully. 'i believe he does. i believe he does wish me well. but there will be a devil of an outcry among my people. and turenne gives fair words too. and i do not know,' he continued, fidgeting with his cup and ball, 'that it might not suit me better to agree with him, you see.' i saw m. de rosny draw himself up. 'dare i speak openly to you, sire,' he said, with less respect and more energy than he had hitherto used. 'as i should to my master?' 'ay, say what you like,' henry answered. but he spoke sullenly, and it seemed to me that he looked less pleasantly at his companion. 'then i will venture to utter what is in your majesty's mind,' my patron answered steadfastly. 'you fear, sire, lest, having accepted my master's offer and conquered your enemies, you should not be easily rid of him.' henry looked relieved! 'do you call that diplomacy?' he said with a smile. 'however, what if it be so? what do you say to it? methinks i have heard an idle tale about a horse which would hunt a stag; and for the purpose set a man upon its back.' 'this i say, sire, first,' rosny answered very earnestly. 'that the king of navarre is popular only with one-third of the kingdom, and is only powerful when united with you. secondly, sire, it is his interest to support the royal power, to which he is heir. and, thirdly, it must be more to your majesty's honour to accept help from a near kinsman than from an ordinary subject, and one who, i still maintain, sire, has no good designs in his mind.' 'the proof?' henry said sharply. 'give me that!' 'i can give it in a week from this day.' 'it must be no idle tale, mind you,' the king continued suspiciously. 'you shall have turenne's designs, sire, from one who had them from his own mouth.' the king looked startled, but after a pause turned and resumed his walk. 'well,' he said, 'if you do that, i on my part----' the rest i lost, for the two passing to the farther end of the gallery, came to a standstill there, balking my curiosity and rambouillet's also. the marquis, indeed, began to betray his impatience, and the great clock immediately over our heads presently striking the half-hour after ten he started and made as if he would have approached the king. he checked the impulse, however, but still continued to fidget uneasily, losing his reserve by-and-by so far as to whisper to me that his majesty would be missed. i had been, up to this point, a silent and inactive spectator of a scene which appealed to my keenest interests and aroused my most ardent curiosity. surprise following surprise, i had begun to doubt my own identity; so little had i expected to find myself first in the presence of the most christian king--and that under circumstances as strange and bizarre as could well be imagined--and then an authorised witness at a negotiation upon which the future of all the great land of france stretching for so many hundred leagues on every side of us, depended. i say i could scarcely believe in my own identity; or that i was the same gaston de marsac who had slunk, shabby and out-at-elbows, about st. jean d'angely. i tasted the first sweetness of secret power, which men say is the sweetest of all and the last relinquished; and, the hum of distant voices and laughter still reaching me at intervals, i began to understand why we had been admitted with so much precaution, and to comprehend the gratification of m. de rosny when the promise of this interview first presented to him the hope of effecting so much for his master and for france. now i was to be drawn into the whirlpool itself. i was still travelling back over the different stages of the adventure which had brought me to this point, when i was rudely awakened by m. de rosny calling my name in a raised voice. seeing, somewhat late, that he was beckoning to me to approach, i went forward in a confused and hasty fashion; kneeling before the king as i had seen him kneel, and then rising to give ear to his majesty's commands. albeit, having expected nothing less than to be called upon, i was not in the clearest mood to receive them. nor was my bearing such as i could have wished it to be. 'm. de rosny tells me that you desire a commission at court, sir,' the king said quickly. 'i, sire?' i stammered, scarcely able to believe my ears. i was so completely taken aback that i could say no more, and i stopped there with my mouth open. 'there are few things i can deny m. de rosny,' henry continued, speaking very rapidly, 'and i am told that you are a gentleman of birth and ability. out of kindness to him, therefore, i grant you a commission to raise twenty men for my service. rambouillet,' he continued, raising his voice slightly, 'you will introduce this gentleman to me publicly to-morrow, that i may carry into effect my intention on his behalf. you may go now, sir. no thanks. and m. de rosny,' he added, turning to my companion and speaking with energy, 'have a care for my sake that you are not recognised as you go. rambouillet must contrive something to enable you to leave without peril. i should be desolated if anything happened to you, my friend, for i could not protect you. i give you my word if mendoza or retz found you in blois i could not save you from them unless you recanted.' 'i will not trouble either your majesty or my conscience,' m. de rosny replied, bowing low, 'if my wits can help me.' 'well, the saints keep you,' the king answered piously, going towards the door by which he had entered; 'for your master and i have both need of you. rambouillet, take care of him as you love me. and come early in the morning to my closet and tell me how it has fared with him.' we all stood bowing while he withdrew, and only turned to retire when the door closed behind him. burning with indignation and chagrin as i was at finding myself disposed of in the way i have described, and pitchforked, whether i would or no, into a service i neither fancied nor desired, i still managed for the present to restrain myself; and, permitting my companions to precede me, followed in silence, listening sullenly to their jubilations. the marquis seemed scarcely less pleased than m. de rosny; and as the latter evinced a strong desire to lessen any jealousy the former might feel, and a generous inclination to attribute to him a full share of the credit gained, i remained the only person dissatisfied with the evening's events. we retired from the château with the same precautions which had marked our entrance, and parting with m. de rambouillet at the door of our lodging--not without many protestations of esteem on his part and of gratitude on that of m. de rosny--mounted to the first-floor in single file and in silence, which i was determined not to be the first to break. doubtless m. de rosny knew my thoughts, for, speedily dismissing maignan and simon, who were in waiting, he turned to me without preface. 'come, my friend,' he said, laying his hand on my shoulder and looking me in the face in a way which all but disarmed me at once, 'do not let us misunderstand one another. you think you have cause to be angry with me. i cannot suffer that, for the king of navarre had never greater need of your services than now.' 'you have played me an unworthy trick, sir,' i answered, thinking he would cozen me with fair speeches. 'tut, tut!' he replied. 'you do not understand.' 'i understand well enough,' i answered, with bitterness, 'that, having done the king of navarre's work, he would now be rid of me.' 'have i not told you,' m. de rosny replied, betraying for the first time some irritation, 'that he has greater need of your services than ever? come, man, be reasonable, or, better still, listen to me.' and turning from me, he began to walk up and down the room, his hands behind him. 'the king of france--i want to make it as clear to you as possible--' he said, 'cannot make head against the league without help, and, willy-nilly, must look for it to the huguenots whom he has so long persecuted. the king of navarre, their acknowledged leader, has offered that help; and so, to spite my master, and prevent a combination so happy for france, has m. de turenne, who would fain raise the faction he commands to eminence, and knows well how to make his profit out of the dissensions of his country. are you clear so far, sir?' i assented. i was becoming absorbed in spite of myself. 'very well,' he resumed. 'this evening--never did anything fall out more happily than rambouillet's meeting with me--he is a good man!--i have brought the king to this: that if proof of the selfish nature of turenne's designs be laid before him he will hesitate no longer. that proof exists. a fortnight ago it was here; but it is not here now.' 'that is unlucky!' i exclaimed. i was so much interested in his story, as well as flattered by the confidence he was placing in me, that my ill-humour vanished. i went and stood with my shoulder against the mantelpiece, and he, passing to and fro between me and the light, continued his tale. 'a word about this proof,' he said. 'it came into the king of navarre's hands before its full value was known to us, for that only accrued to it on m. de guise's death. a month ago it--this piece of evidence i mean--was at chizé. a fortnight or so ago it was here in blois. it is now, m. de marsac,' he continued, facing me suddenly as he came opposite me, 'in my house at rosny.' i started. 'you mean mademoiselle de la vire?' i cried. 'i mean mademoiselle de la vire!' he answered, 'who, some month or two ago, overheard m. de turenne's plans, and contrived to communicate with the king of navarre. before the latter could arrange a private interview, however, m. de turenne got wind of her dangerous knowledge, and swept her off to chizé. the rest you know, m. de marsac, if any man knows it.' 'but what will you do?' i asked. 'she is at rosny.' 'maignan, whom i trust implicitly, as far as his lights go, will start to fetch her to-morrow. at the same hour i start southwards. you, m. de marsac, will remain here as my agent, to watch over my interests, to receive mademoiselle on her arrival, to secure for her a secret interview with the king, to guard her while she remains here. do you understand?' did i understand? i could not find words in which to thank him. my remorse and gratitude, my sense of the wrong i had done him, and of the honour he was doing me, were such that i stood mute before him as i had stood before the king. 'you accept, then?' he said, smiling. 'you do not deem the adventure beneath you, my friend?' 'i deserve your confidence so little, sir,' i answered, stricken to the ground, 'that i beg you to speak, while i listen. by attending exactly to your instructions i may prove worthy of the trust reposed in me. and only so.' he embraced me again and again, with a kindness which moved me almost to tears. 'you are a man after my own heart,' he said, 'and if god wills i will make your fortune. now listen, my friend. to-morrow at court, as a stranger and a man introduced by rambouillet, you will be the cynosure of all eyes. bear yourself bravely. pay court to the women, but attach yourself to no one in particular. keep aloof from retz and the spanish faction, but beware especially of bruhl. he alone will have your secret, and may suspect your design. mademoiselle should be here in a week; while she is with you, and until she has seen the king, trust no one, suspect everyone, fear all things. consider the battle won only when the king says, "i am satisfied."' much more he told me, which served its purpose and has been forgotten. finally he honoured me by bidding me share his pallet with him, that we might talk without restraint, and that if anything occurred to him in the night he might communicate it to me. 'but will not bruhl denounce me as a huguenot?' i asked him. 'he will not dare to do so,' m. de rosny answered, 'both as a huguenot himself, and as his master's representative; and, further, because it would displease the king. no, but whatever secret harm one man can do another, that you have to fear. maignan, when he returns with mademoiselle, will leave two men with you; until they come i should borrow a couple of stout fellows from rambouillet, do not go out alone after dark, and beware of doorways, especially your own.' a little later, when i thought him asleep, i heard him chuckle; and rising on my elbow i asked him what it was. 'oh, it is your affair,' he answered, still laughing silently, so that i felt the mattress shake under him. 'i don't envy you one part of your task, my friend.' 'what is that?' i said suspiciously. 'mademoiselle,' he answered, stilling with difficulty a burst of laughter. and after that he would not say another word, bad, good, or indifferent, though i felt the bed shake more than once, and knew that he was digesting his pleasantry. chapter xvi. in the king's chamber. m. de rosny had risen from my side and started on his journey when i opened my eyes in the morning, and awoke to the memory of the task which had been so strangely imposed upon me; and which might, according as the events of the next fortnight shaped themselves, raise me to high position or put an end to my career. he had not forgotten to leave a souvenir behind him, for i found beside my pillow a handsome silver-mounted pistol, bearing the letter 'r.' and a coronet; nor had i more than discovered this instance of his kindness before simon fleix came in to tell me that m. de rosny had left two hundred crowns in his hands for me. 'any message with it?' i asked the lad. 'only that he had taken a keepsake in exchange,' simon answered, opening the window as he spoke. in some wonder i began to search, but i could not discover that anything was missing until i came to put on my doublet, when i found that the knot of ribbon which mademoiselle had flung to me at my departure from rosny was gone from the inside of the breast, where i had pinned it for safety with a long thorn. the discovery that m. de rosny had taken this was displeasing to me on more than one account. in the first place, whether mademoiselle had merely wished to plague me (as was most probable) or not, i was loth to lose it, my day for ladies' favours being past and gone; in the second, i misdoubted the motive which had led him to purloin it, and tormented myself with thinking of the different constructions he might put upon it, and the disparaging view of my trustworthiness which it might lead him to take. i blamed myself much for my carelessness in leaving it where a chance eye might rest upon it; and more when, questioning simon further, i learned that m. de rosny had added, while mounting at the door, 'tell your master, safe bind, safe find; and a careless lover makes a loose mistress.' i felt my cheek burn in a manner unbecoming my years while simon with some touch of malice repeated this; and i made a vow on the spot, which i kept until i was tempted to break it, to have no more to do with such trifles. meanwhile, i had to make the best of it; and brisking up, and bidding simon, who seemed depressed by the baron's departure, brisk up also, i set about my preparations for making such a figure at court as became me: procuring a black velvet suit, and a cap and feather to match; item, a jewelled clasp to secure the feather; with a yard or two of lace and two changes of fine linen. simon had grown sleek at rosny, and losing something of the wildness which had marked him, presented in the dress m. de rosny had given him a very creditable appearance; being also, i fancy, the only equerry in blois who could write. a groom i engaged on the recommendation of m. de rambouillet's master of the horse; and i gave out also that i required a couple of valets. it needed only an hour under the barber's hands and a set of new trappings for the cid to enable me to make a fair show, such as might be taken to indicate a man of ten or twelve thousand livres a year. in this way i expended a hundred and fifteen crowns. reflecting that this was a large sum, and that i must keep some money for play, i was glad to learn that in the crowded state of the city even men with high rank were putting up with poor lodging; i determined, therefore, to combine economy with a scheme which i had in my head by taking the rooms in which my mother died, with one room below them. this i did, hiring such furniture as i needed, which was not a great deal. to simon fleix, whose assistance in these matters was invaluable, i passed on much of m. de rosny's advice, bidding him ruffle it with the best in his station, and inciting him to labour for my advancement by promising to make his fortune whenever my own should be assured. i hoped, indeed, to derive no little advantage from the quickness of wit which had attracted m. de rosny's attention; although i did not fail to take into account at the same time that the lad was wayward and fitful, prone at one time to depression, and at another to giddiness, and equally uncertain in either mood. m. de rambouillet being unable to attend the _levée_, had appointed me to wait upon him at six in the evening; at which hour i presented myself at his lodgings, attended by simon fleix. i found him in the midst of half a dozen gentlemen whose habit it was to attend him upon all public occasions; and these gallants, greeting me with the same curious and suspicious glances which i have seen hounds bestow on a strange dog introduced into their kennel, i was speedily made to feel that it is one thing to have business at court, and another to be well received there. m. de rambouillet, somewhat to my surprise, did nothing to remove this impression. on all ordinary occasions a man of stiff and haughty bearing, and thoroughly disliking, though he could not prevent, the intrusion of a third party into a transaction which promised an infinity of credit, he received me so coldly and with so much reserve as for the moment to dash my spirits and throw me back on myself. during the journey to the castle, however, which we performed on foot, attended by half a dozen armed servants bearing torches, i had time to recall m. de rosny's advice, and to bethink me of the intimacy which that great man had permitted me; with so much effect in the way of heartening me, that as we crossed the courtyard of the castle i advanced myself, not without some murmuring on the part of others, to rambouillet's elbow, considering that as i was attached to him by the king's command, this was my proper place. i had no desire to quarrel, however, and persisted for some time in disregarding the nudges and muttered words which were exchanged round me, and even the efforts which were made as we mounted the stairs to oust me from my position. but a young gentleman, who showed himself very forward in these attempts, presently stumbling against me, i found it necessary to look at him. 'sir,' he said, in a small and lisping voice, 'you trod on my toe.' though i had not done so, i begged his pardon very politely. but as his only acknowledgment of this courtesy consisted in an attempt to get his knee in front of mine--we were mounting very slowly, the stairs being cumbered with a multitude of servants, who stood on either hand--i did tread on his toe, with a force and directness which made him cry out. 'what is the matter?' rambouillet asked, looking back hastily. 'nothing, m. le marquis,' i answered, pressing on steadfastly. 'sir,' my young friend said again, in the same lisping voice, 'you trod on my toe.' 'i believe i did, sir,' i answered. 'you have not yet apologised,' he murmured gently in my ear. 'nay, there you are wrong,' i rejoined bluntly, 'for it is always my habit to apologise first and tread afterwards.' he smiled as at a pleasant joke; and i am bound to say that his bearing was so admirable that if he had been my son i could have hugged him. 'good!' he answered. 'no doubt your sword is as sharp as your wits, sir. i see,' he continued, glancing naïvely at my old scabbard--he was himself the very gem of a courtier, a slender youth with a pink-and-white complexion, a dark line for a moustache, and a pearl-drop in his ear--'it is longing to be out. perhaps you will take a turn in the tennis-court to-morrow?' 'with pleasure, sir,' i answered, 'if you have a father, or your elder brother is grown up.' what answer he would have made to this gibe i do not know, for at that moment we reached the door of the antechamber; and this being narrow, and a sentry in the grey uniform of the swiss guard compelling all to enter in single file, my young friend was forced to fall back, leaving me free to enter alone, and admire at my leisure a scene at once brilliant and sombre. the court being in mourning for the queen-mother, black predominated in the dresses of those present, and set off very finely the gleaming jewels and gemmed sword-hilts which were worn by the more important personages. the room was spacious and lofty, hung with arras, and lit by candles burning in silver sconces; it rang as we entered with the shrill screaming of a parrot, which was being teased by a group occupying the farther of the two hearths. near them play was going on at one table, and primero at a second. in a corner were three or four ladies, in a circle about a red-faced, plebeian-looking man, who was playing at forfeits with one of their number; while the middle of the room seemed dominated by a middle-sized man with a peculiarly inflamed and passionate countenance, who, seated on a table, was inveighing against someone or something in the most violent terms, his language being interlarded with all kinds of strange and forcible oaths. two or three gentlemen, who had the air of being his followers, stood about him, listening between submission and embarrassment; while beside the nearer fireplace, but at some distance from him, lounged a nobleman, very richly dressed, and wearing on his breast the cross of the holy ghost; who seemed to be the object of his invective, but affecting to ignore it was engaged in conversation with a companion. a bystander muttering that crillon had been drinking, i discovered with immense surprise that the declaimer on the table was that famous soldier; and i was still looking at him in wonder--for i had been accustomed all my life to associate courage with modesty---when, the door of the chamber suddenly opening, a general movement in that direction took place. crillon, disregarding all precedency, sprang from his table and hurried first to the threshold. the baron de biron, on the other hand--for the gentleman by the fire was no other--waited, in apparent ignorance of the slight which was being put upon him, until m. de rambouillet came up; then he went forward with him. keeping close to my patron's elbow, i entered the chamber immediately behind him. crillon had already seized upon the king, and, when we entered, was stating his grievance in a voice not much lower than that which he had used outside. m. de biron, seeing this, parted from the marquis, and, going aside with his former companion, sat down on a trunk against the wall; while rambouillet, followed by myself and three or four gentlemen of his train, advanced to the king, who was standing near the alcove. his majesty seeing him, and thankful, i think, for the excuse, waved crillon off. 'tut, tut! you told me all that this morning,' he said good-naturedly. 'and here is rambouillet, who has, i hope, something fresh to tell. let him speak to me. sanctus! don't look at me as if you would run me through, man. go and quarrel with someone of your own size.' crillon at this retired grumbling, and henry, who had just risen from primero with the duke of nevers, nodded to rambouillet. 'well, my friend, anything fresh?' he cried. he was more at his ease and looked more cheerful than at our former interview; yet still care and suspicion lurked about his peevish mouth, and in the hollows under his gloomy eyes. 'a new guest, a new face, or a new game--which have you brought?' 'in a sense, sire, a new face,' the marquis answered, bowing, and standing somewhat aside that i might have place. 'well, i cannot say much for the pretty baggage,' quoth the king quickly. and amid a general titter he extended his hand to me. 'i'll be sworn, though,' he continued, as i rose from my knee, 'that you want something, my friend?' 'nay, sire,' i answered, holding up my head boldly--for cillon's behaviour had been a further lesson to me--'i have, by your leave, the advantage. for your majesty has supplied me with a new jest. i see many new faces round me, and i have need only of a new game. if your majesty would be pleased to grant me----' 'there! said i not so?' cried the king, raising his hand with a laugh. 'he does want something. but he seems not undeserving. what does he pray, rambouillet?' 'a small command,' m. de rambouillet answered, readily playing his part. 'and your majesty would oblige me if you could grant the sieur de marsac's petition. i will answer for it he is a man of experience. 'chut! a small command?' henry ejaculated, sitting down suddenly in apparent ill-humour. 'it is what everyone wants--when they do not want big ones. still, i suppose,' he continued, taking up a comfit-box, which lay beside him, and opening it, 'if you do not get what you want for him you will sulk like the rest, my friend.' 'your majesty has never had cause to complain of me,' quoth the marquis, forgetting his _rôle_, or too proud to play it. 'tut, tut, tut, tut! take it, and trouble me no more,' the king rejoined. 'will pay for twenty men do for him? very well then. there, m. de marsac,' he continued, nodding at me and yawning, 'your request is granted. you will find some other pretty baggages over there. go to them. and now, rambouillet,' he went on, resuming his spirits as he turned to matters of more importance, 'here is a new sweetmeat zamet has sent me. i have made zizi sick with it. will you try it? it is flavoured with white mulberries.' thus dismissed, i fell back; and stood for a moment, at a loss whither to turn, in the absence of either friends or acquaintances. his majesty, it is true, had bidden me go to certain pretty baggages, meaning, apparently, five ladies who were seated at the farther end of the room, diverting themselves with as many cavaliers; but the compactness of this party, the beauty of the ladies, and the merry peals of laughter which proceeded from them, telling of a wit and vivacity beyond the ordinary, sapped the resolution which had borne me well hitherto. i felt that to attack such a phalanx, even with a king's good will, was beyond the daring of a crillon, and i looked round to see whether i could not amuse myself in some more modest fashion. the material was not lacking. crillon, still mouthing out his anger, strode up and down in front of the trunk on which m. de biron was seated; but the latter was, or affected to be, asleep. 'crillon is for ever going into rages now,' a courtier beside me whispered. 'yes,' his fellow answered, with a shrug of the shoulder; 'it is a pity there is no one to tame him. but he has such a long reach, morbleu!' 'it is not that so much as the fellow's fury,' the first speaker rejoined under his breath. 'he fights like a mad thing; fencing is no use against him.' the other nodded. for a moment the wild idea of winning renown by taming m. de crillon occurred to me as i stood alone in the middle of the floor; but it had not more than passed through my brain when i felt my elbow touched, and turned to find the young gentleman whom i had encountered on the stairs standing by my side. 'sir,' he lisped, in the same small voice, 'i think you trod on my toe a while ago?' i stared at him, wondering what he meant by this absurd repetition. 'well, sir,' i answered drily, 'and if i did?' 'perhaps,' he said, stroking his chin with his jewelled fingers, 'pending our meeting to-morrow, you would allow me to consider it as a kind of introduction?' 'if it please you,' i answered, bowing stiffly, and wondering what he would be at. 'thank you,' he answered. 'it does please me, under the circumstances; for there is a lady here who desires a word with you. i took up her challenge. will you follow me?' he bowed, and turned in his languid fashion. i, turning too, saw, with secret dismay, that the five ladies, referred to above, were all now gazing at me, as expecting my approach; and this with such sportive glances as told only too certainly of some plot already in progress or some trick to be presently played me. yet i could not see that i had any choice save to obey, and, following my leader with as much dignity as i could compass, i presently found myself bowing before the lady who sat nearest, and who seemed to be the leader of these nymphs. 'nay, sir,' she said, eyeing me curiously, yet with a merry face, 'i do not need you; i do not look so high!' turning in confusion to the next, i was surprised to see before me the lady whose lodging i had invaded in my search for mademoiselle de la vire--she, i mean, who, having picked up the velvet knot, had dropped it so providentially where simon fleix found it. she looked at me, blushing and laughing, and the young gentleman, who had done her errand, presenting me by name, she asked me, while the others listened, whether i had found my mistress. before i could answer, the lady to whom i had first addressed myself interposed. 'stop, sir!' she cried. 'what is this--a tale, a jest, a game, or a forfeit?' 'an adventure, madam,' i answered, bowing low. 'of gallantry, i'll be bound,' she exclaimed. 'fie, madame de bruhl, and you but six months married!' madame de bruhl protested, laughing, that she had no more to do with it than mercury. 'at the worst,' she said, 'i carried the _poulets!_ but i can assure you, duchess, this gentleman should be able to tell us a very fine story, if he would.' the duchess and all the other ladies clapping their hands at this, and crying out that the story must and should be told, i found myself in a prodigious quandary; and one wherein my wits derived as little assistance as possible from the bright eyes and saucy looks which environed me. moreover, the commotion attracting other listeners, i found my position, while i tried to extricate myself, growing each moment worse, so that i began to fear that as i had little imagination i should perforce have to tell the truth. the mere thought of this threw me into a cold perspiration, lest i should let slip something of consequence, and prove myself unworthy of the trust which m. de rosny had reposed in me. at the moment when, despairing of extricating myself, i was stooping over madame de bruhl begging her to assist me, i heard, amid the babel of laughter and raillery which surrounded me--certain of the courtiers having already formed hands in a circle and sworn i should not depart without satisfying the ladies--a voice which struck a chord in my memory. i turned to see who the speaker was, and encountered no other than m. de bruhl himself; who, with a flushed and angry face, was listening to the explanation which a friend was pouring into his ear. standing at the moment with my knee on madame de bruhl's stool, and remembering very well the meeting on the stairs, i conceived in a flash that the man was jealous; but whether he had yet heard my name, or had any clew to link me with the person who had rescued mademoiselle de la vire from his clutches, i could not tell. nevertheless his presence led my thoughts into a new channel. the determination to punish him began to take form in my mind, and very quickly i regained my composure. still i was for giving him one chance. accordingly i stooped once more to madame de bruhl's ear, and begged her to spare me the embarrassment of telling my tale. but then, finding her pitiless, as i expected, and the rest of the company growing more and more insistent, i hardened my heart to go through with the fantastic notion which had occurred to me. indicating by a gesture that i was prepared to obey, and the duchess crying for a hearing, this was presently obtained, the sudden silence adding the king himself to my audience. 'what is it?' he asked, coming up effusively, with a lap-dog in his arms. 'a new scandal, eh?' 'no, sire, a new tale-teller,' the duchess answered pertly. 'if your majesty will sit, we shall hear him the sooner.' he pinched her ear and sat down in the chair which a page presented. 'what? is it rambouillet's _grison_ again?' he said with some surprise. 'well, fire away, man. but who brought you forward as a rabelais?' there was a general cry of 'madame de bruhl!' whereat that lady shook her fair hair about her face, and cried out for someone to bring her a mask. 'ha, i see!' said the king drily, looking pointedly at m. de bruhl, who was as black as thunder. 'but go on, man.' the king's advent, by affording me a brief respite, had enabled me to collect my thoughts, and, disregarding the ribald interruptions, which at first were frequent, i began as follows: 'i am no rabelais, sire,' i said, 'but droll things happen to the most unlikely. once upon a time it was the fortune of a certain swain, whom i will call dromio, to arrive in a town not a hundred miles from blois, having in his company a nymph of great beauty, who had been entrusted to his care by her parents. he had not more than lodged her in his apartments, however, before she was decoyed away by a trick, and borne off against her will by a young gallant, who had seen her and been smitten by her charms. dromio, returning, and finding his mistress gone, gave way to the most poignant grief. he ran up and down the city, seeking her in every place, and filling all places with his lamentations; but for a time in vain, until chance led him to a certain street, where, in an almost incredible manner, he found a clew to her by discovering underfoot a knot of velvet, bearing phyllida's name wrought on it in delicate needlework, with the words, "a moi!"' 'sanctus!' cried the king, amid a general murmur of surprise, 'that is well devised! proceed, sir. go on like that, and we will make your twenty men twenty-five.' 'dromio,' i continued, 'at sight of this trifle experienced the most diverse emotions, for while he possessed in it a clew to his mistress's fate, he had still to use it so as to discover the place whither she had been hurried. it occurred to him at last to begin his search with the house before which the knot had lain. ascending accordingly to the second-floor, he found there a fair lady reclining on a couch, who started up in affright at his appearance. he hastened to reassure her, and to explain the purpose of his coming, and learned after a conversation with which i will not trouble your majesty, though it was sufficiently diverting, that the lady had found the velvet knot in another part of the town, and had herself dropped it again in front of her own house.' 'pourquoi?' the king asked, interrupting me. 'the swain, sire,' i answered, 'was too much taken up with his own troubles to bear that in mind, even if he learned it. but this delicacy did not save him from misconception, for as he descended from the lady's apartment he met her husband on the stairs.' 'good!' the king exclaimed, rubbing his hands in glee. 'the husband!' and under cover of the gibe and the courtly laugh which followed it m. de bruhl's start of surprise passed unnoticed save by me. 'the husband,' i resumed, 'seeing a stranger descending his staircase, was for stopping him and learning the reason of his presence; but dromio, whose mind was with phyllida, refused to stop, and, evading his questions, hurried to the part of the town where the lady had told him she found the velvet knot. here, sire, at the corner of a lane running between garden-walls, he found a great house, barred and gloomy, and well adapted to the abductor's purpose. moreover, scanning it on every side, he presently discovered, tied about the bars of an upper window, a knot of white linen, the very counterpart of that velvet one which he bore in his breast. thus he knew that the nymph was imprisoned in that room!' 'i will make, it twenty-five, as i am a good churchman!' his majesty exclaimed, dropping the little dog he was nursing into the duchess's lap, and taking out his comfit-box. 'rambouillet,' he added languidly, 'your friend is a treasure!' i bowed my acknowledgments, and took occasion as i did so to step a pace aside, so as to command a view of madame de bruhl, as well as her husband. hitherto madame, willing to be accounted a part in so pretty a romance, and ready enough also, unless i was mistaken, to cause her husband a little mild jealousy, had listened to the story with a certain sly demureness. but this i foresaw would not last long; and i felt something like compunction as the moment for striking the blow approached. but i had now no choice. 'the best is yet to come, sire,' i went on, 'as i think you will acknowledge in a moment. dromio, though he had discovered his mistress, was still in the depths of despair. he wandered round and round the house, seeking ingress and finding none, until at length, sunset approaching, and darkness redoubling his fears for the nymph, fortune took pity on him. as he stood in front of the house he saw the abductor come out, lighted by two servants. judge of his surprise, sire,' i continued, looking round and speaking slowly, to give full effect to my words, 'when he recognised in him no other than the husband of the lady who, by picking up and again dropping the velvet knot, had contributed so much to the success of his search!' 'ha! these husbands!' cried the king. and slapping his knee in an ecstasy at his own acuteness, he laughed in his seat till he rolled again. 'these husbands! did i not say so?' the whole court gave way to like applause, and clapped their hands as well, so that few save those who stood nearest took notice of madame de bruhl's faint cry, and still fewer understood why she rose up suddenly from her stool and stood gazing at her husband with burning cheeks and clenched hands. she took no heed of me, much less of the laughing crowd round her, but looked only at him with her soul in her eyes. he, after uttering one hoarse curse, seemed to have no thought for any but me. to have the knowledge that his own wife had baulked him brought home to him in this mocking fashion, to find how little a thing had tripped him that day, to learn how blindly he had played into the hands of fate, above all to be exposed at once to his wife's resentment and the ridicule of the court--for he could not be sure that i should not the next moment disclose his name--all so wrought on him that for a moment i thought he would strike me in the presence. his rage, indeed, did what i had not meant to do. for the king, catching sight of his face, and remembering that madame de bruhl had elicited the story, screamed suddenly, 'haro!' and pointed ruthlessly at him with his finger. after that i had no need to speak, the story leaping from eye to eye, and every eye settling on bruhl, who sought in vain to compose his features. madame, who surpassed him, as women commonly do surpass men, in self-control, was the first to recover herself, and sitting down as quickly as she had risen, confronted alike her husband and her rivals with a pale smile. for a moment curiosity and excitement kept all breathless, the eye alone busy. then the king laughed mischievously. 'come, m. de bruhl,' he cried, 'perhaps you will finish the tale for us?' and he threw himself back in his chair, a sneer on his lips. 'or why not madame de bruhl?' said the duchess, with her head on one side and her eyes glittering over her fan. 'madame would, i am sure, tell it so well.' but madame only shook her head, smiling always that forced smile. for bruhl himself, glaring from face to face like a bull about to charge, i have never seen a man more out of countenance, or more completely brought to bay. his discomposure, exposed as he was to the ridicule of all present, was such that the presence in which he stood scarcely hindered him from some violent attack; and his eyes, which had wandered from me at the king's word, presently returning to me again, he so far forgot himself as to raise his hand furiously, uttering at the same time a savage oath. the king cried out angrily, 'have a care, sir!' but bruhl only heeded this so far as to thrust aside those who stood round him and push his way hurriedly through the circle. 'arnidieu!' cried the king, when he was gone. 'this is fine conduct! i have half a mind to send after him and have him put where his hot blood would cool a little. or----' he stopped abruptly, his eyes resting on me. the relative positions of bruhl and myself as the agents of rosny and turenne occurred to him for the first time, i think, and suggested the idea, perhaps, that i had laid a trap for him, and that he had fallen into it. at any rate his face grew darker and darker, and at last, 'a nice kettle of fish this is you have prepared for us, sir!' he muttered, gazing at me gloomily. the sudden change in his humour took even courtiers by surprise. faces a moment before broad with smiles grew long again. the less important personages looked uncomfortably at one another, and with one accord frowned on me. 'if your majesty would please to hear the end of the story at another time?' i suggested humbly, beginning to wish with all my heart that i had never said a word. 'chut!' he answered, rising, his face still betraying his perturbation. 'well, be it so. for the present you may go, sir. duchess, give me zizi, and come to my closet. i want you to see my puppies. retz, my good friend, do you come too. i have something to say to you. gentlemen, you need not wait. it is likely i shall be late.' and, with the utmost abruptness, he broke up the circle. chapter xvii. the jacobin monk. had i needed any reminder of the uncertainty of court favour, or an instance whence i might learn the lesson of modesty, and so stand in less danger of presuming on my new and precarious prosperity, i had it in this episode, and in the demeanour of the company round me. on the circle breaking up in confusion, i found myself the centre of general regard, but regard of so dubious a character, the persons who would have been the first to compliment me had the king retired earlier, standing farthest aloof now, that i felt myself rather insulted than honoured by it. one or two, indeed, of the more cautious spirits did approach me; but it was with the air of men providing against a danger particularly remote, their half-hearted speeches serving only to fix them in my memory as belonging to a class, especially abhorrent to me--the class, i mean, of those who would run at once with the hare and the hounds. i was rejoiced to find that on one person, and that the one whose disposition towards me was, next to the king's, of first importance, this episode had produced a different impression. feeling, as i made for the door, a touch on my arm, i turned to find m. de rambouillet at my elbow, regarding me with a glance of mingled esteem and amusement; in fine, with a very different look from that which had been my welcome earlier in the evening. i was driven to suppose that he was too great a man, or too sure of his favour with the king, to be swayed by the petty motives which actuated the court generally, for he laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and walked on beside me. 'well, my friend,' he said,' you have distinguished yourself finely! i do not know that i ever remember a pretty woman making more stir in one evening. but if you are wise you will not go home alone to-night.' 'i have my sword, m. le marquis,' i answered, somewhat proudly. 'which will avail you little against a knife in the back!' he retorted drily. 'what attendance have you?' 'my equerry, simon fleix, is on the stairs.' 'good, so far, but not enough,' he replied, as we reached the head of the staircase. 'you had better come home with me now, and two or three of my fellows shall go on to your lodging with you. do you know, my friend,' he continued, looking at me keenly, 'you are either a very clever or a very foolish man?' i made answer modestly. 'neither the one, i fear, nor the other, i hope, sir,' i said. 'well, you have done a very pertinent thing,' he replied, 'for good or evil. you have let the enemy know what he has to expect, and he is not one, i warn you, to be despised. but whether you have been very wise or very foolish in declaring open war remains to be seen.' 'a week will show,' i answered. he turned and looked at me. 'you take it coolly,' he said. 'i have been knocking about the world for forty years, marquis,' i rejoined. he muttered something about rosny having a good eye, and then stopped to adjust his cloak. we were by this time in the street. making me go hand in hand with him, he requested the other gentlemen to draw their swords; and the servants being likewise armed and numbering half a score or more, with pikes and torches, we made up a very formidable party, and caused, i think, more alarm as we passed, through the streets to rambouillet's lodging than we had any reason to feel. not that we had it all to ourselves, for the attendance at court that evening being large, and the circle breaking up as i have described more abruptly than usual, the vicinity of the castle was in a ferment, and the streets leading from it were alive with the lights and laughter of parties similar to our own. at the door of the marquis's lodging i prepared to take leave of him with many expressions of gratitude, but he would have me enter and sit down with him to a light refection, which it was his habit to take before retiring. two of his gentlemen sat down with us, and a valet, who was in his confidence, waiting on us, we made very merry over the scene in the presence. i learned that m. de bruhl was far from popular at court; but being known to possess some kind of hold over the king, and enjoying besides a great reputation for recklessness and skill with the sword, he had played a high part for a length of time, and attached to himself, especially since the death of guise, a considerable number of followers. 'the truth is,' one of the marquis's gentlemen, who was a little heated with wine, observed, 'there is nothing at this moment which a bold and unscrupulous man may not win in france!' 'nor a bold and christian gentleman for france!' replied m. de rambouillet with some asperity. 'by the way,' he continued, turning abruptly to the servant, 'where is m. françois?' the valet answered that he had not returned with us from the castle. the marquis expressed himself annoyed at this, and i gathered, firstly, that the missing man was his near kinsman, and, secondly, that he was also the young spark who had been so forward to quarrel with me earlier in the evening. determining to refer the matter, should it become pressing, to rambouillet for adjustment, i took leave of him, and attended by two of his servants, whom he kindly transferred to my service for the present, i started towards my lodging a little before midnight. the moon had risen while we were at supper, and its light, which whitened the gables on one side of the street, diffused a glimmer below sufficient to enable us to avoid the kennel. seeing this, i bade the men put out our torch. frost had set in, and a keen wind was blowing, so that we were glad to hurry on at a good pace; and the streets being quite deserted at this late hour, or haunted only by those who had come to dread the town marshal, we met no one and saw no lights. i fell to thinking, for my part, of the evening i had spent searching blois for mademoiselle, and of the difference between then and now. nor did i fail while on this track to retrace it still farther to the evening of our arrival at my mother's; whence, as a source, such kindly and gentle thoughts welled up in my mind as were natural, and the unfailing affection of that gracious woman required. these, taking the place for the moment of the anxious calculations and stern purposes which had of late engrossed me, were only ousted by something which, happening under my eyes, brought me violently and abruptly to myself. this was the sudden appearance of three men, who issued one by one from an alley a score of yards in front of us, and after pausing a second to look back the way they had come, flitted on in single file along the street, disappearing, as far as the darkness permitted me to judge, round a second corner. i by no means liked their appearance, and as a scream and the clash of arms rang out next moment from the direction in which they had gone, i cried lustily to simon fleix to follow, and ran on, believing from the rascals' movements that they were after no good, but that rather some honest man was like to be sore beset. on reaching the lane down which they had plunged, however, i paused a moment, considering not so much its blackness, which was intense, the eaves nearly meeting overhead, as the small chance i had of distinguishing between attackers and attacked. but simon and the men overtaking me, and the sounds of a sharp tussle still continuing, i decided to venture, and plunged into the alley, my left arm well advanced, with the skirt of my cloak thrown over it, and my sword drawn back. i shouted as i ran, thinking that the knaves might desist on hearing me; and this was what happened, for as i arrived on the scene of action--the farther end of the alley--two men took to their heels, while of two who remained, one lay at length in the kennel, and another rose slowly from his knees. 'you are just in time, sir,' the latter said, breathing hard, but speaking with a preciseness which sounded familiar. 'i am obliged to you, sir, whoever you are. the villains had got me down, and in a few minutes more would have made my mother childless. by the way, you have no light, have you?' he continued, lisping like a woman. one of m. de rambouillet's men, who had by this time come up, cried out that it was monsieur françois. 'yes, blockhead!' the young gentleman answered with the utmost coolness. 'but i asked for a light, not for my name.' 'i trust you are not hurt, sir?' i said, putting up my sword. 'scratched only,' he answered, betraying no surprise on learning who it was had come up so opportunely; as he no doubt did learn from my voice, for he continued with a bow, 'a slight price to pay for the knowledge that m. de marsac is as forward on the field as on the stairs.' i bowed my acknowledgments. 'this fellow,' i said, 'is he much hurt?' 'tut, tut! i thought i had saved the marshal all trouble,' m. françois replied. 'is he not dead, gil?' the poor wretch made answer for himself, crying out piteously and in a choking voice, for a priest to shrive him. at that moment simon fleix returned with our torch, which he had lighted at the nearest cross-streets, where there was a brazier, and we saw by this light that the man was coughing up blood, and might live perhaps half an hour. 'mordieu! that comes of thrusting too high!' m. françois muttered, regretfully. 'an inch lower, and there would have been none of this trouble! i suppose somebody must fetch one. gil,' he continued, 'run, man, to the sacristy in the rue st. denys, and get a father. or--stay! help to lift him under the lee of the wall there. the wind cuts like a knife here.' the street being on the slope of the hill, the lower part of the house nearest us stood a few feet from the ground, on wooden piles, and the space underneath it, being enclosed at the back and sides, was used as a cart-house. the servants moved the dying man into this rude shelter, and i accompanied them, being unwilling to leave the young gentleman alone. not wishing, however, to seem to interfere, i walked to the farther end, and sat down on the shaft of a cart, whence i idly admired the strange aspect of the group i had left, as the glare of the torch brought now one and now another into prominence, and sometimes shone on m. françois' jewelled fingers toying with his tiny moustache, and sometimes on the writhing features of the man at his feet. on a sudden, and before gil had started on his errand, i saw there was a priest among them. i had not seen him enter, nor had i any idea whence he came. my first impression was only that here was a priest, and that he was looking at me--not at the man craving his assistance on the floor, or at those who stood round him, but at me, who sat away in the shadow beyond the ring of light! this was surprising; but a second glance explained it, for then i saw that he was the jacobin monk who had haunted my mother's dying hours. and, amazed as much at this strange _rencontre_, as at the man's boldness, i sprang up and strode forwards, forgetting, in an impulse of righteous anger, the office he came to do. and this the more as his face, still turned to me, seemed instinct to my eyes with triumphant malice. as i moved towards him, however, with a fierce exclamation on my lips, he suddenly dropped his eyes and knelt. immediately m. françois cried 'hush!' and the men turned to me with scandalised faces. i fell back. yet even then, whispering on his knees by the dying man, the knave was thinking, i felt sure, of me, glorying at once in his immunity and the power it gave him to tantalise me without fear. i determined, whatever the result, to intercept him when all was over; and on the man dying a few minutes later, i walked resolutely to the open side of the shed, thinking it likely he might try to slip away as mysteriously as he had come. he stood a moment speaking to m. françois, however, and then, accompanied by him, advanced boldly to meet me, a lean smile on his face. 'father antoine,' m. d'agen said politely, 'tells me that he knows you, m. de marsac, and desires to speak to you, _mal-à-propos_ as is the occasion.' 'and i to him,' i answered, trembling with rage, and only restraining by an effort the impulse which would have had me dash my hand in the priest's pale, smirking face. 'i have waited i long for this moment,' i continued, eyeing him steadily, as m. françois withdrew out of hearing, 'and had you tried to avoid me, i would have dragged you back, though all your tribe were here to protect you.' his presence so maddened me that i scarcely knew what i said. i felt my breath come quickly, i felt the blood surge to my head, and it was with difficulty i restrained myself when he answered with well-affected sanctity, 'like mother, like son, i fear,' sir. huguenots both.' i choked with rage. 'what!' i said, 'you dare to threaten me as you threatened my mother? fool! know that only to-day for the purpose of discovering and punishing you i took the rooms in which my mother died.' 'i know it,' he answered quietly. and then in a second, as by magic, he altered his demeanour completely, raising his head and looking me in the face. 'that, and so much besides, i know,' he continued, giving me, to my astonishment, frown for frown, 'that if you will listen to me for a moment, m. de marsac, and listen quietly, i will convince you that the folly is not on my side.' amazed at his new manner, in which there was none of the madness that had marked him at our first meeting, but a strange air of authority, unlike anything i had associated with him before, i signed to him to proceed. 'you think that i am in your power?' he said, smiling. 'i think,' i retorted swiftly, 'that, escaping me now, you will have at your heels henceforth a worse enemy than even your own sins.' 'just so,' he answered, nodding. 'well, i am going to show you that the reverse is the case; and that you are as completely in my hands, to spare or to break, as this straw. in the first place, you are here in blois, a huguenot!' 'chut!' i exclaimed contemptuously, affecting a confidence i was far from feeling. 'a little while back that might have availed you. but we are in blois, not paris. it is not far to the loire, and you have to deal with a man now, not with a woman. it is you who have cause to tremble, not i.' 'you think to be protected,' he answered with a sour smile, 'even on this side of the loire, i see. but one word to the pope's legate, or to the duke of nevers, and you would see the inside of a dungeon, if not worse. for the king----' 'king or no king!' i answered, interrupting him with more assurance than i felt, seeing that i remembered only too well henry's remark that rosny must not look to him for protection, 'i fear you not a whit! and that reminds me. i have heard you talk treason--rank, black treason, priest, as ever sent man to rope, and i will give you up. by heaven i will!' i cried, my rage increasing, as i discerned, more and more clearly, the dangerous hold he had over me. 'you have threatened me! one word, and i will send you to the gallows!' 'sh!' he answered, indicating m. françois by a gesture of the hand. 'for your own sake, not mine. this is fine talking, but you have not yet heard all i know. would you like to hear how you have spent the last month? two days after christmas, m. de marsac, you left chizé with a young lady--i can give you her name, if you please. four days afterwards you reached blois, and took her to your mother's lodging. next morning she left you for m. de bruhl. two days later you tracked her to a house in the ruelle d'arcy, and freed her, but lost her in the moment of victory. then you stayed in blois until your mother's death, going a day or two later to m. de rosny's house by mantes, where mademoiselle still is. yesterday you arrived in blois with m. de rosny; you went to his lodging; you----' 'proceed, sir,' i muttered, leaning forward. under cover of my cloak i drew my dagger half-way from its sheath. 'proceed, sir, i pray,' i repeated with dry lips. 'you slept there,' he continued, holding his ground, but shuddering slightly, either from cold or because he perceived my movement and read my design in my eyes. 'this morning you remained here in attendance on m. de rambouillet.' for the moment i breathed freely again, perceiving that though he knew much, the one thing on which m. de rosny's design turned had escaped him. the secret interview with the king, which compromised alike henry himself and m. de rambouillet, had apparently passed unnoticed and unsuspected. with a sigh of intense relief i slid back the dagger, which i had fully made up my mind to use had he known all, and drew my cloak round me with a shrug of feigned indifference. i sweated to think what he did know, but our interview with the king having escaped him, i breathed again. 'well, sir,' i said curtly, 'i have listened. and now, what is the purpose of all this?' 'my purpose?' he answered, his eyes glittering. 'to show you that you are in my power. you are the agent of m. de rosny. i, the agent, however humble, of the holy catholic league. of your movements i know all. what do you know of mine?' 'knowledge,' i made grim answer, 'is not everything, sir priest.' 'it is more than it was,' he said, smiling his thin-lipped smile. 'it is going to be more than it is. and i know much--about you, m. de marsac.' 'you know too much!' i retorted, feeling his covert threats close round me like the folds of some great serpent. 'but you are imprudent, i think. will you tell me what is to prevent me striking you through where you stand, and ridding myself at a blow of so much knowledge?' 'the presence of three men, m. de marsac,' he answered lightly, waving his hand towards m. françois and the others, 'every one of whom would give you up to justice. you forget that you are north of the loire, and that priests are not to be massacred here with impunity, as in your lawless south-country. however, enough. the night is cold, and m. d'agen grows suspicious as well as impatient. we have, perhaps, spoken too long already. permit me'--he bowed and drew back a step--'to resume this discussion to-morrow.' despite his politeness and the hollow civility with which he thus sought to close the interview, the light of triumph which shone in his eyes, as the glare of the torch fell athwart them, no less than the assured tone of his voice, told me clearly that he knew his power. he seemed, indeed, transformed: no longer a slinking, peaceful clerk, preying on a woman's fears, but a bold and crafty schemer, skilled and unscrupulous, possessed of hidden knowledge and hidden resources; the personification of evil intellect. for a moment, knowing all i knew, and particularly the responsibilities which lay before me, and the interests committed to my hands, i quailed, confessing myself unequal to him. i forgot the righteous vengeance i owed him; i cried out helplessly against the ill-fortune which had brought him across my path. i saw myself enmeshed and fettered beyond hope of escape, and by an effort only controlled the despair i felt. 'to-morrow?' i muttered hoarsely. 'at what time?' he shook his head with a cunning smile. 'a thousand thanks, but i will settle that myself!' he answered. 'au revoir!' and muttering a word of leave-taking to m. françois d'agen, he blessed the two servants, and went out into the night. chapter xviii. the offer of the league. when the last sound of his footsteps died away, i awoke as from an evil dream, and becoming conscious of the presence of m. françois and the servants, recollected mechanically that i owed the former an apology for my discourtesy in keeping him standing in the cold. i began to offer it; but my distress and confusion of mind were such that in the middle of a set phrase i broke off, and stood looking fixedly at him, my trouble so plain that he asked me civilly if anything ailed me. 'no,' i answered, turning from him impatiently; 'nothing, nothing, sir. or tell me,' i continued, with an abrupt change of mind, 'who is that who has just left us?' 'father antoine, do you mean?' 'ay, father antoine, father judas, call him what you like,' i rejoined bitterly. 'then if you leave the choice to me,' m. françois answered with grave politeness, 'i would rather call him something more pleasant, m. de marsac--james or john, let us say. for there is little said here which does not come back to him. if walls have ears, the walls of blois are in his pay. but i thought you knew him,' he continued. 'he is secretary, confidant, chaplain, what you will, to cardinal retz, and one of those whom--in your ear--greater men court and more powerful men lean on. if i had to choose between them, i would rather cross m. de crillon.' 'i am obliged to you,' i muttered, checked as much by his manner as his words. 'not at all,' he answered more lightly. 'any information i have is at your disposal.' however, i saw the imprudence of venturing farther, and hastened to take leave of him, persuading him to allow one of m. de rambouillet's servants to accompany him home. he said that he should call on me in the morning; and forcing myself to answer him in a suitable manner, i saw him depart one way, and myself, accompanied by simon fleix, went off another. my feet were frozen with long standing--i think the corpse we left was scarce colder--but my head was hot with feverish doubts and fears. the moon had sunk and the streets were dark. our torch had burned out, and we had no light. but where my followers saw only blackness and vacancy, i saw an evil smile and a lean visage fraught with menace and exultation. for the more closely i directed my mind to the position in which i stood, the graver it seemed. pitted against bruhl alone, amid strange surroundings and in an atmosphere of court intrigue, i had thought my task sufficiently difficult and the disadvantages under which i laboured sufficiently serious before this interview. conscious of a certain rustiness and a distaste for finesse, with resources so inferior to bruhl's that even m. de rosny's liberality had not done much to make up the difference, i had accepted the post offered me rather readily than sanguinely; with joy, seeing that it held out the hope of high reward, but with no certain expectation of success. still, matched with a man of violent and headstrong character, i had seen no reason to despair; nor any why i might not arrange the secret meeting between the king and mademoiselle with safety, and conduct to its end an intrigue simple and unsuspected, and requiring for its execution rather courage and caution than address or experience. now, however, i found that bruhl was not my only or my most dangerous antagonist. another was in the field--or, to speak more correctly, was waiting outside the arena, ready to snatch the prize when we should have disabled one another. from a dream of bruhl and myself as engaged in a competition for the king's favour, wherein neither could expose the other nor appeal even in the last resort to the joint-enemies of his majesty and ourselves, i awoke to a very different state of things; i awoke to find those enemies the masters of the situation, possessed of the clue to our plans, and permitting them only as long as they seemed to threaten no serious peril to themselves. no discovery could be more mortifying or more fraught with terror. the perspiration stood on my brow as i recalled the warning which m. de rosny had uttered against cardinal retz, or noted down the various points of knowledge which were in father antoine's possession. he knew every event of the last month, with one exception, and could tell, i verily believed, how many crowns i had in my pouch. conceding this, and the secret sources of information he must possess, what hope had i of keeping my future movements from him? mademoiselle's arrival would be known to him before she had well passed the gates; nor was it likely, or even possible, that i should again succeed in reaching the king's presence untraced and unsuspected. in fine, i saw myself, equally with bruhl, a puppet in this man's hands, my goings out and my comings in watched and reported to him, his mercy the only bar between myself and destruction. at any moment i might be arrested as a huguenot, the enterprise in which i was engaged ruined, and mademoiselle de la vire exposed to the violence of bruhl or the equally dangerous intrigues of the league. under these circumstances i fancied sleep impossible; but habit and weariness are strong persuaders, and when i reached my lodging i slept long and soundly, as became a man who had looked danger in the face more than once. the morning light too brought an accession both of courage and hope. i reflected on the misery of my condition at st. jean d'angely, without friends or resources, and driven to herd with such a man as fresnoy. and telling myself that the gold crowns which m. de rosny had lavished upon me were not for nothing, nor the more precious friendship with which he had honoured me a gift that called for no return, i rose with new spirit and a countenance which threw simon fleix--who had seen me lie down the picture of despair--into the utmost astonishment. 'you have had good dreams,' he said, eyeing me jealously and with a disturbed air. 'i had a very evil one last night,' i answered lightly, wondering a little why he looked at me so, and why he seemed to resent my return to hopefulness and courage. i might have followed this train of thought farther with advantage, since i possessed a clue to his state of mind; but at that moment a summons at the door called him away to it, and he presently ushered in m. d'agen, who, saluting me with punctilious politeness, had not said fifty words before he introduced the subject of his toe--no longer, however, in a hostile spirit, but as the happy medium which had led him to recognise the worth and sterling qualities---so he was pleased to say--of his preserver. i was delighted to find him in this frame of mind, and told him frankly that the friendship with which his kinsman, m. de rambouillet, honoured me would prevent me giving him satisfaction save in the last resort. he replied that the service i had done him was such as to render this immaterial, unless i had myself cause of offence; which i was forward to deny. we were paying one another compliments after this fashion, while i regarded him with the interest which the middle-aged bestow on the young and gallant in whom they see their own youth and hopes mirrored, when the door was again opened, and after a moment's pause admitted, equally, i think, to the disgust of m. françois and myself, the form of father antoine. seldom have two men more diverse stood, i believe, in a room together; seldom has any greater contrast been presented to a man's eyes than that opened to mine on this occasion. on the one side the gay young spark, with his short cloak, his fine suit of black-and-silver, his trim limbs and jewelled hilt and chased comfit-box; on the other, the tall, stooping monk, lean-jawed and bright-eyed, whose gown hung about him in coarse, ungainly folds. and m. françois' sentiment on first seeing the other was certainly dislike. in spite of this, however, he bestowed a greeting on the new-comer which evidenced a secret awe, and in other ways showed so plain a desire to please that i felt my fears of the priest return in force. i reflected that the talents which in such a garb could win the respect of m. françois d'agen--a brilliant star among the younger courtiers, and one of a class much given to thinking scorn of their fathers' roughness--must be both great and formidable; and, so considering, i received the monk with a distant courtesy which i had once little thought to extend to him. i put aside for the moment the private grudge i bore him with so much justice, and remembered only the burden which lay on me in my contest with him. i conjectured without difficulty that he chose to come at this time, when m. françois was with me, out of a cunning regard to his own safety; and i was not surprised when m. françois, beginning to make his adieux, father antoine begged him to wait below, adding that he had something of importance to communicate. he advanced his request in terms of politeness bordering on humility; but i could clearly see that, in assenting to it, m. d'agen bowed to a will stronger than his own, and would, had he dared to follow his own bent, have given a very different answer. as it was he retired--nominally to give an order to his lackey--with a species of impatient self-restraint which it was not difficult to construe. left alone with me, and assured that we had no listeners, the monk was not slow in coming to the point. 'you have thought over what i told you last night?' he said brusquely, dropping in a moment the suave manner which he had maintained in m. françois's presence. i replied coldly that i had. 'and you understand the position?' he continued quickly, looking at me from under his brows as he stood before me, with one clenched fist on the table. 'or shall i tell you more? shall i tell you how poor and despised you were some weeks ago, m. de marsac--you who now go in velvet, and have three men at your back? or whose gold it is has brought you here, and made you this? chut! do not let us trifle. you are here as the secret agent of the king of navarre. it is my business to learn your plans and his intentions, and i propose to do so.' 'well?' i said. 'i am prepared to buy them,' he answered; and his eyes sparkled as he spoke, with a greed which set me yet more on my guard. 'for whom?' i asked. having made up my mind that i must use the same weapons as my adversary, i reflected that to express indignation, such as might become a young man new to the world, could help me not a whit. 'for whom?' i repeated, seeing that he hesitated. 'that is my business,' he replied slowly. 'you want to know too much and tell too little,' i retorted, yawning. 'and you are playing with me,' he cried, looking at me suddenly, with so piercing a gaze and so dark a countenance that i checked a shudder with difficulty. 'so much the worse for you, so much the worse for you!' he continued fiercely. 'i am here to buy the information you hold, but if you will not sell, there is another way. at an hour's notice i can ruin your plans, and send you to a dungeon! you are like a fish caught in a net not yet drawn. it thrusts its nose this way and that, and touches the mesh, but is slow to take the alarm until the net is drawn--and then it is too late. so it is with you, and so it is,' he added, falling into the ecstatic mood which marked him at times, and left me in doubt whether he were all knave or in part enthusiast, 'with all those who set themselves against st. peter and his church!' 'i have heard you say much the same of the king of france,' i said derisively. 'you trust in him?' he retorted, his eyes gleaming. 'you have been up there, and seen his crowded chamber, and counted his forty-five gentlemen and his grey-coated swiss? i tell you the splendour you saw was a dream, and will vanish as a dream. the man's strength and his glory shall go from him, and that soon. have you no eyes to see that he is beside the question? there are but two powers in france--the holy union, which still prevails, and the accursed huguenot; and between them is the battle.' 'now you are telling me more,' i said. he grew sober in a moment, looking at me with a vicious anger hard to describe. 'tut tut,' he said, showing his yellow teeth, 'the dead tell no tales. and for henry of valois, he so loves a monk that you might better accuse his mistress. but for you, i have only to cry "ho! a huguenot and a spy!" and though he loved you more than he loved quélus or maugiron, he dare not stretch out a finger to save you!' i knew that he spoke the truth, and with difficulty maintained the air of indifference with which i had entered on the interview. 'but what if i leave blois?' i ventured, merely to see what he would say. he laughed. 'you cannot,' he answered. 'the net is round you, m. de marsac, and there are those at every gate who know you and have their instructions. i can destroy you, but i would fain have your information, and for that i will pay you five hundred crowns and let you go.' 'to fall into the hands of the king of navarre?' 'he will disown you, in any case,' he answered eagerly. 'he had that in his mind, my friend, when he selected an agent so obscure. he will disown you. ah, mon dieu! had i been an hour quicker i had caught rosny--rosny himself!' 'there is one thing lacking still,' i replied. 'how am i to be sure that, when i have told you what i know, you will pay me the money or let me go?' 'i will swear to it!' he answered earnestly, deceived into thinking i was about to surrender. 'i will give you my oath, m. de marsac!' 'i would as soon have your shoe-lace!' i exclaimed, the indignation i could not entirely repress finding vent in that phrase. 'a churchman's vow is worth a candle--or a candle and a half, is it?' i continued ironically. 'i must have some security a great deal more substantial than that, father.' 'what?' he asked, looking at me gloomily. seeing an opening, i cudgelled my brains to think of any condition which, being fulfilled, might turn the table on him and place him in my power. but his position was so strong, or my wits so weak, that nothing occurred to me at the time, and i sat looking at him, my mind gradually passing from the possibility of escape to the actual danger in which i stood, and which encompassed also simon fleix, and, in a degree, doubtless, m. de rambouillet. in four or five days, too, mademoiselle de la vire would arrive. i wondered if i could send any warning to her; and then, again, i doubted the wisdom of interfering with m. de rosny's plans, the more as maignan, who had gone to fetch mademoiselle, was of a kind to disregard any orders save his master's. 'well!' said the monk, impatiently recalling me to myself, 'what security do you want?' 'i am not quite sure at this moment,' i made answer slowly. 'i am in a difficult position. i must have some time to consider.' 'and to rid yourself of me, if it be possible,' he said with irony. 'i quite understand. but i warn you that you are watched; and that wherever you go and whatever you do, eyes which are mine are upon you.' 'i, too, understand,' i said coolly. he stood awhile uncertain, regarding me with mingled doubt and malevolence, tortured on the one hand by fear of losing the prize if he granted delay, on the other of failing as utterly if he exerted his power and did not succeed in subduing my resolution. i watched him, too, and gauging his eagerness and the value of the stake for which he was striving by the strength of his emotions, drew small comfort from the sight. more than once it had occurred to me, and now it occurred to me again, to extricate myself by a blow. but a natural reluctance to strike an unarmed man, however vile and knavish, and the belief that he had not trusted himself in my power without taking the fullest precautions, withheld me. when he grudgingly, and with many dark threats, proposed to wait three days--and not an hour more--for my answer, i accepted; for i saw no other alternative open. and on these terms, but not without some short discussion, we parted, and i heard his stealthy footstep go sneaking down the stairs. chapter xix. men call it chance. if i were telling more than the truth, or had it in my mind to embellish my adventures, i could, doubtless, by the exercise of a little ingenuity make it appear that i owed my escape from father antoine's meshes to my own craft; and tell, in fine, as pretty a story of plots and counterplots as m. de brantôme has ever woven. having no desire, however, to magnify myself, and, at this time of day, scarcely any reason, i am fain to confess that the reverse was the case; and that while no man ever did less to free himself than i did, my adversary retained his grasp to the end, and had surely, but for a strange interposition, effected my ruin. how relief came, and from what quarter, i might defy the most ingenious person, after reading my memoirs to this point, to say; and this not so much by reason of any subtle device, as because the hand of providence was for once directly manifest. the three days of grace which the priest had granted i passed in anxious but futile search for some means of escape, every plan i conceived dying stillborn, and not the least of my miseries lying in the fact that i could discern no better course than still to sit and think, and seemed doomed to perpetual inaction. m. de rambouillet being a strict catholic, though in all other respects a patriotic man, i knew better than to have recourse to him; and the priest's influence over m. d'agen i had myself witnessed. for similar reasons i rejected the idea of applying to the king; and this exhausting the list of those on whom i had any claim, i found myself thrown on my own resources, which seemed limited--my wits failing me at this pinch--to my sword and simon fleix. assured that i must break out of blois if i would save, not myself only, but others more precious because entrusted to my charge, i thought it no disgrace to appeal to simon; describing in a lively fashion the danger which threatened us, and inciting the lad by every argument which i thought likely to have weight with him to devise some way of escape. 'now is the time, my friend,' i said, 'to show your wits, and prove that m. de rosny, who said you had a cunning above the ordinary, was right. if your brain can ever save your head, now is the time! for i tell you plainly, if you cannot find some way to outman[oe]uvre this villain before to-morrow, i am spent. you can judge for yourself what chance you will have of going free.' i paused at that, waiting for him to make some suggestion. to my chagrin he remained silent, leaning his head on his hand, and studying the table with his eyes in a sullen fashion; so that i began to regret the condescension i had evinced in letting him be seated, and found it necessary to remind him that he had taken service with me, and must do my bidding. 'well,' he said morosely, and without looking up, 'i am ready to do it. but i do not like priests, and this one least of all. i know him, and i will not meddle with him!' 'you will not meddle with him?' i cried, almost beside myself with dismay. 'no, i won't,' he replied, retaining his listless attitude. 'i know him, and i am afraid of him. i am no match for him.' 'then m. de rosny was wrong, was he?' i said, giving way to my anger. 'if it please you,' he answered pertly. this was too much for me. my riding-switch lay handy, and i snatched it up. before he knew what i would be at, i fell upon him, and gave him such a sound wholesome drubbing as speedily brought him to his senses. when he cried for mercy--which he did not for a good space, being still possessed by the peevish devil which had ridden him ever since his departure from rosny--i put it to him again whether m. de rosny was not right. when he at last admitted this, but not till then, i threw the whip away and let him go, but did not cease to reproach him as he deserved. 'did you think,' i said, 'that i was going to be ruined because you would not use your lazy brains? that i was going to sit still, and let you sulk, while mademoiselle walked blindfold into the toils? not at all, my friend!' 'mademoiselle!' he exclaimed, looking at me with a sudden change of countenance, and ceasing to rub himself and scowl, as he had been doing. 'she is not here, and is in no danger.' 'she will be here to-morrow, or the next day,' i said. 'you did not tell me that!' he replied, his eyes glittering. 'does father antoine know it?' 'he will know it the moment she enters the town,' i answered. noting the change which the introduction of mademoiselle's name into the affair had wrought in him, i felt something like humiliation. but at the moment i had no choice; it was my business to use such instruments as came to my hand, and not, mademoiselle's safety being at stake, to pick and choose too nicely. in a few minutes our positions were reversed. the lad had grown as hot as i cold, as keenly excited as i critical. when he presently came to a stand in front of me, i saw a strange likeness between his face and the priest's; nor was i astonished when he presently made just such a proposal as i should have expected from father antoine himself. 'there is only one thing for it,' he muttered, trembling all over. 'he must be got rid of!' 'fine talking!' i said, contemptuously. 'if he were a soldier he might be brought to it. but he is a priest, my friend, and does not fight.' 'fight? who wants him to fight?' the lad answered, his face dark, his hands moving restlessly. 'it is the easier done. a blow in the back, and he will trouble us no more.' 'who is to strike it?' i asked drily. simon trembled and hesitated; but presently, heaving a deep sigh, he said, 'i will.' 'it might not be difficult,' i muttered, thinking it over. 'it would be easy,' he answered under his breath. his eyes shone, his lips were white, and his long dark hair hung wet over his forehead. i reflected; and the longer i did so the more feasible seemed the suggestion. a single word, and i might sweep from my path the man whose existence threatened mine; who would not meet me fairly, but, working against me darkly and treacherously, deserved no better treatment at my hands than that which a detected spy receives. he had wronged my mother; he would fain destroy my friends! and, doubtless, i shall be blamed by some and ridiculed by more for indulging in scruples at such a time. but i have all my life long been prejudiced against that form of underhand violence which i have heard old men contend came into fashion in our country in modern times, and which certainly seems to be alien from the french character. without judging others too harshly, or saying that the poniard is never excusable--for then might some wrongs done to women and the helpless go without remedy--i have set my face against its use as unworthy of a soldier. at the time, moreover, of which i am now writing the extent to which our enemies had lately resorted to it tended to fix this feeling with peculiar firmness in my mind; and, but for the very desperate dilemma in which i stood at the moment--and not i alone--i do not think that i should have entertained simon's proposal for a minute. as it was, i presently answered him in a way which left him in no doubt of my sentiments. 'simon, my friend,' i said--and i remember i was a little moved--'you have something still to learn, both as a soldier and a huguenot. neither the one nor the other strikes at the back.' 'but if he will not fight?' the lad retorted rebelliously. 'what then?' it was so clear that our adversary gained an unfair advantage in this way that i could not answer the question. i let it pass, therefore, and merely repeating my former injunction, bade simon think out another way. he promised reluctantly to do so, and, after spending some moments in thought, went out to learn whether the house was being watched. when he returned, his countenance wore so new an expression that i saw at once that something had happened. he did not meet my eye, however, and did not explain, but made as if he would go out again, with something of confusion in his manner. before finally disappearing, however, he seemed to change his mind once more; for, marching up to me where i stood eyeing him with the utmost astonishment, he stopped before me, and suddenly drawing out his hand, thrust something into mine. 'what is it, man?' i said mechanically. 'look!' he answered rudely, breaking silence for the first time. 'you should know. why ask me? what have i to do with it?' i looked then, and saw that he had given me a knot of velvet precisely similar in shape, size, and material to that well-remembered one which had aided me so opportunely in my search for mademoiselle. this differed from that a little in colour, but in nothing else, the fashion of the bow being the same, and one lappet bearing the initials 'c. d. l. v.,' while the other had the words, 'a moi.' i gazed at it in wonder. 'but, simon,' i said, 'what does it mean? where did you get it?' 'where should i get it?' he answered jealously. then, seeming to recollect himself, he changed his tone. 'a woman gave it to me in the street,' he said. i asked him what woman. 'how should i know?' he answered, his eyes gleaming with anger. 'it was a woman in a mask.' 'was it fanchette?' i said sternly. 'it might have been. i do not know,' he responded. i concluded at first that mademoiselle and her escort had arrived in the outskirts of the city, and that maignan had justified his reputation for discretion by sending in to learn from me whether the way was clear before he entered. in this notion i was partly confirmed and partly shaken by the accompanying message; which simon, from whom every scrap of information had to be dragged as blood from a stone, presently delivered. 'you are to meet the sender half an hour after sunset to-morrow evening,' he said, 'on the parvis at the north-east corner of the cathedral.' 'to-morrow evening?' 'yes, when else?' the lad answered ungraciously. 'i said to-morrow evening.' i thought this strange. i could understand why maignan should prefer to keep his charge outside the walls until he heard from me, but not why he should postpone a meeting so long. the message, too, seemed unnecessarily meagre, and i began to think simon was still withholding something. 'was that all?' i asked him. 'yes, all,' he answered, 'except----' 'except what?' i said sternly. 'except that the woman showed me the gold token mademoiselle de la vire used to carry,' he answered reluctantly, 'and said, if you wanted further assurance that would satisfy you.' 'did you see the coin?' i cried eagerly. 'to be sure,' he answered. 'then, mon dieu!' i retorted, 'either you are deceiving me, or the woman you saw deceived you. for mademoiselle has not got the token! i have it; here, in my possession! now, do you still say you saw it, man?' 'i saw one like it,' he answered, trembling, his face damp. 'that i will swear. and the woman told me what i have told you. and no more.' 'then it is clear,' i answered, 'that mademoiselle has nothing to do with this, and is doubtless many a league away. this is one of m. de bruhl's tricks. fresnoy gave him the token he stole from me. and i told him the story of the velvet knot myself. this is a trap; and had i fallen into it, and gone to the parvis to-morrow evening, i had never kept another assignation, my lad.' simon looked thoughtful. presently he said, with a crestfallen air, 'you were to go alone. the woman said that.' though i knew well why he had suppressed this item, i forbore to blame him. 'what was the woman like?' i said. 'she had very much of fanchette's figure,' he answered. he could not go beyond that. blinded by the idea that the woman was mademoiselle's attendant, and no one else, he had taken little heed of her, and could not even say for certain that she was not a man in woman's clothes. i thought the matter over and discussed it with him; and was heartily minded to punish m. de bruhl, if i could discover a way of turning his treacherous plot against himself. but the lack of any precise knowledge of his plans prevented me stirring in the matter; the more as i felt no certainty that i should be master of my actions when the time came. strange to say the discovery of this movement on the part of bruhl, who had sedulously kept himself in the background since the scene in the king's presence, far from increasing my anxieties, had the effect of administering a fillip to my spirits; which the cold and unyielding pressure of the jacobin had reduced to a low point. here was something i could understand, resist, and guard against. the feeling that i had once more to do with a man of like aims and passions with myself quickly restored me to the use of my faculties; as i have heard that a swordsman opposed to the powers of evil regains his vigour on finding himself engaged with a mortal foe. though i knew that the hours of grace were fast running to a close, and that on the morrow the priest would call for an answer, i experienced that evening an unreasonable lightness and cheerfulness. i retired to rest with confidence, and slept in comfort, supported in part, perhaps, by the assurance that in that room where my mother died her persecutor could have no power to harm me. upon simon fleix, on the other hand, the discovery that bruhl was moving, and that consequently peril threatened us from a new quarter, had a different effect. he fell into a state of extreme excitement, and spent the evening and a great part of the night in walking restlessly up and down the room, wrestling with the fears and anxieties which beset us, and now talking fast to himself, now biting his nails in an agony of impatience. in vain i adjured him not to meet troubles halfway; or, pointing to the pallet which he occupied at the foot of my couch, bade him, if he could not devise a way of escape, at least to let the matter rest until morning. he had no power to obey, but, tortured by the vivid anticipations which it was his nature to entertain, he continued to ramble to and fro in a fever of the nerves, and had no sooner lain down than he was up again. remembering, however, how well he had borne himself on the night of mademoiselle's escape from blois, i refrained from calling him a coward; and contented myself instead with the reflection that nothing sits worse on a fighting-man than too much knowledge--except, perhaps, a lively imagination. i thought it possible that mademoiselle might arrive next day before father antoine called to receive his answer. in this event i hoped to have the support of maignan's experience. but the party did not arrive. i had to rely on myself and my own resources, and, this being so, determined to refuse the priest's offer, but in all other things to be guided by circumstances. about noon he came, attended, as was his practice, by two friends, whom he left outside. he looked paler and more shadowy than before, i thought, his hands thinner, and his cheeks more transparent. i could draw no good augury, however, from these signs of frailty, for the brightness of his eyes and the unusual elation of his manner told plainly of a spirit assured of the mastery. he entered the room with an air of confidence, and addressed me in a tone of patronage which left me in no doubt of his intentions; the frankness with which he now laid bare his plans going far to prove that already he considered me no better than his tool. i did not at once undeceive him, but allowed him to proceed, and even to bring out the five hundred crowns which he had promised me, and the sight of which he doubtless supposed would clench the matter. seeing this he became still less reticent, and spoke so largely that i presently felt myself impelled to ask him if he would answer a question. 'that is as may be, m. de marsac,' he answered lightly. 'you may ask it.' 'you hint at great schemes which you have in hand, father,' i said. 'you speak of france and spain and navarre, and kings and leagues and cardinals! you talk of secret strings, and would have me believe that if i comply with your wishes i shall find you as powerful a patron as m. de rosny. but--one moment, if you please,' i continued hastily, seeing that he was about to interrupt me with such eager assurances as i had already heard; 'tell me this. with so many irons in the fire, why did you interfere with one old gentlewoman--for the sake of a few crowns?' 'i will tell you even that,' he answered, his face flushing at my tone. 'have you ever heard of an elephant? yes. well, it has a trunk, you know, with which it can either drag an oak from the earth or lift a groat from the ground. it is so with me. but again you ask,' he continued with an airy grimace, 'why i wanted a few crowns. enough that i did. there are going to be two things in the world, and two only, m. de marsac: brains and money. the former i have, and had: the latter i needed--and took.' 'money and brains?' i said, looking at him thoughtfully. 'yes,' he answered, his eyes sparkling, his thin nostrils beginning to dilate. 'give me these two, and i will rule france!' 'you will rule france?' i exclaimed, amazed beyond measure by his audacity. 'you, man?' 'yes, i,' he answered, with abominable coolness. 'i, priest, monk, churchman, clerk. you look surprised, but mark you, sir, there is a change going on. our time is coming, and yours is going. what hampers our lord the king and shuts him up in blois, while rebellions stalk through france? lack of men? no; but lack of money. who can get the money for him--you the soldier, or i the clerk? a thousand times, i! therefore, my time is coining, and before you die you will see a priest rule france.' 'god forbid it should be you,' i answered scornfully. 'as you please,' he answered, shrugging his shoulders, and assuming in a breath a mask of humility which sat as ill on his monstrous conceit as ever nun's veil on a trooper. 'yet it may even be i; by the favour of the holy catholic church, whose humble minister i am.' i sprang up with a great oath at that, having no stomach for more of the strange transformations, in which this man delighted, and whereof the last had ever the air of being the most hateful. 'you villain!' i cried, twisting my moustaches, a habit i have when enraged. 'and so you would make me a stepping-stone to your greatness. you would bribe me--a soldier and a gentleman. go, before i do you a mischief. that is all i have to say to you. go! you have your answer. i will tell you nothing--not a jot or a tittle. begone from my room!' he fell back a step in his surprise, and stood against the table biting his nails and scowling at me, fear and chagrin contending with half a dozen devils for the possession of his face. 'so you have been deceiving me,' he said slowly, and at last. 'i have let you deceive yourself,' i answered, looking at him with scorn, but with none of the fear with which he had for a while inspired me. 'begone, and do your worst.' 'you know what you are doing,' he said. 'i have that will hang you, m. de marsac--or worse.' 'go!' i cried. 'you have thought of your friends,' he continued mockingly. 'go!' i said. 'of mademoiselle de la vire, if by any chance she fall into my hands? it will not be hanging for her. you remember the two foucauds?'--and he laughed. the vile threat, which i knew he had used to my mother, so worked upon me that i strode forward unable to control myself longer. in another moment i had certainly taken him by the throat and squeezed the life out of his miserable carcase, had not providence in its goodness intervened to save me. the door, on which he had already laid his hand in terror, opened suddenly. it admitted simon, who, closing it behind him, stood looking from one to the other of us in nervous doubt; divided between that respect for the priest which a training at the sorbonne had instilled into him, and the rage which despair arouses in the weakest. his presence, while it checked me in my purpose, seemed to give father antoine courage, for the priest stood his ground, and even turned to me a second time, his face dark with spite and disappointment. 'good,' he said hoarsely. 'destroy yourself if you will! i advise you to bar your door, for in an hour the guards will be here to fetch you to the question.' simon cried out at the threat, so that i turned and looked at the lad. his knees were shaking, his hair stood on end. the priest saw his terror and his own opportunity. 'ay, in an hour,' he continued slowly, looking at him with cruel eyes. 'in an hour, lad! you must be fond of pain to court it, and out of humour with life to throw it away. or stay,' he continued abruptly, after considering simon's agony for a moment, and doubtless deducing from it a last hope, 'i will be merciful. i will give you one more chance.' 'and yourself?' i said with a sneer. 'as you please,' he answered, declining to be diverted from the trembling lad, whom his gaze seemed to fascinate. 'i will give you until half an hour after sunset this evening to reconsider the matter. if you make up your minds to accept my terms, meet me then. i leave to-night for paris, and i will give you until the last moment. but,' he continued grimly, 'if you do not meet me, or, meeting me, remain obstinate--god do so to me, and more also, if you see the sun rise thrice.' some impulse, i know not what, seeing that i had no thought of accepting his terms or meeting him, led me to ask briefly, 'where?' 'on the parvis of the cathedral,' he answered after a moment's calculation. 'at the north-east corner, half an hour after sunset. it is a quiet spot.' simon uttered a stifled exclamation. and then for a moment there was silence in the room, while the lad breathed hard and irregularly, and i stood rooted to the spot, looking so long and so strangely at the priest that father antoine laid his hand again on the door and glanced uneasily behind him. nor was he content until he had hit on, as he fancied, the cause of my strange regard. 'ha!' he said, his thin lip curling in conceit at his astuteness, 'i understand. you think to kill me to-night? let me tell you, this house is watched. if you leave here to meet me with any companion--unless it be m. d'agen, whom i can trust--i shall be warned, and be gone before you reach the rendezvous. and gone, mind you,' he added, with a grim smile, 'to sign your death-warrant.' he went out with that, closing the door behind him; and we heard his step go softly down the staircase. i gazed at simon, and he at me, with all the astonishment and awe which it was natural we should feel in presence of so remarkable a coincidence. for by a marvel the priest had named the same spot and the same time as the sender of the velvet knot! 'he will go,' simon said, his face flushed and his voice trembling, 'and they will go.' 'and in the dark they will not know him,' i muttered. 'he is about my height. they will take him for me!' 'and kill him!' simon cried hysterically. 'they will kill him! he goes to his death, monsieur. it is the finger of god.' chapter xx. the king's face. it seemed so necessary to bring home the crime to bruhl should the priest really perish in the trap laid for me, that i came near to falling into one of those mistakes to which men of action are prone. for my first impulse was to follow the priest to the parvis, closely enough, if possible, to detect the assassins in the act, and with sufficient force, if i could muster it, to arrest them. the credit of dissuading me from this course lies with simon, who pointed out its dangers in so convincing a manner that i was brought with little difficulty to relinquish it. instead, acting on his advice, i sent him to m. d'agen's lodging, to beg that young gentleman to call upon me before evening. after searching the lodging and other places in vain, simon found m. d'agen in the tennis-court at the castle, and, inventing a crafty excuse, brought him to my lodging a full hour before the time. my visitor was naturally surprised to find that i had nothing particular to say to him. i dared not tell him what occupied my thoughts, and for the rest invention failed me. but his gaiety and those pretty affectations on which he spent an infinity of pains, for the purpose, apparently, of hiding the sterling worth of a character deficient neither in courage nor backbone, were united to much good nature. believing at last that i had sent for him in a fit of the vapours, he devoted himself to amusing me and abusing bruhl--a very favourite pastime with him. and in this way he made out a call of two hours. i had not long to wait for proof of simon's wisdom in taking this precaution. we thought it prudent to keep within doors after our guest's departure, and so passed the night in ignorance whether anything had happened or not. but about seven next morning one of the marquis's servants, despatched by m. d'agen, burst in upon us with the news--which was no news from the moment his hurried footstep sounded on the stairs--that father antoine had been set upon and killed the previous evening! i heard this confirmation of my hopes with grave thankfulness; simon with so much emotion that when the messenger was gone he sat down on a stool and began to sob and tremble as if he had lost his mother, instead of a mortal foe. i took advantage of the occasion to read him a sermon on the end of crooked courses; nor could i myself recall without a shudder the man's last words to me; or the lawless and evil designs in which he had rejoiced, while standing on the very brink of the pit which was to swallow up both him and them in everlasting darkness. naturally, the uppermost feeling in my mind was relief. i was free once more. in all probability the priest had kept his knowledge to himself, and without him his agents would be powerless. simon, it is true, heard that the town was much excited by the event; and that many attributed it to the huguenots. but we did not suffer ourselves to be depressed by this, nor had i any foreboding until the sound of a second hurried footstep mounting the stairs reached our ears. i knew the step in a moment for m. d'agen's, and something ominous in its ring brought me to my feet before he opened the door. significant as was his first hasty look round the room, he recovered at sight of me all his habitual _sang-froid_. he saluted me, and spoke coolly, though rapidly. but he panted, and i noticed in a moment that he had lost his lisp. 'i am happy in finding you,' he said, closing the door carefully behind him, 'for i am the bearer of ill news, and there is not a moment to be lost. the king has signed an order for your instant consignment to prison, m. de marsac, and, once there, it is difficult to say what may not happen.' 'my consignment?' i exclaimed. i may be pardoned if the news for a moment found me unprepared. 'yes,' he replied quickly. 'the king has signed it at the instance of marshal retz.' 'but for what?' i cried in amazement. 'the murder of father antoine. you will pardon me,' he continued urgently, 'but this is no time for words. the provost-marshal is even now on his way to arrest you. your only hope is to evade him, and gain an audience of the king. i have persuaded my uncle to go with you, and he is waiting at his lodgings. there is not a moment to be lost, however, if you would reach the king's presence before you are arrested.' 'but i am innocent!' i cried. 'i know it,' m. d'agen answered, 'and can prove it. but if you cannot get speech of the king innocence will avail you nothing. you have powerful enemies. come without more ado, m. de marsac, i pray,' he added. his manner, even more than his words, impressed me with a sense of urgency; and postponing for a time my own judgment, i hurriedly thanked him for his friendly offices. snatching up my sword, which lay on a chair, i buckled it on; for simon's fingers trembled so violently he could give me no help. this done i nodded to m. d'agen to go first, and followed him from the room, simon attending us of his own motion. it would be then about eleven o'clock in the forenoon. my companion ran down the stairs without ceremony, and so quickly it was all i could do to keep up with him. at the outer door he signed me to stand, and darting himself into the street, he looked anxiously in the direction of the rue st. denys. fortunately the coast was still clear, and he beckoned to me to follow him. i did so and starting to walk in the opposite direction as fast as we could, in less than a minute we had put a corner between us and the house. our hopes of escaping unseen, however, were promptly dashed. the house, i have said, stood in a quiet by-street, which was bounded on the farther side by a garden-wall buttressed at intervals. we had scarcely gone a dozen paces from my door when a man slipped from the shelter of one of these buttresses, and after a single glance at us, set off to run towards the rue st. denys. m. d'agen looked back and nodded. 'there goes the news,' he said. 'they will try to cut us off, but i think we have the start of them.' i made no reply, feeling that i had resigned myself entirely into his hands. but as we passed through the rue de valois, in part of which a market was held at this hour, attracting a considerable concourse of peasants and others, i fancied i detected signs of unusual bustle and excitement. it seemed unlikely that news of the priest's murder should affect so many people and to such a degree, and i asked m. d'agen what it meant. 'there is a rumour abroad,' he answered, without slackening speed, 'that the king intends to move south to tours at once.' i muttered my surprise and satisfaction. 'he will come to terms with the huguenots then?' i said. 'it looks like it,' m. d'agen rejoined. 'retz's party are in an ill-humour on that account, and will wreak it on you if they get a chance. on guard!' he added abruptly. 'here are two of them!' as he spoke we emerged from the crowd, and i saw, half a dozen paces in front of us, and coming to meet us, a couple of court gallants, attended by as many servants. they espied us at the same moment, and came across the street, which was tolerably wide at that part, with the evident intention of stopping us. simultaneously, however, we crossed to take their side, and so met them face to face in the middle of the way. 'm. d'agen,' the foremost exclaimed, speaking in a haughty tone, and with a dark side glance at me, 'i am sorry to see you in such company! doubtless you are not aware that this gentleman is the subject of an order which has even now been issued to the provost-marshal.' 'and if so, sir? what of that?' my companion lisped in his silkiest tone. 'what of that?' the other cried, frowning, and pushing slightly forward. 'precisely,' m. d'agen repeated, laying his hand on his hilt and declining to give back. 'i am not aware that his majesty has appointed you provost-marshal, or that you have any warrant, m. villequier, empowering you to stop gentlemen in the public streets.' m. villequier reddened with anger. 'you are young, m. d'agen,' he said, his voice quivering, 'or i would make you pay dearly for that!' 'my friend is not young,' m. d'agen retorted, bowing. he is a gentleman of birth, m. villequier; by repute, as i learned yesterday, one of the best swordsmen in france, and no gascon. if you feel inclined to arrest him, do so, i pray. and i will have the honour of engaging your son.' as we had all by this time our hands on our swords, there needed but a blow to bring about one of those street brawls which were more common then than now. a number of market-people, drawn to the spot by our raised voices, had gathered round, and were waiting eagerly to see what would happen. but villequier, as my companion perhaps knew, was a gascon in heart as well as by birth, and seeing our determined aspects, thought better of it. shrugging his shoulders with an affectation of disdain which imposed on no one, he signalled to his servants to go on, and himself stood aside. 'i thank you for your polite offer,' he said with an evil smile, 'and will remember it. but as you say, sir, i am not the provost-marshal.' paying little heed to his words, we bowed, passed him, and hurried on. but the peril was not over. not only had the _rencontre_ cost us some precious minutes, but the gascon, after letting us proceed a little way, followed us. and word being passed by his servants, as we supposed, that one of us was the murderer of father antoine, the rumour spread through the crowd like wildfire, and in a few moments we found ourselves attended by a troop of _canaille_ who, hanging on our skirts, caused simon fleix no little apprehension. notwithstanding the contempt which m. d'agen, whose bearing throughout was admirable, expressed for them, we might have found it necessary to turn and teach them a lesson had we not reached m. de rambouillet's in the nick of time; where we found the door surrounded by half a dozen armed servants, at sight of whom our persecutors fell back with the cowardice which is usually found in that class. if i had been tempted of late to think m. de rambouillet fickle, i had no reason to complain now; whether his attitude was due to m. d'agen's representations, or to the reflection that without me the plans he had at heart must miscarry. i found him waiting within, attended by three gentlemen, all cloaked and ready for the road; while the air of purpose which sat on his brow indicated that he thought the crisis no common one. not a moment was lost, even in explanations. waving me to the door again, and exchanging a few sentences with his nephew, he gave the word to start, and we issued from the house in a body. doubtless the fact that those who sought to ruin me were his political enemies had some weight with him; for i saw his face harden as his eyes met those of m. de villequier, who passed slowly before the door as we came out. the gascon, however, was not the man to interfere with so large a party, and dropped back; while m. de rambouillet, after exchanging a cold salute with him, led the way towards the castle at a round pace. his nephew and i walked one on either side of him, and the others, to the number of ten or eleven, pressed on behind in a compact body, our cortège presenting so determined a front that the crowd, which had remained hanging about the door, fled every way. even some peaceable folk who found themselves in our road took the precaution of slipping into doorways, or stood aside to give us the full width of the street. i remarked--and i think it increased my anxiety--that our leader was dressed with more than usual care and richness, but, unlike his attendants, wore no arms. he took occasion, as we hurried along, to give me a word of advice. 'm. de marsac,' he said, looking at me suddenly, 'my nephew has given me to understand that you place yourself entirely in my hands.' i replied that i asked for no better fortune, and, whatever the event, thanked him from the bottom of my heart. 'be pleased then to keep silence until i bid you speak,' he replied sharply, for he was one of those whom a sudden stress sours and exacerbates. 'and, above all, no violence without my orders. we are about to fight a battle, and a critical one, but it must be won with our heads. if we can we will keep you out of the provost-marshal's hands.' and if not? i remembered the threats father antoine had used, and in a moment i lost sight of the street with all its light and life and movement. i felt no longer the wholesome stinging of the wind. i tasted instead a fetid air, and saw round me a narrow cell and masked figures, and in particular a swathy man in a leather apron leaning over a brazier, from whim came lurid flames. and i was bound. i experienced that utter helplessness which is the last test of courage. the man came forward, and then--then, thank god! the vision passed away. an exclamation to which m. d'agen gave vent, brought me back to the present, and to the blessed knowledge that the fight was not yet over. we were within a score of paces, i found, of the castle gates: but so were also a second party, who had just debouched from a side-street, and now hurried on, pace for pace, with us, with the evident intention of forestalling us. the race ended in both companies reaching the entrance at the same time, with the consequence of some jostling taking place amongst the servants. this must have led to blows but for the strenuous commands which m. de rambouillet had laid upon his followers. i found myself in a moment confronted by a row of scowling faces, while a dozen threatening hands were stretched out towards me, and as many voices, among which i recognised fresnoy's, cried out tumultuously, 'that is he! that is the one!' an elderly man in a quaint dress stepped forward, a paper in his hand, and, backed as he was by half a dozen halberdiers, would in a moment have laid hands on me if m. de rambouillet had not intervened with a negligent air of authority, which sat on him the more gracefully as he held nothing but a riding-switch in his hands. 'tut, tut! what is this?' he said lightly. 'i am not wont to have my people interfered with, m. provost, without my leave. you know me, i suppose?' 'perfectly, m. le marquis,' the man answered with dogged respect; 'but this is by the king's special command.' 'very good,' my patron answered, quietly eyeing the faces behind the provost-marshal, as if he were making a note of them; which caused some of the gentlemen manifest uneasiness. 'that is soon seen, for we are even now about to seek speech with his majesty.' 'not this gentleman,' the provost-marshal answered firmly, raising his hand again. 'i can not let him pass.' 'yes, this gentleman too, by your leave,' the marquis retorted, lightly putting the hand aside with his cane. 'sir,' said the other, retreating a step and speaking with some heat, 'this is no jest with all respect. i hold the king's own order, and it may not be resisted.' the nobleman tapped his silver comfit-box and smiled. 'i shall be the last to resist it--if you have it,' he said languidly. 'you may read it for yourself,' the provost-marshal answered, his patience exhausted. m. de rambouillet took the parchment with the ends of his fingers, glanced at it, and gave it back. 'as i thought,' he said, 'a manifest forgery.' 'a forgery!' cried the officer, crimson with indignation. 'and i had it from the hands of the king's own secretary!' at this those behind murmured, some 'shame,' and some one thing, and some another--all with an air so threatening that the marquis's gentlemen closed up behind him, and m. d'agen laughed rudely. but m. de rambouillet remained unmoved. 'you may have had it from whom you please, sir,' he said. 'it is a forgery, and i shall resist its execution. if you choose to await me here, i will give you my word to render this gentleman to you within an hour, should the order hold good. if you will not wait, i shall command my servants to clear the way, and if ill happen, then the responsibility will lie with you.' he spoke in so resolute a manner it was not difficult to see that something more was at stake than the arrest of a single man. this was so; the real issue was whether the king, with whose instability it was difficult to cope, should fall back into the hands of his old advisers or not. my arrest was a move in the game intended as a counterblast to the victory which m. de rambouillet had gained when he persuaded the king to move to tours; a city in the neighbourhood of the huguenots, and a place of arms whence union with them would be easy. the provost-marshal could, no doubt, make a shrewd guess at these things. he knew that the order he had would be held valid or not according as one party or the other gained the mastery; and, seeing m. de rambouillet's resolute demeanour, he gave way. rudely interrupted more than once by his attendants, among whom were some of bruhl's men, he muttered an ungracious assent to our proposal; on which, and without a moment's delay, the marquis took me by the arm and hurried me across the courtyard. and so far, well. my heart began to rise. but, for the marquis, as we mounted the staircase the anxiety he had dissembled while we faced the provost-marshal, broke out in angry mutterings; from which i gathered that the crisis was yet to come. i was not surprised, therefore, when an usher rose on our appearance in the antechamber, and, quickly crossing the floor, interposed between us and the door of the chamber, informing the marquis with a low obeisance that his majesty was engaged. 'he will see me,' m. de rambouillet cried, looking haughtily round on the sneering pages and lounging courtiers, who grew civil under his eye. 'i have particular orders, sir, to admit no one,' the man answered. 'tut, tut, they do not apply to me,' my companion retorted, nothing daunted. 'i know the business on which the king is engaged, and i am here to assist him.' and raising his hand he thrust the startled official aside, and hardily pushed the doors of the chamber open. the king, surrounded by half a dozen persons, was in the act of putting on his riding-boots. on hearing us, he turned his head with a startled air, and dropped in his confusion one of the ivory cylinders he was using; while his aspect, and that of the persons who stood round him, reminded me irresistibly of a party of schoolboys detected in a fault. he recovered himself, it is true, almost immediately; and turning his back to us, continued to talk to the persons round him on such trifling subjects as commonly engaged him. he carried on this conversation in a very free way, studiously ignoring our presence; but it was plain he remained aware of it, and even that he was uneasy under the cold and severe gaze which the marquis, who seemed in nowise affrighted by his reception, bent upon him. i, for my part, had no longer any confidence. nay, i came near to regretting that i had persevered in an attempt so useless. the warrant which awaited me at the gates seemed less formidable than his majesty's growing displeasure; which i saw i was incurring by remaining where i was. it needed not the insolent glance of marshal retz, who lounged smiling by the king's hand, or the laughter of a couple of pages who stood at the head of the chamber, to deprive me of my last hope; while some things which might have cheered me--the uneasiness of some about the king, and the disquietude which underlay marshal retz's manner--escaped my notice altogether. what i did see clearly was that the king's embarrassment was fast changing to anger. the paint which reddened his cheeks prevented any alteration in his colour being visible, but his frown and the nervous manner in which he kept taking off and putting on his jewelled cap betrayed him. at length, signing to one of his companions to follow, he moved a little aside to a window, whence, after a few moments, the gentleman came to us. 'm. de rambouillet,' he said, speaking coldly and formally, 'his majesty is displeased by this gentleman's presence, and requires him to withdraw forthwith.' 'his majesty's word is law,' my patron answered, bowing low, and speaking in a clear voice audible throughout the chamber, 'but the matter which brings this gentleman here is of the utmost importance, and touches his majesty's person.' m. de retz laughed jeeringly. the other courtiers looked grave. the king shrugged his shoulders with a peevish gesture, but after a moment's hesitation, during which he looked first at retz and then at m. de rambouillet, he signed to the marquis to approach. 'why have you brought him here?' he muttered sharply, looking askance at me. 'he should have been bestowed according to my orders.' 'he has information for your majesty's private ear,' rambouillet answered. and he looked so meaningly at the king that henry, i think, remembered on a sudden his compact with rosny, and my part in it; for he started with the air of a man suddenly awakened. 'to prevent that information reaching you, sire,' my patron continued, 'his enemies have practised on your majesty's well-known sense of justice.' 'oh, but stay, stay!' the king cried, hitching forward the scanty cloak he wore, which barely came down to his waist. 'the man has killed a priest! he has killed a priest, man!' he repeated with confidence, as if he had now got hold of the right argument. 'that is not so, sire, craving your majesty's pardon,' m. de rambouillet replied with the utmost coolness. 'tut! tut! the evidence is clear,' the king said peevishly. 'as to that, sire,' my companion rejoined, 'if it is of the murder of father antoine he is accused, i say boldly that there is none.' 'then there you are mistaken!' the king answered. 'i heard it with my own ears this morning.' 'will you deign, sire, to tell me its nature?' m. de rambouillet persisted. but on that marshal retz thought it necessary to intervene. 'need we turn his majesty's chamber into a court of justice?' he said smoothly. hitherto he had not spoken; trusting, perhaps, to the impression he had already made upon the king. m. de rambouillet took no notice of him. 'but bruhl,' said the king, 'you see, bruhl says----' 'bruhl!' my companion replied, with so much contempt that henry started. 'surely your majesty has not taken his word against this gentleman, of all people?' thus reminded, a second time, of the interests entrusted to me, and of the advantage which bruhl would gain by my disappearance, the king looked first confused, and then angry. he vented his passion in one or two profane oaths, with the childish addition that we were all a set of traitors, and that he had no one whom he could trust. but my companion had touched the right chord at last; for when the king grew more composed, he waved aside marshal retz's protestations, and sullenly bade rambouillet say what he had to say. 'the monk was killed, sire, about sunset,' he answered. 'now my nephew, m. d'agen, is without, and will tell your majesty that he was with this gentleman at his lodgings from about an hour before sunset last evening until a full hour after. consequently, m. de marsac can hardly be the assassin, and m. le marechal must look elsewhere if he wants vengeance.' 'justice, sir, not vengeance,' marshal retz said with a dark glance. his keen italian face hid his trouble well, but a little pulse of passion beating in his olive cheek betrayed the secret to those who knew him. he had a harder part to play than his opponent; for while rambouillet's hands were clean, retz knew himself a traitor, and liable at any moment to discovery and punishment. 'let m. d'agen be called,' henry said curtly. 'and if your majesty pleases,' retz added, 'm. de bruhl also. if you really intend, sire, that is, to reopen a matter which i thought had been settled.' the king nodded obstinately, his face furrowed with ill-temper. he kept his shifty eyes, which seldom met those of the person he addressed, on the floor; and this accentuated the awkward stooping carriage which was natural to him. there were seven or eight dogs of exceeding smallness in the room, and while we waited for the persons who had been summoned, he kicked, now one and now another of the baskets which held them, as if he found in this some vent for his ill-humour. the witnesses presently appeared, followed by several persons, among whom were the dukes of nevers and merc[oe]ur, who came to ride out with the king, and m. de crillon; so that the chamber grew passably full. the two dukes nodded formally to the marquis, as they passed him, but entered into a muttered conversation with retz, who appeared to be urging them to press his cause. they seemed to decline, however, shrugging their short cloaks as if the matter were too insignificant. crillon on his part cried audibly, and with an oath, to know what the matter was; and being informed, asked whether all this fuss was being made about a damned shaveling monk. henry, whose tenderness for the cowl was well known, darted an angry glance at him, but contented himself with saying sharply to m. d'agen, 'now, sir, what do you know about the matter?' 'one moment, sire,' m. rambouillet cried, interposing before françois could answer. 'craving your majesty's pardon, you have heard m. de bruhl's account. may i, as a favour to myself, beg you, sire, to permit us also to hear it?' 'what?' marshal retz exclaimed angrily, 'are we to be the judges, then, or his majesty? arnidieu!' he continued hotly, 'what, in the fiend's name, have we to do with it? i protest 'fore heaven----' 'ay, sir, and what do you protest?' my champion retorted, turning to him with stern disdain. 'silence!' cried the king, who had listened almost bewildered. 'silence! by god, gentlemen,' he continued, his eye travelling round the circle with a sparkle of royal anger in it not unworthy of his crown, 'you forget yourselves. i will have none of this quarrelling in my presence or out of it. i lost quélus and maugiron that way, and loss enough, and i will have none of it, i say! m. de bruhl,' he added, standing erect, and looking for the moment, with all his paint and frippery, a king, 'm. de bruhl, repeat your story.' the feelings with which i listened to this controversy may be imagined. devoured in turn by hope and fear as now one side and now the other seemed likely to prevail, i confronted at one moment the gloom of the dungeon, and at another tasted the air of freedom, which had never seemed so sweet before. strong as these feelings were, however, they gave way to curiosity at this point; when i heard bruhl called, and saw him come forward at the king's command. knowing this man to be himself guilty, i marvelled with what face he would present himself before all those eyes, and from what depths of impudence he could draw supplies in such an emergency. i need not have troubled myself, however, for he was fully equal to the occasion. his high colour and piercing black eyes met the gaze of friend and foe alike without flinching. dressed well and elegantly, he wore his raven hair curled in the mode, and looked alike gay, handsome, and imperturbable. if there was a suspicion of coarseness about his bulkier figure, as he stood beside m. d'agen, who was the courtier perfect and point devise, it went to the scale of sincerity, seeing that men naturally associate truth with strength. 'i know no more than this, sire,' he said easily; 'that, happening to cross the parvis at the moment of the murder, i heard father antoine scream. he uttered four words only, in the tone of a man in mortal peril. they were'--and here the speaker looked for an instant at me--'ha! marsac! a moi!' 'indeed!' m. de rambouillet said, after looking to the king for permission. 'and that was all? you saw nothing?' bruhl shook his head. 'it was too dark,' he said. 'and heard no more?' 'no.' 'do i understand, then,' the marquis continued slowly, 'that m. de marsac is arrested because the priest--god rest his soul!--cried to him for help?' 'for help?' m. de retz exclaimed fiercely. 'for help?' said the king, surprised. and at that the most ludicrous change fell upon the faces of all. the king looked puzzled, the duke of nevers smiled, the duke of merc[oe]ur laughed aloud. crillon cried boisterously, 'good hit!' and the majority, who wished no better than to divine the winning party, grinned broadly, whether they would or no. to marshal retz, however, and bruhl, that which to everyone else seemed an amusing retort had a totally different aspect; while the former turned yellow with chagrin and came near to choking, the latter looked as chapfallen and startled as if his guilt had been that moment brought home to him. assured by the tone of the monk's voice--which must, indeed, have thundered in his ears--that my name was uttered in denunciation by one who thought me his assailant, he had chosen to tell the truth without reflecting that words, so plain to him, might bear a different construction when repeated. 'certainly the words seem ambiguous,' henry muttered. 'but it was marsac killed him,' retz cried in a rage. 'it is for some evidence of that we are waiting,' my champion answered suavely. the marshal looked helplessly at nevers and merc[oe]ur, who commonly took part with him; but apparently those noblemen had not been primed for this occasion. they merely shook their heads and smiled. in the momentary silence which followed, while all looked curiously at bruhl, who could not conceal his mortification, m. d'agen stepped forward. 'if your majesty will permit me,' he said, a malicious simper crossing his handsome face--i had often remarked his extreme dislike for bruhl without understanding it--'i think i can furnish some evidence more to the point than that to which m. de bruhl has with so much fairness restricted himself.' he then went on to state that he had had the honour of being in my company at the time of the murder; and he added, besides, so many details as to exculpate me to the satisfaction of any candid person. the king nodded. 'that settles the matter,' he said, with a sigh of relief. 'you think so, merc[oe]ur, do you not? precisely. villequier, see that the order respecting m. de marsac is cancelled.' m. de retz could not control his wrath on hearing this direction given. 'at this rate,' he cried recklessly, 'we shall have few priests left here! we have got a bad name at blois, as it is!' for a moment all in the circle held their breath, while the king's eyes flashed fire at this daring allusion to the murder of the duke de guise, and his brother the cardinal. but it was henry's misfortune to be ever indulgent in the wrong place, and severe when severity was either unjust or impolitic. he recovered himself with an effort, and revenged himself only by omitting to invite the marshal, who was now trembling in his shoes, to join his riding-party. the circle broke up amid some excitement. i stood on one side with m. d'agen, while the king and his immediate following passed out, and, greatly embarrassed as i was by the civil congratulating of many who would have seen me hang with equal goodwill, i was sharp enough to see that something was brewing between bruhl and marshal retz, who stood back conversing in low tones. i was not surprised, therefore, when the former made his way towards me through the press which filled the antechamber, and with a lowering brow requested a word with me. 'certainly,' i said, watching him narrowly, for i knew him to be both treacherous and a bully. 'speak on, sir.' 'you have baulked me once and again,' he rejoined, in a voice which shook a little, as did the fingers with which he stroked his waxed moustache. 'there is no need of words between us. i, with one sword besides, will to-morrow at noon keep the bridge at chaverny, a league from here. it is an open country. possibly your pleasure may lead you to ride that way with a friend?' 'you may depend upon me, sir,' i answered, bowing low, and feeling thankful that the matter was at length to be brought to a fair and open arbitration. 'i will be there--and in person. for my deputy last night,' i added, searching his face with a steadfast eye, 'seems to have been somewhat unlucky.' chapter xxi. two women. out of compliment, and to show my gratitude, i attended m. de rambouillet home to his lodging, and found him as much pleased with himself, and consequently with me, as i was with him. for the time, indeed, i came near to loving him; and, certainly, he was a man of high and patriotic feeling, and of skill and conduct to match. but he lacked that touch of nature and that power of sympathising with others which gave to such men as m. de rosny and the king, my master, their peculiar charm; though after what i have related of him in the last chapter it does not lie in my mouth to speak ill of him. and, indeed, he was a good man. when i at last reached my lodging, i found a surprise awaiting me in the shape of a note which had just arrived no one knew how. if the manner of its delivery was mysterious, however, its contents were brief and sufficiently explicit; for it ran thus: '_sir, by meeting me three hours after noon in the square before the house of the little sisters you will do a service at once to yourself and to the undersigned, marie de bruhl_.' that was all, written in a feminine character, yet it was enough to perplex me. simon, who had manifested the liveliest joy at my escape, would have had me treat it as i had treated the invitation to the parvis of the cathedral; ignore it altogether i mean. but i was of a different mind, and this for three reasons, among others: that the request was straightforward, the time early, and the place sufficiently public to be an unlikely theatre for violence, though well fitted for an interview to which the world at large was not invited. then, too, the square lay little more than a bowshot from my lodging, though on the farther side of the rue st. denys. besides, i could conceive many grounds which madame de bruhl might have for seeing me; of which some touched me nearly. i disregarded simon's warnings, therefore, and repaired at the time appointed to the place--a clean, paved square a little off the rue st. denys, and entered from the latter by a narrow passage. it was a spot pleasantly convenient for meditation, but overlooked on one side by the house of the little sisters; in which, as i guessed afterwards, madame must have awaited me, for the square when i entered it was empty, yet in a moment, though no one came in from the street, she stood beside me. she wore a mask and long cloak. the beautiful hair and perfect complexion, which had filled me with so much admiration at our first meeting in her house, were hidden, but i saw enough of her figure and carriage to be sure that it was madame de bruhl and no other. she began by addressing me in a tone of bitterness, for which i was not altogether unprepared. 'well, sir,' she exclaimed, her voice trembling with anger, 'you are satisfied, i hope, with your work?' i expected this and had my answer ready. 'i am not aware, madame,' i said, 'that i have cause to reproach myself. but, however that may be, i trust you have summoned me for some better purpose than to chide me for another's fault; though it was my voice which brought it to light.' 'why did you shame me publicly?' she retorted, thrusting her handkerchief to her lips and withdrawing it again with a passionate gesture. 'madame,' i answered patiently--i was full of pity for her, 'consider for a moment the wrong your husband did me, and how small and inadequate was the thing i did to him in return.' 'to him!' she ejaculated so fiercely that i started. 'it was to me--to me you did it! what had i done that you should expose me to the ridicule of those who know no pity, and the anger of one as merciless? what had i done, sir?' i shook my head sorrowfully. 'so far, madame,' i answered, 'i allow i owe you reparation, and i will make it should it ever be in my power. nay, i will say more,' i continued, for the tone in which she spoke had wrung my heart. 'in one point i strained the case against your husband. to the best of my belief he abducted the lady who was in my charge, not for the love of her, but for political reasons, and as the agent of another.' she gasped. 'what?' she cried. 'say that again!' as i complied she tore off her mask and gazed into my face with straining eyes and parted lips. i saw then how much she was changed, even in these few days--how pale and worn were her cheeks, how dark the circles round her eyes. 'will you swear to it?' she said at last, speaking with uncontrollable eagerness, while she laid a hand which shook with excitement on my arm. 'will you swear to it, sir?' 'it is true,' i answered steadfastly. i might have added that after the event her husband had so treated mademoiselle as to lead her to fear the worst. but i refrained, feeling that it was no part of my duty to come between husband and wife. she clasped her hands, and for a moment looked passionately upwards, as though she were giving thanks to heaven; while the flush of health and loveliness which i had so much admired returned, and illumined her face in a wonderful manner. she seemed, in truth and for the moment, transformed. her blue eyes filled with tears, her lips moved; nor have i ever seen anything bear so near a resemblance to those pictures of the virgin mary which romans worship as madame did then. the change, however, was as evanescent as it was admirable. in an instant she seemed to collapse. she struck her hands to her face and moaned, and i saw tears, which she vainly strove to restrain, dropping through her fingers. 'too late!' she murmured, in a tone of anguish which wrung my heart. 'alas, you robbed me of one man, you give me back another. i know him now for what he is. if he did not love her then, he does now. it is too late!' she seemed so much overcome that i assisted her to reach a bench which stood against the wall a few paces away; nor, i confess, was it without difficulty and much self-reproach that i limited myself to those prudent offices only which her state and my duty required. to console her on the subject of her husband was impossible; to ignore him, and so to console her, a task which neither my discretion nor my sense of honour, though sorely tried, permitted me to undertake. she presently recovered and, putting on her mask again, said hurriedly that she had still a word to say to me. 'you have treated me honestly,' she continued, 'and, though i have no cause to do anything but hate you, i say in return, look to yourself! you escaped last night--i know all, for it was my velvet knot--which i had made thinking to send it to you to procure this meeting--that he used as a lure. but he is not yet at the end of his resources. look to yourself, therefore.' i thought of the appointment i had made with him for the morrow, but i confined myself to thanking her, merely saying, as i bowed over the hand she resigned to me in token of farewell, 'madame, i am grateful. i am obliged to you both for your warning and your forgiveness.' bending her head coldly she drew away her hand. at that moment, as i lifted my eyes, i saw something which for an instant rooted me to the spot with astonishment. in the entrance of the passage which led to the rue st. denys two people were standing, watching us. the one was simon fleix, and the other, a masked woman, a trifle below the middle height, and clad in a riding-coat, was mademoiselle de la vire! i knew her in a moment. but the relief i experienced on seeing her safe and in blois was not unmixed with annoyance that simon fleix should have been so imprudent as to parade her unnecessarily in the street. i felt something of confusion also on my own account; for i could not tell how long she and her escort had been watching me. and these two feelings were augmented when, after turning to pay a final salute to madame de bruhl, i looked again towards the passage and discovered that mademoiselle and her squire were gone. impatient as i was, i would not seem to leave madame rudely or without feeling, after the consideration she had shown me in her own sorrow; and accordingly i waited uncovered until she disappeared within the 'little sisters.' then i started eagerly towards my lodging, thinking i might yet overtake mademoiselle before she entered. i was destined to meet, however, with another though very pertinent hindrance. as i passed from the rue st. denys into the quiet of my street i heard a voice calling my name, and, looking back, saw m. de rambouillet's equerry, a man deep in his confidence, running after me. he brought a message from his master, which he begged me to consider of the first importance. 'the marquis would not trust it to writing, sir,' he continued, drawing me aside into a corner where we were conveniently retired, 'but he made me learn it by heart. "tell m. de marsac," said he, "that that which he was left in blois to do must be done quickly, or not at all. there is something afoot in the other camp, i am not sure what. but now is the time to knock in the nail. i know his zeal, and i depend upon him." an hour before i should have listened to this message with serious doubts and misgivings. now, acquainted with mademoiselle's arrival, i returned m. de rambouillet an answer in the same strain, and parting civilly from bertram, who was a man i much esteemed, i hastened on to my lodgings, exulting in the thought that the hour and the woman were come at last, and that before the dawn of another day i might hope, all being well, to accomplish with honour to myself and advantage to others the commission which m. de rosny had entrusted to me. i must not deny that, mingled with this, was some excitement at the prospect of seeing mademoiselle again. i strove to conjure up before me as i mounted the stairs the exact expression of her face as i had last seen it bending from the window at rosny; to the end that i might have some guide for my future conduct, and might be less likely to fall into the snare of a young girl's coquetry. but i could come now, as then, to no satisfactory or safe conclusion, and only felt anew the vexation i had experienced on losing the velvet knot, which she had given me on that occasion. i knocked at the door of the rooms which i had reserved for her, and which were on the floor below my own; but i got no answer. supposing that simon had taken her upstairs, i mounted quickly, not doubting i should find her there. judge of my surprise and dismay when i found that room also empty, save for the lackey, whom m. de rambouillet had lent me! 'where are they?' i asked the man, speaking sharply, and standing with my hand on the door. 'the lady and her woman, sir?' he answered, coming forward. 'yes, yes!' i cried impatiently, a sudden fear at my heart. 'she went out immediately after her arrival with simon fleix, sir, and has not yet returned,' he answered. the words were scarcely out of his mouth before i heard several persons enter the passage below and begin to ascend the stairs. i did not doubt that mademoiselle and the lad had come home another way and been somehow detained; and i turned with a sigh of relief to receive them. but when the persons whose steps i had heard appeared, they proved to be only m. de rosny's equerry, stout, burly, and bright-eyed as ever, and two armed servants. chapter xxii. 'la femme dispose.' the moment the equerry's foot touched the uppermost stair i advanced upon him. 'where is your mistress, man?' i said. 'where is mademoiselle de la vire? be quick, tell me what you have done with her.' his face fell amazingly. 'where is she?' he answered, faltering between surprise and alarm at my sudden onslaught. 'here, she should be. i left her here not an hour ago. mon dieu! is she not here now?' his alarm increased mine tenfold. 'no!' i retorted, 'she is not! she is gone! and you--what business had you, in the fiend's name, to leave her here, alone and unprotected? tell me that!' he leaned against the balustrade, making no attempt to defend himself, and seemed, in his sudden terror, anything but the bold, alert fellow who had ascended the stairs two minutes before. 'i was a fool,' he groaned. 'i saw your man simon here; and fauchette, who is as good as a man, was with her mistress. and i went to stable the horses. i thought no evil. and now--my god!' he added, suddenly straightening himself, while his face grew hard and grim, 'i am undone! my master will never forgive me!' 'did you come straight here?' i said, considering that, after all, he was no more in fault than i had been on a former occasion. 'we went first to m. de rosny's lodging,' he answered, 'where we found your message telling us to come here. we came on without dismounting.' 'mademoiselle may have gone back, and be there,' i said. 'it is possible. do you stay here and keep a good look-out, and i will go and see. let one of your men come with me.' he uttered a brief assent; being a man as ready to take as to give orders, and thankful now for any suggestion which held out a hope of mademoiselle's safety. followed by the servant he selected, i ran down the stairs, and in a moment was hurrying along the rue st. denys. the day was waning. the narrow streets and alleys were already dark, but the air of excitement which i had noticed in the morning still marked the townsfolk, of whom a great number were strolling abroad, or standing in doorways talking to their gossips. feverishly anxious as i was, i remarked the gloom which dwelt on all faces; but as i set it down to the king's approaching departure, and besides was intent on seeing that those we sought did not by any chance pass us in the crowd, i thought little of it. five minutes' walking brought us to m. de rosny's lodging. there i knocked at the door; impatiently, i confess, and with little hope of success. but, to my surprise, barely an instant elapsed before the door opened, and i saw before me simon fleix! discovering who it was, he cowered back, with a terrified face, and retreated to the wall with his arm raised. 'you scoundrel!' i exclaimed, restraining myself with difficulty. 'tell me this moment where mademoiselle de la vire is! or, by heaven, i shall forget what my mother owed to you, and do you a mischief!' for an instant he glared at me viciously, with all his teeth exposed, as though he meant to refuse--and more. then he thought better of it, and, raising his hand, pointed sulkily upwards. 'go before me and knock at the door,' i said, tapping the hilt of my dagger with meaning. cowed by my manner, he obeyed, and led the way to the room in which m. de rambouillet had surprised us on a former occasion. here he stopped at the door and knocked gently; on which a sharp voice inside bade us enter. i raised the latch and did so, closing the door behind me. mademoiselle, still wearing her riding-coat, sat in a chair before the hearth, on which a newly kindled fire sputtered and smoked. she had her back to me, and did not turn on my entrance, but continued to toy in an absent manner with the strings of the mask which lay in her lap. fanchette stood bolt upright behind her, with her elbows squared and her hands clasped; in such an attitude that i guessed the maid had been expressing her strong dissatisfaction with this latest whim of her mistress, and particularly with mademoiselle's imprudence in wantonly exposing herself, with so inadequate a guard as simon, in a place where she had already suffered so much. i was confirmed in this notion on seeing the woman's harsh countenance clear at sight of me; though the churlish nod, which was all the greeting she bestowed on me, seemed to betoken anything but favour or good-will. she touched her mistress on the shoulder, however, and said, 'm. de marsac is here.' mademoiselle turned her head and looked at me languidly, without stirring in her chair or removing the foot she was warming. 'good evening,' she said. the greeting seemed so brief and so commonplace, ignoring, as it did, both the pains and anxiety to which she had just put me and the great purpose for which we were here--to say nothing of that ambiguous parting which she must surely remember as well as i--that the words i had prepared died on my lips, and i looked at her in honest confusion. all her small face was pale except her lips. her brow was dark, her eyes were hard as well as weary. and not words only failed me as i looked at her, but anger; having mounted the stairs hot foot to chide, i felt on a sudden--despite my new cloak and scabbard, my appointment, and the name i had made at court--the same consciousness of age and shabbiness and poverty which had possessed me in her presence from the beginning. i muttered, 'good evening, mademoiselle,' and that was all i could say--i who had frightened the burly maignan a few minutes before! seeing, i have no doubt, the effect she produced on me, she maintained for some time an embarrassing silence. at length she said, frigidly, 'perhaps m. de marsac will sit, fanchette. place a chair for him. i am afraid, however, that after his successes at court he may find our reception somewhat cold. but we are only from the country,' she added, looking at me askance, with a gleam of anger in her eyes. i thanked her huskily, saying that i would not sit, as i could not stay. 'simon fleix,' i continued, finding my voice with difficulty, 'has, i am afraid, caused you some trouble by bringing you to this house instead of telling you that i had made preparation for you at my lodgings.' 'it was not simon fleix's fault,' she replied curtly. 'i prefer these rooms. they are more convenient.' 'they are, perhaps, more convenient,' i rejoined humbly, 'but i have to think of safety, mademoiselle, as you know. at my house i have a competent guard, and can answer for your being unmolested.' 'you can send your guard here,' she said with a royal air. 'but, mademoiselle----' 'is it not enough that i have said that i prefer these rooms?' she replied sharply, dropping her mask on her lap and looking round at me in undisguised displeasure. 'are you deaf, sir? let me tell you, i am in no mood for argument. i am tired with riding. i prefer these rooms, and that is enough!' nothing could exceed the determination with which she said these words, unless it were the malicious pleasure in thwarting my wishes which made itself seen through the veil of assumed indifference. i felt myself brought up with a vengeance, and in a manner the most provoking that could be conceived. but opposition so childish, so utterly wanton, by exciting my indignation, had presently the effect of banishing the peculiar bashfulness i felt in her presence, and recalling me to my duty. 'mademoiselle,' i said firmly, looking at her with a fixed countenance, 'pardon me if i speak plainly. this is no time for playing with straws. the men from whom you escaped once are as determined and more desperate now. by this time they probably know of your arrival. do, then, as i ask, i pray and beseech you. or this time i may lack the power, though never the will, to save you.' wholly ignoring my appeal, she looked into my face--for by this time i had advanced to her side--with a whimsical smile. 'you are really much improved in manner since i last saw you,' she said. 'mademoiselle!' i replied, baffled and repelled. 'what do you mean?' 'what i say,' she answered, flippantly. 'but it was to be expected.' 'for shame!' i cried, provoked almost beyond bearing by her ill-timed raillery, 'will you never be serious until you have ruined us and yourself? i tell you this house is not safe for you! it is not safe for me! i cannot bring my men to it, for there is not room for them. if you have any spark of consideration, of gratitude, therefore----' 'gratitude!' she exclaimed, swinging her mask slowly to and fro by a ribbon, while she looked up at me as though my excitement amused her. 'gratitude--'tis a very pretty phrase, and means much; but it is for those who serve us faithfully, m. de marsac, and not for others. you receive so many favours, i am told, and are so successful at court, that i should not be justified in monopolising your services.' 'but, mademoiselle--' i said in a low tone. and there i stopped. i dared not proceed. 'well, sir,' she answered, looking up at me after a moment's silence, and ceasing on a sudden to play with her toy, 'what is it?' 'you spoke of favours,' i continued, with an effort. 'i never received but one from a lady. that was at rosny, and from your hand.' 'from my hand?' she answered, with an air of cold surprise. 'it was so, mademoiselle.' 'you have fallen into some strange mistake, sir,' she replied, rousing herself, and looking at me indifferently. 'i never gave you a favour.' i bowed low. 'if you say you did not, mademoiselle, that is enough,' i answered. 'nay, but do not let me do you an injustice, m. de marsac,' she rejoined, speaking more quickly and in an altered tone. 'if you can show me the favour i gave you, i shall, of course, be convinced. seeing is believing, you know,' she added, with a light nervous laugh, and a gesture of something like shyness. if i had not sufficiently regretted my carelessness, and loss of the bow at the time, i did so now. i looked at her in silence, and saw her face, that had for a moment shown signs of feeling, almost of shame, grow slowly hard again. 'well, sir?' she said impatiently. 'the proof is easy.' 'it was taken from me; i believe, by m. de rosny,' i answered lamely, wondering what ill-luck had led her to put the question and press it to this point. 'it was taken from you!' she exclaimed, rising and confronting me with the utmost suddenness, while her eyes flashed, and her little hand crumpled the mask beyond future usefulness. 'it was taken from you, sir!' she repeated, her voice and her whole frame trembling with anger and disdain. 'then i thank you, i prefer my version. yours is impossible. for let me tell you, when mademoiselle de la vire does confer a favour, it will be on a man with the power and the wit--and the constancy, to keep it, even from m. de rosny!' her scorn hurt, though it did not anger me. i felt it to be in a measure deserved, and raged against myself rather than against her. but aware through all of the supreme importance of placing her in safety, i subjected my immediate feelings to the exigencies of the moment and stooped to an argument which would, i thought, have weight though private pleading failed. 'putting myself aside, mademoiselle,' i said, with more formality than i had yet used, 'there is one consideration which must weigh with you. the king----' 'the king!' she cried, interrupting me violently, her face hot with passion and her whole person instinct with stubborn self-will. 'i shall not see the king!' 'you will not see the king?' i repeated in amazement. 'no, i will not!' she answered, in a whirl of anger, scorn, and impetuosity. 'there! i will not! i have been made a toy and a tool long enough, m. de marsac,' she continued, 'and i will serve others' ends no more. i have made up my mind. do not talk to me; you will do no good, sir. i would to heaven,' she added bitterly, 'i had stayed at chizé and never seen this place!' 'but, mademoiselle,' i said, 'you have not thought----' 'thought!' she exclaimed, shutting her small white teeth so viciously i all but recoiled. 'i have thought enough. i am sick of thought. i am going to act now. i will be a puppet no longer. you may take me to the castle by force if you will; but you cannot make me speak.' i looked at her in the utmost dismay and astonishment; being unable at first to believe that a woman who had gone through so much, had run so many risks, and ridden so many miles for a purpose, would, when all was done and the hour come, decline to carry out her plan. i could not believe it, i say, at first; and i tried arguments and entreaties without stint, thinking that she only asked to be entreated or coaxed. but i found prayers and even threats breath wasted upon her; and beyond these i would not go. i know i have been blamed by some and ridiculed by others for not pushing the matter farther; but those who have stood face to face with a woman of spirit--a woman whose very frailty and weakness fought for her--will better understand the difficulties with which i had to contend and the manner in which conviction was at last borne in on my mind. i had never before confronted stubbornness of this kind. as mademoiselle said again and again, i might force her to court, but i could not make her speak. when i had tried every means of persuasion, and still found no way of overcoming her resolution--the while fanchette looked on with a face of wood, neither aiding me nor taking part against me--i lost, i confess, in the chagrin of the moment that sense of duty which had hitherto animated me; and though my relation to mademoiselle should have made me as careful as ever of her safety, even in her own despite, i left her at last in anger and went out without saying another word about removing her--a thing which was still in my power. i believe a very brief reflection would have recalled me to myself and my duty; but the opportunity was not given me, for i had scarcely reached the head of the stairs before fanchette came after me, and called to me in a whisper to stop. she held a taper in her hand, and this she raised to my face, smiling at the disorder which she doubtless read there. 'do you say that this house is not safe?' she asked abruptly, lowering the light as she spoke. 'you have tried a house in blois before?' i replied with the same bluntness. 'you should know as well as i, woman.' 'she must be taken from here, then,' she answered, nodding her head, cunningly. 'i can persuade her. do you send for your people, and be here in half an hour. it may take me that time to wheedle her. but i shall do it.' 'then listen,' i said eagerly, seizing the opportunity and her sleeve and drawing her farther from the door. 'if you can persuade her to that, you can persuade to all i wish. listen, my friend,' i continued, sinking my voice still lower. 'if she will see the king for only ten minutes, and tell him what she knows, i will give you----' 'what?' the woman asked suddenly and harshly, drawing at the same time her sleeve from my hand. 'fifty crowns,' i replied, naming in my desperation a sum which would seem a fortune to a person in her position. 'fifty crowns down, the moment the interview is over.' 'and for that you would have me sell her!' the woman cried with a rude intensity of passion which struck me like a blow. 'for shame! for shame, man! you persuaded her to leave her home and her friends, and the country where she was known; and now you would have me sell her! shame on you! go!' she added scornfully. 'go this instant and get your men. the king, say you? the king! i tell you i would not have her finger ache to save all your kings!' she flounced away with that, and i retired crestfallen; wondering much at the fidelity which providence, doubtless for the well-being of the gentle, possibly for the good of all, has implanted in the humble. finding simon, to whom i had scarce patience to speak, waiting on the stairs below, i despatched him to maignan, to bid him come to me with his men. meanwhile i watched the house myself until their arrival, and then, going up, found that fanchette had been as good as her word. mademoiselle, with a sullen mien, and a red spot on either cheek, consented to descend, and, preceded by a couple of links, which maignan had thoughtfully provided, was escorted safely to my lodgings; where i bestowed her in the rooms below my own, which i had designed for her. at the door she turned and bowed to me, her face on fire. 'so far, sir, you have got your way,' she said, breathing quickly. 'do not flatter yourself, however, that you will get it farther--even by bribing my woman!' chapter xxiii. the last valois. i stood for a few moments on the stairs, wondering what i should do in an emergency to which the marquis's message of the afternoon attached so pressing a character. had it not been for that i might have waited until morning, and felt tolerably certain of finding mademoiselle in a more reasonable mood then. but as it was i dared not wait. i dared not risk the delay, and i came quickly to the conclusion that the only course open to me was to go at once to m. de rambouillet, and tell him frankly how the matter stood. maignan had posted one of his men at the open doorway leading into the street, and fixed his own quarters on the landing at the top, whence he could overlook an intruder without being seen himself. satisfied with the arrangement, i left rambouillet's man to reinforce him, and took with me simon fleix, of whose conduct in regard to mademoiselle i entertained the gravest doubts. the night, i found on reaching the street, was cold, the sky where it was visible between the eaves being bright with stars. a sharp wind was blowing, too, compelling us to wrap our cloaks round us and hurry on at a pace which agreed well with the excitement of my thoughts. assured that had mademoiselle been complaisant i might have seen my mission accomplished within the hour, it was impossible i should not feel impatient with one who, to gratify a whim, played with the secrets of a kingdom as if they were counters, and risked in passing ill-humour the results of weeks of preparation. and i was impatient, and with her. but my resentment fell so far short of the occasion that i wondered uneasily at my own easiness, and felt more annoyed with myself for failing to be properly annoyed with her, than inclined to lay the blame where it was due. it was in vain i told myself contemptuously that she was a woman, and that women were not accountable. i felt that the real secret and motive of my indulgence lay, not in this, but in the suspicion, which her reference to the favour given me on my departure from rosny had converted almost into a certainty, that i was myself the cause of her sudden ill-humour. i might have followed this train of thought farther, and to very pertinent conclusions. but on reaching m. de rambouillet's lodging i was diverted from it by the abnormally quiet aspect of the house, on the steps of which half a dozen servants might commonly be seen lounging. now the doors were closed, no lights shone through the windows, and the hall sounded empty and desolate when i knocked. not a lackey hurried to receive me even then; but the slipshod tread of the old porter, as he came with a lantern to open, alone broke the silence. i waited eagerly wondering what all this could mean; and when the man at last opened, and, recognising my face, begged my pardon if he had kept me waiting i asked him impatiently what was the matter. 'and where is the marquis?' i added, stepping inside to be out of the wind, and loosening my cloak. 'have you not heard, sir?' the man asked, holding up his lantern to my face. he was an old, wizened, lean fellow. 'it is a break-up, sir, i am afraid, this time.' 'a break-up?' i rejoined, peevishly. 'speak out, man! what is the matter? i hate mysteries.' 'you have not heard the news, sir? that the duke of merc[oe]ur and marshal retz, with all their people, left blois this afternoon?' 'no?' i answered, somewhat startled. 'whither are they gone?' 'to paris, it is said, sir,--to join the league.' 'but do you mean that they have deserted the king?' i asked. 'for certain, sir!' he answered. 'not the duke of merc[oe]ur?' i exclaimed. 'why, man, he is the king's brother-in-law. he owes everything to him.' 'well, he is gone, sir,' the old man answered positively. 'the news was brought to m. le marquis about four o'clock or a little after. he got his people together, and started after them to try and persuade them to return. or, so it is said.' as quickly as i could, i reviewed the situation in my mind. if this strange news were true, and men like merc[oe]ur, who had every reason to stand by the king, as well as men like retz, who had long been suspected of disaffection, were abandoning the court, the danger must be coming close indeed. the king must feel his throne already tottering, and be eager to grasp at any means of supporting it. under such circumstances it seemed to be my paramount duty to reach him; to gain his ear if possible, and at all risks; that i and not bruhl, navarre not turenne, might profit by the first impulse of self-preservation. bidding the porter shut his door and keep close, i hurried to the castle, and was presently more than confirmed in my resolution. for to my surprise i found the court in much the same state as m. de rambouillet's house. there were double guards indeed at the gates, who let me pass after scrutinising me narrowly; but the courtyard, which should have been at this hour ablaze with torches and crowded with lackeys and grooms, was a dark wilderness, in which half a dozen links trembled mournfully. passing through the doors i found things within in the same state: the hall ill lit and desolate; the staircase manned only by a few whispering groups, who scanned me as i passed; the antechambers almost empty, or occupied by the grey uniforms of the switzer guards. where i had looked to see courtiers assembling to meet their sovereign and assure him of their fidelity, i found only gloomy faces, watchful eyes, and mouths ominously closed. an air of constraint and fore, boding rested on all. a single footstep sounded hollowly. the long corridors, which had so lately rung with laughter and the rattle of dice, seemed already devoted to the silence and desolation which awaited them when the court should depart. where any spoke i caught the name of guise; and i could have fancied that his mighty shadow lay upon the place and cursed it. entering the chamber, i found matters little better there. his majesty was not present, nor were any of the court ladies; but half a dozen gentlemen, among whom i recognised revol, one of the king's secretaries, stood near the alcove. they looked up on my entrance, as though expecting news, and then, seeing who it was, looked away again impatiently. the duke of nevers was walking moodily to and fro before one of the windows, his hands clasped behind his back: while biron and crillon, reconciled by the common peril, talked loudly on the hearth. i hesitated a moment, uncertain how to proceed, for i was not yet so old at court as to feel at home there. but, at last making up my mind, i walked boldly up to crillon and requested his good offices to procure me an immediate audience of the king. 'an audience? do you mean you want to see him alone?' he said, raising his eyebrows and looking whimsically at biron. 'that is my petition, m. de crillon,' i answered firmly, though my heart sank. 'i am here on m. de rambouillet's business, and i need to see his majesty forthwith.' 'well, that is straightforward,' he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. 'and you shall see him. in coming to crillon you have come to the right man. revol,' he continued, turning to the secretary, 'this gentleman bears a message from m. de rambouillet to the king. take him to the closet without delay, my friend, and announce him. i will be answerable for him.' but the secretary shrugged his shoulders up to his ears. 'it is quite impossible, m. de crillon,' he said gravely. 'quite impossible at present.' 'impossible! chut! i do not know the word,' crillon retorted rudely. 'come, take him at once, and blame me if ill comes of it. do you hear?' 'but his majesty----' 'well?' 'is at his devotions,' the secretary said stiffly. 'his majesty's devotions be hanged!' crillon rejoined--so loudly that there was a general titter, and m. de nevers laughed grimly. 'do you hear?' the avennais continued, his face growing redder and his voice higher, 'or must i pull your ears, my friend? take this gentleman to the closet, i say, and if his majesty be angry, tell him it was by my order. i tell you he comes from rambouillet.' i do not know whether it was the threat, or the mention of m. de rambouillet's name, which convinced the secretary. but at any rate, after a moment's hesitation, he acquiesced. he nodded sullenly to me to follow him, and led the way to a curtain which masked the door of the closet. i followed him across the chamber, after muttering a hasty word of acknowledgment to crillon; and i had as nearly as possible reached the door when the bustle of some one entering the chamber caught my ear. i had just time to turn and see that this was bruhl, just time to intercept the dark look of chagrin and surprise which he fixed on me, and then revol, holding up the curtain, signed to me to enter. i expected to pass at once into the presence of the king, and had my reverence ready. instead, i found myself to my surprise in a small chamber, or rather passage, curtained at both ends, and occupied by a couple of guardsmen--members, doubtless, of the band of the forty-five--who rose at my entrance and looked at me dubiously. their guard-room, dimly illumined by a lamp of red glass, seemed to me, in spite of its curtains and velvet bench, and the thick tapestry which kept out every breath of wholesome air, the most sombre i could imagine. and the most ill-omened. but i had no time to make any long observation; for revol, passing me brusquely, raised the curtain at the other end, and, with his finger on his lip, bade me by signs to enter. i did so as silently, the heavy scent of perfumes striking me in the face as i raised a second curtain, and stopped short a pace beyond it; partly in reverence--because kings love their subjects best at a distance--and partly in surprise. for the room, or rather that portion of it in which i stood, was in darkness; only the farther end being illumined by a cold pale flood of moonlight, which, passing through a high, straight window, lay in a silvery sheet on the floor. for an instant i thought i was alone; then i saw, resting against this window, with a hand on either mullion, a tall figure, having something strange about the head. this peculiarity presently resolved itself into the turban in which i had once before seen his majesty. the king--for he it was--was talking to himself. he had not heard me enter, and having his back to me remained unconscious of my presence. i paused in doubt, afraid to advance, anxious to withdraw; yet uncertain whether i could move again unheard. at this moment while i stood hesitating, he raised his voice, and his words, reaching my ears, riveted my attention, so strange and eerie were both they and his tone. 'they say there is ill-luck in thirteen,' he muttered. 'thirteen valois and last!' he paused to laugh a wicked, mirthless laugh. 'ay,--thirteenth! and it is thirteen years since i entered paris, a crowned king! there were quélus and maugiron and st. mégrin and i--and _he_, i remember. ah, those days, those nights! i would sell my soul to live them again; had i not sold it long ago in the living them once! we were young then, and rich, and i was king; and quélus was an apollo! he died calling on me to save him. and maugiron died, blaspheming god and the saints. and st. mégrin, he had thirty-four wounds. and _he_--he is dead too, curse him! they are all dead, all dead, and it is all over! my god! it is all over, it is all over, it is all over!' he repeated the last four words more than a dozen times, rocking himself to and fro by his hold on the mullions. i trembled as i listened, partly through fear on my own account should i be discovered, and partly by reason of the horror of despair and remorse--no, not remorse, regret--which spoke in his monotonous voice. i guessed that some impulse had led him to draw the curtain from the window and shade the lamp; and that then, as he looked down on the moonlit country, the contrast between it and the vicious, heated atmosphere, heavy with intrigue and worse, in which he had spent his strength, had forced itself upon his mind. for he presently went on. 'france! there it lies! and what will they do with it? will they cut it up into pieces, as it was before old louis xi.? will merc[oe]ur--curse him!--be the most christian duke of brittany? and mayenne, by the grace of god, prince of paris and the upper seine? or will the little prince of béarn beat them, and be henry iv., king of france and navarre, protector of the churches? curse him too! he is thirty-six. he is my age. but he is young and strong, and has all before him. while i--i--oh, my god, have mercy on me! have mercy on me, o god in heaven!' with the last word he fell on his knees on the step before the window, and burst into such an agony of unmanly tears and sobbings as i had never dreamed of or imagined, and least of all in the king of france. hardly knowing whether to be more ashamed or terrified, i turned at all risks, and stealthily lifting the curtain, crept out with infinite care; and happily with so much good fortune as to escape detection. there was space enough between the two curtains to admit my body and no more; and here i stood a short while to collect my thoughts. then, striking my scabbard against the wall, as though by accident, and coughing loudly at the same moment, i twitched the curtain aside with some violence and re-entered, thinking that by these means i had given him warning enough. but i had not reckoned on the darkness in which the room lay, or the excitable state in which i had left him. he heard me, indeed, but being able to see only a tall, indistinct figure approaching him, he took fright, and falling back against the moonlit window, as though he saw a ghost, thrust out his hand, gasping at the same time two words, which sounded to me like 'ha! guise!' the next instant, discerning that i fell on my knee where i stood, and came no nearer, he recovered himself. with an effort, which his breathing made very apparent, he asked in an unsteady voice who it was. 'one of your majesty's most faithful servants,' i answered, remaining on my knee, and affecting to see nothing. keeping his face towards me, he sidled to the lamp and strove to withdraw the shade. but his fingers trembled so violently that it was some time before he succeeded, and set free the cheerful beams, which, suddenly filling the room with radiance, disclosed to my wondering eyes, instead of darkness and the cold gleam of the moon, a profusion of riches, of red stuffs and gemmed trifles and gilded arms crowded together in reckless disorder. a monkey chained in one corner began to gibber and mow at me. a cloak of strange cut, stretched on a wooden stand, deceived me for an instant into thinking that there was a third person present; while the table, heaped with dolls and powder-puffs, dog-collars and sweet-meats, a mask, a woman's slipper, a pair of pistols, some potions, a scourge, and an immense quantity of like litter, had as melancholy an appearance in my eyes as the king himself, whose disorder the light disclosed without mercy. his turban was awry, and betrayed the premature baldness of his scalp. the paint on his cheeks was cracked and stained, and had soiled the gloves he wore. he looked fifty years old; and in his excitement he had tugged his sword to the front, whence it refused to be thrust back. 'who sent you here?' he asked, when he had so far recovered his senses as to recognise me, which he did with great surprise. 'i am here, sire,' i answered evasively, 'to place myself at your majesty's service.' 'such loyalty is rare,' he answered, with a bitter sneer. 'but stand up, sir. i suppose i must be thankful for small mercies, and, losing a merc[oe]ur, be glad to receive a marsac.' 'by your leave, sire,' i rejoined hardily, 'the exchange is not so adverse. your majesty may make another duke when you will. but honest men are not so easily come by.' 'so! so!' he answered, looking at me with a fierce light in his eyes. 'you remind me in season. i may still make and unmake! i am still king of france? that is so, sirrah, is it not?' 'god forbid that it should be otherwise!' i answered earnestly. 'it is to lay before your majesty certain means by which you may give fuller effect to your wishes that i am here. the king of navarre desires only, sire----' 'tut, tut!' he exclaimed impatiently, and with some displeasure, 'i know his will better than you, man. but you see,' he continued cunningly, forgetting my inferior position as quickly as he had remembered it, 'turenne promises well, too. and turenne--it is true he may play the lorrainer. but if i trust henry of navarre, and he prove false to me----' he did not complete the sentence, but strode to and fro a time or two, his mind, which had a natural inclination towards crooked courses, bent on some scheme by which he might play off the one party against the other. apparently he was not very successful in finding one, however; or else the ill-luck with which he had supported the league against the huguenots recurred to his mind. for he presently stopped, with a sigh, and came back to the point. 'if i knew that turenne were lying,' he muttered, 'then indeed----. but rosny promised evidence, and he has sent me none.' 'it is at hand, sire,' i answered, my heart beginning to beat. 'your majesty will remember that m. de rosny honoured me with the task of introducing it to you.' 'to be sure,' he replied, awaking as from a dream, and looking and speaking eagerly. 'matters to-day have driven everything out of my head. where is your witness, man? convince me, and we will act promptly. we will give them jarnac and moncontour over again. is he outside?' 'it is a woman, sire,' i made answer, dashed somewhat by his sudden and feverish alacrity. 'a woman, eh? you have her here?' 'no, sire,' i replied, wondering what he would say to my next piece of information. 'she is in blois, she has arrived, but the truth is--i humbly crave your majesty's indulgence--she refuses to come or speak. i cannot well bring her here by force, and i have sought you, sire, for the purpose of taking your commands in the matter.' he stared at me in the utmost astonishment. 'is she young?' he asked after a long pause. 'yes, sire,' i answered. 'she is maid of honour to the princess of navarre, and a ward also of the vicomte de turenne.' 'gad! then she is worth hearing, the little rebel!' he replied. 'a ward of turenne's is she? ho! ho! and now she will not speak? my cousin of navarre now would know how to bring her to her senses, but i have eschewed these vanities. i might send and have her brought, it is true; but a very little thing would cause a barricade to-night.' 'and besides, sire,' i ventured to add, 'she is known to turenne's people here, who have once stolen her away. were she brought to your majesty with any degree of openness, they would learn it, and know that the game was lost.' 'which would not suit me,' he answered, nodding and looking at me gloomily. 'they might anticipate our jarnac; and until we have settled matters with one or the other our person is not too secure. you must go and fetch her. she is at your lodging. she must be brought, man.' 'i will do what you command, sire,' i answered. 'but i am greatly afraid that she will not come.' he lost his temper at that. 'then why, in the devil's name, have you troubled me with the matter?' he cried savagely. 'god knows--i don't--why rosny employed such a man and such a woman. he might have seen from the cut of your cloak, sir, which is full six months behind the fashion, that you could not manage a woman! was ever such damnable folly heard of in this world? but it is navarre's loss, not mine. it is his loss. and i hope to heaven it may be yours too!' he added fiercely. there was so much in what he said that i bent before the storm, and accepted with humility blame which was as natural on his part as it was undeserved on mine. indeed i could not wonder at his majesty's anger; nor should i have wondered at it in a greater man. i knew that but for reasons, on which i did not wish to dwell, i should have shared it to the full, and spoken quite as strongly of the caprice which ruined hopes and lives for a whim. the king continued for some time to say to me all the hard things he could think of. wearied at last by my patience, he paused, and cried angrily. 'well, have you nothing to say for yourself? can you suggest nothing?' 'i dare not mention to your majesty,' i said humbly, 'what seems to me to be the only alternative.' 'you mean that i should go to the wench!' he answered--for he did not lack quickness. '"_se no va el otero a mahoma, vaya mahoma al otero_," as mendoza says. but the saucy quean, to force me to go to her! did my wife guess--but there, i will go. by god i will go!' he added abruptly and fiercely. 'i will live to ruin retz yet! where is your lodging?' i told him, wondering much at this flash of the old spirit, which twenty years before had won him a reputation his later life did nothing to sustain. 'do you know,' he asked, speaking with sustained energy and clearness, 'the door by which m. de rosny entered to talk with me? can you find it in the dark?' 'yes, sire,' i answered, my heart beating high. 'then be in waiting there two hours before midnight,' he replied. 'be well armed, but alone. i shall know how to make the girl speak. i can trust you, i suppose?' he added suddenly, stepping nearer to me and looking fixedly into my eyes. 'i will answer for your majesty's life with my own,' i replied, sinking on one knee. 'i believe you, sir,' he answered gravely, giving me his hand to kiss, and then turning away. 'so be it. now leave me. you have been here too long already. not a word to any one as you value your life.' i made fitting answer and was leaving him; but when i had my hand already on the curtain, he called me back. 'in heaven's name get a new cloak!' he said peevishly, eyeing me all over with his face puckered up. 'get a new cloak, man, the first thing in the morning. it is worse seen from the side than the front. it would ruin the cleverest courtier of them all!' chapter xxiv. a royal peril. the elation with which i had heard the king announce his resolution quickly diminished on cooler reflection. it stood in particular at a very low ebb as i waited, an hour later, at the little north postern of the castle, and, cowering within the shelter of the arch to escape the wind, debated whether his majesty's energy would sustain him to the point of action, or whether he might not, in one of those fits of treacherous vacillation which had again and again marred his plans, send those to keep the appointment who would give a final account of me. the longer i considered his character the more dubious i grew. the loneliness of the situation, the darkness, the black front, unbroken by any glimmer of light, which the castle presented on this side, and the unusual and gloomy stillness which lay upon the town, all contributed to increase my uneasiness. it was with apprehension as well as relief that i caught at last the sound of footsteps on the stone staircase, and, standing a little to one side, saw a streak of light appear at the foot of the door. on the latter being partially opened a voice cried my name. i advanced with caution and showed myself. a brief conversation ensued between two or three persons who stood within; but in the end, a masked figure, which i had no difficulty in identifying as the king, stepped briskly out. 'you are armed?' he said, pausing a second opposite me. i put back my cloak and showed him, by the light which streamed from the doorway, that i carried pistols as well as a sword. 'good!' he answered briefly; 'then let us go. do you walk on my left hand, my friend. it is a dark night, is it not?' 'very dark, sire,' i said. he made no answer to this, and we started, proceeding with caution until we had crossed the narrow bridge, and then with greater freedom and at a better pace. the slenderness of the attendance at court that evening, and the cold wind, which swept even the narrowest streets and drove roisterers indoors, rendered it unlikely that we should be stopped or molested by any except professed thieves; and for these i was prepared. the king showed no inclination to talk; and keeping silence myself out of respect, i had time to calculate the chances and to consider whether his majesty would succeed where i had failed. this calculation, which was not inconsistent with the keenest watchfulness on my part whenever we turned a corner or passed the mouth of an alley, was brought to an end by our safe arrival at the house. briefly apologising to the king for the meanness and darkness of the staircase, i begged leave to precede him, and rapidly mounted until i met maignan. whispering to him that all was well, i did not wait to hear his answer, but, bidding him be on the watch, i led the king on with as much deference as was possible until we stood at the door of mademoiselle's apartment, which i have elsewhere stated to consist of an outer and inner room. the door was opened by simon fleix, and him i promptly sent out. then, standing aside and uncovering, i begged the king to enter. he did so, still wearing his hat and mask, and i followed and secured the door. a lamp hanging from the ceiling diffused an imperfect light through the room, which was smaller but more comfortable in appearance than that which i rented overhead. i observed that fanchette, whose harsh countenance looked more forbidding than usual, occupied a stool which she had set in a strange fashion against the inner door; but i thought no more of this at the moment, my attention passing quickly to mademoiselle, who sat crouching before the fire, enveloped in a large outdoor cloak, as if she felt the cold. her back was towards us, and she was, or pretended to be, still ignorant of our presence. with a muttered word i pointed her out to the king, and went towards her with him. 'mademoiselle,' i said in a low voice, 'mademoiselle de la vire! i have the honour----' she would not turn, and i stopped. clearly she heard, but she betrayed that she did so only by drawing her cloak more closely round her. primed by my respect for the king, i touched her lightly on the shoulder. 'mademoiselle!' i said impatiently, 'you are not aware of it, but----' she shook herself free from my hand with so rude a gesture that i broke off, and stood gaping foolishly at her. the king smiled, and nodding to me to step back a pace, took the task on himself. 'mademoiselle,' he said with dignity, 'i am not accustomed----' his voice had a magical effect. before he could add another word she sprang up as if she had been struck, and faced us, a cry of alarm on her lips. simultaneously we both cried out too, for it was not mademoiselle at all. the woman who confronted us, her hand on her mask, her eyes glittering through the slits, was of a taller and fuller figure. we stared at her. then a lock of bright golden hair which had escaped from the hood of her cloak gave us the clue. 'madame!' the king cried. 'madame de bruhl!' i echoed, my astonishment greater than his. seeing herself known, she began with trembling fingers to undo the fastenings of her mask; but the king, who had hitherto displayed a trustfulness i had not expected in him, had taken alarm at sight of her, as at a thing unlocked for, and of which i had not warned him. 'how is this?' he said harshly, drawing back a pace from her and regarding me with anger and distrust. 'is this some pretty arrangement of yours, sir? am i an intruder at an assignation, or is this a trap with m. de bruhl in the background? answer, sirrah!' he continued, working himself rapidly into a passion. 'which am i to understand is the case?' 'neither, sire,' i answered with as much dignity as i could assume, utterly surprised and mystified as i was by madame's presence. 'your majesty wrongs madame de bruhl as much by the one suspicion as you injure me by the other. i am equally in the dark with you, sire, and as little expected to see madame here.' 'i came, sire,' she said proudly, addressing herself to the king, and ignoring me, 'out of no love to m. de marsac, but as any person bearing a message to him might come. nor can you, sire,' she added with spirit, 'feel half as much surprise at seeing me here, as i at seeing your majesty.' 'i can believe that,' the king answered drily. 'i would you had not seen me.' 'the king of france is seen only when he chooses,' she replied, curtseying to the ground. 'good,' he answered. 'let it be so, and you will oblige the king of france, madame. but enough,' he continued, turning from her to me; 'since this is not the lady i came to see, m. de marsac, where is she?' 'in the inner room, sire, i opine,' i said, advancing to fanchette with more misgiving at heart than my manner evinced. 'your mistress is here, is she not?' i continued, addressing the woman sharply. 'ay, and will not come out,' she rejoined, sturdily keeping her place. 'nonsense!' i said. 'tell her----' 'you may tell her what you please,' she replied, refusing to budge an inch. 'she can hear.' 'but, woman!' i cried impatiently, 'you do not understand. i _must_ speak with her. i must speak with her at once! on business of the highest importance.' 'as you please,' she said rudely, still keeping her seat. 'i have told you you can speak.' perhaps i felt as foolish on this occasion as ever in my life; and surely never was man placed in a more ridiculous position. after overcoming numberless obstacles, and escaping as many perils, i had brought the king here, a feat beyond my highest hopes--only to be baffled and defeated by a waiting-woman! i stood irresolute; witless and confused; while the king waited half angry and half amused, and madame kept her place by the entrance, to which she had retreated. i was delivered from my dilemma by the curiosity which is, providentially perhaps, a part of woman's character, and which led mademoiselle to interfere herself. keenly on the watch inside, she had heard part of what passed between us, and been rendered inquisitive by the sound of a strange man's voice, and by the deference which she could discern i paid to the visitor. at this moment, she cried out, accordingly, to know who was there; and fanchette, seeming to take this as a command, rose and dragged her stool aside, saying peevishly and without any increase of respect, 'there, i told you she could hear.' 'who is it?' mademoiselle asked again, in a raised voice. i was about to answer when the king signed to me to stand back, and, advancing himself, knocked gently on the door. 'open, i pray you, mademoiselle,' he said courteously. 'who is there?' she cried again, her voice trembling. 'it is i, the king,' he answered softly; but in that tone of majesty which belongs not to the man, but to the descendant, and seems to be the outcome of centuries of command. she uttered an exclamation and slowly, and with seeming reluctance, turned the key in the lock. it grated, and the door opened. i caught a glimpse for an instant of her pale face and bright eyes, and then his majesty, removing his hat, passed in and closed the door; and i withdrew to the farther end of the room, where madame continued to stand by the entrance. i entertained a suspicion, i remember, and not unnaturally, that she had come to my lodging as her husband's spy; but her first words when i joined her dispelled this. 'quick!' she said with an imperious gesture. 'hear me and let me go! i have waited long enough for you, and suffered enough through you. as for that woman in there, she is mad, and her servant too! now, listen to me. you spoke to me honestly to-day, and i have come to repay you. you have an appointment with my husband to-morrow at chaverny. is it not so?' she added impatiently. i replied that it was so. 'you are to go with one friend,' she went on, tearing the glove she had taken off, to strips in her excitement. 'he is to meet you with one also?' 'yes,' i assented reluctantly, 'at the bridge, madame.' 'then do not go,' she rejoined emphatically. 'shame on me that i should betray my husband; but it were worse to send an innocent man to his death. he will meet you with one sword only, according to his challenge, but there will be those under the bridge who will make certain work. there, i have betrayed him now!' she continued bitterly. 'it is done. let me go!' 'nay, but, madame,' i said, feeling more concerned for her, on whom from the first moment of meeting her i had brought nothing but misfortune, than surprised by this new treachery on his part, 'will you not run some risk in returning to him? is there nothing i can do for you--no step i can take for your protection?' 'none!' she said repellently and almost rudely, 'except to speed my going.' 'but you will not pass through the streets alone?' she laughed so bitterly my heart ached for her. 'the unhappy are always safe,' she said. remembering how short a time it was since i had surprised her in the first happiness of wedded love, i felt for her all the pity it was natural i should feel. but the responsibility under which his majesty's presence and the charge of mademoiselle laid me forbade me to indulge in the luxury of evincing my gratitude. gladly would i have escorted her back to her home--even if i could not make that home again what it had been, or restore her husband to the pinnacle from which i had dashed him--but i dared not do this. i was forced to content myself with less, and was about to offer to send one of my men with her, when a hurried knocking at the outer door arrested the words on my lips. signing to her to stand still, i listened. the knocking was repeated, and grew each moment more urgent. there was a little grille, strongly wired, in the upper part of the door, and this i was about to open in order to learn what was amiss, when simon's voice reached me from the farther side imploring me to open the door quickly. doubting the lad's prudence, yet afraid to refuse lest i should lose some warning he had to give, i paused a second, and then undid the fastenings. the moment the door gave way he fell in bodily, crying out to me to bar it behind him. i caught a glimpse through the gap of a glare as of torches, and saw by this light half a dozen flushed faces in the act of rising above the edge of the landing. the men who owned them raised a shout of triumph at sight of me, and, clearing the upper steps at a bound, made a rush for the door. but in vain. we had just time to close it and drop the two stout bars. in a moment, in a second, the fierce outcry fell to a dull roar; and safe for the time, we had leisure to look in one another's faces and learn the different aspects of alarm. madame was white to the lips, while simon's eyes seemed starting from his head, and he shook in every limb with terror. at first, on my asking him what it meant, he could not speak. but that would not do, and i was in the act of seizing him by the collar to force an answer from him when the inner door opened, and the king came out, his face wearing an air of so much cheerfulness as proved both his satisfaction with mademoiselle's story and his ignorance of all we were about. in a word he had not yet taken the least alarm; but seeing simon in my hands, and madame leaning against the wall by the door like one deprived of life, he stood and cried out in surprise to know what it was. 'i fear we are besieged, sire,' i answered desperately, feeling my anxieties increased a hundredfold by his appearance--'but by whom i cannot say. this lad knows, however,' i continued, giving simon a vicious shake, 'and he shall speak. now, trembler,' i said to him, 'tell your tale?' 'the provost-marshal!' he stammered, terrified afresh by the king's presence: for henry had removed his mask. 'i was on guard below. i had come up a few steps to be out of the cold, when i heard them enter. there are a round score of them.' i cried out a great oath, asking him why he had not gone up and warned maignan, who with his men was now cut off from us in the rooms above. 'you fool!' i continued, almost beside myself with rage, 'if you had not come to this door they would have mounted to my rooms and beset them! what is this folly about the provost-marshal?' 'he is there,' simon answered, cowering away from me, his face working. i thought he was lying, and had merely fancied this in his fright. but the assailants at this moment began to hail blows on the door, calling on us to open, and using such volleys of threats as penetrated even the thickness of the oak; driving the blood from the women's cheeks, and arresting the king's step in a manner which did not escape me. among their cries i could plainly distinguish the words, 'in the king's name!' which bore out simon's statement. at the moment i drew comfort from this; for if we had merely to deal with the law we had that on our side which was above it. and i speedily made up my mind what to do. 'i think the lad speaks the truth, sire,' i said coolly. 'this is only your majesty's provost-marshal. the worst to be feared, therefore, is that he may learn your presence here before you would have it known. it should not be a matter of great difficulty, however, to bind him to silence, and if you will please to mask, i will open the grille and speak with him.' the king, who had taken his stand in the middle of the room, and seemed dazed and confused by the suddenness of the alarm and the uproar, assented with a brief word. accordingly i was preparing to open the grille when madame de bruhl seized my arm, and forcibly pushed me back from it. 'what would you do?' she cried, her face full of terror. 'do you not hear? he is there.' 'who is there?' i said, startled more by her manner than her words. 'who?' she answered; 'who should be there? my husband! i hear his voice, i tell you! he has tracked me here! he has found me, and will kill me!' 'god forbid!' i said, doubting if she had really heard his voice. to make sure, i asked simon if he had seen him; and my heart sank when i heard from him too that bruhl was of the party. for the first time i became fully sensible of the danger which threatened us. for the first time, looking round the ill-lit room on the women's terrified faces, and the king's masked figure instinct with ill-repressed nervousness, i recognised how hopelessly we were enmeshed. fortune had served bruhl so well that, whether he knew it or not, he had us all trapped--alike the king whom he desired to compromise, and his wife whom he hated, mademoiselle who had once escaped him, and me who had twice thwarted him. it was little to be wondered at if my courage sank as i looked from one to another, and listened to the ominous creaking of the door, as the stout panels complained under the blows rained upon them. for my first duty, and that which took the _pas_ of all others, was to the king--to save him harmless. how, then, was i to be answerable for mademoiselle, how protect madame de bruhl?--how, in a word, redeem all those pledges in which my honour was concerned? it was the thought of the provost-marshal which at this moment rallied my failing spirits. i remembered that until the mystery of his presence here in alliance with bruhl was explained there was no need to despair; and turning briskly to the king i begged him to favour me by standing with the women in a corner which was not visible from the door. he complied mechanically, and in a manner which i did not like; but lacking time to weigh trifles, i turned to the grille and opened it without more ado. the appearance of my face at the trap was greeted with a savage cry of recognition, which subsided as quickly into silence. it was followed by a momentary pushing to and fro among the crowd outside, which in its turn ended in the provost-marshal coming to the front. 'in the king's name!' he said fussily. 'what is it?' i replied, eyeing rather the flushed, eager faces which scowled over his shoulders than himself. the light of two links, borne by some of the party, shone ruddily on the heads of the halberds, and, flaring up from time to time, filled all the place with wavering, smoky light. 'what do you want?' i continued, 'rousing my lodging at this time of night?' 'i hold a warrant for your arrest,' he replied bluntly. 'resistance will be vain. if you do not surrender i shall send for a ram to break in the door.' 'where is your order?' i said sharply. 'the one you held this morning was cancelled by the king himself.' 'suspended only,' he answered. 'suspended only. it was given out to me again this evening for instant execution. and i am here in pursuance of it, and call on you to surrender.' 'who delivered it to you?' i retorted. 'm. de villequier, 'he answered readily. 'and here it is. now, come, sir,' he continued, 'you are only making matters worse. open to us.' 'before i do so,' i said drily, 'i should like to know what part in the pageant my friend m. de bruhl, whom i see on the stairs yonder, proposes to play. and there is my old friend fresnoy,' i added. 'and i see one or two others whom i know, m. provost. before i surrender i must know among other things what m. de bruhl's business is here.' 'it is the business of every loyal man to execute the king's warrant,' the provost answered evasively. 'it is yours to surrender, and mine to lodge you in the castle. but i am loth to have a disturbance. i will give you until that torch goes out, if you like, to make up your mind. at the end of that time, if you do not surrender, i shall batter down the door.' 'you will give the torch fair play?' i said, noting its condition. he assented; and thanking him sternly for this indulgence, i closed the grille. chapter xxv. terms of surrender. i still had my hand on the trap when a touch on the shoulder caused me to turn, and in a moment apprised me of the imminence of a new peril; a peril of such a kind that, summoning all my resolution, i could scarcely hope to cope with it. henry was at my elbow. he had taken off his mask, and a single glance at his countenance warned me that that had happened of which i had already felt some fear. the glitter of intense excitement shone in his eyes. his face, darkly-flushed and wet with sweat, betrayed overmastering emotion, while his teeth, tight clenched in the effort to restrain the fit of trembling which possessed him, showed between his lips like those of a corpse. the novelty of the danger which menaced him, the absence of his gentlemen, and of all the familiar faces and surroundings without which he never moved, the hour, the mean house, and his isolation among strangers, had proved too much for nerves long weakened by his course of living, and for a courage, proved indeed in the field, but unequal to a sudden stress. though he still strove to preserve his dignity, it was alarmingly plain to my eyes that he was on the point of losing, if he had not already lost, all self-command. 'open!' he muttered between his teeth, pointing impatiently to the trap with the hand with which he had already touched me. 'open, i say, sir!' i stared at him, startled and confounded. 'but your majesty,' i ventured to stammer, 'forgets that i have not yet----' 'open, i say!' he repeated passionately. 'do you hear me, sir? i desire that this door be opened.' his lean hand shook as with the palsy, so that the gems on it twinkled in the light and rattled as he spoke. i looked helplessly from him to the women and back again, seeing in a flash all the dangers which might follow from the discovery of his presence there--dangers which i had not before formulated to myself, but which seemed in a moment to range themselves with the utmost clearness before my eyes. at the same time i saw what seemed to me to be a way of escape; and emboldened by the one and the other, i kept my hand on the trap and strove to parley with him. 'nay, but, sire,' i said hurriedly, yet still with as much deference as i could command, 'i beg you to permit me first to repeat what i have seen. m. de bruhl is without, and i counted six men whom i believe to be his following. they are ruffians ripe for any crime; and i implore your majesty rather to submit to a short imprisonment----' i paused struck dumb on that word, confounded by the passion which lightened in the king's face. my ill-chosen expression had indeed applied the spark to his wrath. predisposed to suspicion by a hundred treacheries, he forgot the perils outside in the one idea which on the instant possessed his mind; that i would confine his person, and had brought him hither for no other purpose. he glared round him with eyes full of rage and fear, and his trembling lips breathed rather than spoke the word 'imprison?' unluckily, a trifling occurrence added at this moment to his disorder, and converted it into frenzy. someone outside fell heavily against the door; this, causing madame to utter a low shriek, seemed to shatter the last remnant of the king's self-control. stamping his foot on the floor, he cried to me with the utmost wildness to open the door--by which i had hitherto kept my place. but, wrongly or rightly, i was still determined to put off opening it; and i raised my hands with the intention of making a last appeal to him. he misread the gesture, and retreating a step, with the greatest suddenness whipped out his sword, and in a moment had the point at my breast, and his wrist drawn back to thrust. it has always been my belief that he would not have dealt the blow, but that the mere touch of the hilt, awaking the courage which he undoubtedly possessed, and which did not desert him in his last moments, would have recalled him to himself. but the opportunity was not given him, for while the blade yet quivered, and i stood motionless, controlling myself by an effort, my knee half bent and my eyes on his, mademoiselle de la vire sprang forward at his back, and with a loud scream clutched his elbow. the king, surprised, and ignorant who held him, flung up his point wildly, and striking the lamp above his head with his blade, shattered it in an instant, bringing down the pottery with a crash and reducing the room to darkness; while the screams of the women, and the knowledge that we had a madman among us, peopled the blackness with a hundred horrors. fearing above all for mademoiselle, i made my way as soon as i could recover my wits to the embers of the fire, and regardless of the king's sword, which i had a vague idea was darting about in the darkness, i searched for and found a half-burnt stick, which i blew into a blaze. with this, still keeping my back to the room, i contrived to light a taper that i had noticed standing by the hearth; and then, and then only, i turned to see what i had to confront. mademoiselle de la vire stood in a corner, half-fierce, half-terrified, and wholly flushed. she had her hand wrapped up in a 'kerchief already stained with blood; and from this i gathered that the king in his frenzy had wounded her slightly. standing before her mistress, with her hair bristling, like a wild-cat's fur, and her arms akimbo, was fanchette, her harsh face and square form instinct with fury and defiance. madame de bruhl and simon cowered against the wall not far from them; and in a chair, into which he had apparently just thrown himself, sat the king, huddled up and collapsed, the point of his sword trailing on the ground beside him, and his nerveless hand scarce retaining force to grip the pommel. in a moment i made up my mind what to do, and going to him in silence, i laid my pistols, sword, and dagger on a stool by his side. then i knelt. 'the door, sire,' i said, 'is there. it is for your majesty to open it when you please. here, too, sire, are my weapons. i am your prisoner, the provost-marshal is outside, and you can at a word deliver me to him. only one thing i beg, sire,' i continued earnestly, 'that your majesty will treat as a delusion the idea that i meditated for a moment disrespect or violence to your person.' he looked at me dully, his face pale, his eyes fish-like. 'sanctus, man!' he muttered, 'why did you raise your hand?' 'only to implore your majesty to pause a moment,' i answered, watching the intelligence return slowly to his face. 'if you will deign to listen i can explain in half a dozen words, sire. m. de bruhl's men are six or seven, the provost has eight or nine; but the former are the wilder blades, and if m. de bruhl find your majesty in my lodging, and infer his own defeat, he will be capable of any desperate stroke. your person would hardly be safe in his company through the streets. and there is another consideration,' i went on, observing with joy that the king listened, and was gradually regaining his composure. 'that is, the secrecy you desired to preserve, sire, until this matter should be well advanced. m. de rosny laid the strictest injunctions on me in that respect, fearing an _émeute_ in blois should your majesty's plans become known.' 'you speak fairly,' the king answered with returning energy, though he avoided looking at the women. 'bruhl is likely enough to raise one. but how am i to get out, sir?' he continued, querulously. 'i cannot remain here. i shall be missed, man! i am not a hedge-captain, neither sought nor wanted!' 'if your majesty would trust me?' i said slowly and with hesitation. 'trust you!' he retorted peevishly, holding up his hands and gazing intently at his nails, of the shape and whiteness of which he was prouder than any woman. 'have i not trusted you? if i had not trusted you, should i have been here? but that you were a huguenot--god forgive me for saying it!--i would have seen you in hell before i would have come here with you!' i confess to having heard this testimony to the religion with a pride which made me forget for a moment the immediate circumstances--the peril in which we stood, the gloomy room darkly lighted by a single candle, the scared faces in the background, even the king's huddled figure, in which dejection and pride struggled for expression. for a moment only; then i hastened to reply, saying that i doubted not i could still extricate his majesty without discovery. 'in heaven's name do it, then!' he answered sharply. 'do what you like, man! only get me back into the castle, and it shall not be a huguenot will entice me out again. i am over old for these adventures!' a fresh attack on the door taking place as he said this induced me to lose no time in explaining my plan, which he was good enough to approve, after again upbraiding me for bringing him into such a dilemma. fearing lest the door should give way prematurely, notwithstanding the bars i had provided for it, and goaded on by madame de bruhl's face, which evinced the utmost terror, i took the candle and attended his majesty into the inner room; where i placed my pistols beside him, but silently resumed my sword and dagger. i then returned for the women, and indicating by signs that they were to enter, held the door open for them. mademoiselle, whose bandaged hand i could not regard without emotion, though the king's presence and the respect i owed him forbade me to utter so much as a word, advanced readily until she reached the doorway abreast of me. there, however, looking back, and seeing madame de bruhl following her, she stopped short, and darting a haughty glance at me, muttered, 'and--that lady? are we to be shut up together, sir?' 'mademoiselle,' i answered quickly in the low tone she had used herself, 'have i ever asked anything dishonourable of you?' she seemed by a slight movement of the head to answer in the negative. 'nor do i now,' i replied with earnestness. 'i entrust to your care a lady who has risked great peril for us; and the rest i leave to you.' she looked me very keenly in the face for a second, and then, without answering, she passed on, madame and fanchette following her in that order. i closed the door and turned to simon; who by my direction had blown the embers of the fire into a blaze so as to partially illumine the room, in which only he and i now remained. the lad seemed afraid to meet my eye, and owing to the scene at which he had just assisted, or to the onslaught on the door, which grew each moment more furious, betrayed greater restlessness than i had lately observed in him. i did not doubt his fidelity, however, or his devotion to mademoiselle; and the orders i had to give him were simple enough. 'this is what you have got to do,' i said, my hand already on the bars. 'the moment i am outside secure this door. after that, open to no one except maignan. when he applies, let him in with caution, and bid him, as he loves m. de rosny, take his men as soon as the coast is clear, and guard the king of france to the castle. charge him to be brave and wary, for his life will answer for the king's.' twice i repeated this; then fearing lest the provost-marshal should make good his word and apply a ram to the door, i opened the trap. a dozen angry voices hailed my appearance, and this with so much violence and impatience that it was some time before i could get a hearing; the knaves threatening me if i would not instantly open, and persisting that i should do so without more words. their leader at length quieted them, but it was plain that his patience too was worn out. 'do you surrender or do you not?' he said. 'i am not going to stay out of my bed all night for you!' 'i warn you,' i answered, 'that the order you have there has been cancelled by the king!' 'that is not my business,' he rejoined hardily. 'no, but it will be when the king sends for you to-morrow morning, 'i retorted; at which he looked somewhat moved. 'however, i will surrender to you on two conditions,' i continued, keenly observing the coarse faces of his following. 'first, that you let me keep my arms until we reach the gate-house, i giving you my parole to come with you quietly. that is number one.' 'well,' the provost-marshal said more civilly, 'i have no objection to that.' 'secondly, that you do not allow your men to break into my lodgings. i will come out quietly, and so an end. your order does not direct you to sack my goods.' ^tut, tut!' he replied; 'i want you to come out. i do not want to go in.' 'then draw your men back to the stairs,' i said. 'and if you keep terms with me, i will uphold you to-morrow. for your orders will certainly bring you into trouble. m. de retz, who procured it this morning, is away, you know. m. de villequier may be gone to-morrow. but depend upon it, m. de rambouillet will be here!' the remark was well timed and to the point. it startled the man as much as i had hoped it would. without raising any objection he ordered his men to fall back and guard the stairs; and i on my side began to undo the fastenings of the door. the matter was not to be so easily concluded, however; for bruhl's rascals, in obedience, no doubt, to a sign given by their leader, who stood with fresnoy on the upper flight of stairs, refused to withdraw; and even hustled the provost-marshal's men when the latter would have obeyed the order. the officer, already heated by delay, replied by laying about him with his staff, and in a twinkling there seemed to be every prospect of a very pretty _mêlée_, the end of which it was impossible to foresee. reflecting, however, that if bruhl's men routed their opponents our position might be made worse rather than better, i did not act on my first impulse, which was to see the matter out where i was. instead, i seized the opportunity to let myself out, while simon fastened the door behind me. the provost-marshal was engaged at the moment in a wordy dispute with fresnoy; whose villainous countenance, scarred by the wound which i had given him at chizé, and flushed with passion, looked its worst by the light of the single torch which remained. in one respect the villain had profited by his present patronage, for he was decked out in a style of tawdry magnificence. but i have always remarked this about dress, that while a shabby exterior does not entirely obscure a gentleman, the extreme of fashion is powerless to gild a knave. seeing me on a sudden at the provost's elbow, he recoiled with a change of countenance so ludicrous that that officer was himself startled, and only held his ground on my saluting him civilly and declaring myself his prisoner. i added a warning that he should look to the torch which remained; seeing that if it failed we were both like to have our throats cut in the confusion. he took the hint promptly, and calling the link-man to his side prepared to descend, bidding fresnoy and his men, who remained clumped at the head of the stairs, make way for us without ado. they seemed much inclined, however, to dispute our passage, and replying to his invectives with rough taunts, displayed so hostile a demeanour that the provost, between regard for his own importance and respect for bruhl, appeared for a moment at a loss what to do; and seemed rather relieved than annoyed when i begged leave to say a word to m. de bruhl. 'if you can bring his men to reason,' he replied testily, 'speak your fill to him!' stepping to the foot of the upper flight, on which bruhl retained his position, i saluted him formally. he returned my greeting with a surly, watchful look only, and drawing his cloak more tightly round him affected to gaze down at me with disdain; which ill concealed, however, both the triumph he felt and the hopes of vengeance he entertained. i was especially anxious to learn whether he had tracked his wife hither, or was merely here in pursuance of his general schemes against me, and to this end i asked him with as much irony as i could compass to what i was to attribute his presence. 'i am afraid i cannot stay to offer you hospitality,' i continued; 'but for that you have only your friend m. villequier to thank!' 'i am greatly obliged to you,' he answered with a devilish smile, 'but do not let that affect you. when you are gone i propose to help myself, my friend, to whatever takes my taste.' 'do you?' i retorted coolly--not that i was unaffected by the threat and the villainous hint which underlay the words, but that, fully expecting them, i was ready with my answer. 'we will see about that.' and therewith i raised my fingers to my lips, and, whistling shrilly, cried 'maignan! maignan!' in a clear voice. i had no need to cry the name a third time, for before the provost-marshal could do more than start at this unexpected action, the landing above us rang under a heavy tread, and the man i called, descending the stairs swiftly, appeared on a sudden within arm's length of m. de bruhl; who, turning with an oath, saw him, and involuntarily recoiled. at all times maignan's hardy and confident bearing was of a kind to impress the strong; but on this occasion there was an added dash of recklessness in his manner which was not without its effect on the spectators. as he stood there smiling darkly over bruhl's head, while his hand toyed carelessly with his dagger, and the torch shone ruddily on his burly figure, he was so clearly an antagonist in a thousand that, had i sought through blois, i might not have found his fellow for strength and _sang-froid_. he let his black eyes rove from one to the other, but took heed of me only, saluting me with effusion and a touch of the gascon which was in place here, if ever. i knew how m. de rosny dealt with him, and followed the pattern as far as i could. 'maignan!' i said curtly, 'i have taken a lodging for to-night elsewhere. when i am gone you will call out your men and watch this door. if anyone tries to force an entrance you will do your duty.' 'you may consider it done,' he replied. 'even if the person be m. de bruhl here,' i continued. 'precisely.' 'you will remain on guard,' i went on, 'until to-morrow morning if m. de bruhl remains here; but whenever he leaves you will take your orders from the persons inside, and follow them implicitly.' 'your excellency's mind may be easy,' he answered, handling his dagger. dismissing him with a nod, i turned with a smile to m. de bruhl, and saw that between rage at this unexpected check and chagrin at the insult put upon him, his discomfiture was as complete as i could wish. as for fresnoy, if he had seriously intended to dispute our passage, he was no longer in the mood for the attempt. yet i did not let his master off without one more prick. 'that being settled, m. de bruhl,' i said pleasantly, 'i may bid you good evening. you will doubtless honour me at chaverny tomorrow. but we will first let maignan look under the bridge!' chapter xxvi. meditations. either the small respect i had paid m. de bruhl, or the words i had let fall respecting the possible disappearance of m. villequier, had had so admirable an effect on the provost-marshal's mind that from the moment of leaving my lodgings he treated me with the utmost civility; permitting me even to retain my sword, and assigning me a sleeping-place for the night in his own apartments at the gate-house. late as it was, i could not allow so much politeness to pass unacknowledged. i begged leave, therefore, to distribute a small gratuity among his attendants, and requested him to do me the honour of drinking a bottle of wine with me. this being speedily procured, at such an expense as is usual in these places, where prisoners pay, according as they are rich or poor, in purse or person, kept us sitting for an hour, and finally sent us to our pallets perfectly satisfied with one another. the events of the day, however, and particularly one matter, on which i have not dwelt at length, proved as effectual to prevent my sleeping as if i had been placed in the dampest cell below the castle. so much had been crowded into a time so short that it seemed as if i had had until now no opportunity of considering whither i was being hurried, or what fortune awaited me at the end of this turmoil. from the first appearance of m. d'agen in the morning, with the startling news that the provost-marshal was seeking me, to my final surrender and encounter with bruhl on the stairs, the chain of events had run out so swiftly that i had scarcely had time at any particular period to consider how i stood, or the full import of the latest check or victory. now that i had leisure i lived the day over again, and, recalling its dangers and disappointments, felt thankful that all had ended so fairly. i had the most perfect confidence in maignan, and did not doubt that bruhl would soon weary, if he had not already wearied, of a profitless siege. in an hour at most--and it was not yet midnight--the king would be free to go home; and with that would end, as far as he was concerned, the mission with which m. de rosny had honoured me. the task of communicating his majesty's decision to the king of navarre would doubtless be entrusted to m. de rambouillet, or some person of similar position and influence; and in the same hands would rest the honour and responsibility of the treaty which, as we all know now, gave after a brief interval and some bloodshed, and one great providence, a lasting peace to france. but it must ever be--and i recognised this that night with a bounding heart, which told of some store of youth yet unexhausted--a matter of lasting pride to me that i, whose career but now seemed closed in failure, had proved the means of conferring so especial a benefit on my country and religion. remembering, however, the king of navarre's warning that i must not look to him for reward, i felt greatly doubtful in what direction the scene would next open to me; my main dependence being upon m. de rosny's promise that he would make my fortune his own care. tired of the court at blois, and the atmosphere of intrigue and treachery which pervaded it, and with which i hoped i had now done, i was still at a loss to see how i could recross the loire in face of the vicomte de turenne's enmity. i might have troubled myself much more with speculating upon this point had i not found--in close connection with it--other and more engrossing food for thought in the capricious behaviour of mademoiselle de la vire. to that behaviour it seemed to me that i now held the clue. i suspected with as much surprise as pleasure that only one construction could be placed upon it--a construction which had strongly occurred to me on catching sight of her face when she intervened between me and the king. tracing the matter back to the moment of our meeting in the antechamber at st. jean d'angely, i remembered the jest which mathurine had uttered at our joint expense. doubtless it had dwelt in mademoiselle's mind, and exciting her animosity against me had prepared her to treat me with contumely when, contrary to all probability, we met again, and she found herself placed in a manner in my hands. it had inspired her harsh words and harsher looks on our journey northwards, and contributed with her native pride to the low opinion i had formed of her when i contrasted her with my honoured mother. but i began to think it possible that the jest had worked in another way as well, by keeping me before her mind and impressing upon her the idea--after my re-appearance at chizé more particularly--that our fates were in some way linked. assuming this, it was not hard to understand her manner at rosny when, apprised that i was no impostor, and regretting her former treatment of me, she still recoiled from the feelings which she began to recognise in her own breast. from that time, and with this clue, i had no difficulty in tracing her motives, always supposing that this suspicion, upon which i dwelt with feelings of wonder and delight, were well founded. middle-aged and grizzled, with the best of my life behind me, i had never dared to think of her in this way before. poor and comparatively obscure, i had never raised my eyes to the wide possessions said to be hers. even now i felt myself dazzled and bewildered by the prospect so suddenly unveiled. i could scarcely, without vertigo, recall her as i had last seen her, with her hand wounded in my defence; nor, without emotions painful in their intensity, fancy myself restored to the youth of which i had taken leave, and to the rosy hopes and plannings which visit most men once only, and then in early years. hitherto i had deemed such things the lot of others. daylight found me--and no wonder--still diverting myself with these charming speculations; which had for me, be it remembered, all the force of novelty. the sun chanced to rise that morning in a clear sky, and brilliantly for the time of year; and words fail me when i look back, and try to describe how delicately this simple fact enhanced my pleasure! i sunned myself in the beams, which penetrated my barred window; and tasting the early freshness with a keen and insatiable appetite, i experienced to the full that peculiar aspiration after goodness which providence allows such moments to awaken in us in youth; but rarely when time and the camp have blunted the sensibilities. i had not yet arrived at the stage at which difficulties have to be reckoned up, and the chief drawback to the tumult of joy i felt took the shape of regret that my mother no longer lived to feel the emotions proper to the time, and to share in the prosperity which she had so often and so fondly imagined. nevertheless, i felt myself drawn closer to her. i recalled with the most tender feelings, and at greater leisure than had before been the case, her last days and words, and particularly the appeal she had uttered on mademoiselle's behalf. and i vowed, if it were possible, to pay a visit to her grave before leaving the neighbourhood, that i might there devote a few moments to the thought of the affection which had consecrated all women in my eyes. i was presently interrupted in these reflections by a circumstance which proved in the end diverting enough, though far from reassuring at the first blush. it began in a dismal rattling of chains in the passage below and on the stairs outside my room; which were paved, like the rest of the building, with stone. i waited with impatience and some uneasiness to see what would come of this; and my surprise may be imagined when, the door being unlocked, gave entrance to a man in whom i recognised on the instant deaf matthew--the villain whom i had last seen with fresnoy in the house in the rue valois. amazed at seeing him here, i sprang to my feet in fear of some treachery, and for a moment apprehended that the provost-marshal had basely given me over to bruhl's custody. but a second glance informing me that the man was in irons--hence the noise i had heard--i sat down again to see what would happen. it then appeared that he merely brought me my breakfast, and was a prisoner in less fortunate circumstances than myself; but as he pretended not to recognise me, and placed the things before me in obdurate silence, and i had no power to make him hear, i failed to learn how he came to be in durance. the provost-marshal, however, came presently to visit me, and brought me in token that the good-fellowship of the evening still existed a pouch of the queen's herb; which i accepted for politeness' sake rather than from any virtue i found in it. and from him i learned how the rascal came to be in his charge. it appeared that fresnoy, having no mind to be hampered with a wounded man, had deposited him on the night of our _mêlée_ at the door of a hospital attached to a religious house in that part or the town. the fathers had opened to him, but before taking him in put, according to their custom, certain questions. matthew had been primed with the right answers to these questions, which were commonly a form; but, unhappily for him, the superior by chance or mistake began with the wrong one. 'you are not a huguenot, my son?' he said. 'in god's name, i am!' matthew replied with simplicity, believing he was asked if he was a catholic. 'what?' the scandalised prior ejaculated, crossing himself in doubt, 'are you not a true son of the church?' 'never!' quoth our deaf friend--thinking all went well. 'a heretic!' cried the monk. 'amen to that!' replied matthew innocently; never doubting but that he was asked the third question, which was, commonly, whether he needed aid. naturally after this there was a very pretty commotion, and matthew, vainly protesting that he was deaf, was hurried off to the provost-marshal's custody. asked how he communicated with him, the provost answered that he could not, but that his little godchild, a girl only eight years old, had taken a strange fancy to the rogue, and was never so happy as when talking to him by means of signs, of which she had invented a great number. i thought this strange at the time, but i had proof before the morning was out that it was true enough, and that the two were seldom apart, the little child governing this grim cut-throat with unquestioned authority. after the provost was gone i heard the man's fetters clanking again. this time he entered to remove my cup and plate, and surprised me by speaking to me. maintaining his former sullenness, and scarcely looking at me, he said abruptly: 'you are going out again?' i nodded assent. 'do you remember a bald-faced bay horse that fell with you?' he muttered, keeping his dogged glance on the floor. i nodded again. 'i want to sell the horse,' he said. 'there is not such another in blois, no, nor in paris! touch it on the near hip with the whip and it will go down as if shot. at other times a child might ride it. it is in a stable, the third from the three pigeons, in the ruelle amancy. fresnoy does not know where it is. he sent to ask yesterday, but i would not tell him.' some spark of human feeling which appeared in his lowering, brutal visage as he spoke of the horse led me to desire further information. fortunately the little girl appeared at that moment at the door in search of her playfellow; and through her i learned that the man's motive for seeking to sell the horse was fear lest the dealer in whose charge it stood should dispose of it to repay himself for its keep, and he, matthew, lose it without return. still i did not understand why he applied to me, but i was well pleased when i learned the truth. base as the knave was, he had an affection for the bay, which had been his only property for six years. having this in his mind, he had conceived the idea that i should treat it well, and should not, because he was in prison and powerless, cheat him of the price. in the end i agreed to buy the horse for ten crowns, paying as well what was due at the stable. i had it in my head to do something also for the man, being moved to this partly by an idea that there was good in him, and partly by the confidence he had seen fit to place in me, which seemed to deserve some return. but a noise below stairs diverted my attention. i heard myself named, and for the moment forgot the matter. chapter xxvii. to me, my friends! i was impatient to learn who had come, and what was their errand with me; and being still in that state of exaltation in which we seem to hear and see more than at other times, i remarked a peculiar lagging in the ascending footsteps, and a lack of buoyancy, which was quick to communicate itself to my mind. a vague dread fell upon me as i stood listening. before the door opened i had already conceived a score of disasters. i wondered that i had not inquired earlier concerning the king's safety, and in fine i experienced in a moment that complete reaction of the spirits which is too frequently consequent upon an excessive flow of gaiety. i was prepared, therefore, for heavy looks, but not for the persons who wore them nor the strange bearing the latter displayed on entering. my visitors proved to be m. d'agen and simon fleix. and so far well. but the former, instead of coming forward to greet me with the punctilious politeness which always characterised him, and which i had thought to be proof against every kind of surprise and peril, met me with downcast eyes and a countenance so gloomy as to augment my fears a hundredfold; since it suggested all those vague and formidable pains which m. de rambouillet had hinted might await me in a prison. i thought nothing more probable than the entrance after them of a gaoler laden with gyves and handcuffs; and saluting m. françois with a face which, do what i would, fashioned itself upon his, i had scarce composure sufficient to place the poor accommodation of my room at his disposal. he thanked me; but he did it with so much gloom and so little naturalness that i grew more impatient with each laboured syllable. simon fleix had slunk to the window and turned his back on us. neither seemed to have anything to say. but a state of suspense was one which i could least endure to suffer; and impatient of the constraint which my friend's manner was fast imparting to mine, i asked him at once and abruptly if his uncle had returned. 'he rode in about midnight,' he answered, tracing a pattern on the floor with the point of his riding-switch. i felt some surprise on hearing this, since d'agen was still dressed and armed for the road, and was without all those prettinesses which commonly marked his attire. but as he volunteered no further information, and did not even refer to the place in which he found me, or question me as to the adventures which had lodged me there, i let it pass, and asked him if his party had overtaken the deserters. 'yes,' he answered, 'with no result.' 'and the king?' 'm. de rambouillet is with him now,' he rejoined, still bending over his tracing. this answer relieved the worst of my anxieties, but the manner of the speaker was so distrait and so much at variance with the studied _insouciance_ which he usually affected, that i only grew more alarmed. i glanced at simon fleix, but he kept his face averted, and i could gather nothing from it; though i observed that he, too, was dressed for the road, and wore his arms. i listened, but i could hear no sounds which indicated that the provost-marshal was approaching. then on a sudden i thought of mademoiselle de la vire. could it be that maignan had proved unequal to his task? i started impetuously from my stool under the influence of the emotion which this thought naturally aroused, and seized m. d'agen by the arm. 'what has happened?' i exclaimed. 'is it bruhl? did he break into my lodgings last night? what!' i continued, staggering back as i read the confirmation of my fears in his face. 'he did?' m. d'agen, who had risen also, pressed my hand with convulsive energy. gazing into my face, he held me a moment thus embraced, his manner a strange mixture of fierceness and emotion. 'alas, yes,' he answered, 'he did, and took away those whom he found there! those whom he found there, you understand! but m. de rambouillet is on his way here, and in a few minutes you will be free. we will follow together. if we overtake them--well. if not, it will be time to talk.' he broke off, and i stood looking at him, stunned by the blow, yet in the midst of my own horror and surprise retaining sense enough to wonder at the gloom on his brow and the passion which trembled in his words. what had this to do with him? 'but bruhl?' i said at last, recovering myself with an effort--'how did he gain access to the room? i left it guarded.' 'by a ruse, while maignan and his men were away,' was the answer. 'only this lad of yours was there. bruhl's men overpowered him.' 'which way has bruhl gone?' i muttered, my throat dry, my heart beating wildly. he shook his head. 'all we know is that he passed through the south gate with eleven horsemen, two women, and six led horses, at daybreak this morning,' he answered. 'maignan came to my uncle with the news, and m. de rambouillet went at once, early as it was, to the king to procure your release. he should be here now.' i looked at the barred window, the most horrible fears at my heart; from it to simon fleix, who stood beside it, his attitude expressing the utmost dejection. i went towards him. 'you hound!' i said in a low voice, 'how did it happen?' to my surprise he fell in a moment on his knees, and raised his arm as though to ward off a blow. 'they imitated maignan's voice,' he muttered hoarsely. 'we opened.' 'and you dare to come here and tell me!' i cried, scarcely restraining my passion. 'you, to whom i. entrusted her. you, whom i thought devoted to her. you have destroyed her, man!' he rose as suddenly as he had cowered down. his thin, nervous face underwent a startling change; growing on a sudden hard and rigid, while his eyes began to glitter with excitement. 'i--i have destroyed her? ay, mon dieu! i _have_,' he cried, speaking to my face, and no longer flinching or avoiding my eye. 'you may kill me, if you like. you do not know all. it was i who stole the favour she gave you from your doublet, and then said m. de rosny had taken it! it was i who told her you had given it away! it was i who brought her to the little sisters', that she might see you with madame de bruhl! it was i who did all, and destroyed her! now you know! do with me what you like!' he opened his arms as though to receive a blow, while i stood before him astounded beyond measure by a disclosure so unexpected; full of righteous wrath and indignation, and yet uncertain what i ought to do. 'did you also let bruhl into the room on purpose?' i cried at last. 'i?' he exclaimed, with a sudden flash of rage in his eyes. 'i would have died first!' i do not know how i might have taken this confession; but at the moment there was a trampling of horses outside, and before i could answer him i heard m. de rambouillet speaking in haughty tones, at the door below. the provost-marshal was with him, but his lower notes were lost in the ring of bridles and the stamping of impatient hoofs. i looked towards the door of my room, which stood ajar, and presently the two entered, the marquis listening with an air of contemptuous indifference to the apologies which the other, who attended at his elbow, was pouring forth. m. de rambouillet's face reflected none of the gloom and despondency which m. d'agen's exhibited in so marked a degree. he seemed, on the contrary, full of gaiety and good-humour, and, coming forward and seeing me, embraced me with the utmost kindness and condescension. 'ha! my friend,' he said cheerfully, 'so i find you here after all! but never fear. i am this moment from the king with an order for your release. his majesty has told me all, making me thereby your lasting friend and debtor. as for this gentleman,' he continued, turning with a cold smile to the provost-marshal, who seemed to be trembling in his boots, 'he may expect an immediate order also. m. de villequier has wisely gone a-hunting, and will not be back for a day or two.' racked as i was by suspense and anxiety, i could not assail him with immediate petitions. it behoved me first to thank him for his prompt intervention, and this in terms as warm as i could invent. nor could i in justice fail to commend the provost to him, representing the officer's conduct to me, and lauding his ability. all this, though my heart was sick with thought and fear and disappointment, and every minute seemed an age. 'well, well,' the marquis said with stately good-nature, we will lay the blame on villequier then. he is an old fox, however, and ten to one he will go scot-free. it is not the first time he has played this trick. but i have not yet come to the end of my commission,' he continued pleasantly. 'his majesty sends you this, m. de marsac, and bade me say that he had loaded it for you.' he drew from under his cloak as he spoke the pistol which i had left with the king, and which happened to be the same m. de rosny had given me. i took it, marvelling impatiently at the careful manner in which he handled it; but in a moment i understood, for i found it loaded to the muzzle with gold-pieces, of which two or three fell and rolled upon the floor. much moved by this substantial mark of the king's gratitude, i was nevertheless for pocketing them in haste; but the marquis, to satisfy a little curiosity on his part, would have me count them, and brought the tale to a little over two thousand livres, without counting a ring set with precious stones which i found among them. this handsome present diverted my thoughts from simon fleix, but could not relieve the anxiety i felt on mademoiselle's account. the thought of her position so tortured me that m. de rambouillet began to perceive my state of mind, and hastened to assure me that before going to the court he had already issued orders calculated to assist me. 'you desire to follow this lady, i understand?' he said. 'what with the king, who is enraged beyond the ordinary by this outrage, and françois there, who seemed beside himself when he heard the news, i have not got any very clear idea of the position.' 'she was entrusted to me by--by one, sir, well known to you,' i answered hoarsely. 'my honour is engaged to him and to her. if i follow on my feet and alone, i must follow. if i cannot save her, i can at least punish the villains who have wronged her.' 'but the man's wife is with them,' he said in some wonder. 'that goes for nothing,' i answered. he saw the strong emotion under which i laboured, and which scarcely suffered me to answer him with patience; and he looked at me curiously, but not unkindly. 'the sooner you are off, the better then,' he said, nodding. 'i gathered as much. the man maignan will have his fellows at the south gate an hour before noon, i understand. françois has two lackeys, and he is wild to go. with yourself and the lad there you will muster nine swords. i will lend you two. i can spare no more, for we may have an _émeute_ at any moment. you will take the road, therefore, eleven in all, and should overtake them some time to-night if your horses are in condition.' i thanked him warmly, without regarding his kindly statement that my conduct on the previous day had laid him under lasting obligations to me. we went down together, and he transferred two of his fellows to me there and then, bidding them change their horses for fresh ones and meet me at the south gate. he sent also a man to my stable--simon fleix having disappeared in the confusion--for the cid, and was in the act of inquiring whether i needed anything else, when a woman slipped through the knot of horsemen who surrounded us as we stood in the doorway of the house, and, throwing herself upon me, grasped me by the arm. it was fanchette. her harsh features were distorted with grief, her cheeks were mottled with the violent weeping in which such persons vent their sorrow. her hair hung in long wisps on her neck. her dress was torn and draggled, and there was a great bruise over her eye. she had the air of one frantic with despair and misery. she caught me by the cloak, and shook me so that i staggered. 'i have found you at last!' she cried joyfully. 'you will take me with you! you will take me to her!' though her words tried my composure, and my heart went out to her, i strove to answer her according to the sense of the matter. 'it is impossible,' i said sternly. 'this is a man's errand. we shall have to ride day and night, my good woman.' 'but i will ride day and night too!' she replied passionately, flinging the hair from her eyes, and looking wildly from me to m. de rambouillet. 'what would i not do for her? i am as strong as a man, and stronger. take me, take me, i say, and when i meet that villain i will tear him limb from limb!' i shuddered, listening to her; but remembering that, being country bred, she was really as strong as she said, and that likely enough some advantage might accrue to us from her perfect fidelity and devotion to her mistress, i gave a reluctant consent. i sent one of m. de rambouillet's men to the stable where the deaf man's bay was standing, bidding him pay whatever was due to the dealer, and bring the horse to the south gate; my intention being to mount one of my men on it, and furnish the woman with a less tricky steed. the briskness of these and the like preparations, which even for one of my age and in my state of anxiety were not devoid of pleasure, prevented my thoughts dwelling on the future. content to have m. françois' assistance without following up too keenly the train of ideas which his readiness suggested, i was satisfied also to make use of simon without calling him to instant account for his treachery. the bustle of the streets, which the confirmation of the king's speedy departure had filled with surly, murmuring crowds, tended still further to keep my fears at bay; while the contrast between my present circumstances, as i rode through them well-appointed and well-attended, with the marquis by my side, and the poor appearance i had exhibited on my first arrival in blois, could not fail to inspire me with hope that i might surmount this danger also, and in the event find mademoiselle safe and uninjured. i took leave of m. de rambouillet with many expressions of esteem on both sides, and a few minutes before eleven reached the rendezvous outside the south gate. m. d'agen and maignan advanced to meet me, the former still presenting an exterior so stern and grave that i wondered to see him, and could scarcely believe he was the same gay spark whose elegant affectations had more than once caused me to smile. he saluted me in silence; maignan with a sheepish air, which ill-concealed the savage temper defeat had roused in him. counting my men, i found we mustered ten only, but the equerry explained that he had despatched a rider ahead to make inquiries and leave word for us at convenient points; to the end that we might follow the trail with as few delays as possible. highly commending maignan for his forethought in this, i gave the word to start, and crossing the river by the st. gervais bridge, we took the road for selles at a smart trot. the weather had changed much in the last twenty-four hours. the sun shone brightly, with a warm west wind, and the country already showed signs of the early spring which marked that year. if, the first hurry of departure over, i had now leisure to feel the gnawing of anxiety and the tortures inflicted by an imagination which, far outstripping us, rode with those whom we pursued and shared their perils, i found two sources of comfort still open to me. no man who has seen service can look on a little band of well-appointed horsemen without pleasure. i reviewed the stalwart forms and stern faces which moved beside me, and comparing their decent order and sound equipments with the scurvy foulness of the men who had ridden north with me, thanked god, and ceased to wonder at the indignation which matthew and his fellows had aroused in mademoiselle's mind. my other source of satisfaction, the regular beat of hoofs and ring of bridles continually augmented. every step took us farther from blois--farther from the close town and reeking streets and the court; which, if it no longer seemed to me a shambles, befouled by one great deed of blood--experience had removed that impression--retained an appearance infinitely mean and miserable in my eyes. i hated and loathed its intrigues and its jealousies, the folly which trifled in a closet while rebellion mastered france, and the pettiness which recognised no wisdom save that of balancing party and party. i thanked god that my work there was done, and could have welcomed any other occasion that forced me to turn my back on it, and sent me at large over the pure heaths, through the woods, and under the wide heaven, speckled with moving clouds. but such springs of comfort soon ran dry. m. d'agen's gloomy rage and the fiery gleam in maignan's eye would have reminded me, had i been in any danger of forgetting the errand on which we were bound, and the need, exceeding all other needs, which compelled us to lose no moment that might be used. those whom we followed had five hours' start. the thought of what might happen in those five hours to the two helpless women whom i had sworn to protect burned itself into my mind; so that to refrain from putting spurs to my horse and riding recklessly forward taxed at times all my self-control. the horses seemed to crawl. the men rising and falling listlessly in their saddles maddened me. though i could not hope to come upon any trace of our quarry for many hours, perhaps for days, i scanned the long, flat heaths unceasingly, searched every marshy bottom before we descended into it, and panted for the moment when the next low ridge should expose to our view a fresh track of wood and waste. the rosy visions of the past night, and those fancies in particular which had made the dawn memorable, recurred to me, as his deeds in the body (so men say) to a hopeless drowning wretch. i grew to think of nothing but bruhl and revenge. even the absurd care with which simon avoided the neighbourhood of fanchette, riding anywhere so long as he might ride at a distance from the angry woman's tongue and hand--which provoked many a laugh from the men, and came to be the joke of the company--failed to draw a smile from me. we passed through contres, four leagues from blois, an hour after noon, and three hours later crossed the cher at selles, where we stayed awhile to bait our horses. here we had news of the party before us, and henceforth had little doubt that bruhl was making for the limousin; a district in which he might rest secure under the protection of turenne, and safely defy alike the king of france and the king of navarre. the greater the necessity, it was plain, for speed; but the roads in that neighbourhood, and forward as far as valancy, proved heavy and foundrous, and it was all we could do to reach levroux with jaded horses three hours after sunset. the probability that bruhl would lie at châteauroux, five leagues farther on--for i could not conceive that under the circumstances he would spare the women,--would have led me to push forward had it been possible; but the darkness and the difficulty of finding a guide who would venture deterred me from the hopeless attempt, and we stayed the night where we were. here we first heard of the plague; which was said to be ravaging châteauroux and all the country farther south. the landlord of the inn would have regaled us with many stories of it, and particularly of the swiftness with which men and even cattle succumbed to its attacks. but we had other things to think of, and between anxiety and weariness had clean forgotten the matter when we rose next morning. we started shortly after daybreak, and for three leagues pressed on at tolerable speed. then, for no reason stated, our guide gave us the slip as we passed through a wood, and was seen no more. we lost the road, and had to retrace our steps. we strayed into a slough, and extracted ourselves with difficulty. the man who was riding the bay i had purchased forgot the secret which i had imparted to him, and got an ugly fall. in fine, after all these mishaps it wanted little of noon, and less to exhaust our patience, when at length we came in sight of châteauroux. before entering the town we had still an adventure; for we came at a turn in the road on a scene as surprising as it was at first inexplicable. a little north of the town, in a coppice of box facing the south and west, we happed suddenly on a rude encampment, consisting of a dozen huts and booths, set back from the road and formed, some of branches of evergreen trees laid clumsily together, and some of sacking stretched aver poles. a number of men and women of decent appearance lay on the short grass before the booths, idly sunning themselves; or moved about, cooking and tending fires, while a score of children raced to and fro with noisy shouts and laughter. the appearance of our party on the scene caused an instant panic. the women and children fled screaming into the wood, spreading the sound of breaking branches farther and farther as they retreated; while the men, a miserable pale-faced set, drew together, and seeming half inclined to fly also, regarded us with glances of fear and suspicion. remarking that their appearance and dress were not those of vagrants, while the booths seemed to indicate little skill or experience in the builders, i bade my companions halt, and advanced alone. 'what is the meaning of this, my men?' i said, addressing the first group i reached. 'you seem to have come a-maying before the time. whence are you?' 'from châteauroux,' the foremost answered sullenly. his dress, now i: saw him nearer, seemed to be that of a respectable townsman. 'why?' i replied. 'have you no homes?' 'ay we have homes,' he answered with the same brevity. 'then why, in god's name, are you here?' i retorted, marking the gloomy air and downcast faces of the group. 'have you been harried?' 'ay, harried by the plague!' he answered bitterly. 'do you mean to say you have not heard? in châteauroux there is one man dead in three. take my advice, sir--you are a brave company--turn, and go home again.' 'is it as bad as that?' i exclaimed. i had forgotten the landlord's gossip, and the explanation struck me with the force of surprise. 'ay, is it! do you see the blue haze?' he continued, pointing with a sudden gesture to the lower ground before us, over which a light pall of summery vapour hung still and motionless. 'do you see it? well, under that there is death! you may find food in châteauroux, and stalls for your horses, and a man to take money; for there are still men there. but cross the indre, and you will see sights worse than a battle-field a week old! you will find no living soul in house or stable or church, but corpses plenty. the land is cursed! cursed for heresy, some say! half are dead, and half are fled to the woods! and if you do not die of the plague, you will starve.' 'god forbid!' i muttered, thinking with a shudder of those before us. this led me to ask him if a party resembling ours in number, and including two women, had passed that way. he answered, yes, after sunset the evening before; that their horses were stumbling with fatigue and the men swearing in pure weariness. he believed that they had not entered the town, but had made a rude encampment half a mile beyond it; and had again broken this up, and ridden southwards two or three hours before our arrival. 'then we may overtake them to-day?' i said. 'by your leave, sir,' he answered, with grave meaning. 'i think you are more likely to meet them.' shrugging my shoulders, i thanked him shortly and left him; the full importance of preventing my men hearing what i had heard--lest the panic which possessed these townspeople should seize on them also--being already in my mind. nevertheless the thought came too late, for on turning my horse i found one of the foremost, a long, solemn-faced man, had already found his way to maignan's stirrup; where he was dilating so eloquently upon the enemy which awaited us southwards that the countenances of half the troopers were as long as his own, and i saw nothing for it but to interrupt his oration by a smart application of my switch to his shoulders. having thus stopped him, and rated him back to his fellows, i gave the word to march. the men obeyed mechanically, we swung into a canter, and for a moment the danger was over. but i knew that it would recur again and again. stealthily marking the faces round me, and listening to the whispered talk which went on, i saw the terror spread from one to another. voices which earlier in the day had been raised in song and jest grew silent. great reckless fellows of maignan's following, who had an oath and a blow for all comers, and to whom the deepest ford seemed to be child's play, rode with drooping heads and knitted brows; or scanned with ill-concealed anxiety the strange haze before us, through which the roofs of the town, and here and there a low hill or line of poplars, rose to plainer view. maignan himself, the stoutest of the stout, looked grave, and had lost his swaggering air. only three persons preserved their _sang-froid_ entire. of these, m. d'agen rode as if he had heard nothing, and simon fleix as if he feared nothing; while fanchette, gazing eagerly forward, saw, it was plain, only one object in the mist, and that was her mistress's face. we found the gates of the town open, and this, which proved to be the herald of stranger sights, daunted the hearts of my men more than the most hostile reception. as we entered, our horses' hoofs, clattering loudly on the pavement, awoke a hundred echoes in the empty houses to right and left. the main street, flooded with sunshine, which made its desolation seem a hundred times more formidable, stretched away before us, bare and empty; or haunted only by a few slinking dogs, and prowling wretches, who fled, affrighted at the unaccustomed sounds, or stood and eyed us listlessly as we passed. a bell tolled; in the distance we heard the wailing of women. the silent ways, the black cross which marked every second door, the frightful faces which once or twice looked out from upper windows and blasted our sight, infected my men with terror so profound and so ungovernable that at last discipline was forgotten; and one shoving his horse before another in narrow places, there was a scuffle to be first. one, and then a second, began to trot. the trot grew into a shuffling canter. the gates of the inn lay open, nay seemed to invite us to enter; but no one turned or halted. moved by a single-impulse we pushed breathlessly on and on, until the open country was reached, and we who had entered the streets in silent awe, swept out and over the bridge as if the fiend were at our heels. that i shared in this flight causes me no shame even now, for my men were at the time ungovernable, as the best-trained troops are when seized by such panics; and, moreover, i could have done no good by remaining in the town, where the strength of the contagion was probably greater and the inn larder like to be as bare as the hillside. few towns are without a hostelry outside the gates for the convenience of knights of the road or those who would avoid the dues, and châteauroux proved no exception to this rule. a short half-mile from the walls we drew rein before a second encampment raised about a wayside house. it scarcely needed the sound of music mingled with brawling voices to inform us that the wilder spirits of the town had taken refuge here, and were seeking to drown in riot and debauchery, as i have seen happen in a besieged place, the remembrance of the enemy which stalked; abroad in the sunshine. our sudden appearance, while it put a stop to the mimicry of mirth, brought out a score of men and women in every stage of drunkenness and dishevelment, of whom some, with hiccoughs and loose gestures, cried to us to join them, while others swore horridly at being recalled to the present, which, with the future, they were endeavouring to forget. i cursed them in return for a pack of craven wretches, and threatening to ride down those who obstructed; us, ordered my men forward; halting eventually a quarter of a mile farther on, where a wood of groundling oaks which still wore last year's leaves afforded fair shelter. afraid to leave my men myself, lest some should stray to the inn and others desert altogether, i requested m. d'agen to return thither with maignan and simon, and bring us what forage and food we required. this he did with perfect success, though not until after a scuffle, in which maignan showed himself a match for a hundred. we watered the horses at a neighbouring brook, and assigning two hours to rest and: refreshment--a great part of which m. d'agen and i spent walking up and down in moody silence, each immersed in his own thoughts--we presently took the road again with renewed spirits. but a panic is not easily shaken off, nor is any fear so difficult to combat and defeat as the fear of the invisible. the terrors which food and drink had for a time thrust out presently returned with sevenfold force. men looked uneasily in one another's faces, and from them to the haze which veiled all distant objects. they muttered of the heat, which was sudden, strange, and abnormal at that time of the year. and by-and-by they had other things to speak of. we met a man, who ran beside us and begged of us, crying out in a dreadful voice that his wife and four children lay unburied in the house. a little farther on, beside a well, the corpse of a woman with a child at her breast lay poisoning the water; she had crawled to it to appease her thirst, and died of the draught. last of all, in a beech-wood near lotier we came upon a lady i living in her coach, with one or two panic-stricken women for her only attendants. her husband was in paris, she told me; half her servants were dead, the rest had fled. still she retained in a remarkable degree both courage and courtesy, and accepting with fortitude my reasons and excuses for perforce, leaving her in such a plight, gave me a clear account of bruhl and his party, who had passed her some hours before. the picture of this lady gazing after us with perfect good-breeding, as we rode away at speed, followed by the lamentations of her women, remains with me to this day; filling my mind at once with admiration and melancholy. for, as i learned later, she fell ill of the plague where we left her in the beech-wood, and died in a night with both her servants. the intelligence we had from her inspired us to push forward, sparing neither spur nor horseflesh, in the hope that we might overtake bruhl before night should expose his captives to fresh hardships and dangers. but the pitch to which the dismal sights and sounds i have mentioned, and a hundred like them, had raised the fears of my following did much to balk my endeavours. for a while, indeed, under the influence of momentary excitement, they spurred their horses to the gallop, as if their minds were made up to face the worst; but presently they checked them despite all my efforts, and, lagging slowly and more slowly, seemed to lose all spirit and energy. the desolation which met our eyes on every side, no less than the death-like stillness which prevailed, even the birds, as it seemed to us, being silent, chilled the most reckless to the heart. maignan's face lost its colour, his voice its ring. as for the rest, starting at a sound and wincing if a leather galled them, they glanced backwards twice for once they looked forwards, and held themselves ready to take to their heels and be gone at the least alarm. noting these signs, and doubting if i could trust even maignan, i thought it prudent to change my place, and falling to the rear, rode there with a grim face and a pistol ready to my hand. it was not the least of my annoyances that m. d'agen appeared to be ignorant of any cause for apprehension save such as lay before us, and riding on in the same gloomy fit which had possessed him from the moment of starting, neither sought my opinion nor gave his own, but seemed to have undergone so complete and mysterious a change that i could think of one thing only that could have power to effect so marvellous a transformation. i felt his presence a trial rather than a help, and reviewing the course of our short friendship, which a day or two before had been so great a delight to me--as the friendship of a young man commonly is to one growing old--i puzzled myself with much wondering whether there could be rivalry between us. sunset, which was welcome to my company, since it removed the haze, which they regarded with superstitious dread, found us still plodding through a country of low ridges and shallow valleys, both clothed in oak-woods. its short brightness died away, and with it my last hope of surprising bruhl before i slept. darkness fell upon us as we wended our way slowly down a steep hillside where the path was so narrow and difficult as to permit only one to descend at a time. a stream of some size, if we might judge from the noise it made, poured through the ravine below us, and presently, at the point where we believed the crossing to be, we espied a solitary light shining in the blackness. to proceed farther was impossible, for the ground grew more and more precipitous; and, seeing this, i bade maignan dismount, and leaving us where we were, go for a guide to the house from which the light issued. he obeyed, and plunging into the night, which in that pit between the hills was of an inky darkness, presently returned with a peasant and a lanthorn. i was about to bid the man guide us to the ford, or to some level ground where we could picket the horses, when maignan gleefully cried out that he had news. i asked what news. 'speak up, _manant!_' he said, holding up his lanthorn so that the light fell on the man's haggard face and unkempt hair. 'tell his excellency what you have told me, or i will skin you alive, little man!' 'your other party came to the ford an hour before sunset,' the peasant answered, staring dully at us. 'i saw them coming, and hid myself. they quarrelled by the ford. some were for crossing, and some not.' 'they had ladies with them?' m. d'agen said suddenly. 'ay, two, your excellency,' the clown answered, 'riding like men. in the end they did not cross for fear of the plague, but turned up the river, and rode westwards towards st. gaultier.' 'st. gaultier!' i said. 'where is that? where does the road to it go to besides?' but the peasant's knowledge was confined to his own neighbourhood. he knew no world beyond st. gaultier, and could not answer my question. i was about to bid him show us the way down, when maignan cried out that he knew more. 'what?' i asked. 'arnidieu! he heard them say where they were going to spend the night! 'ha!' i cried. 'where?' 'in an old ruined castle two leagues from this, and between here and st. gaultier,' the equerry answered, forgetting in his triumph both plague and panic. 'what do you i say to that, your excellency?' it is so, sirrah, is it not?' he continued; turning to the peasant. 'speak, master jacques, or i will roast you before a slow fire!' but i did not wait to hear the answer. leaping to the ground, i took the cid's rein on my arm, and cried impatiently to the man to lead us down. chapter xxviii. the castle on the hill. the certainty that bruhl and his captives were not far off, and the likelihood that we might be engaged within the hour, expelled from the minds of even the most, timorous among us the vapourish fears which had before haunted them. in the hurried scramble which presently landed us on the bank of the stream, men who had ridden for hours in sulky silence found their voices, and from cursing their horses' blunders soon advanced to swearing and singing after the fashion of their kind. this change, by relieving me of a great fear, left me at leisure to consider our position, and estimate more clearly than i might have done the advantages of hastening, or postponing, an attack. we numbered eleven; the enemy, to the best of my belief, twelve. of this slight superiority i should have recked little in the daytime; nor, perhaps, counting maignan as two, have allowed that it existed. but the result of a night attack is more difficult to forecast; and i had also to take into account the perils to which the two ladies would be exposed, between the darkness and tumult, in the event of the issue remaining for a time in doubt. these considerations, and particularly the last, weighed so powerfully with me, that before i reached the bottom of the gorge i had decided to postpone i the attack until morning. the answers to some questions which i put to the inhabitant of the house by the ford as soon as i reached level ground only confirmed me in this resolution. the road bruhl had taken ran for a distance by the riverside, and along the bottom of the gorge; and, difficult by day, was repotted to be impracticable for horses by night. the castle he had mentioned lay full two leagues away, and on the farther edge of a tract of rough woodland. finally, i doubted whether, in the absence of any other reason for delay, i could have marched my men, weary as they were, to the place before day break. when i came to announce this decision, however, and to inquire what accommodation the peasant could afford us, i found myself in trouble. fauchette, mademoiselle's woman, suddenly confronted me, her face scarlet with rage. thrusting herself forward into the circle of light cast by the lanthorn, she assailed me with a virulence and fierceness which said more for her devotion to her mistress than her respect for me. her wild gesticulations, her threats, and the appeals which she made now to me, and now to the men who stood in a circle round us, their faces in shadow, discomfited as much as they surprised me. 'what!' she cried violently, 'you call yourself a gentleman, and lie here and let my mistress be murdered, or worse, within a league of you! two leagues? a groat for your two leagues! i would walk them barefoot, if that would shame you. and you, you call yourselves men, and suffer it! it is god's truth you are a set of cravens and sluggards. give me as many women, and i would----' 'peace, woman!' maignan said in his deep voice. 'you had your way and came with us, and you will obey orders as well as another! be off, and see to the victuals before worse happen to you!' 'ay, see to the victuals!' she retorted. 'see to the victuals, forsooth! that is all you think of--to lie warm and eat your fill! a set of dastardly, drinking, droning guzzlers you are! you are!' she retorted, her voice rising to a shriek. 'may the plague take you!' 'silence!' maignan growled fiercely, 'or have a care to yourself! for a copper-piece i would send you to cool your heels in the water below--for that last word! begone, do you hear,' he continued, seizing her by the shoulder and thrusting her towards the house, 'or worse may happen to you. we are rough customers, as you will find if you do not lock up your tongue!' i heard her go wailing into the darkness; and heaven knows it was not without compunction i forced myself to remain inactive in the face of a devotion which seemed so much greater than mine. the men fell away one by one to look to their horses and choose sleeping-quarters for the night; and presently m. d'agen and i were left alone standing beside the lanthorn, which the man had hung on a bush before his door. the brawling of the water as it poured between the banks, a score of paces from us, and the black darkness which hid everything beyond the little ring of light in which we stood--so that for all we could see we were in a pit--had the air of isolating us from all the world. i looked at the young man, who had not once lisped that day; and i plainly read in his attitude his disapproval of my caution. though he declined to meet my eye, he stood with his arms folded and his head thrown back, making no attempt to disguise the scorn and ill-temper which his face expressed. hurt by the woman's taunts, and possibly shaken in my opinion, i grew restive under his silence, and unwisely gave way to my feelings. 'you do not appear to approve of my decision, m. d'agen?' i said. 'it is yours to command, sir,' he answered proudly. there are truisms which have more power to annoy than the veriest reproaches. i should have borne in mind the suspense and anxiety he was suffering, and which had so changed him that i scarcely knew him for the gay young spark on whose toe i had trodden. i should have remembered that he was young and i old, and that it behoved me to be patient. but on my side also there was anxiety, and responsibility as well; and, above all, a rankling soreness, to which i refrain from giving the name of jealousy, though it came as near to that feeling as the difference in our ages and personal advantages (whereof the balance was all on his side) would permit. this, no doubt, it was which impelled me to continue the argument. 'you would go on?' i said persistently. 'it is idle to say what i would do,' he answered with a flash of anger. 'i asked for your opinion, sir,' i rejoined stiffly. 'to what purpose?' he retorted, stroking his small moustache haughtily. 'we look at the thing from opposite points. you are going about your business, which appears to be the rescuing of ladies who are--may i venture to say it?--so unfortunate as to entrust themselves to your charge. i, m. de marsac, am more deeply interested. more deeply interested,' he repeated lamely. 'i--in a word, i am prepared, sir, to do what others only talk of--and if i cannot, follow otherwise, would follow on my feet!' 'whom?' i asked curtly, stung by this repetition of my own words. he laughed harshly and bitterly. 'why explain? or why quarrel?' he replied cynically. 'god knows, if i could afford to quarrel with you, i should; have done so fifty hours ago. but i need your help; and, needing it, i am prepared i to do that which must seem to a person of your calm passions and perfect judgment alike futile and incredible--pay the full price for it.' 'the full price for it!' i muttered, understanding nothing, except that i did not understand. 'ay, the full price for it!' he repeated. and as he spoke he looked at me with an expression of rage so fierce that i recoiled a step. that seemed to restore him in some degree to himself, for without giving me an opportunity of answering he turned hastily from me, and, striding away, was in a moment lost in the darkness. he left me amazed beyond measure. i stood repeating his phrase about 'the full price' a hundred times over, but still found it and his passion inexplicable. to cut the matter short, i could come to no other conclusion than that he desired to insult me, and aware of my poverty and the equivocal position in which i stood towards mademoiselle, chose his words accordingly. this seemed a thing unworthy of one of whom i had before thought highly; but calmer reflection enabling me to see something of youthful bombast in the tirade he had delivered, i smiled a little sadly, and determined to think no more of the matter for the present, but to persist firmly in that which seemed to me to be the right course. having settled this, i was about to enter the house, when maignan stopped me, telling me that the plague had killed five people in it, letting only the man we had seen; who had, indeed, been seized, but recovered. this ghastly news had scared my company to such a degree that they had gone as far from the house as the level ground permitted, and there lighted a fire, round which they were going to pass the night. fanchette had taken up her quarters in the stable, and the equerry announced that he had kept a shed full of sweet, hay for m. d'agen and myself. i assented to this arrangement, and after supping off soup and black bread, which was all we could procure, bade the peasant rouse us two hours before sunrise; and so, being too weary and old in service to remain awake thinking, i fell asleep, and slept; soundly till a little after four. my first business on rising was to see that the men before mounting made a meal, for it is ill work fighting empty. i went round also and saw that all had their arms, and that such as carried pistols had them loaded and primed. m. françois did not put in an appearance until this work was done, and then showed a very pale and gloomy countenance. i took no heed of him, however, and with the first streak of daylight we started in single file and at a snail's pace up the valley, the peasant, whom i placed in maignan's charge, going before to guide us, and m. d'agen and i riding in the rear. by the time the sun rose and warmed our chilled and shivering frames we were over the worst of the ground, and were able to advance at some speed along, a track cut through a dense forest of oak-trees. though we had now risen out of the valley, the close-set trunks and the undergrowth round them prevented our seeing in any direction. for a mile or more we rode on blindly, and presently started on finding ourselves on the brow of a hill, looking down into a valley, the nearer end of which was clothed in woods, while the farther widened into green sloping pastures. from the midst of these a hill or mount rose sharply up, until it ended in walls of grey stone scarce to be distinguished at that distance from the native rock on which they stood. 'see!' cried our guide. 'there is the castle!' bidding the men dismount in haste, that the chance of our being seen by the enemy--which was not great--might be farther lessened, i began to inspect the position at leisure; my first feeling while doing so being one of thankfulness that i had not attempted a night attack, which must inevitably have miscarried, possibly with loss to ourselves, and certainly with the result of informing the enemy of our presence. the castle, of which we had a tolerable view, was long and narrow in shape, consisting of two towers connected by walls. the nearer tower, through which lay the entrance, was roofless, and in every way seemed to be more ruinous than the inner one, which appeared to be perfect in both its stories. this defect notwithstanding, the place was so strong that my heart sank lower the longer i looked; and a glance at maignan's face assured me that his experience was also at fault. for m. d'agen, i clearly saw, when i turned to him, that he had never until this moment realised what we had to expect, but, regarding our pursuit in the light of a hunting-party, had looked to see it end in like easy fashion. his blank, surprised face, as he stood eyeing the stout grey walls, said as much as this. 'arnidieu!' maignan muttered, 'give me ten men, and i would hold it against a hundred!' 'tut, man, there is more than one way to rome!' i answered oracularly, though i was far from feeling as confident as i seemed. 'come, let us descend and view this nut a little nearer.' we began to trail downwards in silence, and as the path led us for a while out of sight of the castle, we were able to proceed with less caution. we had nearly reached without adventure the farther skirts of the wood, between which and the ruin lay an interval of open ground, when we came suddenly, at the edge of a little clearing, on an old hag; who was so intent upon tying up faggots that she did not see us until maignan's hand was on her shoulder. when she did, she screamed out, and escaping from him with an activity wonderful in a woman of her age, ran with great swiftness to the side of an old man who lay at the foot of a tree half a bowshot off; and whom we had not before seen. snatching up an axe, she put herself in a posture of defence before him with gestures and in a manner as touching in the eyes of some among us as they were ludicrous in those of others; who cried to maignan that he had met his match at last, with other gibes of the kind that pass current in camps. i called to him to let her be, and went forward myself to the old man, who lay on a rude bed of leaves, and seemed unable to rise. appealing to me with a face of agony not to hurt his wife, he bade her again and again lay down her axe; but she would not do this until i had assured her that we meant him no harm, and that my men should molest neither the one nor the other. 'we only want to know this,' i said, speaking slowly, in fear lest my language should be little more intelligible to them than their _patois_ to me. 'there are a dozen horsemen in the old castle there, are there not?' the man stilled his wife, who continued to chatter and mow at us, and answered eagerly that there were; adding, with a trembling oath, that the robbers had beaten him, robbed him of his small store of meal, and when he would have protested, thrown him out, breaking his leg. 'then how came you here?' i said. 'she brought me on her back,' he answered feebly. doubtless there were men in my train who would have done all that these others had done; but hearing the simple story told, they stamped and swore great oaths of indignation; and one, the roughest of the party, took out some black bread and gave it to the woman, whom under other circumstances he would not have hesitated to rob. maignan, who knew all arts appertaining to war, examined the man's leg and made a kind of cradle for it, while i questioned the woman. 'they are there still?' i said. 'i saw their horses tethered under the walls.' 'yes, god requite them!' she answered, trembling violently. 'tell me about the castle, my good woman,' i said. 'how many roads into it are there?' 'only one.' 'through the nearer tower?' she said yes, and finding that she understood me, and was less dull of intellect than her wretched appearance led me to expect, i put a series of questions to her which it would be tedious to detail. suffice it that i learned that it was impossible to enter or leave the ruin except through the nearer tower; that a rickety temporary, gate barred the entrance, and that from this tower, which was a mere shell of four walls, a narrow square-headed doorway without a door led into the court, beyond, which rose the habitable tower of two stories. 'do you know if they intend to stay there?' i asked. 'oh, ay, they bade me bring them faggots for their fire this morning, and i should have a handful of my own meal back,' she answered bitterly; and fell thereon into a passion of impotent rage, shaking both her clenched hands in the direction of the castle, and screaming frenzied maledictions in her cracked and quavering voice. i pondered awhile over what she had said; liking very little the thought of that narrow square-headed doorway through which we must pass before we could effect anything. and the gate, too, troubled me. it might not be a strong one, but we had neither powder, nor guns, nor any siege implements, and could not pull down stone walls with our naked hands. by seizing the horses we could indeed cut off bruhl's retreat; but he might still escape in the night; and in any case our pains would only increase the women's hardships while adding fuel to his rage. we must have some other plan. the sun was high by this time; the edge of the wood scarcely a hundred paces from us. by advancing a few yards through the trees i could see the horses feeding peacefully at the foot of the sunny slope, and even follow with my eyes the faint track which zigzagged up the hill to the closed gate. no one appeared--doubtless they were sleeping off the fatigue of the journey--and i drew no inspiration thence; but as i turned to consult maignan my eye lit on the faggots, and i saw in a flash that here was a chance of putting into practice a stratagem as old as the hills, yet ever fresh, and not seldom successful. it was no time for over-refinement. my knaves were beginning to stray forward out of curiosity, and at any moment one of our horses, scenting those of the enemy, might neigh and give the alarm. hastily calling m. d'agen and maignan to me, i laid my plan before them, and satisfied myself that it had their approval; the fact that i had reserved a special part for the former serving to thaw the reserve which had succeeded to his outbreak, of the night before. after some debate maignan persuaded me that the old woman had not sufficient nerve to play the part i proposed for her, and named fanchette; who being called into council, did not belie the opinion we had formed of her courage. in a few moments our preparations were complete: i had donned the old charcoal-burner's outer rags, fanchette had assumed those of the woman, while m. d'agen, who was for a time at a loss, and betrayed less taste for this part of the plan than for any other, ended by putting on the jerkin and hose of the man who had served us as guide. when all was ready i commended the troop to maignan's discretion, charging him in the event of anything happening to us to continue the most persistent efforts for mademoiselle's release, and on no account to abandon her. having received his promise to this effect, and being satisfied that he would keep it, we took up each of us a great faggot, which being borne on the head and shoulders served to hide the features very effectually; and thus disguised we boldly left the shelter of the trees. fanchette and i went first, tottering in a most natural fashion under the weight of our burdens, while m. d'agen followed a hundred yards behind. i had given maignan orders to make a dash for the gate the moment he saw the last named start to run. the perfect stillness of the valley, the clearness of the air, and the absence of any sign of life in the castle before us--which might have been that of the sleeping princess, so fairy-like it looked against the sky--with the suspense and excitement in our own breasts, which these peculiarities seemed to increase a hundred-fold, made the time that followed one of the strangest in my experience. it was nearly ten o'clock, and the warm sunshine flooding everything about us rendered the ascent, laden as we were, laborious in the extreme. the crisp, short turf, which had scarcely got its spring growth, was slippery and treacherous. we dared not hasten, for we knew not what eyes were upon us, and we dared as little after we had gone half-way--lay our faggots down, lest the action should disclose too much of our features. when we had reached a point within a hundred paces of the gate, which still remained obstinately closed, we stood to breathe ourselves, and balancing my bundle on my head, i turned to make sure that all was right behind us. i found that m. d'agen, intent on keeping his distance, had chosen the same moment for rest, and was sitting in a very natural manner on his faggot, mopping his face with the sleeve of his jerkin. i scanned the brown leafless wood, in which we had left maignan and our men; but i could detect no glitter among the trees nor any appearance likely to betray us. satisfied on these points, i muttered a few words of encouragement to fanchette, whose face was streaming with perspiration; and together we turned and addressed ourselves to our task, fatigue--for we had had no practice in carrying burdens on the head--enabling us to counterfeit the decrepitude of age almost to the life. the same silence prevailing as we drew nearer inspired me with not a few doubts and misgivings. even the bleat of a sheep would have been welcome in the midst of a stillness which seemed ominous. but no sheep bleated, no voice hailed us. the gate, ill-hung and full of fissures, remained closed. step by step we staggered up to it, and at length reached it. afraid to speak lest my accent should betray me, i struck the forepart of my faggot against it and waited: doubting whether our whole stratagem had not been perceived from the beginning, and a pistol-shot might not be the retort. nothing of the kind happened, however. the sound of the blow, which echoed dully through the building, died away, and the old silence resumed its sway. we knocked again, but fully two minutes elapsed before a grumbling voice, as of a man aroused from sleep, was heard drawing near, and footsteps came slowly and heavily to the gate. probably the fellow inspected us through a loophole, for he paused a moment, and my heart sank; but the next, seeing nothing suspicious, he unbarred the gate with a querulous oath, and, pushing it open, bade us enter and be quick about it. i stumbled forward into the cool, dark shadow, and the woman followed me, while the man, stepping out with a yawn, stood in the entrance, stretching himself in the sunshine. the roofless tower, which smelled dank and unwholesome, was empty, or cumbered only with rubbish and heaps of stones; but looking through the inner door i saw in the courtyard a smouldering fire and half a dozen men in the act of rousing themselves from sleep. i stood a second balancing my faggot, as if in doubt where to lay it down; and then assuring myself by a swift glance that the man who had let us in still had his back towards us, i dropped it across the inner doorway. fanchette, as she had been instructed, plumped hers upon it, and at the same moment i sprang to the door, and taking the man there by surprise, dealt him a violent blow between the shoulders, which sent him headlong down the slope. a cry behind me, followed by an oath of alarm, told me that the action was observed and that now was the pinch. in a second i was back at the faggots, and drawing a pistol from under my blouse was in time to meet the rush of the nearest man, who, comprehending all, sprang up, and made for me, with his sheathed sword. i shot him in the chest as he cleared the faggots--which, standing nearly as high as a man's waist, formed a tolerable obstacle--and he pitched forward at my feet. this balked his companions, who drew back; but unfortunately it was necessary for me to stoop to get my sword, which was hidden in the faggot i had carried. the foremost of the rascals took advantage of this. rushing at me with a long knife, he failed to stab me--for i caught his wrist--but he succeeded in bringing me to the ground. i thought i was undone. i looked to have the others swarm over upon us; and so it would doubtless have happened had not fanchette, with rare courage, dealt the first who followed a lusty blow on the body with a great stick she snatched up. the man collapsed on the faggots, and this hampered the rest. the check was enough. it enabled m. d'agen to come up, who, dashing in through the gate, shot down the first he saw before him, and running at the doorway with his sword with incredible fury and the courage which i had always known him to possess, cleared it in a twinkling. the man with whom i was engaged on the ground, seeing what had happened, wrested himself free with the strength of despair, and dashing through the outer door, narrowly escaped being ridden down by my followers as they swept up to the gate at a gallop, and dismounted amid a whirlwind of cries. in a moment they thronged in on us pell-mell, and as soon as i could lay my hand on my sword i led them through the doorway with a cheer, hoping to be able to enter the farther tower with the enemy. but the latter had taken the alarm too early and too thoroughly. the court was empty. we were barely in time to see the last man dart up a flight of outside stairs, which led to the first story, and disappear, closing a heavy door behind him. i rushed to the foot of the steps and would have ascended also, hoping against hope to find the door unsecured; but a shot which was fired through a loop hole and narrowly missed my head, and another which brought down one of my men, made me pause. discerning all the advantage to be on bruhl's side, since he could shoot us down from his cover, i cried a retreat; the issue of the matter leaving us masters of the entrance-tower, while they retained the inner and stronger tower, the narrow court between the two being neutral ground unsafe for either party. two of their men had fled outwards and were gone, and two lay dead; while the loss on our side was confined to the man who was shot, and fanchette, who had received a blow on the head in the _mêlée_, and was found, when we retreated, lying sick and dazed against the wall. it surprised me much, when i came to think upon it, that i had seen nothing of bruhl, though the skirmish had lasted two or three minutes from the first outcry, and been attended by an abundance of noise. of fresnoy, too, i now remembered that i had caught a glimpse only. these two facts seemed so strange that i was beginning to augur the worst, though i scarcely know why, when my spirits were marvellously raised and my fears relieved by a thing which maignan, who was the first to notice it, pointed out to me. this was the appearance at an upper window of a white 'kerchief, which was waved several times towards us. the window was little more than an arrow-slit, and so narrow and high besides that it was impossible to see who gave the signal; but my experience of mademoiselle's coolness and resource left me in no doubt on the point. with high hopes and a lighter heart than i had worn for some time i bestirred myself to take every precaution, and began by bidding maignan select two men and ride round the hill, to make sure that the enemy had no way of retreat open to him. chapter xxix. pestilence and famine. while maignan was away about this business i despatched two men to catch our horses, which were running loose in the valley, and to remove those of bruhl's party to a safe distance from the castle. i also blocked up the lower part of the door leading into the courtyard, and named four men to remain under arms beside it, that we might not be taken by surprise; an event of which i had the less fear, however, since the enemy were now reduced to eight swords, and could only escape, as we could only enter, through this doorway. i was still busied with these arrangements when m. d'agen joined me, and i broke off to compliment him on his courage, acknowledging in particular the service he had done me personally. the heat of the conflict had melted the young man's reserve, and flushed his face with pride; but as he listened to me he gradually froze again, and when i ended he regarded me with the same cold hostility. 'i am obliged to you,' he said, bowing. 'but may i ask what next, m. de marsac?' 'we have no choice,' i answered. 'we can only starve them out.' 'but the ladies?' he said, starting slightly. 'what of them?' 'they will suffer less than the men,' i replied. 'trust me, the latter will not bear starving long.' he seemed surprised, but i explained that with our small numbers we could not hope to storm the tower, and might think ourselves fortunate that we now had the enemy cooped up where he could not escape, and must eventually surrender. 'ay, but in the meantime how will you ensure the women against violence?' he asked, with an air which showed he was far from satisfied. 'i will see to that when maignan comes back,' i answered pretty confidently. the equerry appeared in a moment with the assurance that egress from the farther side of the tower was impossible. i bade him nevertheless keep a horseman moving round the hill, that we might have intelligence of any attempt. the order was scarcely given when a man--one of those i had left on guard at the door of the courtyard--came to tell me that fresnoy desired to speak with me on behalf of m. de bruhl. 'where is he?' i asked. 'at the inner door with a flag of truce,' was the answer. 'tell him, then,' i said, without offering to move, 'that i will communicate with no one except his leader, m. de bruhl. and add this, my friend,' i continued. 'say it aloud: that if the ladies whom he has in charge are injured by so much as a hair, i will hang every man within these walls, from m. de bruhl to the youngest lackey.' and i added a solemn oath to that effect. the man nodded, and went on his errand, while i and m. d'agen, with maignan, remained standing outside the gate, looking idly over the valley and the brown woods through which we had ridden in the early morning. my eyes rested chiefly on the latter, maignan's as it proved on the former. doubtless we all had our own thoughts. certainly i had, and for a while, in my satisfaction at the result of the attack and the manner in which we had bruhl confined, i did not remark the gravity which was gradually overspreading the equerry's countenance. when i did i took the alarm, and asked him sharply what was the matter. 'i don't like that, your excellency,' he answered, pointing into the valley. i looked anxiously, and looked, and saw nothing. 'what?' i said in astonishment. 'the blue mist,' he muttered, with a shiver. 'i have been watching it this half-hour, your excellency. it is rising fast.' i cried out on him for a maudlin fool, and m. d'agen swore impatiently; but for all that, and despite the contempt i strove to exhibit, i felt a sudden chill at my heart as i recognised in the valley below the same blue haze which had attended us through yesterday's ride, and left us only at nightfall. involuntarily we both fell to watching it as it rose slowly and more slowly, first enveloping the lower woods, and then spreading itself abroad in the sunshine. it is hard to witness a bold man's terror and remain unaffected by it; and i confess i trembled. here, in the moment of our seeming success, was something which i had not taken into account, something against which i could not guard either myself or others! 'see!' maignan whispered hoarsely, pointing again with his linger. 'it is the angel of death, your excellency! where he kills by ones and twos, he is invisible. but when he slays by hundreds and by thousands, men see the shadow of his wings!' 'chut, fool!' i retorted with, anger, which was secretly proportioned to the impression his weird saying made on me. 'you have been in battles! did you ever see him there? or at a sack? a truce to this folly,' i continued. 'and do you go and inquire what food we have with us. it may be necessary to send for some.' i watched him go doggedly off, and knowing the stout nature of the man and his devotion to his master, i had no fear that he would fail us; but there were others, almost as necessary to us, in whom i could not place the same confidence. and these had also taken the alarm. when i turned i found groups of pale-faced men, standing by twos and threes at my back; who, pointing and muttering and telling one another what maignan had told us, looked where we had looked. as one spoke and another listened, i saw the old panic revive in their eyes. men who an hour or two before had crossed the court under fire with the utmost resolution, and dared instant death without a thought, grew pale, and looking from this side of the valley to that; with faltering eyes, seemed to be seeking, like hunted animals, a place of refuge. fear, once aroused, hung is the air. men talked in whispers of the abnormal heat, and, gazing at the cloudless sky, fled from the sunshine to the shadow; or, looking over the expanse of woods, longed to be under cover and away from this lofty eyrie, which to their morbid eyes seemed a target for all the shafts of death. i was not slow to perceive the peril with which these fears and apprehensions, which rapidly became general, threatened my plans. i strove to keep the men employed, and to occupy their thoughts as far as possible with the enemy and his proceedings; but i soon found that even here a danger lurked; for maignan, coming to me by-and-by with a grave face, told me that one of bruhl's men had ventured out, and was parleying with the guard on our side of the court. i went at once and broke the matter off, threatening to shoot the fellow if he was not under cover before i counted ten. but the scared, sultry faces he left behind him told me that the mischief was done, and i could think of no better remedy for it than to give m. d'agen a hint, and station him at the outer gate with his pistols ready. the question of provisions, too, threatened to become a serious one; i dared not leave to procure them myself, nor could i trust any of my men with the mission. in fact the besiegers were rapidly becoming the besieged. intent on the rising haze and their own terrors, they forgot all else. vigilance and caution were thrown to the winds. the stillness of the valley, its isolation, the distant woods that encircled us and hung quivering in the heated air, all added to the panic. despite all my efforts and threats, the men gradually left their posts, and getting together in little parties at the gate, worked themselves up to such a pitch of dread that by two hours after noon they were fit for any folly; and at the mere cry of 'plague!' would have rushed to their horses and ridden in every direction. it was plain that i could depend for useful service on myself and three others only--of whom, to his credit be it said, simon fleix was one. seeing this, i was immensely relieved when i presently heard that fresnoy was again seeking to speak with me. i was no longer, it will be believed, for standing on formalities; but glad to waive in silence the punctilio on which i had before insisted, and anxious to afford him no opportunity of marking the slackness which prevailed among my men, i hastened to meet him at the door of the courtyard where maignan had detained him. i might have spared my pains, however. i had no more than saluted him and exchanged the merest preliminaries before i saw that he was in a state of panic far exceeding that of my following. his coarse face, which had never been prepossessing, was mottled and bedabbled with sweat; his bloodshot eyes, when they met mine, wore the fierce yet terrified expression of an animal caught in a trap. though his first word was an oath, sworn for the purpose of raising his courage, the bully's bluster was gone. he spoke in a low voice, and his hands shook; and for a penny-piece i saw he would have bolted past me and taken his chance in open flight. i needed nothing after this to assure me that he meditated something of the basest; and i took care how i answered him. 'i have known you stiff enough upon occasions,' i replied drily. 'and then, again, i have known you not so stiff, m. fresnoy.' 'only when you were in question,' he muttered with another oath. 'but flesh and blood cannot stand this. you could not yourself. between him and them i am fairly worn out. give me good terms--good terms, you understand, m. de marsac?' he whispered eagerly, sinking his voice still lower, 'and you shall have all you want.' 'your lives, and liberty to go where you please,' i answered coldly. 'the two ladies to be first given up to me uninjured. those are the terms.' 'but for me?' he said anxiously. 'for you? the same as the others,' i retorted. 'or i will make a distinction for old acquaintance sake, m. fresnoy; and if the ladies have aught to complain of, i will hang you first.' he tried to bluster and hold out for a sum of money, or at least for his horse to be given up to him. but i had made up my mind to reward my followers with a present of a horse apiece; and i was besides well aware that this was only an afterthought on his part, and that he had fully decided to yield. i stood fast, therefore. the result justified my firmness, for he presently agreed to surrender on those terms. 'ay, but m. de bruhl?' i said, desiring to learn clearly whether he had authority to treat for all. 'what of him?' he looked at me impatiently. 'come and see!' he said, with an ugly sneer. 'no, no, my friend,' i answered, shaking my head warily. 'that is not according to rule. you are the surrendering party, and it is for you to trust us. bring out the ladies, that i may have speech with them, and then i will draw off my men.' 'nom de dieu!' he cried hoarsely, with so much fear and rage in his face that i recoiled from him. 'that is just what i cannot do.' 'you cannot?' i rejoined with a sudden thrill of horror. 'why not? why not, man?' and in the excitement of the moment, conceiving the idea that the worst had happened to the women, i pushed him back with so much fury that he laid his hand on his sword. 'confound you!' he stuttered, 'stand back! it is not that, i tell you! mademoiselle is safe and sound, and madame, if she had her senses, would be sound too. it is not our fault if she is not. but i have not got the key of the rooms. it is in bruhl's pocket, i tell you!' 'oh!' i made answer drily. 'and bruhl?' 'hush, man,' fresnoy replied, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and bringing his pallid, ugly face, near to mine, 'he has got the plague!' i stared at him for a moment in silence; which he was the first to break. 'hush!' he muttered again, laying a trembling hand on my arm, 'if the men knew it--and not seeing him they are beginning to suspect it--they would rise on us. the devil himself could not keep them here. between him and them i am on a razor's edge. madame is with him, and the door is locked. mademoiselle is in a room; upstairs, and the door is locked. and he has the keys. what can i do? what can i do, man?' he cried, his voice hoarse with terror and dismay. 'get the keys,' i said instinctively. 'what? from him?' he muttered, with an irrepressible shudder, which shook his bloated cheeks. 'god forbid i should, see him! it takes stout men infallibly. i should be dead by night! by god, i should!' he continued, whining. now you are not stout, m. de marsac. if you will come with me i will draw off the men from that part; and you may go in and get the key from him.' his terror, which surpassed all feigning, and satisfied me without doubt that he was in earnest, was so intense that it could not fail to infect me. i felt my face, as i looked into his, grow to the same hue. i trembled as he did and grew sick. for if there is a word which blanches the soldier's cheek and tries his heart more than another, it is the name of the disease which travels in the hot noonday, and, tainting the strongest as he rides in his pride, leaves him in a few hours a poor mass of corruption. the stoutest and the most reckless fear it; nor could i, more than another, boast myself indifferent to it, or think of its presence without shrinking. but the respect in which a man of birth holds himself saves him from the unreasoning fear which masters the vulgar; and in a moment i recovered myself, and made up my mind what it behoved me to do. 'wait awhile,' i said sternly, 'and i will come with you.' he waited accordingly, though with manifest impatience, while i sent for m. d'agen, and communicated to him what i was about to do. i did not think it necessary to enter into details, or to mention bruhl's state, for some of the men were well in hearing. i observed that the young gentleman received my directions with a gloomy and dissatisfied air. but i had become by this time so used to his moods, and found myself so much mistaken in his character, that i scarcely gave the matter a second thought. i crossed the court with fresnoy, and in a moment had mounted the outside staircase and passed through the heavy doorway. the moment i entered, i was forced to do fresnoy the justice of admitting that he had not come to me before he was obliged. the three men who were on guard inside tossed down their weapons at sight of me, while a fourth, who was posted at a neighbouring window, hailed me with a cry of relief. from the moment i crossed the threshold the defence was practically at an end. i might, had i chosen or found it consistent with honour, have called in my following and secured the entrance. without pausing, however, i passed on to the foot of a gloomy stone staircase winding up between walls of rough masonry; and here fresnoy stood on one side and stopped. he pointed upwards with a pale face and muttered, 'the door on the left.' leaving him there watching me as i went upwards, i mounted slowly to the landing, and by the light of an arrow-slit which dimly lit the ruinous place found the door he had described, and tried it with my hand. it was locked, but i heard someone moan in the room, and a step crossed the floor, as if he or another came to the door and listened. i knocked, hearing my heart beat in the silence. at last a voice quite strange to me cried, 'who is it?' 'a friend,' i muttered, striving to dull my voice that they might not hear me below. 'a friend!' the bitter answer came. 'go! you have made a mistake! we have no friends.' 'it is i, m. de marsac,' i rejoined, knocking more imperatively. i would see m. de bruhl; i must see him.' the person inside, at whose identity i could now make a guess, uttered a low exclamation, and still seemed to hesitate. but on my repeating my demand i heard a rusty bolt withdrawn, and madame de bruhl, opening the door, a few inches, showed her face in the gap. 'what do you want?' she murmured jealously. prepared as i was to see her, i was shocked by the change in her appearance, a change which even that imperfect light failed to hide. her blue eyes had grown larger and harder, and there were dark marks under them. her face, once so brilliant, was grey and pinched; her hair had lost its golden lustre. 'what do you want?' she repeated, eyeing me fiercely. 'to see him,' i answered. 'you know?' she muttered. 'you know that he----' i nodded. 'and you still want to come in? my god! swear you will not hurt him?' 'heaven forbid!' i said; and on that she held the door open that i might enter. but i was not half-way across the room before she had passed me, and was again between me and the wretched makeshift pallet. nay, when i stood and looked down at him, as he moaned and rolled in senseless agony, with livid face and distorted features (which the cold grey light of that miserable room rendered doubly appalling), she hung over him and fenced him from me: so that looking on him and her, and remembering how he had treated her, and why he came to be in this place, i felt unmanly tears rise to my eyes. the room was still a prison, a prison with broken mortar covering the floor and loopholes for windows; but the captive was held by other chains than those of force. when she might have gone free, her woman's love surviving all that he had done to kill it, chained her to his side with fetters which old wrongs and present danger were powerless to break. it was impossible that i could view a scene so strange without feelings of admiration as well as pity; or without forgetting for a while, in my respect for madame de bruhl's devotion, the risk which had seemed so great to me on the stairs. i had come simply for a purpose of my own, and with no thought of aiding him who lay here. but so great, as i have noticed on other occasions, is the power of a noble example, that, before i knew it, i found myself wondering what i could do to help this man, and how i could relieve madame in the discharge of offices which her husband had as little right to expect at her hands as at mine. at the mere sound of the word plague i knew she would be deserted in this wilderness by all, or nearly all; a reflection which suggested to me that i should first remove mademoiselle to a distance, and then consider what help i could afford here. i was about to tell her the purpose with which i had come when a paroxysm more than ordinarily violent, and induced perhaps by the excitement of my presence--though he seemed beside himself--seized him, and threatened to tax her powers to the utmost. i could not look on and see her spend herself in vain; and almost before i knew what i was doing i had laid my hands on him and after a brief struggle thrust him back exhausted on the couch. she looked at me so strangely after that that in the half-light which the loopholes afforded i tried in vain to read her meaning. 'why did you come?' she cried at length, breathing quickly. 'you, of all men? why did you come? he was no friend of yours, heaven knows!' 'no, madame, nor i of his,' i answered bitterly, with a sudden revulsion of feeling. 'then why are you here?' she retorted. 'i could not send one of my men,' i answered. 'and i want the key of the room above.' at the mention of that--the room above--she flinched as if i had struck her, and looked as strangely at bruhl as she had before looked at me. no doubt the reference to mademoiselle de la vire recalled to her mind her husband's wild passion for the girl, which for the moment she had forgotten. nevertheless she did not speak, though her face turned very pale. she stooped over the couch, such as it was, and searching his clothes, presently stood up, and held out the key to me. 'take it, and let her out,' she said with a forced smile. 'take it up yourself, and do it. you have done so much for her it is right that you should do this.' i took the key, thanking her with more haste than thought, and turned towards the door, intending to go straight up to the floor above and release mademoiselle. my hand was already on the door, which madame, i found, had left ajar in the excitement of my entrance, when i heard her step behind me. the next instant she touched me on the shoulder. 'you fool!' she exclaimed, her eyes flashing, 'would you kill her? would you go from him to her, and take the plague to her? god forgive me, it was in my mind to send you. and men are such puppets you would have gone!' i trembled with horror, as much at my stupidity as at her craft. for she was right: in another moment i should have gone, and comprehension and remorse would have come too late. as it was, in my longing at once to reproach her for her wickedness and to thank her for her timely repentance, i found no words; but i turned away in silence and went out with a full heart. chapter xxx. stricken. outside the door, standing in the dimness of the landing, i found m. d'agen. at any other time i should have been the first to ask him why he had left the post which i had assigned to him. but at the moment i was off my balance, and his presence suggested nothing more than that here was the very person who could best execute my wishes. i held out the key to him at arms length, and bade him release mademoiselle de la vire, who was in the room above, and escort her out of the castle. 'do not let her linger here,' i continued urgently. 'take her to the place where we found the wood-cutters. you need fear no resistance.' 'but bruhl?' he said, as he took the key mechanically from me. 'he is out of the question,' i answered in a low voice. 'we have done with him. he has the plague.' he uttered a sharp exclamation. 'what of madame, then?' he muttered. 'she is with him,' i said. he cried out suddenly at that, sucking in his breath, as i have known men do in pain. and but that i drew back he would have laid his hand on my sleeve. 'with him?' he stammered. 'how is that?' 'why, man, where else should she be?' i answered, forgetting that the sight of those two together had at first surprised me also, as well as moved me. 'or who else should be with him? he is her husband.' he stared at me for a moment at that, and then he turned slowly away and began to go up; while i looked after him, gradually thinking out the clue to his conduct. could it be that it was not mademoiselle attracted him, but madame de bruhl? and with that hint i understood it all. i saw in a moment the conclusion to which he had come on hearing of the presence of madame in my room. in my room at night! the change had dated from that time; instead of a careless, light-spirited youth he had become in a moment a morose and restive churl, as difficult to manage as an unbroken colt. quite clearly i saw now the meaning of the change; why he had shrunk from me, and why all intercourse between us had been so difficult and so constrained. i laughed to think how he had deceived himself, and how nearly i had come to deceiving myself also. and what more i might have thought i do not know, for my meditations were cut short at this point by a loud outcry below, which, beginning in one or two sharp cries of alarm and warning, culminated quickly in a roar of anger and dismay. fancying i recognised maignan's voice, i ran down the stairs, seeking a loophole whence i could command the scene; but finding none, and becoming more and more alarmed, i descended to the court, which i found, to my great surprise, as empty and silent as an old battle-field. neither on the enemy's side nor on ours was a single man to be seen. with growing dismay i sprang across the court and darted through the outer tower, only to find that and the gateway equally unguarded. nor was it until i had passed through the latter, and stood on the brow of the slope, which we had had to clamber with so much toil, that i learned what was amiss. far below me a string of men, bounding and running at speed, streamed down the hill towards the horses. some were shouting, some running silently, with their elbows at their sides and their scabbards leaping against their calves. the horses stood tethered in a ring near the edge of the wood, and by some oversight had been left unguarded. the foremost runner i made out to be fresnoy; but a number of his men were close upon him, and then after an interval came maignan, waving his blade and emitting frantic threats with every stride. comprehending at once that fresnoy and his following, rendered desperate by panic and the prospective loss of their horses, had taken advantage of my absence and given maignan the slip, i saw i could do nothing save watch the result of the struggle. this was not long delayed. maignan's threats, which seemed to me mere waste of breath, were not without effect on those he followed. there is nothing which demoralises men like flight. troopers who have stood charge after charge while victory was possible will fly like sheep, and like sheep allow themselves to be butchered, when they have once turned the back. so it was here. many of fresnoy's men were stout fellows, but having started to run they had no stomach for fighting. their fears caused maignan to appear near, while the horses seemed distant; and one after another they turned aside and made like rabbits for the wood. only fresnoy, who had taken care to have the start of all, kept on, and, reaching the horses, cut the rope which tethered the nearest, and vaulted nimbly on its back. safely seated there, he tried to frighten the others into breaking loose; but not succeeding at the first attempt, and seeing maignan, breathing vengeance, coming up with him, he started his horse, a bright bay, and rode off laughing along the edge of the wood. fully content with the result--for our carelessness, might have cost us very dearly--i was about to turn away when i saw that maignan had mounted and was preparing to follow. i stayed accordingly to see the end, and from my elevated position enjoyed a first-rate view of the race which ensued. both were heavy weights, and at first maignan gained no ground. but when a couple of hundred yards had been covered fresnoy had the ill-luck to blunder into some heavy ground, and this enabling his pursuer, who had time to avoid it, to get within two-score paces of him, the race became as exciting as i could wish. slowly and surely maignan, who had chosen the cid, reduced the distance between them to a score of paces--to fifteen--to ten. then fresnoy, becoming alarmed, began to look over his shoulder and ride in earnest. he had no whip, and i saw him raise his sheathed sword, and strike his beast on the flank. it sprang forward, and appeared for a few strides to be holding its own. again he repeated the blow--but this time with a different result. while his hand was still in the air, his horse stumbled, as it seemed to me, made a desperate effort to recover itself, fell headlong and rolled over and over. something in the fashion of the fall, which reminded me of the mishap i had suffered on the way to chizé, led me to look more particularly at the horse as it rose trembling to its feet, and stood with drooping head. sure enough, a careful glance enabled me, even at that distance, to identify it as matthew's bay--the trick-horse. shading my eyes, and gazing on the scene with increased interest, i saw maignan, who had dismounted, stoop over something on the ground, and again after an interval stand upright. but fresnoy did not rise. nor was it without awe that, guessing what had happened to him, i remembered how he had used this very horse to befool me; how heartlessly he had abandoned matthew, its owner; and by what marvellous haps--which men call chances--providence had brought it to this place, and put it in his heart to choose it out of a score which stood ready to his hand! i was right. the man's neck was broken. he was quite dead. maignan passed the word to one, and he to another, and so it reached me on the hill. it did not fail to awaken memories both grave and wholesome. i thought of st. jean d'angely, of chizé, of the house in the ruelle d'arcy; then in the midst of these reflections i heard voices, and turned to find mademoiselle, with m. d'agen behind me. her hand was still bandaged, and her dress, which she had not changed since leaving blois, was torn and stained with mud. her hair was in disorder; she walked with a limp. fatigue and apprehension had stolen the colour from her cheeks, and in a word she looked, when i turned, so wan and miserable that for a moment i feared the plague had seized her. the instant, however, that she caught sight of me a wave of colour invaded, not her cheeks only, but her brow and neck. from her hair to the collar of her gown she was all crimson. for a second she stood gazing at me, and then, as i saluted her, she sprang forward. had i not stepped back she would have taken my hands. my heart so overflowed with joy at this sight, that in the certainty her blush gave me i was fain to toy with my happiness. all jealousy of m. d'agen was forgotten; only i thought it well not to alarm her by telling her what i knew of the bruhls. 'mademoiselle,' i said earnestly, bowing, but retreating from her, 'i thank god for your escape. one of your enemies lies helpless here, and another is dead yonder.' 'it is not of my enemies i am thinking,' she answered quickly, 'but of god, of whom you rightly remind me; and then of my friends.' 'nevertheless,' i answered as quickly, 'i beg you will not stay to thank them now, but go down to the wood with m. d'agen, who will do all that may be possible to make you comfortable.' 'and you, sir?' she said, with a charming air of confusion. 'i must stay here,' i answered, 'for a while.' 'why?' she asked with a slight frown. i did not know how to tell her, and i began lamely. 'someone must stop with madame,' i said without thought. 'madame?' she exclaimed. 'does she require assistance? i will stop.' 'god forbid!' i cried. i do not know how she understood the words, but her face, which had been full of softness, grew hard. she moved quickly towards me; but, mindful of the danger i carried about me, i drew farther back. 'no nearer, mademoiselle,' i murmured, 'if you please.' she looked puzzled, and finally angry, turning away with a sarcastic bow. 'so be it, then, sir,' she said proudly, 'if you desire it. m. d'agen, if you are not afraid of me, will you lead me down?' i stood and watched them go down the hill, comforting myself with the reflection that to-morrow, or the next day, or within a few days at most, all would be well. scanning her figure as she moved, i fancied that she went with less spirit as the space increased between us. and i pleased myself with the notion. a few days, a few hours, i thought, and all would be well. the sunset which blazed in the west was no more than a faint reflection of the glow which for a few minutes pervaded my mind, long accustomed to cold prospects and the chill of neglect. a term was put to these pleasant imaginings by the arrival of maignan; who, panting: from the ascent of the hill, informed me with a shamefaced air that the tale of horses was complete, but that four of our men were missing, and had doubtless gone off with the fugitives. these proved to be m. d'agen's two lackeys and the two varlets m. de rambouillet had lent us. there remained besides simon fleix only maignan's three men from rosny; but the state in which our affairs now stood enabled us to make light of this. i informed the equerry--who visibly paled at the news--that m. de bruhl lay ill of the plague, and like to die; and i bade him form a camp in the wood below, and, sending for food to the house where we had slept the night before, make mademoiselle as comfortable as circumstances permitted. he listened with surprise, and when i had done asked with concern what i intended to do myself. 'someone must remain with madame de bruhl,' i answered. 'i have already been to the bedside to procure the key of mademoiselle's room, and i run no farther risk. all i ask is that you will remain in the neighbourhood, and furnish us with supplies should it be necessary.' he looked at me with emotion, which, strongly in conflict with his fears as it was, touched me not a little. 'but morbleu! m. de marsac,' he said, 'you will take the plague and die.' 'if god wills,' i answered, very lugubriously i confess, for pale looks in one commonly so fearless could not but depress me. 'but if not, i shall escape. any way, my friend,' i continued, 'i owe you a quittance. simon fleix has an inkhorn and paper. bid him bring them to this stone and leave them, and i will write that maignan, the equerry of the baron de rosny, served me to the end as a brave soldier and an honest friend. what, _mon ami?_' i continued, for i saw that he was overcome by this, which was, indeed, a happy thought of mine. 'why not? it is true, and will aquit you with the baron. do it, and go. advise m. d'agen, and be to him what you have been to me.' he swore two or three great oaths, such as men of his kind use to hide an excess of feeling, and after some further remonstrance went away to carry out my orders; leaving me to stand on the brow in a strange kind of solitude, and watch horses and men withdraw to the wood, until the whole valley seemed left to me and stillness and the grey evening. for a time i stood in thought. then reminding myself, for a fillip to my spirits, that i had been far more alone when i walked the streets of st. jean friendless and threadbare (than i was now), i turned, and swinging my scabbard against my boots for company, stumbled through the dark, silent courtyard, and mounted as cheerfully as i could to madame's room. to detail all that passed during the next five days would be tedious and in indifferent taste, seeing that i am writing this memoir for the perusal of men of honour; for though i consider the offices which the whole can perform for the sick to be worthy of the attention of every man, however well born, who proposes to see service, they seem to be more honourable in the doing than the telling. one episode, however, which marked those days filled me then, as it does now, with the most lively pleasure; and that was the unexpected devotion displayed by simon fleix, who, coming to me, refused to leave, and showed himself at this pinch to be possessed of such sterling qualities that i freely forgave him the deceit he had formerly practised on me. the fits of moody silence into which he still fell at times and an occasional irascibility seemed to show that he had not altogether conquered his insane fancy; but the mere fact that he had come to me in a situation of hazard, and voluntarily removed himself from mademoiselle's neighbourhood, gave me good hope for the future. m. de bruhl died early on the morning of the second day, and simon and i buried him at noon. he was a man of courage and address, lacking only principles. in spite of madame's grief and prostration, which were as great as though she had lost the best husband in the world, we removed before night to a separate camp in the woods; and left with the utmost relief the grey ruin on the hill, in which, it seemed to me, we had lived an age. in our new bivouac, where, game being abundant, and the weather warm, we lacked no comfort, except the society of our friends, we remained four days longer. on the fifth morning we met the others of our company by appointment on the north road, and commenced the return journey. thankful that we had escaped contagion, we nevertheless still proposed to observe for a time such precautions in regard to the others as seemed necessary; riding in the rear and having no communication with them, though they showed by signs the pleasure they felt at seeing us. from the frequency with which mademoiselle turned and looked behind her, i judged she had overcome her pique at my strange conduct; which the others should by this time have explained to her. content, therefore, with the present, and full of confidence in the future, i rode along in a rare state of satisfaction; at one moment planning what i would do, and at another reviewing what i had done. the brightness and softness of the day, and the beauty of the woods, which in some places, i remember, were bursting into leaf, contributed much to establish me in this frame of mind. the hateful mist, which had so greatly depressed us, had disappeared; leaving the face of the country visible in all the brilliance of early spring. the men who rode before us, cheered by the happy omen, laughed and talked as they rode, or tried the paces of their horses, where the trees grew sparsely; and their jests and laughter coming pleasantly to our ears as we followed, warmed even madame's sad face to a semblance of happiness. i was riding along in this state of contentment when a feeling of fatigue, which the distance we had come did not seem to justify, led me to spur the cid into a brisker pace. the sensation of lassitude still continued, however, and indeed grew worse; so that i wondered idly whether i had over-eaten myself at my last meal. then the thing passed for a while from, my mind, which the descent of a steep hill sufficiently occupied. but a few minutes later, happening to turn in the saddle, i experienced a strange and sudden dizziness; so excessive as to force me to grasp the cantle, and cling to it, while trees and hills appeared to dance round me. a quick, hot pain in the side followed, almost before i recovered the power of thought; and this increased so rapidly, and was from the first so definite, that, with a dreadful apprehension already formed in my mind, i thrust my hand inside my clothes, and found that swelling which is the most sure and deadly symptom of the plague. the horror of that moment--in which i saw all those things on the possession of which i had just been congratulating myself, pass hopelessly from me, leaving me in dreadful gloom--i will not attempt to describe in this place. let it suffice that the world lost in a moment its joyousness, the sunshine its warmth. the greenness and beauty round me, which an instant before had filled me with pleasure, seemed on a sudden no more than a grim and cruel jest at my expense, and i an atom perishing unmarked and unnoticed. yes, an atom, a mote; the bitterness of that feeling i well remember. then, in no long time--being a soldier--i recovered my coolness, and, retaining the power to think, decided what it behoved me to do. chapter xxxi. under the greenwood. to escape from my companions on some pretext, which should enable me to ensure their safety without arousing their fears, was the one thought which possessed me on the subsidence of my first alarm. probably it answered to that instinct in animals which bids them get away alone when wounded or attacked by disease; and with me it had the fuller play as the pain prevailed rather by paroxysms than in permanence, and, coming and going, allowed intervals of ease, in which i was able to think clearly and consecutively, and even to sit firmly in the saddle. the moment one of these intervals enabled me to control myself, i used it to think where i might go without danger to others; and at once and naturally my thoughts turned to the last place we had passed; which happened to be the house in the gorge where we had received news of bruhl's divergence from the road. the man who lived there alone had had the plague; therefore he did not fear it. the place itself was solitary, and i could reach it, riding slowly, in half an hour. on the instant and without more delay i determined on this course. i would return, and, committing myself to the fellow's good offices, bid him deny me to others, and especially to my friends--should they seek me. aware that i had no time to lose if i would put this plan into execution before the pains returned to sap my courage, i drew bridle at once, and muttered some excuse to madame; if i remember rightly, that i had dropped my gauntlet. whatever the pretext--and my dread was great lest she should observe any strangeness in my manner--it passed with her; by reason, chiefly, i think, of the grief which monopolised her. she let me go, and before anyone else could mark or miss me i was a hundred yards away on the back-track, and already sheltered from observation by a turn in the road. the excitement of my evasion supported me for a while after leaving her; and then for another while, a paroxysm of pain deprived me of the power of thought. but when this last was over, leaving me weak and shaken, yet clear in my mind, the most miserable sadness and depression that can be conceived came upon me; and, accompanying me through the wood, filled its avenues (which doubtless were fair enough to others' eyes) with the blackness of despair. i saw but the charnel-house, and that everywhere. it was not only that the horrors of the first discovery returned upon me and almost unmanned me; nor only that regrets and memories, pictures of the past and plans for the future, crowded thick upon my mind, so that i could have wept at the thought of all ending here. but in my weakness mademoiselle's face shone where the wood was darkest, and, tempting and provoking me to return--were it only to tell her that, grim and dull as i seemed, i loved her--tried me with a subtle temptation almost beyond my strength to resist. all that was mean in me rose in arms, all that was selfish clamoured to know why i must die in the ditch while others rode in the sunshine; why i must go to the pit, while others loved and lived! and so hard was i pressed that i think i should have given way had the ride been longer or my horse less smooth and nimble. but in the midst of my misery, which bodily pain was beginning to augment to such a degree that i could scarcely see, and had to ride gripping the saddle with both hands, i reached the mill. my horse stopped of its own accord. the man we had seen before came out. i had just strength left to tell him what was the matter, and what i wanted; and then a fresh attack came on, with sickness, and overcome by vertigo i fell to the ground. i have but an indistinct idea what happened after that; until i found myself inside the house, clinging to the man's arm. he pointed to a box-bed in one corner of the room (which was, or seemed to my sick eyes, gloomy and darksome in the extreme), and would have had me lie down in it. but something inside me revolted against the bed, and despite the force he used, i broke away, and threw myself on a heap of straw which i saw in another corner. 'is not the bed good enough for you?' he grumbled. i strove to tell him it was not that. 'it should be good enough to die on,' he continued brutally. 'there's five have died on that bed, i'd have you know! my wife one, and my son another, and my daughter another; and then my son again, and a daughter again. five! ay, five in that bed!' brooding in the gloom of the chimney-corner, where he was busied about a black pot, he continued to mutter and glance at me askance; but after a while i swooned away with pain. when i opened my eyes again the room was darker. the man still sat where i had last seen him, but a noise, the same, perhaps, which had roused me, drew him as i looked to the unglazed window. a voice outside, the tones of which i seemed to know, inquired if he had seen me; and so carried away was i by the excitement of the moment that i rose on my elbow to hear the answer. but the man was staunch. i heard him deny all knowledge of me, and presently the sound of retreating hoofs and the echo of voices dying in the distance assured me i was left. then, at that instant, a doubt of the man on whose compassion i had thrown myself entered my mind. plague-stricken, hopeless as i was, it chilled me to the very heart; staying in a moment the feeble tears i was about to shed, and curing even the vertigo, which forced me to clutch at the straw on which i lay. whether the thought arose from a sickly sense of my own impotence, or was based on the fellow's morose air and the stealthy glances he continued to cast at me, i am as unable to say as i am to decide whether it was well-founded, or the fruit of my own fancy. possibly the gloom of the room and the man's surly words inclined me to suspicion; possibly his secret thoughts portrayed themselves in his hang-dog visage. afterwards it appeared that he had stripped me, while i lay, of everything of value; but he may have done this in the belief that i should die. all i know is that i knew nothing certain, because the fear died almost as soon as it was born. the man had scarcely seated himself again, or i conceived the thought, when a second alarm outside caused him to spring to his feet. scowling and muttering as he went, he hurried to the window. but before he reached it the door was dashed violently open, and simon fleix stood in the entrance. there came in with him so blessed a rush of light and life as in a moment dispelled the horror of the room, and stripped me at one and the same time of fear and manhood. for whether i would or no, at sight of the familiar face, which i had fled so lately, i burst into tears; and, stretching out my hands to him, as a frightened child might have done, called on him by name. i suppose the plague was by this time so plainly written on my face that all who looked might read; for he stood at gaze, staring at me, and was still so standing when a hand put him aside and a slighter, smaller figure, pale-faced and hooded, stood for a moment between me and the sunshine. it was mademoiselle! that, i thank god, restored me to myself, or i had been for ever shamed. i cried to them with all the voice i had left to take her away; and calling out frantically again and again that i had the plague and she would die, i bade the man close the door. nay, regaining something of strength in my fear for her, i rose up, half-dressed as i was, and would have fled into some corner to avoid her, still calling out to them to take her away, to take her away--if a fresh paroxysm had not seized me, so that i fell blind and helpless where i was. for a time after that i knew nothing; until someone held water to my lips, and i drank greedily, and presently awoke to the fact that the entrance was dark with faces and figures all gazing at me as i lay. but i could not see her; and i had sense enough to know and be thankful that she was no longer among them. i would fain have bidden maignan begone too, for i read the consternation in his face. but i could not muster strength or voice for the purpose, and when i turned my head to see who held me--ah me! it comes back to me still in dreams--it was mademoiselle's hair that swept my forehead and her hand that ministered to me; while tears she did not try to hide or wipe away fell on my hot cheek. i could have pushed her away even then, for she was slight and small; but the pains came upon me, and with a sob choking my voice i lost all knowledge. i am told that i lay for more than a month between life and death, now burning with fever and now in the cold fit; and that but for the tendance which never failed nor faltered, nor could have been outdone had my malady been the least infectious in the world, i must have died a hundred times, as hundreds round me did die week by week in that year. from the first they took me out of the house (where i think i should have perished quickly, so impregnated was it with the plague poison) and laid me under a screen of boughs in the forest, with a vast quantity of cloaks and horse-cloths cunningly disposed to windward. here i ran some risk from cold and exposure and the fall of heavy dews; but, on the other hand, had all the airs of heaven to clear away the humours and expel the fever from my brain. hence it was that when the first feeble beginnings of consciousness awoke in me again, they and the light stole in on me through green leaves, and overhanging boughs, and the freshness and verdure of the spring woods. the sunshine which reached my watery eyes was softened by its passage through great trees, which grew and expanded as i gazed up into them, until each became a verdant world, with all a world's diversity of life. grown tired of this, i had still long avenues of shade, carpeted with flowers, to peer into; or a little wooded bottom--where the ground fell away on one side--that blazed and burned with red-thorn. ay, and hence it was that the first sounds i heard, when the fever left me at last, and i knew morning from evening, and man from woman, were the songs of birds calling to their mates. mademoiselle and madame de bruhl, with fanchette and simon fleix, lay all this time in such shelter as could be raised for them where i lay; m. françois and three stout fellows, whom maignan left to guard us, living in a hut within hail. maignan himself, after seeing out a week of my illness, had perforce returned to his master, and no news had since been received from him. thanks to the timely move into the woods, no other of the party fell ill, and by the time i was able to stand and speak the ravages of the disease had so greatly decreased that fear was at an end. i should waste words were i to try to describe how the peace and quietude of the life we led in the forest during the time of my recovery sank into my heart; which had known, save by my mother's bedside, little of such joys. to awake in the morning to sweet sounds and scents, to eat with reviving appetite and feel the slow growth of strength, to lie all day in shade or sunshine as it pleased me, and hear women's voices and tinkling laughter, to have no thought of the world and no knowledge of it, so that we might have been, for anything we saw, in another sphere--these things might have sufficed for happiness without that which added to each and every one of them a sweeter and deeper and more lasting joy. of which next. i had not begun to take notice long before i saw that m. françois and madame had come to an understanding; such an one, at least, as permitted him to do all for her comfort and entertainment without committing her to more than was becoming at such a season. naturally this left mademoiselle much in my company; a circumstance which would have ripened into passion the affection i before entertained for her, had not gratitude and a nearer observance of her merits already elevated the feeling into the most ardent worship that even the youngest lover ever felt for his mistress. in proportion, however, as i and my love grew stronger, and mademoiselle's presence grew more necessary to my happiness--so that were she away but an hour i fell a-moping--she began to draw off from me, and absenting herself more and more on long walks in the woods, by-and-by reduced me to such a pitch of misery as bid fair to complete what the fever had left undone. if this had happened in the world i think it likely that i should have suffered in silence. but here, under the greenwood, in common enjoyment of god's air and earth, we seemed more nearly equal. she was scarce better dressed than a sutler's wife; while recollections of her wealth and station, though they assailed me nightly, lost much of their point in presence of her youth and of that fair and patient gentleness which forest life and the duties of a nurse had fostered. so it happened that one day, when she had been absent longer than usual, i took my courage in my hand and went to meet her as far as the stream which ran through the bottom by the redthorn. here, at a place where there were three stepping-stones, i waited for her; first taking away the stepping-stones, that she might have to pause, and, being at a loss, might be glad to see me. she came presently, tripping through an alley in the low wood, with her eyes on the ground, and her whole carriage full of a sweet pensiveness which it did me good to see. i turned my back on the stream before she saw me, and made a pretence of being taken up with something in another direction. doubtless she espied me soon, and before she came very near; but she made no sign until she reached the brink, and found the stepping-stones were gone. then, whether she suspected me or not, she called out to me, not once, but several times. for, partly to tantalise her, as lovers will, and partly because it charmed me to hear her use my name, i would not turn at once. when i did, and discovered her standing with one small foot dallying with the water, i cried out with well-affected concern; and in a great hurry ran towards her, paying no attention to her chiding or the pettish haughtiness with which she spoke to me. 'the stepping-stones are all on your side,' she said imperiously. 'who has moved them?' i looked about without answering, and at last pretended to find them; while she stood watching me, tapping the ground with one foot the while. despite her impatience, the stone which was nearest to her i took care to bring last--that she might not cross without my assistance. but after all she stepped over so lightly and quickly that the hand she placed in mine seemed scarcely to rest there a second. yet when she was over i managed to retain it; nor did she resist, though her cheek, which had been red before, turned crimson and her eyes fell, and bound to me by the link of her little hand, she stood beside me with her whole figure drooping. 'mademoiselle,' i said gravely, summoning all my resolution to my aid, 'do you know of what that stream with its stepping-stones reminds me?' she shook her head but did not answer. 'of the stream which has flowed between us from the day when i first saw you at st. jean,' i said in a low voice. 'it has flowed between us, and it still does--separating us.' 'what stream?' she murmured, with her eyes cast down, and her foot playing with the moss. 'you speak in riddles, sir.' 'you understand this one only too well, mademoiselle,' i answered. 'are you not young and gay and beautiful, while i am old, or almost old, and dull and grave? you are rich and well-thought-of at court, and i a soldier of fortune, not too successful. what did you think of me when you first saw me at st. jean? what when i came to rosny? that, mademoiselle,' i continued with fervour, 'is the stream which flows between us and separates us; and i know of but one stepping-stone that can bridge it.' she looked aside, toying with a piece of thorn-blossom she had picked. it was not redder than her cheeks. 'that one stepping-stone,' i said, after waiting vainly for any word or sign from her, 'is love. many weeks ago, mademoiselle, when i had little cause to like you, i loved you; i loved you whether i would or not, and without thought or hope of return. i should have been mad had i spoken to you then. mad, and worse than mad. but now, now that i owe you my life, now that i have drunk from your hand in fever, and, awaking early and late, have found you by my pillow--now that, seeing you come in and out in the midst of fear and hardship, i have learned to regard you as a woman kind and gentle as my mother--now that i love you, so that to be with you is joy, and away from you grief, is it presumption in me now, mademoiselle, to think that that stream may be bridged?' i stopped, out of breath, and saw that she was trembling. but she spoke presently. 'you said one stepping-stone?' she murmured. 'yes,' i answered hoarsely, trying in vain to look at her face, which she kept averted from me. 'there should be two,' she said, almost in a whisper. 'your love, sir, and--and mine. you have said much of the one, and nothing of the other. in that you are wrong, for i am proud still. and i would not cross the stream you speak of for any love of yours!' 'ah!' i cried in sharpest pain. 'but,' she continued, looking up at me on a sudden with eyes that told me all, 'because i love you i am willing to cross it--to cross it once for ever, and live beyond it all my life--if i may live my life with you.' i fell on my knee and kissed her hand again and again in a rapture of joy and gratitude. by-and-by she pulled it from me. 'if you will, sir,' she said, 'you may kiss my lips. if you do not, no man ever will.' after that, as may be guessed, we walked every day in the forest, making longer and longer excursions as my strength came back to me, and the nearer parts grew familiar. from early dawn, when i brought my love a posy of flowers, to late evening, when fanchette hurried her from me, our days were passed in a long round of delight; being filled full of all beautiful things--love, and sunshine, and rippling streams, and green banks, on which we sat together under scented limes, telling one another all we had ever thought, and especially all we had ever thought of one another. sometimes--when the light was low in the evening--we spoke of my mother; and once--but that was in the sunshine, when the bees were humming and my blood had begun to run strongly in my veins--i spoke of my great and distant kinsman, rohan. but mademoiselle would hear nothing of him, murmuring again and again in my ear, 'i have crossed, my love, i have crossed.' truly the sands of that hour-glass were of gold. but in time they ran out. first m. françois, spurred by the restlessness of youth, and convinced that madame would for a while yield no farther, left us, and went back to the world. then news came of great events that could not fail to move us. the king of france and the king of navarre had met at tours, and embracing in the sight of an immense multitude, had repulsed the league with slaughter in the suburb of st. symphorien. fast on this followed the tidings of their march northwards with an overwhelming army of fifty-thousand men of both religions, bent, rumour had it, on the signal punishment of paris. i grew--shame that i should say it--to think more and more of these things; until mademoiselle, reading the signs, told me one day that we must go. 'though never again,' she added with a sigh, 'shall we be so happy.' 'then why go?' i asked foolishly. 'because you are a man,' she answered with a wise smile, 'as i would have you be, and you need something besides love. to-morrow we will go.' 'whither?' i said in amazement. 'to the camp before paris,' she answered. 'we will go back in the light of day--seeing that we have done nothing of which to be ashamed--and throw ourselves on the justice of the king of navarre. you shall place me with madame catherine, who will not refuse to protect me; and so, sweet, you will have only yourself to think of. come, sir,' she continued, laying her little hand in mine, and looking into my eyes, 'you are not afraid?' 'i am more afraid than ever i used to be,' i said trembling. 'so i would have it,' she whispered, hiding her face on my shoulder. 'nevertheless we will go.' and go we did. the audacity of such a return in the face of turenne, who was doubtless in the king of navarre's suite, almost took my breath away; nevertheless, i saw that it possessed one advantage which no other course promised--that, i mean, of setting us right in the eyes of the world, and enabling me to meet in a straightforward manner such as maligned us. after some consideration i gave my assent, merely conditioning that until we reached the court we should ride masked, and shun as far as possible encounters by the road. chapter xxxii. a tavern brawl. on the following day, accordingly, we started. but the news of the two kings' successes, and particularly the certainty which these had bred in many minds that nothing short of a miracle could save paris, had moved so many gentlemen to take the road that we found the inns crowded beyond example, and were frequently forced into meetings which made the task of concealing our identity more difficult and hazardous than i had expected. sometimes shelter was not to be obtained on any terms, and then we had to lie in the fields or in any convenient shed. moreover, the passage of the army had swept the country so bare both of food and forage, that these commanded astonishing prices; and a long day's ride more than once brought us to our destination without securing for us the ample meal we had earned, and required. under these circumstances, it was with joy little short of transport that i recognised the marvellous change which had come over my mistress. bearing all without a murmur, or a frown, or so much as one complaining word, she acted on numberless occasions so as to convince me that she spoke truly--albeit i scarcely dared to believe it--when she said that she had but one trouble in the world, and that was the prospect of our coming separation. for my part, and despite some gloomy moments, when fear of the future overcame me, i rode in paradise riding by my mistress. it was her presence which glorified alike the first freshness of the morning, when we started with all the day before us, and the coolness of the late evening, when we rode hand-in-hand. nor could i believe without an effort that i was the same gaston de marsac whom she had once spurned and disdained. god knows i was thankful for her love. a thousand times, thinking of my grey hairs, i asked her if she did not repent; and a thousand times she answered no, with so much happiness in her eyes that i was fain to thank god again and believe her. notwithstanding the inconvenience of the practice, we made it a rule to wear our masks whenever we appeared in public; and this rule we kept more strictly as we approached paris. it exposed us to some comment and more curiosity, but led to no serious trouble until we reached etampes, twelve leagues from the capital; where we found the principal inn so noisy and crowded, and so much disturbed by the constant coming and going of couriers, that it required no experience to predicate the neighbourhood of the army. the great courtyard seemed to be choked with a confused mass of men and horses, through which we made our way with difficulty. the windows of the house were all open, and offered us a view of tables surrounded by men eating and drinking hastily, as the manner of travellers is. the gateway and the steps of the house were lined with troopers and servants and sturdy rogues; who scanned all who passed in or out, and not unfrequently followed them with ribald jests and nicknames. songs and oaths, brawling and laughter, with the neighing of horses and the huzzas of the beggars, who shouted whenever a fresh party arrived, rose above all, and increased the reluctance with which i assisted madame and mademoiselle to dismount. simon was no match for such an occasion as this; but the stalwart aspect of the three men whom maignan had left with me commanded respect, and attended by two of these i made a way for the ladies--not without some opposition and a few oaths--to enter the house. the landlord, whom we found crushed into a corner inside, and entirely overborne by the crowd which had invaded his dwelling, assured me that he had not the smallest garret he could place at my disposal; but i presently succeeded in finding a small room at the top, which i purchased from the four men who had taken possession of it. as it was impossible to get anything to eat there, i left a man on guard, and myself descended with madame and mademoiselle to the eating-room, a large chamber set with long boards, and filled with a rough and noisy crew. under a running fire of observations we entered, and found with difficulty three seats in an inner corner of the room. i ran my eye over the company, and noticed among them, besides a dozen travelling parties like our own, specimens of all those classes which are to be found in the rear of an army. there were some officers and more horse-dealers; half a dozen forage-agents and a few priests; with a large sprinkling of adventurers, bravos, and led-captains, and here and there two or three whose dress and the deference paid to them by their neighbours seemed to indicate a higher rank. conspicuous among these last were a party of four who occupied a small table by the door. an attempt had been made to secure some degree of privacy for them by interposing a settle between them and the room; and their attendants, who seemed to be numerous, did what they could to add to this by filling the gap with their persons. one of the four, a man of handsome dress and bearing, who sat in the place of honour, was masked, as we were. the gentleman at his right hand i could not see. the others, whom i could see, were strangers to me. some time elapsed before our people succeeded in procuring us any food, and during the interval we were exposed to an amount of comment on the part of those round us which i found very little to my liking. there were not half a dozen women present, and this and our masks rendered my companions unpleasantly conspicuous. aware, however, of the importance of avoiding an altercation which might possibly detain us, and would be certain to add to our notoriety, i remained quiet; and presently the entrance of a tall, dark-complexioned man, who carried himself with a peculiar swagger, and seemed to be famous for something or other, diverted the attention of the company from us. the new-comer was somewhat of maignan's figure. he wore a back and breast over a green doublet, and had an orange feather in his cap and an orange-lined cloak on his shoulder. on entering he stood a moment in the doorway, letting his bold black eyes rove round the room, the while he talked in a loud braggart fashion to his companions. there was a lack of breeding in the man's air, and something offensive in his look; which i noticed produced wherever it rested a momentary silence and constraint. when he moved farther into the room i saw that he wore a very long sword, the point of which trailed a foot behind him. he chose out for his first attentions the party of four whom i have mentioned; going up to them and accosting them with a ruffling air, directed especially to the gentleman in the mask. the latter lifted his head haughtily on finding himself addressed by a stranger, but did not offer to answer. someone else did, however, for a sudden bellow like that of an enraged bull proceeded from behind the settle. the words were lost in noise, the unseen speaker's anger seeming so overpowering that he could not articulate; but the tone and voice, which were in some way familiar to me, proved enough for the bully, who, covering his retreat with a profound bow, backed out rapidly, muttering what was doubtless an apology. cocking his hat more fiercely to make up for this repulse, he next proceeded to patrol the room, scowling from side to side as he went, with the evident intention of picking a quarrel with someone less formidable. by ill-chance his eye lit, as he turned, on our masks. he said something to his companions; and encouraged, no doubt, by the position of our seats at the board, which led him to think us people of small consequence, he came to a stop opposite us. 'what! more dukes here?' he cried scoffingly. 'hallo, you sir!' he continued to me, 'will you not unmask and drink a glass with me?' i thanked him civilly, but declined. his insolent eyes were busy, while i spoke, with madame's fair hair and handsome figure, which her mask failed to hide. 'perhaps the ladies will have better taste, sir,' he said rudely. 'will they not honour us with a sight of their pretty faces?' knowing the importance of keeping my temper i put constraint on myself, and answered, still with civility, that they were greatly fatigued and were about to retire. 'zounds!' he cried, 'that is not to be borne. if we are to lose them so soon, the more reason we should enjoy their _beaux yeux_ while we can. a short life and a merry one, sir. this is not a nunnery, nor, i dare swear, are your fair friends nuns.' though i longed to chastise him for this insult, i feigned deafness, and went on with my meal as if i had not heard him; and the table being between us prevented him going beyond words. after he had uttered one or two coarse jests of a similar character, which cost us less as we were masked, and our emotions could only be guessed, the crowd about us, seeing i took the thing quietly, began to applaud him; but more as it seemed to me out of fear than love. in this opinion i was presently confirmed on hearing from simon--who whispered the information in my ear as he handed a dish--that the fellow was an italian captain in the king's pay, famous for his skill with the sword and the many duels in which he had displayed it. mademoiselle, though she did not know this, bore with his insolence with a patience which astonished me; while madame appeared unconscious of it. nevertheless, i was glad when he retired and left us in peace. i seized the moment of his absence to escort the ladies through the room and upstairs to their apartment, the door of which i saw locked and secured. that done i breathed more freely; and feeling thankful that i had been able to keep my temper, took the episode to be at an end. but in this i was mistaken, as i found when i returned to the room in which we had supped, my intention being to go through it to the stables. i had not taken two paces across the floor before i found my road blocked by the italian, and read alike in his eyes and in the faces of the company--of whom many hastened to climb the tables to see what passed--that the meeting was premeditated. the man's face was flushed with wine; proud of his many victories, he eyed me with a boastful contempt my patience had perhaps given him the right to feel. 'ha! well met, sir,' he said, sweeping the floor with his cap in an exaggeration of respect, 'now, perhaps, your high-mightiness will condescend to unmask? the table is no longer between us, nor are your fair friends here to protect their _cher ami!_' 'if i still refuse, sir,' i said civilly, wavering between anger and prudence, and hoping still to avoid a quarrel which might endanger us all, 'be good enough to attribute it to private motives, and to no desire to disoblige you.' 'no, i do not think you wish to disoblige me,' he answered, laughing scornfully--and a dozen voices echoed the gibe. 'but for your private motives, the devil take them! is that plain enough, sir?' 'it is plain enough to show me that you are an ill-bred man!' i answered, choler getting the better of me. 'let me pass, sir.' 'unmask!' he retorted, moving so as still to detain me, 'or shall i call in the grooms to perform the office for you?' seeing at last that all my attempts to evade the man only fed his vanity, and encouraged him to further excesses, and that the motley crowd, who filled the room and already formed a circle round us, had made up their minds to see sport, i would no longer balk them; i could no longer do it, indeed, with honour. i looked round, therefore, for someone whom i might enlist as my second, but i saw no one with whom i had the least acquaintance. the room was lined from table to ceiling with mocking faces and scornful eyes all turned to me. my opponent saw the look, and misread it; being much accustomed, i imagine, to a one-sided battle. he laughed contemptuously. 'no, my friend, there is no way out of it,' he said. 'let me see your pretty face, or fight.' 'so be it,' i said quietly. 'if i have no other choice, i will fight.' 'in your mask?' he cried incredulously. 'yes,' i said sternly, feeling every nerve tingle with long-suppressed rage. 'i will fight as i am. off with your back and breast, if you are a man. and i will so deal with you that if you see to-morrow's sun you shall need a mask for the rest of your days!' 'ho! ho!' he answered, scowling at me in surprise, 'you sing in a different key now. but i will put a term to it. there is space enough between these tables, if you can use your weapon; and much more than you will need tomorrow.' 'to-morrow will show,' i retorted. without more ado he unfastened the buckles of his breast-piece, and relieving himself of it, stepped back a pace. those of the bystanders who occupied the part of the room he indicated--a space bounded by four tables, and not unfit for the purpose, though somewhat confined--hastened to get out of it, and seize instead upon neighbouring posts of 'vantage. the man's reputation was such, and his fame so great, that on all sides i heard naught but wagers offered against me at odds; but this circumstance, which might have flurried a younger man and numbed his arm, served only to set me on making the most of such openings as the fellow's presumption and certainty of success would be sure to afford. the news of the challenge running through the house had brought together by this time so many people as to fill the room from end to end, and even to obscure the light, which was beginning to wane. at the last moment, when we were on the point of engaging, a slight commotion marked the admission to the front of three or four persons, whose consequence or attendants gained them this advantage. i believed them to be the party of four i have mentioned, but at the time i could not be certain. in the few seconds of waiting while this went forward i examined our relative positions with the fullest intention of killing the man--whose glittering eyes and fierce smile filled me with a loathing which was very nearly hatred--if i could. the line of windows lay to my right and his left. the evening light fell across us, whitening the row of faces on my left, but leaving those on my right in shadow. it occurred to me on the instant that my mask was actually an advantage, seeing that it protected my sight from the side-light, and enabled me to watch his eyes and point with more concentration. 'you will be the twenty-third man i have killed!' he said boastfully, as we crossed swords and stood an instant on guard. 'take care!' i answered. 'you have twenty-three against you!' a swift lunge was his only answer. i parried it, and thrust, and we fell to work. we had not exchanged half a dozen blows, however, before i saw that i should need all the advantage which my mask and greater caution gave me. i had met my match, and it might be something more; but that for a time it was impossible to tell. he had the longer weapon, and i the longer reach. he preferred the point, after the new italian fashion, and i the blade. he was somewhat flushed with wine, while my arm had scarcely recovered the strength of which illness had deprived me. on the other hand, excited at the first by the cries of his backers, he played rather wildly; while i held myself prepared, and keeping up a strong guard, waited cautiously for any opening or mistake on his part. the crowd round us, which had hailed our first passes with noisy cries of derision and triumph, fell silent after a while, surprised and taken aback by their champion's failure to spit me at the first onslaught. my reluctance to engage had led them to predict a short fight and an easy victory. convinced of the contrary, they began to watch each stroke with bated breath; or now and again, muttering the name of jarnac, broke into brief exclamations as a blow more savage than usual drew sparks from our blades, and made the rafters ring with the harsh grinding of steel on steel. the surprise of the crowd, however, was a small thing compared with that of my adversary. impatience, disgust, rage, and doubt chased one another in turn across his flushed features. apprised that he had to do with a swordsman, he put forth all his power. with spite in his eyes he laboured blow on blow, he tried one form of attack after another, he found me equal, if barely equal, to all. and then at last there came a change. the perspiration gathered on his brow, the silence disconcerted him; he felt his strength failing under the strain, and suddenly, i think, the possibility of defeat and death, unthought of before, burst upon him. i heard him groan, and for a moment he fenced wildly. then he again recovered himself. but now i read terror in his eyes, and knew that the moment of retribution was at hand. with his back to the table, and my point threatening his breast, he knew at last what those others had felt! he would fain have stopped to breathe, but i would not let him though my blows also were growing feeble, and my guard weaker; for i knew that if i gave him time to recover himself he would have recourse to other tricks, and might out-man[oe]uvre me in the end. as it was, my black unchanging mask, which always confronted him, which hid all emotions and veiled even fatigue, had grown to be full of terror to him--full of blank, passionless menace. he could not tell how i fared, or what i thought, or how my strength stood. a superstitious dread was on him, and threatened to overpower him. ignorant who i was or whence i came, he feared and doubted, grappling with monstrous suspicions, which the fading light encouraged. his face broke out in blotches, his breath came and went in gasps, his eyes began to protrude. once or twice they quitted mine for a part of a second to steal a despairing glance at the rows of onlookers that ran to right and left of us. but he read no pity there. at last the end came--more suddenly than i had looked for it, but i think he was unnerved. his hand lost its grip of the hilt, and a parry which i dealt a little more briskly than usual sent the weapon flying among the crowd, as much to my astonishment as to that of the spectators. a volley of oaths and exclamations hailed the event; and for a moment i stood at gaze, eyeing him watchfully. he shrank back; then he made for a moment as if he would fling himself upon me dagger in hand. but seeing my point steady, he recoiled a second time, his face distorted with rage and fear. 'go!' i said sternly. 'begone! follow your sword! but spare the next man you conquer.' he stared at me, fingering his dagger as if he did not understand, or as if in the bitterness of his shame at being so defeated even life were unwelcome. i was about to repeat my words when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. 'fool!' a harsh growling voice muttered in my ear. 'do you want him to serve you as achon served matas? this is the way to deal with him.' and before i knew who spoke or what to expect a man vaulted over the table beside me. seizing the italian by the neck and waist, he flung him bodily--without paying the least regard to his dagger--into the crowd. 'there!' the new-comer cried, stretching his arms as if the effort had relieved him, 'so much for him! and do you breathe yourself. breathe yourself, my friend,' he continued with a vain-glorious air of generosity. 'when you are rested and ready, you and i will have a bout. mon dieu! what a thing it is to see a man! and by my faith you are a man!' 'but, sir,' i said, staring at him in the utmost bewilderment, 'we have no quarrel.' 'quarrel?' he cried in his loud, ringing voice. 'heaven forbid! why should we? i love a man, however, and when i see one i say to him, "i am crillon! fight me!" but i see you are not yet rested. patience! there is no hurry. berthon de crillon is proud to wait your convenience. in the meantime, gentlemen,' he continued, turning with a grand air to the spectators, who viewed this sudden _bouleversement_ with unbounded surprise, 'let us do what we can. take the word from me, and cry all, "_vive le roi, et vive l'inconnu!_" like people awaking from a dream--so great was their astonishment--the company complied and with the utmost heartiness. when the shout died away, someone cried in turn, 'vive crillon!' and this was honoured with a fervour which brought the tears to the eyes of that remarkable man, in whom bombast was so strangely combined with the firmest and most reckless courage. he bowed again and again, turning himself about in the small space between the tables, while his face shone with pleasure and enthusiasm. meanwhile i viewed him with perplexity. i comprehended that it was his voice i had heard behind the settle; but i had neither the desire to fight him nor so great a reserve of strength after my illness as to be able to enter on a fresh contest with equanimity. when he turned to me, therefore, and again asked, 'well, sir, are you ready?' i could think of no better answer than that i had already made to him, 'but, sir, i have no quarrel with you.' 'tut, tut!' he answered querulously, 'if that is all, let us engage.' 'that is not all, however,' i said, resolutely putting up my sword. 'i have not only no quarrel with m. de crillon, but i received at his hands when i last saw him a considerable service.' 'then now is the time to return it,' he answered briskly, and as if that settled the matter. i could not refrain from laughing. 'nay, but i have still an excuse,' i said. 'i am barely recovered from an illness, and am weak. even so, i should be loth to decline a combat with some; but a better man than i may give the wall to m. de crillon and suffer no disgrace.' 'oh, if you put it that way--enough said,' he answered in a tone of disappointment. 'and, to be sure, the light is almost gone. that is a comfort. but you will not refuse to drink a cup of wine with me? your voice i remember, though i cannot say who you are or what service i did you. for the future, however, count on me. i love a man who is brave as well as modest, and know no better friend than a stout swordsman.' i was answering him in fitting terms--while the fickle crowd, which a few minutes earlier had been ready to tear me, viewed us from a distance with respectful homage--when the masked gentleman who had before been in his company drew near and saluted me with much stateliness. 'i congratulate you, sir,' he said, in the easy tone of a great man condescending. 'you use the sword as few use it, and fight with your head as well as your hands. should you need a friend or employment, you will honour me by remembering that you are known to the vicomte de turenne.' i bowed low to hide the start which the mention of his name caused me. for had i tried, ay, and possessed to aid me all the wit of m. de brantôme, i could have imagined nothing more fantastic than this meeting; or more entertaining than that i, masked, should talk with the vicomte de turenne masked, and hear in place of reproaches and threats of vengeance a civil offer of protection. scarcely knowing whether i should laugh or tremble, or which should occupy me more, the diverting thing that had happened or the peril we had barely escaped, i made shift to answer him, craving his indulgence if i still preserved my incognito. even while i spoke a fresh fear assailed me: lest m. de crillon, recognising my voice or figure, should cry my name on the spot, and explode in a moment the mine on which we stood. this rendered me extremely impatient to be gone. but m. le vicomte had still something to say, and i could not withdraw myself without rudeness. 'you are travelling north like everyone else?' he said, gazing at me curiously. 'may i ask whether you are for meudon, where the king of navarre lies, or for the court at st. cloud?' i muttered, moving restlessly under his keen eyes, that i was for meudon. 'then, if you care to travel with a larger company,' he rejoined, bowing with negligent courtesy, 'pray command me. i am for meudon also, and shall leave here three hours before noon.' fortunately he took my assent to his gracious invitation for granted, and turned away before i had well begun to thank him. from crillon i found it more difficult to escape. he appeared to have conceived a great fancy for me, and felt also, i imagine, some curiosity as to my identity. but i did even this at last, and, evading the obsequious offers which were made me on all sides, escaped to the stables, where i sought out the cid's stall, and lying down in the straw beside him, began to review the past, and plan the future. under cover of the darkness sleep soon came to me; my last waking thoughts being divided between thankfulness for my escape and a steady purpose to reach meudon before the vicomte, so that i might make good my tale in his absence. for that seemed to be my only chance of evading the dangers i had chosen to encounter. chapter xxxiii. at meudon. making so early a start from etampes that the inn, which had continued in an uproar till long after midnight, lay sunk in sleep when we rode out of the yard, we reached meudon about noon next day. i should be tedious were i to detail what thoughts my mistress and i had during that day's journey--the last, it might be, which we should take together; or what assurances we gave one another, or how often we repented the impatience which had impelled us to put all to the touch. madame, with kindly forethought, detached herself from us, and rode the greater part of the distance with fanchette; but the opportunities she gave us went for little; for, to be plain, the separation we dreaded seemed to overshadow us already. we uttered few words, though those few were to the purpose, but riding hand-in-hand, with full hearts, and eyes which seldom quitted one another, looked forward to meudon and its perils with such gloomy forebodings as our love and my precarious position suggested. long before we reached the town, or could see more of it than the château, over which the lilies of france and the broad white banner of the bourbons floated in company, we found ourselves swept into the whirlpool which surrounds an army. crowds stood at all the cross-roads, wagons and sumpter-mules encumbered the bridges; each moment a horseman passed us at a gallop, or a troop of disorderly rogues, soldiers only in name, reeled, shouting and singing, along the road. here and there, for a warning to the latter sort, a man dangled on a rude gallows; under which sportsmen returning from the chase and ladies who had been for an airing rode laughing on their way. amid the multitude entering the town we passed unnoticed. a little way within the walls we halted to inquire where the princess of navarre had her lodging. hearing that she occupied a house in the town, while her brother had his quarters in the château, and the king of france at st. cloud, i stayed my party in a by-road, a hundred paces farther on, and, springing from the cid, went to my mistress's knee. 'mademoiselle,' i said formally, and so loudly that all my men might hear, 'the time is come. i dare not go farther with you. i beg you, therefore, to bear me witness that as i took you so i have brought you back, and both with your good-will. i beg that you will give me this quittance, for it may serve me.' she bowed her head and laid her ungloved hand on mine, which i had placed on the pommel of her saddle. 'sir,' she answered in a broken voice, 'i will not give you this quittance, nor any quittance from me while i live.' with that she took off her mask before them all, and i saw the tears running down her white face. 'may god protect you, m. de marsac,' she continued, stooping until her face almost touched mine, 'and bring you to the thing you desire. if not, sir, and you pay too dearly for what you have done for me, i will live a maiden all my days. and, if i do not, these men may shame me!' my heart was too full for words, but i took the glove she held out to me, and kissed her hand with my knee bent. then i waved--for i could not speak--to madame to proceed; and with simon fleix and maignan's men to guard them they went on their way. mademoiselle's white face looked back to me until a bend in the road hid them, and i saw them no more. i turned when all were gone, and going heavily to where my sard stood with his head drooping, i climbed to the saddle, and rode at a foot-pace towards the château. the way was short and easy, for the next turning showed me the open gateway and a crowd about it. a vast number of people were entering and leaving, while others rested in the shade of the wall, and a dozen grooms led horses up and down. the sunshine fell hotly on the road and the courtyard, and flashed back by the cuirasses of the men on guard, seized the eye and dazzled it with gleams of infinite brightness. i was advancing alone, gazing at all this with a species of dull indifference which masked for the moment the suspense i felt at heart, when a man, coming on foot along the street, crossed quickly to me and looked me in the face. i returned his look, and seeing he was a stranger to me, was for passing on without pausing. but he wheeled beside me and uttered my name in a low voice. i checked the cid and looked down at him. 'yes,' i said mechanically, 'i am m. de marsac. but i do not know you.' 'nevertheless i have been watching for you for three days,' he replied. 'm. de rosny received your message. this is for you.' he handed me a scrap of paper. 'from whom?' i asked. 'maignan,' he answered briefly. and with that, and a stealthy look round, he left me, and went the way he had been going before. i tore open the note, and knowing that maignan could not write, was not surprised to find that it lacked any signature. the brevity of its contents vied with the curtness of its bearer. 'in heaven's name go back and wait,' it ran. 'your enemy is here, and those who wish you well are powerless.' a warning so explicit, and delivered under such circumstances, might have been expected to make me pause even then. but i read the message with the same dull indifference, the same dogged resolve with which the sight of the crowded gateway before me had inspired me. i had not come so far and baffled turenne by an hour to fail in my purpose at the last; nor given such pledges to another to prove false to myself. moreover, the distant rattle of musketry, which went to show that a skirmish was taking place on the farther side of the castle, seemed an invitation to me to proceed; for now, if ever, my sword might earn protection and a pardon. only in regard to m. de rosny, from whom i had no doubt that the message came, i resolved to act with prudence; neither making any appeal to him in public nor mentioning his name to others in private. the cid had borne me by this time into the middle of the throng about the gateway, who, wondering to see a stranger of my appearance arrive without attendants, eyed me with a mixture of civility and forwardness. i recognised more than one man whom i had seen about the court at st. jean d'angely six months before; but so great is the disguising power of handsome clothes and equipments that none of these knew me. i beckoned to the nearest, and asked him if the king of navarre was in the château. 'he has gone to see the king of france at st. cloud,' the man answered, with something of wonder that anyone should be ignorant of so important a fact. 'he is expected here in an hour.' i thanked him, and calculating that i should still have time and to spare before the arrival of m. de turenne, i dismounted, and taking the rein over my arm, began to walk up and down in the shade of the wall. meanwhile the loiterers increased in numbers as the minutes passed. men of better standing rode up, and, leaving their horses in charge of their lackeys, went into the château. officers in shining corslets, or with boots and scabbards dulled with dust, arrived and clattered in through the gates. a messenger galloped up with letters, and was instantly surrounded by a curious throng of questioners; who left him only to gather about the next comers, a knot of townsfolk, whose downcast visages and glances of apprehension seemed to betoken no pleasant or easy mission. watching many of these enter and disappear, while only the humbler sort remained to swell the crowd at the gate, i began to experience the discomfort and impatience which are the lot of the man who finds himself placed in a false position. i foresaw with clearness the injury i was about to do my cause by presenting myself to the king among the common herd; and yet i had no choice save to do this, for i dared not run the risk of entering, lest i should be required to give my name, and fail to see the king of navarre at all. as it was i came very near to being foiled in this way; for i presently recognised, and was recognised in turn, by a gentleman who rode up to the gates and, throwing his reins to a groom, dismounted with an air of immense gravity. this was m. forget, the king's secretary, and the person to whom i had on a former occasion presented a petition. he looked at me with eyes of profound astonishment, and saluting me stiffly from a distance, seemed in two minds whether he should pass in or speak to me. on second thoughts, however, he came towards me, and again saluted me with a peculiarly dry and austere aspect. 'i believe, sir, i am speaking to m. de marsac?' he said in a low voice, but not impolitely. i replied in the affirmative. 'and that, i conclude, is your horse?' he continued, raising his cane, and pointing to the cid, which i had fastened to a hook in the wall. i replied again in the affirmative. 'then take a word of advice,' he answered, screwing up his features, and speaking in a dry sort of way. 'get upon its back without an instant's delay, and put as many leagues between yourself and meudon as horse and man may.' 'i am obliged to you,' i said, though i was greatly startled by his words. 'and what if i do not take your advice?' he shrugged his shoulders. 'in that case look to yourself!' he retorted. 'but you will look in vain!' he turned on his heel as he spoke, and in a moment was gone. i watched him enter the château, and in the uncertainty which possessed me whether he was not gone--after salving his conscience by giving me warning--to order my instant arrest, i felt, and i doubt not i looked, as ill at ease for the time being as the group of trembling townsfolk who stood near me. reflecting that he should know his master's mind, i recalled with depressing clearness the repeated warnings the king of navarre had given me that i must not look to him for reward or protection. i bethought me that i was here against his express orders: presuming on those very services which he had given me notice he should repudiate. i remembered that rosny had always been in the same tale. and in fine i began to see that mademoiselle and i had together decided on a step which i should never have presumed to take on my own motion. i had barely arrived at this conclusion when the trampling of hoofs and a sudden closing in of the crowd round the gate announced the king of navarre's approach. with a sick heart i drew nearer, feeling that the crisis was at hand; and in a moment he came in sight, riding beside an elderly man, plainly dressed and mounted, with whom he was carrying on an earnest conversation. a train of nobles and gentlemen, whose martial air and equipments made up for the absence of the gewgaws and glitter, to which my eyes had become accustomed at blois, followed close on his heels. henry himself wore a suit of white velvet, frayed in places and soiled by his armour; but his quick eye and eager, almost fierce, countenance could not fail to win and keep the attention of the least observant. he kept glancing from side to side as he came on; and that with so cheerful an air and a carriage so full at once of dignity and good-humour that no one could look on him and fail to see that here was a leader and a prince of men, temperate in victory and unsurpassed in defeat. the crowd raising a cry of '_vive navarre!_' as he drew near, he bowed, with a sparkle in his eye. but when a few by the gate cried '_vivent les rois!_' he held up his hand for silence, and said in a loud, clear voice, 'not that, my friends. there is but one king in france. let us say instead, "vive le roi!"' the spokesman of the little group of townsfolk, who, i learned, were from arcueil, and had come to complain of the excessive number of troops quartered upon them, took advantage of the pause to approach him. henry received the old man with a kindly look, and bent from his saddle to hear what he had to say. while they were talking i pressed forward, the emotion i felt on my own account heightened by my recognition of the man who rode by the king of navarre--who was no other than m. de la noüe. no huguenot worthy of the name could look on the veteran who had done and suffered more for the cause than any living man without catching something of his stern enthusiasm; and the sight, while it shamed me, who a moment before had been inclined to prefer my safety to the assistance i owed my country, gave me courage to step to the king's rein, so that i heard his last words to the men of arcueil. 'patience, my friends,' he said kindly. 'the burden is heavy, but the journey is a short one. the seine is ours; the circle is complete. in a week paris must surrender. the king, my cousin, will enter, and you will be rid of us. for france's sake one week, my friends.' the men fell back with low obeisances, charmed by his good-nature, and henry, looking up, saw me before him. on the instant his jaw fell. his brow, suddenly contracting above eyes, which flashed with surprise and displeasure, altered in a moment the whole aspect of his face; which grew dark and stern as night. his first impulse was to pass by me; but seeing that i held my ground, he hesitated, so completely chagrined by my appearance that he did not know how to act, or in what way to deal with me. i seized the occasion, and bending my knee with as much respect as i had ever used to the king of france, begged to bring myself to his notice, and to crave his protection and favour. 'this is no time to trouble me, sir,' he retorted, eyeing me with an angry side-glance. 'i do not know you. you are unknown to me, sir. you must go to m. de rosny.' 'it would be useless sire,' i answered, in desperate persistence. 'then i can do nothing for you,' he rejoined peevishly. 'stand on one side, sir.' but i was desperate. i knew that i had risked all on the event, and must establish my footing before m. de turenne's return, or run the risk of certain recognition and vengeance. i cried out, caring nothing who heard, that i was m. de marsac, that i had come back to meet whatever my enemies could allege against me. '_ventre saint gris!_' henry exclaimed, starting in his saddle with well-feigned surprise. 'are you that man?' 'i am, sire,' i answered. 'then you must be mad!' he retorted, appealing to those behind him. 'stark, staring mad to show your face here! _ventre saint gris!_ are we to have all the ravishers and plunderers in the country come to us?' 'i am neither the one nor the other!' i answered, looking with indignation from him to the gaping train behind him. 'that you will have to settle with m. de turenne!' he retorted, frowning down at me with his whole face turned gloomy and fierce. 'i know you well, sir, now. complaint has been made that you abducted a lady from his castle of chizé some time back.' 'the lady, sire, is now in charge of the princess of navarre.' 'she is?' he exclaimed, quite taken aback. 'and if she has aught of complaint against me,' i continued with pride, 'i will submit to whatever punishment you order or m. de turenne demands. but if she has no complaint to make, and vows that she accompanied me of her own free-will and accord, and has suffered neither wrong nor displeasure at my hands, then, sire, i claim that this is a private matter between myself and m. de turenne.' 'even so i think you will have your hands full,' he answered grimly. at the same time he stopped by a gesture those who would have cried out upon me, and looked at me himself with an altered countenance. 'do i understand that you assert that the lady went of her own accord?' he asked. 'she went and has returned, sire,' i answered. 'strange!' he ejaculated. 'have you married her?' 'no, sire,' i answered. 'i desire leave to do so.' 'mon dieu! she is m. de turenne's ward,' he rejoined, almost dumbfounded by my audacity. 'i do not despair of obtaining his assent, sire,' i said patiently. '_saint gris!_ the man is mad!' he cried, wheeling his horse and facing his train with a gesture of the utmost wonder. 'it is the strangest story i ever heard.' 'but somewhat more to the gentleman's credit than the lady's!' one said with a smirk and a smile. 'a lie!' i cried, springing forward on the instant with a boldness which astonished myself. 'she is as pure as your highness's sister! i swear it. that man lies in his teeth, and i will maintain it.' 'sir!' the king of navarre cried, turning on me with the utmost sternness, 'you forget yourself in my presence! silence, and beware another time how you let your tongue run on those above you. you have enough trouble, let me tell you, on your hands already.' 'yet the man lies!' i answered doggedly, remembering crillon and his ways. 'and if he will do me the honour of stepping aside with me, i will convince him of it!' '_venire saint gris!_' henry replied, frowning, and dwelling on each syllable of his favourite oath. 'will you be silent, sir, and let me think? or must i order your instant arrest?' 'surely that at least, sire,' a suave voice interjected. and with that a gentleman pressed forward from the rest, and gaining a place of 'vantage by the king's side, shot at me a look of extreme malevolence. 'my lord of turenne will expect no less at your highness's hands,' he continued warmly. 'i beg you will give the order on the spot, and hold this person to answer for his misdeeds. m. de turenne returns to-day. he should be here now. i say again, sire, he will expect no less than this.' the king, gazing at me with gloomy eyes, tugged at his moustaches. someone had motioned the common herd to stand back out of hearing; at the same time the suite had moved up out of curiosity and formed a half-circle; in the midst of which i stood fronting the king, who had la noüe and the last speaker on either hand. perplexity and annoyance struggled for the mastery in his face as he looked darkly down at me, his teeth showing through his beard. profoundly angered by my appearance, which he had taken at first to be the prelude to disclosures which must detach turenne at a time when union was all-important, he had now ceased to fear for himself; and perhaps saw something in the attitude i adopted which appealed to his nature and sympathies. 'if the girl is really back,' he said at last, 'm. d'aremburg, i do not see any reason why i should interfere. at present, at any rate. 'i think, sire, m. de turenne will see reason,' the gentleman answered drily. the king coloured. 'm. de turenne,' he began, 'has made many sacrifices at your request, sire,' the other said with meaning. 'and buried some wrongs, or fancied wrongs, in connection with this very matter. this person has outraged him in the grossest manner, and in m. le vicomte's name i ask, nay i press upon you, that he be instantly arrested, and held to answer for it.' 'i am ready to answer for it now!' i retorted, looking from face to face for sympathy, and finding none save in m. de la noüe's, who appeared to regard me with grave approbation. 'to the vicomte de turenne, or the person he may appoint to represent him.' 'enough!' henry said, raising his hand and speaking in the tone of authority he knew so well how to adopt. 'for you, m. d'aremburg, i thank you. turenne is happy in his friend. but this gentleman came to me of his own free will and i do not think it consistent with my honour to detain him without warning given. i grant him an hour to remove himself from my neighbourhood. if he be found after that time has elapsed,' he continued solemnly, 'his fate be on his own head. gentlemen, we are late already. let us on.' i looked at him as he pronounced this sentence, and strove to find words in which to make a final appeal to him. but no words came; and when he bade me stand aside, i did so mechanically, remaining with my head bared to the sunshine while the troop rode by. some looked back at me with curiosity, as at a man of whom they had heard a tale, and some with a jeer on their lips; a few with dark looks of menace. when they were all gone, and the servants who followed them had disappeared also, and i was left to the inquisitive glances of the rabble who stood gaping after the sight, i turned and went to the cid, and loosed the horse with a feeling of bitter disappointment. the plan which mademoiselle had proposed and i had adopted in the forest by st. gaultier--when it seemed to us that our long absence and the great events of which we heard must have changed the world and opened a path for our return--had failed utterly. things were as they had been; the strong were still strong, and friendship under bond to fear. plainly we should have shewn ourselves wiser had we taken the lowlier course, and, obeying the warnings given us, waited the king of navarre's pleasure or the tardy recollection of rosny. i had not then stood, as i now stood, in instant jeopardy, nor felt the keen, pangs of a separation which bade fair to be lasting. she was safe, and that was much; but i, after long service and brief happiness, must go out again alone, with only memories to comfort me. it was simon fleix's voice which awakened me from this unworthy lethargy--as selfish as it was useless--and, recalling me to myself, reminded me that precious time was passing while i stood inactive. to get at me he had forced his way through the curious crowd, and his face was flushed. he plucked me by the sleeve, regarding the varlets round him with a mixture of anger and fear. 'nom de dieu! do they take you for a rope-dancer?' he muttered in my ear. 'mount, sir, and come. there is not a moment to be lost.' 'you left her at madame catherine's?' i said. 'to be sure,' he answered impatiently. 'trouble not about her. save yourself, m. de marsac. that is the thing to be done now.' i mounted mechanically, and felt my courage return as the horse moved under me. i trotted through the crowd, and without thought took the road by which we had come. when we had ridden a hundred yards, however, i pulled up. 'an hour is a short start,' i said sullenly. 'whither?' 'to st. cloud,' he answered promptly. 'the protection of the king of france may avail for a day or two. after that, there will still be the league, if paris have not fallen.' i saw there was nothing else for it, and assented, and we set off. the distance which separates meudon from st. cloud we might have ridden under the hour, but the direct road runs across the scholars' meadow, a wide plain north of meudon. this lay exposed to the enemy's fire, and was, besides, the scene of hourly conflicts between the horse of both parties, so that to cross it without an adequate force was impossible. driven to make a circuit, we took longer to reach our destination, yet did so without mishap; finding the little town, when we came in sight of it, given up to all the bustle and commotion which properly belong to the court and camp. it was, indeed, as full as it could be, for the surrender of paris being momentarily expected, st. cloud had become the rendezvous as well of the few who had long followed a principle as of the many who wait upon success. the streets, crowded in every part, shone with glancing colours, with steel and velvet, the garb of fashion and the plumes of war. long lines of flags obscured the eaves and broke the sunshine, while, above all, the bells of half a dozen churches rang merry answer to the distant crash of guns. everywhere on flag and arch and streamer i read the motto, 'vive le roi!'--words written, god knew then, and we know now, in what a mockery of doom! chapter xxxiv. ''tis an ill wind.' we had made our way slowly and with much jostling as far as the principal street, finding the press increase as we advanced, when i heard, as i turned a corner, my name called, and, looking up, saw at a window the face of which i was in search. after that half a minute sufficed to bring m. d'agen flying to my side, when nothing, as i had expected, would do but i must dismount where i was and share his lodging. he made no secret of his joy and surprise at sight of me, but pausing only to tell simon where the stable was, haled me through the crowd and up his stairs with a fervour and heartiness which brought the tears to my eyes, and served to impress the company whom i found above with a more than sufficient sense of my importance. seeing him again in the highest feather and in the full employment of all those little arts and graces which served as a foil to his real worth, i took it as a great honour that he laid them aside for the nonce; and introduced me to the seat of honour and made me known to his companions with a boyish directness and a simple thought for my comfort which infinitely pleased me. he bade his landlord, without a moment's delay, bring wine and meat and everything which could refresh a traveller, and was himself up and down a hundred times in a minute, calling to his servants for this or that, or railing at them for their failure to bring me a score of things i did not need. i hastened to make my excuses to the company for interrupting them in the midst of their talk; and these they were kind enough to accept in good part. at the same time, reading clearly in m. d'agen's excited face and shining eyes that he longed to be alone with me, they took the hint, and presently left us together. 'well,' he said, coming back from the door, to which he had conducted them, 'what have you to tell me, my friend? she is not with you?' 'she is with mademoiselle de la vire at meudon,' i answered, smiling. 'and for the rest, she is well and in better spirits.' 'she sent me some message?' he asked. i shook my head. 'she did not know i should see you,' i answered. 'but she--she has spoken of me lately?' he continued, his face falling. 'i do not think she has named your name for a fortnight,' i answered, laughing. 'there's for you! why, man,' i continued, adopting a different tone, and laying my hand on his shoulder in a manner which reassured him at least as much as my words, 'are you so young a lover as to be ignorant that a woman says least of that of which she thinks most? pluck up courage! unless i am mistaken, you have little to be afraid of except the past. only have patience.' 'you think so?' he said gratefully. i assured him that i had no doubt of it; and on that he fell into a reverie, and i to watching him. alas for the littleness of our natures! he had received me with open arms, yet at sight of the happiness which took possession of his handsome face i gave way to the pettiest feeling which can harbour in a man's breast. i looked at him with eyes of envy, bitterly comparing my lot with that which fate had reserved for him. he had fortune, good looks, and success on his side, great relations, and high hopes; i stood in instant jeopardy, my future dark, and every path which presented itself so hazardous that i knew not which to adopt. he was young, and i past my prime; he in favour, and i a fugitive. to such reflections he put an end in a way which made me blush for my churlishness. for, suddenly awaking out of his pleasant dream, he asked me about myself and my fortunes, inquiring eagerly how i came to be in st. cloud, and listening to the story of my adventures with a generous anxiety which endeared him to me more and more. when i had done--and by that time simon had joined us, and was waiting at the lower end of the room--he pronounced that i must see the king. 'there is nothing else for it,' he said. 'i have come to see him,' i answered. 'mon dieu, yes!' he continued, rising from his seat and looking at me with a face of concern. 'no one else can help you.' i nodded. 'turenne has four thousand men here. you can do nothing against so many?' 'nothing,' i said. 'the question is, will the king protect me?' 'it is he or no one,' m. d'agen answered warmly. 'you cannot see him to-night: he has a council. to-morrow at daybreak you may. you must lie here to-night, and i will set my fellows to watch, and i think you will be safe. i will away now and see if my uncle will help. can you think of anyone else who would speak for you?' i considered, and was about to answer in the negative, when simon, who had listened with a scared face, suggested m. de crillon. 'yes, if he would,' m. d'agen exclaimed, looking at the lad with approbation. 'he has weight with the king.' 'i think he might,' i replied slowly. 'i had a curious encounter with him last night.' and with that i told m. d'agen of the duel i fought at the inn. 'good!' he said, his eyes sparkling. 'i wish i had been there to see. at any rate we will try him. crillon fears no one, not even the king.' so it was settled. for that night i was to keep close in my friend's lodging, showing not even my nose at the window. when he had gone on his errand, and i found myself alone in the room, i am fain to confess that i fell very low in my spirits. m. d'agen's travelling equipment lay about the apartment, but failed to give any but an untidy air to its roomy bareness. the light was beginning to wane, the sun was gone. outside, the ringing of bells and the distant muttering of guns, with the tumult of sounds which rose from the crowded street, seemed to tell of joyous life and freedom, and all the hopes and ambitions from which i was cut off. having no other employment, i watched the street, and keeping myself well retired from the window, saw knots of gay riders pass this way and that through the crowd, their corslets shining and their voices high. monks and ladies, a cardinal and an ambassador, passed under my eyes--these and an endless procession of townsmen and beggars, soldiers and courtiers, gascons, normans and picards. never had i seen such a sight or so many people gathered together. it seemed as if half paris had come out to make submission, so that while my gorge rose against my own imprisonment, the sight gradually diverted my mind from my private distresses, by bidding me find compensation for them in the speedy and glorious triumph of the cause. even when the light failed the pageant did not cease, but, torches and lanthorns springing into life, turned night into day. from every side came sounds of revelry or strife. the crowd continued to perambulate the streets until a late hour, with cries of '_vive le roi!_' and '_vive navarre!_' while now and again the passage of a great noble with his suite called forth a fresh outburst of enthusiasm. nothing seemed more certain, more inevitable, more clearly predestinated than that twenty-four hours must see the fall of paris. yet paris did not fall. when m. d'agen returned a little before midnight, he found me still sitting in the dark looking from the window. i heard him call roughly for lights, and apprised by the sound of his voice that something was wrong, i rose to meet him. he stood silent awhile, twirling his small moustaches, and then broke into a passionate tirade, from which i was not slow to gather that m. de rambouillet declined to serve me. 'well,' i said, feeling for the young man's distress and embarrassment, 'perhaps he is right.' 'he says that word respecting you came this evening', my friend answered, his cheeks red with shame, 'and that to countenance you after that would only be to court certain humiliation. i did not let him off too easily, i assure you,' m. d'agen continued, turning away to evade my gaze; 'but i got no satisfaction. he said you had his good-will, and that to help you he would risk something, but that to do so under these circumstances would be only to injure himself.' 'there is still crillon,' i said, with as much cheerfulness as i could assume. 'pray heaven he be there early! did m. de rambouillet say anything else?' 'that your only chance was to fly as quickly and secretly as possible.' 'he thought my situation desperate, then?' my friend nodded; and scarcely less depressed on my account than ashamed on his own, evinced so much feeling that it was all i could do to comfort him; which i succeeded in doing only when i diverted the conversation to madame de bruhl. we passed the short night together, sharing the same room and the same bed, and talking more than we slept--of madame and mademoiselle, the castle on the hill, and the camp in the woods, of all old days in fine, but little of the future. soon after dawn simon, who lay on a pallet across the threshold, roused me from a fitful sleep into which i had just fallen, and a few minutes later i stood up dressed and armed, ready to try the last chance left to me. m. d'agen had dressed stage for stage with me, and i had kept silence. but when he took up his cap, and showed clearly that he had it in his mind to go with me, i withstood him. 'no,' i said, 'you can do me little good, and may do yourself much harm.' 'you shall not go without one friend,' he cried fiercely. 'tut, tut!' i said. 'i shall have simon.' but simon, when i turned to speak to him, was gone. few men are at their bravest in the early hours of the day, and it did not surprise me that the lad's courage had failed him. the defection only strengthened, however, the resolution i had formed that i would not injure m. d'agen; though it was some time before i could persuade him that i was in earnest, and would go alone or not at all. in the end he had to content himself with lending me his back and breast, which i gladly put on, thinking it likely enough that i might be set upon before i reached the castle. and then, the time being about seven, i parted from him with many embraces and kindly words, and went into the street with my sword under my cloak. the town, late in rising after its orgy, lay very still and quiet. the morning was grey and warm, with a cloudy sky. the flags, which had made so gay a show yesterday, hung close to the poles, or flapped idly and fell dead again. i walked slowly along beneath them, keeping a sharp look-out on every side; but there were few persons moving in the streets, and i reached the castle gates without misadventure. here was something of life; a bustle of officers and soldiers passing in and out, of courtiers whose office made their presence necessary, of beggars who had flocked hither in the night for company. in the middle of these i recognised on a sudden and with great surprise simon fleix walking my horse up and down. on seeing me he handed it to a boy, and came up to speak to me with a red face, muttering that four legs were better than two. i did not say much to him, my heart being full and my thoughts occupied with the presence chamber and what i should say there; but i nodded kindly to him, and he fell in behind me as the sentries challenged me. i answered them that i sought m. de crillon, and so getting by, fell into the rear of a party of three who seemed bent on the same errand as myself. one of these was a jacobin monk, whose black and white robes, by reminding me of father antoine, sent a chill to my heart. the second, whose eye i avoided, i knew to be m. la guesle, the king's solicitor-general. the third was a stranger to me. enabled by m. la guesle's presence to pass the main guards without challenge, the party proceeded through a maze of passages and corridors, conversing together in a low tone; while i, keeping in their train with my face cunningly muffled, got as far by this means as the antechamber, which i found almost empty. here i inquired of the usher for m. de crillon, and learned with the utmost consternation that he was not present. this blow, which almost stunned me, opened my eyes to the precarious nature of my position, which only the early hour and small attendance rendered possible for a moment. at any minute i might be recognised and questioned, or my name be required; while the guarded doors of the chamber shut me off as effectually from the king's face and grace as though i were in paris, or a hundred leagues away. endeavouring to the best of my power to conceal the chagrin and alarm, which possessed me as this conviction took hold of me, i walked to the window; and to hide my face more completely and at the same time gain a moment to collect my thoughts, affected to be engaged in looking through it. nothing which passed in the room, however, escaped me. i marked everything and everyone, though all my thought was how i might get to the king. the barber came out of the chamber with a silver basin, and stood a moment, and went in again with an air of vast importance. the guards yawned, and an officer entered, looked round, and retired. m. la guesle, who had gone in to the presence, came out again and stood near me talking with the jacobin, whose pale nervous face and hasty movements reminded me somehow of simon fleix. the monk held a letter or petition in his hand, and appeared to be getting it by heart, for his lips moved continually. the light which fell on his face from the window showed it to be of a peculiar sweaty pallor, and distorted besides. but supposing him to be devoted, like many of his kind, to an unwholesome life, i thought nothing of this; though i liked him little, and would have shifted my place but for the convenience of his neighbourhood. presently, while i was cudgelling my brains, a person came out and spoke to la guesle; who called in his turn to the monk, and started hastily towards the door. the jacobin followed. the third person who had entered in their company had his attention directed elsewhere at the moment; and though la guesle called to him, took no heed. on the instant i grasped the situation. taking my courage in my hands, i crossed the floor behind the monk; who, hearing me, or feeling his robe come in contact with me, presently started and looked round suspiciously, his face wearing a scowl so black and ugly that i almost recoiled from him, dreaming for a moment that i saw before me the very spirit of father antoine. but as the man said nothing, and the next instant averted his gaze, i hardened my heart and pushed on behind him, and passing the usher, found myself as by magic in the presence which had seemed a while ago as unattainable by my wits as it was necessary to my safety. it was not this success alone, however, which caused my heart to beat more hopefully. the king was speaking as i entered, and the gay tones of his voice seemed to promise a favourable reception. his majesty sat half-dressed on a stool at the farther end of the apartment, surrounded by five or six noblemen, while as many attendants, among whom i hastened to mingle, waited near the door. la guesle made as if he would advance, and then, seeing the king's attention was not on him, held back. but in a moment the king saw him and called to him. 'ha, guesle!' he said with good-temper, 'is it you? is your friend with you?' the solicitor went forward with the monk at his elbow, and i had leisure to remark the favourable change which had taken place in the king, who spoke more strongly and seemed in better health than of old. his face looked less cadaverous under the paint, his form a trifle less emaciated. that which struck me more than anything, however, was the improvement in his spirits. his eyes sparkled from time to time, and he laughed continually, so that i could scarcely believe that he was the same man whom i had seen overwhelmed with despair and tortured by his conscience. letting his attention slip from la guesle, he began to bandy words with the nobleman who stood nearest to him; looking up at him with a roguish eye, and making bets on the fall of paris. 'morbleu!' i heard him cry gaily, 'i would give a thousand pounds to see the montpensier this morning! she may keep her third crown for herself. or, _peste!_ we might put her in a convent. that would be a fine vengeance!' 'the veil for the tonsure,' the nobleman said with a smirk. 'ay. why not? she would have made a monk of me,' the king rejoined smartly. 'she must be ready to hang herself with her garters this morning, if she is not dead of spite already. or, stay, i had forgotten her golden scissors. let her open a vein with them. well, what does your friend want, la guesle?' i did not hear the answer, but it was apparently satisfactory, for in a minute all except the jacobin fell back, leaving the monk standing before the king; who, stretching out his hand, took from him a letter. the jacobin, trembling visibly, seemed scarcely able to support the honour done him, and the king, seeing this, said in a voice audible to all, 'stand up, man. you are welcome. i love a cowl as some love a lady's hood. and now, what is this?' he read a part of the letter and rose. as he did so the monk leaned forward as though to receive the paper back again, and then so swiftly, so suddenly, with so unexpected a movement that no one stirred until all was over, struck the king in the body with a knife! as the blade flashed and was hidden, and his majesty with a deep sob fell back on the stool, then, and not till then, i knew that i had missed a providential chance of earning pardon and protection. for had i only marked the jacobin as we passed the door together, and read his evil face aright, a word, one word, had done for me more than the pleading of a score of crillons! too late a dozen sprang forward to the king's assistance; but before they reached him he had himself drawn the knife from, the wound and struck the assassin with it on the head. while some, with cries of grief, ran to support henry, from whose body the blood was already flowing fast, others seized and struck down the wretched monk. as they gathered round him i saw him raise himself for a moment on his knees and look upward; the blood which ran down his face, no less than the mingled triumph and horror of his features, impressed the sight on my recollection. the next instant three swords were plunged into his breast, and his writhing body, plucked up from the floor amid a transport of curses, was forced headlong through the casement and flung down to make sport for the grooms and scullions who stood below. a scene of indescribable confusion followed, some crying that the king was dead, while others called for a doctor, and some by name for dortoman. i expected to see the doors closed and all within secured, that if the man had confederates they might be taken. but there was no one to give the order. instead, many who had neither the _entrée_ nor any business in the chamber forced their way in, and by their cries and pressure rendered the hub-bub and tumult a hundred times worse. in the midst of this, while i stood stunned and dumbfounded, my own risks and concerns forgotten, i felt my sleeve furiously plucked, and, looking round, found simon at my elbow. the lad's face was crimson, his eyes seemed starting from his head. 'come,' he muttered, seizing my arm. 'come!' and without further ceremony or explanation he dragged me towards the door, while his face and manner evinced as much heat and impatience as if he had been himself the assassin. 'come, there is not a moment to be lost,' he panted, continuing his exertions without the least intermission. 'whither?' i said, in amazement, as i reluctantly permitted him to force me along the passage and through the gaping crowd on the stairs. 'whither, man?' 'mount and ride!' was the answer he hissed in my ear. 'ride for your life to the king of navarre--to the king of france it may be! ride as you have never ridden before, and tell him the news, and bid him look to himself! be the first, and, heaven helping us, turenne may do his worst!' i felt every nerve in my body tingle as i awoke to his meaning. without a word i left his arm, and flung myself into the crowd which filled the lower passage to suffocation. as i struggled fiercely with them simon aided me by crying 'a doctor! a doctor! make way there!' and this induced many to give place to me under the idea that i was an accredited messenger. eventually i succeeded in forcing my way through and reaching the courtyard; being, as it turned out, the first person to issue from the château. a dozen people sprang towards me with anxious eyes and questions on their lips, but i ran past them and, catching the cid, which was fortunately at hand, by the rein, bounded into the saddle. as i turned the horse to the gate i heard simon cry after me, 'the scholars' meadow! go that way!' and then i heard no more. i was out of the yard and galloping bareheaded down the pitched street, while women snatched their infants up and ran aside, and men came startled to the doors, crying that the league was upon us. as the good horse flung up his head and bounded forward, hurling the gravel behind him with hoofs which slid and clattered on the pavement, as the wind began to whistle by me, and i seized the reins in a shorter grip, i felt my heart bound with exultation. i experienced such a blessed relief and elation as the prisoner long fettered and confined feels when restored to the air of heaven. down one street and through a narrow lane we thundered, until a broken gateway stopped with fascines--through which the cid blundered and stumbled--brought us at a bound into the scholars' meadow just as the tardy sun broke through the clouds and flooded the low, wide plain with brightness. half a league in front of us the towers of meudon rose to view on a hill. in the distance, to the left, lay the walls of paris, and nearer, on the same side, a dozen forts and batteries; while here and there, in that quarter, a shining clump of spears or a dense mass of infantry betrayed the enemy's presence. i heeded none of these things, however, nor anything except the towers of meudon, setting the cid's head straight for these and riding on at the top of his speed. swiftly ditch and dyke came into view before us and flashed away beneath us. men lying in pits rose up and aimed at us; or ran with cries to intercept us. a cannon-shot fired from the fort by issy tore up the earth to one side; a knot of lancers sped from the shelter of an earthwork in the same quarter, and raced us for half a mile, with frantic shouts and threats of vengeance. but all such efforts were vanity. the cid, fired by this sudden call upon his speed, and feeling himself loosed--rarest of events--to do his best, shook the foam from his bit, and opening his blood-red nostrils to the wind, crouched lower and lower: until his long neck, stretched out before him, seemed, as the sward swept by, like the point of an arrow speeding resistless to its aim. god knows, as the air rushed by me and the sun shone in my face, i cried aloud like a boy, and though i sat still and stirred neither hand nor foot, last i should break the good sard's stride, i prayed wildly that the horse which i had groomed with my own hands and fed with my last crown might hold on unfaltering to the end. for i dreamed that the fate of a nation rode in my saddle; and mindful alike of simon's words, 'bid him look to himself,' and of my own notion that the league would not be so foolish as to remove one enemy to exalt another, i thought nothing more likely than that, with all my fury, i should arrive too late, and find the king of navarre as i had left the king of france. in this strenuous haste i covered a mile as a mile has seldom been covered before; and i was growing under the influence of the breeze which whipped my temples somewhat more cool and hopeful, when i saw on a sudden right before me, and between me and meudon, a handful of men engaged in a _mêlée_. there were red and white jackets in it--leaguers and huguenots--and the red coats seemed to be having the worst of it. still, while i watched, they came off in order, and unfortunately in such a way and at such a speed that i saw they must meet me face to face whether i tried to avoid the encounter or not. i had barely time to take in the danger and its nearness, and discern beyond both parties the main-guard of the huguenots, enlivened by a score of pennons, when the leaguers were upon me. i suppose they knew that no friend would ride for meudon at that pace, for they dashed at me six abreast with a shout of triumph; and before i could count a score we met. the cid was still running strongly, and i had not thought to stay him, so that i had no time to use my pistols. my sword i had out, but the sun dazzled me and the men wore corslets, and i made but poor play with it; though i struck out savagely, as we crashed together, in my rage at this sudden crossing of my hopes when all seemed done and gained. the cid faced them bravely--i heard the distant huzza of the huguenots--and i put aside one point which threatened my throat. but the sun was in my eyes and something struck me on the head. another second, and a blow in the breast forced me fairly from the saddle. gripping furiously at the air i went down, stunned and dizzy, my last thought as i struck the ground being of mademoiselle, and the little brook with the stepping-stones. chapter xxxv. 'le roi est mort!' it was m. d'agen's breastpiece saved my life by warding off the point of the varlet's sword, so that the worst injury i got was the loss of my breath for five minutes, with a swimming in the head and a kind of syncope. these being past, i found myself on my back on the ground, with a man's knee on my breast and a dozen horsemen standing round me. the sky reeled dizzily before my eyes and the men's figures loomed gigantic; yet i had sense enough to know what had happened to me, and that matters might well be worse. resigning myself to the prospect of captivity, i prepared to ask for quarter; which i did not doubt i should receive, since they had taken me in an open skirmish, and honestly, and in the daylight. but the man whose knee already incommoded me sufficiently, seeing me about to speak, squeezed me on a sudden so fiercely, bidding me at the same time in a gruff whisper be silent, that i thought i could not do better than obey. accordingly i lay still, and as in a dream, for my brain was still clouded, heard someone say, 'dead! is he? i hoped we had come in time. well, he deserved a better fate. who is he, rosny?' 'do you know him, maignan?' said a voice which sounded strangely familiar. the man who knelt upon me answered, 'no, my lord. he is a stranger to me. he has the look of a norman.' 'like enough!' replied a high-pitched voice i had not heard before. 'for he rode a good horse. give me a hundred like it, and a hundred men to ride as straight, and i would not envy the king of france.' 'much less his poor cousin of navarre,' the first speaker rejoined in a laughing tone, 'without a whole shirt to his back or a doublet that is decently new. come, turenne, acknowledge that you are not so badly off after all!' at that word the cloud which had darkened my faculties swept on a sudden aside. i saw that the men into whose hands i had fallen wore white favours, their leader a white plume; and comprehended without more that the king of navarre had come to my rescue, and beaten off the leaguers who had dismounted me. at the same moment the remembrance of all that had gone before, and especially of the scene i had witnessed in the king's chamber, rushed upon my mind with such overwhelming force that i fell into a fury of impatience at the thought of the time i had wasted; and rising up suddenly i threw off maignan with all my force, crying out that i was alive--that i was alive, and had news. the equerry did his best to restrain me, cursing me under his breath for a fool, and almost squeezing the life out of me. but in vain, for the king of navarre, riding nearer, saw me struggling. 'hallo! hallo! 'tis a strange dead man,' he cried, interposing. 'what is the meaning of this? let him go! do you hear, sirrah? let him go!' the equerry obeyed and stood back sullenly, and i staggered to my feet, and looked round with eyes which still swam and watered. on the instant a cry of recognition greeted me, with a hundred exclamations of astonishment. while i heard my name uttered on every side in a dozen different tones, i remarked that m. de rosny, upon whom my eyes first fell, alone stood silent, regarding me with a face of sorrowful surprise. 'by heavens, sir, i knew nothing of this!' i heard the king of navarre declare, addressing himself to the vicomte de turenne. 'the man is here by no connivance of mine. interrogate him yourself, if you will. or i will. speak, sir,' he continued, turning to me with his countenance hard and forbidding. 'you heard me yesterday, what i promised you? why, in god's name, are you here to-day?' i tried to answer, but maignan had so handled me that i had not breath enough, and stood panting. 'your highness's clemency in this matter,' m. de turenne said, with a sneer, 'has been so great he trusted to its continuance. and doubtless he thought to find you alone. i fear i am in the way.' i knew him by his figure and his grand air, which in any other company would have marked him for master; and forgetting the impatience which a moment before had consumed me--doubtless i was still light-headed--i answered him. 'yet i had once the promise of your lordship's protection,' i gasped. 'my protection, sir?' he exclaimed, his eyes gleaming angrily. 'even so,' i answered. 'at the inn at etampes, where m. de crillon would have fought me.' he was visibly taken aback. 'are you that man?' he cried. 'i am. but i am not here to prate of myself,' i replied. and with that--the remembrance of my neglected errand flashing on me again--i staggered to the king of navarre's side, and, falling on my knees, seized his stirrup. 'sire, i bring you news! great news! dreadful news!' i cried, clinging to it. 'his majesty was but a quarter of an hour ago stabbed in the body in his chamber by a villain monk. and is dying, or, it may be, dead.' 'dead? the king!' turenne cried with an oath. 'impossible!' vaguely i heard others crying, some this, some that, as surprise and consternation, or anger, or incredulity moved them. but i did not answer them, for henry, remaining silent, held me spellbound and awed by the marvellous change which i saw fall on his face. his eyes became on a sudden suffused with blood, and seemed to retreat under his heavy brows; his cheeks turned of a brick-red colour; his half-open lips showed his teeth gleaming through his beard; while his great nose, which seemed to curve and curve until it well-nigh met his chin, gave to his mobile countenance an aspect as strange as it was terrifying. withal he uttered for a time no word, though i saw his hand grip the riding-whip he held in a convulsive grasp, as though his thought were ''tis mine! mine! wrest it away who dares!' 'bethink you, sir,' he said at last, fixing his piercing eyes on me, and speaking in a harsh, low tone, like the growling of a great dog, 'this is no jesting-time. nor will you save your skin by a ruse. tell me, on your peril, is this a trick?' 'heaven forbid, sire!' i answered with passion. 'i was in the chamber, and saw it with my own eyes. i mounted on the instant, and rode hither by the shortest route to warn your highness to look to yourself. monks are many, and the holy union is not apt to stop half-way.' i saw he believed me, for his face relaxed. his breath seemed to come and go again, and for the tenth part of a second his eyes sought m. de rosny's. then he looked at me again. 'i thank you, sir,' he said, bowing gravely and courteously, 'for your care for me--not for your tidings, which are of the sorriest. god grant my good cousin and king may be hurt only. now tell us exactly--for these gentlemen are equally interested with myself--had a surgeon seen him?' i replied in the negative, but added that the wound was in the groin, and bled much. 'you said a few minutes ago, "dying or already dead!"' the king of navarre rejoined. 'why?' 'his majesty's face was sunken,' i stammered. he nodded. 'you may be mistaken,' he said. 'i pray that you are. but here comes mornay. he may know more.' in a moment i was abandoned, even by m. de turenne, so great was the anxiety which possessed all to learn the truth. maignan alone, under pretence of adjusting a stirrup, remained beside me, and entreated me in a low voice to begone. 'take this horse, m. de marsac, if you will,' he urged, 'and ride back the way you came. you have done what you came to do. go back, and be thankful.' 'chut!' i said, 'there is no danger.' 'you will see,' he replied darkly, 'if you stay here. come, come, take my advice and the horse,' he persisted, 'and begone! believe me, it will be for the best.' i laughed outright at his earnestness and his face of perplexity. 'i see you have m. de rosny's orders to get rid of me,' i said. 'but i am not going, my friend. he must find some other way out of his embarrassment, for here i stay.' 'well, your blood be on your own head,' maignan retorted, swinging himself into the saddle with a gloomy face. 'i have done my best to save you!' 'and your master!' i answered, laughing. for flight was the last thing i had in my mind. i had ridden this ride with a clear perception that the one thing i needed was a footing at court. by the special kindness of providence i had now gained this; and i was not the man to resign it because it proved to be scanty and perilous. it was something that i had spoken to the great vicomte face to face and not been consumed, that i had given him look for look and still survived, that i had put in practice crillon's lessons and come to no harm. nor was this all. i had never in the worst times blamed the king of navarre for his denial of me. i had been foolish, indeed, seeing that it was in the bargain, had i done so; nor had i ever doubted his good-will or his readiness to reward me should occasion arise. now, i flattered myself, i had given him that which he needed, and had hitherto lacked--an excuse, i mean, for interference in my behalf. whether i was right or wrong in this notion i was soon to learn, for at this moment henry's cavalcade, which had left me a hundred paces behind, came to a stop, and while some of the number waved to me to come on, one spurred back to summon me to the king. i hastened to obey the order as fast as i could, but i saw on approaching that though all was at a standstill till i came up, neither the king of navarre nor m. de turenne was thinking principally of me. every face, from henry's to that of his least important courtier, wore an air of grave preoccupation; which i had no difficulty in ascribing to the doubt present in every mind, and outweighing every interest, whether the king of france was dead, or dying, or merely wounded. 'quick, sir!' henry said with impatience, as soon as i came within hearing. 'do not detain me with your affairs longer than is necessary. m. de turenne presses me to carry into effect the order i gave yesterday. but as you have placed yourself in jeopardy on my account i feel that something is due to you. you will be good enough, therefore, to present yourself at once at m. la varenne's lodging, and give me your parole to remain there without stirring abroad until your affair is concluded.' aware that i owed this respite, which at once secured my present safety and promised well for the future, to the great event that, even in m. de turenne's mind, had overshadowed all others, i bowed in silence. henry, however, was not content with this. 'come, sir,' he said sharply, and with every appearance of anger, 'do you agree to that?' i replied humbly that i thanked him for his clemency. 'there is no need of thanks,' he replied coldly. 'what i have done is without prejudice to m. de turenne's complaint. he must have justice.' i bowed again, and in a moment the troop were gone at a gallop towards meudon, whence, as i afterwards learned, the king of navarre, attended by a select body of five-and-twenty horsemen, wearing private arms, rode on at full speed to st. cloud to present himself at his majesty's bedside. a groom who had caught the cid, which had escaped into the town with no other injury than a slight wound in the shoulder, by-and-by met me with the horse; and in this way i was enabled to render myself with some decency at varenne's lodging, a small house at the foot of the hill, not far from the castle-gate. here i found myself under no greater constraint than that which my own parole laid upon me; and my room having the conveniency of a window looking upon the public street, i was enabled from hour to hour to comprehend and enter into the various alarms and surprises which made that day remarkable. the manifold reports which flew from mouth to mouth on the occasion, as well as the overmastering excitement which seized all, are so well remembered, however, that i forbear to dwell upon them, though they served to distract my mind from my own position. suffice it that at one moment we heard that his majesty was dead, at another that the wound was skin deep, and again that we might expect him at meudon before sunset. the rumour that the duchess de montpensier had taken poison was no sooner believed than we were asked to listen to the guns of paris firing _feux de joie_ in honour of the king's death. the streets were so closely packed with persons telling and hearing these tales that i seemed from my window to be looking on a fair. nor was all my amusement without doors; for a number of the gentlemen of the court, hearing that i had been at st. cloud in the morning, and in the very chamber, a thing which made me for the moment the most desirable companion in the world, remembered on a sudden that they had a slight acquaintance with me, and honoured me by calling upon me and sitting a great part of the day with me. from which circumstance i confess i derived as much hope as they diversion; knowing that courtiers are the best weather-prophets in the world, who hate nothing so much as to be discovered in the company of those on whom the sun does not shine. the return of the king of navarre, which happened about the middle of the afternoon, while it dissipated the fears of some and dashed the hopes of others, put an end to this state of uncertainty by confirming, to the surprise of many, that his majesty was in no danger. we learned with varying emotions that the first appearances, which had deceived, not myself only, but experienced leeches, had been themselves belied by subsequent conditions; and that, in a word, paris had as much to fear, and loyal men as much to hope, as before this wicked and audacious attempt. i had no more than stomached this surprising information, which was less welcome to me, i confess, than it should have been, when the arrival of m. d'agen, who greeted me with the affection which he never failed to show me, distracted my thoughts for a time. immediately on learning where i was and the strange adventures which had befallen me he had ridden off; stopping only once, when he had nearly reached me, for the purpose of waiting on madame de bruhl. i asked him how she had received him. 'like herself,' he replied with an ingenuous blush. 'more kindly than i had a right to expect, if not as warmly as i had the courage to hope.' 'that will come with time,' i said, laughing. 'and mademoiselle de la vire?' 'i did not see her,' he answered, 'but i heard she was well. and a hundred fathoms deeper in love,' he added, eyeing me roguishly, 'than when i saw her last.' it was my turn to colour now, and i did so, feeling all the pleasure and delight such a statement was calculated to afford me. picturing mademoiselle as i had seen her last, leaning from her horse with love written so plainly on her weeping face that all who ran might read, i sank into so delicious a reverie that m. la varenne, entering suddenly, surprised us both before another word passed on either side. his look and tone were as abrupt as it was in his nature, which was soft and compliant, to make them. 'm. de marsac,' he said, 'i am sorry to put any constraint upon you, but i am directed to forbid you to your friends. and i must request this gentleman to withdraw.' 'but all day my friends have come in and out,' i said with surprise. 'is this a new order?' 'a written order, which reached me no farther back than two minutes ago,' he answered plainly. 'i am also directed to remove you to a room at the back of the house, that you may not overlook the street.' 'but my parole was taken,' i cried, with a natural feeling of indignation. he shrugged his shoulders. 'i am sorry to say that i have nothing to do with that,' he answered. 'i can only obey orders. i must ask this gentleman, therefore, to withdraw.' of course m. d'agen had no option but to leave me; which he did, i could see, notwithstanding his easy and confident expressions, with a good deal of mistrust and apprehension. when he was gone, la varenne lost no time in carrying out the remainder of his orders. as a consequence i found myself confined to a small and gloomy apartment which looked, at a distance of three paces, upon the smooth face of the rock on which the castle stood. this change, from a window which commanded all the life of the town, and intercepted every breath of popular fancy, to a closet whither no sounds penetrated, and where the very transition from noon to evening scarcely made itself known, could not fail to depress my spirits sensibly; the more as i took it to be significant of a change in my fortunes fully as grave. reflecting that i must now appear to the king of navarre in the light of a bearer of false tidings, i associated the order to confine me more closely with his return from st. cloud; and comprehending that m. de turenne was once more at liberty to attend to my affairs, i began to look about me with forebodings which were none the less painful because the parole i had given debarred me from any attempt to escape. sleep and habit enabled me, nevertheless, to pass the night in comfort. very early in the morning a great firing of guns, which made itself heard even in my quarters, led me to suppose that paris had surrendered; but the servant who brought me my breakfast declined in a surly fashion to give me any information. in the end, i spent the whole day alone, my thoughts divided between my mistress and my own prospects, which seemed to grow more and more gloomy as the hours succeeded one another. no one came near me, no step broke the silence of the house; and for a while i thought my guardians had forgotten even that i needed food. this omission, it is true, was made good about sunset, but still m. la varenne did not appear, the servant seemed to be dumb, and i heard no sounds in the house. i had finished my meal an hour or more, and the room was growing dark, when the silence was at last broken by quick steps passing along the entrance. they paused, and seemed to hesitate at the foot of the stairs, but the next moment they came on again, and stopped at my door. i rose from my seat on hearing the key turned in the lock, and my astonishment may be conceived when i saw no other than m. de turenne enter, and close the door behind him. he saluted me in a haughty manner as he advanced to the table, raising his cap for an instant and then replacing it. this done he stood looking at me, and i at him, in a silence which on my side was the result of pure astonishment; on his, of contempt and a kind of wonder. the evening light, which was fast failing, lent a sombre whiteness to his face, causing it to stand out from the shadows behind him in a way which was not without its influence on me. 'well! 'he said at last, speaking slowly and with unimaginable insolence, 'i am here to look at you!' i felt my anger rise, and gave him back look for look. 'at your will,' i said, shrugging my shoulders. 'and to solve a question,' he continued in the same tone. 'to learn whether the man who was mad enough to insult and defy _me_ was the old penniless dullard some called him, or the dare-devil others painted him.' 'you are satisfied now?' i said. he eyed me for a moment closely; then with sudden heat he cried, 'curse me if i am! nor whether i have to do with a man very deep or very shallow, a fool or a knave!' 'you may say what you please to a prisoner,' i retorted coldly. 'turenne commonly does--to whom he pleases!' he answered. the next moment he made me start by saying, as he drew out a comfit-box and opened it, 'i am just from the little fool you have bewitched. if she were in my power i would have her whipped and put on bread and water till she came to her senses. as she is not, i must take another way. have you any idea, may i ask,' he continued in his cynical tone, 'what is going to become of you, m. de marsac?' i replied, my heart inexpressibly lightened by what he had said of mademoiselle, that i placed the fullest confidence in the justice of the king of navarre. he repeated the name in a tone i did not understand. 'yes, sir, the king of navarre,' i answered firmly. 'well, i daresay you have good reason to do so,' he rejoined with a sneer. 'unless i am mistaken he knew a little more of this affair than he acknowledges.' 'indeed? the king of navarre?' i said, staring stolidly at him. 'yes, indeed, indeed, the king of navarre!' he retorted, mimicking me, with a nearer approach to anger than i had yet witnessed in him. 'but let him be a moment, sirrah!' he continued, 'and do you listen to me. or first look at that. seeing is believing.' he drew out as he spoke a paper, or, to speak more correctly, a parchment, which he thrust with a kind of savage scorn into my hand. repressing for the moment the surprise i felt, i took it to the window, and reading it with difficulty, found it to be a royal patent drawn, as far as i could judge, in due form, and appointing some person unknown--for the name was left blank--to the post of lieutenant-governor of the armagnac, with a salary of twelve thousand livres a year! 'well, sir?' he said impatiently. 'well?' i answered mechanically. for my brain reeled; the exhibition of such a paper in such a way raised extraordinary thoughts in my mind. 'can you read it?' he asked. 'certainly,' i answered, telling myself that he would fain play a trick on me. 'very well,' he replied, 'then listen. i am going to condescend; to make you an offer, m. de marsac. i will procure you your freedom, and fill up the blank, which you see there, with your name--upon one condition.' i stared at him with all the astonishment it was natural for me to feel in the face of such a proposition, 'you will confer this office on me?' i muttered incredulously. 'the king having placed it at my disposal,' he answered, 'i will. but first let me remind you,' he went on proudly, 'that the affair has another side. on the one hand i offer you such employment, m. de marsac, as should satisfy your highest ambition. on the other, i warn you that my power to avenge myself is no less to-day than it was yesterday; and that if i condescend to buy you, it is because that course commends itself to me for reasons, not because it is the only one open.' i bowed, 'the condition, m. le vicomte?' i said huskily, beginning to understand him. 'that you give up all claim and suit to the hand of my kinswoman,' he answered lightly. 'that is all. it is a simple and easy condition.' i looked at him in renewed astonishment, in wonder, in stupefaction; asking myself a hundred questions. why did he stoop to bargain, who could command? why did he condescend to treat, who held me at his mercy? why did he gravely discuss my aspirations, to whom they must seem the rankest presumption? why?--but i could not follow it. i stood looking at him in silence; in perplexity as great as if he had offered me the crown of france; in amazement and doubt and suspicion that knew no bounds. 'well!' he said at last, misreading the emotion which appeared in my face. 'you consent, sir?' 'never!' i answered firmly. he started. 'i think i cannot have heard you aright,' he said, speaking slowly and almost courteously. 'i offer you a great place and my patronage, m. de marsac. do i understand that you prefer a prison and my enmity?' 'on those conditions,' i answered. 'think, think!' he said harshly. 'i have thought,' i answered. 'ay, but have you thought where you are?' he retorted. 'have you thought how many obstacles lie between you and this little fool? how many persons you must win over, how many friends you must gain? have you thought what it will be to have me against you in this, or which of us is more likely to win in the end?' 'i have thought,' i rejoined. but my voice shook, my lips were dry. the room had grown dark. the rock outside, intercepting the light, gave it already the air of a dungeon. though i did not dream of yielding to him, though i even felt that in this interview he had descended to my level, and i had had the better of him, i felt my heart sink. for i remembered how men immured in prisons drag out their lives always petitioning, always forgotten; how wearily the days go, that to free men are bright with hope and ambition. and i saw in a flash what it would be to remain here, or in some such place; never to cross horse again, or breathe the free air of heaven, never to hear the clink of sword against stirrup, or the rich tones of m. d'agen's voice calling for his friend! i expected m. de turenne to go when i had made my answer, or else to fall into such a rage as opposition is apt to cause in those who seldom encounter it. to my surprise, however, he restrained himself. 'come,' he said, with patience which fairly astonished me, and so much the more as chagrin was clearly marked in his voice, 'i know where you put your trust. you think the king of navarre will protect you. well, i pledge you the honour of turenne that he will not; that the king of navarre will do nothing to save you. now, what do you say?' 'as i said before,' i answered doggedly. he took up the parchment from the table with a grim laugh. 'so much the worse for you then!' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'so much the worse for you! i took you for a rogue! it seems you are a fool!' chapter xxxvi. 'vive le roi!' he took his leave with those words. but his departure, which i should have hailed a few minutes before with joy, as a relief from embarrassment and humiliation, found me indifferent. the statement to which he had solemnly pledged himself in regard to the king of navarre, that i could expect no further help from him, had prostrated me; dashing my hopes and spirits so completely that i remained rooted to the spot long after his step had ceased to sound on the stairs. if what he said was true, in the gloom which darkened alike my room and my prospects i could descry no glimmer of light. i knew his majesty's weakness and vacillation too well to repose any confidence in him; if the king of navarre also abandoned me, i was indeed without hope, as without resource. i had stood some time with my mind painfully employed upon this problem, which my knowledge of m. de turenne's strict honour in private matters did not allow me to dismiss lightly, when i heard another step on the stairs, and in a moment m. la varenne opened the door. finding me in the dark he muttered an apology for the remissness of the servants; which i accepted, seeing nothing else for it, in good part. 'we have been at sixes-and-sevens all day, and you have been forgotten,' he continued. 'but you will have no reason to complain now. i am ordered to conduct you to his majesty without delay.' 'to st. cloud!' i exclaimed, greatly astonished. 'no, the king of france is here,' he answered. 'at meudon?' 'to be sure. why not?' i expressed my wonder at his majesty's rapid recovery. 'pooh!' he answered roughly. 'he is as well as he ever was. i will leave you my light. be good enough to descend as soon as you are ready, for it is ill work keeping kings waiting. oh! and i had forgotten one thing,' he continued, returning when he had already reached the door. 'my orders are to see that you do not hold converse with anyone until you have seen the king, m. de marsac. you will kindly remember this if we are kept waiting in the ante-chamber.' 'am i to be transported to--other custody?' i asked, my mind full of apprehension. he shrugged his shoulders. 'possibly,' he replied. 'i do not know.' of course there was nothing for it but to murmur that i was at the king's disposition; after which la varenne retired, leaving me to put the best face on the matter i could. naturally i augured anything but well of an interview weighted with such a condition; and this contributed still further to depress my spirits, already lowered by the long solitude in which i had passed the day. fearing nothing, however, so much as suspense, i hastened to do what i could to repair my costume, and then descended to the foot of the stairs, where i found my custodian awaiting me with a couple of servants, of whom one bore a link. we went out side by side, and having barely a hundred yards to go, seemed in a moment to be passing through the gate of the castle. i noticed that the entrance was very strongly guarded, but an instant's reflection served to remind me that this was not surprising after what had happened at st. cloud. i remarked to m. la varenne as we crossed the courtyard that i supposed paris had surrendered; but he replied in the negative so curtly, and with so little consideration, that i forebore to ask any other questions; and the château being small, we found ourselves almost at once in a long, narrow corridor, which appeared to serve as the antechamber. it was brilliantly lighted and crowded from end to end, and almost from wall to wall, with a mob of courtiers; whose silence, no less than their keen and anxious looks, took me by surprise. here and there two or three, who had seized upon the embrasure of a window, talked together in a low tone; or a couple, who thought themselves sufficiently important to pace the narrow passage between the waiting lines, conversed in whispers as they walked. but even these were swift to take alarm, and continually looked askance; while the general company stood at gaze, starting and looking up eagerly whenever the door swung open or a newcomer was announced. the strange silence which prevailed reminded me of nothing so much as of the court at blois on the night of the duke of merc[oe]ur's desertion; but that stillness had brooded over empty chambers, this gave a peculiar air of strangeness to a room thronged in every part. m. la varenne, who was received by those about the door with silent politeness, drew me into the recess of a window; whence i was able to remark, among other things, that the huguenots present almost outnumbered the king's immediate following. still, among those who were walking up and down, i noticed m. de rambouillet, to whom at another time i should have hastened to pay my respects; with marshal d'aumont, sancy, and humières. nor had i more than noted the presence of these before the door of the chamber opened and added to their number marshal biron, who came out leaning on the arm of crillon. the sight of these old enemies in combination was sufficient of itself to apprise me that some serious crisis was at hand; particularly as their progress through the crowd was watched, i observed, by a hundred curious and attentive eyes. they disappeared at last through the outer door, and the assemblage turned as with one accord to see who came next. but nearly half an hour elapsed before the chamber door, which all watched so studiously, again opened. this time it was to give passage to my late visitor, turenne, who came out smiling, and leaning, to my great surprise, on the arm of m. de rosny. as the two walked down the room, greeting here and there an obsequious friend, and followed in their progress by all eyes, i felt my heart sink indeed; both at sight of turenne's good-humour, and of the company in which i found him. aware that in proportion as he was pleased i was like to meet with displeasure, i still might have had hope left had i had rosny left. losing him, however--and i could not doubt, seeing him as i saw him, that i had lost him--and counting the king of navarre as gone already, i felt such a failure of courage as i had never known before. i told myself with shame that i was not made for courts, or for such scenes as these; and recalling with new and keen mortification the poor figure i had cut in the king of navarre's antechamber at st. jean, i experienced so strange a gush of pity for my mistress that nothing could exceed the tenderness i felt for her. i had won her under false colours, i was not worthy of her. i felt that my mere presence in her company in such a place as this, and among these people, must cover her with shame and humiliation. to my great relief, since i knew my face was on fire, neither of the two, as they walked down the passage, looked my way or seemed conscious of my neighbourhood. at the door they stood a moment talking earnestly, and it seemed as if m. de rosny would have accompanied the vicomte farther. the latter would not suffer it, however, but took his leave there; and this with so many polite gestures that my last hope based on m. de rosny vanished. nevertheless, that gentleman was not so wholly changed that on his turning to re-traverse the room i did not see a smile flicker for an instant on his features as the two lines of bowing courtiers opened before him. the next moment his look fell on me, and though his face scarcely altered, he stopped opposite me. 'm. de marsac is waiting to see his majesty?' he asked aloud, speaking to m. la varenne. my companion remaining silent, i bowed. 'in five minutes,' m. de rosny replied quietly, yet with a distant air, which made me doubt whether i had not dreamed all i remembered of this man. 'ah! m. de paul, what can i do for you?' he continued. and he bent his head to listen to the application which a gentleman who stood next me poured into his ear. 'i will see,' i heard him answer. 'in any case you shall know to-morrow.' 'but you will be my friend?' m. paul urged, detaining him by the sleeve. 'i will put only one before you,' he answered. my neighbour seemed to shrink into himself with disappointment. 'who is it?' he murmured piteously. 'the king and his service, my friend,' m. de rosny replied drily. and with that he walked away. but half a dozen times at least before he reached the upper end of the room i saw the scene repeated. i looked on at all this in the utmost astonishment, unable to guess or conceive what had happened to give m. de rosny so much importance. for it did not escape me that the few words he had stopped to speak to me had invested me with interest in the eyes of all who stood near. they gave me more room and a wider breathing-space, and looking at me askance, muttered my name in whispers. in my uncertainty, however, what this portended i drew no comfort from it; and before i had found time to weigh it thoroughly the door through which turenne and rosny had entered opened again. the pages and gentlemen who stood about it hastened to range themselves, on either side. an usher carrying a white wand came rapidly down the room, here and there requesting the courtiers to stand back where the passage was narrow. then a loud voice without cried, 'the king, gentlemen! the king!' and one in every two of us stood a-tiptoe to see him enter. but there came in only henry of navarre, wearing a violet cloak and cap. i turned to la varenne and with my head full of confusion, muttered impatiently, 'but the king, man! where is the king?' he grinned at me, with his hand before his mouth. 'hush!' he whispered. ''twas a jest we played on you! his late majesty died at daybreak this morning. this is the king.' 'this! the king of navarre?' i cried; so loudly that some round us called 'silence!' 'no, the king of france, fool!' he replied. 'your sword must be sharper than your wits, or i have been told some lies!' i let the gibe pass and the jest, for my heart was beating so fast and painfully that i could scarcely preserve my outward composure. there was a mist before my eyes, and a darkness which set the lights at defiance. it was in vain i tried to think what this might mean--to me. i could not put two thoughts together, and while i still questioned what reception i might expect, and who in this new state of things were my friends, the king stopped before me. 'ha, m. de marsac!' he cried cheerfully, signing to those who stood before me to give place. 'you are the gentleman who rode so fast to warn me the other morning. i have spoken to m. de turenne about you, and he is willing to overlook the complaint he had against you. for the rest, go to my closet, my friend. go! rosny knows my will respecting you.' i had sense enough left to kneel and kiss his hand; but it was in silence, which he knew how to interpret. he had moved on and was speaking to another before i recovered the use of my tongue, or the wits which his gracious words had scattered. when i did so, and got on my feet again i found myself the centre of so much observation and the object of so many congratulations that i was glad to act upon the hint which la varenne gave me, and hurry away to the closet. here, though i had now an inkling of what i had to expect, i found myself received with a kindness which bade fair to overwhelm me. only m. de rosny was in the room, and he took me by both hands in a manner which told me without a word that the rosny of old days was back, and that for the embarrassment i had caused him of late i was more than forgiven. when i tried to thank him for the good offices, which i knew he had done me with the king he would have none of it; reminding me with a smile that he had eaten of my cheese when the choice lay between that and lisieux. 'and besides, my friend,' he continued, his eyes twinkling, 'you have made me richer by five hundred crowns.' 'how so?' i asked, wondering more and more. 'i wagered that sum with turenne that he could not bribe you,' he answered, smiling. 'and see,' he continued, selecting from some on the table the same parchment i had seen before, 'here is the bribe. take it; it is yours. i have given a score to-day, but none with the same pleasure. let me be the first to congratulate the lieutenant-governor of the armagnac.' for a while i could not believe that he was in earnest; which pleased him mightily, i remember. when i was brought at last to see that the king had meant this for me from the first, and had merely lent the patent to turenne that the latter might make trial of me, my pleasure and gratification were such that i could no more express them then than i can now describe them. for they knew no bounds. i stood before rosny silent and confused, with long-forgotten tears welling up to my eyes, and one regret only in my heart--that my dear mother had not lived to see the fond illusions with which i had so often amused her turned to sober fact. not then, but afterwards, i remarked that the salary of my office amounted to the exact sum which i had been in the habit of naming to her; and i learned that rosny had himself fixed it on information given him by mademoiselle de la vire. as my transports grew more moderate, and i found voice to thank my benefactor, he had still an answer. 'do not deceive yourself, my friend,' he said gravely, 'or think this an idle reward. my master is king of france, but he is a king without a kingdom, and a captain without money. to-day, to gain his rights, he has parted with half his powers. before he win all back there will be blows--blows, my friend. and to that end i have bought your sword.' i told him that if no other left its scabbard for the king, mine should be drawn. 'i believe you,' he answered kindly, laying his hand on my shoulder. 'not by reason of your words--heaven knows i have heard vows enough to-day!--but because i have proved you. and now,' he continued, speaking in an altered tone and looking at me with a queer smile, 'now i suppose you are perfectly satisfied? you have nothing more to wish for, my friend?' i looked aside in a guilty fashion, not daring to prefer on the top of all his kindness a further petition. moreover, his majesty might have other views; or on this point turenne might have proved obstinate. in a word, there was nothing in what had happened, or on m. de rosny's communication, to inform me whether the wish of my heart was to be gratified or not. but i should have known that great man better than to suppose that he was one to promise without performing, or to wound a friend when he could not salve the hurt. after enjoying my confusion for a time he burst into a great shout of laughter, and taking me familiarly by the shoulders, turned me towards the door. 'there, go!' he said. 'go up the passage. you will find a door on the right, and a door on the left. you will know which to open.' forbidding me to utter a syllable, he put me out. in the passage, where i fain would have stood awhile to collect my thoughts, i was affrighted by sounds which warned me that the king was returning that way. fearing to be surprised by him in such a state of perturbation, i hurried to the end of the passage, where i discovered, as i had been told, two doors. they were both closed, and there was nothing about either of them to direct my choice. but m. de rosny was correct in supposing that i had not forgotten the advice he had offered me on the day when he gave me so fine a surprise in his own house--'when you want a good wife, m. de marsac, turn to the right!' i remembered the words, and without a moment's hesitation--for the king and his suite were already entering the passage--i knocked boldly, and scarcely waiting for an invitation, went in. fanchette was by the door, but stood aside with a grim smile, which i was at liberty to accept as a welcome or not. mademoiselle, who had been seated on the farther side of the table, rose as i entered, and we stood looking at one another. doubtless she waited for me to speak first; while i on my side was so greatly taken aback by the change wrought in her by the court dress she was wearing and the air of dignity with which she wore it, that i stood gasping. i turned coward after all that had passed between us. this was not the girl i had wooed in the greenwoods by st. gaultier; nor the pale-faced woman i had lifted to the saddle a score of times in the journey paris-wards. the sense of unworthiness which i had experienced a few minutes before in the crowded antechamber returned in full force in presence of her grace and beauty, and once more i stood tongue-tied before her, as i had stood in the lodgings at blois. all the later time, all that had passed between us was forgotten. she, for her part, looked at me wondering at my silence. her face, which had grown rosy red at my entrance, turned pale again. her eyes grew large with alarm; she began to beat her foot on the floor in a manner i knew. 'is anything the matter, sir?' she muttered at last. 'on the contrary, mademoiselle,' i answered hoarsely, looking every way, and grasping at the first thing i could think of, 'i am just from m. de rosny.' 'and he?' 'he has made me lieutenant-governor of the armagnac.' she curtseyed to me in a wonderful fashion. 'it pleases me to congratulate you, sir,' she said, in a voice between laughing and crying. 'it is not more than equal to your deserts.' i tried to thank her becomingly, feeling at the same time more foolish than i had ever felt in my life; for i knew that this was neither what i had come to tell nor she to hear. yet i could not muster up courage nor find words to go farther, and stood by the table in a state of miserable discomposure. 'is that all, sir?' she said at last, losing patience. certainly it was now or never, and i knew it. i made the effort. 'no, mademoiselle,' i said in a low voice, 'far from it. but i do not see here the lady to whom i came to address myself, and whom i have seen a hundred times in far other garb than yours, wet and weary and dishevelled, in danger and in flight. her i have served and loved; and for her i have lived, i have had no thought for months that has not been hers, nor care save for her. i and all that i have by the king's bounty are hers, and i came to lay them at her feet. but i do not see her here.' 'no, sir? i she answered in a whisper, with her face averted. 'no, mademoiselle.' with a sudden brightness and quickness which set my heart beating she turned, and looked at me. 'indeed!' she said. 'i am sorry for that. it is a pity your love should be given elsewhere, m. de marsac--since it is the king's will that you should marry me.' 'ah, mademoiselle!' i cried, kneeling before her--for she had come round the table and stood beside me--'but you?' 'it is my will too, sir,' she answered, smiling through her tears. * * * * * on the following day mademoiselle de la vire became my wife; the king's retreat from paris, which was rendered necessary by the desertion of many who were ill-affected to the huguenots, compelling the instant performance of the marriage, if we would have it read by m. d'amours. this haste notwithstanding, i was enabled by the kindness of m. d'agen to make such an appearance, in respect both of servants and equipment, as became rather my future prospects than my past distresses. it is true that his majesty, out of a desire to do nothing which might offend turenne, did not honour us with his presence; but madame catherine attended on his behalf, and herself gave me my bride. m. de sully and m. crillon, with the marquis de rambouillet and his nephew, and my distant connection, the duke de rohan, who first acknowledged me on that day, were among those who earned my gratitude by attending me upon the occasion. the marriage of m. françois d'agen with the widow of my old rival and opponent did not take place until something more than a year later, a delay which was less displeasing to me than to the bridegroom, inasmuch as it left madame at liberty to bear my wife company during my absence on the campaign of arques and ivry. in the latter battle, which added vastly to the renown of m. de rosny, who captured the enemy's standard with his own hand, i had the misfortune to be wounded in the second of the two charges led by the king; and being attacked by two foot soldiers, as i lay entangled i must inevitably have perished but for the aid afforded me by simon fleix, who flew to the rescue with the courage of a veteran. his action was observed by the king, who begged him from me, and attaching him to his own person in the capacity of clerk, started him so fairly on the road to fortune that he has since risen beyond hope or expectation. the means by which henry won for a time the support of turenne (and incidentally procured his consent to my marriage) are now too notorious to require explanation. nevertheless, it was not until the vicomte's union a year later with mademoiselle de la marck, who brought him the duchy of bouillon, that i thoroughly understood the matter; or the kindness peculiar to the king, my master, which impelled that great monarch, in the arrangement of affairs so vast, to remember the interests of the least of his servants. the end. [frontispiece: "the heavy animal turned to face raoul." _p_. .] in paths of peril a boy's adventures in nova scotia by j. macdonald oxley author of 'donalblane of darien,' 'a boy of the banks,' 'norman's nugget,' etc. _with six illustrations_ toronto the musson book company limited contents in paths of peril chap. i. from the old world to the new ii. the great bear hunt iii. setting a bad example iv. off to the woods v. the moose hunt vi. in the nick of time vii. at close quarters viii. a perilous enterprise ix. the stopping of the supply ship x. adventure in boston xi. traitors in the camp xii. a glorious victory befriended by bruin illustrations "the heavy animal turned to face raoul." . . . . . . _frontispiece_ "the party set forth." "suddenly, raoul raised himself upon his knees." "joe led the way." "rising to his full height, joe swung the paddle above his head." "she pointed the first cannon with her own hands." in paths of peril chapter i from the old world to the new the defence of the city of la rochelle by the huguenots, when for more than a year they defied the whole power of france under the leadership of cardinal richelieu, must ever remain one of the most heroic and soul-stirring chapters in history. for the sake of their faith these noble people endured the pangs of hunger, the perils of battle, and the blight of pestilence, until at last, their fighting men being reduced to a mere handful, with broken hearts they were compelled to surrender. it was a terrible time for the weak and the young. nearly one-half of the population of the city died during the siege, and those who survived formed a gaunt, haggard, miserable band, more like scarecrows than human beings. among them were a maiden of twenty and a boy of twelve years of age, whose fortunes we shall follow in these pages. she was constance de bernon, the only daughter of one of the most important families, and he, raoul de bernon, her nephew, now an orphan, both his parents having perished in the dreadful days of the siege. not all the horrors she had witnessed, nor the sufferings she had borne, in the least degree shook constance's fidelity to her faith. she was of the stuff which makes martyrs, and would have died at the stake rather than renounce her religion. right glad, therefore, was she when her parents succeeded in effecting their escape from old france, where only persecution awaited protestants, and making their way across the atlantic ocean to the new france, where it was possible to be true to one's belief without having to suffer for it. the de bernons settled in what was then known as acadia, now the province of nova scotia, and began life again amid the wildness of the land which the micmac and melecite indians had hitherto held as their hunting-ground. raoul accompanied them. since the loss of his parents his whole heart had gone out to constance. never was aunt more beloved by nephew. it might indeed with truth be said that he fairly worshipped her, and found in her companionship the chief solace for his great bereavement. while to the older people the change from the comfort and security of their former life at la rochelle to the crude and hard conditions of their new home could not help being a very trying one, raoul, on the contrary, was rather pleased with it. there was no going to school, nor learning of lessons, except when his aunt could now and then spare an hour to spend with him over the few books they had been able to bring. he lived out-of-doors for the most part, and had no difficulty in finding plenty to occupy his time. he was a sturdy lad, with a bright, strong countenance, which gave good promise for the future if only he kept in the right path; and he made many friends, not only among the settlers, but also among the indians, some of whose camps were always near at hand. "it seems to me you do not miss la rochelle very much, raoul," said constance to him as they sat at the door of the house in the quiet of the evening, when all the work of the day was over. "you are quite happy here, are you not?" the colour came into the boy's face at his aunt's words, for although she did not so mean it, her question seemed to imply that he was forgetting his former home and the dear ones he had lost. "i do like it here," he replied, lifting his big brown eyes to hers. "it is very different from la rochelle, i know, but----" and here he hesitated so long that constance with a smile took up the sentence. "but you'd rather live in the woods than in the city--that's it, isn't it, raoul? i quite understand, and i don't blame you in the least. you're fond of adventure, and you're glad to be where there's apt to be plenty of it. how would you like to go with me to cape sable?" "i'm ready to go with you anywhere, aunt constance!" was the prompt and hearty response. "but why are you going to cape sable?" it was now constance's turn to blush, and very charming she looked as she answered in a low tone with her face turned away: "i am to be married soon, raoul, to monsieur la tour, and he is going to take me to cape sable, where he has his fort." raoul sprang to his feet excitedly. the idea of his beloved aunt belonging to somebody else hurt him cruelly. it filled his heart with jealousy, and he exclaimed in a tone of passion: "you're going to be married, aunt constance, and to leave us all! what is that for? why couldn't you stay with us? we are so happy here." constance smiled with pleasure at the vigour of his speech, and putting her arm about his neck affectionately, said: "you surely would not have me live and die an old maid, would you, raoul? and monsieur la tour will make such a good husband for me!" raoul sighed as he warmly returned his aunt's caress. his protest was foolish, of course, and, after all, if she was going to take him with her to her new home, what would be the difference? "oh, yes, i suppose so," he answered. "but i didn't know. please tell me all about it." so constance went into particulars, raoul listening with profound interest. charles de la tour, who was also a huguenot, had now been for a number of years in acadia, carrying on an extensive business in fishing and fur-trading, and had just built a strong fort at cape sable, which he called fort st. louis. of this establishment he had invited constance to become the mistress, and she had given her consent. yet, although she loved de la tour, who was a handsome, genial, daring man such as easily win a woman's heart, she did not want to part with her nephew, and de la tour made no objection to his accompanying her, especially as he himself must needs be often absent from the fort on business expeditions for months at a time, and raoul would then be good company for his wife. so in due time it all came about as was arranged, and raoul found himself settled at fort st. louis with his new uncle, whom he greatly admired and respected. this fort, placed at the extreme south-east point of what is now nova scotia, looked out over the restless waters of the atlantic, and kept an eye upon the ships passing by to the bay of fundy or to the new england ports. it was very strongly built of stone, and mounted many cannon which raoul longed to see in use. a snug harbour lay to the east, where de la tour's vessels could anchor in safety from any storm, and inland stretched vast forests, which fairly swarmed with game, from the lively rabbit to the gigantic moose. what with fishing, trapping and hunting, rowing, sailing and swimming to his heart's content, raoul was in no danger of finding the time hang heavy on his hands. chapter ii the great bear hunt there were many tribes of indians scattered over acadia--abenakes, etechemins, micmacs, openagos, and so forth, in whom constance de la tour took a very deep interest. she was full of zeal to teach them the christian religion, and how to improve their way of living; and she went about from village to village, and from wigwam to wigwam, with wonderful patience striving to reach the hearts of the pagans, and help them to better things; so winning their love that she came to be esteemed as the guardian angel of their children. raoul usually accompanied her on these journeys, and strange enough were many of the places they visited. now it would be a mere huddle of huts that looked like inverted wash-tubs, or again what seemed a cluster of large-sized hen-coops, or perhaps a big shed a hundred feet long with sleeping stalls below, and a loft above for the children, having neither windows nor chimney, and inclosed by a heavy oak stockade. whether big or little, these odd dwellings swarmed with squaws and children, and while his aunt was speaking to the elder folk, raoul would always find amusement with the youngsters. many useful things did madame de la tour teach her dusky pupils--the way to bake bread, how to raise corn, pumpkins, and melons, the mode of preserving the fruit that was so plentiful in the autumn, and the art of making maple-sugar, all of which helped to benefit them, no less than the gospel message she never failed to give also. she was the first missionary to these wild children of the forest in acadia, and her memory is still enduring and fragrant because of the good she wrought amongst them. raoul, vastly as he admired his aunt's devotion, could not of course be expected to share in it to any great extent, but since his idea of life was to have as good a time as possible--and he much preferred going on these expeditions to being cooped up in the fort--it suited him all right that she should be so zealous as she was. tramping through the vast green forests, or paddling in birch canoes over the clear water of smooth-running streams, there was always something new to be seen, and at any time an adventure might happen. in the autumn after their coming to fort st. louis, a great bear hunt was arranged to take place at the tusket river, and raoul was full of excitement about it. the plan was certainly as daring as it was novel, for the bears were not to be killed when found, but driven with clubs and switches towards the village, where arrows and spears and sharp appetites awaited them. "i do hope there'll be plenty of bears," exclaimed raoul to his aunt the evening before the hunt. "won't it be exciting when they get them started, and they try to escape? i think i'll go out after the bears, and not wait at the village for them to come--that will be too tiresome." "whatever you do, raoul, take good care of yourself," said madame, patting him upon the shoulder. "you are my boy, you know, and i should be very sorry if anything were to happen to you." raoul smiled confidently as he drew himself up to his full height. "oh, there's no fear of me. i've had too much to do with bears to let any of them hurt me." madame smiled fondly back at him as she responded: "you certainly look as if you ought to be able to take care of yourself. you are a fine big fellow, raoul, and i pray god your life may be a long and happy and useful one." the bear hunt was well organized under the direction of madame, who had a genius for command. raoul preferred going into the forest with the beaters to remaining at the village, and set off in high glee, the party being chiefly composed of the young men of the tribe. it was the season of grapes, and the vines, which climbed in wild profusion to the very tree-tops, were laden with the luscious fruit which bruin dearly loved. the hunters, therefore, were in no doubt as to where to seek their prey. armed only with light clubs and supple switches, they dashed into the forest, darting this way and that, each one eager to be the first to find a victim. raoul joined forces with an indian lad of his own age named outan, and it was understood that they were to stand by each other. beside his club raoul had a good hunting-knife in his belt, but he carried no fire-arms. pressing forward with reckless haste, they came to a place where the grape-vines fairly smothered the trees which supported them. "ah-ha!" exclaimed outan exultantly. "plenty bear here, for sure!" and the words had but left his lips when he gave a cry of joy and pointed excitedly to a tree, whose leaves were shaking, although there was not a breath of wind. raoul gazed in the direction indicated, and his heart gave a bound when he caught sight of a dark body that the leaves only half concealed. "there he is! i see him!" he cried; "a great big fellow, and he's coming down!" running to the foot of the tree, the boys began to shout up to the bear, calling him names, and daring him to come down. but, instead of obeying them, the big black fellow, one of the largest of his kind and in superb condition, turned about, and proceeded to climb higher. "hullo! that won't do," said raoul in a tone of disappointment. "we'll never get him down that way. let us throw stones up at him." accordingly they began to bombard the animal with stones, raoul, who was a capital shot, succeeding in hitting him more than once. yet this did not help matters at all. on the contrary the bear only climbed the higher. then outan proposed to climb an adjoining tree, taking some stones with him, and then to drive the creature down. raoul thought the idea an excellent one, and took up his station at the foot of the tree with his club in readiness for immediate use. outan went up the tree with the ease of a monkey, and gaining a good position above the bear shouted fiercely at him, while he threw the stones with accurate aim. thus assailed from this unexpected quarter, the bear was panic-stricken, and started down the tree at utmost speed. "look out! bear's coming!" yelled outan, and raoul, with every nerve quivering, and his muscles as tense as bow-strings, grasped his club until his knuckles went white. tail foremost, the heavy animal shuffled down the tree-trunk with astonishing agility, and, reaching the ground on all fours, turned to face raoul. chapter iii setting a bad example up to this moment raoul, carried away by the excitement of the hunt, had not stopped to consider what he should do if the bear happened to show fight instead of running away, but now he found himself face to face with the creature, which was evidently in no very good humour at having been so rudely disturbed while feasting on the grapes. growling fiercely the bear charged at raoul, who darted off, shouting: "quick, outan, quick! come, help me!" by dodging in and out among the trees he could keep out of the bear's clutches; but this complete change of programme was not at all what he had counted upon, and it was with great relief that presently he saw not only outan, but several other indians coming to his aid. shouting and swinging their clubs they attracted the animal's attention from raoul, who was fast losing his breath, and from being the pursuer the bear now became the pursued. he was wise enough to see that the odds were against him, and made off at a shambling gallop which the hunters found it difficult to keep up with. their object being to drive the bear towards the village they must needs keep him going in that direction, and this they found no easy task. it would almost seem as if he suspected their purpose, so hard did he try to go off at a tangent instead of straight ahead; and more than once raoul well-nigh despaired of their succeeding in their object, and regretted that he had not brought his musket with him. but the indians were not to be fooled. the bear was too fine a specimen to lose, and they spared neither their lungs nor their muscles as they kept up the pursuit with unflagging zeal. it certainly was a curious way of hunting bears, and if bruin had only known how powerless his persecutors really were, he would, no doubt, have freed himself from them in short order. he was too badly frightened, however, to perceive the truth, and did his best to keep out of range of the menacing cudgels, while all the time the village drew nearer, where his fate awaited him. raoul would have liked very much to reach the village ahead of the bear, but although he ran his very best, he was left well in the rear, and when he came up the big black creature had already been dispatched. "you poor fellow!" said raoul as he passed his hand over the rich, glossy black fur, a qualm of pity succeeding the lust of the chase now that the excitement was over. "you did your best to get away from us, but we were too many for you. it was not just a fair fight, was it?" several other bears had been secured, and when the hunt was over, and the indians had all gathered again, some strange ceremonies took place. into the mouths of the slain bears smoke from an indian pipe was blown by the hunters, and at the same time each lifeless creature was begged not to hold any hard feelings because of what they had suffered. then the bears' heads, painted and decorated, were set on high, and the savages sang the praise of the acadian king of beasts, after which the well-cooked bodies were divided amongst the hungry people, who feasted upon them greedily. madame and raoul had their share of bear-steak, and then the former took advantage of the quiet which followed the feast, to talk to these heathens about the great spirit whom she was so anxious they should learn to love. she was listened to with great attention by the indians, because she had won their hearts, not only by her lovely character, but also by her many generous deeds and gifts. but they were, for the most part, slow learners of the new and better way. the grizzled old chief, to whom madame with infinite patience was teaching the lord's prayer, made a quaint objection. "if i ask for nothing but bread," said he, "i shall have no more moose nor sweet cakes," referring to some toothsome cake that madame had herself baked as a present for him. after madame had spoken, the young folks fell to sky-larking, while the elders smoked their pipes, and outan, who was fond of teasing, raised a big laugh at raoul's expense by telling how the bear had dropped from the tree and put him to flight, and he mimicked raoul dodging around the tree-trunk. this angered raoul, and when his orders to outan to "shut up" passed unnoticed, he rushed at him and struck him in the face. now, although outan looked upon both madame de la tour and raoul as superior beings, and would have endured a great deal at their hands rather than displease them, still he had his own share of temper and pride, and this sudden blow from raoul, given in the presence of his companions, filled him with fury. he struck back with all his might, and the next instant the two boys were rolling upon the ground in a mad grapple. at once they were surrounded by an eager circle of spectators, who keenly relished what promised to be a lively fight, and with excited cries urged on the youthful combatants. so close were raoul and outan locked in each other's arms that they could not use their fists, and the struggle was therefore in reality not more than a wrestling-match. but the more they strove the fiercer burned their rage, and the moment that one or the other did succeed in getting a hand free, cruel use would certainly be made of it. while this was taking place madame had been talking with some of the women, little imagining how raoul was engaged, and she might have continued in her ignorance had not outan's little sister run up to them, sobbing out something which her mother at once understood, and darted off with an exclamation of alarm. this attracted madame's attention, and more out of concern lest some accident should have happened than from curiosity, she followed the indian woman. when they reached the crowd that surrounded the fighters, so densely packed was it that at first they could not get within sight of what was going on. but presently some of the men made space for madame in rather a shamefaced way, until she was quite close to the struggling boys. for a moment she thought it was only an innocent trial of strength, but a second look at their inflamed faces and furious eyes told her the truth, and in a horror-stricken voice she called out: "raoul! raoul! what's the meaning of this? stop it at once. i command you." but raoul was in too wild a fury to hear or heed, and, realizing this, madame, the grace of whose form concealed an unusual degree of strength in a woman, laid hold of the boys and tore them apart. chapter iv off to the woods raoul rose sullenly to his feet, and faced his aunt, who fixed upon him a look of stern displeasure mingled with sorrow. "oh, my nephew," she said in a tone of profound reproach, "are you not ashamed of yourself to be engaged in such an unseemly brawl? what an example to set those whom we are striving to teach better things! come away, that i may have some talk with you in private." raoul, his anger now having in large part given place to shame, obeyed her bidding without a word, and they passed through the crowd into the forest. here raoul found his tongue, and explained how the thing had occurred. madame heard him with attention and sympathy. "you certainly had good reason to be provoked, my boy," she said as she tenderly patted his cheek. "but you must not forget that these poor people are heathens, and we are christians, and that if we would win them over to be christians also, we must do very differently from what they would do themselves. now you must confess that you did not act in a christian way, and i am very sorry. let us pray to god to give us such self-control that we shall not fall into errors of this kind." so they kneeled together upon the turf, and raoul's heart was melted by the fervent prayer that came from his aunt's lips for the help of god in right living, and in the conversion of the indians. then, without delay, he sought out outan, and, to the great surprise of the lad, expressed his regret for his hasty blow and begged his forgiveness. to outan the situation was so utterly novel that he was bewildered what to do, but obeying the impulse of his heart, he smiled broadly and gave raoul a hearty hug, which showed in the clearest way that all ill-feeling had vanished from him. the bear hunt having been successfully carried out, madame and raoul returned to fort st. louis, where they found monsieur la tour, who had got back from one of his trading expeditions, awaiting them in high spirits, because his business operations had been very successful. charles la tour thought more of wealth and power than anything else in the world. not even his beautiful, devoted wife was dearer to him. yet he loved her after his own fashion, was very proud of her, and had not the slightest objection to her missionary zeal, so long as it did not cross any of his plans or ambitions. in regard to raoul, of whom he was quite fond, he did think it rather a pity that he should be filled with his aunt's religious notions, because it might spoil him for the rough business of life; yet he made no protest against it, although he did now and then let drop a cynical speech that touched the boy's sensitive nature. he had not been long at home before his restless spirit moved him to start off again, and this time he proposed that raoul should accompany him. "if your aunt can do without you for a few weeks, you'd better come with me," he said in his off-hand way, which took consent for granted. "you'll get some useful lessons in buying furs and trading goods, and in how to make good bargains with the indians, if you keep your eyes and ears open." raoul, for his part, was quite eager to go. he loved adventure and excitement, and was very weary of the routine of life at the fort. so his response was no less hearty than prompt. "why, of course i want to go, uncle," he exclaimed, his face beaming with pleasure, and then checking himself as he thought of his aunt, he added in a more subdued tone, "if aunt constance is willing for me to go." in her heart madame would have very much preferred to have raoul remain with her, but she was too unselfish to confess it, and smiled gaily enough as she said: "oh, i think i can manage to get along without you for a while, raoul, although i shall of course miss you both greatly." winter was drawing near when the party set forth, and they must needs be not only well-armed, but well supplied with blankets and furs to resist the cold. [illustration: "the party set forth."] there were twelve of them in all, six whites, and as many red men, stalwart fellows all of them, and thoroughly fitted to endure the hardships of their undertaking. madame was left in charge of the fort, with trusty old simon imbert as her lieutenant. "my prayers will follow you every foot of the way, charles," she said as she gave her husband a parting embrace, "and i shall be a happy woman when i see you safe back again." la tour's purpose was to go clear across the peninsula to the bay of fundy, seeking out the indian encampments, buying whatever furs they had, and arranging for further supplies. he accordingly took with him a stock of goods such as pleased the indian fancy. sufficient snow had already fallen to enable toboggans to be used, and with their baggage loaded upon these the party made good progress through the forest. raoul was in high spirits. neither the toilsome tramping all day, nor the sleeping under the sky instead of in his own warm bed at night, nor the rude though abundant fare counted anything in comparison with his pride of filling a man's place, and, as far as was possible, doing a man's work. there was one thing that gave him some trouble at first, however, until he solved the difficulty by being true to his best instincts. his aunt had taught him to pray night and morning, and in the privacy of his own snug chamber in the fort he never omitted doing so; but when out in the forest in the company of men who took no thought for such things, it was very different. although his conscience pricked him sharply he let several days go by without prayers, just because he had not the courage to kneel down before the others. but one night it seemed as if he could not get to sleep, he felt so conscience-stricken, and at last, unable to bear it any longer, he rolled out of his blankets, and kneeled against a tree-trunk. a minute later his uncle, who had been out with some of his men setting traps, returned, and seeing raoul, exclaimed in a tone of surprise: "hullo, my boy, what's the matter? have you had a scare while i was away?" raoul, blushing deeply, rose to his feet, and with eyes fixed on the ground, murmured: "no, sir, i was just saying my prayers, as i ought to have done every night, but i felt ashamed to." it was on the tip of la tour's tongue to say: "oh! leave that to your aunt. she can pray enough for both of us." but he kept the words back, and with an indulgent smile which implied plainly that he thought the boy's occupation was of small consequence, he said in a kindly tone: "well, you'd better get back into your blankets again. we're going to have a stormy night, if i am not greatly mistaken." that he had not mis-read the weather signs became evident ere midnight, for a snow-storm set in which grew in violence hour by hour, until by daylight it was so furious that not even charles la tour had the hardihood to brave it. chapter v the moose hunt for several days the storm continued, and during that time no member of the party dared to leave camp, except to gather wood for the fire, which by great exertion and care was kept burning. it was a miserable time for all. la tour fumed and fretted at the delay, and the other whites shared his feelings, although the indians seemed stolidly content with the forced inaction. temporary tents had been hastily made out of spruce boughs, and these being covered thickly with snow, afforded passable protection; yet they were poor places in which to spend a long day, and their occupants soon grew utterly weary of them. raoul was hard put to it to while away the dreary hours. his uncle was in too ill a humour to be pleasant company, and so the boy fell back upon the society of the men, who were inclined to be rough in their ways and coarse in speech. on the evening of the third day of the storm la tour called raoul to him, and said in a sneering tone: "how much good can your prayers do, think you? if you were to pray for the storm to stop, would it have any effect? you certainly couldn't wish a better chance to show what you can do." raoul was sorely puzzled to reply. he suspected that his uncle was only seeking to make fun of him, and yet it did not seem right to respond in the same spirit, thus making a jest of what was so sacred. looking very confused, he kept silence, until la tour exclaimed impatiently: "have you lost your tongue? why don't you answer me?" "because i don't know what to say," murmured raoul. "aunt constance told me that we must not expect every prayer to be answered right away, and maybe even if she were to pray for the storm to stop it would not do it." at this point la tour's better nature asserted itself. he began to feel ashamed at thus teasing the boy, and to be impressed by his evident sincerity, so patting him affectionately upon the shoulder, he said: "don't mind my foolish words, raoul. i didn't mean to hurt your feelings, or to weaken your faith. keep on doing what you feel to be right, even if you are made fun of by those who ought to know better." raoul was deeply touched by these words, and thenceforward admired his uncle more than ever. ere he closed his eyes that night he did pray fervently for the storm to abate, and then curled up in his blankets to sleep as soundly as if in his own snug bed in fort st. louis. he was awakened next morning by his uncle giving orders to the men in so cheery a tone that it was evident there had been a great change in his spirits; and, in making his way out of the half-buried tent, raoul at once understood the reason, for the storm was all over, and the sun shone dazzlingly upon a world of spotless white. "good!" cried raoul joyously. "now we needn't stay here any longer. i am so glad," and he felt like dancing a little by way of expressing his feelings. in his delight at the return of fine weather he might have forgotten to be thankful for the answer to his prayer, had not monsieur la tour reminded him by calling out: "good-morning, raoul. you see the snow has ceased, and perhaps it was your prayers that caused it to stop." raoul laughed, and shook his head in disclaimer of such being the case. "and now, uncle, we can be off again, can't we?" he responded. "i hope we won't have any more such storms." in their journey across country they presently came to the region where huge moose, the grandest of all antlered animals, were to be found, and la tour, as their supply of food was running low, decided to halt for a few days, in order that they might have a moose hunt. this was good news to the whole party, and there was keen competition among the members to be allowed to take part in the hunt, la tour's purpose being to have one-half of the men accompany him, while the rest remained at the camp. raoul took it for granted that he was to go, and was quite dismayed when his uncle let fall a remark which implied that he was to stay behind. "why, uncle," he exclaimed, "am i not to go with you?" "well, i hadn't thought about it, raoul," was the reply. "won't it be rather hard work for you to keep up with us? and then there may be some danger, you know." "oh, but i don't mind either the hard work or the danger," raoul promptly responded. "please let me go too, uncle, i want to so much." "very well then," replied la tour, good-naturedly. "you can come along, but you'll have to look after yourself, for i'm going to give my whole attention to the moose." mounted upon broad snow-shoes, which enabled them to travel with ease and speed over the deepest snow, the hunting-party set forth amid the cheers of those who regretfully remained behind. they were all in high spirits, and the men made little boasts among themselves as to which of them would be the first to sight a moose, and to get the first shot at one. "this heavy fall of snow will make things easier for us," monsieur la tour said to raoul, as they tramped along together. "the big fellows will not be able to run very fast through such deep drifts." it was not until mid-day drew near that signs of moose were seen, and then one of the keen-sighted indians, who was in the van, came hurrying back to announce that he had found fresh tracks in the snow. after examining them la tour consulted for a moment with his companions, and then laid out his plan of campaign, which was that the party should spread out in a wide line, so as to cover as much ground as possible, and yet keep within hearing of signals, so as to be able to gather together again at the proper time. "as for you, raoul, you had better follow me," he said. "you'll not miss any of the excitement, and you'll be less likely to get astray." this suited raoul perfectly, and having seen to it that his gun was ready for instant action he followed his uncle's lead, although it was no easy matter to keep pace with his rapid stride. on they went through the forest, with every sense alert to detect the proximity of their prey. presently la tour stopped short, and bent his gaze intently to the right. raoul looked in the same direction, but at first could not make out anything, yet from his uncle's action, it was plain that he must have sighted a moose, for he began to creep forward stealthily, with his gun held in readiness to fire. raoul, holding his breath, kept close behind, and at last his eyes fell upon a dark form scarcely distinguishable from the thick evergreen against which it stood. "there he is! i see him!" he whispered to himself, while his heart throbbed wildly. just then la tour levelled his gun, and the silence was shattered by its startling report. a moment later the evergreens were violently agitated, and out of them rushed a huge bull moose, made furious by the wound, which at once charged fiercely down upon the hunters. chapter vi in the nick of time as it happened, the snow did not lie very heavily at this particular place, and the great creature was able to move with tremendous speed. "look out, raoul!" shouted la tour, as he darted aside to evade the moose's onset. "get behind a tree, and then fire at him." this was precisely what raoul had in mind to do, and he made a gallant effort to accomplish it, but unfortunately in his haste he caught his snow-shoes together, and over he went headlong into the snow with such violence as to nearly bury himself. confused by the fall, and blinded by the snow, he lay there helplessly, while the bull moose, infuriated by its wound, and seeing only the prostrate boy to account for it, bore down upon him with murderous intent. he fully realized his danger, and yet felt powerless to avert it, for to regain one's feet after a tumble with snow-shoes on is no easy matter. in the meantime la tour had rushed out from behind the tree, and by waving his arms and shouting, strove to attract the attention of the animal to himself until raoul should have time to get upon his feet again, and find a place of safety. but the moose was not to be thus diverted from its victim, and kept on until it was within ten yards of raoul, whose fate now seemed to be sealed. la tour, quite forgetting himself in his anxiety for the boy, made a desperate effort to get in between him and the animal, and groaned aloud as he saw that it could not avail. then, suddenly, raoul raised himself upon his knees, and pointing his gun at the moose's head, pulled the trigger. [illustration: "suddenly, raoul raised himself upon his knees."] at the report the big brute pitched forward upon its antlers, almost turning a somersault, and la tour with an exclamation of joy ran to raoul, and lifting him up clasped him to his breast, crying: "bravo! my nephew, bravo! that was a splendid shot. i never thought you could do it." but hardly had the words left his lips than his exultation changed to alarm, for the moose, which had been only stunned by the bullet, and not mortally wounded, rose to its feet again to renew the charge. happily the shock of the bullet had bewildered it so that it went off at a tangent, and ere it could recover itself la tour had hurried raoul to safe shelter behind a mighty tree. hastily reloading his gun, an action which raoul lost no time in imitating, la tour watched his chance to give the great animal a final shot. after plunging about for a little it once more located its assailants, and, looking very terrible in its rage, made another furious rush at them. this they both evaded without difficulty, and then la tour got the opportunity he sought, and sent a bullet into the heart of the mighty creature, which brought its career to a sudden end. "phew!" he exclaimed in a tone of profound relief, as he took off his fur cap and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "that was lively work, wasn't it, raoul? what a grand fight the old fellow did make! he pretty nearly had you under his hoofs. you managed to fire in the nick of time. that was a clever shot, my boy, and i am proud of you for it." raoul flushed with pleasure at his uncle's praise, which he appreciated all the more because la tour was far more prone to find fault than to express approval. "i thought it was all over with me, uncle charles," he said, "for the snow had got into my eyes so that i could not see properly, but i did the best i could." "and a very good best it was, my boy. no man could have done better. you'll make a fine hunter when you're full grown. ah, ha! here come some of the men. i wonder what fortune they have had." attracted by the sound of the firing, the rest of the hunting party had hurried to the scene, and la tour was in his element as he proudly displayed the fallen monarch. "raoul and i are partners in him," he said laughingly. "raoul hit him in the head, and i hit him in the heart, but he came within an ace of finishing raoul first." and he then proceeded to relate what had happened. raoul was warmly congratulated upon his lucky escape, and upon the excellence of his marksmanship, and everybody rejoiced over the splendid prize which had been secured, for the moose was in superb condition, and would supply them with savoury steaks and roasts for many days. after what had occurred at the moose hunt, it was evident that his uncle regarded raoul in a different light. he dropped his bantering tone toward him, and treated him more on an equal footing, and raoul fully appreciated the change. during the remainder of their trip they were favoured with such good fortune--the game proving plentiful all along the route, and the indians whose villages they visited being so well supplied with furs and so eager to trade--that la tour, in high good humour, told raoul he brought him good luck, and must accompany him again. the whole party got back to fort st. louis without a mishap, and then everybody settled down for the winter, as there were to be no more trading expeditions. but madame la tour did not suspend her missionary work because it was winter time. as soon as her husband had returned and relieved her of the charge of the fort, she resumed her visits to the indian encampments. this was the best season for what she sought to accomplish, because the men were about the wigwams most of the time, and she could get a hearing from them as well as from the women and children. raoul usually went with her. he liked the idea of being in some sense her protector, and she was always such good company that the hours never seemed long that were spent in her society. he always carried his gun, not that there was anything to fear from the indians. they were altogether to be trusted. but some wild animal might be encountered that would venture to attack, or that might be worth having a shot at, any way. right glad he was that he did have his gun one afternoon when he and his aunt were returning from a day spent at the souriquois village, where the good woman had been teaching the squaws, not only how to be christians, but also how to be better wives and mothers. they were walking rapidly, and talking busily, when a horrible scream that sent a chill of terror to their hearts, and caused them to stop suddenly in the path, issued from the thick woods in front of them. a stranger would have been at a loss to guess what sort of creature could produce so frightful a sound, but madame la tour recognized it at once, and she perceptibly shrank closer to raoul as she said in a startled voice: "it is a _loup cervier_, raoul, and right in our way!" chapter vii at close quarters raoul knew the scream also, and something about the animal from whence it came, and he first looked carefully at his gun to make sure that it was ready for instant use, and then peered into the obscurity of the thick evergreens, in the attempt to locate the fierce brute which had thus challenged their passing. what madame meant by _loup cervier_ was what is now known as the "indian devil," or catamount, a species of puma that could be very dangerous when in a fighting humour, as this one evidently was. "don't be frightened, aunt constance," said raoul sturdily. "i'll shoot him dead the moment i see him," and he brought his gun to his shoulder as he spoke. "wait, wait until you can see him plainly," said madame under her breath. "you must not miss." there was a rustling among the branches, another blood-curdling scream, and then the hideous face of the creature appeared, its eyes flaming with fury, and its cruel teeth showing white among the rigid bristles that protruded from its furry cheeks. now if raoul had been alone, he would assuredly have been nervous enough to make it a difficult matter to take good aim, but the presence of his aunt made him forget himself utterly in his loyal determination to protect her from the impending peril. he felt as firm as a rock. not a nerve quivered, and, aiming straight between the baleful eyes, he fired. the report rang out on the still evening air, and was instantly followed by a snarling shriek from the wounded animal, so charged with fury that raoul instinctively pressed his aunt back out of the path. just as he did so the puma sprang at them, for it was not killed, a slight movement of its head as raoul fired having caused the bullet to strike too high, and plough through the fur on the forehead, instead of burying itself in the brain. raoul's sudden movement caused the brute to fall short, and ere it could gather itself to spring again the boy, clubbing his gun, struck at it with the heavy butt. it was the best thing to be done under the circumstances, and yet, when the maddened catamount, squirming around as if it were made of rubber, caught the stock in its teeth, and tore at the gun with its terrible claws, there seemed small chance of raoul being able to repeat the blow. happily this was not necessary on his part, for madame, who had been perfectly composed throughout, having picked up a stout stick, came to his assistance, and, with a clever blow delivered just behind the puma's ear, put an end to its existence. "bravo, aunt constance!" cried raoul delightedly. "you've done for him, and just in time, too! he was pulling the gun out of my hands." there was the light of triumph in madame la tour's fine eyes as she turned the dead thing over with her stick. "he meant us mischief, raoul," she said, "and he has paid dearly for it. if he had left us alone he would not be lying there now. let us kneel down and thank god for our deliverance." and so they knelt together, while madame, in a few fervent sentences, expressed their gratitude to providence for having thus protected them from injury. as they hastened homeward, madame said in a low tone, as if talking to herself rather than to raoul: "this is a wild, dangerous country, and i grow very weary of it. i pray that i may be spared to get back to france some day." raoul heard these words with some surprise. his aunt always seemed so busy and content in the doing of her duty, that he did not suppose she was not as happy as he was himself, but his quick sympathy inspired him to ask: "shall we be going back to france some day, aunt constance?" "only god knows that, my dear," was the reply. "i'm sure i cannot tell. we are in the hands of providence, and whatever comes to pass will be the best." raoul said no more at the time, but thenceforward his admiration for his aunt was deepened by the knowledge that she would really prefer being across the ocean, although she always seemed so serene and satisfied with her lot in acadia. monsieur la tour was much interested in the account of the encounter with the catamount. "you deserve credit, both of you," he said warmly. "as for you, my dear wife," he added, with an unusually loving look, "there seems to be no limit to your talents. you can preach, teach, hunt, fish, and look after the affairs of your own household better than any woman i ever knew. how fortunate i was to get such a wife! eh, raoul?" madame's noble countenance was flooded with colour by her husband's frank praise, which made her heart sing for joy, and going up to him, she threw her arms about his neck and kissed his bronzed cheek, saying: "thank you, my dear charles, for your kind words, which i am sure are not empty ones." with the return of spring, la tour, whose enterprise and energy knew no bounds, unfolded a new plan he had formed for the extension of his power and the increase of his fortune. this was the building of still another fort, and the site he had selected was the mouth of what is now the st. john river, in the province of new brunswick, then known by the musical indian name of ouangondy. this place had many advantages over fort st. louis. the river went far inland, and was the highway for many indian tribes who had precious pelts to barter. not only so, but the whole new england coast could be conveniently reached by canoe, or sailing shallop, and again, the lay of the land was such that an exceedingly strong position could be easily had. throughout the summer the building went on, and ere autumn came again the new fort, which la tour modestly called after himself, was completed. it stood upon a rise of ground commanding the harbour and the sharp turn made by the river on entering, about half-a-mile below, the famous falls, which then as now worked both ways, pouring up river when the tide was high and down river when it was low. fort la tour was solidly built of stone, and stood nearly two hundred feet square, with four bastions at the angles, and twenty good cannon frowning from the battlements. without were sturdy palisades as a further protection, and within, two comfortable dwellings, a tiny chapel, and the necessary storehouses, barracks for the garrison, and other buildings. such was raoul's new home, and he heartily approved of the change, because the country round about fort la tour was far richer and finer than that about fort st. louis, and the beautiful river held out promise of many a pleasant canoe trip, when the warm days of summer returned. as for madame la tour, she felt sorry to leave her dusky charges when they seemed to promise such good results, but she consoled herself with the thought that there were plenty of others equally needing the light, and that she could continue her good work from the new fort. chapter viii a perilous enterprise hitherto all had gone so well with charles la tour that he could hardly be blamed if he came to look upon himself as a favoured child of fortune. he had had the whole of acadia to himself, so to speak, and what with fishing, fur-trading, and farming, had greatly increased his substance. but now rumours of a rival came to disturb his peace. another charles, who was generally known as charnace, had obtained from the french king certain grants and privileges in acadia, and, wrath at finding la tour already monopolizing the country, he let it be known that he proposed to contest the field with him by force of arms. he chose his time well for the attack upon fort la tour, coming when the stock of provisions were lowest, the garrison smallest, and those whose support could be counted upon were most widely scattered, and he brought with him a strong force of soldiers in his four staunch vessels. stationing his two ships and the galiot so that they blockaded the ship channels, and the pinnace to the north-east of partridge island, he landed several hundred men so as to control the surrounding country, and then settled down for a siege, feeling quite confident that the capitulation of the fort was only a question of time. in the meantime the commander of fort la tour had not been idle, although the coming of charnace had been like a bolt out of the blue, for he did not expect to see anything of him that year. he lost no time in making preparations for a determined defence, in which his stout-hearted wife gave him efficient help. by means of spies, he got full information as to his enemy's purpose, and laughed grimly at the latter's threats. "and so he has vowed that he will send me back to france in manacles, has he? well, words are cheap. it is easy to indulge in big talk, but not always so easy to put it into deeds. we shall see how monsieur charnace will keep his word." raoul was not at all dismayed at being besieged. on the contrary, he was pleased by the prospect of exciting times, and promised himself to take as active a part in the defence as his uncle would permit. "what right has charnace coming here to attack us?" he asked with fine indignation at the insolence of the intruder. "we were here first, and he has no business interfering. we must give him such a beating that he will not dare to come near us again." keeping his ships well out of range of the cannon at the fort, and his men safely disposed in the protection of the woods, charnace sought to cut off all supplies by sea or land, and thus let slow starvation win the day for him. now la tour was just then eagerly expecting the arrival from la rochelle of the armed ship _clement_ with a full cargo of supplies of all sorts, and a goodly number of soldiers and colonists. in fact, the vessel was overdue, and if she should come up the bay without warning, she would assuredly be captured by charnace's ships, which would have no difficulty in overpowering her. "we must stop her before she comes too far," he said, "and yet i hardly know how it is to be managed. charnace's spies and scouts are all around us. have you any notion how it can be managed, constance?" and, as was usually the case when in perplexity, he turned for counsel to the shrewd woman who was so peculiarly his helpmate. "let us send for joe takouchen," was her reply. "he may think of a way." accordingly joe was sent for, and promptly appeared, his usually impassive countenance betraying curiosity as to the reason for the summons. joe was a splendid specimen of the souriquois, who worshipped madame la tour as though she were divine. she had been particularly kind both to himself and his family, and he was ready to risk his life for her on any occasion. the situation was explained to joe, while he listened in silence, but with a comprehending expression. then, nodding his head sagely, he said: "joe will take the message to the ship. he will go to-night." "and how will you manage it, joe?" asked la tour. joe smiled significantly, and explained that his plan was to steal out of the fort at night, make his way to the headlands south-west, and thence put off in a canoe, as soon as the supply ship came in sight. la tour's face lit up at the proposition. "it's a big risk, joe, but if any man alive can carry the thing out it is you. whom will you take with you?" joe replied that jean pitchebat, a stalwart frenchman, who was his special friend, would be his choice, and la tour approved. raoul, who had been a silent listener hitherto, now spoke up. "may i go with joe too, uncle charles?" he asked, in a tone whose anxiety showed how fully he was in earnest. la tour looked at the boy with such manifest surprise that the latter flushed hotly. yet, being full of his desire, he turned to joe and said entreatingly: "you will not mind taking me, will you?" joe glanced inquiringly at his master and mistress. he was very fond of raoul, and had no objection to taking him along, but he felt that the matter was not one for him to settle. la tour had it on the tip of his tongue to brusquely refuse raoul's request, but the expression on his wife's face made him pause, and before he spoke, she said in her gentle way: "you might let him go, charles. he will be in god's hands. there is danger everywhere now, and his heart is set upon going." "oh, very well, then, so long as joe is willing. what do you say, joe?" and la tour turned to the taciturn indian. "joe say all right," was the laconic response, at which raoul clapped his hands gleefully. they set off the same night. fortunately it was both dark and windy, so that there was all the less danger of their movements being seen or heard. but they must needs exercise the utmost caution, for charnace had many indians in his service, and they would no doubt be acting as scouts and sentinels in the neighbourhood of the fort. joe led the way with amazing dexterity, stepping over the ground as silently as a serpent, and the other two followed, doing their best to imitate him. several times he stopped short, peered eagerly into the darkness, listened intently for a moment, and then, muttering something which raoul could not catch, changed his course to right or left. [illustration: "joe led the way."] once the sound of voices came out of the night to them, and raoul's heart throbbed wildly. he was not so much afraid of being captured as he was that they should be balked in their purpose, and that the supply ship, coming up without warning, would fall into charnace's hands. they were evidently passing through the line of their enemy's sentinels, and in peril of being betrayed by the slightest sound. very cautiously did joe make his way, now turning this way and now that, while raoul and jean kept so close that they could almost touch him. it was trying work, that told upon muscles and nerve, yet raoul held his own with the men all right, and certainly moved as silently as jean, even if he could not quite equal joe. at last they seemed to be getting well away from the fort, and into safer ground, when suddenly a dark form rose in front of them. chapter ix the stopping of the supply ship joe crouched low, preparing for a spring. jean and raoul did likewise, and not one of them breathed. "who goes there?" demanded a rough, stern voice, but the next instant it was silenced, for joe, throwing himself upon the speaker with a leap like that of a panther, brought him to the ground with his hands at his throat. but the man lay so motionless in his grip that there was no need to take his life. in falling backward, his head had struck a stone, and he was senseless. as soon as joe realized this he let go of him, and whispering to his companions: "quick--quick--run!" he darted off with them at his heels. not trying to pick their steps, they plunged through the darkness as fast as they could, slipping, stumbling, tripping, yet keeping on desperately, for they knew not if the whole camp might not presently be upon their heels. there was a stir among charnace's sentinels and a calling to one another, but none of them knew in which direction the fugitives had gone, and after some aimless scurrying about they gave up all idea of pursuit, and settled down to quiet again. meanwhile, the three had continued their wild flight until their breath was spent, and then they threw themselves down to recover it. "all right now," said joe, nodding complacently. "we see no more of them," and he was quite correct. they were now beyond charnace's lines, and could pursue their way in a more leisurely fashion. the break of day found them far down the shore and drawing near an encampment of friendly indians. from these joe had no difficulty in obtaining a good canoe, and a supply of provisions, and by noon they were out on the bay of fundy, watching for the _clement_. the weather was fine, and raoul keenly enjoyed dancing over the white-capped waves in their buoyant craft, which joe and jean managed with such matchless skill. they did not expect him to paddle, and so he stretched himself out in the bottom of the canoe and took his ease, the excitement and exertion of the past night having pretty thoroughly tired him. for some hours no sign of the ship appeared, and then, as the afternoon drew towards its close, joe's keen eyes descried a sail showing above the horizon to the southward. "good!" he grunted, and with a sweep of his paddle he turned the canoe in that direction. "you paddle now," he said to raoul, and the latter obeyed. propelled by the three blades, into which the paddlers put their strength, the light craft bounded over the water towards the ship. "oh! i hope it is the _clement_" said raoul. "we shall be just in good time." mile after mile they swept along, until raoul's arms began to ache, and his breath to become scant, but joe and jean were pegging away as vigorously as at first, and he hated to give up. they were nearing the ship rapidly, and ere long would be close enough to hail her, when, to their surprise, she came about, and went off on another tack, leaving them rapidly astern. "hullo!" exclaimed raoul in a tone of consternation. "what did she do that for? we shall soon be farther away from her than we were at first." joe stopped paddling for a moment, and looked very cross. then, rising to his full height, he swung the paddle above his head, hoping to attract the attention of some one on board the vessel. but it had no effect. the ship continued in her course, and, there being plenty of wind, her speed was so great as to make it useless for the canoe to follow her. [illustration: "rising to his full height, joe swung the paddle above his head."] the occupants of the canoe looked blankly at each other. even the usually impassive joe did not disguise his chagrin, while jean sought relief for his feelings in some strong language that would have brought upon him a reproof from madame la tour had she been present. the sun had already set. night was drawing near, and unless they reached the ship before darkness fell they might miss her altogether, and she would go on to become a prize for the waiting charnace. raoul clearly realized their critical position, and while joe and jean discussed what should be done, he lifted up his heart in earnest prayer that god would guide them to the ship even through the darkness. rested by their brief halt, the paddlers resumed work, steering the canoe straight up the bay, so as if possible to intercept the vessel in her next tack. meanwhile the daylight faded out of the sky, the wind dropped, and the water became perfectly calm. in almost complete silence the canoe glided steadily forward, raoul, who had paddled until he was tired, once more taking it easy in the bottom. suddenly there came through the gloom the sound of a man's voice giving a command, and it made the hearts of those in the canoe leap for joy. joe and jean had been paddling listlessly, but now they went to work with fresh energy. their light craft shot over the smooth water in the direction of the voice, and, a few minutes later, the dark bulk of the ship they sought loomed up before them. jean promptly hailed her, and was bidden to come alongside. a rope was thrown, whereby all three clambered up, and the next instant stood on the deck of the _clement_. very hearty was their welcome here. the captain of the good ship felt deeply grateful for the timely warning, and offered his wearied and hungry visitors the best at his disposal, while the colonists and others crowded about, eager to be told about la tour and his forts, and how things were going in the new world to which they had come. raoul was pleased to find himself a person of some importance, and his tongue wagged merrily as he answered the many questions poured upon him, or in his turn made inquiries on his own account. ere he lay down that night in the captain's cabin, he did not forget to thank god for having answered his prayer by guiding the canoe into the way of the _clement_. after consulting with joe and jean, the captain of the _clement_ decided that the best plan would be for him to keep the ship off for the present, as it was not likely charnace would break his blockade of fort la tour to go after her, and, even if he did, she could easily over-match any one of his vessels, and sail away from any of them. in the meantime, joe and jean would make their way back to the fort, leaving raoul on board. this arrangement was carried out successfully. the messengers again passed through charnace's lines and brought their good news to la tour, who at once decided that the best thing to be done was for him to get on board the _clement_ and sail on her for boston, to obtain reinforcements against the enemy. so, on a dark, still night a canoe, containing both monsieur and madame, glided unseen past the blockading vessels, la tour smiling grimly, and constance giving a shudder as they heard charnace's own voice saying: "the spy who just came from the fort says that his comrades will send down la tour in shackles at midnight," little knowing that the rascally conspirators had been discovered, and were themselves now lying in irons in the dungeon of the fort. chapter x adventure in boston the _clement_ was found and boarded without much difficulty, and at daybreak she was on her way to boston, bearing the la tours and raoul. they were well received at the quaint capital of the new england province, and, after a good deal of negotiation, for the shrewd colonists knew how to drive good bargains, la tour succeeded in arranging for four ships, carrying nearly two score guns, and one hundred and fifty men. with this force he felt quite equal to getting the better of his rival, and set sail from boston in high spirits. for six weeks fort la tour had been silent as a tomb, the besiegers, who were quite unaware of the la tours having slipped away, trusting to starvation to do their work for them, while the garrison, looking forward to their commander's return in force, made no attempt at sorties, but got along, as best they could, on the scanty rations left them. they kept a sharp and steady look-out, however, and one day their eyes were gladdened by the sight of many sails in the offing. "la tour! la tour!" they cried joyously, and at once proceeded to welcome him with a salute in which every cannon on the ramparts had a part. la tour did his best to capture some of charnace's vessels, but both wind and tide favoured their escape, although he chased them as far as the penobscot. there was great rejoicing at the fort, and feasting followed famine for the remainder of the week. "will monsieur charnace come back again, do you think?" raoul asked of his aunt as they sat in her room, having grown weary of the revelling. "i am afraid so," she answered with a sigh. "he is a proud, determined man, and this defeat will only cause him to try again with a stronger force. i fear there is trouble in store for us." "but why can't he leave us alone?" raoul cried petulantly. "we have never made any attack upon him." "because this world, big as it may seem, raoul, is all too small for such men as your uncle and charnace," madame replied. "they cannot brook a rival, and they must needs fight until one or the other is overthrown," and she sighed again deeply, for her gentle heart shrank from conflict, and she infinitely preferred teaching religion to the indians, to all her husband's grand plans for wealth and power. foiled in his first attempt, but not shaken in his purpose, charnace went off across the ocean to france to see if something could not be done there to humble his rival, and la tour was left to pursue his way in peace. raoul now took an active part in what went on, and led quite a busy life. he accompanied his uncle in his trips up the river st. john, where they met with indians from the interior, who brought rich furs to barter for goods. twice he crossed over to fort st. louis, and each time congratulated himself on the move to fort la tour; and what pleased him most of all, he was allowed to go on one of the ships to boston, for he had very pleasant recollections of his first visit there. his visit was made memorable by an experience which was certainly of too exciting a nature to be soon forgotten. having a leisure afternoon, he went off alone for a stroll along the river-bank, where he felt sure he would find something to interest him. and in this he was not disappointed. he had gone about half-a-mile from the town when, seeing a group of boys evidently much interested in something, he hurried towards them. to his surprise he saw that they were making sport of a strange-looking lad of about his own age, who seemed to be only half-witted. they wanted him to go into the water, but he held back in a terror-stricken way that ought to have caused them to desist, but only served to spur them on. just as raoul reached them, they had dragged the poor fellow to the edge of a little point below which the water was fairly deep, and, crying out: "give him a dip; he needs a good wash!" were about to shove him over the edge, when raoul, stirred to such indignation that he quite forgot that he stood alone against half-a-dozen, called out: "shame! shame! let the poor fellow be! why do you torment him so?" and springing into their midst, he tore them away from their victim, and set him free. so sudden was his onset--for the boys, being intent upon their _fun_, had not noticed his approach--that they were completely taken aback, and the idiot boy, finding himself free, had sufficient sense to make a break, whereby he got out of their reach ere they recovered from their surprise. then they turned upon raoul, and with coarse oaths demanded who he was, and what business he had interfering with them. raoul realized that he was in a pretty tight place, and had no idea just how he was to get out of it, but he put on a bold front and replied: "it's no matter who i am. you had no right to be tormenting that poor chap." "oh, ho! he's a frenchie. let us put him in instead," was the cry raised, and at once they threw themselves upon raoul. there were none of them larger than he, but they were six to one, and, although he fought splendidly, they were not long in bringing him to the ground. seizing him roughly by the arms and legs they bore him to the edge of the bank, and in another instant they would have pitched him over, when a commanding voice shouted: "stop! let that boy alone!" and again the young rowdies were checked in their rough sport. this time the interposition came from no less important a personage than governor winthrop himself, who, chancing to take his afternoon constitutional in that direction, had observed the disturbance, and hurried up to ascertain its meaning. he carried a stout cane, and followed up his command by laying it upon the backs of the boys nearest him with such good effect that they dashed off howling, and in a moment raoul was left free to pick himself up and arrange his disordered dress. "pray, sir, what were they doing to you?" inquired governor winthrop with grave concern. "they were trying to throw me into the river," responded raoul, "and but for you, sir, they would have done it." and then he went on to explain what had taken place, while the governor listened with an approving smile; and when he had finished, he placed his hand upon raoul's shoulder, saying: "you have borne yourself nobly, my son, and i feel ashamed that the children of our own townspeople should behave in so unseemly a fashion. and now tell me who are you and whence you come, for you are assuredly a stranger here." when he learned that raoul was the nephew of charles la tour, lieutenant-general of acadia, his interest manifestly deepened. "indeed, indeed," he said. "i know your worthy uncle well, and hold him in high esteem. you must come and sup with me, and i shall see that you return to your ship in due time." raoul was only too glad to accept such an attractive invitation, and so the close of this eventful day found him the guest of the governor, and keenly relishing the excellent fare that his table afforded. chapter xi traitors in the camp madame la tour greatly enjoyed raoul's relation of his boston experience. "you see, virtue is not always merely its own reward," she said, smiling proudly upon her nephew. "it is sometimes well rewarded in other ways. be ever ready to champion the weak and the innocent, raoul. they are god's children, and you are doing his work when you take their part against the wicked and cruel people, of which, alas! there seems to be too many in this world." the summer passed into autumn, and the autumn into winter, without bringing anything of special moment into the lives of those at fort la tour, save somewhat disquieting rumours of the intentions of charnace. it was said that he had gone to france to obtain the revocation of la tour's commission as lieutenant-general of acadia, and authority to take him prisoner, and send him back to be imprisoned in the bastile. now charnace was known to have great influence at court, and in those days, when the french kings so lightly valued their possessions in america, and did pretty much what those who had most influence over them advised, there was no telling how far charnace might succeed in his hostile plans. accordingly la tour set himself to prepare for the danger then threatening him, while his good wife prayed that, in some way, further conflict might be averted. with the coming of spring, the news was confirmed by the appearance of charnace in the ship _st. francis_ and his sending a messenger to demand la tour's surrender. to this la tour defiantly replied that he would not give up either himself or his fort, so long as he had a pound of powder left; and charnace, not being ready for an attack just then, withdrew to the penobscot, where he had a fort of his own, to prepare for another siege. great was the concern now at fort la tour, whose commander bestirred himself in every way to meet the crisis. unfortunately, circumstances were not in his favour. his trading had not prospered of late, and he had been compelled to mortgage his fort and all his real and personal property to a merchant in boston as security for a large loan, in order to meet the demands upon him, and now he required a larger supply of ammunition, and, if possible, some more men. in this emergency he decided to make a flying trip to boston in quest of both, trusting to get back ere charnace reappeared. ere he left he called his wife, raoul, joe takouchen, and jean pitchebat to him, and explained his purpose. "i know it's a risk," he said, "but there seems no help for it. without powder we cannot hold the fort, but with a good supply of it we can beat off this villain charnace. constance, i leave you in command. you, raoul, will be her lieutenant, and you, joe and jean, her right-hand men. i know that i can trust you all to the uttermost." and, having thus spoken, he was about to dismiss them, when madame, whose beautiful countenance had of late worn an anxious expression, for she fully realized the danger, said softly-- "charles, let us kneel down and ask for god's protection from the enemy, for without his blessing your best plans will be of no avail." so they all knelt, while madame prayed with profound fervour for divine help, and, when they rose, her face had regained its wonted serenity. raoul felt quite flattered at being joined with his aunt in the charge of the fort. it seemed, in some sort, a recognition of his being more than a boy, and he vowed in his heart that he would show himself worthy of the confidence reposed in him. followed by his wife's prayers, and the anxious thoughts of the garrison, la tour set sail for boston. he had not been gone long before a startling discovery was made by raoul. although the majority of those connected with the fort were huguenots, the remainder were catholics, and for their benefit la tour tolerated the presence of two jesuit priests named miraband and oriani. towards these men raoul held feelings of cordial dislike. they had done their best to change his faith, using in vain the sly and subtle methods for which their order has ever been notorious, but, instead of winning him over they had only aroused his antagonism. now it chanced that raoul had been out shooting in the afternoon, and was returning to the fort, when, being weary, he sat down in a snug nook near the falls to rest, and, before he knew it, was asleep. presently he was awakened by the sound of voices engaged in earnest talk, and, peeping through the thick foliage which hid him completely, he saw miraband and oriani. suspecting that this secret meeting meant some mischief, he felt no scruples about playing the part of listener. the first few words confirmed his suspicions, and as they went on, his heart grew hot with indignation and wrath, for it became clear to him that these men, who had been so well treated at fort la tour, were in reality charnace's spies, and had been keeping him informed of all that took place. "the villains!" muttered raoul under his breath. "they deserve to be hung, even if they are priests. i must let aunt constance know at once." he did not stir until the two wicked plotters had finished their conference and gone off, and then he made all haste to the fort. madame la tour was not entirely taken by surprise at his information. she herself had mistrusted these jesuits, and had even warned her husband against them, but he had laughed the matter off, saying she was mistaken. now, she sent for her trusty joe and jean, to whom raoul re-told his story. they were mightily enraged at this treachery, and cried out for the hanging of the spies in the gate of the castle; and had la tour himself been present, this would undoubtedly have been done, despite their sacred calling, which they had so dishonoured. but madame was too tender of heart to take such extreme measures. good reason as she had to hate the whole jesuit body, apart from the villainy of these two members of it, she shrank from following the advice of her counsellors, and to their frankly-expressed disgust did no more than to summon miraband and oriani before her, upbraid them with their treachery, adding some bitter words as to their being wolves in sheep's clothing, and then ordered them to be set adrift in a light canoe. "betake yourselves to your employer," she said with withering scorn, presenting a splendid picture of righteous indignation, as she towered above the cowering priests. "he is fit company for you. you have no right amongst honest men." raoul saw them into the canoe. he heartily agreed with joe and jean that the punishment was altogether inadequate, but he was too loyal to his aunt not to carry out her bidding; and as the jesuits, who had wisely kept silence through it all, paddled off, he called after them: "you've got off with your lives this time. but if my uncle ever catches you, it will be different." chapter xii a glorious victory it was not a wise, even if it were a womanly, step on madame la tour's part to let the jesuits go, for they, of course, made their way directly to charnace, and acquainted him with the true state of affairs at the fort--la tour absent in quest of reinforcements, only fifty men in the garrison, and the supply of powder and shot unduly low. "ah, ha!" chuckled charnace, rubbing his hands. "you bring good news. my time has come. i would prefer not having to fight with a woman, but since la tour has seen fit to desert his post, he must take the consequences." meantime, madame la tour, with her faithful supporters, strained every effort to prepare for the assault that could not be long delayed. everything that could be secured in the way of food was packed into her storehouses; the scanty stock of ammunition was carefully examined and apportioned, so as to be used to the best advantage, and the little garrison was divided up into four watches, of which madame took command of one, while raoul, joe and jean captained the others, and then, as madame said: "we have done all that we can. we now leave ourselves in the hands of god." many days of suspense followed, and then the report came from a watcher on the headland, that three large ships were approaching. raoul received it first, and hastened to his aunt. "it is charnace," she said. "the crisis has come. god grant us strength and wisdom according; to our need." confident of an easy victory, charnace sailed right up within cannon-range, and, having anchored, sent one of his captains ashore under a flag of truce to demand the surrender of the fort, coupling the demand with the threat that, if not immediately complied with, he would level the fort to the ground. raoul intently watched his aunt's face as she listened to the message. he devoutly hoped she would not surrender, but he knew better than to volunteer his opinion. madame listened gravely to what the captain had to say, and then, after a brief pause, replied: "be good enough to say to monsieur charnace from me that until he has laid the walls of fort la tour level with the ground, it shall not be surrendered." "i cannot but admire your courage, madame, although i beg to doubt the wisdom of your decision," responded the captain, bowing low, while raoul gave a cheer in which the others joined. the instant the captain returned to the ship the flag of truce was lowered, and with the crash and roar of the first broadside the battle began. now among madame la tour's many accomplishments, was skill in the firing of big guns. this she had acquired when a mere girl at la rochelle, and she had kept her hand and eye in by occasional practice after coming to acadia. it was therefore but natural that she should direct the firing from the fort, and so, posting herself in one of the bastions, with raoul as her _aide-de-camp_ to fly to and fro with orders, she pointed the first cannon with her own hands. [illustration: "she pointed the first cannon with her own hands."] charnace's own ship was her target, and the well-aimed shot went straight to its mark, killing three men upon the crowded deck. a second shot was equally effective, and then the whole fort broke forth into flame, the iron missiles hurtling across the eddying waters, and smashing into the bulwarks of the ships, or carrying away their masts and rigging. right gallantly did charnace return broadside for broadside, but his cannon balls had little more effect upon the massive stone walls of fort la tour than they would have had upon the rocky cliffs near by, and raoul laughed triumphantly as the round shot rolled harmlessly back into the moat. "charnace can keep that up as long as he likes," he cried. "it won't do us any harm, and it's wasting his powder." the boy was in the highest spirits. not a whit dismayed by the roar of the cannon or the crashing of the balls against the ramparts, he stood beside his aunt in the bastion, where she directed the firing as calmly as though it were only some household task, or sped away to the other parts of the fort to see how joe and jean were getting on and to encourage them with cheering messages. the heroic spirit which animated madame la tour had communicated itself to the whole garrison, and there was not a man who did not feel prepared to fight to the last gasp rather than surrender to the hated charnace. as the cannonading went on, the damage done to the fort was trifling, while the ships were suffering severely. the number of killed and wounded grew rapidly, and the vessels themselves were becoming so riddled with shot as to be in danger of sinking. at last charnace's situation became intolerable, and, consumed with futile rage, he gave the order to retreat. but this was not so easily carried out. the wind had shifted during the fight, and now blew strongly from the east, so that the ships could not get out of range without warping, and while this slow method of movement was being resorted to, the fort guns continued their bombardment, inflicting further damage. at last, with great difficulty, and the loss of many men, the three vessels were got around bruyeres point, and there run aground to prevent them from sinking. raoul, accompanied by joe, set off from the fort to follow the ships as soon as they withdrew, and shouted gleefully after them: "ho, ho! monsieur charnace. your spies did not do you much good, did they? surely you've learned a lesson this time, and will mind your own business in future." when he saw the ships run aground, he hurried back to the fort, and actually had the hardihood to suggest to his aunt that a party, which he offered to lead, should be sent out at midnight to try and set the ships on fire ere they were floated again. but madame wisely refused to sanction any such rash enterprise. "charnace will not trouble us any more for the present," she said. "let him alone; as soon as his ships are repaired he will depart." and so it proved. the holes having been hastily caulked, charnace, profoundly chagrined, yet grimly determined to try again, returned to his stronghold at the penobscot, and a few days after he disappeared, charles la tour returned from boston with an abundant supply of munitions of war, and a strong party of men. his joy at the successful defence of the fort, and his pride in his heroic wife, was somewhat clouded by his disappointment at being too late to complete charnace's rout by capturing or burning his ships, but madame did not hesitate to reprove him for this. "god has been very good to us all," she said, "and we cannot be sufficiently grateful. let us unite in thanking him for his great mercy." and so a thanksgiving service was held in which all joined heartily, and then followed a feast, the like of which fort la tour had never seen before. a month later, la tour, having set everything in order, and put simon imbert in charge in his place, took ship for france, his wife and raoul going with him. his purpose was to plead his own cause before the french king, and to have charnace enjoined from further hostility. in this he was not altogether successful, and there were dark days in store for both him and constance. but in these raoul did not share, because he remained in france, where a career unexpectedly opened for him. what befell him in the future, his successes and failures, his joys and sorrows, his trials and his triumphs, cannot be related here; but this must be told, that through them he never was false to his huguenot faith, and that he won for himself a place of honour in the history of his country. * * * * * befriended by bruin by the same author one of the noble families of lorraine has a curious crest. it represents a big black bear in an iron cage, and recalls the legend as to the founding of the fortunes of the house, which runs somewhat in this way. several centuries ago there lived in the city of nancy a little savoyard named michel, whose lot was certainly about as hard as a ten-year-old boy could endure without giving up life altogether. he was a homeless orphan, dependent entirely upon the alms of the charitable, for which he begged through the stony streets. a more pitiable appearance than he presented could scarcely be imagined. privation and hunger had blanched his cheeks and shrunken his form. with his haggard face, half hidden by long disordered locks of a slightly reddish tinge, his bones showing through the thin ragged garments from which the sun and rain had taken all colour, he wearily dragged himself barefoot from door to door, meeting with many a harsh repulse, and but few kindly responses to his appeals. his eyes alone showed any sign of spirit. they were of a deep blue tint, and in spite of his sufferings, held a strange sparkle that sometimes startled those who caught it. at night, in company with some other street arabs of his own age, he found shelter in a wretched cellar kept by a villainous old hag, who made her lodgers pay nearly all they had, with such difficulty, begged during the day, for the privilege of sleeping upon mouldy straw pallets. the miserable place was draughty, damp and pestilential, but it was the only lodging the poor boys could afford, and offered at least some protection from the merciless cold of winter. in that cellar there would only too often be heard through the hours of darkness heart-breaking sobs that refused to be suppressed, or the piteous moan, "i am so hungry, oh, i am so hungry!" and sometimes in the morning, when the old hag would seek to clear her cellar of its occupants, screaming at them and striking them with her broom, there would be one who paid no heed to either screams or blows, but remained motionless on his pallet, for he had passed into the sleep that knows no waking. each day michel grew paler, thinner, feebler, a cruel cough racking his slender frame as he shivered in his rags and tatters. every limb ached, and sometimes it seemed to him as if he must lie down on the snow to die. late one afternoon, crouched in the corner of the doorway of the duke's palace, and waiting for some one to pass by of whom he might beg alms, he wept bitterly. he was starving and freezing, but nothing came his way; yet to return to the cellar he did not dare. the old hag had a flinty heart which nothing save money could soften, and he was without a sou. overcome with despair at his condition, and horror at the thought of spending the night in the street, he fell on his knees and, lifting his tear-filled eyes to the darkening sky, put forth this pathetic prayer: "o god in heaven, take me to my mother!" just then a deep growl came from somewhere behind him and interrupted his prayer. he sprang up and looked about him. the street was silent and deserted. the snow fell softly. a grating near the ground attracted his attention, and without stopping to consider, he said to himself that possibly if he passed through it he might find a good place to sleep. he was exceedingly thin, and the bars of the grating widely placed, so that he had no difficulty in squeezing through. but imagine his consternation on finding himself face to face with an enormous black bear, into whose cage he had thus ventured to intrude. "oh, oh, what's the meaning of this!" demanded the astonished bruin in his own language. he had just disposed of a good supper, and was feeling in particularly good trim, when poor michel so unexpectedly tumbled into his presence. angered at being disturbed, he made ready to demolish the impertinent intruder with his mighty paw. the little savoyard, pale and tearful, kept perfectly still while he continued his prayer: "o god in heaven, take me to my mother, who went to you to beg for bread for her boy----" a hot breath played upon his cheek. "o lord..." he moaned. he thought he was as good as dead, and yet it seemed to him that something licked his face gently. when, a few moments later, he realized that he was not being devoured--that he was still unharmed--he opened his eyes wide and they encountered those of the bear full of kindness and good humour. this gave him courage. he got up. he patted the black muzzle of the big creature, which received the caress with a murmur of pleasure. the stress of the day had so exhausted michel that the moment his terror left him, he, with surprising unconcern, threw himself down to sleep. the bear, as if flattered by the confidence thus shown in him, regarded him in a friendly fashion, then lay down beside him, almost completely enveloping him with his warm fur, and so fell asleep in his turn. now this bear was no other than the famous "mascot," who was maintained at the palace as a representative of the canton of berne, in recognition of the valuable services rendered by the swiss to the people of lorraine in their struggle with the duke of burgogne. mascot was an important figure at the court of duke leopold. everything possible was done for his comfort. he had his own attendant, whose sole duty was to care for his person and to minister to his every want. in his spacious cage he could move about freely and swing at ease his heavy head. every afternoon he was visited by the courtiers, and sometimes even by the duke; but he troubled himself very little concerning the one or the other. indifferent to everything, even the ducal smile, he gazed stolidly upon the folk, who did not interest him in the least. his superb fur was greatly admired, but not his unsociable disposition. and so he passed the days, promenading up and down his cage, swinging his head to and fro for hours at a time, eating, drinking, and sleeping in seemingly perfect content, and regarded with profound respect by his numerous visitors. on the morning after michel made his way into the cage he awoke at daybreak. bewildered at his strange situation, yet delighted because of the comfortable night he had passed snuggled up in the bear's thick warm fur, he made haste to get out in the same manner that he had entered, not forgetting, however, to give his kind host a hearty hug expressive of his gratitude. he had no idea of losing so excellent a sleeping-place by remaining in it too long and being discovered by the bear's attendant. that day fortune favoured him in his begging, and he was able to obtain the food he so sadly needed. as it was still very cold he impatiently awaited the return of night in order to regain his snug refuge. on re-entering the cage the bear gave him a kinder welcome than the first time, and henceforward the two were great friends. every morning the little savoyard slipped away unseen, and every night returned to his shaggy benefactor. thanks to the comfort he then enjoyed, his appearance began to improve. his shrunken limbs rounded out again and the colour came back to his cheeks. but this could not go on indefinitely. one fine day the bear's attendant was filled with astonishment at finding a small boy sleeping beside mascot, who was licking him softly. he thought he must have lost his senses, when he beheld the little fellow wake up and caress the fierce brute in his turn without showing the slightest sign of fear. his outcries attracted the attention of a groom, and he told the strange news to a footman, who passed it on to the pages, and they spread it about the palace so thoroughly that presently everybody, including duke leopold himself, was hurrying towards the cage. there they found poor michel, weeping piteously and evidently in terror of being harshly dealt with. having soothed him with a few kind words, the duke ordered him to come out of the cage and explain himself. the boy promptly obeyed, and, as best he could, told his story. touched by the recital of his sufferings, and animated by a worthy determination not to be outdone in generosity by a bear, the duke offered michel a place in his household. the little savoyard did not hesitate to accept, and presently found himself in what seemed like paradise, after the miseries he had been enduring. clothed in fine raiment and faring sumptuously every day, he soon developed into a handsome lad. his spirit grew with his body. he took an ardent interest in the sports and martial exercises of his companions, and in due time he became the most expert of them all in the use of bow and sword and lance. withal, remaining modest in manner, respectful to his superiors, and devoted to the duke, he rapidly rose in the latter's service through the grades of squire, knight and count, until he came to be the second person in the realm, and the founder of a family enjoying large possessions and great influence. nor was he ungrateful to the animal which had befriended him in his extremity. so long as mascot lived he visited him constantly. their friendship never cooled, and when the one-time beggar was entitled to choose a crest for himself, he gave orders that it should be a big black bear in an iron cage. lorimer and chalmers, printers, edinburgh. google books (princeton university) transcriber's notes: . page scan source: google books https://books.google.com/books?id= pcuaaaayaaj (princeton university) . this volume includes henry de cerons vol. i. and vol. ii.; and short stories entitled eva st. clair and annie deer. . the diphthong oe is represented by [oe]. the man-at-arms; or, henry de cerons. a romance. by g. p. r. james, esq., author of "darnley," "de l'orme," "charles tyrrell," "henry of guise," "king's highway," &c., &c. in two volumes. vol. i. new york: harper & brothers, publishers, franklin square. . henry de cerons. --------------- chapter i. it is difficult to discover what are the exact sources from which spring the thrilling feelings of joy and satisfaction with which we look back to the days of our early youth, and to the scenes in which our infancy was passed. it matters not, or at least very little, what are the pleasures to which we have addicted ourselves in after years, what are the delights that surround us, what are the enjoyments which heaven has cast upon our lot. whenever the mind, either as a voluntary act or from accidental associations, recalls, by the art of memory, the period of childhood, and the things which surrounded it, there comes over us a general gladdening sensation of pure and simple joys which we never taste again at any time of life. it must be, at least in part, that the delights of those days were framed in innocence and ignorance of evil, and that he who declared that of such as little children consisted the kingdom of heaven, has allotted to the babes of this world, in the brightness of their innocence, joys similar to those of the world beyond--joys that never cloy, and that leave no regret. what though some mortal tears will mix with those delights; what though the flesh must suffer, and the evil one will tempt; yet the allotted pleasures have a zest which not even novelty alone can give, and an imperishable purity in their nature which makes their remembrance sweeter than the fruition of other joys, and speaks their origin from heaven. i love to dwell upon such memories, and to find likenesses for them in the course, the aspect, and the productions of the earth itself. i see the same sweetness and the same simplicity pervading the youth of all nature; and find in the sweet violet, the blue-eyed child of spring, an image of those early joys, pure, soft, and calm, and full of an odour that lasts upon the sense more than that of any other flower. thus it is, i suppose, and for these causes, that, in looking back upon the days of my youth, though those days were not as happy and as bright as they are to many people, i feel a sweet satisfaction which i knew not at the actual time; for those hours--as one who gives a diamond to a child--bestowed upon me a gift the value of which i knew not till many a year had passed away. my first recollections refer to the period when i was about seven or eight years old, and to a sweet spot in the far south of france called blancford, not far from the great city of bordeaux. the chateau in which i dwelt had belonged for ages to my ancestors, and the little room in one of the turrets which was assigned to me, looked towards the setting sun over manifold beautiful green slopes and wooded banks, with now and then a broken, cliffy bit of yellow ground, that harmonized beautifully and richly with the warm tints of the spring and the autumn, and broke not less pleasantly the thick green of the mid year. upon those banks, and trees, and slopes, the sunshine seemed to dwell with peculiar fondness; and thither came the bright and smiling showers of spring, and the rich, vision-like lights and shades of autumn. gay hawking parties, and many a splendid cavalcade from the rich and important town in the neighbourhood, diversified the scenery during the bright part of the year, and towards the winter-time the beasts of the forest and the field used to resume their dwelling in the neighbouring woods, and afford sport and diversion to the inhabitants of the castle. as i have said, that chateau had been for centuries the dwelling-place of my ancestors, ever since, indeed, the arm of du guesclin and the wisdom of charles had expelled the english from the shores of france; but still that chateau was not mine, nor ever likely to be mine; for i was at that time a poor dependant upon the bounty of others, without wealth, rank, station, or fortune of any kind to give hope to my heart or energy to my effort. the lord of that castle, my poor father's first cousin, had taken me out of compassion to his relation, a poor soldier of fortune, who married thoughtlessly and died young; and as he himself, a lover of pleasure--even of license, at the time he took me into his house, thought only of marriage as a remote evil, he treated me at first with so much kindness, that the foolish persons who surrounded us imagined that a time might come when i should be his heir. nothing, indeed, was farther from his thoughts. he had always determined, and still held the resolution of wedding ultimately, in the hope of seeing his possessions descend to children of his own. the accomplishment of this purpose was hastened by accidental circumstances, which placed it in his power to marry a beautiful and wealthy bride, whom he brought home to the chateau in great pomp, and the festivities which followed her arrival are among the first events which i distinctly remember. surrounded by friends, and with scarcely a wish ungratified, he might well consider himself a rich and happy man in the possession of one so fair as she was. but beauty was not the only quality which she brought to make him happy, nor riches the only dowry that was settled upon her head. never did i see any one who combined more graces of person with more fine qualities of the heart; never any one who more merited the love of every one who approached her. it was evident that she had heard of me before she came, and she greeted me with a warm and kindly smile, which went direct to my heart. she gazed upon me at the same time with a look of deep interest and scrutinizing inquiry, as if she thought to read my character in my face, or to divine what were the feelings with which i met her. heaven knows that i had no feelings but those of sincere joy. i entertained not the slightest idea that her coming, could have any evil effect upon my fate; that it would in the least change my destiny or affect my happiness. of course, i was utterly ignorant of such things at that period; the joy that was around me found a ready echo in a heart naturally joyous, and i laughed, and danced, and sang with the rest, more unthinking of the morrow than the bird upon the wing. if the fair lady of blancford gazed at me when first she came, my cousin's eyes rested upon me many a time when he saw me so gay and happy. i know not what it was, but it seemed as if my happiness displeased him. i have since learned to know that in the human heart there is often a great difference between remorse and repentance; and that, when we have done a fellow-creature wrong, when we have pained, injured, aggrieved--ay, even when we only entertain the purpose of doing so, we hate that being on account of the very arts for which we should hate ourselves. i do not mean to say that my cousin had injured me by his marriage, for surely he had a right to wed where and when he thought fit. but i am inclined to believe, from facts which i heard afterward, that the first germe of harsh and unkind feelings towards me was produced by a conviction that he had treated me with greater kindness and distinction than he afterward intended to keep up, and that it was his duty to make a provision for me, against which his inclination struggled. there were other matters, of which i may have to speak hereafter, which increased and perpetuated such feelings. he could not but recollect that, before the death of my father, he had been liberal of promises and generous in words; he had told him that he would breed me up for a soldier; that he would take care that i should have the means of advancing myself; and now, perhaps, his intentions were changed. if they were not, they certainly became so after a short time. he was, at that period, a gay and gallant man of about five or six-and-thirty years of age, handsome in appearance, specious in manners and words, with no traces of profligate life in his language or appearance, and very well fitted to gain and keep the love of any young heart not thoroughly versed in the ways of mankind. although his marriage, as most marriages were at that time, had been arranged entirely by the relations of the lady, without any reference to her wishes, yet there is no doubt that she married him with a heart free from other attachments, and even prepossessed in his favour. from such feelings, of course, attachment easily sprung up; and, had he merited it, love, deep, devoted, heartfelt, unchanging love, would indubitably have followed. but alas! he did not deserve it; he took not the means to obtain it; and though the attachment remained, that attachment was mingled with sadness and perhaps with bitterness, and grave melancholy trod fast upon the steps of feasting and merriment. for my own part, i was of a cheerful and happy disposition, a little fanciful perhaps, and somewhat wild; somewhat fond, occasionally, of solitary wandering and deep thought; but at other periods light and gay as a butterfly. thus, then, i felt not, scarcely perceived, indeed, that the demeanour of the general servants and retainers of my cousin's house was at all changed towards me; although it was so changed from the very first day of his marriage. but, had it been changed ten times as much; had they treated me with neglect, or scorn, or contemptible malice, the pain would have been more than compensated by the love and tenderness of that sweet lady, and by the constant care she showed me. she first it was who recollected that, born of noble birth, and connected with many of the great and proud of the land, it was needful that i should hate the common education and accomplishments of the day; and she argued that, if i were poor and penniless as her husband said, and required to make a name and fortune for myself, it was but the more necessary that, by the cultivation of my mind, even in an extraordinary degree, i should be provided with the means of accomplishing the more difficult task that was allotted to me. my strength of body and an eager, active spirit had already rendered me familiar with manly exercises in far greater degree than most youths of my age could boast of. but my mind was totally uncultivated. i could ride wild horses that many a man could not manage; i could fence as well as my little strength allowed me; my aim with the arquebus was true and firm; i know not the time when i could not swim; and my cousin's pages, though considerably older than myself, were unable to compete with me in leaping or pitching the bar. but could neither write nor read, and knew nothing of books or of the world, but by occasional words which i had heard spoken and treasured up in my memory. no sooner did she find that this was the case, than she herself became my instructress; and oh how kindly did she teach me, day after day, with unwearied patience; her fingers playing with the curls of my hair, and her eyes often bent thoughtfully upon me, as if she were calculating with some melancholy my future destiny and her own. perhaps i was stupid, perhaps i was by nature inattentive; but the love, the deep love that i felt towards her, made me exert every energy of my mind to give her pleasure and to make her task easy; and, though the undertaking must have been dull, and my progress slow at first, yet she always seemed well satisfied, and cheered me on with words of bright encouragement. a time soon came, however, when her instructions became somewhat painful to her; apparently there was a languor in her eyes and in her tone, which seemed to me strange; and, without being told to do so, i spoke in a lower tone of voice, i paid more attention to everything she said, i avoided everything that could disturb or trouble her. it seemed to me that she was ill, and nature taught me how to act under such circumstances. at length, one day, she said to me, "i must give over teaching you for a time, henry, but good monsieur la tour will take the task till i can follow it again." and she put me under the charge of the minister of our little village, or rather, indeed, of the chateau, a good man as ever lived, who had always shown himself fond of me, and who now followed up, with zeal and kindness, that which she had so kindly and generously begun. the whole family, and every one in the immediate neighbourhood, were, as is well known, of the reformed religion, and my cousin, the baron de blancford, was at that time absent with the protestant army. shortly after, however, he returned, sent for, i believe, to be present at the birth of his first child, and great anxiety manifested itself in the household for several days. fears were entertained for the safety of the lady, and great precautions taken; but at length i heard that the baroness had given birth to a child, and that she herself was proceeding favourably. with my heart full of joy and satisfaction, i ran to congratulate my cousin, thinking that there could be nothing but similar feelings in his own heart. he pushed me angrily away from him, however, exclaiming, "you fool, it is only a girl!" not understanding what he meant, or comprehending in the slightest degree why the birth of a girl should give him less satisfaction than if a son had been born, i ran to the room of monsieur la tour, and told him what had happened; and then it was, for the first time, that i was made to understand how great was the difference made by the customs of the world between two classes of beings naturally equal. a vague idea, too, of my own circumstances was also communicated to my mind, and from that time the change which had taken place, and which daily increased, in the deportment of my cousin's servants towards me, was marked, understood, and felt painfully. two days after the birth of his daughter the baron again left the chateau, but he remained long enough to make me feel most bitterly that i was no longer the boy that he had sported with and loved in former years. the lady soon recovered, and resumed her care of me without a change. she loved to have me with her; she loved to see me play with her infant; and, as month after month proceeded, the child's affection for me grew stronger and more strong, till there was none but her mother that she loved so well. about a year and a half afterward a son was born; and then another; and from the birth of the first i found that i was no longer an object of consideration to any one except to the good clergyman, whose affection towards me seemed to increase as that of others diminished, and to the sweet lady, who never for a moment, in her love and care for others, forgot her love and care for me. a change had come over the whole household, however; the lover had long been forgotten in the husband, the husband had been forgotten in the man of pleasure. whenever any short cessation of hostilities permitted him to visit the capital, it was in paris that the lord of blancford's time was wholly spent, and at other periods his days were passed in the pleasures of other great towns, afar from the family which required his care and direction, and from the wife whose love he had cast away. on her part, she showed not the slightest inclination to depart from his expressed wish that she would remain at the chateau of blancford. she loved not great cities; she sought not to indemnify herself for her husband's neglect by following the same evil course in which he led: she enjoyed fully and entirely the pleasures of rural life, and found in the duties of a mother the greatest consolation and delight. once in the course of the month, perhaps, she visited bordeaux with the state becoming her rank and station, called upon some of the chief ladies of the city, and returned home after having remained there but a few hours. very frequently, on these occasions, i accompanied her, and the kindness with which she mentioned me to all who were really good and estimable, seemed to bespeak for me their future protection and regard, although she never even hinted at such an object. i was her companion almost always in her walks, too; and from her conversation i daily gained information upon subjects with which otherwise, most probably, i should never have been acquainted; for she took a delight in forming and expanding my mind, and, while she endeavoured to instil principles even more than knowledge, she illustrated for me the lessons she gave by facts and examples which often drew her on to farther explanations, and which certainly remained in my memory, storing it with much that was curious, interesting, and beautiful. thus there was scarcely a circumstance which ever happened to me in after life which did not cause me to recollect some example from her instruction which might teach me to know the right from the wrong, to choose the good from the bad, or to return from the evil, when i had been led into wrong, by the shortest and most expeditious way. in short, though she often fell into fits of musing, she seldom lost an opportunity of giving my mind improvement. if i fixed upon a wild flower, she told me its nature and its qualities; if i watched a passing cloud, she explained to me how sweet and beneficial to the earth's surface are the light vapours that float gently over it, descending in light rain to render everything fertile and productive; and she would explain to me, as well as she could, what were the beneficial effects produced by winds and storms that seemed to my imagination tremendous, pointing still to the all-powerful hand of providence, shaping still the events of this world with never-erring wisdom directing never-failing might. from her conversation, from her train of thought, my mind took the peculiar turn which it ever after retained; and even to the present day, after scenes of peril, and danger, and activity; after having gained, by sad experience, knowledge of the world, and become hackneyed and keen in the wisdom of the earth, many of the words that she spoke to me, many of the counsels that she gave, come back upon my ear in all the fresh sweetness of the tones in which it was originally spoken, and i feel myself better, happier, more contented, when thus dwell with her for a moment in the wide tracts of memory, than i do when fulfilling any of the ordinary duties of my state and station. what she herself could not do to improve my mind the good priest did; he applied himself to teach me sciences; to read other languages than my own, both dead and living; to argue by rule; to write my native language with accuracy; to calculate arithmetically; and to do all, in short, that he himself could do, which was more, perhaps, than my after fate required. it was some years, of course, ere i gained much facility in everything, but ere four years had passed after my cousin's marriage i had become quite a different being. the formidable obstacles that await us at the entrance of every science had given way, and during the following year, which was the fourteenth of my age, i made greater progress than i had done in any other. i had now acquired a taste for the poetry which had descended to us from other days; and from that high and ennobling source i drank long, deep draughts of pure and unmingled delight. i found, too, that there were works of infinite value, full of fancy and of wit, full of instruction and amusement, in other languages besides either french, or greek, or latin; and, almost unaided--for my good preceptor knew little of that tongue himself--i made myself a tolerable master of the italian language, and felt like one who has suddenly discovered a treasure when the works of dante and boccaccio, and the newer poems of tasso, fell into my hands. nevertheless, i did not in any degree neglect the usual exercises of which i had formerly been fond. there were always a number of old military retainers about the house, who were willing and eager to teach me everything that could be taught in the profession to which they had devoted themselves. i did not, it is true, follow any study with great regularity, but i followed all and each with eagerness, and zeal, and devotion. when the baroness could give me up any of her time, she was always the first i sought, and then the good minister la tour. but he had many duties to perform, and, during the rest of the day, every sport of the field that was going on i followed with eagerness; every instruction i could get in military exercises i sought continually, and listened with deep and profound attention to all that the old officers or soldiers could tell me of discipline and of tactics, or to their tales of terrible sieges, well-fought fields, and marvellous escapes. i was one of the best of listeners; and, flattered by the attention that i paid them, they were always willing to amuse or to instruct me. the courtyard of the castle became the mimic field of battle, the walls the sisterus, the stables the fortifications of a besieged city; and everything that was at hand was pressed into our service, either as the animate or inanimate materials of war. all the tales that they told me were delightful to me, but more especially so were those in which my father's name was introduced, and when i heard deep regrets expressed for his early death, and praises of the promise that he had displayed as a soldier and a commander. in the mean while, the greater part of the servants and retainers of the household treated me completely as the poor dependant; the little services i required were neglected; any direction that i gave was heard in silence, or replied to with contemptuous lightness; and, in order as far as possible to keep myself from the irritation of petty insolence, i was obliged to avoid all communication with the domestics of the chateau. in the presence of their mistress, indeed, the servants dared not behave in such a manner, and when her eye was on them they showed me every sort of reverence and respect; once also i remember her rebuking one of the grooms for neglecting my horse, speaking to him in a manner so severe, as to work a permanent change in his conduct, and in some degree to affect his companions. these slight inconveniences, however, did not in the least depress my spirit or keep down my gayety. youth's buoyant and happy blood beat in every limb, my heart was light, my cheerfulness unchecked; and, though i learned when any one neglected me to punish by a cutting word, yet it was always done with light and happy gayety, and forgotten almost as soon as it was spoken, at least by myself. thus years rolled on, and during the frequent and long-continued absence of my cousin, his children learned to love me with a strong affection; and, taking a model from the domestic circle of a neighbouring family, my imagination pictured for me a future fate like that of a person whom i frequently beheld situated in very similar circumstances. he was at this time a man well advanced in life, and, like me, the cousin of the lord of the castle. but he had gained considerable renown in arms. the father of the family, who was now withheld from active service by the effects of severe wounds, confided to him the leading of his retainers; the children clung to him with reverence and affection; and the two eldest were, even at that very time, trying their first arms under the sword of their veteran cousin. he possessed no property, he sought none; but he lived with people who reverenced and loved him: he had his own honoured seat by the hall fire; his tales were listened to and sought for with delight by all, and his counsel or assistance was asked by the father when any matter of real danger or difficulty arose, by the elder sons in the mysteries of the chase or the mew, and by the younger children in any of the small sorrows or difficulties which were to them as important as wars or sieges. i fancied myself, i say, like him; winning renown in arms, gaining a station by my own deeds, and seeing the young beings that i loved so tenderly as babes, grow up round me as round an elder brother. but oh, how vainly, how youthfully did i calculate! my cousin, when he returned to the castle after any of his long absences, had now become harsh and stern. me he treated with utter neglect and coldness; he saw me dine at his table without addressing a word to me; he met me without any kind gratulation: he heard me wish him joy of his return with scarcely an answering word. when he looked at me it was coldly; and i could not but feel that i was a burden to him. when i was about fifteen years of age, he one morning took the pains to ask what progress i had made in my studies. the question was addressed to monsieur la tour, but in my presence. the clergyman replied with high praise; higher, i believe, than i deserved; and the baron's reply was, "don't you think you can contrive to make a priest of him, la tour?" my blood boiled, i confess, but my cousin turned away without waiting for any reply, having satisfied himself that, by the question he had asked and the suggestion he had made, he quite fulfilled his duty towards me, at least for the time. i thought, however, of the days when i had sat upon his knee, and when he had said that he would make a little hero of me: that i should be a bayard or a du guesclin. he was absent after that visit for more than two years; and there were tales reached the chateau of some fair dame in the capital who withheld the baron from his wife, his children, and his duties, and kept him in bonds stronger than the green withes of delilah. the health of the baroness had for some time been declining; she had now been married ten years, and of that period she had known a few months perhaps of visionary happiness, two or three years of calm, unmurmuring tranquillity, and six or seven of anguish and sorrow. her little girl, louisa, was now nine years of age, the image of her mother in everything--features, complexion, disposition; there was the difference, of course, between the woman and the child, but still there was the same small, taper hand, the same beautiful foot, the same brilliant complexion, the same open, clear forehead, the same thoughtful but ingenuous smile. she was with her mother constantly or with me, and it was she who even at that age first discovered the progress of illness in the being she best loved, and pointed out to me the flushed cheek, the bright and glittering eye, the pale lips, and the features daily becoming sharp. "do you not think, henry," she said to me one day, "that mamma looks ill?" and then she went on to say in what particular it appeared to her that it was so, showing that she had watched her mother's countenance in a way most strange for a child of her age. when my attention was thus called to the subject, i remarked the change also, and i and louisa used to watch with care and anxiety the progress of disease. we neither of us knew, we neither of us fully comprehended to what it all tended. it was not exactly fear that we entertained, but it was grief; we grieved to see her suffer, we grieved to see the languor and weakness that crept over her frame. at length the baron returned, but his return contributed very little to the restoration of his wife's health. he brought with him many gay and riotous companions; the castle was filled with revelry and merriment: he was absent at the chase or in the city during the greater part of each day; and the night went down in songs, and mirth, and drinking. he soon went away again to the capital, and his wife continued withering slowly, like a flower, whose day of brightness is over. such was the course of events for some years till i reached the age of twenty, when the health of the baroness so completely and rapidly gave way, that messengers were sent off in all haste to call her husband to the side of her deathbed. he came, and, though he came unwillingly, yet he was evidently pained and struck at the sight of the ruin and decay which he now beheld. he was gloomy and sorrowful, and it might be some consolation to his dying wife to find that, when all was irrevocable, and neither tears nor regrets could recall the past, he mourned for the approaching loss of one whose worth he had not sufficiently estimated, and felt feelings of affection towards her which he had not known till it was too late. the lady of blancford died, and the grief of all, good and bad alike, followed her to the grave; for there was a sweetness, and a gentleness, and a kindness in her nature which touched the heart even of the selfish and the vicious, and made them mourn for her as soon as her virtues were no longer a living reproach to their errors. at the time of her death, her daughter and eldest child was little more than twelve years old, the two boys somewhat younger than eleven and ten; and well might the father, when he looked round upon their young faces, feel that his hearth was left desolate: well might he regret, in the bitterness of his heart, that he had not sufficiently valued the blessing he had possessed. that he felt such sensations i am perfectly sure, but he felt them with a degree of sullenness as well as sorrow. conscience lashed him, but he bore its chastisement with obdurate pride, and murmured at the smart. i did not see him for several days after the funeral of his wife, and, indeed, since his return he had taken scarcely any notice of me, seeming not even to see me. but, soon after, i saw his eyes fix upon me, from time to time, with a dull and frowning aspect; and to bear such cold unkindness had by this time become a burden to me, which i was resolved to cast off. the one whom, of all others, i had loved best from my early days, was now gone; and, though i loved all her children, and especially louisa, who now clung to me as her only prop and stay in her overpowering grief for her mother, yet i felt that i could not endure any longer the proud coldness of my cousin, since the tie between him and me, which his wife's care and tenderness had afforded, was broken for ever. "i have at least my father's sword," i thought; "with that he gained his living, and with it will i gain mine." but there was much to be thought of, there was much to be done. "what course," i asked myself, "shall i choose what plans shall i pursue?" and much i meditated even these matters, but meditated always alone: for there was none whom i could consult, none in whom i could confide. to monsieur la tour, who loved me as his own son, i would not speak of the matter at all, for i knew that he would oppose my going; and my cousin himself, of course, i did not choose to consult; for the proud air of contempt with which he had long treated me, made me feel that his advice could not be such as i could follow without pain; and any assistance that he offered could only be an indignity to receive. i was utterly ignorant of the world, and of the world's ways; and though, perhaps, i was not deficient in natural acuteness, yet life was to me an unknown country, full of thick woods and tangled paths, without a map to show me the road or a guide to direct my footsteps aright. although it was now the winter-time, and the sere leaves had fallen from the trees, leaving the woods thin and naked, yet it was in the forest which came near to the chateau that i loved to take my way and dream of my future prospects. an event, however, occurred one day, which deranged all these plans for the time, and suspended their execution for more than two years. i had gone out, as usual, on foot, and wandered a considerable way into the wood, when suddenly, as i was walking up and down, gazing upon the icy bondage of the stream, and the feathery frost upon the rushes and other water plants, i heard what seemed a loud but distant cry of distress. it struck me instantly that the voice was a familiar one; and, crossing the stream, i rushed on like lightning to the spot whence it seemed to proceed. there i found the eldest of my cousin's sons, charles, a noble and high-spirited, but somewhat weakly boy, thrown down upon the ground by an immense wolf, whose fangs were fixed in his shoulder. the animal, it seems, had sprung at his throat, and knocked him down by the force of its attack; but, even in falling, the boy, with noble presence of mind, had struck the animal with his dagger, and prevented it from taking the fatal grasp which it sought, and which certainly would have terminated his existence before i arrived. a loud shout which i gave as i came up, to scare the beast as fast as possible from his prey, made the wolf instantly turn upon me, with its peculiar, fierce, low howl. i had been accustomed, however, to hunt such beasts in these woods for many years; and, as he rushed upon me, i struck him a violent blow with my sword across the eyes, which almost blinded him, and dashed him down to my feet at once. but, mad with hunger and pain, the beast, even in falling, seized my leg in his fangs, and never let go his hold till he was quite dead. i killed and threw him off as quickly as possible; and then, running to my young cousin, carried him home to the castle without the pause of a moment, although the wound i had received in my leg was extremely painful, and the blood marked my track all the way to the gates. the boy was but little hurt, and from his wound no serious consequence arose; mine also was of little importance, though it left me lame for several weeks. my cousin, however, on the following morning, thought fit to thank me for the service i had rendered his son; and at the same time he presented me with some trinkets and jewels, which, he said, his wife had requested might be given to me, as remembrances of her. there was much coldness and constraint in his manner while he spoke, and the purpose which i had entertained for some time now broke forth. "my lord," i said, "i thank you for these things, which i shall always keep and value highly in memory of one from whom i have never received anything but benefits and kindness." the baron was turning away, but i added, "stay, my lord; i have yet more to say. it is not often that i trouble you with words, and now shall not make them very lengthy." the baron turned round towards me with evident surprise at my tone and manner, and with some sternness, but without the slightest touch of scorn, demanding, "what is it you wish to say?" "merely this, sir," i replied; "i have been somewhat too long a burden to you. i am now more than twenty years of age, and ought probably to have done before what i intend to do now, namely, seek my own fortunes, and endeavour to provide for my own necessities, without remaining dependant upon any one. i am perfectly competent, i believe, in every respect, to gain my bread as my father did his. i ask nothing of you in any shape; and only now seek to inform you that i will leave the chateau to-morrow, with many thanks for the shelter and bread you have afforded me." i never in my life beheld the countenance of my cousin express so much surprise. i saw him waver for a moment, as if he were going to turn and leave me with contempt; but the grief he had lately suffered, the chastening sight of death, and the service which i had rendered to his son, gave to a better spirit than that which usually actuated him the predominance for a moment; and, turning round, with a look both mournful and reproachful, he said, "no, henry, no; do not leave the poor children now. if not for my sake, for their mother's memory, stay with them still for a while. la tour will also be with you and with them. but he is growing aged, his health is feeble, his life insecure; my own life, god knows when it may end; and while i am obliged to be absent, and before i have determined what to do with them, i would fain have some kindred blood near. on my return from paris, which will not be very long, you shall be free to do as you please, and i will promote your views to the utmost of my power." he spoke with a tone of command which i might have been inclined to resist, had there not been mingled with it a certain degree of confidence and kindness, the value of which was certainly enhanced not a little by its rarity. i made no reply; indeed, i had not time; for, taking it for granted that i acquiesced, he quitted me immediately. a long conversation ensued between him and monsieur la tour, in which he arranged everything regarding the maintenance of his family during his absence, and the proper regulation of the chateau. a portion of the rents were ordered to be paid to the pastor for the expenses of the house; and the worthy man promised never to quit the family for more than one day. my cousin spoke of me too, i found; and, according to monsieur la tour's representation, spoke with some kindness. i am inclined to believe, however, that the minister's representations were the cause of his acting towards me ere he quitted the chateau, i may say more wisely, as well as more kindly, than he had previously done. the regulation of all expenses was confided to the clergyman; he received and he paid for everything. but a portion, though a small one, of the sum allowed, was ordered to be given into my hands, to be employed for my own purposes, and for any military repairs or arrangements that i might think required in the castle. two servants, at my choice, were to be considered as my own especial attendants; and the baron himself announced to the retainer's assembled in the public hall, that, in case of peril or attack, from the tide of war rolling in that direction, the supreme command of all things was to rest with me during his absence. no sooner had these arrangements been made, than he himself set out again for paris, promising to return at the end of six months; and leaving an old and faithful attendant of his dead wife as in some sort the governess of his daughter. the affection which the baroness had always entertained towards me, had communicated itself to the good old servant i have mentioned, donine le mery; and she declared, after the baron was gone, that the greatest consolations she could receive after the death of her mistress were, first, the promise of her lord that she should remain ever with mademoiselle louise, and next to see me have the command of the castle. whatever she sought, whatever she wished for, the good soubrette came to me to seek it; and if louise herself had been inclined to cling to me with all a sister's affection before her mother's death, she was now ten times more disposed to do so, when she had no other companion to whom she could pour forth undisguised all her feelings and all her thoughts. her brothers, younger than herself in age, were still younger in mind; and her good attendant, though the best of all creatures, was too far below her in education to permit of any interchange of thought between them. to me, therefore, the poor girl turned with the full confidence of childhood and unbounded affection. i was the companion of her walks, and of her rides, and of her solitary hours. i remembered her as an infant; i had seen her grow up day by day under my eyes; time seemed to make no difference; she was still a mere child in my sight. i looked upon her as a dear but far younger sister; and i never found that either i myself or any one else could dream there was a possibility that such a change could take place in her feelings or in mine which could be dangerous to the one or to the other. the end of the six months came, but the baron returned not, and he did not even hint in his letters that such an event was likely to take place. he said that he had been delayed by various circumstances; that the arrangements he had made in regard to the chateau must continue in force till his coming; but he mentioned no period of return, and, in truth, was once more entangled in the meshes of that net, from which he had only been withdrawn for a time by the couriers which had summoned him to his wife's deathbed. in the mean time the days passed away happily enough. i had gained importance in the eyes of all around me; deference and attention were paid to me by the attendants; and, had i not been disturbed by the frequent thought that the best season of my life was passing away; that the days of youth were flying by in inactivity, when i felt myself formed for action, i could have been well contented there, in the society of that sweet girl to whom i was all in all; and of two generous and high-spirited boys, who loved me with all the strength and energy of youthful affection. a year passed, and the baron came not. louise was now growing up towards womanhood; the warm blush mantled more deeply on her cheek; her eye gained a brighter lustre; her lip acquired a warmer red; her mind, too, expanded every hour, as if to keep pace with that fair form, which was each day acquiring additional beauty. as she wandered along beside me, her conversation was more imaginative, more full of deep thought; and we talked over a thousand things in which fancy and feeling linked our thoughts together, so as to remain inseparable for ever. there was thus formed for me a store of ideas, in regard to which i have since felt--alas! how painfully--that they could never be mentioned, that they could never be alluded to in the slightest manner, without calling up in my bosom the thought of her, of her words, of her looks, of scenes long past, and of departed happiness. nor, indeed, could it be otherwise with her. we created, in fact, for ourselves, a world of magic aspirations; a straight and even pathway, on which fancy, guided by memory, ran back like lightning from the present to the past. we talked of her mother and of the days gone by, and we recalled all her sweetness, and her beauty, and her tenderness towards us both; and more than once we mingled our tears together, when we recollected all that she had done to win and merit love, and that the eternal barrier had fallen between us and her, shutting us out from all communication with the loved and the departed. we talked of the future and of the world--the wide, unknown world open before us both. she spoke of it herself with awe and shuddering, as if she foresaw and would have shrunk from the griefs, and cares, and anxieties before her. often, also, we would have recourse to dreams to chase away apprehensions; she would inquire of me what the great capital was like; and when she found i could in no degree satisfy her, she would apply to fancy, and build up an enchanted city from the gay things of her own imagination. the bright and glorious universe, too, afforded to both of us a thousand schemes for speculation; other lands would rise up before the mind's eye, clothed with brightness not their own; and when i spoke of italy or spain, the vast and beautiful creations of art, a climate of sunshine, a soil of fertility, and a courteous and friendly people, such as i had read in the vague or overcharged accounts of travellers, her countenance would glow brightly, her young eye sparkle, and she would wish to be a journeyer through such scenes with people who could love them or admire them like herself. frequently, in our ramblings, her brothers would accompany us, and during a great part of the morning i was constantly with them, acting in some degree the part of their preceptor, or taking a share in those instructions which were communicated to them by masters from the capital of guienne. they loved me well, too; and, on looking back to that time, i can recollect no one feeling in my own bosom--i cannot believe that there was any one in the bosoms of those who surrounded me--the natural tendency of which was calculated to give a moment's pain to any one of the small but united party which then tenanted the chateau of blancford. such was the state of all things till louise reached the age of fifteen; and i feel confident that i could have gone on with the same feelings towards her perfectly unchanged, and looking upon her merely as a sister, had not other events intervened which soon separated us from each other. at this point may be said to end the period of my early life, which--like an old picture, painted at first in vivid colours, soon loses the brightness of its hues, becomes mellower but less distinct to the eye, then grows gray and dim, and then is almost obscured altogether--has now greatly faded away from memory, though the impressions were then as bright and vivid as perhaps any that i have received since. two days before the period at which louise concluded her fifteenth year, messengers from her father, whom they left at no greater distance than barbesieux, announced his sudden return. his letter contained merely intelligence of the fact, that he would be at the chateau of blancford at supper-time on the ensuing day. i shall not easily forget the anxiety with which we all waited his appearance, the messenger having informed us of more than the letter that he bore, namely, that the baron had wedded another bride, whom he was now bringing home from the capital, where she had remained, while the wife of another, somewhat too long for her own honour, for the baron's reputation, and for the peace of a husband whom she speedily ceased to mourn. hitherto i have given but a general view of all that passed during my early years, but i must now give a more minute account of the event that followed; for, from the day in which my cousin's new bride set her foot within those doors, my fate underwent a greater change than any to which it had yet been subject. chapter ii. it may well be believed that we counted the minutes as the evening of the second day went by. every one there present felt that there was a book to be opened before them that night, on the pages of which the future destiny of all was more or less distinctly written. the two boys felt it much, but they felt it with some sort of eagerness, and some anticipations of pleasure. old monsieur la tour looked grave and thoughtful, as well he might; for he was the only one there present who was fully aware of the character and previous history of the person about to be added to the domestic circle at blancford. i had heard something, indeed, but not all; but, to counterbalance any painful reflections, i had the prospect before me of entering upon a new and more active course of being, and fulfilling the destinies to which the spirit within my bosom called me. the person who felt the most on the occasion was louise de blancford; and nobody could doubt that--though a portion of the happiness of every one there present was in some way to be affected--it was her whole fate, peace, comfort, and tranquillity which then trembled in the balance. the boys would soon naturally seek the tented field, or plunge into the occupations of the city or the court; but she was to remain alone, with the happiness of every moment in the hands and at the disposal of another. she was at that time as beautiful as a young rose, with a countenance upon which all the emotions of her pure heart traced themselves in an instant as they arose in her bosom; and i could see her eye turn towards me from time to time with an anxious and inquiring glance, which showed me at once the feelings that were going on within, and told me all she would have asked, although no words were spoken. i did my best to comfort her, and to raise up hope of bright and happy things. perhaps i did so hypocritically; but surely it was pardonable, when i found that cheerful moments were passing away, perhaps for ever, to give her as many as i could till the power of so doing was absolutely taken from me. it was a bright and beautiful summer's evening; and going out upon the sloping hill which was crowned by the castle, we looked in the direction where we expected to see the cavalcade appear, and watched anxiously for the first spear-head rising above the distant trees. we waited long, however; the sun descended to the horizon in splendour; the whole sky was rosy with his light; the very air itself seemed to be filled with purple rays; and the woods, and villages, and towers around were all steeped in the same rich and glowing hue. it seemed to speak of hope and bright days to come; and yet, though we were all young, and under the soft guardianship of kind inexperience, our hearts refused to receive the colouring of the bright scene without, and the sweetness of the evening seemed rather to make us more melancholy than to raise our expectations. the sun went down slowly; the distant lines of the country assumed the most intense blue; the last rays of the setting orb poured through hollow way in the deep masses of the forest, and caught upon a large piece of water at the foot of the hill, rendering one part like a sea of liquid gold, while the other remained shadowed by a wood as black as night. the moon, too, was coming up in the western sky, together with a single star, so pure, so soft, so full of pale light, that it seemed like a drop fallen from the eyes of the departing sun. louise's hand rested sisterly upon my arm; we gazed upon the glowing west and the deep blue lines beyond; we gazed upon the pale pure east, with the moon and the stars; and we gazed upon the golden water, and the shadowy wood, and the higher towers of the castle, partly lighted up, as if on fire, with beams that we could no longer behold, and partly buried in profound shadow. we then turned our eyes upon each other; and oh! how i wished at that moment that it had been in my power to command the fate of that sweet girl, and by my will alone to ensure that she should be happy. at that moment we heard the distant sound of a trumpet; but it was far, far off, borne upon the wings of the soft westerly wind. neither banner, nor spear, nor cavalcade could be seen as far as the eye could reach; and, after gazing for a few minutes longer, we re-entered the castle, and waited there till we heard the sound of horses coming up the hill. all ran down at once from the room where we had been sitting; louise and the old clergyman to the great hall, i and my two young cousins to welcome the baron at the drawbridge. he came, accompanied by a long train of retainers, with a carriage and a horse litter containing his new wife and her manifold attendants. the torches and lanterns showed us a countenance much changed since we had last seen him, older in appearance than in reality, thinner, and more harsh than ever. there was a heavy frown, too, upon his brow, and it was evident that something had gone wrong on the road. to me he spoke but one word in answer to my inquiries after his health, and the boys, who were pressing round him with the eagerness of natural affection, he pushed roughly away, telling them that they encumbered him. he then approached the side of the carriage and handed out the lady, who, being of course masked for the journey, did not suffer her face to appear. he led her at once into the hall, where louise and the old clergyman had remained; and his daughter, who was the only person that seemed to shrink back from himself and his new wife, was the only one to whom he spoke kindly and tenderly. there, sheltered from the wind, and with plenty of light around, the lady took of her velvet mask; and oh, how every idea which i had previously formed of what her person was likely to present, vanished in a single instant! as she lifted that mask from her face, the imagination of memory conjured up in a moment the beautiful form of the first wife, and set it beside the new one. certainly i had expected to find transcendent beauty in the being who had lured the heart of the husband away from such a lovely and amiable being; and who, after having made her miserable through life, had taken her place when dead. the figure of the new baroness was fine, it is true; tall, commanding, and well-proportioned; but it wanted that soft and easy grace, that flowing symmetry of every line which had distinguished her predecessor; and if there was a difference and an inferiority in figure, what was there not in countenance? she was no longer young; the features were large and strongly marked, the eyes bright, indeed, and full of fire, but that was the fire of a harsh and domineering temper; and they were only softened, if at all, by a look of wanton meaning which sometimes came across them. the lips were thin, and generally closely shut, though the teeth were fine which they concealed; the chin was rounded, but somewhat projecting; the cheek bones were high, and the skin, though not brown, was coarse. there was a good deal of colour in the face; so much, indeed, that i should have supposed it not altogether natural, had it not been roughly scattered over the cheek with a sort of mottled appearance, which convinced me that art had no share in placing it there. the hair was fine and luxuriant, although she had passed her prime, and her hand was large and somewhat coarse, though much pains had been taken to keep it soft and white. she gazed at louise from head to foot, with a look of scrutiny and apparently some surprise. "you told me that she was a girl, a mere child," the lady said, addressing the baron as he introduced his daughter to her. "why this is a woman!" "she was a child when i left her, madam," replied the baron, "and you may see that she is a child in heart still by the blushes which your words call up." "she looks all the prettier for them," replied the baroness; "but i must teach her not to be such a spendthrift, and to reserve them for occasions when they will have some effect. and, pray, who is this young gentleman!" she proceeded, turning towards me while that meaning look came up in her eyes. "not your eldest son, i suppose, my lord, for he was only twelve years old when last i heard of him, and he has not probably made such a rapid jump as the young lady. if he have, he has gotten him goodly limbs in a short time." and she ran over me with the same unblushing effrontery with which she had gazed upon louise. "this, madam," replied the baron, bitterly, "is a cousin of mine, henry de cerons, son of another cousin, henry de cerons, who has done me the honour of living in my house for the last twenty years." the blood came up into my cheeks as i heard him speak. "i have been, madam," i said, taking up the words immediately, "a poor pensioner upon my cousin's bounty since the period that he speaks of. it was then that the death of my noble father left me dependant, with nothing but a sword, which he had rendered glorious, for my future fortune." "it proved but a poor fortune to him," replied my cousin, frowning at me; "and you have suffered it somewhat to rust in the scabbard, methinks, master henry." "at your own request for the last two years, my lord," i replied, "and it shall do so no longer." i was going to add more, though i saw that the baron's mood was becoming every moment more and more fierce. but the eyes of both at that moment fell upon louise, and we beheld the tears running through her long eyelashes and down her cheeks. "come, come, no more, no more," he said; "let us drop such subjects, and not make the evening bitter. madam, i will show you your apartments. supper, i hope, will soon be ready." "and the baron in a better humour," said the lady, giving a sarcastic look round as she swept up the hall after him. we left her lord and the attendants to show her the way; and the five who had tenanted the castle before her coming remained behind in the hall, gazing upon each other, while memory again drew a comparison between the present and the past, the most painful, the most bitter that it is possible to conceive. no one spoke; the sensations in the heart of every one were too dark and sad for us to give them utterance; and, before a word was uttered, the baron had returned. how the cheerful meal of supper passed over that night in the chateau of blancford may be easily conceived, for the same spirit which had marked the return of the lord of that castle to his dwelling pervaded the whole conversation. why or how he had been induced to wed the woman whom he had brought thither might be difficult to say; but it was very evident that where there could never have been any esteem there now remained no affection. we were all silent but the lord and lady of the house, except when, from time to time, good monsieur la tour endeavoured to break the restraint by a word upon some ordinary subject, or when i replied to him, which act seemed not a little to create the baron's surprise that i should presume to converse in his presence. when the meal was over, the lady declared she was fatigued, and retired speedily to rest. louise followed; and, as there was now no cheerful circle gathered together in the evening to converse over the events of the day, i was about also to retire very soon; but the baron stopped me, saying he wished to speak to me, with a sort of dull, leaden look about his eyes, which he put on when he wanted to assume an air of despotic rule, and to announce his purpose in such a way as to admit of no reply. the clergyman also stayed; and, turning to me, the baron said, "it is time, my fair cousin, if we may judge by the specimens which you have given us to-night of your conversational powers, that you should find yourself a new home." "i am not only quite ready, my lord," i replied, "but fully determined to do so as speedily as may be." "it may be very speedily indeed, then," replied the baron, "for i have already arranged the whole matter for you. you will be pleased to set out to-morrow morning for the town of pau in bearn; and i will furnish you with letters to the protestant clergyman of that place, who will put you in the proper way so to complete your education in the college as to become, i trust, a worthy member of our church. nay, hear me, hear me to the end. your maintenance, and the expenses of your studies till the period of your taking orders, will be borne by myself, provided your conduct is such as to justify my kindness. and, having done this, i think i have fulfilled to the utmost the promises which i was induced to make to your late father." "your lordship has informed me before now," i replied, "that it was my father's wish that i should be a soldier, and pursue the profession which all my race have followed. you informed me once also that you had promised him it should be so, and that you would place me in that course where he had won glory." "of course, sir," replied the baron, frowning fiercely upon me, "all such promises were conditional, as were also his requests. he left your fate to my discretion, and did not dictate to me how i was to deal with the boy whom i brought up from charity." the words were galling enough, but i struggled hard to keep down the demon of pride--a demon which had endured enough, surely, to quell him in my heart. i therefore replied at once, "my father's wishes, my lord, i am perfectly aware, can be no law to you. to me, however, they would be a law, even did not my own inclinations second them. it is my determination, therefore--" "hush, hush!" said the good clergyman; "hush, my dear henry. do not speak of your determination; but leave it to your cousin to take into consideration the motives that you have mentioned." "leave him to his own obstinate folly, la tour," replied my cousin, turning from me. "i have told him all that i will do. i have made him what may well be considered a noble offer. i give him till to-morrow to think of it; and, if he do not accept it, then i will drive him from my door like an ungrateful hound, and send him forth a beggar to the fate he deserves." thus saying, he turned and abruptly quitted the hall; while i remained, as may well be conceived, fully determined never to eat bread again at the expense of such a man. i remained thoughtful and silent for a moment, while la tour gazed with interest and anxiety in my face, and at last asked me, "what do you intend to do, henry?" "to keep my resolution, excellent friend," i replied. "you cannot suppose that such words as i have heard can at all shake my purpose." "but consider, my dear boy," replied the clergyman, "you are utterly without means of support. i fear, henry, that you do not know how little is to be gained in the barren field of war; and, at all events, you will be obliged at first to support yourself till you can receive pay." "it matters not, my good friend," i replied; "i should lose my own esteem for ever--my heart would have no strength to struggle with the world, if i let this man set his foot upon it again." the clergyman said nothing more to change my purpose, for he saw that it was unchangeable; but he answered, "at all events, then, henry, take what little gold i have. i need it not, my boy; and i always have the means of support. you will not mind taking it from me." "i will not take it all," i replied, kissing his hand; "but, to show you how willingly i can bend my pride to depend upon one that loves me, i will take twenty gold crowns from you, and that shall be the fortune with which i go forth into the world. i have, indeed, nearly treble that sum in my own chamber; but that belongs to a man from whom i will take nothing, so that you shall give it to him to-morrow after i am gone." "do you go early, then?" demanded the clergyman, looking anxiously upon me. "as early as possible," i replied; and he then told me that he would bring the money to my little room. thither i now turned my steps, and the good clergyman soon followed. he gave me the sum i had agreed to take from his little store, and pressed upon me more, which i would not accept. he sought also to persuade me that i had every right to keep the money which the baron had allowed me; but on that score my mind was made up, and i would hear no arguments. a long conversation then ensued, and la tour added many wise counsels and noble precepts to many which had gone before. i treasured them in my mind; and, if i have not always followed them exactly in the strife of passion and the assault of temptation, at all events, everything that has been good in my conduct or estimable in my character, i owe, first, to the sweet influence of her who so tenderly cultivated my youth, and, next, to the counsels and exhortations of that good man. it was nearly one o'clock in the morning when he left me, and then i sat down to consider what should be my next step. what were the baron's habits now, i knew not; but him i was resolved to see no more. all the rest of the family, however, were generally up not long after daybreak; and, if i remained, i knew that there must be a bitter parting both with louise and with the boys; most likely, an angry parting also with the baron; and, perhaps, the pain of seeing the expression of his childrens' love for me, call down his wrath upon them. i thought of it all, and determined to suffer alone, as far as might be. i made all my preparations in haste; took with me a few jewels and trinkets, which i inherited from my mother, and those the baroness had given me; packed up the necessary clothes which i intended to carry away; destroyed many a memorial of the place and its inhabitants, which i did not choose to have exposed to the harsh eyes of the baron, or the impure ones of his new wife; and, only preserving some little things in the handwriting of poor louise, i prepared to take my departure for ever from the dwelling which i had so long inhabited. as i stood upon the threshold, intending to waken one of the grooms, whom i had chosen, at the time the baron had last visited the castle, to attend upon me, having occasion for some one to carry my valise to the next cabaret, a thousand recollections of the place, sweet, and happy, and affectionate, crowded upon my heart; a thousand gloomy images of the future rose up before my eyes; hope hung down her torch, as if its light had been extinguished; and memory strove to bind me to that past from which i was tearing myself away. i looked round the little room which i had inhabited, and every object that my eye fell upon acquired an interest that it had never acquired before. the dreams of childhood, the thoughts of other years, the figures of some long gone, came back in crowds, and tenanted the apartment; and my heart would have broken if i had not wept. my tears were quickly dried, however; and i went to wake the boy, and tell him of my purpose. i found him in so sound a sleep that i could hardly wake him; and, after he was roused, he gazed round him stupidly for a moment, as if he did not well comprehend what i meant. the next instant, however, he sprang up with alacrity and cast on his clothes. we went together to bring the valise from my room, and then waiting till we heard the guard (for we were still in a state of war) going round to the front gate, we descended quietly by the little staircase, and passed through the court. as all the military arrangements in the castle had been, for the last two years, in my hands alone, the gates were thrown open at my first word. the men looked surprised, it is true: but they did not presume to ask any questions, or to make any observations, at least in my hearing; and, issuing out of the chateau about two in the morning, i stood upon blancford lea, prepared to seek my future fortunes with my own hand. there were still some sad feelings in my heart which would not be driven forth; but, nevertheless, i struggled hard against them, and the natural hopefulness of youth was beginning to do its part, so far, at least, that i could find some sources of consolation in the aspect of the world around me. the moon was just going down, appearing large and red through a light haze upon the edge of the horizon. the stars overhead were light, but they were far, far distant, seeming to my fancy like some of the bright imaginations of early youth, brilliant, but unattainable. i looked to the eastern sky, however; and, there upon the very edge of the horizon, was a faint glimmering light, the first announcement of the distant dawning. there seemed to me to be hope and promise in that very sight. "i may be covered with darkness and night," i said to myself, "but the day will certainly come at length: and, whether it be fair or bad, it too will pass away." it is the nature of man to trust in auguries; they have been found in the flight of birds or in the entrails of the sacrifice. let me find promises or threatenings in the various aspects of nature, where the hand of the almighty has marked his will; and, in the course of one train of events, has often pointed out what must be the course of another. as i walked along, i did what few young men on their outset in life think fit to do. i considered deliberately and carefully what was to be the general tone of my demeanour, what the general plan of my conduct in the path that lay before me. i considered how i stood towards the world that i was about to enter; looked at the vulnerable points in my nature; considered where i was most likely to be attacked, and how i might best defend myself. i had arrived at an age when the human intellect is in full strength; i had much acquaintance with books, and my mind, therefore, was not enfeebled for want of exercise. i had every power of looking into my own heart, guiding, guarding, and directing myself, which any other man at the same age possesses. but where i was deficient was in knowledge of the world and of my fellow-men; and here i felt that i was utterly ignorant and without experience. i had, indeed, had some little dealings with mankind during the last two or three years; but that had only served to confirm a fact which books before had taught, me--that, in general, man looks upon himself but as a human shark, whose great object it must ever be to seize upon and devour the unwary. in order, then, at once to conceal and defend my weak point till it could be remedied by knowledge and observation, was one part of my determination. but there were other things to be considered; and i made up my mind as to the general conduct i was to pursue before i reached the first village inn. to be honest and true, daring and firm, was, of course, the foundation of all; but, in order to prevent those with whom i was likely to have dealings from perceiving my ignorance of the world, i made up my mind to put a guard upon my lips; to affect a light and jesting tone, in order to conceal deeper feelings; to assume that perfect indifference to all things which i had already learned was a natural consequence of that experience which i did not possess; and, repressing every expression either of surprise, pleasure, or grief, to be in some degree a stoic externally, and never to lay open my heart to any persons till i had tried them long and deeply. to execute such a resolution may appear more difficult than to form it; but there were many things which rendered the enterprise more easy to me than it would have proved to other men. my natural character was gay and light, not easily repressed, with a large share of hope, and a fearlessness of consequences which gave me a great command over my own actions and over those of others. the pitiful neglect and want of respect with which my cousin's servants had treated me, as soon as another heir had appeared in his house, had taught me to assume a tone of indifferent contempt, when the occasion served, which now stood me in great stead; and the very feelings of grief and indignation which were at my heart, by giving me matter to dwell upon in my own bosom, rendered me more careless of all that passed without. such, then, were my resolutions, and my means of accomplishing them, as far as the government of myself was concerned: but there were many other things, of course, to be thought of; with whom i was to take service; how i was to shape my course to join the army; how i was to obtain the necessary arms and equipments; for, following the determination i had before made, not to take anything from the castle but that which absolutely belonged to myself, i had left behind both the horses which had been given to me for my use, and the arms in which i had exercised myself since i was a boy, with the exception of the sword and dagger that i usually wore, and a rich knife, with a hilt and a sheath of gold, inlaid with jewels, which my father had brought from the east when warring against the turks in former days. on the first point, how i was to join the army, many difficulties existed. the short peace which had been granted to the protestants had now been some months at an end, and the third war of religion had already began. the principal forces of the huguenots were assembled in the neighbourhood of la rochelle, and a considerable distance remained to be traversed before i could hope to fall in with the army. while i was considering all these things, the eastern sky became somewhat brighter, and the faint pink of the morning air afforded sufficient light to see all the objects distinctly. i had taken my way towards bordeaux, as the first great town where i could hope to obtain any information, and had walked on rapidly, while the boy, carrying on his shoulder the valise with which i had charged him, trudged on in perfect silence by my side, without making the slightest inquiry as to the end or object of my journey, or where he himself was going. i had chosen him, indeed, from the rest of the servants, when i was permitted to select two of them to attend upon me, principally because he had always shown both respect and attachment towards me, but scarcely less because there was a degree of similarity between his fate and my own; his father having been killed at the battle of st. denis, and he left an orphan to the care of strangers. he was now a stout, active youth of about nineteen, somewhat variable it his mood, occasionally loquacious, but more frequently quite the reverse; replying with a sharp, quick word, observing keenly all that passed, and having much shrewd sense under a somewhat dull and boorish exterior. on the present occasion, however, his taciturnity had been even more marked than usual. when i had roused him, at first he had looked at me with some wonder, but he had not said a word since, doing exactly as i bade him in profound silence. at the distance of about two miles from the chateau of blancford, we reached the first village, which boasted such a thing as an auberge; and there i had proposed to make the lad put down the valise, and, getting some one else to carry it forward with me, to give him some small pieces of money as a parting gift, and send him back. on entering the village, however, we found that no one was up; and, though there was written over the door of the inn, "were lodge travellers on foot. a dinner six sous. a bed eight sous. come in and try!" the closed door belied the hospitable invitation, and i was somewhat puzzled how to proceed. "i suppose i must wait till they get up, andriot," i said. "so you can put down the valise and return to the castle. i shall find somebody up presently to carry it on to bordeaux for me." "i can carry it on, sir," he said; "they'll be an hour before they're up, and i don't see why you should get an inn-boy while you've your own man." "alas! my good andriot," i said, "you can be my own man no longer. i am too poor a gentleman to afford attendance upon me, and you had better go back at once, lest any review of the servants should be made at the chateau, and the baron should be angry at your absence." "the baron may be angry once," said the lad, "but he'll not be angry any more than once with me, at least; for we all saw and heard enough last night to make me very glad when i found you were going. no, no, sir, i have been your servant for two years, and not the baron's, and the chateau of blancford is no more a home for me if you are not there." "but think a while, my good andriot," i replied; "it is utterly impossible for me either to pay you any wages or to support you. i go forth with scarcely the means of supporting myself till i reach the army. i seek fortune there as a common soldier, and may not even obtain, for aught i know, the means of gaining bread for myself with my own sword. me, therefore, you cannot accompany; and you must remember how many chances there are in these troublous times against your obtaining any situation at all comparable to that which you may still hold in the chateau of blancford." "i have thought of all that you say, sir," he replied, "as we came along; for it is always right to think well what one is about, after one has taken a resolution. i took mine an hour or two ago. when you first roused me i was half asleep, and didn't understand what you meant. but then again, as soon as both my eyes were open, i understood the whole, for i had thought to myself, when i went to bed, that, if what the baroness' groom had said about the baron and you was true, you would not stay in the castle much after daylight; so i made up my mind in a moment, as soon as i found that you were going. as to wages, i owe you three weeks' service, for you paid me a month in advance last monday; then, as for food, i have taken care to have all the money that you ever gave me in my pocket to the last sous; then, besides that, i have got three crowns of the sun, and two livres tournois, which were brought me by sampson the squire from my poor father when he was killed at st. denis. so you see, sir, i have plenty to keep me for a year; and as for the rest, if you are going to seek your fortune, i do not see why i should not go and seek mine with you." "well, then, andriot," i replied, with a smile which i could not refrain at his using arguments for following me which were so like the reasons that existed in my own bosom for my own conduct, "if such be your resolution, take up the valise and let us go on. what you do is your voluntary act, and, at any time that you think fit to leave me, you shall do so; so pray heaven send you soon a wealthier master, and one that can reward you for your fidelity." "i hope to heaven it may be so, sir," replied the youth; "and i don't suppose you'll be long before you have some piece of good luck. fortune gets tired of troubling a man that cares little about her; and i have heard old jansen, the jew merchant, say that luck changes at five-and-twenty, at fifty, and at seventy-five, if a man but lives so long." thus saying, he once more lifted the valise; and i then perceived, for the first time, that he had strapped on it a little packet of his own goods and chattels, which showed that his resolution had, as he said, been taken before he quitted the chateau. on approaching the gates of bordeaux, it became necessary to determine to what inn we should go. my meager finances did not permit of my lodging for even a day at any of the expensive auberges of the gascon capitol; and i bethought me that andriot, born and brought up in that neighbourhood, was much more likely to be acquainted with the inferior inns than myself. i therefore consulted him upon the subject, and he replied at once, "oh! sir, go to the little inn kept by jacques de cannes, called the soleil levant, at the end of the rue de minimes. it is a poor place, but you will have plenty of protestant news there, and you will get a good dinner for a small sum. in the evening, when you have settled all, we can go on to carbon blanc, or, perhaps, to cubzac." "we could not have a more auspicious name," i replied, "than the rising sun, andriot; and see where the sun is indeed rising, and with as bright an aspect as one could desire." andriot instantly pulled off his cap towards the east with as much apparent reverence as ever did persian to the rising orb of day. "send us good luck, monseigneur," he said, addressing the sun; and then, with a gay laugh, full of careless hope and light-hearted cheerfulness, he followed my steps, and in a quarter of an hour we were in the town of bordeaux. the doors of the soleil levant were by this time wide open, and it was evident, by the joyous welcome given to andriot, that it was not the first time that he had set his foot within those walls. i had just time to tell him that it might be prudent, for the time being, not to mention my name, when we were surrounded by half a dozen of his old friends and companions, who led us both into the little hall, where breakfast was in active preparation for those guests who had passed the night at the house. only one of these, however, had as yet appeared, and he was seated at that one of the two tables the room contained which was nearest to the window that looked into the street. he was so placed, however, in the corner of the hall, that he could see the passengers who went by without being remarked himself; and though i had passed the windows but a moment before, i had not perceived that there was anybody in the room. according to the hint that i had given to andriot, he merely informed jacques de cannes that i was a gentleman adventurer seeking my fortune as a soldier, with whom he had taken service, being sick of his late employ in the chateau de blancford. this was said after i had taken a step or two forward towards the table, and just loud enough for me to hear. the worthy aubergiste answered in the same tone, demanding, with an expressive nod, "he is one of our people, of course?" "i should not be with him," replied the lad, "if he were not." and the aubergiste, rejoining in a somewhat lower tone, "perhaps i can tell him where he is likely to find service by-and-by," left us to seek the basin of soup, which, with half a loaf and a small bottle of very good wine, was our allotted breakfast. seating myself at the same table, while andriot took his place a little farther down, i waited patiently for the arrival of my mess, giving from time to time a glance towards the previous occupant of the room, who was busily engaged in emptying the contents of his own bowl, and, apparently, taking very little notice of what was passing around him. as far as i could see, he was a good-looking man, somewhat below forty years of age, broad and powerfully made, with hair not red, but of a light glossy brown, curling round his brow with flowing and graceful waves. the mustache which he wore upon his upper lip was very thick and long, but lighter even in colour than his hair. the features were good, without being strikingly handsome; but when he opened his mouth, the expression of his whole face was injured by the want of three of his front teeth. there was a scar or two on other parts of his countenance, which bespoke the soldier; and one of his hands, which rested somewhat listlessly on the table while he ate his soup with the other, was disfigured by a large round scar on the back, and seemed to have been penetrated either by a spear or a ball. he ate his bread with his soup, but drank no wine till he had done; he then, however, nearly filled his cup, and, after having drank it, looked up, saying, with a slight foreign accent, "good wine in these parts. are you of this country, young gentleman?" "no," i replied (for i was born on the banks of the loire); and, having satisfied myself by speaking the simple truth in one monosyllable, i took no farther notice till he said. "and yet yours is a gascon accent, it seems to me." "and yours a scotch one," i replied. "well hit, my young falcon," replied the stranger, in a light tone; "you follow the game true." "as every one should do," i replied, not a little doubtful of the character of my worthy companion, and answering no more than was absolutely necessary. the stranger, however, was not so easily to be frustrated, and he returned to the charge about my gascon accent. "some birds," he said, "have a rare skill in deceiving their pursuers. i should not marvel still if guienne had been your birthplace." "you could not wish me a better," i answered. "no, nor a shrewder wit, you think," he said: "however, i give you good-morning." and, taking up his hat, which lay beside him, he finished his small bottle of wine and moved towards the door. at that moment jacques de cannes was coming in with a bowl of soup for andriot, and the stranger stopped him for a minute or two, saying something that we did not hear. the aubergiste replied in the same low voice, and the stranger, turning away, added aloud, "not till i have seen him again, maître jacques." after putting down the pottage for andriot, the good aubergiste came up to me, and, bending down his head, he said, "you are seeking service in arms, i think, seigneur; you could not trust to any one better than that gentleman who has just gone out. he is an old soldier and a good one, and as stanch a protestant as ever lived. but he will be back here to dinner, and, if you like to talk to him about your views, he will most likely get you service." my heart beat at the offer, i must confess; but yet, pursuing my cautious determinations, i was resolved neither to trust aubergiste nor stranger too far; and, although i awaited with some impatience for the return of the latter, i schooled myself during the whole time of his absence, lest, by too great heat, i should show my own ignorance and inexperience, and fall into some snare. about twenty minutes before the hour appointed for dinner, the stranger again entered the hall, as i was holding one more consultation with andriot upon what was the next step to be taken. andriot had been greatly smitten with the stranger's appearance, and he now assured me, with so many asseverations, that good jacques de cannes was one of the most excellent and serviceable men in france, that it was scarcely possible to doubt that he was well informed of the fact. indeed, he added, a moment before the stranger made his appearance, that the worthy aubergiste stood in the near connexion with himself of a second cousin. why he had not told me this at first i do not know; but it certainly did not in any degree diminish my confidence in the good landlord, to hear that he was related to one who had served me well and faithfully for two years. "then i may take his word fully as to the stranger's character, andriot?" i said; "for i'm sure your cousin would tell me no falsehood." the youth was replying eagerly, when the stranger, as i have said, entered, and, taking off his hat, approached the place where i stood. i had now a better view of him than before, and saw that he was as powerful in body as i had been led to think was the case by the mere sight of his head and shoulders. he was graceful, too, and had the air of a gentleman, though his clothes were somewhat coarse, and displayed none of the ordinary colours affected by that rank. the scabbard of his sword, however, was of velvet, and the weapon was thrown so much back across his loins, that it was impossible for him to see the hilt. this was almost a certain sign, at that time, in france, of one who prided himself upon his birth, though the custom has now greatly changed, and we wear our swords almost straight upon the thigh. "i am glad to find you here, young gentleman," he said; "and, if i may propose such a thing, we will ask maître jacques to give us our dinner in some little room apart, that we may talk over matters which may interest you to hear." i thought of my small store of money, and of the additional expense which i might be led into; but it seemed that this was a lucky chance which had befallen me, and i determined not to throw it away. i accordingly assented, and we mounted into a chamber on the second floor, where a dinner, which, though certainly not equal to those of the chateau, was by no means bad, was soon set before us, and maître jacques retired to serve his ordinary guests below. "well, sir," said the stranger, as soon as we had helped ourselves and began, "i understand your whole situation as well as if i had heard it." "which you probably have," i replied, in the dry tone that i had determined to maintain. "no, upon my honour," replied the other. "i'll tell you how it all comes about, and you shall say whether i am right or wrong. first, then, and foremost, i see a gentleman of good manners and deportment, followed by a servant carrying a valise, very much better dressed than myself, come into an inn for travellers on foot. i hear he has no horses with him, and he sits down to eat his soup and drink his wine, for which he pays three sous altogether, with a lace upon his pourpoint which cost at the very lowest twenty sous in all. from all this, one gathers that on some account or another--whether it be a duel, or whether it be any other cause--this gentleman does not wish the path he has chosen to be tracked, and perhaps is in some need, by accidental circumstances, of money or employment. the landlord of the inn tells me that he is seeking military service, and is on his way, even now, to join condé, or the admiral, or andelot. i therefore conclude that he is willing to serve against these butchers who have been massacring the poor protestants throughout france. there is nothing very miraculous in all this. am i not right?" "in general you are," i replied; "but, let me ask, how is this to affect my acquaintance with you?" "why, i will tell you in a moment," replied the stranger, in the same frank tone. "i happen at this moment to be engaged in the same cause, among the soldiers of which you are seeking service. i know that every man in the monarchy is wanted; and i wish both to give you such information as may enable you to join the army with all speed, and urge you to do so without a moment's delay." "i propose hastening towards rochelle as fast as possible," i replied. "rochelle!" he exclaimed, with a laugh; "why, my good young friend, you must have been living in some hermitage, where the news of what is passing in the world penetrates but rarely. the protestants are no longer at rochelle. condé and the admiral have advanced, the lord knows how far, up the loire, and andelot himself has been at blows with martigue far beyond saumur." my countenance fell as he spoke; for, if my finances had been barely sufficient to carry me scantily to rochelle, the far greater journey that lay between me and the protestant army rendered it almost impossible for me to accomplish the undertaking of joining it, except, indeed, as a mere beggar. the stranger saw the effect that his words had produced, and demanded, with a smile, "why has your brow grown clouded, young gentleman? what is it that makes you so suddenly gloomy?" "the army," i replied, conquering all feelings of pride, "is much farther than i expected, and my worldly wealth is but small." the stranger looked at me fixedly for a moment, and then said, "you have served before, have you not? you seem of an age to have seen many a stout conflict." i answered in the negative, however, evidently to his surprise; and he mused for a minute or two without speaking. it appeared to me that my new acquaintance was considering more what should be his own conduct than what he should recommend for mine. "have you not wherewithal to take you to the army?" he said at length. "doubtless i have," i replied, "but not more; and, if i spend what i have as i go, how am i to get a horse and arms when i arrive?" "oh, there is many a man in your case," replied the stranger. "you must not be nice when you get there; but you will find many a jockey--if there has been much fighting going on, and our party has had the advantage--who will be willing enough to supply you with a horse on the chance of your paying him a good sum for it within a certain time. it is a thing done every day. these jockeys buy horses that are taken from the enemy for an old song or a mess of pottage, and then sell them again, if they can find means, to those who will pay down. but, if they cannot find such pleasant customers, they dispose of them to any soldier of fortune who is likely to pay them well at an after period. as to arms, however, that is a more difficult matter; and i know not very well what to advise you to do. i see there is some story about you, if one did but know it; for your dress is not that of a man who cannot afford to buy himself a steel cap and a cuirass. have you nothing that you can sell?" he added: "that turkish dagger in your belt; if that be gold, it will furnish you well with what you want, and you must make your own right hand do the rest." "i should not like to sell it," i replied, looking down at the dagger; "this knife is one that my father brought from the east, and was taken from a turk killed by his own hand in battle. i should not like to sell it if i could avoid it." "i fear, then," replied the stranger, "if you have nothing else to dispose of, you must even take to the arquebuse, buy no horse, and serve in the infantry. you will most likely find many a leader who will be glad to give you arms for your services; though i cannot think that a man of your figure was made for a _pedescal_. i should think that your father would rather see you part with the dagger than so lower yourself." "my father is dead," i replied; "but, were he living, i think that what you say is true, and therefore i will part with it; but i would fain place it in such hands that i may redeem it again, in case of ever being able to do so." "there are jews in the world," the stranger exclaimed, with a laugh; "there are jews in the world. thank heaven for all things--there are jews in the world. they will take it for six months, and lend you as much money thereon as will serve your purpose. before that period is over, it is to be hoped that you will have clipped some of these gilded troops of the enemy of quite a sufficient portion of their golden fleece to recover your weapon. after dinner we will go and see what is the value of the knife. it is a pretty toy, and doubtless of good steel; for these turks declare, and i believe it true, that the waters of damascus temper iron far better than those either of toledo or milan." it was joyful news for me to hear that i might thus obtain that which i most wanted, without absolutely parting with a thing which i prized, not from its intrinsic value, but from the memories associated with it, and because i had some recollection of being told, in my earliest youth, never to give it away. i thanked my new companion, therefore, warmly and sincerely for the advice he had given. "we may have more to say to each other hereafter," he answered, smiling. "i am not, perhaps, any more than yourself, quite what i seem; and the truth is, i am here recruiting men for a company of men-at-arms. i must not venture, indeed, to place any one therein who is not a tried and well-known man; otherwise, to say the truth, from your height, and look, and manner, i should not have scrupled to engage with you at once. we may meet again, however, as i have said, and then the first vacancy you may join us, if you have proved your manhood well upon the enemy. i am glad to find you come of a fighting race, however: that is a great thing in a man's favour; for courage runs in the blood as well as cowardice." "if it be an inheritance," i replied, "i have every right to it; and at present it is my only one." "i cannot say that originally i was much better provided myself," replied the stranger. "good blood, strong limbs, and a heart without fear, however, have increased my inheritance; and i look upon the beginning of this war as just a call to the sheep-shearing. i take it as a matter of course, when i talk of your entering our band, that your blood is noble, one way or another." "it is as good as your own," i replied. "indeed!" he said, with a somewhat mocking smile. "then it is of a somewhat extraordinary quality; for the man who can boast descent from a long race of kings cannot go beyond mine." "perhaps you mean if traced back to adam," i replied, not quite liking his tone. "no, young gentleman," he answered, very gravely; "i mean, if traced back for twenty generations. but come, let us go seek this jew, and see what he says the knife is worth." thus saying, he rose; and, following him through manifold turnings and windings in the fine old city of bordeaux, i entered the little alley that lies just under the cathedral garden. "here lives a jew," continued my companion, "with whom i have had some dealings. the nearer the church the farther from god, they say: so this misbegotten infidel plants himself close against the chief church." a few steps farther brought us to a small dark doorway, which certainly gave no promise of wealth or traffic; and, feeling his way up the stairs with his hands, my guide led me on to the second floor, where he knocked hard with his clinched fist against a door. it was not opened at once to his summons: but a part of one of the panels, about two spans square, was drawn back, admitting a little light to the landing-place on which we stood, and through it a dark countenance with a long beard examined us carefully. "ah, it is you, is it, my good seigneur!" cried the jew, after having more than once keenly looked on my companion's face. "i will open the door directly, and let you in." and, almost as he spoke, bolts and bars were withdrawn, and the door opening, gave us admission into a room which presented a very strange scene. there were only two persons in the chamber; the first of which was the jew himself, a man of about fifty years of age, dressed in the long, flowing black robe usually worn by his people. the top of his head was quite bald; for though he wore a small black velvet cap upon it, he uncovered himself on the entrance of my companion, and bowed down almost to the ground. his hair, however, and beard were jetty black, without a single gray hair, and his complexion was of that deep oriental yellow-brown not uncommon to his nation. the other person whom the room contained was a girl of about eleven or twelve years of age, as beautiful a little creature as it is possible to conceive; having, indeed, some resemblance to the jew in feature, but so softened with womanly and with childish beauty, that all harshness was done away. she was dressed in white, but sat playing on a pile of many-coloured shawls, winding them fancifully round her, and, in so doing, throwing her beautiful figure into attitudes the most graceful that it is possible to conceive. the interior of the chamber itself, however, had a great many other objects to attract the eye on every side. it seemed a complete showroom of rich and valuable things. on a table near the window appeared piles of different jewels and trinkets; swords, silver-mounted daggers, and many an implement of modern and ancient warfare, were scattered around on every side: in other corners lay rich dresses and magnificent embroidery; in others, piles of carpets and tapestries, and pieces of silk and velvet. rich lace of gold and silver, and many a book, perhaps invaluable in themselves, and enriched by clasps and mountings of fine filigree-work, were cast promiscuously together with a thousand articles of high price which i have now forgotten. our business was soon explained to the jew; and, taking the turkish dagger, he looked at it, saying that he would give ten crowns for it, after he had touched a part of the haft with a touchstone. "ten crowns!" exclaimed my scottish companion. "by abraham's beard, solomon ahar, thou art more a jew than the rest of thy tribe. see you not that the stones are real?" "nay?" exclaimed the jew, with a look of surprise, "is it so?" and, drawing near to the window, he examined it again by the faint light that entered the chamber through the manifold tall courts and stacks of chimneys behind. "as true as thou art a son of israel," replied the scotchman. but, ere he could say more, the jew himself exclaimed, "blessed be heaven! it is so indeed. here are--let me see--six, seven, nine, fourteen fine stones. nay, then, i will give the gentleman an hundred crowns an he choose to leave it with me, as what the people of lombardy call a pignus or pledge; and if he will sell it outright, i think i could venture to go as far as an hundred and fifty or two hundred." "which means that it is worth three." "on my honour, on my conscience!" cried the jew; and was beginning to bargain upon the worth of the thing, when i cut short the discourse by exclaiming, "i have no intention of selling the dagger: it is but for a temporary need that i want the money, and trust to pay it back full soon." "he shall give thee an hundred and fifty for it at least," exclaimed the scotchman. "i know how to deal with the tribe of israel. look ye, master solomon, the haft of the dagger is worth three hundred crowns or more. if the youth lives, returns, and claims it, you gain your interest of fifteen hard per cent. if he gets himself killed, as is a thousand chances to one, or dies a natural death, or never finds a crown to spare to pay thee, all of which are very probable, the dagger is yours at the end of six months or a year, and then you gain double for the loan." "i cannot give it," replied the jew; "i cannot give it. it is too much. it would be my ruin. how often am i a loser! what taxes have i not to pay! no, i cannot give it, i will not give it. there is your dagger, young gentleman." i hesitated whether i should take the weapon; but the scotchman gave me a nod, saying, "take it, take it; there are more jews in bordeaux than he." and i was taking it back into my hand, when the girl suddenly left off her sport with the shawls, and, plucking the old man by the robe; she said. "give it him, my father; give him the money. he seems as if he would fain have it. he wants it, and thou dost not." the jew still was silent, only putting the child away with his hand, and saying, when she urged him farther, "silence, prattler, what is it to thee?" the girl, turning away from him, looked up in my face; and i laid my hand upon her jetty locks, saying, "i thank thee, my pretty maiden. he will not yield to thee, but thou art kind, however." "nay," said the jew; "i will yield something. you shall have a hundred and twenty-five." "no!" said the scot, turning towards the door; "we shall get a hundred and fifty for it from moses levi." the jew hesitated for a moment longer; but when my companion laid his hand upon the lock of the door as if to go out, he said, "stay, stay: thou shalt have it, though i vow it is the full value of the thing." he carried an inkhorn at his button, and soon wrote down upon two pieces of vellum a mutual acknowledgment between him and me; the one was drawn up in his name, acknowledging the receipt of the dagger, specifying every stone it contained, and promising its restitution on the payment of the sum of a hundred and fifty crowns, together with interest at the rate of fifteen per cent. the other was on my part, acknowledging the receipt of the hundred and fifty crowns, and promising to return it within the space of twelve months, paying an interest of fifteen per cent. as soon as this was concluded, the money was paid down, and the weapon, with its glittering hilt, surrendered. i still wanted a leathern bag to carry the money in; but in the store of the jew all things were to be found; and, having taken one from a cabinet in the room, he made me pay about double the value, and thus we departed; i far richer than i had expected to be for many a year, but feeling yet a degree of regret and disquietude at having suffered the last gift of my father to pass out of my own hand, which, for the time, more than counterbalanced the pleasure of receiving the money, even though it was to furnish me with the means of pursuing that profession for which he himself had destined me. when we had quitted the jew's house, my companion laughed aloud in his peculiar clear, merry, careless way. "these sons of israel," he said, "these sons of israel, it needs a long acquaintance to deal with them wisely: for they always take their chance of those who traffic with them being fools, in order to cheat them, if it be possible. the old sinner knew that those were real jewels in the dagger from the first moment he set eyes on it; but he hazarded offering a small sum, in case you should not know the fact. i took my chance the other way, and swore they were real jewels, though i knew nothing about it; being very sure that, if they were not, he would not suffer me to deceive him. however, you are now not only master of enough to arm you from head to heel as a proper man-at-arms, and to buy you a horse, but to arm half a dozen others lightly to follow you; and, if you will take my counsel, i think i can set you off on a plan by which you may gain both fame and fortune, or lose your life, remember!--for that must always be put at stake. come to the inn, however: come to the inn, and we will talk more." i followed him through the streets meditating on what he had said, and inclined very strongly to trust him, but feeling that want of confidence in myself which was produced by a knowledge of my own inexperience, and which prevented me from being at all sure whether i was dealing with an honest man or a knave. he had certainly put me in a way of obtaining money, which i could not have done myself, and he had, as yet, asked me for no share in the sum thus obtained. there was a frankness too in his whole demeanour, which produced a strong impression in his favour; and, though i was still upon my guard, yet i was well inclined to receive any advice that he might give me under a favourable view. "come, master jacques," he said, speaking to the landlord, whom we met upon the stairs of the inn, "let us have a bottle of your best wine, for we were interrupted in our draught to go away upon business." the landlord bowed low at orders which landlords are always willing to hear; and the stranger led the way to the same room where we had before sat, humming away the time till the aubergiste returned. ensconced at length in that room, with the bottle and glasses before us, he began, in somewhat of a consequential tone, and with a look of superior knowledge, to direct my proceedings. "you have now," he said, "the opportunity of making or marring your own fortunes. you have but very little experience, i have a great deal; and, were i placed exactly as you are, i would do as i am going to tell you to do. i would, in the first place, buy myself arms and horses here in bordeaux, where you will get them cheaper than either at la rochelle or at charenton, where they are in more request. i would arm myself completely at all points with a plain, good suit, which may be had at a low price, of just as strong materials as if you paid two or three thousand livres for it. then buy the armour of a demi-lance for that stout youth whom i saw with you below. two horses may be had for you cheap enough if you can ride well; for there is a maquinon, called pierrot, has got a troop of wild devils from the limousin, for which he can find no sale here among the merchants and citizens, and soft-boned gentry of bordeaux." i smiled, replying, "we will ride them if they can be ridden." "i advise you," he continued, "to do this rather than to furnish yourself at the army, both because you will find it cheaper, and because it always looks better, and gives a higher opinion of a man when he joins his leader fully prepared. besides, you have a chance of some little adventure on the road, which may take off the freshness of your arms, and give you some little reputation. such things are as common in these days as they were in the times of the knights-errant. now what i propose for you to do, when you have joined the army, is, not for you to put yourself in this troop or that, as a simple man-at-arms--for that is the way to get yourself killed speedily, without anybody hearing anything of you--but to look about the camp for any stray vagabonds that may be about; i mean of those whose whole fortune consists in a steel cap, a breastplate, and a horse, and the whole sum of whose virtues lies in courage. you will find two or three young fellows too at every corner, who, like yourself, are seeking service, fresh in arms, and willing to stick to any leader who will but gallop them into the cannon's mouth. they are generally younger than you are, for you have been somewhat late in taking to the trade. that, however, will only make it the more likely they should follow you, which is the great thing; for to be the leader of one of these bands is the sure means of getting on, whereas, to be a follower in one of them is the readiest way of getting hanged. you have then nothing to do, you know, but to take up absolutely the trade of adventurer, attack the enemy everywhere, harass him on every occasion, cut off his parties, attack every chateau where you think there is a soldier--in short, run your head against every stone wall that you meet with. you may chance to knock some of them down; and if you do, you will gain a reputation which will soon put you at the head of a better band than that with which you set out. good old soldiers will be glad to come to you then, and you may work yourself up to be a general by steadiness and perseverance." "there are two things, however," i said, "which you have forgotten to mention: first, where i am to get the money to pay these recruits; for, after i have bought horses, and arms for myself and andriot, there will not be much left to pay any one." "oh, they will pay themselves, they will pay themselves," he said. "you may have, indeed, in the first instance, to give one or two of those vagabonds who have seen service a crown a week, just to make the beginning of a band; all the others you will take merely upon trial; and, of course, you must put the catholics under contributions. if they will have war, let them have war and pay for it. it is an undoubted fact, that, since the last peace, they have put to death, in one town or another, full ten thousand protestants; and, therefore, we have a right to make them pay for such sorts of amusement. then you will put the prisoners to ransom, you know; and every one that is taken by your men pays you a share too. you will therefore have plenty to keep the band up as soon as it is formed. but what was your next question?" "why, simply by whose authority i shall act," i replied; "for, not being of sufficient authority and rank to levy war on my own account, i must have some sanction for raising such a band." "i had thought of that," he replied, "i had thought of that. such things are not, indeed, much considered in these wars; and, after all, i believe you might do it on your own account: ay, and with right, for your father was a man of good nobility as well as courage; and, though he never had a crown in his purse to bless himself, might have spread his own banner according to the ordinances of st. louis." "did you know my father?" i demanded, somewhat surprised: "and, if you did know him, how have you found out that i am his son?" "i knew your father but little," replied the other, "though we have fought side by side together before now; and as to the rest, you forget that i saw you sign your name before the jew. however, as it is better that you should have some authority for what you do, i will give you a letter to the prince de condé, telling him your plans and purposes, and he will not refuse you a commission under his own hand at the request of robert stuart." "robert stuart!" i exclaimed; "what, he who killed the constable montmorency at the battle of st. denis?" "the same man that you mean," replied my companion; "but, for all that, i did not kill the constable. the world gives me greater credit than i deserve. it was one of my band who shot him with a pistol. i took him indeed, for he was down on the ground; and i thought he had formally surrendered, and believe so still, when up he jumped, and, with the pummel of his sword, dashed out my three front teeth, knocking me backward on the ground, for i had dismounted to receive his sword. one of my fellows, seeing this, called out that he was as treacherous an enemy as a friend, and shot him on the spot. that is the exact truth of the story that people tell twenty different ways. and now, knowing who i am, you will wonder, perhaps, to see me here, in a little inn, paying a few sous for my dinner. but the truth is, i came to swell my band a little by any veteran men-at-arms i can find, and also to meet here some half dozen of my friends from scotland, who are about to join me. now there is a certain report gone abroad, well-nigh as false as the other, that i was the person who caused that old meddling fool, the president minard, to be assassinated. there is many a one of his friends here in the good town of bordeaux, so that, till i am well accompanied, it might not be pleasant to lodge at a great inn and draw eyes upon me." it may well be supposed that i now thanked this celebrated leader gratefully for what he had done and proposed to do in my behalf. but he replied that the protestant cause was much at his heart; that he loved a good soldier and the son of a good soldier, and that what he had done for me was really nothing. "come," he said at length, "let us go and seek for the horses and arms: bring your boy with you, and i will let my people know where i am, that, in case the ship arrives, they may come and tell me." the horses were soon bought, about twenty of them having been brought out for me to try. for myself, i chose one of the strongest and most fierce, having soon perceived that he was tractable and good in his temper, though he was perfectly unbroken. a lighter horse served the boy's turn; but i left my new friend to bargain with the dealer for the price of both, and was surprised to find the small sum at which he contrived to purchase the two. it is true, the dealer knew him, and imagined that i was a man-at-arms newly engaged to serve under the scotch captain. the arms were procured in a similar manner; and, being now fully equipped, i returned with stuart to the inn, telling him my intention of setting out for the army that very night, in order not to lose any time in pursuing the course before me. "that is right," he said, "that is right; i like activity! you and your man can get to cubzac to-night. i will write the letter for you at once; and, if you can pick up another follower or two in your way to the camp, do not fail to do so; for, the more men you carry with you, the warmer will be your welcome. do not arm yourself till you get to cubzac, for the good people here might stop you. you must then shape your course as you hear news of the army; but avoid angoulême; for, when i came by some ten days ago, that neighbourhood was somewhat dangerous for a protestant." of course my thanks were not wanting; and, immediately after our arrival at the inn, he wrote the letter which he had promised; making no mention, indeed, of my never having served before, but simply telling the prince de condé, with whom he seemed on terms of great intimacy, who i was, and that the object i proposed was to raise a troop of adventurers in order to harass the catholic armies. he farther begged him not only to give me a commission to the effect he proposed, but to point out to me the means of swelling my troop, and to afford me every assistance in so doing. when this was finished, and the armour charged upon the servant's horse, i lost no time in mounting my own; and my new friend shaking me as heartily by the hand as if we had known each other for years, bade me adieu, saying that we should soon meet again at the camp. the landlord of the auberge and his drawers all bowed low as i came away, for i had paid whatever was asked, and perhaps had been more liberal to the attendants than some of the frequenters of the inn not poorer than myself; and, with a heart considerably lightened, i rode away and quitted the city of bordeaux. my first sensations were those of joy and satisfaction at being no longer dependant upon the bounty of any one, but bent upon my way through the wide world to win for myself honour and renown, and, as i trusted, high station and happy competence. but, even while i was passing the ferry, those sensations began to change. i thought with some regret of the chateau of blancford, of good old la tour, of the two glad, light-hearted boys, who had been my companions for many a year, and of the sweet girl, whom i might never see again. a feeling of solitude came over me, and i do believe that it is impossible even for him who has the lightest heart, the brightest hope, and the most enviable situation, to quit the scenes and the companions of his youth without feeling as if he were left alone in the whole wide world, and without seeing before his eyes vague visions of the difficulties, dangers, distresses, and griefs which await every man who passes forth into active existence. such, at least, were my sensations; and, after landing, paying the ferryman his fare, and ascending the heights on the other side, i paused to look back over the scene that i was quitting, and a thousand bright and happy memories, clinging to my heart like children that would keep a parent from the wars, seemed to hold me to the spot with a force i could scarcely resist. i thought of the condition of those that i had left behind; i saw the peaceful dwelling where i had spent so many years with but few of earth's discomforts, rendered the abode of contention, and sorrow, and discomfort; i fancied the grief of the two youths when they found that i was gone; i beheld the fair face of louise bathed in tears, as she remained unprotected and alone, and left to the guidance, the control, perhaps the tyranny, of a harsh, bad woman. it was all painful; the thought almost unmanned me, and i would have given worlds to rescue her from such a painful situation. i felt that i must call up such images no longer; but still the form and face of louise haunted me: and at length, out of the darker and more gloomy thoughts that filled my brain, came forth a bright and lustrous hope, a hope on which i dared not let my mind rest; which was like the night vision of an angel to some lonely anchorite, too brilliant for the eye to gaze upon firmly, but yet full of joy, and consolation, and encouragement. it was the first time that ever such a dream had suggested itself even to my imagination. it was wild, it was foolish; but yet how sweet was the idea, that the time might come when, having, by the exertion of every power of my mind and body, conquered the difficulties which surrounded me, swept away poverty and dependance, gained fame, and honour, and emolument, i might be enabled to snatch that sweet girl from the dark and hateful tyranny which i believed the rule of her mother's rival must necessarily become, and to repay in some degree, by kindness, and tenderness, and love for the child, the kindness, and tenderness, and love which had been shown to me by the mother. but, almost in the very act of thus dreaming, there came upon me the memory of all that multitude of obstacles--i might almost say, of impossibilities--which lay in the way to the fulfilment of such hopes. but i felt at the same time that, though it was only a fancy, it was a noble one; that, though it was merely a wild aspiration after that which could not be, it was a high aspiration; one that might lead me to great attempts, if not to great deeds; one that would even guard me against low and debasing pursuits, that would elevate my purposes, and give object to my energies and exertions. i felt that such an object was holy and great, and i speak with reverence when i say that it seemed to me then like the star which led the magi from the east. as this image rose upon my mind, it soothed and it strengthened me; and i could gaze upon the city, with its manifold towers and steeples reposing calmly in the rich purple light of evening, and upon the distant sloping grounds beyond, leading away towards blancford, and on the wanderings of the bright garonne, as, rolling down from langdon, it swept on by the city towards its meeting with the kindred stream, and on their joint progress to the ocean: i could gaze, in short, upon all the natural objects which my eye had been accustomed to behold from childhood, without that deep feeling of regret on quitting them which i had experienced the moment before; and, as i turned my horse's rein to ride on, i murmured, "i shall see you all again, perhaps, with a lighter heart and a spirit more at rest." the country was well known to me; for, during the last two or three years, i had made manifold excursions from the chateau in different directions; and now, leaving the high road somewhat to the right, i took a bridle-path which conducted me towards my place of rest for the night more rapidly, though somewhat more roughly, than the ordinary track. advancing somewhat quickly, for my charger was impatient of the bridle, i passed a man upon a small rugged horse, neither very fat nor very comely in its appearance, and apparently little able to carry him and the large package which he bore on the croup behind. when first i saw him he was trailing a spear along, with one end of the shaft describing a long zigzag line upon the road; but the sound of a horse's feet made him turn round rapidly, and his lance was brought into rest in a moment, in a way that bespoke no slight practice in charging a sudden enemy. whether on an occasion he might charge any one without much considering if it were an enemy or friend, i did not know at the time; but such things were very common in those days, though i think the worthy gentleman was somewhat too badly mounted to attempt the experiment upon me, even if i had been alone. we passed, however, in all safety, with a "good-evening, seigneur," on the part of our fellow-traveller. i had only time, as i passed by, to remark that he was a tall, rawboned man, with a countenance which did not prepossess any one very much in his favour. he was somewhat dirty in his clothing, and rugged in his person and appearance also; though there was a roguish twinkle in his eye, which did not escape my attention, even in the slight glance i obtained. in a short time after i arrived at cubzac, and rode straight to the inn, the hospitable doors of which showed themselves very willing to give me admission. when i stood in the courtyard, however, and saw my armour and my valise unloaded from andriot's horse, while the aubergiste waited to conduct me, with every appearance of reverence, towards the hall of general entertainment, a strange feeling suddenly came over me, from the recollection that it was not yet four-and-twenty hours since the arrival of the baron de blancford at his own chateau, that all i had done--the making of a new acquaintance, my dealings with the jew, the purchase of horses and of arms, and a hundred little incidents, which appeared to me like the occupations of a life--had in reality occupied but a few hours. so it was, however: my whole fate and course of existence had been changed as by the stroke of a magician's wand, which had set me free in a moment from the state of indolent dependance in which i had been forced to remain like one of the spirits in the old fables, imprisoned motionless in the heart of some knotted oak, and had sent me forth in a moment to active life and energetic exertion. there was something ennobling, elevating, inspiring in the feelings, very different from the sensations with which i had looked back upon the scenes i was leaving, from the northern bank of the garonne. that all this had been accomplished in so short a space, gave me a sensation of power and energy; a confidence in myself which i had before wanted; and in the calm and deliberate step, and thoughtful air with which i followed the landlord into the auberge, no one, i think, could have discovered any trace of a mind as inexperienced as that of a mere boy. the hall of the inn was a very spacious one; and a long table appeared in the middle, at the farther end of which i could just see, through the dim twilight of the evening, some seven or eight persons assembled round what seemed a hasty supper. one of the servants of the inn, however, brought in lights almost immediately after i had entered; and it then became evident that the party had just arrived from some long journey. there were two or three grave, elderly men of respectable appearance, apparently tradesmen of some importance, or merchants. there was a good dame, too, of the same class, with two or three little girls of seven or eight years old, and one or two women servants; besides which, there was a youth of eighteen or nineteen, strong and well made, scarcely tasting his supper, but sitting beside the rest, and resting thoughtfully, with his head leaning on his hand. manifold were the caps and mantles which covered the whole party; and one would certainly have supposed, from the way in which they were wrapped up, that we were in the midst of winter rather than in the warmest time of year. it often happened at that time, however, that such superabundant garments were adopted for the purpose of concealment; and i judged, and judged rightly, that these might be a party of wealthy traders, who, travelling through a disturbed country, and in dangerous times, chose to be recognised as little as possible, lest the report of wealth might draw upon them the attention of the plunderers with whom the country was overrun. all their eyes had been turned upon me as soon as i entered; the conversation they were carrying on ceased; and, as if for something to say, one of the elder men addressed the younger, saying, "why do you not eat your supper, martin? you are not sick, are you?" "not sick, uncle, but sorry," replied the lad. "pshaw! thou art a whimsical boy," replied the elder man. "i can tell thee, however poor a trade thou mayest follow, it is richer than that of a soldier. here is this gentleman coming in," he added, raising his eyes to me as i stood half way up the table. "he looks as if he knew something of arms, and i dare say will tell thee that to sell silk or linen, however little one may get, is better than fighting all day, watching all night, and having hard blows for one's only payment." i laughed at his description of the soldier's life; and, as he addressed me first, replied at once, "i cannot think we are so badly off as that, my good sir. every one knows his own taste; and, though certainly fortunes are rarely made by the sword, yet honour is gained, and glory, and frequently competence; and you must remember there is not a noble family in the land which does not owe its elevation to the sword." "that was in other days, that was in other days," said the elder man. "but i am right, then, in thinking you a soldier, sir?" i nodded my head, and was about to reply somewhat more fully, when andriot entered the room and whispered a word or two in my ear, which made me rise and go out, while the landlord busily put down my cover, and prepared to give me supper. the intelligence which the lad had brought me was simply that the man with the spear, whom we had passed on the road, had come into the inn-yard, and, finding him there, had asked him many questions concerning me. the good youth had been in one of his loquacious moods, and had given the interrogator more information than i thought right, telling him my name, and that i was a gentleman going to join the army. on this the other had immediately asked to speak with me, and i accordingly went out at once, in order to put my mind at ease with regard to the person in whose favour andriot had shown himself so communicative. i found him in the courtyard busy in unloading his beast, and examining the contents of the package he had thus carried behind him, which proved to be a considerable store of very miscellaneous pieces of armour, both offensive and defensive. the cuirass was at that moment on the top, and, from its condition, left little doubt that one of its possessors, at least, had seen some service like itself; for not only did sundry hacks and dents betray the fact of many a close encounter, but a large round hole appeared to have been perforated, either by bullet or lance, on the right-hand side, near the armhole; and the gap was now curiously stopped up by means of a piece of thick leather, attached by nails driven through the iron and clinched on the inside. "why, my good friend," i said, looking at the cuirass, and without taking any immediate notice of his message, "that piece of leather will never keep out anything." "it will keep out anything i want it to keep out," replied the man, looking up at me with a laugh. "and what is that?" i demanded; "what is it you want it to keep out?" "the wind," he replied; "for when the wind gets in between cold iron and an empty stomach, a man gets melancholy, and has no appetite for dry blows. but i know what you mean; that sword, or bullet, or spear would go through it as easily as a skewer through a cock of the indies; but there's not much chance of any other bullet finding out that place again; and if it did, no great matter, for it would meet with its fellow here, just lying between the ribs, under my armpit, and that would stop it from going any farther." "that is looking upon the matter rationally," i replied; "but now, my good friend, what is it that you wanted with me?" "why, simply this, seigneur," he replied; "finding that you are a soldier going to join the army, and having heard of your name a great many years ago as a very brave and gallant gentleman--" "you must mean my father," i said, interrupting him: "my name you most likely have never heard." "ay, i dare say it was your father, now look at you," he replied, "for you couldn't be much out of your swaddling-clothes at the time i talk of. however, i was going to propose, that you, being travelling alone, or nearly so, and i alone, or what's somewhat worse than alone, having nothing but a bad beast with me, which trots me five miles an hour, and thinks itself a miracle--i was going to propose, i say, that we should join company; for in these days we may fall in with friends and acquaintances by the way, where we shall find two right hands better than one. besides, we may chance to fall in with some booty, and two dogs will always kill more game than twice one dog." on the very face of the matter, the proposal was somewhat impudent; for at least my clothing, my horses, and, i trust, my appearance altogether, were those of a man of high birth; but when i came to look my companion over more attentively by the twilight, which did not improve his appearance, it struck me as more impudent still. he was a person of about forty-five years of age, lean, long-limbed, thin-flanked, broad in the shoulders, with as unprepossessing a countenance as it was possible to imagine, and nothing on earth to redeem it from a sort of assassin-like expression, except a merry but somewhat sarcastic glance, which occasionally came into his eyes, or, rather, into one of them, for it was the right eye only which had any movement; and i afterward found that the left was made of glass, though a very good imitation of the other. what might have been the original shape of his nose i do not know; but a large cut across the bridge and down one cheek seemed to indicate that its conformation had been somewhat violently changed into its present socratic turn upward. his long gray hair, thin and ragged, his unwashed face, his untrimmed beard, all added to the sinister appearance of his countenance, and, in short, no one could look at him without doing him the same bitter injustice that i did him at that moment, and thinking him as murderous and rascally a person as it was possible to set one's eyes on. besides all this, his garments were anything but that which one would have desired in a friend and companion; for his buff jerkin, besides the rusty stains which had been left upon it after having been worn under ill-cleaned armour, was soiled and dirty in various other ways, and in more than one place patched with a piece of gray cloth. he stood my survey quite quietly; and, indeed, the discrepant gaze of his two eyes rendered it somewhat difficult to tell whether he was looking full in my face or across the inn-yard on the other side. after having remained for about half a minute silent, however, he brought both eyes into a straight line, demanding, in a significant tone. "am not i an ugly dog?" "yes," i replied, "you are. but you have made a little mistake, my good friend; i am not seeking companions, but raising a troop to serve under my command." "then i am the very man you want," he replied; "for i have experience, and you have none, that's clear enough; and i do not much care what i do, whether it be as a leader or follower, so that i do something." "i don't think you would do much credit to my new troop," i replied, "unless you troubled the brook a little oftener, and gave the barber a sous at least once a month." "oh, that is easily remedied," said the adventurer; "i have no sous to spare, but i have ten fingers, baiting one which was hacked off at the battle of st. denis, which will do as well for me as any barber in christendom; and then, again, though water is not plenty in this hot weather, yet it is to be had. as to my jerkin, too, a couple of ounces of chalk, and the worth of a denier of yellow ochre, will put that all to rights; so that, if you like to have me, i will turn out to-morrow morning as smart a trooper as you'd wish to see. i cannot get rid of my face though, so you must make the best of that." "what religion are you of?" i asked, wishing to ascertain that point first before i divulged my own. "i don't know," he replied. "what is yours?" there was a sort of quaint oddity about the fellow which amused me, and, i confess, made me think better of him, though i know not why, and i demanded, without answering his question, "who have you served under?" "two or three dozen," he answered; "but i have got my character written down for the benefit of those whom it may concern by a great many of my different friends, and i have not altered a word of their certificates, for it is useless for a man to try to change his nature, and it will come out sooner or later. who will you have?" he continued; "here is martigues on the one side, and andelot on the other. here is puygaillard, and lossac, and stuart, and--" "stay, stay," i said; "that will do. let me see martigues on the one side, and stuart on the other." "you are a cute bird, after all," he said; "you wont be limed, i see, to show yourself a protestant or a catholic. however, here are the papers." and, lifting up the flap of his jerkin, he drew from an inner pocket a number of dirty pieces of paper, of which he placed in my hands two, saying, "there they are." the first i opened was in a strange hand, and it went on as follows: "this is to signify that moric endem is the greatest liar in europe; but none the worse for that. he fights like a tiger, and will now and then obey his orders." this was signed "martigues;" and the other, which i instantly recognised as the same handwriting wherein stuart had given me a letter to the prince de condé, was much in the same strain. "i hereby aver," it said, "that moric endem is better than he looks. he will stand by a friend or leader till the last, and has done so many brave things, that he is a fool for bragging of things that he never did." i smiled as i read such accounts of my volunteer, but paused for a moment to consider whether there was a possibility of my being deceived. had i been still is the frame of mind in which i had set out that morning, i should have lost my opportunity, and rejected the offer of a man who afterward proved of infinite use to me. but, as i have said, i had become somewhat more confident in myself by this time: stuart's recommendation to increase my numbers as far as possible had been strong; and therefore i determined to run the risk, as in case of any malconduct on the part of my new follower, i and andriot were at least two to one against him. "and now, monsieur moric endem," i said, "which would you rather serve on, the catholic or the protestant side? answer me fairly, for on the reply hangs all our proceedings." "that is not a fair question," he cried, flinging down his cap upon the ground with some vehemence. "that is not a fair question to a soldier of fortune. the matter, see you, is balanced pretty evenly, my young lord. with the catholics there is pay and but little plunder, for the protestants have nothing to lose. with the protestants there is no pay but plenty of plunder; for each catholic, like a fool, comes with a fortune on his back. i have, indeed, a little hankering one way--" "what, then," i said, "do the protestants give no pay?" "by st. geronimo," he cried, slapping his thigh, "you are a catholic! but, no," he continued, a moment after, "i remember quite well cerons was a protestant, and so was his cousin the baron de blancford. if you are the young lord, you are a protestant too." "perhaps it may be so," i replied, in a low tone, but with a significant look. "well, then, i am your man," he said, without raising his voice; "for, to say sooth, i was born and bred a protestant. but it is full thirty years since i thought of those things; and, on my honour, i don't well know what's the difference now. as to the rest, my young master, you must give me a crown to gild my hand, and you must give me and my horse something to eat till we get to the army, at all events; for, if i had not met with you this night, he and i would have shared supper; that is to say, he would have had the hay and i the water, and to-morrow we might have been obliged to prove troublesome to any one we met upon the road. i declare, so help me heaven, i have not seen a crown piece for the last two months." "i am nearly as poor as yourself, moric," i said; "however, there is a crown for you, and now you are my follower; but i expect to see a change in your appearance by to-morrow, and you had better get your armour on your back, as i intend to do with mine, so that we may be well prepared for all things." "you shall see a change, you shall see a change, sir," cried the man; "and i will help to fill your purse as you have now helped to fill mine. i will get this crown changed directly into silver and billon, that it may feel heavy in my purse, and make me think of the days of old; for i have had many more crowns in my pocket, i dare say, than you have in yours now. but, however--i don't know how it was--peace never lasted six months without finding me as poor as ever; the pockets grew empty, and the crowns went away, some to one slut, some to another, and the rest, as i have heard stuart tell of an english prince, were drowned in butts of malmsey or burgundy, as the case might be. but i will go and polish my armour, and patch my jacket, and wash my face, and trim my beard, and then i must try and get a new horse the first time i meet an enemy, though it is to be confessed that on the back of that brute there are ten chances to one against me." while moric endem was speaking, the landlord came from the house to seek me, telling me that my supper was not only ready, but getting cold; and, leaving my new follower to make the best arrangements he could, i re-entered the hall of the inn. i found the party that i had left there concluding their supper, and they all looked at me as i sat down to mine with a sort of shy and anxious, but yet not a reserved look, somewhat like that which a dog puts on when he is willing to be familiar with us, but somewhat afraid of trusting to our kindness. the two elder men, however, and the elder lady, entered into conversation with me after a short time, and i saw evidently that they were endeavouring to probe my character and feelings. those, however, were sad days, when no one dared to trust to his neighbour; and i as little chose to confide my views or purposes to them, as they chose to put any trust or confidence in me. the conversation, then, was merely general: i found that one of the elder merchants had travelled much, and had considerable information, and he seemed not a little surprised to find that a young soldier could possess so much general knowledge as i had acquired during my long period of study. the younger people, too, began to draw nearer to me; and some little sportive jests, such as i would have used towards my cousins at blancford, appeared completely to win their hearts, so that they were speedily clinging round me, playing with the tassels of my cloak or my sword-knot, and taking a thousand little liberties, for which they were, of course, gravely reproved by their elders. the young man who had been called martin, however, sat silent and thoughtful for a long time, and at length only spoke to ask me some questions concerning the movements of the armies. the first words on that subject, however, seemed a signal for the party to break up, his uncle interrupting him immediately by saying it was time to go to bed; and the whole then retired, wishing me good-night and a prosperous journey on the morrow. their reserved conduct was not explained till the following morning, when, on rising early, i saw them setting off from the courtyard, and the aubergiste, as innkeepers generally do, came instantly to volunteer every information he possessed regarding the guests who were just gone. "ay, poor people," he said, "silly people they are. i told them they might trust to you, seigneur, and what a protection it would be to them to have you with them; for they are a party of rich merchants, as you might well see, sir, and doubtless have their pockets lined with many a good gold piece, so that they are afraid of all the bands of plunderers about, especially at the passages of the rivers." "what religion are they of?" demanded i, nothing doubting they were protestants, as the landlord himself was well known to be of my own creed. to my astonishment, however, he answered that they were "poor misguided catholics. that is to say," he continued, "they are what people are beginning to call nowadays, i hear, politics, which means people that are neither very much one thing nor the other. that eldest one is the well-known paris merchant, martin vern, who has so much to do with the jews and lombards. i've a great notion he's a protestant at heart; though his life, and all his goods, which he loves better than his life, would be in jeopardy every hour in paris if he did not go to mass as regularly as the clock strikes the hour. it seems that young martin, the nephew, had his father's promise to be made a soldier of; but the father died a month or so ago, which brought them all into this part of the country, and old martin won't hear of the boy's taking to the sword. yet i would stake my life that they are attacked before they get many miles farther, and then they will find that young martin's stout back and strong arm are both shield and sword for them. i hope, sir, we shall have good news of you at the army; but you might as well have won a few gold pieces by the way of conducting three fat merchants safely. with what will you please to break your fast! it is not well to set out fasting, as they have done, and it's good twelve miles ere you get to cavignac." "i am not going to cavignac, my good host," i replied, not choosing exactly to have my route settled for me. "ay, then," he answered, "you are going to guitres, which is farther still; but in that case you'll have to pass the saye low down, and i fear that all the rain which fell last night may have rendered the ford impassable. besides all that, however, i heard that lossac and his band were lying between st. aulaye and contras, and it is even to be doubted whether he does not keep parties scouring the whole country up as far as barbezieux, for he wants to prevent the bands from the south from joining our great admiral and the prince de condé. so you had better take my advice and keep hard away to the west, though you do get among the sands, for you are not strong enough to do much against any of his people, and must e'en have recourse to what we call fox's strength, by which i mean cunning." i thanked the aubergiste for his good information, which was, indeed, not a little important to me; for the armies of the prince de condé and the duke of montpensier were so placed that it was difficult for either to reach its resources, and no less so, for any one wishing to join the one, to avoid falling into the hands of the other. the tidings i had received cast me into a momentary fit of musing; and the aubergiste, seeing the effect his words had produced, and, at the same time, having a strong desire that i should take my breakfast at his house, represented to me that, if i would but wait for half an hour, a courier from angoulême would pass through cubzac, and from him we could extract much information. i agreed to his suggestion; and, soon after the morning meal had been prepared, i heard the arrival of the courier himself, and learned that he had passed a small band of horse, whether troops of lossac or not he could not tell. they amounted not to more than six or seven persons, he said, and were apparently moving back towards cercon. these tidings having been obtained, i had nothing farther to detain me at cubzac; and, paying the host his reckoning, i mounted to my chamber, clothed myself in my good suit of steel, and, after calling loudly, but in vain, for andriot, to make the rest of my goods and chattels into as small packages as possible, that it might be carried more easily, i descended to the courtyard to see what had become of my young attendant and my new follower, the latter of whom i had not seen during the whole morning. i found them together, behind some stables at the back of the auberge, chaffering with a sturdy farmer of the neighbourhood in regard to a proposed exchange of master moric endem's piece of lean cattle for a fine, fresh, sturdy, but rather vicious horse belonging to the other. moric had offered, it seems, to give his own horse, and all the remains of the crown which i had given him the day before, together with another crown that andriot had lent him, for the more powerful and befitting charger which had been placed before his eyes. the farmer, however, stood out for another piece of money, and i was fain now to come forward and give it, though the price seemed to be somewhat exorbitant.[ ] the horse that moric already possessed was anything but fit for the journey; and, as he willingly agreed that i was to be considered the proprietor of the beast now purchased, it gave me a greater command over him than i might otherwise have obtained. after all this was concluded and the horse in his hands, i gave a glance towards my new follower's figure, and saw that it certainly was as much improved as his form and features would admit. the buff jerkin was now cleared from its rusty stains and spots of dirt, and was shining in the full freshness of chalk and yellow ochre. it seemed scarcely dry as yet, indeed; but that circumstance he did not appear to mind; and the plain steel cap with flying cheek-pieces, into which he had thrust his head, had been painted with a sort of indian black since the night before, so as to look very smart, without offering a very shining or conspicuous point to the eye of a watchful enemy. no other piece of armour had yet been put on, i suppose in order to give the buff jerkin time to dry; but when, after having told him to hasten his preparations for departure, i came down once more with andriot to mount my horse, i found master moric armed from head to foot, with his cuirass also painted black; thus hiding, in a great measure, the unseemly patch upon his right side. if i contemplated him with some attention, well pleased with his neatly-trimmed beard and well-washed face, he did not seem to regard me less narrowly or with less apparent pleasure, scanning all the pieces of my arms with an experienced eye, and rubbing his hands joyfully as he saw how easily they sat upon me. the ease with which i managed my horse too, though the brute kicked and plunged most unmercifully on first being mounted, gave him no less satisfaction; and it was only upon andriot that he bestowed some counsels and some reproof in regard to the unsoldierly manner in which he had put on his morion. when all was completed, we set out from cubzac, and took our road onward towards barbezieux. as we went, moric treated me with a large portion of his conversation, amusing by its quaint drollery, but occasionally tiresome from touches of that rhodomontade whereof he had been accused. were his own word to be believed, there was no great action which had been enacted during the last half century that he had not either absolutely performed himself or had a very considerable and important share therein. but he even went beyond that; and when he began telling a story of any one else, it very often happened that he entirely forgot, before he came to the end of his tale, the original hero with whom he set out, dropped the third person, took up the first, changed the personage spoken of to himself, and performed all the last acts he had to relate in his own person. the most ludicrous instance of this kind of transformation took place while he was giving me an account of the tournament at which king henry ii. had been killed not many years before, and at which moric had been present. he asserted that the fault which occasioned the death of the king was entirely on the part of montgomery; but, before he had finished his tale, he entirely forgot that declaration, got warm and heated with the subject, was seized with the peculiar sort of cupidity which induced him so constantly to appropriate the actions of others, and becoming montgomery himself, described how he had killed the king of france, and explained, with the utmost perspicuity and exactitude, the eager feelings with which he had been animated, and which prevented him from recollecting in time that it was necessary to throw away instantly the broken staff of his lance. i could not help laughing at this absurdity; but he took it all in good part, laughed himself, and declared that it was every word true, except that he was the person who did it. in many other respects, however, his conversation was full of interest. he was an old veteran soldier, and full of information upon every practical point, both of military tactics and military habits. as far as study could render me acquainted with the subject, i was so already; but i gained more useful information from my new follower in a few hours, more directions for employing well the science that i had acquired, than i could have done from the best master of the art in weeks or months. from him, too, i learned all the habits and manners of the camp; the rules, the regulations, the etiquettes, which i had before no notion of. what could and might be done, what could not be done, he told me; and i found that, constituted as armies of that period were--low in discipline, licentious in habits--with a little complaisance to the great leaders, and the observation of a few insignificant regulations, the captain of such a party as i proposed to raise might, in fact, do anything that he liked, and act totally independent of the general during almost the whole of his campaign, provided he showed himself daring and fearless, and ready to fight whenever he was called upon. as we were conversing in this manner while we pursued our onward way, we came to the high grounds near the little hamlet of marceau, and, looking down over the country below, we saw a considerable number of people riding along, as if in great haste and confusion, upon the bank of the river, and at some distance to the right another party appeared upon the edge of the little slope, while the sun, glittering upon their arms, left no doubt whatever that they were troopers of some kind. "those are surely the poor merchants," i said, "who left cubzac this morning." "ay," said the old soldier, "they are running away from those worthies on the hill; some of lassac's people, i suppose. but the stupid fools have missed the ford. it is there, a hundred yards to the right, and they are running away from it. i know it as well as my own buff jerkin. they will get themselves caught and plundered if they don't mind." "let us go down and help them," i exclaimed. "if you know the ford, we can reach them before the others, and once having them across, we can turn and take a blow or two with the pursuers." "bravo! bravo, my captain!" cried moric endem. "that's the way! that's the way! it seems as if you had been born and bred to it! always fight the enemy when he's not more than two to one! i am with you, my good captain!" and, spurring down the hill at full speed, we approached the party of merchants, who, terrified at seeing another body of troopers on the opposite side, paused and hesitated, till, taking off my steel cap, i waved it in the air, calling to them not to be afraid. it seems that i was instantly recognised, for they stopped, and some advanced towards me, while, pointing with my hand towards the spot which moric had indicated as the ford, i shouted to them to ride in that way with all speed. people in a fright, however, never understand anything that is said to them, and they did not obey my directions till i reached them, so that by the time we got them to the side of the river, and some of the horses into the water, the enemy were close upon us. it seemed to me just like one of the military games which i had been accustomed to play with the old retainers and my young cousins. with moric endem and andriot, i turned my horse upon the pursuers; the lad martin rode up in a minute to my side; one of his uncles could not resist following; and, by a sudden and unexpected charge, we drove the enemy back, who paused for a moment's consideration before they followed us again. "now, seigneur," cried moric, "quick over the stream, for the river is coming down like fury, and in ten minutes more will be impassable. we can easily keep the opposite bank when we are over." i had remarked that the water was up to the girths of the horses' saddles when the party of merchants passed, and therefore, without more ado, i gave the necessary order for crossing the stream. we found that the little river saye, like some of the others that flow into the isle, subject to a sudden increase, had become a complete torrent in consequence of the rain which had fallen during the night, and was swelling every moment, coming down in large brown eddies, which nearly carried our horses off their feet. the two merchants who had remained with us and andriot passed first, and i followed, thinking that my friend moric was close behind me; but, in charging the catholics, one of them had been struck to the ground, slightly wounded, near the bank of the stream, and moric's fondness for plunder could not be restrained. the man-at-arms, indeed, had run away, but the horse had somehow got his feet entangled with the bridle, and remained very soberly lying on the ground. turning round when i had half crossed the stream, i perceived my worthy follower busily employed upon the saddle, and shouted to him that the enemy were upon him. he looked up, however, calculated the distance nicely, finished the operation of cutting the girths with his dagger, threw the rich saddle and its caparisons on the crupper of his own horse, sprang upon his back in a moment, and plunged into the river, with the spears of the catholics close at his horse's flanks. the water had risen some inches since i had passed; his horse was not quite so tall as mine, and for a few feet had to swim; but moric endem was never at all discomposed by any such little adventure; and, keeping his spurs close to the horse's sides, brought him to land, not more than a few yards below the spot where the rest were standing. the catholic band pursued him into the water, and one of them seemed inclined to follow his example in swimming; but moric was by no means unprepared; and snatching from the miscellaneous crowd of arms which surrounded his saddle a long horse-pistol, which fired with a flint and wheel, he took a deliberate aim at the pursuer's horse and shot him in the water. though the wound was mortal, the horse, luckily for its rider, dashed out of the water before it fell; and moric, scarcely staying to mark the effect, proceeded calmly and quietly to examine the saddle which he had taken, to rip off the gold lace and velvet which covered it, and to extract from the lining of the bow some twenty gold pieces, which were there stowed away for security. laughing at his prize, he rode up to us, and breaking in upon the expressions of gratitude which the merchants were pouring upon me, he pointed to the tops of a thick wood of sapins which were seen it the distance of about two miles, saying, "we had better ride on that way; for, if these fellows see us remain talking here, they will go down to the bridge and pursue us out of very spite. if we set off quick for the wood, however, they will know that it is useless, and we shall go on in quiet." his advice was immediately followed; and, turning round on a little elevation before we reached the wood, we had the satisfaction of seeing that the enemy had given up the pursuit, and were slowly proceeding across the country in another direction. chapter vi. it was not till we had placed several miles between us and the enemy that the good merchants felt at all satisfied of their security; and they pursued their way with a degree of eagerness which soon brought us into the midst of the sandy tracks in the neighbourhood of cheperiers. we then came to the banks of a little stream, the name of which i forget; and, as the women and children were now evidently much tired, i assured good master vern that there was no farther danger, at least from those who had already attacked him; and, dismounting from our horses upon the banks of the stream, we let the beasts crop the scanty herbage, while we prepared to repose and refresh ourselves from a good store of provisions which the traders had brought with them from the inn. the faces of the women and children were still somewhat pale, both from fear and fatigue, and martin vern and his companion looked grave and thoughtful, as i imagined, from the risk their property had just run. young martin, however, who had been as far forward in our little fray with the enemy as if he had been armed with steel from head to foot, looked not a little proud of his exploits, especially as somehow, i do not very well know how, he had got a sharp gash upon the forehead, which bled a little, and promised to leave a military mark upon him that he was not likely easily to get rid of. seeing the two elder merchants standing apart, busily talking to each other, i advanced to the young man, and, shaking hands with him, complimented him highly upon his courage and promptitude. he grasped my hand again, but said nothing that was audible, while the colour came up bright into his cheek, and he looked confused as well as gratified. ere i had well concluded what i had to say, however, master vern and his companion came up; and the former took my hand, saying, "permit me to touch your hand, seigneur, and to offer you my very best thanks for saving us all this day. the landlord of the inn at cubzac informed us this morning that we might well trust to you; but we poor merchants, going on business from one part of the kingdom to another, are forced in these troublous times to be so careful, that sometimes prudence acts the part of imprudence, and, by refusing to trust when we ought, we do ourselves as much harm as by trusting when we ought not." not knowing very well where his harangue was about to lead him, and never having been particularly fond of thanks of any kind, i took the first opportunity of replying, that what i had done was a mere nothing, a piece of common humanity; and i added, laughing, "to-day's adventure, good sir, should teach you catholics to treat us poor protestants somewhat better than you do; for here you have been attacked, though unarmed, and would doubtless have been plundered by your own party, while you have been defended by protestants only because you were unoffending people." "oh, sir," said both the merchants at once, "we are not the sort of catholics you take us for. we look upon the protestants just as much like brethren as they do each other. we see no reason why any man should be condemned for worshipping god in his own way." "there are many sorts of catholics in france, sir," continued martin vern; "and those who call us _politics_ well deserve the name themselves, for their religion is all a matter of politics together. but, however, we are no enemies to the protestants; for i am even now going to the camp of the prince de condé, to treat with him on my own part, and that of my good friend solomon ahar, concerning some stores and other matters that he requires." "indeed!" i said, with some surprise; "then i am certainly the more glad that i have rendered you this little service." "the prince de condé will be glad too, sir," replied the merchant; "and i shall take care that he knows to whom it is owing. i think the aubergiste told me your name was monsieur cerons. but all such professions of gratitude i know are vain; and my companion and myself have agreed to beg your acceptance of this purse of fifty crowns for the service that you have already rendered us, promising you the same sum if you will kindly conduct us in safety to the camp of the prince." heaven knows that i was as poor as might be; that i calculated upon my sword as my sole means of fortune, and that i could never have gained any little sum in a more honest or honourable way. but yet it went against me to take the man's money, and i had to think two or three times before i could bring myself to resolve upon so doing. the merchant saw my situation, and, not knowing how inexperienced i was in such matters, attributed it to a wrong cause. "we would offer you more, sir," he said; "but the fact is, the speculation on which we are going is a very uncertain one. we cannot gain much, but we may lose much. otherwise--" "think not of that, think not of that," i said; "i was only hesitating whether i should take your money at all. nor would i do so, but the fact is, i am but a soldier of fortune, monsieur vern, and am now trying to raise a troop with but small means of doing so. if i take the money at all, therefore, it is for the purpose of increasing my number as i go along, which will add to your own security. of the fifty pieces that you offer me, i shall give ten to each of the men, and will employ the other thirty in recruiting my numbers, if i can meet with any likely men either at jonsac or barbezieux. the other fifty will depend upon whether we guide you well and rightly, and that i shall take without hesitation, as that to which i feel some right." "you shall have deep thanks and gratitude into the bargain," replied the merchant; "and, although you gentlemen of the sword do not value much the good will or services of us traders, occasions do happen sometimes when, according to the old fable, the mouse can help the lion." he held the purse in his hand, and certainly his words were calculated to make the acceptance of it palatable to me; yet i felt my cheek grow hot as i took it, and i looked round towards the women and children and the rest of the party, as if to see whether they were looking at me. in the mean while, andriot and moric endem had been aiding the merchant's wife and the women-servants to lay out the provisions on the banks of the stream and, with all the facility of an old soldier. moric had cast down his steel cap, and was busily arranging the whole, with many a dry jest between, and merry looks and careless laughter, which made the women and the children soon forget the terror that had seized them, and prevented them from even perceiving the extraordinary ugliness of their gallant defender. a huge cold capon, which he instantly christened "monseigneur," was placed in the midst of the little circle; manifold eggs were arranged neatly around; various stores of salted provisions, chopped tongues, lard and sausages, were spread out by his hands, with more taste than one might have expected; and at length came two huge bottles of wine, which he called the king and queen, with various attendants, for each of which he had a name. as we took our all places around, however, it was discovered suddenly that the eggs, which were to form no inconsiderable part of the meal, had not been cooked. "we could soon cook them," cried andriot, "for there's wood in the world in the neighbourhood; but where are we to find wherewithal to cook them in!" "you get the wood, you get the wood, scapegrace," cried moric; "run up the hill and get the wood. you show how long you have been a soldier. don't you know that every man-at-arms carries a kettle on his head and a frying-pan on his stomach? get ye gone, and come back speedily, and leave the cooking to me." "now we will put him in a fright for his polished morion," continued moric, after the youth had gone, at the same time collecting some dry sticks and grass that lay about, and striking a light. "susanne, my pretty one," he continued, to one of the little girls, "i see some branches lying there: go and fetch them, while i blow the fire up." and, using his mouth for a pair of bellows, he had contrived to kindle a strong flame by the time that andriot and the girl had returned. "now, andriot," he went on, "take off your morion, there's a good youth; fill it with water out of the stream, and you shall see that we will boil the eggs in a minute." "had i not better take yours, master moric?" said the young man, looking somewhat ruefully at him. moric burst into a loud shout of laughter, in which all the rest of the party joined. "come, come," cried moric, "since thou art stingy of thy morion, andriot, we will roast the eggs, though it is a difficult task, and not to be undertaken by any but an old woman or an old soldier. "song. "there's an art in routing of eggs, there's an art in roasting of eggs; and he who would run before he can walk, must first learn to use his legs." thus sung moric endem, in a tolerably good voice, as he laid the eggs in order among the hot wood-ashes. there was something very contagious in the gay, careless merriment which my new follower displayed, and i never beheld a meal pass more cheerfully than did ours of that day, by the banks of the little stream. moric's eggs proved to be excellent; and of the wine, which was excellent also, he was permitted, in recompense, to have his full share. it had no perceptible effect upon him, however; more cheerful it could not make him, and his head was a great deal too well seasoned to the juice of the grape for his faculties to be disturbed by it. before we rose to go on our way, however, i produced the purse which i had received from the merchant, and bestowed ten crowns from it upon the old soldier, with the like sum upon andriot. the eyes of both glistened not a little at the treasure they had so rapidly acquired; and the old soldier, starting up, drew me on one side, saying, "that puts me in mind of something. now, monseigneurs, i have got some plunder, you know, to divide, which came out of that fellow's saddle. we have said nothing yet about the way we intend to divide what we get; but i will tell you what i saw tried in the last war, and which is the best plan; namely, this, that everything which is brought in is given up to the captain. every week it is divided among the whole band, the number of lots being just one more than the band, including the captain. he has two lots, and every other man one. that makes each man do his best for the whole, and see that others do the best too; and the captain, who has a great many things to pay, and to do for us all, has something to do it with, and a little more. ransoms, however, and compositions, and such things, are, of course, regulated differently, according to the laws of arms, and each man keeps his own. also, of any plunder taken in a general battle, you know, a part goes to the leader whose cornet we fight under; but only be sure, in making terms with the general, that you get his authority for dealing with your own men according to your own way, and bind yourself as little as you can to the laws and regulations of other people." "somewhat freebooting advice, master moric," i replied, "though not bad in some respects. but, nevertheless, you must remember that i have honour and glory to gain, and to make a name for my band too, as well as to gain money and plunder." "the one's the way to do the other," replied moric. "your way to get honour and renown for yourself and your band is to fight like a lion, and make your men fight; and, depend upon it, every one fights ten times as well when he thinks he is to get something for it, as when he thinks that everything he takes is to be shared with the whole army." there was some reason in what the man said, and i then proceeded to consult him in regard to obtaining some new recruits as speedily as possible. "oh! we shall find some at jonsac," he said, "no doubt of it! the people are arming all over the country, and few have yet taken service with any one. all the daring fellows that are ready to eat fire and brimstone served up hot out of a cannon's mouth, will choose some free band such as ours, depend upon it, and we shall have our share, though it's a pity you are not better known among the old soldiers. however, my face will do you some good. people don't forget it when once they have seen it; and the task of guarding these merchants will have its effect too, for the men will think that there's something to be gained at least, which is true too." "why, for that matter," i said, "you may give each known man that you can meet with a couple of crowns as earnest, and promise them two more at the end of our journey." "then we are safe enough, then we are safe enough!" cried moric. "we shall have plenty of men, depend upon it, and good men, too. there's nothing like a bird in the hand--one of these yellow birds, i mean. why four crowns certain, to begin with! four golden crowns! that is enough to buy a protestant count or a catholic archbishop at any time. but we had better not increase the band too much at first, sir; for if you go with too many, you will either not save room for many of the best men that we find straying about the camp, or else you'll have the troop so large that some one of the leaders will be for having you under his command altogether." "why, from your account, moric," i said, "it seems to me that every one does very much what he likes in the camp, whether he be under command or not." "there's some truth in that, sir," replied the man. "there's much truth in that. every man in the protestant army does what he likes; for, receiving no pay from any one but such as some of the lords give their own men, no one has a right to say to another, do this or do that, and it only happens every now and then that this sweet prince or that charming general hangs one or two of his beloved volunteers, just to prove that his authority is what it is not, and that he has some power, when, in reality, he has none. then among the catholics it is even worse; for, though they have the right, and the power too, if they choose to exert it, yet every lord has his own will and his own way; and from the king down to the valet, every one is afraid of offending the man below him, and driving him to sing psalms in french instead of latin. but, at the same time, it is just as well to have good authority for what one does; and a man who comes fresh to offer his services, with ten or a dozen stout troopers at his back, may make what bargain he likes, and the best bargain is the freest." while this conversation and some more of a similar nature passed between myself and moric endem, the merchants and their train were preparing to pursue their journey, saddling their beasts, gathering together various portions of their goods and chattels, which had been unpacked to arrive at the provisions, and placing the women and children on the horses destined to carry them. i and my two followers mounted speedily to accompany them; and, when everything was ready, we set out together, i entering now into my first employ in arms as the guard and protector of a party of rich merchants. i believe i fulfilled the task pretty well, and did not suffer my inexperience to appear, at least to the eyes of any one but moric endem. he, however, in the presence of our new companions, showed the utmost deference to his leader; and a little incident which happened at jonsac tended, perhaps, to increase his respect fully as much as the promptitude with which i had turned upon the enemy in the morning. we had arrived towards nightfall, and, sitting down in the public room of the inn as usual, found at the other end of the table a somewhat noisy and excited party of soldiery, that little town being then entirely in the hands of the protestants, and the inhabitants being very generally arming to support the admiral and the prince de condé. those who were at the end of the table were evidently raw to the service, and of the very useful class of _pedescaux_ or foot soldiers. one or two of them, also, seemed to have drunk a sufficient quantity of wine to make them insolent. taking upon myself the place that my rank, both as a gentleman and as the leader of the whole party, entitled me to, i advanced at once to the top of the table, and, placing myself there, arranged the merchants and their families on either side; and, to guard as well as possible against any annoyance, i told moric endem to place himself at the end of the line on one side, and andriot on the other. my precaution proved not in vain; for, after eying us for a few moments, the conversation of the soldiery at the other end of the table evidently turned upon us, and a great deal of laughter and jesting took place, which made the colour come and go in the merchants' cheeks. we had fallen well upon the hour of supper, so that the last meal of the day was speedily set before us; but the laughing of the others continued more loudly than before, and it seemed that some of the elder and more experienced were busily engaged in instigating a heavy looking burly youth of twenty or one-and-twenty to do something to insult or annoy us. at length i distinctly heard the words, "you dare not!" and the reply, "i dare!" and, at the same time, the young man pushed the settle from behind him, and walked up to the part of the table where we were sitting. the women looked terrified over their shoulders; but the man, without saying a word to any one, stooped over and lifted a dish, as yet untouched, from before martin vern. moric endem, who was on the other side, was instantly starting up, but i exclaimed in a tone of authority, "sit down, moric endem!" "as you please, monseigneur," replied the man. "put down that dish instantly!" i said to the young man, who looked somewhat aghast, either at his own daring, or at the monseigneur which moric endem had given me. i was rising as i spoke, but the man hesitated, while a loud laugh, evidently at his expense, burst from his fellows below. "put down that dish!" i exclaimed again, in a voice that made the hall echo; and, as he did not instantly obey, i struck him a single blow on the head, which, coming from an arm well practised and not particularly weak, stretched him at full length upon the floor, with sauces and condiments floating round him. it luckily so happened that the aubergiste himself was in the room at the moment, and, taking instant advantage of the dead silence that ensued, i said, in as calm a tone as possible, "landlord, bring in another dish, and charge that which is on the floor to those persons who are at the other end of the table." "certainly, monseigneur! certainly!" replied the aubergiste, impressed as much as i could desire by what had taken place; while i quietly returned to my place and proceeded in carving the boiled beef, in which i had been interrupted. in the mean while my fallen friend raised himself up, glanced at me for a moment with uncertain rage, of which i took not the slightest notice, and then returning to his companions, spoke a word or two sullenly to them. they laughed, but in a much lower tone than before; and a brief and muttered consultation seemed to be held, while the landlord brought in a new dish and deposited it before martin vern. as the landlord passed them, however, one of them beckoned him up and asked him something in a whisper, and i could then hear my own name passing from mouth to mouth, with various additions and improvements at the fancy of the retailers, as, "the seigneur de cerons!" "the count de cerons!" "the celebrated count de cerons!" "the seigneur de cerons, colonel-general of the infantry!" it was clear, however, that the whole party--whether these additions had been made by the magnifying powers of moric endem when he announced my name to the host or not--it was clear that the whole party were now determined to look upon me as a very great man, and to make that an excuse to themselves for sneaking away without taking any farther notice of the chastisement inflicted on their companion. accordingly, after hesitating and looking doubtful, and whispering for several minutes more, one by one disappeared through the doorway, and we were left in possession of the hall to discuss our supper in tranquillity. i should not have mentioned the subject at all in conversation with my companions, but both martin vern and his nephew talked of it, laughing as soon as the others were gone, and, while they loaded me with thanks and praises, made many a shrewd and jesting comment upon the pusillanimity of the departed. it had another effect, however, for the landlord's voice was heard several times without, talking loud to different persons; and, from two or three words that could be distinguished, i found that he was thus loud in my praise. when, at length, he was putting some dessert upon the table before us, he spoke to me in a whisper, saying that there were without two or three gentlemen who had served in the last war, who had taken arms again, and were very anxious to know whether i could and would receive them into my company. i replied, "that i could not leave the party i was escorting, but that i would send my lieutenant," by which sonorous name i dignified good moric endem, to speak with them at once; choosing, in such a case, to trust to his judgment much sooner than to my own. the result was, that he engaged for me five stout fellows as ever were seen, of whom he had known something in the preceding wars, and who also had the advantage of coming to me with horses, arms, and accoutrements complete. the whole of this was settled during that evening, and the joy and satisfaction which i myself might feel at my growing importance was far outdone by that of good martin vern and his companions, who now thought themselves perfectly competent to encounter any catholic force in the neighbourhood. two more, but not exactly of such good stuff, were added to our number at barbezieux, and, thus forming a troop of ten men, we advanced on the road to angoulême, as far, or perhaps farther, than it was prudent so to do. we had heard that the prince de condé and the rest were at that time at the town of sainctes; but a few miles on the other side of barbezieux we learned that the army had marched in a different direction, and had apparently quitted the charente. news, too, was heard, that the catholic garrison of st. jean d'angely had sent out considerable detachments into the country on the side of pons, while light-armed troops from angoulême were scouring the fields in every direction, for the purpose, it was supposed, of supplying the city in case of siege. in conversing over these affairs, which certainly bore a somewhat menacing aspect, with martin vern, i found that he was determined to proceed with his nephew and his partner to the camp of the prince de condé, but was in a state of very considerable alarm on account of his wife and children. under these circumstances, i advised him strongly to despatch messengers to the duke of montpensier, who was at that time, we understood, at st. junien, in order to demand a safe conduct for his family, which would immediately be given on his declaring them to be all catholics. he seized at the proposal eagerly; a messenger was easily found, and set out with directions to pass on the other side of angoulême on his return, and to meet us at cognac, whither we now bent our steps with slow and cautious journeys. cognac we found in the hands of a small protestant force, and we then first learned that the siege of angoulême by the prince de condé had actually begun. the rest of our journey, then, would have been easily completed, even without the safe conduct; but, as martin vern was aware he should have to return to bordeaux himself at all events, he judged it best to wait for the safe conduct in the suburb of cognac, and to send the women of his party on at once to paris, as it was impossible to say what turn the war might take. though the protestant force would not admit the soldiery within the limits of their little garrison, i there made the acquaintance of several officers and gentlemen attached to the protestant cause, and became still farther acquainted practically with the habits of a camp and an army. though i had now under my command several good and experienced soldiers, yet moric endem was my chief adviser, and i was glad to find myself justified to the full in having trusted him so far by the opinions and commendation of all the military men with whom i was brought in contact. every one laughed when his name was mentioned, but every one also declared that he was as brave as a lion, and might with safety be fully trusted by those who chose to trust him fully. those who chose to show him, on the contrary, either unkindness or want of confidence, would need, they said, the eyes of argus to prevent the old soldier from finding some means of retribution. he was now fully and completely established as my lieutenant; but he was as jealous of his leader's reputation and authority as his own, and presumed in no degree upon his new station. the short time we spent at cognac gave me an opportunity of becoming more thoroughly acquainted with my men, and of making them generally aware of my views and purposes. at length, with the interval of one day, the safe conduct arrived, and, with many embraces and some tears, good martin vern saw his wife and children depart for paris. an hour or two after they were gone, we ourselves commenced our march; and, just as evening was setting in, saw the high hill of angoulême rising above the lesser slopes that border the charente. chapter vii. it was night when we reached the outposts of the prince de condé's camp, and we were stopped by a small body of soldiers, who demanded the sign, which, of course, we could not give. our errand was soon explained, however, and we were led on into the camp, which was not entrenched, nor, indeed, defended in any other way. it presented a gay, mixed scene, where little regularity of any kind existed, except in the lines of the tents, which resembled long streets when once one had passed the skirts of the camp, where plenty of disorder was going on. my followers and horses were left at the second guard, while i and the merchants were led on foot through the canvass streets and squares to the spot where the tent of the prince de condé was pitched. though certainly not a very convenient dwelling, it was divided into two chambers, if not three, and we were detained in the outer one while the prince was informed of our arrival. the pride of arms and birth made me imagine that i should be called to his presence immediately, though we found he was at supper; but i was much disappointed, for the merchants were much more important people at that moment in the eyes of the prince than any small leader like myself, and they were ushered in immediately, while i remained without, talking with one of the prince's attendants, who remained sitting with me, as if in the antechamber. the conference of the protestant leader with the merchants seemed interminably long, and the occasional laughter and merriment that i heard made me think that the conversation was protracted after all real business was over. at length, however, they came out, and i was summoned into the presence of the prince, while martin vern, in passing, said, "we will wait for you here." i found the prince still seated at supper, with a man considerably older than himself, though yet in the prime of life. condé's countenance was remarkably handsome; far more so, indeed, than his figure; and there was in his eyes that sort of sparkling impetuosity which well indicated the character of the man. he received me with a smiling countenance, and made me take a seat near him, saying, "it is always pleasant, monsieur de cerons, to receive new friends and companions, but still more pleasant to receive one who bears back to our camp an illustrious name, which has been too long banished from the roll of arms. i take it for granted i speak to the son of that monsieur de cerons who, just twenty years ago, distinguished himself in the attack upon the forts at boulogne, and, to the regret of the whole army, fell upon the occasion. i grieve to say that i knew little of him, for that was my first campaign, and i was not worthy of the notice of so distinguished a soldier; but my friend, monsieur d'andelot here, was his companion in many a well-fought field." "i was indeed, young gentleman," said d'andelot; "and, i must say, a better soldier or a braver man never existed. you are very like him, and, i trust, are as like him in character as you are in person." "it is with the hope of proving that i am so, sir, that i come here," i replied; and, judging it more respectful to the distinguished officers with whom i was speaking to say as little as possible, i ceased there. "i doubt not that you will completely fill his place among us," replied the prince, after a moment's thought. "indeed, monsieur de cerons, we have every reason to believe so, from the account these good merchants have given us of your conduct on the road. you do not know what an obligation you have laid upon us by bringing them safely hither; for, on my faith and honour, i think, without their help, we should not have been able to carry on the campaign: for, though very one here fights for good-will, yet men must have food, and cannons and arquebuses are poor contrivances without powder and shot. these merchants tell us you have a troop with you, monsieur de cerons?" i now evidently saw that it was the design of the prince to give me notice, in a quiet, passing manner, that i was to expect no pay for my services, and, at the same time, to ascertain with what views and purposes i came. "my troop is not a large one, my lord," i replied; "at present it comprises but ten men. they are all, however, stout men-at-arms, and have some experience; and i hope to increase my troop to double that number. it is fit, my lord, however, that i should tell you that my father left nothing but his sword; and it is needful to myself that i should raise myself by arms, and to my men that i should be enabled to maintain them by the sword." "ay," replied the prince, "i understand--make the horse feed the horse. but it is somewhat difficult to know what to do. we cannot and must not drive away such bands as yours, especially when led by such a gentleman as yourself. as little can we expect them to range themselves under any regular leader, when we have no pay whatever to give them; and yet it is absolutely necessary that both i myself and monsieur de coligny should put a stop to everything like indiscriminate plunder. were we not to do so, we should soon have the whole country rising upon us." "i am not one, my lord," i replied, "to wish that it should be otherwise. all i wish is, that, in order to keep my men together, i may have, as it were, a detached command of my own people under your highness's commission, in order that, by fair war against the enemy in arms, i may be enabled to maintain my troop and advance myself. neither the threshold of the cottage nor the hearth of the citizen shall ever be invaded by my people. i only want permission to attack the enemy whenever i can find occasion, and to cut off from him, as my legitimate prize, whatever i can meet with." "that is soon granted," replied the prince de condé, "if we understand each other rightly. but what is that in your hand, monsieur de cerons? it seems a letter." "i had forgotten it, my lord," i said; "it is one addressed to your highness on my behalf, i believe." the prince took it and read it, and then turning with a smile to d'andelot, he said, "we shall have stuart with us in less than ten days; and he does more service, you know, than any ten besides. now, monsieur de cerons. my friend stuart here has explained all your plans more clearly than yourself; and, indeed, it is not always so easy to explain one's self as to let another do it. i fear very much, however, that you have attached yourself to the wrong side of the question, as far as obtaining wealth, at least, is concerned. you shall have, however, what seamen, i believe, call a roving commission; and on the following terms, remember. during all marches, countermarches, and on general service, you shall have the opportunity allowed you, as far as possible, of doing as you please. at other times, such as the eve of a general battle, the assault of a town, or any similar operation, you shall render yourself into the camp on due notice given you. in short, any special order given to you by me or by the admiral de coligny you shall obey as strictly as any other soldier; but, at the times when you are without any such orders, you shall not be called to account for anything you do at your own hand; with these provisos, that you shall neither commit, nor suffer to be committed by your people, any outrage upon, or pillage of, the peasantry of the country, that you shall neither exact contributions from villages, hamlets, or places friendly or unarmed, nor permit any plunder in towns taken by capitulation; and, in fact, shall only wage honourable war against enemies with arms in their hands. nor shall you receive money called _pati_, or sufferance, from any persons whatsoever. on these conditions, all prizes whatsoever captured by yourself shall be at your own disposal, without claim or intervention from any persons whatsoever. this is all that can be done for you, and, if it suits you, it shall be done." "it suits me perfectly, my lord," i replied; "i require nothing more; and, as far as in me lies, will never be absent from my post when my services may be wanted." some farther conversation ensued between the prince, d'andelot, and myself, in which a great many other matters were settled with regard to my lodging in the camp, &c.; and, sending for his secretary, the prince de condé gave orders for the commission to be drawn up, which was immediately done, giving me authority to raise a company of fifty men, and imbodying all the stipulations contained above. as soon as i had received it i rose to depart; but d'andelot, after whispering for a moment to the prince, said, "it always gives an officer great honour, monsieur de cerons, to begin his career in any new service with some brilliant exploit. now we propose to-morrow to attack the breach at angoulême, which has been made by our batteries yesterday and to-day. now the leading of this assault has been given to monsieur de genissac; but we have no doubt that he will suffer you to be his companion, if you choose to mount the breach among the first along with your men. the breach is in the wall of what is called the park; but we will send genissac to you in the course of to-morrow morning. you will be supported by the regiment of monsieur de corbouson; and you are to remember to obey promptly the orders you receive from that quarter." it may well be supposed that, eager as i was to distinguish myself, i caught at the offer without hesitation. in this instance i had not the slightest fears in regard to my own inexperience, for i knew that i had nothing to do but to fight with courage and determination; and, having ascertained the hour the assault was likely to take place, i retired to seek the quarters assigned to me, which were in one of the little suburbs, as i had informed the prince that i had yet no tents with me. in the anteroom i found the worthy merchants, and with them returned to the spot where i had left my men. as we went, martin vern informed me that he was to return to bordeaux early on the following morning, and asked if he could execute any commission for me in that city, from which he was about to return again in ten or twelve days. he said nothing more at that time, but accompanied me to the little auberge in the suburb, after i had lodged my troopers as i had been directed. i found the hall of the inn, as may well be conceived, a scene of confusion almost indescribable. at first it seemed to me that everybody was talking, everybody was singing, everybody was drinking, and everybody was snuffing the candles, at the same time. eyes swimming with excitement or dropping with sleepiness, faces heated and flushed with drink, mouths wide open with oaths, vociferations, or songs, and outstretched arms, crossing each other in various directions, were to be seen on every side, while the din and uproar were absolutely deafening. the scene did not seem to strike the merchants as much as it did me; but martin vern turned out of that room again almost as soon as he had entered it, saying, "we shall doubtless find less confusion somewhere else;" and, after looking into the kitchen, in hopes that, protected by the awful genius of the culinary art, that place might be found somewhat more quiet, he mounted the stairs, and walked from bedroom to bedroom, which had all been turned into eating or drinking rooms, and which were, in most instances, crammed to the very doors. at length we came to one large room, which might contain, perhaps, not more than twenty people, ranged at different tables, and enjoying themselves more soberly. the secret of this was, that the tenants were all inferior officers, and the common soldiery judged it more expedient to pursue their potations in other rooms. the officers, too, might perhaps themselves desire a little quiet; and i remarked that several of them looked up and scanned us closely, as if to satisfy themselves that the intruders were likely to be more quiet and orderly than the parties assembled in other places. there was one table vacant, near a window, at the very farther end of the room, and at that we seated ourselves, glad to be as far as possible from the general roar that rushed up the stairs and through the passages. a boy, who was running from table to table with the activity of a marmoset, came up to inquire what we wished for supper; and, as soon as he had left us, master vern leaned across the table, and asked me, "now, monsieur de cerons, have you no commands for bordeaux? for i have many things to do, and, perhaps, may not have the opportunity of speaking to you to-morrow." after thinking for a moment or two, i replied that i feared there was no commission that i could give; that i longed, indeed, to hear of my relations at the chateau de blancford, but did not know how to compass it. "that is easily done, monsieur de cerons," said the merchant; "i am going to the chateau de blancford myself. there is scarcely a noble in the land that we merchants have not something to do with. the baron must have reached the chateau by this time, for he was to leave paris in three weeks after we did. come, come, monsieur de cerons," he said, seeing that i hesitated, "i have many a time remarked, since you were with us, that something weighs upon your mind. we owe you a great deal, not only for good service, but for kindness. sit down and write a few lines to your friends, and we will find means that you shall have an answer. relieve your mind, my friend; relieve your mind by words. depend upon it, the best remedy for a heavy heart is to cast off part of the load upon paper." "but i have no means of writing here," i said, "and fear it will be difficult to procure them." "what! a merchant without paper and ink?" cried martin vern, opening a pocket in the lining of his cloak, and taking out all the requisites: "that would never do. there, monsieur de cerons, write, write, and i will take care it shall reach its address." i took the paper and pen that he gave me, and, with the first impulse of my heart, wrote a few lines to my cousin louise. the terms in which i spoke were precisely such as i should have used before my departure. i bade her not forget me, nor the affection which had existed between us ever since our childhood. i bade her recall me to the remembrance of her brothers and la tour. i told her that i should never forget or cease to love her and them; and i assured her that nothing but absolute necessity, and the fear of giving them all bitter pain, would have led me to quit them without bidding them adieu, as i had done. this led me to speak of my situation at the time, and i told her that i had met with much greater success than i could have expected; that i was already at the head of a small band: and that i was to lead, in company with another, the assault upon angoulême on the following morning. a few words of affection and kindness succeeded, and, having folded and sealed the letter, i put the address upon it, and gave it into the hands of martin vern. he looked at the address, and when he saw the name, a sober and somewhat melancholy smile came over his face, and, putting it up carefully, he said, "it shall go safe." shortly after this the head of moric endem made its appearance at the door, and, seeing me seated at the opposite table, he entered the room and came across towards me. ere he was half way to the table, however, three or four of the different officers who were dining at the tables around started up, and one of them exclaimed, "why, moric endem! what, you old comrade, is it you come back to join us? and looking fat and well-feathered too." "ay, my good friends; ay, ay," said moric, "here i am; but i am in leading-strings, my boys, i am in leading-strings. i'm baby moric now, and there's my nurse--my captain, i mean to say; so i must go and speak to him, for i have a word for his ear." "if he seeks to fill his purse," said one, looking at me across the room, "you're the man for him; for you could always fill a purse, but never keep one." "too true, good friend, too true," replied moric, advancing towards me; "but i will do better this time." they all shook their heads, however, with laugh; and moric came on and sat down beside me. he had lost no time in pursuing his avocations, and informed me that he had already seen and spoken with nearly twenty of his old comrades, who were hanging about the camp and seeking for employment. they were rather more difficult, however, in their choice than those which i had already enlisted; for not one of them would serve with a leader who had never served at all. "we must make up to-morrow, sir," said endem, "for your idleness hitherto. it answered no purpose my telling them that you would do this or do that; the answer always was--let us see him fight. so to-morrow, at the assault, we must eat fire and brimstone, to show what sort of stuff we are made of." "rather a hot breakfast, master moric," i replied; "but, nevertheless, i don't think i shall find my appetite fail." this conversation had been carried on in a low tone, but it had caught the ears of the merchants nevertheless; and one of them asked me at what time it was intended to storm the breach. i replied that i really did not know, as i had not received my orders yet, but supposed that it would not be late; and martin vern, in reply, intimated his determination to wait and see the result before he departed. soon after this i retired to the little cottage which had been appointed as quarters for myself and all my men; and, having given what orders i thought necessary, and seen that the horses had been well fed and put under shelter, i threw myself down upon some straw, which andriot had prepared for me in one corner of the hovel, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. i was awake by daylight on the following morning, was up, and had made a soldier's brief toilet, as well as armed myself completely, before five o'clock. luckily it happened that i was so, for in a few minutes afterward i was visited by a gay-looking youth, who introduced himself as the captain genissac, and who told us that in an hour we were to mount the breach together. he looked at me somewhat superciliously from head to foot; and though i felt that i could have broken him through the middle over my knee as a boy breaks a stick, his cool scrutiny annoyed and discomposed me. we talked over what was to be done for some time; and, urging me to hasten my movements, he went to take his station at the head of the storming party. i hurried after at all speed, followed by my little band; and getting out of the hamlet, and passing through the middle of the tents towards the battery which had effected the breach, a fine, a gay, and an interesting sight was presented, which remains as much fixed upon my memory, in consequence of the beauty of the scene, as from being the first military effort of any consequence in which i ever took a part. the whole army was turned out in the open space between the camp and the city; and about five or six hundred yards in advance of the line was the small battery which had effected a very insufficient breach in the wall. it was still firing, as it had been since the break of day: and a light wind blew the wreaths of smoke down into the hollow which ran towards the charente, enveloping the base of the hill on which angoulême stands, while out of the white uncertain mist thus created started forth clear the town of angoulême, with all its manifold towers and spires. the sun was shining brightly as he rose upon the glittering line of our cavalry and infantry, variously armed, and with many a cornet and a pennon among them: while the rich and peaceful slopes and rises, the clear blue sky, the bright sunshine, and the soft murmur of the autumnal air, contrasted strangely and strikingly with the camp behind us, the long line of iron-clad soldiery in the front, the occasional thunder of our own artillery, and the flashes that burst from time to time from the walls of angoulême. some way in front of the general line appeared a small body of infantry, with genissac at their head; and behind him, a little in advance of the other forces, an entire infantry regiment, supported by a strong force of cavalry. between that body and the little _peloton_ of genissac was a group of officers and gentlemen, with one or two led horses, apparently waiting for their riders. as i passed by, my eye rested for a moment upon the well-known d'andelot; while another officer, considerably older in appearance, but with a fine, open countenance, whom i took to be the far-famed admiral de coligny, sat beside him, on a strong horse, receiving from time to time communications from different persons who rode up. d'andelot's visor was up, and, as i passed, he noticed me with an inclination of the head, and then, turning to the admiral, pointed me out to him. coligny immediately beckoned me towards him; and, ordering my men to march on and take the order from monsieur de genissac, i advanced to the side of the admiral's horse. "i knew your father well, monsieur de cerons," said coligny, "and my seeing his son here this day gives me the pleasant expectation of soon seeing him behave as his father would have done on a similar occasion. i grieve that we have not the presence of your cousin, monsieur de blancford; but his faith has been supposed to be wavering for some time. i must not detain you, however, for here comes the prince, and the word will be given in a moment." i bowed, and then advanced immediately to the side of genissac, who, i found, had drawn up my men with his own very fairly and very skilfully. in order to take advantage of some hollows in the ground, we were to advance six abreast, three of my men and three of his, with the two leaders at the head. as the whole of the party was composed of about a hundred men he had filled up the space behind, where my scanty band ended, by his own troops; and, placing himself close to me, he said, "now, monsieur de cerons, you and i will keep near together, as i may have something to say to you when we are near the breach. i wish they would send us the word to advance, for this long expectation dulls the men's spirits." at that moment, however, an officer gave the word to march, while the battery opened a sharp fire upon the breach. in the first instance we had to descend some way, which we did with considerable rapidity, but not so fast as far to outstrip the regiment behind, who, as soon as they were within shot, opened a smart fire of small arms against the enemy. from the bottom of the valley we had now, however, to ascend to the park; and, the moment we began to do so, one of the hottest fires of musketry i ever saw was poured upon us from the breach and the neighbouring walls. one of genissac's men went down; and one of mine staggered from a wound in the shoulder, but regained his footing and kept on with the rest. i was somewhat surprised that we did not advance more rapidly, and said, "let us hasten forward! let us hasten forward! the men will soon be out of the fire." genissac gave no order; and, at the same time, a shot, passing between him and me, carried away a part of my casque, and went through the head of one of the men behind. "don't be too hot, don't be too hot," he said, in a minute after, when he had got so near that i could see the features of the men in the breach. "i am only ordered to make a reconnoissance, but to retreat immediately if the breach is not practicable." "but i was ordered to storm," i replied; "and the breach, though small, is deep, and seems to me quite practicable." "have with you, have with you, then," he said, "if you are so eager." but what we had said had been heard by those behind us; and, though we had been still advancing while we spoke, the men began to waver. it was a critical moment; and, waving my sword over my head, i cried aloud, "to the breach! to the breach!" my own men took it up, shouting, "to the breach! to the breach!" his men followed, and, dashing forward with jealous rivalry of each other, we climbed the height, and though, as we came nearer, the shots of the enemy told terribly among us, rushed up furiously to the foot of the wall. there was an immense deal of broken rubbish, earth, and stones to be passed, which had been cast down by the fire of the battery, and a tremendous discharge of musketry welcomed us at the top; but still we rushed on, while the regiment which had advanced to support us now caught the spirit of the assault, and, doubling its pace, crossed the valley and charged up the hill. on we pressed, as hard as we could go, with the stones and earth slipping away under our feet, all staggering, some falling, and only thankful that the dense smoke of the enemy's fire rolled into the breach, and prevented them from taking any very certain aim. when first we arrived at the foot of the wall the breach was crowded by arquebusiers; but they began to fall back as we climbed over the piles of rubbish, and when we were near the top only five or six men remained, of whom one rushed down several steps to meet me, aiming a pistol at me as he came, and firing within three paces. striking my cuirass on the left side obliquely, the shot glanced off and entered my arm a little above the elbow; but it was a mere flesh wound, and only inconvenient. a blow of my heavy horse sword, however, dashed my adversary's casque down upon his head, broke the fastenings, and brought him on his knee; another blow, before he could ward it off, struck the helmet from his head, and, at the same time, inflicted a deep wound upon his forehead; and as he called out that he would surrender--indeed, he had no choice--i passed him back to the hands of moric endem, who followed me close, without seeing anything farther than that he was a young man of good mien. genissac was now a step or two before me; but, rushing up, i was by his side in a moment, and in another instant we stood together at the top of the breach. the interior of what was called the park--a large, open space, forming a sort of place d'armes--was now before us, and, to my surprise, i beheld, drawn up on either side, and ready to charge at the moment we descended, a large body of men-at-arms, with their lances levelled, and supported by a considerable force of pike-men and arquebusiers on foot. our men were rushing up, however, one by one, as fast as they could climb, to our support; moric endem, having passed on his prisoner, was close behind us; another slight-looking youth, armed only with a close-covering casque and cuirass, was upon my right, struggling up with difficulty over a steep part of the ruin; and giving him my hand, unfortunately for himself, i drew him up in a moment: genissac was a little farther on the same side, with four or five of his followers, and, seeing the other infantry regiment coming up, i thought it not at all improbable that we might be able to force an entrance, notwithstanding the strength of the enemy in the park. all this was soon done; but i saw, at the very same instant, the regiment behind halt, a small party of horsemen gallop up towards us from our own army at full speed, and the arquebusiers from the park open a sudden and tremendous fire upon the breach. three men among us fell at once. genissac, standing upon a high point of the broken wall, received a shot in his head and fell back, rolling over and over down the heaps of rubbish, writhing in the agonies of death; one of his men fell forward severely wounded, and a shot took the poor youth i had just helped up, and, entering his right side, laid him prostrate across one of my feet. still my own followers were coming rapidly up, several of genissac's people were making their way rapidly to the top; and though it was impossible to face the force in the park, now that the other regiment had halted, it was quite possible to effect a lodgment on the breach. turning, therefore, to those who were following, and to the group of officers who had now ridden up to the foot of the wall, and were shouting up loudly to me, though i could not hear a word they said, from the noise of the small arms, i called to them to roll me up gabions and barrels, for that we could certainly effect a lodgment. my words were passed down by those who followed: but d'andelot, whom i now saw at the head of the officers, shook his clinched fist at me, and shouted to me, as i found, to come down and retreat. the words were passed up to me, and with much regret, i own, i prepared to obey. "we must retreat, moric," i said. "we are commanded to retreat!" but at that moment i heard a voice, which i thought i had heard before, from the casque of the young man who had fallen beside me, and who exclaimed, "oh, do not leave me here!" it would have been cruelty to do so, even had it been more difficult and dangerous to rescue him than it was; and, therefore, taking him up in my arms, i carried him down to the spot where d'andelot stood, and to which several horses had been brought by this time for the purpose of removing the killed and wounded. "you seem perfectly determined to get yourself killed, monsieur de cerons," said d'andelot. "we only intended a reconnoissance, and poor genissac has suffered for his folly in changing it into an assault." "my orders were to storm, sir," i said, "and i have done no more than i was directed to do." "we were wrong! we were wrong, monsieur de cerons!" said that great commander. "we wanted to try you: but genissac had full orders how to act, and he should have obeyed them. now take a horse, put yourself at the head of his men too, get them in order, and make the best of your retreat. you are pretty well sheltered here, but you will find the fire somewhat hot in the valley. don't mind using your legs there, for you have shown sufficiently that it is not bullets you are afraid of." i only paused to tell moric to place the lad i was carrying on a horse, and take him carefully to the camp, and then obeyed the orders of d'andelot. the matter was now a mere affair of discipline; the men followed my commands with alacrity; and, choosing the direction which seemed most sheltered from the fire of the garrison, i led them on without loss, and with but little haste and confusion, till, passing the battery which had effected the breach, i took up the same position with them which we had occupied in the morning before the assault began. i acted altogether as i had learned from the memoirs of various distinguished knights and officers it was right and proper to do on such occasions; and, the moment i had reached the same spot from which we had started, i made the men wheel round again and face the city, as if for a new assault. they were all picked soldiers, and they did it with promptitude and precision; but in the troubled state into which the whole art of warfare had fallen in that day, this little evolution, which never would have been neglected in former times except in case of a complete defeat, excited the surprise of everybody; and a loud shout of applause burst from the regiments around. at the same time, the prince de condé, with the admiral and his companions, moved slowly forward to meet d'andelot, who was now riding up the slope. after conversing with him for a few minutes, they all advanced towards me, and various kind and complimentary things were said, of which i only remember now the words of the prince de condé. "we shall take care, monsieur de cerons," he said, "how we put you upon dangerous services any more; for your life will henceforth be so much more precious to us than it seems to you, that we must not suffer you to risk it without much need." they then inquired closely what i had seen within the breach, which i explained to them as well as i could, expressing my opinion that by a strong effort the town might have been taken. their better judgment and greater experience, however, showed them that such was not the case; and orders were immediately given for opening a battery in another place, on the heights of st. ozani. as soon as this was determined, and orders given to that effect, the men were allowed to retire to their quarters; and i hurried down to the hovel assigned me in the hamlet, to see what had become of moric endem, my prisoner, and the wounded youth, for whom i felt a considerable degree of anxiety. chapter viii. at the door of the hovel i found moric, with one of the men who had been wounded in the arm, and an old woman, who was bandaging up the injured limb. the first exclamation of my worthy lieutenant was, "you will find them both in there, sir; and a good ransom ought you to have for that fair youth. he is the seigneur de blays. the old gentleman is with the lad, who is badly hurt, and a surgeon too; but little good will they do him, i fear. he is drilled like a keyhole, and if there was any wind it would whistle through him." without questioning him farther, though not comprehending one half of what he meant, i entered the hut; when, to my utter astonishment, i found young martin vern stretched upon the straw which had served me during the previous night for a bed, and his uncle standing behind him, with a most anxious and sorrowful countenance, while a surgeon, with a large pair of forceps, was drawing something, which proved to be a bullet, from the wound in his side. the young man bore the operation, which must have been extremely painful, with the utmost fortitude and resolution, shutting his teeth hard, so as to prevent even a groan from escaping. martin vern looked at me as i entered somewhat reproachfully; but at that moment the surgeon, holding up the bullet in his forceps, exclaimed, "here it is, here it is!" and on my asking some questions concerning the poor youth, he proceeded to pour forth upon me a quantity of barbarous terms, to explain the precise course the ball had taken, and the parts external and internal which had been wounded. i cut him short as soon as possible, thinking i perceived through all these technicalities that the surgeon had hopes the youth would get better, and wished to give importance to the cure. "some better bed," he said, "must be provided for him immediately." and he added that, if we would see for one, he would wait and superintend the movement of the wounded man himself. i immediately turned to see what could be done, and was followed by the merchant himself; who, as soon as we were out of the door, shook his head ruefully at me, saying, "ah! monsieur de cerons, this was not kind of you, when you knew how much i wished to keep that boy from this warlike folly of his." "my good friend," i replied, "you are entirely mistaken in supposing that i had any share in this matter. on my honour, i was not aware who it was that fought so gallantly beside me till i entered the hut this moment. he gave me no intimation of it; and i did not even know that i had an additional man in the field." "i never knew anything of it," cried moric endem, who had heard our conversation. "i never knew anything of it till we were just going to march, and then he came up to me, and besought me, for pity's sake, to let him go with us. he had bought himself a casque and a cuirass; and i pushed him in anywhere into the ranks, thinking it a devil of a pity that a fine, high-spirited boy should be balked, and made a mere merchant of; to sit stupifying himself over a tall book, or selling silks and satins by the yard, when he is as proper a youth as ever was seen to take a lance in his hand and meet the enemy." martin vern shook his head with a melancholy "what has come of it?" and added, "well, monsieur de cerons, i am glad at least you had no share in it; for i owe you so much gratitude for different things, that i would rather repay you in any other way than think you had done me an unkindness to make the balance even. what i am to do now i cannot tell. business of infinite importance, not only to myself, but to the prince and the admiral, calls me immediately to bordeaux; and yet i cannot bear to leave this boy, whom his dying father placed under my charge not two months ago, without any one to take care of him or attend him." "leave him to me, my good friend; leave him to me," i said. "i will treat him, depend upon it, as a brother. to move him far now is out of the question; several days must elapse before angoulême falls, as they have determined upon making another breach, and we have but five cannon in the army, two of which are but bastards. by the time the place is taken, he will be better able to bear moving; and no care shall be wanting on my part, i can assure you. you yourself will be back ere long, and, i trust, will find him better in all respects." martin vern pressed my hand in his; and, thanking me with the deep, low-spoken words of true gratitude, he suffered it to be as i wished. at my suggestion, we sought for and were fortunate enough to find one of those beds which are fitted to horse-litters, which the merchant immediately bought in case that it should be necessary to move the wounded man to any distance. in it he was carried almost immediately to the house where martin vern had taken up his own abode, and which his wealth had ensured should be of a far superior description. there he placed in my hands the large sum of five hundred crowns for his nephew's expenses, and the fifty which he had promised for my escort. he besought me earnestly to spare nothing which could tend to the youth's recovery, to buy horses immediately to carry the litter in case of need; to ensure the constant attendance of the surgeon; and to see him myself as frequently as i could. i said and did all that i could to comfort the worthy merchant; and a few words spoken to him in a low tone by his nephew ere he departed, telling him that, though i did not know who he was, i had saved his life by bearing him away from the breach, seemed to console good martin vern greatly, and give him greater confidence to leave the youth in my charge. when all this was settled he bade him adieu, and mounted his horse to depart. he paused a moment to grasp my hand in his, and then, just as he was setting out, said, "the time will come, monsieur de cerons--the time will come, i am quite sure and confident, when i shall have an opportunity of showing my gratitude for all that you have done for me and mine." as soon as he was gone i bethought me of my prisoner, whose situation for the time had quite passed from my mind; and, hastening back where i had left moric endem, i found my worthy lieutenant busily engaged in making preparations for rendering the hovel a somewhat more comfortable dwelling. as, however, it had been now arranged that i was to take up my abode in the house which had been hired for the young merchant, the adorning of what he termed my lodging was no longer necessary; and, on inquiring after the prisoner, i found that they had put him in a sort of back shed, where the old woman i had before seen was even then in the act of dressing the wound on his head. on entering, i found a sentry at the door, and the prisoner with his hands tied, and very indignant at the treatment he had received. i was informed, however, that he had twice endeavoured to make his escape, and i therefore thought that few apologies were necessary. in justification of his conduct, he said that he had never surrendered, rescue or no rescue; and in consequence, before i would suffer his hands to be untied, i made him pronounce these words, something against his will. although he was undoubtedly brave and high-spirited, i never yet saw man more full of loud-tongued bravado: and i thought that, before he had vented his indignation, he would literally have tried to cut my throat in the shed. i listened to all he had to say with much more coolness than he seemed to think respectful, and merely replied while i uncovered my arm, that the old woman might exercise her skill upon me also, "sir, you are a prisoner, and therefore privileged to rail." before his hands had been untied for five minutes, however, he approached, looked at my arm, and said, "that's an awkward wound. how did you come by that, sir!" "it is your handiwork, my good friend," i replied. "it was well it didn't go through my body." "indeed, indeed!" he cried, rubbing his hands; and i must say i never saw a person more heartily rejoiced at anything in my life than he was that he had given me the wound under which i was then suffering. "well," he added at length, "i suppose i must forgive you for tying my hands, after such a wound as that; and now tell me, at what ransom do you intend to put me?" "i know who you are," i replied, "and all about you; and i must say you have shown yourself a gallant soldier, though somewhat rash withal. you know of what consequence you are as well as i do, or better, and therefore i shall leave you to name your own ransom; so now let us see what you value yourself at." i was not wrong in my calculation. to say the truth, i had been very much puzzled at what rate to fix his ransom myself; but, in trusting to his vanity to do it, i knew i could not be very far wrong. he hesitated, however, and said, "if you know who i am and all about me, you had better fix it." "i know so far about you," i replied, "that you are the seigneur de blaye; and the old and ordinary custom is, that a lord's ransom is one year's revenue, besides what his captor may think fit to exact on account of the prisoner's reputation in arms. you know your revenues better than i do, and your reputation in arms better than i do, and i therefore leave it to you to fix it yourself, being sure that so brave a man must be a man of honour." "i see, sir," he said, "that i have fallen into the hands of a gentleman, and therefore will deal frankly with you. my revenues are four thousand crowns a year; but since my uncle's death i have somewhat hurt my means. i trust you will, therefore, take the four thousand without exacting anything more." so surprised, so astounded, i may say, i was at the very name and idea of receiving such a sum, in consequence of my first day's actual service in arms, that i could not reply for some minutes. i had heard such things occasionally recounted, and i knew that the famous montluc had gained, or was likely to have gained, some few years before, no less than eighty thousand crowns as the ransom of a young italian nobleman; but when it came home to myself, i could hardly believe it, with difficulty concealing my astonishment. he mistook my silence, it would seem, for discontent, and was going to add something in regard to his condition and inability to pay a larger sum, when i stopped him, saying, "it is enough, monsieur de blaye; it is enough. as an honourable man, i do not doubt your word; and i have heard that it is a common saying of one of the bravest captains on your own side, i mean monsieur montluc, that it is not the custom to skin one's prisoners in the present day. i have your word of honour as a gentleman; and you will accordingly remain in the camp and be my guest until such time as your ransom can arrive." "oh! as soon as the city falls," he replied, "i will pay it you; and, in the mean time, thank you for your hospitality." "then you calculate upon the city falling very soon," i said, with a laugh. he smiled in return, replying, "it ought to see all you reformers rot before it surrenders, if the people in it knew what they were about; but there's argence, and grignaud, and meziere, brave enough men when they are in the field, but without the slightest idea of holding a walled place. the old woman who has just dressed your arm would make a better governor of angoulême. but, however, as soon as you get into angoulême you shall have the money. the jews will give it me on my bond. it is crammed full of jews to the very doors, and that is another reason it will fall. but, however, i hope this is not the house, the hospitality of which you invite me to partake;" and he looked round the shed in which we were still standing with some dismay. "oh, no!" replied. "this and the hovel near was my only lodging last night; but i have got better quarters to-day, and, if you will come up with me, i will show you where they are." the old lady who fulfilled the office of surgeon to the soldiery and inferior officers had managed to bind up my arm very skilfully, pouring in some peculiar compound of her own devising, which healed the wound so rapidly that i can scarcely say i received any farther inconvenience from it. after she had done and received her reward, we walked up to my new dwelling, and i assigned to the young lord a room immediately beneath that which i had chosen for myself. having done this, and given some little regularity to my affairs, i went out to visit the different quarters of the camp, and to see more with my own eyes than i had hitherto been able to see. the day passed over without any farther effort on our side than the erection and opening of the new battery; but, as i went round every part of the encampment, i twice met the prince de condé and d'andelot, and once the admiral de coligny. they noticed me, i saw, though neither of them spoke; and while their conduct showed me there was no want of activity or vigilance on the part of our leaders, my appearance at different points of the camp was construed by them, i afterward found, into proofs of my zeal and industry. i mentioned that each of these generals had praised my conduct highly in the morning; but the most satisfactory proof to myself of having really acted well was afforded to me that night. on my return, towards supper-time, i found, besides one of my men on guard at the door, good moric endem standing talking to him while waiting my arrival. "no want of men now, sir," he said. "this morning's work has got your name up famously. you have nothing to do but to whistle, and you'll have all the stray men of the camp. i have had a hundred talking to me about it already, at least; but, of course, i could do but little till i spoke to you. there were five or six rare old hands, however, that i could not let go away; so that we now muster seventeen. how many more would you like engaged?" "at present." i replied, "not more than five-and-twenty or thirty in all, moric. we can do a good deal with that number; more may be difficult to manage; and, though we are well provided for at present, they might, in the end, be difficult to feed." "you are quite right, sir, you are quite right," replied my good lieutenant. "a small band, every one a good man, depend upon it, is better than an army, with every other man an ass or a sheep; and sure i am that i can fill up your troop till there shall not be thirty more desperate, fearless, skilful ragamuffins in the whole place." "well, do so," i replied, "as speedily as possible. and now, where is this monsieur de blaye?" "oh! you will find him down there, at the house by the river," replied moric, with a grin, applying to the house at the same time an epithet which i had never heard before, but which instantly designated it as a place where no man of any refinement of mind or feeling could be found. "there he has been ever since you went away almost; and i hear from a soldier who served with him two years ago, that he is never satisfied except he is there, or with a dice-box in his hand. if you don't send andriot after him, he'll not be up to supper." "andriot is a mere youth," i replied. "i wish you would go yourself, moric." "that i will, that i will," he said. "i am no prude about such things; though i cannot but think that a gentleman with his head broke might do better, or, at least, wait till the campaign is over." thus saying, he sped away, and soon returned, bringing the seigneur de blaye along with him. as i had not the keeping of my prisoner's morality, it gave me but little concern at the time; but it became afterward, i grieve to say, a matter of sad and great importance; and i must add here, that, during the three or four days he remained with me, though brave and good-humoured, as well as vain and light, his life was one continued course of the lowest intemperance and debauchery. on the following day i went early to see the battery and the effect it had produced; but there was, as yet, no appearance of its being practicable; and the prince de condé, whom i met near the spot, stopped his horse to speak with me upon the subject, saying, "probably tomorrow we may be able to do something. will you be of the storming-party again, monsieur de cerons?" "willingly, my lord," i answered; "and hope to be permitted to take the same post." "no," replied the prince, "i will not suffer you to expose yourself too far. besides, d'andelot is jealous of you, and will lead the party this time himself. but you shall be one of the number, if you desire it. you can take four men with you, if you please, but not more; for, after yesterday's exploits, every gentleman in the camp wants to have a share in the business." i thanked him for the permission, and retired; and about eleven on the following morning the attack was determined upon. the army was drawn up in battle array; the storming party was formed, and led by d'andelot himself; the batteries were redoubling their fire; and we were even beginning to march, when a white flag was suddenly displayed upon the breach, and some horsemen came forth from the city with an offer of capitulation. the terms were soon agreed upon; the garrison was permitted to march out with their swords, the leaders with their baggage, and the town was surrendered immediately. a little incident occurred in the marching in of the troops which struck me greatly, and showed that the good old spirit of our ancient armies was not entirely extinct. there was some dispute at first as to what regiment should take possession of the town; but the admiral settled the matter by declaring that the storming party, having been disappointed, should march in first through the breach, with his brother d'andelot at the head, while he led another party round by the gates. this was accordingly effected; and, as was natural enough under such circumstances, on taking possession of the city, we found almost all the houses shut up and barricaded. as we came into the long street, however, which runs down the hill, we saw the troops of the admiral advancing, and a good deal of confusion taking place. we had ourselves preserved the strictest order; but, as there were many officers and leaders among us, d'andelot permitted us to separate, in order to remedy any evil that might be going on. taking my way down the street towards the spot where i had seen some confusion, i found that, in spite of all commands and efforts, some excesses had been committed. a jeweller's shop had been broken open; and the admiral, having been informed thereof, had turned back and ordered the house to be surrounded and the men to be marched out one by one. the regiment commanded to perform this service was that of an old soldier, famous for his courage, named the seigneur de puyviault; and, as i came up on foot, i heard more of the facts than the admiral himself was aware of. the soldiers in the house, it seems, were puyviault's own men; and it was very evident, from the dispositions he made, that the worthy commander was inclined to screen them from the punishment which was justly their due, and which the admiral would certainly have inflicted had he discovered them. the moment they were driven forth, they were swallowed up in the mass of puyviault's men surrounding the door; and coligny, seeing what nobody could help seeing, rode up in fury, and pushed puyviault vehemently with his leading staff. the colour came into that commander's cheek, and one or two of his followers behind exclaimed, "he has struck you! he has struck you!" one moment of forgetfulness on the part of puyviault would have given another striking instance of how frail are the bonds which unite volunteer armies together; but, turning to those behind him, he said, "i endure everything from my leader, nothing from my enemies: and i this day show you what i expect from you." there was a murmur of applause ran through those around; and, after that little incident, the town was quietly occupied by the protestant troops. chapter ix. it is needless for me to pause upon all the movements that subsequently took place. they have met with historians more competent to treat of military details than myself; nor would my own personal narrative for several weeks, nay, for months, present many matters of interest. no sooner had angoulême capitulated and order been restored in the town, than monsieur de blaye found means easily to procure the money for his ransom, and paid me the sum of four thousand crowns, which was certainly far more than i had ever possessed before in my life. in the arrangements which had been made between myself and moric endem, and which he communicated to the men as we engaged them, the ransom of prisoners, it may be remembered, had been held apart as belonging to the actual captors. nevertheless, i determined to endeavour, as far as possible, to attach the men to me by liberality, and to show that i could recompense good service, in order that, if necessity required it, i might be the more fully justified in punishing bad conduct. i accordingly called the men together as soon as i had received the ransom of my prisoner; and explaining to them what i was about to do, and the reason why, i divided the money into two equal portions, and, having reserved one for myself, i again divided the other half into two, whereof i bestowed one upon my good lieutenant, moric endem, to whom i owed so much, and distributed the residue among the men who accompanied me to the breach. the others, who had chosen to wait till they saw me tried, looked a little foolish and mortified upon the occasion, but acknowledged it was all just; and, to give them some consolation, i bestowed ten crowns a man upon them out of my own stock, only requiring that each two should provide themselves with a small tent, and each five with a baggage-horse, and a boy to ride it. after this was done, my next thought was to redeem the dagger which i had left in the hands of the jew; but the matter was somewhat difficult to be arranged; for how was i to obtain the weapon without going myself to bordeaux, or without sending some one in whom i could fully trust? i thought of andriot, of whose honesty i felt as certain as of my own; but then he was by far too illiterate and simple in his nature to deal with so shrewd a personage as the jew; and the specimen which i had had of good solomon ahar's proceedings was not very well calculated to increase my confidence in his probity. although the weapon might be considered as a mere gewgaw, yet i clung to the thought of regaining it as speedily as possible with feelings which some people will easily enter into. it seemed as if it were my inheritance; it was the only thing i possessed of my father's; it was the tie between me and past years. i meditated over this for some time, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion; and at length remembering that there were many other things to think of, i proceeded to the bedside of young martin vern, to prepare him for removal on the following day. since the extraction of the ball he had been daily recovering strength. the great quantity of blood he had lost had in all probability been the cause that no great fever had ensued; and he had been able to lie and talk to me at various times during the preceding day without any apparent inconvenience. i now found him still better; and he heard that the siege of angoulême was over, and that we were preparing to make a retrograde movement, to attack the small town of pons, with apparent pleasure. he expressed himself perfectly willing and able to be moved; but only desired to find a messenger to bear intelligence of his state to his uncle, and to tell him in what direction we were likely to proceed. i instantly caught at the opportunity of communicating with the jew through martin vern; and, after consulting with the young man upon the subject, and telling him the whole facts, the matter was very easily arranged. andriot was sent back to bordeaux with a mere verbal message concerning the movements of the army, but with a letter from me to the merchant, which told him of his nephew's improved health, and of my own wishes with regard to the jew, and also enclosed both the receipt which the worthy solomon had given me, and the requisite sum for redeeming the dagger. andriot by this time had nearly enough of military service, and was not at all sorry to lay aside the cuirass and helmet. he did not even affect to conceal that such was the case; but, at the same time, begged that i would let him return and join me in the capacity of a servant as before. early on the following morning we began our march for pons; and that city was besieged in form, the garrison expressing its determination to hold out to the last extremity. they kept their word in the town; the place was taken by assault; and for the first time i beheld the most awful scene that war, always terrible, can display. death, and destruction, and cold-blooded massacre surrounded me on every side; but, terrible as it all was, i had the satisfaction of contributing, in some degree, to the cessation of the evil. one or two of the officers joined with me; and we endeavoured, as far as possible, to shelter even the officers and soldiers that surrendered. this attempt was nearly vain, however; but it prepared the way for more successful efforts when the pillage of houses commenced. to prevent plunder was impossible, i found; but to stop massacre was less difficult, and most of my soldiers were beginning to listen to the repeated commands that they received, and form into some order, when, suddenly, a girl rushed from one of the houses, pursued by a trooper whom i had engaged at barbazieux, and who had shown himself somewhat slack in the combat and eager in the pillage. both the girl and the man heard clearly the orders i was in the very act of repeating, to abstain from outrage, and, rushing forward, she clung to my knees. the man darted on after her, swearing that he would have his lawful prey; that the town was taken by assault, and nobody should stop him. there was a large body of soldiers coming up at the time under monsieur de boucard, and i knew that at that moment example was everything. the man had the insolence to seize the woman by the shoulder at my very feet; but my heavy double-edged sword was naked in my hand at the instant, and his foul fingers had scarcely touched her when his spirit went to its dark account. "rightly done, rightly done, monsieur de cerons!" cried boucard, turning partly towards his men and partly towards me. "the same punishment for any one who commits such excesses." the greater part of the town's people were saved, but four hundred of the soldiery were massacred in cold blood; and i grieve to say, that four hundred more were afterward slain when the citadel was taken. there was every reason to believe that the castle had capitulated; but, by some mistake, the assailants got in at once, and put to death every soul they met with. i was not in the town at the moment that this latter act took place, having been ordered to follow the admiral de coligny with all speed towards chauvigny, whither he had marched some days before in pursuit of the duke of montpensier. i was ordered to bear to him tidings of the fall of pons; and a company of foot soldiers was added to my band, so that we might afford at once a small re-enforcement to his division of the army, and give him notice that those he had left behind would soon be prepared to support him. various movements on the part of both the catholic and protestant armies followed during the greater part of the winter and the early spring of the ensuing year. the duke of montpensier collected his forces in the neighbourhood of chatelherault; and tidings spread abroad that the duke of anjou, the king's brother, was coming down with a great force, to put himself at the head of the catholic armies. various disasters also befell different detachments of protestant soldiers making their way up from distant parts of the country, to join the main body under the admiral and the prince de condé. the protestant leaders, however, did not suffer themselves to be daunted, and still acted upon the offensive, harassing the enemy in continual skirmishes, and prepared even to risk the event of a general battle. in all these proceedings i had my share. i knew that all and everything depended upon my own exertions and my own success; and, daily becoming more and more habituated to the life i led, i suffered no opportunity to pass of attacking any detached body of the enemy. when i thought myself not strong enough to attempt any of the small fortified towns or castles, soon found plenty of leaders who were willing to aid me for a share of the plunder which was likely to be taken. thus i was scarcely ever out of the saddle; rarely two days at a time without crossing my sword with an enemy; and never suffering myself, by any ambition, to be led into the great mistake of increasing the numbers of my band, it became rather a privilege than otherwise to obtain admission into it. such exertions were not without their reward; for, though in the course of the campaign i did not meet with any other such rich prize as monsieur de blaye had proved, yet many a prisoner of less importance was taken--several by my own hand; while a large quantity of booty was obtained, especially after the gay and luxurious soldiery of the duke of anjou began to arrive in the country. on one occasion we took an immense quantity of baggage, belonging to two or three noblemen of the court, in a village which they had fortified for their own defence, so that the amount of fifteen thousand crowns in money alone was divided between our troop and a band of foot who had joined us in the enterprise. we had been told that the duke of joyeuse himself was in the village; but if he was so, he made his escape with the other nobles before we forced our way in. had i been able to capture him, indeed, i might have thought myself deserving of the name which i had by this time acquired in the army, of the "fortunate monsieur de cerons." i was indeed, in many respects, extremely fortunate; for i had escaped without any wounds that deserved the name, except the pistol-shot in the arm which i received at angoulême; and in the month of february i had in my own private store an accumulation of nearly six thousand crowns. not twelve months before i should have considered that fortune as quite sufficient for all my wants and wishes through life; but my feelings had changed; i desired more, far more. what was it that was at my heart? was it avarice? oh, no! what was it, then? i cannot tell. there was a hope, and an expectation, and a looking forward into the future, that made me greedy without greediness, and aspiring without ambition. i must now return to speak for a moment of one whom i have not noticed for some time. the progress of young martin vern was slow but steady; and at the end of about a month or six weeks he was enabled to sit up and walk about the camp. in a week more he could ride out with me on horseback, when with no particular enterprising view i went forth to reconnoitre the enemy or examine the country around. from his uncle he had received no intelligence up to that period at which the protestant army was marching upon saumur, being completely master of the country between the loire and the charente. but a terrible storm was gathering to the east, where the army of the duke of anjou was daily increasing in strength, and moving rapidly towards us. a degree of ferocity, too, was beginning to animate both parties. the count de lude attacked the town of mirabeau; received its surrender upon capitulation, and yet ordered the greater part of the garrison to be put to the sword in cold blood. the wrath and indignation of the protestants now exceeded all bounds, especially as la borde and his brother, who were among the first victims at mirabeau, were universally loved and admired in the army. no one felt their death more bitterly than the admiral de coligny; and, swearing by all he held sacred that he would avenge them, he refused all terms of capitulation to the town of st. florent, which he was then besieging, but gave the garrison notice to defend themselves to the last, as beyond all doubt he would put every man to the sword. i was myself, at the time, marching forward with a large body of troops towards loudun; but i heard shortly afterward that the admiral had too terribly kept his word. we came in presence of the enemy in the neighbourhood of loudun; and on the assembling of the whole protestant force, it was found that we were not much inferior in number to our antagonists. but the weather had now become extremely severe; and the duke of anjou not judging it prudent to risk a general battle at that moment, retired, leaving us to take a little repose in winter-quarters. some days before he retreated, however, i was at length rejoined by the good youth andriot, who bore a letter from martin vern, announcing that he would speedily join us in our quarters. andriot himself had much to tell; for he had been at the chateau de blancford, and had borne tidings of all my proceedings, as far as he knew them, to those in whom he believed i was interested at my ancient home. he repeated to me all the kind things that the boys had said; all the affectionate words of old la tour; and he told me how louise's eyes had sparkled when she saw him; how she had made him repeat over and over again everything that related to me; and how she had wept to hear of my good success, which the youth declared he could not understand at all, though i understood it right well. he had taken care, he said, as far as possible, to keep out of the way of the baron; but he was caught the second day of his visit, and made his escape as fast as he could, to avoid being beaten out with stirrup-leathers, which my worthy cousin threatened highly. the letter of martin vern gave but little intelligence of anything but his own approach, and we looked anxiously for his arrival during three or four days; at the end of which time, as i was sitting with his nephew in my quarters at the little village of troismoutiers, the good merchant made his appearance, accompanied by a much more imposing train of followers than he had displayed when i last saw him. his first attention was of course given to his nephew; but, after embraces and congratulations, he turned to me to speak on my affairs, and told me that he had succeeded in one part of his mission, but had been unsuccessful in another. the dagger, he said, he had not been able to redeem, having found that my friend monsieur stuart had already redeemed it when he heard how fortunate i had been in the army, with the purpose of carrying it to me direct. this intelligence mortified me a good deal; but the worthy merchant had consolation for me. "i have seen your fair cousin," he said, "and a beautiful creature she is. not knowing whether there was anything private in your letter or not, i delivered it to her as she passed through the room where the baron kept me waiting; and the tidings that you gave her must have moved her much, for she first turned so pale that i thought she would have fainted, and then grew red again, and pressed your letter to her lips, and thanked me a thousand times for bearing it. as she ran away to read it, and i did not see her when i went back again to the chateau, i feared that i should have no answer to give you; but the servant who brought me, two days after, some bonds for the money that your cousin wanted, gave me also this letter for you, and i think it is in a woman's writing." the moment i saw it i knew louise's hand; and, approaching the sconce, i tore it open and read--oh, how my heart beat! oh, how nearly were my eyes overflowing as i read the sweet, the dear, the tender, the affectionate words with which she greeted me. "dearest, dearest henry!" it began, "how can i ever thank you for the comfort, for the consolation, for the joy that your letter has given me! the only consolation, the only joy that i have had since you left me! i will not upbraid you for leaving me without bidding me adieu; for to fly was all that you could do, and to go without farewell saved me, perhaps, a long and bitter pang, even though it denied me a sad and painful pleasure. the news of your success, from your own hand, is indeed gratifying; but farther accounts of your success have now reached me, and i trust in heaven that they may be true. "oh, henry! can i doubt anything that is told me of you, which represents you as braver, and nobler, and more generous than any one else? perhaps it is all very foolish to think in this way; but you have been my companion from my childhood; the kindest, the dearest, the best of brothers to me! the one that i have loved the most on all the earth since my poor mother's death. how, then, can i think sufficiently of you? how can i think at all of any one else with hope and comfort than of you? my two poor brothers, charles and albert, are suffering under the same dark and cheerless fate as myself; and when we steal up to sit together in the room that once was yours, we talk of you and of all your kindness, and of the days that are gone by for ever; and we mingle our tears together when we think that we may never see him again whom we all loved so dearly. they indeed vow that, when they are able, they will fly to join you at the army, and fight under your sword. but what is to become of me? "but i will not make you sad, henry, with my sadness; nor will i dwell upon all that is terrible to me, and painful in this house at this moment. from the little that you saw, you may conceive the rest; and nothing is too terrible to be true. perhaps, if you were to write to my father, it might do good; for, though he is very much exasperated against you, and will not even hear your name mentioned from any of us, yet when i have heard other people praise you, and mention some high deed you have done, my father's eyes have looked bright, and i have the thought he seemed somewhat proud that you should be his near relation. of his plans or his purposes at present i can give you no account. he is evidently wretched here; and i have heard some words spoken in regard to a journey to the capital if a truce or peace were to take place, or if a safeguard could be obtained from the court. when i see him so unhappy, i would fain console him, but he will not be consoled; and the moment i attempt to do it, the expression of his face changes from melancholy to anger. "you tell me to think of you, and that you think of me constantly. oh, dear henry! if you could see my thoughts, you could never fancy that you were forgotten even for a moment by "louise de blancford." the worthy merchant had not been long with us before he was summoned to the presence of the prince de condé, to whom his arrival had been notified; and i was not allowed mere than a few minutes alone to dream over the letter of louise, when an officer from the admiral warned me to have everything prepared to march before daybreak on the following morning, for the purpose of attacking the catholic army in its retreat. when morning came the admiral himself led the _avant garde_, while the prince of condé followed at the head of the rest of the forces; and i, with my own troop and another small troop which was placed under my command for the purpose, was ordered to man[oe]uvre on the prince's right, for the purpose of deceiving the enemy into the belief that we were marching in three divisions. the task was allotted to me, because it was well known that i had thoroughly reconnoitred the whole country on that side during the three or four preceding days. the issue of the attempt would have been more fortunate, however, had they attached me to the admiral's division; for we were at that time in a part of the country filled with catholics, and i have not the slightest doubt that both the generals were purposely deceived by their guides. of the admiral we saw nothing for a long time after his departure; and the prince de condé, beginning his march about half an hour before daybreak, was led straight on to the enemy's camp, instead of approaching it on the north, as he had intended. about eight o'clock in the morning, both he and i perceived the position of the duke of anjou, strongly intrenched and flanked by a stream, but not the slightest appearance of the admiral on any side; and, from the whole aspect of the scene, the strongest proof that coligny had not even approached the enemy's camp. notwithstanding the great inferiority of numbers, however, the prince determined to commence the attack, seeing clearly that the admiral had been misled, and hoping that the sound of the cannon would bring him up to the field of battle. the order was then given for the skirmishers to advance; and, according to the directions i had received, i made the greatest possible display of my forces on the right, occupying the attention and diverting the efforts of a part of the duke of anjou's army. the troops that the prince de condé had thrown forward were met by the cavalry of souline, monsalis, and la vallette, and driven back for some way at the point of the sword; but the famous count de montgomery and several other distinguished officers caused the cannon to be brought forward upon the height, and opened a sharp fire upon the duke's encampment. each party was animated by the same courage and spirit; the troops on both sides were fighting under the eyes of their most celebrated leaders; and the advantages of the day remained so completely balanced, that if the admiral had come up in time, the camp of the duke must have been forced, and his army in all probability annihilated. in the mean time, martigue, at the head of three cornets of horse, had come out to reconnoitre my strength; but it luckily so happened that the small body of men which had been placed under my command in addition to my own troop, consisted principally of horse arquebusiers, and i contrived, by thinly lining the hedges with these soldiers dismounted, while i filled up the gaps with my cavalry, to make my force appear much larger than it really was. martigue, who was an old and experienced soldier, at first seemed to entertain great suspicions of what was really the case, and advanced up the hill with a resolute face, as if he had been determined to dislodge me. although i had no chance in contending with him, i determined not to give way till i was forced; and, suffering him calmly to come completely within shot, i ordered the arquebusiers to fire and then spring upon their horses. this was done through the hedges with considerable effect, several of the shots telling in the midst of martigue's own troop, and producing great confusion, while what seemed to them a body of fresh cavalry appeared behind the hedges, and decided their retreat. the shortness of the daylight at that period of the year favoured not a little the duke of anjou; for, or the arrival of the admiral, who had been led several miles out of his way, the day was found to be too near the close for any farther advantage to be gained. not a few difficulties and dangers, however, presented themselves to the protestant army when it contemplated a retreat, and the prince determined to stop upon the ground he had occupied. just as it was turning dark, this resolution was notified to me by an officer, who brought me also high praises from the prince, not for having fought well, but for having avoided fighting. his orders now were to retreat a little from the ground i occupied, to do my best to cover my right flank, and to send him instant notice in case of attack, making what head against the enemy i could, in order to give him time for preparation. he would have sent me more men, he said, but the position that both he and the admiral occupied was so hazardous that he could not spare any. my retreat was easily effected; but, as i came down the hill, i was somewhat alarmed and surprised by seeing a large body of men moving up in the dusk across one of the wide open fields of that part of the country. in the dim twilight i could not distinguish anything farther than that there must be two or three thousand men, with what seemed to be artillery; and i was upon the point of sending off intelligence of the fact to the prince de condé, when the sound of some bells, such as they hang round the necks of the draught oxen, caught my ear, and made me comprehend at once what sort of apparition this was. it proved that a rascally guide, who had accompanied the attendants, camp followers, and others who were bringing up the baggage, had misled this important body also, and was guiding it direct into the midst of the duke of anjou's men. an immense booty it certainly would have been to the catholics had i not fortunately met the mass of rabble horseboys, suttlers, bad men, bad women, and baggage wagons that were thus trooping on into the hands of the enemy. approaching cautiously, that i might be quite sure i was right, i called out as soon as i had ascertained the fact, and commanded this great procession to halt. at the very first word, the guide, it seems, would have fled; but the leader of the party, who was a man of execution and an old soldier, had entertained suspicions for some time that all was not right, and, on the man's attempt to spur away, shot him through the head. as soon as some explanations had taken place between myself and the rest, a stratagem struck me, which i instantly proceeded to put in practice. all the men who had just come up were very willing to put themselves under my command; and, returning up the hill till i came within sight of the lights of the enemy's camp, i formed an encampment there, defending it as well as i could with carts and wagons. i then collected together all the most likely varlets that i could find, put my own men in command over them, and arming them to the best of my power, prepared to defend that post in case of need, making sure that, for an hour or two at least, i could completely cover the right of the prince de condé. i despatched a messenger to him, however, to tell him what had occurred, and to say that, if he thought fit, when he and the admiral fired their cannon at nine o'clock, as was very customary, i would do the same, as there was an old dismounted culverine in one of the baggage-wagons, which would the more completely serve to impose upon the enemy. on his return the messenger told me the prince laughed heartily; and, entering into the spirit of the thing at once, bade me follow out my plan according to my own proposal. it took some time, indeed, to get out the culverine, to place it in such a position that it could be fired without danger, and to draw out a nail which had been driven into the touchhole. this was all accomplished, however, before the hour appointed; and no sooner was the gun fired from the quarters of the prince de condé, than the admiral on one hill and i on the other shot off our ordnance, doubtless much to the surprise, and somewhat to the consternation, of the camp below. indeed, our position formed a scene altogether not a little striking and beautiful; and somewhat imposing and majestic it must have appeared to the enemy, who could see it all at once. i had gone forth to fire the culverine myself, fancying that, what between its antiquity and the quantity of powder with which it had been crammed, in order to make the report the louder, it might do what it did not, and burst under the operation. i then gazed, with feelings near akin to awe, along the range of the camp, and the immense numbers of fires lighted all along the lines to keep the people warm, blazing lightly over a great extent of the opposite hill, and sweeping quite down across the mouth of the valley where the prince de condé's division remained, till the illumination was taken up again by the people who were with me on those heights. there, too, at about the distance of three quarters of a mile, were the fires and lights of various kinds in the camp of the duke of anjou, while between that globe of flame and the semicircle of fire that surrounded it on our side, there remained a dark black ring, on which the struggle of the morning had been carried on, and in which nothing was now to be seen but a single lantern, or a torch wandering here and there, and seeking for the wounded or the dead. as i stood and gazed, the murmur of merriment which was kept up by the varlets and the people of the little encampment behind me was carried away by the wind, which blew strong from the northeast, and borne upon its wings from the camp of the admiral came suddenly one of the protestant psalms, sung by several thousands of voices at once, and sweeping mournfully but sweetly through the dark and solemn night. if i joined not in the melody, i joined at least in the prayer that it conveyed on high; and i was listening still with no small delight, when the youth andriot plucked me by the sleeve, and told me that there was somebody who wished to speak with me in the encampment. there was a meaning look in the youth's face--a mixture of joy and archness which i did not at all understand; but i followed without farther question to a tent which had been prepared for me, and towards which he now led the way. there were lights within, and a good number of people standing round it; and in drawing back the flap of the tent, i saw a table laid out with a very splendid supper, which, as i afterward found, had been prepared for the prince de condé, and who, probably, that night went without. but that which surprised me much more (for i was well aware that the whole provisions of the army were with my part of the encampment) was to see a respectable-looking elderly lady with her back towards me, and an old man with white hair bending down to point out to her something in a book upon the table. the little noise i made in entering did not disturb them; but my first step in the tent caused the old man to raise his head, and, to my inexpressible astonishment, i beheld good old monsieur la tour; while the old lady, turning round, displayed to my sight the well-known features of her who had been the faithful attendant of the former baroness de blancford and her daughter for several years. chapter x. it was evident, from the manner in which la tour and the old lady, whom we called dame marguelette, received me, that they had been already made acquainted with the fact of my being there; and, therefore, there was no degree of astonishment whatever in their countenances, though much joy. i thought they would have devoured me; but when the first expressions of gladness and satisfaction were over, i remarked a great change in the appearance of the good old pastor. the few months that i had been absent seemed to have worn and broken him more than several years had done at a preceding period; and there were also lines of much care and thought about his brow and eyes, together with a melancholy expression round his mouth, which was very painful to me to behold. nor was my good old friend dame marguelette as well-looking or as hale as when i left her. such were my impressions; but they, on the other hand, could hardly find words to express how much improved i appeared to them in personal appearance since i had quitted the chateau. after a few minutes given to mutual gratulations, my next question, of course, was, where was the baron, and what brought them there. "alas! my son," replied la tour, "where the baron is i cannot well tell you; but i much fear that he is in the hands of the enemy. i trust not with his own consent; but i fully believe with the consent and by the arrangement of the woman whom he has so madly made his wife. but i have a long story to tell you, henry, which will explain the whole; and i had better tell it you at once. alas! you little know what a change has taken place since you were at blancford." he then went on to tell me all that had occurred, drawing a sad picture of a wretched and miserable family. the baroness he depicted as harsh, haughty, and unprincipled--capricious to such a degree that there was no calculating upon any determination for a whole day, and only checkering the most idle and licentious levity with occasional fits of violent passion or long hours of gloomy sullenness. the baron, on his part, evidently both contemned and despised her; and yet, as we so frequently see, the woman who had acquired a tie upon him by his passions and his vices, ruled him like a slave by his weaknesses, even after his passions had been sated. the conduct of both to the children of the late baroness was anything, la tour said, but what it should be, though towards louise, the old man added, her father displayed strong affection, and sought her society when he seemed to fly from that of any one else. as to the religion of the baroness, the protestant minister declared his solemn belief that she had none; but if ever she had a leaning either way, it was towards papistry. he feared very much too, he added, he feared very much that the baron himself was wavering in his faith. "and that fear," he added, "has induced me to cast every other consideration behind me, and to remain with the poor children, still to guard their minds from perversion as far as possible." the time since my departure thus passed, he said, in the most comfortless state of discontent on all parts, until at length the baron had declared, that if he could not obtain a safe conduct to reside unmolested in paris with his whole household, he would take arms and join the protestant forces. it was the policy of the court of france at that time, by every sort of bribe, by every promise of immunity and inducement that could be held out, to prevent the lukewarm protestants from joining the more zealous ones in arms. the words of the baron were speedily noised abroad; and with no greater space of time than was necessary for a courier to travel post-haste from bordeaux to paris and from paris to bordeaux, a safe conduct for the baron, and every one whose name he chose to insert in it, arrived at the chateau de blancford, with the sole condition annexed, that he should present himself at the court as speedily as possible, where every sort of honour and distinction, the document said, awaited him. "his resolution was taken in a moment," continued la tour; "and he proposed to me, ungraciously enough indeed, that my name should be put into the list. for the children's sake, and especially for dear louise's sake, i suffered it to be done: and we advanced by slow journeys altogether till yesterday morning, when the baroness declared that, by pushing forward to chatelherault, and thence to leselle, they would put the vienne and the creux between them and the contending armies, and thus pass on to paris without interruption. all the heavy baggage, and several of the servants and retainers, together with the old men and women, such as myself and dame marguelette, were to follow more slowly; but i yesterday heard the baroness speaking with one of the guides who had been hired to conduct their party not long before they went, in such a manner as to convince me that she at least would not be ill pleased to fall into the hands of the catholic army. they went on; and though they promised to send back a messenger to tell us when they had safely passed the vienne, none has ever come near us; and this morning we fell in with the baggage of our own army, and came on with it, thinking that we should be in greater security." "but where is louise?" i cried immediately. "have they taken her on with them?" "alas! yes, my son," replied the pastor. "all the young people have gone on; and i do not believe that the baroness will at all grieve that they should be separated from those who have hitherto had the charge and direction of their youth." the tidings that i heard made me, i acknowledge, very uneasy; and i meditated for some time without making any reply, revolving in my mind some plan for gaining more certain information regarding my relations. i judged that if they had followed the road towards chatelherault and been taken, they must have fallen in with some of the troops of the duke of anjou's left wing, probably under la vallette; and i therefore made up my mind to make an excursion on my own right, if possible, the next morning, and attempt to carry off some prisoners, who might give me information. i found that the baggage of the baron and all his old servants were in the immediate neighbourhood of the spot where they had erected my tent, and i took care that everything should be done to make the people comfortable. i was somewhat uneasy, however, at not seeing good martin vern and his nephew, who i knew must have remained with the baggage when the prince de condé advanced. i accordingly sent out andriot and one or two others to find them, which was, perhaps, a difficult task; as the wagons, and carts, and horses, and tents which formed my encampment were spread over a very large space of ground. they were found at length, however, in company with the prince de condé's intendant, wandering about at the extreme end of the encampment, not choosing to trust themselves without a guide in the wide chaos of all sorts of rascals and lumber that it contained. good martin vern seemed not a little discontented with his expedition, and declared that, as soon as he had seen the prince de condé on the following morning, and had settled with him the business that brought him thither, he and his nephew would make the best of their way to paris. i now bethought me that if, by the mistake or rascality of the guide, the baggage of the protestants had fallen into the hands of the enemy, my whole little fortune would have been also swept away, and that i should have been left almost in the same condition as that in which i had joined the army. how to remedy this, and to put my treasure beyond the chances of war, i did not know; but to consult good martin vern seemed the surest plan of obtaining advice, and he immediately proposed that i should place it in his hands, which, as he explained to me, was the common custom with those who had floating sums of money which they wished to put in security. as, from all i had seen, i had not the slightest doubt of the good man's integrity, i acceded without the slightest hesitation, but only asked, "are you not more likely to lose it in travelling through the country, unprotected, than even i am in the midst of an army?" "not a single crown of it," he said, laughing, "will ever go out of this camp. the prince de condé will have it all, and glad to get it. he is to receive two hundred thousand crowns at niort from a jewish house with whom you yourself have had some dealings; part of the sum is on my account, and gold and silver plate to the full amount is by this time in my brother's hands in paris. he will be glad enough to have your six thousand crowns in ready money instead of my bill upon niort, which is the only way i should pay him. i give you an acknowledgment for the money, payable on demand; and if you should want it, or any part of it, you have nothing to do but to show my acknowledgment to any banker or merchant, and draw upon me what is called a bill of exchange. were it not for these bills, my good young friend, in such troublous times as the present, no merchant would venture to stir out of his own city, for fear of being skinned alive on account of the money on his person." on this explanation, the money was soon sent for and readily found; for my baggage had all been collected together round the tent, and the ground in the immediate vicinity was kept clear by my own people. after paying over six thousand crowns to martin vern, deducting the sum that i had sent him for the redemption of the knife, there still remained in my hands nearly five hundred crowns; and, with many thanks, i repaid to the good pastor the sum i had borrowed from him on quitting the chateau of blancford. "i would not take it from you, my son," he said, "but i see your exertions have been blessed with success, and that you have already become what i may well consider enormously rich." i would not tell him how changed my estimation of enormous riches was, as i could not explain to him--perhaps not even to myself--the causes of that change; but, even while we were speaking upon this subject, a messenger from the prince de condé came to the tent, seeking his intendant and martin vern, who accordingly sped away in all haste to confer with that general. "will you let some of your men carry this gold for me?" said martin vern, adding, with a smile, "this will ensure me a mighty warm reception from his highness." taking care that he should have a sufficient escort, i turned when the merchant was gone to his nephew, and asked him how he relished the thoughts of this immediate journey to paris, and whether his military ardour was or was not at an end. to my surprise, however, i found that he was as much changed in some of his feelings as i was in some of mine; and for the first time i learned the cause of his whole conduct. "you must know," he said, "that when i was living in bordeaux, not long before my father's death, we became acquainted with a merchant's widow and her daughter, so well to do in the world that it was proposed i should marry the young lady. she was very beautiful, and i fancied myself in love with her. indeed, i believe i was so; but she had got her head filled with ideas of battles and military glory; and though she coquetted with me a good deal, and gave me every encouragement, so as to raise my passion to the highest pitch, yet she declared that she would never give her hand to any one but a soldier, or one, at least, who had seen some service. if i would go and fight, she said, for two or three campaigns, she liked me well enough to promise to marry me; but she would not upon any other conditions. my father was so enraged that he broke off the match altogether; and, dying shortly after, left me under the charge of my uncle, who was even more averse to it than himself. "of course i could not see with their eyes at first, and thought of nothing but how beautiful she was; but afterward, when i had done quite enough to show that it was not fear prevented me from being a soldier, and was lying at angoulême in sickness and in pain, i began to think that she must have been a very selfish and inconsiderate person, to wish me to expose myself to such things for the mere gratification of her vanity. if she loved me at all, she ought to have loved me sufficiently as i was--plain martin vern; and if she did not love me as i was, and could love nothing but a soldier, why, a soldier let her have. as time went by--and i had plenty of opportunity of thinking, as you know--i began to find out that i had not loved her as much as i thought; and not at all doubting that the quality she most loved in a soldier was a slashed pourpoint and the feather in his cap, i began to think the only quality i had liked in her was a pair of rosy lips and a pink and white complexion; and therefore, as soon as my uncle proposed it, i expressed myself quite satisfied to go on with him to paris." there was something amusing to me in the sort of debtor and creditor account the young man seemed to keep with his own heart; but as it was now beginning to wax late, i did my best to provide accommodation for all the friends around me; and telling la tour that i had a scheme for gaining some information the next morning concerning the baron and his party, i led him to another tent, leaving good dame marguelette where she was, and for my own part took a station by one of the watch-fires for the night. the complete knowledge that we have of any little stratagem that we attempt makes us always fear more than necessary that it will be suspected by others; but on the present occasion i was not wrong in supposing that an attempt might be made to discover the amount of our force upon these heights. it was even probable that the extent of ground which we occupied might create suspicion, as the position of the admiral and the prince de condé was accurately known; and it was not probable that they should weaken themselves by making a large detachment occupy that hill. however, i caused a number of saddled horses and armed men to wait at the point where our camp was most easily approached, and i remained by the side of the fire, wrapped in my cloak, dozing perhaps a little, but more frequently gazing upon the red embers, and thinking of the fate of my sweet cousin louise. moric endem, who had kept watch there during my absence, left me in about half an hour, to get some refreshment. it was long ere he returned; and, indeed, i cannot say that good moric was ever famous for shortening his potations. when he did come back, he cast himself down at the other side of the fire, and fell as sound asleep on the hard ground, in the face of the enemy, as if he had been it the warmest bed of a well-fenced chateau. about five o'clock in the morning, having no more wood to trim the fire, which was beginning to grow very dull, i rose up and went out beyond the barricade which we had constructed, gazing up at the stars, which were shining in all the clear brightness of a frosty night. as i so gazed i thought i heard sounds from below; and, looking down the slope, i clearly saw a body of horse and foot advancing slowly and silently towards our little camp. going back quietly, but in haste, i woke moric endem, got the men together without any noise, stationed the arquebusiers among the carts and wagons, with directions for no one to fire till the general order should be given; and then causing my troopers to mount, i brought them close to the spot by which they could issue forth upon the enemy. i could there also see the catholics as they approached; and, suffering them to advance till within the distance of sixty yards from the camp, i stood a little forward, like a sentinel, and challenged them. they made no answer, but only quickened their pace; but then, instead of discharging my arquebus, and leaving any one who liked it to follow my example, as a common sentinel would have done, i gave the word to fire, and in a moment a line of sharp flashes ran along the face of the carts and wagons, and, springing on my horse, i led out the men, and charged the advancing body down the hill. as well as i could see, i singled out their commander, with the hope of making him prisoner, for the body was evidently nothing more than a reconnoitring party, and not much stronger numerically than my own. the surprise--for they had not calculated upon such a reception--the darkness, to fight in which they were altogether unaccustomed; and, as i imagine, a want of complete knowledge of the ground, rendered the resistance of the enemy but momentary; and we drove infantry and cavalry down the hill together at the point of the spear, bearing to the catholic camp, and to martigue, who had sent them, a somewhat exaggerated account, i have a notion, of the strength upon the hill. i somehow missed the commander in the dark; but i struck one man from his horse as he fled with the staff of my lance, and then pointing the iron to his throat, made him surrender, rescue or no rescue, and gave him into the hands of the people who followed. we pursued the reconnoitring party as far, or perhaps farther, than it was prudent; and then returning, had the prisoner brought up to a somewhat better lighted fire than the one i had been sitting at, and asked him the questions which i had proposed. i found that he was a common soldier, though of good family; and on my inquiring strictly in regard to the baron de blancford and his party, he said that he had heard a report in the corps to which he belonged of that nobleman having either come in and surrendered himself, or being made prisoner, with a promise of safety, by some of the roving parties of the left wing. he described to me pretty accurately the part of the camp where he imagined the baron to be lodged; and as his own regiment could not be far from the spot, i took it for granted that he was right. i then put him at a small ransom for the sake of the men, and let him go upon parole; having taken especial care that he should see nothing around him but the grim faces of steel-clad horsemen, and the lighted matches of the arquebusiers. by the time that all this was accomplished the eastern sky was beginning to grow gray, and a faint buzzing, murmuring sound seemed to me to indicate some early movement in the enemy's camp, although the light was not yet sufficiently strong for any eye to discern what was taking place. the murmur increased and grew louder; but of course i could make no attempt under such circumstances without orders, and i sent down a messenger immediately to tell the prince de condé what had occurred, and to ask for his instant commands. the reply was short, and written on a scrap of paper with a piece of black chalk. "i think the enemy are decamping," it said: "if it should prove so, take what men you have as soon as it is daylight, and hang upon the rear. you shall be joined by fifty more as speedily as possible--all under your command. but be not too rash; for it is now determined not to risk a battle till the season is more advanced." before the messenger with this notification reached me, what the prince de condé had foreseen had become evident. by the gray light of the morning i could see the spears of the retreating army already winding along the opposite hill, within two miles of the outposts of the admiral. there was a thick, white mist in the valley, however, which covered the catholic camp, and prevented me from perceiving what had taken place there; but i judged, from the distance at which the cavalry were now seen, that their retreat might be considered as secure. giving orders to moric endem to get every man that he could muster under arms as fast possible, i ran to the tent of good old la tour, and besought him not to quit the army till my return, promising to bring or send some news of the baron and his family, if possible. martin vern i had not an opportunity of seeing, though i trusted, as he had all my little wealth, and had not even given me such a receipt as he had promised, that i should find him on my return. not that i in the slightest degree doubted his honesty or honour, but that i knew i might have need of a part of what i had given him at a moment's notice. no time, however, was now to be lost; and, getting into the saddle as speedily as possible, i put myself at the head of my men and of the horse arquebusiers, and dashed down into the enemy's camp at full speed. a portion of the baggage, and that in some degree valuable, was left; and moric endem, whom i had christened the plunder-master-general, as he conducted all that part of our military proceedings, made a goodly booty in less than half an hour. ere we reached the end of the valley in pursuit, a body of fifty more spears joined us, sent, according to his promise, by the prince de condé, from whom i received, by their leader, an order to follow the enemy as far as possible, and not to leave them, unless i was compelled, till they were two days' march from their former camp. i had neither tents nor any other kind of baggage with me, and for a moment thought of sending back to bid the servants and horseboys follow; but recollecting of how much importance it was to lose no time, i urged on the pursuit, and speedily overtook a small body straggling from the rear-guard, whom we drove in upon the rest at the point of the spear. the appearance of the horse-arquebusiers behind us, for they had not been quite so rapid in their movements as we were, gave the idea of a much more considerable body of pursuers than really followed the enemy; and a small troop of cavalry faced about and charged. among them was one who seemed a mere youth; but the whole were routed in a moment, and the lad, thrown to the ground, was absolutely under my horse's feet. how he escaped unhurt i do not know; but i helped him to rise, and, scarcely thinking what i did, but looking on him as a mere child, i bade him remount his horse and get back to his own people as fast as he could. he took me at my word, and i did not see him again, though more than once during the rest of the day we met a body of the enemy in pretty sharp encounter. on that night i slept at a small village somewhat in the rear of the enemy, and on the following day found it necessary to follow the pursuit somewhat more cautiously; for here we were, in all not one hundred and twenty men, nearly thirty miles distant from the protestant army, and without anything to fall back upon nearer than that. to cut off stragglers, therefore, was all that we could do; but towards evening we took some prisoners, from whom i learned tidings that i was anxious to obtain. the duke of anjou had by this time halted and encamped for the night; and the prisoners informed me that they belonged to the regiment of monsieur de la valette. on questioning them concerning the baron de blancford, one of them, who seemed their leader, informed me that that gentleman and all his family were detained as prisoners by the duke of montpensier. he seemed a somewhat willing prisoner, the man added, and was not guarded at all strictly, but left under the eyes of the marquis de la valette and his regiment. their tents, he said, were on the extreme verge of the camp, to the right of the line of march; and the ease of carrying off the whole party seemed to me so great, that i determined to make the attempt that night. we were still at some distance from the camp; but, to make the attempt more secure, i retired a little farther still, to a village called scorbe, and there remained quiet, waiting with not a little impatience for the first hour of night, which, as i well knew, is of all others the time when a camp is left most exposed; when the men, first feeling themselves relieved from the vigilance, activity, and labour of the day, are thrown more completely off their guard than at any other period. here, in the mean time, i made all my arrangements with moric endem and the leader of the arquebusiers. the prisoners were safely locked up in a barn belonging to a neighbouring farm, and their horses, appropriated to our use, were destined to act a part which will speedily be seen. chapter xi. it was intensely cold, when, just as it was turning dusk, we set out from the little village upon our projected expedition. the ground was as hard as iron, every stream was held in icy shackles, and there was a dull stillness in the air as if even the very sounds were frozen. the wintry melody of the robin had ceased, the lowing of the cattle was over, and the shrill crowing of the watchful cock heard in some far distant farm, which once, and once only, broke the stillness as we proceeded, made it seem more profound the moment the sound had ceased. notwithstanding the intensity of the cold, or rather, perhaps, as a consequence of it, the whole ground was covered with a light white mist. it could not be called a fog, but, together with the duskiness of the hour, it rendered all the surrounding objects difficult to be seen, magnifying them in size, and even seeming to distort them in shape. there was no wind to move the light vapoury cloud that lay upon the surface of the earth; and as we rode on, sometimes climbing high up over the slopes where the ground was more clear, we could see the distant stars peeping through with a faint and doubtful glimmer; but, whenever we were upon the low grounds, nothing whatever could be seen around us at a greater distance than twenty yards. the arrangements which i had made were, that morin endem, myself, and eight others, should keep in advance of the party till we came near the camp of the enemy. i was then to go on alone, endeavouring to find out the tents which the prisoner had described as the lodging of the baron de blancford. as soon as we had found it, i was to return and draw up my men; the greater part of them, with the arquebusiers, were to remain in the nearest sheltered spot i could find, and then five or six holding saddled horses, on two of which i had contrived to place pillions for louise and the baroness, were to be stationed as near as i could bring them with safety to the camp. having arranged all this, i and the nine who had accompanied me in advance were to dismount, and taking upon our backs some sacks stuffed with straw, which we had brought from the village, we were to walk forward and attempt to enter the camp as a foraging party. i felt sure that the enemy, having now discovered that they were not followed by the bulk of the protestant army, would be, as indeed they always were, in a very lax and careless state, and i doubted not that the word would never be asked, and that we should be admitted without difficulty. in the first instance, however, we had nearly been discovered; for, in the darkness and the mist, instead of coming upon the tents where we should have seen lights more readily, we suddenly found ourselves at the back of a village which was stationed at the head of the right wing, and the loud sound of merriment from within was the first thing that gave us any intimation of our danger. drawing back as quietly and stealthily as possible, we passed round a small bank of osiers which grew by a little stream, and then clearly distinguished the tents to which i had been directed by the lights which were seen scattered here and there, and which came dim and enlarged through the mist. i now found the description which the man had given so accurate, that could tell perfectly where i was at every step; and numbering the tents onward from a large pavilion belonging to martigue, the fiftieth tent on that side, brought me to the spot where the baron de blancford was said to be lodged. we had ridden slowly along, skirting the bank of osiers which i have mentioned upon a little eminence between it and the enemy's camp, and stationing my arquebusiers and spare lances behind with the led horses, just covered by the brow, i dismounted with the party assigned to enter the camp. taking our sacks upon our backs, we approached the tents; and, to say the truth, the enterprise was both somewhat hazardous to the undertakers thereof if it failed, and somewhat rash, at all events. if we were taken--though we were in arms, and had every signal of the protestant party about us--it was not at all improbable that, in those days, we should be hanged at once for spies. however, we were not persons to be much daunted by the thought of consequences, and we walked boldly forward towards the tents. as we had skirted along from the village to the spot where i had halted my men, we had seen nothing to give us any alarm. the buzz, the noise, the merriment of a camp were heard, it is true, but were heard from a distance towards the centre; and where we were there reigned all the stillness and quietness of the suburb. no sight was to be seen indicating human life, except every now and then, beheld through the canvassed street, some tall form, magnified by the mist, either accidentally crossing the light of a watch-fire, or bending down to stir it into a brighter blaze. not a soldier who could help it put out the unsheltered head in that intense frost; and as the wine in the neighbourhood was cheap and abundant, every opportunity had been given by the generals to keep up the warmth of the body by deep potations taken in the tents and houses. fixing upon the tents which i conceived to be assigned to the baron de blancford, and which i had been told were six in number, i gave moric endem and andriot, who accompanied me, full directions what to do on their part, while i, with two of the other men, proceeded to the principal pavilion to liberate the baron and his family. bearing, then, our sacks upon our shoulders, we approached a little breastwork which seemed to have been constructed on some former occasion, and, entered a gap therein, when a soldier, who had been sitting in the ditch beyond, started up with his pike in his hand and demanded the password. i murmured out something that he did not hear, keeping myself prepared, however, in case he persisted, to cut him down at once; but he seemed little disposed to take any very exact note of the proceedings; and, seeing the sacks, he took us, as i hoped he would, for a foraging party, and consequently suffered us to pass without making me repeat the word more than once, though i cannot suppose that my reply was at all like it. as soon as we were within the camp, each man applied himself to his task, and, without taking any note of what the others were about, i, with two stout fellows behind me, approached the largest of the tents, and, throwing down our sacks, i pulled back the canvass and entered. the moment that i did so i found that i was so far right. the baron de blancford was before me, seated at a table with wine upon it and some dried fruits. he was quite alone, without even a page; but there was a division in the tent, and i concluded the rest of his family were in the chamber beyond. immediately on the entrance of myself and my two followers, he rose and looked at us with some surprise, demanding, "what want you, gentlemen! do you come from the duke de montpensier?" holding up my finger for the purpose of making him understand not to speak loud, i raised the visor of my casque, saying, "my lord, i heard you were a prisoner contrary to the tenour of the safe conduct which you bear, and therefore i have come at once to liberate you. horses and guards are waiting. if you choose to embrace the opportunity, you may be free at once." i never in my life beheld utter astonishment so completely depicted on a human countenance as on his. "henry de cerons," he exclaimed, gazing at me as if he could scarcely believe his eyes, "is this true? can this be true, or is it a dream?" "it is true, my lord," i replied, "perfectly true. but we have no time to lose if you would take advantage of the moment of escape. my men are preparing your servants, and i will ensure your perfect safety to the camp of the prince de condé." he still continued to gaze at me for a moment, as if he yet could scarcely convince himself that it was all true; but the next instant he asked, "and do you really still, henry, take such an interest in me and mine as to risk your life to free us?" "indeed, my lord, i do," i replied; "i believe you have not understood me rightly in former days; but my love and gratitude to you and others that are gone, believe me, are quite as lively as any one could require or wish." he seemed somewhat touched, and mused a moment; but, just as he was about to reply, the baroness entered from the inner part of the tent, and in an instant the evil spirit seemed to come over him again. "no," he said, "no, i must not and i cannot go. they detain me but till they ascertain the accuracy of my safe conduct. no, sir, i fear you have taken this trouble for nothing." "are you, my lord, quite decided?" i said; "for this can never be risked again. every moment that i stay here is, as you know, full of peril; but the moment is before you if you choose to seize it." while i was speaking, the baroness came round the table towards me, gazed in may face with a look of coquettish wonder, and, ere he could answer, exclaimed, "good heavens, this is the young gentleman who only suffered one to see him for a moment at blancford! and has he really had the generosity to come hither in order to rescue us?" "whatever he have come here for, madam," answered the baron, "he comes, as you well know, in vain; for, of course, we must remain with the king's troops till the authenticity of our safe conduct is ascertained." "nay, but speak gently, baron!" said the lady; "speak gently, for pity's sake. surely you are indebted to him." "i am," said the baron, "but--" at that moment, close to where we stood, burst forth the report of a pistol-shot, with some loud tongues speaking. "come you or not, my lord?" i cried; "this is the last moment." "of course i come not," replied the baron. "go, go, henry," he added, with a momentary emotion of feeling, "i thank you, i thank you, but i cannot come." i left the tent instantly with some disappointment, that even in that short moment i had not beheld louise. the moment i was beyond the canvass walls, however, the voice of moric endem met my ear, and i darted towards the spot where we had left the sentry. "this way, sir, this way," cried moric, as soon as he perceived me by the light of the fire; "i have been obliged to shoot the pikeman, and we shall have them all upon us in a minute. see, see, they are coming up there. are not your friends ready? then you must leave them, for, by heavens, we shall have hot work before we make our escape." "they do not come, moric, they do not come," i cried, hurrying on towards the gap. "could you not have dealt with him more quietly? firearms make such a noise." "he kept me off with his pike," said moric, speaking as we hurried along; "and, if i hadn't shot him, he would have stopped the lady." "what lady, in the name of heaven?" i exclaimed, pausing in astonishment. but moric seized me by the arm, saying, "come on, come on, my lord! there's no stopping to think now! i mean the lady andriot brought out." i now paused not an instant, but hurried on like lightning to the spot where the led horses were held. the mist prevented me from seeing anything till i was close upon them; but then, to my confusion and consternation, i beheld, seated on the pillion behind the lad andriot, the light, beautiful figure of louise de blancford, with no other covering against the cold of the night but a thick veil thrown over her head. "good god!" i exclaimed, running up, "they have made a mistake, louise! dear louise, your father will not come, and to take you back would cost my life and that of every one with me." "then you shall not go, henry," she said, instantly recognising me, and holding out her arms towards me; "you will take care of me, you will protect me, till i can go back to my father in safety." "but you are not fitly clothed, dear child, for such a night as this," i cried. "where is my horse? give me the cloak from the saddlebow." and, throwing it over her shoulders, i was clasping it around her neck, when moric endem shook me violently by the arm, exclaiming, "mount, mount, seigneur de cerons, and begone! they are already in the saddle and after us!" i sprang upon my horse's back in a moment, snatched my spear from one of the boys, and, turning to andriot, exclaimed, "do you know the way back to the village?" "every step, sir," he answered, boldly. "away, then!" i cried, "away, on before! you, moric, and the rest, accompany the lady and protect her. i will soon make these pursuers turn upon their steps." "i stay with you, sir," replied moric. "arlivault and the rest, on with the lady and the boy!" andriot, who was a capital horseman, dashed over the side of the hill, crossed the little stream, and away across the lea, while i, with moric, galloped down to the arquebusiers by the osier bank, and the body of lancers that i had left at the corner. we had scarcely reached them when the horses of the pursuers stopped upon the brow of the hill; and, though we could not see them, we could hear them shouting as they turned towards the camp, "torches! bring torches! they must be down here! they cannot escape. there are many on foot, for we saw them!" a minute after, a glare of light, as of a number of links and torches, appeared coming up from the camp, and we could see the figures of some fifteen or twenty men on horseback shining out upon the red back ground of the mingled mist and torchlight. "now, arquebusiers," i said, "give them one volley, then quick upon your horses, and off back to the village." the firearms were lowered in a moment, and, just as some fresh men, to the amount of twenty or thirty more, were coming over the slope, our osier bank blazed with a long line of fire. down went five or six of the coming horses and men; and the arquebusiers, springing on their horses, obeyed the orders they had received. "what say you, lances?" i cried. "we will never ride off without striking a stroke!" "upon them, upon them, lucky captain!" cried the men; and, though we had the hill against us, we galloped up with our lances levelled against the enemy, who were already in a state of hesitation and confusion from the unexpected fire they had encountered, and who began to fly at the very sound of charging horse, which they could not see sufficiently to distinguish the numbers. in this terrible state we drove them in, one tumbling over the other, horses and torches, officers and men, all full well frightened out of their wits, and more than one meeting the fate of a coward by the stroke of a lance in the back. one man had brought out, it would seem, with him the cornet of his troop, and had very nearly got into the gap in safety. but i was up with him just as he was struggling to push his way forward before the other fugitives, and i caught hold of the standard pole. raising the staff of my lance in my hand, i struck him a blow upon the cowardly head that felled him to the earth. "here, take the cornet, moric," i cried. "and now, my men, we will wish them good-night." a loud laugh burst from those who heard me, which, i believe, gave to the flyers a greater idea of our being perfectly secure in our numbers than any other part of the affray, and i heard afterward that it was reported in the camp of the duke d'anjou that i had beat up the quarters of la valette with five hundred men. we then passed the stream and the osier bank in safety; and whether we were farther pursued again or not during that night, i cannot tell. with the horse-arquebusiers we easily came up, for they had lingered a moment or two on the opposite slope, with some anxiety about our fate; but we rode on for a considerable way afterward without seeing anything of louise or her escort, and i began to feel some apprehensions lest they should have missed their way. the fog was increasing in density, the frost was most intense, and, though more than once we halted to listen if horses' feet could be distinguished, not a sound broke the stillness of the night. we had ridden about a league and a half, and it now, for a moment, became a question whether we were ourselves on the right road or not; but the unfailing sagacity of moric endem pointed out marks which proved that we were not mistaken. there was a tree here that looked like an old sniffing woman, with a bottle under her arm; there was a small _maiterie_ there, with some trees round it, which looked like a partridge garnished with endive; and on we went in perfect security upon our road for two or three miles farther. "hark!" cried moric endem, as we were going over a gentle slope. "there was a pistol-shot far off to the left. it may be a signal that they have lost their way." we halted and listened; and as the wind, though very light, was from that side, i thought i heard the sound of horses' feet. i bade them then fire an arquebus in return, and two minutes after another pistol-shot was heard, which at once confirmed the supposition of moric endem. turning our horses that way with a shout and a halloo, we rode on as fast as we could, and, at the distance of about two miles to the left of the right road, we came up with a party which proved to be that we were in search of. riding up to the side of louise, i bestowed not a few harsh words upon master andriot for having misled the party; and then, taking louise's hand in mine, i said everything i could say, in order to put her mind at ease, that the circumstances permitted, being surrounded by a number of people who heard every word that was spoken. her hand was like a piece of ice; and i found that she was suffering much from the intense cold; yet how to assist her i could not tell. i became, i confess, greatly alarmed about her. nor were my fears without some foundation, for two or three days before i had seen the hands of one of our men so completely frostbitten as to require the amputation of two of the fingers. nothing, however, was to be done but to ride on as fast as possible, and yet we were now so far from the road that the time of our journey to the village must necessarily be lengthened, and was, in some degree, uncertain. after riding on for about three miles more, however, i saw a long, irregular building on the left, and, on a nearer approach, found that it was one of those large granaries or barns which are found scattered about so frequently in poitou and sainctonge at great distances from any habitable spot. though it was a miserable shelter enough, yet, as it promised to afford us a covering against the intense cold, i turned our horses' heads thitherward, saying that, at all risks, we must break it open in order to obtain some shelter for the young lady. not a little to my satisfaction, however, the door was found unlocked, and the place completely vacant; and, on entering, we found that it was divided into two by a wooden partition, which separated a small space, in the shape of an ordinary room, from the great barn and threshing-floor. this we discovered by lighting two or three coils of match that we had brought with us; and, lifting louise from her horse, i carried her into the inner room in my arms, for she was so stiff with the cold that she could hardly move. soldiers may, and, doubtless, have a multitude of faults; but the tenderness and care which they can sometimes exhibit towards the weak and the suffering, forms a strange contrast with the savage fury they display under excitement. nothing could exceed the kindness, the diligence, the attention with which they crowded round to give assistance to poor louise, one cheering her with a kindly word, another bringing in the pillions to make a comfortable seat for her, a third rushing in with his arms full of apple-branches, which he had torn down from the neighbouring trees, and which, placed on a hearth that we found in the inner room, soon raised a cheerful and a blazing fire. moric endem, for his part, brought from his saddlebow an appendage without which he never travelled, and which, on the present occasion, proved of the utmost service. this was a gourd, dried in the form of a bottle, and filled with excellent wine, and i insisted upon louise drinking some, which, i believe, more than anything, prevented her from suffering severely. some more piles of wood were soon brought in, together with other cloaks; and moric and the rest, having seen that everything had been done to make louise as comfortable as the circumstances admitted, retired into the larger division of the barn, to provide, as best they might, for the passing of a long winter's night, moric leading the way, and saying, "better leave the seigneur and his cousin alone. i dare say they have a great deal to say to each other." "is he her cousin?" i heard one of the men say as they went out, turning at the same time to andriot; "i thought most likely he was her lover." "he is her cousin," replied andriot. "you might almost call them brother and sister, indeed, for they have been like such all their lives." i had, indeed, always felt so towards louise de blancford; i had loved her as a very dear sister, with whom no word had ever been exchanged but that of kindness and affection, and such had been simply my sensations till the moment when, quitting her father's house, i sought my own fortunes in the wide world. i have said that then a dream came up before my eyes; that a vision of future happiness connected itself with the remembrance of louise, that i felt that i could not be happy, that i could not even figure to myself a state of happiness without the dear, the beloved companion of my infancy and my youth. from that moment new and deeper feelings began to mingle with the memory of louise; hopes and visions, and fancies bright and enchanting, dreams of joy and satisfaction in meeting her again; aspirations to conquer every difficulty and overcome all resistance, till i had raised myself high for her sake. was this love, or merely a dream of the fancy--a boyish fondness for the girl that had been brought up with me? i cannot well tell, but i think not; for love can have no greater intensity of regard and affection than i felt towards louise de blancford: imagination might gild it, but does not imagination gild love also? it wanted something, indeed. i had looked upon louise with fondness, i can scarcely say that it was with admiration, for i had been so much accustomed to the sight of her beauty that i did not know how beautiful she was, even as a girl, till afterward, in comparing the beauty of others whom i saw with her image in my memory, i found that there was none at all like her. if there was anything wanting, however, to make that which i felt towards her love of the deepest, the most intense, the tenderest, the most passionate nature, it was wanting no longer after that night; the dear embrace which she had given me when first we met; the touch of her hand when we came up with her after the little skirmish; the holding her in my arms and to my bosom as i carried her from her horse into the building; the anxiety for her, the fear, the tenderness, the care, gave warmer, nearer, more engaging, if not more intense sensations to my affection for her; and from that moment i felt i loved her with all the fire and energy of passion. by the warmth of the fire louise soon began to revive, her eyes to sparkle brightly again, the natural colour to come into her lips and cheeks, the icy hand to grow warm and soft. she had been scarcely able to speak when we entered, but now she answered my eager words kindly though briefly, and added a bright smile, and let her hand press mine, to thank me more than she was able to do in words. oh! how beautiful did she look then, as gradually the bright returning stream of life flowed more rapidly through her veins, and every moment seemed to bring out some new loveliness. i cannot but think that so must have looked the ivory statue of the greek sculptor, when his prayer of love was heard, and it was kindled into sudden being. she was changed, much changed since last i saw her: she was now just sixteen; and what a difference one year will make at that period of life! every alteration had been an addition to the beauty that she possessed before: she was now a woman, when i had left her a girl, and the brightness of perfection had been added to the rich promise of beauty. she seemed not to see or to feel that there was any change in me; the endearing names which we had used towards each other in youth were still employed; the terms of love and deep affection were nothing new to us, and nothing strange; and while i called her dear louise--my own louise--my sweet, dear girl, and every name expressive of the fondest affection, it seemed all quite natural, and she murmured in reply, "dear, dear henry, how glad i am to see you again!" i may own it, for it was all harmless and pure, my lips were pressed on hers more than once, and her hand remained clasped in mine, while her head leaned upon my bosom. the casque i had laid aside at my first entrance; the iron cuirass soon became a load to me, and i threw it off also; and, smiling at me as i did so, she said, "ah, henry, you now look more as you did at blancford." i sat down beside her on the ground, near the fire, and chafed her hand, which was still cold, though not so intensely so as before, and in about an hour she was nearly well again. it seemed to me, however, that, as she recovered from the effects of the cold, she became somewhat thoughtful, and she asked we many questions about the adventures of that night--whether i had seen her father, and what he had said. i told her all exactly as it had happened; but still she seemed anxious, and i said, "it will be easily explained, dear louise, and your father will understand in a moment that it was impossible to return when the alarm was once given." "i am afraid," she said, hesitating, "i am afraid that the baroness will say everything that is cutting and unkind. i know what she will say quite well. she will say that i came away with you willingly enough, for she used always to speak in that manner at blancford after you went, and would never hear me mention your name, or look at all thoughtful, without saying she was sure i wished to go and join you. she thus tried very much to make my father angry with me; but still he was not angry." "and did you ever wish to come and join me, louise!" i said. there was a slight blush came into her cheek, but she answered at once, "i wished every day that you were there, henry; for i have never had a happy hour since you were gone. we could not have been so happy, indeed, as we used to be, but still we might have had a few sweet hours together; but now i am afraid--though i am sure i do not know what harm there is in being with you--she will say everything that is unkind if she finds that i am away with you, alone, for many days." "do not be afraid, sweetest," i replied; "to-morrow we shall arrive at our own camp, where you will find good dame marguelette and monsieur la tour. under their protection no one can say anything; and for the night, dearest louise, you shall be under mine, and let the man who dare say that i do not protect you rightly." "oh, that you will, that you will," she said; "i have not the least fear, henry, with you; and i am sure, if good monsieur la tour be there, i shall like being with you both much better than being near the baroness." our conversation was interrupted by some one knocking at the door; and, bidding him come in, moric endem presented himself, accompanied by andriot and a good farmer of the country, whose face was somewhat pale, rather with surprise than fear, and who looked round the apartment with an inquiring glance, as if asking what he was to meet with next. they were all loaded with different sorts of provisions, however, and it soon appeared that moric, well knowing that there must be some farmhouse at not many miles' distance from the barn, had set out in search of one with andriot, and a sufficient number of the soldiery to give force to his entreaties for hospitality. the farm had been found more easily than they expected; the farmer and his wife were roused; and on the representation that there was a young lady in want of food and assistance, joined to a promise of prompt payment, the farmer was easily induced to rise, and bring forth everything that his house contained which could afford us food or comfort. heaps of blankets and coarse woollen cloths, piles of straw and hay, several large bottles and stoups of wine, an immense pie not yet broken into, and sausages and _andouillettes_, with bread, and a jar of baked apples, had been brought down by the different men for our comfort and consolation in the barn. it was about two miles, they said, to the farmhouse; and the good farmer offered, with every show of readiness, to provide louise with a lodging there till the next morning. at first the impression on my mind was, that, notwithstanding the cold walk or ride which she must take, it would be better for louise, in every point of view, to go up to the farm at once. but i saw by the sign the man made on entering the room in which we were, that he was a catholic. i remembered the proximity of the catholic army too, and that it would be extreme cruelty to order any of the men, in such a night as that, to keep guard round the house. i therefore thanked him for his offer, but declined it; and, after having paid him handsomely for his trouble and attention, saw him depart, but not without bidding moric endem take some heed of which way he turned his steps. my next care was to make a sort of temporary bed for my sweet cousin; and then, having taken what portion of the provisions we wanted, and distributed the rest among the soldiery, i supped gayly and happily with louise, and passed nearly two hours in conversation, mingling sad things with sweet ones, with many an affectionate word between. it was evident to me that louise was unconscious of any change in her own feelings towards me, or in mine to her; and i blessed that unconsciousness, for it suffered a thousand little tender tokens of affection to display themselves openly in her conduct, which might have been driven back into the shy recesses of the heart had she known the full strength of her own sensations towards me. the only thought that seemed to have given her uneasiness, had been altogether removed by my telling her that we should join good la tour on the following day; and the joy of our meeting again seemed checkered by nothing but some timid fears lest we should be pursued and overpowered by some force from the catholic camp. thus passed the time brightly and happily, till at length the chimes of a distant clock, though we could hear it but faintly, told that one hour had passed after midnight. rest, i knew, was needful to her, and i spread out the cloaks and blankets on the straw, so as to ensure that no cold should there visit those young, tender limbs, and piled up a quantity of wood upon the hearth, assuring the long continuance of the fire by burying a considerable part in the ashes. i then took louise in my arms and kissed her, wishing her good-night; but she seemed somewhat frightened at the idea of my leaving her, asking why i could not stay beside her, and sleep by the fire too. i could have stayed and watched her slumbers with the greatest pleasure; but i would not have it said by any one that such had been the case. the men were still talking together in the next chamber; the door i had purposely left ajar; and pointing out to louise that the only window was up near the roof, through which no one could pass, i told her that i would lay myself across her door till the morning, so that she might be sure no one could come in. "dear louise," i said, "i must not stay, i ought not to stay with you." i again held her for a moment to my heart; the colour came up brightly into her cheek, and she hid her face for a moment on my bosom. "thank you, henry, thank you," she said, when she raised her head, but still leaving her hand in mine. "you are good as well as kind." and from that moment, though she did not love me less, louise felt that we could no longer be brother and sister to each other. chapter xii. it was with a feeling of some gladness that, after a long and, to my fair louise, somewhat fatiguing march, i at length saw the camp of the reformed army occupying a position not very different from that in which it had been placed when i left it. the convenience of the troops had of course been consulted, and the greater part of the army had been put into quarters, either in the town of loudun, or in the villages round about. three or four of these villages to the southeast of loudun had indeed been converted into a sort of detached camp, being united by long lines of tents, which served the soldiery for many of the occupations of the day; and here i saw the colours of the prince de condé hurrying about, so that it was to the centre of this part of the army that i directed my progress, knowing that there my own tents and baggage would be found. the frost was somewhat less intense, and the sun shining clear and bright, when my little cavalcade approached a battery of three small pieces of artillery which defended the principal entrance of the village that formed the centre. it was a gay and cheerful scene; strife for a time had ceased, and the soldiers were amusing themselves, as best they might, in various manners, though just on the outside of the camp the amusements that were going on were certainly all of an athletic kind, for it needed the most robust exercise to make the blood circulate freely in the terrible cold of that year. a considerable number of officers and gentlemen were gathered together near the battery i have spoken of, looking out over the wintry scene before them; and as my coming formed a little incident in the somewhat monotonous life they had led for the last two days, five or six of those who knew me came forth to shake hands, and to congratulate me on my safe return. "well, fortunate de cerons," cried one, looking somewhat earnestly at louise, who had drawn the veil down over her whole head and face as we approached, "you have made a fair booty, as usual." he spoke with a smile, but i replied, "i sent all the booty that i did get back to the camp the day before yesterday; but all that was found was in the enemy's tents, i believe. i have been lucky enough, however, to rescue my fair cousin, mademoiselle de blancford, from the hands of the catholics, who had taken her prisoner; so i must see where i can find some sort of comfortable quarters. you have no idea, monsieur de luze, where my people are with the baggage?" "oh, the prince de condé has taken especial good care of you," said the other, laughing; "he has given you the house of a fat farmer there up at the end of the village, and a cottage close by it for your people. montgomery wanted it, and half a dozen others; but he said you had done him as much service that night by your army of baggage-wagons on the hill as if you had brought him up ten thousand men; and therefore, having sent you to follow the enemy, he would be your quartermaster himself." i thanked him for his information, and was riding on, but another officer stopped me, putting his hand upon the bridle, and asking, "do you always go to war, brave de cerons, with a _femme-de-chambre_ in your suite!" my cheek began to glow, for i thought he had applied that term to louise: but he added immediately, "i do not know whether you are aware of it, but three or four _femmes-de-chambre_, with five or six blue-nosed serving-men, and a good old clergyman, who preached us an excellent sermon yesterday, have taken possession of your quarters, right or wrong, though the prince refused them to me and to montgomery." "that is your father's servants, and la tour, and your own woman, louise," i said. "we must ride on and find them out. they will all be right glad to see you safe." but i was destined to be stopped once more; for one of the officers i had just passed called after me as the troop rode in, "hi, de cerons! hi! where did you get this that the man is carrying? why, it is martigue's own cornet!" "it is his no longer," i answered: "but the fact is, i beat up their quarters in their camp last night. they came out after me, and we drove them back again, taking their cornet." "you are certainly the luckiest man in the camp," cried another. but, without waiting for any more observations, i rode on as quickly as possible towards the house which had been indicated as my quarters. it proved, however, that eager eyes had been looking for my return; and, before i had reached the farmhouse, good la tour was out and through the little gate of the courtyard to meet me. the old man's face sparkled with joy when he saw me, but ten times more when he saw louise along with me; and he exclaimed, embracing me as closely as my iron covering would permit, "i should never do for a soldier, my dear henry, i should never do for a soldier. i have been more anxious than you can conceive; every half hour, every moment, i thought that it was either you returned, or some one to say that you had been killed or wounded." "oh, you would soon forget such things, my good friend," said i. "but, dear la tour, here is a poor girl who wants not a little comfort and consolation; so i will leave her with you for one hour, to tell her own story and mine too, and go and repeat my proceedings to the prince de condé." "ay, you must do so quickly," replied the old man: "for i hear he sets out for niort either this night or early to-morrow morning. but i will take care of this dear child till you come back, and--see, here comes marguelette to welcome her mistress." while marguelette was literally shrieking with joy and surprise, i gave orders to moric endem to lodge the men, and to entertain the horse arquebusiers who had been our companions, at my expense, and then, with a boy to guide me, and one of my troop, carrying the cornet we had taken, behind me, i hurried on with all speed to an old sort of chateau, called the _manoir_, where the prince had taken up his quarters. there were people hurrying about the place, preparing, it seemed, for departure; but, on my being admitted, i found him sitting calmly with de luze, who had joined him, and given the news of my return before my appearance, together with the famous montgomery, better known for accidentally killing henry ii., king of france, than for all the bold, gallant, and chivalrous actions he performed, and one or two other gentlemen, all of whom looked as merry as might be. "you left us laughing as heartily as we could, monsieur de cerons," said the prince, "over the affair of the valets and the baggage-wagons, and your most excellent and successful stratagem. one of monsieur de coligny's band took an officer attached to the duke of anjou, and from him we have learned that the sight of that third camp, and a skirmish which took place in front of it towards morning, was the absolute cause of the enemy decamping in such haste. but how have you fared since you went! we have taken care of you, you see, in your absence." "why, i have fared extremely well, sir," i replied; "and have brought you a cornet which we took, and which some one says is martigue's." "oh, it cannot be martigue's," cried the prince de condé. "he would have charged to regain it if it had cost him his life." "but it was not taken in the pursuit," i said: "it was taken last night. i determined to give them an _alerte_ on their right wing, and was in their camp for some minutes." "are you mad, de cerons?" exclaimed the prince de condé. "why, gentlemen, i thought i was the maddest man in the army, and this good youth is determined to outdo me, it seems. give them an _alerte_, too, with less than a hundred and fifty men! pray how many did you bring back?" "every one i took, your highness," i replied, "and but with one slight wound among them. it seems lucky that i have brought back martigue's cornet, or i should not get credit for my tale, however simple it might be." "oh, you have full credit," replied the prince de condé; "and i was proposing now, as the only reward that could be given you for your service three nights ago, to arm you a knight at once; but montgomery asked me to stop a day or two." "may i ask why?" i demanded, turning towards montgomery with some surprise. "with no ill meaning, i can assure you, monsieur de cerons," replied montgomery. "i thought, if you were knighted for that exploit, the wags of the court would call you the knight of the valets. "they must give him another name now, however," replied the prince de condé; "there lie the spurs, and he shall have them on his heels this night. they may then call him the chevalier _alerte_, if they like." i thanked the prince, as may easily be supposed: for i imagine the time never was, and am certain it never will be, when any man of honour and of courage could feel the touch of the knightly sword upon his shoulder without sensations of joy and redoubled energy. i thought fit, in the first place, however, to let his highness know upon what occasion i had so boldly entered the enemy's camp, lest the personal object that conducted me there might be considered as a diminution of any honour attached to the act. i accordingly gave a full account of the whole transaction, which seemed, indeed, rather to augment than decrease the approbation of the prince. he paused and mused for some time, however, over the refusal of the baron de blancford to seize the opportunity of escape. "it has long been reported," he said at length, "that the baron is wavering in his faith both to god and to his fellows in arms. on my honour! it were but right to detain this fair lady as a hostage for her father's conduct. what say you, de cerons?" he added, with a smile: "will you be her guardian?" "i beseech your highness," i replied, "not to think of such a thing. indeed, i intended to ask that your highness would send a flag to the catholic camp to inquire whether the baron de blancford is detained there as a prisoner or not, and to demand that, if he be not there as a captive, a safe conduct may immediately be granted to his daughter and his domestics now in this camp, in order that they may join him without farther delay. i will, at the same time, write to him, explaining the cause of his daughter's temporary absence; and i trust that your highness will not refuse me this request." "certainly not, de cerons," replied the prince. "but, if i do write, you must not expect me to spare your good cousin, for his conduct has been most base in the whole of this affair, and he must hear that we consider it such." "oh, in that matter be it as your highness pleases," i replied; "i have neither wish, nor reason to wish, that he should be spared; though perhaps, my lord, there may be causes for his conduct that we do not know." "so shall it be, then, de cerons. i will give the order this night. but, by my faith! you must see to the execution of it yourself, for i set out to-morrow morning, two hours before daylight, for niort, where i have business enough to do, in all conscience, during the five or six days that i shall be absent, to wring money from hard-handed usurers, and assistance from that great but stony-hearted woman, elizabeth of england, who sees right willingly the internal feuds of france, but will give no aid to those whose part she pretends to espouse till they are driven to the last extremity." "i had hoped, sir," i replied, "from what i heard from good martin vern, the merchant, that your highness was likely to obtain some supplies more easily." "he has done somewhat, he has done somewhat," replied the prince; "and he deals liberally himself; but he is obliged to negotiate on my part with jews and lombards innumerable, and he has now gone to paris with but small hope of getting their bills discounted except at exorbitant interest." the news of martin vern having quitted the camp without giving me any acknowledgment whatever for the money he had received from me, was, as may be imagined, not very satisfactory to me; and i remained musing for a moment or two, while the prince wrote the order that i had demanded, and made some memorandums in regard to what was to be done in carrying it into execution. "come, de cerons," he said, in a light tone, after he had done, "you seem sad, my good friend. kneel down here. we will make a knight of you before we part, as young knights, they say, are always gay-hearted. condé shall strike the stroke, montgomery shall buckle on the spurs, and, lo! where comes d'andelot, who was dubbed by the hand of the great francis himself on his first field of battle, to buckle on the sword." certainly it could scarcely be by hands more distinguished that the ceremonies of knighthood were performed, and i might well go back to my quarters with a heart rejoicing in having taken a step far higher than any i had previously reached in the career which i had chosen for myself. out of the small stock that remained to me, i gave a hundred crowns among the men as a largesse on my knighthood, and then immediately sought the room in the farmhouse where louise had remained in conversation with good old la tour and dame marguelette. their rejoicing for her arrival had by this time poured itself forth, and they now all gathered round me with the strange mixture of feelings which i knew existed in their bosoms, causing an odd confusion of manner, which can only be understood when we recollect that those who now surrounded me remembered me chiefly as a boy--even as a child, whom they had been accustomed to direct, exhort, and to control, and that now the very same people found that child commanding, providing for, and protecting them with a tone of independence and authority, and proofs of power and right strangely opposed to all their former ideas. the old pastor, though he certainly did not look upon me still as a boy, could scarcely understand how the men that he saw around me came to pay such instant deference to my orders; how one waited for my casque, another took off my cuirass, another came to me for one direction, and another on something else; and dame marguelette, for her part, would, i believe, willingly have patted my head when the helmet was taken off, and she saw again the brown curls that she used to twine round her fingers in my infancy. louise alone seemed fully to look upon me as a man and a commander; but we must remember that on my arm had she leaned from her own childhood; that i had not only been her companion, but her counsellor and her protector; and that, side by side with my greater strength and powers, she had grown up like a violet under some taller shrub, shaded but sheltered. i found good old la tour thoughtful, very thoughtful; and at the meal which ensued, i remarked that he frequently laid down his knife and spoon, and fell into a deep revery. louise, on the contrary, was bright and happy, full of joy and satisfaction at being once more amid those whom she loved best; and though, ever since the preceding night, a slight shade of timidity--timidity shall i call it? no, it was not timidity, nor exactly tenderness perhaps, but a depth, a profundity, a feelingness of tone--mingled with all she said to me. though the colour in her cheek became somewhat brighter, and her eye acquired a calm intensity of look when she spoke to me long upon any interesting subject, yet it was evident that the change in her feelings towards me was, if i may use the term, less complete, even though greater, than with the two others; she beheld me with sensations which were only the expansion of what had gone before; they saw me under a point of view altogether altered; i saw the change in her, perhaps, in one little trait more than in anything else. with natural, vanity i happened, during the meal, to mention that the prince de condé--at that time the great hero of the protestant party--had just conferred upon me the order of knighthood with his own hand. louise started up with her eyes and her cheeks all glowing, and with a look of joy and delight that can never pass from my mind. the tears of deep satisfaction were almost overflowing her eyes, and the words of congratulation were almost overpowering to her; but she sat down again immediately, and only held out her hand to me. the time had been when she would have cast her arms around my neck, and kissed me while she wished me joy. after supper i went round the quarters which had been assigned to me, and concluded all my arrangements; and louise, fatigued as she had been during the preceding night and day, retired to rest soon after my return. dame marguelette, and one of the maids who had been with her, slept in the same chamber, and retired at the same time; and good old la tour and i were left alone. i was certainly altogether unprepared for the conversation that was to ensue. "henry," he said, as soon as we were quite alone and the door shut, "henry, i am anxious for you and for louise, most anxious for louise." and, as he spoke, there was a sad and foreboding look about his eyes which showed that the anxiety that he spoke of was deeper than the lips. "indeed!" i replied, with a thousand vague and unreal fears excited in a moment: "and what makes you so anxious, my dear friend? why are you troubled, la tour? i have seen, indeed, that it was so all supper-time, though i knew not why." "oh henry," cried the old man, "does not your own heart tell you why? do not your own feelings at this moment?" "no, indeed, my dear sir," i replied, "i have no such feelings at all, no such sensations; i know not what you allude to. it might, perhaps, be wrong to bring louise away, and i would not have done it if there had been any choice. but she must have explained to you that it was done without my knowing it, and, once done, impossible to take her back." "it is not that at all, it is not that at all, henry," replied la tour; "it is--it is," he continued, hesitating, "it is that you love louise, henry, and that," he paused for a moment or two, and then added, "it is useless to conceal it; you know it already; you guess it, you see it, even if she have not acknowledged it to you with her own lips; it is that you love louise, henry, and that she loves you." i might have replied that it was quite natural that it should be so; i might have replied that we had always loved each other, and that he knew it; but i would not have equivocated with that straightforward, honest, kind-hearted old man for the world, and i therefore answered him. "is that the cause, my good friend, why you are so grieved? in truth, i see not why it should so grieve you; nothing can be more natural than that it should be as it is. i affect not to deny that i love louise to the full extent of your meaning. whether she loves me or not--though i do believe and hope she does--i can in no degree tell, for we never have spoken to each other on such a theme; but, even taking it for granted that she does, where is the terrible evil which should make our best and oldest friend look sad, and evidently feel pained, to behold two people, to whom he has been a father indeed, love each other mutually, dearly, and well?" "it is because i love you both," replied la tour. "you have been frank and honest with me, henry, and your confidence shall never be ill-rewarded, shall never be betrayed. but, oh, my son! how little do you yet know of the world's ways! you may have some small experience in arms; you may divine what other men learn of the military art; but of the world, henry, of the world, you as yet know little, or you would at once see what it is that grieves me in your mutual love; what it is that will render it nothing but misery to you both. say, henry, what is it that you can expect, but that you should see the hand of louise bestowed upon some other man when her heart is yours? what is then to be the result?" "but, my dear friend," i replied, "let me ask you, in return, one question. why may i not obtain that hand myself?" "you, henry! you!" exclaimed the good pastor; "that, indeed, is a vain imagination! can you entertain it for a moment? do you think her father, wealthy, powerful, proud, will wed her to one who has nothing but his sword to depend upon, however good that sword may be? ask yourself, is such a thing probable? is it possible?" "at present, certainly not," i replied; "but louise is still young, quite in her youth. i have already been successful in an extraordinary degree; why may i not, step by step, advance in the same course, till a high point, both of fame and of wealth, is obtained? why may not i, though without the birth of a condé indeed, raise myself as high as he has done, who set out in life poorer even for a prince than i am for a gentleman! why may not i build up a new house, like my great ancestor, the count de cerons, who founded the noble house to which i belong with nothing but his sword?" "true, he did so," replied la tour, "and you may do the same; but recollect, henry, that your grandfather alienated the estates and barony of blancford to a younger brother, to support the cause for which he fought; that your father did the same, and that the trade of war, like every other trade, is now great gain, and now heavy loss, but with this difference, that accident in war mingles in a tenfold proportion, and that it is a game in which there is always an important and heavy chance against the player. but, granting that fortune favours you to the utmost and to the end; that you acquire wealth, honour, and distinction; granting, too--which may well be granted--that louise would willingly wait till all this was accomplished, think you that her father will wait? think you that he will patiently reserve his daughter for one towards whom he cannot help feeling respect and esteem, but for whom he has shown no great affection throughout the whole course of his life? can you say, henry, to put it in one word, can you say that he will not to-morrow promise the hand of louise to another? can you be sure that he has not already promised it?" there was something in the old man's manner which seemed to imply more than his words expressed; and, determined to come to the point at once, i rose and took his hand in mine. "what is it you mean, la tour?" i said. "there is something you would warn me of; there is something upon your mind. speak out--speak plainly. we have always been honest and true towards each other; let us be so, i beseech you, still." "there is no reason why i should not be so toward you," replied la tour; "no pledge has been extorted from me, no promise of secrecy has ever been asked. the baron, then, does destine louise's hand to another. he has even, i believe, promised it." his words fell like drops of molten fire upon my heart; they were agony to me; they were beyond all agony i had ever felt before. "to whom?" i said, "to whom?" "to the seigneur de blaye," replied the good clergyman; "a catholic, a persecutor, an enemy to the faith that we ourselves profess, but wealthy, powerful, handsome, brave, nobly connected--" i stamped my foot angrily upon the ground, exclaiming, "a libertine, a debauchee, a sot, and a fool!" "indeed!" exclaimed the clergyman. "but how do you know all this, henry de cerons? let not jealousy, my son, ever tempt you to take away the reputation of another; there is a great commandment against it. how can you know all this? i demand, henry." "because," i replied, "he was my prisoner and my guest for several days, and during that time he lived a life of folly, intemperance, and vice, which would have shamed the lowest debauchee in the most corrupt capital of europe." "alas! alas!" said the old clergyman, "you now do make me tenfold unhappy, indeed, henry. i know you would not pervert the truth on any account, and yet i would fain believe that this terrible tale might be untrue." "it is as true as i live!" i replied, vehemently. "does louise herself know of this proposed marriage? has she ever seen the man they seek to make her wed?" "never," replied la tour; "nor does she know aught of it. he is distantly related to the baroness. she, doubtless, has managed the whole; and all i know is, that, on the application of this young lord, the baron replied that his daughter was still too young to wed, or even to think of marriage. what more he added i know not, but i understood that expectations, if not promises, were given." "they are promises that shall never be fulfilled!" i replied, seating myself more calmly at the table. "he shall never marry louise de blancford, were he as wealthy as an indian king!" "how so?" demanded the good pastor. "think what you say, my son, think what you say. what should stay him, henry de cerons?" "this right hand," i replied, pressing it firmly on the table; "and now, my good father, in this business i must act without control. willingly will i ask your advice, willingly will i listen to your counsels, but i must determine upon the results myself; and remember, in anything that passes between us on this subject, or anything connected therewith, as a friend, as a preceptor, as a monitor, i expect, and shall receive your assistance whenever it agrees with your own views of right and wrong to give it; and as a christian pastor and an honest man, i expect the most profound secrecy in all things. i know that with you i shall have no double dealing or prevarication, no pious frauds, as i might expect among the priests of our enemies and persecutors." "but what do you propose to do, henry?" demanded the pastor. "what am i to suppose are your intentions?" "i know not as yet, good friend," i replied, "and i even now hesitate whether to tell louise at once what are my changed feelings towards her, and to ascertain what are her feelings towards me, or to leave matters to take their course." "nor know i well what to advise, my son," replied la tour. "it is woful and terrible to think that one so beautiful, so pure, so innocent, should be forced to wed one of a different creed, who, in the very first instance, will doubtless pervert, or try to pervert, her religious principles, and then, perhaps, the purity of her mind; who will ultimately neglect, abandon, perhaps ill-treat her, and who will never, can never make her happy. it is a sad fate, de cerons, a sad and terrible fate, especially for one who loves another." "can i feel certain that she loves me?" i said, more musing than questioning the good man. "enough to make her unhappy with another, am i very sure," replied la tour; "and that is one reason, henry, why i am almost inclined to counsel you to speak with her on the subject of your mutual affection. she may feel deeply that she loves you, but may not discover how much till she has become the bride of another. i, of course, can never counsel her to disobey her father, unless i were to see, beyond all doubt and casuistry, that her soul's salvation was endangered by it; but i think there might be a safeguard in knowing her own feelings towards you and yours towards her, which might guide her rightly even where i dare not counsel and you scarcely dare act--i know not, henry--yet i know not." "i will think of it, my good friend," i replied, "i will think of it often during the night; and i will endeavour, as far as possible, to cast away every selfish consideration; so fare you well for this evening, for i have duties that now call upon me." chapter xiii. i passed the most anxious and most restless night that i ever yet had known in life. new feelings had got possession of my heart, strong, violent, irresistible and thoughtful, watchful, unreposing, my mind remained active with many bitter and painful images, and with many wild and anxious thoughts. my determination, however, was taken ere i rose the following morning, nor was it taken without full consideration of the circumstances under which i was to act. had my cousin's conduct towards me, i asked myself, been such as to lay me under any bond of gratitude or tie of honour to sacrifice calmly all my own hopes of happiness in life, while at the same time i saw sacrificed the peace, the comfort, the temporal, perhaps the eternal repose of the being i most loved on all the earth? the answer was plain and straightforward; there was no such tie: and then, again, i thought of the baroness--not the second wife, but the first--of her who had been a mother to me--more than a mother; and i asked myself how all that i owed to her ought to affect my conduct towards her child. that, too, was soon determined. i felt a consciousness that i could make louise happy, that i could secure her peace and comfort, and that, if fortune were but added, there could be no danger or difficulty, no pain or anxiety within the common range of probabilities, that i could not guard her from and protect her against. was there anything, therefore, in the deep feelings of gratitude and love which i experienced towards the dead, which should forbid my making the attempt so to protect and shield the child of her who had conferred so many benefits upon me? was it not rather what i owed her, to endeavour, as far as heaven gave me power, to prevent my poor louise from being driven into a union with one who could make her only wretched; the pure tied to the impure, the innocent to the corrupt? again the answer was--yes! no one can say, when he argues with his own heart on a question where all its deepest feelings are interested--no one can say that simple, straightforward reason alone dictates the reply; nor can i say that it was so in the present instance. but still i had done my best to make it do so. i believed that i was right; i believed that there could scarcely be any farther question of what my conduct ought to be; and i determined, therefore, to tell louise of how i loved her; to inform her of my hopes and wishes for the future; not, indeed, to bind her by any promises, but to open her eyes, to satisfy myself as to the feelings of her heart, and then to leave her native strength of mind, her resolution and her love, to do the rest. with this resolution i rose at daybreak on the following morning. it was a clear, bright, cheerful day, and on my going my early rounds, i found the soldier charged to bear the flag of truce, with letters from the prince de condé to the duke of anjou, waiting for my farther orders. i instantly sat down and wrote the letter which i had promised to the baron de blancford, explaining in few and brief words what had happened in regard to louise, expressing my grief that she had been subjected to some inconvenience and fatigue, but making no excuse or apology whatever for an event which i did not think required any. having done this and despatched the messenger, i made some farther inquiries concerning the state of the army, perceiving that a large body of troops were moving to the left from the spot which had been assigned to us for our quarters, leaving only five or six hundred men in the hamlet. i now found that the troops i saw marching were destined to take up their quarters nearer loudun, in order to strengthen the centre of the position, as a violent fever had broken out among the soldiers from provence, which had occasioned a mortality of nearly two thousand men within a few days. our little hamlet was now comparatively deserted; a number of the officers had gone to niort with the prince de condé; and though montgomery remained in the command, he was the only man of any consequence left. after occupying myself with various military avocations, i returned, and found the rest of my little household up and waiting for me. good old la tour looked at me with grave and thoughtful eyes; but louise had risen refreshed and beautiful as the morning; and had there been any doubt or irresolution remaining in my mind, i do not believe that it would have resisted those bright looks. there was no irresolution, however, and immediately after our morning meal was over, i said, "come, louise, the day is most beautiful; good marguelette here will doubtless find you some better head-gear than that with which you travelled through that terrible cold night, and i will take you round the camp, to let you see more of the military world than perhaps you have ever seen yet." marguelette assured me that almost all the young lady's wardrobe was within immediate reach, for that the baron had gone off so hastily, he had taken little enough for the journey with him. louise, therefore, was soon equipped for her walk, and, leaning fondly on my arm, she went forth, walking with me from post to post for about half an hour. not knowing what was in my heart, she might, doubtless, wonder at the fits of silent thoughtfulness into which i fell, and, beginning to think that all went not well with me, she asked, with the sweetest and tenderest tones of her sweet and tender voice, what made me so sad, and why i did not tell my own louise. i replied that i would tell her presently, and, walking forth out of the hamlet, i led her past the old manoir, where the prince de condé had made his abode for a time, up the slope of the hill to a little wood of tall fir-trees, whose ever-green tops spread out till they met each other, although the bolls below were far apart, suffering the clear rays of the low winter sun to stream in over the red and yellow leaves which had fallen from the branches above, and thickly strewed the ground beneath. the day, indeed, was as bright as summer, and it was cheerful and refreshing too; but there was something which told that it was not summer; something in the aspect of the whole scene which gave a shade of thoughtfulness, if i may so call it, even to the brightness of the morning. the blades of grass upon the sides of the hill were all shining as if they had been decorated with gems; but one saw and felt that, like the blaze of light upon many another gem, the sunshine fell upon nothing but frostwork, and that everything was cold and frozen underneath. there was now no fog upon the ground, and through the clear, calm air the church of loudun and various other buildings in that small town were seen rising up in the distance, and we paused, and gazed over the scene around, without one sound breaking the wintry silence of nature. "how far is it to that town?" demanded louise, after gazing for some time. "nearly five miles, dear one," i replied. "how near it looks!" she said: "i should not have thought it were two." "it looks so near, dear louise," i replied, "from the clearness of the wintry air; and so it is, louise," i said, "with future as with distant things. to the calm, cold, icy eye of experience and reason, the future and distant times, the five or six years hence, look near as if we could touch them; the space between dwindles down to nothing, and the rest of life seems but as a moment: while, on the contrary, in the warm and sunny days of youth, the airy mist of passion, of fancy, and of expectation, throws every future thing far, far away, and the five or six years that lie between us and happiness seem a long age of wearisome expectation." she looked up in my face and smiled, saying, "i suppose it is so, henry. i know that since you went away from blancford, in thinking when i might probably see you again, the space has seemed interminable." "and, now that we have met again, louise," i said, "we are to part in a few short hours--to part, when to meet again?" she gazed down upon the ground, and sighed deeply; and i said, "you know, louise, the messenger has gone to the duke of anjou's camp, to demand a safe conduct for you and the rest to join your father?" "so marguelette told me," she replied; "oh, i hope he will not return immediately." "it will seem as but a moment to us, dear louise," i replied; "but as a short moment, and then you will leave me, and it may be years before we meet again; and perhaps by that time, louise"--my voice trembled, i believe, very much as i spoke--"and perhaps by that time you may be the bride of another." louise started and let go her hold of my arm, gazing up in my face with eager and intense looks, as if she had been startled from a dream by the horrible images that came across it. "oh, no!" she cried, somewhat reproachfully, "no, henry--no--no." her voice dropped as she slowly pronounced the words, and she fell into a fit of musing. "louise," i said, after having given her some time for thought, "do you know how i love you?" "oh yes, henry," she replied, looking up still very pale, "i know you love me." "but do you know how well i love you, louise?" i demanded. "do you know that i love you doubly, that i have loved you twice?" "twice!" she said, musing. "that is strange, henry. i think i know what you mean, too; and yet it is strange." "scarcely strange, dearest," i answered, "scarcely strange. you know i loved you well before i quitted blancford; dearly, most dearly, louise. but i love you differently now; better, more dearly, more warmly, more tenderly." i heard her breath come very thick as i spoke, and she leaned her hand upon my arm, still looking down, and saying, as if for the first time she was scanning her own feeling, "differently? oh yes--and i love you differently too." i threw my arm around her and drew her to my bosom, saying, "thank you, thank you, dearest louise, for that word. yet tell me, oh! tell me, what it is you feel towards me?" "i cannot," she said, pressing her glowing forehead against my breast, "i cannot tell you, henry. i scarcely know myself. i feel strangely, very strangely, but it seems as if to part with you again were the most terrible thing that could befall me." again i pressed her gently to my heart. "sit down here, louise," i said, "on these dry fragments of the fir-trees, and let us speak more calmly. look here, dear girl; this sword that you see is the sole inheritance of him who loves you better than life. already, however, that sword has raised him to some renown, and won him some wealth: on it he trusts for more: he trusts to win with it higher rank and station, fortune sufficient for a moderate ambition, and a right to demand the hand of her he loves. that, that, louise, is the end and object of all my endeavours; that is the hope that animates me, and will carry me on to greatness if i am permitted to indulge it. it is that hope which has made me what i now am; it is that hope which will make my efforts far greater: it is for your love, louise, that i strive; it is that you may be mine entirely, heart of my heart, and soul of my soul, that my arms may be your resting-place for life, and that no one may ever, ever tear you from my bosom. "oh, tell me, dear louise--give me that one bright consolation, that one surpassing motive for every kind of exertion--tell me, tell me, does the change which you admit has taken place in your feelings towards me, does it tend to the same as my own wishes; does it make you feel that you could be happy as mine--not as a sister, but as a bride--not as a mere companion, but as the one united to me for life, and through life, by every link of love in one, being the sister, the companion, the friend, the wife? oh, tell me, louise, tell me. is it so? does the change in your feelings towards me speak to your own heart, and say that you can love me with such love, ardent, deep, intense, passionate as my own?" louise did not answer--she could not answer--for some time; for the tears were rolling over her cheeks, the tears of strong emotion; but her hand was clasped in mine, her head leaned upon my shoulder. the cheek burned, the eyes were bent down, and the lip quivered; but there was not a sign of all the many which her demeanour gave that could teach me anything but hope; and yet i was impatient to hear more. i repeated my question in a different form; i kissed her cheek again and again; i urged her to speak. it was long ere she did so, however; till at length, looking up at me, she said, almost reproachfully, "oh, henry, henry, you know, you feel, you are aware, well, well aware, that i love you as deeply, truly, fully, as any woman can love man; that, had i my will, i would never part with you, i would never leave you. what can i say more?" "nothing, dearest, nothing," i replied; "you have said enough; you have made me happy, most happy; happier than i almost ever fancied i should be. and yet much remains, dear louise, before we can be fully happy together. i have to use every energy and every exertion to place myself in such a situation that i may rightly and wisely ask your hand. you, louise, may have fully as much to do on your part. ere you can be mine, they will press you to give your hand to others; they will command you, they will urge you--" "never, never!" cried louise, eagerly; "i will never hear them, i will never listen to them for a moment; from this instant, henry, i am yours; and i promise--" "nay, nay, dear louise," i said, "let me not bind you by any promise; that i have, as yet, no right to do." "you bind me by no promise, henry," she said, "but i bind myself. i will never listen to such a thing even for a moment, so let not that trouble your repose at any time. believe nothing that you hear of the kind; doubt not, fear not, dear henry. i am yours, and none but yours; when first you began to speak just now, and said you might perhaps find me the bride of another, though i had not thought of all this as i now have, yet i felt that it could never be so, and that never, never would you find me the wife of any one." we spoke longer upon the same theme, we dwelt upon our thoughts and feelings; agitation, and emotion, and timidity in some degree passed from louise's mind, and gradually she let me see more and more deeply into the recesses of her heart, and made me at each instant happier by showing that i was beloved as fully and deeply as i could wish. we lingered for a considerable time under those fir-trees; and then again we walked down the hill to the hamlet, but turned before we reached the camp, and walked some way farther round, and lingered still and turned again, and more than once hesitated, and paused, and spoke a few fond words more before we went back to that world between which and ourselves there was now drawn a thin and filmy screen, perceptible to none but ourselves, but yet sufficient to be a perfect separation. it seemed as if love was now at home in our mutual bosoms, and the casements of the heart were closed. good la tour was for the time our only confidant, if i may so call it; for in the evening he questioned me closely as soon as he found an opportunity, and i told him at once that i had spoken with louise upon the subject of my love, and that with joy unutterable i had found it was returned. i farther added, that i had bound her by no promise; that she was free from all but such engagements as her own heart imposed upon her; but that now to obtain her was the end and object of my existence, and that to him i trusted at least to throw some impediment in the way of her union with one where misery was the only fortune that she could expect. he said, in reply, that he could scarcely blame me for what i had done; he could scarcely approve either, he added, for there were so many contending considerations that he saw not what was the most fit plan to be adopted. in short, it was evident to me that the good man's sense of what was right towards louise and towards myself were struggling against ideas preconceived of what was right to the baron as a father. he saw evidently to what the baron's own conduct had led; to what consequences, fatal to his own peace and to the happiness of his family; and he evidently doubted my cousin's power and his inclination to conduct his child to happiness and to peace, though he dared not deny his right to direct her. the conversation was luckily soon terminated by the entrance of other persons, and the two days that followed passed without any material conversation between la tour and myself on the subject that was uppermost in both our thoughts. with louise those days passed in joy, mingled with that kind of gentle sadness which the knowledge that our hours of happiness were destined to be few, was well calculated to produce. each of us felt drawn more and more closely towards the other as the moments became few that we were to be together; the knowledge that we must soon part but increased the desire to remain, and gave at once delight and anxiety to our short communion. at length, however, the messenger arrived with the safe conduct; there was no farther delay to be gained; the period of louise's departure for the camp of the duke of anjou was fixed for the following morning early, and but a few hours remained ere we were to be parted for an indefinite length of time. there wanted but such a state and such a prospect to bring forth all louise's deep and fervid feelings. her affection, her love, were no longer concealed, were no longer veiled under any show of reserve. she wept at the thought of parting from me long and sadly; she felt it more difficult to bear than she had anticipated; and the only thing that seemed to comfort her was a promise that, by writing sometimes to her, and frequently to la tour, i would give her continual tidings of my proceedings and of my well-being. we passed a long evening, which, as our days of pleasure had been mingled with pain, now gave us hours of pain not unmingled with pleasure. at length the time came for her departure, and i mounted with a small body of my men to escort her till we were met by the party appointed to receive her. la tour, marguelette, and the rest of the old servants, with the baggage and all the rest of the things they had brought, followed in our train, and we rode slowly on, calmer, indeed, than we were the night before, but still sad. we talked, however, of the joy we had in meeting, of the happy days we had spent together, and we spoke of hopes and pleasures for future years, even while fears mingled with the hopes, and dark images of pain crossed the bright visions that we were inclined to indulge. thus we rode on, making the way which, if our wishes could have had effect, would have been interminable, far shorter than it might otherwise have seemed; and at length, before i thought that we could have gone above a quarter of the way, we saw upon the opposite slope of a valley we were crossing a considerable body of horsemen, bearing, like ourselves, a white flag in the midst of them. they halted as soon as they saw us, and, halting my men likewise, i rode forward alone, to make sure that we were right. the moment that this was perceived, two gentlemen came forth from the other party, the one a man pretty well advanced in years, and the other apparently a youth, whom, as he rode down the hill, i naturally enough concluded to be alfred de blancford, louise's brother; but i soon perceived that i was mistaken. it was a boy whom i had seen once before, but where i could not recollect. the elder of the horsemen i had never till then beheld, but from his dress and demeanour he was evidently a person of high distinction; and when we met at the bottom of the valley he saluted me with much courtesy, inquiring if i were the seigneur de cerons, and had escorted thither mademoiselle de blancford. i replied that such was the case, and begged to know if he was empowered to receive her from my hands, inquiring at the same time to whom i had the honour of speaking. "my name," he said, "is montpensier, and in the absence of the duke of anjou i am commander-in-chief of the army, with whom the baron de blancford sojourns at this moment. i took upon myself the task of meeting mademoiselle de blancford for various reasons, but for one especially. this young gentleman is my son, monsieur de cerons. you have, i think, seen him before." "i remember him perfectly, monseigneur," i replied, "but where i had the honour of seeing his face last i cannot recollect." "under your horse's feet, i rather suspect, monsieur de cerons," replied the young gentleman, with a graceful inclination of the head. "my visor flew up as that vile brute i was riding stumbled and fell with me." "oh! now i remember you well," i replied at once. "you are the young gentleman who made so gallant a charge against us when we were pursuing the other day. i rather imagine you would have given me some trouble," i continued, smiling, "if your horse had not fallen with you." the young man coloured with pleasure, and the duke replied for him. "you speak too flatteringly, monsieur de cerons; but he is a brave youth, too, and he told me, the moment he came back, what had occurred, and how generously you had behaved to him." "god forbid, sir," i said, "that i should strike one blow at a gallant young gentleman when he is down." "but," said the duke, "you might have made him prisoner, and his ransom would have been no slight sum. we cannot, therefore, thus rest your debtors, monsieur de cerons, and i brought him here this day, that we might both acquit ourselves to you of that which we owe you." "you are both more than acquitted already, my lord," i replied. "the thanks which you have been pleased to give me are sufficient recompense; and let it be remembered always, that this young gentleman neither surrendered nor demanded quarter; that what was done was my doing; and perhaps the time may come, on some future day, when the little kindness i showed may be returned by some other. will you allow me," i added, in order to change the subject, "to inquire whether any of the relations of mademoiselle de blancford are with your company above?" "no," replied the duke. "the truth is, monsieur de cerons, that the baron de blancford has been somewhat enraged by a letter from the prince de condé to the duke of anjou respecting him, and by one which, i understand, you wrote to him yourself. i therefore undertook the task of meeting you here, to prevent any unpleasant collision. i wished his two sons to have accompanied me; but he replied, that if he did not go himself, none of his family should go. but that i have full authority to receive the young lady, you may believe." "i doubt it not in the least, my lord," i replied; "but i was in hopes that the two boys were there, who have been brought up beside me from their infancy, but whom i have not seen for a long time. however, mademoiselle de blancford shall be delivered into your hands immediately, and i pray you to do your best to induce her father to look differently upon my letter, and to believe that, when i gave you the little _alèrte_ the other night, my only view was to rescue him, if, as i suspected, he was detained as a prisoner." "what, then, it was you," said the duke, "who roused us in such a manner, and who carried off one of the cornets. take care how you come in the way of martigues, monsieur de cerons, for he has not forgotten the loss of that cornet." "i will treat it with all honour and distinction, my lord," i replied, smiling: "i will carry it with me into the very next field where i am likely to meet your army, and there monsieur de martigues may take it if he have the will and the power." "i shall tell him so, i shall tell him so," replied the duke. "we shall have the days of chivalry revived again. but we must waste no more daylight, monsieur de cerons, for we shall but have light enough to get back to the camp." at this hint i immediately went back, and telling louise who it was that had come to meet her, i dismounted from my horse, and led her forward by the bridle-rein. good old la tour and the rest followed at a little distance, giving us an opportunity of passing those few last moments alone. we said nothing, however, as we went on. her hand rested for a moment in mine; our eyes looked long and speakingly into each other's; and thus we went on till we approached the duc de montpensier, who, dismounting also, took a step forward to meet his fair charge. he asked her some courteous question of no great import as he approached, but louise could not answer; her voice was choked, her eyes were full of tears. the duke looked to me as if for an explanation. i had none to give, and felt that the best way was to withdraw as soon as possible. "louise," i said, approaching as close as i could, and speaking in a low voice, "louise, my beloved, adieu! god be with you, and protect you, and give you courage, and give you strength." louise bent down over her jennet, let her arm drop over mine, and her weeping eyes fell upon my shoulder. after a moment she made an effort and raised her head, saying, "adieu, henry, adieu!" as she did so our lips met, and, turning hastily away, i quitted a scene that was becoming too much for me in every respect. ere i had taken ten steps, however, some one touched me on the arm. it was the young prince de la roche,[ ] the duke of montpensier's son, who held out his hand to me, and grasped mine, saying, "we shall meet again, monsieur de cerons, we shall meet again." chapter xiv. it may well be conceived that the first few miles of my return were travelled without any particular observation on my part of the objects around me. moric endem was not with me to call my attention to this thing or that, and to inspire me with the same remarking and commenting spirit as himself; and, busy with the thoughts and feelings of my own bosom, i rode on, seeing, perhaps, the things that i passed with the mere corporeal eye, but with the communication between the organ of sight and the reasoning brain altogether cut off for the time. i had gone on thus for about five miles, when the distant sound of a trumpet caught my ear, and caused me to make an effort to shake off selfish sorrow, and turn to the business of life again. the spot at which i had then arrived was so enclosed with trees, though close to the edge of a high hill, commanding a view over a wide plain below, that i could not see any object at a distance, and, riding quickly forward to the point where the road left the wood and opened upon the bare slope, i gazed down into the plain. my surprise was not small at seeing a very considerable body of men, perhaps three or four thousand, winding along at the distance of fully four miles. they were marching in a line rather to the left of that which the protestant camp occupied, and seemed to me to be bending their way rapidly towards the charente. they were easily to be distinguished from the protestants, whose white cassocks always afforded a distinguishing mark at a great distance; and i would instantly have endeavoured to cut off some stragglers from their rear, in order to ascertain what was their object and destination, had i not been shackled by a flag of truce, and felt myself bound to return to our camp before i made any attack upon the enemy. i rode on, therefore, as fast as possible, trusting that, as night was not far distant, the party i had seen would lodge itself in some of the neighbouring villages. as soon as i had arrived at my own quarters, i made some inquiries in regard to any movements that had taken place, and found indications of the army marching by detachments towards the loire. montgomery i could not find, though i sent messengers seeking for him in different directions; and i consequently made up my mind to let my men take some repose, to mount them upon fresh horses, of which my little band had now a plenty, and if there was a possibility of seeing our way after nightfall, to beat up the enemy's quarters and endeavour to gain some information. giving orders to this effect, i sat down to my solitary supper, and had very nearly concluded the meal when montgomery himself entered, saying, "i have come to sup with you, de cerons. they tell me you have been sending all over the place for me; so i suppose you have some news." i gave him the best cheer i could, and, while we sat together, told him what i had seen and what i proposed to do. "they are on foot again, are they?" he said, after thinking over the whole for a few minutes. "they must have got information that de pile is moving up from guyenne with our re-enforcements, and wish to cut him off. yet what can be done? the orders we have received to-night are distinct, to march upon the loire; and if we do not do so, and do so quickly, we shall never be able to effect our junction with the germans and the duc de deux ponts, or zweibrucken, as his own people call him, and that were worse than missing be pile. however, the only thing that can be done is what you propose yourself, to gain any intelligence that we can, to show these gentlemen that they are discovered, and to send instant information to the prince and the admiral. but, to make your reconnoissance anything at all effectual, you must have more men, de cerons. what will you have?" of course i was glad to take as large a force as could easily be managed in the darkness of the night; and as the arquebusiers had proved of great use to me on my former expedition, i required their presence, together with some ten more spears, which montgomery readily granted. from him i gained a more thorough knowledge, too, than i had hitherto acquired, of all the existing plans and circumstances of the protestant leaders. their forces had been so greatly weakened by the sickness which prevailed in loudun, that re-enforcements were absolutely necessary for them to keep the field against the catholics. de pile had been sent some time before to gather together all the troops that he could in gascony, and a large body of reiters, under the duke of dupont, was marching rapidly towards the loire, in order to join the protestant army. in the mean time, the catholics had been re-enforced by bodies of troops from every part of france, and were eager to fight the protestants before either de pile or the duke could come up. the task, therefore, of the protestant leaders was a difficult one, namely, to avoid a battle in the presence of a superior army; to guard the line of the charente, where all the bridges were in their own hands; and to aid the junction of the gascon forces from the south, at the same time that they extended their line of operations to facilitate the junction of the germans. "i trust," said montgomery, "that the princes will decide upon maintaining the charente in preference to anything else. de pile is not one to suffer himself easily to be outwitted, and stuart, who is with him, will cut his way through a wall of solid iron, if need be. once having joined the gascons, we shall be able to detach troops to the loire, without losing our command of the rivers, and, when the germans have joined, we can fight the enemy with the advantage of a just cause, and no great disadvantage in point of numbers." "depend upon it," i said, after hearing this explanation, "since such is our situation and that of the enemy, the catholics i have seen are thrown forward to gain possession of some place in the heart of our position. but i will soon bring you farther intelligence if possible; and, in the mean time, were it not better to send off at once a messenger to the prince and the admiral, to inform them of what has been already observed, and of the direction which the catholics are taking?" montgomery agreed immediately to do so, and in less than an hour after i was once more in the saddle, and advancing with a force sufficient for all that i proposed towards the villages in which i calculated the enemy would lodge that night. i need not enter into all the particulars of my expedition: suffice it to say, that about one o'clock in the morning i found forty or fifty poor peasants in a barn not far from the village, who had been driven out of their habitations by the enemy, on account of adhering to the protestant faith, and who thought themselves not a little fortunate to have escaped with only a few strokes from the staff of a lance to make them give up their dwellings more quickly to the royal troops. i learned little from them, however, except that the commander of the catholics lodged in one of the houses at the end of the village; and thinking that it would be an excellent consummation if i could carry him off, i bent my way thither, guided by one of the young labourers. before we came near, however, i caused my men either to strip off their white cassocks altogether, or, when they were lined with any other colour, to turn them inside out, in order, as far as possible, to escape attention. i did not succeed, however, so well this time as i had done before. there were men on watch at both sides of the house; and though we approached somewhat near without being seen, we were at length challenged in a loud voice. the sentry would not let the false word i gave pass current, but instantly fired his arquebus; and, as had been arranged before, while my arquebusiers remained drawn up in a line to support us, i dismounted with my men-at-arms, and rushed forward to attack the house. moric endem shot the unfortunate sentry through the head with a pistol; the door and one of the windows were burst open in a moment, and we poured into the lower rooms, in which we found ten or twelve men who had been sleeping in their arms, on the floor. taken by surprise, and in confusion, their resistance was not very great, but it was sufficient to give time for the commander himself to make his escape out of one of the back windows in his shirt. we did not, however, discover this till afterward; for, by the following circumstance, i was mistakenly led to imagine, for more than an hour, that he had fallen into our hands. i had just cut down one fellow who opposed my progress up the stairs, and had nearly reached the top, when out of a room on the right hand rushed a gay-looking youth, in a furred dressing-gown embroidered with gold. he bore a taper in one hand and a sword in the other: but a pistol at his head, with an order to surrender, rescue or no rescue, soon brought his weapon into my hand; and, passing him down the stairs to those who came behind, i entered the different rooms above, and, with moric endem and two or three others, swept the table that i found there of a number of papers and parchments, with cases for writing and other things, which i doubted not would give us full information respecting the object of the enemy's movement. as i was looking at the title of one of these papers, a sharp fire opened by the arquebusiers, whom i had left without, announced that the enemy were prepared to make us pay for our intrusion; and, clearing the house as fast as possible, i effected my retreat, though i found the garden half full of catholic troopers on foot. it was now, however, that the stratagem of making my men quit or turn their cassocks procured us great advantages which i had not foreseen. in issuing forth form the house in some disarray, the enemy could not tell whether each man was of their own party or not; and in the confusion that followed--we being very certain of what we were to do, and they quite uncertain--we forced our way through and regained our horses, carrying with us the gentleman in the furred dressing-gown and three other prisoners. of the men who accompanied me, two only were missing; one of my own band, whom i had seen fall by a pistol shot in the head, and one of the men-at-arms that montgomery had given me, who, not so well accustomed to such expeditions as we were, lingered behind and was taken prisoner. we now made the best of our way over the hill, the enemy mounting as fast as horses could be brought out, and pursuing us; but i had ridden over the ground several times before, and knew every inch of it, so that they gained little but their labour, till at length i reached the spot whence i had first discovered them on the preceding morning, when, seeing by a strong glare in the sky, the cause of which i did not at the moment discover, that i was followed by some thirty or forty horse, i ordered my men-at-arms to wheel about and give them a taste of our spear points. as there was no one to support them, they did not make any great resistance, but were driven down the hill in a very short space of time. i pursued them no farther than the shoulder of the heights, whence i could see the village which we had attacked, and, to my surprise, beheld it all in flames. how it happened i do not know; our people were inclined to believe that the catholics themselves had set it on fire, in their indignation at the peasants for having guided us thither; but this opinion was evidently founded upon party animosity; and i am inclined to believe that, in the confusion attending our attack upon the farmhouse, some light must accidentally have dropped and set fire to the building. hurrying on as fast as possible, we reached my quarters about five in the morning, and then, for the first time, i had an opportunity of speaking with, and showing some civility to my principal prisoner. he was conducted up stairs to my own apartments by two of the soldiers, while i remained for a minute or two below, to see my men properly disposed of. on entering my room, i found him standing shivering by the fire, and approached him, saying, "i fear, sir, you have had a very cold ride?" "i never had so cold or so disagreeable a one in my life," he replied. "i was sure that such must be the case," i answered. "but we must try to make you more comfortable as soon as possible. "pray, sir," he said, gazing at me somewhat superciliously from head to foot, and sticking out from under his furred dressing-gown a bare leg and a foot only covered with a slipper, "can you procure me such a thing in your camp as a wooden leg? for i am quite sure that this thing, which used to help me through the world, must be frozen of by this time." "no," i answered, "i do not know that we can do that; but, at all events, i think we can bring some life into the one that you have; and, if you will take my advice, you will get into a warm bed again as fast as possible, drink as large a portion as you can swallow of hot wine, and keep yourself warm for half an hour or so, by telling me who you are, and what is the object of the expedition, whereof you were, i suppose, the commander." "sir, you do me a great deal too much honour," said the young gentleman. "however, as you are a very civil person, i will first take possession of the bed you talk of, if you will show me where it is; i will then drink the wine, if anybody will bring it to me; and, having done that, hold myself bound to reply to any questions that you think right to ask, that are not wrong for me to answer." calling to andriot, i caused my prisoner to be placed in the room which had been occupied by good la tour, and the warm wine to be procured for him, together with some spices and comfits; and, having thus made him as comfortable as i could, i questioned him as to his rank, station, &c. to my mortification, i now found that he was not the commander; that the expedition was destined to attack jarnac, and was led by the celebrated count de la rivière puitaillé. the young gentleman whom i had taken proved to be one of the gay gallants of the court, called gersay, and my only consolation for having missed the commander was the prospect of a large ransom for his friend and companion. my men were more satisfied, indeed, than i was; for moric and the rest had stumbled upon various articles of value, and a considerable sum of money, so that the prize to be divided was considerable. gersay's ransom was soon arranged and soon paid, and i once more found my military chest overflowing. in the mean time, the absence of the princes at niort, though absolutely necessary, in order to obtain money and to treat with the queen of england; was sadly detrimental to our military prospects. before full information of all that i had discovered could be conveyed to the prince de condé, before the troops could be recalled from their movements towards the loire, or others marched to defend jarnac, la rivière had made himself master of that place, thus occupying an important point on the charente, and breathing nothing but vengeance for the attack upon the village, in retaliation for which he made desperate excursions on every side. the burning of the village, indeed, which must have been purely accidental, led to consequences of a very terrible kind. the house occupied by a captain lespinette had been the second or third which took fire, and some of his effects had been burned therein; and, on the first expedition which la rivière intrusted to him, he vowed he would retaliate upon the protestants. he accordingly attacked a village, swept away all that it contained, and some women and children having taken refuge in one of the houses, while their husbands and fathers escaped into the fields, he brutally, we were assured, set fire to the place, and burned them to death therein. an awful retribution fell upon him. as soon as a sufficient force could be collected, the admiral commanded the marquis de briquemont to attack la rivière in jarnac. the town was taken by assault; but, as the inhabitants were our own people, no outrages were committed. the catholics who surrendered received quarter, and many made their escape; but lespinette and his band took refuge in the old keep, declaring they would hold it to the last: but, almost at the same moment that they were making this declaration, the lower part took fire. unable to find any other means of escape, he and two of his companions determined to leap from the loopholes, which were large. but the corbels which hung over impeded them, and, in the effort to force themselves through, their armour was so tightly jammed in the stonework that no human power could remove them, and in this horrible situation they were actually burned to death in their arms. at this period, the situation of the protestant army became every day more and more critical. the catholic army, nearly double in force that which we could oppose to it, was now approaching nearer and nearer, and interposing between us and the troops coming from gascony, with the purpose of forcing us to an immediate battle. the most important points of the charente were, it is true, in our hands; the admiral and the prince de condé were once more at the head of their troops; and, had their tactical skill been as well seconded by the zeal and obedience of the officers under their command, we might have set the enemy at defiance till sufficient re-enforcements had arrived to enable us to fight them. the duke of anjou was advancing daily, but still his progress was delayed far more than might otherwise have been the case by the continual skirmishes which d'andelot and the prince de condé contrived to treat him on his advance. scarcely a day passed without some hundreds, sometimes thousands, of our troops being thrown unexpectedly upon some vulnerable point of the enemy's position; sometimes we advanced absolutely into the quarters of the duke of montpensier, and once we were actually in the lodgings of the duke of anjou himself. on the latter occasion, under the command of puiviaud, we encountered close to auville, where the duke had established his quarters, a body of seventy or eighty gentlemen of the court, and obstinately maintaining our ground for some time till we were re-enforced, large bodies of men began to come up on either side, till it became absolutely necessary for the protestants to withdraw, lest the skirmish should end in a general battle when neither party was prepared. nothing, however, could stop the progress of the enemy; and, early in march, the duke of anjou made himself master of chateauneuf on the charente. the bridge, however, was in our possession, and we had various small cars pushed across the river in different directions, in order to guard against surprise. i myself, no longer acting as a mere partisan, but attending implicitly to the orders i received as a soldier, was stationed some little way in advance of cognac, with orders to obtain every information that i could regarding the enemy's movements, and communicate them immediately to the admiral or the prince de condé; and at three o'clock on the very day of my arrival, i perceived a large body of the enemy marching down towards me. the continual noise they made, the sounding of trumpets and beating of drums, made me suspect at once that their appearance was a mere feint; and, having ridden to a rising ground, which gave me a view over the country beyond, i clearly perceived that they were followed by no sufficient force to attempt the passage of the river at that point, and sent immediate intelligence of what i had observed to the admiral, in order to make sure that he was not deceived by any stratagem of the enemy. coligny sent me down thanks in return, telling me that he was not deceived, and that, after maintaining my ground as well as i could, i might come round to join the count de montgomery at the village of triac. the affair at cognac lasted scarcely half an hour; but it was past midnight before i could bring my men, fatigued with a long march, to the quarters appointed me. the house seemed pretty comfortable, and the stables for the horses good, with room in a granary above for the greater part of the men, and plenty of room in the house for the rest. not a truss of straw, however, was to be found; no forage of any kind; and while i was endeavouring to obtain some in the village by sending hither and thither, i saw a head put out from one of the up-stairs windows of the house, and heard a voice call me by name. "monsieur de cerons, monsieur de cerons," said the voice, "i give you good-evening; it is long since we met." the tones were not unfamiliar to my ear, but yet i could not recollect where i had heard them; and i merely replied, "i will come up in a minute, when i have seen the horses fed." "_morbleu!_" said moric endem, "you may think yourself lucky if you get a straw a horse, seigneur. these are one of the nights, i take it, which teach cavalry horses to be crib-biters, seeing that they can get nothing else to bite." "moric," i said, "as we passed the day before yesterday, there was a large farm i saw about a quarter of a mile out there to the right. the man would neither say whether he was catholic or protestant, chemille told me. but i must have forage, whichever he is. the admiral says we must have no plunder; so take ten men with you, go to his house, and with your sword in one hand and this purse in the other, tell him you come from the seigneur de cerons for the forage he wants for his horses. give him his choice of the gold or the steel, and bring back the forage at all events." "bravo! bravo!" cried the voice from the window above, though i certainly did not know i had been listened to; "justice and equity both together monsieur de cerons;" and, leaving moric to fulfil his orders, which he did with pre-eminent success, i entered the house and mounted the creaking staircase, which seemed as if two men at a time would have brought it to the ground. there were lights and a blazing fire on the right hand, and i entered that room, when i saw before me a tall, powerful man sitting in the window-seat, with a page busily taking off the various pieces of his armour. he turned round his head as i entered, though bestowing no very soft benediction on the page for pinching his leg with the _genouillère_, and exclaimed, "welcome, welcome, de cerons; so i find you, as i hoped to find you, changed from little david the shepherd's boy into a mighty man of war. and who shall say what will come of it next?" the face that was turned towards me was that of my first military friend and counsellor, stuart; and with equal joy and gratitude i grasped his hand, and welcomed him to the army. "i have expected to see you long," i said, "but certainly did not expect to see you this night, and in my own quarters." "why, it so happens," replied stuart, "that they are mine too; for the house, and yard, and stables were to be shared between us. heaven knows how we should have managed if i had brought on my band. but i left the greater number of them some way back, for men and horses were absolutely exhausted by hard riding and starvation. though the prince would very willingly have kept me at jarnac, to sup with him to-night and dine with him to-morrow, yet i came on with two or three of my servants only, to see what was doing out here at the advance guard; for i have a strange notion that we sha'n't be four-and-twenty hours without a battle. i wanted to see you, too, and have got a good supper ready for you, as there wants no food for men's mouths here, though all the forage i could get was a bushel of oats and a handful of straw for six horses." i followed stuart's example as soon as possible in disencumbering myself of my armour, for i never had the casque off my head for more than twenty hours, nor had anything passed my lips but a cup of cold water during the whole of that time; so that the sight of a huge piece of roasted pork, and a dish of pig's ears and feet strewed with crayfish, was, i must acknowledge, one of the pleasantest prospects that my eyes had lighted upon for some time. for my poor men's sakes, too, i was glad to hear that provisions were to be had in abundance, and, before i ate myself, i took care to send out the means to purchase everything that was necessary, although my expeditions had been so successful as to leave the purses of my troop better stored than those of any other in the army. during supper, stuart and i talked over all that had happened to us both since we parted in bordeaux; and, although my first intercourse with him had been but of a few hours' duration, yet, when we met, we felt as if we had been old and intimate friends for many years. he told me all that had befallen him to delay his journey to join the army, the difficulty in getting his scotch companions over from his native country, or raising others fitted for his band: the necessity which then presented itself of joining his forces to those of de pile, and of labouring with that commander to induce the protestant noblemen of higher and lower gascony to come forward in arms, and risk something for the common cause; then the obstacles which the catholics had thrown in his way, to prevent his junction with the protestant army; and he ended by telling me that he had at length been obliged to leave de pile behind with the greater part of the troops, and, with only sixty helmets, to make his way on to join the prince de condé, having a sort of presentiment in his mind, which, he said, had never failed him hitherto, that a battle was on the eve of taking place between the two contending parties. to me he put a thousand questions concerning my state and prospects, although it was evident enough that he had heard news of me from time to time, and was not a little proud of his military neophyte. i told him all the military part of my history, as i have told it here, and met his approbation of all my proceedings. in pursuing these subjects, however, the conversation naturally turned to good martin vern, his journey to bordeaux, and the redemption of my dagger; and, as soon as the subject was mentioned, he exclaimed, "oh! by-the-way, it is true i did what was, perhaps, not very justifiable on my part, and made good solomon ahar do what was not quite right upon his. but, having seen how much you regretted the loss of your weapon; and also having received an unexpected sum, which gave me a few crowns to spare, i went and insisted upon redeeming it, thinking that in a day or two i should join you. i have been forced to wander far enough since," he continued, "but your dagger is quite safe, and with my baggage at jarnac. one thing, however, i must tell you of, which happened in the redemption of it, and which made me very glad that i had got it out of the jew's hands, who has now moved from bordeaux to paris, as i dare say you have heard." "no," i replied, "i did not hear of his removal. but i can easily conceive that he was not much to your taste. yet tell me, what was this circumstance which made you glad?" "doubtless you know the fact yourself already," replied stuart, "but i discovered it from the jew. when, much against his will, i had driven him to give it up, good solomon said, 'ha! do you know it is hollow, seigneur stuart?' and he then showed me, by weighing it against another dagger, with a smaller hilt than it had, that the haft is hollow, and, through a hole where one of the old jewels had fallen out, we clearly saw some folded parchment within. it may be a matter of some consequence, or of none to you, for aught i know. were you aware of the fact?" i replied in the negative; and, after some farther conversation on the subject, it was determined that, if military operations did not prevent us, we should ride together to jarnac on the following morning, where i should redeem my dagger, and ascertain what the hilt contained. after that we separated, stuart retiring to his bed and i to mine; and though for the last five or six days i had borne up with scarcely any rest or repose, i now fell into a profound and heavy slumber, still, motionless, dreamless, more like death itself than sleep. end of vol. i. the m a n-a t-a r m s; or, henry de cerons. a romance. by g. p. r. james, esq., author of "darnley," "de l'orme," "charles tyrrell," "henry of guise," "king's highway," &c., &c. in two volumes. vol. ii. new york: harper & brothers, publishers, franklin square. . henry de cerons. ---------------- chapter i. the day had not far advanced, when some one, shaking me by the arm, roused me from my sleep, and, looking up, i found stuart already up and fully armed. "come," he said, "de cerons, come, you will be called a sluggard. i have just had a message from the admiral, who is at bassac, and my people have come on there with the baggage. the same messenger brings a message to you, begging you to come and report more fully what took place yesterday at cognac. it would seem that intelligence has been received from that side which leads to some apprehension." i shook my head. "they will make no attempt there," i replied. "however, i will be up and out in a moment." "i will see your horses ready," replied stuart; and, ere they were well prepared, i was myself down in the courtyard. leaving some brief orders for moric endem, who did not appear, i rode away with my companion, followed by his attendants and some four or five of my own men. the light was still gray in the dull march morning, but everything was quite quiet and still, and nothing, as we passed along, would have given to any eye the slightest indication of warring armies in the immediate neighbourhood, or of the approach of a speedy and sanguinary conflict. we went on, talking of the position and situation of the armies, and stuart seemed perfectly confident, from what he had heard the night before, that any attempt of the enemy to pass the charente at chateauneuf would be frustrated in a moment. "there is soubise," he said, "and montgomery, and la loue, with plenty of forces to guard the passage, at all events, till the rest of the army could come up; and they dare not attempt it before the force which the admiral can bring into the field." scarcely, however, were the words out of his mouth, when a trooper at full gallop overtook us. it proved to be one of my own people, who came on waving his hand for us to stop, and exclaimed, the moment that he came up, "in god's name, return, seigneur! the enemy have passed the river by the bridge and a bridge of boats. i have myself seen ten or twelve cornets of horse, with the great blue standard among them. the whole vanguard has passed already, i am sure; and there is a bridge of boats built just below the other bridge." "i fear this is some negligence on la loue's part," i said, turning to stuart; "i have always remarked that he is the most negligent of commanders. i will go back, but i fear we shall have to fight, and we are in no condition to do it. for heaven's sake, stuart, ride on, and let the admiral know." these were all the words that were spoken; and stuart, waving his hand, galloped off, while i hurried back as fast as possible to the village. half a dozen messengers, going at full speed towards the quarters of the admiral and the prince de condé, met me before i reached triac, but passed without speaking; and just before my quarters i found moric endem, with my own troop and the horse arquebusiers, drawn up in order to march. without a moment's delay we hurried out from the village, and the next moment the whole scene of the commencing battle was beneath our eyes. the beautiful meadows, which there sweep down to the bank of the river, were now filled with the royal troops in all the splendid array of war: cornets, and standards, and waving plumes, and gay-coloured cassocks lined the whole side of the river, while over the bridge of chateauneuf, and over a bridge of boats constructed during the night, the rear guard of the catholic army was passing, with cymbal, and trumpet, and drum, the clang of which, borne by the wind, reached the hill where i stood. some half a mile before the great body of the catholics were a number of squadrons of horse, charging, with levelled lances, two or three small bands of huguenots, who, though contending with them gallantly, were evidently contending in vain. we could see the lances shivered and the horses go over, but still the protestant cavalry was driven back towards a large pond confined within some raised causeways, and a rivulet which meandered in silver brightness through the meadows at the foot of the hill. other small bodies of protestant horse were seen coming up at full speed to the aid of their companions; but more effectual assistance appeared at that moment; for, drawing out from between the walls of a little hamlet, i perceived four or five companies of infantry, which i immediately knew to be that gallant and determined body, puyviault's arquebusiers, who advanced rapidly towards the causeway of the tank, and opened a sharp fire upon the advancing squadrons of the catholic cavalry. this was all seen as we rode on down the hill; but, the moment after, the sound of a trumpet on the right called my attention in that direction, and i saw a small party of our own horse, perhaps consisting of a hundred and fifty or two hundred men, galloping down in the same direction as myself. recognising at their head one whose skill and talents were already remarkable, now celebrated as la noue, together with asier and la loue, whose vigour and determination, in all moments of actual conflict, seldom failed to inspire their soldiers to the greatest efforts, i made what speed i could to join them, and was hailed gladly, though there was no pausing to speak or to draw a rein. on we galloped, four a breast, down the road till we had passed some hedges that intersected the slope of the hill, and then, spreading out, charged the enemy's cavalry just as they were passing the causeway on the right of the tank. puyviault at the same moment renewed his fire upon the enemy, and we drove them back in great confusion for two or three hundred yards. as all that we could hope to do, however, was so long to delay the enemy in the meadows by the river as to enable the admiral and the prince de condé to gain a good position on the heights, la noue gave the order to wheel, and keep upon the same line with the infantry; but, on looking round, we saw that puyviault, attacked on the left hand, had been forced to retreat, and that martigue, with his fire-eating cavalry, had passed round on the other side of the tank, and was already on our flank. we had no time for preparation; the catholics were upon us with a rapidity and an energy worthy of admiration; martigue was within ten paces of me when i turned my horse; and, calling out, "ha, the cornet! the cornet! _à moi, à moi_, monsieur de cerons!" he spurred on upon me. i met him as best i might, but our little band was broken by their impetuous charge in every direction: la noue and the rest were making the best of their way back towards the infantry of puyviault, and the men following by twos and threes, as they could disentangle themselves; and, after several sharp blows, i found that i must either get away from martigue or suffer myself to be taken, and therefore, drawing a pistol from the holster, i shot his horse in the throat, and the animal went down at once. "that is not fair!" he cried, as the horse fell with him. "i had no other resource," shouted i, as i galloped on. "you see i am left alone." thus saying, i made my way back to the rest as fast as i could, and found our little cavalry once more rallied and supporting puyviault, who, with admirable skill and determination, was keeping the enemy at bay as long as possible, maintaining every little hedge and every little wall with his arquebusiers, taking advantage of each little rise and fall of the ground, and fighting every step as he slowly retreated towards the village where i had slept the preceding night. to him, i cannot help saying, more than to any one else, is to be attributed that the battle did not prove more disastrous to the protestants than it ultimately did. in the mean time la noue exclaimed to me, "retreat into the village, de cerons, as fast as possible, and maintain yourself in it as long as you can, for there is martigue dashing up towards it on the right, and will cut us off if he is not prevented." taking the shorter road, i was there before the catholic leader, and received him at the entrance of the principal road or street, if i may so call it, with a charge which, though it could not be long sustained, drove him back for some way, and enabled la noue and the rest to retire in good order. asier came to my assistance in a moment or two after, exclaiming in a gay tone, "now, fortune's favourite, let us see how long you and i, de cerons, can keep out the enemy!" "not long, asier," i replied, "i fear; both your numbers and mine are somewhat thinned since the beginning of this morning; and see, there are six more cornets coming up the hill to join martigue. ha, moric!" i continued, as i turned round to look at the numbers of my men, "i thought you were gone, my poor fellow. are there any more coming up?" "two will be here in a minute, seigneur," replied moric; "i sent them to see the valets, and horse-boys, and baggage out at the other end of the town. ah, master martigue," he exclaimed, seeing that the enemy had paused for a single instant, and ridden round a little to the right, "i've stopped that gap for you. there's a road between two houses there," he said, "but i have upset a wagon across it." good moric's precaution, however, did not avail us for long. martigue himself again charged us in front; and though the narrowness of the road enabled us to stand against him firmly, yet we saw that a party of his men were busy in removing the wagon which had been overturned; and, after protracting the resistance as long as possible, we effected our retreat only just as the enemy were pouring in upon our flank. puyviault, however, was by this time safe; and as we issued forth from the other side of the village and mingled with the foremost of the enemy, the glad sight appeared of d'andelot coming up at the head of a considerable body of horse, while a long hedge of spears was seen rising over the slope, and giving notice that the admiral or the prince de condé would be in the field in a few minutes. the enemy perceived this at the same moment that we did, and pursued no farther; martigue hastening to strengthen himself in the village, in order to maintain it, if possible, till the royal troops came up. d'andelot halted his men for a moment, in order not to charge friends and enemies together, and welcomed us, as we rode up, with nothing but courage and confidence in his tone, exclaiming, "ah, brave asier! ah, de cerons! gallantly done, gentlemen; gallantly done! rally your men, and let us at them again! now each man do as he sees me do!" and, as soon as we were in line, he spurred on again upon the village. martigue, confident in his numbers and his courage, had by this time drawn out a part of his cavalry beyond the houses, and we spurred forward upon them with a determination equal to their own. i was at the distance of about twenty paces from d'andelot, who had no lance; but i saw him gallop up to a gay-looking cavalier opposite to him, armed from head to foot; and, putting past his spear, he struck him under the visor with the gauntlet of his left hand, which at the same time held his reins, and at that single blow dashed up the covering of his enemy's face; at the very same moment, with his right, he pointed a pistol under his opponent's helmet and fired. the man fell dead from his horse, and d'andelot passed on at once through the line.[ ] though we certainly did not follow d'andelot's order in doing as he did, yet we did our best. martigue's troops were driven again into the village, the streets of which became a terrible slaughter-house. in a few minutes the admiral himself, with a large body of cavalry, came up to support us, and the catholics were driven out at the other side, and over the hill for nearly half a mile. their operations had all been well-arranged, however. by the time we had proceeded thus far, we were suddenly assailed by a tremendous discharge of firearms; and martigue, finding himself supported by the count de brissac, with a fresh body of cavalry and sixteen hundred arquebusiers, horse and foot, resumed the offensive, while we were driven back in considerable confusion, from the incessant and well-directed fire kept up upon us by what were called the old bands of brissac. the position that we had attained, however, though we had gained it but for a moment, showed us the whole royalist army on this side of the river, the duc de montpensier advancing up the slope with at least ten thousand men, and the division of the duke of anjou following in fine order towards the tank which i have before mentioned. after retreating for about three or four hundred yards, the troops got into somewhat better order, and the admiral took care to seize the opportunity of restoring confidence by wheeling with a small force as if to charge martigue. he did not do so, however; but, after looking round him for a moment, seeking, it would seem, some one he could trust, he beckoned me up to him, and said in a low tone, "monsieur de cerons, you fear nothing, i think." "i trust not, sir," i replied. "the battle must be general, i imagine," he said; "there is no avoiding it. i wish some one to ride towards jarnac to the prince de condé, without the loss of a moment or a step of ground, to tell him to bring up the main body of the troops, and charge in order to extricate his vanguard. we will maintain the ground till he comes. the straight road runs along the whole line of those arquebusiers; whoever undertakes the task must endure their fire. will you go? take three men with you if you do." i merely bowed my head in reply, spoke a word or two to moric endem, leaving him in the command of my surviving men, and, accompanied by andriot and two troopers, galloped off as hard as i could go towards jarnac. either the arquebusiers for some time did not see me, or mistook me for some of their own people as i came galloping rapidly towards them, for they suffered me to pass half along the line without firing a shot at me. there, however, they seemed to discover their mistake, and, at the distance of not more than a hundred yards, opened upon me one of the most tremendous fires that i ever remember to have seen. poor andriot was down in a moment; but there was no possibility of stopping, and on i went at the full gallop. about thirty or forty yards farther, a ball struck my cuirass, but glanced off without entering, and a second passed through the crest of my casque. two or three went through the cassock i wore above my arms, and one ball just grazed the lower part of my bridle-hand sufficiently to deluge my glove in blood. it then struck the pommel of the saddle and bounded off. i was now within twenty yards of the end of the line; but, ere i reached it, another of my men was knocked off his horse; and if the arquebusiers had been wise enough to fire at the chargers instead of the riders, not one of us would have escaped to bear the admiral's message to the prince de condé. the last shot that was received was in my left shoulder; but it was of no importance, and did not even disable my arm. i now continued my course in safety, but without relaxing my speed, and opened the visor of my casque both to get some air and to see more distinctly whether we were followed. such was not the case, however; and at the top of the hill i saw the squadrons of the admiral, and could perceive the group in which he stood watching my course, perhaps with some anxiety. at the distance of about two miles i heard the sound of some trumpets behind a little wood in advance, and going on at the same quick pace, i came, in a moment after, upon some thirty or forty horsemen, covered with white cassocks, and bearing the cornet of the prince de soubise. "where is the prince de condé?" i demanded "where is the prince? i bear him a message from the admiral." "he is coming up that narrow road," replied one of the gentlemen. "having heard firing, we supposed that some affair was taking place, and are now marching up towards triac." "the whole van are engaged," i replied; and, without more words, rode on and met the prince at the head of three or four hundred horse, almost all gentlemen of high quality, and distinguished in arms. the prince was speaking gayly; and, the moment he saw me, he exclaimed, "ah, de cerons! what news do you bear? so the enemy has crossed the river, we hear. but, good heavens, your surcoat is pierced in twenty places, and you are bleeding from the hand and shoulder." "that is nothing, my lord," i replied. "the enemy have passed the river, the vanguard has been engaged these two hours, and the admiral has sent me to say to your highness that a general battle is inevitable, and to beg you to charge in order to disentangle the advance." "instantly," replied the prince, his bright eye flashing with a light which i never saw anywhere but in them. "martinet, you ride back instantly, and hurry the advance of the main battle. chouppes, ride on with languilliers to soubise, and you three, with your men, gallop as fast as you can towards triac, to clear the ground a little while we come up. de cerons, you stay with me, as you have seen all that is passing, and can guide us well. now on, my men!" and, putting the whole troop into a quicker pace, he led the way, till we came out half way down the hill up which the royalist army had been advancing when i left the field. the aspect of everything, however, was now very much changed; the admiral had retreated beyond triac; brissac occupied the village; martigue had taken ground to the right thereof; the duke of montpensier was at the top of the rise, and the main body of the catholics, under the duke of anjou, occupied the rest of the ground towards chateauneuf. the gallant puyviault, however, and his men, stretching out and menacing the flank of martigue's troops, afforded us the means of joining our line to that of the admiral; and had the whole of the prince de condé's division been upon the field, we might still, perhaps, have gained the day. such not being the case, and, by one accident or another, the prince having received but tardy information of what was taking place, the situation of the admiral seemed to all of us who were on the lower ground more perilous than it really was. condé halted for a moment, as if to consider and to communicate with the admiral; and, had it not been for the arrival at that instant of a small body of german protestants who were with the army, in all probability such counsels would have been held as would have prevented the fatal results of that day's field. condé, however, saw our auxiliaries arrive with joy and satisfaction; not that he hoped to save the battle by the rash, and desperate conduct he was prepared to pursue, but he thought that, at all events, he should be enabled to disentangle the troops of the admiral by a strong diversion in his favour; and, the moment that the arrival of the germans was known, i heard him call loudly for his casque. at this time, though we were within shot of the arquebusiers, and a ball or two fell every now and then among us, he had nothing on his head but a small cap of crimson velvet. the page who bore his helmet, however, came but slowly; the different officers who were round about pressed up eagerly towards the prince; the horses were furious and eager to proceed; and condé himself, having one arm in a sling, from an accident he had met with, restrained his own charger with difficulty from dashing forward into the midst of the enemy's ranks. at length the page brought up the casque, and one or two persons were assisting him to place it on his head: his standard had been carried forward, bearing, written in letters of gold, "_doux le peril pour christ et le pais!_" the count of rochefoucault was mounting a fresh horse, to accompany him into the _mêlée_; and, turning round towards me, the prince was asking, "know you, de cerons, whose cornets of horse those are upon the hill?" when, in a moment, i saw the charger that la rochefoucault was about to mount lash out with both his feet towards the prince, whose horse seemed to stagger with the blow it received. the velvet cap he had in his hand dropped to the ground, but that was the only expression (if it may be so called) of pain which escaped him. to my horror and astonishment, however, on approaching, i saw that the horse had broken his leg, and that the bone was absolutely protruding through the thick leather boot. exclamations of grief and distress burst from the lips of all around: but the prince waved his hand, exclaiming, "silence!" and, a moment after, he added, "behold, you true nobles of france, that which has occurred! follow me to finish well what our brave friends have already so well begun! and remember this day, as you fight, in what state louis of bourbon leads you to the charge, 'for christ and for his country!'" as he spoke he pulled down the visor of his helmet, bent his head over his saddle-bow, gave the rein to his horse, and dashed like fury upon the flank of the duke of anjou's division. there was an immense body of men-at-arms before us, amounting, it is said, in all, to two thousand men; and the moment we began the charge, two regiments of reiters, amounting to two thousand five hundred men, and eight hundred lancers, with a small body of horse arquebusiers, swept round and hemmed us in; and yet it is extraordinary what that charge of the prince de condé did. there was not one man of us that hour who then spurred on his horse, and did not believe that his life was at a close, and he must sell the remnant dearly. the light-horse which were in front gave way before us in a moment; the duke of guise and his men-at-arms were driven back upon la valette; the regiments, of chravigny and nevers were cast into confusion; and, to use the words of another eyewitness, "in brief, the prince and his troop seemed like a thunderbolt." but all that we could do was over in ten minutes. the regiment of the young prince d'auvergne came forward to support the rest, and in a gallant charge separated our small troop into parties: his father, the duke of montpensier, wheeled two regiments upon us to support his son; martigue came down from the hill to have a share in our destruction, and, separated one from the other, we each fought with desperation against that party of the adversary which happened to be nearest to us. i was cutting my way on, attending to little else, and dealing the best blows i could with my heavy sword, when i suddenly received a pistol-ball in my right arm, which made it drop powerless by my side. an instant after, before any one could take advantage of my situation, my horse was killed under me, and fell at once to the ground, jamming firmly my right leg between the saddle and the earth, so that it was impossible for me to extricate myself. the catholic men-at-arms who were nearest to me, apparently conceived that i was myself killed, and one of them passed over me; but i was not only uninjured, except from the wounds i have mentioned, but was also painfully sensible of all the horrors that were passing around me. it is utterly impossible to give anything like the slightest idea of the scene that took place before my eyes. sometimes i was left almost totally alone, beholding nothing but clouds of dust, and dim, uncertain figures whirling hither and thither; in another instant, one, two, three, perhaps fifty or sixty of the combatants, were close about me, and their horses nearly treading upon me at every instant. thrice, indeed, they did strike me with their hoofs, but my armour luckily protected me. at length i saw a charger all bloody, mounted by one whose aspect i knew full well. he was then at about twenty yards from me, and was riding rapidly up the hill where the ground was somewhat more clear. but at that very instant, two cavaliers, bearing red crosses on their shoulders, galloped fiercely forward upon him; and i saw that, though the horse exerted his utmost force to obey his rider's will, and though the rider urged him still on with eager speed, yet the gallant beast, bleeding from more than one wound, wavered as it struggled on, and the rider, with his head bent low, could scarcely keep himself in the saddle. the other two, fresh and apparently unhurt, were up with him in a moment; and seeing that it was in vain to contend, with not a friend near him, without power to resist, without strength either in himself or in his horse to fly, condé gave his left-hand gauntlet to one of those who approached him, and at the very same moment his horse stumbled and fell beneath him. as he lay, i saw him raise the visor of his helmet, and show his face to the gentleman to whom he had surrendered, whose name i afterward found was argence. the moment he saw the face of the prince, argence sprang from his horse and attempted to aid condé in rising; but then, seeing the state of his leg, he bore rather than assisted him to the foot of a small hawthorn-tree, and placed his back against the bank that supported it. this was nearer to me than before, and the next instant two or three other gentlemen came up, and dismounting beside the captive prince, were talking to him in a quiet tone, when montesquieu, whom i had seen several times before, and knew for his brutality, rode slowly up, and looked down upon me as i lay. my visor being down, he could not see whether i was dead or alive; and i remained quite still, though i held tight the pistol which i had drawn from my saddle-bow, determined not to surrender to him, but to shoot him with my left hand if he molested me. i believe he was looking for some unarmed point to stab me with his sword, in order to ascertain whether i was living or dead; but, not finding any, he had taken his pistol in his hand, as if to shoot me, in order to make all sure. at that very instant, however, one of the others rode up from the hawthorn-tree, saying, "they have taken the prince de condé, there, montesquieu." "taken!" exclaimed the brute, in a furious tone. "kill him! kill him!--_mortbleu!_" and, dashing forward, he levelled his pistol at the head of the unfortunate prince, and fired. condé's head first fell back up against the bank, and then, rolling over with a convulsive motion, he fell dead at the feet of argence, who turned angrily upon montesquieu, and seemed to reproach him with what he had done. after that i saw no more of them, for a company of horse came sweeping along between me and the spot at a somewhat slow pace, though martigue was at their head. i knew his character well; though fierce, bold, and courageous as a lion, he was noble and generous-minded too; and as he passed within about ten paces of me, i called loudly upon his name. he did not hear me himself, but a young officer who was behind exclaimed, looking round, "who calls monsieur de martigue?" "it is i," i cried, lifting up my left hand, "i, a gentleman and a knight, wish to speak with him." the young officer called his commander's attention, who turned his horse and rode up to me. "who are you, and what do you want?" he said, looking down upon me without dismounting. "i am de cerons," i replied; "and, of all men in the army, wish to surrender to you;" and at the same time i raised my visor. "ah, you young tiger!" he cried, "have i got you. if i did right, i believe i should drop a lance into you. but, however, i suppose that must not be, and so i will give you some supper instead; for you have lost the day, young man, as i suppose you know." "but too well," i replied, sadly; and martigue, turning to some of those who followed, said, "there, help him up, and take care of him. look to his wounds, too; for it is a pity that any one who has gone through a day like this should die at the end of it." thus saying, he rode on and left me. chapter ii. a page, a soldier, and one of the valets who were following martigue through the field, disentangled me from my horse, and raised me with some care and kindness from the ground. for some time i could scarcely walk, from the stiffness and bruises consequent upon the horse falling upon my leg and thigh. i made a great effort to do so, however, and the men who accompanied me asked me if i were hurt in the leg. i replied i was not; and, being soon stripped of my armour, i was enabled to move more easily. my right arm, however, still continued powerless; and the men who had me in charge led me away, according to martigue's orders, to search for a surgeon. the only men of skill, it seems, who accompanied the catholic army, were to be found with the division of the duke of anjou, and in seeking them we passed through several bodies of men that were advancing rapidly towards jarnac. all, however, was now passing quietly; the battle was over, the protestant army in full flight, the victory secured, and i felt not the slightest apprehension that either insult or injury would be offered to any fair combatant, wounded and a prisoner. thus passing on with martigue's people, without a word being said to me, i came near a gallant body of cavaliers, brilliantly armed, and equipped with the finest horses in the field, and followed by another glittering band of evidently picked men. there might be twenty or thirty gentlemen in advance and some four hundred behind; and i saw there the duke of montpensier, and the prince d'auvergne his son. they were no longer, however, occupying the first rank; for about half a yard before either of them rode a young man, in fact, scarcely more than a boy, for he did not yet seem twenty years of age. his arms were covered with a rich surcoat, and on one side of his horse, a page on foot carried his casque, while another bore a lance on the other side. everything about his person and his charger was glittering and splendid, and the _fleur-de-lis_, which were profusely scattered over all his accoutrements, at once marked him as the duke of anjou. the little party by which i was led along made way instantly for the others to pass, and i took no notice of the prince's countenance till some one called us up before him. i then lifted my eyes, and considered him attentively while he spoke to martigue's page, whom he seemed to have recognised. he was certainly handsome, and there was something commanding in his figure and deportment; but there was a sinister expression about his countenance which was not pleasant, and a peculiarity in his features which, in the course of my whole life, i have only seen in two other men besides himself. it was, that, as long as he remained grave and serious, though somewhat stern, the expression was not so bad; but, the moment that he smiled, it made one's blood run cold. after speaking two words to the page, he turned to me, saying sternly, "do you know whether the prince de condé has escaped from the field?" "only by death, sir," i replied. "why," answered the duke, "i saw his great white standard myself, with some thirty or forty men, fly across the upland twenty minutes ago." "the prince, sir," i said, "is dead, depend upon it. i, with my own eyes, saw him murdered." "murdered!" exclaimed the duke of anjou, with that same sort of sinister smile coming over his face. "what call you murder, sweet friend, in such a field as this?" "shooting a man, sir," i replied, "after he has been received to quarter, and surrendered to honourable gentlemen." "it may be justice, not murder, sir," replied the duke, frowning upon me. "and pray who are you, who are so choice in your expressions!" "my name, sir," i replied, "is de cerons; and i, too, am a prisoner." "ha!" cried the duke; "the most insolent varlet in the camp of the rebels. we have heard of your doings." though i knew it might cost me my life, i could not restrain myself, and i replied, "not a varlet, sir, but a knight and a french gentleman!" "take him away, and--" cried the duke; but, before he could finish his sentence, which probably was intended to have been a command to treat me in the same way as the prince de condé, the duke of montpensier urged his horse forward, and spoke a word or two to the duke in a low tone. "take him away!" repeated the duke, after listening for a moment. "put him with that scotch marauder stuart, and bring them before me after supper to-night. yet stay," he continued. "where, think you, is the prince de condé! i would fain see him with my own eyes." "if you go straight towards yon tree," i replied, pointing with my hand, "you will find his body under the bank, unless they have removed it." "go you, magnac, and see," said the duke. "i will remain here. there is your man constureau coming up, montpensier. he knows the prince, let him go with magnac. stand there, sir: we shall soon see whether you speak truth or falsehood." i made no reply, and the baron de magnac and another gentleman rode on to see if they could discover the body of the unfortunate prince de condé. while they were gone, the deepest stillness pervaded the whole scene. there was a sort of awful expectation about those who knew not whether i had spoken truth or not, which kept all silent; and it was evident that the duke of anjou himself, though he strove to appear perfectly calm and unmoved, concealed various emotions under the stern and harsh aspect which he assumed he spoke not either, but remained gazing forward in the direction which his messengers had taken, though the number of persons scattered about in different directions, and the bodies of horse and foot moving to and fro, prevented his distinguishing them after they had gone a hundred yards. at length, however, we saw a number of people coming forward in an irregular mass, with something carried apparently in the midst of them, and, as they approached the duke of anjou, one of the most painful and horrible sights that i ever beheld was exposed to view. stripped of his armour, and even of the buff coat which he had worn underneath, with his shirt and person dabbled with blood and dirt, was the body of the unfortunate prince de condé cast across an ass, with the head hanging down on one side and the feet on the other. his hair, which was long and very beautiful, fell in glossy curls towards the ground; but, from the point of the locks near the face, the blood, still streaming from his death-wound, dropped slowly as they bore him along upon the dusty ground, and made a small pool when the body stopped before the feet of the duke of anjou's horse. however much he might be changed since i had seen him, i knew the body at once, by the lace and the violet-coloured ribands which tied the sleeves of his shirt, which i had remarked particularly while he was putting on his casque at the moment that the horse had kicked him. "are you sure that is he?" said the duke of anjou. "lift up his head, magnac; one cannot see his face." the baron de magnac twined his fingers in his hair and lifted up his face, exposing the ghastly wound from which he died, and which had so terribly disfigured him, that, what with blood and dirt, and the black smoke of the pistol, his features could hardly be recognised by any one. when i thought of that same countenance, as i had seen it but a few weeks before, smiling with gay and kindly feelings as he laid the blade of knighthood on my shoulder, and compared it with the dark, mutilated object before me, i myself could scarcely have told that it was the same, had it not been for the other marks i have mentioned. "some one bring water from the stream," cried the duke of anjou. "we must wash his face and see." the water was soon brought in a morion; and, when the blood and dirt were washed away, there was no difficulty in recognising the features of the unfortunate prince. "get a sheet from some of the farmhouses," cried the duke of anjou, "and carry the body on to jarnac. you have told the truth, sir," he added, turning to me. "now get you gone. do with him as i bade you. put him with the scotchman, and bring him up this night." thus saying, he rode on himself, and i was conducted to the rear, where a surgeon dressed my wounds, and, finding my right arm broken, set it as best he might. they then led me for about two miles on the road to jarnac, when they brought me to a farmhouse, where they placed me in a small room with several other prisoners, among whom i found la noue and the prince de soubise, but not stuart. all, as well might be supposed, were deeply depressed, but that did not prevent a great deal of conversation from taking place; and there were fewer lamentations over our defeat itself than over the negligence of those who had occasioned it, by suffering the enemy to pass the river. la loue, whose turn it had been to guard the bridge of chateauneuf, was very much blamed; and certain it is, that, even if the enemy had forced the passage, the delay which that would have occasioned might have given us a chance of victory; for it was afterward ascertained that not one sixth part of the protestant cavalry, and not one tenth of the protestant infantry, arrived within a league of the field of battle till the whole was over. the truth is, that not above four thousand men were ever, at one time, engaged upon our part. the discussion of these events had been going on for some time before i was brought in, and i soon found that the worst news of the whole, the death of the prince de condé, was still unknown among the leaders taken. when i told them the fact, however, i could scarcely get them to believe it, so horrible and improbable seemed the action that montesquieu had committed. if i had told them that he had fallen by some chance blow or shot in fair fight, they would have given me credit at once; but i found them even more incredulous than the catholics had been; and soubise insisted that i must have made a mistake in the person, for argence would never have suffered montesquieu to kill a prince of the blood royal in his hands. about four o'clock the rest of the prisoners were removed and marched on towards jarnac, but i was ordered to remain, and i continued in the room of the farm for about a quarter of an hour, suffering intense torture from the wound in my right arm, and giving myself up, in solitude, to every sad and gloomy thought and expectation that it was possible for imagination to conjure up. at the end of that time the door of the room again opened, and stuart was brought in. but oh, how changed he now appeared from the preceding night! he was wounded in two or three places, though not dangerously in any; yet the loss of blood had turned him very pale, and he walked with difficulty. but it was not so much in his colour or his gait that the change was remarkable; it was in the deep, profound melancholy that had fallen upon him. "i grieve to meet you here, stuart," i said, shaking him by the hand. "and so i grieve for you, de cerons," replied he. "i wish it had been god's will, de cerons, that i had died three hours ago; but the villains would not kill me, though i refused them quarter and asked none myself. they knew better: they knew better." "but, good god!" i said, "they will never think of butchering their prisoners now?" "you do not know henry of anjou," replied stuart. "but i know very well, de cerons, that i have not long to live. whether i speak him fair or not, there are things to be remembered which he will not forget. but, on your part, take my advice; if you see him, speak him fair, and perhaps you may save your life thereby. my day is done, de cerons;" and, seating himself by the table, he leaned his brow upon his hand, and fell into deep thought. it length he started up again, saying, "if you should live and get free, de cerons, remember the dagger. it is with my baggage, which i trust is safe; for these catholic tigers, it is evident, have won but a fruitless victory. yet my people, perhaps, may not give it up. stay; if we can get materials for writing, i will make an acknowledgment that it is yours." and, rising, he knocked hard at the door, which was locked. one of the soldiers immediately came; but it was some time before stuart could procure what he wanted. at length, however, it came; and in haste, but with great precision, he wrote down the acknowledgment and gave it to me. he had scarcely done so when we were ordered to march on towards jarnac; and, under a small guard of soldiers, set out on foot for that place, which we reached shortly after dark. we were then conveyed to a small room on the ground floor of the castle, where some food was given to us, and a fire, for it was very cold. i had never been a prisoner before myself, but i had always seen the prisoners treated differently; and i could not but think that this long foot march of two wounded gentlemen was somewhat harsh. i noticed the fact to stuart, who said, "it is not a sign of the times, de cerons, but it is a sign of the duke of anjou. there is not another commander in france who would have treated noble prisoners as he has done this day. however, to me it matters little; my account with this world is made; and, as soon as i have taken some nourishment, for i feel faint, i must try and make my peace with god." after eating a small quantity, and drinking a cup of wine mingled with water, he turned away, and, kneeling in the most distant part of the room, remained for several minutes in prayer. he then rose and spoke more cheerfully, or perhaps i should say, more calmly; and in about half an hour we were both summoned to the presence of the duke of anjou. at the door we found two or three guards, who led us on up some dark steps, and then through a door into a long and wide but low stone gallery, with large gray columns every three or four steps, supporting the pointed vault of the roof. it was tolerably well lighted with torches placed here and there, and on the left side was a row of windows, while on the right was a row of doors between the columns. at the third pillar from the entrance, two or three people were gathered round a large sort of stone table close underneath the column, and as i passed i saw that on it was stretched the corpse of the prince de condé, the body wrapped in linen with some degree of decency, but the head and face exposed. those who were gazing upon it took no notice of us as we advanced, and at the very farther end of the hall we paused for the first time before a door, where stood a man-at-arms with his sword drawn. one of those who accompanied us went in, and the next minute stuart was called into the room beyond, while i remained without. i could hear nothing that passed, but i was not a little anxious and apprehensive for my poor comrade. at length my name was called, and i passed on into the small passage which led to an inner room; it could scarcely be called the antechamber, for it was not above eight feet long and five or six in width. it was tapestried, however, and there was a lamp against the wall, but the door of the chamber beyond was partly open, and a great light streamed forth. at the moment that the other door closed behind me, i could hear the voice of the duke of anjou exclaiming aloud and somewhat angrily, "away with the scotch assassin! away with him!" and, as i entered the room, i saw stuart standing close by the door, with a tall, dark-looking man grasping him by the shoulder. my noble comrade's head, however, was raised and dignified; there was a bright red flush upon his brow, and his cheek was now anything but pale, while his right hand was stretched out, not exactly in the attitude of menace, but still bold and fearless. "take back the word assassin, prince," he said; "i am none; had your false constable died by my hand in fight, as would to heaven he had! he would have died well and deservedly, as the man who attempts to kill the person to whom he surrendered merits by every law of arms. i am no assassin: it is you who butcher prisoners in cold blood. but i warn you, the time shall come--ay, and the knife that shall do it is even now sharpened--when you shall regret the blood that you now wantonly spill, as the hand of some other butcher like yourself takes a life that you have misused too long. now fare you well! do your will! i care not how soon it comes!" thus saying, he turned away; he looked at me for a moment as if he would have spoken to me, but in that moment i could see his features change. i feel convinced that at that moment he recollected he might do me injury by any token of friendship, and he passed me as if he had never seen me before. the moment he was gone and the door closed, the duke of anjou pronounced my name; but, before i could answer, i heard one or two blows struck without, a short cry suppressed into a groan, and then a heavy fall. "seigneur de cerons!" repeated the voice of the duke of anjou in a fierce tone; and, turning to the table, i saw that prince's countenance extremely red, while the faces of all those who were standing around were deadly pale. i have never been accustomed to set any great value upon life, but i have never, in the course of my existence, felt so utterly careless of living and dying as i did at that moment. the great event seemed close upon me, and i advanced to the table as calmly as if i had been going to sit down to meat. the duke of anjou fixed his eyes upon me, and again there came upon his countenance that unpleasant smile, which, whether i interpreted it right or wrong i know not, seemed to augur anything but good. "you appear alarmed," said the duke, gazing at me. "if so, my lord," i replied, "my countenance must sadly belie my heart." "then you fear nothing," he said. "we shall soon see how you will bear your fate." "very probably, your highness," i replied, "as other men bear theirs; though, as to fear, i am as free from it as your highness." among the officers who stood behind the duke, two made me a sign at this moment. the duke of montpensier pointed to the door through which stuart had just passed, then lifted his hand as if to beseech me to be silent. martigue, though evidently friendly towards me, knit his brows and shook his fist at me. but the duke of anjou, after gazing on me for a moment, exclaimed, "what babblers and braggarts these huguenots are! take the maheutre out, and hang him to one of the spouts of the castle!" "i beg your highness's pardon," said martigue, advancing with a frank and somewhat jocular air: "you will recollect he is my prisoner; and, before you hang him, you must pay me fifteen hundred crowns for his ransom." "oh, i will pay you, i will pay you, martigue," said the prince. "i will give no credit," replied martigue, in the same tone. "down upon the table, my lord, or you don't have him! a hanged man is no good to me, and, i should think, none to your highness either." "i should think not indeed," said one of the gentlemen who stood behind: "besides, my lord, i really do not know anything that monsieur de cerons has done, either against your highness or his majesty's service which should excite your indignation against him: besides, he is a knight, my lord. "has he not done plenty?" exclaimed the duke, still maintaining his anger, although he had smiled upon martigue. "a knight! haven't i heard that he is a mere marauder, cutting off our parties, stealing into our camp as a spy, setting fire to villages? i say, is he not a mere marauder?" perhaps the love of existence had grown upon me as i heard the question of life and death discussed; and, at all events, i had a very strong objection to hanging from one of the spouts of jarnac. the duke looked towards me as he asked the last time if i were not a marauder, and i replied, "your highness has been greatly misinformed. i am no marauder, but acting under a commission from the princes of the protestant league. neither can it ever be said of me, sir, or of one single man under my command, that we have ever sacked or pillaged a catholic house, that we have ever drawn the sword against any unarmed man, or that i have demanded one shilling of contribution from any village in which i lodged. the bare walls of the house in which i was quartered was all that i ever demanded; and my purse has ever been ready to pay for everything that i took." "that is more than his highness, or any one else here can say," cried martigue; and the duke himself burst into a loud laugh. "allow me to add," i said, "that my entering your highness's camp, though somewhat bold, was in no degree as a spy; for i came with my men at my back, and all of us armed to the teeth: neither was there say great harm in coming to rescue a relation, which was our sole object; nor, did we injure any one till we were ourselves attacked." "ay!" cried the duke; "and, if i remember right, your cousin rewarded you by refusing to go." "you must be a poor mouse, monsieur de cerons," cried martigue, laughing, and evidently trying to set the prince in good-humour again, "you must be a poor mouse to get into the trap, and not to get the bait after all." "ay, but the mouse not only got out of the trap," i replied, "but bit the rat-catcher's fingers. was it not so, monsieur martigue!" "ha! he has you there, martigue," cried the duke. "what say you now? will you hang him in revenge for the loss of that cornet?" "i say, sir," replied martigue, gayly, "that the young gentleman speaks very true. the mouse did bite the rat-catcher's fingers, and bit him to the bone. but the rat-catcher has caught him at last, and, by your highness's good leave, will keep him now he's got him." it was evident that some progress had been made in moving the duke of anjou, and at that moment the duke of montpensier joined in. "i told your highness this morning," he said, "that it was my intention to ask a boon of you in regard to monsieur de cerons; but, as your highness knows, i intercede for no one without good reason. in the first place, let me say, that this gentleman, instead of being a mere marauder, as some one has induced your highness to believe, is perhaps the most generous and scrupulous of the enemy's party. i can speak of the accounts given of him by the peasantry myself; and, besides, i have had certain information, from a gentleman who saw it in the town of pons, that he was there known to cut down one of his own men for some of the horrors usually committed in a town taken by assault. but this is not all, sir. i personally owe him a deep debt of gratitude for saving the life of my son, and sending him back into the camp without demanding a ransom." "what! your son, montpensier?" exclaimed the duke; "what! d'auvergne?" "neither more nor less, my lord," replied the duke. "when we decamped from the neighbourhood of loudun, monsieur de cerons led those that pursued. my son turned to drive them back. in the _mêlée_ he was borne to the ground, and was absolutely under the feet of monsieur de cerons' horse. that gentleman helped him to rise; and, telling him to mount in haste, suffered him to retire unhurt. under these circumstances, i must not only beg his life of your highness, if you ever seriously thought of putting him to death, which i do not believe; but i would also offer to pay his ransom at once to monsieur de martigue and set him free, only that i trust, by keeping him here in our camp for some time, we may cure him of some prejudices of education, and gain a very distinguished soldier back to religion and to loyalty. such gentlemen as monsieur de cerons, my lord, are far better worth winning than hanging, depend upon it." "you will ruin us all, you will ruin us all!" cried a voice from behind, which i found afterward came from the well-known chicot. "if you convert monsieur de cerons, and bring him into our camp, the army's lost, the king's throne shaken, and he may play at bowls with the globe and crown. why, heavens and earth! wasn't it bad enough when we had only martigue to lead us into every mad adventure, while the huguenots had this mad fellow to run his head against our crack-brained galloper! if you bring, over another such to our side to match martigue, the army will be like a string between two young dogs, pulled here and there over every bush, and hill, and fence, through the whole land. 'pon my soul, i had hoped and trusted that i should hear martigue had been killed to-day; for i am tired to death, and my brain quite weary with thinking where he will be next: but if you come to add to him this same night-walking spectre of cast iron, there is no chance of any one ever having a moment's repose through life." "pray attend to chicot's reasons, your highness," said martigue; "for, like some old verses that i've met with, they always read the wrong way, you know." "well," said the prince, "if you will all have it so, so it must be, i suppose; but, at all events, i shall expect no slight apology from monsieur de cerons for the rash and insolent words he addressed to me this morning." "i trust, sir," i replied, "that in my grief for the disasters of this day, i have not been mad enough to address to your highness, the brother of my king, any words of insolence whatever. i am quite ignorant and unconscious of having done so, but beg your highness's pardon most sincerely and most humbly for anything that could have been construed to that effect." "that is well, that is well," replied the duke: "you must indeed have forgotten yourself; but the words that you spoke, sir, about the prince de condé, were rash and insolent." "but were never applicable to your highness," i replied. "they were entirely and totally meant for and pointed at the baron de montesquieu, the cold-blooded murderer of a gallant prince; and i am sure, sir, that, had you seen the act as i did, your generous nature would have been roused in a moment to avenge the butchery of your cousin upon his foul assassin." "perhaps i might," replied the prince: but the duke of montpensier, who knew that such discussions with the duke of anjou became dangerous in every point of view when carried too far, took advantage of a slight thoughtful pause to say, "i think your highness graciously granted my request." the prince bowed his head, and montpensier, passing round the table, took me by the arm, nodding to martigue, who replied, if i might read his looks, "get him away as fast as you can." the prince, however, detained us for a moment longer, saying, "i will speak to monsieur de cerons at some future time: his countenance pleases me." "no reply," whispered the duke of montpensier; and, merely bowing my head low as my answer, i followed the duke through the door. in that little passage antechamber, however, my first step was into a pool of dark blood, and i was about to draw back with an exclamation, when the duke pulled me on sharply by the left arm; and after we had got several paces down the gallery, he said, in a low, deep tone, "young man, young man! you have been sporting with a tiger, who has already torn one to pieces, and has got the thirst for blood upon him strong!" chapter ii. to the duke of montpensier's words i made no reply, as there were several persons not far off at the time, and i feared that whatever i might say at such a moment would be less calm and temperate than i could have wished it. the duke added nothing more, but led me on past the spot where the body of the prince de condé lay, to the lower story of the building, where we found, not far from the room in which i had been at first confined, a considerable body of his attendants, with his son, the prince d'auvergne. the moment the young man saw me, he started forward and grasped my hand, exclaiming, "he is safe, he is safe!" "he is so," replied the duke; "but it is not his own fault that he is not now lying stark and cold as some others that i could name. take him away with you, d'auvergne, to our quarters, and, for heaven's sake, teach him to be cautious where he is. monsieur de cerons," he continued, turning to me, "i need not ask you whether i have your parole." "of course, my lord," i replied, "of course; i surrendered voluntarily to monsieur martigue, and by the same right that i claim my life, not as a matter of grace, but as a matter of justice, i consider myself as a prisoner till my ransom is granted and paid." the duke bowed his head and left me, and the prince d'auvergne, with his attendants, led me out into the streets of jarnac, where, with several torches before us, we proceeded to the lower part of the town, and entered a large dwelling which had been taken possession of by the duke of montpensier. a good deal to my surprise, for i had as yet seen nothing but the huguenot camp, i found nearly as much splendour and luxury reigning in the temporary abode of the catholic commander as if he had been in the mansion of his ancestors. there were servants in splendid dresses, there were lights in all the rooms, and the prince led me into a great hall, where a large table was set out as if for the supper of some twenty or thirty persons. "my father," he said, "will soon return; but, till he does so, monsieur de cerons, let us go into this little room beyond, and converse for a few moments quietly." he then led me in, asked after the wounds i had received, spoke to me of the different events of the late battle, and mentioned the death of the prince de condé with so much kindly and noble feeling, that, had not my mind been altogether prepossessed in his favour before, those words would have attached me to him for ever. he then gave me several cautions with regard to my conduct during my stay in the catholic camp. "neither my father nor myself," he said, "would wish you to abandon your opinions except upon full conviction; but, at the same time, it will be much better for you, as far as possible, to restrain any expression of those opinions, for there are dangerous men around us all, and you might place yourself in situations from which it might be difficult, if not impossible, to extricate you." i promised to follow his counsel; and then, judging from his conversation that he must have more experience in the ways of courts and camps than i had imagined, i asked him if this was the first campaign in which he had served. "oh, no!" he replied; "i am older than i appear, monsieur de cerons." and i found that such indeed was the case, but that in him there was the extraordinary combination of high powers of mind and considerable experience, with unpresuming modesty, and all the frank, quick emotions of boyhood. there was something fine and noble, too, in the demeanour of the father to the son and the son to the father. the duke felt all the eager apprehensions and tender anxiety for the young prince that he had felt when he was a boy, flew always to his succour in the battle-field, and seemed to feel unwilling to yield the affectionate privilege of guiding, guarding, and defending his boy; but, at the same time, he was aware and proud of his son's high qualities, had every confidence in his mind and judgment, and treated his opinions with that respect which ensured the respect of others. the son, on his part, though well aware of his own capability of directing and defending himself, ever showed the deepest gratitude for his father's tenderness, and reverence for his authority and advice. not long after our conversation had begun, there were some steps heard in the hall, and the voice of the duke of montpensier was heard exclaiming, "where are you, francis? where is monsieur de cerons?" in another moment the duke entered the room, before his son could go to meet him. he was accompanied by martigue, who entered the little room with him, and by several others, who remained behind in the supper-room. the moment he entered, martigue seized me roughly by the collar on both sides of my buff coat, and gave me a little but friendly shake, exclaiming, "you young scoundrel, you owe me double ransom, i swear." and, as he spoke, the old soldier looked me over from head to foot with the eye of a connoisseur, as if calculating what portion of strength there was in my limbs. "upon my honour, monsieur de martigue," i replied, "i think i do; for you have certainly once spared my life and once saved it." "you are honest, you are honest!" replied martigue, in the same tone: "but here i and monsieur de montpensier have been quarrelling for you. he says he will keep you here till your wounds are whole, to try if he cannot cure you of calvinism, or, at all events, teach you to serve the king in another way than fighting his troops and cutting the throats of his subjects. i want you to be put to ransom directly, in order that you and i may, some day or another before long, have a fair opportunity of trying our right hands; for we have not had it out yet, seeing that you got off in such a shabby way this morning by shooting my horse." "i could not help it, monsieur de martigue," i replied, "or i would not have done it. i was in the midst of your people; and if i had not taken that moment to escape, i must have surrendered to them, even if i had got the better of you. however, i surely made up for it afterward." "what! in the village?" cried martigue. "oh, i never got near you there." "no," i replied; "after that unfortunate _mêlée_, i made up my mind that i would surrender to none but you if i could help it, and lay still there, while twenty people passed, till i saw you come up." "by the lord, you might have done worse!" cried martigue. "if montluc had got hold of you, he would have given you a pistol-shot for your pains. by-the-way, it was shrewd of you, monsieur de montpensier, to send montluc away towards cognac; for, by heavens! if he had been at the ear of monseigneur to-night, instead of quiet people like ourselves, there is no knowing what would have come of it." "the streets of jarnac would have flowed with blood," replied the duke; "however, monsieur de cerons, you are now safe, and i have to inform you that monsieur de martigue consents to receive your ransom from me, so that you are now my prisoner. i trust i may add, also, that you are my son's friend, and therefore will beg you to remain with us some few weeks, as i have every reason to believe that, ere long, matters will assume a more pacific aspect, and the contentions which now desolate france be brought to an end without your taking any farther share therein." i had no choice but to obey; for, of course, i could not compel them to set me at liberty before they thought fit. i knew also that, for the time, i was unable to do any effectual service in the field, and therefore i regretted less to be thus detained a prisoner. when all this was settled, the duke informed me that he intended to send a flag the next morning to the admiral, and that, if i chose it, i could communicate at the same time with any of my friends in the camp, and give any orders concerning my baggage and attendants that i might think fit. this information was gratifying to me in several respects, but in none more than inasmuch as it showed me that the admiral had been enabled to save a large portion of the huguenot army and all the baggage. i took advantage of the duke's offer, then, to send word to moric endem to take the command of my troop till my return, and to send me three horses and two horse-boys; to carry the small chest, in which i had placed the ransom of monsieur de jersay, with other money, to the admiral, and desire him to open it, with a request that he would divide a thousand crowns among the men of my troop, and, sending me a thousand crowns, would put the rest in safety for me till the catholics admitted me to ransom. i wrote these directions down at once by the duke's desire, as the messenger was to set off early on the following morning; and, ere i had done, for it took me some time to write with my left hand, one of the servers announced to the duke that supper was upon the table. "you look pale and worn, monsieur de cerons," said the duke. "my principal officers sup with me to-night; pray come and take some refreshment, after which you shall retire to a chamber prepared for you, and i will send my own surgeon to attend you, for i see you are somewhat hurt." thus saying, he left me; and, finishing what i was writing, i directed it to moric endem, with a note stating that, if he was not to be found, it was to be given to the admiral. i then followed to the supper-table, which i found surrounded by a number of distinguished men, but with a seat reserved for me among them; and i must say that i never in my life met with more kindness and courtesy than greeted me there, while a prisoner, at the duke of montpensier's table. the duke and the prince both pressed me to eat, but the wound in my arm had given me excessive pain during the whole evening; my shoulder was burning and inflamed; i felt bruised, feverish, sick, and weary; and before my eyes, as i sat at the table, were floating continually vague images of all the terrible scenes and events that i had been witness of during that day. it may well be conceived, therefore, that i loathed the very sight of food, and yet every moment i felt myself becoming more and more faint. i saw the eyes of the prince d'auvergne upon me from time to time, and at length he sent round one of the attendants, who was pouring out for him some choice wine, to carry the flagon to me. i held the cup for him, thinking that the wine might revive me; but, as i did so, and turned my head somewhat suddenly, all the objects in the room seemed to swim around me, and i fell back senseless upon the floor of the hall. when i recovered in some degree, i found myself in bed in a very comfortable room, with a gentleman in the dress of a surgeon beside me, and two or three attendants around. i have only a vague recollection, however, of what passed on that occasion, for i was during the whole night in a state approaching delirium, with wild images of the battle and its consequences rising up before my mind the moment i closed my eyes to sleep. now i was in the midst of the enemy, again fighting hand to hand with martigue; then he suddenly changed to the prince de condé, and by some strange process of the imagination i became montesquieu, and was about to shoot him under the bank, hating myself all the time for what i was doing, yet hurried on irresistibly to accomplish it. then suddenly a strong hand seemed to seize me, and i found myself a prisoner; and at other times i beheld the gallant prince who had fallen, as he sat before the last fatal charge, raising his hand towards the white banner above his head, and addressing those last, terrible, memorable words to us who surrounded him. in such wild visions passed the whole night; but an hour or two before daybreak i fell into a somewhat sounder sleep, and when i woke, just after dawn, i found the prince d'auvergne sitting beside me, and speaking to one of the attendants. "oh, is that you, monseigneur," i said, turning partly towards him. "yes, monsieur de cerons," he replied, "i did not like to disturb you, because the attendant tells me you have had a bad night; but, as you are awake, i may as well ask you if there is anything that i can do for you this morning, as i am going with the rest of the officers to the field of battle, to see the loss on either side, and to make arrangements in regard to the wounded and the dead. i fear that you must, like most of us, have some friend there." "several, i doubt not, my lord," i replied; "but, of course, my principal care must be for my own people. should you find among the prisoners or the wounded any men belonging to my band, i trust you will have them kindly treated for my sake. there is one poor lad, indeed, for whom i am anxious to make inquiries. he is named andriot, and followed me to the field, not as a man-at-arms, but merely as an attendant; he fell upon the slope of the hill, about half a mile from triac, in face of monsieur de brissac's arquebusiers." "i will not fail to make inquiries for him," replied the prince, "and for the others also; and i will report to you, as soon as i return, what has been done. it may be late, however, before i come back; and, in the mean time, i understand the surgeon has left especial orders that you should not quit your bed on any account whatever." i would fain have risen, but the prince insisted so strongly upon my obeying the surgeon's commands to the letter, that i promised him to do so, and soon found the benefit of yielding to better knowledge than my own. after remaining for an hour, or somewhat more, in sorrowful but more tranquil thoughts than during the preceding evening i had been able to obtain, exhaustion and weakness again brought on sleep, but of a far more calm and beneficial character; and, till nearly four o'clock in the evening, i enjoyed a long lapse of peaceful slumber. at length i awoke, and found a servant still with me, with whom i talked for some time on the rumours of the day, and found, much to my satisfaction, that a large force of protestants occupied cognac, and that the rest of the army had effected its retreat in complete safety to the town of sainctes. very few prisoners were said to have been taken, and the whole baggage of the protestant army had, it seems, been saved. the attendant, however, spoke confidently of cognac being attacked the next day; talked of the protestant cause as utterly ruined and hopeless, and exalted the virtues, skill, and courage of the duke of anjou to the very skies. remembering the warning i had received on the preceding night, i made no reply, but only asked questions, to which he very willingly returned an answer. in the midst of our conversation, however, i heard irregular footfalls without, as if of some lame person approaching the chamber, and in a moment or two after, not a little to my satisfaction, poor andriot hobbled in, supporting himself upon a stick. the same ball, it seems, which had killed his horse, had wounded him also in the leg; and though the man was by no means a coward, and, i believe, was perfectly insensible of anything like nervous agitation, he avoided from that moment every scene of strife, declaring deliberately that wounds in the leg were not comfortable. i was visited on the same night by the prince d'auvergne, and on the following day was permitted to rise, and spent an hour in the morning with the duke of montpensier. the duke and his son both showed me the greatest kindness; but there was not the slightest word said about admitting me to ransom, and i remarked that the subject was carefully avoided. in the evening, my horses and the grooms i had sent for arrived, together with the money and a letter from moric endem, which was couched in the following terms: "monseigneur, "i have never seen any one comport himself better in a hot _mêlée_ than you did yesterday, which must console you for being taken prisoner and for having to pay a ransom, which is always, of course, the most unpleasant thing that can happen to any gentleman adventurer. i dare say, for a gentleman of your kidney, it would have been pleasanter, take it upon the whole, to be killed outright by the side of our brave prince. i have often heard gentlemen--that is to say--young gentlemen, say such things; but i never could manage to feel anything of the kind myself, always looking upon a live ass to be a great deal better than a dead lion. i have not the slightest doubt, therefore, that some time or another hereafter you will find it a very comfortable thing indeed to be alive; and you will have the advantage, too, of being able to get yourself killed another time in case you like it. "in the mean time, i will do my best to lead the troop as you have done, and trust we shall have plenty of plunder to give an account of when you come back again. the enemy are not so successful at that work as we are, and you will be glad to hear that all the baggage is quite safe. i have taken the chest to the admiral, as you commanded; and have distributed the thousand crowns among the men, who are very grateful; and i send you the thousand that you require for yourself, together with the admiral's receipt for the remainder, amounting to three thousand seven hundred and sixty crowns of the sun, with two livres tournois, six sous, and two derniers. i am sorry to tell you that we have lost no less than thirteen men, of whom nine were killed or disabled before you quitted us on the hill. poor moriton we got off, but he died last night, having been shot very funnily by two arquebus balls at the same moment, which must have touched each other, for they made a long wound just like a keyhole. i have kept his cuirass, poor fellow, for one may live many a day without seeing such a thing as that. i myself have lost the tip of my right ear, which is no great loss after all, for it only makes that one match the left, the end of which was shot off some years ago by a mad fellow called chicot. i send you below a list of our killed and wounded, and am, your devoted servant, "moric endem." with this curious epistle was a brief note from the admiral, acknowledging the receipt of the money, and telling me that though, of course, it was necessary to arrange the liberation of the elder and more experienced officers in the first instance, he would not forget me when it came to my turn. the words were words of course, and i certainly did not expect that the admiral would think of the matter much more, as in fact he did not do. towards night the duke of montpensier himself came back to jarnac, and i saw that he was a good deal mortified, annoyed, and thoughtful. after supper he somewhat recovered himself, and i then found, from what he said, that the efforts of the catholics upon cognac had been repelled successfully at every point, and the army obliged to withdraw. shortly after this, the duke entered my chamber one morning early, saying, "monsieur de cerons, i come to take leave of you for a time. the army is about to march, the surgeon thinks it not fit that you should advance as rapidly as we do, and it is therefore my wish that you should proceed by slow stages to my house at champigny, where a part of my attendants are about to go. you will there find every convenience; i have written to prepare my people for your reception, and i consider you still, you must remember, upon parole." "it must be, my lord," i replied, "of course, as you think fit: but i trust it will not be long before you kindly name my ransom, and set me at liberty." the duke turned to me with a kindly expression of countenance, and replied, "believe me, monsieur de cerons, i have your interests nearly at heart. neither i nor my son are persons whose affections are given by halves. i have consulted with him and with one or two other gentlemen, for whose opinion i have a respect, and they all think with me, that i had better act as i have undoubtedly a right to do, and detain you as a prisoner; though assuredly a prisoner in no very strict sense of the word, than, by permitting you to go on in the course with which you have begun--glorious in a military point of view, as it may be--see you make yourself remarkable by determined rebellion and opposition to the royal authority, and thus exclude yourself for ever from the royal protection. there is my hand. monsieur de cerons. believe me, i wish you well." i took his hand respectfully, i may say affectionately, and replied, "your good opinion is, indeed, most deeply valuable to me, my lord; but yet, pardon me for detaining you to hear one word more. in your calculations for my benefit, there are things that you do not know. are you aware, my lord, that the whole fortune i possess on earth is my sword; that it is an absolute necessity for me to distinguish myself, and make myself a high name by military exertion? it is, of course, impossible for me to fight against those who maintain the same religious opinions as myself, and, consequently, the only field that is open to me is in arms in the protestant cause." "but the estate of cerons?" said the duke, inquiringly. "i remember it a very fair property in the hands of, i think, your father?" "alas! sir," i replied, "the estate of cerons has never been mine. my father, by the necessities of the times in which he lived, was obliged to part with the whole estate, except one rood of land, to preserve the name to his son. it was bought by his more fortunate cousin, the baron de blancford, with whom it still remains. thus, therefore, my lord, if you keep me still a prisoner, though your motives may be most kind ones, you cut me off from every opportunity of advancing my own fortunes and renown; and, let me add in one word, that i have the strongest of all possible motives for seeking to urge my way forward as fast as possible." "what, love?" said the duke of montpensier, laying his hand upon my shoulder, and gazing in my face with a smile. "nay, never conceal it. i can feel for you well, monsieur de cerons. but let me consider for a moment." and he fell into a fit of musing which lasted for several minutes. "i had thought your circumstances were different," he continued; "but, however, it will only make this difference, that it will induce us to do at once what we intended always to do ultimately." "to set me at liberty, i trust, my lord?" i replied. "no," he said, with a smile, "no; the very reason you give is a stronger motive for keeping you. but francis shall speak to you upon it all. you will make your first day's march with him to-morrow, and remember, i only exact one thing on my part. when you are at champigny, you are to make yourself as little known by name as possible, and to keep yourself as much concealed as you can. however, i will talk to d'auvergne about it, and he shall tell you all. he sees me ten miles upon my way to-day, and then returns. trust to what he tells you from me as if they were my own words." and, thus saying, he left me, grateful indeed for having made such a friend, but still not a little grieved and melancholy at the prospect of remaining a prisoner, confined to the dull neighbourhood of saumur. chapter iv. from the windows of the house where the duke of montpensier had taken up his quarters, i saw a large division of the army march out of jarnac, and certainly a very different scene, indeed, was the gay and glittering procession of the royal host from the bands of the poor huguenots even in their freshest guise. of the young prince d'auvergne i saw nothing during that day till supper-time, when, surrounded by his officers, he had only an opportunity of speaking to me a few words to prepare me for taking my departure from jarnac an hour after sunrise on the following day. though there were one or two persons of higher rank sat nearer the prince at supper than i did, and many with whom he was in old habits of intimacy, yet the little incident which had occurred during the retreat from loudun, my condition as a prisoner, and the anxiety he had felt at different times on my account when my life was in danger, seemed to have established a deeper kind of interest between me and him than there existed between himself and any of his own party; and he always spoke to me with that tone of kindness, attention, and feeling which made any strangers who might happen to be at the table turn their eyes to see who it was that the prince addressed in such a manner. somewhat before the time appointed on the following morning i descended from my chamber, prepared to set out. i found that the prince[ ] had gone to the quarters of the duke of anjou, and the attendants, who were about to be sent from the army to champigny, were waiting round the door with their horses and mine, ready to take their places as the troops passed along. determined to follow their example, i waited by the side of my horse, while the attendants of the duke of montpensier and my own kept respectfully at a little distance, when i felt some one suddenly pull my mantle, and, turning round, i saw one of the most beautiful girls i had ever beheld, whose features were not unfamiliar to me. the handwriting of the letter that she slipped into my hand, however, was far better known, for it was that of louise de blancford; and, with a hand all eagerness, i was tearing it open, when the girl again plucked me by the cloak, and, gazing up in my face with her large, dark eyes, cried, "hist! seigneur, hist! will you befriend us!" she seemed about thirteen or fourteen years of age, not more; and, after gazing upon her for a moment, endeavouring to recollect where i had seen her, i said, "how can i befriend you, my good girl? what is your name?" "you recollect me not," replied the girl; "but my name is miriam ahar." "oh, i recollect thee well," i replied, "now. tell me what i can do for thee, pretty one, and i will do it with pleasure." and, as i spoke, there was a look of real pleasure, i believe, came over my countenance, which brought a smile upon the girl's beautiful lips. "i was sure you would be kind," she said, "and you can help us thus. my father is here in yonder house with some rich merchandise. he is appointed to come after the army with the rear guard, which sets out at four this evening; but he has learned, from a good friend in this place, that six of the many men who do evil deeds in such armies as these have their eyes upon him. now you know what often happens to a jew when he travels with the rear guard of an army." "no, i do not," i replied: "i never heard of any injury befalling them." "ay, who hears of such things befalling them but their own nation?" she replied, sadly. "who hears that the dead body of a jew, murdered and stripped, is found by the roadside? and all that are with him, what becomes of them? they fly if they are permitted, and some are killed to prevent them bearing witness, and the rest are silent through fear, and the murderers go away enriched." there was reason to believe that the girl's tale was too true, but it was difficult to know how to serve her. "my poor child," i said, "what can be done for you? i am a prisoner, and wounded myself; but if you would point out what could be done, i would gladly do it, for i remember you were kind to me long ago." "you can do much for us," she said; "we knew you were a prisoner, for we have been in the protestant camp, and inquired for you. but still you can do much for us; for they say you are loved by some of the great among these people, and we have only the protection of those who would devour us. get us permission to go this very hour in the train of the main battle with which you go, and let one of your people accompany us; if so, we are safe; if not, we are altogether lost." "i will do my best for you, miriam," i replied; "here comes the prince d'auvergne; i will apply to him. stand by me; do not go back. my lord," i said, "here is a petitioner to me. she and her father were kind to me long ago. they are jews, but without their help i could never have appeared in the field at all. they are now appointed to go with the rear guard; but you know what is likely to happen to a jew, in a march partly in the night, among the stragglers of the army." "let them follow us if they can get ready," replied the prince, in evident haste; "one of your people can go with them, de cerons." "but give them some sort of safeguard, my lord," i said; "one word under your hand." "here, a pen and ink, arnon!" said the prince, in the same hasty tone; and, tearing a leaf out of his tablets, he wrote, "suffer to pass--what is the name?" "solomon ahar," i replied. "oh, solomon ahar, the usurious villain!" he said; "i have heard of him. well, nevertheless--" and he went on writing--"suffer to pass solomon ahar, his people and horses, with the baggage of francis d'auvergne." "there," he said, "these vermin will do no great credit to my baggage, de cerons; but, if you wish it, so let it be;" and, as he spoke, he looked upon the exquisitely beautiful form and features of poor miriam ahar as if she had been a speckled toad. such is prejudice! "i will be back instantly, de cerons," he continued, "and then we will join the regiment." thus saying, he turned into the court of the hotel, and i gave the paper to the girl, saying, "there, miriam, that is all i can do for you. andriot, you go with her, and take one of the grooms: i want only one with me. see them safe, and join me after the march." miriam took the paper, and for her only reply kissed the hand that held it to her; and, running away so fast that andriot, though very willing to accompany the pretty jewess, it seemed, could scarcely mount his horse and follow her, she disappeared under the doorway of a house higher up the street. in a moment or two after the prince d'auvergne made his appearance again, and, following him to the park of the chateau, where his regiment and several others were drawn up, i was soon plunged into all the bustle of a march with a large army. for some time orders and counter-orders, and arrangements of various kinds, came so thick, that he had no time for conversation with me; but, after the lapse of about an hour, everything fell into regular order again; and, as there was no chance of any attack, he left the conduct of his regiment to the inferior officers, and civilly getting rid of several noblemen and gentlemen who seemed inclined to attach themselves to his person, he rode on with me, at once opening the conversation with the subject on which his father had spoken to me on the preceding night. "my father," he said, "was so hurried yesterday that i did not clearly understand whether he had told you, de cerons, what he intended to do or not." i replied that the duke had not done so, but referred me to him: and i went on to say, "you know well, monsieur d'auvergne, that protracted imprisonment must be very painful to me, and i trust it is your father's intention to admit me to ransom." i was proceeding to repeat what i had said to his father the day before, when he interrupted me with a smile, saying, "you need not give me reasons why, de cerons; though i look so young, i am old enough to have felt; and though i am older than you think me, i am not too old to have forgotten such feelings as i saw upon a certain parting between a lady and her lover. your secret was well kept both by my father and myself, and your sour cousin of blancford heard nothing of it from us. but with regard to setting you free i have nothing to do; and i feel very sure that one of my father's reasons for sending you to champigny is that you may be near your fair lady, and not, by a lengthened imprisonment, lose the opportunity of advancing yourself in the favour either of herself or her father." "good god!" i exclaimed, "i had not the slightest idea that the baron had gone to saumur." "oh! you mistake, you mistake," said the prince. "my father did not speak of sending you to champigné-le-sec, which, as its name implies, would be a dry residence for you enough, but to champigny near paris, where we have estates, and an old chateau of which we are all fond. but still i must say it is not in my power to affect at all my father's determination about your imprisonment. indeed, i must confess, i think it best for you that it should be as it is; and, at all events, i have no authority in the matter. what i alluded to was something quite different. the day before yesterday, as we were riding down towards cognac, my father and i were talking of you, and we determined, in memory of the day when you and i first met, to make you a present of a little farm that we lately bought, for the purpose of giving it to an old friend of ours, but who was unfortunately killed in the first skirmish of this campaign. it lies close to our own place at champigny, and is called by his own name, which was the cause of our buying it for him. that name is les bois. it remains just as we had it all arranged to give him. the old chateau, though but small, is, i think you will admit, as sweet a spot as well could be chosen to repose in after the toils of war. we have had it tapestried and furnished afresh throughout in the very last mode; and the annual rent amounts to about five thousand livres per annum. "oh, my lord, my lord, mention not such a thing to me," i cried. "although your rank and mine might well permit me to accept your bounty, yet such a gift as that i am utterly undeserving of." "not at all, de cerons, not at all," replied the prince. "you must recollect the circumstances under which it is offered. if, on the occasion you speak of, you had chosen to have killed me, you might have done so; but you were too generous for that. you might equally have made me your prisoner; but the truth was, you thought me a mere boy, and let me escape. i have no objection, de cerons, to remain under obligations to you; and, even in offering you this little gift, both my father and myself are still your debtors. you forget what would have been the ransom of the prince d'auvergne. i know well what it would be if montluc had to fix it. certainly not less than fifty thousand gold henris, or a hundred thousand crowns of the sun. the estate we give, in all cost but a third of that sum; and therefore, my good friend, i still bear a great portion of my ransom to the credit of gratitude. the deeds of the estate my father has left with me to make over to you, and, if we can find a notary within ten miles of our halting-place, they shall be made your own this very night." it may be easily conceived what were my feelings upon the present occasion. the tone in which he spoke, his whole manner and look, left no opportunity of refusing even with courtesy, had i been so inclined. but when i looked upon his offer, and thought that that which was given so generously might be but the foundation of my future fortunes, i felt no such inclination to refuse. i thought of louise, too, my own bright louise, and i felt the letter which she had sent me, and which i had placed in my bosom to read when alone, glow warm upon my heart when new hopes and expectations entered into it. the eye of the prince was upon me as i thus thought, and he seemed to read all the feelings that were passing in my bosom, for a smile came up upon his countenance, and he said, "come, de cerons, you accept it. prithee, not a word more. at champigny you will have the opportunity of visiting your new estate, or even of dwelling there if you so will, for the limits of the two properties touch, and, of course, you may reside at which you will. it is better, perhaps, that you should go to champigny at first, where everything is prepared and ready for you; and, in the mean time, as it is somewhat dangerous just now for a protestant to appear in the neighbourhood of paris, you may take with all safety the name of des bois, as you have made that of de cerons somewhat too well known." thus conversing, we went on our way, and in the evening arrived at the camp under the walls of angoulême. persons were waiting for us at the quarters marked out for the prince d'auvergne, inviting us to sup with the duke of montpensier, and not a moment was allowed me to read the letter of louise till i retired to rest for the night. in the mean time, however, two circumstances happened which i must notice briefly. the first was the actual transfer of the chateau and property of les bois to myself, which was executed that night in the presence of a notary, both the duke of montpensier and the prince signing the act. the next occurred as we were pausing round the table for a moment after supper. there was no one in the chamber but the duke, his son, and myself, and we were about to separate, when an attendant announced that the jew, solomon ahar, waited without. probably each of the three thought that the business of the jew was with himself; but the duke said, "it is only that usurious jew, who comes to tell me, i suppose, that the duke of anjou cannot have the money that he wants. in fact, i saw it would be so last night; and i suppose that the man is afraid of telling the duke himself, lest he should lose his ears, so comes to put the unpleasant task on me. send him in, however." in a moment after poor solomon ahar entered, cringing and bending down to the ground. "well, solomon," said the duke, "you have come sooner than i expected to see you; and i suppose this promptitude shows that you have no very good news to bring me." "not so, my most gracious lord," replied the jew, bending again to the very ground. "on the contrary, i come to say i think it can be done. i trust it can be managed. i have good hope that we can accept the terms of the noble prince; for, as i came along but now, i have had much talk and conversation with some of the gentle leaders about arms, and spoils, and ransoms, and what not, and i have done a little commerce by the way, so that i think the matter can be done to the prince's contentment; and i came to tell you first, monseigneur, because i thought it would do you a pleasure to tell his highness yourself." "on my life it does!" cried the duke; "for there is many a thing i want the prince to do, which i dare not even ask when he is in such a humour as at present." "it is all owing, my very good and excellent lord," said the jew, "it is all owing to these two noble gentlemen, my excellent good lord your son, and that very respectable knight who sits by him; for, had it not been for their protection, and my lord the prince's permission to come with the main battle, i should never have seen these worthy traders, and done the little commerce that enables me to pleasure the prince." "it cannot be a little commerce, good solomon," said the duke, "which enables you to furnish a sum of two hundred thousand crowns, when you declared you could not find it in all paris." "on my life and soul!" cried the israelite, "it will but pay the interest of the money in case i be a loser." but both the duke and his son laughed, and solomon himself grinned silently, as if he did not in the least degree expect to be believed. he produced from under his robe, however, two small packets, one containing the most exquisitely beautiful pair of gloves for a lady that i ever beheld, being formed of peach-coloured velvet, embroidered on the back with gold and pearls, which he laid before the prince d'auvergne, begging his acceptance of them as a present for any lady that he loved. the other was a small plain dagger, about two hands' breadths in length, the haft of which was as plain as it well could be, being distinguished by nothing but a few lines of gold inlaid in the steel. the blade, which he drew from the plain steel sheath, was thick and dull in colour, as if it had been rusty and ill cleaned. nevertheless, this somewhat coarse-looking implement he laid upon the table before the duke with great reverence, saying, "let me beg your noble acceptance of that which, though it looks but a poor gift, may be considered as invaluable. that dagger is made of one cake of pure damascus steel. it will pass through the finest-tempered corslet that can be produced in the camp, even when struck by a weak arm; and with that dagger the emperor hassan, caliph of the moors, killed no less than ten spanish cavaliers at the great battle of the salado." the duke of montpensier seemed to value the gift highly, and the jew then turned towards me, bowing lowly, and saying, "i have not forgotten to be grateful to monsieur de cerons." "the only gratitude i wish, good solomon," i replied, "is, that you would find for me a certain dagger that you know of, and which i fear may be lost to me for ever by the death of the person to whom you delivered it." "i feared so, i feared so," said the jew; "but it shall be found if it be on this side of constantinople. i have heard, good sir, that you are going towards paris; so monsieur arnon, the intendant of good monsieur d'auvergne, told me; and i would fain travel in such safe company, especially as i go on the business of his highness of anjou," he added, looking at the duke. "be it so, be it so," said the duke of montpensier; "and the sooner you arrive in the capital the better." "on the twenty-fifth day of the present month," said the jew, "his highness may draw on me bills of exchange through any of the merchants of poitiers. they will not refuse him the money when they see the name of solomon ahar." the duke seemed not a little pleased with this intelligence, and, a few words more having passed, solomon retired from the room, and the duke hastened to communicate the news he had received as fast as possible to the duke of anjou. in the mean time, the prince d'auvergne and i returned to our quarters, and bidding me kindly adieu, as i was to depart early on the following morning, he left me, as he thought, to repose. sleep, however, was not destined to visit my eyes that night. it was with difficulty, my right hand and arm being still bound up in its wooden case, that i was able to open the letter of louise; and oh! when i did open it, what pain did it inflict! the letter has been since destroyed, so that i cannot give it accurately; but it informed me that the baroness had notified to her that her father had concluded upon a marriage between her and the lord of blaye. her consent, she said, had never been asked and the marchioness had immediately left her stupified and thunderstruck. the only consolations she had, the poor girl said, were, in the first place, that the man himself was absent with the army, and likely to be absent for long; and, in the second, that la tour assured her that the baron himself had fixed that the marriage should not take place for some time. to give me some comfort under such circumstances, she said, "you know me, henry, and know that i would rather die. but, oh! that i could see you, and speak with you now, if it were but for a few hours!" it may well be conceived that the time now seemed to lag; and, when i at length set off upon my journey towards champigny, every league seemed extended to two or three, every minute was protracted into days. i was the first in the saddle in the morning, the last to feel fatigue at night. but still, as all the various military movements had disturbed the posts, and we rode our own horses, our journey was in reality slow, and seemed to me still slower. there were but few events in that journey which i need dwell upon. the party which went through it was divided by their particular circumstances, by their religion and habits, and each kept much apart from the other. i, belonging to the higher class of the land, was separated from the rest both by my rank and by my faith; and my servants, being protestants, were, of course, not sought by the attendants of the duke of montpensier. the intendant, indeed, of the prince d'auvergne generally rode by my side, a step farther back, endeavouring to beguile the way with different stories of the scenes which he had seen in a long life, and the descriptions of objects which i had never beheld. he told a tale pleasantly enough, and his descriptions were vivid and accurate. i showed a sufficient degree of interest in what he said to flatter his vanity a little, and induce him to go on. but he saw that i was deeply melancholy, and sometimes appeared to suppose that his conversation wearied me, and ceased it for an hour or two. thus, however, some little conversation took place between the catholics and protestants; but it was very different with the jews, who formed the third division of our party. they were spoken to, indeed, by both the catholics and protestants from time to time, and were treated with great kindness and with substantial courtesy, having every protection and assistance given to them whenever they needed it; but the servants, like their masters, looked upon them evidently as an inferior race, and kept up as little communication with them as possible. to ensure that they were well treated and had nothing to complain of--for the prince d'auvergne had given me authority to regulate such matters on the march--i generally made solomon and miriam come and sit with me for an hour after our day's journey was over, somewhat to the scandal, i believe, of good master arnon the intendant, who thought it strange that a french nobleman should permit a jew to sit in his presence. by this means an intimacy--if that can be so called which consisted almost altogether in tokens of respect and reverence on the one side, and protection on the other--took place between me and the jew and his daughter; they clung to me as the only being that treated them with real kindness, and miriam used to strive to amuse me with a thousand little engaging youthful ways: she would dance to me to the sound of her own singing, which was very sweet, though in a tongue that i did not understand; and she would play to me at other times, either upon a small instrument which she called a cithern, or upon a lute, with a skill and perfection that i had never heard before. she used to watch my looks, too, as if to see whether she amused me; but she was too young for idle thoughts to enter into the head of any one with regard to her; and i do not think i was of a character, even if she had been two or three years older, to fancy that she was in love with me, because she had a grateful regard for me. the jew himself, i believe, would have trusted her anywhere with me, as by this time he would have trusted me with any jewel of his store; and one evening, when he himself had arrived at the inn, weary and somewhat unwell, he sent his daughter to amuse me, and to tell me that he himself had retired to rest. well might he do so; and yet the conversation that we had together was as tender and as full of thrilling interest as it is possible to conceive. i had been musing sadly over my fate and that of louise, and my eyes were buried in my hands when her entrance roused me, so that it was evident enough to her that she had just recalled me from a painful dream. "you are sad, seigneur," she said, drawing a seat close up beside me, and laying her small, clear, olive hand upon mine. "you are sad, and you do not tell miriam what you are sad about." "oh, you would not care to hear, miriam," i replied, "and could do me no good if you did hear." "oh, but i should care to hear," she said, "for i love you very much, seigneur. i loved you, from the first moment i saw you, almost as much--no, not so much as i love him." "were you going to say your father, miriam?" i said. "no," she said, "not him. i was going to say as martin vern." and the girl coloured a little as she spoke, but added immediately, "but he loves you too, and told me how kind you had been to him when he was at the siege of angoulême, and how you had given him your hand to help him up into the breach, and how you had carried him down in your arms when he was wounded, and saved his life, and been to him like a brother; which, for a lord and a soldier like you, he thought very kind indeed." "you seem to have talked very much about me, miriam," i said. "when was all this?" "oh, it was when we were last in paris," replied the girl; "when we were staying at the house of levi, my father's cousin, who has become a christian, you know; and then i would go and see the lady that you had written to, which he told me about, and who had written to you again, and sent it to my fathers house at bordeaux for the old merchant. and when the baron de blancford wanted the persian silver brocade for his wife, i went with martin vern, that is, with the old merchant, and saw the young lady too, and spoke with her in the cabinet behind the great saloon. i told her then that if she would write you a letter, and send it to levi's house, it should be conveyed to you; but i did not think then that i should carry it myself." "and was it so the letter came to me?" i said. "i had fancied, miriam, that your father had got it when he was in the protestant camp." "oh, no," she replied; "i carried it all the way in my bosom. and now i wish you would tell me why you are so sad, and why she looked so sad too. perhaps i could do more than you know." "oh, no, miriam," i answered, "you could do no thing, my good girl. that which makes me sad would need a more skilful surgeon than you are to cure." she looked in my face for a moment, as if to see whether i was speaking plainly or metaphorically, and she then cried, "ay, now i understand you. you love her, and she loves you, and they will not give her to you in marriage." "ay, miriam," i answered, with a sigh, as she came so near the truth; "and they talk of giving her to another." "who to? who to?" cried the girl, eagerly. "i heard something once which makes me suspect." "oh, no," i replied, "you know him not, miriam. his name is the seigneur de blaye." "i hate him!" cried the girl, bounding up from her seat as if i had pronounced some talismanic word; "i hate him! he dared to take hold of me when my father was gone to get him the money he wanted from the other room, and asked me if i would go and live with him; and when i told him no, i would rather be catching-wench to a butcher's wife, he struck me on the face with his fingers, and called me a name that i must not speak. i never told my father, or i believe he would have stabbed him; but i hate him, and i shall ever hate him. oh, seigneur!" she continued, turning towards me and clasping her hands together, "you have been very good and kind indeed to me and mine, and to all that i ever heard mention your name. it is such people as you that make us know what good people there can be; and i will try to show you that there can be gratitude in a poor little jewish girl. i told my father, when he knew the people intended to murder him on the march from jarnac, that if he would let me go and speak to you, you would be kind to him. he would not believe me for a long while; but he said that, if you were, you would be the first christian that ever looked upon a jew as anything but a dog. my father, however, can be grateful too, seigneur; and, though you may think that poor little miriam has no power, yet in this business she may have more power than you know of." our conversation went on for some time; and the girl, young as she was, spoke with a depth of feeling, a tenderness, an experience of the world and the world's ways, which was very extraordinary, mingled as it was with a sort of eager and imaginative wildness of manner and language, which probably she had acquired in the somewhat wandering and irregular life to which her father's pursuits subjected her. i looked upon the hopes and expectations that she tried to fill me with, of being able to do something in my behalf, as quite idle and vain; but still the gratitude that she showed was something pleasant to meet with, and i sent her away with thanks, and many a kindly speech in return. at the village of berny, a short distance from paris, the jew, his daughter, and the innumerable packhorses which followed him, were to part with their companions of the way, he proceeding to the capital, and we by a side road to champigny. he now, however, considered himself quite safe; and, when i had mounted to depart, he came up to the side of my horse, followed by miriam, and prayed a blessing from god upon my onward journey. "i have heard from monsieur arnon," he said, in a low voice, "that the estate of les bois is yours, and that, for the time, i am only to call you monsieur des bois; but, whether you be at champigny or at les bois, i hope you will not refuse to let me within your gates; for you have shown me kindness such as i have seldom found, and such as i shall never forget." thus saying, he kissed my hand after his fashion, and miriam, coming up, did the same. there was something in the poor people's gratitude that made my eyes glisten though they were jews, and, bidding them adieu, i rode on. as i turned my horse into the road at the right, i looked back, and saw that they were standing before the inn door, gazing after me still. chapter v. i was well pleased to arrive at champigny, and certainly a very beautiful and charming spot it was; but, of course, the sight of les bois was still more agreeable to me as its proprietor. the chateau was a small house, built in the antique fashion, but still in the most perfect repair; certainly not so large as the duke's own mansion at champigny, yet large enough for my ambition. it was seated on a hill, in the midst of fine old woods, from which it derived its name; and there was an aspect of peace, and calm, and tranquillity, which was pleasant to the eye and to the heart after the scenes of anguish, care, and excitement which war had lately presented to my sight. the interior of the chateau was, as the prince d'auvergne had told me, well furnished, and newly furnished throughout. to my eyes, indeed, it was splendid; for in those day there was perhaps, even more than now, a marked difference in the grace, taste, and execution of everything in the neighbourhood of the capital and in the remote provinces. the good intendant of the prince d'auvergne insisted upon taking me all over the chateau, and showing me every hole and corner, though i was most anxious, i confess, to go into paris itself, and take some means for obtaining an interview with louise. i did not know well how to explain my inclinations to my worthy companion, and, to break the subject to him, i made some inquiries regarding the capital; but, the moment he heard that i had never seen paris, nothing would serve him but that i must go there immediately. to his imagination it was the chief wonder of the world; and, after descanting upon its merits, beauties, and excellences for half an hour, he said, "if it were not presuming too far, my lord, i would propose to accompany you thither immediately, and show you some of the beauties of the place, though even to notice them all would require many weeks, i might say months." i instantly caught at this proposal; and, mounting fresh horses at champigny, we rode on into the city, where, giving our horses to the boys, we proceeded to walk through the streets of the capital. at any other moment, when my mind was not so occupied by one predominant subject, everything that i saw would have been a matter of interest to me. the long ranges of shops, covered over with awnings to keep the merchandises there exposed from the sun and the air; the people reading aloud pieces of poetry and satire at the corners of the streets; the different shows and exhibitions that attracted the sight at every step, all would have amused, detained, and interested me; but now my great desire and object was to discover the abode of the baron de blancford, and obtain some means of communicating with her i loved. the multitude of houses, and streets, and people that increased upon me at every minute, confused and puzzled me, and made me fancy the attempt almost impracticable, not knowing the address, and having no clew in such a labyrinth as that. suddenly, however, i called to mind that, from miriam's account, martin vern was still in the custom of visiting the house of the baron de blancford, and judging that he, as a great merchant, must be known to everybody, i asked arnon the intendant if he could lead me to his dwelling. "i do not know him," said the intendant. "is he a huguenot?" "no," i replied, with a smile at the sort of horror that came over the man's countenance at the very idea of visiting a huguenot in paris. "no, monsieur arnon, he is a catholic, and a great merchant who has money of mine in his hands." "oh, then the case is very different," replied arnon. "we will inquire after him immediately." and, entering a large goldsmith's house by the door close to the shop, he asked for martin vern the merchant. we had now no difficulty in finding the dwelling, which was up a flight of steps, and the goods were not exposed in the streets, as among the ordinary shopkeepers, but spread out in rooms within doors. neither good martin vern, however, nor his son was to be found at home; and i left a message, under the name of des bois, asking to see one or both of them at the chateau at champigny. although by this time the days had lengthened, and we were in the height of summer, it was now time that we should turn our steps homeward, as the distance we had to go was nearly four leagues; and during the whole of the following day i waited in anxious expectation for the appearance of one of the two merchants. no one came, however, and another and another day succeeded, during which i scarcely stirred out, and left directions for finding me whenever i did so. at the end of the third day my patience became quite exhausted, and on the following morning i begged arnon to send off one of the prince's servants, who knew the capital well, to ask why master martin vern had not been to champigny. arnon did as i directed immediately; and, on bearing me the answer, which was, that neither martin vern nor his nephew had yet returned from blois, where they had gone to attend upon the king, added, in order to put my mind at rest upon the subject which he thought troubled me, that i might make myself quite easy about the money; for that, having made inquiries, he found that the house of martin vern was one of the most wealthy and respectable in paris. i could not help exclaiming, "pshaw! it is not the money, my good friend." and it was evident, from that moment, that arnon's curiosity was not a little excited to find out what it could be that i sought with the merchants, if it was not the money that they owed me. my determination, however, was now taken to seek the house of the baron de blancford myself; but not all my efforts could discover it, and it was equally in vain that i attempted to discover the abode of solomon ahar: that he was going to lodge at the house of his cousin levi i knew; but his cousin levi was not to be discovered; and, on making inquiries concerning him, i was always met by a demand of "levi who?" there being a thousand in paris of the name of levi, but all with some surname attached. in the mean time, the news that daily came in from the scene of the war was anything but such as to give me gratification. the feeble attack on poitiers by the protestants; the gallant defence of the young duke of guise; the siege of st. jean d'angely; the death of poor martigue, whom i could not help regretting; the fatal battle of moncontour, which, although the defeat of the protestants was as complete, and the success of the catholics as surprising as well need be, was magnified in paris in a very great degree; all these things grieved and pained me, while week after week went by in fruitless inquiries; and at length, with that sort of scorn of one's self, which is a true part of misanthropy, for giving a moment's credit to the jew's professions of gratitude, i sat me down in bitterness of spirit, and tried to fancy that i hated the whole human race. the autumn of the year was now approaching; there could be little or no doubt that, during the ensuing winter, the young lord of blaye would be free to return to paris, and pursue the project of marriage which was held out to him; and the thoughts of poor louise, and the privations to which she would be subjected, tormented me like an army of fiends, and re-enforced themselves by every power of imagination. the news that st. jean d'angely had been recaptured by the protestants, and that the prince d'auvergne, who had held it out for some time against them, had been forced to capitulate for want of supplies, had reached us some days, when, as i was sitting one night in the cabinet at champigny, i heard the clattering of horses' feet in the courtyard below; and in a moment after, to my great astonishment, the prince himself entered the room. he embraced me kindly; and, after a few minutes' conversation upon general things, remarked that i neither looked well nor happy. "come," he said, "de cerons, tell me what is the cause of this. i think by this time you might fully confide in your friend." before i could answer, one of his officers had entered for some directions; and, while he gave them, i made up my mind to unbosom my whole thoughts to him. in the course of the evening i accordingly did so; and, as was much the character, both of his father and himself, he heard me fully out with scarcely any observation or reply. when i had done completely, however, and he had a complete view of my past life and present situation, he said, "there are a good many strange parts in your tale, de cerons; but neither you nor i, i fancy, know so much of the laws as to know whether these acts of your father and your cousin were legal. however, i see it is not that which pains you now. it is the matter of your fair cousin; and i grieve to say, that any news i may have for you is not calculated to sooth you. no wonder that you have not found them in paris, for they are all still at blois with the court, which gladly keeps your cousin from joining the admiral and the prince de bearn. i saw them all there at a grand fête given by the king, and talked for some time with mademoiselle de blancford. i talked of you, de cerons, so you may suppose that she heard me willingly; and, indeed, it was impossible to mistake her looks, ay, or even her words when you were mentioned. if monsieur de blaye were to marry her, he would certainly wed a woman knowing that she loved another man. however, when the baron came up too, i mentioned you to him also, and somewhat startled him, i believe, by calling you my dear and most intimate friend. but he did not look displeased, de cerons, nor do i think that he bears any ill-will towards you in his heart, though he be wayward and moody, and entirely ruled by that worst of all women, his present wife." "was monsieur de blaye there?" i demanded, somewhat sharply. "he was," replied the prince; "and giving himself out rather more decidedly than monsieur de blancford seemed to like, i thought, as the promised husband of your louise." i started up with an exclamation and a threat that i am now ashamed of. "hush, hush," cried the prince, with a reproving smile "do not give way so, my good friend. by this conduct he is doing more harm than good with the baron, at least, for i heard him questioned upon the subject; and, turning upon his heel with a sort of sneer, he replied, 'monsieur de blaye is somewhat sanguine in his nature.' however, i did not forget you, de cerons, and i told the whole story to my father, who, of course, is more competent to act than i am. i do not very well know what my father did; but i see the result, which is, that monsieur de blaye has received a high appointment, which he solicited more than a year ago, namely; to go with our military embassy to the court of the sultan. this was done, i am sure, for the purpose of removing him for a time from the scene, and of allowing you to have a fair opportunity--" "but how, my dear prince," i said, "can i have a fair opportunity, when i am held a prisoner here, unable to advance myself or signalize my name?" "you shall hear, de cerons, you shall hear," replied the prince. "my father was not a man to forget any point under such circumstances. he empowered me to offer you your liberty, freely and without ransom, upon one condition, that you should go join the prince of orange or prince ludovic, who are now waging war in the low countries, my father undertaking to obtain for you a high command in their army. you would thus be enabled to distinguish yourself in a protestant cause without bearing arms against your native country. you would not be farther from mademoiselle de blancford nor even so far, as carrying on this fatal contest in guyenne or poitu: you would be serving the king rather than opposing him, for it is his wish to give some support to the prince of orange; and my father only requires you to remain in the low countries till a peace is established in the internal affairs of france, which, we trust, will soon be the case; he, at the same time, promising to you that you shall have permission to return to france, freed from all restriction, the moment that it is ascertained that monsieur de blaye is about to return from the east." "your father, my lord," i said, "is most noble, generous, and considerate; and, foreseeing everything that i could desire or wish, of course, not only prevents the possibility of my refusing such an offer, but binds me to him by gratitude for ever." "i told him that such would be the case," replied the prince; "but, alas! de cerons, an unexpected event is likely to obstruct all our proceedings. the embassy was to set off in ten days, and everything was arranged. monsieur de blaye, though looking very much mortified when he heard his appointment, of course could not refuse it; and i proposed to stay another week at blois, and then come and confer with you regarding the whole affair, when suddenly, one evening, as i was returning home, i met with three women in the street, the principal of whom, for the other two were evidently servants, asked to speak with me without taking off her mask. i had a number of people about me, but it was close to the door of the hotel; and, taking her into the porter's chamber, i asked her to explain what it was she wanted. as soon as we were alone, she took off the mask and showed me the face of the jewish girl, solomon ahar's daughter, whom i found talking with you one day at jarnac. she told me, at the same time, that she came to speak to me about you, and seemed to know your whole history, and every secret of your heart. but to the facts that she told me: they were these: that monsieur de blaye had gone straight to the king, and had asked and obtained leave to remain six weeks in paris before he set out, for the express purpose of concluding his marriage before he went. the baron, the girl said, had not given his absolute consent, but made it dependant upon his daughter's inclination; but the baroness had positively promised that the baron and herself should at least sign the contract of marriage, even if their daughter, as she said, preferred waiting till the return of monsieur de blaye. should this event take place, however, you may consider your louise as lost to you for ever; for her father puts it out of his own power to dispose of her hand or withdraw his consent. the girl was really agitated about the whole business; and she made some wild exclamations, declaring that she would stop it if i would get permission for her father, and some persons who have been trading in partnership with him, to quit the court, where they have been detained for several weeks in regard to some negotiations now going on for loans of money. this was easily done, as the thing was nearly concluded; and, as soon as i had seen this arranged, i came away hither, with my father's consent, to consult with you in regard to what can be done." "you are most kind, most kind," i said. "how can i ever thank you, d'auvergne? but, alas! i fear that i am doomed to misery and to despair." "not so, not quite so," replied the prince. "as i came hither from blois i considered the matter maturely; and we have to recollect that you, as a near relation of the lady, have every right to oppose the signature of the contract, if you think fit so to do. in the first place, you must make perfectly sure that she herself is brought to yield by no means of persuasion or intimidation that can be used towards her; and, at the same time, things must be suffered to take their course till the contract is on the very eve of being signed by the baron. you must then, by some form of law which i can inquire into, give him formal intimation of your opposition, which will consequently be brought before the courts. the fact is, you are fighting for delay; for your opposition against her own father cannot, of course, be successful, and you may perhaps be fined in some small sum for having made it; but, long before that time, this young libertine, for such he is, must be in constantinople, and the matter secure." i mused for a moment in thought, the intensity of which approached to agony: i saw before me the blasting of all my best hopes, and i felt at that moment, more than i had ever yet done, not only how deeply, how truly, how ardently i loved poor louise, but how completely and thoroughly, without my knowing it, her image had been mingled with all my dreams and aspirations; how intimately the thought of winning her had mingled with all my motives for energy, exertion, and endeavour. i felt at that moment that to lose her was to lose my whole hold on life--my whole inducement to struggle onward in the course i was pursuing. there was no scheme so wild, so improbable, so daring, that i would not have undertaken at that moment to frustrate the schemes that could but tend to her misery and my own: there was no step so dangerous to myself, even had it been planted on the crumbling edge of an open grave, that i would not have taken to make her mine; yet, as i mused, i could not help thinking--i may say i could not help being convinced--that the scheme of the prince d'auvergne was likely to be frustrated by some impetuous act of the baron de blancford. "with many men," i said, "the whole might succeed admirably; but i, who know his determined and passionate character well, feel perfectly certain that, if there be a way of frustrating us, he will find it." "i see none," replied the prince dauphin, "if we can by any means ensure that the signing of the contract is put off to the last moment. however, de cerons, the whole party are coming to paris immediately; the jew, and the merchants who are with him, will most probably arrive to-morrow morning, and your cousin, with his train, on the morning after. obstacles of various kinds, i am sure, will keep this monsieur de blaye for a day or two after them; and let us do the best we can in the mean while. at all events, we shall gain some intelligence; and what i should propose is, to ride out on the day after to-morrow on the road to meet them, and, bringing them to your chateau of les bois, give the baron a little entertainment and repose ere he goes into paris." i smiled at the thought, saying, "i much fear, my excellent friend, that you will find the baron would neither accept the invitation nor thank the giver." "pshaw! de cerons," replied the prince; "you are older than i am in years, but younger a great deal in experience of the world. the baron undervalued and undervalues you simply because he thought and thinks you poor. he thought you the creature of his bounty: he will now come here and find you the creature of your own sword, renowned in arms, independent in fortune, and seeking no aid from him or any man. his view will be quite different now, depend upon it. as for the arrangements of your little regale, leave that all to me: you, on your part, cast off the rough and somewhat negligent apparel in which your despondency has brought you to remain, trim your beard, bring forth your best brocade, and look as gay and gallant as if you were going into the tiltyard." it is needless to pause upon all the minute incidents at this time. martin vern and his nephew had scarcely arrived in paris before they were at champigny, bringing with them little miriam, who seemed to have her own will with all of them. not knowing that the prince was there, i found that his high rank and connexion with the royal blood of france somewhat abashed and confounded the two merchants. he, on his part, did not so much unbend as perhaps i had expected; but he treated them kindly and without haughtiness, though with dignity: but he soon left them alone with me; and a few words showed me that both the elder and the younger martin vern, what between all they had observed of the conduct of myself and louise, and the information of the young jewess, were perfectly aware of how we stood towards each other, and took a kindly interest in my fate. miriam, for her part, seemed to me to have gone quite mad. she said it was just what she had wished, all that she could wish, that had happened and would happen, and seemed quite as happy and elevated as i was bereaved and depressed. her conduct somewhat annoyed me; and, after some short conversation about the money, which i still determined to leave in the hands of martin vern, i saw them depart without any effort to detain them. on the following morning, with a splendid train, comprising at least twenty persons, dressed, as far, at least, as the prince himself was concerned, in the height of the then existing fashion, d'auvergne and myself set out upon the road towards blois; and, after riding for some eight miles on a fine autumnal morning, we came within sight of a large party advancing slowly, which proved, as we expected, to be that of the baron de blancford. putting our spurs to our horses' sides, we rode up at a quick pace, and the baron thought fit, in those dangerous times, to halt his troop upon seeing such a body of horsemen coming down upon him. his surprise, when he beheld me and the prince dauphin, however, i shall not easily forget: nor need i say much more of this interview, as far as it regarded him, than that i readily perceived that the prince's view of the baron's character was correct, and that i had grown wonderfully in his opinion since i had ceased to need his assistance. the fête at les blois was accepted at once; but it required some persuasion on the part of the prince dauphin to make him believe that i was really the lord of the estate to which he was now conducted. the baroness, on her part, gazed at me with some surprise, and throughout the day i forced myself to show her as much civility and attention as possible: but there were some others in that group where there were deeper interests at work. louise met me with eyes full of deep and intense affection, and a manner from which the sudden surprise seemed to have taken all confidence, but not all tenderness; and her two brothers, whom i had not seen for more than a year, clung round me as if their affections had found no object since we parted. in the course of the day i had an opportunity of speaking more than once with louise, and in a few brief words i gave her an account of all that was taking place in our plans and purposes. her only reply was by words of affection that could never pass from my heart, and by the solemn assurance that no power on earth should ever make her consent to become the wife of the seigneur de blaye. the day went over, in short, as brightly as it was possible under such circumstances; and, during the three weeks that followed, everything seemed to combine to favour the plan which the prince had laid down for me. it fortunately occurred that i never met with the seigneur de blaye during the whole of that period. such a meeting could have been followed but by one result, and that result must have been fatal to myself; for it must be remembered that i was a protestant and he a catholic, and the survivor in a duel, under such circumstances, could only expect death. my visits to the hotel of monsieur de blancford were generally short; for i soon saw that, if i did not find louise when first i went, means were taken to prevent her appearing while i was there. the baron, however, was all condescension, and declared that he was proud of his cousin. the baroness, on her part, seemed to make herself somewhat more tender and amiable than was needful. but, at length, the fatal minute, which was to dissipate such a state of things altogether, arrived; and, just on the day preceding that which was fixed ultimately as the last for monsieur de blaye's stay in paris, a messenger from the baron invited me, in courteous terms, to come and witness his signature of the contract of marriage between my cousin louise and the seigneur de blaye. we had already ordered a notary to prepare in due form my opposition to the baron's signature, upon the plea both of relationship and never having been consulted, and of having a prior claim to the hand of mademoiselle de blancford. the note requested the honour of the prince dauphin's company on the same occasion as my friend; and, on reading it, he exclaimed, "oh, certainly, certainly! i will go, de cerons, and, not only that, but we will take a sufficient body of retainers with as to guard against all chances, and we will have likewise our own notary to take act of your opposition." all this being settled, we set out, and reached the house at the hour appointed. i was somewhat surprised to find going up the stairs good martin vern, accompanied by a boy carrying several packages, and another man not so burdened. on entering the great saloon, we found the baron with monsieur de blaye, the baroness, and some of her kindred, both male and female; besides whom, the room contained louise, with the tears already in her eyes, and several notaries and lawyers. immediately on our entrance, monsieur de blaye came forward with his hand extended towards me, as if imagining that we were the best possible friends; but i drew myself up and bowed stiffly, and he fell back with a heavy frown. the baron looked somewhat surprised, but the presence of the prince d'auvergne acted as a restraint upon him, and he welcomed his distinguished guest with courtesy, if not with so free and unrestrained a demeanour as usual. he looked two or three times suspiciously at the notary who accompanied us, and who was one of the most distinguished of his class, and received far more attention and marks of reverence from his brethren than either d'auvergne or i wished or expected. sweetmeats and some choice wines, however, were handed round before the destined explosion began; but at length the baron, prefacing the matter by a little eulogy upon monsieur de blaye, which had wellnigh made some of those who knew him laugh, directed the contract to be read. that document began by setting forth that, "as an alliance was intended at a future period between the seigneur de blaye and mademoiselle de blancford, it had been judged expedient that the baron de blancford should sign the contract to that effect previous to the departure of the said seigneur for foreign lands; and therefore," &c. it went on to express the usual agreements in such cases, but took care to omit the express consent of the bride, and also made no provision for the freedom of her religion. she was declared heiress of the lands of blancford and cerons in the event of her two brothers' death without children; and the baron promised with her a dowry which to me, who knew his habits of expense, and, in some degree, the true nature of his property, seemed enormous. as soon as the whole was read, he took the pen in his hand to sign, and i could see my poor louise clasp her two hands together and raise her eyes to me with a look of anguish and supplication. at that moment, however, the notary we had brought, who had been consulting with the others, stepped forward, and laid his hand upon the spot where the baron was about to sign, saying, "your pardon, monsieur le baron de blancford; i think that monsieur de cerons has something to say on this matter, and a short paper to read, to which i beg your attention, and of which, gentlemen, you will all bear witness." he then handed me the paper, saying, at the same time in a whisper, "neither more nor less." i followed his directions to the letter, and read the paper of objections through without pausing. when i came to the end, however, and found there stated that i would sustain my right upon the grounds therein stated, and upon several other legal grounds of objection, to all and sundry parts and clauses of the said contract, in warranty of which i produced as my surety the prince dauphin d'auvergne, i laid, i know not well why, considerable emphasis upon the words "several other objections." at the same time, i remarked the baron turn very pale; but he recovered himself immediately, and, with an angry gesture, exclaimed to the notary, who had continued to hold his hand on the paper, "remove your hand, master jean! i will sign it at all risks." "it is useless, monsieur le baron," replied one of the lawyers; "after this solemn protest in due and legal form, no act that you can do in this matter is lawful until the parliament shall have considered the matter to render justice therein." "but i shall take care to render justice to myself," exclaimed monsieur de blaye, advancing towards me furiously: "we all know that you lawyers love to see all things plunged into the quagmire of the courts, round the edges of which you toads sit and croak at leisure; but gentlemen have a shorter means of settling such transactions, and to such, monsieur de cerons, do i appeal. nor, sir, must there be delay of any kind. tomorrow i depart from paris; the rest of this day is our own." "oh! no, no!" cried the voice of louise, while, with her arms extended towards me as if for protection, she ran forward. but, ere she reached me, she fell fainting on the ground, and the marchioness, with other ladies present, prevented my approach. all was now a scene of confusion; the gentlemen of the party came forward, each talking, each offering his opinion, towards the spot where de blaye and myself stood face to face, and the baron seemed divided between us and his daughter, for whom i saw that he was not without feeling, though he struggled not to show it. in the midst of this babel, however, the clear, fine-toned voice of the prince dauphin suddenly made itself heard, saying, "your pardon, gentlemen, your pardon! i have one word to say; but that one word is an important one, which must settle all this matter between my excellent good acquaintance monsieur de blaye and my friend monsieur de cerons." all were instantly silent except de blaye himself, who repeated more than once, in a tone of authority, to keep silence, and let the prince speak. when he stopped and bowed, d'auvergne went on: "what i have to say, de cerons, is, that you will be good enough to remember you are my father's prisoner, and therefore can lie under a challenge from no man. monsieur de blaye, i must call upon you to retract your challenge, as no man of honour can offer one to a gentleman incapable of accepting it." de blaye, who was both really enraged and really brave, blustered a good deal at this notification, and said something rather offensive to the prince about his father the duke being afraid of losing my ransom. d'auvergne answered coolly, however, saying, "that is not his fear or mine, monsieur de blaye; but our fear might well be that the catholic army might lose a very tolerable soldier and brave young gentleman in yourself; because, as we all know, monsieur de cerons would kill you like a rat. come, de cerons, i must beg you to accompany me." if the first part of the prince's speech had pleased monsieur de blaye, and made him simper and look modest, the unpleasant simile in the latter part caused him to swell and colour with anger. but d'auvergne took no farther notice; the fact of my not being at liberty was without reply, and, after one look to my poor louise, i quitted the room. martin vern was at the door, and to him the prince whispered a word as we passed. the merchant made a low inclination of the head, and, mounting our horses, we rode away. chapter vi. i had remarked particularly, in the painful interview just past, that neither good old la tour, nor the two dear boys who were daily growing up more and more like their angel of a mother, had been present; but i learned afterward that many painful efforts had been made to induce louise to wed a man she abhorred, and that her brothers had broken forth with somewhat rash expressions of indignation, while la tour had remonstrated in milder but as forcible terms. the consequence had been, that the baron had sent them all three to some distance, and probably was not a little glad, when the scene terminated as it did, that he had taken that precaution. i received from him that night a threatening note, but it was so worded as evidently to court a lengthened reply; and, after pondering over it for some moments, i showed it to the prince, who came in at the time. he read it attentively; but, wise beyond his years, he returned it, saying, "keep that note, de cerons; and, if you will take my advice, reply but vaguely, and still as shortly as possible." i did take his advice; and to all the haughty demands of how i dared to offer opposition to his disposal of his own child, i replied, merely, that i had acted as i doubted not would be found just in a court of law; but at the same time i added--as it was my first wish not to irritate the father of her i sought to obtain--all that was kind and deferential towards himself. d'auvergne approved highly of my note; but, as he gave it back to me, he placed his hand kindly upon my arm and said, "and now, de cerons, remember our compact; you must, after all this business, go immediately into the low countries upon the conditions i stated. for your own safety i say you must, for your stay in paris as a known and marked huguenot will be most dangerous; but you must also do so for our sake. my father, as well as myself, wishes you every success in your suit; but remember, we must not be found taking any undue advantage either of de blaye or monsieur de blancford; all that we wish is to give you a fair chance; and, as soon as we have the positive assurance that the former is fairly gone from paris, you must go and win honours and renown with the bright hope of obtaining her you love." i felt myself bound in honour to follow his injunctions to the letter, and only required one day to prepare, and to ascertain that the seigneur de blaye had actually departed. much business, however, remained to be done in the mean time. i had to write to the admiral de coligny, giving him information of the conditions that were imposed upon me, and begging him to transmit whatever money of mine remained in his hands, when convenience served, to good master vern. i had to write to moric endem, giving him, as far as it was needful, orders to command my troop in the service of the protestant princes; and i had to buy all those necessary equipments for my journey and for active service, few of which i now possessed. the attendants that i had brought with me were all that i could expect to obtain, as few in paris were willing to own themselves of the poor and persecuted sect. on the following morning early, then, i rode into paris, and went straight to the house of martin vern, when i was directed to seek him at the dwelling of levi judi, the great goldsmith. i there found a number of persons whom i knew collected together, and talking earnestly in a small, dark room. there were the two christian merchants with solomon ahar and his daughter miriam; and besides these was levi himself, the converted jew, who was speaking when i came in, and suddenly stopped. they were all evidently rejoicing over some event, which proved to be the success of my opposition to the young lord of blaye; and i now learned that he had been obliged to depart by daybreak that morning, letters of reproof having been sent him from blois for having already lingered too long. i thought miriam's satisfaction would have exceeded all bounds; and a slight degree of discomfort which i remarked in the demeanour of the younger martin vern at the sight of miriam's evident regard for me, first gave me a suspicion of matters which were going on in their hearts, perhaps as yet unknown to both. after some conversation upon the chief topic of all my thoughts, i took the good merchant aside, and telling him the destiny that awaited me, begged him to procure, as reasonably as possible, all i stood in need of before night. i also told him that, with the exception of what my equipment might cost, i should leave all i had in his hands, having plenty by me for my journey; and i then besought him, if he obtained any speech with my sweet louise alone, to tell her that i loved her ever, and would never cease to seek her hand so long as i had life. he mused for some time over what i said, committed all my orders to a note-book, and then said, in his calm and business-like tone, "i will do all this as far as possible, seigneur, and will be at champigny with you to-night; but i have a request to make, which you may think a strange one from a poor merchant like myself. it is, that if ever you be placed in difficulties again regarding this transaction between your noble cousin the baron and monsieur de blaye, you would give some of us instant and full intelligence; for, though we be merely citizens, we have some say in many families; and perhaps, had not your opposition yesterday morning been successful, martin vern might not have been upon the stairs for nothing." i pressed him much to explain what he meant, but he would not; and promising, in return for the interest he showed in me, to place the confidence he required in him, i left him and went back to champigny. i found the prince dauphin busily writing when i arrived, with several letters before him sealed with various different seals; and when he had ended those that he himself was employed upon, he gave them all to me. "these, de cerons," he said, "are letters from my father, and from some of the ministers of the king to different princes and nobles in the low countries and on the rhenish frontier of germany; two among them being to the prince of orange. they will, beyond all doubt, procure you every opportunity, and you will do the rest to raise yourself still higher than you yet have done. this which i have written is to the count de bergh, to whom i once did some kindness; and this, in case of extreme need, is to the duke of alva. i mean by extreme need that you should use it in case your life is in danger from some of alva's proceedings. he is a nobleman of a high heart and gallant character; but the streams of toledo, which harden steel to such a temper, have not altogether left his heart untouched by their influence. at the sight of this, however, he will free you as he is bound to do; and now, de cerons, if i can at any future time serve, aid, or befriend you, call upon me instantly as you would upon a brother; and depend upon it that i will give you information, even should you be at the other end of the earth, the moment there is even a whisper of your rival's return." i thanked him, as may be supposed; and the conversation that thus commenced went on to touch upon a thousand things, in regard to all of which, his mingled kindness of heart and soundness of judgment made me but admire and love him more and more. at night, nearly at ten o'clock, martin vern himself arrived, with horses loaded with all that i required; but there was one small note among the rest far more valuable to me than anything else that he brought with him. it was from louise, and very short; but oh, how sweet it was to me to read! "dear, dear henry! a thousand thanks, a thousand blessings on your head for saving me from distraction. i am better now--i am well now. they know your love for me, they now know mine for you; and they will find neither fail, i am sure. the worst is over. they cannot shake me. i am yours for ever! "louise." the account given me by martin vern was even more cheering than the letter of louise herself; he had seen her, he said, and spoken with her long in her chamber. during the whole of the preceding day she had been so ill that the baron had become alarmed and grieved, and, in order to make some atonement, had sent for jewels and rich clothes as gifts to his daughter. it showed how little he knew her nature; with louise, one kind word would have been worth all the jewels upon earth. after speaking long of her, the good merchant turned to other matters; and not only gave me the long-delayed acknowledgment of the sums of mine he had in hand, but pointed out means by which i might be enabled to obtain money, should i need it, in any of the great towns which i was likely to visit. my equipage was now complete, and on the following morning at daybreak i began my journey, proposing in the first place to seek the prince of orange. the kindness of the prince dauphin showed itself to the last moment, and he was up and out to see me depart, embracing me ere i mounted my horse as if he had been my brother. i found the prince of orange labouring hard to gather a sufficient army on the german side of the rhine to support the insurgent protestants of the low countries; and as he himself, and his brother count ludovic, had been much with our troops in france, my name was not unknown to him. he received me kindly and gladly; but there was about him a sort of cold and suspicious reserve, which doubtless was very needful, but which had a tendency to check attachment in the outset; and, had it not been for his great wisdom, skill, courage, and determination, which were already well known, one would have been inclined to say that he was less calculated than almost any other man on earth to sustain the character of a popular leader. the great difference, however, which exists between the mere capricious outbreak of popular discontent and the determined resistance to insufferable oppression, is shown in nothing more strongly than in the choice of leaders. the fiery, impetuous, loud-tongued demagogue does well enough for the one, but the calm, cool, powerful-minded statesman must be sought for in the other. the prince of orange gave me authority and command, but it was long ere he trusted me; and i could often see that, in conversing with me upon any indifferent subject, he watched every word that fell from me, every look, every gesture; but it was the same with others; and, ere he was perfectly satisfied with his own knowledge of the man, he never trusted, nor, even then, trusted entirely. the first proof of the confidence that he at length placed in me was rather diplomatic than military. his movements had been retarded by a thousand adverse circumstances, and he sent me on to holland to communicate with sounoy, and to do as much as possible to keep up the spirits of the dutch malcontents. from holland i had to make a tour through utrecht, guelderland, and friesland, and was, on the whole, far more successful than i had expected. on my return to the prince, i found him well pleased with what i had done, and, on making a report of some of my proceedings, i saw a quiet smile curl his lip, which made me stop suddenly. "you wish to know why i smile, de cerons," he said; "it is because you have done exactly what i expected, and what no hackneyed diplomatist would have done. i have often remarked that, in rapid negotiations, a man of strong natural sense, but little experience in intrigue, puts to fault a whole host of old politicians. if they had time to discover his true character, the result would be lost; but, as it is, they attribute to experience that which is merely the result of good sense, and puzzle themselves to discover motives, overstepping the true ones that he lays before them. however, de cerons," he continued, "i have good news for you; news which, as a protestant and a frenchman, you will be glad to hear. peace is concluded in france; and the secret assurances of support from king charles which you brought me, and which i did not trust, are thus confirmed." he then went on to give me a full account of all the events which had taken place in france since i left him; events which had reached me only in rumours during my journey. we were all deceived by the fair aspect of events. the military preparations of the protestants of the low countries went on rapidly; town after town revolted against the tyranny of alva; where leaders and assistance were wanted, the prince of orange despatched them in all speed from his camp, and my military life again began. on it, however, i need not dwell; the general events of the times are written in general histories, and my own individual career offered nothing but the usual occurrences in the life of a soldier, who, not naturally timid, has every motive to daring exploits. i was not less active or less brave than others; and there was no one more fortunate than myself. honours, rewards, and recompenses flowed in upon me rapidly; the news that i daily received from france was most joyful: the protestants were not only treated with gentleness, but with especial favour: the admiral ruled the court of france, and a regular french army was promised to cooperate. so far, indeed, was this proceeding carried, that by the same courier i received news that count ludovic had been sent to maintain a correspondence with the protestants of flanders, tidings that he had captured mons, and a commission for myself, under the hand of the king of france, to raise a regiment of protestant soldiery for the service of the flemish insurgents. it was now full spring in the year , and, as soon as i showed the commission i had received to the prince of orange, he exclaimed, "if this man is deceiving us, de cerons, he forgets no means to blind the eyes of all, however, we must take advantage of the opportunity, at all events, whether it be afforded for the purpose of deceiving us or not. are you willing, de cerons, to take the risk of a hazardous journey to join my brother in mons, to tell him that the duke of alva will certainly besiege him, and that i as certainly will march to his relief without the loss of a moment? then hasten on yourself into france, raise a regiment, and bring it to our aid." it may easily be supposed that i did not hesitate; and with a train which had now been increased again to about twenty men, i set off for mons. i reached it some time before the siege commenced, and was received with joy by the gallant and enterprising prince of nassau, who that very day took me round the fortifications, and entertained me at supper, perhaps making a little more of my arrival than the event warranted, in order to raise the spirits of the garrison and inhabitants. after supper, torches were waiting to light me home to the quarters prepared for me, and, accompanied by one of the count's officers, i was proceeding through the streets, when we were met by a small party of soldiery, who stopped to look after us. the next moment i heard my own name pronounced aloud, and a young officer, running after us, cast his arms affectionately round me. what was my surprise to behold my young cousin charles! he followed me to my quarters; and i now learned that albert, as well as himself, unable any longer to endure the tyranny of their stepmother and the daily disgrace of their father, had quitted their paternal roof, and, with the young prince of nassau, had thrown themselves into the city of mons. there they had met with a part of my old band, commanded by moric endem; and when i told them that i was about to raise a regiment to join the prince of orange, they besought me eagerly to let them serve under me. that matter was settled easily; moric was sent for, and i thought would have gone mad with delight at seeing me again. he was evidently not in such good circumstances as when i left him, and he declared that fortune had quitted my band when i was taken at jarnac. only six of the men had survived moncontour and arnai le duc; and on the following morning i begged count louis to permit me to take these six, with moric and my two young cousins, to form a sort of nucleus for my future regiment. he hesitated; for to say truth, he had no men to spare; but the difficulty was removed by my offering to leave an equal number of those who had accompanied me to mons. i was eager to proceed on my journey; but my adventures in mons were not yet over. it was necessary to procure money for the raising of the force i intended to levy, as i had transmitted to martin vern all the wealth i had acquired during my absence. it luckily happened, however, that i had a letter from him to one of the wealthy catholic bankers of mons, and to him i hastened as soon as i had given moric and my two cousins notice to prepare for departure. i found the old man i sought in a dressing-gown of rich brocade, a black velvet cap on his large head, and a pen in his mouth. he listened to me, read the letter, and looked me all over in silence somewhat offensive, and at length i told him that i was in haste, and begged that he would attend to my demand. "you are not like him here described," said the old man, dryly; "how shall i know, if you be in such haste, that you are the right person?" i answered, i believe, somewhat angrily, and he rejoined, "ha, ha! frenchmen are always prompt; but it so befalls, young gentleman, that there is in this very house, at this very time, a partner of the house of martin vern and company." "what, his nephew?" i cried. "not so, young gentleman," answered the merchant; "but he shall be called in, and you shall soon have your answer." thus saying, he rose, and, opening a door behind him, spoke a word to some one in the neighbouring room. the next moment appeared in the doorway the figure of my old acquaintance, solomon ahar. the good jew started forward, and, in his oriental fashion, fell upon my neck, embracing me. "how i have longed to see thee, my son!" he said; "how delighted my poor miriam will be to hear that thou art here in safety! but stay not in this town till they bring the armies round it and lay siege to it. it is well to be here while one can come and go, for there is always much traffic in gold, and silver, and light goods when a place is likely to be assaulted from without; but no wise man should stay after there be gates shut against the goers out as well as the comers in. stay but till i go, my son, which will now be in a few days, and then journey with me to paris, where a certain gold-hilted dagger, with seven fine jewels in the haft, is laid up safely for thee; and thy money has been put out to interest, and used in traffic, and has brought thee, i think, wellnigh fifty for the hundred." there was now no farther question in regard to the money; and, having informed the jew, who was really grateful and kindly hearted, what were my purposes, i received some valuable information from him as to where i was likely to procure men. i then took what money i wanted, and, bidding solomon ahar adieu, was soon once more beyond the walls of mons, and in the high road towards france. there were parties of the enemy about between mons and cambray, however, and it was with some difficulty that we reached the french frontier. there, however, i soon increased my force to between three and four hundred men, and was thinking of beginning my march with that number to join the prince of orange, when i received letters from the admiral and from the prince d'auvergne, to both of whom i had written, advising me to join a considerable force under the gallant but wrong-headed genlis, who had raised, by a commission from the king, a force of nearly six thousand men. at the same time, the admiral informed me that the king, at his request, had raised the estate of les bois into a lordship for me, under the title of count des bois and cerons. this was indeed very joyful news; and though the credit of the admiral seemed to me almost inconceivable, yet i obeyed his desire at once, and prepared to join genlis, though determined to act independently of him if his rash vanity should render it necessary. the admiral's letter had distinctly stated that genlis was about to march to join the prince of orange; but, when i at length met that officer at noyon, i found him determined to march direct upon mons. as by this time the siege of that place was formed, and as i had heard, on good authority, that the duke of ascoe was marching to swell the forces of alva's army, the idea which genlis had taken up, that he could deliver mons with a force of less than six thousand men, seemed to me so absurd, that i told him at once i would not accompany him, my intention and duty being to join the prince of orange. he answered at first by a sneer, but shortly after begged me at least to accompany him as far as st. quentin, as he had learned that the peasantry on the frontier had been armed by the duke of alva, and were in force in that neighbourhood. on the following day we made a short march towards ham; but we soon learned that don ferdinand de toledo was before us, with a regular army equal to our own, instead of a troop of ill-disciplined peasantry. the enemy as now within ten miles' march of us; a battle was inevitable; and, of course, it was impossible even to think of retiring at that moment. yet, ere the sun went down, i had only one desire, namely, to mount my horse and ride to paris at full speed. at guiscard, where we halted for the night, a courier reached me from the prince dauphin. the words of the letter were so few and prompt, that they evinced how eagerly and hastily my friend had written. "if you can with honour," so the letter went, "give up your command and come to paris, do so without a moment's delay. your rival, without warning or notice of any kind, has returned--is in paris, and in the house of the baron de blancford. you will blame me for this, but i can endure the blame; for, on my honour, i do not deserve it. his journey has been concealed with care; and, though i watched anxiously, have been deceived. come quick, then, de cerons, for you protestants now carry everything at the court before you; and if you delay an hour, monsieur de blancford's influence may have overborne all. think, too, what must be your course; for remember, that, as we both foresaw, your late opposition to the will of the father in the marriage of his own daughter was declared vexatious by the parliament, and you were fined a hundred crowns. if you resolve on letting the sword decide between you and your rival, forget not your friend d'auvergne." scarcely giving the messenger time to refresh himself, i despatched him with two letters, one to the dauphin d'auvergne, informing him of the position in which we stood with regard to the enemy, and telling him i would but stay to fight, and then hasten back to the capital; and the other to the good martin vern, whose parting words in regard to my love of louise gave me the only glimpse of hope that could now visit me. to him i told all that had occurred as briefly as possible; but besought him, at all events, to use the utmost exertions to stop any hasty steps on the part of the baron. it may easily be imagined that the tidings i had received did not reconcile me greatly to the mad folly of genlis, and i began the march on the following morning out of spirits and out of humour; but the march of the whole force, the negligence and vain confidence with which genlis conducted it, made a great addition to my discomfort. at length we came to a small stream, over which it was necessary to construct a bridge; and seeing, from the disarray of the whole force, that, if attacked at that moment by an enemy of one half our strength, we might be absolutely cut to pieces, i caused my men to seize upon the tower of an old church, which had before been pierced for musketry, and which, while the rest were busy at the bridge, i took some pains to strengthen, having an impression on my mind that we should meet with a check. when the bridge was concluded we again began our advance, and entered a little wood, through which we straggled rather than marched. we had scarcely passed it, however, when a party which had been thrown forward was driven in, with a strong body of men-at-arms at their heels. i charged and broke the spanish men-at-arms. but it now became evident that a trap had been laid for us: a tremendous fire was opened upon my men from a bed of osiers that flanked the ground; charge after charge of the enemy's cavalry took place; and, overwhelmed by numbers, as well as taken unaware, after maintaining a hopeless combat for near an hour and a half, we were obliged to fly as best we could. genlis, it must be said, did all that courage, and skill, and coolness could do to remedy his former faults, but in vain. he himself was taken in endeavouring to cover the retreat of the infantry; and all i could do was to bring off a part--a very small part--of my own men, with one piece of artillery. i was hotly pursued, however, and had no time to destroy the bridge. my only resource was to throw myself into the church, and defend it as long as possible. what i had done in the morning now proved my salvation. the cavalry who followed kept us blockaded during the whole of that night and a part of the next day, but they could not remain long enough to starve us out; we kept them at a distance with our firearms, and a small body of musketeers who joined them were driven back with loss. at length i offered to capitulate, as i found the men beginning sadly to feel the want of water, and the terms granted me were certainly far more favourable than i dared hope. we were permitted to march out with our arms, but it was exacted from us that we should swear not to fight against the king of spain for two complete years; and, well satisfied with the result, we retired from our post, and made the best of our way back to noyon. it was there first that my young cousin charles complained of a wound in the shoulder, but he represented it as slight; and, leaving the men we had brought off under his command, i set out for paris with moric endem and one or two others, determined to obtain, if possible, through the intervention of the admiral, some reward for the gallant fellows who survived our defeat. albert de blancford remained with his brother; but i afterward found that the wound of my poor cousin had that very night assumed so unfavourable an appearance that he was obliged to relinquish the command to the other, who, terrified at the state to which he soon saw his brother reduced, divided the greater portion of the money i had left with him among the men, and suffered the shattered remnant of the regiment to disperse. he then placed his brother in a litter and returned to paris, seeking his father's house immediately, but finding nothing but sorrow there. chapter vii. the distance was long, but our horses were good; we were in the month of august, when days are long, and we accomplished the journey from noyon to paris in one day. we entered the capital just as the shades of twilight were beginning to fall, and i paused for a moment to consider whither i should first direct my steps. i had resolved, however, not to go to the prince dauphin, as i knew that, in case of my rivalry with de blaye ending in our settling the dispute with the sword, d'auvergne would insist on accompanying me to the field, and i could not endure the thought of seeing the hope and strength of that noble house run the risk of such an encounter for my sake. my hesitation, therefore, only was, whether i should first seek the admiral, to inform him of the fatal result of genlis's expedition, or go at once to good martin vern, to hear news of my poor louise. love had wellnigh triumphed; but i did resist; and, turning my rein towards the rue de bethisy, where i had been informed the admiral resided, i found his abode, which was in a handsome inn. there, however, i learned that he was himself at the court; and, having satisfied myself by doing my duty, i turned my horse's head towards the dwelling of the merchant. martin vern and his house, though they had taken many risks during the war, had been enriched in an extraordinary degree by the restoration of peace, and the favour which all the protestants had so speedily acquired. debts, which had appeared almost hopeless, had been paid, with long arrears of interest; and, though many others remained, yet the good merchant was one of the most wealthy men in paris. his house showed it, but not himself; for, on being ushered into the room where he sat at supper with his wife, his brother, his nephew, and his children, i could certainly discover no change of demeanour from the good, plain merchant that i had first seen on my journey to angoulême. they were all delighted to see me; and, unwilling to disturb them, i sat down to partake of their meal, while moric endem and the rest of my followers obtained a lodging in an inn hard by. during supper martin vern was grave and thoughtful, but not sad: his nephew had become a fine and noble-looking young man; and there was in his whole appearance an air of smartness and manly dignity, which bespoke a change of thoughts and feelings since we had last met. ere supper was well concluded, he rose, saying to his uncle, "i will go to monsieur ahar, and bring what he has got for the seigneur de cerons;" and, as soon as he was gone, the merchant added, "you know, i believe, monsieur de cerons, that your old acquaintance, monsieur solomon ahar, has become a partner of ours; but doubtless you know not how his conversion was brought about." "converted!" i exclaimed. "do you mean to say that he has become a christian?" "he would not otherwise have become a partner in our house. he is a good catholic christian, thank god! but i was going to tell you how this was brought about. my nephew, having got over some of the follies of his youth, learned to love and esteem those qualities of mind and heart which were really worth love, and he found them combined with beauty and affection in miriam ahar. there was one objection--her religion; but that martin found means to remove; and the good jew, declaring that, as all things were reversed nowadays, the father might as well follow the religion of the child, instead of the child following the religion of her father, made his abjuration, as his relation levi had done, and was received into the bosom of the church. miriam becomes his bride in a few weeks; and, in the mean time, this conversion has obtained for my nephew so much celebrity among the catholic divines, that i do believe they would make him a bishop if he would. but that would prevent his marriage, you know, seigneur, and therefore he remains a merchant." as soon as supper was over, the wife and children of martin vern left us, and he immediately turned to my letter and to the business that brought me. "i have much to tell you, seigneur," he said, "and much advice to give you. in the first place, you are saved by one day; and you owe that to the scheme which our little miriam devised for you before you went. the baron, your cousin, is indebted in a large sum to solomon ahar, and in a lesser sum to me; and as he promises this seigneur de blaye a large dowry with his child, miriam proposed that the whole debt, which comprises more than all his moveable wealth, should be claimed at once. i was unwilling to do as she wished, except in case of absolute need; and when, on a former occasion, you found other means to stop the signature of the contract, i held back. now, however, i knew there was no time to be lost; and, even had your letter not reached me, i would have acted as i have done, for i have been almost daily at the baron's house, as there is every day need of money for the husband, or jewels and rich stuff for the wife. by this means i had heard and knew that the baron had sworn his daughter should consent to marry the young lord of blaye, or that he would declare himself a catholic, and use those means which our religion gives to force her to obey. it is not, however, that he loves this lord of blaye, for he abhors him; but it is, my good lord, that his wife has power over him of some kind which we know not. some secret is in her hands, depend upon it, which puts him wholly in her power. however that may be, the day for signing the contract was named as yesterday, and the hour noon. the whole had met when i presented myself. i knew that the money to pay the dowry was prepared. i had armed myself with all legal forms, and went accompanied by those who knew each turn of law. the money was paid me; and the baron, with a proud air, said, 'it mattered not; that he was ready to sign; and that, in order to pay the dowry he had promised, and not to fail in one tittle of his word to monsieur de blaye, he would sell the estate of cerons, even by auction in the halls of the palais de justice, and discharge the amount before the week was over.'" "good god! has he done so?" i cried. "it was always my ambition to recover that, land." "he has not done so yet, seigneur," replied martin vern; "but this is friday: to-morrow will be the last day of the week: his word is pledged, the sale proclaimed, and he will not retract; though, when the seigneur de blaye declared it would be better for none to sign the contract till the dowry was ready, i could see the blood mount into the baron's cheek and forehead till i feared the veins would burst. he turned towards his wife, but that fierce lady held up her finger to him, and he cowed in a moment. unless you, sir, can stop the sale--unless you can prove that the estate of cerons cannot be sold--the estate is sold, and the contract signed; nay, more, the young lady must become the wife of one she abhors, or be plunged into the imprisonment of a convent, from which you can never deliver her." "alas! alas! my good friend," i said, "i can prove no such thing. i know the estate can be sold, for my own father sold it. it is not hereditary, and depends upon the baron's will. there is only one means, and that must be tried at once. louise must fly with me. under such circumstances, it is quite justifiable to do so." "before you adopt any determination, let us consider for a moment, monsieur de cerons," replied the merchant, in his cool, calculating tone: "what would you grant that man who would first prove to you that the lordship of de cerons cannot be sold in perpetuity, and, in the second place, point out a way by which you may perhaps fly with the lady that you love, but fly with her as your wife, and with her father's own consent?" "what would i give?" i exclaimed. "what would i not give, you should say, my good friend." "well, then, monsieur de cerons," said the merchant, somewhat more rapidly than was his wont, "i must be quick with my conditions, for i hear martin's steps on the stairs. first, you shall forgive, fully and entirely, a girl's curiosity; the next is a harder task--you shall take a piece of advice without asking a question; the third, you shall put yourself entirely under my guidance for the next three days." "willingly!" i said, "willingly!" but, as i was speaking, and martin vern was turning to his brother to witness our contract, his nephew entered the room with solomon ahar himself and miriam, now become a lovely woman. "oh, false merchant!" cried the girl, addressing martin vern, "you have told him! i see it in his face! you have told him!" "no, indeed, miriam," replied the merchant, "i have told him nothing." miriam was about to proceed, it seemed, when her father bustled forward, saying, "a truce to nonsense, girl! let us do business first. seigneur de cerons, here is the dagger which is your property, on account of which you are in my debt the sum of--" and he was taking out his inkhorn to calculate, when martin vern motioned him to be silent, saying, "hold me responsible, my good brother, for capital and interest, according to law and justice. we have other matters now in hand. examine your dagger well, monsieur de cerons. do you see nothing to attract you farther?" "i know," i replied, "that the hilt is hollow. my poor friend stuart assured me that it was so, and that there were papers in it. i cannot unfasten it, however," i added, trying to do so impatiently. "we had better have a hammer brought." "less violent means will do," replied martin vern. "if you will give it to that fair lady, she will open it." miriam took it from my hand, saying, with a look of graceful deprecation, "will you, my noble count, pardon me for an act which i would be well ashamed of, did not these gentlemen tell me that my curiosity may prove of use to you? i first discovered that the dagger-hilt was hollow. i too have opened it, and have read that which it contains. forgive me--i know, i am sure you will." and, as she spoke, she unscrewed the large massy ring of gold which encircled the haft just where the blade was inserted. a large emerald which was at the top also unscrewed without difficulty, and the blade then, with a much smaller haft of solid steel, was drawn out from the false case of gold. round the real haft was wrapped a roll of fine vellum, which encircled it six times; and, on opening it, i saw at the bottom the handwriting of my cousin the baron. it was his name, attached to an acknowledgment and covenant, duly drawn up in legal form, whereby he deprived himself of the power of ever selling either the lordship of de cerons or the barony of blancford; settled the succession of the first-named property on me in case of his death without male heirs, and the other also in case of his death childless. the vellum still farther set forth, that he made this settlement in consideration of receiving the estate of de cerons, and another farm belonging to my father, below their real value, my father being unwilling that they should depart from a race to which they had belonged, for centuries. it was witnessed by a personage of the name of des chappes; and martin vern, pointing to that name as i stood, thunderstruck, gazing at the vellum, said, "he is still living, and revered by the whole parliament, of which he is one of the most honourable members. i have myself asked him if he remembers the transaction, and can tell you that, having a deep regard for your late father, he can swear to every line, though he be past eighty years of age." "these are, indeed, great and extraordinary tidings," i said, grasping the good merchant's hand: "but i fear, my good friend, that, by exercising the rights that this paper gives me, i shall but make the separation between myself and my proud cousin the more complete. how shall i, by any means here presented to me, gain his regard or his affection?" "did you never in life observe, monsieur de cerons," said the merchant, "that men often treat haughtily and harshly those they love, while they are courteous and yielding to those they fear. the baron loves you far better than any one except his own children: he respects, he esteems you, and, at the same time, he hates, contemns, and fears your rival. if you assist and support him against this lord of blaye, while you maintain your own rights with kindly firmness, you will cause him to rest upon you, and give way to his own better feelings. let us first stop the sale; that, depend upon it, will stop the marriage. then, if we had time, we could leave time to do its work. but," he added, musing, "but i will not trust to what time may bring forth. everything is a matter of merchandise in this world: what will you give for a wife you love, monsieur de cerons?" "all that i have on earth!" i replied, smiling. "nay, nay, not so much as that," answered the merchant. "will you give sixty thousand livres?" "if i had it i would," i answered; "but i have it not." "very nearly in my hands," replied the merchant. "twelve thousand crowns, at fifty-seven sols parisis, make--but it matters not! you shall have it. do you consent to give it?" "i do," i answered: "but how, my good friend, am i to--" "look here, monsieur de cerons," said the merchant, taking out a portfolio, and placing in my hand a note or bill of exchange, "you see here that one augustus, seigneur of blaye, agrees and promises to pay on demand to martin vern the sum of sixty thousand livres, being the remainder of an account between them. if martin vern transfers this bill to you, and you, in consideration of certain concessions, transfer it to a certain baron de blancford--what say you?" "that there is hope," i replied, "that there is hope; but yet, my good friend, there is much to be thought of." "not much of which i have not thought, sir," replied the merchant. "you have already agreed to put yourself entirely under my guidance for the next three days; but you have promised also to take a piece of advice without asking a question--are you ready so to do?" "i am always ready to keep any promise," i replied. "what is the advice?" "it is a somewhat harsh one," answered martin vern: "neither more nor less than to execute a bill of sale to me this night of your chateau and estate of les bois, in consideration of which i will give you bills, money, or credit for sixty thousand crowns." he spoke gravely, even sadly, and with a frowning brow; and when i commenced my reply with, "but--" he stopped me, saying, "yon promised, monsieur de cerons, to ask no questions. hear me," he said, in a lower voice, and drawing me somewhat aside, "i know little--indeed, i know nothing--but i suspect and i fear much, monsieur de cerons; and think that if you can obtain the hand of your fair louise with her father's consent, and fly with her at once far from paris, you will do well and wisely. follow my advice in this; take my note for the money; let me become the apparent proprietor of les bois till better times, and i will explain your conduct to these who gave it you. if you never need the money, you shall be free to give it back and keep the land. at all events, you shelter yourself against the danger of confiscation." what he said was so true that i should have been foolish to neglect it, suspicious as i still felt of the sudden change in the feelings of the court which had so completely taken in the admiral and the queen of navarre; and, on the spot, while his nephew, his brother, and solomon ahar were still present, the papers were drawn up between the merchant and myself, leaving him the nominal, though not the real, proprietor of the estate of les bois. not long after this, martin vern and myself were left alone, but the business of the day was not nearly over. he insisted that his house should be my home for the time; but, ere he suffered me to retire to rest, he kept me in conversation for two or three hours more, explaining to me all his views with mercantile brevity and accuracy; and my conduct during the following day, which i am now about to detail, was the result of the consultation that we then held. at length, tired and exhausted, i went to the room prepared for me, and no prince's palace could certainly have afforded me more comfortable or luxurious accommodation. i was too tired, however, to sleep for some time; and, ere i had enjoyed any real repose for more than two hours, young martin vern entered my room and took his seat by my bedside. he remained for more than half an hour, and his conversation was not, like that of his uncle, devoted entirely to business. he talked of the affairs of the day, and discussed some light, some serious topics, with which my readers would be but little edified. it seemed to me, however, that there was something labouring on his mind all the time while we conversed; and, as he rose to depart, he put his head close down to mine, saying, in a whisper, "whenever you hear the great bell of st. germain l'auxerrois ring at an unusual hour, set off out of paris if it be day, and fly to me if it be night." then, laying his finger on his lips as an injunction to secresy, he left the room without waiting for farther question. chapter viii. i need hardly here detail my visit to the admiral de coligny, which was my first act after rising the next morning, as that visit had no results either affecting myself or the protestant cause. i had, in the mean time, however, written to my cousin, giving him tidings of his sons, and beseeching to speak with him on matters of deep importance to us both. i said all that was kind, all that was affectionate; and i besought him to give me an interview alone, if it were but of a few minutes, before midday. on my return to the merchant's house i found an answer. it was not in his handwriting, though an attempt had evidently been made to imitate it; and the reply, though given in an affected tone of courtesy, was tantamount to a refusal. the baron de blancford, it said, would be very happy to see me, as well as any other of his near relations, and would receive me whenever i chose to call upon him; but, at the same time, to save me unnecessary trouble, it might be as well to let me know that he should not be able to entertain me till after the following monday. the letter went on to add some unmeaning compliments on my valour and distinction, and some heartless thanks for the care and attention i had shown his sons. after i had read it i handed it to good martin vern, whose only comment was, "well, then, we must go to the halls of the parliament, where all is already prepared for us. come, seigneur, i am at your service." it was, i confess, most painful to me to enter into open contest with the father of louise de blancford, and i determined that nothing should draw from me one angry word or rash expression. we were upon the ground first, however; and, as i walked up and down in the hall of last steps, martin vern somewhat reassured me by telling me that i should find my cousin a completely altered being. in about ten minutes there was a slight movement among the number of petitioners and others at the farther end of the hall, and an old man advanced, with an upright carriage but slow step, towards the entrance of the great chamber. he was pale, and much shrivelled with age; but, though small in stature, he was dignified, and his eye seemed to have lost none of its fire. on seeing martin vern, he stopped; and turned his eyes on me for a moment; but the next instant he advanced and took me by the hand. "i cannot be mistaken," he said. "this must be monsieur de cerons. my dear young friend! i rejoice to meet you once before i go to meet your father again in those mansions which i doubt not he has reached, and which i humbly trust in christ that i may be also permitted soon to enter." i needed no other words to tell me that this was the president des chappes, of whom martin vern had spoken; and, after a few words more of inquiry and retrospect, the worthy magistrate turned the conversation to the subject which had brought me thither. "i have come myself," he said, "though not very well, to prohibit the sale of this property, not knowing whether you would arrive in time or not. no one can know so well as i do the terms on which the transfer was made to your cousin, as i drew the very paper i see now in your hands. i was at that time a lawyer in the royal court of bordeaux; and, though not exactly in my line of business, i put the matter in order for your father with my own hand. alas! i knew not that i should never see him more after i witnessed the signature of that deed. but here i think come our opponents: i will not call them adversaries, for i love not to see a breach in families. this must be either the baron de blancford, or some other person who thinks himself of importance." i turned to see, and perceived the baron, followed by several other gentlemen, advancing rapidly up the hall, and speaking, it seemed to me, angrily with the young seigneur de blaye. at all events; their brows were frowning and their cheeks were heated; and, not knowing whether the sight of my attendants without might not have produced all these signs of indignation, i remained without taking any farther notice, to let the storm burst. to my surprise, however, the baron advanced and took my hand. "henry," he said, in a voice that trembled with emotion, "my poor boy has arrived, i fear dying of the wound you mentioned in your letter. i see you feel for me," he continued; "and no one shall prevent me expressing my thanks for the kindness and,--and--and--" while he spoke his eyes had rested on the pale and withered countenance of the president des chappes: a look of doubt and surprise came into his face; he turned white; he hesitated, and then added confusedly, "charles is eager and anxious to see you. he thought you would have come this morning. who is that beside you--the old man?" he asked, in a lower tone. "that," i replied, "is an old friend of my father's: monsieur des chappes, formerly of bordeaux." the baron trembled excessively; and, as far as possible to let him recover himself, i went on. "i would have been at your house long ago, but you yourself refused to receive me till after monday." "i!" cried the baron; "i said no such thing. i said i would receive you whenever you chose to come--i--" "my fair cousin, i have your note," i replied; "there it is!" he took it and read it through, and certainly never did i behold the cheek, even of a timid girl, change its hue so frequently. at length, however, he tore it to atoms and trampled it under his feet, saying, "i am fooled! it is the production of a lady, henry de cerons, and therefore i must say no more." he paused and gazed round him for a moment or two in silence, as if uncertain how to proceed, while the seigneur de blaye remained playing with his sword-knot; and maintaining a determined silence; and the rest who had followed the baron conversed together in a low tone. "now speak with him alone," whispered martin vern, who had been talking to monsieur des chappes; and i immediately followed the suggestion, saying, "as it appears, my noble cousin, that the interview which i asked this morning, for the purpose of communicating to you a most important fact, was only prevented by a mistake of the baroness in regard to your intentions, perhaps you will give me five minutes' conversation with you alone; the proclamation of sale will not take place for a quarter of an hour." "where can we speak alone?" said the baron, with a furtive look at des chappes. "i fear that--" "oh, in one of the bureaux," said the president. "i will wait here for you, my young friend. huissier, lead these two gentlemen to some cabinet where they may confer." "and pray," said the seigneur de blaye, "am i to remain here idling my time away till you return, baron?" "you came, good sir, to see the sale, i think," replied the baron, sharply, "not to enjoy my conversation, which, i suppose, could not be very entertaining to you;" and, thus saying, he followed the huissier, who led us to a small room, where we were left alone. the moment the door was shut, the baron seized me by both hands, and gazed in my face with a wild and haggard eye. "henry!" he exclaimed, "what are you here for? what is the meaning of this?" "the meaning, sir," i answered, calmly but firmly, "the meaning is simply that the estates of cerons cannot be sold. make me not say anything painful to you, but you know, as well as i do, that they must not and cannot be sold." "henry! henry!" burst forth from the baron, "do not drive me to despair!" "god forbid!" i cried, earnestly; "i seek anything but that. on the contrary, turn, my lord, to those who really love and can really serve you, and among the most zealous count myself. i have raised myself, unsupported and alone, from nothing. with your support, and in your defence and aid, i can do far more; and, if you will let me, i will in ten minutes chastise yon empty coxcomb, who seeks your sweet child's dowry, not her hand. the estate of cerons cannot be sold; but still i will enable you to--" "you cannot, you cannot," replied the baron, interrupting me vehemently. "you do not know that i have bound myself to him in a large sum that i cannot pay. the money i borrowed to pay the poor child's dowry is gone. i have nothing to give with her. he will claim the bond i gave him. if the sale be stopped, i am distrusted." "nay, nay," i said, "all this may be well amended." "impossible! impossible!" he said, in a low tone. "i am ruined, disgraced. why, your very opposition is enough. i cannot stop the sale without calling his claim upon me. you cannot stop it without exposing all." "but hear me," i said, "but hear me. i know all: you have nothing to explain. if you will consent to my marriage with louise, dowerless, portionless, i will allow you to stay the sale without one word of the where--hear me! hear me!--and i will instantly put it in your power to quash this man's claim with a single word, and render him your debtor. i know he cannot pay that debt, and therefore--" "can you do this? can you do this?" cried the baron, with his whole face brightening. "ay, my cousin, i can," i replied, "and will this moment; and, if he dare but sneer, i will lash him from that look like an unruly hound." "that is needless! that is needless!" replied the baron, a look of triumph coming over his face. "he will be my debtor, i not his; that will be sufficient. but oh, henry," he added, while his look fell again and his cheek became pale, "oh, henry! there is another! there is another! perdition is on either hand; and if i snatch at the aid you so nobly and generously offer, i fall into another abyss, perhaps worse than that from which you snatch me; and yet, if the sale do not take place, it is double destruction. what can i do? what ought i to do! tell me! tell me, if you pity me!" "i will tell you, sir, if you will listen to my advice," i replied; "but you must decide speedily, for time wears. the most pressing evil is the one before you. the president des chappes will instantly forbid the sale if it be proclaimed. the cause of the prohibition must then be put on record. nothing can ever erase that. then comes upon you this lord of blaye; and, unprincipled libertine as he is, think you he will spare in any shape! at all events, sweep this away, and let us meet whatever other risk or difficulty may be in store as best we may. will you consent, sir?" "you know not, henry de cerons, you know not what those difficulties are. but what you ask must be done. she shall be yours; but you promise to aid me--to save me if you can?" "to the very utmost of my power," i answered; "but i know or guess more than you suppose, sir. you are threatened with danger if you give your child to any but this libertine"--he bowed his head in token of assent--"and it is the baroness you fear?" i went on, but he interrupted me, exclaiming, "not her! not her!" "but the secrets she possesses," i rejoined, and he turned deadly pale. "the only way," he said, after a pause of some minutes, "the only way will be for you to conceal your marriage." "no, my lord," i replied, "that cannot be; but i will conceal your consent. hear me!" i continued, seeing him about to grasp at it eagerly without any conditions, "hear me out. i will conceal your consent during your whole life, unless compelled by any process of law to reveal it, or driven by any attempts to annul our union. if you agree to that, draw up at once, in your own hand, your formal approbation of our union upon those conditions, so, if ever i produce that paper without need, the dishonour will fall on me. i will assign this bond to you; and, walking forth together from this room, we will at once forbid the sale, and set yon braggart boy at defiance. there are paper and pens upon that desk." "be it so, be it so!" cried the baron, seeming to revive from the tone of confidence with which i spoke; and, taking the pen, he wrote the words i put into his mouth. he read it over, and then gave it to me, and imagination can scarcely do justice to the feelings with which i received it. i then assigned to him the bond; and, while i wrote, he remained with his eyes fixed musingly upon the ground. "henry," he said, taking it when i had done, but scarcely looking at the signature, "you think that i am rather weak to be so swayed by a woman so criminal that i should fear her. but believe me when i swear to you, that she holds her power over me by a gross falsehood. a few unfortunate words, written thoughtlessly, and seeming, as she has turned them, to countenance a deed that i abhorred, has bound me to misery and slavery." "i grieve, sir, most truly," i replied; "but i hope the time will come when you will trust me more fully, and i doubt not then to be able----" at that moment, however, one of the huissiers opened the door, saying, "monsieur le baron, the sale is about to be proclaimed." we both hurried to the house where it was to take place; but, ere we reached it, the proclamation was made, and the president des chappes was in the act of saying, "i prohibit the sale in the name of henry count de cerons and des bois." "speak! speak, sir!" i whispered to the baron; "forbid it also, that no cause may be entered on my part." "i prohibit the sale also," he said, raising his voice aloud; and then added, in an ordinary tone, "i have just received intelligence which alters altogether my intentions." "you have, sir?" exclaimed the seigneur de blaye, advancing with a menacing air. "then you are, as i trust you remember, my debtor to the amount of forty thousand livres." "pardon me, sir!" said the baron, in that cold, bitter tone which i had more than once heard him use towards myself in former days, "i think, if i read this paper right, that it is you who are my debtor to the amount of twenty thousand. we will settle our accounts whenever you think fit." the young man looked at the paper, and evidently recognised it well; then turned his eyes upon me, saying, "i understand to whom i am most a debtor, and will take occasion to settle my accounts with him before a week be over." "i trust you will be punctual, monsieur de blaye," i replied; but the president des chappes interfered, saying, "young men! young men! many words like that uttered here will send you to the châtelet. i beseech you, sir," he continued, speaking to de blaye, "as it seems to me that you have nothing to do with this cause, to leave the hall first." de blaye was about to reply, but one or two of the gentlemen who had accompanied him and the baron thither took him by the arm and drew him away. we remained in the hall some ten minutes longer, the baron speaking to monsieur des chappes in as unconcerned a tone as he could employ; but, the moment we had issued forth into the street, he spoke to me eagerly and long upon the subject whereon my own thoughts were most earnestly bent. he urged my immediate marriage and departure with louise, and he promised himself to speak with her and prepare her mind for it. "if you are long," he said, "the matter will be discovered, and i shall be forced either to sanction your union at once, or to oppose it. the latter," he continued, "of course, must not be done; but as you have promised to spare me, henry, as far as possible, i trust that, by the utmost secrecy and expedition, you will let the whole assume the appearance of being done without my consent." my answer may easily be conceived; but the baron's fears were not less eager than a lover's hopes, and he turned instantly from me to martin vern, who stood upon the steps of the palais just behind us. their conversation tended all to the same object; for the baron, from various matters that had been discussed, comprehended at once that the greater part of my information had been derived from the merchant. i did not hear their exact words, however, for at that moment a gay train passed along, and, before i was well aware, my hand was in that of the prince dauphin. the first expression of his countenance was pleasure at seeing me; but the next was shaded by some other feelings, and, after a few rapid questions, he asked me to come to champigny the next day, and spend the following night there. there was a hope in my bosom, however, which prevented me from saying yes; and i replied, with a smile, that perhaps i might be obliged to quit paris ere that. he smiled again, but seemed puzzled by my reply, saying, "well, well, let it be so;" but, ere he left me, he came closer, and said in a low tone, "promise me, upon your honour, de cerons, to come to me at champigny to-morrow night, if you do not quit paris to go elsewhere. i have something important to say to you." i promised without hesitation; and, grasping my hand warmly, he left me and went on. "now," said the baron, as i turned towards him again, "i have settled it all with this good merchant, at whose house you lodge. come with me, henry, for charles, poor boy, cries eagerly to see you; and to-night i will visit you, and tell you, i trust, that all is prepared." bidding adieu to martin vern for the time, with many thanks for all that he had done, i mounted my horse and accompanied the baron to his house, saying, as we rode along, "may i not hope to see louise also? if we are to be so soon united, it were but needful that i should speak with her myself." "nay, henry, nay," replied my cousin, with the blood mantling up in his cheek: "press it not if the baroness be there. if she be not, for a moment you can speak with the dear child, to tell her that, to save all farther pain on either part, your union is to take place in her chamber to-morrow night. good old la tour shall be brought from montmorency to speak a blessing on you: the contract shall be duly drawn, and albert shall be present, though i must not. one staircase shall be put in the hands of your people, to ensure your passing unopposed; the merchant engages that a gate of the city shall be kept open to give you exit; and then, as soon as she is yours, fly with her into the south without delay." "to-morrow night, did you say?" i exclaimed, in some surprise: "can all be arranged by that time?" "all, all," replied the baron; "and oh, henry! when she is your wife, tell her that, towards her at least, her father was not made harsh by nature; tell, henry--tell her, in one word, that she is like her mother; ay, and that, whatever she may think, i love her for that likeness." "oh! monsieur de blancford," i cried, moved by those words, "why, why will you not shake off the yoke that presses on you? why do you not treat threats with scorn?" "because, henry--because i have sold myself to a fiend," he answered. "speak not of it now: one day i will tell you more." we rode on; and i saw charles de blancford--terribly changed, indeed, in the space of two short days--i saw louise, too, though it was but for a few short minutes; but that was enough to tell her that our fate was changed, and to ask her if she would consent to be mine so suddenly, so secretly, so unprepared. she replied not at first, but her looks left all other answer needless; and, ere she could reply, we heard the arrival of the baroness in the courtyard, and we parted. with charles i sat for some hours; and all i had to tell him of the transactions between his father and myself seemed to afford him better medicines than the druggist's shop could supply. i saw not the baroness: but, after my return to the house of martin vern, the baron came, and we passed nearly three hours in making every arrangement. the good merchant sat by and listened gravely, even sadly. once i saw him bury his eyes in his hands, and he sighed often and deeply; but he promised all that we required in regard to his own aid; and, when the baron asked him if he thought not that our plan must certainly succeed, he replied, with a smile that i afterward understood better, "i will stake my life upon it." chapter ix. it was two o'clock in the morning of sunday, the th of august, , when i reached the _porte-cochère_ of the baron de blancford. the whole town was still, and the soft, balmy air of the summer night fanned my cheek like the breath of love. the wicket was, as i had expected, open, and behind it was moric endem, armed only with the usual weapons of daily defence, with the addition of a pistol in case of need. he was masked, however, as it was agreed that we all should be; and, pointing to a small door on the other side of the court, he whispered, "by that door and up the stairs, sir, you will find andriot and two others." i looked towards the porter's room, fearing lest the least noise should disturb those we wished to slumber. all was quiet, however; and, passing across the court, i found the door held open by andriot. on the first landing-place of the stairs there was another of my men, and higher up a third. on the third landing there appeared a light shining through a door ajar, and i gently pushed it open and entered. it admitted me to a small anteroom, and watching on the opposite side was albert of blancford. the noble boy embraced me gladly; and, with a whispered word or two of joyful congratulation, led me into the room beyond. there stood louise, somewhat pale and agitated; but the dear girl suffered not such feelings to veil or check her affection for the man she loved; and, starting forward from the side of old la tour, she cast herself into my arms. i soothed and caressed her for a moment, while the good old pastor came forward and grasped me eagerly by the hand. the contract of our marriage lay upon the table; but we had many words to say to each other, and had not yet signed it, when the door behind us opened, and the baron himself entered. "is it done?" he asked, anxiously: "has it taken place? be quick, henry! be quick!" he added, seeing that the contract was still unsigned. "i fear, and shall fear for your happiness, my children, till the act is irrevocable." oh! happy interruption to words, every one of which occupied those moments that bore fate upon their wings! gladly we signed the paper; gladly we pronounced the vow that bound us to each other; gladly i placed the mystic symbol of eternal union on the hand of her i loved. "now!" cried the baron, as soon as the whole was completed, "now depart at once! you will find good dame marguelette without the walls at the spot where your horses wait. bless thee, my louise! bless thee! be kind to her, henry, and love none but her: be warned--be warned by what you have seen and know. get thee to bed, albert, and let all now be quiet in the house." louise trembled a good deal, but i led her on; and gradually, as the severing from her father's house seemed more complete, she clung to me more closely. the baron, with his own hand, shut the door behind us, and, step by step, we descended the dark stairs. "i have thought it better, dear louise," i said, as we reached the bottom of the stairs, "that we should both be screened from notice as far as possible; and i have here a nun's gown, if you can throw it over your other clothes. where is the gown, andriot?" he gave it me, and louise covered her white dress with the gray serge; but, as she was in the very act of putting it on, to my surprise i heard the great and remarkable-toned bell of st. germain l'auxerrois begin to ring loudly, as if for matins; and, scarcely had i hurried louise across the court into the street, when loud shouts were heard from different parts of the town; the bells of the churches were heard ringing; the light of torches and flambeaux was seen advancing from the side of the louvre; and it was evident that, notwithstanding the profound stillness which had reigned in the city as i passed along, one part, at least, of the population was up and watchful. a moment after we heard a loud and piercing shriek in the distance, and louise, trembling in every limb, clung to my arm. at first she seemed to think that all this referred to ourselves; that we were discovered, and about to be dragged back; but the cries from every part of the town soon undeceived her: and, as i remembered the various little incidents of the last three days; the warning of young martin vern; the eager and pressing invitation of the prince dauphin, i doubted not that some dark and horrible scheme for the destruction of the protestants was upon the eve of execution. moric endem closed the door behind us, and, with the other men, sprung to my side; and, remembering the caution of the young merchant, i drew louise on, with scarcely a word, towards his dwelling. the street in which we were was still nearly vacant, with the exception of the people bearing torches, who were coming from the farther end; but, just as we quitted the shadow of the hôtel de blancford, a man darted forth from a doorway on the other side, crying, "help! help! here are protestants escaping!" and, at the same time, he seized me by the arm and aimed a blow at my head. he was masked, but the voice was that of de blaye; and he certainly would, have cut me down, had not moric endem, always prompt and cool, levelled his pistol at his head and fired. he fell dead upon the spot; but the cry had brought a number of the torch-men down at full speed, and i certainly thought that our hour was come. moric's wit, however, now saved us, as his ready courage had done. he seemed to comprehend the whole in a moment; and, as his religion never stood in the way of his proceedings, he burst out into a loud laugh as the men came up, crying, "that maheutre of a huguenot will need no more. by the mass, if i had not had my pistol, he would have murdered some of us. there, drag him along by the heels to montfaucon. so perish all enemies of the true church!" "bravo! bravo!" cried the torchmen, taking us for zealous catholics; and on we hurried after them as close as we could come. but the house of martin vern was far off. the streets were beginning to swarm with people; we saw two doors burst open, to pillage the houses and massacre the inhabitants, before we reached the end of the street; and louise could not keep up with the men, whose mistake might still have saved us if we could have gone on in their company. nothing, then, but certain death seemed to surround us on every side; the only chance was in putting moric endem at the head of our troop; but he was known to so many catholics as well as protestants, that the first order to unmask would have betrayed all. as we were following the other party at some distance, five or six people came up from the opposite direction, and spoke a moment to those before us. there was a woman with these new-comers; but they stopped, and one man advanced, saying, "unmask!" moric was about to cut him down, but i stopped him, and replied, "unmask yourself." "ha!" cried the other, "i was seeking you, monsieur des bois. we shall save you still. miriam, link yourself with the lady; my men, mingle with their men. let none of your party," he added, in a low tone, "unmask; we will do that if need should be. now, shout, my men, and wave your torches. up with the catholic church, down with the maheutres!" "oh, my father! my father!" said louise to me, in a low voice; "can we not save my father! oh, henry! henry! think of him!" i spoke a word upon the subject to the young merchant, but he stopped me sharply ere i could finish my sentence. "i am risking my life by what i am doing even now. speak not of it! he has a catholic wife; she will save his house. come on! come on! you will see such sights as will make you glad of your own lives!" i whispered to louise the hope that he gave me, scanty as it was; and, alas! as we hastened onward, the sights we saw did fully justify that which the young merchant had said. before we had gone half a mile, the streets of paris were one scene of massacre and horror. the whole place was blazing with torches; large parties of armed men, on foot and on horseback, were scouring the streets, killing every one even suspected of protestantism; and many a catholic, too, was slain in the anarchy of the time, who stood between fair estates and greedy relations. six or seven we saw slain before our eyes; and thrice, while the echoing screams of new victims were heard within the houses, a dead body was cast forth from the upper windows into the streets as we were passing. instantly a crowd of the dark and sallow villains that crowd the lanes and alleys of every great metropolis, gathered round, like vultures over the dead, to strip it of its clothing; and often was heard the low groan or faint cry which followed the dagger-stroke that ended what the assassins above had left unfinished. as we approached the banks of the river, however, the scene became still more terrible and still more confused; thousands of figures, all bent on the same bloody business, whirled round us in every direction; the cries of the victims; the shouts of their butchers; the breaking in of doors and windows; the occasional discharge of firearms; the incessant ringing of the bells, the beating of drums, and the sounding of trumpets, made a noise perfectly deafening; while the sights that were now presented, as clearly as if it had been day, made the heart sick with horror, and agony, and indignant grief. in one gateway alone i saw piled up so many human bodies, among which were two women, that the gate could not be shut; and, as i kept my eyes upon the ground, i saw that the gutters flowed red with blood. a little farther on, a boy of thirteen or fourteen years of age was seen dragging along a naked body by the heels; and farther still, a fiend of a woman pressing out the last breath from the body of a creature like herself, while she tore the rich clothes from her dying limbs. all those that appeared active in the massacre, of a better class, at least, all i saw were masked; but much happened even close to me that i beheld not at all; for my whole thoughts were taken up with the situation of the dear girl by my side, and i feared every moment that her strength would fail through terror, horror, and agitation. she hung heavily upon my arm, it is true, but still she did not give way. with her eyes bent down upon the ground, she hurried on, while the kind girl miriam, though evidently terribly agitated herself, poured strengthening and consoling words into her ear, and supported her on the other side. three times we had been stopped and commanded to unmask; but either a single word from young martin vern, or moric endem's well-imitated shout of "down with the huguenots!" obtained us a free passage without uncovering our faces. at length, the long-wished-for sight of the street in which the merchant lived presented itself; but at that very spot we were stopped by a crowd of wild rabble whom no words would pacify; and even when the young merchant and two of those who were with him pulled their vizards off, a furious man, brandishing a sword, swore that he gave a false name, and was calling out to kill him, when moric endem, starting forward, exclaimed, "ha! gouquant! huguenot! maheutre that you are! knock his brains out, martin! knock his brains out! he was coligne's horseboy at moncontour, and was taken. knock his brains out! knock his brains out! he is a huguenot shamming catholic." with his drawn sword in his hand he rushed forward, and, before he could be stopped, cut the man down. "by the mass, there are more huguenots among them!" he cried, springing at another man. "kill them all! kill them all! down with the huguenots!" but the men fled in every direction, and left the street clear. young martin vern, however, paused and looked angrily upon moric endem, saying, "this must be answered." "it is answered in six words," replied moric. "the man is what i said. he is gouquant, who was horseboy to the admiral, and has since, i hear, been cutthroat for any one that wanted one here in paris." nobody could contradict him, and the young merchant hurried on. oh! with what joy and satisfaction did i see the great doors of the merchant's courtyard close behind us, and held my poor half-fainting louise to my heart in a momentary dream of safety! but that dream was soon dispelled, for i heard one of the men, as pale as death, telling the good youth who had protected us that the whole place had been twice searched for me and my followers already. the next moment there was a low rap at the gate, and, on looking through the grating, we saw the two elder merchants, with a footboy, and immediately gave them admission. martin vern's face was sad and pale, however. "they refuse me to open the city gates on any account," he said, as soon as the door was closed. "nay, cheer up, sweet lady, we will find means to save you. miriam, what says your quick wit? to-morrow the search will be stricter and more orderly--not less fatal, though. how can we get them out of the city?" "by the river!" said the girl, eagerly, "by the river! my father's barge, that brought all the gold plate from rouen, is just at the back of our garden." "but, to get to the top of your house, miriam," said the merchant, "they must pass round through that awful street where the blood is now flowing like water." "over the tops of the houses!" cried the girl; "over the roof! i know there is a way. you, dear martin, run round and tell my father to open the door above. i will guide them thither." the young merchant paused not a moment, and his uncles as eagerly and rapidly led us out upon the tops of their warehouses. tremendous was the lurid glare that rose up from the streets below; tremendous the mingled roar of terrific sounds that reached us as we hurried along the narrow and giddy way; it was like walking along the precipice verge of hell itself; and i do not think that louise could have borne it long, had not good martin vern soon led us into a sort of alley between the double roofs of the houses. it was with some difficulty that we found out which was the roof of the good jew's house; but at length miriam fixed upon it, and knocked at a small door in the side. for several moments there was no answer, and she knocked again. then, however, came the sound of steps hurrying up, and hands unsteady, it seemed, with age or fear, unlocked the door on the other side. as soon as it was opened the head of solomon ahar appeared, his limbs shaking, and his face pale. "blessed be god!" he cried. "blessed be god! come in, my children! come in! all is safe here. i always make my house doubly strong. ah! bless your sweet face, lady, you look pale, and well you may; but the boat will save you. it is close to the shore; in the little creek i had made to unload my merchandise. i owe my life to the good lord, your lover, there!" "my husband!" said louise, in a tone that i shall never forget; and, casting herself upon my bosom, she wept. her tears were soon dried, however, and we hurried down to the bank. as it was probable that we might be fired upon, some large piles of fagots were given us to make a sort of screen on either side, and also to give the barge the appearance of merely a wood-boat. a large bag of money was placed in my hands by martin vern; miriam brought down some rich cushions for louise to lie upon; the jew himself added wine and provisions; and moric endem, doing his best to assume the appearance of a common boatman, aided another of the men to push away from the shore and get into the middle of the river. as we slowly made our way along, the horrid sounds from the centre of the town began to decrease; but, just in passing near the walls, the guards first called out to stop, and then fired upon us. but their shot did us no harm, and, ere they could load and fire again, we were out of reach. we passed the suburb, too, in safety; and oh! how strange was the sensation, when we felt the boat gliding on through the calm, noiseless scenes of the country, and saw the calm morning light glowing warmly in the east! our horses and the rest of my followers, with good dame marguelette, had been stationed at a little cabaret not a hundred yards from the river, and moric, who knew the spot, engaged to land us, and lead us thither at once. he was not one to mistake, and we put ourselves entirely under his guidance. when the boat touched the shore, however, i thought i heard many persons talking at a distance, and landed first to see. as i approached the rendezvous, i saw, by the gray dawn, a much larger body of horse than that which i expected, and, pausing, i was on the eve of returning to the barge, when i perceived a young man dismounted, and pacing eagerly backward and forward, but every now and then pausing to look up the road. i thought that i could not be mistaken in the figure, and, advancing a little nearer, the face of the prince dauphin became more distinct. at the same moment he caught a sight of me, and, darting forward, he caught me by the hand, saying, "thank god! but oh, de cerons, you are surely not alone!" i told him briefly what had happened, and he replied, "lose not a moment! bring them all here. there is a letter for the lady, and an escort of my own men, with a safe conduct from my father. but you must put twenty leagues between you and paris ere you sleep; for here, at this moment, no man could be certain of saving his own brother from hour to hour. no words, de cerons, but away! to geneva! to geneva! if you would have safety." no words, indeed, were spent in vain. louise and the rest were brought up from the boat, and, ere twenty minutes had passed, we were on the road to switzerland. it was not till we had passed the french frontier that i could believe that the beloved being, now my own, was in safety; but there my joy was mingled with deep grief; for there we learned, for the first time, the extent of our loss, and found that the barony of blancford, as well as the lordship of cerons, had fallen to one who wept to receive them. good old la tour, too, was among the gone; and the baroness de blancford had not been suffered, by the wild beasts that were let loose upon the protestants of france, to escape that fate which she made no effort to avert from her husband. eva st. clair. a tale. eva st. clair. -------------- chapter i. 'twas a bright day in the autumn; the brown leaves were still upon the trees, the moss was springing up rich and green round the old roots and upon the sloping banks, and the sun, peeping in wherever the hand of time had cast down their green garmenture from the earlier shrubs, checkered the ground every here and there with bright glances of yellow light, which, while the wind moved the branches gently above, waved slowly backward and forward, as if well pleased at the velvety cushion on which it rested. the scene was as still and solitary as it was possible to conceive; for those were days in which civil wars and angry strife had diminished by one half the population of merry england. no forester took his way through the wood; no guard of the king's chase or baron's huntsman watched to see whether some churl or yeoman was not aiming the shaft at the royal deer, or entangling the roebuck in a concealed snare. stephen, pressed on all sides, had been forced to abandon rights for the sake of popularity; and many a wide track, deserted by its lord, and destitute of inhabitants, remained open to any one that chose to hunt within its precincts. a low wind sighed through the tops of the trees, and made the dry leaves whisper as if telling each other some solemn tale. the sun shone, as i have said; but with great silence and in the midst of solitude, there is something solemn even in sunshine. at length a woodpecker came down upon the green moss, ran up a neighbouring tree, knocked it with its bill where it seemed hollow, and then either came down again upon the ground, or flew on again to another tree, with the wild, melancholy sort of laugh to which that bird gives utterance while upon the wing. he had gone on this way for nearly an hour, confining his excursions to the limits of a few hundred yards, when suddenly he started up from a green cushion of moss on which he had settled for a moment, and flew away from the open spot, where the trees stood far apart, into the depths of the thicker wood beyond. what was it started the wild bird from the moss! it was a step that fell lightly, and scarcely left a print behind it; but it was quick and hurried, and the small foot that made it was somewhat weary with the length of way it had come. in a moment after, in the midst of the tall trees where the woodpecker had been disporting himself, there stood the form of a girl of some nineteen or twenty years of age. over her other clothes she wore a dark brown cloak, such as in those days was very commonly worn by women of the lower orders, and the hood, which formed the principal part of the garment, was brought far over the head. this mantle, rough and rude in itself, seemed also somewhat too large for the person that wore it; but, nevertheless, it could not conceal entirely the grace of the form it covered, nor the movement of each well-turned limb. the young lady--for no one who saw her could doubt that she was so--paused as she came up to the spot we have mentioned, and gazed round about her somewhat inquiringly, as if she expected to find there something she did not behold. "it is strange," she said at length, speaking low, in a sweet, melodious voice, like the musical murmuring of a stream, "it is very strange that the old woman is not here. perhaps i am before the time. i will wait and see," and, seating herself on the mossy bank in the sunshine, she bent down her head upon her hand, and soon fell into a deep fit of meditation. the expression of her countenance grew something more than thoughtful--it grew even melancholy; and so busy did she become with her own thoughts, that her tongue betrayed, from time to time, the ideas that were passing within. "it is very long," she said, "very long since i heard from him. old maude has forgotten such feelings, or she would not keep me so long from the letter. i wonder if i shall ever forget them? oh, i hope not!" and again she fell into silent thought, with her eyes fixed upon the rich green stems of the moss which carpeted the ground beneath her feet. a minute or two after, however, borne upon the light wind came the sound of a distant bell, and, looking up and listening with a smile, she again murmured, "i was too soon! there is the bell of the convent sounding the angelus." scarcely had the last tone died away when another sound met her ear--the sound of a full, clear voice singing a gay country ditty; one of the many for which old england has been famous at all times. the words were in the old saxon tongue, but they may very nearly be rendered as follows in the english of our own day. song. shut the window, close the door; see, the brown leaves strew the floor; chilling winds are in the sky, autumn's gone and spring is nigh, but winter lies between. oh, the brown leaves! oh, the brown, best of hues for fields or town, it outlives the good-by of the green. hark, the curfew! hide the fire; let no flame rise like a spire, but leave enough of ashes bright to see my maude's eyes by the light that the gray embers lend. oh, the gray! night's sober gray! gold light and blue sky for the day, but gray on all in the end. the lady had started up at the very first sounds, and looked in the direction whence they came with some degree of apprehension. as she listened, however, she said, with a more assured countenance, "she has sent her son, the good woodman; yet that does not sound like his voice either. i will creep behind those bushes and watch; but it must be him." silently drawing back, and keeping the tree still between her and the path by which the singer seemed to be approaching, she placed herself behind some bushes at the distance of between twenty or thirty yards of the spot where she had been seated. as she there stood, the person whose voice she had heard came forward from the thicker part of the wood, looking, as he advanced, towards the westward, which, it must be remarked, was the quarter from which the lady herself had first appeared. he slackened his pace, too, as he came up, so that there could be but little doubt that it was for her he looked. his dress, too, reassured her; for it consisted of the yellow untanned leather coat of the woodman, which, from the green ochrey earth that was employed to clean it, received a tint very much like that of the young leaves of the trees. the coat, indeed, was not in the very best condition, being a good deal worn, and somewhat ragged at the spot where the heavy axe, thrust through the broad belt, had chafed the thick leather for many a day. there was a large gap, too, and a patch upon the right arm; and the fair girl, who was now advancing, with a heart naturally kindly and expanding, at that moment more particularly, from the happy expectation of receiving tidings, thought that she would give the good woodman wherewithal to renew his leathern coat as a reward for bearing her the letter. the woodman, unconscious of her presence, was looking the other way; but, though her step was light, his ears soon caught it, and he turned quickly towards her as she came forward. there might be seen, the instant that he turned, a sudden change in the lady's look. she stopped, gazed at him with a look of astonishment, and then, uttering a cry of surprise and joy, sprang forward to his arms. in her eagerness, the hood and mantle fell off, disclosing the graceful person, the lovely face, and the rich apparel below; and it was a strange sight, certainly, to see so fair and delicate a creature, habited as might become the daughter of a prince, clasped in the arms of one clothed in such rude attire. it wanted, however, but one glance at his countenance to show that he upon whose bosom the lady hung so fondly was not what he seemed; and every moment spoke of long training to graceful exercises and to courtly demeanour, though each limb was well fitted to wield the heavy sword or couch the tough ash spear. he was tall and powerfully made, but his countenance was mild and kind, and his eye, as it rested upon the fair girl whom he now held to his heart, was full of tenderness and affection as well as joy--joy rising out of grief, and not entirely freed from some portion thereof, like a flower opening out after a shower, but with its head still bent down, and its leaves encumbered with the drops that had fallen heavily upon it. all that the young gentleman said for some time was, "eva, my beloved eva;" and all that the lady replied was, "oh, richard, how long it is since we have met!" then succeeded words of joy, and tenderness, and love; but upon these we will not dwell, for to pause and fix our eyes upon moments of such bright happiness is like gazing upon the sun, which, for long after, prevents us from seeing all other things less bright. they had much to say, however, that was not joyful; they had much to tell that was painful to hear; for, though eva st. clair assured him again and again that she would never love any one but him; that, sooner than wed any other, she would take that fatal vow by which many a young, a kind, and affectionate heart bound itself, in those days, to cold solitude for ever, she had yet to tell him that she saw no prospect of her father, the well-known hubert of st. clair, changing in any degree his determination of refusing her hand to him whom he had once permitted to expect it as a certain treasure; with whom all her years had been passed, and to whom her young affection had been given. the dissension between their fathers, which, as was so often the case in those days, had been permitted to break through the happiness of their children, seemed, she said, of a character rather to be aggravated than diminished by time, at least in the mind of her father, who, though generous to all, and especially kind to her, would not yield on a point where he conceived his honour was concerned. he, too, had to tell much that was painful. he had to inform her that his father was more than ever attached to the cause of the usurper stephen, and that he, his son, was still bound to fight upon a side where his heart told him that the cause was unjust, and where his own observation showed him that injustice was upheld by tyranny and wrong; a side in defence of which his arm was weak and his sword fell powerless; where he felt that he could never win renown, because his heart was deprived of all those enthusiasms that lead on to high destinies in whatever cause they are enlisted. still, however, while they told each other all these sad things, the joy of this meeting again mingled with the sorrow, and many a look of love, and many a fond caress was added, which softened their grief, and made the anticipated evils look far off while hope was born of joy. though their meeting, even in the wild chase of the lords of st. clair, was a rash and dangerous act, yet they promised to meet again: and still they talked, and still they lingered; nor would they probably have separated for many a moment longer, had not the sound of a horn, echoing through the glades of the green wood, told them that some one was rapidly approaching. "fly, richard, fly!" exclaimed the fair girl; "it is my father; most likely it is my father; and oh, if he were to find you here, how terrible might be the result." richard de lacy pressed her once more to his heart, once more kissed the sweet lips of her who loved him, and then plunged into the deepest part of the wood; while eva, snatching up the dark mantle she had dropped, gathered it round her, and, with a quick step, bent her way homeward. chapter ii. we must now change the scene for a time; for, in so brief a history as this the reader's imagination must aid the writer, and supply all those links in the chain which would occupy much time to detail. on the top of a high wooded hill in the county of buckingham, which was in those days covered with great forests of beech-trees, rose heavily from amid the green boughs the square, heavy keep of an old norman castle. this was all that could be seen of the dwelling of the lords of st. clair from the lower country which it commanded; but, upon approaching through the chase, vast ranges of walls, and battlements, and outbuildings were seen; moats and ditches covering a great extent of ground, with the turreted gate and barbican thrown forward in front. though no artillery, in those days, looked down from the battlements, with mouths ready to pour forth fire and destruction upon those who advanced to attack them, yet the aspect of those walls was no less imposing; and bold would have been the man who, without an overwhelming force, would have marched to the assault of the castle of st. clair. such was not likely to be the case on the day of which we speak. but, nevertheless, there was an imposing display of strength upon the walls--archers, and slingers, and men-at-arms; and, though the gates were thrown open and the drawbridge was down, yet the archway was lined with soldiers, and the great court was half filled with men in complete arms. often did it happen in those days, that the appearance of reverence covered preparations for defence or resistance; and while hubert of st. clair stood a few steps beyond the gateway of his own castle, clad in the long and flowing robes which were then much affected in times of peace by the norman nobles, he looked round upon the iron-clad forms and bristling spears of his men-at-arms with pride and pleasure, while he watched the advance of a small train of horsemen who came slowly up the long road cut down the edge of the wooded hill. the person who approached at the head of that party was stephen, king of england; and ever and anon, as he rode up the ascent, he rolled his eyes over the well-manned walls of the castle he was approaching, and murmured some words to himself in a tone of displeasure, perhaps of scorn. when he came near to st. clair, indeed, his face assumed a softer aspect, and he tried hard to smooth his tone and manner when he returned the salutation of the baron. the effort was very unsuccessful, however; and a heavy frown still sat upon his brow as he dismounted from his horse and entered the hall, where everything had been prepared as far to receive him as the shortness of the notice he had given would permit. "well, my good lord, well," he said, as he advanced into the hall, still glancing his eye, as he spoke, over every object that the place contained, "i have come all this way from my army to see if i cannot persuade you to give your fair daughter to the son of my noble friend de lacy." the baron heard him with a calm, cold countenance, but replied nothing directly, merely saying, "let me beseech you, my liege, to taste some refreshment, such as my place can afford. had i known of your coming sooner, i would have been better provided." "but give me an answer, give me an answer, my good lord," replied the king, "and a fair answer, too, i beseech you." "i seek not to marry my daughter, sire," replied the baron, in the same cold tone; "perhaps, before i do, she may be a ward of the crown." stephen bit his lip, but smothered every inclination to make a sharp reply, saying, in a jesting tone, "but where is the fair lady? where is your daughter, my good lord! let us have her to council; her voice, surely, will have some weight in the matter." "not knowing of your coming, my liege," replied the baron, "she is gone forth, i understand, either to visit the good nuns of grace dieu, or to see her old foster-mother maude, who lives near the small town on the other side of the chase. but where is your noble son, my liege? your messengers informed me he came with you." "he follows hard after," answered the king; "perhaps he may have gone to strike a hart in your forest, my good lord. you will not grudge the king's son a head of venison?" "heaven forbid!" replied the baron. "but there seems some disturbance without there, as if they were bringing in some one who is hurt. heaven forbid that your son, my liege, should have met any one of my rough foresters." stephen looked instantly towards the court; but, seeing his son, prince eustace, on horseback, and apparently safe, he turned again towards the baron, whose attention had been called in another direction. during the brief time the king's eyes had been turned towards the court, some other persons had been added to the group in the hall; but, ere we proceed to say what brought them thither, we must once more take the wings of imagination, and fly back to the glades of the forest, and to the scenes which had just taken place under their green canopy. eva, as we have said, had hastened rapidly homeward; and, though the horns sounded hither and thither at no great distance from her, the path she pursued was for some way quite solitary; till at length, secure from being found in the midst of the wild chase with richard de lacy, she slackened her pace and walked more slowly, stopping at last entirely, to take breath and gaze around her, at a spot where the road, rounding an angle at the hill, exposed a deep wooded valley below, with a wide, sloping upland on the other side, rising gradually towards her father's castle, the tall keep of which was discernible above the woody scene before her eyes. along the side of the opposite hill the hunt was sweeping merrily; horsemen and hounds were seen from time to time bursting forth for an instant, and then plunging again among the bushes; and still the cheerful echo of the horns and eager cry of the dogs told which way the chase went, as the quarry led them through a long, mazy course amid its native woods. eva gazed, and saw them take their way in a direction opposite to that in which her own steps were bent; but, the moment after, she started with surprise, and uttered a faint cry, as two gayly-dressed horsemen dashed forth from the wood close beside her, and one of them, springing from his horse, caught the edge of her mantle with rude familiarity. "ha! my pretty maiden," he cried, "we have been hunting the hart and caught the hind, ha? back with your hood! back with your hood! we three foresters let no deer escape us. on my soul, eustace, this is no pitiful prize! thank my lucky stars, that gave you the first choice and the miller's maiden, and threw this pretty creature as the prize of the second chance." the person who spoke was a young man of some nineteen or twenty years of age, rather effeminate than otherwise in his appearance, and with a great quantity of long black hair,[ ] beautifully curled and parted in front. as he spoke he pulled back violently the hood from eva's face, and al the same moment cast his arm round her slender waist. she struggled to free herself, entreated, threatened her father's wrath; but he heard not or heeded not; those were days of unbridled license, when even churches and monasteries did not give security; and the walls of the castle were woman place of safety against insult and brutal violence. terror took possession of the daughter of st. clair, and she screamed loudly again and again. ere the second cry had issued from her lips, however, some one darted from the wood, and in a moment another followed him. both were dressed as woodmen, and again eva screamed loudly, holding forth her arms towards the one who first appeared. "get thee back, churl," cried the man who held her, still detaining her with his left arm while he drew his sword with his right; "get thee back, or, by heaven, i will send thy soul to the place appointed for the serfs in the other world;" and he laughed aloud at his own jest. his laughter was soon over, however, for the stranger was upon him in a moment with a broad axe drawn from his belt and glittering in his hand. the proud noble struck at him with his sword; but, to his surprise, the axe met the blow and parried it, as a weapon in the hand of a skilful swordsman. with a bitter curse he let go his hold of eva, and rushed forward upon his adversary; but he had scarcely time to strike another blow, when his opponent, turning the back of the axe, struck him first on the shoulder a blow that brought him on his knee, and then another on the forehead, which, though lighter than the first, laid him stunned and bleeding on the earth. "lie there, earl of northampton," said his adversary: and then, giving one glance to eva, who had fled to some distance, he turned towards the other horseman, who had likewise drawn his sword, and, with furious and blasphemous invectives, was pressing fiercely upon the second person who had come to eva's rescue. that other horseman was even younger than the first; but pride, and violence were stamped on every feature, and vice had written early marks of its blighting effects upon his countenance. "walter, walter," cried the voice of him who had so soon terminated the contest with the earl of northampton, "leave him, walter; it is the king's son! the lady is safe. leave him, i say." "he shall not leave me till i have cleft his scull," cried the prince. "richard de lacy, i know you; and, if you dare to interfere, i will treat you as i would a hound;" and, as he spoke, he spurred his horse upon the woodman walter, aiming a furious blow at his head; but richard de lacy thrust himself between, turned aside the stroke, and, catching the bridle of the horse, reined it sharply back upon its haunches, so that it slipped and wellnigh rolled down the hill. "fy, prince, for shame," said de lacy; "some day such acts will cost you a crown. you can do no more mischief here, however; get some of your attendants to carry away the carrion of yonder vile perverter of your youth." "hark ye, de lacy, hark ye," cried the prince, bending over his saddle-bow, and dropping the point of his sword; and, as the young baron approached nearer to hear, the prince struck him a blow with his clinched fist in the face, saying, "take that, hound, and learn your duty." de lacy suddenly raised the axe in his hand, but instantly suffered it to fall again without doing the deed he had meditated. "the time for answering this will come," he said; "it shall not be said of me that i killed the king's son in a wood, with no one by, or broke the neck of a stripling who deserves the rod of a pedagogue." thus saying, he cast free the rein, and, making the woodman go before him, he followed eva on her way. he overtook her soon; for, though fright carried her fast, her strength soon failed; and, taking a small path which all of them well knew through the depth of the wood, he led her to one of the postern gates of the castle, and there left her in safety. when he had done so he went back to the woodman's cottage, cast off the dress under which he had concealed his rank, and mounted the horse which was waiting there for his return. at the neighbouring town a large and splendid train had been ordered to remain till he came back; but richard de lacy waited only for those who were ready to spring into the saddle, and, spurring onward without the loss of an hour, he reached his father's castle on the following morning just as high mass was over. his father was still in the chapel, speaking with old friends and affectionate retainers ere he returned to the hall; but richard advanced at once up the aisle, and, to the astonishment of his father, he strode without a pause to the high altar, on which, after kissing the cross upon its hilt, he laid down his sheathed sword, saying, "that sword shall never be drawn again in the service of an usurper, or for the race of one who has dared to strike the son of reginald de lacy." the old man frowned upon him, but made no reply. chapter iii. these were busy and eager movements seen through the lands of hubert st. clair. horsemen galloping hither and thither, the german catching up his bow, the men-at-arms buckling on sword and helmet, and troops flocking to the castle from every part of the domain. these signs and symptoms of some sudden change in the views and the prospects of the lord of st. clair were followed by the marching of forces towards oxford; and in the midst of one of the strongest bands was a fair lady, with a train of matrons and damsels attending upon her, and several old squires and grooms, who had seen her grow up among them from infancy to womanhood. in the good town of oxford there stood at that time a large palace and a strong castle, both of which have been long swept away, if not entirely, yet so far as to leave scarcely a trace of the original forms behind. at the gates of the palace eva st. clair dismounted from her horse, and was led on by some attendants who met her, into a chamber where sat a lady of tall and commanding person and imposing aspect. eva advanced somewhat agitated, but still gracefully, and knelt at the feet of the empress matilda; for such was the person to whom she now came. the empress suffered her to kneel, gazing on her as she did so with a look of some surprise and admiration; but at length, seeming suddenly to recollect her, she exclaimed, "oh! the daughter of st. clair! he has, indeed, kept his word with me, and sooner than he promised;" and, bending down her head, she kissed the fair brow that was raised towards her, and asked what news the lady had brought. "i bring you, madam," said eva, "a small band of three hundred chosen men, with tidings from my father, that with the same number he has gone to join your majesty's brother, the noble earl of gloucester. besides this, he holds three castles strongly garrisoned for your majesty's service, and he hopes, ere long, to join you with the earl, with such a force as will make your enemies tremble." such tidings were very consolatory to the empress queen, and the aid she so suddenly received was indeed most needful, for her party had been reduced to little better than a name. stephen's power was every day increasing; her brother, the earl of gloucester, had gone to seek aid in normandy and anjou, and she was left with a very scanty force to keep alive the struggle till his return. that return, however, was delayed much longer than any one expected, by the hesitation and uncertainty of her own husband, who left her to fight for the crown, which was hers by hereditary right, with scarcely an effort to assist or support her. taking advantage of the great earl of gloucester's absence, stephen exerted every energy to crush the cause of his rival while the hand of adversity was upon her. the last troops which found their way into oxford were those which accompanied eva st. clair; and although, for two days more, the army of stephen did not appear beneath the walls of the city, the supply of provisions which had been eagerly demanded from the country round, in order to enable the place to support a long siege, became more and more scanty every day. at length appeared the armies of the enemy. one body led by stephen in person, one by the murderous and bloody william of ipres, and one by prince eustace, in whose camp was the young earl of northampton, slowly recovering from the severe blow which he had received. at first nothing was seen but the tents and pavilions of the enemy crowning every distant eminence, while dark bodies of horse and foot, the numbers of which could scarcely be distinguished, were seen moving about over the low hills, and through the meadows around. day by day, however, the besieging force drew closer and closer round the city. the numbers could be counted, the arms could be distinguished, the groups of leaders could be told, the shouts and commands could be heard, and at length many a face could be recognised, and every piece of armour plainly seen from the beleaguered walls. eva's heart sunk when she gazed forth and saw nothing but the iron ranks of the enemy surrounding her on every side; it seemed as if deliverance could never come, and hope were at an end. still, however, the gallant defenders of the place knew no fear and relaxed no effort. by many a sally and feat of arms, they proved their prowess upon the assailants, and not one tower or outwork was lost. still the garrison thought the good earl of gloucester must soon be here. still they gazed from the highest turret, to see if they could discover the lances of their deliverers coming through the distant woods. no aid, however, appeared: the provisions in the place became scanty, autumn gave way to winter, and intense cold was added to their other evils. regulations were made in regard to the quantity of food and firing to be allowed to each person; and the table of the empress and her attendants was, by her own order, reduced to no more than would supply the demands of nature. in the town the scarcity was, of course, felt more than in the castle; for there were many poor, and many improvident there, who had not been able, or had not thought fit, to lay in sufficient stores against the hour of need; and, after the siege had lasted about two months, one could not walk through the streets without seeing pale and haggard faces, and sunken eyes turned eagerly towards the countenance of every one they met, as if asking, "is there any hope of relief?" no relief appeared; and the eyes that watched the distant country saw the low winter sun slowly rise and early set without one sign of coming deliverance. at length a heavy fog fell over the whole land, and lasted nearly a week: so dense that nothing could be seen the distance of twenty yards. during the first and second day, under the cover of the mist, the besieging force attempted at various points to force its way into the town; but it was in vain that they did so; and, repelled at every point, again reduced their efforts to a strict blockade. after that busy period was over, the garrison had nothing more to occupy them than hope and fear. the stores were often examined, and found to have dwindled down to a mere pittance: but then, again, people thought they heard distant trumpets and shouts from a spot far beyond the lines of the besiegers. every one augured that the earl of gloucester was coming up, and that, as soon as the mist cleared away, he would attack the army of the enemy. at length, however, after one night of more intense frost than ever, the fog did clear away, and the half-famished garrison ran up to the highest towers, alas! but to see their hopes blasted. there was the country beyond all bright and glittering in the frostwork, but neither spear, nor pennon, nor banner, nor hauberk, but those in the camp of the enemy. all hearts fell; and, although they endeavoured not to suffer despair to show itself in their looks, matilda, wherever she turned her eyes, found nothing but an echo to the apprehensions that were in her own heart. the only one who even tried to console her was eva of st. clair, who had become very dear to the empress; and though, when the siege first began, her heart, unaccustomed to such scenes, had entertained none of the proud confidence which had animated others, she now displayed more fortitude than all, and in the midst of sorrow spoke of better days. she was thus sitting at the feet of the empress, trying to cheer her, when the governor of the castle entered the chamber where they were alone, without other witnesses, and, approaching the empress with a calm but sad countenance, "i have come, madam," he said, "to bring your majesty very sad news. on examining the stores this day, i find that there is but food left of any kind for three days. by killing all the horses that we have left, we may, indeed, make it outlast a fourth day, but that is all; and, moreover, i grieve to say, that a pestilential distemper has broken out in the town for the want of food; a hundred and ten souls took flight last night between midnight and matins." matilda clasped her hands and looked up towards heaven; but, instantly resuming her native courage, she said, "something must be done, my lord, something must be done; have you anything to propose? please god, we will never surrender." "were your majesty not here," he replied, "we could obtain easy terms enough; but the usurper has sworn that you shall yield to him without conditions. as that cannot be, however, all that i have to propose is this: wallingford is full of your friends, strong, and well provided with all things; 'tis but a short distance; we are still here six hundred men-at-arms; and, though we have but thirty horses left, that number may well do all that is needful. let your majesty, and such knights as can find horses, mount a little before daybreak to-morrow morning; let us take one good meal before we set out, and then, throwing open the gates towards wallingford, all issue forth suddenly together, horse and foot, and cut our way through. the moment you and your guard have passed, i will form those that are on foot across the road, which is between steep banks, you know, and i will wager my head to maintain it for nearly half an hour against all they can bring to fight me. it will take them as long to go round by either of the other roads, so that you can get to wallingford in safety." "and you, my good friend, and you," said the empress, "you, and all the brave men who are with you, you will remain but to die in my defence. well, well, say no more. i will think of it till midnight, and then give you my answer after consulting my fair counsellor here." the baron shook his head, as if not approving of such counsel; but, before he went, he bent down his head to eva, saying, "may thee be resolute; there is but one way to save your sovereign." when he was gone, the empress, who had hitherto suffered no emotion to appear, bent down her head upon her hands, and the tears rolled from her eyes. eva stood by in silence, for she knew that as yet it was in vain to speak; and thus the sun went down, leaving the chamber in the gray shadow of the twilight. at that instant there was the sound of a footstep in the anteroom; and, in a moment after, the door opened, showing the tall, dark form of a monk, in his long gray gown and cowl. the empress started up, exclaiming, "who are you! who is it you seek!" "peace be with you, my daughter," replied the monk; "it is you i seek, and i bear you some tidings of moment. see you this letter?" the empress snatched it from his hand, and darted eagerly to the window to catch the last faint light that was in the sky. as soon as her eyes were fixed upon the letter, she exclaimed, "robert of gloucester's hand, as i live." then, as she tore it, she added, "six days! he will be here in six days! alas! he will come too late!" "so indeed i find, my daughter," said the monk. "since i made my way in here, i see that your situation would be hopeless if you could not escape." "escape!" exclaimed the empress; "would that i could escape! but how came you hither yourself? how found you your way through the enemy's lines?" "by a path that is open to you, my daughter," replied the monk, "if you will be contented to trust to my guidance, and to take but few persons with you." "but who are you that i should trust?" demanded the empress. "what is your name? how shall i know that you are faithful?" "did i not bring that letter?" said the monk. "but if you want farther proof, let me speak a word to this lady in yonder chamber, and she shall be my surety." he took eva's hand in his and led her towards the anteroom; and, as he did so, that fair hand trembled and her whole frame thrilled. they were absent some minutes; but, when they returned, eva cast herself at the empress's feet, exclaiming, "oh, trust him, madam, trust him. i will pledge my life and soul for his faith." chapter iv. the clock was striking twelve, the moon was bright and high, but a thin mist had come back upon the earth, and lay lightly over all the slopes, and the lower parts of the ground in the neighbourhood of oxford, when a train, which might have scared the peasant or schoolboy had he beheld it, so like was it to what imagination has pictured a train of ghosts, took its way down a small turret staircase at the castle of oxford. that train consisted of three ladies and two men, and all, with the exception of one, who wore a monk's gray gown, were covered from head to foot in white. when they had descended to the bottom of the stairs, the empress turned to the monk, demanding, "through the vaults, say you? how came you to discover the way?" "i discovered it," replied the monk, "when i was mere boy, and studied sciences under a clerk of this place." the empress looked down as if apprehensive and doubtful, but still followed on; and, leading the way, the monk opened the door which led into some vaults below the castle, and thence down another narrow flight of steps, which made the way seem to matilda as if they were descending into a well. "lord brian," she said, in a low voice to her other male attendant, "if you find that he deceives us, cleave him down with your battle-axe." "fear not, lady," replied the gentleman to whom she spoke; "i know him, although he does not know me, and you may trust to him in all faith." again they proceeded in silence; and at the bottom of the steps they found another door, which led them into a long vaulted passage. at first it was cased with masonry, and a pavement was beneath their feet; but at the end of twenty or thirty yards the masonry ceased, and the torch carried by lord brian fitzwalter showed that they were passing under the arch of a sort of rude cave, occasionally supported by brickwork, but not sufficiently so to prevent large masses of the earth and stones from falling down and obstructing the way. at the end of near two hundred yards more the monk turned towards the baron, saying, "here you must put out the light, but lead her majesty gently forward, for the road is rough and dangerous." lord brian obeyed at once, and extinguished the torch against the wall of the vault, if wall it could indeed be called. he then led on the empress by the hand, while the monk went before, directing them upon their way; and presently after the faint blue light of the moonbeams were seen glimmering at some distance before them. "now be silent as death," said the monk; "for, when we issue forth from this place, we are within a hundred yards of the tent of william of ipres. when we are among the bushes at the mouth, stop, and let me go on first. you will see exactly the course that i take, and, if i am not seen in this gray gown, you, covered entirely in white, may well escape." a few steps more brought the whole party to a spot where a number of dry hawthorn bushes had gathered themselves into a hollow in the ground, completely concealing the mouth of the cavern or vault by which they had issued forth from the castle of oxford. that hollow had been part of some ancient saxon, or, perhaps, roman camp; and it extended some way in the form of a narrow ravine. the depth, indeed, except where the hawthorn bushes were, was very little; but it still afforded some shelter from the eyes of any of the enemy's soldiers who might have been near; nor was some shelter unnecessary; for at that moment the empress and her attendants had already passed the outer guards of stephen's army, and were, in fact, half way through his camp. gliding through the hawthorns, the monk advanced calmly on his way; and, too impatient to wait long, the empress, with the hand of eva st. clair clasped in hers, followed the distance of some twenty or thirty paces. after a few minutes of ascent the whole scene around burst upon them, and fearful it must have been to persons in their situation. the camp of stephen was before and around them; not indeed close, for that was a spot of open ground which served as a sort of division between the quarters of the different leaders, and the space of about two hundred yards lay between tent and tent. that space, indeed, was usually well watched by sentinels; but the night was intensely cold, the wind was high, and the men gladly got behind the shelter of the tents, or warmed themselves by the blazing watch-fires. on the right, as the empress and her party then stood, was a large pavilion, with torches burning before it, while a light could be seen through the canvass walls, and the voice of merriment and revelry made itself heard upon the calm ear of night. between that tent and those on the left the monk took his straightforward course, and the rest followed with silent but beating hearts. there was no one opposed them, however; they passed that tent, and another, and another; they crossed over some slight defences which had been cast up in the rear of the army, and they saw before them a long row of osiers, forming a sort of hedge, and looking black amid the white of the wintry scene around them. towards these the monk bent his steps, but paused when he reached them; and the rest of the party found him waiting for them at the angle of a little lane. "we are safe, lady, we are safe," said lord brian fitzwalter; "this lane leads down to the thames; it is firmly frozen over, and you can pass across direct to wallingford." "we are safe; thank god, we are safe," cried eva; but at that moment there was a blast of a trumpet behind them, and galloping horse were seen coming down with furious speed. "look to the lady, brian," cried the monk, in a voice of command; "lead them quick across the stream; once on the other side, you are safe, for the horses dare not follow you. give me your battle-axe; on my life i will detain these horsemen here till you are safe; they cannot pass me here; fly, lady, fly, for they are coming fast;" and, snatching the battle-axe from lord brian's hand, he cast himself into the middle of the road. matilda would have spoken, but all voices cried, "fly, lady, fly;" and she was hurried onward, while the horsemen came down like lightning there was one considerably ahead of the rest, the captain of the guard for the night; and, seeing himself opposed in the middle of the lane, he couched his lance at the monk, and spurred eagerly upon him. one stroke of the battle-axe, however, parried the lance and shivered it to atoms; and, rushing on the monk caught the rein of the horse, and prepared to dash the rider from his seat. but the captain of the guard, an experienced soldier, wheeled his horse with his heel to keep himself from the foe while he drew his heavy sword, and with a thrust which it was difficult for an axe to parry, he lunged straight at the breast of his opponent. at the same time that he did so, he shouted his old accustomed battle-cry, "a lacy! a lacy! reginald to the rescue! a lacy! a lacy!" the axe dropped from the monk's hand; the thrust of old reginald de lacy was true and strong; his adversary fell, dying the snow with his gore; and the baron, spurring his horse on over the body, led his followers fiercely forward in pursuit of matilda. when he reached the bank of the thames, however, he could see nothing but some moving objects on the other side; and, eager in the cause he had undertaken, he urged his horse vehemently upon the ice. the animal felt it shake beneath him, trembled, resisted, fell. the whole mass gave way, and man and horse, with their heavy armour, were plunged to the bottom of the stream. it was in vain that the followers of old reginald de lacy endeavoured to extricate him from the water before life was extinct. near two hours elapsed before they could recover his body, and then they bore it by another path to his tent. they spent the rest of the night in lamenting their lord; and it was not till the morning that one of them thought to tell a priest, whom stephen had sent to offer prayers for the soul of de lacy, that a few minutes before his death, old reginald with the red hand had killed some one like a monk, who had attempted to stop his progress. the priest took others with him, and instantly set out for the place they described; but there they found a sight that made even the hearts of men accustomed to seek voluntarily every scene of human suffering, ache for the fate that was now past recall. there, indeed, lay the fair and powerful form of one in the earliest years of manhood, with the gray gown of a monk, indeed, cast over his shoulders, but beneath it the rich garments of a norman noble, dyed with the flood of gore which had streamed from the death-wound in his breast. there, indeed, lay richard de lacy, slain by the hand of his own father; but he was not alone in death; for, cast upon his bosom, with her rich brown hair all dishevelled and unbound--with her garments, too, drenched in the blood that flowed from the heart of him she loved, lay the still, cold, but yet beautiful form of eva de st. clair. none could tell how she died; whether the intense cold of the night had aided, or whether grief had been alone enough to extinguish the warm spark of life within her bosom. all that was ever learned was the fact that, when the empress reached the bank of the river, eva was not with her; and the fierceness of the pursuit compelled the rest of the party to go on without seeking the unhappy daughter of st. clair. annie deer. annie deer. ---------- there is a little town on the coast of england, which at the present day is not exactly a seaport, though in former times, when the chivalrous race of plantagenet held sway within these realms, it was not only reckoned as such, but sent its ships to the fleet under the command of a mohun, a grey, a de lisle, or a clinton. there is as little connexion, however, between the former state of the town and the present, as there is between those days and the time at which the events which i am about to relate took place. all that remains of its former splendour, indeed, is the ruin of an old castle, picturesquely perched on the extremity of a little slope, which, like the ambitious aspirations of youth that have no result, runs out, promontory fashion, into the sea, towering up as it goes, till, cut short in its career, it ends in a chalky cliff of no very great height. upon the brow of that cliff is the castle we have mentioned, standing like the scull and cross-bones upon a nun's table, a memento of the transitory nature of all things, though the eyes once familiar with it seldom draw any moral from that memorial of the dead. along the slope of the hill, towards the west, is built the little modern town, or, rather, the village, a congregation of small white houses looking over the ever-changing sea. manifold are the gardens. though flora loves not to be fanned with the wings of zephyr when his pen-feathers are dipped in brine, yet we are obliged to confess that the flowers there grown are sweet and beautiful; the shrubs, though rather diminutive in size, green and luxuriant. there are one or two pretty houses in the place, the best being the rectory, which stands near the church, and which, though large, is not very convenient. the neatest, the most commodious, is one which, situated just below the castle, takes in part of the ancient vallum as a portion of the garden, and is built in the purest style of cottage architecture, as if to contrast the more strongly in its trim and flourishing youngness with the old walls which, in the pride of decayed nobility, tower up above it, raising battlement and watch-tower high in air, as if turning up the nose at the little upstart at their feet. in this house dwelt a personage by no means uncommon in england, and combining in his own nature a great many of the faults and good qualities of our national character. but we must give a sketch of his history, which, though as brief as possible, will explain his character without any long details. the son of a well-doing man in the neighbouring county town, he had early been put apprentice to a large dealer in various commodities; gradually made his way in the world; entered into partnership with his old master; rendered the business doubly flourishing by care, activity, and exactness; increased in wealth and honour; married, at forty-five, the daughter of a poor clergyman--the only thing he ever did in his life without the cash-book in his hand; and was duly presented with one fair daughter, whom he loved passing well. through life he was the most exact of men, prompt, punctual, authoritative: and, having really considerable talents in a particular line, very good taste in many things, an easy and increasing fortune, and a very comfortable notion of his own value, he became one of the most important men of the town, gave law to the common council, and tone to a considerable class in society. he was a little dogmatic, somewhat pompous, and loved not contradiction; and his wife, who was as meek as a lamb, took care that he should experience none in his own dwelling. but, with all these little faults, he had contrived to make himself loved as well as respected. for though, in putting two and two together, he was as accurate as our great mathematician's calculating machine, yet, in reality and in truth, there was not a more liberal man upon the face of the earth. if anybody applied to him for pecuniary assistance, he would sit down, and, gathering together all the facts, calculate, with the most clear-headed precision, whether a loan would be really useful to the person who asked it. if that were made clear, he had no hesitation whatever; and, even if it were not made clear, and there was something like an even chance that his assistance might be serviceable or might not, he only hesitated for a minute and a half; and the good spirit unloosed the purse-strings ere the bad spirit could get them into a run knot. as, however, he was upon extremely good terms with a lady who is one of the pleasantest companions that we can have in life, and whose name is dame fortune, those instances in which the chances were equally balanced generally turned out as he could have wished, and he both served his friend and regained his money, with the proper addition of interest, both in bank-notes and friendship. he never met with but one great misfortune in his life up to the time of our commencing his history; but that misfortune drove him from the county town, and caused him to settle underneath the old castle by the seaside. he lost neither his wife nor his daughter, his health, his spirits, nor his fortune. no! it was an addition, not a loss, that cut him to the heart. one of the members of the common council, it seems, had a brother who was a silversmith in london, and who, having made a comfortable competence, wisely retired from trade, came down to the town of which he was a native and a freeman, and was soon admitted into the municipal body. now, whether he had frequented a debating society or the reporters' gallery of st. stephen's, whether he had studied under cobbett or hunt, burdett or hume, or any of those gentlemen--we do not mean either to be personal or political--any of those gentlemen, we say, famed for opposition, it would seem as if, from the moment he came down, he had determined to overthrow the supremacy of our worthy friend, and to worry him as though he had been a bishop, a baited bull, or a prime-minister. moreover, he was oratorical; he would speak you a speech by the hour, in which he would confound all that the straightforward good sense of our friend had made clear; he would pour upon the simplest point a torrent of fine words, not always pronounced with the utmost purity; he would render the most pellucid position opaque by the turbid stream of eloquence, and would add a few words of latin, with very little reverence for the terminations of the nouns or the tenses of the verbs, but still with sufficient volubility to astound and overawe the ignorant ears around him. our friend was resolved not to die without a struggle; and, at the close of any of these triumphant orations, he would rise, feeling morally convinced--seeing, knowing, believing--that all his adversary said was idle, absurd, and stupid, but yet labouring under a consciousness of his own incapability to disentangle the subject which had been twisted up into a gordian knot, or even to find out the thin, feeble, and insignificant thread of his foe's argumentation amid the crystals of sugar candy with which his eloquence had invested it. he would rise, as we have said, and gasp, and struggle, and sit down again, impotent of reply. there was no help for it; he felt himself worsted; and, after the agony of a couple of months, he retreated from a field which he no longer could maintain. he resigned his post in the town council; made the necessary arrangements with his partner in business to give up his active share, and retired, a man well to do, to spend the rest of his days in peace at the little coast-town, about ten miles from his former dwelling, the localities of which we have already described. there, then, he settled with his wife and only daughter; there he embellished, improved, did good, and enjoyed his doings, and passed his time in that busy and important usefulness which was so well suited to his disposition. but we forgot all this time to make the reader acquainted with his name. it was one which, though not uncommon, was in some degree remarkable, being neither more nor less than john deer. now he certainly was not so lightfooted as a roe, nor so timid as a stag, nor possessed of any of the distinctive qualities of the cervine creation. he was much too consequential a person also for any one--not even excepting his own wife--to venture to play upon his name, and turn john deer into dear john: so that the name of deer could come to no harm in his hands. but, alack and well-a-day! he had, as we have before said, one fair daughter, whom he loved passing well; and she was beautiful as a rose, gentle as a dove, timid as a young fawn, and her name was ann; so that it very naturally happened that when anybody spoke of her as annie deer, there was an expression about the lips and a meaning in the eyes which gave the last _e_ in her name very much the effect of an _a_; and annie deer from her father's and her mother's lips--and one other pair besides--was annie dear whenever she was mentioned. now it was natural for her father to call her so, and very natural for her mother to call her so, and still more natural than all for one other person in the village to call her so also; but who that person was remains to be shown. we will not keep the reader a moment in suspense. suspense is wrong, unjust, wicked: persons who have been condemned by a competent jury, and judged by a competent judge, are the only ones to whom suspense should be applied; and very seldom, if ever, even then. the person who pronounced the name of annie deer with such a tone shall be disclosed to the reader immediately. there was a poor widow in the village, who had seen better days, but whose whole remaining fortune was a hundred and fifty pounds per annum, and more than one half of that was on annuity. yet out of this sum she had contrived both to live with great respectability, and to give her son, whom she loved far better than herself, an education equal to the station in which his father had moved. when mr. deer and his family had first come to live at the little town of saltham, as we shall call the place, william stanhope was absent with his ship, for he had by this time become a mate in an east indiaman, and mr. and mrs. deer did everything they could to be kind and civil to mrs. stanhope, and make her time pass cheerfully till her son's return. when at length he did come back, they welcomed him as an old friend, pouring upon him all those civilities and festivities with which we greet the long-absent and long-expected. he was a very handsome young man; brave, gay, and happy in his disposition; gentlemanly and well educated, but, withal, touched with the frank straightforwardness of a sailor; but the quality which, joined with others, pleased mr. deer the most, was a prudent and economical calculation of expenses, which taught him what was just to others and what was just to himself. mr. deer liked him very much; and, though annie deer was at that time only fourteen, and no great chance existed of her falling in love with anybody, yet mr. deer, being famed for foresight, resolved that he would examine young stanhope's character thoroughly, and watch him well. that year william stanhope had brought home no great wealth, having scarcely any capital to trade upon; but he brought some very pretty presents for his mother, which showed him to be a very kind and dutiful young man. the next year, having increased his capital, his gains were increased; and, besides bringing home more money, he brought home not only presents for his mother, but presents for annie deer, which he gave straightforwardly to her father, expressing his gratitude for all the kindness which had been shown to his mother during his absence. mr. deer took the presents, and inquired, with looks of much personal interest, into the speculations of the young sailor and their success. william stanhope was frank and candid; and though the sum that he had made was not very brilliant, yet, compared with his means of making it, it promised so well, that mr. doer began to calculate, and found that liberal assistance might without risk enable young stanhope to advance his fortune rapidly, and he made the offer at once. it was embraced with thanks, and the next voyage ensured to william stanhope competence as a single man. he had a higher ambition, however. he was now competent to take the command of a ship. he was respected and esteemed by all who knew him; and a favourable offer was made to him, but the sum of ready money required was very large; and, though he mentioned the offer to his mother, with all its advantages, and all the difficulties that interposed, he spoke of it to no one else. his mother went that evening to drink tea with the family under the castle, but william stanhope remained at home musing, alleging that he had letters of business to write; and the next morning, instead of taking his way to the house of mr. deer, as was his common practice, he wandered along solitary upon the sands round the bay, seeming to count every pebble that studded the shore. he had not gone very far, however, before a friendly hand was laid upon his arm, and mr. deer, joining him in his walk, entered at once upon business. he told him that mrs. stanhope had related to them the evening before the offer which had been made concerning the command of a ship, and then went on to ask his young friend why he had not applied to him, john deer, for the money. "i did not know, my dear sir," replied the youth, "that you would be willing to lend so large a sum." "not willing to everybody," replied mr. deer, "but quite willing to you, who in all your transactions are as correct as my cash-book." still william stanhope paused; and then, after letting two sailors, who were loitering along the shore, pass them by, he turned directly towards his companion, and, raising his head, he said, "there is another reason, mr. deer, why i have not asked you: i am in love with your daughter annie, and, if i get on in the world, i am determined to seek her hand. i did not wish to mention this at present, because i have but little to offer her, except in hopes and expectations, and i could not think of asking you to lend me so large a sum of money without telling you what were my feelings towards your daughter." "sir, you are an honest man," replied mr. deer, "and keep, i see, both sides of the account clear. but i will strike a balance with you, and begin a new account. thus, then, we stand, william: i will lend you ten thousand pounds to buy your ship, and, when you think you have made enough to afford a wife, i will give you the ten thousand pounds as my daughter's fortune, and be glad to receive you as my son-in-law." "this is beginning a new account, indeed, my dear sir, for it leaves me your debtor in every way." "pay it off in kindness to my child," replied mr. deer; and the matter was thus finally settled with the father. as to the daughter, william stanhope sat with her for an hour and a half before dinner; and at a little party which was given that night at the clergyman's house, everybody declared that the beautiful eyes of annie deer looked like two stars. the two months that followed were filled up with that thrilling joy in which present pleasure is mingled with and heightened by the expectation of something not exactly sorrowful, nor painful, nor melancholy, but perhaps we should call it sad. thus annie deer enjoyed, to the full, the society of him she loved, though the expectation of his departure, upon his first voyage as captain of a china vessel, sometimes brought a cloud over the bright sky of their happiness. time, that rapid old postillion, who goes jogging on in the saddle faster and faster every day, without at all minding the six thousand years that have elapsed since first he began to beat the road--time, we say, whipped his horses into the full gallop, and carried william stanhope and annie deer with wonderful rapidity to the point of parting. annie deer cried very bitterly; and, as they were among the first tears she had ever shed in her life, they were, of course, the more painful. william stanhope would not suffer himself to weep, but he felt little less than she did. they parted, however. he took the command of his vessel; and, shortly afterward, she, within one hour, saw in the newspaper, and read in his own handwriting, that the honourable company's ship the earl spencer, captain stanhope, commander, had cleared out and dropped down the river. it was the month of march, and the weather somewhat boisterous; and mr. deer, when he heard the wind whistle and roar down the chimney, thanked god that some man had been struck with the very provident idea of ensuring vessels risking themselves upon that treacherous ocean. annie deer's mind ran in the same way, but it went no farther than wishing that there was really some meaning in the name by which life assurance societies designate themselves. but she felt too bitterly, poor girl, that there is no ensuring that fragile thing, human life, especially when trusted to the mercy of the winds and waves. her daily walk was upon the edge of the little promontory looking over the vast, melancholy sea: and at length, a few days after the ship had dropped down the river, she beheld a gallant vessel coming on with a furious and not very favourable gale; and, watching it with deep interest, saw it take refuge in their little bay, and come to anchor to let pass the storm. about four in the afternoon, the wind lulled, but shifted more to the southwest, so that no ship was likely to get out of the channel. about half past four, as she was looking out of the drawing-room windows of her father's house, she saw something like a boat tossed up from time to time by the bounding waves, which the tempest had left behind it. in half an hour after, she was pressed in the arms of william stanhope, and two or three hours more of pure happiness were added to the few which they had known through life. at ten o'clock he took his departure; but, at that hour, the moon, though she was shining was red and dim, announcing that the presence of the commander might soon be wanted on board his vessel. annie deer retired to her chamber immediately afterward. she retired not to repose, however, but, on the contrary, to pay for the happiness which she had that night experienced by many a tear. she prayed, too, and prayed fervently, not without hope in the efficacy of prayer, but with that trembling timidity, that doubt of our own worthiness, under the weight of which the footsteps of the apostle, though miraculously upheld, sunk through the surface of the yielding waters. all remained calm; and, towards eleven o'clock, she remarked the clouds passing over the moon, taking a different direction from that which they had done in the morning: and she thought, with mixed hope and apprehension, that, ere the morning, perhaps, he whom she loved might be far away upon that voyage, which was destined either to give them comfort and independence, or to separate them for ever. she lay down to rest; but, towards twelve o'clock, the wind began to rise, increased in violence every moment, and swelled at length into a hurricane. the casements rattled; the wainscot shook and creaked; the house itself seemed shaken. loudly roaring round and round, the spirit of the storm appeared clamouring at the gates for admittance. it could be heard as it whistled through the branches of the trees. it could be distinguished as it rushed and raved amid the ruins of the castle up above. it could be felt as it swept, with sighing and a melancholy sound, over the level sands of the bay, interrupted only by the sudden plunge of the waves, as they poured headlong upon the resounding shore. annie deer rose from her bed, and listened, and wept, and prayed through the livelong night. but what boots it to tell a long and a sad story, when a very few words will serve our purpose! with the morning light annie deer gazed from her window, but the ship was gone, and the storm continued; and, as she looked, without making any particular effort to hear, the sound of a few distant guns caught her ear, and made her heart sink low. the tempest lasted the whole day. during the night it decreased, and the next morning there were found on various points of the coast the spars and timbers of a gallant vessel, on some of which were painted "the earl spencer!" the gentlemen of lloyd's announced the loss of an outward-bound chinaman. the owners of the earl spencer cursed the luck which had lost them a good voyage, and applied to the underwriters. the underwriters cursed their luck still more furiously, but paid the money. mr. deer thanked god that he had ensured to the full amount of his loan, and annie deer sat down, with widowed heart, to pass the rest of her life with very little interest in the things thereof. her mother marked the varying colour of her cheek, the langour of her look, and the frequent tearfulness of her eye; and, kissing her tenderly, let fall a drop on the pale forehead of her only child. annie deer met with sympathy from one kindred being in her melancholy path, and it was all she hoped for, all she asked in life. such was the first part of the story of annie deer. now all stories, into whatsoever imaginary divisions they may be separated by the brains of the teller, have at least two parts; there is no getting rid of the beginning and the end. having told the former, we must now turn to the latter, which is destined to be shorter still. mr. deer went to london, and was indemnified by the underwriters for the money he had advanced; and he returned to his dwelling, looking really sad for the loss of poor william stanhope. he called upon the childless widow, and tried to comfort her; but she was not to be comforted. he spoke some soothing words to annie, but annie only wept the more; and mr. deer himself had a kind of perception that they had all suffered a loss which money could never repair. as the house was dull, and the village was dull, and everything about the place looked more or less gloomy since the loss of the earl spencer and poor william stanhope, mr. deer betook himself one day, merely for the sake of relaxation, to the county town, purposing, as the pleasantest and most habitual way of amusing his thoughts, to look into all the accounts and proceedings of the very respectable firm in which the greater part of his fortune was still embarked. his partner was out, however, when he arrived; and mr. deer, strolling out into the town, was met by mr. pocock, the silversmith, and mr. pocock's retired brother john, the common councilman and orator. now mr. deer and mr. john pocock were severally sixty-three years of age and upward, and the enmities of sixty-three years are pertinacious things. mr. deer, therefore, would willingly have avoided mr. john pocock; but that gentleman, on the contrary, put his arm through his, talked to him very civilly, and, leading the conversation to the affairs of mr. deer's house, gave him a hint, with perfect kindness of intent and manner, that his partner might be getting on too fast. mr. deer was agitated, alarmed, and irritated; and, if he had done what his heart bade him, he would have told his companion to mind his own business, and to meddle with nobody else's affairs, for that he, john deer, was rich enough to buy out him, john pocock, and all his relations. he refrained, however, and answered as civilly as the nature of the case would allow; but returned to his partner's house, and instantly set to work to investigate the matter thoroughly. sad and alarming was the result of his inquiries. he found that, during the five or six years of his absence, his partner, although he had contrived to make a fair show in their half-yearly accounts, had, in fact, addicted himself to banking, farming, and such vices. immense sums were risked at that moment in hazardous speculations, and mr. deer saw himself inextricably implicated in transactions which he would not have meddled with for the world of his own free-will. the matter went on as simply as it is possible to conceive. his partner, seeing that mr. deer was now convinced that he had trusted once too far, grew angry, resisted the interference which might have saved him, hurried recklessly on in the wrong course, and, ere four months were out, the house of deer and co. were bankrupts to the amount of more than a hundred thousand pounds. by the wise and strenuous efforts which mr. deer had made during those unhappy four months to retrieve the affairs of his firm, they were enabled to pay very nearly twenty shillings in the pound. but the beautiful house under the castle was advertised for sale; the rich furniture and plate were disposed of by auction; and mr. deer retired to a small cottage next to that of the widow stanhope. amid all this distress, no one was so kind as mr. john pocock, though at his period of life much locomotion was not agreeable, he drove over two or three times a week to console, advise, and expostulate with mr. deer, whose mind had fallen into a painful state of despair, and who in body had sunk at once into an old man. he wished mr. deer to rouse his spirits, and to resume business at once upon his own account, and he offered most liberally to advance him any sum of money for that purpose; but mr. deer felt, and mr. john pocock was soon convinced, that such a course was impracticable. the bankrupt's health gave way more and more each day. he became fretful and impatient. a very small pittance, which belonged to his wife, supported him and his family in penury for some months, but he saw it drawing to a close with agony of heart. pity pained him, consolation seemed an insult; and he would gaze upon his daughter by the hour together, as she sat painting little screens, working little purses, or busying herself in any of those employments which she fancied and hoped might prove the means of supporting her father and mother in their old age. at length the money came to an end, and on that very night mr. deer was struck with palsy, which fixed him to the marble seat of impotent age all the rest of his days. annie deer then found how little could be procured by those means to which she had trusted for support. mrs. deer bore all patiently, and she and her daughter consulted and deliberated long with mr. john pocock as to what they could do in the terrible strait to which they were reduced. his kindness was unfailing. he looked at the afflicted wife, he looked at the beautiful but destitute girl till the tears rose in his eyes; and, insisting upon their taking a small sum as a loan till he could devise some plan for their future life, he left them, promising to return on the following day, and declaring that he would not come back without some feasible scheme for their support. it was night on the promised day before he made his appearance; but then he came in his own chariot, and then there was a briskness in his look and a smartness in his whole aspect, which led mrs. deer and her daughter to believe that his meditations on their behalf had not been without result. his hair was nicely powdered and adjusted to a line, his pigtail was tied up with a new piece of riband, and his best blue coat and white waistcoat shone without a speck. mr. deer was somewhat better, and sitting in a chair by the fire. poor mrs. stanhope had come in to cheer them as far as her sad heart would allow; and the sight of mr. john pocock with a gayer air, blew up the last spark of hope that lingered in their hearts. mr. pocock looked at mrs. stanhope as if he could have wished her away; but he was full of what he had to say, and would not delay it. "my dear mr. deer," he said, advancing into their little circle, "and you, mrs. deer, and _you_, my dear young lady, must give me your attention more than all. misfortunes may happen to every one, and very sharp misfortunes have happened to you. now i see but one way on earth of remedying them, and making us all again happy and comfortable. i am an old man, miss annie, sixty-four years of age in april, which will be next month; but, if you will accept the hand of an honest man, who loves you dearly and respects you much, he will do all he can to make you and yours happy. his fortune is of his own making, and he may well do with it what he likes; he will be not only proud to have you for his wife, but proud to have a wife who will devote herself to make her _parents_ as well as her _husband_ comfortable." annie deer had turned as pale as death; mrs. deer threw her arms around her child's neck and wept bitterly; her father said not a word, but, like the parent in the most beautiful song we possess, he looked in her face till her heart was like to break. her eyes did not overflow, but they turned towards mrs. stanhope, and her lips muttered, "oh, william, william! sir," she continued, turning to mr. pocock, "i have loved, deeply loved another, and i love his memory still, and ever must love it." "i will not be jealous of that, my dear young lady," he replied; "your love for the dead will never interfere with your duty towards the living. nor do i expect you to love me otherwise than as a young woman may love an old man who is kind to her. believe me, miss annie," he continued, taking her hand, "i am not a selfish man; and i do not make this proposal altogether for my own gratification." "i know it is not, i know it is not," replied annie deer, and she wept. "oh, annie," cried mrs. stanhope, "do not let the thoughts of our lost william prevent you from doing your duty towards your parents in such a terrible situation as this!" the tears streamed from mr. deer's eyes, and he cried in a feeble voice, "annie! annie, my child, do not make yourself miserable for me!" that tone and that look were worth all the persuasions in the world; and the fatal consent hung upon the lips of annie deer, when the door behind her opened, and mrs. stanhope, who sat with her face towards it, started from her seat, and with one loud scream fell senseless on the floor. annie turned to see what was the matter, and she, too, would have fallen, had she not been caught in the arms and held to the heart of william stanhope. "good god! what is the cause of all this?" he exclaimed: "everybody seems frightened at me; the servants run away; my mother faints! have you not received my letter?" the scene of confusion that ensued, explanations, histories, inquiries, replies, fresh mistakes, and fresh _eclaircissements_, though they were all comprised in the space of about an hour, would occupy a great many hours in the detail. at the end of that time, there were only two things which wanted explanation; the first of which was, what had become of two letters, one of which william stanhope had sent from st. helena on his way to india, telling that he had been shipwrecked; that when his vessel went down he had been saved in the last boat, and had been picked up by an outward-bound indiaman; that he had preserved the bills in which all his little capital was invested; and that he intended to employ them in india, in the hope of recovering, in some degree, the terrible loss he had sustained. the second letter had been written from london three days before his reappearance; and went to inform mr. deer that the loss of his vessel had proved, as far as he was concerned, the most fortunate chance that could have befallen him; that he had arrived in india at a happy moment; had made one of those successful speculations which were then not uncommon, and which the good name he had acquired while a mate in the service had now enabled him to extend far more than his own limited capital would have permitted; that, contented with one happy chance and a moderate fortune, he had returned to england, and was coming down to claim the hand of his fair bride, a far richer man than his most sanguine hopes had ever led him to anticipate. the loss of the first of these letters william himself easily accounted for, by acknowledging that he had intrusted it to a private hand; and every one who has had anything to do with private hands must be well aware that they are in general furnished with very slippery fingers. the loss of the second was justly accounted for by a surmise of mr. john pocock's, who suggested that, as postmasters--whether legally or not we do not know--take upon themselves the infamous task of handing over the letters of bankrupts, public and private alike, to the assignees; exposing to the cold eyes of mercantile inquisitors all the secrets of domestic life; the anguish of the child's heart for the parent's misfortune; the agony of the parent for the downfall of his child; the sweet communings and consolings of kindred affection; the counsel and the comfort, the care and the apprehension--as this evil and iniquitous practice, we say, is or was tolerated in the land, mr. pocock suggested that the letter of william stanhope had very likely been sent to the assignees. and so it was. the letter had been so sent. the assignees were absent. and thus, for three long days, the letter was withheld from the only eye that should have seen it. all that remained was the explanation between mr. pocock and william stanhope, and that might have been very well omitted if the former gentleman had pleased; for william had remarked nothing farther than that he was a good-looking old gentleman, and seemed to take a great interest in mr. deer's affairs. but mr. pocock, who had at first felt a little uneasy at the reappearance of the young sailor, had soon made up his mind, like a sensible man as he really was, to make the best of what he could not avoid, and rejoice in the renewed happiness of others, though it brought a little disappointment to himself. he was resolved, however, to extract the satisfaction of a speech from the matter, and therefore, as soon as everything else was settled, he got upon his legs, and proceeded: "captain stanhope," he said, "you have come just in time to prevent the completion of what, perhaps, might have been a very bad bargain on all parts. the fact is, that i saw no earthly way of arranging the affairs of our good friend mr. deer but by marrying his daughter. i had just made a bargain with her not to oppose her thinking of you with regret when we all believed you dead; and, god knows, i shall as little oppose her thinking of you with affection now that we see you are living. as you deprive me of the title of a husband, captain stanhope, i shall only demand that you grant me the name of a friend; and, though i am a tolerably spruce old gentleman," he added, twitching his pigtail, "yet, as you have not found me a dangerous rival, you will doubtless not fear me as a dangerous acquaintance." captain stanhope shook him by the hand, and willingly ratified the treaty he proposed. the days of mr. deer passed happily thenceforward to their close, and his daughter became the wife of captain william stanhope. restored to affluence and comfort, she was the same gentle, unassuming, affectionate being she had ever been; and--though the good people of the little town where she continued to live called her, with great reverence, mrs. captain stanhope--to her husband and her family she never changed her name, but remained _annie dear_ to the last day of her life. the end. footnotes (henry de cerons) [footnote : it was, in fact, exorbitant; for we find that the duke of montpensier, himself holding the government of all these provinces, only gave a hundred crowns to each captain for raising a company of foot, and three hundred crowns only to the maître de camp of eight or ten companies thus raised.] [footnote : he was also called the prince dauphin and the prince d'auvergne.] [footnote : this curious trait of the famous d'andelot is recorded by all the other persons present as well as by monsieur de cerons. the person who was thus killed, is said to have been the marquis de monsalez, but there is every reason to think that this is a mistake.] [footnote : he was called the prince dauphin on account of his being the dauphin of auvergne; but we have given him the title of prince only for fear of confusion. it has been attempted in these pages to display his character as it really was, we give a few traits and anecdotes of his conduct in situations in which he was actually placed.] (eva st. claire) [footnote : this was an effeminate custom, against which the good archbishop anselm preached in vain. some, indeed, of the norman nobles cut off the long ringlets which were the objects of his aversion, but many retained them, and few gave up the vices that accompanied them.]